The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  As soon as he had a chance, Leo Fender approached Merle Travis and asked about this “newfangled guitar.” Gushing over his new accessory, Travis reeled off the instrument’s strengths: it was loud, it was beautiful, it was thin and easy to play. Its mostly solid-wood body kept the strings ringing like those on a steel guitar. The headstock wore the name “Bigsby” in elegant script.

  Fender couldn’t have missed this last detail, but he was too fascinated to be polite. Here, suddenly, was proof that his black radio shop experiment—a standard guitar built like a steel, with a solid-wood body—had shown the way forward all along. The only way standard guitars could get much louder was by going completely electric, jettisoning sound holes and large acoustic cavities—by throwing out much of what had made a guitar a guitar. Bigsby was apparently already building such a radical instrument. But how well did it work?

  Leo asked if he could borrow Merle Travis’s new trophy and return it at next Saturday night’s western dance. Amazingly, Travis agreed. (Nice guy.) At the end of the show, the player handed his gorgeous new guitar over to Fender, who—although he would deny these events for the rest of his life—drove back to Fullerton that night with its thin case laid out on the bench seat of his sedan.

  Leo had abstractly envisioned adding a standard guitar to the Fender line, and had listened when his salesman Charlie Hayes suggested it. Now he knew he had to do it—and soon. Travis’s Bigsby guitar was getting all kinds of attention: from onlookers who’d never seen such a skinny six-string, from players who’d never heard anything like the sweet electric patter it emitted through an amplifier. That Bigsby guitar was alluring—for Leo, dangerously so. It was beautiful; it was a breakthrough. It must have sent his mind racing with thoughts about the future, the possibilities of volume, of tone, of expression. He was dying to get the guitar back to his workbench, to run its signal through his oscilloscope. But Leo must also have dwelled on the fact that Merle Travis’s new electric guitar was custom made, a one-off, expensive. Because he was already envisioning another way to do it.

  The quality crisis that had threatened to drag Fender into ruin was now starting to let up, but the company was still far from stable. If Leo truly wanted to design his own standard electric guitar, he’d have to work on it at night, after his daily production run had been completed. Only by constantly churning out new merchandise—and praying that Don Randall and his team could sell it—could he keep his struggling outfit afloat.

  Luckily, Leo now had help in both production and design. He’d recently hired a wiry Arkansan named George Fullerton to be his all-around assistant, shop foreman, and companion through endless desolate nights in the workshop. Fourteen years younger than Leo, and a skilled guitarist, Fullerton had to be cajoled into coming on board. But for Leo, his presence was worth swallowing a little pride.

  The men had first become friends when George Fullerton moved to California just before the war. Both were music and radio enthusiasts, but when George opened a rival electronics shop almost across the street from Leo’s, the older man was angered and hurt. Their relationship turned cold. But even in a town of some thirteen thousand, Leo couldn’t get away from George, especially not while running sound for the country gigs George’s band played.

  The passage of two years and the worsening fortunes of the instrument company seem to have overridden Leo’s bruised ego. Soon, he viewed George Fullerton as the perfect man to rescue Fender. A hard early life in the Ozarks had taught George a panoply of skills: he knew electronics, mechanics, and woodworking; he was an illustrator and a painter; he could play guitars and build them. After months of persuading, Leo convinced the younger man to come work in his dangerous factory part-time, in the evenings, and they began to make steady progress toward rebuilding the hundreds of Fender steel guitars and amplifiers that had been returned under warranty. When they finally finished these repairs, in the late winter of 1948, Leo and George set fire to the heap of discarded steel guitar bodies and amp cabinets behind the plant, burning to ashes all the evidence of Fender’s near-failure.

  George expected to return to his job wiring fuselages at the Lockheed plant. But Leo knew that if the company didn’t have someone with this man’s talents, he would end up right back in the same mess. The chances of convincing George to stay weren’t good: he’d made it clear that building steel guitars and amps in a stifling workshop wasn’t his idea of a great career, and he didn’t even play the steel guitars Fender made—only standard guitar.

