Les Paul, 1915-2009: His Electric Guitar and Inventions Changed 20th Century Popular Music

Source: Voice of America Special English  www.manythings.org/voa/people 

Les Paul, 1915-2009: His Electric Guitar and Inventions Changed 20th Century Popular Music

I'm Shirley Griffith.

And I'm Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell about Les Paul, one of the most influential people in modern popular music. He was a skillful guitarist who played an energetic mixture of jazz and country songs. He was also an inventor.

The electric guitar and recording devices he created changed the sound of popular music and greatly influenced rock and roll.

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VOICE ONE:

That was the song "Lover", first released in nineteen forty-eight. To make this song, Les Paul layered eight recordings of himself playing the electric guitar. Some of the tracks were recorded at normal speed and some were recorded at half speed. Played at normal speed, the half speed recordings sound twice as fast.The song gives a good example of Les Paul's experimental style and inventive spirit.

Les Paul is best known for creating one of the first solid-body electric guitars and the eight-track recording device. He also perfected new recording methods to give special effects to his music.

Les Paul was born Lester William Polfuss in nineteen fifteen in Waukesha,Wisconsin. By the age of nine, he had taught himself to play the harmonica and had built a radio. He also learned to play the guitar and banjo.  He could not read music, but he could play music that he heard. And he had a good sense of musical structure.

Les Paul was soon performing in country bands in the Midwest. He left high school to perform full time on radio shows. He performed using the names "The Wizard of Waukesha", "Hot Rod Red" and "Rhubarb Red." He also started playing music influenced by great jazz guitarists including Django Reinhardt.

By nineteen thirty-seven, he had formed the Les Paul trio. He moved to New York City the next year. Les Paul played with many famous performers including the popular singer Bing Crosby.

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Around nineteen forty-one, Les Paul invented his famous guitar. He wanted to make an instrument that could play a note longer than notes played on a traditional acoustic guitar. He developed a new kind of electric guitar that had a solid body. On an acoustic guitar, the strings vibrate and the hollow part of the instrument, or the sound box, also vibrates. Les Paul wanted an instrument in which only the strings vibrated.

Making a guitar with a solid body permitted the sound of the strings to last longer because their vibrating energy was not weakened by a vibrating sound box. And this design reduced feedback, a noise problem common with acoustic guitars.

VOICE TWO:

To make his guitar, Les Paul attached guitar strings and two electronic pickup devices onto a flat piece of wood from a railroad track. A pickup is a device that captures the vibration of the metal guitar strings and changes them into electronic sound signals. He called his non-vibrating guitar body "the Log." It was a very strange- looking instrument, so he hid it inside the body of a traditional guitar.

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Les Paul said that guitarists could play louder and truly express themselves with this new guitar.  He said guitarists could become some of the most powerful people in a band. Les Paul was not the only person to make a solid-body guitar. Leo Fender created another version, the Fender Telecaster, in nineteen forty-eight.

The Gibson Guitar Company hired Paul to design a special "Les Paul" guitar. Versions of the guitar he created in nineteen fifty-two are still huge sellers, even today. Some of the top guitarists in the world have used this guitar. They include Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page from the band Led Zeppelin and Slash from the band Guns N' Roses.

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That was the song "Vaya Con Dios" which Les Paul performed with his wife, singer and guitarist Mary Ford. The two began playing together in nineteen forty-seven. The next year, Les Paul had a serious car accident that left him with severe injuries. His right arm was crushed.  Once set, he would never be able to bend his arm again. He decided to have his arm set at an angle so that he could keep playing the guitar.

During the nineteen fifties, Les Paul and Mary Ford recorded many hit songs including "Mockingbird Hill" and "How High the Moon." Mary Ford performed on Les Paul's radio show. Later they had a television show. Les Paul continued to experiment with different recording methods. He built his own recording studio in his house. He used technology and electronic effects to add a special sound to his music. In the late nineteen fifties he invented the eight-track recording method known as multi-track recording. Each track could be recorded and changed separately, without affecting the others.

By the nineteen sixties, Les Paul and Mary Ford's series of hits came to an end and they later ended their marriage. But Paul never stopped improving his guitars and other musical devices. He invented the "Les Paulverizer" device which permitted a performer to echo, or repeat, his or her music.

In the nineteen seventies, Les Paul made two records with the country guitarist Chet Atkins. One was called "Chester and Lester." It won a Grammy Award in nineteen seventy-six. Starting in the early nineteen eighties, Paul began playing in jazz clubs in New York City. He kept on performing weekly until a few months before his death.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored Les Paul by making him a member in nineteen eighty-eight. He was also a member of the Grammy Hall of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame and National Inventors Hall of Fame. His last record was "Les Paul and Friends: American Made World Played." It was released in two thousand five to observe his ninetieth birthday. On the album, Les Paul plays with guitar greats including Jeff Beck and Keith Richards. The album earned him two more Grammy Awards.

Les Paul died in August of two thousand nine. He was ninety-four years old. Someone once asked him if he thought he would still be playing at one hundred years old. He said he did not see why not, as long as people put up with him and he was having fun.

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This program was written and produced by Dana Demange. For transcripts, MP3s and podcasts of our shows go to voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Shirley Griffith.

And I'm Steve Ember. Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.

