Unraveling Fender's CBS Era: Insights and Opinions

PJ Pat dives deep into the intriguing history and impact of Fender's CBS era, drawing inspiration from an article in GUITARIST magazine. Discover the debates between pre-CBS and CBS Fender guitars, learn about Leo Fender's legacy, and how corporate changes influenced the quality and production of Fender guitars. 

PJ Pat also shares personal anecdotes about his Fender guitars and offers a critical look at the shifting paradigms in the electric guitar industry. Ideal for guitar enthusiasts and rock musicians, this episode balances historical insights with personal reflections, making it a must-listen for fans of Fender's storied history.

00:14 Fender's Early Days and Iconic Guitars
04:20 The CBS Era Begins
09:33 Changes and Challenges Under CBS
15:48 The Eternal Debate: Pre-CBS vs. CBS Fenders
21:22 Modern Guitar Quality and Personal Preferences
22:52 Conclusion and It’s 1 Louder Merch Plug to support the show

Transcript

Hey, rock, fan and Freaks. Thank you for joining the It's 1 Louder podcast. My name is PJ Pat and this episode is particularly aimed at all. You rock musicians out there, specifically all you guitar players out there. I found this article talking about Fender, the CBS era in the latest, uh, GUITARIST magazine.

Very core article. Uh, so for those of you who don't know Fender, I guess it's a tossup, which is a top brand in guitar, whether it's Gibson or Fender. I personally think it's Fender because Leo came out with the first solid bodied guitar, so I think he deserves the mantle for that. Leo Fender, the legend himself.

I'm a big fan, obviously offender. I got my George Harrison a Beatles replica guitar when they did the last. Concert on the rooftop. George Harrison, uh, pretty much played a guitar that looked very similar to this one, and as soon as I saw this, I just had to get it. Good old, trustworthy Telecaster. The Telecaster came out in 1950.

Pretty much four years after Leo Fender founded Fender Musical Instruments came up with this first solid body guitar. Believe it or not, when Leo Fender. Started the company, he was actually working on amps and lap seal guitars, and only after a couple years started working on experimenting on solid body guitars.

I guess it's still a classic, you know, classics never die. And then four years later, 1954, this iconic guitar came along right here, the Strat. AKA Stratocaster. This one, personally, it means a lot to me. My wife got this for me on my 40th birthday, so 10 years ago, pretty much this came out and they were called the Shaw Buckles because Tim Shaw.

Is a very famous pickup designer. I think he came from Gibson, or he worked for Gibson for a couple years. And Tim Shaw very, very coveted pickup man, maker, uh, designer I should say, and Thinner was able to snatch him up for a couple years. And this guitar was the first year where they came up with Tim Shaw's design of the Hum Bucker.

So they actually call this. Guitar, the Shaw Bucker. And man, I absolutely love this thing. If you can check out the nut here, it is actually stainless steel versus, you know, the, uh, what is it, plastic or ebony type of nut. And since then they haven't really come out with this stainless steel nut anymore.

I'm not sure why. I'm not sure if they think it affects the sound, but I absolutely love this thing. This thing is a. Workhorse, it's got locking tuners and man, you just really can't go wrong. It keeps in tune perfectly. You know, sometimes I won't play this guitar for a couple of months and then come back to it and it's just turned perfectly.

Yeah, so I'm a big fan of the Strat. For me, the neck of the Strat just feels so much more comfortable than let's say a Les Paul. Don't get me wrong, I love Gibson's. I mean, the sound of Les Paul is really unmatched when it comes to rock and roll and playing heavy music. For me, what, uh, takes a cake with fender is the feel and comfort of the neck.

I don't know, it just feels like home to me, you know, compared to me playing a Les Paul, I just feel so much more comfortable playing a fender neck, you know, with their design. And they have obviously all kinds of variety, you know, D shapes, C shape, D two C, all this stuff. But, um, you know, for a Strat, you know, in particular, nothing beats it for me.

