Dumble

GW: You play through Two Rock amps. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JM: It all started with this quest to find a great Dumble amp. I remember saying during the time of making Heavier Things, “God, if I could ever have a Dumble, I’d feel like that was the Holy Grail.” I mean, we’ve all read the interviews about what Stevie Ray Vaughan was using, and he’d always mention his Dumble.

So I came across a Dumble at one point, and I just got hooked. They are just the wide-open Ferraris of amps. I bought a couple, and then I discovered a Two Rock Custom Reverb at Rudy’s Music in New York, and I went, “Wow, this is a really cool amp!”

Later, I called the Two Rock guys, and they were so easy to talk with. So for the past five or six years I’ve been working with them, and we’ve designed a series of amps that fit my needs. I use these two signature model Two Rocks. They’re single channel, really clean, and have a huge amount of headroom.

MT: Back to electrics, you have your Two-Rock and your Dumble amps on stage - how do you use them?

JM: I use the same amps in the studio as I do live. The Dumble is incredibly chesty, and strong and open and singing. The Two-Rock is like the Dumble but a little more refined, and together I think they make a really good combination - it's almost like one amp.

The Two-Rock puts into the Dumble what the Dumble doesn't have, but man, the Dumble will SCREAM at you. The Dumble has this thing on top of it called a Smooth And Slim, I think it's called, and it's really sort of an attenuator, for the treble, and for the volume a little bit.

So I just gotta take off that really harsh, kinda' tinny… I mean it's great for recording 'cos you can kinda' take it off in the EQ.

So that's happening there, and then the Two-Rock is supplementing that to be a little bit smoother. It's sort of Fender-y, but I would also like to put a real Fender in there.

Mayer was almost legendary for having one of the most expensive rigs on the planet. On any given night, he would show up for one his shows with a backline consisting of rare boutique Dumble and Two-Rock amps that had guitar nerds genuflecting in the aisles. But those days are gone and, as far as Mayer is concerned, it's for the better.

At $5,990 the Mayer/Smith collaboration ain't cheap, but considering that Dumble amps are going for $70,000 it ain't bad either.

DD: You ever get burned?

JM: I've gotten burned.   

DD: I got burned recently selling a watch to a guy. A supposed friend. I sold it to him, he goes, I'll pay you the rest later and just said, No I'm not paying you. And I'll fill you in on that person later.

JM: It's funny because he was an instrument dealer, music instrument dealer, and he asked me—and I bought stuff from him before. And he asked me did I have anything that I wanted to let go of because he had a bunch of buyers. And I think he did for a time. And I started looking through what I had and I went, Well maybe it's time to start selling stuff off.

I gave him a Dumble Overdrive Reverb.

DD: Because you didn't like that one? We'll get into the Dumbles, you got a bunch. 

JM: I thought, You know it's not the one I've fallen in love with the most, and I really worked hard to track it down and it involved a relationship and somebody trusting me and seeing that I was gonna be the guy to own it.

And I remember driving off this guy's out of this guy's driveway with a Overdrive Reverb and a 410 EV cab. The thing was so preserved they took the road case lid off and the foam crumbled out. It decomposed. The thing was absolutely perfect.

And okay well I hadn't fallen in love with that one, and so I'm gonna weed and seed, make some room. A little more money back and just sort of start doing what most normal people do which is to don't own everything. And a couple of other things—and they were important things—and took them and ran.

Kept saying he would pay me, kept saying he would pay me. Filed for bankruptcy. Had to go to court, had to do all this stuff. And I think every musician at some point has to know that there's stuff out there that they got ripped off on.

Keith Urban came across the Dumble Overdrive Reverb and I think he bought it.

DD: Oh shit. 

JM: And so it's not his fault. Enjoy the amp. You bought it fair and square. You didn't get screwed.

DD: Is it considered stolen?

JM: That's a really good question. It's not considered stolen. The money that was owed to me is considered stolen. The item itself—this is where it just gets unfun right?

DD: That's brutal, man.

DD: When you start the Dead and Co. and you sit down and you think alright “what gear do I want to do," because when you're out with John Mayer your gear is so different. I watched a gear breakdown on YouTube from I think '13, but then you know last run it was—when you first were in Dead and Co.—you had that Paul Reed Smith amp and the guitar, then you just, it's so simple it's just a Dumble head. What is it two 12's?

JM: I ended up with a Dumble Overdrive Special 50-watt that I adore and [just like three petals] and that's it. The inspiration is a fixed-gear bike. You ever see a “fixie?" That's what I'm trying to be now. It's part of a deeper thing that might sound artsy fartsy when I get into it but, I want to only focus on my playing. I want to put the guitar out of the equation.

DD: Let's get into the Dumble stuff real quick and then we'll all ask you some other stuff here. But I was always fascinated with Dumble. I actually thought the guy died years ago. That was always the thought that he died years ago, but no he's in Santa Cruz or whatever right now, still with like a waiting list. Let's get into the history of the Dumble; you got Santana's right?

JM: That one is one of Carlos's yeah. The one that I used on this last tour.

DD: And how many Dumbles do you got?

JM: Several. My answer is always just "several." Yeah I actually don't even know, and it's just it would be designed to just make people go, "blah." There but look at it like this I'm the kind of guy who wants to buy three of a thing to find the best one

DD: I'm the same way. I am the same way!

JM: And then when you get the best one you sell the other two. But then it just so happened that selling them seems silly because they're so in demand. I don't like selling things. There's very, very, very few things out there that I have sold. Very few things.

