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50 Years Ago, the Wah-Wah Pedal Was Born in a Hollywood Hills Garage
The saga of the wah-wah pedal's rise to prominence in rock & roll is a tale fraught with bizarre twists and memorable artistic breakouts. With a cast of characters including Lawrence Welk, Phyllis Diller, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix, the wah’s glide through American pop culture can be traced back to the muted cornets in 1920s Chicago speakeasies and, thanks to an ambitious young guitarist named Del Casher, came to fruition 50 years ago in a Hollywood Hills garage.
Born Delton Kacher in Hammond, Indiana, on Dec. 28, 1938, Casher idolized electric guitar innovator Les Paul and aspired to eclipse him as both a musician and inventor. At just 21, he helped develop and demonstrate the revolutionary Ecco-Fonic tape delay machine (ads ballyhooed its “limitless range" and "complete freedom of expression”) and kept busy as an in-demand session player. He also was a member of the pop group Three Suns, a featured soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show and a guitarist for singing cowboy Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch TV show.
But Casher, who also invented the Fender Electronic Echo Chamber and worked on Roland's first guitar synthesizer, was no mere hired gun. He was an aggressively creative musical explorer eager to take on any artistic challenge — including jamming with the most experimental L.A. band of the era, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.
“I had a nice garage studio at my place in the Hollywood Hills,” Casher said. “One day, Frank Zappa knocks on my door and says, ‘I hear you have a good studio.’ I’m looking at him, with the beard and the hair, wondering who he was.”
Zappa was on assignment to do a song for Roger Corman’s 1966 sci-fi flick, Queen of Blood, and he needed an out-of-this-world sound. “Frank brought [actor] Florence Marly in, she’s singing these really wild lyrics, ‘Space Boy, Space Boy, sex without soul,’ and I thought it’d go nowhere fast. I started overdubbing my parts, and Frank says, ‘Make it as spacey and weird as you can.' So I got my oscillator out, and soon the sounds were whizzing by, really weird and wild. And then Zappa says, 'Can I overdub the drums now?' And I thought this wacko is going to screw up everything I just did. In one take, he did it, it was perfect. We hit it off, and he invited me to join his band.
“So I was doing the Hollywood music business from A to Z. I played lead guitar for Autry’s TV show in the morning, and at night, Zappa would hire me to sit in with the Mothers of Invention at the Whisky a Go-Go.”
In the midst of all this, Casher also began work on what would become the wah-wah pedal. “Dick Denney at Vox U.K. invented the original prototype, the midrange boost switch. When it was converted to transistors, they put a variable switch on it." Now that the midrange boost could be more precisely controlled, Casher had a flash of inspiration. "I thought, 'Let’s put it on a pedal.' We got one from a Vox organ, and it fit very nicely. After I demonstrated it to all these engineers and music producers, everyone said, 'This will be the greatest thing — the trumpet players are going to love it!' ”
It was February 1967. “I wanted to use it for guitar, but they said no. Everyone thought I was just a crazy kid,” Casher said. “After the demonstration, a guy came up and said, ‘I really liked that, give me your number, Universal is going to call tomorrow and we’re going to use this on some movie soundtracks.’ It was Vic Mizzy, who did the Addams Family and Green Acres themes. I thought, 'Yeah, sure, Universal is going to call.' But they did and almost immediately I was in the studio playing for that Phyllis Diller picture [Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady?]. I mean, here I was with a 60-piece orchestra playing wah-wah guitar. All the first-call players like Bob Bain and Tommy Tedesco were saying, ‘What is this kid doing playing first chair?’ Well, it was because I had the wah.
“I thought it’d catch on immediately, but it didn’t,’” Casher continued. “After all, the wah sound goes back to Gershwin, with the muted horns on Rhapsody in Blue — he used that crying sound in 1927. And I wanted to give a voice to the guitar. I played it for James Brown and he really liked my playing, but he didn’t understand the wah-wah at all. He said, ‘Why the fuck would anyone want a guitar to do that?’ I tried to explain that it was a way to allow the guitar to really be expressive and reach people, like a voice, or a harmonica, to reach the soul. He didn’t see it.
“I mean, my conventional people who I worked for, Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, you know, the suits, I couldn’t even try to use the wah with them — it was too weird, way out for them. I called Frank [Zappa] and said, ‘I’m having a problem getting people to use it,’ and of course he took one. He was playing it in New York and Jimi Hendrix heard it and asked him about it, so we made sure he got one. In ’67, Jimi was just getting started with his recording. He used it brilliantly, but it wasn’t until Jimi played it in the rain at Woodstock that everyone just went crazy for it. The rest is history.”
The wah-wah eventually became a staple in rock, R&B, metal, funk and soul but only after it enhanced several unforgettable hits — Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," the Oscar-winning theme from Shaft, Tony Joe White’s swamp-rock workout “Polk Salad Annie.” By the ’70s, everyone from Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath to Bob Marley and Miles Davis (on his trumpet, bringing the sound full circle) began exploiting the pedal’s marvelously versatile, expressive capabilities. More recently, it helped shape the sound of such rock bands as Metallica (Cliff Burton used it on his bass), Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns N’ Roses.
“It took five years. It was slow getting off the ground, but that’s the problem with being ahead of your time,” Casher said. “I still have that original prototype that Vox gave me, and I’d like to see it go into the Smithsonian or Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s that significant. And to this day it’s still very musical-sounding, not at all harsh. It has all the quality of the human voice.”
