Les Paul Remembers, Episode 4
"See, Django Reinhardt played a mess of guitar, but I’m sure he couldn’t find his ass from his elbow if you handed him a tape machine or a microphone. And I doubt if Leo Fender can play a guitar."
Les was continuing his recollections of the duo’s great Fifties singles. “One that we never released was ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ which Mary sang.” [He was wrong; the song had indeed been released.] “Mary was a tremendous, tremendous musician, with a tremendous ear. It was a great combination; together, we could do anything.” Anything that Les had in mind, that is. His remark, “If ever I could be with anybody who could do anything I wanted her to do, she could do it,” has an ominous cast.
From the 1955 album Les and Mary.
The marriage was, in fact, a lopsided affair, with Mary expected to be both world-class musician and working housewife. Les installed a microphone over the kitchen sink so that she could record her vocals while she did the dishes. By the late Fifties, Mary was drinking heavily. She and Les divorced, acrimoniously, in 1964. Mary kept working, performing Les Paul/Mary Ford hits with increasingly mediocre ensembles. She died in 1977 of complications from alcoholism, only 53.
Apart from the ambiguous words of praise in the last sentence of Paragraph #1, Les avoided all but incidental mention of Mary throughout the interview, sticking to topics where he stood on firmer ground.
“Now, I can think of players that fool around with electronics,” he said, “and I can think of electronics guys that fool around with music. But I doubt that I’d be able to find someone where I could say, ‘Now, there is a guy that knocks me out because he’s got it all together.’ See, Django Reinhardt played a mess of guitar, but I’m sure he couldn’t find his ass from his elbow if you handed him a tape machine or a microphone. And I doubt if Leo Fender can play a guitar. I’m not tooting my horn when I say this, but I think that God just gave me the ability to go in more than one direction.”
“When I record, I run the board myself. That’s one of the first things that you learn to avoid, by which I mean that you can spend the whole day trying to get an engineer to do what you’ve got in your head. Which is a train wreck. When I’m making making a record, I’ll think, ‘This is the sound I want,’ and just turn the knob myself.
“I go to New York and I’m sitting up at Columbia Records and I’m telling you, I was ready to slit my wrists! Because they kept saying, “Well, we’ll have to send out for this or that, and then everyone takes a two-hour break. With me, I just reach up on my console, throw the switch, and I got it. Or you say, ‘We need to put a slapback echo on there. Let me do it.’ They say, ‘You can’t, you don’t belong to the union.’ You go completely outta your…. you’re wigged out! Working by myself, I can have a record out in two hours, because I know exactly what I want and how to get it. That’s why I’m right here.”
And he paused, blew his nose, and shook his head at the plight of the omnidirectional man in an ever-more specialized world.
Les Paul doesn’t seem like a decent guy.