Sometimes a song becomes something bigger than a hit. It strikes a nerve with its audience and becomes an anthem that unites listeners with its message.

Brian May had no idea Queen were on the verge of recording such a momentous tune as the group set out to make News of the World, their sixth album, in 1977. Frontman Freddie Mercury had been working on a song designed to encourage audience participation. But when he first presented it to May, bass guitarist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor at a rehearsal, they didn’t get it.

Part of the problem was its lyrics, in which Mercury moved from complaints about having paid his dues to telling his audience his climb to the top had been “no bed of roses.”

Worst of all was the title: “We Are the Champions.”

“Our initial sense of it was that it was something very big-headed,” May told Guitar Player. “We all looked at Fred and said, ‘Really?’

“But he had a very clear view of it. It was aimed at an audience that wanted to feel a togetherness and a power and an optimism. He knew people would sing it.”

More than a gifted vocalist, Mercury was a performer who knew how to unite an audience. Which was only appropriate, considering that Queen had decided to bring them into the show with News of the World,

The genesis of this approach came after Queen’s 1977 show at Bingley Hall in Stafford, England, where the audience sang along loudly and enthusiastically to every song.

“We did an encore and then went off,” May explained in a BBC interview that year, “and instead of just keeping clapping, they sang ‘You'll Never Walk Alone‘ to us, and we were just completely knocked out and taken aback.”

As they began to work on News of the World, the band was inspired to write tracks that would harness that collective energy. May brought along “We Will Rock You,” sensing its stomp-clap rhythm and simple vocal refrain would be good way to bring the audience together. Mercury, meanwhile, envisioned “We Are the Champions” as a theme that would unify fans in a moment of collective celebration.

“This was the first album where we contemplated audience participation,” May told Guitar Player. “Up until that point, we were sort of tentative. We didn't expect the audience to sing along because they didn't in those days. It was a big transition for us to realize that the audience was part of the show, and we decided to encourage that.”

As he explained, this shift in audience behavior was evident more in England and Europe than in America.

“This phenomenon started in Europe way before in the states,” he said. “And I used to prefer that people didn't sing, to be honest. I liked them to hear all the delicate nuances of what we were doing. I found it kind of annoying, as if it was getting in the way of Freddie’s vocals. It's funny to look back on that.”

Regarding “We Are the Champions,” May recalls that it was recorded in what was a typical fashion for Queen at the time.

“Normally, [Mercury] would put down the piano part with Roger and John live, and when it was good enough — after three or four takes — that would be what we used. And that's pretty much what happened with ‘Champions.’”

Working that way allowed May to think about his guitar parts while the others were recording their parts. But sometimes his best ideas came later, as they did for “We Are the Champions.” Roughly two weeks after initially completing his part, he added two new guitar tracks of bell-like chimes using his Red Special electric guitar.

Panned in stereo on the song’s second verse, they ping-pong from speaker to speaker during the lines “It’s been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise,” adding a bit of decoration as the arrangement builds to a new high ahead of the chorus.

“I remember listening to it in the car the day it was to be mixed and thinking that my guitar wasn't good enough,” he explained. “I told them to give me one more go and planned that little piece in stereo that happens in verse two, which I really like, it's that sort of bell effect between two guitars. So I know I did some extra work on this one in the light of having lived with it for a couple of weeks.”

May also added some guitar lines — “the lead guitar responses to Freddie’s vocal, particularly at the end,” he said. But when listening to them in the final mix, he felt they were too obtrusive.

“We were very wary of that, because we liked order in our music,” he said. “But the guitar in that case was kind of competing with Freddie’s vocal.”

However, Mercury felt it was exactly what the song needed: a contest of wills. He told May, “No. The guitar is fighting with the vocal here, and that’s the way it should be.”

“That song doesn’t have a solo as such,” May said, “and I don’t think it’s ever needed one.”

Neil Henderson, the Scottish guitarist who played with the Bay City Rollers during the band’s formative years, has died at 73.

Henderson’s death was announced by Middle of the Road, another Scottish pop group he later joined. In a statement on Facebook, the band remembered him as its “original lead guitarist, songwriter and friend,” adding that he had been ill for some time and had been working to recover from a stroke suffered several years ago. The group offered its condolences to Henderson’s daughters, Heather and Shona, along with his family and friends.

Henderson joined the Bay City Rollers in 1970, when the group was still establishing itself in Scotland. He played on the band’s 1971 single “Keep On Dancing,” which reached number nine on the U.K. singles chart and gave the Rollers their first Top 10 hit.

He left the group the following year, reportedly after disagreements over its musical direction. His departure came well before the Bay City Rollers’ international breakthrough in the mid-1970s, when the band became one of the era’s biggest pop acts with songs including “Saturday Night” and “Money Honey.”

Henderson subsequently joined Middle of the Road, which was enjoying considerable success in Europe at the time. The group established itself as the leaders of Europop in the years before ABBA’s rise, selling more than five million records, including the international hits “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” “Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum” and “Soley Soley.” As a guitarist and songwriter for the group, Henderson contributed to songs such as “Rockin’ Soul” and “Everybody Loves a Winner.”

Henderson’s death also prompted a tribute from Stuart “Woody” Wood, the guitarist who played with the Bay City Rollers during their period of greatest commercial success. Wood said he had never met Henderson personally but noted that the band’s late bass guitarist Alan Longmuir had spoken highly of him.

“Just heard the very sad news about Neil Henderson, one of the original Bay City Rollers,” Wood wrote. “Though I never met him personally Alan spoke very highly of him. Sincere condolences to all his family and friends.”

Middle of the Road concluded its tribute by remembering Henderson’s lasting connection to the musicians he had worked alongside: “His memory will live on with all who had the pleasure of sharing the stage with him as will his music.”

More than half a century since the release of “Layla,” one of the most iconic tracks in Eric Clapton’s canon, Rita Coolidge is still waiting to be credit for writing the outro’s piano lines.

Clapton's own signature is, of course, all over the eponymous 1970 track from Derek & the Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, an album with an intriguing backstory of its own. The album is a uniquely personal entry in Clapton's catalog, written and recorded while the guitarist was in the throes of longing for Pattie Harrison, the wife of his famous Beatle pal George.

While the song's signature electric guitar riff was penned by the then largely unknown Duane Allman, who guested on the record, the tune was Clapton's entirely — up to the piano coda that concludes the song's final minutes. That final icing on the cake was written by Dominos drummer Jim Gordon and singer Coolidge.

Coolidge was hardly anonymous at the time. Like Clapton and the rest of his band, she had served in Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett's band, ground zero for Derek & the Dominos. Since then, Coolidge had gone on to record with artists that included Joe Cocker, Leon Russell — who wrote Cocker's hit "Delta Lady" for her — Stephen Stills and Clapton himself on his self-titled debut solo album.

As the singer explained in a TikTok post, she was in Miami's Criteria studio — the same facility where Layla was recorded — having her photo taken to promote her 1971 debut solo album, when she heard the song being played.

“I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I recognize this music and know this music,'" she said. “They’re like, ‘You don’t know it, it’s a brand-new Eric Clapton record,’ and I said, ‘It’s my music!’ They took pictures of the veins popping out in my neck. I was so upset.”

Coolidge said that, after hearing the song, she rushed to Tower Records, where, to her dismay, she found her name absent in the credits.

“I started trying to get in touch with Eric through Robert Stigwood, who was his manager at the time, and was just a mogul,” she recalled. “I got him finally on the phone, and I said, ‘I’m one of the writers, that’s my music.’ He said, ‘Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? You’re a girl. You don’t have the money to fight this. Let it go.’ And that was it.”

In her memoir, Delta Lady, Coolidge wrote that Clapton heard her play the song during their previous recording sessions together, long before he’d woven it into “Layla’s” tapestry.

“We played the song for Eric Clapton in England,” she wrote. “I remember sitting at the piano in Olympic Studios while Eric listened to me play it. Jim and I left a cassette of the demo, hoping, of course, that he might cover it.”

Although he hasn't publicly addressed Coolidge's claims, Clapton told Guitar Player in 1985 that he had coaxed the song away from Gordon for use as the coda to "Layla."

"Jim Gordon wrote that and had been secretly going back into the studio and recording his own album, without any of us knowing it," Clapton told assistant editor Dan Forte. "And they were all love songs composed on the piano. And we caught him playing this one day and said, 'Come on, man. Can we have that?'

"So he was happy to give us that part. And we made the two pieces into one song."

While Clapton did give Gordon a co-writing credit for the song, Coolidge's part in Derek and the Dominos' short-lived legacy remains overlooked.

In addition to his own bands — Yes, Asia, GTR, the Syndicate, the In Crowd/Tomorrow — Steve Howe has served as a hired gun for a number of other artists, appearing on albums for the sometimes incongruous likes of Queen, Bee Gees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Dixie Dregs, Dream Theater, William Shatner and others.

One of his earliest, meanwhile, was on Lou Reed, the self-titled debut album by the iconoclastic New York rocker fresh out of the Velvet Underground. Both he and Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman found themselves recruited for the album in January 1972 when Yes were woodshedding new ideas at Morgan Studios in London during a break between legs of its world tour supporting its then-current album Fragile. Reed was in another studio at Morgan working on his album.

“We were in two separate buildings, but they were right across the road,” Howe recalls. “So, for Rick and I, it was about the simplest session we ever did. We just walked across the road, into another building.

“Lou was great. He played us two songs, demos; they were very simplistic — voice, maybe a keyboard and a guitar. He said, ‘They’re the two songs we’re doing.’ I think he gave us chord charts, or we made chord charts, ’cause I don’t read music so notation’s no use to me at all. As long as I’ve got a chord chart I can navigate my way through pretty much anything.

“I remember the studio had the old-fashioned kind of booths, separation booths, and the drummer, Clem Cattini, was in the corner. Basically we spent the afternoon doing those songs.”

Howe says he was not particularly a Reed fan at the time, however. “I wasn’t really big on American bands from that era,” he explains. “We liked the Byrds pretty much exclusively. Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, blah, blah … it’s sort of like they were too American for us. We were into this other sort of prog/psychedelic music at the time.”

Which of the Lou Reed album’s 10 tracks Howe appeared on remains a matter of guesswork all these years later, as any published credits for the project have always been general. (Caleb Quaye and Paul Keogh also played on the album.) The moody, atmospheric album-closer “Ocean” — first attempted with the Velvet Underground for 1970’s Loaded — is a likely candidate, with Wakeman’s cascading piano and carefully deployed guitar licks throughout, along with the loping “Lisa Says.”

“It was very smart ’cause he got us in there and he got us to contribute, which is better than telling us, ‘Here’s what you’re gonna play,’” Howe remembers. “All I know in music is to contribute — not copying, not simulating or repeating, but actually contributing. I’m sure it was good for us.

“I think all guest appearances, I almost never turn them down. They always surprise you, and I like surprise — like when I stood in for Stone the Crows [at the Great Western Festival, summer of 1972]; I didn’t know I was gonna do that. Even with Queen [for the title track for Innuendo, 1991], I didn’t know I was going to do that until about two hours before.

“They also wanted spontaneous playing, because they didn’t have a part for me. I could’ve gone in and said, ‘Okay, what do you want me to play?’, but they said, ‘Just play anything. Do what you do.’ So they understood me quite thoroughly, that I wasn’t going to come in and play a ditty, a tune on top of it. They really wanted me to improvise.”

An “almost” on Howe’s guesting resume, meanwhile, came early when he was booled into London’s Olympic Sound Studios during May of 1969 at a session for Ella Fitzgerald’s album Ella, which came out later that year.

“I was in very early years … and was known as a bit of a jazzer, even though I couldn’t play jazz. I went there on a bus — the number. 13 from Holloway to Putney — with my 175,” he says, referring to the Gibson ES-175 electric guitar that has been mainstay throughout his career. “And when I get there, who do I pass in the corridor? Ella Fitzgerald. So I’m like, ‘Wow, Ella … Where’s she going? I just got here.’

“They told me, ‘Okay, well, set your amp up and we’ll do something,’ and lo and behold in the control room there were people like Mick Jagger standing there. I don’t know what they were doing there. I think Ron Wood was there. I think the drummer was one of the most famous drummers in the world; I can’t remember if it was Mick Fleetwood or Charlie Watts. I thought, ‘This is good,’ but I’ve forgotten who it was — obviously you don’t forget Mick Jagger’s in the control room.

“I recorded something, but I don’t know what, or if it was used, and I doubt that anybody in the world knows what it is. But if anybody does, give me a call, please.”

Howe is currently recuperating from “an essential operation” that scuttled Yes’s plans to promote its latest album, Aurora, which came out in April. The group will be returning to the road next May for dates in the U.K. and also plans to tour in Japan and North America.

Tears for Fears guitarist Roland Orzabal says he wasn't convinced about the hit potential of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" when the group recorded it 40 years ago. And neither, he adds, was his bandmate, Curt Smith.

But thanks to a chance riff he came up with on his Fender Stratocaster, the song generated enough interest to keep its creator from throwing it away.

Released on the group’s 1984 album, Songs From the Big Chair, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was in fact Tears for Fears' second number-one single, following on the success of its predecessor, "Shout," which had ascended to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

Now three-times Platinum, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is the band's top-selling track of all-time, winning the Brit Award for Best Single in 1986 and helping drive Songs From the Big Chair to five-times Platinum sales. Tears For Fears recast it as "Everybody Wants to Run the World" to raise money for the African famine relief organization Sport Aid in 1986.

Amid its prominent synthesizers and drum machines, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is awash in electric and acoustic guitars played by Orzabal, who handled the song’s first break — the “rhythm solo,” as he calls it — and a second burning guitar solo played by the band’s touring guitarist, Neil Taylor.

Orzabal says his indoctrination into the guitar universe began "around the age of 13, 14," while he was growing up in Bath, England.

"A guy on the same street as me introduced me to bands like Budgie, Uriah Heep and a band called Led Zeppelin or something like that,” he says with a laugh. “I didn't like it at first, 'cause I was into glam rock. It took a long time for that music to wash over me. And, of course, once you start trying to copy Jimmy Page it becomes a little bit off-putting. But I appreciate a lot of those artists now.”

Today, Orzabal’s guitar collection numbers about 50 specimens, including the walnut Fender model known as "The Strat" he played on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Manufactured from 1980 to 1983, this deluxe version of the Fender Stratocaster offered nine pickup combinations and featured gold hardware, a colored headstock and a unique bridge.

But as Orzabal explains, guitar didn't figure much in Tears for Fear's music at that point. Roughly six months before writing and recording Songs From the Big Chair, the band released the single “Mother’s Talk,” a track they’d recorded with great difficulty, using primarily synthesizers.

“It had been a very painful process,” Orzabal says of that song’s creation. “It had been mainly synthesizer and marimbas and xylophones. There wasn't much rock about it. Chris Hughes [who produced the group's 1983 debut, The Hurting] was brought back in to produce us, and he changed it all around. It was a difficult process, but the record company seemed to like it.”

With a month off to write songs for the new album, Orzabal retired to his home in Bath, England, and got to work using his walnut Strat, a Prophet 5 synthesizer and a LinnDrum rhythm box. “The downstairs had no furniture in it, so there was a lot of echo,” he says. “I would copy the drum parts from certain records into the drum machine. It gave me confidence knowing that had produced a great song, and I would write to those beats.”

One of those rhythms was from "Waterfront" by Simple Minds. “Just that simple ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump,” Orzabal says. "So that was the bass drum and the snare. There was another track by Lynx called ‘Throw Away the Key,’ and that had a very strange high-hat part. And I had this other pattern to counteract the high-hat part and put that in.” Together, the three rhythm tracks inspired the compelling shuffle rhythm that is the hallmark of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

“And then,” Orzabal continues, “I tuned my guitar's E string down to D, and I came up with this riff.” He sings the percolating arpeggiated guitar line that opens the song. “I didn't really think anything of it, to be honest with you. It didn't have the depth of the other material I'd been working on.

“But my wife at the time liked it. So I thought, Okay, maybe I'm wrong."

Once in the studio, Orzabal shared his songs, which were still in their early stages of creation. They included “Shout” and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which at the point was called "Everybody Wants to Go to War.” Although Orzabal wasn’t convinced of the latter’s value, Hughes and the duo's label rep, David Bates, were immediately interested.

“Chris and David were adamant about it,” he recalls. “They wanted some kind of drive-time American hit — whatever that was — and they thought this could be. But neither Curt nor I were convinced. So Chris said, ‘All right, we'll do a proper day's recording on the other songs, and at the end of the day we'll put up the beats and just jam and muck around with it.’ "

When they finally returned to the song, its appeal slowly became apparent to its creator. “At some point I realized that it shouldn't be ‘Everybody Wants to Go to War,’ which was an annoying title,” Orzabal says. “We recorded it with Curt singing it. I didn't want to sing it — I didn't want anything to do with it.”

Besides, Orzabal had enough to do playing his walnut-bodied Strat. “I'd just bought it for its looks alone,” he says of the instrument. “It had gold everywhere. Where you would have the bridge tone control, you had a [nine-position] pickup selector switch. I played the guitar through a Boss compressor — I remember it was blue [most likely the Compression Sustainer CS-2 pedal, released in 1982] — into a Roland JC-120 with the chorus on. That's all.”

When it came time to record a solo, Orzabal took a chordal approach to the job. “The rhythm solo is my kind of thing, but it was a lot of drop-ins — all kinds of things just to sort of get the shape of it.”

But when Hughes and Bates decided he song needed a blazing-hot solo for the song’s outro, Orzabal knew it wasn’t his thing. “At the end they decided to put on a real, proper lead guitar solo,” he recalls, “and the first thing we said, without thinking, was ‘Neil Taylor.’ Neil had been floating around Tears for Fears for awhile, but he wanted to do his own thing. But we always knew he had a very idiosyncratic way of playing —far better than us when it comes to playing lead.”

Orzabal recalls that as recording proceeded, they often felt the beat needed to be faster. “We thought it was too slow, so every time we would record on it, we would put it up at least two percent,” he says. As a result, he says, the pitch "ended up between D and E flat.”

Released on March 22, 1985, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” began its chart ascent, reaching number one in the U.S., Canada and New Zealand, and number two in the U.K., Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands. The song’s music video went into regular rotation on MTV and became a staple of the channel through much of that year,

Forty years on, Tears for Fears now have seven studio albums to their credit, including last year's The Tipping Point, the group's first in 18 years. October 25 will see the release of Songs for a Nervous Planet, which includes a set from the band’s latest tour plus four new studio tracks. It will be accompanied by Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film), which screens in theaters on October 25 and 26 (tearsforfearsfilm.com). Orzabal and Smith are also about to start work on the next Tears for Fears album, with the former predicting that "there will be more guitar" this time around.

As for the popularity of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Orzabal says he’s gotten used to it, as well as fans’ reactions when it’s performed in concert. “You’re never really surprised by the hits,” he says. “What’s shocked me was that people were so keen to listen to the new material, and so patient. When Curt decided to do [2022’s] ’The Tipping Point’ as the first song of the show, I was a bit nervous of opening with a new track. But moving from that into ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ — it was just fantastic. It’s the old and the new, and it all works together.”

Peter Frampton’s career has produced only one Grammy for the classic-rock guitarist. It’s not for Frampton Comes Alive !, the 1976 smash hit that made him a global superstar, but for Fingerprints, his 2007 instrumental album.

But at the age of 76, the guitarist measures success on his own scale.

