The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 11: Lord of Loud

Episode Date: April 5, 2016

He didn't like the quiet, so he made sure we all could pump up the volume.

This is the way I heard it. Jimmy was a quiet kid from London. He was also a prisoner. From his toes to his armpits, the young lad was encased in plaster, a suffocating body cast that kept him completely immobile. For most of his childhood, Jimmy endured the terrible suffocating quiet, wasting away a little more with every passing day. But tuberculosis of the bones is an unpredictable thing,

and happily, by the age of 13, Jimmy had begun to recover. Slowly, he outgrew his plaster cocoon and hobbled into the world around him. It was a tough transition. To build his strength and confidence, he took up tap dancing and found himself drawn to the music. But in the pre-war London of 1938, there was no money in dancing. So he tried his hand at selling shoes. Then he worked in a jam factory. Then he worked in a scrap metal yard, with no formal, education, his options were limited. At the canned food factory, he cut off a chunk of his thumb slicing meat. There had to be a better way. Jimmy decided to educate himself. He read everything he could and found that aside from music, engineering and fabrication made the most sense to his brain.

When the war broke out, he found work in a factory manufacturing aircraft. It was important work, and he was good at it. But still, it was the music that called him. And when the drummer of a local band was drafted, Jimmy auditioned for his spot. And then things got a whole lot louder for the quiet kid from London. Jimmy was hired on the spot, and the drums became his all-consuming passion. They were physical, they were tactile, and best of all, they were noisy. So adept was Jimmy on the skins, he was, started giving private lessons. Then he opened a school. Then he opened a music store. And then, in 1960, a local guitar player named Pete walked in to Jimmy's store, and things got very loud indeed. Like Jimmy, Pete was frustrated by the limitations of rock and roll. The sound was just too clean, too constrained. Pete and his band, they wanted more volume, and Jimmy was hired to make it happen. After a few weeks of tinkering, Jimmy had designed a new way to boost the sound. The difference was shocking, but for Pete, not quite shocking enough. So Jimmy tinkered some more, and a few weeks

after that unveiled his engineering masterpiece, two speaker cabinets, stacked on top of each other, controlled by an amplifier positioned above them. The noise was unlike anything London ever heard, dirty and distorted, jarring and discordant, but mostly it was loud, and that was music to Jimmy's ears. Pete was blown away and expressed his enthusiasm by smashing his guitar into Jimmy's invention

at his next performance. The buzz grew so quickly that musicians came from all over the world to see for themselves what Jimmy had concocted Another Jimmy arrived from the States and quickly claimed that Jimmy's newfangled fabrication would make him the most famous guitarist in the world. And he was right. Thanks to the quiet kid from London, once consigned to the suffocating silence of a plaster prison, Jimmy Hendrix and Pete Townsend were able to turn the volume all the way up to 11, and a host of other guitar gods would follow in their tracks. Clapton and Beck, Gilmore, and Page, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and too many others to name. But for all their ear-shreading, head-banging, glorious racket, there was only one Lord of Loud.

And you can still see Jimmy's name today, front and center, at every major rock concert around the world, etched in white cursive on the front of every amplifier. Marshall. unmistakable, eponymous, a towering column of sound unlike anything the world has ever heard. Anyway, that's the way I heard it.