Marshall Law

How Hendrix turned an amp/speaker combo into a bluesrock icon.

THE BIRTH OF THE 100W STACK It was The Who’s Pete Townshend and John Entwistle who initiated the use of the 100-watt Marshall stack. Sick of failing to drown out their noisy mod audiences and be heard over the manic drumming of Keith Moon, they approached Jim Marshall, drum teacher and boss man at J&T Marshall Musical Instruments in Uxbridge Road, Hanwell, West London, and his engineers Ken Bran and Dudley Craven. At that point, Marshall sold the JTM45, a 50-watt job based around the classic Fender Bassman. By late ’65, Townshend and Entwistle were using the first four pre-production Marshall JTM45 100 heads, the first draft of the now iconic model 1959 JTM100 Super Lead. Entwistle was the first to connect his new amp to a 4x12 cabinet, but it was Townshend who first put one 4x12 on top of another to create a ‘stack’. “I could never work out why most people played with them on the floor,” he said. “I wanted them belting in my earhole.” Despite all their great work, The Who soon switched allegiance to other amp brands such as Vox, Sound City and Hi-Watt. It was left to Jimi Hendrix to smash, beat and dry hump the 100-watt Marshall stack into rock iconography. Jimi, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell of the Experience first visited Marshall HQ on October 8, 1966. “I met Jimi through having taught Mitch Mitchell to play drums,” Jim Marshall, recalled “and Mitch brought this guy along to the factory one day. This character said to me: ‘I’m going to be the greatest.’ And I thought: ‘Oh no, not another American wanting something for nothing.’ But his next words were: ‘I don’t want you to give them to me. I will pay the full price. I just want to know that wherever I am in the world, I won’t be let down.’ And Jimi, without doubt, became our greatest ambassador.” Hendrix now had the right backline to amplify his Fender Stratocasters, and he soon set about establishing himself as the guitarist to fear and admire. “I can still remember him scaring the living daylights out of all the big English guitarists when he first came over here,” said Marshall. “They’d never heard or seen anything like Jimi. No one had. His talent was extraordinary.” Thanks to British acts breaking ground in the US, American guitarists began picking up the scent of Marshall. “Murray The K had a live show with Mitch Ryder, Otis Redding, Cream and The Who [1967, in Manhattan], and I was in The Vagrants, who also played on some of those shows,” Mountain guitarist Leslie West told The Blues. “I remember seeing The Who come out with these huge Marshall cabinets and make a fantastic noise. Those Marshalls had a lot to do with their sound. I knew right away I had to get some of them, and eventually Manny’s, a great music store in New York City, started bringing them in. I think I must have been the first guy in line to get them.”