It’s Les Paul…with a Les Paul!
WOW. About a month ago I was having a conversation with Deacon buddy Alfie Smith. He was absolutely beside himself – he’d been invited to New York to play with Les Paul at his Monday night residency at Iridium. Unfortunately, I don’t believe Alfie made it in time – Les died this morning at his home in White Plains, NY, of complications relating to pneumonia.
I don’t exactly how to quantify what Les Paul did for the music that came after. Perhaps the best way is to paraphrase Ron Wood – ” I was sitting in the control room of a recording studio with Les Paul one day, and he’d point at a piece of gear and say ‘See that? I invented that.’ Then he’d point at another piece of gear and say ‘See that? I invented that.’ Then ‘And that’. ‘And that’. ‘And those over there’.”
It is something of an exaggeration to say that Paul invented the solidbody electirc guitar, or multitrack recording. However, he standardized it, and taught musicians that there was no reason that they couldn’t be in charge of the records they made. Once recording tape came along, there was no reason to let the technicians run the show.
A lot of the musicians that influenced me were Les Paul disciples – Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, and entire generations from the sixties onward. You can read his CNN obit here.
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