Les Paul & Leo Fender Part II

I think so. It seems appropriate, all right. Well, where we left off with part one was Leo Fender, lifelong engineer, tinker and non musician, has made a career making amps and trying to figure out the problem with electric guitar feedback. Les Paul was a budding superstar guitar player and session player, also tinkerer, trying to figure out this problem of amplifying the electric guitar without feedback, and they were introduced in

trying to figure this out together. And then enters a third gentleman who may have had more to do with the invention of the solid body electric guitars we know it, than either one of them. For real. This is where things get a little bit shady, little murky, when Carrie Grant enters what's the guy's name, Paul? His name is Paul Biggsby, and I've heard of the last name I've I've seen those guitars before. Is it still are the is the company is still around? Yeah, So here's the deal.

Biggsby is now most well known for what's called the Biggsby tail piece, which is he's the guy who kind of invented the wammy bar. If you know nothing about guitars, but you've ever seen like Eddie Van Halen play. Not all guitarists use these things. But if you hit a note and then you reach below the guitar and grab that little steel bar and make it go wow, why wow, wow wow, that's a whammy bar. Bigsby invented that, and

he is still most well known. Like you can get Biggsby tail piece put onto a Less Paul or an s G or uh. You can't do a two Fenders because they have their own I guess you could with a telecaster, but um, any guitar without a wammy bar you could put on a Biggsby tail piece. They're beautiful, they look great, and that's what they're kind of most well known for today. Okay, gotcha. But at the time Bigsby was he was the oldest of so Leo Fender.

If you didn't realize was older than Less Paul, and Paul Bigsby was older than Leo, and he had started out his career as a motorcycle racer and then went on to start to make up motorcycle parts, I believe, and then moved on to instruments. And he Um was known to Leo Fender and that they were competitors because Um Biggsby also made electric steel guitars at the time. I don't know if they were friendly necessarily, but I do know that they definitely worked together in Fenders workshop.

UM kind of working on electric instruments together, so I would guess you'd have to be somewhat friendly. It wasn't like you know, Macy's and gimbals or anything like that. You know, Yeah, I think I think that's about right. Okay, So they definitely worked together at some point in time, and they were friendly enough to to do that, and there they were dedicated to creating that big electric sound

out of a guitar. Um and Bigsby, if you ever have seen those guitars that he made, they were beautiful. They were It was a lot like Gibson. They were artisan. UM just just crafted works of art basically UM one at a time, kind of things exactly, and so he already had Um, Paul Bigsby already had a name for

himself in that respect. And he was hanging out at a radio station as guitar makers do in l a um k x l A, which featured country music played live kind of like Grand Old Opry stuff, I guess, and uh, country mus sition named Merle Travis Um was there, I believe, playing, and Merle Travis knew Paul Biggsby at least by reputation, and said, Hey, you know I heard you can build anybody whatever, whatever they're looking for. If I draw you a picture of a guitar, can you

make it for me? And I guess Paul Bigsby said challenge accepted, good sir, and um, we should probably fast forward about a month or two. Huh yeah. And I just again, I want to stress the fact that at one point in Les, Paul Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby are all together in a garage and county in southern California. And this is like, I mean, it makes my mind explode to think about those three men in a room

together like working on something. I'm like, I'm trying to think of another industry where like three separate top brains got together like this, and I can't even think of a of anything to compare it to. It'd be like if um, Steve Jobs, Build Gates and Paul Giamatti all got to I couldn't. Yes. Yeah, uh So anyway, a very just special moment in history. So yeah, he comes

back a few months later, uh, with this guitar. Leo Fender is backstage at a show and Merle Travis is there playing, and he pulls out this thing that Paul Bigsby made And if you look up Merl Travis Bigsby guitar, this thing is beautiful. It is a gorgeous guitar and looks like and is a real deal solid body electric guitar. Yeah, and he pulls it out in front of Leo Fender no Less, who said, hey, Merel, that's a pretty neat

looking guitar there. Uh, you mind if I get my hands on that for a little bit and just check it out. I want to see what it's all about. You know, this little prototype out of the way right, uh, And Merle Travis was kind enough to let Leo Fender borrow it, and Leo Fender and so should we should caveat this? Supposedly, Leo Fender, where he alive today, would be like, no, no, that's not true. No, this is

not correct. But supposedly there are informed people who say that Merle Travis let um that let Leo Fender take his guitar that Paul Bigsby had made for him back to Leo Fender's workshop and basically have a reverse engineer session all over it. Yeah, this is where it gets a little hinky, because Leo Fender was a great man and a great inventor of things. Um, but what he

