In Rainbow’s eight-album catalog, “Stargazer” stands as the band’s masterpiece — an eight-and-a-half-minute epic from 1976’s Rising. Ritchie Blackmore certainly thinks so. When Guitar Player asked him earlier this year to name Rainbow’s defining songs, he singled it out alongside “Man on the Silver Mountain” and “Long Live Rock and Roll.”

But Blackmore remembers “Stargazer” as much for what didn’t make it into the final mix. The guitarist says two musicians who helped shape the song ultimately saw their finest contributions disappear from the finished recording — one because it was deemed too elaborate, the other simply because the tape ran out.

Rainbow cut Rising at Munich’s Musicland Studios shortly after Led Zeppelin completed Presence there. As the group settled into the sessions, an engineer played the band “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” from Zeppelin’s then-unreleased album. Blackmore says he recognized the challenge posed by Jimmy Page’s stunning electric guitar work and Robert Plant’s vocal performance. It immediately raised the stakes for Rainbow.

“It was a threat for us, as that song was overwhelmingly good,” he exclaims. “It was hard to follow that. I really thought it was incredible. It was a brilliant riff by Pagey. A very weird riff. Of course Planty sang brilliantly, and I thought, ‘We have to follow this?! We better write something that good.’”

Blackmore believes Rainbow answered the challenge with “Stargazer,” the fantasy epic he and Ronnie James Dio wrote together during rehearsals. The song tells the story of a wizard who enslaves thousands to build a towering stone monument from which he hopes to fly to the stars.

“Ronnie and I wrote that together; I came up with the riff at home and the progressions. Ronnie sang it brilliantly, within a couple of takes,” Blackmore says.

Dio also contributed one of the song’s defining musical moments. “He came up with going up to the key of B riff — that little part there,” Blackmore says, referring to the refrain “Where is your star?”

“It was so nice to have someone else do some of the writing. I was overjoyed. I was so used to doing it all myself for so long.”

Clocking in at nearly eight and a half minutes, “Stargazer” builds to one of Blackmore’s most blistering solos before riding out over a hypnotic vamp backed by an orchestra. To create the dramatic finale, Rainbow hired 28 members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of conductor Rainer Pietsch. Blackmore’s instructions were simple.

“I said, ‘Look, there’s a song we have written, basically two chords, A minor and G, and I want you to improvise and play this particular riff.’ I showed him the riff. I said, ‘If you would like to, do some ad libbing yourself, as we will be ending the song with a long, two-minute fade out.’”

Pietsch spent the weekend preparing his arrangement. But when Blackmore and Dio heard the results, they felt the orchestra overwhelmed the song rather than strengthened it.

“Ronnie and I thought it was too busy. We wanted to hit home the main riff of the song. And the conductor was so pleased with what he had written, but it was too much. It didn’t work.

“So we brought him into the control room. Ronnie said, ‘You tell him it’s too busy.’ I said, ‘No, you tell him.’ We were both apprehensive to break the news.

“In the end Ronnie told him it was too busy. So we asked him to rewrite it again, with the main riff being prominent, not flowery and busy. He played it again, but it was still too flowery.

“So we had to talk with him again, saying that the main riff — the simple riff — had to be with power, directness and simplicity. Rainer was so demoralized at this point that all we left in was the 28-piece orchestra playing the riff, which is what you hear now.”

Pietsch wasn’t the only musician to leave the session disappointed. Blackmore had also hired what he describes as “a brilliant gypsy violinist” to improvise over the song’s extended fade. The performance was everything he’d hoped for — until the tape machine reached the end of the reel.

“As the song was fading out, the violinist was playing his heart out, and it sounded fantastic,” Blackmore recalls. “Unfortunately the reel came to an end. And we wanted so badly to have him playing this gypsy part at the end.

“The man came into the control room to hear his playing, which was brilliant, and we had to embarrassingly say to him that everything he had just played wasn’t recorded because the stupid tape ran out. He was not amused.”

Pete Townshend has enormous respect for Angus Young. He also believes the AC/DC guitarist is living proof of what can happen when a musician spends too much time on the road.

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2000, the Who guitarist argued that many rock musicians stop evolving because they're constantly touring instead of developing new ideas in the studio.

“I think a lot of great musicians become frozen in time because of their obsession with the road,” Townshend said. “I mean, look at AC/DC. They've never stopped touring and Angus is still wearing those stupid shorts. He still plays brilliantly—and he's one of my favorite guitar players—but the band is definitely stuck in a rut.”

It was a surprising jab at one of rock's most enduring guitar heroes — and, in fact, AC/DC are currently out on their massive Power Up tour, which returns to the U.S. on July 11.

But for Townshend it illustrated a larger point. Long before home studios became commonplace, he'd built one of his own and made it the center of his creative life.

“I was the first person,” Townshend told Guitar Player. “The only people I know who had home studios before I did — apart from electronic music composers — were Les Paul, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Barry Gray, who did music for English cartoons.”

Having his own studio gave Townshend a place to experiment with sounds and develop songs long before he brought them to the Who. Working alone, he built remarkably complete demos that served as blueprints for ambitious projects including Tommy, the abandoned Lifehouse project and Quadrophenia, allowing the band to hear exactly what he envisioned before they entered the studio.

Many of those recordings were eventually released on the Scoop albums, Lifehouse Chronicles and expanded editions of classic Who releases, including Who's Next/Lifehouse and My Generation.

Despite his reputation as one of Britain's most influential guitarists, Townshend said recording — not playing guitar — had always been his true passion. In addition to his fluency on electric and acoustic guitar, he’s also a capable drummer, bass guitarist and keyboardist when it comes to turning his ideas into fully formed demos.

“Recording has always been a passion of mine, and it still is,” he said. “I find it hard to talk about guitars and amplifiers because playing guitar is just something that I do—it's not a passion. The guitar just happened to be what I fell into, and the guitar has become an icon that has grown out of all perspective. The way that I used the guitar in the early days was incredibly irreverent. To some extent, I continue to be irreverent about it.

“My passion and enthusiasm has often been contained in my home studio — partly because it's private, and it's where I've found a way of expressing my complete musicianship. For me, the creative idea is about a neighborhood. The creative spirit needs roots — you have to be fairly well grounded before you can set it free. My studio provides me with a place to create and to be creative.”

Townshend believed the place where music is made becomes part of the music itself, pointing to early rock pioneers like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, who rehearsed and recorded in garages.

“I’m a great believer in the concept that the creative process is often about where the music comes from,” he said. “People like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly rehearsed their routines and made recordings in their garages — Cochran used to engineer his own records!

“So you can't remove the garage from the sound of their early work. You'd never find a painter, for example, who would say they didn't need a place to work, but a lot of musicians undervalue the importance of the studio space. They'll say, ‘Here's my guitar and my bottle of water, so now I can go anywhere.’ Crap! You can't really do that.”

Townshend's own fascination with home recording began in the early 1960s after meeting Barry Gray, whose electronic soundtracks for British television introduced him to the creative possibilities of recording outside a commercial studio.

“He was doing those cartoon soundtracks electronically with simple organs,” Townshend recalled. “Pete Wilson, the guitar player in my very first band, had his father arrange for us to record our first demo in Gray's studio. We recorded one of my first songs, ‘It Was You,’ which was also the first song I ever published. This was around 1963 or ’64.”

Townshend soon began experimenting with a pair of film-location tape recorders, bouncing tracks between the two machines to create sound-on-sound recordings before upgrading to a Revox recorder with Dolby noise reduction and, later, a 3M eight-track machine.

By 2000, Townshend had embraced Pro Tools, but his old analog studio remained his creative refuge. It was the kind of space he believed every musician needed—a place to experiment, evolve and avoid becoming, in his words, "frozen in time."

“If I want to make a great-sounding demo,” he said, “I'll go back to my classic analog equipment.”

Robin Trower's performance at Stockholm Concert Hall on February 3, 1975, has become one of the most celebrated live recordings of the decade. Released the following year as Robin Trower Live!, it captured the electric guitarist's power trio at the height of its powers.

But the album almost never happened.

"We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night," Trower tells Premier Guitar with a smile. "We were performing in a proper concert hall, and it sounded fantastic, which inspired us to play in top form.

"It was very refreshing, because most of the time we were playing in these hockey arenas that sounded awful. We weren't even aware that they were recording it."

At the time, Trower was touring behind Bridge of Sighs, the album that established him as one of rock's new guitar heroes on the strength of songs like "Bridge of Sighs" and "Day of the Eagle." Drawing a crowd to Stockholm Concert Hall wasn't difficult, even if the elegant, wood-paneled venue was better known as the home of the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the site of Nobel Prize ceremonies than for hosting walls of Marshall amps.

The crucial detail, however, was invisible to the band. Swedish Radio had recorded the performance without Trower's knowledge.

Only later, after receiving a tape of the broadcast — a common practice for radio stations at the time — did Trower and his band realize they had the makings of a live album.

There was just one problem. James "Jimmy" Dewar's vocal track was unusable because his microphone had picked up too much spill from the rest of the band, particularly the drums. Rather than rebuild the album in the studio — as Kiss would infamously do with much of Alive! the following year — the band kept the repairs to a minimum.

"Jimmy sang it all again," Trower says. "He polished it off in about an hour — just ran through it in real time."

Now, 50 years after the concert and nearly as many since the album's March 1976 release, Robin Trower Live! has been expanded and remixed. The new edition restores the complete 12-song performance in its original running order, replacing the seven-track LP sequence, with a fresh remix by Richard Whittaker.

For Trower, though, there was no hidden ingredient behind the performance.

"There was no magic amp or special guitar," he says. "Almost everything I owned was pretty new. I just went to Manny's, the legendary guitar shop in New York City, bought a 100-watt Super Lead Marshall, and listened to about six or eight Strats acoustically before settling on a black-and-white one with a maple neck.

"If there's any secret to my tone," he adds, "it's that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings. It's all about getting the strings to ring acoustically, and that's what translates into a great electric sound."

Ironically, Trower might never have become synonymous with the Stratocaster had Jethro Tull’s Martin Barre not nudged him toward Fender's iconic model in the first place. Although the Strat became central to his sound, Trower has long resisted comparisons to the player who defined it for a generation: Jimi Hendrix.

• Robin Trower Live! (50th Anniversary Edition) is out now. See Robin Trower for more.

Before the British Invasion swept the Beatles across American airwaves, popular music in the United States had a distinct sound. Roger McGuinn, who co-founded the Byrds, accented by his now iconic Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string, was a big part of it.

When the Beatles landed in America on February 7, 1964, McGuinn was working as a session player and songwriter, writing songs for singer Bobby Darin’s T.M. Music company. He says that despite Paul, John, George and Ringo being relative unknowns in the States, he was aware of them.

“I was living in New York, and I was a studio musician, and also working as a songwriter in the Brill Building,” he tells Guitar Player. “And as it turned out, I think there was a CBS TV Channel 2 in New York, and there was a clip of the Beatles, maybe about two minutes long. It had girls screaming, and had the Beatles playing… I don’t know if it was ‘She Loves You,’ or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ but it was one of those songs.

“I went, ‘Man, these guys are good,’” he admits. “I realized they were using folk music chords for rock and roll. They’d come up as a skiffle band, the Quarrymen, and they’d been playing folk tunes with chords they’d developed into a rock band.”

This realization led McGuinn to change course with varied results. “I started putting folk songs to a Beatles beat and taking it to the Village [in New York City] and playing that for people in the coffee houses.

“They didn’t like it,” he adds with a laugh.

But he knew he was onto something. When George Harrison began playing a Rickenbacker 360/12 in 1964, McGuinn — who had been playing 12-string for years — picked on up as well.

The same year, McGuinn founded the Byrds with David Crosby on guitar and vocals, Gene Clark on vocals, Chris Hillman on bass guitar and Michael Clarke on drums. A 1965 tour followed, orchestrated by their press office Derek Taylor, who had worked for the Beatles in 1964 (and would again from 1968 to 1970). Through Taylor, the Byrds met the Beatles, leading to a friendship between the bands that had a profound impact on both their musical and personal lives.

That impact is evident in George Harrison’s Rubber Soul track “If I Needed Someone.” It also provides the back story to “She Said She Said,” one of John Lennon’s tracks from the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver. In August 1966, near the end of their last tour, the Beatles were visiting the Byrds. LSD was a popular drug of choice at the time, and the Byrds and Beatles dropped acid together, along with actor Peter Fonda.

It was Fonda, who, while tripping on acid, said, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

“Peter had somehow shot himself in the stomach when he was a kid,” McGuinn explains. “He died on the operating table. But they brought him back. So he did know what it was like to be dead.”

Lennon was appalled at the Fonda’s statement. Long after the party ended, still reeling from the episode, Lennon wrote “She Said She Said,” substituting a woman for Fonda, who says, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

Asked what he made of Lennon’s creation, McGuinn shrugs. “I liked it. I like the song,” he says, “I loved everything the Beatles did, really. There’s nothing that I would put down.”

Despite these connections, the friendship between the two groups is rarely discussed. But the Beatles and Byrds were tight, so tight that when the Beatles gave a press conference at Capitol Records on August 24 of that year, Crosby tagged along.

“Yeah, we were friends,” McGuinn says. “And Crosby kind of followed them around. He’d poke his head out, and whoever was interviewing the Beatles said, “Who’s that guy with the long hair over there?’ And the Beatles would say, “Oh, that’s our mate from the Byrds, David Crosby.’”

Is it true that George Harrison inspired you to start using a Rickenbacker 12-string?

Yeah. We all went to the movies and saw A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d heard that sound on the records, but I didn’t know what instrument it was. But George came out with a Rickenbacker, and it looked like a six [string] from the front.’

But he turned it sideways, and you could see six other tuning pegs, like a classical guitar, sticking out of the back. I went, "Oh, they kind of condensed the 12-string head into something good-looking.” And it sounded great. I had to get one.

What was the first Rickenbacker 12-string you had after seeing George’s?

I traded an acoustic Gibson 12-string that Bobby Darin had given me because he broke the one that I had before that. I put it up against the piano, and the piano was on casters, and it rolled, and the guitar fell down, and the neck broke off. So he brought me a new Gibson 12-string.

I also traded my five-string banjo — a Vega long-neck five-string banjo, like Pete Seeger played — and some cash, and I bought a Rickenbacker 360 12-string in a guitar store in L.A. I played it for about seven hours a day. [laughs]

Was it tough to get used to the 12-string?

Oh, Jim Dixon, who was our manager, said, “You can’t put a capo on an electric guitar, it’s just not done.” So, I had to learn a lot of scales and learn how to play all kinds of stuff up the neck. I had to practice like seven hours a day to do this. That’s how the “Eight Miles High” thing came about, because I’d been doing a lot of scales.

George influenced you, but if you listen to “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul, it’s obvious that you influenced him, too.

Well, Derek Taylor had been in London, and George gave him, I think, a three-inch reel-to-reel of “If I Needed Someone.” He came over — Derek had been living in L.A., and we were all in Laurel Canyon. He was a few houses down from me, and [Byrds bassist] Chris Hillman.

But Derek came over to my house with this three-inch reel-to-reel tape, and said, “George wants you to play this.” So I played it, and it was “If I Needed Someone.” He said he wants you to know that he got that riff from [Pete Seeger’s] “The Bells of Rhymney” [which the Byrds recorded a famous live version of in 1965].

That same year, in 1965, the Byrds and the Beatles met in August for a psychedelic experience. Can you recount that?

The Beatles had already come over to America and declared that the Byrds were their favorite group. And when they first came over, they would send a limo down to pick us up at our various locations and take us to the house that they were renting up in the Hills, in Beverly Hills.

It was the estate of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor that they had rented for, like, a week, or however long they were there for. And so, we’re coming up in the limo, and there’s all these girls, and they’re up on the fences, and there were policemen, and they took us in. The gate opened up, and we go down to this house, and that’s when we all dropped acid.

What was that like?

Peter Fonda was with us, Ringo [Starr] took acid, and Paul [McCartney] didn’t want to do it. So, George, John, and I did, and Ringo, I think, was playing with some girls in the pool.

Did Paul say why he didn’t want to drop acid, too?

No. I really didn’t have any interaction with Paul at that time. I did when we first met the Beatles in London. It was during that tour that we went over, and they billed us as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” Derek Taylor was with us, and, of course, he had been their press officer, so he introduced us to the Beatles.

I met George and John the first night, and then Paul invited me to the Scotch of St. James, his private club. We had a Scotch and Coke, went outside, and he got into his Aston Martin DB5, and we drove around London. It was really cool.

And later on, we went to a party with the Beatles and the [Rolling] Stones. The Stones told us how their butler would roll up hash joints and put them on the steps for breakfast every morning. [laughs]

Circling back to dropping acid in Beverly Hills, that’s also when you and David Crosby introduced George and John to Ravi Shankar, right?

George, John, David Crosby and I went into this big shower, like a big, maybe nine-foot-square shower, where you could sit on a ledge. And we had one guitar that we kept passing around, and that’s when we showed him some Ravi Shankar stuff — and we all were on acid.

That was especially impactful on George.

George started freaking out. [laughs] He said, “I feel like I’m dying…” And then, Peter Fonda said, “Oh, I know what it’s like to be dead.” And John Lennon said, “Oh, don’t tell me that… you’re creeping me out. This is terrible.”

George was pretty into Indian music by then, so it’s surprising that he hadn’t heard of Ravi Shankar.

Well, Jim Dixon was a producer and engineer at World Pacific Records in Hollywood, and they had Ravi Shankar as one of their artists. So we got a preview of the recordings of Ravi, and we knew about Ravi early on. That’s how we were able to tell George about him, and that he’d been an influence. He had been exposed to Indian music prior to that, but I guess he just didn’t know about Ravi Shankar.

You mentioned earlier that when you went to London, the Byrds were billed as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” But given how you fed off each other, it’s clear that it wasn’t so much about an answer as it was a call-and-response.

Well, what was going on was that America was blindsided by the British Invasion. They were looking for some kind of counter to it. I remember watching American Bandstand, and Dick Clark said, “The best Beatles antidote? It’s probably the Beau Brummels.”

And then, he’s on the phone with somebody, saying, “What? The Byrds? Oh, yeah, okay. It’s the Byrds.”

Today is Global Beatles Day.

During a 1963 visit to St. Louis, George Harrison found a record he couldn't stop thinking about.

He even imagined the Beatles recording it. But despite his enthusiasm, the song never made its way into the band's repertoire. Harrison would eventually get another chance with it — 24 years later.

It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation.

“In 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, who was living there at the time,” Harrison wrote in The Beatles Anthology. “The whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the U.K., and we’d had three or four hit singles.

“So while visiting my sister, I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that’s where I finally found the James Ray album, If You’re Gonna Make a Fool of Somebody.”

In particular, the song that grabbed his attention most was “Got My Mind Set on You,” and Harrison thought it had the makings of a Beatles recording — despite one significant drawback.

“It would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn’t really rock and roll,” he admitted. “It was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by a jazz musician — it had all these squawky horns and stuff.”

As Harrison later recalled, the song “stuck in my mind.” More than two decades passed before he finally revisited it while working on Cloud Nine, his 1987 comeback album after a lengthy break from recording.

Produced by Jeff Lynne, Cloud Nine found Harrison returning to a more electric guitar–driven sound. Revisiting Rudy Clark’s song, he stripped away the brass-heavy arrangement that had bothered him in the first place and gave it a contemporary rock treatment.

“I finally decided to try and put more of a rock edge on the song,” he wrote.

The changes made all the difference. Driven by punchy drums and a leaner arrangement, Harrison’s version of “Got My Mind Set on You” became a massive hit, reaching number one in the United States and giving him one of the biggest singles of his solo career.

In a fitting twist, the song Harrison once hoped the Beatles might record ultimately found its audience through him instead. After carrying it around in his head for nearly a quarter-century, he finally discovered what he'd sensed back in that St. Louis record store: the song had staying power.

Notably, the success of “Got My Mind Set on You” paved the way for Harrison’s next success, the Traveling Wilburys. When his record company asked for a B side to accompany a 12-inch remix of the hit, Harrison enlisted Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty to help him write "Handle With Care." The song was ultimately deemed too good to waste as a flip side and became the debut single by the newly christened Wilburys, one of the biggest supergroups of all time.

Everyone has a favorite guitar solo — Brian May included.

While the Queen guitarist drew tonal inspiration from Rory Gallagher and has called Ritchie Blackmore an incendiary trailblazer of electric guitar, neither man played what he considers the greatest solo ever recorded. That honor, for May, belongs to Eric Clapton on “Key to Love,” from Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton.

“It’s the hottest, burning, high-passion piece I’ve ever heard in my life — still to this day,” May reveals (via Classic Rock). “I just love it. It totally rips, and I’ll never get over that. That’s one of my great inspirations.”

Clapton was just 20 when he left the Yardbirds to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a move that coincided with what Jeff Beck later described as a streak of jealousy when his former band beat him to a U.S. breakthrough. In hindsight, though, Clapton hardly needed to worry: his brief tenure with the Bluesbreakers produced one of the defining blues-rock records of the era — an album that would go on to inspire future guitar giants, including Eddie Van Halen, who credited Clapton as a primary influence.

Though “Key to Love” runs just over two minutes, its loose, swinging groove builds toward a climactic stretch where Clapton unleashes roughly 30 seconds of unrestrained lead work.

“He burned in that solo!” May gushes. “The whole track revolves around that solo. Every time I put it on, I’m just waiting.

“John Mayall’s great,” he adds, “but you’re waiting for that moment when Eric rips out, and suddenly he’s whacking into those top notes. It’s incredible. Absolutely spine-chilling.”

May and Van Halen later paid tribute to Clapton on May’s 1983 solo EP Star Fleet Project, where the pair went head-to-head on the 13-minute blues workout “Blues Breaker.” Clapton, however, said he felt “almost insulted.”

“I think he hated it,” May said with a laugh in a 2023 interview with Guitar Player. “But he’s entitled. Eric could do anything and he’ll still be our hero. There’s probably lots of things I disagree with Eric about, but that doesn’t change anything. He’s been one of the greatest inspirations of my life, and that’ll never change.”

For May, Clapton’s playing didn’t just set a standard — it raised his own. And despite any critical remarks, the mutual respect between them is clear: they’ve shared the stage on several occasions, a quiet acknowledgment that the admiration runs both ways.

Today is Global Beatles Day.

As Paul McCartney’s longtime guitarist and occasional bass player, Brian Ray has gained unique insights into the former Beatle’s songwriting process. Over his 24 years with McCartney, Ray says he learned just how prolific — and instinctive — the songwriting partnership between McCartney and John Lennon really was.

“I asked Paul if he wrote to a title or a little melody, or a riff or something, and he said, ‘No. It was always lyrics, music, melody and guitars all at once,’” Ray told Guitar Player in 2005.

As a result, Lennon and McCartney worked quickly — and had to. “You have to remember that the Beatles did a record every six months,” said Ray, a veteran electric guitar player known for favoring a 1957 Les Paul Goldtop.

For all their productivity, however, McCartney told Ray there was one occasion when the pair hit a creative roadblock.

“Paul said that in the more than 300 songs he and John wrote, he could only remember one time where they got stuck, and that was when they were writing ‘Drive My Car.’ They thought the title wasn’t working, but they liked the song. So they took a break, had some tea, and changed it.”

What exactly changed during that tea break? Ray wasn’t saying.

“I won’t tell you the lyric they tossed, because that’s Paul’s right to do that. I don’t want to be the guy who tells everybody what ‘Drive My Car’ was originally written as. And, you know, even with the rewrite they still finished the song at the end of the day.”

As some Beatles fans know, the discarded lyric centered on “golden rings.” McCartney had mined similar imagery before with the phrase “diamond rings,” notably in “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “If You’ve Got Trouble,” a Help!-era outtake later released on Anthology 2. Lennon had also referenced them in “I Feel Fine.”

As McCartney explained to Barry Miles in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, “‘Drive My Car’” was “one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session.”

“The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal,” he said.

When McCartney presented the song to Lennon, neither could come up with a satisfactory replacement. “So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became ‘drive my car’ instead of ‘golden rings,’” he recalled.

Which means Ray was faithfully protecting a secret that McCartney himself had revealed years earlier.

The infamous “Clapton is God” graffiti that began appearing on London walls in the mid-’60s helped cement Eric Clapton’s status as Britain’s first guitar hero. Roughly a year earlier, Jeff Beck had taken his place in the Yardbirds, stepping into one of the most scrutinized jobs in British rock.

Comparisons between the two guitarists began almost immediately and never truly disappeared. Although Beck often praised Clapton’s playing, he also believed his predecessor viewed him as a rival, a suspicion that followed both men for decades.

Born on this day in 1944, Beck was revered as one of the instrument’s great innovators. He frequently spoke highly of Clapton, once calling him “the household name for electric guitar.” But he also felt there was an undercurrent of resentment stemming from the success he enjoyed after replacing Clapton in the Yardbirds.

“I know he didn’t like the fact that I took over from him in the Yardbirds and we did great,” Beck told Classic Rock.

“The general buzz of the band was that they thought they were finished when Eric left. At my debut with the Yardbirds at the Marquee, I showed them what was what, and I got a standing ovation. That was the end of that.”

Beck believed Clapton was also irritated that the Yardbirds reached America before he did. While Beck’s band was enjoying chart success and building a following across the Atlantic, Clapton was still grinding it out on the British blues circuit with John Mayall.

Years later, Beck said he received what he considered confirmation that the rivalry was real.

“I remember he invited me to this gig [in 1980] in Guildford, and I thought, Why is he asking me?” Beck recalled to Rolling Stone.

During the drive to the venue, Clapton invited him to join him onstage for a song and to use his electric guitar Blackie, the famous Fender Stratocaster he’d cobbled together. .

“On the way there, he goes, ‘Do you want to play Blackie?’” Beck recalled. “And I said, ‘Uh, I don’t know that song.’ He said, ‘No, it’s my guitar.’ I went, ‘Oh, whoops.’ First calamity of the evening.

“So I said, ‘I didn’t bring a guitar, so I’ll do that.’

