I can’t get over the price of the musical instruments these days. With the 3rd World countries making guitars and the miniaturizing of sound support you can get a guitar-amp combo for $150 that could blow away a Sears Silvertone and amp of the same price over 40 years ago.
Now starting a band didn’t entail instruments as we know them now. A group of us sat around the park singing and only one person could play the guitar. One of the gang could keep beat with a couple of sticks so he was the drummer. I couldn’t do much without a piano and even then I couldn’t improvise so I played bass notes on my brother’s acoustic guitar. I think they were pretty well in tune. Unlike many of the band bios of the time, this was not the band I eventually played in. This was just a band of friends trying to figure out how to do it.
You see, half the fun of starting a band was the thought of starting a band. We would meet at recess and send secret messages in class with thoughts of band names and songs. In fact a couple of teachers thought we were writing cryptically about girls and I was chastised for it. But girls were the farthest thing from my mind at the time - or real ones, that is. The only girls I cared about were in the songs - and this was because I had to remember the lyrics.
Band gear was very primitive, especially in a small town. We borrowed stuff and when I actually got a bass I played it through a record player. The guitar player had an arch-top Harmony acoustic that he attached a pick-up to the F-hole. Then he played it through his Mom’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. But we dreamed of Fenders and Gibsons and practiced how we would hold one, if we ever got one. Or how we would carry a piggy-back amp like a Fender Bandmaster, the Holy Grail of all amps. Or how we would set our equipment up on the Ed Sullivan Show when we finally got there.
Our drummer never did buy drums. The next year we were all in junior high and he hung out with a different crowd. The guitar player (the only one who could play) got in with another band that actually could play 10 songs without repeating. I went into the doldrums of wishing they would all come back and play like we did the previous summer. Because, without instruments, it was a lot of fun.