In the CURL with BIGROCK ...by Devon Cathlin

... By Devon Cathlin

      Oh, sure, everyone knows that if you invent a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, but what about something really important? Hmmm??? Leave the little furry things to that strange stuff in the far back corner of your kitchen cabinet and go for a real invention. Go for the ultimate. Go one better than the wheel! Make a pick that will stay in a double picking, string-sizzling, reverb-thrashing, Stingray driving surf rock guitarist's fingers. Yeah! Do that and you've got a winner!

      Of course, like many a late bloomer, such an invention wasn't important to me when I curled up in front of the television watching Klaatu befriend little Bobby Benson in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. And, by the time Bud was having girl trouble on the 50s TV sitcom Father Knows Best, I still didn't care, pretty much taking it for granted that tiny little picks and big triangular picks were the extent of what could be done for guitar players. So I watched my sitcoms between trying to get my fingers and mind to curl around music in general and guitars in particular. Unlike music, I understood sitcoms. I thought Bud was cool. I wanted to be cool. But, well, as that relates to being a surf rock guitarist — at the time I wanted to be a beach bunny and the only way I could relate to a guitar was C, F and G on a dilapidated flattop.

      Inventions? Didn't think about them. Didn't think about them when Rolling Stone Magazine pulled the infamous Masked Marauders coup, either. Okay, that was cool and I wanted to be cool so I paid attention just like I paid attention to Bud on Father Knows Best. And I'll grant that I didn't much care to act like Betty. Nope. Wanted to be cool. Betty was popular. Popular wasn't good enough. Had to be cool. Had to be a Masked Marauder, had to be Bud, had to ...... I'm getting a little carried away here and by now I can imagine you're wondering (probably with a slack jawed "wha?") just what mousetraps, wheels, Bud and masks have to do with Dick Dale-like picking prowess.

      Uh, nothing. Unless, of course, you weren't born with Dale's lightning fingers, which, sadly, a lot of us weren't. Have you ever strapped on your Strat, turned your vintage amp to mondo reverb, taught yourself twenty sizzling surf tunes with a thousand hours of practice? Have you ever taken the stage, your performance groovin' like a perfect curl? Yeah? Was that when your pick propelled itself — exit, stage left — taking your dazzling solo with it? If that's the case, Rolling Stone faking a Bob Dylan recording and Bud from Father Knows Best are two things you have just got to learn about. And I, Beach Bunny Turned Rocker, have got the skinny.

      Here it is. It was a dark and stormy night. Well, maybe not. It was probably sunny and warm considering it was Sunset Strip down L.A. way, but let's not let that get in the way of a great story with a rock solid ending. A flower child named Allen ran into a guitarist wanna-be named Billy. Allen, as luck would have it, taught guitar. Billy, to our future joy, wanted to learn guitar. History, my friends, was made. No, don't look it up in the college textbook you're using to prop up Gonzo's bass drum. It actually took awhile, but that's just the way history is, isn't it?

      In a nutshell, Billy always wanted to be an inventor. What he was, instead, was an actor. He was Bud on Father Knows Best. He was Bobby, Klaatu's buddy on The Day the Earth Stood Still. Back when Bill was a child actor, a reporter once asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He promptly and with presentience said he wanted to be an inventor, that some day he'd invent a paper water bucket or something. Fast forward to 1965 and Billy Gray begins to take guitar lessons from a very hip Allen Chance. Gray confesses now that he never did get overly involved in guitar, pretty much moving on to different interests. Before long he was an accomplished Speedway motorcycle racer. You know, as in going very, very fast on a small dirt oval with several other equally fast and determined motorcyclists nipping your heels. As in these bikes have no brakes. Even when he wasn't playing cool Bud, he was always cool Bill.

      Chance, however, stuck with it and was soon playing in a band that one day was asked to imitate famous rockers for a hoax record lauded in Rolling Stone Magazine. If you're old enough, you probably remember the 1969 review in Rolling Stone by T. M. Christian for an LP that allegedly was a bootleg created by famous rockers Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Mick Jagger. Since the players were contracted to other record companies, they supposedly made the album anonymously as the Masked Marauders. However, it was just a joke by author Greil Marcus writing under the Christian pseudonym. When the article hit the magazine stands there was no such LP, no such band — nothing, nada, nyet — just a cunning ruse that was about to take on the proportions of a tsunami. The punch line of the joke turned out to be us, the consumers. Being the clever little lemmings so many of us were back then, we all promptly told our prehistoric versions of Sam Goody that we had to have that album. Rolling Stone's honchos looked at each other and said, "Kaching!" The Masked Marauders were born and Allen Chance placed his name firmly in Rock'n'Roll history by being one of them. Chance himself portrayed Bob Dylan on the song More Or Less Hudsons Bay Again that he also co-wrote.

      In the meantime, Gray had begun inventing devices to make his motorcycle racing career more dynamic. Matching consummate skill as a racer with imagination as an inventor took him all of the way to winning the 1977 National Long Track Speedway Ascot 1/2 Mile Dirt Oval Championship. While Gray was looking for problems with things and fixing them, Chance was playing and writing music. And surf rock music slowly crumbled to a secondary genre under the heat of The Beatles and Janis Joplin's brand of entertainment. The only thing that didn't change was Chance and Gray's friendship, which, ironically, turns out to be a wonderful thing for sizzle-pick surf guitarists.

