LANDING AT THE FET OF THE 1176
In the ’70s there was a boy-band called The Osmonds. Imagine Justin Bieber in a suit with porno pool-guy hair and then clone him by five. They sang and dance-stepped schmaltzy pap, and mothers the world over thought Donny Osmond was the nicest boy alive. They should have stuck to their guns, but The Osmonds got fazed by people like me labelling them as a bunch of wet dishrags. One day they indignantly announced we were wrong, they really ‘totally rocked’ and would prove it with a song called Crazy Horses. There was a problem though; the Osmonds didn’t rock, they wocked, like bunny wabbits.
They missed the point. Rock wasn’t simply going to pop out of an amp cranked to 11. It required content, and The Osmonds were floating on sky ponies, not wrestling mustangs. Equipment can often be a mask applied in the absence of content, and our pre-occupation with eBaying anything vintage for a leg-up into the Golden Era can be a bit like The Osmonds sugarcoating their bunny rock with a cranked backline.
This popular music business has been with us long enough now that not only have some of its personalities acquired a luminary aura, so has the gadgetry they used. In 1993 a guitar museum paid a million bucks for the Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix
