I first got to know Daredevil Pedals’ Johnny Wator because I recognized a fellow Stooges fan. As you’d expect from any pedal-building acolyte of Ann Arbor’s finest, Wator’s wares explored the filthier side of the effects spectrum: raspy silicon fuzzes, dirty delays, and the sound of cocked wahs. And for players drawn to all things punky, scuzzy, and dragged through the gutter, Daredevil’s roster is, forgive the pun, a funhouse. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of folks more sympathetic to Wator’s aims than Dunlop. They harbor many maniacs with a deep affinity for the heavy and unhinged. And the fruit of their collaboration with Wator, the Cry Baby Daredevil Fuzz Wah, is as beautifully nasty as you would dare imagine.
The Cheetah Growls in Chrome
Given a wah pedal’s extroverted musical mission, I think they should be stylish things, too. Wator and Dunlop seem to feel the same. The treadle is adorned with a crown logo that would make a killer hood or grille ornament. It’s also chrome plated in the style of vintage Colorsound and Vox wahs. Even the side-mounted toggle switch that activates the fuzz is mounted against a suitably glam steel lightning bolt.
The circuit is a unique design based on custom-order fuzz wahs that Wator built in his Chicago shop, and in this mass-produced iteration it is very carefully put together. The circuit itself is fastidiously laid out on through-hole circuit board, and switches for both the wah and the fuzz are enclosure mounted, making replacement and repair easy. The circuit board is also home to two small knobs that control fuzz gain and volume. It’s too bad that the two controls are internally mounted given the profound way that they can shape the pedal’s tone and functionality. And considering their placement on the outboard edge of the circuit board, you can imagine how the knobs could be mounted on the enclosure’s exterior. On the other hand, such a feature would have driven production costs skyward, making the reasonable $229 price less appealing.
Filter the Fuzz Fantastic
Wator’s conceptual departure point for the Daredevil Fuzz Wah was a union of the old Clyde McCoy Cry Baby sound and his own LSD Fuzz, which is a sort of high-octane derivative of the Mosrite Fuzzrite circuit. On its own, the wah exhibits pronounced midrange-y leanings, which can drive the fuzz to manic heights. I have wahs that are creamier sounding, which is lovely for soul ballads and mellow psychedelia. The Daredevil, however, comes on relatively strong. There’s a distinct volume jump when you click it on. And the taper from the heel down position to biting midrangey zones can seem both fast and steep. Wator deliberately made the tone sweep of the Daredevil’s rocker shorter and narrower—a quality he admires in Cry Babys from the mid to late 1970s. While this filtering curve can make the Daredevil feel less subtle and sound a little more nasal, there are abundant shadings to explore in the middle and higher ranges of the sweep. It can give a Stratocaster a lot more body and attitude in a solo, and it is a beautiful match for PAFs, which can mellow its more aggressive edges.
Everything from Stones-y garage folk and Stooges punk to My Bloody Valentine walls of sound can be awakened by the way the Daredevil lunges for the jugular.
Kicking on the fuzz, meanwhile, is an electric thrill. Fuzz tones in the toe-down range are white hot and focused. And a lot of players that quest for the most perfectly vicious mid-’60s fuzz will find it here. At many rocker settings, the fuzz buzzes and explodes with feral fury. But it’s the way it can scythe through a mix that make it feel like the ultimate ’60s fuzz, and everything from Stones-y garage folk and Stooges punk to My Bloody Valentine walls of sound can be awakened by the way the Daredevil lunges for the jugular.
While I generally kept the fuzz gain at maximum, I kept the master volume much lower, because at maximum output the DareDevil is blistering hot and very, very loud. There are benefits to this volume. Toying with feedback at the higher output levels, for instance, is a joy and broadens the palette of the pedal, your guitar, and an amp. Navigating these feedback zones necessitates a bit of a dance with your amplifier as you find just-right proximities for coaxing certain overtones. But even minor mastery of the technique yields thrilling results, and there are copious, unexpected tone colors to source.
The Verdict
The Daredevil Fuzz Wah is not a mere branding exercise or some insignificant twist on an existing Cry Baby design. It’s a cool, idiosyncratic, if slightly aggressive, wah paired with a deadly take on a silicon Fuzzrite. Can you link up any wah and a Fuzzrite clone and achieve the same effect? My attempts to do so yielded a much less cohesive and less pleasing take on the sound Wator concocted here. Because the Daredevil is engineered to yield a very specific sonic sum, evaluation scores should be considered fluid based on musical predilections. If you like confrontational, retro-punky assault, go with my scores here. If you like smoother, more predictable outcomes, you may want to round down a bit on the tone side. But if you’re keen to escape wah convention or love the emotive, unshackled wah styles of Ron Asheton, Eddie Hazel, or Mick Ronson, the Daredevil Fuzz Wah is a perfect vehicle for cutting loose.
Dunlop Cry Baby Daredevil Fuzz Wah Demo | First Look
Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.