HOW HIGH THE MOON
Les Paul & The Invention of Multitrack Recording Mark Cunningham
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Publication Text & design copyright Š 2015 Mark Cunningham / Liveculture Music Limited
www.liveculture.co.uk
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The Father of Sound-On-Sound In late 1994, when I was planning a book on the unwieldy subject of the history of record production, high on my list of people I wished to interview was Les Paul. Naturally, my first point of call was the UK offices of guitar brand Gibson where I found a kind soul who was willing to share a mailing address for the great man. Within 10 days of writing to Les, he surprised me with a late night phone call. “Your book sounds like a great idea,” he said. “I’d be very happy to help you in any way I can.” Originally, I had no ambitions beyond a telephone interview but this was something that Les advised against. “That’ll cost a fortune after everything I’ve got to tell you!” he laughed. “It’d be cheaper to fly over!” And so in late January 1995, I boarded a flight to Newark, New Jersey and spent the majority of five days in the company of one of the most inspirational people I have ever met.
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“What we hoped to hear was ‘Hello, hello, hello, hello, one, two, three, four, testing’ played together. If it did that, then we could go on until the neighbours complained. And, lo and behold, it worked!”
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Anyone who has earned a living – or even merely enjoyment – from recorded sound owes a debt of gratitude to Thomas Alva Edison (pictured left) who in 1877, invented the world’s first record and playback machine. Built by assistant John Kruesi from Edison’s specific instructions and drawings, the cumbersome device was completed in New York on December 6, 1877 and consisted of four key components: the phonograph, with a mouthpiece connected to a diaphragm and a central stylus; a four inch diameter grooved brass cylinder, mounted on a threaded shaft and turned by a handle; a tin foil phonogram, made by the indentation of a recording on to the foil-covered cylinder; and a phonet – a stylus and diaphragm assembly enabling the tracing of engravings on the phonogram and their transmission. To make a recording, Edison projected a loud vocal signal into the mouthpiece of the phonograph while turning the handle simultaneously. The vibrations were then conveyed via the diaphragm and stylus to the foil that became indented with a number of small marks. In order to reproduce or play back the signal, the phonet’s style made contact with the revolving cylinder and followed its indentations whilst vibrating its own diaphragm. Depending on the speed at which the 6
crank handle was turned, a recording would last for around two minutes. Edison’s first successful recording was of his own a capella rendition of the nursery rhyme, ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, an account of which appeared in ‘Edison And His Inventions’, a publication by J.B. McClure. In it, Edison explained: “I was singing... to the mouthpiece of a telephone when the vibrations of the wire sent the fine steel point [the stylus] into my finger. That set me thinking. If I could record the actions of the point, and then send that point over the same surface afterwards, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk. I tried the experiment and found that the point made an alphabet. I shouted the word ‘halloo!’ into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point and heard a faint ‘halloo!’ in return! I determined to make a machine that would work accurately and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered... the discovery came through the pricking of a finger.” The inventor filed his new contraption with a Patent Office on Christmas Eve, 1877 and within 12 years, commercial recordings would be made available for public consumption. For many years after Edison made those first tentative steps, the challenge for anyone
