Mick Mars's main recording amp on Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood (1989) is a 1973 Marshall Super Lead modded by Jose Arredondo. The mod is in the no-diode Jose family — what some players colloquially call "the standard 3-mod Jose recipe" (V0 + cascade + Jose MV + NFB tightened, all-tube saturation). Friedman uses "3-mod" as informal shorthand for this no-diode family; the *naming* is Friedman's, the *recipe* is Jose's.
What makes this Jose mod distinct from the Brown Sound / EVH treatment: - Lower gain than the EVH #12301 — meant to be played loud and let the power tubes do work, not crank the preamp into compression at bedroom volume. - NO diode clipping — pure all-tube saturation. The "diodes-out" school. Same family as Cesar Diaz's preference, opposite end of the spectrum from Lynch's diode-shelf-heavy treatment. - The reverse-engineered topology (per Pete Thorn's teardown video + the Rig-Talk recreate-thread + metallicagearhistory.com): an extra preamp gain stage added in front of a stock Super Lead circuit + post-EQ (post-tone-stack) master volume — NOT the canonical Jose pre-tone-stack MV — with no clipping diodes and an all-tube signal path. Pete Thorn states this explicitly in the demo video: *"this particular Jose is not using the standard Jose Master that gets inserted before the tonestack."* So the Mars amp is a Jose-school amp (Jose's hand + Jose's front-end-gain philosophy) but it's the post-EQ MV variant — closer to a "Lee Jackson Metaltronix / standard hot-rodded Marshall" topology than to the canonical pre-TS Jose recipe. The JMIL Mick Mars preset models a pre-TS MV because that's what the audio engine supports; the documented historical amp sits one variant over.
Why it matters historically: Lars Ulrich has explicitly said the tone Metallica was chasing on the Black Album (1991) was Dr. Feelgood. Bob Rock — producer of both Dr. Feelgood (1989) and the Black Album (1991) — got Mick Mars's amp-tech (Jose) contact information specifically because of how the 1973 Marshall performed on the Mötley Crüe album, commissioned his own Jose-modded Marshall ("the Asshole Marshall"), and brought THAT amp into the Black Album sessions for Hetfield to use. So the Mars Jose-mod DNA literally ended up in the Black Album rhythm chain via a Jose-built sister amp Bob Rock commissioned (documented at metallicagearhistory.com); this isn't forum lore, it's the actual provenance chain.
Provenance: Per published coverage (Pete Thorn's teardown + Gear Page threads), the amp was reportedly acquired by Richard Fortus (Guns N' Roses) — Mars is reported to have called it his #1 favorite recording amp and retired it from the road. It's among the most-traded Jose-mod amps in living rock-tone history, alongside EVH's #12301.
JMIL surface area: the "Mick Mars Dr. Feelgood (3-mod, no diodes)" preset on the Recipe bar applies cascade + Jose-MV + NFB on a 1959 SLP. Don't add diode-clipping — the whole point of this amp is the all-tube saturation. Drop the gain knob to ~6/10 and crank Master to ~8 to feel the lower-gain / louder-power-tube character.