The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  Back then, Randall was right about one thing: it was hard for people to get used to the idea of a bass played like a guitar. The following summer, in 1952, he and his salesmen unveiled the Precision Bass at the major trade show in Chicago, and were met with no small amount of derision. “Portable String Bass Really New,” mused the headline in Musical Merchandise, with a story far more skeptical than the usual promotional blurb: “Obviously, the new bass is a big departure from the standard type of bass, as it is only one-sixth the size and is played in the same position as a guitar.”

  The Precision Bass looked different from any instrument on the market, weirder even than the boardlike Telecaster. Leo had wanted its weight to balance horizontally on a player’s lap or shoulders, and to achieve this, he and George created a body that had two horns curving far out over the neck, like the fingers of flames painted on the side of a hot rod. The shape struck some as incredibly ugly, others as terrifically provocative—but it came from Leo’s obsession with practicality.

  Other details, like the chrome knobs and bridge cover, the translucent yellow finish and black pickguard, were taken straight from the Telecaster. Putting them together into an instrument for which there were no existing dimensions to copy, nor any usable strings to buy and test on prototypes, had put Leo and George through another year of headaches and lost sleep. The result was Fender’s most original creation yet—and its most controversial.

  At the trade show, a photographer captured salesman Mike Cole trying to hand a floor model to one wary-looking music dealer from Connecticut. “Yes, it IS a bass,” a caption writer would quip. Salesman Charlie Hayes, who was also present, would later recall that “those who were not sure if Leo was crazy when he brought out the solid-body guitar were darn sure he was crazy now, since he came up with an electric bass. They were convinced that a person would have to be out of their mind to play that thing.”

  Leonard Feather’s excited reaction in DownBeat had been an exception. In 1952, most people had a hard time seeing what this skinny electric Fender bass would be good for.

  • • •

  DOWN THE HALLWAY at the same Chicago trade show, “dealers really rushed the guitar room” where Gibson was introducing its new solid-body electric. “Those who played it . . . said that all traces of feed-back and over-tone have been eliminated in the Les Paul Model Gibson,” one report went. “Those hearing it agree that it produced a wealth of contrasting tonal effects, from brilliant treble to full, deep bass, with a good solid in-between voice for rhythm.”

  Everything about the Gibson Les Paul suggested privilege and status. The instrument’s long list of features—a body made with two types of wood, volume and tone knobs for each pickup, faux mother-of-pearl inlays—paled next to its most striking aspect: a metallic gold finish. In 1952, guitars came in black or shades of stained wood, not bright hues. The gold finish both distinguished this instrument and, of course, exuded opulence. If Leo Fender had built a Volkswagen with his Telecaster, the Gibson Les Paul was a Cadillac: mannered, smooth, and striving for elegance in every detail. On its traditional headstock curled the signature of the man himself, in flaky gold lettering as large as the Gibson logo.

  Les, of course, had had almost nothing to do with the development of the instrument, adding only a bridge he’d developed (which, because of a production error, hampered the earliest models) and insisting on the gold finish. But he’d let the claim stand. For decades, it would help buttress the wildly incorrect statement (which Les also never quite denied) that he “invented” the solid-body electric guitar, an instrument that simply can’t be attributed to one single person.

  By 1952, in the wake of the Telecaster, a handful of competing solid-body models had reached the market. Only Gibson offered one that tried to improve on the Fender and sold for a higher price. The most respected American guitar maker had given its imprimatur to the idea of a fully electric six-string—and after realizing this in Chicago, its competitors were livid. “Ted, how could you do this?” Fred Gretsch complained to Gibson’s Ted McCarty. “Now anybody with a band saw and a router can make a guitar. That’s the sort of thing that Fender is selling.” Gretsch insisted to McCarty that if the rest of the companies hadn’t followed Leo Fender’s lead by making a solid-body guitar, the trend would’ve died out.

  But McCarty saw that a fully electric design had undeniable advantages. As music grew louder, fighting feedback would only become more important. The solid-body electric wasn’t going away, even if companies like Gibson and Gretsch ignored it. The only option was to answer Fullerton with something better.

