by Ian Port
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To my parents, who gave the gifts of love, writing, and music.
CONTENTS
Prologue
1. “The Electric Guitar Spelled Money”
2. “He’s the Reason You Can Hear Us Tonight”
3. “That’s Not Les Paul”
4. “I’m Gonna Do Something About It”
5. “You Say You Can Make Anything. Right?”
6. “All Hell Broke Loose”
7. A “Newfangled Guitar”
8. “Point It Toward My Belly Button, So I Can Play”
9. “We Perform Like We’re Singing in the Bathtub”
10. “If Leo Misses the Boat Now I Will Never Forgive Him”
11. “The Time When It Will Be Delivered Is Indefinite”
12. “Guess I Shouldn’t Have Fought You So Long About Releasing This”
13. “If You Don’t Do Something, Fender Is Going to Rule the World”
14. “Like a Surging Undertow”
15. “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music”
16. “Les Has Actually Made a New Instrument!”
17. “He Doesn’t Like to Get Involved with Things That Are Unpleasant”
18. “Why Don’t You Ask for the Moon?”
19. “Let’s Try This Again”
20. “We Had No Idea That ‘Maybellene’ Was Recorded by a Niggra Man”
21. “Two Donkeys on Each End of a Rope, Pulling in Opposite Directions”
22. “If We’re Going Over Well, Our Guitars Weigh Less Than a Feather”
23. “I Realized It Was All Over for Musicians Like Me”
24. “Why Do You Have to Play So Loud?”
25. “You Won’t Part with Yours Either”
26. “I Just Don’t Understand Him at All”
27. “Where You Going, Leo?”
28. “Prone to Loose Talk”
29. “That Man Just Done Wiped You Up”
30. “I Can’t Believe I Have to Play This Shit”
31. “It’s a Rickenbacker”
32. “I’d Broken My Cardinal Rule”
33. “He Is Clearly Not Growth-Minded”
34. “Which Is Worth More?”
35. “I Thought Dylan Was Abandoning Us”
36. “Give God What He Wants”
37. “It Is a Giant Step”
38. “I Don’t Have My Own Guitar”
39. “From Completely Different Angles”
40. “Here Was the Real Thing”
41. “The Guitars Nowadays Play Just as Good”
42. “You Finally Heard What That Song Was About”
Epilogue
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes and Sources
Index
An if ya listen, you’ll hear a movin,’ an’ a sneakin,’ an’ a rustlin,’ an’—an’ a res’lessness. They’s stuff goin’ on that the folks doin’ it don’t know nothin’ about—yet. They’s gonna come somepin outa all these folks goin’ wes’—outa all their farms lef’ lonely. They’s comin’ a thing that’s gonna change the whole country.
JOHN STEINBECK, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, 1939
PROLOGUE
SANTA MONICA, 1964
The screams came in waves, hysterical and elated, punctuated by applause. Then the camera found them: five men in matching striped shirts, teetering with nerves, grinning like children. The Beach Boys. A clap on the snare drum sent the song rumbling to life, and the players at the stage’s front tapped their feet to stay in time. Punches from the drum kit underpinned a sheen of male voices in harmony. But fighting for prominence was another noise—a throaty, splattering sonic current.
Curious instruments hung over the striped shoulders of the men in front. Two of the instruments were painted white, with thin bodies and voluptuous curves that suggested spaceships, or amoebae, or the human torso. Behind their players sat cream-colored cabinets the size of refrigerators, massive speakers barely visible inside, components in a new system of noisemaking. These sleek guitars transformed single notes and chords into flows of electrons, while the amplifiers converted those electrons into wild new tones—tones that came out piercingly human despite their electric hue.
There was no piano, no saxophone or trumpet, no bandleader, no orchestra. Besides their drums and voices, the Beach Boys wielded just these bloblike guitars, each dependent on electricity, each able to produce ear-piercing quantities of sound, and nearly all bearing the name Fender. Their amplified blare seemed to encourage the shrieks of fans buffeting the stage, their bodies swaying to the thrumming joys of “Surfin’ USA.”
When this scene played in American movie theaters just after Christmas 1964, it was a vision of the future. It was part of a filmed rock ’n’ roll concert—the very first—that also showed the Rolling Stones seething and strutting, and James Brown pulling off terpsichorean heroics unlike anything most of the American public had yet seen. The Teenage Awards Music International Show looked like one more entry in a procession of frivolous teen movies, but it arrived with the shock of the new. It was a multiracial assemblage of the day’s most famous pop stars, captured on film alongside bikini-clad go-go dancers and howling youths. Movie critics mostly sniffed. “Adults, unaware of the differences between these numerous young groups, view the combined efforts as fairly monotonous,” went a typical assessment. But a new order was establishing itself.
One of its precepts was racial equality, or at least the sincere pursuit of such. It was a celebration that both targeted and was beholden to the American teenager. And it prized music played on electric instruments that gave individual musicians a vast new sonic palette—and volume level—with which to express themselves.
