Les Paul Interview: In His Own Words

Introduction by Michael Cochran
Interview by Rick Landers
Photo Credit: Michael G Stewart and Joseph Rosen

By: Michael Cochran, co-author of Les Paul: In His Own Words

Born the grandson of immigrants in 1915, Lester William Polfuss exhibited an inborn Germanic talent for analytical thinking at a precociously early age.

Coupling an insatiable curiosity about the world around him with a natural flair for showmanship, his inventiveness and musical abilities merged with the advent of electronics and the birth of jazz to launch and maintain a spectacular career that spanned more than three-quarters of a century.

After beginning his career at thirteen, under the name Red Hot Red, he met his primary guitar mentor, the multi-talented Sunny Joe Wolverton, becoming Rhubarb Red and achieving wide success as a country performer on radio while still in his teens.

Further inspired by jazz greats of the day, he introduced Les Paul as a new persona in 1934 and became the primary force in popularizing the electric guitar, bringing it out of the rhythm section and into the spotlight as a lead instrument.

In the late ’40s, he achieved his signature “New Sound,” and with wife Mary Ford, unleashed a string of hit records that forever changed the way music was recorded and heard.

The guitar techniques perfected during his playing prime introduced stunning innovations still copied today, while his contributions to audio recording technology and the electronic processing of sound blazed new trails that have since become super highways.

Through it all, what Les Paul has always done is take every resource available and integrate it with his own ideas to produce unique innovations.

Taken together, the enduring influence of his unique contributions to recording technology, instrument design and American popular music are unsurpassed by any other single individual.

He is the man who changed the music, and truly the godfather of modern electric guitar.

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Rick Landers: Are you still tinkering with Gibson guitars, like the new Digital Les Paul?

Les Paul: I have two or three different experimental models. We go in there and work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions. One minute we’re over here, the next minute we’re doing something completely different.

It’s interesting because you are producing so many things you couldn’t do with analog. We’re switching the sounds, not so much the tone of the instrument. When things seem impossible, it’s back to grade school, soldering, re-developing and always building.

I’ve been working with the digital Les Paul guitar since its infancy, experimenting in many directions. It’s something I enjoy doing.

Rick: They must be much different from the first guitar you played.

Les Paul: My first guitar came from Sears Roebuck, and I believe it was $3.95. When I got it, I took it into the dining room and through the swinging door into the kitchen.

Mother was in the kitchen and I took it out of its shipping box and one of the strings went “twang”. She said, “Les, you sound great already!” That was a great line!

Rick: Was she musical?

Les Paul: Yes. She played the piano and she would play a lot of blues. Mom and my father were getting a divorce and she would sit at the piano and cry. She had the blues. She was very aware of what was going on and also what was commercial and what wasn’t commercial. So I had a person unknowingly guiding me.

She was an asset to me because she’d say, “You need to put your foot here or you do this there or right here smile.” Or she’d say “Do this or that!” She was always thinking about how it would look on stage. She knew when it was good too. She knew when there were right notes and wrong notes.

Rick: At what point did you decide the guitar needed to be amplified?

Les Paul: 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 six or seven. I used my mother’s radio as a P.A. 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.

Later, I was at a barbecue stand half-way between Waukesha and Milwaukee and people loved it when I first played on stage. I was at this barbecue stand playing and one car drove up and there was a fellow in a rumble seat. He wrote a note to the car hop for me that said, “Red, your voice and harmonica are fine, but your guitar’s not loud enough.”

Rick: And that was the beginning?

Les Paul: Well, that guy started me thinking I’ve got to find a way to make the guitar louder. Then when I did, I ran smack into the problem of feedback. So, I filled the guitar with tablecloths and dirty socks. I tried everything!

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. 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.

Rick: It had to look like a guitar?

Les Paul: 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 a 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.

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

Les Paul: 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. 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.

Rick: What was your role in developing multi-track recording and how did people react?

Les Paul: 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.

