The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  “Sit down, I have something to tell you,” Leo said, as White recalled. The plant manager had sensed that something unusual was occupying his boss, but he had no idea of the news he was about to hear.

  “You know, I haven’t been able to shake this sinus condition, and I think it’s time for me to get out,” Leo continued. “Don and I have been talking to CBS Records about them buying the company.”

  White grasped for a response. He finally muttered something sympathetic about Leo’s health. White had long noticed a strange change of character in his boss, but hearing this news, he was so surprised he could hardly speak.

  34.

  “WHICH IS WORTH MORE?”

  FULLERTON, WINTER 1965

  CBS’s purchase was formally announced in a press release on January 5, 1965, and hit papers across the country the next day. Fender Musical Instruments was to become a division of the Columbia Records Distribution Corporation. The electric guitar industry had graduated from a niche business to a visible and expensive corporate player. Electric guitars were now officially a part of mainstream American life, suitable for suburban homes and sprawling corporations and sensible adults.

  Check number 8339, for $5,735,000, was made out to Leo and Esther Fender from Columbia Record Distributors. Leo couldn’t be bothered to go to New York to pick it up. Instead, Don Randall went alone, and deposited both Leo’s check and his own, for $5,265,000, into their bank accounts. An additional $2 million was placed in escrow to be distributed in two years.

  January 6 was a dark winter day, as cold and dim as Southern California gets. At the Fender Sales office in Santa Ana, Bill Carson, the former western swing sideman whose ideas had shaped the Stratocaster, answered the phone to hear someone asking about a strange story they’d seen in the Wall Street Journal. Carson had heard nothing about a sale of the company, but in the afternoon, he went out and bought his own copy of the paper. There, sure enough, was a piece announcing the news. Carson took it to his boss, sales vice president Stan Compton. “You know as much as I do,” Compton said. Despite whirlwind negotiations on both coasts, Randall had kept this dramatic change of guard a total secret.

  Phone calls deluged the sales office and the factory—from friends, competitors, and family members—all asking if the news was true and what it meant for Fender and its employees and products. No one had any answers. Abigail Ybarra was working on the factory floor, winding coils for guitar pickups, when the rumor spread that Fender had new owners and that Leo would be handing over control of the plant. After eight years of work at Fender, Ybarra was frightened. She had no idea what to expect.

  Eventually, Leo’s nasal voice crackled through the factory’s public address system. “We have an important announcement for everybody; the rumors you’ve heard are true,” he began. In less than three minutes, Mr. Fender himself explained what had happened and tried to calm the fears crossing his employees’ faces. Everyone will still have a job, he said, and not to worry—“I will still be here.”

  Despite these assurances, the employees were in shock. The entire Fender production system—as well as every other piece of the company—was soon to be at the mercy of a New York firm that knew nothing about making musical instruments, let alone electric guitars. Regardless of what Leo had said, everything about the future seemed in doubt. These January days would eventually come to be seen as some of the darkest in Fender history.

  The outside world received news of CBS’s acquisition with a mix of bewilderment and hilarity. “Which is worth more,” asked the Associated Press story: “A guitar factory or controlling interest in the New York Yankees?” The fact that CBS had recently paid $11.2 million for an 80 percent stake in the Yankees would sneak into many reports on the Fender purchase, the contrast showing the arrival of a new age in which youth-led music could compete—not just for attention but for cash—with the oldest and greatest American pastime. The combination of baseball and guitar making under one corporate umbrella would also give sportswriters material for a few laughs. “It wouldn’t surprise us if CBS split the Yankees into rock ’n’ roll groups and sent them to England during the off season,” quipped one hack in Chicago. Music Trades would call the deal “the largest cash transaction in music industry history,” noting that the CBS corporation’s sales volume exceeded that of the entire musical instrument industry.

