172: Les Paul & Mary Ford // The World is Still Waiting for the Sunrise
The World is Still Waiting for the Sunrise
Les Paul & Mary Ford
1974, Capitol
You get older (63), and every day someone mashes you in the gob with how long ago some event contained within your conscious lifespan took place (“Can you believe it’s been 19 years since NBC’s Ed was cancelled?”), and every day I’m telling them to shut up shut up shut up. My favourite “Remember when?” date is when the dinosaurs went extinct, because when I was a kid it was 65 million years ago, it is 65 million years ago now, and when I am dead and all my bones are being divvied up as souvenirs among my surviving friends it will not be 66 million or 69 million but 65 million years since the dinosaurs took their all-time steel-toe to the goolies.
I mention this because 12 years ago I reviewed Les Paul & Mary Ford’s 1951 single “How High the Moon” (b/w “Walkin’ and Whistlin’ Blues”), and now I’m reviewing a compilation that contains those songs. My 51-year-old self marveled at the ingenuity of the then-sixty-now-seventy-year-old recording, and I remain just as wowed today. I’m going to throw this portion of the review to my younger self:
“‘How High the Moon’ is a single from 1951, but it doesn’t sound like it’s only sixty years old. It’s like a radio transmission that’s travelled far beyond our solar system, the signal decaying imperceptibly over the lightyears until only the highest, whitest musical frequencies remain. A sort of ghost image of a pop song.
The song’s trebly, lunar sound is a result of guitarist and recording genius Les Paul’s meticulous, labour-intensive way of making records. At a time when most performances were recorded to a single track and overdubbing was almost unheard of, a man of Paul’s talents could easily have made his way in the business purely on the strength of his technical chops. But Paul was a recording nut who loved to work with the newest audio technology in order to push it beyond its makers’ intentions.
On his earlier breakthroughs, his technique involved recording himself playing on a disc, then recording himself playing along with the first recording on another disc, then recording himself playing along with the recording of the first two takes, and so on and so forth. This technique required Paul to play virtually perfectly each time, as direct editing was impossible and the poor fidelity of the discs he recorded on meant that the first tracks laid down decayed with each successive re-recording. If Paul didn’t record the various rhythm parts, bass lines and “solos” in the best possible order, the track would sound terrible (what we would now called “badly mixed”) and Paul might be forced to restart from scratch. Innovations in magnetic tape recording made this process easier in some ways (as well as making significant vocal multi-tracking possible), but Paul in turn increased his number of tracks from around eight on his first magnetic tape recording in 1947 to an astonishing twenty-four on 1951’s ‘How High the Moon’ (the same number commonly used in big budget productions today). There is something almost maniacal about a man going through such an arduous process just to get this fucking sound out of his head.
I’m not going to say it’s actually scientifically possible ‘How High the Moon’ has no bass tones at all, but the recording technology of the time fared much better at capturing high frequency sounds, which meant that each time Paul “recorded a recording” the previous tracks would have more of a high, pinched sort of frequency. When you do this as many times as Paul did here, the resulting sound has a cool, vacuum-sealed crispness. Paul’s wife Mary Ford had the ideal voice for this close-mic’d, trebly recording style, being high, clear and having very precise enunciation. She harmonized with herself exceptionally well, managing to project a playful, carefree quality in spite of the exacting precision it demanded. With simpler production, she might’ve come off as flirty or precious, particularly when an internal rhyme in the lyrics makes her voice sort of shimmy (“there is no moon above / when love is far away too…”), but this recording gives her singing a processed quality that, like today’s extensive use of Autotuning, makes it sound strikingly pristine but far less human. Her voice is doubled just enough to wipe out the lower register of her voice, and the multiplication of her voice renders its outlines thick and ever so slightly like static. It’s not music that makes you think of curling up with a girl, but rather of a girl’s voice curlicuing around the moon.
I’d always assumed Les Paul had probably become overrated as a guitarist because of the branding of the popular model of guitar that bears his name, but I was a fool. His style feels like a cross between jazz and rockabilly, but that doesn’t do justice to the oddness of how it sounds. I adore the array of trills and scratches with which he adorns the verses, the way he almost seems to be chasing himself in circles on his lengthy guitar solo (it’s over half of the song), bouncing against the rhythm. ‘How High the Moon’ is an uncommonly perfect blend of guitar virtuosity and classic pop style. And if there were ever a BioShock game set on the Moon, this would be its theme.
Defining Moment: Mid-way through Paul’s solo, Ford belts a long note and holds it for a good ten seconds or so, and it’s a shock because her voice to this point has been relaxed and soft. This is where Paul hits you over the head with the possibility of multi-track recording, because it sounds like there’s a now a choir singing, and the members of that choir’s voices are all impossibly similar to one another. It feels like a seachange.”
I really had time to dig into a record when I wasn’t trying to punch out one of these things every day, eh? In any case, the disc I now have in my physical collection, This World is Still Waiting for the Sunrise kicks off with “How High the Moon” and zips through 11 other sides recorded in their early ‘50s salad days. Many of them are jittery sprints in the same vein as their breakout hit, but the collection also dips into countrified ballads (“I Really Don’t Want to Know”), strolling novelties (“Walkin’ and Whistlin’ Blues”), and sonically-literal instrumentals (there’s not a better word for his “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” than ‘bubbly’). There are plenty of compilations of Paul and Ford’s work out there; sometime before the next asteroid smashes into us, you should get one.
Editor’s Note: No no no fuck! FUCK.
