First things first: Les Paul is not dead. Apologies if that comes off as needlessly coarse, but so many people, when told recently that Paul had been giving interviews to promote a new album, expressed surprise at the basic fact of his continuing existence, that it seemed necessary to firmly establish it before proceeding.
In fact, Paul, a genuine legend in the worlds of invention and guitar playing, is more than not dead, way more. He is thriving, at least as much as any 90-year-old former multiple-bypass patient beset with painful arthritis and other cruel vagaries of age can be said to be thriving. Last June, Carnegie Hall filled up for a birthday tribute to Paul that featured him playing with more than a dozen guitar stars, leading to the release of a special edition of Les Paul with Mary Ford: The Best of the Capitol Masters.
The new album, Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played, which is ambling up the charts, is his first original studio recording in 27 years as well as the first unabashed blues/rock 'n' roll disc of his 70-year career. He continues to sell out two sets every Monday night at the Iridium on Broadway, playing old-time jazz favourites.
At the end of a recent afternoon sound check in the subterranean club, Paul gingerly lifts his bony frame off a stool and shuffles into the cramped dressing room backstage, where he settles himself onto a tired couch. He doesn't even notice the beat-up surroundings until they are pointed out to him. "Oh, the greatest digs, yeah," he chuckles.
Paul tried to give up this life 40 years ago when the slog became too exhausting, retiring to his home on a seven-acre spread across the Hudson River in Mahwah, N.J. "It's more difficult the more popular you get," he explains. "It's getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning to appear on all the disc-jockey shows, and to be at all the events and the record signings, and all the promotion, and always being in the public eye."
Besides, when he announced his retirement in 1965, Paul already had enough successes to his name for 10 careers: backing up the Andrews Sisters, Dinah Shore and Bing Crosby; playing for presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower; playing on the first television broadcast in 1939; scoring a string of million-plus-selling top-10 hits in the 1950s with his then-wife Mary Ford (they divorced in 1964, she died in 1977), such as Vaya Con Dios and How High the Moon; helping originate the concept of multiple-track recording and designing the first portable eight-track recorder; hosting a radio show and, later, a television show. Then there's the little matter of him being one of the inventors of the solid-body electric guitar. In 1952, Gibson picked up his design and began manufacturing the Les Paul Gibson, which became one of the instruments of choice for rock gods around the world.
Keith Richards, who contributes a rip-snorting version of Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl with Buddy Guy and Rick Derringer on Les Paul & Friends, says in the publicity materials for the album, "We must all own up that without Les Paul, generations of flash little punks like us would be in jail or cleaning toilets. This man, by his genius, made the road that we still travel today."
Paul, too, is still travelling that road: Retirement didn't quite work out as planned. That's what happens when you can't stay away from playing music for yourself and others. "If you're a lover of music, that means you must love your instrument. You wanna practise, you wanna conquer it and you're always changing," he says, speaking in a congested growl. Though his inventions and performances have made him a rich man, he clearly doesn't waste money on clothes, sporting a uniform of faded green turtleneck, dark work pants and a satin jacket bearing the Gibson logo.
"Arthritis will make you do a lot of changing in your whole life. Do you give up, give in to the arthritis, or do you fight it? Even the advice of a doctor would tell you to forget about it, because you're just gonna live with something that's never gonna give up on you, it's gonna keep eating away on ya, worsening the condition and you'll be on medication the rest of your life. But do you wanna give up on your music?"
For Paul, playing guitar offers the same sort of emotional and physical therapy that an amateur gets from strumming by himself at home. "I have seen this over and over, where this high executive can't wait to get home, put his old clothes on, grab his guitar and get in a kitchen corner somewhere so he can play his instrument. He may be an amateur, he may be very good at it, but that's his psychiatrist, that's his housewife, that's his maid, that's his bartender," he says.
The new album got its start when an executive from Capitol/EMI Records, "walked right in that door and says, 'We gotta do something with you, you got a dynamite act.' " The problem is, Paul has no idea what might be considered commercial in today's uncertain and fragmented music market.
