![](\"https:\/\/pocket-image-cache.com\/direct?resize=w2000&url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F01%2F11122308%2FGeoFullertonFactory.jpg\")
<\/p>\nGeorge Fullerton (left) testing a Stratocaster in the Fender factory, sometime in the mid-to-late 1950s. Photo courtesy of Richard Smith.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Many places deserve to be called the birthplace of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. Memphis often gets the nod because that\u2019s where Sam Phillips of Sun Records recorded Elvis Presley belting out an impromptu, uptempo cover of \u201cThat\u2019s All Right\u201d in 1954. Cleveland makes the list since it\u2019s the place where, in 1951, a local disc jockey named Alan Freed coined the genre\u2019s name. Chicago\u2019s claim precedes Cleveland\u2019s by several years; in 1948, McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, took the tiny stage of a neighborhood tavern called Club Zanzibar, pulled up a chair, and played his hollow-body electric guitar so loud, the sounds emanating from his small amplifier crashed upon the sweaty crowd in waves of soul-stirring distortion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Fender Esquire was derided by competitors as a toilet seat with strings.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Those would all be good choices, but for author Ian Port, whose new book, The Birth of Loud<\/a><\/em>, has just been published by Scribner, the birthplace of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll could also be the former farming community of Fullerton in Orange County, California. That\u2019s where an electronics autodidact named Clarence Leonidas \u201cLeo\u201d Fender founded a radio repair shop in 1938. By 1943, Fender and a friend named Clayton \u201cDoc\u201d Kaufman, who was Fender\u2019s business partner in those days, had taken a solid plank of oak, painted it glossy black, attached a pickup at one end, and strung its length with steel strings (see photo here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Leo Fender amid numerous G&L guitars, a company he ran with George Fullerton years after he sold Fender. Photo via the Rock Hall Library and Archive<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This \u201cradio shop guitar,\u201d as Port calls it in his book, was very similar to the tabletop \u201csteel\u201d guitars that Fender and Kaufman were manufacturing for the country-western swing bands playing the honky-tonks and dance halls of Southern California, except this one could be hung from a strap around the neck and played while standing up, just like a traditional \u201cSpanish\u201d guitar, as regular guitars were called in those days. As Port tells it in The Birth of Loud<\/em>, Fender didn\u2019t believe his and Kaufman\u2019s prototype had been built well enough to sell to anyone, but he regularly rented it to \u201cFullerton\u2019s cowboy pickers,\u201d who would \u201croar through that proud little downtown on their motorcycles<\/a>, pull up to Leo\u2019s shop three doors down from the main intersection, breeze past the shelves of records and radios for sale, and ask for that black guitar. There was only one.\u201d<\/p>\n The romance between country musicians and solid-body electric guitars continued in 1947, when a country-music star named Merle Travis asked a steel-guitar competitor of Leo Fender\u2019s named Paul Bigsby to make him a Spanish style, solid-body electric. Bigsby\u2019s Merle Travis guitar, delivered in 1948, would prove highly influential, particularly to Leo Fender, but it wasn\u2019t until the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll musicians of the 1950s and \u201960s embraced solid-body electrics that guitar players were transformed into bona-fide guitar heroes. In the process, they elevated their genre to heights no one in postwar Southern California\u2014or Chicago, Cleveland, or Memphis, for that matter\u2014could have possibly imagined.<\/p>\n Les Paul with a few of his clunker guitars. Photo via the Rock Hall Library and Archive<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Birth of Loud<\/em> chronicles this evolution, mostly via the short friendship and longer rivalry between Leo Fender and jazz guitarist Lester Polsfuss, better known as Les Paul, after whom the venerable Gibson Guitar Company<\/a> named its first solid-body electric guitar in 1952. Port tells us who did what first, who stole which ideas from whom, and explains why live performers considered the solid-body electric guitar to be such an essential improvement over the hollow-body electric guitars that had come first (Muddy Waters-style distortion was one thing, but hollow-body electrics were prone to producing ear-piercing shrieks and screeches of feedback).