Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss, known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid-body electric guitar, and his prototype, called the Log, served as inspiration for the Gibson Les Paul. Paul taught himself how to play guitar, and while he is mainly known for jazz and popular music, he had an early career in country music. In the 1950s, he and his wife, singer and guitarist Mary Ford, made numerous recordings, selling millions of copies.
Paul is credited with many recording innovations. His early experiments with overdubbing, delay effects such as tape delay, phasing, and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention. His licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques, and timing set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day.
Among his many honors, Paul is one of a handful of artists with a permanent exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is prominently named by the music museum on its website as an "architect" and a "key inductee" with Sam Phillips and Alan Freed. Paul is the only inductee in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Early life
Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to George and Evelyn Polsfuss, both of German ancestry. Paul's mother was related to the founders of Milwaukee's Valentin Blatz Brewing Company, and to the makers of Stutz automobiles. His parents divorced when he was a child. His mother simplified their Prussian family name first to Polfuss, then to Polfus, although Les Paul never legally changed his name. Before taking the stage name Les Paul, he performed as Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red.At the age of eight, Paul began playing the harmonica. After learning the piano, he switched to the banjo and guitar. During this time, Paul invented a neck-worn harmonica holder that allowed hands-free switching from one side of a double-sided harmonica to the other. His design is still widely manufactured today. By age thirteen, Paul was performing semi-professionally as a country-music singer, guitarist, and harmonica player. While playing at Waukesha-area drive-ins and roadhouses, Paul made his first experiments in attaching electric amplification directly to instruments and in modifying the instruments themselves. Wanting to make his acoustic guitar heard by more people at local venues, he wired a phonograph needle to his guitar and connected it to a radio speaker. As a teen Paul experimented with sustain effects, and built a guitar-like instrument using a 2-foot piece of rail from a nearby train line as the body. At age seventeen, Paul played with Rube Tronson's Texas Cowboys, and soon after that he dropped out of high school to team up with Sunny Joe Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis, Missouri, who played regularly on KMOX.
Career
Early career
Paul and Wolverton moved to Chicago in 1934, where they continued to perform country music on radio station WBBM and at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair. While in Chicago, Paul learned jazz from the great performers on Chicago's Southside. During the day, he played country music as Rhubarb Red on the radio. At night, he was Les Paul, playing jazz. He met pianist Art Tatum, whose playing influenced him to continue with the guitar rather than play jazz on the piano. His first two records were released in 1936, credited to "Rhubarb Red", Paul's hillbilly alter ego. He also served as an accompanist for other bands signed to Decca. During this time, he began adding different sounds and adopted his stage name of Les Paul.Paul's guitar style was strongly influenced by the music of Django Reinhardt, whom he greatly admired. Following World War II, Paul sought out and made friends with Reinhardt. When Reinhardt died in 1953, Paul paid for part of the funeral's cost. One of Paul's prized possessions was a Selmer acoustic guitar given to him by Reinhardt's widow.
Paul formed a trio in 1937 with rhythm guitarist Jim Atkins and bassist/percussionist Ernie "Darius" Newton. They left Chicago for New York in 1938, landing a featured spot with Fred Waring's radio show. Chet Atkins later wrote that his brother, home on a family visit, presented him with an expensive Gibson archtop guitar that Les Paul had given to Jim. Chet recalled that it was the first professional-quality instrument he ever owned.
While jamming in his apartment basement in 1941, Paul was electrocuted and nearly died. During two years of recuperation, he moved to Chicago where he was the music director for radio stations WJJD and WIND. In 1943, he moved to Hollywood where he performed on radio and formed a new trio.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, where he served in the Armed Forces Radio Network, backing such artists as Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, and performing in his own right.
As a last-minute replacement for Oscar Moore, Paul played with Nat King Cole and other artists in the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles, California, on July 2, 1944. His solo on "Body and Soul" is a demonstration of his admiration for and emulation of Django Reinhardt, as well as his development of original lines.
Also that year, Paul's trio appeared on Bing Crosby's radio show. Crosby sponsored Paul's recordings. They recorded together several times, including "It's Been a Long, Long Time", which was a No. 1 hit in 1945. Paul recorded several albums for Decca in the 1940s. The Andrews Sisters hired his trio to open for them during a tour in 1946. Their manager, Lou Levy, said watching Paul's fingers while he played guitar was like watching a train go by. Their conductor, Vic Schoen, said his playing was always original. Maxine Andrews said, "He'd tune into the passages we were singing and lightly play the melody, sometimes in harmony. We'd sing these fancy licks and he'd keep up with us note for note in exactly the same rhythm... almost contributing a fourth voice. But he never once took the attention away from what we were doing. He did everything he could to make us sound better." In the 1950s, when he recorded Mary Ford's vocals on multiple tracks, he created music that sounded like the Andrews Sisters.
In January 1948, Paul shattered his right arm and elbow among multiple injuries in a near-fatal automobile accident on an icy Route 66 west of Davenport, Oklahoma. Mary Ford was driving the Buick convertible, which plunged off the side of a railroad overpass and dropped twenty feet into a ravine. They were returning from Wisconsin to Los Angeles after visiting family. Doctors at Oklahoma City's Wesley Hospital told Paul that they could not rebuild his elbow. Their other option was amputation. Paul was flown to Los Angeles, where his arm was set at an angle—just over 90 degrees—that allowed him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him nearly a year and a half to recover.