  “He’s cutting into the market,” McCarty said of Leo Fender. “And we’re going to give him a run for his money.”

  15.

  “DIM LIGHTS, THICK SMOKE, AND LOUD, LOUD MUSIC”

  CHICAGO, MEMPHIS, AND BAKERSFIELD, 1948–1952

  Three miles from where Don Randall and Ted McCarty were unveiling their new solid-bodied electric instruments, in a black neighborhood in Chicago, a revolution was beginning. This revolution would determine the future of Fender and Gibson, Randall and McCarty, Leo Fender and Les Paul—and alter the sounds musicians made across the world. It first gathered force when a style of music born decades earlier, in the fields of the South, came to the city. One of the men who’d brought it was an obscure black sharecropper born McKinley Morganfield, an almost invisible presence in the United States but for the songs he sang as Muddy Waters.

  Days after Muddy Waters stepped off the train from Mississippi, in 1943, his sister had told him: “They don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doing now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago.” The popular sound then was slick, up-tempo swing jazz, led by saxophones and pianos. Muddy was thirty years old and had spent almost his entire life on a cotton plantation near Clarksdale, venturing north to make money in a factory, not pursue a career in music. But in Chicago he kept meeting older bluesmen he knew from down south, folks like Big Bill Broonzy, who introduced him around as a good blues singer. Muddy just had a look about him, a fineness that seemed to mark him as special. His straightened hair was slicked back around the sides of his head and combed neatly, making him look younger than his years. High cheekbones framed huge brown eyes whose initial mirth hid an innate wariness—and hid it well. The magazines would call him “Dreamy Eyes.”

  Muddy’s uncle had laughed at the simple acoustic guitar his nephew brought to the city. That thing might do in the South, where the night was silent, but not in Chicago, with the automobiles and the street cars and the clatter that a liquor-fueled party made in even a small room. So the uncle gave Muddy his first electric guitar, a cheap hollow-body with a pickup. Muddy and another friend started jamming in the four-room apartment he rented on the West Side, getting a few songs together, and soon they were playing parties. There was a tavern a half block from Muddy’s place where he’d go to drink and sometimes eat. Back then “he was almost like a bum off the street,” the tavern owner told biographer Robert Gordon. But when Muddy asked the proprietor of the Club Zanzibar to let him and his boys take over the bandstand one evening, she agreed.

  Here was where the revolution really began, as far back as 1948: a small room with stools at a half-circular bar, Formica tables capped with black plastic ashtrays, boxes of bottled beer stacked against the wall. A room filled on weekend nights with men in crisp slacks and pressed shirts and women smiling from under fur hats, all trying to forget the hours they spent stamping out paychecks at the mill or the stockyard. No white faces, but that was no surprise in this part of Chicago. The surprise was the music, which hit like a wall.

  Muddy would sit in a chair at the front of the tiny stage, caressing his electric guitar. A suitcase-shaped amplifier lay in front of his legs, aimed out at the gyrating ladies and the men chewing pigs’ feet and corned beef sandwiches. There were only three other musicians up there with him—another guitarist, a drummer, and a harmonica player—and not a single sax or horn. The core of the mu
sic was vocals, rhythm, and electric guitar. Yet it overwhelmed the room. Muddy’s instrument was cranked up so high it distorted the amplifier, his crackling tone tracing the drummer’s slow shuffle. When he finished singing a verse, Muddy slid over his guitar strings with the piece of metal pipe on his pinky, sending out a wailing, moaning sound. His slide seemed to jab toward a resolution that would never quite come, mirroring the ache in his words, scraping the song toward its climax. And when the solo ended, Muddy slammed his dreamy eyes shut and let a hoarse tremble surface in his voice, as if he could barely get the next lines out:

  Minutes seemed like hours, and hours gon’ to seem like days

  Seems like my baby would stop her old evil ways

  Minutes seemed like hours, and hours seemed like days

  Well now, seems like my baby child, well child would stop her low down ways

  The people gyrating near the bandstand writhed in joy to this exquisite portrait of longing—a personal longing, of course, but in some ways a public one. The song was called “I Feel Like Going Home,” once a classic country blues, now an electric lamentation for a black community that had recently left the South to find a better life in this noisy and chaotic Northern city.

