by Ian Port
“Fred Tavares was employed in late 1953 as a laboratory assistant and handyman,” Fender wrote. “He did not design the amplifiers, the Telecaster guitar, the bass, the Stratocaster, the various steel guitars . . . Nor did he design the tooling to produce the foregoing. This can be verified.” The article, Fender wrote, was “untruthful and defamatory,” and “could cause [him] several million dollars damage.” There’s no evidence that this note, with the calculations and circuit diagram above the text, was ever sent. But it shows that Fender was keenly aware of the need to protect his growing reputation.
In the new guitar magazines sprouting up in the seventies, and among collectors of vintage instruments especially, Fender was seen as almost the founder of a new religion. But in the letter, Leo revealed the more earthly concerns in his mind: the designs he wanted credit for, and the more than fifty patents under his name that he sought to protect. Perhaps even more than the instruments themselves, those patents were Leo’s truest legacy, documents of the workings of his peculiar mind in the language of the engineer and industrial designer. According to the present owners of G&L, who kept Leo’s handwritten letter to William Paley in their files, Freddie Tavares later apologized to Leo in person and retracted any claim that he’d designed Fender instruments.
The episode nonetheless points to a lingering question about Leo’s work and legacy. There were numerous musicians around at all stages of Fender’s development, suggesting ideas, rejecting them, demonstrating through their crude modifications to the instruments what changes they wanted. And Leo Fender rarely started from scratch with any of his designs. His first solid-body guitar borrowed key ideas from Paul Bigsby and Rickenbacker, as well as some inspiration from Les Paul. The most original instrument Leo created—his proudest achievement—was the Precision Bass. Everything else had had a clear ancestor, and all Fender products had benefited from the input of the guinea-pig players hanging around the factory. Yet no matter the extent of any other contributions—contributions that can be hard to judge given the distance of years—Leo’s name alone ended up on the patents.
Too, the products were ultimately his responsibility. He had final say over everything the company designed and released from 1946 to 1964; he invested his funds and years of his life—and Esther’s—in making them a success. Thinking up ideas for an instrument wasn’t the same as wagering one’s future on it. That certain features or details came from George Fullerton, Bill Carson, Jimmy Bryant, Freddie Tavares, Noel Boggs, or dozens of other Fender factory denizens is true and shouldn’t be discounted; in some ways, Fender instruments were a team effort. Without Doc Kauffman getting Leo interested in building electric steel guitars and amps during World War II, the laconic radio repairman likely never would have founded an instrument company, as he himself admitted. But the importance of the notions that bubbled up from Fender employees or Leo’s acquaintances pales next to the achievement of building the ideas into a mass-produced instrument that millions of people could afford and enjoy—one that changed the sound and look of popular music. That achievement was Leo’s alone.
Almost immediately after Fender’s success became clear in the late fifties, competitors began copying its designs. By the 1970s, any instrument with three single-coil pickups, two cutaways, and a blotchy white pickguard was, in the public mind, just an electric guitar, something almost every manufacturer made—not specifically a Fender Stratocaster. Leo took a certain pride in seeing the way other firms, especially those from Asia, copied his designs down to the last detail, even if that detail had been added by mistake and served no purpose. By the early 1980s, with CBS-Fender at its nadir of quality and reputation, the immaculate Stratocaster and Telecaster copies coming from Japan found more favor with players than the American models. In 1985 CBS, running deeply in the red, finally decided to get out of the instrument business and sold the Fender brand to a group of private investors. It did not, however, sell the Fullerton buildings—so for about a year, while the new owners built a manufacturing facility in Corona, California, and sold only imported instruments, Fender ceased to exist as an American company. By the late eighties, under the new management of William Schultz, Fender Musical Instruments was rising to become the industry leader it is today, producing a vast line of models and running a custom shop that turned out museum-worthy new guitars.