“In my mind, I’m more successful than I’ve ever been — because I like myself, I like what I do,” Frampton told The New York Times. “I’ve always been someone who didn’t think I was good enough, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I should have felt that way a long time ago.”

That perspective has come through both the highs and lows of his career, as well as the physical challenges he has faced in recent years. Frampton recalls the first sign that something might be wrong. It was 2009, when he was 59. He and his son, Julian, were on a rare road trip to Big Sur to reconnect and write songs together.

“Julian said, ‘Let’s run up this hill.’ Normally I would beat him, and I didn’t,” Frampton says from his home studio in Nashville. “It felt like there were insects in my legs, like they were vibrating.”

Frampton later learned that he had Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a progressive muscle-wasting disease that weakens the arms and legs. He was diagnosed around 2014 after suffering several falls at home and onstage, but he didn’t publicly reveal the diagnosis until 2019.

His career had already taken him through extraordinary highs and lows. In recent interviews he’s said the success of Frampton Comes Alive! overwhelmed him — and that its hastily recorded follow-up, I’m in You (1977), was a mistake. Suddenly he was everywhere — on the radio, TV and posters on fans’ walls, with his famed Fenix Les Paul electric guitar.

“The pressure was so great,” he said. “There was absolutely no need to do I’m in You then and there. The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

His career slowed afterward as musical tastes shifted. Years later, speaking at The Art of Music event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last year, Frampton said it was then that he began planning for the next phase of his career.

“That’s when I sort of stopped working and basically just started writing on my own and getting ready for something that was to come.”

His evolution since then resulted in what may be his most personal — and political — record. Carry the Light, released earlier this year, found the guitarist reflecting on life, family and the current political climate, with assistance from friends that include Graham Nash, Sheryl Crow and Tom Morello.

The album developed over three years, as he and his son, Julian, reconnected following the COVID-19 pandemic. Just before then, Frampton became a grandfather for the first time.

But the joy of that milestone was tempered by the effects of IBM. Since revealing his diagnosis, Frampton has made fewer appearances. He surprised attendees at the 2025 NAMM music show with an appearance at the Martin Guitar booth, where he first hinted he was recording Carry the Light. But standing — and even playing guitar — has become more difficult, forcing him to adjust how he frets chords and notes.

While he’s unsure whether he’ll tour again — his last tour, Let's Do It Again!, concluded in November 2025 — he remains hopeful and is keeping positive.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must be so upset,’ and, yeah, I am. But you can fix the little things,” Frampton says.

“But big things never worried me, because they’re the things you can’t do anything about. If I don’t accept what I have, I’m going to be mad for the rest of my life.”

Before he became one of rock’s most distinctive guitarists, Brian May was a teenager in southwest London trying to find his musical voice. Like many aspiring British players of the era, he was captivated by the guitar heroes emerging from the local club scene. But two musicians in particular would fundamentally alter the way he thought about the instrument: Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Speaking about his formative years in a school band called 1984, May recalled regularly performing soul covers by Sam & Dave and Otis Redding before Britain’s psychedelic explosion changed everything.

“We played a mixture of adapted soul stuff,” he said. “It was just pre-psychedelia. We used to try and do a couple of songs of our own. Luckily, as time went on, Pink Floyd, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix came along, and we started doing that.”

The first major revelation came from Eric Clapton during the guitarist’s tenure with the Yardbirds.

“Clapton was unbelievable, just so sparkling and fluid,” May said. “He was what turned me away from the Shadows style and sent me back to listening to B.B. King, Bo Diddley, and all those people I’d heard before.”

At the time, May admitted he had underestimated the blues, viewing it largely as a repetitive form.

“I thought it was all the same: 12-bar blues, and that was it,” he explained. “I didn’t realize the depth or emotion there was in it until I saw Eric Clapton doing it. That somehow made it accessible for me.”

Inspired by Clapton’s playing, May began tracing the guitarist’s influences and immersing himself in the records that had shaped the British blues boom.

“I went back and listened to his influences,” he said. “I listened to Clapton very closely, and to people like Mike Bloomfield on the first album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.”

May was equally enthralled by Jeff Beck, who replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds and pushed the electric guitar into increasingly adventurous territory.

“I couldn't believe what he could do,” May recalled. “I remember seeing him put the guitar down, make it feedback, and play a whole tune without even touching the fingerboard. That was the first time I saw a Les Paul guitar. I saw a gig at the Marquee soon after Beck had joined, and Eric Clapton came on and jammed at the end. That was pretty amazing; I'll never forget that.“

But even the combined impact of those two British guitar giants could not prepare him for what came next.

After years of developing his own expressive approach to the instrument, May believed he was beginning to achieve the sounds he heard in his head.

“I was beginning to make the guitar sort of talk,” he recalled. “I always wanted the guitar to play for people, to talk the same way a vocal did and have feeling in it.”

Then he encountered Hendrix.

“When I saw Hendrix, I thought, Oh my God. This guy is doing everything that I was trying to do.”

The experience was humbling.

“He just made me feel like I couldn’t play,” May said. “It makes you feel very uncomfortable when you thought you knew everything that was going on, and then suddenly somebody comes along who seems to be doing all sorts of things you hadn’t even thought of.”

Initially, May suspected that some of Hendrix’s seemingly impossible sounds might have been studio trickery. Hearing the guitarist’s conversation-like soloing on “Stone Free,” he wondered whether recording techniques were responsible.

That skepticism vanished when he saw Hendrix perform live at London’s Savoy Theatre while supporting the Who.

“He completely blew me away,” May said. “I thought, ‘He’s it.’”

The impact was so overwhelming that May believed even one of Britain’s biggest bands couldn’t compete.

“The Who couldn’t follow him in those days,” he said. “Anybody in the world would find it hard to follow Hendrix.”

The lessons May absorbed from both players would remain central to his own style. From Clapton, he learned that blues guitar could communicate emotion and nuance — even if he did once earn Slowhand’s wrath when he and Eddie Van Halen dedicated a blues jam to the guitarist that Clapton called “so horrible.” From Hendrix, he discovered that the instrument’s expressive possibilities were far broader than he had imagined.

Those influences would eventually help shape the singular voice May developed with Queen — a style capable of singing, soaring, and, just as he had always wanted, making a guitar talk.

Olivia Rodrigo’s “The Cure” started with a guitar mistake — and ended with Dan Nigro having to Melodyne a piano to match an acoustic guitar that was 15 to 20 cents sharp.

Speaking to the Song Exploder podcast, Rodrigo and her co-writer and producer Nigro broke down the making of the song, which Rodrigo has called her favorite track on her latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love.

The song began with a conversation Rodrigo had with a friend while sitting next to him in his Jeep. She told him that she was in love, but also miserable much of the time, and that she wanted to write love songs.

“He’s like, ‘You have to write about how you’re actually feeling. You can’t pretend to write a certain way. You can’t write in the way that you think you’re supposed to feel.’”

A few days later, Rodrigo started writing “The Cure” on her couch with an acoustic guitar. And although she admits, “I’m not great at guitar,” that turned out to be an advantage.

“I was trying to play a chord and I played it wrong. I messed up where my fingers were, but it actually just sounded cool. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ A wonderful thing about being a novice is sometimes you make a happy accident.”

When she brought the song to Nigro, they worked out the guitar part and added a bridge. But when it came time to record it, Nigro didn’t exactly follow standard acoustic-guitar recording procedure.

Rather than set up microphones specifically for the guitar, he used two microphones that were already positioned above his piano.

“These two microphones that are up on my piano were there,” he says. “And instead of micing the guitar properly, I literally just stood on the piano bench and played the guitar into the two piano mics. It was a really rough take, and then [Olivia] recorded her vocals to my guitar.”

That rough guitar recording became the foundation for the vocals — and created a second, rather unusual recording problem. Nigro says he deliberately avoided pitch correction on Rodrigo’s vocals, leaving the two vocal tracks to rub against each other slightly and preserve the song’s uneasy character.

“There’s no Auto-Tune, and there’s no Melodyning or anything,” he says. “They’re just her vocal tracks; they kind of rub a little bit in spaces [and] that makes it feel unsettling. And I feel like as much as we have all the modern tools that we can, like, make a vocal feel perfect, it felt imperfectly perfect.”

But the guitar itself wasn’t quite in tune. Nigro had recorded the part so quickly that he hadn’t checked the tuning, leaving the instrument 15 to 20 cents sharp.

“My guitar is actually about 15 to 20 cents sharp, and so I ended up having to tune every other instrument to the guitar and the vocal because I didn’t want to mess with it,” he says. “When I played the piano, because the piano was actually in tune, I had to Melodyne the piano to be in tune with the guitar.”

So while Melodyne wasn’t used to clean up Rodrigo’s vocals, it was used to make the properly tuned piano conform to the accidentally sharp guitar.

That imperfection became part of the character of “The Cure,” a song Rodrigo describes as “very tense.” Nigro deliberately kept building that tension into the second verse, withholding the drums when listeners might expect them to arrive.

“I think everyone thinks when they hear it for the first time that the drums are about to come in, but they don’t,” he says.

When the drums and strings finally arrive, Rodrigo says the payoff feels earned — the same philosophy that shaped the song’s guitar recording in the first place: rather than polish away every imperfection, they kept the elements that made the track feel human and unsettled.

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter has played on hundreds of recordings as a member of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, as well as in his long career as a session musician. He has two essential pieces of advice for guitarists, which he shared during a conversation about performance with co-hosts Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden.

The men were appearing on an episode of the podcast Really? no, Really?. Titled “Guitars & Guided Missiles: Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s Extraordinary Career,” the episode offers an examination of both Baxter’s history and his unique approach to the guitar and problem solving.

“I only give two lessons,” Baxter tells Alexander. “One is use a metronome. ’Cause if you can't groove, you're not gonna get any work.”

But it’s lesson number two that takes the conversation in a different direction. Baxter — who has riffed on the hidden charms of modern electric guitars — introduces the concept by pointing to Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

“If you ever watch Oscar Peterson play, he's playing, but you can hear him going [scats]. Basically, he's singing. And I always tell anybody who wants to learn to play the guitar to sit down and sing while you play, because eventually you'll be able to connect singing the melodies in your head to your fingers.

“And that's how you get what the psychologists call 'flow,' where you remove the conscious piece. That's what most people do when they're improvising — they’re actually translating the voice in their heads to their fingers.”

Alexander agrees, offering a powerful illustration of Baxter’s point from his own viewing history.

“I remember watching a great documentary years ago about Isaac Stern, the violinist, in China. There was a section where he was teaching protégés — I mean, really gifted young violinists — and he was doing a master class.

“And this young woman got up and she played, you know, 16 bars of a piece, and it sounded great. And he went, ‘Yeah, put the instrument down. Sing it. Sing what you just played.’ And she sang it. And he said, ‘Now, pick up the instrument and sing it as you play it.’ And it transformed her playing. And I thought that was remarkable.”

Baxter explains that singing while playing is transformational because it forces a musician to shape their phrasing, adding nuance, interest, and expression to the performance.

“The melodies usually are pretty close, but the phrasing is, I would say, 60 percent of why people enjoy what you play,” Baxter says. “It’s how you play it, not necessarily what you're playing.”

September 25 is Dolly Parton Day, a fitting date for celebrating the life and music of the late country icon because it can be written as 9/25 — a numerical nod to her signature song, “9 to 5.”

Guitarists marveled for years at Parton’s ability to fret a guitar while wearing her famously long acrylic nails. But those glamorous extensions — part of her signature look — did more than make her guitar playing a little more challenging. They also helped her write one of her biggest hits.

Parton died August 25 at age 80, leaving behind a seven-decade career as a singer, songwriter, actress and philanthropist. Among her many achievements, she wrote thousands of songs and earned 11 Grammy Awards, while her Imagination Library distributed more than 300 million books to children around the world.

But “9 to 5” remains one of Parton’s most instantly recognizable songs. Written for the 1980 comedy of the same name, it became her first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, earned her two Grammys in 1982 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

And the story of how she wrote it is wonderfully Dolly Parton.

The movie starred Parton alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three office workers who plot to get even with their sexist, egotistical boss. Fonda had championed Parton for the role, and Parton agreed to appear on the condition that she would have a chance to write the theme song.

The song came to her while she was on the set, with her guitar back in her trailer. And, fittingly for a movie about office workers, Parton found an unlikely substitute for a typewriter: her fingernails.

“I was bored always in between takes because they have so much time between setups with lighting,” she explained on The Graham Norton Show. “And you just sit around, and what are you going to do?”

Part of her deal with Fonda was that she would get to write the theme song. But without her guitar at hand, she began experimenting with the sound of her acrylic nails.

“I would take my nails, and because it was acrylic nails it makes like a percussive sound,” Parton explained. “It sounds like a typewriter, too.”

She began clacking her nails together to create a rhythm while jotting down words and ideas inspired by what she was seeing around the set.

“So I just started to write little words and things that I would see, and things I would think that would fit with that day-to-day nine-to-five job. Then I’d go back at night to my hotel room and put those things down,” she said.

The idea stuck. And the sound of those nails eventually became part of the finished recording.

Parton even gave her manicure an official credit on 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, the album on which the song appeared.

“I have a credit on the back of the album that says, ‘Nails by Dolly!’”

That little detail is one of those perfect Dolly Parton stories: her trademark look wasn’t simply decoration. She found a way to make it part of the music.

And those nails had long presented another musical challenge for Parton. How, exactly, did she manage to fret an acoustic guitar while wearing them?

Her solution was to work around them. Parton explained that she often used open tunings and barre chords, allowing her to play without having to curl her fretting fingers as much. She also favored the three-quarter-sized acoustic guitars she had played since her youth.

There were limits, though.

“If I’m really serious about it, I just have to saw ’em down!” she said.

Much of Parton’s distinctive guitar style comes from her rhythmic right hand. Her playing combines the Maybelle Carter-style “thumb and flick” approach with the alternating bass technique associated with players such as Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Her thumb picks out bass notes while her first finger flicks down across the strings to sound the corresponding chord.

You can hear and see that approach in action when Parton performs the title track from her 1973 album, My Tennessee Mountain Home, all while sporting her trademark nails. Her picking-hand nails even tap against the guitar’s body, adding another percussive element to the performance.

It’s a fitting reminder of something that came through in so much of Parton’s music: she could turn just about anything into an instrument — even her fingernails.

Country music legend Dolly Parton was never a stranger to collaboration. While songwriting sessions with Linda Ronstadt and Kenny Rogers are classic examples of more predictable team-ups, she was always happy to go a little off-piste, too, as her 2025 collaboration with Mötley Crüe attests.

However, it was Irish rockers U2 who got the honor of recording Parton’s last-ever song with her, and Bono says her passing has now made it too painful to listen to.

The Irish band have sold an estimated 175 million records during their career. They’ll be looking to give that figure a shot in the arm when they release Carnaval de Luz, their first album in over a decade, this November. But following Parton’s passing at 80 last month, one song from the new batch is getting more attention than most.

“When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song,” Bono tells Rolling Stone of “Torn,” a song that Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid also helped write.

“And you can hear that,” he adds. “I can’t even listen to it now.”

The track will close the band’s first full-length record of new music since Songs of Experience in 2014. Mind you, the band has already released two EPs — Days of Ash and Easter Lily — this year. They’re dead center in a purple patch right now.

Like many U2 songs before it, the original idea for their duet drew influence from Irish folk music. Parton wasn’t overly fond of the suggested sketch, with Bono saying she quipped, “That’s a little too Irish for me,” when it was first presented to her. In classic Parton fashion, the tireless songstress had a backup plan in her back pocket.

“She said, ‘I got this song. It’s called ‘Torn’; do you wanna see where you can take it somewhere else, maybe?’” he recalls.

Details about the song are still closely guarded at this point, but it has been revealed that Daniel Lanois, who has worked with U2 before as well as the likes of Neil Young, Peter Gabriel and Willie Nelson, plays pedal steel on the track. It’s a hire that ensures the signature Parton flavor comes from more than just her belted vocals.

An official press release from the band, meanwhile, describes “Torn” as “a tender country song detailing broken family ties, that holds wider resonances.”

Not only is it another unlikely collaboration from an artist who remained unpredictable and vivacious until the very end, it feels like a dream for Bono that it even happened.

“It’s very moving to have had these intimacies with such a figure,” he says. “The fact that they’re not there now, in any way you can call back, other than through her songs, is very sobering.”

The news comes as Parton’s estate deals with an increasingly complicated aftermath of her death. On September 23, a Tennessee judge granted a temporary restraining order against her nephew Bryan Seaver and his security company, following allegations from Parton’s estate that he had made threatening statements toward employees, attorneys and business partners. Seaver, who served as Parton’s head of security and announced her death last month, has denied making threats and called the restraining order a “publicity stunt.”

Parton was laid to rest at a private Nashville ceremony at the end of August, and was the subject of a teary tribute at the Emmys just two weeks later.

Her career would begin with just one little guitar, and would go on to span a staggering eight decades. During that time, she released 49 studio albums, with her last, Rockstar, showing another side to the singer once more.

It was an album that Steve Albini had wanted to produce before his passing, but it was U2 who got the honor of one last studio trip with the Queen of Country.

Lonnie Mack’s beloved 1958 Gibson Flying V is heading to auction, along with the 1962 Magnatone Custom 440 combo and strap he used throughout his career. The Flying V — number 7 off Gibson’s production line — has a starting bid of $300,000 and is expected to rise when it goes under the hammer at Heritage Auctions.

For guitar players, though, the significance of the instrument goes well beyond its rarity. Mack never quite became a household name, but serious players knew his power and influence. Through his mix of blues, country and soul, he left an indelible impression on a young Stevie Ray Vaughan — who would eventually help bring his hero’s career back from the brink.

When Vaughan discovered Jimi Hendrix’s music via a lucky dumpster find, his life was irrevocably changed. He never had the chance to meet Hendrix, but when another pillar of his musical inspiration needed a helping hand, Vaughan was able to be his hero.

“Lonnie was a big influence on me,” the bluesman said in Guitar Player’s April 1985 issue, speaking during a break in a recording session at Austin’s Cedar Creek Studio. Mack’s career, playing and comeback via Strike Like Lightning, which he co-produced with Vaughan, were key topics of conversation.

“A lot of people don’t realize how big an influence he is on today’s guitar players in general, especially when it comes to phrasing,” Vaughan said. “That first album of his, The Wham! Of That Memphis Man, is the first record I ever bought. Actually, my brother Jimmie first turned me on to Lonnie, but I beat him to the punch getting the album to the house.”

After the success of his debut album, Mack struggled to properly follow it up, with subsequent records suffering from poor promotion. Compounding matters, as the British Invasion took hold in the States — the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan debut came the year after Wham! was released — his opportunities and prominence began to wane.

During his bleakest spell on the fringes of the music business, Mack was reportedly selling Bibles out of the back of his car. He was later hired to play bass on the Doors’ 1970 album Morrison Hotel, where he can be heard on “Roadhouse Blues” and “Maggie M’Gill.”

It was the better part of a decade later that Mack and SRV crossed paths. The meeting proved fortuitous for both men.

“Stevie impressed the hell out of me,” Mack said in that same interview. “He wasn’t right for the South band [Mack’s group], which was country-rock, but he was definitely a great player.”

“I was playin’ the Rome Inn in Austin, and we had just hit the opening chords of ‘Wham!’ when this big guy walked in,” Vaughan recalled. Little did he know he was playing Mack’s biggest hit in front of the man himself.