was really really good at was improving things. He was like the Japanese, Yeah, and um, they make some pretty good guitars to it, think right, but there, well, the Japanese are well known for taking something that's pretty cool and then just improving the heck out of it, and

like he say, you should do it? Yeah exactly. Uh so Yeah, I mean definitely a point in history sort of a crossroads where some people are like Leo Fender stole this from Paul Bigsby and was able to mass produce it, whereas Bigsby was intent on making these artists and pieces one by one and just got left in

the dust. Um, there may be something to that. If you look at the headstock for that original Bigsby guitar, and you look at the head stock and the head stock is at the the very end of the neck where the strings end up and where the little tuning pegs are, it looks a lot like the Stratocaster headstock,

almost exactly like it. And he denied kind of even ganking that, but in meetings at Fender later on, there were higher ups at Fender that said, go out and make us something like that Biggsby, Like they literally said that. So it's kind of undeniable at this point. Um. He was even sued. There was a lawsuit that Bigsby sent about the head stock and they basically said, you know, they were there were too many just sort of similar

kinds of things before this, so it's not gonna hold water. Well, not only that, Um, there there is some there are other similarities to like you talked about that little wammy bar. Um, the biggs By had one. It's called the biggs By pure vibrato, where basically you're you're you're pushing pushing down on a bar that's actually manipula I don't understand. Actually, Chuck,

what is manipulation? Maybe you should take this part. All I know is that it affects the sound like wa wa wa wah like that, But I don't know the mechanism by which it does the wa wah wah wah. It's really easy because it's purely mechanical. It's the guitar bridge is the part where you're, if you're right handed players, where the right hand is, and that's where the strings

are rooted. So what the wammy bar and what the Bigsby tailpiece did is it lifts up the back of the bridge and it literally manually loosens the guitar strings until you release it, and then it snaps them back. So if you press on it, it just it's literally losing the guitar string enough to make it go wait wait waiting. And you remember when you do this around the pickup the metal strings and steel strings affect the

the electrical signal that's produced. So if you're messing with the strings, you're messing with the electrical signal and hence the sound. Right. Uh. The other thing we should point out that Leo Fender probably kind of stole was the all the tuning pegs on the headstock are all on

top and in one line. So if you look at telecasters and strato casters, and that's sort of the Fender thing, they're all in a row because it's just really easy to access them as a player, whereas uh Gibson models were based on acoustic or Spanish guitars, where there's three on one side and three on the other. And in order to turn to tune those lower strings or I guess the higher strings, you have to reach under and around. And Leo Fender was I guess he saw this design

was like, hey, that's kind of brilliant. Actually to put them all on one side, that's superior. Frankly. Yeah, so yeah, it's really tough to get around. Like if you put the there's plenty of pictures out there. If you put that first Bigsby Merle Travis guitar next to the first guitar that Fender ever mass produced, it's pretty much the same thing in a lot of ways. Um, And so yeah,

I don't know. It was tough to swallow it. But like you said, the idea UM, the idea of impugning um Leo Fender's character, it just doesn't it doesn't quite make sense because he was a great guy and he did do a lot um for the industry, and he founded Fender, which just that alone is pretty amazing too. But one of the things that he doesn't necessarily get credit for UM at least outside of like musicians circles I'm guessing, but UM is the basse that he created, right, Yeah,

the Precision basse um. Before the electric bass guitar. The basses were all the big standard upright basses, and they were a problem because they were huge. You either had to drop it to the strap it to the top of your car, uh and you know, potentially have it get beat up by weather, or you had to ride separately from the rest of the band because that thing filled up the entire back seat. They were just big and bulky and hard to transport. So uh leo. Fender

again was not the first UM. A guy named Paul tut Mark who worked on He was a big lap steel maker and he founded the Audiobox company, which is still around fifteen years before the Fender p base. The Precision base. He invented what's generally known as the first electric solid body bass guitar. It just didn't take off like the precision. And again the p bass is called

a precision because the upright basse doesn't have frets. So if you knew how to play it, you know how to play it, but you couldn't be like go to the fourth fret. You would just sort of not guess, but you would generally know where it falls. The electric bass guitar, the p bass had frets, so they say it had more precisions, so that's why they called it that.

