The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  I’m back home now lying on my back thinking about how you jokers came through for me when I really needed it. “Lover” and “Brazil” are number 6 in the Big Variety as I write so maybe your efforts (and what plugs they were) will help get me out of hock with the docs (a poet yet!). Seriously, though, I don’t know how to thank you. But the next time I drive across country I promise to take more time and drop in to see you instead of trying to crash that disc jockey show that old St. Peter’s running. That’s where I made my big mistake. Well, right now I look like Mr. Plaster of Paris. They’ve got me in a plaster straight jacket that won’t quit, but it won’t be long now. I’m going to do a Houdini any day, and see whether the busted wing will work.

  With much healing ahead of him, and a bit more optimism, Les started to take advantage of the forced pause in his career. He’d done a great deal by then, and yet he knew—even after the reception of “Lover”—that he was a long way from where he wanted to be, a long way from what his mother would call “the top.” Lying in bed, he read electronics manuals and books on philosophy, drifting deep into thought. This was a recharge, a chance to stop, assess where he was going, and perhaps refocus himself and his efforts. Les remembered his childhood years playing hillbilly music, his passionate leap into jazz in the 1930s, his tours with pop singers after the war. Thinking about all he’d seen and done, especially the time spent with the Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby, Les began to feel that playing jazz—despite all he loved about it—was not going to get him the large audience he craved. “When my trio and I would come out and play our jazzy stuff, the audience would applaud like, ‘That’s good. That’s very nice,’ ” he recalled in his autobiography. “Then the Andrews girls would start singing, and the crowd would go nuts. They were connecting with the audience by giving them what they wanted to see and hear, and I got the message.”

  Though the futurism of “Lover” had dazzled the public, Les also suspected that the novelty of his flashy guitar playing and sound-on-sound recording techniques would wear off someday. He thought about adding yet another dimension to his sound—and remembered the hillbilly radio shows he’d first done with Mary Lou. A man and a woman performing together, and playing off each other, naturally gave an audience a lot to relate to. But Les didn’t consider Mary a serious musical partner then. He thought of her as a hillbilly singer, a “lightweight,” he told his biographer. He wanted to pursue a more powerful female vocalist, someone like Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, or Kay Starr.

  As feeling came back to his fingers, he retaught himself the guitar. He’d done it once already, after the electric shock in Queens, but this time would be a much greater challenge. The huge ring of plaster surrounding his chest kept him from even holding the instrument close to his body, so he set it on top of a modified guitar stand. Before too long, it seems, Paul Bigsby came over with something to make the effort a little easier.

  What Bigsby brought to the Hollywood garage one day was a curious and forgotten milestone in the development of the guitar: a solid-body electric with a miniature body and a full-size neck. It was built of exquisite wood and with full electronics, like Bigsby’s Merle Travis guitar—but with a body small enough to fit around Les’s cast.

  Les would long after deny any knowledge of this instrument, since the existence of a Bigsby guitar built for him deeply complicated the story of his long and profitable relationship with Gibson. But Bigsby left players’ names on the patterns he made for their guitars, and a team of researchers discovered the pattern for this one decades later, while cleaning out an old instrument factory. When Bigsby biographer Andy Babiuk confronted Les with the pattern bearing his name, apparently in Paul’s own handwriting—a pattern that perfectly matched a strange Bigsby guitar that had been sold at a garage sale only a few miles from Les’s longtime home—Les finally acknowledged it. “Bigsby brought over this little guitar that he’d made up,” he told Babiuk. “We fooled around with it and I threw it in my pile of guitars. It was so small that it was hard to play.”

  However little use it saw, the instrument shows how fluid things were in those Hollywood days. Les Paul, a name long associated with Gibson and his own experiments, worked with Paul Bigsby on a radical solid-body electric guitar—a vital step toward what the instrument would soon become.

  As the nimbleness returned to Les’s fingers, and as Les adjusted to having his right elbow at a permanent bend, he managed to record a few new discs. Capitol wanted a follow-up to “Lover,” and Les desperately needed the money; medical bills from his accident had nearly bankrupted him. While still encased in plaster, he recorded the jazz standard “Caravan,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” and a few others. Meanwhile, the outward appearance of his personal life began to adjust to its furtive reality.

