“Lover” by Les Paul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6VHlqH4-xs

“Lover” by Richard Rodgers (Original): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SqP-vqwQ6s

“It’s Been A Long Long Time”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHpoGcRcwns

“Eruption”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Czx8EWXb0

“How High the Moon”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkGf1GHAxhE

Les Paul recalled an incident that happened at a party where he slipped his record onto the turntable and played his version of “Lover.” Artie Shaw reacted with “What in the world is that?” (Demain, 2009). That is a very valid reaction because of how innovative the song is. “Lover” by Les Paul (1948) is one of the first popular songs that utilized the studio not merely as a medium to capture a live performance, but as a creative tool to manipulate and arrange the song. He took a 1932 Rodgers and Hart standard and turned it into a sound that no live band could reproduce, paving the way for modern music productions that we take for granted.

Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, 1915, Lester William Polsfuss (more commonly known as Les Paul) started out as a country performer. Rhubarb Red, Les Paul’s stage name for his country phase, sang and played guitar with a harmonica. His first two records, Montgomery Ward 8012 and Montgomery Ward 8013, were recorded in Chicago in May 1936 and released under this stage name on the house label of the mail-order company Montgomery Ward (Discography of American Historical Recordings [DAHR], n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Together they held four sides: “Just Because,” “Answer to Just Because,” and two separate recordings of “Deep Elem Blues No. 2.” (Unfortunately I was not able to find these recordings on YouTube nor Spotify) During daytime, he played country on Chicago radio as Rhubarb Red, while at night he played jazz under the name Les Paul. After his country phase, he entered his jazz phase where he formed the Les Paul Trio with rhythm guitarist Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton, and the trio later moved to NYC in 1938. They had an opportunity to be featured on Fred Waring’s national radio show, resulting in Les Paul’s first national exposure (Shaughnessy, 1993). In 1943, he moved to Hollywood and formed a new trio, which backed Bing Crosby on the 1945 hit “It’s Been a Long Long Time” and became regular guests on Crosby’s radio show. Around the same time, Paul built a recording studio in the garage behind his Hollywood home, the room where “Lover” would later be made (McQuade, 2023).

Aside from his performer career, Les Paul had always been interested in developing and modifying gear to suit his needs. As a teenager, he wanted to play harmonica and guitar at the same time, so he built a hands-free harmonica holder. As a guitar player himself, he also made great contributions and left his name as a legacy. Electric guitars in the 1930s were mostly hollow-body archtops with a pickup attached to them. However, because the hollow body vibrates along with the sound coming out of the amplifier, the pickup would pick back up the vibration, and this would eventually lead to a feedback loop. The vibrating body also absorbs the strings’ energy, causing the sustain on those guitars to be not that great. To resolve these issues, Les Paul built “The Log” around 1940, a solid body guitar that was essentially a 4x4 block of pine consisting of the neck, pickups, and the bridge. To make it look like a guitar, he sawed an Epiphone hollow body in half and glued the two wings onto the sides. Paul initially was excited about his new design and proposed it to Gibson in 1941, but Gibson called it a “broomstick with pickups” and rejected the idea (Shaughnessy, 1993). It was not until 1950 when Fender started to sell solid body guitars that Gibson eventually designed a solid body guitar and had Les Paul as a consultant, and eventually made it his signature guitar that went on sale in 1952 and has remained in constant production since then. (Shaughnessy, 1993).

The song “Lover” was originally written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for a film called Love Me Tonight in 1932 (Mamoulian, 1932). It was a Viennese-style waltz in 3/4 with a string orchestra. The singer, Jeanette MacDonald, is a classically trained opera singer, thus you would hear the distinct opera singing techniques in the original recording. In contrast, Les Paul’s version sounds completely different. The whole track is built from guitar parts. What is unique about his arrangement is that he recorded eight different guitar parts with overdubbing on top of one another. He also changed the speed to alter the pitch and timbre of the guitars. You can hear it in the second half of the song where it sounds a little bit funny and like video game music that we sometimes hear today. This was extremely groundbreaking for his time because back then, the studio was mainly used to capture a live performance. Overdubbing had occasionally been tried before, but almost no one in pop music had used it to build an entire record. With recordings sped up, you would essentially get the chipmunk effect, with the timbre of the guitar sounding much higher and thinner, whereas if you were to halve the speed, it would sound much warmer and thicker. Les Paul also recorded some of his parts at half speed so that when played back at normal speed, they came out an octave higher and twice as fast (a technique that I personally use when I struggle to play fast enough). The way he did the recordings was through 16-inch acetate discs instead of tapes. This meant that he had to play the new part along with the recorded ones, and if he were to make a mistake, he had to start all over again. Every new pass also copied the earlier layers onto a fresh disc, so the first parts lost a little quality each time. He had to plan the arrangement from the bottom up, and he worked on the record’s two sections separately. In the end, he discarded around five hundred discs before finishing the song (McQuade, 2023).

