The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  Dale himself had learned to surf shortly after moving to Orange County. His long, strong limbs had no trouble handling a nine-foot Hobie, and his dark complexion and chiseled figure meant that he looked positively godlike out there, riding the ocean, gleaming in the sun. Some Dale fans surfed at Huntington Beach or the Wedge in Newport all day before showing up to Del-Tones gigs at night, and the link they heard between the sport and the music wasn’t just in their saltwater-clogged ears.

  Dale intended his overwhelming volume and the hypnotic rhythm of his instrumental music to evoke the awesome power of the sea. You could all but hear a surf rider in the movement of his lead guitar, the way it ventured from lower pitches to higher, crisscrossing the wave of the rhythm section as far up the fretboard as it could go. In this new sound—surf music, as it was beginning to be known—electric guitar was no longer an accompaniment, no longer a sideline. There wasn’t even a singer to compete with. The instrument had taken over the music, had become the very protagonist of the songs. And after another collaboration between Leo Fender and Dick Dale, the electric guitars themselves began to sound wet.

  25.

  “YOU WON’T PART WITH YOURS EITHER”

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1961–1963

  The acoustic guitar produces a natural richness. The steel guitar sustains almost forever. The saxophone blows raspy and aggrieved. But an electric guitar run straight through an amplifier often comes out sounding plain. Since the earliest days of the instrument, players have felt that it needs some additional element to give it character and make it a compelling lead voice—some sort of distortion, or, perhaps, echo. With echo, each note builds on the last, and the sound becomes layered, complex, three-dimensional. Les Paul used echo to add sparkle to his clean tones. Sam Phillips’s Memphis studio was famous for its tape echo system, which gave a surreal tint to Elvis Presley’s voice and guitar. Such dimensionality is integral to the character of many instruments: a pipe organ, for example, derives plenty of majesty from the way its sound bounces around a cathedral.

  That church-organ echo was exactly what Dick Dale wanted. Dale told Leo Fender that his Hammond organ had a button to induce artificial reverberation, adding a little warble and a lot of sustain to the notes. The Hammond reverb was created by a metal chamber with springs inside, built into the organ. Dale wanted this effect for his singing voice, and Leo was presumably happy to give it a try.

  At Dale’s request, Leo took a Hammond reverb tank and placed it in a standalone box. Dale ran his voice through it. Suddenly, he “was able to sing and sound like Elvis,” he remembered. Next, almost on a lark, Dale tried running his Stratocaster through the reverb. Dale and Leo knew in an instant that they’d found something even more amazing. The crisp edges of the Stratocaster, always so present and cutting, seemed now to waft around a damp, metallic cavern. The plucks of his strings, always so prickly and pointy, now seemed to float, their edges rounded off, their chords buoyant. Dale’s crisp electric guitar was transformed into a smear of tonal color. The sharpness of the Fender Stratocaster blurred by the wet atmosphere of the reverb made for a thrilling juxtaposition, like a knife gleaming underwater.

  Dale wanted this sound for his stage show, and Leo gave the first Fender Reverb units to Dick Dale and the Del-Tones in 1961: cream-colored rectangles, each a little larger than a shoebox, containing a spring tank (licensed from Hammond) and displaying a few knobs. You plugged the guitar into the Reverb, then the Reverb unit into the amp, and then basked in the humid glow. Many of Dale’s acolytes were starting surf bands of their own, and as soon as they heard his Stratocaster transformed by this new Fender gadget, they had to have one, too.

  The Chantays were one such group. For a show at the Tustin Youth Center in January 1962, guitarist Bob Spickard somehow obtained Dick Dale’s very own Fender Reverb without his knowing it. (The device had been in Leo’s shop for repair.) He and his bandmates were so impressed that they bought their own—a wise investment, as it would turn out. The Chantays were just a group of friends from Santa Ana High School, playing casually, but that year they recorded a moody, mellow single, titled “Pipeline,” with their new Fender Reverbs. A small LA label released the song, and somehow, by the following spring, “Pipeline” had reached no. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and had sold more than a million copies in the United States, becoming the most successful surf music recording yet made. Spickard and his friends were stunned; their young lives would be transformed forever. Importantly, “Pipeline” featured none of the saxophones or horns that often appeared on early surf records. There was an electric piano, but the Showman-amplified, reverb-soaked Fender electric guitar stood alone, front and center.

