That Old Feeling: Les Is More

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In the 2001 version of 'How High the Moon,' Lou Pallo does the intricate plucking; Les mostly sits in on his own signature song. It's an instrumental (Paul never worked with a female singer after he broke up with Ford), but there's still a pretty woman on-stage: Parrott, the Australian double-bassist. 'I want her to get damn tired,' the old spieler says. ''Cause I got somethin' in mind.' Now he's playing the cute old goat. 'I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole.' Parrott soldiers on, with exemplary forbearance, and Paul puts a note of hope into his mock-lechery: 'I don't have too much to offer, hon' just money.' He turns to the audience and offers the plaint of any 86-year-old whose royalties from records and guitar sales keep accumulating while the energy level keeps dissipating. 'I can get anything I want,' he says. 'It's just, what am I gonna do when I get it?'

In 1955, the first official year of rock 'n roll, the hits stopped coming. A nice married couple was suddenly sooooo 1954. Paul looked less like a genius- guitarist than an irrelevant uncle. Les and Mary did commercials for the Robert Hall clothing chain ('When the values go up-up-up/ And the prices go down-down- down') and Rheingold Beer. They broke up the act, and their marriage. (Ford died, at 52, in 1976.) Paul pretty much retired. He survived quintuple-bypass heart surgery; it was one of the first operations of its kind — another Les Paul innovation. Back from the dead, he was named to the Rock Hall of Fame in 1988. At the induction ceremony, Jeff Beck said, 'I've copied more licks off Les Paul than I'd care to admit.' Paul later said to Stephen Peeples, 'I'm glad I was able to give the kids some toys to play with.'

These days, Merlin of Mahwah can hardly play with the toys he invented. Arthritis has frozen all the digits on his right hand and all but two on his left. His fingers, which once flew over the frets at Mach 2 speed, now do the walking. 'You know, I can't do what I used to do when I was 20 or 30,' he told David John Farinella. 'With the arthritis I got, Christ, I got no fingers. But what I got, I play. A knuckle here, a knuckle there. You forget about the arthritis and everything else when you're playing.'

I think of Henri Matisse, wheelchair-bound in his 80s, who continued to create art — cutting out bits of colored paper, painting with his brush in his mouth, supervising his decoration of the Chapel of the Rosary in Saint-Paul de Vence — because it was what he did, because it kept him alive. For those reasons, Les Paul shows up at Iridium each Monday evening, putting the final touches, grace notes, to the edifice of his achievement.

He kept playing and chatting for hours that night. Around four in the morning he called his pal Joey Reynolds, the all-night radio host, to say that Billy Joel and the James Brown horn section had showed up at his birthday party. He was just kidding, or wishing. But who needed them when two legends were filling that tiny stage? A living legend, Les Paul, and the precious memory of his partner. He closed the first set that night with the plaintive ballad 'Just One More Chance.' He was playing it, he said, 'in remembrance of my partner Mary.'