Clad in perpetually drab workmen’s clothes, preferring to spend most of his waking hours designing and building in his lab, Clarence Leo Fender toiled endlessly to perfect the tools that ushered in pop music’s electric revolution, yet he couldn’t play a single instrument himself.
It was a guitar, made by the venerable Gibson company, that bore the name Les Paul. Thanks to Keith Richards and certain other British rockers, this Les Paul guitar would soon rise again to become Fender instruments’ prime companion and rival—just as the man it was named after had been many years earlier.
But soon after Keith Richards appeared in The T.A.M.I. Show using his Gibson Les Paul, his peers in the British rock scene would find that this instrument could produce tones then out of reach of any other guitar—including a Fender. The Gibson Les Paul could become molten, searing, heavy: sounds for which it was never intended, but which were now wildly desirable. This guitar’s look and sound would go on to virtually define a new style of blues-based hard rock.
What Les really wanted, what he’d dreamed about almost since that parking lot afternoon in Waukesha, was a purely electric tone from a purely electric guitar. No woody warmth. No acoustic cavity. Just the crisp electric signal from the vibrating steel strings, made loud—as loud as he wanted—by an amplifier. No instrument available in New York in 1940 could do that.
Pouring sweat, he touched his electric guitar and a metal microphone stand at the same time, completing a circuit and sending a jolt of electricity through his body. He screamed for help, but it took the others a few crucial seconds to figure out that he was being electrocuted. When they kicked away the mic stand, all feeling was gone from Les Paul’s hands. The jolt had torn his muscles; he was facing weeks in the hospital, and his future as a performer seemed suddenly unclear. Electricity, the very force Les believed would give him the prominence he so desired, had thrown everything into jeopardy. He was now a guitar player who couldn’t play the guitar.
And that was where their friendship turned competitive. Soon Leo Fender and Les Paul were focused on—even obsessed with, as only people like the two of them could be—the challenges of electric guitars. They met on Les’s patio on Sunday afternoons to listen to the players and discuss ideas. Les had built his Log; Leo had constructed his black radio shop instrument. Both knew there was a major advance on the horizon for the electric guitar, that the present limits on its volume and tone would somehow have to be overcome. They were chasing the sound of music’s future.
Around the end of the war, Bigsby had grown indignant
The worst, though, was his right arm—his strumming arm. It was shattered in three places, including his elbow. Doctors believed it might have to be amputated from the shoulder down. Only days earlier, Les Paul had seemed on the cusp of stardom, with a thrilling single ready for release. Now, suddenly, no one knew whether he’d ever play the guitar again.
The Fender Esquire was the first solid-body standard electric guitar most industry insiders had ever seen, and the first intended to be mass-produced for everyday musicians. The guitar was easy to play, durable, and repairable, and could get very loud without feeding back.
Competitors overlooked all that. Most mocked the Esquire as a “canoe paddle” or a “toilet seat with strings.” Fred Gretsch, whose New York firm made guitars and other instruments, told a colleague, “That thing’ll never sell.” The Fender looked like it came from a different universe than the hollow-bodied instruments of Gibson, Gretsch, and Epiphone—and it did.
To a traditional luthier, the idea of bolting a neck to a wooden board and calling the result a guitar, as this tiny California firm had done, was heresy. It was mass production, not artisanship.
Les thought joining with Fender might be smart. Leo had shown the ability to realize a radical and controversial idea. The Telecaster was now a guitar that regular working musicians could buy, one strikingly different from anything else hanging in a music store. A partnership with Leo “first hit me as a swell idea,” Les recalled.