      As time went on, Allen moved onto a boat. How cool is that? Music, water, wow! By then his accomplishments had already stacked up in a big way, including co-authoring Linda Ronstadt's first single with the Stone Poneys, One For One. Bill continued to invent things, a number of which made their way through manufacturers and into our daily lives. One such item was a very popular champagne key he invented along with Chance. Gray had turned into the inventor he predicted he would be and Chance was making a substantial mark as a musician.

      Like most of us, Chance dropped picks and was hoping for a way to attach a spare to his shoulder strap without using the holders available at the time. This I understand. I know Dick Dale has a gummy-backed pick holder on his Strat, but I'd as soon go to the dentist for an unnecessary root canal as glue anything to my beloved Hot Rod Red baby. Then, too, unlike most of us, Gray was getting well established and thoroughly enjoying his life as an inventor. He now says of his early years making modifications on his racing bikes, "I was an ergonomic engineer without knowing it." He liked finding ways to make things more comfortable. Then as now, Gray had a knack for seeing where a problem was and coming up with an answer to fix it. His and Chance's guitar strap lock system (manufactured by Dunlop) outshines the others and, but for a lack of intensive promotion, many people it think would have become the industry standard. BIGROCK Engineering, Chance and Gray's company, had begun doing remakes of any number of old ideas and stale designs into new formats.

      It probably isn't a surprise that when Chance needed a pick holder for his guitar, he began to brainstorm with Gray. In the course of tossing ideas around, a lot of options were discussed. Then, one day, Chance kicked a tie clasp across the floor of his boat. Nothing new. He said he'd "been kicking it around, but never threw it away" for some time. This time, though, something clicked. He took the idea of combining the tie clasp and guitar pick to Bill Gray who promptly set about integrating his talent for ergonomic design into the equation. Part of Gray's genius is insight. Yep, just like a musician who can play like a god, inventors bring their own special magic to the things they make. First Gray folded a fairly standard shaped pick over so it could be clipped to the guitar or the guitar strap. A pick that was both pick and pick holder in one - success!

F-1 Pick by BIGROCK Engineering

Oh, but we're talking Bill Gray here. He looked at it. His brain kachunked. New! Idea! Incoming! He redesigned it. Why, he reasoned, not make it a better pick all of the way around? Why not give it a design that allowed you to hold it without the old Guitarist's Death Grip? If you don't have to hang on like it's your last quarter and you're at the only phone booth left that takes a quarter you could relax and — BINGO — play better! Side effect: hands are more relaxed and your back doesn't hurt as much.

X-1 Chassis with Single Pick by BIGROCK Engineering

X-1 Chassis with Single Pick by BIGROCK Engineering

      Aha! Could this be true? Well, it appears so. BIGROCK Engineering was nice enough to let us give some of their picks to musicians with special needs. The resulting feedback indicates these picks are winners. A bassman who developed carpal tunnel symptoms typing at the "real job" his fiancé got for him said, "my fingers didn't seem to get as tired as they do with a normal pick." A double picking speed demon who does a Miserlou to die for commented, "The X-1 single pick combo gets me into that groove and keeps me there. I can slam it into overdrive and never blow the shift." One player came right out and claimed, "[This pick] allowed me to concentrate on other areas of my picking style. Once I wasn't having to consciously think about keeping my pick from spinning or moving in my fingers, I was able to focus on my wrist motions, and I noted I had a lot of wasted movement with my wrist, which was slowing down my velocity when double picking, as well as tiring my wrist out sooner." (Yeah, I promise, in spite of the weird way he talks, this dude really is a musician.) Paul Musso, a professor of music at the University of Colorado at Denver, is the author of some very popular guitar books published by Mel Bay. Musso knows his stuff; he's played with the Colorado Symphony. He says, "I love the F-1 pick and I think it is a very useful tool for guitarists on all levels." And he's the teach, guys, so you know you gotta listen.

      The dynamics of these comments are simple. Better mousetrap. Remember? Gray built proper pick technique into the picks themselves so players will develop good licks from the very beginning. Of course, old timers (that would be me) do a "saywha?" routine when they first grab one of those little suckers but, hey, it takes awhile to learn to drive a Corvette, too. Somehow even geezer pickers can learn a new trick or two. We aren't dogs. Okay, some of us are dogs, but with the right tools and enough time anyone can improve their technique.

      Now, I promised the skinny, the dope, the inside information. You know Klaatu's friend Billy, aka Bud, designed these picks. You know the faux Bob Dylan from Rolling Stone's infamous Masked Marauders is a hands-on creative idea type person. You gotta love a company that, more or less, is on thirty-one feet of Uniflite Sedan Cruiser boat/water demon. Oh, yeah, did I mention that Japanese (as in "they never stopped loving surf rock there" fame) rock icon Cornelius had scads of the picks made up to include with the action figures he sells at his gigs? Hot rod music chimed in, too, when BIGROCK was asked to make a mountain of F-1s for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Shelby Cobra.

      This one floats, Surf Guys. We've got a pick that, due to that clever skag-like curve, sticks in your fingers even when you're in the danger zone. We've got a pick originally made out of PVC — eyup, that stuff a guy named Waldo Semon reinvented in 1926. Boats, a pick with a skag, a guy named Sea Man, Japanese-never-stopped-loving-surf-rockers, muscle cars. We have a winner: The Surf Guitar Pick! And, hey, if you need a bonus, as this is being written each and every pick is still being manufactured by Gray himself, forever friend of Klaatu the Space Man. That makes it a ... space pick! Buy one.

BIGROCK Engineering's F-1 picks are available from:

All models can be purchased directly from BIGROCK Engineering through the mail:

BIGROCK Engineering
BX 9172
Marina Del Rey, CA 90295

Or their website:

http://www.bigrockeng.com/