The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock 'n' Roll
By Ian S. Port
Read by Pete Simonelli
Unabridged
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2 Formats: CD
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2 Formats: Library CD
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ISBN: 9781508281498
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ISBN: 9781508281481
Runtime: | 9.83 Hours |
Category: | Nonfiction/Music |
Audience: | Adult |
Language: | English |
Summary
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
A #1 Amazon.com bestseller in Popular Culture
Runner-Up for the Porchlight Best Business Book of 2019 in Narrative & Biography
In the years after World War II, music was evolving from big-band jazz into rock ’n’ roll—and these louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny firm marketed the first solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire, musicians immediately saw its appeal. Not to be out-maneuvered, Gibson, the largest guitar manufacturer, raced to build a competitive product. The company designed an “axe” that would make Fender’s Esquire look cheap and convinced Les Paul—whose endorsement Leo Fender had sought—to put his name on it. Thus was born the guitar world’s most heated rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo.
While Fender was a quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was a brilliant but headstrong pop star and guitarist who spent years toying with new musical technologies. Their contest turned into an arms race as the most inventive musicians of the 1950s and 1960s—including bluesman Muddy Waters, rocker Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton—adopted one maker’s guitar or another. By 1969 it was clear that these new electric instruments had launched music into a radical new age, empowering artists with a vibrancy and volume never before attainable.
In “an excellent dual portrait” (The Wall Street Journal), Ian S. Port tells the full story in The Birth of Loud, offering “spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The story of these instruments is the story of America in the postwar era: loud, cocky, brash, aggressively new” (The Washington Post).
Editorial Reviews
Editorial Reviews
Details
Details
Available Formats : | CD, Library CD |
Category: | Nonfiction/Music |
Runtime: | 9.83 |
Audience: | Adult |
Language: | English |
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