dogfood wrote:
#2) Story time: around '88 White Zombie played at Stache's and had a brand new guitarist. Gone was Tom 5 and the noise sound. In was Heavy Metal. fog, and sirens on top of a brand new JCM800 stack. Started up an amp conversation with the new guitarist and he said the 800 sound so much like Guns n Roses he HAD to put a Rat in front to change the GNR tone. Remember back in the 70's and even the 80's high gain amps were not the norm. Mesa's still cost an arm and a leg.
That's a cool story!
I think that Rats used to maybe have more cache, because like this story above would illustrate, there was only a few affordable distortion pedals that were around back then that would deviate from a stock Marshall sound or stock Fender amp overdrive or what have you. Boss made some (obviously the ever popular Distortion), there was the Big Muff and then the Rat. There were overdrives (Tube Screamers, etc), but as far as distortions went, the Rat had more versatility than a Muff, because a Muff doesn't clean up very well, whereas a Rat has more sharpness and can still technically almost be considered a fuzz at more extreme settings. The reason why one would see so many indie/ alternative/ grunge/ punk bands using a Rat back then, is because they were cheap and still provided a different tone than what most bands were using. The LM308 chip Rats are still considered to be the superior ones, much in the way that a TS type pedal seems to use the JRC4558D chip--enough of the major artists got their signature sound by using those pedals with that circuitry.
Now, there's zillions of pedal makers doing great things with distortions/ fuzzes and more interesting variants of them with far more versatility and customization options (Catalinbread, Skreddy, Wampler, etc), but back then, the selection was pretty limited. To answer your question in a shorter fashion--the Rat has that legendary status from all those years of use by some well known bands--lots of exposure on stages across the land. If it were introduced nowadays, it likely wouldn't do that well--despite what it does well, there's far too much competition.
Hope this answers 'yer questions.....