Les Paul: A Great White Swims On

A Letter From the Editor





TRI would like to take time today to remember a true Great White shark: Les Paul. He invented the solid-body electric guitar, or as we call it now, "the guitar." He invented multi-track recording, or as we call it now, "recording."
I will now recount, in the self-indulgent fashion of our times, my personal journey with this man, from the day I first got one of his guitars to the night I spent in his sharky presence in a jazz club in New York.
I first went crazy for the Les Paul guitar in high school. I didn’t play then, but I was a devout member of the Church of Social Distortion, and our pastor, Mike Ness, always played a beautiful gold-top Les Paul. I would have ran through fire for Mike Ness in those days, but I’ll never forget the one thing I was willing to criticize him over – the RF sticker he had plastered on that guitar. I remember thinking, How could he slap that thing on that beautiful golden guitar? I vowed that if I ever got one of my own, it would be completely unadorned.
When I started playing myself, I would go over to my dad’s place and fuck around with the many guitars in his quiver. He had Les Pauls, but long ago devoted himself to the Fender Stratocaster (hey, if it’s good enough for Jimi Hendrix, I guess).
But I always preferred the Paul. Not so much because of the sound, since I didn’t know shit from shinola sound-wise in those days, but the look. It just looked beefier, stronger and more substantial. I looked at it and imagined clubbing someone over the head with it, killing them instantly.
Anyway! When I picked my first guitar out of the Musician’s Friend catalog, I went with the Epiphone Les Paul Special II. It was the very cheapest entry-level Paul in existence and when it stopped working, as $150 guitars tend to do, I took it to my dad to fix.
He called me over to his house one day and said, "Your guitar is fixed." He handed me my case, and I immediately felt it was heavier than when I left it. I opened it up and my Epiphone Paul was nowhere to be seen – in its place was my dad’s authentic Gibson "The Paul" 1979 solid walnut Les Paul. He was giving it to me. He said something like, "You’re ready for a real guitar," and it was one of the best days of my life.
When I started looking into the man himself, the first thing that struck me was the story about how he broke his left arm at some point, and the doctor said he was going to have to set it in a fixed position. Paul chose to have it fixed at a 90-degree angle, so he could still play guitar. I tried finding a picture of it, but I swear, there’s pictures where he’s standing there with his left arm sticking out. It looks hilarious – unless he’s playing, in which case it looks totally natural.
Anyway, several years ago I was surprised to find the man was still alive…he was approaching 90. Then I was AMAZED to find that he was still playing shows, every Monday night at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City.
I became fixated on the idea of going there to see him. Well…partly I was fixated on that, and partly fixated on a woman I loved who had bailed on me and moved to New York, and partly fixated on going to New York and watching the b-ballers at Rucker Park, but anyway! This came to represent what was so fucking cool about New York to me. LES PAUL PLAYS THERE EVERY FUCKING MONDAY NIGHT!
So years later, I got that woman back, and we went to New York together and went to the show. Again, one of the best nights of my life. It was so damned fun….I really don’t have the words for it. Some editor, huh?
First of all, his band SHREDDED. Bluesy-jazzy-rock, just straight up, good-time, have-five-or-six-martinis, good ol American music.
And Les Paul the man, just shy of 94 years old, was one of the most engaging, charismatic frontmen I had ever seen. Just full of jokes and good vibes…I remember at one point he was talking about some encounter he had just had with a beautiful woman, and he said, "I felt like a condemned building with a new flagpole." HAHA! This was a 93-year-old man making boner jokes! The crowd loved it.
His Iridium Jazz Club residency was famous for HUGE guest appearances: Jimmy Page, Springsteen and other huge names had popped in for unannounced appearances before.
On our night, Les announced that he was going to welcome to the stage, "One of the first men around the world."
I was sitting there thinking, who the fuck’s he bringing up, Magellan? But it turns out what Les meant to say was, "One of the first men to orbit the planet Earth." It was astronaut Scott Carpenter.
I was a little disappointed at first, but Carpenter turned out to be an awesome guest. He took the mic and talked a little bit about space, boasted like a real old bastard about beating the Russians in the space race, then left us with a really foreboding warning, as only a true old bastard could: "China…LURKS…" he said, then left the stage.
The crowd didn’t know whether to applaud or cry. Me, I almost spit up my martini before busting up laughing.
On the way out of the club that night I walked right by Carpenter. As I mentioned, I had had a few martinis. I said to him, "Before this week, I had never even been to New York. And you’ve been to space!"
Carpenter smiled and shook my hand and said, "Well, they’re both great places!"
I laughed my fucking ass off. It was a magical night, and I’d like to thank Les Paul for it. Oh, and for inventing the greatest musical instrument in human history.
Sincerely,
Travis Lee Hunter
Editor and Publisher