『1: "The Man Who Couldn't Play Guitar: The Rise of Leo Fender"』のカバーアート

1: "The Man Who Couldn't Play Guitar: The Rise of Leo Fender"

1: "The Man Who Couldn't Play Guitar: The Rise of Leo Fender"

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He couldn't tune a guitar. He couldn't play a chord. And yet — without him — rock and roll as we know it could not exist.This is the cinematic true story of Leo Fender — born Clarence Leonidas Fender on August 10, 1909 in a barn on his parents' orange grove between Anaheim and Fullerton, California. The boy who lost his left eye to a tumor at age eight and wore a glass eye for the rest of his life. The teenager who saw a homemade radio at his uncle John West's auto-electric shop in Santa Maria and never recovered. The accounting major who never took a single course in electrical engineering. The bookkeeper who got fired from a tire company in 1938 and used six hundred borrowed dollars and a Ford Model A as collateral to open a small radio repair shop on South Spadra Avenue in Fullerton — Fender's Radio Service. The man whose first shop got wiped out by a Santa Ana River flood that same year, and who waded through the floodwaters in a kayak to save what he could before reopening.He never learned to play the instruments he would invent.He spent the early forties listening — really listening — to musicians complaining at his counter. The amps fed back. The pickups buzzed. The hollow-body guitars warped under stage lights. The big band guitarists couldn't be heard over the brass. Every problem the musicians described was an engineering problem, not a musical one. And while the rest of California's young engineers were drafted overseas — Leo Fender, with his glass eye and his exemption from service, was left in his Fullerton shop. With nothing but time. With nothing but tools. With nothing but the slow, patient years that other men didn't have. And he used every minute of them.In 1943 he met Clayton Orr "Doc" Kauffman, a lap steel player who had worked at Rickenbacker. Together they founded K&F Manufacturing in 1945. When Doc pulled out the next year, Leo kept going alone. By late 1947 he had the Fender Electric Instrument Company. By 1948 he had hired George Fullerton as his draftsman. By April 1950 he had launched the Fender Esquire — and shortly after, the two-pickup Broadcaster, renamed the Telecaster after a trademark dispute with Gretsch over their Broadkaster drum line. The first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar in history. While Gibson was still calling Les Paul's prototype "a broomstick with pickups" in Kalamazoo, Leo Fender was shipping Telecasters to dealers across America. The man who couldn't play guitar — beating the man who could — by eleven months.In 1951 he did it again with the Precision Bass — the first mass-produced solid-body electric bass guitar in history. The entire low end of popular music repositioned overnight.Then in 1954 — sitting at a drafting table in Fullerton with a Hawaiian-born draftsman named Freddie Tavares — Leo Fender designed the most influential guitar of the twentieth century. The Fender Stratocaster. Contoured body. Three pickups. A floating bridge with springs underneath. A whammy bar that bent every string at once. Six tuning pegs all on one side of the headstock. Two hundred forty-nine dollars and fifty cents.Buddy Holly strapped one on. A teenage Eric Clapton saw a picture of Buddy Holly with a Stratocaster in a magazine in England — and his life was decided. Jimi Hendrix bought a Stratocaster in London and made it scream, pray, burn, and resurrect itself in front of audiences who did not yet know what electricity could feel like. Stevie Ray Vaughan played one called Number One until the day he died. David Gilmour. Mark Knopfler. Bonnie Raitt. Buddy Guy. John Mayer. Yngwie Malmsteen. Every one of them bending notes through a system of springs Leo Fender drew in pencil at a desk in Fullerton.By the mid-1950s a streptococcal sinus infection began to grind at him. Antibiotics didn't work. Year after year, he got worse. By 1964 he believed he was dying. He started getting his affairs in order. He sold the Fender Electric Instrument Company to Columbia Broadcasting System on January 5, 1965 — for thirteen million dollars. He went home. He lay down to die.And then he changed doctors.A new doctor tried a different antibiotic. Inside of a month, Leo Fender was fully well — for the first time in ten years. He went back to CBS and tried to buy his company back. They refused. So he founded a new company called CLF Research, set up a drafting table, and started drawing again. He couldn't sell guitars under his own brand for ten years because of the non-compete clause. Fine. He'd just design them. He helped two former Fender employees launch Music Man, became its president in 1975, and designed the StingRay — the first production bass with active electronics. After his wife of forty-five years, Esther, died of cancer in 1979, friends introduced him to a widow named Phyllis Thomas. They married on a Love Boat cruise in 1980. He was seventy-one years old. The same year he founded his third company — G&L, named for himself and his ...
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