『S2 Ep1: "The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Tinkering: The Rise of Les Paul"』のカバーアート

S2 Ep1: "The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Tinkering: The Rise of Les Paul"

S2 Ep1: "The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Tinkering: The Rise of Les Paul"

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MR HANSoN Podcast "The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Tinkering: The Rise of Les Paul"He was told flat-out that what he built wasn't even a guitar. They called it a broomstick with pickups. Eleven years later, every guitar company in America was racing to copy it.This is the cinematic true story of Les Paul — born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9, 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The boy his teacher said would "never learn music." The kid who heard a ditch digger play harmonica on a sidewalk and never recovered. The eight-year-old who built a crystal radio from scratch. The ten-year-old who bent a coat hanger into a hands-free harmonica holder — a design still manufactured today. The twelve-year-old who pulled a piece of railroad rail from the train tracks behind his house and proved, with a single guitar string and a phonograph needle, that a note could live longer than it should.That note — the one that wouldn't die — became the obsession of his life.He chased it from Waukesha to St. Louis. Dropped out of high school at seventeen to join Sunny Joe Wolverton's Radio Band on KMOX. Moved to Chicago in 1934 and lived two lives at once — country picker Rhubarb Red by day on hillbilly radio, jazz player Les Paul by night in the South Side clubs where Django Reinhardt records spun until the grooves went silver. Two stage names. Two careers. On the same kitchen table.By 1938 he was on national radio with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians. By 1941 he was sneaking into the Epiphone guitar factory in New York City after hours — owner Epi Stathopoulo had handed him the keys — and building the most important guitar prototype in the history of recorded music. A four-by-four piece of pine. A guitar neck. Two homemade pickups. He called it The Log.Gibson laughed. They told him to take it home.That same year — 1941 — Les Paul was nearly killed by electrocution in his apartment basement. It took him almost two years to recover. By 1944, on the advice of Bing Crosby, he opened a recording studio inside his garage on North Curson Street in Hollywood. Tape machines. Microphones bolted to the rafters. The smell of solder. Every musician in town came through that garage. Bing Crosby. The Andrews Sisters. Nat King Cole. And in between sessions, Les Paul kept stacking sounds — figuring out how to make a single guitar sound like four, a single voice sound like a chorus.In 1947 he cut a song called "Lover" with eight different guitar parts. All of them him. Layered. Stacked. It was the first time anyone had ever heard a record like it.And then came January 1948.On icy Route 66 west of Davenport, Oklahoma, the Buick convertible carrying Les Paul and his fiancée Iris Colleen Summers — soon to be known to the world as Mary Ford — plunged through a guardrail and dropped twenty feet off a railroad overpass into a frozen ravine. Mary's pelvis was broken. Les's right elbow was shattered in three places. Doctors at Wesley Hospital in Oklahoma City told him the arm could not be rebuilt. Their best option was amputation.A guitarist. Without his right arm.So he asked for a pencil. From a hospital bed in Oklahoma — with morphine dripping and the future of his career hanging on a single decision — Les Paul drew up plans for a guitar synthesizer he could play with one hand. A full decade before Robert Moog would build the actual machine.Then he asked the surgeons to set the arm at slightly over ninety degrees. Bent inward toward his chest. So he could still cradle a guitar.It took eighteen months to recover. Mary Ford moved into his Hollywood house and nursed him back. They married in Milwaukee in 1949 — Steve Miller's parents stood as best man and matron of honor. Les Paul became Steve Miller's godfather and gave him his first guitar lessons.Then the couple moved to a small apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and built a recording studio inside it.What happened next changed every record ever made after.Between fire-truck sirens and planes coming into LaGuardia and a 400-pound neighbor flushing the toilet upstairs in the middle of Mary's high harmony, Les Paul invented multitrack recording. Overdubbing. Tape delay. Phasing. Close miking. He recorded twelve guitar parts and twelve vocal parts on a single song called "How High the Moon" — and when it came out in 1951, it spent nine straight weeks at #1 on the Billboard pop chart, twenty-five weeks total on the chart, and reached #2 on the rhythm and blues chart at the same time. Six million records sold in 1951 alone.In 1952 Gibson finally said yes. After eleven years of rejection, they handed Les Paul a finished guitar — single cutaway, carved maple top, mahogany body, two P-90 pickups, painted gold. The first Gibson Les Paul Model.It became the most-played guitar in the history of rock and roll. Jimmy Page. Slash. Eric Clapton. Duane Allman. Pete Townshend. Keith Richards. Billy Gibbons. Joe Perry. Every one of them speaking a language Les Paul invented.The hits kept ...
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