  A friend who visited Les and his wife, Virginia, at home that summer remembered that when their conversation ended, Les walked him to the corner outside. When they got there, Les suggested they head to a nearby tavern, where, to the friend’s surprise, Mary Lou was waiting. Les went off with her for the rest of the evening. Not long after that encounter, Virginia finally gave up on being married to a largely indifferent husband and moved with their two children back to Chicago. Les didn’t even protest; he later claimed that he’d known marrying Virginia was a mistake. “I let myself be talked into it,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I knew my first love was always going to be the guitar, and that first love is very selfish.” Others saw the continuation of a pattern in which Les charged toward his own goals and jettisoned any impediments—human or otherwise—that slowed his progress.

  With Virginia now gone, Les moved Mary into the Hollywood bungalow. The friend who’d seen Les and Mary rendezvous at the bar was shocked at how quickly the change occurred. “Four weeks later,” he told Les’s biographer, “I got back to his house and there [Mary] is, washing his clothes, scrubbing the floors. I look at Les and he doesn’t say anything. He just laughs.”

  9.

  “WE PERFORM LIKE WE’RE SINGING IN THE BATHTUB”

  SUMMER–WINTER 1949

  In the summer of 1949, more than a year after the crash, Les and Mary drove to the Mayo Clinic, in Ohio, to have his cast removed, and decided to stop for a few days in Waukesha. Les hadn’t performed live since the accident and thought the tavern owned by his father and brother would make a friendly, low-stakes place for his shaky fingers to debut.

  Inside Club 400, he got an old friend to play bass, set down a chair against a mirrored wall, and, with a clunker guitar under his still-healing right arm, proceeded to joke and jam for the hometown crowd. Something about the arrangement didn’t suit him. Perhaps the sound was too thin, or perhaps Les had been expecting a rhythm player who didn’t show up. Different versions of the story abound, but for whatever reason, Les soon pulled Mary out of the crowd, thrust a guitar into her hands, and—ignoring her obvious reluctance—coaxed her to not only strum but sing. Mary normally sang country, not pop or jazz, and other than a brief run of radio shows at the start of their relationship, the two had never performed together. She didn’t know the words or chord changes to Les’s songs, so she stumbled, prompting Les to correct her.

  But Les could see immediately that the crowd adored Mary. The two of them, wildly in love, had a natural spark, and they tossed out the kind of affectionate banter that’s hard to fake. Les realized before the set ended that the female singer he wanted, the onstage companion he’d been mulling since the accident, had been with him all along. He hadn’t considered it—he’d thought Mary’s unadorned voice wasn’t suited for pop or jazz—but Les, of all people, knew that a crowd’s reaction doesn’t lie. There was no question: this “Mary Lou,” the girlfriend for whom he’d jettisoned his wife and children, should also be his costar, joining him onstage and on recordings, adding her sweet, familiar voice to the circus of sounds from his guitar. Colleen Summers was up for it, too—maybe sensing that by combining their talents, these two longtime accompanists could make a strong
claim for center stage.

  Rehearsals started the following day in Les’s mother’s basement. Next, the couple set up at a jazz club in Milwaukee to practice in front of an audience, hoping to ease Mary’s lingering stage fright—all the worse now since, as the lead vocalist, she was the center of attention. While preparing for those gigs, Les flipped through a local phone book, seeking a new stage name for his singer. He’d always called her Mary, or, on the radio, Mary Lou. Now, he decided, she would be known as Mary Ford. When they returned to Hollywood a little later, Les cajoled NBC into giving him a radio show on which Mary also sang and performed. They were paid $150 per weekly, fifteen-minute episode, just enough to keep them afloat.

