by Ian Port
Les got an idea. One afternoon, he rode his bicycle over to his father’s service station and borrowed the guts of George Polsfuss’s radio and phonograph set. Back at the barbecue stand, Les ran his microphone through his mother’s radio, as usual. But this time, he took his father’s phonograph needle and jammed it into the top panel of his guitar—the wood panel vibrated by its strings. Then he ran the phono needle wire into his father’s radio, thinking that the connection might transfer the sound of the acoustic guitar into the radio’s electric circuit and speaker, thus amplifying it.
Guitar plus radio: it proved a magical combination. Les’s voice and harmonica blared out of one electronic speaker, and his guitar—raw and muddy, but louder—plunked from another. The barbecue crowd could now hear the whole range of Red Hot Red’s act: voice, harmonica, and scratchy guitar. They were agog. His tips that afternoon tripled (or so Les, in his often fanciful memory, recalled). Young Lester Polsfuss had learned, as he later put it, that “the electric guitar spelled money.”
But not only money. Les saw that overcoming the guitar’s pathetic volume could propel his career—that the sonic prominence of his instrument could, and would, determine his prominence as a performer.
Eleven years later, on those restless Sunday afternoons in New York, Les Paul was still trying to amplify the guitar with an electric speaker. He was now a rising star, having persuaded a well-known bandleader into making a place for the Les Paul Trio inside his forty-five-piece jazz orchestra. Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians did two live shows every evening from the Vanderbilt Theatre on Forty-Eighth Street, their sets broadcast on radio stations coast-to-coast during prime evening hours. DownBeat magazine had championed the wily guitar runs Les added to Waring’s broadcasts, declaring his rambunctious, jokey group a highlight among the tuxedoed, self-serious swing regiment. From the parking lot of a Wisconsin farm town, Les had talked himself—with the help of his incandescent talent—into one of the most prestigious and well-paid staff jobs in American music.
Yet he wasn’t satisfied. Not with the rigid schedule of the job, not with the staid music he had to play for it, and not at all with the sound of his instrument.
The guitar had come a long way in the eleven years since Les repurposed his father’s phonograph set. Electric guitars had appeared on the market in 1932, as players wrestled against the oldest limitation of their instrument: volume. A guitar was inherently a marvelous thing—Beethoven himself had called it a “miniature orchestra,” since it covered four octaves and could be used to play lush chords as well as sprightly melodies. But while versatile and portable, the guitar’s low volume sharply limited its usefulness. Those six strings worked far better in a parlor, or around a campfire, than in a big hall, competing with other instruments.
Having improved so much of daily life in the early twentieth century, electricity seemed fit to improve the guitar, too. By 1940, many firms sold guitars that employed electric power to increase their volume. In New York, Les relied on a Gibson model, considered state-of-the-art, that had hit the market only three years earlier. Yet for all the promise electricity seemed to hold for boosting the guitar’s volume and sound, Les found the result deeply disappointing.
What passed for an electric guitar in 1940 was actually an acoustic instrument in every respect but one. Les’s Gibson ES-150 had a thick, hollow body with F-shaped holes in the top to project sound, just like any acoustic model. Its key difference was a black metal bar under the strings, called a pickup, that turned the strings’ vibrations into an electromagnetic signal and sent that through a cable to an amplifier. Les’s instrument wasn’t a completely electric guitar, then, but a hybrid. It had been designed mainly to produce a warm, airy acoustic tone. The pickup allowed the player a small boost in volume via connection to an amplifier. But this electric sound was optional, and limited. If Les turned up the amplifier too loud, the sound from the amp would reverberate inside the guitar’s body, get captured by the pickup, and emit howls of feedback, ruining a performance.
What Les really wanted, what he’d dreamed about almost since that parking lot afternoon in Waukesha, was a purely electric tone from a purely electric guitar. No woody warmth. No acoustic cavity. Just the crisp electric signal from the vibrating steel strings, made loud—as loud as he wanted—by an amplifier. No instrument available in New York in 1940 could do that. So on those Sunday afternoons, alone, often exhausted, driven by his insatiable curiosity, Les set out to make one.