  Dick Dale’s crowd-favorite songs like “Misirlou”—later to become iconic in the opening credits of Pulp Fiction—and “Shake n’ Stomp” had made Fender equipment much desired among the surf bands forming around Southern California. But after the Chantays’ “Pipeline,” Fender gear was all but required. Surf music was now defined, first, by the sharpness and clarity of a Fender guitar through a Fender amp, and second, by the watery echo of the Fender Reverb and the hisses and pops it made when heated up. Only Leo’s creations had that knife-in-the-water character.

  Yet Fender’s near-ubiquity in the early 1960s also came through marketing efforts shrewdly attuned to the teenage sense of cool. The company had been largely oblivious to 1950s rock ’n’ roll, but in part because this latest movement was happening in its backyard, Fender quickly grasped the appeal of surfing and surf music, hot rods and hot-rod music. Around 1957, the company started offering guitars in a bright “Fiesta” red. The idea of a musical instrument painted the color of an Italian sports car was so novel that at first Don Randall’s sales team laughed it off. Then Fiesta red, first mixed at a hardware store by George Fullerton, massively caught on with young players. Fender soon offered guitars in the same hues as Detroit dream machines: Lake Placid Blue, Firemist Silver, Foam Green, Candy Apple Red Metallic, Burgundy Mist.

  These instruments’ chrome components mirrored those of flashy cars, and Leo’s new solid-body electric models seemed to fit with the vehicles’ sleek silhouettes. The Jazzmaster offered a rounded, amoeba-like body shape to go with the tail-fin mania of 1958. It never succeeded as a jazz guitar, but surf rockers loved it. The Jaguar of 1962 added more knobs, switches, and chrome to the same body shape. Leo thought both models made improvements to the Stratocaster and Telecaster, though many players disagreed. Meanwhile, cheaper models like the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic put Fender sound and quality within the reach of players just starting out.

  Firms like Gibson and Gretsch marketed their products to serious musicians: adults. At Fender Sales, Don Randall and his number two, Stan Compton, targeted young people. After all, young players were the ones who’d take lessons at music stores, see the instruments hanging on the wall, and ask their parents to buy one. Randall hired an artist-turned-adman, Robert Perine, whose images showed Fender guitars in places one would never expect a professional-quality instrument. He took a picture of a man riding a motorcycle with a Jaguar model on his back, or a kid riding a skateboard down a suburban sidewalk while strumming a Stratocaster, or a surfer fingering a chord as he rode a longboard down a wave, and turned these into magazine ads with a pithy caption: “You won’t part with yours either.” The message was clear: You didn’t have to be an expert to play a Fender. A Fender guitar wasn’t a professional tool, it was a leisure accessory. For the readers of the national music magazine DownBeat, on whose back cover many of Perine’s ads ran, Fender became a part of the Golden State dream, a sexy, cheeky contrast to the self-serious professionalism of Eastern-made instruments. Jazz elites might still never play Fender instruments (its amps were an exception), but young people everywhere would want them.

  Band photos and record covers from these years can themselves seem like Fender advertisements, with every member proudly cradling their favorite company product, often in matching colors. Groups gave themselve
s names like the Fender IV and Eddie and the Showmen, testifying to their adoration. And if uninitiated high schoolers needed a lesson in the charms of a Fullerton export, the company erected booths at teen fairs, like one at the Hollywood Palladium in March 1964, to give it to them. Amid displays of hubcaps and beauty supplies, Fender set out Jaguars and Strats and Showmen and let the kids rock out. Further guidance was offered by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, who pounded the LA teens into sonic ecstasy at the fair one evening while the image of bandleader Lawrence Welk gazed down from a billboard, hopelessly obsolete in a world where three-chord rock blasted out of refrigerator-size amplifiers.

