Les Paul, 94, guitar hero

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - Les Paul, 94, who invented the solid-body electric guitar later wielded by a legion of rock-and-roll greats, died yesterday of complications from pneumonia.

According to Gibson Guitar, Mr. Paul died at White Plains Hospital. As an inventor, he also helped bring about the rise of rock and roll with multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then balance the tracks in the finished recording.

Born Lester William Polfus, in Waukesha, Wis., on June 9, 1915, Mr. Paul began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago.

In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton.

Electric guitar gained popularity in the 1940s and then exploded with the advent of rock in the mid-'50s.

"Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music," Mr. Paul once said. "To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn't think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system."

"Without Les Paul, we would not have rock and roll as we know it," said Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. "His inventions created the infrastructure for the music, and his playing style will ripple through generations. He was truly an architect of rock and roll."

A tinkerer and musician since childhood, Mr. Paul experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called "The Log," a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings.

"I went into a nightclub and played it," he recalled. "Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut." He later fixed wooden "wings" onto the body to give it a traditional guitar shape. In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar. Pete Townshend of the Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola, and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.

Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie's auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.

After World War II, Mr. Paul helped develop technqiues such as "tape echo" and overdubbing. With Mary Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including "Vaya Con Dios" and "How High the Moon," which both hit No. 1. Many of their songs used the overdubbing Mr. Paul had helped develop.

"I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished," he recalled. Both echo and overdubbing became mainstays in the recording arsenal.

He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, they broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced.

Mr. Paul retired from music in the 1960s but was lured back starting in the 1970s by projects with other legendary guitarists. Several of these efforts won Grammy Awards. Mr. Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

See Les Paul on video and Web links via http://go.philly.com/lespaul EndText