Photo via WMSE
On May 1, 2015, Milwaukee hardcore outfit Holy Shit! performed as part of a three-band bill at the now-defunct BBC. It was the last night of Arte Para Todos, Milwaukee’s annual celebration of the arts that spans multiple dates and venues, and Holy Shit! was there to do what they do best: barrel through a set list of sub-minute-long punk jams before the crowd has even fully realized what they’re experiencing. But part-way through the band’s set, Andy Junk’s Fender Bassman 135 guitar amp ceased to emit sound.
Junk fiddled with his amp with no results, while the band carried on without him. Grabbing a microphone, he summoned a man from the audience onto the stage.
“My amp keeps fucking up, and what do you know—Jon Blick, the city’s foremost amp tech, is here,” Junk recalls announcing over the chaos. “How convenient!”
Blick, a modest man with a quiet demeanor, was there to watch a show, not fix an amp, but he took to the stage to work his magic. And, while the issue turned out to just be a loose speaker cable that needed to popped back into place, Blick saved the day.
He’s Your Guy
It’s a moment that’s representative of Blick’s reputation among Milwaukee’s musicians—if there’s a problem with your amp, Blick is your guy. A message board post dating back to 2005 on The Gear Page sums it up quite nicely: “Jon Blick is the best and pretty much only guy in the area for amp repairs. He’s certified to do work on about any amp you can find. He’s an odd guy, but does good work.”
And its not just internet message boards backing up this claim. Music shops throughout Milwaukee, Appleton and Madison outsource their repairs to his home shop as well. Whether a Milwaukee musician knows it or not, there’s a good chance that their amp has likely at one point been fixed by Blick. Skott Moriarti, co-owner of the Kenosha and Greenfield Music-Go-Round locations, notes that the Blick’s name has become a past-tense verb to describe an amp that has a good sound due to the fact that it had recently been worked on—“Blicked.” And considering that one of Blick’s favorite past-times is going to local shows, he’s okay with that.
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“It’s frustrating for me to go to a show where the equipment doesn’t work, so I like to at least put that part of me out there as much as I can,” Blick says. “I do what I can to keep the music scene well-oiled and functioning.”
Audio Business
Blick grew up in Appleton during the ‘70s, where he discovered a love for the innerworkings of stereos while he was in high school. He went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After graduating, he got a job down in Illinois at Zenith, a company that—at the time—specialized in radio and television receivers and is remembered for creating the first ever practical wireless television remote. Zenith would eventually leave the audio business behind, giving Blick and his wife the perfect excuse to leave the Chicago area for Milwaukee. It was in Milwaukee that Blick started to become involved in the music scene.
“When we moved to Milwaukee, we were always going out to see live music,” Blick says. “Just about every weekend, we’d be out seeing bands, and I’d see guys mixing and I thought, ‘Well I could do that.’”
With the prospect of free drinks and free live music on his mind, Blick put an advertisement in the Shepherd Express selling himself as a sound guy. The ad worked, and The Squares—a rock-and-roll band who had recently transplanted from Indiana to Milwaukee in 1984 (and would go on to be remembered fondly as one of the decade’s best Milwaukee acts)—contacted Blick.
“I met those guys and started doing sound for them and started fixing their equipment, and (it spread) from word of mouth from there,” Blick says. “The principles between stereo equipment and pro audio aren’t that different, so it wasn’t all that big of a change,”
Fixing Full Time
Word of mouth and the skills to back it led to Blick receiving certifications from big names like Fender, Peavey and Marshall. On Fender’s website, he’s one of 12 listed technicians in the state of Wisconsin. On Peavey’s website, he’s the only “service center” listed in the Milwaukee area. By 1998, Blick was fixing amps full-time, allowing himself to comfortably leave a design engineer job in Oconomowoc.
When he’s not fixing amps, attending a show or riding his bicycle, you can catch Blick DJing a midnight show on WMSE on Thursdays. From 12 a.m. to 3 a.m. “Blick’s Overnight Sensations” beckons listeners into a genre-free zone, where Blick covers the last 50-or-so years of anything from punk to country and jazz to indie-rock. He’s no stranger to spinning local music as well and encourages listeners to call in and make requests.
And even over the course of this last year, with live shows mostly on hold during the pandemic, Blick has stayed busy. A report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stated that Cream City Music sold more guitars in 2020 than ever before in company history, and Fender and Yamaha reported record sales that year as well. With people continuing to buy gear, Blick will continue to have gear to fix.
But what if you want to avoid having to meet the Milwaukee amp repair legend himself?
“A lot of repairs are just broken stuff from gear being hauled around and banged around,” Blick says.
He suggests buying a case for your amp or making one out of cardboard and duct tape. If your amp has a fan, Blick recommends cleaning out the dust and dirt periodically. He claims that (without commenting on their sound—Blick doesn’t actually play any instruments) old Fenders, Peaveys and Mesa Boogies are durable pieces of equipment. For amp storage, Blick suggests avoiding garages and damp basements.
“Like Tom Petty sang, ‘store it in a cool, dry place,’” Blick says.
To contact Jon Blick for inquiries about electronics repair, call 414-475-6198
