MY FIRST BOOK IS HERE!
Six Years, One Book, and the Stories That Almost Died
In 2019, I started shooting what I thought was a documentary.
I’d been trying to piece together how one of the most important music companies in history actually came to be. Gathering artifacts, ephemera, and every interview I could scrounge up. I had gotten to know the founder Mike Matthews through some casual conversations, and I could tell there was a possibility that he might let me work on this project in a way beyond what anyone else had ever been given access to. I was a competing figure of sorts in the industry, but he knew where I stood. Mike was my hero, and Electro-Harmonix, in my opinion, was one of the greatest guitar-centric companies America had ever seen.
One key problem in my project was that there was a complete absence of any original characters, internal documentation, records, or witness to the company’s origins outside of the Matthews. I assumed, like many, that the original designer of the Big Muff and LPB-1 - Mike’s cohort - a man named Bob Myer - was long gone. There were no interviews with him anywhere. No one talked about him in the present tense. He had simply vanished.
Then I got an email that changed everything.
Bob Myer was alive. He was in his 90s, living in New Jersey, and he wanted to talk.
A few days later, I flew out to meet him. My friend Daniel Danger - a collector whose Electro-Harmonix collection belongs in a museum - met me in the driveway. We’d built a friendship over text messages, Instagram, and a video app called Marco Polo, but it was the first time we’d ever met in person. Pedals had brought our friendship together, and here we stood at what we both knew was potentially a holy site - an undiscovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings, sealed for decades and waiting to be explored. Within the hour, we were crawling through Bob’s flood-damaged backyard workshop with flashlights, covered in decades of dust and mold, pulling notebooks and prototypes from everywhere that hadn’t been touched since the 1970s.
It felt like being a kid again. Like we’d walked into one of those Indiana Jones movies we grew up on, except the treasure was schematics, prototypes, stories, and circuits that no one knew existed.
That day, standing in Bob’s driveway catching our breath, Daniel and I looked at each other and said the same thing: this is a book.
We knew how long it would take. We knew how hard it would be. We knew what it would cost. We did it anyway.
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Made On Earth For Rising Stars: The Electro-Harmonix Story is available for pre-order today, and I’m still processing the fact that it’s real.
Several publishers had pursued me over the years, but I was determined to self-publish my first work. Then Third Man Books came along, and something felt different. Jack White is a preservationist like me - he collects things so they don’t get lost. He obsesses over gathering history. The Big Muff is synonymous with his sound. There was no one better to launch this project with, and like so many things involving this project, the relationship felt like it appeared perfectly out of nowhere.
For years, I’ve dreamed about what this day would feel like, and it’s pretty crazy. And even further than that, it’s an amazing book. I say that with a lot of humility, but also a lot of honesty about what’s headed to print. There has never been anything like this for people who love guitar, and it’s technology - especially those who love guitar pedals.
Six years of work. Countless miles of travel across the country to dig through strangers’ garages, storage units, basements, and archives. Hundreds of hours of interviews with engineers spanning five decades of the company’s history. Rooms full of documents we scanned page by page. The project became so massive that we brought in acclaimed writer, editor, and historian Dan Epstein to help us sort through the endless piles of interviews and history we had gathered. His phenomenal biographical writing and his exceptional editing have helped shape the book in a way Daniel and I never could have done alone.
This book isn’t just about what was made. It’s about who made it. The engineers you’ve never heard of who shaped sounds you know by heart. The unlikely collaborations between people who had nothing in common except a shared obsession with making things that had never existed before. The full, unbelievable story of how a hippie music promoter and a devout Mormon engineer from Bell Labs changed the sound of popular music forever.
I’ve said for years that companies don’t make things - people do. And my greatest joy in finishing this book is that I get to hand it to so many of these people while they’re still here to hold it. I live for this kind of stuff.
The engineers who built the Memory Man, the Big Muff, the Electric Mistress, the POG, the Small Clone - many of them are still with us, but not for long. This book honors them not as historical footnotes, but as the brilliant, curious, often eccentric humans they actually are. That matters to me more than I can explain.
I think my life’s work, in the context of writing about history and what you’ve seen me do on the JHS Show, is really simple: find who made things and make sure everybody knows their name. This work drives me. It’s important. At the end of the day, it lets us realize that we can do the same thing. We can be like these people, who never achieved massive notoriety, but somehow changed the world simply by creating what they had a passion to create. That’s a message we all need to hear, and that’s the core of this book.
If you’ve enjoyed my historical deep dives on the JHS Show, this is that and so much more. Unbelievable biographies on the inventors, breakout chapters with artists like John Mayer, Billy Corgan, J Mascis, Bill Frisell, Jack White, Vernon Reid, Adrian Belew, Wes Borland, and more. Photos of prototypes and ideas that have never been seen. Stories that reach far beyond the pedals and into the engineers who worked to cure death, pull power from the sky, conduct mass ESP experiments, and more unbelievable aspects of the company that would have been lost forever if we hadn’t shown up when we did.
This is a visual history book, and Daniel Danger’s design work sends it over the top. Unlike so many books about history, we actually have the photos. We actually found the things that were lost. The stories leap off the pages because Daniel’s unbelievable layout and visual gifts make every spread feel like you’re discovering something alongside us. The writing stands on its own - but what Daniel created around it is stunning.
MY ASK: pre-orders REALLY matter.
When you pre-order a book, it signals to publishers and distributors that people actually want this kind of thing. It tells the book industry that guitar history - the real, deep, obsessive kind - has an audience. I have more books in me. My second book is already drafted, and though it needs a little more work, I see a path for it this time next year. This one sets the stage for me to keep writing and saving the stories of the past. Your support now doesn’t just help this book succeed; it helps me embark on the journey of writing the definitive works on guitar technology in a way that has never been done before.
(Oh - and if you’re into the gear side of things, the research for this book led to some discoveries. One of them is a lost Big Muff circuit that’s being released today as well, alongside the book. But that’s its own story. Heres the video if your interested.
Thank you for eighteen years of showing up. For watching the videos, reading this Substack, buying my creations, caring about this weird world of guitar pedals and the people who make them. This book exists because you made it possible for me to spend six years chasing a story.
I can’t wait for you to read it.
