THE EHX STORY
Mike Matthews,
Electro-Harmonix Founder & President
GENESIS
Mike Matthews, 1962 in his college apartment
1941
GROWING UP
Mike Matthews & His Father
As a child, Mike had a tenacious entrepreneurial spirit. In his own words, “Ever since I was five years old, I was into business. I always knew I wanted to start my own business. I grew up in The Bronx (NYC) in the 1940s. I used to fish balls out of the sewers with hangers and sell them. I bought a guy’s inventory who’d been making binoculars during World War II. It included all his prisms and lenses. I sold them in junior high school, creating a big fad with prisms. There were rainbows all over the school. Teachers didn’t know where they were coming from. When I went to camp and kids were playing golf, I’d be in the pond looking for golf balls to sell, and during rest period I’d sneak out and dive in the lake to retrieve snagged fishing lures to sell.
“As far as music is concerned, when I was very young my mother gave me piano lessons. I was five. I had a formal, classical teacher a year later. When I was seven, I started doing concerts at elementary school. In the fourth grade I was rambunctious and I climbed up the rafters in the classroom. To punish me, the teacher canceled my upcoming concert, so I got pissed off and quit playing. But in high school, when rock and roll was first evolving, I started getting involved in boogie-woogie on the piano and I got pretty good at it.
1958
CORNELL DAYS
“At college at Cornell I saw my first live concert, an R&B band called the Sawyer Brothers. They had this incredibly soulful sound which really influenced me. I formed a band and played a Wurlitzer electric piano and Hammond M3 organ in the R&B style of the Sawyer Brothers. I really got into playing music and I was booking all our gigs. While in college at Cornell and in the summer on Long Island, I would also promote rock and roll bands. I hired The Coasters, The Isley Brothers, The Drifters, The Rascals, The Byrds, The Lovin’ Spoonful and many dozens more.
1966 – 1968
CORPORATE DAYS
Mike graduated Cornell with undergraduate and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Business Management. He joined IBM as a computer salesman in 1965 but continued promoting concerts. One of those concerts included a young guitarist who would go on to superstardom.
1965 – 1970
HANGIN OUT WITH HENDRIX
I also became good friends with Jimmy James who eventually went back to using the name Jimi Hendrix.
1967
FOXEY LADY PEDALS
While I was still at IBM, I had a growing urge to quit and go out and play with a band full time. In those days, “Satisfaction” with Keith Richards’ fuzz-tone guitar riff was the longest running No.1 hit of all time and Maestro couldn’t make their fuzz pedals fast enough. All the music stores in New York City were on West 48th Street and there was a repair guy there named Bill Berko who was making fuzz tones one at a time. He said, ‘Hey Mike, why don’t you come in with me? We can make these much faster.’ At that time I was married and my wife was kind of conservative. I wanted to make some quick money so I could say, ‘Here’s twenty-five grand, I’m going out playing, and you got a little security.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I figured I’d make enough so I could quit IBM and go out on the road. But it turns out he didn’t do any work, and I ended up doing that myself with a contractor in Long Island City. Al Dronge, the founder of Guild Guitars, wanted to buy them all so every couple of weeks I’d bring a few hundred pedals out to Guild in Hoboken, N.J. They would write me out a check, and I would go back to work at IBM. Al Dronge wanted to call them Foxey Lady pedals ‘cause Jimi was huge by then and everyone wanted to sound like him!”
BECOMING AN
ICON
Mike Matthews, 1970
1968
THE LPB-1 LINEAR POWER BOOSTER
Twenty-six-year-old Mike Matthews started Electro-Harmonix in 1968 with just $1000. That was when EHX’s first product, the LPB-1 Linear Power Booster, was born. It’s a device which helped usher in the Age of Overdrive, a phenomenon that profoundly affected the sound of modern music.
Mike describes it like this: “The first pedal that I built under Electro-Harmonix was in late 1968 and it was the LPB-1 Linear Power Booster. I hooked up with Bob Myer, an award-winning inventor from Bell Labs. I contracted with him to design a distortion-free sustainer and when I went to check out the prototype, I saw a little box plugged into the front of the sustainer prototype. I asked him, ‘What’s that?’ and he said, ‘Well, I didn’t realize that guitar put out such a low signal, so I just built a simple one-transistor booster to stick in the front.’ When I hit the switch, all of a sudden, the amp was so loud! I said, ‘Wow! That’s a product!’ In those days, amplifiers were designed with a lot of headroom. There was no such thing as overdrive. So, you would turn them up to 10 and they would still be clean and loud. But with this device, you could make the amp much louder, but then overdrive it. I called it the Linear Power Booster, or the LPB-1, and started selling them mail order and then in stores. We still sell tons of LPB-1s today.
1969
BIG MUFF PI
Just one year later, in 1969, Mike introduced the Big Muff Pi. It’s the pedal Electro-Harmonix is probably best known for — a game-changer with a roster of users that reads like a who’s who of popular music. Prominent Big Muff players include Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, The Isley Brothers’ Ernie Isley, Carlos Santana, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., Jack White of the White Stripes and many more. Mike relates, “We plunged into production and I brought the very first units up to Henry (Henry Goldrich, the son of Manny’s founder, Manny Goldrich), the boss at Manny’s Music on