by Ian Port
In Santa Monica on that Friday evening after the war, Leo watched as the returned servicemen and their dates jaunted around the ballroom, refusing to let Junior Barnard’s storm of feedback ruin the occasion. Like so many white audiences in the West, these couples were elated just to be in the room with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, rather than listening over the radio as usual. During the war, Wills had become a folk hero, a western demigod, for bringing the sound of home to the thousands of Texans, Oklahomans, and Arkansans who’d come to work or serve in the Golden State. His style of music, known as “western swing,” was a curious combination of hillbilly tunes layered over a rollicking jazz beat: white American melody and black American rhythm. It was music for dancing, and as its popularity grew—whole towns from Amarillo to Fresno would now come out to see Wills play—it needed to get louder. Which is how Bob Wills came to rely on Leo Fender.
As Leo watched the Playboys on the bandstand, he might have briefly let his affection for this music and these musicians distract him. Wills stood up there, with his kindly brown eyes and indefatigable smile, winking at the ladies, while his twelve-piece band kept the rhythm rocking. The bandleader’s belly seemed to bulge a little more every time the Playboys’ bus rolled up to Leo’s radio repair shop in Fullerton. The players would stumble out of the bus, stinking of stale air, booze, reefer, other things Leo did his best to ignore. A few of them would address the balding thirtysomething in the plain blue shirt who was never without his belted leather tool pouch. Whatever horrors the road had inflicted on their amplifiers, whatever complaints the musicians had about volume or tone, Leo would fix them. He’d started building electric instruments in the back of his radio shop during the war, because the established guitar and amplifier companies had converted to making bomb gyroscopes or toothbrush handles. By that evening in Santa Monica, about two years later, the most popular band west of the Mississippi would use nothing but his equipment.
Watching the Playboys at the Aragon Ballroom that evening, with all the gleaming smiles and throbbing ranch-dance songs, Leo understood the reasons for his success in this business so far. He knew how to make amplifiers and public address systems sound good. He knew how to make them durable. He adored the electric steel guitar—the flat tabletop guitar that wove such gorgeous, golden ribbons through Wills’s western swing music. Steel guitars were built of solid blocks of wood and played by sliding a metal bar across the strings. Leo’s versions, played through his own amplifiers, emitted his ideal tone: heavy treble, heavy bass, light midrange to keep from getting muddy. It was a sound like “lemonade,” he’d later explain—clear, bright, and punchy.
Leo looked at Noel Boggs, seated on the bandstand behind the electric steel guitar that had come from his radio shop. With its electric volume almost unlimited, its cascades of sound so liquid and fluent, the steel guitar made a star out of Boggs or any capable player in a western band. Standard guitarists, even hotshots like Junior Barnard, sat off to the side of the group, usually strumming their hollow-bodied instruments in near-anonymity. Steel guitarists, like Boggs, played riveting solos and often sat up front.
Leo lingered on a far side of the ballroom, listening carefully. He cocked his head to one side, hearing something strange. Curious, he pushed through the twirling couples toward the center of the room, where he could hear more clearly, and glared at Noel Boggs’s steel guitar amplifier. Then, as if a switch had flipped, Leo took off.
He charged toward the bandstand, oblivious to the dancers all around. He dodged spinning shoulders in uniform, tripped over feet, incited a few angry words, but soon he reached the edge of the stage. Wills and his musicians were still pounding away, oblivious, the bandleader’s eyes teasing the crowd. A couple of female adorers stood at Wills’s boots, mesmerized, one running her hand up his trousers. Her eyes searched up for an approving glance, though Wills was long past the years when he might have given her one.
The Playboys hit the middle of the song, and this time the pianist took a solo. Leo, now at the foot of the stage, reached down to feel the tool belt on his waist. Then he set his palms on the edge of the bandstand, hoisted his body up, and plopped himself onto the stage.
A few dancers gasped. A few more stopped moving, pointed and stared.
