by Ian Port
So Les quit the Andrews Sisters tour in a huff, relinquishing all the money and attention it brought. Then he raced back to his little bungalow in Hollywood, to find a sound no one else could match.
4.
“I’M GONNA DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT”
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1947
It was the most unusual instrument to come out of Leo Fender’s workshop, and no one could buy it. The little black guitar was not part of the Fender product line, that array of amplifiers and electric steel guitars that drew musicians from around Southern California to Fullerton. It had no name. It was an experiment.
Leo had made it back in 1943, with his friend Clayton “Doc” Kauffman, a fellow tinkerer who’d shifted his interest and ambition from radios to electric guitars and amplifiers. Late one night in the back of the radio shop, Leo and Doc had hastily fashioned this odd little thing from an oak plank. They’d envisioned it simply as a test bed for a pickup, which is why they made the body so small—only three or four inches wide. They thought no one would really use it. Then the locals heard it.
Four years later, Fullerton’s cowboy pickers would still roar through that proud little downtown on their motorcycles, pull up to Leo’s shop three doors down from the main intersection, breeze past the shelves of records and radios for sale, and ask for that black guitar. There was only one. It was too shoddily built to sell. But Leo would rent it out, and some months it was gone every weekend.
Instead of building that test bed as an electric steel guitar—the type played flat like a table, by running a metal bar over the strings, useful mainly for country and Hawaiian music—Leo and Doc had made it a standard, or “Spanish,” guitar: the type fingered with bare hands, held against the chest, and played far more widely. However amateurish it looked, it was an electric guitar. Yet unlike every other electric guitar, this one had no hollow acoustic body. It was just a solid plank of wood, with strings and an electric pickup, slathered in glossy black paint. Leo and Doc hadn’t intended this design to be radical; they’d built it from solid wood because, back then, they’d known only how to build steel guitars, and steel guitars were solid. Essentially by accident, they’d wound up creating something players loved, a misfit stepchild of a guitar that extended creative expression past what any other standard model allowed. With its solid body, the black radio shop guitar could be cranked up as loud as anyone wanted, loud enough to plunk out over a band, and it wouldn’t feed back.
No wonder Leo had been so eager to trade the steady, dull business of repairing radios for the novel, unpredictable one of making electric instruments. At first, even his accidents, like that radio shop guitar, became successes. But nearly two years into running the Fender Electric Instrument Company, by 1947, the situation had drastically changed. Now when Leo looked around the workshop where his namesake instruments were built, he felt not pride, nor confidence, but fear. Doc Kauffman had left their happy partnership early the previous year, scared of taking on debt to build a company. Leo now wondered if incurring new financial obligations had been smart. Though it had barely started, his outfit stood on the precipice of ruin. And if this enterprise went under, Leo knew that everything else he’d amassed in his thirty-eight years—his modest success of a radio shop, his self-respect, perhaps even his marriage—would go with it.
Leo’s wife, Esther, had already endured years of sacrifice while he established the radio shop, and with his now running both the shop and the instrument company, the two of them lived as near-ascetics. Esther contributed the salary she earned as a telephone operator to his businesses while adhering to a strict household budget. A lively, unpretentious farm girl—dark-haired, pretty, and at least as odd as Leo—Esther financed her husband’s projects, tolerated his absence (with frequent rolling of the eyes), and retorted with a sharp word or two when he went too far. Thirteen years into their marriage, the Fenders rented a house in Fullerton instead of owning one, and plowed all of their earnings back into Leo’s businesses. They’d decided not to have children. Leo felt that he didn’t have time or money to raise a family, that he couldn’t bear any distraction from his work.
The headquarters of the Fender company consisted of two corrugated steel sheds sitting a few steps from the railroad tracks that carried Fullerton’s oranges and lemons to the world. Sunlight shone into the sheds’ raw interiors, but over the first winter there, Leo had discovered that their roofs let rain leak in. In one shed, wood saws buzzed constantly; in another, metal presses stamped out parts with an ominous, incessant clanging. There was no bathroom, so Leo and his half-dozen employees had to walk down to the train station to relieve themselves. The workers used acetate to finish the steel guitars and kept the highly flammable liquid warm in the most risky way possible: near an open, gas-fed flame. When the fire inspector visited, he was so terrified by this arrangement that he ran off and called from a pay phone. Leo, of course, knew that his factory wasn’t a safe environment: one employee had seen his guitar-playing career ended when a punch press sliced off four fingers, and another mishandled a table saw and sent a shard of wood straight into his groin. But right now, there were bigger problems.
