Leo Fender would never learn to play the guitar. Later, he’d explain that his enjoyment of the instrument stemmed from the precise pattern of harmonics produced by its strings. Where others heard music, Leo Fender heard physics.
In late August, Billboard announced that Les Paul and Mary Ford held four spots on its Best Selling Pop Singles chart simultaneously. They were the only artists in history to do so.
Les Paul was the first player to claim the studio as an instrument, a move so common today that we often forget to remark on it.
Les had learned, as he would later put it, that audiences “listen with their eyes.”
But Les Paul had a sound in his head that needed to get out.
Electric guitars had appeared on the market in 1932, as players wrestled against the oldest limitation of their instrument: volume. A guitar was inherently a marvelous thing—Beethoven himself had called it a “miniature orchestra,”
“He could sell you a set of false teeth you’d need when you were fifty, if you were twenty-four,”
Les had been hearing the sound for almost half his life—ever since he was a kid playing hillbilly tunes and telling cornball jokes to anyone in Waukesha, Wisconsin, who’d listen. Born Lester Polsfuss on June 9, 1915, to a mother who’d adored and spoiled him from the start, Les had picked up the harmonica at age eight, discovering by accident that he could make it sound better by soaking it in boiling water. As a child, he’d torn apart and reassembled his mother Evelyn’s player piano, her telephone, her phonograph—even her electric light switches. He adored radio—loved listening to the Grand Ole Opry with Evelyn, a devoted country fan; loved building a simple earpiece radio; loved tinkering with a fancier receiver he shared with a friend.