The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  Hanging around Les Paul’s Hollywood garage on that first afternoon was a group of country-western sidemen, some of them well-known. For all three tinkerers, watching these pros rehearse, record, even just fool around, was almost a sacred rite. To be in the presence of these drawling musicians was an edifying joy, and furthering their music—the common-man songs that had raised them all—was a dear cause. So Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Paul Bigsby listened carefully, noting the way the steel and standard guitarists would tweak the knobs on their primitive amplifiers, how they’d arrange the microphones, what sound they aimed to get. Then they’d pepper the musicians with questions: How’s that tone for ya? What if we give this a try? Does the amp need more bite? More growl? Maybe a bit more chime? Does it got enough hair on its chest?

  When recording had finished for the day, the three men would retire to the patio and take seats around Les’s outdoor fireplace, under the orange tree. Sipping on beers—or, for teetotaling Leo, lemonade—they got into the real intricacies, the stuff only sound engineers cared about: frequency equalization, speaker type, cabinet size. What kinds of magnets to use in pickups, where to install the pickups on a guitar, how such details would change the instrument’s tone.

  It was an obsession the three men shared with rare intensity. Each knew there was a breakthrough on the horizon for electric instruments. None could have foreseen the arrival of rock ’n’ roll, but it was clear that music was growing louder and more driving, challenging the limits of acoustic instruments. The electric steel guitar was the star of the western band—so somehow, there had to be a way to get more volume out of the standard electric guitar, too. Yet even apart from one specific instrument, there was a sense among these men that the potential for electric amplification in music hadn’t yet been realized, that there was still a lot of power waiting to be harnessed, incredible new tools waiting to be built.

  Did Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Paul Bigsby gather the importance of their proximity to one of the first home recording studios in the country? Did they know that western swing in the style of Bob Wills, so popular in Southern California, was driving music toward a louder future? Could they see that their backyard group made up a kind of avant-garde?

  Most likely not. This was not Bell Labs or MIT; though these people ached to improve music technology, their improvements were initially aimed at a very tight circle, rather than at the larger public. There was no way they could foresee the wide-ranging consequences that the development of better electric instruments would have. The question in their minds was more immediate: which one of them would perfect a new design first?

  Almost as soon as these three had started talking, a competition had been outlined, a race, a challenge—one to which each man brought a different strength. Les was the only expert guitarist. Leo excelled at electronics. Bigsby was a master craftsman. What each stood to gain from the project varied, but for all three, building a better electric instrument would fulfill the promise each saw within himself. And so on Les Paul’s citrus-shaded patio, the three most important men in the development of the modern electric guitar began to gather regularly, starting a race that would define the sound of sixty years of popular music.

  Bigsby fired off the opening salvo. It was a new pickup—a gray metal oval with a balanced, punchy sound—that he brought to Les Paul, who installed it on one of his main guitars. Storytellers and bullshitters, Paul and Bigsby were both social people, despite their consuming interests, and quickly formed a collaborative relationship. Les liked the sound of Bigsby’s pickup so much that he tried to keep it a secret; whenever someone pulled out a camera, he’d hide it behind his right hand. Not that it worked. A popular country player named Merle Travis asked Bigsby about it. Chet Atkins, another gifted country guitarist, saw Bigsby’s creation and requested one, too. As players listened to the tinkerers’ conversations in the backyard and reaped the fruits of their experiments, the race between the three men accelerated.

  It took a decisive turn one weekday morning that year. Merle Travis was strumming his Martin acoustic at the Pasadena studios of KXLA, a booster of local cowboy musicians that would soon become the first all-country radio station in the United States. In rushed Paul Bigsby—an oak of a man and a regular visitor to musician friends playing live at the station. Bigsby and Travis were close buddies, having bonded over their love of motorcycles and music, and they liked to give each other a hard time. Travis would sometimes bait Bigsby’s ego by asking him to build wild new devices for the guitar, challenges the older man would accept but not always pull off. On this particular morning, after Travis’s radio show had ended, Travis strolled up to Bigsby in the control room and popped a question.

