When I first started writing this article, I thought I was going to be rehashing some old material about Gibson (under owner Henry Juszkiewicz) and one particular completely crappy business practice: "The Bumblebee Capacitors".

But while doing research for that article (the bumblebee capacitors debacle is still a pretty interesting and an instructive case study), I was lead to a whole lot of other things: namely the information that is now this article. Most notably that there was a whole chain of events, playing out across several years, under Juszkiewicz's leadership that caused the failure of Gibson, and the forced sale that threw "Henry J" out, and that brought in new investors and new company leadership. Early last month, it had been a year since Gibson went through that ownership and leadership change.

Henry Juszkiewicz acquired Gibson in 1986 for $5m. 5 Million Dollars. That's it. Now, 1986 is quite a bit different from 2019 in terms of how much inflation has devalued the dollar, but $5 million still seems a pittance given the storied Gibson name...

Our reporting on this is way too late in coming... Well, not the release yesterday.

Let's just say that Trevor Church, the organizing force around Beastmaker put together an incredible release campaign - In June. It seems to have culminated yesterday.

Beastmaker just released EP #9:

So we've been doing a lot of work to put information into the wiki here on the site. We've completed the catalog of all the pedals we have. This doesn't include just the brand-name already-assembled pedals by larger manufacturers. We actually also undertook a lot of work scanning different websites and companies that offer more than just the run-of-the-mill pedals and found ourselves drawn into kit pedals and pcb-only pedals. Now, of course this site is about tube amps, and tube amps alone, while they take us to the promised land of heavy music, they won't alone keep it interesting.

We've been meaning to post something about our encounter with Lace Pickups a couple of weeks ago, but just saw this from Brian Wampler's YouTube channel. It just was posted today on YouTube:

So I've spent a little bit of time trying to find this episode of Undercover Boss for you to see. CBS makes you sign up for some membership. But then so does Hulu. Hulu seems to be the least objectionable from what I found. The best solution is if you have Tivo, or a DVR from your Internet/Cable/whatever company and can manage to record it on re-run.

Merry New Year! Happy 2017 to everyone! Did you get a chance to see the Mariah Carey fiasco on New Year's Eve?