“He looked just like a great big bear,” Vaughan added. “As soon as I looked close at his face, I realized who he was, and naturally he was blown away to hear us doing his song. We talked for a long time that night, and he wanted to produce us. So it’s kind of ironic the way things turned out.”

Indeed, plans were made, and in 1985, Vaughan and Mack wound up working together on Strike Like Lightning, Mack’s comeback record. Vaughan co-produced the album, helping bring the guitarist back into the spotlight.

Mack had essentially one guitar throughout his career, and he didn’t need anything else. It was a red 1958 Gibson Flying V, number 7 off Gibson’s production line. A quick look at it reveals that he was more than happy to modify the guitar, with a metal bar running across the split in the V to accommodate a Bigsby vibrato. The guitar was also sent to Gibson for its distinctive refinish in 1963, the same year his debut LP was released.

Notably, the guitar has more than Mack’s own history attached to it. On Strike Like Lightning, it was plugged into some of SRV’s most distinctive tonal weapons.

First, it ran through the guitarist’s fabled Ibanez Tube Screamer, with the signal then feeding into a mic’d Fender Vibroverb, another piece of Vaughan’s arsenal.

Their album together had plenty of poetry to it. The Wham of That Memphis Man was the first record SRV ever bought, and together, they reworked its instrumental title track, renaming it “Double Whammy” for obvious reasons.

A year after its release, Mack was asked by Guitar World how he arranged the song with his biggest fan. His response typified the informal chemistry between the two.

“I’d just say, ‘go!’” he laughed. “I’d say, ‘Okay, you play rhythm, take the second solo,’ like that; we never worked anything out in detail.”

For more SRV, check out our recently republished 1984 Guitar Player interview, taking in everything from Dumbles to strippers and crazy gigs.

American pop-punk band New Found Glory has found a fitting way to pay tribute to their late guitarist, Chad Gilbert — they’re headed to Disney World.

Gilbert was part of the Coral Springs, Florida, band’s founding lineup in 1997 and went on to build a cult following across 11 albums. In recent years, he battled multiple forms of cancer and earlier this month tragically passed away at age 45.

There’s been an outpouring of love for the guitarist from across the music scene, and now his surviving bandmates have found a fitting way to honor his memory by going ahead with a series of shows at Epcot at the Disney World resort in their home state.

The shows were arranged before Gilbert’s passing, but they’ve now taken on a different meaning.

“We want to thank everyone for the overwhelming amount of love and tribute posts for Chad these past few days,” the band says in an official statement via Instagram. “Seeing how deeply he touched so many lives means everything to us, and we know he would be so proud to see it.”

The band also announced that it was pulling out of its upcoming appearance at Aftershock Festival to give its members time to grieve. Though taking place before the festival, the Epcot shows will be the band’s first since Gilbert’s death, and they will go ahead as planned. In doing so, the band will unite two of Gilbert’s biggest passions.

“Anyone who knew Chad knew that he was a massive Disney fan,” the post continues. “Our shows at Epcot were dates he was so excited for and he was actively planning to be on stage with us there. He had already worked on the setlists with us and was practicing as much as possible to be ready.

“Because of how much he wanted to play these shows, taking the stage at Epcot feels like the right way to honor him, and what he would want us to do. Our plan from the beginning with him was to announce our Epcot sets ahead of time, so we feel it’s only appropriate to share them with you now as we prepare to play in his memory.”

Given his illness, Gilbert — whose main electric guitars were Les Pauls and Telecasters — had been unable to play many shows with the band in recent years. Real Friends guitarist David Knox has been filling in for him at recent shows, but Gilbert was able to return to the stage for a show in Nashville on June 8, performing two songs from a motorized scooter as his daughter watched on. He underwent brain surgery in March after struggling to control his left hand.

At Epcot, the band will play three shows each night at America Gardens Theatre in the American Adventure pavilion, at 5:30 p.m., 6:45 p.m. and 8 p.m. The shows will take place September 28 and 29 as part of the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival.

“Every note we play and every word you sing at Epcot is for Chad,” the band concludes. “Thank you all for wrapping us in so much love, understanding, and support as we come together to honor his legacy.”

Meanwhile, Blink-182 bassist and Fender signature artist Mark Hoppus has paid an emotional tribute to the guitarist, who touched the lives of many.

“Chad was the best friend to every person he met,” he writes. “The most positive and creative force in any room he walked into. These past years he fought his sickness with the soul of a joyous, courageous warrior. With dignity, love, and gratitude. He never complained once, only kept saying how lucky he was. For everything. Today we lost a good one, and the world won’t be the same.”

Gilbert is survived by his wife and daughter, as well as his mother, Jackie, and brother, Brian.

Macklemore is turning the controversy surrounding his departure from Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour into a new run of shows centered on his support for Palestinians.

The rapper announced the Free Palestine Tour Thursday, with initial dates set for Dublin, Paris and London. Additional artists and U.S. dates will be announced soon, he said, with all proceeds from the tour set to benefit organizations supporting Palestinians. The Dublin date is scheduled for October 26, with the Paris and London dates to follow.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s Loop Tour following comments he made during a September 4 performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore told the crowd that one reason he wanted to join the tour was to be able to say “Free Palestine” from stadium stages, and he performed his 2024 protest song “Hind’s Hall.”

Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the remainder of the U.S. leg of the tour. Sheeran has said the decision was made by the tour’s promoter, Messina Touring Group, after venues indicated they would not host the shows if Macklemore remained on the bill.

Several of Sheeran’s other supporting acts — including Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and Beoga — subsequently withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Sheeran also incurred the ire of former Pink Floyd bass guitarist Roger Waters, a longtime supporter of Palestinian causes, who called him "a little prick" in a video about Macklemore’s removal from the Loop tour.

Sheeran has continued the Loop Tour, performing largely on his own after the supporting acts departed.

At his September 19 concert in Philadelphia, Sheeran addressed the controversy from the stage. He said he had made “mistakes” and apologized to fans, while also describing the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic and unjustifiable.” Sheeran said he wanted his shows to be about “unity and humanity, not politics,” but acknowledged that the controversy had placed him in the middle of a debate over freedom of speech and the conflict.

Macklemore, meanwhile, said the experience had convinced him that artists should use their platforms to speak out even when doing so carries consequences.

“What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage,” he wrote in announcing the new tour. “When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.”

He said he spent the past week reaching out to other artists who have publicly supported Palestinians and began discussing a new tour. Macklemore acknowledged that the project has come together quickly, with artists, schedules and other details still being finalized.

“But this is a moment of momentum, and there is work to be done,” he wrote. “So we’re going on tour.”

The first announced dates are in Dublin, Paris and London, with artist announcements and U.S. dates to follow. Macklemore is directing fans to his website to sign up for updates and first access to tickets. The presale is scheduled to begin Monday, September 28, at 10 a.m. local time, with the general on-sale beginning Wednesday, September 30, at 10 a.m.

The controversy surrounding Nirvana’s final album, 1993’s In Utero, has been well documented. The band had deliberately set out to make a rawer, less polished follow-up to Nevermind, enlisting Steve Albini to record the album in just 10 days. But reports that executives at their label, DGC, were unhappy with the finished record’s abrasive sound and commercial potential led to a contentious post-production process.

Nirvana ultimately stood by most of Albini’s work, but they did bring in Scott Litt to remix “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies,” both of which would become singles. While Kurt Cobain said he felt the vocals weren’t prominent enough in Albini’s original mixes, bass guitarist Krist Novoselic has now revealed that he had a rather different objection to “Heart-Shaped Box” — one he had raised with Cobain and Albini while the album was being recorded.

The trio — Kurt Cobain on guitar and vocals, Krist Novoselic on bass and Dave Grohl on drums — had decided to go back to basics ahead of their session with Albini. They wanted the album released warts and all, despite concerns that its roughness would make it an unsuccessful follow-up to Nevermind.

But by the time they decided to remix All Apologies and Heart-Shaped Box, as Novoselic told Mojo, the latter song had been nagging at the bassist for a while.

“That was the thing with Steve. It felt like once the record was done it was completely done,” he said. “That’s when the record label kinda stepped in and said, ‘Hey!’ We had a confrontation about the situation.”

He continued: “But you know why we had to remix Heart-Shaped Box? You should hear the original version of that song — the guitar solo has this effect on it. It just sabotages the whole song. Steve and Kurt were colluding!

“I would go to Kurt, ‘Why are you sabotaging this beautiful song by putting this hideous abortion in the centre of it?’ He’d be like, ‘Well, I think it sounds cool.’”

He added that he couldn’t clearly remember the reasons Cobain and Albini offered for having tracked it that way. “Some statement against commercial radio or something — the popular mainstream aesthetic… I dunno!”

When Litt was hired to remix the two tracks, Novoselic reflected: “Maybe I should have spoke up at the time [of recording].”

But he countered his own position: “I think it’s a great-sounding record. It’s a highly artistic record. I don’t know who else could have produced it except Albini.

“It’s my favorite Nirvana record, and I’ll tell you why. There was a lot of stuff going on with the band; externally and internally, there was a lot of pressures. But when we walked through that door we left all that stuff outside the door. We just played music, we worked together really well, we were laughing, we were concentrating, we were open.

“And that really shows on the record. We didn’t mess around. Nobody got bombed, everybody was focused and clear-headed. I’m really proud of it, it’s a beautiful record.”

He went on: “Sometimes the lyrics on In Utero are really creepy. I listen to ’em now and it’s like, ‘Why didn’t I hear that back then?’”

Black Sabbath’s first manager said it was important that their 1969 demo tapes be released so fans could hear the development of Tony Iommi as a world-changing guitarist.

The tracks were laid down in Birmingham during the brief period when the band called themselves Earth, with a sound that was still rooted in blues and jazz. They’d started out as the Polka Tulk Blues Band in 1968 before shortening the name to Polka Tulk, then becoming Earth. They took on their best-known name in August 1969.

Jim Simpson looked after their affairs in those early days and was instrumental in making the recordings, which he wanted to release in 2025 as Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes. Those plans were stalled after Sharon Osbourne stepped in, and the masters have since been handed over to the band.

In an interview earlier this year (via Blabbermouth), Simpson explained what he thought had gone wrong.

“The sleeve notes, which I wrote, talked about those great days when Birmingham established itself as the U.K. home of rock and roll. And it exalted some of the names that were coming through and the people who made us famous musically.

“It ended up by saying, ‘At the end of the decade came along one band who would not only change the face of music in the U.K., but create their own style and go on to world domination.’ I didn’t mention Black Sabbath, electric guitarist Tony Iommi, bass guitarist Geezer Butler, singer Ozzy Osbourne and drummer Bill Ward. It irked somebody.”

No release plans have been revealed, although Iommi said in July 2026 that they’d appear “at some point.” Simpson said: “Right at the beginning I was told that the band didn't want it to happen.” He went on to argue that, regardless of the musicians’ concerns, it was important for the music to be heard.

“They were a blues band when I met them,” he emphasised. “And the album’s nine tracks. It starts off with four blues tracks [and] a couple of jazz tracks, because of Tony Iommi's love of gypsy jazz. The two jazz tracks are both called Song For Jim. One featured Tony on guitar, the other featured Tony on flute. We’d already recorded one with guitar, so we recorded it again with flute. And he did a good job.

“They all did a good job. But after the first few tracks, the remaining four tracks get towards, but never quite reach, what you know of as Black Sabbath. It slowly got heavier and heavier. It’s a historical document. Any real Black Sabbath fans will really want to hear this.”

Earlier this year, Iommi — who joined fellow flautist Ian Anderson in Jethro Tull for a few weeks in 1969 before returning to Sabbath to apply what he’d learned — said he’d enjoyed listening to the Earth recordings. “It’s weird when you hear stuff from so long ago; all these things crop up that you forgot about,” he told Rolling Stone. “I sat listening to them all, and it was good because there’s some jazzy stuff and bluesy stuff we done on them where we just used to jam. On a lot of the jams, it was all guitar, and I forgot about half of that. I can’t play that now.”

Joe Satriani recalled two twists of fate that turned the title track of his 1989 album Flying in a Blue Dream into one of his favorite pieces of all time. In a recent interview with Guitar.com he said he’d been working on another track, titled “Big Bad Moon,’ but realized it wasn’t working at that point. That’s when another thought occurred to him.

“I had a memory of when I was a kid, having these flying dreams as I was trying to go to sleep,” he said. “It just filled me with a kind of musical inspiration… I suddenly picked up this acoustic guitar and I heard these chords. I tuned the guitar to an open F for some reason — maybe because I kept thinking a low C was the note I was hearing in my head — and I started playing these chords that sounded right to me.”

Once he’d mapped out the piece, he told himself: “That’s really interesting. You’ve never done that before.” He added: “This was all happening minute by minute. I got so excited that I completely forgot about ‘Big Bad Moon’ and just focused on this. I had my Tascam four-track cassette recorder — a great, fun little deck — and I was busy recording bits of it as I was writing.”

He was still wondering about the music’s direction as he listened back.

“The funniest thing came to my mind: Frank Sinatra,” he said. “Very often, Frank would start a song and tell you a story in a colloquial, American spoken way of singing. By the end of his melody, not only would the register move up and up, but he’d finally say the word that is the chorus at the very end.

“I thought, ‘That’s my model. That’s what I have to do here, because I’m telling a story, but it’s about flying.’ As I get to the height of the story, I need to be high up in the sky flying around. I started to think, ‘Just pace it the way that Frank Sinatra would have paced it. Go slowly, go way behind the beat, just go late, late, late, and then move your way up.’”

When it came to recording the full track, fate intervened once again, this time in the form of a radio broadcast that introduces the music. Satriani said he’d been encountering constant interference issues at the Coast Recorders studio in San Francisco because the room wasn’t set up for high-gain guitars at high volume.

“We were sitting there laughing, like, ‘How are we going to record this part if it’s so noisy?’ Every time I turned the volume knob from two to three, I’d get a different radio station. At one point, we heard this kid’s voice coming through, talking about something… it sounded like an old 1950s Art Linkletter radio show or TV show from when we were kids.”

Producer John Cuniberti decided to try recording the voice onto the leader tape ahead of Blue Dream. Satch — who recently listed the “small realities” that every player needs to know — remembered:

“As soon as the kid says, ‘And sometimes afterwards they like each other, and sometimes they don’t,’ the leader ended, the magnetic tape hit the heads, and the guitar chords came pounding in. We were like, ‘Damn!’ The timing was just too good to be true for a song written about being a kid having flying dreams.”

Elliott Randall’s electric-guitar solo on Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years” is one of those performances that sounds almost impossible to have happened spontaneously. But that’s essentially how it came together: Randall had no solo written, no elaborate rig and no particular plan beyond responding to the track in front of him.

The result became one of the most celebrated guitar solos in rock. Jimmy Page has reportedly called it his favorite solo of all time, while readers of our sister publication, Guitar World, selected it as the 40th greatest guitar solo ever in a poll several years ago.

Written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, “Reelin’ in the Years” appeared on Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. Fagen and Becker knew they had a great song, but they were struggling to find the right guitar solo to complete it. So they called on Randall, whom they knew from their days playing in the backing band for Jay and the Americans and who had also played on several of the duo’s pre–Steely Dan demos.

“They were having trouble finding the right ‘flavor’ solo for ‘Reelin,’ and asked me to give it a go,” Randall told Guitar World several years ago. Presumably, Dan’s guitarists Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Denny Dias and Becker himself had given the solo a try without success.

“Most of the song was already complete,” Randall adds, “so I had the good fortune of having a very clear picture of what the solo was laying on top of. They played it for me without much dialog about what I should play.

“It just wasn’t necessary because we did it in one take and nothing was written.”

As Randall explained in a 2007 interview with Guitar Player, the performance heard on the record was, more precisely, his first recorded take. He had done an earlier run-through that several people in the studio felt was even better, but the tape machine hadn’t been armed.

“I never plan a solo in advance,” Randall said. “If I did, it wouldn’t be improvisation, which to me is one of the most exciting things about being a soloist. What you hear on the Steely Dan record is the first recorded take of my response to the track.”

The experience had a lasting effect on Steely Dan’s recording process. “From then on, Katz [Steely Dan’s producer] never let a run-through go by without ensuring that it was being recorded,” Randall recalled.

Randall’s approach was remarkably straightforward. He recorded the solo on his ’63 Fender Stratocaster, which featured a PAF humbucker in the neck position, plugged directly into an Ampeg SVT amp and miked with a single AKG 414.

“The SVT wouldn’t have been my first choice for an amp, or even my fifth choice,” Randall said. “But it was the only amp in the studio that night. My Strat has been my number one axe since 1965.”

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter played the harmony parts, while Randall handled the entire lead performance — intro, answers, main solo and ending — as one continuous take.

“The whole solo just came to me, and I feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to play it,” Randall said.

That spontaneous quality is central to Randall’s view of studio playing. As a longtime producer and session musician, he says his job is to help make the best possible recording while responding to what the artist and producer want from him.

“My job as a studio musician is to facilitate the making of the best possible recording,” he said. “As I’ve also been a producer since the ’60s, I have specific ideas about how to do that, but if I’m not the producer of a session, it behooves me to make my clients happy.

“And if they are asking for ‘classic Randall,’ I have to determine what their concept of that is. Of course, I do love when someone wants me to be ‘collaboratively creative.’”

There is even more Randall on the four-channel quadraphonic mix of “Reelin’ in the Years,” which contains additional lead fills that aren’t heard in the more familiar two-channel stereo version.

Beyond his legendary work with Steely Dan, Randall has performed and recorded with artists ranging from the Doobie Brothers to Asia and James Galway. He has also worked as a producer, teacher, clinician and technological consultant to major musical-instrument manufacturers.

But for many guitarists, it’s those few minutes on “Reelin’ in the Years” — improvised in the studio and captured on tape before anyone had quite decided what the solo should be — that remain his signature.

Queen’s first-ever live performance was organized by drummer Roger Taylor’s mother to raise money for charity. The young musician, however, felt the band still had a long way to go as they stepped offstage together for the first time. Surprisingly, he says Freddie Mercury was the weak link.

Winifred Taylor had arranged for the band to play a concert for the British Red Cross. It was a group that Mercury, then known as Freddie Bulsara, had assembled from the ashes of Smile. The show took place in Truro, Cornwall, in June 1970, and was originally intended to be a Smile performance. Queen would take the mantle instead. Bass player John Deacon wouldn’t join until the following year, so the bass spot was filled by Taylor’s friend Mike Grose. Brian May rounded out the trio with his homemade Red Special electric guitar.

May and Mercury, as history remembers, became a formidable songwriting partnership. There were occasional arguments over guitar solos, songs written in the bath, and songs that possess a strange kind of magic. Yet for Taylor, who has just released his latest solo album, Violence Insane In a Beautiful World, there were few signs of the majestic history that lay ahead of them that day.

“I think we were paid £50, which was an enormous amount in those days,” he tells the BBC. “We had just started Queen then, and Freddie hadn’t really developed his voice, his vocal capacities, to the full.

“He sounded quite alarming some of the time,” he recalls. “He sounded a little bit like a strangled sheep at times, with a very fast falsetto. But of course he kind of invented himself out of it all.”

Mercury’s strongest assets were slow to reveal themselves.

“We didn’t realize at the time what a great musician he was,” Taylor admits. “A great piano player. A fantastic songwriter. We didn’t know what a gem we had at first.”

That gem, of course, was still rough around the edges at that first show in Truro City Hall.

