Les Paul

For several years – seven or eight – I gave my son Tyler the same birthday present every year. It was a Les Paul CD, adorned with a store-bought, factory-folded green ribbon bow, attached with a strip of Scotch tape.

And for my birthday, Tyler gave the same CD back to me, with the same green bow. It said something about him and me. The gift was the essence of simplicity, in selection and presentation, which men like us prize at gift-giving time. (I also taught him how to use the Sunday comics as gift wrap.) And the gift was something we knew the other wanted: a Les Paul CD.

Today, then, I imagine Tyler and I feel pretty much the same about, for us, the day's most newsworthy event, the death, at age 94, of Les Paul. I heard about it on the (appropriately) car radio, and when I got home, I found "How High the Moon" on YouTube and emailed it to Tyler with no message. The story was front-and-center, with photo, on The New York Times Website, where a day earlier Eunice Kennedy Shriver's death story had appeared.

I say "appropriately," above, because Les Paul was a primary driver behind the music on all my car radios, starting in 1955 when I got my driver's license, and hence, the music fingerprints that I left on Tyler, when he was 4 years old and I would bounce him in my arms as we stood at the turntable and played the old 45s. "Honey Don't." "Blue Suede Shoes." "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man." "Don't Be Cruel."

Les Paul was rarely the artist, but he was the reason, for the formative sound coming from my radio, and so many radios, listened to by teenagers who by 1956 were a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. His artist's career was starting to end in the 1950s, just at the pre-dawn of the rock and roll era. He acknowledged as much in an interview whose date I can't pinpoint, but it may in fact be in the "Chasing Sound" PBS documentary from a couple of years ago. He said as soon as he heard rock and roll, he knew that his recording career was over.

But not his sound. Les Paul invented the solid-body guitar, and he invented multi-track recording. It is that sound, that he created, that drove the new music. When you listen to Les Paul playing at speed, on "How High the Moon," say, you can hear his personal technique, which was dazzling but more jazzy than rock and roll, but you can also hear a rhythm, the same rhythm that Chuck Berry talked about in "Johnny B. Goode:"

"He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
"Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track
"Oh, the engineers would see him sitting in the shade
"Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made . . . "

Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made. That's the sound that makes the record producers, in "Chasing Sound," sit forward in their seats, listening again to Les Paul play "How High the Moon." There's a passage in there, that, well . . . when people like Tyler and me, and others who are hooked on rock and roll guitar, are listening to a great song with a great guitar break, and the break is about five seconds away, we'll sit forward and say, "Here it comes." And then we'll back it up to that same point, five seconds to go, so we can feel it coming all over again. It may take five or six of these until we are satisfied.

In 2002, Tyler moved to Nashville, and the green-bow birthday string got broken. I don't remember who wound up in final possession of the CD. I think it was me. Thank God for YouTube. It's not the only, but the best, I think, last gesture of respect to Les Paul to listen to that song today and feel yourself inching forward when the passage starts to come.