Sunday, July 19, 2009
Les Paul and other neighbors
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Les Paul, the great innovator and wonderful musician who died on August 13, 2009, at the age of 94, was a long-time neighbor and an important attraction to tourists visiting our East Midtown music scene and checking out New York’s significant architectural mementos.
For 12 years he was the main musical draw at Fat Tuesday’s Jazz Club , from 1983 until it closed in 1995. It was located in the basement of Scheffel Hall (a/k/a Allaire’s and Joe King’s Rathskeller), 190 Third Avenue, at 17th Street, now Sal Anthony’s Movement Salon, a Pilates studio. When the former upstairs restaurant was demolished and rebuilt, the new owner invited me to view the strange stained glass ceiling of the main floor, featuring pipe-smokers and other Germanic figurations, an early 20th Century decorative scheme.
Scheffel Hall, designated as a NYC Landmark in 1997, is built on the grounds of Peter Stuyvesant’s old farm, and the bicycle shop on 17th Street, past the Greek Orthodox Church, still has, in its subterranean structure, some remnants of the framing of a prior 1600’s farm building. The original Hall, with a narrow storefront, reached a ways back towards Irving Place. The known names associated with the current structure are those of Carl Goerwitz, who after 1904 sublet it to Fred Ahrens, who sold the lease to restaurant owner William Allaire, who combined four properties into restaurant/ meeting hall/rental space for weddings enterprise, until in 1928 it became the German American Athletic Club, with some suspected sympathies with the new rulers of Germany. Joe King assumed management in 1937, returning n 1947 after WWII service in the US Air Corps, and the basement of his German American club reverted to serving as a popular collegiate beer/music hall, with beer mug thumping and sing-along of the falling of 99 bottles off the wall (one by one), about buckling up Winsocki, and events Far Above Cayuga’s Waters, not forgetting the Halls of Montezuma. In 1979 a jazz club took over the basement, and Helen Merrill, Stan Getz and Ahmed Jamal were the music names, until in 1982 came Les Paul.
Born Lester William Paulfuss in Waukesha, WI, as a youngster he learned to play the harmonica, the banjo and eventually the guitar, figuring how to attach the pickup arm of the family Victrola to the music baffle, thus converting the record player into an amplifier. By 1941 he had developed an electric amplifier, and a solid-body guitar, which could hold a tone indefinitely (“The Long”). Then, the echo effect, and an eight-track tape recorder, tools that permitted a solitary instrumentalist in a studio enrich a melody by recording many variations over an original tune. Meanwhile his Les Paul Trio, started in 1936, became an important studio music group, backing up radio shows.
Les Paul met Colleen Summers, a Gene Autry westerns singer in the 1940s, and changed her name to Mary Ford . Her cool voice, with space age sound effects that are still impressive decades later, gave the couple some 10 hits for Capitol Records. I still feel shivers when recalling the sonorous Tennessee Waltz, the thrills of Mockingbird Hill and How High The Moon, and the soft Vaya Con Dios. The marriage lasted 15 years, till 1964, broken seemingly due to the musician’s total devotion to his craft. Their Mahwah NJ house was a sound and film studio, and he even had his broken shoulder, hurt in a 1948 car accident, obliquely reset to facilitate his guitar-playing. The venerable Gibson instrument people named their Long guitar after him, TV and recording successes multiplied. Only after a 1981 bypass surgery did he slow down, concentrating on NYC club work for his trio.
My personal involvement came, when I met a young street person, Cornell, who had an ingratiating manner and a coffee cup out during the day, just outside Fat Tuesday’s. At night he acted as a street guide, earning tips by telling stories and taking tourists to the hidden stairs leading down to the club’s dinky premises. Just about then Readers Digest had published a four page article about Les Paul, which I photocopied and stapled in a booklet form, in some 20 copies. I gave them to Cornell to earn him some extra money (it was then that Cornell’s reading and writing difficulties became apparent), and he had Les inscribe and sign them, good for a decent tip. I lost track of further progress of the enterprise, and when the jazz club closed (the upstairs became the Highlander Brewery and Restaurant ), Les Paul moved to the somewhat more sumptuous Iridium Club, across Eight Avenue from Lincoln Center. When we met him there, some years later, he inquired about Cornell, who still continues the street life, interspersed with helping at the supermarket, telling stories and collecting small weekly support dues, as becoming to the longest lasting local street character faithful to the neighborhood. Les is now gone, he too continued in character, as the longest lasting active club musician, until June, when complications of pneumonia took him from us.