Only fifteen years earlier, this scene would have been unrecognizable. Popular music had been the domain of dedicated artisans, trained pros in tuxedos who read notes on paper and sat on bandstands in disciplined regiments, led by a big name in a bow tie. Crooners like Bing Crosby acted out songs written for them by others, and sang for adults, not young people. Nearly everyone who joined them on the pop charts had white skin.
But in the boom years after World War II, teenagers had wrested control of the market for pop music, and many lacked their parents’ racial prejudice. Singers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, and later Marvin Gaye and the Supremes, rose onto charts once ruled by whites. These cultural changes were accelerated by a complementary revolution in the technology of music-making. By the night The T.A.M.I. Show was filmed in 1964, anyone with the right equipment could achieve volumes that would reach hundreds or thousands of onlookers. The new rulers of music could manipulate electric guitars and amps to produce a universe of evocative or alien new sounds.
One company had done more than any other to usher in the technology that was changing listeners’ aural experiences. One company had made electric guitars into ubiquitous leisure accessories, by supplying cheap, sturdy instruments to amateurs and professionals alike. This firm was the first in its industry to align itself with the tastes of young people, among the first to paint guitars bright red and later metal-flake blue and purple, first to give its models sexy monikers like the Stratocaster and the Jaguar.
Competitors had long mocked the creations of the Fender
Electric Instrument Company, but this Southern California upstart had an asset unlike any other—a self-taught tinkerer whose modesty was utterly at odds with the brash characters who used his tools. Clad in perpetually drab workmen’s clothes, preferring to spend most of his waking hours designing and building in his lab, Clarence Leo Fender toiled endlessly to perfect the tools that ushered in pop music’s electric revolution, yet he couldn’t play a single instrument himself. Instead, he trusted musicians, whom he loved, to tell him what they wanted. In the waning days of World War II, Leo Fender had started building guitars and amplifiers in the back of his radio repair shop. By that night in 1964, the company he’d built dominated the burgeoning market for electric instruments.
At least, for the moment.
Showing off their striped, short-sleeve shirts, the Beach Boys appeared clean-cut and respectable, apparently (if not actually) innocent young men. To close out The T.A.M.I. Show, a quintet of Brits arrived wearing modish dark suits and expressions of bemused insouciance, even outright hostility. The lead singer’s dark hair fell in curls down to his collar as he prowled the stage, thick lips pressed up against the microphone, hunting and taunting his young quarry. To his left, a craggy-faced guitarist beat on an unfamiliar instrument. That small, solid-bodied guitar responded with snarls and growls, a thick, surging sound that couldn’t have been more different from the thin rays of light that had emanated from the Beach Boys’ Fenders.
The earlier act embodied rock ’n’ roll life as a teen idyll, a carefree jaunt in which sex was mentioned only euphemistically, and hardly ever as a source of conflict. Minutes later, the Rolling Stones made rock into a carnal fantasy, a dim mélange of ego and lust, betrayal and satisfaction. Already labeled rock ’n’ roll’s bad boys, the five young Brits embraced the role in performance and offstage, viewing the Beach Boys—another band of white men using electric guitars to play music first created by black men—as entrants in a completely different competition.
The Rolling Stones did sound new and distinct. And part of what then fueled the difference was an instrument discovered in a secondhand music shop in London, a secret weapon for producing the nasty tones this outfit preferred. It was a guitar, made by the venerable Gibson company, that bore the name Les Paul. Thanks to Keith Richards and certain other British rockers, this Les Paul guitar would soon rise again to become Fender instruments’ prime companion and rival—just as the man it was named after had been many years earlier.
For Les Paul himself was as emphatic and as colorful as human beings come, as loud and public as Leo Fender was quiet and private: a brilliant player and a gifted technician, a charmer and a comedian, a raconteur and a tireless worker who hungered for the top of the pop charts. Out of his roots in country and jazz, Les Paul had invented a flashy style of playing that was immediately recognizable as his own, a style that would help define the instrument for generations of ambitious guitarists. But almost since the moment he began playing, Les Paul had found existing guitars inadequate. He knew what he wanted and what he thought would make him a star: a loud, sustaining, purely electric guitar sound. Nothing would give it to him.
His search for this pure tone—and through it, fame—led him to California, to a wary friendship with the self-taught tinkerer Leo Fender, who was interested in the same problem. The two men began experimenting together, pioneering the future of music. But when Les finally managed to drag the guitar out from its supporting role and deposit it at the center of American culture—and when a radical new electric guitar design finally became reality—their friendship fractured into rivalry. The greatest competitor to Leo Fender’s instruments was soon a Gibson model with Les Paul’s signature emblazoned in gold. From then on, it was Fender vs. Gibson, Leo Fender vs. Les Paul, their namesake electric guitars battling for the affections of a vast generation of players inspired by the new sound of rock ’n’ roll.
For a brief period this competition seemed to abate. But soon after Keith Richards appeared in The T.A.M.I. Show using his Gibson Les Paul, his peers in the British rock scene would find that this instrument could produce tones then out of reach of any other guitar—including a Fender. The Gibson Les Paul could become molten, searing, heavy: sounds for which it was never intended, but which were now wildly desirable. This guitar’s look and sound would go on to virtually define a new style of blues-based hard rock.
