Les Paul, Chasing Sound! (review)

Les Paul’s name has been part of popular culture since the 1930s. He is a pioneer of modern recording techniques, a co-creator of one of the world’s greatest electric guitars, and a celebrated musician. And at ninety-three, he still gets out of the house to play a weekly show at the Club Iridium in New York, always to a packed house.

John Paulson’s Les Paul, Chasing Sound! is a long-overdue documentary, made more valuable by the footage from Les’s recent Iridium shows that Paulson interweaves with older performance footage from TV and radio, stills, and recordings. The film, enhanced with commentary by Les Paul, attempts to convey both sides of Les: the musician and the inventor.

During the course of the film the camera takes us on a tour of his home and shows off his workshop, several rooms stacked and cluttered with electronic gear in different stages of assembly and disassembly. His original projects are there: the eight-track recorder (eight tape machines stacked on one another), as well as a compost heap of mixing boards, amps, radios, tubes, wires, and, of course, guitars.

Les describes how, as a boy, growing up in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he was always curious about the mechanics of the world around him. He took things apart to see how they worked and often rebuilt them in “better” ways. This curiosity extended to his musical life. When he was a teenager playing guitar and harmonica and singing at a local store, he was told that his guitar was not loud enough. So he experimented with amplification by putting his father’s phonograph needle on the guitar and wiring it through a telephone receiver. It did amplify his guitar, but the vibrations caused too much feedback. That is when he started tinkering with what was to become his life-changing creation: a solid-body amplified guitar.

He put guitar strings on a piece of metal railroad track because of its size and density. “It’s so dense and free of any vibrations that I don’t want, I would get this sustain and this clear sound,” he said. He put a telephone receiver under the strings, played it through his mother’s radio, and got a sound that pleased him. But Les said his mother told him no one would want to hear him play a railroad track.

Les was also a driven musician who worked his way up to playing pop “hillbilly” music on the radio in Chicago and it was there that he was exposed to jazz. He was influenced by artists such as Art Tatum and Louis Armstrong, and especially by jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Les said that his own fleet, clear, and melodic picking style owes a lot to Django. During a tour of Les’s house in Mahwah, New Jersey, he shows off a treasured item from his collection: one of Django’s Selmer/Maccaferri guitars.

Les said that he moved to New York around 1938, got on a radio show, and jammed at night in Harlem with musical lions such as Lester Young and Art Tatum. “To this moment, when I’m playing and an idea comes to me, it came from (people like) Art Tatum or Coleman Hawkins,” he said. “That’s where I learned it.”

In the meantime, he continued to design his amplified guitar, forming the core from a solid 4” x 4” piece of wood for density and sustain, and gluing halves of a real guitar on either side for aesthetic appearances. Les said he labored on it—with permission—in the Epiphone guitar factory on Sundays. Around 1941 he perfected his invention, which he nicknamed “The Log.” Les started badgering the Gibson guitar company to develop his electric guitar but, he said, they treated him as if he were a character peddling a broomstick with a pickup on it.

In the early 40s, Bing Crosby—with whom Les was working in Los Angeles—gave Les...