Les Paul's Homecoming
The Wizard of Waukesha Returns
In 1954 at a meeting of the Audio Engineering Society in New York, Les Paul proposed the ideal device for music listeners. He recalls his words as if the meeting had been held last week: “Ideally, it would be something you could carry in your pocket that had no moving parts and held every song you ever wanted to hear.”
On June 21 Les Paul, who celebrated his 93rd birthday a week earlier, returns to Milwaukee for a performance at the Pabst Theater in conjunction with an exhibition at Discovery World, “Les Paul’s House of Sound.” Nobody knows who played the first electric guitar, but Paul was among the pioneers who tinkered with the potential of amplification. Paul’s first stab at electrification involved jabbing the needle from a phonograph into the top of a Sears & Roebuck guitar and playing it through a radio receiver. By 1934 he built a solid body electric guitar, an early prototype of the famous Les Paul Gibson that went into production in the 1950s. And that wasn’t Paul’s only enduring accomplishment. Magnetic recording tape, developed in Nazi Germany, was first used in postwar America by Bing Crosby.
It was Paul, however, who glimpsed the new medium’s full potential as he hammered out the basic tools of modern recording from the workbench of his garage. “How High the Moon,” Paul’s 1951 hit with his wife, singer Mary Ford, marked a breakthrough in multitrack recording, employing tape to overlap dozens of guitar and vocal performances.
Although reel-to-reel tape machines have been replaced by digital audio workstations, the method of assembling recordings like an aural mosaic from bits of separately recorded sound remains the way most contemporary music is produced.
The Entertainer
It’s
been a long road from Paul’s public debut, at age 13, at downtown
Milwaukee’s Schroeder Hotel (now the Hilton City Center) to the weekly
residency he maintains nowadays at Midtown Manhattan’s Iridium Jazz
Club. As a teenager he performed a hillbilly vaudeville act on guitar
and harmonica; soon enough his fleet fingers began wrapping themselves
around the more challenging progressions of jazz. By the 1940s he
became an ace sessions man, performing with Nat “King” Cole and other
popular jazz artists.
But the insights from his early shows at Wisconsin Lions Clubs and band shells proved indelible. Performing at a Kenosha theater, he grabbed a banana from a backstage
fruit bowl before strolling into the limelight. “The first thing I did
was peel the banana, toss out the banana and eat the peel. And then I
started to play. I had the audience!” he says, still amused at his
nerve as well as his digestive fortitude.
Even over a phone
call from his home in Mahwah, N.J., Paul’s personality shines. Like a
favorite uncle who serves unconventional opinions at Thanksgiving
dinner with a twinkle in his eye, he is a little zany at the edges. He
is also earnest and unassuming.
If the speaker at the other
end of the line is an audience, he will be a trouper, an entertainer.
He must have won over many peanut galleries as a teenager in Wisconsin.
“The worst thing a musician can do is blame the audience,” he remarks.
“If you’re not giving the audience what they want, it’s your fault. As
a guitarist I’m telling the audience with my hands what I’m feeling. [I
should be able] to make them laugh, make them cry. One time there was a
woman in the audience who wasn’t responding. I stopped playing. I
leaned over from the stage and said, ‘Are you all right?’” He wasn’t
being sarcastic. Paul always wanted to tickle everyone’s ear, whether
concert or on record. He wanted to please the public and be true to the
sonic ideas carried in his head from a young age. It explains why the
string of hit recordings made in the 1950s with Mary Ford were almost
inevitably pitched in the key of relentless good cheer. By the time of
those records, and the endearingly wacky network program he hosted with
his wife, he had distilled elements of country and jazz into
idiosyncratic, Sputnik-era pop sound of percolating melodies and
caffeinated guitar riffs. It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll, but it pointed
toward the technology that made rock, from the 1960s onward, possible.
Guitar Hero
Paul
readily admits that he lost interest in the evolution of music even as
he continued to develop new technology for creating music. The turning
point for him was the bebop jazz of the late 1940s. Like the rock ’n’
roll of the following decade, postwar bebop musicians “were no longer
playing the melody.”
Whether or not he dug their melodies,
Paul shaped the development of many rock musicians through multitrack
recording and, perhaps more importantly, the line of Les Paul Gibson
guitars. It has been the ax of choice for guitar heroes, and has drawn
musicians like Jimmy Page and Joe Perry to his gigs. Although Paul was
not initially in the rock ’n’ roll camp, he seems entirely pleased by
the impact he made and welcomes the contributions of guitarists such as
Jeff Beck and Keith Richards on his recent CDs.
Why has the
Les Paul Gibson won so many devoted fans from the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame? For starters, it’s as well crafted as the handiwork of Old World
luthiers. Because of its aesthetics, a guitarist can feel the resonance
through the contoured top while hugging the instrument to his body. The
guitar is beautifully shaped and proportioned with the neck set into
the body, not bolted on as with other models. The humbucking pickups
give the Les Paul Gibson a deeper, wider, warmer sound than the trebly, piercing
Fender Stratocasters that are its major rival at instrument stores. Pop
psychologists who deemed the electric guitar a phallic symbol might
have gotten it wrong. For Paul, a guitar should be “your psychiatrist,
mistress, housewife and bartender.”
For him, the shapely
Gibson is just like a woman. The solid body guitar bearing his
signature represents the convergence of the two sides of Les Paul’s
coin, the knock-’em dead entertainer and the basement inventor. From an
early age Paul was tinkering like a young Thomas Edison, eager to
discover what new things the machinery of the modern age could
accomplish. As a teenager he built his own crystal radio set, through
which he discovered hillbilly music on the “Grand Ole Opry.” He built
his own PAsystem and electric guitars because “I had to be heard” in a
world that was only getting noisier. He took apart his mother’s piano
in the parlor to figure out how it worked.
Among younger
generations, the inventive impulse that moved Paul has shifted into
computer software. He’s not entirely happy with the influence this has
had on music. “Digital technology bothers me,” he says. “It is tinny.
It has no warmth. Neither did the player piano. Remember, digital is
either on or off like the player piano.”
Paul has not retired
from technology, however. Recently he was asked by the Gibson company
to design a new line of amplifiers. Paul was happy to sign on. “There
is no speaker made today that can faithfully reproduce the sound of a
solid body electric guitar,” he explains. “You always lose the true
sound value the guitar is capable of. It’s easy for a bad guitarist to
sound good given the amplifiers of today.”
Any obstacle to
reaching the sound he hears in his head has always frustrated and
motivated the Wizard of Waukesha, whose goal has been to create a space
where listener and musician can meet on common ground. “My whole life
has been dedicated to chasing the sound,” he says. “All of my
inventions have been chasing the sound.”
What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com or comment on this story online at www.expressmilwaukee.com.
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