By: Rick Landers
If you’re a Fender guitar aficionado and think you’ve got a lock on its history…think again.
Author, Tom Wheeler, has released his latest book, The Fender Archives: A Scrapbook of Artifacts, Treasures, and Inside Information and it’s crammed full of never before divulged information, images, details and anecdotes.
As always, Wheeler’s done his homework and included historical photos, facts and figures, images and copies of archival documents, as well as fueled his book with the inside scoop on key Fender company developments, as told by those who grew up working with Leo Fender. It was a team that included Leo, George Fullerton, Freddie Tavares, a host of working musicians and others who figured out how to make guitars that proved to be both practical and, ultimately, visionary.
The foreword, “A Guitar to Last a Lifetime”, by the legendary guitarist, James Burton, kicks starts The Fender Archives, telling us about how a ’52 blonde Telecaster sitting in a storefront window stole his heart. We can all relate to Mr. Burton when he talks about that purchase during the cusp of his teen years that led to his playing sideman with Ricky Nelson, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.
Tom worked with a pantheon of Fender experts to pull out the stops on his book, including Richard Smith, curator of the Fender Gallery at the Fullerton Museum Center, some of the masters of the Fender Custom Shop like John Page and Mark Kendrick, as well as other celebrated guitar experts, Lee Dickson [Eric Clapton’s guitar tech], vintage guitar expert, George Gruhn, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and more – the list itself will impress and exhaust you!
Be prepared to work when reading this book, as it’s more of an archeological dig than a tourist cruise. The amount of detail can become daunting…in a good way.
You’ll pick the book up, you’ll put it down, you’ll pick it up again. Later, you might grab a glass of wine and roam through the pages and ponder. And like James Burton, you’ll go back and remember the day a Fender guitar first caught your attention and imagination, how your heart skipped a beat or the conflicting emotions wrought by being star struck and jealous when watching a band mate open up the case of their brand new sunburst ’65 Stratocaster – like I did!
The Fender Archives tracks the origins and development of Leo Fender’s vision, his inventiveness and hard work, as well as his good timing.
“Indeed, Fender is more than a brand. The name conjures an edgy, fuel-injected attitude toward creating and performing music, that was born in the late 1940s in a small town in Fullerton, California, a place of orange groves and oil wells where Hawaiian music met country, and Western met swing”. – Tom Wheeler
Beginning with Chapter I – “Reflections – Leo Fender Recalled the Early Years”, the author takes us back to Leo’s early days that reflects the man’s life reflected a true “rags to riches” story about a tinkerer who never learned to play guitar, but built a tool that changed the world of music and the lives around it.
Next up is Chapter 2 – “Big Twang Theory”, the story of the origins of the Telecaster. And it’s a solid body of coverage that includes insights into the significance of Rickenbacker, Merle Travis’s Bigsby guitar, Doc Kauffman, lap guitars and more that influenced Leo’s practical little beast that evolved from the Esquire, Broadcaster, the Nocaster, and the Telecaster. And Tom Wheeler doesn’t miss the details as he offers up information on the skunk stripe, the bolt-on neck, the tooling for the truss rod and more.
Wheeler follows the development of the Telecaster with that of what some consider the ultimate electric guitar, the Fender Stratocaster and the arrival in 1953 of an essential Fender figure – Freddie Tavares.
From helping out at odd jobs, Tavares soon found himself working alongside Leo, penciling out design ideas that launched the Stratocaster. And he was nearby when Leo decided on three pickups saying, “Let’s put in three pickups – two is good, but three will kill ‘em.”
“Someone once said that Leo was in a state of grace when he designed the Stratocaster. I can’t argue with that.” – Paul Reed Smith
Chapter 3 takes us on a ride with Leo Fender and His California Playboys where we’re told about the critical direction Leo took by listening to local players and asking them for ideas to improve his guitar prototypes. And through the “eyes” of old Fender correspondence we’re taken to those early days with talk about the company’s urgent need to transform their prototypes into production models and into the hands of Fender dealers, especially with Gibson’s Les Paul electric guitar project hot on their heels.
