Celebrating Les Paul: The Story of a Jersey Cop’s Unlikely Friendship with a Legend
As a young cop in the early '80s, Jim Wysocki had never even heard of the musical innovator, but a phone call at the station one winter night changed his life forever.
When Les Paul gave Jim this vintage Gibson L7, it lay broken in a box in Les’ cellar. Only after having Gibson restore it did Jim find out the L7 had been one of Paul’s earliest electric-guitar test instruments.
Jim Wysocki is a retired Mahwah, New Jersey, police officer and longtime friend of the late guitar legend, inventor, and musical innovator Les Paul. Their friendship began when Jim was just out of high school and grew into a relationship that lasted more than 29 years. Over the course of that friendship, Les presented Jim with a handful of vintage guitars, artifacts, and musical relics. Jim now displays many of these priceless mementos at a museum in Mahwah, and also shares his collection through the occasional Gibson bus tour—allowing anyone who is interested to touch, hold, and play Les’ gear.
Born Lester Polsfuss in 1915, Les Paul spent his life searching for the perfect sound, leading him to become one of the pioneers of the solidbody electric guitar and the multitrack tape recorder, as well as of rock ’n’ roll in general. A tinkerer and a firm believer in DIY, Les would make it if it wasn’t out there and he needed it—that’s just the kind of person he was. Les Paul died in 2009. He would have been 100 this year.
Jim was gracious enough to share with us some pictures of Les’ legendary gear, as well as some wonderful, heartwarming stories of their relationship. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
Rain, Snow, and a Danelectro
“Put it under your bed for a rainy day.” That’s what Les Paul told Jim when he gave him his first guitar in 1981, back when Jim was just a kid. He’d hear the phrase quite a few more times over the years, often accompanied by another guitar. Back then, Jim wasn’t “a music guy.” In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Les Paul prior to their first encounter.
“I was just out of high school, working a desk job at the police department,” Jim recalls. One winter night during a snowstorm, Jim got a call at the station. “The voice on the other end said, ‘Howdy, this is Les Paul’ … I didn’t know Les Paul from the janitor down the hall!” Les was looking for help finding someone to plow his driveway so he could leave home early the next morning. Jim told him, “If it can wait till midnight, another hour, I’ll swing over and do your driveway.”
Thinking nothing of it, Jim plowed the driveway and thought nothing more of it. About a week later, Jim got a call from Arlene Palmer, Les’ girlfriend, saying Les would like to see him.
Jim made the trip to Les’ house, where Arlene greeted him and led him to the kitchen. He recalls seeing “a little old man sitting behind the counter with a guitar. He looked up and said, ‘Howdy you must be Jim.’”
Les—not “Mr. Paul” as Jim quickly learned—greeted him with a smile, a handshake (using his left hand), and a thank-you. He wanted to offer something as payment. Jim insisted it wasn’t necessary, but Les was not one to take no for an answer. He went behind the counter and picked up a few cassette tapes. “This is my music and I want you to listen to it.” He asked Jim—who still had no clue who he was dealing with—“Do you play guitar?”
When Jim answered that he didn’t, Les decided to fix the problem: He handed him a thin, odd-shaped guitar with a little silver tube across its soundhole, then gave him a receipt with three chords—E, A, and D—scribbled on the back. He then demonstrated how to play the chords and told Jim to come back in a week.
Before Jim left, Les gave him one other gift, a bottle of Krug champagne whose back label read, “Especially selected by British Airways.” On the front, Les had written in gold marker, “To my pal Jim, from Les Paul.”Les’ only request was that Jim save it for a special day.
When Jim asked about the bottle, Les’ answer was the first hint that he wasn’t dealing with just any elderly gentleman. “A bunch of years ago I got a phone call from the airline,” Jim remembers Les explaining. “They wanted me to go on a plane ride. They said everyone was going to go—Eric, Jeff, Paul.”
Perplexed, Jim asked, “Who?”
“You know—Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney.”
Needless to say, that got Jim’s attention. On his way home he stopped at the library, opened a few encyclopedias, and was shocked to see pictures of the man he’d just met.
When he went back the following week, the first thing Les said was, “Jimmy, did you learn those chords?” Jim bashed out the chords fast as he could, and Les said, “Good—[but] too fast. Slow down. Everything’s too fast.” He then took the guitar, went behind the counter, and turned his back on Jim, apparently busy with something.
While he waited for Les to finish what he was doing, Jim said, “I read about you—everything about you is Gibson. You designed their guitars back in the ’30s and ’40s, you were signed by them to endorse their guitars—so what’s with this Danny Electro guitar?”
“It’s pronounced ‘Dan-electro,’ Les corrected him. “Nathaniel Daniels, the owner of Danelectro, gave it to me as a present. It was a prototype, and I want to give it to you now … Put it under your bed for a rainy day.” When Jim said he couldn’t accept it, Les turned around, marker in hand, “It’s too late—because I already got your name on it.”