Meanwhile, Leo and George persisted at G&L. They built some great products, though never anything as revelatory as the Stratocaster or the Precision Bass. Times had changed in manufacturing and in music, and Leo Fender couldn’t relate to the headbangers or New Wavers of the eighties as he had to the cowboys and jazzmen of the forties and fifties. Neither he nor many other veterans of the Fender company much liked where guitar music was going, but Leo toiled on, seeing himself, as Phyllis Fender recalls, as a servant of musicians. As guitar culture grew, Fender earned wider recognition for the enormous contributions he’d made. He’d been given an award by the Country Music Association in 1965 and later earned a technical Grammy for his work. More acclamation would come, but as always, Leo preferred to remain outside of the spotlight. Apart from sometimes chatting up the members of cruise ship bands, Leo didn’t rush to tell strangers who he was, and he found it uncomfortable to be recognized in public. Except perhaps to tweak an amplifier, he’d never been one for going onstage.
In 1984 or 1985, Leo was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and its onset made it increasingly difficult for him to interact with others or make himself understood. Nonetheless, he continued to go to work every day at G&L, having lunch with George Fullerton and working on designs late into the evenings at the home he shared with Phyllis.
On the morning of March 21, 1991, Phyllis noticed that she didn’t hear the usual snoring from Leo’s side of the house. She went into the room where Leo worked and saw his body lying on the floor where he’d fallen. She called the paramedics, but it was no use. Parkinson’s and work had finally exhausted the tireless radio repairman, and he was pronounced dead at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton. After patenting more than fifty inventions and designs, creating a handful of iconic instruments and amplifiers, and making his name beloved by players around the world—after eighty-one years of life, spanning from the age of the horse and buggy to the age of the Space Shuttle—the humble, quiet, glass-eyed Leo Fender had died. He’d achieved more than he could have imagined, more than he ever expected, more than perhaps he even knew. Leo himself had gone silent, but the instruments that bear his name won’t cease to make music any time soon.
• • •
THE OPEN BAR was stocked and ready. Buffet tables stretched out in a long line, stacked with ribs, chicken, and shrimp. Inside the Hard Rock Cafe on Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, organizers decided to move Les Paul’s seventy-second birthday party from an upper balcony to the entire place, shutting down the restaurant to the public. Later that night, June 9, 1987, it became clear why. Arriving guests included guitar heroes Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, both of whom had flown in from London. Robbie Krieger of the Doors showed up. So did Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers and rockabilly pioneer Duane Eddy. Tony Bennett arrived. MTV, Rolling Stone, WNBC, the New York Daily News, People, and USA Today all sent reporters. The Hard Rock Cafe faced twice the number of scheduled attendees as fire marshals would allow inside. Partiers stood shoulder to shoulder, pouring sweat on that warm Manhattan evening. And finally there arrived the birthday boy himself, stepping out of a long black limo: Les Paul, his thinning frame sheathed in a baby-blue turtleneck, his boyish blue eyes glowing in joy at this magnificent party, these famous guests—all for him. Twenty years earlier, or even ten or five, such a resplendent tribute wouldn’t have seemed possible.
Les Paul had learned that having your name on a popular guitar isn’t the same as being popular yourself. Gibson had reissued the Les Paul Model in 1969, and it became the cornerstone of the company’s solid-body line. As Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and other bands transformed blues rock into hard rock, and then hard rock in
to heavy metal, the Les Paul guitar became ubiquitous. By the 1980s, MTV showed Aerosmith’s Joe Perry and Guns N’ Roses’ Slash strutting around, their bare chests exposed, sunburst Les Pauls hanging at a conspicuous distance below their waist. Even the rock underground favored the smallish body and overpowering tone of the Gibson: the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones played a Les Paul, as did the Stooges’ James Williamson, demonstrating the power of those dual humbucking pickups for punk. After its revival in the mid-1960s, the original Gibson solid-body reigned superior in hard rock.
Yet through the 1960s and early 1970s, Les himself remained an obscure figure, working quietly at his rural New Jersey home, retired from the stage. How did he, the boy who’d come of age on a Waukesha bandstand, endure this? Painfully, it seems. Like his old friend and rival Leo Fender, Les Paul didn’t enjoy the music of the time. He could see the theoretical appeal of distorted electric guitars, but after spending decades pursuing a resplendent, muscular, clean tone on the instrument, he wasn’t about to trade it away for the sake of fashion.
