The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll Audiobook (Free)

“A hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history” (THE BRAND NEW York Times Book Evaluate), this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between your two males who innovated the electric acoustic guitar’s amplified audio—Leo Fender and Les Paul—and their intense competition to convince rock stars just like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to play the instruments they built.

In the years after World War II, music was growing from big-band jazz into rock and roll ’n’ move—and these about The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, as well as the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny firm advertised the initial solid-body guitar, the Esquire, musicians immediately saw its appeal. Not to be out-maneuvered, Gibson, the biggest guitar manufacturer, raced to create a competitive product. The business designed an “axe” that could make Fender’s Esquire appear cheap and confident Les Paul—whose endorsement Leo Fender had sought—to put his name on it. Thus was born the guitar globe’s most warmed rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo.

While Fender was a quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was an excellent but headstrong pop star and guitarist who spent years toying with brand-new musical technology. Their contest converted into an hands race as the utmost inventive musicians of the 1950s and 1960s—including bluesman Muddy Waters, rocker Pal Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton—used one maker’s electric guitar or another. By 1969 it had been clear these fresh electric instruments got launched music into a radical new age, empowering artists using a vibrancy and quantity nothing you’ve seen prior attainable.

In “an exceptional dual family portrait” (The Wall Road Journal), Ian S. Port tells the full story in The Birth of Loud, offering “spot-on individual characterizations, and erotic paeans towards the bodies of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The tale of these instruments is the story of America in the postwar period: loud, cocky, brash, aggressively fresh” (The Washington Post).