Word: paule
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Paul, Les • death...
...Just One More Chance In 1955, the 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. Paul and Ford 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...
...Then Ford takes over with her menthol-smooth voice, multiplied into three-part harmony by Paul's studio gizmonics. She coos, "Somewhere there's mu-u-u-sic," coaxing four syllables out of the word by gliding over them rather than hiccuping through them. She wants the listener to know this is an up-tempo love song, not a stuttering novelty. In the bridge - "There is no moon above, and love is far away too" - she lightly swings "above" and "and love," almost gulping each first syllable. You expect her to do the same with "is far," but she smartly...
...softening also leads smartly into Paul's solo. He feeds out of Ford's vocal with a wah-guitar wail that seems to hunch the shoulders of a note, then relax into some fleet picking in Paul's trademark bubbly style as if he's somehow playing underwater and the notes have quickly risen to the surface to pop in the clear air. That's the first chorus. The second features a lot of the power chords that later rock guitarists would borrow. It climaxes in an ascending "aaaah" from the Ford voices that transports us into the third instrumental...
...like Henri Matisse, in a wheelchair in his 80s, who continued to create art - cutting out bits of colored paper, painting with his brush in his mouth, supervising his decoration of the Chapel of the Rosary in St.-Paul de Vence because it was what he did, because it kept him alive. That's why Les Paul continued to play weekly gigs at Iridium well into his 90s, until shortly before his death, putting the final touches, grace notes, on the edifice of his achievement. Each Monday evening, two legends would fill that tiny stage: a living legend, Les Paul...