Tom Morillo demonstrating some electric guitar techniques
Rickenbacker Frying Pan
Rickenbacker Electro String Instrument
Acoustic guitar fine, but…
An acoustic guitar has many advantages. It is lightweight. It is portable. Manufacturers can make them inexpensively.
For centuries string-instruments held a high place among musicians.
Big bands…
In the early 20th century, big brass band became more popular and its powerful sound simply overpowered the acoustic guitar.
Enter electricity
As electricity increasingly became more accessible and a part of everyday life, inventors increasingly designed devices to use that power.
Electro String Instrument
On August 10, 1937, the United States Patent Office awarded Patent #2,089.171 to G.D. Beauchamp for an instrument known as the Rickenbacker Frying Pan.
Inventor G.D. Beauchamp, partnered with Adolph Rickenbacher in the Electro String Instrument Corporation of Los Angeles, California. They had spent more than five years pursuing his patent on the Frying Pan.
A telephone or a guitar?
The idea was a simple one. Simple to understand. Complicated to design. An electro-magnet placed near a vibrating string will pick up and amplify that vibration.
A problem that Beauchamp and Rickenbacker faced was the telephone worked in a very similar manner. They had to revise the guitar’s design several times before the Patent Office accepted their guitar as a guitar and not a telephone.
Their design resembled a circular magnet that surrounded the strings. That design is no longer used.
The same, but different
All the things that a guitarist could do with an acoustic guitar to vary its sound could, of course, be done with an electric guitar, such as bending the strings.
What an acoustic guitar could not do (at least not at first and not without magnetic pickups) was color the sound.
The simple current set up by the vibrating string within the magnetic field is not enough to make a loud sound. An amplifier is necessary. Put some other electronics between the guitar and the amp and a rainbow of sounds is produced.
According to his site, “Wavy Gravy is not your ordinary clown. He certainly has had a long run since his earlier days as a poet and stand-up comic, improvisational theater artist, psychedelic bus caravan luminary, and rock concert MC, and often jokes: “if you don’t have a sense of humor, it just isn’t funny anymore.”
A week away
Woodstock Ventures had made the move from Wallkill, NY in Orange County to Bethel, NY in Sullivan County. Plans already in place for the festival wherever it was continued apace.
One of those plans was, of course, for food. Ventures had hired Food for Love to provide food, but it had also hired members of the Hog Farm to do general set up and provide food as well.
Some members drove in a Further-type bus from New Mexico to Bethel. Others took the chartered flight Woodstock Ventures paid for from Albuquerque (Al-buh-quirky) to JFK in NYC.
The Museum at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that today sits on and around the festival’s field rented from Max Yasgur displays the manifest from that flight. The #1 name is Hugh Romney.
Hugh Romney
33-year-old Hugh Nanton Romney arrived at JFK on August 7, 1969 after a reportedly mythical flight. It was, according to Tom Wolfe in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Romney who came up with the idea of putting LSD in Kool-Aid at the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Test parties in 1965. Apparently someone in the Hog Farm used that same recipe for the flight.
Hog Farm
The Hog Farm was the commune that Romney and his wife Bonnie Beecher was at the center of. It originated in Los Angeles, but after an eviction, relocated to a hog farm in in Tujunga, California. The deal was labor in exchange for free rent.
In 1969, the commune was in Llano, New Mexico. Thus the flight from Albuquerque.
Hugh Romney Arrives
The Activist Clown
Hugh Romney was a political activist and authorities often beat and mistreated demonstrators. Romney thought that if he dressed as a clown, authorities would be less likely to hit him. It worked.
Sometimes.
Arrival
When Hugh Romney and his fellow commune-ists disembarked, the NY media were there. They asked him a question that he had to ad lib an answer to because he didn’t know, as the media asked, how he intended to be part of the festival’s security?
Romney said he would have a “Please Force.” Media followed up: how would he be that? “Cream pies and seltzer bottles.”
The obvious answer for a clown.
Hugh Romney Arrives
While most people speaking of Woodstock and those who became known from their participation in it refer to Romney as Wavy Gravy, he was not known by that moniker. Yet.
