I'd actually never heard of Jim Marshall before this thread...
Maybe he should've had a better pr rep/agent 'cause his shit is everywhere, but I had no idea there was actually some dude named marshall behind it.
I'm not trying to slight the guy or anything.
Just making the observation that I find it odd that the man himself wasn't more famous given how ubiquitous his products are.
Actually, Heat, it's not at all unusual that you {and many others, I'm sure} would not have heard of Jim Marshall. In a way, that's kind of one of the subtexts of this thread that some of us were skimming over earlier - popular music since the dawn of the 20th century has had thousands of contributors and the overwhelming majority of well known ones are those that have actually made the music or whose faces are representative of the songs we know and love or hate {few people could name you the session musicians on countless singles and albums or members of housebands like those of, say, Motown or Stax}. But there's been many behind the scenes that, for whatever varying reasons, aren't particularly known except to those that have a particular interest in that vein. My kids are 10 and 7 and even they know Whitney Houston died. I bet only a minute fraction are aware of Jim Marshall and not many with no interest in guitars, amps, Hendrix, the Who, etc. I don't think he courted fame and publicity.
Actually, alot of old timers whose inventions, developments, productions or innovations that we are aware of
now seem pleasantly surprized when people in the modern day want to interview them about stuff they did 50 years ago. Often, they have no real way of knowing the impact they've had. Can you imagine if the Wright brothers or Oppenheimer were around today to talk about planes and nuclear weapons ! ?
When I was a kid, one of the features of our household from the mid 60s right through to when I left home in '81 was a Kenwood chef, a kind of blender. We just always knew it as 'the Kenwood'. A few years ago, I happened to come across an article in which the death was reported of a guy called Ken Wood who was the company head and developer of a number of Kenwood products. It never even occurred to me that there was a person called Ken Wood ! 'Kenny Wood' was the name of a footballer that I made up in my younger days for a game my cousin and I invented.
The only reason I'd heard of Steve Jobs when he died is that a few weeks before, there was a thread in the Cave about him. I didn't even read it, the name just remained with me {I initially thought it was a thread about jobs and unemployment}.
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