August 24, 2021 • 43 mins
The story of Les Paul and Leo Fender defines rock and roll music. Listen in to part one of the tale of these two musical rivals.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
the Jet Clark. There's Charles w Chuck, Benny and the
Bryant and Jerry's over there and she's just Jerry. This
(00:29):
is Stuff you should Know. Darry's captain fantastic. Oh yeah,
that's a good one. We're talking about the piano player.
What about how about Mr Roboto? Sure? Okay, Jerry, Mr
Roboto Rowland great? So um, how are you doing? Man?
I think you're probably pretty jazzed about this one, do
(00:50):
you think? Yea, Dad, Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this one.
As a musician and guitar nerd uh. And we we
definitely want to shout out at the beginning. The inspiration
behind this, and a lot of the research for this
came from the great book called The Birth of Loud.
It's not there's not a colon on the cover, but
(01:11):
it's implied. Should we get a different jingle for implied colon? Um? Yeah,
but it should could be like a down kind of
thing burn Okay. The Birth of Loud, Leo Finder, Les
Paul and the guitar pioneering rivalry that shaped rock and
Roll And this was from Ian Ports in twenty nineteen,
and it is a if you're a guitar player, just
(01:33):
get the book. You probably already read it, but if
he hadn't get it because it's great. Yes, um, hats
off to him. Hats off to Dave Russ for helping
us out with this one as well too. Totally they
did a great job. So um, well it's a two
part right, Yeah, we were gonna too parted up because
it's that big, it's that important of a thing. It's
really easy for people like me, who um, you know,
(01:55):
appreciate music but also appreciate music to you know what
I mean, um, to kind of overlook the just the
the epic story behind electric guitars. It's almost like like
I didn't think they were always there, and I knew
roughly when they've been invented, and I think I kind
(02:15):
of knew kind of who invented it, but I didn't
realize just what a sweeping effect and impact that electrifying
certain kinds of guitars had on the world. Like it's
it's it's one of the most impactful inventions ever made.
Oh absolutely, uh. And then when you look at this
(02:35):
story and read that book, especially Um the Gentleman Les
Paul and Leo Fender. It's a remarkable story and that
they were very similar in some ways, they were very
very different in a lot of ways. They they both
ended up with um permanent injuries that affected their craft. Um.
(02:56):
When one was up, another might be down a little um.
And and this goes to the guitars as well. When
the the Fender brand was up, it seems like the
less Paul was down. When the Less Paul was up,
Fender was down. And it's really they both kind of
tried to take credit for things that they didn't really
invent at times. So it's it's really interesting when you
(03:18):
look at the story of these two dudes and this
era of innovation and invention and just how remarkable it
was and for the people who are really unfairly left
out that had maybe even more to do with it. Yeah,
because there's a lot of hands that went into the
creation of the electric guitar as we understand it today,
a lot of people, a lot of unsung people. Uh,
(03:39):
these guys just happened to be two the ones who's
whose names you know, became synonymous with electric guitars. But
there's also not to say like they didn't deserve to
have that kind of recognition too. They really did contribute,
even if they did kind of like you said, take
credit to some extent for things they didn't necessarily do specifically. Yeah,
(04:00):
it's one of those inventions that if you ask someone
who invented the electric guitar, you have to follow that
up with a lot of questions in order to answer it.
Is it the person who invented the electric guitar pickup
which made it possible to electrify something? Or is it
the first person to stick that pick up on a
chunk of wood instead of a big hollow guitar? Or
(04:23):
is it the first person to actually build one that
worked that you could sell to people. Um, you just
can't answer that cleanly and say this person invented the
electric guitar. Like five or six people invented the electric guitar. Yeah,
And if you're just a normal like non you know,
guitar person, you probably regretted asking that question. Now you
(04:43):
just say, is that freedom rock? Hey man? Yeah, that
ran through my head more than once. For sure. Turn
it up. So, UM, I guess we should get started.
Um with you want to start with Leo Fender. Yeah, so, um,
Aaron's Leonitas Fender. Webster's defines Fender as Leonitas Fender. He
(05:06):
doesn't have a good name. And he's one of these
guys you said that. He and Les Paul, who will
meet in a little while, we're very different. And Um,
Leo Fender wasn't just different from Less Paul. He was
different from a lot of people. He was what you
would call an engineer. And if you have a parent
who is an engineer, or a friend dad, or you're
an engineer, you know that engineers are different, kind of different.
(05:30):
They're cut from a different cloth. And and Leo Fender
was definitely an engineer from what I can tell. Yeah,
I totally thought about your dad during this. Um. Leah
was born on August nineteen o nine in Orange County, California,
and his first injury that affected his craft was his eye.
When he was um between seven and eight. He lost
(05:50):
an eye when he fell off his dad's vegetable truck
and had a glass eye from there on out. Um,
you know it's it's not like losing an year, which
we'll get to that later. Um, if you're an engineer
who works in generally in sound, but when you're working
on small circuit boards and stuff like that, losing one
eye is certainly going to affect your work well. Plus
(06:12):
also he apparently was self conscious about it, which is
just just at my heart. Can you imagine a little
a little eight year old Leo Fender who's like, you know,
can't look up, He's looking down at the ground all
the time while he's talking to you because he's self
conscious about his class ali that it's just heartbreaking. Yeah.
And like he said, he was an engineer, little electrical
circuit board nerd Uh. He would take things apart and
(06:35):
put him back together from an early age. He there's
a great story from the book when he was about
ten years old. Uh, he got underneath the car and
the driveway and basically took a look at it, what
was going on, went inside and sketched out not only
(06:56):
just what it exactly looked like, but how it all
and could explain how it all together to make that
car move, Yeah, which is astounding. That's like prodigy kind
of stuff. Like he was an engineering prodigy is another
way to put that. Not you know, even even among engineers,
that's pretty remarkable, and especially as a kid to do
it too. Um, and then what makes him even more
(07:17):
remarkable as an engineer And for all the things that
he accomplished, he never had any formal training as an engineer.
He just kind of became one just by beat. Doing
things that engineers do. Was like taking things apart, putting
them back together, inventing new stuff, improving things that he
thought could be improved. He just kind of learned by doing,
which is you know, that's that's old school, very old school.
(07:42):
Get in there and tink her away, right. Yeah, but
if you don't have overalls on, what are you doing?
You know what I mean? Now? Was your dad always
tinkering with things in the house to know? He was
more like, um, I've had to like make drawings all
day at work. Leave me alone, Maybe bring me an
old Milwaukee Tallboy before you leave. But if there was
anything that went wrong in the house, you know, my
(08:04):
mom would be like can you fix that? Can you
fix this? And he could fix it all. Yeah, no problem,
I can fix nothing. Yeah. He was like, um, he
was too busy leading um cub scout meetings that I
was not a part of any longer. It's a tinker.
He was too busy. Well, it sounds like you guys
found a great way to not spend time together. Well,
(08:24):
I would bring a beer. That's how I got to
spend time. Uh. So Leo was really fascinated with radios
early on as a child. He would build his own.
He got a broadcast license when he was in high school,
and before you know it, he had kids and neighbors,
adults even that would come over to have him fix
their radios, and to the point where he had a
little repair shop and there in Folds in California, where
(08:47):
the big Fender factory ended up being. Yeah, I guess
it started out at that radio as the radio repair
shop and just kind of grew from there, right, Yeah,
as a radio shack. Isn't that cool? A literal radio shack? Yeah,
I guess so. I I think that the good people
at radio Sheck would have had a problem with it
had you called it that, But it was that. You
could have made a case like, no, no, radio shack
(09:09):
is the rip off. This is the radio shack, and
the judge had been like, shut up, shut up, shut up,
you're all going to jail. Um. So he was building radios,
he started working on PA systems, public address systems, which
I don't know what that is. It's always people are
getting on me now for saying, like everyone knows what
that is. It's what the principal talked on. Yeah, or
(09:31):
anytime you have a microphone attached to speakers, that's a
public addresses. Yeah, that's funny because it has been a
little while since since somebody called you out on that
because you stopped saying if you've been living under a rock,
But now they're they're they're meeting you wherever you're at.
As far as that, I think you either have to
completely stop or just give up caring. One of the two. Well,
(09:54):
I explained what a PA system was, So maybe I'm
on the right track. I think you did great with that.
So this is in he started to become obsessed with
where we're just gonna call the big challenge, which was basically,
you have to think back to a time where music
was not electrified. They were singing through microphones. The they
(10:15):
did have um lap steel guitars were electrified. That was
technically the first electric guitar was the lap steel. Yeah,
the Rickenbacker frying pan I saw, Yeah, that was kind
of the very first thing. And in fact, the the
guy who started Rickenbacker, George bow Champ, he was the
inventor of the electric pickup. So so I gotta thank
(10:36):
him big time for kind of bleeding the way. Yeah.
He basically he yeah, he laid the foundation that who
knows how long it would have taken. But I just
want to like explain to people who are like me
who don't understand this kind of stuff, just real quick,
with a pick up. Yeah, the pickup is the heart
of what makes the electric guitar electric. And it basically
(10:57):
works through um the electro magnetus him where you loop
a bunch of like copper wire around some magnets, and
then when you move the strings above those magnets, it
actually affects that magnetic field and produces an electrical signal.
