by Ian Port
Randall seemed to anticipate that shortly after the Stratocaster’s release, Americans would become obsessed with space travel through the launch of Sputnik and the rivalry of the Cold War. The Jet Age was already nigh when Fender began advertising the Strat in the spring of 1954, the whooshing curves and jutting roofs of Googie architecture already rising along the boulevards of Southern California. Corporate logos were melting into boomerangs, car trunks were growing fins. Even the first advertisements for this guitar featured the symbol of an atom. Yet neither Randall nor Leo could have foreseen how well their new instrument would fit the aesthetic and social currents of the decade. At a time when faith in and fear of new technologies was peaking—with automatic transmissions and Communist satellites, all-electric kitchens and the hydrogen bomb—the Fender Stratocaster announced itself as an ideal integration of technology and artistry.
When Paul Bigsby saw a picture of the guitar inside his modest white house in Downey, however, he felt not elation, or admiration, but rage. A Fender brochure sat on his dinner table. In his booming voice, Bigsby cursed the name Leo Fender until the walls shook. “That son of a bitch ripped me off!” he yelled, so loud that his daughter would never forget it. When he looked at this new instrument—at the shape that would delight Buddy Holly, the guitar that would change the idea of what a guitar could be—Paul Bigsby felt the sting of betrayal.
Besides its contoured, double-cutaway body, the Stratocaster’s most remarkable feature was its “Tremolo Action” lever, which let players lower or slightly raise the pitch of all strings for dramatic effect. “A flick of the wrist means live, tremolo action—perfect pitch!” chirped the magazine ads. It worked better than the True Vibrato Bigsby had first designed, and it came standard on the Stratocaster. Thus, only a year after Bigsby had crafted a nifty add-on for the Telecaster, Leo released a guitar that made Bigsby’s work pointless, his Fender-compatible product obsolete. Other firms, like Gibson and Gretsch, regarded Bigsby’s vibrato so highly that they began installing it on their guitars at the factory. But Leo and Don Randall hadn’t even considered doing this. Players who wanted a Fender with a whammy bar were simply steered toward a Stratocaster and the tremolo that Leo had designed himself.
Such a series of events might seem standard in business: one company introduces a product, another follows up with a competing version. But in the mid-fifties, the electric guitar industry was small and familiar. Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby were compatriots whose enterprises had so far not seriously conflicted. But while Bigsby was building guitars out of love and pride, Fender was trying to build a national empire. That empire was now pushing against the gates of Bigsby’s beautiful little domain.
If Bigsby was miffed that his friend had chosen to create a new, competing vibrato system, he was fully infuriated by another grab of Leo’s. Looking at the first Fender brochure on his dinner table, Bigsby saw that the Stratocaster’s headstock—the wooden panel at the end of the neck—appeared to be a direct copy of the shape Bigsby had been putting on all his standard guitars since 1948. Its sloping line placed all the tuners on top, with a round knob at the end and a sweeping curve on the lower edge. The Stratocaster had very slightly modified Bigsby’s proportions, but the similarity was undeniable.
The headstock was a straight steal, as Bigsby saw it, and therefore grounds for legal action. Bigsby called his lawyer, and, according to his daughter, Mary Bigsby, tried to pursue a lawsuit against Leo Fender for copying the headstock. But while Bigsby had patented his vibrato, he’d apparently not secured a trademark on his headstock shape. There were too many echoes of it in older instruments. Leo Fender later told the writer Tom Wheeler that he’d borrowed the Stratocaster’s headstock shape from an old Croatian instrument he saw in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There were other precedents, too: in the nineteenth century, the celebrated acoustic guitar builder C. F. Martin had arranged a guitar’s tuning pegs in a single line and cut a headstock shape similar to the Fender and Bigsby designs. Because of these instruments and the lack of a trademark, Bigsby was told he didn’t have a legal claim, according to his daughter. The former motorcycle racer could yell all he wanted, but Fender was free to market its new creation.
