Dom's Rambles

I finally snagged myself a DOD American Metal fuzz box off eBay last night. Whenever one of these has come up for sale in the past the same thing has happened. The price stays at £5 until a couple of minutes before the auction closes and then goes totally mental, always managing to catch me off my bidding guard. I must have got lucky this time (although I’d much rather be lucky in another department – but let’s not go there), I put a £20 maximum bid on as close to the close of play as I dared and secured the thing for £17.
Someone who worked in a music shop once told me that DOD stood for Donny Osmond Developments! Apparently, they reckoned, the young Donny used to be quite an electronics whizz and when the family’s musical career waned he ended up marketing the guitar effects that he used to build for his brothers. Of course that’s probably about as true as the story of Bob Holness (of Blockbusters fame) having played the saxophone break on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, but there you go.
I’ve owned a Boss HM-2, which is another classic Eighties stomp box, for years and although the thing is perfectly serviceable I find the tone just a little bit too harsh. The DOD stomp box, an example of which I borrowed to record the first Lovechild demo over 22 years ago, has an altogether warmer quality to it and when using a Les Paul and Marshall combination makes you sound exactly like Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top – which is no bad thing. I’ve been listening to the classic Eliminator album – as well as its vastly underrated follow up, Afterburner - quite a lot recently (which reminds me, I must get to a meeting at Santa Pod sometime soon). I was even intending to take a certain person to see the band in Paris as a surprise. Alas, ‘twas not to be – like a lot of other things.

posted by Dom  # 11:12 AM