So almost from the moment the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones shared a stage in The T.A.M.I. Show, the old Fender-Gibson rivalry, that competition between the unassuming Leo Fender and the attention-seeking Les Paul, reignited. Once begun, this showdown—between bright and dark, thin and thick, light and heavy, West and East, new and old—would consume countless future musicians, as it still does to this day.
But both men’s instruments would also further a larger struggle. Whether in the hands of Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix or the Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone or Led Zeppelin, Prince or the Runaways, Bad Brains or Sleater-Kinney, electric guitars would be used to make music with a tolerance—stated, if imperfectly applied—for people of different racial and ethnic identities. The music fueled by these instruments sought a single audience, or at least one ever-expanding group of listeners, who thought of themselves, however improbably, as young. And perhaps this bias toward diversity and youth explains some of the hostile words so casually published in 1964.
For there were proper adults in the audience of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on the night The T.A.M.I. Show was filmed. There were grown-ups sitting in the many movie theaters where it played. Were they really so bored by James Brown and the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye and the Beach Boys? Or did they perhaps sense that young people, armed with Leo Fender’s and Les Paul’s powerful new tools, might finally finish the cultural revolution they’d long been threatening?
1.
“THE ELECTRIC GUITAR SPELLED MONEY”
NEW YORK CITY, 1940–1941
On Sunday afternoons, Les Paul would bolt awake at his apartment in Queens and rush across the East River into Manhattan. There was something he needed to build, something he could only build there.
It was never in the mornings, because Les Paul was allergic to mornings. It had to be in the afternoons, after Les had had time to sleep off the previous nights: those rabid jazz jam sessions up in Harlem or on Fifty-Second Street, and the big-band swing concerts he sometimes played before them. Sundays were often the only day of the week when Les didn’t have a rehearsal, or a radio concert, or a live gig. He could have spent them with his family, with the wife he’d brought to New York from Chicago, the woman who was about to have his first child. But Les Paul had a sound in his head that needed to get out.
After arising well into the middle of the day, he’d throw on some rumpled clothes, dash alone out of his tiny apartment, and barrel back across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge toward the same crowded, smoky island from which he’d just returned a few hours earlier. He’d nose his sedan down through the clogged avenues of Manhattan to Fourteenth Street, where a proud Renaissance Revival building stood near the corner of Seventh Avenue, its upper floors occupied by the Epiphone stringed instrument factory.
The factory was ostensibly closed on Sundays, but Les had made an arrangement with the owner. When the lanky twenty-six-year-old approached those stately front doors and flashed his goofy smile, a watchman let him in and showed him upstairs. The guard turned on the lights and the lathes and the sanders in the empty workshop, and demonstrated how they worked. Then he left Les Paul alone inside that cavernous room, left him to build a tool that could create the sound Les heard in his head.
Les had been hearing the sound for almost half his life—ever since he was a kid playing hillbilly tunes and telling cornball jokes to anyone in Waukesha, Wisconsin, who’d listen. Born Lester Polsfuss on June 9, 1915, to a mother who’d adored and spoiled him from the start, Les had picked up the harmonica at age eight, discovering by accident that he could make it sound better by soa
king it in boiling water. As a child, he’d torn apart and reassembled his mother Evelyn’s player piano, her telephone, her phonograph—even her electric light switches. He adored radio—loved listening to the Grand Ole Opry with Evelyn, a devoted country fan; loved building a simple earpiece radio; loved tinkering with a fancier receiver he shared with a friend.
But for all Les’s passion for electric gadgets and their mysteries, nothing captivated him like the guitar. After he’d first encountered the instrument, backstage at a hillbilly concert in Waukesha, he’d thrown himself at it, racing to master it as if there were some countdown clock only he was aware of. By his early teens, as the leader of a nascent band, Les was climbing out of his upstairs bedroom at night and talking his way into taverns to scope out older players, memorizing their chords and licks. Soon, he had an epiphany about the guitar and the radio, his two favorite things. The first device had a crippling weakness, he’d learned, and the second seemed to offer a way to fix it.
At fourteen, he often performed solo at a barbecue stand outside of Waukesha, in a dirt parking lot where the customers, chewing drippy beef sandwiches in their cars, made a captive audience. In the warm summer just before the Great Depression, Lester Polsfuss—or “Red Hot Red,” as he then called himself—earned generous tips. He’d set up at the edge of the parking lot and warble out old hillbilly tunes like “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor” (“I change my socks three times a year / With no one to complain”), blow harmonica, and crack jokes while the highway travelers half listened in their Model Ts. To make himself more audible across the noisy lot, Les had cleverly wired a microphone into the circuit of his mother’s portable radio, transforming it into a primitive public address system.
One afternoon at the barbecue stand, a carhop brought a note up to young Red Hot Red. It was not a request, nor a compliment; rather, it complained that while listeners could hear Les’s voice and his harmonica, they could not make out his guitar. That little acoustic instrument, a Troubadour model Les had bought with $3.95 in paper-route earnings out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, couldn’t carry on its own over the hungry voices and rattling motors in the parking lot.