So this is definitely my desert island. Guitar if I were to pick one. Alright, the art's called The Big Deal with an amazing Strat right there. Look at this. Unbelievable. Alright, you ready to get into this? Let's do this. Welcome to the It's one Louder podcast. Your host, PJ Pat, has done absolutely nothing that you would know about.

I'll write the article is called The Big Deal Fender's, CBS Era, with this beautiful, beautiful traditional coffee mug Strat. Look at that nice wear and tear there. Okay, so 1965, the year that the giant CBS corporation bought fender for many, that moment marks the start of rot setting in at California's finest electric guitar maker.

So for a lot of guitar collectors and musicians and rock stars that can afford classic fenders, the pre CBS era is the best. So, like I said, fender, Leo Fender started. Fender musical instruments back in 1946 and in 1965, that's when CBS purchased his company. And a lot of people say that that was the beginning of the end in terms of quality control and not really meeting the standards that Leo Fender had set for his guitars.

And so if you talk to a lot of collectors and a lot of people who know what's going on. They definitely look at pre 1965 fenders as the holy grail type of fenders. I'm sure you've heard the 50 nines are the top premium holy grail type of guitars in within that pre CBS era. But this article focuses on the area that CBS purchased them from 1965 and on, and let's just see what uh, was going on at Fender at that time.

1965, the year that the giant CBS corporation bought fender For many, that moment marks the start of rot setting in at California's finest electric guitar maker. But is that judgment fair? A fresh look at the early years of CBS ownership. 60 years on reveals a more nuanced picture, one that helps us properly understand Fender's Place at the eye of the rock and roll hurricane that was transforming American culture.

We joined Historian Tony Bacon and Guitar Restorer. Hugh Price to learn why post CBS vendors deserve more kudos than they sometimes receive words. Tony Bacon, Jamie Dixon and Hugh Price Photography, Phil Barker. Rising tide during its long history. Fender has navigated several tricky turning points, but 1965 marks for some the start of a decline from the standard set by Leo's original company.

Is that view still justified words? Tony Bacon Photography, Phil Barker, by 1964 Fender was a few years away from its 20th anniversary. Business was strong and fine. Guitars and amps continued to pour from the company's Fullerton factories in California. Around 600 people worked there. The majority in manufacturing spread across the 29 buildings that had appeared as the man grew through the years.

Forrest White in charge of production recalled that by the end of 64, his workers were making 1,500 guitars a week compared with just 40 a week when he joined Leo's small set up 10 years earlier. As well as the electrics and amps, fenders, catalogs, and price lists from the mid sixties also featured acoustics effects, accessories and Fender roads, electric pianos.

Wow. No idea. They made pianos. Ronda who headed the sales side offender remembered writing a million dollars worth of wholesale business during his first year in the fifties, but by the mid sixties, he had helped multiply that figure by 10, which in turn translated to about 40 million worth of retail sales.

The beat boom triggered by the Beatles and a so-called British invasion had begun its sweep across America in short electric guitarists were at. Peak of popularity and Fender was just about their biggest and most successful producer. Then in January, 1965 came the big surprise, the Music Trades. The Prime American magazine for the instruments and industry was clearly shocked by the news of Fender's acquisition by the Mighty Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.

Better known as CBS. The purchase price of 13 million is by far the highest ever offered in the history of this industry. For any single manufacturer it reported, wow, that's just chump change right now at this point. The acquisition of Sterling proof of the music industry's growth potential marks the first time that one of the nation's largest corporations has entered our field with seals volumes in excess of half a billion dollars annually.

CBS currently does more business than the entire US musical instrument industry does at retail. Actual purchase offender was made by the Columbia Records distribution division of CBS, whose outstanding recent feats have included the production of my Fair Lady. Wow. I wonder what the big vision was for the executives at CBS at the time to purchase an instrument manufacturer, let alone an electric guitar instrument manufacturer just seems so out of their comfort zone and of their expertise.

