The Den - 1977
"Still life with guitars." I did this little grouping to record the fact that I owned:
1.) A cheap no-name twelve-string guitar (against the wall), which I could never keep in tune, let alone play.
2.) An Ovation acoustic guitar. I disn't like this guitar because it had a plastic, bowl-shaped back that kept slipping off my lap. My parents bought it for me at a pawn shop in Las Vegas.
3.) A 1975 Fender Telecaster electric guitar. I wish I still had it. I decided to sell it in 1987 to buy my first computer hard disk - a 20 MB drive.
4.) Four Advent speakers, two per channel. Why this was necessary I'm still not sure I understand.
To the left of the Fender neck, just above that cheap electric alarm clock, you can see what looks like a false, loose or gapped panel of wood. When we bought the house in 1965 I quickly discovered that, for some reason, this panel was never nailed to the wall with the rest of the panels, so I put hinges on it. It provided me with a secret storage place for things I wanted to leave for future generations, as one might see in some episode of Dark Shadows - which inspired this. I recall writing up a bogus will of some ancient, made-up Clark ancestor of a suitable name (Jedediah, Malachi, Ezekiel or some such Old Testament thing), leaving our two bedroom stucco-covered San Fernando Valley home for the Clark Family in perpetuity. Perpetuity would last until 1986, when Mom sold the house.
On the far right, on the sofa, you can see a pair of Wallabies. Somebody is on the sofa.
A swing of the camera rightways a bit reveals that it's Dad! He's looking at the bookcase at the end of the room.
The main difference between the den in 1976 and 1977 was the replacement of the Teac with the mighty Akai GX-650D reel-to-reel tape recorder and the DBX noise reduction unit (seen of the left sitting on the cassette machine). That Akai cost me nearly $1,200 - in 1977 that was real money!
But enough of the den and my expensive audio equipment. Let's open the folding door placed into the hole Mom knocked into the wall between this room and the garage and check out the pool hall!
Next photo, into the Pool Hall