But I knew Stevie Ray Vaughn had played one and god knows I was looking for that sound.

DD: I knew that too. He's what made it famous.

JM: He's what made it famous. Now before Stevie you've got Jackson Browne, you've got guys from Little Feat, got guys in Jackson Browne's band—I think Jackson Browne was probably the biggest "Avon Lady" for Dumble because anyone who played in his band got one. Danny Kortchmar had one, David Lindley had several of them. So it's from this era of California music. Kind of post, you know, sort of early 70s, kind of Southern California Eagles.

DD: Yeah, Troubadour.

JM: That Troubadour thing. Yeah exactly, I was looking for it, you found it. And so that world had him and then because Stevie Ray Vaughn recorded Texas Flood at Jackson Browne's studio he discovered this Dumble. And it was a Dumbleland Special. Big hundred and fifty watt thing, I think.

DD: God, super loud.

JM: Super loud. It will tear your head off, but the right way. Ever had your ears torn up the right way? There is a way to go deaf in style. I heard AC/DC play the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and I've never heard something that loud

DD: There's nothing better than that.

JM: When I heard Angus Young's guitars I said two things: I'm going deaf, and this is the greatest thing I ever heard. It's the right kind of loud.

So I'm making my second record and somebody brings a Dumble around. Some rental place. "Oh I got to try the Dumble. We got one, we got one." I tried it out. I don't remember how I felt about it. And then I found a guy who had an Overdrive Special from the early 90s and I bought it.

DD: In LA?

JM: No, this guy was from Kansas. He was a dealer. And I bought one and I used one on Chuck Berry's giant showman cab on my second record. And I kept renting it because they needed to keep it in case Chuck Berry—"That's Chuck Berry's"—when he comes through and gigs we need to have it for him. So I just kept renting this showman cab. Six tens in there or something.

DD: Six tens!

JM: It was like a big giant cab. And I remember the sound of that amp and I think I liked it more for being a Dumble than for being a great amp.

But it did kind of what I wanted it to do. And then I would kind of like want to buy a backup because I'm a backup guy. Everything needs a backup.

[40:20 - 43:27: Talk about buying backups of shirts, etc.]

DD: So you got you got the second Dumble and then when do you start chasing and realized I've got the great Dumble? Is that the Santana one?

JM: No, that's the Steel String Singer. 

DD: No shit. Cause that's a weird one they didn't even make that many of.

JM: You want to talk about the rarest thing that I've ever come across, it's the Steel String Singer.

DD: What they make like five of those?

JM: Five. Five maybe. And I had number five.

DD: How long were you chasing that?

JM: Forever. Because that's what Stevie had. It's all I wanted. And I finally found one and I had it delivered to me when I was making Continuum. It came in a Jackson Browne road case. When I was making Continuum, this would have been 2005 or really early 2006. I took it out and we started playing it and someone had sent me this Japanese Stevie Ray Vaughan Bible and in there is a photograph of that amp and it said this is the amp that Stevie Ray Vaughan played Texas Flood through. And I flipped out. 

I went, Look at every little scratch in this amp. "Rene this is the amp." Rene Martinez, who was Stevie's tech, "Rene, this is the amp, this is the amp." He went, That's it buddy, that's the amp.

And he wasn't saying it like he remembered seeing it, but he went, Yeah that's the amp in that photo.

And we thought the Japanese were never wrong about this stuff. I thought I had it. I couldn't sleep. And then I called Jackson Browne's gear guy, "Will you run this, will you check this with the serial number." And he goes, No this isn't it.

And that wasn't it, but that's the amp I took around forever. That's the ones still on stage. And then I found another one a couple years ago and as the backup .That one sounds cool, it was Henry Kaiser's. It was the one in the blue—if you ever saw the blue suede Steel String Singer—that's the one. And that was Henry Kaiser's. It was originally in a big combo and then he had it taken out and put in different— 

So the speaker for that combo for that head is the former combo so it's missing the top. The top is blacked out. It's got a panel in the front which is a weird little part of history.

So the thing about a Dumble, and I don't know that many people outside of guitar players will know this or understand this, is that they're really fast. Their response time is so fast and unwavering and they don't sag.

Sag is like this thing in an amp where you hit a note and it kind of takes a second. It goes through the tubes kind of has this natural compression and the transformer has to figure out what to do with it. And that's what people like about a lot of things, because it's kind of apologetic to your playing. 

DD: That Tweed Deluxe sags like crazy!

JM: It's kind of a compressor. So you start doing that Stevie Ray Vaughan stuff and you realize, Oh he liked this stuff because it was so fast. 

It's immovable and it's lightning fast and I love that. I love an amp that doesn't back down it just stays there. And so that's the Steel String Singer thing to me.

And interestingly enough, the Dumble really intersects with early Eighties session work, right? Like, Stevie Ray Vaughan was kind of an anomaly in that Dumble world because almost everyone else using a Dumb e was kind of doing really clean stuff. I mean, I know guys like Larry Carlton and Robben Ford were making it sing with distortion, but it was mostly clean tones you were hearing with that amp.

And so it worked really, really well to take a Silver Sky, which is already kind of hi-fi, and run it through a Dumble and a direct, and then maybe an old Fender combo for the softness. Because those old Fenders apologize really well for the notes. But for that kind of session-player, speed-of-note thing, that picking response really comes from direct input or a Dumble amp, which, really, is a direct-input amplifier. Even though it's coming through a speaker, everything in those amps moves so fast, and in the best, cleanest way, that when you pick that single-note stuff, you're just in heaven because the notes are so crisp.