  Leo’s little guitar-making project had shaken the world. That day, at age fifty-five, he became a multimillionaire many times over, a name known and respected far outside of music circles, his historic development of the solid-body electric guitar to be recorded in newspapers and magazines everywhere. As historian Richard Smith points out, Leo Fender was one of the first people to get rich off rock ’n’ roll.

  Yet he was turning over his life’s work, his surrogate brood, his very name, to an army of East Coast corporate types with no inherent interest in the product or the musician it served, and no real appreciation for just how difficult and unlikely the path to this point had been. Could Leo trust CBS with his company? He preferred not to think about it that way. He just needed to get out.

  At least he would get to stay in California. Don Randall would soon be flying back and forth to New York, holding endless meetings inside wood-paneled Manhattan boardrooms, a onetime stock boy with no degree negotiating among Ivy League egos and witnessing a conglomerate’s total indifference to any detail not found on a balance sheet. Could Randall—a doer, a public face, a self-directed leader—really endure such a transition, even at $50,000 a year plus bonuses?

  On January 4, two nights before the sale hit the papers, Forrest White walked down to Leo’s lab. Leo was packing up his personal items, his favorite tools, in preparation for others to take over. Per his agreement with CBS, he’d do his consulting from another building he owned in Fullerton. A few close friends, including Noel Boggs, were there to help. There was an awl—a small, handheld punch with a walnut knob for a handle—that had been a favorite tool of Leo’s father. Leo placed it inside his small box, along with his tool belt, a voltage meter, and a few other things. While White and Boggs helped Leo carry the items out to the trunk of his Chrysler Imperial, White pretended not to notice the tears welling in Leo’s eyes, and tried to suppress his own.

  After loading his trunk, Leo pulled up to the parking lot gate in his massive sedan. White waited by the fence to let him out before locking up, as usual. It was to be the last evening of this life they’d known, the last night in which White would see his brilliant boss, the owner of this entire Fullerton spread, drive out the front gate.

  “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” Leo Fender said. It was, for him, a gusher of sentimentality.

  Then, without waiting for a response, Leo hit the gas pedal and zoomed out of the parking lot, off for good, away toward some future as a CBS consultant—or, perhaps, as an invalid.

  White, still sobbing, watched until Leo’s car disappeared.

  35.

  “I THOUGHT DYLAN WAS ABANDONING US”

  NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, JULY 1965

  Leo Fender thought his story was over. The electric guitar he’d perfected for his country-western pals, the massive amps he’d developed for Dick Dale and the surf rockers—he looked at those tools and believed he was seeing the end of the line, the full maturity of the technology. Electric guitars were commonplace by 1965, Fenders especially. What could be next—ubiquity? Leo Fender and Don Randall, for all their ambitions, would never have dreamed of that. It must have seemed that they’d sold Fender at the best possible moment—that surely, in the wake of the Beatles, the electric guitar had reached peak popularity. Thirteen million dollars was an almost ludicrous sum for a guitar company in 1965, so large that even those who’d clawed the business into being could hardly believe they’d been there to catch the windfall.

  Leo was now heading home to read a stack of Zane Grey western novels, develop pictures in his photographic darkroom, and plan vacations with Esther. Yet as he withdrew f
rom the arena of innovation, the instruments bearing his name were still evolving in the hands of musicians—morphing themselves, and morphing the culture, into something Leo would struggle even more fruitlessly to understand. His retirement would be quickly followed by huge leaps in the sound and style of the instrument he’d helped perfect, by its transformation from a key accessory of youth pop music into an apparatus for more grown-up and dangerous modes of expression. The revolution continued—and the next phase of it began the very summer after Fender’s sale became public, through a singer who released his music through a tentacle of the same CBS corporation that now sold Telecasters and Showman amps. This phase began on a stage in Newport, Rhode Island, on the night of Sunday, July 25, 1965, over the course of about seventeen minutes.