But that's another thing that's easy to overlook too, is like you know, the electric guitar, it's it's pretty different from like the electric Spanish guitar, but it's still in the same general it's like a progression from that. The electric bass was like hull cloth and a new invention basically,

and it changed everything too. I mean, like I was reading an article I think, yeah that you sent from maybe Pitchfork UM where I was talking about like just how much that changed things having that around like basically Motown and then later on Funk like like none of that would have existed without the electric bass, and like um, like another one bites the Dust and like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and like you know, Parliament, like all these like bands were predicated on the fact

that there was like a nice slappy electric bass that, um,

you just couldn't get around, You couldn't ignore it. It It became like a part of the band rather than just some background thing that was more visual than than audio or wait oral, Yeah, because the upright basse kind of ended up having the same problem as the acoustic guitar, and that once they had electric guitars, that upright bass wouldn't really cut through live, and so you had, you know, the a song is driven by the rhythm section that the bass player and the drummer. That's when you ever

hear about the rhythm section. They drive the heart of the song. Everyone follows them. Like as much as you think is the guitars out front, it's not leading the band. The low end is what's actually leading the song, and everyone else kind of falls in line with that because they're setting that beat with the bass and the drums. But he's he's working on this and again not to get in the weeds with the amps, but this whole time he's making leaps and bounds on amplification that works

at really high volume with these Fender amps. Yeah, and then one of the other things that made Fender really innovative was he um aided the he created like instruments for everyday people. That was the big innovation for him.

Like his company set out to create to bring this stuff to the masses so that you know, teenage kids could save up from like there after school job and like buy one of these things and buy an amp and start a band and maybe actually get kind of good and it like I mean, I hate to use this word because it's so over used these days, but he kind of democratized starting a band. Whereas before you had to you know, you're you had like a twenty piece band, and you had to know all these people,

and you had to do dance halls and everything. And now you could you could because everything was amplified and electrified. You could get away with just you know, three or four pieces and um everybody could hear you, and they could hear you louder than they could hear the big bands from before um because it was amplified, but it was affordable. And he also made him really durable too. Yeah, And it was because he introduced kind of like a

factory process to it. Whereas over at Gibson and Rick and Bucker and Bigsby, they were all still making these hands kind of not one at a time, but they were making them by hand, very slowly. Uh. One of the big reasons he was able to factory I is it was he started he was basically the only company using a bolt on neck. Um. So in other words, you take the neck and you literally screw it into

the body of the guitar on the back. And that's why anytime you see a Fender guitar on the back, they have this little silver square plate where the neck meets the body and under that it's where it's bolted together. Um. Gibson and basically everyone else was using uh what's called set neck which are glued on. And you might think that, like many bolting sounds a lot better than glue. But what glue does is that actually it hears it and makes it more like that log almost like a through neck.

It makes it part of the body and gives you more warmth and a little more sustain and it's just a bit of a different it sound. Whereas the both on guitar got a little more known for sort of being kind of pluckier, and you know, they both have their advantages. Some people swear by one or the other, but uh, neither like nowadays, neither one of them is superior to the next. Really, it's just sort of two

different methods. Gotcha, I got you. But I could also see that Bolt almost represents that mass production to ye for sure. So it took um Leo Fenders working on that, um big we'll call it Biggsby inspired design. And at the same time, um Les Paul is about to have a life changing experience in Oklahoma of all places. Right, Yeah, So he, like I said, was not a good husband to either his first wife or his second. Really, he had a long time affair with a woman her with

her stage name of Mary Ford. She was a singer and also a champion guitar player. Uh, they had at a duo going on. It was Less Paul mary Ford, and they had tons and tons of number one hit records, and they had been together for quite a few years

before he even got divorced from his first wife. But in while traveling I think back to l A from Wisconsin, they were in a really bad car accident on the icy roads of uh near Davenport, Oklahoma, and it was a really really bad wreck that could have killed both of them. Yeah. So um, they were both thrown from the car along with all their equipment. UM. And from what I understand, Mary's injuries weren't nearly as bad as less as um his spleen was all messed up a

bunch of other stuff. But the big problem for less Paul was that his right elbow was shattered, and at first the doctors said, well, we're just gonna have to amputate your arm, and that obviously would have been that for his guitar playing days. Um. Apparently, when he was faced with this news, when of the first things he started doing was um coming up with how to create

um an effect where you could play guitar one handed. Um. But he luckily did never have to actually follow through and invent that, because uh, some doctor was aware of his status and that he played guitar and like that. He just they couldn't take his arm, so he set about trying to figure out how to solve the problem while keeping his arm and allowing less Paul to somehow play one way or another. Yeah, I mean, he basically

