Niels Nielsen
Gonzo engineer, artist

When Niels first started learning to play bass in 1970, he had no money for amplifiers or speakers- and so he had to build his own, using scrap lumber form his father’s cabinet shop and bits of electronic gear scrounged from garage sales and junk stores. Over 45 years later, he is still at it.

 

A Nielsen Kill-O-Watt Amp has tone for days. With it, you will spread unrest, outrage and consternation in a solid swath cutting across all artificial boundaries of class and taste. Spacetime will be twisted so tightly that a Musical Event Horizon will appear and at its periphery, the self-energy of the Funk Field will abstract billions and billions of groove-antigroove particle pairs from out of the roiling quantum foam; the antigroove particles to disappear immediately into the Black Hole, and the groove particles to escape at near-relativistic speeds in all directions.

 

Wherever they strike, chaos will reign and carnage will result. You will create power surges that will threaten the integrity of the electric grid and cause brief power outages throughout most of the state. Yugos and other small metallic objects will be deflected from their trajectories. Compass needles will do the Funky Boogaloo. Plumb bobs with hang askew, in violation of physical laws. Wristwatches will suddenly stop. Cabalistic shortwave transmissions will interfere with television reception in most districts after midnight. A tidal surge of record proportions will toss fishing boats about like toys. The clock on the County Courthouse will strike thirteen. Bottles of sparkling water from the French Alps will be turned into so many quarts of Thunderbird in slim brown paper bags.

 

Bells will ring, but not for dinner. Dogs will howl, but not at the moon. You will void leases in a 50-yard radius and make strange lights appear in the darkened sky. Crisp new bills will fall into the palm of your hand as mists and miasmas rise from the swamp down at the end of the road where nobody ever goes. Halos will encircle the headlights of 1965 Buick Rivieras on the boulevard. It will rain fifteen-year-old Scotch whiskey for exactly fifteen minutes. The blind will dance and the lame will see,  the naked will be fed and the hungry clothed.  Mode-locked housewives and salarymen will be released from their bondage to clap on two and four for the first time in their lives. Cows will yield sour milk. Clothes will disappear from the clotheslines. Pies left to cool on kitchen window sills will evaporate into thin air, and huge watermelons ripening slowly in the back yard will vanish. Sax players will crawl out of the woodwork, and mysterious raven-haired siren temptresses will materialize in their darkest secret underwear from out of the very substance of the night in frantic search for the source of the good vibrations.

 

You will cause crudely-scrawled voodoo symbology to suddenly appear on the sidewalks in front of the Houses of the Anointed. Paper pulp mills will spew the aroma of fried chicken from their smokestacks. All candles will burn for seven days and nights in backyard altars. Guys who look like Wolfman Jack will come up to you on the street and shake your hand. The Spot on the Blue Dress will transubstantiate into barbecue sauce and formations of black gyrocopters without markings will buzz City Hall. Used car salesmen all up and down 82nd Avenue will face east, drop their cigars, fall to their knees, and weep. Whitebread muzak malls will drown in a sudden and unexplained gumbo avalanche. Parliament will be dissolved, a new government will be announced within hours, and an alternate reality will congeal from the primordial broth.

 

The Pope will "get down".

 

But being a white guy, he’ll get back up again.