worked with him until the day Leo passed away.
Dale Hyatt was a charismatic guy who oversaw the sales at Fender and was a longtime associate of Leo and George. Dale had been a tail gunner on a B-17 bomber who flew twenty-five missions and was once shot down over France. Dale began working for Leo in 1946. He left Fender Musical Instruments when Leo sold the business to CBS in 1965.
While never an official employee of Fender, Bob Perline was also a close friend of Leo’s. Bob developed a popular advertising campaign that really grabbed people’s attention. Bob said that when he drove from his home in Laguna Beach up to the Fender plant in Fullerton, he saw Freddie Tavares taking a break and hitting a tennis ball against the side of the building. The two chatted, and then Freddie said, “Well, let me introduce you to Leo.”
Leo was keenly observant and could size people up rather quickly. Leo liked Bob and Bob liked Leo. They instantly hit it off, and Leo really loved the “You won’t part with yours either” ad campaigns that Bob created because they were clever, really grabbed attention, and did not cost a lot of money! These were all winning qualities to Leo. Bob went around looking for people engaged in everyday activities, gave people a Fender guitar, and snapped pictures. He then cropped the photo and added the slogan. It was simple, yet powerful.
Bob was a classically trained, offbeat Laguna Beach artist, Mormon bishop, and beach bum, all wrapped into one. He took pictures of surfers playing a G-cord, (recruited on the spot near the Huntington Beach pier), beautiful girls in bikinis with surfboards (friends of his daughters from Laguna Beach High School), smiling parachutists (hired on the spot before skydiving in Riverside), and a scuba diver (just some guy down at Crystal Cove) walking into the ocean, with a Fender guitar on his back. The whole thing was brilliant.
Leo loved these concepts, especially the ones with cute girls! I often teased Leo that the only thing that took his attention off guitars was a cute girl in tight jeans walking by!
While Leo was a quiet and subdued guy who often wore the same basic outfits, his head was always spinning with innovative ideas. His instruments were truly Southern California. Before Leo, there were no mint green or candy apple red musical instruments. Leo made them, along with glittery gold, turquoise blue, and shiny silver guitars. Fender guitars were fitting for jazz, country, and rock and roll. They were outrageous, but at the same time, they were solid, high-quality instruments, with a distinctive sound that everybody loved.
The most common question I get asked about Leo is, “What was he really like?” The truth is, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he was really thinking about musical instruments and amps. You could be talking with him for five minutes, and then in mid-conversation, he would get an idea and would just walk away. He would not say “excuse me” or “goodbye.” He would just leave.
Because Leo was never in it for money or personal fame, he was an easy person to get behind and support, and his team greatly admired him. With Leo ever at the captain’s wheel, this core team of Freddie, George, Dale, and Bob kept designing, inventing, producing, selling and promoting. The Telecaster, Stratocaster, and amplifiers grew and grew in popularity and eventually spread across the world.
Later, Leo got the idea to invent the electric bass guitar. The Fender bass turned music upside down, as up until then bass guitars were huge, fretless upright instruments. With Leo’s invention, the bass player could run around the stage like everyone else. Without Leo, everyone from Gene Simmons to Sting would be plunking one of those huge, wooden basses on stage!
During this time Guitar Player magazine said,
Fender tube amps were enormously popular and set standards still followed by the industry; the competitors envied both their design and sales records. They sounded great, and they were hip – you could get a piggy-back (the father of the stack) with JBL’s 30 years ago. To this day, even metal head Marshall Maniacs rave about the tonal hugeness of a small Fender amp cranked to tube meltdown. Nothing succeeds like success, and when it came to promotion, Fender’s touch was solid gold. Ventures album covers looked like Fender ads; in a sense, they were. The Hendrix association still sells Strat’s by the truckload, and the company continues to reap incalculable benefits from millions of fans seeing Fenders in the hands of everyone from Buddy Holly and Dick Dale to Beck, Richard and Clapton.”
For many years, Leo’s life was a cycle of eating and sleeping in his modest home, driving a few blocks to the plant, where he would spend time quietly in his laboratory designing new instruments. Leo would also go out to the production line and check on how things were going, make executive decisions with regards to marketing and sales, go home, and then do it all again the next day.
However, this rigorous daily grind eventually got to be too much for Leo, and he became sickly and tired. Most people did not know it, but Leo had gotten a severe staph infection. It lingered and lingered and eventually got worse. The doctors told Leo that this was incurable and that he was going to die, so, in 1965, Leo decided to sell the company he had built. He wanted to wrap up his affairs so that when he died his wife, Esther, would not have to deal with them.
Guitar Player magazine explained this time well,
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