Les Paul

American guitarist

• Born: June 9, 1915
• Birthplace: Waukesha, Wisconsin
• Died: August 13, 2009
• Place of death: White Plains, New York

In addition to inventing the kind of solid-body electric guitar that made rock music possible, Paul developed a number of unusual recording techniques that are now standard in the recording studio, such as sound-on-sound, overdubbing, and tape delay.

Primary field: Music

Primary inventions: Solid-body electric guitar; multitrack recording

Early Life

The father of the modern electric guitar was born Lester William Polfuss in Waukesha, Wisconsin. His father, George, left home when Les was eight, estranged partly by his wife Evelyn’s radical communist politics. Evelyn became a doting “stage mother” to young Lester, indulging his passion for music. When he brought home a harmonica given him by a ditch digger, Evelyn boiled it before his son put it to his mouth—unintentionally making the reeds capable of the bluesy sound Les would come to emulate. When he finally picked up the guitar four years later, the twelve-year-old Les was fascinated with WLS radio star Pie Plant Pete, who met Les at a concert and showed him how to finger the guitar. Within weeks, Les had mastered Pete’s repertoire and was soon imitating it on rival station WJJD. Calling him “Red Hot Red,” Evelyn Polfuss found him gigs at PTA meetings, and he would sneak into speakeasies at night. By the summer of his junior year, 1932, he was on the road with a picker named Sunny Joe Wolverton and left school to play with him on KMOX in St. Louis, then the seventh-largest city in the United States. The partnership only lasted two years, by which time Les was listening to and imitating jazz in Chicago, as well as building pickups for his first experiments in electric guitars.

Paul began playing in Chicago with Jimmy Atkins, older brother of later guitar legend Chet Atkins. In 1938, Paul made the jump to network radio with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, forming a side act with Atkins on acoustic guitar and Ernie Watkins on bass, under the name of the Les Paul Trio. In the midst of traditional studio recording sessions with his trio at that time, Paul experimented at home in his garage studio, recording different parts at different speeds and editing them together. He was on the verge of inventing techniques that would revolutionize the recording industry.

Life’s Work

While neither of the inventions for which Les Paul is most famous—the solid-body electric guitar and magnetic tape overdubbing—were totally original with him, he was, like most innovators in the electronics field, a creator of something distinctive and influential built on existing technology. In the crudest sense, however, Paul has as early a claim as anyone to the invention of the electric guitar, since he improvised one while playing for tips in the parking lot of Beekman’s Barbecue Stand in Waukesha in 1929, at the age of fourteen. Adolph Rickenbacker (1886-1976) is usually credited with the first electric guitar, in 1931, but his was based on the same hollow body as acoustic guitars. By the end of the 1930’s, Rickenbacker was also marketing a solid-body electric guitar, and Leo Fender (1909-1991) was experimenting with similar designs when, in 1941, Paul first demonstrated his design. It was nicknamed “the Log” because it was simply a block of wood the width of a fretboard, to which were attached the two halves of a traditional hollow-body guitar. The solid wood core prevented the insides of the body from acting as a sounding chamber.

Paul brought his design to the Gibson Guitar Corporation in Nashville, Tennessee, in hopes of interesting the manufacturer in producing his design. Gibson was not interested—until its rival Leo Fender showed how lucrative the electric guitar market was with the introduction of the Broadcaster (later the Telecaster) solid-body electric in 1950. Hiring Paul as a consultant, Gibson president Ted McCarty designed a solid-body guitar that he named the “Les Paul” and contracted Paul’s endorsement. Paul and his fans have often exaggerated his role in the development of the Gibson Les Paul, but at the first meeting between McCarty and Paul in the fall of 1951, McCarty already had a prototype. Paul did, however, contribute one element to the design. His only suggestion regarding the prototype was that it incorporate the sort of tailpiece he had pioneered on the Log that gave him the muting sound Paul had made famous. It had a trapeze-shaped bar below the strings. It was fitted into Gibson’s design, and the Gibson Les Paul was born.

There is little mystery about why Gibson wanted Les Paul to be part of its name brand. In 1951, Paul was not only the top guitarist in the world (both in sales and in the Down Beat polls) but also one of the top-selling recording artists of any type. The Les Paul-Mary Ford version of “How High the Moon” spent nearly half the year (twenty-five weeks) on the Billboard charts, nine weeks of that time in the number one spot. On August 25 of that year, Billboard magazine announced that the duo became the first act in history to have four hits simultaneously in the famous Top 40. Paul and Ford (his wife) ended 1951 tied with Patty Page for best-selling recording artists (they even sang some of the same songs). Paul and Ford had more Top 10 hits in 1951 than Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and the Andrews Sisters combined.

