Jim Marshall | Amplifier maker, 88

Jim Marshall, 88, who made rock and roll rawer and noisier by inventing the amplifier that helped define guitarists from Jimi Hendrix to members of countless garage bands, died of cancer Thursday at a hospice in London.

Mr. Marshall was part of the English music scene as a drummer, drumming teacher, and owner of a store in London that sold drums as the new rock music was gathering momentum in the early 1960s. Musicians urged him to add guitars and amplifiers to his wares. One of them, Pete Townshend of the Who, said he told Mr. Marshall that he wanted something "bigger and louder."

"I was demanding a more powerful machine gun" to "blow people away all around the world," Townshend told NPR in 2002. "I wanted it to be as big as the atomic bomb had been."

With his sixth prototype, Mr. Marshall and his helpers came up with a harmless-looking black box with a speaker inside and controls on top. It would become the basis for the formidable wall of amplifiers used by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and almost every other major rock guitarist in the '60s and '70s and by the next generation of guitarists as well, including Kurt Cobain, Eddie Van Halen and Slash.

This acoustic artillery came to be called the "wall of Marshalls" or "Marshall stacks." Mr. Marshall became known as "the father of loud."

The Marshall amps were cheaper than the ones made by Fender, which produced a more precise sound. But the emerging rockers wanted something rougher and rowdier. In a tribute on Twitter, Motley Crue's bassist, Nikki Sixx, said Mr. Marshall had been "responsible for some of the greatest audio moments in music's history - and 50 percent responsible for all our hearing loss."

Mr. Marshall was born in London to parents who owned a fish-and-chips shop. He was stricken with tuberculosis of the bones and spent much of his early youth in a plaster cast from his knees to his armpits. When he was 13, sinking family fortunes forced him to take jobs in a scrap-metal yard, a jam factory and a shoe shop.

During World War II, he worked at an engineering firm after failing his draft physical and read engineering books on his own. After the war, he taught drumming and eventually had 65 students.

A connoisseur of Cuban cigars and a single-malt Scotch bottled for him, Mr. Marshall many times refused to sell Marshall Amplification. "You can't take it with you, you can only live in one house and drive one car at a time," he said. "It's the name that means something to me - because it is my name." - N.Y. Times News Service