Remembering Les Paul: The Boy Who Heard the Future

From a simple childhood question came a revolution in the way we hear music.

Editor's Note: On August 13, 2009, music legend Les Paul passed away. In this article from 1993, we see just how far-reaching and significant this visionary guitarist and inventor was.

Whenever young Les Polfuss was sick, his mother put him on the parlor couch in their home in Waukesha, Wis. There Les could hear the boxcars from the Chicago-St. Paul line rumbling up and down a nearby siding.

Listening to the trains one morning at the age of five, he noticed that when the sound reached a certain pitch, it made the window vibrate. That's strange, he thought. Feeling the glass, he discovered that he could dampen the vibration but couldn't make it stop. Only when the train's speed and pitch changed did the windowpane become silent.

"That's resonance," Mr. Kahn, a local science teacher explained when Les put the question to him. "Your window is 'hearing' the train, just as your eardrum is hearing my right now—by vibrating." Then he added, "That's how music is made."

Les forever questioned things. "What are you doing," his older brother cried one day, seeing Les punching new holes in the player-piano rolls. "I'm making it better," Les responded. By adding holes, he could make the instrument sound like two pianos.

Les had a gift for music. When he picked up a harmonica, he learned to play it in hours. Then he bought a five-dollar Sears Roebuck guitar and, plucking on that while alternately blowing the harmonica and singing, he became a one-man band.

By age ten, Red Hot Red, as he called himself because of his hair color, was playing for tips at a drive-in barbeque stand. One day a carhop told Red Hot that customers were complaining. "The people in the back can't hear," she said.

What I need is a way to make myself louder, Les thought. Having discovered that the mouth piece in his family's new telephone worked by vibration, as did the speaker in their radio, Les carted both components to the barbeque stand. He tied the mouthpiece to a broom handle, then ran a wire from it to the radio. Into this "mike" Les began to sing.

Customers applauded, but then complained that his voice drowned out his guitar. So Les took the needle from his family's record player and stuck it in the bridge of his guitar, then wired it into another radio speaker. The needle's vibrations were amplified by the radio, and now he had an electric guitar.

In 1932, when Les was 17, he became interested in early bluegrass music and life beyond Waukesha. A guitarist named "Sunny Joe" Wolverton, hearing Les play, wanted the boy to join his group. He said he'd teach him everything he knew about the guitar. Sunny Joe was good as his word, and in the early 1930s Les, now known as Rhubarb Red, was playing country music in Chicago.

But his inventive mind kept whirling. He had already built his own recording lathe, using and old Cadillac flywheel and a turntable and hooking it up to a jukebox motor with dental-drill belts. Now, as a night person frustrated when there was no one to "jam" with into the wee hours, he remembered what he done to the player-piano rolls and wondered whether he could use his recording machine to turn a phonograph into an automated backup band. He began to experiment.

Sounds are recorded on ordinary records by etching the vibrations of a needle along a spiraling groove. Les found he could cut a second groove between the tracks of the first, which could carry a different set of notes. Both grooves could then be played at the same time using two needles. The effect was that of two guitars playing.

Going further, he made a second turntable and recorded alternately on one turntable, then the other, adding new parts, until the sound became multi-layered, but record companies laughed off his inventions as "just gimmicks."

Then, Les moved to New York City, having changed his name to the now familiar Les Paul. He was playing guitar for orchestra-leader Fred Waring's NBC radio show by day and Harlem jazz greats by night.

In those days, to make records you got all the musicians into a room and hoped they'd play perfectly. But inevitably someone would make a mistake and they'd have to start over. Paul knew there had to be a better way.

"You need your own studio," Bing Crosby told him in 1947 after Paul had begun playing with him in Los Angeles. So in a garage behind his house Les build a custom sound studio with the most advanced recording equipment then available. Some of the era's greatest performers—Andy Williams, Kay Starr, W. C. Fields and the Crosby family—came to record in Paul's back yard. Furthermore, his studio gave Les a place to perfect his multiple-recording techniques and build a stock of demonstration records.

During the war, Paul had joined the Armed Forces Radio Service, editing recording for worldwide broadcast. But no matter how hard he worked, the Germans seemed to record just as well, and often faster. How could that be?

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