The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  And there was still more to the operation: A distribution center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A service center in Flushing, New York. Randall’s sales office was planning its own expansion, a larger Santa Ana home for Randall’s forty-seven employees and the goods they shipped. The Fullerton factory’s 270 workers were now churning out a thousand amplifiers and a thousand electric guitars every week—as much as the company had sold over an entire year in the 1950s.

  No matter how much more they made, though, it was never enough. Leo Fender’s company had become a behemoth, its daily operation an almost unimaginable contrast to the rickety operation he’d started in downtown Fullerton. He’d become a rich man, a homeowner, with a new yacht every two years. Don Randall now owned a nimble two-seater plane that the air force had used to train combat pilots. There was absolutely no one to answer to, other than the two of them, since Leo owned all of the factory and half of the Fender Sales company. With no one else to share profits with, he and Randall paid themselves enormous salaries of $242,000 each, the equivalent of nearly $2 million today.

  Their idea, that a durable, reliable, good-sounding electric guitar and amplifier would find an eager reception among musicians, had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. From virtually nothing in 1946, Fender had grown into the largest maker of electric guitars and amplifiers, second in total size only to Gibson, which sold many acoustic models. Fender had changed the sound and look—and the very course—of popular music, and was still doing so. Yet Leo was the furthest thing from happy.

  The combination of his strep infection and a slight breeze could leave him with an energy-sapping cold. The infection showed no sign of abating, no matter how many treatments his doctor gave him. Carrot juice didn’t help; neither did his constant trips to the chiropractor. The very size of his namesake firm intimidated him—it felt beyond his control, perhaps even beyond his understanding. The western swing and country players he loved were far out of the spotlight now, even if a few of his old favorites, like Speedy West and Bill Carson, had become Fender employees. When Leo looked at the musical landscape, at all those Dick Dale acolytes with their loud guitars, he felt that he didn’t belong. He’d helped create this world, but he didn’t see any place for himself in it.

  Overwhelmed occasionally by bouts of deep insecurity, Leo Fender assessed his position in 1962 and 1963 and reached two conclusions: First, he decided that his self-taught electrical skills would become irrelevant soon, as vacuum tubes were replaced by the smaller but far more complex transistor.

  Second, given his strep infection and what he felt were numerous other health problems, he didn’t figure he’d live very long.

  Meanwhile, the company had to expand. Demand was unyielding; the backlogs were growing untenable. But expanding meant borrowing money, and Leo, sick with strep, felt queasy at that idea. “Prone to loose talk,” as the historian Richard Smith described him, Leo Fender caught Don Randall off-guard one day in a private meeting and said something deeply unexpected.

  Leo told Don Randall that he’d sell him his half of the Fender companies—for $1 million.

  Don Randall was stunned, too aghast to respond. The company was thriving beyond anything he or Leo had dared to dream of. Fender dominated the industry it had had a singular hand in creating. There were problems, logistical issues, sure, but money was rolling in, more of it than they knew what to do with.

  Yet Leo wanted out. On top of his illness, and his fear of the transistorized future, Leo may have also believed that Fender simply couldn’t sell that many more electric guitars. According to Geoff Fullerton, Leo thought that surely, everyone who wanted a Fender instrument by now had one—and since the guitars and amps were made to last, those customers wouldn’t be buying another any time soon. The company had already experienced more than a decade of straight upward growth. How much bigger, how much broader, could the electric guitar really get?

  But all around the country, all around the world, a new generation of musicians was preparing to answer that question in a way that Leo Fender, seeking to retreat from his company, and Les Paul, slowly resigning himself to the idea of retirement, would never have believed. Only through the sounds and stories of these musicians would the ultimate legacy of Leo Fender and Les Paul become clear.

  29.

