The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  Now there was Gibson to contend with. The Telecaster had awakened the fury of the industry leader, and Gibson’s competing product could bury Fender if it didn’t come up with a proper response. Leo would have to fight against an instrument bearing the name of—and ostensibly designed by—a man who’d once been his friend, a coconspirator in this new realm of solid-bodied electric instruments. Leo’s personal feelings about this situation were never recorded. But Les’s decision to reject the Telecaster, and to instead endorse an instrument from Fender’s largest competitor, seems to have brought an end to any closeness between the two men. What had been a friendship was now a rivalry. Everyone in Fullerton saw the Les Paul Model as an existential threat. Fender had made a Volkswagen, and now, somehow, it would have to answer to Gibson’s Cadillac.

  Other products were squeezing Fender in different ways. In 1952, Paul Bigsby began selling a bridge for the electric guitar that let players subtly shift the pitch of the strings downward by pressing on a lever. When the player released the lever, the strings returned to standard pitch. With this Bigsby True Vibrato, a standard-guitar player could emulate the wavering sound of a steel guitar, along with many other effects. It was the first reliable version of what would become known as the whammy bar. Les Paul loved Bigsby’s vibrato and started using it; Merle Travis also got one, and before long, many players wanted them, including those who hung around the Fender factory. So in 1953, Bigsby introduced a version of his vibrato designed for the Fender Telecaster—a project that took considerable effort, since it had to replace several key parts of the guitar.

  The relationship between Bigsby and Fender had been largely friendly. Bigsby didn’t seem to care much that Leo had borrowed some of his ideas for the Telecaster. When Bigsby couldn’t keep up with demand for his custom solid-body guitars, he’d tell customers to drive over to Fullerton and buy an instrument from Leo Fender. But by creating a vibrato for the Telecaster, Paul Bigsby sparked a new sense of competition between the two outfits. Looking at the Bigsby True Vibrato, Don Randall saw that this other firm had become the best source of a feature that many players wanted and that Fender didn’t offer. He told Leo to create a competing vibrato system for Fender’s successor to the Telecaster.

  Everyone knew Fender would need to improve on its first solid-body. Almost since the moment he’d handed the Esquire prototype to Jimmy Bryant, back in 1950, players had been telling Leo what was wrong with it. Some purported flaws were purely aesthetic, while some were worryingly technical. Bob Wills and his main rhythm guitarist, Eldon Shamblin, complained about the Telecaster’s plain, thin body, comparing it to a “two-by-four.” Bill Carson, another local country sideman, had received a Telecaster in 1951 in exchange for working part-time for Leo at the factory. But as he got more recording work, Carson started to hear complaints about the tuning of his guitar. The Telecaster offered only limited adjustments for its strings, and it sometimes could not be brought into perfect tune with itself. A note at the far end of the neck might be the same E played by the pianist, but farther up, past the fifth or sixth fret, another supposed E was noticeably off-pitch. If session producers felt someone couldn’t play in tune, they wouldn’t call them for future work. Carson thus believed the Telecaster’s intonation problem threatened his livelihood.

  Carson and others also loathed the hard corners of the Telecaster’s body. In profile, the guitar really did look like a plank, with flat sides meeting a flat top at nearly ninety degrees. After hours of sitting in a recording studio or standing on a stage, these corners dug painfully into a player’s chest. Several complained about this, but Carson was now one of the half-dozen musicians who constituted the Fender “guinea pigs” (as Leo called them), and he decided to act. After getting a second Telecaster, Carson took a hacksaw to his first, cutting out a section of its body around where it touched his chest, and slicing some wood off the top back corner, where it met his forearm, to make a beveled edge. Then Carson started dicing up the bridge so that each string saddle could be moved back and forth to adjust for intonation. This cut-up guitar “wasn’t very pretty,” of course, but Carson could use it in the studio. It was comfortable, and it could be tuned properly. Leo hated that a player had butchered one of his guitars—most people thought of his instruments as his children. But looking at Carson’s modifications, he got the point.

