SamboraBlog

The Legendary Les Paul The Wizard of Waukesha turns 90 By Jeanette Hurt

Les Paul still stays up all night, still plays a weekly gig in New York City and has his hands on more than a handful of recording and writing projects. Not too bad for a guy who turned 90 in June.

“You’ve got it just about covered,” says Paul, calling late one night from his New Jersey country abode. “I went in the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame last week so I got another trophy. I never dreamed of all this.”

Paul, who is a member of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, would have been memorable enough for recording hits with his wife, singer Mary Ford, in the 1940s and ’50s, but he also revolutionized music with his little invention—the solid body electric guitar. Paul invented the instrument back in 1941, when he was performing a stint at Bateman’s Barbecue Stand on Bluemound Road. “This man comes riding in a rumble seat in the back of the car, and he wrote a note to the carhop, who passed it to me,” Paul recalls. “The note said, ‘I can hear your harmonica and your voice, but the guitar, I can’t hear.’ And that got me to go home to build a guitar from the telephone. I put that underneath the strings on a piece of railroad track on top of a four-by-four, and Ibe darned if I didn’t make a real good sounding guitar.”

Because “people listen with their eyes,” Paul refined that block of wood to resemble a guitar, and he took it to Gibson Guitar Co. After 10 years of Paul’s persistence, Gibson put his guitar into production. The rest is history.

Going to Guitartown
Paul’s birthday celebration began back in April, when Nashville unveiled its summer public art project, Guitartown, featuring larger-than-life versions of his signature guitar by dozens of artists. “Les Paul just revolutionized the business,” says David Baldwin, owner of Nashville’s famed Pancake Pantry, where one of Paul’s guitars is being displayed. “I’ve seen him play in New York City. He sits on a stool, and he acts like he’s only 60 years old. He was perfect for this project, and I just admire him a lot.”

Other admirers are awarding Paul the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame’s Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor he received on his birthday, June 9, at a special concert at Carnegie Hall. Paul also performed as a spotlight artist in the Big Apple’s JVC Jazz Festival, and continues to play weekly shows at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City, with 8 and 10 p.m. sets every Monday night.

Concerts aside, Paul also has a new album coming out from Capitol/EMI Music Catalog Marketing this summer. He recorded songs with Eric Clapton, Sting, Peter Frampton, Johnny Rzeznik, Jeff Beck, Joss Stone, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Joan Osborne and Richie Sambora, among others. “You’re going to be surprised with this, but the way we did it is a lot of the musicians were at the Grammy Awards in California, so they went to the Capitol Studios there and recorded their parts. A few of them were in New York, and I put them in the studio here, and I put my parts down, and then we sent it off, and they made a record,” Paul says. “You don’t have to be there to make a recording with somebody. I personally like it much better when you’re all together doing the same thing, but it’s because of the invention I made—multi-track recording—you don’t have to be together.”

The Records Keep Coming
Paul has another album coming out this summer, as Capitol/EMI recently reissued Les Paul with Mary Ford: The Best of The Capitol Masters (90th Birthday Edition). “I’m also going to put out an album of Rhubarb Red (his country act), and I’m going to do a blues album with all the blues players, and I’m going to do my jazz album and so we’ll just cover everybody,” Paul says. “That’s about the craziest thing you can do at 90 that I can think of.”

Paul is the subject of two books as well. One is a limited-edition autobiography coffee-table book, called Les Paul In His Own Words. Published by Russ Cochran, there will only be 1,500 copies of the book, each one signed by Paul and priced at $200. One hundred of these books are going to the Waukesha Historical Society Museum, earmarked for the museum’s fund-raising efforts.

“It was a blast working with Les on this book,” Cochran says. “Les is just amazingly energetic, and he has just an amazing ability to recall the details of things that happened 50, 60, 70 years ago. He’s sharp.”

Milwaukee’s Hal Leonard Publishing is putting out Robb Lawrence’s historical book, The Les Paul Legacy. Lawrence, who was Paul’s West Coast concert tech, waxes poetic about “the man, the sound and the Gibson guitar” in this hardcover bio, due out in September.

Paul says he would love to come back to Wisconsin to perform a benefit concert or to play Summerfest. “I’m telling everybody to think something up, to give me a reason to come back, to do something good for somebody.”