by Ian Port
The next morning, Clapton learned that Jimi Hendrix was dead. Instead of seeing Sly the previous evening, he’d gone to a party and spent the night at the apartment of his new girlfriend. Exhausted and desperate for rest, but riding a tumultuous mix of substances, Hendrix had taken a heavy dose of prescription sleeping pills, and the combination of drugs caused him to throw up in his sleep—but also kept him from waking up and gagging. Jimi had lain there and choked, dying of asphyxiation while his girlfriend slept beside him, sometime in the early morning hours of September 18, 1970.
Friends and fans were devastated by the loss of such a prodigious talent and such a warm, kind, and shy man. Eric Clapton felt the pain especially deeply, finding himself that Friday morning “filled with a feeling of terrible loneliness.” In his presence, Hendrix had diminished some of Clapton’s solitude; in his tragic and needless death, he reinforced it.
Inspired by Hendrix, countless future individuals would express themselves through the electric guitar, many in ways that couldn’t be imagined in 1970. Yet there’d never be another guitar player quite like him, someone who seemed to find new possibilities for the instrument with every flick of his fingers. From that day on, listeners could only ponder the vast and thrilling recorded legacy Hendrix left behind, and imagine the surprises and revelations he might have concocted had he lived past the age of twenty-seven. Would he have gone into jazz with his friend Miles Davis? Prog rock with the English virtuosos? Punk metal, even?
Perhaps some glimpse of his project lived on through the career of Clapton, who continues to perform past his seventieth birthday, exploring many genres of music but always circling back to the blues. In the early seventies, only a few years after Jimi died, Clapton switched loyalties from various Gibson models to a Fender Stratocaster. Since then, he has played the double-cutaway Fender model almost exclusively among electric guitars. There is some irony in the fact that the man who resurrected the Gibson Les Paul Model in the midsixties became an icon inextricably linked with what is arguably Leo Fender’s most beloved design. But it shows, perhaps, the inherent worthiness of each of these instruments—and the towering eminence of their namesakes.
• • •
IN THE YEARS when Jimi Hendrix was elevating the Stratocaster into the most iconic silhouette in rock music, CBS seemed to be doing everything possible to ruin the company that made it.
Leo Fender had believed in selling tools that would give a lifetime of service, knowing this meant fewer sales and less profit but more loyal customers. Under his leadership, the company strove to uphold strict standards of quality, and often (though not always) succeeded. Amps were made excessively sturdy; only the best cuts of wood were used for guitars; even the wiring for pickups was carefully selected and handled.
But in the new factory building CBS had erected next to the old Fender plant, workers struggled with cheaper components, a tolerance for poor build quality, and shoddy product designs. The consultants who’d written in 1964 that a staff of college-trained engineers could surely develop new products as well as Leo Fender were proven spectacularly wrong. After the CBS takeover, not a single new product from Fullerton achieved anything close to the reputation of the Fender classics. Leo’s Telecaster, Stratocaster, Precision and Jazz basses, and virtually every amplifier he made between 1952 and 1965 would endure for decades as coveted vintage trophies or reissued models in near-continuous production. Later guitar designs, like the Jazzmaster and the Jaguar, would remain cherished underdogs, also in production.
The same couldn’t be said of CBS-Fender’s first major post-Leo product line, a prototype from which had appeared on Forrest White’s desk in 1966. The more that White, then director of manufacturing, had looked at the new amplifier—a large, silvery box with futuristic details straight out of The Jetsons—the less he’d liked it. For one thing, there was no easy way to repair the amp. Ease of maintenance had been a Fender hallmark since the days of Leo’s radio shop, because out on the road, in the hands of musicians, everything eventually breaks.
The more urgent problem with the prototype on White’s desk was that it sounded awful. This amp, unlike any previously made by Fender, was solid state—that is, it relied not on old-fashioned glass vacuum tubes for power, but on transistors, the tiny semiconductors that would become an integral part of radios, calculators, and computers. Transistors were lighter, were cheaper, ran cooler, and to some ears, offered greater sonic fidelity than the 1920s vacuum tube technology. Leo had wanted to get out of Fender in part because he thought that more complex, transistor-driven amps would render his technical skills obsolete.
