PatheinRaindropMoe
New member
Mr. Middleman Returns
I half-heartedly went along with an idea the Idolmaker had worked out with Mr. Middleman. It was more out of curiosity than anthing though I must admit that the bait had me tempted. The promises of easy cash made me hesitate, made me doubt myself. Mr. Middleman had a Japanese "connection". He wasn't cashing in with the Goose's pedal so much anymore so he decided "we" would launch "Gomer Effects" and dump these into the Japanese market. They were waiting hungrily. I just needed to lend my name to it. I just had to come up with pedals. Which pedals? It didn't matter to these two what the pedals were. They didn't know or care. Anything. The Idolmaker had been fascinated with a couple of pedals I had modded years ago which just sat on my shelf. One was the DOD Vibrothang. This pedal, modded, had freaked him out. "You need to bottle that shit and sell the piss out of it, son". He took to calling me "son". Nevermind that it really wasn't mine. Another one was an opto-compressor. He loved it. It gave his copped blues licks "that" sound. It unfortunately ran on a bipolar 18 volts and was a lovelovelovelovelove to work the bugs out with a charge pump. It took too much of a current draw. It needed a true bipolar supply. That wasn't really the problem though that I had with it. It was too closely related to Jack Orman's and Midwest Analogue's retake on the Anderton Compressor for me to feel comfortable in using it other than just for myself. "Huh? What?" said the Idolmaker. "I don't care where it comes from, you need to bottle that shit and sell the piss out of it... son". Through the months we piled up a handful of these "sell the piss out of them" circuits. They were to be sold on the Japanese market by a Japanese distributer as "Gomer's Effects" through Mr. Middleman's Music Store. Every ripped off one of them. A fact which nobody, not in the slightest, seemed to care about. This was Business.
I found myself sitting across the table one evening with the Japanese Connection. I was squeezed between Mr. Middleman and the Idolmaker. Plans were being formed. The Japanese guys were very nice, I must say. Extremely polite and well mannered. They treated me with the greatest respect which I believe to this day was sincere. I don't really know though. My question to them was simple. Why me? In fact, why any of this? Why this intense interest in circuits which actually go back 30 years in some instances and originated in the minds of Japanese designers? True engineers and true electronics experts? Why do you guys pay so much money for Americans to rip off your own circuits and resell them to you? The rather sad thing was that the older man (there was an older man and his traveling mate who was the guitar playing demo tester) knew this though I don't think anyone ever straight out asked him. He looked slightly embarrassed but he took the time to go on and try to explain the situation in Japan to me.
In a nutshell, Japanese youth is as propagandized as the rest of us. They are ignorant of the roll their own fathers have had in shaping the industry for musical equipment gear. They believe too that someone like the Goose is offering something never before seen. The poison has been very effective. There are voices of dissent I did discover later when I got the chance to correspond with 2 bona fide Japanese electronics engineering experts. They know full well what guys like the Goose, and other such bullshitters with "5 Year Business Plans" are doing. You think AG is heated about this? These guys are too. More so even because it's steeped in a kind of Nationalism. A pride in what their own countrymen have done and a general lack of appreciation for their own past by their own youth. This may sound odd but they resent the pilfering of their own heritage's IP in terms of electronics innovation. I completely understand this and I cannot say that I blame them. Freestompboxes.org isn't the only place you'll find that this kind of crap just burns the hell out of some people.
I grudgingly gave my consent and the dinner ended. I was to be the new Goose. The next night, to my surprise, the older and younger visiting Japanese gentlemen showed up to my gig. To my even greater surprise the first Goose came along too. The younger man, Jun, sat in with us and he was an excellent guitarist. Before he left we went through the pedals on my board. He really liked them a lot but it was hard to tell what they were by just looking at the board. There was one particular "pedal" he was interested in. It was six circuits in a cake pan. All run in series. I unscrewed the cake pan from the piece of raw wood it was sitting on and the young man's eyes grew large and wide. "Dan-erectro?". Yeah, man... Danelectro mini pedals. All the non OD/Distortion ones which interested me. I love them. "Ohhh", he said... "Sound good!". Yes, they sure do.
He also like my gutted, modded, truebypassed, toggle switched to hell Peavey Hotfoot Distortion - my Rat pedal... my own personal "'Mo' D" distortion costing a grand total of $28. He wanted that one. I gave it to him and he took it home with him back to Japan.
The next day I told the Idolmaker about the exchange. His response... "There you go son, that there's our pedal lineup. You need to bottle that shit and sell the piss out of it."