Okay, back to the article. This was at a time when economy. Wonks, were busy advising big corporations like CBS to diversify and gobble up firms from a variety of different businesses. Ah, there you go. That answers my question. It's not hard to imagine their advice. Finance and streamline the new acquisitions and rich pickings will follow.

That seems to be what Goddard Libson, the boss of Columbia Records, thought. He described Fender as a fast-growing business tied into the expanding leisure time market and said he expected the industry to grow by 23% in the next couple of years. So why did Fender sell up? Leo Fender was by all accounts a hypochondriac.

Randall said he was a fattest and that he would readily go on what he called health kicks, and it was Leo's health worries, notably the staph infection in his sinuses that troubled him for many years. That led to Leo's decision to sell Fender, along with nervousness about expanding the company further.

Looking back later, he said he felt he wasn't going to be in good enough health to be able to carry on. Alright, I'm not gonna read the entire article. I'm just gonna pick and choose the interesting bits. But fun fact to know American Sales of guitars during 1965 at 185 million, up from 24 million in 1958.

Wow, what could possibly go wrong? It says, meanwhile, back in California, as you might imagine, this change of ownership was not universally applauded by the factories and offices in Fullerton. There seems to have been a clash of cultures. The new CBS people often train engineers with college degrees, had a firm belief in high volume production fenders, old guard.

Meanwhile, were long serving craft workers without formal qualifications. Anyone who noticed a particular job. In the Los Angeles Times would be forgiven for thinking that it summed up the changes underway. The ad was for a systems analyst to oversee a computer feasibility study at Fender for a management information system covering sales order processing, material control, manufacturing systems and accounting systems.

They wanna run the place with computers. Whatever next. George Fullerton, who had various roles at Fender said, management was first alerted to criticisms when the firm's sales reps began to feedback complaints from their dealers. They'd say The guitars don't play like they used to. They aren't adjusted like they used to be.

Fullerton remembered one of the top sales reps at the time, Dale Hyatt. He said it got to a point where he didn't enjoy going into stores anymore because he regularly found himself defending some poor piece of workmanship. They got very sloppy in the finish with far too many bad spots. Hyatt recalled, they created their own competition, letting the door wide open for everybody else, including the Japanese.

I guess it was more of an issue back then. You know, you had to compromise between scaling up and the high quality of your instruments. You know, it's not like today where there's really, really high quality. Robots and technology that can really manage the quality control of a manufacturing of an instrument like a guitar.

But back then, that technology didn't exist, so it must have been a tricky situation trying to produce more while maintaining that same quality. The other problems that existed were multiple. Randall added. After interviewing all my people, they wrote job descriptions for everybody. We didn't need that sort of thing.

We knew what we were doing, and I have to admit it, it wasn't a very sophisticated operation we had, but it worked. But they divided everything into its cost center down to the last nut, bolt, and screw. We had more cost centers than you could ever imagine. Everything had to be moved from one cost center to another cost center for corporate bookkeeping.

The burden became horrendous. Wow. Ain't that the story? Eh? How many times have you heard this story? A big corporation takes over a a mom and pop shop that focus on quality and relationships with customers throughout the years. And the big guy comes in, gobbles 'em up, and pretty much turns everything into red tape.

Puts 'em through the corporate grinder and you come up with this unmotivated staff pumping out very average product and not really caring about it. I guess things just never change. These job descriptions, complicated things further to everyone went back to work, Randall recalled and they'd be saying.

Don't tell me to do that. That's not my job. Before everyone worked as a team, push the product through anything that went wrong, it was, well, that's not my job. You take care of it. This led to a lot of problems working for big American companies in my day job. I've seen that time and time again where someone comes in and tries to put everything down on an Excel spreadsheet and tries to justify everything based on the numbers, not really understanding the intangibles and what it takes to work as a team.