I was involved deeply with my dream, which was multi-track recording, starting in ’53 and finished in ’56. It took a lot of hard work. We flew the eight-track machine back to Ampex three times before we finally got it up and running.

Then we did some big modifications and made so many changes that the fellow who worked with me became the vice president of Ampex. It’s ironic, but they found that the guys I had working here were more on top of what was going on. We were working closely together and we were many years ahead of Ampex.

When it came out on the market it took the industry maybe five years to figure out what they were going to do with it because, for some reason, they limited their vision to, “Where do we find another Les Paul and Mary Ford?”

They weren’t thinking, “Where could we add an Artie Shaw part or a Benny Goodman, or another voice?” Or all the different things you could do with multi-track other than what Les Paul and Mary Ford were doing.

It was amazing to see how slow they were! But, once they got the hang of it and Motown got it and Atlantic Records got it, Tommy Dowd and the rest of them, when they got it, it was a Godsend because it really alerted the world to the potential of multi-track recording.

Rick: How did your partnership with Mary Ford begin?

Les Paul: Well, Mary and I were going together for five years. She was a guitar hippie and she followed me around from city to city. Boy, I was the round wheel. She thought that there was no one who played like me or sounded like me. It was about five years when I decided that I was going to do something with my group. I was going to add a vocalist.

Mary and I were in New York and I was with Paramount and we were sitting down figuring out who would be a great singer. We had Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day and Kate Starr. Anyway, I picked Doris Day as the girl who was going to be my singer.

At the last minute I backed out and said, “No, I don’t think so.” And Mary said, “What are you going to do, sit up there sing and play tambourine?”

I figured I needed to think of somebody, somewhere. But, it never got to me until later, when one night I was playing at my brother’s and father’s tavern and my brother forgot to hire a bass player. Mary had been following me around for five years.

I told her that she should know what I play so she could play. I’m not playing up there alone! It was then and there that I decided I’d have Mary sing something. She sang church songs and a couple of hillbilly songs. So, I got her doing that and that’s when the light lit!

I turned to my dad and he was shaking his head, “No!” and I was shaking my head, “Yes!” My dad said that I was a roughneck and she was so delicate, you two will never make it together! We did. We met in ’45 and we married the day before New Years, the last day of ’49.

Rick: A lot of people may not know about your involvement with the creation of the electric bass guitar.

Les Paul: 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.

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 mic up into the bass. It sounded pretty good. So he ended up developing my suggestion.

Rick: You’ve been involved with so many musical firsts. What’s this about your idea that gave us Alvin and the Chipmunks?

Les Paul: The Chipmunks would never be here if it wasn’t for me. One night, I was with my friend Howie, who I didn’t even know was Howard Hughes, I only knew him as Howie. Well, Howie was always busting my chops.

I was playing at this jazz joint called the Club Rounders and Howie asked, “How you doing playing at the Upholstered Sewer” Later, we went to get a hot dog and we went by this studio and I knocked on the door and the guy inside says, “Can’t you see the light’s lit? Who are you anyway?”, and Hughes said, “This is Howie,” I said, “I’m Les Paul.” The guy behind the door said, “The Les Paul?” and I said, “Yep,” and he then said, “Well, come on in!”

I went in 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?” 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, and since that time he would always stop a date if he saw me, he’d cancel the date. He’d say, “Come back another day. Book another day, my friend is here!”

He always felt like he owed me a million dollars. Very few people know this story, I’ve rarely told that story. A lot of people that know me know about it, but I’ve never told the press about it. I just forget a lot of things.

Rick: Tell us some of the highlights of your performing career.

Les Paul: 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?”

So, that was one of my highlights, that particular day. That night was a big, big, big thrill!

Working with Bing Crosby, I don’t think anybody could have a greater privilege than working with somebody as big and powerful as Bing Crosby. He was just great.

There were many other thrills, such as playing with Django Rheinhardt. In ’46, Django went electric after he heard me playing with my band. He hid for three years to learn bebop. I told him not to and so did Eddie Lang. It ended up not being a good idea for him.

