an audition on Fred Waring’s popular radio
programme. Suddenly, Les was reaching an
audience of millions nationwide. “It was the biggest
break of my life, and a great education,” he said.
As Les Paul’s profile rose, he continued to pursue
the idea of a guitar that could “sustain for days”.
Coincidentally, just a few blocks from his
apartment was a new showroom and laboratory
belonging to the Epiphone guitar company. Paul
introduced himself, and before long “it was no
problem to get permission to use their machinery
and equipment on Sundays, when the place was
shut down”. As he’d done with other things
as a boy, he took the Epiphone guitars apart,
making notes about their construction, all in
pursuit of his solid-body dream.
He nicknamed his prototype guitar The
Log, because, well, it looked like a straight
piece of timber with strings, frets and
pickups. Paul recalled the first time he
played it in front of an audience: “I took it to
a tavern in Queens, and people didn’t even
notice. There I was, flying up and down the
neck... No response. So I took it back to the shop,
added ‘wings’, fastening two sides on the log so that
it looked like a guitar. The next week, the audience
applauded. I realised then that most people hear
with their eyes!”F
rom Waring’s show, Paul moved on to
accompanying America’s biggest star,
singer Bing Crosby. On their first hittogether, the wartime ballad It’s Been A Long, Long
Time, Paul played one of his most lyrical solos ever.
It didn’t have any of the speedy pyrotechnics that
he’d become famous for, but it remained one of his
favourites. “There was a case of you don’t have to
play a lot of notes, you just have to play the right
notes,” he said. “And that tells the whole story.”
In 1946, while looking for a singer to front his
own trio, Paul met a pretty young guitarist-vocalist
called Colleen Summers. “She had the smoothest,
sweetest voice I’d ever heard,” he said. The two
quickly became partners in music and in love, andSummers changed her name to Mary Ford. But
in 1948, just as the duo started to gather steam,
playing gigs and doing their first recordings,
tragedy struck.
On an icy winter road in Oklahoma they were in
a car accident that left Paul’s right arm shattered in
several places. He was in hospital for more than
a year. The prognosis was that he’d never play
guitar again. Rather than have the arm amputated,he convinced doctors to set the bone
at such an angle that he could still strum and pick.
Decades later, he said: “That was an asset to be
disabled that badly. You know, in the 1940s I felt as
though I played the best I’ll ever play. I had a lot of
dexterity and technique. If I thought of it, I could
play it. But the accident forced me to stop doing
everything I knew, and think about this concept
for a whole new kind of music.”
When Paul recovered, he began chasing that
concept, experimenting with “sound-on-sound”
recording in his garage studio. “Bing Crosby gave
me a brand new Ampex tape recorder in 1949,” he
said, “and I immediately started thinking about
how to modify it. With the multi-tracking, at first
I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. I just locked
myself out there in that garage and said: ‘I’m going
to make a sound where people will be able to tell
me from anybody else.’ And it had to be different.
Something that was brand new.”
He recalled the night he did his first successful
multi-tracking experiment: “I’d asked Ampex for
a fourth head for the recorder, and they just drilled
a hole and put it in there. They had no idea what
I was doing, and I didn’t tell them until five years
later. As a test, we recorded Mary’s voice, then my
guitar. Then we added harmonies. They were all
there on the tape. I said: ‘By God, it works!’ Mary
and I were dancing around the room. We were the
two happiest people in the world.”
The Les Paul & Mary Ford sound was an
elaborate layer cake. It featured Mary’s warm,
effortless vocal harmonies at its centre, with Paul’s
multi-tracked guitars zooming around, providing
percolating beds and exquisitely arranged
counterpoints. It sounded folksy and
futuristic, smooth and strange. And it was
all recorded at home, an unthinkable feat at
the time. Record buyers may not have
understood what they were hearing, but
they loved it. In the duo’s 10 years together
they had more than 40 Top-40 hits,
including classics such as How High The
Moon, Smoke Rings, Vaya Con Dios and Bye Bye
Love. And from their big bang, everything in
recorded popular music followed. More
specifically, you can draw lines to many future
points in rock, including the one-man vocal
choruses of ELO and Todd Rundgren, the
elaborate guitar orchestrations of Brian May and
Lindsey Buckingham, the flashy leads of Jimmy
Page and Eddie Van Halen.
Jeff Beck said: “I remember hearing How High
The Moon as a kid. The sound was fantastic,
especially the slap-echo and the trebly guitar. I hadGET
TY(^) x 2
“I remember hearing How
High The Moon as a kid. I had
never heard an instrument
sound like that before.”
Jeff Beck
Les Paul and Richie
Sambora at Fat
Tuesday’s in New York
City, circa 1993.
A young Les Paul
with a neck-worn
harmonica, another
device (^) he invented.
52 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM