By: Rick Landers
In tribute to the legendary guitarist, Les Paul, we caught up with his son, Rusty (Lester G. Paul, Jr) to gather up his thoughts about his father, who had passed a way over a year before. We knew Rusty was carrying on the family musical legacy, by playing bass with his own group, frequenting the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City, a long time gig played by his father every Monday night for decades and working on a tribute tour for his dad.
Rusty spent years hanging out with his father at the Iridium, as well as helping him out in their home workshop while Les tinkered about with audio gear and guitars. During the last few years of his life, Rusty, who is a recording engineer, took on the role of “Les Paul Historian” by videotaping gigs of his father at the Iridium with well-known guest artists.
But, along with all the fame and accompanying brouhaha surrounding Les; to Rusty, Les Paul was “Dad” and his friend.
Today, Rusty continues playing engagements at the Iridium, commiserating with some of the top guitarists and musicians in the world, and preparing for a tribute tour and supporting The Les Foundation. The Foundation’s mission is stated as, “…to honor and remember the life, spirit, and legacy of Les Paul by supporting music education, engineering and innovation as well as medical research.”
Guitar International is honored to present our interview with Rusty Paul, as a tribute to the legendary guitarist, inventor, television and radio personality, recording hit maker, guitar designer, innovator…and father.
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Rick Landers: First, I do want to offer my condolences on the passing of your father. I know it’s been over a year, but it takes a long time, if you ever get over something like that.
Rusty Paul: Oh, it sure does. I’ll tell you. Many nights I’ve spent where I can’t sleep because I can’t get it out of my head.
Rick: My father passed away 35 years ago and I still have moments of gushing tears, so it’s tough.
Rusty: Especially somebody like that, because he’s kind of a special guy.
Rick: Oh, sure, just an amazing person. I actually met Les a couple of times and he was always a hoot. I’ll tell you a quick little story. I was at the Iridium and it was during sound check and when he finished sound check, he came around. I was with a photographer and he said, “Hey, who are you guys?” and so I told him who we were. He sat down and talked to me for like 45 minutes. It was just amazing. I couldn’t believe it.
Rusty: He was quite a guy. Especially if somebody asked him the right question, he’d be there for an hour giving an answer. [Rick Laughs]
Rick: During the 1960s, I was raving to my father about Jimi Hendrix and how great he was. My father said, “Nobody’s as good as Les Paul,” and I’m like, “Who’s Les Paul?” [<em>Laughing</em>] Finally I figured it out. I did play guitar. None of us could afford Les Pauls at the time even though they were pretty cheap back in the ’60s. Eventually I figured out who Les was and obviously he was just an incredible player. I’ve seen some of the YouTubes on him and it’s just amazing what he was able to do.
Rusty: He did a lot more than people really expected him to do or had done. He’s just a quiet guy and they didn’t know him, but for playing the Iridium and together with designing the solid body electric guitars. He lived in Mahwah, New Jersey, but that’s probably the most that people know him by. There were an awful lot of things that he was involved with before he died, including hearing aids.
Rick: Actually, he and I talked about that.
Rusty: Yeah, he and I were working on those things very deeply. It was quite an honor to grow up with him and get the knowledge that I do have and the knowledge that I don’t have. Well, I’m gonna have to figure that out because he’s not here to tell me.
Rick: At what point in your life did you recognize that your father was important, well beyond the relationship you had as a son, but as a person having such amazing…
Rusty: I knew that a long time ago. But, like the reporters usually ask me, they’d say, “Well, how was it growing up with somebody that special?” and I’d say, “It’s hard to do it because I’m in the loop. I’m growing up with it. I’m with it 24/7.” But, it’s hard for me as much as it is for an outsider to look at it and say, “Gee, this is what he did. That’s amazing.” But, I don’t look at it that way because I’m growing up in it. They ask me. “How is it growing up?” I said, “Well, it’s like growing up playing with Bing Crosby’s son, with Gary and all them and now they’re all gone. But, I grew up with him, so it felt like another buddy to me. It’s nothing special.”
