Valve Amplification Company Master Preamplifier

When I was a teenager growing up in South Los Angeles in the 1960s, the most vaunted among us were the guys who tinkered with their cars and souped them up with fuel injection, overhead cams, dual carburetors, heavy-duty MacPherson strut suspensions, and 8-track super stereos with speakers arrayed in the dash, the doors, and the rear deck under a tinted back window. This was the SoCal car culture celebrated by the Beach Boys in “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “Don’t Worry Baby” — male-teen sexual prowess sublimated and distilled into small fleets of superb, gleaming machines and gallant jalopies. A guy I knew in my neighborhood was always under the hood of his ’50s Dodge coupe, working some sort of magic I had no clue about. His father and uncles were partners in a gas station and garage, and my friend had been a grease monkey since childhood, at first just pumping gas and changing tires and spark plugs, but quickly advancing until he could swap out stock parts for custom, fine-tune an engine’s timing, raise a car’s suspension, and supercharge everything in his inline six engine until it could accelerate faster than a stock V8. He was a marvel among us and his wheels were so cool, he got all the girls we could only dream of dating.