One of the keys to the success of those recordings was another series of Les Paul inventions: overdubbing, tape delay effects, and multitrack recording. In 1948, Paul was playing on Bing Crosby’s radio show when Crosby bought the first mass-produced tape recorder in America, the Ampex Model 200. Fascinated with Paul’s experiments with double-tracking and overdubbing on wax disks, Crosby gave Paul an Ampex 200 and encouraged him to continue. Paul added a second recording head, slightly misaligned, allowing two tracks to be recorded on the same tape. Crosby at the time was recording with the top female harmony recording group, theAndrews Sisters. Paul, who had recorded with the Andrews Sisters, realized that his wife could sing all three harmony parts with his multitracking technique. He had already been using it on multitrack disk to record multiple guitar parts, playing some back at different speeds, allowing his already-fast picking technique to appear superhumanly faster (“Lover,” 1947). Putting the two together produced the stunning effects that propelled “How High the Moon” to number one.

Paul understood, more than the marketing executives at Capitol Records did, how much of the appeal of these multitracked recordings was due to their “modern” sound. However, instead of putting this modernity across with hip, modern compositions—these were the waning years of the big band era, and Elvis Presley had not yet appeared—Paul stunned listeners with up-tempo, electrified versions of old-fashioned hits, including covers of the 1918 jazz classic “Tiger Rag” (Paul’s first recording with the Gibson Les Paul) and Al Jolson’s 1926 hit “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” which Variety identified as the thirteenth consecutive Paul-Ford single to sell half a million copies.

Impact

No electric guitarist has been more influential on popular music—rock, country, and jazz—than Paul. Furthermore, the recording techniques he pioneered—tape delay, sound-on-sound, multiphasing, and multitracking—became standard in the studio. Multitrack recording, in fact, became virtually universal, even when an artist was not playing multiple instruments. Paul even invented the mechanical means by which multitracking became possible, when he modified an Ampex 200 by adding a second recording head. His design experiments on the solid-body electric guitar were vital to its development, even if his claims as an inventor are not fully granted, because he combined experiments in performance with experiments in guitar construction.

In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine rated the top guitarists of all time, and Les Paul was ranked number 46. Many of the top guitarists of the time objected, arguing that his rating should be higher because of his massive influence and sheer longevity. In 2006, at the age of ninety, Paul won two Grammys for his album Les Paul and Friends. In the summer of 2008, Discovery World in Milwaukee opened a museum exhibit featuring his contributions to the electric guitar and the recording industry. Paul died on August 13, 2009, at the age of ninety-four.

Bibliography

Atkins, Chet. Country Gentleman. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1974. This autobiography of a country music legend influenced by Paul’s style (Chet’s brother Jimmy was a third of the Les Paul Trio in the 1930’s), and written the year before he himself recorded with Paul, includes a few glimpses of the early Les Paul.

Duchossoir, A. R. Gibson Electrics. New York: Hal Leonard, 1981. This history of Gibson electric guitars through the early 1960’s features a generous account of Paul’s role in the development and promotion of the Gibson that bore his name.

Huber, David Miles, and Robert E. Runstein. Modern Recording Techniques. Boston: Focal Press, 2005. Entries on the history of multitracking, overdubbing, and multiphase recording in this standard textbook remind the potential recording engineer of the legacy of Paul, who invented all three techniques.

Lawrence, Robb. The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy: 1915-1964. New York: Hal Leonard, 2008. Most of this book’s focus on Paul’s legacy centers on the guitars he made; the chapters are organized not by Paul’s recordings or performance events but by developments in Paul’s instrument.

Shaughnessy, Mary Alice. Les Paul: An American Original. New York: William Morrow, 1993. A well-balanced biography covering his role as inventor and technical innovator as well as musical performer. It also looks at his obsessive drive that took him to the top of his field but at times made him difficult to work with.

Thompson, Charles. Bing: The Authorized Biography. New York: McKay, 1976. Includes a detailed picture of Bing’s encouragement (and to some extent, funding) of Paul’s experiments with tape recording, at a time when Crosby’s show became the first tape-delayed radio program in history.