But, Dad was somebody who just dabbled in things and he was very inquisitive about everything. Nothing stopped his curiosity and if he had something in his mind and it completely didn’t work, it was always there. He’d just say, “Well, there’s an answer to this. Nobody’s figured this out yet, but why not? There is an answer for it.”
Read GI’s interview with the man himself, Les Paul.
Rick: Yeah, and it’s almost like he’s asking, “Why not me?” as far as figuring it out.
Rusty: Yeah. He always did, but at the table at night, we’d sit and have dinner and everything and he’d say, “Why are all my buddies gone and I’m still here? What is this? All my good buddies and close friends are all gone and I’m still here.” I’d say, “Well, it’s simple, as far as I can figure it out. Your name ain’t on the list yet and you’re here for a purpose. You haven’t finished what you had to do yet.”
I’m sure that even though he passed away a year ago, there’s still things that he wanted to finish that he figured out in a certain way, but it could never be found. It can’t be done. He tried his hardest to do it. He tried to make that guitar the best guitar in the world and at that time wasn’t totally satisfied with the sound and everything that he thought he could make it better and get the whole pie, not just part of it. But, it’s because he said, “There must be a way of making the whole pie instead of half the pie or three-quarters of the pie.” That’s the way his head operated. It’s just an odd little thing.
We’d set the line of coil up, put it on the strings. He’d say, “Gee, that sounds good, but it’s missing something.” We’d say, “Where can we place it? Where can we put it? We can wind it differently,” but he ended up having a string or a pickup or the magnet under it and there it is. All you’re gonna do is get more level, more highs, more bass, but it’s still going to get the whole pie. That bothered him until then, because we were up with that guitar up until June of 2009, before the last show he did. Every week we would take the guitar home and say, “Okay, what effect can we make a little bit better,” and we’d work on it, work on it, work on it and we’d come up the next week with something a little bit better. He’d say, “Well, that’s close, but we can make it better.” We’d end up doing it again and we’d fool with different designs and different things to make it better and just something. He’d say, “I can get this far, but I can’t get all the way.”
Rick: Yeah. Are you talking about his Recording guitar, the ’72?
Rusty: The Recording guitar, the high-impedance guitar. I don’t care which guitar as long as he could get it. It didn’t matter. High-impedance, let’s try a low impedance. Low impedance was the best because it gave you the least amount of noise and it was very clean and it was different. Up until this day, that Recording guitar is different from any other guitar on that market. You can put any guitar up next to that thing and he would still say, “Gee, that Recording guitar still sounds better.”
Rick: I’ve got an old ’52 and it’s got monster P-90s on it that are still amazing.
Rusty: Oh, God. You’ve got a good one there.
Rick: Yeah.
Rusty: That P-90’s still one of the best ones out there.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of guitars and it’s as strong, if not stronger, than any of them. It’s incredible.
Rusty: It was something; he developed a monster. You look at it and say, “Jeez. What could beat that?” You look it up on the Internet and just look at the comments on the Recording guitar and they say, “Well, gee, this guy is off the wall with the Recording guitar,” low impedance and everything. As we went along in the years, we kept looking at it. People would come up and comment, saying, “You know what? He may have THE guitar.” Everywhere you look you find comments that are saying, “This is better; low impedance from high impedance. You gain here. You gain there.” You get a certain tone out of that that you don’t get out of the high impedance. It’s so many things in there and they’re finally figuring it out after all these many years that you can take the Recording bass and the Recording guitar and you can do anything you want.
Les Paul & Friends
He just didn’t know at the time how to do that because there were so many knobs and stuff on that. He could create anything he wanted to, but if you know how to do it. But, if the guys don’t know how to do it and they stumble on this thing, they say, “Holy smokes. This is what I’ve been looking for,” but it’s been there the whole time. He was just a person who was like 10, 20 years ahead of himself all the time, on everything. That’s a weird thing to say, but he was. He was just farther ahead of himself. When he made the first 8-track, he wanted to make the 8-track so that you could line it up with the film, so that you could put it in sync.
