by Ian Port
One night in Bakersfield, 1952. A row of honky-tonks lined the road out of this gritty oil town, and one joint had booked Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, a singing couple who’d moved to Southern California on the recommendation of their friend Merle Travis. The two were scheduled to play at a place called the Blackboard Cafe, a club known as much for its nightly violence as for charging the highest beer prices in Bakersfield—seventy-five cents a bottle, not twenty-five.
Pushing through the double doors into the saloon, Joe and Rose Lee could hardly see through the cigarette smoke. A few lamps cast a wan glow over the mirrored wall behind the bar, the shuffleboard table, and the wooden floor, where patrons, enthused by beer or whiskey, dragged their feet to the music, swaying in each other’s arms. It hit Joe and Rose Lee that this airborne din, this atmospheric crackle they were hearing, was in fact music. There was a band up on a high stage, five people producing a tremendous racket. The Orange Blossom Playboys had a steel guitar, a piano, a fiddle, and a drummer, who kept the music moving to a steady beat, something Joe and Rose Lee hadn’t seen before. In Virginia, decent white people didn’t dance to folk music; they didn’t need a drummer for it, and, while listening to it, they certainly didn’t get drunk and sway in the arms of some barroom lover.
There was also a greasy kid playing lead guitar up there, slicked-back hair, face like a peanut. He was holding a thin little instrument. Every pluck of its strings seemed to puncture the leaden atmosphere in the Blackboard like an ice pick striking a helium balloon. His yellowish guitar sounded electric, the brightest thing in there, and seemed to push the imbibers into doing things Joe and Rose Lee had never seen adults do in public.
To these Southerners, the Blackboard was a temple of sin. They didn’t know that the peanut-faced lead guitarist’s name was Buck Owens, that he’d purchased his Fender Telecaster from a bandmate the previous year for $35, that he and another vice-tainted local named Merle Haggard would come to embody a vital and rough-hewn style of country music named after the city of Bakersfield. Rose Lee and Joe couldn’t have dreamed that the Fender Telecaster would one day become as closely identified with country music as a cowboy hat.
They only knew what hit their senses: the gritty environs of the Blackboard, a place where women spoke of the sex act with a frankness unheard anywhere else, where men broke into fights three or four times a night and shrugged off the odd murder. Buck Owens hadn’t been the first to discover that the Telecaster’s solid body and long, sturdy neck could be handy in a fight.
The Virginians were so stunned by what they saw and heard that later, driving back to Los Angeles, they portrayed it in a song. Their lyrics linked the atmosphere of the Blackboard to many varieties of sin:
Dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music
Is the only kind of life you’ll ever understand
Dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music
You’ll never make a wife to a home-loving man
A home and little children mean nothing to you
A house filled with love and a husband so true
You’d rather have a drink with the first guy you meet
In the only home you know, the club down the street
Thus was the penetrating sound of the Fender guitar first linked to behavior deemed unfit for polite society. Barely a year after it hit the market, as a musical revolution burbled forth around the country, the Telecaster was already starting to change how bands worked and sounded—already carving a gap between those who would give themselves over to the new electric music, and those who heard in it a serious moral danger.
16.
“LES HAS ACTUALLY MADE A NEW INSTRUMENT!”
CHICAGO AND MAHWAH, NEW JERSEY, 1952–1953
As the hollers of the crowd ricocheted off the walls of the Chicago Theatre and reached the ears of Les Paul and Mary Ford, he smiled wider. She tensed. No achievement—not their run up the pop charts, not their well-reviewed stint at the Paramount Theatre in New York—could soothe the stage fright of this pastor’s daughter. The crowd tonight would break attendance records for a stage show at the 3,800-seat Chicago Theatre, but as Mary stood there on the boards, receiving applause in a frilly white gown, her insides vibrated with fear.
