Gar and I developed this unit together back in ’65-’66. Growing up playing violin, I loved the sustain, especially of a viola or cello. So early on in the mid ’60’s, I found out that by plugging a small amplifier into a bigger amplifier, I could get this sound. Now I was taking the power out, which normally would go to the speaker and plugging it into the input of another amp. The result, for a few short minutes was a cool, great new sustained sound. Gar Gillies had a tv/radio repair shop, was a cool musician, and I wasn’t embarrassed to take in my amps, which were literally burned by the power misuse; fried, to say the least.

Gar asked what the heck I was doing, and when I told him, he said, you’re insane to do this, its very dangerous. So he offered to help me do it a safer and less destructive way. Gar proceeded to build me a tube pre-amp, which when put into another amp, got me the desired sound. But not really, the sound was a little weird in a Fender amp which was all that was around, so Gar decided to get parts from Heathkit and build an amplifier to go with the unit.

We were looking for a name, and at the time I was reading a book with HERZOG written across the cover. Hence the name, so we could stop referring to the unit as the “noise thing”. I used to go to his shop on Osborne Ave late at night after gigs, and stay till the wee hours of the morning, making the most incredible Moose and Ox bellowing,

distortion/blotto screeching sounds that would make us laugh. But once it was smoothed out, it was smooooth. So that became my lead guitar solo sound. It was first featured on The Guess Who CBC weekly show, Let’s Go and Music Hop in 1967-68 but really came to the forefront as the sound of “No Time”, “American Woman” and many other songs on the Guess Who albums, “Wheatfield Soul”, “Canned Wheat”, and “American Woman”. I continued using it later on “Brave Belt I and II”, and then on Bachman Turner Overdrive albums.

That’s about the story. There is still no unit that sounds like it today. One that comes close is the SansAmp rackmount which has an actual setting called “American Woman”. It’s close.
John Johnson of Johnson Amps, Digitech and DOD, pedals and amps, told me that as a kid, he tried to make his own pedal to get the “American Woman” guitar sound and couldn’t get it. However, the pedals he did make in trying to get that sound have gone on to sell hundreds of thousands for Digitech and DOD, but none got the American Woman sound.