If the guitar hadn’t existed when Les Paul was born, he surely would have invented it.
The jazz giant, who died in 2009 at age 94, didn’t just play the instrument with wizardly aplomb — he reconceived its potential.
Do you love the sound of the solid-body guitar? Paul invented it.
Do you appreciate the overdubbed, multi-layered recording effects of the late 1940s and ’50s? Yes, that was Paul’s creation, too.
Do you remember “How High the Moon,” “Tiger Rag” and other hit duets featuring Paul with vocalist Mary Ford, his wife? More than half a century ago, they reaffirmed that jazz-tinged music could claim a place in the popular culture.
Much of this may be forgotten by now, which is partly why Steve King and Johnnie Putman — the husband-wife duo best known as Steve and Johnnie from WGN Radio — have published “A Little More Les,” their homage to a great artist and, apparently, an equally dear friend.
“The average kid who is able today to go into his room, plug his guitar into his computer and do multiple tracks — he doesn’t realize that wouldn’t be possible without Les Paul,” says King.
“That wouldn’t have happened.”
To which Putman interjects, as if they were on the radio, “Or if it did, it would have been later or different.”
Regardless, Paul holds an outsized position in the history of both jazz and pop, an incontrovertible truth documented in loving detail throughout “A Little More Les.” Though no one is going to confuse this with a scholarly tome or a rigorous biography, it certainly captures the highlights of Paul’s achievements, the flavor of his era and the nature of his relationship with King and Putman.
Historic photos, personal snapshots, transcribed radio interviews and testimonials penned by various guitarists (from Charlie Daniels to Frank Vignola to Muriel Anderson) make this a kind of scrapbook chronicling a remarkable life and career.
“I’ll say it right out: This is not an objective book,” observes King, who’s right about that.
“We call this our Valentine” to Paul, adds Putman.
“This is personal,” says King. “We felt so lucky to get to know this man.”
They did that, of course, through WGN, their first interview with Paul, in 1991, leading to another and another, up through their last, on Paul’s 94th birthday: June 9, 2009 (a little more than two months before his death). Because Steve and Johnnie held the overnight slot, they could let their conversations with Paul stretch on for as long as the master wished to chat.
“Very quickly it went from a radio host/guest relationship to a genuine friendship,” remembers King, who with Putman accumulated more than 60 hours of interviews.
“And the fact that Les would call us so frequently on Monday nights, as he’d be coming home from the club Iridium (in Manhattan), he became a kind of regular on the show.”
If Steve and Johnnie had been broadcasting during morning or afternoon drive, they clearly never could have stretched out in this way.
“Les was a night person,” says Putman. “He would get up at 5 or 6 in the evening, so he was raring to go at 2 or 3 in the morning. There was no one knocking on his door or pulling him away, because they were all sleeping.”
Equally important, Paul knew how to tell a story. And considering his history and achievements, he had a great deal to say, as anyone fortunate enough to have conversed with him knows.
“I don’t even know why I’ve always been a tinkerer,” he told me in 1992.
“All I know is that, from the very beginning, I noticed a fundamental difference between myself and my brother. I noticed that when he would reach for a light switch, he would throw it on and be terribly content. With me, I had to take off the plate, find out what was going on, get jolted and knocked down on my rear end. But I just had to know.”
That innate curiosity, combined with Paul’s keen ear, ultimately changed the way the rest of us hear music. It all started when Paul, as a child in Waukesha, Wis., started punching extra holes in piano rolls, to coax new sounds from the instrument. He considered that the origin of his future experiments in multi-track recording.
As he was doctoring those piano rolls, “I said to myself: ‘Holy cow, if I could just do this to a clarinet, a drum, a sax, I’d have it made,’ ” he told me.
“So in the ’30s, while I was living in Chicago, I had this problem in that I couldn’t rehearse with the sidemen whenever I wanted.
“So I came up with this idea of cutting one (record) groove real wide, so that the outside groove was the rhythm, and the next groove to it was the bass line. Then I could play along with my sidemen, even though they weren’t there.”
Paul eventually took his experiments public, creating multi-track recordings on discs that caused a sensation, such as “Lover” and “Brazil” in 1948.
A year later, Paul dared to apply roughly the same strategy to newfangled audio tape.
“Bing Crosby had given me one of the first Ampex tape machines, and the idea hit me right away,” Paul said in our interview. “All you needed was a fourth (tape) head, so that you could record sound-on-sound.
“But I didn’t want anybody to know the idea I had, so I called Ampex and told them: ‘Look, I blew the playback head, will you send me another one?’
“Then I got a guy to drill a hole in the tape recorder and put in the new head, and what do you know? It worked.”
With Ford’s reverberating vocals placed atop Paul’s layered guitar lines, the duo became a hit-making machine in the 1950s with “How High the Moon,” “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” “Vaya Con Dios,” “Tiger Rag” and many more.
Stories like the ones Paul told me course through “A Little More Les,” perhaps encouraging at least a few readers to dig more deeply into Paul’s legacy.
“We hope that as people read the book, they will hear Les’ voice,” says King, who with Putman left full-time broadcasting on WGN in December of 2011 but work at the station periodically.
“We really wanted to extend his legacy, if we could.”
They have.
“A Little More Les” (Bantry Bay Publishing) is available at www.alittlemoreles.com.
Twitter @howardreich
“Portraits in Jazz”: Howard Reich’s e-book collects his interviews with Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald and others, as well as profiles of early masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Get the e-book at chicagotribune.com/ebooks.