Rick: Interesting.
Rusty: Nobody wanted to do that. That’s his life. See, this is obvious. This is simple, lock things up and people just turned it down, so apparently he got Ampex to build one, but not sprocketed. And he built the first one, had to pay for it to get it built.
Rick: Really?
Rusty: But, look what it became. 10 years after it was built, people would have it in the middle of the hallway saying, “What are we gonna do with it?” And Dad says, “Well, why do you have it out in the hall with a cover on it? You should be using it.” They’d say, “Well, we don’t have a Les Paul and Mary Ford to make it work.” He’d say, “You don’t need it. You put a separate instrument on each track.” And they’d say, “Wow! That’s what it is?” [Rick laughing] And it became 8, 16, 32, 48 and then it went just crazy. But, it took them 10 years after that Ampex was built for them to figure out what they could do with it, and what it turned into was a total monster.
Rick: Yeah, just phenomenal, the influence and impact.
Rusty: I’m getting ready with a 13-piece band myself to go on the road.
Rick: Are you?
Rusty: One of the buses is gonna be a museum that’s gonna go with us and the people who don’t know anything about him or knew very little are gonna know every concert we do of where and what he was doing and what he was involved in and what he got involved in. Past, future, and how far he was advanced ahead of himself. He was already thinking 10, 20 years ahead of himself the whole time.
When people got to the point where they thought he had something, he was already past that by 20 years and farther advanced, but they just didn’t understand it at the time. People just thought that he had something fantastic. They always loved his sound. Anytime they’d come into the Iridium, they’d hear this thing and they’d say, “Wow! What a sound!”
It was just crazy what he had in his mind and what he created. Way back when he was a kid, a train would go by a window and the window would vibrate. Well, he was one that wanted to know why that thing vibrated and what made it vibrate, where somebody would just say, “A train went by and it vibrated a window,” and that’s the end of it. But, he wouldn’t stop there. He would go on and on and on, and this is what made him what he was.
Rick: I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about his curiosity. Sounds to me, his curiosity was was almost all-encompassing.
Rusty: Yes, it was. It was, very much so. He would hear something or he would get an idea in his head, and that curiosity just ate him up ’til he finally found out that he can’t go any farther than this with that idea and he’d run into a problem. He’d try to solve the problem, and then he’d say, “I can’t do it, so I’ve got to go another way.” But, the curiosity definitely was there; very much so.
Rick: How did he influence you beyond the world of music as a father? How did he influence you as far as your outlook on the world and character strengths and that type of thing?
Rusty: He was kind of a guy that there is no “no” in the vocabulary, as far as he was concerned. Unless, he had been there and gone and knew that you can’t get anywhere with that and it’s a dead issue. He would really go after these things and it would be every direction that you can think of and if he didn’t think of one he’d say, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow about it. I’ll figure out another idea to do.” We’d try that and if that didn’t work, then we’d say, “Okay.” After you just tried everything you could possibly, every angle you could possibly try, and it didn’t work, then we would say, “Okay, we’ll write that in a book and let’s put that aside and say that never worked, on to the next idea.”
Rick: So, he wasn’t really into first impressions of almost anything. He’d walk around an issue.
Rusty: Oh, he would walk around an issue, but he wouldn’t forget about it because it would be in his mind as a secondary thing. If something came up and it went back to that, he’d say, “Well, here’s an idea. Let’s try this one on, that one we were thinking about two weeks ago where we were doing this and this and this. I’ve got an idea. Let’s try it this way.” And if that didn’t work, we’d put it aside and continue on what we were doing on the other. It was the curiosity; that’s really a big factor there.