That electrical signal goes from the pickup through the chord
to the p a where it's amplified, and now you
(11:19):
have an electric guitar. And that's the guy who came
up with this astoundingly impressive invention, because not only did
it work, he figured out how to make it pretty
small right out of the gate, like that frying pan.
Um electric lap steel guitars ugly but it was small
and compact. It wasn't like those early computers that took
up an entire room. He like figured out how to
(11:42):
make it, you know, useful right out of the gate.
It was a big, big innovation from what I can tell. Yeah.
And another way to think of h if you know
nothing about guitars of the pickup is it's like the
microphone for the guitar. Uh, and you when you're when
someone is playing a guitar, it's that little horizontal uh
(12:03):
usually sort of uh, not oval, but it's square and
then rounded. I don't know what that shape is. What's
that called ellipsoid? Is that real? Yeah? It's like that
means that what it really is? Uh? Yeah, I think so.
All right here it's the little ellipsoid underneath the strings. Uh.
(12:24):
Sometimes they're covered up. Uh. Sometimes they're left open, like
on Fender guitars, they're left open. Um. There's something called
a humbucker pickup, which uh. Fenders have a tremendous amount
of hum and buzz when you plug them in because
it's only one magnet. Humbuckers had two sets of magnets
that canceled the hum out from each other and those
are usually but not always, covered up with a little
(12:46):
steel plate. Right, So humbuckers just two pickups so that they,
like you said, they cancel out the electrical noise from
the other equipment that it picks up right, Yes, and
that's what I prefer. Although do you have a rick
and bocker? I prefer and have quite a few Gibsons. So, um,
when we say, like the electric guitar, you just hit
upon something when we were talking about the frying pan.
(13:08):
The frying pan was the world's first electric guitar. It
was from nine thirty one. It had pickups, um, it
had amplified sound, but it was a lap steel guitar. UM.
So very shortly after that we had what other people
would call the world's first electric guitar. This is where
the answer where you're like, well, who invented the electric
(13:30):
guitar comes from because what a lot of people were
recognized as an electric guitar came after and it was
from Gibson I think in N six where it looked like,
you know, a normal guitar, but it was electrified, like
the classic acoustic guitar, but an electrified version. And he said, well,
why doesn't that qualify as the first electric guitar, because
it doesn't. For our purposes for this episode, that's still
(13:52):
not the first electric guitars we're talking about. What we're
talking about is, as we'll see, what's known as the
first solid body electric guitar. That's what we're really driving at.
So if you're sitting there, you know, and you're just
crump crumpling your your issue of Guitarist magazine right now
and losing your mind, sell down, because I just spelled
(14:14):
it out for everybody. Okay, Yeah, And so getting back
to where we kind of got off track in a
good way, but getting back to the big burning question,
and the big problem was with these they called them
Spanish guitars, but we call them acoustic guitars now that
had those electric pickups in them. They were really prone
to feedback because they had this big hollow cavity behind
(14:35):
the hole or it. You know, it usually had what's
called f holes, and that sounds funny, but if you
look at them, there to shape like an ornate sort
of curse of f I'm glad you said it. So
because of these big hollow acoustic guitars with these pickups
and early amp technology they would just feedback like crazy
anytime you try to get any volume. So, yeah, those
(14:55):
pickups wouldn't differentiate between the vibrations from the string that
you were intended or the reverberated vibrations from inside the
hollow body of that that Spanish style guitar, and so
it just sounds awful, right, So that was the thing
that Leo Fender was obsessed with. He was like, how
could because you know, it's hard to imagine, but at
(15:16):
the time, the guitar was not a lead instrument, and
it was there were occasionally like guitar solos and stuff
that you could uh insert into a recording or you know,
they recorded lives, but you could put on a recording,
but like if you were playing live in a in
a venue, the guitar was very much in the background
because you couldn't turn it up loud enough to cut
through the vocals and the drums, the piano, the horn sections.
(15:37):
These were all really loud live instruments. And he was like,
Leo Fender was like, we've got to be able to
amplify this sound such that it doesn't feedback to where
you can actually hear the guitar in a concert hall. Yeah,
so like it can stand on its own rather than
a company's you know whoever the horns or get drowned out.
Like that was the point of like Fender and later
(16:00):
on Les Paul's quest is to make the guitar its
own thing, and to basically do that by making it
really loud and sound really good when it is loud.
Oh man, this is getting good. It's a good time
for a break, I think right. I think so too. Man.
All right, I'm gonna go take a cold shower and
I'll be right backs and shock alright, chuck, So we're back.
(16:47):
So Leo Fenders on this quest, he's figured out there's
a big problem here that if you want to make
a guitar loud, you have to make it not an
acoustic guitar. But he one of the things about him
was he wasn't a musician, and like he didn't clamp
onto this this problem of creating the electric guitar, figuring
out how to make an electric guitar because he necessarily
(17:10):
cared about the music. And he also later on it
turns out he didn't like rock and roll, which would
be kind of ironic. He was a country western dude
from southern California, kind of like Nicolas Cage's character and
Valley Girl exactly. Belly Girl that was him basically is
based on Leo Fender. That's my that's my theory. Uh yeah,
So Fender didn't play, but here's something that was very
(17:33):
cute that story from the book. He would go to
local music halls during live performances with his He always
had this little tool kit on him, I think, much
like your dad's slide role, and he would jump up
on stage and tweak the amps during the middle of
performances and people there would be like, what is this
guy doing? And in the band sometimes and say, hey, everybody,
(17:55):
this is Leo Fender. He's the one that makes it
sound just right. And uh he would like during during
the show, would kind of get a screwdriver out and
mess with the amps. That's pretty cute, It's very cool.
Uh yeah. He'd be like, oh, you want me to
turn it up, man, I'll turn it up for you,
dirty hippie. All right? Should we go to Mr Les Paul? Yeah? So,
(18:15):
um Fender, we should just just recap real quick. Fender
has has stumbled upon the big problem with electric guitars,
the reverb with a classical guitar. So he's thinking about that.
And now we meet Chuck Les Paul who was born
Lester Paul Fuss in nineteen fifteen and Waukesha, Wisconsin. He
was a Wisconsin boy like Ed Geene was as well,
(18:37):
but not nearly as Grizzly. No, but a guitar wizard
like ed Geene. Right, a little known fact about ed Gaine. Yeah,
so before we get into his childhood, this is the
real important distinction between Leo Fender and less Paul. Leo
Fender did not play instruments, was an engineer at heart
and love to figure out problems for other people. Less
(18:59):
Paul all was uh the height of his game, the
most popular guitar player in the world and with a
string of number one hits. Uh. He was also a tinkerer,
but he was like, I need to make my guitar
sound better for me, so I can get better and
sound better. Yeah, that was his goal all along. But
(19:21):
you know, it takes a special kind of person to
say like, Okay, well then I need to figure out
how to make that happen. I need to figure out
how to make an electric guitar rather than oh, what
can I do. I need to I need somebody to
do this for me. Somebody needs to invent this, right,
I need to collaborate somebody. He was like, I'm I'm
gonna go try to figure this out myself. And he
really like, I didn't realize what a guitar got he
(19:43):
was and that he he was like this. Um. I
think at one point he had like four hits or
four spots on the Billboard top charts. UM. Like he
was really a popular musician. UM about midway through his career.
But even from a young age, he started out playing
like he was a performer. And I think he's also
(20:05):
credited Chuck with being the person um because he played
country western too. He also played the harmonica. His act
was called rubar Bread and it was just him and
he played the guitar and the harmonica. And he figured
out long before Bob Dylan every came along. But that's problematic.
You technically need four arms for that. So he fashioned
a harmonica holder that he could wear while he was
(20:27):
playing the guitar, just like Bob Dylan. More later on,
he was the kid who invented that years before. Yeah,
maybe this is another one of those things where it's
like did he invent it or did he see it
and make one on his own? But not taking anything
away from the guy. He was also a kid taking
apart electronics in his house putting them back together. He
(20:47):
really knew what he was doing, and he also had,
you know, like every guitar player, that same big problem
was when he played, he would be up there and
he could sing through that microphone, although he didn't sing
that much. He did when he was a kid, but
later on he realized he wasn't not like a pro singer.
Harmonica sounded good through the mic, but the guitar was
still in the background, and he knew that was an issue. Yes,
(21:09):
apparently um as this as legend has it, he was
playing a show at a barbecue stand. Um and I
think it was a regular potentially a regular show. He
could his harmonica sounded fine when he was singing. It
was broadcast fine because he had a microphone, but nothing
was working for the guitar was He was drowning it
(21:30):
out himself. So he realized that if he took the
phonograph needle, the electrified phonograph needle from his his parents
phonograph and attached it to the guitar and then attached
to that to a radio, he could actually amplify his guitar.