I think I’ve played with every great guitar player that there is, on the stage with me where we’re actually playing together. So many. There are a million more memorable moments, playing the London Palladium and for many Presidents. I’ve had many great experiences.

Playing with Judy Garland, it’s an endless list, all different. Something was always happening and it’s still the same, no end.

It was a great pleasure playing with Count Basie just before he died. Talking about him, he’d just lift his left hand and take one finger and hit one note. It was the best damn note I ever heard. It’s not how many notes you play, you just have to play the right ones! Like Freddie Green pumping a great rhythm.

Let me tell you a story about Bing Crosby. I never rehearsed and went in cold. Well, one night Sinatra was with us. He worshiped Bing, but was deathly afraid of him like a dog with his tail between his legs. He even bought a pipe and hat to be like Bing. Bing was the king!

Well, Bing and I were in the bathroom standing next to each other, and he asked me if the kid [Sinatra] was any good. I said, “He’s pretty good, Bing.” Later, I was between Bing and Frank when they were singing and there was a low note that Sinatra couldn’t hit and he got nervous. Bing looked him straight in the eye and said to Frank, “Is this what you’re trying to do?” and easily hit that low note! Nobody was as good as Bing Crosby.

Rick: I understand that you’re working on a hot new rock CD with some legendary players.

Les Paul: There’s a whole slew of them: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Santana, Richie Sambora, it just goes on and on. All my friends are great, great, great players and great songwriters. The album’s “finished”, but Jimmy Page may do it too. We’re waiting to hear from him to see if he’s cleared to do it. These are great things and it’s great for me!

The great licks they changed them and put them into rock. The actual playing is very familiar to me. What wasn’t familiar is the change in the sound and how they were mixed all together and the way they were played, the rhythm sounds or how they use drums. I didn’t use drums like this.

After this rock album, we want to do a bluegrass album where I’ll play with the very best bluegrass guitarists of all time by dubbing them in with me! Then we’ll do a blues and a jazz album with the greatest guitarists. That’s going to be a big charge!

It’ll be hard because half of my fingers are arthritic, frozen stiff, no movement and so I play more with my hand from the first knuckle. I don’t play that many notes now.

Rick: How did you and your jazz friends react to rock ‘n’ roll when it arrived on the scene?

Les Paul: 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, and you needed to turn it up five-hundred watts to get the sound right. It was rebellion, having something to say with a new beat. They wanted “How High the Moon” with a new strength!

The rock people wanted adventure, wanted to move cavities in their body, wanted to move your navel. There was this gal who called me who had been in a car crash. She told me she had figured out the music thing.

She was a paraplegic and said when she was laying on her back and rock musicians hit certain notes, the sounds moved her innards. That’s when she figured the music sounded really good!

Rick: What’s the best band you’ve ever played in?

Les Paul: The band I’m in now. We have four and it’s the right size. Five gets in the way. It’s different with a small group. They’re the greatest.

Rick: Looking back on your life, what are some of the things you’re most proud of?

Les Paul: 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.

Delay and echo were other big ones, and phasing and flanging were very important. It wasn’t tape delay, it was disk delay first and today it’s digital delay. Delay has been used in so many ways.

If you’re in the U.S. and talk to someone on the phone who’s in Iraq, you’ll experience sound delay. It isn’t long, but the sound has to go to a satellite and back, it’s used for everything. I’m proud to have that be something I invented.

Same with the multi-track recording that’s used in many of the flight programs to get to the moon, to see my ideas used for all of those things, I feel terribly proud of it, that I was given the privilege to think of it.

Rick: You’re now an inductee of the Inventors Hall of Fame. Your thoughts on that?

Les Paul: I think about Edison and all the things he did. If the honor went to Edison, I mean look at his cylinder and the first light bulb. That’s something! He was a scientist, but we think of him as a gadgeteer.

It’s odd for me to think that I’m an inductee with inventors like the Wright Brothers and Goddard. My God almighty! Personally, I’m not sure I deserve it, you know, for a hunk of railroad track and strings.