He also endured a period of extremely bad luck. In 1969, a friend jokingly slapped Les on the right side of the head, accidentally cupping his hand over the ear and damaging the eardrum. Les underwent several surgeries to try to fix the problem, but, as he writes in his memoir, none proved successful. Incredibly, almost the same thing happened to Les’s left ear in 1972. After five surgeries altogether to improve his hearing, Les still relied on a hearing aid, finding himself unable to assess his playing with the same clarity he once had.
As if losing his audience and then his ears wasn’t bad enough, Les began losing his fingers, too. His arthritis, which he’d struggled with since 1961, worsened. Known for playing complex, frilly leads, and for the careful precision with which he could issue even the fastest, most demanding passages on the guitar, Les now bore witness to the slow decline of his abilities as his fingers painfully refused to execute their commands.
Les never stopped tinkering with electronics at his home studio in Mahwah and was still developing the gadgets and designs that produced the guitar and recording sounds he wanted. He had essentially invented multitracking, which came of age with the huge recording budgets of the 1970s. He’d pioneered the sound of the solid-body electric guitar. And yet, of course, he still wasn’t satisfied. In these years, Les worked on developing a new style of pickup he believed would revolutionize his instrument once again.
A surprising thing had happened in the years after 1965, when Les retired from the road: he and Mary Ford had rekindled a close friendship. It wasn’t a romantic relationship, as Mary had already remarried, but she and Les would spend hours together on the phone, talking about their past, their children, their music. She too eventually gave up performing in favor of family life. But unfortunately, its joys didn’t alleviate her depression or help cure her alcoholism. After years of heavy drinking, Mary had developed diabetes, but she still didn’t quit the bottle. Les writes that Mary would call him late at night through the early and midseventies to reminisce about their past. On one of these calls, in the late summer of 1977, she complained to Les about having blurred vision—a symptom of her diabetes. Les told her to go immediately to a doctor, but she didn’t. A couple of weeks later, according to biographer Mary Shaughnessy, Mary Ford fell into a diabetic coma and was rushed to the hospital.
Though the family played her old records and soothed her with conversation, Mary Ford never woke up. She passed away on September 30, 1977, at Methodist Hospital in Arcadia, east of Pasadena, California, at fifty-three years old: a singer and guitarist who was as famous in her time as a musician can get. Mary Ford had played an essential role in attaining the celebrity she and Les had enjoyed, the stature that led to his endorsement deal with Gibson, and thus she helped bring about the birth of that iconic instrument. But Mary had also stood onstage as a gifted player and singer in her own right, a woman who showed herself to be at least her husband’s equal when it came to entertaining an audience, and a ready match for him on the guitar. Though discounted by many men—including Les himself—Mary Ford pioneered a starring role as the guitar-playing female singer, a role ever more women would follow. By the time of her death, a generation of female rockers in bands like the Runaways, the Pretenders, and the Go-Go’s were starting down the path that Mary Ford, the pretty Pasadena girl who sang country-style and tore up an electric fretboard, had blazed for them.
Though Les didn’t attend Mary’s funeral, he was shattered by her death. Only upon losing her, it seems, did he truly come to appreciate the close bond they’d had—a bond broken more by the demands of performing than by true incompatibility. “What stayed with me was a very deep appreciation for how fortunate Mary and I were,” Les wrote in his autobiography. “Very few in this world are that lucky. There were things between us, regrettable things we both did that hurt, but with a love like ours, the bad things go with time, and the good things are there forever.”
The pain of her loss was compounded by the passing of Les’s friend Bing Crosby only two weeks later, cementing the feeling that the end of an era had come. For Les himself, though, a brighter new age was beginning—a slow resurgence that would ultimately bring him to a crowded and opulent party at the Hard Rock Cafe in Manhattan.