He began with a rough plank of pine, four inches by four inches, about two feet long. Just solid, dense wood—what could have been a section of fencepost. This was to be the entire body of the guitar.
To one end of it, Les glued a spare Epiphone guitar neck (he had talked the Epiphone factory owner into contributing to this experiment). In the center, he attached a homemade electric pickup—essentially a magnet wrapped thousands of times with copper wire—that would transform the strings’ vibrations into an electric signal. When he’d bolted on hardware and strings, Les Paul regarded his strange contraption. It looked like a lumberyard mutant, a stick bound with steel cables, a wood shop project—which is what it was. He called it the Log.
On the Sunday evening he finished the project, Les took the Log to a little place called Gladys’ Bar in Sunnyside, Queens. He pulled his mutant guitar up on the small stage, fired up his Gibson amplifier, and strummed a chord. The purely electric sound he’d so long dreamed of came splattering out of the little speaker. It was thin and sharp, prickly and alien. It possessed none of the mellow warmth, the woody grace, of a hollow-body electric—but it did have some of the qualities Les had dreamed of.
Because there was no acoustic cavity, Les could turn up this Log guitar unusually loud without creating any feedback. And because its dense, solid-wood body didn’t absorb vibrations easily, the strings themselves vibrated longer than on an acoustic instrument, giving each note a lyrical sustain. Les thought this strange guitar sounded pretty good. Frustratingly, though, no one in the room even noticed. Here was a four-by-four stick of wood, strung up and plugged into an amplifier—and a young man daring to use it as a guitar. Not one person in the audience would have seen a wooden board made into a guitar before, yet none seemed to care one bit.
Thinking it over, Les wondered if the Log’s plain appearance might be the problem. Over subsequent Sundays, he went back to the Epiphone factory, sawed an old acoustic guitar body in half, and attached its sides to the Log like wings. Now the instrument looked like a standard guitar, but with a curious block of solid wood running through its middle.
The evening he finished the addition, Les took the Log back to the bar. This time, when he went onstage to jam, there was a huge reaction. Everyone seemed captivated by the thin, bright sound of the Log, and they bombarded him with questions about the guitar and the amplifier. Les had learned, as he would later put it, that audiences “listen with their eyes.” Because his instrument now looked like something strange and substantial, the crowd noticed its powerful volume and sustaining tone. They seemed so captivated that Les—ever prone to dissatisfaction with a thing he’d just achieved—began to wonder if he could make a solid-body guitar that would sound even better than the Log.
Les continued playing and jamming around New York until one steamy afternoon in May 1941. He was goofing around that day with some fellow musician friends in the basement of his Queens apartment building. Pouring sweat, he touched his electric guitar and a metal microphone stand at the same time, completing a circuit and sending a jolt of electricity through his body. He screamed for help, but it took the others a few crucial seconds to figure out that he was being electrocuted.
When they kicked away the mic stand, all feeling was gone from Les Paul’s hands. The jolt had torn his muscles; he was facing weeks in the hospital, and his future as a performer seemed suddenly unclear. Electricity, the very force Les believed would give him the prominence he so desired, had thrown everything into jeopardy. He was now a guitar playe
r who couldn’t play the guitar.
In the wake of the accident, Les quit Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and moved back to Chicago, where he’d lived before venturing to New York. While his body healed, and with his playing sidelined, Les continued to work on the Log, increasingly convinced of the advantages of an electric guitar with a solid body. That year or the following one, Les recalled, he got a meeting with leaders at the Gibson guitar company. Founded in 1902 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Gibson made the guitars that Les publicly endorsed and played. The company had been in the vanguard of fretted instrument design for decades but its executives, some of whom had been running things since its founding, were on the verge of selling to younger owners.
Still only twenty-six years old, Les Paul arrived at his appointment full of hope, and with the Log in tow. With characteristic audacity, Les held out his huge, unvarnished hunk of a guitar and told the managers that Gibson should consider building something like it: an electric guitar with a solid body that would allow unlimited volume and increased sustain. He insisted that the Log’s pure electric tone, produced entirely by an amplifier, revealed new vistas of opportunity for the instrument by eliminating the ceiling on its volume.
