by Ian Port
Muddy was surprised by the reaction his Telecaster playing got in England. Aside from perhaps a few curious white faces in a South Side club, he’d never performed for an audience outside of his core black following. In 1958, his music was virtually unknown to white listeners in America. He was wounded by the harsh criticisms these foreigners initially made, and as the England tour progressed, he gradually turned his amplifier down.
Yet despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, nearly all of the shows in England sold out. Over those two weeks, Muddy saw that his music had found an appreciative audience all the way on the other side of the Atlantic, an unimaginable distance from the South Side, and this realization rejuvenated him. “I didn’t play guitar until about two months ago, but I’m gonna keep on playing now,” he told Tony Standish. “I won’t rest no more—when I rest next time, I’ll be through.” All the electric guitars he’d played before had not stuck with him, but Muddy would play the Telecaster he used in England for the rest of his life, later repainting the guitar red and adding a thicker neck.
By the end of the tour, receptions had grown so warm that Muddy talked about making plans to come back. “Now I know,” Muddy told Melody Maker, “that the people in England like soft guitar and the old blues.” But he’d already begun to change that. Among those who saw Muddy Waters in England were a few art-school students who’d soon start a couple of bands. One of those bands would be called the Animals. The other would become the Rolling Stones, after one of his own hits. Older English fans, those who wrote for the magazines, who swooned over Chris Barber’s 1920s jazz, might have preferred the acoustic Muddy Waters. Those younger listeners would never forget the way he made that Telecaster howl.
So by the end of 1958, two Americans with Fender guitars—a white Texan and a black Chicagoan—had demonstrated raw, electric-guitar-driven music as it had never been heard in England. Surely neither Buddy Holly nor Muddy Waters realized how fully, and how soon, a few English players would come to master it themselves.
24.
“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO PLAY SO LOUD?”
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1959–1961
“Like many adults, I’ve been in the habit of switching the radio off rather quickly the last couple of years,” Les Paul’s old friend Bing Crosby wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune in 1960. “Two bars of rock ’n’ roll and I reach for that dial. But despite those jangling guitars, I’ve stayed optimistic about the future of popular music . . . Now, I guess I was right. Rock ’n’ roll seems to have run its course.” Crosby wrote that teenagers had lost their taste for “thumping electric guitars” and a big beat, and that something else would soon take their place as the musical fad of the day—perhaps even the slow, gentle ballads he loved.
Surveying the music of the time, it would have been easy to agree. After a ruthless rise in the mid-1950s, rock ’n’ roll seemed to crater by the end of the decade. Elvis Presley entered the army in October 1958 and returned to civilian life in 1960 more a crooner than a greaser. Little Richard announced his plans to retire and enter the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis, on a tour of England, revealed to the press that he was married to his thirteen-year-old cousin—and that she was his third wife—thus banishing himself from polite society.
The following February, in the greatest tragedy to befall the first generation of rock ’n’ rollers, the plane carrying Buddy Holly and the rising stars Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed, killing everyone aboard and cutting short the career of that lanky, bespectacled, Strat-wielding genius from Texas. In November, Alan Freed, the DJ who’d helped start the rock ’n’ roll craze, was implicated in a payola scandal. The following month, Chuck Berry was arrested for transporting an underage girl over state lines; he’d spend the next three years fighting a Mann Act charge and serving time for his conviction.
So Crosby’s claim that the “thumping electric guitars” had met their end perhaps had some backbone. A folk music revival led by groups like the Kingston Trio was capturing the attention of older youth, while novelty song-dances like Chubby Checker’s “Twist” stormed the pop charts. Whatever those were, they weren’t rock ’n’ roll.
In Southern California, however, a particular strain of original rock ’n’ roll endured among middle-class teenagers. It was largely instrumental music: tough, lean, easy to play, led by the electric guitar and the saxophone. The first signs of it had surfaced in 1956, when Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” replaced vocals with jaunty electric guitar and shot to no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming a rock ’n’ roll standard. Two years later, Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” offered up little besides the echoing, metallic sound of a Gretsch hollow-body guitar as its centerpiece, inventing “twang” and exuding unimpeachable cool. Link Wray’s “Rumble” of 1958 was even rawer, foregrounding a crackling, distressed tone that Wray achieved by cutting holes in his amplifier speaker.
