The Friday Fillip

One of the most important figures in popular music died this week, and I’m going to join the crowd eulogizing him. I’m talking about Lester Polsfuss, orse. Polfuss, a.k.a. Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red — and Les Paul.

Les Paul, along with Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher, was one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar — that’s a recent version of Gibson’s Les Paul Standard model you see to your left — the idea being that hollow body electric guitars could be played only so loud because of feedback from the body’s resonance. And though he himself only ever used the instrument for sweet, light jazzy sounds, the greats of the rock and roll world put it through paces he never dreamed of.

As if that weren’t enough, he invented multiple track recording and machines able to produce the layered, “overdubbed” sound he sought. He developed “special effects” such as echo or reverb, possible only on electric instruments. He and his wife, Mary Ford, made dozens of hit recordings in the fifties using this multi-track technique. In case you’re one of the few who’s never heard Les Paul and Mary Ford do their thing, I’m providing a couple of snippets from their recordings that typify their style: the first is from The World is Waiting for the Sunrise, and the second from How High the Moon.

Videos of his performances abound on YouTube — over 92,000 results for a search for “les paul” — but I probably couldn’t do better than to refer you to a particular video featured by fellow blogger Garry Wise; it shows Paul’s incredible dexterity. It’s corny, dated — the Listerine ad is frightening — but it works as a video epitaph.