  “THAT MAN JUST DONE WIPED YOU UP”

  NASHVILLE, 1963

  Jimi Hendrix played guitar on the way to the gig, onstage during it, backstage afterward, in the car on the way back, and once he’d returned to the hotel. He dozed off with the instrument in his arms. “He played all the time,” one collaborator remembered. “It wasn’t like a thing you were listening to, though, it was a simple observation—like, the sun is shining; Jimi’s playing his guitar.” Jimi Hendrix was a sideman, a guitar player for hire, shuttling around a network of black-run theaters and clubs called the Chitlin Circuit, taking any gig he could get, and trying to master his instrument along the way.

  At eighteen, he’d left his home of Seattle for the army, which shipped him off to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, near the Tennessee border. He’d been thrilled to join the 101st Airborne but soon found his electric guitar far more interesting than parachute jumps and military discipline. After ten months and a ruthless campaign to convince army doctors that he’d been seized by homosexual tendencies, Jimi found himself discharged from the army with a few hundred dollars in his pocket and a Danelectro six-string at his side. He quickly lost his virginity to a local woman, and with it, any intention of returning to Seattle. Instead, Jimi Hendrix—raised by a struggling, indifferent father, long accustomed to feeling holes in the soles of his shoes—set off to become a famous guitar player.

  He moved to Nashville with some musician friends and soon decided to show off his growing abilities. Jimi often went to watch a talented guitarist named Johnny Jones, a Mississippi native who’d learned from bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Freddy King, and who played in a band called the Imperial Seven. Hendrix would often ask to hold Jones’s guitar when his band took a break, trying to parse the older man’s sound. One night, encouraged by a friend, Hendrix challenged Jones to a cutting contest—a classic encounter in jazz and blues wherein one band or musician contests another’s superiority onstage, tries to “cut their head,” as the phrase went. Hendrix and his friend wheeled an amplifier into the club where Jones played and announced that they were coming after him, that he’d better get ready. They set up their gear, and the head-hunting contest began: young Jimi Hendrix and his occasional tutor, sparring on electric guitars over what was likely a spare blues song.

  Immediately, it was clear that Hendrix’s amp couldn’t match Jones’s for power or clarity. Then, when Hendrix pulled out some of his favorite licks, the crowd in the room snickered. Through Jones’s tutelage, Hendrix had recently met B. B. King and Albert King, titans of electric blues guitar. He’d had an intimate conversation with B. B., in which the older man explained his preference for slow, singing notes, notes that radiated out from his large hands and his Gibson guitar like a good vocalist’s vibrato.

  The influence had gone to Jimi’s head, and as he tried to replicate B. B.’s sound onstage, hoping to beat Jones with it, the crowd had started laughing. Laughing—that was how transparent Jimi’s imitation of B. B. King was, how obvious, how facile. Meanwhile, Jones, schooled by the greats and having lived the tumultuous life of a Southern bluesman, had conjured his own deep, yearning voice through the guitar and brought the house down, exposing his challenger as naive, inexperienced, perhaps even a phony.

  “Jimi left the stage dejected,” according to biographer Charles Cross, “and Jones remained the headman.” Afterward, Jimi explained to friends that he’d been trying to sound like B. B. King but had simply failed. “That man just done wiped you up,” Jimi’s friend told him. The failure wasn’t merely in the execution, though—it was in Jimi’s attempt to imitate rather than express. An electric guitarist couldn’t truly move an audience (at least not a savvy one) merely by copying s
omeone else. The only route to the chilling power Jimi sought was to live and play and evolve into the truest, most fluent version of himself. And he still had some evolving to do.

  These dues he’d chosen to pay as a sideman, joining the tours of stars like Little Richard, Ike Turner, the Isley Brothers, Curtis Mayfield, and Solomon Burke—witnessing a golden era in American soul and R & B music that looked decidedly less glamorous up close. In these years, Hendrix could barely keep himself clothed and fed, since he refused to take any job outside of music. He’d pawn or lose numerous guitars—Epiphones, Fenders, some bought for him or rescued from hock by his employers. And he’d learn the power of pure showmanship. To audiences on the Chitlin Circuit, playing music well meant nothing without a good stage act, and Hendrix soon began to incorporate flashy moves into his sideman’s routine. He learned to play guitar behind his back and with his teeth, to act like he was fucking the guitar onstage, to fall to his knees while soloing, to flick his tongue at the ladies in front when he shredded the high notes. It drove the audiences wild. His bosses were less enthusiastic.

