2023/12. GEAR

Short on time, I resorted to an online random word generator to trigger todays writing. The word I got was GEAR.

You can tell an awful lot about a person without talking to them, or hearing about them. If it’s a person with any sort of passion you will be able to read them by the gear they drag along with them. For instance, waiting in line at the airport, you happen to be stuck in the eternal zig zag feeding into the stack of x-ray machines at TSA. The person three spots ahead of you is pulling a reinforced Gore-Tex bag with a familiar embroidered emblem sewn into the corner. His shoes are super high end hiking boots, broken in but not ragged. His shorts say Patagonia and his backpack cost him a good multi-hundred chunk of change, unless it was given to him by the company, which looks to be a real possibility. He wears an orange nano-puff jacket and his tightly woven hat bears a logo with four letters, the vowel of which carries an umlaut over top.

I’ve never met the guy before and am likely never going to meet him unless he sits beside me on the plane, but I venture to guess I could tell you a bit about him: Where he spends his free time, where he shops, even what kind of socks he’s wearing under this lightweight trouser legs.

People who peek into the back of Dave’s car can guess something about him, too. They’ll see a set of golf clubs, a hand pulled titanium golf cart, a pair of white golf shoes… all evidence of what he might do after work or on weekends. Not all the time, but its surely a part of who he is.

His fishing rod is custom. If someone asks him what kind of pole he has, he knows they are in the realm of amateur and can refer them to me to exchange fish tales. 

People who walk past our open garage, and trust me, there are a lot of them, can see by the shelves stacked by the garage door that there’s a need for sound amplification in our lives. The shelves are loaded with speakers, mixers, mic stands, speaker stands. Bulging black bags filled with cords and mics. Folded guitar stands, metal music stands… the gear my roadie and I have lugged around for decades. There’s a heavy-duty folding cart for lugging the heavy stuff. There’s a big set of Ramsa speakers and a 16 channel Mackie board, a medium set of Ramsas, and the small Samson set. We know exactly what to load into the back of the van depending on the show and the size of the venue. Anyone can tell by the quality of the gear that this isn’t Karaoke gear. But we are also not going to have the quality that Robinette Sound gives us for our big shows. We know when what we have isn’t good enough, and thank goodness we know who has not only the gear but the talent to use it when we need it.

People who swim in certain waters can tell a good bit about others who swim with them just by the nature of the gear they have. I’ll get a nod when guitarists ask what kind of guitar I have and I answer, “Well, I have a few. My best ones are Martin, Collings and Taylor and my current favorite, a custom Stika.” If you know, you know. If you don’t, it frankly doesn’t matter.

Yes, indeed, one can presume a lot just by looking at someone’s gear. On the other hand, I’ve seen some pretty masterful art emerge from inferior tools. The touch of a master’s hand trumps the gear. And then there are the people who stack the gear in their favor, but the talent just isn’t there to take full advantage of it.

Those kind of divine experiences, when you see someone pull of some pretty dope bike moves on his kid’s teeny bike, or a musician makes a cheap guitar vibrate and sing, or an iPhone produces some remarkable photos…  when crayons produce incredible art…those experiences are a reminder that gear can say a lot, but talent says more.