It’s often said Marshall stacks were born to fill bigger and bigger venues with enough volume to satisfy thousands of screaming rock and roll fans. But a couple of years before Jim Marshall lifted Fender’s tweed Bassman schematic to build the JTM45 — and several years before the British amp maker dreamed of doubling it to create a 100-watt amp — Leo Fender and his team in Fullerton, California, were chasing that goal with assistance from one of the most bombastic guitarists of the era: Dick Dale.
In 1959, Dick Dale and his band, the Del-Tones, began cramming some 3,000 stomping teenagers into the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California, where they moshed to something that would soon be known nationwide as surf music. In that era of woefully underpowered P.A. systems, Dale, who passed away in March of this year at the age of 81, needed volume to get the music above the roar of the crowd and to simulate the wild, tumbling, swirling experience of catching a mammoth wave. He turned to the Fender Showman to get him there.
The Showman quickly went through several transitional iterations in 1960 and ’61 as Leo and Dale worked to build an amp that could stand up to the guitarist’s abuse. In the process, they blew up dozens of test rigs, their underrated speakers or output transformers (OTs) frying under the punishment. Fender finally achieved a suitable 80-watt OT coupled to a more robust JBL F-Series 12- or 15-inch speaker (with two 15s in the Dual Showman). Early Showman cabs also used a complex speaker baffle with a tone ring to decouple the speaker from the structure, resulting in increased projection and efficiency. The archetypal Showman settled in as an 80-watt head (later frequently rated as 100 watts) atop an extension speaker