The Inimitable Les Paul

Retired since 1979, the Master Tinkerer is back in the groove.

Gene Santoro, Pulse!, September 1984

LESTER POLFUS may not be a name to conjure with, but Les Paul certainly is. Among his many accomplishments: the invention of the Les Paul solid-body electric guitar, that basic rock 'n' roll axe; the invention of multi-track recording, which in the early 1950s won wide popularity for him and then-wife Mary Ford as they released overdubbed hit after hit featuring their "New Sound"; phase shifting, echo, tape delay, and so on, and so on, and so on. Sometimes you have to wonder how he found the time to play the guitar at all.

We're sitting in Fat Tuesday's, a low-slung basement jazz club in New York where Les has been holding forth with his trio on Monday nights. There's a heat wave on, the air conditioning is broken, and the inveterate master tinkerer is letting his barbeque chicken get cold while he toys with the club's compressor and blower. Fifteen minutes later — and, for one of the few times in his technological life, unsuccessful — he sits down to eat and chat. He has retired more than once; his last time was in 1979. But in 1983, Paul's doctor gave him some advice.

"After my bypass surgery (in 1980) and after having a lot of problems — some fellow accidentally hit me in the ear, and I had four ear operations — it seemed like from 1940 io 1980 that if I counted up the years in the hospital it would add up to half that time. And all because of accidents I had retired from playing in 1964, and from '64 to '74 I never even touched a guitar. Then I got talked into playing again, and I did that until 1979, when I decided to forget it. So I gave up playing the guitar. Then l had mv bypass operation, and by 1983 I had thought about playing again, but I have a very serious problem. I have very bad arthritis, so it started to really take away my fingers. I didn't mind that so much until I got to thinking about the thing I like to do best, which is to play; and that was the one thing that was being taken away. I now have two fingers on my left hand that are useless, and three fingers on my right. Seeing I was in a mess, the doctor said to me, you should exercise and keep what mobility you've got. So I figured the best thing to do would be to play the guitar. The arthritis got me in here, but what keeps me here is playing for the people. When I see a nice look on someone's face, if I'm making them happy, that means an awful lot more to me than arthritis."

With the live shows working well, Les has plans to do some recording, "as long as I can get my fingers around it." But this time, he'll be doing something different.

"I'll play what I always wanted to play, what I wouldn't play because I knew it wasn't commercial. I'd avoid things like 'Mockin' Bird Hill' and 'Vaya Con Dios.' Nothing wrong with them — they're very fine, and I think Mary and I did them very well. On the other hand I get nervous if I go way out, because if I go beyond these people in the room (he gestures at the audience filing in for the first set) and start to educate them, I stop. I do not get my kicks trying to educate somebody. Stan Kenton and Miles (Davis) and I had a big discussion about that. Miles says, I'm not going to play unless they're willing to learn. And Kenton said the same thing: he was going to go from place to place and educate the world. And I said, my theory is different; I'm going to go around and they're going to tell me what they want to hear, and I'm going to give it to them. But I'm playing here because the people who come to a club like this are hip; they'll call out for the B sides of my records, where I could get bolder."

With a lustrous career already under his belt, and the respect and admiration of so many of his peers, what would Les Paul's fantasy band be?

"I always like to record with Ella (Fitzgerald)," he said, "and if Tatum wasn't passed away I'd like to record with him again. If I had to pick a singer besides Ella, it'd probably be a Doris Day type, or maybe something like the Andrews Sisters. In a jazz vein I'd pick something like I'm doing right now, with Gary Maseroppi (on acoustic bass) and Wayne Wright (rhythm guitar). Maybe add a piano player like an Oscar Peterson or a Paul Smith or a Dick Hyman. Over on tenor there are a lot of great players I could work with very easily, but on trumpet I would say without a doubt Clark Terry. And on drums, if I was lucky enough, I'd use Buddy (Rich). I'd stick with what I call a Count Basie rhythm section. So many bands didn't understand that that was the key, but Basie knew it all along I'd keep it acoustic: I don't like electric bass or piano, though I do like synthesizers when they're used right."

But when it comes to using synths, Les has mixed feelings. The musical world has changed profoundly since he first experimented with overdubbing, phase shifting, and echo over 30 years ago What does this pioneer of electronics think about the hundreds of electronic toys that today's musicians have at their disposal?

