Les Paul: Invented Here
Play back Les Paul’s life and you might notice how closely it tracks with his recordings — each marked by energetic yet precise runs, registered with impeccable timing, and advancing across many layers simultaneously. This is not so surprising given that Paul, one of the hardest (and longest) working men in show business — still playing and recording regularly at 92 — forged his life and style together in a dedicated, near-century-long effort to create music that would “last forever but sound unlike anything you’ve heard before.”
To get there Paul moved restlessly and relentlessly from country music to jazz, pop, and even rock, playing masterfully in each, a singular achievement. But to truly create music that nobody had heard he had first to invent instruments and techniques no one had seen or even dreamed of. These include not only prototypes for the solid-body electric guitar, but also key inventions in the development of modern music recording like reverb, sound-on-sound, and multi-track recording.
Waukesha to Mahwah
Born in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul showed early aptitude for both fingering (piano, harmonica, then guitar) and tinkering, creating something like a proto-multi-track effect by punching extra holes in the roll of his mother’s player piano. He performed Country music in Waukesha as Red Hot Red, before dropping out of high school to tour with various bands, including “Sunny Joe” Wolverton. In Chicago, he played Country by day to earn money while jamming nights with contemporary jazzmen to master that genre.
With the Les Paul Trio in 1934, Paul began recording jazz and blues as well as experimenting with solid-body guitar prototypes, looking for a perfect sound (a quest, he says, that continues to this day). Paul’s playing and recording career featured national NBC radio broadcasts with Fred Waring, a private concert for FDR, a legendary “chase” jam with Nat King Cole, and a long collaboration with Bing Crosby, including Paul’s unforgettable accompaniment on the post-war hit “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.”
In 1945 Paul met and began performing and recording with country singer Mary Ford. They eventually married. Also in the 40s, Paul began experimenting in his studio in Hollywood, heavily investing his time in researching new recording techniques such as phasing and overdubbing. And in a series of Les Paul recordings issued by Columbia Records, including Paul’s hit single, “Brazil,” he began to deliver to a mystified recording industry and ecstatic fans the utterly new, completely unforgettable sound he had been chasing.
After recovering from a severe automobile accident, Paul continued his recording experiments on one of the first tape-recording machines, a gift from Bing Crosby. Paul jerry-rigged it by adding another head to create the first sound-on-sound tape machine, which allowed him to layer different takes in one recording. The effects generated by Paul by layering Ford’s vocals and his accompaniments produced an unprecedented run of pop hits in the 50s, notably “How High the Moon” and “Vaya Con Dios.”
The couple’s enormous popularity led also to a series of 5-minute daily television and radio shows, 170 in all, called the “Les Paul & Mary Ford Show,” aka the “Listerine Show.” To do the shows, Paul and Ford moved into a state-of-the-art studio/home in Mahwah, New Jersey, near company headquarters, where Paul still lives today.
The Listerine Shows
Featuring Paul and Ford in scripted daily exchanges at home, as well as in musical numbers showing off Ford’s lilting voice and Paul’s ripping licks, the show, which ran for seven years, was a major success. And as with almost any Paul project, the show behind the show — featuring Paul’s custom production workflow efforts — was as fascinating in its own way as the show it was devised to deliver.
“The shows were all made in our home here, which was also our studio. What makes them different is that there was only Mary and me, just two people,” he says. “And we did all of the music, the complete show, with one quarter-inch Ampex tape machine that I had adjusted to do sound-on-sound recording. This was prior to the multi-track, which I also invented. So for this show I did the engineering, directing, writing, the whole thing.”
It’s a story Paul hopes to tell in an upcoming (2008) DVD, which will feature restored content from the shows, as well as commentary by Paul describing how they were created. “There’s a terrific amount of information that the public doesn’t know. They know “How High the Moon,” but they don’t know how it was made.”