  “Let’s go!” Bob Dylan shouted, and the band jumped in behind the guitars—bass, drums, piano, organ, all radiating a wave of electric noise toward the audience. Out in the hot July darkness, the wave crashed into seventeen thousand attendees of the Newport Folk Festival, knocking them back on their bleachers and blankets. Dylan paused in his black leather jacket, black trousers, and blood-red shirt, and turned toward his wobbly accompaniment. He strummed furiously on a shiny new Stratocaster, its sunburst finish gleaming under a single stage light. The lamplight pushing through Dylan’s unkempt hair cast a halo around his head, framing an expression somewhere between doubt and defiance.

  Suddenly a note came ripping out of the darkness around him, a bent, distorted Telecaster yowl. Detonating camera flashes revealed Mike Bloomfield, a besuited figure on the left, huddled over his guitar, poised for attack. Dylan himself sauntered up to the mic, strumming, defiant. “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more,” he snarled, and then leapt away. Bloomfield issued another electric blurt, his tone like a razor slashing at the night.

  Dylan continued spewing out the lyrics to “Maggie’s Farm” in a nasal monotone, and after every line, Bloomfield seemed to challenge him for the lead, slicing through the song in high, distorted notes. Perhaps Bloomfield knew what he was doing to the assembled throngs of folkies and college students. But it seems Dylan himself had no idea what was happening.

  He found out as soon as “Maggie’s Farm” crashed to its end. Up from the darkness of the crowd came a roar—a roar of negativity, of booing. Dylan had walked onstage that night as the young prince of Newport, the voice of the American folk movement, the main draw of this supposedly non hierarchical three-day festival. Now the devoted were howling in disapproval. He could hear their furor wafting up as he retuned his Stratocaster, the shouts that he, the supposed voice of the anticommercial movement, should go back to The Ed Sullivan Show.

  There was a pause as the musicians prepared for the next song. The boos mingled with cheers as its first notes floated up from the unsteady band. Bloomfield outlined the chord changes with his crackling guitar, and in a moment Dylan was back at the mic: “Once upon a time you dressed so fine / You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?” Dylan’s latest single had been released just five days earlier. “Like a Rolling Stone” was climbing the charts as he performed it live that night for the first time, his rendition mostly faithful to the hit recording.

  As soon as it ended, though, the booing returned. There was applause, some cheering, but there were more angry shouts and bellowed insults, fans bewildered and disappointed. Rumors swirled of a festival organizer so infuriated by the noise that he was threatening to cut the sound cables with an axe. The crowd’s rancor only worsened when Dylan and his band left the stage after just three songs. “We want Dylan,” some shouted. “We want the old Dylan,” others yelled.

  It would be known as the night Dylan went electric. The night that American rock ’n’ roll became folk rock or just rock. The night Dylan declared his allegiance to his own ideas rather than those of the folk community. “I thought Dylan was abandoning us,” one witness said, and in a way, she was right. “Dylan was all of a sudden wearing a black leather jacket, and it was LOUD.”

  Folk was not loud. The folk movement favored old (or old-style) songs sung by anyone who cared to sing them, not for wide attention or profit but to express a feeling or tell a story. True folkies were people who lived in log cabins or roachy Greenwich Village apartments, who played “natural” instruments. At the Newport Folk Festival, most (though not all) performers used acoustic equipment. No one expected to hear a full-throated electric band pound through three-chord rock ’n’ roll. And even for the fans who’d heard Dylan play electric on recordings, the sonic power of a full electric band playing through a large public address system made for a bewildering new experience. There were no rock concerts yet, with their jet-engine decibel levels. Even the Beatles, touring the world with custom-built hundred-watt Vox amplifiers, were regularly drowned out by screaming fans. As Elijah Wald writes in his history of Dylan’s electric rupture, the levels of the night’s set were assaultive, quite literally terrifying for those not used to them—which was just about everybody—and made even more grating by poor sound mixing.