  Searching for a sales pitch, something that would convince a young father to give up a steady aerospace job in that uncertain period after the war, Leo shared with George his nascent vision for a new electric standard guitar. A guitar that could be—should be—revolutionary. Like most of American manufacturing, the musical instrument industry had been virtually erased by the war effort. Now normal life was resuming, and Fender’s competition was moving slowly. Leo told George that this little company could have a major impact with the new type of standard guitar he had in mind. But he could only make such an instrument with a skilled guitarist and woodworker on board.

  Leo’s pitch worked. That day, Fender gained a huge asset, a man even more important than Doc Kauffman, the partner who’d first gotten Leo interested in electric instruments. George Fullerton would spend the next forty-three years working alongside Leo Fender—building, designing, and testing, as well as serving as Leo’s chief interface with the rest of humankind.

  Over chilly nights together in the factory, Leo and George now confronted the most basic of questions: What should an electric guitar be? If the instrument truly didn’t need an acoustic body, as Bigsby’s Merle Travis guitar seemed to have proven, what did it need? What could it allow a player to do that current instruments did not?

  To answer these questions, the two men haunted dance halls and honky-tonks around Southern California, pressing up against stages to ask lanky cowboy players what they liked and didn’t like about their instruments. Leo gathered vital intelligence and ideas from the Sunday afternoon sessions at Les Paul’s house—doubtlessly, noting the mess of experimental guitars scattered around his garage—and closely studied Bigsby’s Merle Travis guitar for the week that he borrowed it that spring.

  Obviously, the new instrument had to solve the core problem created by putting an electric pickup in an acoustic guitar: feedback. Leo and George’s chief goal was to let players turn up loud without creating ruinous screeches and howls.

  But the drawbacks of hollow-bodied guitars didn’t end there. These instruments were painstakingly assembled out of dozens of thin wooden panels and had necks that were carefully glued to the body, which meant that if any part of the guitar was broken or damaged, the entire thing had to be sent away for a lengthy and expensive repair. Meanwhile, the player, who usually owned only one guitar, would be out of work.

  At the time, life on the road for a western sideman was extremely rough: bands crammed six or more players and their equipment into station wagons, or piled larger ensembles into hard-sprung tour buses. However wholesome country music could appear, its lifers witnessed every vice and crime imaginable: alcoholism and drug addiction (Benzedrine and reefer were big), gambling and prostitution, regular brawls and the occasional murder. As accessories to this life, delicate wooden guitars were bound to get smashed or shattered. Leo and George wanted their guitar to be durable, but they also knew it must be easy to repair when, inevitably, some part of it broke.

  Naturally, the thing had to be affordable. A giant firm like Gibson could offer a broad line of instruments, with plain models at the low end and opulent creations at the top, but Leo wanted to sell the Fender guitar for a price the average semiprofessional could manage, to maximize its accessibility and, hopefully, its sales.

  So: loud, durable, and cheap. Leo and George had come up with a set of specs no electric guitar on the planet then fulfilled. And there was still another. Their new instrument had to sound gorgeous; otherwise, what would be the point? Yet
achieving sonic brilliance was probably the challenge Leo perspired least over. He knew he possessed one great skill, a core ability that meant everything here: From the maze of an electric circuit—from the countless possibilities of resistors and capacitors and potentiometers and magnets and wiring and power supplies and schematics—Leo Fender could conjure whatever lush and evocative sounds he desired. He could make human tones arise from a tangle of matter. That wizardry seems to have formed the bedrock of his identity—and likely his sense of self-worth.

  From almost the moment he’d encountered the world of radio electronics as a thirteen-year-old, Leo Fender had wanted to excel in it. Perhaps some part of him understood, even back then, that these machines offered him a unique opportunity for mastery and success. He certainly came to see this later, after his parents chose to send his younger sister to a four-year college instead of him, depriving him of any formal education in engineering or electronics, and after he’d tried selling ice (which he hated) and working as a government bookkeeper (where he was laid off after four years). Radio work was something—perhaps the only thing—he knew he could do well. Because of what had happened to him as a child, the list of endeavors at which Leo Fender could likely succeed was unusually short.

