Lester William Polfuss, known as Les Paul died he was 94. Paul was an American jazz guitarist and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which "made the sound of rock and roll possible."[2] His many recording innovations included overdubbing, delay effects such as "sound on sound" and tape delay, phasing effects, and multitrack recording. He is often credited as being the 'father of modern music'.
(June 9, 1915 - August 13, 2009[1]) |
He was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin to George and Evelyn Polsfuss.[3] The family name was first simplified by his mother to Polfuss before he took his stage name of Les Paul. He also used the nickname "Red Hot Red".
Paul first became interested in music at the age of eight, when he began playing the harmonica. After an attempt at learning to play the banjo, he began to play the guitar. By 13, Paul was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist. At the age of 17, Paul played with Rube Tronson's Texas Cowboys, and soon after he dropped out of high school to join Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis, Missouri on KMOX.
In the 1930s, Paul worked in Chicago in radio, where he performed jazz music. Paul's 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.
In January 1948, Paul was injured in a near-fatal automobile accident in Oklahoma, which shattered his right arm and elbow. Doctors told Paul that there was no way for them to rebuild his elbow in a way that would let him regain movement, and that his arm would remain in whatever position they placed it in permanently. Paul then instructed the 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.
Paul was dissatisfied with the acoustic guitars that were sold in the mid 1930s and began experimenting with a few designs for an electric model on his own. Famously, he created "The Log," which was nothing more than a length of common 4" x 4" lumber with bridge, guitar neck, and pickup attached. For the sake of appearance, he attached the body of an Epiphone hollow-body guitar, sawn lengthwise with The Log in the middle. This solved his two main problems: feedback, as the acoustic body no longer resonated with the amplified sound, and sustain, as the energy of the strings was not dissipated in generating sound through the guitar body.
In 1938, Paul moved to New York as part of a trio that included Jim Atkins (older half-brother of guitarist Chet Atkins) and bassist/percussionist Ernie Newton. They landed a featured spot with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians radio show. Paul moved to Hollywood in 1943, where he formed a new trio. As a last-minute replacement for Oscar Moore, Paul played with Nat King Cole and other artists in the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles on July 2, 1944. Also that year, Paul's trio appeared on Bing Crosby's radio show. Crosby went on to sponsor Paul's recording experiments. The two also recorded together several times, including a 1945 number one hit, "It's Been A Long, Long Time." In addition to backing Crosby and artists like The Andrews Sisters, Paul's trio also recorded a few albums of their own on the Decca label in the late 1940s.
Paul's innovative guitar, "The Log", built in 1939, was one of the first solid-body electric guitars.[4] (Leo Fender also independently created his own solid-body electric guitar around the same time and Adolph Rickenbacher had marketed a solid-body guitar in the 30s). Gibson Guitar Corporation designed a guitar incorporating Paul's suggestions in the early fifties, and presented it to him to try. He was impressed enough to sign a contract for what became the "Les Paul" model (originally only in a "gold top" version), and agreed never to be seen playing in public, or be photographed, with anything other than a Gibson guitar.
The arrangement persisted until 1961, when declining sales prompted Gibson to change the design without Paul's knowledge, creating a much thinner, lighter, and more aggressive-looking instrument with two cutaway "horns" instead of one. Paul said he first saw the "new" Gibson Les Paul in a music store window, and disliked it. Though his contract required him to pose with the guitar, he said it was not "his" instrument, and asked Gibson to remove his name from the headstock. (Others claimed that Paul ended his endorsement contract with Gibson during his divorce, to avoid having his wife to get his endorsement money.) Gibson renamed the guitar "Gibson SG" (which stands for "Solid Guitar"), and it also became one of the company's best sellers.
The original Gibson Les Paul guitar design regained popularity when Eric Clapton began playing the instrument a few years later (although he also played an SG and an ES-335). Paul resumed his relationship with Gibson, and has endorsed the original Les Paul guitar design ever since (though his personal Gibson Les Pauls are much modified by him — Paul always used his own self-wound pickups and customized switching on his guitars). To this day, various models of Gibson Les Paul guitar are used all over the world, by both novice and professional guitarists. A less expensive version of the Les Paul guitar is also manufactured for Gibson's lower-priced Epiphone brand.
In 1947, Capitol Records released a recording that had begun as an experiment in Paul's garage, entitled "Lover (When You're Near Me)", which featured Paul playing eight different parts on electric guitar, some of them recorded at half-speed, hence "double-fast" when played back at normal speed for the master. ("Brazil", similarly recorded, was the B-side.) This was the first time that multi-tracking had been used in a recording. These recordings were made not with magnetic tape, but with acetate disks. Paul would record a track onto a disk, then record himself playing another part with the first. He built the multi-track recording with overlaid tracks, rather than parallel ones as he did later. There is no record of how many "takes" were needed before he was satisfied with one layer and moved onto the next.
Paul even built his own disc-cutter assembly, based on auto parts. He favored the flywheel from a Cadillac for its weight and flatness. Even in these early days, he used the acetate disk setup to record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his signature sound with echoes and birdsong-like guitar riffs. When he later began using magnetic tape, the major change was that he could take his recording rig on tour with him, even making episodes for his 15-minute radio show in his hotel room.
