VOX AMPLIFIERS:
The JMI Years
BY CHRIS BURGESS
The History for Hire Press has just published
Vox Amplifiers: The JMI Years by Jim Elyea.
Twelve years in the making, it is a very big
book, and I’m not just talking about its physical size—although at 9. 5 x 12 inches and 682
pages, it’s no slight thing in that regard either.
In terms of what this book achieves, it may be
even bigger than its outsized proportions can
convey. In these pages is a seemingly endless array of pictures detailing every aspect
of Vox history, familiar and unfamilar, along
with an engrossing narrative and meticulous
documentation. Interspersed throughout
are charts, sidebars and illustrations, and
a running item called “Setting the Record
Straight,” in which Elyea clears up many
popular myths with the information he dug up
in his years of searching. Laudably, he is never
reticent about what he could not verify. Oh
yes, there’s also plenty of gear porn.
Certain to become the definitive book on the
subject, Vox Amplifiers also sets a new standard by which other books on the history of
our most beloved gear might be judged.
It’s not just that the text and the photography
are equally edifying, organized and easy to
navigate, or even just that it covers so much
territory, from history to field guide, to reference manual, to nostalgaic coffee table book.
What sets it apart is its depth of detail. It
must have been Elyea’s obsession with Vox
amps that started it, but his quest to find out
everything that could be found out about
Vox Amplifiers in the early years can only be
described as relentless.
He began his gear collecting with a general
interest, but as he got more interested in Vox
amps he decided to focus solely on them,
foregoing guitars, effects, and other amplifiers alike. “As much as I loved the different
guitars and amps,” he says, “when a potential
new addition to the Vox collection would
appear, another guitar would go on the block:
360/12, 370, 6120, ES- 5, SJ- 200, TV Junior,
pre-CBS Strats, black guard Teles—they all
were sold to buy more Vox.” Though just the
thought of parting with such a bevy of great
guitars is enough to make any gearhead rueful, the end result of all this trading-off was
the Vox Museum, so the story is a bittersweet
one, rather than just bitter. Elyea continues,
“I remember the day I sold a complete set
of Fender Reverb units, all with covers, and
I never looked back. As a result, the Vox
Museum has become a repository of some
of the rarest amplifiers around, and with the
book, I am able to share it with everyone.”
Starting with that collection, which spawned
an expanding database of amplifiers, Elyea
also put in years of tracking down manuals;
data sheets, log books and other documents,
made many trips to the UK to talk to everyone he could find who’d ever worked there;
did scores of interviews… you get the idea.
This guy is thorough, and when he went out
to find something, he went all out to find it,
every detail. Elyea informs me that there are
“some other things” that he would’ve liked to
include in the book, but it’s hard to imagine
what could’ve been left out.
Just a glance at the book makes it clear that
an obsession has been at work here, but reading it reveals a depth that could not have been
inspired by obsession alone. This book was
concieved with great ambition. Elyea says that
after years of waiting for the next great book
on Vox to hit the stores, it dawned on him one
day that he would be the one to write it. “At
that moment, there was no question,” he tells
me. From there the obsession began to find a
focus—or perhaps, more accurately, a purpose.
The painstaking attention to detail recorded in
these pages is extraordinary; it is the product
of a keen appetite for knowledge.
Describing the way the plan of the book took
shape over time, Elyea says, “Like a fool, I
thought it would be easy. The original idea
was to have a thirty-five-page field guide with
seven or eight charts, some basic info, and
photos of some of my collection. Simple.” He
started a database (which has
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