Les Paul: Invented Here
Back and Forth
Paul describes the custom audio recording process he devised to create his and Ford’s signature sound. “The shows were all recorded backwards. With sound-on-sound, we would record the least important part first, then work our way up to the final part, the lead vocal. The vocals have 16 voices, all the different parts, sung by one person. All the music was done that way.” That included, of course, Paul’s accompanying guitar tracks.
The production details reveal the intense daily behind-the-scenes churn required to create and sustain the seeming serene surface of the show. “Say there’s 32 parts that have to be done,” says Paul. “When you make the first part, then sing or play along with it, the first track is erased. So with this method you really had to know what you were doing, because you’re not only recording the song, but you’re mixing the music to its final destination. If somebody knocked at the door, if an airplane goes over, you can be on the fifteenth take, and you have to go back to take one. So it was very tedious.”
Almost as tedious, says Paul, was selling this MO to broadcasters. “In those days all the networks, all the radio stations, were not only not aware of what we were doing, but they were skeptical of the fact that you could use a tape machine to broadcast with. So if we were doing the Ed Sullivan show or any guest shot, when you said tape machine, they said, “What’s that?” So it was up to us to convince them that the tape machine wouldn’t break down and that the quality would be very good.”
Creating the pictures for the television show required equal resourcefulness. “On the video side, we had an electronicam. That was another forerunner. We piggy-backed TV monitors on our Mitchell cameras. We used the same set up and crew as “The Honeymooners,” but we were making a show a day, 5 times a day, 5 days a week, so it was all terribly interesting.”
Restoration
In the years since the show’s great run, it has been largely inaccessible, except in occasional web clips. “They just sat here in storage, forgotten about,” he says. “I was too busy with other adventures I was on. Mary and I both were playing the London Palladium, the Paramount Theater, the Ed Sullivan show, and every other show you can think of. So we were going down another road.”
In the past few years, though still remarkably busy, Paul found time to organize his video and audio archives, with help from research assistant Elliott Liggett. “We decided to restore the Listerine shows, which were recorded optically,” says Paul. “Luckily, I’d kept all the audio masters that had been edited for these shows on magnetic tape. And so when we decided to take these first 140 shows and change them all over to the optical tracks, we had to do what I call a car wash. To clean them up and make sure that they’re in sync, and that the quality was very good.”
Liggett suggested that for this car wash the “natural tool would be a Mac.” And when Liggett returned to school, engineer Jim Krause took over readying the archival footage for DVD. The original 5-minute Listerine shows, originally shot on film (which contains both optical audio and video tracks) had at some point been transferred to 1-inch tape. After moving the tapes into Final Cut Pro on a Mac using the AJA IO, Krause began replacing the poor quality optical audio tracks with the better quality audio from the stored magnetic tapes. He then synced the audio with the video, even adjusting video timing as necessary.
Because the dialog seems noisy compared to the fresh music in the show, Krause uses Soundtrack Pro to clean noise, hiss, and rumble. Krause archives the finished files on an Xserve RAID for output to DVD and for other purposes. Nearly halfway through the restoration process — Krause has yet to begin the video restoration in Final Cut Pro — he’s happy with the workflow. “Without the Mac Pro, we would probably still be fiddling in the video transfer stage,” he says. “Using Soundtrack Pro for quality audio editing, cleaning, retouching, and EQing of music and dialog, and Final Cut Pro to move everything into sync, has made this huge project so much easier.”
Paul is happy as well, eager to bring to his fans a fresh look at the Listerine Show performances and a first look at his pioneering production workflow. And as usual, he worries the details. “There’s a lot of fantasy that goes into history,” he says. “You don’t always get the truth about how the actual facts come out. But if we do this right, I think you’ll get it here.”
