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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