It was in 1969 when Randall resigned from CBS and he went off to form Randall Electric Instruments. Wow. And that's actually a pretty well-known brand. Crazy how it was kind of a spinoff from Fender. I had no idea about that. Very cool. He was by no means the only one of the original team to leave CBS retained Leo Fender Services as a special consultant in research and development.

The corporation's confidential presale report into Fender concluded that Randall was a necessity to run the business, but not Leo. It said a competent chief engineer can move products forward, but that it would be the highly desirable and at least for a period of four to five years to maintain the active interest and creativity of Mr.

Fender. In other words, they didn't want Leo taking his ideals elsewhere, but didn't particularly want him getting in the way of the newly efficient, thinner production machine. So they set him up anyways from the main buildings where he was allowed to tinker as much as he liked with little effect on the product.

Man, talk about a way to kill creativity and from the guy who actually came up with the damn thing in the first place. Damn shame. I say, damn shame. CBS damn shame. A couple of years later, after the sale to CBS, Leo found a new doctor who put him on antibiotics and cured his sinus complaint. He completed a few projects for CBS, but left when his five year contract expired in 1970.

Going on to spearhead music man and then GNL. Is right. Leo then spun off and formed GNL guitars, and I think they're still around. Unfortunately, they didn't have the machine behind them in terms of marketing. So Fender obviously right now, is a much, much, much more well known and popular brand, and you rarely see GNL in guitar shops anymore, even here of GNL anymore.

I'm not sure, you know, what the transition was when Leo passed and who took it over, if his sons took over or his kids, I'm not sure. But uh, yeah, that's, that's too damn bad, you know. Okay, so here's the eternal debate. Maybe not so eternal for a lot of you pre CBS versus CBS in the vintage fender world.

Pre CBS has a magical ring about it and increasingly unreal prices, and yet no one is likely to suggest that say a tele made towards the end of 1964 is gonna be much different from one made in the early months of 65. Nonetheless, that first one would be tagged as pre CBS, in other words, made before the takeover offender by CBS.

The one shipped in early 65, however, is A CBS. Many will agree that over a period of time after the sale CBS introduced changes to the production methods, that fender and that a number of those changes were detrimental to the quality. Some instruments, fender's, production and sales certainly increased and profits went up.

Randall recalled income, almost doubling in the first year that CBS owned Fender. Leo said he didn't think the changes made by Fender had lowered Fender quality. They weren't trying to cheapen the instrument. He told guitar player 1978 maybe they tried to accelerate production, but it was natural for them to do that because on one instrument alone, I think it was a Mustang.

We were back ordered something like 150,000 units on a back order of that size, and there were others too. You can't just sit around. Psychedelia and cost cutting around 1967 fender changed the control wiring of the telecaster, altering the unusual circuit that had been used since 1952. Now, the tele operated as you'd expect for a two pickup guitar.

The three-way selecting rear pickup, both. Neck along with a regular master volume and tone. Also, in 67 Fender's budget line for beginners gained the Bronco, another relatively straightforward guitar with single pickup and basic vibrato bridge and with fender's medium, 24 inch scale. At first, it was also offered as a set with a little matching Bronco Amp.

Oh, neat. The following year, psychedelia hit fender. The company's designers had fun with self-adhesive pastely and floral pattern wallpaper, presumably to increase flower power appeal. The pastely red and blue flower telecasters could hardly be described as examples of a boring approach to guitar design by CBS.

Fender's, high gloss, thick skin polyester finish, which started to appear in the late sixties, would become a characteristic design of a seventies fender. Pre BS guitars were customarily painted with nitro cellular lacquers, but CBS considered poly as a better and safer option with it drive for expanded production.

Oh, so that's where all that pastely design comes from. That whole flower power movement in the early seventies. I had no idea about that. You see that now. Um, they released certain guitars with that pastely look, and it's kind of a flowery, I just come to think of it. Yeah, it is kind of a flowery design.