They’d had an arrival fit for conquering heroes. Les and Mary had been ferried into the city across Lake Michigan on a yacht, as the fireboats escorting them raised up their hoses and sprayed columns of water in celebration. Chicago pols had declared it Les Paul and Mary Ford Day to mark the start of their performances. Outside the theater’s towering edifice, dozens of fans had paraded that afternoon, holding signs that read “Vote for Les Paul and Mary Ford, the original Guitarocrats.” (It was an election year.) Some wore little pendants with the stars’ names emblazoned over the outline of an electric guitar. The major downtown music stores both put up window displays featuring Les Paul and Mary Ford and their new Gibson guitars.
That evening, though, the husband and wife stood alone under the bright lights and faced the challenge that came with every live performance: replicating their complex multitracked songs onstage. Les grinned in his pressed suit, held up his gleaming signature instrument, and put a folksy twang in his voice: You know, this new Gibson guitar has a special feature called a Les Paulverizer, a device I designed to make it sound like five or ten or fifteen guitars at once, he would’ve said. With this new Les Paulverizer, Mary and I can multiply ourselves onstage just like we do at home. Right, Mary?
Many in the audience believed him. A few reporters would note that there was an array of electronic equipment backstage, out of sight—and two more people back there helping with the show. Mary’s sister Carol lurked with a microphone and a voice virtually indistinguishable from her sister’s, while her husband, Wally, played recorded tracks of Les and Mary’s guitars to fill out what they performed onstage. There was no special echo device inside Les’s Gibson guitar, of course—just a tape machine behind the curtain. But it made for a great illusion. “If people didn’t realize it was a hoax, I wasn’t going to tell them,” Les wrote in his autobiography.
Les and Mary got through a few songs and reached the climax of the set. Les started in on another monologue about how much he loved his new guitar, how he’d adored the instrument since childhood. The couple took up “There’s No Place Like Home,” a sweet old hillbilly song, and in the middle of it, Les plucked out a fancy little run. But as he basked in the applause, Mary, standing a couple of feet away, copied his playing note for note on her own guitar. The crowd laughed.
Les’s smile fell into a frown; he shot his wife a cruel look. Then he played a more complicated passage, his fingers fanning up the fretboard in a blur, a grin on his face—until Mary broke in and played the same lick herself, coolly replicating every bit of what Les had done. Screams of laughter and surprise from the crowd. Hardly anyone knew that pretty little Mary, as they thought of her, was a ferocious guitar talent.
The husband yelped in mock disgust. But Les gathered himself, winked at the crowd, and then set off a flurry of notes, his left hand racing around the neck of his guitar, his right hand furiously striking the strings. The solo ended as Les arrived at the highest notes on his neck, hitting the pinnacle in one sharp, glassy prick. No way up from there. Cheers from out in the dark.
Then Mary started in on the same solo at the same speed, her fingers gliding swiftly and faultlessly up the neck of her own instrument. After she’d gotten just a few notes in, though, Les dashed over and yanked the electric cable out of her guitar. Her efforts were drowned in silence. The crowd roared.
It killed every time, this routine. It was the carefully practiced peak of the show; even critics liked its suggestion of musical rivalry. “It sounds obvious in conception, but in execution it’s brilliant,” wrote London’s Melody Maker a few weeks later, when the duo had made their first trip across the pond. “He starts a flashy run; she breaks in to duplicate it. He tries something trickier; she matches. His mock exasperation could have been
fatuous, but it’s amusing. The fooling is not incidental to his playing . . . He makes it appear that his guitar is backing up his personality.”
The dynamic it showed was real. Les’s hyperactive guitar style reflected a man who ceaselessly pursued whatever goal was at hand, working eighteen or twenty hours at a stretch, proudly going for days without sleep, and keeping Mary alongside him. But while both husband and wife worked hard, the public gave Les most of the credit. He was the virtuoso and the sound engineer; to most people, she was the girl who sang. Reporters who saw them perform were often shocked to learn that Mary could do more than wear a dress and vocalize. “Gal, incidentally, is a nicely gowned looker, and fact that she also can handle a git-box comes as a surprise to most of the ticket-holders,” Variety reported of a 1951 performance. Almost no one bothered to note that the woman had been playing guitar all her life.
