Les Paul & Leo Fender Part I

you think? Yea, Dad, Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this one. As a musician and guitar nerd uh. And we we definitely want to shout out at the beginning. The inspiration behind this, and a lot of the research for this came from the great book called The Birth of Loud. It's not there's not a colon on the cover, but it's implied. Should we get a different jingle for implied colon? Um? Yeah, but it should could be like a down kind of

thing burn Okay. The Birth of Loud, Leo Finder, Les Paul and the guitar pioneering rivalry that shaped rock and Roll And this was from Ian Ports in twenty nineteen, and it is a if you're a guitar player, just get the book. You probably already read it, but if he hadn't get it because it's great. Yes, um, hats off to him. Hats off to Dave Russ for helping us out with this one as well too. Totally they did a great job. So um, well it's a two part right, Yeah, we were gonna too parted up because

it's that big, it's that important of a thing. It's really easy for people like me, who um, you know, appreciate music but also appreciate music to you know what I mean, um, to kind of overlook the just the the epic story behind electric guitars. It's almost like like I didn't think they were always there, and I knew roughly when they've been invented, and I think I kind of knew kind of who invented it, but I didn't realize just what a sweeping effect and impact that electrifying

certain kinds of guitars had on the world. Like it's it's it's one of the most impactful inventions ever made. Oh absolutely, uh. And then when you look at this story and read that book, especially Um the Gentleman Les Paul and Leo Fender. It's a remarkable story and that they were very similar in some ways, they were very very different in a lot of ways. They they both ended up with um permanent injuries that affected their craft. Um. When one was up, another might be down a little um.

And and this goes to the guitars as well. When the the Fender brand was up, it seems like the less Paul was down. When the Less Paul was up, Fender was down. And it's really they both kind of tried to take credit for things that they didn't really invent at times. So it's it's really interesting when you look at the story of these two dudes and this era of innovation and invention and just how remarkable it was and for the people who are really unfairly left

out that had maybe even more to do with it. Yeah, because there's a lot of hands that went into the creation of the electric guitar as we understand it today, a lot of people, a lot of unsung people. Uh, these guys just happened to be two the ones who's whose names you know, became synonymous with electric guitars. But there's also not to say like they didn't deserve to have that kind of recognition too. They really did contribute, even if they did kind of like you said, take

credit to some extent for things they didn't necessarily do specifically. Yeah, it's one of those inventions that if you ask someone who invented the electric guitar, you have to follow that up with a lot of questions in order to answer it. Is it the person who invented the electric guitar pickup which made it possible to electrify something? Or is it the first person to stick that pick up on a chunk of wood instead of a big hollow guitar? Or is it the first person to actually build one that

worked that you could sell to people. Um, you just can't answer that cleanly and say this person invented the electric guitar. Like five or six people invented the electric guitar. Yeah, And if you're just a normal like non you know, guitar person, you probably regretted asking that question. Now you just say, is that freedom rock? Hey man? Yeah, that ran through my head more than once. For sure. Turn it up. So, UM, I guess we should get started.

Um with you want to start with Leo Fender. Yeah, so, um, Aaron's Leonitas Fender. Webster's defines Fender as Leonitas Fender. He doesn't have a good name. And he's one of these guys you said that. He and Les Paul, who will meet in a little while, we're very different. And Um, Leo Fender wasn't just different from Less Paul. He was different from a lot of people. He was what you

would call an engineer. And if you have a parent who is an engineer, or a friend dad, or you're an engineer, you know that engineers are different, kind of different. They're cut from a different cloth. And and Leo Fender was definitely an engineer from what I can tell. Yeah, I totally thought about your dad during this. Um. Leah was born on August nineteen o nine in Orange County, California, and his first injury that affected his craft was his eye.

