“A hot-rod pleasure trip through mid-20th-century American background” (THE BRAND NEW York Times Book Review), this one-of-a-kind narrative masterfully recreates the rivalry between your two men who innovated the electric guitar’s amplified sound—Leo Fender and Les Paul—and their intense competition to persuade rock stars like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton to try out the devices they built.

In the years after World War II, music was changing from big-band jazz into rock ’n’ roll—and these about The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll louder styles demanded revolutionary instruments. When Leo Fender’s tiny firm marketed the 1st solid-body electric guitar, the Esquire, music artists immediately saw its appeal. Never to end up being out-maneuvered, Gibson, the biggest guitar producer, raced to build a competitive product. The business 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 onto it. Thus was born the guitar world’s most warmed rivalry: Gibson versus Fender, Les versus Leo.

While Fender was a quiet, half-blind, self-taught radio repairman, Paul was an excellent but headstrong pop superstar and guitarist who spent years toying with brand-new musical systems. Their contest converted into an arms race as the utmost inventive musicians from the 1950s and 1960s—including bluesman Muddy Waters, rocker Friend Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton—followed one maker’s electric guitar or another. By 1969 it was clear that these new electric instruments got 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 entire story in The Delivery of Loud, offering “spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans towards the physiques of guitars” (The Atlantic). “The story of these equipment is the tale of America in the postwar period: noisy, cocky, brash, aggressively brand-new” (The Washington Post).