Les Paul

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August 4, 2004

PUBLIC LIVES

Onstage, Almost Anonymous, Despite the Name

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

LES PAUL began playing the guitar professionally in 1930, the same year the Chrysler Building was completed, and quickly plucked his way into musical history. A restless inventor and innovator, he was an early developer of the electric guitar, and is widely credited with creating multitrack recording, the groundbreaking technique of synchronizing separate recordings to make them sound as if they were recorded together.

But Mr. Paul, who turned 89 in June, is also part of New York City culture. Every Monday, he performs two sets at the Iridium Jazz Club in Midtown. He has played weekly shows since the early 1980's, strumming old songs like "How High the Moon" and "Over the Rainbow" for audiences that are often too young to know him or the ways he made all the new songs possible.

"It's probably selfish, but my whole life, what keeps me going are the people I play for," he said with his characteristic twang. "The goal is to make the people happy."

Before a recent set, Mr. Paul, in a turtleneck and gray slacks, sat in the darkened club tuning an electric guitar propped on a stool. His fingers, thick like a farmer's, moved slowly on the neck, his concentration so intense that he seemed not to notice when a technician approached. He looked up with a shy, lopsided smile.

Born Lester William Polfuss in 1915 to German-American parents in Waukesha, Wis., Mr. Paul says he was 5 when he persuaded a man playing the harmonica on the street to give up his instrument. Mr. Paul's mother insisted on boiling it first to sterilize it, a step that gave the harmonica a bluesy sound, he said.

As a teenager, he played guitar one summer for a country music band. A few months later, a band member invited him to St. Louis to play, and Mr. Paul went off to seek his musical fortune. He arrived in New York in 1937, and began playing on an NBC radio show with Fred Waring's orchestra. He lived in an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he set up an illegal radio station and began experimenting with recording. It was a watershed era for jazz and swing in New York City, and Mr. Paul was part of it, playing with musicians like Bobby Hackett and Artie Shaw. He tasted pizza for the first time in Corona.

"It seemed like the whole world was in New York, and we were in the midst of it," he said.

He experimented with guitars in the late 1940's, when other innovators like Leo Fender were also developing designs for solid-body electric guitars. Mr. Paul said he had proposed a solid-body design to the Gibson company, but his idea had not been taken seriously. "They thought it was a joke," he said. All the same, Gibson named a solid-body model after Mr. Paul in the early 1950's, and it is still selling today.

Though he was not the first to come up with the solid-body design, his playing and experiments with recording placed the guitar on center stage in music of the late 1950's and 60's, said John Teagle, co-author of "Fender Amps: The First 50 Years." Mr. Paul also created special effects like echo and recording at half speed. "He set the stage for a lot of electric guitar players, replacing saxophones with guitars as lead instruments," Mr. Teagle said. "He was brilliant."

Shortly after World War II, Mr. Paul was given one of the first tape recorders in America, and he proceeded to develop multitrack recording. The technique profoundly influenced musicians for decades and helped push songs he recorded with his wife, Mary Ford, to the top of the pop charts in the 1950's. The music "didn't sound like a saxophone, like a piano, like a guitar," Mr. Paul said.

"It sounded like all those things,'' he said. "Like an orchestra from another planet." (Ms. Ford died in 1977, and Mr. Paul has four grown children, including two sons who are musicians and sound engineers.)

PLAYING has become harder over the years. Mr. Paul's right arm required extensive surgery after he was injured in a car crash in Oklahoma in the late 1940's. In later decades, arthritis slowly stiffened the fingers on both hands. By the 60's, he was no longer playing, though he did win a Grammy Award with Chet Atkins in 1977 for their country music album, "Chester and Lester."

But when a doctor advised Mr. Paul to start performing again in the 1980's as a tonic, he took the challenge. He began traveling from his home in Mahwah, N.J., to New York to play once a week at the music club Fat Tuesday's. At first the task seemed daunting; he had to learn to play all over again.

"Here I am saying, 'What am I going to do when I walk on the stage with no hands?' " he recalled. "I can't play anything like I got on my hit records. I can't play any of those unusual sounds."

But his audiences, he said, did not seem to mind. "The people enjoyed it, and they applauded," he said. "It just went on from there."

Those audiences have changed since the 1950's. More foreigners come to hear him, and few listeners seem to know just who he is. "You never know who you're playing for," he said. "Someone might come in out of the rain. Someone might have stayed an extra night in New York."

Mr. Paul, in typical fashion, prefers to see that in a positive light. "It's a great challenge to entertain a person who's never heard of you."

[Bright Moments]

Great article! thanks for sharing! B-)

[Alon Marcus]

Thanks for the info, Les Paul is a guy I heard of but never heard him ! I know that he made contributions to jazz guitar development and interested in recommendations for some of his albums as leader or sideman.