FULLERTON — More than two years after the death of Leo Fender, his glasses are still where he left them on his desk at G&L Guitars. So are his coffee cup and his last few notes; and the calendar hasn't been changed from March, 1991.
A little strange? Maybe. But Fender, after all, is nothing less than an icon. A Japanese film crew was through the workshop not long ago to shoot a documentary. A British crew has been there since to film another.
Fender was one of the first people to get really rich from rock 'n' roll. He didn't do it in a recording studio or a record company executive suite, either; he did it in a factory.
He was the first person to mass-produce a first-rate electric guitar, a sort of Model T of rock 'n' roll. His sleek, futuristic Fender Stratocasters--so well-designed that they don't look much different now than they did 40 years ago--have been played by Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, not to mention the garage band down the street. Not bad for a middle-aged electronics nerd.
Making guitars is a sexier business than, say, making concrete, and so the tale of what happened to Fender's companies encompasses corporate intrigue, Japanese millionaires, bitter lawsuits and intense rivalries.
It starts in 1965, the year Fender got rich. That's when he sold his first company, Fender Musical Instruments Corp., to CBS for $13 million--the same amount that the TV network had paid for the New York Yankees a few months earlier. Fender never had anything more to do with the company; in fact, he thought the quality of the guitars CBS made was lousy, a judgment with which plenty of guitar players concurred.
Enter John C. McLaren, an urbane Englishman who was put in charge of the problem child when he was appointed president of CBS' musical instruments unit in 1981.
One of the things McLaren did was start making guitars in Japan; the weak dollar meant that American-made Fender guitars were hugely expensive abroad. But he fought with CBS over moving most of the rest of Fender's guitar production overseas. After all, part of the mystique of the guitars was that they were made in America--and Fender already had a quality problem.
By 1983, McLaren had had enough. He left the day after his 50th birthday by what he says was "mutual agreement." After he left, Fenders started to be made in places like Korea and even--for a time--India.