“Then about a minute later, he turned around and stood at the car and goes, ‘This is not gonna be one of these blowing-off things, is it?’ I said, ‘Listen, either I play, or I don’t.’ And there was that — what’s the word — uncomfortable rivalry about it.

“I found out later from Pattie, his wife, that there definitely was — especially with the Stevie Wonder stuff. He was not too amused about me doing something successful with Stevie. I think that maybe got under his skin a bit.”

The Stevie Wonder collaboration Beck referenced dated back to the early ’70s, when the two musicians struck up an unlikely creative partnership. Beck played on and co-wrote material for Wonder’s Talking Book album and was present when Wonder came up with the central riff for “Superstition,” a figure Beck later called “the riff of the century.”

There’s little doubt Beck’s success irked Clapton, who was enduring one of the darkest chapters of his life. Derek and the Dominos had collapsed, and his drug addiction was worsening.

Those circumstances only reinforced Beck’s belief that professional jealousy had occasionally colored their relationship. Yet for all the stories of rivalry, competition and perceived resentment, Beck would eventually discover that Clapton’s feelings toward him were more nuanced than he had imagined.

That realization came while watching Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story, the 2018 documentary chronicling his life and career.

In the film, Clapton offered an assessment that caught Beck completely off guard.

“I think he was a hard rock pioneer from day one,” Clapton offered early in the film. “He was doing stuff that didn’t exist, except for him.” Later in the documentary, reflecting on Beck’s invitation to perform with him at his 2007 Ronnie Scott’s residency, Clapton said, “It was honor to get up with him in that venue. It was tremendously touching that he would want me to get up and play with him.”

For a guitarist who had spent years suspecting that Clapton viewed him as a rival, the praise came as a genuine surprise.

“I didn’t know he thought that,” Beck later admitted.

Whatever tensions may have existed between the two guitar legends over the years, hearing Clapton speak so openly and admiringly about his playing revealed a side of their relationship that Beck had never fully appreciated — one rooted not in rivalry but respect.

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Leslie West is decidedly modest when it comes to “Mississippi Queen,” the rock behemoth that put his band Mountain on the map when it was released in 1970.

“The song’s got three chords,” the late guitarist told Guitar Player. “Any idiot can play it.” He chuckles, then adds rather immodestly, “I just happen to play it better than anybody.”

West admitted that the track — driven by West’s fierce electric guitar leads — “has just everything you need to make it a winner. You’ve got the cowbell, the riff is pretty damn good, and it sounds incredible. It feels like it wants to jump out of your car radio. To me, it sounds like a big, thick milkshake. It’s rich and chocolatey. Who doesn’t love that?”

“Mississippi Queen” was the opening track on Climbing!, the debut album from the four-piece, which included West, bassist/producer Felix Pappalardi, drummer Corky Laing and keyboardist Steve Knight.

As West pointed out, the song doesn’t wear out its welcome. “The whole thing is two and a half minutes,” he exclaimed. “It’s over before it starts. People ask me, ‘Why didn’t you make it longer?’ What would be the point? At two minutes, you don’t get bored.”

The song came to him at a moment when he was having some success. After releasing Mountain in 1969, West expanded the project into a full band, Mountain, which made its debut at Woodstock in August that year, creating high anticipation for what would be the group’s first album.

“Thanks to my first record company check, I had this huge apartment on Park Avenue,” the New York City native explained. “I thought, Now that I have this place, I’d better do something to keep it. So I was messing around with this riff and these chords.

“I had this thing I used to do – it was my ‘bedroom sound.’ I’d put this little amp on my bed and position it so it was shooting right into the pillow. I cranked it up all the way, and it sounded like a truck. It really worked with this new idea I had.’

It turned out that Laing had already composed some lyrics that were just waiting for a song. “So when Corky heard my riff and chords, he showed me what he had,” West continued. “I said, ‘Okay, I think this can be something. Let me work on it.’”

Laing’s friend David Rea came up with a few lines for the chorus, and the song was complete. They entered the studio without even having rehearsed it.

"We never actually played the song ’til we recorded it,” West said, “but I had a sense that it would come together.”

It did so very quickly in a matter of a few attempts.

“There’s this story on Wikipedia that we did all these takes,” West said. “What a load of crap. We did maybe two takes.

“And the story goes that Corky got bored, so he started playing the cowbell. Also crap. The cowbell was always in there. The first time we played it, Felix said, ‘Count the fuckin’ song off!’ Corky had a cowbell on his kit, and that’s what he used to count it off. After that, we were in.

“It’s only one guitar track on the rhythm – a Les Paul TV Jr. into a 50-watt Marshall that went into a Sunn 12-inch cabinet. I knew how to make it sound extra fat. I overdubbed the leads, and we were done.”

Almost. Against West’s wishes, Pappalardi added a piano to the recording, which can be heard playing a trill near the end.

“Felix stuck a little piano on the track,” West explained, “which I always hated.”

Although West didn’t consider the song a potential hit, he was encouraged after demoing it for no less than Jimi Hendrix.

“We recorded at Studio A of the Record Plant, and Jimi Hendrix was in Studio B,” he said. “I played him some of the album we were making, including ‘Mississippi Queen,’ and his eyes got wide. Seeing how impressed he was made me feel like we were on to something.”

The label agreed. It released “Mississippi Queen” as the lead single from Climbing! To ensure DJs pushed the song, radio station promo copies of the record had the song on both sides “so DJs couldn’t get creative and play the flipside instead,” West explained. “The single only got to number 21, but I think it could have gone a lot higher. I don’t know how they decide these charts. I mean, radio stations were playing the hell out of it.

“Live, the reaction was always enormous. People freaked out the second we started playing it. We stretched it out a bit onstage, because two minutes is pretty short, and we usually saved it for the encore. I learned a long time ago to go out on a high note.

“It’s a song that keeps on giving,” noted West, who died in 2020. A lot of people have covered it. I like most of the versions, but I really like the one that Ozzy Osbourne did. I even played on it. The song has been sampled something like 2,000 times. Every time I hear it, I call my accountant.”

“The thing about Bob Dylan is you think, Oh, he’s lost his mind!

“But Bob’s very Bob,” Steve Bolton explains. “He just goes through these phases in his life.”

Bolton has first-hand experience with the folk-rock icon. After spending a year playing guitar for the British rock act Atomic Rooster in the early 1970s, Bolton was central to the group’s revival in 2016. But in-between those years, he bumped around the business, performing alongside Pete Townshend on the Who’s 1989 reunion tour and in Paul Young’s band, among various other assignments.

It was his talent as a musician that got him hired to appear alongside Dylan in the 1987 film Hearts of Fire, where Bolton performed as Spyder, the guitarist in his band.

“I received a phone call from the record company telling me they had got me a part in this Bob Dylan movie,” Bolton recalls. The guitarist was apparently treated well for his minor role in the feature. “On set, I even got my own trailer, with ‘Boltz’ written on it,” he notes.

The film was one of many left turns in Dylan’s long career. In the mid 1980s, after enduring a string of poorly received albums, he decided to venture into feature film acting for the third time, having previously starred in Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and his own 1978 movie, Renaldo and Clara.

A 1980s take on the A Star Is Born franchise, Hearts of Fire was directed by Richard Marquand, famous for films like Return of the Jedi and the 1985 thriller The Jagged Edge. In addition to Dylan, it starred actor Rupert Everett and actress Fiona Flanagan, who had a hot minute (as simply Fiona) with her 1985 single “Talk to Me.” The film is also noteworthy for including brief appearances by folk legend Richie Havens (who, unusually for him, plays an electric guitar) and U.K. pub rocker Ian Dury.

But as Bolton explains, the filming proved stressful on Marquand, not least because of Dylan’s idiosyncrasies and unfamiliarity with the process, which only added to the director’s problems.

Bolton met Dylan on set on the first day of shooting. He says the artist was in a temperamental mood and believes he didn’t like that, at six-foot-two, Bolton was noticeably taller than him.

“My first scene with him was in an old warehouse,” Bolton says. “We were rehearsing the scene and Bob came in with his Telecaster. He was going through a weird period at that time, where he wasn’t actually talking to anybody. He must have said something to the director about my height, as I was soon instructed to sit at the back on a flight case and drink a beer.”

He says Dylan seemed unable to follow basic instructions. During a scene that called for the musicians to mime onstage to a backing track, he insisted on playing his Telecaster through an amplifier, much to the displeasure of Marquand and the film crew.

“Bob’s scratching away on the guitar, and as the track came to an end, the drummer does this drum fill and the live mics come on, which is quickly followed by a bit of dialogue,” Bolton explains. “Bob’s line goes, ‘Hey, Nico, not too heavy on the drums, this ain’t World War III.’ But Richard couldn’t make Bob understand that he had to turn his guitar down in order for his line to be heard.

“An hour and a half later, Dylan still hasn’t got it right. They run through the track again and again, and each time when the mics come on, he still doesn’t turn down.

“So they decide to get a guy to lay behind Bob’s amp to turn the volume down. The director yells, ‘Cut!,’ and we get the scene.

“It was very bizarre.”

Although Bolton says his time with Dylan was brief, he finally got to share a moment alone with him while they were waiting around on set.

“We were filming this scene at the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town in London,” Bolton says. “And it’s the most incredibly boring experience, as you’re hanging around waiting, with no one telling you what’s going on until it actually is about to happen. They’ve brought in a rent-a-crowd — all these punks and weirdos — and we’re going to be miming to a really awful reggae track.”

Typical of the film’s problems, the band that was supposed to appear in the scene failed to show up.

“A new hot London band called Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction were supposed to be in this film too,” Bolton explains, “but they ended up being locked up in the slammer after something happened outside a London club.”

Bolton, however, had a copy of the lyrics for the song the band was scheduled to mime to.

As he recalls, “It goes, ‘I’m the high priest of love / I’m shooting babies from the end of my dick / This ain’t science baby / It’s magic.’

“I turned to Bob: ‘They’re the kind of lyrics you should be writing,’ I told him.

“He looks at me, pauses and says, ‘You think so?’

“And I reply, ‘No. I’m just messing with you.’”

Released in the U.K. in October 1987, Hearts of Fire was a box office failure. The film received limited release in the U.S., where it fared no better. Dylan disowned it not long afterward.

As for the director, Marquand passed away from a stroke a month before it opened.

“The film ended up killing him,” Bolton claims.

Bolton, for his part, has no regrets about the experience. He says the one thing he took from his up-close-and-personal time with Dylan was his immense understanding of music.

“His knowledge of music is quite unbelievable,” he says. “He may be just a strummer, but he knows exactly what he is doing.”

Billy Gibbons was just 19 when Jimi Hendrix famously called him America’s best young guitar player. It was a compliment that carried enormous weight. But by then, Gibbons had already earned Hendrix’s respect.

The pair first met in 1968, when Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top band, the Moving Sidewalks, landed the opening slot on a U.S. tour by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Looking back, Gibbons still isn’t sure how the young Texas psychedelic-blues outfit got the gig.

“It’s a great mystery,” he told AXS TV.

What wasn’t a mystery was Hendrix’s impact.

“We had only recently discovered Jimi Hendrix, and we quickly came to learn that here was a guy who was doing things with the Fender Stratocaster that was turning it inside out in ways the inventors never even imagined,” Gibbons recalled with a laugh.

Offstage, Hendrix was reserved. Onstage, he was transformative.

“He was a bit shy offstage, but once the lights went on, he came a-glowing,” Gibbons said. “And man, he would set about doing things with that guitar that were just otherworldly.”

For the Moving Sidewalks, every night on tour became a masterclass. The relationship took an unexpected turn when the band realized it didn’t have enough original material to fill its 40-minute opening set. Their solution was audacious: play two Hendrix songs — “Purple Haze” and “Foxey Lady” — in front of Hendrix himself.

“Dare we play this in front of Hendrix?” Gibbons remembered asking his bandmates.

The gamble paid off.

“As we wrapped it up, I remembered passing by, being spun around, and this guy grabbed me by the shoulders, and smiling, he said, ‘Man, I wanna meet you. You got a lot of nerve. I like that.’”

By the end of the tour, the musicians were spending evenings together in Hendrix’s hotel room, listening to records and talking guitars. During one listening session, Hendrix reportedly asked Gibbons how Jeff Beck produced some of the sounds heard on the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth.

Gibbons’ answer put Hendrix’s influence into perspective.

“Jimi, it would probably surprise you to know that Jeff Beck is probably listening to your record, trying to figure out what you’re doing at the same time!”

The lessons Gibbons absorbed during that tour stayed with him long after Hendrix’s death in 1970. In fact, one of Hendrix’s guitars helped shape a key ZZ Top recording nearly a decade later.

“When we recorded that song, I was playing the Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix gave me when we were traveling together,” Gibbons told Music Radar of ZZ Top’s “A Fool for Your Stockings.” “For some reason, the guitar wasn’t working through the amp. We wound up plugging the guitar straight into the board, and that’s why it’s such a clean tone on that track.”

Hendrix’s influence extended beyond gear. The Experience’s three-piece format helped inspire ZZ Top’s own lineup, though Gibbons later admitted it took years for the band to find an identity beyond the blues tradition Hendrix had so radically expanded.

Even today, the Strat Hendrix gave him remains part of Gibbons’ arsenal. Speaking to Premiere Collectibles in 2020, he revealed that the guitar “still gets a good whoopin’ in the studio every once in a while.”

Most fans know Joe Satriani as the guitarist David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen approached for the post–Eddie Van Halen tribute tour that never got off the ground.

But according to Satriani, Roth first tried to recruit him decades earlier — for a band that would play Van Halen songs while Eddie was still alive and active.

Speaking to Thinking About Guitar, Satriani recalled receiving a call from Roth in the mid-’90s.

“In the mid ’90s, David Lee Roth called me; he wanted to put together a band to do Van Halen songs,” the guitarist says. “He went on and on about how we were the only guys who could really do it right, and he had all these crazy plans.”

It’s unclear exactly when the conversation took place. Roth briefly reunited with Van Halen in 1996 before the band moved on with Gary Cherone, whose stint as frontman led to the release of Van Halen III in 1998.

Whatever the timing, Satriani says he immediately questioned the premise.

“I said, ‘But Dave, Ed’s still alive! He’s still making amazing records. He’s still on tour. What guitar player would ever try to imitate him while he’s still working? It makes no sense.’

“‘Of course, I said, ‘Look, I’m not the guy.’”

For Satriani, stepping into Eddie Van Halen’s role while the guitarist was still recording and performing was unthinkable. As a lifelong admirer of Eddie’s electric guitar work, he had no interest in trying to recreate it while its creator was still actively pushing the instrument forward.

The idea resurfaced years later under very different circumstances.

Following Eddie Van Halen’s death on October 6, 2020, Satriani was contacted by Roth and Alex Van Halen about participating in a tribute project honoring the late guitarist. Reports later emerged that former Metallica bass guitarist Jason Newsted had also been approached, though the project ultimately stalled. Alex Van Halen would later place the blame on Roth.

“When he and Alex called me after Ed had passed away, it made a little bit more sense,” Satriani says. “Even though I tried to convince them I was not the person who could do it justice.”

Rather than take the role himself, Satriani suggested two guitarists he felt would be better suited to the challenge: his former student Steve Vai and Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt. In the end, the project never materialized.

Satriani would eventually find himself playing Van Halen music onstage, albeit in a different setting. In 2024, he joined Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, performing material spanning Hagar’s tenure with the band and the broader Van Halen catalog. While Hagar says Satch isn’t the best man for the job, he credits him with bringing “his own thing to the music.”

The tour was widely praised by fans and critics alike, but Satriani’s latest recollection reveals that his connection to Van Halen’s legacy almost began nearly 30 years earlier — thanks to an unexpected phone call from Roth and a proposal he simply couldn’t get behind.

Johnny Marr spent much of his career avoiding the guitar-hero label.

As guitarist with the Smiths and throughout his solo career, Marr largely shunned guitar solos, prioritized songs over showmanship and frequently criticized the cult of virtuosity that dominated rock guitar culture in the 1980s.

That philosophy helped make Marr one of the most influential players of his generation. While the Smiths scored 17 hit singles in the 1980s, Marr built the band’s sound around intricate layers of overdubbed guitars, unusual chord voicings and a vast palette of tones. His style drew from the rock ’n’ roll primitivism of the ’60s, the grooves of the ’70s and the bright, chiming textures of the ’80s, creating a sound that inspired countless guitarists.

“I’ve always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words,” Marr told Guitar Player in 1990. “That’s born out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players. I’m interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. I don’t like to waste notes, not even one.”

The guitarist recently made headlines for a different reason, announcing plans to auction nearly 100 acoustic and electric guitars from his personal collection, including instruments used with the Smiths.

Among the highlights is the 1960 Cherry Red Gibson ES-355 that Sire Records founder Seymour Stein bought for Marr to help persuade the Smiths to sign with the label. The guitar is expected to fetch as much as $198,000. Also heading to auction is Marr’s 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo, which he purchased in 1983 and used on the Smiths’ self-titled debut, including “This Charming Man.” Marr later loaned the guitar to Noel Gallagher, who used it during the recording of Definitely Maybe. It subsequently appeared on the cover of Oasis’s “Supersonic” single.

Speaking to the BBC about the sale, Marr explained, “I didn’t like the idea of my studio space becoming a museum.”

Back in 1990, however, Marr was focused on another subject entirely: the army of guitar shredders dominating magazine covers and guitar-store walls.

“Who was it that said, ‘The reason why all those guitar players play so many notes is because they can’t find the right one?’” he asked Guitar Player in a cover interview. “I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really like Nils Lofgren’s soloing, because he’s so melodic. I love John Lennon’s rhythm playing, and George Harrison was an incredible guitarist.”

Marr’s admiration for melody and economy put him at odds with much of the era’s guitar culture.

“There’s a lot of guitar culture that I don’t like at all,” he said. “I find the traditional idea of the guitar hero to be really irrelevant to the 1990s. I don’t think that young people are that impressed with some guy brandishing spandex trousers and a hideously shaped guitar, playing that kind of masturbatory, egotistical noise.

“Being a soloist who wants to just display virtuosity is a dated philosophy, and I don’t think there’s any room for it in pop music. It’s the last stand of late-’60s/early-’70s rockism, and it should have gone a long time ago.”

Despite his criticism of shred culture, Marr made clear he respected players with genuine technical ability.

“I have a healthy respect for guitarists like Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen, disciplined players who really know what they’re doing — if you’re going to be a virtuoso, you can’t be hit-and-miss. But I think people like Yngwie Malmsteen should be forgotten as soon as possible, I really do.”

Marr then offered one of the interview’s most provocative observations.

“It’s got very little to do with music, and the ‘I’m the fastest gun in town’ idea is almost like homosexual panic. Nothing against gays, but when players perpetrate this incredibly sexist image of being so macho, I find it suspicious.

“Plus, I can’t do all that stuff, so that’s why I say it’s stupid,” he added with a laugh.

Joe Bonamassa owns a collection of electric guitars with long, unusual histories. Among them is Terry Reid’s heavily modified 1952 Fender Telecaster, an instrument whose discovery he called “one of the greatest guitar safaris of my life.”

Reid was a British singer, guitarist and songwriter who emerged in the 1960s U.K. rock scene. Widely respected by his peers, he was Jimmy Page’s first choice to sing in Led Zeppelin before he declined and recommended Robert Plant for the job.

He went on to build a solo career that included acclaimed albums such as Seed of Memory and River, the latter of which featured guitarist David Lindley. Reid remained a cult figure in British rock up to his death on August 4, 2025, at the age of 75, from complications related to cancer.

As Bonamassa explains, Reid purchased the Telecaster in Chicago, circa 1968, while he was the support act for Cream’s final U.S. tour. When the neck pickup died during that tour, he had it replaced with a humbucker at Manny’s on New York City’s 48th Street Music Row.

The opportunity to buy his hero’s guitar arose in the summer of 2014 when Bonamassa received a call from a guitar dealer he knows, who asked if he had any interest in buying Reid’s guitar.

“I told him that of course I would love to own it,” Bonamassa said, “but even more so, if nothing else, just to meet the guy who gave a young David Lindley one of his first professional gigs.”

They agreed on a price, but when calls to Reid went unanswered for several days, Bonamassa figured the opportunity had passed.

Coincidentally, that same evening he received a message from a friend on Facebook asking if he was interested in Reid’s guitar.

“I replied, ‘Yes, but he can’t be reached so I guess it’s not available,’” Bonamassa recalled. “Long story short, my friend responded with Terry’s cell phone number and, lo and behold, I was speaking to him within minutes. We set a time the next day for me to drive way out into the desert to meet him and check out the guitar.”

“The following day I set out in my car from Los Angeles to Palm Desert. When I left my house the temperature was 82 degrees — mind you, it is August. As I approached the freeway exit in Palm Desert, it was a balmy 112!”

“I find Terry’s house, knock on the door, and there he is — one of my musical heroes and a super nice guy. I say, ‘Is it always this hot?’ He replies, ‘Nah... it’s kind of cool today.’”

Over the next two hours, Reid shared stories of the road and photos of Jimi Hendrix. Bonamassa described it as “a glimpse into a time that I wish I had lived in: London in the late ’60s.”

Bonamassa noted that Reid was invited not only to join Led Zeppelin but also Deep Purple, “but he chose to follow his own musical path, something I respect a great deal.”

As the visit came to an end, Bonamassa said he began to question whether he should proceed with the purchase.

“As it came time to leave I realized just how attached he was to the guitar,” he explained. “So I told him that it will forever be at his disposal and it will always be his — I will just look after it for a while. I gave him a big hug and said goodbye. I’m honored to have it and even more honored to call him my friend.”

Bonamassa has since taken the guitar out on the road and often uses it to play the song “Slow Train,” as seen in this clip from his 2017 show at Red Rocks.

If you only have one pedal in your arsenal, chances are it’s some sort of overdrive. Fuzz, boost, overdrive and distortion pedals are the most popular stomp boxes out there, and for good reason. If you don’t have the luxury of being able to crank up a great tube amp to excessive volume to get the world’s sweetest lead tones — and few of us do — you need one of these machines to dirty up your sound and help generate the singing, saturated, sustaining sound that so many styles of electric guitar playing require.

Despite their popularity, however, the distinctions between the different pedals in the “OD” category can get blurred. While each of these pedals helps you get cranked-up tone at the stomp of a switch, each type works its magic in a different way, and many from within the same type can function very differently.

Let’s break down the overdrive category to define, dissect and demystify each effect in the group.

Boosters

Among the simplest and oldest of overdrive-inducing pedals is the booster, which, at its heart, is just a straightforward preamp that’s placed in front of an amp’s input. These are used to increase the guitar’s signal — either to create a loud, but relatively clean volume lift for solos, or to kick the amp into overdrive.

Many types of boosters first became popular in the mid ’60s, as elements within their design — flaws, you could argue — produced far less than the clean boost that was intended, and instead induced tonal enhancements that players came to love. Early examples such as the Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster and Vox Treble Booster and Bass/Treble Booster owed their creamy, thick sound to a single germanium transistor, an archaic component that is still used as the magic ingredient in many current boosters (and fuzz pedals, as we shall see).

Note that these didn’t merely boost treble as the name might imply. They did help highs push through, but they boosted other frequencies as well, and the “treble booster” tag was partly a sales point in an age when “more treble” was often the call of players muted by high-load guitar cords and murky live mixes.

In addition to boosting the signal, the germanium transistor added a little midrange girth and high-end sweetening, elements that became crucial to the early lead tones of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Brian May and many others. These players used their germanium boosters to hit the front ends of a Marshall or Vox amp with a little extra oomph in order to kick it into a singing and more harmonically saturated tube overdrive.

As such, pedal and amp work together as one instrument, and few boosters are used purely for their own inherent tone, but rather for the way they perform in conjunction with a particular amplifier. Plenty of mass manufacturers and boutique makers offer contemporary versions of such vintage-styled boosters, but a different breed, the “linear” (or “clean”) booster, is also popular. These purport to retain the full frequency range of the guitar signal, and simply make it louder. In the process, they can also help overdrive a tube amp in the same way as many vintage units.

Fuzz

The real godfather of the dirt boxes — the fuzz pedal — arrived even before the booster, and it was initially intended as an effect that would let a guitar player mimic the raspy, reedy tone of a saxophone. One of the most famous fuzz-guitar parts of all time — the signature riff to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — was originally recorded by Keith Richards as a “holding track” for a horn section that would eventually replace it. The “Satisfaction” riff was recorded through an early Maestro Fuzz-Tone, and it is archetypal of the fuzz sound, as are many of Jimi Hendrix’s legendary solos, often recorded through a Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face.

Each of these pedals, and others like them — both old and new — owe their tone to a pair of the hallowed germanium transistors previously mentioned. These two components — along with a simple network to govern their functions and connect them to a pair of potentiometers for Volume and Fuzz (or some form of level and drive controls) — combine to unleash seven deadly sins’ worth of ungodly sonic mayhem on your tone, but it’s mayhem with a smooth, warm, and furry heart.

The very best fuzz pedals are beloved for their “playability,” meaning the extent to which their response and dynamics can be controlled by your pick attack and your guitar’s volume control.

Silicon transistor-based fuzzes followed germanium units, and these are known for their slightly harder and more crisply defined tones. This is not to say that silicon-based fuzzes are inferior, only different, and many notable players count themselves fans of each breed.

Unlike linear boosters, fuzzes slather a wealth of their own stink all over your signal (and that’s precisely the idea), but they can also be used to drive a tube amp into clipping. Ultimately, most great guitarists with definitive fuzz tones are using their pedals in both of these ways simultaneously to create a larger, more interactive instrument out of the individual components in their rig.

Overdrive

Just like it says on the box, an overdrive pedal seeks to replicate the sound of an overdriven tube amp. In the course of doing so, it often facilitates the real thing a little more quickly by pushing your amp into clipping a little earlier, just as a booster and fuzz will frequently do.

While fuzz pedals of the ’60s and early ’70s inherently sound very little like an overdriven amplifier — other than perhaps an amplifier in bad need of attention — it occurred to many players and pedal designers in the late ’70s that it would be useful to have a box that sounded like the warm, tubey crunch of a mildly pushed amp.

