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Recent Articles: • The Fabulous Fifties • Rock, Rock, ROCKABILLY BOOGIE! • The year-end review: • Blackie Goes To Hollywood The Fabulous Fifties - 02/23/2010 The Fabulous Fifties: From the (Rickenbacher) Frying Pan to The Flying V So this guy walks in to a music store, January, 1950. He's got a big gig coming up, playing Western Swing in a cafetorium. Assuming the store has a selection of the latest and greatest, what are the options for a rig? Telecaster? 2 years away. Stratocaster? Not for another 4 years. Les Paul? Great player, but there's no such guitar. Think he uses an Epiphone, Gibson's big rival. So... maybe a lap steel? Or, if you're rich, there's Gibson's new ES-5, but prepare to wait 5 years for Seth Lover to "Apply For " the famous "Patent". Rumor has it that Slingerland has built some solidbodies, whatever those are. AMPS? The news is a bit better, here, with a few hepcats sporting the big, bad, 25w "Dual Professional" from Doc Kauffman's partner, Clarence Leo Fender, over at the radio shop. For the most part, though, it's a world of metal-tubes, Class A, single puny speakers (field transformer speakers; those fancy magnet jobs are just coming on) , with scarcely enough decibels to cause a ruckus in a public library. At the show that night, our hero slobbers on an ungrounded mic, and his skeleton lights up like a cartoon. He finally comes to, in a hospital bed, only now it's December 31st, 1959. He groggily requests to be taken to a music store, reasoning that it's New Year's Eve, so he MUST have a gig. WHAT THE...? Gold Tops are cheap and out-of-production. The store is blowing out the new 'Bursts for $200, since, once again, they didn't sell at Christmas. The new ES-335 cured the feedback problems created my the deafening roar of the 4-tube, class A/B Tweed Twin. Esquires, Broadcasters, NoCasters, Telecasters, Stratocasters, MusicMasters, Jazzmasters, Flying Vs, Explorers, Melody Makers, Juniors, Specials, TVs, Round-Ups, 6120s,... and, now, Leo's Orange County rival, Rickenbacker, is sending a few solidbodies to Liverpool, England. Hey, you never know. WHAT HAPPENED WHILE OUR MAN SLEPT? Hank died. Elvis and Buddy emerged, fully formed, from the forehead of Zeus. Bands got smaller, more peripatetic, and WAY louder. Yeah, there were electric guitars before and after the Decade of the Tailfin. And, yeah, a whole population of players can't live without Marshall designs from the mid-to-late 1960s. But for 90% of serious guitarists, nothing beats a Fifties Tele, Strat, Paul, or 335 TO THIS DAY. Was it a latter-day rennaissance? A concatonation of "Greatest Generation" ingenuity meets the freewheeling demands of The Atomic Cafe Baby Boomers? Yes, combined with irreplacable timbers, irreplacable luthiers, the Darwinian winnowing out of inferior specimens. We are the stewards of a finite supply of the American Stradivarius. |