To get his instruments into stores, Leo depended on a pair of new partners: Francis Carey (F. C.) Hall and Don Randall, the owner and manager, respectively, of a radio parts wholesaler in Santa Ana, some half hour’s drive south of Fullerton. Under the arrangement made with Hall—an upright businessman, pious churchgoer, and rather cold-blooded finance whiz—Leo designed and built Fender electric instruments while Hall’s Radio and Television Equipment Co., known as Radio-Tel, marketed and sold them. Instead of handling the Fender line himself, though, Hall had assigned it to Don Randall, an ambitious twenty-eight-year-old former clerk. Leo had been a little surprised at seeing this Randall kid made his coequal in charge of sales and marketing. He could never have imagined how long they’d work together.
To fill Hall’s initial order of five thousand steel guitar and amplifier sets, Leo had purchased a boxcar full of walnut originally destined to become rifle stocks. The boards languished as his workers slowly assembled them into steel guitar bodies and amplifier cabinets, and they’d become infested with termites. The wood was ruined, and so were dozens of products. One of Randall’s salesmen had been demonstrating a shiny new Fender steel guitar inside a music store, hoping to land a customer, when a termite came boring out of the guitar body in plain sight.
Bugs were only the beginning of the quality problems. Steel guitars left Fullerton without magnets in their pickups; amplifiers would arrive in stores plagued by mysterious hums and buzzes; players would purchase new equipment only to find corroded electronics and cracked finishes—the telltale signs of moist wood. It wasn’t in Leo Fender’s nature to believe that there was anything he couldn’t accomplish. But he now ran a factory producing wooden instruments without having any real experience in either manufacturing or woodwork. He was still just a radio repairman—and it showed.
When Fender amps and steel guitars did come out at top quality, musicians like Bob Wills and the country-western players of Los Angeles raved about them. Leo spent his nights dragging amplifiers and steel guitars to honky-tonks and dance halls around the region, converting one musician at a time with the clear sound and durable design of his instruments. But popularity among pros didn’t quickly translate into mass sales. Just getting Fender products into music stores around the country, as Hall and Randall had promised to do, had proven far more difficult than anyone expected.
With orders lagging, Leo had had no choice but to hide from his creditors and intermittently close down the factory. When it did operate, it was normal for workers to rush to the bank on Friday afternoons to cash their checks before the company funds ran out. (The money covering them was usually Esther’s pay from the phone company, deposited just in time.) Leo had already taken out two loans from F. C. Hall to stay afloat, humiliating himself in front of his chief investor. Now he was desperate. He’d made every conceivable move t
o keep the factory from failing, thus ensuring that if it did fail, he’d be completely wiped out. So when a slick salesman came through Fullerton one day that year with a big, bright idea, Leo was probably as irritated as he was intrigued.
Of the half-dozen traveling salesmen Don Randall had hired to get Fender products into music stores, none was more effective than Charlie Hayes. The tall, slender Texan could walk up to a crowd of strangers and return a few minutes later having befriended all. “He could sell you a set of false teeth you’d need when you were fifty, if you were twenty-four,” a colleague remembered. For Hayes, life was a party, and so was selling musical instruments. Clad in cowboy boots of which he was inordinately proud, and fine, shiny suits finished with a bow tie, Hayes cruised around the Southwest in a Cadillac, selling Fender equipment out of his trunk. He wasn’t a musician. He was a schmoozer and a prankster in an era when setting a friend’s golf bag on fire made for a good practical joke.
Though his sales territory stretched to Texas and Oklahoma, Hayes kept an apartment in Santa Ana, across the street from Radio-Tel. He enjoyed close relationships with both Don Randall—a boss who was at least as much a friend—and Leo, who shared his love of practical jokes. Hayes served as a bridge between the two men, and a link to the outside world of everyday dealers and players, from which he gathered vital intelligence.
