The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  Leo and his factory employees spent much of that fall designing a so-called truss rod and devising a way to install it. George Fullerton’s wiry father, Fred—who’d joined the company two weeks after his son—developed a method in which a channel was cut in the back of the neck, the rod was inserted, and then it was covered over with a narrow strip of walnut. The Fender guitar thus acquired another quintessential visual feature: the so-called “skunk stripe” of brown wood running up the back of its yellow maple neck.

  By the start of 1951, Leo was finally satisfied with his electric standard guitar. With two pickups, a striking asymmetrical headstock with all the tuning pegs on one side, and gleaming chrome components, the Fender Esquire had evolved dramatically. This slab of wood transformed into a guitar had become a professional-quality instrument, and Don Randall felt it needed a new name to distinguish it from the more primitive item he’d shown the previous year. As Fender was surrounded in Southern California by the industry of mass communication, working with players like Jimmy Bryant who earned their living on the radio, Randall decided to call it the “Broadcaster.” If the model were to succeed, after all, it would do so largely over the airwaves.

  A full-page insert ran in the February 1951 issue of Musical Merchandise: “New Fender Electric Standard,” the headline proclaimed. Detailed illustrations, based on photos that Leo took himself, pointed out the guitar’s features: a “modern cut-away body,” an adjustable bridge, a switch that selected between the two pickups. The early Esquires were painted black, but these drawings showed a Broadcaster with a translucent blond finish capped by a black plastic pickguard, giving striking contrast to a design that was otherwise radically plain.

  Orders had poured in to Radio-Tel ever since the fall of 1949, but now, Leo didn’t want to make the single-pickup Esquire for which the early orders called. His factory began producing the newer two-pickup Broadcaster. Leo didn’t care that he was about to ship a guitar other than what the buyers had asked for, that the difference in names and specs would confuse many. He wanted to put the best example of his creation out into the world first. One way or another, he assumed, the back orders, many of which had been languishing in Radio-Tel’s files for nearly eighteen months, would get filled.

  But among those who noticed the announcement of the Broadcaster were executives at the Fred Gretsch company in Brooklyn, makers of guitars and drums. On the morning of February 20, 1951, Don Randall received a telegram:

  YOUR USE OF TRADEMARK BROADKASTER ON YOUR ELECTRIC GUITAR IS INFRINGEMENT OF OUR TRADEMARK BROADKASTER U.S. PATENT OFFICE REGISTRATION 347503 OF 29 JUNE 1937. WE REQUEST IMMEDIATE ASSURANCE THAT YOU ARE ABANDONING THE USE OF THIS NAME—THE FRED GRETSCH MFG CO

  Fender spelled the name of its guitar with a “C,” but that didn’t matter. In the universe of musical instruments, “Broadkaster” belonged to Gretsch, as a moniker for its flagship drum line. The Fender salesman on the East Coast was already encountering dealers confused by the coexistence of the Broadcaster guitar and Broadkaster drums.

  Here was an embarrassing and frustrating setback—one more delay after so many, and this one coming just when it looked like Fender had finished its standard guitar. Randall wrote to his salesmen, admitting a major mistake but striking his usual upbeat tone: “It is a shame that our efforts in both selling and advertising are lost, but I am sure we can change over with little or any detrimental effects.” He asked for other name ideas, too. But Gretsch’s complaint was not going to keep Fender from getting its instrument out. After the telegram, someone in Fullerton, probably Leo himself, simply cut the “Broadcaster” lettering off the headstock decals, and guitars were shipped from the factory bearing no model name at all, just “Fender” in thin cursive.

  Three days after the bad news, Randall had an idea. The revolutionary technology of the day was television—a device similar to radio, but with a screen that showed moving pictures along with sound. It was already a hit with American consumers; some twelve million televisions flickered in the nation’s homes by 1951. Leo’s old radio shop now had a television and a speaker hanging in its front window that lured passersby to stand and watch. The Fender electric guitar would enter a world in which Americans didn’t just listen to their news and entertainment but watched them in real time. People would hear this electric guitar with their eyes.