It looks good on certain guitars and, uh, no idea it came from this. So pretty cool to know. A clear sign of the new owner's. Cost cutting came in the unusual shapes of two short-lived. Ster Bitner models, the swinger and the custom jigsaw together from unused parts that CBS did not wanna waste. Wow. For the swinger.

AKA arrow or music lander. SIM put together music master Base V and Mustang parts, adding a curve to the body base, and shaving the headstock into an arrowhead for the six string custom. AKA Maverick. He carved electric 12 in Roman numerals to a revised shape, adding a Mustang vibrato and a 12 neck neither lasted long in fender's lines.

You can't blame 'em for trying to be creative while trying to save costs at the same time, meanwhile, a feeling was setting in amongst guitarists that fenders and other American guitarists were not made like they used to be. More musicians were being seen playing old guitars, which were starting to be called vintage instruments.

Alongside a growing impression that numbers might now be more important defender than quality. Yeah, and I'm sure that's when, like the article said earlier, that's when the Japanese probably started making a mark too and more. Well-known guitar players started playing Japanese. Not sure when I've been in it started, but I'm guessing around then that attitude has softened in decades since.

And while pre CBS guitar certainly can be great instruments for those able to afford them, the musical worth of many late sixties fenders is now much better. Understood. Around the time he bought his 56 Brownie Strat, Eric Clapton was clearly an early convert to the idea declaring in a 1967 issue of Melody Maker when you're starting always by a secondhand guitar, because it will be broken in quote unquote, and easier to play apart from the fact that the older the guitar, the better it seems to have been made.

Contrast that with an image of Jimi Hendrix creating a supreme interpretation of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock a few years later. Performed on his 1968 white Strat. It may be a cliche, but let's say it anyway, Jimmy didn't do too badly with the CBS vendors. I guess if you put it that way, that idea goes out the window.

And how does all this sit today? As ever, with any guitars you want to try or to compare, there's only one test that matters. Of course, have a look at them, have a feel, plug them in, play them. If you're lucky, you could set up a blindfold test with a pre CBS and an early CBS telly or whatever model you favor.

It's the sort of thing that can have surprising results and upset, long-held beliefs and superpositions. But we'll leave that kind of thing to your hands, your ears, and your head. It's personal after all. Absolutely. I can definitely see where this article is coming from and the notion of vintage is better.

James Hetfield, I read an interview, that's kind of his philosophy as well. Vintage is better, but for just regular players like us and regular average musicians and uh, you know, that has day jobs. Man at the end of the day is number one, it is not even how the guitar feels, number one, it's how the guitar looks.

'cause that's the number one thing you're attracted to is the look of the guitar. The shape of it. The color. You know the color of the pit guard, you know how the neck is. You know, it's just some people just love flying vs. Or love explorers. They don't care. Exactly if the neck is perfect for them or not?

No, they just want to play a freaking flying V. I've been there. I have a flying V and that's probably one of the reasons why I bought it. First of all, I wanted a flying V, and second of all, the one I have looks super damn dope. Is the neck the most comfortable thing? No. Is it as comfortable with this? No, but I love playing that guitar and I had just have so much fun playing that guitar and I love.

Seeing it on me and just playing it and rocking out so that at the end of the day, that's all that matters, you know? And like I said, nowadays, you know, for 600 guitars you can get a pretty damn good guitar. You know, just the way things are made now and all the quality control with other robotic systems and machines and computers, it's pretty damn hard to get a shitty guitar right now for a very good price.

So think about that. Don't let that discourage you. It's just fun to read these kind of articles. There you go. I hope you enjoyed that little tidbit of Fender history. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next one. By the way, if you do think that this cap is kind of cool and wanna show the world your love and passion for rock and roll, definitely check out it's one ladder.com.

That's ITS, the number one ladder.com where you can grab this cap and other rock and roll gear. And I really appreciate 'cause you'd be supporting. The show. Thank you. Rock on one louder.