involved in music and audio was to improve the fidelity of the recording medium. Several improvements evolved during the first half of the 20th century, but the first major breakthrough to affect the creative use of sound and indeed launch the notion of record production as we know it today came in 1949, in Chicago, with the invention of sound-onsound – or layered – tape recording. Like the tin foil phonograph itself, this occurred as a complete accident at the hands of an electronics genius who had both Edison’s scientific curiosity and the musical dexterity of Django Reinhardt: Lester William Polsfuss, known to us all as Les Paul. A highly gifted musician and the only person to be inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and New Jersey Inventors’ Hall of Fame (in 1988 and 1996 respectively), Paul will always be known for the legendary Gibson electric guitar he designed and to which he gave his name, in 1952, but to some degree this fame has overshadowed his enormous contribution to recording studio technology. Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin on June 9, 1915, Paul’s inquisitive nature and eagerness to learn was apparent from an early age, and as a schoolboy in the depressed twenties he would while away the hours tinkering with the most unlikely toys – his gramo-
“I shouted the word ‘halloo!’ into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point and heard a faint ‘halloo!’ in return!” Thomas Alva Edison 7
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phone, piano, radio, telephone, harmonica and, of course, guitar – “all the weapons I needed to go out and rattle a lot of cages”. Something of a boy genius, it wasn’t long before his teachers ran out of things to teach him. “I asked my teacher at grade school how, when I pressed my finger on a record and slowed it down, the pitch changed,” he recalled, when I visited him in New Jersey in 1995 for an interview. “I was just a kid, but they marched me to the library where I met the professors and they began to tell me what digital and analogue meant, and in no time I was building my own recording machines and broadcast stations. One of the things I made really early on at about the age of about eleven was a disc recorder, using a Victrola gramophone pick-up arm and a Cadillac fly wheel, and that was the same recorder I used on my first-ever radio broadcast in 1929.” Paul’s early successes as a musician were based on his enormous popularity on American radio where he would be in regular demand as the writer and performer of kitsch product advertisements, as well as providing the guitar backing for Bing Crosby, Nat ‘King’ Cole and other greats of the era.
In 1944, as an army soldier, he also appeared on what has been credited by some researchers as a contender for the original rock’n’roll record – the live ‘Blues Part 2’ by Jazz At The Philharmonic – when he performed under the pseudonym, Paul Leslie, to avoid military regulation problems. After signing with Capitol Records in 1947, Paul chalked up a number of his own hits (later with his partner and future wife, Mary Ford), recorded in a studio that he installed in the garage of his Los Angeles bungalow. The state of the art equipment was built to his own design and so well regarded by the fledgling record industry that various top artists of the day, including the Andrews Sisters, were virtually queuing at Paul’s studio door. It should be noted that Les Paul’s early voyage into layered sound began in 1930 when he became the first known person to record a multi-instrumental performance by building up several guitar tracks on the outside and inside bands of an acetate disc. “I took my ideas for multitrack recordings around the record companies but they could only see the novelty value,” he said. “They certainly didn’t look upon it as a way of the future.”
“The professors began to tell me what digital and analogue meant, and in no time I was building my own recording machines and broadcast stations...” Les Paul 9
Mary Ford and Les Paul at work on one of their many recordings.
Nevertheless, Paul’s brainwaves did filter through the industry and in 1931, opera singer Laurence Tibbett superimposed a baritone vocal line on top of his original tenor performance for the recording of ‘The Cuban Love Song’. Mike Oldfield’s multi-instrumental feats on 1973’s Tubular Bells were also pre-dated by 32 years when jazz musician, Sydney Bechet took sole responsibility of two saxophones, clarinet, bass, piano and drums on his version of ‘The Sheik Of Araby’. An absence of backing vocalists on one session in Chicago in December 1947 later 10
gave Patti Page good reason to duplicate her own voice. Mercury Records, seeing this as little more than a gimmick, was to market the record (‘Confess’) as performed by Pattie Page and Patti Page. A similar PR approach was reserved when, for Page’s follow-up record, ‘With My Eyes Open, I’m Dreaming’, she used the overdub technique to create a four-part harmony. But it is vital to understand that the standard medium for recording at this time was still acetate disc, which Les Paul continued to use to its creative limits for his Capitol record releases throughout the forties.
