Rock and roll history

Last night we saw guitar legend Les Paul play in a cozy little basement club just off Times Square.

He's 90, so not surprisingly he doesn't play with the frenetic abandon of youth. It's more finesse playing, like the way two partners who've known each other for 50 years dance -- no wasted motions, total knowledge of what each movement will do.
(OK, so I was thinking more that it was the difference between sex in your 20s and sex in your 90s, but for some reason I was trying to be more G-rated.)

It was more like a jazz club night than I expected. A quartet including a piano, standup bass and rhythm guitar played standards like Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Begin the Beguine.

Les was playful and seemed to be really enjoying himself.
The piano player was talking between songs about all the things he has to think about when he's improvising -- pace and where he's headed and what everyone else is doing and technique ... Les said, "I don't think about any of that." "What do you think about?" the piano player asked. "My wife's sister."
Early in the show, someone in front was taking a picture and Les stopped the song they'd just begun to pose with his band mates. Flashes started going off like mad, then Les flipped the finger and said "This is for the guy driving in New Jersey."



http://www.iridiumjazzclub.com/les.shtml
One fateful night while performing in front of an outdoor crowd, Les became frustrated that people farther back couldn’t hear him. Les Paul created an electric guitar and amplification system out a radio, the earpiece of a telephone and a needle from a family record player that he jammed into the fret board as a "pickup"! Les'guitar and voice were now heard by all. However, the resulting vibration and resulting feedback had to be contained. Les experimented by stuffing clothes and plaster of paris in the guitar; he even went so far as attaching a string to a hinge placed at the end of a railroad track. The sound was perfect. When Les showed his mother his accomplishment she replied, "You’ll never see Gene carrying that thing around". So he settled on using a 4x4 block of wood attached to an Epiphone neck. When the audience paid no attention to his playing because the instrument was too strange, he attaches two non-functional "wings" to the 4x4 so it looked like a normal guitar.The fans loved the sound and the solid body electric guitar was born! In 1950, Les started his design of the Les Paul model for The Gibson Guitar Company, which has become the world’s best selling line of electric guitars.