Warren Haynes has spent more than four decades developing one of the most distinctive voices in blues-rock guitar. But before he became a fixture of the Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule and the wider jam-band circuit, a handful of guitarists showed him just how far the instrument could go.

The 66-year-old guitarist recently revisited those early influences on the popular YouTube channel Track Star, where he was handed a pair of headphones on the streets of New York and asked to identify the songs being played for him. The challenge was easy enough for a musician with Haynes’ encyclopedic knowledge of guitar history, but the exercise prompted him to reflect on the players who first made him want to pick up the instrument.

“I first discovered Hendrix due to my oldest brother, who had Smash Hits,” he says of the first guitarist to turn him on to the sound of soul and heavy blues-rock. He picked out “Fire” in no time.

“Then I started hearing Cream and Johnny Winter, and it moved me and made me think about playing guitar.”

Hendrix was Haynes’ gateway to a new world of electric guitar music. “It was so different at that time than anything anybody’d ever heard,” he says, stressing that he isn’t exaggerating.

“I had two older brothers that had really great taste in music,” he adds. “So they played a lot of great stuff around the house.”

Still, it’s Eric Clapton, the second player in Haynes’ trifecta of heroes, who gets the most praise. He identifies “Lay Down Sally” within seconds.

“Clapton was probably my first guitar hero. He was millions of people’s first guitar hero,” he laughs. “He took the blues to another level. He just filtered it through his brain, his personality, and combined it with all the other influences that he grew up with and created this style of playing that no one had done before.”

As Haynes quips later in the video, “Freddie King taught him how to make love to a guitar.”

Haynes also recognizes that Clapton did little to hide his influences, from the Three Kings — Freddie, B.B. and Albert — to Buddy Guy. Clapton absorbed what those players were doing and helped introduce their music to British audiences, bringing the blues to a new generation while putting his own stamp on it.

By his own admission, Clapton benefited from growing up in a musically rich household. His father played everything from the Sensational Nightingales to the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and Bobby “Blue” Bland. That education helped position Clapton to bring the blues to contemporary audiences, where he remained faithful to its roots while injecting it with his own psychedelic personality. His Cream legacy attests to that, although the band’s surprising pop influence is often overlooked.

It’s also worth noting that Haynes’ beloved 12-string Les Paul is a direct nod to Slowhand.

Winter’s music doesn’t make an appearance in the Track Star video, but Haynes’ reaction to his passing in 2014 says all that’s needed about the impact the “Rock Me Baby” hitmaker had on his life.

“He was an influence on every guitar player of my generation,” Haynes wrote in a statement published by JamBase. “If you were a guitarist from a younger generation, you were influenced by Johnny Winter whether you knew it or not.

“He was one of the few guitarists who created a style of playing that everyone who came later recognizes,” he added. “I treasured the few times we’ve played together over the years, and I was proud to call him my friend.”

Through his work with the Allman Brothers Band and his own group, Gov’t Mule — a band that will never say no to an extended guitar solo — Haynes has carved out his own path on the instrument. His standing in the scene was typified last year when, after years of talks, he finally worked with Gibson on a new signature guitar.

As for the magic of the Allman Brothers Band, Haynes says an imperfect secret sauce was key to their legacy.

Yet while Haynes believes Clapton brought the blues to contemporary audiences, the guitarist offered a somewhat cynical assessment of who has carried that tradition forward, saying that only one player has done likewise since.

Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello has often used the phrase “punk rock guilt” to describe one of the great contradictions of the grunge explosion: musicians raised on underground, anti-establishment music suddenly found themselves at the center of the mainstream.

In a 2006 interview, Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell suggested that the same conflict may have been part of the pressure surrounding Kurt Cobain.

Cornell was speaking while he and Morello were bandmates in Audioslave, promoting what would become the group’s third and final album, Revelations. Looking back at the grunge generation, Cornell remembered an awkward period when bands rooted in punk and underground culture were suddenly enjoying enormous commercial success.

“It felt to me like there was a definite awkward period, and what Tom Morello refers to as the ‘punk rock guilt,’” Cornell said. “This was the first generation of people who were raised on punk rock music and followed the punk rock Bible, but suddenly were having incredible commercial success.

"I think that what happened with Kurt Cobain is probably the easiest way to present that and say this was the worst example, I think, of the outcome of that kind of clash."

Morello later explained the idea in greater detail on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast. He pointed to the strange musical collision at the heart of the era: bands such as Soundgarden and Nirvana could love Kiss and Black Sabbath while simultaneously embracing Minor Threat, Fugazi and Bad Brains.

That contradiction became the sound of grunge: punk’s anti-establishment attitude combined with the weight and power of heavy rock.

But once that music became hugely successful, the contradiction became personal.

“There was a real synergy of awesome kick-ass music with ideas and art and poetry,” Morello said. “But there was a part of the ethos that was ‘I can’t stand the success that is happening because it makes me feel like I’ve betrayed principles.’”

Cornell — who, like Cobain, died by suicide, in 2017 — knew the feeling firsthand.

“When you would look through a magazine and see a Soundgarden or a Pearl Jam article, and then you turn the page, and it would be an article on Great White, we started feeling a little bit uncomfortable and self-conscious,” he explained. “Like, does that make us the same thing?”

For Nirvana, that contradiction was magnified beyond anything Soundgarden experienced.

Nevermind and In Utero both topped the U.S. charts. Each sold millions of copies worldwide and inspired a new breed of alt-rock electric guitarists. Nirvana transformed from an underground band to one of the biggest acts in the world.

Cobain openly acknowledged how difficult that transformation was. Speaking to Rolling Stone in January 1994, he described Nirvana's success as “fast and explosive.”

“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” he said. “If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.”

Just three months later, he was dead.

That timing makes Cornell's comments haunting, but it would be too simplistic to suggest that “punk rock guilt” explains Cobain's suicide. His death was the result of deeply complicated personal circumstances, and no single cultural conflict can account for it.

What Cornell's theory does illuminate is the strange psychological territory occupied by Cobain and his peers. They had grown up believing that authenticity meant standing outside the mainstream. Then the mainstream came looking for them.

The irony was unavoidable: the music industry didn't destroy the underground by ignoring it. It destroyed the boundary between underground and mainstream by embracing it. For Cobain, that contradiction never seemed entirely resolved.

And perhaps that's one reason Nirvana's music still feels so conflicted — simultaneously triumphant and alienated, enormously popular yet deeply suspicious of its own popularity.

“Punk rock guilt” may not explain Kurt Cobain's death. But it may help explain the world in which he was trying to survive.

Billy Strings couldn’t say goodbye to his mother. But on So Much for Goodbyes, he’s finding a way to keep talking to her.

The bluegrass virtuoso was on the road last year, somewhere near Kentucky, when his wife called with the news that his mother, Debra Apostol, had died. She was 64. He never got the chance to say goodbye to the woman who raised him.

Releasing August 28, So Much for Goodbyes is Strings’ attempt to make sense of what happened. But its title carries a deeper meaning, too: His mother may be gone, but she’s still with him in the music, the memories and the art she left behind.

“It was a sad thing that I didn’t get to say goodbye,” he recalls to the New York Times. “But when I told my manager about the album title, he said, ‘I like that, ’cause it’s not really goodbye. She’s in everything, and she’s everywhere.’”

The bluegrass acoustic guitar virtuoso has the chops and accolades to match his reputation, including three Grammys. More importantly, his playing and songwriting have helped push bluegrass to new heights, with 2024’s Highway Prayers becoming the first bluegrass record to top the Billboard charts in 2022 years.

Whether Strings can repeat that feat — or go one better — with his fifth album remains to be seen. What’s already clear is just how personal the record is.

Strings wrote “Still I Crash” in the wake of his mother’s death, using the song to say the things he no longer could.

“That’s the one that’s pretty blatantly me talking to her, wondering where she went and why,” he explains. “[It’s me] explaining the fact I had to learn how to walk again, like a child. And just how difficult it is to be without her.”

His mother’s influence is less obvious on some of the other tracks, but it’s there all the same. Lead single “Mill Town Flood,” for instance, draws on Strings’ childhood hometown to tell the story of an alcoholic lumber worker who drinks his life away.

“I’m one of her greatest creations,” Strings says. “She was so artistic and so creative. [But] she struggled her whole life with different substance abuses, and she had a lot of unresolved trauma. I think her way of getting through that was medicating herself.

“She had an illness that she eventually succumbed to. She died of an overdose,” he adds. “It was a shock to me because I had no idea that she was using again. She seemed to be doing really well.

“She’s caused a lot of trauma in my life, but she’s kind of like a conundrum, because she’s such a beautiful, amazing, and artistic person. I’ve never met anybody like her.”

Her presence is perhaps most tangible on the album cover itself, which was created by his mother.

“We always talked about her making the artwork for my next record,” he explains. “She was an artist. She always was making art, these little shadow boxes and mixed media art. She would always be collecting these little trinkets, and pieces of junk, and she would take all this forgotten rusty crap, glue it together to make something beautiful.

“Even before I had any of the songs for this record, she was going to make the next cover. That was our dream.”

The dream was fulfilled in a way neither of them could have imagined.

“It was actually the piece that she was working on the night she died,” he reveals. “It was the last thing she touched.”

Now recovered and back on the road after a skateboarding incident brought his tour to an abrupt end in April, the Martin signature artist is embracing the catharsis of making the album — and the opportunity to break a cycle he knows all too well.

“I’m 10 years sober from alcohol, and I’m definitely drawing a line in the sand here,” he admits. “All this generational trauma has to stop with me, and I’m gonna give my son a very different life from mine.”

After celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024 with special editions, including choice Legacy models honoring Bob Taylor’s most essential acoustic designs, Taylor is all about pushing the envelope further forward with the Next Generation. Primary features include an Action Control neck, scalloped V-Class bracing and Taylor’s new Claria acoustic pickup system.

Of all the Next Gen models, the Builder’s Edition 514ce is particularly interesting. The 514ce has always held a special place in the Taylor line and in the hearts of a great many players, including me. The traditional pairing of solid mahogany back and sides with a red cedar top yields a particularly warm tone that is plenty articulate, making it applicable to practically any musical style.

The Grand Auditorium body with a Venetian cutaway and electronics makes it super versatile and stage worthy. Being in the middle of the main American range means that the 514ce is in the middle of the price range as well, and it looks good without being too fancy. It’s simply a great, all-around workhorse.

The Next Generation Builder’s Edition 514ce promises to take everything to the next level, and it stands on the shoulders of some notable recent developments. In 2018, Andy Powers redesigned the 514ce with V-Class bracing. Taylor is always working with new tonewoods, and in 2022 Taylor revamped the 500 Series using sustainably sourced Urban Ironbark and switching to a torrefied Sitka spruce top.

For the 50th anniversary, they chose the 514ce as a historic model, representing the 30th anniversary of the iconic Grand Auditorium body style. Taylor recognized its significance with a Legacy Edition featuring throwback specs, including X-bracing and a return to the classic mahogany-and-cedar tonewood combination.

I have more experience playing a Taylor 514ce than any other acoustic since I picked up a 1998 edition back in 2008. As a result, I was compelled to review both the 514ce Urban Ironbark and the Legacy 514ce. The Next Generation 514ce is now available in both a standard edition, in traditional mahogany and cedar, and as a luxurious Builder’s Edition in either Natural or Kona Burst finish on a Sitka spruce top with Shamel Ash back and sides. I had to try the Builder’s Edition experience in Kona Burst.

Fresh Face

At first glance, this is the most attractive 514ce yet. The dusky sunburst top with glossy finish and Firestripe pickguard is uniquely beautiful. Large faux pearl Compass fretboard and peghead inlays add a bit of bling. So does the Antique Chrome hardware, although the golden hardware of a classic 514 might look even more complimentary.

The single-ring faux pearl rosette is a bit of a disappointment compared to the three-ring abalone rosette of a classic 514ce. But it’s still an unquestionably beautiful guitar, though perhaps not unquestionably more beautiful than my ’98, simply younger in a new style with a fresh face.

Modern/Classic Tone

The classic 514 tone shone through right away in this Next Gen model, and that’s a great thing. It’s not exactly the same as mahogany and cedar, but Shamel Ash and Sitka combine to render a very similar sound: woody with a dry finish. And it feels great to know that the former is harvested sustainably under Taylor’s Urban Wood Initiative.

While I appreciate the many attributes of V-Class bracing, such as superior sustain and tuning accuracy, I’ve also felt there was little something missing compared to the classic X-braced models. Perhaps V bracing was making the top a bit stiff and therefore slightly stiff sounding.

However, this guitar resonates right out of the box. It’s not quite as balmy in the bottom as some of the new Gold Label Taylors I’ve tried — more like the original 514 tone I’ve grown to know and love. Perhaps scalloping the bracing a bit has allowed the top to flex more freely, resulting in a friendlier tone that still has the deadly note precision of V-class.

Playability, Playability, Playability

This is where the Builders Edition 514ce truly shines. Every note is viable, from the very lowest to the very highest on each string. The neck and frets feel silky smooth, encouraging exploration, and intonation is spot-on everywhere. Chords come together with ease, while notes ring true with individual overtones.

Since this is a Builder’s Edition model, the body has beveled edges under the strumming arm and on the cutaway. That makes strumming feel comfortable and makes notes in those short fret rows at the very top of the fingerboard a bit easier to reach and hold.

I found the factory action agreeable and stable, but having the ability to make my own string height adjustments via Taylor’s Action Control Neck was handy. You can reach the adjustment screw through the sound hole and set string height to your preference. However, it would be nice if Taylor included a tool like the one shown in their demo videos. Either way, I wish every one of my acoustics had beveled edges and an Action Control Neck.

Plugged In with Claria

When Taylor started moving away from its long-standing Expression 2 System on some models, it seemed like maybe something was up, and apparently that was the Claria Pickup System. The new kid in town is actually a classic piezo undersaddle pickup with a flexible, proprietary preamp. It’s kind of crazy that after years of lobbying about piezo sensors sounding better when positioned behind the bridge, as in the ES2, Taylor is now back to the traditional undersaddle piezo strip.

But apparently it’s all about the new preamp. Tested through a Circa 74, it sounded supper peppy. There’s plenty of power with a noticeable zing compared to a basic undersaddle pickup. Controls include volume and tone, plus a handy Mid-Contour. I pegged the volume, put the tone at center indent and focused on the mids.

Rolling it back scoops the mids, which sounds nice and mellow when strumming a simple chord progression with a pick, such as Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” Pushing it forward makes notes project with ever-increasing articulation, which is perfect when you need a fingerstyle passage to pop.

Claria’s Mid-Contour control location near the fretboard side of the sound hole makes it very accessible on the fly, so you can truly use it to great effect during a performance. The downside, from my perspective, is there’s not enough room left to throw a magnetic pickup to run my usual dual-signal chain. The good news is that I generally use the sound hole pickup to add more string pop, and the Claria offers plenty of that, especially when pushing the Mid-Contour.

Taylor’s Next Generation features are awesome. I appreciate the acoustic-tone improvement from scalloping the V-bracing, the precision flexibility of the Action Control Neck, and the dynamic plugged-in pleasure of the Claria Pickup System. Having them on a fresh-looking, classic-sounding, modern-playing performance machine such as the 514ce is a big win.

I can honestly say that out of all the 514ce models I’ve tried, this is the one I’d prefer to take to the stage right now. Kudos to Taylor for making a lovely modern version of my ol’ fav.

SPECIFICATIONS

BE 514ce

CONTACT taylorguitars.com

PRICE $3,499 street, hardshell case included

NUT WIDTH 1.75", black Tusq

NECK Neo-tropical mahogany, long-tenon, standard carve, satin finish, faux pearl Compass inlays

FRETBOARD West African ebony, 25.5" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Gotoh 510 Antique Chrome

BODY Solid Shamel ash back & sides, solid Sitka spruce top with scalloped V-class bracing

BRIDGE West African ebony with compensated white Micarta saddle

ELECTRONICS Claria Pickup System with Volume, Tone, and Mid-Contour controls mounted in sound hole

POWER 9V battery

FACTORY STRINGS D’Addario XS Coated Phosphor Bronze Light gauges .012 - .053

WEIGHT 4.5 lbs (as tested)

BUILT USA

PRO Elegant, modern take on the classic 514 with fabulous playability and comfort. Articulate and warm acoustic tone; punchy, sculptable amplified tone

CON None, but it would be so handy if Taylor included a tool for adjusting the Action Control Neck

It’s been a year since Bob Weir and Dead & Company took over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for three concerts, August 1–3, 2025, celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary. The shows — Weir’s last before his death on January 10, 2026 — were a fitting showcase for his singular approach to the guitar: the unconventional chord voicings, rhythmic invention and musical interplay that made him such an essential counterpart to Jerry Garcia.

That distinctive approach was reflected in Weir’s collection of guitars. Over the years he spent as a founding member of the Grateful Dead — and afterward with groups including RatDog, Furthur and Dead & Company — Weir acquired about 100 electric and acoustic models, he said in the 2015 documentary The Other One.

Yet Weir told Guitar Player in 1998 that two guitars in his collection stood above the rest: an early ’70s Gibson ES-335, which he affectionately called “an old sweetheart,” and an Ibanez George Benson model with an especially unusual back story.

“I was working with Ibanez on some designs in the mid ’70s,” Weir told us, “and they showed me a new guitar that had just come in from Japan. I played it a bit, and they told me they had made it for George Benson. I told them, ‘No, you didn’t. You can call the police or do whatever you’re going to do to me, but I’m taking it.’

“It still has Benson’s name on it, and I’ve written so many songs on that guitar. I don’t know if George knows that ever happened, and I’d like to apologize to him.”

The story says something about Weir’s relationship with the guitar — but so does his role in the Grateful Dead. He was never simply the band’s rhythm guitarist, filling in chords beneath Garcia’s solos. His unconventional voicings and constantly shifting rhythmic ideas were a crucial part of the music’s architecture.

No one articulated that better than Garcia, who told Guitar Player’s Jon Sievert in the October 1978 issue that Weir was “like my left hand.”

“We have a long, serious conversation going on musically, and the whole thing is of a complementary nature,” Garcia explained. “We have fun, and we’ve designed our playing to work against and with each other.

“His playing, in a way, really puts my playing in the only kind of meaningful context it could enjoy. That’s a hard idea to communicate, but any serious analysis of the Dead’s music would make it apparent that things are designed really appropriately.

“There are some passages, some kinds of ideas, that would really throw me if I had to create a harmonic bridge between all the things going on rhythmically with two drums and Phil [Lesh]’s innovative bass style. To solve that kind of problem as he does is extraordinary.”

Weir’s unconventional chord vocabulary had roots in his studies with blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis, something Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen highlighted in an interview with Guitar Player late last year.

“Bobby’s a freaking genius on a lot of levels,” Kaukonen said. “He went and studied with Reverend Davis, and the chord shapes Bob used were Reverend Davis’s chord shapes, and these were not typical kinds of things most fingerstyle guitar players use. It was interesting, really interesting, ’cause he was playing with a pick, not his fingers. It was really cool, actually.”

That ability to approach the guitar from an unconventional angle remained central to Weir’s playing long after the Grateful Dead ended in 1995. He continued exploring the band’s music and his own songwriting through RatDog, Furthur and eventually Dead & Company, where he shared the stage with fellow Grateful Dead members Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, as well as John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti.

And Weir never seemed interested in simply preserving the past. In 1998, he told Guitar Player that the opportunity to keep reinventing himself was part of what made his post-Dead career so appealing.

“Not everybody gets a chance in midlife to reinvent himself,” he said, “and I’d be remiss to overlook that opportunity and challenge.”

A quarter-century later, he was still taking that challenge — and still finding new ways to make a guitar sound like nobody else’s.

Suzanne Vega didn’t set out to change the music business. But by the end of the 1980s, the New York singer-songwriter had done exactly that in two very different ways.

Her success helped convince a record industry dominated by male executives that a woman with an acoustic guitar and a notebook full of original songs could be a major commercial success. Then, almost by accident, her voice on “Tom’s Diner” became an important tool in the development of a technology that would transform the way the world listened to music.

Vega had risen through New York’s folk-music scene before breaking through with her second album, the platinum-selling Solitude Standing in 1987. The record produced her signature U.S. Top 5 hit, “Luka,” and her success helped open the door for a new generation of women singer-songwriters.

“I think I was perceived as someone who had opened the door for women’s success,” Vega tells Guitar Player. “I think I showed the businessmen that this was a template that would work. And they saw that with Tracy Chapman, and then they saw that with all these other wonderful dynamic women, like Sinéad O’Connor and many that came out in the ’90s. And it continues today. There are so many women making all kinds of music and I think that’s the way it should have always been.”

At the time, much of the music business still regarded a woman writing her own songs and accompanying herself on guitar as an anomaly. Vega remembers being regarded as a novelty because she played guitar and wrote her own songs.

“When I was up and coming, a lot of people sort of thought that it was odd to have women playing guitars,” she says. “They thought of it as a ’70s movement or something, so I was still considered a novelty because I played guitar and wrote my own songs. Everyone thought of me as being both retro and futuristic. And I thought this was nonsense. Why shouldn’t women play the guitar and write songs? And of course, all these women before me had already been doing it.”

In 1989, Vega became the first woman to headline the long-running Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. The occasion was marred by a death threat from a stalker that prompted police to insist she wear a bulletproof vest for the performance.

“I was happy to be headlining Glastonbury Festival, but I certainly did not enjoy that whole drama that was going on backstage,” she recalls. “That was totally unexpected, but fortunately, it all ended fine. It all dissipated. The next day, it was never repeated. The threat stopped, and we were able to all go on with our lives.”

But Vega’s influence would soon extend far beyond the artists who followed her.

“Tom’s Diner,” the spare a cappella song that opened Solitude Standing in 1987, had been only a minor hit when it was released as a single in Europe that year, reaching number 58 in the U.K. Its stripped-down arrangement, however, made Vega’s voice unusually exposed — and that would prove significant a few years later.

In the early 1990s, German electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg was working on technology that would allow digital audio files to be compressed dramatically while retaining as much of their perceived sound quality as possible. He used the a cappella recording of “Tom’s Diner” as a reference while testing and refining the technology, helping make the song part of the story behind the development of the MP3 format.

Vega was eventually dubbed “the mother of the MP3.”

“I didn’t know what to make of it at first,” Vega says. “When I was told this story, I thought, what the heck is an MP3? But in the end, I am sort of tickled that I am part of history in a sense, that they used my voice to refine this thing called the MP3.

“I eventually met Karlheinz Brandenburg, and he’s a lovely man, very funny, and kind of a mad scientist type of person. And so, I enjoy that I have a role in history, and a small role in the technology of music.”

When she followed Solitude Standing with Days of Open Hand in 1990, Vega had the budget and freedom that came with a successful album. Rather than replicate the formula of its predecessor, she and her collaborators took a more experimental approach. The record received good reviews but failed to match the commercial impact of Solitude Standing.

“First of all, any formula you think is going to work, it’s not going to,” Vega says. “People give you advice and say, ‘Oh, here’s how it’s done.’ And the fact is that it’s all kind of the Wild West. You just have to do what works.

“After Solitude Standing was a big hit, I had a big budget and lots of time to make the follow-up album. And we worked really hard on that album probably for a whole year, getting every guitar part squeaky clean, and spending so much time looking at everything with a fine-toothed comb. And the album in the end did okay.”

Ironically, the song that made the biggest commercial impact that year was not on Days of Open Hand at all. British production duo DNA turned Vega’s a cappella “Tom’s Diner” into a dance track and scored a major hit.

“The thing that really did well in 1990 was this remake of ‘Tom’s Diner’ by two boys in a studio who had very little money, but had just a brilliant idea,” explains Vega. “They put together this funky remix of ‘Tom’s Diner’ on a weekend! And that was the thing that hit big that year.

“My album got pretty good reviews, but it didn’t hit the way that their version of ‘Tom’s Diner’ did. This taught me that all the good intentions and all the money and all the time that you put into something isn’t always the thing. The thing is the idea. Does the idea connect with an audience?

“And so that was a big learning point for me. I learned to trust my instincts more. So, the 99.9F° album, which came after both ‘Tom’s Diner’ and Days of Open Hand, was much wilder and much freer and was just a lot more fun. And I think that’s one of the most important things I learned.”

By the time the Beatles broke up in late 1969, they had recorded and released more than 200 songs — most of them originals — and left dozens more in the vault. While the bulk of those unissued tracks ranged from rough demos to jams, several were completed recordings that they rejected for one reason or another.

