Cry Baby

The other name came from the sound. The way the story goes, somebody at Thomas heard the pedal scream and said it sounded like a baby crying.

Cry Baby and Clyde McCoy pedals both went into production early in 1967, first in Sepulveda, then in Italy, at Eko and then at JEN, a factory Benaron founded with a foreman named Ennio Uncini. The patent application went in on 24 February 1967. It was granted on 22 September 1970.

Those early pedals were not consistent. They varied a lot from one unit to the next. Dunlop’s own telling has Jimi Hendrix going through six or seven before he found one that sounded right.

The first famous wah records came quickly after that. Which pedal was on which of them is murkier than people like, and Hendrix’s name usually comes attached to a Vox. Where somebody did write down “Cry Baby,” one of the best examples is a record where the wah hardly moves.

Mick Ronson played guitar on David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, from 1972. He played a stripped 1968 Les Paul Custom through a Marshall, with a Cry Baby in between. The producer, Ken Scott, said that when it came to Ronson’s sound, “it was always the Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall and the Cry Baby wah.” And he remembered exactly how Ronson used it:

Mick would start at one end of the wah and slowly work down or come up, he’d hit the sound we wanted, leave it there.

A wah pedal is a filter that sweeps a peak up and down the midrange. Stop it halfway and you get a fixed tone: nasal, thick, cutting, like a guitar talking through its nose. That’s Ronson on Ziggy. He wasn’t rocking the pedal. He was using it as a tone knob he worked with his foot.

Put the record on and listen to how the guitar sits forward, honking, while nothing about it wobbles.

Thomas Organ went out of business in 1981 or 1982; the dates don’t agree. In 1982 Dunlop acquired the Cry Baby name, along with the original Thomas Organ and JEN tooling and machinery.

Its first pedal was the GCB-95. Dunlop raised the frequency range for a more aggressive, up-front sound than the 1967 voicing had. The GCB-95 is still the standard Cry Baby.

After that came the variants: the 535Q, the Mini, signature models for Slash, Kirk Hammett, Eddie Van Halen, and Mick Ronson. There’s a fair case that the Cry Baby is the best-selling pedal of all time.

The name traveled too. When the Tube Screamer’s makers brought their overdrive to Sam Ash in Manhattan, Sammy Ash pointed to the Cry Baby, a pedal named for the sound it made. The Tube Screamer got its name partly by the same logic.

Fame never needed a fancy one. Slash, looking back on Guns N’ Roses’ first album:

When I did Appetite for Destruction I had a stock Cry Baby.

No mods, no rebuild. The one off the shelf.

Tom Morello has a GCB-95 on a board he hasn’t changed since the early ’90s, right next to a Phase 90.

Nobody at Thomas Organ ever drew up a setting called “halfway, and leave it.” Ronson found it on his own, somewhere in the middle of the pedal’s travel, by ear and by foot. On Ziggy Stardust you can still hear it, sitting right where he left it.