by Jon Chappell
Les Paul was a giant in the music industry long before rock and roll was even a glimmer in the eye of record company executives or a restless youth culture. But, it was Les’s longevity and active life that made him such a continuing source of inspiration, a portal to history, and a relevant force to all who knew him. It’s hard to believe that as revered as he was when he passed, the heyday of his popularity as an entertainer was over 50 years ago.
But, no matter how the times changed, and the musical fashions came and went, Les always adapted and prevailed. My first in-person meeting with Les came in the mid-1980s, when Les was already over 70 years old. I’ve been learning from him ever since.
I thought I was unique because I had a few “Les Paul stories”—personal encounters with the great man that were funny, anecdotal, and provided great material to whip out at a cocktail party. But, it turns out that anyone who ever shook Les’s hand or got his autograph or was an audience member and the target of his good-natured ribbing also had a great story. In talking to colleagues, friends, and fans, I realized that almost everyone who even came within earshot of the great man can relay a choice Les anecdote.
Les just had that effect on everybody. He connected to all kinds of people and on every level, whether he knew them or not. If you talk to my in-laws, now in their ’80’s, they will recall how exciting and entertaining Les Paul and Mary Ford were in their prime (“She sang so smoothly and beautifully,” said my mother-in-law about Mary Ford; “what an entertainer!” was my father-in-law’s pronouncement on Les).
Audio engineers marvel at his ingenuity, heartily endorsing the 2005 decision to finally induct him into the Inventors Hall of Fame, alongside Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Guitar players who meet Les can’t believe they’re shaking the hand that shook the hand of Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Chet Atkins, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and so many others. Of course, he didn’t just shake the hands of these legends; he jammed and recorded with them as well.
But perhaps the greatest influence Les had was on ordinary folks looking for entertainment and the chance to witness living history. Les generously and consistently made this possible by packing them in every Monday night, two shows a night, for decades, at small clubs in New York City. Going to hear Les Paul was a popular tourist destination and New York City institution. He started out at Fat Tuesdays on the East Side, and later moved to the larger Iridium Jazz Club in Times Square.
In this environment, Les was a tireless and consummate entertainer. He played, he sang, he joked, he told stories but mostly he interacted with people and delighted legions of fans—whether from the stage, during breaks, or in the long autograph line after his show.
Since I live in New York, I had ample opportunity to catch him live, and most of these instances occurred when my music-playing friends visited from out of town. Everyone wanted to go see Les Paul perform live, so over the 10 years, I’ve probably seen Les 20 or 25 times.
Two of these times were with my friend Doyle Dykes, an amazing fingerpicker, who sat in with Les. Doyle and I got to hang back stage with Les, his engineer Tom Doyle, and Rusty Paul, Les’s son. Several times I went with my wife, but mostly it was with buddies who loved to just check out Les and the many world-class guest performers who would drop by and sit in with the great man.
I’ve also interviewed Les several times in my career as a journalist, but the most memorable exchange was not for an interview but when I acted as the on-camera host for an instructional video Les did for StarLicks (distributed by Hal Leonard). For this two-day shoot, the crew assembled at Les’s house in Mahwah, NJ, which is a treasure trove of audio and music history. But, more than just a museum of Les’s inventions, this is the actual ground where Bing Crosby drove up in a truck to deliver a new Ampex reel-to-reel, the room where W.C. Fields entertained two female companions (ahem) on Les’s piano, and the couch where Charlie Parker spent the night—after the two had gotten lost in Harlem after a gig.
During the breaks from filming the instructional stuff, Les would recount his most outrageous adventures—stuff that would never pass the “family rating” for public viewing, but that had the crew and me howling. Les recounted his various capers that ran the gamut from grinding up mothballs for fuel when gasoline was rationed to his favorite methods for dispatching unruly hecklers and drunks at clubs.
