Any devotee of the electric guitar soon comes to learn the names of those pioneering musicians who realized the instrument's potential: people like Charlie Christian, who first started overdriving his amps and incorporating distortion into his playing, or Jimi Hendrix, who took that concept to the nth degree, and also threw in feedback, phase shifting, wah-wah and backward effects.
One of the most important was Les Paul, the man who pretty much invented the solid-body electric guitar, and, as if that wasn't enough, multitrack recording as well, two things which every musical idiom since the 1950s has relied upon. Paul's musical heyday was in the '30s and '40s, pre-rock 'n' roll, which means younger generations might not be so familiar with his name. But you would be hard-pressed to look through photos of the top rock guitarists of the '60s and '70s and not see more than a few of them wielding a Gibson Les Paul ax.
A former guitarist myself, I was familiar with the legends of Les Paul: How after a car accident that crippled him, he had the doctors set his arm at a right angle, so he could keep playing even if he couldn't move it; or how his recordings were so devilishly fast, no other guitarist could match them. After seeing the documentary movie "Les Paul: Chasing Sound" by director John Paulson, I learned, to my surprise, that the former was true, the latter, a trick — Paul had recorded at a slower tape speed and sped up his playing (like the voices of the "kids" on "South Park.")