The granddaddy of overdrives is the Ibanez Tube Screamer TS808 (and its Maxon equivalent), manufactured for Ibanez by the Nisshin company from 1979 to 1981 (both small- and large-box versions). The TS808 and the TS-9 and TS-10 that evolved from it were adored by players who wanted less than the extreme hair of the fuzz pedal, but more than the pristine clarity of a clean amp.

Several name players — Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson among them — also used Tube Screamers for their amp-boosting functions, and the low-gain/high-volume control settings that facilitate this have become popular with many guitarists.

DOD, MXR, Boss and others issued formative overdrives, and the genre continues apace today as probably the most popular single breed of pedal. Maker after solder-dazed maker has chased the ultimate in transparent, tube-like, dynamic overdrives. It’s interesting to note that the majority of these pedals achieve their overdrive tones quite differently.

Some makers praise and utilize the “vintage” JRC4558D dual op amp (as used in the most lauded of Tube Screamers), while others declare any op amps to be the death of transparency and dynamics, and go the discrete-circuit route instead. Whichever way you go, a good overdrive is one of the cornerstones of any comprehensive pedalboard, and an extremely useful tone twister.

Distortion

Like going from a ball-peen hammer to a 10-pound sledge, a distortion pedal seeks to reproduce the full-stack tube-distortion rage that the kinder, gentler overdrive pedal barely hints at. In doing so, most distortion pedals also emulate the high-production-value version of this sound, rather than merely enhance the amp tone it starts with, complete with a scooped-EQ curve and liberal helpings of compression.

There are many flavors of distortion available, of course, but by its very nature this pedal aims to achieve its “sound in a box,” rather than partner up with a good tube amp to sound its best.

An iconic example of distortion can be heard on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ where Kurt Cobain used a Boss Distortion DS-1. Although the DS-1 preceded it by a year or so, the ProCo Rat, released in 1979, is usually considered the seminal heavy distortion pedal. (The MXR Distortion+, released in 1973, is really more of an overdrive pedal.)

Every major pedal maker on the market today offers their own renditions of this sonic fury. Most distortion pedals employ a combination of op amps and silicon diodes to do their dirty work, some using the latter in asymmetrical circuits to produce a more jagged and edgy form of clipping.

Whatever gets you to your own flavor of filth, you will most likely want to use your booster, fuzz, overdrive or distortion early in the pedal chain. If you are using more than one pedal, a quick rule of thumb says to put the milder, or cleaner, OD earlier in the chain. On the other hand, there are always notable exceptions. Wah-wah pedals usually like to go before fuzzboxes to work their magic, and messing around with the “accepted order” of other ODs might produce results that give your tone the extra zing you’ve been looking for.

Thomann, the world’s largest music retailer, is suing Fender in an effort to halt the company’s cease-and-desist campaign against guitar makers that use Stratocaster-style body designs.

In doing so, Thomann says it is standing up not only for its own Harley Benton brand, but also for other manufacturers affected by Fender’s legal action.

For weeks, Fender has been sending cease-and-desist letters to U.S. guitar makers such as PRS Guitars, as well as retailers of S-style electric guitars across Europe and the U.S.

The campaign stems from a December 2025 ruling by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, which determined that the Stratocaster’s body shape qualifies as a copyrighted work.

Since May, Fender has cited that decision in demanding that manufacturers and retailers cease production and sales of Stratocaster-style guitars. In addition, the company has called on them to recall instruments already sold and provide customer and sales data.

Fender CEO Edward “Bud” Cole said in June that Fender is not suing anyone, but simply enforcing its intellectual property rights. The company’s position directly affects Thomann, particularly its Harley Benton line of guitars.

However, Thomann says its lawsuit is about more than protecting its own interests.

“We used to be a small music store ourselves and know exactly where we have come from,” Thomann CEO Hans Thomann says. “Many of those affected do not have the financial and legal means to conduct such a legal dispute. We therefore see it as our responsibility to have this matter clarified in court not only for our own company, but for all parties involved.”

Thomann also notes that the Düsseldorf ruling was a default judgment issued after the defendant — a Chinese seller of Stratocaster-style guitars — failed to appear in court. By pursuing its case, Thomann hopes to have the copyright claim tested in a fully contested trial.

There is a personal side to the dispute as well. Thomann debuted in 1954, the same year Fender introduced the Stratocaster. Since then, the retailer has carried Fender products alongside S-style guitars made by numerous other manufacturers.

At the heart of Thomann’s case is the claim that form follows function — that the Stratocaster shape is not merely artistic but functional as well. The guitar’s double cutaways provide upper-fret access and help balance the body, making them practical design elements. Thomann also argues that Fender has benefited from the shape’s ubiquity, which can be seen in everything from Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein to the rise of the Superstrat.

Thomann is not seeking financial damages, but rather a determination that the use of an S-style body shape does not constitute copyright infringement.

“The music business is full of thieves!” Don McLean declares. “Luckily, I had a degree in finance and so I was always watching the numbers. But promoters, publishers, club owners, you name it, they’re all out to rob you blind, so you have to watch out for that.”

More than five decades after “American Pie” established him as one of America’s most celebrated songwriters, McLean remains every bit as outspoken, self-assured and suspicious of the music industry as he was when he started out. Those qualities have served him well. McLean is one of the few artists of his era to retain control of his catalog and master recordings, having resisted the temptation to sign away the rights to his songs.

But if there’s one theme that runs through his career, it’s a refusal to listen to people who told him what he could or couldn’t do.

“Well, the thing is that I’ve been kicked around by a lot of writers and stuff in different time periods, but I have always outfoxed them,” he says. “In the beginning, when I did ‘American Pie,’ they all said, ‘You can’t follow it, blah, blah, blah.’ I heard two years of this crap and then ‘Vincent’ was number one all over the world. And it was totally different.

“Then they said, ‘Oh, well, maybe you can do it?’ And then ‘And I Love You So’ got recorded by hundreds of people and then later on ‘Castles in the Air’ and then I had a number one with my version of ‘Crying.’ So eventually they shut their stupid mouths and they began to realize that I know what I’m doing. The records that I have done have lasted because they’re very good records. Let’s not kid ourselves.”

McLean’s résumé backs up the bravado. “Vincent” became a worldwide hit just a year after “American Pie,” “And I Love You So” evolved into a modern standard recorded by hundreds of artists, and his rendition of “Crying” gave him another major international hit in 1980. For an artist routinely dismissed as a one-hit wonder, the evidence tells a different story.

That confidence extends to his recollections of making American Pie, an album whose creation was not without friction. Producer Ed Freeman has previously revealed that McLean’s vocal for the title track was assembled from 24 different takes. McLean rarely phrased his singing exactly the same way twice, leading Freeman to choose his favorite vocals nuances from multiple recordings and comp them into a final track.

“I’m not sure he had to, but he did,” McLean says. “I mean, I guarantee you every vocal I did was very good, but if he had a reason for wanting to do this or that, that’s why I let him be the producer.

“And that wonderful vocal sound that you hear on ‘Vincent,’ it has never been gotten ever since. There’ve been other very good vocal sounds on me, but that was quite an effort. It was a work of art and a work of love.”

McLean once described himself as a fusion artist, blending popular music of an earlier era with folk music and the sounds of early rock and roll.

“That’s absolutely correct that I did describe myself like that,” he says. “I don’t read music. I don’t write music. I just happen to have a very good musical memory for these kinds of songs and as a result I have thousands of them in my head and whatever I do comes through from that.”

His musical heroes largely predate rock and roll, and McLean argues that even the greatest songwriters of the modern era can’t match the masters who came before them.

“First of all, nobody — and I don’t care who it is, the big boys like McCartney or Paul Simon — they cannot touch Irving Berlin and those writers from the 1940s; they just can’t,” he says. “They don’t really understand music enough to be able to truly come close to those melodies.

“‘Yesterday’ is a wonderful song, but it can’t touch anything Irving Berlin wrote. It just doesn’t. It’s wonderful and it’s great that McCartney tried to do it and the Beatles are influenced by the same people as I am, except not as much by the American folk scene because they’re not Americans.

“All they had to go on was skiffle and Lonnie Donegan and even then, that was mostly Weavers records, songs that were by Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter that Lonnie Donegan did a terrible job of recording.”

When it comes to songwriting itself, McLean believes one of the hardest skills to master is knowing when an idea has reached its full potential.

“There are ideas that a songwriter may have when writing a song that they might think is big enough to be a title of a song,” he explains. “But it ends up then being just a verse in a new song. So, you have to really fully excavate that thought and that takes weeks of thinking and working until you get to the real idea of what you’re after with the song.

“And that comes down to having a certain kind of self-psychology. In other words, to tell yourself, ‘You’re not really saying what you mean. You have to keep working on this as you mean something else.’”

While songwriting remains at the center of his legacy, acoustic guitars have been his constant companions throughout his career. McLean has long favored Martin acoustics and over the years assembled a formidable collection.

“I auctioned off about 20 of them, though,” he says. “And I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had a few of them back, but I let somebody else have them.

“I still probably have about 50 guitars and I use about three or four on the road. They’re really wonderful guitars and there’s nothing else like them. And the great thing is that you can buy an old one from say 10, 20, 30 years ago and get a decent price on it and it will always be the same. There’ll be no cracks or any problems with it because it’s already done all the adjusting that it’s going to do in the environment.”

One of the biggest boosts to McLean’s catalog came in 2000 when Madonna recorded a dance-pop version of “American Pie,” introducing the song to a new generation and delivering a fresh wave of royalties.

“I was happy just for her to do it,” he says today. “Madonna is a very aggressive woman who wants to be in the spotlight all the time. It is probably time for her to pack it in, but you can’t do that with someone like her. She has got so much ambition that it’s almost bigger than her talent.”

McLean’s critics might say the same about him, but he wouldn't care. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he neatly sidesteps the question: “Oh, I’m going to be remembered, believe me!”

With nearly 60 years of hindsight, having the Jimi Hendrix Experience open for the Monkees back in 1967 was clearly not a good idea.

Then again, it should have seemed so at the time — but not to Micky Dolenz, who considers himself “the one to blame for that little bit of insane rock and roll trivia.”

The lead singer of Monkees hits such as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m a Believer,” Dolenz was an early Hendrix fan, from when he was playing in New York City as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and before his fateful move to England and the formation of the Experience there.

“I had seen him in New York at the Cafe Au Go Go with John Hammond,” Dolenz tells us. “His claim to fame was he’s the guy who plays guitar with his teeth.”

A little more than a year later, Dolenz spied Hendrix again with his new band members: drummer Mitch Mitchell and bass guitarist Noel Redding.

“I was at the Monterey Pop Festival and all of a sudden, onstage comes this trio dressed up in crazy stuff. And I look and say, ‘Hey, that’s the guy that played guitar with his teeth!’”

Dolenz was dazzled by Hendrix’s performance, which included him famously setting his Fender Stratocaster on fire and smashing the electric guitar to pieces.

“I remembered him… and I was blown away by him and, of course, his talent, and by Noel Redding and Mitch, too,” Dolenz recalls. “It was the most incredible rock blues that we’d ever heard. I was dumbfounded, as everybody was.”

That was in June 1967, by which time Dolenz and the Monkees had a hit NBC TV series, three chart-topping, multi-Platinum albums and three number one singles to their credit. At the time, they were in the midst of planning their first major U.S. tour.

“We were looking for an opening act,” Dolenz remembers, “and I suggested him to the producers of the show. I said, ‘Y’know, he’s very theatrical,’ which he was, of course. And the Monkees, to me, was essentially a theatrical act. We were a TV show, right?

“So I thought it was a good mix, and I loved his music. That had a lot to do with why I recommended it. I was like, ‘Wow, this would be great.’”

File that under “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

Hendrix and company took the tour — over the strenuous objections of Chas Chandler, Hendrix’s producer/manager, who knew the Experience’s electric church would not play well to a female-dominated teen crowd bent on worshipping Dolenz and Monkees mates Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork, with whom Hendrix had become friendly at Monterey. Hendrix was subsequently Tork’s house guest in Laurel Hills, California as well.

Dick Clark, who promoted the tour, recalled later, “I’m positive that there must have been some concerns and skepticism raised, because anybody could have seen it was not a compatible coupling... That’s what [the Monkees] wanted, and the deal was made.

“They fancied themselves as being an attractive coupling. It wasn’t, and the audience was totally lost.”

The tour began on July 8, 1967 in Jacksonville, Florida, about two months after the release of Hendrix’s Are You Experienced album, followed by a sea cruise the next day to celebrate Mitchell’s birthday before a show in Miami that night. The reception was predictable, with Monkees-mania ruling and the Experience playing to chants of “We want the Monkees!” and “We want Davy!”

Less than two weeks into the tour Chandler met with Clark, who agreed to take the band off the bill. The promoter concocted a story that they’d received complaints — including one from the Daughters of the American Revolution — that Hendrix’s performance was “too erotic,” leading to the Experience being “barred from the tour” after eight shows.

Hendrix himself spoke to New Musical Express about the situation some time after.

“Firstly they gave us the ‘death’ spot on the show — right before the Monkees were due on. The audience just screamed and yelled for the Monkees. Finally, they agreed to let us go on first and things were much better. But we were not getting any billing — all the posters for the show just screamed out ‘Monkees!’

“Then some parents who brought their young kids complained that our act was vulgar. We decided it was just the wrong audience. I think they’re replacing me with Mickey Mouse.”

“He felt bad, we felt terrible,” Dolenz says now, “but he knew it wasn’t our fault, and we knew it wasn’t his fault. It comes with the territory. We knew he was still great, and believe you me, Jimi Hendrix would have done just fine without opening for the Monkees.”

Nevertheless, Dolenz adds, “We all became quite good friends. He was very kind, quiet, very gentle, not at all like his onstage persona. We really had a good time hanging out together.”

The Hendrix story is one Dolenz is fond of telling during his Songs and Stories solo shows. He is currently on his 60 Years of the Monkees tour, with dates running to November 13.

Suzi Quatro didn’t become a star in America by having a hit record. The Detroit-born bass guitarist found fame playing a version of herself on one of the biggest TV sitcoms of the 1970s: Happy Days.

By then she’d become a star in Britain and Europe, scoring hits with songs like “Can the Can,” “48 Crash” and “Devil Gate Drive.” As the leather-clad leader of her own band, she’d helped blaze a trail for women in rock years before acts like Heart and the Runaways broke through.

Acting, however, was another matter. Quatro was completely green when she received an unexpected invitation to audition for Happy Days. The role would eventually make her familiar to millions of U.S. viewers as Leather Tuscadero, but when she first arrived on set in 1977, she was a musician stepping into an entirely different world.

And, despite years of experience performing live, she was nervous.

“I was touring Japan when I got a call from my agent asking would I like to audition for Happy Days,” Quatro told Louder. “I didn’t know the show, but he said, ‘Believe me, you’ll want to do this.’”

The audition itself seemed almost preordained.

“I’d never acted before. I was wearing my ‘street leathers,’ a jacket and pants, different to my stage outfits. The producer, Gary Marshall, said, ‘Oh, very clever of you to dress in the part.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘The character is called Leather Tuscadero.’”

Quatro got the job and went on to appear on the show from 1977 through 1979. But before she could become one of Happy Days’ most memorable recurring characters, she had to survive her first appearance in front of a live studio audience.

“I’d done the rehearsals, but this was in front of a live audience,” she recalled. “Henry Winkler, as Fonzie, came up to me and said, ‘How you doing? Okay?’”

Quatro admitted she wasn’t entirely comfortable.

“I said, ‘Henry, I gotta tell you, I’m a little bit nervous.’ He said, ‘I’ve watched your rehearsal. You’re gonna kill it. Go — you’re on.’”

Reassured, Quatro headed out for her entrance.

“So I walked out, doing my Leather Tuscadero saunter, thinking, ‘I got this.’ I got to my mark and went to speak, but the director said, ‘Excuse me, Miss Quatro. What are you doing here?’”

The comment left her stunned.

“It was like somebody threw water in my face. I said, ‘That was my entrance.’ He said, ‘No, you’ve got another page yet.’”

Certain she’d blown her first scene, Quatro retreated backstage — only to discover she’d been the victim of a practical joke.

“I walked back, and Henry was on the floor, laughing. He did it on purpose.”

Winkler’s prank, it turned out, wasn’t meant to embarrass her. It was meant to relax her.

“He said to me, ‘Now nothing more can go wrong. Go out and enjoy yourself.’”

The advice worked.

“That took my nerves away. And when I came out again the applause was huge.”

These days, Quatro is still making music. The bassist and singer released her latest album, Freedom, in 2026 and remains an active touring artist at 75, nearly six decades after she first picked up the instrument that made her famous.

The following story originally appeared in the October 1984 issue of Guitar Player.

Several hours before show time, Stevie Ray Vaughan sits alone on a weary couch in a backstage dressing room, his head buried in his trusty, albeit beat-up, Stratocaster. Dressed in Japanese happi coat, wide-brim black gaucho hat, black slacks, and pointed-toe shoes, Vaughan limbers up, and greets the occasional visitor with a vice-like handshake and a bit of tentative conversation. It's a ritual the slight but wiry Texan has been through countless times, but he still appears a bit nervous.

Once plugged in onstage, however a completely different Stevie Ray Vaughan emerges – cool, confident, flamboyant, and even a bit cocky. Before the crowd is finished applauding the opening instrumental, Testify (from his debut album, Texas Flood), he and the two-man rhythm section known as Double Trouble (bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton) launch into Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (from the group's impressive follow-up, Couldn't Stand the Weather).

For the next 90 minutes, each vocal phrase, every guitar solo and fill, is delivered at full-throttle. Even during almost inaudible parts of his solo in the dirge-like Tin Pan Alley, Vaughan's intensity never subsides. He doesn't just play his guitar; he mauls it – as evidenced by the nonexistent finish and 1/4"-deep scratches on the face of his battered '59 Fender Strat.

By the end of the set, closing with Hendrix's sonic tour de force Third Stone From The Sun, Vaughan has played the guitar behind his head, off his shoulder like a violin, behind his back, and on the floor – standing over the cutaways with one hand firmly on the guitar's neck, the other pulling up on the vibrato bar.

While making vintage guitar collectors wince and teachers moan, Stevie Ray has given the biggest exposure in years to one of the most fundamental but unsung musical forms: the blues. And with every achievement and accolade he has received since he burst onto the charts on David Bowie's critically acclaimed album Let's Dance (lauded in large measure because of Stevie's searing guitar work), the 30-year-old has shared his honors with the bluesmen who preceded him and with the genre itself.

“Most of all, I'm glad to see the blues getting the recognition it deserves,” the guitarist has emphasized on more than one occasion.

After being lifted out of the Austin, Texas, blues scene to play on Let's Dance, Stevie Ray went back to his hometown group, Double Trouble, and teamed with A&R legend John Hammond to produce Texas Flood, which took top honors in Guitar Player's 1983 Readers Poll as Best Guitar Album.

In the same balloting, Vaughan racked up two more blue ribbons – completely dominating the New Talent category and edging out no less than Eric Clapton as Best Electric Blues player – to become the first triple-crown winner since Jeff Beck's 1976 hat trick.

With Texas Flood still selling strongly, Double Trouble released Couldn't Stand The Weather, which hit the Billboard pop chart on June 13 of this year at (144, leaped up to 63 in its second week, and bulleted to 37 and 31 in the following two weeks.) “What's happened, I guess,” drawls Vaughan, “is that we've come from playing clubs to where we can pretty much fill a 5,000-seat hall now. We just worked our butts off.”

Vaughan's popularity is as worthy of scrutiny as his phenomenal guitar playing. While numerous blues-based rockers have become guitar heroes after crossing over to the rock camp – including Clapton, Michael Bloomfield, and Jimi Hendrix – Stevie is the first since fellow Texan Johnny Winter (who also eventually drifted into out-and out rock and roll) to make the major leagues by sticking with the blues.

His videos of Love Struck Baby (from Flood), Couldn't Stand the Weather, and Cold Shot (from Weather) are in steady rotation on MTV's playlist, and Pride and Joy (from his debut LP) received substantial airplay on FM stations. He teamed with George Thorogood for a tribute to Chuck Berry at this year's Grammy awards, and has appeared on such unlikely TV shows as Solid Gold.

Most people's first exposure to Stevie Ray's searing solos, of course, was via Bowie's Let's Dance. But even though the material was not the type of R&B he had mined in Texas bars for more than a decade, Vaughan's razor-edged leads were pure blues, relying heavily on Albert King for tones and riffs.

Texas Flood revealed a debt to blues masters such as Jimmy Reed, Magic Sam, Lonnie Mack, Buddy Guy, and Hubert Sumlin, and paid that debt with interest. Opening for coliseum acts such as Men At Work, the Moody Blues, Huey Lewis and the News, and the Police – Stevie riveted audiences with his passionate homages to Jimi Hendrix, including Voodoo Chile, Little Wing, and Third Stone From The Sun.

While countless guitarists have been influenced by the creative genius of Hendrix, few have attempted to cover any of his songs.

There are several obvious similarities between Vaughan and the late southpaw – each led a trio, had incredible control of feedback and volume with a minimum of effects devices, and could sing adequately but not well enough to make it strictly as a vocalist. But what sets Stevie above other pretenders to the Hendrix throne is his ability to play lead and rhythm simultaneously – like Jimi, he fires a nonstop barrage of chords, licks, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and unorthodox tricks at the listener. Vaughan's guitar technique doesn't just impress; it overwhelms.

Instrumentals such as Rude Mood (from Texas Flood) and Scuttle Buttin' (Weather) are textbook studies of the pedal-to-the metal Vaughan style, while Lenny (Flood) is reminiscent of Hendrix' most sensitive ballads, and Stang's Swang (Weather) reveals a firm grounding in organ-trio guitarists such as Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, and early George Benson.

Unlike many other guitar-based trios, Double Trouble overdub next to nothing in the studio; the 12-inch pieces of vinyl are accurate representations of the sort of thing Vaughan & Co. have been playing onstage since they formed in 1978 – following Stevie Ray's stints with the Cobras and Triple Threat Revue.

Couldn't Stand The Weather made use of a few of Vaughan's Texas buddies – saxophonist Stan Harrison, Fabulous Thunderbirds drummer Fran Christina, and brother Jimmie Vaughan (guitarist/leader of the T-Birds) – and at press time, Stevie was finalizing plans to augment the trio further for his October debut at New York's Carnegie Hall. To be recorded for a possible live LP and video, the concert will tentatively include Jimmie Vaughan, organ legend Booker T. Jones, and the Tower Of Power horn section as special guests.

A lot has happened to Stevie Ray Vaughan since he was featured in the August '83 Guitar Player. In the following interview, he talks about his techniques and tricks, his major influences, his collection of Stratocasters, and the most important element to Double Trouble's sound: soul.

There seems to be a long tradition of Texas guitar players.

“Yeah. I don't know if any of us know what it is. It's just in the air, you know.”

Does the environment of friendly competition improve the caliber of the players?

“Sure, yeah. For some reason, nobody lets go of the soul of it. Same way with a lot of San Francisco players. There are a lot of musicians in the Bay Area who do remember how to play from their heart – as opposed to a lot of the things in LA that are missing that; it's just show time. But in Texas especially, there seems to be a lot of musicians interested in pulling for each other and working together, and it really, really helps a lot. It makes you a tighter unit, and it keeps you right in your heart. And that has a lot to do with your playing.”

Austin musicians definitely have strong feelings of community – even though a band like Asleep At The Wheel plays Western swing, the Fabulous Thunderbirds play blues, and Eric Johnson plays fusion.

“It doesn't matter. People still work together.”

Can you spot a Texas guitar player by hearing him?

“Oh yeah. I don't know what it is – I just can hear it. Maybe it's the water [laughs].”

What's the blues scene like in Austin?

“There's some crazy jam sessions going on down there. Hubert Sumlin is staying down there now, and Mel Brown is living there, and Lonnie Mack. He's a great cat. Also Buddy Guy comes down and hangs out for two or three weeks a month, just about.

“It ends up where all those guys are up there playing. And Mel Brown plays [Hammond] B-3 organ like nobody's business, too. Antone's closes down at 2:00, but it's nothing out of the ordinary for it to be 4:30 when the last set's over – after starting at midnight. A four-hour set ain't too bad.”

I heard stories years ago about a jam session at Antone's with B.B. King, yourself, and Luther Tucker.

“Yeah, that was the night B.B. scared me to death. He sat on his amp and played rhythm for me for about four songs. And then he stood up and played one note – [picks up an acoustic guitar and plays a high, stinging vibrato]. You know, one of those B.B. notes that make you go, 'Haaugh!'”

What you just played sounded exactly like B.B. Did you work on that a lot?

“Just listened.”

When you first took up guitar, was it blues that you were mainly attracted to?

“A lot – because of my brother Jimmie. He'd bring home records by B.B. and Buddy Guy. And he was the one who hit me with Lonnie Mack, too; the first record I ever bought was The Wham Of That Memphis Man. Jimmie brought home a Hendrix record, and I went, 'Whoa! What is this?' I'll never forget that.”

Did Jimmie show you things on guitar, or did you just pick up things from hearing him around the house?

“At first, he taught me a couple of things, and then he taught me how to teach myself – and that's the right way.”

Your brother was heavily influenced by another Texas bluesman, Freddie King. Did that style rub off on you as well?

“Yeah, it did. I had that instrumental album of his [Let's Hide Away And Dance Away]. Jimmie used to know him pretty well, but Freddie wouldn't talk to me in public. In private, but not in public. I guess I was a young white boy he didn't want to be seen with [laughs]. I played with him once, sitting around a table when no one was around.”

What specifics did you get from various players?

“I got a lot of the fast things I do from Lonnie Mack – just the ideas and the phrasing. Like on Scuttle Buttin'. [plays a barrage of chicken-picked pull-offs]. That's really a Lonnie Mack thing – that's dedicated to him. I got a lot of turnarounds from Freddie King.”

Who were the main blues players you heard on records?

