How Les Paul's inventive mind revolutionised music

Whenever he was ill, his mother put young Les Polsfuss on the parlour couch in their home in Waukesha, Wisconsin. There Les could hear goods wagons rumbling up and down a nearby railway siding.

Listening to the trains one morning at the age of five, he noticed that when the sound reached a certain pitch, it made the window vibrate. That's strange, he thought. Feeling the glass, he discovered he could dampen the vibration but couldn't make it stop. Only when the train's speed and pitch changed did the windowpane become silent.

"That's resonance," Mr Kahn, a local science teacher, explained when Les put the question to him. "Your window is 'hearing' the train, just as your eardrum is hearing me now—by vibrating." Then he added, "That's how music is made.”

Les forever questioned things. "What are you doing?" his older brother cried one day, seeing Les punching new holes in the player-piano rolls. "I'm making it better," Les responded. By adding holes, he could make the instrument sound like two pianos.

Les had a gift for music. When he picked up a harmonica, he learned to play it in hours. Then he bought a cheap guitar and, plucking on that while alternately blowing the harmonica and singing, he became a one-man band.

By the age of ten, Red Hot Red, as he called himself because of his hair colour, was busking at a drive-in barbecue stand. One day a waitress told Red Hot that customers were complaining. "The people at the back of the car-park can't hear," she said.

What I need is a way to make myself louder, Les thought. Having discovered that the mouthpiece in his family's new telephone worked by vibration, as did the speaker in their radio, Les carted both components to the barbecue stand. He tied the mouthpiece to a broom handle, then ran a wire from it to the radio. Into this "mike" Les began to sing.

Customers applauded, but then complained that his voice drowned out his guitar. So Les took the needle from the family's record player and stuck it into the bridge of his guitar, then wired it into another radio speaker. The needle's vibrations were amplified by the radio, and now he had an electric guitar.

In 1932, when Les was 17, he became interested in early bluegrass music—string band country and western—and life beyond Waukesha. A guitarist named "Sunny Joe" Wolverton, hearing Les play, wanted the boy to join his group. He said he’d teach him everything he knew about guitars. Sunny Joe was as good as his word, and in the early 1930s Les, now known as Rhubarb Red, was playing country music in Chicago.

But his inventive mind kept whirling. He had already built his own recording lathe, using an old car-engine flywheel as a turntable and hooking it up to a jukebox motor with dental-drill belts. Now, as a night owl frustrated when there was no one to "jam" with into the small hours, he remembered what he had done to the player-piano rolls, and wondered whether he could use his recording machine to turn a gramophone into an automated backup band. He began to experiment.

Sounds are recorded on ordinary records by etching the vibrations of a needle along a spiralling groove. Les found he could cut a second groove between the tracks of the first, which could carry a different set of notes. Both grooves could then be played at the same time using two needles. The effect was that of two guitars playing.

Going further, he made a second turntable and recorded alternately on one, then the other, adding new parts, until the sound became multi-layered. But record companies laughed off his inventions as "just gimmicks".

Then Les moved to New York, having changed his name to Les Paul. He was playing the guitar for orchestra-leader Fred Waring's radio show by day and Harlem jazz greats by night.

In those days, to make records you got all the musicians into a room and hoped they'd play perfectly. But inevitably someone would make a mistake and they'd have to start all over again. Les knew there had to be a better way.

"You need your own studio," Bing Crosby told him in 1947 after Les had begun playing with him in Los Angeles. So, in a garage behind his house, Les custom-built a sound studio with the most advanced recording equipment then available. Some of the era's greatest performers—Andy Williams, Kay Starr, WC Fields and the Crosby family—came to record in Les's back yard. Furthermore, his studio gave him a place to perfect his multiple-recording techniques and build a stock of demonstration records.

During the war, Les had joined the US Armed Forces Radio Service, editing recordings for worldwide broadcast. But no matter how hard he worked, the Germans seemed to record just as well, and often faster. How could that be? The answer came when Les saw a machine discovered in an abandoned Nazi headquarters. He instantly realised its significance. "Bing," he told Crosby, "I think I've found how you can sing on the radio and be on the golf course at the same time." Instead of discs, this device recorded on magnetic tape, which was reusable and could be easily edited with scissors and glue. By now Les had engineered dozens of multiple-recorded discs and was determined the world should hear them. One day, after a rejection from yet another record company, Les spotted workmen putting up a building sign that read "Capitol Records". Tucking demo discs under his arm, Les backed his way inside, reckoning if someone stopped him, he could say he was on his way out. Backing up the stairs, he came to the office of vice-president Jim Conkling. "Would you listen to one of my records?" Les pleaded.