  In 1952, Leo made plans to expand the Fender factory yet again. A large new site was carved out of the orange groves on the southeast side of Fullerton, in what would become a major industrial park, home to National Cash Register and the Kimberly-Clark paper company. When Fender arrived in 1953, the plant consisted of three white concrete-block buildings, each long and narrow, lined up next to each other with open alleys in between. If the factory needed to expand further, identical new buildings could be added to this row.

  Inside, though, “the place looked like a complete mess,” Forrest White thought when he saw the new facility for the first time. “It was obvious that no planning had been done before they moved in. There was absolutely no evidence of work flow. Amplifier and guitar assembly benches were all mixed together—no separation at all.” Nor had there been any consideration of noise. Metal punch-presses, which stamped out amplifier chassis and guitar components at ear-shattering volume, were set just outside the uninsulated wall of the main factory office, ensuring that the company’s secretaries were drowned in a cacophony all day long.

  To White, oversights like the arrangement of machines and the lack of a system for ordering parts were deeply upsetting. A skinny, nervous Ohioan with a personality many saw as cold—even sociopathic—White was an amateur guitarist and industrial manager who’d first met Leo in 1948 and decided almost immediately to worship not just Fender instruments, but the man himself. After joining the company as plant manager, White began to organize the factory operations by any means necessary. He’d post brutally passive-aggressive public memos on company bulletin boards and intimidate prospective employees by hardly ever smiling. When guitarist Jimmy Bryant stumbled around the factory sipping from a beer can (the backseat of Bryant’s car was famous for its mountain of empties), White mercilessly booted the Fender endorser out of the factory, upholding company policy. His intensity was foreign territory for the laid-back Fullerton plant, where veteran employees walked around without shoes (and men without shirts) on hot summer days, and it earned White enemies from the start.

  White thought of himself as Leo’s number two—but so, since 1948, had George Fullerton. The two clashed immediately, as White recounted in his memoir. When White told Fullerton that he wanted to rearrange the factory floor for better efficiency, Fullerton shot back, “What makes you think you can come in here and after two weeks decide that everything is wrong and needs changing?” After yelling back and forth, Fullerton, normally a soft-spoken fellow, huffed off to complain to Leo. Meanwhile, White skulked in the factory office. Seeing him there, Leo’s secretary, Ione, leaned over cheerfully from her desk: “You’ll find that he doesn’t like to get involved with things that are unpleasant,” she told White, referring to Leo. “Welcome aboard!” Much of White’s job would turn out to be handling the unpleasantness Leo preferred not to get involved with.

  The factory staff had also expanded to include Freddie Tavares, a wiry, gregarious, Hawaiian-born guitarist who’d work as Leo’s lab assistant when he wasn’t doing recording sessions up in LA. Tavares’s recording work had included playing the steel guitar riff in the Looney Tunes theme song, and he would get more high-profile spots in the future. One of his first tasks at Fender was assisting Leo as he designed a competitor to the Gibson Les Paul.

  Bill Carson wanted four or five pickups and a bridge that allowed the adjustment of each string’s intonation. Don Randall and Charlie Hayes wanted a vibrato unit to compete with Bigsby’s. Several guinea pigs wanted a body that had cutouts to reduce pressure on the player’s torso. (A body that “fit like a good shirt,” in Carson’s words.)

  Leo wanted the weigh
t of the guitar to balance on the player’s lap. George Fullerton wanted a recessed jack for the amp cable, so that the guitar could be rested on the ground without damaging the cable. Don Randall wanted a sunburst finish—yellowish wood grain at the middle, fading to black at the edges of the body—because every other guitar company had one and Fender didn’t, and because it looked pretty.

  Carson wanted a headstock that looked like the one on Bigsby’s Merle Travis guitar, with more swooping curves. Jimmy Bryant wanted the new guitar to be called the Jimmy Bryant Model. Bill Carson would call early prototypes “Carson’s guitar.”

  Don Randall wanted the new instrument ready for display at the trade shows of 1953, one year after Gibson had debuted the Les Paul Model.

  So Leo started drawing.