  “Five dates would go by beautifully,” recalled soul singer Solomon Burke, “and then at the next show, he’d go into this wild stuff that wasn’t part of the song.” Burke ended up leaving Jimi Hendrix by the side of some Southern road.

  While touring with Little Richard, Jimi once wore a ruffled shirt onstage, eliciting howls of outrage from the star. “I am Little Richard!” the bandleader screamed at him. “I am the only one allowed to be pretty!”

  Hendrix played briefly with R & B singer Bobby Womack, who would never forget the experience: “He’d turn his git-tar down but he would still overshadow a person . . . Everybody he would play with, people wouldn’t be payin’ no attention to the artist, they’d be sayin’, hey, look at him. When he would play with his teeth, they’d give him an ovation because they thought he was crazy, but the artist at the front would think he was tryin’ to take the show.”

  The singers who hired Jimi weren’t looking for a rival star. They wanted a clean, obedient employee, someone to stand on the side of the stage and play rhythm guitar, maybe add a solo when one was called for. The problem with Jimi Hendrix, even then, was that he couldn’t stay off to the side of the stage. Wherever he stood was the center.

  30.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO PLAY THIS SHIT”

  HOLLYWOOD, 1963–1964

  Carol Kaye would nudge her Chevy Impala into the recording studio parking lot barely ten minutes before a session, park, and wearily open the trunk. In it were the half-dozen instruments a studio guitarist like her was expected to carry: an Epiphone hollow-body, a Fender Jazzmaster, a twelve-string acoustic, a six-string Danelectro electric bass guitar, and more, plus an amplifier. She would trudge inside the studio with just two guitars and an amplifier, and there would be five minutes left to grab a cup of vending machine coffee and look over the charts for the current session: another three-chord rock tune, most likely. And Carol Kaye would think to herself, maybe even mutter to one of the other studio musicians—all of them male—whom she worked with: I can’t believe I have to play this shit.

  But she did have to play it. After taking her first studio gig in 1957—backing Sam Cooke on “Summertime,” at the request of storied R & B producer Bumps Blackwell—Carol Kaye had joined a corps of musicians who performed anonymously on nearly every disc the LA recording studios put out, regardless of who the named performer was. Employing such uncredited pros was standard practice around the country. Producers looking to hustle out product weren’t about to let rock ’n’ rollers, many still in high school, waste time and money with sloppy musicianship. They wanted experts who could either read charts or invent clever parts on the fly, getting a song perfectly on tape in just a few takes.

  Yet bringing in jazz-trained musicians of Carol’s caliber to record the music of the day—surf rock or pop, usually—was like using a nuclear warhead to destroy an anthill. The style of jazz Carol Kaye loved most, bebop, took brains and fingers like nothing else: it was to swing jazz what cubist painting was to classical portraiture, but improvised at a hundred miles an hour. The electric guitar was so much about accents and flowery little touches, but bebop rose and fell on hard, swift, positive notes. You got a moment to cut away into a solo, and Carol could take it and go, each tonal color flying off her Epiphone hollow-body like raindrops splattering the windshield of a car racing down the highway.

  By 1963, though, the hundreds of jazz clubs that had once dotted LA County, the places where Carol had earned her reputation, had shuttered or transformed into rock clubs, following the money in the industry. One by one, the jazz players she knew had moved to New York, or accepted starvation as a way of life, or started working in the studios.

  Sixty-three dollars was union scale that year for a three-hour recording session, during which a good group might lay down as many as four or five songs. So by playing music she hated, Carol was earning good money. She could give her children all the food they wanted and plenty of Christmas presents, could keep them safe in a quiet neighborhood in North Hollywood. Compared to her childhood, theirs was a miracle. She was determined that they wouldn’t know the want she’d suffered, not live with the fear that there might not be enough to eat. She knew she should be grateful for the good life she’d built by playing guitar—but she still couldn’t stand the music she spent her days recording. She was grieving for a jazz world that had mostly disappeared. Musically, Carol Kaye had died.

