[Dixielandjazz] A Les Paul Essay Rules?

[Stephen Barbone]

July 6, 2003 - New York Times

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. It 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.