gave less Paul the choice. He was like, you can either amputate it, or we can try this procedure where we kind of screw your arm back together and we don't know if it'll work. And he he said, but it's gonna be permanently bent in some kind of direction. And less Paul said, why don't we at least try it first so we know if it works before we cut the arm off, And he said, and just bend it and pointed towards my belly button and leave it there. Yeah,

so he could play guitar. And that's what they did, and for the rest of less Paul's life. Like if you ever see a picture of less Paul, that right arm is bent. Yeah, and the doctor just to put a little flourish on it, made it so that his thumb was always in the thumbs up position, so it always looks like Les Paul was really happy about whatever was going on when that picture was taken. Alright, So

that's where Les Paul is. He recovers. It literally takes him about a year in the hospital to fully recover from his injuries. So he's on pause when Leo Fender builds Uh the Fender Esquire guitar and debuts it at the nineteen National Association of Music Merchants Convention in Chicago. I say we take a break here and then we come back and talk about that and keep going. How about that? It sounds great. Okay, we'll be right back

and shock alright, chuck so um so. Leo Fender takes his um Paul Bigsby inspired guitar and creates a prototype out of it that's known as the Esquire. And I think there's some differences between the Esquire and what would become later known as a Telecaster, Right, it's not the exact same thing, just with a different name. Uh yeah, I mean I think there was only one pick up and the Telly ended up having a couple, but it was when you look at pictures of the Esquire, it's

the same body shape, very utilitarian. Uh, not the most comfortable guitar to play. Um, which we'll see later on what's kind of a big deal in the creation of the strap a cast. But it was a real deal guitar and it was loud, it was clear it could be mass produced, and everybody basically said this is the future. Yeah, He's had the National Association of Music Merchants convention going, hey, you like you like it this, you like it this guitar,

and they all said yes very much. So he went back after the convention and kind of tinkered with it a little more. Um. He had a collaborator named George Fullerton, uh, and they ended up producing from the Esquire. There are a couple of problems with it, apparently from the steel strings when they were tuned tightly. Um, eventually the neck would start to warp a little bit. That's a big problem.

So they figured out how to reinforce it with the rod, and they solved some other small problems and then ended up coming up with the broadcaster. Right, that's right. Uh. A guy we should mention here is Um. I think Dave called him as marketing sales guy. It's true he was that Don Randall, but he was Leo Fenders d fifty partner in the Fender Music Corporation and a huge, huge part of this story that we really won't get into.

But Don Randall was there the whole time and and sort of was everything that Leo Fender wasn't as far as when you're looking for a good business partner, UM out there hitting the bricks selling this thing, drumming up deals, and the Broadcaster. You know, the ads came out and he got that first cease and desist from Gretch. The they made drums and guitars, and there was actually a drum set called the Broadcaster with a k. It sounds like a sound you make when you burp and choke

at the same time. Yeah, broadcaster, no Gretch. Oh I misread that one. Sorry, broadcaster with the case sounds evil? Remember yeah, yeah, yeah, um Gretch still makes beautiful guitars and great drums, but they had a drum set with a k. Uh. So they said, all right, we gotta think of a different name. And so TV was the latest thing, and so they literally called it the Telecaster because of that, I know, and people were like, boy, howdy, I love this. They did, so that was a big deal.

The Telecaster was I guess the first mass produced, widely available electric guitar, solid body electric guitar that shredded, that you could shred on. I guess. Yeah. It kind of started at all. Yeah, and so um Less Paul by this time he had gotten in that car rec in n you said. It took him about a year to recover. Um. He got divorced from his wife. He ended up marrying Mary Ford um, and together they actually his his music career got even even greater than it was when he

was working with Bing Crosby. Um. This is when they had four slots on the Billboard top charts at one time on one week. That's enormous. They were the first to do it. I'm sure maybe some others like Michael Jackson, the Beatles and a couple others have done it since, but there were only kind of gets across just how huge less Paul was as a popular musician. Right. Yeah, Mary was great and um, everyone loved her. She had a beautiful voice. Again, he was not a good husband

to her. He was eventually when they got divorced, it was on grounds of cruelty. Was one of them because he was just a workaholic and would never stop, and he would not let her stop. And she was like where they were really really wealthy at this point from their career, and she was like, can we enjoy life a little bit? Can we stop and and live? And he was like no, Like, we're not getting anything accomplished if we're doing that. And the stage act was a little I mean, I guess for the time it was