  One day that fall of 1963, Carol arrived for a session at the circular Capitol Records tower on Sunset Boulevard. She had no reason to expect anything besides the usual three hours of playing “idiot music,” as she thought of it. And she had a lot of other things on her mind. All her life, Carol had had bad luck with men. She was then thinking about leaving her third husband, who loathed the fact that Carol spent many long hours and late nights working with musicians and producers who were often black men. The husband had recently smacked her son so hard with a rake that he’d had to skip school and see a doctor, which sent Carol tumbling into a nervous breakdown. It’s a testament to her troubles that she would later remember nothing about the details of the session that fall day—who the producer was, what the songs were. All she would remember is that the bass player didn’t show up.

  Producers knew Carol could handle the modified Danelectro six-string bass guitar she kept in her trunk. But on this day in 1963, it was a Fender Precision Bass player who didn’t come to Capitol. Recording sessions often used both a Danelectro and a “Fender bass,” as the Precision was commonly known, and the producer that day chose Carol to take the Fender player’s place. Someone put a borrowed Precision in her lap and told her to play any line she thought would work. The instrument had four thick strings instead of six thin ones, with a neck significantly longer than that of an electric guitar or a Danelectro bass. Carol had never really played it before. She was an expert guitarist, but she had no idea what might come of her trying out this thing.

  As it turned out, something big came. After the session, Carol drove to the Fife and Nichols Music store in Hollywood and bought two Fender Precisions for herself. Then she went straight home to practice on them.

  Playing guitar in the studios, Carol was usually not a soloist but a rhythm player—thus a middle layer in the thick cake of a final recording. She was barely audible on songs like the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” a Phil Spector–produced masterpiece from 1964, strumming chords on an acoustic guitar somewhere within Spector’s titanic production. Her job was to support, not stand out, and she did it well.

  Support was also considered the bass’s role. Most studio players did little more than plunk out single notes in reference to the changing chords of the song. But starting at that Capitol session on which she played the Fender bass, Carol saw that the electric four-string sat at a crucial juncture in the studio ensemble, one that offered her a unique opportunity. The Fender bass
linked the pure percussion of the drums to every other melodic element in the group. Sitting at the bottom of the mix, playing Leo Fender’s radical electric bass guitar, she became the “bus driver,” as she thought of it—the one player besides the drummer that everyone else had to follow. Few songs came into the studio with a written bass line; instead, session players were expected to invent one. So by playing electric bass, not only did Carol get to drive, but she often got to choose the route she took, calling on the melodic fluency she’d developed in jazz.

  The benefits of her helmsmanship were evident from the first moments of “Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette),” by Ohio funk-soul group the O’Jays, recorded a few months after Carol’s first encounter with the Fender four-string. Her Precision Bass pumped and throbbed, pressing an elastic energy into the lower registers that drove the song forward. She locked into Earl Palmer’s drumming, and the two of them seemed to meld together into a single fat beat. Played with a heavy pick, the electric instrument let her highlight every subtlety in the rhythm. Palmer’s kick and snare drums punctuated the stride of her bass, she underscored his fills, and together, they carved out a thrusting groove.

  Playing with such intricacy at such a high volume would have been impossible on a traditional upright bass—it required an electric bass guitar. But the even greater revelation of Carol’s playing was the way she found to weave her bass line through a song’s melody. In “Lipstick Traces,” she painted variations in pitch with her Fender Precision that guided the singers, effectively unifying groove and melody, rhythm and vocals, into a single movement. When she responded with her bass to what the singers were doing, the entire recording became more intense and athletic. Leo’s Precision Bass, in Carol Kaye’s hands, was helping to make music funkier, to make every layer of it more alive.