  • • •

  RUMBLINGS OF A new sound were growing louder. In 1953, the hirsute Philly bandleader Bill Haley scored a minor hit called “Crazy Man, Crazy,” which some listeners described as “rock ’n’ roll music.” The next year, a DJ named Alan Freed brought his hugely popular radio show, Moondog’s Rock ’n’ roll Party, from Cleveland to New York City. And that same summer, a white nobody named Elvis Presley entered Sam Phillips’s recording studio in Memphis and spat out a record called “That’s All Right,” which became a regional smash.

  Meanwhile that year, news arrived that finally seemed to promise Les Paul and Mary Ford a break from their tireless efforts. The couple announced it with an unusual full-page ad in Billboard, featuring a huge drawing of a stork holding a Les Paul guitar in its mouth, and page-crossing type that was meant to look handwritten. It read:

  “Mary is taking a little time off to attend to some very special business—Les.”

  “And Les will probably take all the credit for it—Mary.”

  After five years of marriage, Les Paul and Mary Ford were about to have their first child. It was the summer of 1954, and Mary was due to give birth in the fall. Neither Mr. and Mrs. Guitar, nor virtually anyone in the gleaming hallways of the recording establishment, could see what revolution lay just around the corner.

  18.

  “WHY DON’T YOU ASK FOR THE MOON?”

  TEXAS, NEW YORK CITY, AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, FALL 1954–SPRING 1955

  He picked up the guitar in elementary school, after his brother returned from the war with the habit of plunking out chords. Young Charles Hardin Holley (as his family name was spelled)—Buddy, everyone called him—got his own $15 Harmony six-string at a pawnshop, and from then on, that was how he spent much of his time at home, on the bus to school, and in the long Texas afternoons afterward. The guitar in his hands “was another instrument entirely,” Buddy’s oldest brother, Larry, told the writer Ellis Amburn. But lots of people in the town of Lubbock played: this was the Panhandle, the land whose emigrants had brought guitar-driven hillbilly music to California, the same ranch country where Bob Wills had perfected western swing. A place where the rows of cotton fanned out toward an endless flat horizon, where apocalyptic dust storms browned out the sun. There was not much else to do besides pick guitar and go to church.

  On the white side of town, country music wafted through the air like specks of field dirt. Buddy Holley picked up hillbilly classics like “Footprints in the Snow,” picked up the mandolin and the banjo and some Hank Williams tunes, too. By the time he reached high school, his band played regularly on the radio and at venues like the Cotton Club, just over the line from where Lubbock’s God-fearing city fathers outlawed the sale of alcohol.

  The Cotton Club was one place where Buddy saw Elvis Presley perform. There’s a photograph: Elvis shining on the left side of the frame, a twenty-year-old greaser whose fine clothes encase a molten core of sex, his gravity pulling every set of eyes in the room toward him—including those behind the thick glasses orbiting far right. After Buddy’s band opened for Elvis a few times, the two became friendly, and the Mississippian’s sound, as well as his scandalous sense of freedom, began to rub off. “We’d been hillbillies, but after the Cotton Club we were rockers like Elvis,” bandmate Sonny Curtis remembered. Seeing what Elvis got away with unleashed a new energy in Buddy. Instead of standing frozen at the microphone like a country singer, he started shaking and writhing, radiating a little heat of his own. It wasn’t the suggestive hip-swaying of the soon-to-be King, but it was still a heady show of vim for a skinny young four-eyes.

  Then there was the guitar. In 1954, around the time he began picking up the rhythm and blues music played on the other side of town, and before he saw Elvis ignite hillbilly into rockabilly, Buddy began playing the most modern instrument available: a solid-body electric guitar. A gold-top Gibson Les Paul with matching Gibson amplifier was very nice kit for a teenager from a struggling family to own, even if Buddy feared how the nine-pound guitar would treat his shoulders. His was a 1952 model, made before Gibson started adding serial numbers and before designers fixed the original, flawed bridge. The Gibson was a fine-quality instrument that would have subtly signaled an affection for rhythm and blues—and Buddy was already listening obsessively to Muddy Waters, as well as black vocal groups like the Drifters. Just as Gibson heads Ted McCarty and M. H. Berlin would have hoped, Buddy’s love for Les Paul’s guitar work also likely influenced his selection of a gold-top.

