Clowntime Is Over

Ever read something so weird you wonder if you dreamed it? That's how I felt after John Payne's tribute to Les Paul in the LA Weekly.

Right off the bat, something felt off when I read this underneath the headline:

W.C. Fields on the legendary innovator: “The music you’re making sounds like an octopus. Like a guy with a million hands."

Huh? Why would W.C. Field's have anything to say about Les Paul? More on that in a sec. First, let me quote you a big chunk of the piece:

One of Paul’s greatest periods of innovation came during his residency in L.A. during the 1950s. In his garage studio on Curson Street, he worked in secrecy. Immersed in his work one day, however, he heard someone in his yard. It was W. C. Fields, sitting on a swing and listening to Paul’s strange new effects. “You know what?” Fields asked. “The music you’re making sounds like an octopus. Like a guy with a million hands. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

Among the myriad innovations Paul was developing was the first multitrack recording unit, an acetate recording lathe that he fashioned from a Cadillac flywheel and fan belt. After finishing up his night’s work on the project at a friend’s hobby shop in Hollywood one morning, Paul heard someone throwing rocks in the window. He looked out and saw Groucho Marx.

“Groucho says, ‘I’m trying to wake the guy up upstairs.’ I started throwing rocks too, and Groucho said, ‘What in the world are you doing here?’ ‘Well, I’m working on a recording. You wouldn’t know what it is.’ Groucho says, ‘Let’s see what you got.’ ”

Paul showed Marx the lathe. Marx said, “My family are engineers over in Glendale. They might be interested in something like this.”

Marx’s family company ultimately manufactured a lathe for Paul, which he used along with the one he’d built himself to create a multitrack recording unit that would record and bounce tracks back and forth between the two lathes.

Once again, huh?

First, we're in LA with Les Paul in the 50s, and there's guitar lover W. C. Fields on a swing. There are a lot of things wrong with this picture, but the wrongest is that Fields died in 1946. At the very least, Payne's dates are way off--though I suspect the whole thing never happened.

As for the next story, I've read everything could get my hands on about Groucho Marx and have never heard this one. Okay, it's a Les Paul story, not a Groucho story. But once again, it's the 1950s, which puts Groucho in his 60s, throwing rocks at a window. Alright, maybe that happened, but a Groucho with family who are engineers in Glendale? Who then manufactured a lathe for Paul? Chico? Harpo? Zeppo? Gummo? This is nutso. Groucho et al created gags, not gauges.

Either someone was funning with Payne and he bought it, or Payne knew some actual anecdotes and replaced the real names with his favorite clowns.