“A hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history” (The New York Times Book Review),
this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between
the two men who innovated the electric guitar’s amplified sound—Leo
Fender and Les Paul—and their intense competition to convince rock stars
like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to play the
instruments they built.
In the years after World War II,
music was evolving from big-band jazz into rock ’n’ roll—and these
louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny
firm marketed the first solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire,
musicians immediately saw its appeal. Not to be out-maneuvered, Gibson,
the largest guitar manufacturer, raced to build a competitive product.
The company designed an “axe” that would make Fender’s Esquire look
cheap and convinced Les Paul—whose endorsement Leo Fender had sought—to
put his name on it. Thus was born the guitar world’s most heated
rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo.
While Fender was a
quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was a brilliant
but headstrong pop star and guitarist who spent years toying with new
musical technologies. Their contest turned into an arms race as the most
inventive musicians of the 1950s and 1960s—including bluesman Muddy
Waters, rocker Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric
Clapton—adopted one maker’s guitar or another. By 1969 it was clear that
these new electric instruments had launched music into a radical new
age, empowering artists with a vibrancy and volume never before
attainable.
In “an excellent dual portrait” (The Wall Street Journal), Ian S. Port tells the full story in The Birth of Loud, offering “spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The story of these instruments is the story of America in the postwar era: loud, cocky, brash, aggressively new” (The Washington Post).
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