January 10, 2010

Les Paul/Mary Ford—The American Dream


What struck me most about the documentary Les Paul - Chasing Sound! were the scenes of The Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home television show, sets of 5-minute long daily shorts which number 170 in all. Sponsored by Listerine Mouthwash and syndicated in the mid-1950's, the show (which was based on a previous popular radio program, The Les Paul Show) features the couple at home, invariably breaking into song in the midst of performing stereotypical domestic tasks.




It has been speculated that Les Paul did not so much invent multitracking and tape delay, but simply put together the puzzle pieces that were already inherent in recording technology to create these spectacular early-50's hits. Indeed, there exists a very small number of primitive multitrack pieces by German composers Ernst Toch (Gesprochene Musik, 1930's) and Paul Hindemith (Trickaufnahme, 1930), and the American John Cage (Imaginary Landscape No. 1, 1939), which all utilize variations in playback/recording speed of turntables to create impossibly fast or thick textures. These works and the technology used to create them predate Les Paul's breakthrough instrumental track Lover (When You're Near Me) by almost a decade. Lover, like Toch's, Hindemith's, and Cage's pieces, utilized phonograph discs, which would later be replaced by magnetic tape. Magnetic tape, which was developed by the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft corporation for the use of the German army in World War II and was later manufactured by the 3M corporation after its discovery by Americans after the war, greatly simplified the multitracking process and remained the recording medium of choice until the advent of digital audio.

What I see as Les Paul's greatest accomplishments are not his technological innovations, but rather his ability to co-opt these avant-garde technologies and techniques to proliferate and uphold postwar American middle-class values at exactly the same time that this nation was situating itself as the preeminent cultural and economic juggernaut of the world. Once you get past the saccharine Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet-esque setup and nauseatingly stereotypical gender roles of Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home (and the Listerine product plugs!), one can begin to see the ways in which psuedo-Space Age technology (magnetic tape) was used to extol the rosy "on top of the world" outlook of the baby boom era. The entire concept of making bestselling hit records in the privacy of one's own home (a common theme in both the television and radio programs) seems to be a sort of ultimate fulfillment of the American Dream, complete with a Frigidaire and electric iron.

Chasing Sound! only briefly mentions Les Paul's sink into relative obscurity after the emergence of rock 'n' roll as a new revolutionary popular music genre and practical retirement (at age 40) in 1965 after his 1962 divorce from Mary Ford. While it is, indeed, impossible to overstate Paul's technological influence on all popular music since the 1940's, it's hard not to feel that his sunny, childlike musical innocence quickly become incongruous with the hardships of his personal life and the tastes of a nation entering a tumultuous adolescence in the 1960's.

Bing Crosby/Les Paul - It's Been A Long, Long Time

1 comment:

  1. Your point about Les Paul in the context of Avant-Garde music developments makes us wonder exactly who/what he was actually exposed to in his travels and what he assimilated through osmosis vs. what he adapted consciously. He got around. Seems more people are realizing the American Dream of recording at home (maybe not hit records in the way Les knew them) now than then. Was Les visionary with his campy concept of singing and playing to the refrigerator?

    ReplyDelete