For the rest of his life, Leo Fender would deny copying Bigsby. But, though he may have seen an older instrument in a museum at some point, he’d clearly borrowed another one of Bigsby’s designs. Fender guinea pig Bill Carson even claimed to have shown Leo the Bigsby shape and asked to have it incorporated into the Telecaster’s successor. “I told Leo I wanted a large, fancy headstock like the Bigsby guitars had,” Carson wrote in his memoir. “As it turned out, the final shape did indeed have a Bigsby look.”
19.
“LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN”
LAS VEGAS AND ELSEWHERE, 1954–1955
Mary Ford leaned over the edge of the balcony and looked out at the lights of Las Vegas glimmering against a backdrop of black desert. Back in the yellow glow of their room, Les was lying on the floor, scrunched up underneath some piece of recording equipment, trying to make a repair. The couple was back out on the road. But it was just the two of them together now that Mary’s sister Carol and her husband, Wally, had gone home to California. For Mary, the absence of others, especially her sister, only worsened the almost unbearable misery of this experience.
On November 26, 1954—Thanksgiving Day—Mary Ford had gone into labor at the Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and given birth to a little girl. Colleen Paul arrived prematurely, weighing only five pounds. Newspapers around the country reported that both mother and daughter “were doing fine,” but soon doctors noticed that the little girl wasn’t breathing normally. Two days later, the baby was rushed in an incubator from the New Jersey hospital to St. Vincent’s in Manhattan. A surgery at first seemed to correct her respiratory distress.
But at one fifteen a.m. on November 30, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s first child died. Mary was still at the hospital in New Jersey and wasn’t told right away. According to Les’s biographer, she learned of the baby’s death when the singer Perry Como, a friend of the couple, read the news in the morning paper and called to offer his condolences. Hearing Como’s words, straining to understand what had happened, Mary Ford shattered. Grief just broke her apart.
Papers nationwide had reported on the death of little Colleen Paul, even as music columnists still gushed at the amazing success of her parents’ recording career. The couple had kept recording until the very day Mary gave birth, hoping to stockpile a few discs for release during their time away. Drinking beer and vodka to cope with stress, staying busier than she probably wanted to, Mary had hardly rested during her pregnancy as she tried to satisfy the demands of being a chart-topping pop singer. Les didn’t just encourage their hectic lifestyle; he enforced it. All the activity, the nerves, the drinking, the exhaustion—Mary must have wondered after that tragic Thanksgiving if the way she’d lived had something to do with little Colleen’s premature birth, her acute respiratory distress, her untimely end.
After Colleen’s passing, Mary Ford had descended into an abyss. The preacher’s daughter from Pasadena had hardly laid eyes on the precious child she’d wanted so badly, only to see her torn away. Now she felt a raw, searing pain, an ache from which she thought she might never escape. In the weeks after that awful Thanksgiving, she’d been paralyzed with grief, permanently horizontal, the flood from her eyes unceasing.
Les had thought that taking a trip to Europe would distract Mary from her sadness, and she’d spent the winter there with him hoping it would, too. But in Europe they’d done almost the same thing they did at home: careen through one city after another in search of who knows what. Les had spent a fortune on sound equipment. In Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden, Mary had stared out the window and thought about the daughter she lost. It was a hell of way to spend the longest vacation Les ever gave her.
The calendar read 1955 by the time they came home. Mary ached inside, but her allotted grieving period ha
d ended. It was time to get back to work—to be the person she’d been or pretended to be: smiling and enthusiastic and eager to greet her audience, though the thought of going onstage sent tremors through her still. This reticence now conflicted even more sharply with Les’s enthusiasm, his desire to be out there, talking to the fans, playing and recording. On the road, there was no one else around to absorb his energy anymore—no one but Mary to try to slow him down. Les had never been good at taking it easy, but ever since they’d gotten back from Europe, he was just all go.
Mary glanced in at her husband lying there on the floor. He was biting his lip in deep concentration, aiming the silvery tip of his soldering iron at some piece of electronic guts. She let out a sigh. The balcony of their room looked out over the hotel pool, and far down there she could make out the frolicking shapes and sounds of Lucille Ball and Frank Fontaine, comedians and fellow guests at the hotel. They weren’t working. They were enjoying themselves. The stars’ laughter echoed around the pool deck and up off the stucco walls of the building, slipping in through the open balcony door, mocking Mary’s sour mood.
