I want to take just a minute to focus in on Les Paul and the act Les Paul and Mary
Ford to just put an extra bit of emphasis on mainstream pop in the period before
1955. But also to talk a bit about the role of
technology, and how the development of technology really affects in many ways,
the way that the history of rock n' roll unfolds.
some of you may, some of you guitar players may be surprised to know that
there is actually a guy named Les Paul and Les Paul is not just a brand or a
model of guitar made by the Gibson Guitar Company.
In fact, Les Paul as a guitarist, was one of the top guitarists in jazz and in
popular music in this period between the Second World War, well, during the Second
World War, during the 40s leading up to rock, and roll.
I mean, he, he had the best gig in, in all the business and that he was the
guitarist for the Bing Crosby group. and also recorded on the side with his
jazz group. And then developed this duo with his
wife, Mary Ford. one interesting thing about these Les
Paul and Mary Ford recordings, is that Les Paul in, in, did this thing with
overdubbing his, his, music, where initially, the way he would do it is,
there, there were, there were no tapes involved, the way that you recorded
something was you'd actually cut it onto a disc.
But if you had two disc cutting machines like that, you could put one thing, you
could cut one thing onto a disc, and then once you had that one thing recorded, you
could play that back and while you were playing that back, you could play
something else along with it, and then cut that onto a second disc.
And then, you could take that second disc, put it back on a first machine.
Put a fresh disk here. Hear those two things together.
Add a third thing. Record that onto that disk.
And then keep adding, so you can add this sort of layered you can do this layered
technique of sort of creating track after track after track.
Well, one of the things that Les Paul is instrumental in doing is creating these
layered arrangements where there are tons and tons of guitar.
And also tons and tons of vocal harmonies, all of it, just being Les Paul
and Mary Ford. One of the things he knew was that tape
recording was going to be big, big, big in the popular music business and that it
was, it was a technology that was going to change a lot of things.
And indeed it did. You see tape recording was developed by
the Germans during the Second World War as a way of recording Hitler's voice when
he would give his speeches to the nation. The Germans were concerned that the
Americans had technology that would allow them to zero in on exactly where Hitler
was when he was delivering his radio addresses to the German nation and then
they would bomb that radio station and, and perhaps kill the leader.
And so, what they decided to do was they developed this technology, whereby they
could get lifelike reproductions of his voice, send that to the radio station
where Hitler could be in an entirely different part of the country at the
time. And so that if, if the station ended up
getting bombed, the worst they would do is ruin a tape recorder.
Now, the, the allies didn't know anything about this until Germany was conquered.
And all of the sudden these troops wondered the first thing you should do,
of course, is take over the communications of, of, of any sit you
march into. And they go into these radio stations and
what do they see? These big reel to reel recorders there.
And it turns out that this magnetic tape recording the Germans had developed this
to a fantastically high degree of fidelity.
Well, Les Paul heard about this and he said, he told Bing Crosby, he said, you
know, Bing This was going to be the next best thing, the next big thing.
You, you ought to think about investing in this.
So Bing Crosby took the money that he had, he was a rich man at the time, he
took a lot of the money that he had, and he invent, he, he, invested it in the
Ampex Tape Company and that ended up making him millions of dollars.
He got in on the ground floor of, of recorded tape.
And one of the things he was able to do for Les Paul, that is Bing Crosby was
able to do for Les Paul, was to give him one of the first 8-track recording
machines. Now we're talking about the early 1950s
here. 8-track recording didn't come in,
generally in rock music until the end of the 1960s but Les Paul had a machine.
He called it the Octopus because he recorded 8-tracks, where he could now do
what he had been doing by, you know, playing things on different records and
playing them back again. He could play one, he could play one
thing on track 1, one thing on 2, one thing on track 3, one on 4, one on 5.
He could build these arrangements up the way he'd been doing.
So, it was fantastic. for him and it all came from his
connection with Bing Crosby there. also another thing about Les Paul that
we, we mentioned earlier is that he's often referred to as the inventor of the
solid body electric guitar. Not the electric guitar, there had been
electric guitars before for Les Paul. For heaven's sake, Charlie Christian
played one with Benny Good-, Goodman's group.
But the solid body electric guitar. And so, it isn't quite true that Les Paul
invented the solid body electric guitar, but he was one of the first ones to be
involved in engineering a kind of solid body electric guitar.
He would, ended up going into partnership with the Gibson Guitar Company and they
produced the Les Paul model. The Les Paul guitar has become iconic.
And so these developments in technology. this, this overdubbing, this tape
technology, this overdubbing technology. the development of the solid-body guitar,
solid-body electric guitar. All these kinds of things make a big
change. Now, we couldn't think about Les Paul as
being an important figure in rock music per se, because none of his music was
never rock oriented. But Les Paul as a guitarist, was a
fantastic influence on a whole generation of guitarists who came after him in rock
and roll. Jimmy Page people like this, were all
sort of big Les Paul fanatics. The song are the songs they heard when
they were a kid. but the technologies that he developed
will continue to influence rock and roll for many years, in fact decades to come.
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