  “You say you can make anything,” Travis said in his distinctive Kentucky drawl. “Right?”

  “Any damn thing,” Bigsby bellowed.

  “Can you build me a guitar like I draw the picture of?”

  “Sure! Draw it!”

  So Travis grabbed a roll of KXLA script paper and sketched out his design for a new instrument. As a standard guitar player, Travis was sick of all the attention electric steel players got just because their instrument was louder. He’d been toying with an idea: why not build a standard guitar just like a steel, with a solid body shaped to be held against the player’s chest, and a neck shaped to be fretted with fingers? In a region then saturated with country music, and in love with the electric guitar, such an instrument, as radical as it would have been back east, just seemed to make sense.

  Travis fancied himself an amateur cartoonist, and he drew a detailed sketch with a pencil. He wanted an electric guitar whose body had almost the same width and height as a standard acoustic, but far less depth. That body was to be made like a steel guitar—virtually solid, with no acoustic sound holes—and only about an inch and a half thick. It would be finished with a single electric pickup and an ornate, violin-style tail piece, along with other fancy details.

  In handing Bigsby the sketch, Travis may have been jesting, tossing a problem at his friend that he knew would be brow furrowing. But Paul Bigsby didn’t hesitate to pick up the gauntlet: he took the roll of paper back to his workshop.

  6.

  “ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE”

  CALIFORNIA, WISCONSIN, AND OKLAHOMA, WINTER 1947–1948

  Late at night in the Hollywood garage, Les Paul recorded himself. He was trying to capture the sound he heard in his head, a futuristic style that couldn’t be copied. Excited by his talks with Fender and Bigsby, he’d mostly stopped using the Log guitar he’d built back in New York and was using newer experimental instruments, some more conventional and some rather bizarre. Les’s workhorses were three modified Epiphone hollow-bodies, each of which had a factory-cut hole in the back that let him easily swap out pickups and other components. These “clunkers,” as Les called them, had bolts popping out of their bodies, black tape covering their sound holes to fight feedback, and metal plates set under their strings to limit acoustic vibrations. Next to another project of his, though, they looked downright plain.

  Les fashioned the “headless monster” out of a sheet of aluminum and an old guitar neck. He bent the aluminum into a kind of amoeba-like blob to form the body of the guitar and bolted the neck to it. He ran the strings down the neck in the opposite of the usual direction, so the guitar didn’t have a headstock with tuners—its neck simply ended. The result was a headless electric guitar with one pickup, a body made out of sheet metal, and no acoustic properties whatsoever. “It was like something from Mars,” one friend remembered. And it sounded great. Jim Atkins, Les’s former bandmate, called it the “undisputed finest, clearest tone quality instrument that was ever devised” (presumably, he meant by Les). “It looked like a frying pan with strings on it.” The headless monster worked well in the studio, but it had to stay there: Les discovered that heat from stage lights would expand its aluminum body and push the strings out of tune, making the guitar tremendously unreliable. He’d taken another bold step in reimagining
the electric guitar with this instrument, proving that a guitar didn’t even need a wood body—but just as with the Log, he hadn’t found quite the guitar he wanted.

  By late 1947, though, another wild experiment of Les’s was yielding more promising results. It had taken him about five hundred tries, he claimed—five hundred acetate discs cut, ruined, and thrown away—but he’d finally made one recording that showed off all the features of the new sound he envisioned. It was a completely reimagined, instrumental version of “Lover,” a sentimental Rodgers and Hart tune originally written for the 1932 musical film Love Me Tonight. After so many hours of listening only to himself, Paul wasn’t sure what effect the recording would have, so he brought the disc to a party one night at the home of a well-known publicist. The room was filled with his Hollywood friends, famous musicians and show-business people, all drinking and enjoying themselves. “Mary,” as Les now referred to Colleen Summers, came, too. After they arrived, Paul snuck over to the turntable, slapped on the disc, and stepped away to watch the crowd react.