Among them was the first song written for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the tune was a heavy riff-rocker built on a modified three-chord blues progression.

From the start of the Beatles’ recording career, Starr was given a vocal spot on each of their albums (except for 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night) in order to please his fan base. Because he wasn’t a songwriter in the group’s early years, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or Lennon and McCartney cast-offs like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” from 1963’s With the Beatles.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the second category. According to Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, Lennon knew it was not his finest work.

“I wrote it. It's the funniest thing I've ever done,” Lennon told Coleman, who attended the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965, and wrote about it for the magazine's February 27 issue,. “Listen to the words,” Lennon said, laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”

Despite Lennon’s disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm guitar, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electrics, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman reported, McCartney was happy with the vibe the group was creating.

“Paul thought the sound was one of the best ever,” he wrote.

The song is notable as one of the first Beatles tracks on which McCartney played guitar, joining Harrison to perform its driving riff with his Epiphone Casino hollowbody electric. Interestingly, in the same week that it was recorded, the Beatles also cut “Ticket to Ride,” “Another Girl” and “The Night Before,” three Help! songs that were among the first to feature McCartney playing guitar solos and leads.

“Hey, listen, hear that play by Paul?” John asked Coleman at one point. “He’s been doing quite a bit of lead guitar work this week.”

McCartney’s sudden emergence as a guitarist during this week in the group’s history may help to explain Starr’s rather unusual shout out leading into the guitar solo on “If You’ve Got Trouble.” On previous recordings, he had made a habit of announcing Harrison’s solo breaks, calling out “All right, George,” on “Boys,” and “Rock on, George, one time for Ringo,” on “Honey Don’t.”

But on “If You’ve Got Trouble,” he says the rather unusual, “Oh, rock on, anybody!” Perhaps the Beatles had yet to decide whether Harrison or McCartney would play the solo; according to George Martin’s notes, Ringo’s vocals (which he double-tracked) were recorded before the solo was laid down.

That job eventually fell to Harrison, who delivered what is easily his most uninspired solo in the Beatles’ catalog. Perhaps everyone realized by the night’s end that the song was hopeless. Although the song received mono and stereo mixes on February 20 and 23, respectively, it was ultimately abandoned.

Remarkably, that February 20 mix session saw the Beatles record yet another song that wouldn’t be released for years. “That Means a Lot” was a McCartney tune played in a heavy, R&B style, with a thudding beat and a medium tempo similar to “Ticket to Ride.” It would be subjected to a remake one month later, on March 30. Dissatisfied with the results, the Beatles gave the song to American singer P.J. Proby, whose version reached number 24 on the U.K. charts that September.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” was nearly released in 1984 when former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick prepared the recording for inclusion on the group’s unreleased rarities album, Sessions. His work included cutting the first verse, thereby shortening the song by 20 seconds.

But after the surviving Beatles blocked the album, “If You’ve Got Trouble” remained unreleased until it was included in its full length on Anthology 2 in 1996. Commenting on the song, music critic Ian MacDonald called it “the only unmitigated disaster in the Lennon–McCartney catalog.”

Even George Harrison was unsparing in his criticism. “It’s the most weird song,” he commented in the Beatles’ Anthology book. “I’ve no recollection of ever recording it. It’s got stupid words and is the naffest song. No wonder it didn’t make it onto anything.”

Bobby Whitlock was all of 22 when he and Eric Clapton set about forming Derek and the Dominos in England during the summer of 1970. A talented singer, organist and guitarist from Memphis, Whitlock forged a friendship with Clapton unlike any other musician. Beyond serving as his partner in the group’s creation, he was Clapton's co-writer on many of the songs on Derek and the Dominos’ only studio album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

“‘I Looked Away’ was the very first one,” Whitlock told Guitar Player. “And then ‘Anyday,’ and then ‘Tell the Truth.’ It felt really natural for us to write together, because we were friends first and we weren’t writing to make money or anything like that. We were just writing songs to have something we could play together.”

The two men would go on to perform on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, lending their talents to — among other tracks — Harrison’s 1970 hit single, “My Sweet Lord.”

But it was with their own songs that they would make music history, along with bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon, as Derek and the Dominos. Toward the end of August, the quartet settled into Criteria Studios in Miami to begin their fruitful sessions for Layla.

But as close as they were, Whitlock understood that there was a deeper connection between Clapton and Duane Allman. The Allman Brothers Band guitarist was a late arrival to Derek and the Dominos. Although the Allmans weren’t famous at the time, Clapton knew Duane's guitar talents from his session work for Atlantic recording artists, in particular Wilson Pickett, whose 1969 cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” featured Duane's blazing fretwork.

“I remember hearing ‘Hey Jude’ by Wilson Pickett and calling either [Atlantic president] Ahmet Ertegun or Tom Dowd, and saying, ‘Who’s that guitar player?’” Clapton said. “To this day, I’ve never heard better rock guitar playing on an R&B record.”

As it happened, the Allman Brothers Band was playing a benefit concert at the Miami Beach Convention Center on the night of August 26, the first day of the Dominos’ sessions. Clapton and the band attended, after which Allman accompanied them back to Criteria for a jam. He never left.

Playing together — Clapton on Brownie, the 1956 Fender Stratocaster he’d purchased in 1967 during his tenure with Cream; Allman with his gold-top 1957 Gibson Les Paul — the two guitarists seemed to read each other’s moods and minds. “The sound of those two guitars together was perfect and complementary,” Whitlock said. “You just couldn’t have asked for anything better than that.”

As Whitlock explained, Clapton and Allman’s friendship was as symbiotic as their guitar playing. He witnessed many moments of camaraderie between them and recalls the profound impact it had on his own awareness of what they were accomplishing in the studio.

“One night after we had finished up recording for the day, we went on back to Eric’s room,” he recalled. “We were all drinking whisky and playing guitars, and I was listening to Eric and Duane talking about Robert Johnson, Elmore James and so on, and playing Bill Broonzy stuff.

“But I was standing there, leaning up against the wall and taking all this in, knowing that this is some really important stuff that’s going down, and I’m a witness to it. And these two young guys — we were all in our 20s — they were like two old, sage black blues guys talking it over with a bottle of whisky, and then playing the music, right there.

“And it was then that I took the photo of Eric and Duane together that’s in the album gatefold. It was the one time I felt truly privileged to be there, at the right time, the right place, and in the right frame of mind.”

Whitlock was also present when Allman worked his magic on Layla’s title track, devising the seven-note opening lick that is the song’s calling card. “Duane suggested it, and he came up with it,” Whitlock confirmed. “We already had the song together, but it just started out completely different when we worked it up in England. And Duane said, ‘How about starting it this way?’”

Perhaps playing off the desperation in Clapton’s lyrics, Allman cleverly lifted the first half of the opening melody from Albert King’s “As the Years Go Passing By,” where the bluesman sings, “There is nothing I can do if you leave me here to cry.” Whitlock recalls that, originally, Allman played the line slower than it appears on the recording. “It was Eric’s idea to play it fast,” he said. “Duane played it, but Eric sped it up.”

For all the great music and communal spirit that arose from those sessions, Clapton at one point disowned the album. Speaking of the Dominos in 1985, the guitarist groused, “We were a make-believe band. We were all hiding inside it: Derek and the Dominos — the whole thing.”

But Whitlock saw the artifice as something else — a chance for a band led by a world-famous guitarist known to many as "God" to stand on its own merits.

“It’s great music,” said Whitlock, who passed away August 10, 2025. “And it’s real. It became a success on its own, not because of promotion and not because of Eric Clapton.

“I remember when we were doing our tour of the United States. We were riding in a station wagon somewhere up in Minnesota, heading to a gig, and ‘My Sweet Lord’ comes on the radio. At the time, it was the number-one record in the country.

"And there we were, four guys in a car, heading to some little gig somewhere. I mean, we were the guys on a number-one record, and nobody even knew who the hell we were!”

History remembers Car Wheels on a Gravel Road as Lucinda Williams’ breakthrough — an album that helped define Americana and reshaped the singer-songwriter landscape.

Gurf Morlix recalls it differently. As Williams’ former guitarist and bandleader, his stylistic touch and musical fingerprints are all over the record and the three years it took to create it. The album’s liner notes bear this out in a brief but telling dedication: “To Donald, Ciambotti & Gurf: Thanks for the years of hard work & joy & the blood you sweat over this.”

But long before Car Wheels became a touchstone, Morlix was grinding it out on the margins, shaped by a hard-earned realism that never left him.

As an aspiring musician in Buffalo, New York, Morlix felt trapped in a local scene that “didn’t really seem conducive to making a living.” He wasn’t looking for hits or fame; Morlix was an old-school man’s-man type with a big heart and a warm, outlaw-country tone that felt pulled from an earlier era — music built for the twang-hungry faithful rather than the charts.

Still, nothing came easily.

“I had a bit of talent,” he tells Guitar Player. “But I couldn’t find like-minded people who wanted to play the same kind of music I did.

“I decided that Austin was the place to go — a great live music scene, hip college town and cheap rent. I was in heaven.”

So began the first of many moves that would define his life and career.

Lucinda Williams was part of that same Austin ecosystem, although Morlix didn’t meet her there. By the mid ’80s, he had pushed further west to Los Angeles, where their paths finally crossed.

“I’d moved out there ‘cause the Austin music scene started seeming a little small for me,” Morlix says. “She came out from Austin to do a sorta high profile gig. She was rehearsing a band of L.A. musicians. Her guitar player, David Grissom, was gonna fly out from Austin for the gig, but they asked me if I’d do some of the rehearsals just for fun.”

The chemistry was immediate, and Morlix soon became a fixture in Williams’ band. By the late ’80s he was serving as her bandleader.

“It worked well,” he says. “After a while, she moved out there, and I fell into playing with her. Bass, at first, and then lead guitar. We started doing gigs, and it worked well.”

Creatively, the two were aligned in a way that felt effortless. “It just worked organically,” Morlix explains. “She’d play me a new song, and I’d start playing along. Usually, I’d come up with the musical hooks right there, on the first or second pass. It was so natural.”

By 1988, Williams was ready to record her first album since 1980’s Happy Woman Blues. Until then, commercial success had eluded her. That changed with Lucinda Williams.

“We weren’t sure what would happen,” Morlix explains. “We had to do it really fast because of financial considerations and time constraints. We barely had any time to think. We made it in a week or two.”

The response was immediate and emphatic. Critics raved, and Williams was suddenly being mentioned alongside the era’s most respected songwriters, thanks to songs like “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad” and “Passionate Kisses.” The album is often credited with helping launch the alt-country movement. Morlix — as its producer, bandleader, and guitarist — was stunned by the reaction.

“It got played around the country,” he recalls, “though we didn’t know it. They cobbled together a national tour, and we were completely surprised to find lots of people showing up at the shows.”

Momentum carried Williams into the ’90s and 1992’s Sweet Old World, a slicker, more polished record that proved her success was no fluke. That same year, Mary Chapin Carpenter scored a major hit with her cover of “Passionate Kisses,” earning Williams a Grammy for Best Country Song at the 1994 awards.

For Morlix, however, the shine was wearing off. The larger budget for Sweet Old World brought new pressures — and new frustrations.

“And lots of time to overthink things,” he says. “As producer, I was actually having to look for places we could spend money. I had told the A&R person I could make the album for a tenth of our budget. He said, ‘Don’t ever say that. That’d ruin it for all of us.’”

An old-school musical maverick with a strong moral compass was now colliding head-on with the machinery of the music business. Those tensions would intensify during the making of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Between February and March 1995, Williams and Morlix were back in Austin recording the album’s initial sessions. Williams, however, was unhappy with her vocals. “I was trying to grow,” she told Billboard in 2018, reflecting on the album’s 20th anniversary. “I didn’t want to make another Sweet Old World.”

Morlix saw it differently. Despite his reservations about the record’s production, he loved the sounds he’d achieved on Sweet Old World. “I was playing a Telecaster, through either a blackface Fender Twin, or a Vox Super Beatle head going into a Marshall 4x12 cabinet,” he says. “I have never heard a better-sounding and more versatile tremolo than on that Vox amp.”

By his estimate, they’d completed nearly 90 percent of the album when Williams pulled the plug. She scrapped the sessions and relocated to Nashville, where she began spending time with guitarist and songwriter Steve Earle, who was close with producer Ray Kennedy. Before long, Williams asked Earle and Kennedy to re-record material she and Morlix had already tracked.

For Morlix, it was almost too much. He stepped down as producer and eventually walked away from Williams entirely, although he continued playing guitar as Car Wheels dragged on for the next three years.

“We were working on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road for forever and ever it seemed,” he says with a sigh. “She wasn’t feeling very good those days. The longer it went on, the worse it got.

“Making music is supposed to be joyful. What we were going through was not. Finally, it came to a head, and I quit.”

His exit coincided with Williams’ breakthrough. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road propelled her into the mainstream, powered by songs like “Metal Firecracker,” the Blaze Foley tribute “Drunken Angel,” the hip-hop-inflected “Joy” and the swaggering title track. The album reached number 65 on the Billboard 200, went Gold in the U.S., and was met with near-universal acclaim.

While Williams’ profile exploded, Morlix retreated.

“I didn’t pay much attention,” he insists. “It was all too fresh and raw.”

Commercial success changed nothing for him. “I learned that I can make great music with musicians I enjoy being around,” he says. “Getting out of that situation was the best move I’ve ever made.”

Morlix believes he’s never been fully credited for his role in shaping Car Wheels. Some associated with the album have suggested little of his playing made the final cut.

“All I know is they had a lot of guitarists come in to try playing in place of me, and to add other parts,” he counters. “Every part I played got used in the final mixes. The person who mixed it told me the producer stressed that there were to be no politics involved in the mixing process.”

Even so, he remains ambivalent about his own work on the record.

“The parts I played on Car Wheels, all of which are used on the album, were done with my 1956 Gretsch Duo Jet electric through a blackface Fender Pro Reverb,” he recalls.
“But it wasn’t my amp. I wasn’t quite happy with the sounds we got. I had hoped to redo my parts, but things got dark, and I decided I’d had enough.”

After leaving Williams’ band, the two artists diverged sharply. Morlix opted for a quieter path, focusing on his solo career and steering clear of the spotlight.

“I don’t have any regrets,” he says. “I did it all my way.

“I’ve turned down big money gigs with famous people ’cause I couldn’t see myself feeling good about having to play that music every night. And I’ve turned down offers from musicians I respect ‘cause the timing didn’t seem right, or something similar. I’ve been so lucky to be able to do what I do with no compromises.”

Listen closely to any Lucinda Williams album recorded since Car Wheels, and Morlix’s influence still lingers. The sonic vocabulary he helped establish remains baked into her music.

“I don’t really think about that,” Morlix says. “But I do know that we were on the ground floor of Americana music. There were not many similar acts at the time, but these days there are tens of thousands of people wanting to be part of it. It’s overwhelming.”

Morlix never left the music behind. Since stepping away from Williams, he’s released 19 solo albums, most recently 2025’s Bristlecone.

“Songwriting is not easy,” he says. “But it’s so rewarding when people tell you they are moved by a song you’ve written.”

He still plays daily and continues collecting gear. “I’ve got so many instruments and amps,” he says with a laugh. “I look at them as colors to paint with. My taste keeps evolving. I don’t play any better than I used to, but my desire to create keeps me moving.”

For the second time this year, Lindsey Buckingham has hinted that he and Stevie Nicks could have something new in the works, saying their renewed relationship has made next year “pretty interesting.”

The guitarist was speaking with E! about the forthcoming Fleetwood Mac documentary when he reflected on the healing that has taken place between himself and his former girlfriend and bandmate.

“I think the process of making that has been a very circular healing process for all of us,” Buckingham said.

Asked about the possibility of touring with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham was more circumspect, suggesting that repairing his relationship with Nicks was more important than reuniting the band.

“When we left things in 2019, maybe as far as I was concerned, not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons,” he said. “No one was happy about it, and all of that has been healed and worked out.”

“Stevie and I are talking all the time now,” he added. “Next year should be a pretty interesting year, because I think quite a few things will reveal themselves.”

Whatever those “things” turn out to be, Buckingham's comments suggest that the long-fractured relationship between two of Fleetwood Mac's most important members has entered a new phase.

Buckingham and Nicks, who were romantically involved at the time, joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year's Eve 1974 after performing together as Buckingham Nicks. They became central figures in the band's hugely successful mid-'70s lineup, thanks to their songwriting and vocal talents, as well as Buckingham’s virtuoso fingerstyle approach on both acoustic and electric guitar. He remained with the group until 1987, while Nicks stayed until 1990. Both returned in 1997, but Buckingham was fired from the band in 2018.

The circumstances surrounding his exit were contentious. Buckingham subsequently told People that it was “all Stevie's doing,” claiming that Nicks had “basically gave the band an ultimatum that either I had to go or she would go.”

Nicks disputed that account, saying she had not demanded that Buckingham be fired and had instead removed herself from what she considered a toxic situation.

“I did not demand he be fired,” she said. “Frankly, I fired myself. I proactively removed myself from the band and a situation I considered to be toxic to my well-being. I was done. If the band went on without me, so be it.”

The first significant signs of a thaw came last year, when Buckingham Nicks, the duo's 1973 album, was reissued. Nicks shared a letter she wrote in 1973 in which she predicted Buckingham was destined for greatness. She also revealed that she and Buckingham had begun communicating again, despite the animosity that had followed his departure from Fleetwood Mac.

“Lindsey and I started talking about [the album] last night,” she said. “This whole thing seems really like yesterday to us.”

Buckingham then hinted at the possibility of a new collaboration with Nicks in a video shared on Instagram earlier this year. Looking ahead to 2026, he spoke about the renewed connection sparked by the Buckingham Nicks reissue.

“I think on a more general level, just the energy of what Buckingham Nicks did to sort of create a resurgence of connection between Stevie and myself, I think on a larger scale that seems to be something that's in the air,” he said.

“And what that translates to specifically, I wouldn't want to speculate yet, but I believe with all my heart it will translate to something good and something wonderful and something needed and something extremely appropriate.”

A Fleetwood Mac reunion, however, appears to be a different matter. Nicks has repeatedly ruled one out following the death of keyboardist and singer Christine McVie in 2022.

“Without Christine, no can do,” Nicks told Mojo. “There is no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together in any way. Without her, it just couldn't work.”

Buckingham has been more open to the possibility of returning to the band. In a 2024 interview with Conan O'Brien, he said he would reunite with Fleetwood Mac “in a heartbeat.”

“In a heartbeat, absolutely,” he said. “If there's more to come, if there's a way to heal that, that would be great. It would be very appropriate to close on a more circular note.”

For now, though, Buckingham's latest comments point toward something potentially more intriguing: not necessarily a Fleetwood Mac reunion, but a new chapter for Buckingham and Nicks themselves.

“That’s my gift from the songwriting gods,” Randy Bachman says.

That gift is “Takin’ Care of Business,” Bachman’s 1974 hit single with Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO), and a staple of classic-rock radio ever since. But as the Canadian-born guitarist reveals to Guitar Player, his gift took a lot of hard work, rejection and patience to earn. Although it’s part of the BTO catalog, the song dates back to Bachman’s earlier group, the Guess Who, for whom he penned hits like “Undun” and co-wrote other smashes, like “American Woman” and “These Eyes,” with keyboardist and singer Burton Cummings.

But “Takin’ Care of Business” wouldn’t see the light of day until well after Bachman left the Guess Who in May 1970.

“That took me six or seven years to write,” he says. “I started it about ’67 at Scepter Studios in New York, where the Guess Who were recording.” Scepter had achieved fame in the early 1960s as the label for the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers. The studio, though less successful, is notable now as the place where the Velvet Underground cut much of their debut record, The Velvet Underground & Nico, in April 1966.

At the outset, Bachman says, “I was trying to write a song like the Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ — a day in the life of a guy — rather than write a love song.

“In fact, I was actually writing about Stanley Greenberg, who was the son of Florence Greenberg, who owned Scepter Records. She managed the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, and she wrote [the Shirelles’ 1962 hit] ’Soldier Boy.’

“Her son Stanley Greenberg was the engineer, and he was blind. And every day coming to work, he would wear a white button-down shirt, a tweed tie, tweed jacket, tweed pants and brogue shoes. And this is in August in New York, when it’s 95 above and 95 humidity! We’re wearing ripped shirts, cut-off pants, ripped jeans and clogs, and he’s coming to work in a suit.

“We’d ask, ‘Stanley, why are you dressed this way? It’s so hot out there!’ He’d say, ‘I want to look like George Martin. I know this is what he wears.’

“‘Okay, you look like George Martin,’ I told him. ‘I want to write a song about you.’

“I wanted to call it ‘White Collar Man,’ ’cause he wore that white button-down shirt every day.”

Bachman decided he would tag along with Stanley that evening to draw inspiration for his song.

“So we leave at 10 o’clock at night,” Bachman continues. “And I asked him, ‘So what happens in the morning when you get up and go to work?' And he says, ‘Well, it’s crowded, and I take the 8:15 into the city.’

"And I start thinking: I wake up in the morning, the alarm clock’s warning, I take the 8:15 into the city. ‘And then what?,’ I asked him. He says, ‘I smell makeup and hairspray. The girls on the train are trying to do their makeup to look pretty for their jobs. And then I walk to work and start my slavin’ job to get my pay.’

“I thought, Great! There’s a song!"

While the verses that Bachman wrote up hewed closely to the song as it’s known today, the familiar chorus and its refrain were nonexistent. As Bachman explains, “Originally, when we got to the hook, the song stopped and we sang, ‘White Collar Man,’ the same as [sings] ‘Paperback Writer.’

The song’s debut was anything but successful.

“I played it for Burton Cummings, who hated it,” Bachman recalls. “He said, ‘The verses are great — but "White Collar Man?" Gag me with a drumstick! I’m never gonna do this song. We’ll get sued by Lennon and McCartney. Let me change the hook.’ I said, ‘No, it’s my song. I’ll find the hook!’

“So that song never made it onto any Guess Who album.”

By the latter half of 1970, Bachman was on his own, having left the Guess Who when tensions with Cummings reached the breaking point. He formed Bachman-Turner Overdrive with his brothers, guitarist Tim and drummer Robbie, and bassist and lead vocalist C.F. Turner. But Bachman hadn’t forgotten about “White Collar Man.”

“I’m driving to a gig one night,” he recalls, “and this DJ on the radio, who I knew very well, says, ‘This is Daryl B on CFUN radio, takin’ care of business!’ I thought, What a song title!”

Arriving at the gig, Bachman learned Turner had lost his voice and couldn’t sing. “So I had to sing the last set on a Saturday night in a rock and roll club,” he says. “And I’m not a singer.”

Staring down disaster, Bachman gamely took on vocal duties but was limited in what he could perform given his skills. After leading the band through improvised versions of various tunes, including Santana’s ”Oye Como Va" — “I don’t know Spanish but it was on the radio and everybody loved dancing to it, so I sang it phonetically” — Bachman was at a loss for what to play.

“And then a little light went on in my head,” he says. “I thought, This is your big chance for ‘White Collar Man!’ Put it together with the ‘takin’ care of business’ line you just heard on the radio. The band can’t say no — they are your hostage.

“I said to them, ‘Just play these three chords and follow me!’ And I starting singing, ‘You get up every morning the alarm clock’s warning...’ And when I got to the hook, I started singing, ‘Takin’ Care of Business.’”

By the next chorus he had the band singing along with him. “And I answered them with ‘Every day!’ and ‘Every way!’

“And then — boom — it hit me: This is a classic!”

The group recorded it a few weeks later, with Bachman playing his 1957 Gretsch 6120 electric guitar and taking lead vocals for the first time “Fred told me, ‘You should sing this,’” Bachman recalls of the session. “'You’ll be, like, my relief pitcher.’ It felt like a real BTO song.”

Released on Bachman-Turner Overdrive II, “Takin’ Care of Business” was released as a single in January 1974 and began a slow march up the charts, reaching number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 that August and remaining on the chart 20 weeks, the longest of any BTO song.

Although BTO called it quits in 1980, they reformed several times, most recently in 2023, albeit with a revised lineup that includes Bachman’s son Tal on vocals, guitar and piano. The reunion was a welcome celebration for Bachman, who was already glowing after recovering his Gretsch 6120, which was stolen in 1976.

As for “Takin’ Care of Business,” it lives on today on classic-rock radio, commercials, film and TV. The phrase has also become part of the modern lexicon for hourly and salaried employees everywhere, a richly deserved reward for Randy Bachman’s long, hard work.

