The Les Paul Estate is up for auction Browse through the Les Paul Estate auction catalog and see the historic collection of guitars, recording equipment, and personal memorabilia owned by Les Paul. Sorry, you cannot bid on these items, the auction finished yesterday. News of the auction results are just coming in now. The auction brought in a total of $5 Million, with the proceeds going to the
Les Paul Foundation in support of music education and medical research.
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posted by charlie don't surf
on Jun 10, 2012 -
40 comments
After 30 years, Peter Frampton had been living without 2 critical pieces of his legacy: 1) his hair and 2) the Les Paul that he used in Humble Pie and on the (in)famous Frampton Comes Alive album. But now Frampton can rest easy, as one of those things
has been returned to him.
posted by spicynuts
on Jan 4, 2012 -
110 comments
Wanna Buy a Record?
A 1951 promotional film in which Mel Blanc takes Billy May on a tour of the Capitol Records studio on Melrose (followed by the somewhat less glamorous Scranton pressing plant) in an attempt to convince him that 85 cents is not too much to charge for a record. [SLYT]
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posted by mintcake!
on Jul 12, 2011 -
13 comments
Duke Ellington recalled "... that's one of those things Tizol came up with. See, it wasn't in tempo, he stood [and played it] sort of ad lib. He played it, [the] first ten bars, we took it and worked out the rest of it." That thing was
Caravan, and the instigator was
Juan Tizol, who was a trombonist in Duke Ellington's orchestra. The track, originally recorded in 1936, became a
jazz standard. The lyrics were penned in 1936 by publisher and manager
Irving Mills, adding to the exotic feeling and romance of what is considered by many to be
the first Latin jazz piece, before the late swing era and first decade of bebop when Latin Jazz (also called Afro-Cuban Jazz) came into prominence. The track didn't cross into other genres until Les Paul created his version of the track in 1948, which lead to other covers, and eventually a successful cover by The Ventures (
source).
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posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 2, 2009 -
28 comments
Ahmet Ertegun was profiled by George W. S. Trow in The New Yorker in a classic piece back in 1978. Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to the US and he remained behind in D.C. studying medieval philosophy at Georgetown. Instead of devoting himself to his studies he founded Atlantic Records with his friend Herb Abramson. Trow charted how Ertegun moved from tramping through muddy, Louisiana fields in search of hot new sounds to the whirl of Studio 54. Below the cut are links to the songs mentioned in the article, as best as I could find, in the order in which they appear.
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posted by Kattullus
on Aug 17, 2009 -
25 comments
Fried Gibson. I've always thought you were safe in a house from lightning storms as long as you were off the land-line or computer. A Mississippi man's Gibson Les Paul got positively roasted while sitting in his home, in its case, leaning against a wall.
That's a powerful bolt.
Lots of gory photos here and in the auction linked above including a nice shot of some of
the parts that exploded off of the guitar, some shooting
like bullets through the case.
Awesome! And it still held quite a bit of its value.
Via [more inside]
posted by JBennett
on Jul 10, 2009 -
49 comments