Les Paul had influences from various music genres. You hear the fast single-note runs as a sign of his jazz guitar playing, the use of stacking guitar parts to resemble sections of a big band, with some guitars playing melody, harmonies, and answering phrases. The fast tempo may also come from the mid-40s big bands like Gene Krupa, which were already making this waltz  into an up-tempo swing tune.

For the listeners, this was marketed as “The New Sound,” and listeners genuinely had an extremely difficult time figuring out how one guitarist could make such sounds (reminiscent of people trying to figure out how Eddie Van Halen did his tapping in “Eruption”). The single reached No. 21 on the Billboard chart, and Capitol (the label) later collected it on the album The New Sound. Just weeks before the record came out in February 1948, Les Paul got into a car accident that shattered his right arm and elbow. This meant that this record was released while he was recovering. Because the full recovery of the arm was estimated to take a long time (it eventually took a year and a half) and doctors could not rebuild the elbow joint, he asked the doctors to set his arm permanently at the angle he needed to hold and pick the guitar so that he could continue to play.

The record also arrived at a turning point for the country and for the music business. After WWII, Americans had the money to afford buying radios, phonographs, etc. At the same time, the big swing bands that had dominated in the 1930s and early 1940s were breaking up, and audiences were moving toward singers and smaller groups, so a record like “Lover” where one man sounded like a whole band fit the time.

The impact that this record has made is immense. The most direct impact was on Les Paul himself, where he later released a hit named “How High the Moon” (1951) with his wife Mary Ford harmonizing her own lead vocals. The innovation of treating the studio as an instrument has influenced music ever since, as you can hear from the Beatles, Queen, Eddie Van Halen, and of course the modern era where we all use the DAW to produce songs. In addition, the boom of guitar culture, rock and roll, and the iconic Les Paul signature guitar all shaped a whole generation of iconic music. To a listener today, “Lover” can sound like a cartoon soundtrack, yet the innovative ideas that were used behind it can be found everywhere today. I myself as a guitarist have benefitted from both of these. My first ever legitimate guitar was a Les Paul from Epiphone, all thanks to wanting to play like Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Because I can only play the guitar and I am essentially a bedroom producer, I heavily rely on the DAW to make layered guitar compositions. It is crazy to see how much the song “Lover” has impacted me generations after.

What Artie Shaw was struggling to identify is now the default of music production. We hear it in pop, hip hop, rock, all kinds of genres. What took Les Paul five hundred acetate discs and countless hours now takes a couple clicks, and it is easy to forget that someone had to come up with this innovative technique. I cannot wait to see what innovative ideas that we as music producers do today that will just be taken as granted in future generations.

References

DeMain, B. (2009, November). Les Paul: Guitar man. Mojo.

https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/les-paul-guitar-man

Discography of American Historical Recordings. (n.d.-a). Montgomery Ward 8012 (10-in.). UC

Santa Barbara Library. https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/objects/refer/369707

Discography of American Historical Recordings. (n.d.-b). Montgomery Ward 8013 (10-in.). UC

Santa Barbara Library. https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/objects/refer/369708

Mamoulian, R. (Director). (1932). Love me tonight [Film]. Paramount Pictures.

McQuade, M. (2023, January 19). The incredible story of Les Paul’s “Lover” – the

breakthrough multitrack recording that changed the world, part 1. Guitar Player.

https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/the-incredible-story-of-les-pauls-lover-the-breakth

ough-multitrack-recording-that-changed-the-world-part-1

Shaughnessy, M. A. (1993). Les Paul: An American original. William Morrow.