MI Pro

I mean, if you’ve got a spare $117 million – “in cash” as the PR stated – what would you do with it? At the time of writing no one seems to know if, like some of Fender’s other acquisitions, these brands will be brought ‘in-house’ or indeed how distribution of the brands will change. There will no doubt be some casualties but, hey, that’s business, that’s life.

But I do have a problem with FMIC and it relates to a press release (actually titled a ‘News Feature’) issued a day after the one informing us of these business changes: ‘Punk at 30—a Retrospective on the Filth, the Fury and Fender’ offers the heading.

“When the first blinding flash of first-wave punk detonated in 1976-77, it wasn’t immediately apparent that an enduring cultural phenomenon was under way,” it starts off. “But if punk passed quickly as a musical phenomenon, it succeeded wildly – and enduringly – as a powerful and worldwide cultural one.” Hurrah. Punk lives!

“After all, in its spiritual home and cultural epicenter, London, punk was never conceived of as a strictly musical movement, but rather as a cultural one that also encompassed art, fashion and politics.” Hmmm, not sure about the last bits but in the spirit of bodacious hyperbole we’ll move onto the point…

“For its part, Fender played a significant role in the history of punk.” Really? “Fender instruments turned out to be perfectly suited for its raucous sound, its powerfully arresting look and its iconoclastic DIY attitude and work ethic.” Bloody hell, vicar, pass me the dictionary.

The ‘News Feature’ twaddles on like this for some while but its point remains simple. Fender – which at the time would have chased any real punk out of any of its stores or showrooms – now wants us to believe it played a “significant role in the history of punk.” Bollocks.

I was in London in 1976 and I don’t remember seeing any stores with signs saying ‘Fender Welcomes Punks’. I doubt very much Paul Simonon dutifully read his copy of International Musician and Recording World to check which was the best bass to buy.

(“Hmmm,” Simonon mused. “This Precision bass, reviewed by Argent’s Jim Rodford, looks like just the thing I can smash on stage just as Pennie Smith takes a photo that will be called by Fender, some years hence, “one of the greatest rock photos ever taken.” We can use it for the cover of my band’s most famous album. That is, of course, after Mick Jones has taught me how to play the thing.)

Most musicians at the time reviled punk… or had a swift haircut, donned a bin bag and jumped on the bandwagon pretending they couldn’t play. Ask Stewart Copeland.

“In short, Fender instruments were perfect for punk because the more you abused them and the more you personalized them, the better they got, in a way that just didn’t work with other instruments.” Bollocks. Ask the guys who were there. Hasn’t anyone at Fender ever heard of the fucking Les Paul?

By 1976 Fender was a joke, producing some truly awful instruments that couldn’t have been more out of step with a musical, or indeed cultural, movement like punk. Fender just wishes, 30 years on, that it’d been there, McClaren-like: influential. If the number of people who now say they saw the Sex Pistols play live actually did, the band wouldn’t have been playing skuzzy dives, they’d have been selling out Wembley Stadium.

Leo Fender was, much more accurately, a true punk. That’s a given. He genuinely stuck two fingers up at the guitar industry and gave us the electric instrument in its purest form – the Telecaster – when the de rigueur instrument was essentially an archtop jazz guitar. He did the same for the electric bass, not to mention the amplifier. True anarchy. And boy did he get some insults thrown at him.

“Who would’ve thought 30 years ago that punk artists like the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash would be inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame?” continues Fender’s feature.

Who’d have thought that Leo Fender’s ‘plank’ would generate a massive company able to shell out $117 million to buy another massive company? It’s amazing. The reason the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is because they made some fucking great records. The reason some of them played Fender guitars is thanks to the vision of Leo, not the bloated out-of-touch ‘thing’ that Fender had become in the mid-seventies.

Paul Reed Smith recently said: “how can we compete with Fender? They’re selling guitars from the grave.” The latest, of course, is the oh-so-punk Joe Strummer Telecaster. Guys, c’mon. Let’s give credit where it’s due. Without visionary artists – of whatever genre, background or creed – we’re all fucked. All we do is make, sell and write about the tools. We are not the art.

Unless of course you believe that it was Hendrix’s Stratocaster that wrote Purple Haze while he was busy spliffing up or it was Strummer’s Tele that wrote out the words for White Riot without any help whatsoever from Joe who was far too busy shaping his own cultural phenomenon-ness.