So he figured this out I think at like age thirteen, Um,
(21:50):
because he wanted to improve his barbecue stand chops and
tips and tips. He supposedly his tips tripled as a result.
But um, you know that's pretty impressive stuff. I would
not have thought about that at the as at the
tender year on the age oft. Yeah, I mean that's
where the tinkering comes in. And I'm sure it didn't
(22:11):
sound great to our ears now, but at the time,
you have to put yourself in the place of like
literally having never heard something like this happen. Uh, it was.
It had to have been like a revelation to actually
hear that guitar coming through a speaker, especially if you
lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin. You've never heard anything like that
in your life. But he was very much opposite of
(22:33):
Leo Fender and his personality. He was very gregarious, very outgoing,
made a lot of friends. Uh, could also be a
little brash. Was not a great husband to his two wives,
which we'll get to, but he was He was always
sort of the life of the party and he loved
performing in front of people, whereas Leo Fender really kind
of wanted to be at the background unless he was
very quietly getting on stage. Um. Unless Paul from the
(22:57):
very beginning, once he could afford regular guitars, I think
he moved to Chicago and was like making decent money,
like backing other people up. But he had a relationship
with Gibson from the very beginning because Gibson started out
as an acoustic guitar maker. Uh, and they're still known.
I mean, they make these great electric guitars, but you
(23:17):
know some of the best guitars in the world, or
Gibson acoustic guitars. Yeah, they also made like Mandolin's and
like yeah, like just all manner of stringing instruments and
what they made were basically works of art. Yeah, they
were beautiful and they still are. My favorite guitar I
owned is one I bought during the pandemic. I finally
bought the Gibson Acoustic U based on a nineteen forties model,
(23:40):
and it's just it's amazing. The sound difference between even
that and my really nice Martin Acoustic is striking. Yeah,
Gibs or Fender was not making acoustic guitars, and they
still to this day don't make a very good acoustic guitar. Yeah,
I can't imagine. It's really interesting that, like one of
the biggest guitar companies in the world. I don't if
they can't or if they just don't put the resources
(24:01):
toward it, but I think they're nicest acoustic guitar tops
out at about eight hundred bucks, which is you know,
you can get a pretty good guitar for that, but
these really really nice Gibson's are like four and five dollars. Yeah,
And like Gibson's whole jam was to make professional quality
instruments that were again works of art, but like if
you were a professional musician, like Gibson could make an
(24:22):
instrument that you could use and probably love UM. And
they were making them already. They were making those electrified
Spanish style or electrified acoustic guitars as as like I
was saying, as as early as I think six was
the e S one fifty. E S stood for Electrified
Spanish Guitar UM and there was a jazz guitarist named
(24:47):
Charlie Christian who really kind of championed that development. He
think he played for Benny Goodman's band, um but um
I think they named the pickup in those after him,
Charlie Christian Pickups. But U so les Paul was playing
these Gibson guitars, but it still wasn't what he was
looking for, because again, if you turned it up really loud,
(25:08):
you it would provide all sorts of problems. Yeah, it's
funny these little letters that like the E S three
thirty five is just a classic, amazing instrument still today,
and they have all these cool letters and you never
know what they name, but they mean but electrified Spanish.
Is kind of funny that the iconic Gibson s G
s G stands first Solid Guitar. Really. Yeah, they're all
(25:31):
just these very mundane abbreviations that all these years later
just seemed cool because Angus Young plays it. Yeah right,
well yeah, I mean if used a different example from
Angus Young and be really on board, but I got
you I play one. Well, there you go has a
cool acts. Uh. So he charmed his way into the
(25:54):
Epiphone factory in New York. Epiphone was a really big
guitar maker at the time, and I think Gibson eventually
bought UM, I think they're co Co brand or you know,
under the Gibson umbrella. Now, but he got to work
on his problems, and you've got to look up some
pictures of some of this stuff kind of starting now. Uh,
just look up a picture of the log from Les Paul.
(26:16):
And it was a I was about to say essentially,
but it's not essentially. It was a four by four
block of pine wood about two ft long that he
put a guitar neck on, an epiphone guitar neck, and
he made his own pickup. I guess he didn't go
out and buy a pickup or use one from another guitar,
(26:36):
and he made his own pickup, you know, with a
magnet and the wire, put some strings on it and
called it the log. And it was a very primitive
but working, solid body electric guitar. It looked very much
like something Devo would have played. Yeah, And in fact,
it freaked people out so much early on UM that
(26:56):
he ended up taking a part another guitar and glue
ng sides onto the side of it to make it
look normal, to make it look normal, And there's this
great picture of him holding the log, kind of separating
the sides off with a little wry smile. Um. But
the Gibson little side note gives the Gibson Firebird guitar,
which is one of my favorite guitars. I used to
have one, but I sold it. It is a it's
(27:18):
called a through neck guitar. I'm sure there are others,
but it's the only one I can think of that's
really popular. Whereas it's the same thing. It's basically one
long piece of wood, like the neck is the same
piece of wood as the body, and then they glue
on these wings on the outside. Okay, all right, settle down, Chuck.
It's pretty exciting, so Chuck. Also, if you ever found
(27:39):
yourself trapped in walt Kesha, Wisconsin, you go to go
to the book Kesha County Museum and they actually have
the original log there on display. Oh really, Yeah, apparently
they have a lot of Less Paul stuff there, including
that with the wings of the of the guitar kind
of pulled away to kind of show you know, it's
a neck through design like the Fireber. I I was
(28:03):
just teasing you, and I said to settle down. I
was just taking an opportunity. Like, I'm charmed very much.
I'm sure everyone else is by your childlike excitement over
this whole thing. I'm as excited as when I got
my first guitar when I was twelve, which was a
candy Apple red BC rich like metal guitar. I wish
I knew what mine was. I had a metal guitar too,
mom was pink, had a light coating of diamond dust.
(28:25):
And I wish to god I could remember who it was.
A local metal band from Toledo. Yeah. Yeah, they had
like an album and a poster and everything. And the guy,
the guitarist from the band worked at like the music store,
um where I would take lessons and he taught me
(28:46):
and he was as interested as um Oh. I can't
remember Carl Weather's character and happy Gilmore, but he's like
a golf pro and just totally uninterested. That's how interested
this guitar player wasn't seeing me as a future guitar player. Um.
And it's not like I blame him for me losing
interesting guitar, but he definitely didn't. He wasn't a great
(29:07):
mentor or anything. But I wish it's so bad I
would have stuck with it a little bit longer because
it was pretty pretty boss. When I look back on
the whole thing. I never knew this. How long did
you try? I don't know, five six lessons maybe? Al right.
I wonder what happened to that guitar too, Like my
parents bought the guitar. I mean it was used in everything,
but like, I have no idea what became of that guitar.
(29:31):
I never uh took lessons, So maybe that's the key. Yeah,
I could totally see that. I just shut myself in
my room and and started buying tableature, which, if you
don't know what that is, instead of actual sheet music,
like written out like a you know, like real sheet
music tableature or little numbers on they kind of mimic
(29:51):
a six string guitar and they put little numbers on
the strings on where you should put your fingers. So
it allows anyone who can't read music to sort of
figure out songs like e E G, E e G.
What are those chords? Someone's going to call you out
on that. I don't know, but that that was the
Kids in the Hall reference more than even a Deep
Purple reference. Oh man, I love that band in the
(30:15):
in the skits, the little kid garage band. Yeah, it's
all right. So back to the log. The log was
very rough, very primitive, but what it did accomplish was
amplification without feedback in longer sustain. Yeah. And more importantly,
it was a solid body guitar. Like like Less Paul
(30:38):
kind of crack that code that Fender, as far as
I know, is still working on. Because this is nineteen right, Yeah,
this was pre uh yeah, early nineteen forty. I think
it was prely Offender for sure. Yeah, so I mean
Less Paul really does have a claim to fame to
creating the first wooden solid body electric guitar because I
think the frying pan was solid body aluminum. He figured
(31:00):
out that problem of reverse just get rid of the
hollow body, replace it with the solid body, and it
was ugly. That seems to be the big problem. It
wasn't exactly what he was looking for sound wise, but
it was definitely close enough that it was like, I'm
on the right track. Let me go show the people
at Gibson. They're gonna love this kind of thing. And um,
they basically laughed him out of the meeting in Kalamazoo,
(31:22):
Michigan because he um showed up with a really ugly guitar. Yeah,
and not only that, like they just didn't see the
vision because, like I said, they were working with these
ancient luthier's who had this ancient craft. They weren't ancient humans,
but they would wake them from the dead each day
to go to the workshop and create a new guitar.
(31:44):
But the point is they were doing great with these
big acoustic guitars, and they were like, no one's gonna
want to hear that, because this is what a guitar is, basically, like,
you don't it's not a lead instrument in the band.