  In 1955, Don Randall had been thrilled to sell a million dollars’ worth of merchandise. In 1963, at the height of the surf craze, Fender’s net sales in just three months totaled more than $2.2 million. A study found that Fender claimed 26 percent of the national electric guitar market that year, crushing Gibson’s 11 percent. And yet the surf obsession couldn’t last forever. Even in Southern California, not everyone could surf, not everyone looked good at the beach, and not everyone appreciated a wordless style of music that often expressed little more than smug naïveté. Surf rock was distinctly upper-middle-class, too, dominated by teens who had both a car to get to the beach and the cash to buy equipment like a Fender Showman. (The amplifier’s initial price in 1960 was an astronomical $550, more than $4,000 today.) The scene was dominated by white, middle-class males, who created a sound that spoke to their rarefied and rather circumscribed existence.

  Dale himself didn’t care much about making his music a national phenomenon, even after signing to the heavyweight Capitol Records. Rather than touring, he preferred to stay home and play with his surfboard, his exotic cats, his sports car, and his girlfriends. Perhaps he could have helped define surf music for the outside world as tough, instrumental, guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll, but instead, another group sold the California dream in a strikingly different form.

  One night in December 1961, a few brothers and friends from the LA suburb of Hawthorne went onstage before Dale’s set at the Rendezvous and sang two songs. It was just during the intermission, for barely ten minutes, and no one thought much of it, especially not the group’s leader, Brian Wilson. They’d arrived in Balboa looking rather like carpetbagging fops, wearing navy blue dress shirts and tight white pants, hoping to back the unexpected success of a novelty record they’d made called “Surfin’ ” with a live performance—their first. But their singing was shaky, and the reception from Dale’s loyalists was vicious. To hard-core surf fans, this group’s intricate, high-pitched vocal harmonies amounted to heresy, especially since only one of the soon-to-be Beach Boys had ever ridden a fiberglass board down a curling swell of the Pacific. Never mind that the group would soon outfit itself with full surf-rock equipment—Fender Showman amps and matching white Fender guitars (with a Precision Bass for Brian Wilson)—and issue the attendant volume. They were seen in Orange County as impostors.

  For the rest of the country, whose listeners couldn’t know that the motifs of Dick Dale’s guitar embodied “the boom of the barrel and the hiss of the lace”—that is, the very experience of riding a wave—the clarion voices of the Beach Boys proved a far more compelling advertisement for the Southern California lifestyle. Here were not just the sounds of the ocean but words about it, and words about the romances and souped-up cars that supposedly went with it. California boys might have loved a pounding, reverb-soaked electric guitar, but young people everywhere loved the lush harmonies that Brian Wilson wrote and the Beach Boys performed.

  Underneath their college-boy exterior, though, the Beach Boys essentially paired doo-wop vocals with electric-guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. “Surfin’ USA,” which in 1963 outperformed any instrumental surf song on the pop charts, was essentially a rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” from 1958, complete with a furious, Berry-style guitar solo played by Brian’s younger brother, Carl, in a tone that would’ve suited Dick Dale. The Beach Boys hadn’t thrown out loud guitars, despite the criticisms of Dale loyalists; they’d simply added to them. This basic combination would fuel the next great wave of rock ’n’ roll—one rolling in from the far side of the Atlantic.

  It was 1960 when Bing Crosby argued that rock ’n’ roll had “run its course.” Just three years later, his claim would’ve looked absurd. “Thumping electric guitars” had returned to the pop charts and the repertoires of high school dance bands around the country—and powered largely by Leo Fender’s creations, they were now louder and more dynamic than ever. The big beat was back.

  26.

  “I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND HIM AT ALL”

  MAHWAH AND LOS ANGELES, 1958–1963

  While teenage rockers bumbled their way onto the charts with a few sunglass riffs and an aquarium of Fender reverb, Les Paul and Mary Ford bumped along the nostalgia circuit, playing state fairs, army bases, policemen’s balls, and second-rate nightclubs. The Houston Auto Show and Birmingham Fashion Week were a long way from Friday night at the Chicago Theatre, but they were gigs. The couple’s fans in the press, many sporting a hardened distaste for rock ’n’ roll, still penned the occasional glowing review. Capitol Records let Les and Mary go in 1958, but Columbia picked them up, with rock-loathing producer Mitch Mitchell helping the duo turn out a spate of releases aimed at proper adults.

