Up FRONT encore
Little Black Box
Exhibits showcase invention that rocked music world by
Adam Rayes
A
little black box born in a “cavernous basement” in Kalamazoo changed the music industry, and almost no one here noticed. Meet the RAT, a unit about the size of a box of Pop-Tarts that gives electric guitars a distortion sound effect. That box was and still is ProCo Sound’s crown jewel. The Kalamazoo-born company’s distortion pedal has become legendary, with the company selling tens of thousands of the boxes in more than a dozen versions. The RAT has been used by many well-known musicians, from The Police’s Andy Summers to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl.
Born in the basement When the RAT was created in 1978, ProCo was already a wellregarded company. Started in 1974 by Charlie Wicks, ProCo began out of the ashes of The Sound Factory, a music store founded in 1970
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that shared a building at 131 E. Kalamazoo Ave. with a local recording studio known as Uncle Dirty’s Sound Machine Studios. When The Sound Factory failed, its founder, Wicks, created ProCo to focus on manufacturing speaker cabinets, PA systems and sound cables. According to several sources, those cables would go on to carry sound for Disney World in Florida, Carnegie Hall in New York, and many other venues. ProCo manufactured some of the less glamorous, more utilitarian parts required for music making, such as audio cables and snakes for microphones and instruments. But in 1978, in what ProCo employee Scott Burnham describes as the “cavernous basement” of the company’s building, Burnham struck gold for the company. “There was always a need to get a really good, raunchy distortion sound without it being too loud,” Burnham says. “I listened to all of the distortion boxes that were out there and I didn’t like any of them, and for some reason I thought, ‘Maybe I can do something better.’” It would appear that the world of rock agreed with him. Only 12 of Burnham’s original “Bud Box” RATs were built, but demand for more rose very quickly, and in the following year ProCo began massproducing the boxes. Wicks died in 2010 at age 65, and ProCo is now part of RHC Holdings, based in Jackson, Missouri. ProCo still has sales and accounting offices at 5278 Lovers Lane, in Portage, but all manufacturing is now done in Missouri and the products are sold to instrument retailers and sound contractors.
Retelling ProCo’s story Kalamazoo’s part in the history of the RAT and the rise of ProCo may well have faded into obscurity if it weren’t for efforts by Burnham and Craig Vestal, president of Portage Printing. Starting this month, the RAT will be featured in three exhibits at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum. Beginning Sept. 1, an exhibit on ProCo, put together by museum staff, with Vestal and Burnham’s input, will be installed in the museum’s Community Case, which offers rotating exhibits. A re-