Another key aspect of the band’s trademark sound took shape in the local area. Roughly 10 miles northwest of Truro, the band found remarkable natural reverb in the caves at Chapel Porth beach, St. Agnes. There, they would refine their vocal harmonies.

“I think we must have been in caves because it sounds bigger,” Taylor says. “The sound rattles everywhere.”

Despite the bumpy first show, the band’s potential soon became much clearer, with their self-titled album arriving three years later. It peaked at number 24 in the U.K. charts, despite May’s dissatisfaction with its production.

Speaking to Guitar Player about the album’s troubled and involuntarily rushed recording in 2021, May said they didn’t have the chance to flex their muscles until its follow-up. The record was still an important first step, though — the moment when Queen began putting paint on the proverbial canvas.

Queen’s success wasn’t forged after one humble charity gig. Mercury would go on to blossom into one of rock’s most distinguished and cherished talents, though May says there was at least one occasion when he left the group speechless. Not all of Mercury’s ideas were solid gold.

It’s been 35 years since Mercury’s all-too-soon passing in 1991, at just 45. His legacy shows no signs of waning. Now, one of the band’s most infamous and controversial concerts is set for a 40th-anniversary theatrical release, bringing a monumental moment in rock history to the big screen in 4K.

“There will never be an event quite like that again,” May said of that show. The same could be said of Mercury — even if Taylor thought his first gig was less than perfect.

A fight over Dolly Parton’s entertainment empire has spilled into public view, with her longtime manager accusing her nephew and former security chief of intimidation, threats and an escalating effort to extract money from the late singer’s estate.

Danny Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager and head of She’s Alive, the corporation that oversees her businesses, has filed for a restraining order against Brian Seaver, Parton’s nephew, who was dismissed as head of security for Parton’s properties last week. Seaver was the person who publicly announced Parton’s death on August 25 in a video.

According to The New York Times, Nozell’s filing accuses Seaver of launching “an obscene, deliberate and escalating campaign of threats” in an effort to obtain money from Parton’s estate.

The filing includes a series of text messages that appear to show Seaver making increasingly aggressive threats. In one message sent to at least one partner of Dollywood, someone identified as Seaver wrote that he would become “the hand of retribution for my entire family.”

In another message, dated September 3, Seaver referred to himself as a “killer” and claimed he had sold $27 million worth of arms and ammunition to Haitian police on the day the “9 to 5” singer/songwriter and guitar player died.

Other messages allegedly threatened to “set up a podcast dedicated to ruining Dolly’s brand partnerships and telling the violations these people have done on us.” The message also included a demand for payment.

Parton’s businesses include Dollywood, her SongTeller hotel and Life of Many Colors museum that is set to open this month.

Seaver and his security company had protected Parton and her properties for many years. But according to Nozell’s complaint, the operation was far from a conventional security detail. He describes it as “a heavily armed, paramilitary-style force” with access to military-grade weapons.

Nozell and other Parton business associates reportedly became increasingly alarmed as Seaver made demands in the period surrounding Parton’s death. Some have left, while others have hired their own security teams, according to the filing.

Seaver has defended his conduct and his work protecting Parton and her family in comments to TMZ.

“We remain unshakably resolved to fulfill her final directive to protect her family, and we refuse to be intimidated by those whose actions we believe are being taken in bad faith and with the intent to profit from the life of someone who willingly gave so much,” he said.

Steve Howe is known for being one of rock’s great virtuosos on both electric and acoustic guitar, but he has another, much more unexpected skill — he plays the washboard.

It goes back to Howe’s childhood in London, when he was growing up during the skiffle boom of the late 1950s that influenced musicians ranging from the Beatles to Pink Floyd. The British skiffle craze drew heavily from American folk, blues and country music, and washboards were a common part of the sound.

Howe was also listening to plenty of American roots music at home. His parents’ record collection included artists such as Tennessee Ernie Ford and Chet Atkins, and Atkins in particular showed Howe how much rhythmic and percussive detail could be pulled from an acoustic instrument.

So while Howe would eventually become famous for his guitar playing, he also picked up a few other instruments along the way. The washboard was one of them — and it eventually landed him an unlikely studio gig with producer Trevor Horn.

Horn was working with former Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren on the 1983 album Duck Rock when he needed someone who could play washboard. As Howe tells it, there weren’t exactly a lot of candidates.

"One of my hidden skills is definitely the washboard,“ he tells Guitar Player. “On my own albums I’ve done quite a lot of washboard. I think it’s terrific. I think it’s a brilliant instrument, totally underrated.

"I have a story; one day the phone rang and it was Trevor Horn, and he said to me, 'I’ve got something going on with a recording here. It’s Malcolm McLaren, and he wants a washboard. Don’t you play washboard?'

“I said, 'Yes, I’m the best in London,' and he says, 'Well, you’re the only one in London. I can’t find anybody who plays it. Come in.' So I went a few days later and played on some track Trevor was producing.

“I quite like that story."

It wasn’t just a one-off for Howe, either. He continued to use the washboard on his own recordings, including his 1993 solo album The Grand Scheme of Things.

These days, Howe is focused on getting back to full strength after undergoing surgery earlier this year. Yes is now scheduled to hit the road in early May next year, with plans to perform its 1971 album Fragile and more in the U.K. before heading to Japan. North American dates are also being planned, with details still to come.

Suzi Quatro believes she deserves a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and after more than half a century of breaking ground for women in rock, she has certainly paid her dues.

When the 22-year-old Quatro released her first single, “Rolling Stone,” in 1972, she was a rock and roll outlier. Propelled by Peter Frampton’s guitar playing, the song may only have been a commercial success in Portugal, but Quatro was doing something far more significant: beating down a door that had long been locked for women rockers.

The bass player and vocalist, full of rock’s trademark attitude, has been recognized as the world’s first “Rock Chick”, inspiring a generation of female-powered acts to follow in her wake. The Runaways and Heart are two vital examples, while Joan Jett has recalled being inspired by Quatro because “she had the guts to get on stage and play” at a time when women were grossly underrepresented in rock.

Nearly 55 years after “Rolling Stone” introduced her to the world, Quatro is still going strong, as defiantly punk and Detroiter as ever. She has enjoyed — and sometimes endured — a chaotic career, one she was happy to regale in a new interview with the Guardian.

And some of her stories demonstrate exactly the kind of professional resolve that has kept her onstage for more than half a century. For Quatro, the golden rule has always been simple: whatever happens, the show must go on.

“We were doing a show once, going down a storm, and I had a section with the drummer,” Quatro, a trained percussionist, remembers. “Then the P.A. blew, and all the audience could hear were drums. We looked at each other and went, ‘Right, let’s go!’

“So, we did a 15-minute drum solo together, because whatever happens onstage, the golden rule is you have to make it work. Everybody thought it was part of the show.”

She has had to improvise through considerably more embarrassing situations, too. Quatro says most of her fan interactions are great, but there are always exceptions.

“A couple of years ago I was coming out to do my final song, and everybody had their hands up for a high-five,” she recalls. “So did a little bit of that, and one girl grabbed my hand, held on to it with a death-grip, and tried to pull me off the stage. I tried to pull back, and my entire jumpsuit ripped, right across my ass.”

Eventually, she broke free and shuffled back toward her onstage monitor, where she — “very professionally!” — finished the song sitting down.

“As soon as the song was over, the monitor guy came and put a towel around my waist, and I walked off,” Quatro adds. “I wish I could find that girl because I would love to give her a piece of my mind. I was really upset.”

The incidents are funny in retrospect, but they also speak to the attitude that has defined Quatro’s career. She has spent decades proving that she belongs onstage, and she has no intention of stopping until she feels she can no longer deliver at her own standard.

Freedom is her latest studio album. It’s her 18th solo album overall, and her first since Face to Face, a collaborative record with KT Tunstall in 2023. As the title suggests, she isn’t ready to have her wings clipped yet.

“When I was 35, a journalist stupidly asked me, ‘When are you going to retire?’” she remembers. “I said, ‘I will retire when I go on stage, turn my back on the audience, shake my ass, and there’s silence.’”

The sentiment hasn’t truly changed some 40 years later, although Quatro has updated the punchline.

“When I got to 65, I said, ‘I will retire when I go onstage, turn my back on the audience, and my ass shakes by itself’,” she laughs. “I’m 76 now, but at 75 I gave my final quote on this subject, and it was serious — I will retire when I go on stage and do not deliver to my standard. When I feel that, I’m done.”

That distinguished, generation-inspiring career has led many fans to call for Quatro’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Quatro herself says it would be a “no-brainer.” Yet she has never even received a nomination, while Oasis and Iron Maiden were among those getting the nod in the British-heavy class of 2026.

Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde are also notable members of Quatro’s fan club, having followed the path she blazed in the 1970s. With more than 55 million albums sold, the case for recognition is one Quatro clearly feels is worth making.

Still, after everything she has endured onstage and off, she isn’t letting the omission stop her.

“It used to bother me, but now I’ve read up on lots of people who aren’t in it, and I’m in good company,” she says. “I just hope they’re not waiting for me to die so they can do it posthumously.”

Johnny Marr has just made headlines after selling nearly 100 guitars from his collection for just shy of $5 million at auction. That’s a lot of cherished instruments to let go of, but it turns out he only feels he — and every player, in fact — needs three specific guitars.

During last week’s Christie’s auction, the former Smiths guitarist saw several of his historic instruments fetch six-figure sums. A whopping £3,649,280, or around $4.87 million, was spent during the auction, with the money going to selected charities.

During a recent interview with one-time Top Gear host Chris Evans for Virgin Radio, Johnny Marr made it clear why he was happy to slim down his collection. He was asked a hypothetical question: If he could only have three guitars in his life, what would he choose? He answered it with ease.

First up is a bona fide classic electric guitar.

“So, you get a Gibson ES-335, ideally from between 1961 and 1963,” he says. “The reason is that they’re versatile, and they have a really rich, dark sound, made famous by Eric Clapton in Cream.”

As he says, one of Clapton’s main Cream workhorses was a 1964 Gibson ES-335 in its usual and iconic Cherry Red finish. As Guitar World reports, conflicting stories exist about how he got the guitar, but the most likely scenario is that he acquired it in 1968, which is why it became such an important instrument for Cream during the London dates of Cream’s farewell tour just weeks later.

It stayed in his collection until 2004, when it was auctioned off for his Crossroads charity. It sold for $847,500. That lineage, in turn, inspired Marr to get his own mid-’60s Cherry Red 335, with a ’63 model heard across his latest solo album, The Age of Everything.

“They just do a thing that other guitars can’t do,” he says.

Next up, Marr picks a guitar even closer to home.

“The other guitar, in all honesty, you get my signature Jag,” he explains. “The reason is because of the way my signature Jag sounds; you don’t have to get a Rickenbacker, and you don’t have to get a Gretsch, a Jazzmaster or a Strat, because, inadvertently, I ended up designing a guitar that does all the things [those three guitars do].”

Marr’s signature Fender Jaguar first arrived in 2012, with key features including a four-position Tele-style pickup selector that replaced the Jag’s high-pass filter and individual pickup on/off switches, allowing players to flit between the bridge position, both pickups in parallel or both in series.

Its bridge saddle is also inspired by Fender Mustang guitars, which have better tuning stability when abusing the whammy bar. It became one of Fender’s best-selling signature guitars.

An updated version arrived last year, and Marr reinvented the Jag all over again. New lipstick pickups and a whole new pickup system were noteworthy changes.

“I would have said you need a Rickenbacker for that jangle, and you need a Strat for that slinky sort of thing, and maybe a Gretsch for that ringing thing,” Marr extends. “Well, because all of those are encompassing sort of my sound, I realized after I designed my Jag, it did all three.”

Last but not least, he unplugs to complete the trio.

“Then I’d get a Martin acoustic guitar, a D-28, because if you’ve got to be able to play the acoustic,” he quips. “It’s a little bit of a clumsy comparison, but if you can’t, it’s like learning to drive an automatic car, then getting into a manual.

“Being able to play acoustic makes you infinitely better on the electric, and vice versa,” he reasons.

For Marr — a player with a hatred for satin necks and Yngwie Malmsteen — those guitars are the holy trinity. Other players may disagree, but it’s a versatile trio whichever way you look at it.

Elsewhere, he’s talked about his strange method to avoid impulse buying guitars, explained how Paul McCartney came to his aid when the Smiths broke up, and what made his songwriting tandem with Morrissey magic.

In 1973, Alice Cooper was no longer just a rock star; he was the ringmaster of a high-decibel circus that thrived on shock and spectacle. But as he and his band prepared to record the masterpiece that would become Billion Dollar Babies, they lacked the perfect “curtain raiser” — a song that could encapsulate the thrill of a performance in a sold-out arena.

The solution arrived from the most unlikely of places: a folk-pop tune originally made famous by Judy Collins. What followed was a radical sonic transformation of the song, turning it into a menacing but triumphant call to arms that united fans for Alice’s grand entrance.

Billion Dollar Babies marked the start of a new era in Cooper‘s career, and he was adapting his persona to fit. The success of his 1972 hit “School’s Out” brought Cooper fame among teens and infamy among their outraged parents who feared the song would encourage rebellion and school absenteeism.

In response, he began his metamorphosis from underground shock rocker to headline-grabbing provocateur. His Billion Dollar Babies song “Elected” was part of the new image, a satire that cast Alice as a presidential candidate for the rock and roll generation.

Bob Ezrin, Cooper’s producer, had the talents for helping Alice through this evolution. His keen sense for novelty, combined with his theatrical approach to music, elevated his productions, whether by having kids sing along on the chorus of “School’s Out” or by adding a brass section on "Elected."

For Cooper’s new emergence on the world stage, Ezrin discovered a song he thought made the perfect opening track: “Hello, Hooray.”

Written by Canadian singer-songwriter Rolf Kempf, the tune had been famously covered by Collins on her 1968 album, Who Knows Where the Time Goes. At its core, the lyrics are about a performer preparing to step into the spotlight, a theme that seemed well suited to Cooper’s new persona.

But the singer needed convincing.

“I heard it and I said, ‘Bob, this is a folk song,’” he recalled on The Alice Cooper Show Radio Special. “He said, ‘No, listen to the lyrics. It’s about a guy who is about to go onstage. And he’s terrified — but he’s ready.’

“It was the perfect opening for Billion Dollar Babies.”

Together with Ezrin, Cooper reconstructed Kempf’s folk-pop tune into a bombastic declaration of Cooper’s newfound power. In addition to giving the tune new lyrics that addressed the audience, they pumped it up with an orchestral arrangement and a fusillade of cannon blasts that echo over the song’s extended outro.

But the song wouldn’t be complete without some heavy guitar licks. For that, Ezrin enlisted studio guitarist Steve Hunter, and suggested he apply some harmonized slide guitar work to the intro and solo.

Hunter’s big career moments were still largely ahead of him — handling electric guitar on Aerosmith’s “Train Kept A’ Rollin’,” tackling a tricky acoustic part on Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” and helping Lou Reed capture his first Gold record with Rock ’N’ Roll Animal — but he had great instincts for what a song needed.

Even so, he was initially skeptical of Ezrin’s approach.

“It had a great arrangement, and it had terrific parts played very well by the Alice Cooper boys,” he tells Guitar Player. “But I was taken aback when producer Bob Ezrin suggested a slide part for the song’s solo section. I had tried my hand at slide playing a few times, and I quickly discovered it was much harder than it appeared. I decided to leave the slide stuff to Johnny Winter or George Harrison.

“Luckily for me, however, I had spent five years of my youth learning how to play lap-steel — thanks to my father — and I experimented with making my lap-steel technique sound like slide guitar.”

For the session, however, Hunter showed up toting not a lap steel but a beat-up, mid-to-late-1950s Gibson electric six-string pedal steel. It was a basic model with just four pedals, but one of those was badly damaged, leaving just three pedals to work with.

“I tuned the guitar to an open E, the first pedal to an open A, and the third pedal to an A minor chord, so I would have at least one minor,” he says. “Plus, I could use the relative major/minor chord relationship to get another minor. That was just about the extent of my music theory in those days.”

“With all of its problems, when you plugged the pedal steel into a Marshall half-stack, it sounded amazing,” Hunter continues, “likely due to the fact that its pickup was probably a PAF. Whatever Bob had in mind when he envisioned a ‘slide part,’ it was a pedal-steel performance.”

Although Hunter usually approached soloing through improvisation, he and Ezrin agreed a constructed solo was what the song required.

“I worked out the solo,” he says, “then doubled the first half and played harmony to the second half. Over the chords immediately following the solo, I pushed a couple of the Gibson’s ‘chord pedals’ — which is what I called them — to follow the progression.

“The tone was pretty organic. No effect pedals. We did use outboard studio gear, such as compressors and EQ, but my guitar tones were primarily from the volume and tone controls on the amp, and the volume and tone controls on the guitar. I still love the tone of that old pedal steel on ‘Hello Hooray.’”

Unfortunately, he no longer owns the Gibson pedal steel.

“It died a sad death,” he says. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have at least kept that PAF pickup.”

As for Ezrin, his instincts were spot on. “Hello Hooray” (minus the original‘s comma) became a hit for Cooper — it reached number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and made for a grand spectacle as the opening tune on the Billion Dollar Babies tour.

“That song was the quintessential Alice opening,” Cooper says. “It was the call to arms. It told the audience, ‘The show is starting, and you’re part of it now.’”

James Hetfield has named Tony Iommi as the single biggest influence on his rhythm guitar playing and songwriting — and pointed specifically to Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave” as a masterclass in riff construction.

“Tony Iommi is the riff lord, in my mind, and he is the one that has inspired me the most out of any guitar player for my rhythm guitar playing and songwriting,” Hetfield says in the latest episode of James Hetfield’s Riff Life on SiriusXM’s Maximum Metallica.

Discussing “Children of the Grave,” Hetfield breaks down what makes Iommi’s playing so effective, from the song’s central electric guitar riff to the way the guitarist uses chords, percussion and effects to expand its sound.

“Obviously, Tony is the riff lord and everyone starts the song together on the one riff,” he says. “Tony plays off that riff, goes in to hit the big giant chords, which opens the song up. I really love the drum overdub that they did to help with that percussion of the riff and the real cool ghostly guitar sounds at the very, very end.”

Hetfield’s admiration for Iommi is hardly surprising. Metallica took up the mantle of heavy metal’s original architects when they emerged in the 1980s, with Black Sabbath’s influence running throughout the band’s music. Iommi acknowledged that lineage in 2024, saying it was “brilliant to hear about other musicians liking what I’d done, taking the same kind of idea and improving on it, evolving it into their own sound.”

Metallica made that connection especially clear at Black Sabbath’s star-studded “Back to the Beginning” farewell show last year, performing “Johnny Blade” from Sabbath’s 1978 album Never Say Die! — a deeper cut rather than one of the band’s most obvious classics.

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has been equally emphatic about what Black Sabbath’s four original members mean to heavy music. Reflecting on the band’s influence ahead of the farewell show, he said:

“If it wasn’t for those four guys, man, we might still be just kind of like wandering around in the dark. But the fact that they created a genre — not only created it, but then developed it and then turned it into like a few different things over the course of their career — is completely awe inspiring to me and my peers musically.”

For years after Mick Ronson’s death, the where-abouts of his stripped 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom – the Ziggy Stardust guitar – were a mystery even to those who had been closest to him.

When Rick Tedesco asked Ronson’s friend and fellow performer Ian Hunter about it, the former Mott the Hoople frontman shrugged.

