The Birth Of Loud

by Ian Port

  The Gibson Les Paul Model’s finest moment in 1950s rock ’n’ roll came in the hands of rockabilly hero Carl Perkins, who used his gold-top to play “Blue Suede Shoes”—a slab of stop-time genius and a huge hit in 1956. Recording for Sun Records under the guidance of Sam Phillips, Perkins bent notes and slid around the fretboard in a casually smoldering style, careful not to break the spell of studied indifference coursing through the song. There was the merest hint of the snarl this guitar would one day be associated with, a clue that if handled a certain way, this thing might peel the paint right off the walls. But even as recorded by Sam Phillips, a lover of distortion, Perkins’s Les Paul didn’t howl or scream or growl. Rather, it chimed and purred, supplying cool dignity rather than unhinged rebellion. Black bluesmen were achieving wickedly raunchy tones on Les Pauls at this time in near-total obscurity, but popular rock ’n’ roll hadn’t yet caught up to what the guitar could do best. By the late 1950s, even Gibson’s constant improvements to the Les Paul Model couldn’t mask a bleak reality: the instrument simply wasn’t selling well.

  Nearly every hot guitarist had at least given the Les Paul Model a shot. But in an age when even the brashest rock ’n’ roll tunes used mild distortion, and when electric guitars still competed with pianos and saxophones for the lead in songs, no one had managed to discover (or value) what would later be hailed as the guitar’s greatest strength. The more obvious aesthetic niceties of the Les Paul didn’t seem to make up for its excessive heft. A newspaper writer in Florida reported that Les and Mary’s guitars weighed eighteen pounds each—a mistake (they were more like nine to eleven pounds), but a revealing one. “If we’re going over well, our guitars weigh less than a feather,” Mary had said, hinting at her discomfort. The difference between the weight of a Gibson Les Paul and a Telecaster’s or Stratocaster’s roughly seven pounds might seem slight, but over several sets in a long night, it meant a persistent ache in the shoulders. Even Mary, when at home, preferred to pick up Les’s old hollow clunkers.

  The popularity of the Gibson solid-body had peaked in 1953, with 2,245 shipped. Four years later, the company was selling less than half that number, even when including the more upscale, black-finished Les Paul Custom model. With the guitar failing fast, Gibson made major changes to its sound and look.

  In the mid-fifties, at the direction of president Ted McCarty, an engineer at Gibson named Seth Lover had developed a pickup that produced no hum when plugged into an amplifier. Most other electric guitars, including all of Leo Fender’s designs, used pickups consisting of a single magnetic coil, which sent an audible sixty-cycles-per-second buzz through the amplifier. This sound wasn’t loud enough to drown out any music, and many took it as a matter of course, but the hum was noticeable, especially with an amp set to high volume. Seth Lover’s new design consisted of two magnetic coils joined together, their reverse polarities canceling out the hum. Quietness wasn’t their only benefit: Lover’s pickups issued a thick, punchy sound, a pleasing alternative to the often piercing character of single-coils. Placed in the Les Paul’s dense body for the 1957 model year, Lover’s new pickups, identified by their “Patent Applied For” stamp, made for an instrument with tremendous sonic muscle.

  The following year, Gibson gave up on that gold paint Les Paul had liked so much and instead offered the guitar with a beautiful cherry sunburst finish, similar to the more traditional look of Gibson’s other models. On these “bursts,” as they’d become known, the center of the guitar was stained a transparent yellow, which faded to a deep translucent red toward the edges of the body.

  But while Gibson’s designers certainly improved the guitar, the new humbucking pickups and cherry finish did little to change the Les Paul’s declining sales. Even in 1959, a year seen in retrospect as the model’s best, Gibson sold only 643 standard Les Pauls, along with 246 black Customs. Such paltry figures didn’t threaten the company; Gibson still retained the largest market share of any electric guitar maker. But solid-bodies were only growing more important, and the Les Paul Model had become a weak spot for America’s premier firm.

