by Ian Port
One of the many pleasures of doing a book like this is befriending librarians and research assistants around the country who vibrate with enthusiasm for their subject. Cheri Pape, at the Fullerton Public Library’s Local History Room, directed me not just to everything Fender but everything Fullerton. And I owe a giant debt of gratitude to Dan Del Fiorentino, Katie Wheeler, and Bethany Gilbert at the National Association of Music Merchants Library and Oral History Program, for making available the full recordings of NAMM interviews with many of the key subjects in this book. I’d also like to thank the research staffs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives (especially Jennie Thomas), the Country Music Hall of Fame, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Santa Monica Public Library, the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, the Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies, the Costa Mesa Historical Society, the Santa Maria Historical Society, and Jane Ishibashi at Fullerton College. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, so if you liked this book, hug a librarian.
A number of people were elemental to turning this idea into a book. My agent, Chris Calhoun, believed in a proposal about a bunch of guitar-building weirdos on the West Coast, and saw to it that I was able to concentrate on researching and writing their story for a blessedly long period. At Scribner, the brilliant Rick Horgan shared a vision for what this tale could be and pushed me hard to realize it. Emily Greenwald provided helpful insights and shepherded the book through its many phases. Aja Pollock saved me from a number of embarrassments. So many others helped, too—thank you all for your excellence and patience.
You have to feel sorry for writers’ friends: the generous ones get buried by drafts and then blasted by their friends’ insecurities. Among the readers I could count on for sympathy and brutality were Sean Hurley (who probably has read more of this book than anyone but its author); Noah Gallagher Shannon (who cheerfully persisted through two drafts and made brilliant suggestions); and my former SF Weekly colleagues and friends Anna Roth and Brandon Reynolds, who read and pondered along with me. Thanks to Katie Zanecchia, who gave support and guidance about the world of publishing. Matty Van Meter and Constanza Martinez, my writing workshop family from Columbia, encouraged me to go down this path. You’re all the best, and I’ll read the shit out of those manuscripts you all goddamn better write.
One strange thing about writing a book about other people is that some essential part of yourself ends up in their story. So this book is in some ways a product of the people who made me: my parents and family, who contributed ideas, criticisms, and memories to this project, as well as meals, transportation, and bedrooms. Thank you to the Innerest Circle: Blake Criswell, Chloe Gates, Michael Mullan, Peter Feytser, and Sean Hurley. Thanks to Cody Nabours for telling me about all kinds of great music. Thanks to Auntie T and Fred for their love and humor. Thanks to my wife’s parents, Brent and Marcy, who believed in this book and talked it up to everyone they knew, and did so much more. The deepest gratitude to Mom (Perrin Krumbuegel), Dad (Thomas Port), Judy Thomas, and Marco Krumbuegel for encouraging me to be who I am, and for believing in the wisdom of this path. I love you all. (Dad, next time I need a book idea, let’s just drive up to Napa.)
Gratitude is not a big enough word for what I owe my companion in life, Lindsay Criswell, whose kindness and patience resemble those of a saint, but whose sense of humor thankfully does not. This project was often difficult and sometimes deeply discouraging, but I always found comfort in having someone so brilliant, fierce, and lovable in my corner. Without her, it never could have happened. We got guns hidden under our petticoats, lady. I love you.
And lastly, thanks to the heroes of this book, Leo Fender and Les Paul and the others, who helped make the sound of the music that has made my life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© TORY WILLIAMS
IAN S. PORT is an award-winning writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and The Believer, among other publications. He is also the former music editor of the San Francisco Weekly. He makes his home in New York City. You can find him at iansmithport.com.
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NOTES AND SOURCES
This book is built from hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses to these events, as well as leading historians of them; private documents of which I was granted use; public records; oral histories (some never previously accessed); memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies of those involved; archival materials; films, photographs, and recordings and their liner notes; museum exhibits; newspaper and magazine articles; and about a hundred other books. I was fortunate to be granted access to the original Fender company documents collected by guitar historian Richard R. Smith, and to the private papers of Don Randall, as well as to a cache of never-before-used oral histories captured on video by the archivists of the National Association of Music Merchants. (A complete accounting of the many favors I received in assembling this book is in the acknowledgments.)
As all writers of history do, I came to rely on the work (both published and not) of prior authors and researchers, and I have tried to mention the names of the most important ones in the text itself. Among the authors and researchers without whose dedicated efforts this book could not have been written are Richard R. Smith, Mary Alice Shaughnessy, Tom Wheeler, Robb Lawrence, Andy Babiuk, Geoff Fullerton, Robert Gordon, A. R. Duchossoir, Philip Norman, and Charles Cross.
In a handful of places, I have extended the details of a scene slightly beyond the spoken or written accounts of it, or drawn reasonable conclusions from the available information. In these constructions, no verifiable fact was ever ignored or changed. If conflicting views or details exist, they are given. In places where I discuss a character’s unspoken thoughts, those thoughts were recorded elsewhere.