  So Randall coined the name “Telecaster.” It sounded newer, fresher, and sharper than “Broadcaster,” more in line with the times, perhaps even vaguely telepathic, hinting at supernatural ease of play. Telephone, television, Telecaster: Instruments of communication. Ways to be heard and seen. Powerful new technologies.

  It took a month for Randall’s patent attorney to clear the name. Leo’s factory would use the “Fender”-only decals until August, probably because Leo didn’t want to waste them. But by the spring of 1951, the instrument was in full production in Fullerton and for sale everywhere Randall’s salesmen could get it. Two pickups, a body of solid wood, a thin neck that allowed for fast movement. “This guitar can be played at extreme volume without the danger of feedback,” the catalog touted. Now it had a name that announced it as belonging to the second half of the twentieth century. The Fender Telecaster had finally arrived.

  12.

  “GUESS I SHOULDN’T HAVE FOUGHT YOU SO LONG ABOUT RELEASING THIS”

  HOLLYWOOD AND NEW YORK CITY, WINTER 1950–SUMMER 1951

  After “Lover,” Les Paul released a string of singles, and only one—“Nola”—matched the success of the first. Critics were grumbling that his “new sound” had grown tiresome. Les felt enthusiastic about the music he was making with Mary, but Capitol Records didn’t. The label turned down their initial recorded collaboration, and their first real release together, “Until I Hold You Again,” did nothing exciting on the charts.

  In late 1950, the singer Patti Page released “The Tennessee Waltz,” a lovelorn ballad that became a blockbuster hit. The recording featured multitracked layers of her voice—a technique Les felt was borrowed, or stolen, from him. Les and Mary quickly released their own version, and it reached no. 6 on the pop charts early in 1951. Their release almost certainly confused buyers who were seeking Page’s record, but this was a common route to success in the cutthroat music industry. Les didn’t care—he ached to reach the top of the charts, stubbornly aware that even with his reputation as a guitarist and Mary’s beautiful voice, the couple was still considered a second-tier act at best.

  To rise up a rung, Les persuaded Mary to record a song she hated. Their next big release, in January 1951, was the cloying jingle “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” a tune Mary had dismissed as soon as she heard it. But Capitol had suggested it as a potential hit, and Les agreed, suspecting that its bouncy, singsong melody would glue itself into listeners’ ears. The label and Les were right: the couple’s “Mockin’ Bird Hill” went to no. 2 and stayed there for five weeks, despite complaints from critics that “ditto vocals”—meaning sound-on-sound recordings—“have been milked for all they are worth.”

  With this success, Les felt emboldened to press Capitol to release a recording it had been sitting on for months. He thought the song and production were stupendous—perhaps the wildest sound-on-sound job he’d ever done, with Mary or without. But Jim Conkling, Les and Mary’s A & R man at Capitol, steadfastly refused to release it. Record shops already had dozens of different copies of this tune by various artists, Conkling said, and none had sold well. He believed there was no way stores would stock one more version. To Les, this must have sounded similar to the rejection Gibson had given his Log guitar eight years earlier.

  Ever since they’d started performing together, Les Paul and Mary Ford had toyed with “How High the Moon,” a standard sometimes called the “national anthem of jazz.” They tried out different tempos and arrangements, carefully noting which versions received the most applause. One night, they recorded it on the Ampex tape machine in the tiny apartment they kept in Queens, New York. Their “How High” raced along, wi
th Les cutting out bright, busy lines on one of his clunker guitars and Mary’s singing layered into an anodyne sheen.

  As sung by, say, Ella Fitzgerald, who kept it in her live show for years, “How High the Moon” was a tune about longing for a distant lover, its mood wistful but not devastated: classic fare for the lounge era. Les and Mary’s interpretation was R & B–like in its blistering tempo and otherworldly sonics. Les’s harried, single-note runs screamed despite the lack of any distortion on his guitar, and Mary’s vocals conveyed warmth and coldness simultaneously, a soaring melody made slightly nauseous by so many disembodied layers of electronic voice. Their song was no personal demonstration of feeling, no revelation of longing, but a canvas for brilliant new sounds and textures. It was a production in which tonality mattered more than the tune itself—an utterly modern recording.

