A funny thing happened to Stan Morgan on the way to retirement from St. Louis Music.
“It was weeks before the NAMM Show, and I called and asked him to come work with us,” says Magnatone president Ted Kornblum.
“Ted and I worked together at St. Louis Music when his father Gene owned it, and then we worked for LOUD for a while, so we have a history,” Morgan explains. “I had planned to retire, but this sounded like fun.” (Morgan worked for Guitar Center after LOUD, before rejoining St. Louis Music when Mark Ragin bought it from LOUD in 2008.)
Magnatone has also added Chuck Philips as a sales rep to a team that includes Obeid Khan, engineer, and Dave Hinson, sales manager.
Kornblum graduated from college and worked in the industry outside SLM before eventually joining the family business. There he was involve din product development and artist relations on the combo products like Ampeg, Crate, and Alvarez (he got Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir to endorse the guitars).
He says the whole time he was at SLM, he always had a desire to strike out on his own from the company his grandfather founded in 1922.
The Magnatone story begins the following decade, and the amps made by them would be distributed by SLM. Known as a high-end boutique amp for the discriminating guitarist, it’s claim to fame was to be the first and only amp to feature pitch-shifting stereo vibrato.
One day he was flipping through the old catalogs and spotted an Magnatone flyer. “I was curious to see if this company was still in business, and much to my delight, the company had been out of business since 1969 and the trademark had been abandoned! It was almost too good to be true.” He secured ownership of the brand, but kept it a secret for years.
When Kornblum quit LOUD, he knew it was time to start Magnatone. “But just because I owned the brand, it did not guarantee success,” he says. “Who better to help me with this then the great talent pool of engineers that helped my father bring Ampeg back from the dead?” Many in the shop are SLM alumni, including Khan and
It took a few years to debut Magnatone because Kornblum wanted to bring a whole line out at once. The nine models offered today are all made by hand in St. Louis. With the current sales team headed by Morgan, they are growing their high-end boutique dealer base. Currently more than 50 percent of their sales come from oversees, Kornblum says.
Photo: Some of the Magnatone team – Ted Kornblum, Chuck Phillips, Stan Morgan, Diane Villani, and Obeid Khan.
