Swan Dive

I was in Chicago over the weekend and saw this interesting mural.

This is a great commercial from the ’70s, featuring our good friend Ken Nordine on the voice-over:

Ken Nordine for Levi’s

If you’ve never listened to Ken’s Word Jazz albums, do yourself a favor and get one today!

Word Jazz

I interviewed Les Paul in 2005 and 2008. Both times, we talked for over an hour, and I still felt like I’d barely scraped the surface of his amazing career as a musician and inventor. He was such a positive, enthusiastic person, full of life and inspiration. An American original.

Here’s a piece I did last year for Eldr, a magazine for seniors.

R.I.P Les. You were a great man.

The Man With The Multi-Track Mind
by Bill DeMain

Master guitarist, inventor, recording pioneer, hitmaker, legend – Les Paul changed the face of popular music as we know it, while overcoming a lifetime of obstacles. At 92, he continues to push boundaries, whether he’s tinkering in his garage workshop or trading licks on stage in New York.

“If you’re elderly, you can’t be a sissy,” says Les Paul. “You have to face the fact that the clock is ticking. I’m ninety-two pushing a hundred. Every tick of the clock is valuable. The way to handle it is to be busy, work hard and do what you love to do.”

Across nine decades, that prescription has helped Paul rack up many milestones: He’s played guitar with everyone from Bing Crosby to Chet Atkins to Keith Richards. With Mary Ford, he had forty-three Top 40 hits. He designed the first solid body electric guitar, and invented multi-track recording. Quite simply, he’s one of the true giants of modern music.

Born Lester Polfuss on June 9, 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he strummed his first guitar at age eight. Shortly after, he dismantled that guitar. “From the second I got it, I noticed things that could be improved upon,” Paul says. “But I was always taking things apart. I’d either have the light socket off, or the vacuum cleaner apart. The other kids were out playing ball while I was inside trying to learn about how sound waves travel.”

Soaking up the jazz and country sound waves from the family’s radio, Lester – nicknamed “Rhubarb Red” – became a one-man band, blowing harmonica, beating a washtub and playing guitar at local barbecue stands.

“That taught me how to be a performer,” Paul says, “and to give people what they want. That’s been my goal since. To entertain people. They paid to get in. Give them their money’s worth.”

When one paying customer in the late 1920s commented that Paul’s guitar wasn’t loud enough, Les went home and made like Thomas Edison.

Using a piece of steel railroad track and a telephone receiver, he built a prototype electric guitar.

Paul recalls, “My mother said, ‘That’ll be the day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a piece of railroad track!’ Next I tried a 4 x 4 plank, with a string stretched on it. That was my first solid body guitar. From then on, it was all about making a better block of wood with a string on it.”

When Paul brought his unorthodox ideas to instrument manufacturers, they laughed at him. Years later, they’d praise his genius, naming a guitar after him.

The young inventor also became an in-demand virtuoso, moving from Fred Waring’s big band in the ‘30s to Bing Crosby’s accompanist in the early ‘40s. In 1945, a pretty country singer named Colleen Summers captured his heart (“The smoothest, sweetest voice I ever heard,” Les says). After they married, he rechristened her Mary Ford.

In 1948, just as the pair got rolling, a near-fatal car crash left Paul’s right arm shattered. Rather than have it amputated, he convinced doctors to set it at such an angle that he could still play guitar. Paul views the accident with a lemonade-from-lemons attitude.

“That was an asset to be disabled that badly. It forced me to stop doing everything and think about this concept for a whole new kind of music.”

That bewitching concept wrapped multiple-layered guitars around harmonizing voices. On signature 1950s-era hits such as “Lover,” “Vaya Con Dios” and “Tiger Rag,” listeners were hearing up to five Les’s and ten Mary’s simultaneously.

How? Another earth-shaking discovery – the multi-track recorder. The complex recordings of every artist from the Beatles to Beyoncé would be unthinkable without Paul’s overdubbing invention.

Ironically, the rock music he fostered soon rendered his own style passé. After he and Mary divorced in 1964, Les drifted into a semi-retirement that lasted seventeen years. Meanwhile, his namesake Gibson guitar became one of the world’s best-selling instruments, picked by greats such as Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend.

In 1981, Les finally re-emerged, a year after his quintuple bypass surgery.

“In the hospital, I took a piece of paper and I drew a line down the center,” he says. “On one side, I put all the things I liked about my life up until then. On the other side, the things I didn’t like. What I liked best was to play in small, intimate clubs where you get to know your customers.”

For the past twenty-three years, he’s been doing just that. Currently, every Monday at New York City’s Iridium Jazz Club, Paul holds court with his fancy fretwork and corny jokes.

“It’s been a chance to stay active and make new friends,” he says. “Also, it makes me continue to learn. It’s great therapy. Much better than taking a pill!”

In addition, Paul stays busy with several projects – restoring archival recordings, writing a book about inventing, and designing a new hearing aid. And in idle moments, there’s always a trusty friend nearby.

“There’s a guitar in every room in the house,” Paul chuckles. “If I got a few minutes, I’ll play. It’s a beautiful instrument. It’s your best friend, your psychiatrist, your bartender – it’s everything.”

That lifelong relationship was threatened again in the mid-1990s, when Paul developed arthritis. “I’ve had to learn to play without all my fingers,” he sighs. “It’s a challenge. But I tell you, there’s hardly a thing, except for chords, that I can’t do. It’s amazing what you can do if you’re determined.”

Looking ahead to another busy year, the nonagenarian legend says, “I’m a person who can’t wait to get out of bed each day because I’ve got so much to do. Every hour that I’ve got, I’m busy. I look forward to tomorrow, no matter what.”

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