Well, this one sure wouldn’t. CBS engineers had rushed out designs for the solid-state models, and in their haste had forgotten to make them sound good. White found the tone of this prototype flat and dull compared to the tube amps rolling out of Fullerton. Where a Deluxe Reverb or a larger Twin Reverb projected a lush, three-dimensional sonic image, adding so much character to the guitar that it qualified as an instrument on its own, this solid-state amp emitted just a dry brittleness. Pleasing character—not necessarily high fidelity—was what players wanted in a guitar amplifier, and this one didn’t have it at low volumes or high ones.
White refused to approve the solid-state amp for production, declaring the amps unworthy of Leo Fender’s name. According to his memoir, the resulting spat with CBS executives led to his resignation from Fender on December 6, 1966, ending his twelve-year run in Fullerton. White then went to work for the parent company of Gibson. CBS, meanwhile, released the hurried new solid-state amps to an icy reception from players and such abysmal sales that it abandoned the entire line a short while later. The company’s first major research-and-development effort in Fullerton had proven a complete failure.
In these years, nearly every factory employee witnessed an episode in Fender’s decline. Charlie Davis, a longtime worker in the plant and the service center, shuddered over the cheaper bridge CBS designed for the Stratocaster, which couldn’t hold the whammy bar without its threads getting stripped, and, due to its lighter weight, didn’t sound as good as the old one. Davis shook his head at the too-large drill bit CBS insisted on using on a hole for one component. He had to insert a toothpick in the hole to make sure the part stuck, and recalls four years of wrangling the corporate bureaucracy before that one drill bit was changed.
Abigail Ybarra continued winding the pickups for which she’d eventually become famous, having left her initials on some of the best-sounding Fender guitars of the fifties and sixties. She too was flabbergasted by the new mandate. Parts came to her workbench and pickups left her care that would never have passed quality standards before. “And CBS came and said use it, use everything,” she recalled. “We had to get used to doing things like that.”
Under Leo’s management, Fender employees had expected to stay at the company for their entire working lives. Now that the founder was out of the picture, many started to question that assumption, especially given that few of their bosses felt the same way. Babe Simoni, who as a hotheaded new arrival had unknowingly yelled at Leo Fender back in the early fifties, took bets with his coworkers on how long each new CBS-installed department head would last. It became a belief at Fender that the parent company would send executives out to Fullerton to work as punishment, exiling them from the real action in New York.
Even Don Randall was struggling: trying to live in California, work in New York City, and run the sole manufacturing arm of a company whose real expertise lay in radio, television, and recording. The ruthless Ivy Leaguers who oversaw CBS pressed him for cost savings, and his once-loyal salesmen grew disgruntled. Randall had been forced to lower the commissions of the Fender jobbers he’d relied on for so long—some of whom had earned more per year than CBS chairman William Paley himself—and this led to a near-revolt. As usual, Randall answered the jobbers’ complaints with a firm hand, writing in a letter of June 1967: “I am sure you all realize that the ‘fairyland’ in which you were living so
me day had to revert into something approaching reality.” Though there was nothing Randall could do for his salesmen, the reality hit hard.
Randall began to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t an organization man at heart, if he lacked the necessary cunning to climb a corporate ladder. At Fender, he’d made all the big decisions himself, with almost no one to second-guess him. Running the CBS musical instruments division was entirely different: the commuting to the East Coast, the endless meetings, the corporate politics, the decisions-by-committee, the demands of the bean counters. All these guys with PhDs who thought they knew the guitar business but had no idea of what the average pro musician or teenage garage rocker really wanted. Leo Fender had certainly been cranky and difficult to work with, but he’d valued his customers above all else.