When he was um between seven and eight. He lost an eye when he fell off his dad's vegetable truck and had a glass eye from there on out. Um, you know it's it's not like losing an year, which we'll get to that later. Um, if you're an engineer who works in generally in sound, but when you're working on small circuit boards and stuff like that, losing one eye is certainly going to affect your work well. Plus also he apparently was self conscious about it, which is

just just at my heart. Can you imagine a little a little eight year old Leo Fender who's like, you know, can't look up, He's looking down at the ground all the time while he's talking to you because he's self conscious about his class ali that it's just heartbreaking. Yeah. And like he said, he was an engineer, little electrical circuit board nerd Uh. He would take things apart and put him back together from an early age. He there's a great story from the book when he was about

ten years old. Uh, he got underneath the car and the driveway and basically took a look at it, what was going on, went inside and sketched out not only just what it exactly looked like, but how it all and could explain how it all together to make that car move, Yeah, which is astounding. That's like prodigy kind of stuff. Like he was an engineering prodigy is another way to put that. Not you know, even even among engineers, that's pretty remarkable, and especially as a kid to do

it too. Um, and then what makes him even more remarkable as an engineer And for all the things that he accomplished, he never had any formal training as an engineer. He just kind of became one just by beat. Doing things that engineers do. Was like taking things apart, putting them back together, inventing new stuff, improving things that he thought could be improved. He just kind of learned by doing, which is you know, that's that's old school, very old school.

Get in there and tink her away, right. Yeah, but if you don't have overalls on, what are you doing? You know what I mean? Now? Was your dad always tinkering with things in the house to know? He was more like, um, I've had to like make drawings all day at work. Leave me alone, Maybe bring me an old Milwaukee Tallboy before you leave. But if there was anything that went wrong in the house, you know, my mom would be like can you fix that? Can you fix this? And he could fix it all. Yeah, no problem,

I can fix nothing. Yeah. He was like, um, he was too busy leading um cub scout meetings that I was not a part of any longer. It's a tinker. He was too busy. Well, it sounds like you guys found a great way to not spend time together. Well, I would bring a beer. That's how I got to spend time. Uh. So Leo was really fascinated with radios early on as a child. He would build his own.

He got a broadcast license when he was in high school, and before you know it, he had kids and neighbors, adults even that would come over to have him fix their radios, and to the point where he had a little repair shop and there in Folds in California, where the big Fender factory ended up being. Yeah, I guess it started out at that radio as the radio repair shop and just kind of grew from there, right, Yeah, as a radio shack. Isn't that cool? A literal radio shack? Yeah,

I guess so. I I think that the good people at radio Sheck would have had a problem with it had you called it that, But it was that. You could have made a case like, no, no, radio shack is the rip off. This is the radio shack, and the judge had been like, shut up, shut up, shut up, you're all going to jail. Um. So he was building radios, he started working on PA systems, public address systems, which

I don't know what that is. It's always people are getting on me now for saying, like everyone knows what that is. It's what the principal talked on. Yeah, or anytime you have a microphone attached to speakers, that's a public addresses. Yeah, that's funny because it has been a little while since since somebody called you out on that because you stopped saying if you've been living under a rock, But now they're they're they're meeting you wherever you're at.

As far as that, I think you either have to completely stop or just give up caring. One of the two. Well, I explained what a PA system was, So maybe I'm on the right track. I think you did great with that. So this is in he started to become obsessed with where we're just gonna call the big challenge, which was basically, you have to think back to a time where music was not electrified. They were singing through microphones. The they did have um lap steel guitars were electrified. That was

technically the first electric guitar was the lap steel. Yeah, the Rickenbacker frying pan I saw, Yeah, that was kind of the very first thing. And in fact, the the guy who started Rickenbacker, George bow Champ, he was the inventor of the electric pickup. So so I gotta thank him big time for kind of bleeding the way. Yeah. He basically he yeah, he laid the foundation that who

knows how long it would have taken. But I just want to like explain to people who are like me who don't understand this kind of stuff, just real quick, with a pick up. Yeah, the pickup is the heart of what makes the electric guitar electric. And it basically works through um the electro magnetus him where you loop a bunch of like copper wire around some magnets, and then when you move the strings above those magnets, it actually affects that magnetic field and produces an electrical signal.

