Success For Fender - The Boy Destined To Be An Accountant

June 12, 2012 - PRLog -- Once upon a time in California a 13-year-old boy was obsessed with electronics but when he grew up he was encouraged to study accountancy and a career crunching numbers looked on the cards.

If that had happened, rock and roll greats including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters and Bob Marley would have sounded very different. The boy was Clarence Leo Fender and he was responsible for designing iconic guitars, bass guitars and amplifiers which, quite simply, changed the face of music.

Fender Guitars have an illustrious history dating back to 1946 and the company which still bares Leo’s name has transformed music worldwide and in nearly every genre including rock ‘n’ roll, country and western, jazz, and rhythm and blues.

Everyone from beginners to the world’s most acclaimed artists and performers have used Fender instruments and amps. Even the sound of much of Elvis Presley’s early work owes a huge amount to his guitarist James Burton’s Fender Telecaster.

Leo Fender, who died in 1991 aged 86, is a cultural icon whose contribution to music was recognised in 2009 with a Technical Grammy Award. Not bad for a man who couldn’t even play the guitar!
The achievements of this giant of the music industry were a world away from the lad who, in the autumn of 1928, entered Fullerton Junior College as an accounting major. While studying to be an accountant, he continued to teach himself electronics and to tinker with radios.
Fender then became a deliveryman for a cold storage company where he was later made the bookkeeper. One day a local band leader asked him to build a public address system and the rest, as they say, is history.

Leo Fender loved country music. He once said: “We were trying to get a tone like you get with the steel guitar, because a steel was so much cleaner in sound than an acoustic."

In The Story of the Fender Stratocaster by Ray Minhinnett and Bob Young he also added that the instrument had to be strong enough for musicians to use them in a fight in a club if they had to. "If you get clobbered over the head with one of those, you know you've been hit!" Fender said.

The best known Fender electric guitars are the Stratocaster and Telecaster.  The Telecaster, the prototype of which was produced in 1951, was the first solid-body Spanish-style electric guitar to be commercially mass-produced. The Stratocaster first appeared in 1954, incorporating many design innovations based on feedback from professional musicians, Fender staff and Leo Fender himself.

These two instruments laid the foundation for a new kind of group and a revolution in popular music; the modern rock combo. Electric Fender guitars and amplifiers made it possible for smaller groups of musicians to get together and be heard.

With an accountant’s eye for detail and an inventor’s flair for design, Leo Fender was further refining many of his models right up until his death. His legacy lives on. Bookkeeping’s loss was music’s gain; not bad for a man who couldn’t play a note!

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