One day in April 1969, Randall’s oldest son, Don Jr., returned home on a day when he thought his father was at work to find a brand-new gold Cadillac parked in the driveway. Don Jr. thought it was the ugliest car he’d ever seen—metallic paint and wheel skirts hanging under the fenders; a typically gaudy late-sixties land yacht. He went inside to find a beaming grin stretching across his father’s square face. That morning, Don Randall had told CBS to shove it. After four years as an underling of William Paley, Randall had requested a release from his contract, quit the corporate behemoth for good, and gone straight out to buy himself a flashy new car.
The Caddy was only the latest symbol of Randall’s remarkable success. The poor boy from a family of struggling Idaho farmers now owned a collection of airplanes, and kept avocado and lemon trees on the spacious lands of his Tustin home. Still tanned and fit at fifty-one, Randall felt himself ill suited for permanent retirement after leaving CBS. Aching for a return to the business he loved, he founded his own eponymous amplifier company the very next year, and ran it until 1987. Randall Amplifiers still operates today, supplying formidable equipment to players like Metallica’s Kirk Hammett.
Don Randall spent the rest of his life living comfortably in Orange County, surrounded by his wife, Jean, and his three children—Don Jr., Kathy, and Tim—until he passed away on December 23, 2008, at the age of ninety-one. Within the musical instrument industry, Randall became widely recognized as a pioneer, a man whose genius for marketing and gregarious personality rocketed a California upstart into the lead role in its industry. Working with Fender ad man Bob Perine, Randall had changed the image of the guitar in the popular mind, transforming it from a specialized tool for professionals to an everyday consumer product, a shapely and lively addition to the average American living room. Whether or not Leo fully appreciated his enormous and essential contribution to Fender’s success—and it’s likely he didn’t—the company, the electric guitar, and popular culture wouldn’t be what they are without Don Randall.
• • •
TWO YEARS AFTER selling his instrument business to CBS, Leo Fender visited a different doctor than the one who’d been treating his strep infection. This one tried something new. Leo later said it was a massive dose of antibiotics; other acquaintances recall that the treatment skirted the edge of legitimate medicine. Either way, after briefly making him very sick, this new fix did something the carrot juice, soup diets, and prior doctoring never had. It killed the strep.
Thus, within a few years of selling Fender, Leo had regained good health. In 1969, he turned sixty years old. He was now stunningly wealthy, with no growing factory to oversee anymore. Many years of life lay ahead, and Leo would make the most of them.
After the sale, Leo bought land around Southern California, eventually developing his own eighteen-acre business park along the newly named Fender Avenue in Fullerton. He became a private lender to close friends and associates. He was still under contract to develop instruments for CBS, but the company showed no interest in the new ideas he came up with. So he tried out retirement, ordering a new yacht from Stephens Brothers in Stockton almost every year until 1974, when he took delivery of a fifty-one-foot cruiser called the Aquafen IX. He and Esther traveled to China, Egypt, Hawaii, Alaska, and elsewhere; with his beloved Nikons, Leo photographed countless vacations and cruises, though usually training his lens on some mechanical device that would be invisible to anyone else, like the anchor winch on the bow of a ship.
Leo had known almost nothing else in his life besides work, and soon, it seems, he was bored with relaxation. He still ached to answer musicians’ needs with the best possible equipment. He felt guilty about handing off his factory employees—whom he cared for and who had adored him—to the cold corporate atmosphere of CBS. And although he never quite said it himself, Leo almost certainly regretted selling the little company he’d founded in the back of a radio repair shop so many years earlier. Especially once he saw the lousy products CBS started to churn out under his name. Almost as soon as his noncompete clause with CBS expired, he leapt right back into making instruments.
Leo didn’t want to run another large enterprise. Instead, he wanted, as the Fender historian Richard Smith put it, “a place to tinker and some friends around to have lunch with.” In 1972, Leo Fender and Forrest White founded a new instrument company, bringing in former Fender veterans like George Fullerton and Babe Simoni. This outfit would eventually become Music Man, a Southern California enterprise that continues today. Though Leo funded the company and designed the instruments, he kept his involvement quiet. His Music Man StingRay electric bass would prove a classic design, and musicians loved the rich, tube-driven tone of Music Man amplifiers. A rift among the managers and financial problems eventually led to the sale of Music Man to a guitarist and entrepreneur named Ernie Ball, but by then, Leo had started another company.