  Though Fender enjoyed rising sales of its radical solid-bodies, the Fullerton crew remained mostly clueless as to where the action was in guitar music. Buddy Holly, the Stratocaster-wielding front man, had turned kids in America on to the company’s Jet Age shapes, but hardly anyone in Fullerton seems to have noticed or cared. When Buddy’s Strat was stolen on a tour stop in 1958, a bandmate with connections called Fullerton and got the company to send out two new guitars and amplifiers free of charge. It was the typical Fender arrangement: Don Randall would never pay artists to use Fender products, but if an established performer wanted them, he or she could often get them at no cost. Holly was apparently deemed just important enough to get gear for free.

  In the eyes of Don Randall, a more crucial Fender player was someone like Buddy Merrill, a clean-cut young man in the country-jazz mold of Les Paul, who performed on The Lawrence Welk Show. Welk himself was a big-band leader—the high-priest of so-called champagne music, staunchly old guard—but he gave a nod to the kids by featuring Merrill, who lit up his short spots with acrobatic runs, a gleaming Fender tone, and the confident grin of a prodigy. Merrill’s Stratocaster heroics were beamed into living rooms once or twice a week, at prime time, and doubtless incited plenty of demand for a two-horned guitar with an asymmetrical headstock. He certainly earned his portraits in Fender ephemera, as did James Burton, the gifted Louisianan and Fender guinea pig who chopped out wily licks behind Elvis manqué Ricky Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

  Meanwhile, Fender never even mentioned Buddy Holly in a magazine ad. Like most adults, the company leaders in Fullerton and Santa Ana were oblivious—convinced, as it seemed safe to be, that this rock ’n’ roll music would be no more than a passing fad.

  23.

  “I REALIZED IT WAS ALL OVER FOR MUSICIANS LIKE ME”

  ENGLAND, 1958

  At home, Buddy Holly’s reign on the charts was brief. “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” yanked him out of Lubbock and onto the package tours that trundled around the US through the boom years of rock ’n’ roll, but he’d only had those two major hits. In England, however, Holly’s singles were outright blockbusters—not just the initial pair, but follow-ups like “Maybe Baby” and “Rave On,” which failed to do much in the US. When Buddy arrived in London in early 1958, he was regarded as a giant: only the second real rock ’n’ roller (after Bill Haley) to make it over the pond.

  The signal moment of Holly’s trip came on Sunday, March 2, when the Crickets appeared on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium: the British equivalent of Ed Sullivan, but with even worse sound. Onstage, Buddy radiated confidence, tilting his shoulders suggestively, holding his long frame taut, as if ready to pounce at any moment. Under the Palladium’s lights, his face no longer seemed gawky or nerdy but casually handsome. On “Oh Boy,” the Crickets’ second number, Buddy let out a wolfish yelp and laid into his Stratocaster, pounding its strings with the abandon he’d learned from watching rhythm and blues artists at home.

  Live, especially, Buddy’s songs were feasts of guitar—and just his guitar, since the Crickets were now a trio. This forced Buddy to conjure all the magic that in other groups might come from two or three performers. They had only modest equipment: an upright acoustic bass, a standard drum kit, and that Stratocaster run through a four-speaker Fender amplifier. Yet with this they attained heights of volume their listeners wouldn’t soon forget. Ronnie Keen, the leader of a large British jazz orchestra, had stood watching Holly and the Crickets perform the night before they appeared on Palladium. “At that moment,” Keen remembered, “I realized it was all over for musicians like me. This was the future. They hardly had any power—only the house mics and that one little amp . . . The bass player, I remember, wasn’t even amplified. But they still managed to make as much noise as the whole of my thirteen-piece orchestra.”

  The Stratocaster was so rare
in England that it qualified as a star next to Buddy himself. Its space-age outline floated before the bare backdrop of the Palladium stage, its pickups chirping through the tinny speakers of a million British televisions, its body a shock of curvaceous brilliance from the country where fun seemed to be a major export. The England of 1958 was still bound by Victorian propriety, still in such a state of recovery from World War II that food rationing was a recent memory. The impressions left by this skinny, charming lad and his sleek guitar had an incalculable effect on the younger generation of Britons. “It showed that to play rock ’n’ roll you did not have to be a bespangled Technicolor freak,” the English Holly biographer Philip Norman wrote. “You did not have to be a pouting Adonis like Elvis . . . You could be thin, hollow-faced, a little goofy; you could even be a foureyes!”

