Guitar Legend And Innovator Les Paul Dies : NPRGuitar Legend And Innovator Les Paul Dies
The Life Of Guitar Legend Les Paul
Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor who changed the course of music with the electric guitar and multitrack recording and had a string of hits, many with wife Mary Ford, died Thursday. He was 94.
According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in New York. His family and friends were by his side.
He was in the hospital in February 2006 when he learned he won two Grammys for an album he released after his 90th birthday, Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played.
"I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole on it," he joked.
As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock 'n' roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the "tracks" in the finished recording.
With Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records and 11 No. 1 pop hits, including "Vaya Con Dios," "How High the Moon," "Nola" and "Lover." Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul the inventor had helped develop.
"I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished," he recalled. "This is quite an asset." The overdubbing technique was highly influential on later recording artists such as The Carpenters.
The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid- to late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock in the 1950s.
"Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music," Paul once said. "To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn't think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system."
A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called "The Log," a 4-by-4 piece of wood strung with steel strings.
"I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut." He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a traditional guitar shape.
In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production of the Les Paul guitar. Pete Townsend of The Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.
Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie's auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.
August 13, 2009
Guitar Legend And Innovator Les Paul Dies : NPR
Sonic Youth: A Six-Minute Ode To Britney : NPR
Sonic Youth: A Six-Minute Ode To Britney : NPRSonic Youth: A Six-Minute Ode To Britney
Enlarge courtesy of the artistSonic Youth's "Malibu Gas Station" is almost certainly the greatest rock opus ever written about Britney Spears.
Sonic Youth's "Malibu Gas Station" is almost certainly the greatest rock opus ever written about Britney Spears.
- Song: "Malibu Gas Station"
- Artist: Sonic Youth
- CD: The Eternal
- Genre: Rock
August 13, 2009 - Sonic Youth's "Malibu Gas Station" is almost certainly the greatest six-minute opus ever written about Britney Spears. That's assuming, of course, that the song is
about Spears, an idea supported by lines that seem to refer to her
childhood performing career and recent erratic behavior. There's also
the guffaw-worthy song title — a Malibu resident, Spears has been
famously photographed walking barefoot from a gas-station bathroom — as
well as Sonic Youth's own description of the song as "an ode to the
flash moment of the camera as you knowingly step from your SUV sans
panties."Singer-guitarist Thurston Moore says that The Eternal,
the noise-rock demi-gods' 16th album, focuses on "avant-garde rock 'n'
roll." Like most songs on the album, the somewhat avant-sounding
"Malibu Gas Station" doesn't exactly come up and give you a kiss, but
it can certainly get under the skin. Kim Gordon dispenses a simple but
memorable minor-key melody, and if Spears is the subject, it wouldn't
be the first time Gordon has gotten inside the head of a troubled
female pop star: 1990's creepy "Tunic (Song for Karen)" was partly
written from the perspective of anorexia casualty Karen Carpenter.
Here, lyrics like "The breasts are bangin' / Abdominal master" sound
Britney-esque, though in Gordon's wicked purr, they're more eerie than
funny.Elsewhere, this is Sonic Youth at its most sleekly
propulsive. The main groove is all minimalist forward-motion, with
drummer Steve Shelley, who's increasingly been a force at recent SY
live shows, playing an austere tom-tom beat. The wandering guitar lead
around the three-minute mark makes for a somewhat conventional — and,
therefore, not very Sonic Youth-y — solo. Much more satisfying is the
grumbling noise jam near the song's end, as well as the spate of fluid,
sexy guitar spills mixed throughout. Both of those elements are,
happily, very Sonic Youth-y.
Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94
Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94 
Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
Les Paul Dies
By Jon ParelesRichard Drew/Associated Press Les Paul in 2004.
Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains. He was 94.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, Gibson Guitar announced.
Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.
Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar Corporation and his family announced. .
Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.
Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polsfuss, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.” But he picked up harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing with country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio broadcasts on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard of Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.
His interest in gadgets came early. At the age of 10 he devised a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified guitar by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind the strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player on, the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own pickup from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine using a Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist’s drill.
From country music Mr. Paul moved into jazz, influenced by players like Django Reinhardt and Eddie Lang, who were using amplified hollow-body guitars to play hornlike single-note solo lines. He formed the Les Paul Trio in 1936 and moved to New York, where he was heard regularly on Fred Waring’s radio show from 1938 to 1941.
In 1940 or 1941 — the exact date is unknown — , Mr. Paul made his guitar breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a guitar neck. “The log,” as he called it, if not the first solid-body electric guitar, became the most influential one.
“You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding,” Mr. Paul once said.
The odd-looking instrument drew derision when he first played it in public, so he hid the works inside a conventional-looking guitar. But the log was a conceptual turning point. With no acoustic resonance of its own, it was designed to generate an electronic signal that could be amplified and processed — the beginning of a sonic transformation of the world’s music.
