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out of the house, after a moderate delay they did so.
The first thing was to drive out to Progress' house. Slim picked up some clothes and his guitar,
and then they headed back into town, to Charlie's. Orville, who was glad to see them, took charge of
Slim's guitar. He would intonate it and make sure it was set up properly. Intonation was a process Slim
had never quite understood. He knew the bridge pins had to be adjusted and such, but it was a mystery
to him how a guitar could be in tune when it was open, and not in tune at the higher frets and octaves.
But he could hear it was true when he played the guitar unintonated, and he had faith that Orville
would make it right.
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r r
Nadine then told him to go into the front of the shop and pick out an amp. Slim tried to argue
about it, but he was learning that arguing with Nadine was like swimming upstream in a flood. It
couldn't be done, never, no how.
Normally, he would just have looked for a duplicate of the Fender Super Reverb he was used to
and preferred. But, to his dismay, Fender didn't seem to exist in this world. And it seemed that, taking
the power into account, he should be more than usually choosy about his amp. He started out deciding
he would look only at tube-type amps, older models similar to the Super Reverb. He played through a
few of them, checking them out, but none had the bite, the volume or the distortion he was used to.
Then he noticed a dusty, ugly, orange crate of an amp sitting half-hidden in a corner. It was obvious
that no one had looked at it or played with it in a long time. But it seemed to have a faint glow or shine
about it, so he moved some other amps out of the way and rolled the orange monstrosity out to the
center of the floor.
It was a simple construction of tubes, sheet metal, a reverb chamber, and unmarked, unnumbered
dials. In fact, the only writing on it at all was the maker's name, wrought in blue chrome across the
front of the speaker grille. A simple word; HILLS. But the sound that came from the speakers when
Slim plugged in was the sweet dirty tone he was used to, the warm twisted sound he called his own. It
was more, though, and as he played he could sense undertones and harmonics that seemed to vibrate
deeply inside him, and when he played a thumb edge to get a pure high harmonic note, it screamed
and rang with sustain, far longer than he'd ever been able to catch before. The amp, he knew, had its
own power.
"This is it," he said, smiling, excited.
The blond kid, Wanger was his name, Slim remembered, looked slightly disturbed. "You sure
you want that one?" he asked.
"Yeah, why? There something wrong with it?"
"Uhm, no. Not exactly. It's about twenty years old, but we reconditioned it, so it's in good shape."
"What, then," Slim said. The kid was fidgeting, and Slim wanted to know why.
Wanger looked over at Nadine. She only shrugged. Did she know something about it?
"Well, see," the boy mumbled. "We've sold that thing and had it returned ten or fifteen times so
far. It sounds good and it works good, but people get freaked out by it or something. It's never
anything they can explain, it just makes them uncomfortable to play it. A few of them well, almost
all of them, really said it felt like the amp was fighting them."
"Feels okay to me," Slim said, ripping off a quick riff in B-flat. "Feels real good. Who knows,
maybe it was just waiting for the right player."
"Maybe," Wanger said dubiously. "I won't be surprised to see you bring it back, though."
"Hah! No chance. This is exactly what I want. Throw in a thirty-foot cord and I'll take this
sucker. If you can clean it up a little and have Orville tweak and match it, we'll pick it up when we
come back for the guitar."
"Okay," Wanger said, shaking his head. "You got it, for what it's worth."
The next order of business was the trip to the Canadian River to see how Elijigbo's crew was
doing setting up the festival site.
The site was crawling with activity. Crews were clearing brush and rocks from the audience area,
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smoothing it down and setting out trash cans. The stage had been constructed backing up to a hill,
with the river behind it. The major activity centered around three cranes which were lifting a steel grid [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]