“Well, let's run 'em down. There was Buddy Guy, Muddy, of course, and all the various guitar players who were with him [including Jimmy Rogers and Pat Hare], Hubert Sumlin, Lonnie Mack, B.B., Albert King, Freddie, Albert Collins, Guitar Slim – he'd just turn it all the way up. I can just imagine people saying, 'Slim, why do you always play so loud?' 'Because it sounds like this' [laughs].”

Johnny Winter was the first white Texan bluesman to make it on a big scale. Were you influenced much by him?

“Yes, although I hadn't heard him as much then. I listened more to people like Albert Collins, Albert and Freddie King, [and] Johnny Guitar Watson. But around '71 or '72, I got to jam a lot with Johnny over at Tommy Shannon's house – that was a little bit after his initial big success.”

How did you meet Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton?

“I've known Tommy for years and years – since about '69. I was in Dallas playing at this after-hours place called the Fog, and he'd just left Johnny Winter. He claims that he walked in and saw this little person playing guitar [laughs]. I was 15 or something – wasn't supposed to be in that club.

“We've played together in bands off and on ever since. Chris and I have been together about six years, I guess. I met him through Joe Sublett of the Cobras – they were roommates. I went over to the house once and Chris was in the kitchen with his headphones on, blasting away on the drums. When he was finished, I told him I needed a drummer, so he quit his other band.”

Was he basically a blues drummer when you found him?

“No, but he could do it. Took him about 15 minutes to learn how to do a rub shuffle right. A lot of it was just natural.”

Did you play in clubs in Dallas before you moved to Austin?

“Yeah. I could make decent money there, playing the Cellar, but it wasn't the kind of place you'd want to hang too long. That was the only place that let me do what I wanted to do – because nobody cared about shit there. They just had strippers and crabs everywhere [laughs]. If you really wanted to come in there and play, they'd let you. A couple of times, people would get pissed and start shooting at the stage. You had to duck and keep playing [laughs].

“I played there from age 14 until I was 18. There was a Cellar in Dallas and one in Fort Worth. We'd play two sets in one town, drive to the other club, and play two more sets. We got 90 bucks a night per person, and we were never awake during the day, so there wasn't any way to spend it.

“I was trying to stay as close to this kind of music as I could, but at the same time I was going through a phase of playing through Marshalls – just turning up to 10 and being a teenager. I remember doing some Allman Brothers songs, which I liked at the time – skirting the outskirts – but we were also doing Buddy Guy and B.B. King stuff.”

Have you had a hard time playing blues as an opening act to major rock bands?

“No, the audiences reacted real well to it. I think more of the people on the Moody Blues tour were aware of what we were doing. When we played with Men At Work, it was still a lot of fun, but there were mainly 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds, and a few of them knew how to slingshot dimes, you know [laughs]. But a lot of those kids really went for it, even though they weren't expecting it.”

Your playing on Let's Dance isn't along the lines of Texas Flood; it's more like Albert King.

“I kind of wanted to see how many places Albert King's stuff would fit. It always does. I love that man. When that album first came out, Albert heard it. He said, '[sneering] Yeah, I heard you doin' all my shit on there. I'm gonna go up there and do some of yours" [laughs].

“We were doing this TV show right outside of Toronto – Hamilton, I think – and during the lunch break, Albert went around to everybody in there looking for an emery board. I didn't think anything of it. We were jamming on the last song, Outskirts Of Town, and it comes to the solo, and he goes, 'Get it, Stevie!' I started off, and I look over and he's pulling out this damn emery board, filing his nails, sort of giving me this sidelong glance [laughs].

“I loved it! Lookin' at me like, 'Uh-huh, I got you swinging by your toes.' He's a heavy cat.”

Do you ever play with your thumb to get an Albert King sound?

“I play with a pick and a finger. I used the round end of the pick, too. You break less of them and don't get tangled up in the strings. Sometimes I play with both together, or I'll palm the pick and use my fingers, or sometimes I'll just 'Hubert' it [play with bare fingers a la Hubert Sumlin].”

Is that to get a variety of tones?

“Different tones, different moods. It depends on how the amps are working that night, how dead the strings are, how much I can hear, how crazy I'm feeling.”

On Cold Shot, did you play through a Leslie speaker to get that underwater sound?

“It's a Fender Vibratone, which is basically like a Leslie. It's a 10" speaker with a Styrofoam rotor in front of it – so the speaker is stationary, but a drum with a slit in it revolves – and then you mike it from both sides.”

On Couldn't Stand The Weather, were there any tracks where you cut a rhythm part and overdubbed a lead, or vice versa?

“No, on some of the songs I just played and then did the vocal later – which sometimes is a mistake, because you play differently when you're not singing than you would if you were singing along. A lot of times the licks won't match the phrasing of the vocals. Most of the solos were cut live. I redid one line in Voodoo, because my amp went crazy on me. The punch-in didn't come off very well; it still doesn't sound right to me.”

Texas Flood sounds like there are hardly any overdubs.

“There aren't. Only if I broke a string or something.”

So you played the lead and rhythm in the same take, rather than laying down a rhythm track and soloing over it later?

“Right. We redid a few vocals, but some of them were live, too. That was mainly to go back if a word was left out or not real clear, plus, we got a better vocal sound by redoing them. I don't think that's cheating too much.”

Do you set up in the studio the same as onstage, or do you use drum booths and headphones, etc.?

“The first record, we pretty much set up like we do onstage, but we did have a few baffles between us. We went ahead and used headphones like on one ear. We couldn't see the control room; it was at the other end of this place with a bunch of stuff in between and no window. I like it a lot that way.

“That was at Jackson Browne's rehearsal studio called Downtown, in LA. For Couldn't Stand The Weather, we were in the Power Station [in New York], and all the walls separating the rooms are glass, so we were separated but we could still see each other. So I could go in and play louder than shit.”

Do you usually record pretty loud?

“Sometimes. Sometimes real quiet, like on Tin Pan Alley.”

What about Voodoo Chile?

“Had it up as loud as I could – and I was in the same room with it.”

Do you use the same amps in the studio as onstage?

“Yes. Two Fender Vibroverbs – they came out in '63; they're number 5 and 6 off the production line, but I bought them in two different places at two different times.

“It's basically like a Super Reverb with a 15 and a shorter cabinet, and it has no midrange knob – it's preset on 4, I think. My favorite setup used to be two Vibroverbs and two Supers – just stack 'em up. Just let the Vibroverbs handle the bottom. I had one Super set clean, and the other where I could just turn it up or down wherever I wanted it.”

You don't use the Super Reverbs now?

“Right now, I use a Howard Dumble 150-watt. He calls it the Steel String Singer, I call it the King Tone Consoul [laughs] – that's s-o-u-l. It's like an overgrown Fender tube amp. Some Dumbles – like the Overdrive Special – you've got to know what you're doing with them, because they'll get away from you and take you with 'em.”

Was John Hammond in the studio for the first album?

“No, he wasn't there at all, except for the mixdown and the mastering. This time he was there a lot for the recording.”

Do you have any guitars not in the Strat family?

“I have a 1958 Gibson dot-neck ES-335 and a '48 Airline that's a bit smaller but the same shape as a Barney Kessel Kay. It's got three pickups with a 4-position toggle switch – bass, middle, treble, or all three. I've got an old Rickenbacker prototype with a flat top, and I'm giving that to Hubert [Sumlin]. And I've got this 1928 National that belonged to Blind Boy Fuller. Byron Barr, my guitar roadie, gave it to me.

“Sometimes I'll pull it out at the end of a set and sit down and play Rude Mood or a little slide. I'd planned on using it on the last record, but we got sidetracked and never got around to it.”

Do you play slide in open tuning?

“I usually just tune up the G string to Ab and leave everything else the same.”

How did you go about recreating the sounds you heard on Hendrix's records?

“You just keep listening and trying to find the sound, because it's in your hands as much as anything. It's the way you play. There are different techniques to playing everybody's styles, and it's not just necessarily the amp or the guitar. It's the way you pick, the way you hold the guitar.

“For instance, T-Bone [Walker] played like this most of the time [holds guitar horizontally, away from his body], and the tone is different when you play that way. Can you hear the difference? [Holds guitar against his body and plays the same licks – gets a bassier tone]. It's the way your fingers hit the strings, and you're more prone to pick closer to the neck when you hold the guitar like T-Bone.”

Your '59 Strat has the vibrato bar anchored off the bass side of the bridge. Did you set it up that way because Jimi Hendrix's guitar bodies were upside down?

“Well, I started listening to people and noticed that when Otis Rush used one, he had it on the top – he played upside-down. And Hendrix had the guitar upside-down, except he strung it regular. It seemed to me that the people who did that the best had it on top, so I moved mine. Sometimes it does get in the way. I've had it tear my sleeve halfway off.”

So instead of working it with the little finger of your picking hand, it lays right in the middle of your palm.

“Yeah, and I've got the springs set up so I couldn't move it with my little finger anyway. It's pretty tight, with four springs tightened all the way up. That's how I can do Third Stone From The Sun and still be in tune. See, I have my old Strat set up where it won't go up at all. On my newer Strats, the vibrato handles are on the bottom, in the regular place. The orange one and Lenny, the brown one, both of their vibratos will go pretty far up and down as well, and they're set up a lot lighter.

“All the guitars have personalities of their own and feel completely different. They each have different sounds. Like the brown one sounds real good for jazzy-type things or Lenny. It's a '63 or '64 that my wife, whose name is Lenny, found for me.”

What about the old beat-up one?

“That's my first wife [laughs]. The new one with my name on the fretboard, I call Main, for main guitar. It's a Hamiltone, build by James Hamilton of Buffalo, New York. It's basically Strat-shaped but a little thicker, and the construction of the neck is pretty much like a [Gibson] Super 400, except it goes all the way through the body. So the vibrato is on the neck, basically – dead center right there. You can pop the low E string, and the whole guitar has this reverb you can hear even without an amp, because of the springs being in the neck.

“It's got an ebony fretboard that's the same width as my beat-up '59, and then they added binding on the outside of that, because I have big hands and I always play barre chords with my thumb wrapped around. What happens a lot of times is my thumb will end up pushing the low E string accidentally. So the wider neck keeps me from doing that.

“The pickups in there now are EMGs with a little computer chip preamp in them, so there's a battery in the guitar, of course. I like that a lot. They say that the battery will last six months, but I can hear it going down – you can hear it in the tone; it gets fuzzier, like it's straining. When it's got a brand-new battery in there, it sounds clear as a bell, and smooth. It'll sing to you.”

You've also got a white Strat with three Danelectro "lipstick tube" pickups.

“That was put together by Charley Wirz at Charley's Guitar Shop, Dallas, Texas. He also gave me the yellow one with the pickup in the bass position. That one is hollowed out from the neck to the bridge, because the guy from Vanilla Fudge had put four humbucking pickups in there. It's got a pretty cool tone. Charley then came up with the design for the white one with the Danelectros. He also found me the orange 1960.

“All of the Strats have bass frets. I get them from Gibson, or I use Dunlop jumbo bass frets, the biggest ones I can get. I don't have to replace them twice a year, and there's a lot more sustain. It's a lot easier to get under the strings when you use big strings like I do. You can work yourself to death with those little frets. Instead of the note fading out when you bend a string, it'll get bigger when you bend with the jumbo frets.”

Do any of your Strats have maple necks?

“Yeah, Lenny does. It's got a real clear tone, and the pickups are microphonic – you can hear it when you hit the pickguard. But when you play it soft, it sounds great. When I first got the guitar, it had a rosewood fingerboard, but it was thinner, and that bothered me. So I put a copy of a Fender maple neck on there that Billy Gibbons gave me.

“I like the rosewood necks usually, because for one thing, when you sweat, you don't get blisters. It seems like the finish on a maple neck gets hotter and there's more friction. As hard as I play and as much as I sweat, I get sore enough as it is. There's a fatter sound on the rosewood, as far as I can tell; it's not as bright. The ebony fretboard seems a little bit clearer, but it's fat, too.”

Which guitars have you recorded with most?

“Lenny on the song Lenny, and everything else has been the '59. I'd like to record with the one with the Danelectro pickups; I like it a lot.”

How do you do some of the tricks you do onstage – like getting the whole guitar behind your back so fast?

“As I'm spinning around, I'm taking the strap loose and the guitar pivots behind my back, and then I rehook it behind my back. It's really playing the same way, except you've got to hold the guitar out a little bit, and you just can't see as well.”

In Third Stone From The Sun, you have the guitar laying on the stage while you straddle it, pulling up on the neck with one hand and on the wang bar with the other.

“Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that anybody do that on their 335 [laughs]. A Stratocaster's a pretty tough thing, though. Then I figured out how to get the guitar to rumble. I put it on the middle pickup, turn the tone knob down, grab it by the wang bar, and just shake it on the floor.”

Do you use any effects besides the wah-wah on the Hendrix tunes?

“Just an Ibanez Tube Screamer. I have Univibes, but I don't use them. I use the Vibrotone for that effect. I don't have any straight distortion devices; I use the Tube Screamer for that.”

Who works on your guitars?

“Charley Wirz or Michael Stevens in Austin, depending on who's available and what I'm having done. Certain things, both of them do very well; other things, one of them does better.”

Do you string all the Strats the same?

“Yeah, I use a .013, a .015, or .016 depending on what shape my fingers are in, .019 plain, .028, .038, .060 or .056. If I go down to an .018 on the G string, it feels like a rubber band to me.”

Do you have 3-way or 5-way switches on the Strats?

“5-way. I use all the positions for different tones.”

With the amount of amplification you use, do you still pick fairly hard with your right hand?

“Yeah, terribly. That's just how I play. Sometimes I literally pull the strings off. I can deaden a set of strings completely after one set, because I play 'em hard and do a lot of this – [snaps bass string] – to get bottom notes, like Albert Collins. Sometimes, though, I play really soft. That's probably the best Albert King tone I can get.”

When you got the '59 Strat, was it as beat-up as it looks now?

“[Laughs] It wasn't in real good shape. You could still get a jar of model car paint and go around the edges to make it look decent, but that continued to wear off. You asked if I pick hard – well, look at the top of the guitar [which is worn away a good 1/4"]. That's from picking.

“It's gradually sounding different, because I let it dry out too much. I bet if I start oiling it up, it'll start fattening up some. The body is a '59, but the neck is a '62, I believe. In the body, it says, 'LF.59.' I came to find out that was Louis Fuentes, not Leo Fender. But Louis Fuentes was a good cat. You never heard a Stratocaster sound real meaty like that one.”

The tendency on the part of most white blues-rock artists has been to eventually drift more towards mainstream rock.

“We try to keep it going in both directions. There's no reason for us to leave behind what we've got, you know, but there is a good reason to expand on it. I'd like to keep it as a trio, keep that identity, but I have nothing against playing with great horn players or keyboard players or other guitar players – or more than one drummer, even.”

Stang's Swang is still blues, but it's a departure from the type of stuff you're known for.

“I wrote that four or five years ago. I like guys like Kenny Burrell and Grant Green a lot. I like Django Reinhardt a lot, too, and Wes [Montgomery], of course.”

What's the turnaround on that song – IIVs?

“I don't know. I don't know what key I'm in sometimes. I just try to listen.”

Are you completely self-taught when it comes to any theoretical vocabulary?

“I don't know any of that stuff.”

What about the chord voicings you use?

“I just look for things that sound right.”

So if you're playing something like, say, a diminished 7th...

“I don't know it. I almost learned how to read chord charts doing some of those Bowie things. But as soon as I learned how to read the charts, they took the charts away. Most of the time, I'd listen to a couple of run-throughs while he was doing his vocals, to get an idea of where the song was going. Then I'd figure out in my head where this Albert King lick or that Albert King lick would fit [laughs].”

It was three years ago that Buddy Guy announced his Damn Right Farewell Tour and talked about winding down his touring career.

But you might have noticed that, at 89, the dude is still performing and enjoying the success of his latest album, Ain’t Done With the Blues.

More to the point, Guy is preparing to return to the road in celebration of his 90th birthday on July 30. His BG90 North American Tour kicks off on July 15, 2026 at Massey Hall in Toronto.

Guy tells Guitar Player he’s given serious consideration to retirement but feels an obligation to keep going.

“I thought about retiring twice,” he says. “But, y’know, I thought about all those great blues players who are no longer with us — B.B. King. Lightnin’ Hopkins, all those guys — and they used to tell me, ‘You need to keep playing and keep representing the blues,’ ’cause they don’t play it on radio or anything anymore.

“So I said to myself, ‘Well, Buddy, you better hang on a little longer. My health ain’t doing too bad, so I’m still doing what I’ve always done. Every time I get onstage, just try to play the best I can.”

Guy has certainly been rewarded for that over the past 60-plus years. He has nine Grammy Awards — including a Lifetime Achievement nod — a Kennedy Center Honor, a National Medal of Arts, a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement and inductions into the Rock and Roll, Musicians and Louisiana Music halls of fame.

There’s a marker honoring Guy on the Mississippi Blues Trail, and his profile was bumped again last year by an appearance in the hit Ryan Coogler film drama Sinners, playing the elder version of one of the story’s main characters and performing the song “Travelin.’”

“He’s inspirational,” says Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, who counts Guy as a valued mentor.

“When you hear him play, you just know that’s the way it’s supposed to be done.”
Tom Hambridge, the Nashville-based producer who’s helmed Guy’s last seven albums — from 2008’s Skin Deep through Ain’t Done With the Blues — is not at all surprised that farewell did not really mean goodbye.

“This is what he knows,” Hambridge explains. “He seems very content living on a stage — ‘Put a guitar in my hand and lead me to the stage and I want to play with people.’ That’s what he’s been doing his whole life.

“And I think he really means it when he always says he wants to keep the blues alive and keep the word he gave to Muddy [Waters] and all of them. He thinks if he’s out there doing it, making new music, he’ll be keeping the blues alive.”

You can still hear exasperation and anger when Guy — the son of Louisiana sharecroppers who learned to play on a two-string diddly bow — addresses that mission, as he has for a great many years now.

“The blues has been treated like a stepchild,” he says. “Your big FM station don’t play our music anymore. When I was coming up you could turn your radio on and you could hear everything. You didn’t just hear B.B. King or Lightnin’ Hopkins all day. They played everybody — horn players, keyboard players, guitar players, gospel, jazz, blues. We don’t have that no more. If you’ve got satellite radio, you can hear a little more, but they don’t play the deep stuff.

“My own son didn’t know who I was until he could turn 21 and get into the blues clubs. He said, ‘Dad, I didn’t know you could play like that!’ And whenever we play these little outside theaters, you get these kids — seven, eight, nine, 11 years old — they come and come up, like, ‘Wow, man, I didn’t know who you was!’

“And not me — the blues. When they hear it, they love it. They just ain’t hearing it enough, so...that’s why I’m still here.”

Buddy Guy’s BG90 tour launches July 15 at Massey Hall in Toronto and continues through October 29 at Graceland Soundstage in Memphis.

Despite a $2 million royalties lawsuit currently playing out in a London courtroom, Stewart Copeland says his relationship with former Police bandmate Sting remains intact.

Copeland and Police electric guitar player Andy Summers are suing Sting, the band’s singer and bass player, over unpaid royalties they claim are owed to them. But Copeland tells Billboard that the legal battle is largely being handled by accountants and lawyers.

“They’re all arguing away,” he says. “For me, it’s, ‘Lemme know how it works out…’”

In fact, Copeland says he and Sting remain in regular contact, discussing “kids, Instagram memes, and bullshit” rather than legal disputes.

“I’m happy that we get along just fine,” he explains. “And it’s not because of satanic impulses or any of the human infirmities of jealousy, greed, pride, whatever. It’s because we had a spell where our music universes overlapped and we created some incredible stuff. We really achieved everything we needed to achieve.”

The comments come amid an ongoing dispute over Police royalties. The biggest development since the case was filed in January was the revelation that Sting had paid his former bandmates more than $800,000 after the lawsuit began — a figure Summers and Copeland argue falls well short of what they are owed.

For Copeland, however, the key to maintaining the friendship is simple: he and Sting no longer have to work together.

“As I’ve been saying a lot recently, Sting and I make music for different reasons, and it has a different place in our lives,” he says. “So we get along great as long as we’re not trying to make music together.”

That wasn’t always the case. During the Police’s rise from the late-’70s punk and new-wave scene to global superstardom, tensions between Sting, Copeland and electric guitar player Andy Summers became legendary. Although the trio sold tens of millions of albums and produced classics such as Synchronicity, the relationship between the band members was often volatile.

When the band reunited for a world tour in 2007, Copeland says they even brought in professionals he likens to marriage counselors to help smooth over old tensions.

The approach worked. The reunion proved successful enough for the band to extend the tour by another six months.

Nearly two decades later, Copeland suggests the old conflicts have finally been put into perspective. The music was worth it, the friendships survived, and the lawyers can worry about the rest.

While Norman’s Rare Guitars has built its reputation as one of the world’s premier vintage guitar shops, Norman Harris’ influence extends far beyond buying and selling old instruments. For decades, he’s also used the store’s considerable reach to help young musicians find an audience.

That side of Harris’ legacy is highlighted in the recent documentary Norman’s Rare Guitars, which explores not only the store’s celebrity clientele and vintage electric and acoustic guitar treasures but also the musicians who’ve found exposure through its popular “Guitar of the Day” videos.

“The way he helps struggling artists that come through the store, like, ‘Hey, come play a song, we’ll put it on our YouTube channel,’” Joe Bonamassa says in the film.

“And you can sit on that sofa, and you can play, and they’ll put it out,” adds Malcolm McDowell. “It’s such an important place for a young musician to go and get a little exposure. He nurtures.”

A quick scroll through the store’s YouTube channel reveals countless young players showcasing everything from blues and country to rock and fingerstyle guitar. For many, the videos provided exposure they might not have found elsewhere.

“He’s finding musicians and bands that he thinks are worth breaking, sets them up in here, and makes them play,” actor Kiefer Sutherland says. “He’s actually making a difference.”

One musician who benefited directly from that exposure is slide guitarist ace Sarah Rogo, who later became a regular presenter on the channel.

“Norm’s platform definitely helped elevate my platform a lot,” she says. “With the YouTube algorithm, someone will punch in the name of a unique guitar, and Norman’s Rare Guitars is the first place that pops up, and they’ll see me playing the guitar. Billy Gibbons called the store one day and said, ‘Who’s that girl playing the resonator guitars?’”

But perhaps the most notable success story to emerge from the channel is Marcus King.

Mark Agnesi, who managed the store before joining Gibson, remembers filming a young King during a visit to the shop.

“I remember when he came into the store,” Agnesi recalls. “We start rolling the video, he starts playing, and then he opens his mouth and starts singing. It stopped you dead in your tracks; it was like, ‘Oh my god, I am watching the real deal right now, this kid is gonna have a serious career.’”

Agnesi’s prediction proved accurate. Since then, King has released seven albums, earned a Grammy nomination, and landed signature gear deals with Gibson and Orange.

“That video launched a career,” King says.

The clip eventually surpassed two million views, and Bonamassa was among those who took notice. According to Agnesi, Bonamassa’s reaction was simple: it wasn’t a question of whether King would make it, but when — and that time was already arriving.

As Harris puts it in the film, “giving back is very important.” Through Norman’s Rare Guitars, he’s done far more than connect players with vintage instruments; he’s helped connect promising musicians with the audiences they needed to reach.

The murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, sent shockwaves through the music world. For Mark Knopfler, it also sparked an idea that would eventually become one of the most unusual songs of his solo career.

Lennon's killer was an obsessed fan, and the tragedy forced musicians everywhere to confront the darker side of fame. Knopfler found himself thinking about that subject through the lens of his own experiences, particularly a German autograph hunter named Rüdiger who regularly appeared outside Dire Straits concerts.

The idea came quickly.

“I wrote the lyrics to ‘Rüdiger’ without changing a word right after John Lennon was assassinated,” Knopfler told Vulture.

While the lyrics arrived almost immediately, the music did not. Knopfler has often described himself as a songwriter first and a guitarist second, believing that songs emerge in their own time rather than through force of will.

“There are definitely some that hang around in the junkyard out the back in bits,” he explained. “One song took 16 years. Other songs can take 16 minutes.”

In this case, he was talking about “Rüdiger.” Although the lyrics were written in the immediate aftermath of Lennon's death, the song remained unfinished until it appeared on his 1996 solo debut, Golden Heart.

The finished track — an acoustic-led number with weeping clean electric guitar lines — tells the true story of a devoted fan who followed Knopfler from show to show in search of an autograph. While Rüdiger was harmless, the song's origins reveal how Lennon's murder prompted Knopfler to reflect on the fine line between admiration and obsession.

That long gestation period was entirely in keeping with Knopfler's approach to songwriting. Rather than chase ideas that aren't working, he prefers to leave them alone until inspiration returns.

“I enjoy songwriting so much, but if it's not working, I'll get up and leave it,” he said while promoting One Deep River in 2024. “I know it'll be alright if I come back to it, eventually.”

For Knopfler, “Rüdiger” became proof of that philosophy: a song born from one of rock's darkest moments, but one that took 16 years to find its final form.

From the Van Halens to the Gallaghers, rock history is full of famous musical siblings. But few brotherly relationships were as formative — or as complicated — as the one between Gregg and Duane Allman.

Although Gregg helped found the Allman Brothers Band and wrote some of its most enduring songs, he spent much of his life measuring himself against his older brother. As he admits in a new documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, that admiration never really faded.

The film, which opens in theaters today, explores Gregg Allman’s life and career. In doing so, it also shines a light on Duane Allman’s brief but hugely influential life through the eyes of those who knew him best. Among them is Gregg, who recalls how a childhood rivalry over an electric guitar eventually forged one of rock’s most celebrated musical partnerships.

“My brother was walking through the house one day,” Gregg remembers, “and that’s when he looked at it, like, ‘What have you got there that’s making that sound? How are you doing that?’”

Gregg was the first of the brothers to pick up the instrument, much to Duane’s annoyance.

“You’re not supposed to be doing cool stuff,” Gregg recalls his older brother thinking. “Big brothers will do it first.”