“I got into playing many different parts, using only one guitar to play bass lines and drum parts by tapping or beating the strings,” Paul told me. “I even got it to sound like a xylophone or a marimba, and all these different sounds were generated by one guitar. I had two disc machines and I’d send each track back and forth. I’d lay down the first part on one machine, the next part on the other, and keep multiplying them. “In other words, I would record a rhythm track on the first disc, then I would play along with the rhythm track and lay the needle down on the second disc which would simultaneously record me playing along to my rhythm track. The second disc would now contain two guitar parts. “Going back to the first machine, I would put the needle down on to the disc and record, say, a bass line along with the music from the second disc. Then for other instrumentation, I would just repeat the process, ad infinitum. “It was very interesting because it was in my garage in Los Angeles that I stumbled across and invented all those things that you hear on the recordings like disc delay, echo, phasing, multitracking and recording
at different speeds, on records like ‘Chicken Reel’ and ‘Lover’. So I was very excited because it was something new and different.” MODIFIED BY MULLIN At this point, Les Paul had only ever seen a magnetic tape recorder. Namely, the AEG/ Telefunken-manufactured Magnetophon that had been commercially launched in 1937 and notably used during World War II by German radio stations to broadcast ‘inspirational’ music and Nazi propaganda. The Allied forces had to wait until the Nazi regime fell to discover that their broadcasters were using magnetic tape to reproduce high fidelity sound – far superior to that of shellac records – for broadcasts often lasting up to 15 minutes in duration. This capability was previously unheard of in America. It was Major John T. ‘Jack’ Mullin of the U.S. Army Signal Corps who made the discovery towards the end of the war, having been assigned to investigate the Germans’ radio and electronics capabilities. “The thing that made me really wonder about how they were doing this was when I stumbled upon a German broadcast very late at night,” said Mullin in 1977.
“The quality was on a completely different level to what I’d just been hearing. There was no distortion, no detectable record scratches... naturally my curiosity was awoken.” Jack Mullen 11
“I was stationed in England and was listening to the BBC, but then tuned into this other station. I heard a full orchestra performing Strauss loud and clear. The quality was on a completely different level to what I’d just been hearing. There was no distortion, no detectable record scratches. It was inconceivable that an orchestra would be performing live at this hour, so naturally my curiosity was awoken.” After inspecting a site near Frankfurt, where the Germans had allegedly experimented with directed high energy radio beams to disable the ignition systems of flying aircraft, Mullin acquired two suitcase-sized Magnetophon recorders and 50 reels of BASF type-L tape, and had them shipped home to San Francisco. DEMONSTRATIONS Mullin spent the next two years modifying the machines to improve their performance, hopeful that he would interest Hollywood’s booming film studios to use magnetic tape for soundtrack recording. His first move was to partner with San Francisco-based William Palmer Studios. After converting to American standard vacuum tubes and placing pre-emphasis on the high frequency record circuit and de-emphasis on the playback, the Magnetophons were approved by Palmer to support his movie business. To their knowledge, this was the first time that magnetic tape was used to record motion picture sound and the subsequent transfer to film. The next move was to demonstrate the recorders to a number of influential people. The first of these presentations, in San Fran12
cisco on May 16, 1946, was to the local chapter of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Attendees included Harold Lindsey and Myron Stolaroff, staff members of a Northern Californian company named Ampex (founded by Russian-American engineer Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff – the ‘ex’ stood for excellence) which was looking for new products to develop. Lindsey and Stolaroff both agreed that Mullin’s Magnetophons fitted this requirement perfectly. The Palmer-Mullin demonstration was followed in October 1946 by another at MGM Studios in Hollywood at which live music was performed behind a curtain by Jose Iturbi, George E. Stoll and the MGM Symphony Orchestra, followed by a concealed playback of the performance. Reportedly, no one present could tell the difference between the two. The industry was unanimously impressed but it was the presence of one particular person, Murdo Mackenzie, that proved to be of most value. At the time, Mackenzie was the technical director for Bing Crosby, one of the era’s biggest movie and radio stars who, having developed a dislike of live broadcasts and their limitations, who was keen on the idea of pre-recording his radio shows. The obstacle to this was that American radio networks tightly restricted the use of long-form recordings the then-standard 16inch lacquer discs due to the medium’s comparatively poor sound quality. In June 1947, however, this all changed when Mackenzie arranged for Mullin to give a private demonstration of his tape recorders to Crosby. “It was pure revelation!” exclaimed the star, during a television interview in the
Above: Jack Mullin. Below: Mullin (third from left) conducting one of the fateful demonstrations.
