Blood for Blood.

This magazine grants no guitar manufacturer an exemption, Fender included, so believe us when we say we were paying attention this spring. February: Fender seats a new chief executive, Edward Bud Cole, a decade of Asia-Pacific business on his resume and a lifelong Fender player by every account. April: he tells guitar.com the company has a moral duty to the players, and that leading it is servant work. June: multiple guitar builders are reported to have received cease and desist letters, and the same CEO goes on video to answer his critics. The sources for every one of those sentences are linked in the file above.

First, the correction, because we owe one. An earlier version of this piece, live at this URL for about a day, called Bud Cole a fictional executive we had invented. He is not. He is the actual chief executive of Fender Musical Instruments, and getting that wrong in a piece about accountability is the kind of L this magazine promised to take in public. Taken. The demand survived the correction. If anything it grew teeth, because now it has a real record to stand on.

So here is the position, stated plainly enough that nobody can misquote it. We want Bud Cole out of the CEO chair at Fender. Resignation, retirement, a graceful move upstairs to a board seat, we are flexible on the exit. We are not flexible on the exit happening. And we want to be precise about what we are not claiming: we are not claiming he drafted the letters, ordered the letters, or knew about the letters. We are claiming it does not matter. That doctrine is called command responsibility, it is the oldest rule on any org chart, and it is the entire case. The chair signs for the building. He told guitar.com the job carried a weight to it. We agree. This is the weight.

And when you hear blood for blood, put down the fainting salts. This is a guitar magazine. The blood we want is one resignation letter, on Fender letterhead, and the feud ends the day it is signed. That is the entire invoice. The instruments were never on trial: the Telecaster is still the most repairable electric ever built, the man himself reportedly still plays the Thinline he bought in 1989, and the kind words this publication has printed about Fender stay up in the file, sourced, because a feud that has to burn its own archive was never confident in the first place.

Before the verdict, his defense, argued at full strength, because a demand that cannot survive his best answer does not deserve to stand. There is no public evidence the letters were Cole's idea, his order, or even on his desk. The reports are real and the outrage is real, but the line from the letters to the chair is an inference. His record points the other way: a decade building Fender's Asia-Pacific business and a lifetime as a player, which is not a resume you assemble by hating the people who build instruments. The moral duty quote can be read as a defense exhibit too, since a man who says that on the record has handed you the standard to hold him to, and one reported legal salvo does not erase it. Legal departments run on their own weather. And demanding a resignation without proof of personal involvement looks a lot like the corporate theater this magazine exists to roast.

There is also a harder line than ours, and it gets a hearing. It says one letter is soft. A company does not send legal paper to small builders in the same season its CEO is quoted on moral duty unless the duty came with an asterisk. Answering critics on camera without changing anything is content, not accountability. Every institution asks for patience while it investigates itself, and every institution finds itself innocent. I hear all of it, and I am not signing it. A demand has to say exactly what ends it, and anything past one letter is a grudge with no exit.

Three cases, then: his defense, the harder line, and the demand I signed. Pick the one you can actually defend, then take it to the discussion at the bottom of this page and defend it where everyone can see you.