The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  When Leo came to ask what Les thought of the instrument, and brought up the possibility of an endorsement, Les had bad news. “I told Leo, ‘Geez, you know, I’ve had a great relationship with Gibson all these years, and it’s part of the biggest instrument company in the world, and I’d like to take another shot at doing a guitar with them before I make a move.’ ” Les just wasn’t ready to give up on Gibson, even though Gibson had laughed at his last big idea. In his autobiography, Les claimed that Leo understood this decision. “He was okay with me not wanting to abruptly jump into something new.”

  But Les didn’t just decline the endorsement. He decided to use Leo’s breakthrough in a way that would change their relationship forever. In Les’s telling, he tried to wield the Fender solid-body as leverage to get Gibson to make the kind of instrument he wanted. After taking a close look at the Telecaster, Les claims he called Maurice H. Berlin, president of Gibson’s parent company, and told him about it. At a subsequent meeting, according to Les, Berlin asked him what he thought of the Telecaster. Les tried to put a bug in the executive’s ear: “I believe the solid-body guitar is going to be very important,” he told Berlin. “And if you don’t do something, Fender is going to rule the world.”

  • • •

  UNBEKNOWNST TO LES, Gibson was already working on an instrument to compete with the Fullerton creation. After seeing the Esquire on display at a 1950 trade show, M. H. Berlin and Ted McCarty, the president of Gibson, had ordered their staff to begin developing a rival solid-body electric guitar immediately.

  The Gibson company still occupied the Kalamazoo factory it had moved into in 1917, after rising high on the success of founder Orville Gibson’s exacting designs for mandolins and guitars. As one of the most respected American makers of stringed instruments, Gibson employed a staff of experienced artisans, many first- and second-generation Americans, still with German or Dutch names and accents, who practiced the fine art of luthiery. One man might develop a specialty—carving a body cutaway or shaping a neck block—and spend decades doing nothing but that single painstaking task. Builders tuned the company’s guitars by tapping their hollow bodies, listening to the resonances, and shaving or sanding wood until they got the precise sound they wanted, using skills that took years to perfect. Naturally, then, the fact that some unknown California outfit had bolted together a guitar out of boards—and that Gibson would have to compete with such a monstrosity—inspired some disgust in Kalamazoo. “We didn’t think it took a lot of skill to build a plank of wood that made a shrill sound,” remembered Ted McCarty. If Gibson was going to build a solid-body guitar, it would do so while meeting Gibson standards.

  Designers had nearly a year to work on the instrument while Fender’s operation fussed and delayed in getting its Telecaster to market. They realized quickly that a solid-body shaped like Gibson’s large jazz guitars would be uncomfortably heavy—and a small shape would work well. In 1951, they settled on a prototype with a solid mahogany body roughly three-quarters the size of a standard Gibson, and a single, sharp-pointed cutaway. A thin layer of maple was glued to the top of the body to brighten the tone. This maple panel was also contoured, or “carved,” giving the top of the guitar a curvaceous shape that offered several advantages. For one, it followed the design of Gibson’s carved-top hollow-body guitars, which were inspired by the rounded shape of a violin and had been a key innovation of company founder Orville Gibson. McCarty also believed the curves would distinguish—and dignify—Gibson’s solid-body contender. “I said, ‘Look, if we are going to make a guitar, we are going to make one that will be different than anything Leo was making,’ ” McCarty told the guitar historian Robb Lawrence. Gibson’s president knew that Fender didn’t have the equipment or craftsmen to make a carved-top guitar. It was a feature his biggest competitor couldn’t copy.

  Ted McCarty later said that given its position, Gibson “needed an excuse” to release a solid-body—a way to reconcile the avant-garde idea of the instrument with the august image of Gibson. To find one, he and M. H. Berlin had to look no further than the Billboard charts of 1951, or the reader’s poll in that year’s DownBeat magazine. At the top of both was the man who’d first brought them that broomstick with pickups, who’d been urging Gibson to make a solid-body guitar since the early 1940s, who’d turned the metallic gleam of his home-built instruments into a sound that was both popular and respectable. The endorsement of that player would give Gibson a great excuse.