Performing came like breathing to Les, but no achievement, however rarefied, would let Mary get comfortable. “I still dread going onstage,” she told a women’s magazine. “My stomach turns into knots, and I wish I were home.” Even with her fears, the couple ruled Chicago for those two weeks in August of 1952, breaking all previous attendance records at the downtown theater and taking in more than $37,000 (nearly $350,000 in today’s dollars) in the process. They repeated this feat all over the country, as well as in England.
People were simply fascinated by this husband and wife, who, after all, resembled no other figures in public life. Features in Look, Pic, and Cosmopolitan probed the couple’s creative domesticity in what was soon its dramatic new setting. In 1952, Les and Mary left the West Coast for good and moved to a sprawling mountainside ranch house in Mahwah, New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York City. Here, they could record all day and night without disturbing any neighbors, and without traffic noise or planes flying overhead. The home would also be the setting for their new television offering, The Les Paul and Mary Ford Show, sponsored by Listerine. Just as they recorded for Capitol in their Hollywood garage and living room, they’d tape these five-minute TV segments around their house, emphasizing the normalcy of their lives even as they showed how, with a microphone over the sink, Mary could record her vocals while doing the dishes. Gags abounded, and usually not at Les’s expense. Mary played a bewildered spouse who happened to make music while fulfilling her domestic duties—her ability to have this multiple identity courtesy of a genius husband who ran the show.
Les turned the whole New Jersey house into a recording studio, filling it with the finest equipment and effectively guaranteeing that there was no moment during which he and Mary couldn’t be working. It made a novel setting for TV, but soon, just as George Polsfuss had feared, living as Les’s costar began to wear Mary out. Not only did she find performing in public intrinsically nerve-racking; there were so many events to get through, and each one asked a lot of her. She had to not only sing and laugh and play guitar, but look immaculate in a dress and full makeup for every show—even a radio appearance. All this while traveling frequently on aggressive itineraries, eating badly on the road, and recording constantly with a partner who refused to rest. She began relying on vodka to help her cope with the stress. “[She] kept saying, ‘We have more money than we can ever spend. Why don’t we take a break and just be us again?’ ” Les would write later. “And I wanted to do it, but then the phone would ring and there would be something else to do, more people to please, somewhere new to go, and I could never say no to more work.”
By 1953, Les and Mary couldn’t get away from their reputations even when they wanted to. They were recognized on weekend getaways while dressed in grubby clothes, and discovered and hounded while staying in foreign hotel rooms under fake names. And they were still getting bigger. That year they released “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” their thirteenth consecutive hit to sell more than five hundred thousand copies.
With astronomical record sales, the Gibson endorsement deal, earnings from live performances, and a Listerine contract worth $2 million over three years, Les and Mary were becoming fabulously wealthy. Les spent freely on electronics and recording equipment but lashed down the purse strings when it came to other expenses. “He was tighter than the bark on a tree,” Gibson’s Ted McCarty remembered. He wouldn’t hire assistants to help with the driving or the domestic duties, and, to the frustration of their manager, he even resisted buying Mary new clothes to wear onstage or paying to get her hair done.
Still, a seemingly boundless success helped smooth the differences between husband and wife. One evening in the spring of 1953, Les and Mary were resting in a St. Paul hotel room when Les heard a song come on the radio. It was Anita O’Day singing a midtempo version of “Vaya Con Dios,” a jazzy lament with heavy string arrangements and western-themed lyrics. Les turned up the radio.
“Mary, how do you like that song?” he asked.
Mary was sitting on the bed, mending a dress. “I love it,” she said. “But I don’t know what it is.”
It was a song Capitol had been begging them to record. On June 1, 1953, the label released Les and Mary’s version of “Vaya Con Dios.” It shot to no. 1 on the Billboard charts and sat there for nearly three straight months, becoming bigger even than “How High the Moon.” In contrast to their frantic breakthrough hit, “Vaya Con Dios” was languid, almost deliriously slow and romantic. The couple’s hillbilly roots showed right through their pop sparkle.