Lead that to the horns and the piano. So he
was laughed out of there and a little egg on
his face. But this was a full five years before
(32:04):
Leo Fender came up with his first plant guitar, which
you should also look up just typing Leo Fender black
Plant guitar. And it looks a little more like a
guitar than the log, but not that much. No, it
looks more way more like a guitar than the log,
but it still doesn't look like a guitar as we
(32:24):
know it. Yeah, it was almost I get the impression
that he created the guitar kind of like how you
might build like a car out of clay, but the
axle works because you're testing wheels, I don't think people
and he built it as a test, yeah, but I
don't think we mentioned that though, Yeah, but it was
it was he was testing out like pickups and I
think testing the concept of a solid body as well.
(32:47):
But he wasn't making it like this is going to
be my prototype. But it turned out to actually be
kind of a prototype because um, when he uh, I
don't exactly know how word got around. I guess because
he was friends with band and so bands would kind
of come around the workshop to see what's going on,
and they started coming around seeing and hearing this guitar
that he made, and um, people started renting it apparently
(33:09):
for the weekend to go play shows with and just
knocking the socks off of the Bobby socksers in town
from what I can tell. Yeah, And at this point
he has the Fender Electric Instrument Company. Uh, it's legit.
And you know, in the background of all of this,
and we're not going to talk much about amps, but
in the background of all of this, he's building amps
along the way. He was one of the first sort
(33:31):
of master amp builders. Well, yeah, Fender amps are like
as famous as the guitar. Basically, yeah, so where are
we at right now? Fenders made his playing guitar, Leo's
got his log. Neither one of them are going places
immediately with it. It's just kind of like they've both
now cracked to the problem and there's a lot of
(33:54):
obstacles between them and fame, or at least guitar production fame. Um,
but you know what that means though, Right we're at
our second break. Oh good, okay, Chuck, I think that
was great. Um, so Chuck, just separ at our second break.
He's clearly driving this episode. Let's all go with it,
shall we shock? Okay, we're back, Chuck, We're back. We
(34:43):
got a log, We've got this little funny looking black,
solid body guitar, and uh, we need to pick back
up with with Les Paul In nineteen I guess forty
one ish. He moves to Los Angeles. He's and to
get session work. Uh he plays with Bing Crosby, who was, uh,
(35:04):
sort of one of the most popular singers at the time.
Oh yeah, dude. He moved to Los Angeles to be
near being Crosby, which I did little research, and that
was kind of a common thing, what to just want
to be near bing Crosses. Yeah, you've moved across the
country to be near bing Crosby unless you were one
of his kids. Oh is he a good father? Oh?
Really not a good dad. I didn't know that. Wait
(35:27):
a minute, are you thinking of mommy dearest? Oh yeah,
that's right, that's one thinking thinking of John Crawford. Uh.
But he was a huge, huge music star. Um Les
Paul was out there working with him. But then he
gets I don't think we mentioned he had electrocuted really
bad when he was twenty six playing music. He had
sweaty hands, held the microphone, was also touching the guitar strings,
(35:49):
completed a circuit and really damaged his hand such that
it took Uh. I mean I heard his whole body,
but it damaged his hand such that took quite a
couple of years to even recover, which was huge. Like
he he might have never played again, Like there was
a possibility that was going to happen. Yeah, and that's
just injury number one for him. Um but he gets
(36:10):
drafted in World War Two, goes to work in the
Army at the Armed Forces Radio Network and is playing guitar,
basically backing up the Andrews sisters backing up Being Crosby
when they do these USO tours. So as far as
the army goes in World War Two, pretty plumb gig right.
Um so. And plus he's again like he did move
to l A to Bean or being Crosby in the
(36:31):
fact that he's getting to like play with being Crosby.
Is I'm guessing a lifelong dream of his come true.
Um And even after the war, I guess he made
enough of a connection with being Um I'm on a
first name basis with him. By the way, um he
uh that that Less Paul um kind of I guess became.
(36:51):
I don't know if there was like a mentor thing,
but at the very least he definitely patronized. Less Paul
helped his career big time. One of the things that
really helped Less Paul become like a genuine, bona fide star.
He was already fairly well known and a lot of
circles had some hits, but what really shot him to
the top was the song called It's Been a Long
Long Time. It's actually a really good song, but it
(37:14):
was kind of a song that was a hit because
it kind of summed up America trudging wearily back from
World War Two. Um, and it's just kind of like
this mellow solemn song where, uh, it's almost I'm sure
there's other instruments, but my ears pick up Bing Crosby's
vocals and Less Paul's jazz guitar um and they his
(37:37):
guitar enhances the vocals so much. But there's a actual
guitar solo in there, and it's slow, but it's really good.
And that kind of shot Less Paul to superstardom from
that point on. Yeah, so Bing Crosby is like, you
need to open up a studio. I'll even help finance
this thing. He did so in his garage and before
(37:58):
you know it, and Los Angeles, all these famous people
are stopping by Les Paul's garage to hear him play,
to hang out with him. Uh. He, like I said,
he was a very gregarious guy. So people just kind
of wanted to be around him. And this is all
going great, but he still wasn't quite satisfied with what
was going on because the sound just still wasn't there.
(38:21):
He was he he called it sound on sound recording.
He was the first person, or one of the first
people to experiment with studio techniques where you could layer
recordings on top of one another. And this was before
they were even recording on magnetic tape. Yeah, dude, multi
track recording like you know how you hear drums playing,
(38:41):
and you hear a guitar playing, and then you hear
like vocals, all of those musicians may never have even
been in the same room at the same time. You
can do that with multi track recording. Back in the day,
if you wanted to make a recording, you had to
get everybody into a room. You all had to be
playing it once. He had to be playing the song together,
and then you recorded it and that was the record wording, right,
So did it come up with multi track recording? Was
(39:03):
huge in and of itself, But I looked into what
he was actually doing and it's mind boggling. He would
He came up, I think, with a song called Lover
and it was was that the one where it's like
seven tracks or eight tracks of guitars. And the way
that he made each track was he recorded one track,
the first initial track onto acetate. He made a record
(39:26):
of that, and then he took that record and he
played it, and then he played along with it, and
then he recorded that onto another record, and then another record,
and then another record, and by the time he was
doing his seventh track, he had a record of seven
of seven tracks playing all at once on one record
that he had recorded one by one, and he was
(39:47):
playing the eighth track with it. And if you messed
up one time, say on track five, he had to
start all over at the beginning, unless he still had
those first few tracks handy. Hopefully he didn't break each
record after each recording or anything like that, but in
that nuts going to that, and that was about as
innovating uh form of music as anyone had come up
(40:08):
with to that point. Yeah, it's funny when you hear
people working with like pro tools and dragon drop digital
recording now and they talk about like in the old
days when they used when they would cut and spice tape,
like go back even further, dude to less Paul doing
this on actual actual ascetate records. It's crazy. It is crazy.
(40:29):
When I was like, what what does that mean? What
was he doing? Like dueling a state records? And I
looked tonight my eyes popped out of my head. Yeah,
it's it's pretty remarkable. The innovations he was coming up with.
So he's doing all that, he's becoming more and more popular,
and then a very faithful thing happened. Uh a steel
guitar player name. Uh do we say Joaquin Murphy. That's
(40:51):
how I'm going with all right, that's how it spelled.
H He came over to Less's house one day and
he said, you know what, I got this guy here.
I want you to meet him. And he's really good
with working on amplifiers, and I think you guys might
like each other. Uh. And his name is Leo Fender
and where you know it? And this this is movie territory.
Leo Fender and Les Paul are hanging out together, trying
(41:15):
to figure stuff out together, work shopping, problem solving. They um,
you know, they pointed out, and he's right that they
weren't like great friends. But it's not like they were
enemies or rivals at first. They just were really really
different from each other. Yeah. Um, they kind of shared
a U at the very least, they had a common
problem or a common quest that they were both working on.
(41:37):
They were just not similar people personality wise, so they
didn't click. They were like, this is great, let's be
partners were the same, right exactly, but they also were
also kind of becoming rivals a little bit too, right, well,
not quite yet. Like at this point they were genuinely
trying to figure stuff out together. Uh, and I think
(41:58):
like Leo was coming over every he can basically musicians
would come over still, and he would ask them questions
and try and figure stuff out, try and solve these
amplification problems. But um, yeah, there may have been a
little friendly like let's see what this guy's got kind
of thing, but you know, Les Paul was like, you
can't even play yeah. And again remember remember though Fender.
(42:20):
By this time he had a company, the Fender Electric
Instrument Company. He was mostly focusing on electric steel guitars because, um,
not just country Western love that stuff, but Hawaiian music
was really huge as well. Um, and they use a
lap steel guitar. So um, he was he had a
company already going. Les Paul had his own musical career going.
(42:41):
He was just kind of, you know, he tinkered because
he needed to his his focuses on his musical career.
So I could see there being like a little bit
of a rivalry and that they were trying to crack
the same problem, but other than that, they weren't necessarily rivals.
You know, that's right. Uh. And in order to really
solve this problem, it would take the entrance of a
or gentlemen that we haven't even mentioned yet that was very,
(43:03):
very important to the story of the electric guitar. And
that is where we're going to leave you for part one.