“G&L” stood for “George and Leo”—Fullerton and Fender—although once again, Leo designed the instruments and put up most of the money. He and George worked closely together through the 1970s and ’80s—so closely, in fact, that according to George’s son, Geoff, Fullerton’s house once had a private phone line to which only Leo knew the number, so he could call at any hour of the day and run ideas by the partner he’d had since 1948. Even when Leo was out on a cruise, it wasn’t unusual for George to get calls from his friend late at night and, once he got on the line, to hear Leo pitch a new idea for a guitar pickup or bridge.
Leo and Esther traveled extensively, but by the end of the 1970s, their adventures ceased. Esther had fallen ill with lung cancer. To make life easier on her, the couple moved out of their spacious ranch house and into a mobile home on the north side of town. Leo might have been the only local yacht-owning millionaire who lived in a trailer park. But after a three-year battle with lung cancer, on August 1, 1979, Esther Fender died at the age of sixty-five. The vibrant, teetotaling party girl was still listed on her death certificate as a telephone operator—the steady job that had helped cover the paychecks at the Fender factory back in the 1940s and ’50s, and had also likely encouraged her habit of smoking. She’d been an essential piece of the Fender project, not only with the financial support she’d given Leo, but in the bottomless confidence she placed in him.
Esther’s passing shattered the normally stoic Leo Fender far more than many expected, or perhaps even realized. He felt loneliness and profound guilt at all the years he’d left her alone, especially those while she was ill with cancer. Seeing their close friend wracked with grief and guilt, George and Lucille Fullerton asked a friend from church, a divorcee named Phyllis, to come talk to him. Left alone with this kind, gregarious younger woman, Leo poured out his feelings. Phyllis became a regular at dinners with George, Lucille, and Leo, and the Fullertons soon saw Leo’s spirits improve—indeed, they saw a chatty, even flirtatious side emerge from their laconic friend. Apparently, Leo only needed to be seated next to a cute blond woman to open up.
Only a year after Esther’s death, Leo and Phyllis married, moving into a comfortable hillside house in Fullerton. The newlyweds honeymooned on a cruise boat, where, on the first night, Phyllis entered their stateroom bathroom to find a small, elegant blac
k box on the counter. She thought it was a gift Leo had slyly left behind, a little extra present to celebrate their nuptials. She opened it, and found instead a shiny brown glass eye. In all the time they’d known each other, all through their courtship and wedding, Leo Fender hadn’t said a word about his childhood accident.
When he and Phyllis weren’t taking cruises, Leo’s life followed the same pattern it had for decades. Each day he awoke, dressed, drove for ten minutes in his cushy white Lincoln down to the plant, and went in to work in a windowless office where he spent the day designing components for new guitars. Even as his reputation grew dramatically with the popularity of rock music, Leo rejected the idea that the models he’d designed in the 1950s and ’60s were superior to what he made in the present. G&L produced a full line of electric guitars and basses, many of them packed with innovative new features, and, as much as he could, Leo resisted copying the old shapes and designs of classic instruments like the Telecaster and Stratocaster.
Although G&L was minuscule compared to Fender, Leo’s new firm came into conflict with his old one. There was sniping about the shape of its headstocks, just as there’d been in the mid-fifties with Paul Bigsby, and legal action over G&L’s use of the name Leo Fender, rights to which CBS had purchased in 1965.
Most intriguing, though, was a 1970s CBS-issued trade magazine article asserting that Freddie Tavares, who’d worked in Leo’s lab during the fifties, actually designed several of Fender’s classic instruments. Several Fender employees would later make such arguments in interviews and memoirs, claiming credit for certain features, but this one particularly enraged Leo. He’d apparently been scratching out a diagram for a new circuit and calculating some figures on a yellow legal pad when he saw the story. He quickly began writing out a response, addressing it to CBS president William Paley himself.