what it was, but it was kind of misogynistic. He would make cracks about about Mary, you know, singing in between doing the dishes and and kind of you know, making him dinner, and she would sort of laugh, and it was their banter, but it was just the whole thing was kind of gross in retrospect, Yeah, for sure, especially today and then the cats on the unicycles with the Sparklers. It was just widely considered to be over

the top. Yeah, way over the top. So um, But because Leo knew Less Paul, I mean, like you said, they they and Paul Bigsby were all working in a garage together, working on electric guitars. Like you kne him. He was friendly with him enough so that, um, Leo Fender and Don Randall said, you know, if we could get Less Paul, who's like the most well known guitar player in the world, to endorse our Fender guitars, this

would be a huge deal, huge. So they sent him a telecaster and with a note saying like, hey, this is where I'm going, I'd like you to to consider coming here with me something along I'm paraphrasing, um and uh, Less Paul was like, no, that's all right, I don't really like this guitar that much. Yeah, I think he was fairly kind about it, but he just said, this sound is too bright at that bolt on neck and you know, it's a different sound, and he didn't like it.

And remember, like that was the whole reason he dedicated himself to coming up with the electric guitar and cracking this code for a decade or more a couple of decades by that, because he wanted to. He was searching for that one perfect sound and so that actually he didn't give up the quest after Fender said, you know,

here's my guitar and it didn't work. Um Les Paul, despite having been turned away by Gibson a full decade before, went back to Gibson and said, hey, you guys have to listen to me this time, like it's this is this is where things are going. Look, Leo Fender has just come out with this telecaster, Like it's very clear that you guys need to be developing a solid body

electric guitar. And Gibson said, funny, you should mention that because we've been working on it ever since we saw that Esquire at that music convention and it knocked our socks off, that's right, So they were kind of already on it um. They were different, they were they were sort of modeled after those acoustics with the tuning pegs on both sides. The Gibson guitar was really heavy, and that's it's funny. Later on, many many guitar players started

with what would end up being the Less Paul. Eric Clapton and uh and Keith Richards and all these people played the less Paul early on, and a lot I think Pete Townsend and they all eventually switch to fenders later in their career because the less Paul weighs between nine and ten pounds and the strats and Telly's way about seven pounds, and it's difference two or three pounds strapped on your back when you're touring is a big deal.

Like I can tell a difference when I play a heavy guitar, you know, being fifty years old in my basement after a few hours, so I can imagine what like touring year after year, what what kind of told that takes, for sure. But this Gibson was heavy. It had that glued on neck which gives you a little more warmth, a little more resonance, and it was a really good guitar. And so they say to less Paul like, now he's being courted by Gibson officially, like, hey, what

do you think of this? We will let this be your guitar, We will slap your name on it, will give you a five percent royalty, and you've got to play it exclusively. And he said the done deal, my friends. Yeah, because he was like like he'd always only played Gibsons. He loved Gibson. This is like a dream come true for him, you know, and for them also to come back to him now, um had had to feel awfully sweet.

But it was so stupid too, because this is a decade after he went to them with this idea of the first time and now they're finally getting around to it. But it was a big deal. So Less Paul now played Gibson guitars exclusively and they named that first model the Lebson the Gibson. Less Paul. Yeah, I wonder if in that meeting he said, can also tell people that I U I designed and invented this thing, because that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life. Yeah,

which which is really something because he apparently didn't. There's a guy named uh, I think Paul McCarty, George McCarty. I think George McCarty. I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure his name is George McCarty. UM. He was the president of Gibson at the time. His last name is McCarty. Let's just call him that or mr X. Mr X was the president of Gibson at the time, and he um

largely designed the guitar. But yeah, they kind of let I guess as part of the endorsement deal, they let um less Paul just basically claim it like he had a lot to do with it. He made some tweaks um for sure, but he never designed the less ball that that is also a fact. And he did not admit the electric guitar. A lot of people still say that Les Paul invented the electric guitar, and he was always happy to just sort of nod his head right,

all right, Chuck. So like by the by the mid fifties, by the early fifties, um Fender had the Telecaster out, um Gibson had their less Palm model out, So they were now widely available electric guitars being produced, and that that sounded awesome, like this sound had finally been a cheap loudness, clarity, shredding nous, gnarly nous. All of that stuff was now extant in the world. Did not exist

