{"id":2640,"date":"2010-03-24T15:51:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T19:51:11","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-03-24T15:51:11","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T15:51:11","slug":"creator-of-the-rat-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/creator-of-the-rat-dies\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Wicks, Creator of The Rat, Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I never used the guitar distortion stomp box The Rat<\/strong> myself, but here in Philadelphia I’ve long associated it with Townsman saturnismine<\/strong>,* who’s always had it ready to boost one of his solos whenever I’ve seen him play live and the few times I’ve played alongside him. I’m pretty sure he’s the only guitarist to have used a Rat on one of my own band’s recordings, when he overdubbed dualing solos on what we hoped would go down as the shortest seemingly long guitar jam in rock history. In other words, I hated The Rat for whatever weird aesthetic reasons I’m prone to hating inanimate things until I heard being stomped on and played through by my friend.<\/p>\n

I learned from another friend of the Hall today that Charlie Wicks<\/strong>, the creator of The Rat and the founder and CEO of musical equipment manufacturer Pro Co died of cancer a couple of weeks ago<\/a>. This other friend is also a cool guy and cool musician. I may have to re-think The Rat…<\/p>\n

In honor of Mr. Wicks and his Rat, what’s your favorite stompbox?<\/em> No digital plug-ins, please! I wrote about my favorite a few years ago, here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Also in honor of Mr. Wicks, Rock Town Hall’s Official Eulogy follows the jump!<\/em>
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*Hey, where is<\/em> that guy when we need him to raise a little hell?<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never used the guitar distortion stomp box The Rat myself, but here in Philadelphia I’ve long associated it with Townsman saturnismine,* who’s always had it ready to boost one of his solos whenever I’ve seen him play live and the few times I’ve played alongside him. I’m pretty sure he’s the only guitarist to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[164,170],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}