Les Paul, a talented musician more praised for his technological innovations than his highly a dept guitar playing, died Thursday at age 94 after a bout with pneumonia. His development of the solid-body guitar and multi-track recording carried his influence far beyond his distinctive early-‘50s pop-jazz hits.

Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9, 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin and started playing music at age eight. Semi-pro by age 13, at first he found work with hillbilly bands, sometimes going by the name “Rhubarb Red.” He played on radio, branched out into jazz and blues, moved to Chicago, and made his first records in 1936. He then moved to New York City in 1938, where his trio landed a high-visibility slot on the radio show Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians. Five years later he’d moved to Hollywood, started a new trio, and was a part of history on July 2, 1944 when he filled in for Nat “King” Cole’s guitarist at the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert. Paul’s Hollywood sojourn brought him work with Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters; his trio also recorded albums for Decca.

In 1948, Paul made history with the first released multi-track recording, the single “Lover (When You’re Near Me),” released by Capitol. By recording one guitar part onto an acetate disc (using a disc-cutter he’d constructed himself), then playing that back while recording the next guitar part, he was able to build up eight tracks, some recorded at half speed so that they could be played back at double speed. He eventually added delay and echo effects. This might seem like total music geek material, but this technology soon hit the charts when, inspired by the harmony sound of the Andrews Sisters, Paul overdubbed his duo partner/wife, singer Mary Ford, layering her vocals and taking the sound of multiple vocals into an utterly distinctive realm that netted 11 #1 singles and 36 gold records.

This highly laborious recording process was far from ideal. Seeing the promise of magnetic tape in such an approach, he pushed Ampex to develop two- and three-track machines, which led in 1954 to the first eight-track recording deck, manufactured to his specifications. He was ahead of his time, but by the following decade multi-track recording had revolutionized the making of music; though the pop-jazz sound of Paul and Ford had been made obsolete by rock ‘n’ roll, his invention helped transform the upstart style into the more ambitious realms of rock. It wasn’t his only technological innovation to abet the rise of rock.

Back when Paul had started his career, electric guitars were mostly built along the same hollow-body design parameters as acoustic guitars (though Rickenbacher had made a solid-body in the '30s that didn’t catch on). Feedback was an inherent danger with hollow-body electrics. An inveterate experimenter who had constructed his first electric guitar at age 13 using a telephone receiver, Paul’s vision of a solid-body guitar -- initially just a plank of wood he dubbed “The Log” -- not only avoided feedback but also increased sustain and volume. He had built it in 1941, but was too far ahead of his time to convince anyone to produce and sell it until 1952 (by which point Leo Fender’s Telecaster had beaten Gibson’s Les Paul model guitar to the market).

In a way, though, Paul’s signature moment had come earlier: His career had been threatened by a 1948 car crash that smashed up his right arm so badly that the doctors said his elbow would never regain movement. They asked him to pick a position for them to set it in. He chose a bent angle that would allow him to play guitar. That choice alone would be legendary enough to make any man live on in honored memory for complete devotion to music.

With the rise of rock, Paul retreated from the spotlight, though there were occasional albums in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But in the late ‘80s he returned to performing with a vengeance with a weekly gig in New York that showed that he didn’t need recording tricks to be a virtuoso player. Until shortly before his death, he was still playing every Monday night at the Iridium club on Broadway, displaying his salty humor and receiving accolades from legions of worshipful guitarists well aware that his innovations had enabled their careers. - Steve Holtje

Dusty Wright Video Podcast Interview with Les

Dusty Wright Show Audio Podcast Interview with Les

Photo: Gene Martin

Thanks to Christine Natanael for the first video choice.

Mr. Holtje is a Brooklyn-based poet and composer who splits his time between editing Culturecatch.com, working at the Williamsburg record store Sound Fix, and editing cognitive neuroscience books for Oxford University Press. No prizes for guessing which pays best.