Over a 56-year recording career, Paul Rodgers has collected guitar players like a connoisseur collecting fine wines. They’re pulled in by the soulful power of his voice, and he embraces what the combination, and combustion, of that with their playing can do to a song.

Consider the company English-born Rodgers — a solid rhythm guitarist himself, as well as a pianist — has kept, starting with the late Paul Kossoff in Free between 1969 and 1973, the band that put both men on the rock and roll map.

After that he joined forces with Mott the Hoople’s Mick Ralphs in the recently minted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group Bad Company, for six albums defined by brawny, muscular but still sophisticated hard rock that had few peers for success during the ’70s. (The new Can't Get Enough: A Tribute to Bad Company demonstrates the group's continuing influence, with Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke joining on tracks like "Shooting Star" and "Feel Like Makin' Love" with Halestorm, Blackberry Smoke and Def Leppard's Joe Elliott and Phil Collen.)

Then for his next trick? No less than Jimmy Page in the short-lived band the Firm, delivering a pair of powerhouse albums and Billboard Mainstream Rock chart toppers such as “Radioactive” and “All the King’s Horses.”

Rodgers went on to join forces with drummer Kenney Jones in the Law, then spent five years alongside Brian May in Queen + Paul Rodgers, another supergroup collaboration that brought May and drummer Roger Taylor back on the road and also yielded two live albums and 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks, the first Queen-related studio album since 1995’s Made In Heaven.

Rodgers maintained his impressive six-string relationships outside of his band affiliations, too, and through his seven solo albums — Jeff Beck, Joe Bonamassa, Steve Cropper and Slash among them.

“I don't really know the secret of how guitarists create their own unique sounds,” he tells us, “but I know a good guitar sound when I hear it.”

Here he shares some reflections about some of the best he’s worked with.

Paul Kossoff (Free)

“Koss was my friend and guitar player extraordinaire from before the formation of the band Free. We had met at a jam session. He came up onstage at a blues club in London, the Fickle Pickle, and blew me away with his powerful sound and his fluid electric guitar work. We played like we had been playing together for a long time, There was an instant rapport between us.

“His Gibson Les Paul was, as we used to say, ‘the bees’ knees.’ At the time, Eric Clapton was doing the Les Paul–Marshall stack thing and was playing at the Marquee just across town on Wardour Street in the West End.

The London music scene was referred to as experiencing a blues boom. The blues was the music we all listened to, the likes of B.B. King, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

“Paul was one of those instantly recognizable players. You could identify him from just a few notes or chords, as in the opening chords of ‘All Right Now.’ Such a full spectrum of sound — all the high tones and all the low, with just a hint of crunch. I think the uniqueness is in the fingers, but you have to have the right gear too, and Koss had one hell of a great sound, even to this day. He was my soulmate guitarist, and we were in sync musically. Sad we lost him when he was just 25. Such a tragedy.”

Mick Ralphs (Bad Company)

“We were ‘label buddies.’ Both our groups, Free and Mott the Hoople, signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records. I would see Mick in the office on Bodine St., Notting Hill Gate. Then Mott the Hoople and my next band, Peace, toured the U.K. together. I got to know Mick and liked him as a person — always friendly and so funny.

“We started writing songs together, and songs being the lifeblood of any band, the songwriting turned into a band, Bad Company. He had ‘Can’t Get Enough;’ Mott's Ian Hunter did not feel it suited the band's style, so when Mick played it for me I told Mick that the song was a hit and that I would love to sing it — and we were off to the races on our first album.

“Mick was often, described as a nuts-and-bolts guitar player, but to me he was always so much more than that. Being both a brilliant songwriter and guitarist. One of the great things about his sound was that he was multi-dimensional.

“Take ‘Rock Steady’ or ‘Burning Sky’ or ‘Silver, Blue and Gold,’ and of course the unstoppable ‘Can’t Get Enough’ or ‘Movin’ On.’ If you picture each song or track and focus on the guitar, not just the part he chose to play but the actual sound, each song is a a one-off — never been done before or since. Although there have been lots of copycat attempts — which is the highest praise, I’m told.

“In each song his sound perfectly matched and enhanced the mood and atmosphere of the lyrics — dark, moody and mysterious ‘Electricland’ or the blatantly rock and roll ‘Preacher.’ To me he was, and will forever and always be extremely inspirational. I believe that Mick made Bad Company what it is with his unique and varied guitar sounds.

“I can’t say how he got the variety of sounds he did. They broke the mold when they made him. I’m so happy we learned about our Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction while he was still alive. He was very happy when he heard the news.”

Jimmy Page (The Firm)

“We kind of fell together after I had built a studio in my London home, with the help of a designer, Steve Hoyland, and made a solo album Cut Loose — coincidently the same name as the smash hit American movie at that time.

“But Jimmy and I got together in that studio and began to create music. It was a very mind-expanding, creative and exhilarating time for me. Jimmy would bring along music for me to write lyrics to; the first serious song was ‘Midnight Moonlight Lady,’ and his guitar layering on that is superb — a beautiful, introspective sensitive and deeply personal piece of music.

“I would bring songs along that I had written, like ‘Radioactive’ and ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed,’ and it was pure magic watching him add his signature touches. We weren’t together long — as agreed, two years — but we left our mark on the tapestry of the story that is rock and roll.”

Brian May (Queen)

“I always admired Queen from afar. They had such a good sound. Every word from Freddie and every note from the band was crystal clear.

“When I heard ‘I Want to Break Free,’ the guitar solo was mouth-watering — so good. When we played that song together live, I would always turn around from the end of our 30-foot thrust in the center of huge arenas and watch and listen. Every time it just blew me away.

“‘The Show Must Go On’ is another great song. The passion and commitment is breathtaking, and Brian’s guitar totally matched the incredible moments in that song. His sound burns and pierces the very heart of things. He played ‘All Right Now’, with his massive chord sound, banks of Vox AC30s hooked up together. He uses a six-pence, which is an old silver U.K. coin, for a plectrum, which gave the strings a metallic overtone. After a show the stage was littered with them.”

Jeff Beck

“Now, Jeff Beck took no prisoners. He was outstanding amongst outstanding guitar players, in a league of his very own out in the stratosphere.

“Don't believe me? Listen to ‘Shapes of Things’ with Rod Stewart. The solo on that recording can't fail to blow your gaskets. He was a towering monster on guitar. There's also a track he did in the same time period, the B-side of ‘Tallyman.’ Just listen and you will know what I'm talking about. Actual words fail me, he was just so gut wrenchingly awesome.

“In 2002, Jeff invited me to perform a couple songs with him in London at the Royal Festival Hall. Sharing the stage with him was an exhilarating experience and one that I will never forget. I remember touring with Jeff, Ann Wilson and Deborah Bonham in 2018. Jeff and I would, flip-flop: One night he would close the show, the next night I would close with my solo band. It was so surreal on the nights when he was closing to stand at the side of the stage with my wife, Cynthia and listen to Jeff. It was absolutely breathtaking.”

Steve Cropper

“Steve Cropper was a staple in my listening and learning curve. He followed the emotion of the song and was the gold standard by which I viewed every guitar player. His playing really moved me.

“Steve was a sensitive yet powerful member of Otis Redding’s band on the Otis Blue album, the first vinyl album I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash, and my first love in terms of music. I still have that album. Steve Cropper, Duck Dunne, Al Jackson and Booker T Jones — the core band on ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ — build it incredibly to a climax that moved me to tears, the band working with Otis to tear your heart out.

“And Steve is such a big part of that emotional climb, hitting just the right notes in just the right place — sometimes chordal, sometimes playing lead. He was very, very restrained, nothing flashy or extraordinary until required, as in ‘Rock Me Baby,’ which has such an incredible groove.

“And when he lets it loose on the solo — every note counts with Steve. I was blessed to work with him a few times, most recently in 2021 on his last solo album, Fire It Up. We cowrote a song together: ‘She's So Fine.’ He’s sadly missed, but his contribution to music will always be remembered and appreciated.”

Slash

“Slash played on ‘The Hunter,’ a Steve Cropper/Albert King song on my Tribute to Muddy Waters blues album in 1993, and gave the recording his own inimitable interpretation of the blues with a fiery solo and some outstanding rhythm guitar playing. I think Slash is influenced by all the right people, old-school and blues, with his powerful Les Paul and his Marshall stack. He has great stage presence, witnessed when he joined me and performed at Woodstock in 1994. He was ripping it up in the rain and sounding good with Andy Fraser on bass and Jason Bonham on drums.

“I invited him up for a jam when Queen and I played in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005. The crowd loved it and so did I. Most recently we performed together as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington on the CMT Awards show. That same year I also sang on his latest album, Orgy of the Damned, on which Slash's guitar playing once again shines a light on the blues with his excellent sound and unique style, pure gold, raw and bluesy.”

Joe Bonamassa

“When I first met Joe, he told me that he was a huge Free fan, which impressed me, because most people in America are aware of Bad Company, not Free, other than ‘All Right Now.’ He had taken a deep dive into Free’s catalog, and the songs that he preferred weren’t the commercial songs, which intrigued me — songs like ‘Walk in my Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’

“So when he asked me to join him at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2011 to record a live DVD, I accepted. And which songs did we decide to play? ‘Walk in My Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’ Joe and his band were tight and nailed both songs. I really like his tone and sound and his phrasing is blinding liquid.

In 2024 Joe organized a tribute album to B.B. King, B.B. King's Blues Summit 100 [out February 6, 2026]. He asked me to record a track and I chose ‘The Night Life.’ I have always liked that track; the sentiment spoke to me. The next generation of guitar greats has arrived, and Joe is leading the way.”

Dolly Parton has spent more than six decades becoming one of the most celebrated songwriters and performers in American music, and this year the Americana Music Association will honor her with its Lifetime Achievement Award. But before the global fame, the movie roles, the business empire and the timeless songs, there was a small Martin guitar given to a young girl with big dreams.

Parton will accept the honor via video at the 2026 Americana Honors & Awards, held at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium during AMERICANAFEST on September 16. The award recognizes artists whose careers have made an enduring impact on American roots music, and Parton’s legacy — from “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors” to “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5” — is built on the songwriting foundation she developed with that first instrument.

Parton has always favored smaller guitars. Throughout her career, she has played small-scale three-quarter acoustics and frequently performs with her custom Taylor GS Mini and Martin 5-18 Terz.

Her love of compact instruments traces back to her first guitar, a small Martin acoustic given to her by her uncle Lewis, a guitarist among the many musicians in her extended family.

“When he saw how serious I was about my music, he gave me his little Martin guitar,” Parton told Reverb. “It was my treasure.”

By the time Parton left home at 18 to pursue her music career, the guitar had already seen years of use and was too worn to bring on the road. She left it in the loft of her family’s home, planning to have it repaired once she had the money.

“My plan was always to — when I got money, when I got rich and famous — have it fixed up,” she explained.

But the instrument was lost in a house fire.

“But the loft burned out of our house, and burned up my guitar, so I only have the neck of that one,” Parton said. “But I have collected little Martin guitars all through the years. I have some classic little guitars, especially the Martins, the baby Martins.”

Those smaller Martins became a fitting match for Parton’s distinctive songwriting style — an intimate sound that helped shape songs that would eventually become standards across country and pop music.

Among them was “I Will Always Love You,” the farewell song she wrote after her professional partnership with Porter Wagoner came to an end. Wagoner had played a crucial role in launching Parton’s career, inviting her to join his syndicated television program, The Porter Wagoner Show, in 1967 and helping her secure a record deal with RCA.

“If it hadn’t been for Porter, I wouldn’t have written this song,” Parton said of “I Will Always Love You.” “It was kind of my goodbye song to Porter.”

The song became one of Parton’s defining compositions, and decades later it reached an even wider audience when Whitney Houston’s recording for The Bodyguard soundtrack topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks. Parton’s decision decades earlier to retain her publishing rights — after declining Elvis Presley’s request for half the song’s publishing in exchange for recording it — ensured that she continued to benefit from one of the most successful songs ever written.

Now, as the Americana Music Association recognizes Parton’s extraordinary career, the story of her first guitar offers a reminder that before she became a country legend, she was simply a young songwriter holding a little Martin and dreaming about what music could become.

Robert Plant made a surprise appearance at a youth chess tournament in England on August 1 — and walked away with a loss to a 17-year-old local player.

The Led Zeppelin singer quietly attended the mayor’s junior charity tournament in Bewdley, Worcestershire, where he sat down for a game against George Walker. The local teenager ultimately won by resignation after Plant had to leave before the match could be completed.

Walker, a Led Zeppelin fan, told the BBC he didn’t recognize Plant when they first began playing — and was stunned when he realized who his opponent was.

“He’s one of my favorite music artists,” Walker said. “My mum and sister like him as well. The odds are tiny; I didn’t even know he was in the area at the time.”

Despite the unusual circumstances, Walker said Plant was a gracious opponent.

“He was really decent,” Walker said. “I won by resignation because he had to quickly go, but it was a good game.”

Kidderminster Chess Club chairman John Wrench said Plant’s appearance was kept quiet ahead of the event.

“We were really delighted to have him along, and it adds a bit of prestige to the event,” Wrench said. “We couldn’t publicize the fact that he was going to be there, but we were aware there was a strong chance he was gonna show.”

Wrench added that some of the young competitors didn’t immediately recognize the rock legend in their midst.

“Some of the youngsters — remember this was an under-18 chess tournament — they thought, ‘Robert who?’” he said. “It seems strange to people of a certain generation; but once you make them aware that he’s a rock legend, I think they get it.”

As for Plant’s chess skills, Wrench offered a measured assessment: “I think he has the potential to be good, with a bit of practice.”

Marty Stuart’s enviable collection of historic guitars and country-music memorabilia is rooted in the same deep love for country’s rich legacy that inspires his music. More than a collection of rare instruments, it’s a personal mission to preserve pieces of American musical history before they’re lost forever.

As a boy growing up in Mississippi, Stuart collected autographs, set lists and used guitar picks from country musicians who passed through his hometown. In 1972, at just 14 years old, he joined bluegrass legend Lester Flatt’s band, putting him in an ideal position to acquire memorabilia and forge friendships with many of the artists whose legacies he would later help preserve.

With the rise of the 1980s urban-cowboy phenomenon, Stuart watched traditional country music fall out of fashion. Vintage electric and acoustic instruments and priceless artifacts were disappearing into pawnshops, private collections and overseas buyers, convincing him that someone needed to safeguard the genre’s history.

“The old-timers were kind of disregarded and put out to pasture,” he says. “Their costumes, manuscripts, instruments, and all things pertaining to the old world of country music were being forgotten. The guitars at the time were either going to George Gruhn’s or they’d get traded in pawnshops around town. Japanese collectors would come to Nashville and buy up country culture. It seemed like the family jewels were getting away.”

That conviction only deepened after Stuart joined Johnny Cash’s band in 1980. During a U.K. tour with Cash, he visited the London Hard Rock Cafe, which had recently begun displaying celebrity guitars and music memorabilia.

“I really understood and respected what they had going on,” Stuart recalls. “All the way back home to America, I kept going, ‘I know my mission. I’m going to self-appoint myself to save as much country-music old-world culture as I can.’ I see it as American culture and a great part of our story that’s been squandered, pawned and thrown away. So I got serious.”

The instrument that perhaps best embodies that mission is the sunburst 1954 Fender Telecaster that belonged to country-rock pioneer Clarence White. More than just White’s stage guitar with the Byrds, it’s one of the most influential Telecasters ever built.

White’s ’54 Telecaster was fitted with one of the earliest Parsons/White B-Benders, a groundbreaking mechanical device developed by White and Byrds drummer Gene Parsons that allowed a guitarist to raise the pitch of the B string by a whole step, recreating the soaring, weeping sound of a pedal steel.

The idea came to Parsons during a 1967 recording session for country duo Vern and Rex Gosdin. White wanted to bend a string behind the nut while simultaneously playing harmonics higher up the neck and joked that he’d need “a third hand” to pull it off. Parsons, a former machinist as well as a drummer and multi-instrumentalist, began wondering if a mechanical third hand could do the job instead.

His first prototype used a floor pedal, but White wasn’t interested.

“If I wanted to play pedal steel,” he told Parsons, “I’d play pedal steel!”

Working together, the pair devised a system of levers, springs and fulcrums activated by the guitar’s upper-bout strap button. By pushing down on the neck and releasing it, White could smoothly bend the B string while continuing to fret and pick normally. Parsons built the original mechanism from pedal-steel parts mounted to the back of White’s Telecaster beneath a wooden frame and Masonite cover. Later versions would become far more refined, but the original remains unlike any B-Bender that followed.

That’s exactly how Stuart prefers it.

“It’s an indescribable guitar,” he says. “You could put a hundred Telecasters in a row, and when you plug this guitar in it just has a voice all its own. It is absolutely one of the most magical guitars I ever played.”

The guitar’s unique personality isn’t down to the B-Bender alone. A hot-wound Stratocaster neck pickup crafted by pedal-steel legend Red Rhodes contributes to its unmistakable tone, giving the Tele a voice Stuart considers impossible to duplicate.

Stuart’s connection to the instrument stretches back long before he owned it. Clarence’s brother, bluegrass mandolin ace Roland White, was the man who got the teenage Stuart his job with Lester Flatt. Stuart later lived in Roland’s Nashville home and became close with Clarence’s widow, Susie White.

In 1980, Stuart traveled to Susie’s home in Elkhorn City, Kentucky, intending to buy a 1954 Stratocaster she had decided to sell. Knowing how deeply Stuart admired her late husband’s playing, she also brought out Clarence’s Telecaster and invited him to spend some time with it.

“She said, ‘That’s what you really want, isn’t it?’” Stuart recalls. “I said, ‘Absolutely, I would love to have it.’ She said, ‘Let me think about it.’

“Later in the afternoon, she said, ‘I’d be happy to sell it to you.’ So she sold me the ’54 Strat, Clarence’s Tele, a couple of his Nudie suits and a lot of Byrds memorabilia for $1,450.

“I couldn’t believe it. I had basically laid my checkbook on the table and said, ‘Susie, name your price.’ She could have asked for far more and I would gladly have paid.”

The Clarence Tele has occupied a central role in Stuart’s music ever since. It can be heard on “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” from Saturday Night, and has remained his constant companion onstage for decades.

The $1,450 price tag has become one of vintage guitar’s great bargains, but Stuart has never viewed Clarence as a collector’s trophy. For him, it’s a working instrument, a singular musical voice and a tangible piece of American history — the very kind of cultural treasure he set out to preserve when he made that promise to himself on the flight home from London.

Few guitarists have enjoyed a front-row seat to as much music history as Carlos Alomar. Beyond his decades with David Bowie, the guitarist worked closely with John Lennon during the former Beatle's most creatively fertile post-Beatles years, shared unforgettable moments with Paul McCartney and even found himself onstage with rock ’n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry.

Last year, Alomar returned to the road after a nine-year hiatus, reuniting with drummer Dennis Davis and bass guitarist George Murray as the D.A.M. Trio. Together, the three musicians formed the powerhouse rhythm section that helped Bowie reshape his sound on a landmark run of albums, including Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, “Heroes” and Lodger.

When Alomar spoke with Guitar Player, he reflected on those experiences with the perspective of someone who knows such moments can't be recreated. “It’s fortuitous that it happened, but it never happened the same way every time,” he says. “So I cherish the moments that we have, because those little moments in time should be cherished and shared, but never really repeated.”

Chuck Berry

“I got this phone call to do a job at the Rye Playland [in Rye, New York, north of New York City]. It was an amusement park, but they had entertainment there under the giant tent and everything. I get there and in walks Chuck Berry with his electric guitar. He walks right up to us and says, ‘When I do like this’ — and he takes his headstock and moves it sideways — ‘you stop.’

“‘And when I do like this’ — and he moves his headstock up and down — ‘you play.’ That was it.

“He turns around to walk out, and I said, ‘Come on…’ I was maybe in my early 20s and naive. I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Berry, are we gonna rehearse?’

“That man turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Boy, I ain’t gonna rehearse rock and roll.’

“He turned around, walked out.

“We hit that stage in true form. And every time that headstock went up, every time that headstock went sideways — bam! I mean, it was amazing, and to this day, I still kind of conduct the same way that Chuck Berry did. [laughs]

“To me, the biggest lesson was you don’t rehearse rock and roll. You either know it, or you don’t.

“But I also learned that you did not talk to Chuck — Chuck talked to you. And how do I remember him? As a mean drunk. [laughs] You only remember your last experience with someone.

“It’s like a song: You can do a whole song, but if you mess up the ending, all you remember is the messed-up ending. Chuck Berry is like that song. It was great. But at the end, he came and stunk that up real good.”

David Bowie

“I was a session musician for RCA Studios when I got called to work on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album. I was in a session, and in comes this thin, 98-pound, translucent dude with white skin, orange hair, fedora — everything. I was like, ‘Whoa, dude, you look like crap. You need to come to my house and get a home-cooked meal.’ [laughs]

“Little did I know he would take me up on it. We got on really, really well. I took him to the Apollo Theater, and he met [comedian] Richard Pryor, of all people, who was opening for [soul group] the Main Ingredient, which I was playing with. And then, I took him to the Latin clubs to hear some Latin music. We just hung out. There was no work.

“His intelligence was really amazing. I started talking to him about the chitlin circuit and James Brown — man, I found out at that moment how much the Brits studied Black music. Not only was I impressed with his intellect and his knowledge, but I was also impressed with his accent. You gotta remember, I was a kid from the Bronx, and I’m speaking to a Brit with that weird accent. So I was very curious.

“Eventually, he told me he was doing his Diamond Dogs album, but there was no money. There was no way I was gonna drop my gig with the Main Ingredient for this gig with no-paying David Bowie. [laughs]

“So I turned him down. Then later, after the Diamond Dogs album and tour, I got another phone call, and I turned him down again. He was very disappointed. I told him, ‘I’m married. I can’t take a pay cut like this.’ David said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’

“And that was it. He took care of it. So from there we formed the band that relaunched his career with Young Americans.

“The last time I talked to David was at a birthday party. I didn’t realize that he was under the grip of his own demise. Although we had a good time, I didn’t realize that was our goodbye. That was it. Later on, I found out what was happening, and then of course, it affected me deeply. It was a pretty brutal year.”

John Lennon

“One day, I was in the studio, and in walked David Bowie with John Lennon and May Pang [Lennon’s girlfriend during his separation from Yoko Ono]. At the time, I didn’t really know who David Bowie was. But hell, I knew who John Lennon was. And John Lennon was a character who understood who he was.

“We had the groove down for ‘Fame’ [Alomar wrote the song’s underlying funk riff], but that was all we had at the time — not even the words. John came in with just an acoustic guitar, and they said, ‘Would you like to play?’ and he said, ‘Sure.’ And every time he would play, he would sigh the word ‘fame.’

“They left to go to dinner and invited me, but I decided to stay and put some parts down. But I kept hearing that sound that John had been making. So we isolated his track, and we could hear him playing the guitar and saying ‘fame.’

“And that’s how the song became ‘Fame.’ It was my first number one hit. I was young and sandwiched between David Bowie and John Lennon on the song.”

Paul McCartney

“I had just finished writing with Mick Jagger when I was invite to work with Paul on his next album [1986’s Press to Play] at his studio, Hogg Hill Mill, in England.

“He was just the most endearing individual, very self-effacing, and his family was just so inviting and friendly. We walked upstairs to a studio filled with equipment. There were the Vox amplifier, the Höfner bass, the Mellotrons… I was drooling, man. [laughs]

“As I’m taking all that in, the man proceeded to roll the biggest spliff I’ve ever seen in my life. [laughs] I thought I was back in Jamaica! We talked about all kinds of music, and the Black experience. Again, I was reminded of the way the British studied R&B music and their curiosity, and, with all due respect, the way they always give proper respect to the African-American experience, the blues, and all the music we’ve done. They really hold it in high esteem, and rightfully so, you know?

“So he played me his first track, and I said, ‘Oh, sorry, Paul, I like what I hear, but I don’t hear myself in that.’ Same with the second track. I said, ‘Respectfully, I think it’s just great, so that I wouldn’t touch that one.’

“When we got to the third song, I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I hear something in that!’ So I’m just practicing, you know, putting little things out there. Little did I know that Paul was recording all of that. The minute I got the record home, I listened to it, and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I thought I was just practicing!’ So it was just a wonderful experience.”

