“He said, ‘You think I’m old. Don’t you ever hold back onstage again”: Tommy Emmanuel on the time Les Paul baited him into bringing his A-game to a jam

Les Paul made no secret of the fact that he loved to jam. He would welcome all kinds of players up onstage with him. Slash, B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen, Brian Setzer, David Gilmour... The list goes on. They have all shared the stage with the man.

Besides putting his name to one of the most-famous electric guitars of all time, he was a heckuva player. He also had a heckuva sense of humor, as Australian acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel learned when he was first invited to sit in with the Les Paul band during his residency at the Iridium, in New York. You would find Les Paul in there every Monday night. He played there weekly from 1995 until his dead in 2009.

Well, Paul could spot an easy mark. He was going to have a little fun with Emmanuel.

The gig was simple, a two-hander. The first night was easy. “I take a little solo then throw it back to him then I play one more tune, like Caravan or something like that, and then I bow and go off,” says Emmanuel, in a recent radio interview with Q104.3. “I didn’t make anything of it, and I was being very low-key.”

Emmanuel was being a perfect gentlemen, respectful of his host, and we would expect nothing less (a few later years, he would recount onstage that he and everyone who played with Paul for the first time would be “scared shitless” as Paul chuckled in delight).

With his bit done, Emmanuel kicked back in the dressing room. In came trouble. Paul wanted a word with him.

“When he finished the first show, I was sitting in the dressing room, and he came straight in like a rabid dog and he said, ‘I know what you’re doing!’ He said, ‘You think I’m old. Don’t you ever hold back onstage again. When I call you out there, you get up there! You give it hell. You give it all you’ve got!’” says Emmanuel.

Naturally, he was taken aback. But also, he’s also no shrinking violet. Challenge accepted. “I looked him right in the eye,” says Emmanuel, “and I said, ‘Okay, Les, I will.’ Just like that.”

He would not make the same mistake twice. On night two, Emmanuel was taking no prisoners.

“He calls me up, I come running out there, I crank my amp up, and I went straight into Classical Gas,” recalls Emmanuel. “The audience erupted at the end, jumped to their feet. They were screaming. Deafening. And just going wild.”

Something tells us this is what the cunning Les Paul had been planning all along. Emmanuel says he walked into the punchline: “When they finally calmed down, Les gets on the mic and says, ‘Ah! So he waits till I’m old to come and beat me up!”

Emmanuel was a longtime friend of Les Paul and first played with him during his 90th birthday bash at Carnegie Hall. He insists that the guitar icon only got better in his 90s.

“In that last year of his life, I said to him one night, ‘Les, I don't know, but I swear, you're playing better than you were last year,’” said Emmanuel, speaking to Rick Beato.

In his later years, the notes didn’t come just as easy, but Emmanuel says there was no stopping him. He adapted his style.

“The funny thing is, after hanging around with Les Paul those few years before he passed away, watching him deal with the pain in his hands, and watching him playing melody, using four fingers to get one note... that's dedication.”