Pace Communications
Attache Magazine (USAirways) - October 2004
Profile: jazz great, guitar innovator, Les Paul
Legend of Note: Les Paul
The amazing Les Paul is through with his groundbreaking sonic inventions. Now, at age 89, he’s doing the thing he loves best.
by Bill Henderson
In a recent beer commercial, a young guitar show-off indulges a senior citizen wanting to try a few licks. The old dude fires off a blues run so hot that everyone’s mouth drops open. “What’s your name, man?” says the young dandy. The old dude shrugs. “It’s on your guitar.”
Out on Broadway, on a balmy afternoon, teenage boys cruising Times Square on spring break pull up momentarily in front of New York’s premier jazz club, Iridium.
“Wow, it’s Les Paul,” says one, reading the billboard.
“Wow. He’s famous, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s like—Les Paul!”
Inside the club, the famous Les Paul is one happy guy. Blessed with a sunny nature, genuinely appreciative of a good joke and a good meal, Les Paul is happy because so many battles are behind him and he is still in the game, leading an active group of young jazz virtuosos. And happy because at the moment he’s doing what he loves best: tinkering.
There is an obvious do-not-disturb aura around him as he sets and resets the controls on his amp and plays with the 1940s radio knobs on his old, funky-looking, hot-rod guitar (which, incidentally, is not a Les Paul). Stepping off the stage, he wanders purposefully through the club with his guitar, sitting here, sitting there, sampling the sound from various spots. In momentary repose, his face looks as though it might belong on Mount Rushmore. He has big ears, big hands, and massive arthritic fingers that move around the guitar neck as if they were a single mass.
“I don’t play chords anymore with these fingers,” he says later, between bites of a meal brought backstage by a waiter. He displays one hand without a hint of self-pity.
“Just leads and fills.” Arthritis is a problem; Les Paul fixes problems. In this case, he fixed it by adapting his technique to play what he’s still able to play—problem solved. After nearly a century on earth, Les Paul is what he has always been, a practical guy, a doer, and some even say (though you’ll never hear him use the word)…a genius.
Lester Polsfuss, a.k.a. Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red, or the Wiz of Waukesha (Wisconsin), has been around a long time. In his 89 years, he appears to have done everything, known everybody, been everywhere—with perfect historical timing. Born in 1915, he matured into a national radio star, playing guitar with Fred Waring in New York in the late ’30s and with Bing Crosby in Hollywood in the mid ’40s. He was then perfectly placed to catch the wave of early TV in the 50s. But the rise to celebrity as a performer is only one of his narratives. Just as imposing is the story of Les Paul the innovator and inventor. Legend places him, Zelig-like, at the center of nearly every technologically significant moment in American recording and electric guitar history.
Any music-loving high-schooler can tell you the names of the two mightiest of rock instruments—the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul. Rhubarb Red improvised his first acoustic-electric guitar in 1928, when patrons of the sandwich shop where he played complained they couldn’t hear him. In response, he jammed the stylus from the family phonograph into the bridge of his guitar.
In 1941, he came to the Gibson company with his archetypal solid-body electric, “The Log” (now on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville). Paul had long believed that electric guitars worked best when they had no acoustic properties at all, so the Log was essentially a four-by-four mini railroad tie with strings. To the Gibson executives, justly proud of their elegantly designed acoustic-electric guitars, an inert block of wood, regardless of its electronics, could never bear the Gibson name.
Only in 1952, after Leo Fender beat everyone to market with his own solid-body, the Broadcaster (renamed the Telecaster), did Gibson scramble to clear the way for what would finally be the most prestigious and recognized electric guitar in history, the Les Paul.
Les Paul is generally given credit for conceiving the idea of multi-track recording and pressing the Ampex company into constructing the first eight-track studio recorder for his use. As early as 1934, he was mixing successive combinations of tracks directly to a master disk. Anyone familiar with the famous Les Paul–Mary Ford sound—guitar upon guitar upon guitar—will understand why he experimented with what he called “disk multiples,” a technique that came to be known as “sound-on-sound.”
Overdubbing on an eight-track recorder was a quantum leap in the same direction, allowing more control and less loss of quality. Paul knew at the time what the industry was slow to grasp—that multi-track was more than just a Les Paul “novelty.” It was a master tool that would revolutionize the way all music is created in the studio.
If the recording studio was his canvas, Paul needed a full palette of colors. On his recordings, he often played all the instrumental parts himself, hardly an uncommon practice today, but unheard of in 1950. To make his sound as unique and identifiable as possible, he developed many of the basic special effects we now take for granted.
Why all the sound gimmicks? Paul tells the following story: In 1946, big-time radio had made him the most popular guitarist in the country. One morning the telephone rang. It was his mother.
“Lester, I just heard a guitar player that sounds exactly like you. He almost fooled me. You need to do something about that.”
“Well, Mother, I can’t arrest him.”
“You’re a clever boy, Lester. You’ll think of something.”
Paul can laugh about it now, but clearly, at the time it wasn’t funny. The message was: Son, you’re not unique. In Paul’s words, “How can you be a success if your own mother can’t even pick you out of the lineup?”
So it was goodbye to Chicago, where he had been featured on the top-rated Andrews Sisters’ radio show. Paul took a train straight home to Hollywood and the little garage studio he had built with Bing Crosby’s encouragement. There he sequestered himself, determined not to emerge until he had built a new sound from the ground up, one that his mother and everybody else would recognize as completely, unmistakably, his own.
What he came up with was shimmery, thick, reverberant— the sound of six or eight simulmultaneous Lesters, one layered on top of another. Paul sweetened the mix by adding the vocals of Mary Ford, similarly layered, and the result was one commercial hit after another: “Mockingbird Hill,” “Vaya Con Dios,” “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” “Brazil.”
Now, a half-century later, music fans sometimes need to be reminded that the Les Paul of guitar and recording history is, as he puts it, “a man, not a guitar.” In a time when former pop idols are recycled as living museum displays, Les Paul is all about today.
As he approaches 90, he’s making some of the most interesting live music of his career—and he’s a hit: “Les Paul Mondays” has been a hot ticket at Iridium for nearly ten years. Unlike his old pal Bing Crosby, his friendly rival Leo Fender, his engineer buddies at Ampex, or his long-gone cohorts of ’50s pop, Les Paul is still happening. He hasn’t let history claim him yet—he’s too busy making good music.