before now it did. But the one that really changed everything, the the electric guitar that changed at all was um Offenders. If not their second model, they're definitely their second well known model, the Stratocaster, right, which came out in nine. Yeah, this was a huge innovation because the problems with the Telly is that it uh like I said it was it was. It wasn't rounded, it wasn't sharp, and I'm

talking about the edges of it. It was you know, it kind of dug into your body and wasn't super comfortable. So Leo Finder does what he does, which is making improvements like the Japanese, and he got into the back of it and he he carved out where the top of the back of the guitar meets your belly. He shaved that down to where it was contoured and then where your right arm if you're right and player your pick hand, where it where your forearm kind of rests

on the top front of the guitar. He carved that down to and contoured it so your arm and your belly weren't pressed against these sharp edges, and it was just a more comfortable guitar all the way around. It

had a had a cool look. This was a time in the early fifties, mid fifties when you know, these these cars has had these big fins on them and everything just had this sort of look like it's hard to describe what the how weird the stratocaster and how sort of modern and futuristic it looked at the time because we all just see that it's like, oh, that's what a guitar looks like. But at the time it was revolutionary and everyone literally was like, what in the

world is that hot looking thing? Yeah. One of the other things that made it look hot, those fins had a purpose. The horns at the top of the guitar, where the neck met the body. Um, it carved out space so you could get your fingers to press those frets on the higher notes a lot more easily than you could have before when you were reaching all the

way around it, which again allowed for greater shredding. That's right, And the fenders did those on both sides, whereas the Less Paul was only carved on the underside, so you could still get into some strings, but it took a little bit of finagling. Uh. Later on, Les Paul would come up and I have one of these two what's called the double cut where it's cut on both sides, and the Gibson s G which is cut on both sides.

But originally it was just Fender doing that, and then the Less Paul did something that just did away with that all together and made the coolest guitar of all time, the Flying V, which is the one I always associated with heavy metal. And by Less Paul, of course I mean Gibson, but that that that's the one. Like Jimmy Hendricks played that one, like, um, I can't remember, like a bunch of people played it. You've seen this before, but when he looked, well, he also played a Flying

V I've seen. I've seen pictures on of it on the internet. Um, but the the UM like it's what you associate with, like like just just rocking out with a guitar, and it turns out the thing was designed in It's one of the most mind blowing facts I learned in this podcast. I couldn't believe because I associated with eighties hair metal, and um, it's been it was. It had been around for a good thirty years by then, and it like the fifties is when this thing came out.

It's like the coolest looking guitar of all time for my money. No, I love the Flying V and I'll probably own one at one point. At some point, you should look up reverse Flying be because they were one of the ugliest guitars. Yeah, I've seen that before, but yeah, Gibson was tinkering around. They made the Flying V, and they made the Explorer, which is the one that's kind of looks like a lightning bolt. Uh, and then the Firebird and those all did okay, but they weren't like

you know, and Leo fendered the same thing. After the Stratocaster success, he came up with the jazz Master and the Jaguar, and he thought these were all improvements on those guitars because they added a lot more options for switches and switching in additional pickups. But they were I mean, they're kind of cool now, but they were a little busy for a lot of players back then, so they

didn't take off like the strat did. It was just this utilitarian, really comfortable players guitar that everyone really wanted after Buddy Holly jumped on TV and and played one. Because Buddy Holly was huge. Yeah, he was huge, and he was actually bigger in the UK than he was in America at the time. UM, and I didn't realize to see this is another factor the podcast. There were two tours of the UK and ninety that changed music history.

I just think it's so cool. But one was Buddy Holly, who Buddy Holly and the Crickets went on tour with the Stratocaster front and center. And then Muddy Waters came to the UK. And Muddy Waters have been around for years by then. He actually was just kind of like an old relic in America by then. But it was super cool in the sixties and the UK to be into old style blues, so they brought Muddy Waters over and Muddy Waters didn't show up with the Spanish style guitar.