Nice Chuck, it was a very good cliffhanger. Who could
it be? I don't know, but you're gonna have to
tune in Thursday to find out. In this very special
two part episode of Stuff you Should Know, My money's
(43:25):
on CC to Bill. Stuff You Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
the Jet Clark. There's Charles w Chuck, Benny and the
Bryant and Jerry's over there and she's just Jerry. This
(00:29):
is Stuff you should Know. Darry's captain fantastic. Oh yeah,
that's a good one. We're talking about the piano player.
What about how about Mr Roboto? Sure? Okay, Jerry, Mr
Roboto Rowland great? So um, how are you doing? Man?
I think you're probably pretty jazzed about this one, do
(00:50):
you think? Yea, Dad, Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this one.
As a musician and guitar nerd uh. And we we
definitely want to shout out at the beginning. The inspiration
behind this, and a lot of the research for this
came from the great book called The Birth of Loud.
It's not there's not a colon on the cover, but
(01:11):
it's implied. Should we get a different jingle for implied colon? Um? Yeah,
but it should could be like a down kind of
thing burn Okay. The Birth of Loud, Leo Finder, Les
Paul and the guitar pioneering rivalry that shaped rock and
Roll And this was from Ian Ports in twenty nineteen,
and it is a if you're a guitar player, just
(01:33):
get the book. You probably already read it, but if
he hadn't get it because it's great. Yes, um, hats
off to him. Hats off to Dave Russ for helping
us out with this one as well too. Totally they
did a great job. So um, well it's a two
part right, Yeah, we were gonna too parted up because
it's that big, it's that important of a thing. It's
really easy for people like me, who um, you know,
(01:55):
appreciate music but also appreciate music to you know what
I mean, um, to kind of overlook the just the
the epic story behind electric guitars. It's almost like like
I didn't think they were always there, and I knew
roughly when they've been invented, and I think I kind
(02:15):
of knew kind of who invented it, but I didn't
realize just what a sweeping effect and impact that electrifying
certain kinds of guitars had on the world. Like it's
it's it's one of the most impactful inventions ever made.
Oh absolutely, uh. And then when you look at this
(02:35):
story and read that book, especially Um the Gentleman Les
Paul and Leo Fender. It's a remarkable story and that
they were very similar in some ways, they were very
very different in a lot of ways. They they both
ended up with um permanent injuries that affected their craft. Um.
(02:56):
When one was up, another might be down a little um.
And and this goes to the guitars as well. When
the the Fender brand was up, it seems like the
less Paul was down. When the Less Paul was up,
Fender was down. And it's really they both kind of
tried to take credit for things that they didn't really
invent at times. So it's it's really interesting when you
(03:18):
look at the story of these two dudes and this
era of innovation and invention and just how remarkable it
was and for the people who are really unfairly left
out that had maybe even more to do with it. Yeah,
because there's a lot of hands that went into the
creation of the electric guitar as we understand it today,
a lot of people, a lot of unsung people. Uh,
(03:39):
these guys just happened to be two the ones who's
whose names you know, became synonymous with electric guitars. But
there's also not to say like they didn't deserve to
have that kind of recognition too. They really did contribute,
even if they did kind of like you said, take
credit to some extent for things they didn't necessarily do specifically. Yeah,
(04:00):
it's one of those inventions that if you ask someone
who invented the electric guitar, you have to follow that
up with a lot of questions in order to answer it.
Is it the person who invented the electric guitar pickup
which made it possible to electrify something? Or is it
the first person to stick that pick up on a
chunk of wood instead of a big hollow guitar? Or
(04:23):
is it the first person to actually build one that
worked that you could sell to people. Um, you just
can't answer that cleanly and say this person invented the
electric guitar. Like five or six people invented the electric guitar. Yeah,
And if you're just a normal like non you know,
guitar person, you probably regretted asking that question. Now you
(04:43):
just say, is that freedom rock? Hey man? Yeah, that
ran through my head more than once. For sure. Turn
it up. So, UM, I guess we should get started.
Um with you want to start with Leo Fender. Yeah, so, um,
Aaron's Leonitas Fender. Webster's defines Fender as Leonitas Fender. He
(05:06):
doesn't have a good name. And he's one of these
guys you said that. He and Les Paul, who will
meet in a little while, we're very different. And Um,
Leo Fender wasn't just different from Less Paul. He was
different from a lot of people. He was what you
would call an engineer. And if you have a parent
who is an engineer, or a friend dad, or you're
an engineer, you know that engineers are different, kind of different.
(05:30):
They're cut from a different cloth. And and Leo Fender
was definitely an engineer from what I can tell. Yeah,
I totally thought about your dad during this. Um. Leah
was born on August nineteen o nine in Orange County, California,
and his first injury that affected his craft was his eye.
When he was um between seven and eight. He lost
(05:50):
an eye when he fell off his dad's vegetable truck
and had a glass eye from there on out. Um,
you know it's it's not like losing an year, which
we'll get to that later. Um, if you're an engineer
who works in generally in sound, but when you're working
on small circuit boards and stuff like that, losing one
eye is certainly going to affect your work well. Plus
(06:12):
also he apparently was self conscious about it, which is
just just at my heart. Can you imagine a little
a little eight year old Leo Fender who's like, you know,
can't look up, He's looking down at the ground all
the time while he's talking to you because he's self
conscious about his class ali that it's just heartbreaking. Yeah.
And like he said, he was an engineer, little electrical
circuit board nerd Uh. He would take things apart and
(06:35):
put him back together from an early age. He there's
a great story from the book when he was about
ten years old. Uh, he got underneath the car and
the driveway and basically took a look at it, what
was going on, went inside and sketched out not only
(06:56):
just what it exactly looked like, but how it all
and could explain how it all together to make that
car move, Yeah, which is astounding. That's like prodigy kind
of stuff. Like he was an engineering prodigy is another
way to put that. Not you know, even even among engineers,
that's pretty remarkable, and especially as a kid to do
it too. Um, and then what makes him even more
(07:17):
remarkable as an engineer And for all the things that
he accomplished, he never had any formal training as an engineer.
He just kind of became one just by beat. Doing
things that engineers do. Was like taking things apart, putting
them back together, inventing new stuff, improving things that he
thought could be improved. He just kind of learned by doing,
which is you know, that's that's old school, very old school.
(07:42):
Get in there and tink her away, right. Yeah, but
if you don't have overalls on, what are you doing?
You know what I mean? Now? Was your dad always
tinkering with things in the house to know? He was
more like, um, I've had to like make drawings all
day at work. Leave me alone, Maybe bring me an
old Milwaukee Tallboy before you leave. But if there was
anything that went wrong in the house, you know, my
(08:04):
mom would be like can you fix that? Can you
fix this? And he could fix it all. Yeah, no problem,
I can fix nothing. Yeah. He was like, um, he
was too busy leading um cub scout meetings that I
was not a part of any longer. It's a tinker.
He was too busy. Well, it sounds like you guys
found a great way to not spend time together. Well,
(08:24):
I would bring a beer. That's how I got to
spend time. Uh. So Leo was really fascinated with radios
early on as a child. He would build his own.
He got a broadcast license when he was in high school,
and before you know it, he had kids and neighbors,
adults even that would come over to have him fix
their radios, and to the point where he had a
little repair shop and there in Folds in California, where
(08:47):
the big Fender factory ended up being. Yeah, I guess
it started out at that radio as the radio repair
shop and just kind of grew from there, right, Yeah,
as a radio shack. Isn't that cool? A literal radio shack? Yeah,
I guess so. I I think that the good people
at radio Sheck would have had a problem with it
had you called it that, But it was that. You
could have made a case like, no, no, radio shack
(09:09):
is the rip off. This is the radio shack, and
the judge had been like, shut up, shut up, shut up,
you're all going to jail. Um. So he was building radios,
he started working on PA systems, public address systems, which
I don't know what that is. It's always people are
getting on me now for saying, like everyone knows what
that is. It's what the principal talked on. Yeah, or
(09:31):
anytime you have a microphone attached to speakers, that's a
public addresses. Yeah, that's funny because it has been a
little while since since somebody called you out on that
because you stopped saying if you've been living under a rock,
But now they're they're they're meeting you wherever you're at.
As far as that, I think you either have to
completely stop or just give up caring. One of the two. Well,
(09:54):
I explained what a PA system was, So maybe I'm
on the right track. I think you did great with that.
So this is in he started to become obsessed with
where we're just gonna call the big challenge, which was basically,
you have to think back to a time where music
was not electrified. They were singing through microphones. The they
(10:15):
did have um lap steel guitars were electrified. That was
technically the first electric guitar was the lap steel. Yeah,
the Rickenbacker frying pan I saw, Yeah, that was kind
of the very first thing. And in fact, the the
guy who started Rickenbacker, George bow Champ, he was the
inventor of the electric pickup. So so I gotta thank
(10:36):
him big time for kind of bleeding the way. Yeah.
He basically he yeah, he laid the foundation that who
knows how long it would have taken. But I just
want to like explain to people who are like me
who don't understand this kind of stuff, just real quick,
with a pick up. Yeah, the pickup is the heart
of what makes the electric guitar electric. And it basically
(10:57):
works through um the electro magnetus him where you loop
a bunch of like copper wire around some magnets, and
then when you move the strings above those magnets, it
actually affects that magnetic field and produces an electrical signal.