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Bing Crosby and two of the Ampex machines purchased by his company Bing Crosby Enterprises. Above right: A Billboard news item from October 1947.
mid-sixties. “The quality was superb – like nothing I’d heard before and immediately I could see there was huge commercial potential for magnetic tape. In my mind I knew that I could pre-record a show and edit parts where necessary – because no one wants to hear bloopers – and not one listener out there would know whether it was live or not.” On the spot, Crosby asked Mullin to record a test show. The experiment was a runaway success, prompting the singer/ actor to invest $50,000 in the building of production models by Ampex which soon 14
revolutionised the radio and recording industry with its famous Model 200-A tape deck, developed directly from Mullin’s modified Magnetophones. Its final development cost would be $76,000. Crosby then hired Mullin as his chief engineer to record his next ‘Philco Radio Time’ series for ABC, using 3M’s new Scotch 111 gamma ferric oxide-coated acetate tape. History had been made but the next steps would prove absolutely vital to the evolution of recorded sound. While working Crosby in 1949, Les Paul’s future, and the future concept of re-
Les Paul in his workshop.
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Pages from an original Ampex marketing brochure. Bing Crosby Enterprises, Inc. went on to become Ampex’s sales representative for the U.S. West Coast until 1957.
cording itself, would change forever. “Bing came over to my house and said, ‘Les, I’ve got something for you in the car’,” recalled Paul. “I figured it was going to be a truckload of cheese, because we were doing a radio programme for Kraft. I never dreamed that Bing would have in his car something far more precious than that. “But actually, what he had was one of the very first ‘200 Series’ tape machines made by Ampex. We carried it through the backyard to my garage and then he quickly left, telling me to have fun. 16
“I must have looked at that Ampex machine for maybe three or four hours, and finally I ran into the house and said to Mary [Ford], ‘Hey, have we got something here!’ We weren’t nailed down to recording in a garage anymore. We could go anywhere.” Paul realised that by adding a fourth head to the Ampex machine, sound-onsound recording would be possible. “I always recorded my guitar direct to the tape machine by plugging it into the mixer,” he said. “It was a mono machine and I had to put the last parts down first. The least impor-
tant parts went down first and the important parts last. In the beginning, the recordings were just of me playing on my own, but I added Mary later on. “Recording these songs in a backwards order, if you like, was terribly interesting because you would play the third part first, the second part next and the first part last. And I would go down as many as 37 generations before I finished a recording, but the quality would slowly start to deteriorate.” Knowing that a truly flat frequency response would be impossible to achieve, Paul concentrated on the electronics to ensure that the ‘head hump’ was at a mini-
mum and the linearity of the tape machine and mixer was as flat in frequency response as possible. “The acoustics in the room are not flat, the vibrations of the strings on a guitar are not linear, your ears are not linear, neither are your speakers or earphones,” he reasoned. “So there is almost nothing flat in frequency response, other than electronically. But that is not going to be the final result anyway, so I had to be very careful to design equalisers and amplifiers, to provide the headroom and the ability to get the correct results. I also had to change the curve of the tape machine. 17
“People now use frequency tone recordings to align machines but back then every studio had to invent its own. In doing all of this, I was able to go down many generations of recording and still keep the sound relatively clean.” So crystal clear were the results of Paul’s labours that his 10-inch album, New Sound, was seized upon by hi-fi manufacturers and retailers as a test disc to demonstrate the quality of their gramophones. IN SEARCH OF THE FOURTH HEAD A conniving approach helped Les Paul acquire the elusive “fourth head” for the Ampex, which led to the birth of real multitrack taping. 18
“When Mary and I hit the road with this tape deck, I thought, ‘How am I going to get a fourth head?’ I ended up calling Ampex and told them that I blew a head, and they agreed to send me a new one. I really didn’t know at that point if it would work but on paper, on the back of an envelope in fact, it seemed to me that it would. “I was totally convinced that it was going to until we were driving all the way from California to New York. All through that journey, my confidence was tested and by the time we got to Chicago I really wasn’t so sure anymore, because Mary was asking me all the way across the desert, ‘How do you know if it’s gonna work or not?’ “We depended on the tape machine because it was the only thing we had to record the type of thing that I was doing in my garage, which was making radio programmes for NBC and records for Capitol. I was doing them on acetate but now I packed this all away and said we were going to do them all on the tape machine with four heads on it. Mary was very concerned and, of course, she had a legitimate reason.