  One day that summer, Les’s old friend Bing Crosby pulled up to the Hollywood bungalow with a gift in the trunk of his car. It was an Ampex Model 300 recording machine, an early version of a piece of equipment that would become standard in recording studios for decades to come. Using magnetic-tape technology developed in Germany and copied after World War II, the Ampex provided vastly improved sound quality over acetate discs, and though it was large—a silvery mass inside a suitcase, with two reels that held spools of tape—it was ostensibly portable. Crosby had adopted the technology almost as soon as he’d heard about it, since its high fidelity allowed him to prerecord his radio shows. Les could never have afforded the machine himself, but the gift from Crosby would spur a major change in his life—and with it, the future of recording. Les quickly realized that he could simply add a second recording head to the Ampex’s original one to allow for multitrack recording, or “sound-on-sound.” It would no longer be necessary to laboriously bounce songs from one platter to the next. The tape machine could do it all, and its portability would allow Les and Mary to record their weekly NBC show from the road. Immediately after receiving Bing’s gift, they loaded up the trunk of their Cadillac and headed for Chicago.

  Les had wanted to play at the Blue Note ever since “Lover” had first tantalized the public more than a year earlier, but the accident had kept him from making it to the stage of this elite jazz club. Finally at the Blue Note as part of a duo with Mary, he produced as much uproar over his clothes as his music. In an era in which pop and jazz musicians performed in fine suits or tuxedoes, Newsweek wrote that patrons at the club were “all but stunned” by the couple’s debut. “In sport shirt, unpressed pants, Argyle socks, and loafers, Les was as relaxed as his clothing as he gave out with his extraordinary guitar style . . . Mary Ford, an attractive blonde who sings and plays second guitar, was almost as casually attired.” But the review, headlined “Paul’s Comeback,” was unmistakably positive. In keeping with their low-key attire, Les and Mary and their electric guitars possessed a familial, slightly mischievous appeal that won over every crowd that saw them. “We perform like we’re singing in the bathtub,” he told the charmed Newsweek reporter.

  Soon the couple hunkered down in Les’s old neighborhood of Jackson Heights, on the edge of New York City. They still owned the bungalow in Hollywood and were recording shows for NBC in Los Angeles, but events in the East kept occupying them. In October, Les’s father died, and the couple returned to Waukesha; at the end of the year, they were hired for another club engagement in Milwaukee. Back in the vicinity of home, Les remembered how his father had disapproved of his living and traveling with Mary without being married to her. George Polsfuss had warned his son not to make this sweet girl part of his hectic performer’s life, believing Les would wear her out. But Les’s and Mary’s careers were growing ever more intertwined. They loved each other, and they were hopeful about the future.

  So on December 29, 1949, at the Milwaukee County courthouse, the man born Lester Polsfuss and the woman born Colleen Summers married, with two friends as witnesses. Neither Les’s mother, Evelyn, nor his brother, Ralph, who both lived less than twenty miles away, attended the ceremony. A few hours later, in a move that would foretell much about their marriage, Les and Mary picked up their guitars and strode onstage for another gig.

  10.

  “IF LEO MISSES THE BOAT NOW I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HIM”

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, FALL 1949–SUMMER 1950

  After closing down the factory one evening in the fall of 1949, Leo Fender and George Fullerton drove up Highway 101 to a sprawling dance hall on the north side of Los Angeles called the Riverside Rancho. Billing itself as “the Home of Western Music,” the Rancho was the most prominent country-western venue in town, offering live music nearly every night. Its interior was slathered in frontier kitsch, with Spanish tiles topping false eaves, whitewash trim around the stage, and walls that sagged with weathered wooden boards and wagon wheels. Performing that night was Nashville’s Little Jimmy Dickens, a grinning, soon-to-be-famous country singer who stood four foot eleven on the Rancho’s broad stage.

  As Dickens played, Leo and George strode through the smoky dimness to a corner near the bandstand, carrying a prototype of their new solid-body electric guitar. The room was filled with white Angeleno men in crisp slacks and shirts, twirling grinning ladies in long dresses. The stench of stale beer pervaded the venue. Back in the dark, male voices were swelling with whiskey.

  Leo and George were waiting for the band to take a break, hoping to talk to the guitarist, when a young man walked in, noticed them sitting there with a strange-looking instrument on the table, and sidled over. His greasy hair, which was parted to one side, framed a dashing young face with dark features. The man asked about the guitar in a thick Georgia accent. Leo held up the prototype and must have beamed.

