[September 14, 2007]

The Oklahoman Gene Triplett column: Les Paul's concepts changed landscape of modern music

(Daily Oklahoman, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Sep. 14--If it hadn't been for a slick stretch of Route 66 that caused his car to flip over an embankment near Davenport, OK, one cold January night in 1948, Les Paul might never have found the time to dream up the inventions that would revolutionize sound recording and lay the groundwork for modern pop music.

Already a popular jazz guitarist who had recorded and performed on stage and radio with such stars as Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Paul was actively searching for a new sound that would set him apart from the pack. To that end, he had hired a new vocalist named Colleen Summers, who would later become his wife and take the stage name of Mary Ford. They were on a crosscountry drive together, and she was at the wheel that night, Paul asleep on the seat beside her, when she lost control of the Buick convertible on an icy curve.

The injuries he suffered nearly ended his career and put him flat on his back in Oklahoma City's Wesley Hospital for almost a year. It also gave him a lot of time to reassess his music and his life.

"I'm lying there in the hospital really a mess, so it was a question of whether I was even going to make it," Paul said in a recent phone interview from his New Jersey home. "Of all the injuries I had, the worst was my right arm."

Doctors at first told him the arm might have to be amputated. With that possibility in front of him, Paul set to work in his hospital bed, drawing up plans for a guitar synthesizer that could be played with one hand.

His knack for invention dated back to his boyhood in Waukesha, Wis., when he punched new chords in his mother's player piano roll to enrich the instrument's sound, and turned his bedsprings into a radio antenna which could pull in Chicago jazz broadcasts and the Grand Ole Opry. At the time of his accident, Paul had already been tinkering for two years with those new-fangled tape recorders developed by the Germans in World War II, and during his hospital stay, he began making in-depth notes on technical innovations that would perfect the overdubbing and multi-track recording techniques he had already begun to invent.

"I got a long time to think about it," he said. "I changed the whole concept, that I was going to switch and I was going to have Mary be the singer, just the two of us, and create this whole new kind of music. And so it happened. That was such an asset to me, to be disabled so badly that it forced me to stop doing everything and think about it. And in thinking about it, I changed my whole life right there."

A specialist in Los Angeles was able to save Paul's arm by fusing his elbow at a permanent right angle, enabling Paul to resume his career.

"I just said, 'Point it at my navel,' " he recalled with a chuckle.

The rest is pop music history, entertainingly chronicled in "Les Paul: Chasing Sound," a new documentary on DVD from filmmakers John Paulson and James Arntz that features vintage clips from the "Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home" TV show of the early 1950s, interviews with music greats Jeff Beck, Tony Bennett, B.B. King, Steve Miller, Bonnie Raitt, Kay Starr and Ahmet Ertegun, and fulllength performances from New York's Iridium Jazz Club, where Paul still performs at age 92.

There is also a generous sampling from the incredible string of hits that followed Paul's unscheduled Oklahoma City stay, including "How High the Moon," "Hold That Tiger" and "After You've Gone," all propelled by the guitarist's astonishingly speedy, high-register solo runs and chunky rhythm chords, electronically layered to sound like a full orchestra of solid-bodied Gibsons (which he designed), underscoring Ford's soaring and sultry, multitracked choral vocals.

It's a sound that still echoes throughout the high-tech digital recordings of today, but it took a visionary such as Paul to capture it first on primitive analog equipment. As Keith Richards once said of him, "He put the tools in our hands."

"Many years later, I gave a speech on it for the Audio Engineering Society, and I'll be darned if it didn't come true," Paul said. "And it was that there will be no moving parts (in recording devices) at all. We'll do away with the tape, the gouging of a phonograph record, and it will be down to what you and I know as a memory stick."

Such an accurate technological prediction is no surprise, coming from Paul.

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