G&L Music Instruments, the Fullerton guitar-making shop launched by the legendary Leo Fender, has gone silent after 45 years.
News of the company’s closure hasn’t been confirmed by anyone at G&L. But on Friday, Oct. 31, the evidence started piling up. While the closure was first broached on G&L fan pages, a museum curator with a permanent collection of Leo Fender artifacts and a contractor who worked for G&L for decades appeared to confirm early conjecture.
Neither David nor John McLaren, the brothers who owned BBE Sound and G&L Musical Instruments, could be reached for comment on Friday. But according to the California Secretary of State’s online business search tool, BBE, which was the parent company of G&L, terminated its corporate status with the state on Tuesday, Oct. 28.
As well, the fact that loads of the company’s parts and materials have been tossed into dumpsters throughout October only adds to the circumstantial confirmation that G&L, this last direct connection to Leo Fender‘s instrumental genius, has gone dark.
Down in the dumpster
Eric Bootow, founder of the Facebook group Punk Rock Bass Players and a longtime Fullerton-based bassist in bands like Jughead’s Revenge and Fourth In Line, fueled much of the Facebook furor when he posted photos and videos from the multiple dumpster diving outings he’s made to the trash bins behind the G&L workshop and warehouse on Fender Avenue in Fullerton.
“I was watching the G&L Facebook groups, they’re talking about how they’re gonna go out of business,” Bootow said. “I knew they were going to start tossing stuff in the dumpster.”
Then a friend who builds guitars reached out late one night. He’d been grabbing empty guitar shipping boxes from the trash bins in the alley and thought Bootow might want to check it out.
“He’s like, ‘Hey, man, I don’t know if you want or are interested in this, but you should go jump in the G&L dumpster right now,’” Bootow said. “There’s about 600 pickups in the trash can. Thousands of bridges for guitars and bass, and who knows what else is in there.’
“So I drove down and saw the dumpster filled with just crazy (stuff), and I was like, this is absolutely insane,” he says. “There were trays and trays of pickups in there. They’re all magnetized so they were stuck to the bottom of the dumpster. Oh, yeah, dude, it was crazy.
“Me and my cousin and his friend just jumped in that thing and just started piling everything in our cars. Everything you can imagine, to put a guitar together or bass was in there” — the innards, not the bodies or necks. “Then we go to another dumpster. And I’m not joking that it was filled to the brim with guitar and bass bridges,”
This week, Bootow posted word of his scores — he and other dumpster divers have been hitting the spot regularly — on his personal and Punk Rock Bass Players Facebook pages.
And people from around the world are abuzz with a mix of sadness — this ignominious end of a direct link to Fender, the godfather of guitar — and excitement. Countless Facebook commenters are asking how they can buy parts from him, and musicians he knows in punk bands, including the Descendents and GWAR, have reached out directly.
Leo’s legacy
Over at the Fullerton Museum Center, where a permanent Leo Fender Gallery shares his story as an inventor who contributed mightily to the past, present and future of music, museum director Elvia Susana Rubalcava had also heard that G&L was gone.
“Someone reached out to us, and we dug into it, and it got confirmed,” Rubalcava said. “And I reached out to the owners and just gave them my support.”
Only a few months ago, Rubalcava was invited for a tour through G&L, she said.
“Dave McLaren gave it to us with his wife, and it was really great to see, to walk through the factory,” Rubalcava said. “I worked for the Fullerton Museum Center for over 12 years, and we’ve all worked really hard to keep up Leo’s legacy.
“Although I had been to G&L before years ago, I didn’t really get a thorough tour,” she said. The recent tour “was just full of stories about Leo and details of his last day. He was testing something out. What he was working on was basically a combo of parts from Music Man [Fender’s previous company] and G&L.”
Fender didn’t want to leave his workbench that night, but eventually he did. He died shortly after. His workbench remained as he’d left it thereafter, Rubalcava said.
“It felt like going into a museum,” she said of entering the time capsule of Fender’s life left behind at G&L. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with all of that. I told them that we’d be honored to host an exhibit of G&L or of his studio. We haven’t heard back from them, but we wish them nothing but the best.
“It will always be part of Leo’s legacy, and we’re hoping to keep that legacy alive here at the Fullerton Museum Center,” Rubalcava said.
On Nov. 22, the museum’s Leo Fender Gallery debuts a new exhibit titled “A Man Named Charlie: Fender’s Unsung Hero,” which explores the life of Charlie Davis, who worked for Fender at the original company, becoming one of its most renowned guitar technicians.
Parts, unknown
G&L may be gone, but where the remnants of the company Leo Fender and George Fullerton founded have ended up is a little bit harder to see.
Of course, the dumpster discards are in the garages of pickers like Bootow, who stumbled onto a clue about where some of the materials might be headed.
He struck up a conversation with a crew dismantling, distributing and discarding materials on the site, and he offered to rent a truck and help them take stuff away for free.
Nice try, but they declined the offer. But they did tell Bootow they were shipping some things to a Tennessee-based company called MIRC that buys instruments that have been used or are factory seconds, refurbishes and then sells them wholesale to retail shops.
The hot rumor on Facebook pages like Bootow’s and those dedicated to the G&L factory is that Fender Corporation has bought at least some part of the company, possibly to get the rights to Leo Fender’s name, likeness and intellectual property.
We reached out to several of Fender’s media reps but did not hear back from them on Friday.
Then we stumbled across a YouTube video on the account of MikesGigTV, which had the headline “Fender Buys G&L.” Michael DiMattio is a bassist, guitarist and singer whose day job is graphic design and who has designed graphics for BBE and G&L for more than 30 years.
In the video, he says he recently received an email from BBE Sound to inform him the company was closing, and asking if he would accept a less-than-full payment of what they owed him for designing the look and packaging of their Sonic Stomp and Green Screamer guitar pedals.
DiMattio says he agreed, and when he received the check — which he displayed in the video he posted on Thursday, Oct. 30 — the payer was listed as Headliner Holdings / Fender Musical Instruments.
“So let me make an assumption that … BBE and G&L Guitars has been sold to Fender,” DiMattio says in the video. “Whether they keep the location on Fender Avenue or they bring it in-house to maybe Corona or whatever, we don’t know at this point because there hasn’t been an official announcement made.
“But I think it’s clear just from the way that the money’s been paid out that Fender is involved in one way, shape or form.”