by Ian Port
Of course, the songs told of different worlds, from Wills’s “Chicken in a bread tray, peckin’ out dough” to Berry’s “Cadillac doin’ about ninety-five,” with Berry compacting a full narrative into just over two minutes and summoning a wry attitude that was entirely of its moment. And as a black man singing songs aimed at white teens, Berry embodied, as perhaps no other artist had, the profound cultural and racial convulsion that accompanied the rise of rock ’n’ roll.
Like Americans themselves, American music had long been segregated into white and black charts, styles, record labels, and radio stations, all in an effort to disguise the fact that members of each race regularly found things to like in the other’s music. DJ Alan Freed first adopted the “rock ’n’ roll” label to make it more acceptable for young whites to buy and appreciate the vital black sound of rhythm and blues. But the music’s evident blackness made many white listeners uncomfortable, and canny producers and artists deemed further accommodations necessary. “There was something in many of those youngsters that resisted buying this music,” Sam Phillips once explained. “The Southern ones especially felt a resistance they probably didn’t quite understand. They liked the music, but they weren’t sure whether they ought to like it or not.”
To find commercial success in this divided landscape, artists blurred racial lines. Phillips found a white singer—Elvis Presley—who could sound black. Chuck Berry disarmed white listeners by training his black voice to sound white. Honing his act in St. Louis clubs, he’d taught himself to sing with a harder, whiter diction, as he explained in his autobiography. In those days, fans rarely saw pictures of recording stars, leaving skin color open to imagination—and anyway, “photos of black faces only required less exposure to appear as bright as white faces,” Berry noted. Berry sounded hillbilly enough that he found himself accidentally booked into white clubs in segregated states, clubs it was illegal for him as a black man to enter, much less headline. He later recounted the confused mutterings of one such white promoter: “It’s a country dance and we had no idea that ‘Maybellene’ was recorded by a niggra man.”
But if Berry could summon white attributes to broaden his appeal, he arranged his bands in the style of black R & B, making its structure the standard for a rock ’n’ roll group. After the war, as jazz had grown more abstract and less danceable, black bandleaders like Louis Jordan and Lionel Hampton had built small, rhythm-focused combos around a powerful lead instrument like a saxophone. Half a decade later, Berry borrowed their format—but replaced the sax with his electric guitar.
Rising to fame a couple of years after Chuck Berry’s arrival, Buddy Holly became Berry’s style of bandleader, filling a role that would later be called a front man. Like Berry, Holly wrote most of his songs, sang them onstage, and played rhythm and lead guitar. Though Berry was the greater innovator, Holly was in some ways more modern—in his choice of instrument, for one thing. A few other rock ’n’ rollers used solid-body guitars, even Stratocasters. Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps could be seen wielding double-cutaway Fenders as they scratched out “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” But no early rock ’n’ roller would shape the future through a solid-body guitar the way Buddy Holly would. Because no audience felt the allure of Holly and his Strat more than the teenagers of Britain.
21.
“TWO DONKEYS ON EACH END OF A ROPE, PULLING IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS”
FULLERTON, 1955–1957
On a warm Thursday morning in June 1955, salesman Charlie Hayes drove out to Fullerton to visit the Fender factory. Hayes had been recently married—to the surprise of his friend Don Randall, who wondered whether Hayes’s pretty new wife, Dorothy, knew what she was in for. How could the prankster Charlie Hayes keep a wife, especially one who seemed so mild? But marriage seemed to calm Hayes down a bit. He still loved to pour too much lighter fluid on the barbecue, but he seemed to have realized that, along with all the opportunities for practical jokes, there was serious money to be made in the Fender operation. And as its vice president of sales—a corporate officer along with Don Randall, Leo Fender, and F. C. Hall—the lanky Texan was in a position to earn plenty.