That intelligence—and, most likely, knowledge of Leo’s experimental black guitar—informed a request Charlie Hayes made to Leo one day, likely in 1947 or early 1948. He asked Leo to produce a standard (or as it was then called, “Spanish”) electric guitar—an ideal complement, he thought, to Fender’s line of electric steel guitars and amplifiers.
Hayes was a born salesman, and Leo wouldn’t have been hard to sway. He’d seen players visit his radio shop to rent the black guitar. He’d seen the struggles that players like Junior Barnard faced when trying to pull off searing solos on their hollow-body electrics. He knew by then that the electric guitar needed a radical redesign, that music was pushing past what an acoustic body would allow.
But at that moment, with his business sliding toward insolvency, and with his factory unable to build its current products to consistent quality, there was not a whole lot that Leo Fender could do about it.
• • •
UP IN HOLLYWOOD, Les Paul wrestled with the knowledge that even being a virtuoso on the guitar would not bring the fame he craved. His own mother had told him she couldn’t tell if it was him playing on the radio or someone else, and any new guitar feats Les mastered were quickly copied by others. So he began to think differently. Instead of an end in itself, Les now began to see his guitar playing as one element in a larger project: a whole new sound that would combine his brilliant musicianship, the pure electric guitar tone he wanted, and radical new recording techniques he envisioned.
Les had long been intrigued by the idea of what he called “sound-on-sound”—the layering of several different recordings, or tracks, on top of one another. Technology in 1947 made it possible to layer performances only through the slow, arduous process of recording a track onto one black plastic disc, then recording that disc onto another disc while simultaneously performing the next layer. If even the slightest mistake appeared, everything had to be started over. A multilayered recording was thus mind-bendingly difficult and expensive to make, given the precision and studio time required. But when executed flawlessly, it opened up a world of possibilities. And Les now had his own studio.
As he struggled to conceive this project, the garage studio drew musicians: singers and jazzmen and members of the loose group who sometimes called themselves the Hollywood Hillbillies. These were sidemen in the innumerable cowboy and western swing bands gigging around Los Angeles—some elite, some barely working. One elite was a steel guitar genius named Joaquin Murphy, who came to Les’s backyard one Sunday afternoon that year with an older man, an acquaintance who’d built him an unusually good amplifier. While the cowboy jazzmen milled around the studio and drained cans of beer in the backyard, Les shook hands with a quiet man, six years his senior, with a balding pate and exacting enunciation, who introduced himself as Leo Fender. They soon realized they had a lot to talk about.
Both men loved music; both were onetime radio geeks; both were uniquely preoccupied with the nature of amplified sound. Leo, the private, plainspoken tinkerer, cared for nothing but the immediate technical problem on his mind. He relished engineering not necessarily because it might bring wealth or fame, but because it simply fascinated him: he liked to improve electronic devices more than he liked to do just about anything. If anyone could understand that depth of obsession, it was Les Paul. And yet Les’s experimentation had a different aim than Leo’s. Les’s electronics projects thrilled him on their own, but they had the ultimate goal of helping him achieve his personal sound, the unique style that would take him where he’d wanted to be since childhood: the top. While Leo Fender followed his nose from one intriguing problem to the next, happy to dwell for hours in his private workshop, Les Paul pursued a type of achievement that was intrinsically public.
It’s not hard to picture the two of them together, hanging with a group around the Hollywood garage: Les probably overacting, performing the role of host, asserting his place as the alpha while oozing false humility. And Leo, most likely glued to his chair or bent over to inspect some mechanism or circuit, occasionally and impolitely breaking his silence to exclaim either admiration or disdain. Paul, though charming as hell, would’ve made sure his dominance was clear. Fender would have been largely oblivious to the contest of egos in the room. They must have amused each other—so similar were they, yet so different. If not for their overlapping fascination with amplification and musical instruments, they might never have become friends. Their personalities and worlds were as far apart as any in music could be: one’s arena was primarily the stage, the other’s, the workbench; one talked and the other listened. Paul hesitated to drop his showman persona and show his technical knowledge, wary of boring his audience. Fender offered detailed, dulling disquisitions to anyone.
