October 6th, 2012 - by Robby Slaughter

You may not have heard the name Leo Fender before, until you associate it with the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. Most sources agree, however, that Leo couldn’t actually play.

There are tons of articles that reference this claim all over the web, but perhaps the most profound is the final paragraph in an obituary from Guitar Player magazine:

Leo Fender neither drank nor smoked and had few close friends. He had no children. “His guitars and amps,” one associate said, “those were his kids.” He was described by more than one associate as something of a recluse. While he dabbled in photography, liked to play pinochle on a Saturday night, and owned an expensive boat, his only true hobby, perhaps his obsession, was his work. He was a man of few words. He did not play guitar.



Photo © absolutradio.de Photo © absolutradio.de

It’s hard to imagine the life of someone who completely transformed music but did not contribute any of his own musical inspiration. We usually think of inventors as scratching an itch, as people who set out to solve their own problem or at least bring something into the world that they personally plan to use.

But not in this case. Although Fender died in 1991, a recent New York Times article reminisces about his influence and the company that survives.

IN 1948, a radio repairman named Leo Fender took a piece of ash, bolted on a length of maple and attached an electronic transducer. You know the rest, even if you don’t know you know the rest. You’ve heard it — in the guitar riffs of Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Knopfler, Kurt Cobain and on and on.

Failure is the secret to success. If you want to create the sound that changes the world, you don’t have to be the artist that goes on stage. You just might be the artist in the lab, tinkering until you build something that can only sing in someone else’s hands.

You don’t have to play. You just have to start.

Related Posts Popular Music Trivia question: What was the first piece of instrumental sheet music to sell over one million copies? You might be surprised to learn it’s a song by someone that most would probably expect to fail. Failure Gets More Popular It seems like everyone is jumping on the failure bandwagon. A New York Times piece made the rounds, asking “What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?”

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