No, 100.3 isn’t the frequency of a favorite FM radio station, it was my temperature last night. My fever has broken, but I’m still miserable with a very bad cold, the worst I can recall having in many years.
Carol says because of the fever and muscle aches, it must be the flu.
Well, that certainly is a fun account Dennis wrote about seeing, hearing, and meeting Les Paul, the legendary guitar impresario, virtuoso, and recording engineer. Thanks again, Den.
Les Paul had first played around with sound-on-sound using disc recording, but as soon as magnetic tape recording came along he took full advantage of it. At its simplest, by disabling the erase head on a monaural tape recorder, a second recording can be placed over another. Added to that was the trick of the recording the first pass at 7.5 inches per second, then running the overdub pass at 15 ips. This sped up the first pass, giving it a weird, yet compelling, sound, if it’s done right. Listen to this 17-second Les Paul clip.
[audio:/2008/MAY/LesPaul_normal_speed.mp3]Hear that guitar that’s pitched impossibly high? Now listen to the same clip played at half speed.
[audio:/2008/MAY/LesPaul_half_speed.mp3]The guitar sounds right, but everything else is slow. Ross Bagdasarian used the same technique for his chipmunks, and the South Park guys make liberal use of audio speed manipulation.
One of the highlights of my mid-April visit to New York City was seeing Les Paul and his Trio perform at their standard Monday night gig. With apologies to “Stardust Memories” and Woody Allen, it was “Jazz Heaven”!
“Good morning!” Les Paul opened his sold out eight o’clock show with that greeting — but it was 8:00 pm — not 8:00 am! Les famously keeps the night club musician’s hours — staying up late into the night and sleeping through most of the day. At 1:00 am, he was still bright and talkative, long after most people of any age had hit the sack. The man, who started in Vaudeville as part of a hillbilly act under the name “Rhubarb Red”, is nearing 93 years old! Les is still active and engaged, still intent on coaxing notes out of his customized Les Paul guitar, still working on new sounds. Talk about a “Living Legend” — Les Paul defines the term!
The founding father of the solid-body electric guitar and the innovator of sound-on-sound and multi-track recording, Les Paul still plays two shows a night, every Monday night, at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City. The small club is located below street level, beneath Ellen’s Stardust Diner, at the corner of Broadway and 51st Street. The capacity is listed as 120 and they make sure that they squeeze in all 120!
Seated at the front of the stage on a stool, Les is lively and talkative and not afraid to make a few risqué jokes with the band. The current Les Paul Trio consists of longtime accompanist Lou Pallo on rhythm guitar, versatile John Colianni on the piano and the lovely and talented Nicki Parrott on the double bass. He shares the spotlight with his crack trio, allowing him to take short breaks while the music and repartee never cease. He opened the 8:00 pm set with “Begin The Beguine” and included such standards as “The Tennessee Waltz” and “All Of Me”. He may no longer have the speed of his younger days, but he still knows how to get the most out of each song. In fact, his modern sound may be even more soulful and expressive than his legendary speed-demon years. Guest vocalist Sonya Hensley came out to perform a scornful blues tune with Les and the Trio. After a brief discussion, they did a driving version of “Route 66” followed by a personal favorite, “Summertime”. Les invited a young guitar player in the front row to come up and join the band, using the showcased Les Paul guitar from the stage set. Les joked around as they played a blues jam, telling the youngster to “show some teeth” as he played! The band later played a rousing and fresh version of “Sweet Georgia Brown”, which knocked the dust off of the old museum piece and brought it back to life for the 21st Century.
The PBS American Masters episode, “Les Paul — Chasing Sound” is available on DVD and is well worth the investment with 90 minutes of extras, including a full set at the Iridium. Les’ son, Rusty, sells copies of the DVD at a little table by the entrance after the show. The 8:00 pm audience must vacate the club to make room for the 10:00 pm performance. After the late show, Les comes back out and meets his fans. If you go to the first show, as I did, you have to return and wait outside until the second show ends. It seems like half the audience has brought their own Gibson Les Paul guitar for him to personally bless and autograph. Being 92, he moves slowly and needs a bit of assistance, but he navigates the narrow aisles and soon takes his place in a booth on the mezzanine level. He sits and chats with each person in an unhurried fashion. The line to meet him stretched all the way around the club. Quite a few kids, toting their Les Pauls, waited expectantly in line with their parents.
