BREAKING NEWS: Les Paul dead at 94

Friday August 14, 2009

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Grammy award winning guitar virtuoso, inventer and musical genius,

Les Paul died Thursday August 13, 2009 at age 94

in White Plains, New York of pneumonia.

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His survivors include a companion, Arlene Palmer; two sons from his first marriage; a son and daughter from his second marriage; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. A daughter from his second marriage died in infancy in 1954.

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Les Paul will, first and foremost, be remembered as one of the greatest guitar players ever to play a chord. But that would be cheating him of his full genius in that he was the first guitarist to invent and play an electric solid body model guitar.

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Mr. Paul first came to prominence for his fast and flashy jazz-guitar style, playing with such entertainers as Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. In the 1940s and early 1950s , he and singer Mary Ford, his wife, had hits with How High the Moon, The Tennessee Waltz, Vaya con Dios and The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.

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He actively promoted such guitars for the Gibson company, and the Les Paul line of guitars became commonplace among such musicians as Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.

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He said his efforts were toward one goal: to change the way people saw the guitar.

"I wanted people to hear me," he told the publication Guitar Player in 2002.

"That's where the whole idea of a solid-body guitar came from. In the '30s, the archtop electric was such an apologetic instrument. On the bandstand, it was so difficult battling with a drummer, the horns, and all the instruments that had so much power."
"With a solid-body, guitarists could get louder and express themselves," he said. "Instead of being wimps, we'd become one of the most powerful people in the band. We could turn that mother up and do what we couldn't do before."

He, also, played a key role in developing the eight-track tape recorder and used the device to play many parts on the same recording, a process now known as multi-tracking. Such early work in overlaying sound contributed to the richness and distinctiveness of his recordings.

It was his work in this field that led the Beatles to experiment with overdubbing and laying down track over track over tracks.

Mr. Paul earned the nickname "the Wizard of Waukesha," after the Wisconsin town where he was born Lester William Polfuss on June 9, 1915. His father was an auto mechanic.
As a boy, Les Paul taught himself music on his mother's player piano, mimicking the notes with his hands. An admirer of the blues and country troubadours he heard on the radio, he imitated their songs with his harmonica and mail-order guitar. He played both instruments simultaneously by making his own harmonica holder.

Artists such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young used a variation of this device to play live gigs using both instruments at the same time.

As a teenager, he played at a drive-in restaurant, where he experimented with amplified sound to reach the open-air audience. He stuck a phonograph needle inside his acoustic guitar and wired it to a radio speaker.

Adopting the moniker "Rhubarb Red," he left high school, joined a traveling cowboy band and later played on the "National Barn Dance" program on WLS radio in Chicago. He named one of his early groups the ''Original Ozark Apple Knockers''.

Not wishing for a career in hillbilly music, he convinced two friends -- guitarist Jimmy Atkins (Chet's brother) and bassist Ernie Newton - that he knew Paul Whiteman, the prominent big-band leader. The trio went to New York in 1937, only to be kicked out of Whiteman's office.
They were waiting to take the elevator back down when they saw bandleader Fred Waring standing next to them. He already had dozens of musicians, but Les insisted that he hear the trio's lightning-fast tempo -- timed to please Waring before the elevator arrived. He was hooked, and they got a job on his NBC show.
Around this time, Les Paul also became a consultant to the Gibson company, testing its new models. Not until a decade later, in 1952, and after a rival company developed a similar model did Gibson see the selling potential of Les's solid-body electric guitar. It sought his endorsement on its own design.

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It was during his playing time with Bing Crosby that Crosby arranged for a recording session at Decca records, where they made It's Been a Long, Long Time, Tiger Rag and other titles that were bestsellers.

In the early 1940s, Les worked for Armed Forces Radio Service and became a staff musician at NBC, accompanying the Andrews Sisters and other pop singers.
He jammed the blues with pianist Cole in Norman Granz's first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series in 1944. Their quicksilver note-for-note matching of solos created howls of approval from the audiences.

He also had musical dates worldwide, once meeting his idol, Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt.

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On Crosby's advice, Les Paul created his own recording studio, both to help his guitar career and to further his interest in electronics. He began to take advantage of new, still bulky tape-recording machine technology. Facing initial skepticism, he persuaded Ampex to market his eight-track tape recorder.
After hundreds of false starts, he began recording with the new devices in the late 1940s, and the results can be heard on such numbers as Nola, Josephine, Whispering and Meet Mister Callaghan.

His version of Lover contained eight overdubbed electric guitar parts, which he electronically wove into a single record. It was a sensation.

Married at the time, he also had been seeing Mary Ford, whom he had hired as a singer and guitarist. In 1948, both were in an auto wreck on an icy patch of road in Chandler, Okla., that almost killed him.

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Les's right arm was crushed, and one doctor suggested amputation. Instead, he had it fixed at a right angle so he could play his instrument.
The next year, Les Paul divorced his wife, Virginia Webb Paul, and married Mary Ford. The new couple settled in Mahwah, N.J., and continued to work together on a series of albums for Capitol and Columbia in the 1950s, including The New Sound and Time to Dream.
The rigorous touring schedule and Ford's alcohol addiction damaged their marriage. Meanwhile, the public demand for rock-and-roll harmed their careers. They divorced in 1964.

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Les Paul, who had long ago made his fortune, tried to settle into retirement in the 1960s as the popularity of rock-and-roll music grew. He made occasional recordings, notably the album Chester and Lester, for which he shared a 1976 Grammy with Chet Atkins for best country instrumental performance. Les was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and won two more Grammys, in 2006, for his album Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played.

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He gradually reentered public performance, obtaining a regular date at Fat Tuesday's and later the Iridium jazz club in New York, where he played Monday nights until shortly before his death. AT AGE 94 MIND YOU!

For fans and fellow musicians, including Billy Joel and Paul McCartney, catching Les Paul was a Monday night must. He was a sprightly presence, even after he developed arthritis that left him with the use of only two fingers of his left hand.
"If you're stubborn, it can be done," he once told The Washington Post. "I've been playing with what fingers I have left. If they'll put up with it, I can put up with it."

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LARRY..CURTIS..SPURLOCK

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