By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 16, 2005
The way Les Paul tells it, he's 13 years old and providing entertainment at an outdoor barbecue restaurant, playing harmonica, singing and strumming the full-bodied mail-order guitar he got from Sears Roebuck for $2.95.
"There's a fellow sitting in the rumble seat of one of the parked cars, and he writes a note to the car hop. Then he drives away," Paul says. "Car hop" is what they used to call waitresses at drive-in restaurants. "She hands me the note: 'Red -- your voice is coming through fine, the harmonica is fine, but the guitar isn't loud enough.' "
The year was 1927 or 1928, and the weekend critic wasn't telling Paul anything he didn't already know. Guitars had a beautiful sound and worked great for accompanying a singer or showing off a picker's virtuosity -- but always, always in an intimate setting.
Put the guitar in a band, or in front of a crowd at the barbecue pit, and it disappeared. Like fanning your hand in thin air. Paul fled the barbecue. "I gotta make the guitar louder," he thought.
And he did.
On Saturday, Les Paul, less than a month shy of his 90th birthday, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, in Akron, Ohio, as the creator of the solid-body electric guitar, arguably the most important musical innovation of the past half-century, a device as common today in the nightclubs of Nairobi and Manila as in Bethesda on prom night.
The electric guitar brought Paul international renown as a musician, won him five Grammys, put him on television for eight years with his wife, Mary Ford, and made Gibson Guitar Corp.'s signature Les Paul Standard a guitar of choice for garage bands and virtuosos on five continents.
"In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would see so many people using them," Paul said in a telephone interview last week from his New Jersey home. "I owe it to the rock-and-roll players, especially the Jeff Becks, the Paul McCartneys and Jimi Hendrix. All of them were playing a Les Paul guitar."
The Hall of Fame, founded in 1973 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the then-National Council of Patent Law Associations, will take nominations from anyone who gets to its Web site. Experts screen the nominees and recommend finalists to a panel that picks the winners. There are 235 inductees in all.
"We always have a mixture of the living and deceased," said Hall of Fame spokeswoman Rini Paiva. This year's 14 inductees included six living inventors, among them Paul, Dean Kamen (the Segway transporter) and Leo Sternbach (Valium). Among the posthumous honorees: Selman Waksman (streptomycin) and Clarence Birdseye (frozen foods). Edison is the lone charter member.
Paul's love affair with the guitar began in Waukesha, Wis., in the early 1920s when his mother suggested he ought to quit the piano, because he had his back to the audience and nobody would see his face when he sang and played the harmonica. "I tried an accordion, and pitched it into the city dump," he said. "Then I sent away to Sears. I was about 9."
Besides having musical talent, Paul, known professionally then as "Red Hot Red," was a natural tinkerer and very early figured out that he could use the mouthpiece of a wall telephone as a microphone. Make the family radio or phonograph into an amplifier and you had an instant public address system. This worked fine for the singing and the harmonica, but it wasn't enough for the guitar.
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."