That electrical signal goes from the pickup through the chord to the p a where it's amplified, and now you have an electric guitar. And that's the guy who came up with this astoundingly impressive invention, because not only did it work, he figured out how to make it pretty small right out of the gate, like that frying pan. Um electric lap steel guitars ugly but it was small and compact. It wasn't like those early computers that took

up an entire room. He like figured out how to make it, you know, useful right out of the gate. It was a big, big innovation from what I can tell. Yeah. And another way to think of h if you know nothing about guitars of the pickup is it's like the microphone for the guitar. Uh, and you when you're when someone is playing a guitar, it's that little horizontal uh usually sort of uh, not oval, but it's square and then rounded. I don't know what that shape is. What's

that called ellipsoid? Is that real? Yeah? It's like that means that what it really is? Uh? Yeah, I think so. All right here it's the little ellipsoid underneath the strings. Uh. Sometimes they're covered up. Uh. Sometimes they're left open, like on Fender guitars, they're left open. Um. There's something called a humbucker pickup, which uh. Fenders have a tremendous amount of hum and buzz when you plug them in because

it's only one magnet. Humbuckers had two sets of magnets that canceled the hum out from each other and those are usually but not always, covered up with a little steel plate. Right, So humbuckers just two pickups so that they, like you said, they cancel out the electrical noise from the other equipment that it picks up right, Yes, and that's what I prefer. Although do you have a rick

and bocker? I prefer and have quite a few Gibsons. So, um, when we say, like the electric guitar, you just hit upon something when we were talking about the frying pan. The frying pan was the world's first electric guitar. It was from nine thirty one. It had pickups, um, it had amplified sound, but it was a lap steel guitar. UM. So very shortly after that we had what other people

would call the world's first electric guitar. This is where the answer where you're like, well, who invented the electric guitar comes from because what a lot of people were recognized as an electric guitar came after and it was from Gibson I think in N six where it looked like, you know, a normal guitar, but it was electrified, like the classic acoustic guitar, but an electrified version. And he said, well, why doesn't that qualify as the first electric guitar, because

it doesn't. For our purposes for this episode, that's still not the first electric guitars we're talking about. What we're talking about is, as we'll see, what's known as the first solid body electric guitar. That's what we're really driving at. So if you're sitting there, you know, and you're just crump crumpling your your issue of Guitarist magazine right now and losing your mind, sell down, because I just spelled

it out for everybody. Okay, Yeah, And so getting back to where we kind of got off track in a good way, but getting back to the big burning question, and the big problem was with these they called them Spanish guitars, but we call them acoustic guitars now that had those electric pickups in them. They were really prone to feedback because they had this big hollow cavity behind

the hole or it. You know, it usually had what's called f holes, and that sounds funny, but if you look at them, there to shape like an ornate sort of curse of f I'm glad you said it. So because of these big hollow acoustic guitars with these pickups and early amp technology they would just feedback like crazy

anytime you try to get any volume. So, yeah, those pickups wouldn't differentiate between the vibrations from the string that you were intended or the reverberated vibrations from inside the hollow body of that that Spanish style guitar, and so it just sounds awful, right, So that was the thing

that Leo Fender was obsessed with. He was like, how could because you know, it's hard to imagine, but at the time, the guitar was not a lead instrument, and it was there were occasionally like guitar solos and stuff that you could uh insert into a recording or you know, they recorded lives, but you could put on a recording, but like if you were playing live in a in a venue, the guitar was very much in the background because you couldn't turn it up loud enough to cut

through the vocals and the drums, the piano, the horn sections. These were all really loud live instruments. And he was like, Leo Fender was like, we've got to be able to amplify this sound such that it doesn't feedback to where you can actually hear the guitar in a concert hall. Yeah, so like it can stand on its own rather than a company's you know whoever the horns or get drowned out.

Like that was the point of like Fender and later on Les Paul's quest is to make the guitar its own thing, and to basically do that by making it really loud and sound really good when it is loud. Oh man, this is getting good. It's a good time for a break, I think right. I think so too. Man. All right, I'm gonna go take a cold shower and I'll be right backs and shock alright, chuck, So we're back.