"When Mary and I were back in that era, there was nothing I didn't know. I could tell you what was in the top 50 records any week of the year, for years and years and years, and I could tell you where the most records were sold, in which state, which city, which store, what the jukebox operators thought of it, everything," he explains. "Now, there's rap over here, there's heavy metal over there." he trails off. "It just never stops."
When the label suggested a rock record, "I says, 'A rock one at 90 years old with some young guys? It's a hell of an idea.' " He told EMI they could pick the songs and he'd pick the artists. He invited his friends to play on the album, turning the disc into an all-star tribute to his life and career.
Joss Stone and Sting play with him on Love Sneakin' Up on You, Sam Cooke purrs over Eric Clapton on the throwback Somebody Ease My Troublin' Mind; Peter Frampton, Mick Hucknall, Richie Sambora and Jeff Beck each sit in on a cut; and a five-year-old Steve Miller, who has known Paul all his life, is featured singing in an archival sound bite from The Les Paul Radio Show that kicks off Miller's own new funkily revised Fly Like an Eagle. Paul offers no opinion on the disc, saying that he'll wait for the public to pass judgment. This is a frequent theme in his conversation, the notion that audiences' desires are the only thing that matters. "I want to please the people, and I play for the people, and if they want to hear Sleepwalk, I'll play Sleepwalk, if they want to hear Caravan, they'll hear Caravan." (In fact the new album does include Paul doing a Mexican-tinged version of Caravan.) "If they wanna hear some down blues, we'll play down blues, if they want country, we'll play country, it would make no difference to me."
Still, when pushed, he'll admit that jazz is his first love, but he never dedicated himself solely to the form, "because I know that's a good way of starving. I found that out many years ago. I quit my job in Chicago as a country player, making $1,000 a week and I went to work the following week for $5 a week, playing jazz." In time, of course, that changed, and for the golden years of his life, Paul found a little niche where he could play the jazz standards without pressure, giving himself and the people what everyone wanted.
For more than 20 years now, first at Fat Tuesdays, then at the Iridium near Lincoln Center and, since August, 2001, here at the new Iridium location next to the Winter Garden Theatre, Paul has given the people want they want: a jazz lick or two, a few stories about the old days and some shopworn but harmless and well-received shtick. He is a mini-industry at the Iridium. Out-of-towners line up to pack two sets every Monday night, at $37.50 a head, the highest cover price at the joint. The staff wears white-on-black Les Paul T-shirts, which patrons can buy as they are rushed out between sets, along with one of Paul's CDs. The priciest cocktail on the menu, at $20 a pop, is the Les Paul Gibson: Belvedere vodka, vermouth and onions served in an oversized souvenir martini glass.
This past Monday night, about halfway through his first set, he introduced the audience to his bass player, a blonde knockout from Australia with a moody set of pipes, and asked her with a hint of lechery in his voice what she was going to do. "What do you want me to do?" she purred. "I'm flexible." Paul shot back, "Hey, I do the funny lines," then turned to the crowd with mock self-pity. "Why do they always come around when you're 90?"
They're hoary jokes -- he and the blonde have been bantering like this for years -- but the crowd laps up the routine. At one point, the sound kicks out on his guitar and he struggles for a few minutes. Finally he gives up and switches guitars, turning to the crowd with sly comic timing to growl, "Shoulda' got a Fender." The crack brings down the house. He's just giving the people what they want.
Back in the dressing room, Paul is reminded that he has been inducted into the Grammy, rock 'n' roll and inventors halls of fame and is asked how he would like to be remembered: as a musical innovator, an inventor or a multi-million-selling guitarist?
"I'll let the public decide that," he says softly. "But I don't think any of us, inventors or creators or people who are lucky enough to be successful in their career, should think that they're going to be remembered for this or this or this," muses Paul. When he dies, he says, he'll just be, "a person that was here, and is gone and that's the end of it."
He recalls that one day, many years ago, he was driving around Edison, N.J., looking for the site of the former laboratory of Thomas Edison, after whom the town is named. "I asked two policemen that were leaning against a lamppost where Thomas Edison's laboratories were, and they says, 'Tom who?' "
He pauses to let the words sink in. "This is the biggest surprise to me.
Someone that invented so much and was so important. And as far as these two policemen were concerned, they never heard of him and they work on the force in Edison," he says. "And that makes you think. Makes you think."