When Black Sabbath and Van Halen toured together in 1978, the veteran metal pioneers found themselves sharing the bill with a young band led by a guitar phenomenon named Eddie Van Halen.

The tour came at a pivotal moment for both groups. Black Sabbath were on the road behind Never Say Die!, the final album to feature Ozzy Osbourne before his dismissal the following year. Van Halen, meanwhile, were riding high on their blockbuster self-titled debut, with Eddie’s revolutionary electric guitar playing — showcased most famously on “Eruption” — turning the band into rock’s hottest new attraction.

Osbourne would later admit the upstarts were blowing Sabbath off the stage. But according to David Lee Roth, one unforgettable night in Tennessee nearly landed him in even bigger trouble, after Tony Iommi accused him of making the Black Sabbath frontman disappear.

Recalling the incident in a new YouTube video, Roth says he and Osbourne spent the evening partying together before the bands headed to their next stop.

“Ozzy and I are partying. We’re partying like demon buccaneers,” Roth recalls. “I was a ball of muscle in those days, man. If somebody said, ‘We’ve got to get up at 6:00 in the morning because we get on the bus,’ we’d stay up.”

After leaving Nashville, Van Halen checked into its hotel in Memphis and played that night’s show. But Osbourne never turned up.

“Then they burst through the door,” Roth says. “Tony Iommi is screaming at me: ‘What did you do to Ozzy?!’ I’m not in charge of Ozzy, but Ozzy’s disappeared.”

With Osbourne missing and tensions already running high within Black Sabbath, the situation quickly escalated. Roth says he was even asked whether he could replace Osbourne for the evening’s show.

“When I said I couldn’t learn the lyrics, they canceled the show,” he recalls.

The situation quickly became surreal.

“Now the FBI and everybody are back at the hotel because Oz has disappeared,” Roth says. “We think he’s been kidnapped. They’re sitting on the floors. The press is there. They have the cameras. The police are combing the airport all night long. Still no Ozzy, and I’m getting blamed for the entire thing. It’s getting scary.”

Then the elevator doors opened.

“He’s in his fucking pajamas,” Roth laughs. “He walks out of the elevator into a lobby full of FBI, CIA, local police, news media, and television cameras. Finally, everybody stops looking at me.”

The explanation, Roth says, was pure Ozzy.

Still carrying the room key from the band’s previous hotel in Nashville, Osbourne mistakenly assumed it belonged to his room in Memphis. He found the matching room number, walked in while housekeeping was cleaning, threw the maid out, climbed into bed and slept for nearly 18 hours.

“He throws her out,” Roth says. “He slams the door, falls face down on the Sealy Posturepedic mattress, and sleeps for almost the next 18 hours.”

For anyone who thinks Roth is exaggerating, his anecdote is supported by Greg Renoff, author of Van Halen Rising

Roth freely admits he played a part in Osbourne’s “stone stupor,” but the misunderstanding ultimately became another classic chapter in the singer’s long history of outrageous tour stories. It also remains one of the most memorable tales from the infamous 1978 trek that paired Black Sabbath’s fading original lineup with the young Van Halen, a band on the verge of becoming rock’s next superstars.

Tony Iommi will release his first solo album in 21 years later this year, and the Black Sabbath guitarist has assembled a core lineup that gives From the Dark a true band feel.

For bass guitarist Becky Baldwin, however, her first session with Iommi was a nerve-racking experience. The Birmingham musician admits she was convinced she had blown her chance before she had even left the studio.

Reflecting on the experience eight months later, Baldwin recalls how nervous she was when she first walked into the room to record with one of her musical heroes.

“This photo was taken at the end of our first recording session, on the day we met,” she writes on Instagram. “I still couldn’t believe that this great honor could be real, and I was so nervous recording in front of Tony with no preparation.

“I was sure they’d look for another bass player once I left the room. I asked, ‘Could we get a quick photo together, in case I never see you again?’”

According to Baldwin, Iommi laughed off her concerns.

“Tony just laughed and said, ‘You’ll be back here in two weeks for the next session!’ But he granted my request. And I still didn’t really believe him.”

The guitarist was true to his word. Baldwin returned to complete the remaining bass parts for From the Dark, and she now finds herself as part of Iommi’s new band alongside drummer Karl Brazil and vocalist Jorn Lande, whose powerful voice recalls the Ronnie James Dio era of Black Sabbath.

The album’s first single, “World Alone,” arrived last week, giving fans their first taste of the new lineup.

“Fast forward eight months and here we are,” Baldwin says. “The nerves faded, and I did get to record the rest of the bass tracks for Tony’s incredible album. I am so proud to be a part of this, and we’re so thrilled with the results. I have to believe it’s all real now.”

Baldwin’s place on the record was not guaranteed, though. Iommi initially hoped to reunite with his longtime Black Sabbath bandmate Geezer Butler for the project.

“I wanted him, but he couldn’t do it,” Iommi explains. “He’s doing his own album, I think… he couldn’t come to England. I wanted to get it done and finally get it out.”

The guitarist says Baldwin was the natural alternative.

“Becky lives in Birmingham, she’s a really good player, and she plays in Geezer’s style,” he says. “I thought, ‘Let’s give it a try.’ And she was good.”

While Baldwin is the newest member of Iommi’s musical family, one of his oldest collaborators will also appear on From the Dark: Brian May.

The Queen guitarist is the only guest feature on the album, continuing a friendship and musical partnership that stretches back decades.

“We’ve done a couple of album tracks [before],” Iommi tells Rolling Stone. “He’s a very, very close friend.”

May previously contributed an electric guitar solo to Black Sabbath’s Tony Martin-fronted album Headless Cross, appearing on “When Death Calls.” More than a decade later, he reunited with Iommi for the guitarist’s 2000 solo album Iommi, playing alongside Dave Grohl on “Goodbye Lament.”

Their latest collaboration, “Death Awake,” continues that relationship — although Iommi says there could have been even more.

“I did say to him, ‘Do you want to play on something else?’” he recalls. “He said, ‘No, no. Your solos are good. I don’t need to play.’”

Joe Bonamassa owns more than 600 guitars, including some of the world’s most coveted vintage instruments. But when asked to name one of his favorites, the blues star didn’t reach for a pristine six-figure Les Paul or rare Fender.

Instead, he picked a heavily modified 1968 Fender Telecaster.

Speaking to Guitar Center, Bonamassa explained that the guitar’s appeal has little to do with originality or collector value. In fact, its previous owner permanently altered it by routing the body to accommodate a pair of Gibson PAF humbuckers — one of the most sought-after pickups ever made.

Bonamassa isn’t the first guitarist to embrace the combination. Eddie Van Halen famously loaded Gibson PAF humbuckers into his legendary Frankenstein.

“I bought this guitar from a guy in Daytona Beach, Florida about 15 years ago. It wasn’t a lot of money,” Bonamassa says. “I plugged it in, and it was magic.”

“It’s basically a Gibson Les Paul jammed into a Fender Telecaster,” he continues. “But the difference is you have a maple neck and an ash body. And they sound great. Sometimes a hybrid can turn out to be the best.”

That recipe gives the guitar a distinctly different voice from a traditional Les Paul, whose mahogany body and neck produce a warmer, thicker sound. Bonamassa says the Telecaster’s ash body and maple neck bring extra clarity and bite to the vintage Gibson pickups.

“That’s the beauty of a Fender Telecaster,” he says. “You can pretty much do anything to it. The ash body does something cool with the humbucking pickups.”

He also points to the electric guitar’s 500k potentiometers, which help brighten the PAFs and tighten their high end, creating a remarkably versatile instrument.

“Now, do I suggest going out there and buying a very expensive vintage Telecaster, taking a pin router to it and jamming a whole bunch of pickups in there? No,” he says. “If they’re already modified, then that’s the beauty of it. You can save yourself some money and have literally just a utility plank that can play anything.”

That’s exactly how Bonamassa uses it.

“I’ve used this guitar for jazz fusion gigs; I’ve used it for rock gigs. I’ve used it for everything, because it has so much flexibility.”

He laughs that audiences often underestimate the instrument before hearing it in action.

“This is one of my favorite secret weapons,” he says. “When I bring it out, people discount it. Then they hear it.”

The guitar now bears plenty of battle scars—many of them Bonamassa’s own—after years of regular use.

Its status as one of the most-played guitars in his collection is especially notable given Bonamassa’s changing attitude toward collecting. After the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, the blues guitarist said he has begun curtailing his relentless pursuit of vintage gear, placing greater value on the instruments he already owns.

For Bonamassa, this modified Telecaster is proof that a guitar doesn’t have to be museum-grade to earn a permanent place in the rotation. Sometimes the best instrument is simply the one that makes you want to keep playing.

Joe Bonamassa has a blunt message for the “armchair quarterbacks” and keyboard warriors who fuel toxic guitar culture online.

The blues guitar star says social media has made it easier than ever for musicians to become targets of relentless criticism, with every mistake amplified by commenters more interested in declaring winners and losers than appreciating the music.

“In the U.S., we have this term called ‘armchair quarterback,’ right?” Bonamassa tells Guitar Interactive Magazine. “That means I can sit in my chair and say to Tom Brady, ‘I could have thrown that ball better than you.’”

Bonamassa says that mentality has spread to the guitar world, where players are routinely torn apart online over the smallest mistakes.

He points to one infamous example: Nick Jonas’ widely mocked performance with Kelsea Ballerini at the 2016 ACM Awards. Jonas fluffed a guitar solo during the live broadcast in front of an estimated 11 million viewers, and the clip quickly spread across social media, spawning countless jokes, reaction videos and harsh criticism.

“There’s that classic one,” Bonamassa says. “It caused this guy to go into therapy. He goes out and clams? We’ve all done that. Everybody’s done that, like, ‘I didn’t even know what I was thinking.’ But the vitriol. It’s like, ‘What do you want him to do? Burn his guitar in effigy, or jump off a cliff?’”

Jonas later admitted the incident had a profound impact on him.

“In retrospect, I can kind of laugh about how big I thought it was,” he said. “But it did travel more than I wish it would have—and it did cause me to go into therapy.”

Recalling the performance, Jonas explained how quickly things unraveled.

“I’ve rehearsed it a million times… and as I walked towards her [Ballerini], I just went completely blank. I hit a wrong note and blacked out. I clocked that it was wrong and I couldn’t stop.”

For Bonamassa, the same competitive mindset extends beyond isolated mistakes. He says audiences often turn collaborative performances into imaginary electric-guitar duels, even when the musicians themselves are simply enjoying the moment.

“Kenny Wayne Shepherd and I have been on stage a lot together over the last five or six years. It’s not a competition,” he says. “Warren Haynes and I have been on stage a lot. We look at it like it’s fun, because we’re having fun.”

Yet some fans still approach those performances like head-cutting contests, expecting one guitarist to emerge victorious.

“What do they expect?” Bonamassa asks. “A trophy at the end? A cash prize? A judge that goes, ‘I declare the winner…’ like a fucking boxing match?”

For Bonamassa, that mentality misses the point entirely. Live music isn’t a sporting event, and treating every missed note or shared jam as a contest only makes the guitar community poorer for it.

Jimi Hendrix revolutionized rock guitar with Are You Experienced, but Todd Rundgren believes he didn’t truly become the artist we remember until Axis: Bold as Love.

Much has been written about the sea change Hendrix’s arrival in Britain sparked. Eric Clapton, already hailed as an electric-guitar god, suddenly had another deity to contend with, while Jeff Beck very nearly hung up his guitar for good.

Released in 1967, Are You Experienced was an immediate success. Rundgren, however, believes the leap from that record to Axis: Bold as Love, released just seven months later, was astonishing.

“At first I didn’t know what to think about him,” Rundgren says in a video posted to Hendrix’s official YouTube channel. “Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Peter Green all played Gibson guitars, which had a certain sound. And they were all very heavily influenced by the original blues masters, so they tended to play a lot of the same licks. I wanted to be like them.

“Jimi was playing a Fender Stratocaster and the sound was very different,” he adds. “He wasn’t as precise as everyone else seemed to be; it was a little bit wild and noisy. At first, he depended a little bit on the blues, R&B, and a new thing he was working on. But he hadn’t fully ripened.”

For Rundgren — who recalled nearly jamming with Jimi in Greenwich Village — Hendrix’s second album marked a dramatic shift. The guitarist had found not only a more distinctive musical voice, but a richer imagination as a songwriter.

“That was just a whole new thing,” he says of Axis: Bold as Love. “Not just simply in terms of the guitar playing, but Jimi had evolved as a songwriter. He was creating this whole fantastic universe of dragonflies, castles; things that were fun to imagine and [you could] think of the songs as a soundtrack.

“You could tell that he was really maturing as a songwriter because some of the songs got covered to death by other artists like ‘Little Wing’. This, to me, was the first real Jimi Hendrix album. It still stands the test of time for what you can do with a guitar, and for a lyrical style that very few black artists were using at the time. He had an imagination that was unexpected from somebody who had worked his way up as an R&B guitar player.”

Hendrix’s evolution was remarkably swift. Are You Experienced? announced one of rock’s most exciting new talents, but Axis: Bold as Love revealed an artist who had already begun moving beyond the blues vocabulary that shaped his years as an R&B sideman with artists including the Isley Brothers and Little Richard.

Rundgren’s point goes beyond Hendrix’s technical brilliance. For him, the guitarist’s greatest breakthrough was not simply the revolutionary sound he created with the Stratocaster, but the way he transformed his influences into an entirely new musical world.

Although David Lee Roth never matched Van Halen’s success as a solo artist, he assembled one of the most formidable backing bands of the era. Alongside Steve Vai — whom Roth saw as the ideal foil to Eddie Van Halen — he recruited drummer Gregg Bissonette and virtuoso bass guitarist Billy Sheehan, who would later find massive success with Mr. Big.

But Sheehan was the first to head for the exit, saying Roth’s second solo album drained the joy from making music.

Released in 1986, Eat ’Em and Smile was an immediate success. Led by the MTV staple “Yankee Rose,” the album showcased the chemistry between Roth, Vai, Sheehan and Bissonette, eventually earning Platinum certification in the U.S. Vai, who has long insisted he never viewed himself as Eddie Van Halen’s replacement or rival, quickly emerged as Roth’s secret weapon.

Things changed on 1988’s Skyscraper. With keyboardist Brett Tuggle brought in as Roth pursued a more polished, radio-friendly sound, Sheehan says the atmosphere that had made the debut so enjoyable disappeared.

“Skyscraper was a whole different world,” he tells Rock Interview Series. “It’s not a record I really gravitated towards when it was done. It seemed kind of stiff to me.”

Looking back, Sheehan believes the band’s working methods were reflected in the music itself.

“With Eat ’Em and Smile we were hanging out, having fun, playing in one room, and we wrote the stuff together,” he recalls. “It was for fun, and we’d go out afterward and have some drinks, have a couple of beers at the end of rehearsal. We had a riot — it was a great hang. Skyscraper was different.”

Commercially, the album kept Roth’s momentum going, reaching No. 6 on the Billboard 200 and eventually selling more than two million copies. The bassist, however, wasn’t enjoying the band’s new direction.

“When we recorded it, we recorded one guy at a time,” he says. “I’d go into the studio, and there’d be nobody there but me and the producer. I played to Gregg’s drums and a rough [cut] of Steve’s guitar, and then I’d leave. Then one of the other guys would go in.

“Something happened, and the whole atmosphere changed. That’s why, at the end of that, I was out of the band because it was not my thing.”

While Sheehan decided to move on after the album was completed, Vai remained committed to Roth’s vision, at least through the subsequent tour. Speaking to Guitar World around the time Skyscraper was released, he made it clear he wasn’t looking for an exit.

“I get a lot of offers to play on other records and stuff that I don’t do because we’re building a band image here,” he said. “I don’t want to be looked at as a studio musician.”

He also addressed Sheehan’s departure with characteristic diplomacy.

“When two people get together, and they’re playing music, and everything goes fine until one of them wants to do something different, it’s best to get together and talk about it. If one of them decides to move on, that’s it. It was Dave’s decision, but it’s best for Bill, and it’s best for Dave; that’s at least the way I feel about it. It’s not like the Van Halen extravaganza.”

Vai remained with Roth through the Skyscraper tour before leaving in 1989 to join Whitesnake. Jason Becker succeeded him for A Little Ain’t Enough, but Roth’s solo career never again reached the commercial heights of those first two albums. For Sheehan, though, the decision to leave had never been about chart positions. Once the fun disappeared, it was time to move on.

In related news, David Lee Roth recently announced he was canceling dates on his tour, prompting a response from his Van Halen successor, Sammy Hagar.

When asked to reach for greatness, most musicians dig deep into their soul for inspiration or a brainstorm that will take their performance to the top.

But when Journey were cutting their monster hit “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Neal Schon says the group’s producers had a different sort of direction for him.

“They said, ‘Play something dumb,’” the guitarist reveals in a new interview with Rick Beato.

It’s not exactly what you’d expect to hear when you’re recording a tune about holding onto faith.

But, sometimes, that’s how hits are made.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” reached the top 10 in 1981, when it was released as a single from Journey’s seventh studio album, Escape. Since then, it’s become a cultural phenomenon. In addition to its use in the 2007 series finale of The Sopranos, the song is played in the eighth inning at San Francisco Giants home games. Former Journey vocalist Steve Perry, who sings on the original, even led the hometown crowd in a singalong during the Giants’ 2014 World Series game.

Today, “Don’t Stop Believin’” is in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. It’s a credit not only to the song’s sales success — its sold more than 18 million copies — but to its cultural significance as well.

“It's crazy. When we wrote it, I thought there was something there, you know — when we were messing around with it in the studio," Neal Schon says.

"When I went back in the studio to listen after we cut it and it was coming together [in the] mix, I looked at the guys, and I go, 'I think there's something here that's special, that's going to be bigger than this whole record.'

“And not until this many decades later, did it happen. But it did happen."

And perhaps that all comes back to that request from producers Kevin Elson and Mike Stone: Play something dumb.

Schon’s response was to come up with what he calls a “chunky rhythm part” — a meat-and-potatoes chord pattern that can be heard as the song starts rolling along in top gear in the third verse.

And to the producers’ credit, it was just what the song needed.

“It's like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive, ‘Taking Care of Business' kind of rhythm part,” Schon says. “And it just kind of worked. When you listen to it, you don't even really notice it, but if you take it out, then you go, ‘What happened to it?’

“It wasn't my idea — I came up with the rhythm part,” Schon says. "But that's what a good producer will do for you — make you search a little bit."

“Don’t Stop Believin’” was a co-write between Schon, Perry and keyboardist and rhythm guitarist Jonathan Cain, who had recently joined Journey. As Schon told Guitar Player in 2023, Cain brought the chord progression, for which the guitarist suggested a Motown-style bass groove to move it along.

“Jon had the ‘Don’t stop believin’’ chorus, so we moved on trying to create the rest of the song,” he says. “I came up with the B section — ‘Strangers, waiting.’ Perry goes, ‘Oh, that’s perfect,’ so we threw it together. Those were the main pieces of the song.”

As for the famous chorus?

“It doesn’t happen until the end,” Schon points out. “I don’t think any song that’s become as big has ever had that. The first rule of songwriting is, ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!’

“But we broke it — and had a hit! And the song works because it has something very interesting and melodic moving it along.”

When recording his guitar parts, Schon used his black 1977 Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, an instrument that he used for much of Escape and Journey's subsequent tour. It fetched $250,000 at auction in 2021.

As he recalls, his big guitar contribution to the song — aside from his anthemic solo — was the rapidly arpeggiating guitar part that introduces the second verse. “It was like something you might hear in a symphony and it felt like it was helping the track move along.”

Which is definitely a far cry from playing something dumb.

But, hey, whatever works. After all, no less than Forbes magazine named “Don’t Stop Believin’” the Biggest Song of All Time in its March 2024 issue. Maybe there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.

Few guitarists have developed a sound as distinctive as David Gilmour. But the Pink Floyd legend has always been open about the players who helped shape it.

While Gilmour would eventually become known for his lyrical phrasing and expressive bends, he spent his formative years studying the guitarists he admired. One album, in particular, became an important part of his education in electric-guitar playing: Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton.

Released in 1966, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers’ landmark album captured Eric Clapton at the forefront of Britain’s blues boom following his departure from the Yardbirds. Combining blues standards like Freddie King’s “Hideaway” and Robert Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind” with originals such as “Double Crossing Time,” it became essential listening for aspiring guitarists — including a young David Gilmour.

Gilmour has often said he was never interested in building his reputation on speed. Instead, he gravitated toward the melodic playing of the Shadows’ Hank Marvin. But when it came to developing his blues guitar vocabulary, Clapton’s work with John Mayall proved just as important.

“All of those guys were incredible,” Gilmour once said. “I spent time trying to learn how to play their licks perfectly. I would suggest any young player should try to sit down and do that. You will wind up knowing how to play their stuff quite well.”

For Gilmour, learning Clapton’s solos wasn’t about imitation for its own sake. It was about building a musical vocabulary that would eventually become his own.

“Eventually,” he added, “you will find your own style from that. It forces its way out of the copying.”

Alongside Clapton’s blues playing and Marvin’s melodic approach, Gilmour found the foundations of a style that would later define Pink Floyd. Although his music ultimately moved well beyond traditional blues, he has always maintained that those influences never disappeared.

Speaking to Guitar World in 1988, Gilmour recalled that he also spent his early years studying Jimi Hendrix and Howlin’ Wolf.

“When I was young, I actually sat down and learned many of the classic blues solos by Eric and Hendrix, as well as studying old Howlin’ Wolf records,” he said. Although he no longer consciously thinks in blues clichés, he added, “the blues run pretty deep” in his playing.

While Gilmour has admitted he feels “a certain sort of jealousy“ over Clapton’s talent and reputation, he’s chosen not to compete with him. Instead, Gilmour built his reputation on phrasing, dynamics, and tone. To that end, Clapton’s influence was an important part of that journey, alongside Marvin, Hendrix, and the blues pioneers whose music helped shape one of rock’s most recognizable guitar voices.

It goes without saying that John McLaughlin is an outright legend. A jazz-fusion hero on steroids, the electric guitarist has worked with everyone from Miles Davis and Carlos Santana to Tony Williams and Al Di Meola.

But when asked which of his many moments onstage and on record he’s most proud of, McLaughlin hesitates.

“It’s such a hard question,” McLaughlin tells Guitar Player. “I really have no idea. You’d have to give me at least a day to think about it. I have so many memories that are engraved in my mind.”

One of his earliest comes from his days in the Graham Bond Organization, which he helped found in 1963 with organist Graham Bond and a combustible rhythm section: bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker. Within a few years, the pair would go on to form Cream with guitarist Eric Clapton.

McLaughlin had a front-row seat to Bruce and Baker’s infamous clashes.

“They were unbelievable together, but they just got under each other’s noses all the time,” McLaughlin says, laughing at the memory. “It was unbelievable. I mean, the second I heard them play together with Graham Bond, I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m in.’ And those two, man — onstage they were kicking my butt. They were wonderful, and just what I needed.

“But every now and then, during the bass solo, which was done with an upright bass, Ginger would get impatient and start making commentary.

“He would say, ‘Come on, get a move on!’ And then there would be other times, onstage and off, where Ginger would say to Jack, ‘Your time is all fucking wrong!’

“And Jack would say, ‘You don’t fucking tell me my time is wrong!’

“And I remember one night, Ginger got so bored with Jack’s bass solo that he started throwing drumsticks at him.”

McLaughlin says he wasn’t present when Bruce finally got his revenge on Baker, but by all accounts the moment was explosive.

“Ginger was throwing the sticks at Jack too hard, and Jack turned around, took his upright bass and smashed it down on Ginger’s drums.

“I know when Eric Clapton was with them in Cream, he didn’t like it. I know Eric suffered, and I did, too.”

Despite his efforts, McLaughlin found it impossible to make the two men get along.

“I’d say, ‘Shit. Relax. Just play music and be happy.’ But they couldn’t stop.”

And yet, somehow, Bruce and Baker managed to turn their animosity into musical gold.

“When they worked together, they were dynamite,” McLaughlin says. “Ginger had a groove, and Jack just jumped on it, you know? I loved the beat they’d put down, and I know Eric did, too. They were amazing together.

“And their fighting was absolutely, without a doubt, part of their chemistry. I mean, emotions run high — and listen: music needs emotion. It needs strong emotions, and one of the things about them was that they had some strong emotions.”

