Category: General Interest

A 53 year old guitar legend told Jimi: “You’re ruining my invention” — 5 minutes later Les Paul was crying

Spring 1968, Gibson Guitar Factory, Kalamazoo, Michigan. A private event for dealers and session musicians. Maybe 40 people in the room, all professionals who’d built careers on the instrument they were celebrating. Les Paul was there. Of course he was there. This was his guitar. Not metaphorically, literally.

He’d invented the solid body electric guitar in 1941, perfected it over years, and in 1952, Gibson put his name on it. The Les Paul model. 26 years later, it was the most recorded guitar in popular music. At 53, Les was still playing regularly, still touring, still showing younger musicians how it was done. His technique was immaculate.

Clean, precise, every note crystal clear. He’d made his reputation on control, on making the electric guitar sound refined, not a noise maker. He’d heard about Jimi Hendrix. Everyone had. The young guitarist who’d come from London the previous year and changed American rock music overnight. Are You Experienced? Purple Haze.

The Monterey Pop Festival where he’d set his guitar on fire. Les had opinions about all of it. “That’s not guitar playing,” he told people. “That’s chaos. I built this instrument for clean tone, for jazz, for precision. These rock kids are just making noise with it. Feedback, distortion, all that garbage.

They don’t understand what the guitar is for.” Someone at Gibson had invited Jimmy to the event. A publicity move, probably. Get the hottest guitarist in rock music to show up at a Les Paul celebration, get some photos, create some buzz. Jimmy had said yes, though nobody was sure he’d actually come. Around 9:00 p.m., he walked in. Jimmy was wearing a purple velvet jacket, his Afro huge, even by 1968 standards.

A white Stratocaster case in his hand. He looked around the room quietly, not making a scene, just observing. A few people recognized him immediately. Whispers started spreading through the crowd. Les Paul was in the middle of telling a story about recording “How High the Moon” in 1951, when someone tapped his shoulder and pointed toward the entrance.

“Jimi Hendrix just arrived.” Les turned and looked. He’d never met Jimmy in person, only seen him on television, seen the footage of Monterey, heard the records. He looked younger in person, smaller, less threatening. Les excused himself from the conversation and walked over. “Mr. Hendrix,” Les said, extending his hand. “Les Paul.”

“I know who you are, sir,” Jimmy said quietly, shaking his hand. “Honored to meet you. I’ve been playing your guitar since I was 15.”

“I’ve heard your records,” Les said, not warm, not cold, observational.

“Yeah?” Jimmy said, uncertain how to read the tone.

“You play a Strat, though.” Les nodded toward the case.

“Mostly,” Jimmy said, “but I learned on a Les Paul. Couldn’t afford a new one. Bought a used one in Seattle for $50. Played it until the neck warped.”

Les nodded. There was a pause. Around them people were watching, sensing something was about to happen, but not sure what. “Can I ask you something?” Les said.

“Sure.”

“Why do you play so loud?” Jimmy didn’t answer immediately.

He was used to this question, used to the judgment behind it.

“It’s how I hear it,” Jimmy finally said.

“The guitar wasn’t designed for that,” Les said. “I built it for clean tone, for hearing every note. When you turn up that loud, when you use all that distortion and feedback, you’re fighting the instrument. You’re using it wrong.”

The room had gone quiet. People nearby had stopped their conversations. Jimmy looked at Les. No anger in his eyes, no defensiveness, just listening. “I spent 20 years perfecting this instrument,” Les continued, “making it sing clearly. And your generation is just making it scream. That’s not music. That’s noise.”

Someone in the crowd shifted uncomfortably. This wasn’t the friendly photo op they’d expected. “You ever play clean?” Les asked. “No effects, no volume, no tricks. Just the guitar and your fingers?”

“Sometimes,” Jimmy said quietly.

“Show me.” It wasn’t aggressive. It was a challenge, yes, but delivered calmly. An older craftsman asking a younger one to prove he understood the fundamentals. Jimmy looked around the room. There were several Les Paul guitars on display stands, beautiful instruments under glass cases. Jimmy pointed to one, a 1958 gold top.

“Can I?” A Gibson representative unlocked the case and handed the guitar to Jimmy.

It was the first time many people in that room had seen Jimmy hold a Les Paul. He sat down on a stool someone adjusted the guitar on his lap, spent maybe 30 seconds tuning it by ear. The room watched in complete silence. Les Paul stood about 10 feet away, arms crossed, waiting. Jimmy plugged into a small Fender amp someone had set up earlier for demonstrations.

He turned the volume to maybe three out of 10. Clean. No distortion possible at that level. Then he started playing. He didn’t play one of his own songs. He didn’t play Hendrix. He played Les Paul. Specifically, he played “How High the Moon,” the 1951 recording that had made Les Paul a household name.

The song that had shown the world what the electric guitar could do when played with precision and innovation. Les Paul had recorded that song using sound-on-sound, layering multiple guitar parts to create harmonies that sounded like a full band, but were all guitar. Revolutionary in 1951, still influential in 1968, Jimmy played it note for note.

Not approximately, not in his own style, exactly as Les had recorded it 17 years earlier. The jazz chords, the complex fingerings, the rapid runs, every harmonic, every pull-off, every piece of the arrangement that had taken Les months to perfect. Jimmy played it from memory, clean and precise, making that 1958 Les Paul sing exactly as Les Paul had intended.