I finally got to meet him at about 1:00 am and mentioned that I was thrilled that he played “Golden Earrings”, a hit movie song from early 1948 but now largely forgotten. The most popular versions were done by Peggy Lee and Bing Crosby. The song has a gypsy guitar vibe, very fitting for Les Paul’s current style. He said that the band had started playing the song while warming up recently and they added it to the set since it had turned out so well. He signed my DVD and said “You’re really going to enjoy that, it’s received four star reviews.” I watched it this week and I can’t recommend it enough. In fact, it easily could have been twice as long! Just the tour of his equipment room in his New Jersey home is worth the price of the DVD. It appears that he saved every piece of electronics he ever fiddled with, including his original Ampex tape recorder and the home made solid body guitar known as “The Log”.
The official DVD site and the American Masters site may interest you. You can check below for some rough video clips of Les Paul at the Iridium, starting with this shaky one which catches him at his most playful, profane and risqué!
© Dennis F. Rogers
Wow, thanks, Den! How ’bout I play a couple of Les Paul instrumentals? These are both from among the first Les Paul sessions with Capitol Records, exactly sixty years ago, April 1948. The first tune is an interpretation of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and it’s followed by Les Paul’s own composition, “Hip-Billy Boogie.”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/ThisThingCalledLove.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/HipBillieBoogie.mp3]Note that these recordings are early examples of pop releases done on magnetic tape. (As is Arthur Godfrey’s unfortunate 1948 song, “Slap Er Down Agin, Paw“.) Dennis pointed out that Les Paul was a pioneer in sound-on-sound recording, and Paul also took advantage of the variable speed feature available with tape recording; a technique that the Beatles later adopted with enthusiasm.
It’s always been my intention to not make my posts comprehensive. I try to keep each one focused on one thing, and provide what I can from my collection of stuff, without doing a lot of research. Tom Tastewar, who shall henceforth be called just Tastewar, because it sounds edgier, has done some checking into Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. 
In this instance, a little looking on my part would have served me well, because Tastewar found a link with animated GIFs of something that was included in Brother, the Van Eaton’s Apple LP. Here’s the link. I had totally forgotten about this! It’s a strip of paper with slits, printed on both sides, that you put into a loop, placed on the turntable, and played like a zoetrope. One side had Lon, the other had Derrek. It’s the next step up from a flip book in animation technology. Mine has been lost for ages. I remember the first time I realized it was missing, but I have no idea what happened to it.
One of my relatively rare eBay acquisitions is this Nostalgia Postcard from England, reproducing a magazine cover from late 1949 with Petula Clark, just turned 17. Picturegoer called itself The National Film Weekly, and Petula was a movie star, and not yet a chart-topping hit singles singer. Of course in America we knew nothing of Pet’s 20+ year career when she hit it big here, stateside.
Way back in high school, in the November 23, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, was a review of a record by a pair of brothers, Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. Click the thumbnail picture to see a scan from my original copy of the magazine. The LP was on the Beatles’ Apple label, and it was called, fittingly, Brother. The cover looked a bit weird, with the brothers bare-chested and embracing, but the review was a rave, it was on Apple, and George Harrison was involved, so I bought it. I enjoyed the record a lot, and being very much into church at the time I liked the religious theme that ran through many of the tracks. The Van Eaton brothers had a follow-up record, but by then Apple Records as a recording studio was gone, so they were on a different label. I forget which one (A&M) because I was a totally broke college student and my record purchases were very few.
A brief account of the demise of Apple Records as anything but a logo and a legal entity (albeit a significant one, ably run by the late Neil Aspinall), is told in the memoir of recording engineer and producer Geoff Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere. Emerick also describes his involvement, or lack of it, with the recording of the Brother album.
One of George Harrison’s new signings was the Von [sic] Eaton brothers–Lon and Derrek… Harrison started out producing the brothers’ album, with me doing the engineering, but then he got fed up and frustrated, so he had his old friend Klaus Voormann take over as producer. I knew him from as far back as the Revolver days, when he’d come into the sessions to talk about the album cover he was designing. He and I just didn’t click, though, so I begged off from the project and turned the reins over to another engineer.
I’ll play a couple of tracks from the album. First, the song produced by George Harrison, “Sweet Music,” that the Rolling Stone review characterized as being similar to, and as good as, “My Sweet Lord.”
To hear this song, buy this CD.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/SweetMusic.mp3]
And this is “Sun Song,” produced by Klaus Voormann.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/APR/SunSong.mp3]