"So many of them are things I created or the results of things I was working on — the 8-track, echo, sound-on-sound, all that stuff. But everything bridged from the guitar for me; all that stuff came about because of a necessity. Robert Moog says to me, Les, if it wasn't for you there wouldn't be a synthesizer, because no one else around was doing it I like synthesizers, but the most difficult aspect of playing with them is the time; what makes it bad is that the guys playing with them start to become like clocks also. It's difficult to over-phrase and it's difficult to play around; it's difficult to give and take and sway with the beat. There's nothing worse than listening to a singer or player who's had the rhythm beat into them."

Even though Les was responsible for so many of the electronic tools that today's guitar players constantly use, he doesn't do much with the available technology these days.

"Why should I go out and fool with a synthesizer that every kid in town could buy and sound just like me? Whereas if I take a straight guitar and play it there's hardly anyone who can come near it. The reason my mother says, that's my son, is because I sound different from anybody else."

Les still does a lot of listening to records, but mostly to older things. As for his earliest record purchases, there is an interesting progression.

"It was probably about 1929, 1930. Eddie Lang — 'Feeling My Way' and 'Picking My Way'. That was the first record I bought; before that I bought some records by the Skillet Lickers and the Gully Jumpers and people like that. I bought them — probably for less than a quarter — at Orth's Music Store in Milwaukee. l went in there to buy country records and heard Eddie Lang and Dick McDonough and Nick Lucas, and that switched me to jazz. It's also where I found my first guitar pick — up until that point I was using a piece of ivory from a piano key ground down.

"And as far as my all-time favorite discs, I'd say first off anything by Segovia. Time/Life put out a collection of things by Art Tatum that has to have some really great stuff. Almost anything by Django Reinhardt is great, but I prefer listening to him solo, like on 'Improvisation'. With Ella Fitzgerald I go back to 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket', which is the first record of hers I bought. One of the best things she's done, actually, was with my quartet: she does 'How High The Moon' and says 'high how the moon.' Then there's Buddy Rich playing 'Caravan' with a small combo — at the time he was working at Birdland.

"These days, I'm still pretty locked in to the Django arid Tatum and Ella stuff, though I also like Artie Shaw and Count Basie. Tatum and Django were guys I really latched on to for my own style, though for a while I studied piano trying to sound like Earl Hines. Stride piano is a difficult thing to play, and it sounds so good."

So, for that matter, does Les Paul, in spite of his physical disabilities. He does his set, with his patter and his high-stepping picking, and makes his way through classics like 'How High The Moon' and 'C Jam Blues'. From the look on the audience's faces it's clear he still knows how to play what they like to hear. •

THE CAR CRASH

In the winter of 1948, Les Paul was on his way to a gig when the car he was driving skidded on an icy bridge and plunged 50 feet down into a snowbank. There he lay for 8 hours, until help arrived. When he finally got to the hospital, his injuries were catalogued: a smashed nose, a broken collarbone, six broken ribs, a cracked vertebra, a pelvis split front and back, and his right elbow joint knocked clean off. Fortunately, the doctor was a Les Paul fan, so instead of amputating he talked it over with Les, and devised a metal plate that would hold the arm together at an angle that would let the guitarist continue to play. It took 7 screws to hold the plate in place; the cast stayed on for 1½ years. To this day, his arm is permanently welded to a picking position.

THE LES PAUL: THE GUITAR THAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS

Les Paul made his first electric guitar by ripping the back of his Sears acoustic and sticking the pickup on an old phonograph arm through the soundhole. When he turned the record player on — zowie, amplification.

He gradually got more sophisticated, until he finally developed the guitar that bares his name. Most often identified with the heavier end of rock's spectrum, the Les Paul has found its way into the hands of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, and legions of other real or would be guitar heroes. Ironically, when Les first showed the prototype (called "The Log" because it consisted basically of two movable pickups an a slab of wood) to the Gibson guitar company, they were so unimpressed they turned the idea down cold. Today, of course, Gibson manufactures the Les Paul in a number of models, and the prices collectors pay for vintage Pauls are astronomical.

© Gene Santoro, 1984