“What’s he doing up there?”
“Is this some kind of prank?”
It was obvious from everything about Leo Fender that he was not part of the band. His clothes were plain and rumpled. His back was turned. His hair was mussed. His hand seemed to be pulling something out of the pouch on his waist—a screwdriver.
A few of the Playboys rolled their eyes. Leo shuffled over to the wooden box next to Noel Boggs and began probing the back of it with his tool. Boggs just grinned and shook his head. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen it happen.
More dancers started to stare and gasp. Murmurs issued through the ballroom. The hell’s this fella doing?
Bob Wills saw the commotion and leaned into the microphone. “That’s our friend Leo Fender, everybody, from Fender Electric,” he said, in a Panhandle drawl warm enough to stop wars. “He’s the reason you can hear us tonight.”
The dancers shook their heads and turned back to their partners. And soon, his tweak made, Leo scurried back to the edge of the bandstand, hopped back down onto the dance floor, and disappeared into the crowd as if nothing had happened.
He’d been up there only a few moments. But after he returned to his post at the far side of the room, Bob Wills and Noel Boggs both noticed something. Boggs’s electric steel guitar now came out a little clearer, a little more crisp. The difference was subtle, but both men could hear it. The thing just sounded better.
3.
“THAT’S NOT LES PAUL”
HOLLYWOOD, 1946–1947
She pulled up to the house around dusk one evening, probably wondering if she was making a mistake. The newspapers were filled with stories of would-be starlets who’d taken such chances, only to meet some unspeakable end. This was a city soon to be terrified by the brutal Black Dahlia murder and captivated by Bugsy Siegel’s gangland execution, a city transforming through the wartime influx of servicemen and defense workers into the third-largest metropolis in the United States. Only a decade before, the City of Angels had been little more than a pleasant provincial capital. It was now a chaotic behemoth hobbled by industrial smog and inadequate roads, a place of random violence, dashed hopes, and surging racial tensions.
But Colleen Summers was from Pasadena, and she knew that this troubled place could be a city of dreams. Most of those who’d come to LA during the war now wanted to stay, not just for the pleasant weather and sprouting suburban neighborhoods, but out of a sense that, for all its faults, this was where the future was being created. Even in such a modest place as the bungalow where Summers had pulled up at 1514 North Curson Avenue in Hollywood—a small green house with a curved roof over the entryway and, in the front yard, two palm trees standing like a giant’s skinny legs—even there, a glimpse of radical new possibilities might be seen.
Or rather, heard. For the man who’d asked Colleen Summers to come over that evening had claimed over the phone to be a famous guitar player, her favorite. It was a chance the twenty-two-year-old strummer and singer couldn’t turn down.
In front of the house, Summers found a gardener mowing the lawn in a dirty work shirt and army boots. He told her to go to the garage and wait for Les Paul, who would meet her shortly. Summers walked down the driveway toward the detached building, slowly growing aware of male voices and music coming from inside. She noticed a little patio in the backyard, with a few orange trees and an outdoor fireplace. The main garage door was sealed shut, but some of the men inside saw her through a window and helped her climb in.
Immediately upon squirming inside, Summers could see that this wasn’t a garage in any normal sense. The walls were paneled in white acoustic tile, and a piano dominated the central space. Microphones dangled from shiny stands like lush metal frui
t, and disassembled guitars leaned listlessly against the walls. One side of the room had been cordoned off into a booth and filled with what Colleen recognized as recording equipment. This was apparently some kind of studio.
Soon the window slammed open again, and the gardener wriggled in. He was an unshaven man of about thirty in a straw hat, several inches shy of six feet, with a potbelly. As he entered, Colleen could smell the beer on his breath.
“There’s Les now,” one of the men said.
Colleen gasped. “That’s not Les Paul, that’s the gardener!” she said.
