The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  But while Bigsby’s work embodied old-world craftsmanship, Leo’s prototype embraced the age of mass production. The pattern-maker had toiled over the smallest details, from fretboard inlays shaped like the suits of playing cards to a neck joint that he spent hours shaping by hand. The radio repairman, on the other hand, glued together two blocks of pine, rounded off the edges, and bolted on a neck cut from a slab of maple before finishing the guitar in chrome and plastic. This was the leap from classical design to modernism; from the age of walnut to the age of celluloid; from the America of brick-and-iron cities to the America of stucco-and-glass suburbs.

  Though the Fender prototype did look toward the future, it remained—like Leo himself—stubbornly modest. Bigsby’s Merle Travis guitar was one exceedingly fine tool for an expert, the Rolls-Royce of six-strings. Leo had instead built a Volkswagen. He knew that an everyman guitar would sell better than an elite one, and he needed it to sell. But he simply wasn’t the craftsman Bigsby was; he wasn’t an artisan who invested his ego in the smoothness of a neck joint. Rather, Leo was a technician: a man who judged himself by the clarity of a signal, the logic of a circuit—and now, the easy replacement of a guitar neck.

  After that night at the Riverside Rancho, Jimmy Bryant soon demanded his own Fender electric standard guitar, and in exchange he agreed to publicly endorse Fender instruments. Leo was thrilled. His ostensible rival was not.

  On October 7, 1949, Paul Bigsby completed a new standard guitar, a custom job that had been ordered by none other than Jimmy Bryant. Another bird’s-eye-maple beauty inspired by the Merle Travis creation, this instrument at first had Bryant’s name inlaid in black letters on the top of its body. When Bigsby called to say that the guitar was done, Bryant backed out, explaining that he’d just made a deal with Leo Fender and no longer wanted it. Paul Bigsby was enraged. He hadn’t spent a month or more making a single instrument so that some mouthy guitar player could reject it. In a fit of spite, Bigsby cut out every bit of Bryant’s name and filled in the cuts with wood. Then he covered over the entire section with a black pick guard and sold the guitar off to another player.

  So far, there hadn’t been much sense of direct competition between Leo Fender’s instruments and Paul Bigsby’s. But with Leo now developing his own standard electric guitar, that was starting to change.

  While Leo showed the new guitar off to players, Don Randall, the man tasked with trying to sell Fender instruments to the world, found he couldn’t get an example of it out of Leo’s hands. He desperately wanted to have a standard guitar ready for the industry trade shows of 1949, only to have Leo refuse. “I have done everything I know to convince Leo of the importance of having this material ready for the show,” Radio-Tel owner F. C. Hall had written that year to Randall, who was then on the road. “Still he states that it is impossible to deliver these items in time.” The demands of the business were banging at his door, but Leo, still stung by all those early warranty returns, wouldn’t release a prototype until he was sure he’d gotten it right.

  As Randall tried to sell the new standard guitar to dealers sight unseen, Leo made dramatic changes to the design. In late 1949, he decided that the guitar should have a solid-wood body instead of one with hollow chambers. It would be a board, basically; heavier but nearly foolproof to build. Leo also designed a headstock—the panel at the far end of the neck where the strings end—that arranged all the tuning pegs on the upper side, to be within easy reach of the player. Merle Travis had asked Paul Bigsby for this feature, and Bigsby had achieved it by ingeniously modifying the tuning machines to make them fit in one row of six, rather than the typical two opposing rows of three. On his second prototype, Leo used exactly the same tuners, modified in exactly the same way, and fitted them to a vaguely similar headstock. He later would insist that he’d come to this idea independently. He even denied borrowing the Bigsby guitar—but in light of the evidence, these denials are ludicrous. Leo Fender was simply doing what he’d always done: adopting a good idea.

