In 1940 or 1941 — the exact date is unknown — , Mr. Paul made his guitar breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a guitar neck. “The log,” as he called it, if not the first solid-body electric guitar, became the most influential one.
“You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding,” Mr. Paul once said.
The odd-looking instrument drew derision when he first played it in public, so he hid the works inside a conventional-looking guitar. But the log was a conceptual turning point. With no acoustic resonance of its own, it was designed to generate an electronic signal that could be amplified and processed — the beginning of a sonic transformation of the world’s music.
Les Paul has passed at the age of 94. He's the man who brought us the modern electric guitar -- the essential cornerstone from rock & roll which has spread all over the earth like a wave and even into outer space, a revolution in music, aesthetics, style and thought, but Paul's legacy includes other pioneering work as well:
Paul also was responsible for changes in the way music was recorded with his advances in multi-track engineering, tape delay, close-in microphones for vocals and playback speeds.A modest man about his achievements:
“Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison,” he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “The only reason I invented these things was because I didn’t have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really.”If there's a rock & roll heaven, Les Paul is up there now making custom guitars for St. Peter and the Angels.
Hail hail the Thomas Alva Edison of rock & roll. And an electric guitar will get you through a day without a lightbulb a lot better than a lightbulb with get you through a day without hearing that sweet sustain of a strummed, picked or pummeled electric guitar string.
Thank you, Les!
1 comment:
Up until fairly recently, Les had a weekly Monday night club gig. I saw him prob 15 times over the past 20 years. He put on a great show every time & was always *really* funny and entertaining.
If you were trying to figure out what to do with a gang of people with differing tastes, Les was a mortal lock to make everybody happy.
He always struck me as uniquely post-War American: a regular guy who tinkered with all kinds of electronics to make himself happy, and oh-by-the-way came up with some of the most ubiquitous inventions of his generation.
It might be a stretch to draw a line from Les to Jobs/Wozniak et al, but I don't think so.
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