When Green Day released their Dookie album in 1994, they went from an underground punk group from San Francisco to one of the biggest bands in the world. Not only were they great songwriters and musicians, they got a lot of attention for Bille Joe Armstrong’s monster guitar tone, which came from a modified Marshall provided by producer Rob Cavallo.
It was tweaked at Custom Audio Electronics – founded by legendary electronics guru Bob Bradshaw – by master guitar and amp builder John Suhr. In the mid ’80s, Suhr was working at Rudy’s Music on Manhattan’s 48th Street, across the street from Manny’s. He was making a name for himself building guitars for Mark Knopfler, Peter Frampton and Reb Beach.
Suhr was also creating his own amp mods, and like most tone wizards, he was self-taught. He carried a satchel full of tech books with him on the subway to work. “I was happy when the train got held up, so I could read,” he says. “That’s where I learned a ton of it.”
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He eventually got in touch with Bradshaw, who sent an amp to work on, but didn’t tell him who it was for. Suhr later found out it was Steve Lukather, one of his favorite players. It was the first time he’d modified an amp with what he calls the crunch mod – and a variation of that would eventually become the Dookie mod.
Bradshaw wanted a three-channel preamp, which became the CAE 3+. Based on Suhr’s circuitry, the first channel was a cleaner black-panel Fender sound, channel 2 was the crunch mod, and channel 3 was what a “singing overdrive tone.”
Eddie Van Halen, who was close to Bradshaw, used it on Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge for a number of tracks – he liked channel 3.
Top studio guitar players including Lukather and Mike Landau were already using Bradshaw gear, and the 3+ proved to be a very versatile addition. Kirk Hammett used it for Metallica’s Black album, and Megadeth employed it for several records, too.
Suhr believes he created the crunch mod in 1988, and first put it into a JCM 800. His initial tone influences were the usual suspects of hard rock – Leslie West, Brian May, Neal Schon, Billy Gibbons, Angus Young. The tone he was going for was “a ballsy crunchy Marshall with some saturation in the notes.”
But he couldn’t stop tinkering.
“The more I listened to it, the more I thought, ‘Channel 2 isn’t exactly what I want. It’s a little too bassy, and a little too out of control.’
“So I modified that, and that very first preamp is what became the Dookie crunch mod. It’s a little more bassy, and more of the high-end is rolled back.” The tone he was going for was a cranked-up Plexi “but a bit less wild.”
Suhr left Bradshaw to become a master builder at Fender, so it was an assistant at CAE, the late Martin Golub, who put the crunch mod into the Green Day Marshall. “Martin was trained to do amp mods and we would job a lot of stuff out to him,” Suhr says. “He would wire our racks as well.”
Golub modified several other Marshalls for the Dookie tour.
“As I understand it, one has the channel 3 mod, and one is closer to the crunch mod,” Suhr says. “A tech who worked on one of Billie’s road amps gave me a schematic, and it was identical to the first prototype amp.” (In addition to modding amps for Green Day, Golub also reportedly worked with Tom Petty, Sum 41, Mick Mars, Brad Paisley and others.)
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In a recent interview with legendary studio guitarist Tim Pierce, producer Cavallo said the amp he’d taken to Bradshaw was a 1971 Marshall Super Lead Plexi, and Armstrong used his Fernandes Strat-style with a Duncan JB pickup in the bridge. “Nobody really had any money,” he said.
“But I decided to spend a little on the off-chance that [Armstrong] might like the sound of it. We went to Bob and I said, ‘Make something that sounds kind of punk, but also sounds kind of rich,’ so that it would be very intense and bright, but also sort of sing.” (Cavallo recalled working on the amp himself, but Suhr says Golub usually did the work.)
At first, Suhr didn’t know the crunch mod was on a monster-selling album. “I didn’t learn about it until after I was at Fender, which was probably about ’93 or ’94,” he says.
“It really hit me when people started contacting me about it. I still get a ton of requests for Dookie mods. I have six of them in front of me to work on right now.”
Marshall recently announced the production of an official Green Day amp – the first artist signature they’ve made in 14 years. But if you want the sound direct from Suhr, you should be able to get it soon.
“My plan, maybe for next year, is to put all my mods into a couple of amps,” he says. “That way people can flip some switches, and if they want the Dookie mod they can flip it here.”
It’s remarkable that, over 30 years since Green Day exploded, there’s still a great demand for the tone – but, as Suhr says, “A great sound is timeless.”