“God only knows where that went,” he replied. “Mick probably gave it to some guy walking across the street. He didn’t care about gear. It was just a tool to him.”

For Tedesco, finding the guitar became a mission.

A guitarist, producer and engineer whose credits include work with Hunter, Alice Cooper and former Cooper band members Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith, Tedesco had become a Bowie fanatic through the artist’s 1974 album, Diamond Dogs.

“I was a 13-year-old kid who was just obsessed with horror movies,” he recalls. “And then I saw that album cover. I just absolutely loved that album. I was like, ‘I’m done. That’s what I want to do.’”

Working his way backward through Bowie’s catalog, he soon discovered Ronson’s signature performances on the albums Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups.

Eventually he caught D.A. Pennebaker’s 1973 Ziggy Stardust concert film on television. “There was Mick,” he recalls. “And that’s what I wanted to be – David Bowie’s guitarist.”

Tedesco was particularly drawn to Ronson’s Les Paul Custom. Originally a Black Beauty, the guitar was stripped in 1970 after Ronson heard that removing the finish could improve resonance and high-frequency tone.

He subsequently used it on his first record with Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, right through Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups, making it the vehicle for each album’s searing power chords, singing leads and lyrical solos.

For Tedesco, a hardcore Bowie and Ronson fan, the guitar was an indelible part of his own identity as a guitarist.

By the 1990s, he was working at a music store in Danbury, Connecticut, when one day Hunter strolled in.

“Ian happened to live about 45 minutes away at the time,” he says. “I was like, Holy shit, it’s Ian Hunter! I even had posters of him and Mick on my wall.”

Hunter made repeat visits, and a friendship developed after Tedesco helped him refurbish his studio with an ADAT system.

“Mick had passed, and Ian didn’t really know what the hell to do,” Tedesco says. “He didn’t have his right-hand man anymore. So he started asking me, ‘Do you want to put some stuff down on this song?’”

Before he knew it, Tedesco was working with Hunter, who also introduced him to some members of Alice Cooper’s camp.

Hunter still had several of Ronson’s guitars, which he was holding onto for Suzi, Mick’s wife, but the stripped Les Paul Custom wasn’t among them.

“Nobody knew where it was,” Tedesco says. “I did some research and talked to one guy who thought he remembered an interview where Mick said he’d given it to the Hard Rock Cafe.”

Tedesco began calling Hard Rock locations, asking if they had the guitar, but a sweep of the company’s database came up empty.

“They had nothing of his at all,” he says.

Afterward, Tedesco’s source confirmed that the guitar had gone to the Hard Rock, adding that the restaurant was located in Australia. Because that facility is licensed from, but not owned by, the Hard Rock, its holdings weren’t listed in the company’s records.

Tedesco felt a glimmer of hope.

One call to the restaurant was all it took. “I asked a guy there if they had Mick’s guitar, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m standing right next to it,’” Tedesco says. “They had it hanging on the wall. I went through the roof.”

As it happened, the Hard Rock was open to a trade if Tedesco could give them a guitar to replace it.

“A lot of people like myself are huge fans of Mick’s, but he wasn’t a giant marquee name, so they didn’t really care about the guitar,” he explains.

He offered them a small collection that included some guitars signed by Hunter as well as some bearing Gene Simmons’ signature, and the deal was done.

It wasn’t without complications, though. In his excitement, Tedesco accidentally addressed his package to Newcastle, rather than Castle Hill, Australia. His guitars spent six weeks lost in a UPS lockup until the error was discovered.

Soon after, Ronson’s electric guitar showed up at his house.

“I had been out running some errands and got home to find this box leaning against my garage door,” Tedesco recalls. “I was so excited. And then I opened it up and saw a headstock. There was no case. The guitar came all the way from Australia covered in bubble wrap.”

To his relief, it made the trip unscathed, and with a bit of cleaning of its electronics, it was back in action.

For Tedesco, who’d purchased his childhood home after his parents retired, the coolest part of the experience was playing Ronson’s Les Paul in the very room where he’d first discovered the guitarist in the Ziggy Stardust film.

“It was such a weird cosmic circle,” he says.

Over the years, he put the guitar to good use. In addition to the Les Paul Custom, he’s owned Ronson’s Marshall Major tube amp head, among other gear, and two-inch tapes from the guitarist’s studio.

He made a video of his collection, allowing fans to see and hear these instruments for the first time in years.

He also loaned the guitar to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and shared it with fans who stopped by the Guitar Hangar, the musical instrument shop he opened in 1999.

Eventually, he offered a limited-edition Mick Ronson Tribute Guitar based on the Les Paul Custom. “I did all this with no intention of doing anything but sharing what I had with the Mick-loving world,” he says.

But eventually, Tedesco began receiving offers to buy the guitar. In 2014, he rejected one for $50,000 from producer Bob Rock, funneled to him by Suzi Ronson.

Soon after, a fan from England – Simon Dolan, the multimillionaire entrepreneur and race car driver – asked about buying both the guitar and Ronson’s Marshall Major head.

“‘It would have to be for stupid money, and I’m not looking to sell,’” Tedesco recalls telling him. “I said it would take at least 200 thousand, just for the guitar alone. And he goes, ‘Done!’

"And I thought, Oh god. Did I just sell my Mick Ronson guitar?”

Two days later, the wire transfer came through his bank.

“I cried,” Tedesco says. “I’d never been so sad and sick over selling something.

“I called Ian up, crying, and he started laughing at me,” he says, cracking up at the memory. “He said, ‘You silly bastard! Mick would tell you you’re a fucking wanker. That’s why you buy something like that. It’s an investment. And it paid off!’

“But I felt like I had sold my soul. It took me several months to get over that.”

In the end, the money went to good use. At the time, Tedesco was getting ready for the grand opening of a new and larger Guitar Hangar in Brookfield, Connecticut, the store’s current location.

“It allowed me to open in style, with tons of gear and without going into massive debt,” he says.

“But owning that guitar was never ever about money. I knew it was worth a lot, but I never envisioned parting with it. It was where I was forged. It put all of my parts together and made me go, Ah, there’s a place for me on planet Earth!

“And then it was gone.”

Order Lisa S. Johnson's 108 Rock Star Guitars here and Immortal Axes: Guitars That Rock here.

This story originally ran in the June 2022 issue of Guitar Player.

“I've always played what I wanted to play and fortunately for me, I've always played with artists whose music I liked, so I really fitted in at the time,” Albert Lee tells Guitar Player. The country guitar legend has performed and recorded with artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman, to name but a few. He even participated in the supergroup Biff Baby’s All-Stars, featuring Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather and Steve Morse.

But one legendary act he played with remains a career highlight: the Everly Brothers.

“I did a long stint with them,” explains Lee. “During the ’70s they'd broken up and weren’t speaking to each other, so I got to know Don really well. He was playing at a local bar once a week with some old friends, and that turned into a regular thing and it was great fun.

“By that time, I was doing the occasional session in Los Angeles too, and because I didn't have an acoustic guitar with me, I used to borrow one or two of his guitars to take to the sessions. He was fine with it and would say, ‘Take this one, it's amazing.’ He then gave me one of his own Gibson J-200s and it's one of my treasured possessions now.”

Guitar Player asked Lee to look back on five of his memorable moments playing with rock’s finest artists.

Eric Clapton

“I was working on a session for a week with an artist called Marc Benno and at the end of the week, Eric's manager said that Eric had just done a tour without a second guitarist and so, how did I fancy going out with him? I thought, ‘Well, that's great, yes.’

“At the time I was just about to get my first real album released, so I don't know if I did a good thing or a bad thing, but I dropped the promotion of my new record and went out with Eric and it was great fun because we were all friends from the ’60s. I think he liked having me around and it worked really well because our styles are so different. I've heard most of the guys who played with him tried to sound like him, but I didn’t, I just did what I do. And likewise, he did the same thing, too.

“I was with him for five years, and during that period he fired his whole band twice, but I managed to survive. He was very happy for me to do a song or two during the show, he’d say, ‘Go on, Albert,’ and he’d go and sit behind the amp and have his brandy and lemonade and a cigarette. He was really enthused to have me around at that time. Then after five years he decided that I wasn't wanted anymore. I have to say that we're still good friends and since then, I've done most of the Crossroads concerts.”

Ritchie Blackmore

“I did an album with Jon Lord called Gemini Suite [in 1971] and Ritchie, because of his moods, decided he didn't want to do it, so Jon thought, Well, I'll get somebody else to do it. And it was good fun. Ritchie and I knew each other as he used to be with the Outlaws, an English country band that wore Western shirts and played instrumentals and also backed [English rock and roll singer] Mike Berry for a while in the ’60s.

“Ritchie and I played in this studio band called Green Bullfrog with producer Derek Lawrence who was friends with all the guys in that band. Derek had a lot of free studio time and told me, ‘Come tomorrow and we'll put down some tracks, with any songs you want to do,’ and that's how that all came about. He did have some kind of record deal, but rather than having to deal with the contracts for all those different record companies, he decided to give us nicknames. You can tell who's who, though.

“Ritchie did a few sessions with different people in the early years and he did a lot of sessions with [English record producer] Joe Meek, who was getting some very commercial sounds that people weren't getting at that time. Ritchie has always been really friendly with me and has always said nice things about me in articles.”

Jerry Lee Lewis

“I've always been a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis. There was a period in the early ’70s when American record companies were getting records done in London with well-known British names, so we did a record [The Session, 1973] for Mercury Records and there were lots of artists on it. It was a lot of fun. Jerry always lived up to his reputation as ‘the Killer’ back then. He liked what I was doing and compared with some of the guitar players who were on it, I guess my sound was more to his liking, because of his country background.

“There was this one time at Wembley Arena in London and I was playing with Duane Eddy and I just happened to be walking down the hallway when Jerry's roadies called out to me: ‘Come down and say hello to Jerry.’ I was a bit nervous but I went in and said hello. His manager then pulled me aside and said, ‘Jerry’s guitar players have been drinking all day. Do you want to get up and play with Jerry?’ Of course, I said yes. Little Richard was on the show as well and he'd already done his set. They had agreed that Jerry would close the show so I was up there playing with Jerry and it was discussed that for the encore Little Richard would come on, and it all got pretty wild.”

The Crickets

“I'd always been a huge Buddy Holly fan. I was at a record launch party for my band Heads Hands & Feet and Ric Grech was there and we got to talking over a drink. I had missed Buddy when he and the Crickets came over to England for the first time. Ric said that the Crickets were coming over that weekend and that I better come along. Glen Hardin, the piano player, wasn't going to be able to make it in time because he was finishing up a tour with Elvis Presley, so they asked me to fill in.

“We had a little rehearsal a few days later and it was a lot of fun. We did the first gig at the Speakeasy in London, the late-night drinking establishment. It went really well, and at the end of the night Jerry Allison said, ‘Do you want to do the whole tour?’ So, I did.

“They shared lots of stories with me about touring America back then. It was quite difficult, driving overnight and hardly getting any sleep. Some of them were bus tours and other times they were in a van or a big car with a lot of instruments. And the buses weren’t like nowadays, with bunks and whatever; these were old-school buses, so you’d travel overnight sitting up.

“Then that February day, the heating had broken down on the bus and it was miserable. Buddy decided he couldn’t face it one more night, so he decided to rent a plane, a four-seater for him and his band. But Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were really putting pressure on the guys, saying, ‘Oh God, I'd really like to get off that bus for a day,’ and we all know the rest of what happened. The weather was bad and the pilot was only about 21 and not really familiar with using flight instruments for night flying.”

Eddie Van Halen

“[The supergroup] Biff Baby’s All-Stars was actually started by Sterling Ball, Ernie Ball’s son. When I was with Heads Hands & Feet, Ernie and his son came along to our gig because they'd heard ‘Country Boy’ on the radio and they wanted to see this English band playing country music.

“I got really friendly with the family and I started to play local gigs with Sterling, who then put a band together and it developed from there. We did a lot of gigs.

“There was this one gig we did on a weekend during the NAMM show. By that time the Balls had gotten really friendly with Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather and Steve Morse, and we all played this show together. Eddie didn't want to play ‘Country Boy.’ He told me, ‘No, I don’t want to play on that’ because his style was so different from country, but I said, ‘You just do what you do with the tapping bit,’ and he did and he loved it.”

The saying “Don’t meet your heroes” is one worth heeding, particularly if you’re in the creative arts. The pure feelings we harbor for artists when they’re afar often become tarnished by exposure to the all-too human qualities they exhibit in person, often to extremes.

Producer Rick Rubin writes in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, “Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.”

Mark Knopfler found out as much when he had a chance to produce his boyhood idol Bob Dylan in 1983. The album he was selected for was Infidels, a record that found Dylan returning to secular music following three albums of songs inspired by his experience as a born-again Christian.

Knopfler had helped out on one of those releases, playing guitar on 1979’s Slow Train Coming, the first disc in Dylan’s “Christian trilogy.” The album arrived shortly after Knopfler’s own ascendency to guitar hero status courtesy of Dire Straits’ 1978 self-titled debut and its hit song, “Sultans of Swing.”

“I was hugely influenced by him about the age of 14 or 15,” Knopfler told Dan Forte in an interview published in Guitar Player’s September 1984 issue. “I heard Bob Dylan from the very beginning, the ‘Hard Rain’ days, and went with him all the way up, and I'm still with him. I still think he's great. Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite records.”

It’s a remarkable sentiment given that Dylan had put the guitarist through the ringer just one year before, while making Infidels. The former folk icon selected Knopfler to produce him after considering and rejecting David Bowie, Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa. Dylan felt inexperienced in the modern recording studio environment and needed someone who was up to speed with technology. His trio of rather bizarre choices suggests he was also looking to make a sea change in his musical approach and sound.

As it turns out, the songwriter had pretty much sewn things up on his own before Knopfler arrived and recording began at the Power Station in New York City, in April 1983. It was the first inkling Knopfler had that he would not be driving the sessions as much as navigating them, guiding the players through Dylan's temperamental fluctuations.

Dylan's choices for band members dictated Infidel’s strong rhythmic vibe and highly polished style. For the rhythm section he hired bass guitarist Robbie Shakespeare and drummer Sly Dunbar, a tandem better known as Sly & Robbie who found fame both as producers and as Island Records recording artists, where they also produced acts like Black Uhuru, Wailing Souls and Grace Jones.

Dylan had likewise selected former Rolling Stones lead guitarist Mick Taylor, possibly before choosing Sly & Robbie. The two had met the previous summer, and Dylan had begun showing him his new songs months before recording began.

Knopfler, for his part, brought in keyboardist Alan Clark and engineer Neil Dorfsman, who had worked on Dire Straits’ 1982 album, Love Over Gold, and Knopfler’s soundtrack for the movie Local Hero. As one of the album’s musicians, as well as its producer, Knopfler was paired with Taylor, who played slide guitar for much of the record.

The result was the sound of two virtuosos lending their fluid electric guitar chops to what many consider to be one of Dylan’s best albums from his later catalog. Combined with the strongly syncopated rhythms of Sly & Robbie, they helped Infidels achieve a remarkable, and successful, shift in style for Dylan, as exemplified by standout tracks like “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “Sweetheart Like You” and the stunning lead track, “Jokerman.”

“I suggested Billy Gibbons, but I don't think Bob had heard of ZZ Top,” Knopfler told Guitar Player. “It would have been great to have done that with Billy.”

As Knopfler would soon find out, working with his hero was anything but smooth. Dorfsman’s recollections of the sessions are vivid and excruciating.

“I don’t want to use the wrong word, here, but Bob was also a little bit of an agent provocateur, or he even had a little saboteur in him,” Dorfsman told Uncut. “If things were going maybe too well, in somebody else’s definition, he would consciously make an effort to make that stop.”

On one session, Dylan took the tinfoil wrapper from the sandwich he’d had for lunch and began flexing it, accordion style, into the microphone. ”It was just his way of saying, ‘I’m bored with this, I don’t want to do this particular song anymore,’” the engineer recalled.

Dylan also announced one night that he wanted to start recording a Christmas album immediately. “We all laughed, thinking, He’s just messing with us,” Dorfsman said. “But, of course, years later, he subsequently came out with a Christmas record. It was kind of intimidating, challenging, but also hilarious in its own crazy way.”

Tasked with keeping the sessions running smoothly, Knopfler found himself frustrated at how differently it was going from what he had initially imagined.

“I know that it really, really bothered Mark, that song choices were dictated a little bit, and were turning out to be different from the song choices he thought we were going in to do,” Dorfsman said. “I could feel the air just sort of going out of Mark a little bit, when he realized that the traditional role of the producer was not going to be in play on this record... I’m sure it was very frustrating to Mark.”

Knopfler admitted as much — albeit with admirable diplomacy — when speaking with Forte for Guitar Player.

“Was it difficult producing Dylan?”

“Yeah. You see people working in different ways, and it's good for you. You have to learn to adapt to the way different people work.

“Yes, it was strange at times with Bob. One of the great parts about production is that it demonstrates to you that you have to be flexible. Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing. You have to be sensitive and flexible, and it's fun.

“I’d say I was more disciplined. But I think Bob is much more disciplined as a writer of lyrics, as a poet. He's an absolute genius. As a singer — absolute genius. But musically, I think it’s a lot more basic. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”

Regardless of the trials he endured, Knopfler maintained his love for Dylan’s work on the album, particularly the song “I and I.” He was particularly moved by the song’s first lines: “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed / Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams / In another lifetime she must have owned the world or been faithfully wed / To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.”

“To hear the first lines of ‘I And I,’ that's enough to make anybody who writes songs want to retire,” Knopfler told GP. “It's stunning.

“Bob's musical ability is limited, in terms of being able to play a guitar or a piano,” he explained. “It's rudimentary, but it doesn't affect his variety, his sense of melody, his singing. It's all there. In fact, some of the things he plays on piano while he's singing are lovely, even though they're rudimentary. That all demonstrates the fact that you don't have to be a great technician.

“It's the same old story: If something is played with soul, that's what's important. My favorite records, by and large, aren't wonderful technical achievements, with the exception perhaps of people like Chet Atkins. But generally speaking, all you've got to do is listen to a Howlin' Wolf album. That's just soul.”

Although the original Silvertone 1446 hollowbody electric was born in the early 1960s, these days you’ll often hear the instrument referred to as “the Chris Isaak guitar.” That’s on account of the fact that the retro crooner cradled one in publicity photos around the same time his moody “Wicked Game” became a huge radio hit in 1990. (Incidentally, the tune’s lilting guitar lines were played by lead guitarist James Calvin Wilsey on a Fender Stratocaster.)

Regardless of your familiarity with (or affinity for) Isaak, old Harmony and Silvertone guitars have long been a more accessible entry point to the vintage guitar market than more prominent names, partially because they feature construction details some players, rightly or not, consider cost-cutting compromises. For example, Silvertones typically had three-bolt neck joints rather than the set-neck construction found on more expensive Gibson and Gretsch instruments of the era.

The latter was true of the original Silvertone 1446, which was built by the Chicago-based Harmony Guitar Company and sold in Sears catalogs and department stores, yet it was still considered a top-of-the-line instrument. Beyond its swanky looks — including distinctive hexagonal pickup surrounds and diamond-shaped selector plate — the vintage 1446 also boasted characterful mini humbuckers designed by Gibson pickup pioneer Seth Lover, creator of the legendary PAF (Patent Applied For) humbuckers in highly sought-after Les Pauls and SGs.