This had to be a prank. There was no way this wormy figure could be the man who elicited such elegant lines from the guitar. But then the gardener stuck out a dirty hand, smiled, and introduced himself as Les. Colleen was certain she was being mocked and refused to believe that the tall, sophisticated jazzman she’d so long envisioned could be really this schlub. Finally, the gardener picked up a guitar and plucked out a few runs in a fast, frisky style she couldn’t help but recognize.
So this was him: the man whose records had filled her family phonograph cabinet back in Pasadena, the artist she’d praised for so many years without ever seeing his picture. Les Paul had invited Summers over to audition for a spot on his new radio show, and she’d thought it would be a great opportunity. Now she must have begun to wonder.
Summers’s disappointment with Les Paul wasn’t reciprocated. Climbing through the window into the garage that evening, Les saw a gifted young woman whose expectant brown eyes and leveling smile had broken the hearts of more than a few hometown suitors. She sang in a warm, quiet, conversational style—not with any operatic flair or jazzy mystique, but with a clarity and sweetness that were undeniably appealing. Summers had been playing guitar and singing on church stages around Southern California since she was in junior high, and was now leading the Sunshine Girls, a trio within Gene Autry’s radio retinue, building a following around Southern California.
With that voice and experience, Les thought Summers would make a perfect foil for a hillbilly radio show he was planning. Despite her disappointment in his physical presentation, she agreed that night to be on it. Les would play the crass country rube, and she’d be the decorous ingenue, shrieking and laughing when he set her script papers on fire, acting genuinely scandalized when he appeared in the studio wearing nothing but his underwear. In between, they’d sing songs. Colleen had been playing guitar since childhood and was a worthier match on the instrument than Les wanted to admit. Even at that first encounter, with his wife, Virginia, and his two young sons resting not thirty feet away inside the house, he began to get ideas about this woman that went far beyond music and a radio show.
Les had come to Hollywood from Chicago back in 1943, hoping to get close to Bing Crosby, America’s most popular singer and the person who, to him, symbolized the top of the music world. Almost as soon as Les had arrived in LA, the army had drafted him, but as usual, he managed to schmooze his way into a plum assignment producing discs for Armed Forces Radio. Between a job working with stars and evening club gigs playing jazz for them, Les befriended half of Hollywood. After a single year, he’d talked his way out of the army and, through another bit of conniving, had finally encountered and charmed the great Bing Crosby.
In July 1945, as the United States had prepared to either bomb or invade Japan, the two musicians had recorded a languid ballad called “It’s Been a Long Long Time.” Bing’s voice, a fatherly bass-baritone completely unshaded by worry or doubt, had drifted through the lyrics: “You’ll never know how many dreams I dreamed about you, or just how empty they all seemed without you,” he sang, before turning over the entire middle of the song—sixteen bars—to Les for a solo. Given space to roam, Les’s round, raspy electric guitar went fast and busy, then soft and sweet, deepening the song’s feeling of a long, contented sigh. At thirty years old, running on little sleep, Les delivered what might have been the best solo of his life.
Decca Records had released “It’s Been a Long Long Time” the following October, two months after Japan’s surrender brought the end of World War II. The song’s lyrics made not a single mention of the conflict, of the men returning home from all around the globe, of the ecstatic families being reunited, the great baby boom beginning. They didn’t have to. The dreamy ballad perfectly captured the national mood and became a hit for the ages, riding the charts through the fall and winter of 1945–46. Les Paul had instantly gained a national reputation. In the wake of that wildly successful first collaboration, a grateful Crosby had helped persuade Les to convert his garage into a private recording studio, and spread the word about the brilliant guitarist with a talent for making vivid recordings.
After Crosby’s endorsement, Les received an unending stream of visitors in his backyard, including such talents as singing cowboy Gene Autry, comedian W. C. Fields, and jazz great Art Tatum. They all came for one reason. In 1940s Hollywood, commercial recording studios were run by stodgy, bureaucratic corporations. Any time booked in them was extremely expensive and tightly controlled. Recording itself was done by the book, in a way Les (who by then had accumulated years of experience in radio studios) thought antiquated. So a private studio in a casual backyard—a place where anyone could make a recording, at any time of day, for free (at least at first)—was a revelation. There, musicians could experiment, fool around, show up drunk at midnight. And tireless Les, with his novel ideas about microphone placement and noise reduction, would make them sound good.