So Leo Fenders on this quest, he's figured out there's a big problem here that if you want to make a guitar loud, you have to make it not an acoustic guitar. But he one of the things about him was he wasn't a musician, and like he didn't clamp onto this this problem of creating the electric guitar, figuring out how to make an electric guitar because he necessarily cared about the music. And he also later on it turns out he didn't like rock and roll, which would

be kind of ironic. He was a country western dude from southern California, kind of like Nicolas Cage's character and Valley Girl exactly. Belly Girl that was him basically is based on Leo Fender. That's my that's my theory. Uh yeah, So Fender didn't play, but here's something that was very

cute that story from the book. He would go to local music halls during live performances with his He always had this little tool kit on him, I think, much like your dad's slide role, and he would jump up on stage and tweak the amps during the middle of performances and people there would be like, what is this guy doing? And in the band sometimes and say, hey, everybody, this is Leo Fender. He's the one that makes it

sound just right. And uh he would like during during the show, would kind of get a screwdriver out and mess with the amps. That's pretty cute, It's very cool. Uh yeah. He'd be like, oh, you want me to turn it up, man, I'll turn it up for you, dirty hippie. All right? Should we go to Mr Les Paul? Yeah? So, um Fender, we should just just recap real quick. Fender has has stumbled upon the big problem with electric guitars, the reverb with a classical guitar. So he's thinking about that.

And now we meet Chuck Les Paul who was born Lester Paul Fuss in nineteen fifteen and Waukesha, Wisconsin. He was a Wisconsin boy like Ed Geene was as well, but not nearly as Grizzly. No, but a guitar wizard like ed Geene. Right, a little known fact about ed Gaine. Yeah, so before we get into his childhood, this is the real important distinction between Leo Fender and less Paul. Leo Fender did not play instruments, was an engineer at heart

and love to figure out problems for other people. Less Paul all was uh the height of his game, the most popular guitar player in the world and with a string of number one hits. Uh. He was also a tinkerer, but he was like, I need to make my guitar sound better for me, so I can get better and sound better. Yeah, that was his goal all along. But you know, it takes a special kind of person to say like, Okay, well then I need to figure out

how to make that happen. I need to figure out how to make an electric guitar rather than oh, what can I do. I need to I need somebody to do this for me. Somebody needs to invent this, right, I need to collaborate somebody. He was like, I'm I'm gonna go try to figure this out myself. And he really like, I didn't realize what a guitar got he was and that he he was like this. Um. I think at one point he had like four hits or four spots on the Billboard top charts. UM. Like he

was really a popular musician. UM about midway through his career. But even from a young age, he started out playing like he was a performer. And I think he's also credited Chuck with being the person um because he played country western too. He also played the harmonica. His act was called rubar Bread and it was just him and he played the guitar and the harmonica. And he figured out long before Bob Dylan every came along. But that's problematic.

You technically need four arms for that. So he fashioned a harmonica holder that he could wear while he was playing the guitar, just like Bob Dylan. More later on, he was the kid who invented that years before. Yeah, maybe this is another one of those things where it's like did he invent it or did he see it and make one on his own? But not taking anything away from the guy. He was also a kid taking

apart electronics in his house putting them back together. He really knew what he was doing, and he also had, you know, like every guitar player, that same big problem was when he played, he would be up there and he could sing through that microphone, although he didn't sing that much. He did when he was a kid, but later on he realized he wasn't not like a pro singer. Harmonica sounded good through the mic, but the guitar was

still in the background, and he knew that was an issue. Yes, apparently um as this as legend has it, he was playing a show at a barbecue stand. Um and I think it was a regular potentially a regular show. He could his harmonica sounded fine when he was singing. It was broadcast fine because he had a microphone, but nothing was working for the guitar was He was drowning it

out himself. So he realized that if he took the phonograph needle, the electrified phonograph needle from his his parents phonograph and attached it to the guitar and then attached to that to a radio, he could actually amplify his guitar. So he figured this out I think at like age thirteen, Um, because he wanted to improve his barbecue stand chops and tips and tips. He supposedly his tips tripled as a result.

