Les Paul – The story of the father of the electric guitar
Les Paul was much more than a musician, although he was later described by Time magazine as one of the ten greatest guitarists of all time. He was born in 1911 and got into music at the age of 8. At age 9 his mother sent him to piano lessons, but after a few he was sent home with a note suggesting that his mother keep his money as Les (née Lester) never would. . he can learn to play. But The must have gotten something from the music; After trying out the harmonica and banjo, he spent $5 on his first guitar. He earned his money collecting potato bugs.
Not content with one instrument, he invented a harmonica stand that allowed him to play both instruments at the same time. The device is still manufactured today. The desire to accompany each other would lead to a permanent change in the way music is made and sold. By the time he was thirteen, Les Paul was already a country singer and guitarist, by the time he was seventeen he was ready to turn professional; he joined Wolverton’s Radio Band in St Louis and began a career in radio. In 1936 the first recordings of him were released and he began to play jazz, his role model? Who else but Django Reinhardt.
In 1939, using his new stage name of Les Paul, he moved to New York to work with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, a band with a national radio show. Around the same time, he began to play with the design of a solid body electric guitar. Made from a piece of wood with a guitar bridge, pickup and neck, the design was called ‘the trunk’. Paul took this solid body design to Gibson, who rejected it with the comment that it was “nothing more than a broomstick with a pickup.”
In 1940, his continual tinkering nearly ended in fatal electrocution. During his recovery, he moved to Hollywood to produce more radio music, before being drafted into the Army, where he served in the Armed Forces Radio Service, acting as an entertainer himself and as backup for Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. His association with Crosby gave him his first big hit “It’s Been a Long Long Time.”
In 1945, Paul met his hero Django Rheinhardt when Django came to the United States on tour. They met again in Paris, and Paul traveled back to France after Django’s death. Finding his hero’s wife penniless, with no running water or electricity, Paul paid for Django’s headstone, then contacted the record companies and got them to provide $10,000 in unpaid royalties (a large sum for the time). to the widow of the legendary guitarist.
But there was more to Paul than just the interpreter. An engineer named Jack Mullin procured a German tape recorder (an early tape recorder) and shipped it, along with the required tape, to the United States. When he came home from the war, he rebuilt the device and demonstrated its capabilities, hoping the movie industry would adopt it. The tape machine then caught the attention of Bing Crosby, who invested money in a local electronics company, Ampex, and asked them to produce (with Mullin) the first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder. Crosby later gave one of the first production models to the Les Paul.
Again, Paul had the idea to accompany himself, so he modified the recorder, added another recording head, and was able to record once, then play along with (and record) the recording, resulting in a mix of both. The second recording destroyed the first, a process called sounds on sound, but the idea of multitrack recording was born. Then, in 1948, disaster struck. Paul was involved in a traffic accident that damaged his right arm. The doctors said his arm would stay in whatever position they put it in, as they couldn’t reconstruct it correctly. Paul had it set up so he could hold and pick his guitar. Like his hero Rheinhardt, it took a long time for Les Paul to recover, but he kept playing.
With his new wife, Mary Ford, he had increasing success. From 1951 to 1956 they had a run of 14 hits with a unique sound for the time as, using sound on sound, he featured Mary harmonizing with herself. The Les Paul Show hit radio in 1950 on NBC, and then moved to television at which point Gibson approached Paul with his electric guitar design. No one will ever know for sure how much of the design Paul contributed to, but he agreed to endorse the guitar that was known from then on as the Gibson Les Paul.
In 1954, Paul commissioned Ampex’s first eight-track tape recorder, developing the technology for true multitrack recording. He had already asked Westrex to develop a method for stacking recording heads and synchronizing them, but they said it couldn’t be done. Ampex, on the other hand, agreed, and 2 years later provided Paul with the device (called the ‘Octopus’) for which he had paid $10,000.
The late 1950s saw the rise of rock’n’roll, but Paul was not a rock musician. The couple’s popularity waned, and they divorced in 1962. In 1965, Les Paul half-retired, but that wasn’t the end. By the late ’80s, Paul was back, working again despite arthritis and other health problems. In 2006, at age 90, his album ‘Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played’ won two Grammy Awards. For his 90th birthday, a tribute concert was held at Carnegie Hall. Paul continued to perform every Monday night at Broadway’s Iridium Club until his death on August 21, 2009.
How will Les Paul be remembered? Somehow ‘Father of the Electric Guitar’ doesn’t seem to cover it. From the classical guitar model that bears his name, to his many wonderful recordings, his inspired guitar playing, and perhaps most of all, his invention of multitrack recording, Les Paul is the man who changed the world of guitar. music.
