Brian May and the Vox AC30 guitar amp: it's like peanut butter and jelly, bread and butter, baseball and hot dogs. That and, of course, his trademark Red Special electric guitar, and you have one of the most iconic player/instrument/amp combos in rock.
That's not to say, though, that May arrived at that setup straight away.
In Queen's early days, May didn't have a backup Red Special on hand, leading him to have to turn to Strats and Les Pauls – neither of which he ever clicked with – on occasion.
Having gotten his real start in the rock guitar world in the early '70s, May was also absolutely surrounded by Marshall stacks, which were seen as both a necessity in the nascent arena rock circuit – which didn't really exist until the late '60s – and a weapon in the loudness war of sorts that was fast developing between the biggest bands of the period.
Asked by Guitarist in a recent interview if he was ever tempted to follow his contemporaries down the Marshall road, May replied in the affirmative, vividly recalling the night he experimented with a fabled Marshall stack.
“We played one show at Olympia [in London]. Top of the bill was Jimi Hendrix and everybody essentially played through the same gear,” the guitarist recalled. “So I plugged into a Marshall stack with my guitar and treble booster. Turned it all the way up – and it sounded so awful. I could hardly play.
“I didn’t know what to do. It sounded like an angry wasp. It didn’t have any depth or articulation, I couldn’t play chords. It was a really hard experience for me.”
Naturally, as May observed, Mr. James Marshall Hendrix seemed a bit more at home with that particular sonic weapon.
“After we’d played, I stayed behind backstage and I looked through between the amps as Jimi came on stage, plugged into that same amp – and it sounded like a cataclysm,” May recalled.
To read the full interview with May – in which the guitarist discusses the new Queen I boxset, poverty, parental disapproval, and the Red Special’s first run-out – pick up a copy of the new issue of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.
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