The Birth of Loud

The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry that Shaped Rock n' Roll, by Ian S. Port, 340 pages

This is a fantastic read for music lovers, guitar players, and pop-culture historians alike, documenting the early lives and creative lightning bolts that brought us the beginning of the modern guitar era. In the 1930s and 40s, after archtop guitars had been electrified with pick-ups and became regular fixtures on big band stages, it became clear that the electrified, hollowbody archtop could only be turned up so loud before the guitar would begin to produce the awful, overloaded signal known as feedback. Western swing guitarists especially, who wanted to compete more with the other instruments on stage, would typically try to crank up the volume on the amplifier to get a louder, more distorted sound, but it always ended in ear-crushing noise. Leo Fender, not a musician but more of a self-described engineer and tinkerer, began to workshop an idea for a solid body guitar. At roughly the same time, Les Paul, a top-jazz and swing player at the time, was also having a similar epiphany. He began workshopping his own ideas, hoping that a more solid-body style guitar would end the feedback problem. Fender's guitar designs would revolutionize the instrument landscape in the mid-1950s, while Paul got a sweet deal with Gibson guitars, sponsoring their newest solid body guitar that bore his name (the Gibson Les Paul) that would eventually become an iconic piece of equipment for 60s and 70s hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream. This book reads easy and action packed, with short chapters and guitar inventions that quickly became canon for any aspiring player. As much as these two did for guitars in this era, country-picker Merle Travis might be most responsible for the solid body design. He sketched his idea on a bar napkin and gave it to his friend Paul Bigsby, another musician and inventor, who essentially created one of the first solid-body designs. The same design that Leo Fender would shamelessly steal from. With Fender's designs sweeping the country, they stole the market share out from under Gibson and helped influence the golden age of guitars.