Kiko Blake's List: Les Paul

• Paul was tinkering with electronics by then, and in 1940 or 41 he built his first "electric guitar" -- a 4" x 4" chunk of pine with strings and a microphone pick-up attached, which Paul called "The Log."
• Les Paul is the musician and inventor generally credited with inventing the solid-body electric guitar. A harmonica and guitar player from an early age, Paul moved in his late teens to Chicago, where he became a minor star on the country music circuit.
• Paul married singer Mary Ford (b. Colleen Summer, 1928-1977) and together they had hit records during the 1950s, including "Mockin' Bird Hill" and "Vaya Con Dios." They also hosted a successful TV show, The Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home Show (1953-60). Paul was by now a renowned guitar wizard; in the early 1950s he signed a deal with Gibson to produce his Les Paul guitars, which became a mainstay of the budding rock 'n roll industry.

• He returned to performing in the late '70s, and he and Chet Atkins released a Grammy-winning record, Chester & Lester (1978). In 2006, at the age of 90, Paul won Grammys for the pop instrumental "Caravan" and the rock instrumental "69 Freedom Special," both from the album Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played.

    

  Les Paul was given a Grammy for technical achievements in 2001... He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988... He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.
• Paul eventually developed an astonishingly fluid, hard-swinging style of his own, one that featured extremely rapid runs, fluttered and repeated single notes, and chunking rhythm support, mixing in country & western licks and humorous crowd-pleasing effects.
• took up the harmonica at age eight
• Alas, a bad automobile accident in Oklahoma in January 1948 put Les out of action again for a year and a half; as an alternative to amputation, his right arm had to be set at a permanent right angle suitable for guitar playing.
• After his recovery, he teamed up with his soon-to-be second wife, a young country singer/guitarist named Colleen Summers whom he renamed Mary Ford, and reeled off a long string of spectacular multi-layered pop discs for Capitol, making smash hits out of jazz standards like "How High the Moon" and "Tiger Rag."
• Discography:  Les Paul

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• Les Paul, the father of the electric guitar and multitrack recording, dressed in a thick, oatmeal-colored ribbed turtleneck sweater (and it's in the high-70s and humid on this June 3rd day), navy blue trousers and black loafers, and wearing wire rimmed aviator-style glasses, is doing a sound check at 6:00 p.m., before the first of his two shows every Monday night at the Iridium Club on Broadway and 51st in Manhattan.
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• Later in that same decade, he began developing the concept of sound on sound recording, first painstakingly overdubbing part after part on a 78 rpm record cutting machine, and then later on magnetic tape. The Beatles' complex and masterful recordings of the late 1960s, as well as virtually all popular music recorded since, use the very methods he developed

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• Though he had a long and successful pop-jazz career, both with and without singer Mary Ford (born Colleen Summer, July 7, 1928, Pasadena, California; died September 30, 1977), guitarist Les Paul is of paramount importance to rock & roll as the creator of the solid-body electric guitar and as a pioneer in modern recording techniques such as electronic echo and studio multitracking.
• Having learned harmonica, guitar, and banjo by age 13
• Around this time, Paul began seriously thinking about revolutionizing the guitar. He had become interested in electronics at age 12, when he built a crystal radio set. He built his first guitar pickup from ham radio headphone parts in 1934, and by 1941 he had built the first prototypical solid-body electric guitar, a four-foot wooden board with strings, pickup, and a plug, which he called the "Log" and still uses to test against other guitars.
• In 1942, he was drafted and worked for the Armed Forces Radio Service, playing behind Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Johnny Mercer, Kate Smith, and others.
• He backed Bing Crosby with his trio and toured with the Andrews Sisters. With Crosby's encouragement, Paul built his first recording studio in his L.A. garage in 1945. There he began to pioneer such now-standard recording techniques as close microphone positioning ("close-miking"), echo delay, and multitracking.
• "Mockin' Bird Hill" (#3, 1951), "How High the Moon" (#1, 1951), "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" (#3, 1951), and "Vaya Con Dios" (#1, 1953). These recordings -- among the earliest multitracked pop songs -- featured Ford's voice answering Paul's "talking" guitar. Paul also had some instrumental hits on his own: "Nola" (#9, 1950), "Whispering" (#7, 1951), "Tiger Rag" (#6, 1952), and "Meet Mister Callaghan" (#5, 1952)

