9781508281474
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The Birth of Loud audiobook

  • By: Ian S. Port
  • Narrator: Pete Simonelli
  • Category: Business Aspects, Music
  • Length: 9 hours 49 minutes
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
  • Publish date: January 01, 2019
  • Language: English
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The Birth of Loud Audiobook Summary

“A hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history” (The New York Times Book Review), this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between the two men who innovated the electric guitar’s amplified sound–Leo Fender and Les Paul–and their intense competition to convince rock stars like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to play the instruments they built.

In the years after World War II, music was evolving from big-band jazz into rock ‘n’ roll–and these louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny firm marketed the first solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire, musicians immediately saw its appeal. Not to be out-maneuvered, Gibson, the largest guitar manufacturer, raced to build a competitive product. The company designed an “axe” that would make Fender’s Esquire look cheap and convinced Les Paul–whose endorsement Leo Fender had sought–to put his name on it. Thus was born the guitar world’s most heated rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo.

While Fender was a quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was a brilliant but headstrong pop star and guitarist who spent years toying with new musical technologies. Their contest turned into an arms race as the most inventive musicians of the 1950s and 1960s–including bluesman Muddy Waters, rocker Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton–adopted one maker’s guitar or another. By 1969 it was clear that these new electric instruments had launched music into a radical new age, empowering artists with a vibrancy and volume never before attainable.

In “an excellent dual portrait” (The Wall Street Journal), Ian S. Port tells the full story in The Birth of Loud, offering “spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The story of these instruments is the story of America in the postwar era: loud, cocky, brash, aggressively new” (The Washington Post).

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The Birth of Loud Audiobook Narrator

Pete Simonelli is the narrator of The Birth of Loud audiobook that was written by Ian S. Port

About the Author(s) of The Birth of Loud

Ian S. Port is the author of The Birth of Loud

More From the Same

The Birth of Loud Full Details

Narrator Pete Simonelli
Length 9 hours 49 minutes
Author Ian S. Port
Category
Publisher Simon & Schuster Audio
Release date April 30, 2024
ISBN 9781508281474

Subjects

The publisher of the The Birth of Loud is Simon & Schuster Audio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Business Aspects, Music

Additional info

The publisher of the The Birth of Loud is Simon & Schuster Audio. The imprint is Simon & Schuster Audio. It is supplied by Simon & Schuster Audio. The ISBN-13 is 9781508281474.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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