That electrical signal goes from the pickup through the chord
to the p a where it's amplified, and now you
(11:19):
have an electric guitar. And that's the guy who came
up with this astoundingly impressive invention, because not only did
it work, he figured out how to make it pretty
small right out of the gate, like that frying pan.
Um electric lap steel guitars ugly but it was small
and compact. It wasn't like those early computers that took
up an entire room. He like figured out how to
(11:42):
make it, you know, useful right out of the gate.
It was a big, big innovation from what I can tell. Yeah.
And another way to think of h if you know
nothing about guitars of the pickup is it's like the
microphone for the guitar. Uh, and you when you're when
someone is playing a guitar, it's that little horizontal uh
(12:03):
usually sort of uh, not oval, but it's square and
then rounded. I don't know what that shape is. What's
that called ellipsoid? Is that real? Yeah? It's like that
means that what it really is? Uh? Yeah, I think so.
All right here it's the little ellipsoid underneath the strings. Uh.
(12:24):
Sometimes they're covered up. Uh. Sometimes they're left open, like
on Fender guitars, they're left open. Um. There's something called
a humbucker pickup, which uh. Fenders have a tremendous amount
of hum and buzz when you plug them in because
it's only one magnet. Humbuckers had two sets of magnets
that canceled the hum out from each other and those
are usually but not always, covered up with a little
(12:46):
steel plate. Right, So humbuckers just two pickups so that they,
like you said, they cancel out the electrical noise from
the other equipment that it picks up right, Yes, and
that's what I prefer. Although do you have a rick
and bocker? I prefer and have quite a few Gibsons. So, um,
when we say, like the electric guitar, you just hit
upon something when we were talking about the frying pan.
(13:08):
The frying pan was the world's first electric guitar. It
was from nine thirty one. It had pickups, um, it
had amplified sound, but it was a lap steel guitar. UM.
So very shortly after that we had what other people
would call the world's first electric guitar. This is where
the answer where you're like, well, who invented the electric
(13:30):
guitar comes from because what a lot of people were
recognized as an electric guitar came after and it was
from Gibson I think in N six where it looked like,
you know, a normal guitar, but it was electrified, like
the classic acoustic guitar, but an electrified version. And he said, well,
why doesn't that qualify as the first electric guitar, because
it doesn't. For our purposes for this episode, that's still
(13:52):
not the first electric guitars we're talking about. What we're
talking about is, as we'll see, what's known as the
first solid body electric guitar. That's what we're really driving at.
So if you're sitting there, you know, and you're just
crump crumpling your your issue of Guitarist magazine right now
and losing your mind, sell down, because I just spelled
(14:14):
it out for everybody. Okay, Yeah, And so getting back
to where we kind of got off track in a
good way, but getting back to the big burning question,
and the big problem was with these they called them
Spanish guitars, but we call them acoustic guitars now that
had those electric pickups in them. They were really prone
to feedback because they had this big hollow cavity behind
(14:35):
the hole or it. You know, it usually had what's
called f holes, and that sounds funny, but if you
look at them, there to shape like an ornate sort
of curse of f I'm glad you said it. So
because of these big hollow acoustic guitars with these pickups
and early amp technology they would just feedback like crazy
anytime you try to get any volume. So, yeah, those
(14:55):
pickups wouldn't differentiate between the vibrations from the string that
you were intended or the reverberated vibrations from inside the
hollow body of that that Spanish style guitar, and so
it just sounds awful, right, So that was the thing
that Leo Fender was obsessed with. He was like, how
could because you know, it's hard to imagine, but at
(15:16):
the time, the guitar was not a lead instrument, and
it was there were occasionally like guitar solos and stuff
that you could uh insert into a recording or you know,
they recorded lives, but you could put on a recording,
but like if you were playing live in a in
a venue, the guitar was very much in the background
because you couldn't turn it up loud enough to cut
through the vocals and the drums, the piano, the horn sections.
(15:37):
These were all really loud live instruments. And he was like,
Leo Fender was like, we've got to be able to
amplify this sound such that it doesn't feedback to where
you can actually hear the guitar in a concert hall. Yeah,
so like it can stand on its own rather than
a company's you know whoever the horns or get drowned out.
Like that was the point of like Fender and later
(16:00):
on Les Paul's quest is to make the guitar its
own thing, and to basically do that by making it
really loud and sound really good when it is loud.
Oh man, this is getting good. It's a good time
for a break, I think right. I think so too. Man.
All right, I'm gonna go take a cold shower and
I'll be right backs and shock alright, chuck, So we're back.
(16:47):
So Leo Fenders on this quest, he's figured out there's
a big problem here that if you want to make
a guitar loud, you have to make it not an
acoustic guitar. But he one of the things about him
was he wasn't a musician, and like he didn't clamp
onto this this problem of creating the electric guitar, figuring
out how to make an electric guitar because he necessarily
(17:10):
cared about the music. And he also later on it
turns out he didn't like rock and roll, which would
be kind of ironic. He was a country western dude
from southern California, kind of like Nicolas Cage's character and
Valley Girl exactly. Belly Girl that was him basically is
based on Leo Fender. That's my that's my theory. Uh yeah,
So Fender didn't play, but here's something that was very
(17:33):
cute that story from the book. He would go to
local music halls during live performances with his He always
had this little tool kit on him, I think, much
like your dad's slide role, and he would jump up
on stage and tweak the amps during the middle of
performances and people there would be like, what is this
guy doing? And in the band sometimes and say, hey, everybody,
(17:55):
this is Leo Fender. He's the one that makes it
sound just right. And uh he would like during during
the show, would kind of get a screwdriver out and
mess with the amps. That's pretty cute, It's very cool.
Uh yeah. He'd be like, oh, you want me to
turn it up, man, I'll turn it up for you,
dirty hippie. All right? Should we go to Mr Les Paul? Yeah? So,
(18:15):
um Fender, we should just just recap real quick. Fender
has has stumbled upon the big problem with electric guitars,
the reverb with a classical guitar. So he's thinking about that.
And now we meet Chuck Les Paul who was born
Lester Paul Fuss in nineteen fifteen and Waukesha, Wisconsin. He
was a Wisconsin boy like Ed Geene was as well,
(18:37):
but not nearly as Grizzly. No, but a guitar wizard
like ed Geene. Right, a little known fact about ed Gaine. Yeah,
so before we get into his childhood, this is the
real important distinction between Leo Fender and less Paul. Leo
Fender did not play instruments, was an engineer at heart
and love to figure out problems for other people. Less
(18:59):
Paul all was uh the height of his game, the
most popular guitar player in the world and with a
string of number one hits. Uh. He was also a tinkerer,
but he was like, I need to make my guitar
sound better for me, so I can get better and
sound better. Yeah, that was his goal all along. But
(19:21):
you know, it takes a special kind of person to
say like, Okay, well then I need to figure out
how to make that happen. I need to figure out
how to make an electric guitar rather than oh, what
can I do. I need to I need somebody to
do this for me. Somebody needs to invent this, right,
I need to collaborate somebody. He was like, I'm I'm
gonna go try to figure this out myself. And he
really like, I didn't realize what a guitar got he
(19:43):
was and that he he was like this. Um. I
think at one point he had like four hits or
four spots on the Billboard top charts. UM. Like he
was really a popular musician. UM about midway through his career.
But even from a young age, he started out playing
like he was a performer. And I think he's also
(20:05):
credited Chuck with being the person um because he played
country western too. He also played the harmonica. His act
was called rubar Bread and it was just him and
he played the guitar and the harmonica. And he figured
out long before Bob Dylan every came along. But that's problematic.
You technically need four arms for that. So he fashioned
a harmonica holder that he could wear while he was
(20:27):
playing the guitar, just like Bob Dylan. More later on,
he was the kid who invented that years before. Yeah,
maybe this is another one of those things where it's
like did he invent it or did he see it
and make one on his own? But not taking anything
away from the guy. He was also a kid taking
apart electronics in his house putting them back together. He
(20:47):
really knew what he was doing, and he also had,
you know, like every guitar player, that same big problem
was when he played, he would be up there and
he could sing through that microphone, although he didn't sing
that much. He did when he was a kid, but
later on he realized he wasn't not like a pro singer.
Harmonica sounded good through the mic, but the guitar was
still in the background, and he knew that was an issue. Yes,
(21:09):
apparently um as this as legend has it, he was
playing a show at a barbecue stand. Um and I
think it was a regular potentially a regular show. He
could his harmonica sounded fine when he was singing. It
was broadcast fine because he had a microphone, but nothing
was working for the guitar was He was drowning it
(21:30):
out himself. So he realized that if he took the
phonograph needle, the electrified phonograph needle from his his parents
phonograph and attached it to the guitar and then attached
to that to a radio, he could actually amplify his guitar.
So he figured this out I think at like age thirteen, Um,
(21:50):
because he wanted to improve his barbecue stand chops and
tips and tips. He supposedly his tips tripled as a result.