“You know, we’re up here, and we work so hard,” she said out loud, absentmindedly, just as much to herself as to her husband. “And they’re down there goofing off. Doing nothing.”
Les had just finished the repair and was putting his machine back together. “Yeah, they’re goofing off and they’re not getting anything done,” he said. “Now, come back over here to the microphone, and let’s try this again.”
Les’s response irked her. All she heard was try it again, or one more time, over and over—so incessantly it drove their hotel neighbors crazy, even the ones who loved the music. From next door the neighbors would rush over at three a.m., pounding on the door, apologizing, saying, I love you, you’re great, but please, stop playing that same thing over and over, I’m so sick and tired of it.
Well, imagine how tired of it I am, Mary wanted to say.
There had been a time when every performance felt like it made a difference, when every stage and every microphone had meant something new. But that feeling was gone. When she and Les had returned from Europe, they’d been shocked at how much music—and the country—had changed in their absence. Looking at the charts, the names they knew, their friends, had disappeared or fallen far below where they’d once stood. In place of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and Perry Como now rose obscure figures like Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Ruth Brown, Fats Domino, Little Richard. All singing raucous little numbers about teenage love, it seemed.
Les dismissed them as vulgar impostors, chumps who knew but one tempo and couldn’t play an instrument to save their lives. But Mary had noticed that since the arrival of this rock ’n’ roll music, their own records faced a stronger headwind than they had in years. The single they’d released that summer of 1955, “Hummingbird,” got positive notices in Billboard and Cash Box, and the couple’s DJ friends said nice things about it. But after an initial burst of attention, it had fizzled out, rising to only no. 7 on the pop charts—a disappointment compared to their previous hits. Meanwhile, everyone seemed to be dazzled by some fellow named Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley had spent the summer at no. 1.
Naturally, all the attention given to this kids’ music annoyed Les, but it didn’t dissuade him. If anything, he felt that the rise of rock ’n’ roll made his and Mary’s live performances only more important—a chance to show what skilled musicians could do. Even while the new music surged to prominence, Les thought there were plenty of places for him and Mary to draw a contrast, to make a stand—so many that Mary found the task of even tallying them exhausting. The couple still had their own television show, sponsored by Listerine. They were scheduled to appear that fall on the first televised broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry. The magazines were still calling, asking for cover stories. Also calling was the White House, where the couple had been requested to play for President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon and their families. Mary shuddered at the thought.
The dry desert wind wafted into their hotel room. Mary put on her headphones and looked over the lyrics sheet for the song they were trying to capture. Thinking of the work ahead depressed her, especially since there’d be even more now, with these challengers. She wanted to lie by the pool and laugh like Lucille Ball, or hole up quietly at home in New Jersey and not worry about performing so much. But whenever she voiced this latter urge, Les just glared at her. He could be so cold sometimes, so indifferent.
The backdrop to Mary’s life with Les had always been the couple’s shared conviction that their future would be inevitably brighter than their present. Now Mary worried that no amount of work would take them to a better place. How far would Les want to go? How far, she wondered—pulling the balcony doors closed against the desert night and turning toward the microphone—could she stand to go with him?
20.
“WE HAD NO IDEA THAT ‘MAYBELLENE’ WAS RECORDED BY A NIGGRA MAN”
NEW YORK CITY AND ST. LOUIS, 1955–1957
Ed Sullivan, a glum head on too-narrow shoulders, shrugged in front of the curtain and started to mumble: “Here, from Lubbock, Texas, the Crickets”—he spat out the name with a contemptuous nod—“with one of their hit records.” A patter of applause rose invisibly, and then a chord fell brightly down the neck of an electric guitar. Suddenly on-screen there was a delicate young man in a rumpled black suit and bow tie, wearing Elliot-style eyeglasses. He looked up, directly into the camera, and for a moment there was a flash of pure terror in his eyes, a look that seemed to ask just what the hell he was doing here, in this New York City theater, submitting to this grouchy old man, about to play at an intolerably low volume.