Sir Paul McCartney

Source: www.speakup.com.br

Language level: Advanced

Standard: British accent

SIR PAUL MC CARTNEY

Thanks for the Memories

At the age of 65, Sir Paul McCartney is a legendary figure. In addition to having been one half of the Lennon McCartney team that wrote most of the hits for the Beatles, his subsequent work, both with his band Wings and by himself, has also been impressive. According to Guinness World Records, McCartney is in fact the most successful musician and composer in pop music history.

Nor does McCartney have any retirement plans, in spite of having passed the age of 64 of the famous Beatles song (as in, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”). This year he released another album, Memory Almost Full, on the Mercury label. He was asked to explain the title:

Paul McCartney:

(Standard British /mild Liverpudlian accent).

To me, what I like about a title is if it’s not very specific…in actual fact I’d seen the phrase and I wasn’t quite sure where I’d seen it, but it stuck in my mind. Then I realised it was off my phone, just warning me that I…there were too many messages and I had to delete some. So I thought, “Oh, ‘Memory almost full’:  OK, that’s…kind of applies to the phone thing, so that’s sort of, you know, what happens in the modern world, but then, again, you know, when I talked to people about it, they didn’t see that, and they thought of, in…in a life, you know, your memory is often like a bit over-crowded, and you’ve got to, you know, delete some stuff, in order to put some more stuff in it.

THE EARLY DAYS

And, on the subject of memories, he was asked whether he had many of the days of the Beatles:

Paul McCartney:

Yeah, very vivid…you know, all our sort of early gigging memories, I mean, they’re not…I probably can’t remember individual moments so much as a haze of, you know, being in a ban. I probably can’t imagine…remember all the individual gigs. You remember some of them. You know, I remember going down to a place called Slough and we thought, “That’s a…you know” –we’d never been to places like that, you know, we were down to Slough and got there in an afternoon, like a church hall, and there…hardly anyone showed up, you know, ‘cause we weren’t famous. So those kind of things you remember.

A SENSE OF SADNESS

Memory Almost Full contains a rather morbid track. “End of the End,” which deals with the subject of death. McCartney was asked whether his own experiences of death had made him weaker of stronger:

Paul McCartney:

I’d like to think it would strengthen me…it doesn’t weaken me: let’s start there. It saddens me because there’s mates and lovers that will not come through the door again. And that’s a very sad thing, you know, your…my mum died when I was a teenager, my dad died later, Linda died after 30 years of marriage, and John and George have since died. So all of those deaths, and…and some others are very sad, just…just inasmuch as you won’t see that person again, in this life, anyway.

The Long and Winding Road…(no audio)

James Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool on June 18^th, 1942. At the age of 11 he was one of the few children at his primary school to pass the 11-plus exam. This enabled him to attend a grammar school, the Liverpool institute, where he was to meet George Harrison. Paul was only 14 when his mother, Mary, died of cancer (he would later immortalize her in the song, “Let it Be”). The early loss of his mother would also bring him close to John Lennon, whose own mother, Julia (who would also be the subject of a Beatle song), died when he was 17.

Lennon and McCartney first met when the former’s band, The Quarryman, played at Woolton Fete on July 6^th, 1957. Their families were not happy about their friendship: John’s domineering Aunt Mimi, considered Paul too “working-class,” while Paul’s dad told him Lennon “Will get you into trouble.”  

Paul McCartney

Source: Speak Up

Standard: British accent

Language level: Basic

Paul McCartney

In recent years Sir Paul has been in the news on account of his traumatic relationship with Heather Mills. Now he’s back in the news, but for a better reason: he has released a new album, Memory Almost Full. It’s intended as a tribute to his first wife, Linda, who died of cancer in 1998. McCartney says she was the one true love of his life.

STARBUCKS!

Memory Almost Full is released through a new record label, Starbuck Hear Music, and is on sale worldwide through their coffee shops. Starbucks already sells compilations CDs through their shops, but McCartney is the first artist to sign to their record label. The title of his new album is an anagram of “For my soul mate LLM” (Linda Louise McCartney); the album also includes songs inspired by his recent painful divorce from Healther Mills.

Some youngsters have never heard of the Beatles, but back in the 1960s, these four lads from Liverpool – John, Paul, George, and Ringo – formed world’s most famous pop group: the Beatles. They had 20 US hits singles: their concerts were occasions of mass hysteria as their fans screamed so loud no one could hear the band. The Beatles gave their last live concert in 1966. The band split up in 1970. John Lennon, the most outspoken member of The Beatles, caused a scandal when he suggested the Beatles were more famous than Jesus, watch one of their early films, A Hard Day’s Night of Help! To get an idea of this crazy time.

YESTERDAY…

According to the Guiness Book of Records, McCartney is the most successful musician ever: more than 2.000 singers have recorded his song “Yesterday.” McCartney seems to have endless energy: in recent years he has released modern classical pieces (such as last year’s “Behold My Heart”): he’s organised art exhibitions of his paintings; and he’s published his poetry. He certainly isn’t stopping now: McCartney toured with his band to promote his new album, and appeared at Al Gore’s Live Earth concert in July.

Going Solo

McCartney formed the group wings after the break-up of the Beatles in 1970. As a solo artist, his career has been incredibly successful. He sang hit duets with Stevie Wonder (“Ebony and Ivory”) and Michael Jackson (“The Girl is Mine”),and starred at Live 8 with U2 – they performed the song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which became the latest hit single of all time: released just 45 minutes after their performance, it was an immediate hit around the world.