“I picked up the head from Ampex when we reached Chicago and immediately mounted it. The first thing I did was record me saying ‘Hello, hello, hello, hello…’, and then I rewound the tape and explained that I was going to use the fourth head to record me saying, ‘One, two, three, four, testing.’ “What we hoped to hear was ‘Hello, hello, hello, hello, one, two, three, four, testing’ played together. If it did that, then we could go on until the neighbours complained! And, lo and behold, it worked!” By spacing the heads on the Ampex, Les was able to achieve tape delay – a technique that was still essential to the recording process until the development of purpose-de-
signed effects units in the seventies. “I was having a drink in a tavern with my buddy and telling him that I was still trying to figure out how to achieve tape echo. I told him to picture himself in the Alps, shouting, ‘Hello,’ and then hearing the echo return…’Hello, hello, hello…’. “That’s what I wanted, but I didn’t want an echo chamber. If that was the case, I’d record in the bathroom. I didn’t want reverb. It was just a clean, repeat echo I was looking for. “He said, ‘What do you mean, like if you put a playback head behind the record head?’ My God, that was it! We both jumped out of our chairs and went to the 19
other side of town to my house, and within 20 minutes we had ‘Hello, hello, hello…’ all over the neighbourhood. Suddenly, that opened up a whole new world. “The repeating of the delay was a matter of choice, in terms of how much delay you wanted and how much repeat you wanted, although the timing between each delay was about one-tenth of a second to avoid a reverb effect. “It was very easy for me to space the heads on a disc recorder, but on a tape machine I didn’t have that privilege because you just can’t take a head and move it further away or closer to the preceding head. “So in the end I changed the speed of the tape machine. If I wanted the echo delay of my voice saying ‘Hello’ to be faster, I’d just change the speed and consequently tape delay was born.” ‘How High The Moon’ Relocating from Los Angeles to Jackson Heights in New York in 1950, Les Paul’s discovery of tape delay, coupled with the ability to layer sound on tape, was the key to his and Mary Ford’s most successful record, their version of the Lewis/Hamilton
Broadway revue song ‘How High The Moon’, which was to occupy the No.1 position on the Billboard chart for nine weeks over the spring and summer of 1951, and launch the concept of sound-on-sound recording to a bewildered public. As well as his Ampex 300, his “sound laboratory” consisted of a power supply, a Bell & Howell amplifier, a Lansing Iconic reference loudspeaker and a small mixer made by Paul himself. Along with his dynamic guitar solo, which would influence many of the early rock’n’roll guitarists, Paul’s technique for recording his partner’s voice defied tradition. “The unwritten rule stated that a vocalist should be placed no closer than two feet away from the microphone,” said Paul, “but I wanted to capture every little breath and nuance in Mary’s voice. So I had her stand right on the mic, just a couple of inches away. Then, what happened? Everybody started to record vocals in that way!” For many years, Paul employed the use of only one microphone, an RCA 44BX ribbon mic (pictured on the next page), changing over to a Neumann around 1952. “The earphones we used were U.S. Air Force earphones, and the frequency response
“I changed the speed of the tape machine. If I wanted the echo delay of my voice... to be faster... I’d just change the speed and consequently tape delay was born.” Les Paul 20
was something like 250Hz on the bottom. If we were lucky, we got a pair that went to 5kHz on the top end.” In those early days, it was very easy for a work of recorded art to be spoiled by accidental sounds leaking on to a multitrack master in the making. Especially when Paul was on his 12th-generation overdub and a loud truck just happened to pass the garage. “Many things would happen to drive me mad and call a halt to a take,” he admitted. “Either someone would knock on the door, the phone would ring or the fire department or police would drive past with their sirens wailing. The fellow who lived upstairs above us in New York had a weak bladder and Mary and I would time our recordings around his regular trips to the bathroom. I knew that he always went at around two o’clock, for example. He always made a noise when he got up and walked across the floor, so we knew better than to record. “We knew the schedule of the air traffic in the area so we recorded in between that. But what we couldn’t do was predict when there was going to be a fire. We lived across the street from a firehouse, so we did have some opposition. But I guess we made it! “The man and his wife upstairs must have