Watch an interview with Jim Wysocki:
It’s Not “Shit”—It’s Stuff
Les Paul was so famous that people were always giving him things—gifts, trinkets, gadgets. His house was full of them. Boxes, guitars, speakers, electronics, and all sorts of things were literally everywhere. “Three-hundred-sixty-five days a year he’d get something in the mail from somebody around the world,” says Jim, “and he would not throw it away. One day I asked him, ‘Hey, what are you doing with all this shit?’”
“It’s not shit,” Les replied. “It’s stuff, Jim. It’s stuff.”
Over time, Jim helped Les manage the build up of gifts in order to keep the house habitable. “One of the most interesting things I ever came across—I guess it was late in the ’80s—was an old, broken guitar sitting in a Seagram’s Seven box in a corner of Les’ basement.”
Les had called Jim and another friend over late one night to give him a hand fixing the furnace. As they were finishing up, Les asked Jim to bring the box over. “I told him it was junk,” remembers Jim. “But he said, ‘No, no. Bring it over.’” Jim retrieved the box and opened it. There was a dead mouse inside. “This right here,” said Les of the old Gibson archtop, “this breaks my heart. Do me a favor, take this guitar and do the right thing—put it under your bed for a rainy day when you fix it.”
It wasn’t until after Les had passed away that the proverbial “rainy day” finally arrived and Jim shipped the guitar to Gibson to have it restored. A year later the guitar was ready.
“I flew down to pick it up, and when they presented it to me I was expecting some brand-new guitar,” he recalls, “but here was this guitar that was rustic and old. It still had holes in the body—from bugs, as far as I could tell!”
The Gibson employees laughed at how appalled Jim looked. He clearly didn’t know how special the instrument was. “Turns out,” says Jim of the circa-1936 instrument, “it was one of Les Paul’s first attempts at an electric guitar. What I thought were bug holes actually turned out to be where he took a record-player needle and jammed it in the body.”
Jim took the guitar to vintage-guitar expert George Gruhn in Nashville to have it appraised and was laughed at yet again. He recalls George telling him, “You’ve got to be kidding me—I can’t even think about putting a price on this!”
Les’ Shocking Developments (Literally) As Jim understands it, Les’ interest in electronics started at a very early age. He says the guitar legend told him he was just five years old when he saw his brother Ralph flip a light switch and immediately wanted to know how and why the light turned on. “Back then you didn’t have breakers and you didn’t have safeguards on electrical lines,” says Jim. “As a result, Les was shocked many times—but he learned to respect it.”
Electricity apparently almost killed Les three times. The last incident occurred at his studio in 1941 when he was practicing with his bass player. With his guitar in one hand, Les reached into an audio stack and inadvertently touched a live wire.
“He fell to the ground and, at first, the bass player thought he was fooling around—because Les was a joker,” says Jim, “but when he noticed Les’ eyes start to flutter he realized something was really wrong and turned off the circuit.”
Les was so badly burned that the muscles were separated from the tendons in his right arm. The injury forced him to take a year off from playing, and during that time he found unusual new ways to study guitar. It was during that period that Les invented two of the world’s earliest solidbody electric-guitar prototypes, which are now known as “the Clunker” and “the Log.”
An Agreement Among Friends
One night in 2006 Jim received a phone call from Les asking if he and another friend who often helped around the house would come over. It wasn’t out of character for Les to call late at night, but it was unusual for Les to answer the door. Usually it was Arlene.
Les guided them through different rooms, pointing at various things and shaking his head. When they wound up in his guitar room, Les asked, “What do you think?” But Jim wasn’t sure what he was getting at and merely replied, “I don’t know.” Les told them to follow him downstairs, where they went out onto the patio and sat on a couch.
“I got a lot of pressure,” Jim remembers Les confiding. “A lot of people want a lot of my things, but I don’t want to give things to people that are just going to take them and go sell them for a yacht. So what are we going to do with this stuff?”
The other friend interrupted, “What do you mean, ‘we’?”
“You two have been a part of this with me for a long time. I need help. What are we going to do with all of it?”
Jim remembers the look on Les’ face—he was stressed. Genuinely worried. He and the other friend turned to Les and came up with a plan. “How about this deal: Everything you gave us over the course of 20, 25 years, we’re going to make sure people get to see, touch, and play after you pass away.”
Les reportedly looked at them, took his glasses off, smiled, and said, “That’s a deal—let’s go have a drink.”