Guitar builder
In 1940, Les Paul revisited his experiments with the train rail. This time he created a similar prototype instrument, a one-off solid-body electric guitar known as "The Log", which was manufactured utilizing a common construction material often referred to as a "4×4 stud post", which provided a unique neck-thru design. The "stud post" was then equipped with a crude bridge and an electromagnetic pickup, neck and strings. The Log was constructed by Paul after-hours in the New York City Epiphone guitar factory, and is one of the first solid-body electric guitars. For the sake of appearance, he attached the body of an Epiphone hollow-body guitar sawn lengthwise with The Log in the middle. This solved his two main problems: feedback, as the acoustic body no longer resonated with the amplified sound, and sustain, as the energy of the strings was not dissipated in generating sound through the guitar body. These instruments were constantly being improved and modified over the years, and Paul continued to use them in his recordings even after the development of his eponymous Gibson model.Paul approached the Gibson Guitar Corporation with his idea of a solid-body electric guitar in 1941,
but Gibson showed no interest until Fender began marketing its Esquire and Broadcaster guitars in 1950.
Gibson's Ted McCarty was the chief designer of the guitar, which was based on Paul's drawings and later dubbed the Gibson Les Paul. Gibson entered into a promotional and financial arrangement with Les Paul, paying him a royalty on sales. The guitar went on sale in 1952. Paul continued to make design suggestions.
In 1960, sales of the original Les Paul model had dropped, so a more modernistic model was introduced, but then still bearing the Les Paul name. Not liking the new look and severe problems with the strength of the body and neck, made Paul dissatisfied with this new Gibson guitar. This, and a pending divorce from Mary Ford, led to Paul ending his endorsement and use of his name on Gibson guitars from 1964 until 1966, by which time his divorce was completed.
Paul continued to suggest technical improvements, although they were not always successful commercially. In 1962, Paul was issued, for a pickup in which the coil was integrated into the bridge. In the mid-1940s, he introduced an aluminum guitar with the tuning mechanisms below the bridge. As it had no headstock, and the string attachments were at the nut, it was the first headless guitar. Unfortunately, Paul's guitar was so sensitive to the heat from stage lights that it would not keep tune. However, he used it for several of his hit recordings. This style was further developed by others, most successfully Ned Steinberger.
A less-expensive version of the Les Paul guitar is manufactured for Gibson's Epiphone brand.
Multitrack recording
Paul first experimented with sound on sound while in elementary school when he punched holes in the piano roll for his mother's player piano. In 1946, his mother complimented him on a song she had heard on the radio, when in fact she had heard George Barnes, not Paul. This motivated Paul to spend two years in his Hollywood garage recording studio, creating his unique sound, his New Sound. Paul stunned the music industry with his New Sound in 1948.Paul recorded several songs with Bing Crosby, most notably "It's Been a Long, Long Time," which was a number-one single in 1945.
After a recording session, Bing Crosby suggested that Paul build a recording studio so he could produce the sound he wanted. Paul started his studio in the garage of his home on North Curson Street in Hollywood. The studio drew many vocalists and musicians who wanted the benefit of his expertise. His experiments included microphone placement, track speed, and recording overdubs. These methods resulted in a clarity previously unheard in this type of multitrack recording. People began to consider his recording techniques as instruments—as important to production as a guitar, bass, or drums.
Capitol Records released "Lover ", on which Paul played eight different parts on electric guitar, some recorded at half-speed, hence "double-fast" when played back at normal speed for the master. This was the first time he used multitracking in a recording. His early multitrack recordings, including "Lover" and "Brazil", were made with acetate discs. He recorded a track onto a disk, then recorded himself playing another part with the first. He built the multitrack recording with overlaid tracks rather than parallel ones as he did later. By the time he had a result that satisfied him, he had discarded some five hundred recording disks.
As a teen he had built a disc-cutter assembly using the flywheel from a Cadillac, a dental belt and other parts from his father's car repair shop. Years later in his Hollywood garage, he used the acetate disc setup to record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his signature sound with echoes and birdsong-like guitar riffs.
In 1949, Crosby gave Paul one of the first Ampex Model 200A reel to reel tape recorders. Paul invented sound on sound recording using this machine by placing an additional playback head, located before the conventional erase/record/playback heads. This allowed Paul to play along with a previously recorded track, both of which were mixed together onto a new track. The Ampex was a monophonic tape recorder with only one track across the entire width of quarter-inch tape, and therefore, the recording was "destructive" in the sense that the original recording was permanently replaced with the new, mixed recording. He eventually enhanced this by using one tape machine to play back the original recording and a second to record the combined track. This preserved the original recording.
In 1952, Paul invented the flange effect, wherein two recordings of the same sound run slightly asynchronously, causing phase cancellations that sweep through the frequency range. The first example of this can be heard on his song "Mammy's Boogie".
Observing film recordings inspired Paul to design the stacking of eight tape recorders. He worked with Ross Snyder on the design of the first eight-track recording deck built for him by Ampex for his home studio. Rein Narma built a custom 8-channel mixing console for him. The mixing board included in-line equalization and vibrato effects. He named the recorder "The Octopus" and the mixing console "The Monster". The name "octopus" was inspired by comedian W. C. Fields, who was the first person to hear Paul play his multi-tracked guitar experiments. "He came to my garage to make a little record," Les recalled. "I played him the acetate of 'Lover' that I'd done. When he heard it, he said, 'My boy, you sound like an octopus.