The Gibson crew managed to suppress their laughter, but only barely. They declined Les’s idea out of hand, quickly showing the bright-eyed young man and his craft project out of the office. Why, after all, would anyone want a guitar that consisted of little more than a fencepost? The loveliest thing about a guitar was the rich, airy tone that seeped out of its sound holes. To completely eliminate that was ludicrous.
After Les left, the managers chortled among themselves about that crazy guitar player who wanted Gibson to build a broomstick with pickups on it. They would keep chortling for almost another decade.
2.
“HE’S THE REASON YOU CAN HEAR US TONIGHT”
SANTA MONICA, 1946
He stood almost perfectly still as the maelstrom swirled around him, left hand tucked under his right elbow, eyes trained on the stage, ears scanning. Leo Fender was the only still body in the blur of pressed uniforms and evening dresses, the only serious face. Two thousand young couples filled a dance hall thrust aloft over the crashing waves of the Pacific, most of the revelers swaying and jitterbugging, smoking cigarettes and sneaking pulls from hidden flasks. It was Friday night at the Aragon Ballroom on Lick Pier, the Second World War was over, and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys were playing. From everywhere there seemed to emanate a giddiness, men and women finding unencumbered joy after the long years of the war. Everywhere, that is, but around Leo Fender. For him, this was work.
Standing there in his drab repairman’s clothes, his thin mustache crinkling with concern, Leo studied the musicians. They were a cowboy retinue, swaying in white shirts, red ties, and ten-gallon hats. Bob Wills, the bandleader, cawed out into the smoky expanse, tucked his fiddle against his neck, and began to saw a twanging melody into the microphone. Behind him, the bass, piano, and drums came in with a rollicking thump: boom-slap, boom-slap, boom-slap.
Out in the ballroom, men brushed back sweaty strands of their hair, took their ladies’ arms, and glided out onto the parquet floor for another fast two-step. Boom-slap, boom-slap. The bandleader finished a melodic phrase, and Leo Fender saw him thrust his violin bow toward a ruddy-faced sack of a man sitting on the far side of the bandstand, strumming a white guitar.
It was Junior Barnard’s turn. The guitarist flipped a switch on his instrument, and its sound became instantly bladelike and brittle. Louder. Barnard’s guitar was plugged into a wooden speaker box, and tones began to flow out of it in hot, sticky ribbons. The guitarist slid into a main chord of the song, and his notes seemed to grind out from the amplifier, dark and thick, louder still.
“Get low, Junior!” the bandleader shouted, and the fat guitarist flashed a mischievous smile to himself. His fingers danced across the neck. He unfurled a mellifluous run—all a blur, the individual notes lost inside a thrilling cascade—and punctuated the phrase with one cutting chord, then another, louder. He dashed up to a single note and bent the string, yanking its pitch upward, holding it up there, the note ringing—but then it curdled into something else. Barnard tried to keep going, but a metallic wail rose out of that note, flooded over the band, and spilled out into the room: YOOOOOOOOOWWWWL.
Shouts of complaint filled the air as the dancers stopped to plug their ears. The bandleader scowled from the far side of the stage. Barnard fiddled with the knobs and switches on his guitar, trying to make the wailing stop, finally choking off the feedback by splaying his fingers flat across his guitar strings.
Down in the crowd, Leo Fender grimaced. The overeager guitarist had killed the song, infuriated his listeners and bandmates, by trying to take his solo too loud. Junior Barnard always wanted to play loud. Of course, it was one of Leo’s amps that had fed back, but the amp itself wasn’t the problem. That awful screech had been the fault of Junior Barnard’s white Epiphone Emperor, and the big hollow box that made up the body of it. Leo had worked on that guitar, had hot-rodded the pickups for more bite, like Junior asked. But no matter what he did to the electronics, Leo knew there was a limit. He knew that a guitar made from a hollow box, prone as it was to producing feedback, was never going to let Junior Barnard play as loud as he wanted to.