  All over that rainy island, the first generation born since the horrors of the war watched in delight as Holly played on the telly. A twelve-year-old boy in the village of Ripley, southwest of London, stared at Buddy’s guitar, listened to the music, and thought he’d gone to heaven. To Eric Clapton, Fenders seemed like instruments from outer space, promising glints from the future. Here, he realized, was what he wanted and needed—that instrument, that sound, the exhilaration they brought. Even at twelve, Clapton felt deeply alone in the world, and for good reason: His mother had given birth to him when she was sixteen, in the bedroom of her parents’ Ripley flat, and then had largely disappeared. When Clapton later learned that the people raising him weren’t his real parents, but his grandparents, it sent him spiraling into a fever that would last for decades. He hungered after something, perhaps the love he’d been denied, perhaps a way to numb the pain of its absence, and he’d use the guitar as a means to find it.

  That same night, in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, a nearsighted seventeen-year-old named John Lennon slouched toward his grainy screen and studied the chordal riffs Buddy Holly played instead of single-note solos. A few streets over, in a working-class neighborhood of modest town houses, Lennon’s friend Paul McCartney also sat mesmerized by the curves of Buddy’s guitar.

  Three weeks later, when Holly and the Crickets came to Liverpool, neither Lennon, a struggling art school student, nor McCartney, a high schooler, could afford tickets. Instead they pried details out of friends about his set list, his appearance, his guitar. Afterward, Lennon pushed to change the name of their band from the Quarrymen to something like the Crickets, the name of Holly’s band. They settled on the Beetles, which Lennon, a lover of puns, soon changed to reflect the so-called beat music they played. They’d practice in Paul’s living room on soggy afternoons, learning Buddy’s vocal harmonies, which they adopted as their own. Lennon, legally blind, took a new attitude toward his spectacles. Both dreamed of a Fender guitar.

  The curvy shape of the Stratocaster illuminated something else beneath Buddy Holly’s surface, hinted at an aspect of his appeal not obvious from that gawky, white exterior: sex. Outwardly, Holly was no Adonis like Elvis; nor did he radiate lust like Little Richard. But Holly never lacked sensuality—he and Little Richard reportedly shared some wild dressing-room encounters, none strictly heterosexual. “Peggy Sue” may have conveyed a simple, sweet devotion, but those feelings belonged to drummer Jerry Allison (who’d make the real Peggy Sue his bride). Other entries in the Holly catalog, like “Ting-a-Ling” and “Oh Boy,” revealed a libido raging for satisfaction, a young man utterly familiar with the yearning of the flesh.

  Holly’s Stratocaster revealed it, too. For all the practicality that Leo Fender had carefully instilled in his handiwork, his new instrument had arrived hot—not some workman’s modest tool, but a gorgeous object of desire. The Telecaster hadn’t had such an effect, and neither quite had the Les Paul. The Stratocaster was the lone hot rod—a pinup model among musical instruments. For the teenagers watching Buddy Holly at home, its lascivious shape was a tell that this singer, for all his nice neckties, for all the adult tolerance he might receive next to the likes of Elvis Presley, wanted to get it on just as much as they did.

  • • •

  TO ERIC CLAPTON, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, Buddy Holly linked the sound and look of the solid-body electric guitar to rock ’n’ roll, the music they’d spend their lives pursuing. But even if few of its original purveyors had so far performed in England, rock ’n’ roll was a familiar style by then on both sides of the Atlantic. Later that year, English observers got a taste of a ferocious American music that even most Americans had never heard of.

  By the time the invitation arrived from the other side of the world, asking him to tour concert halls in England, Muddy Waters’s career had fallen far from its onetime peak. In 1954, Chess Records had released what would become Waters’s biggest hit: a thick, strutting testament to his own mythical stature called “Hoochie Coochie Man,” whose lyrics left audiences as much laughing in disbelief as howling in appreciation. (It began: “The gypsy woman told my mother / Before I was born / ‘I got a boy child’s coming, / Gon’ be a son of a gun.’ ”) In the wake of its success, Muddy bought himself a house and a car and a Hoochie Coochie Man’s guitar: a Gibson Les Paul gold-top. When he brought it to a gig, everyone in the band marveled, but Muddy had a turbulent relationship with those nine pounds of mahogany and maple. “He didn’t like it, ’cause it was thin and real heavy,” Jimmy Rogers told the writer Sandra B. Tooze.

