Any kid who perused the pages of Guitar Player magazine in the late 1970s as intently as I did would have noticed the enticing ads featuring Carlos Santana dressed in a dapper all-white outfit playing a Gibson Les Paul, standing behind a small, blonde amp that looked like something your granddad might have played jazz through in the rec room at the old folks home. The implicit juxtaposition of Santana’s wailing tone and that rather kitsch looking little box was more than enough to draw me in—right alongside plenty of others—and prod me into further exploring this enigmatically named “Boogie” amplifier.
This being the pre-internet days (way pre-internet), I ordered up the catalog, and discovered, first, that “well known players with Boogie amplifiers” included not only Carlos Santana, but The Kinks, Frank Zappa, Waylon Jennings, Wishbone Ash, Joe Walsh, Ted Nugent, Pete Townshend, The Blue Oyster Cult, Steve Cropper, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Jerry Garcia, Bruce Springsteen… the list went on and on (although, admittedly, without detailing whether they used them regularly, or just owned one). Next I discovered that this was not just a smaller, cuter version of your traditional amp: no, this was a high-gain amplifier. It gave you big, screaming lead tones right out of the box, no fuzz box needed. What more could a guitar-wielding teen in 1978 ask for? Not much. I had to have one, as did everyone else on the planet, and as if overnight the Mesa/Boogie was the amp to own.
High-gain amps are as familiar as decaf soy lattes today, but consider what this thing must have sounded like to players of the early to late ’70s, when nothing like it was available—or, not in any form of production model, at least. Rock was big-arena music back in the day, and the best sounding gig-ready amps, which at the time meant a minimum of 50 watts, had to be cranked up to deafening levels before they’d generate the kind of creamy, sustaining, fully saturated lead tones that sizzled enough to satisfy ever more gain-hungry tastes. Then along comes this little combo in a cabinet just barely big enough to contain its single 12-inch speaker and, while it can roar right alongside a Marshall half stack if necessary, it can also produce singing, sustain-for-days tone at club and studio volume levels. Got to get one of those! And plenty of people did.
Mesa/Boogie founder Randall Smith first built his revolutionary new design in 1967 by hotrodding a Fender Princeton Reverb combo, into which he soldered his high-gain circuit, added larger transformers, and wedged a heavy duty 12” speaker to take the heat. After modding upwards of 200 Princetons for gain-hungry So-Cal guitarists from 1968 to around ’71, Smith started building Boogies from the ground up, covering them first in fake snake skin, then black or blonde Tolex, with polished hardwood cabs available as an upgrade. (Note that the first production Boogies weren’t referred to as “Mark I” until the “Mark II” came out around 1980).
While these little combos and heads had a look all their own, what really mattered to players was what was going on inside. The route that Smith took to achieve this over-the-top gain was devilishly clever. Where most tube guitar amps’ preamp sections had one or two gain stages (the second usually to make up gain that was lost as the signal ran through level-sapping EQ stages), Smith gave his Mark I a walloping four gain stages between Input 1 and the output stage (that is, the front of the phase inverter that feeds the output tubes), with two Volume (gain) controls plus a Master along the way, along with Treble, Bass and Middle controls, with a Presence on the back panel. By ramping the gain up high from one tube stage to the next, where it could be dialed up even further—a process that came to be known as “cascading gain”— with overall volume levels controlled by a Master volume control, previously unattainable degrees of overdrive could be generated right from the amp. The end result was a sizzling tone and endless sustain, as Santana most prominently demonstrated. While from the Mark IIs onward Boogies became famous for their footswitchable lead channels, the Mark I had no footswitch. You plugged into Input 1 for the full-blast, four-stage lead preamp (with pull Mid Boost on Volume 1) or Input 2 for a more restrained, traditional tone generated by a mere three gain stages, with a Pull Bright switch on Volume 2.
All of this complex circuitry was achieved right from the start of the official production versions with a printed circuit board (PCB), although Mesa/Boogie always used an extremely high-quality PCB that was etched and hand-wired by Smith himself in the early days, later with help from his wife Rayven. In many ways, Mesa Engineering deserves acknowledgement as an early force in the “boutique” amp world. And while many players have moved back to more vintage-inspired, non-master-volume designs—available in so many forms in an ever-expanding amplifier market—these little Mesa/Boogie Mark Series amps, and the plethora of Mesa designs that have evolved from it, remain among the most popular means of achieving high-gain lead tones in the rock world today.