Guv'nor

Marshall had put its name on pedals before, sort of. The Supa-Fuzz of the late ’60s was somebody else’s design, a Sola Sound Tone Bender with a Marshall badge, and the Supa-Wah after it was a rebadged Sola Sound wah. By the mid-’70s both were gone.

In the later ’80s, Marshall’s head designer, Steve Grindrod, got a harder job: make a stompbox that sounds like a Marshall amp cranked up. The target was the company’s own high-gain sound, the JCM800 by most accounts, or the older Plexi. The Guv’nor came out in 1988, the first pedal Marshall designed and built itself. That’s Grindrod’s foot on the original box.

It’s easy to forget how new the idea was. Marshall’s Steve Smith, looking back:

Back then, amp-in-a-box pedals weren’t really a thing. You had [ProCo] Rats, the [Boss] SD-1 Super Over Drive and [Ibanez] Tube Screamers, but a distortion pedal with a full EQ to recreate the sound of a Marshall stack was a game changer.

Look down at it and you see an amp. Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble, Level, in a row, the way they sit on a Marshall head. The three tone knobs are a passive tone stack, the same kind of circuit an amp uses, and they really move things: plenty of beef from the bass, and a Middle knob that can scoop the sound mean or shove it forward, the way Moore did.

Inside, the clipping is hard, and it happens in red LEDs where most distortion boxes use ordinary diodes. LEDs clip later, so the signal comes out stronger and less squashed. Set it to a medium crunch and it cleans up nicely when you roll back the guitar’s volume.

Then there’s the jack marked “loop.” It’s one socket carrying a send and a return, so you need a Y-cable, and it sits after the distortion and the EQ. Put an echo in it and the Guv’nor’s footswitch brings the delay in with the dirt. Moore’s tech called it “a nice touch.” A reviewer of the 2023 reissue called it “the most infamously pointless feature of the Guv’nor.” Both of them have a point. Marshall kept it anyway.

The name depends on who you ask. In England, “guv’nor” means the boss, and that’s what the workers at Marshall’s factory called Jim Marshall. Marshall says the pedal is named after him.

Jim told it differently to one of his employees. A guitarist played a final prototype, he said, and was so knocked out that he shouted, “Wow! That’s the Guv’nor, innit!” Nobody has ever named the guitarist.

Either way, the ads leaned in. One in Britain in 1989 read: “You’ve seen the rest. Now put yourself in charge — get yourself a Guv’nor.”

Still Got the Blues came out on 12 March 1990, and Moore became one of the pedal’s greatest champions. Across the album the same rig keeps turning up, the JTM45 reissue and the 4x12, with the Guv’nor supplying the extra saturation and sustain. He had two ’59 Les Pauls on hand, a newly bought one called “Stripe” and Peter Green’s old one, “Greeny.” And the pedal itself is pictured in the album’s artwork.

Not every track, though. “Texas Strut” is a Strat, and “That Kind of Woman” was cut at George Harrison’s home studio. On stage Moore often ran Soldano heads, with either a Guv’nor or an Ibanez TS10 on the crunch channel. Don’t go looking for it on his ’80s hard-rock records, either. Nobody has put it there.

Other players found their way to it. Josh Klinghoffer had one on his Red Hot Chili Peppers board in 2012, between a modified Boss DS-1 and a Pigtronix PolySaturator.

The original didn’t last. In 1991 three new pedals took its place, the Bluesbreaker, the Shredmaster and the Drivemaster, which was built on the Guv’nor circuit and dropped the loop. Another count has the Guv’nor itself running to late 1992. The early ones were made in England, the later ones in Korea. In 1998 a smaller Guv’nor Plus arrived, with a changed circuit and a Deep knob for the low end. Same name, different pedal.

In 2023 Marshall brought the first one back, made in England, loop jack and all. Smith’s team worked from a few Guv’nors from 1988 and found they didn’t quite agree. “They all sounded just a little bit different,” he said, but nudging the knobs brought them into line. “We copied them exactly.”

Put on the title track and wait for the solo, the one Moore got on the first try. It sounds like a Marshall stack pushed to the edge. The stack is clean. The roar is coming from the floor.