Wilco is finishing up our tour in Europe right now, and I’ll be in the bowels of the air travel system making my way home soon. In the meantime, I asked Mark to prepare another GEAR TALKIN’™. He wrote about one of the companies that made a lot of the cool amps and effects we have at The Loft, Analog Outfitters.
The rest of the Starship bridge has also been hard at work preparing the next batch of prizes for people who subscribe to the Captains Club. (My family calls gifts “prizes.”) Every summer around this time we ship a compilation CD of some of the best songs from the previous year or “orbit” of the Starship to Captains Club members. The Orbit Four CD will mail out soon, but I’m told it’s not too late to sign up for Orbit Five. Some of these songs might make the cut.
Anyway, back in Orbit One we had a special week where we opened up the paywall on 10 songs that I’d shared recently. Just for fun, and to show you what’s going on behind the curtain, or, uh, wall. So we’re doing that this week, too. Eventually we’ll put them back behind the paywall.
You Can Have It All (George McCrae cover) and Is Anything Wrong (Lhasa de Sela cover) (two for one!)
I’m very thankful to have this community, whether you’re a paying passenger or not.
Carry on, and enjoy Mark’s brilliance. OxO—Jeffy
Gear Talkin’™ #25: Analog Outfitters
Recycle and reuse. Can one liken this noble duty to Jeff’s collecting of vintage instruments and amplifiers? Let me try. Why reach for something made from brand-new materials when there are so many wonderful instruments that already exist and walk this earth, ready to serve? Ok, yes. I’ll allow it.
You may already know this, but we here at The Loft have a side hustle where we search out attractive old belts from thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and repurpose them into one-of-a-kind guitar straps. We sell them under the branding Loft Relics Guitar Straps on Reverb (shameless plug… also allowed). You can see these up-cycled straps on stage with Wilco, holding up most of Jeff’s touring guitars as he plays them.
With reclaiming and reusing in mind, I want to tell you about an incredible Illinois gear-maker who leaned super hard into the mission of recycling. Analog Outfitters was a small shop opened by Ben Juday near Champaign, IL about 15 years ago. Ben did his best to collect all (yeah, not “some” or “a lot” … but all) the old unwanted Hammond organs scattered across the land. Half-working organs that needed a new home … broken organs in your garage … church organs … parlor organs … organs that were in a flood … organs that were in two floods. It almost didn’t matter what condition they were in because he had use for all the bits and pieces. I heard at its height, AO was housed in an old airplane hangar with hundreds and hundreds of organs piled high, ready to be pulled apart. Ben would disembowel the organ, pulling out the amplifier section, and fashion it into a great-sounding tube guitar amp. It would then get a speakerectomy, rehousing the speaker in a beautiful wooden cabinet he would fabricate utilizing the wood and grill cloth from the organ’s original housing. He would use the wooden bass pedals as trim on the cabinets. He would rescue the tubes, knobs, mechanisms, and circuitry and build his own creations from those organs’ organs. Ben lived as if he had an obligation to these old instruments, like a responsible hunter who uses all the parts of their kill; the meat, the fat, the blood, the hide, and the bones. Every bit has a use. Every bit has a purpose.
Ben also used old decommissioned traffic signs for some of his creations. He’d bend, cut, and repurpose these old metal signs into the shapes he needed to house and protect the electronics. No two amps looked exactly alike. Both Nels and Jeff have a few of Ben’s guitar amp heads, and Nels actually toured quite a bit with his Analog Outfitter “Sarge” amps, using them on Wilco stages and beyond.
Ben’s crowning achievement was a contraption he called The Scanner, a large stand-alone effect unit built from the vibrato and reverb portion of the organ, harvested fresh and placed into a see-thru petri dish-like plexi box so you could observe the electronics in their new habitat. You got to watch what you were hearing. Ben designed this unit so it could be used as easily in a guitar signal chain as it would be as an outboard effect in a recording studio. It has a spooky, murky underwater-type sound that holds up next to other available vibratos and tremolos and reverbs, but with a voicing all its own.
AO closed its doors in 2019 when Ben moved on to other things in his life. Thankfully, there are other makers working within this type of creative reincarnation. Checkout our buddy Kris Bulakowski at Upcycled Percussion from Portland, OR, for all your shaky-thing needs, as well as Cindy Hulej at Cindy Guitars, who makes custom-built guitars out of reclaimed timbers from ancient New York buildings.
This Week in Wilco, Etc.
2002 / September 2: Wilco plays a 20-song set at the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle, WA.
2024 / September 3: Starship Casual: Orbit Two (dBpm Records) is released. It features 22 songs shared on Substack including covers of songs by Christine McVie, Television, The Grateful Dead, Violent Femmes, and more.
2007 / September 4: Wilco is at Bayfront Festival Park in Duluth, MN with Low opening. Nels guests on lap steel for Low’s “One More Reason to Forget,” and Alan and Mimi from Low return to the stage during Wilco’s set to guest on “California Stars.”
Lovely story!
"speakerectomy"!
Gear Talkin’™ is always a treat.
Thanks Mark!
After watching the documentary on Amazon Prime, I walked into Carmine City Guitars this summer in NYC and met Cindy and her husband. They were extremely great people who make one of a kind guitars. (My wife said I have too many guitars. I bet Susie doesn’t say that to Jeff.) Thanks for giving Cindy a shout out.
I loved the picture of see through reverb/ vibrato box. I am always amazed at how people can just put things together.
Put a Loft guitar strap on the Christmas list. (My wife says I can have as many guitar straps as I want. 🙁)