MH: So when did repairing lead to modifying?
RS: In 1969 or '70 we wanted to play a prank on Barry Melton, guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish. So I took his little Fender Princeton, which stock puts out about 12 watts and has a ten inch speaker and I totally rebuilt it. I cut up the chassis to fit big transformers and used the famous 4-ten tweed Bassman circuit. I then carefully cut out the speaker board and fitted a 12 inch JBL D-120 which was the hot speaker back then.
When I finished building it, I took it out to the front of the store to get a good play test and who do you think happened to be hanging out right then? Carlos Santana. He just wailed through that little amp until people were blocking the sidewalk. When he stopped playing he just said, "Shit man. That little thing really Boogies!" Those boosted Princetons became a pretty big hit with several known players ordering them. I made a point of keeping them totally stock looking until I overheard some young guys saying they couldn't figure out how Santana could play Winterland with just his "Princeton" when theirs worked like... a little practice amp! After that, I silk-screened some BOOGIE nameplates and started putting them on the boosted Princetons, just to spread the word.
MH: When did you actually start building Boogies from the ground up?
RS: A couple of years later, though the first was a MESA Bass amp.
MH: What's MESA?
RS: My other gig was rebuilding old Mercedes Benz engines; nothing else, just engine rebuilds. .....Surprising thing was those Benz engines were so fantastic, they weren't that hard to do, and I know of some that I redid that were still going strong after another 100,000 miles. The way they were designed was an inspiration, and the difference between them and the British engines of that time was shocking. It was another lesson on the virtues of getting it right. Anyway, I needed an official sounding name to buy pistons and such from Mercedes as well as for ordering ready-mix trucks full of concrete and Mesa Engineering seemed to have a familiar, professional ring. It would have been much harder to get trade prices calling myself Boogie Engineering!
But the first amp was a snakeskin bass amp built for Patrick Burke called the MESA 450. It was a combination of a Twin and a Dual Showman and it's still out there being used. All of these adventures together enabled me to afford having custom transformers manufactured. That was crucial because Fender had recently cut me off for ordering too many! The Bay Area was also running out of used Princetons to modify and it was pretty weird to buy them new, strip them bare, and build a whole new amp on the chassis. So we only did that a couple of times. ....
Q: Is it fair to say that early Boogies were somewhat modeled to be a "beefed up"
version of Fender tube amps?
RS: Absolutely. I loved Fender amps, they were the example of how to do so many things right. Their tone controls are unsurpassed to this day. Nearly every amp owes deep homage to Fender, just as do so many guitars. Part of it was that they were defining the classic sounds, but the sounds themselves were inherently great. Remember, that 4-ten tweed Bassman circuit is right there, unchanged, in the best vintage Marshalls. Their use of EL-34 (instead of 6L6) tubes accounts for most of the sonic difference, plus of course the four-twelve cabinets.