But um, you know that's pretty impressive stuff. I would not have thought about that at the as at the tender year on the age oft. Yeah, I mean that's where the tinkering comes in. And I'm sure it didn't sound great to our ears now, but at the time, you have to put yourself in the place of like literally having never heard something like this happen. Uh, it was. It had to have been like a revelation to actually hear that guitar coming through a speaker, especially if you

lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin. You've never heard anything like that in your life. But he was very much opposite of Leo Fender and his personality. He was very gregarious, very outgoing, made a lot of friends. Uh, could also be a little brash. Was not a great husband to his two wives, which we'll get to, but he was He was always sort of the life of the party and he loved performing in front of people, whereas Leo Fender really kind of wanted to be at the background unless he was

very quietly getting on stage. Um. Unless Paul from the very beginning, once he could afford regular guitars, I think he moved to Chicago and was like making decent money, like backing other people up. But he had a relationship with Gibson from the very beginning because Gibson started out as an acoustic guitar maker. Uh, and they're still known. I mean, they make these great electric guitars, but you know some of the best guitars in the world, or

Gibson acoustic guitars. Yeah, they also made like Mandolin's and like yeah, like just all manner of stringing instruments and what they made were basically works of art. Yeah, they were beautiful and they still are. My favorite guitar I owned is one I bought during the pandemic. I finally bought the Gibson Acoustic U based on a nineteen forties model, and it's just it's amazing. The sound difference between even

that and my really nice Martin Acoustic is striking. Yeah, Gibs or Fender was not making acoustic guitars, and they still to this day don't make a very good acoustic guitar. Yeah, I can't imagine. It's really interesting that, like one of

the biggest guitar companies in the world. I don't if they can't or if they just don't put the resources toward it, but I think they're nicest acoustic guitar tops out at about eight hundred bucks, which is you know, you can get a pretty good guitar for that, but

these really really nice Gibson's are like four and five dollars. Yeah, And like Gibson's whole jam was to make professional quality instruments that were again works of art, but like if you were a professional musician, like Gibson could make an instrument that you could use and probably love UM. And they were making them already. They were making those electrified Spanish style or electrified acoustic guitars as as like I was saying, as as early as I think six was

the e S one fifty. E S stood for Electrified Spanish Guitar UM and there was a jazz guitarist named Charlie Christian who really kind of championed that development. He think he played for Benny Goodman's band, um but um I think they named the pickup in those after him, Charlie Christian Pickups. But U so les Paul was playing these Gibson guitars, but it still wasn't what he was looking for, because again, if you turned it up really loud,

you it would provide all sorts of problems. Yeah, it's funny these little letters that like the E S three thirty five is just a classic, amazing instrument still today, and they have all these cool letters and you never know what they name, but they mean but electrified Spanish. Is kind of funny that the iconic Gibson s G s G stands first Solid Guitar. Really. Yeah, they're all just these very mundane abbreviations that all these years later

just seemed cool because Angus Young plays it. Yeah right, well yeah, I mean if used a different example from Angus Young and be really on board, but I got you I play one. Well, there you go has a cool acts. Uh. So he charmed his way into the Epiphone factory in New York. Epiphone was a really big guitar maker at the time, and I think Gibson eventually bought UM, I think they're co Co brand or you know,

under the Gibson umbrella. Now, but he got to work on his problems, and you've got to look up some pictures of some of this stuff kind of starting now. Uh, just look up a picture of the log from Les Paul. And it was a I was about to say essentially, but it's not essentially. It was a four by four block of pine wood about two ft long that he put a guitar neck on, an epiphone guitar neck, and

he made his own pickup. I guess he didn't go out and buy a pickup or use one from another guitar, and he made his own pickup, you know, with a magnet and the wire, put some strings on it and called it the log. And it was a very primitive but working, solid body electric guitar. It looked very much

like something Devo would have played. Yeah, And in fact, it freaked people out so much early on UM that he ended up taking a part another guitar and glue ng sides onto the side of it to make it look normal, to make it look normal, And there's this great picture of him holding the log, kind of separating the sides off with a little wry smile. Um. But the Gibson little side note gives the Gibson Firebird guitar, which is one of my favorite guitars. I used to have one, but I sold it. It is a it's