  The white-enameled body of the instrument looked almost alien it was so thin, with a single cutaway on the lower side to allow players’ fingers to reach the highest frets. A small black pickguard curled up next to the strings like an artful tattoo. One black electric pickup—the heart of the machine—sat in a gleaming metal tray under the strings. At the base of the thin body, two knobs protruding from a steel plate allowed for adjustments to volume and tone. Here was radio technology, screwed into a wood-shop project.

  “Well, could I try it?” the stranger drawled.

  And so Leo handed it over. The young man took the guitar and sat down on an edge of the stage, far from where Jimmy Dickens was warbling with the band. He started running his fingers over the thing, unplugged, nearly silent. Leo Fender and George Fullerton watched from their table, having no idea who this man was.

  “Live it up” was his philosophy, “money green” his favorite color. Jimmy Bryant, then known as Buddy Bryant, held regular gigs at the Fargo Club on Skid Row and was rising quickly in the LA country scene. The handsome guitarist fancied himself a jazzman, almost a bebopper, a pure artist—and the blur of his fingers put jaws on the floor wherever he played. Maybe it was the Purple Heart he’d been awarded for fighting Germans in the war, or the abusive childhood that had encouraged him to pick up the fiddle, or the drinking habit, or the metal plate in his head from a combat injury, but Bryant never lacked for self-confidence. When Dickens’s band took a break, the guitarist asked if he could plug into one of their amplifiers, and the band members agreed.

  Right then, Leo and George discovered whom they’d been talking to. Cranking the amp to a biting volume, Bryant began to unfurl fluid runs up and down the Fender guitar’s thin neck. The first thing everyone noticed was his speed—a lightning quickness that he’d picked up from playing fiddle breakdowns. But Bryant wasn’t only fast. As with some of LA’s best country pickers, the foundation of his style was jazz, which let him conjure a vast range of moods. Bryant wrung humor out of his flurries, tapping out voices that addressed and answered one another as if an entire horn section were conversing through a single guitar solo. The Fender’s thin neck let him reach preposterous speed, and the sharpness of the guitar’s tone gave his phrases clear punctuation. In contrast to the warm, often muddy-sounding hollow-bodies of the day, the Fender issued bright and crisp, with emphasis on the bass and treble and a thin midrange. It cut through the smoky room with the pre
sence of an electric steel guitar, just as Leo had intended.

  A crowd of dancers gathered around as Bryant, still sitting on the edge of the stage, sent flutters of notes out from the strange contraption in his hands. Even the band members stood wide-eyed, watching him play. Bryant and this prototype guitar soon became the evening’s main entertainment, regaling the Riverside Rancho for more than an hour, as George Fullerton remembered. No matter how complex or quick his runs became, Bryant simply sat there, still but for his fingers, wearing a devious grin while casting sprays of electric sound out of this incredible machine. Little Jimmy Dickens never retook the stage.

  That evening gave Leo and George tremendous new confidence in the ideas they’d pursued over so many late nights. Bryant’s vivid playing and the reception it got validated Leo’s notion that an electric guitar could indeed be solid, simple, and plain so long as it supplied powerful volume and good tone. It seemed the audience at the Rancho had been enthralled as much by the strange look of the guitar as its sound. The thin shape and graceful curves of the Fender prototype exuded a sense of modernity and newness, while its sharp, metallic tone struck virgin ears as fresh, even futuristic—the aural equivalent of a gleaming patch of chrome.

  As Leo showed the Fender prototype around Southern California, close observers noticed its similarity to the guitar Paul Bigsby had made for Merle Travis. Both bodies filled nearly the same dimensions; both had one electric pickup near the metal plate that secured the strings to the body, known as the bridge; and both had a section of the body cut away to allow access to the upper frets. Some felt that Leo had simply copied his competitor’s work. “I designed the Fender guitar, you know, and Bigsby built the first one,” Merle Travis said years later. Indeed, signs that Leo had learned from Bigsby would continue to reappear.