(TV) semi-OT: Les Paul tells all

["eracerx" <eracerx@adelphia.net>]

Inventor of electric guitar tells how he figured it out

By Guy Gugliotta

Washington Post

The way Les Paul tells it, he's 13 years old and providing entertainment at
an outdoor barbecue restaurant, playing harmonica, singing and strumming the
full-bodied mail-order guitar he got from Sears Roebuck for $2.95.
``There's a fellow sitting in the rumble seat of one of the parked cars, and
he writes a note to the car hop. Then he drives away,'' Paul says. ``She
hands me the note: `Red -- your voice is coming through fine, the harmonica
is fine, but the guitar isn't loud enough.' ''
The year was 1927 or 1928, and the weekend critic wasn't telling Paul
anything he didn't already know. Guitars had a beautiful sound and worked
great for accompanying a singer or showing off a picker's virtuosity -- but
always, always in an intimate setting.
Put the guitar in a band, or in front of a crowd at the barbecue pit, and it
disappeared. Like fanning your hand in thin air. Paul fled the barbecue.
``I've got to make the guitar louder,'' he thought.
And he did.
Earlier this month, Les Paul, almost 90, was inducted into the National
Inventors Hall of Fame, in Akron, Ohio, as the creator of the solid-body
electric guitar, arguably the most important musical innovation of the past
half-century, a device as common today in the nightclubs of Nairobi and
Manila as in the United States.
The electric guitar brought Paul international renown as a musician, won him
five Grammys, put him on television for eight years with his wife, Mary
Ford, and made Gibson Guitar Corp.'s signature Les Paul Standard a guitar of
choice for garage bands and virtuosos.
``In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would see so many people using
them,'' Paul said in a telephone interview last week from his New Jersey
home. ``I owe it to the rock 'n' roll players, especially the Jeff Becks,
the Paul McCartneys and Jimi Hendrix. All of them were playing a Les Paul
guitar.''
The Hall of Fame, founded in 1973 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
and the then-National Council of Patent Law Associations, will take
nominations from anyone who gets to its Web site. There are 235 inductees in
all.
This year's 14 inductees included six living inventors, among them Paul,
Dean Kamen (the Segway transporter) and Leo Sternbach (Valium). Among the
posthumous honorees: Selman Waksman (streptomycin) and Clarence Birdseye
(frozen foods).
Paul's love affair with the guitar began in Waukesha, Wis., in the early
1920s when his mother suggested he ought to quit the piano, because he had
his back to the audience and nobody would see his face when he sang and
played the harmonica. ``I tried an accordion, and pitched it into the city
dump,'' he said. ``Then I sent away to Sears. I was about 9.''
Besides having musical talent, Paul, known professionally then as Red Hot
Red, was a natural tinkerer and very early figured out that he could use the
mouthpiece of a wall telephone as a microphone. Make the family radio or
phonograph into an amplifier and you had an instant public address system.
This worked fine for the singing and the harmonica, but it wasn't enough for
the guitar.
So after the barbecue, he wired the guitar directly, making a pickup (a
sensor to transmit the sound frequency from the plucked string) by jamming a
phonograph needle into the neck, mounting the telephone mouthpiece inside
the instrument and hooking it all up to the radio.
It worked, ``but the feedback was terrible,'' Paul said. ``I took towels and
shirts and stuffed them in the guitar. No good. Then I poured in plaster of
Paris. It improved, except there were still problems.''
But he had had the crucial insight: The box -- the very essence of an
acoustic guitar -- was the problem. ``I went to the railroad yard with some
friends, and we stole a 2 1/2-foot length of steel rail. I stretched a
string the length of the rail and held it down with a spike at each end.
Then I put the telephone mouthpiece underneath the string.''
This was much better. ``I have it,'' he told his mom. ``An electric
guitar!''
Mom wasn't impressed. ``I'm waiting for the day you see a cowboy on a horse
playing a piece of railroad track,'' she said. ``And where do you plug it
in?''
As Paul became a full-fledged pro, he played acoustic. He put pickups on an
acoustic. He miked the acoustic. ``I tried everything,'' he said. It wasn't
right yet.
Finally, late in the 1930s, he fretted up a length of four-by-four lumber
and took it to a nightclub. This one really worked, but ``there was no
reaction.'' People didn't know what he was supposed to be doing.
``You have to have a beautiful piece of wood,'' Paul concluded, ``something
you can caress, and hold, and love.'' So he cut two sides off an acoustic
guitar and attached them to the four-by-four ``so it looked like a guitar.''
He called it ``the log.'' Today it resides at the Smithsonian.
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