The room was mesmerized. Les Paul’s expression changed from skeptical to focused. He was watching Jimmy’s fingers, listening to the phrasing, recognizing his own playing in someone else’s hands. This wasn’t mimicry. This was mastery. Jimmy understood every choice Les had made in that recording, understood the theory behind the voicings, the logic of the progressions, the touch required to make those notes speak clearly.

After about 90 seconds, Jimmy finished the main theme of the song. The room started to applaud, but Jimmy held up a hand. “That’s how you intended it,” Jimmy said, looking at Les. “Now let me show you how I hear it.” He reached down and turned the amp up. Not to 10, not to Monterey levels, but to maybe six.

Enough to get some natural tube distortion, some sustain, some of that warmth that made rock and roll possible. Then he played “How High the Moon” again. But this time it was different. Same notes, same chord progression, same melodic ideas, but now it had weight. It had emotion. It had what Jimmy heard when he listened to that 1951 recording, not just as a technical achievement, but as music, as human expression.

He used the volume knob on the guitar, rolling it back and forth to go from clean to dirty within the same phrase. He used his fingers to create dynamics that clean playing couldn’t achieve, making single notes sustain and bloom in ways that sounded both ancient and futuristic. He took Les Paul’s crystalline jazz arrangement and added blues to it, soul to it, rock and roll to it.

Not replacing what Les had done, but building on it, showing how the same musical ideas could live in 1951 and 1968 simultaneously. And then for the final 30 seconds, he added the Jimi Hendrix touch. A little feedback, controlled and musical. Some wah-wah texture. A harmonic that seemed to come from nowhere.

But even with all of that, even with the volume and the modern techniques, you could still hear Les Paul’s original arrangement underneath. Jimmy hadn’t destroyed it. He’d honored it, then expanded it. When he finished, he turned the amp back down and set the guitar gently on the stand. Nobody applauded. Not yet.

The moment was too big for immediate reaction. Les Paul stood perfectly still. His arms had uncrossed at some point during the performance. His expression was unreadable. Then someone noticed his eyes were wet. Les walked over to Jimmy slowly. The room watched as the 53-year-old legend approached the 25-year-old revolutionary.

“Where did you learn to play like that?” Les asked quietly.

“From your records,” Jimmy said. “From Muddy Waters, from Robert Johnson, from everyone who came before me.”

“The first part,” Les said, “that was my arrangement, exactly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve had that memorized?”

“Since I was 17. Wore out three copies of that record trying to learn it.”

Les Paul was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was thick. “I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years. I invented this instrument. I thought I knew what it was for, what it could do.” He gestured at the Les Paul guitar Jimmy had just played. “I built this for clean tone, for precision, for jazz.

I thought your generation was ruining it, using it wrong, making noise.”

“You weren’t completely wrong,” Jimmy said gently. “Sometimes it is noise, but sometimes noise is music, too.”

“What you just played,” Les said, and now there were definitely tears on his face, visible to everyone close enough to see. “The first part, that was the past.

My past. What I built.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The second part, that was the future. What it’s becoming.” Jimmy didn’t respond, just listened. “And they’re both beautiful,” Les said. “I couldn’t see that before. I thought you kids were destroying what I’d created, but you’re not. You’re completing it. You’re showing me what it was always meant to become.” He put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “I built this guitar 27 years ago. Tonight you showed me what I built it for. I just didn’t know it yet.” The room erupted in applause then. Not the polite applause of a corporate event, but genuine, moved applause from people who understood they’d witnessed something profound.

Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix talked for another hour that night, sitting in a corner while the party continued. Les asked about technique, equipment, how Jimmy created his sounds. Jimmy asked about the early days, Les’s innovations, the choices he’d made. It wasn’t teacher and student. It was two craftsmen sharing knowledge across generations, both learning.

A photographer captured one image that night. Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix sitting side by side, both holding Les Paul guitars, both smiling. Les has his arm around Jimmy’s shoulders. The photo would become iconic. When Jimmy died two years later in 1970, Les Paul was devastated. In interviews afterward, he would always bring up that night in Kalamazoo.

From Lim Tean on Facebook:

Before you can have an opinion on Iran, you owe it to yourself to know its history. What Churchill and Britain did with Iranian oil. What MI6 and the CIA did to Mosaddegh in 1953. What the Shah spent at Persepolis while his people went hungry. What America did when Saddam gassed Iranian soldiers.

Read this. Then tell me the anger is irrational.

The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know

I will be honest about why I wrote this article.

Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.

This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Let me show you why.

The Original Theft

To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.

In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.

The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.

For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries. The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

Mosaddegh and the Crime of Democracy

Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel. He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration. For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.

Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history. They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation.

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.

In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.

This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.

The Shah’s Gilded Cage

The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.

Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — twenty-six years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image. When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.

But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.

To mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of fifty lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital.

The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France. Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation. The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.

The estimated cost was anywhere between $100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.

The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

Khomeini’s Rational Revolution

When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity. He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together. They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.

When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution. The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.

When America Armed the Man Who Gassed Iranian Children

If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited. The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.

What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.

As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win.

And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew. American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.

The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day. It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.

Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.

And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.

Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging. It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.

If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian irrationality. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.

47 Years of Punishment

Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.

And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.

Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.

Justice Delayed

When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.

For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.

The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine. It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.

It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.

Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.

Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs. They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.

The picture below is of Mohammed Mosaddegh, August 1953- at the moment of his arrest in a coup plotted by MI6 and the CIA.