The pair battled over the family’s lone guitar until their mother stepped in.

“She had to buy another one to keep peace in the family,” Gregg says with a bittersweet smile. “And when she did, she bought two electrics. I got a Fender, and he got a Gibson, and we just started playing.”

What began as a source of friction soon became the foundation of an unusually close bond.

“We became closer and closer,” Gregg says. “It was wonderful to watch it happen, because I admired him so much. Then we started becoming equal. That was such a good feeling.”

By the time the Allman Brothers Band broke through with songs such as “Midnight Rider” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” Duane had emerged as one of the most respected guitarists of his generation. His reputation grew even further when Eric Clapton recruited him for Derek and the Dominos, creating one of rock’s most celebrated guitar pairings.

But Duane’s rise was cut tragically short. Just months after the release of At Fillmore East, he died in a motorcycle accident in Macon, Georgia, at the age of 24.

More than five decades later, Gregg still struggled to talk about his brother without emotion.

“I spent my life trying to impress him,” he says after a long pause. “Well, the first 20 years of it, anyway.”

More than 50 years after Duane’s death, Gregg’s admission offers a revealing glimpse into the bond that powered one of rock’s greatest bands.

Lenny Kravitz learned plenty about vintage electric guitars from Tom Petty and Mike Campbell. But one of the best lessons came later, when a man facing jail time pulled into a parking lot with a car full of vintage instruments — including the Les Paul that would become Kravitz’s number-one studio guitar.

Kravitz says his education in vintage gear began when he opened for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers following the release of his album Let Love Rule. Campbell, in particular, owns a number of classics, including the Fender Broadcaster he calls “the guitar I can’t live without.”

“When Let Love Rule came out, I opened for Tom Petty, and he and Mike Campbell taught me so much about vintage guitars,” Kravitz recalled. “I’m talking about ’89, when you could still find good things at really great prices. I’d go with Tom and Mike to stores in each city, and at that stage I couldn’t afford the things that they could, but I felt that they were educating me.”

Once albums like Mama Said and Are You Gonna Go My Way turned him into a major star, Kravitz was finally able to put those lessons to use.

“I really started to pick up a lot of great guitars,” he said. “People used to show up in the parking lot, find somebody from the crew and ask them to tell me that they had guitars to sell.”

One encounter proved particularly memorable.

“I got word that this guy was in the parking lot selling guitars,” Kravitz recalled. “And he, unfortunately, was facing jail time and needed to get a lawyer. I went out to his car, and I probably bought five guitars that day.”

The haul included a ’57 Telecaster, an early-’50s Stratocaster and a ’53 Les Paul Goldtop conversion that quickly became one of the most important guitars in his collection.

“It became my number one studio Les Paul from that time to now. It’s got a great Les Paul bite, and the distortion is really smooth and even, from the high end to the mids to the low. It’s on the slightly cleaner side — the pickups are not hot, but they’re just perfect. This has been on every album since I got it, starting with Are You Gonna Go My Way.”

Grace Bowers has returned to YouTube, relaunching her channel with a wholly new approach just months after quitting the platform altogether.

The young hotshot guitarist had proclaimed her discomfort at being gawked at by older generations, insisting that she wanted to appeal to her own age.

Her U-turn comes with a change of tack, as she ruminates on the person and player she was when she broke out several years ago, and on the one she is today.

“Let’s try this again, huh?” she writes on her channel’s community page. “I’m making changes. I’m not bothered by just comments; I’m bothered by the things I had to deal with in real life. Things I didn’t think about when I was 14, posting videos for fun.”

She goes on to say that her focus is now on making “music for the girls in the front row. Not the weird dude with a tripod tryna look up my shorts.”

The guitarist broke out at a young age by uploading cover songs to the platform, quickly garnering the respect of some big-name players and the press. But she’s also had to contend with sexism and agism, as she’s forged a career that’s seen her release an acclaimed blues album, Wine on Venus, in 2025, jam with Peter Frampton, and play the Grammys.

Bowers has previously stated that she wants to pivot away from the blues to explore other musical styles, and her Ozzy tribute last year certainly proves she has the chops. It appears she wants to unshackle herself from the ‘savior of the blues’ that she’s had bandied around her, given her age and profile.

“I’m not a prodigy,” she asserts. “I’m not carrying a torch. I’m not here for old heads to sexualize me, as I have been for the past few years. I’m creating music that I have never felt is so true to who I am.

“I’m not letting anyone push me around anymore,” she continues. “I’ve been through a lot this year as I get ready to turn 20 next month. You’re either in it with me or not. I’m not who you want me to be, and I can’t wait for this next era of music.”

A follow-up post later said to expect less guitar content, although music videos seem to still be on the cards as she tees up a new release.

Based on the reels she has recently posted on both Instagram and YouTube Shorts, her content now appears to be taking a more informative, biographical approach. Reels have covered everything from ‘How to get into music as a teenager’ to speaking out against AI to promoting women’s rights.

It’s a bold and defiant move from a guitarist who has been seen as blue guitar’s next best thing – we won’t use the phrase ‘torch bearer’ – for many years now. She is, in effect, stepping away from the fanbase that has gotten her this far, but it’s also a move that puts her creative and personal wants and needs before all else.

What doesn’t change is Bowers’ talents, and if she wants to put them towards art that she is more personally attached to, that can only yield great results.

Samantha Fish admits she used to be trigger-happy with her lead playing, piling on ideas whenever she was given a solo spot. It took some blunt studio advice to change how she thinks about the role of the guitar in a song.

Guitar solos are one of the most demanding forms of electric guitar expression. Get them right, and they can define a career — Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” didn’t just showcase technique, it reshaped what the instrument could be. Get them wrong, though, and they risk coming off as self-indulgent at best, or meme-worthy at worst.

In her early days recording and performing live, Fish was eager to demonstrate everything she could do as a blues guitar player, often at the expense of the music itself.

“When I was young, any time I got the opportunity to do a guitar solo, I’d throw in every trick,” she tells Guitar Interactive Magazine. “I’m in the blues world, so at a lot of jam sessions it’s about improvising around the original form, and I’d be like ‘Here’s this lick, here’s this lick.’”

That instinct — which is common among developing players trying to prove themselves — meant the focus often drifted away from the song. What she needed was a reset in perspective.

That moment arrived during the sessions for her 2015 album, Wild Heart, when she was working with Luther Dickinson.

“I was trying to do a solo — ‘trying’ being the operative word here – and he came in like, ‘It’s all bullshit!’” she recalls. “He said, ‘There’s a melody in the song; you can hear the hook when you’re singing. You need to cop that and build something around it — create a counterhook and build off that.’”

“I’ve realized that’s what you do; you create a hook, you build off of that, you weave something exciting, and if you can return to that hook at the end of the solo when it comes to fruition, that’s where the cheers come from,” Fish notes. “There’s something about that return to the earworm.”

The lesson stuck. Rather than treating solos as a showcase for technique, Fish began approaching them as extensions of the song’s central melody—something to serve the composition rather than overwhelm it.

“In music, what are we trying to do other than write great melodies that really engage with people?” she ponders. “As a guitar player, I was getting bogged down with trying to show what I could do. Sometimes the best approach is to lie back, listen, breathe; come up with a real simple idea, and figure out how to execute it with the most drama and dynamics.”

Looking back, she now considers her early approach a misstep, even describing her debut-era instincts as “shitty.” Her recent work, including Paper Doll Live, reflects a more disciplined, song-first philosophy that highlights how far her playing and writing have evolved.

While few guitarists have built a more distinctive voice than David Gilmour, there's one player whose position he has long envied: Eric Clapton.

Not because Clapton is more famous, or because of his technique, but because of the freedom his blues background affords him.

“I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy of Eric Clapton’s position,” Gilmour says. “He has his wealth of material, and he's such a consummate blues player that he's got a wealth of other people's material that he can play that's not so well known. He can take out a new band every time.

“That would be a nice position to be in. Then reality kicks in. But I'm not in that position.”

It's a surprising admission from a guitarist whose own catalog includes some of rock's most celebrated solos. Yet Gilmour has never viewed himself as a traditional blues player in the Clapton mold.

In fact, he says his signature style was shaped partly by necessity.

“I wasn't gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Rick Beato in 2024. “There were years when I was younger when I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn't ever really going to happen.”

Rather than chase technical flash, Gilmour gravitated toward melody and phrasing, drawing inspiration from early hero Hank Marvin.

“Hank was just playing a tune,” he said. “I think I come from there.”

That melodic approach would become the cornerstone of Gilmour's playing with Pink Floyd, helping him forge a style that stood apart from both blues traditionalists and the generation of electric guitar heroes obsessed with speed. He’s said before that his style is “an amalgamation of folk and blues.” As a young guitarist, he studied the work of Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Peter Green, borrowing ideas while gradually developing a voice of his own.

“You bend a note, hold it, then shake it,” he said of his vibrato technique in a 1983 interview. “It's kind of like the way classically trained singers hold a note for a couple of seconds, then add vibrato. I've always enjoyed listening to guitarists who do that well — players like Peter Green.”

Even after decades at the top of the guitar world, during which heÆs performed some of the most-loved guitar solos, Gilmour has remained surprisingly self-critical. Speaking to Guitar World in 1998, he admitted that “about once a year, I have sort of an attack of a guilty conscience about my abilities, so I'll sit and run through a couple of scales.”

That lingering insecurity may help explain his admiration for Clapton's position. Gilmour can appreciate the freedom that comes with being able to draw from a vast blues repertoire, even if pursuing that path would have meant abandoning the qualities that made him unique in the first place.

As Gilmour himself once observed, he can try to sound like Jeff Beck, Clapton or Hendrix, “but it never works.” He only ever sounds like David Gilmour.

Years before Joe Walsh scored solo hits and sawed up hotel rooms with the Eagles, the guitarist was making his mark with the hard rock trio the James Gang. Which is how he came to meet and jam with Jimi Hendrix backstage at a club in 1970 where both acts were billed along with Sly & the Family Stone.

“It was in Youngstown, Ohio,” Walsh said in a 2012 interview with Howard Stern. The James Gang was opening the show and sharing a dressing room with Hendrix.

“We finished, came in, and he’s sitting playing his guitar,” the “Rocky Mountain Way” composer recalls. “And I come in with mine, and we had a jam. I showed him my guitar, and he showed me his.”

Walsh confirms that Hendrix was every bit as sensational as other guitarists have said. When he performed, he notes, the response was “‘what the hell are we doing?’ “That was generally thought by the community."

While he says Hendrix was a “wonderful” guy, his friendliness did little to diminish the weight of his reputation.

“Of course I’m intimidated by him,” Walsh confesses. “I mean, he had an aura; he had feathers on! It was terrifying.”

Still, Walsh had the presence of mind to take notes, hoping to extract the secrets behind Hendrix’s electric guitar magic during “three or four minutes” that felt like a master class.

“I paid attention to his guitar, like, how heavy or light the strings were, and what the action was, because he was a tough one,” says Walsh, who notes that his own guitar was a Les Paul.

“Because he was left-handed, everything was backward. That’s why he sounded like that. None of us right-handed guitar players could do what he was doing. And that’s why we couldn’t crack the code.”

Walsh leaned further into that theory speaking with Guitar Player last year, noting, “It was like you almost had to be on acid to conceive what he was playing.

“One of the reasons people have such a hard time playing like Jimi is that he used an upside-down right-handed Strat, so he had his tremolo bar on the top, by the low-E string,” he explained. “It’s so hard to play like that when you have a regular Strat with a tremolo bar below the high-E string. It requires a different technique.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan used a left-handed tremolo on his iconic right-handed "Number One" Stratocaster primarily as a tribute to Hendrix, whose music he first heard on an album that had been tossed in the trash. Nevertheless, while SRV may have come closest to capturing Jimi’s sonic soul, no one could top him, as Walsh attests.

“I’m a big believer in collaborations,” says journeyman guitarist and composer Gary Lucas. “I think a good collaboration definitely is sometimes mostly greater than the sum of the individual parts going into it.”

Lucas is certainly in a position to know. In a career spanning more than five decades, he’s collaborated, worked, or played guitar with some of rock’s most distinctive artists, including Jeff Buckley, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, John Cale, Captain Beefheart, Chris Cornell, and Bryan Ferry, as well as composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Like Forrest Gump, he seems to always be where the real action is happening.

Buckley is a case in point. The two met at a tribute concert to the singer’s late father, Tim Buckley. Soon after, Buckley was performing with Lucas’s psychedelic rock band Gods and Monsters. Once Buckley got his own record deal, Lucas contributed a pair of tracks to his celebrated studio album Grace: the title track and “Mojo Pin.”

“I had given the music of ‘Grace’ a crack before I met Jeff,” he recalls. “I had some of it already written, but it just sucked in what I had done. But then once Jeff heard it, he took it to a whole different place.”

The New Yorker once called Lucas “the Thinking Man’s Guitar Hero.” We asked him to tell us about five artists with whom he’s inarguably served in that role.

Jeff Buckley

“Jeff was the most incredible young musician all around — not just an amazing vocalist, but an accomplished guitar player, too. Pretty much any instrument he picked up, he could get music out of it, which is what they used to say about Brian Jones of the Stones. And when I worked with him, he was 24, so he was very fresh, unspoiled, with a great attitude, and super nice. It was only after the business crept into our relationship that tension set in. But initially it was like a dream.

“I had first met him at Greetings From Tim Buckley, a tribute to his father, who I adored. I remember feeling overwhelmed when I first heard him sing. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I was in a deal with Columbia Records and the singer I had wasn’t working out very well. I told Jeff, ‘I might be able to get you on this record — I think you’re so great,’ and he said, ‘I’d love to.’

So I took him to lunch and he told me that he adored the Smiths, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin. And so do I! My dream with this band was to take a bit of this template of a shamanistic singer-rock star and drag it into the ’90s, taking a bit of that formula but doing something fresh with it, incorporating different elements. And that really appealed to Jeff, as he fancied himself doing that. He was so into this idea.

“The beauty of working with him was that I could come up with instrumental pieces and send them to him, and he never failed to come back with perfect lyrics and a melody. That’s why I loved that writing relationship. He always rose to the occasion.”

Chris Cornell

“I first met Chris at a wake for Jeff Buckley. There was sort of a concert after Jeff had died at this church in Brooklyn. And Chris was a friend of Jeff’s, as Chris was one of the few artists out of the Seattle scene that Jeff bonded with and admired. Chris was a big Led Zeppelin fan, too.

“Several years later, Steve Lillywhite, who was producing Chris’s album Carry On, called me in and said, ‘Chris would like you to play on this new album I am producing.’ I went to Hollywood, where they were recording, and Chris heard me play really up close and watched me. He threw about six songs at me throughout the day, and at the end he said, ‘Can you stay here all week? I really love the way you play.’ So I stayed and ended up being on about eight songs on Carry On.

“Chris had already done the demos and the writing. At the time, he’d been in a disagreement over writing credits with the members of Audioslave. I did show him a few instrumental ideas that I had for him, but I never demanded any credit. He was under a lot of pressure both personally and with his management to keep the lion’s share of the writing as much as possible, as is the case with artists who have heavy management.

“I could have said, ‘Well, Chris, these are my parts,’ but I was just happy to do it. Sometimes you can stand up for yourself, but other times I think it’s wise not to if you want to keep a good working relationship. I was grateful to have that gig and super happy about everything.

“I really miss the guy. I thought he was so talented. I couldn’t believe the way he passed. I didn’t see it coming at all, but he had his demons. It was a big shock. I would’ve loved to have continued to do more work with him.”

Lou Reed

“Musician magazine asked 20 guitarists, including me, to pick their favorite guitar solos. I submitted Lou Reed’s solo on ‘I Heard Her Call My Name,’ a Velvet Underground track that opens side two of their second album White Light/White Heat. Lou does this totally crazy feedback-drenched, somewhat atonal, free jazz–type solo with explosions of feedback.

“I later found out it was controversial among the group because Lou and an engineer went back into the studio the next day, at the crack of dawn, to turn his guitar up in the mix. The band was not happy about it. But Lou knew how powerful it was and wanted it to be more prominent.

“Six months later, I was out at JFK Airport to take a trip to the Berlin Jazz Festival. Lou was at the airport too and walked up to me. He stuck his hand out and said, ‘I want to thank you, Gary, for that nice thing that you said about me in Musician magazine.’ I said, ‘Oh Lou, come on, I think you’re spectacularly talented and I admire your work so much and what you’re doing today.’ So we bonded over that and then he made a point of seeing me in a rehearsal doing what I was doing.

“Afterward he said, ‘We should get together when I get back to New York.’ He invited me up to jam with him one day. We went out to lunch, and it was then that I found out he was a gearhead. All afternoon people were bringing custom-made guitars and new amplifiers for him to test. I didn’t realize he had this gear-mania side to him.

“He wanted me to teach him the Jewish song ‘I Have a Little Dreidel,’ as he was rediscovering his roots, so I showed him the song. He said, ‘I could listen to you play for hours, Gary.’ He was super complimentary.

“The funny thing is, I did a show with him and I was just pumped about the whole thing. He told me, ‘Don’t bring any pedals — just plug right into the amp.’ So I came with just my electric guitar — and then he showed up with a roadie and about 15 pedals set up all in front of him! But that was Lou.”

Captain Beefheart

“He was the most gifted artist. I never met anybody like him. He was completely light years ahead of most. On a good day, he was utterly charming, especially if it was a one-on-one situation. He’d draw you in and you’d have these deep philosophical conversations that could touch on everything and nothing. He could pluck images out of the air and just crack you up.

“For example, one day we were over visiting a friend and the television was going on in the background with some news show. It turned out to be about race relations and riots in the ’60s in America. And the announcer said just randomly, ‘a mood of black rage swept over America in the 1960s,’ and he caught that word and went, ‘Black rage! What a hip name for a perfume, man. Let’s do that!’ So he was taking it all in and living in this largely whimsical, lovely world of Beefheart.

“But on a bad day, he could be extremely paranoid and angry, especially if somebody in the band was failing or not playing something exactly right. He would make the band work really hard to codify his instructions for a song. He didn’t write things out, and a lot of the sounds that he got were captured in the moment.

“Once, when we were recording in a London hotel, he threw an ashtray against the wall in the room. It spun around the floor for 30 seconds, and the tape captured the sound. He said, ‘That’s the drum solo, man.’ I had to give that to [Robert] Williams [drummer] to learn.

“Sometimes he would get on your instrument and move your fingers — ‘No, no, it’s here’ — just to mess up the chord you’re playing. He could achieve really good keyboard effects and saxophone, too. He’d get on a keyboard and improvise, but he couldn’t repeat it once he had the thing down. You’d ask him to play it again to clarify the part, but he couldn’t do it. He was a total primitive. He just had an instinctual feeling for the instrument and would get in grooves and ride them. And then you had to learn what he’d done.”

Bruce Springsteen

“I heard that first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., while I was on the way to go to work in the Far East to visit a friend. I found ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Spirit in the Night’ enchanting and inspirational songs. I thought he’s truly a poet with so much soul.

“In 2003 there was a charity album being made, Light of Day: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen, and I was asked to be involved. They wanted me to take one of Bruce’s songs and do my own version with Gods & Monsters, so I took ‘Ain’t Got You’ from Tunnel of Love, and we did a ripping version.

“We were invited to do it in a public performance at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, which is where Bruce got his start. We just got off the stage when I got tapped on the shoulder. It was Bruce. I was startled because I did not expect that he would be there. He said, ‘Man, you’re a phenomenal guitarist. And that was a phenomenal version of my song.’ He used that word twice! He began quizzing me, like, ‘Where are you from? What are you doing?’ I walked out of there feeling like a million bucks.

“A few years after, they were putting together a big multiple-artist tribute in New York called the Nebraska Project, where artists performed arrangements from his album Nebraska. I performed ‘State Trooper’ and played it solo.

“When I finished, Bruce bounded onto the stage and gave me a bear hug. At the party afterward, he and Patti Scialfa were super nice. My wife said, ‘Bruce, I love The Rising. I listen to it every day.’ And he’s like, ‘Come here, darling…’”

By the mid-1980s, Alice Cooper's career had lost much of its momentum. Years of heavy drinking had taken a toll, and after helping define shock rock in the 1970s, he found himself struggling to connect in an era increasingly dominated by glam metal and MTV.

His early-'80s albums — Flush the Fashion, Zipper Catches Skin and DaDa — failed to gain commercial traction. After getting sober in 1983, Cooper set out to rebuild his career, but reclaiming relevance would require more than a refreshed image. He needed a harder-edged sound that could compete with the guitar-driven metal acts then filling arenas and dominating music television.

That presented a challenge. Cooper's longtime guitar collaborators, Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, had helped define his classic sound, but the mid-'80s demanded a different approach. To make an impact in the shred era, Cooper needed a guitarist who could deliver technical firepower while helping shape a contemporary metal identity.

He found exactly that in Kane Roberts. Just 24 years old, the muscular guitarist brought formidable chops, a larger-than-life stage presence and a knack for writing the kind of polished, hook-heavy metal that was thriving in the decade.

Roberts wasn’t a brand name — he was starting from the bottom. His background was even more unlikely than Cooper’s return to the limelight.

“I was dealing cards at illegal blackjack games to make money,” Roberts tells Guitar Player.

“It was at a hotel. They’d rent big conference rooms on the weekend, and they’d show me where all the guns were, I’d do that to survive.”

But he had dreams of making it as a musician.

“I had recorded a tape and given it to a company called Screen Jumps Publishing,” he explains. “And they gave it to Bob Ezrin.”

Ezrin had produced much of Cooper’s work in the ‘70s and, though he and Cooper didn’t work together in the 1980s, he was part of his trusted camp. Ezrin liked what he heard and invited Kane to meet with him, Cooper and Cooper’s manager, Shep Gordon.

“I went down there, and I sat in this room with Shep Gordon, Ezrin and Alice Cooper,” Roberts says. “Alice and I got along; we just started laughing. We immediately became friends.”

Before long, Roberts was Cooper’s new lead guitarist and a key creative partner in the singer’s comeback effort.

“We really got into it,” Roberts says. “I didn’t want Alice to seem like he just survived rehab. I wanted him to come back as a nuclear version of what he’d been.”

The challenge was to modernize Cooper’s sound without losing the qualities that had made him a star in the first place. Roberts believed the music needed a heavier, more contemporary edge to compete in a decade dominated by hard rock and metal.

“We had to upgrade the energy and the sound to make it much more metal,” Roberts explains, “because that’s where I came from.”

At the same time, neither musician wanted to abandon Cooper’s roots.

“We did need to preserve the history of that music and keep the essence of the classics,” Roberts says. “Alice and I agreed on that.”

The balance between reinvention and tradition was evident on Constrictor, released in 1986. Even the cover art nodded to Cooper’s past, depicting the singer entwined with a giant snake — imagery reminiscent of earlier albums such as Killer.

Musically, however, Constrictor was firmly of its era. Tracks like “Teenage Frankenstein” paired Cooper’s trademark theatrics with contemporary production and Roberts’ aggressive guitar work. The album and its supporting tour helped reestablish Cooper as a commercial force. Constrictor was certified Gold and reached Number 59 on the Billboard 200.

For Roberts, it was a promising start, but he believed the partnership had room to grow.

“For the second album, we hit the ground running,” he says. “We came off tour and started recording, and it was killer. We tore right through it, and the process was really good, as was our relationship.”

Roberts also became a prominent part of Cooper’s stage show. With his muscular physique, high-energy playing and arsenal of shred-approved electric guitars, including Kramers and Schecters. But his best known weapon of choice was a six-stringed machine gun that shot fire.

“Some kid called up Shep Gordon and said, ‘Hey, I have a guitar that might be good for the Alice Cooper tour,’” Roberts says. "Shep called me up and said, 'Hey, Kane, take a look at this and meet with this kid.' So I did."

Despite the strong working relationship between Cooper and Roberts, 1987’s Raise Your Fist and Yell did not build significantly on the momentum of Constrictor. Reviews were mixed, and while the album was certified Gold, it reached only Number 73 on the Billboard 200 — a step down from its predecessor’s Number 59 peak.

Still, Roberts’ reputation was rising. Geffen Records saw commercial potential in the guitarist’s combination of technical skill and larger-than-life image, and the label offered him a solo deal.

“It ended,” Roberts says of his time with Cooper. “I got a record deal with Geffen, and I think Cooper changed labels when he did his next record, too. It just ended. There wasn’t any controversy; we just stepped in different directions.”

Cooper did indeed move from MCA to Epic, and the stylistic direction he and Roberts had developed together continued into 1989’s Trash. The album embraced polished, radio-friendly hard rock, and its lead single, “Poison” — cowritten by Cooper, guitarist John McCurry and hitmaker Desmond Child — became Cooper’s biggest hit in years, reaching number seven in the United States and number two in the United Kingdom.

Roberts, meanwhile, launched his solo career with Geffen. His self-titled 1987 debut drew a modest response, but 1991’s Saints and Sinners found a more appreciative audience and later developed a cult following. The album included the single “Does Anybody Really Fall in Love Anymore?,” written by Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Diane Warren. The song had previously been recorded by Cher for her 1989 album Heart of Stone.

Roberts stops short of taking credit for Cooper’s late-'80s resurgence.

“It was more like Alice’s evolution,” he says. “I’m happy to have influenced that a little bit, but he takes the bull by the horns and runs with it wherever he wants to go.

Although the two discussed working together again over the years, a reunion did not materialize until 2022, when Roberts returned to Cooper’s band as a temporary replacement for Nita Strauss during her tour with Demi Lovato.

“Alice has had a great many guitarists shuffling in and out of this band,” Roberts says. “But I gotta be honest with you, I never expected to be called. His band has always been really good.”

Since completing that stint, Roberts has focused on his own projects. As he puts it, he is pursuing them “without the bullshit recording industry,” though he remains optimistic about whatever comes next.

“You have to have faith,” he says. “If you work hard enough, the world will beat a path to your door.”

“That’s just the way life operates,” he says. “I’m living proof of that. I worked very hard, and the only band that would ever hire me was Alice Cooper. He found me, this 230-pound guy playing guitar. It was like, ‘Who is gonna hire this guy?’ He was the only one. Alice never goes for the safe bet, and I think that’s awesome.”