Rick: When I said walking around an issue, I didn’t mean avoiding it. I meant he looked at it from all different angles.
Rusty: Oh, yes definitely. He would never totally say that that 100% won’t work, because something would come up in experiments or something years later and he’d say, “Gee, you remember that thing we were fooling with, that idea we didn’t try? I’ve got an idea. Let’s try this.”
Chester and Lester
Rick: So, can I assume that your first guitar was a Les Paul or were you already on bass guitar?
Rusty: No, I started off playing electric guitar. He taught me that a little bit and every time I would figure out what to play and how to play it, he would say, ’This is the way you should do it ,’ and he’d rip it off and I finally got a little discouraged and I said, “Well, I’ll play bass and you play guitar.” Got that mastered down so much that I went to that.
But it was very interesting because he trained himself to play the guitar probably a dozen times from arthritis, and that bugged him. But, it never got to the point to where he said he couldn’t do it. He would find another way of doing it. That’s what kept him going because if he gave it up, if he put it down, he would deteriorate real quick. So that was a challenge to him no matter what to just say, “I’m gonna get it another way.”
It’s like Django [Reinhardt], when he got his fingers caught in the fire in the trailer and lost some of his fingers, he only had two fingers to do this with. So, all this stuff came down, and he learned how to play all of this monstrous guitar with two fingers and it scared the hell out of everybody. Dad, in a way, was the same thing. He didn’t have any fingers destroyed, but the arthritis would freeze him up and he would be kind of handicapped of what he could play. He couldn’t do like one, two, three, four fingers right in a row on one string, because his fingers would freeze up, turn, he’d have to hit one, hammer one, slide one, that kind of thing, to get around.
But, he figured out a way to do it, and no matter what, people would look at it and say, “Jeez, he doesn’t look like he has any problems with his hands,” but if he had go to close his hands like to make a fist, you would see his hands were all messed up to the point where he couldn’t even get all fingers to come down on his wrist. Like when you close your hand, all your fingers could come down evenly and directly he’d make the fist in the palm, his fingers wouldn’t come down. He’d find one sticking up, one turned in, one closing straight, that kind of thing. People didn’t realize what he’d gone through in his life and changed styles of playing to make it work. All that the public heard was what he played, and what he played, it looked like he had no problems at all.
Rick: They say survival of the fittest, but I think more critical is survival of those who can adapt.
Rusty: Yeah, very much so. And he was one who wouldn’t take, like I said, ‘No’ for an answer. He would say that, ‘There is a way, I’ll figure it out’, and he may work on it for six months to get one run that he had a problem with and he would find a way to do it. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound like it was no problem whatsoever to play it. He’d have it down just like it was a piece of glass. There was no problem. You wouldn’t suspect anything. But, this is him. The challenge to him was that if there was no complication, there’s a way of doing it if you want to figure it out.
Rick: The first time I talked to him, the first question I had was, was he still a tinkerer. And I meant that in a very affectionate way, not in any discounting way, because of his major contributions. When he was tinkering, did you get involved and help him out?
Rusty: Yes, I did. I did help him out a lot and he would go and say, we’d go hit the sack at night. This was like 5:00 in the morning and he says, “Well, I’ll think about this and I’ll see you in the morning and we’ll figure it out.” He’d lay down and wouldn’t go to sleep right away, so he’d lay there in bed and just close his eyes and think for three or four hours. He may get three or four hours of sleep the whole night.
Rick: That’s incredible.
Rusty: And just sit down and see in his mind how he could do it in different ways, and not only figure it out. He would actually work it out to where he could tell you exactly what was gonna happen, what he thought was gonna happen when we did it. So, if we decided to do something, we would wind the coil. I’d put the magnets in, wire it up, give it to him and he says, “I think I know what it’s gonna be like right now before we even play it,” and sure enough, 99% of the time he was right on.
Check out Part II of our interview with Rusty Paul.
Check out Part III, the final part of our interview with Rusty Paul.