called a through neck guitar. I'm sure there are others, but it's the only one I can think of that's really popular. Whereas it's the same thing. It's basically one long piece of wood, like the neck is the same piece of wood as the body, and then they glue on these wings on the outside. Okay, all right, settle down, Chuck. It's pretty exciting, so Chuck. Also, if you ever found yourself trapped in walt Kesha, Wisconsin, you go to go to the book Kesha County Museum and they actually have

the original log there on display. Oh really, Yeah, apparently they have a lot of Less Paul stuff there, including that with the wings of the of the guitar kind of pulled away to kind of show you know, it's a neck through design like the Fireber. I I was just teasing you, and I said to settle down. I was just taking an opportunity. Like, I'm charmed very much. I'm sure everyone else is by your childlike excitement over

this whole thing. I'm as excited as when I got my first guitar when I was twelve, which was a candy Apple red BC rich like metal guitar. I wish I knew what mine was. I had a metal guitar too, mom was pink, had a light coating of diamond dust. And I wish to god I could remember who it was. A local metal band from Toledo. Yeah. Yeah, they had

like an album and a poster and everything. And the guy, the guitarist from the band worked at like the music store, um where I would take lessons and he taught me and he was as interested as um Oh. I can't remember Carl Weather's character and happy Gilmore, but he's like a golf pro and just totally uninterested. That's how interested this guitar player wasn't seeing me as a future guitar player. Um. And it's not like I blame him for me losing

interesting guitar, but he definitely didn't. He wasn't a great mentor or anything. But I wish it's so bad I would have stuck with it a little bit longer because it was pretty pretty boss. When I look back on the whole thing. I never knew this. How long did you try? I don't know, five six lessons maybe? Al right. I wonder what happened to that guitar too, Like my parents bought the guitar. I mean it was used in everything, but like, I have no idea what became of that guitar.

I never uh took lessons, So maybe that's the key. Yeah, I could totally see that. I just shut myself in my room and and started buying tableature, which, if you don't know what that is, instead of actual sheet music, like written out like a you know, like real sheet music tableature or little numbers on they kind of mimic a six string guitar and they put little numbers on

the strings on where you should put your fingers. So it allows anyone who can't read music to sort of figure out songs like e E G, E e G. What are those chords? Someone's going to call you out on that. I don't know, but that that was the Kids in the Hall reference more than even a Deep Purple reference. Oh man, I love that band in the in the skits, the little kid garage band. Yeah, it's all right. So back to the log. The log was very rough, very primitive, but what it did accomplish was

amplification without feedback in longer sustain. Yeah. And more importantly, it was a solid body guitar. Like like Less Paul kind of crack that code that Fender, as far as I know, is still working on. Because this is nineteen right, Yeah, this was pre uh yeah, early nineteen forty. I think it was prely Offender for sure. Yeah, so I mean Less Paul really does have a claim to fame to creating the first wooden solid body electric guitar because I

think the frying pan was solid body aluminum. He figured out that problem of reverse just get rid of the hollow body, replace it with the solid body, and it was ugly. That seems to be the big problem. It wasn't exactly what he was looking for sound wise, but it was definitely close enough that it was like, I'm on the right track. Let me go show the people at Gibson. They're gonna love this kind of thing. And um, they basically laughed him out of the meeting in Kalamazoo,

Michigan because he um showed up with a really ugly guitar. Yeah, and not only that, like they just didn't see the vision because, like I said, they were working with these ancient luthier's who had this ancient craft. They weren't ancient humans, but they would wake them from the dead each day to go to the workshop and create a new guitar.

But the point is they were doing great with these big acoustic guitars, and they were like, no one's gonna want to hear that, because this is what a guitar is, basically, like, you don't it's not a lead instrument in the band. Lead that to the horns and the piano. So he was laughed out of there and a little egg on his face. But this was a full five years before Leo Fender came up with his first plant guitar, which you should also look up just typing Leo Fender black