The Fender Archives book reaches back to the start up days of Fender, then moves forward in the following chapters feeding us information on the Jaguar, the Jazzmaster, the shift in music from western swing to rockabilly to surf to rock, to punk and more.
A whole chapter tells how the character of Fender’s guitars blended, absorbed then helped define musical trends and scenes. Hawaii’s musical influence resurfaced again in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but stoked in the curling wave of surf music was still tethered to the sounds of Leo’s early lap steel guitars – but, now amped up and reverberating with strapped on Telecasters, Stratocasters, Jaguars and Jazzmasters.
A truly surprising and delightful excursion on amps is Chapter 8 – “Pilgrimage to Fullerton” offered up by amp builder, Alexander Dumble. And it’s worth it’s weight in “Shoreline Gold”. Dumble recalls his tour of the Fullerton plant and the ideas it generated resulting in his own iconic and highly sought after amps.
I need to stop here for a moment to mention the pocket inserts that Tom’s included in his book that are jammed with copies of documents he found in Fender’s archives and presumably in other places whilst doing research.
Fender Archives includes four large envelopes with inserts of copies of documents that are stuffed to include: a pick guard diagram of Eric Clapton’s late ‘80s Signature Stratocaster courtesy of his guitar tech, Lee Dickson; a copy of Leo Fender’s business card; sketches of a phonograph record changer devised by the Kauffman/Fender partnership, a letter of Don Randall frantically urging the company to get the Esquire/Broadcaster guitars on the market and more.
They’re about as close as most of us will ever get to the authentic Fender archives and they pull you back into the early Fender shop, where you feel like you’re in the mix with Leo, George, Freddie, Don and the others.
History is never always pretty and Wheeler doesn’t pull punches or glaze over the dark times.
In Chapter 9 – Meet the New Boss, Tom makes it clear the new boss is not the same as the old boss. Unlike Leo’s intent to give guitar players what they wanted, the new CBS owners focused on the bottom line and it’s at this point that many guitarists consider the pivot point where Fender quality declined. It would be years later before the company would win back its market with Dan Smith era models and their Custom Shop quality. Wheeler tells us about “the Japanese closing in”, referring to the intrusion of high quality Japanese copies of Fender guitars that began to flood the market.
In 1982, Fender began its own line-up of high quality Japanese made guitars, but that’s another story that’s ripe for telling in another book.
The Fender Archives offers an up close and personal account of this era and it’s an eye opener. He gives us some insights into the development of the Fender Maurader and the Starcaster, including a Maurader with “invisible” or concealed pickups. The now defunct models are interesting curiosities and are rightly placed in a book about the history of the company.
In the same Chapter there’s some welcome digests from Freddie Tavares’s daily log, along with insights into Leo’s ideas about acoustics, quality control problems and an aside about the company buying thousands of cases with the wrong handles.
Nope, not all Fender history is pretty. But, the company does have a history of hitting a lot of ideas out of the park and into the stands where many of us wait anxiously for our next Stratocaster, Telecaster, Twin Reverb, Showman or Custom Shop job.
Chapter 10 – Revival: Larry Thomas and the Turning of the Tide, takes us from survival territory to revival territory, where in the hands of CEO, Larry Thomas, Fender returned to Leo’s philosophy of listening to guitar players and his own employees. The chapter is essentially an interview of Larry and we see that he walked the talk. When an employee liked a color on a car he saw at a restaurant and painted a couple of guitars to show the boss, the color became a Fender color – Lexus green.
And, it didn’t hurt that Larry Thomas played guitar.
With his new book, The Fender Archives: A Scrapbook of Artifacts, Treasures, and Inside Information, Tom Wheeler has given us a choice.
We can fly through all of the book’s very cool images and remarkable inserts or we can muscle our way through Wheeler’s in-depth and informed assortment of Fender history like archeologists on a dig, experiencing one intriguing discovery after another.
I’d wager a bet that we’ll all do both.
Amazon: The Fender Archives: A Scrapbook of Artifacts, Treasures, and Inside Information.
amj (9 years ago)
A companion to this book is the Fender Bible which contains a list of all the Fender stuff and these can be heard on a DVD included.