Mr. Paul was drafted in 1942 and worked in California for the Armed Forces Radio Service, accompanying Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith and others. When he was discharged in 1943, he was hired as a staff musician for NBC radio in Los Angeles. His trio toured with the Andrews Sisters and backed Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, with whom he recorded the hit “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” in 1945. Crosby encouraged Mr. Paul to build his own recording studio, and so he did, in his garage in Los Angeles.
There he experimented with recording techniques, using them to create not realistic replicas of a performance but electronically enhanced fabrications. Toying with his mother’s old Victrola had shown him that changing the speed of a recording could alter both pitch and timbre. He could record at half-speed and replay the results at normal speed, creating the illusion of superhuman agility. He altered instrumental textures through microphone positioning and reverberation. Technology and studio effects, he realized, were instruments themselves.
He also noticed that by playing along with previous recordings, he could become a one-man ensemble. As early as his 1948 hit “Lover,” he made elaborate, multilayered recordings, using two acetate disc machines, which demanded that each layer of music be captured in a single take. From discs he moved to magnetic tape, and in the late 1950s he built the first eight-track multitrack recorder. Each track could be recorded and altered separately, without affecting the others. The machine ushered in the modern recording era.
In 1947 Mr. Paul teamed up with Colleen Summers, who had been singing with Gene Autry’s band. He changed her name to Mary Ford, a name found in a telephone book.
They were touring in 1948 when Mr. Paul’s car skidded off an icy bridge. Among his many injuries, his right elbow was shattered; once set, it would be immovable for life. Mr. Paul had it set at an angle, slightly less than 90 degrees, so that he could continue to play guitar.
Mr. Paul, whose first marriage, to Virginia, had ended in divorce, married Ms. Ford in 1949. They had a television show, “Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home,” which was broadcast from their living room until 1958. They began recording together, mixing multiple layers of Ms. Ford’s vocals with Mr. Paul’s guitars and effects, and the dizzying results became hits in the early 1950s. Among their more than three dozen hits, “Mockingbird Hill,” “How High the Moon” and “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” in 1951 and “Vaya Con Dios” in 1953 were million-sellers.
Some of their music was recorded with microphones hanging in various rooms of the house, including one over the kitchen sink, so that Ms. Ford could record vocals while washing dishes. Mr. Paul also recorded instrumentals on his own, including the hits “Whispering,” “Tiger Rag” and “Meet Mister Callaghan” in 1951 and 1952.
The Gibson company hired Mr. Paul to design a Les Paul model guitar in the early 1950s, and variations of the first 1952 model have sold steadily ever since, accounting at one point for half of the privately held company’s total sales. Built with Mr. Paul’s patented pickups, his design is prized for its clarity and sustained tone. It has been used by musicians like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Slash of Guns N’ Roses. The Les Paul Standard version is unchanged since 1958, the company says. In the mid-1950s, Mr. Paul and Ms. Ford moved to a house in Mahwah, N.J., where Mr. Paul eventually installed both film and recording studios and amassed a collection of hundreds of guitars.
The couple’s string of hits ended in 1961, and they were divorced in 1964. Ms. Ford died in 1977. Mr. Paul is survived by three sons, Lester (Rus) G. Paul, Gene W. Paul and Robert (Bobby) R. Paul; a daughter, Colleen Wess; his companion, Arlene Palmer; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.In 1964, Mr. Paul underwent surgery for a broken eardrum, and he began suffering from arthritis in 1965. Through the 1960s he concentrated on designing guitars for Gibson. He invented and patented various pickups and transducers, as well as devices like the Les Paulverizer, an echo-repeat device, which he introduced in 1974. In the late 1970s he made two albums with the dean of country guitarists, Chet Atkins.
In 1981 Mr. Paul underwent a quintuple-bypass heart operation. After recuperating, he returned to performing, though the progress of his arthritis forced him to relearn the guitar. In 1983 he started to play weekly performances at Fat Tuesday’s, an intimate Manhattan jazz club. “I was always happiest playing in a club,” he said in a 1987 interview. “So I decided to find a nice little club in New York that I would be happy to play in.”
After Fat Tuesday’s closed in 1995, he moved his Monday-night residency to Iridium. He performed there until early June; guest stars have been appearing with his trio since then and will continue to do so indefinitely, a spokesman for the club said.
At his shows he used one of his own customized guitars, which included a microphone on a gooseneck pointing toward his mouth so that he could talk through the guitar. In his sets he would mix reminiscences, wisecracks and comments with versions of jazz standards. Guests — famous and unknown — showed up to pay homage or test themselves against him. Despite paralysis in some fingers on both hands, he retained some of his remarkable speed and fluency. Mr. Paul also performed regularly at jazz festivals through the 1980s.
He recorded a final album, “American Made, World Played” (Capitol), to celebrate his 90th birthday in 2005. It featured guest appearances by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Sting, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. The album brought him two Grammy Awards: for best pop instrumental performance and best rock instrumental performance. He had already won recognition from the Grammy trustees for technical achievements and another performance Grammy in 1976, for the album “Chester and Lester,” made with Chet Atkins.