  So in the fall of 1951, only a few months after Don Randall and Leo Fender had sought Les Paul’s endorsement for their new solid-body guitar, McCarty flew from Kalamazoo to New York City for the very same purpose. McCarty met with Phil Braunstein, Les’s financial adviser, and the two drove some ninety miles out of town to try to find Les and Mary, who were holed up in a hunting lodge near the Delaware Water Gap, in a mountain retreat owned by the bandleader Ben Selvin. The couple had set up their equipment in Selvin’s living room and planned to record nonstop, day after day—or rather, night after night: their habit. Upon hearing that they’d have a surprise visitor, Les sent his brother-in-law, Wally Kamin, to find the party at a nearby diner and guide them up the twisty, narrow roads to the top of the mountain. When McCarty and Braunstein finally arrived at the lodge late that night, heavy rain poured out of a pitch-black sky.

  Inside, after a warming cup of coffee and a few minutes of small talk, McCarty unveiled the prototype his designers had so carefully labored over. Here was Gibson’s version of a solid-body guitar: A classic rounded shape with a single cutaway. Inarguably elegant. Two single-coil pickups of the kind found on the firm’s hollow-body electrics. A thick mahogany body capped with a carved maple top. A mahogany neck that had been carefully glued—not bolted—to the body. Plugged into an amplifier, the guitar produced a rich, powerful sound, with a response that could vary from warm and round to bright and clear with the adjustment of its pickup switch and tone knobs.

  Though entirely the creation of Gibson designers, not Les himself, the prototype solid-body shared profound similarities with Les Paul. Both stood as conservative radicals within their historical moment, pursuing new ideas without violating current standards of respectability. The sonic advances Les had achieved were tremendous, but he innovated within the established order of the music industry, according to what he knew would please a large, grown-up audience. Gibson luthiers had struck a similar balance. A solid-bodied, purely electric design stood as intrinsically radical in 1951. Yet this prototype strove in every way to meet the standards of respectability long established by Gibson’s acoustic models, from its familiar body shape to a carved top that suggested fine, old-world craftsmanship.

  Even the guitar’s sound was conservative, mimicking the mellow tones that hollow-body electric guitars employed in jazz. A Fender Telecaster might scream or twang or even howl; it could certainly offend some ears. As envisioned by its creators in 1951, this Gibson model was almost incapable of producing an ugly or unbalanced sound. It was a solid-body electric with none of the raffishness or bellicosity of the Fender; a guitar for tuxedos and velvet-curtained theaters rather than ten-gallon hats and dusty honky-tonks.

  Inside the airy, wood-paneled hunting lodge, Les plucked out runs on the Gibson prototype. As Mary puttered about upstairs, he called up to her, delighted. “They’re getting awfully close to us,” he said—by which he meant that this instrument nearly matched the sound of their homebuilt clunkers. “I think we should join them.”

  As with most activities involving Les, negotiating the details took place through the night, fueled by pots of coffee that Mary brewed and poured. By the time she was cooking them breakfast, Les, Ted McCarty, and Les’s financial adviser had a deal written out by hand on a page and a half of plain paper.

  In the entire history of Gibson guitars, going back to the late 1800s, only two players had been given signature models. Lester Polsfuss would be the third. Gibson would call its first solid-body electric guitar the Les Paul Model, pay
ing Les a royalty for every instrument sold. Even better, the company would claim that Les himself had designed the guitar, capitalizing on his reputation for technological innovation.

  In return, Les would offer his insights and feedback to Gibson, suggesting a few tweaks to the prototype. He would also not be seen in public using any other maker’s guitar, or risk losing his earnings. The executives were so serious about this last point that they sent Les a supply of Gibson nameplates to stick on his clunkers, covering up their Epiphone badges, while the new instrument was readied for production. The nameplates wouldn’t be needed for long. Gibson planned to offer the new guitar—featuring Les Paul’s signature emblazoned in gold on the headstock—the very next year.

  14.