<\/p>\n Port\u2019s passion for his subject grew from his love of music and, in particular, guitars. \u201cI\u2019ve been a guitar player pretty much my whole life,\u201d Port told me when we spoke over the phone recently. \u201cI think I got my first electric guitar, a Peavey Predator, when I was 10 years old. It was a beginner model, a Strat copy, but a really nice guitar. I still pick it up and play it sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n The original color of the 1954 Fender Stratocaster was a three-toned sunburst. Photo via Gbase<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cStrat,\u201d as in \u201cStratocaster<\/a>,\u201d a model introduced by the Fender Electric Instrument Company in 1954. \u201cStrat,\u201d as in the guitar Buddy Holly purchased in Lubbock, Texas, in the spring of 1955, and subsequently took with him when he conquered the UK in 1958. On that tour, Holly\u2019s trio, the Crickets, were booked on a television variety show called \u201cVal Parnell\u2019s Sunday Night at the London Palladium,\u201d which Port describes in The Birth of Loud<\/em> as \u201cthe British equivalent of Ed Sullivan, but with even worse sound.\u201d Watching the live telecast on the evening of March 2 were a couple of teenagers from Liverpool named John Lennon and Paul McCartney<\/a>, who, Port writes, were \u201cmesmerized by the curves of Buddy\u2019s guitar.\u201d The two were also impressed enough by Holly\u2019s music and style that they changed the name of their incubating band from the Quarrymen to the Beetles, before changing it once more\u2014Lennon, a pathological punster, thought the word \u201cbeat\u201d was a better allusion to the music of the day than the name of a bug.<\/p>\n The Strat, therefore, was a guitar that the Peavey Electronics Corporation of Meridian, Mississippi, would have wanted to copy. But Leo Fender\u2019s first guitar, the Esquire? Not so much. As Port describes it, when the Esquire was introduced in the summer of 1950 at the National Association of Music Merchants convention in Chicago, the instrument was derided by competitors as a \u201ctoilet seat with strings.\u201d In fact, the Esquire did have a lot in common with crap. Early examples were plagued by shorts in the guitar\u2019s single pickup, the microphone-like component made from a magnet tightly wrapped in copper wire.<\/p>\n \u00a0When Leo Fender\u2019s first solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire, was introduced in 1950, it was plagued by pickup problems and bowing necks. Those defects would be fixed in 1951 with the release of the similarly designed Telecaster. Photo via Gardiner Houlgate<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Electrical shorts would seem an unforgivable error for an electricity wizard like Leo Fender, but almost more problematic was the pickup\u2019s hard, sharp sound, a tone that was fine for country pickers in honky-tonks but completely unsuited, Port writes, to the needs of the rhythm guitarists backing them up. The Esquire\u2019s sound was also a very poor cousin to the warm, mellow tone of Gibson\u2019s electric hollow-body workhorse, the Super 400. So, in 1950, with Fender selling Esquires even as customers were returning them to correct various defects, Leo Fender went back to the drawing board, rewiring the pickup and adding a second one that was shielded by a chrome-plated cover, which reduced the intensity of the high-frequency signals the pickup was capturing.<\/p>\n Then things got worse. \u201cOne day,\u201d Port writes, \u201cLeo Fender looked at his Esquire prototype and realized that its neck was bending upward, succumbing to pressure from the strings.\u201d Fender\u2019s head of marketing and sales, Don Randall, had warned Leo Fender that this was going to be a problem, but Fender apparently believed the maple he was using for the Esquire\u2019s neck, which was bolted to the guitar\u2019s ash body, would be strong enough to withstand the strain. It was not, and now production at the Fender factory ground to a halt as Leo Fender and a few of his most trusted employees struggled to solve this potentially company-killing problem.<\/p>\n One of those employees was George Fullerton, who had joined the company in 1948 and would work with Leo for 43 years, right until the great man died in 1991. At the time of the Esquire debacle, George\u2019s father, Fred, was also working at Fender, and it was Fred Fullerton who figured how to cut a channel in the back of the Esquire\u2019s maple neck, install a rigid steel truss rod, and then cover it up with a strip of walnut, all in a way that would allow the instrument to be mass-produced.<\/p>\n An early sales sheet for the Telecaster called out the \u201csolo-lead pickup\u201d hidden under a plate that also hid the bridge. The black bar in the top-right corner suggests that this sales sheet may have originally featured the model name \u201cBroadcaster,\u201d which Fender had to drop due to a lawsuit from Gretsch.