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10 June 2011

CORRECTED EXPANDED POST about Google's Les Paul guitar and Lawrence Welk / Les, I forgive you for divorcing Mary Ford!

 Click, it gets bigger, 
but you got to go HERE to play music on it.

Quick! Go to the Main Page of Google and see -- and PLAY! -- their homage to Les Paul's 96th Birthday!

(I'm not clever enough to filch it.)

YES I AM CLEVER ENOUGH 
TO FILCH IT!!!
The galaxy-wide popularity of Google's Les Paul Electric Guitar has inspired them to keep running it forever (according to one headline -- well, you know, the definition of "forever" on the Internet is a slightly different one from the one we learned in math class and Sunday School)


And when you've finished playing your best riff, there's a little button that will record and save it for you (I think).

And now I would like to say a word about Les Paul.

Les (geboren Lester William Polfuss)
is an odd sort of Deity. He invented the Electric Guitar. 

I suspect there are more people today who would microwave Girl Scouts if Les Paul commanded them to than the Thugee Cult of the Death Goddess Khali ever numbered at the height of its popularity.

When I was a real little kid, he and his guitar-playing and singing wife Mary Ford used to have a 15-minute-long TV show (black and white) in which they would play Les' amazing invention, the Electric Guitar, while Mary would play AND sing AND harmonize with herself (because Les also invented multi-track overdubbing).

But the music they played!!!!! (This color is supposed to resemble shit.)

Les & Mary played Holiday Inn Lounge Music so square that it made Lawrence Welk seem like Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. 

The signature theme of the show was "Bye Bye Blues," a pretty uninspired standard from 1930 which Les & Mary turned into a Top 10 AM radio hit in 1952.

The USA was VERY SQUARE in 1952. Eisenhower was president (and Les & Mary performed for him at the White House), Negroes were kept in a condition of about 87% slavery (luckily for Earth, they were permitted to compose and perform music), and all wives would greet their husbands ar the door with a dry martini when Dad came home from work. Mom had stayed home all day attending to Junior and Sis, cooking dinner, doing the laundry ...

There were zero homosexuals or lesbians in the USA. (Except maybe 11 or 12 in Greenwich Village.)

Marihuana, the Satan Weed from Hell which loosened the judgment center of young white Protestant virgins, had not been invented yet. It was at an early stage of research and experimentation by a tiny number of Negro jazz musicians and white Beatniks who wore berets, played bongo drums, and recited non-rhyming poetry in Greenwich Village.

How anyone could invent the Electric Guitar, play it So Wonderfully -- and dedicate himself to a musical repertoire which would have been too square for Kate Smith to sing -- has lifelong mystified me. And yet long before his death, the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi, and every Rock Guitar God bowed down before Les and kissed his feet.

Les and Mary divorced in 1952, it was apparently a real nasty divorce.

If you really can play a riff on the Google Les Paul and save it somehow, send it to me! (Try not to play "Bye Bye Blues," no Pizza for playing that.)


* * *


Send It To Me
 

by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards 
(performed by The Rolling Stones)
 

oh I think I had enough of your religion
it's tough, it's a state of mind
I don't need it

sending a letter
to my mother
I need some loving
send it to me

I lost my lover
unfaithful lover
I need some money

send it to me

I need consoling
your boy's feeling lonely
describe her for me
send it to me

send it to me
send it to me
send it to me

this is no doctor
no second cousin
that needs some lovin

send it to me

if she can't travel
I can take the mule train

I can take the aeroplane
send it to me
 

yeah and I'm begging you
begging you down on my knees
baby please please

You you got to send it send it send it
send it to me
send her to me
 

send her to me
send her to me
send her to me
 

yeah I'm sending in a letter
to my sister
in Australia
sister Marie

I'm lookin for a woman
she don't got to be beautiful
she has to be lovin
lovin I need
 

ain't got no lover
no sense of cover
I need some loving

send it to me
 

send it to me
send it to me
send it to me
 

she won't have to watch her step
she won't have to relocate
I guarantee 

her personal
security

she don't have to be five foot ten
or a blonde or brunette
she don't have to be no social hostess

send her
 

she might work in a factory
right next door to me
in my fantasy
send her to me
 

send her to me
send her to me
send her to me

she could be Rumanian
could be Bubarian
could be Albanian
she could be Hungarian
she might be Ukrainian
could be Australian
could be the Alien

send her to me

send her to me
send her to me
send her to me

3 comments:

patfromch said...

Sweet ! Missed it, but saw a video on youtube. I^d buy a Les Paul If I could only afford it....

How about a Glenn gould Google Doodle for either this September or his 80th ?

patfromch said...

Ah, this is SO briiilant !!! I have been fooling around with it for a while. gimmie a fuzzbox and a crybaby pedal and a big Marshall amp ! I think I will pick up guitar lessons again !
Note: you can also control this thing with the letters on your keyboard and I reckon if I hook up my USB synthesizer up I could play it much better. But that would be cheating in terms of getting Pizza I reckon....

Vleeptron Dude said...

All those things you want ... if Les didn't invent them, he did introduce them to the world:

================

Wikipedia
He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which made the sound of rock and roll possible.[5] He is credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound),[6] delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention ...

============

On a John McLaughlin album liner notes, there is a reference to a guitar he used on the album whose "strings" were actually laser beams, and when the fingers interrupted the laser beam, that electronically made the sound he wanted.

You ever heard of such a laser guitar? I WANT ONE!