But um, you know that's pretty impressive stuff. I would
not have thought about that at the as at the
tender year on the age oft. Yeah, I mean that's
where the tinkering comes in. And I'm sure it didn't
(22:11):
sound great to our ears now, but at the time,
you have to put yourself in the place of like
literally having never heard something like this happen. Uh, it was.
It had to have been like a revelation to actually
hear that guitar coming through a speaker, especially if you
lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin. You've never heard anything like that
in your life. But he was very much opposite of
(22:33):
Leo Fender and his personality. He was very gregarious, very outgoing,
made a lot of friends. Uh, could also be a
little brash. Was not a great husband to his two wives,
which we'll get to, but he was He was always
sort of the life of the party and he loved
performing in front of people, whereas Leo Fender really kind
of wanted to be at the background unless he was
very quietly getting on stage. Um. Unless Paul from the
(22:57):
very beginning, once he could afford regular guitars, I think
he moved to Chicago and was like making decent money,
like backing other people up. But he had a relationship
with Gibson from the very beginning because Gibson started out
as an acoustic guitar maker. Uh, and they're still known.
I mean, they make these great electric guitars, but you
(23:17):
know some of the best guitars in the world, or
Gibson acoustic guitars. Yeah, they also made like Mandolin's and
like yeah, like just all manner of stringing instruments and
what they made were basically works of art. Yeah, they
were beautiful and they still are. My favorite guitar I
owned is one I bought during the pandemic. I finally
bought the Gibson Acoustic U based on a nineteen forties model,
(23:40):
and it's just it's amazing. The sound difference between even
that and my really nice Martin Acoustic is striking. Yeah,
Gibs or Fender was not making acoustic guitars, and they
still to this day don't make a very good acoustic guitar. Yeah,
I can't imagine. It's really interesting that, like one of
the biggest guitar companies in the world. I don't if
they can't or if they just don't put the resources
(24:01):
toward it, but I think they're nicest acoustic guitar tops
out at about eight hundred bucks, which is you know,
you can get a pretty good guitar for that, but
these really really nice Gibson's are like four and five dollars. Yeah,
And like Gibson's whole jam was to make professional quality
instruments that were again works of art, but like if
you were a professional musician, like Gibson could make an
(24:22):
instrument that you could use and probably love UM. And
they were making them already. They were making those electrified
Spanish style or electrified acoustic guitars as as like I
was saying, as as early as I think six was
the e S one fifty. E S stood for Electrified
Spanish Guitar UM and there was a jazz guitarist named
(24:47):
Charlie Christian who really kind of championed that development. He
think he played for Benny Goodman's band, um but um
I think they named the pickup in those after him,
Charlie Christian Pickups. But U so les Paul was playing
these Gibson guitars, but it still wasn't what he was
looking for, because again, if you turned it up really loud,
(25:08):
you it would provide all sorts of problems. Yeah, it's
funny these little letters that like the E S three
thirty five is just a classic, amazing instrument still today,
and they have all these cool letters and you never
know what they name, but they mean but electrified Spanish.
Is kind of funny that the iconic Gibson s G
s G stands first Solid Guitar. Really. Yeah, they're all
(25:31):
just these very mundane abbreviations that all these years later
just seemed cool because Angus Young plays it. Yeah right,
well yeah, I mean if used a different example from
Angus Young and be really on board, but I got
you I play one. Well, there you go has a
cool acts. Uh. So he charmed his way into the
(25:54):
Epiphone factory in New York. Epiphone was a really big
guitar maker at the time, and I think Gibson eventually
bought UM, I think they're co Co brand or you know,
under the Gibson umbrella. Now, but he got to work
on his problems, and you've got to look up some
pictures of some of this stuff kind of starting now. Uh,
just look up a picture of the log from Les Paul.
(26:16):
And it was a I was about to say essentially,
but it's not essentially. It was a four by four
block of pine wood about two ft long that he
put a guitar neck on, an epiphone guitar neck, and
he made his own pickup. I guess he didn't go
out and buy a pickup or use one from another guitar,
(26:36):
and he made his own pickup, you know, with a
magnet and the wire, put some strings on it and
called it the log. And it was a very primitive
but working, solid body electric guitar. It looked very much
like something Devo would have played. Yeah, And in fact,
it freaked people out so much early on UM that
(26:56):
he ended up taking a part another guitar and glue
ng sides onto the side of it to make it
look normal, to make it look normal, And there's this
great picture of him holding the log, kind of separating
the sides off with a little wry smile. Um. But
the Gibson little side note gives the Gibson Firebird guitar,
which is one of my favorite guitars. I used to
have one, but I sold it. It is a it's
(27:18):
called a through neck guitar. I'm sure there are others,
but it's the only one I can think of that's
really popular. Whereas it's the same thing. It's basically one
long piece of wood, like the neck is the same
piece of wood as the body, and then they glue
on these wings on the outside. Okay, all right, settle down, Chuck.
It's pretty exciting, so Chuck. Also, if you ever found
(27:39):
yourself trapped in walt Kesha, Wisconsin, you go to go
to the book Kesha County Museum and they actually have
the original log there on display. Oh really, Yeah, apparently
they have a lot of Less Paul stuff there, including
that with the wings of the of the guitar kind
of pulled away to kind of show you know, it's
a neck through design like the Fireber. I I was
(28:03):
just teasing you, and I said to settle down. I
was just taking an opportunity. Like, I'm charmed very much.
I'm sure everyone else is by your childlike excitement over
this whole thing. I'm as excited as when I got
my first guitar when I was twelve, which was a
candy Apple red BC rich like metal guitar. I wish
I knew what mine was. I had a metal guitar too,
mom was pink, had a light coating of diamond dust.
(28:25):
And I wish to god I could remember who it was.
A local metal band from Toledo. Yeah. Yeah, they had
like an album and a poster and everything. And the guy,
the guitarist from the band worked at like the music store,
um where I would take lessons and he taught me
(28:46):
and he was as interested as um Oh. I can't
remember Carl Weather's character and happy Gilmore, but he's like
a golf pro and just totally uninterested. That's how interested
this guitar player wasn't seeing me as a future guitar player. Um.
And it's not like I blame him for me losing
interesting guitar, but he definitely didn't. He wasn't a great
(29:07):
mentor or anything. But I wish it's so bad I
would have stuck with it a little bit longer because
it was pretty pretty boss. When I look back on
the whole thing. I never knew this. How long did
you try? I don't know, five six lessons maybe? Al right.
I wonder what happened to that guitar too, Like my
parents bought the guitar. I mean it was used in everything,
but like, I have no idea what became of that guitar.
(29:31):
I never uh took lessons, So maybe that's the key. Yeah,
I could totally see that. I just shut myself in
my room and and started buying tableature, which, if you
don't know what that is, instead of actual sheet music,
like written out like a you know, like real sheet
music tableature or little numbers on they kind of mimic
(29:51):
a six string guitar and they put little numbers on
the strings on where you should put your fingers. So
it allows anyone who can't read music to sort of
figure out songs like e E G, E e G.
What are those chords? Someone's going to call you out
on that. I don't know, but that that was the
Kids in the Hall reference more than even a Deep
Purple reference. Oh man, I love that band in the
(30:15):
in the skits, the little kid garage band. Yeah, it's
all right. So back to the log. The log was
very rough, very primitive, but what it did accomplish was
amplification without feedback in longer sustain. Yeah. And more importantly,
it was a solid body guitar. Like like Less Paul
(30:38):
kind of crack that code that Fender, as far as
I know, is still working on. Because this is nineteen right, Yeah,
this was pre uh yeah, early nineteen forty. I think
it was prely Offender for sure. Yeah, so I mean
Less Paul really does have a claim to fame to
creating the first wooden solid body electric guitar because I
think the frying pan was solid body aluminum. He figured
(31:00):
out that problem of reverse just get rid of the
hollow body, replace it with the solid body, and it
was ugly. That seems to be the big problem. It
wasn't exactly what he was looking for sound wise, but
it was definitely close enough that it was like, I'm
on the right track. Let me go show the people
at Gibson. They're gonna love this kind of thing. And um,
they basically laughed him out of the meeting in Kalamazoo,
(31:22):
Michigan because he um showed up with a really ugly guitar. Yeah,
and not only that, like they just didn't see the
vision because, like I said, they were working with these
ancient luthier's who had this ancient craft. They weren't ancient humans,
but they would wake them from the dead each day
to go to the workshop and create a new guitar.
(31:44):
But the point is they were doing great with these
big acoustic guitars, and they were like, no one's gonna
want to hear that, because this is what a guitar is, basically, like,
you don't it's not a lead instrument in the band.
Lead that to the horns and the piano. So he
was laughed out of there and a little egg on
his face. But this was a full five years before
(32:04):
Leo Fender came up with his first plant guitar, which
you should also look up just typing Leo Fender black
Plant guitar. And it looks a little more like a
guitar than the log, but not that much. No, it
looks more way more like a guitar than the log,
but it still doesn't look like a guitar as we
(32:24):
know it. Yeah, it was almost I get the impression
that he created the guitar kind of like how you
might build like a car out of clay, but the
axle works because you're testing wheels, I don't think people
and he built it as a test, yeah, but I
don't think we mentioned that though, Yeah, but it was
it was he was testing out like pickups and I
think testing the concept of a solid body as well.
