There are so many ways Les Paul's epitaph could be written – he could be remembered as the pioneer of multitrack recording, the godfather of the electric guitar, and the figurehead behind rock'n'roll's development, from John Lee Hooker to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols and Guns N' Roses.
But the irony is that Paul only acquiesced to playing rock when he'd reached his 90s. Paul's 1951 hit duet with Mary Ford, How High the Moon, was one of the prototypes for rock'n'roll, but when Elvis exploded, Paul and so many other jazzers were left on the shelf.
When, after several years of urging, he persuaded Gibson to make an expensive guitar bearing his name, Paul was merely thinking about giving jazz and country a warmer, deeper and more sustained sound – and yet it was the brutalisation of the design classic, the distortion meted out by John Lee Hooker and the electric blues pioneers, that led to it being embraced by everyone from Keith Richards to the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones, and Paul McCartney to Slash.
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