Guitar man passes on

Think about having this on your resume — you created a number of innovations that spawned thousands, if not millions, of rock, country and pop-music acts over the decades.

One of those innovations was the solid-body electric guitar. Without it, it’d be hard to fathom Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Joe Perry, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Tom Morello and countless others.

The man behind those innovations, Les Paul, has died of pneumonia at age 94, according to CNN and other media outlets.

This excerpt in his obituary encapsulates his legacy:

Paul was a guitar and electronics mastermind whose creations — such as multitrack recording, tape delay and the solid-body guitar that bears his name, the Gibson Les Paul — helped give rise to modern popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll. No slouch on the guitar himself, he continued playing at clubs into his 90s despite being hampered by arthritis.

Those innovations probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for a traffic accident on Route 66 in Oklahoma more than 60 years ago.

According to a report by the Daily Oklahoman, Paul was seriously hurt in a crash on U.S. 66 near Davenport, Okla, in 1948.

The injuries he suffered nearly ended his career and put him flat on his back in Oklahoma City’s Wesley Hospital for almost a year. It also gave him a lot of time to reassess his music and his life.

“I’m lying there in the hospital really a mess, so it was a question of whether I was even going to make it,” Paul said in a recent phone interview from his New Jersey home. “Of all the injuries I had, the worst was my right arm.”

Doctors at first told him the arm might have to be amputated. With that possibility in front of him, Paul set to work in his hospital bed, drawing up plans for a guitar synthesizer that could be played with one hand.

At the time of his accident, Paul had already been tinkering for two years with those new-fangled tape recorders developed by the Germans in World War II, and during his hospital stay, he began making in-depth notes on technical innovations that would perfect the overdubbing and multi-track recording techniques he had already begun to invent. […]

“I got a long time to think about it,” he said. “I changed the whole concept, that I was going to switch and I was going to have Mary be the singer, just the two of us, and create this whole new kind of music. And so it happened. That was such an asset to me, to be disabled so badly that it forced me to stop doing everything and think about it. And in thinking about it, I changed my whole life right there.”

The happy part of this story is that not only did Paul come up with those inventions, but he recovered sufficiently to play guitar again — which he did shortly before his death. Here he is, jamming with Sonia Hensley, in a video clip from just a few years ago.