(32:47):
But he wasn't making it like this is going to
be my prototype. But it turned out to actually be
kind of a prototype because um, when he uh, I
don't exactly know how word got around. I guess because
he was friends with band and so bands would kind
of come around the workshop to see what's going on,
and they started coming around seeing and hearing this guitar
that he made, and um, people started renting it apparently
(33:09):
for the weekend to go play shows with and just
knocking the socks off of the Bobby socksers in town
from what I can tell. Yeah, And at this point
he has the Fender Electric Instrument Company. Uh, it's legit.
And you know, in the background of all of this,
and we're not going to talk much about amps, but
in the background of all of this, he's building amps
along the way. He was one of the first sort
(33:31):
of master amp builders. Well, yeah, Fender amps are like
as famous as the guitar. Basically, yeah, so where are
we at right now? Fenders made his playing guitar, Leo's
got his log. Neither one of them are going places
immediately with it. It's just kind of like they've both
now cracked to the problem and there's a lot of
(33:54):
obstacles between them and fame, or at least guitar production fame. Um,
but you know what that means though, Right we're at
our second break. Oh good, okay, Chuck, I think that
was great. Um, so Chuck, just separ at our second break.
He's clearly driving this episode. Let's all go with it,
shall we shock? Okay, we're back, Chuck, We're back. We
(34:43):
got a log, We've got this little funny looking black,
solid body guitar, and uh, we need to pick back
up with with Les Paul In nineteen I guess forty
one ish. He moves to Los Angeles. He's and to
get session work. Uh he plays with Bing Crosby, who was, uh,
(35:04):
sort of one of the most popular singers at the time.
Oh yeah, dude. He moved to Los Angeles to be
near being Crosby, which I did little research, and that
was kind of a common thing, what to just want
to be near bing Crosses. Yeah, you've moved across the
country to be near bing Crosby unless you were one
of his kids. Oh is he a good father? Oh?
Really not a good dad. I didn't know that. Wait
(35:27):
a minute, are you thinking of mommy dearest? Oh yeah,
that's right, that's one thinking thinking of John Crawford. Uh.
But he was a huge, huge music star. Um Les
Paul was out there working with him. But then he
gets I don't think we mentioned he had electrocuted really
bad when he was twenty six playing music. He had
sweaty hands, held the microphone, was also touching the guitar strings,
(35:49):
completed a circuit and really damaged his hand such that
it took Uh. I mean I heard his whole body,
but it damaged his hand such that took quite a
couple of years to even recover, which was huge. Like
he he might have never played again, Like there was
a possibility that was going to happen. Yeah, and that's
just injury number one for him. Um but he gets
(36:10):
drafted in World War Two, goes to work in the
Army at the Armed Forces Radio Network and is playing guitar,
basically backing up the Andrews sisters backing up Being Crosby
when they do these USO tours. So as far as
the army goes in World War Two, pretty plumb gig right.
Um so. And plus he's again like he did move
to l A to Bean or being Crosby in the
(36:31):
fact that he's getting to like play with being Crosby.
Is I'm guessing a lifelong dream of his come true.
Um And even after the war, I guess he made
enough of a connection with being Um I'm on a
first name basis with him. By the way, um he
uh that that Less Paul um kind of I guess became.
(36:51):
I don't know if there was like a mentor thing,
but at the very least he definitely patronized. Less Paul
helped his career big time. One of the things that
really helped Less Paul become like a genuine, bona fide star.
He was already fairly well known and a lot of
circles had some hits, but what really shot him to
the top was the song called It's Been a Long
Long Time. It's actually a really good song, but it
(37:14):
was kind of a song that was a hit because
it kind of summed up America trudging wearily back from
World War Two. Um, and it's just kind of like
this mellow solemn song where, uh, it's almost I'm sure
there's other instruments, but my ears pick up Bing Crosby's
vocals and Less Paul's jazz guitar um and they his
(37:37):
guitar enhances the vocals so much. But there's a actual
guitar solo in there, and it's slow, but it's really good.
And that kind of shot Less Paul to superstardom from
that point on. Yeah, so Bing Crosby is like, you
need to open up a studio. I'll even help finance
this thing. He did so in his garage and before
(37:58):
you know it, and Los Angeles, all these famous people
are stopping by Les Paul's garage to hear him play,
to hang out with him. Uh. He, like I said,
he was a very gregarious guy. So people just kind
of wanted to be around him. And this is all
going great, but he still wasn't quite satisfied with what
was going on because the sound just still wasn't there.
(38:21):
He was he he called it sound on sound recording.
He was the first person, or one of the first
people to experiment with studio techniques where you could layer
recordings on top of one another. And this was before
they were even recording on magnetic tape. Yeah, dude, multi
track recording like you know how you hear drums playing,
(38:41):
and you hear a guitar playing, and then you hear
like vocals, all of those musicians may never have even
been in the same room at the same time. You
can do that with multi track recording. Back in the day,
if you wanted to make a recording, you had to
get everybody into a room. You all had to be
playing it once. He had to be playing the song together,
and then you recorded it and that was the record wording, right,
So did it come up with multi track recording? Was
(39:03):
huge in and of itself, But I looked into what
he was actually doing and it's mind boggling. He would
He came up, I think, with a song called Lover
and it was was that the one where it's like
seven tracks or eight tracks of guitars. And the way
that he made each track was he recorded one track,
the first initial track onto acetate. He made a record
(39:26):
of that, and then he took that record and he
played it, and then he played along with it, and
then he recorded that onto another record, and then another record,
and then another record, and by the time he was
doing his seventh track, he had a record of seven
of seven tracks playing all at once on one record
that he had recorded one by one, and he was
(39:47):
playing the eighth track with it. And if you messed
up one time, say on track five, he had to
start all over at the beginning, unless he still had
those first few tracks handy. Hopefully he didn't break each
record after each recording or anything like that, but in
that nuts going to that, and that was about as
innovating uh form of music as anyone had come up
(40:08):
with to that point. Yeah, it's funny when you hear
people working with like pro tools and dragon drop digital
recording now and they talk about like in the old
days when they used when they would cut and spice tape,
like go back even further, dude to less Paul doing
this on actual actual ascetate records. It's crazy. It is crazy.
(40:29):
When I was like, what what does that mean? What
was he doing? Like dueling a state records? And I
looked tonight my eyes popped out of my head. Yeah,
it's it's pretty remarkable. The innovations he was coming up with.
So he's doing all that, he's becoming more and more popular,
and then a very faithful thing happened. Uh a steel
guitar player name. Uh do we say Joaquin Murphy. That's
(40:51):
how I'm going with all right, that's how it spelled.
H He came over to Less's house one day and
he said, you know what, I got this guy here.
I want you to meet him. And he's really good
with working on amplifiers, and I think you guys might
like each other. Uh. And his name is Leo Fender
and where you know it? And this this is movie territory.
Leo Fender and Les Paul are hanging out together, trying
(41:15):
to figure stuff out together, work shopping, problem solving. They um,
you know, they pointed out, and he's right that they
weren't like great friends. But it's not like they were
enemies or rivals at first. They just were really really
different from each other. Yeah. Um, they kind of shared
a U at the very least, they had a common
problem or a common quest that they were both working on.
(41:37):
They were just not similar people personality wise, so they
didn't click. They were like, this is great, let's be
partners were the same, right exactly, but they also were
also kind of becoming rivals a little bit too, right, well,
not quite yet. Like at this point they were genuinely
trying to figure stuff out together. Uh, and I think
(41:58):
like Leo was coming over every he can basically musicians
would come over still, and he would ask them questions
and try and figure stuff out, try and solve these
amplification problems. But um, yeah, there may have been a
little friendly like let's see what this guy's got kind
of thing, but you know, Les Paul was like, you
can't even play yeah. And again remember remember though Fender.
(42:20):
By this time he had a company, the Fender Electric
Instrument Company. He was mostly focusing on electric steel guitars because, um,
not just country Western love that stuff, but Hawaiian music
was really huge as well. Um, and they use a
lap steel guitar. So um, he was he had a
company already going. Les Paul had his own musical career going.
(42:41):
He was just kind of, you know, he tinkered because
he needed to his his focuses on his musical career.
So I could see there being like a little bit
of a rivalry and that they were trying to crack
the same problem, but other than that, they weren't necessarily rivals.
You know, that's right. Uh. And in order to really
solve this problem, it would take the entrance of a
or gentlemen that we haven't even mentioned yet that was very,
(43:03):
very important to the story of the electric guitar. And
that is where we're going to leave you for part one.
Nice Chuck, it was a very good cliffhanger. Who could
it be? I don't know, but you're gonna have to
tune in Thursday to find out. In this very special
two part episode of Stuff you Should Know, My money's
(43:25):
on CC to Bill. Stuff You Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.