Les Paul Chasing Sound!
November 2007 Reviewed by: Joseph Taylor Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

In one of my favorite scenes from This Is Spinal Tap, guitarist Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest) holds up one of his many guitars for documentary director Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner).

Nigel: This is the top of the heap right here. There's no question about it. Look at the, look at the flame on that one....

Marty: Yes.

Nigel: I mean it's just... it's quite unbelievable. This o- this one is just ah...is perfect... 1959... ah... you know, it just, you can uh... listen!

Marty: How much does this....

Nigel: Just listen for a minute....

Marty: I'm not....

Nigel: The sustain... listen to it...

Marty: I'm not hearing anything.

Nigel: You would, though, if it were playing, because it really... it's famous for its sustain...

This Is Spinal Tap may be a parody, but it gets the details right. The guitar Tufnel is showing off is a Les Paul, a solid-body instrument whose design and concept were based in part on a prototype Paul had brought to Gibson Guitar Corporation in the mid-‘40s. Les Paul had taken a four-by-four, attached a neck, two guitar pickups, and a bridge, and the first solid-body guitar was born.

Well, nearly the first. As Les Paul: Chasing Sound shows, Paul had been experimenting with the idea of a solid-body electric guitar since he was an adolescent, playing guitar and singing for tips at a barbecue restaurant near Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he was born in 1915. Lester William Polsfuss grew up in Waukesha and was playing professionally by his early teens. Necessity drove him to find a way to make sure people could play his guitar, so he put a phonograph needle under the strings. "It was simple," Paul tells an interviewer in Les Paul: Chasing Sound. "If it plays a phonograph record it must play the guitar, right? They both vibrate. It didn’t last long because of the feedback and all that."

That combination of common sense, curiosity ("[My brother] threw a switch, the light went on, that’s it. When I threw the switch, I wanted to know why that light went on."), and the willingness to try anything is the hallmark of Les Paul as a musician and inventor. He realized that feedback on an electrified guitar was caused by the vibration, which was amplified along with the sound of the strings in the hollow body of a standard guitar. He theorized that a solid object would control or eliminate feedback, so he put a guitar string on a piece of railroad track, attached a pickup, and proved his hunch.

Les Paul: Chasing Sound is a highly entertaining history of Les Paul’s music, his inventions, and his charmed life. He gets his first tape recorder from Bing Crosby, gets the idea to attach another recording head to the machine, and multi-track recording is born. Les Paul is as honored for his recording and electronic innovations as he is for his music -- maybe more so. Bonuses include performance footage of Les with his current trio and with famous guests, including Keith Richards and Merle Haggard, as well as vintage television appearances of Les with Mary Ford. Throughout Les Paul: Chasing Sound musicians make the point that modern music as we know it wouldn’t be possible without Les Paul. For once, it’s not hype.

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