LES PAUL: Still Changing Songs

Around what year was this?
Well, that would be 1932.

So, you were only 17 years old?
Um, hmm. I can’t count, but you can. [Laughs]

What was your inspiration was your first prototype of the electric guitar which you later referred to as “The Log?”
In the beginning, I played the harmonica and the guitar, and I’d rigged up a way of singing into the mouthpiece of the telephone that went into my mother’s radio. I was appearing in person playing outdoors at a place called Goerke’s Corner. That was halfway between Waukesha and Milwaukee, and it was interesting because the people would drive in to get their barbecue sandwiches and their root beer, or whatever. I would play and sing for them, and one fellow sitting in a rumble seat of a car wrote a note to me and gave it to the car hop. She brought it to me and it says, “What you got going up there…I can hear your voice and your harmonica fine and I enjoy it, but the guitar is not loud enough.” That made me go home and think about it, and in my own simple way, I said, “Well, now, let me investigate the guitar.” I first tried filling it up with rags, and I ended up with Plaster of Paris in it.

I assume that didn’t correct your problem.
No, finally I was slinging the guitar and I said, “OK. It’s down to, which way do I go?” The thing was, we’re picking up the string, and I’m using the receiver which was no more than a magnet, a diaphragm and a coil. So, one half of the telephone came into use, which I sang into, the other half I placed under the string. Now, the first thing I had to do was to make a decision on was, “Which is the best way to go with something that was terribly rigid, dense and would sustain and give me the vibration of the string, and also not give me coloration with the vibration of the wood?” The other mate to that was a wooden four-by-four of soft pine wood, which would deliberately give me the sound of wood, and then I compared the two again through my mother’s radio. I went running to her in the kitchen and I said, “Mom, I’ve found it.” What I wanted was to have the string vibrate and nothing else. Just do its thing. The lesser of the sounds would be transmitted acoustically via the material that was surrounding the string. I tried it on. I tried it on the run, and I tried it another way. I went to my mother again and said, “I’ve found the answer. It’s a piece a railroad track two-and-a-half feet long, with a string suspended on it.”

This was made out of metal?
Plain railroad track. What a train runs on. So, my mother solved that problem. She says, “The day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a railroad track…” [Laughs] So, that idea went right out the window, knowing that it had to be something else. Then the idea entered my mind to make it out of something that would be the hardest wood that we could use and work with.

Mahogany?
I used a maple top and the rest of it was made of rosewood…pine. It could be anything underneath, you know. That was not as important as it was for me to get that sustain, and of course after I got that, it took quite a long time for me to develop it, because I was learning to play the guitar at the same time.

What was your impression of the first rock performers who arrived in the mid-‘50s like Elvis, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly….
Oh, it was very interesting to see the change. The change actually came in 1945.

Eleven years before Elvis?
Yes, the first change came with be-bop. The kids had come back from the War with a strange kind of music that they didn’t dig. So, that went to the side and got replaced with a new kind of music: rock and roll. At the beginning, it was very primitive. A guy would know only two or three [chord] changes, and they would bury the vocals. If the guy couldn’t sing, he was perfect to have a hit record, and of course, there was some pretty bad stuff that came out. There was a mixture of music where they were faltering, or they were looking for something that was difficult to swallow. There were some very well written songs, but there were also some very stupid songs that weren’t very well done. I talked to this one engineer right here on Broadway. I’d say, “Hey, Morty, how you doin’?” He says, “I’m gonna quit being an engineer. They’re stompin’ on boards. They’re singing wrong changes. They’re breaking all the rules.”