  • Listen to these
• He built the Les Paul Recording Guitar in the early '50s and used it on his own recordings, not allowing Gibson to market that model until 1971. Since they were first marketed in May 1952, Les Paul Gibsons have been known for their "hot" pickups, "fatter" tone, and sustaining capacity, as compared to the twangier electric guitars of Leo Fender.
• In the early '50s, Paul built the first 8-track tape recorder, which helped pioneer multitrack recording, and he invented "sound-on-sound" recording, which has since become known as overdubbing.
• His other inventions include the floating bridge pickup, the electrodynamic pickup (both patented), the dual-pickup guitar, the 14-fret guitar, and various types of electronic transducers used both in guitars and recording studios.

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• Les Paul Interview in April of 2009 by Summit Media Communications

• Born the grandson of immigrants in 1915, Lester William Polfuss exhibited an inborn Germanic talent for analytical thinking at a precociously early age.
• With the new model almost ready for market, Gibson approached Les Paul, the obvious choice to help launch it. Les was already intimately familiar with the unique characteristics of a solidbody electric guitar.
• The Les Paul Model, as it was originally called, has changed little since its debut in 1952. Except for an updated bridge and humbucking pickups, the Les Paul Standard of today is still the same guitar.
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• LP: When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn't go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7. I used my mother's radio as a PA [public address] system. I'd take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

• LP: Well, that guy started me thinking I've got to find a way to make the guitar louder. And when I did, I ran smack into the problem of feedback. So, I filled the guitar with tablecloths, dirty socks -- I tried everything! And then I took that out and filled it with plaster of Paris. That was better, but it still wasn't the answer. So, in ruining the guitar, I decided once and for all to find the best piece of wood or steel.

    

  I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound. I tried two of them. I first tried a piece of railroad track, about two-and-a-half-feet long, strung a string across it, down the length of the rail and then put the earpiece of the telephone under the string. And lo and behold, I put it into my mother's radio and out came the sound of the railroad track!

    

  I ran into my mother and told her and she said, "The day you see a cowboy on a horse with a railroad track..." [Laughs]. So, it didn't take me long to get off the railroad track.
• It had to look like a guitar?
• LP: Yes! So, I said, "Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist -- whatever. The guitar became so much part of me, it became what I loved the most and lo and behold I found that it would do the same thing around the world.

• You also moved into the world of recording, eventually inventing multi-track recording?

    

  LP: The first thing I did was tune in the radio and hear cowboys singing. I became interested in not only him singing and playing the guitar, but the clock ticking, his breathing, his fingers sliding on the strings, the hum of the transmitter. I started to become hooked on the sound in many ways and I wanted fidelity, like when you're parked underneath a transmitter at a radio station. I would actually go out to the station on my bicycle with my crystal phone and ear phones and sit under the transmitter so I could hear everything that was going on in the room. You could hear everything that was happening in the room. And of course, that gave me a whole new outlook and the next thing I was doing was building a recording machine, so that I could record and hear what I was doing and capture that same sound.
• LP: My role started at the very beginning. I went to three different tape machine companies, but no one thought it was feasible until I met with Ampex. They just jumped on it. They were so excited they put staff on it immediately while another project was underway across the hall. It ended up that two inventions were born at practically the same moment, both of them involving or using the same machinery. They were the first color tape machine and the first multiple sound recorder, each complementing the other and using similar equipment.

• LP: I came up with the electric bass in the early 1930s when Everett Hull came into a little saloon called the Warm Winds, a little bar in Chicago, and he walked up to the bar (he didn't own Ampeg yet and he later owned Bass-Amp and Guitar-Bass) and he asked, "What the hell are you guys talking about?"

    

  I was talking about my ideas for a solid-body guitar with no f-holes and all that stuff, made with a solid piece of wood. So, he's listening and we're drinking. I told him, "What you ought to do is make an electric bass!" And he did.

    

  And, with his great sense of humor, Hull made an electric bass that had a seat and license plate on it that he "drove it to work"! [Laughs] He had a great sense of humor! What happened was one night he came home drunk and pulled the neck off his bass when he was parking. He ended up incorporating the parts into his automobile and would drive the thing to work.

