The real Guitar Hero: Les Paul
Posted: Fri Nov 07, 2008 7:23 pm
CLEVELAND (AP) — When Les Paul's grandchildren are jamming on the video game "Guitar Hero," it's not lost on him that he made it all possible.
Paul, known as the "Father of the Electric Guitar," will be honored at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's annual American Music Masters series, a weeklong event that starts Monday.
Paul is a rock 'n' roll da Vinci, part artist, part inventor, and at age 93 still performs weekly at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City.
"It's therapy," Paul said Thursday.
Paul recalled that the first time he heard a guitar on his mother's radio he knew he had to have one. By age 13, he was performing semiprofessionally as a country-music guitarist.
He built a solid-body electric guitar in 1941 — an invention born from his frustration that audiences were unable to hear him play.
Paul remembers the moment when inspiration hit. He was playing at a barbecue stand somewhere between his hometown of Waukesha, Wis., and Milwaukee when a man told him his guitar wasn't loud enough.
It took Paul 10 years to sell the Gibson guitar company on the concept.
"They thought it was a crazy idea to make a guitar come through an amplifier," he said.
In 1952, Gibson introduced the Les Paul model, which became the instrument of choice for musicians such as Duane Allman and Jimmy Page.
"We now could be king because you could turn the level up and you could be heard and you could play things that you could never have played acoustically," Paul said.
Paul's other innovations include recording techniques like close miking, echo delay, overdubbing and multitracking. He also made his mark as a jazz-pop musician, recording hits like "How High the Moon" with his second wife, singer Mary Ford.
Paul was inducted into the early influence category of the Rock Hall in 1988.
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