So after the barbecue, he wired the guitar directly, making a pickup (a sensor to transmit the sound frequency from the plucked spring) by jamming a phonograph needle into the neck, mounting the telephone mouthpiece inside the instrument and hooking it all up to the radio.
It worked, "but the feedback was terrible," Paul said. "I took towels and shirts and stuffed them in the guitar. No good. Then I poured in plaster of Paris. It improved, except there were still problems."
But he had had the crucial insight: The box -- the very essence of an acoustic guitar -- was the problem. "I went to the railroad yard with some friends, and we stole a 2 1/2 -foot length of steel rail. I stretched a string the length of the rail and held it down with a spike at each end. Then I put the telephone mouthpiece underneath the string."
This was much better. "I have it," he told his mom. "An electric guitar!"
Mom wasn't impressed. "I'm waiting for the day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a piece of railroad track," she said. "And where do you plug it in?"
Paul grew into adolescence and beyond and became a full-fledged pro. He played acoustic. He put pickups on an acoustic. He miked the acoustic. "I tried everything," he said. It wasn't right yet.
Finally, late in the 1930s, he fretted up a length of four-by-four lumber and took it to a nightclub. This one really worked, but "there was no reaction." People didn't know what he was supposed to be doing.
"You have to have a beautiful piece of wood," Paul concluded, "something you can caress, and hold, and love." So he cut two sides off an acoustic guitar and attached them to the four-by-four "so it looked like a guitar." He called it "the log." Today it resides in the Smithsonian.
And the audience figured it out. Paul took the log to Gibson, in Chicago, but they turned him down. He kept going back, but Gibson kept saying no. "They laughed at me for 10 years," Paul said. "They called me 'the guy with the broomstick with the pickups on it.' "
But then one afternoon Leo Fender, a tinkerer who owned a radio repair shop, showed up at Paul's house in Los Angeles to talk about his own ideas for a solid-body. "Leo and I were always good friends," Paul said. "He said we ought to form a company together, but I told him I'd been loyal to Gibson [guitars] all my life, and I'd wait for them." Paul said Fender, who died in 1991, probably should be entering the Hall of Fame, too, but Paiva said no one had nominated him.
After Fender's visit, Paul called Gibson again, and in a tedious, virtually nonstop 30-hour session, convinced them that the log was the future.
And not a moment too soon. Fender came out with the first commercial solid-body, in 1950, and five years later followed with the legendary Stratocaster. Gibson answered in 1952 with its first Les Paul model, and history was made.
"It was tremendous," Paul said. "I designed some amps that were pit bulls, and when I put my speaker beside a sax player, he reacted like he had a heart attack. And we could walk all over the rhythm section."
"We had a knob," he said, "and all we had to do was turn it."
