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Father of invention | page 1, 2
This time, a year after Leo Fender had beaten Gibson to the market
with the first truly electric guitar, the Broadcaster, Gibson came knocking on Paul's door. The solid-body concept itself had many authors. But though it was Fender who first gave the instrument to the world, Paul is nearly always credited as its inventor, something that may be impossible to prove or disprove. One thing, however, remains clear: "You pick up a Les Paul and it's heavy and it really means something," as Jeff Beck has said.
"It means business." By 1954 Paul had moved on. He was struck with the idea of recording on
separate tracks and blending them together. He commissioned Ampex to build
the first eight-track tape recorder, at his cost. His prodding resulted in a
new technology, later known as "Sel-Sync," in which a recording head could
simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones. The concept
allowed for extensive multi-tracking, and without it, the world may have
never known "Pet Sounds," or "Sgt. Pepper," or just about anything else
recorded in the last 40 years. Paul had made his art his life, but it was taking
a toll on his family. The grind of recording and touring was exhausting Ford, and the recording duo was headed for divorce, but there was a cultural force looming that would spell the end of their career even sooner: rock 'n' roll. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Les Paul's relationship with rock is soaked with irony. The airwaves in the
late '50s belonged to Little Richard and Elvis; by 1961, the Les Paul guitar
was out of production. But as rock matured in the '60s, it owed much of its
studio sophistication to advances Paul pioneered. Ultimately, rock placed Paul
in its pantheon, making an uncomfortable god of him. In 1966, he tried
re-recording "How High the Moon" and a cover of Paul Simon's "Sounds of
Silence," but neither made much of an impact. His music, like his guitar,
was out of fashion. With sales in continued decline, Gibson was threatening
to phase out the electric guitar, telling him it would be "extinct." But Paul had unwittingly made his mark on the next generation of musicians,
and they would not forget him. "We used to start our gigs with the opening
riffs from 'How High the Moon'," Paul McCartney told Shaughnessy, Paul's
biographer. "Everybody was trying to be a Les Paul clone in those days."
Then, in 1966, a young English blues guitarist named Eric Clapton plugged
his sunburst Les Paul into a Marshall amplifier -- the first time anyone had
done so for a recording. With a little help from Paul, Clapton had paved
the way to the next new sound. Perpetuated by guitarists from Jimmy Page to
Slash, the Les Paul and the Marshall remain rock's signature combination. As a measure of how musicians feel about Paul's guitars, Clapton in
1988 was still mourning the loss of his prized sunburst two decades earlier:
"It was stolen during rehearsals for Cream's first gig," he told Guitar
Player. "It was almost brand new -- in the original case with that lovely
purple velvet lining. Just magnificent. I never really found one as good as
that again. I do miss it." Les Paul got a new trio together in the '70s and played a few scattered gigs,
including Carnegie Hall. He recorded a country album with Chet
Atkins, whose fame had eclipsed that of his brother Jimmy, Paul's early bandmate.
"Chester & Lester" won a Grammy for best country instrumental album in 1976.
The next year Les Paul and Mary Ford were named to the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1983
Paul got a Grammy Achievement Award for his contributions to the recording
industry, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 by Jeff Beck,
who said, "I've copied more licks from Les Paul than I'd like to admit."
Everyone wanted to be on hand when Gibson and the New York Hard Rock Cafe
threw him a 72nd birthday party in 1987. The Smithsonian dedicated a wing of
its American Music Exhibit to him and borrowed the Log from its permanent
home, the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. In 1984, Paul started playing the weekly sets in Manhattan that continue to this
day. He appeared at Fat Tuesday's until the club closed, then moved to the
Iridium, across from Lincoln Center, where I met him before a recent Monday
night gig. His eyes were bright and flashed with mischief as he reminisced
about his earliest experiments, while his right arm was suspended in guitar
position, always at the ready. "I spent my whole early life trying to figure
out how to get those holes in the piano roll," he said. In his youth, Paul
mastered nearly everything he touched -- the harmonica, saxophone, banjo,
guitar. But he conquered neither the piano's mechanics nor the instrument
itself, and it still gnawed at him. "At that time, the piano was the No. 1 instrument in the world, and the guitar was way down at the bottom of the list." Watching him lean lovingly over his guitar as he performs, you realize
everything Paul has achieved springs from his love of his instrument and his
desire to entertain. Like every great guitarist, Paul just wants to play -- and
he still cooks, in spite of the fact that most of his right hand and all but
two fingers on his left are arthritic. And he is still experimenting, still
searching for something he has called "the perfect sound," an electrified
but pure string tone. "You hear that in your head," he said: a sound unimpeded by
resonating wood, amplification, filtering and harmonics. "Oh, it's so
complicated," Paul said of this lifelong pursuit. "Especially a guitar."
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