He showed up with the strato caster and blared it. Then those two tours produced bands like the Beatles, The Who, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, UM like basically every band in the British Invasion were in the audience as kids are slightly younger men, uh for those two tours and were inspired to go on and form some really amazing

bands afterward. Yeah, it was funny. It was kind of like either you were in the Beatles camp where you saw Buddy Holly and you wanted to do sort of upbeat pop music, or you were Eric Clapton going to see Muddy Waters and you wanted to do this sort of raunchy blues rock thing. But either way, it was a strato caster front and center and another. Well, I guess we should take a break now before we get

to the next guy. Right, all right, all right, we'll take our final break and talk about surf guitar legend Dick Dale right after this blooms and shock. Okay, welcome, Wait, hold on, let me do it differently. We're back, all right. So all these people are being influenced by people like Buddy Holly and Muddy Waters. Then comes a gentleman named Dick Dale in the nineteen fifties, the you know everyone knows him now, of course, is the the head of

the surf guitar surf music movement. And that was big. That wasn't just like a sort of like, oh, some people are listening to that. That was like the most popular form of music for a little while in the nineteen fifties. And Dick Dale's thing was he wanted He was the first guy to really want enormous amounts of volume, like more than just like let me amplify this so

we can cut through. He wanted to blow people's ear drums out, and he actually accidentally blew out Leo Fender's ear drum when they were working together trying to figure out this problem. Leo Fender bent down and said he he thinks he hears a hum. He said, don't play for a minute. He literally put his ear on the amplifier speaker, and no one knows what happened. If he bumped the guitar or something, but cranked all the way up, which is how you would listen for a buzz or

a hum. He literally destroyed one of Leo Fender's ear so now he's down to one ear and one eye. Yeah. Leo Fender famously clutched his ears and went, cratch my ears, and they said, hey, we'll see you for that. It's like Marty McFly getting blown across the room and Doc Yeah, Slan sort of is. But he was a huge, huge influence on UM achieving volume for rock bands that would

come along later. I actually saw him in Athens, you know, uh, towards not towards the end of his life, because he just died a few years ago, but it was saw him at forty. What it was amazing, that's awesome, but that was Yeah. Supposedly he inspired Jimmy Hendrix. Um, he was like a guitar god himself, for sure, an overlooked one. I saw I think an article you sent that he's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is like the cookiest thing I've heard in a while.

It's ridiculous. Yeah, so he's playing the strat the Beach Boys are playing Fenders. Uh, we have to shout out legendary session bass player Carol Kaye, a woman among men who played the Fender Precision bass. Yeah. I mean, if you think of just about any popular song from the nineteen fifties and sixties, there's probably about a chance that Carol k played bass on it. Yeah, motown song, every Beach Boys up record like you name it. Wow, that's

really cool. I hadn't heard of her. Yeah, it was there's a great documentary called The wreck and Crew about these legendary studio musicians who basically played all that stuff. Like the Beach Boys didn't play their instruments on the records. What it was the Wrecking Crew. Be quiet, don't tell me things like that. I'm sorry. Brian Wilson's a genius, but he played bass on stage. Carol k played bass in the studio. Okay, so, um, Leo Fender, here's the

thing about him. Remember we said that he was a tinker and engineer. Those guys don't translate to head of highly successful and quickly growing company very well. They tend to get a little stressed out and overwhelmed. And that's

exactly what happened to good old Leo. He apparently had ulcers, which has nothing to do with stress, as we learned thanks to the guinea pig scientists who drank a bunch of that bacteria to prove that it was caused by a bacteria rather than stress anyway, So he tried to s l out in the early sixties, I believe, yeah, And um, I guess Randall didn't accept that. What do you why? Why not? I think they had been partners

for so long at Randall. It seems like genuinely thought, like, you don't understand the value of this company asking for a million dollars, And so he started uh courting other companies.

He courted Baldwin to sell the whole company. He courted eventually CBS UH, CBS, CBS Records UH, and they ended up paying what would be the equivalent of a hundred and ten million dollars for the Fender Music Corporation, and Don Randall and Leo Fender each got checks uh for five million bucks, which is about fifty something million dollars today. That's amazing. Wow. Don Randall was great, great kind of have in your corner. Huh. He really was, um and

they were friends. And I think you know, Leo also had this. He was just always in bad health. He had this and I had never heard of this, be in a case of strep that apparently literally never went away like he had it for years and years and years and was always so a week sucks. But I can't imagine having a chronic case of strip. Yeah, so he I think part of the terms of the deal was there were two parts of the company that were

brand new that didn't make any money. Actually lost money, which was the Fender Rhodes Electric piano, which everyone was like, what the heck is this? Of course now it's amazing, and then the Fender Acoustic division, which really never did take off, like I mentioned earlier. And part of the deal was that they had to include those even though they weren't profitable. As he said, fine, and then they had to keep Leo on for five years as a consultant, which they were happy to do. And I think he