Plant guitar. And it looks a little more like a guitar than the log, but not that much. No, it looks more way more like a guitar than the log, but it still doesn't look like a guitar as we

know it. Yeah, it was almost I get the impression that he created the guitar kind of like how you might build like a car out of clay, but the axle works because you're testing wheels, I don't think people and he built it as a test, yeah, but I don't think we mentioned that though, Yeah, but it was it was he was testing out like pickups and I think testing the concept of a solid body as well. But he wasn't making it like this is going to

be my prototype. But it turned out to actually be kind of a prototype because um, when he uh, I don't exactly know how word got around. I guess because he was friends with band and so bands would kind of come around the workshop to see what's going on, and they started coming around seeing and hearing this guitar that he made, and um, people started renting it apparently for the weekend to go play shows with and just knocking the socks off of the Bobby socksers in town

from what I can tell. Yeah, And at this point he has the Fender Electric Instrument Company. Uh, it's legit. And you know, in the background of all of this, and we're not going to talk much about amps, but in the background of all of this, he's building amps along the way. He was one of the first sort of master amp builders. Well, yeah, Fender amps are like as famous as the guitar. Basically, yeah, so where are we at right now? Fenders made his playing guitar, Leo's

got his log. Neither one of them are going places immediately with it. It's just kind of like they've both now cracked to the problem and there's a lot of obstacles between them and fame, or at least guitar production fame. Um, but you know what that means though, Right we're at our second break. Oh good, okay, Chuck, I think that was great. Um, so Chuck, just separ at our second break. He's clearly driving this episode. Let's all go with it,

shall we shock? Okay, we're back, Chuck, We're back. We got a log, We've got this little funny looking black, solid body guitar, and uh, we need to pick back up with with Les Paul In nineteen I guess forty one ish. He moves to Los Angeles. He's and to get session work. Uh he plays with Bing Crosby, who was, uh, sort of one of the most popular singers at the time.

Oh yeah, dude. He moved to Los Angeles to be near being Crosby, which I did little research, and that was kind of a common thing, what to just want to be near bing Crosses. Yeah, you've moved across the country to be near bing Crosby unless you were one of his kids. Oh is he a good father? Oh? Really not a good dad. I didn't know that. Wait a minute, are you thinking of mommy dearest? Oh yeah, that's right, that's one thinking thinking of John Crawford. Uh.

But he was a huge, huge music star. Um Les Paul was out there working with him. But then he gets I don't think we mentioned he had electrocuted really bad when he was twenty six playing music. He had sweaty hands, held the microphone, was also touching the guitar strings, completed a circuit and really damaged his hand such that it took Uh. I mean I heard his whole body, but it damaged his hand such that took quite a

couple of years to even recover, which was huge. Like he he might have never played again, Like there was a possibility that was going to happen. Yeah, and that's just injury number one for him. Um but he gets drafted in World War Two, goes to work in the Army at the Armed Forces Radio Network and is playing guitar, basically backing up the Andrews sisters backing up Being Crosby when they do these USO tours. So as far as the army goes in World War Two, pretty plumb gig right.

Um so. And plus he's again like he did move to l A to Bean or being Crosby in the fact that he's getting to like play with being Crosby. Is I'm guessing a lifelong dream of his come true. Um And even after the war, I guess he made enough of a connection with being Um I'm on a first name basis with him. By the way, um he uh that that Less Paul um kind of I guess became. I don't know if there was like a mentor thing, but at the very least he definitely patronized. Less Paul

helped his career big time. One of the things that really helped Less Paul become like a genuine, bona fide star. He was already fairly well known and a lot of circles had some hits, but what really shot him to the top was the song called It's Been a Long Long Time. It's actually a really good song, but it was kind of a song that was a hit because it kind of summed up America trudging wearily back from

World War Two. Um, and it's just kind of like this mellow solemn song where, uh, it's almost I'm sure there's other instruments, but my ears pick up Bing Crosby's vocals and Less Paul's jazz guitar um and they his guitar enhances the vocals so much. But there's a actual guitar solo in there, and it's slow, but it's really good. And that kind of shot Less Paul to superstardom from that point on. Yeah, so Bing Crosby is like, you need to open up a studio. I'll even help finance

this thing. He did so in his garage and before you know it, and Los Angeles, all these famous people are stopping by Les Paul's garage to hear him play, to hang out with him. Uh. He, like I said, he was a very gregarious guy. So people just kind of wanted to be around him. And this is all going great, but he still wasn't quite satisfied with what was going on because the sound just still wasn't there. He was he he called it sound on sound recording.

