I assume you assume wrong. I am from those dinosaur days, and do in fact like me some early Steve Miller. My more complete cheap shot at Steve Miller is about his descent from his Chicago blues days and early stuff with Boz Scaggs etc. to “The Joker” et al.

Yeah, his achievments in multi-track recording were huge. Not only in inventing the technology but also in the uses he put it to, very early on.

I stand corrected. Seems like Les Paul’s most influential achievements were in
developing the technology and techniques of multi-track recording and overdubs.
That’s huge enough. Ted McCarty, Seth Lover, (and probably other people at
Gibson ?), take the credit for the LP guitar design.

LP’s How high the moon not bad

He didn’t invent the Les Paul guitar. So it’s not his 1950s guitar design. Guitar historians dispute how much input he had into the guitar but the consensus is that it was the colour of paint that was used, and probably the trapeze bridge, which was replaced early on because it wasn’t very good. Everything else about it , i.e. everything we think of as distinctive about the Les Paul guitar, were Ted McCarty’s invention. It’s just constantly recited as fact that he invented the solid body guitar, and that the Les Paul model guitar was it, but neither are true.

PRS brought out a McCarty model in tribute to Ted McCarty. Most of the Gibson patents from that period are McCarty [or Seth Lover for the humbucking pickup].

& john lee hooker didn’t really predate the chicago guys. muddy made his first recordings with an electric guitar in ‘48, the same year as hooker.’s “boogie chillun”. anyway, muddy wasn’t the first chicago bluesman to play an electric guitar: before muddy, before hooker, there was tampa red, certainly, and possibly big bill broonzy and mebbe others, too.

the guitarist who was in on the birth of rock n roll was none other than tiny grimes, who, with his band the kilt-clad “rocking highlanders”, played what is said to be the first rock n roll concert evah—alan freed’s moondog coronation ball in cleveland, 1952.

I’ll testify to that. Miller’s band, with Boz on board, on a flatbed truck in the Panhandle in ‘67, said truck recently relinquished by the Dead. A fine, fine, rocking set in the early evening, in front of a smallish remaining crowd made up of the sort of people you might suspect could not remember precisely how to leave. Wonderful rave-up cover of “Mercury Blues.”

(Listing back toward the topic, Garcia played a Les Paul guitar that day)

LB won the thread; bianca wins the internet.

Yes, but it’s not as though American popular music (or Western classical music) before
1940 was some kind of pure art uncontaminated by engineering innovations. The saxophone,
the resonator guitar, the pianoforte, equal temperament, are all advances in engineering
and design which opened the way for new kinds of creative expression.

I’m not familiar with Les Paul’s recordings, but his 1950s guitar design was a classic and
arguably a great advance on its successors :-) To design something that can remain popular
for 50 years in an era of rapid technological change in a highly faddish business is simply
remarkable. He must have been a heck of an engineer and designer.

To my 10 year old mind (kiddies) there was rock and old-people-music, and Les Pauls’s stuff I knew about was definitely over there with Patti Page as old-people-music. It took decades before I would voluntarily listen to pre-rock-and-roll, especially swing and jazz-pop.