His return to public notice began with an album he recorded with country wizard Chet Atkins. Chester and Lester featured the two guitarists trading licks over a subdued background, chatting and ribbing each other between tunes, showing off their easygoing virtuosity. To everyone’s surprise, the album—tracked live in a Nashville studio over two days, during which Les and Chet bickered constantly—proved a tremendous hit. It was a thrill to have such talents in such a low-key setting, to hear not just their playing but their attempts to one-up and belittle each other. In addition to finding commercial success, the album won Les Paul his first Grammy Award. (The awards weren’t bestowed until 1959, well after Les’s first popular peak.) The two veteran artists performed live at the Grammy Awards ceremony in February 1977: a couple of aging white guys flicking around their shiny guitars, all alone on a stage. With Les back in the public eye, players like Peter Frampton approached him to issue informal tributes. Here was the man whose name graced the guitars every young rocker loved. He was still alive, and despite the arthritis, he could still play. More awards, for recording and songwriting, soon followed.
But what really changed things for Les was his rediscovery of public performance. He’d been appearing before crowds almost since he got that first harmonica at age eight, and in retirement, he’d forgotten how much he needed it, how badly he craved a chance to jam and tell the jokes he’d collected and filed on index cards. After the Grammy Awards and a few other public performances, Les decided to put a small group together for a run of shows in New York. The first one took place on Monday, March 26, 1984, at Fat Tuesday’s, a cramped club on Third Avenue. Monday night is not usually a popular night for live music, but Les drew such an enthusiastic crowd that his run was extended, then extended again. Soon, it became a standing engagement: the Les Paul Trio performing live, every Monday night in New York City. Les’s regular shows became a draw for musicians all over the world, from every generation. Guest players ran the gamut from old jazz friends like Tal Farlow and George Benson to eighties stalwarts like Eddie Van Halen and Billy Idol, and of course, the illuminati of the sixties rock scene: Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Keith Richards.
With Les returned to prominence, paying tribute to him became almost a national pastime. That, in part, is what led to the blowout at the Hard Rock Cafe for his seventy-second birthday, but it wasn’t only a celebration. The event was intended to soothe the frayed relationship between Les and Gibson, the guitar company he felt was paying insufficient attention to the namesake of one of its most popular models.
Like its rival Fender, Gibson had stumbled along a difficult path after its golden years in the 1950s and early ’60s. In 1969, the company was sold to a conglomerate called Norlin, which trea
ted Gibson much as CBS treated Fender, penny-pinching its instruments into low-quality shadows of their former glory. The arrival of Asian imports in the seventies further decimated Gibson’s bottom line until, in 1986, Norlin sold the brand to a group of private investors. New CEO Henry Juszkiewicz soon made the company profitable, but he had a major endeavor on his hands. He would lead the new Gibson to more than two decades of success, selling new and reissued models that were widely adored. But as computerized instruments (samplers, drum machines, especially laptops) came to play an ever-greater role in pop music, Juszkiewicz invested in expensive companies and technologies many players saw as tangential, at best, to Gibson’s line of guitars. In the middle of 2018, the Gibson company, squirming under mountains of debt from these acquisitions, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to refocus on making musical instruments. Its guitar line—led by the Les Paul Models—is now regarded as its core asset.
Back in 1987, Juszkiewicz had appeared on the brink of losing that famous name, with other manufacturers lurking, hoping to get the legend’s endorsement. So that summer, despite having more pressing things to do, Juszkiewicz had no choice but to show some public appreciation. A party—a huge one—was necessary to win back Les Paul’s favor.
The event proved bigger than anyone expected, with the crowd in the Hard Rock Cafe swelling likely beyond capacity. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck held court at a VIP table near the stage. Paul Shaffer’s band had come up from David Letterman’s TV studio to provide backing for the night. Everyone was sweaty and excited, riding high on gratis cocktails. And with the lords of forty years of pop music assembled in one room, the tributes to Les poured forth. Les’s Gibson guitar had kept his name in circulation, but many testified to the influence of his work as a pop star, the mind-blowing multitracked records he’d made with Mary Ford. “I had an LP at a very early age, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I was just totally mesmerized by it,” Jimmy Page told a reporter. “The pure imagination of it, its arrangements . . . it’s just in a total world of its own, and obviously it was a total inspiration.” Page was among the most iconic devotees of the Les Paul, but to hear the genius behind Led Zeppelin’s thunderous sound express his appreciation for Les and Mary’s sweet, swirling little melodies showed just how deeply the couple’s records had cut.