  In 1917, Leo’s family grew vegetables on their ten-acre plot in Orange County, selling them every Saturday at a market on the coast. To earn extra money, Clarence Monte Fender, Leo’s burly, pipe-smoking father, would arise long before dawn and get to the stockyards outside Los Angeles, where he’d load up his wagon with manure and bring it back to Fullerton to sell as fertilizer. Monte had started his own working life on a Kansas dairy at age twelve, and taught his son that being a man meant working tirelessly—that work made you who you were.

  One evening that year, after a Saturday trip to sell vegetables, Leo arrived home with his father. He was seven or eight years old, and it was his job then to clean out the wagon bed—to sweep or wash out the residues of the day’s haul. He was up there that evening in the high perch of the farm wagon, scrubbing, sweeping, tossing out buckets of water over the worn wooden planks, working like his father taught him . . . when, suddenly, he lost his balance.

  Leo tried to steady himself, but he couldn’t. Instead, he pitched over the side of the wagon and tumbled down onto a fence post, landing hard on his face. The fall battered Leo’s body and smashed his right eye. He cried out for help, and his parents carried him inside. But while the bruise slowly dissipated, Leo’s right eye refused to heal. Then it became infected. Monte and Harriet Fender were frontier-hardened farmers, and they waited a long time before seeking a doctor to look at their son’s eye. By the time a physician finally saw the wounded child, there was nothing to do but remove the eye altogether.

  So Leo Fender, not ten years old, was now without his binocular vision. He would wear a glass eye for the rest of life.

  Having a glass eye meant that Leo would never excel at boyhood pursuits like football or—his father’s favorite—wrestling. It meant he would never get called up to serve in the military. As a kid he’d felt ashamed, embarrassed by the droop on one side of his face caused by the glass orb. Naturally taciturn, he reacted to the handicap by retreating further into himself.

  But although Leo couldn’t see as well as other people, he loathed the idea that he was any less capable.

  Five years after the accident, an uncle introduced him to radio electronics, opening up a world in which he could show his abilities. And almost thirty years later, fortified with the knowledge of his expertise, Leo decided to give up running his successful radio shop and train his focus on another challenge: creating a completely new type of standard electric guitar, like Bigsby had for Merle Travis, but in his own way.

  Leo could now look at a machine and see instantly its strengths and weaknesses. Just as he had borrowed and examined the Bigsby creation, Leo helped himself to what he believed were the best ideas in current electric instruments, whether they came from local competitors like LA’s Rickenbacker—which had been the first to offer a commercial electric guitar in 1932, and which even sold a compact solid-body guitar made out of an early plastic in the mid-thirties—or elite giants like Gibson, or his own electric steel guitars. Instead of gluing the new neck to the guitar body, as a typical guitar maker would do, Leo borrowed Rickenbacker’s method and simply bolted the neck and body together. This took minimal effort, and if the neck ever had to be replaced, the player could do it themselves in five minutes. The fact that this method ran counter to prevailing aesthetics did not bother Leo, since it was eminently practical.

  There were dozens of other decisions to be made, about wood types, body sizing, string spacing, and the arrangement of electronics. George Fullerton, who unlike Leo knew how a standard guitar should feel to a player, sketched outlines of a body, cutting blocks of wood in various shapes to ensure proper sizing and balance. He and Leo first designed a body that had hollow but sealed-off resonating chambers inside, rather than one made of solid wood. For the neck material, Leo settled on hard rock maple, the same material used in bowling pins, as it was so strong a full-grown man could stand on the neck without breaking it.

  Working day and night amid the clatter of the factory’s saws and presses, George soon learned one reason Leo’s former partner, Doc Kauffman, had left the business: Leo Fender labored seven days a week, starting early in the morning and continuing—fueled by endless cans of Planters peanuts—until two or three a.m. On the coolest nights that spring, he hooked up a gas hose to a steel drum, lit a spark, and let the lambent, cherry-red barrel radiate heat. The room still didn’t get very warm.

  8.

