“Word on the street was that if you got a Dumble second hand, third hand, you had to make sure it was kosher with him,” Ben Harper tells Fretboard Journal of fabled amp maker Howard Dumble.
“There was a code of honor and ethics when it came to procuring a Dumble that didn’t come from Dumble directly,” he explains.
So when the three-time Grammy winner got a chance to own his first Dumble amp — a Super Overdrive Special — he knew what he had to do.
“He said, ‘Bring it in right away,’” Harper relates.
The tube amp not only brought the guitarist an invitation to meet Dumble at his base of operations — it also became a surprise to Dumble himself when he realized the amp’s history.
The legendary builder started his career modding Fender amps in the early ‘60s. By the turn of the decade, he was applying his choice tweaks to more high-gain amps, like Mesa/Boogies, before founding his namesake brand. Dumble would go on to make custom amps for guitarists like Eric Clapton, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Lowell George.
Unlike those made by brands, Dumble’s amps were made slowly by hand. He typically built just two or three per year, and his hands were the only pair involved in their creation. Finding one on the second-hand market is the guitar world’s equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack. And if a player were to find one, they had better have deep pockets.
As it happened, Harper was talking to Dumble about a custom build when the bargain Dumble Super Overdrive Special practically landed in his lap after a friend discovered it at a yard sale, of all places.
“A friend of mine found it,” Harper says. “He was looking for a bass amp and bought it from a yard sale for what you would think a yard sale bass amp would cost and should cost. He got it home and realized what he had pretty quickly and called me up. He thought of me as soon as he found out. I had the first crack at it, and it’s the first Dumble I’ve ever owned.”
The guitarist’s initial talks about a custom Dumble hadn’t born fruit. He was in a rush for one, but Howard Dumble worked at his own pace. Harper had good reason for his request: At the time he was using Jackson Browne’s Dumbleland 300 SL amp, the same Dumble amp Stevie Ray Vaughan had used for the majority of his Texas Flood sessions. Harper was feeling the weight of having such a storied amp in his possession.
“We had talked about him making me one,” Harper said, “but I needed one in real time because I had Jackson Browne’s Stevie Ray amp that needed to be on amp watch 24/7.”
“It had too much providence,” he says. “[I needed to] get it off the road and get it back to Jackson.”
When Harper told Dumble about his friend’s yard sale find, the amp maker told him to bring it in. He agreed to give the amp a once over and fine-tune it to Harper’s needs, just as he had for Carlos Santana, who also got his Dumble secondhand.
“It took a lot to surprise Dumble,” Harper continues. “He had seen and heard pretty much everything. But this amp did surprise him.
“He peeled a piece off the back, then he disappeared off into a back room, which I later learned was where he kept all his books,” Harper says. “He dug around and dug around, pulled out boxes, climbed up on ladders, pulled out more boxes, and came out with the carbon copy bill of sale.
“He said, ‘You know what that is? It’s one of the Beach Boy amps.’ He was so excited. It was like one of his kids returned home.”
It’s perhaps fitting that Harper’s retelling of this tale to Fretboard Journal was released just days before the passing of Brian Wilson. Almost every Dumble amp tells a unique story, and this one proved to be no different.