Leo, eternally occupied in his lab, kept Hayes waiting all morning, and Hayes used the time to gab with the still-new plant manager, Forrest White, about the increasingly tense relationship between Don and Leo. In his easygoing drawl, addressing White as “kid,” Hayes said that the two men were behaving like sparring generals on the same side of a war, communicating only cryptically through their secretaries, each refusing to bend to what the other wanted. Sales were erupting, but frustration was mounting on both sides of the company. Leo wanted to create radical new products, to make improvements anywhere possible. Don wanted to produce what customers would buy. As White soon learned, the two men were like “two donkeys on each end of a rope, pulling in opposite directions trying to get some food.”
Around noon, Leo emerged from his lab and went to lunch with Charlie, Forrest White, and George Fullerton. They lingered over their hamburgers, finding a lot to talk about. Hayes’s personal life had just undergone a radical change: he now had a wife, a new house in Tustin with a lawn he’d just planted, and a dealer-fresh Cadillac Coupe De Ville—baby blue with a white roof—to ferry him around on sales trips. Leo asked about the car and gave tips about cultivating the lawn, both subjects on which he considered himself an expert.
There were urgent developments at work to be discussed, too. F. C. Hall, who owned part of the company that sold Fender instruments, had recently purchased the Electro String factory in Los Angeles, maker of the venerable, competing line of Rickenbacker electric guitars and amps. Leo and Charlie were furious that Hall had bought a local rival: it seemed Hall was hedging his bet on the electric instrument industry across two separate manufacturers, rather than putting all his faith in Fender. Leo especially hated the idea that, through Hall, Rickenbacker would know how many guitars and amplifiers Fender was selling.
It was the longest lunch Leo had taken in a while. Afterward, Hayes stuck around the factory to continue talking business and spent all afternoon there, walking out with Leo, Forrest, and George as they were locking up the plant just after seven p.m. “So long, kid,” Hayes told Forrest White. Then he got into his new Cadillac and headed south toward the Fender Sales office in Santa Ana.
The area between Fullerton and Anaheim was then largely empty. The roads were country two-laners, nothing like the ribbons of freeways that would later crisscross the region. Golden hills rose to the north and east, and long rows of fruit trees undulated in neat lines, filling the foreground in every direction. The only blip of civilization was the lone Fullerton drive-in, dusty and vacant in the fading summer light.
Hayes’s Coupe De Ville rolled south down Placentia Avenue, just coming into Anaheim. Racing in the opposite direction, unbeknownst to Hayes, was a drunk twenty-one-year-old named Raul Rivera. Roaring north out of town, Rivera suddenly nudged his car into the other lane to pass a local doctor, who was driving that evening with his three children in the car. But in the haze of his intoxication, Rivera miscalculated the distance. His car struck Hayes’s Cadillac head-on, and both vehicles all but exploded in the crash. Hayes’s massive new Caddy absorbed the brunt of the impact and was mangled into ribbons, virtually unrecognizable. Rivera, the passing driver, was killed instantly. The doctor Rivera had been trying to pass got out to give aid to Hayes, and found the lanky Texan critically injured, lying unconscious in the Caddy’s glass-strewn interior.
Later that evening, Don Randall’s eldest son was getting ready for bed when he heard the phone ring. At thirteen, he was old enough to know immediately that something was wrong. From his bedroom at the back of the Randall home, Don Jr. heard his parents talking in brittle tones, heard a quaver in his father’s usually firm voice. No one told him any news that night. The elder Don Randall was too upset to explain, and left to try to comfort Hayes’s wife. Don Jr. sat up with his grandmother late into the night, finally falling asleep on the sofa.
The next morning, Jean Randall went into her son’s room and sat down next to him on the bed. “Uncle Charlie isn’t here anymore,” she said. By the time emergency workers had gotten the vice president of Fender Sales to Orange County Hospital, all life had fled from his body.
Hayes’s death leveled Don Randall. He and Charlie were best friends, travel partners, golf buddies, and close confidants. Hayes was a regular around the Randall family dinner table and a beloved uncle to Don’s kids. For all that Don and Charlie’s relationship had been about selling instruments, for all the barbs they traded in letters back and forth, their friendship was about much more than sales goals and product announcements—it was personal. The two men had loved and understood each other, and had had big, if untold, dreams for the future. But Randall, so used to running things along with this wisecracking, supremely capable older companion, would now have to helm Fender Sales on his own.
