Milwaukee may have missed celebrating Les Paul’s exact birthday on
June 9, but the self-proclaimed “City of Festivals” more than made up for it a couple weeks later, devoting a weekend to celebrating their local musical legend―Les grew up in nearby Waukesha―in grand style.
Anchoring the festivities was the June 22 opening of “Les Paul’s House of Sound,” a multi-media retrospective/museum show at the city’s
Discovery World education center on the shore of Lake Michigan. There, with the musician’s assistance and a wealth of personal memorabilia, curators have lovingly recreated the roots of Les Paul’s legendary career.
There’s a replica of his childhood Waukesha living room, complete with a player-piano, its paper rolls dotted with extra hand-punched holes, tribute to one of his earliest experiments in altering musical technology. Nearby are his famous “log,” a cut-down railroad tie with guitar strings that represents his earliest solid-body guitar experiments, as well as the jury-rigged telephone, radio, and broomstick contraption that was an early attempt at amplification and the towering, brushed-aluminum hulk of the prototype 1957 eight-track tape deck that was but one of his many revolutionary studio innovations that earned him the nickname of “Wizard of Waukesha.”
The exhibit allows visitors to virtually follow Les from his earliest days as country performer Rhubarb Red during his radio days in St. Louis and Chicago, before following Route 66 west to Hollywood and fame. It’s a multimedia journey that features a wealth of photographs and memorabilia, even projected episodes of the pioneering daily network show Les and wife/partner Mary Ford broadcast in TV’s early days. His earliest instrument collaborations with Gibson are represented, as are the disc lathe―cobbled together from an automobile fly wheel and dental tools―that cut his first, pioneering multi-track recordings in the ’40s. Yet another multimedia exhibit allows players a unique opportunity to jam with a virtual Les Paul.
Keeping the vampire-hunter hours that have been his routine for decades, Les arrived at the city’s Mitchell Airport after 1 am, then spent the next four hours holding court for a small coterie of admirers, reminiscing and telling stories leavened with a blunt, often irreverent humor that belies his age. But he was also focused on securing a few still-needed hardware items for his Discovery World exhibit. “When do we get to work?” he eagerly inquired at an hour when most of the city’s residents were fast asleep.
Friday found Paul striding confidently out to the infield of Miller Stadium to throw out the honorary first pitch of a game against the Orioles, decked out in a Brewers jersey emblazoned with number 93 to honor his age. “Listen to the sound,” he said, basking in adoring cheers and sensory overload of a modern major league park. “Marvelous!”
Beaming like a kid, but unable to throw right-handed because of injuries sustained in a horrific 1948 car crash, Les gamely tossed the ball softball-style with his left.
If some of the younger Brewers players had only had a vague idea of who Paul was, or of the many musical and technical innovations the Wizard of Waukesha was responsible for, 27-year-old relief pitcher Seth McClung wasn’t one of them. Indeed, the six-foot-six right-hander from West Virginia asked Les to autograph a bat as a personal memento. “One of the great things about being in the big leagues is getting to meet special people like this,” the clearly thrilled McClung said of the visiting legend. “It is a pleasure to meet you, sir!”
Les also visited the downtown headquarters of the city’s Marshall & Ilsley Corporation, where he was presented with a cake in the shape of his namesake Gibson guitar design, then threw a switch that lit up two sides of the building in the shape of an 18-story-high Les Paul guitar. The company, who sponsors the city’s renowned Riverfest annual music festival, had employed a team of over a hundred to cover 900+ window interiors to create the massive image.
Saturday found the ageless Wizard in typically lively spirits,
regaling reporters and visitors with his legendary tales at a private reception to honor the opening of his career-spanning Discovery World exhibit. Asked what he hoped visitors to the multimedia retrospective might take away from it, the ever-sly Les instantly cracked, “I hope they don’t take my stuff!”
That night Les and his trio, who still play a regular weekly gig at Manhattan’s Iridium jazz club, gave a warm, cabaret-style show at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater before an ecstatic sold-out crowd. Entering to a thundering standing ovation, the guitarist and his two sidemen―Lou Pallo on second guitar and bassist Jay Leon Hart―breezed through a set of familiar standards that included a gorgeous “Over the Rainbow” that leaned on Les’ playful, idiosyncratic melodic touches. Displaying the good humor that’s his trademark, the 93-year-old Wizard also emceed the show, introducing supporting acts that ranged from singer Sonia Hensley and nine-year-old blues guitar wunderkind Tallan Lantz to Milwaukee expat musician Jon Paris, who nudged the musicians into a more rollicking mini-set of Midwest blues. Les finished with a sprightly “Tennessee Waltz,” before the audience raised their voices to sing him “Happy Birthday.”
It would have been a hectic, exhausting 48-hours for a 30-year-old musician, let alone one of 93. Yet Les Paul shows few signs of slowing down, let alone retiring. Asked why Milwaukee should host a retrospective on a career and fame forged largely elsewhere, Les replied with typical forthrightness: “Because it’s my home. I was married here and I’ll be buried here.”