I had only met Mr. X once at NAMM show around 2017 time frame.
I got a call from Mr. X out of the blue during Covid.. He said he had just purchased the original Osiris / Mission Control Bass from Alembic used by Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. It was designed for the “Wall of Sound”. and used on the record “Shakedown Street”. I was very familiar with the band, their music and much of the Alembic music gear which had been designed around them as I had become a fan of the band 1986, seeing the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band 100 times before his passing in 1995. So it seemed like cool situation.
The bass was not working as it was missing a special “LIMO” connector jack. It has 6 different outputs as well as power cables running into the bass, hence it required a harness with the same special connectors.
He showed up at my house/studio/lab in the thick of covid with Bass, 2 connectors and 2 harness cables he had specially made. Mr. X then asked if I could install the Jack and get the bass working. There was no documentation and it was a complete rat’s nest inside.
For a few hours I wriggled thru the spaghetti wires and figured out what went where and what did what. I thought I had it right only to find, the pinouts on the LIMO were a mirrored opposite. I then decided to clean up some of these wire points and put them on headers like I do on other complicated electronics wiring. I wired in the second jack and, Voila! I also discovered that only one of the two harness cables was built correctly. It sure was a lot of hunting in the dark.
I just happened to be working on an album with a band called “Sweet Juanita”, which was the line in a song by the band Little Feat written by Lowell George. It just so happened that Lowell had produced the Shakedown Street record which this bass was last ever recorded on. I recorded the newly functional bass onto the song “Down The Line”. The 1st song to be recorded with the bass since Shakedown Street. Ironically , it is a song about the Kharma that’s coming down the line.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/down-the-line-feat-rand-anderson/1660154305?i=1660154309
Mr. X said thank you and left. I think he gave me a sticker. I would see a few weeks later a social media post by Mr. X telling the world how the bass is finally working again thanks to Rick Turner and his son. No mention of me fixing the bass or the song . 🙁
