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At one of these barbecue gigs, it was the advice of an unknown amateur critic listening to him play, said Paul, that totally changed the direction of his playing, and ultimately helped define his future career.

"I'm playing and singing and everything," he said, "and some guy in the rumbleseat of a car wrote a note to the carhop, and the note read, `Red, your voice and your harmonica are fine, but your guitar sounds lousy.' And that critic, I only wish I knew what his name was, but he was an angel sent to me. He said the guitar wasn't loud enough."

Les couldn't stop thinking about that anonymous listener's comment. It made him wonder about the ideal materials that might be employed to ensure a stringed instrument's maximum volume, something which, strangely enough, few had bothered to consider up to this time.

He thought about the density and hardness of railroad track, something in plentiful supply where he lived. His idea was to combine that dense steel, which would sustain and project the sound, with wood, which would give it a tonal richness –– "Something," he said, "where the strings would vibrate but not the object holding the strings. In other words, to add a piece of wood that would color the sound, alter the sound or add to the sound, and make it different than the string actually is."

Thus he built two guitars, one of wood and one of steel railroad track; on the train track guitar, he suspended the strings with spikes from the original track, and under it placed the half of the telephone that you listened on, which has a coil and a magnet in it. The resulting sound was fed into his mother's radio, and blasted out loud and startlingly clear.

The crucial matter here is how Les Paul had discovered that the fusing of mismatched electronic parts, musical instruments and sundry bricabrac could not only lead to the creation of new musical instruments and devices, but that in fact this –– necessity being the mother of invention –– was the only way to go. He was, you might say, a born inventor.

"All this came about by just sitting in the living room with all these pieces that married each other –– the piano told me one thing, the phonograph told me something else, the radio and the telephone told me something else. When you put all those things together, you could do so many things."

Meanwhile, at Les' live dates, people would tell him they enjoyed his playing and would like to be able to play him on the Victrola at home, which only encouraged him to build his own recording device. His father was a mechanic who had a ready supply of lathes and tools and used car parts at hand, from which Les would fashion his own recording machinery.

But in order to build his own recording machines, Les had to learn electronics, which he did by interning at the local radio station, near the barbecue stand. Even prior to this, however, he'd acquired a fascination not just with sound but with how sounds were made.

"When I first got my crystal set," he said, "I built it, and when I got that thing running and I listened to the radio, the thing that impressed me was the ticking of the clock and the hum of the transmitter. And I would go out to the radio station and pump on my bike, and I would stand out there in the rain and listen with my crystal set on my bicycle.

"The engineer would say, `What possesses you to do what you're doing?' And I said, `I'm curious about what's happening here. How are you broadcasting? How are we receiving it on the radio?"

From the start, Les Paul had parallel interests in playing instruments and the instruments' construction. At core, he was driven to understand the whys and wherefores of music itself.

"I just surrounded myself or observed the others," he said. "For instance, there was a place called Waukesha Beach, it was nine miles away. I would go there and listen to these orchestras, Lawrence Welk and Ted Fio Rito, whoever it was. If it was musical, I wished to know what he did, how he did it. I was there to understand the drum, understand the guitar, understand the piano and the banjo, understand every instrument..."

It was the same thing with electronics –– if anybody knew anything about it, Les would find them, observe carefully and latch on.

This process of learning by observation was deeply ingrained in Paul, and when he moved to Los Angeles a few year later, he didn't go to the recording studios to learn new tricks of the trade.

"I went over to the movie lot," he said. "I went over to see what happened on the sound stage, and found out what the real pros were doing. I figured they were far ahead of the broadcasters and recording studios.

"The No. 1 thing was the movies. This is where I learned speakers; I learned how to take them apart and everything about 'em. So I not only did a hysterectomy on my mother's piano or radio or telephone, everything I took apart. I had to know what made it run."

Early on, playing his guitar and harmonica as Rhubarb Red in a country combo in Wisconsin and St. Louis had sharpened Les' playing chops, and he had a good feel for the music. His playing even then dazzled with speed, agility and especially resourceful harmonic and melodic content. In his mind, his country roots were naturally entwined with the rapidly developing language of jazz.

When Les moved to Chicago and later on New York, it was primarily to challenge what he thought he knew about music by playing with the big jazz boys of the day.

"I was interested in Duke Ellington, and in the beginnings of jazz, such as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and people like that. My ambition was to get with them, to play with them, to learn from them, and it was a type of music that intrigued me as much as country music. I don't try to separate them or compete one with the other; it was just two types of music, and both were great.

"When I got to Chicago, the first thing I did was start working with Eddie South, the greatest violin player. Then to play with Louis Armstrong at the Regal Theater at the beginning of time, in 1929. And then when Art Tatum came along, and to become a friend of his and go to his home, and to understand. It was very important to be able to play with these idols of mine."

Then again, beyond the purview of these genre-specific styles was a vast zone that would, according to Paul, reach a far larger number of listeners, and it was that "commercial music," as he termed it, that beckoned to him.

When Paul teamed with singer Mary Ford in 1950, it was with this idea about "commercial music" in mind. "It was right down the middle," he said. The duo scored 16 Top Ten hits between 1950 and 1954 –– yet they were technically innovative projects whose multilayered and heavily effected voices and guitars even today seem like a daring aural experience. This melodically rich "commercial" sound owed equal debts to Ford's country-imbued vocal phrasing and Paul's jazz-inspired, harmonically complex guitar.

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