In recent years, he said he was working on another major invention but would not reveal what it was.
“Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison,” he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “The only reason I invented these things was because I didn’t have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really.”
Les Paul, Live at the Iridium - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com
Les Paul, Live at the Iridium - City Room Blog - NYTimes.comLes Paul, Live at the Iridium
By The New York TimesFor years, Les Paul, the guitar pioneer who died on Thursday at 94, was a mainstay at the Iridium in Manhattan on Monday nights, delighting fans with his musical mastery (and harmlessly risqué jokes). Here is a City Room report on a show in March:
The original guitar hero, playing two shows on Mondays into his 90s.
“Birds do it. Bees do it. Even 93-year-old guitar players do it.’’
More than half a century after the electric guitar pioneer Les Paul had his biggest hits with Mary Ford, the jazzman is still doing it — playing guitar at the Iridium, two shows on Monday nights.
Having taken a post-pastrami nap and later dined with relatives who are in town, I’m sitting at a back table in this intimate basement venue on Broadway at 51st Street. A woman in front of me sways gently as “the Wizard of Waukesha’’ and his trio take us “Over the Rainbow.’’ His right foot often tapping to the beat, Mr. Paul makes his way through many favorite standards, from “The Lady Is a Tramp’’ and “Blue Skies’’ to a jazzed-up “Tennessee Waltz.’’
To a nonmusician like me, his playing seems strong, controlled. In his day, I imagine, he must have been amazing.
There is an easy banter among Les Paul and his trio, from his harmlessly risqué jokes (“I’ll let you play with my pacemaker,’’ he tells his comely bass player) to mentions of Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum and Jackson Heights, Queens, where Mr. Paul and Ms. Ford recorded some of their songs in a basement.
The tab, including cover and minimum purchase, is $75 before tax and tip.
By the time Mr. Paul plays “Sweet Georgia Brown’’ and prepares to sign autographs, there’s no doubt that he’s managed to take a hint from one number the group played: “Young at Heart.’’
2009 James Burton International Guitar Festival Tribute to Elvis - www.theadvertiser.com
Getaway: Has Elvis really left the building?Acadiana News - The Daily Advertiser - www.theadvertiser.com
The original rock megastar kicked off his career in this Shreveport landmark.
The 2009 James Burton International Guitar Festival Tribute to Elvis
Louisiana State Fair Grounds, Festival Plaza and Municipal Auditorium, Shreveport
Tickets: (318) 424-5000
Web site: jamesburtonmusic.comLegend has it that a few ghosts inhabit Shreveport’s historic Municipal Auditorium, where Elvis Presley began his career along with numerous country and rock legends.
Plans are in the works to restore one of the best examples of Art Deco architecture in Louisiana, but visitors can tour the building and see Elvis’s dressing room and take in Shreveport’s musical history at the Stage of Stars Museum with its rare photos and personal artifacts of the many musicians who have played there. Outside in front are two statues — Elvis and guitarist James Burton, one of Shreveport’s best-known performers.
The Municipal Auditorium opened in 1929, with seating for 3,000 with a 54-foot-high proscenium arch and accented by an art deco design. Mardi Gras balls, circuses and the famous Louisiana Hayride radio show were regular visitors of the building, the latter featuring musicians Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Tex Ritter, Doug Kershaw, George Jones and Huddie Ledbetter.
Elvis joined the lineup on Oct. 16, 1954, when he was paid just $18 per show. On his last performance in 1956, it was said, “Elvis has left the building.”
In 1969, when Elvis returned to touring, he contacted Burton and asked him to form a band. That was 40 years ago this year, a milestone that will be marked at the fourth annual James Burton International Guitar Festival on Aug. 21 and 22 in Shreveport.
Most of the festival takes place at the Hirsch Memorial Coliseum at the Louisiana State Fair Grounds with highlights including a guitar showdown and talent competition hosted by Tipitina’s Shreveport Music Office Coop at 9 a.m. Aug. 22, followed by live music at 11:30 a.m. and the attempt at a Guinness World Record featuring the most guitarists performing together at 2 p.m.
There will be a James Burton Birthday Bash featuring local and regional bands from 6 p.m. to midnight Aug. 21, at the Festival Plaza by the Red River in downtown Shreveport and a James Burton & Friends Concert will be held at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 22, at the Municipal Auditorium with tickets costing $25 to $100.
The festival was created by the James Burton Foundation to raise money for free guitars, technical training and music lessons to young musicians who can’t afford them otherwise.Where to stay
Shreveport is home to several hotels and bed and breakfasts, plus numerous casinos flanking the Red River. The 25-story Horseshoe Casino, for instance, faces downtown on the Bossier City side, next to the new Louisiana Boardwalk, an outdoor outlet, lifestyle and dining mall. Horseshoe offers luxurious rooms with massive Roman bathtubs, a health spa, various dining options and, of course, plenty of gaming tables.