Ritchie Valens, the Latino rocker from Los Angeles who died in the plane crash with Buddy Holly, had contributed to this movement with “Fast Freight,” an instrumental that featured him tooling around the neck of his Stratocaster, flicking out licks over a steady beat. Like “Rebel Rouser” and “Rumble,” “Fast Freight” was two minutes of utterly basic music: three chords, a chugging rhythm, and Valens’s Fender issuing attitude. It showed obvious debts to Chuck Berry, but Valens had also borrowed from a friend and brief label-mate in LA. That friend was a handsome young man who’d moved out to California in high school, a lefty developing a strikingly powerful style on the guitar, which he played upside down, its strings reversed from the usual order. Born to Lebanese parents as Richard Monsour, this friend of Valens’s had started out playing local talent shows, and showed enough ambition that one night a four-hundred-pound country-western DJ named T. Texas Tiny bestowed on him a stage name: Dick Dale.
Los Angeles had facilitated Dick Dale’s evolution from a would-be Hank Williams to a would-be Elvis Presley, even giving him a bit part impersonating the King in a Marilyn Monroe flick called Let’s Make Love. But Dale’s initial rockabilly recording went nowhere, and working in metallurgy at Hughes Aircraft was a drag. So in the late fifties, he moved south to Orange County and joined a little folk scene on the Balboa Peninsula, a spit of land jutting out from Newport Beach into the Pacific. Balboa was a kind of Hamptons of Los Angeles, and a favorite spring break destination for local high schoolers, whose annual “Bal Week” festivities shattered the usual seaside calm. There was one beatnik coffeehouse in town, and an ice-cream parlor with a stage where Dick Dale and his cousin started playing folk and country music on electric guitars, building a little following. In the summer of 1960, their audiences overflowed the ice-cream parlor and clogged the street outside. So Dale moved one block away, to a cavernous venue called the Rendezvous Ballroom.
Built in 1928 to present traveling jazz orchestras, the Rendezvous had once hosted Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, though lately, its staid offerings barely drew a few hundred people to a parquet floor that could hold three thousand. Its hulking, Spanish-tiled exterior and vast parking lot sat right on the sand, their concrete pad occupying more than 160 feet of beachfront, so close to the breakers that ribbons of sea foam spilled into the parking lot at high tide. It made a perfect birthplace for what would become known as surf music.
Starting in July 1960, Dick Dale and the Del-Tones performed at the Rendezvous every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, from eight p.m. to midnight. After spreading the word around local high schools, their audiences swelled from dozens to hundreds within weeks. To satisfy authorities nervous about rock ’n’ roll’s corrupting local youth, Dale imposed strict rules. There’d be no alcohol, of course, and no letting attendees in after they’d left the show, to limit any parking lot mischief. A strict dress code was enforced: no “short pants”—not even capris for the girls—and for the boys, collared shirts and neckties. A box of ties was even kept at the door, to be handed out to the rebellious or forgetful.
With Dale now using guitars, ba
ss, drums, and as many as three saxophones, his folk tunes were replaced by more forceful numbers, especially rock instrumentals. Much of the Del-Tones’ set was soon wordless, with Dale’s guitar simply buzzing out lead melodies over a tumbling rhythm. His guitar style grew out of his fascination with the drums, particularly the haywire soloing of big-band leader Gene Krupa. Trying to re-create Krupa’s percussive force and blinding speed on a guitar, Dale started chopping at his strings with a pick so fast that every note came out serrated, his wrist a blur, the amplifier spitting a steady tremble of barbed wire. Sawing at the strings required formidable strength and precision from Dale, and as his playing grew more intense and powerful at the Rendezvous, he began to have problems with his amplifiers. He kept setting them on fire.
That, anyway, is what Dale said was happening, though any conflagrations were likely small and short-lived. He’d paired his white, left-handed Stratocaster with speaker boxes from Gibson, Fender, and the smaller Southern California company Standel, but no matter which amp he played, he’d destroy it. He sought the fattest, thickest sound from his Stratocaster, the heaviest bass possible, a gut-punch. To get such a sound in such a large room, he turned up his amps so loud that he either fried the capacitors inside—sending up small puffs of smoke—or shook the speaker into incoherent flatulence.