Each man clearly developed a sharp assessment of the other. “He talks a lot,” Fender mused about Paul, “but he doesn’t say much.” And Paul would later recall Fender as utterly determined despite the humbleness of his situation—a portrait both admiring and a little condescending. “Leo was a person [who] learned what to do by listening to the person [who was] playing, which is a wise thing to do,” Les Paul said years later. “When Leo came over to the house . . . he could listen to his guitar amplifier and ask the musician what he would like to have changed on it. Does he like it? If he doesn’t like it, what does he not like about it? Well, he was doing the same thing with the guitar.”
And that was where their friendship turned competitive. Soon Leo Fender and Les Paul were focused on—even obsessed with, as only people like the two of them could be—the challenges of electric guitars. They met on Les’s patio on Sunday afternoons to listen to the players and discuss ideas. Les had built his Log; Leo had constructed his black radio shop instrument. Both knew there was a major advance on the horizon for the electric guitar, that the present limits on its volume and tone would somehow have to be overcome. They were chasing the sound of music’s future. “Fender was in my backyard looking at that guitar”—the Log—“for years,” Paul recalled. “And he says, ‘I’m gonna do something about it.’ ”
Soon, though, they met another man, as different from each of them as they were from each other, who was looking to transform the electric guitar, too.
5.
“YOU SAY YOU CAN MAKE ANYTHING. RIGHT?”
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1947
It was Leo Fender who brought him over, likely one Sunday afternoon that year. Les Paul must have chuckled when he saw the two of them walking down the driveway toward the garage: Leo, dressed as always like a janitor, his engineer’s body unremarkable in every way, his expression distracted, as usual. And next to him, this other man, grinning be
hind a cigarette, a decade older and perhaps half a foot taller, booming with confidence. Booming, literally—it was said that Paul Adelbert Bigsby didn’t need much help from the microphone when he called motorcycle races at the local speedway.
Les felt a tension between Paul Bigsby and Leo Fender almost from the start, and he soon learned why. In workshops only about twenty miles apart, both men built steel guitars for the country musicians of Southern California. It didn’t matter that their business philosophies were as dissimilar as their appearance and demeanor, that they’d come from vastly different backgrounds. Bigsby and Fender made and sold the same thing. Each believed in the superiority of his designs and regarded the other’s warily, at best. Leo never outwardly evinced any disdain for Bigsby—it had been his idea to bring Bigsby to Les Paul’s house that afternoon, to include him in the fascinating conversations taking place there. But even in those days, Bigsby sometimes preferred not to be reminded of Leo Fender’s existence.
Born in Illinois in 1899, Paul Bigsby had a decade on Leo and fifteen years on Les, and, consequently, a different view of life. He’d spent a wayward youth racing motorcycles through the deserts of California and Mexico, picking up trophies and stories along the way. In Los Angeles, Bigsby had learned the versatile trade of pattern-making. A pattern-maker carved wood into precise shapes—gears, engine parts, even pieces of battleships—that were used to make a mold from which a metal part was fashioned. Not all pattern-makers engineered the pieces they cut, but Bigsby did. Since he could both design detailed mechanical parts and create them, he liked to brag that he could build “any damn thing,” and he wasn’t exaggerating.
Around the end of the war, Bigsby had grown indignant over what he thought were inadequate tools then available to his musician friends. Soon, his last name appeared on the most expensive electric steel guitars in Los Angeles, which he designed and built entirely on his own at a home workshop in the industrial suburb of Downey. Obsessed with traditional craftsmanship, with the neatness of joints and the finish of panels, Bigsby measured his success in the immaculate quality of his final product, not the numbers sold. While Fender offered a complete product line—electric steel guitars and amplifiers—to what he hoped would become a mass market, Bigsby custom-built steel guitars that only established pros could afford. Each one took him a month or more. In 1947, he quoted a price of $750 for one complex model, half the cost of a brand-new Chevrolet then, and about $8,000 today.