ELECTRIC DREAMS
“The first time I saw that guitar, he wasn’t playing it,” Gene Paul recalls of his father Les Paul’s most cherished possession. “He asked me to go downstairs and get a specific guitar. And when I brought it back upstairs, it was in its case. And he said, ‘Put it right on the table there.’ And he said, ‘Open it up.’ And I opened it up – and it was this gold magnificent guitar, simple… elegant.
“I don’t think people understand what the hell this guy went through from getting that note at the barbecue stand till the time he finally got Gibson lit…”
“I was just so struck by it,” Gene continues, “because I was used to the black Les Paul [Custom] guitar and the white one – the ones he usually used on stage and had in the control room. But he asked me to get this one and I brought it out. So I’m sitting there and looking at it and I asked him,‘What’s this?’ And then he sat down and told me a story…”
The story was no less than a full account of how Les battled for years to make his dream of a solidbody electric guitar a reality. A guitar whose voice could rise above a full orchestra and that summoned up the pristine sounds that Les, a Grammy Award-winning master of the instrument, could not achieve with the acoustic archtops he started his career on, back in the 1930s. The guitar that the young Gene beheld in the case in 1959 was his father’s fabled ‘Number One’ – the first approved production model Les Paul to be presented to Les prior to the model’s launch in 1952.
To Les himself, this elegant guitar sitting in its plush case didn’t represent the beginning of something – but the triumphant end of a near-30-year struggle to make a dream that he pursued “obsessively” finally come true. Now, for the first time, Gene Paul is ready to tell Guitarist the full story of how it all happened.
“People were coming up and asking for autographs and I saw him in his element. And that’s when I really started to appreciate the adventure of my dad’s life”