Electronics engineer Jack Mullin had been assigned to a US Army Signals unit stationed in France in WWII. On a mission in Germany near the end of the war, he acquired and later shipped home a German Magnetophon (tape recorder) and 50 reels of I.G. Farben plastic recording tape. Mullin rebuilt and developed the machine back in the US with the intention of selling it to the movie industry, and held a series of demonstrations which quickly became the talk of the US audio industry. Mullin's second demonstration was witnessed by Murdo MacKenzie, technical director for the Bing Crosby radio show.
Within a short time Crosby had hired Mullin to record and produce his radio shows and master his studio recordings on tape, and he invested US$50,000 in local electronics firm Ampex. With Crosby's backing Mullin and Ampex created the Ampex Model 200, the world's first commercially-produced reel-to-reel audio tape recorder. Crosby gave Les Paul the second Model 200 to be produced and Les immediately saw its potential both for special effects, like echo, and eventually its suitability for multitrack recording, of which he is considered the father. Using this machine, Paul placed an additional playback head, located before the conventional Erase-Record-Playback heads. This allowed Paul to play along with a previously recorded track, both of which were mixed together on to a new track. Keep in mind that this was a mono tape recorder - just ONE track across the entire width of quarter-inch tape - and so the recording was 'destructive' in the sense that the original recording was erased and replaced with the new recording.
One need only listen to any of the early Capitol recordings from the early 1950s to realize how great a challenge this process was. These revolutionary recordings were made with his wife, Mary Ford, who sang. The couple's hits included "How High the Moon", "Bye Bye Blues", "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise", and "Vaya Con Dios". These songs featured Mary harmonizing with herself, giving the vocals a very novel sound.
Les Paul's need for multiple non-destructive tracks was obvious and his re-invention of the Ampex 200 inspired Ampex to develop two-track and three-track recorders. These machines were the backbone of professional recording, radio and television studios in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1954, Paul continued to develop this technology by commissioning Ampex to build the first eight track tape recorder, at his expense. The machine took three years to get working properly, and Paul says that by the time it was functional his music was out of favor and so he never had a hit record using it. His design became known as "Sel-Sync," (Selective Synchronization) in which a specially modified electronics could either record or playback from the Record Head, which was not optimized for playback but was acceptable for the purposes of recording an "overdub" (OD) in sync with the original recording. This is the core technology behind multi-track recording.
Like Crosby, Paul and Ford also used the now-ubiquitous recording technique known as close miking, where the microphone is less than six inches from the singer's mouth. This produces a more intimate, less reverberant sound than is heard when a singer is a foot or more from the microphone. When implemented using a cardioid-patterned microphone, it emphasizes low-frequency sounds in the voice due to a cardioid microphone's proximity effect and can give a more relaxed feel because the performer isn't working so hard. The result is a singing style which diverged strongly from un-amplified theater-style singing, as might be heard in musical comedies of the 1930s and 40s.
Paul had hosted a 15-minute radio program, The Les Paul Show, on NBC in 1950, featuring his trio (himself, Ford, and rhythm player Eddie Stapleton) and his electronics, recorded from their home and with gentle humour between Paul and Ford bridging musical selections, some of which had already been successful on records, some of which anticipated the couple's recordings, and many of which presented dazzling re-interpretations of such jazz and pop selections as "In the Mood," "Little Rock Getaway," "Brazil," and "Tiger Rag." Several recordings of these shows survive among old-time radio collectors today.
The show also appeared on television a few years later with the same format, but excluding the trio and retitled The Les Paul & Mary Ford Show (aka Les Paul & Mary Ford At Home) with "Vaya Con Dios" as a theme song. Sponsored by Warner Lambert's Listerine, it was widely syndicated during 1954-'55, and was only five minutes (one or two songs) long on film, therefore used as a brief interlude or fill-in in programming schedules. Since Les created the entire show himself, including audio and video, he has maintained the original recordings and is in the process of restoring them to up-to-date quality.[5]
During his radio shows, Paul introduced the legendary "Les Paulverizer" device, which multiplies anything fed into it, like a guitar sound or a voice. Paul has stated that the idea was to explain to the audience how his single guitar could be "multipled" into an orchestra. The device even became the subject of comedy, with Ford multiplying herself and her vacuum cleaner with it so she could finish the housework faster. Later Paul claimed to have made the myth real for his stage show, using a small box attached to his guitar which is really just a stage prop. He typically pretended to lay down one track after another on stage, in-sync, and then play over the repeating forms he had recorded.
In the late 1960s, Paul went into semi-retirement, although he did return to the studio occasionally. He and Mary Ford (born Iris Colleen Summers) had divorced in December 1964, as she could no longer countenance the itinerant lifestyle their act required of them. Paul's most recognisable recordings from then through the mid-1970s were an album for London Records, Les Paul Now (1967), on which he updated some of his earlier hits; and, backed by some of Nashville's celebrated studio musicians, a meld of jazz and country improvisation with fellow guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins, Chester and Lester (1976), for RCA Victor.
By the late 1980s, Paul had returned to active live performance. In 2006, at the age of 90, he won two Grammys at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards for his album Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played. He also performed every Monday night, accompanied by a trio which included guitarist Lou Pallo and pianist John Colianni, at the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway in New York City.[6][7]
On August 13th, 2009, Les Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, NY. His family and friends were by his side. [8]
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