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This redesigned, two-pickup guitar was renamed the Broadcaster, which immediately prompted a trademark-infringement lawsuit by Gretsch<\/a>. But Fender had orders to fill\u2014for Esquires, actually, but Leo wasn\u2019t keen about letting too many more of those out into the world\u2014so the company shipped about 60 guitars to customers with no model name on them at all. In the meantime, Don Randall had come up with the word Telecaster<\/a>, which is why those Telecasters that were sold without a model name on them are known today as Nocasters. In the Telecaster, Fender had finally delivered the world\u2019s first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar, which it sold for $189.50, plus $39.95 for a hardshell case (multiply those numbers by 10 for 2019 dollars).<\/p>\n Fender could not make Telecasters fast enough, and Randall wanted to keep his foot on the gas, lest Fender\u2019s biggest potential competitor, Gibson, decided to make a solid-body of its own. What Fender needed, Randall reasoned, was a marquee endorsement, and in 1951, no electric guitarist was more marquee than Les Paul, who had just released one of the biggest hits of career.<\/p>\n At the time, Leo Fender and Les Paul were friendly, if not exactly friends. Like Leo, Les was an inveterate tinkerer, pioneering advances in multi-track recording when he wasn\u2019t making his own pickups and electric guitars, which he called his clunkers. But unlike Leo, who never learned to play the instruments he made, Les could play the tar out of an electric guitar. Leo\u2019s interest was essentially technical\u2014solving one vexing problem after another was his joy, an end in and of itself. Les loved technology, too, but his goal was to create a guitar that would produce a loud, clean tone that no one else could duplicate, a sound that would be unmistakably \u201cLes Paul.\u201d<\/p>\n When western swing star Merle Travis asked his steel-guitar maker Paul Bigsby to build him a solid-body electric guitar, he was performing ditties like this.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n To that end, Paul had built his own prototype in 1940, three years before Fender\u2019s radio shop guitar. Paul\u2019s guitar was a Frankenstein monster of an instrument. It featured a stock Epiphone<\/a> guitar neck glued to a 2-foot length of 4-by-4-inch pine. After screwing a homemade pickup onto it and stringing it with strings, Paul dubbed his creation the Log.<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike Leo Fender, Les Paul could play the tar out of an electric guitar.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As described in The Birth of Loud<\/em>, on the Sunday evening Paul finished the Log, he took it to a bar called Gladys\u2019 near his home in Queens, New York. \u201cHe pulled his mutant guitar up on the small stage,\u201d Port writes, \u201cfired up his Gibson amplifier, and strummed a chord. The purely electric sound he\u2019d so long dreamed of came splattering out of the little speaker. It was thin and sharp, prickly and alien. It possessed none of the mellow warmth, the woody grace, of a hollow-body electric\u2014but it did have some of the qualities Les had dreamed of.\u201d Those qualities included being able to crank his amp as loud as he wanted without worrying about feedback. As for the Log\u2019s sound, \u201cbecause its dense, solid-wood body didn\u2019t absorb vibrations easily,\u201d Port writes, \u201cthe strings themselves vibrated longer than on an acoustic instrument, giving each note a lyrical sustain.\u201d<\/p>\n Two years later, in 1942, after electrocuting himself in his basement workshop, an accident that sidelined him as a guitarist for a spell, Paul took his Log to Gibson, with whom he already had an endorsement deal thanks to his status as a rising jazz guitarist. By now the Log had a more traditional body so that it looked more like a Spanish style electric guitar than a 4-by-4 with strings. Paul was sure Gibson would jump at the chance to be the first guitar manufacturer to release a solid-body electric guitar, but Gibson executives practically laughed him out of their offices, dismissing his Log as \u201ca broomstick with pickups.\u201d<\/p>\n The heart of Les Paul\u2019s 1940 Log guitar, which is now at the Country Music Hall of Fame<\/a> in Nashville, is an Epiphone neck and a 4-by-4. The Epiphone body parts were added later. Photo by Don Mitchell<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Undaunted, Paul moved to Hollywood in 1943 (the same year Muddy Waters left Mississippi for Chicago and that Leo Fender made his radio shop guitar) with the unusually specific goal of accompanying Bing Crosby on a song. Recording with Crosby, Paul thought, would boost his career. By 1945, Paul had insinuated himself enough into Crosby\u2019s orbit that the two teamed up on a recording for Decca called \u201cIt\u2019s Been a Long Long Time.\u201d The song was a smash and, as he had hoped, Paul was soon the toast of the town.<\/p>\n Naturally, Paul continued to tinker, but instead of a cramped basement in Queens, he now had a comparatively spacious garage studio adjacent to his Hollywood bungalow. In fact, Paul\u2019s bungalow and its legendary garage became a frequent hangout for LA\u2019s best studio musicians, who called themselves the Hollywood Hillbillies when they played there with Paul. After a session, Paul and his buddies would amble over to the patio, pull up some chairs, and toss back a few cool ones in the shade of an orange tree.