Headroom
TSF · № 07
In the small hours of Sunday, August 30, 1970, a voice carries across a farm field on Afton Down, at the western end of the Isle of Wight. Jeff Dexter, the festival’s MC, introduces “a nice rock and roll band from Shepherds Bush London—the ’Oo.” Keith Moon gallops ahead of them; the band swaggers behind, telling jokes. Beyond the stage the field climbs away into the dark, and the dark is full of people, farther up the rise than anyone can see. At the band’s backs stands a wall of amplifiers.
Two songs warm the valves, and then “Young Man Blues”—a jazz pianist’s blues from 1957, Mose Allison’s, a quiet man’s song. The Who play it stop-time. The band slams down and cuts dead, and Daltrey sings the young man’s complaint alone into the hole it leaves. Again—a slam, then nothing. The voice, and the hillside listening. The stops run out and the band comes down together, and the noise stands up all at once and rolls uphill through the crowd and over the top of the down, clean the whole way out. Deep in the song Townshend leans into the rhythm, windmilling, and the guitar is ringing—harmonics feeding back over Entwistle’s walking bass.
It breathes.
While it breathes—down through the back panel. The chord is in here, working: four Mullard EL34s in a row, glowing, behind a metal shield for the heat, closer to a hundred and twenty watts than the rated hundred. It climbs through Partridge iron, the mains transformer tapped for whatever country the tour lands in. At full power, the wave coming out matches the wave going in. The components sit on thick fiberglass strips. The harnesses were braided by hand and run at right angles. The cabinets are fourteen-ply birch, braced hard, pushing the air. The head is a CP103, a custom circuit built for Townshend—the traffolyte plate on the front engraved The Who. Four bolts secure the steel chassis to the case; it looks less like a guitar amplifier than equipment for a ship.
Up on the surface the night has moved. Two new songs have gone by—“I Don’t Even Know Myself,” “Water”—the future already in the set, and now the band is deep inside Tommy, in the middle of the night.
Tommy ends at 4:15 in the morning, and huge spotlights turn on the crowd from behind the stage. The darkness has faces—by the estimate, six hundred thousand people, lit on a high, moths in the beams. Daltrey swings the microphone overhead. The band answers with “Summertime Blues.” The sound rolls uphill through all of them and into the pre-dawn air.
They play on, and when they finally leave the stage it’s twilight. Sunrise belongs to Melanie and Sly.
*
1964. Dave Reeves spent his evenings in a room above Potter’s Music in Morden, fixing hi-fis and television sets, and building amplifiers of his own. He had come up through technical school and apprenticeships at Marconi and at Mullard, the valve works. Mullard made him redundant in 1966. He financed his own company by building somebody else’s: Sound City amplifiers were Reeves circuits under another badge, and the money made the deposit on a house in New Malden. The garage became the factory—Reeves, Doug Fentiman, Daphne Reeves—and the neighbors complained about the noise. In late 1968 the Who came to Ivor Arbiter, the man who owned the badge, wanting the amps changed. Arbiter declined. Reeves built them himself, and when the contract ended, the amps came out under his own badge. Hiwatt. The production line ran on the DR103. The initials are his, and the band followed the man.
Arbiter sued over the designs; Reeves won when Sound City’s own engineers couldn’t explain the unused holes in their chassis. By 1969 the wiring in a Hiwatt already ran in right angles and neat bundles—his hand and habit. Then the orders outgrew him.
What Reeves wanted was a “certified government wirer,” and in early 1971 the name came out of the phone book. Walton-on-Thames: Joyce Electronics, under contract to Gravesby Instruments, wired for the British Navy. The proprietor was Harry Joyce.
Joyce had learned the trade from American servicemen, and it arrived complete: every component labeled, every wire dressed and tied off, service leads left long enough that the equipment could be repaired wherever it failed. Field repair is the entire logic. A ship can’t come home because a resistor let go. The solder joints carry a dot of red dye to finish them—you know when something has been changed. Reeves passed him a single schematic, and that was it.