  It began with layers of bright electric guitar runs racing over each other, some tracks mechanically sped up, their pitch raised, so that the strings seemed to twinkle. One guitar strummed the outlining chords in a standard pitch while countless sped-up layers drizzled out the lead melody, letting it rain down in sparkling little notes. At a minute and six seconds, the music seemed to subside, pausing briefly, only to leap into an even faster tempo, with more twinkling electric guitars playing intricate runs that soon cascaded and collided into each other, forming a dizzying eddy of sound.

  “All hell broke loose. No one knew what it was and who was doing it, and questions were flying,” Paul recalled in his autobiography. “But Mary knew immediately, even though she hadn’t heard it before. She said, ‘I know who that is!’ ”

  Les Paul had remade the Rodgers and Hart song into something unrecognizable. Using just his garage studio and his modified guitars, Les had given “Lover” an electric renovation, outfitted Old Hollywood in the sound of science fiction. He’d created something that no other recording studio could then produce, and dazzled everyone at the party.

  Given this reaction to “Lover,” Les knew the record had to be released. Decca Records, with which he’d been associated, deemed the production too wild, so Les decided to try Capitol Records, an LA upstart that in only five years had become one of the biggest labels in the country. He showed up late one Friday afternoon to the office of A & R man Jim Conkling, who was packing for a flight. Conkling told Les they’d meet when he returned, but Les once again snuck “Lover” onto the turntable. Conkling listened in amazement as the waves of sped-up electric guitars crashed over one another and agreed right then to release the song. The two of them wrote out the basic conditions of a contract, including the stipulation that Les could work out of his garage studio and deliver the master recordings he made himself to Capitol.

  And with that, Les Paul was no longer just a sideman. He now had his own solo record deal as an artist. Capitol would release “Lover” in early 1948, and Les felt sure it would be a hit. The driving force behind this achievement, just as Les had envisioned, was his pioneering recording techniques paired with a pure electric guitar sound—as pure as he could then get.

  That winter, Les took Mary home to Wisconsin for a celebration. His father and older brother had bought a tavern in Waukesha called Club 400 and planned a grand-opening party over three days in early January. With a recording contract at Capitol, a revolutionary new single on the way, and a young woman in his life whom he deeply loved, Les had reason to celebrate, too. On the drive east, though, he picked up a fever. Sweating in the high-altitude Arizona mountains during the dead of winter, he began to worry that he was seriously ill.

  Les returned home to find his father furious at him for traveling and sleeping with a twenty-three-year-old singer while still married to another woman. George Polsfuss had been notoriously unfaithful to Les’s mother, and their marriage had collapsed in a bitter divorce when Les was eight. But George was now a converted Presbyterian and a remarried man, and he didn’t think his son should be with a homewrecker. Evelyn, who usually disapproved of her son’s female companions, decided that she liked this Mary Lou.

  Club 400 was no rough-hewn roadhouse but an elegant saloon just across from a train depot, with a sweeping art-deco bar, Formica tables, long curtains, and patterned wallpaper, as if half diner and half living room. Les spent several days there jamming with his hometown buddies and bragging about the record Capitol was about to release. By the time the festivities ended, George Polsfuss’s opposition to Mary had started to soften. He told his son, however, that this young lady was too nice for him—that a “roughneck” like Les would end up hurting her.

  Meanwhile, Les’s flu showed no sign of abating. As they headed south out of Waukesha, intending to stop in Chicago before driving home, the illness grew worse. Paul was perspiring in the brittle Midwestern cold, delirious. He couldn’t stop to see friends in Chicago. As he and Mary cruised down Route 66 into Missouri, he asked her to take the wheel of their Buick convertible and lay down in the passenger seat to rest. Voices on the radio warned about a winter storm about to slam into Oklahoma, exactly where they were headed.

