Les Paul still innovating at 86

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 18 (UPI) -- Les Paul -- a seminal figure in jazz, pop, country and rock music -- has lost the use of most of his fingers and both of his thumbs due to arthritis, so the 86-year-old guitarist has had to figure out a different way to produce the sound that made him a hero to generations of musicians.

Fortunately for Paul -- whose hits include "Blue Skies," "How High the Moon," and (with his late wife and singing partner, Mary Ford) "The World Is Waiting for a Sunrise" and "Vaya Con Dios" -- finding new ways of making music is something of a specialty of his.

From his development of the solid-body electric guitar and multi-track recording techniques to his startling comeback from massive injuries in a 1948 car crash, Paul is an old hand at blending the conventional with the improvisational to come up with the novel.

Take the crash, for example, in which his right arm was shattered at and below the elbow. It took him two years to recover from an array of injuries that included a broken nose, back, shoulder, six ribs, right leg and pelvis -- front and back -- as well as an injured spleen. Such extensive injuries would naturally cause a musician to contemplate a new career.

"I was way beyond scared," said Paul in an interview with United Press International to promote the new release of "The Best of Les Paul -- The Millennium Collection," part of the 20th Century Masters Series from Universal Music.

He had the presence of mind, though, to ask doctors to set his right arm at a 45 degree angle, so when the cast came off he would still be able to cradle and pick the guitar. Then, when the last of the casts came off, he went right back to work.

"Eventually they open you up and you're free," said Paul, "then you take as long as it takes and go back to work. The first thing I did was book a job for three days later."

The experience, said Paul, required him to learn to play all over again, to find new fingering and picking styles that enabled him to play the music that he wanted to play -- and that his fans wanted to hear.

"Within two or three months, I was back on the circuit and growing and was on my way," he said, "playing perhaps many of the same runs and scales, and the technique was similar but it had to be achieved differently."

Paul seems to have derived great pleasure from finding ways to succeed, even while going against the grain. And perhaps even while rubbing other musicians the wrong way, as he did in his early experiments with guitar amplification.

"It's the people that tell you it can't be done," he said, "and the rejects that you get when you carry an amp into the room and somebody says, 'You mean to tell me that you're going to plug that damn speaker into the wall?' And everybody in the band just hates anybody walking into the room with an AC cord."

He tells a story about the time when he was playing with bandleader Fred Waring -- "back at the beginning of the stuff" -- and Waring asked him why he got more fan mail than the leader of the band.

"I told him it was from people pleading with me to stop playing the electric guitar," said Paul. "Now you see a jazz violinist walk into a studio and he's got a damn cord hanging from his violin."

Paul's influence on the hardware that guitarists use is well known. It turns out that he has also been a stylistic influence on untold numbers of players who followed him.

He said Paul McCartney once told him that "if it wasn't for you there would be no Beatles."

If you listen to the stuff Les Paul plays on his 1944 recording "Blue Skies," you'll hear guitar riffs that showed up 40 years later in any number of heavy metal bands -- but with the amps cranked up and the beat changed to a straight ahead 4/4 rock and roll.

"If I go up to see Jeff Beck, for example, sometimes he's playing exactly the way I'm playing," said Paul. "Put today's rhythm behind it, you don't recognize it. I don't think there's a guitarist out there that I don't hear certain things. In most cases they turn it around until it's far from the original, and much better."

Paul has his favorites, and he's willing to single out some players and express his admiration for their music -- such as Al Dimeola, George Benson, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix -- but he said the guitarists he admires are too numerous to mention.

"I know I'd leave out 50 of my favorites if I just mentioned a few," he said. "There's just tons of them out there."

Now, nearly 70 years into his career, Paul is using his penchant for creative solutions to get around new limitations.

"I have arthritis so I don't have any movement in the fingers," he said, "so it's a challenge for me to simulate what I did on 'How High the Moon,' while I'm thinking, 'Somehow I'll get through this thing and people will recognize it.'

"You figure a way to do it with one or two fingers," he said. "You'd be amazed how much a tiny little movement becomes in how you're going to play something."

At this time of year, say 50 or 60 years ago, Paul said he learned to keep his schedule flexible so he could accommodate his friend and frequent collaborator, Bing Crosby.

"Every Christmas, Bing more or less told me, 'We got a date for Christmas and New Year's right?' said Paul. "I was to go with him wherever he went. We'd go to parties and Bing would bring his own trio, so he doesn't get into a party somewhere and everybody wants to hear Bing sing and he has some crummy old lady with flowers in her hat to accompany him.

"I look at that now and I say. 'My God, the people we played for, shared Christmas and New Year's Eve with, the elite.' Then of course the same thing works in some joint on Central Ave. in Los Angeles -- dealing with a jam session down there, learning and hearing something you'd never hear anywhere else.

Playing alongside the greats of his time, it turned out, was good for Paul's musical education.

"It was great," said Paul, "but that isn't what I wanted to do. It came down to a beer joint, where it didn't matter if you miss a note, and you're with the people and you're one of them."