Rick: Les Paul guitars have been around since 1952, with countless sold, if you could have only one, which one would you choose?

Les Paul: The one I’m playing. It happens to be a Les Paul Recording and it’s not the most popular one of the Les Paul line for many reasons. But that particular guitar is the type of guitar that gives me the sound that I want, without any equalization and all the problems you have with all the other guitars, with all the voodoo stuff on them. I don’t have any of that. I just go right into the port and do my thing and we just make the album. There’s no equalization at all. Nothing.

It’s a 1971, a brown one. I also have a black one that was one of the first prototypes made of what they call the recording guitar due to its low impedance device. The black one’s so good that I’m afraid to take it down to the club because if I leave it on that stool it would be gone in a minute.

When I was in Chicago they’d take a jack to the lid of the car trunk. I lost many guitars that way, stolen. They should do it more with accordions.[laughs].

I don’t know of a guitar player that has only one guitar. They’re never happy with one. I’m never happy with just one of them. I woke up and ended up with six, even if you can only play one at a time! Of course, the competition between the wife and the guitar is pretty heavy!

Rick: What did you think when you first saw Leo Fender’s Telecaster?

Les Paul: Well, I called Gibson and told them that they’d better get off their duff because Leo is going ahead with it. Told them they’d better find out what’s going on in this world and Gibson agreed because I’d seen it first hand and thank God Gibson agreed. The rest is history.

Rick: Did you like the Telecaster when you first saw it?

Les Paul: Sure.

Rick: You get a chance to play it?

Les Paul: I’ve never played a Fender, though Leo gave me one of the first ones. He gave me one with no serial number and no model name on it. It just had his name on it, you know, Fender.

Rick: What was your relationship with Leo Fender and did you ever consider yourself in competition?

Les Paul: Leo was a dear friend. We shared our ideas a lot and we talked about them. He’d come into “the backyard,” it was a great place because I had a recording studio. Most of the people that I recorded were cowboys, country and western bands, and the electric guitar was the perfect thing to have in there.

Leo was interested in two things, a good amplifier and a good guitar. Where would you get a better opinion than from guitar players, who could tell you what was wrong or what improvements were needed? What’s better than being at a recording spot and hearing the complaints so you could rectify them?

But all of us were in different worlds. I was in the Gibson world and I’d be talking to Gibson. Paul Bigsby was with Leo once and he was looking at my vibrola and said, “I’m going to make one of those.” So, Bigsby went in that direction.

Leo’s beliefs and my beliefs were terribly similar. We just had different ideas about the sounds we wanted to create with this thing. They’re both great. I have no qualms saying that. Whether it’s Fender or Gibson, my God, they both came through with flying colors.

Let me tell you about Freddie Gretsch. He was a good friend and I told him I had another friend who I wanted him to meet. So, I introduced Freddie to Chet Atkins. And you know what? Chet asked, “Fred who?” They’d never heard of one another until I introduced them!

Rick: If you could go back and time and give some advice to the young Les Paul, what would you say?

Les Paul: I would say how lucky I was in my life. I’d tell anyone young to first be prepared! I set my sights high and with determination. If you believe in yourself you need to only reinforce all your dreams.

People need to raise their sights. I was able to get everything I set out to do. I have to thank somebody, someone, this act that has been given to me is bigger than I am.

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Note about Les Paul’s FX Pedals

Before his performance at the Iridium Jazz Club, I got a peek at Les Paul’s FX pedal setup, a photo of which you’ll see below. The pedals, from left-to-right as they would face him, are: Chromatic Tuner (TU-2); Super Chorus (CH-1); Digital Delay (DD-3); Tremolo/Pan (PN-2); another Digital Delay (DD-3); and an Equalizer (GE-7). All pedals are by BOSS. In addition to the pedals, his FX holder contained a pair of sunglasses, electrical tape, a pair of pliers, screwdrivers, white out, and an extra guitar strap.