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Serious Hamer sighting!


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The cover of Def Leppards new box set - The Early Years 79-81 - sports three Hamer Standards. Pretty damn cool. 

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Cool.  Remember their first US tour the were on a bill with priest (British steel) and Scorpions (animal magnetism). Well, At least on the northeast leg.   Must have been quite a show.    Good job by Hamer getting guitars in their hands.  

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1 hour ago, Ed Rechts said:

First noticed Hamers in the hands of CT back in the late 70s when Gibson and Fender ruled the world...

I think outside of the guys in Cheap Trick, everyone first saw Hamers because of Cheap Trick.

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Def Leppard is an interesting phenomenon to me. 

I graduated high school in 1982; my brother, in 1985.  No one in the rural south had heard of them until Pyromania in 1983.  Kids in my brother's class went nuts over them while people my age (now in college) dismissed them as derivative "kid metal" and went on with our Priest and Scorpions (Screaming for Vengeance and Blackout were still relatively new!).  Neither of those groups were embraced by those just three years younger.

Not sure this matters or will interest anyone else, but it was definitely after MTV caught up to Def Leppard before we really got into them (Hysteria helped a lot, too).

I've been listening to The Early Years this morning (after the posted Satch album).  It's good stuff, but I'm guessing nothing that I would have sought out at the time.  There's just something about the absolute swagger of Priest (then and now) that I find much more appealing.

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My first exposure to Def Leppard was with Pyromania. My older sister brought that LP home after a trip to The Record Bar; and WQDR, the de facto FM rock station in Raleigh, had just begun playing the album in heavy rotation. To my young ears, it seemed to have a great post-'70s hard rock (not metal), vibe to it. The guys seemed (and were) relatively young compared to their contemporaries.

In '84, I bought my own cassette copy of the USA-reissue High n Dry (including "Me and My Wine" as a bonus track). THAT, my friends, was the definitive humbucker-into-Marshall sound. Those 4-digit Hamers made their act even cooler, because they seemed like unobtanium at that time. Like Velorush, I still found Maiden, Priest, and the Scorps more appealing overall, but those first three Leppard albums are timeless. It's a damn shame Mutt cut the boys' balls off in making Hysteria, but it certainly gave them financial security beyond their wildest dreams.

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Summer vacation of 1979 was when my friends and I found out about Def Leppard.  When school started in the fall we were all telling each other about this new band that had to be checked out.  That first Def Leppard album was perfect for the time when it came out, and it is still my favorite Def Leppard album. 

Seeing Cheap Trick in magazines was my exposure to Hamer.  Molly Hatchet was playing them in 1979 when they were the hot new band.  There was always a Hamer at a Molly Hatchet show right up to the end of the original band in the mid 80s. 

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Similar intro to Hamer here too; Cheap Trick and then Def Lep ...then soooo many other people and a million ads. Hamer really had it going on back then. I know they got into the whole vintage thing later, especially after the cooler guitars (to me anyway) went out of fashion for awhile, but man, had the real Hamer company held on they could probably still been extremely relevant if they still produced the cool guitars marketed correctly under today's conditions. Just look at all the retro type guitars being released today like the Heavy Metal Strat and a ton of other Floyd equipped shredder type guitars on the market. Imagine if they still had Def Lep in their stable and the number of people they're still playing in front of today? I know, it's a dead horse around here, but still a shame.

The first two decent guitars I bought were similar to Hamers but in my more affordable range; an Ibby Destroyer II (also Def Lep influence) in place of a Standard, and a Peavey Destiny which was as close to a Chap as I could afford. Both were actually very quality instruments, but still not Hamers!

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Of course, any discussion on the HFC of Def Leppard's best era wouldn't be complete without the obligatory endorsement of Pete Willis. I'll do the honors, Pete:

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2 hours ago, Ed Rechts said:

Yeah, but being a young teenager at the time and picking up those copies of Guitar Player, I didn't know anything about off-brands being legitimate or not unless they were in the hands of prolific musicians that I could identify.

Well, look at the bright side, Rechts. Now we have The Rear Page for that.

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2 hours ago, Ed Rechts said:

Out of curiosity...what's the prevailing wisdom on S.D. Curlee's on the Gear Page?

Like most of the Rear Page, it's about 10% skulduggery, 40% numbnutsery, and 50% scumbaggery.

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I remember getting into Def Leppard as a kid when they were first in Circus Magazine.  Serial and I snagged the “Rock Brigade” 45, and then it was off to the races.  Right around the time they started slinging Hamers, we managed a Unicorn sighting in our tiny state of Delaware - a Greenburst ‘81 Standard with dot inlays, tagged at $1,299.   We offered to trade the shop our two brand-spankin’ new Les Paul Customs for it, and he politely declined.  At the time, I only knew of that shop, Pierce Music in Dover, and another shop near where we grew up in Wilmington before moving downstate -the latter had a row of gleaming Hamer Specials and various Deans on the wall in ‘80/‘81, which were unobtainium before we were old enough to perform fast food slave labor at the local McD’s for guitar money.  
Dug Leppard through “Pyromania”, but got burned out on them during the video years for some reason.  “High and Dry” was definitely on the high school soundtrack...

Good times...

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I’m not sure exactly when they started playing Hamer guitars but I know for a fact that when they toured promoting their first album I saw them in a small venue opening for the Scorpions. They all had Hamers that night. But that was because a local guitar store, The House of Guitars in Rochester Ny, loaned them their equipment for the show because their equipment truck broke down and didn’t make it for the show. Maybe before that they played Hamers or maybe I got to see them using Hamers for the first time ? That would be cool. The only other time I saw Hamers that early in person was with the band Crack the Sky. They frequently were a opening act for a lot of bands at that time. 

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Wow!  I didn’t know CTS guys played Hamers apart from Joe Macre’s Cruisebass.

Great band...

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I was just playing along with the High N Dry album about two weeks ago.  I'd learned some of that stuff in high school.  I like that album more than anything else they did.

I too loved all the Hamer ads in guitar magazines and bought my used Special in '85 or '86 for $300.  Don't have that guitar anymore.

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