couldn't do anything else with anyone. I think he had a noncompete for ten years. But he would go on later to start new companies even after that, and he died in Um. He lived a pretty pretty good life, pretty good long life, got to tinker for a pretty long time, ended up being a wealthy man, and really kind of like became one of the people who's known as the inventor of the electric guitar. For better or worse, UM and Less Paul's story kind of took a slightly

different turn um than Leo Fenders. Leo wanted to fade into the background. That decision was made for Less Paul, not necessarily UM in conjunction with his wishes, his innovations with electric guitar. His and Leo fenders creation and introduction of electric guitars changed music like we saw Um created rock and roll or led the found created the foundation that rock and roll was built on. And all the kids said, we don't really like less Paul's music anymore.

So this he created this monster that ended up swallowing him basically, Um, and he kind of faded off into uh, into nothingness there for a little while. He was gonna become this obscure, incredibly wealthy guy. Yeah, he got divorced from Mary. Like I said earlier, Um, he ended up getting custody the kids, which was just crazy at the time, and that was kind of the only thing she wanted. It was really ugly, kind of public divorce. It was

very sad. And he uh, you know, I mentioned the Gibson SG earlier, the solid guitar they made that to be lighter and to kind of compete with these. That was originally called the Gibson Les Paul s G. And eventually he didn't like it at all, so they took his name off of it and then it was just the Gibson s G. And Yeah, he just kind of

faded away. He he lived to be ninety two. I mean he had a great life, like you said, as a wealthy guy who he would always play these live kind of small club gigs in New York, and very famous people like Slash would stop through and everyone would come through to play with Less Paul and he would regale people's stories. And it wasn't like a sideshow act. He just he couldn't fill large halls anymore. Basically. Yeah, but he you know, he he got the recognition that

he I'm sure liked. I mean, he seemed like a pretty good guy as long as you weren't married to him. Um. But he Uh, he's known as like the guitar God's guitar god. I saw put somewhere that like, if you are a guitar player, guitar hero, you look up till Less Paul for what he did, not just with creating or helping to create or at least saying that he created the electric guitar, but also for all the other innovations that he really did invent, like multi track recording

and sound sound you know. Yeah, and just to sort of button up the story of the guitar itself, Uh, they only made them in fifty nine sixty and I'm sorry, fifty fifty nine and sixty made of these. And after Muddy Waters is when people like Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend and uh like kind of any big English guitar player at the time played less Paul's. Remember how seeing at the very beginning in the first episode, how when Finder was up less Paul was down on the other

way around, the strat kind of changed the world. And then the strat became kind of uncool for a little while in the six stas when all these guys started playing the less Paul Jimmy page of course, and um, people are like, wait a minute, we need less Paul's. Like there was only of them, so they started making them again by popular demand, and I think sixty something, Yeah, sixty eight, and they never went out of production again, Yeah,

sixty eight to start making him again. And since then it's you know, there are plenty of people who have both, but the questions sort of always unless you play like an off like like a Rick and Bucker or something, people are always like you Gibson person or a or a Fender person, And I'm a Gibson person, always have been.

That's well, less Paul ended up he died in two does and nine, but he ended up being the only person to date who has been inducted in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is pretty cool, pretty amazing. Great story. That's it, the story of the solid body electric guitar, as told through the eyes of Leo Fender. Unless Paul the end, thanks for indulging me on this. That was a good one, man. It was nice to hear you

just so just jazzed like a precision jazz bass. Well, after thirteen years, it was we finally tackled something. I knew something. Whatever. Well, if you want to know more about the electric guitar, go pick one up, see what happens, and maybe you'll start your own shredding rock band yourself. And since I said shredding rock band, of course, it's time for a listener mail. You know what, Let's not do a listener mail today. And we we do this occasionally where we will not do listener mail and ask

people for a favor. We do this like once every three years. Never been good at self marketing, but we like to call out occasionally for people to go on iTunes or your pod player of choice. Leave reviews, leave ratings. It helps us out. I don't care how long we've been around, we still need people saying positive, hopefully positive things about us out there. So instead of listener mail, just do us favorite telefriend about us, tell a relative, tell a coworker that they might hate us or love us.

Well done. That's why we only do this at once every three years. That's right, so clunky. Well, Like Chuck said, we would love it if you left us a review, specifically a positive one. But whatever, you know, speak from your heart. How about that? That's what Josh and Chuck think you should do. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us as well as always, you can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a

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