How an underdog
guitar, the Fender Stratocaster, became the soulof rock 'n' roll
by
GREG QUILL - ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST - The Toronto
Star - April 10, 2004
"There's no sensation like it ... when
you switch on a Fender amp and hear that characteristic `thop' sound, and the
whispering hum of the pickups waiting to make a noise ... and then the crisp,
bright, deep tone of the low E string, so vibrant, so masculine, and you see heads
turn and the crowd start to draw close.
"That's a great feeling."
Toronto
rocker and veteran guitarist Danny Marks is putting into words what he feels every
time he sets his machine — he calls his favourite Stratocaster "Daddy's
little moneymaker" — in motion. He relishes this moment as he recalls
it, and though it has happened often enough to pass below his consciousness for
more than 30 years, this ritual is sacrosanct, the ceremonial preparation for
the psycho-spiritual surge that comes when vibrating strands of steel are transformed
mysteriously by magnets and coiled wire into electric sound.
" 1958 Gibson L5" Daddy's Little Money Maker (not shown) is
my Blue Strat | |
"Danny's Fiesta Red 58 Maple Neck" Click
on picture above
to hear this Surfin'
Safari guitar! |
A big sound. The sound of
Leo Fender's solid body electric guitar, the Stratocaster, enduring icon of the
rock 'n' roll age.
"The Stratocaster does everything," continues
Marks, who has just finished recording Big Town Boy, a CD paying tribute to the
music Toronto's first guitar gods helped make — "guys like Freddie Keeler,
who played with David Clayton-Thomas and The Shays, and Robbie Robertson, with
The Hawks.
"The Stratocaster is architecture ... with the cutaway design,
the fins ... you fall into it from the back and the front. It's a really sexy
thing, with a warm shape, nice curves, thin and not too heavy, and what seems
like a very long neck. It's both male and female, but there's also something dangerous
about a Strat.... It feels almost like a weapon when you sling that strap over
your back. It's a very serious guitar. It can be sweet and it can be mean."
Architecture
was almost certainly on Leo Fender's mind when he designed the Stratocaster —
the first model was issued in 1954, the year Bill Haley recorded "Rock Around
The Clock," which history arbitrarily defines as the official first progeny
of rock 'n' roll — but he could not have known how compelling, comfortable
and infinitely adaptable his guitar would become.
At first an exaggerated
primitive space-age fantasy that alluded to the feats of height and speed in the
U.S. Air Force's daredevil program to break the sound barrier, the Stratocaster
was abandoned a few years later as passé, a relic of the pre-space age,
like cars with massive tailfins and acres of moulded chrome fittings.
It
was replaced in popularity by its predecessor, the unassuming and versatile Fender
Telecaster, whose smaller size, tight, precise tone and gutsy responsiveness had
endeared it to both country and blues guitarists, and by Gibson's hollow-body
Les Paul and solid body SG instruments, which had a distinctively high level of
sustain.
So the Strat languished until the mid-1960s, when Jimi Hendrix
came around.
Hendrix began exploiting qualities — aesthetic, erotic,
metaphorical and sonic — that few before him had known Fender's fantasy guitar
possessed.
"It begged to be rocked," says Kim Mitchell, another
of Toronto's enduring guitar legends. "It begged to be set on fire, swung
over your head.... It wanted to be in the hands of someone with a very strange
personality. It wanted to be plugged into a stack of Marshall amps and made to
roar.
"The Strat rules!" Mitchell exclaims. "It might not
have changed the world, but it sure has changed the lives of a lot of little girls."
As
important as the Stratocaster is to rock, and despite its place as the prototype
of all that followed in electric guitar technology, it was a latecomer, the culmination
of a process that began in the 1920s when guitarists began experimenting with
ways of making themselves heard above the rest of the band.
Resonators —
sound-reflecting metal bowls inserted inside the guitar's wooden frame —
and 12-string guitars with bigger bodies and twice the number of strings were
early physical manifestations of the guitarist's desire to be heard, other than
as a chording adjunct of the rhythm section.
Bottle-neck slides were used
by blues and country pickers on acoustic guitars to simulate and sustain the tonal
qualities of the human voice, but it wasn't until the West Coast jazz and country
guitarist Les Paul in the 1940s more or less perfected the magnetic pick-up that
the instrument we've come to associate with rock 'n' roll found its voice and
its destiny.