Knowing how gadgets worked—what they could do, what they couldn’t—had always been Leo Fender’s specialty. Anyone who’d met him since about the age of fifteen knew that he had a gift when it came to circuits and schematics, wires and knobs. His parents had seen his technical abilities for the first time one bright afternoon back in 1919, when Leo was just ten years old.
The bouncing jalopy had turned off the main road and sputtered down the dirt driveway toward the Fender family ranch, skidding to a halt in front of the barn where, ten years before, on August 10, 1909, Clarence Leonidas Fender had been born. This was one of the first automobiles anyone had seen around the farm towns of Fullerton and Anaheim in the year after World War I’s end, now sitting still while the Southern California sun burned its reflection into the hood. The car immediately drew Clarence and Harriet Fender’s son over for a look. For young Leo, the vehicle was an object of endless curiosity: a smoking, bouncing, fussy testament to human ingenuity and restlessness.
The boy walked around the car in a hurried circle. Then he got on his back, squirmed underneath the chassis, and lay there in the dirt, studying the underside of this machine. All of it was caked in dust and grease, but he could still make out distinct parts. He saw the iron block of the engine bolted to a funnel-shaped transmission, which shot a rod of steel—the driveshaft—back to the rear axle. Thin black leaves held the two axles to the body. Skinny rubber tires hunched at every corner.
Leo lay there, taking mental pictures for what seemed like a long time. Then he shimmied back out into the sunlight, clothes painted in dust, thoughts racing, and went back into his parents’ little ranch house. A while later, after the car had puttered away, Leo emerged with a drawing he took straight to his mother. Harriet Fender started when she saw it. Her ten-year-old son had sketched the car’s underside in perfect detail, capturing not just the appearance of the various components, but their function and interaction with one another. All those complex parts neatly arranged in order. Young Leo had not merely seen the underbelly of this mechanical contraption—he’d understood it.
Cars would forever fascinate him, but not long after he made that drawing, Leo discovered the technology that would lead to his life’s work. It lived inside the precious wooden cabinet his parents used to bring country singer Jimmie Rodgers and swing bandleader Benny Goodman into their home and out onto the fields where they grew vegetables. It gathered music and voices out of thin air, as if by magic. It was radio.
Leo’s obsession began in 1922, when an uncle demonstrated a machine that received radio signals and amplified them enough to carry over a whole town. Radio was still known as “wireless” then, still so hampered by s
tatic that it was mainly used for transmitting Morse code. Yet from the moment he’d witnessed radio’s possibilities, Leo Fender was fascinated. He soon built his own crystal set, a simple radio with an earphone instead of a speaker. When the handful of early commercial stations in Southern California would shut down for the night, he’d listen to the maritime communications between Catalina Island and harbors on the mainland.
By high school, Fender had a license to broadcast on amateur frequencies and a radio station set up high in his parents’ barn, where he’d built an antenna that captured signals from Arizona and New Mexico. He was known by schoolmates for his ability to fix any broken radio, and for his long, detailed mechanical diagnoses. Decades later, Leo would date the establishment of his radio repair business to 1922, the year he turned thirteen.
It was as if he spoke the language of electricity, or electricity spoke to him. Leo Fender would never receive any formal training in electronics or engineering; rather, it seems he naturally understood them, perhaps needed to understand them, and achieved this understanding on his own. This technological world offered a chance to demonstrate his worth, to excel. At first glance, Leo Fender may have looked as capable as any other young man: healthy, from a stable family, a regular attendee at schools in Fullerton. But finding a realm in which he could thrive wasn’t so easy, for reasons he would tell almost no one.
Certainly, performing wasn’t going to be his specialty. Leo loved music and the sound of instruments, but “he couldn’t keep a beat,” one classmate told the guitar historian Richard Smith. He built a crude acoustic guitar in high school, yet he never learned to play or even tune the thing, seeing it largely as a technical object, a tool for producing vibrations. Leo Fender would never learn to play the guitar. Later, he’d explain that his enjoyment of the instrument stemmed from the precise pattern of harmonics produced by its strings. Where others heard music, Leo Fender heard physics.