Like any good old time rock n roller, I monitor ebay and craig's list for vintage stuff. What amazes me is that in almost EVERY ad for a Tuck n Roll head is included the words, "...a couple of minor cigarette burns, of course"..... Was EVERYBODY so carelss back then that all these vintage amps have cigarette burns in them? I was a smoker then. I never put a burn in my equipment (except for the one I put through the grill cloth of an old Twin Reverb while I was soldering the connection on a patch cord... but that's a WHOLE other story). But seriously... why are the ones with the butt burns the only ones that seem to have survived???
stevem Messages: 4733 Registered: June 2004 Location: NY
Senior Member
I have one empty kustom head case that has a burn well over two inches long and near a inch wide. The but must of been burnnig for a good 2 or 3 songs at someones gig while a planed smoke show was going on, other wise I can not see how the hell it would have not been noticed!
BC Messages: 583 Registered: March 2000 Location: Kentucky
Senior Member
Nearly every fool was smoking in the 60s and 70s. Yes..they were careless! I have seen tolex amps burned as well.....along with guitar heads. Hey guys...remember seeing someone with a filter stabbed with an untrimmed guitar string on a tuner? Sometimes the Kustoms would get burns by the ash falling from a well meaning "friend" as he smoked, while moving your gear, or another player "momentarily" placing his
cig on the amp then forgetting it was there. Solder irons and lights have also caused burns on Kustoms.....but mostly coffin nails were the fault.
JC proposed a theory a few years ago that I liked. He suggested Kustom had a guy at the end of the assembly line who burned the top of amps! There are so many out there it makes you wonder. BC
Optyk Messages: 125 Registered: August 2006 Location: Texas
Senior Member
No doubt Kustoms seem to be more prone to have cigarette burns in them, but for the record, at one time in my life, I was the proud owner of a Vox Continental combo organ that had a beauty of a burn on the orange top that had been painted with some kind of orange paint attempt to hide it. It didn't.
Currently, I have a 3-15 black Kustom cabinet that has NO cigarette burn in it. Although they begged me to put it in the Guiness World Record Museum, I'm not going to let them have it. They won't agree to me hanging out down there and jamming with other musicians. Go figure.
Rod
There's only two kinds of music. . . . blues and zippity doo dah.