The path to the invention of the wah-wah pedal — which lets an electric guitar take on aspects of the human voice — shows the twists and turns of the creative process.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the New York Times on August 7, 2011

DEL CASHER has done a lot of impressive things with his guitar over the last 50 years. He has performed with Gene Autry, Lawrence Welk, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He’s appeared, strumming, in movies with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. He’s been a featured player on dozens of film and TV soundtracks.

But there is one accomplishment that Mr. Casher, now 73, wishes more people knew about: his role in the invention of the wah-wah pedal.

The story of this device, which enables an electric guitar to take on aspects of the human voice — and which helped define the sounds of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — is complicated. But that very complexity drives home a point: While it is easier — and more romantic — to talk about innovation as the domain of lone inventors who hit pay dirt while tinkering in solitude, creativity is more often than not a collaborative, and messy, affair. As such, Mr. Casher’s story seems an apt one to tell in this, my last Prototype column.

“There’s a lot of players in this whole thing,” and a brilliant engineer named Brad Plunkett was one of them, says Mr. Casher, who is based in Los Angeles. “But I’m the one who said, ‘This is a guitar thing!’ ”

As a studio player in the 1960s, Mr. Casher was always looking for effects and techniques that would set his guitar solos apart. He admired the bluesy tones that the trumpet and trombone players emitted, with the help of wah-wah mutes, on “Rhapsody in Blue,” George Gershwin’s 1924 classic, but couldn’t figure out how to imitate them on the electric guitar.

The Thomas Organ company had acquired the rights to distribute Vox amplifiers — a British brand that the Beatles helped to make famous. To promote their venture, Thomas Organ formed the Vox Ampliphonic Orchestra, and Mr. Casher was invited to join. That put him on the premises of the company’s headquarters in Sepulveda, Calif., when its engineers began working to modify the amplifiers into solid state, translating all the tube circuits into transistors. As they did so, they ran across a switch known as a midrange boost, or M.R.B. for short.

“They said, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” Mr. Casher recalls of the M.R.B., which used different frequencies to make certain sounds seem louder. The feature — a switch that musicians clicked — had been invented by Dick Denney, a British engineer and guitarist. “If you really want to say who was the grandfather of the wah-wah,” Mr. Casher says, “it was Dick Denney.”

When Joe Benaron, the chairman of Thomas Organ, found out that installing that same switch in the United States would cost almost $3 a unit, he balked. So the chief engineer, Stan Cuttler assigned a young colleague, Mr. Plunkett, to solve the problem. He did so by replacing the switch with a 75-cent knob much like those used for volume control. Soon afterward, at a Vox Ampliphonic Orchestra rehearsal, Mr. Casher first encountered the device.

“I said, ‘What’s this knob?’ And I’m flipping it around and noticing it’s going wah-wah as I went from left to right,” he recalls. “I said: ‘Hold on! This is what I’ve been looking for!’ ”

But guitars take two hands to play — you can’t be fiddling with knobs during a solo. So Mr. Casher says he asked Mr. Plunkett whether the knob could be put into a pedal instead. In at least one interview, however, Mr. Plunkett has said that this was his own idea. (I could not reach Mr. Plunkett for comment.)

“With anything like this, mysteries abound about who did what when,” says Art Thompson, a senior editor at Guitar Player magazine who has looked into the history of what he refers to simply as “the wah.” But he says that while it’s impossible to know exactly who played what role, it would make sense that Mr. Casher could have participated: “When a musical instrument device is transitioning from the lab to market, there’s always a player who’s involved.”

Can true love tame James Ellroy, the Demon Dog of L.A. fiction?

By Amy Wallace

Los Angeles magazine, September 2010

James Ellroy is sitting in a corner booth at the Pacific Dining Car, the 6th Street steak joint, brooding about women. It’s the perfect place for it. The last time L.A. fiction’s Demon Dog, as Ellroy likes to be called, recited wedding vows, he was right here in this windowless cave of a room. On October 4, 1991, he married his second wife, the writer and critic Helen Knode. The bride wore a peach pink ’40s vintage dress and “looked stunningly cougarlike and hip/feral,” Ellroy recalls in his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. The groom wore a kilt, and his eyes darted around too much. There were steaks off the menu and a custom wedding cake.

When it came time to toast, Ellroy “threw out a mock-impromptu rock song, replete with lurid lyrics,” he writes. “Helen whooped and busted me to the guests. ‘That’s a retread, Big Dog! You wrote that for one of your ex-bitches!’ ” Knode pirouetted, prompting whistles from the male guests, and then quoted Doris Lessing: “Marriage is sex and courage.”

“Helen said it in this room: ‘Sex and courage.’ And it’s entirely true,” Ellroy tells me now. At 62 he is tall, even when seated, and almost gaunt from daily devotion to his elliptical machine. He has a clean-shaven skull and a manic glare that burns through his wire-rim glasses. His voice is reverent, if only for a beat. Pushing aside his Caesar salad (he’s eaten only the filet mignon off the top), he lets loose a tirade that somehow manages to sound both fond and furious: “The food here sucks Chihuahua dicks! Shih tzu dicks! Yorkie dicks!”

What led Ellroy’s second marriage to disintegrate—the overwork, the competition, the neglect, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” open relationship—occupies a large chunk of The Hilliker Curse, which is due out this month from Knopf. Has Knode vetted it? The answer is no. None of the women in the book have, but for one.