PROLOGUE
just after Christmas 1964: The T.A.M.I. Show opened in Austin on December 29, 1964, according to the Austin American-Statesman; in Los Angeles December 26, according to the Los Angeles Times; and in Washington, DC, on December 26, according to the Washington Post.
frivolous teen movies: See, for instance, Ann Bordelon, “Who Goes to Movies? Teenagers,” Austin American-Statesman, December 31, 1964.
“Adults, unaware of the differences”: “Rock ’n’ Roll: Shrieks at the Center Indicate Popular Film,” Boston Globe, December 31, 1964.
pursuit of such: The Los Angeles Sentinel, a black newspaper, noted on November 5, 1964, that “the rollicking inter-racial dance group appearing throughout the flick might anger some Southern Whites.”
completely different competition: In his autobiography, Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2010), Keith Richards writes of listening to the Beach Boys: “There was no particular correlation with what we were doing, so I could just listen to it on another level.”
CHAPTER 1
apartment in Queens: Les Paul and Michael Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005, 2016), 89.
allergic to mornings: Les was well-known for his nocturnal habits and dislike of mornings, as Mary Alice Shaughnessy writes in many places in her authoritative biography Les Paul: An American Original (New York: William Morrow, 1993).
jazz jam sessions: Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 109; Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 88–89.
barrel back across: According to Sh
aughnessy in Les Paul, 85, Les once got caught driving seventy-five miles per hour on the bridge in his Buick and talked his way out of a ticket.
a proud Renaissance Revival building: The Epiphone factory was located at 142 West Fourteenth Street, in a building that now is occupied by the Pratt Institute.
made an arrangement: Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 102.
torn apart and reassembled: Ibid., 18–19 and 22–23.
a crippling weakness: Ibid., 21.
At fourteen: Shaughnessy, in Les Paul, 14, credibly dates this event to the summer of 1929, although it may have been earlier. In one interview (Oral History of American Music, Yale University, interviewer Joan Thomson, side 207 a–b, April 3, 1978), Les claims it was the summer of the so-called Long-Count Fight between boxers Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, which would have made it around September 1927, when Les would have been twelve.
a Troubadour model: Robb Lawrence, The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy, 1915–1963 (New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2008), 5.
jammed it into the top panel: Interview with Les Paul, Oral History of American Music, side 207 a–b.
“the electric guitar spelled money”: Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 14.
Eleven years later: Les sometimes dated his work on the instrument he was creating, which he would call the Log, to 1940, and sometimes to 1941. Since Les was electrocuted in May 1941 and left Waring and New York that summer with numb hands, it seems to me that work on the Log most likely began in 1940.
forty-five-piece jazz orchestra: A photo of Waring’s group in Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 96–97, shows forty-eight people, including the members of the Les Paul Trio and Waring himself.
had championed: Leonard G. Feather, “Waring’s Social Club Is Unique in Music Circles . . . ,” DownBeat, October 1, 1940.
appeared on the market in 1932: Electro String’s amplified Hawaiian guitar, made by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation and later known as a Rickenbacker, was developed in 1931 and first sold in 1932, according to Richard Smith, The Complete History of Rickenbacker Guitars (Fullerton, CA: Centerstream Publishing, 1987), 11.
“miniature orchestra”: This quote is somewhat disputed, though it appears in Spanish virtuoso Andrés Segovia’s “The Romance of the Guitar,” Etude 48, no. 5 (May 1930), accessed at http://www.icoldwell.com/robert/music/etude/XLVIII_05.html.
considered state-of-the-art: With Waring, Les often played what he called his “Gibson Cheapie”: an ES-150, the company’s first electric Spanish model, introduced in 1936, which he continuously modified.
purely electric tone from a purely electric guitar: Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 102. The emphasis on purity here is in debt to Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 39–46.
crisp electric signal: Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 102.
none seemed to care one bit: Ibid., 103.
“listen with their eyes”: Paul Burch, “Les Paul: The Wizard in His Own Words,” Epiphone.com, June 1, 2016, http://www.epiphone.com/News/Features/2016/Les-Paul-The-Wizard-In-His-Own-Words.aspx.
Les got a meeting: This meeting, assuming Les was truthfully recounting it, most likely occurred in 1942, although other sources date it to 1943 or even 1946. See Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 105.
broomstick with pickups: Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 105; Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 116.
CHAPTER 2
almost perfectly still: This scene is a reconstruction based on facts from author interviews, photographs, music recordings, and various histories of Fender, Bob Wills, and western swing. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys performed regularly at the Aragon Ballroom on Lick Pier in the 1940s, and it is widely known that Leo Fender supplied equipment and operated the public address systems at these concerts. Leo was also known then for venturing onstage to repair his equipment in the middle of performances. Sources include:
• Richard R. Smith, Fender: The Sound Heard ’Round the World (New York: Hal Leonard, 2003).
