Sunn employees

[LarryF]

I lived in Tualatin in 1972-3 and played in a band with Allen Gill.  Allen built speaker cabinets at Sunn and later made his own amps with another Sunn employee named Cris Caristmos (I think).  They were called Rose amps.  Does anyone here remember Allen, Cris, and Rose amps?  Allen and Cris died in 1973 and 1974.  I have lost track of the amps we used to use.

[LarryF]

A funny story Allen told me.  He said that the cabinet workers used to write memos on the inside of the speaker cabs that were to be shipped to the Who, Stones, Hendrix, and others.  They would write "we love you," "keep rocking," or whatever to the artists they liked and "you suck," "you're a jerk" to the artists they didn't like.  He spoke on the phone to Jagger and Andrew Loog Oldham.  Both asked a lot of questions.  He later drove a truckload of amps up to Seattle for the Stones to try out on stage.  The only comment he got was from Bill Wyman, who said that the amp sounded good on his low E, or something.

Later Allen experimented with mounting the bass speaker backwards, as can be seen in the photos on this page: http://www.lawrencefritts.com/bandphotos.html.  Scroll down to Saturday Miles, Cowboys and Indians, and Straight Arrow to see this.

[TheFridge]

Thanks for the story! I really like hearing about what it was like at Sunn, and about people who may have built my amps.
Sounds like they were a great bunch of people.

Hope Jimi and the Who didn't smash up their cabs because of what they read what was written inside of them! 

[Wally]

Larry, I enjoyed your story about the 'notes' in the cabs.
By chance, did your friends ever mention the possibility that artist's name were written on back panels of amps heads?
The reason I ask is that my 1200S has a certain artist's name in black 'grease pencil' written on the back panel. IT is obviously not an autograph by the artist...it doesn't resemble Jimi's signature at all.
I know that HEndrix had access to some Sunn products. I have even read something about Sunn being owed something like $70,000 by the HEndrix group for equipment that was not paid for??

[LarryF]

Yeah, they certainly could have written stuff in the amp cabs.  Thinking back, I'm not sure that it was necessarily the speaker cabs only that they did this to.  It could have been any cabs made in the shop.

When I first found Sunn in Tualatin, it was a very unimposing building with a gravel parking lot.  I don't think they had much in the way of signage.  Tualatin was a very small town about 15 minutes south of Portland.  I eventually moved there with my hippy friends.  The town soon became a mix of farmers, rockers, and bikers, co-existing.  That is all gone now, as the place has become a fairly upscale community of tech workers.  Norm Sundholm still lives in the area.  In the 70s, you could find tons of Sunn amps and cabs around Portland.  Their speaker cabs were incredibly rugged.