The first pick-up was an ad hoc hybrid microphone in which
magnets and tightly coiled copper wire transmuted the vibrations of steel strings
into sound via an electric amplifier — the apparatus first used in American
country music by players of the lap-steel and pedal-steel guitars.
"It
was the jazz guys, particularly Charlie Christian in Benny Goodman's band, who
got there first," says Rik Emmett, former frontman for the hard rock trio
Triumph, a Canadian guitar hero since the 1970s, and a teacher of some renown.
"They
used electrified hollow-body guitars for the first time to give them the volume
to play single-note lines that matched the saxophone and trumpet. It was no longer
a chording instrument.... The guitar could finally talk, it could sing.
"That
was when Leo Fender and Les Paul started their war — how to make it louder.
And that's when rock 'n' roll began, first with T-Bone Walker using the electric
guitar front and centre as a lead instrument. And from there, it's a straight
line to B.B. King to Chuck Berry to Keith Richards to Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix."
The
evolution of the electric guitar has social and cultural overtones, as well as
industrial implications, York University professor and musicologist Rob Bowman
points out.
"It was more complex than making noise," Bowman says.
"In the late 1940s and early 1950s, record companies and producers were encouraging
cross-pollination between segregated black and white musicians, between white
country music and black rhythm `n' blues.
"In Memphis, Sam Phillips
was beginning to record white country singers performing `black' music, and decided
to divest the studio bands of country music identifiers such as steel guitar,
mandolin and fiddle," he continues. "The guitar, the only expressive
instrument R&B and country music had in common, suddenly became extremely
important, particularly when it was picked up by the so-called rebels of rockabilly,
and became associated with youth, emotional intensity, energy.... It was a way
of asserting the identity of a new kind of music."
The popularity of
the electric guitar also grew because it was affordable, portable and extremely
versatile, says Jeff Healey, the Toronto guitar legend, blind from infancy, who
is credited with having developed a radical playing technique — with the
instrument on his lap, and using both hands to play chords, stretch and pick the
strings.
"Technology made that possible for the guitar to emerge from
the background, to come to the front of the stage," Healey says. "In
the hands of people like Scotty Moore (Elvis), James Burton (Ricky Nelson), Carl
Perkins, Albert King, Chuck Berry and Lonnie Mack, it very quickly became obvious
you could use the guitar to make as many sounds as you could imagine.
"And
it didn't cost an arm and a leg."
The electric guitar was synonymous
with rebellion, recalls Domenic Troiano, another Toronto guitar warrior, whose
best work with Bush, Mandala, The James Gang and Guess Who, as well as several
solo projects, was recently released on a 20th Century Masters anthology on Universal
Music.
"You could play it any way you wanted. There were no rules,"
Troiano says. "There was no structure to it. It didn't have the mechanics
of the piano, which I found too restrictive as a child. The electric guitar is
just a hunk of wood and some magnets, and no one could have foreseen what it became
... this fluid thing with endless possibilities. You can sustain notes, bend them
into new shapes, distort them a hundred different ways.... That was the sound
that spoke to me."
And it spoke to Fred Keeler, one of Toronto's most
innovative guitarists during Hogtown's R&B glory days in the early '60s, when
Robbie Robertson was the reigning local guitar slinger, and Keeler tagged his
every lick backing David Clayton-Thomas in The Shays.
"I learned from
watching Robbie play — every guitarist in town did in those days," Keeler
remembers. "But it wasn't till I heard Hendrix's work on `Purple Haze' that
I understood the possibilities of overdrive and distortion. This was definitely
not plinky guitar music. It was wild."
Plinky is not what the electric
guitar does best. And no one would ever look at a Stratocaster, by the late 1960s
the universal icon of the rock age, and expect to hear it go plink.
"You
can't ignore the psychosexual origins of the instrument," Rik Emmett says.
"It's a guitar with a voice, a loud voice, with its own language, punctuation
and syntax. It will always demand to be heard. Danny Cidrone's brilliant solo
on Haley and The Comets' `Rock Around The Clock', Chuck Berry's riff on `Johnny
B. Goode', Hilton Valentine's primal arpeggio on The Animals' `House Of The Rising
Sun,' Eddie Cochran's work on `Summertime Blues,' The Ventures' powerful surf
rock ...
"But for all that, it's still a guitar, still fingers on strings,
still the most intimate and personal form of instrumental expression, not unlike
the guitar the Spanish balladeer of old used to play, serenading his sweetheart
on the balcony.
"The difference is, when you plug this thing in and
crank it, it's a pile-driver, pure and simple."
