History of Distortion Part 1
In these dark and uncertain times, I think there is one thing we can all agree on: they should not remake “The Princess Bride.” I don’t care if they get back the entire original cast, if the score is written posthumously by David Bowie somehow, if that kid from the Wonder Years comes back and this time he’s the grandfather because it’s been thirty years and he’s telling the whole story to his grandson-- we just should not do it.
Let me paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm on this: “Your producers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could remake ‘The Princess Bride’, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
For those of you currently breathing into a paper bag, don’t worry. I’m fairly sure this is one remake that will never get off the ground. It’s just inconceivable.
That said, I think we can agree on one more thing: distortion is the greatest effect ever created for electric guitar. I don’t think anyone would fight me on that (which is honestly a relief).
Today I'm gonna take you back about 70 years to the origin of distortion, to those early stories. We're gonna go from there and bounce forward through the decades, because different technologies and different forms of this effect existed as we moved forward. I'm really excited, because this is the heartbeat of electric guitar. It just is.
So let's nail down why this effect is so important.
I'm going to start about 1950, and bring us to the present day with these different technologies of distortion. I am not in any way going to bring up or talk about Tube Screamers and overdrive pedals, just because that’s another article for another day.
The ’40s - ’50s
The first thing we're gonna look at is a 1949 Fender Deluxe. This is called a TV front, because it kind of looks like the front of a TV. #themoreyouknow
In 1951, Howlin’ Wolf's guitar player took an amp much like this and cranked it up on a song called “How Many More Years.” When the amp's clean, it's clean. And that's what it was intended to be, but he turned it up; people were scared to turn it up, but when he did, it was pretty awesome. It's one of the first recorded distortion tones ever, and it's actually achieved by overdriving the tubes inside the amplifier.
Because this guy turned up a tube amp, it opened the door for a whole lot of oddness in the guitar community. For instance, around 1951, the guitarist on a really cool track called “Rocket 88” supposedly took a pin of some sort, and jammed little holes all in the speaker, and that was what he said made the distortion sound on that track. Another viable legend of this recording is that while unloading his amplifier from the car, he dropped it, thus breaking something inside.
At the end of the day, who knows?
Of course, he’s not the only guitarist surrounded by legend and folklore. One of the most famous stories about how guitar distortion was discovered goes back to the Kinks, around 1964. So you have the Davies Brothers, and they argued all the time, and apparently didn't get along well, which means there's two versions of this story.
Version 1: Ray says that he took the knitting needle that he had (why did he have a knitting needle with him in the recording studio? Who knows?) and he stabbed a bunch of holes in the speaker.
Version 2: Ray’s brother, Dave, says that's an absolute lie. Dave says he took a razor blade (picture a box cutter), jabbed it in, just cut a hole in the speaker, and that distorted the sound. Again, why did Dave have a box cutter with him in the recording studio? And why would either brother feel compelled to cut a hole in a speaker for no obvious reason? These are the questions we’ll probably never get a satisfactory answer to. Such is life.
That said, I think it's a pretty pivotal moment in guitar history, and when you listen to “You Really Got Me,” you hear the sound of a not-clean guitar. It's a very unique distortion, and it's a very unique process. Whether or not you agree that the Davies brothers actually discovered this effect, you have to admit that it comes through perfectly on this track.
But I’m getting a head of the timeline, here. Let’s go all the way back to 1960.
The ’60s
The year is 1960. The setting is a Nashville recording studio, with a country artist named Marty Robbins. Basically, the bass player Grady Martin was playing a tic-tac bass plugged into the mixing console. There's a problem with that channel, and it distorts/fuzzes out (the track is called “Don't Worry”; go check it out on YouTube.) All of a sudden, you just hear this crazy, distorted, fuzzy guitar coming through on this pop country track. In 1961. It's crazy, it's insane, it should not be there. There's even arguments over, “Do we keep it in the recording?”
Well, they did. Even better, there was a guy in the room named Glenn Snoddy, and he took that sound and made a little box to recreate it in real time. Legend goes he had a friend who worked at Gibson in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and it became the Maestro Fuzz Tone.