“I have been around the world, but I’ve never been to Orinda,” Latin music maestro Charo proclaims with her signature Spanish accent. “It’s such beautiful name. If I have a little girl, I will call her Orinda. I understand it is near San Francisco, and the greatest audience is there because the people are crazy like me!”

Within the first few moments talking to Charo, her infectious personality shines through even the jankiest of phone connections. It’s immediately apparent why the lady born María del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza in Murcia, Spain, lit up American television screens on shows including the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Fantasy Island and the Love Boat after she moved Stateside in the late ’60s.

GP readers eventually voted Charo as Best Classical Flamenco Guitarist in the World. Twice! Let that sink in for a moment and consider that she was trained by the most influential acoustic guitar player of all time, classical master Andres Segovia.

During her rise to fame the guitar took a back seat to her comedic persona and “cuchi-cuchi” catch phrase, even though she was already an ace on her instrument. So, she played the entertainment business game, and kept on practicing.

She says, “Little by little, I discovered how to merry the serious part with the fun part.”

Charo is still very much Charo. She can clearly entertain with her charming stories and killer comedic instinct. But over time her guitar playing has evolved from a side story to the heart of her act.

“I got a great review on the concert I did about two months ago at Pepperdine college, she reports. “And the message was incredible, it said that there were tears of happiness. People came from far away and they were so happy just to hear beautiful music. I understand because sometimes it happens to me.

“When the music goes so deep that it takes you to another level in your soul. To me, that’s worth it. As long I have the energy to put my feet on the stage, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Unlike many performers that still get stage fright most nights, even long into a successful career, Charo seems even more comfortable about being onstage than she is off it.

“Off the stage I am a cucaracha with a lot of issues,” Charo says with a laugh. “I don’t get nervous onstage because I love people and I have trained like an Olympian. When you train and train, practice and practice, you don’t get nervous because you are ready.”

“So I will talk for some time and then I’ll say, ‘Let me introduce you to a side of me that I have been hiding for a while.’ And then I’ll play the guitar the best I can.

“I go for a high energy level. And I’ll keep it up for 30 to 45 minutes going from salsa to rhumba to flamenco.”

She loves it all, but she doesn’t hesitate to name a favorite piece that we can expect to hear in Orinda at GP Presents, citing ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ by Juaquin Rodrigo and calling it “a gift from God to every musician.”

Having lived one of the more interesting lives one can imagine, Charo has developed a profound perspective.

“I feel lucky and honored to be performing for everybody in Orinda,” she says. “When you go to perform and see lots of people ready for good entertainment, it’s priceless.”

If you’re planning to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, June 20th, make plans to share the evening with Charo at the historic Orinda Theatre in Orinda, California, located in the East Bay a short ride inland from Berkeley.

And keep an eye out for a guest appearance by Charo in a new comedy starting RuPaul that’s coming to theaters this summer called Stop! That! Train!

Secure your tickets to GP Presents Charo at the Orinda Theatre on June 20.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Charo in Orinda, California, on Saturday, June 20, please send an email and put put “Charo” in the subject line. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact is greatly appreciated for confirmation.

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

EVENT DETAILS
GP Presents Charo! in Concert

Saturday, June 20

7:00 p.m.

The Orinda Theatre

Orinda, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

Flatpicking queen Molly Tuttle epitomizes classic Americana artistry, so it’s a natural for her to put her fingerprint on a signature Martin — well actually, two Martins. The D-18 Molly Tuttle is her take on the all-American Dreadnought, while the D-X2E Molly Tuttle is made south of the border to deliver similar playability with far greater affordability. The raw ingredients are notably different, but both Martin Dreadnoughts share the same essential recipe and key specifications.

Tuttle is known to play a few guitar brands, but she’s been a true-blue Martin lover since she was a girl. She’s well aware of its history and what works for her approach. Molly went with mostly traditional specifications, and one that’s a bit of an outlier.

Her choice of a D-18 echoes the preference of a long line of acoustic icons from Hank Williams to Norman Blake, who praised the mahogany model on his iconic 1990 duet with Tony Rice, the “D-18 Song, (Thank You Mr. Martin).” Lots of bluegrassers favor mahogany back and sides for its articulate tonal nature. Tuttle’s D-18 features a throwback nut width measurement and an authentic 1941 neck profile with a Standard Taper. What’s particularly interesting about Tuttle’s D-18 is the rear-shifted scalloped bracing under its solid spruce top.

Rearward- Versus Forward-Shifted X-Bracing

Rearward-shifted X-bracing is designed to make the guitar sound even more articulate, and it goes against the grain to a degree. Forward-shifted X-bracing is designed to increase bass and resonance by moving the X closer to the sound hole, leaving more of the top to resonate more freely between it and the bridge. That’s the preference of players including Billy Strings who employed it on his signature D-28 that came out last year, and it has literally become standard at Martin as nearly all Standard Dreadnoughts since 2025 feature forward-shifted, GE-scalloped bracing. “GE” stands for Golden Era and refers to the period of approximately 1920 to 1942 when Martin meticulously shaved bracings down by hand to facilitate greater top flexibility. The D-18 Molly Tuttle features that GE-style scallop as well.

Molly and Billy’s Martins, Tonal Comparisons

So while the D-18 Molly Tuttle draws its inspiration from her own favorite 1943 D-18, its rear-shifted X brace is designed to tame bass boom while adding clarity and punch. That’s exactly the tonal hallmark of this guitar: it’s ultra-articulate and punchy. Note separation is exquisite, which makes sense for a guitar designed around her fabulous flatpicking skills.

Take a close look at her right-hand technique and notice how she alternates between plucking closer to and then further away from the neck at breakneck speed. Or check out her clawhammer approach, adapted from the banjo. You can see and hear why she’d appreciate that X brace being a bit further back towards the bridge and want a guitar with pinpoint tonal accuracy from note to note to match her own precision on the instrument.

And this is a Custom/Special Edition instrument with the kind of craftsmanship you’d expect from a guitar that costs significantly more than a Standard. It stands to reason that attention to detail, perhaps with a degree of hand-tuning factors into how Martin is able to make this D-18 sound so springy, airy and articulate while still having a nice low-end response.

It’s nowhere near as robust as, say, the D-28 Billy Strings with its forward shifted X-brace and hearty rosewood back and sides, but that’s clearly by design. Molly is going for a more refined tone compared to Billy’s burly tone. It’s kind of funny to make such a comparison, but they are essentially the current prince and princess of the bluegrass scene, and I suppose it’s rather natural for the boy to be a bit more rambunctious while the lady is graceful.

American Molly vs. Mexican Molly

It’s always a bit of a challenge to consider a guitar that costs 75 percent less in the same breath, and the greatest challenge for the manufacturer is clearly tone. The D-X2E Molly Tuttle has a standard X-brace, which makes sense for a guitar made of laminate, which is inherently brighter than solid wood.

Taken on its own, the D-X2E Molly Tuttle sounds pretty darn good. It delivers nice clarity and punch and decent low end that one can accentuate by plucking closer to the sound hole than the bridge. Side by side, the Mexican model is not in the same league as it’s American cousin, nor would I expect it to be.

That said, the D-X2E comes with a pickup while the D-18 version does not, and the D-X2E sounds big and bold when plugged into a nice acoustic amplifier, such as the Circa 74 used for these tests. The E1 pickup and preamp system with its onboard tuner tucked perfectly in the lip of the sound hole is super handy.

Playability

The D-18 Molly Tuttle and D-X2E Molly Tuttle are very playable guitars right out of the box with factory action, with the latter having lighter strings. You notice something as soon as you lay a hand in open position. Modern standard nut width is 1.75 inches, but many vintage Dreadnoughts measured 1.69 (1 11/16) inches. That’s the spec on both of Tuttle’s Martins, and I appreciate it. Being narrow at the nut helps a player get fingers on frets in ready fashion down in the longer fretted regions of the first few positions.

These necks are both built to 1941 profile specs with a Standard Taper, so the overall feel is quite similar. Both feel nice and chunky in hand, especially in lower positions. I seemed to feel more of a V shape, particularly on the D-18, further up the neck in higher positions.

No one in their right mind would ever hire me to play lead guitar in their bluegrass band, but I can muster up a few good licks with the right guitar in hand. The D-18 Molly Tuttle has such a bona fide classic Martin feel under the fingers that it’s easy to find yourself ripping off more than a few and taking them a bit further than you might otherwise do. I found that to be the case with the D-X2E too.

I’m mostly a fingerpicker that uses fake nails, but I was drawn to using a plectrum more often on these signature Molly Tuttle Martins. There’s something about having a high degree of tonal articulation that in turn makes you want to play more articulately. Both guitars pack plenty of projective power, and you truly get the most of that when you dig in with a serious pick.

Hey Good Lookin’

Let’s face it, lots of Martins look alike, but the D-18 Molly Tuttle is as unique as the player who picked it. I dig the vintage sunburst top with glossy finish, and her choice of Moon Phase inlays that practically appear to pop out from the fingerboard.

And in the aesthetics department, the D-X2E is in the same arena. From a distance, they appear quite similar. A closer look reveals subtle differences including a satin finish, and inlays made of faux mother of pearl and abalone instead of real seashells. Bottom line: both of Molly’s Martins look fabulous!

Major Tuttle fans and anyone after a super-sonic flatpicking D-18 tone shouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on the Molly Tuttle Signature. For those on a budget and/or want to plug in right out of the box, then the D-X2E serves those purposes and delivers a fine acoustic sound as well.

Either guitar is a strong value. Looking at the wider Martin Dreadnought range, the D-18 Custom shares the exact same price point of $4,199. From what I can tell, the D-18 Molly Tuttle is much more aesthetically interesting. I’ll be it plays a little easier as well, especially in the lower positions near that narrower nut. And the D-X2E Molly Tuttle delivers a lot of the same features and tone for about a quarter of the cash. Martin and Molly Tuttle have got a great thing going. Fans of both should be very happy with her new signature models.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT martinguitar.com

D-18 Molly Tuttle

PRICE $4,199 with molded hardshell case

NUT WIDTH 1 11/16", bone

NECK Mahogany, 1941 profile with Standard Taper, dovetail joint

FRETBOARD Ebony with Moon Phase mother-of-pearl inlays, 25.4" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Nickel open gear with oval knobs

BODY Solid mahogany back & sides, solid spruce top

BRIDGE Ebony with compensated bone saddle

ELECTRONICS None

FACTORY STRINGS Martin Authentic Acoustic Lifespan 2.0 Phosphor Bronze Medium gauges .013—.056

WEIGHT 3.8 lbs (as tested)

BUILT USA

KUDOS Gorgeous aesthetics, ultra-articulate tone without being too top heavy, fine playability

CONCERNS Articulate tone is very revealing and therefore not for the faint of heart

D-X2E Molly Tuttle

PRICE $999 street with softshell case

NUT WIDTH 1 11/16", white Corian

NECK Select hardwood, 1941 profile with Standard Taper, mortise & tenon joint

FRETBOARD Ebony, 25.4" scale

FRETS 20

TUNERS Nickel open gear with oval knobs

BODY Figured mahogany high-pressure laminate back & sides, spruce top

BRIDGE Ebony with compensated white Tusq saddle

ELECTRONICS Martin E1 with volume and tone flywheel controls plus tuner on/off and phase buttons in upper lip of sound hole; tuner in lower lip

FACTORY STRINGS Martin Authentic Acoustic Lifespan 2.0 Light gauges .012—.054

WEIGHT 4.5 lbs (as tested)

BUILT Mexico

KUDOS Great playability, strong amplified tone, affordable

CONCERNS Acoustic tone is quite bright

There’s no doubt Eddie Van Halen was one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. Although he has his detractors, Van Halen’s playing helped ignite an electric guitar revolution built on virtuosity that came to dominate the 1980s.

But Van Halen believed many of the guitarists who followed in his wake misunderstood what he was actually doing. Speaking with Dweezil Zappa for a 1995 Guitar Player interview, he argued that an emphasis on speed and flash missed the point of his playing, which — at its core — was about feel, not technical display.

“I’ve influenced a batch of people in a certain period of time, and I think those people missed my point,” he said. “They took what they learned from me and made it very sterile and too calculated, too typewriter-perfect. I won’t name any names.

“People got sick of that type of flash guitar playing, whereas I never considered what I did flash. It was natural to me. I still play the same.”

Van Halen acknowledged that he, too, was shaped by earlier players, most notably Eric Clapton. But even as he absorbed those influences, he insisted his own playing quickly moved in a direction rooted less in imitation than in instinct.

“Eric Clapton was my god and everybody else’s,” he said. “I said that once in an interview: ‘That’s the guy I grew up on, but I don’t play anything like him.’ And it came back to haunt me. They took it like I was being an uppity prick about it. I didn’t mean that at all. I just meant that if you listen to Clapton and listen to me, it’s two completely different styles, even though he’s the guy I grew up on.“

Nevertheless, Van Halen took one rule from Clapton: a solo should tell a story.

“The shit he does… he spoke when he played,” he said of Clapton. “After having grown up on that, I thought that every time I solo I should make it like that too.”

By the end of the 1980s and into the early ’90s, guitar music began shifting away from the excesses of shred toward a more stripped-down aesthetic associated with grunge and alternative rock. Van Halen viewed that change not as a rejection of his era but as part of a recurring cycle in popular music.

Nevertheless, he found the results uninspiring.

“Nowadays it’s almost like solos are interchangeable. You can put a disc on and listen to a solo on one song and you might as well put it in any song because they don’t mean anything. It’s basically just beating off, and there’s no point to it.

“I think the reason why people play the way they do now is because it all broke down. Where could guitar have gone from where people in the ’80s took it? It was so flash it got ridiculous. So shit — the natural thing is to break it down to the lowest common denominator and start over.”

Ed wasn’t dismissive of newer players as a group, however. Even artists who stood outside technical orthodoxy, like Kurt Cobain, could still be making meaningful musical statements.

“He was still speaking,” Van Halen said of the Nirvana guitarist — a point that Joe Satriani recently made. “He was still expressing himself through one string or one note or whatever. But some people’s lack of technique doesn’t work.”

Ultimately, Van Halen saw the ebb and flow of guitar styles as cyclical rather than permanent — an ongoing reset between extremes of complexity and simplicity.

“The natural thing is to break it down to the lowest common denominator and start over,” he said. “And it’s just gonna build right back up. It’s almost like every ten years it happens. This is phase two of disco and punk. We survived the first one, and we’re going to survive this one too.”

When Brent Hinds left Mastodon after 25 years, Marcus King stepped up to help one of his guitar heroes get back on the road. Months later, King says he was forced to kick Hinds off the tour as the guitarist's increasingly erratic behavior spiraled into backstage chaos.

Hinds co-founded the Atlanta progressive metal outfit alongside Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor in 2000. Then, to the shock of the band’s fanbase, Mastodon announced its split with Hinds after 25 years together in March 2025. At the time, Kelliher described it as “a hard decision we all had to make.”

Following his departure, Hinds focused on his solo work, and King — a longtime admirer of his genre-blurring talents — invited him out on tour.

Speaking during a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, King hailed Hinds as “the fucking man,” but admitted their time working together was regretfully short-lived.

“Brent and Mastodon kind of had a mutual agreement that he would leave the band, so he was doing his solo thing, and he’s one of my heroes,” King explained. “I was like, ‘I’ll take you out, sure,’ and he just threw it together somehow.

“Then I ended up having to kick him off the tour, which broke my heart,” he added. “But he kind of forced my hand.”

King, who has been candid about his own struggles with alcohol and substance abuse — he once got so drunk he doesn’t remember buying a vintage electric guitar — said he could relate to some of Hinds’ behavior during that period.

The split from Mastodon had clearly been difficult. Several months after leaving the band, Hinds publicly blasted his former bandmates, calling them “horrible humans,” before later claiming that “they kicked me out of the band for embarrassing them for being who I am.”

Still, King had a tour to run.

According to the guitarist, the breaking point came after an incident involving a member of Hinds’ touring camp.

“The night in question, I walked outside, and he had this tour manager named Angela, and she was crying, and my tour manager was holding her, and she was crying,” King recalled. “I was like, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘I walked into the dressing room, and Brent was peeing on the floor. I said, “No, no, you have to stop.” So then he peed in his mouth.’”

King laughed as he recounted the story, calling the incident “hilarious,” but acknowledged that it had deeply upset the tour manager.

After that, he said, Hinds’ place on the tour became increasingly difficult to justify.

“I was ready to fix it,” King continued. “But his whole band and crew were like, ‘It’s not working.’ He was just, just partying a little too much.”

Despite the chaos, King’s recollections were ultimately affectionate. Following Hinds’ death in a motorcycle crash in August 2025, he attended the guitarist’s funeral, where the story took on a life of its own.

“At his funeral, I told Matt Pike that story,” King said. “He was like, ‘Yeah … and? That’s normal.’”

Hinds would later contribute what is believed to be his final recorded guitar solo to The Marcus King Band’s “Red Door,” playing his trusted Banker Ironman SG-style guitar on the track.

“He slept on the living room couch for a week (or two, who’s counting) with the Marcus King Band at the house they rented down in Macon, Georgia, while they were writing and recording their latest record, Darlin’ Blue, at Capricorn Studios,” Banker Guitars wrote on Instagram.

“Ever the stubborn perfectionist, he managed to do 278 takes before landing on the one he liked best.”

In the months since Hinds’ death, his former Mastodon bandmates have also spoken openly about the difficulty of moving forward without their longtime friend and collaborator. The band’s recent single, “Your Ghost Again,” marks its first release since his passing.

“I understand that, from a fan’s perspective, we never really addressed it. We just couldn’t; it was too much,” Dailor said in an interview shared on the band’s social channels. “I know Brent’s not there, and I know it’s weird, and it’s hard, and some people might be like, ‘Well, I don’t want to listen to it because Brent’s not there, and I’m hurting about that,’ but we are too. I’m still unpacking it.”

The old adage goes that you should never meet your heroes; it’s sure to bring only disappointment.

But the friendship between Eddie Van Halen and Eric Clapton reveals another useful proverb about heroes: Never piss them off; they might tell you what they really think of you.

Although he’s an icon to millions of guitarists today, Eddie Van Halen was relatively unknown when Jas Obrecht interviewed him for Guitar Player’s November 1978 issue. Van Halen, the self-titled debut album from his band, had come out the previous February, but no one had interviewed the guitarist before Obrecht, who delivered essential insights into Eddie’s background, techniques and musical influences.

Among the first things the public ever learned about Eddie Van Halen was the key influence behind his furiously fast, technically precise but melodic electric guitar work.

“I’d say the main one, believe it or not, was Eric Clapton. I mean, I know I don’t sound like him.”

It was a surprising revelation, given that his style was much more raw and aggressive, as well as technical — “more like Hendrix or Blackmore,” Obrecht suggested.

“Yeah, I know,” Eddie replied. “I don’t know why, because Hendrix I like, but I was never into him like I was Clapton.

“And Clapton, man, I know every fuckin’ solo he ever played, note for note, still to this day.

“I used to sit down and learn that stuff note for note [off the record] The live stuff, like ’Spoonful,’ ‘I’m So Glad’ live — all that stuff.”

As Van Halen’s fame grew, Eddie and Clapton eventually crossed paths, hung out and formed a friendly relationship. Although there seemed to be not a drop of blues in Eddie’s highly technical shred guitar work, Clapton — who by this point was deeply wedded to the blues and Fender Stratocasters — suggested there was something innate about the younger guitarist’s sensibilities.

"If Eddie Van Halen likes the way I play, then assumedly, he must like what I liked,” he told Guitar Player in our July 1985 issue. “But if he can recognize all of that and still do what he does, then we have to accept that he's on to something that we're not really clear about. Because he couldn't be doing what he does and recognize Robert Johnson without there being something valid going on.”

It was high praise — an affirmation from an older, established guitar hero that Eddie’s transformational shred guitar work was rooted in the same bedrock from which Clapton’s own muscular and fluidly melodic blues-rock style came.

“He is very fast, and to my ears, a lot of the time he kind of goes over the top,” Clapton continued. “But that's because I'm a more simple player. Maybe I would play like that if I had the technique.

“I’ve heard that he slowed down records of mine to learn the solos. That's dedication! I don't know quite how to respond to that.”

Clapton’s comments might seem like a whole-hearted endorsement of Van Halen and his devotion to the blues. But below the surface, Clapton was harboring profound doubts about Eddie’s understanding of the genre. Roughly two years earlier, he’d been incensed after hearing a tribute song on Brian May’s 1983 Star Fleet Project mini-album. Titled “Blues Breaker,” the nearly 13-minute track featured May and Van Halen going to town on a medium-tempo blues workout that was tagged “Dedicated to EC”

Clapton wasn’t at all pleased by what he heard. While he’d held his tongue when speaking with Guitar Player in 1985, he vented his feelings when interviewed by Musician magazine shorty after, in 1986.

“It was so horrible, and they dedicated it to me,” he said. “They sent me a copy, and I put it on expecting something, and, you know, I was almost insulted that they should send this to me because they both… they can't play! They took turns to play solos and just went head at it with everything they knew. And there was no dynamics, no build up, no sensitivity. I was very disappointed.

“The thing is,” he added, “if [Van Halen] wants to play blues, he has to look at it as a style. It's got rules. It's like Japanese Kabuki theater or something. It's got certain things which you do and other things which you don't do.”

More personal, however, were his comments about Eddie’s obsession with his music. Contrary to his earlier statements to Guitar Player, Clapton felt that, despite studying his work so closely, Eddie had somehow never grasped the essence of the music from which Clapton himself drew.

“Eddie Van Halen went over the top,” he said. “It's crazy for him to have learned that much from me. I mean, he could have just been aware of what I was doing and then said, ‘Oh yeah, well, that's a bit like Buddy Guy,’ or, ‘That's a bit like so, and so.’ Put it all in perspective. To get obsessive about one person…

“If he was that tuned into me and missed that point, then he missed the whole point.”

Harsh as Clapton’s comments were, what tends to get overlooked were his negative appraisals of his own youthful attitude toward blues stated elsewhere in the interview. He cited his ignorance of Sonny Boy Williamson’s blues back when Clapton was a member of the Yardbirds. Clapton says he thought every 12-bar blues was the same.

“But every 12-bar blues is different,” he told Musician. “Sonny Boy Williamson would have an intro on certain songs, and if you didn't know that, then he would be disgusted with you.

“And I know this from experience because he was disgusted with me, because that was my attitude.”

Taken within context, Clapton’s comments are a critique on what guitarists tend to get wrong about playing the blues, and they're spoken from the experience of someone who made the same mistakes. Clapton was playing the mentor trying to help his student avoid his errors.

But the full extent of his treatise was missed if you focused solely on his comments about “Blues Breaker.” Eddie did. He was hurt, but he still hoped to remain friends with Clapton. Some years after, at a party in New York City, Eddie attempted to patch things up. He was reportedly drunk. Clapton — newly sober — came off as dismissive. Eddie was furious. “Forget that teabag,” he said.

That ballsack.

Eddie was still hurt a few years later when he sat down for an interview conducted by Dweezil Zappa in Guitar Player's March 1995 issue. Nearly 20 years after he praised Clapton in our pages, Ed offered a new assessment of his hero.

“I grew up on Clapton, but — don't hate me, Eric! — it's like he doesn't do that anymore. Now when he solos, to me it's like he's pissing up a rope. Excuse my French.

“Listen to his early solos, all the Cream stuff like ‘Sunshine of Your Love.’” Here Eddie played a flurry of Clapton licks. “The shit he does… he spoke when he played.

“And, like, ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ — the end of that solo was great. After having grown up on that, I thought that every time I solo I should make it like that too.”

Clapton might have agreed with some of that, including the part about pissing up a rope. At the end of his Musician interview, he offered a revealing self-critique.

“I always overplay,” he said. “Whenever I listen back to stuff, I'm always disappointed. I mean, I hate listening to cassettes of shows. I listen sometimes, and think I could have done three notes to those 10. Just halved it and made it more meaningful. But it's very difficult.”

“It’s very difficult” — Van Halen and Clapton might have built something from that small patch of common understanding. They never spoke again.

Brian Setzer says he destroyed his beloved 1959 Gretsch 6120 once after a favorite stage stunt went disastrously wrong during a show in Japan.

Setzer and the vintage electric guitar had been inseparable since he bought it as a teenager. But during a concert in Tokyo, he recalls that a crowd-pleasing move he’d performed countless times finally backfired.

“I used to throw the guitar up, way as high as I could, and I would go ‘Wham!’ and snatch it out of the air, and start playing it again,” he says in an interview posted to his YouTube channel.

The crowd loved it, and Setzer loved doing it. So he repeated the stunt night after night — until it finally went wrong.

“I lost it in the lights,” he explains. “I couldn’t see it. It disappeared, and then all of a sudden, down it comes.”

Instinctively, he threw out his hands to catch the falling Gretsch. It was too late.

“I missed it. And it made this god-awful sound, like, ‘How could you do this to me?!’

“The neck flew into the audience, and I had the body in my hand, thinking, Oh my God, I ruined my guitar!”

Fortunately for Setzer, the accident happened in Japan, where respect and politeness are deeply ingrained cultural values.

“Some guy brought me the neck back,” he says. “Anywhere else, it would have been stolen.”

Renowned luthier and pickup designer Tom Jones eventually repaired the guitar, although Setzer says it wasn’t quite the same afterward.

“It didn’t play right for a couple of years. It just didn’t have it.”

Then, just as mysteriously as it had lost its magic, the guitar recovered.

“All of a sudden it started to play right again,” he says. “I don’t know why!”

It should be noted that his guitar tech, Tyler Sweet, tells the story differently. In a “Rig Rundown” with Premier Guitar, he says the Gretsch was damaged in a handoff to Setzer's former stage tech and that the guitarist threw the damaged neck into the audience, forcing his crew to retrieve it.

No matter how the episode went down, the loss of the Gretsch would have been especially painful given how long it had been part of Setzer’s life.

