Sovteks and a Stogie: Mike Matthews leans on an Electro-Harmonix-designed Sovtek Bassov Blues Midget head in a room full of Sovtek tubes and testing machines circa 2008. |
Among the multitudes of stompbox manufacturers
to have come and gone over the
years, Electro-Harmonix is one of the longest
running and most prolific. They’ve also made
some of the most iconic pedals of all time,
including the Big Muff Pi, the Small Stone, and
the Deluxe Memory Man. The fact that this
company—founded by the enigmatic Mike
Matthews in 1968—was there when the fuzz
box craze started is amazing. The fact that it
has thrived during so many changes in popular
music is even more so. Today, certain EHX
pedals are must-haves for many players, and
the company’s influence has most assuredly
been a huge factor in the boutique stompbox
boom of the last two decades.
As you can imagine, based on the warped
sounds that emanate from so many EHX
devices, Matthews’ story and the saga of
Electro-Harmonix is a long, twisted tale that
could only happen in the world of rock ’n’ roll.
From Kool-Aid Stands
to Guild Foxey Lady Fuzzes
Matthews’ tale begins in New York City.
“Ever since I was a kid, I was always into business—
y’know, big money,” he says. “On the
street in the Bronx, my mother first set me up
with one of those stands to sell drinks. And
our drinks were better because she helped
me make real fresh juice as opposed to
Kool-Aid or . . . stuff out of the sewers. I
was just always into hustling and business
as a kid. I also started playing piano when
I was 5. It was classical, and I quit in the fourth grade."
Then came rock ’n’ roll. “I really got into
it in college, but I didn’t know what the
hell I wanted to do. My father said, ‘Well,
you’ve got to have a profession.’ So, for no
particular reason, I registered in electrical
engineering. Between the electrical engineering,
being into business, and being a
musician, it was sort of natural for me to fall
into this industry.”
Even as he was beginning this free-fall toward
immortality in the pantheon of stompbox
pioneers, Matthews got married and started
to feel his literal mortality. “I got married
young,” he says, “and my first wife told me I
should work toward a goal. So I took that to the
ultimate extreme—this was right at the beginning
of Electro-Harmonix—and that goal was . .
. to whip death. In my own lifetime.”
Back up. Weren’t we talking about effects
pedals here? Rock ’n’ roll?
“If you look at each generation,” says Matthews,
“they live longer than the last. I thought if you
look ahead a hundred years, people will be
regularly living to 100, 120, maybe even 200
years. A thousand years from now, they’ll cross
the threshold where they just won’t die.”
Smacking Rather Than Stomping: Matthews lets loose on an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synth, circa 1979. |
Rediscovering Roots
Though he’d had his head in the electrical
engineering space, Matthews couldn’t stay
out of the rock world for long. The road to
becoming a guitar-gear kingpin began with
Matthews wanting to get back into playing
music—which he had given up temporarily
to take a straight job as a salesman for IBM.
“You know how it is,” he says, “once it gets
into your blood, you want to get back. You
like the people digging you. You want to
be a star. The ladies, the money, the glory.
Basically the glory, y’know.” [
Laughs.]
As Matthews rediscovered his rock roots,
he also witnessed the renaissance that was
unfolding around him in Greenwich Village.
He gigged around the area and got close
to some of the biggest players of the day,
including Jimi Hendrix. The two met when
the future Strat master was working as a
sideman for Curtis Knight and the Squires,
and Matthews says he encouraged Hendrix
to develop his vocal abilities so he could
move on to establish his own career. Hendrix
apparently did so, and soon went off to
England as Matthews went his own way.
The future pedal guru was in and out of
day jobs and night gigs, but through it all
he clung to the dream of breaking out. And
slowly but surely, Matthews found ways to
make money from music.
“My relationship with Hendrix had really
no effect on my work,” he says, “because I
wanted to start playing again. At that time,
‘Satisfaction’ was a big hit. It was Number
One for 13 weeks, I think. Everybody
wanted a fuzz tone, but Maestro couldn’t
make them fast enough. I started building
fuzz tones to make some quick money so
I could quit my day gig at IBM and play
music again.”
Matthews and then-partner Bill Berko,
an audio repairman who claimed to have
his own custom fuzz circuit, outsourced
construction of the units and sold them
to Guild, which ended up labeling them
“Foxey Lady” in an effort to capitalize on
Hendrix’s rising popularity.
But for Matthews, starting his own business
was the real dream. “Back in ’68, I
worked with this brilliant guy, Bob Myer at
Bell Labs, trying to design a distortion-free
sustainer, so everybody could sound like
Jimi Hendrix. The LPB-1, the Linear Power
Booster, started the business.”
As Myer developed the LPB-1, he found
that it wasn’t difficult to create a circuit that
sensed the lower volume and turned up the
gain as a note died out. The real difficulty
was decreasing the gain fast enough so that
there weren’t horrendous popping sounds
when a new note was struck.
In short order, Matthews learned a few things
about the guitar business. “I started out selling
the LPB-1s via mail order,” he recalls. “You can’t
sell direct as a manufacturer and at the same
time sell to stores [
laughs], because a store
isn’t going to buy something that competes
with them. What I did was advertise at full list,
and the stores would still get their discount. I
didn’t make a profit, but it basically paid for my
advertising. As such, I was able to advertise as
a big company, which gave me a big presence
and built up demand at the stores.”