How did you get the Marauder?
In grade 9, I sold my trumpet which I used for one year in grade 8 band. I was really bad at the trumpet. I didn't have the lips nor the will and called it a day after a year. I still liked music and my dad thought I should buy an electric guitar. He took me all over Vancouver looking for my first electric guitar. The quest was really fun though I didn't really understand what goes into an electric guitar.
We eventually bought my first electric from a grade 12 kid in Vancouver who had it listed in the classified ads in the Vancouver Sun. (Remember those? If not, think of a non-digital version of Craigslist that came on -gasp- paper). The guitar was a 1977 Marauder. Dad liked it because it had "Gibson" on the headstock. I liked it because it was black. The kid who I thought looked like a hairy man demoed the guitar by cranking this huge stack and played what I think were Ted Nugent riffs.
The man kid handed me the guitar, so I could try it out and asked me what kind of music I played, and I think he wanted to take the guitar back when I said, "Elton John." I plucked a couple of chords I knew, then passed the guitar over to Dad who strummed his very distinct country chording with the galloping bass line. The rocker kid did not want to blow the sale, so he tried not to roll his eyes and said, "Uh, nice." Hairy kid and Dad agreed on a price (my trumpet money plus some extra Dad kicked in) and I walked out of there with the black Marauder and it came with a Gibson case, complete with crushed purple velvet interior.
How did the Marauder sound?
At first, I LOVED that guitar. It was cool. It was black. It had strings and knobs. It was shaped like the iconic Gibson Les Paul. I could not really play it that well, but I thought I would with lessons. I never really knew how the guitar sounded because though I had a cool electric guitar, I did not have an amplifier. About twice a year, I would plug it into an amp that Dad had, but that old amp would distort and feedback above 2 on the volume setting. Plus, because the amp had a two prong plug, I would slightly electrocute myself every time I played wearing socks in our cement floor basement. Good times.
I finally bought an amp three years later. I didn't know much about sound or specs or practicality. I ended up buying this huge, heavy Yamaha solid state amp. I think I bought it because it was big, it had a distortion knob on it, and it cost exactly how much I had saved up. The thing was built like a tank (I verified this by dropping it accidentally and on-purpose several times over the years), and it had four ten-inch speakers, so it had to sound 4 times better, right?
I remember this guy at a store in North Vancouver trying to convince me to buy this puny, used Garnet tube amp. It had three knobs, one little speaker, and it was slightly beat up. Looking back, that amp only did one thing well: sound amazing. Me now is kicking myself (teen me) for not getting that amp. Unfortunately, teen me decided that bigger was better, more knobs (including a decent spring reverb, a farty distortion, and a vomit-inducing tremolo), and 4 speakers was the way to go. To make matters worse, I don't think I ever tried the amp out before I bought it. Nor did I try to lift it. Luckily, my buddy Trev who was taller and stronger was there to lift the behemoth out to my mom's car. Then Trev carried the beast down into our basement where it stayed for years.
Not the greatest beginning for my first electric and my first amp, but it gets worse. Before I bought the amp, I always KNEW I would sound so much better once I got an amp. By then, I was getting better at the guitar, I could play barre chords and did a little improvising using one or two positions of the pentatonic scale. My ear was always fairly good, and I could play riffs or parts of riffs, and my friends said that I would be amazing once I got my amp. And when I got my amp, we were all deeply, deeply disappointed.
The amp's best feature was that it could get really loud. But that was about it. It was a clean, boring sounding amp. Later, I found out that some guys were using it for a mellow jazz sound. This was not the sound I was going for, especially in the 80s, it had the exact opposite sound.
Pair the dead-sounding amp with the Marauder and you have a match made in heck. The Marauder was heavy in weight, but the neck felt good and the low action made it easy to play. Sound was a different story. It had a three way pickup selector switch. The bridge single-coil sound was nasally and spiky (not good for 80s rock), the neck humbucker pickup sounded muddy and dull, and the middle combined position just sounded confused.
History and my experience with the Marauder were not kind.
In the mid 80s, I bought a super Strat style guitar with a humbucker in the bridge position and a locking trem for those dive bombs. After that, the Gibson collected a lot of dust or became my loaner guitar. I think I loaned it to a dozen people; no one loved it. Later in years, I read on line reviews of the Gibson Marauder and reviewers said unkind, but accurate things like:
- A perfect example of Norlin era Gibson. A perfect failure.
- Gibson's Edsel.
- Gibson said that people will have a love-hate relationship with the Marauder. They were half right.
- No wonder Kiss axeman Paul Stanley used to smash these things at every concert.
- The butt ugly mutant cousin of the Les Paul.
- With a bolt-on neck and a single coil bridge pickup, Gibson's attempt at a Tele?
