"Dude, grab my amp out of the van! It's in the glove compartment!"

The tiny Smokey Amp gives you searing, Marshall Stack gnarliness, fits in your back pocket and comes inside a pack of butts. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top was the first rock star to discover that the battery powered amp, which can power a 4 x 12 cabinet, gives you suprisingly vicious distortion when you record with it. Since then he has handed out dozens as gifts. The Rolling Stones began using them last year and have since bought 300. Now you can't swing a roadie's discarded back brace without hitting a big name album, from Korn's Follow the Leader to The Offspring's Americana, made with the pocket sized rock machine.

The Smokey Amp's inventor, Bruce Zinky, spent his teen years tinkering with amp building and watching James Bond movies. He built a few prototype Smokeys in the mid eighties for himself and some friends because he liked the idea of a Maxwell Smart "shoe phone" for guitar players. In 1997 a friend asked Zinky to build another one, which drew the attention of Gibbons, who bought a hundred of them. The rest is history. Now Zinky and partner Annette Yurchak have a booming amplifier manufacturing business in their Flagstaff, Arizona living room.

By the way, Zinky says his company does not endorse tobacco use. "We're not promoting smoking," he says. "We're promoting music." Still, if you want less smokiness, Smokey Amps now makes the same size amp in a colored plastic box. But it probably doesn't look as cool rolled up in your sleeve.