2 Concerts Will Honor Leo Fender : * Fund-raiser: The shows--one country, one rock--at Knott’s will benefit Parkinson’s Educational Program.

Leo Fender’s January induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame secured the late guitar innovator’s place in rock music history.

Now plans are afoot to ensure that the Anaheim native’s memory is celebrated each year in his home county.

Organizers of a benefit in Fender’s honor have booked the 2,100-seat Good Time Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm for two concerts on Sept. 12: an afternoon show that will feature country music, and an evening rock show.

The concerts will benefit the Parkinson’s Educational Program (PEP), a Newport Beach-based charity. Fender died March 21, 1991, at the age of 81, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. During the 1950s, when he operated out of a garage workshop in Fullerton, Fender designed revolutionary electric guitars, including the Fender Telecaster and Fender Stratocaster, that have helped shape the sound of blues, rock and country music for the past 40 years.

Chairing the benefit are Phyllis M. Fender, the guitar-maker’s widow, and Charlotte Jayne, executive director of PEP. Their aim is to turn an event launched last August with a concert at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center into an annual fixture that will serve as a tribute to Fender, and as a festive occasion for musicians who wish to honor him.

“It’s fun for all the musicians to get together and party in Leo’s honor. He would have loved that,” Phyllis Fender said. “But he would have loved it even more to be able to help people in this way.”

Jayne said she hopes that the benefit will take on the atmosphere of an annual “family party” that will be as much a social occasion for musicians as it will be a concert for their fans and a fund-raiser for the charity.

“(Raising) monstrous money isn’t the goal at this point,” Jayne said. “It’s getting our philosophy out--which is treating the musicians properly, and getting the right image, so people will look forward to it each year.”

The benefit is being coordinated under PEP auspices. Jayne said a committee currently numbering 12 people will recruit talent for the concerts, seek corporate sponsors, and oversee plans to tape the shows for future cable and video release. Two video-oriented companies, Long Beach-based Tay Entertainment and Cambria-based This Town Entertainment, will handle concert and video logistics and assist in recruiting musicians willing to donate their performances.

Last year’s show, dubbed the Leo Fender Memorial Jam Benefit, was the brainchild of Leland Jeffries, a Fullerton rock musician who had worked under Fender at his last guitar company, G & L Musical Products. Jeffries was a novice when it came to concert promotion, and the marathon show had its troubles: It wound up losing about $2,500 (Jeffries and his partner, Dan Cabbell, absorbed the loss rather than PEP), and suffered from logistic problems that dragged the show out for more than 10 hours.

A 58-minute video of highlights from last year’s concert is currently being shopped to cable networks and overseas broadcast outlets. Featured performers include guitarists Robbie Krieger, James Burton, Albert Lee, Steve Lukather, Dick Dale & the Del-Tones and Yngwie Malmsteen. If the program is bought by television outlets, cable and broadcast income could eventually turn last year’s money-losing benefit into a moneymaker for the charity and for Jeffries, who as promoter was entitled to 15% of profits and video proceeds netted by PEP.

Phyllis Fender, who wasn’t involved in planning last year’s concert, said that it succeeded in one important way: She said 20 families that hadn’t previously known about PEP were alerted to the organization because of publicity surrounding the benefit. PEP puts out educational newsletters and videos and coordinates support groups designed to help Parkinson’s sufferers and their families cope with the debilitating neurological disease.

“By using Leo’s reputation, we will be able to share this Parkinson’s information with people who could use it,” she said.

It is information that Fender’s widow wishes she and her husband had during the last two years of his life, when the disease took its worst toll. “We didn’t know anybody with Parkinson’s” or about PEP. “If I could have gone to a support group where the care-givers get together, I would have been (better) able to understand what Leo and I were going through, and gotten ideas on how to make him comfortable, how to communicate better with him. Unless you have been as desperate as I was, you don’t realize what a page or two of hints (such as PEP provides) would have done to relieve some of the pressure.”

In a recent PEP bulletin, Jayne credited Jeffries and Cabbell with having “given birth to a new institution” by conceiving and producing last year’s show. But Jeffries is bitter about the direction that the Fender benefit is now taking.

Jeffries, who supports himself by giving guitar lessons, says that he began groundwork last year for a second Fender benefit, aiming to avoid the mistakes he made the first time around (the main one, Jeffries acknowledged, was not landing a star headliner who would guarantee a successful draw). Jeffries said this year he was working to secure Eric Clapton, a leading exponent of the Fender Stratocaster, to headline a benefit at the 6,000-seat Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Jeffries said a major brewery had expressed interest in sponsoring the event.

Instead, Jeffries found that PEP had plans to proceed more slowly, and on a smaller scale. He said that Jayne declined to help him secure the corporate sponsorship that would have enabled him to promote a concert himself. Instead, she invited him to join the committee that PEP was setting up to organize future benefits. Phyllis Fender, who has given her blessing to PEP’s plan, said that the Fender name cannot be attached to any concert without her consent and the consent of a trust set up by her husband.

“I feel like I’ve been really taken advantage of and burned and stripped of the chance to stage a concert that would bring international recognition” to Leo Fender’s achievements, Jeffries said. He predicted that the shows being planned at Knott’s won’t create the buzz that would have been generated by a Clapton-led tribute at the Greek. “I see it being reduced to a fuddy-duddy country (music) benefit, as opposed to the wide scope I was after with rock. I’ve dubbed it the Leo Fender Memorial Boysenberry Jam.”

Jayne and Phyllis Fender both said they hope Jeffries will change his mind and join their efforts. “He has heart, energy and enthusiasm, and he did a very unique thing” in originating the idea of a tribute concert, Jayne said. “But he isn’t qualified to represent PEP or the Fender name” as sole promoter of another concert. “It’s too big a thing to manage for one person who isn’t particularly in that business.”