If Jimmy Page and Slash Were as deeply influenced by seventy-six-year-old Les Paul as they say, why is it they've never played a lick as lighthearted as the silvery yips Paul coaxes out of his guitar in "Lover," the first of 116 numbers in this four-CD box? Times change? That's the easy answer, and maybe even the right one, given the mood of the country from 1948 to 1958, when the material in this retrospective of Paul's days with Capitol Records was recorded. Those were growth years – and Paul was certainly a man for the times. He was not only a guitar virtuoso and pop hit-maker but a workaholic inventor, with the solid-body electric guitar, multi-tracking, eight-track recording and such studio tricks as echo and tape-speed manipulation to his credit.

Paul's puckish zeal colors this set right from the opening notes. "Lover" uses his early multi-tracking technique as if it were a shiny new toy. A second melody flutters behind the instrumental's main tune, a neurotic Tinker Bell gaily zooming in circles until it comes to the fore. Paul's guitar, with a giddy tone achieved by speeding up the tape, sounds like it's laughing. On the next cut, "Brazil," Paul pushes his high-speed trickery as far as it can go, weaving a dizzy, circular pattern over a trim, linear melody and some durable jazz chords. Later, he makes his axe squeak like a mouse and cackle like a hen. And when he brings the sweetly harmonized solo of "Nola" to a close, his guitar mimics that old vaudeville saw "Shave and a haircut, two bits."

Of course, Paul has never played just for laughs; he's interested in beauty, too. Enter Mary Ford, his wife and vocalist, whose lush, honey-toned singing complemented Paul's deep guitar sound (she died in 1977). In these Capitol recordings, Paul displays a seemingly inexhaustible talent for writing simple, pretty and memorable melodies, and he and Ford play them as mated souls, twining guitar and voice into lovers' knots so true that even Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower confessed to being moved to tears by "Vaya con Dios."

That hit and dozens more, including such Paul-Ford signatures as "How High the Moon," "Mockin' Bird Hill" and "Bye Bye Blues," are included. So are more obscure vocal tunes, like the campy blues "Give Me Some Money," which catches the usually temperate Ford in a rare earth-mama growl, and novelty numbers like "Jungle Town" (about a monkey marriage) and "Ro-Ro-Robinson" (as in Crusoe). Those two entries are among the thirty-four previously unreleased recordings herded onto one CD. Hiding among forgettable gag pieces and cloying toss-offs like "Scarlet Ribbons (for Her Hair)" are the inevitable instrumental gems. "I Love You, Oh So Much" is an especially golden nugget, ricocheting between Spanish guitar flourishes and impeccable swing, then sidling into "Back Home in Indiana," which starts as crisp, twanging country and dashes home to be-bop.

Some of this material comes from Paul and Ford's radio show, which ran for twenty-three weeks in 1949 and '50 and catapulted them to stardom. Three complete episodes are presented, but on them Paul seems to have had trouble separating the main course from the corn. Nonetheless, it's sweet corn, home-grown and earnest enough to smooth over the groans it induces, in much the same way that Paul's ever-flawless playing makes up for this collection's jumbled liner notes and its omission of important pre-Capitol material like the country sessions he worked as Rhubarb Red or his recordings as a jazz sideman. Time and again on this set, Les Paul proves that what becomes a legend most is simply being himself. (RS 618)

TED DROZDOWSKI