Today, Jim is keeping his word on that agreement. “That’s why we travel around and we let people play his things,” he explains. “Some people think we’re nuts for letting just anyone touch these million-dollar guitars, but like Les always said, ‘It’s only a piece of wood. Gibson can fix it.’”For more information:
American Music Supply
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Click here for more videos of Les Paul's historic guitars with Richie Castellano
Handcrafted by the Gibson Custom Shop, only 100 guitars will be made, featuring premium appointments and a Murphy Lab Light Aged Walnut finish.
B.B. King’s performance at the Zaire 74 festival--which took place September 22-24 at the Stade du 20 Mai in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)--was a powerful moment in music history, bringing the soul of the blues to the stage, uniting a global audience. B.B. King’s performance alongside James Brown and more set the tone for one of the most iconic sporting events of all time, the “Rumble in the Jungle,” a groundbreaking heavyweight championship fight between boxing legends Muhammed Ali and George Foreman, which ended up taking place on October 30, 1974.
“B.B. King’s performance at the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ was not just a concert--it was a defining cultural moment,” says Vassal Benford, CEO and Chairman of the B.B. King Music Company. “We are honored to collaborate with Gibson to create a guitar that captures both the artistry and spirit of B.B. King’s legendary performance. This instrument is more than a tribute-it’s a continuation of his enduring legacy, ensuring that future generations of musicians can connect with the heart and soul of the blues. The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ guitar is a knockout, and Gibson’s craftsmanship is unmatched. This is a great surprise for the BIRTHDAY month of the Iconic Mr. King. Thank you, Gibson from the ALL of the King Family!”
Handmade by the master craftspeople of the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville, Tennessee, the B.B. King “Rumble in the Jungle” 1974 ES-355 is an instant collector’s item, and only 100 guitars will be made.
The B.B. King “Rumble in the Jungle” ES-355 from Gibson Custom is a limited edition guitar that accurately replicates B.B.’s Walnut 1974 ES-355 he used for the concert. Like all ES-355 models, the B.B. King “Rumble in the Jungle” 1974 ES-355 features premium appointments befitting every top-of-the-line Gibson ES™ model, including mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays, Murphy Lab aged gold hardware, a Custom split diamond headstock inlay, T-Type Custombucker pickups, a mono Varitone switch, and a Maestro Vibrola tailpiece. It also comes bundled with a host of case candy that ties back to that historic festival performance, as well as the legendary Rumble in the Jungle fight itself. The B.B. King 1974 ES-355 “Rumble in the Jungle” arrives in a stunning Murphy Lab Light Aged Walnut finish, and a B.B. King “Zaire” hardshell case is also included.
For more information, please visit gibson.com. Price: $9,999.00 USD.
Guitarist Zac Socolow takes us on a tour of tropical guitar styles with a set of the cover songs that inspired the trio’s Los Angeles League of Musicians.
There’s long been a cottage industry, driven by record collectors, musicologists, and guitar-heads, dedicated to the sounds that happened when cultures around the world got their hands on electric guitars. The influence goes in all directions. Dick Dale’s propulsive, percussive adaptation of “Misirlou”—a folk song among a variety of Eastern Mediterranean cultures—made the case for American musicians to explore sounds beyond our shores, and guitarists from Ry Cooder and David Lindley to Marc Ribot and Richard Bishop have spent decades fitting global guitar influences into their own musical concepts.
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Socolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Socolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Socolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Socolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Socolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Socolow's Gear
Socolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos”Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero”Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”
Check out Warm Audio’s Pedal76 and WA-C1 with PG contributor Tom Butwin! See how these pedals can shape your sound and bring versatility to your rig.
The Cure return after 16 years with Songs of a Lost World, out November 1. Listen to "Alone" now.
Songs from the record were previewed during The Cure's 90-date, 33-country Shows Of A Lost World tour, for more than 1.3 million people to overwhelming fan and critical acclaim.
"Alone," the first song released from the album, opened every show on the tour and is available to stream now. The band will reveal the rest of the tracklisting for the record over the coming weeks at http://www.songsofalost.world/ and on their social channels.
Speaking about "Alone," the opening track on Songs Of A Lost World , Robert Smith says, "It's the track that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus. I had been struggling to find the right opening line for the right opening song for a while, working with the simple idea of ‘being alone’, always in the back of my mind this nagging feeling that I already knew what the opening line should be… as soon as we finished recording I remembered the poem ‘Dregs' by the English poet Ernest Dowson… and that was the moment when I knew the song - and the album - were real."
Initially formed in 1978, The Cure has sold over 30 million albums worldwide, headlined the Glastonbury festival four times and been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. They are considered to be one of the most influential bands to ever come out of the UK.
Songs Of A Lost World will be released as a 1LP, a Miles Showell Abbey Road half-speed master 2LP, marble-coloured 1LP, double Cassette, CD, a deluxe CD package with a Blu-ray featuring an instrumental version of the record and a Dolby Atmos mix of the album, and digital formats.