  One gig turned into more. Muddy’s band would visit other clubs, ask to sit in with the bands, and then blow them off the stage with the power and intensity of their amplified music. They called themselves the Headhunters, slashing their way into more and more gigs around town with their electric instruments.

  A while later, Muddy found himself inside a downtown recording studio, where the people in charge, a well-to-do white lady and a foul-mouthed Jewish man, asked him to do a song or two of his own. Muddy agreed. With his amp turned up so loud that his strings crackled through its speaker, Muddy sang that old slow blues from the Mississippi Delta. He gave himself over to the words, conjuring the distraught tremble that killed in a club: “Well, brooks run into the ocean, and the ocean run into the sea / If I don’t find my baby, somebody gon’ sure bury me.”

  “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” said the Jewish man in the control room, a club owner named Leonard Chess. Here was just a singer and an electric guitar, backed by an upright bass. Chess was laughing skeptically, shaking his head. “Who the fuck is going to buy that?”

  Chess’s partner, Evelyn Aron, hadn’t heard this music before, either. But she liked it. “You’d be surprised who’d buy that,” she told him.

  Aristocrat Records pressed up three thousand copies of release 1305, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” backed with “I Feel Like Going Home,” performed by Muddy Waters. The ten-inch, 78 RPM platters went out to corner stores and beauty parlors around Chicago one Friday. By the next afternoon, every one of them was gone. People snapped them up so quickly that Muddy could find only a single copy.

  A critic for Billboard heard the record. “Poor recording distorts vocal and steel guitar backing,” was the assessment. But it wasn’t the recording that had distorted the guitar—it was the overdriven amplifier that gave it that thick, worried tone. Muddy’s electric guitar and amplifier had begun to transform the Mississippi Delta blues, the country blues, into the electric blues. “I Feel Like Going Home” reached no. 11 on the national Billboard charts—a feat that neither Muddy Waters nor Leonard Chess would have dreamed of.

  In the club, performing with another guitar, a harmonica, and drums, Muddy’s music reached its full power. Yet Chess (who soon assumed total control over Aristocrat and renamed it Chess Records) refused to bring Muddy’s full group into the studio, seeing no reason to mess with a successful formula. Muddy, seeing the reactions of crowds in clubs night after night, hankered to capture the potency of his new electric blues, though, and finally went renegade to do it.

  In a covert session for the Regal label, Muddy Waters and his band made an astounding document. “Ludella” featured the front line of his club band—Muddy on lead guitar, Jimmy Rogers on vocals and guitar, and their harp player, the explosive genius Little Walter, filling in. Drums and bass came in behind the three of them, laying down a heavy, rolling, medium-tempo beat. From the very start, Muddy was all over his guitar, bending notes in ecstatic agony, keeping his overdriven amplifier growling. While Little Walter cried through his harmonica, Rogers moaned about a woman sneaking around, a woman who “just won’t get along.” The intensity, the sheer heaviness of the performance, was devastating. It was 1949. “Rock ’n’ roll” as such was still years away. But there is no other word for it: the song absolutely rocked.

  More hits came, and by the early fifties, Muddy’s electric music had a hold on Chicago. “They even named it the Muddy Waters blues,” a contemporary remembered. Muddy hadn’t been the first to play blues songs on an electrified guitar, of course, but his band was “the first to use amplification to make their ensemble music rawer, more ferocious, more physical, instead of simply making it a little louder,” the critic Robert Palmer would later write. Muddy was taking music to new realms of expression and power through the electric guitar. One of his bigger hits was a song called “Rollin’ Stone.” The revolution was under way.