Les just wasn’t ready to give up on Gibson, even though Gibson had laughed at his last big idea. In his autobiography, Les claimed that Leo understood this decision. “He was okay with me not wanting to abruptly jump into something new.” But Les didn’t just decline the endorsement. He decided to use Leo’s breakthrough in a way that would change their relationship forever. In Les’s telling, he tried to wield the Fender solid-body as leverage to get Gibson to make the kind of instrument he wanted. After taking a close look at the Telecaster, Les claims he called Maurice H. Berlin, president of Gibson’s parent company, and told him about it. At a subsequent meeting, according to Les, Berlin asked him what he thought of the Telecaster. Les tried to put a bug in the executive’s ear: “I believe the solid-body guitar is going to be very important,” he told Berlin. “And if you don’t do something, Fender is going to rule the world.”
Gibson would call its first solid-body electric guitar the Les Paul Model, paying Les a royalty for every instrument sold.
Nearly all stringed bass instruments in Western music, like the double bass and the cello, are played vertically. The wooden bathtub the mariachis were using was a guitarrón, a bass instrument played horizontally, like a guitar. Watching the mariachis, Leo realized what his competitors hadn’t: that building a bass in the same shape as a guitar would solve a lot of problems. A horizontal design would make an easy adjustment for guitarists, of course, and would free up the player to dance and move around. If Leo built a bass just like his new electric guitar—with a solid, feedback-resistant body—it wouldn’t even need a massive acoustic chamber like a guitarrón; it could be thin and light and still get as loud as the player wanted. Some previous designer had sought a booming, portable bass instrument, and their decades-old solution led Leo to an idea that made perfect sense: just build a bass like a deeper-pitched electric guitar.
Back then, Randall was right about one thing: it was hard for people to get used to the idea of a bass played like a guitar. The following summer, in 1952, he and his salesmen unveiled the Precision Bass at the major trade show in Chicago, and were met with no small amount of derision. “Portable String Bass Really New,” mused the headline in Musical Merchandise, with a story far more skeptical than the usual promotional blurb: “Obviously, the new bass is a big departure from the standard type of bass, as it is only one-sixth the size and is played in the same position as a guitar.”
Les, of course, had had almost nothing to do with the development of the instrument, adding only a bridge he’d developed (which, because of a production error, hampered the earliest models) and insisting on the gold finish. But he’d let the claim stand. For decades, it would help buttress the wildly incorrect statement (which Les also never quite denied) that he “invented” the solid-body electric guitar, an instrument that simply can’t be attributed to one single person.
If Leo Fender had built a Volkswagen with his Telecaster, the Gibson Les Paul was a Cadillac: mannered, smooth, and striving for elegance in every detail.
More hits came, and by the early fifties, Muddy’s electric music had a hold on Chicago. “They even named it the Muddy Waters blues,” a contemporary remembered. Muddy hadn’t been the first to play blues songs on an electrified guitar, of course, but his band was “the first to use amplification to make their ensemble music rawer, more ferocious, more physical, instead of simply making it a little louder,” the critic Robert Palmer would later write. Muddy was taking music to new realms of expression and power through the electric guitar. One of his bigger hits was a song called “Rollin’ Stone.” The revolution was under way.
Yet all that work had brought Les exactly what he’d wanted since childhood. He was now the most popular and important electric guitar player in the country—and the world. “What Benny Goodman did for the clarinet, Harry James for the trumpet, Tommy Dorsey for the trombone, and Coleman Hawkins did for the tenor sax, Les Paul has done for the guitar,” Metronome’s George Simon declared in 1953. “He has brought it into such prominence that it has become an almost newly discovered instrument for many people, as well as one with which musicians can make more sounds and more money than ever before. You only have to hear some of his fantastically successful records to realize this.
Rising sales benefited the whole industry, and just as Les Paul stood first among guitar players, so did Gibson among guitar manufacturers. Fender had been the earliest to release a commercial solid-body electric, but after 1952, many players converting to this design found it difficult to resist the gold-painted Gibson. Everyone knew that Gibson meant quality, that Les Paul meant fame. Together, they made for the most desirable solid-body electric guitar on the market.
