Word: les
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...version of 'How High the Moon,' Lou Pallo does the intricate plucking; Les mostly sits in on his own signature song. It's an instrumental (Paul never worked with a female singer after he broke up with Ford), but there's still a pretty woman on-stage: Parrott, the Australian double-bassist. 'I want her to get damn tired,' the old spieler says. ''Cause I got somethin' in mind.' Now he's playing the cute old goat. 'I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole.' Parrott soldiers on, with exemplary forbearance, and Paul puts a note of hope...
...first official year of rock 'n roll, the hits stopped coming. A nice married couple was suddenly sooooo 1954. Paul looked less like a genius- guitarist than an irrelevant uncle. Les and Mary did commercials for the Robert Hall clothing chain ('When the values go up-up-up/ And the prices go down-down- down') and Rheingold Beer. They broke up the act, and their marriage. (Ford died, at 52, in 1976.) Paul pretty much retired. He survived quintuple-bypass heart surgery; it was one of the first operations of its kind - another Les Paul innovation. Back from the dead...
...popular mind Les Paul existed for a half-decade: the years 1950-54, when he and Ford enjoyed 16 top-ten hits, including 'How High the Moon' (#1 for nine weeks) and 'Vaya Con Dios' (#1 for 11). That would be enough, for anyone whose memory contained chips of Ford's silky stylings and Paul's amazing facility with a sound he invented and perfected. As he told Stephen K. Peeples in the 60-page booklet that comes with the 'Les Paul: The Legend and the Legacy' four-volume CD set (on the Gold Rush label): 'That big, fat, round...
...sound with an early reel-to-reel tape machines. He designed (but did not build) one of the first synthesizers. He devised the first eight-track tape recording system, which would not become generally accepted until 15 years later, with the Beatles' "White" album. And he invented the Gibson Les Paul, a guitar used in various models by Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and loads of other Guitar-zans. Paul told interviewer Frank Beacham that a lot of people don't know he plays a guitar. 'They think I am one.' He is something more: a genius of a tinkerer, with...
...formed his first trio, with the bass player Ernie Newton and rhythm guitarist Jim Atkins (the older half-brother of Chet Atkins, with whom Paul would cut the 1995 album 'Chester and Lester'). They came east and, 64 years before Paul's gig at Iridium, there was a Les Paul Trio playing a New York club...