  By the summer of 1950, Don Randall was dying to show Leo’s creation to the world, eager to see how it would be received at the major trade shows. The musical instrument industry was then a chummy club of white men, whose trade magazines ran briefs on which executive had just married or which had returned from a Hawaiian vacation. Well before long-distance phone service, widespread television, the fax machine, and the Internet, trade shows were where all the action (including the cocktail-swilling and back-slapping) happened. Every significant dealer attended to find out what their stores should be stocking. Getting a standard—or as it was then called, “Spanish”—electric prototype on display would make a major statement about Fender and the future of the guitar.

  At thirty-two, Don Randall still found traveling around the country on business a thrill. He’d slept in a hotel for the first time only a couple of years earlier, and in letters to F. C. Hall he’d express feeling guilty about the exorbitant cost of his staying in Chicago and New York on business. Straightforward and likable in that small-town American way—“definitely the high moral type,” as Hall once described him—Randall was frugal by habit, having come from a family of poor Idaho farmers who’d migrated to Orange County to seek a better life. Although he’d wanted to be a doctor, and probably had the brains for it, his parents couldn’t afford the education. Instead, Randall had taught himself electronics, earned a commercial radio operator’s license, and picked up some German and Spanish. In high school, he’d captained the basketball team, had his photo—strong square jaw and unflappable brown eyes—in the paper. During the war, he’d worked for the Army Signal Corps, its communications division, at an air base in Santa Ana. So while avoiding combat, and staying close to his wife, Jean, and their young son, Randall had felt the ennui of a new father staring down a long working life—especially after Hall requested his discharge from the service in order to get him back hawking radio parts.

  Thank God, then, for the Fender line. Randall was now selling products he found fascinating, even if he couldn’t play them, products that required hanging out with colorful musicians and traveling to trade shows. That summer of 1950, while Leo was fussing over the design, Randall and his salesman pal Charlie Hayes finally unveiled Fender’s newest product at the National Association of Music Merchants convention in Chicago.

  Randall had branded the guitar “the Esquire” in a catalog that spring, boasting that it could be played at “extreme volume.” In Chicago, the instrument made its in-person debut—sparking notice as a wild creation from what was then a minor outfit in the far West. The Fender Esquire was the first solid-body standard electric guitar most industry insiders had ever seen, and the first intended to be mass-produced for everyday musicians. The guitar was easy to play, durable, and repairable, and could get very loud without feeding back.

  Competitors overlooked all that. Most mocked the Esquire as a “canoe paddle” or a “toilet seat with strings.” Fred Gretsch, whose New York firm made guitars and other instruments, told a colleague, “That thing’ll never sell.” The Fender looked like it came from a different universe than the hollow-bodied instruments of Gibson, Gretsch, and Epiphone—and it did. Those Eastern and Midwestern companies worked in fealty to the European tradition of guitar-making, in which artisans known as luthiers hand-built stringed instruments according to long-established standards. Except for their pickups, F-holes, and steel strings, the elite hollow-body electric guitars of 1950 weren’t so different from the acoustics made in Spain in 1850. To a traditional luthier, the idea of bolting a neck to a wooden board and calling the result a guitar, as this tiny California firm had done, was heresy. It was mass production, not artisanship.

  Musicians to whom Don Randall showed the Esquire found it exciting, even revelatory. Yet serious problems with the design emerged. At the trade show, the Esquire’s single, bright bridge pickup seemed lonely and impoverished next to competitors’ two- and three-pickup guitars. “It really looks hot, but it still isn’t a very
good instrument for rhythm,” Randall explained to Hall. The Fender pickup just sounded too sharp for playing background chords, an essential part of any guitarist’s duty.

  A friend also warned Randall that the Esquire’s unreinforced maple neck was vulnerable to bowing as the guitar’s tightly wound strings exerted pressure on it. Leo seems to have believed that the maple neck was strong enough on its own, but Randall was already having to apologize for his demonstration model. At the show, he learned that Gibson had invented a way to forestall bowing by adding an adjustable metal rod to the inside of the neck—and that Gibson’s patent on this design had just run out. “I really believe that this should be carefully considered,” Randall told Hall. “We could do ourselves a lot of harm by putting out a weak product.”