  • • •

  IN THE SPRING of 1951, another young black musician from Clarksdale, Mississippi, was preparing for a rare opportunity. Ike Turner played piano and led a band called the Kings of Rhythm, and a white man had asked to record his group at a studio in Memphis. The Kings of Rhythm were a cover band and didn’t have any original songs of their own, but that wasn’t going to hold them up. While driving up Highway 61 toward Memphis, Turner’s sax player, Jackie Brenston, rewrote the lyrics to an up-tempo rhythm and blues hit called “Cadillac Boogie.” He ostensibly named his song after an engine that Oldsmobile had just introduced, called the Rocket 88, but there was no missing the undertones: this was a song about sexual power. The Kings of Rhythm showed up at the Memphis Recording Service with the song still unfinished and, with the help of the studio’s owner, a man named Sam Phillips, worked out the arrangement right there.

  They had one problem. When they’d pulled over to change a flat, Willie Kizart’s guitar amplifier had fallen out of the trunk of the car, busting its speaker cone. There was no way to get it fixed. Phillips, though, liked to record musicians as they presented themselves, without polish. He didn’t want to tell these teenagers that their gear wasn’t good enough to record, so instead he came up with a cheap solution: stuffing a wad of paper up against the rupture in the speaker cone. It was free, and, surprisingly, the electric guitar sounded pretty good coming through it—buzzing and distorted, bristling with emotion.

  On that early March day, the group cut Brenston’s “Rocket 88”: Willie Kizart’s electric hollow-body blaring, its raspy tone like a saxophone ripping through hell; Ike Turner pounding a groove on the piano keys; Brenston boasting about riding in style—“everyone likes my Rocket 88”—as the whole ensemble tore through what was essentially a standard R & B boogie but seemed to everyone who later heard it like something else, something altogether new: a joyous explosion of young energy, yoked to a surging and infectious rhythm. Muddy Waters’s electric music evoked the past; this record spoke to right now.

  Released by Chess Records and spun incessantly by a friend of Sam Phillips at the white Memphis radio station WHBQ, “Rocket 88”—credited not to Ike Turner or the Kings of Rhythm but Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, much to Turner’s irritation—amazingly shot to no. 1 on the Billboard R & B charts. The song roared past Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon,” which was then enjoying rare success for a white pop song among black listeners, and the two songs’ juxtaposition showed the crossing musical currents of that crucial year.

  Les and Mary had hit the charts with careful, polished layers. Ike Turner and Sam Phillips arrived in a miracle of accident and improvisation. Both “How High the Moon” and “Rocket 88” gave unusual prominence to electric guitars, but the latter sound, channeled through Willie Kizart’s busted amplifier, came out more distorted and distraught than o
n any previous hit record. Its sandpaper grit would have infuriated Leo Fender and Les Paul, had they heard it. Yet that distortion was doubtless part of why “Rocket 88” found even more success with white audiences than “How High” had with black ones.

  White people simply didn’t listen to “race records” or rhythm and blues or whatever this was—then, suddenly, they did. The hipper white teenagers clamored for “Rocket 88” and anything like it, of which there was plenty, since the song was essentially a rewrite. This wasn’t the more visible jazz of upwardly mobile black Americans, nor the gospel of good-hearted churchgoers, nor the gutbucket electric blues of Chicago millworkers; it was the impulsive, erotic, urgent expression of black youth, perhaps the least powerful members of a minority then subject to open segregation in the South and systemic oppression everywhere else. The sound was so powerful that after hearing it, a white Philadelphia DJ and bandleader named Bill Haley decided to change his entire direction, switching from Bob Wills–style western swing to rhythm and blues. And Sam Phillips, who’d captured “Rocket 88” in his Memphis studio, began to get ideas about the magnitude of success a white singer might find with this music.

  • • •

  SOLID-BODY ELECTRIC INSTRUMENTS were so new that they hadn’t yet penetrated the musical communities of Chicago and Memphis, even as musicians there started the revolution in which they’d become essential. In California, especially among the country players who were close to Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby, the new tools spread faster. People could see and hear the changes they were ushering in, and the response wasn’t always positive.