It was a problem Leo Fender just couldn’t understand. By then, Leo had taken a liking to the young Richard Monsour, bonding with him after the young player apparently came around Fullerton begging for a guitar. The two would call each other with new technical ideas late at night, and spent time sitting in Leo and Esther’s living room, listening to Marty Robbins country records. Leo found Dick Dale’s amplifier conundrum intriguing. He and his lab assistant, Freddie Tavares, spent weeks developing improvements for Dale, building stouter versions of the new amplifier line they were developing. Dale would drop by on Thursday afternoons in 1960 and play through the new circuits and the wall of speakers Leo used for testing. Inside the concrete bunker of Leo’s lab, his guitar sounded like a machine gun. It was deafening how Dale played the instrument, his tanned left arm bulging as he knifed the strings with his pick.
Yet at the end of every weekend, Dale trudged back to Fullerton with whatever supposedly powerful amp Leo had given him, and it ended up with its capacitors smoked or the speaker cone torn or both, and Dale still claimed that it hadn’t given him the sound he wanted. “Leo kept asking me, ‘Why do you have to play so loud?’ ” Dale remembered. After what he claims were some forty or fifty amps destroyed, Freddie Tavares finally told Leo that to truly understand the problem, they’d have to go see Dale perform in person.
Mr. Fender and Mr. Tavares, middle-aged professionals heading out to get a taste of the local teen mania, must have been quite a sight: Freddie in his round metal glasses and Hawaiian shirt, grinning, the ever-curious musician; Leo in plain khakis and a blue button-up, slightly frowning, battling an ulcer after nearly fourteen years of running his own instrument company. On that weekend evening, they joined a line of cars three miles long down Balboa Boulevard and found the Rendezvous parking lot crammed full. The two grown-ups must have moved awkwardly through the crowds of teens hanging around, the kids surreptitiously drinking or necking or getting into precisely the mischief the town fathers had feared. Out on the darkened beach, the crashing waves left trails of white foam that glowed in the streetlights.
After the cool damp of the outside, the humid air inside the Rendezvous hit like a wall. In the ballroom darkness they could just make out the bulk of the crowd: three thousand teens knotted together, twirling, spinning, stomping. Boys in neat gray jackets and ties; girls in flannel skirts and closed-toed shoes, leaning on one another. A few more rebellious types in Pendleton flannels and huaraches, their collars torn open, dancing alone. The boys would put one foot down, slide it a little, then the next foot, slide, and so on: the surfer’s stomp. A forest of young faces, sweating, smiling, their white skin turning pink with exertion, everyone absorbed in the music and each other.
Leo and Freddie clumsily made their way to the center of the room and focused on the stage, where their friend was leading his band. Dale was a marble statue, animated: a shovel-chinned superman wearing a madras blazer and a tie. A curl of greasy hair fell over his face while his dark eyes stared down at the veiny hands pummeling his Stratocaster. There were perhaps five more musicians up there, all dressed as immaculately, all swaying in unthinking unison to the beat, which was relentless. There was a drum kit alongside a Fender Precision Bass cranked up, and a trio of horns, but the star was Dale’s left-handed Stratocaster. It wasn’t playing just rhythm or lead, but somehow both. As the loose shuffle of the band swayed beneath him, Dale jackhammered electric notes out into the ballroom, as if trying to stab the sound of his guitar through the chests of his fans. His picks disintegrated on his thick guitar strings, and flurries of white plastic rained down on the checkerboard stage at his feet. Dale was punishing his guitar, pounding it, sawing it, threatening to tear it in half, and the resulting blare was like nothing Leo Fender or Freddie Tavares had heard. It wasn’t a sweet, clear melody. It was a jagged rhythm, a howl of steel, a squall of electric nails to which every single one of the three-thousand-something young people inside the Rendezvous Ballroom appeared desperately and completely in thrall.