The Silvertone brand has changed hands a few times, most recently in 2020, when Texas-based RBI Music bought rights from Korean manufacturer Samick. With the launch of the 1446 seen here, RBI offers a modernized instrument that mates iconic visuals of yore with set-neck construction and a semi-hollow rather than a hollow body.

In place of the 24-inch-scale original’s wood bridge mounted to a “floating” wood foot, the 24 3/4-inch-scale reissue has a center-block-anchored, Tune-o-matic-type bridge with roller saddles meant to offer more stable tuning and smoother action with the Bigsby B70 vibrato. (Trapeze-tailpiece versions are also available in Gloss Black and Tobacco Sunburst.)

The pickups feature sharp-looking brushed-steel covers and surrounds that look pretty much identical to the originals. At the other end of the 12-inch-radius rosewood fretboard, Waverly-style open-gear tuners look equally elegant. The instrument streets for $999 sans case and is made in China.

RBI says the Alnico 5 magnet mini-humbuckers were designed by Trev Wilkinson and are “exacting era-specific recreations inspired by the rare original P19 pickups.” To my ear, they sound hotter than one would expect from a vintage guitar from the early ’60s. Particularly the bridge pickup.

Plugged in to an edge-of-breakup vintage Supro-style combo amp, in addition to silver-panel Fender combos, our test 1446 proved surprisingly toothsome and plenty bright with the treble pickup soloed and full-up. Pushed to varying degrees with a J. Rockett Archer and a Catalinbread Skewer treble booster, it can get downright vicious. Not metal vicious by any means, but certainly more ripping than some might anticipate from the guitar’s sophisticated old-school looks.

Even so, notes remained clear and well defined. What’s more, backing off the bridge pickup’s volume knob a quarter of the way and dialing the tone back perhaps two-thirds availed a balance of bite and responsiveness that felt more in keeping with the model’s sonic roots.

The neck pickup sounds a bit more polished, but still clear and assertive. Capable of both muscular corpulence and chimey detail, the neck ’bucker had me working knobs less, too. Either soloed or in tandem with the bridge pickup, it yielded a range of vibes from jazzy to soulful/rootsy and chukka-chukka reggae-ready. In fact, brighter bridge-pickup settings were quite useful in expanding the range of dual-pickup tones, even into quasi-Strat-like territories.

For funsies, I compared the 1446 to both my recent-make Gretsch Broadkaster (a semi-hollowbody with Filter’Tron-style pickups) and a Guild X-175 Manhattan hollowbody with authentic old Franz-style “soapbar” pickups. The R pickups out-muscled both. And, of course, the 1446 handled high volumes much better than the Guild — even with a bunch of Auralex foam stuffed inside it.

Conclusion

I’ve long been interested in original Silvertone 1446s, but have never had the opportunity to play one. However, with the plethora of construction departures on this new iteration, it’s safe to say an A/B test with a vintage specimen would be an apples-to-oranges aural affair. Watching videos of original 1446s, one immediately discerns a sense of hollow earthiness that is no doubt inextricably linked to its bolt-on neck design, among other things.

The new 1446, with its set neck and center block — which spans the entire length of the body, splitting it into two smaller sound chambers rather than a large one — was clearly intended to be a handsome rocker. And that it is.

But it’s also much, much more than that. Vintage nitpickery aside, it constitutes a fantastic alternative to the usual semi-hollowbody options — especially at this price point. At $999 street, it is a mid-priced steal, on par in every way and then some with competing options from Gretsch, Guild, Ibanez, Epiphone and others.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT silvertoneguitars.com

PRICE $999 street

BODY Arched maple-laminate semi-hollowbody with center block,

PICKUPS Wilkinson R-Series mini humbuckers

SCALE 24 3/4"

NECK Soft C-shaped mahogany with 12"-radius rosewood fretboard and pearloid block inlays and 20 Silvertone “Easy Feel” ball-end frets

CONTROLS Two Volume and two tone knobs with vintage-style “cupcake” knobs, 3-way pickup selector

HARDWARE Bigsby B70 vibrato, Tune-o-matic-style bridge with roller saddles, single-ply cream pickguard, chrome hardware

FINISH Gloss Black

ASSEMBLED China

PRO Nice setup with smooth, comfortable frets. Versatile, quality pickups by Trev Wilkinson. Modernized center-block and set-neck construction facilitate high-volume friendliness and more sustain than a vintage 1446

CON Departures from original hollowbody and bolt-on construction make this more of a visual tribute than a bona fide reissue. Vibrato bar slightly loose

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.

New Found Glory guitarist and co-founder Chad Gilbert died Sunday, September 20, at age 45 following a yearslong battle with cancer.

Gilbert’s wife, Lisa Cimorelli, and his New Found Glory bandmates announced his death on social media, saying he died peacefully in his sleep surrounded by family and friends.

“On the morning of September 20th, Chad Everett Gilbert passed away peacefully in his sleep,” they wrote. “He left this world surrounded by friends and family and took his final breaths with his wife and mother by his side, just as he wished.”

“We are devastated and shocked by how quickly he left us, yet so grateful for how peacefully and smoothly he went. The amount of visitors that crowded the hospital lobby at a moment’s notice is a testament to how beloved and cherished Chad was, and always will be,” the statement continued. “He was a legendary musician, but his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father. His biggest dreams came true.”

Gilbert had been undergoing treatment for metastatic pheochromocytoma, a rare adrenal cancer, since 2021. In February, he underwent emergency brain surgery after experiencing weakness in his left hand and leg and doctors discovered three tumors in his brain. The surgery was successful, but revealed that his cancer had progressed to adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), a different and more aggressive form of adrenal cancer.

Just four months later, Gilbert returned to the stage in his hometown of Nashville. On June 8, he played guitar with New Found Glory during “Hit or Miss” and “My Friends Over You” from a motorized scooter.

“I got to play a show in front of my daughter, something I truly never thought I’d get to do again,” he wrote on Instagram after the performance. He also thanked “all the nurses and doctors, my amazing team that have kept me alive through my battle.”

Gilbert remained open about his determination to keep making music and spending time with his family throughout his treatment. Speaking to People in April, he said, “I got my dream in my family, and to have done so many things creatively.

“I always wanted to play music, and I got that, but my biggest dream was to be married to a beautiful wife that would love me and have a daughter,” he said of his daughter, Lily, who was 5 at the time. “That was my dream, so I accomplished my dream.”

Gilbert co-founded New Found Glory in Florida in 1997 and served as the band’s lead guitarist and songwriter for nearly three decades. The group went on to release more than a dozen albums and become one of the defining bands of the pop-punk era.

He favored Gibson Les Paul electrics for much of his time with the group before switching to Telecasters, whose light weight was easier on his spine.

“Chad’s guitar playing, songwriting, humor, and relentless drive helped shape New Found Glory for nearly three decades,” his bandmates wrote. “Through more than a dozen albums, endless tours around the world, and more accolades than we ever could have imagined, Chad challenged all of us to grow as musicians, performers, and human beings.”

“While we are devastated to lose him, we are so grateful for the incredible life he lived, the memories we shared, and the brotherhood we had. His influence will always be part of New Found Glory and his spirit will be felt on every stage we stand on, with every note we play,” they continued. “Rest in peace, Chad. We love you forever ❤️.”

Gilbert is survived by his wife and daughter, as well as his mother, Jackie, and brother, Brian.

“Back in the early 1980s, there were no other girls out there that could play like I could play,” Lita Ford says. “And I had to prove it was me playing those songs, because nobody could accept it.”

These days, it’s a well-established fact that Ford knows her way around an electric guitar. From her groundbreaking work in the 1970s with all-female hard rockers the Runaways to her string of shredding, glam-tinged melodic metal efforts in the ’80s and early 1990s, Ford has remained a highly visible figure in the rock-guitar world for more than 40 years.

And in recent years she has also been celebrated as a major influence on a new generation of guitar-playing front women, in particular Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, who credits Ford with “kicking the door down” for waves of female six-string slingers.

To make that happen, however, Ford occasionally had to do some actual kicking. As she explains, you may underestimate her skills as a guitarist, but you’ll do so at your own peril.

“I remember one time around ’81, there was a guy in the front row at a show,” Ford recounts. “He was right up against the stage, and he had an unopened can of beer. While I was playing, he shook that beer. I was watching him do it, but he didn’t know I could see him. I was acting like I didn’t see him.

“I knew he was gonna spray me down with his beer, so I waited for him to get the can up, and as he was about to pop the little tab, I walked over and kicked him in the wrist as hard as I could. I know I broke his wrist, because I used to wear these great big clodhopper platform shoes onstage!”

Ford lets out a laugh. “But it was like, Dude, you’re gonna spray me with that? I don’t think so. If someone spits at me, I spit back.”

As Ford tells it, her indoctrination into rock and roll came very early in life. Born in England, she moved with her family to Long Beach, California, at age four. Before she was even a teenager, she says, she was already taken with the heaviest sounds of the era.

“I asked my mother for a guitar,” she recalls. “And she bought me this Sears acoustic model. I ended up giving it away to my girlfriend, and I got another guitar that was a step up from Sears — it was, I don’t know, maybe a Bloomingdale’s model or something. I was playing heavy metal on this acoustic guitar. It was all Black Sabbath and Deep Purple riffs, but it just didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t have the balls I was looking for.”

After a cousin chaperoned Ford to a 1971 Black Sabbath concert at the nearby Long Beach Arena, she knew exactly what she needed. “I saw Tony Iommi, and I had to have a Gibson SG,” she says. “I just loved the darkness and the low end of the sound. I went to this hospital where my mom worked, and I bullshitted my way in and got a job. I saved up $375 from that job and bought myself a chocolate-colored SG.”

Ford was still playing that SG when, a few years later, she joined the Runaways at the tender age of 16; it’s the guitar that can be heard on the band’s classic, self-titled 1976 debut. At that time, however, she needed to update her amplifier.

“I had been using my father’s reel-to-reel,” Ford says, laughing. “It was this huge thing, and it had an echo on it that sounded like a delay, which was great. It was like, Wow, I’ve got effects and everything! It was bizarre, but it worked. But once I was in the Runaways, I used a Marshall.”

Later in 1976, Ford augmented her Runaways gear with a pair of eye-catching Hamer Standards — one black, one white. These Gibson Explorer–inspired guitars became her main instruments throughout the rest of her tenure with the band and can be heard on the Runaways’ later albums.

Ford says she enjoyed her time in the Runaways, but the group’s explicit punk stance proved somewhat suffocating, considering that she’d grown up on a steady diet of Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, and Jimmy Page.

“I would go home and learn stuff like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ — all the riffs, all the solos,” she says, “because that was the type of stuff I wanted to play in the band. But when I got into rehearsal, we would end up doing, you know, ‘Cherry Bomb.’ It was always that chunky, straight-ahead thing.”

It wasn’t until the Runaways dissolved in 1979 that Ford finally found the space to spread her guitar wings.

“I really took over my own self,” she continues. “I cut my hair and changed my clothes. I came up with my own style, my own look, my own way of playing.”

She also swapped out her guitars. “I got into B.C. Rich,” says Ford, who rediscovered her stolen B.C. Rich Mockingbird through an audition. “They became my home away from home. [B.C. Rich founder] Bernie Rico, Sr. was just fantastic, and I was always over there carving out new ideas and helping to make new stuff.

“They would make anything I asked them to make. By the end of the ’80s, I had a stack of different B.C. Rich guitars, and I would play them all in concert, because I wanted to show them off.”

By the latter part of the decade, Ford was also enjoying the success of a bona fide hit record: 1988’s Lita. Her third solo effort overall, the album spawned two hit singles — the hard-rocking “Kiss Me Deadly” and the ballad “Close My Eyes Forever,” sung as a duet with Ozzy Osbourne — and eventually became her first Platinum-seller.

Ford stuck to her guitar-playing guns, so much so that when she saw hard rock’s popularity declining in the early ’90s, she opted to bow out altogether rather than change her music to suit prevailing trends. “The music scene was changing,” she says. “Grunge was kickin’ in, and I was getting tired. So I said, ‘It’s a good time to disappear.’ What else was I gonna do? Go be a country star?”

Ford spent roughly 15 years away from the music scene before returning. It wasn’t easy to dive back in.

“Not at all,” Ford says. “It wasn’t like riding a bike. I had to relearn how to do it. I hadn’t been playing guitar all those years I was away. I even had to get used to wearing clothes again. Because I was living on a deserted island, all I wore was Billabongs. Then all of a sudden it was, ‘My God, I’ve got on high heels and leather pants!’”

Nevertheless, Ford has been fully back in the creative swing of things ever since. As for the music, it remains true to her heavy metal roots.

“Yeah, absolutely,” she says. “If it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. It never really goes away.”

Sammy Hagar certainly gets his due as a singer, frontman, band leader, songwriter and, of course, liquor and restaurant entrepreneur. That he’s also a solid guitar player is often lost in the mix.

That, however, could have something to do with those who have stood beside him throughout his 54-year recording career.

The Red Rocker came to prominence in 1973 as the frontman for Montrose, collaborating with Ronnie Montrose over the course of two albums — Montrose and Paper Money — and favorites such as “Bad Motor Scooter” and “Rock the Nation.”

After Montrose changed the lineup in 1975, Hagar embarked on a solo career and scored his own batch of hits (“There’s Only One Way to Rock,” “I Can’t Drive 55” and more). He also teamed with Journey’s Neal Schon in 1983 for the short-lived supergroup HSAS, which released the live album Through the Fire in 1984.

The following year, Hagar performed with Eddie Van Halen at the first Farm Aid concert, then went on to spend 11 years with Van Halen, recording four number one albums with the band following the departure of David Lee Roth. (Hagar would return for one more tour in 2004 and record three new songs for The Best of Both Worlds compilation.)

He worked with Schon again and, later, Joe Satriani in the side project Planet Us. Satriani would also join Hagar in another supergroup, Chickenfoot, and later become part of Hagar’s Best of All Worlds Band in 2024. In between, Hagar brought Vic Johnson into his bands the Waboritas and the Circle.

That’s a lot of electric six-string firepower to be attached to in one career, and Hagar does not take those associations for granted. He loves to talk about his good fortune, too — which he did with us via Zoom from Maui as he prepares for a new run of Best of All Worlds dates beginning June 13 in St. Louis. Here he tells us about four guitar greats he’s played with who aren’t Eddie Van Halen (we’ll leave that discussion for another day).

Ronnie Montrose

“Ronnie was on fire. That’s the way he played — like it’s burning. He wasn’t that fast. He wasn’t a shredder. He played well, and he played really fiery.

“I learned how to play guitar from Ronnie. I learned more from Ronnie than Eddie as a guitarist. I still play more like Ronnie Montrose today. He really inspired my guitar playing.

“When he got into his Town Without Pity era, he started playing more like what Joe Satriani plays — with that sound and that vocal style. He probably would’ve gotten even better; he just had some real head problems. I’ve never seen a guy like that. He fired everybody. The second you had one smidgen of success with him, he broke up the band.

“Montrose — we were about to explode. We were gonna be the American Led Zeppelin, and he couldn’t take it. I don’t know what it was. He was afraid of success. He’d sit there in the studio holding his face like, ‘Oh God, what are we gonna do?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck, let’s jam! Let’s make some music.’

“He was so tormented, man. I don’t know why; I think it must’ve been some far-out childhood thing that happened to him. I mean, come on — the guy shot himself in the head. It’s horrible. [Montrose died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 3, 2012.]

“That broke my heart when he did that. It made me think, Could somebody have helped him? What happened here? How do you let some guy do that? I wasn’t around, but if I’d been around and knew he was in that kind of condition, I would’ve put this guy in a hospital or taken him under my wing. I would’ve helped.”

Neal Schon

“Neal’s been my friend forever. Before Journey broke, we were buddies. We used to play shows together, and he would always come jam with me when I’d play Winterland [in San Francisco]. Neal just walks around with a fuckin’ guitar around his neck. He takes it off to shower, and that’s probably it. He probably fucks with a guitar around his neck. He’s just always playing.

“He’s a great, melodic player. He uses the whole neck and makes it look like a toy. I can tell a Neal Schon solo instantly because he plays a really cool, melodic lick, and then he goes [scats] — just spills out all these crazy, whacked-out notes. I don’t know if any of them are real notes, but if you’re not hitting bad notes, it doesn’t matter.

“I could say, ‘Let’s write a song, Neal,’ and he’ll write a song in five minutes. Him and Joe Satriani — they’re so frickin’ prolific, it’s scary. And it’s ’cause he’s got the guitar on all the time, so he’ll think, ‘Here’s what I was playing a couple minutes ago. This could be a song.’ That’s Neal.”

Vic Johnson

“I call him Vic ‘Right Hand’ Johnson all the time. He’s got a right hand like The Edge, like Pete Townshend. He can shred — his left hand’s great — but his right hand, man, he kicks off a groove and you don’t need to hear the drums. He puts it right in the pocket.

“He was never in a band till he got in my band, and he was kind of a sideman. Earlier on, if he’d had a superstar singer — a Sammy Hagar, a David Lee Roth or a Robert Plant or somebody — Vic would’ve been much more famous as a guitar player.

“Vic’s got the biggest, fattest sound. When I pick up his guitar, his strings are really fat — big ol’ fat strings. I can’t play ’em. I can’t bend ’em, but he’s got those big, ol’ strong hands, and he gets a lot of tone out of there.

“Joe [Satriani], Neal Schon — Eddie, when he heard Vic play — they all go, ‘Yeah, he’s got a cool tone.’ Vic’s pretty much a simple Ronnie Montrose-style guitar player like me, but he’s got the baddest tone of all of us.”

Joe Satriani

“Joe’s got the same thing Jeff Beck had, and that’s that he can make the guitar sing. He’s got the tone and the touch — his vibrato and the way he uses his whammy bar — like Jeff Beck. Songs like ‘Summer Song’ or ‘Surfing With the Alien’ sound like there’s a singer in the band.

“He’s one of the few instrumentalists who can carry it to where you can tolerate it. When I go see an instrumentalist, by about the third song I’m going, ‘Well, when’s the singer coming out?’ ’Cause I’m getting bored. But Joe will play the next tune and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a cool melody!’ In my head, it’s like he’s singing it.

“I think Joe could be one of the best guitar players on the planet right now. Look — he taught Steve Vai how to play, so Steve will never be better than him. He taught Kirk Hammett how to play, so Kirk will never be better than him. ’Cause you can’t outdo the teacher.

“Joe knows exactly what Eddie was playing; that’s why I love having him in this band. He studied it. He watched live tapes, he saw him live, he listens to the records and knows exactly what Eddie was doing. That’s the difference between him and some kid in a music store playing ‘Eruption’ exactly like Eddie. Joe knows what he’s doing, and he knows what Eddie was doing, and that’s different from simply emulating somebody.

“He’s a genius, honest to God. I’m not joking about his intelligence. He’s super smart. When you interview him, his answers are so thoughtful and so deep. I love the guy.

“Lemme say one bad thing about him so you don’t think I’m kissing his ass too much: He plays too fuckin’ loud. And he doesn’t need to play that loud ’cause he has in-ears. But he’s used to not having a singer, so he thinks, ‘I gotta be the loudest thing.’ [laughs] We’re still working that out.”

Nearly 40 years have passed since Johnny Marr walked away from the Smiths. It was 1987 when a communication breakdown between the guitarist and the group’s frontman, singer Morrissey, caused him to leave the group.