In the early 1980s, drugs were woven into the fabric of rock and roll — often celebrated, rarely questioned, and sometimes deadly. Chrissie Hynde lived through that era from the front lines with the Pretenders, and decades later, she still carries the guilt of losing two of her closest bandmates to addiction.

The Ohio-born guitarist formed the Pretenders in London in 1978 alongside guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, bass guitarist Pete Farndon and drummer Martin Chambers. Their self-titled debut album arrived the following year, introducing a band that combined punk’s urgency with classic pop songwriting and Hynde’s distinctive rhythm guitar style.

The group’s rise was swift, but so was the devastation that followed. By 1982, both Honeyman-Scott and Farndon were dead, their lives cut short by drug-related problems. Looking back, Hynde has admitted she feels she should have done more to help them.

“I am guilty,” she told Record Collector in 2023. “It’s not a big word if you are guilty. It’s big if you feel guilty and you’re not guilty. If you really are guilty, then you should put your hand up and say, ‘Guilty as charged.’”

During the same interview, Hynde reflected on the culture surrounding the band’s early years and acknowledged that she was part of an environment where drug use had become normalized.

“I didn’t discourage the drug-taking, and I was part of it,” she said. “Not that I was their mother, and we went on the road, and it was very hardcore.”

Hynde’s memories also reflect just how normalized drug use had become in the rock world of the early 1980s. Her first encounter with Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, which she recalled in her memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, is a striking example of the era’s excess.

“The first time I clapped eyes on him was in a shop on the King’s Road. We exchanged no words at all,” she wrote. “He eyed me up and down, moved in close, dipped the silver tube he wore on a chain around his neck into a plastic bag of white powder, shoved it up my snout, then turned around and walked out. I was up for three days.”

For Hynde, though, the consequences of that culture were far from a rock ’n’ roll anecdote.

The Pretenders’ second album, Pretenders II, arrived in 1981 as the band’s profile continued to grow, but behind the scenes Farndon’s drug use had become increasingly destructive. He was eventually dismissed from the group and died less than a year later from complications related to his addiction.

Just two days after Farndon’s departure, Honeyman-Scott — who had attended the meeting where the bassist was removed — died from heart failure caused by cocaine use. The loss was devastating for Hynde, particularly because she had played a role in the decision to fire Farndon.

“I was having problems with Pete,” Hynde recalled. “So, perhaps not guilty, but there’s an element of wishing you’d done better.”

Honeyman-Scott’s death was the loss that hit especially hard. His melodic, inventive electric guitar playing had become central to the Pretenders’ identity, and Hynde has repeatedly spoken about the lasting impact he left on generations of players.

“Every guitar player I’ve had since James Honeyman-Scott has been influenced by him, for example: Johnny Marr [who briefly joined the band in 1987],” she said. “The moment James came to my front door, I knew we’d be in a band together. It’s insane: Jimmy died aged 25. Only guitar players remember him, and yet he was the sound of the Pretenders.”

For Hynde, losing Honeyman-Scott and Farndon also marked the end of the band’s original spirit.

“Since Pete and Jimmy died and because I’ve had to replace people, it’s now kind of like a Pretenders tribute band,” she said.

The Pretenders would continue for decades, with Hynde remaining the one constant at the center of the group. But the shadow of those early losses has never fully disappeared — particularly the absence of Honeyman-Scott, whose innovative guitar work helped define the band’s first era.

“Of course, I could never play like him. I never tried. Only an idiot competes with Eddie Van Halen.”

So said Steve Vai to Rolling Stone in 2020, as he reflected on his friendship with Eddie. Vai certainly spoke from wisdom — after all, he was David Lee Roth’s guitarist after Roth left Van Halen. He knew what would be expected of him and that he needed to cut his own path to avoid being compared to and overshadowed by the great Eddie Van Halen.

“When I joined David Lee Roth’s band, it was great opportunity for me to play such well-constructed rock songs,” Vai said. “Of course, nobody can play them like Edward, but you do your best.”

Eddie was certainly aware of the guitarist who had taken his place alongside Roth. And while Ed knew his own talents were immense, he remained humble and believed other guitarists had something to teach him. Allan Holdsworth for example: Ed was a huge fan of the guitar giant and did everything he could to help him land a recording contract. With Ed, there was never competition, just a desire to play guitar and keep getting better.

So he kept his eye on Vai and was pleasantly surprised at what he heard. Unlike the numerous EVH clones, Vai combined his limits-stretching electric guitar techniques with lyrical melodies. Joe Satriani — who stepped into Ed's shoes on last year's Best of All Worlds tour — might impress you with his bluesy fusion, and Yngwie Malmsteen with his neoclassical chops. But Vai combined an almost operatic beauty with the sort of avant-garde eccentricities of his former employer, Frank Zappa.

And when Eddie heard Vai apply his magic to his own songs in Roth’s band, he was duly impressed.

“I’m going, ‘This guy is better at what I do than I am’, you know?” Eddie told interview Shaun Baxter in 1995.

“But,” Ed added, “ he lacked the vibe… the feel. He was technically very proficient but stiff. It always made me feel bad in a way. Because it made me feel like, ‘Wow, is that how people perceive me?’ ”

Vai stayed with Roth from 1985 through 1989, during which time he performed on the singer’s albums Eat ‘Em and Smile and Skyscraper. Once he was out, Ed felt it was safe to give him a call.

“The day after I left David Lee Roth’s band — I don’t know how Edward found out — but he called me,” Vai told Rolling Stone. “That was the start of a nice relationship and friendship.”

Vai recalled that they hung out frequently over a six-month period, during which he visited Ed’s 5150 Studios and was treated to private listening sessions of his work tapes. “He played me stuff that was never released,” Vai recalled. “I said, ‘Why don’t you make a solo record?’ And he always felt that the Van Halen records were his solo records.

"But this stuff he was playing me was really quite nice. It was all the things we loved about the way he played.”

While Ed considered Vai the one guitarist who out–Van Halened him, Vai believes Ed was a rock and roll game changer with only one peer.

“If I had to use my intuition,” he said, “it’s Hendrix, it’s Van Halen, in rock guitar. So many great guitarists came along and contributed, but those guys just did something for us that reshaped not just the way we played instruments, but the way we write the music, the way we dress, and the way we act onstage. It goes really deep. So I firmly feel that he was one of those monoliths.”

Vai certainly has his own share of fans who consider him a game changer. Tosin Abasi recently spoke of working 16 hours a day in a salmon processing factory in Alaska to buy his Steve Vai signature guitar.

For those who want to channel some of Steve's guitar mojo, his three top guitar tips will prove worthwhile.

When Eric Clapton asked Phil Collins to produce Behind the Sun in 1985, he wasn’t looking for someone to reinvent him. He’d already worked with legendary producers, played with everyone from John Mayall to Derek and the Dominos, Cream and Blind Faith, and long since earned his place among rock’s greatest electric guitar players.

Behind the Sun would become an important turning point in Clapton’s career. After a period in the early 1980s when he remained highly respected but had slipped from the commercial heights he’d reached in the previous decade, the album marked the beginning of a renewed run of mainstream success. Its eventual hit single “Forever Man” helped reintroduce Clapton to a wider audience and set the stage for the resurgence that would follow later in the decade.

But Collins understood something important: his job was not to show Eric Clapton how to play guitar. It was not to impose his own identity on one of rock’s most distinctive musicians. It was to find what was missing — and help bring it back.

Looking back years later, Collins recalled listening to Clapton’s previous album, Money and Cigarettes, and feeling that something wasn’t quite connecting. The playing was unmistakably Clapton, but Collins felt the guitarist had stopped pushing himself creatively.

“Money and Cigarettes was a little lame,” Collins told Rock and Roll Garage. “I think he was on automatic pilot. I kicked him out of that and made him start writing.”

Home recording was beginning to transform the way musicians worked, and Collins was one of its biggest advocates. He encouraged Clapton to keep some basic recording equipment at home so ideas wouldn’t disappear before they became songs. Clapton never became the home-recording enthusiast Collins hoped he might, but he did start keeping a cassette recorder close by. Song ideas accumulated, melodies were captured before they were forgotten, and little by little they became the foundation of Behind the Sun.

The same instinct shaped the way he approached Clapton’s guitar playing. Many producers earn an artist’s trust by identifying what needs to change. Collins seemed to earn it through enthusiasm — but that enthusiasm was backed by a willingness to make decisions.

“It was great with Phil,” Clapton told Guitar Player in July 1985, “because he’s a real fan.”

Whenever Clapton played a solo and asked what Collins thought, the answer rarely varied. “It’s dynamite, man. Dynamite!” Collins would say. Clapton would shake his head. “No, it isn’t.”

The exchange became almost comical, but it revealed something important. “I felt like I could have played anything, and he’d love it,” Clapton admitted. “That’s great from a producer.”

Far from flattering Clapton, Collins was attempting to quiet his inner critic and help rebuild his confidence. It worked. Rather than laboring over a single “perfect” guitar solo, Clapton would attempt a handful for his producer’s consideration.

“I’d do three or four solos on a song and say, ‘You sort it out,’” he told Guitar Player.

Clapton admitted that after hearing the same solo several times, he’d become tired of it, unable to judge it objectively anymore. Collins, by contrast, delighted in the painstaking work of listening, comparing, and assembling performances from multiple takes. On “Just Like a Prisoner,” Clapton recalled, Collins edited the finished solo together from a much longer performance, choosing the moments that best served the song rather than insisting on a flawless take from beginning to end.

It’s an aspect of Collins’ production style that’s often overlooked. Known publicly as a drummer, songwriter and frontman, he approached the studio less as a taskmaster than as a curator, convinced that the best performance was usually already there if you listened carefully enough.

One of Collins’ favorite memories came after the album was supposedly finished. Clapton rang to say he’d written one more song. It was “Behind the Sun.”

Instead of returning to a commercial studio, Clapton arrived at Collins’ house carrying little more than an acoustic guitar. Collins later laughed at the irony of finding himself responsible for recording Eric Clapton’s guitar without the experienced engineers he normally leaned on. For a producer who had spent years behind the drum kit, the prospect was both exhilarating and faintly terrifying.

The song they captured that day became the album’s title track.

Perhaps the clearest indication that Collins’ approach had worked came not years later in an autobiography or retrospective interview, but while the album was still new. Asked where Collins ranked among the producers he’d worked with, Clapton first named the legendary Tom Dowd before immediately adding, “Phil is a different kettle of fish. I love him, and he’s a great musician also, so he’s got another angle.”

Then he offered a compliment few producers ever receive.

“If I could get the two of them to produce a record together,” he laughed, “that would be it for me. They’re my ideal producers.”

For a guitarist who had worked with some of the most respected producers of the previous twenty years, it was remarkable praise. It also confirmed something Collins himself understood about production: it wasn’t about imposing your personality on another artist. It was about creating an environment in which they could become more fully themselves.

The irony, of course, is that the only people who weren’t completely convinced were the executives at Warner Bros. After hearing the completed album, the label decided it needed stronger commercial singles. Clapton returned to the studio with Ted Templeman and Lenny Waronker, recording additional tracks — including “Forever Man” — before Behind the Sun was finally released.

It’s easy to view that episode as a rejection of Collins’ work. In reality, it says more about the priorities of mid-1980s record companies than it does about the album he and Clapton had made. By the label’s standards, the record needed bigger hits. By Clapton’s standards, he’d just worked with one of his ideal producers.

Nearly forty years later, that’s the story that endures. Phil Collins never taught Eric Clapton how to play guitar. He simply reminded one of the greatest guitarists in rock history that he already knew how.

Tony Iommi says he never expected Ozzy Osbourne to die so soon, despite years of watching his longtime friend battle serious health problems.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the Black Sabbath electric guitar riff master has reflected on the band’s emotional farewell concert, revealed the contents of the final text message Osbourne sent him, and admitted he’s still struggling to accept that his bandmate of nearly 60 years is gone.

“I didn’t expect him to go overnight,” Iommi says. “Blimey. It was a hell of a shock, really.”

The two had been friends and collaborators since forming Black Sabbath in 1968, remaining close throughout their respective health battles and regularly checking in on one another.

Looking back on Black Sabbath’s farewell performance, Iommi says the show felt unlike anything the band had experienced before.

“On the night, it felt very strange for me because obviously we’d never been onstage with Ozzy in a throne before, sitting down,” he says. “He was always jumping around, pulling faces, and making me and Geezer laugh. But on this occasion, I couldn’t see him because he’s in that throne at the front.”

With drummer Bill Ward back behind the kit for the first time in two decades, Iommi also spent much of the set standing closer to his longtime bandmate.

“Bill wanted me to stand back by him just because he was unsure of some bits. And so I did.”

Watching the performance back has only made the experience more emotional. Although he knew Osbourne’s health had been deteriorating, Iommi says he “didn’t expect it to happen that quick.”

He also revealed the final exchange the pair shared before Osbourne’s death.

“He texted me the night before, funny enough, and said he weren’t feeling great and so on. But obviously, most of our conversations to each other have been, ‘How are you feeling? How’s this? How’s that?’ And so it was just another conversation,” Iommi recalls. “I didn’t expect him to go overnight. Blimey. It was a hell of a shock, really.”

The guitarist says the pair leaned on one another throughout years of health struggles.

“We did stay in touch a lot. And he was going through so many different things and constantly in and out of hospital and having this done and that done. And again, he stood by me when I was diagnosed with cancer. He called me every day. So we’ve been supportive of each other. I do miss our conversations.”

Months after Osbourne’s death, Iommi admits the loss still doesn’t feel real.

“It’s been really strange. I still don’t feel like he’s gone because when I look on YouTube or whatever, there’s something to do with Ozzy, and I see him again and again,” he says. “It’s almost like he’s still here. It’s really peculiar. Only we were in touch so many times. That’s what I miss.”

Iommi is preparing to release his first solo album in 21 years. From the Dark arrives October 23 via BMG and features Norwegian vocalist Jørn Lande, Mercyful Fate bass guitarist Becky Baldwin and former Robbie Williams drummer Karl Brazil.

Why are the blues the lingua franca of guitarists everywhere? Why is the 1959 sunburst Les Paul one of the most coveted axes in the universe?

The answer to both questions has a lot to do with guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Though he is often overshadowed by Eric Clapton, Peter Green and other electric blues guitarists who emerged in the mid-1960s, Bloomfield set the pace for the disruptive fervor of that period’s youth revolution with his deep-fried mix of Chicago blues and freak-out frenzy.

The steely urgency of his guitar solos energized the music of groundbreaking artists, including Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Janis Joplin, Al Kooper and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan himself once called Bloomfield “the best guitar player I ever heard.” Many would agree.

Indeed, nothing compares with the purity of Bloomfield’s tone and the edgy fluidity of his style. Unlike other 1960s guitar icons, he never embraced big Marshall stacks, fuzz boxes, or other effects. He was all about the truth of touch, transmitted from an electric guitar down a patch cord to a combo amp.

His fate of being born Caucasian tends to pigeonhole him alongside white bluesmen, like Clapton and Green, but it is really more accurate to think of him as a contemporary and peer of guitarists like Albert King, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush. At one point in the 1970s, when Bloomfield was thinking about quitting music, B.B. King called him up and begged him not to.

Every bit the equal of rock guitar gods like Clapton and Jimmy Page, Bloomfield is nonetheless not as widely celebrated today. This is partially because his career was tragically brief. Though he was open-hearted and absolute in his devotion to the blues, Bloomfield was intense, brilliant and troubled, affirmed by his struggles with insomnia, drugs and a deep-seated discomfort with musical success.

“Mike was irrepressible,” says blues keyboardist Mark Naftalin, Bloomfield’s Butterfield bandmate and lifelong musical collaborator. “You could hardly contain his energy. He was superabundant in every characteristic: extremely emotional, extravagantly intellectual and extraordinarily capable.”

Bloomfield was still a teenager when he started venturing into the sweatbox blues clubs of Chicago’s African-American South Side, reveling in the glory of giants like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and Magic Sam, who were dishing out dirty electric blues to boozy, boisterous crowds.

Soon the young guitar player was venturing onto the stage himself, sitting in with Muddy, Wolf and others at their invitation, hanging with them and becoming very much one of them.

“Michael came up through the real, no-bullshit blues scene,” says Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, another of Bloomfield’s friends and acolytes. “I remember going to some of those blues clubs much later, in 1965, and you needed somebody to go with, otherwise you’d get your ass whipped. Today there are blues bars and people playing the blues everywhere, but Michael was one of the guys spearheading it for us back then.”

The depth of Bloomfield’s authenticity was boundless, and his roots ran deep and in many directions. He went through a folk music phase in the early 1960s, switching to the acoustic guitar, studying assiduously at Chicago’s seminal Old Town School of Folk Music, and becoming quite an accomplished fingerpicker.

He also managed a folk coffeehouse, the Fickle Pickle, where he hosted many of the great acoustic bluesmen. He even recorded with a few of them, including Yank Rachell, Sleepy John Estes and Big Joe Williams. His published memoir of his time with Williams, Me and Big Joe, conveys a sense of Bloomfield’s incredibly hungry eyes and ears.

Bob Dylan 

The early 1960s folk scene was an enormous influence for many great guitarists, singers and songwriters of that period, including Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Jerry Garcia. A common grounding in folk was one source of the incredible musical bond that Bloomfield shared with Bob Dylan.

That connection, in turn, led to the guitarist playing on Dylan’s groundbreaking 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, the performance that really put Bloomfield on the map. The hot-wired frenzy of his Telecaster set fire to the album’s epic, breakthrough radio hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The sound burned itself deep into the tender young minds of incipient rock and pop music fans, many of whom had little or no prior acquaintance with folk, blues or, for that matter, Bob Dylan.

Dylan had made a first foray into electric instrumentation on his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, but Highway 61 Revisited was a total immersion, and he could hardly have chosen a better lead guitarist for the venture than Bloomfield. The two were kindred spirits in many ways: hip, literate Jewish guys from the American Midwest, weaned on folk music, blues and early rock and roll, and drawing on it all to create a new musical idiom that people would soon be calling folk rock.

On keyboards for Highway 61 Revisited was Al Kooper, another up-and-coming young musician, songwriter and producer, who would also go on to play a key role in Bloomfield’s career. But although Dylan had surrounded himself with great players to cut Highway 61 Revisited, the sessions, which took place in the summer of 1965, were directionless.

“You wouldn’t believe what those sessions were like,” Bloomfield later recalled. “There was no concept. No one knew what they wanted to play, no one knew what the music was supposed to sound like other than Bob, who had the chords and the words and the melody... They had the best studio drummer [Bobby Gregg]. They had a bass player, terrific guy, Russ Savakus. It was his first day playing electric bass, and he was scared about that. No one understood nothing.”

Yet, from the freeform chaos, Dylan and his musicians wrested the brilliant razor-blade bite of “Tombstone Blues,” the glorious wreckage of “Queen Jane Approximately” and other marvels of sheer musical and poetic genius. The intensity of Bloomfield’s guitar work beautifully underscored the amphetamine rush of Dylan’s kaleidoscopic lyrical imagery.

Bloomfield’s guitar at the time was a 1964 Fender Telecaster, an instrument ideally suited to cut through the cacophonous sound and carnivalesque poetic fervor of Highway 61 Revisited. Bloomfield was one of the musicians who accompanied Dylan on his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, shortly before the album’s release.

Butterfield Blues Band 

Later, in the first of many curious career moves seemingly calculated to impel him away from major success, he declined Dylan’s offer to go on the road as his touring guitarist. He opted instead to throw his lot in with a new group he’d just joined, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan was a far bigger name at the time, but the Butterfield Blues Band would quickly acquire the kind of underground artistic cred that always meant far more to Bloomfield than fame or money.

Hailed as the first biracial blues group, the Butterfield Blues Band boasted Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm section of Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums, both of whom had also joined Dylan and Bloomfield onstage at Newport. Riding atop this venerable foundation were singer/harmonica ace Paul Butterfield, organ/piano man Naftalin and the guitar duo of Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop.

The band’s eponymous 1965 debut and 1966 follow-up, East-West, were essential items for any mid-1960s hipster’s record collection. Bloomfield’s churning guitar leads on tracks like the minor-key blues “I Got a Mind to Give Up Living” inspired countless guitarists, and his telepathic trade-offs with Butterfield’s harp exemplified ensemble playing at its best.

The Butterfield Blues Band was an early exponent of the blues as a platform for adventurous musical experimentation and improvisation. At the time, neither Hendrix nor Clapton had broken out yet, and Bloomfield satisfied the nascent counterculture’s hunger for a musical hero all its own—someone who had the cred of a jazz virtuoso or streetwise bluesman but who was entirely part of the new music movement coalescing around the hippie scene.

Following a triumphant debut at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966, the Butterfield Blues Band became the toast of San Francisco, ground zero for the new psychedelic rock music and culture. Bloomfield’s work had a profound influence on soon-to-be prominent guitarists, like Carlos Santana and Jorma Kaukonen.

“It was a fabulous band,” Kaukonen says. “They were amazingly tight. The combination of Michael, Elvin and Butterfield was simply incredible and powerful. The music they played.— it was the shit.”

During his tenure with Butterfield, Bloomfield traded his 1964 Telecaster for a goldtop 1956 Gibson Les Paul, an instrument remembered as one of Bloomfield’s iconic guitars. Although he always kept a Telecaster around (he replaced the 1964 with a 1966 model), Bloomfield was heavily associated with Les Pauls from about 1966 onward.

Electric Flag and Super Session 

A mercurial figure in many regards, Bloomfield suddenly and unexpectedly left the Butterfield Blues Band in 1967, saying that he wanted to give Bishop “more space.” Although the group would continue to enjoy success in the late 1960s, things were never quite the same without Bloomfield.

The guitarist’s next venture was to start his own band, the Electric Flag, in 1967 with bassist (and fellow Highway 61 Revisited alumnus) Harvey Brooks, pianist Barry Goldberg, drummer Buddy Miles, singer Nick Gravenites, and a full horn section. Rock bands of the time rarely had horn sections, but Bloomfield took his cue from soul music and the Black end of the blues spectrum.

The Electric Flag got off to an auspicious start with a high-visibility live debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and a spot in the Peter Fonda/Roger Corman counterculture feature film The Trip, for which they also provided the soundtrack.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill as Bloomfield began using heroin, the drug that ultimately killed him. Completion of the Electric Flag’s debut album, the appropriately named A Long Time Comin’, was delayed, and Bloomfield didn’t shine as brightly in this context as he had in the electric blues and folk-rock idioms. Bloomfield had already begun to lose a battle for band leadership to the brash, demonstrative Miles, who would go on to lead his own Buddy Miles Express and perform with Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.

As a result, Bloomfield was kicked out of the Electric Flag shortly after the March 1968 release of A Long Time Comin’. He was bitterly disappointed, but quickly found himself engaged in a new project with his old pal Al Kooper. As it happened, Kooper had himself just been canned from his own group, Blood, Sweat & Tears.

A resourceful producer and A&R man, as well as one of the era’s definitive Hammond B-3/keyboard stylists, Kooper decided to take the “rock musician as jazz hero” conceit to its logical conclusion, arranging a two-day all-star recording session in Los Angeles patterned after a jazz date, with plenty of space for live-in-the-studio jamming. Bloomfield was Kooper’s first choice for the lead guitar role. The ensemble was rounded out by old friends Brooks and Goldberg, along with session drummer Eddie Hoh.

The result was the 1968 release Super Session, one of the most influential albums of the late 1960s. Bloomfield displayed his considerable blues chops on tracks like the Albert King tribute “Albert’s Shuffle” and the slow blues “Really.” Other tracks showed his broad stylistic range to great advantage. “His Holy Modal Majesty” harks back to “East-West” trippiness; “Stop” is a funky Mixolydian workout, and the cover of the Curtis Mayfield song “Man’s Temptation” is an exercise in pure soul.

Surprisingly, Bloomfield played guitar on only five of the original album’s nine tracks. After the first day of recording, he departed without explanation. Kooper has speculated that Bloomfield couldn’t score dope and was unable to cope with his insomnia, leading to his hasty retreat. Fortunately, Kooper quickly recruited Stephen Stills, fresh from the recently disbanded Buffalo Springfield, to finish out the record.

Released on July 22, 1968, Super Session was a hit, peaking at Number 12 on the Billboard 200 and going Gold. The following September, Kooper and Bloomfield reunited for six shows over three nights at the Fillmore West. Once again, Bloomfield’s insomnia kicked in and he bailed midway through the schedule.