He was the first person, or one of the first people to experiment with studio techniques where you could layer recordings on top of one another. And this was before they were even recording on magnetic tape. Yeah, dude, multi track recording like you know how you hear drums playing, and you hear a guitar playing, and then you hear like vocals, all of those musicians may never have even been in the same room at the same time. You

can do that with multi track recording. Back in the day, if you wanted to make a recording, you had to get everybody into a room. You all had to be playing it once. He had to be playing the song together, and then you recorded it and that was the record wording, right, So did it come up with multi track recording? Was huge in and of itself, But I looked into what

he was actually doing and it's mind boggling. He would He came up, I think, with a song called Lover and it was was that the one where it's like seven tracks or eight tracks of guitars. And the way that he made each track was he recorded one track,

the first initial track onto acetate. He made a record of that, and then he took that record and he played it, and then he played along with it, and then he recorded that onto another record, and then another record, and then another record, and by the time he was doing his seventh track, he had a record of seven of seven tracks playing all at once on one record that he had recorded one by one, and he was

playing the eighth track with it. And if you messed up one time, say on track five, he had to start all over at the beginning, unless he still had those first few tracks handy. Hopefully he didn't break each record after each recording or anything like that, but in that nuts going to that, and that was about as innovating uh form of music as anyone had come up

with to that point. Yeah, it's funny when you hear people working with like pro tools and dragon drop digital recording now and they talk about like in the old days when they used when they would cut and spice tape, like go back even further, dude to less Paul doing this on actual actual ascetate records. It's crazy. It is crazy. When I was like, what what does that mean? What was he doing? Like dueling a state records? And I looked tonight my eyes popped out of my head. Yeah,

it's it's pretty remarkable. The innovations he was coming up with. So he's doing all that, he's becoming more and more popular, and then a very faithful thing happened. Uh a steel guitar player name. Uh do we say Joaquin Murphy. That's how I'm going with all right, that's how it spelled. H He came over to Less's house one day and he said, you know what, I got this guy here. I want you to meet him. And he's really good with working on amplifiers, and I think you guys might

like each other. Uh. And his name is Leo Fender and where you know it? And this this is movie territory. Leo Fender and Les Paul are hanging out together, trying to figure stuff out together, work shopping, problem solving. They um, you know, they pointed out, and he's right that they weren't like great friends. But it's not like they were enemies or rivals at first. They just were really really

different from each other. Yeah. Um, they kind of shared a U at the very least, they had a common problem or a common quest that they were both working on. They were just not similar people personality wise, so they didn't click. They were like, this is great, let's be partners were the same, right exactly, but they also were also kind of becoming rivals a little bit too, right, well, not quite yet. Like at this point they were genuinely

trying to figure stuff out together. Uh, and I think like Leo was coming over every he can basically musicians would come over still, and he would ask them questions and try and figure stuff out, try and solve these amplification problems. But um, yeah, there may have been a little friendly like let's see what this guy's got kind of thing, but you know, Les Paul was like, you can't even play yeah. And again remember remember though Fender. By this time he had a company, the Fender Electric

Instrument Company. He was mostly focusing on electric steel guitars because, um, not just country Western love that stuff, but Hawaiian music was really huge as well. Um, and they use a lap steel guitar. So um, he was he had a company already going. Les Paul had his own musical career going. He was just kind of, you know, he tinkered because he needed to his his focuses on his musical career.

So I could see there being like a little bit of a rivalry and that they were trying to crack the same problem, but other than that, they weren't necessarily rivals. You know, that's right. Uh. And in order to really solve this problem, it would take the entrance of a or gentlemen that we haven't even mentioned yet that was very, very important to the story of the electric guitar. And that is where we're going to leave you for part one. Nice Chuck, it was a very good cliffhanger. Who could

it be? I don't know, but you're gonna have to tune in Thursday to find out. In this very special two part episode of Stuff you Should Know, My money's on CC to Bill. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.