<\/p>\n When Les Paul arrived in Hollywood in 1943, his goal was to record a song with Bing Crosby. Paul achieved his goal in 1945 when he and Crosby teamed up on \u201cIt\u2019s Been A Long Long Time,\u201d which was Paul\u2019s first hit.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1947, several of these soirees included Leo Fender, who one day brought along custom-steel-guitar maker Paul Bigsby as his plus-one. The three guitar gurus would get together regularly after that, nerding out for hours on end about pickup magnets and frequency equalization. Eventually, Bigsby brought Paul a new pickup to try out, which, Port writes, Paul liked so well, he tried to hide it from fellow guitarists such as Chet Atkins and Merle Travis. Both players were soon asking Bigsby for a pickup like the one he\u2019d made for Paul, but Travis went further, requesting a complete guitar.<\/p>\n Bigsby delivered his new guitar to Merle Travis in the spring of 1948. Soon after, Fender got to see and hear the instrument for himself when Travis played it at a western dance concert one Saturday night at American Legion Post No. 277, just outside of Fullerton. \u201cIt was a standard guitar\u2014the kind you fret with your fingers, not a steel\u2014but like nothing Leo had ever seen,\u201d Port writes. \u201cIts body was impossibly, absurdly, beautifully thin: an inch and a half, perhaps, from the back to the front. This body had the same height and width as a standard acoustic, but with no thickness and no sound holes. Its top was all solid wood. Solid bird\u2019s-eye maple, in fact, so the entire thing, its usual hourglass guitar-body shape, gleamed as if gilded, and appeared to be spotted with rivulets of darker wood: the so-called bird\u2019s eyes in the maple. The accent pieces around the bridge were intricate, even florid. The headstock was a flowing, avian shape with all its tuners arranged on top, to be within easy reach of the player.\u201d<\/p>\n Merle Travis holding his Bigsby guitar, which is easily identifiable thanks to its distinctive headstock. Photo via WMOT Roots Radio<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n As fate would have it, that spring Fender was under pressure from his sales team to design a production-ready follow-up to his radio shop guitar of 1943. \u201cNow he knew he had to do it\u2014and soon,\u201d Port continues in The Birth of Loud<\/em>. \u201cTravis\u2019s Bigsby guitar was getting all kinds of attention: from onlookers who\u2019d never seen such a skinny six-string, from players who\u2019d never heard anything like the sweet electric patter it emitted through an amplifier. That Bigsby guitar was alluring\u2014for Leo, dangerously so.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Travis took the stage, Fender peppered him with questions about his new guitar. For his part, Travis was only too happy to brag about his new pride and joy, going so far as to loan it to Fender for a full week until his next gig the following Saturday. Fender, Port writes, \u201cwas dying to get the guitar back to his workbench, to run its signal through his oscilloscope.\u201d<\/p>\n A fair amount of that Merle Travis Bigsby would eventually make its way into the Fender Esquire of 1950 and the Telecaster of 1951. In particular, Leo Fender copied a key feature of Paul Bigsby\u2019s headstock design, in which all of the tuners were aligned on one side. But Bigsby was not the only guitar maker Fender found inspiring. The method of bolting the Esquire\u2019s neck to its body, which would become a hallmark of Fender guitars<\/a> in the coming decades, was actually lifted from a Southern California guitar manufacturer named Rickenbacker<\/a>.<\/p>\n This sheet music for \u201cHow High the Moon\u201d, Les Paul\u2019s and Mary Ford\u2019s smash hit of 1951, shows Paul cradling one of his hand-built clunker guitars.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Which is not to say that Leo Fender brought nothing of his own to the table. \u201cFrom the maze of an electric circuit\u2014from the countless possibilities of resistors and capacitors and potentiometers and magnets and wiring and power supplies and schematics\u2014Leo Fender could conjure whatever lush and evocative sounds he desired,\u201d Port writes. Indeed, Fender\u2019s electrical intuition had always been his company\u2019s secret sauce, more than offsetting Fender\u2019s occasional pragmatic plagiarism when it came to manufacturing decisions involving mere nuts and bolts.<\/p>\n Beginning in the spring of 1951, shiny new Telecasters, with their reinforced necks and dual pickups, were shipping to retailers across the country as fast as the Fender factory in Fullerton could manufacture and assemble them. Which brings us back to the decision by Don Randall to approach Les Paul about endorsing the Fender Telecaster. At the time, Paul was basking in the glow of his biggest hit ever, \u201cHow High The Moon,\u201d recorded a few months earlier with his second wife, the singer and guitarist Mary Ford.