Conkling agreed. Les put the disc on the turntable, and as guitar runs engineered in ways few had ever heard poured forth, Conkling froze. "How many records like that do you have?" he asked. "Dozens," said Les. "That one's the worst."

Taking out a pen, Conkling scribbled a note on the back of an envelope, signed it and passed it to Les. That agreement changed the history of music recording. "Lover," Les Paul's first commercially distributed multiple recording, was released in 1948 and became an instant hit. It began with golden-toned bass notes, swelled into a filigree of rapidly plucked sound, and introduced the world to audio effects such as echoes and delays.

Just about the time "Lover" was being released, Les was a passenger in a car that slid off an icy road and plunged into a ravine. The driver, a young singer named Colleen Summers, wasn't seriously hurt, but Les broke both shoulders, a leg and his back, and ruptured his spleen. Seven inches of bone were torn from his right arm. Doctors pieced the arm together but it became infected, swelled to five times normal size, and looked as if it might have to be amputated. At 33, in the prime of his musical career, Les Paul was about to become a one-armed has-been.

Fortunately, at the suggestion of one of his Oklahoma surgeons, Les was transferred to Good Samaritan hospital in Los Angeles where doctors rebroke his arm, joined it with screws, and set it so his hand was pointing permanently towards his navel. "I'm a guitarist," Les had told them. "If I have to be frozen in one position, that's the one I want." After two years convalescing, Les was back playing the guitar. "The accident actually improved my technique," he recalls. "It forced me to eliminate needless elbow movement."

There was another unexpected consequence. Les Paul and Colleen Summers fell in love. Les thought she might make a good addition to his act. "Just one problem—your name," he said. When Colleen asked what she should be called instead, Les consulted a phone book, then said, "Mary Ford". They married in 1949, and together Les and Mary recorded some of the 1950s' biggest hits: "How High the Moon", "Mockingbird Hill", "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise", "Vaya Con Dios".

When rock 'n' roll began to dominate music, Les and Mary retired from singing. But Les never stopped inventing.

For years Les had been imagining another kind of sound—one that couldn't even be made on his electric guitar. He had spent hours listening to the vibration of a single string plucked against a variety of backgrounds—hollow wood, solid wood, aluminium, steel. He had concluded that hollow wood was inferior for amplification, so he built several solid-body guitars. They produced the sound he sought, but no one wanted them. As Les said, "There was no way Gene Autry was going to strum something that looked like a railway sleeper!"

Although the Gibson Guitar Company produced a solid-body in the 1950s, it wasn't until the mid-1960s, after groups like the Beatles took rock in another direction, that this type of guitar became the instrument of choice and Les was vindicated. Today, Les Pauls are still favoured by rock's top stars, like Jimmy Page (formerly of Led Zeppelin), while an original Les Paul Standard solid-body built by Gibson between 1958 and 1960 could fetch up to £25,000.

Les's fascination with the tape recorder continued. With help from others, he worked out that by altering the heads on his machine he could record one sound on top of the other on the same tape. But it was his next idea that was the most revolutionary. "Instead of recording across the whole width of tape," he said, "let's stack the heads and record in narrow tracks." This led to the development of synchronised stereophonic tape and eight-track tape, right up to the sophisticated present.

Nowadays, when a performer makes records, the musical parts maybe recorded on as many as 48 separate tracks during several sessions. The tracks are then mixed by an audio expert, with the result often sounding different from what was first played. Says Daniel Queen, chairman of the Technical Council of the Audio Engineering Society, "Les Paul's multi-track concept has not only affected the way popular songs sound, it has even influenced ‘serious’ music, from a recording of a Mahler symphony to the avant-garde music of composers like John Cage."

Today, Les Paul is 78 and still going strong. He and Mary divorced after their retirement but remained close friends until her death in 1977. That same year Les won a Grammy award for an album he made with guitarist Chet Atkins. Then, in 1992, a retrospective album called Les Paul: The Legend and the Legacy was nominated for a Grammy.

Les still stays up all night and invents at his New Jersey home, crammed with paraphernalia (including his mother's wind-up record player from which he took the gramophone needle). He is now working on recording devices that will take the industry beyond compact discs. "Recording should be done without any moving parts," he says, "and played through speakers that can convey all the sound our ear drums can hear." He also performs every Monday at Fat Tuesday's, a Manhattan jazz club.

Summing up Les Paul's career, rock guitarist Steve Miller comments: "Besides selling millions of records and entertaining six decades of fans, Les was the first with the talent and vision to combine music and technology."

What Miller and countless other musicians know is that every sound they make is a legacy of Les Paul's talent. But few can imagine that it all began with a boy, a train and a vibrating window. That was the day a child touched music. That was the day he heard the future.

Banner photo: Les Paul playing in New York, 1947. Credit: William P Gottlieb