  Even as the most established companies mocked Fender’s solid-body design, others raced to copy it. Randall had revealed Leo’s ideas to the world in Chicago, thereby starting the clock on any advantage of surprise Fender had. The few Esquires that had been released to musicians so far were coming back with problems: dented pine bodies, shorted-out pickups, warped necks. Time was growing short to get the product into worthy shape and out to dealers. Though Radio-Tel had announced the guitar, marketed it, displayed it—and had even started taking orders for it the previous fall—Leo was still meddling with the design.

  And Randall was growing desperate. “Francis,” he wrote to Hall that summer of 1950, “I don’t believe you realize the gravity of the Spanish guitar situation. If something isn’t done soon we will have a very bad name. The complaints are terrific already and if you could talk to some of these people who have been made so many promises you would understand better what I mean.”

  Out on the road with players and dealers, Randall worried that only he truly saw Fender’s opportunity: “We have the beginning of a very fine product in our Spanish guitar. Nothing has been produced, in the past, by anyone that has created the excitement and speculation among dealers, players and even our competitors as has this instrument. Now if we don’t flood the market with our product you can bet your life our competitors will be right behind us with the same instrument only better and much fancier. The idea in our guitar has made a hit and believe me we better get on the ball—every day is precious. . . . If Leo misses the boat now I will never forgive him.”

  Randall knew that Fender had an instrument that might change not just the fortunes of their company but music itself. Everything now depended on getting Leo to relent on his obsession with improvement.

  11.

  “THE TIME WHEN IT WILL BE DELIVERED IS INDEFINITE”

  CALIFORNIA, SUMMER 1950–SPRING 1951

  On June 28, 1950, the handsome, cocky guitarist Jimmy Bryant arrived in the studio for his first recording session with Capitol Records. This was the label of Les Paul and the leading LA country singers, and Bryant was thrilled to be recording there—though he would have been more thrilled if he were the star. Instead, he and the steel guitarist Speedy West had been hired as session players to back a deep-voiced country boy named Tennessee Ernie Ford and a pop singer named Kay Starr on a couple of duets.

  Jimmy and Speedy had been building their reputation on a popular local country music TV show and were now getting featured segments that earned them even more notice. The men would sit at each other’s elbow and race through a jaunty instrumental while flashing conspiratorial grins: Speedy pricking the strings of his Bigsby steel guitar, making them sparkle; Bryant flying around the fretboard of his prototype Fender Esquire. Both played so fast that together they earned the nickname “Flaming Guitars.”

  Their job that June day wasn’t playing on a local TV show or hinterland square dance, however. It was a major recording date at one of the most important labels in the country. And, it would turn out, the very first recording session to capture Leo Fender’s new electric guitar.

  From the moment the musicians started into the ballad “I’ll Never Be Free,” something new began to happen. As Tennessee Ernie Ford and Kay Starr entangled their voices and a jazzy piano twinkled far in the background, the two electric guitars dueled in sci-fi tones—Speedy West slapping notes out of his steel, Jimmy Bryant issuing bright, liquid phrases on his Fender. “Each time I hold somebody new, my arms go cold aching for you,” Starr and Ford sang lushly. Behind them, Bryant played a pattern taken from the rhythm and blues bands popular on the south side of Los Angeles. When the singers paused, Bryant or West leapt out of the background, playing a twitchy little run or dribbling out a quick flurry of notes. But when the solo break came, Speedy West got the spotlight for all of it, a producer’s call that must have left Bryant frustrated.

  Though marketed as country, “I’ll Never Be Free” came out as rhythm and blues played by heartsick white people—it was based on a classic old blues called “Sitting on Top of the World.” The presence of electric guitars reinforcing an R & B groove pushed the record past old-style western swing and hillbilly, and toward a harder, simpler style of country that would become known as “honky-tonk,” after the rough halls in which it was played. And the electric tones of Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West would be essential to the song’s appeal. By the fall of 1950, “I’ll Never Be Free” sat at no. 2 on the national country charts and no. 3 on the pop charts—an astounding success. Its B-side, an up-tempo Ford and Starr duet entitled “Ain’t Nobody’s Business but My Own,” on which Bryant’s virtuosity was given more space to roam, hit no. 5 in country and no. 22 in pop. People sure seemed to like the gleaming, sharp voice of that Fender electric guitar. But even by the time Jimmy Bryant used it on a couple of national hits, most listeners still couldn’t buy one.

