Don't Fret the Funk

Right at the end of the 60s, there was a hiccup in the timeline, and we got Craig Hundley, a skinny red-headed kid about 14 years old who played jazz piano like he was four times that age and a completely different colour. *

Sorta. Adding to the surreality was his previous career as a child actor.**

Burnout was inevitable. When next we heard of Mr. Hundley, he'd changed his last name to Huxley, had embraced avant-garde music making, and unveiled to the world The Blaster Beam, his personal take on Francisco's Cosmic Beam. ***

The Blaster Beam was a gargantuan scale instrument: 18' long, with four piano wire strings and both magnetic and piezo pickups. Played with mallets, plectrums, and . . . er . . . marital aids, and fretted with a honkin' big piece of stainless- steel pipe, The Blaster Beam's extremely low-frequency output is easily recognized as the sound of V'ger in the first Star Trek movie and is infamously linked to instances of spontaneous orgasm in female audience members during live performances. ****

Hundley/Huxley subsequently worked as a sound designer/composer on a number of movies through the 80sthen slowly descended into the murky depths of New Age multi-frikkin'-media DVDs.

Which likely don't feature a whole lot of serious Blaster Beam action.

Anyway, we're not building one of those at the moment. As the theme of these instruments is "Desktop D 'n' B", we're more or less forced to scale the concept back a tad so that it fits on the titular desktop.

Actually, I have a confession to make. It's not just gonna fit on your desk; it's gonna be your desk. Or rather, your desk is gonna be it. We're making a bridge, tailpiece, and headstock to clamp onto your desk and turn it into an extended scale fretless bass.

*I owned Craig Hundley vinyl in the mid 70s. He was a skilled but polite player, kinda like the bastard offspring of Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck. It gets better: he had his own teenaged jazz combo too! Gary Chase, a Louie Belson protégé drumming, and Jay-Jay Wiggins, who had a totally gnarly 'fro, on bass rounded out the trio.

They did not swing.

**Among other things, two appearances in the original Star Trek series: as Peter Kirk in "Operation - Annihilate!" and as the deeply creepy Tommy Starnes in "And the Children Shall Lead".

***Another musical curiosity from mid '70s California, Francisco was an odd combination of Maker, Musician, and Mystic. His Cosmic Beam featured driftwood stumpage as legs and was just one of many homebrew instruments in his arsenal. The Grateful Dead were enthusiastic first adopters of the Beam, at one time featuring two of them on stage to augment their acclaimed weenk weenk weedly weenky weenk musical stylings.

****Your results may vary.