Kooper managed to save the shows by bringing in Elvin Bishop and Carlos Santana, who was then relatively unknown beyond the San Francisco music scene. The resulting recordings, issued in 1969 as The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, are loose but lively documents of Bloomfield’s blues mastery.

Gibson Les Paul Years 

The pervasive influence of the Super Session album helped boost interest in the instrument that Bloomfield is seen playing on its cover: a sunburst 1959 Les Paul Standard. Like many players at the time, Bloomfield first became interested in the Les Paul Standard, a.k.a. Burst, through Eric Clapton’s prominent use of it on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album, from 1966. He’d also spent quite a bit of time playing one that belonged to John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful.

Bloomfield acquired his 1959 Standard from guitar dealer/player/luthier Dan Erlewine in 1967, offering his Les Paul goldtop plus 100 bucks in trade. The legendary guitar can be heard on the first Electric Flag album and on both of Bloomfield’s albums with Kooper, among other recordings. His use of the 1959 Les Paul helped to elevate the Burst’s status, particularly among guitarists in the United States. Prior to then, Les Paul goldtops commanded higher prices than sunburst Standards, but by 1967 the market had flipped, and the Burst would go on to become one of the most desirable electric guitars of all time.

Bloomfield ended the 1960s in top form. He scored the radical chic film Medium Cool, worked with Janis Joplin on her album I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! and performed on Chess Records’ all-star Fathers and Sons album with Muddy Waters, blues piano great Otis Spann, Paul Butterfield, Stax bass guitarist Donald “Duck” Dunn, Sam Lay and Buddy Miles. The guitarist also released his first solo album, It’s Not Killing Me, in 1969.

Sadly, Bloomfield’s popularity began to fade as the 1970s wore on. An Electric Flag reunion and the short-lived group KGB both fizzled. He hit a low scoring several “artistic” porn films for San Francisco’s notorious Mitchell Brothers, including Hot Nazis, Rampaging Dental Assistants and Sodom and Gomorrah, in 1974 and 1975. Bloomfield still managed to deliver quality work strewn amid the dross, including 1973’s Triumvirate album with Dr. John and John Hammond, Jr., a handful of albums for the Takoma label, and an instructional album recorded for Guitar Player magazine, If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em as You Please.

During the late 1970s, Bloomfield gigged sporadically around the Bay Area with various incarnations of Mike Bloomfield and Friends, sometimes returning to the acoustic blues and ragtime idioms he had explored in his pre-fame days.

“I worked with him on and off through most of the 1970s,” Naftalin says. “Our work together tapered off quite a bit. He had really gone into not a very good place. I wasn’t gonna follow him there.”

One final scene of triumph was Bloomfield’s gig with Bob Dylan at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater on November 15, 1980. A Mike Bloomfield fan to the very end, Dylan had sought him out and brought him onstage to revisit their mutual moment of glory, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bloomfield played the show in his bedroom slippers. A few months later, on February 15, 1981, Bloomfield was found dead in the front seat of his 1965 Chevrolet Impala. He died from a heroin overdose.

Several days passed before his body was identified and claimed at the city morgue.

“Michael Bloomfield is an important figure in American music,” Kaukonen concludes. “It’s tragic that he died the way he did. He made the blues accessible to a lot of guys like me. He loved life so much. There weren’t enough hours in the day for him to get done all he needed to get done.”

When Richie Sambora walked away from Bon Jovi in 2013, fans were left wondering how one of rock’s most successful partnerships could fall apart.

More than 30 years after the guitarist and Jon Bon Jovi helped turn a New Jersey club band into a global phenomenon, Sambora says his departure was not caused by one argument or one moment of frustration. Instead, it was the result of years of personal struggles, creative differences and a partnership that had slowly lost its balance.

Speaking in his cover feature for Guitar Player’s August 2024 issue, Sambora reflected on the circumstances behind his exit — a departure revisited in Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, the four-part documentary series chronicling the band’s 40-year history.

“I probably should have left after The Circle,” Sambora said, referring to Bon Jovi’s 2009 album. “Because I was really getting unhappy.”

For Sambora, the problem was not fame, touring or the demands of being in one of the biggest bands in the world. It was the feeling that his voice — creatively and personally — was no longer being heard.

“When you’re together for 32 years, and especially when you’re in close quarters and you go through all that kind of stuff, there’s a lot of disagreements,” he said. “But my talent and my passion were just being expelled a bit.”

That was a difficult position for a musician who had been central to Bon Jovi’s identity from the beginning.

Together, Sambora and Jon Bon Jovi formed one of rock’s most successful songwriting partnerships, creating defining hits including “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “Wanted Dead or Alive” and “You Give Love a Bad Name.” While Jon supplied the unmistakable voice and frontman presence, Sambora brought the signature electric and acoustic guitar riffs, vocal harmonies and blues-based musicianship that helped separate Bon Jovi from its arena-rock peers.

“I was also a fan of his,” Sambora said of Jon. “I could write Jon better than he could, almost.”

But as Bon Jovi grew into a global brand, Sambora felt the creative dynamic that had fueled the band was changing.

The guitarist has said he never wanted the group to revolve around him. He believed in Bon Jovi as a collective and took pride in everything they had built together.

“It wasn’t called Sambora. Cool — I didn’t want it to be,” he said. “We came up with a band name — Bon Jovi.”

The breaking point came during the recording of 2013’s What About Now. After completing his solo album Aftermath of the Lowdown, Sambora returned to Bon Jovi energized and ready to contribute.

Instead, he found a different creative environment. The band, he told Jon, felt “stale.”

“Look, if anybody told Jon the truth, it was me,” he said.

Jon Bon Jovi and producer John Shanks had already written much of the material, leaving Sambora feeling like his role had changed from creative partner to supporting player.

“Jon just said, ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about preparing anything. Me and [producer John] Shanks and everybody, we wrote all these songs. Don’t worry about it. Just come to the studio,’” Sambora recalled.

His response showed how much the situation had changed.

“I said, ‘Play me a song.’ And he did. And I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like Bon Jovi.’ You know why? Because I was that part of the nucleus.”

For Sambora, the issue was not simply about songwriting credits. It was about the chemistry that had defined the band disappearing.

That became clear during the recording of “The Fighter.” Sambora believed he could elevate the song’s acoustic guitar part, drawing on decades of experience shaping Bon Jovi’s sound.

Instead, producer John Shanks played the part.

“I went, ‘Do you want to just make it that way? Okay,’” Sambora said. “See? Not a band.”

By March 2013, Sambora had stepped away from the What About Now tour and was replaced by Phil X. Although the decision surprised fans, Sambora says he had already reached his limit.

“I wouldn’t have been able to stay,” he said. “It was too much at that point.”

Rather than pointing to one single cause, Sambora describes his departure as the result of years of accumulated pressure — including family issues, the challenges of life in a massive rock band and a breakdown in communication.

“There was obviously an amalgamation of a shitload of things over a 31-and-a-half-year period,” he said. “We couldn’t talk at that point. We weren’t talking — we weren’t communicating.”

Despite the split, Sambora remains proud of what Bon Jovi achieved. His frustration with Thank You, Goodnight was not that the documentary explored the band’s struggles — it was that he felt it overlooked the extraordinary connection the band created with millions of fans.

“What the documentary missed was the unbelievable feeling of being on the world stage and your songs hitting people in the heart — making people happy, keeping them company,” he said.

Sambora has relived those moments on occasion. In 2018, he reunited with Bon Jovi for the band’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. He did it again in 2023, performing alongside Phil X and Orianthi at a Rock for Responders Benefit Concert in San Pedro, California.

And while Sambora’s return to Bon Jovi has remained uncertain, he says he would still be open to it.

“The reason I said, ‘Yes, I would go back to the band, and I would go back to the band now,’ is because of the fans,” he said.

More than a decade after his departure, the story of Richie Sambora and Bon Jovi remains one of rock’s great unfinished chapters: a partnership that created some of the biggest songs of the era, but one that ultimately could not survive the pressures that came with becoming one of the biggest bands in the world.

Two well-worn Kramer guitars that belonged to Eddie Van Halen have gone up for auction — complete with what are claimed to be cigarette butts the guitarist smoked, still wedged beneath the low strings behind the nut.

The electric guitars are among the headline lots in Backstage Auctions’ latest sale, which runs through August 8. Listed as “Edward Van Halen 1986 Zeke Clark Customized 5150 Kramer Guitar” and “Edward Van Halen 1987 Zeke Clark Customized 5150 Kramer Guitar,” each carries a starting bid of $50,000.

While their exact recording history can’t be verified, Backstage Auctions president Jacques van Gool says there’s little doubt the guitars saw extensive studio use during one of Van Halen’s most successful periods.

“Those two guitars were definitely and extensively used by Eddie in the studio,” van Gool said during an appearance on Final Resonance TV. “They were never taken out on the road. But Zeke doesn’t remember if those guitars were used on recordings. Most likely they were. But again, you cannot just fill in blanks. I mean, you either know or you don’t. And even if you know, then I always say, ‘We have proof.’

“But they have so much wear and tear on them and the usual cigarette burns on the headstock and all that good stuff. It’s fantastic that those pieces survived and that he hung on to them.”

Among the guitars’ more unusual features are the cigarette butts reportedly smoked by Van Halen himself, each left tucked beneath the strings on the headstock — a small but unmistakably personal detail that has become one of the auction’s biggest talking points.

Final Resonance TV host Jeff Goebel added that former Van Halen guitar technician Zeke Clark had shared the story behind the instruments, explaining that Van Halen initially had Clark build them to prove his abilities before keeping them as backup guitars.

“These were ones that Eddie made [Zeke] build to kind of get Ed’s approval of his skills,” Goebel said. “Then he had these as sort of backups, as well.”

Clark’s connection gives the instruments particularly strong provenance. A respected luthier and technician, he worked as Eddie Van Halen’s lead guitar and amp tech from 1985 to 1993, overseeing the guitarist’s gear throughout the 5150, OU812 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge eras.

According to the auction listing, Clark’s career also included building, repairing and maintaining equipment for artists including Prince, Sammy Hagar, Journey, Heart and Poison.

The sale features dozens of Van Halen-related artifacts drawn from the collections of Clark and longtime Van Halen associate Nick D’Andrea, offering collectors a rare glimpse inside the guitarist’s inner circle. Few lots, however, are likely to attract as much attention as the two battered Kramer guitars — not least because they still bear traces of Van Halen’s daily habits decades after they left his hands.

Bidding remains open through August 8. For collectors willing to meet the hefty opening price, the sale offers the chance to own not only two studio-used Kramer guitars with impeccable provenance, but also an unusually intimate piece of Eddie Van Halen history.

When a die-hard fan spray-painted “Clapton is God” on a London wall in the middle of the British blues boom, it was evident that a modernized interpretation of the blues had successfully captured the imagination of contemporary audiences.

By Clapton's own admission, playing the blues, let alone reshaping it for a new era, required not superhuman talent but plain-old hard work. As he continued to push the genre forward in Cream — after a glimpse of Buddy Guy's live show convinced to form his own power trio —– other artists helped take it to new places in the following decades. Clapton believes Robert Cray did that better than anyone.

“It’s the most difficult thing to write, a modern blues,” Clapton told Rolling Stone in 2017 mused. “The only person I know who can do it well is Robert Cray. It comes straight out of him. I saw him recently this year, and he’s still doing it. He’s on fire, the real thing.

“I wish I could be like that,” he added. “Really, I’m a musician. I try to be a singer and songwriter, and it’s interesting to me. But I would never think of myself as that.”

Clapton, of course, speaks with humility — his success includes 17 Grammy awards. But he felt Cray had the whole package, with his guitar playing and voice working together in perfect harmony.

Despite getting a metaphorical pat on the back from a blues legend, Cray wasn't a purist. Part of his brilliance came from the fact that he peppered his blues with elements of gospel and soul, the musical styles of his upbringing. Blues was, in fact, not his primary source of inspiration.

“My dad would play gospel music on Sundays,” he tells Guitar Player. “It was Swan Silvertones, Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi — and Alabama — and all kinds of stuff like that. During the week, it would be Ray Charles, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Sarah Vaughan...

“It’s funny, because as a kid I heard all that music, and then, as kids do, of course, you listen to your own music. When I got into my late teens and picked up the blues bug, I started taking my parents’ records from the house, and then embellished that collection by buying my own records. So getting the gospel music or getting Curtis Mayfield or the Impressions was all just part of what I grew up on.”

He also played an accidental role in inspiring the hit film The Blues Brothers, having played bass previously in the house band from the film Animal House. While those two instances are comedic footnotes to a journeyman career, Cray is as authentic as modern blues can get.

Unfortunately, for all of Cray's and Clapton's mutual admiration, their friendship wouldn't last. Cray took exception to his friend's decision to sing some lines on Van Morrison's anti-lockdown song, "Stand and Deliver," and ended their relationship.

As he told Clapton, he was particularly taken aback by the lines “Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave? Do you wanna wear these chains / Until you’re lying in the grave?”

“His reaction back to me was that he was referring to slaves from, you know, England from way back,” Cray told The Washington Post.

Cray, who was born in Georgia during segregation, found the reply wanting. He was further dismayed to see a photo of Clapton and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan posing with Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in September 2021. As The Washington Post noted, Abbot had “recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state.”

In addition, Abbott is opposed to vaccination mandates, as is Clapton, who has posted statements against vaccines and described scientific data as "propaganda."

In response to the photo, Clapton's business manager Michael Eaton said at the time that posing with the governor didn't amount to an endorsement of his positions.

“[Clapton] is a great believer in freedom of choice which drives his position on vaccinations,” said Eaton. “And his views on other matters would reflect that belief in freedom of choice.”

It all brings to mind the old saying: You may lose your friends, but you never lose the blues.

Samantha Fish believes the future of blues guitar is in safe hands — and she can point to five players leading the charge.

The Kansas City guitarist, who was championed by the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Slash and Devon Allman as she emerged from the blues underground, has singled out a handful of contemporaries carrying the blues-rock torch into a new era. At the top of her list are Christone Kingfish Ingram and Derek Trucks.

“I just got off the road with Christone Kingfish Ingram, and he’s pretty amazing,” she tells Guitar World. The pair recently shared the bill on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival alongside Warren Haynes, Grace Bowers, Larkin Poe, Eric Gales and plenty of others.

Her praise for Trucks is even stronger.

“I think Derek Trucks is one of the greatest there is,” she says, “not just in blues playing but any playing. He’s an alien.”

Trucks has been performing for almost his entire life. He landed his first paid gig at age 11 and was playing blues clubs with Buddy Guy before his 13th birthday — experiences that, he later revealed, taught him one of his most important lessons about performing.

Fish’s remaining picks are no less enthusiastic.

“I like Gary Clark Jr.,” she says. “He’s very tasteful, and he’s got a great tone.

“Eric Gales is incredible,” she adds. “He just blows everybody away. Luther Dickinson is one of my favorite contemporaries, too. He’s awesome.”

As for Fish herself, she’s credited 10 albums with shaping both her life and her vibrant guitar style. Alongside the more obvious picks — “Who doesn’t have a Rolling Stones record in their top 10?” she asked Guitar Player last year — sits one intriguing outlier: the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams.

“This record came into my life fairly recently,” she explains. “I started getting hip to the Detroit rock and soul scene while I was making the Chills & Fever album. I was going through something of a musical evolution, just taking everything in, and eventually that led me to Kick Out the Jams.

“They were punk in the very early days, and that’s where my heart is. Once you get into them, though, you’re really into them. This record really affected me at a time when I wanted to feel something in a big way.”

She’s also detailed the five most important riffs in her life, saying one R.L. Burnside song shaped her musical upbringing and served as a four-minute masterclass in groove.

Fish believes today’s blues players should continue pushing the genre forward rather than treating it as something to preserve unchanged. Speaking to Guitar World last August, she argued that the music has always evolved through artists willing to challenge expectations.

“Even when Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf went electric, which is what we consider to be traditional blues now, they were outsiders. People were saying, ‘This isn’t blues.’ And now it’s our gold standard. It’s the artist’s job to push boundaries and find their voice.

“And, of course, you worry about losing people. You worry about gaining people. That’s the business side of what we do. But at the end of the day, I feel like you have to make art that you can stand by. The rest of it, it kind of sorts itself out.”

Guitar Player Presents is proud to partner with AEG to welcome ZZ Top with special guest Cheap Trick for a double set of classic guitar rock on a scenic mountain top.

Billy Gibbons has spent more than five decades proving that feel beats flash. His playing is instantly recognizable, whether it’s the fat, vocal-like lead tone, the economy of his phrasing, or the way he threads blues, boogie and rock into riffs that have become part of the electric guitar canon. Songs like “La Grange,” “Tush,” “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Gimme All Your Lovin’” remain master classes in serving the song while leaving an unmistakable signature.

Rick Nielsen has built a career on the same principle from a different angle. A world-class collector of vintage guitars and one of rock’s great entertainers, he’s also the architect behind Cheap Trick’s blend of Beatles-worthy hooks, hard rock muscle, and razor-sharp rhythm guitar. From the enduring power of At Budokan to the band’s latest material, Nielsen’s inventive playing and infectious stage presence have made Cheap Trick one of rock’s most consistently rewarding live acts.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see ZZ Top and Cheap Trick in Saratoga, California, on Saturday, August 8, send an email and put “ZZ Trick” in the subject line. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide their own transportation to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, and have their own accommodations in the area. Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents ZZ Top with special guest Cheap Trick

Saturday, August 8
5:30 p.m. doors, 7:30 p.m. show
The Mountain Winery
Saratoga, CA

We’ll be handing out free packs of Martin strings.

Suzanne Vega never imagined “Luka” would become one of the defining songs of the late 1980s. She also never thought that, decades later, she’d reveal just how personal it really was.

Vega wrote the song in 1984 as the story of an abused child told in the first person. But when her manager suggested it could become a hit, Vega couldn’t see it.

“It’s a small song about an abused boy,” she tells Guitar Player today. “I didn’t really see it hitting the charts or anything. But he argued with me and said he thought that it had an important message.”

That conviction set in motion a lengthy studio process that transformed Vega’s sparse acoustic composition into the polished recording that reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987.

“The production was the biggest thing to deal with,” she says. “Once he made his argument to me that he thought it could be a hit, I was like, ‘Okay, sure, knock yourself out.’ We spent quite a bit of time on the production because they wanted it to fit into the radio-friendly format.”

Producer Steve Addabbo and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye were brought in to help shape the song for radio without sacrificing its intimacy.

“We spent a lot of time on the different parts, like the drum parts,” Vega recalls. “I think it was Anton Sanko’s opening synthesizer chords that made it this ear-catching thing before you hear my opening guitar chords. I think what makes the song radio-friendly is the synthesizer part, the drums and especially the electric guitar solo of Jon Gordon, that has that ringing sound that was very much like U2 at the time. The minute it went to radio, it just hit everywhere it went. It was almost like an instant hit overnight.”

Although the finished recording sounds effortless, Vega says it came together only after painstaking work in the studio.

“I did my guitar part over and over again because Steve was meticulous,” she says. “He’s a terrific engineer. And I’m not a natural in the studio. I’m a good performer live, and I do what it takes to get my message and my song across live. But in the studio, I needed to do it over and over again.

“Today, whenever I hear ‘Luka’ on the radio, it sounds thick, full and fresh. It doesn’t sound labored over. But that’s because of Steve.”

Vega also credits Addabbo with teaching her how to record.

“He was a mentor because he taught me how to work in the studio,” she says. “When I first started working with him in my early 20s, I was very green. He would keep me in there until I got it right. Sometimes he’d have me come into the control room and listen to what I had done, and after listening I’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s not quite right,’ and I’d have to go back and do it again.

“So he really taught me my chops and how to play the guitar in a certain way, how not to exaggerate. He also taught me how to sing with the microphone — not to sing too softly and not to shout. He was a good, patient teacher.”

For the sessions, Vega played the Guild F-47 that was her acoustic guitar of choice during those years.

“I used the Guild in the early days,” she says. “At one point I switched over to Taylor and then for a while I used a Yamaha. In fact, someone from Yamaha just showed up one day at my hotel room and gave me a guitar, so I said, ‘Thank you.’

“I also had a custom Yamaha guitar, which ended up being stolen from the front of my apartment when I lived in Tribeca. To this day, I can’t believe it hasn’t surfaced somewhere since it had my name right on it in mother-of-pearl inlays. So somewhere, somebody has my Yamaha from when it was taken from the front of my building.”

“Luka” reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Vega’s highest-charting U.S. single. Its place in pop culture was cemented years later when it turned up in an episode of The Simpsons.

“It was so random, and so out of context,” Vega says, laughing. “The Simpsons are very funny. I remember going, ‘He’s driving under a bridge, and he comes out singing it.’ I was actually kind of touched by the fact that they would even think to use it.”

But the song’s greatest impact came not from the charts or television, but from the people who heard themselves in it.

“I was writing about a private issue, so it didn’t really occur to me that all these other people would identify with the song,” she says. “And they did. I got many, many letters from people who told me their story and their experiences. That was cathartic for me because, in the end, I understood that, in a way, that’s what was meant to happen.

“Somehow, I had provided a service by writing the song and allowing people to express themselves. There was one girl who wrote to me and said because of the song, she was able to tell others what was happening to her, and she feels it saved her life. I was getting letters like that.”

For decades, Vega maintained that “Luka” had been loosely inspired by a child she had observed playing outside her apartment building. It wasn’t until 2021 that she revealed the song had actually been rooted in her own childhood experiences.

“I was too afraid to reveal myself, so I didn’t want people to know that it was about me,” she says. “I had hidden the abuse for most of my life. Never talked about it, never revealed it. So to be known for that very thing was a little weird for me, but I felt that I had done the right thing in creating the character of Luka and that I could hide behind.”

Looking back nearly four decades later, Vega sees “Luka” as something much bigger than the hit single she never expected to have.

“The success of ‘Luka’ has been one of the highlights of my life,” she says. “In the end, it was not just a pop song, but something that, in a way, I was meant to do.”

Modest Mouse have dropped guitarist Simon O’Connor from their tour lineup following allegations he sent inappropriate messages and a meme to an underage fan.

O’Connor subsequently apologized to the fan, claiming he had confused her with someone who had been harassing him.

“Simon O’Connor will not be joining us on the upcoming tour,” the band posted on Instagram. “The good news is that Seth Jabour of Les Savy Fav will be jumping in to play guitar. We look forward to being out there with you all.”

As reported here previously, the allegations surfaced last weekend on Reddit, when the fan shared screenshots of O’Connor’s messages. After realizing his error, O’Connor apologized. The woman wrote back that she had assumed someone had hacked his account.

“Wish I was hacked just had a party night and looking at everything with one eye ya know,” O’Connor replied.

“But you did blindside me with a gaggle of likes and then very little intro besides bikini pics so we are both to blame,” he wrote in a followup.

In her Reddit post, the fan explained that she was 16 at the time of their exchange, and noted that her birthday was “the first thing in my bio.” She said O’Connor had viewed a story with a countdown to her 17th birthday, and she provided screenshots to back her claims.

Responding in a Reddit post of his own, O’Connor explained that he had been trolled repeatedly by someone else who used multiple accounts and believed the fan was that person.

“After a few minutes, I realized that I had made a mistake and this was not the person who I had dealt with before,” he wrote. “I unsent the messages and immediately ceased communication. I’m genuinely sorry to the person who received those messages. They didn’t deserve to be put in that position, and I’m sorry for the stress and attention this has brought them. I know some people will choose not to believe me, and I understand that. I can’t change what’s happened. All I can do is tell the truth, take responsibility for my mistake, and apologize.”

Fans replying to Modest Mouse’s Instagram announcement have been supportive of the move to drop O’Connor.

“Good news for people who love good news,” wrote one.

“Sorry you guys had your names attached to that previous guitarist, yall are some incredible musicians and deserve better people in your corner,” wrote another.

O’Connor has played guitar for Modest Mouse since 2021 and is on their new album, An Eraser and a Maze.

The story behind the fuzz pedal’s creation is well known to most guitarists, but it goes a little something like this. The effect was born on July 12, 1960, while country superstar Marty Robbins was cutting the song “Don’t Worry” at Bradley Film & Recording Studios in Nashville, better known as the Quonset Hut. Hired for the session was guitarist Grady Martin, who brought along his Danelectro UB-2 six-string bass guitar.

Studio house engineer Glenn Snoddy was running the board, a newly installed custom-built recording console featuring Langevin 116 tube amplifiers. Martin’s guitar, used for the song’s solo, was being sent directly into the console, rather than through an amp.

