Here’s something I didn’t know — if it wasn’t for a car accident on Route 66 near Davenport, Okla., in 1948, Les Paul might have never come up with the inventions that changed pop music.
According to the Daily Oklahoman:
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.”
As for Paul’s arm, a specialist was able to fuse it at a right angle, enabling him to play again.
The story is part of the documentary DVD, “Les Paul: Chasing Sound.” And Paul is still performing all this years later, at age 92.
i need a pic of him with his arm proped up in its permenant position
I am beginning to admire Les Paul for his guts and genius.