    

  Of course, later he went into business making the first electric bass where you shove a mike up into the bass. It sounded pretty good. So he ended up developing my suggestion.
• So, I went in there and he's trying to make a recording of a bunch of guys singing and I said, "Why don't you do it this way?" And I took one of them and worked it up and they liked it and it was the first one to come out as the Chipmunks. That was in the late 1950s I think.
• LP: Oh, my goodness. Playing for Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the highlights. After finishing with Fred Waring and his 65 Pennsylvanians, we had a big gigantic show at the White House. Following that we had the great privilege of going down and speaking personally with the President. When it was my turn to get an autograph, he gave me a pack of cigarettes and then he said, "Mr. Les Paul, would you be kind enough to play for my kids and the rest of us at a private party downstairs after this thing is over?"
• How did you and your jazz friends react to rock 'n' roll when it arrived on the scene?
• LP: We were kind of upset about it - Sinatra, Nat King Cole - all of us. I thought I was out of a job when rock came in. We were told to change and to be less traditional. They used three chords, and not the right chords, and buried the singer! It was another world that you entered into with a riff and rode it,
• Looking back on your life, what are some of the things about which you're most proud?
• LP: Well, I'm proud of sound-on-sound. I was the innovator, the creator of that and that's where you take one tape machine and you can record over and over on one piece of tape and make multi-track recordings like we did on "How High the Moon" and "Lover." That was a big thing. That's multi-track.
• Personally, I'm not sure I deserve it, you know, for a hunk of railroad track and strings.
• Every night I play at the Iridium is just great. It's wonderful playing for the people and meeting the young and the old. And it's great to still play guitar in America where there are no rules. I was once in Spain and came down with the runs, the heaves, and a Spanish doctor came up to my room to take care of me. Well, he saw my guitar picks on my dresser and asked what they were for and I told him they were to play the guitar and he started to close his bag and leave the room saying, "That's not the way to play guitar!" He was going to leave me!

• Thank you, Les, for a great interview.

    

  LP: Was that okay?

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• The Gibson Les Paul is a solid body electric guitar originally developed in the early 1950s. The Les Paul was designed by Ted McCarty in collaboration with popular guitarist Les Paul, whom Gibson enlisted to endorse the new model. The Les Paul design is one of the most famous and recognized of any instrument in the world, and the basic design has been left virtually untouched for nearly sixty years.

• Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009)^[3][4] — known as Les Paul — was an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which "made the sound of rock and roll possible".^[5] He is credited with many recording innovations, including overdubbing (also known as sound on sound),^[6] delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects, and multitrack recording.^[7]

• The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul has been an innovator his entire life. Born Lester William Polfus in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul built his first crystal radio at age nine - which was about the time he first picked up a guitar.
• By age 13 he was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist and working diligently on sound-related inventions. In 1941, Paul built his first solid-body electric guitar, and he continued to make refinements to his prototype throughout the decade. It’s safe to say that rock and roll as we know it would not exist without his invention

• Essential Songs

   How High the Moon 
   Vaya Con Dios 
   Hummingbird 
   The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise 
   I’m Sitting on Top of the World 
   I Really Don’t Want to Know 
   Bye Bye Blues 
   Tennessee Waltz 
   Dry My Tears 
   Lover (When You’re Near Me) 
• But Les Paul didn’t stop there. He also refined the technology of sound recording, developing revolutionary engineering techniques such as close miking, echo delay, overdubbing and multitracking. He also busied himself as a versatile bandleader and performer who could play jazz, country and pop.
• It grew out of his desire, as a musician and inventor, to create a stringed instrument that could make electronic sound without distorting.

• Recommended Reading

   

   Bacon, Tony. 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul: Half a Century of the Greatest Electric Guitars. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2002. 

   

   Bacon, Tony, Paul Day and Les Paul. The Gibson Les Paul Book: A Complete History of Les Paul Guitars. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1993. 

   

   Lawrence, Robb. The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy, 1915-1963. New York: Hal Leonard, 2008. 

   

   O’Donnell, Jim. “Les Paul: Lessons of a Legend.” http://www.lespaulbiography.com 

   

   Paul, Les. The Best of Les Paul. New York: Hal Leonard, 2004. 