  “LIKE A SURGING UNDERTOW”

  CALIFORNIA AND CHICAGO, 1950–1952

  The guitar players who hung around the Fender factory all moaned about the same problems. Leo couldn’t fix the trouble with their wives or mistresses, or the old heaps they drove around on the terrible LA roads—but one of their complaints did get his mind humming. The guitarists would hear of gigs playing upright bass for a night, but they couldn’t take them, because the upright bass was unusually difficult to play. On the “doghouse,” as musicians called it, you had to just know where to put your fingers to find a note—there were no frets to show which points on the neck corresponded with which pitches. Holding down those eighth-inch-thick strings was challenging on its own. String bass players were thus difficult to find, leaving bands incomplete. Listening to these complaints, Leo mused that if any of his guitar-playing friends could quickly adjust to a bass, they’d have another source of rent money.

  The plight of impoverished musicians aside, it really was too bad the doghouse was so hard to play, since the instrument was all but essential to most music. On a standard eighty-eight-key piano, there are nineteen keys, representing nearly two octaves, below the lowest E note of a standard guitar. The guitar bottoms out at eighty-two hertz, but human hearing goes down to about twenty hertz. These sonic depths are where notes solidify into percussive thumps, and they give music a particular power. Listening to a mezzo-soprano sing a beautiful aria won’t get the folks dancing, but a bass’s simple, deep, repetitive rhythm will.

  As Leo continued his pondering, he saw how outdated the double bass really was. Like an acoustic guitar, it couldn’t stand out among the saxophones and trumpets in popular bands. Bass players couldn’t even hear themselves—Leo would see them leaning over to put their ears against their instruments, soaking up the vibrations through their skulls. He also knew the difficulty and loneliness that an upright bass could cause its player. Even a “three-quarters size” model stretched to nearly six feet in length and could barely fit in a car. Usually players put their instrument in a canvas bag and tied it to a car roof, hoping it wouldn’t rain, hoping that the huge thing wouldn’t fall off while they were driving, which it often did. Or the player drove alone, their wooden burden taking up the entire passenger cabin, while everyone else in the band yukked it up in another car.

  These problems bounced around in Leo’s mind while he was developing the Telecaster, and they came to a head one night while he was at a Mexican restaurant. Leo gave few details about this revelation, but it’s easy enough to picture.

  A warm evening in 1950. It was time to go home, but Leo’s mind was still buzzing after his day at the workbench—a day perhaps spent tweaking the neck pickup on his new electric guitar, or fending off calls from Don Randall for more product. He clicked off the lamp over his bench, walked out of his steel factory building, and made the five-minute drive in his ’49 Ford sedan to the rented duplex where he and Esther lived. Then they took off for a rare dinner out.

  At the Mexican restaurant, Leo’s mind was still occupied by work, but eventually, his attention drifted over to the mariachi band performing inside the dining room—a common sight in Fullerton, where many, including some of Leo’s earliest and most loyal employees, were of Mexican descent. The mariachis had a couple of acoustic guitar players, and, to accompany them, one man strumming what looked like a huge, bulbous guitar. This instrument had six strings pulled across an acoustic body—a body the size of a large man’s chest and as deep as a washtub. Its low notes wafted through the restaurant like heavy whispers as the musicians walked through, serenading different tables. Leo watched the mariachis perform, saying nothing at all to Esther, the wheels of his mind turning while his beef enchiladas (or whatever they were) cooled on the table. He was usually quiet—but it would have been clear from his penetrating gaze that a big idea was forming in his head.

  Nearly all stringed bass instruments in Western music, like the double bass and the cello, are played vertically. The wooden bathtub the mariachis were using was a guitarrón, a bass instrument played horizontally, like a guitar. Watching the mariachis, Leo realized what his competitors hadn’t: that building a bass in the same shape as a guitar would solve a lot of problems. A horizontal design would make an easy adjustment for guitarists, of course, and would free up the player to dance and move around. If Leo built a bass just like his new electric guitar—with a solid, feedback-resistant body—it wouldn’t even need a massive acoustic chamber like a guitarrón; it could be thin and light and still get as loud as the player wanted. Some previous designer had sought a booming, portable bass instrument, and their decades-old solution led Leo to an idea that made perfect sense: just build a bass like a deeper-pitched electric guitar.