Amid the din and the sweat, Leo turned to Freddie. “Now I know what Dick is trying to tell me,” he yelled.
Some weeks later, Leo called Dale down to the factory. He’d ordered a new fifteen-inch speaker from the James B. Lansing company and installed it in its own cabinet. An amplifier he’d built for Dale was housed separately, to make the rig easier to move. During use, the amp box stacked on top of the speaker cabinet. Both pieces were wrapped in cream-colored vinyl.
“This is you,” Leo said to Dale. “You are the Showman. This is your amp.”
It was the first amp Fender had made specifically to meet the needs of one player. The Fender Showman was also one of the first so-called stacks, the towering amplifier arrays that would become common as rock ’n’ roll evolved into rock. Based on other Fender circuits, but heftier—and, at eighty-five watts, more than twice as powerful as a common Fender Bassman—the Showman pointed the way to an even louder future, an age in which electric guitarists would require speaker boxes the size of refrigerators—or, at least, would really, really want them.
It still wasn’t loud enough for Dick Dale. Just as with the earlier trials, the Showman roared in Leo’s lab, but inside the Rendezvous, a room filled with thousands of sound-absorbing bodies, the thick bass Dale wanted wasn’t there. Even the new JBL speaker couldn’t stand up to his playing. Dale remembered Freddie Tavares holding the JBL cone in his hands and marveling at the strange contortions his rat-at-at guitar style forced out of it, eventually tearing the edges of the paper. Dale told Leo he wanted even more power, and two fifteen-inch speakers in the cabinet, not one.
One afternoon, Leo and Dale worked inside the beige walls of Leo’s lab, tweaking the Showman. As Dale’s guitar shot out of the speaker, Leo thought he heard a malfunction in the electronics and told Dale to stop playing. He reached over to the amplifier chassis and turned up the volume to maximum. Then he put an ear to the speaker grille and listened carefully for any unwelcome hum or hiss. This was a common procedure for troubleshooting amps, the best way to hear a faulty circuit—just turn it up and listen to what should be silence. But perhaps Dale bumped the guitar, or tripped over it, or smacked it; maybe he didn’t see where Leo’s ear was. Something struck the guitar, which was still plugged into the amp, which was turned all the way up and had Leo Fender’s head against its speaker. The full force of the machine bulldozed into Leo’s skull—the chomp of a Stratocaster at eighty-five watts, producing a violent metallic blast. Leo felt his eardrum crumble. He leapt away from the speaker, howling in agony, his hand covering his ear. But the damage was done; Leo’s ear collected only silence and pain. For days afterward, he could hear nothing out o
f it, and only a meager sensitivity ever returned. It was a cruel stroke of irony. Leo had already learned to live with one eye; now, he’d have to develop musical instruments using little more than one ear.
And yet he did. For Dick Dale, Leo created an even more powerful amp stack, with a huge output transformer and two revamped JBL fifteen-inch speakers in its cabinet. The regular Showman model was now in the Fender catalog. This “Dick Dale Showman,” as Leo called it, was not.
But it worked. Within a year of taking over the Rendezvous, and with his custom Fender amplifier punching out the heavy, tight bass he’d so long imagined, Dale’s performances became legendary around Southern California. As word spread about the band’s new sound, curious listeners came down from Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and beach cities from San Diego to Malibu. Seeing Dale perform became almost a rite of passage. Among the visitors to Balboa that year was a high-school-age singer and songwriter named Brian Wilson, who brought the group of boys he was singing with. They left stunned by the vigor of Dale’s shows, the heaviness of his guitar. “On entering the building, you could hear the shock waves of energy even before you heard the music,” one fan remembered. It was a scene neither they nor many others would forget.
There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that Dale was recording a performance at the Rendezvous in August 1961. When he tried to explain that the next song wasn’t quite finished, the crowd of boisterous young fans, many practitioners of a new sport called surfing, interrupted him with one of their favorite calls to action: “Let’s go trippin’!” A title was born, and so was a style of music. For the youth of coastal Southern California in the early 1960s—who either surfed themselves, wished they surfed, or at least thought surfing was cool—Dale’s instrumental music seemed to capture the bracing experience of riding a wave.