  “POINT IT TOWARD MY BELLY BUTTON, SO I CAN PLAY”

  OKLAHOMA AND HOLLYWOOD, WINTER–SUMMER 1948

  Lying in a hospital bed in Oklahoma City, Les Paul wavered close to death. The gossip columnist Walter Winchell had written about the car crash and suggested that Les wouldn’t survive. Wracked by pneumonia, injured seemingly everywhere, Les coughed until he screamed. After hours of surgery, the doctor at Oklahoma City’s Wesley Hospital, who turned out to be an old friend, finally made some progress toward reassembling the right arm. The patient would live, it now seemed, but perhaps without the ability to play guitar.

  By then, Les was alone in the hospital. Mary had recovered within weeks and was out on the road singing with Gene Autry. While Les waited to see how well he’d heal, on February 23, 1948, Capitol released his “Lover” single with a similarly futuristic instrumental called “Brazil” on its B-side. Just as he’d witnessed at the party, it stunned almost everyone who heard it. Critics at the jazz and pop magazines raved. “Paul goes one-man guitar band. Six guitars recorded individually then dubbed together,” Billboard wrote. “Effect awesome but brilliant.” And that was about “Brazil.” Of “Lover” itself, the magazine gushed, “Man, this is gone . . . technique so good it’s ridiculous.” DJs around the country began playing the songs several times a day. “Lover” hit the charts and rose to no. 21, with “Brazil” reaching no. 22—impressive performances for instrumental songs. Les’s doctor even brought in a radio and placed it at his bedside, so the patient could hear his hit song and the excited listeners and DJs.

  But it all meant nothing to Les. Bound to the hospital bed, alternately coughing and screaming, his right arm only tenuously held together, Lester Polsfuss could barely eat or sleep. He was miserable—his life, once so carefully constructed, had shattered in several places, just like his playing arm. He had no idea whether his fingers would ever again fly across a guitar fretboard. He didn’t know how Capitol Records would treat him during what was sure to be a long recovery. His career had plunged into deep uncertainty, and the medical bills were piling up. Newspapers had reported widely on the crash, and although they’d kept Mary’s real name hidden—Les was reported to be with a certain “Iris Watson,” twenty-three years old, at the time of the accident—the illusion of his having a stable private life had been cracked wide open. There was so m
uch doubt, and so much pain, now and in the foreseeable future. Even if he got lucky, there’d be difficult mending and relearning. Les Paul had finally become popular on his own as a performer, and he couldn’t enjoy it at all.

  After two months in Oklahoma, he was flown to a hospital in Los Angeles, where doctors finally found the cause of his lingering fever and began treating it. The question remained what to do about his shattered arm. Lying in his hospital bed one day, Les heard two doctors arguing about it in the hallway. One wanted to amputate the arm completely, eliminating any chance of his ever playing guitar. Another argued that after all the man was a guitar player—shouldn’t they try to fix the arm before giving up? The two doctors came into Les’s room and presented him with the options: a dicey bid to reconstruct the elbow, or an operation to take off his right arm altogether. Les recalled himself as having a ready quip: “I’ll tell you what. Let’s not say we can’t save the arm until we prove we can’t. Okay?”

  The optimistic plan was to rebuild the elbow with a slice of bone grafted from his right leg and a metal plate attached by seven screws. Once the doctors set the arm in position, Les would never again bend his elbow, but he might regain flexibility in his shoulder and fingers. This was the best-case scenario.

  Before the surgery, the doctors asked at what angle Les wanted his arm screwed together. “Just point it toward my belly button, so I can play,” he told them.

  Les emerged from the surgery looking like the most miserable man ever to wear a toga. A white cast surrounded his torso from one shoulder down to his hips. The broken arm was now bent permanently at ninety degrees, and was anchored to his body with a broom handle. Bruises and swelling covered his right arm, and the merest feeling tingled in his fingers. He began to wriggle the digits on both hands, trying to get sensation and dexterity back. Slowly, he grew hopeful that he might one day resume playing the guitar. And with that, his old sense of humor began to return. “I finally got so ornery they threw me out,” he wrote that year, in a form letter to the many DJs who’d spun his first release.