Les Paul

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.

Leo wanted me to be partners with him – for it to be the Fender guitar: the Les Paul Fender. When he approached me with the idea, he brought over a guitar and he gave it to me and I have it here. And I thought, if I’m gonna do this I’m going to go with the biggest company in the world: Gibson. Why should I fool around with some guy who is not a musician – I should go to the Gibson people.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

That’s a great thing about jazz. We leave it a little space so that we have the opportunity to go where the moment takes us

I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.

Music should never be harmless.

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

My wife Martha used to call me Ol’ Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I’m in torture, when in truth, I’m in ecstasy. I don’t do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

People don’t want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately and this is one of the biggest problems.