The stack

["Gary M. Gillman" <garyg@inforamp.net>]

PT, in the 1980 interview Joe recently added to his Who website (thanks
Joe), said that the lower cabinet of his Hiwatt ampifier stack was a
"dummy", but that he wouldn't feel "right" if it wasn't there. A lister
recently indicated as well that this was the standard stage set-up. But wait
a sec. How could this be? PT is credited with developing the "stack", which
has been much copied by many other acts. Surely this must have meant that
two working amps were used, or four as he often had two stacks behind him,
as did JAE. If both speakers in the vertical stack weren't functional, what
would be the musical point, and what rock innovation, apart from an esthetic
one, was involved? I can understand that PT may have used the dummy speaker
as the one to trash when he did those things, but surely there was more to
the stack than this? Can it be that he switched to a dummy lower cabinet in
the early or mid-70's as a first move towards lowering the sound pressures
on stage to preserve his hearing? An interesting sidenote is that Eddie Van
Halen has always used a stack in which the top, not bottom, speaker was the
dummy, the reason being not to have the sound going straight into his ears
(to save his hearing, but it may not have helped much as both Eddie and Alex
have significant hearing loss as well, but not tinnitus it appears).....Gary M.