So, in 1962, about two years after that accident in a Nashville studio, the Maestro Fuzz Tone officially hit the market. When it was initially released, they marketed it in a way that really didn't connect with guitarists. This is a classic example of the manufacturer attempting to sell a product they didn't know how to sell, which in turn was pitched to customers who didn't understand what was being sold. We were tiptoeing out of the ’50s at this point, having barely exited a period of history when the status quo was king. The Twilight Zone and Andy Griffith Show were mutual staples of weekly television, which hinted that the world was ready to try something a little countercultural--but not too crazy.
A device that makes a guitar sound like...not a guitar? That was a little ahead of its time.
Gibson actually released a little seven-inch vinyl with one of the oddest pitches you’ll ever hear: “Hey, make your guitar sound like a tuba, like a banjo or a cello! Make it sound like a trumpet!” Unfortunately, no one wanted to make their guitar sound like anything other than, well, a guitar.
Gibson sold 5,000 units of the Maestro Fuzz Tone to distributors when it was originally released, but nobody bought them. Probably only three to five of these shipped for an entire year in 1964. So this was an epic #fail.
Until Keith Richards, in 1965, used it on the song “Satisfaction.”
Keith actually talks about it in his biography, and he really just used it to track a horn section of the song. Here’s the first guy to actually follow the initial instructions of the Maestro Fuzz-Tone to try to make his guitar sound like something else -- in this case, a horn -- which means that when he got a hold of this pedal, he was just trying to mimic another instrument. But whether he meant to or not, that decision sets fuzz on the course that we know today. “Satisfaction” made fuzz a household name for guitar players, and forever changed the music scene.
For his part, Keith first heard “Satisfaction” on the radio when the Rolling Stones were on tour in Minnesota. They didn't even know that their manager had released this track, and Keith heard the song over the radio and panicked because it sounded so insane. Put yourself back in the year 1965, and listen to this song again, and you’ll realize that that riff is crazy for the time.
So much so that the guy who played the riff kinda didn't like it? That’s rock’n’roll history for you.
In late 1965, the Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction” was topping the charts, and now every guitarist wanted to play fuzz. Because of this, we have a really cool situation happen in London. Legend has it, a session guitarist in Soho walks up to a music shop called Macarie Brothers, and he takes the Maestro Fuzz Tone up to the counter; he says, "This is cool, you know, it's rare, it's American, but I wish someone could tweak it. Can you add more bass and more sustain?" Well, an engineer on staff did just that, and he created the Tone Bender.
This is such an important piece of rock history, and distortion history specifically. Can you imagine the Yard Birds without this? Can you imagine Jeff Beck? And what if Jimmy Paige had never plugged into a Tone Bender? We wouldn't have Led Zeppelin. It's a massive, massive piece of a story, and probably one of the coolest moments in this entire timeline.**
**Honestly, it’s things like this that keep me from believing in alternate timelines/universes. Because that would mean there’s a universe somewhere where the Tone Bender never existed? Nope. No way that’s a thing.
1966 brought us yet another fuzz pedal, and it was Jimi Hendrix's fuzz of choice: the Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face. Now this pedal is based on the Tone Bender 1.5; it's almost a part by part replica of it, but it was mass manufactured, and it's one of the most popular and well-known fuzz pedals in history, partly because of how many of these were made, and partly because it sat at the feet of Jimi Hendrix.
The ’60s actually brought us one more fuzz pedal, proving that this was basically a fuzz renaissance. In ’69, the market for guitar amps had expanded like crazy. These pedals distorted more and more as you turned them up. This was the sound that guitarists wanted, so the designers delivered. In 1969, Mike Matthews asked his friend Bob Meyer to help him invent a brand new product: a distortion fuzz box sustainer. It's the Big Muff, version one.
This is pivotal because it's one of the first pieces of guitar gear that ever markets itself as distortion. Up to this point in music history, you didn’t market the fact that a product sounded broken. You just didn’t. But distortion didn’t just mean messed up or defective anymore . It was a raw, iconic sound that guitarists couldn’t get enough of, and at the time this was the product that everyone had to have.
Okay, I’ve actually split this article into two parts for the sake of space, so keep reading to get the details on distortion history from the ’70s to present day.
Feel free to jam out to “Satisfaction,” “You Really Got Me,” and “How Many More Years” while you’re at it. Party on, dudes.