“Vaya Con Dios” brought Les and Mary’s worldwide record sales to more than fifteen million copies and made them inescapable on television, on the radio, in jukeboxes. Les was thrilled and wanted to keep going; Mary was exhausted and desperate for a break. According to Les’s biographer, she now privately referred to her husband as a slave driver, and she wasn’t alone. At the height of the couple’s success, Mary’s sister Carol and her husband, Wally, fled New Jersey for California, having tired of living under Les’s unrelenting work schedule.
Yet all that work had brought Les exactly what he’d wanted since childhood. He was now the most popular and important electric guitar player in the country—and the world. “What Benny Goodman did for the clarinet, Harry James for the trumpet, Tommy Dorsey for the trombone, and Coleman Hawkins did for the tenor sax, Les Paul has done for the guitar,” Metronome’s George Simon declared in 1953. “He has brought it into such prominence that it has become an almost newly discovered instrument for many people, as well as one with which musicians can make more sounds and more money than ever before. You only have to hear some of his fantastically successful records to realize this. And it’s not only the multiple recording devices that make the Paul guitar sound so different from others. It’s that Les has actually made a new instrument!”
Les had given his name to a Gibson model, of course, but he’d also made the guitar far more worthy of the spotlight—and had put it there. His playful, athletic style demanded a hearing from anyone who picked up the instrument. And by helping to pioneer the solid-body electric guitar’s bright, metallic tone and almost unlimited volume, Les had helped transform it into a worthy match for the saxophone and trumpet, instruments it could never previously compete with. What had long been a background voice could now stand up front—even if Les was the only one in pop music currently asking it to. (In jazz, it was Les’s late friend Charlie Christian, playing with the Benny Goodman Sextet, who pioneered an electric guitar style similar to that of a brass soloist.)
In part because of this transformation, these years saw a considerable increase in guitar sales. When Les and Mary made promotional visits to small-town Gibson dealers, the stores would be flooded with fans looking for an autograph or a quick jam session. “I am sure more man hours were devoted to the manufacture and assembly of fretted instruments this year than ever before,” Gibson president Ted McCarty told a trade association in 1953, with numbers to back him up. Rising sales benefited the whole industry, and just as Les Paul stood first among guitar players, so did Gibson among guitar manufacturers. Fender had
been the earliest to release a commercial solid-body electric, but after 1952, many players converting to this design found it difficult to resist the gold-painted Gibson. Everyone knew that Gibson meant quality, that Les Paul meant fame. Together, they made for the most desirable solid-body electric guitar on the market.
17.
“HE DOESN’T LIKE TO GET INVOLVED WITH THINGS THAT ARE UNPLEASANT”
FULLERTON AND MAHWAH, FALL 1952–SUMMER 1954
One day a Fender employee asked Leo why he ate a can of spaghetti for lunch every day, instead of buying a hot sandwich from the food truck like everyone else. “Because for the difference in price between the spaghetti and the sandwich,” Leo replied, “I can buy a handful of resistors.”
Despite having introduced the first solid-body electric guitar to the market, despite the favor the Telecaster found among country players, despite the steadily rising sales figures it drove, Leo Fender still worried about affording even the smallest components of his amplifiers. His factory employed thirty-three people by Christmas of 1952, and had expanded from its original steel sheds into a squat new cement building with more space and, at last, a company restroom. Leo and Esther still lived in a little rental town house in Fullerton. After a two-year whirlwind during which he’d sent the Telecaster and the even more radical Precision Bass out into the world, Leo’s sole indulgence seems to have been a chunky new Dodge sedan.
But no rest had been earned; nothing could be taken for granted. In Fullerton, Leo still designed every product, hired every employee, and oversaw every aspect of production. Thus his fixation on the cost of parts, which he’d calculate out to fractions of a cent, scrawling tallies on pieces of scrap paper. His obsessive mind struggled to oversee so much, and the resulting disorganization, exacerbated by material shortages during the Korean War, made the factory’s output terribly erratic. In letters from Santa Ana, Don Randall and F. C. Hall vented frustration about their inability to get Fender products out on time and fretted about the harm it did the company.