  When Elvis added drums to his live band, equipping himself for a big beat, Buddy and his crew followed. The singer-guitarist showed up to rehearse at drummer Jerry Allison’s house with the shiny new Les Paul, and man and instrument grew into a tight unit. Buddy complained about the weight of his new guitar, but that didn’t stop him from using it in every gig the group could get: at ice rinks and vocational group meetings and radio stations and of course at the Cotton Club, where the end of a set might be celebrated with a few Falstaff beers. Contrary to some impressions, Buddy was no saint—no stranger to the sway of alcohol or the lure of women or the rush of a fight. He may have looked geeky in his metal-framed glasses, but “he was an average hard-on good ol’ American boy,” as his friend Jerry Coleman put it.

  Elvis’s earthquake rise, from regional hotshot in 1954 to national phenomenon in 1955, shook the confidence of the major record labels, who presided over the national musical output like somnolent grandparents. Falling out of their easy chairs at the sound of this rock ’n’ roll, their reading glasses tumbling off into alarming articles in Time and the Saturday Evening Post, company executives realized they needed to answer the popularity of the sneering young buck from Memphis. RCA snatched up Elvis’s contract from Sam Phillips for the magnificent sum of $35,000, and the other majors cast about for Presley clones, hoping, on the one hand, to find someone equally compelling, and, on the other, that this rock ’n’ roll would prove just a fleeting tremor.

  Next to his friend Elvis Presley, Buddy felt his image was too plain. He’d been a western-shirt-and-jeans kind of performer—just a poor schoolboy enjoying a local reputation—but now he decided he needed the best in clothes and equipment. He asked his oldest brother, Larry, for a loan of $1,000. “Why don’t you ask for the moon?” Larry replied. But, inspired by Buddy’s determination, the older brother scraped together the funds and wrote out a check.

  Numerous Holly biographies date these events to the following year, after Decca Records offered “Buddy Holly” a contract (and inadvertently sliced the “E” off his last name). But receipts found by the late Holly expert Bill Griggs put the loan in a different context. Larry apparently made it in 1955, long before Decca Records was paying any attention. This is clear because the first place Buddy took Larry’s thousand dollars was B. E. Adair Music, at 1207 Main Street in downtown Lubbock. The store touted that it carried “the famous Gibson and Fender guitars” and was “the only authorized dealer for such within 50 miles.” Buddy knew Adair salesman and teacher Clyde Hankin, who’d given him a few lessons.

  One day in the spring of 1955, according to receipts, Buddy strolled into Adair’s carrying his gold-top Les Paul guitar and matching amplifier, along with Larr
y’s mountain of cash. He’d only owned the Gibson for about a year, but he already wanted to replace it. His problem with the guitar was likely not, as some claimed, that the instrument was too plain—a Les Paul was the most princely solid-body on the market. Rather, Buddy probably decided to trade the guitar because it was too heavy. His thin frame had tired of the clunky, nine-pound Gibson. And Buddy had played another guitar hanging in Adair’s that promised to be far more comfortable, a striking, futuristic model that had just come on the market.

  • • •

  THE FIRST SHIPMENT had rolled out of Fullerton in October 1954, only a few months before Buddy Holly bought one in Lubbock. Don Randall named it the Stratocaster, summoning images of space travel, of a rarefied altitude a level or two up from the Telecaster. The guitar was both an upgrade to the Telecaster and Fender’s answer to the Gibson Les Paul—yet it looked nothing like either. The sole instrument it resembled was the Fender Precision Bass, from which its two-horned outline was taken.

  But only the Stratocaster’s body had been, as the ads proclaimed, “comfort contoured”: the back side was curved to accommodate a player’s chest and belly, and the top back corner was beveled so it wouldn’t jut into the player’s arm. The two horns on the body formed cutaways that let a hand freely travel up the neck, while helping to balance the guitar’s seven pounds across a player’s lap or shoulders. These features made the Stratocaster the most comfortable guitar yet produced, an instrument that fit around the human body rather than cutting into it. Once again, a radical design had been born through Leo’s obsession with practicality.