Les Paul in the NYTimes Magazine

[brownie]

A Les Paul interview in the magazine section of Sunday's New York Times.

July 6, 2003

Rules? What Rules?

By LES PAUL as told to K. LEANDER WILLIAMS

The phone still rings all night. It's been like that ever since I can remember. Musicians

know that I'm a night person, so when someone's got a technical question -- how do

you hold the guitar pick for this, how do you finger that chord? -- they call. Back when

Jimi Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios, he was on the phone all the time; we

talked about how to mike a guitar amplifier and where he should place the mike in

the studio.

I had come across Jimi sometime before at a roadhouse spot in New Jersey called

the Allegro. I know the year was 1965 for two reasons: the Gibson Guitar Corporation

and I were in the middle of what I call our divorce, and second, Simon and Garfunkel

had a hit on the radio, ''The Sounds of Silence.'' I came up playing with the best of

the best jazz and pop musicians in the 30's and 40's, and I believe if you want to

stay at the top of anything, you've got to remain curious. That's why I dropped by

places like the Allegro. Right now I'm trying my damnedest to keep up with the latest computerized recording equipment.

The afternoon I first saw Jimi, he was playing a Les Paul Black Beauty, left-handed.

Man, was he all over that thing! Black was the second color I asked Gibson to make

when they went into production on the first Les Paul model solid-body electric guitars

in 1952. I've found that people hear as much with their eyes as with their ears,

and visually, a black guitar really accentuates the movements of a guitarist's fingers.

Jimi was auditioning that day. My son had been helping me distribute some of my

records, so he was waiting in the car. But when I walked in and heard this guy

wailing -- he had that guitar wide open -- I decided to stick around for a while. I

t was the afternoon; the place was pretty empty, so the bartender was watering

down the drinks. I never got Jimi's name. I asked -- the bartender didn't know.

Then I realized my son's still in the car! I go out there and tell him that we're

going to swing back after we finish dropping off records. When we got back to the

Allegro, Jimi was gone. I said to the bartender, ''Where is that guy? . . . Did he

get the gig?''

''Are you kidding?'' the bartender said. ''He was too loud. We threw him out.''

Luckily the guy had snapped a picture, probably because I was interested. I have

the photo on the wall. It took me years to come across him again.

The music life hasn't gotten much easier than when I was on the road. I wouldn't

have had it any other way, but it's not like the person who works 9 to 5. It helped

that my wife at the time, the singer Mary Ford, was beside me and we had our kids.

I still think that there's nothing like being onstage, but recently I had a thought

that startled me. There was a birthday party for me at the Iridium jazz club last

month, the place I've been appearing every Monday night for about eight years

now, ever since the other club I played regularly, Fat Tuesday's, closed down.

I looked out in the audience -- many young enough to be my grandchildren -- and

found myself wondering how in the hell they knew who this old guy was. It's not as

if I have a hit record; it's been years since I was even on the charts. When I

asked some folks between sets, I got the same answers I've been getting for

years: they own a Les Paul, or a son has one and plays it too loud. I always

apologize. It might have had to do with it being my 88th birthday and all, but I kept

feeling that there's got to be some other reason that I've managed to be this

fortunate. But maybe it's a question no one can answer.

What I'm sure of is that it ties into the one thing that people invariably ask me:

Why am I still at it? The short answer is that I like being around people, especially

all these gifted players who come to sit in with us, the Jimmy Pages and Paul

McCartneys and Eric Claptons and Al Di Meolas. It's true that I can't really keep

up because of the arthritis in all of my fingers; two fingers on one hand are useless

and three on the other. Lots of young guys still ask me how to do things, though,

which is harder nowadays because so much has happened in popular music

that I can't really offer advice on what to play anymore. I was never much for rules,

anyway; otherwise I probably wouldn't have invented anything or gone so far in

music. It makes me think of Wes Montgomery, the great guitar player who used

his thumb instead of a pick. Thank the heavens that no one was around to tell

him what to do when he was learning, because if they had, he might have ended

up sounding like me or someone else -- and we'd never have had him to admire.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality.

There aren't any.

[Joe G]

Nice. Thanks for posting that.

[BERIGAN]