This column is dedicated to the late Old Curmudgeon, a beerhall companion of my youth. If you want to hear or suggest more local bar stories, write to wally@ix.netcom.com
Les Paul, the great innovator and wonderful musician who died on August 13, 2009, at the age of 94, was a long-time neighbor and an important attraction to tourists visiting our East Midtown music scene and checking out New York’s significant architectural mementos.
For 12 years he was the main musical draw at Fat Tuesday’s Jazz Club , from 1983 until it closed in 1995. It was located in the basement of Scheffel Hall (a/k/a Allaire’s and Joe King’s Rathskeller), 190 Third Avenue, at 17th Street, now Sal Anthony’s Movement Salon, a Pilates studio. When the former upstairs restaurant was demolished and rebuilt, the new owner invited me to view the strange stained glass ceiling of the main floor, featuring pipe-smokers and other Germanic figurations, an early 20th Century decorative scheme.
Scheffel Hall, designated as a NYC Landmark in 1997, is built on the grounds of Peter Stuyvesant’s old farm, and the bicycle shop on 17th Street, past the Greek Orthodox Church, still has, in its subterranean structure, some remnants of the framing of a prior 1600’s farm building. The original Hall, with a narrow storefront, reached a ways back towards Irving Place. The known names associated with the current structure are those of Carl Goerwitz, who after 1904 sublet it to Fred Ahrens, who sold the lease to restaurant owner William Allaire, who combined four properties into restaurant/ meeting hall/rental space for weddings enterprise, until in 1928 it became the German American Athletic Club, with some suspected sympathies with the new rulers of Germany. Joe King assumed management in 1937, returning n 1947 after WWII service in the US Air Corps, and the basement of his German American club reverted to serving as a popular collegiate beer/music hall, with beer mug thumping and sing-along of the falling of 99 bottles off the wall (one by one), about buckling up Winsocki, and events Far Above Cayuga’s Waters, not forgetting the Halls of Montezuma. In 1979 a jazz club took over the basement, and Helen Merrill, Stan Getz and Ahmed Jamal were the music names, until in 1982 came Les Paul.
Born Lester William Paulfuss in Waukesha, WI, as a youngster he learned to play the harmonica, the banjo and eventually the guitar, figuring how to attach the pickup arm of the family Victrola to the music baffle, thus converting the record player into an amplifier. By 1941 he had developed an electric amplifier, and a solid-body guitar, which could hold a tone indefinitely (“The Long”). Then, the echo effect, and an eight-track tape recorder, tools that permitted a solitary instrumentalist in a studio enrich a melody by recording many variations over an original tune. Meanwhile his Les Paul Trio, started in 1936, became an important studio music group, backing up radio shows.
Les Paul met Colleen Summers, a Gene Autry westerns singer in the 1940s, and changed her name to Mary Ford . Her cool voice, with space age sound effects that are still impressive decades later, gave the couple some 10 hits for Capitol Records. I still feel shivers when recalling the sonorous Tennessee Waltz, the thrills of Mockingbird Hill and How High The Moon, and the soft Vaya Con Dios. The marriage lasted 15 years, till 1964, broken seemingly due to the musician’s total devotion to his craft. Their Mahwah NJ house was a sound and film studio, and he even had his broken shoulder, hurt in a 1948 car accident, obliquely reset to facilitate his guitar-playing. The venerable Gibson instrument people named their Long guitar after him, TV and recording successes multiplied. Only after a 1981 bypass surgery did he slow down, concentrating on NYC club work for his trio.
My personal involvement came, when I met a young street person, Cornell, who had an ingratiating manner and a coffee cup out during the day, just outside Fat Tuesday’s. At night he acted as a street guide, earning tips by telling stories and taking tourists to the hidden stairs leading down to the club’s dinky premises. Just about then Readers Digest had published a four page article about Les Paul, which I photocopied and stapled in a booklet form, in some 20 copies. I gave them to Cornell to earn him some extra money (it was then that Cornell’s reading and writing difficulties became apparent), and he had Les inscribe and sign them, good for a decent tip. I lost track of further progress of the enterprise, and when the jazz club closed (the upstairs became the Highlander Brewery and Restaurant ), Les Paul moved to the somewhat more sumptuous Iridium Club, across Eight Avenue from Lincoln Center. When we met him there, some years later, he inquired about Cornell, who still continues the street life, interspersed with helping at the supermarket, telling stories and collecting small weekly support dues, as becoming to the longest lasting local street character faithful to the neighborhood. Les is now gone, he too continued in character, as the longest lasting active club musician, until June, when complications of pneumonia took him from us.
This column is dedicated to the late Old Curmudgeon, a beerhall companion of my youth. If you want to hear or suggest more local bar stories, write to wally@ix.netcom.com
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:47 PM 
