Interview with Randall Smith of Mesa Boogie

An Interview with Randall Smith,
President of Mesa Boogie (2002)
by Trent Salter, Musician's Hotline

RS: Some of my earliest memories are musical. I can still recall lying in my crib (no, not a crash pad!) and hearing my dad play his tenor sax. He had a hotel dance band and a radio show for a couple of years after the war (WWII). He was also first chair clarinet in the Oakland Symphony so there was a lot of music in the house, live music. My sister was five years older than me, and a good piano student so I remember hearing her practice all the Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin piano sonatas. The melodies and harmonies of those pieces are great. I remember my mood being affected by that music, as some pieces were haunting and others sunny and uplifting. I think my brain was processing music long before words began to make sense! I also remember the funky smell of my dad's open sax case and that something magic seemed to happen when he played. My mother even said, "He wooed me with his tone" remarking on how they met and fell in love.

When my father began teaching me clarinet, which he insisted came before sax, he had me play one note for about two weeks until I had it pretty well mastered before he'd show me the next one. What he was really teaching me was how to make tone and how to listen to-- and hear all the elements of tone. Of course that's real important now when voicing an amplifier.

RS: A guy who worked for my father was one of those early hi-fi pioneers. This was the era when hi-fi was something you built yourself, way before there was stereo and when all there was for sale commercially were little radios or big pieces of furniture with record players built in. He had a really cool studio turntable with a high-tech looking, futuristic tone arm all mounted to a slab of wood and supported by four beer cans. Hamm's, as I recall. Anyway, it sounded great with his home-built tube amp and seemed like a pretty cool thing to be doing. I got some of his cast off junk but didn't really get much of it together until later when I was 11 or 12. Then I met a guy whose business was building industrial control systems in his garage shop. His son, a little older than me, was into building hi-fi and ham radio gear as a hobby. I originally went to his father as part of a Boy Scout merit badge project, which I thought would be real easy. Man, was I ever wrong.

The requirement for the badge seemed simple: carve three items. Well, when I took my carvings over, I started worrying as soon as the guy opened the door. He was an ex-marine, looked like Clint Eastwood on a bad day and was tough as nails. I handed him my carvings and he gave me this look. He said, "Follow me". And we crossed his shop floor. Then he said, "This is a band saw". He turned it on, stacked my three carvings in a pile and ran them through first one way, then the other. He looked right at me as he tossed the pieces into a trash barrel. "That's what I think of your projects. That's what I think of you".

See, his theory was that when a person makes something, he is leaving behind an artifact of his values at that time. He knew I hadn't put much effort into the carvings and he wasn't about to offer any false praise to "build up my self-esteem" as they say today. No, they weren't good, and I was busted. But, severely humbled, I hung around. It seems like I was in his shop for 3 weeks and carved tons of things, learned how to handle and sharpen his tools and generally how to hang out in a shop with a real craftsman. At that time he was building a control console for the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. Right in his garage shop. That's how heavy he was. Anyway, the things he built just floored me, they were so cool. They exuded artistry, far beyond their primary, functional purpose. His son and I became great friends and spent all our time in the old man's shop building stuff: amplifiers, transmitters, and modulators. All vacuum-tube since transistors weren't much in use yet and tube technology was state-of-the-art. Still is, for audio.

"...our customers included the heavies of the SF scene: Big Brother, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, Santana, Steve Miller."

RS: Many years later I was playing drums in a rock-and-roll band while going to the university in Berkeley. The keyboard player's Sunn 200 amp smoked out on a gig. I offered to fix it for him the next day because we didn't have two nickels between us. He looked real worried but finally consented when I assured him I "would do no harm". Anyway, the fix was pretty easy and a day after that he suggested we open a music store. "What do we know about running a music store?", I asked. He said he'd run the front, selling stuff, and I could do repairs in the back, which turned out to be the meat locker of an old Chinese grocery store. He was right about the demand: everyone was playing in bands in the SF Bay Area then (1967 and on). I felt a huge responsibility to do things right because in no time our customers included the heavies of the SF scene: Big Brother, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, Santana, Steve Miller.

RS: In 1969 or '70 we wanted to play a prank on Barry Melton, guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish. So I took his little Fender Princeton, which stock puts out about 12 watts and has a ten inch speaker and I totally rebuilt it. I cut up the chassis to fit big transformers and used the famous 4-ten tweed Bassman circuit. I then carefully cut out the speaker board and fitted a 12 inch JBL D-120 which was the hot speaker back then.

"....Carlos Santana. He just wailed through that little amp until people were blocking the sidewalk. When he stopped playing he just said, "Shit man. That little thing really Boogies!"

When I finished building it, I took it out to the front of the store to get a good play test and who do you think happened to be hanging out right then? Carlos Santana. He just wailed through that little amp until people were blocking the sidewalk. When he stopped playing he just said, "Shit man. That little thing really Boogies!" Those boosted Princetons became a pretty big hit with several known players ordering them. I made a point of keeping them totally stock looking until I overheard some young guys saying they couldn't figure out how Santana could play Winterland with just his "Princeton" when theirs worked like... a little practice amp! After that, I silk-screened some BOOGIE nameplates and started putting them on the boosted Princetons, just to spread the word.

