A TRIBUTE TO LES PAUL’S LIFE AND WORK: VAYA CON DIOS

Posted August 14th, 2009 by admin

Les Paul had been the quintessential “Guitar Man” long before the rock group Bread recorded a song of the same name.

The 1972 hit wasn’t about Les, but it could have been. Besides being a virtuoso musician who performed with some of early pop’s biggest stars, Lester William Polsfuss, who died August 13 at 94, was also an ingenious pioneer and a trailblazer who changed the face of the 20th century music scene. In fact, it is likely that neither Bread nor other bands that preceded or followed it could have made their mark if it weren’t for Les.

He brought a lot of clever innovations and improvements to the music world, including multi track and echo effects, which have been adapted and used not only by himself in his early recordings with wife Mary Ford, but by many other renowned musicians as well.

But Les’s best-known invention is arguably the solid-body electric guitar, which he originally designed for the Gibson music company in the early 1950s. That instrument had become one of the most widely used in the music industry and has been at the heart of the rock’n’roll revolution. Many rock and pop legends, including the Beatles’s Paul McCartney and George Harrison, The Who’s Pete Townshend, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Eddie van Halen, and many others, too numerous to mention here, used Les’s guitar.

That’s a huge accomplishment for a man who once reportedly said that his first guitar came from Sears & Roebuck and cost $3.95. As he related to AARP Magazine in 2003, the whiz kid (he was 13 at the time) went on to rig up a microphone from telephone parts to get a better sound out of that guitar. Then he took the needle from his family phonograph, put it under the guitar strings and wired the contraption into two carefully spaced radio speakers, thus getting not only amplification but also a crude stereo effect.

This electronic breakthrough paved the way to many more. Today, as the world pays tribute to Les’s life and work, let’s remember that behind every great invention is a great person - in this case, a true Guitar Man.