Hayes’s absence ripped through the entire organization. Fender had lost not just its most talented and best-known salesman, a figure well-known in music industry publications, and a corporate officer. It had lost a crucial communications link between Don in Santa Ana and Leo in Fullerton, between the inward-facing inventor and the outgoing president of sales. Hayes had been the one person who spoke both Leo’s and Don’s languages, who could make one man see problems from the other’s perspective, and who commanded unquestionable respect from both sides. He’d been hugely important in building this motley assemblage of peddlers and craftsmen into a profitable enterprise—and even with Charlie Hayes around, the relationship between Don and Leo had been fraught. Now he was gone, and no one knew quite how to continue.
In the painful weeks after Hayes’s death, however, one certainty declared itself to both Don and Leo: Fender couldn’t maintain its relationship with F. C. Hall. The businessman had been a crucial support from the earliest days of the operation, wagering money from his wholesale radio parts store on Leo Fender’s novel ideas for electric instruments. He’d let Don Randall, a onetime stock boy, run an entire arm of his company. He’d given Leo at least two loans to keep his factory running. But Hall had become a skeptical, glowering parent for a Fender enterprise then entering an awkward adolescence. He wasn’t willing to take the same risks in the new guitar business that Randall was, and he had little patience for Leo’s perfectionism and chronic unreliability. Leo had grown so distressed by Hall that, according to Fender historian Richard Smith, he often had to pull his car off the road and vomit after meetings with the investor.
The final count against Hall was his purchase of the Rickenbacker factory, which Don and Leo saw as an intolerable betrayal. They wanted him out, and Charlie Hayes’s death provided a way to do it. Don and Leo decided they’d buy not only the shares of the company now owned by Hayes’s widow but Hall’s shares, too, consolidating ownership of Fender Sales between the two of them.
Hall of course didn’t want to sell. But Don and Leo had the leverage: Hall only owned shares of Fender Sales, the company that sold the instruments (it had been separated from Hall’s wholesale radio parts business two years earlier). The Fender factory, which actually made all the valuable products, was owned entirely by Leo. “We told Francis either you sell to us or we sell to you,” Don Randall told Richard Smith. If Hall had refused to give up his shares, Leo could’ve simply sold his instruments under another name through another distributor. But rather than fight, Hall gave in. “The parties have encountered differences of opinion as to the management, control, and operation of the corporation,” read the separation agreement drawn up that fall. For the paltry sum of $45,000—less than half of what his lawyer claimed it was worth—plus the repayment of a $10,000 loan, F. C. Hall grudgingly agreed to sell his fifty shares of Fender Sales to Leo and Don Randall. A few years later, such a move would have been unthinkable. But no one could see, at that moment in 1955, just how profitable the electric guitar business would one day become.
If Hall was embittered by his ejection from Fender, he was too dignified to complain loudly about it. It seems he did feel betrayed by Randall, his longtime employee, whom he’d groomed from a provincial, radio-obsessed teenager into a sophisticated salesman and manager. But Hall wasn’t one to linger over his feelings. Business was business; he didn’t hold Fender or musical equipment in any special regard. If he no longer had a piece of Fender, he at least owned Rickenbacker, one of the electric guitar industry’s most venerated names, and he could now turn his attention to building that firm into a stronger competitor.
Leo and Don had agreed that they needed to run Fender themselves, but this did nothing to improve their dysfunctional relationship. Increasingly, each occupied a separate world. With White now largely managing the factory, Leo retreated into his lab, working with a close circle of employees and musicians to develop new products and features. He began to feel that his group was the only one truly focused on the fortunes of the company, that Randall was too distracted by his golf game or his newest hobby, flying airplanes.
Randall, meanwhile, put on sharp suits and spent twelve-hour days talking to outside people, either on the phone or in person, nose-deep in the reality of trying to sell Leo’s instruments. He sometimes came home from work so infuriated, usually by something Leo had done—or not done—that he’d leap up from his chair at the dinner table and disappear for an hour or two until he could calmly interact with his family. Just ten miles separated the Fullerton factory from the Santa Ana sales office, but the divide between Don and Leo felt far larger. It was growing almost as fast as the company’s sales.
In 1954–55, the first year the Stratocaster was offered, Fender had shipped 720 of them. Leo believed in linear technological progress, in a new thing coming along to replace the old. He thought the updated model would wipe out demand for the original Telecaster. He was wrong. Even with the Stratocaster circulating that year, Fender had sold 1,027 Telecasters and single-pickup Esquires, showing that plenty of players thought the original Fender solid-body was newfangled enough.
The combined success of the solid-body guitars, plus the increased demand for Fender amplifiers caused by the changing currents in music, pushed Fender’s net sales above $1 million for the first time in 1955. From May 1956 to May 1957, that number increased to $1.7 million, bringing Don and Leo a net profit of $100,884—the equivalent of nearly seven figures today. Business was booming. Large western swing outfits were in decline along with the old ballrooms, but replacing them was a whole ecosystem of smaller groups—in rock ’n’ roll, country, blues, and pop—who played halls and clubs and depended on electric amplification.
Photographs of the most successful musicians in the second half of the 1950s captured Fender’s growth. Leo’s guitars and amplifiers—either or both—appeared with Elvis and Chuck Berry, with B. B. King and Muddy Waters, with Wes Montgomery and Oscar Moore, with Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, with Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson. And why not? The equipment sounded exquisite. The chief character of the Fender tone was its lushness, the way notes came out full and rich and somehow refreshing. The amplifiers produced more clean, undistorted volume than anything else on the market. But the spectrum of sound available from both Leo’s electric guitars and amplifiers felt tremendously wide, and any note—lows and highs especially—seemed to punch right out of the speaker, demanding attention. This sonic character would animate innumerable concerts and recordings, and would be copied (or at least imitated) by countless competitors.
Just a year after the release of the Stratocaster, Fender was succeeding beyond what Leo could have imagined. He and Esther finally ended their long tenure as renters and purchased their own home—actually, they had one built by Grady Neal, the contractor who’d erected the Fender factory. It was a modest little two-bedroom on the east side of Fullerton, at 221 North Lincoln Avenue, less than five minutes’ drive from the plant. The house had one story, a tiny porch, and Cape Cod shutters on the front windows. Leo took advantage of the spacious lot by having a
large shed built off the alley, which he used as storage for the company.
Leo was literally bringing home his work, and his inability to escape from the goings-on at the factory created new problems. He was always sensitive about his health, but in 1955, he got a streptococcus infection, and no matter what he did, it wouldn’t seem to go away. His doctor injected him with penicillin and other antibiotics, but every time Leo got a chill, the infection flared back up. Soon, the doctor declared that Leo simply couldn’t work seven (or six and a half) days a week anymore, that he needed to take his mind off the plant. They didn’t call it “stress” then, but rather, “worry.” Leo had to stop worrying so much. He needed a distraction.
Leo despised golf, which he associated with Don Randall. But when the doctor suggested fishing, a light must’ve gone off in Leo’s mind. Fishing meant a boat, and boats were interesting. Leo had been in the kayaking club at Fullerton College, but the first real vessel he purchased, around 1955, was no kayak. The Chris-Craft had sweeping, modern lines rendered in fiberglass and fine teak, and, at forty-two feet in length, ample deck space on both the bow and stern. In a fit of literalism, Leo named the boat Aquafen: water plus Fender. He outfitted it with every electronic gizmo available: fish finders, depth sounders, radar. “It was kind of like being in a rocket ship on water,” one family friend remembered. The way Leo looked at it, just because his new boat was meant as a distraction from work didn’t mean it shouldn’t perform as effectively as possible.
22.
“IF WE’RE GOING OVER WELL, OUR GUITARS WEIGH LESS THAN A FEATHER”
MEMPHIS, KALAMAZOO, AND FULLERTON, 1956–1959