If one watches the Woodstock movie, you’ll hear him referred to as Hugh several times during the film. It was Hugh Romney who spoke to the media at JFK. It was Hugh Romney who told the festival crowd about “…breakfast in bed for 400,000.”
Wavy Gravy
It was not until the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville, TX two weeks later that after a conversation with him, BB King reportedly referred to Romney as Wavy Gravy.
A name like that stuck to a character like Romney.
Wavy Gravy at the City Winery in 2014 speaking about his life and times (photo by J Shelley)
Hugh Romney Arrives
Nowadays
His site shows that Wavy is very much an active person giving lectures and participating in music events as well as being a big part of the annual summer Camp Winnarainbow Kids Camp.
Robert McNamara from the documentary, “The Fog of War.”
1964 Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
August 2, 1964
It had been 254 days since President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas.
254.
The number of days that President Lyndon B Johnson was president. November 3, Election Day, 93 days away. He had signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1962 exactly a month earlier.
Vietnam was a mosquito; not a tiger.
Military intelligence had suggested that there might be North Vietnamese military action in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Captain of the destroyer USS Mattox, Captain, John J. Herrick, was on alert.
On this date, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reported to President Johnson that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked the Maddox.
1964 Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
What happened
Three North Vietnamese patrol boats had engaged the Maddox. Herrick ordered the crew to commence firing as the North Vietnamese boats came within 10,000 yards of the ship.
10,000 yards is over 5 miles.
Herrick also called in air support from a nearby air craft carrier, the USS Ticonderoga. The North Vietnamese boats each fired torpedoes at the Maddox, but two missed and the third failed to explode. U.S. gunfire hit one of the North Vietnamese boats. US jets strafed them.
1964 Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
The Result
Maddox gunners sunk one of the boats and two were crippled. One bullet hit the Maddox and there were no U.S. casualties.
The US took no further action, but warned the Vietnamese to cease such attacks.
Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
August 4, 1964
Two days later around 8 PM, the Maddox and the USS C. Turner Joy, both in the Gulf of Tonkin, intercepted North Vietnamese radio messages. Captain Herrick got the “impression” that Communist patrol boats are planning an attack against the American ships. He again called for the support of the USS Ticonderoga.
Neither the pilots nor the ship crews saw any enemy craft. However, about 10 p.m. sonar operators reported torpedoes approaching. The destroyers maneuvered to avoid the torpedoes and began to fire at the North Vietnamese patrol boats. The encounter lasted about two hours. U.S. officers reported sinking two, or possibly three of the North Vietnamese boats, but no one was sure.
Herrick communicated his doubts to his superiors and urged a “thorough reconnaissance in daylight.” Shortly thereafter, he informed Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, commander of the Pacific Fleet, that the blips on the radar scope were apparently “freak weather effects” while the report of torpedoes in the water were probably due to “overeager” radar operators.
1964 Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
President Johnson’s reaction
Convinced that a second attack had occurred, President Johnson, ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to select targets for possible retaliatory air strikes. At a National Security Council meeting, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, recommended the ordering of reprisal attacks to the president.
Though cautious at first, eventually Johnson gave the order to execute the reprisal, code-named Pierce Arrow. The President then met with 16 Congressional leaders to inform them of the second unprovoked attack and that he had ordered reprisal attacks. He also told them he planned to ask for a Congressional resolution to support his actions.
At 11:20 p.m., Admiral Sharp informed McNamara that the aircraft were on their way to the targets and at 11:26, President Johnson appeared on national television and announced that the reprisal raids were underway in response to unprovoked attacks on U.S. warships. He assured the viewing audience that, “We still seek no wider war.”
1964 Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
On August 7, the House of Representatives unanimously (416 – 0) and the Senate overwhelmingly (88 – 2) approved the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Its title read, “”To promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia.” [text]
President Johnson signed the resolution on August 10.
In 1964, there were approximately 23,300 troops in Vietnam.
By 1965 that number was 184,300.
There were 536,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1968.
1964 Gulf Tonkin Ghost Attack
What's so funny about peace, love, art, and activism?
