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Profile/Copyright
© 2005 by Jim O’Donnell
The first thing to substantiate about Les Paul is that there really is
one. Young people think he's a sociology report. Riddled middle-agers think he's a guitar.
Older folks—aware
that he was revolutionizing guitar-playing before Eric Clapton had his first pair of long pants—think he's a legend.
All of them probably think he has guitar strings for arteries.
Nowadays, to confuse matters further, the 90-year-old
guitar-picker has stepped into the stratospheric category known as Rock Star. On his recent CD release, American Made/World
Played, his sidemen include the likes of Jeff Beck, Joe Perry and Buddy Guy.
The CD puts a big bold exclamation
mark to Mr. Paul becoming what was called a “permanent installation” exhibit at the Rock ‘n’ Roll
Hall of Fame last year. He had been inducted into the hall in 1988.
What does Les Paul, person, think about all
the fame fuss that has surrounded his life? “I don't think I'm very successful,” he drawls. “I just constantly
try to improve, knowing that I've improved very little since I was fifteen, sixteen years old. You don't improve much after
that."
The utter absence of hauteur is genuine and, in an age of megahype, downright unnerving. Fact is, besides
his million-selling records, Grammy Awards, and permanently installed Rock Hall of Fame status, Les Paul is, truly, in a class
by himself.
When Jimi Hendrix was planning his Electric Lady Studios in the late 60s, he went to Les Paul for
advice.
Asked some years ago to review a Les Paul album for the English newspaper Melody Maker, former Led Zeppelin
guitarist Jimmy Page put it this way: "He's the man who started everything. He's just a genius."
It's
a genius that has delivered to pop music a mad-scientist's bag of tricks like phase shifting, overdubbing, reverb effects,
sound-on-sound, close-miking, echo and delay.
The Les Paul guitar, in and of itself, is a fine-fragranced,
long-stemmed rose in the garden of modern musical instruments. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen once stood on a stage with Les Paul
and said to him: "Without the things you have done, I wouldn't be able to do half the things I do."
A
rock guitarist who built his instrument entirely from scratch is Brian May, formerly of Queen. When I asked Queen Guitar Brian
about King Guitar Les, he said: “It’s incredible how far into the technology he got all at once.”
Mr. Paul also happens to be the guy who invented multi-track recording and the solidbody electric guitar. For those two
contributions alone, one could venture to say that the history of popular music without Les Paul would be as diminished as
the history of the Beatles less Paul.
If he were Mrs. Paul, his onions would be fried, and he'd be the
mother of all electric guitar wars, since so many rock guitarists choose his instrument as their weapon of choice.
Instead, he's the father because in 1941 in New York City Mr. Paul came up with the first solidbody guitar. Since the instrument
fundamentally transformed how pop music was played and heard, its development was the most important achievement in a lifetime
of important achievements.
In the lifetime of 1941 America, people's minds were on two growing wars: one in Europe
and one in Asia. The Yankees found themselves playing the Dodgers in an all-New-York World Series; something called "automatic
transmission" found its way into automobiles; and in Duluth, Minnesota, a baby boy named Robert Allen Zimmerman (later
to go by the name of Bob Dylan) found himself into the world.
A quarter got you into the movies or six tunes on
a kaleidoscopic Wurlitzer jukebox. It was the height of the Big Band Era and ballroom dancing. Top tunes of the day were Glenn
Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo,"
Sammy Kaye's "Daddy," and the Inkspots' "I Don't Want to Set
the World on Fire."
Setting the world of 1941-U.S.A. on fire was an early-stage communications metamorphosis
in the cocoon of the electric wire. Across the increasingly wired-up nation, natural sound was beginning to be sublimated
by amplified sound. That is to say, there were people beginning to think more in sound waves than sound.
One of those who sensed in electricity the earmarks of a new artistic medium was Lester William Polsfuss, born in Waukesha,
Wisconsin, June 9, 1915, five years after the death of Mark Twain. Although born near the beginning of the Twentieth Century,
Mr. Paul's instincts belonged to the end of it—to a far more voltaic, medium-is-the-message era.
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A natural
musician, he was as fascinated by the flow of electricity as by the flow of music. He would prove to be an American innovator
who had an artistic feel for electric current that was as ingrained as Twain's artistic feel for the Mississippi's current.
In the early 30s, the up-and-coming professional guitarist began
burning his energies on this central vision: a guitar that would produce undistorted electronic sounds. "What I wanted to do," Mr. Paul told me, "is not have two things vibrating.
I wanted the string to vibrate and nothing else. I wanted the guitar to sustain longer than an acoustical box and have different
sounds than an acoustical box." The concept, of course, fired
a cannon shot across the bow of the aesthetic canon that guitars resonate. But it was Mr. Paul's precocious perception to
see that the presence of electric current changed the entire context of the source. The requirements were different. The acoustic
guitar used its hollowness to get vibrations. With electricity,
the vibrations hurt more than helped. The sound would be purer if the body was non-vibrating, stable, solid. The guitar was
not to be the sound producer, after all, but the conveyer. With the vitality of the pioneer and the certitude of the visionary, Mr. Paul hunkered down for years fashioning
a guitar geared for a galvanic generation. He handled electricity as if it were a new vernacular and, like Dante writing in
his native Italian, dared to create in the language of his day. He
determinedly sliced through one problem after another, the first problem being how the instrument would pick up the electric
impulse so the strings would make a sound. Explains Mr. Paul: "I
picked it up first with the other half of a telephone—a magnet and a coil—put it under the strings. Then I used
the phonograph—jabbed the needle in the top of the guitar." Observing
that the hollowness of the instrument was interfering with the electronic sound, he realized that a solid surface would serve
better. "I knew that what I needed was a guitar with no holes,"
says Mr. Paul. "I chucked rags in it. I poured it full of plaster of Paris. I tried everything with the guitar to try
to get it to not feed back and not sound like an acoustical box." He
finally hit on his breakthrough in 1941. While F.D.R. was warming up the country with his fireside chats, 26-year-old Les
Paul was leaving his fireside for a factory every Sunday. Epiphone
guitars, above a Woolworth's on 14th Street in New York City, was letting him use their factory once a week to work on his
guitar-designing. He spent most of every Sunday in the factory while
Big Band's big names serenaded New York hotels: Eddy Duchin at the Waldorf, Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt, Benny Goodman at
the New Yorker. On his Sundays at the factory, he took a four-inch-by-four-inch
piece of wood and attached the sides of a cut-up guitar onto it. There it was: a solid, non-vibrating guitar. The inventor-guitarist
had redesigned some old tools—wood and string—into a new instrument. He dubbed it "The Log." More than three-score years later, the solidbody electric guitar has become the biggest
All-American wooden symbol since the baseball bat or the log cabin. And like the log cabin, the instrument embodies a pioneering
spirit that is enduring. Over the years he has pointed to the formation
of that piece in 1941 as the most essential step in the development of the solidbody prototype. With the hope that his solid guitar would be his solid gangplank to other worlds, the guitar journeyman
tried to sell the idea for manufacturing. But when he brought "The Log" to guitar companies, they eyed him like
Cagney eyeing the FBI. (continued on page 2)Links:
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