Gomer goes to Alabama
This is the end of the story. The meeting with the Japanese had happened in January '07. It was expected that I would start small with anything and build up the whole "lineup" over time. "Product" was due in May. What "product" was I to build? Nobody cared. It didn't matter. Just build anything. I built nothing. This set the Idolmaker off. I needed to get serious with this. I needed to get structure in my life. I was screwing it up for everyone and time was wasting. Eventually, after being badgered almost weekly by the Idolmaker about my lack of progress and my lack of life structure, I collected all my bodged, hand drawn circuit diagrams and modded schematics. Smudged, sloppy, half finished - I put them in a makeshift portfolio. I hopped a flight on a PA28 Piper Cherokee with a friend of mine to a place in Alabama to meet with an industrial designer. My friend would drop me off there, I'd take care of business and he would return to pick me up in a few days after he visited his family in Nashville.
I was dropped off at the destination airport. I rented a car, got a hotel room and then headed out to my meeting with the schematics engineer. He was very patient and helpful. $1000 and a day and half later my shoddy portfolio of half assed modded circuits; circuits which, in my mind, weren't even rightly mine, had been transformed into an impressive array of professional level, factory production ready work. I'd recoup some of the money through the boards ordering. All that was left to do now was to give them one last go over, making sure all was correct because once the schems went out there was no turning back. Any mistakes made would be just tough luck and I'd have to fix the miscues afterwards.
I sat in that hotel room for 3 days due to a problem on the return leg with my friend Jim. It wasn't his fault. It couldn't be helped. I decided to wait because he needed help with the rental costs of the plane. In the ensuing 3 days I flatly, finally decided to trash the whole idea. Once and for all, for good. I couldn't live right with the "plan". It wouldn't let me rest. It was a blatant lie. I was going to be selling pedals which weren't my designs, through people who didn't even care and didn't even really like me. I was just the new Goose. The past six months had shown the plan coming apart and it had made these people I mistook for friends very unhappy with me. This was to be a Business after all and I was just born, maybe bred - I don't know - to be incapable of going along with this kind of thing. I fought it the whole way and in the end, deep down inside I considered it an illegitimate scam. The company I was keeping was with liars and scammers. They of course did not see it that way in the slightest. They were Businessmen. They had a vision. They were going to be players. The were going to have clout. They were providing a service people needed. They were Professionals. All that crap. All that total, pure, salesman crap. Didn't know what they were selling. Did care in the slightest. They just saw sheep and they wanted to be the shearers.
The Idolmaker ended up finding someone else. He had to have. This was the guy who six months earlier watched as I used a multimeter to check for speakerwire continuity with stark wonder. "What's that beeping noise mean?".
He has set himself up as the Goose. He's free to do this. I'm free to ignore it and move on. I expect that he should leave any connection with me out of it. May he lay eggs-a-plenty.
I half-heartedly went along with an idea the Idolmaker had worked out with Mr. Middleman. It was more out of curiosity than anthing though I must admit that the bait had me tempted. The promises of easy cash made me hesitate, made me doubt myself. Mr. Middleman had a Japanese "connection". He wasn't cashing in with the Goose's pedal so much anymore so he decided "we" would launch "Gomer Effects" and dump these into the Japanese market. They were waiting hungrily. I just needed to lend my name to it. I just had to come up with pedals. Which pedals? It didn't matter to these two what the pedals were. They didn't know or care. Anything. The Idolmaker had been fascinated with a couple of pedals I had modded years ago which just sat on my shelf. One was the DOD Vibrothang. This pedal, modded, had freaked him out. "You need to bottle that shit and sell the piss out of it, son". He took to calling me "son". Nevermind that it really wasn't mine. Another one was an opto-compressor. He loved it. It gave his copped blues licks "that" sound. It unfortunately ran on a bipolar 18 volts and was a lovelovelovelovelove to work the bugs out with a charge pump. It took too much of a current draw. It needed a true bipolar supply. That wasn't really the problem though that I had with it. It was too closely related to Jack Orman's and Midwest Analogue's retake on the Anderton Compressor for me to feel comfortable in using it other than just for myself. "Huh? What?" said the Idolmaker. "I don't care where it comes from, you need to bottle that shit and sell the piss out of it... son". Through the months we piled up a handful of these "sell the piss out of them" circuits. They were to be sold on the Japanese market by a Japanese distributer as "Gomer's Effects" through Mr. Middleman's Music Store. Every ripped off one of them. A fact which nobody, not in the slightest, seemed to care about. This was Business.
I found myself sitting across the table one evening with the Japanese Connection. I was squeezed between Mr. Middleman and the Idolmaker. Plans were being formed. The Japanese guys were very nice, I must say. Extremely polite and well mannered. They treated me with the greatest respect which I believe to this day was sincere. I don't really know though. My question to them was simple. Why me? In fact, why any of this? Why this intense interest in circuits which actually go back 30 years in some instances and originated in the minds of Japanese designers? True engineers and true electronics experts? Why do you guys pay so much money for Americans to rip off your own circuits and resell them to you? The rather sad thing was that the older man (there was an older man and his traveling mate who was the guitar playing demo tester) knew this though I don't think anyone ever straight out asked him. He looked slightly embarrassed but he took the time to go on and try to explain the situation in Japan to me.
