Born to Boogie
THE BIG STORY in 1969 was the Apollo 11 lunar landing. But perhaps more relevant to guitar players than Neil Armstrong’s moon walk was Randall Smith’s revolutionary Boogie Mark I combo, the world’s first amplifier that mated a high-gain preamp with cascading volume controls to a bruising 6L6 power section and jammed it all into in a 1x12 package the size of a Fender Princeton. It was a mouse that roared, and every rock guitarist wanted one.
Since then, Petaluma, California–based Mesa/Boogie has remained a leader in tube-amplifier technology, thanks to Smith’s subsequent technological breakthroughs, which include channel switching, effects loops, power and triode/pentode switching and Simul-Class operation. Together, they’ve given legions of players the tools needed to stay on the cutting edges of tone and technology.
To this day, Mesa remains essentially a boutique company that strives to make the best possible gear at affordable prices, while doing it entirely in the United States. Deeply seated in Mesa’s success story is Smith’s devotion to adapting his designs in response to what musicians wanted. “I was always listening to guitar players,” he says. “It began with Carlos Santana, because the first boosted Princeton I made for him sometimes didn’t have enough sustain. He’d say he wanted that big saxophone sound, so I put my high-gain preamp — which I’d actually made for [organist/guitarist] Lee Michaels to drive his Crown power amps — into this compact 1x12 unit that would become the Mark I.
“But even when I was making those first several hundred Mark I amps, I was changing stuff all of the time. Someone might say they wished it was brighter, and I would change the way the output driver and feedback stuff worked. Somebody would want something