RS: I needed to augment the paltry income the music store was providing so I moonlighted a couple of other gigs. One was jacking up several of the old country houses, digging a footing and pouring a real concrete foundation underneath, starting with my own house. It was so near falling down that one end was 18 inches lower than the other! Doing a few of those and helping friends see that it wasn't real tricky earned me the nickname "The Mole"! That was cool because I always wanted my first name to be "The". Of course we'd be smoking refer and drinking beer under these old places but we never "dropped" one of them. Came close, though.

"...the first amp was a snakeskin bass amp built for Patrick Burke called the MESA 450. It was a combination of a Twin and a Dual Showman and it's still out there being used."

My other gig was rebuilding old Mercedes Benz engines; nothing else, just engine rebuilds. I had grown up with a little Austin-Healey Sprite, which is very "character building" in the sense that it forces ingenuity... just to make it home! It required an engine rebuild every year or two, so when I got an old Mercedes with a blown engine, I wasn't afraid to give it a try. Surprising thing was those Benz engines were so fantastic, they weren't that hard to do, and I know of some that I redid that were still going strong after another 100,000 miles. The way they were designed was an inspiration, and the difference between them and the British engines of that time was shocking. It was another lesson on the virtues of getting it right. Anyway, I needed an official sounding name to buy pistons and such from Mercedes as well as for ordering ready-mix trucks full of concrete and Mesa Engineering seemed to have a familiar, professional ring. It would have been much harder to get trade prices calling myself Boogie Engineering!

But the first amp was a snakeskin bass amp built for Patrick Burke called the MESA 450. It was a combination of a Twin and a Dual Showman and it's still out there being used. All of these adventures together enabled me to afford having custom transformers manufactured. That was crucial because Fender had recently cut me off for ordering too many! The Bay Area was also running out of used Princetons to modify and it was pretty weird to buy them new, strip them bare, and build a whole new amp on the chassis. So we only did that a couple of times. I built a two-story studio/garage/shop next to my house in the mountains with wood trucked down from the mills of Northern California. The truck was so overloaded that we had to drive it several miles in the dirt through a pear orchard in order to avoid the Highway Patrol Weight Station. Then we got it stuck half way up my steep driveway about 30 feet from the building site, but still blocking the road. My friend (just back from the Peace Corps) and I were unloading it by hand, in the middle of the night, forced to take the lumber back down the drive before we could move the truck out of the way, then carry it all back UP. We're basically talking about carrying the entire two-story building "piecemeal" down the driveway and back up the next day.

A T T H E L A G U N I T A S H O U S E

"Back then it was a true cottage industry with various people doing small subassemblies, such as the foot switch box, or prepping shielded cables..."

Finally, around 2:00 in the morning, the Sheriff arrived and threatened to impound the truck. We told him to go ahead, impound away. There wasn't a tow truck big enough to get it out (until it was unloaded) and he knew it. Wow, those days... I'm glad I did it but much more glad I don't have to do that stuff anymore. It's kind of scary to think back, but I was young and bare necessity certainly was a strong motivator back then!

RS: Around 1973. I actually got the focus on building Boogies and was able to put aside the other things. At first, it was just me doing everything. Then my wife started helping. Then some neighbors helped. Mike Bendinelli was painting the bathroom ceiling when I dragged him down to the shop and showed him how to remove some capacitors I had discovered to be defective and he stayed on for about 25 years or more. Back then it was a true cottage industry with various people doing small subassemblies, such as the foot switch box, or prepping shielded cables and delivering them to me to build into the finished amp. At one point I was returning from my daily "constitutional" which comprised walking up the mountain behind the house and as I came back down through the redwoods, I could see the girls sitting on the deck, stuffing circuit boards in the sun with their tops off. I stood there for a couple of minutes just realizing that I had achieved the perfect gig (for me, at least) and I told myself never to stray too far from the happy, contented, productive and creative feeling of those times.

"...I'd have to jump up from the dinner table, run down the stairs to the shop and grab a board out of the acid before it got over etched."

By the time we moved Mesa out, that mountain "house" had grown into a 4,000 square feet mini- industrial zone with a wood shop, electronics shop, loading dock, two offices and several full- time employees. Before we left there we were exporting to 37 foreign countries. I want to stop right now and give thanks to everyone involved. And that certainly includes all those musicians who trusted us with their cash and their tone. Thank You So Much. In all, we built 3,000 Mark I Boogies in that house.

RS: Yes. It was kind of nuts. I wanted to do everything "in house" just to figure it out. It seems surprising to think back that I was fabricating printed circuit boards myself back then. Not the whole time, but for the first couple of years. I bought big sheets of copper clad epoxy at the surplus store, cut them to size on my table saw, made up silk-screens, rigged up a hot acid etching tank that was agitated using the variable- speed Leslie control pedal I "borrowed" from my B-3.