wondered what in God’s name we were all about. We rented the basement and that’s where we lived and recorded, underneath their home. They would hear Mary screaming, ‘Look at what you’re doing to me.’ It was a lyric from a song, but maybe the fifth part of the recording, and they didn’t hear any of the music because we were wearing earphones. So they never heard any more than one part at a time and people living around us must have thought we were pretty strange! They didn’t have a clue about what we were doing until we were more than 30 dubs down and they heard the song. “I remember playing in Las Vegas one time and a lady knocked on the door and said ‘I’ll sure be glad when you’ve finished ‘Whispering’, I was working on ‘Whispering’ out there and I was adding parts, but the motor would break down and I’d have to get a new one. Then something else went wrong and I had a real tough time with that particular song. I went back and re-recorded parts, but tape would spill out all over the floor. A million weird things were going on.” Surprisingly, it was years before the rest of the recording industry truly appreciated the power of multitracking, the first two-track stereophonic reel-to-reel tape recorder being introduced in 1954. 21
“The real fun of the early multitrack recording period for me lasted only about five years,” Paul recalled. “I was out there all by myself with no one trying to copy my ideas or follow me. It took about five years for people in the industry to figure out that it could be used for purposes other than just Les Paul and Mary Ford. “At one time in the early fifties, I played for the BBC at the London Palladium and they asked me if I would demonstrate on television how we made a multitrack recording, step-by-step. This was where we recorded on disc, and then they had me go down the hallway with the disc, down some stairs and the cameras following me, to another disc machine where I recorded 22
another part. The two machines weren’t even in the same room or on the same floor. It was a terribly interesting show that the BBC conceived and had me do. It must have taken hours and hours of planning to do this and they did an excellent job of showing the British viewers how multitracking was born. “Somewhere in their library, the BBC has that programme but I have never seen it. For many years, the broadcast industry would not accept tape as a medium; our shows were not allowed to be played from tape. They had to be transferred from tape to disc. Even the early Ed Sullivan shows were not done on tape.” The mid-fifties advent of the eight-track
recorder had most studios perplexed as to what to do with this new technology. “I remember walking down a hallway with an engineer and saw a plastic bag over the top of an eight-track tape machine,” recalled Paul. “He said, ‘Look what you started, Les.’ And I saw this machine and asked what it was doing in the hallway. He said, ‘What are you gonna do with it?’ He didn’t think there was anyone else out there that could use it apart from me and Mary. “People did just not have the foresight that multitracking, this tool, could be used in so many different ways. And it was so terribly important for other things than just to do a multitrack recording of a guitar and a voice. So it took some years before they began making background recordings, and putting a singer on later. They did that with Ray Charles, Patti Page and a lot of people, but it wasn’t really done seriously for quite a few years.” The Les Paulverizer In the early fifties, Les Paul and Mary Ford would often record up to four songs a day, as well as making 15-minute radio broadcasts that showcased Paul’s songwriting and scriptwriting talents.
“We knew the limitations of what we had and we didn’t have that many things to mess our heads up,” he said. “Now you can go down to the music store and buy millions of toys, boxes and footpedals, whatever. But we were very limited by what we had, so we had to make it work. On one of the radio shows I said that I invented the gas guitar just in case there was a problem with electricity and I didn’t want the electric company getting a monopoly. I was into spoofs.” One of these “spoofs” led to yet another Les Paul invention, the Les Paulverizer – a recording device attached to his guitar that enabled him to record and play back numerous guitar parts live on stage to the astonishment of his audience. “It started off as a radio sketch about this mythical device,” he remembered. “All I told them was that I had my invention, the Les Paulverizer, and with it I could take Mary’s voice and make it sound like The Andrews Sisters or even Bing, or turn my guitar into an orchestra. “You know, I was the guy who invented The Chipmunks. I suggested to my friend, David Seville that he do something like that and he made a hell of a lot of money out of that Chipmunks idea.”
