It was exactly 102 years ago today that Lester William Polsfuss was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Happy birthday, Lester. Of course, we’re talking about the late, great Les Paul, the grandfather of the electric guitar. To celebrate his birth, let’s take a look at the birth of his legendary instrument.
Les Paul lived for two things — invention and entertainment. He started playing the harmonica at the age of eight. After a brief run at piano, Les switched to the acoustic guitar. By the time he was 13, Les was performing as a semi-professional country singer and guitar player. He would regularly play harmonica and guitar together, wearing the hands-free harmonica holder he invented.
In the late 1920s, he used a telephone mouthpiece as a microphone for his singing and harmonica playing. Les’s creatively restless mind shifted into high gear. He set the mouthpiece inside his acoustic guitar and wired it to a phonograph needle mounted on the neck — the pickup was born. The contraption performed relatively well, but produced a hellacious feedback. Les added plaster of paris inside the guitar to combat the problem. The hum was greatly reduced, but the guitar was impractically heavy.
It didn’t take Les long to figure out that the guitar’s hollow body was causing his feedback issues. He picked up a piece of steel from his local railroad yard. (Kind of makes you wonder just how heavy his plaster of paris guitar was, doesn’t it?) He mounted his homemade pickup system to the rail. This solved his feedback problems, but it wasn’t the final answer. Audiences were used to seeing graceful wooden bodies adorned with violin-inspired F-shaped sound holes. Les’s spartan rail guitar received a lukewarm reaction.
Les simply couldn’t let the idea go. In 1940, he went back to the drawing board. He was determined to create a guitar with a longer sustain and brighter tone than conventional hollowbody guitars. Working after-hours in the Epiphone guitar factory, Les mounted his homemade pickups and tremelo, along with the neck from an Epiphone Broadway guitar, to a piece of 4″ x 4″ wood. Did it work? “You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing,” claimed Les. He christened his new instrument “The Log” and took to the stage. While the guitar performed well, audiences were still put off by the looks of the chunky instrument.
Frustrated, Les realized he was in an almost impossible situation. “Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track,” he remembered. “But I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist — whatever.”
The mad scientist in Les wouldn’t stop. Returning to his late-night Epiphone haunt, Les cut an Epiphone archtop solidbody guitar in half and grafted the body piece onto his pine block to give the guitar a sleeker look.
In the early 1940s, Les presented his newly overhauled “Log” to Gibson. The executives were unimpressed, calling Les’s guitar “a broomstick with pickups.” Ironically, one man would change their minds — that man was Leo Fender. In the early 1950s, Fender Guitars took the market by storm with, wonder of wonders, the Fender Broadcaster, a solidbody electric guitar. Gibson’s own Ted McCarty quickly went to work on a single-cut, solidbody electric guitar — Les was brought on as a “Special Consultant.”
According to Thomas Doyle, a luthier who worked with Les for more than 30 years, Les called all the shots. “Ted McCarty was certainly the manufacturer, and his engineers certainly developed it, but they did what Les asked,” Thomas said. “Les used to stop by Ted McCarty’s house and they would go to the factory, and you didn’t leave the factory until Les said he was ready.”
In 1952, they rolled out the very first Gibson Les Paul solidbody guitar. These first Les Pauls were available in a gold-finished top with a natural finish on the back and sides. The original design combined the bridge and tailpiece with the strings going over the top, but the shallow neck pitch caused the action to be far too high. As a result, the early production Les Pauls wrapped the strings under the bridge. This “trapeze” arrangement made intonation and playing difficult, yet the Les Paul rapidly gained popularity.
Refinements continued throughout the 1950s. In the mid-50s, the trapeze tailpiece was replaced with the Tune-o-matic bridge and the stopbar tailpiece. Humbuckers replaced the P-90 pickups in 1957. One of the most important changes occurred in 1958, when the traditional gold finish gave way to the legendary “sunburst” finish. Finally, in 1959, the Gibson Les Paul reached the height of its evolution. The neck was thinned, and the trademark narrow frets were enlarged. The new setup made it easier to bend notes, vital to the day’s most popular blues guitarists, including Freddie King and Hubert Sumlin.
The original 1952 Les Paul could be bought brand-new for $250. While that sounds cheap, that’s almost $2,300 by today’s standards. In 1964, the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards bought his and fitted it with a Bigsby whammy bar, making him the first celebrity rocker to endorse the Les Paul publicly. The fuse was lit, and the Gibson Les Paul exploded into rock ‘n’ roll history, carrying a long list of legends, including Mick Taylor, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Paul McCartney, Slash, Joe Perry, and Ace Frehley.
Duane Allman and his Les Paul rock the Grand Opera House in Macon, Georgia.
Paul McCartney takes the stage with his custom-painted Les Paul.
Slash takes his Les Paul back to its blues roots.
Les Paul’s persistence and ingenuity paved the way to fame for musicians of every genre. As Thomas Doyle put it, “From the mid-50s right up until this moment, every guitar hero and rock star we have all ever listened to that played one of Les’s masterpieces would literally not exist.”
Les had his own thoughts about his accomplishments. “If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act,” he was known to say. That’s all right, Les. We’ll say it for you: your contributions to music are great. Thank you for all you have done, and happy birthday.
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Plus, our own Don Carr checks out a gorgeous Gibson Les Paul Classic 2017 T!