Chairs Don’t Change the World, Guitars Do

How Leo Fender inadvertently made the perfect modern object

The next time you’re in a design museum, skip past the row of chairs by Eames and Van der Rohe and try to find a Fender Telecaster instead. What you can’t find at MoMA is more influential and a bolder embodiment of the Modernist ethos than anything those design giants ever created.

The Telecaster has been in continuous production since 1950. Guitarists know what a Telecaster looks like, along with most non-musicians. All you have to do is say that it’s the guitar Bruce Springsteen plays. Or Joe Strummer, or Albert Collins, or Jonny Greenwood or Justine Frischmann.

Before modernism was an aesthetic, it was a manifesto

What are you going to say to someone that gives you a blank stare at the mention of a Barcelona chair? Remind them that it was part of the influential German Pavilion of the 1929 World Expo in Barcelona, Spain?

Popularity or recognition is no measure of importance or influence. Why something is popular and recognizable is a better gauge. In a lot of ways, the Telecaster didn’t do that many new things. Guitars that catered to jazz, Hawaiian, and folk were being built with pickups, solid body construction and relatively unadorned flat tops. The Telecaster combined those influences in a way that excited many people.

Jazz players on their feedback prone arch tops always had a bass heavy tone — the versatile piano and loud, brash horns got the spotlight. Hawaiian slide guitar was very popular in the 30’s and 40’s, and with a solid body and no feedback you could turn it up and be centre stage, even if all you could do was sit there. Folk and blues players had an intimate connection with the audience, although they were valued more for authenticity than virtuosity. The Telecaster was the full package. You could play it much louder than an arch top, you could roam the stage standing up, and it was an unpretentious instrument. This was the machine that invented Rock ‘n’ Roll. What cultural revolution did your fancy chair spark?

The Telecaster was designed to be made by machines of the era. Its body is a flat block of wood. The top hasn’t been arched or sanded down to mimic the popular electric guitars of the era. The electronics are easily accessible by lifting off the pickguard or control plate; no longer are you trying to service it from the f-holes. The neck is a bolted on, not glued. The headstock is no wider than the neck, and isn’t set at an angle from the fret board, both increasing yield from your raw material and making this a simpler part to cut. Before the Telecaster, skilled luthiers built guitars. In contrast, the Telecaster needed competent woodworkers who could follow a template. This was the first guitar that you could mass produce in a factory, with skilled, but not artisan, employees. That’s modern.

The look is thoroughly modern. The headstock is the most abstracted element. Its form is taken from the profile of a violin, stripped of detail and rotated ninety degrees relative to the fret board. The body is an unadorned single cutaway. The curves at the top of the body where it meets the neck remind me of a sine wave. It’s an invitation to pick up on the Telecaster and make good on its symbolic promise. The bridge is simple and functional, and while it’s rarely used, the cover plate is designed to eliminate palm-muting and facilitate greater sustain — a nod to its Hawaiian roots. Either way, it’s more shiny metal without using an old fashioned tailpiece stretching from the tail peg to the bridge. The control plate, a futuristic chrome subway train with the two unmarked knobs and a switch, is pure modernism.

The Telecaster also did something that too few items of the modernist canon have achieved. It was affordable. The Telecaster listed for about half of a Gibson ES-5. Not because Fender outsourced manufacturing to a low cost country, but because it was a designed to be mass produced at a low cost. The design was radically simple. This is the major achievement of the Telecaster. Before modernism was an aesthetic, it was a manifesto. It was an idea that good things were not just for the select few, but for the many. And the early modernists were practical — the many wouldn’t get good objects unless they were mass produced. You’d be forgiven if you’ve always thought the opposite was true. Modernist now means more expensive, exclusive, and elitist. That wasn’t the original intention.

And this is why guitarists, and the Fender corporation might object to the modernist label. Guitarists think of the Telecaster as utilitarian. A workhorse. A working class guitar. To elevate this straightforward instrument into the category of high art or design would alienate the Telecaster’s target market.

I have no issue with calling the Telecaster a workhorse. The road is never kind to gear, and it’s an easy guitar to repair. But I take great issue with calling the Telecaster utilitarian. There would be no curvy bits at all on the headstock, and beyond a spot for the guitar to balance on your knee, no need for any shape at all on the body. If you wanted utilitarian, you’d get a Steinberger — a guitar so ugly the manufacturer’s own marketing department decided to stick with a bunch of close-ups photographs, rather than let the visitor feast their eyes on the entire product in all its terrible glory.

Leo Fender was not a trained luthier, he was a radio repairman who got into musical instruments. He couldn’t have built a Gibson. He built a testing rig to experiment with pickups. That testing rig eventually turned into the guitar that changed music. He was an accidental modernist, but that shouldn’t prevent his work from being displayed in design museums.