Les Paul: The man with the musical broomstick
July 24, 2008
The Guardian has a great article about Les Paul today.
When he was about 13, he played at a barbecue stand outside Milwaukee. By then he had found a way of rigging up his mother’s telephone, singing into it to the speakers of the family radio. “People loved it. Except one guy at the back of the crowd who wrote to me to say: ‘Red [his nickname], your voice and your jokes and your singing were fine, but your guitar wasn’t loud enough.”
That began a search for the perfect amplification. Early experiments involved putting a needle from the family phonograph under the strings of a guitar. He also stuffed the guitar’s hollow box with sheets and rags, and then plaster of Paris, in an attempt to muffle the feedback, but in vain.
He had a breakthrough when he tried the most dense piece of material he could find, a piece of railtrack, attaching it to a guitar string and a telephone receiver wired up to a radio. “It sounded great! I ran to my Mum and shouted ‘I’ve got the answer!’ And she replied: ‘Did you ever see a cowboy on a horse playing a railroad track?’ So that put that idea right out of the window.”
It took many more years of tinkering before he made his first solid-wood guitar, in 1941; he had to wait another 10 years before Gibson finally embraced the idea, in 1951. “The electric guitar was laughed at! They called me the character with the broomstick with pick-ups on it. It was terrible. Before we came along the guitar was an apologetic wimp - the weakest, most unimportant guy in the band. As soon as we put a pick-up on him, and a volume control, he became the king.”