To everyone’s surprise, when Snoddy played back the take, Martin’s six-string bass sounded like a swarm of bees.

In a 2014 interview with the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM)’s Oral History Program, Snoddy attributed the problem to one of the board’s 35 output transformers.

“Prior to making the transformers, they misjudged the windings somehow or other, and there were 250 volts going through the winding instead of the transformers,” he said. “And one malfunctioned at the exact time that Grady was playing his guitar solo through it and it caused this sound, which we called later a fuzz tone sound.”

According to Snoddy, it was Martin who suggested they keep it.

“Grady said, ‘Why don’t we just use that on this record?’” the engineer recalled in the 2010 book How Does It Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear.

Martin’s advice was well taken. Released in February 1961, some six months after it was recorded, “Don’t Worry” became Robbins’ seventh number one on the country chart, and crossed over to the pop chart, where it peaked at number three.

But before that happened, Snoddy’s fuzz circuit had died, taking with it that magic sound. By then, artists were calling the Quonset Hut to ask if they could get the fuzz tone on their recordings. Snoddy decided to replicate the circuit in a pedal format with an old friend, engineer Revis Hobbs. Together the pair set to work on a circuit design using transistors, and re-created the fuzz sound by clipping the signal, progressively squaring off the waveform.

“I got some transistors, and we rigged up a thing, and we eventually sold it to Gibson,” he recalled.

Gibson introduced the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone the following year, in 1962. Although the pedal initially met with a muted public response, it finally took off in 1965 after Keith Richards used an FZ-1 to record his lead riff on the Rolling Stones hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Ever since, fuzz has been an essential part of the electric guitar tone arsenal.

But between Snoddy’s circuit failing and the birth of the FZ-1 are at least three recording artists who helped maintain interest in the effect, all of which helped launch it to its rightful place as an essential pedal in guitarists’ rigs.

The first is the man behind the six-string bass guitar on that transformational session: Grady Martin. As an established Nashville player, Martin knew a thing about making hit records. By 1961, he’d already enjoyed a long career as one of country music’s most in-demand guitarists and become a member of the Nashville A-Team, who, like their counterparts in L.A., the Wrecking Crew, would define the sound of numerous records, including Marty Robbins’ 1959 hit “El Paso.”

Martin liked the sound of Snoddy’s failing circuit so much that he made at least two other fuzz-guitar songs with it. “Tippin’ In” and “The Fuzz,” both instrumentals, were recorded on January 12, 1961 and issued together as a single that same month — before the February release of “Don’t Worry.” Neither was a hit for Martin, but “The Fuzz” likely sealed the deal when it came to the effect’s name.

Martin’s adoption of the fuzz effect didn’t go unnoticed by Snoddy, who appreciated the guitarist’s keen ear for sound. Unfortunately, the circuit was dead by the time those sides were out and “Don’t Worry” was climbing the charts.

What pushed Snoddy to re-create the effect in a pedal? He said the final straw was when Bradley had to turn away Nancy Sinatra when she came looking to use the sound on her next record.

"We had an artist, Nancy Sinatra, that called and wanted to come in and make a record,” the engineer explained. “When she got there, we had to tell her that the console that was causing that sound, the amplifier, had quit, and we couldn't do it anymore.

“They didn't like that at all,” he said with a laugh. “I told [Quonset Hut owner and producer] Harold Bradley that I'd have to see if I could make one and get it going."

So is Nancy Sinatra the mother of the fuzz pedal? It’s a little hard to imagine the young singer was interested in Snoddy’s fuzz sound. Consider that, in 1961, Sinatra was just launching her career as a teenybopper singer of saccharine love songs that often featured orchestrations, not fuzzed-out guitars. Her confidently sassy breakthrough success “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” was still four years away.

What's more, Sinatra was recording for her father’s new label, Reprise, located in Los Angeles. Frank Sinatra had recorded his own early Reprise sides in L.A., at United Recorders. Why would Nancy look to record in Nashville? And would a raunchy guitar sound really be in keeping with the sweet-girl image she was cultivating in 1961?

Whatever the case, let's take Snoddy at his word; Sinatra, after all, would have had license to record wherever she damn well pleased. But note that she didn’t cut a song with fuzz guitar until her 1967 hit, “You Only Live Twice,” the theme from the James Bond film of the same name.

But another dusky-voiced young singer getting a start on her career did use the fuzz effect on a single in 1961. What’s more, she did it in Nashville, just a few months after “Don’t Worry” came out.

Ann-Margret was just 20 years old and on her way to a successful career as a vocalist and movie actress when she released her first single for RCA Victor, the heartfelt “Lost Love,” early that year. Soon after, she followed it up with the very fuzzy — and more adult — “I Just Don’t Understand.”

Recorded at RCA Victor Studio B, Nashville on May 9, 1961, and produced by Chet Atkins, “I Just Don’t Understand” features Billy Strange on electric fuzz guitar. Strange, who would go on to record for the Beach Boys as part of the Wrecking Crew, reportedly had his guitar tone altered by overdriving the input preamp on a channel of the recording console. (He would even go on to record his own version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction.”)

“I Just Don't Understand" was a hit for Ann-Margret, reaching 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1961 and furthering fuzz guitar’s entry into the American psyche.

To be clear, there’s little chance Snoddy misremembered Ann-Margret as Nancy Sinatra. As an RCA Victor artist, she was unlikely to record in a rival studio like the Quonset Hut, which catered largely to artists on Decca, MGM and Columbia, the latter of which bought the studio from Bradley in 1962.

But Ann-Margret’s chart success says something about the popularity of fuzz in 1961, before the development of the Fuzz-Tone. Had Snoddy not put the sound in a box, chances are someone else would have.

As for Grady Martin, he continued to use the fuzz effect well after Snoddy’s circuit kicked the bucket, creating a quartet of sides that, retrospectively, slot neatly into the garage-rock genre.

In February 1962, Martin used fuzz on both sides of his single “Twist and Turn”/“Good Good Good,” released in April 1962. He employed it as well on two other songs cut at this session: “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Big Bad Guitar,” both included on the 1963 album That Good Grady, cut with the Slewfoot Five.

Two years later, those same two recordings would be reissued with vocal overdubs and credited to Beauregard and the Tuffs. No doubt it was this raucous cut of “Ramblin’ Rose” that inspired the MC5’s version from their 1969 album, Kick Out the Jams, which in turn launched a new wave of garage rock that gave birth to punk.

Given that Snoddy’s circuit was long gone by the time Grady cut those sides, it’s anybody’s guess how he achieved his fuzz effect. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if he used the FZ-1.

Designed to recreate the look, playing feel and sound of Fender’s iconic offset model from the mid 1960s, the Vintera III Jazzmaster has a sleek Jetsons-esque shape with a body made of alder, a traditional Fender tonewood that offers a balanced and lively tone with beefy mids and a robust low end.

Coupled to it via a four-bolt joint, the C-shaped maple neck starts off slim at the nut (1.65 inches) and widens moderately to slightly more than two inches at the 12th fret. Riding atop is a round-laminated 25.5 inch–scale rosewood fingerboard carrying 21 vintage-tall frets that provide slightly more height than vintage-style frets for ease of bending and a wider vibrato.

Dressed in Olympic White, and shown here in Candy Apple Red, the Vintera III Jazzmaster came out of its gig bag in tune and with a good factory setup. This cool-looking electric proved a satisfying player thanks to the neck’s slender profile, low, buzz-free action, polished frets and tuneful intonation.

While the fret tips were a bit sharp, the nut was well finished and properly notched so it doesn’t cause string pinching when tuning or using the trem. On a purely cosmetic note, and compared to the previous Vintera II Jazzmaster, the Vintera III features decals that are applied over the finish instead of under it, a genuine bone nut and period-correct clay fingerboard dots.

The vintage-style floating tremolo tailpiece and separate six-saddle adjustable bridge are a good combination that keeps the strings reliably in tune when you’re doing expressive warbles with the push-in bar. As per vintage spec, the tailpiece also features a lock button that’s intended to keep the guitar in tune if a string breaks. To use it, simply press the bar down, slide the button rearward, release the bar and rock on.

To test it out, I purposely snapped the high E string and the system responded by keeping the remaining five strings in good relative tune. However, they all went sharp and had to be retuned anyway. The device can be adjusted to improve tuning stability, and since all it takes is a screwdriver and a little patience it’s worth checking out online videos or other sources that explain how to do it.

The Vintera III’s pickups are also era correct, as opposed to “decade based,” and are optimized to capture the essence of classic Fender single-coil tone, which the company describes as “rich and full-bodied with the distinctive depth and clarity that made these offset guitars the choice of surf, pop and indie musicians.”

Through my PRS DGT 15 head and cabinet — along with a selection of distortion, compression and delay pedals — this acoustically lively guitar was easy to dial in for everything from clean and funky rhythm work to distorted crunch and lead playing. It’s cool how the Lead/Rhythm circuit — which has an on/off slider switch and a pair of volume and tone thumbwheels for the neck pickup — allows you to preset two distinct sounds while still having full control over your lead tone when the slider is flicked to the down position.

In this mode you can select neck, bridge or both pickups via the three-way toggle and control it with the volume and tone knobs. It’s a hip feature, especially for live performance, as it can lessen knob twiddling when going between clean and overdriven tones.

In all, the Vintera III Mid ’60s Jazzmaster is perhaps the best version that Fender has produced so far. It’s fun to play, it looks fantastic and the electronics enhance flexibility in ways that few vintage-style guitars can match. If there’s room in your garage for one of these retro-modern marvels, don’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

SPECIFICIATIONS

CONTACT fender.com

PRICE $1,349, gig-bag included

NUT Bone, 1.65" wide

NECK Maple bolt-on, Mid-’60s C shape

FINGERBOARD Round-laminated rosewood, 25.5" scale,7.25" radius

FRETS 21 vintage tall

TUNERS Fender vintage style, nickel plated

BODY Alder

BRIDGE Six-saddle vintage-style adjustable. Foating tremolo tailpiece with lock button and push-in arm

PICKUPS Era-correct mid-’60s Jazzmaster single-coils with Vintage White covers

CONTROLS Volume, tone, three-way pickup selector. Lead/Rhythm circuit on/off slide switch, thumbwheels for neck pickup volume and tone

FINISH Available in Candy Apple Red, Sonic Blue and Olympic White

WEIGHT 7.94 lbs (tested)

BUILT Ensenada, Mexico

PRO Excellent tones. Great playability. Innovative electronics and trem-lock function.

CON On the heavy side.

During the 11 years Rush spent on hiatus, Alex Lifeson kept busy. He released two albums with his band Envy of None, appeared on records by artists across the musical spectrum and developed a peculiar habit: disappointing the musicians who hired him.

It sounds like the last thing a guitarist of Lifeson’s stature would want to do. After all, artists don’t call Alex Lifeson because they’re looking for an anonymous session player. They call him because they want the guitarist behind Rush’s most iconic textures, unusual chord voicings and endlessly inventive approach to the instrument.

But that was exactly the expectation he wanted to escape.

Not that Lifeson was ever a stranger to guest appearances. Before Rush stepped away from the stage — seemingly for good — in 2015, he had already lent his talents to outside projects, from a soaring guitar solo on Porcupine Tree’s epic “Anesthetize” to helping fellow Canadians Platinum Blonde with some lead work in 1986.

Still, his approach changed after Rush’s final tour cycle ended. In the years that followed, Lifeson wasn’t interested in simply reminding people why they loved Rush. He wanted to find out what else he could do.

“In the last four years, I’ve been doing these other projects,” he told Sweetwater in 2020, midway through his post-Rush run of collaborations. “What’s challenging and what’s so attractive to me about those projects is, when someone asks me to play on their record, I think they think that they’re going to get Alex Lifeson.”

But as anyone who has followed Rush’s constantly evolving sound knows, Lifeson has never been interested in standing still.

“What I like to do is to completely disappoint them and do something that they would never expect,” he said with a smile. “I like to come out of left field, and that’s really a lot of fun for me.”

One of his first major post-Rush collaborations came on Triumph guitarist Rik Emmett’s solo album RES9. There, Lifeson delivered a pair of more traditional blues-rock solos, showing that he could still step into a familiar language when he wanted to.

After that, however, things became much stranger.

While working with Steven Wilson collaborator Marco Minnemann on Borrego, Lifeson leaned heavily into unusual effects, reversed guitar parts, and experimental textures.

Then came an unexpected collaboration with Orange County stoner-rock veterans Fu Manchu, where he approached the guitar less as a lead instrument and more as a source of atmosphere, rhythm, and noise.

“The track was already quite dense with a riffy guitar presence, and it forced me to think in terms of rhythm, ambiance and edge,” he told Guitar World in 2018.

According to Fu Manchu guitarist Scott Hill, the band ended up with exactly the kind of contribution Lifeson was chasing: “awesome riffs, sci-fi effects, and pick slides.” Across the song’s sprawling 18-minute runtime, Lifeson had room to explore every corner of the sonic landscape.

Elsewhere, in 2019, he appeared alongside Slash, Joe Satriani, and Mick Fleetwood on Don Felder’s American Rock ’N’ Roll. That same year, he contributed mandolin and ambient guitar textures to The Mute Gods’ Atheists and Believers.

His most unconventional guest appearance may have come on Tom Morello’s solo track “I Have Seen the Way,” where he shared guitar duties with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. The song is filled with electronic glitches, heavily processed tones, and jagged, wah-soaked electric guitar sounds — a long way from the image of the classic prog-rock virtuoso many fans still carried in their heads.

That was the entire point.

Lifeson wasn’t searching for projects that allowed him to recreate the past. He wanted opportunities that pushed him outside his comfort zone, where he could experiment without becoming a caricature of himself.

“A lot of stuff now that I’m doing, I’m manipulating guitar sounds so it doesn’t sound like a guitar,” he explained. “Sometimes it sounds like a brass instrument. Sometimes it sounds like a stringed violin, or sometimes it’s just a rhythmic noise. There are so many ways you can process [the job].”

After a career spent being recognized as Alex Lifeson, the guitarist spent the years after Rush exploring what it meant to surprise people who thought they already knew what he sounded like.

Now, with Rush once again part of the conversation and the possibility of new music not entirely dismissed, those years of experimentation may prove valuable. The past decade-plus didn’t just give Lifeson new collaborators — it gave him new tools, new instincts, and perhaps new ways to turn progressive rock back up to 11.

For Beatles fans, the forthcoming expanded edition of Rubber Soul promises a wealth of new discoveries, from revealing session outtakes to the previously unheard John Lennon composition “Little Girl.” But the most important story surrounding the album isn't what listeners will hear in the vault recordings — it's what happened inside Abbey Road Studio Two during the autumn of 1965.

The sessions marked the moment when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr stopped accepting the technical limitations imposed by EMI Studios. Instead, they began demanding that the recording process itself become part of their creative vision—a philosophy that would lead directly to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

By late 1965, the Beatles had become students of sound. Between tours, they were listening obsessively to records coming from America. Motown singles leaped from radio speakers with deep bass and crisp percussion. The Byrds’ jangling Rickenbackers electric guitars shimmered with remarkable brilliance. Compared with these productions, the Beatles felt their own records reflected EMI’s conservative engineering philosophy more than the sound they heard in their heads.

For years, EMI’s procedures had emphasized technical accuracy and consistency. The company’s recording standards had been developed during an era dominated by classical music and traditional pop. Engineers were expected to produce clean, balanced recordings while staying within carefully defined operating practices.

The Beatles had reached the point where those rules were getting in the way. Paul McCartney later recalled the constant tug-of-war between the band and EMI’s engineering staff during the Rubber Soul sessions:

“EMI had very firm rules about that, which we always had to break,” he told Mark Lewisohn in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “It wasn’t a willful arrogance, it was just that we felt we knew better.”

McCartney was particularly unhappy with the muffled sound of his bass guitar on the group’s recordings. He’d been told it was necessary to keep the bass low to prevent needles from jumping out of the groove of the vinyl record. But he noticed the records from America had full, prominent bass and suffered not in the least.

“‘What do you mean we can’t have bass?,’” he recalled asking in one conversation with Abbey Road’s staff. “‘I was down the disco last night and I heard a record with that kind of bass!’”

The engineers would respond by citing company policy.

“‘Well, our rule book says…’”

The Beatles had little patience for rule books.

“‘They’re out of date, come on, let’s move!’”

One of the defining moments came during the recording of “Nowhere Man.” The Beatles wanted the electric guitars to be dazzlingly bright, with far more treble than EMI normally permitted. Norman Smith, the band’s recording engineer since 1962, turned the high-EQ potentiometer all the way up.

It still wasn’t enough.

“‘But that’s all I’ve got,’” McCartney recalled Smith replying. “‘I’ve only got one pot and that’s it!’”

The Beatles’ solution was simple.

“‘Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that,’” McCartney replied. “’And if that’s not enough we’ll go through another lot of faders.

“‘Try it for us. If it sounds crappy, okay, we’ll lose it. But it just might sound good.’”

Often, it did. McCartney believed Smith and his fellow engineers quietly enjoyed breaking the rules alongside the band.

“You’d then find, ‘Oh, it worked!’ and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who’d put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of all those things.”

That spirit of experimentation transformed Rubber Soul into a turning point in the Beatles’ career. The studio became a laboratory, and the band began taking creative control of the recording process itself. No longer was the control room simply documenting performances. Musicians, producer and recording engineers had become collaborators, working together to create sounds that had never before been heard on a pop record.

When Geoff Emerick succeeded Norman Smith as the Beatles’ principal recording engineer in 1966, he inherited a band that no longer viewed the studio as a place with limitations. Working alongside producer George Martin, Emerick embraced the same willingness to challenge EMI convention, helping the Beatles realize increasingly ambitious ideas on Revolver.

Microphones moved closer than the rule book allowed. Tape machines were manipulated in novel ways. Artificial Double Tracking, tape loops, extreme compression, and radically reimagined instrument sounds became part of the group’s expanding sonic vocabulary.

By the time work began on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, experimentation had become the norm rather than the exception. The studio itself was now an instrument—every knob and every tape machine another means of expression.

And it all began during the Rubber Soul sessions, when four musicians decided they would no longer accept limitations.

As listeners explore the newly released outtakes and alternate performances — including the long-awaited unveiling of “Little Girl” — they’ll hear more than songs in progress. They’ll hear a band discovering that the recording studio could be as creative an instrument as a guitar or a piano.

That’s the true legacy of Rubber Soul. It wasn’t simply the bridge between Beatlemania and psychedelia. It was the moment the Beatles stopped recording records and started inventing them.

Guitar stars from multiple generations have paid tribute to Glen Hansard, the Oscar-winning Irish singer-songwriter who died in a motorcycle crash in Dublin on July 29 at the age of 56.

Best known as the frontman of the Frames and for his starring role in the acclaimed 2007 musical drama Once, Hansard built a career that took him from busking on the streets of Dublin to international recognition. The film, which he co-created with Markéta Irglová, earned an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly,” the duet the pair wrote and performed for the movie’s soundtrack.

The Irish Independent reports that Hansard was involved in a single-vehicle crash in the early hours of Wednesday, July 29, in Dublin.

Ed Sheeran was among the first to pay tribute to a musician whose career he had closely followed.

“Heartbroken to hear the news about Glen,” a post on his Instagram Story reads. “He was such an incredible human—an incredible force. I am grateful for the times we spent together. Sending so much love to his family.”

Like Sheeran, Hansard began his career busking before finding success with his band the Frames. He later gained wider attention with his acting debut in the 1991 comedy-drama The Commitments and went on to become one of Ireland’s most respected singer-songwriters.

His career included collaborations with artists such as Eddie Vedder, an appearance on The Simpsons as an Irish busker in “In the Name of the Grandfather” (season 20), and performances alongside some of the biggest names in music. But beyond his accomplishments, it was Hansard’s warmth and generosity that left the deepest impression on those who knew him.

Writing on X following news of his death, Bono reflected on the unique presence Hansard brought to the world.

“Sometimes I would wonder if Glen Hansard really existed,” he said. “He was such an angelic presence… not otherworldly… in fact, very present this presence… A smiling rascal if you needed him to be… this most musical and mischievous archangel of Ballymun [Ireland]. No airs, plenty of graces.”

Bruce Springsteen, who shared a stage with Hansard in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 2013, also remembered his friend’s spirit.

“Here on E Street, we are heartbroken over the death of Glen Hansard,” he wrote. “We met in Ireland many years ago, and he was always nothing but a great musician, a good friend and a generous and gracious man. Always positive, smiling and ready to sing. God bless him and his loved ones.”

For guitar fans, Hansard was inseparable from one particular instrument: his Takamine NP-15 acoustic guitar, affectionately nicknamed “The Horse.”

Purchased from a Dublin music store in 1990, the guitar became his constant companion, eventually developing a large wear mark in its cedar top from years of playing.

“As rhe Horse worked harder and harder, its working-class cred began to show, as a hole started to develop in the cedar top where Glen’s fingernails and pick fell naturally on the thin finish,” a post on the Takamine website reads. “By that time Glen had developed a bond with the guitar, so rather than put it out to pasture, he just kept playing it. Today, it’s one of the most recognizable and iconic instruments in guitardom.”

Hansard began busking at just 13 years old and later credited the guitar with changing the course of his life.

“I got all my education on the street,” he told RTÉ Radio.

“My uncle’s guitar was left in my house, and I learned how to play it, and that saved me,” he said. “I was on a kind of a trajectory, getting into the drugs, just getting into that slightly dodgy spot. My girlfriend at the time gave me a Bob Dylan cassette when I was about 12 and a half, as I was heading down a rough road. I listened to Bob Dylan, and my whole world flipped.”

“I stayed in the bedroom,” he added. “I played Bob Dylan songs every day. I learned my craft. I decided music was all I cared about. My uncle was a musician. I wanted to be like him, but I also set sail towards whatever Bob Dylan was doing.”

Hansard spent the rest of his life chasing that dream, turning a love of songs, guitars and street performance into a career that inspired generations of musicians.

Even after six decades of Beatlemania, the Beatles are still capable of springing genuine surprises.

The forthcoming Rubber Soul Special Edition, which comes out October 2, will include a previously unheard John Lennon song. A home demo of “Little Girl” was discovered on a tape reel from Lennon’s archive, and so little was known about it that there hadn’t even been whispers of its existence.

Rolling Stone has had a sneak preview of the track and describes it as “a fragile, gorgeous, bittersweet little tune.” It features nothing but Lennon’s voice and acoustic guitar. The song appears to be a tender love song, putting it a world away from another Lennon composition written during the Rubber Soul sessions that contains the phrase “Little Girl” — the dark and disturbing “Run for Your Life.”

The project’s producer, Giles Martin, says the song’s sudden emergence is “surprising.”

“It came from the Lennon Estate — I think it was Sean,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was one of those things where they say, ‘Oh, and then there’s this.’

“Like with all that stuff, I wasn’t sure whether people knew about it or not, or whether it was on YouTube,” he adds. “Quite often I’ll find something and go, ‘This is amazing.’ Then someone goes, ‘Yeah, it’s on YouTube. Everybody knows about that.’ I’m always the last person to know.”

In this instance, it really is a diamond in the rough. Discovered on a Lennon tape reel, Martin ultimately spliced together two sections to complete the 2:17 recording.

Martin says discoveries like this satisfy fans’ enduring appetite for unheard Beatles music.

“Apart from ‘It’s another song that would have made the album,’ there’s an insatiable desire for something more,” he says. “But I think it’s good to see all of the pencil drawings before you see the picture.”

The exact origins of the song are still unknown, but Martin and his team have deduced that it can be no older than the summer of 1965, given that it includes a tweaked Paul McCartney hook later heard on the Help! track “I’ve Just Seen a Face.”

Yet the song’s emergence from obscurity shouldn’t be wholly surprising, given the mad-dash nature of Rubber Soul’s creation. Much of the album was written in London following the band’s U.S. tour in August 1965, with their marijuana-fueled encounters with Bob Dylan still fresh in their minds.

Their manager, Brian Epstein, and producer, George Martin, had agreed that another album in time for Christmas was good for business, despite Help! having been released only weeks earlier. The band scrambled to write new material, with many songs arriving at Abbey Road unfinished. Given those frantic circumstances, the idea that one composition slipped through the cracks — despite Beatlemania and the exhaustive documentation of the group’s career — doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

Some songs have already been rescued from those sessions, with the bluesy instrumental “12-Bar Original” eventually finding its way onto Anthology 2.

