Salad Daze

Me & Mr. Bass - image ©Al Moores

 

The picture above is of your humble narrator, circa mid 1980's. I can't be more certain about the year, but it's probably around 1986; which makes me thirty-one or thirty-two at the time so just over half a lifetime ago. The photograph was taken in the old and sadly long-gone chapel that our branch of the Association of Artists and Designers in Wales [AADW] had converted into a gallery, performance space and artists' studios over a period of years from the late 1970s. Sadly, the place burned down in the early 1990s, taking with it a valuable local resource that has never been replaced.

In the photograph, I'm pointing at what is obviously a fairly large loudspeaker, which was something I acquired when the old City Cinema in Bangor closed down and was in the process of being turned into a snooker hall. I was working in an office opposite the site at the time [1984], and wandered over one lunchtime to see what was happening there. At the back of the hall, behind where the screen would have originally been, was the old 1930's-vintage RCA theatre speaker stack. I asked the site foreman what they were going to do with it and he said it would probably end up in the skip, although someone had already laid claim to the top horn. I asked if I could take the bass bin and was told that yes, it was up for grabs.

I arranged to pick it up the next day and dragged it back to Bethesda on my mate's trailer. For some time it languished in the basement room at our then house in Gerlan, seeing service at one particularly memorable [and loud] party that entertained gatecrashers from as far away as Caernarfon and beyond as we'd stupidly talked out loud about the event that evening in the King's Head in Bethesda. Every man and his dog turned up; echoes of Winson Street parties: small house, shed-loads of people. The bass bin went on to be a centrepiece in the very first reggae disco at the students' union in Bangor, with my mates Ron and Dylan providing records, turntables and ganja and me on system-lacing.

The speaker was collected from the union a few days after and I discovered that the buggers from the union stage crew had nicked the perfectly good 15" driver that was in it and replaced it with one of their faulty ones: a bloody 'scraper' with a misaligned voice coil. Thereafter, I parked it at the chapel, where it remained long after my involvement with AADW finished; indeed AADW itself soon ceased to exist and the chapel was left in the hands of local musicians. One of the musicians was a lad called Simon.

In 1990, whilst we were living briefly on Anglesey, a few of us Bethesda players formed a loose affiliation as a sort of drinking club stroke blues band that met once a week at Simon's flat on Ogwen Terrace. There were four guitarists(!); me, Al Moores, Arthur Bond and Jake Fitzpatrick. The sole rhythmic element was young Simon on bass and occasionally, Hammond organ. The name of this unholy combination of misfits was Captain Morgan & His Hammond Organ; the eponymous Captain being the bottle of rum that used to lubricate the sessions.

The first time I attended one of these sessions, I happened to notice a rather familiar looking 15" drive unit on the worktop. Enquiring of the lad, I asked what had happened to the cabinet that had housed said loudspeaker. The little bugger [I shouldn't really speak ill of the dead, for he died very young, many years ago; but I will] had only gone and used the bloody thing for firewood, leaving the least valuable [damaged] component behind; having destroyed what is now a highly collectible piece of cinema memorabilia. But as I always say, things come; things go. It wasn't the first treasured thing I've lost and it certainly won't be the last.