In 1978 (yes, I'm backtracking) I moved into my first apartment in San Jose.
The guy next to me thought he was a DJ. He'd point his speakers into the open grassy area between the buildings for all to hear his favorite - heavy metal music.
These were $15.00 J.C. Penny grade speakers that couldn't handle the peaks. There was a lot of rattling and distortion.
After I asked him to "Please, Turn It Down", he flipped me off and yelled some stuff I couldn't understand over the noise.
I gave him an OK sign with my hand, went inside and started setting up my P.A. system.
These were 15" woofers in a three way cabinet. Pretty good quality for their time.
I didn't aim them into the open area outside, I just set them right against the wall of his apartment. This way his whole wall would vibrate and work like a giant speaker.
I put in a bagpipe band cassette and plugged it into the mixer.
I started at at level 2 out of 10.
He pounded on the wall yelling: "Turn that crap off"!
I turned it off, his heavy metal music was back on.
I switched on the bagpipe music again but increased the volume to 3.
He pounded on the wall, I turned it up to four.
By the time I got to 6, he figured it out and turned off the heavy metal.
I guess some people don't like bagpipe music.
Too bad, the next selections would have been from a Polka album.
Tonight, I have new neighbors - right next door.
They've been there a week and every night is a party.
Tonight it's hitting a new peak. Loud Latino music.
I may have to find my old cassettes.
I know what you mean. I play drums in a pipe band, nothing like a Pikemans march 4/4 drum line to get back at noisy neighbors.
ReplyDeleteOne of the funniest sights I'd seen while living in the dorms back in the early 1980s was when a guy had plugged in his boombox into a "Clapper" outlet. No sooner after hitting "play" button on his boombox, the tune (it was one of those "hip" tunes with booming bass drum), the sound from his boombox would turn the power off. The funny bit was that he spent several minutes trying to figure out what was going on.
ReplyDeleteI used to use the Clapper until I realized that a bulb burning out too often made a strong enough of a power surge to ruin the Clapper and I got tired of buying more.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I was dry firing my S&W revolver one night when I decided to do some "double taps." The first time I did that, to my surprise, the light went off. The Clapper was set to respond only to twin claps and it triggered on the click-click of the gun. That was a good laugh once I realized why the light went out.