Saturday, August 22, 2009

Dead Page: "I'll Never Understand Why I Chased Sound All My Life"-- Part 3

LES PAUL 1915-2009

In 2005, Les Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

He dubbed this new electric guitar, "The Log."

Besides the guitar, Mr. Paul worked with multi-track recording.

After getting together with future wife Mary Ford in the 1940s, he found a way to overdub and echo oh her voice and their two guitars, laying multiple layers on a recording, thus creating a "New Sound."

He and Mary Ford then had a string of hit songs, often rerecordings of old standards: "Mockin' Bird Hill," "The World is Waiting for Sunrise," "Bye Bye Blues, "I'm Sitting on Top of the World," and "Tiger Rag." And then there were those two giant hits: "How High the Moon" and "Vaya Con Dios."

At one point, 13 straight tunes by them sold more than 500,000 copies. But once Rock and Roll got started in the late fifties, that was the end of their chart success.

He was born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Waukesha is not too far from us. Hope they open a museum for Les Paul.

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