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Title details for The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port - Available

The Birth of Loud

Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock 'n' Roll

by Ian S. Port
Pete Simonelli
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
"A hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history" (The New York Times Book Review), this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between the two men who innovated the electric guitar's amplified sound—Leo Fender and Les Paul—and their intense competition to convince rock stars like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to play the instruments they built.
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).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 15, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781508281474
      • File size: 283173 KB
      • Duration: 09:49:56

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Pete Simonelli rolls through this history of the electric guitar like he's cruising down the interstate. His steady pacing and relaxed tone are just what's needed to complement author Ian Port's captivating anecdotal story of innovation and rivalry. Port uses the solid-body electric guitar and bass as metaphors for the cultural changes that occurred from the end of WWII to the mid-1970s while illuminating electric visionaries and trendsetters such as Jimmy Bryant, Merle Travis, Muddy Waters, Dick Dale (whose quest for volume caused Leo Fender to lose hearing in one ear), Carol Kay, Eric Clapton, and, of course, Les Paul (an unforgiving taskmaster). The result is an audiobook that should be mandatory listening in business school (a classic story of three innovators, once friends and later foes) and art school (how technology influences art and vice versa). R.W.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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