WAVES AHEAD
Necessity is the mother of invention, and thankfully Lester’s mother let him go ahead and invent! Child tinkerer to electronics innovator – a whistle-stop tour from Rhubarb Red to Les Paul
The young Lester Polsfuss was obsessed with music and tinkering with things in order to make sounds from the get-go. As he told Guitarist early in 2009: “What started me pulling things apart, was that we had a Player Piano in the living room [when aged nine, Les famously modified the cut-out holes to see what effect it would have on the music], a Victrola [basically, a gramophone in a cabinet], a radio and a telephone.”
Part of Les’s fixation was driven by an interest in radio. He’d learned how to make a crystal set [a simple radio receiver] and hung around the transmitter to listen, where he was soon noticed.
“The next thing I know I’m studying electronics and I’m heading towards making a recording device,” he told us. “It’s something that surely wasn’t around Waukesha when I was nine years old! There wasn’t such a thing as a recording device, so I had to build it. I went out to the radio station that was just about to go on air and I started
talking to the engineer, and he started to teach me electronics.”
A louder guiTAr
Alongside his interest in recording, it soon became apparent that Lester also had another little problem to solve. Performing as Red Hot Red around 1928-9 at a barbecue stand halfway between Waukesha and Milwaukee, he decided to address a common problem, for which we should all thank him: the need to get more volume out of the guitar…
“I talked the owner into letting me build a PA system,” explained Les, “and the story was that somebody in the back seat of a car said, Red, your voice is fine, your harmonica’s fine and your jokes are funny, but the guitar isn’t loud enough!
“The way it started was that when I took a phonograph pickup and jabbed it into the front of the guitar, I had a guitar that was amplified, but I had a lot of feedback,” he continued. “So I filled it with tablecloths and socks and everything
I could think of; in the end I filled it up with plaster of Paris, none of that worked, and I finally destroyed the guitar. I decided to pick the most dense material that I could find, and put a string on it, so I found a piece of railroad track that was about two and a half feet long and a piece of wood two and a half feet long. I placed a part of the telephone under the strings, fed it into the radio and I’m running to my mother and saying, I’ve got it! And my mother says, ‘The day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a railroad track…’ She grounded that idea in a hurry. So that went out the window and I said, ‘Well, then I’ve got to get something that’s not heavy…’”
What resulted, eventually, after much experimentation was the groundbreaking Log concept, about which you can read more on page 10.
Rewind to 1932 and Les left high school early to join Joe Wolverton as Sunny Joe and Rhubarb Red: their radio broadcasts beamed across the nation, helping the USA to escape in part from the struggles of the great depression. The following year in Chicago, Les would work playing country and good-time music on daytime radio, then indulge his love of jazz for fun, rubbing shoulders with greats such as Art Tatum and Django Reinhardt in the evenings. The latter’s playing had the most impact on Les’s own style. It was in 1936 that he produced his first recordings, then in 1938 he moved to New York (where he worked weekends at Epiphone and developed the Log) and again to Los Angeles in 1942, as his skills and demand as a player increased. He was soon playing and recording with the likes of Bing Crosby – who supported and encouraged Les’s home studio development – The Andrews Sisters and many other big names of the period.
It was also during the mid-1940s that Les was rubbing shoulders with other pioneers of the music world, including the likes of Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby. “I met both of them in my back yard,” recalled Les. “They came over to listen to people I was recording in Los Angeles. Neither one of them played an instrument and they needed to get the feedback from the player. My studio was just my garage in the backyard and it was a perfect place for us to sit and talk and chat for hours about how to make an electric guitar and an amplifier to suit the customer.”
The new sound
It was around this time that Les was motivated to make the next big step forward in his sound. “My mother came to visit,” he recalled. “She said, ‘I heard you on the radio last night’. I said, ‘I wasn’t playing on the radio, I was here playing with The Andrews Sisters’. She says, ‘Well you should do something about it, because they’re sounding just like you’. So I got thinking about it, gave my notice, and went to my garage and said, ‘I’m not coming out of that garage until I have a sound that’s different from anybody else’. It took a couple of years of working on ideas; new sounds, a new way of recording. I didn’t know it was going to change the world, but I knew it was going to make some noise!”
What Les had been working on was developing his revolutionary recording style where he could layer guitar parts, speed them up and slow them down and employ techniques such as delay, phasing and flanging – creating a totally unique sonic palette for him to work with. Capitol records released Lover (When You’re Near
Me) in 1948 and a whole new sound was born. It was the first use of multitrack recording as we know it, using equipment Les had put together himself.
Later that year, a serious car crash meant Les nearly lost use of his picking arm, but he famously requested that the arm be reset in the playing position!
After a period of convalescence, Les released his first self-recorded music with his then-wife Mary Ford (née Iris Colleen Summers) in the early fifties; the couple had met through Gene Autry in 1946. With the combination of Les’s incredible playing, unique sound and Mary’s pure, perfect-harmony vocals, they were destined to be international stars. Listening to those cuts now – How
High The Moon, Tiger Rag and Mockin’ Bird Hill – and it beggars belief to think that Les not only had the musical vision to imagine the sounds in the first place, but also the technical desire and tenacity to physically create and record them. It was certainly an incredible journey, a long way from the nine-year-old kid pulling apart his mother’s piano.
les who?
So how did the man himself feel, several decades later, if somebody thought Les Paul was ‘just’ a guitar, and not a man behind the instrument?
“That doesn’t bother me at all,” he laughed. “That’s not my goal in life; to go down in history as something other than just another guy. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just a guitar player and my job is to go out there and play and entertain and do my thing. That’s it. If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.”