A permanent exhibit about Les Paul opens Sunday in his hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin.
“The Les Paul Experience” will be held at the Waukesha County Museum. Les Paul loaned the museum personal items and helped raise money, including a personal $25,000 check and playing a concert to raise $100,000.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentential the exhibit includes family photographs, stores about how Paul first sang and danced for his mother’s friends, played on the sidewalks of Waukesha, and experimented to created electrical instruments with parts from the family telephone and radio.
A broom handle Paul used as a microphone stand, his old harmonica, and his versions of the guitar that visitors can touch to hear the results of his experiments are displayed.
In an interview with The Associated Press in 2004 Paul said, “I think it’s more personal. It’s going to be the best exhibit of all.”
The idea for the exhibit was presented to Paul in the 1980s but it wasn’t until 2002 he agreed.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer performed regularly into his 90s with his band and according to The Associated Press developed technology and recording techniques such as tape echo, multitrack recordings and overdubs. Other exhibits devoted to him the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland.
“We really wanted to make sure hat people not only learned about who Les Paul was but got an appreciation for the way he lived his life, and then could take his example and hopefully apply it to theirs,” Kirsten Villegas, the museum’s president said.
He was born Lester William Polfuss in 1915 to a German Immigrant family in Waukesha, Wisconsin and died in 2009. Paul built one of the first prototypes for the solid-body electric guitar in 1941. Having his work rejected many times Gibson Guitar began mass-producing a guitar based on his design in 1952. The electric guitar then became the lead instrument in rock ‘n’ roll.
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