“I was 17 years old and found it in this local paper, The Byline Press,” he told Guitar Player in 2019. “It said, ‘Gretsch guitar, 100 bucks.’ I called the guy up and asked, ‘Is it like Eddie Cochran’s?’ He was like, ‘Who?’

“So I went to his house, and there was the guitar, the 1959 orange 6120. It was exactly what I was looking for. He was going to refinish it and make it natural. He had all of the electronics for it in a shoe box. I gave him 100 bucks, took the guitar and the shoe box, and off I went. It was destiny.”

The 6120 became his main guitar as the Stray Cats sparked a rockabilly revival on both sides of the Atlantic.

By then, Setzer had customized the instrument with a sticker depicting a 1950s pinup girl sitting on a vinyl record and replaced the original knobs with a pair of dice taken from a Monopoly board game.

“The stickers and the dice became trademarks,” he says, “but I put them on without much thought. I found the pinup girls in an old lawnmower repair shop. And I put the dice on because it didn’t have any knobs. I just got a set of Monopoly dice, drilled holes in them, and squirted in some Krazy Glue.”

The only meaningful modification the guitar received, he says, was the addition of Sperzel locking tuners. The stock Filter’Tron pickups and most of the original hardware remained untouched.

Setzer eventually retired the guitar. “It had beer spilled on it and smoke blown all over it,” he says. Besides, he already had a worthy replacement waiting in the wings.

“In about 1984, I ran into Steve Miller in a bar in Germany,” he recalls. “We talked about Gretsches and how mine was getting trashed. When I got back to New York, there was a big box waiting for me, and, to my delighted surprise, it was a 6120 from Steve Miller. And not just a 6120 but a great one!”

Setzer's original 6120 would ultimately become the basis for a Gretsch tribute model. But more importantly, it’s the guitar that launched him on a career that continues as the Stray Cats undertake their current tour — their first since his recovery from an autoimmune disorder and an inadvertent dependency issue.

Despite everything that happened to it, the original 1959 Gretsch survived, and more than six decades after Setzer bought it for $100, it remains one of the most famous rockabilly guitars ever played

When Duane Allman died following a motorcycle crash in October 1971, it nearly became an even greater tragedy for the Allman family.

According to the new documentary Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, Gregg Allman nearly died from a heroin overdose on the same night his brother was killed.

At the time, the Allman Brothers Band was on the verge of a breakthrough. Their landmark live album, At Fillmore East, had established the group as one of America’s premier rock acts, while Duane had further raised his profile through his celebrated electric guitar work with Eric Clapton on Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Then, on October 29, everything changed.

Riding his Harley-Davidson Sportster in Macon, Georgia, Duane swerved to avoid a flatbed truck that turned in front of him and lost control of his motorcycle. Though he survived the initial crash, the severity of his internal injuries wasn’t immediately apparent. He died later that evening at the age of 24.

As Gregg’s friend Chank Middleton recalls in the documentary, he and Gregg had been waiting at the hospital when a doctor assured them Duane would survive. Believing the worst was over, they left.

Hours later, Allman Brothers Band roadie Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell arrived at Gregg’s home with devastating news.

“When I opened the door, I could look at Red Dog’s face and tell that Duane had died,” Middleton says in the film. “And I just told Red Dog, ‘Man, don’t tell him now.’ When I said that, I could hear Gregg’s voice coming out the bedroom from behind me. I could hear his voice saying, ‘Don’t tell me what?’”

What happened next nearly turned one loss into two.

According to Devon Allman, Gregg and Middleton had bought heroin after leaving the hospital.

“They copped some heroin. They got high. And my dad OD’d,” Devon says. “And Chank was like… He literally thought for a second, he thought he lost them both. And they revived my dad, but there for a minute he thought, ‘They just both died tonight.’”

Gregg, who died on May 27, 2017, also reflects on Duane’s death in the documentary and how his perspective on the loss changed over time.

“For a long time, I’d get drunk and rave and rant about, ‘He was short-changed,’” Gregg says. “Then I grew up. He didn’t get short-changed, he had a blast. He had a good ol’ time.”

Directed by James Keach, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces the singer’s life from birth to death through his music, friendships and seven marriages, including his highly publicized marriage to Cher.

The film also chronicles his decades-long battle with addiction. Over the years, Gregg entered rehab 14 times before ultimately overcoming dependencies on cocaine, heroin, alcohol and cigarettes. He remained sober until his death from liver cancer in 2017.

Ozzy Osbourne knew he’d found a gem in the wild when he landed Randy Rhoads as his guitarist in late 1979. Rhoads was a virtuoso whose skillful use of two-handed tapping, intricate scale patterns and whammy-bar dive bombs gave Osbourne’s early solo albums the guitar pyrotechnics metal required in the early 1980s.

But Rhoads’ talent came at a cost to Osbourne, the former Black Sabbath singer who died on July 22. The guitarist practiced nearly all the time, including after hours on tour, which could drive Ozzy mad.

At the dawn of 1982 — the final year of his life — Rhoads received a custom pedalboard, one intended solely for practice, that would solve this problem. The board was built to his specifications by Jon Graves and Domenic Turlace of Zeus Audio Systems in Alhambra, California, which made a line of guitar pedals as well as mini guitar amps designed for practice. Randy’s pedalboard was presented to him on New Year's Eve, 1981, roughly two months into the tour for Ozzy’s second solo album, Diary of a Madman.

Keen-eyed Guitar Player readers got their first — and likely only — look at the board in a photo of Rhoads, taken by photographer Neil Zlozower, that ran in our November 1982 Rhoads tribute issue. Spread across two pages, the photo showed the guitarist practicing on a sofa alongside three of his electric guitars: his 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom, Jackson Concorde and Karl Sandoval Custom Polka Dot Flying V.

Sitting on the floor in front of them was the tiny pedalboard, bearing a few obscured devices.

Two months after the photo ran, Graves and Turlace described the board in Guitar Player’s January 1983 issue in response to a reader’s question.

Although it was small, the pedalboard included a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine, three MXR pedals — a 6-Band graphic equalizer, a Commande Time Delay and a Micro Chorus — and a Zeus 8401 Mini Amp. Red in color, and roughly the size and dimensions of a brick, the 8401 mini amp had controls for preamp, volume and tone, plus preamp and external speaker outputs. A second amp with a 4 1/2–inch speaker was also provided for the Dr. Rhythm.

And because Ozzy was driven to distraction by Rhoads’ constant practicing, the pedalboard included an accessory designed to keep him happy.

"A unique feature is the 'Ozzy Jacks,' added at Ozzy Osbourne's request,” Turlace explained to GP. “These jacks provide separate signals from the gui­tar amp and rhythm machine for a head­phone mix, while shutting off the main speaker."

According to Graves, Ozzy had also requested a remote switch so that he could turn the pedalboard off from the next hotel room while on the road, because Randy tended to play into the wee hours. He probably wasn’t joking. It was never added.

The entire thing was built into an ABS plastic case salvaged from a Casio keyboard. (Some might say it’s the best use ever made of a Casio keyboard.) In addition, the lid included a battery pack as well as an AC adapter. Graves designed the pedalboard so that the battery would shut off when the lid was closed.

As a final touch, the board boasted a gold-plated plaque that read "Custom made by Zeus Audio Systems for Randy Rhoads,” along with his Rolls-Royce–style logo, bearing two R's.

In their response to our reader's question, the builders made clear they had no desire to repeat their efforts. “Anyone wishing to duplicate the pedalboard,” they said, “will have to build one themselves.”

Sadly, Rhoads would not get to use the device for long. He died tragically on March 19, 1982, when the small plane in which he was a passenger crashed during a tour stop in Leesburg, Florida.

As the Police settled into the studio to record Synchronicity in December 1982, they were a band on the verge of breaking up. By then, the trio had spent five years rising from the ranks of London’s post-punk scene to become stadium headliners and one of the most successful acts in the world.

Most bands in that position would have been looking ahead to a long future. The Police, however, seemed determined to leave at the height of their success.

According to Andy Summers, it all came down to Sting.

“It was a tough album, period. I mean, we had been together five years and were massively successful,” he says. “Sting was obviously feeling his oats and wanted to leave the band and go out on his own. In a sort of anal way, he was ready to finish off the contract, which was five albums.”

The recording sessions at AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat have become legendary for the near-violent tension between bass guitarist Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland. Summers told Rick Beato the atmosphere became so unworkable that he hiked across the island to find Beatles producer Sir George Martin, who was staying nearby, and ask for help.

“We said we should get George Martin to come and produce us, because he owned AIR Studios, and he was just across the valley there. And so I got the job to go and get George Martin. So I walked off in the blazing Montserrat heat, knocked on the door, and he comes out.”

Summers recalls how Martin invited him inside and listened over a cup of tea as the guitarist unloaded his frustrations.

“‘We’re having some difficulty,’” he told the producer. “‘In fact, it’s like a screaming bitch fight.’”

“‘Oh yes, right. I’ve seen that before,’ he said.”

After hearing Summers out, Martin offered a few reassuring words.

“It was like he waved his magic wand,” Summers recalls. “He said, ‘Now, I think you should walk back over there. I think it’s going to be all right.’

“I hiked back to the other side of the island, and it was all right. We got to be very polite with each other: ‘Oh, would you like to do that? Oh, yes, of course. I’ll do that. Where would you like it, on the fourth fret or the fifth fret?’

“How amazing. It was the Martin Magic, I’m sure.”

Tempers cooled enough for the band to complete what would become its biggest hit, “Every Breath You Take.”

“The whole album was difficult, but ‘Every Breath You Take’ was going to go in the trash, basically. We thought it was too light and it wasn’t very good. It reached the point where we were all getting pretty tired of it and didn’t really want to do it.”

It was Summers’ contribution that ultimately saved the song.

“Sting said to me, ‘Go on, go in there and make it your own.’ We needed a guitar and I went in and almost instantly played the guitar line that is, of course, the signature of the song.”

Summers has since argued that he deserves a co-writing credit for the song’s instantly recognizable electric guitar riff. His contributions to “Every Breath You Take” are also among the reasons he and Stewart Copeland have said they are owed additional royalties from Sting.

As Summers recalls, everyone in the studio immediately recognized the song’s potential.

“The manager heard it and said, ‘I’m going straight to A&M. This is going to be a number one.’ And it was. That was our first number one in the U.S. It was number one for eight weeks straight.”

Still, the success of the song and the album — it was the band’s biggest seller — wasn’t enough to persuade Sting to stay.

“With the band’s contract fulfilled, he was ready to strike out on his own.

“Of course, any band would stay, naturally, because it was going so brilliantly well. We dominated the world. No one wanted us to break up, but Sting wanted to go and be the thing all on his own.”

Roger Mayer is a legend. His innovations include the Octavia, a groundbreaking fuzz box that doubled signal frequencies, a sound not obtainable previously. Mayer and his effect heavily shaped albums like Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland. And then there’s his work with the Isley Brothers, whose electric guitar sound was tonally linchpinned by Hendrix and Mayer’s effects.

Those sounds influenced a young gun named Junior Marvin, who Mayer worked with in the mid 70s and who would be drafted into Bob Marley and the Wailers at a time when Marley wanted his group to evolve from what Mayer describes as a "raggedy-assed" musicians to proper reggae icons.

Mayer started from square one, tearing down Marley's rig and ensuring all involved in his midst were quite literally playing in tune. The result was what Mayer likens to perfection.

"When everything else is perfect, recording a song is pretty simple," he tells Guitar Player. “There’s nothing special about that for me," he says. "Anybody could walk into a recording studio, hit ‘record,’ and if the other things are perfect, it's gonna sound good."

It's hard to argue with that, considering Mayer's work on Marley's iconic 1975 record Exodus. "I did everything I could in the studio to talk to Bob and Junior about how they could dial in what they heard in the brains," he says.

Mayer did the job. Exodus catapulted the Wailers from a poorly produced group from the beaches of Jamaica to a powerhouse. The result was the album's title track reaching number one in Jamaica, number 14 in Germany, and the top 20 in the U.K.

Exodus's laid-back vibe meshed perfectly with Marley and Marvin's inspired guitar playing. As a result, tracks like "Three Little Birds," "Jammin'" and "Waiting in Vain" became Marley classics — and FM radio staples.

Mayer is aware of all of this — and he'll be the first to tell you that he had a feeling about Exodus from the jump, meaning greatness wasn't just intended but inherent. "That record is very well thought of," he beams.

"I knew what a hit record sounded like. We had all the puzzle pieces come into place. Like with Hendrix and the Isley Brothers, I'd helped, but it wasn't a mistake that it sounded that good."

How did you find yourself in the engineer's chair for the recording of Bob Marley's Exodus?

I had a relationship with Junior Marvin before Junior signed on to work with Bob. We'd finished recording some original material in England in December 1976, so we'd spend a lot of time together while recording, alternating between New York and London.

Were you familiar with Bob going in?

With Junior, we'd recorded at Music Mountain in Jamaica, at Electric Lady in New York and Island Studios in London, so yeah, I was aware of Bob Marley through all of that. I'd come to see him a few times, and I knew Chris Blackwell [founder of Island Records and Bob Marley cohort]. Junior knew Chris too. But it wasn't until after we finished the record with Junior, and he signed on with Bob Marley and the Wailers, that I got to work with Bob.

Having worked with Junior before, do you have a good idea of how to get him to align with Bob's goals?

Junior was recruited into Bob's band to provide the rock and roll aspect to the Wailers, which they were lacking. Before the recordings started, Bob was aware that he needed to change direction so that the music had more international appeal.

They came to be because, obviously, they'd heard the work I was doing with the Isley Brothers, Rick James, Parliament Funkadelic, and all those bands that had crossed over into the mainstream market. When I went to America with Jimi Hendrix back in '68 and then worked with Stevie Wonder, these were artists who had ties to Motown and were given free rein.

To paint a picture, the idea was that Black artists in the '70s had a very difficult time in America as far as getting recognition because the music charts were more into white rock 'n' roll than R&B and soul. It was spread apart. So after Junior joined the Wailers, it helped because they became a bit more rock 'n' roll.

You helped dial in Junior's rig on the recording, right?

After Junior joined, I sent him some of what they requested, which was some new equipment. I went and bought some guitars for Junior in New York and sent them to him after I'd modified them.

Modifications and sounds like you’d used with Jimi Hendrix and Ernie Isley?

That included some of the effects we'd used with Ernie Isley and Jimi Hendrix. And then, of course, everybody started to sit up and say, "Yeah, well, who is this new guitar player that Bob Marley's changed to?" Junior was a bit more rock 'n' roll and was a complete departure from Bob's previous records.

You were close to Junior, but did you get on well with Bob?

Everything was going very well. I got invited down to Jamaica to meet Bob just before the One Love concert, and that's when I first met him. He was a very charming guy. I asked him, "What exactly do you want me to do? How can I help you?"

Bob said, "I want to sound more international." That was the right answer, mate. I said, "For you to go forward in music and take a step forward — especially in record sales and international recognition — you have to have a record that sounds great.”

I told him, “It has to stand up to the quality of what's around." He couldn't just come from an island and not have the same technological advantages that everybody else had. If he did that, his record would have sounded a big amateurish.

So the goal with Exodus was not just to overhaul Bob's sound but to showcase what Junior brought to the party en route to national recognition.

Bob's early albums were kind of tolerated because they came from the islands, you know what I mean? People didn't expect the records to have the same sonic qualities that all the other top artists had, or some of the other artists I was working with. So, yeah… that's how I got roped into it. [laughs]

What was the first order of business once you were in the studio?

The first thing I did after meeting Bob was completely set up all the guitars for him. I'd listened to the band live and said, "The whole band's completely out of tune. For us to go forward, the first thing to do is make the band solid, if not perfect."

In reggae, that's very important, as it is with any music oriented by bass. The bass and drum sounds had to be perfect, or else you lose the magical quality of the beat. The bass guitars had suffered being in Jamaica and needed a lot of work, so we started with that.

What was it like working on Bob and Junior's guitars?

I wanted to fix that up to give off a really authentic, top-quality sound. I moved on to Bob's guitars because Junior already had a guitar that I'd previously modified and had been used in concert and in the studio. I went through all of Bob's guitars, tuned them up, and rebuilt the whole guitar.

Every guitar that had been down in Jamaica for years had to be completely pulled apart and rebuilt because of what the humidity in the tropics would do to the electrics in the guitar. Once I made sure the band was mechanically sound, and actually in tune, and sounded perfect with all the harmonics resonating, that's when we could really get started. That was the beginning of it.

How did that inform the way Junior and Bob approached songs like "Waiting in Vain," "Three Little Birds," and "Jammin'?"

My job was working with Junior to get the right guitar sounds and with Bob. Once Bob's guitar was perfectly in tune, his approach to the song became different because of the way he played. The feeling, solos, and overall feeling of the record became different. This might sound mundane, but you can only record what's there.

In my case, the actual job became making good sounds, and after that, it was recording the sound. I didn't have to do anything. The bass and guitar sounds were perfect. Bob set the people up to play the vibe, and the performances were amazing—much better than before because they were all playing in tune.

Was there a trick to getting the most out of Junior, or was it all mostly free-form and vibe-based?

They were all very highly attuned to the vibrations and the perfection of it all. So, while putting together the tracks, Junior and I would go into the studio and discuss what he wanted to do, for example, "Waiting in Vain" or "Three Little Birds." Those tracks have my touch on them with the various guitar tones, and we worked together to select the perfect tones for each track.

What went into the selection process?

That's one of the secrets! You have the have the ability, and in my case, technical ability, to change the tone, and make it fit the track. That's why every track we recorded with Jimi Hendrix sounds so accessible. It's not just a case of buying a pedal, plugging it in, and playing.

It's more complicated than that. It's having the knowledge of being in the studio and using recording equipment and consoles to know exactly what sound you have to produce in the studio to make it come out well on record.

So if it wasn't just pedals, what was it?

You have to have a whole knowledge of the whole process of recording. It's about knowing where to put microphones and how they should sound in the studio. You had to really, really know how with some of these bands back then, you know, with how to actually tailor the sound so that they can record a song.

While putting together Exodus, did you have an inclination that you were helping make a special record?

Yeah, but at the same time, I'd been in the studio many times before when lots of famous records were made. I wasn't new to what a hit record sounded like. I had a good idea of what it should sound like, so, yeah, Exodus, after the tracks were put together, sounded really good. But the magic of Exodus isn't just that it's a really good collection of songs; there's more to it than that.

Expand on that for me.

Remember: A lot of the songs on Exodus have been recorded before. They weren't new. There were previous incarnations of "Three Little Birds," from what I remember. The difference, I think, with Bob and Exodus was the actual sound of that record. It's perfect. It sounds great.

The sound of the music, and the beat, just the whole thing, makes that record sound international. It doesn't sound like a raggedy bunch of Jamaican musicians. It's interesting and culturally different, but before that, they weren't producing the international quality of music that sounded like that.

Having said that, what are you most proud of when you look back on Exodus?

I've been involved with many records, but I've been involved with very involved in three or four, like, really great records, I think. Exodus is great. The sound of it is just unbelievable. But these things don't happen by accident, right? It doesn't happen by mistake.

The people involved in that record weren't just fortuitous; my sound, equipment, and electronics are on so many hit records. That's not me boasting; it's just the truth. But Bob and Junior were a pleasure to work with and making that record didn't happen by mistake.

It's like they say: you could get a well, a well-nourished orangutan with a pencil and a piece of white paper is not going to make a great picture. It was all the right pieces at the right time. It doesn't happen otherwise.

There were many great guitar moments at this year’s Songwriters Hall of Fame, but none can top the shred fest and sheer joy John Fogerty brought to the stage last night at NYC’s Marriott Marquis.

The youthful 81-year-old and newly honored recipient of the Johnny Mercer Award (the Hall’s most prestigious award) ended his mini set with an epic, blistering jam on “The Old Man Down the Road,” beaming with fatherly pride and tearing it up on the guitar while trading licks with his sons, Shane and Tyler.

The Mercer Award is given to songwriters who are already in the Hall and ‘whose body of work is of such high quality and impact that it upholds the gold standard set by the legendary Johnny Mercer.’

Fogerty began his five-song set with a harmony-filled short version of “Oh! Susanna” in tribute to both his mother and the 19th century American composer Stephen Foster, his first musical idol. He then launched into his singalong classics “Proud Mary,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “The Old Man Down the Road,” aligning himself as a legitimate link in the American songwriting lineage.

In his 26-minute speech, the Creedence Clearwater Revival legend told of his mother playing a record when he was a child.

“It was “Oh! Susanna” and the other side was “Camptown Races.” She played both songs a couple of times and said, ‘well Johnny what do you think?’ I’ like it!’ I said.”

“And then she said something remarkable: ‘You know, Johnny, the songwriter who wrote both of those songs is Stephen Foster.’ I had never pondered that someone created these songs that my mom would sing around the house.”

For the rest of his life, Fogerty said, “I’ve wondered about that little ceremony” and the impact it had on him as he discovered other classic songwriters, and ultimately his own skill at songwriting.

The first song he wrote, he continued, was titled “Wash Day Blues,” taken from a line from a radio commercial. The eight-year-old Fogerty set the lyrics against a Muddy Waters rhythm, “one of the most powerful things I could think of at the time. And it was current.”

Fogerty then showed the audience his original songwriting notebook, which he purchased when he realized he needed to be organized if he was serious about his craft.

“I wrote down the very first words in the book: ‘Proud Mary.’ I had no idea what the phrase meant but it’s there in the book.”

An Army serviceman faced with a life choice between continuing in the service or becoming a musician, he received an official government letter in the mail a year later granting him an honorable discharge at the age of 22.

“I ran outside and started strumming my Rickenbacker electric guitar acoustically. Pretty soon I’m singing,” left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day.”

“I grabbed the notebook and there was the phrase ‘Proud Mary,’ and the word ‘riverboat.’”

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley

This year’s inductees included Kiss founders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Kenny Loggins, Alanis Morissette, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, Taylor Swift, Walter Afanasieff, Terry Britten and Graham Lyle. The artist Raye received the Hal David Starlight Award.

Billy Corgan and John Rzeznik (a 2008 Hal David Starlight award honoree) might seem like an unlikely pairing, but both shared their love and admiration for Kiss and the band’s songwriting partners Stanley and Simmons. The two sang “Rock and Roll All Night” and “Shout It Out Loud,” opting to ditch their guitars for the set.

In a red-carpet interview with Guitar Player prior to the show, Corgan said while he was a massive Rush, Yes and prog music fan growing up, “Black Diamond” was a favorite Kiss track. “Something about the atmosphere of the song and the makeup and being ten years old. I wanted to play that song a hundred times in a row.”

“I had the Kiss poster on my wall as a kid before I ever heard Kiss. That imagery was like, ‘What is this? I want to know about this.’ The music seemed to marry to the image for me, not the other way around.”

As a teen growing up in the suburbs, Corgan said “Gene challenged me in one way — the business angle — and Paul challenged me in another — to think about freedom and self-expression.

“Over time I really began to understand their brilliance as musicians and songwriters.” Gene’s bass playing, he said, “is more ‘50s doo-wop where Paul is more of a Free, Humble Pie, straightahead style. It’s a very interesting mélange of influences.”

Simmons could not attend due to a family emergency and Stanley did not perform any of his classics at the event. But he did give a pre-show interview to this magazine.

“I wanted to be a great songwriter from the beginning,” the guitarist said. “I never wrote songs to jam on. I wrote songs to sing.”

“That can seem simple when you are looking at a song like ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ or ;Heaven’s on Fire’ or ‘Lick it Up.’ But it’s elusive and deceptive. Those songs follow the same formula as a lot of the great songs that inspired me. I was inspired by everyone who was working in the Brill Building.”

He also offered a juicy anecdote specific to this magazine.

“The first time we were on Guitar Player magazine, the guitar snobs at the time were horrified, that it had sold out. Then when the sales came in and it did better than other issues, everybody liked it! It opened the floodgates, not unlike some of the stuff Kiss has done.”

Taylor Swift

Film director Steven Spielberg paid tribute to Taylor Swift, the youngest female artist to be inducted into the Hall, noting “no algorithm can replace the soul of a true original who defies the status quo.”

Spielberg noted her dedication to her craft going all the way back to when “she first picked up a 12-string guitar. Most people start with a six-string. Isn’t that right? But you were an overachiever at the age of 12.”

Swift gave an emotional 21-minute speech, acknowledging her family, collaborators and the importance of the arts.

“Everything came together when I learned to play guitar at 12. I wrote my first song after learning my first three chords. It felt easy to work incredibly hard with this.

“It felt easy to nurture something I loved so much, to watch callouses form on the tips of my tiny fingers and to become a constant observer of the human condition, because people’s feelings, passions and motivations have always fascinated me, and it was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life.”

Madison Cunningham, Brandi Carlile, Alanis Morissette & Kenny Loggins

Other notable guitar highlights of the evening were more subtle, with artists using their instruments to complement and support the song’s lyrical meaning.

Grammy Award winner Madison Cunningham performed a stunning solo acoustic take on the Tina Turner classic “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” paying tribute to the songwriters and inductees Graham Lyle and Terry Britten. Using a Martin nylon string classical guitar in a dropped tuning, Cunningham’s gentle picking set the musical bed for the song’s emotional core.

Before the show, Cunningham spoke with GP about the song’s depth and importance.

The song is a “treasure,” she said. “It’s a very 80’s sexy song that bears a lot of heartbreak within it. I’m putting a different spin on it to showcase the lyrics.”

Alanis Morissette stripped down her classic “You Oughta Know” to two acoustic guitars and her vocal. Guitarists Julian Coryell and Jason Orme effortlessly weaved beautifully played single note runs and counterpoint lines in between Morissette’s breathy and focused lyrics of love gone wrong.

Brandi Carlile paid tribute to Morissette with an equally mesmerizing acoustic version of “Uninvited,” joined by the violin duo Sistastrings.

Kenny Loggins, whose vast catalog includes many guitar-centric classics like “Footloose,” “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” “Danny’s Song,” “Danger Zone” and more told GP of his relationship with the instrument.