  • • •

  “I HOPE THEY start shipping the Spanish guitar soon,” Dave Driver, the Fender salesman who handled the Pacific Northwest, wrote to F. C. Hall on August 15, 1950. “I had built quite a lot of interest in it. In many places they had fellows come in to see it, and I also went out to show it at their request. Now when I call, they ride me.” Driver and the other Fender salesmen were deeply frustrated: their customers wanted an Esquire guitar, but they couldn’t get one. Leo Fender wasn’t yet satisfied with the design, so the Fullerton factory wasn’t producing the instrument in significant numbers.

  A few examples did find their way into the world. Leo allowed Dale Hyatt, a longtime employee who now ran his old radio shop, to sell what Leo claimed were “seconds”—flawed models unsuitable for the regular channels of business but likely to bring in some much-needed cash.

  In the summer of 1950, Hyatt drove a truckload of Fender equipment north through California’s Central Valley, stopping off at bars and honky-tonks along the way. He pulled over in Manteca, a farming town in Northern California where his brother lived, and that night went into a bar where a country band was playing. Hyatt had several Esquires with him, and took one inside to show the band, hoping to make a sale. The guitarist liked it and started playing it onstage. After a few minutes, though, the guitar suddenly quit working—its pickup just stopped sending out any signal. Hyatt had no idea what had gone wrong, but he went out to his truck and brought back another Esquire. Thirty minutes later, this one cut out, too, with the band onstage, in the middle of a song. The crowd was growing restless, and Hyatt was embarrassed. “[The crowd] started saying, ‘There he goes again, ladies and gentlemen, wonder how many he’s got?’ ” Hyatt told author Tony Bacon.

  Luckily, the third Esquire Hyatt brought in lasted for the rest of the evening. The player was impressed—and apparently unfazed by the Esquire’s dubious reliability. The next morning, he came to Hyatt’s brother’s house and asked to trade his son’s train set for a Fender guitar.

  When Leo heard this story, he made sure that if the Esquire’s wiring shorted, the signal would only be diminished, not completely cut. With the help of Jimmy Bryant, he also worked on a second pickup to give the Esquire a tone besides the sole strident one produced by the pickup near its bridge. Bryant considered himself a cowboy jazzman, and like m
ost jazz players, he appreciated elegant hollow-body guitars, especially Gibsons, for the warm, mellow tone that issued from pickups mounted near their necks. As Leo experimented with his own neck pickup, Bryant encouraged him to try to match the sound of Gibson’s grandest hollow-body, the Super 400. Creating that airiness and warmth with the Esquire was impossible, but Leo imitated it by designing a chrome-plated metal cover for the neck pickup that cut the high signals it captured. The mellower sound from this second pickup added a whole new character to the Fender guitar, and in recording sessions and live dates that year, Bryant made good use of it.

  One day, Leo Fender looked at his Esquire prototype and realized that its neck was bending upward, succumbing to pressure from the strings. This was the bowing problem Don Randall had been warned about in Chicago, and it was a catastrophe. Any imprecision in the location of the frets would lead to inaccurate notes, and making the instrument comfortable to play required controlling the narrow gap between the strings and the frets. Leo had thought the guitar didn’t need a reinforcing rod, and he’d been utterly wrong. “I believe that Leo is very much concerned about the Spanish guitar neck,” F. C. Hall wrote that summer of 1950 to Don Randall. “However, he hates to admit the situation.” Hall said that Leo would have to design a whole new neck to fix the problem, delaying release even further. “The time when it will be delivered,” he wrote, “is indefinite.”