  Les was desperate to put it out, and finally, in early 1951, the couple caught a break. Jim Conkling was leaving to become president of Columbia Records, and with one foot out the door, he relented on “How High the Moon”—since, if the disc sold badly, it would no longer be his problem. On March 26, 1951, Capitol issued Les Paul and Mary Ford’s stylized take on the jazz standard. Reactions from the press came immediately. One critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it the “most unusual side of the week.” He also noted it among the bestsellers.

  Les and Mary had made some solid hits, but it soon became clear that “How High the Moon” was succeeding on a different scale than anything they’d ever done. In less than a month, the recording hit no. 1 on the all-important Billboard pop chart, a spot it held for nine weeks. It became ubiquitous on radio and jukeboxes. It also found appeal outside the pop market, becoming the first single by a white act to reach the higher echelons of the rhythm and blues charts, rising to no. 2 on the jukebox list in May. All in all, the song would stay on Billboard’s popular tally for twenty-five weeks that year. Its appeal, as a jazz standard transformed into a revelatory piece of recorded pop-art, was tremendous. Virtually from the moment of its release, Les’s and Mary’s lives changed forever.

  By November, the couple could claim sales of more than four million records in six months. Their total for the year 1951 would reach six million wax platters sold. For even as “How High the Moon” grabbed the no. 1 slot, their earlier release, “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” held strong just below it. Observers in the press were flabbergasted by what seemed like an overnight success. “So far this year, Paul and Ford have turned out about one bestseller a month,” Time magazine wrote in October. Cash Box, a jukebox trade magazine, noted in August that the duo had “risen to the top of the ladder in just a few short months, and [were] still going strong.” Their “How High the Moon” had officially gone blockbuster—and even Jim Conkling had to admit it. In early September, Conkling, now the head of Columbia, sent a telegram to the Hollywood bungalow: “Dear Les and Mary congratulations for having the No. 1 record of the year according to Billboard Disc Jockey poll. Guess I shouldn’t have fought you so long about releasing this.”

  To those just taking notice, the couple seemed to have come upon a surefire formula for making hits. And in a sense, they had. Over years of performing with the guitar, Les had learned how to dazzle audiences with his instrument, but he’d also learned that virtuosity alone wasn’t enough. Even setting off electric fireworks in between verses from a beautiful singer wasn’t a reliable crowd-pleaser. Les and Mary’s trick was to put all their tricks together—the crisp, modern sound of his electric guitar; the sweet, vaguely hillbilly flavor of her voice; and the multivalent textures of his sound-on-sound recording techniques. They gave audiences a shock of the modern, but crucially, they didn’t alter the hummable core of a song. “This ‘New Sound’ Mary and I do doesn’t fool around with the melody,” Les once explained to a reporter. “It leaves the tune alone and puts the filigrees around it. The tune is there; it’s just got a new and fancy frame.”

  A lot of behind-the-scenes work helped capitalize on Les and Mary’s newfound popularity. Within weeks of the release of “How High the Moon,” the couple were doing everything they could to make the song ubiquitous, traveling around the country to meet DJs, appearing on radio and television shows, and performing live. In less than three months, they visited some fifteen hundred disc jockeys and record stores in thirty cities. Les loved driving around and doing publicity; he almost never turned down an appearance, and by the end of 1951 these efforts helped bring him and Mary to the peak of national fame. Their hits continued. In late August, Billboard announced that Les Paul and Mary Ford held four spots on its Best Selling Pop Singles chart simultaneously. They were the only artists in history to do so.

  13.

  “IF YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING, FENDER IS GOING TO RULE THE WORLD”

  CALIFORNIA, MICHIGAN, AND PENNSYLVANIA, SUMMER–FALL 1951

  Hunching over his desk at the Radio-Tel offices in Santa Ana, Don Randall watched orders pour in for Fender’s new Spanish electric guitar. In March, he reported working three or four nights every week until ten thirty p.m. and still falling behind. Exhausted and thrilled by May, before guitars had even left the factory bearing the new Telecaster name, Randall crowed about the order deluge in letters to his salesmen. Then he pushed them for more. “Our Spanish guitar is selling in quantity that surprises even us, but we still aren’t doing a good job,” he told one. Some dealers had ordered the Fender electric so long ago that they were surprised by its arrival, but most moaned about not getting guitars fast enough.