<\/p>\n At first, Paul seemed receptive to the idea of putting his name on his friend Leo\u2019s guitar, but Paul wasn\u2019t all that crazy about the Telecaster\u2019s sound. Meanwhile, the Telecaster had finally convinced Gibson that it needed to manufacture a solid-body electric guitar\u2014within a few months of Randall\u2019s overture, Gibson, too, began talking to Les Paul.<\/p>\n Advertisements for the 1952 Les Paul bragged that Paul had designed his signature guitar, hoping it would boost sales. In fact, Gibson\u2019s president, Ted McCarty, deserves the credit.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The guitar that Gibson began working on as its answer to the Telecaster would not look anything like Les Paul\u2019s Log, which the company had declined to build back in 1942. Instead, Gibson wanted a solid-body electric that felt like it truly belonged to Gibson\u2019s extended family of illustrious instruments. To that end, Gibson\u2019s president, Ted McCarty, led the design team, which prototyped a stunning gold-topped solid-body electric guitar that was a Gibson through and through, from its rounded body to its traditionally glued neck\u2014a Gibson guitar would never be bolted! It even featured a contoured maple veneer on the guitar\u2019s top, which was rounded to allude to the curves of an old-fashioned archtop guitar. It was, in short, as far from the plank-of-wood utilitarianism of the Telecaster as possible. As for its tone, this new Gibson guitar sounded rich and warm, much better suited to a jazzman like Les Paul than the country-western pickers for whom the twangy Telecaster had been designed.<\/p>\n And so, in the fall of 1951, Gibson showed their new solid-body electric guitar to Les Paul, who, according to Port, had a difficult time containing his enthusiasm for the instrument. After an all-night negotiating session, which was \u201cfueled by pots coffee that Mary brewed and poured,\u201d Les Paul agreed to affix his signature to Ted McCarty\u2019s guitar.<\/p>\n The 1952 Les Paul featured a gold top and a trapeze bridge. Photo via Garret Park Guitars.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1952, Gibson\u2019s new Les Paul Model<\/a>, which weighed a whopping 9 pounds, hit the market. For Fender, the one-two punch of the Gibson and Les Paul names on the same instrument was nothing less than an existential threat, a product that could put the upstart Southern California company out of business in a New York minute. There was no time to rest on the laurels they\u2019d earned with the Telecaster, so Leo Fender and his trusted colleague George Fullerton got to work on a new solid-body electric guitar that would address some of the complaints about the Telecaster, and hopefully leave Gibson\u2019s Les Paul Model in the dust.<\/p>\n To accomplish this feat, Leo Fender would once again pillage from Paul Bigsby. Fender had already borrowed Bigsby\u2019s headstock design, in which all the tuners were on the same side, but Bigsby wasn\u2019t especially bothered by that. That\u2019s because for Bigsby, the Telecaster represented a new market for his new True Vibrato units, which were introduced the same year as Gibson\u2019s Les Paul.<\/p>\n A Bigsby B7<\/a> True Vibrato on a Gibson ES-330. The B7 was the first whammy bar. Photo via Bigsby<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Bigsby True Vibrato was basically a customized guitar bridge, which is the piece of hardware that secures the strings to the bottom end of a guitar\u2019s body. When the whammy bar, as it came to be called, on the Bigsby vibrato was depressed, guitarists could change the pitch of whatever chord or note they were playing, causing their instruments to moan like a locomotive whistle or \u201cboing\u201d like a spring.<\/p>\n Best of all for Bigsby, vibrato units could be mass-produced, making them a less labor-intensive revenue stream than his guitars, which were custom-built one at a time. Bigsby had already tooled up machinery to manufacture vibratos in dimensions designed to fit Gibson and Gretsch guitars. In 1953, he released a vibrato unit designed to augment the standard bridge that came with a Telecaster, too.<\/p>\n Don Randall, smarting, perhaps, from his failure to land Les Paul, did not appreciate another company making money off of Fender\u2019s most popular product, so when Leo Fender and George Fullerton set out to build the guitar that would become the Stratocaster, which made it to market in October of 1954, the mandate was that it have its own proprietary Fender whammy bar.<\/p>\n Advertisements for the Fender Stratocaster touted its \u201cTremolo Action,\u201d which was a feature lifted from Paul Bigsby, from whom Fender also copied the Strat\u2019s headstock.