But as he tells Britain’s Channel 4 News in a new interview, he still has fond regard for the group and the years when he and Morrissey crafted the group’s catalog of cherished songs.

Marr explains that the Manchester scene in the 1980s was home to Factory Records, which was known for acts like Joy Division and New Order. The Smiths chose to go with a rival label, Rough Trade.

“I was working in a clothes shop when the band was formed, and other Mancunian musicians used to come into the shop, and most of them were on Factory Records,” Marr explains. “So because of the shop, I knew everyone on Factory, and it was the obvious thing to do to sign to Factory. And that became a narrative.”

Factory Records owner Tony Wilson never signed the Smiths, to his great regret. But Marr says that was unlikely to have happened.

“I was never going to sign Factory. Personally I would never let that happen because it was just too obvious, and it wasn’t that kind of music either.”

Factory acts “weren’t guitar bands per se,” Marr says. “They were doing other things with funk and keyboards... different, almost like non-guitar bands. So it was very deliberate that we were going to be a guitar band, and that was my role in it.”

Marr also reveals how he and Morrissey wrote together. Although sometimes their sessions took place separately — Marr writing the music and passing a tape off to Morrissey — he says of the early days of their writing, “We’d get together face to face, and I’d go, ‘I’ve got this.’ And then I’d record it on the tape machine and he’d take the cassette away.”

Later, “when I’d made a few hundred quid,” he purchased a Tascam Portastudio. “I would make these slightly more elaborate demos with a little drum machine and about three or four guitars on top, and then I’d get on my motorbike and ride round because he lived around the corner 10 minutes [away], and I’d drop it through his letterbox.”

But Marr’s fondest memories are of the making of the group’s 1986 third album, The Queen Is Dead. He recalls how he and Morrissey would sit just a few feet apart with a Walkman cassette player between them.

“It was amazing,” he says. “It was magic. I’d literally have the guitar and I’d have the cassette machine between my knees and I’d go, ‘I’ve got this one.’ And I’d press record.

“I think when I pressed ‘record’ the two of us breathed in, and then when I finished we then breathed out. That’s what it felt like.

“Any songwriter will tell you it’s the best feeling in the world.”

Marr also reveals that he wrote songs in threes, anticipating how Morrissey, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce would embellish his chords with their contributions.

“It was the greatest,” Marr says. “We’ve got three new Smith songs. I can’t wait to hear what the words are. I can’t wait to hear what the vocals are, what the bass is, what Andy does, and what Mike does.

“Man, it was magic!”

Marr is celebrating the results of his guitar auction, held September 16 at Christie’s. Nearly 100 guitars — electrics and acoustics — from Marr’s collection went under the hammer, raising more than £3.6 million for the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the Autistic Society.

The guitarist spoke about a few of the instruments in his Channel 4 interview, highlighting the 1959/1960 Gibson ES-355 he got when the Smiths signed to Sire Records in the U.S. (and which sold at the auction for £204,800).

“We were about to do our record deal with Sire Records in America and the head of Sire Records was a really famous guy called Seymour Stein, and he’d been around since the ’60s. I was getting these stories out of him about the Rolling Stones, and he happened to say that he got Brian Jones a couple of guitars in the ’60s. So I saw my opportunity there, and I said to him, ‘Well, look, Seymour, if you get me a guitar, we’ll sign.’

“True to his word. We trudged across in the snow to 48th Street, New York.”

Marr found what he wanted at We Buy Guitars.

“I looked through the window and I saw that hanging up on the wall. And then I darted back to the hotel that we stayed in, and I started playing it. And the very first thing I played was ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.’ And I always say that guitar definitely had that song in it. I mean, I know it was. It might seem a little cosmic, but I know that certain instruments have music in them.”

Ed Sheeran apologized to fans at his Philadelphia concert Saturday night, acknowledging that he had made “mistakes” in his response to the controversy that has engulfed his tour and speaking publicly for the first time about his views on the war in Gaza.

“I’ve had to take and make difficult decisions, and I am making mistakes, and I am so, so sorry,” the acoustic guitarist told the crowd at Lincoln Financial Field, according to multiple reports.

The singer, who has traditionally avoided political commentary, said he could no longer remain silent about the humanitarian crisis.

“I’ve tried in my career to not be a political commentator of any kind because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics,” he said. “But this is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore.”

Sheeran condemned the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack while expressing strong criticism of the devastation in Gaza.

“What happened in Israel and at the Nova Music Festival on October 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain,” he said. “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians’ lives, children’s lives. And the systemic injustice we’re seeing unfold in the West Bank, it cannot be overlooked.”

He also addressed the broader free-speech dispute that has left him performing without any supporting acts.

“This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people that have opposing views, and everyone here can stand beside people that they don’t agree with on everything, but they can all agree on singing these songs,” Sheeran said.

The Philadelphia show was Sheeran’s first since his U.S. tour erupted into controversy over the removal of Macklemore, who had said “Free Palestine” from the stage during a September performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Sheeran subsequently said the decision to remove Macklemore was made by the tour’s promoter after venues indicated they would not allow the rapper to perform.

Messina Touring Group said venues on the remaining U.S. dates had told the promoter they would not allow concerts to proceed with Macklemore on the lineup, potentially forcing the cancellation of the tour.

The decision prompted the other supporting acts to withdraw in solidarity. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham and Sheeran’s touring band Beoga all announced that they would no longer participate. Finneas wrote that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed” and said, “I stand with Palestine and its people.”

The controversy also prompted Sheeran to speak out about the role of venues in determining what performers can say onstage. Before Saturday’s concert, he said he was “deeply worried” about venues requiring artists to have their content approved in advance.

“This happens in so many places that I perform around the world,” he said, “but it should never happen in the free world.”

Sheeran had faced criticism for initially declining to take a public position on the conflict, including from former Pink Floyd bass guitarist Roger Waters, who criticized him on social media and called him “a little prick.” The controversy also created an unintentionally awkward twist for Guitar Center, which had launched a contest in August offering undiscovered musicians the chance to open for Sheeran on the December 11 date of his Loop Tour in Mexico City.

In Philadelphia, Sheeran said he still wanted his concerts to provide a place where people with opposing views could come together.

“My concerts have always been a safe space for everyone, and that matters hugely to me,” he said.

More often than not, Samantha Fish is the only guitar player in her band. But she has a good history of playing nice with others.

The Kansas City, Missouri, native has been at it since she was a teenager, and recording since 2009’s Live Bait with her Samantha Fish Blues Band. Over the years she’s teamed with Cassie Taylor and Dani Wild as Girls With Guitars and teamed with Texas titan Jesse Dayton on 2023’s Grammy Award-nominated Death Wish Blues. She’s also had albums produced by fellow guitarists such as Mike Zito, Luther Dickinson, Jon Spencer, Bobby Harlow of the Go and Martin Kierszenbaum.

“The music community is so special,” Fish tells us from her current residence in New Orleans. “I’m not talking about any specific region; it’s just a great community of musicians and people playing real instruments as we kind of tiptoe into this digital and, daresay, AI age. I’ve always been encouraged by people older than me and by my peers to grow and explore and not take any shortcuts or anything like that.”

Fish’s collaborative acumen, meanwhile, has been best demonstrated on stage, where she’s been shown an open door from a wealth of colleagues — opportunities she certainly does not take for granted.

“Every time I’m onstage with a guitar player I feel like I learn something,” Fish acknowledges. “You watch their technique and approach and think about how that applies to how I do it. I feel like you can only do what you can do; I’ve gone toe to toe with people before and tried to turn it into a competition, like a lot of people do … and try to see who can out-gun each other.

“But I feel like the best musical things happen when it’s more of a conversation. So for me it’s, ‘What can I say that’s going to add to and elevate this?’ That’s how I approach jamming with people. That’s the most honest way to do it, not come with my stuff and outgun somebody.”

Fish, who released her latest studio album, Paper Doll, last year and Paper Doll Live earlier this year, recently announced this year’s edition of her Shake ’Em Down Tour, joined by Cedric Burnside and Daddy Long Legs for 14 dates starting December 2 in Pensacola, Florida, and wrapping up 18 days later in Louisville. She’s also writing songs for her next album, which Fish says “is still pretty vague to me. It’s taking a shape, but I’m not ready to say what that is — ’cause it will probably change.”

In the meantime, Fish took a few minutes to sit down and reminisce about some of her favorite onstage playing encounters.

Eric Gales

Among Fish’s career highlights is performing at Eric Clapton’s 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles, collaborating with Eric Gales on her “Black Wind Hollow” during her set and then joining him for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” and the Alabama State Troupers’ “Going Down,” the latter with Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

“That was one of those incredible invitations. I’ve always wanted to perform at Crossroads since, I think, 2010 when I stumbled on a DVD recording of the concert. That was just one of those things I put on the bucket list in my brain, in the back of my head, that if it ever happens again it would mean so much to be included.

“So when they invited me and wanted me to play with him — done! I’d played with Eric before, and he’s really one of the best, such an incredible performer and player. The way he puts together melodies, his note selection, he’s otherworldly. He takes you to space and back.

“To get the opportunity with him, and Kingfish as well, was really special. I felt like these are my friends. We’re in the blues community, so it’s special. Crossroads is a super-curated thing; I let them tell me what they wanted to do. I can’t remember if we chose ‘I Put a Spell on You’ or if they did; it might have been a request. It’s a big production and they’ve got this rotating stage; on one side somebody’s performing and on the other side it’s frantically trying to get our stuff set up so that when it rotates we’re ready to go. To put on that kind of a show it requires so much planning, to the minute. To the second, actually.

“There wasn’t any rehearsal; I sent Eric the song, ‘Black Wind Hollow,’ and we knew the others. We kind of talked out the changes and everything. But Eric’s band is so good, and they’re standards. There’s so many versions of them, I knew it would be something we could do really well together.”

Buddy Guy

“Buddy Guy somebody I’ve gotten the opportunity to perform with a few times, on the road opening shows and stuff. We played in Central Park together; Bobby Rush was there, too, so that was a cool show. He is one of the best conversationalists on guitar there is, hands down. He’s such an expert when it comes to that.

“I’ve learned a lot from Buddy over the years. He’s the truth; he tells the truth when he’s up there, and it’s nice to be able to bounce something back to him. Recently he was in New Orleans and I went to see the show and went backstage just to say hello. And he’s like, ‘You’re getting up, right?’ I had not planned on that, but of course I’m not gonna say no to an opportunity to learn something.”

Walter Trout

“Walter Trout is one of the first musicians I remember going to see as a young player, when he’d come to Kansas City and perform. I used to frequent this club called Knuckleheads a lot, and he was somebody the owner of the club was like, ‘You need to come see this guy. He’s gonna teach you something.’

“And he did. The guy is a very powerful guitar player, incredible story, incredible songs. It’s been awhile since we’ve played together, but it’s always great when we get the chance.”

Joe Bonamassa

“I’ve gotten to do the super jams on some of his cruises, and he’s a fun one to play off of, to go toe-to-toe with, as you say. He’s really super expressive and melodic, and he has way different ideas than I do, so it’s kind of fun to hear the way he puts notes together. That’s the fun part.

“I know he has a lot of amps up there — he’s definitely more into gear than I am — but it’s not as loud as you think. It’s workable. He’s got a lot of taste, and his band just sounds exceptional. They’re pristine.”

Slash

“I did a Slash tour, and that just made my little kid heart so happy, ’cause I was such a Guns N’ Roses fan. Do you know how many speeding tickets I got on Appetite for Destruction? So many that they almost took my license away. I told him that and he laughed — or gave me a pity chuckle. I’m not sure.

“He came out and played ‘I Put a Spell on You’ with us, and it was fun just to get to play with an icon like Slash, ’cause he’s such a great player and you can just tell it’s him in the way he plays. We did some back and forth; I wait a lot when I’m playing with somebody, ’cause I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.

“I was more or less sitting back, waiting to hear what he was gonna say and take my time to respond. That’s always a good way to approach playing with anybody, I think.”

Luther Dickinson

The lead singer and guitarist for the North Mississippi Allstars, Luther Dickinson produced two of Fish’s albums — 2015’s Wild Heart and 2017’s Belle of the West — and she calls him “one of my favorite guitar players to play with. He’s really melodic and fun. Every time I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in with him or whatever, he’s just got a way of building melodies and a dynamic, and his tone is some of my favorite guitar tone out there. And every time you play with him, it’s different. We never do the same thing twice.”

Jesse Dayton

“We did that Death Wish Blues album [2023] and a whole collaborative tour and got nominated for a Grammy together. I’ve always been the only guitar player in my band for the longest time, so when Jesse and I started working together it introduced this opportunity for me to approach things differently, and I learned so much from that time period.

“We were on the road together for 18 months, and it was fun for me to approach the guitar from this other level — ‘What can I do to complement the lead right now? What can I play in front? Behind?’ It made me a stronger guitarist. Just to have that back-and-forth dynamic was really, really cool.

“And he’s such an explosive player! That [King double-cut hollowbody] guitar he’s got is so big. The sound of it is just monstrous. For me it was, ‘All right, I’ve got to figure out how to complement this — not compete sonically but take up a different space.’ It was really fun and really interesting.”

Johnny Marr’s guitars have just fetched more than £3.6 million at auction — but the Smiths guitarist has never been particularly interested in treating the electric guitar as a vehicle for theatrics.

The auction, held at Christie’s on September 16, saw nearly 100 guitars from Marr’s collection go under the hammer, raising more than three times their estimated value for the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the Autistic Society.

Among the highlights were the 1960 Cherry Red Gibson ES-355 Marr played on “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” which sold for £204,800, and the 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo he used on the Smiths’ self-titled debut before loaning it to Noel Gallagher for Definitely Maybe. The Rickenbacker fetched £358,400 and later appeared on the cover of Oasis’ “Supersonic” single.

“The auction has been a great experience and has exceeded all my expectations,” Marr said afterward. “I’d like to thank everyone who made bids and special thanks to Christie’s for making it so memorable.”

For Marr, though, the value of a guitar has never been measured simply by how much noise — or how many notes — a player can get out of it. As guitarist with the Smiths and throughout his solo career, he 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.”

That same year, Marr was particularly blunt about the guitarists who seemed to represent the opposite philosophy.

“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.

Yes guitarist Steve Howe is happy to entertain inquiries about his health — especially after postponing the group’s tour plans during the spring to undergo “an essential operation that requires recovery time.”

But he also doesn’t have a lot to say about it.

“I don’t want to dwell on it too much; if I start talking I’ll go somewhere I don’t want to go,” he tells us via Zoom from his home in the English countryside. “I had this major thing and it was pretty difficult, and it’s gonna take some time to get me back to normal.

“But I’m keeping up my playing and my momentum. It’s been three months now since I had the operation, so I’m making progress, slowly.

“So we rescheduled everything we had this year for next year and hopefully everything will be hunky dory and we’ll be back around and try and do all the things we were going to do this year.”

Yes will, in fact, hit the road early next May to play its 1971 album Fragile and more, first in the U.K. and then in Japan, with dates to be announced. North America is also in the band’s sights, with details still being determined, too.

Howe has had plenty to consider during his downtime, meanwhile. Yes did release Aurora — its 24th studio album and third in less than five years, and third consecutive album produced by Howe — during June. Weighing in at nearly an hour, including bonus tracks, it leans even further into the hallmarks of Yes’ progressive sound, with one epic in the four-part, 13:44 suite “Countermovement.”

And while, like its immediate predecessors — 2021’s The Quest and 2023’s Mirror to the Sky — Yes made use of file sharing and other technology, there were also more opportunities for band members to get together now that frontman Jon Davison and bassist Billy Sherwood are spending more time in the U.K., where Howe and keyboardist Geoff Downes reside. (Drummer Jay Schellen remains a full-time U.S. resident.)

On top of that, Yes has just come out with a 25th anniversary edition of Magnification, an album that found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame troupe working with an orchestra again for the first time since its second album, Time and a Word, in 1970. It was also the only Yes album recorded as a quartet (no full-time keyboardist, though late drummer Alan White played some piano) and the last Yes album to feature co-founder Jon Anderson before his acrimonious departure in 2004.

So Howe, robust and in good humor, is eager to make up for lost time now, with plenty to review and look forward to in the not too distant future.

It must have been frustrating to have a new album and tours on the runway and have to put the brakes on everything earlier this year.

It’s immensely disappointing; I feel it probably more than anybody else because I’m the subject matter of it. I had ambitious goals that we just had to postpone ’til next year. But we still put Aurora out; it was in the process, so we couldn’t really stop it. Sometimes the world doesn’t wait for you and other times it does, so you have to make judgment calls.

This has been the most productive period for Yes since, really, the ’70s. Are these last three albums of a piece, do you think?

Yeah, yeah. To my mind these are a sort of trilogy, obviously, a set towards continuing that Yes doesn’t exclusively rely on its old material, and there is a creative pulse in the band. The Quest was like a golden opportunity, and then we did Mirror to the Sky and stepped up a bit and got more compelling. And Aurora is the pinnacle of our achievement, to us. But primarily I’m happy we’ve been able to make new music. That’s a beautiful thing. We want it to be in respect of the past music but we don’t want to cheapen it by pastiching some features of our music together. We got it completely with a blank piece of paper and start saying, “What do we got?”

With you producing, of course, this really is your representation of Yes and what it is at this point in time.

It’s been joyful to produce Yes for three albums. I’ve helped to do that all through my career, but never have I had credit — and also the authority to do something I wanted to do. I’ve tried to make it as fun and as pleasant, as nice as possible. This wasn’t a moment for me to become dominant and sort of call all the shots. But like an orchestra, a conductor does have a job to do; although I don’t primarily do conducting I do have a responsibility — I do have a possibility, that’s a better word, of being able to steer this where it has the history kind of wrapped up in it but takes it somewhere new.

Everybody loves a big Yes epic. What’s the story of “Countermovement” on Aurora?

I surprised them with that one. We had two songs floating around, and neither of them had been developed a great deal. One day I thought, This is sort of untidy; maybe I can do a ‘Luminosity’ on it, or a ‘Mirror to the Sky.’ I think this album needs this.

They weren’t in the same keys and they weren’t at the same tempos, but that didn’t put me off them. And then I had two instrumentals that were viable, and I was happy to offer them to Yes. So what I did was kind of transplant those two instrumentals into the two songs and sort of jiggle around with it, a bit like a jigsaw trying to find out how they fitted together.

To be honest it was longer once, and we got some advice that maybe that idea’s gone a bit far, so we brought them back in, trimmed them back so it was back into a conceivable shell.

So that’s what happened, and everybody grew to like it, and I think it does the album a pile of good.

How many times during Yes’s history have you heard the words, “It needs to be shorter?”

[laughs] Well, I suppose, straightaway, “Roundabout” was a bit too long for Atlantic. There’s been easier times and there’s been harder times. And you do have to consider length. I mean, Tales (of Topographic Oceans) was a colossal undertaking.

I don’t mind if somebody says “It’s too long” or “Can you make it longer?” Most probably the answer to both is “no.” But one must never be flippant about advice. It comes to you for a reason. That’s how I used to bounce back from criticism in the ’70s, when people would say, “What do you think about the press not liking your music anymore?” You learn to flow easily within criticism and not be undermined, which is an important ingredient.

There’s an acoustic segment in “Countermovement,” during the “Anytime Soon” section, that seems to make direct reference to “Your Move.” Deliberate?