"If you look at those early amps, the front panels are black acrylic on which I used to silk-screen all the control labels, then spray with a matte fixative."

Those boards were simple and kind of crude compared to the ones we use now. I'd have to jump up from the dinner table, run down the stairs to the shop and grab a board out of the acid before it got over etched. People use to ask what those stains were on the wall next to my chair at the table: that's where I leaned boards fresh out of the tank. It was a mess and a nuisance that finally ended when my wife got a little bit of acid in her eye. I dragged her outside and turned the hose on her... something I'd been wanting to do for a long time! No, sick joke. Luckily she was fine but that decided it: We'd let someone else fabricate the boards.

If you look at those early amps, the front panels are black acrylic on which I used to silk-screen all the control labels, then spray with a matte fixative. See, I could make a fairly professional looking job even if I was only making one or two units. It wasn't enough to interest a nameplate
company. Same with the sheet metal chassis. I was making so many changes as part of the development, that I needed to cut, form up, and drill out each chassis myself. I had learned how to do all that working in the old ex-Marine's shop.

MH: Is it fair to say that early Boogies were somewhat modeled to be a "beefed up"
version of Fender tube amps?

RS: Absolutely. I loved Fender amps, they were the example of how to do so many things right. Their tone controls are unsurpassed to this day. Nearly every amp owes deep homage to Fender, just as do so many guitars. Part of it was that they were defining the classic sounds, but the sounds themselves were inherently great. Remember, that 4-ten tweed Bassman circuit is right there, unchanged, in the best vintage Marshalls. Their use of EL-34 (instead of 6L6) tubes accounts for most of the sonic difference, plus of course the four-twelve cabinets.

MH: Was there a certain tone that you were out to deliver that was currently in the marketplace?

RS: There was a tone... but it wasn't in the market place, not yet anyway. So many of my repair customers were complaining about the limitations of their amplifiers - amps that now would be considered hot vintage prizes, but then they were just what was available, nothing special. The main complaint was that "loudness" and "drive characteristics" were inseparable. There was only the one Volume control and thus there was no way to get the amps to break-up and sound loud without actually having to be loud. Even though some repairmen were with adding Masters, I wouldn't offer that mod because it didn't really do much. There just wasn't enough gain in the standard Fender circuits. Everyone had that complaint, especially Santana. Even with his jacked-up Princeton, he couldn't get enough sustain. That's what he was always craving: more sustain --that ability to hold a note as long as he wanted without it dying out. Some nights, some notes would hang, but not enough to get what he wanted. Incremental increases in amplifier gain (which is the number of times an amplifier multiplies the weak guitar signal) would help, but it couldn't deliver big, fat tone with predictable sustain.

"...we could hear a faint little sound. Then when we plugged it in right, Lee (Michaels) hit a big power chord and practically blew both our bodies right through the back wall!"

Then as a result of a pre-amp project I was building for Lee Michaels to drive the (then) new monster power amps from Crown (the DC-300), I stumbled onto the Holy Grail. I hadn't any idea what sort of pre-amp signal the Crowns required, I just knew that several heavy-hitting individuals and companies hadn't been able to deliver what Lee wanted. And since I didn't know, I thought I'd cover my basses by adding another complete extra tube stage of gain to the basic amp architecture, and put volume controls (actually Gain controls) at three separate points in the circuit so I could fish around for a proper balance. When we hooked it up in Lee's studio, it didn't work at first because we mistakenly had the speakers plugged directly into the pre-amp.

Before we discovered our mistake, we kept turning it up more and more because we could hear a faint little sound. Then when we plugged it in right, Lee hit a big power chord and practically blew both our bodies right through the back wall! We both looked at each other with big grins and got down to adjusting the various gain controls. It was monstrous! You could play super loud and clean, louder than any Fender ever heard. But most important was you could re-mix the controls and dial in previously unheard of amounts of gain with the first two controls, while adjusting the loudness level separately. It was just HUGE sounding. And it would sustain forever. That was the beginning of cascading high-gain pre-amp architecture. We're no longer talking about incremental increases of 20% or even 100% above "normal" guitar amp gain - we're talking 50 to 80 times the conventional gain, and entirely new realm of performance.

Here's how gain works to generate sustain: Think of your string vibration with an ordinary amp turned way up. Pluck a note and listen for the point when the decay in string vibration can begin to be heard as a decrease in amp volume. Then picture the benefit of say, 50 times more gain. That means the string vibration could continue to decay until it reached just 2% of that earlier level... and still drive the amp fully. That's where sustain comes from. That plus the fact that the extra sensitivity means the note's vibration in the air - the actual sound pressure - is enough to keep the string going. I knew at the time that this was a real breakthrough and I couldn't wait to build up a little 100 watt, combo amp for Santana using four 6L6s. I was pretty sure it would do just what he'd been searching for. And it came together just in time for his great Abraxis album which introduced the sound of high-gain to the world and really started putting that mountain shack "Home of Tone" on the map.