  Not two years later, the fruit of this idea showed up on the other side of the country.

  One evening in the late spring or early summer of 1952, a jazz critic named Leonard Feather scanned the players on the stage before him, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. There were the usual dozen or so members of Lionel Hampton’s big band. The leader and vibraphonist had stationed himself out front, nodding and grinning as he pattered over the tiles of his instrument, clearly pleased with the thick, limber swell of the groove. Hampton’s music was pure pleasure—swing jazz, agile and humorous, with a beat that bore the muscle of rhythm and blues. Hampton’s players looked every bit the urbane professionals they were: their fine dark suits and freshly shined shoes set off the gleaming brass of the horns and the chrome accents on the drum kit and guitar.

  The guitar—that was what struck Feather, a friend of Hampton’s and a longtime critic for the magazine DownBeat. There were two guitars up onstage, which was strange. And there was something else, “something wrong with the band,” a usual character missing from its instrumental lineup: the hulking brown silhouette of the upright double bass. Feather scanned the battery of players onstage and didn’t see its outline. As large as a man, maybe larger, the acoustic bass shouldn’t have been hard to find. “And yet,” Feather recalled later, “we heard a bass.” Hampton’s orchestra seemed to glide along on a wave of low-end might, sounding a little weightier in the bass register than usual.

  Feather looked at the two guitars again. One was a standard, hollow-body jazz model. The other appeared like something out of a science-fiction comic book. Its “peculiarly shaped body” had two horns—there was nothing else to call them—and a yellow finish with a modish black blob on one side. Its neck stretched past the length of a standard guitar’s and ended in a strange asymmetrical headstock, with all the tuning pegs lined up on one side. Other details stood out on the lower half of the body: two “electric controls and a wire running to a speaker.”

  Feather had never seen anything like this before. He was so curious that he approached the bandleader during the next set break and asked about it.

  “That’s our electric bass,” Hampton told the critic with customary enthusiasm. “We’ve had it for months!”

  Feather had never heard of such a thing, and he looked the instrument over as Hampton and his bass player, Roy Johnson, walked him through its details. As a jazz writer, and a friend to musicians, Feather was well aware of the burden bass players endured in playing and transporting th
eir gigantic instruments. Compared to an upright, this yellow, bloblike bass was tiny—a broom instead of a bathtub. Roy Johnson said it was so easy to play that he’d used it on a gig the first night he’d gotten it.

  Feather spent the next set listening carefully, noting the “deep, booming quality of the instrument’s tone,” nearly as warm and mellow as an upright’s. To make a doghouse louder, all you could do was slap the strings harder, and that just made a sharp popping sound. With this, when you turned up the volume knob, the bass notes actually got louder. The result, Feather noted approvingly, “cut through the whole bottom of the band like a surging undertow.”

  By the time he left the club that night, Leonard Feather was buzzing with the same excitement that had caught Hampton and Johnson. A while later, in a July 1952 feature story for DownBeat, he declared that this thin electric bass could be a “sensational instrumental innovation.” But quite a few jazz players—and leaders in almost every other realm of music—wouldn’t be so sure.

  The previous fall, Don Randall had written to Fender salesmen about the new electric bass the company was developing: “The neck is fretted like a guitar, and it is simply one of the most sensational products to hit the market,” he told East Coast salesman Mike Cole. “We have several out being checked by big time operators . . . The reports are simply astounding.”

  The instrument would be called the Precision Bass, a name chosen by Leo “due to the fact that it is fretted and leaves no guess work as to where the notes fall.” Players could press down in the same place as on a guitar for the same pitch, just one octave lower. “It may be hard for you to get used to the idea of a bass being played like a guitar, but the performers are really going for it in a big way,” Randall wrote. “It can be played on the down beat rather than having to use the regular bass motion of grabbing at the strings. It also produces full volume output with a minimum amount of effort, which means they can develop a very fine, fast finger style of playing. It has allowed these bass men to improve their technique far beyond anything that anyone ever imagined.”