“Now the village mission bells are softly ringing…” – “Vaya Con Dios (May God Be With You),” Les Paul and Mary Ford
Random memories of the guitar pioneer while revisiting The Legend and the Legacy …a man’s life is sometimes nothing more than a series of shakes on a kaleidoscopic toy. Within the strangely cinematic circular tube, one sees a series of colorful fragments that coalesce and then drift away, either forgotten, or replaced by another memory shard.
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My young son sits mesmerized in front of the television watching a program about how certain incomprehensible, near miraculous, feats are performed. A masked magician shows, in great detail, how each “magic” trick is actually just that—a trick to fool the audience, and entertain, of course. My son breaks from his spell, leans back and asks: “That’s fake, but is there real magic?” I grin and reply, “Yeah, Les Paul.”
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You can hear it almost immediately on “Lover,” a Rodgers/Hart track from the 1932 film Love Me Tonight. He races through the song at a breakneck pace, fingers fast as lightning, notes peeled off and tossed outwards as if his hand is on fire and the only way to stop the flames is to play as fast as possible until he hits the coda. And then he’s out.
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Well He, in this case, was the guitar pioneer Les Paul who passed away on August 13 at the age of 94 after an incredible 80-year career re-defining what it means to play a block of wood with strings, stirring the heart, inspiring others to reach beyond themselves. The Wizard of Waukesha [Wisconsin for the geographically-perplexed] helped usher in the modern guitar sound with the Gibson Les Paul, and there’s been hell to pay ever since.
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Sometimes known more for his innovative invention of the block of wood with strings, Paul is shamelessly overlooked and underappreciated at times when his recorded output is cued up. And this can be damaging to his reputation. One passage through the two-minute whirlwind that is “Whispering,” shows an artist paying homage to an old standard, and yet his waterfall of notes floats down upon the listener in colorful arcs of light that are both magical and almost sinister. How does the man make it sound so musical, and yet the piece has a powerfully mechanical heart? Ahhh…the inventor’s rub.
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“Meet Mister Callaghan”—multi-tracked guitars rest atop a bass pattern that is gentle but elusive. In less than two minutes, Paul takes what could have been just a demonstration for early guitar overdubs (a phenomenon he would not only help introduce, but master, and deliver on a platinum platter to generations of future musicians), and methodically plays variations of the song’s hook until it rests within your curious psyche.
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“Lady of Spain” follows the overdubbed hook variations but adds numerous twists with various modulated speed patterns on guitar while layering textures over each other, not exactly repeating, but placing each line so it is just off the center of each proceeding pattern, creating a new way to speak on guitar that wasn’t quite present in any other form.
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“Bye Bye Blues” like many of his hits recorded with his then-wife, vocalist Mary Ford, features an infectious hook welded to a modern guitar riff. “I’m Sitting on Top of the World”—woos rather than flirts; it is filled with an intoxicating joy of life; bliss in 2 min.
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Ahh…but it is the block of wood with strings that makes the man so interesting to most musicians. Indeed, Trey Anastasio, like Les Paul, wields his own unique axe, this time by a craftsman, and former sound man, Paul Languedoc. After Les Paul’s passing, the Anastasio-led Phish played “How High the Moon” on August 13, a song that they hadn’t played in nearly 20 years, but an appropriate choice for a band, like Paul, who are well known for their ability to provoke weird and exotic sounds out of traditional instruments.
And like Phish, Les Paul was involved in a bit of odd promotional shenanigans, as well, as he stated in the liner notes for a Paul/Ford compilation featuring the classic song:
To publicize “How High the Moon,” Jim Moran came up with the bright idea of launching a midget from a gigantic kite in Central Park! Moran was always after the big headline. But the cops came along and wouldn’t allow us to, because the midget might have fallen off the kite line and killed a baseball player. Didn’t matter, though. Our version of “How High the Moon”—the 76th, I guess—went straight to the top anyway.
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“You play the guitar, right?” asked Steve Kimock. “No, I played drums,” said the writer.
As one races through the man’s tributes, time and again, the list of those that used his patented Gibson Les Paul are legion. Late 50s models are the true deal, the magic referenced above, waiting in some dark ancient tomb to wreck havoc on a teenager’s mindset like a mummified guitar hero seeking just one more soul for his musical crypt. Everyone from Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck to Jerry Garcia to Trey Anastasio to Warren Haynes to Slash each took a turn on the Les Paul and either made the instrument their own, or drifted towards another guitar. Paul created “The Log,” an early solid-body electric guitar in the 30s, but his real technological breakthrough came in the 1950s when he teamed up with Gibson to produce his ultra-modern instrument known simply as the Gibson Les Paul. By the early 60s, new models, not endorsed completely by Paul, would be manufactured and were called the Gibson SG, or Solid Guitar. Paul discontinued his association with the company, and variations of the instrument were created over the years, but it was the original models, as mentioned, that truly define the Les Paul Sound.
