Have You Found the Amp of Your Dreams?

Amps are the mouthpiece through which the language of electric guitar tone is spoken. That makes them profoundly important. Since our gear theme this issue is amps, I’ve been obsessing about my own amp history. Amps can be part of a lifelong sonic odyssey. Here’s my journey.

While I’ve had some sweet ones over the years, my first amp was a mistake. I’d gotten my first electric guitar, a ’70s Strat, and I needed to plug it into something. I found an affordable new JMF Spectra 60-T, which had reverb, channel switching, and gain/master volume, so it seemed versatile and cool in blonde Tolex. I owned it for a year and was never happy with its buzzsaw distortion or plinky cleans, but concede that I was likely the reason it never sang like any of the guitars I heard on recordings or stages. I sold the Spectra to a violinist, who sounded awesome through it, and used the money to bump up to a black-panel ’66 Fender Twin Reverb.

Now, that amp gave me a toehold on the tones of my blues idols, or at least a pinky grip, given my minimal skills. I picked up a used MXR Distortion+ and soon played my first gig. As I was leaving the stage after my second performance, a friend, Dennis Keller, who co-owned Cambridge Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grabbed me and said, “You need a Marshall.” Luckily, my wife, Laurie, overheard him, and bought me a 1972 50-watt Super Lead head for my birthday. (Yes, she is special!) I immediately picked up a matching-year 4×12 and an obsession was born: I started playing through two amps, switching between the Twin and Marshall for clean and distorted sounds, alienating sound engineers from that day forward.

The sonic expressionism of alternative rock/grunge really spoke to me as a songwriter and noisemaker, even though my deepest interests were in traditional American music and psychedelia. So I beefed up the double-amp setup after seeing my favorite band of the era, Catherine Wheel, take new Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifiers straight out of boxes and onto the stage at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, where we were lucky enough to open for them. Such depth and power. Of course, I scored a Trem-O-Verb model, and ran it in parallel with my Marshall head through a pair of 4x12s. I used the Marshall au natureland gussied up the Mesa with the fairly extensive pedalboard I’d built up. This was not a practical rig, but it was magnificent, and the Twin was relegated to the studio until I sold it a few years ago.