  The summer after “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Chuck Berry had announced himself to the world with “Maybellene,” and Elvis and Bill Haley became major national stars. Sales of Muddy’s records fell off and never recovered. Younger black listeners increasingly thought of his music as slow, down-home stuff, old-fashioned and even a little shameful. By 1958, he was taking almost any gig around Chicago that would fill the schedule, even playing bargain nights when he had to.

  News of Muddy Waters’s decline hadn’t reached England, though. The country was in the midst of a full-scale folk and jazz explosion, led in part by Chris Barber, a bandleader who invited Muddy over. Barber’s 1920s-style New Orleans jazz had become popular among white college students and liberal intellectuals in England, and this same crowd appreciated folk blues records of the kind Muddy had made before moving to Chicago. To these Brits, appreciating blues and jazz was a stance against the crassness of modern pop music, a way to differentiate themselves from the younger (and often poorer) teens who salivated over singers like Buddy Holly and Little Richard.

  Two months before Muddy Waters left for England, he realized that he’d need to relearn the guitar. He’d stopped playing onstage around 1955, due to a bad cut on his left hand, and had never picked it up again. It was partly laziness, but he’d also grown a little embarrassed by his playing, a little less confident in his music after the rise of rock ’n’ roll. In England, since he’d only have a pianist to accompany him, he’d need to play guitar. Yet for reasons that are unclear, he didn’t pick up his old Gibson. Perhaps the Les Paul had been stolen, or perhaps he’d just grown tired of its heft. Instead, he brought with him a white Fender Telecaster.

  The first England gig was at the Leeds Festival, after which Muddy and his accompanist were written up under the headline “Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano”—a hint of what was to come. In London, a decent press contingent came to see him along with the local blues intelligentsia. The Sunday Times had warned that “this is not the voice of the ‘old-time’ American Negro but of the American Negro as contemporary conditions have made him.” Yet many arrived at St. Pancras Town Hall apparently expecting a poor sharecropper with overalls and a drawl and a shabby acoustic guitar.

  What they saw instead was an urban hustler in a crisp suit, wringing overwhelming volume from a thin, white Fender. As Muddy strummed the first chords on the Telecaster and adjusted the sound of his amp, one well-known critic and his entire retinue got up and walked out. “[Muddy] fiddled with the knobs [of his guitar],” the critic wrote. “The next time he struck a fierce chord, it was louder, and I realized that this was the
established order of things. As he reached for the volume knobs again, I fled from the hall.”

  American blues players had toured England before, and some had used amplified hollow-body guitars, but Muddy’s electric blues played through a Fender solid-body made for a dramatically different experience. In the years since his earliest hits, Muddy’s style had grown only heavier and more aggressive—and that sound had never crossed the Atlantic. “Electric guitar had not really been heard, not loud,” one witness recalled. “The chords, yes, but not that kind of wild playing.” Even those who appreciated Muddy’s performance felt stunned by the volume and tone of his guitar:

  By the time the spellbinding “Blues Before Sunrise” came up, Muddy had the audiences hooked on the end of those curling blue notes that shot, shimmering, from the big amplifier box. Mr. Fender would be amazed at the sounds that Muddy Waters, out of Stovall, Mississippi, can wrench from his usually fiendish invention. And when Muddy slipped a short piece of brass pipe onto the little finger of his left hand, the sounds were eerie and yowling, a distorted electronic voice singing back at the intensely human one—answering, commenting, affirming.

  As Muddy scraped that little slide up the neck, over and over, making one of his climax-inducing moves, the Telecaster screamed, shrill and piercing, all but overwhelming. Muddy loved that sound.

  Many English listeners didn’t. Some were jazz and folk purists who saw the electric guitar as a symbol of commercial rhythm and blues. Some were simply rattled by the forcefulness on display. “It was tough, unpolite, strongly rhythmic music, often very loud but with some light and shade in each number,” Max Jones wrote in Melody Maker. “I liked his singing very much. I also liked some of the violent, explosive guitar accompaniment—though there were times when my thoughts turned with affection to the tones of the acoustic guitar heard on his first record.”