History of the Wah Pedal
I have some weird stuff in my guitar pedal collection. I’ll own up to that. I have an MXR paperweight. I have a guitar pick that’s the same size as a slice of bread, which I’ve actually used in an episode of the JHS Show. I have drawers full of the original boxes these guitar pedals came in, which mean the world to me but are pretty much worthless to anyone else. The list goes on.
I added something to my collection this week that was embarrassingly difficult to track down, but I’m not embarrassed to share it with you guys. It’s a piece of music history, and it’s actually pretty cool. I’m talking about the original 1967 Vox Wah Wah demonstrational record. I say “record” instead of “vinyl”, because it's actually made of cardboard. If you look closely, you can even see the perforated edges, like it was punched out of the back of a box of cereal. I like to think that it was. We don’t know for sure.
Long time viewers might remember that I already did an episode of the JHS Show about the world's first pedal demo with the Maestro Fuzztone FZ-1. Same basic principle here, but we’re going through the Vox Wah Wah demo. Before we dive into the actual demo, though, I want to break down the abridged history of the wah pedal.
How the Wah Was Invented
If you watched Pedals: The Musical, you saw the story of Del Casher and Brad Plunkett, but the story of the wah actually starts a little earlier than that.
Basically, Vox started out as a company called Jennings in London, based out of Charing Cross Road in the Denmark Street area. They had an engineer named Dick Denney, who is the biggest deal in guitar history-- still --that a lot of people don't know about. He invented the AC15 and AC30 amps. He invented the 816 Booster, which is probably where the Fuzz Face came from. He invented tons of amazing things, including the Vox Super Beatle amplifier. Remember that in 1964, seventy million people watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, and a Vox amp was visible on stage with them. Overnight, Vox stopped being a Mom and Pop shop and turned into a full empire. They even set up a factory in Hollywood to keep up with the demand.
Dick Denney originally built the Super Beatle amplifier to capitalize on the fact that people associated the Beatles with the Vox amp. It’s worth noting that the Vox Super Beatle was not the actual amp that the Bealtes used on the Ed Sullivan Show, but that’s another soap box for another day. What’s important for the sake of our story is that the Vox Super Beatle amp featured a mid control.
We’re also about to introduce two new characters: Brad Plunkett, a Vox engineer, and Del Casher, a guitarist who’s been featured on TV shows like The Lawrence Welk Show and Green Acres. He works for Vox as an artist demonstration guy.
Basically, one day in 1966 Brad Plunkett is turning the control knob on a Super Beatle amp as he’s working on it. Del Casher's in the other room and he hears the sound of wild “wah, wah, wah” coming from that knob control. Del runs in, freaking out. He's always imagined this kind of sound for the guitar, but he’s never known how to create it. Basically, they take a Vox Continental Organ volume control pedal, they take that mid control circuit out of the amp, and they put it into that volume pedal enclosure. As Del recalled:
“I definitely remember going to Stanley Cutler, head of engineering and [saying], ‘Stan, I know that this can be lifted out of the amplifier. So, can you get me the guy who did that?’ He said, ‘Well, it was Brad Plunkett.’ So I said, ‘Tell Brad that I want the breadboard put into a pedal.’ So they had the breadboard put into a pedal at my request.”
Thus, the first wah pedal was invented in 1966, and Vox produced it as a product in 1967. Del Casher successfully gets Brad Plunkett to put the circuit into the volume pedal enclosure and now has the guitar effect of his dreams, but the suits at Vox don't get it. They think it's a product for trumpet players, which is a horrible idea, but I understand where they’re coming from. At the time, the guitar was still a relatively unknown instrument, but the average orchestra had at least four trumpets and five saxophone players. As the suits argued, “That’s nine pedals we can sell right off the bat.”
To which Del reasonably replied, “Yeah, but it’s for guitar.” They still don’t get it, so he makes a joke:
“I remember my brother had a recording of a guy named Clyde McCoy who played the trumpet in the [song] “Sugar Blues.” I said, ‘Why don't you call it [the] McCoy?’ jokingly. I figured Clyde McCoy was dead. He wasn't. He was still alive.”
And the rest is history. The suits at Vox called Clyde McCoy and offered him 500 bucks (which translates to roughly $3,500 today) to put his face on the back plate of the pedal, and the first ever production models were called the Clyde McCoy Wah Wah.
So that’s how the very first artist endorsement ever was basically a joke. The more you know.
The Demo
The Vox Wah Wah became very popular, but as of 1967 it still wasn’t a hit with guitar players. So Del says, “I'm going to go to my Hollywood Hills studio in my garage, and I'm going to cut a demo record to show how this works on a guitar.” Vox didn’t show a ton of faith in Del’s idea, which is why they only gave him a budget to put it on a plastic-coated cardboard record instead of, you know, actual vinyl. That’s a bummer, because I think Rage Against the Machine and Kirk Hammett would argue that the wah pedal is one of the most versatile guitar effects of all time.
Listening to the demo, I had a lot of thoughts. First off, it’s obvious that these people have no idea what they’re playing. They’ve never heard “Bulls on Parade.” They’ve never heard the theme from Shaft. Basically, the original demo for the Vox Wah Wah is not amazing, and that’s okay. These musicians-- which include co-creator Del Casher on guitar --are playing a completely new musical effect, something that was only invented three months before. They’re allowed to not know how it works yet. For that reason, they also don’t include most of my favorite uses for the wah in their demo, like putting the wah before or after a distortion or leaving it as a “cocked wah.”
Del was thinking, “I’ve gotta sell this product,” so in this demo he pitches the Vox Wah Wah for 12-string guitar players like the Byrds, the most popular musicians of the day. Here’s how Del remembers it going down:
“I went to my garage studio in Hollywood Hills. I brought in Jimmy Troxell, who was one of the session players, a very great drummer...And I said, ‘Jimmy, we're just going to lay 13 tracks down one after another after another. And each track is going to be, you know, a minute and a half.’ So out of the 13 songs, I picked out about five songs to demonstrate the wah pedal and how the guitar can change the sounds and make it groovy, make it growl, make it funky, make a sound like a sitar. We put that all together, and I thought [Vox] was going to put my [name on it], saying ‘Del Casher, young guitarist from Hollywood featuring the wah pedal.’ But they didn't.”
What’s interesting is that I did an interview with Del Casher in his living room in 2019, and I asked him if he was aware that his creation ended up being used by guys like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. He seemed pretty oblivious to that, but even in this 1967 demo, you can hear traces of the same style that Hendrix was going create with his wah. Interestingly, Del told me that James Brown said the wah pedal was pointless and it wouldn't be cool, which just goes to show that even our heroes can be wrong occasionally.
The Vox Clyde McCoy Wah Wah is technically the first ever signature guitar pedal ever made, which is bonkers since Clyde McCoy never used a Vox pedal. As far as we know, he never used a pedal, period. He never used a guitar. He was a trumpet player, but they paid him 500 bucks so he let Vox put his face on their guitar pedal.
As a pedal manufacturer, here’s my tip: when you see an artist's signature pedal, make sure they have actually played the pedal. It sounds simple, but it’s a game changer. You want to make informed decisions as a consumer, and this is a great way to do that. Be smart, do your research, and at the end of the day, play what makes you happy. If it makes you happier to play a pedal from Jimi Hendrix’s signature line, go for it-- you know, as long as you’re aware that Jimi Hendrix never actually played any of the pedals in his “signature line.”
Cool? Cool.