The legendary Les Paul - father of the solid-body electric guitar, inventor of overdubbing and multi-track recording, king of the 50s pop charts and rock 'n' roll pioneer - is still irascible, still egotistical, still indefatigable.

To celebrate his 92nd birthday, this profile looks back at the precocious little boy from Waukesha, Wisconsin, who punched new chords into his mother's piano roll, turned his bedsprings into a radio antenna and rigged a microphone out of telephone parts to get a bigger sound from his Sears & Roebuck acoustic guitar. The legendary Les Paul - father of the solid-body electric guitar, inventor of overdubbing and multi-track recording, king of the 50s pop charts and rock 'n' roll pioneer - is still irascible, still egotistical, still indefatigable, still performing and holding court every Monday night at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City. He is the last of that self-educated, brilliantly innovative generation of media masterminds, who revolutionized popular music and reinvented global musical culture - still tinkering and still chasing the perfect sound.