Chuck Berry RIP

[ERD50]

I seen that first Les Paul Electric guitar at the R&R HOF . I don't think I could hang onto that all night . I remember he used a phonograph needle for a pick up .

The phonograph needle would have been on an earlier guitar - a phonograph needle/pickup was used with a regular acoustic guitar, to pick up the vibrations direct from the body of the guitar.

A solid body electric guitar doesn't use the body for sound, the strings are metal and generate a voltage in the pickup which is a magnet and coil. The increased sustain is specifically because the energy isn't being used to vibrate the guitar body.

There seemed to be a lot of a parallel development of solid body guitars and pickups, I'm not sure exactly how Les Paul fits in there, though he is usually given credit. Though he made many advances in music technology, and was an amazing player as well. And a real business 'showman'. Some of his demos of his technology were outright fakes. I'm not sure if it was all fun and games that the audience was supposed to be 'in' on or not, or whether he figured they'd never understand it so just feed them a line about how it works, or?

-ERD50

 

[HFWR]

http://invention.si.edu/invention-electric-guitar

Frying pan!

Though I cringed when I read this...

Around 1931 George Beauchamp, working with Adolph Rickenbacker, produced an electromagnetic pickup in which a current passed through a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet, creating a field which amplified the strings' vibrations.

 

[Breedlove]

This is the guitar that was on display at the R&R HOF. The Log
I own a couple old Fenders and an old Epiphone built in Kalamazoo . Any buyers ?
Not really a Les Paul SB but one of his first guitars .

https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/Les_Pauls_Log_Solidbody_Guitar

 

[John Galt III]

Johnny B. Goode, Memphis, Roll Over Beethoven, Back in the USA, Little Queenie, Rock and Roll Music, No Particular Place to Go, Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Maybellene, Sweet Little Sixteen, Thirty Days, Too Much Monkey Business...

Many a garage band, including The Beatles and Rolling Stones, covered Chuck.

Back in the USA? I thought that was a Beatles original. No, Wikipedia says Back in the USSR by the Beatles was based on Back in the USA by Berry. Who knew?

 

[HFWR]

Back in the USA? I thought that was a Beatles original. No, Wikipedia says Back in the USSR by the Beatles was based on Back in the USA by Berry. Who knew?

Me... [emoji41]

For an awesome cover of Back in the USA, try Rick Derringer's version on Edgar Winter's White Trash album "Roadwork"

https://youtu.be/wf2NsGMW_A4

 

[Birdie Num Nums]

Back in the USA? I thought that was a Beatles original. No, Wikipedia says Back in the USSR by the Beatles was based on Back in the USA by Berry. Who knew?

Mike Love of the Beach Boys, in his 2016 autobiography Good Vibrations--which I am currently reading--claims at pp. 185-186 that when he and the Beatles were in India early 1968, studying TM, that he was at the birth of "Back in the U.S.S.R." He says Paul told him he was writing a tune that started with a flight from Miami Beach and that "It's sorta Beach Boy style." Love writes that he then suggested to McCartney that in the bridge part he talk about Russian girls: "'The Moscow chicks, the Ukraine girls, and all that.' If it worked for 'California Girls,' then why not for the USSR? So Paul went back in and wrote it[.]" Take that with a grain of salt, however.

 

[HFWR]

The early Beach Boys owe at lot to Chuck Berry; e.g. Surfin' USA.