That Old Feeling: Les Is More

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For all the attention paid to Les Paul the technical innovator, not enough is paid to his skill as an arranger of guitar solos and vocal parts. Similarly, Ford is undervalued as a singer. She looked the way she sang: smooth, clear, pretty. Her voice, tripled or sextupled in harmony, was the vocal version of his slide-guitar style. Her glissandi were intimate, as if she were singing inside the microphone (she was in fact, the first vocal artist to sing not a foot or so away from the microphone, as most studio singers did, but virtually on top of it, the way it's done today). Her vocal approach was less an attack than a seduction — sensuous in an elevated, healthy way, like aerobic sex in a ski lodge. She sold those old tunes with a modern attitude that never stooped to irony or anachronism. And she never put more into a song than she did with 'How High the Moon.'

''How High the Moon' had terrific verve,' Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman has said, 'proof at last that pop could provide stylish, instrumental inventiveness.' So it's instructive to listen closely to 'How High the Moon''not a chore, since the song provides as much musical exhilaration now as it did when it was released, 50 years ago this March. It encapsulates the lithe popular art of all those Les-and-Mary singles: the density and clarity; the distinctiveness of his guitar voice and her intimate vocal instrument; the heart and the fun. It's a number that expresses the choral lilt of early''50s pop and the electric drive of mid''50s rock, as if 'Mr. Sandman' had married 'Peggy Sue.'

Right from the start, Paul's arrangement has more hooks than a Chicago abattoir. ('We used to start our gigs with the opening riffs from 'How High the Moon',— said another Paul — the one with the Beatles. 'Everybody was trying to be a Les Paul clone in those days.') Do you remember that descending pattern (C, C7, F, F-minor, G) that concluded primal rock 'n roll numbers like Billy Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock?' Here, Paul begins with that lick; he also anticipates and reverses the fade-out ending of so many early rock 'n roll songs by beginning with a very quick fade-in. Four seconds into the record, Paul is already making history.

Then Mary takes over with her salve-smooth voice, multiplied into three-part harmony by Paul's studio gizmonics. She coos 'somewhere there's mu-u-u-sic,' coaxing four syllables out of the word by gliding over them rather than hiccuping through them; she wants the listener to know this is an uptempo love song, not a stuttering novelty. In the bridge ('There is no moon above and love is far away too') she lightly swings 'above' and 'and love,' almost gulping each first syllable, Mortimer Snerd-style. You expect her to do the same with 'is far,' but she smartly refuses to surrender to giddy syncopation; she gives the final words in the phrase their full traditional value. When she reaches the last line ('Until you will, how still my heart, how high the moon'), she extends the 'high' into a sighing 'hiiiiigh,' then softens the 'moon' almost into a whisper of regret. This diminuendo is a subtle reminder that, for all its drive and bounce, this is a song of longing; until the lover returns, the moon is just a distant prop for melancholy.

The softening also leads smartly into Les' solo. He feeds out of Mary's vocal with a 'wah' guitar wail that seems to hunch the shoulders of a note, then relax into some fleet picking in Paul's trademark bubbly style — as if he's somehow playing underwater and the notes have quickly risen to the surface to pop in the clear air. That's the first chorus; the second features a lot of the power chords that later Guitar-zans would borrow. It climaxes in an ascending 'aaaah' from the Mary voices that transports us into the third instrumental chorus, where a few more Lawrence Welky bubbles return the number to vocal land.

Uncharacteristically naked (her voice alone, not double — or triple —tracked) for a few syllables, Mary reprises the first chorus, giving each word double value, again asserting the lyric's wistfulness before revving for the finale. Her voice ascends —'How! High! The! Moon!'—and Les' guitar descends, ending as he began with the rock riff and, adding a puckish triple grace note. He and Mary get in and out of this 21-track mini-masterpiece in a breathless two minutes and four seconds.