Leo would have to fight against an instrument bearing the name of—and ostensibly designed by—a man who’d once been his friend, a coconspirator in this new realm of solid-bodied electric instruments. Leo’s personal feelings about this situation were never recorded. But Les’s decision to reject the Telecaster, and to instead endorse an instrument from Fender’s largest competitor, seems to have brought an end to any closeness between the two men. What had been a friendship was now a rivalry. Everyone in Fullerton saw the Les Paul Model as an existential threat. Fender had made a Volkswagen, and now, somehow, it would have to answer to Gibson’s Cadillac.
THE FIRST SHIPMENT had rolled out of Fullerton in October 1954, only a few months before Buddy Holly bought one in Lubbock. Don Randall named it the Stratocaster, summoning images of space travel, of a rarefied altitude a level or two up from the Telecaster. The guitar was both an upgrade to the Telecaster and Fender’s answer to the Gibson Les Paul—yet it looked nothing like either.
Photographs of the most successful musicians in the second half of the 1950s captured Fender’s growth. Leo’s guitars and amplifiers—either or both—appeared with Elvis and Chuck Berry, with B. B. King and Muddy Waters, with Wes Montgomery and Oscar Moore, with Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, with Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson.
A few streets over, in a working-class neighborhood of modest town houses, Lennon’s friend Paul McCartney also sat mesmerized by the curves of Buddy’s guitar. Three weeks later, when Holly and the Crickets came to Liverpool, neither Lennon, a struggling art school student, nor McCartney, a high schooler, could afford tickets. Instead they pried details out of friends about his set list, his appearance, his guitar. Afterward, Lennon pushed to change the name of their band from the Quarrymen to something like the Crickets, the name of Holly’s band. They settled on the Beetles, which Lennon, a lover of puns, soon changed to reflect the so-called beat music they played.
TO ERIC CLAPTON, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, Buddy Holly linked the sound and look of the solid-body electric guitar to rock ’n’ roll, the music they’d spend their lives pursuing.
Jerry Lee Lewis, on a tour of England, revealed to the press that he was married to his thirteen-year-old cousin—and that she was his third wife—thus banishing himself from polite society.
Leo felt his eardrum crumble. He leapt away from the speaker, howling in agony, his hand covering his ear. But the damage was done; Leo’s ear collected only silence and pain. For days afterward, he could hear nothing out of it, and only a meager sensitivity ever returned. It was a cruel stroke of irony. Leo had already learned to live with one eye; now, he’d have to develop musical instruments using little more than one ear.
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.
After his contract expired, Gibson renamed that skinny guitar the SG.
Hall followed his distributor’s advice and arranged a meeting with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, during the band’s upcoming visit to New York. Rickenbacker’s owner was deeply worried, however, that he might not be the only guitar maker seeking to win their favor.
Stateside teens had seen Stratocasters and Precision Basses on Ed Sullivan; they’d thumbed past Gibsons on the covers of their parents’ jazz records. But what were these things in the arms of the Beatles? Paul McCartney plunked an electric bass the shape of a viola, made by a German company called Hofner. George Harrison that night chose not his Rickenbacker, but a guitar from the Gretsch company out of New York called the Country Gentleman. (Three years earlier, in Hamburg, he’d meant to buy a Stratocaster, but another expat Brit beat him to the only one for sale.) Ringo’s drums were made by Ludwig (from Chicago, not Frankfurt); the amplifiers were English prototypes bearing the name Vox. Much of this was new kit to American eyes.
In those three minutes of black-and-white television, the near-hegemony Fender had enjoyed in early 1960s rock ’n’ roll came crashing to an end. What the kids wanted now—perhaps would want evermore—was what the Beatles had. February 9, 1964, the day of the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan, would prove a great day for F. C. Hall and Rickenbacker. For Hall’s crosstown rivals, the British rockers’ television appearance was the first portent in years that Fender’s lofty position in the world of electric guitars might not always be so assured.
