“FROM THE MOMENT I PLUGGED THE DOUBLE-NECK INTO THE SUPER DRAGON, IT WAS LIKE, ‘HALLELUJAH. WE FOUND IT. WE GOT IT”
“We’re well charged-up!” Jimmy Page reports over the phone from New York City. Page has been in New York the previous few days meeting minds and making plans with his two chief collaborators in Sundragon, the boutique amp company he founded in 2017 with former Marshall/Vox executive VP and Park Amps chief Mitch Colby, and noted producer and vintage gear collector/curator Perry Margouleff. It was Margouleff who, among other things, famously rescued Page’s long-missing 1960 Gibson Les Paul “Black Beauty” from obscurity back in 2014.
MARGOULEFF IS, PERHAPS above all things, a dedicated believer in the idea that music and audio history must be preserved. Sundragon’s mandate since its inception, then, has been to hand-build exacting replicas of Page’s most storied amps. Those include the modified two-channel 1959 Supro Coronado 1690T combo that fuels the fury on Led Zeppelin’s 1968 debut album, and his Number One 1969 Marshall JMP Super Bass 100, Page’s principal amp for recording and live work from 1969, which he’d had heavily modified by amp tech and Unicord/Marshall man Tony Frank in the late ’60s. (Frank is often credited as being the inventor of the master volume control in the 1970s, as well.)
The resulting signed, limited-edition models — the Sundragon 12-inch combo and Super Dragon 100-watt head and 4x12 cabinet, respectively — not only passed what Page calls his own “acid test”].