  For Mary, though, playing and pretending the good old days might somehow return wasn’t worth the effort. She’d been ready to give up the stage for years, wanting to settle down in New Jersey and live an actual domestic life, instead of the slave-driving simulacrum of one presented on their TV show. Scarred by the sudden loss of her infant daughter, she’d pushed Les to take custody of a newborn baby girl in April 1958. They named her Mary Colleen. The following October, Mary gave birth to a boy named Robert. With Les’s two sons from his previous marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Guitar now had the family Mary had always wanted. They spent the children’s infancy on a reduced schedule, calling it a “retirement” in the press, but by early 1961, needing to support their output on Columbia, they’d resumed traveling regularly. The mother of two hated being away from her kids. For Mary, performing live always had required a battle with stage fright, but now, knowing there was so much else she could be doing made it far worse.

  Les, of course, wouldn’t allow himself to think of not performing. For him, no crowd was too small or sad, too old or young. Jack Paar would still have him and Mary on The Tonight Show—Paar always loved to laugh at Les’s stories—and Les was almost impossible to embarrass. Indeed, he treated signs of the couple’s reduced status as comedy material, happily telling a newspaperman about the time their electric Gibsons blew out the speakers of one state fair stage in upstate New York. Lacking any kind of amplification, there was no way they could perform. So Les just told the audience to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and as the crowd rose and began belting, he and Mary fled.

  The warmth Les showed in public would often disappear in private. By the end of the decade, he was pushing Mary to perform and travel, threatening, if she didn’t, to find other women out on the road. “You bet your ass I was tough to work for, but who wouldn’t be?” Les wrote in his autobiography. “You may have five things going at once, and they’re all important, and the only way you can keep it all going is to constantly be going a hundred miles an hour.” For so many years the couple had both wanted the same thing. But now, Mary wanted to stop performing altogether, and Les didn’t. There was no way to break the impasse. “I understood how she felt,” he later claimed, “but to cut it off completely was something I couldn’t do.”

  In the midst of this argument, in 1961, Les’s contract with Gibson came up for renewal. Gibson still wanted him, though the company had come to view the Les Paul Model itself as a failure. Fender guitars now wore chrome accents, candy-flake paint jobs, and modernist-blob body styles; other makers had followed suit. In comparison, Kalamazoo’s output—those elegant, wood-grain-sporting instruments�
�looked old-fashioned. Ted McCarty and his luthiers had tried a few more-radical designs: the Flying V was, as its name suggested, a giant arrow of a solid-body electric guitar, while the Explorer took the outline of a stylized lightning bolt. Both were introduced in 1958, when the Cadillac Eldorado was growing two-foot metal sails on its trunk. Yet both guitars failed in the marketplace.

  A more traditional model that launched that year would prove an instant classic. Gibson’s ES-335 was semihollow, with a solid block in its thin acoustic body to counter feedback and provide some of the rich sustain of the Les Paul Model, but at a far lower weight. It found success with jazz, country, blues, and a few rock ’n’ roll players (Chuck Berry adopted a variation), and in the process pinched the already lackluster sales of the flagship Gibson solid-body, that heavy and unbalanced Les Paul.

  So in 1960, Gibson finally gave up, creating an entirely new guitar and sticking the name Les Paul on it. This instrument would become better known as the SG, for “solid guitar,” and it was one of Kalamazoo’s clearest admissions yet of the prescience of Leo Fender. Like a Stratocaster, the SG had two cutaways, contoured edges to fit comfortably against a player’s body, and a whammy bar. Once confident in their superiority over the California company that bolted boards together into guitars, Gibson luthiers now bent to the Fender belief that comfort (in terms of body shape and lighter weight) was paramount. Still, the new guitar was definitely a Gibson. The SG had the same muscular pickups as the rest of the line, a glued-in neck, and the company’s iconic headstock with three tuners per side.

  Les claimed to have first encountered this guitar—branded as the new “Les Paul Model”—in a music store one day. “I didn’t like the shape,” he told guitar historian Tom Wheeler. “A guy could kill himself on those sharp horns. It was too thin . . . The neck was too skinny, and I didn’t like the way it joined the body; there wasn’t enough wood.” But the lack of wood was part of the point: the SG weighed only about seven pounds. And per Les’s contract with Gibson, he was still obligated to play the guitar that bore his name. So in his early-sixties publicity shots with Mary, the two of them held new, red and white Gibson SGs. Their skinny, pointy guitars looked as misplaced and strange as the forced smiles on their faces.