Membrane Pix, 1971

Membrane Pictures -- 1971

Links:

Various pictures of Membrane and friends, from January to December, 1971.
We're still not sure when, exactly, the name changed from Cinnimon Haze to Membrane, so possibly the first of these are still as Cinnimon Haze.

Like the 1968 Cinnimon Haze pictures, my mother mounted these six pictures in an album page and gave copies to each band member. Once again, Kim Hujsak has kindly provided me with his copy to scan.
-- Chip Chapin.

Visitors since July 3, 2000

Updated July 22, 2000

1970
The psychedelic period had passed, and
"Cinnimon Haze" began to sound dated.
It was the dawn of the heavy metal era and
we wanted a name with attitude and gravitas.

Membrane

Monte Etherton -- drums, vocals
Carl Geiberger -- keyboards
Kim Hujsak -- rhythm guitar
David Blair -- lead vocals
Chip Chapin -- bass

Click on each image to see
a much larger version of it.

Membrane in The Pit, 01/1971 - Kim et al.

January 1971, Membrane practices in The Pit

Nice shot of Kim (see detail below), Dave and Monte barely visible, and my (Chip's) back. Note my very cool trousers, probably bell-bottoms...
Monte's drums are covered with contact paper at this point. The old orange sparkle is underneath.

<--
Detail from the picture above. Kim seems to be in a very good mood! Some digital shenanigans bring out David's face a bit more.

I believe these are the original pickups on Kim's Epiphone. he later replaced them with better ones.

In The Pit, May 1971 -->
We look surprisingly cold for May, but that's what the note on the picture says. David singing, Chip playing the Hohner fretless bass. I built the white cab in the background. It contains 2 ElectroVoice SRO-15s and is the second cabinet I built for those speakers. It was a great cab!

Note: the orange crate used as a table. We at one point swiped a whole bunch of orange crates and used them for various things. This is probably one of them. Also, there's a stolen blinky-thing in the background, and some speaker grill screen

Membrane in The Pit, 05/71, David and Chip

<--
Rock on, David! Rock On...

Monte, May 1971 -->
Note that the contact paper AND the orange plastic sparkle has been removed from his drums and he has finished the raw wood.

<-- Detail of the shot above. Nice one of Monte in action.

-->
May 1971. A good picture of Chip and Carl, which also shows lots of equipment. There's also a cropped version of this that looks pretty good: click here.

Visible in this frame:

My whole amp: besides my white speaker cabinet (already described above), there is a Gibson Les Paul guitar preamp and a Carvin 130W power amp. They custom-made the power amp for me by just leaving the preamp out of a regular bass head. Saved me $40 or so, kind of a waste. The two small speakers on top are car speakers that I made, up there for looks.
Carl's Heathkit/Vox combo organ (which he built himself) atop Monte's Wurlitzer electric piano.
My slide projector is on the floor for some reason, possibly we had been looking at slides of a camping trip that Kim, Carl and I took about that time.

Membrane at the Pit, 05/1971, Chip and Carl

May 1971. Not a great picture of anybody, but there's lots of memorable gear visible here. See if you can find:

The Sid Shaw dartboard and beanbag throw
Our original PA amp
The 8-channel active mixer which Chip designed and built in Electronics class.
A sheet of plywood with a zillion holes in it, just the right size for metal film cans (why?).
The table Chip built from the cable reel we salvaged.
The turntable from the junk shop.
more?

December 1971 in Chip's Kitchen. -->
(l-r) Kim, Barbara Rotsheck, Chip, Cookie Redd

This might even be the last picture of us together as a band. The frame is half of a two-picture set -- the other frame shows the rest of the band on the other side of the table. We'll hope it turns up.
Nice view in the background, looking south over what's now Fairbanks Ranch.

<-- Chip surrounded by beautiful girls. A sadly too-rare occurance in my youth.

Some notes on the images in this page:
The original 3.5"x3.5" prints were scanned at 600 dpi and cropped to 1860x1860 pixels. The large size is nice for zooming in on details but really too large for web distribution. After retouching and some brightness/contrast correction, the images were then reduced to 16% for display on this page, and 50% to the 930x930 images that you can get by clicking. Write me if you want the larger formats.

Chip Chapin <cchapin AT cs.stanford.edu>