Back in the sixties, on a visit to my grandmother’s house in New Orleans, my family stopped in Lake Charles to visit some of my cousins. One of my cousins, Mike, showed me his guitar and showed me how to play a few chords. I happened to have with me a little 3" reel-to-reel tape recorder that I used for recording songs off the radio. I had even written a few songs, although I had only written words, no melody. Mike played some chords, and I made up tunes to go with the words. We recorded a couple of my songs under the name “The Amatures.” (We purposely misspelled our band name like the Beatles and the Byrds.)
When I got home (California at the time), I got a guitar and formed a band with a couple of my friends. We called ourselves the Objecks. We made up all kinds of musical instruments, trying our best to get psychedelic sounds. One song, for instance, included the sound of a toilet flushing. I invented an instrument called a wobblebob, which was a spring attached to a microphone. When you plucked the spring, it made a scratchy sound kinda like “wobblebob.” I also learned that if you put a piece of adhesive tape on one side of the capstan drive of my tape recorder, making it turn the recording tape unevenly, you could get some pretty weird sounds kinda like “Wild Honey Pie” on the Beatles’ white album.
Now, almost forty years later, technology has provided the kind of equipment we could only have dreamed about in the sixties. We've resurrected the name “The Objecks” and have begun to record songs both old and new. Join us for a walk through our magical, musical childhood.
Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Byrds, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Lovin' Spoonful, Grateful Dead, Moody Blues, Gordon Lightfoot, Emmylou Harris, Kitaro, Ossian, François Couperin, Dan Bern, and many, many others.
Guitars:
- Rickenbacker 360/12 (12-string electric)
- Epiphone Casino (6-string electric)
- Guild GAD-JF30 (6-string jumbo acoustic)
- Seagull S12+ (12-string acoustic)
- Hohner HC-30 classical guitar
- Warwick Corvette standard (5-string electric bass)
Sequencing software:
- Anvil Studio
Miscellany:
- Tascam Pocketstudio 5
- Behringer B-1 microphone
- Roland GR-20 guitar synthesizer
- Digitech RP-100 effects box
- Hohner Blues Harps in various keys
You may still follow my latest hair-brained and incomplete musical ideas on my new page:
.