Joyce picked his crew fresh out of technical school. Pat Gorman, Keith Johnson, Colin Baverstock, Mike Messina, Trevor Buckley, Roy DeQuincy, Jeff Entwhistle—no relation to John. The bare chassis were wired at Walton-on-Thames and went back to Reeves for valves, transformers, soak tests, and cabinets. And Joyce would wire no more than forty amps a month, for quality. Reeves tried every way he knew to raise the number and never did. Unrelenting was the kind word that stuck. The chassis kept coming—forty a month went back out.
*
Audiences knew Marshall from the grille cloth and Fender from the headstock; Hiwatt they only ever heard—behind Gilmour, Rush, and Genesis, at the back of the loudest stages of the decade. The seventies ended. Journey’s “Stone in Love” opens on a riff everyone files under Marshall. It’s a Hiwatt, front to back. Every one of them had been wired by the same few hands.
Dave Reeves died in early 1981, in a fall. He had meant the company for his children; it passed to the solicitors. The workers incorporated and kept building the old way, until the money ran out. By early 1984 the doors closed. The name wandered through licensees after that; the circuits had moved onto printed boards, and the standard drifted with them. In the nineties Fernandes Guitars, holding the name in the States, contracted the Audio Brothers in England to build them the old way again—and they did: Partridge transformers, chassis wired point to point.
Joyce began building under his own name in the early nineties. The first three Harry Joyce amplifiers went out to Robert Plant’s group; Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes brought his back on their new record, A Pound of Feathers.
The Tube Amp Book, the standard reference, gave Hiwatt three pages. Joyce’s name is not in them. It was somewhere else. Collectors began listing seventies chassis with the signature inside—in full, on the steel, where only a technician would ever look. The shop marked everything it made: wirers’ initials, code letters on the chassis edge, the red dye. The signature sat with the marks.
*
October 1997. Harry Joyce was going to be at the Arlington Guitar Show. I was tending bar in those years; the shift let out near three in the morning. I went home, showered, cooked eggs, made coffee, and drove north out of Austin into the dark with my band brother.
I-35 was nearly empty: scattered taillights in front, no headlights in the mirrors. East and west the fields went black, and the lights out in them were miles apart. A cluster of eighteen-wheelers moving together, then nothing again. The small towns passed and faded—Temple, Troy, Waco. Ahead, West and Abbott. Art Bell was on the AM out of the Nevada desert, taking calls, and in between we played the tapes—Who’s Next, Live at Leeds. More smokes and stories. Past Abbott the sky began to gray. At Hillsboro the interstate split, and we took the west fork.
Harry Joyce was there. I told him what his work had meant to me, and I shook his hand. He talked about the amplifiers, and about the musicians. He was just the kindest. There is no photograph of it.
That winter Rich Renken introduced me to Steve Gibbs at Audio Brothers. James Tyler made my guitars; Rich had been his right hand, and by then he was at Fernandes. I ordered cabinets and had requests: the Fanes wired for four ohms instead of the standard sixteen, and Neutrik locking jacks, so the cables couldn’t vibrate out at volume, or by air.
Gibbs didn’t want to build them that way and he interviewed me. Sixteen is the standard and most players want the sag and give. He asked what would be driving the Fanes. He asked what tubes, what transformers, how high the plate volts ran. He asked where I had heard it. Years of playing four ohms, the subtle tightness underneath. What amused him was that the request had reasons.
I mailed a check to England, months of bar shifts. Spring came and the cabinets arrived in Texas.
Harry Joyce died in 2002. The amps were wired so they could be repaired anywhere in the world; the ones that come open, decades out, show the work exactly as it left Walton-on-Thames. The right angles hold.
* * *
The Find: Listening to You: The Who at the Isle of Wight · directed by Murray Lerner and restored 2006. Lerner’s cameras ran all night. DVD and Blu-ray, in print at the band’s official store.
Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 · 1996. 2CD in print, and it streams everywhere.
The amps are another matter. Clean early-seventies heads approach $5,000. The Audio Brothers and Harry Joyce builds are rarer, and priced by whoever has one.
“Young Man Blues,” third song. Start there at volume.
⁂
At full power, the wave coming out matches the wave going in.
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Opening photograph: Pulse · from the series Transitory.
Closing photograph by Sean Perry for The Sunday Find.
Awesome!! Sooo good!
Love this, those were the days, my friend. The music is everything it holds us all together.