Ritchie Blackmore had to keep to two secrets to get the loudest amp of all time: “I caused them a bit of grief”
There’s an expectation in rock that means most people are reaching for a higher standard of authenticity. Ritchie Blackmore probably knows this better than anyone.
That said, rock’s authenticity complex is a really interesting one. It’s like there has always been a rawness there, a deep, primal kind of expression that leaves no room for pretence.
At the recent VMAs, one social media commenter captured this with Yungblud’s tribute to Ozzy Osbourne with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. They said that they knew for a fact that they pushed to sing live, which couldn’t be said for the other pop performers. It hit something deep, because while we’re not sure if the others did actually lip their performances, there certainly was a different feel with the rockers that felt like the entire roof was about to blow off.
These expectations, when it comes to being real in rock, have spanned decades. Sometimes, it’s so real it doesn’t feel real at all, the music coming over so loud and so unabashed that it couldn’t possibly be coming from the instruments you see on stage. Countless musicians have fought for a bigger, better sound in rock to achieve exactly that, including Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend. Because sometimes, simply having a guitar just isn’t enough for that blow-the-roof-off feeling they all so desperately crave.
Blackmore has always been something of a tyrant when it comes to guitar playing. But it’s also different to others who strive for greatness by being perfect. For Blackmore, it’s the constant quest for perfectionism that makes someone great. A big Hendrix fan, he once said the guitarist was as much of a genius as he is because he was always searching, always playing the wrong notes, trying to find the right ones. And in that journey, he found his genius.
It’s also the reason why he couldn’t get on board with people like Joe Satriani. If a guitarist didn’t seem like they were constantly trying, or if they seemed complacent, Blackmore wasn’t here for it. “To me, listen to Joe Satriani, he is a brilliant player, but I never really hear him searching for notes,” he said. “I never hear him playing maybe a wrong note.”
This level of proactive creativity is what made him search for better instruments on his own journey to finding right through wrong. And it’s also what led him to holding on to two secrets to get there. Because, as it turns out, Blackmore wanted a specific kind of gear to pull off his own version of genius, a kind of gear that didn’t exist, even when it did.
Blackmore initially befriended Jim Marshall when he started buying his guitars from him. But, interestingly, he wasn’t actually all that into the Marshall sound. “It was too mellow and too muted,” he told Guitar Player in 2018. He was actually a big fan of his Vox AC30, but he was searching for a “more distorted treble on the output side”, which they physically were unable to do. But after a while, they came up with a cheeky plan to retrofit a Marshall with a Vox on the condition that Blackmore would zip it.
“One of the secrets that they will deny to this day — ’cause they told me they would — was that they could not come up with the sound that I wanted,” Blackmore said. “I wanted this Vox sound, which was very distorted and very cutting, but seemed to have a bass resonance. And they just couldn’t get that. So in the end, they said, ‘What we’re going to do is get one of our combo amps and we’ll take out the innards and put in the Vox innards. So you’ll actually be playing a Vox, but it’ll say Marshall.’ That was the big secret of the day.”
The second came when two technicians tampered with a Marshall Major to bend the rules around what Blackmore wanted. “They ended up building an extra output stage on the 200-watt Marshall, which took the wattage up to 280 watts,” he concluded. “At that point, I basically had the loudest amp ever made by Marshall. They said if I told anyone, they would deny it, because they didn’t want to have to make any more like that. I think I caused them a bit of grief.”
