Leave it to the media to cover Les Paul’s 90th birthday by mangling his legacy.
It’s a terrific story. Too gritty and ballsy to be sidelined by arthritis that would silence one with lesser spirit, he still performs weekly with his trio at the Manhattan jazz club Iridium. The rub came with celebratory articles in various outlets, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, that bordered on hagiography, claiming he invented the first solid-body electric guitar and the Gibson guitar bearing his name.
Actually, he did neither. The earliest electric guitar designs were patented and designed by others in the late 1920s. The first production solid-body guitars, introduced in the 1930s, were lap steels. One semi-solid electric Spanish model, Rickenbacker’s Electro B, tanked in the marketplace during the ’30s, when Paul began tinkering with his solid-body concepts. When he showed his famous “Log,” built in the early 1940s (now in the Country Music Hall of Fame), to Gibson, company president Maurice Berlin curtly dismissed it as a “broomstick.”
After the bolder Leo Fender successfully introduced his now-legendary Telecaster solidbody in 1950, Gibson, anxiously playing catch-up, designed a prototype single-cutaway solid-body and submitted it to Paul in 1951. He agreed to endorse it and serve as a consultant. The instrument debuted in 1952. The design patent: Gibson’s.
Why the billowing mythology? Paul, a master raconteur, never allows facts to interfere with a good tale. Many simply take his accounts at face value. He withdrew from collaborating on an early 1990s autobiography after co-author Mary Alice Shaughnessy dug into factual contradictions and the downsides in his life. While her 1993 biography Les Paul: An American Original, remains the most factual to date, it’s easier for many to perpetuate the legends, obfuscating the man’s actual — and monumental — achievements.
From the start, Paul’s musical palette was complex. It began as raw country. He derived his Rhubarb Red persona from his early hero, Chicago hillbilly performer Pie Plant Pete. Yet his jazz skills quickly blossomed. Even while recording as Red for Decca in 1936, he was versatile enough to record with blueswoman Georgia White.
Following his mainstream debut with his Les Paul Trio (Jim Atkins, Chet’s half-brother, played rhythm guitar) on bandleader Fred Waring’s NBC radio show, his jazz stature grew. An inveterate jammer, he swapped riffs with Nat King Cole and Lester Young at the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in 1944. Leading a new version of the Trio that recorded and accompanied others, Paul played beguiling riffs that enhanced friend Bing Crosby’s 1945 hit “It’s Been A Long, Long Time”.
His Capitol hit singles, both instrumentals and vocal duets with wife Mary Ford, were benchmarks in the early 1950s. Ford, born Colleen Summers, was originally part of Southern California’s 1940s western music scene and had been a longtime fan when they in 1945 (they married in 1949). Neither ever denied nor denigrated their country roots. During their peak years of live performing, raw hillbilly tunes routinely popped up onstage, Les spicing things up with pranks and dry, insouciant humor.
Amplified jazz guitar soloists were common in that era, but Paul made electric guitar soloists part of the pop mainstream. His records had a unique duality. Their phenomenal sales proved their commerciality, while their innovative sound, based on his multi-part recording techniques, made them cutting-edge (Capitol even titled his first LP The New Sound Of Les Paul).
The concept of pre-tape multi-part disc recordings wasn’t new. Jazzman Sidney Bechet did it in 1941, with middling success. Merle Travis used the idea on his 1948 hit “Merle’s Boogie Woogie”, which appeared roughly the same time as Paul’s first hit instrumental, “Lover”. Paul alone brought it to its full potential, yet refused to stand still. When he obtained his first Ampex tape recorder, he and an engineer friend maximized its potential by designing a second recording head, allowing him to layer guitar and vocal parts atop one another. It not only provided the basis of his and Ford’s trademark style, it forever changed sound recording.
Capitol, deferring to his complex methodology, let him select material, produce the records, and submit finished masters for release. Few realize that it was Les Paul who pioneered the notion of artist control.
He didn’t hide behind electronics, however. He used them to enhance his dazzling technique, aural flights of fancy, and flawless dynamics inspired by Django Reinhardt, his ultimate guitar hero. His substantive yet theatrical style stunned many guitarists. His pioneering spirit inspired others, including his friend Chet Atkins, to launch their own quests for new and innovative sounds, which was one reason for his appeal to later generations.
Almost all of the 23 tracks here assimilated into musical Americana long ago. “Lover” retains the dizzying excitement it had when new; its scintillating double-time, even triple-time passages (he added his own bass and percussion) lose none of their power to amaze. The landmark duets with Ford — “Tennessee Waltz”, “How High The Moon”, “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise”, “Tiger Rag” and “Vaya Con Dios” — remain able to thrill, amuse and astonish, their seamless blend of multiple vocal/guitar parts reflecting a timeless blend of humor, swing and fearless innovation. The disc’s final track, an episode of their 1950s radio show, blends light humor and four numbers.
Despite this, and the fact that his triumphs and vision burnished Capitol’s stature over half a century ago, the label deigned to mark this occasion simply by repackaging a 1992 CD sampler culled from their 1991 Legend And The Legacy box set, adding three more tracks. Apparently no one cared enough to do the right thing: assemble a comprehensive career retrospective beginning with samples of the 1930s Rhubarb Red recordings, moving through his peak years and material from later decades including his Grammy-wining collaboration with Chet Atkins. Offering a mere single disc borders on insulting.
That aside, Les Paul’s nine magnificent decades of achievement remain the incontrovertible truth no one — not even Les — can distort or embellish.