During other breaks, we would rehearse songs for the video, though none of that material ended up on tape. Still, I got to play “How High the Moon” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” with Les Paul.
I’d interviewed Les at the club, at shows and various tributes given in his honor, but seeing him on his home turf was something else indeed. The overwhelming feeling you get is that you’re surrounded by the machines that are milestones in recording and audio history, including prototype Ampex multi-track recorders, Gibson Les Pauls of every stripe, and the memorabilia that chronicles Les’s life in music history.
Of course, being a guitar player myself, it was great to hear Les’s train of thought that led to the solidbody, directly from the man himself, and standing in front of the very instrument that started it all—the Log.
The solidbody electric guitar may have been co-developed by Leo Fender on the West Coast, but Les had been experimenting with the idea of a guitar independently and in parallel, first using a length of railroad track to reduce feedback problems that so plagued acoustic guitars, and to enhance sustain. When his mother pointed out that she wasn’t likely to see any cowboys wielding a railroad track, Les switched to a length of four-by-four lumber—what you’d use for a fencepost or to support a deck. Recognizing this was visually unappealing, Les created “wings” that attached to either side of the post. The wings looked like the body of an F-hole guitar, but of course, they were completely non functional, as far as the sound. This post-with-wings contraption, which Les refined on weekends at the Epiphone factory in New York City, became known as “the Log.” The Log’s final incarnation became, of course, the Gibson Les Paul, and it though looked nothing like the Log, the founding sonic principle is the same: A solid mass providing a better tone than could be derived from the “amplified acoustic” paradigm played by Charlie Christian and his ilk.
No one suspected that a guitar that couldn’t make sound acoustically would be viable until Les had, rather counter-intuitively, figured it out in the late 1930s (the Telecaster wouldn’t be released until the early 1950s). Les’s forays into recording technology were no less visionary.
Just as the Log solved the twin problems of feedback and sustain, Les’s views on recording solved problems on two fronts: the technological limitations of recording simultaneous parts, and applying the modifications he made to musical purpose.
First was his imaginative ability to look at a machine or physical system and tinker with it to make it act in a manner totally unintended by its designer. He would eyeball the path of magnetic tape over capstans, tension levers, and electro-magnetic heads and ponder, What would happen if we drilled a couple of hole here, added another head, and ganged the output wires together? The results, of course, were history.
Les Paul advertisement (1952)
This “tinkerer’s tendency” began early, when Les recorded on acetate disks, using automobile parts to create pulleys, belts, and platters that would rotate at different speeds, giving him the ability to record at half-speed, thereby producing “double-speed sound” at normal playback—what we think of today as the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” sound. He and Mary also used previous recordings of themselves to create harmonies—one disk played the previous parts while the next part was cut to a new disk. This allowed for another Les Paul innovation: close miking and lockstep phrasing—the laid-back, cool, and intimate sound of Mary’s stacked harmonies. Before this, harmonies were created by a group of people standing around a single mic, so as a group, you couldn’t get as close to the diaphragm as Mary was able to do. Les and Mary arranged these harmonies, no doubt influenced by Les’s stint with the Andrews Sisters earlier in his career.
When recording technology moved to open-reel tape, Les again applied his novel way of looking at the existing machinery and asking What if?
This included his innovation of installing additional playback heads in the tape path. Again, this produced two results, discovered by Les at different times: 1) echo (what we think of as “slapback,” rather than the ambience of a canyon or church), because the two playback heads both sent an audio signal at slightly different times, and which was adjustable based on their placement in the path, and of course, 2) overdubbing—the precursor to true multi-track recording.
Jon Chappell (left) with Les Paul at Les's home studio - Photo courtesy of Jon Chappell
While fairly crude, at least by electrical engineering standards (it was a “destructive edit” because you’d permanently fuse the new part to the existing part), the modification that produced overdubbing represented a completely fresh and unique way of thinking. As recording engineer Al Schmitt observed when discussing Les’s contributions, it’s a lot easier to improve upon a technique or innovation once it’s been done the first time. But it’s imagining something that first time that requires genius. Les would later bring his ideas to Ampex, whose engineers, guided by Les’s original vision, would design stacked heads for the multitracking paradigm that became the industry standard.
