Like always, you get a ton of interesting tones on this album. Talk about the opener, “Heavy Horizon.”
For the harmony guitars, it was six tracks of Les Paul into a Suhr Badger—a small 18-watt amp. For the lines that are out of the guitar’s natural range, I used a Digitech Whammy pedal. I find with that pedal the high parts sound better if you roll off a lot of the top end when you’re recording it. This is obviously a tip of the hat to Brian May. I’m a fan of all those early-’70s British-rock guys, and he’s the king of harmonized guitars. I chose the small amp for the same reason he does: the tracks just layer more easily.

Continue on to “Hellcats Take the Highway.” What are we hearing there?
I was listening to a lot of Yardbirds when I was recording that tune, and I had always wanted a Supro amp. But I didn’t really want to pay three grand for an old Supro. I knew Supro was manufactured by Valco, so I went on eBay, typed in Valco, and I found this tiny little amp they made called a Rexx. I got it for around $200. It’s probably four or five watts, and I used it for all the tracks on this song. It has a tiny little Jensen speaker and two controls: Tone and Volume. You just crank it up all the way. I was shocked when I put a mic in front of it, because I didn’t expect it to sound so amazing. I played a Les Paul once again, and I got those choppy-sounding stuttering chords by working the toggle switch.

Weren’t you an old Marshall guy?
Yeah. I still am. For a lot of the tracks, I used my old metal-front Marshall Super Lead from 1970. It’s the one I used on Rebel Yell. It stopped working a number of years ago, but, for me, it’s a good luck charm, so I finally had it serviced. It’s all over “Memory Crash.”

What was wrong with it?
I thought the tranny was blown or something, but I guess it wasn’t that severe. It broke back in the day while we were touring, so I just put it on the shelf. Then, I started buying plexis, and I kind of forgot about that amp. But, recently, Dave Friedman at Rack Systems said, “Hey, if you’ve got an old Marshall that you want me to tinker around with, I’ve learned some things from looking at Eddie Van Halen’s gear.” I told him about my Super Lead, and he fixed it up. We run it off a Variac, and it has become my favorite Marshall for recording. I just finished three new tracks for Billy Idol, and I used this amp, as well. Twenty years later, I’m back on the same amp!

How do you set the Variac, and what effect does that have on the sound?
With the Variac, I run the amp at about 96 volts with everything on 10. It smoothes out the tone a little bit, making it creamier sounding with more saturation—almost like you’d get with studio EQ and compression, but right out of the cabinet.

You get a great Strat tone on your cover of Robin Trower’s “Day of the Eagle.”
That’s one of the things I’ve never really explored before. My Strats had such noise issues that it seemed like too much trouble to get them recorded. But I went out to John Suhr’s shop, and he has this technology where he builds a coil into the body of the guitar. You don’t have to use active pickups or stacked pickups—you can use any kind of single-coils, and they’ll be noise free. Once I got that guitar, it opened up a whole plethora of colors that I could paint with, and that’s why there’s a lot more Strat-style playing on this record. On “Day of the Eagle,” I used one of those John Suhr models. This cover was my way of paying back Robin Trower for influencing me. I love guys that can tell a story with their guitar parts without a lot of overdubs, and he was great at that. Obviously, he was influenced by Hendrix, and, although Robin had success, he really suffered the criticism of being a Hendrix clone. I think that was largely because Hendrix had died just before Robin’s career took off, whereas with Stevie Ray Vaughan, so much time had passed that, although he was influenced by Jimi as well, Stevie didn’t suffer the slings and arrows like Robin did.

The layers on this record seem planned out, but the solos sound really spontaneous. How many of them were improvised?
I would say 95 percent. I’ve never been a player who plans out solos much—even with Billy Idol. I would do five solos or so, and we would inevitably pick the first one, because there was something about the spontaneity. On the title track, I did work out the end bit of the solo where there’s the hammer-on thing going on, but, other than that, all of the solos are pretty much off the cuff.

Would you comp takes together?
I did very little of that. In cases where I would try it, somehow I could tell the lines weren’t played with the same thought. So when there were a couple of bum notes, I would just punch in and fix them.

What’s the real deal with how you got your ray gun sound back in the day?
It’s a toy ray gun that I would pick up and hold close to my pickups. I modded mine. I opened one up, and I saw there was a little resistor in there. I figured if I hooked up a potentiometer to that, it would vary something. Back in the day, Hamer built me a guitar with a ray gun built into it, but it didn’t sound the same. There’s something intrinsic about playing the toy through your pickups. It also creates a natural crossfade, because as you hold the note and the ray gun gets closer to the guitar, that sound takes over from the note. Those ray guns are getting rarer and rarer.

How did you get the killer clean, chorused sound on “Flesh for Fantasy”?
It was a Rockman set on clean sustain through a Roland Dimension D with a lot of echo and reverb. I think the guitar might have been a Kramer Pacer. Now, I replicate it with compressors and a Suhr OD100 amp that has an incredible clean channel. I use the Eventide H3000 for chorus. The massive crunch in the outro was two tracks through the same Marshall Super Lead I used for Memory Crash.

In your work with Billy Idol, you managed to carve out your own niche in a very guitar-heavy musical landscape. What was your mindset back then?
The biggest difference was that I was working with a singer who was closer to a Jim Morrison voice than a lot of the screamers back then, so my guitar parts could be a little weightier than those you’d hear in the average metal band. I was influenced by a lot of flash guitar players, but Billy was definitely coming from the punk-rock aesthetic. Any time it got too note-y, we would get a visit from the Punk Police—which was Billy coming in and saying there’s too many notes. A lot of guitarists might find that frustrating, but, for me, it was good.

A big part of your trip was not competing in the shred sweepstakes—although you obviously could have kicked a lot of ass had you wanted to. Do you enjoy being sort of a “stealth” guitar hero?
It’s not something I planned for, but I never get frustrated with people not putting me in the same category as, say, Satriani or Vai. I’ve worked with a lot of very powerful singers and frontmen, and you have to be a little humble. It’s their show. Your job is to do your best work for the song. I think that’s something I’m good at. I’m also really good at being diplomatic. I think that’s a big part of why I have a 25-year career—I don’t really put my ego out there. I don’t have a separate agenda as a guitar player. I do what I do, and I’m really comfortable with my role as a guitarist.