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In The Birth of Loud<\/em>, Ian Port shares Bigsby\u2019s succinct reaction to seeing a brochure for the Stratocaster for the first time: \u201cThat son of a bitch ripped me off!\u201d In part, Bigsby was angry that Fender customers who wanted what Fender was calling \u201ctremolo action\u201d were being steered to Fender\u2019s new Stratocaster, obviating the need to purchase a \u201cnifty add-on\u201d from Bigsby. But even worse was the Strat\u2019s headstock. Like Bigsby\u2019s Merle Travis guitar, the tuners were all on one side, but the top of the Telecaster\u2019s headstock had ended in an inelegant stub. Not so the Stratocaster, which copied the round knob that had been a defining feature of Bigsby guitars since 1948. \u201cFor the rest of his life,\u201d Port writes, \u201cLeo Fender would deny copying Bigsby. But, though he may have seen an older instrument in a museum at some point, he\u2019d clearly borrowed another one of Bigsby\u2019s designs.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, it was the Stratocaster that killed the Gibson Les Paul Model rather than the other way around. It had a trio of pickups over the Les Paul\u2019s pair, and was fully 2 pounds lighter, which made Stratocasters easier to carry over the course of a long night onstage. The Strat was also contoured to fit a player\u2019s body, thanks to input from a country picker, and part-time Fender employee, named Bill Carson, who took a hacksaw to his Telecaster where the guitar\u2019s body cut into his chest and forearm. This addressed one of the main complaints about the Telecaster, that it was physically uncomfortable to play. Carson also made hacksaw adjustments to the bridge, which improved the guitar\u2019s tuning, making it an instrument that pros in a recording studio could count on to keep them pitch perfect.<\/p>\n In short, the Stratocaster was a better instrument than the Telecaster, although that\u2019s not why John Lennon and Paul McCartney were so excited when they saw Buddy Holly play one on live television in 1958. The curvaceous Strat was also sexy, in a way the handsome, tasteful Les Paul would never be.<\/p>\n It may not look like much, but the photo at top right of Eric Clapton tuning his 1960 Les Paul\u2014it was published on the back cover of a 1966 John Mayall album\u2014created so much demand for the discontinued guitar that Gibson brought it back in 1968. Photo via Sound Station<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Still, the Les Paul Model\u2019s death would prove temporary, lasting from 1961, when Gibson stopped making the slow-selling, heavy instruments, until 1968, when the company reintroduced two new lines of Les Paul guitars. The catalyst had been the renewed interest in vintage Les Paul Model guitars that had exploded in 1966, after a photograph of Eric Clapton holding his 1960 Les Paul made the back cover of a trendsetting John Mayall album called \u201cBlues Breakers with Eric Clapton.\u201d But the Les Paul would never be a threat to the Strat, in no small part because by 1968, another guitarist had aligned himself with Stratocasters, which he played upside-down, restrung because he was left-handed, and occasionally set on fire during performances. That guitarist was Jimi Hendrix<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the most iconic moments of the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967 was when Jimi Hendrix set fire to one of his Stratocasters live onstage. Photo via Amazon<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In a way, musicians like Hendrix and Clapton, who would appear on many of his own subsequent album covers playing a Stratocaster, were proxies in this battle between the two landmark instruments of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, and, by extension, Leo Fender and Les Paul. Similarly, Ian Port and every other guitarist who has imagined themself onstage, a guitar strapped to their neck as the multitudes showered them with waves of adulation, have been proxies, too, even if their instruments were Peavey Predators and their guitar heroes were artists like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. His band\u2019s so-called grunge-rock sound had followed punk, which had been an emphatic middle finger to the arena rock of the 1970s, which had embraced the power chords of \u201960s rock but none of the psychedelia. Naturally, Cobain and the other guitarists who fronted these bands in the decades after the Telecaster, Les Paul, and Stratocaster first came on the scene played all sorts of electric guitars. But in proclaiming their independence from the Stratocaster and Les Paul in particular, they reminded us that these two guitars, initially created for a country picker and a jazz guitarist, remained the standards by which everything since is still measured.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/pocket-image-cache.com\/direct?resize=w2000&url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F01%2F11130114%2Fleorockhall.jpg\")
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