In the next moment, the singer and his three companions fired into the number, and when the drums and bass hit, a glimmer of a smile appeared in Buddy Holly’s expression. When he looked back into the camera, the light in his brown eyes had brightened from fear to determination. Every passing second seemed to imbue him with confidence. Perhaps he was reinforced by the infectious drive of “That’ll Be the Day,” by its charming mix of vulnerability and cockiness: “You say you’re gonna leave me / You know it’s a lie / ’Cause that’ll be the day-ay / When I die.”
But as Buddy’s smile narrowed into a mischievous smirk, it must’ve discomforted some of Ed Sullivan’s eleven million viewers. Here, it must have seemed, was another damn rock ’n’ roller. “That’ll Be the Day” shuffled and scooted along; it was music to bop to; it was teenager stuff. But then, the Crickets all looked like decent prom dates. Buddy Holly smiled; he wore a bow tie. He was no tramp like that Elvis Presley; if he came for your daughter, you might actually let her leave with him. On the other hand, he did sway suspiciously, and the way his voice cracked and warbled with desperation—“You gave me all your lovin’ and your tur-HUR-tledovin’ ”—suggested he’d been up to a certain kind of no good at least a few times. Another rock ’n’ roll degenerate, then, this time disguised in respectable attire.
Furthering this sense of confusion was a strange instrument hanging from his shoulders, which was appearing on national TV for the very first time with a rock ’n’ roll band. If Buddy’s look and bearing presented him as something familiar, his guitar rejected that assessment. Its body seemed to have two horns sticking out of its side, like jet wings or tongues of flame. A white patch was splattered across its body like the side panel of a Chevy Bel Air. The thing was so thin it barely jutted outward at all; it seemed to hug Buddy’s torso with its curves. Compared to the hollow-body guitar held by sideman Niki Sullivan, Buddy’s axe looked downright space-age, a sci-fi, comic-book sort of thing. Even with the awful microphones and mixing of the Sullivan show, the tone of it cut right through: a clear, jangling ring that seemed to let the strike of each string linger in your ears. It stuck out above the din of a rock ’n’ roll band the way it stuck to Ed Sullivan’s viewers’ eyeballs. It was Leo Fender’s latest creation, and perhaps his greatest.
But eve
n as the rock ’n’ roll storm reached hurricane strength in 1957, this radical instrument appeared only rarely on stages and screens. Just a few of the first-generation rock ’n’ roll singers played electric guitar themselves, and even fewer played solid-bodied instruments. Elvis Presley sometimes wore a Martin acoustic onstage but let sideman Scotty Moore grind out the hot licks. Bill Haley led a band whose debt to swing honchos like Bob Wills and Benny Goodman was obvious. Meanwhile, Chuck Berry created the archetype of the singing, soloing rock ’n’ roll superstar. Shuffling and duck-walking out at the front of the stage, a Gibson hollow-body hanging off his muscled shoulders, Berry imported the role of the R & B bandleader into the realm of rock ’n’ roll, and in the process became its original guitar-playing genius. Chess Records had issued his first single, “Maybellene,” in 1955, and watched it rumble to more national success than his labelmate and hero Muddy Waters had ever managed, peaking at no. 1 on the R & B charts and no. 5 on the pop Top 40 chart.
Berry’s music was not like Muddy’s, but a sped-up, teen-targeted hybrid of various styles: the jazzy jump-blues of Louis Jordan, the grinding shuffle of electric Chicago, and even the thumping western swing of Bob Wills. “Maybellene” itself was based on “Ida Red,” one of the more raucous numbers in Wills’s repertoire, showing just how closely rock ’n’ roll modeled itself on the sounds of the prior era. Berry borrowed the earlier song’s tempo, souped up the rolling, battering, boom-chk rhythm, and updated the lyrics into a teen drama complete with a two-timing love interest and a battle between a villainous Cadillac and a heroic Ford. So a tune that thrilled white high schoolers was built from what Bob Wills had used to get their parents dancing the jitterbug. Many grown-up western swing and country fans even recognized “Ida Red” inside “Maybellene”—and liked it.