During the day, Les played on the radio with his jazz trio and on the short-lived hillbilly show for which he’d auditioned Colleen Summers. He soon couldn’t resist trying to charm the young woman, but Summers sharply turned him down, according to biographer Mary Shaughnessy. She didn’t find Les attractive, and of course, she had no lack of suitors. Ever since she’d turned sixteen, the local boys had pursued Summers intensely, and she enjoyed their attention. At twenty-two, she’d already been married twice, though the first nuptials were almost instantly annulled, and the second ended in divorce after she refused to stop performing. When she met Les, Colleen had been focusing her attention—intensely, it was thought—on a Pasadena boy named Foy Willing. But then something started to happen.
Like Les, Colleen lived for music. Like Les, she was a creature of the nighttime. She was young and unencumbered, and Les lived as if he were. His wife, Virginia, though married to him for most of a decade, seems to have had little presence in his life, perhaps because she remained outside music. Soon, Les was inviting Colleen out to see his trio perform at Club Rounders, where they entertained such Hollywood stars as Crosby, Groucho Marx, and Bette Davis. As a background singer with Gene Autry, Summers had been in a distant orbit around these people. But now, going out to see Les play, making eyes at him over a cocktail, enjoying the endless introductions he gave her—Les knew everybody—she found herself laughing among them.
In Colleen, Les saw a beautiful young woman who innately understood his obsession with music and who shared his raucous sense of humor. If she couldn’t quite match his boundless energy—no one could—she came very close. So the older jazz jokester and the young country singer soon began to fall intensely in love with each other. To distinguish her character on his radio show from the Colleen Summers who sang with Gene Autry, Paul rechristened his twenty-two-year-old costar “Mary Lou.” After the initial shows were finished, their relationship turned entirely romantic.
But their professional lives and Les’s marriage to Virginia made that relationship tricky.
Everyone in Hollywood knew Les Paul was married, since so many had visited his house to record. Appearances mattered enough that Paul had to be careful who saw him canoodling with another woman in public, so he and Colleen would often just drive off into the night together, listening to after-hours jazz broadcasts, stopping at hotels in the daytime to rest.
While Les and Colleen carried on their secret affair, he went on tour with the Andrews Sisters, a popular vocal group. Whe
n the tour hit Chicago, his mother, Evelyn, came down from Wisconsin for a visit, as Les recalled in his autobiography. She’d heard him on the radio that week, she said, and he sounded great. Evelyn didn’t give praise by default, and Les would’ve liked to accept the compliment. But there was a problem. Les and the Andrews Sisters had been performing seven live shows a day, a typical theater engagement for 1947. He hadn’t been on the radio that week. Les told his mother she must have heard someone else.
“Well, whoever it was, you should sue them,” Evelyn said. “When you plug that thing”—that electric guitar—“into a wall, you all sound alike.”
Les was hurt. He was dismayed. He thought about it for a few days. And then he realized that his mother was right. Although he’d become a great guitar player, a worthy companion to a top singer like Bing Crosby, Les Paul was still just a guitar player—a sideman.
Singers could never completely be copied, but who besides other musicians knew one trumpeter from another, one drummer, one pianist? Who could tell them apart just by their sound? Les had done nothing so far that couldn’t be copied by some eager usurper—and the imitators were already on his tail. There loomed in the near future a reality in which any distinctiveness he had would be completely lost.
Les took this realization not as an annoyance or fact of life, but as an emergency. To become what he wanted, Les knew he needed to stand apart. He needed the same inimitable character that a singer had. And he’d need to create it with the electric guitar.