Les Paul

Les Paul

1915-2009

While playing at an outdoor music festival in 1941, Les Paul realized that most of the audience couldn’t hear his acoustic guitar. Electricity, he reasoned, could soup up the volume. But merely amplifying a hollow instrument created vicious feedback. “I filled the guitar up with dirty socks, shorts, and anything that would muffle the sound,” Paul recalled. “It didn’t work.” Later, he attached electronic pickups, strings, and a regular guitar neck to an 18-inch-long railroad tie. To make the contraption look more conventional, he sliced a regular guitar in two, lengthwise, and bolted it on. He called the result “the Log.” It worked so well, Paul said, “You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding.”

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With that crude effort, said the Los Angeles Times, Paul helped revolutionize 20th-century music. Although he may not have been the sole inventor of the solid-body electric guitar, his many later innovations “took the instrument from one used for simple background rhythm to an upfront driving force in country music, blues, R&B, and rock.” His namesake model, manufactured since 1952 by Gibson, became the instrument of choice for such music legends as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and Eddie Van Halen. Paul was so synonymous with electric guitars that sometimes, he wrote, “A kid’ll come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re a real person, not a guitar.’”

Growing up in Waukesha, Wis., as Lester William Polsfuss, Paul was “an avid tinkerer,” said The Boston Globe. “He punched new holes in his mother’s player-piano rolls” to produce primitive overdubs, and fashioned a harmonica holder from a wire coat hanger. He never studied music, but began performing professionally at 13, dubbing himself “Red Hot Red,” from his hair’s flaming color. Curiously, Paul “never played anything that sounded the least bit like rock; his style was a distinctive combination of swing, country, and pop.” But his recording career almost ended when a 1948 car crash shattered his arm; an operation “required the insertion of a steel plate which would prevent Paul from bending his elbow. He instructed his doctors to set it at a 90-degree angle” so he could continue to play.

In the 1950s, with his second wife, singer Mary Ford, he had a string of hits, said The New York Times. Among them were the million-sellers “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” “Vaya Con Dios,” “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” and “How High the Moon,” which the Library of Congress selected for its list of the 50 most significant American recordings. Paul also began experimenting with early tape recorders and figured out how to record one track while playing back another. The result was the first eight-track tape recorder. Because “each track could be recorded and altered separately, without affecting the others, the machine ushered in the modern recording era.” Paul also “invented and patented various pickups and transducers” that gave new range to electronic music. “I’ll never understand why I chased sound all my life,” he said. “But I was there chasing it constantly.”

Paul produced 34 gold records and collected seven Grammy Awards. In 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “I have been credited with inventing a few things you guys are using,” he told the audience. “About the most I can say is, ‘Have fun with my toys.’” He is survived by three sons and a daughter.