  Paul was curled up in the car, half-asleep, when he heard Mary scream. He bolted up to see the big Buick sliding sideways over an icy bridge. He grabbed the wheel and kicked Mary’s foot off the brake, straightening out the car for a moment. But he couldn’t keep the heavy vehicle from skidding on the ice. The two of them watched, terrified, as the Buick plowed through the wooden guardrail, slipped off the overpass, and plunged some twenty feet into the ravine below. Les threw his arm in front of Mary to protect her face. Neither of them were wearing seat belts, so when a speaker in the backseat tore open the car’s convertible top, they fell out with it. The Buick landed upside down on the frozen river. Les and Mary landed beside it, alongside their guitars and equipment. There they lay amid the snow and ice, fifty miles from Oklahoma City, waiting for someone to find them. Because of the storm, there was no traffic on the road that January Monday.

  Finally, a telephone operator noticed that a line had been cut somewhere between the towns of Davenport and Chandler, Oklahoma. Only because the accident severed the line did authorities find the scene. Doctors at a local hospital determined that Mary had been lucky—she’d suffered only a cracked pelvis and a few scratches. Les, however, had punctured his spleen, broken his nose, and cracked his collarbone, six ribs, and his pelvis. After lying in the snow all those hours, his fever had turned into full-scale pneumonia.

  The worst, though, was his right arm—his strumming arm. It was shattered in three places, including his elbow. Doctors believed it might have to be amputated from the shoulder down. Only days earlier, Les Paul had seemed on the cusp of stardom, with a thrilling single ready for release. Now, suddenly, no one knew whether he’d ever play the guitar again.

  7.

  A “NEWFANGLED GUITAR”

  ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, WINTER–SPRING 1948

  American Legion Post No. 277 stood off a country road near the town of Placentia, just east of Fullerton. The barnlike building was a former citrus packing house that looked like it had risen right up out of the orange groves, an island of shingled civilization amid Placentia’s oil derricks and dust. On Saturday nights in 1948 a band of western musicians convened there, many of them regulars on a popular local radio show. Their agenda was the usual: to get the folks dancing.

  Leo Fender was a regular at these gatherings. He showed up not to cut loose but to handle the sound system for the performers—to ensure they could be heard over the increasingly boisterous din of the legion hall’s increasingly large audiences. One evening late that spring, Leo was wandering around the building in his dusty work clothes. Slowly, carefully, he set up his hand-built plywood public address system and arranged a set of his amplifiers on the stage. In walked Merle Travis, the country guitarist who’d f
ormed a friendship with Paul Bigsby and given the big man a sketch, challenging him to create a different kind of guitar.

  Tonight Travis showed up with an oddly thin guitar case.

  Travis stepped onstage and opened the case, and what he pulled out of it riveted Leo’s attention. It was a standard guitar—the kind you fret with your fingers, not a steel—but like nothing Leo had ever seen. Its body was impossibly, absurdly, beautifully thin: an inch and a half, perhaps, from the back to the front. This body had the same height and width as a standard acoustic, but with no thickness and no sound holes. Its top was all solid wood. Solid bird’s-eye maple, in fact, so the entire thing, its usual hourglass guitar-body shape, gleamed as if gilded, and appeared to be spotted with rivulets of darker wood: the so-called bird’s eyes in the maple. The accent pieces around the bridge were intricate, even florid. The headstock was a flowing, avian shape with all its tuners arranged on top, to be within easy reach of the player.

  A single magnetic pickup sat under the strings, which—it occurred to Leo as he took in this instrument—meant that the only way to get any sound out of it was to plug it into an amplifier. This instrument was not acoustic. It was a totally electric guitar. A hunk of wood, basically, with a neck and strings. There were knobs for volume and tone, and a switch to alter the sound of the pickup. But there were no holes to emit acoustic sound—or capture feedback.