“Basically, Helen is tired of my shit, except for the alimony check that comes every month,” Ellroy says when asked whether he’s worried about her reaction. Knode lives in Texas now with a pit bull that doesn’t like him, he says. How does Knode feel about Ellroy? “She loves me. She’s the best friend I ever had. We had a great run. But she’s tired of my shit.”

Ellroy’s shit is legion. A pervert (his word) at 9 years old—“a peeper, a scaredy-cat, a follower. I always had my snout up to the glass.” A murdered mother’s son (his phrase) at 10. An addict, an alcoholic, and a derelict by 20. And then, at 33, after getting sober and toiling for years on fiction many deemed too violent and disturbing, a published novelist. He’s been exploiting his shit ever since.

The central event that informs his personal story—the vein he’s tapped more than any other—is the death of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958. A tall, striking redhead from Wisconsin, she was strangled near their home in El Monte by an unknown assailant. She was 43. In 1987, Ellroy dedicated the first volume of his acclaimed “L.A. Quartet”—the novels The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—to her. Later, in his first foray into memoir, My Dark Places, he teamed with a retired sheriff’s investigator named Bill Stoner to try to solve her murder. Now he regards that book as inferior, not because he didn’t bring the killer to justice (“I knew damn fucking well we weren’t going to find the guy”), but for a more fundamental reason: “My mother and I are a love story. We’re not a crime story.”

Hence his 19th book, The Hilliker Curse. It takes its title from something Ellroy said to his mother just months before she was killed. They’d had a fight, and she had struck him. So he cursed her. He doesn’t remember the words exactly, but he knows the gist, which was inspired by a library book about witchcraft whose mystical message—you can conjure your own world—excited him: Ellroy wished his mother dead. Then she was.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in GQ August 2010

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show.

Garry Shandling was in 1A. Conan O’Brien and his family were three rows back. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O’Brien a present. “Mr. Shandling can’t finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest,” the woman told O’Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

“This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?” O’Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. “When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Shandling responded, almost yelling. “I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger”—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—”who I don’t know?”

O’Brien turned to Shandling’s stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. “I’m sorry you have to sit next to him,” O’Brien said. “You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry’s on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats.”

It was a coincidence, these two funnymen being on the Big Island at the same time. Shandling, who had recently completed final reshoots on his first acting role in years—a U.S. senator in Iron Man 2—was enjoying one of his frequent retreats to the Waipio Valley, his favorite place to meditate and ponder the universe. (While he stops short of calling himself a Buddhist, he is a serious student of dharma.) O’Brien, who just weeks before had parted ways with NBC and The Tonight Show, was on what is perhaps best described as a forced vacation. The timing was “synchronistic,” Garry says, recalling that they hung out so much in Hawaii “that Conan’s wife was jealous.”

“We were able to spend some time chatting about, uh, the turtles and anything else that might be going on in our lives,” Shandling says as we stand in the kitchen of the vast Spanish-style home where he lives, alone, in the hills above the West Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood. You can see the distant ocean out the window, past a grassy oasis and Garry’s rock-lined pool. He looks tan and fit, if a little rumpled, in an untucked striped button-down, baggy cargo pants with a tiger emblazoned on one leg, and beige Prada sneakers. When I press, he acknowledges that yes, the topic of O’Brien’s future came up. “Conan’s completely free now,” Garry says with a solemnity more gurulike than you’d expect from someone who got famous making jokes about his hair. “He doesn’t have to fit into someone else’s mold.”

But what Garry really wants to talk about is that hand-me-down cookie. “I’d eaten half, and the other half was in tiny crumbles and pieces,” he says, still delighted. Asked what kind of cookie—oatmeal? chocolate chip?—he adjusts his black baseball cap and takes off: “I asked the same question, and they said, ‘It’s an airplane cookie.’ And I didn’t want to ask what that was exactly. I was frightened.” A beat. “I was in a situation once over water where they said they were having a technical problem with my cookie. I said, ‘Oh, my God, what are you going to do?’ They said, ‘We’re going to have to switch cookies. Give us ten minutes.’”

BY: Amy Wallace

Sean Carroll’s office at Caltech is a jumble of brainy flotsam. There are books with titles like Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology; five empty champagne bottles, one for each of his students who’s earned a PhD; and a NASA-approved blow-up beach ball of the universe. And on the physicist’s computer screen is a graph of the narrative progression of the time-bending movie Memento. “Memento does this combination of flashbacks and reverse chronology,” he says excitedly. “The later scenes are played in reverse chronology, the earlier scenes are played in ordinary chronology, and they meet up.”

In January, Carroll will release his own pop take on the complexities of time with his much-anticipated debut book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Armchair Einsteins will geek out on his audacious thesis. He argues that our perception of time is informed by entropy — the level of disorder in a system — and that the movement from low to high entropy as the universe expands establishes the direction in which time flows. Furthermore, he posits that our cosmos may be a relatively young member of a large family and that in some of our sibling universes time runs in the opposite direction. Some others, he argues, don’t experience time at all; once a universe cools off and reaches maximum entropy, there is no past or present.

Abstract enough for you? That’s where Carroll’s common touch comes in. His writing is accessible and peppered with cultural references — quotes from Dumb and Dumber and Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance. But don’t be fooled by his mass-market approach: Carroll isn’t afraid to wade into topics that have befuddled even name-brand physicists. Though we may deal daily with time’s quotidian realities — deadlines and bus schedules and aging — most of us have trouble thinking about how it might exist outside our own experience of it. “We’re so used to the arrow of time that it’s hard to conceptualize time without the arrow,” he writes. “We are led, unprotesting, to temporal chauvinism.”