The Life and Times of Les Paul : LES PAUL: An American Original, <i> By Mary Alice Shaughnessy (William Morrow: $25; 320 pp.)</i>

Americans have always had a genius for innovation in their popular music, a talent expressed in constantly evolving musical forms and in the endless invention and adaptation of instruments suitable to those forms. Musical form often has dictated function, as when the first musician coaxed blue notes out of a harmonica and gave birth to the blues harp. But with the advent of electronic instruments, it has also been the case that technical advances pave the way for radical changes in the music. After inventors used magnetic pickups to amplify a guitar’s sound, for example, sooner or later someone like Jimi Hendrix would appear on the scene to redefine the new instrument’s possibilities.

For the generation coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s, guitarist Les Paul embodied that restless spirit of innovation with a string of “New Sound” hit records that combined virtuoso playing with revolutionary recording techniques and sound effects. With his wife, singer Mary Ford, Paul was a fixture on radio and in the early days of television, earning as much as $500,000 a year. A little more than a decade later, after the raw energy of rock and roll had eclipsed their mellow, ballad-based style, their marriage and musical collaboration were over. The guitarist’s career was revived in the 1970s, thanks to his long-running endorsement of the Gibson Les Paul line of solid body electric guitars, which had become prized by a generation of rock guitar heroes.

In “Les Paul: An American Original,” author Mary Alice Shaughnessy chronicles Paul’s obsessive quest for success and recognition--an obsession that apparently continues undiminished--while giving him credit for his many musical and technical contributions. This absorbing, thoroughly researched biography of the guitar legend began as a collaboration, but as Shaughnessy records, he backed out of the project in 1988 when she began interviewing Ford’s family. By that time she had already talked to more than 100 of Paul’s musical contemporaries and childhood friends.

Perhaps Paul’s most important achievement, in Shaughnessy’s view, was the fact that although he broke little new ground musically, he was among the first to see the electronically amplified guitar’s potential as a lead instrument. Before his time, guitars were largely relegated to a swing band’s rhythm section. That tradition of lead playing endured even after tastes in popular music changed, Shaughnessy writes, providing a direct link to such rock guitar gods as Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, who now pay homage to the guitarist.

While Shaughnessy, a reporter for People Magazine, grants her subject the admiration he deserves as a musician and technician, she never shrinks from exposing his flaws, the greatest of which appears to be Paul’s mean-spiritedness when it came to giving others their due. An early example came after Paul’s falling-out with Sunny Joe Wolverton, an older guitarist who’d taken him under his wing and shown him a bagful of tricks. “Shortly after their estrangement, Les began complaining to other musicians around town that Sunny Joe was ‘stealing his licks.’ On the contrary, several acquaintances who knew both guitarists felt that Les wasn’t giving Sunny Joe Wolverton the credit he deserved as a mentor. But this was just the beginning of a lifelong pattern. Over the years, Les routinely overlooked or downplayed the invaluable contributions fellow musicians made to his career.”

Shaughnessy traces Paul’s obsession with success to his childhood. Born in 1915, Lester William Polfuss grew up in Waukesha, Wis., an indifferent student with a gift for music and an unrelenting curiosity about how things work. The younger of two sons, he was pushed in his musical endeavors by his doting mother after his parents’ marriage failed. He played the harmonica and took apart his mother’s player piano, but his real love was the guitar. He soon learned how to amplify it by sticking the needle from an old record-player into the wood. Adopting the moniker “Red Hot Red,” he played hillbilly guitar-harmonica concerts on street corners. Within a few years, he quit high school and hit the road with Wolverton, who dubbed him Rhubarb Red for the radio shows they played in St. Louis and Chicago.

Assuming the stage name of Les Paul, the guitarist played jazz and hillbilly music on sister radio stations, experimenting in his spare time with different guitar designs that better suited his playing style. Paul also built himself a simple disk-cutting lathe so he could record his own performances, and then taught himself to over-dub a succession of musical parts. “It was this jury-rigged machine that would eventually become the basis of the ‘sound-on-sound’ recording technique that would catapult Les Paul to international fame,” Shaughnessy writes.

Over the next dozen years, Paul’s reputation as a hot guitar player spread as he signed on as a soloist with the likes of Fred Waring and Bing Crosby. But Paul really hit his stride in the late 1940s, when relentless puttering in his home recording studio allowed him to over-dub as many as eight guitar parts on a single record. Along the way he had met and married Colleen Summers, a talented young singer-guitarist upon whom he bestowed the stage name of Mary Ford. Mixing multiple guitar and vocal parts, the duo’s renderings of standards such as “How High the Moon” and “Mockin’ Bird Hill” topped the charts in the U.S. and England and they suddenly found themselves earning $10,000 a week.

Les Paul and Mary Ford inevitably found their star eclipsed by other artists in the 1950s and 1960s and the marriage crumbled under the strain of Paul’s relentless touring schedule. “As always, Les put his professional life above his family,” Shaughnessy writes. “Performing was his aphrodisiac. He did it for love, he told her, not for money.” Since being rediscovered by a younger generation of musicians, Paul is regularly venerated as a musical elder statesman (even being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988). Far from a has-been, he continues to record and perform live.