   

   Shaughnessy, Mary Alice. Les Paul: An American Original.  New York: William Morrow, 1993. 
• He experimented with different designs until he had his non-vibrating guitar body, which he called “The Log.” Gibson Guitars initially turned him down, calling his invention “a broomstick with pickups”
• That same year, however, Paul unveiled overdubbing, a breakthrough recording technique that would forever change music. Capitol Records released the Paul’s experimental eight-track recordings of “Lover (When You’re Near Me)” and “Brazil,” which he’d made in his garage workshop.
• The guitarist shattered his right arm and elbow, and he also broke his back, ribs, nose and collarbone. He managed to salvage his career as a musician by instructing surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.
• In 1952, Les Paul introduced the first eight-track tape recorder (designed by Paul and marketed by Ampex) and, more significantly for the future of rock and roll, finally saw the release of the the gold-top solid body electric guitar that bears his name. Gibson’s Les Paul Standard went on to become one of the most popular of all models of electric guitar.
• Built and marketed by Gibson, with continuous advances and refinements from Paul in such areas as low-impedance pickup technology, the Les Paul is a staple instrument among many of rock’s greatest guitarists.
• Paul performed weekly – at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club – and indulged his inventor’s curiosity in a basement workshop at home in Mahwah, New Jersey up until his death on August 13, 2009.

• TIMELINE 
   June 9, 1915: Lester William Polsfuss – a.k.a. Les Paul – is born in Waukesha, Wisconsin. 

   

   1928: Les Paul begins performing country music as “Rhubarb Red” at the age of 13. 

   

   1939: Les Paul’s jazz trio performs at the White House at the request of President Roosevelt. 

   

   1941: Les Paul invents the first solidbody electric guitar. 

   

   1946: Les Paul temporarily drops out of music to work on a new guitar sound and recording style. 

   

   1947: The technique of multitracking is introduced to the world when Les Paul releases his first eight-track recordings. 

   

   1948: Les Paul nearly dies when his car skids off a bridge in a snowstorm.  

   

   1949: Les Paul marries singer Mary Ford, with whom he forms a highly successful musical duo. 

   

   1950: The Les Paul Show, featuring Paul, Ford and rhythm guitarist Eddie Stapleton, debuts on NBC Radio. 

   

   1951: “How High the Moon,” by Les Paul and Mary Ford, becomes a #1 single. 

   

   1952: The Les Paul gold-top solidbody electric guitar is brought to the market by Gibson Guitars. 

   

   1953: “Vaya Con Dios,” by Les Paul and Mary Ford, becomes a #1 single. The song’s title translates as “May God Be With You.” 

   

   1954: Les Paul commissions Ampex to build the first eight-track tape recorder. It features a head, designed by Paul, that can record or play back tracks. Paul’s “Sel-Sync” (Selective Synchronization) design becomes the industry standard for 30 years. 

   

   1961: Gibson introduces the new Les Paul model, which has design changes made without Paul’s knowledge. At his request, it is renamed the Gibson SG, and the guitarist temporarily drops his endorsement contract with the guitar maker. 

   

   1967: Les Paul Now!, which features updated version of the guitarist’s earlier hits, is released on London Records. 

   

   1976: Chester and Lester, and album of guitar duets by Les Paul and , is released on RCA. It will win a Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance. 

   

   1978: Les Paul and Mary Ford are inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. 

   

   1983: Les Paul receives the Trustees Award from the Recording Academy in recognition of his “significant contributions to the field of reocrding.” 

   

   1984: Les Paul begins a Monday-evening residency at a Greenwich Village club called Fat Tuesday, which will continue until 1995. 

   

   January 20, 1988: Les Paul is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the 3rd annual induction dinner. Jeff Beck is his presenter. 

   

   February 2005: Les Paul is inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. 

   

   June 7, 2005: The Best of the Capitol Masters: 90th Birthday Edition, a remastered collection of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s classic Fifties recordings, is released. 

   

   August 30, 2005: American Made/World Played, credited to Les Paul & Friends, is released on Capitol Records. It includes appearances by , Joe Perry, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards and . 

   

   May 9, 2007: A film documentary entitled Chasing Sound: Les Paul at 90 debuts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

   

   November 10-15, 2008: Les Paul is honored as the 2008 American Music Master, part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual series. 

   

   August 12, 2009: At age 94, Les Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital.

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