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And thus, brief percussion bashings aside, since I am not a musician, I can only write about how the music feels to me as opposed to the numerous technical attributes that make up the classic Les Paul guitar. With that sensation of sound came, arguably, an even greater invention by the Wizard of Waukesha—the development of multi-tracking, overdubbing, tape delay, and general studio magic that can be explained and taught to the neophyte or veteran musician, but one needs the tunes to create this spell, right?
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Enter young Jimmy Page, who at the age of 25 had already endured (and looking at his list of varied 60s musical credits, some of those sessions must have been painful) hundreds of hours in the studio working on tracks for other artists whilst toiling away for a brief spell with the Yardbirds. When Page compiled his quartet for Led Zeppelin, he also had amassed a lifetime’s worth of knowledge studying the studio work of Les Paul. Therefore, Page felt more than ready to fill the producer’s slot—a role he’d keep for all nine Zeppelin studio albums. More than any other producer, or musician for that matter, Jimmy Page took advantage of Les Paul’s taping innovations to create layers of sound that evoked some memorable moods that are both timeless, and—yes, that word again—sinister. How does one create guitar tracks that appear to contain the cosmos—the Big Bang and Big Crunch—within their nearly invisible-walled sonic environment? Listen to the zenith of the Led Zeppelin studio career, the sprawling guitar army known as “Achilles Last Stand” on 1976’s Presence, and one hears the peak of the Les Paul sound. One hears how far into The Zone a musician can take numerous layers of sound—especially the beloved guitar sound—and not forfeit heart in service of mechanical art.
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My two favorite Clapton albums are ancient. I am not a huge fan of most of his post-_Layla_ work, but it is really the John Mayall album that we are concerned with here, especially if one is, yet again, speaking of that specific Gibson Les Paul sound. On the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, an album with the legendary blues group he recorded with after his brief spell with the Yardbirds (that band, again?), Slowhand found his muse at a crossroads with his influences (arguably an intersection that he never really left), and created a near masterpiece of tension and release. I have it on album because it doesn’t sound right on CD or (gasp) mp3, and it is always cranked at high volume. Clapton used a 1959 Les Paul on the album, and helped continue to usher in the era of the Marshall monoliths by blasting though a Model 1962 Amplifier. But it’s that damn Les Paul guitar, a beast that sounds truly magical in the hands of a seemingly otherworldly talent like Clapton that makes these blues recordings so transcendent. Yeah, I prefer the majestic heartache and fire and brimstone jammed-out blues of Layla, but it was on Bluesbreakers where Clapton produced the sheets of sounds that would be imitated, but never duplicated by lesser lights in the years since. (And when speaking of Hendrix, one places him in a whole other architectural category—the pyramids as opposed to the Mt. Rushmore-like structure of Messrs. Clapton, Beck, Page, and yes, Keith Richards who employed Les Paul’s guitar, or recording techniques, from time to time in their storied careers.)
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Echo (or is it the same spin on the kaleidoscope, yielding a similar yet different image? Is it all a practiced magician’s trick? You meant “musician,” not “magician,” right? No. No, I didn’t). And thus, brief percussion bashings aside, since I am not a musician, I can only write about how the music feels to me. Paul’s guitar and studio wizardry always sounded just about perfect when wedded (literally and figuratively) with Mary Ford’s voice. Although he created numerous overdubs, delay tricks, and multi-tracks on their many tunes, it is her very angelic voice that somehow humanizes the often demonically mechanical heart that beats within the Les Paul sound. You can hear it almost immediately on “Just One More Chance,” a track that Paul wanted her to sing like Bing Crosby. Alas, she could only sing like Mary Ford; yet, that was always just good enough. He played either “The Log,” or a chopped-up pre-Gibson Epiphone, but the track also contains another Paul hallmark—his sound is sometimes so simplistic that it’s beautiful.
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So, yeah, son, there is such a thing as real magic. May you find your own path yourself, but it’s so much easier, especially if one chooses to become a musician, interpreting melodies in a new and unique way, if the path has already been cleared by such an innovative inventor of musical magic like Les Paul.
