Monday, August 10, 2009
Today is the late LEO FENDER'S Birthday...
My original FENDER Stratocaster...Remembering Leo Fender
By Tom Wheeler
There is a good chance that his office would have disappointed the lowest federal bureaucrat in Washington. It was a small room, sparsely furnished—no carpet, functional lighting, with a drafting table piled high with blueprints; the monotonic paint was vaguely institutional. A metal bookcase was crammed with speaker parts and catalogs from electronics suppliers. On the modest, metal-topped desk sat a Styrofoam coffee cup that, while disposable, was nevertheless being saved; it was labeled with a name carefully printed on masking tape in ballpoint pen: Leo. A side door opened into a large, concrete-floored room full of industrial drills and punch presses. There were no clues to the fact that the occupant of the office was a millionaire executive and a leader of his industry, though the absence of frills and the palpable air of utility and frugality befit the man who designed it, Clarence Leo Fender.
If historians can’t pinpoint the first solidbody electric Spanish guitar, it’s partly because of a lack of agreement on criteria that would define it. Was it a Hawaiian lap steel modified by some obscure soul who hammered frets into his guitar, tuned it to standard pitch and flipped it on its side? Was it Lloyd Loar’s short-lived, seldom seen Vivi-Tone of 1933, with its impractical pickup and oddball construction (sort of a full-length neck assembly with a guitar top attached to it)? Was it Rickenbacker’s Model B Spanish guitar of 1935, with an inconveniently small, chambered body of Bakelite, a short scale, and its frets and neck molded into a single unit? Or Slingerland’s late-’30s Songster Style 401, called by some the first “modern” solidbody with its full 25" scale, real frets, and wooden body?
Some point to Les Paul’s “Log,” a makeshift contraption consisting of a neck, hardware and strings attached to a 4x4” pine board with body “wings” stuck on the sides. There were more than a few drops of bad blood among various parties concerning a guitar designed by Merle Travis and built in 1948 by Paul Bigsby; my own contender for the “first modern solidbody” title, it had neck-through construction, a headstock profile that foreshadowed the Stratocaster, and a somewhat Les Paul-like body silhouette.
The Vivi-Tone, Rickenbacker, and Slingerland were innovative, to be sure, but aside from suggesting to anyone who was aware of them that the solidbody concept might be worth pursuing, it would be hard to document their influence on the pioneers who designed practical solidbody guitars. Although the ingenious Paul Bigsby almost certainly influenced Leo Fender to some degree, he never wanted to be a major manufacturer, and according to former Gibson president Ted McCarty, the time-honored Les Paul of 1952 was not so much a fulfillment of Les Paul’s request for a solidbody but rather a response to the Telecaster. As much as we might revel in the romance of a tidy, straight-line evolution traceable to some hallowed First Guitar, the story of the solidbody’s development is rather a tale of sometimes simultaneous efforts by independent builders, each with his own influences and insights. A few of their ideas are still with us every time we play or hear an electric guitar, but most are long forgotten. As with many species, the solidbody’s story is marked with more than a few evolutionary dead ends.
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LOLLAPALOOZA ended in Chicago today...
In sweltering heat! We had a downpour in Oak Lawn for about one half an hour today!
RANKIN/BASS' PINOCCHIO'S CHRISTMAS
This came out last year in the RED BOX SET of Christmas Classics...I also have it on a seperate disc.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Tom Frederick!
August 11th is one of my good pal's Birthdays...Tom Frederick! Tom assisted with my RANKIN/BASS research right from the beginning and has the same love of old movies and television shows. He just joined FACEBOOK today under THOMAS FREDERICK...so you may want to stop and wish him a happy birthday there!
Sunday, August 09, 2009
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THE BRAZEN HEAD October 3rd 9pm
THE STARVING ARTISTS are playing THE BRAZEN HEAD BAR 13602 S. Cicero Avenue, Crestwood, Illinois at 9pm Saturday night October 3rd! Would love to see everyone out from this area. Don't forget about BOBBY McGEE'S August 29th 9pm in Crest Hill, Illinois too! Saturday, August 08, 2009
SCREEN NOVELTIES in Hollywood, CA
My pals Seamus and Mark did a wonderful job in one of the NEW MAD MONSTER PARTY documentaries of explaining ANIMAGIC! Here is what they did with HANNA-BARBERA'S FLINSTONES in THE FLINTSTONES ON THE ROCKS
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My pal JACK DAVIS! I talked about him a little bit in the new MAD MONSTER PARTY documentary. He always told me that the original FRANKENSTEIN and Boris Karloff scared him greatly as a child and he ended up running out of the theatre. Later he would do countless versions of the FRANKENSTEIN's monster character including FANG in MAD MONSTER PARTY.
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