Thus, in only an hour or two with the Beatles, F. C. Hall had outfitted George and John with what would become their most iconic set of guitars, had ensured that the Beatles-Rickenbacker link would endure for decades.
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.
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.
By then, Clapton hadn’t just memorized the licks of American bluesmen like Freddy King, B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and others, but had mastered them. With the freedom given to him by John Mayall, Clapton’s playing had evolved beyond imitation, moving into the realm of deep personal expression.
But when the results of those three or four days in the studio were released, it became clear that no one was on the same planet as Eric Clapton. No white person had ever played blues guitar so aggressively and with such emotional intensity—had ever played as if their life hung on every note. Here was the blues, unmistakable, laid out in all its soulfulness and splendor. Songs from greats like Freddy King, Little Walter, Otis Rush, and Robert Johnson, along with Mayall’s own worthy compositions. The real thing. And since the wider world was then basically ignorant of these black American masters from whom Eric Clapton learned, his summoning of such immense feeling came across as a revelation. Many listeners would experience the terrifying power of the American blues for the first time through Clapton and Mayall. But what was new, truly new—to England and the United States, to both white and black listeners everywhere—was the sound that Eric Clapton had discovered and that Mike Vernon and Gus Dudgeon had begrudgingly captured over those few days. It hit in the first few seconds of the resulting album, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, on a minor-key tune called “All Your Love”:
When it was released in July 1966, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton stunned listeners and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The recording put electric guitar at the forefront of a revamp of the electric blues, recasting it into something heavier and more percussive than any of the American records that inspired Clapton.
To him, the album was simply a record of the shows he performed almost nightly, nothing more, nothing less. And by the time it was released—in fact, the month before—word hit Melody Maker that Eric Clapton had already left Mayall’s band to found a new group, a trio called Cream.
Linda Keith decided right then to take on Jimi’s career as a personal mission—to encourage him to sing and lead his own group, to spread the word about this unknown talent to her friends in the English music scene. She couldn’t let Hendrix’s obscurity stand. But before he could make any steps toward independence and perhaps recognition, Jimi needed his own guitar. When the Rolling Stones arrived in New York to begin a US tour a short while later, Linda made a bold move on Jimi’s behalf: she apparently pilfered a white Fender Stratocaster from the hotel room of her boyfriend—snatched a brand-new guitar from the lair of Keith Richards himself—and gave it to this unknown guitarist. Rummaging around Richards’s hotel room that day, Linda also grabbed a demo he had of a song called “Hey Joe,” by the singer Tim Rose—a grim, moody tale of betrayal and murder—and gave it to Hendrix. These events would later seem almost impossibly auspicious, but Keith claims they happened. (“This is rock ’n’ roll history,” Richards confirmed in his autobiography.)
It didn’t matter that the Strat Keith had stolen was right-handed and Jimi was left-handed. He’d been playing righty guitars since he was a kid in Seattle, just by flipping them over and restringing them to maintain the usual string order.
The Fender bass was not a background instrument; it was worthy of a lead role in the Beach Boys and the brilliant works of Motown, and its players had finally grabbed one. A lead role had been something unimaginable for the bass just a decade earlier.
Accompanying Chandler was a person none of them had seen before: a thin black American wearing outrageous clothes, with a cloud of Afro surrounding a dreamy face and huge brown eyes. He seemed distant—not in a cold way, as Clapton could, but pleasantly aloof. This figure wandered silently over to the dressing room mirror and began toying with his hair, poufing it out with a comb to maximum diameter. Chandler, meanwhile, chatted amiably. He asked his friends in Cream if this newcomer could go onstage with them and jam at the show, just for a few songs.
After October 1, 1966, Clapton was no longer the unquestionable leader of the London scene, no longer the sole deity of English guitar worshippers. There was a period of tension between Eric and Jimi, a sort of sniffing out, a testing of the poses of rivalry and friendship over several encounters. Yet by being immediately, publicly bested by Jimi, and then getting to know him, Clapton found a companion and equal, another person who felt the same ambitions and yearnings he did, and who shared a similar past.
