Wayne Kramer

“I used the Wayne Kramer Stratocaster and a Fender Hot Rod Deville; that was it. I didn’t use any effects. The Strat has such a classic tone that’s very reliable, and the Hot Rod Devilles are just terrific-sounding, so I didn’t have to think about the gear too much; I was more concerned with what I was trying to play.”

By then we were involved with John Sinclair and the White Panthers, and we started to see Marshall amps coming over from England. Cream played them; we knew Jimi Hendrix used them because we had opened for him. So we bought a load of the original 100-watt Super Lead heads. We got six of them and two 200-watt bass heads. They were terrific-sounding amplifiers, but incredibly inconsistent; we blew them up regularly. You might get two or three shows out of them and then they’d go up in smoke. We’d have two sets of Marshalls with us on the road and one set in the shop all the time.

Fred Smith and I got 100-watt Vox Super Beatle amplifiers. Before the Beatles they were just called AC-100s. They were really great; nothing in America had 100 watts. The biggest amps were Fender Dual Showmans at 65 watts with two 15? speakers. The Super Beatles were 100 watts with four 12? speakers and two high-frequency horns mounted in a tubed frame cabinet you could tilt back. It was a huge piece of machinery and very intimidating because it was black. We had two of them; a T60, the transistor bass amplifier with a 15? and 12? speaker and two Vox columns for our PA system with six or eight 10? speakers mounted on chrome stands that went on each side of the stage. In those days, that was the state-of-the-art PA system; there was no such thing as monitors or side-fills.