“The guitar always has a mind of its own. I’ll be starting a song, and I’ll hit a chord and go oh that’s different. It will change the direction of the song.” While writing the classic “Danny’s Song,” he said, “the guitar showed up and added about six different chords than it originally had.”

Fresh off the massive success of his 2025 best-selling memoir Heartbreaker, rock legend Mike Campbell is turning the page. Today marks the release of Mission of Mercy, the fourth studio album from Campbell and his powerhouse band, the Dirty Knobs.

While he will always be associated with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Campbell’s latest 12-song set finds him pushing into unexpected territory, stretching his electric guitar–driven rock with touches of Brian Wilson–inspired pop, psych-rock excursions and even a beat-poet experiment.

“It’s my go-to project,” Campbell, 76, says via Zoom from his home in the Los Angeles area. “I just like having an outlet for all these songs I write, and they’re just the perfect outlet. We get along really well. They instinctively know me, and they follow really well.”

He adds with a chuckle, “They don’t argue too much. They’re just really good, y’know?”

Mission of Mercy was co-produced by Campbell, George Drakoulias and Martin Pradler and recorded at Hocus Pocus Studios in Los Angeles. It follows the Dirty Knobs’ 2024 release, Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits.

Campbell formed the group in 2000 as a side project to play Los Angeles clubs and showcase songs that didn’t fit elsewhere. Since Petty’s death in 2017, however, the group has become his primary creative outlet. The current lineup features former Heartbreakers (and Average White Band) drummer Steve Ferrone, guitarist/keyboardist Christopher Holt and longtime bass guitarist Lance Morrison.

The album stretches the band’s formula in several directions, from the manic “Bongo Mania” — featuring Kate Pierson of the B-52’s — to the beat-poet experiment “Vagrant” and the Brian Wilson–inspired title track. At the same time, it remains rooted in the guitar rock that has defined Campbell’s career, with an appearance by Morgane Stapleton on the gentle “More Than Gold.”

The Dirty Knobs hit the road again in July, covering the Midwest and East, while Campbell will also be doing his first orchestral show on September 12 with the Atlanta Symphony -- probably not somewhere the kid who picked up guitar when he was 16 ever expected to be.

Four albums in with the Dirty Knobs, what did you set out to do on Mission of Mercy?

Well, we always set out to have good songs. We look for the good songs and we keep doing them until we get too many, then we narrow it down and try to make sense of it. That’s just how I approach records — What’s the song? What’s the song today? Is there a good song we can record? Let’s give it a shot, and if it’s good we’ll keep it, and if not we’ll throw it out and do another one.

There was no different concept this time, but I did want to expand the songwriting a little bit — not only have the band rockin’ but have a few esoteric, melodic things here and there. I think by the fourth album it’s OK for us to take some chances.

Look no further than the title track, then.

“Mission of Mercy” is definitely a stretch for the Dirty Knobs. It was a demo I had done several years ago, and it showed up in the middle of the album. I thought it was good and worth finishing. It was very different for us, very Brian Wilson–inspired. The song actually didn’t have any guitar in it, per se, just some chords.

There was a point where I felt like, “Well, something needs to happen,” so I picked up the guitar and played some licks at the end, which kind of lifts it up from maybe a pop ballad to more of a guitar song at the end there. So that was an afterthought; the last thing I put on it was the guitar at the end, but I think it lifts the song up and gives it some edge.

What’s your litmus test for a good song, and how has that changed over the years — even from the Mudcrutch and Heartbreakers days?

I have to like it, and I have to think it’s good. It has to move me in some way. I write a lot of songs, and some of them just kind of come and go and other ones resonate deeper, and it’s the ones that resonate on some level that I tend to gravitate toward — like “Mission of Mercy.” But the process is the same for me as it’s always been: just wait for the good songs to come through.

How does the way you write or arrange now open portals for how you use the guitar that might be different than before?

Well, we have a great guitar player in the band — it’s not me. [laughs] I’m good, but this other guy, Christopher Holt, who we got in the band a couple years ago, is incredible, not only on guitar but vocals and keyboards, and he’s a fine, nice chap. But the Dirty Knobs is a guitar band, and basically we’re a rock-and-boogie band, which allows room for the guitar to express itself.

I like the guitar solos and the guitar parts to be spontaneous, as much as possible. So with Christopher and the rest of the guys, a lot of the time I don’t let them hear the song until they’re recording it. I’ll go, “Here’s the chords, and you play something in this space here, OK? 1, 2, 3, 4, go!” And then we get it and I’m like, “OK, that was good. That was it.” And they try to go, “Wait, wait, no, no, no, I made a mistake!” But that was the real beauty of it, that discovery moment.

Got a good example of that process from Mission of Mercy?

Well, I’m an egomaniac [chuckles], so I play most of the guitar solos. But there’s a song called “Vicious Hangover” which is just a party song; it reminds me of Dick Holler and the Holidays’ “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love),” just a gang of fraternity drunk guys having a good time. It’s very simple; it was written 10 minutes before the band arrived at the session.

I handed my Fender Broadcaster to Chris and said, “Here, play this on this song, and when it gets to the solo just do something,” and what you hear is the first take. He was just inspired by the guitar, and he plays an amazing couple of solos in the song.

A couple of the songs, like “Armageddon” and “Wrecking Ball,” sound like somebody was listening to their Led Zeppelin albums during the process.

“Armageddon,” I remember, I did 20 years ago, and I was thinking of “Kashmir.” It’s got a Middle Eastern type of melody in it, which I’ve always been intrigued by, so I’m certainly channeling a bit of the trance vibe of “Kashmir,” sure. And “Wrecking Ball” is just a riff; all of my stuff, if you talk about my riffs, they all kind of have a bit of a Jimmy Page thing in them, or Keith Richards. I can’t help it.

“Armageddon,” and also “No Regrets,” are fairly topical — maybe political, even. Are you comfortable in that arena?

Well, writers are affected by their environment, so that’s bound to happen. So you put it into your song the best you can, but I do make a conscious effort not to take sides or name names or any specific political points of view. I don’t think that’s my place. I’m not qualified to preach politics; some artists follow that path, and I respect them for that.

Me, I want to entertain and take your mind off that, hopefully, but it’s hard not to be affected these days by the world we’re living in and everything everybody is feeling right now with the confusion and disarray in our government and a stupid war that doesn’t seem to need to be there. Something like “Armageddon” is a perfect example of how things are going horribly wrong, but the sun won’t fade away and somehow we’ll get through this.

You wrote “I Remember” on piano, right?

Yeah. That was fun. It was done very quickly. I like writing on the piano; I’ve written some songs on the piano, like “Woman in Love,” “You Got Lucky,” even Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” Occasionally I’ll sit down at the piano; I don’t know much, but I know chords. So (“I Remember”) was just a little thing I was playing and I thought, “Well, what can I sing over this?” and a lyric came and I said, “That’s good — I’ll sing it again!” [laughs]

It’s an interesting song because it starts with the chorus and it goes through a little turnaround. There’s only one verse in the song, in the middle; the rest of it is just choruses repeating, but that just felt good to me.

Back to taking chances — “Bongo Mania”?

Yeah. [laughs] That was a lot of fun. I had this track that was just a burst of adrenaline, for fun — I can’t wait to hear Ferrone play it live. I was thinking in my mind, “Wow, this sounds just like a B-52’s song.” I’d never met them, but I’ve always liked them from their first album. There’s something really appealing about that band, the two girl singers and the guy who talks and the guitar player who was really clever. And really fun songs, party songs.

So I’ve always been a fan, and I think Kate probably comes up with a lot of the stuff, and if I had her on the song it would be amazing. It was a long shot, but I had the office call her and she called me back and we had a great conversation ... and she said, “Sure,” and she came up with a great part and made the song 10 times better.

You channel your inner beat poet into “Vagrant,” at the end of the album. That was certainly part of the Heartbreakers’ scheme over the years.

It was a joke. The night before, I was watching TV and bored and just making stuff up. The next day I came in and the band showed up and I said, “Let’s warm up. I’ve got this kind of tone poem; it doesn’t mean anything, but let’s warm up with the chords and I’ll talk over it just to get the sounds up and get everyone comfortable with the room.”

We did it one time and I just read the words off the sheets and had these kind of jazzy chords. We finished it and all had a laugh and I said, “Well, that’s enough of that, let’s get to work.” And then “Vagrant” just kept popping up as we were doing a sequence.

“Are we gonna do this? Nah, that’s a joke. Nobody’ll like it.”

Then it started to grow on me, and I started to think, like, Tom Waits or Frank Zappa might do something like this. It’s a valid approach. It’s got a sense of humor and it’s got a mood. So I thought, “Let’s just stick this at the end and see if people like it or not.”

Like I said before, it’s the fourth album. We have, like, a Brian Wilson tribute. We have a “Bongo Mania” song, and then we have a beat-poet monologue. And there’s plenty of rockers, plenty of guitar, plenty of the usual stuff you expect, but I wanted to push the boundaries a little bit and do some stuff that’s kind of whacky.

Any instruments or gear on Mission of Mercy that are different than before?

We pretty much stick to guitar, bass, drums, piano, occasional organ or keyboards. I’ve got a lot of guitars; occasionally I’d go down to the closet and say, “Here, play this one.” But mostly it was me on a Telecaster and Christopher on a Strat or a Les Paul through two little amps in the other room, and that was pretty much our basic tracking setup.

Then when the track was finished we might put piano on it, or put some guitar lines on it. But we didn’t use a plethora of guitars. It was mostly just the ones that were on hand in the room.

You’ve got a particularly interesting show coming up September 12, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. What’s that going to be like?

I’m terrified, [laughs] but excited. I always had this idea in the back of my head — in my 20s, 30s, 40s — that someday when I get old and the Heartbreakers retire, maybe I’ll get a bus and get the dogs and get some charts and go around to the colleges and perform some of the catalog with an orchestra, ’cause I love orchestral music and listen to Beethoven and Mozart and Bach a lot.

I got to the point where I looked up and realized, well, the Heartbreakers aren’t here and I am old now. So it’s time. The day has come, and I’m just gonna go for it. We’ve got some charts that are really good. I’ll probably play some guitar throughout the show. I’m gonna do a dry run and work out the kinks with a college orchestra here in L.A. and then go to Atlanta and throw it out there and see what happens.

If it goes really well and I enjoy it, we’ll book some more, but I want to ease into it and see if I can actually do it or not.

This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the first Heartbreakers album. Is that weighing at all on you as you think about set lists and other things you want to do this year?

Well, a little bit. I mean, I’ve got a Dirty Knobs tour. I always do three or four Heartbreakers songs in the encore, usually, just ’cause I love the songs and I can do them the right way and people enjoy hearing them. So I’ll continue to do that. I love my legacy, but I don’t want to live in it.

The last thing out of the vault was July 16, 1978 — Paradise Theater, Boston, MA. Any plans for the next reissues or box sets or anything coming up?

The way that works is the Petty estate controls the catalog, and we’ve got this great engineer, Ryan Ulyate. So they come up with a reissue they want to do, Ryan mixes it, and then he sends it to me to sign off on it — but I have yet to question any of the mixes. They always sound pretty good, so I usually just go, “Yeah, that’s fine.” That’s as involved as I ever get. I’m busy with my own band, y’know?

By the summer of 1969, John Fogerty had taken Creedence Clearwater Revival from obscurity to the upper reaches of the charts. “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River” had all been number two hits. But they were punctuated by singles that failed to make much of a dent: “I Put a Spell on You,” “Lodi” and “Commotion.”

“I said, well, basically I’m now a one-hit wonder,” the guitarist toldRick Beato. “And I also realized It took us so long to get here; now you only get five minutes to do the next step because the spotlight will move on to Led Zeppelin or somebody.  It’ll just be over for you if you don’t come up with it now.'"

Fogerty was afraid everything he built was going to be lost if the band didn’t have another hit, and fast. Which is one reason why CCR released a total of three albums in 1969: Fogerty was on fire, writing new songs at every turn.

“Fogerty told us that if we were ever off the charts, then we would be forgotten,” drummer Doug Clifford told Goldmine in 2013. “To make it worse, it might sound funny, but we had double-sided hits, and that was kind of a curse, as we were burning through material twice as fast. If we'd spread it out, we would not have had to put out three albums in one year.”

The guitarist was taking inspiration from everywhere, and in 1969 it was impossible to not be affected by the Vietnam War. It was a catalyst behind the decade's counterculture revolution. Anti-war sentiment was a rallying cry for the rock and roll generation when they gathered that August in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival, where CCR had made a late-night stand.

When Fogerty looked at the news, he saw all the young men wounded and dying in the conflict. But he also saw how advantage was keeping many of the country’s politically privileged men from going to fight and die in a war their own fathers insisted was necessary.

He was enraged. And he put it all in one song: “Fortunate Son,” from the group’s third album of 1969, Willy and the Poor Boys.

But unlike other songs he labored over, Fogerty says “Fortunate Son” came out in a blast.

“’Fortunate Son’ was the shortest song I ever wrote — about 20 minutes,” he tells Beato. “This is 1969. All the political and cultural stuff, is just brewing in my mind.”

Fogerty had the music together and “a vague idea” of the subject matter. He took it and nothing else — not even an acoustic guitar — into a room to do some writing.

“But I literally went into the bedroom with a little tablet and a pen, thinking the song was going to be called ‘Favorite Son.’” It’s a phrase used by state delegates when nominating a presidential candidate.

Aside from that, however, Fogerty says, “I had no lines of the song at all.

“And suddenly I’m sitting there, and I [thought], ‘Some folks are born, made to wave…’ Oh, that's pretty good!

“And somewhere, ‘Favorite Son’ flipped into ‘Fortunate Son.’”

As for Fogerty’s fears of slipping down the charts and becoming obsolete, he didn’t have to worry. “Fortunate Son” was released as a double A-side single with “Down on the Corner,” the lead track from Willy and the Poor Boys. Both songs reached number three on the charts, and helped keep CCR’s fortunes alive.

Fogerty has spent much of his post-CCR days fighting to reclaim the rights to the material with which he made his name. His new album is a celebration of that battle ending after 50 tireless years. The pain of the band's demise also saw him give away his prized Rickenbacker 325.

“I was hurt. I was damaged. I gave it away to end that chapter of my life,” he said of his decision to leave it behind. Yet, miraculously, it wound up back in his hands, perhaps standing as a precursor for what was about to follow.”

As the Kinks' rhythm and lead guitarist, Dave Davies inspired a generation of players with his innovative use of power chords and distortion.

Pete Townshend often cited the group as a major influence, and was motivated particularly by Davies’ aggressive rhythm playing and distorted tone. The Who guitarist admitted that “You Really Got Me” inspired him to write “I Can’t Explain” in a similar style. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton all took note of Davies' use of distortion, which was far more aggressive than what anyone had been doing in rock.

But Davies’ influence wasn’t limited to guitarists of rock’s 1960s wave. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi cited him as an early influence on the heavy, down-tuned riffs that defined Sabbath’s sound and acknowledged the importance of the Kinks in creating the blueprint for heavy guitar riffing. The Kinks even inspired Al Di Meola to write a jazz-fusion classic.

And then there’s Eddie Van Halen, who was a fan of the group’s straightforward but powerful approach to rock. Van Halen famously covered two songs by the Kinks: "You Really Got Me," which the California-based hard rockers released as their 1978 debut single, and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone,“ which appeared on their 1982 album, Diver Down.

To be clear, Davies appreciates that he and his brother Ray had an impact on rock and, particularly, rock guitarists.

“It’s always very flattering for people to copy you, but it’s only music, isn’t it? It is an important vehicle, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously,” Davies told Guitar Player in our March 1990 issue. “We’ve been copied more than a lot of people would care to admit. Ray’s music has impressed upon and influenced a lot of people in many different ways, but that’s good.

But, with that said, Davies wasn’t a fan of Van Halen’s take on the Kinks’ classic.

“When I first heard Van Halen’s version of ‘You Really Got Me,’ I laughed,” he said. “It just seemed so exaggerated. It really misses the point of the whole meaning of the song: four working-class guys, struggling to do something different. In the original record, you can sense that in its energy, the roughness. It’s very impure.

“The Van Halen thing; it’s very accomplished and flashy, but what does it mean?

“Whereas when the Stranglers did ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ I thought it was much more respectful, because they actually tried to get a similar snare drum sound and guitar sound, which I thought was strange. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to do that anyway.”

He laughed. “But at least it seemed more respectful to the original concept and feeling. Even the solo was like the original solo, which I thought was really nice and sweet.”

In the same interview, Davies also addressed claims that Jimmy Page had played the electric guitar solos on those early Kinks sides. Davies, who said he was all of 16 years old when he cut those solos in spring 1963, blamed Page's claim on a penchant for myth-building.

“You see, Jimmy Page was a friend of [producer] Shel Talmy’s, and was a session player who used to hang around and hope that he could get in on sessions,” he said. “And we locked him out.

“But he learned a lot, you know, like the many other people who wouldn’t admit borrowing from the Kinks. And I suppose when he became successful himself, all credit due to him, his ego was so inflated he probably thought he invented the bloody instrument anyway, being carried along on that crystal and glamour.

"It’s all an illusion, building your ego up, and eventually something’s going to pop it like a balloon and you’re back flat down on your ass again. Which is what happened, didn’t it?

“And I suppose it was a bit unfortunate of him; I thought he did me a great injustice by saying that. Besides, I can’t see anybody crazy enough to play a solo like the one on ‘You Really Got Me’ anyway.”

We've all seen the classic, grainy clips of Jimmy Page dragging a violin bow across the strings of his Telecaster or Les Paul to produce eerie, evil, previously unimaginable sounds.

He did it frequently in the twilight years of the Yardbirds and whipped it out again in the early days of Led Zeppelin.

Given the fact that violins, cellos, violas and other bowed instruments had already existed for centuries, it's not so shocking, profound and/or mind-blowing that an enterprising young Brit should decide to apply the concept to the world of electric guitars.

But was Page first rock star to do so? Not exactly.

U.K. guitarist Eddie Phillips beat him to it by a few years, it seems. According to some sources, Phillips first took "bow to guitar string" in 1963 and as a member of the Mark Four in the mid-Sixties. That band evolved into the Creation — a respected yet still commonly overlooked Swinging Sixties London band.

“With feedback came the violin bow idea," Phillips told journalist Chris Hunt in 1988. "I just wanted to make the guitar sound different to what it should sound like. I don't even know why I cottoned on to that idea, really, but it just felt like a good idea and a good visual thing as well, just to try and get a sound out of the guitar that no one had ever heard before, something that was against the rules.

"I was aware that [Page] was doing it in 1967 because we did a tour with the Stones in Germany, and one of the roadies was an ex-Jimmy Page roadie, and he said, ‘Oh, I see you're doing that, I've just been working with Jimmy and he's doing that.' By that time I'd been doing it for four years. That's all I can say really…

“For all I know, Jimmy might say he's been doing it since 1954… I don't know, but I can honestly say that it was an idea that I started doing because it was my own idea.”

Above, watch Page use a bow in 1967 as the Yardbirds perform "I'm Confused," which would emerge two years later as Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused."

Now, watch Phillips and the Creation perform "Making Time" in 1966 above. (Side note: Director Wes Anderson used "Making Time" in his 1998 film, Rushmore.)

Phillips is still writing, recording and performing with the reformed Creation (which for a time included original member Bob Garner). In recent years, the Creation toured the UK, US and bits of Europe.

And, just for a laugh or nine, watch Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) drag an entire violin across his guitar strings in This Is Spinal Tap. Note how he pauses to tune the violin, as if that makes a difference.

When Brad Paisley partnered with Fender last year to resurrect one of the company’s most notorious Telecaster finishes, the project was about more than a clever play on his surname. It represented the culmination of a decades-long fascination with one of Fender’s strangest and most short-lived creations.

The Paisley Red Telecaster debuted in 1968, when Fender — then under CBS ownership — attempted to capitalize on the psychedelic spirit of the era. Alongside the equally flamboyant Blue Flower finish, the guitar featured colorful Cling-Foil wallpaper applied directly to the body and covered with a translucent burst finish. It was Fender’s attempt to pay tribute to the Summer of Love.

The look was unforgettable. The execution was not.

The thick decorative paper, inexpensive adhesives and heavy polyester clear coats proved to be a disastrous combination. The finishes cracked, chipped and peeled prematurely, becoming victims of the same cost-cutting measures that defined much of Fender’s CBS era. By 1969, the experiment was over. Production ceased, and many owners stripped or refinished their electric guitars altogether.

That should have been the end of the story.

Instead, decades later, the forgotten finish found an unlikely champion in Paisley.

“It’s unreal that my own name is one of the coolest finishes I think Fender has ever done,” he said when Fender unveiled his signature Limited Edition Brad Paisley 1967 “Lost Paisley” Telecaster in 2024. “This is an attempt to show what this lost color could have been. It’s the best guitar I’ve ever had.”

Long before Fender enlisted him to help revive the design, Paisley had been on a mission to track down surviving examples of original Paisley Telecasters and restore them whenever possible. That was easier said than done. With relatively few produced — estimates generally place the number between 300 and 400 — most had long since been refinished, their psychedelic origins buried beneath later paint jobs.

Still, the hunt fascinated him.

“There’s nothing more beautiful to me than a ’50s Blackguard Tele, a ’54 Strat, or an original Paisley Tele — any of those things that frequently got stripped and mutilated,” he told Rick Beato. “Some of those refins are the best guitars I’ve ever had. It’s therapy to be able to take something and restore it.”

The obsession eventually led him to master builder Bill Crook. Together, they began trying to reverse-engineer the original Paisley finish, assuming that uncovering an authentic example hidden beneath a refinish would be nearly impossible.

Then fate intervened.

“Let me find the right guitar first,” Paisley told Crook.

That search led him to Chicago Music Exchange, where he asked if they had a refinished 1968 Telecaster for sale.

“They said, ‘Yeah, we have a black one, but it’s not a good paint job,’” Paisley recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t care.’

“I pick it up, it’s a good guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna turn this into a Paisley.’”

Crook agreed to take on the project. But once the guitar arrived, something caught his eye.

“He gets it, throws the thing on a guitar stand, and is looking at it hanging on the wall,” Paisley explained. “He looks at the way that the black finish is cracking, and he goes, ‘No.’”

Crook removed the neck and neck plate for a closer inspection. Beneath the black paint was exactly what Paisley had spent years searching for.

“There’s a paisley staring at him,” Paisley said. “He took the finish off with thinner, and that’s 100 percent original paper.

“I had accidentally bought a Paisley Tele, thinking I would turn it into a Paisley Tele!”

The story became even more remarkable when Paisley tracked down the guitar’s original owner. According to Paisley, the owner had purchased the instrument at a discount because the Paisley models weren't selling and later sprayed it black in his backyard.

What had spent decades disguised beneath an amateur refin was suddenly revealed as one of Fender’s rarest late-'60s guitars.

Paisley named the instrument La Brea, comparing it to a fossil preserved in the famous Los Angeles tar pits.

“I called it La Brea because it’s like a fossil in a tar pit,” he said.

Today, the guitar could command tens of thousands of dollars on the vintage market. But for Paisley, its value has little to do with money. After years spent chasing lost Paisley Telecasters, he had finally stumbled across the real thing by complete accident.

Alex Lifeson’s sonic evolution is etched into the gear he’s used on records and onstage. After launching Rush’s debut album with a 1968 Gibson ES-335, he steadily upgraded his arsenal. By the late 1970s, he had acquired a 1974 Les Paul and “Whitey” — his legendary, custom-built 1976 Alpine White Gibson ES-355 electric.

But by the time the 1990s rolled around, following a decade of experimenting with heavily modified Fender Stratocasters, Lifeson transitioned to PRS. In addition to creating a custom acoustic, he leaned heavily on modified CE24 models, frequently utilizing piezo pickups to handle the band’s complex acoustic-to-electric transitions live.

Years later, Lifeson reflected on what that era taught him about the two legendary guitar manufacturers. Speaking to Guitar Player, he admitted that PRS held a clear advantage when it came to out-of-the-box perfection:

“I don’t think you can beat a PRS for workmanship. You open the case, and the guitar is perfectly in tune and perfectly set up. I can’t say the same about Gibson. I’ve had to work on all my Gibsons — they require a fair bit of upkeep and maintenance.”

Yet, by the 2000s, Lifeson’s PRS era faded, and he returned almost exclusively to the Gibson family. Despite the structural reliability of a PRS, Lifeson realized that high maintenance was a small price to pay for a definitive sound.

“I love the way Gibsons sound,” he concluded. “I think the Gibsons sound better than the PRS guitars do.”

It didn’t hurt that Gibson had won his heart long before he ever encountered a tuning stability issue. When Lifeson first received his 1976 ES-355, the instrument instantly transcended being a mere tool of the trade.

“I remember opening the case for the first time, and the truss-rod cover had my name on it,” Lifeson recalled. “That blew me away. I almost started crying.”

That emotional bond translated into musical history. Whitey became Lifeson’s definitive voice, stamped across 12 consecutive Rush studio albums—spanning from A Farewell to Kings (1977) to Test for Echo (1996). It anchored the band’s live sets for nearly 40 years, starring in iconic music videos like “Tom Sawyer” and “Show Don’t Tell” before finally retiring after the R40 tour in 2015.

In 2022, Lifeson made the bittersweet decision to part with the original instrument, selling it at a charity auction for a staggering $384,000. For years, fans assumed the legendary Alpine White semi-hollow body would remain locked away in a private collection.

However, the timing for a revival couldn’t be better. As Rush return to the road, Epiphone has officially launched the Alex Lifeson 1976 ES-355 Reissue as part of its premium Inspired by Gibson Custom line. Equipped with a classic gold Maestro Vibrola tailpiece, USA-made Gibson T-Type humbuckers, and the mandatory multi-position Varitone switch, the reissue mirrors the exact cosmetic and structural appointments of the multi-ply maple-and-poplar masterpiece.

Complete with Lifeson’s name engraved on the truss-rod cover—just like the original that brought him to tears in 1976 — the new reissue proves to everyday players that some classic sounds are well worth the upkeep.