“Now you can go to the music store and buy millions of toys.. but we were limited by what we had, so we had to make it work.” Les Paul 22
Six years after his original radio broadcast scam, the Les Paulverizer did, in fact, become a reality and Paul gave a prestigious demonstration on stage to an audience which included President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon among its numbers. “I got a call from Nixon and some other people, saying that they’d like to have me play for the President of the United States,” Paul explained. “I told Mary it would be a great opportunity to try out my Les Paulverizer. She said, ‘Are you crazy? Surely you are not going to experiment and try this out on
the President?’ But the darn thing worked! “It was the funniest thing that ever happened and, yes, we had a lot of problems with it but in the end it worked out very well and I’ve got a lot of good memories about that whole period. We could now perform live what we achieved in our basement.” As early as 1952, Paul envisaged a time when digital recording would become a reality. “All my close friends and confidantes knew that the things that are so commonplace in studios today would eventually happen,” he said. “I gave an impromptu
“I now see all of my original dreams coming true and it makes me feel mighty pleased.” Les Paul 24
speech at the AES [Audio Engineering Society] conference in front of Sherman Fairchild, Major [Edwin] Armstrong and some of the smartest people in the business. “I was scared to death standing up in front of all these high profile people and it was a speech I wasn’t prepared for. But I said, ‘There have been some things I’ve been bitching about and you’re the guys I’d like to talk to. I am so fed up with gouging out acetate with a needle. It reminds me of a farmer with an ox, ploughing up his field. This is the crudest way of making a record that I can think of. Why don’t we stop it now? Don’t lay tape on me because tape won’t be here tomorrow.’ “I asked the 800 people there with their bald heads to get their act together and make better speakers, better amplifiers and a different way to make a recording machine, other than analogue. I now see all of my original dreams coming true and it makes me feel mighty pleased.” LEGACY In 1953, Paul’s career as a recording artist began to take a downward turn after his last Billboard No.1, ‘Vaya Con Dios’, and the emergence of rock’n’roll shortly afterwards put paid to any meaningful chart
comeback. But the Les Paul name remains in the hearts and minds of guitarists and recording technology aficionados forever. I was extremely privileged to spend a few days with Les in 1995. Although his 80th birthday was looming, old age did not dampen his enthusiasm for music – he would often be seen jamming at his New York club, Fat Tuesday’s. Meanwhile, back at home in Mahwah, New Jersey, his Les Paul House of Sound was one of the most spectacular recording complexes in the United States. “I still get a lot of fun out of music,” he told me. “I moved to New Jersey from California years ago and built this big, big estate with 34 rooms to incorporate some beautiful film, video and music recording studios, and we can do just about anything we want. But we only use it for our own stuff. “It’s been an interesting, amazing life and even though I’ve been in this game for 70 years it doesn’t make any difference, I just keep going.” Succumbing to complications from pneumonia, Les Paul passed away on August 12, 2009 at White Plains Hospital in New York. In 2015, the music world celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of the man who, literally, changed the world. 25
Mark Cunningham was a professional musician and producer before branching out into music industry journalism, media consultancy, event production and marketing. The founding editor of three magazines – SPL, Total Production International (TPi) and Corporate Event Design – he has also authored several acclaimed books. ‘Good Vibrations: A History of Record Production’ (Sanctuary, 1996) ‘Live And Kicking: The Rock Concert Industry In The Nineties’ (Sanctuary, 1999) ‘Horslips: Tall Tales, The Official Biography’ (O’Brien Press, 2013)
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With grateful thanks to Chrissy Cunningham, Gibson Guitars & Mr. Les Paul. Photography: Les Paul Estate, Ampex, Capitol Records, Billboard, LML Archive & unidentified sources.