There was another symbolic rift between these two men besides white and black, English and American—a division missed by few of their close followers, and one that would have great consequence for the future of their instrument. In the flurry of enthusiasm that followed Hendrix’s arrival in London in the fall of 1966, anyone paying close attention would have noted that this flamboyant newcomer had overthrown Clapton and his all-powerful Gibson Les Paul with, of all things, a Fender Stratocaster—a guitar seen at that time and place as a meager and old-fashioned tool.
The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War now called persistent attention to injustices and hypocrisies at the core of American society. Music responded by getting louder, more serious, even angry. Self-satisfaction was out—more afflicted sounds were called for, and the high output of Gibson’s dual-coil, humbucking pickups pushed amplifiers into thick, aggrieved distortion, while the guitar’s heavy body and glued-in neck produced a crying, mournful sustain.
The Fender Stratocaster, meanwhile, was what Buddy Holly and Ike Turner had played, what the surf rockers had used—a workaday instrument out of step with the times. “They were so unfashionable, Stratocasters,” Eric Clapton recalled. “As far as the new blues-rock hotshots were concerned, it was a guitar for skinny, bespectacled nerds,”
Then came Jimi Hendrix, and the right-handed white Stratocaster he brought to England. Hendrix had tried (and would try) practically every guitar on the market, but he was adamant about which model he preferred. “I use a Fender Stratocaster,”
It was the Fuzz Face—wreaking havoc on Jimi’s Strat and Marshall—that painted the tones of his follow-up single to “Hey Joe,” the incomparable “Purple Haze.” It was the Fuzz Face that gave “Foxey Lady” the aspect of a steam kettle boiling over, about to burst. And when the pedal was turned off, the Strat’s single-coil pickups chimed with a clarity that Gibsons couldn’t match, producing the glassy tones heard on songs like “Hey Joe” and “The Wind Cries Mary.”
So seven years after Les Paul had declined to renew his contract with the company, at the summer trade shows of 1968, Gibson displayed a line of Les Paul guitars based on the originals. There was the reissued Les Paul Standard—in gold, just like the original models—and the Les Paul Custom, in gloss black with gold hardware. There were minor differences in the new versions, and their arrival would not stop values for the old ones from eventually climbing into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
Jimi Hendrix, illuminated in haze: now the highest-paid player in rock music, the de facto headliner of this three-day gathering. The Woodstock festival was so far behind schedule that its biggest draw only appeared on a Monday morning, eight hours after the event was supposed to have ended.
“Before that,” said witness Roz Payne, “if someone would have played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ we would have booed. After that, it became our song.” “It was probably the single greatest moment of the Sixties,” said the music critic Al Aronowitz. “You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country, but hate the government.” A patriotic melody, rendered in a distorted electronic voice, cleaved in half by a sonic evocation of the horrors of war: By playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” that day, Hendrix cemented his reputation as the most vital American performer in rock after Bob Dylan. He gave a generation of Americans a new connection with their national anthem, showing that even this most patriotic of songs could embody their painfully conflicted views.
In the early seventies, only a few years after Jimi died, Clapton switched loyalties from various Gibson models to a Fender Stratocaster. Since then, he has played the double-cutaway Fender model almost exclusively among electric guitars. There is some irony in the fact that the man who resurrected the Gibson Les Paul Model in the midsixties became an icon inextricably linked with what is arguably Leo Fender’s most beloved design.
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.
Les Paul also gets credit for designing his Gibson signature model, when the work of guitar researchers like Robb Lawrence (and the testimony of former Gibson president Ted McCarty) shows that in fact a team of Gibson staff members created the instrument. Les left his mark on the guitar in several ways, and he obviously helped make it famous. But he didn’t sketch it out, prototype it, or do any of the true design work. It appeared very close to its final form when McCarty presented it to Les in the fall of 1951, asking for his endorsement.