  At $189.50, plus $39.95 for a hard case, the Telecaster was a relative bargain, and Fender was setting new sales records every month. Randall still thought the company could do better. He remembered what it had been like to walk the floors of the trade shows and be laughed at by Fender’s larger rivals in the East, to see his firm casually dismissed for even dreaming up a solid-body guitar. There was one thing, he knew, that would shut those naysayers up for good.

  That spring of 1951, there would have been no better endorser for the new Fender guitar than Les Paul, the most popular electric guitarist in the country. Getting a Fender Telecaster in Paul’s pop-star hands would virtually guarantee massive sales and acceptance around the country—not just in California and the Southwest, where Fender was already popular. It would be a coup, nabbing this famous player from established firms like Gibson and Epiphone, whose instruments he’d always preferred. Don Randall knew that Leo and Les were friendly, and both Don and Leo desperately wanted Les to adopt the Telecaster. So one evening in the middle of June, Randall went to try to make it happen.

  “I was up in Los Angeles Saturday night, and talked to Les Paul,” Randall wrote to a colleague on June 21, 1951. “[I] left him a guitar and amplifier to try this week, and he is going to give them a good workout and let me know his opinion. You probably know he has been using one of our Super Amps for a long time. In fact, it looks like he must have had it for a hundred years or more. This week, he is trying a Pro Amp and Telecaster guitar and his comments should be very interesting.”

  To Les, Randall gave a translucent blond, two-pickup Telecaster with no name decal, its neck inscribed with the date 5-10-51. Les apparently thought the guitar was a prototype rather than a production model, more or less confirming Randall’s impression that he couldn’t be bothered to pay too much attention to either the guitar or the man delivering it. “This was the first occasion I had to meet Les and to watch him perform in person, and believe me, he is really a fine instrumentalist,” Randall wrote. “However, he appears to be somewhat self-centered. Mary Ford is a very gracious person and very talented. She sings beautifully and plays the guitar better than nine-tenths of the people playing today.” Self-centered or not, Les Paul mattered enough that Randall eagerly awaited his verdict.

  Les later recalled that there with the Telecaster was a note from Leo, asking him “to look at [the guitar] and think about it.” Here was an instrument that embodied the ideas Les had long championed, a solid-body guitar that showe
d the way to the future. Leo wanted Les’s endorsement, but business may not have been his only motive. Leo would’ve wanted to show his friendly rival what he’d been up to—to brag, just a little, in the quiet, matter-of-fact way he did everything. The advances that Les, Leo, and Paul Bigsby had talked about on those afternoons in Les’s backyard were reflected neatly and powerfully in the Telecaster. What had been just wild notions, near-hunches, were now a commercial product, modestly priced, practically designed, and available in music stores all around the country. They’d all been working on the same problem, and Leo believed he’d solved it—not just for a few well-heeled professionals, as Bigsby had, but for guitar players everywhere.

  “This is where I’m going,” Leo told Les around this time, as Les recalled. “Would you like to come and be a part of it?”

  Les thought joining with Fender might be smart. Leo had shown the ability to realize a radical and controversial idea. The Telecaster was now a guitar that regular working musicians could buy, one strikingly different from anything else hanging in a music store. A partnership with Leo “first hit me as a swell idea,” Les recalled.

  Then he started to consider his long, on-and-off relationship with Gibson, whose guitars he’d loved since childhood. The Fullerton operation, though it had a revolutionary new product, was still tiny. “There was no Fender then,” Les told an interviewer—which, while incorrect, suggests the meagerness of Fender’s national impact. “There was just Leo planning to do this.”

  Gibson had turned down Les’s idea for the Log a decade earlier, and Les now played mostly Epiphones he’d modified himself, but he still felt a connection with the prestigious Michigan company. Crucially, Les also decided that he didn’t really like Leo’s Telecaster very much. The sound of it was too bright and sharp for him. The design was too plain, too straightforward, too unlovely. The Fender was a common man’s guitar, and Les had always viewed himself as exceptional.