Les Paul was first and foremost a musician. He knew that once he was able to overdub—and on the eminently more-portable format that tape provided—he and Mary could make complete recordings anywhere and anytime, using just the machines he acquired and modified (and which he carried with him in the back of his car).
Already schooled in this technique from their work on acetate disks, Les and Mary went to town with the far-more-convenient open reel tape machines. They recorded everywhere: in their house, in the studio, and on the road.
As a musical stylist, Les was as inventive and adaptive here as he was with technology. He started out playing banjo and harmonica, moved to guitar, and quickly absorbed and adapted country music to pop and jazz. He could play hillbilly novelty songs, smoothly delivered melodic lines for Bing Crosby, and hard-swinging jazz pyrotechnics up in Harlem—and he often did all three of these in a single day, moving from one venue to another.
As a guitar stylist, Les is probably closest to Django Reinhardt. The virtuosity and single-string work that’s based mostly on the melody recalls Reinhardt’s approach more so than, say, Charlie Christian. Les respected Charlie Christian, and told me that while Christian didn’t have the chops that Django or he himself had, “he nailed me to the wall” with his musical choices and horn-like arpeggios during their jams.
But Les cites Reinhardt as his biggest inspiration, and, as he told me in an interview, felt a special kinship with Reinhardt because of their respective injuries—Reinhardt’s left hand had been badly burned in a fire, which limited his fretting work to two fingers, and Les’s right arm had also been severely injured and permanently impaired in a car accident. Les said he often thought of Django during his long, painful, and uncertain rehabilitation. Of course, Les used a lot more “tricks”—both musical and technological—than Reinhardt did, but the straight-ahead, raw technique and virtuosity of the Wizard of Wauskesha is just as breathtaking as the Belgian gypsy’s.
Les Paul at the Iridium Jazz Club, NYC - Photo courtesy: Jon Chappell
Ultimately, it was Les Paul’s unending inventiveness as a technologist, musician, and entertainer that allowed him to adapt and remain vital and relevant through nine decades. His approach to entertaining was the same as it was with technology and music: find the way to make it work, and make people happy. Whether rolling out the country music tricks of his early career, peeling off flashy showpieces, or playing lyrical melodies, Les always gave the audience what they wanted, never judging, and always giving it his all.
Les wasn’t just a great inventor. He knew sound and he knew music. He played expressively, worked the range of his guitar to best effect, and punctuated notes with stabs of dynamic authority. He retained his uncanny sense of timing and phrasing till the very last, even when it was obvious he had lost a step technically in his guitar playing.
Even when he’d relegate the lead-guitar duties to another guitarist on the bandstand, it was clear who the undisputed musical leader and primary force was on the stage that night. To his credit and to the delight of insatiable audiences, he kept on performing and adapting as the situation required. I’ve never encountered a man more facile at making music, nor a sharper, funnier, wittier, and more in-command stage presence in all my years of concert-going than Les Paul. His greatest gift was that he lived so long, and that he kept on giving until the end.
This is a screen capture taken from a Les Paul instructional video that I hosted. We shot it at his house in New Jersey, surrounded by the machines and instruments that were part of history.
Les let me hold his homemade pick. Though our playing together didn’t make the video, I got to jam with Les during the breaks. He kept the crew in stitches with his amazingly funny stories.
*****
About Jon Chappell: Jon Chappell has written five books in the For Dummies series (Wiley Publishing), as well as The Recording Guitarist: A Guide for Home and Studio (Hal Leonard), Digital Home Recording (Backbeat Books), and Build Your Own PC Recording Studio (McGraw-Hill).
© 2009 Jon Chappell
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