In a nutshell, Japanese youth is as propagandized as the rest of us. They are ignorant of the roll their own fathers have had in shaping the industry for musical equipment gear. They believe too that someone like the Goose is offering something never before seen. The poison has been very effective. There are voices of dissent I did discover later when I got the chance to correspond with 2 bona fide Japanese electronics engineering experts. They know full well what guys like the Goose, and other such bullshitters with "5 Year Business Plans" are doing. You think AG is heated about this? These guys are too. More so even because it's steeped in a kind of Nationalism. A pride in what their own countrymen have done and a general lack of appreciation for their own past by their own youth. This may sound odd but they resent the pilfering of their own heritage's IP in terms of electronics innovation. I completely understand this and I cannot say that I blame them. Freestompboxes.org isn't the only place you'll find that this kind of crap just burns the hell out of some people.
I grudgingly gave my consent and the dinner ended. I was to be the new Goose. The next night, to my surprise, the older and younger visiting Japanese gentlemen showed up to my gig. To my even greater surprise the first Goose came along too. The younger man, Jun, sat in with us and he was an excellent guitarist. Before he left we went through the pedals on my board. He really liked them a lot but it was hard to tell what they were by just looking at the board. There was one particular "pedal" he was interested in. It was six circuits in a cake pan. All run in series. I unscrewed the cake pan from the piece of raw wood it was sitting on and the young man's eyes grew large and wide. "Dan-erectro?". Yeah, man... Danelectro mini pedals. All the non OD/Distortion ones which interested me. I love them. "Ohhh", he said... "Sound good!". Yes, they sure do.
He also like my gutted, modded, truebypassed, toggle switched to hell Peavey Hotfoot Distortion - my Rat pedal... my own personal "'Mo' D" distortion costing a grand total of $28. He wanted that one. I gave it to him and he took it home with him back to Japan.
The next day I told the Idolmaker about the exchange. His response... "There you go son, that there's our pedal lineup. You need to bottle that shit and sell the piss out of it."
Gomer goes to Alabama
This is the end of the story. The meeting with the Japanese had happened in January '07. It was expected that I would start small with anything and build up the whole "lineup" over time. "Product" was due in May. What "product" was I to build? Nobody cared. It didn't matter. Just build anything. I built nothing. This set the Idolmaker off. I needed to get serious with this. I needed to get structure in my life. I was screwing it up for everyone and time was wasting. Eventually, after being badgered almost weekly by the Idolmaker about my lack of progress and my lack of life structure, I collected all my bodged, hand drawn circuit diagrams and modded schematics. Smudged, sloppy, half finished - I put them in a makeshift portfolio. I hopped a flight on a PA28 Piper Cherokee with a friend of mine to a place in Alabama to meet with an industrial designer. My friend would drop me off there, I'd take care of business and he would return to pick me up in a few days after he visited his family in Nashville.
I was dropped off at the destination airport. I rented a car, got a hotel room and then headed out to my meeting with the schematics engineer. He was very patient and helpful. $1000 and a day and half later my shoddy portfolio of half assed modded circuits; circuits which, in my mind, weren't even rightly mine, had been transformed into an impressive array of professional level, factory production ready work. I'd recoup some of the money through the boards ordering. All that was left to do now was to give them one last go over, making sure all was correct because once the schems went out there was no turning back. Any mistakes made would be just tough luck and I'd have to fix the miscues afterwards.
I sat in that hotel room for 3 days due to a problem on the return leg with my friend Jim. It wasn't his fault. It couldn't be helped. I decided to wait because he needed help with the rental costs of the plane. In the ensuing 3 days I flatly, finally decided to trash the whole idea. Once and for all, for good. I couldn't live right with the "plan". It wouldn't let me rest. It was a blatant lie. I was going to be selling pedals which weren't my designs, through people who didn't even care and didn't even really like me. I was just the new Goose. The past six months had shown the plan coming apart and it had made these people I mistook for friends very unhappy with me. This was to be a Business after all and I was just born, maybe bred - I don't know - to be incapable of going along with this kind of thing. I fought it the whole way and in the end, deep down inside I considered it an illegitimate scam. The company I was keeping was with liars and scammers. They of course did not see it that way in the slightest. They were Businessmen. They had a vision. They were going to be players. The were going to have clout. They were providing a service people needed. They were Professionals. All that crap. All that total, pure, salesman crap. Didn't know what they were selling. Did care in the slightest. They just saw sheep and they wanted to be the shearers.
The Idolmaker ended up finding someone else. He had to have. This was the guy who six months earlier watched as I used a multimeter to check for speakerwire continuity with stark wonder. "What's that beeping noise mean?".
He has set himself up as the Goose. He's free to do this. I'm free to ignore it and move on. I expect that he should leave any connection with me out of it. May he lay eggs-a-plenty.
