Grateful Dead Music Forum

prephippie wrote:Les with the 1st electric guitar, "The Log":



RIP

Hmm, in another article he mentions his first electric being on a 2x4 or 4x4 without the wings and it was very poorly recieved.
Then he put the wings on it and voila!

prephippie wrote:Les with the 1st electric guitar, "The Log":



RIP

I have read previously that he once claimed to have invented the electric guitar in 1940, supposedly in Mahwah NJ (I used to live one town over from Mahwah). Unfortunately for him, apparently oodles of irrefutable evidence shows that electric guitars similar to what we use today were in use in the late 1920s, with sketchy evidence stretching back to possibly as early as 1915. Somewhere along the line, he changed his story to being the inventer of the "solid body" electric guitar, I'm not well-read on that topic but what little I have read indicates that there is some dispute over that as well. No bigee, some folks still refuse to accept the Wright Brothers as the first to achieve "heavier-than-air" flight, and I'll leave the splitting of hairs to them. What he "invented" or not aside, he was clearly a pioneer in guitar design and the electrical and electronic concepts surrounding the playing and recording of guitar music, so he gets a few of these from me:

Godspeed Les Paul. Thank you.

who on earth was les paul?

Log was not the first:
http://www.jinxmagazine.com/les_paul.html

I think this is a good summary:

DS: Did you have a patent on the pickup?

LP: No.

DS: Did you invent it?

LP: I'm not saying I invented it. I was the one that way back in the 20's made my rendition of probably the first solid body guitar that was made of wood and seriously was out there not as a novelty, but as an honest to God guitar. I was the first one to do that.

Consistent with what I have read before. Apparently, bluesmen had put pick-ups on their guitars in the '20s, and maybe some in the teens, such that when LP claimed he "invented the electric guitar", he got more than a little pig-piled on. He is saying here that their guitars were a "novelty", and I don't blame him for that as these guys were searching for their own sound, not for a way to mass-produce guitars that only used electronic pick-ups, which no one had done before. So, from a strict sense of the word, did he "invent" the electric guitar? No. Did he revolutionize the guitar-playing world with his designs that made them practical, popular, and reliable? Clearly, yes.