• Bill Carson, My Life and Times with Fender Instruments (Bismarck, ND: Vintage Guitar Books, 1998).
• Charles Townsend, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
• “Sage Brush OK with Aragon,” Billboard, July 8, 1944.
• “American Folk Tunes,” Billboard, November 15, 1947.
• Author interview with Sandy Boggs, March 27, 2016.
• Various photographs from the collection of the Santa Monica Historical Society.
• A discography of Wills’s Tiffany Transcriptions recordings at http://www.tiffanytranscriptions.com/discography/, showing that for a period in 1946, Wills’s band included both Noel Boggs on steel guitar and Junior Barnard on lead electric guitar. Barnard’s playing on the essentially live Tiffany recordings is likely how he would’ve performed for an audience.
metallic wail: “They’d yell their heads off,” Leo Fender recalled of the feedback of early acoustic-electric guitars in “Fender the Founder: A Low-Decibel Chat with the Henry Ford of the Solid Body,” Rolling Stone, February 1976, 59.
always wanted to play loud: Buddy McPeters, “Junior Barnard: Hard-Driving Soloist of Western Swing,” Guitar Player, September 1983, 44.
worked on that guitar: Leo added a pickup to Barnard’s guitar in late 1947, according to Tom Walzem and Mike Newton, “When Do You Absolutely Know You’re Looking at the Work of Leo Fender,” Fretboard Journal, November 2011. It’s almost certain he did other work and repairs prior to that.
prone as it was to producing feedback: Leo had added an electronic pickup to a radio shop customer’s acoustic guitar during the war (Smith, Fender, 11) and thus would have known about the volatility of such a combination.
back in 1919: This is an estimate of Leo’s age based on the author’s March and July 2016 interviews with Gary Gray, Leo’s oldest nephew.
out onto the fields: Tom Wheeler, “Leo Fender: One of a Kind,” Guitar Player, May 1978, 32.
carry over a whole town: Smith, Fender, 7.
listen to the maritime communications: Forrest White, Fender: The Inside Story (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1994), 4.
Arizona and New Mexico: Author interview with Gary Gray, March 16, 2016, and July 27, 2016.
date the establishment: Fender Radio Service ad in Fullerton News Tribune, January 27, 1948.
“he couldn’t keep a beat”: Smith, Fender, 7.
crude acoustic guitar: “Pro’s Reply: Leo Fender,” Guitar Player, September 1971, 9.
pattern of harmonics: “Fender the Founder,” 60.
come out to see Wills play: In the small Central Valley town of Tulare, for example, Wills drew 2,300 in a single night, Billboard reported on September 30, 1944.
rolled up to Leo’s radio repair shop: Smith, Fender, 48, recounts how Leo’s Fullerton shop was often the Playboys’ first stop on their way into Southern California. Former Playboy steel guitarist Herb Remington recalled in a NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Oral History interview (November 16, 2015) that Leo gave new instruments to the band when they stopped by, knowing the Playboys would take them all over the country and influence others to use Fender equipment.
booze, reefer, other things: Rich Kienzle, Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 188.
nothing but his equipment: Smith, Fender, 48.
“lemonade”: Ibid., 65.
running her hand up his trousers: Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 108.
plopped himself onto the stage: As described in Carson, My Life and Times, 9, and author interview with Sandy Boggs, March 27, 2016.
“He’s the reason you can hear us tonight”: Author interview with Sandy B
oggs, March 27, 2016.
CHAPTER 3
third-largest metropolis: Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 230.
was from Pasadena: Summers was born July 7, 1924.
two palm trees: From pictures of the house in Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 152.
Summers found: Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 145–46; Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 164–66.
outdoor fireplace: Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 152–63.
“There’s Les now”: Ibid., 165–66; Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 144–45.
leading the Sunshine Girls: Details on Summers’s background and early days with Les from Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 147–52.
his wife, Virginia, and his two young sons: Lester Paul Jr. (“Rusty”) was born in June 1941 in New York City; the couple’s second son, Gene Paul, was born in August 1944 in California.
as soon as Les had arrived in LA: Les left his job in Chicago in June 1943, was drafted in the fall of 1943, and reported for army duty January 27, 1944, according to letters in the Les Paul Papers, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, box 5, folder 1; Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 136; and Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 113.
another bit of conniving: Les had idolized Crosby and hankered to play with him since childhood. Paul and Cochran, Les Paul in His Own Words, 148–49; Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 120–21.
best solo: Jazz critic Gary Giddens, in the American Masters documentary “Les Paul: Chasing Sound” (PBS, aired July 11, 2007), says, “Les never played a better chorus in his life.”
Decca Records had released: Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 123, and Les Paul Papers, box 5, folder 1, letter dated October 24, 1945. According to Joel Whitburn, Pop Hits 1940–1954 (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, 1994), it debuted on the Billboard charts on October 13, 1945.