Rolling Stone reports that many of the demo’s lyrics are placeholders; there’s a lot of “I love you” and “la la la,” as though Lennon is feeling his way through the song in real time. Speculation about the inspiration for the mysterious little girl ranges from a postcard sent by a Japanese fan to a nod to Brian Wilson’s “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”

The unanswered questions only add to the track’s mystique, reinforcing the remarkable fact that, more than half a century after Beatlemania and the Beatles’ breakup, the band’s story can still produce genuine surprises.

“Little Girl” isn’t the first Lennon demo to surface decades after it was recorded, and, judging by this latest discovery, it may not be the last.

Brian May and Freddie Mercury created some of Queen’s most enduring anthems, with the guitarist’s melodic precision providing the perfect counterbalance to Mercury’s theatrical brilliance. But when asked to name the most beautiful song his late bandmate ever wrote, May doesn’t point to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Somebody to Love” or any of Queen’s other towering classics.

Instead, he chooses a far less obvious track: “It’s a Hard Life.”

Released in 1984 as the third single from Queen’s 11th studio album, The Works, the song became the band’s third consecutive U.K. top 10 hit, peaking at number six. In the U.S., however, it stalled at number 72 — a modest showing compared with many of Queen’s biggest successes.

Despite that, it remains a song that holds deep personal meaning for May. Writing in the liner notes for Queen’s Greatest Video Hits 2 compilation in 2003, the guitarist described Mercury’s composition as one of the most revealing pieces his bandmate ever created.

“To my mind, it’s one of the most beautiful songs that Freddie ever wrote,” May said. “It’s straight from the heart, and he really opened up during the creation of it.”

The song arrived during a period when Queen were still capable of producing massive hits, including “Radio Ga Ga,” “I Want to Break Free,” and “Hammer to Fall.” Yet beneath its grand arrangement — Mercury’s soaring falsetto, ornate piano work, and May’s carefully placed electric guitar lines — “It’s a Hard Life” was ultimately a deeply personal song about relationships and emotional struggle.

For May, the most memorable part was watching Mercury reveal that side of himself during the writing process.

“I sat with him for hours and hours pouring over every word and trying to get the most out of it,” he recalled. “It’s a very revealing thing about how relationships are, and he was talking about his relationship.”

The song’s famously extravagant music video, filmed in Munich, Germany, might suggest otherwise. Mercury appears in the outfit Queen jokingly called “The Giant Mediterranean Prawn,” while May wields a skull-shaped guitar that was merely a prop. The video’s lavish setting and theatrical excess seemed at odds with the song’s emotional weight — and that was partly the point.

“To me it’s one of his loveliest songs, and on the face of it, I think I was mortified that he wanted to make this kind of video because it’s totally distracting,” May said. “This is a Freddie indulgence, and we indulged him. With pleasure I have to say.”

That willingness to indulge each other was a key part of Queen’s creative chemistry — although May has also revealed there were moments when he had to fight to get his own ideas heard, including when he pushed to include a guitar solo on one of the band’s biggest hits.

For all that's made of Stevie Nicks’ songwriting partnership with former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, her friendship with Tom Petty was arguably as big an influence on her career, certainly the solo half of it.

“In 1976, I’d been in Fleetwood Mac for about a year when I heard Tom Petty’s debut,” Nicks wrote about the guitarist in a 2004 tribute for Rolling Stone. “I became a fan right then.

“I loved the way Tom’s Florida swamp-dog voice sounded in cahoots with Mike Campbell's guitar and Benmont Tench's keyboards. Tom had the same influences we had — the Byrds, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash — but he dropped in lots of serious old blues. I became such a fan that if I hadn’t been in a band myself, I would have joined that one.”

Nicks didn’t hide her enthusiasm from Petty. The guitarist said that when he and Nicks met in 1978, he felt overwhelmed.

“She was this absolutely stoned-gone huge fan,” he told American Songwriter. “And it was her mission in life that I should write her a song.”

Nicks didn’t have to wait long for that to happen. In 1980, she prepared to record her debut solo album, Bella Donna. The producer chosen was Jimmy Iovine, the man behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 1979 breakthrough, Damn the Torpedos. Iovine was at work on Hard Promises, the group’s 1981 followup, when he took on Nicks’ album.

The overlap between those productions meant Petty got a chance to hear Nicks’ album in progress. There was one thing both he and Iovine agreed on — they couldn’t hear a hit single on it. (Perhaps “Edge of Seventeen” hadn’t been recorded yet?)

“Both Tom and Jimmy said to me, in a brutally honest way, ‘You don’t have a single on this record,” Nicks recalled. “Tom is a great and loyal friend, but he’s also honest like that.”

Iovine asked Petty to write a song for Nicks. What he came up with was “Insider,” a song he wrote in a style he thought suited her.

"When I wrote that song, I wrote it very quickly — I mean maybe in 10, 15 minutes," he told Melody Maker in 1981. "I just wrote it all down on paper and then I just picked up the guitar and tried to sing each line out. It took me maybe an hour to do that."

Petty said Iovine was thrilled with the song.

“I remember bringing it to him, and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’” The praise stung Petty. He had begun to wonder if he was making a mistake giving the tune away. “I was really attached to it,” he recalled

By the time Nicks was recording it, Petty was glum about the whole endeavor. He recalled being in the studio as she was cutting her harmony vocals and how she could read the concern on his face.

“She walked back in and said, ‘How was it?’ I said, ‘It’s amazing,’” Petty told Musician in 1981. “She said, ‘I can tell by the look on your face, you don’t wanna give me this song. I’m giving it back to you right now.’ I really thought a lot of her for that.”

Feeling guilty, Petty offered Nicks a replacement he and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell had just written: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” As Campbell recalled, he began writing the tune off a chord progression inspired by the drum intro to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

“I just put different chords to that feel, and gave it to Tom and he wrote these great words,” the guitarist explained in a video, where he demonstrated the song using his Fender Broadcaster, the same electric guitar he played on the song’s original recording.

“And we were working with Jimmy Iovine at the time, and he thought the song would work better as a duet, and he was actually right. So Stevie Nicks ended up singing along with Tom on this song.”

Petty said Nicks was thrilled with the new track.

“She says, ‘Wow! That’s why I wanted you to write me a song — it’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s what you do,’” he told Musician. “‘Insider' sounds like what I do.'

“And I thought, How dumb of me to think that she'd want me to write like her."

Sung as a duet by Nicks and Petty, with backing support from the Heartbreakers, “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” became the debut single from Bella Donna. The song rose quickly in the chart to peak at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming both Nicks’ and the Heartbreakers’ biggest hit on that ledger.

Not everyone thought Petty made the right decision by giving it away. “Insider” appeared on Hard Promises, with backing vocals from Nicks and her sister, Lori. But while Petty thought highly of the tune, it failed to grab listeners or critics, one of whom singled out drummer Stan Lynch’s “cymbal-pinged weirdness” on the recording. The drummer wasn’t thrilled.

“As a trade-out for 'Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,' I didn’t think it was a good bargain at all,” Lynch said. “I remember [the discussion], ‘Well, we got “Insider,"' and I’m going, ‘Bad trade!’”

Nicks’ and Petty’s friendship endured for the remainder of his life. And, like a good friend, he was able to give her tough love when she needed it. After a stint in rehab in the early 1990s, she was insecure about relaunching her career and asked for his help writing songs.

“I didn't really expect the reaction I got, which was, ‘No, I won't,’” she wrote in Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘You are one of the premier songwriters in this business. Just write some great songs — that's what you do.’”

When they finally toured together in 2006, Petty gave her a platinum sheriff's badge inlaid with 24-karat gold and diamonds that read, To Our Honorary Heartbreaker. “It's probably the most beautiful piece of jewelry a man has ever given me, ever,” Nicks said.

Petty's sudden death from an accidental drug overdose on October 2, 2017, devastated her. “The loss of Tom Petty has just about broken my heart,” she said when she accepted the 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year Award; Petty won it the year before. “He was a great father and he was a great friend, and he was one of my best friends. My heart will never get over this.”

The Beatles drew inspiration from all over the musical map — Motown, acoustic folk, rockabilly and beyond. But one of the darkest lines ever sung by the band can be traced directly to a 1950s rock and roll record by Elvis Presley.

John Lennon turned the lyric into “Run for Your Life,” the closing track on Rubber Soul — a song he would later call his least favorite Beatles recording.

The track is about to return to the spotlight as the Beatles prepare to release a Super Deluxe edition of Rubber Soul on October 2, expanding the landmark 1965 album with new stereo mixes by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, unreleased session recordings and demos, and the original mono version.

The lyric appears in Presley’s 1955 Sun Records single “Baby, Let’s Play House,” written by Arthur Gunter. Early in the song, Presley delivers a line that’s as blunt as it is unsettling: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”

The phrase stuck with Lennon. Nearly a decade later, he borrowed it almost verbatim for the opening line of “Run for Your Life” before building the rest of the song around the same jealous premise, warning its subject that if he ever caught her with another man, “that’s the end.”

Years later, Lennon admitted the song wasn’t something he thought much about at the time.

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from Elvis.”

The track ultimately became the closer on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ sixth studio album and one often regarded as the point where the band fully embraced the LP as an artistic statement rather than simply a collection of songs.

It was also the first Beatles album to hint at the psychedelic era through increasingly adventurous studio experimentation. George Harrison famously introduced the sitar to the band’s sound on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” while Paul McCartney used a fuzz bass tone on Harrison’s “Think for Yourself,” reflecting the group's growing willingness to expand its sonic palette.

“Run for Your Life,” however, had simpler origins than many of the album’s other songs. Lennon later described it as a quick composition built around the Presley lyric that had caught his ear years earlier.

“I wrote it around that,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was that important.”

In hindsight, the song also reflected something about Lennon’s state of mind at the time. As McCartney later noted in his memoir Many Years From Now, Lennon’s lyrics often revealed a possessiveness that contrasted with McCartney’s own outlook on relationships.

“John was always on the run, running for his life,” McCartney wrote. “He was married; whereas none of my songs would have ‘catch you with another man.’ … I wasn’t as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song.”

Even if Lennon dismissed the track as a throwaway, there was little chance of replacing it. With the holiday season approaching, the Beatles were racing to finish Rubber Soul in time for its December 1965 release.

The album’s final recording session — which began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and stretched into the early hours of the next morning — saw the band record McCartney’s “You Won’t See Me” and Lennon’s “Girl,” while also adding overdubs to “Wait.” With the deadline looming, there simply wasn’t time to write and record another song. “Run for Your Life” remained in place as the album’s closing number.

And while Lennon would later call it his “least favorite Beatles song” and say he “always hated” it, at least one of his bandmates felt differently.

“It was sort of a throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of,” Lennon later said. “But it was always a favorite of George’s.”

The Beatles are set to revisit Rubber Soul, their transformative 1965 album that blended folk, baroque pop, soul, and early psychedelic experimentation — a record that captured a year when popular music was rapidly expanding in every direction. Bob Dylan was one of the artists helping push those boundaries.

Dylan’s influence could be heard in the Beatles’ increasingly introspective songwriting, particularly on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Girl,” as the band moved beyond the youthful optimism of their early years. But while the Beatles were absorbing elements of Dylan’s folk-driven approach, Dylan himself was undergoing a revolution of his own.

In 1965, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, an electrified masterpiece that pushed beyond the conventions of traditional folk and embraced the power of a full rock band. Months later, when he brought that sound to the stage — with Robbie Robertson along playing a Fender Telecaster — and the world was stunned. He was even branded “Judas” during a show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, U.K., in May 1966.many fans felt betrayed — but George Harrison, himself a songwriter constantly looking toward the future, saw the change as a natural progression.

The Beatles’ sixth album will arrive October 2 as an expansive new box set featuring a new stereo mix by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, alongside previously unheard session recordings and home demos. The collection offers fans an unprecedented glimpse into the making of a record that marked a major turning point for the band.

The shift represented by Rubber Soul had roots in the Beatles’ famous 1964 meeting with Dylan, an encounter Paul McCartney later described as a life-changing experience. Dylan introduced the band to marijuana that night, and McCartney later joked that he had discovered “the meaning of life.” The meeting helped reinforce the creative connection between two artists who were both beginning to move beyond the limits placed on them by their audiences.

For the Beatles, that meant songs that explored new emotional territory, from Lennon’s enigmatic “Norwegian Wood” and the aching “Girl” to McCartney’s elegant “Michelle” and the dark, unsettling “Run For Your Life.” The group was leaving behind the straightforward charm of its early singles and embracing something more complex.

Dylan’s own transformation was even more dramatic. When he performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, some members of the folk community reacted with outrage. By the time he toured the U.K. the following year, the backlash had intensified, culminating in the infamous moment when an audience member shouted “Judas” at his concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in May 1966.

But when Harrison saw Dylan perform his electric set at London’s Royal Albert Hall, he couldn’t understand the controversy.

“The set was in two halves, and in the first half, he came out and did his usual thing with the guitar and the harmonica,” Harrison recalled. “Then in the second half he came out with the band.”

The Beatles guitarist understood why some fans were unsettled. Many had embraced Dylan as a symbol of the folk revival and saw the electric performances as a rejection of that identity.

“A lot of them were really uptight. They were like, ‘Hey, he’s forsaken the folk,’” Harrison said. “But Bob just came out and said, ‘Well, you know, you all may know this song. Remember how it goes? Well, here’s how it goes now!’ and they just went off wailing.”

Harrison, however, saw the performance differently.

“It was a great show. I mean, it was ragged, but that is the nature of Bob: raggedy,” he said. “And all through that second half, people were getting up and walking out, and shouting, and it was controversial.”

More than 60 years later, Dylan’s decision to embrace electric guitars and instrumentation seems less like a betrayal and more like a defining moment in rock history. Musician and author Dr. CP Lee has described the “Judas” incident as one of “the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century,” capturing the divide between tradition and experimentation that defined the era.

Dylan, for his part, appeared unfazed. As recalled in the book Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, he responded to criticism of his Newport performance by telling one journalist, “They must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn’t afford it if I was in their shoes.”

And Harrison agreed with Dylan’s instinct to keep moving forward.

“It was interesting. It seemed natural,” Harrison said. “There’s a limit to what you can do just with acoustics; it didn’t seem that Bob should particularly be limited to just doing that. It seemed kind of a natural progression.”

Tony Iommi has announced his first solo album in years, From the Dark, and given fans an early taste with the release of its lead single, “World Alone.”

The album, due October 23 via BMG, arrives little more than a year after Black Sabbath’s farewell Back to the Beginning concert in Birmingham, England, and marks a new chapter for the pioneering heavy metal guitarist.

“World Alone,” which premiered today during a special streaming event in Iommi’s hometown near Birmingham’s Black Sabbath Bridge, pairs the guitarist with acclaimed Norwegian vocalist Jorn Lande. Driven by Iommi’s trademark downtuned riffs and soaring lead guitar work, the song is accompanied by a dystopian-themed video in which a character known as “The Believer” must survive a twisted video game to find salvation.

Lande sings on all eight tracks on From the Dark and shares songwriting credits with Iommi throughout the album. The lineup is completed by bass guitarist Becky Baldwin and drummer Karl Brazil, while Iommi co-produced the record with longtime collaborator Mike Exeter.

“It’s an album we’ve really enjoyed making,” Iommi said. “We’re not trying to prove anything — it’s a great album, it rocks!”

According to the track list, From the Dark opens with “Over the Violent Sun” before moving through songs including “Black Times,” “World Alone,” “Beyond the Dead,” “Stormwatcher,” “Death Wake,” “Return of the Arbalist” and the closing epic, “Legacy.” Lande’s lyrics explore dystopian themes, mortality and resilience, while Iommi’s guitar work remains rooted in the crushing, riff-driven style that helped define heavy metal.

A limited-edition seven-inch vinyl single of “World Alone,” backed with an instrumental version, will be released September 4. The song will also be featured on Gibson’s Learn to Play Guitar app.

From the Dark will be available in multiple vinyl and CD editions, including deluxe versions featuring expanded packaging and bonus tracks.

Iommi’s return comes after an eventful few years. In 2023, he collaborated with the Birmingham Royal Ballet on Black Sabbath – The Ballet, while 2025 saw the original Black Sabbath lineup reunite for the landmark Back to the Beginning farewell concert in Birmingham — Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance before his death just weeks later.

Widely regarded as one of the architects of heavy metal, Iommi helped forge Black Sabbath's groundbreaking sound after adapting his electric-guitar playing style following the industrial accident that cost him the tips of two fingers early in his career. Across six decades, he has earned Grammy Awards, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and numerous honors in the U.K., including being appointed an MBE earlier this year.

With From the Dark, Iommi returns to center stage with his first collection of new solo material since 2005’s Fused, proving that the creative spark behind some of heavy metal’s most influential riffs continues to burn.

Derek Trucks stands among the most commanding slide guitar players of his generation, known for a style that’s deeply soulful, technically fluid and unmistakably vocal in character.

His foundation was laid early. Before he reached his teens, he was already sharing stages with Buddy Guy and Bob Dylan. By 20, he had joined the Allman Brothers Band, and later co-founded the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife, Susan Tedeschi.

Asked how he developed such mastery, Trucks points to several core influences.

“I think it’s important to listen to vocalists and have that in mind,” he tells Ultimate Guitar. “It’s all ear training, it’s all intonation.”

His earliest inspirations were slide guitar pioneers Elmore James and Duane Allman. From them, he absorbed the fundamentals of lyrical phrasing — a quality that also defines electric guitarists like David Gilmour.

But the breakthrough came when he turned to Indian classical music.

“Then it was listening to a lot of Indian classical,” he says of his progression. “The sarod is a fretless instrument. That was a great way into the vocalization.”

The sarod’s fluid, gliding phrasing offered Trucks an expressive vocabulary, one that helped distinguish his guitar style from the slide legends before him.

No figure influenced him more than sarod master Ali Akbar Khan. Trucks first heard Khan at age 14 and called it “a life-changing event.”

“The power of the sound, the dedication and devotion of the musicians — it was so obvious,” Trucks said of Khan's impact upon the musician’s death in 2009. “It re-emphasized the belief in what you love about music.

“When I heard the news [of Khan’s death], it was like losing Ray Charles, or John Coltrane, or Charlie Parker, you know? There probably couldn’t be two to three musicians like him in the world.”

In a related story, Trucks — along with former Allman Brothers bandmate Warren Haynes — has credited an obscure 1997 album as another game changer for his playing.

As most Beatles fans know, John Lennon quit the group first, on September 20, 1969, bringing the Fab Four to what most would agree was an untimely end.

What many don’t know is that just two weeks before he announced his departure, Lennon proposed that the group record another album as well as release a new single in time for the holidays.

The evidence comes from a tape recording made on September 8, 1969, at Apple Corps headquarters in London, of a meeting between Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The recording exists because drummer Ringo Starr was unable to attend. He’d been taken to the hospital with intestinal complaints — Starr had a history of abdominal ailments and food allergies — and the recording was made for his benefit.

“Ringo,” Lennon explains on the tape, “you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”

But as the tape shows, Lennon wasn’t merely thinking about one more Beatles album and single — he was planning a future strategy for the group.

The key evidence is his plan for how he, McCartney and Harrison — the group’s main songwriters — would share space on future albums. He planned that each of them should be allowed four songs per album, with another two reserved for Starr, if he wished.

“When we get into the studio, I don't care how we do it, but I don't want to think about equal time,” he said. “I just want it known I'm allowed to put four songs on the album, whatever happens. I don't have to say, ‘Should we do it now?’ because I think we'll all get fed up in three weeks, or actually the album will be full because we did two of Paul’s last week or one of Ringo's or one of George’s, whatever, and, well, it's too late now. Next album.”

Lennon was also eager to abandon what he called “the Lennon and McCartney myth” about their songwriting partnership. While the two men had occasionally written together in the past — going back to their earliest days as teens struggling to play acoustic guitars — they mostly composed alone. Despite this, each of their songs was credited to Lennon-McCartney, regardless of who wrote it. Lennon suggested that, moving forward, only the sole writer should get credit.

One might think McCartney would have been thrilled by the suggestion to record a new album. He’d been despondent over Lennon’s lack of interest in the group and had corralled the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, back into the studio to record Abbey Road earlier that summer.

But he said very little in the meeting, aside from rejecting Lennon’s suggestions for a more equitable division of songs and a more accurate assigning of songwriting credits.

Lennon’s suggestion to give Harrison a larger share of each album’s real estate was in recognition of the younger guitarist’s growth as a songwriter. Over the previous year, Harrison had contributed “Old Brown Shoe,” “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” to the group’s catalog, each song as good as anything Lennon or McCartney created.

The Beatles felt strongly enough about “Old Brown Shoe” that they made it the B-side of their single “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” released the previous May 30. As for “Something,” it would become Harrison’s first, and only, Beatles A-side (albeit a double A-side) when it was released with “Come Together” on October 6, 1969.

The fact that Harrison could score placement on two singles within a matter of months, while McCartney was left out in the cold, was proof that he had become a stronger songwriter and that, moreover, his bandmates and producer had taken note.

“We always carved the singles up between us,” Lennon said to McCartney. “We have the singles market, [George and Ringo] don’t get anything! I mean, we’ve never offered George B-sides; we could have given him a lot of B-sides, but because we were two people, you had the A-side and I had the B-side.”

It’s also possible that Lennon was thinking about Harrison’s abrupt decision to quit the group the previous January 10 during a dustup with McCartney while making Let It Be. Following Harrison’s departure, Lennon and McCartney had a conversation, recorded without their knowledge at Twickenham Film Studios, about what Lennon referred to as the "festering wound" of Harrison’s discontent after years of having his songs ignored. As Lennon saw it, Harrison’s resignation wasn’t a sudden decision but the inevitable culmination of years of feeling marginalized.

To ensure only the strongest songs made Beatles albums, Lennon suggested they give away tunes that would be better suited to other performers. All three had already been doing this to some extent: Lennon had released “Give Peace a Chance” with his and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band project; McCartney had given his songs “Goodbye” and “Come and Get It” to Apple Records artists Mary Hopkins and Badfinger, respectively; and Harrison had passed his White Album reject “Sour Milk Sea” over to Apple signee Jackie Lomax.

In making his argument, Lennon specifically mentioned McCartney’s “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a pair of old-timey singalong tunes Lennon was known to have reviled.

"Wouldn’t it be better — because we didn’t really dig ‘em, you know? — for you to do songs that you dug and for ‘Ob-La-Di’ and ‘Maxwell’ to be given to people who like music like that. Like Mary [Hopkins] or whoever it is that needs a song. Why don’t you give that to them?

"The only time we need something vaguely of that quality is for a single, and for an album we can just do only stuff that we really dug. It’s a drag to put that song on an album that nobody dug, including the guy who wrote it, just because it was going to be popular. ‘Cause the LP doesn’t have to be popular in that way.”

In fairness, McCartney never said he didn’t like either song, but Lennon’s point was clear: The Beatles should choose the material most representative of them as a collective, rather than serve as each other’s backing band, a practice that had begun with the White Album and continued during the making of Abbey Road, in particular with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and McCartney’s side-two medley.

Sadly, rather than discuss the merits of Lennon’s suggestions, the three Beatles descended into a debate about Harrison’s songwriting — McCartney said his tunes had only improved that year, while Harrison argued that they’d been written even earlier — and whether or not Lennon had participated enough in recording Harrison’s songs.

“Most of my tunes, I never had the Beatles backing me,” Harrison falsely complained.

“Oh, c’mon, George! We put a lot of work in your songs, even down to ‘Don’t Bother Me,’” Lennon responded, referring to Harrison’s first song, which appeared on 1963’s With the Beatles. “We spent a lot of time doing all that, and we grooved. I can remember the riff you were playing, and in the last two years there was a period where you went Indian and we weren’t needed!”

“That was only one tune,” Harrison said. “On the last album [the White Album] I don’t think you appeared on any of my songs. I don’t mind.”

“Well, you had Eric, or somebody like that,” Lennon replied defensively, referring to Eric Clapton’s electric guitar contributions on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” recorded with Harrison’s “Lucy” 1957 Gibson Les Paul.

It’s remarkable that neither Harrison nor McCartney seemed to grasp that Lennon was, for the first time in at least a year, showing his commitment to the group’s future.

It was a missed opportunity. Soon after the meeting, Lennon and Ono departed for a September 13 performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival with an ad hoc Plastic Ono Band lineup featuring Clapton, bass guitarist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White.

By the time they returned, Lennon wanted out. On September 20, 1969, he told his bandmates he was quitting. The Beatles’ last chance to stay together had passed.