50 Years Ago, the Wah-Wah Pedal Was Born in a Hollywood Hills Garage
The saga of the wah-wah pedal's rise to prominence in rock & roll is a tale fraught with bizarre twists and memorable artistic breakouts. With a cast of characters including Lawrence Welk, Phyllis Diller, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix, the wah’s glide through American pop culture can be traced back to the muted cornets in 1920s Chicago speakeasies and, thanks to an ambitious young guitarist named Del Casher, came to fruition 50 years ago in a Hollywood Hills garage.
Born Delton Kacher in Hammond, Indiana, on Dec. 28, 1938, Casher idolized electric guitar innovator Les Paul and aspired to eclipse him as both a musician and inventor. At just 21, he helped develop and demonstrate the revolutionary Ecco-Fonic tape delay machine (ads ballyhooed its “limitless range" and "complete freedom of expression”) and kept busy as an in-demand session player. He also was a member of the pop group Three Suns, a featured soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show and a guitarist for singing cowboy Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch TV show.
But Casher, who also invented the Fender Electronic Echo Chamber and worked on Roland's first guitar synthesizer, was no mere hired gun. He was an aggressively creative musical explorer eager to take on any artistic challenge — including jamming with the most experimental L.A. band of the era, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.
“I had a nice garage studio at my place in the Hollywood Hills,” Casher said. “One day, Frank Zappa knocks on my door and says, ‘I hear you have a good studio.’ I’m looking at him, with the beard and the hair, wondering who he was.”
Zappa was on assignment to do a song for Roger Corman’s 1966 sci-fi flick, Queen of Blood, and he needed an out-of-this-world sound. “Frank brought [actor] Florence Marly in, she’s singing these really wild lyrics, ‘Space Boy, Space Boy, sex without soul,’ and I thought it’d go nowhere fast. I started overdubbing my parts, and Frank says, ‘Make it as spacey and weird as you can.' So I got my oscillator out, and soon the sounds were whizzing by, really weird and wild. And then Zappa says, 'Can I overdub the drums now?' And I thought this wacko is going to screw up everything I just did. In one take, he did it, it was perfect. We hit it off, and he invited me to join his band.
“So I was doing the Hollywood music business from A to Z. I played lead guitar for Autry’s TV show in the morning, and at night, Zappa would hire me to sit in with the Mothers of Invention at the Whisky a Go-Go.”
In the midst of all this, Casher also began work on what would become the wah-wah pedal. “Dick Denney at Vox U.K. invented the original prototype, the midrange boost switch. When it was converted to transistors, they put a variable switch on it." Now that the midrange boost could be more precisely controlled, Casher had a flash of inspiration. "I thought, 'Let’s put it on a pedal.' We got one from a Vox organ, and it fit very nicely. After I demonstrated it to all these engineers and music producers, everyone said, 'This will be the greatest thing — the trumpet players are going to love it!' ”
It was February 1967. “I wanted to use it for guitar, but they said no. Everyone thought I was just a crazy kid,” Casher said. “After the demonstration, a guy came up and said, ‘I really liked that, give me your number, Universal is going to call tomorrow and we’re going to use this on some movie soundtracks.’ It was Vic Mizzy, who did the Addams Family and Green Acres themes. I thought, 'Yeah, sure, Universal is going to call.' But they did and almost immediately I was in the studio playing for that Phyllis Diller picture [Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady?]. I mean, here I was with a 60-piece orchestra playing wah-wah guitar. All the first-call players like Bob Bain and Tommy Tedesco were saying, ‘What is this kid doing playing first chair?’ Well, it was because I had the wah.
“I thought it’d catch on immediately, but it didn’t,’” Casher continued. “After all, the wah sound goes back to Gershwin, with the muted horns on Rhapsody in Blue — he used that crying sound in 1927. And I wanted to give a voice to the guitar. I played it for James Brown and he really liked my playing, but he didn’t understand the wah-wah at all. He said, ‘Why the fuck would anyone want a guitar to do that?’ I tried to explain that it was a way to allow the guitar to really be expressive and reach people, like a voice, or a harmonica, to reach the soul. He didn’t see it.
“I mean, my conventional people who I worked for, Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, you know, the suits, I couldn’t even try to use the wah with them — it was too weird, way out for them. I called Frank [Zappa] and said, ‘I’m having a problem getting people to use it,’ and of course he took one. He was playing it in New York and Jimi Hendrix heard it and asked him about it, so we made sure he got one. In ’67, Jimi was just getting started with his recording. He used it brilliantly, but it wasn’t until Jimi played it in the rain at Woodstock that everyone just went crazy for it. The rest is history.”
The wah-wah eventually became a staple in rock, R&B, metal, funk and soul but only after it enhanced several unforgettable hits — Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," the Oscar-winning theme from Shaft, Tony Joe White’s swamp-rock workout “Polk Salad Annie.” By the ’70s, everyone from Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath to Bob Marley and Miles Davis (on his trumpet, bringing the sound full circle) began exploiting the pedal’s marvelously versatile, expressive capabilities. More recently, it helped shape the sound of such rock bands as Metallica (Cliff Burton used it on his bass), Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns N’ Roses.
“It took five years. It was slow getting off the ground, but that’s the problem with being ahead of your time,” Casher said. “I still have that original prototype that Vox gave me, and I’d like to see it go into the Smithsonian or Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s that significant. And to this day it’s still very musical-sounding, not at all harsh. It has all the quality of the human voice.”
