Les Paul - The Man, Musician and
Inventor
Les
Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss on June 19, 1915 in Waukesha,
Wisconsin. His family was of German ancestry. Paul's mother was related
to the founders of Milwaukee's Valentin Blatz Brewing Company and the
makers of the Stutz automobile. His parents divorced when he was a
child. The Prussian family name was first simplified by his mother to
Polfuss and then to Polfus, though Les Paul never legally changed his
name. Before he took his stage name of Les Paul, he also used the stage
names Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red.
As a young boy he taught himself the harmonica,
guitar and banjo. Paul was not only interested in playing the
instruments but also loved to modify them. At the age of nine he built
his first crystal radio. After an attempt at learning the piano, he
began to play the guitar. It was during this time that he invented a
neck-worn harmonica holder, which allowed him to play both sides of the
harmonica hands-free while accompanying himself on the guitar. The
device is still manufactured using his basic design. Paul created his
first solid body electric guitar using a 2-foot piece of rail from a
nearby train line, in his early teens. While playing at the Waukesha
area drive-ins and roadhouses, Paul began his first experiment with
sound. Wanting to make himself heard by more people at the local venues,
he wired a phonograph needle to his guitar and connected it to a radio
speaker, using that to amplify his acoustic guitar.
At age seventeen, Paul played with Rube Tronson's
Texas Cowboys, and soon after, dropped out of high school, to team up
with Sunny Joe Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis, Missouri, on KMOX.
Paul
moved to Chicago in 1934, where he continued to perform on radio,
calling himself the "Wizard of Waukesha." He met pianist Art
Tatum, whose playing influenced him to a career devoted to guitar rather
than his original plans of playing the piano. His first two records were
released in 1936. One was credited to "Rhubarb Red", Paul's
hillbilly alter ego, and the other was as an accompanist for
blues-artist Georgia White. It was during this time that he began
playing jazz and adopted the name of Les Paul.
Paul moved to New York in the mid 1938 and formed the
Les Paul Trio. He began his stint on national radio with one of the more
popular dance orchestras in the country, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians.
By the 1940s Paul had established himself in the jazz world, recording
with such stars as Nat King Cole, Rudy Vallee and Kate Smith.
Tinkering with electronics and guitar amplification
since his youth, Les Paul began constructing his own electric guitar in
the late '30s. Unhappy with the first generation of commercially
available hollowbodies because of their thin tone, lack of sustain, and
feedback problems, Paul opted to build an entirely new structure.
"I was interested in proving that a vibration-free top was the way
to go," he has said. "I even built a guitar out of a railroad
rail to prove it. What I wanted was to amplify pure string vibration,
without the resonance of the wood getting involved in the sound."
With the good graces of Epiphone president Epi Stathopoulo, Paul used
the Epiphone plant and machinery in 1941 to bring his vision to
fruition. He affectionately dubbed the guitar "The Log."
Les
Paul's tireless experiments sometimes proved to be dangerous, and he
nearly electrocuted himself in 1940 during a session in the cellar of
his Queens apartment. During the next two years of rehabilitation, Les
earned his living producing radio music. Forced to put the
Pennsylvanians and the rest of his career on hold, Les Paul moved to
Hollywood. During World War II, he was drafted into the Army but
permitted to stay in California, where he became a regular player for
Armed Forces Radio Service. By 1943 he had assembled a trio that
regularly performed live, on the radio, and on V-Discs (a
morale-boosting initiative involving the production of several series of
recordings.) In 1944 he entered the jazz spotlight, thanks to his
dazzling work filling in for Oscar Moore alongside Nat King Cole,
Illinois Jacquet, and other superstars, at the first of the prestigious
Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts.
Paul's influence on the music world extended far
beyond the guitar. With the encouragement of Bing Crosby, with whom Paul
had toured, Paul built a recording studio in his garage in his Los
Angeles home in 1945. There, Paul experimented with a number of
different recording techniques.
His breakthrough came in 1948 with a recording of the
song "Lover," which utilized a variety of tracks. It wasn't
long before Paul was creating 24-track recordings and producing hits
like "How High the Moon" and "The World Is Waiting for
Sunrise."
Paul’s
career as a musician nearly came to an end in 1948, when he suffered a
near-fatal car accident in Oklahoma, skidding off a bridge into a river
during a snowstorm. The guitarist shattered his right arm and elbow, and
he also broke his back, ribs, nose and collarbone. He managed to salvage
his career as a musician by instructing surgeons to set his arm at an
angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a
year and a half to recover.
After divorcing his first wife, Virginia Webb, Paul
met the former Colleen Summers, a singer who'd toured with Gene Autry's
band. Paul changed her name to Mary Ford and began recording with her.
They married in 1949, and for much of the 1950s the two had their own
television show, "Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home."
The couple had more than three dozen hits together,
all of them utilizing the recording techniques Paul had created in his
studio.
In 1965, Paul went into semi-retirement, although he
did return to the studio occasionally. He and Ford had divorced in
December 1962. Ford died from complications associated with diabetes in
1977.
The
guitar that bears his name, the Gibson Les Paul, is his crowning
achievement. It grew out of his desire, as a musician and inventor, to
create a stringed instrument that could make electronic sound without
distorting. What he came up with, after almost a decade of work, was a
solid bodied guitar, one that didn’t have the deep, resonant chamber
of an acoustic guitar. He referred to it as "the log." Because
Gibson Guitars initially turned him down, calling his invention "a
broomstick with pickups," Paul was beaten to the marketplace by Leo
Fender, whose Fender Broadcaster, the first mass-produced solidbody
electric guitar, was introduced in 1948. In the 1960s, the rock world
embraced and adored the Gibson Les Paul. Musicians such as Keith
Richards, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney all used the guitar. Since its
debut in 1952 the Gibson Les Paul was been one of the steadiest-selling
guitars made.
He is credited with many recording innovations.
Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early
experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound), delay
effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording
were among the first to attract widespread attention.
His innovative talents extended into his playing
style, including licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques
and timing, which set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired
many guitarists of the present day.
In his later years, Paul's standing and legend in the
music industry only increased. His final recorded album, "American
Made, World Played," debuted in 2005 and featured, among others,
Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Sting and Eric Clapton. The record also
netted Paul two Grammy Awards.
The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric
guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul had been an
innovator his entire life. Paul died from complications associated with
pneumonia on August 13, 2009.
On August 21, 2009, he was buried in Waukesha,
Wisconsin at Prairie Home Cemetery. Paul is buried next to his mother.
The two are surrounded with a brief biography of Les. A stream of
visitors from around the world visit the memorial. Like his funeral in
New York on August 19, the burial was private, but earlier in the day a
public memorial viewing of the closed casket was held in Milwaukee at
Discovery World with 1,500 attendees who were offered free admission to
the Les Paul House of Sound exhibit for the day. |