  But Dylan’s greatest offense to the folk crowd was symbolic. His super-amplified presentation inverted the festival’s usual balance of power between performer and audience. Volume, after all, is power. When one person is heard loudly, another is silenced. Newport had always celebrated the communitarian ideal, the sense that everyone, onstage or not, famous or not, would have a voice. Fans would sing along in the crowd, and most stage performances were quiet enough that the audience’s singing could be heard among itself and by the performers.

  To those used to this arrangement, the overpowering volume of Dylan’s electric set felt like a silencing—even an outright rejection. The sheer force of the music asserted what he’d been hinting at in his presence that year, with his black leather and his Ray-Bans. Dylan was now off on his own, following his ideas, no longer striving to be some voice of a generation. He’d become an artist, not an activist. “What he used to stand for, whether one agreed with it or not, was much clearer than what he stands for now,” wrote one critic of the show. “Perhaps himself.”

  But if Dylan had chiseled himself free of the folk community with the electric guitar, this supposed tool of commercial pop music, he’d imbued the instrument with a new identity, too. The Beach Boys and even the Beatles wrote rock ’n’ roll songs about girls and cars and having a good time—kid stuff, however charming. Now, electric guitars were a vehicle for Bob Dylan’s surrealistic poetry. They were an accompaniment to his ambiguous verse about betrayal and cynicism and melancholy. Amid the crucible of Dylan’s outrageous, overloud performance at Newport in 1965, electric guitars had suddenly become tools for serious art.

  36.

  “GIVE GOD WHAT HE WANTS”

  LONDON, SPRING 1965–SPRING 1966

  When the Yardbirds found a way to move out of small London clubs and onto the national tour circuit, their hotshot lead guitarist just quit the band. Eric Clapton was nineteen years old, had no other job, no place to live. But he also had no interest in the Yardbirds’ catchy new single, “For Your Love,” or in trading the smoky rhythm and blues on which the group had been founded for more widely appealing pop rock.

  Clapton wanted to play the American blues, and only the American blues. He’d discovered the music as an angry young man in the London suburb of Ripley and felt then as if he’d already spent an eon with it—as if he were being reintroduced to something he already knew. With that self-seriousness particular to the lonely teen, he decided right then to dedicate his life to this faraway sound.

  In America, the electric blues was by 1965 almost a decade out of fashion, with stars like Muddy Waters and B. B. King playing to the same aging, all-black audiences they had for years. The reality was utterly different in England, where an all-white intelligentsia—the elders of which had seen Muddy perform in 1958—regularly hired Americans to come over and tour. These visits had given Clapton, before his twentieth birthday, the chance to play with legends like Sonny
Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters, to eye their technique and soak up the delicate feel of their music. Such experiences confirmed for Clapton that he—a white Englishman with fancy clothes, short hair, and a perpetual frown; a guitar prodigy on the run from a miserable childhood—was indeed on the right path.

  John Mayall called as soon as he heard that Clapton had quit the Yardbirds. Mayall was a senior member of the British blues intelligentsia and a thirty-one-year-old husband and father. He was a blues purist and a showman who could play piano and guitar, sing, and write decent songs. But soon after Clapton joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, his guitar playing became the band’s main attraction.

  Clapton had long wielded a red Telecaster, as Muddy Waters did, while occasionally using hollow-body guitars made by Gretsch and Gibson. But he had a habit of moving restlessly through most things in life: bands, dwelling places, emotional states, girlfriends, guitars. After joining Mayall, Clapton decided to try out yet another type of guitar. It was a chance experiment—one that would have an incalculable effect on the future of the instrument.

  Clapton had seen Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones playing an odd, out-of-production Gibson model: a heavy, single-cutaway, solid-body electric guitar. Richards had found the thing hanging, forgotten, in a London music shop, and immediately adopted it. Its finish was a cherry sunburst, and it had two dual-coil, humbucking pickups. Richards’s guitar had been issued by its maker’s Kalamazoo factory late the previous decade, in the vain hope of resuscitating the model’s ailing fortunes. Only 643 were ever shipped. It was a 1959 Gibson Les Paul.