No. It’s fortunate that whenever I pull that Portuguese guitar out, something happens. The first time everybody heard it was “Your Move,” so it has a constant link to that. But after that came things like “Wonderous Stories” and “Nine Voices” and now part of “Anytime Soon.” I don’t think it’s a total reference, but there are only so many things I can play on that guitar because of the tuning. “Wonderous Stories” was a test; in fact, “Nine Voices” was a test, in a way. But I like bringing that out and having that familiar sound. I also like the newer sounds.

But one of the sounds I like best, of course, the oldest sound I’ve got is my [Gibson ES-]175. That is again all over the soloing of this album, as it’s been throughout the years of me playing other guitars. It’s generally appeared again because it’s my best guitar.

On the other side of the spectrum on Aurora is “All Hands on Deck,” a three-minute jolt of total energy. Were you just in that mood on that day?

I don’t like Yes becoming a pomp sort of band, without any rock and roll. Without rock and roll we’re asleep at the wheel. We’ve got to be a rock band; I guess that’s partly why that song is there, the reason it’s brazen and bravado-ish. I like the rock ’n’ roll element being in Yes, and that’s what that song is.

When it started out, I just had a chorus — [sings] “all hands on deck” — and I thought people might like that, just for a change, instead of a page of endless lyrics. And they didn’t; they said, “Is there just a little bit more?” So I wrote some more and it’s still quite sparse. It’s not a big story, but it is about a sinking ship, which could be a metaphor for just about anything — a sinking band, a sinking planet, a sinking environment, whatever you like.

You bust out the washboard again for “Jambustin’,” one of the bonus tracks.

One of my hidden skills is definitely the washboard. On my own albums I’ve done quite a lot of washboard. I think it’s terrific. I think it’s a brilliant instrument, totally underrated.

I have a story; one day the phone rang and it was [producer] Trevor Horn, and he said to me, “I’ve got something going on with a recording here. It’s Malcolm McLaren, and he wants a washboard. Don’t you play washboard?” I said, “Yes, I’m the best in London,” and he says, “Well, you’re the only one in London. I can’t find anybody who plays it. Come in.” So I went a few days later and played on some track Trevor was producing. I quite like that story.

Is this current burst of creativity continuing? Are you starting on the next one yet?

No, we haven’t, for one big reason: due to my operation we put everything on hold. But there are some ideas that have been floated around a little bit, and as this period of a year goes through, in a few months we might choose to do something, but we don’t tell anybody when we’re doing it. So the answer is [leans into screen and whispers] “no.”

The Magnification reissue is the other major Yes release this year. What kind of perspective do you have on that album 25 years on?

I don’t know whether you remember the old TV series with Phil Silvers in it [The Phil Silvers Show, a.k.a. Sergeant Bilko]? He used to say, “Oh, it’s hell, Sarge.” So that would be my first answer; “Steve, what do you think of Magnification?” “It was hell, Sarge.”

It was really difficult, and it shouldn’t have been because there were only four of us in the band. The only reason it’s passably good is because I put my foot down and said, “Those mixers are just awful.” I couldn’t believe it; the bass, drums and the guitar became a sort of backstory to the orchestra. So I insisted that even though it was against all odds for the schedule to allow us to do it, I was going to listen to the album and make notes.

These are the days of faxes, as well, so you can imagine they’re sitting in the studio and they get the first fax, “at .02 do this, at 10 seconds the guitar needs to be focused. Can you turn it up there?” I went through the album thoroughly and gave them faxes, every song, and said, “It’s got to be like this. You can’t put this out without me liking it.” So, yeah, I went through that, and the only reason I can listen to it is because that sort of detail went into it.

How do you feel about the songs, in hindsight?

Oh, any of its pitfalls are overshadowed, I think, by the adventurousness of what we did there. Some of the songs were pretty adventurous. They did take arrangements to a good level. So I’m fairly happy about that. A couple of the songs shouldn’t have been there, ’cause they weren’t really good. But I think Yes sometimes compensates with a bit of charm in a song; “It’s not a great song, but it’s quite charming,” I might say to myself.

Yes toured with Deep Purple a couple of years ago, and we recently saw them reunite, for a song with one of your contemporaries, Ritchie Blackmore. What did you make of that?

I thought it was great. They’re such a lovely bunch of guys, and their lead guitarist [Simon McBride] is fantastic. To have the balls or, let’s say, the gall on both sides of that endorsement, that Ritchie was prepared to come back and play the song and also they were prepared to open it up so that he could… There you are.

Music tells all sorts of stories in one second. It’s a bit like when Art went back with Paul and you had Simon & Garfunkel again, and what a moment. What a joy. But it doesn’t mean all unions are good, because they’re not; the Union Tour of Yes [1991–’92] was unbelievably difficult, for instance.

You’ll be doing the postponed Fragile tour dates in the U.K. and Japan next year. What else is on the docket?

Something will be happening pretty big for next year with touring in the U.S. but we cannot specify anything about that at the moment. After Japan we won’t be playing the Fragile tour anymore; we’ve got a brilliant idea — I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you it’s absolutely brilliant. [laughs] I’m kidding, but we’ve got an idea and it seems to hang together and it’s a little different. That’s what I think keeps Yes alive, is difference. The same isn’t enjoyable. You don’t want to just add a little thing to it, a twist in the tale. You want it to be different.

After all these years, has your view of what progressive rock is changed?

It starts with the word “freedom” — to do any musical molding, any musical style-referencing. It has to have structure; Chris [Squire] was a big advocate of that. He’d say, “Steve, yeah, that’s a really nice guitar solo, but I hope you appreciate the structure.” So we weren’t the kind of band where everybody improvised. “Five Per Cent for Nothing” might sound like that, but it wasn’t. That meant you worked together to make something that did have improvisation but it also had structure.

And I think there’s the beauty of being able to put in any musical reference, whether it’s washboard [chuckles] or folk or jazz or… Blues was the thing we avoided the most, but there’s still a little bit of it in there. Really what it is is the most marvelous hodgepodge. It has to combine things, ’cause if it doesn’t it’s just a song and it doesn’t resonate. It might be a nice song, but you can’t call it prog ’cause nothing happens to it.

“For me, Martin is the songwriter’s guitar,” says British folk-rock phenom Jake Bugg, knocking out a few cool voicings backstage on one of Martin’s new 00L-16E models. “Maybe it’s the warmth, or the midrange quality, but if you just hold a chord and really listen, it’s like the guitar is trying to tell you where to go.”

That’s as good a description of the magic of a good guitar as you’re likely to hear. And it’s the unspoken philosophy behind Martin’s latest “refresh” of one of their less storied guitar lines, the oft under-the-radar 16 Series. Indeed, Martin launched 11 brand new 16 models — with three new finishes: Cherry Cola, Blue Denim and Cream — on September 15 with much fanfare, cocktails, hot chicken, and buzz aplenty at SoBro’s uber-hip InDo Nashville event space as the kick-off event for the city’s annual AmericanaFest celebrations.

Packed to the gills, the afternoon bash included excellent solo performances by Bugg, Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter Brandy Clark, Canadian country star Tenille Townes, as well as Gunnar and Matthew Nelson and rising American acoustic duet Marfa. Notable attendees sipping bevvies included YouTube guitar instruction powerhouse Marty Schwartz, vintage guitar authority George Gruhn, Martin CEO Thomas Ripsam and roots rock legend Webb Wilder.

Evident among the throng was a small fleet of local pickers adorned with silver clothing and silver head-to-toe makeup. Why the silver, you ask? Well, it’s a nod to the adventurous spirit of the revamped 16 line, and their cool cast of custom colors, the type of thing literally no one wants to see on a D-28 or D-18.

“That’s what so fun about the 16 line for us,” says Martin’s Director of Product Management, Joey Osisek, a.k.a. Joey O. “With the 28 and 18s, we’re very aware of maintaining a certain tradition there—in a way, we’re almost shadow boxing with that legacy, and even those materials and finishes.

“But the 16s never had that consistent identity, so it’s much more open-ended, and we’re able to really have fun with it. I’m telling ya,” Osisek laughs, “we’re going to get weird with it, brother.”

Weird is good! But a little history first. Martin's style 16 dates back to 1961, when the company introduced it as an affordable, understated alternative to its more ornately appointed instruments. It offered mahogany guitars built to style 18 construction standards, but with simpler trim. The 16s briefly resurfaced in the 1980s as a catch-all designation for trade show specials that were not for wider sale, but allowed Martin to experiment with outside-the-box designs.

Soon after, the first D-16s reached general release in mahogany, ash, walnut, and koa, and by the early ’90s, the D-16 was featuring scalloped, forward-shifted bracing, along with tortoise binding and pickguards. In the decade to follow, the 16 Series became Martin’s outlet to explore more “outside” tonewoods, construction methods and body configurations, eventually settling into the acoustic-electric, all-solid-wood niche most players know today.

In a sense, then, the 16 series was the perfect line for a funky refresh, and that was certainly the impression the Nashville launch was intended to convey. In addition to the three new finishes, the lineup comprises 11 new models, and marks a genuine departure in body-shape terms. The range now features three very rarely seen body shapes in the Martin canon, from intimate, responsive 00Ls and warm, punchy sloped-shoulder dreads to powerful Jumbos, a balanced Grand Performance cutaway, and a room-filling Grand Jumbo 12-string.

The new DSS-16E is Martin's first-ever short-scale slope-shoulder Dreadnought, with a 24.9-inch scale, akin to a certain other noted maker’s best-known acoustic. (“Keep in mind,” notes Osisek, “the first dreadnought Martin ever built was a slope-shouldered dread for Gibson, so that’s part of our legacy, too.”) The built-in electronics have shifted, too. The outgoing generation used Martin's in-house E1 preamp, while the new models switch to an L.R. Baggs Element preamp (a sonic upgrade that trades away the E1's built-in tuner).

Where the refresh really announces itself, though, is in its finishes. Bold gloss-top finish options including Blue Denim, Cherry Cola, Cream, Black Smoke and 1935 Burst sit alongside more traditional natural tops with a vintage tint. While the price tag on the 16s is typically less than the Standard series, it’s worth noting that this is decidedly not a “budget line.” Each guitar is still handcrafted in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with all-solid-wood construction.

As the afternoon strummed on, Martin set up a Wheel-of-Fortune-style prize wheel somewhere near the bar (sorry, details get hazy at this point…) and a clutch of lucky winners wobbled off with a small run of Series 16 accessories and lifestyle merchandise, including Blue Denim and Cherry Cola steins, a Cherry Cola ringer T-shirt, a Blue Denim corduroy hat, and a Blue Fade leather strap. (Hey, how come I didn’t walk away with any swag!).

For those of you who missed this one-of-a-kind Martin Sweet 16 party, here are the salient details of each of the new Style 16 models.

00L-16E (1935 Burst, Black Smoke, Blue Denim. $2,499.99 each)

A slope-shoulder 00 body pairs a gloss spruce top with satin solid mahogany back and sides for a warm, woody voice with punchy mids and controlled lows. It runs the short 24.9" scale with scalloped X-bracing, built for fingerstyle players and songwriters who want touch and response from a compact body.

DSS-16E (1935 Burst, Black Smoke, Cherry Cola. $2,499.99 each)

Martin's first-ever short-scale slope-shoulder Dreadnought, also on the 24.9" scale. Solid spruce top over solid mahogany back and sides, ebony fingerboard and bridge, 20 frets, open-gear nickel tuners. A warm, punchy dreadnought voice in a more compact-feeling package.

J-16E (1935 Burst, Cream, Black Smoke. $2,599.99 each)

The Jumbo body in the lineup, aimed at players who want bold volume and deep bass for stage work. The Cream finish is built with a solid spruce top over solid East Indian rosewood back-and-sides—the one rosewood guitar among the three Jumbo finishes—giving it extra low-end depth and shimmer compared to its mahogany siblings.

GPC-16E ($2,599.99)

A Grand Performance cutaway with 000 depth, finished in a more traditional natural top with vintage tint rather than the bold gloss colors. It's pitched as the balanced, comfortable option in the range, a stage-ready cutaway for easy upper-fret access.

Grand J-16E 12-String ($2,599.99)

A Grand Jumbo 12-string, also in natural top with vintage tint, built for lush shimmer, rich overtones, and room-filling sound. The big, chorus-textured option for broad strummed chords or layered accompaniment in a live set.

Duncan Sheik, the singer-songwriter behind the 1996 hit “Barely Breathing” and the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening, has died at 56. He passed away Thursday night, September 17, in a Manhattan hospital from heart failure leading to cardiac arrest, according to The New York Times.

Sheik’s loved ones confirmed his death Friday, saying he was “surrounded by love.”

“The world has lost a singular talent, and deeply influential voice in music and theater,” his family wrote on Instagram. The statement remembered Sheik as a “father, husband, son, brother, and friend,” praising “his sensitivity, wit, intelligence, and depth of spirit he brought to those who knew and loved him.”

The news came a day after Sheik’s family revealed on Instagram that he had been “receiving medical care” and was in “critical but stable condition.” They declined to share further medical details at the time and asked for privacy.

Sheik released his self-titled debut album in 1996, with “Barely Breathing” becoming a major pop hit. Driven by Sheik’s acoustic-guitar playing, the song reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 55 consecutive weeks on the chart. It earned Sheik a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance in 1998.

“It kind of took on a life of its own,” Sheik said of the song in a 2015 interview with Broadcast Music, Inc. He had previously revealed that “Barely Breathing” was inspired by his real-life pursuit of a woman who was involved with another man.

His subsequent albums, including 1998’s Humming, 2001’s Phantom Moon and 2002’s Daylight, did not match the commercial success of his debut. But Sheik was already moving in a different direction, beginning a career as a composer for musical theater in the early 2000s.

That work culminated in Spring Awakening, his collaboration with lyricist and book writer Steven Sater. Based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play, the musical took eight years to develop before reaching Broadway in 2006. Sheik and Sater used a rock score to explore the sexuality, repression and emotional turmoil of its teenage characters.

Spring Awakening became a major Broadway success, winning eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Sheik won Best Orchestrations and shared the award for Best Original Score with Sater. The pair also won a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album.

Sheik continued to write for the stage, including the music and lyrics for American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. The musical premiered in London in 2013 before opening on Broadway in 2016.

At the time of his death, Sheik was preparing for the Off-Broadway premiere of Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, a musical adaptation of the manga by Moyoco Anno for which he wrote the music and lyrics. The production was scheduled to begin performances September 25, with an official opening set for October 15.

Sheik’s family cited both “Barely Breathing” and Spring Awakening among his greatest accomplishments, writing that “Duncan’s artistry touched many and leaves an indelible mark on the cultural landscape.”

They also thanked “his fans, friends, collaborators, and the artistic community” for the outpouring of love, adding that Sheik’s “musical legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.”

Sheik is survived by his mother and siblings, as well as his daughter, Inez, whom he welcomed in 2018 with his wife, Nora Ariffin.

The new documentary about Neil Peart arrives at a particularly significant moment for Rush. More than six years after the drummer’s death, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are back onstage, with German drummer Anika Nilles behind the kit for the band’s Fifty Something tour.

And one of the songs Nilles has had to tackle is “Tom Sawyer” — a Rush classic so closely associated with Peart that she initially wondered whether she wanted to play it at all.

“When we were going to play it for the first time, she just stopped and said, ‘Yikes. I don’t know if I want to play this one,’” Lee recalled in an interview with Planet Rock.

The moment takes on a different resonance now that Nilles has actually performed the song onstage with Rush. The band launched its Fifty Something tour in June, marking Lee and Lifeson’s first extended run together since Rush’s final show in 2015.

The tour also coincides with the arrival of Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple, a new documentary exploring the drummer’s artistry and influence. The film features interviews with Lee and Lifeson, archival footage of Peart and appearances from fellow drummers including Stewart Copeland, Chad Smith, Gavin Harrison and Danny Carey. Nilles is also featured.

Rush’s decision to retire after their 2015 R40 tour was largely driven by Peart. Speaking to Rolling Stone at the time, Lifeson said the drummer — who died of cancer in 2020 — had found it “increasingly difficult” to perform at the level he expected of himself. The anniversary run was intended as a dignified farewell.

Yet Lee and Lifeson eventually decided they weren’t finished with Rush. After Lee presented Lifeson with a now-or-never ultimatum, the pair committed to reviving the band.

They sought out Nilles after a recommendation from Lee’s guitar tech, who had worked with her while she was touring with Jeff Beck. Her background outside the traditional progressive-rock sphere offered a useful degree of separation from Rush’s past, something the duo welcomed.

Lifeson had previously revealed that countless drummers contacted them just “minutes” after Peart’s death. Nilles’ unexpected appointment proved a more thoughtful antidote.

Still, stepping into Rush’s world — and particularly its catalog — came with its own pressures.

“It’s really fun to watch Anika as she starts to know the songs,” Lee said. “It’s one thing to play it for the first time and work out what parts have to be, essentially, Neil Peart’s parts — and what parts she can make her own.

“That has been wonderful to watch, and really exciting for Al and I, because now she doesn’t have to think about it. She’s just grooving out.”

But the learning curve wasn’t always smooth.

“She didn’t know our music very well. She knew a couple of the big songs. And of course, every drummer on Earth knew Neil and his reputation,” Lee continued. “She knew ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and when we were going to play it for the first time, she just stopped and said, ‘Yikes. I don’t know if I want to play this one.’”

Released on Rush’s landmark 1981 album Moving Pictures, “Tom Sawyer” became one of the band’s defining songs and a permanent fixture of their live shows. For the recording, Lee famously swapped his usual Rickenbacker 4001 for a pawn-shop Fender Jazz Bass, while Lifeson later admitted he essentially “winged” the guitar solo — preferring spontaneity to the sterility that can come from endless retakes.

The single reached No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 25 in the U.K., but those numbers barely capture the song’s cultural impact — or the pressure it places on any drummer attempting to play Peart’s parts.

“She was kind of nervous because of the importance of that,” Lee said. “But we talked through it, we worked through it. The fills were not the hardest part for her — she could play those no problem. It’s the feel — sitting in that groove that the song has.

“She’s clued in now. It’s really lovely to see.”

That learning process has since moved from the rehearsal room to the stage. Nilles is now performing alongside Lee and Lifeson on Rush’s Fifty Something tour, with keyboardist Loren Gold handling additional parts and helping free Lee from some of the multitasking he juggled in Rush’s classic lineup.

For now, Lee and Lifeson have framed the tour as a celebration of Rush’s legacy. They have also not ruled out writing new music together.

Lifeson, for his part, has found solace in reflecting on his late bandmate, recently describing the “serene, peaceful” process of writing a tribute song to Peart, an experience that helped him through what he called a deeply “difficult” time.

Now, with Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple revisiting the drummer’s life and influence and Rush back on the road, Nilles is helping Lee and Lifeson keep that music alive. She may have initially looked at “Tom Sawyer” and thought, “Yikes,” but she’s now playing the song with Rush onstage.

Volume was certainly a point of notoriety, and perhaps pride, for Sugar during its four-year run during the early and mid 1990s. The group was “somewhere between oppressively and astonishingly loud,” says bass guitarist David Barbe in the new online mini-documentary Changes: The Story of Sugar.

Is it still the case now that the trio is reunited and touring for the first time since 1995?

“I can't tell,” singer-guitarist Bob Mould tells us. “I think so. It is not as loud at my microphone as it used to be. I'm using half the amps I did in the loud Sugar days.”

Nevertheless, social media comments gave a different perspective following Sugar’s August 15 show at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre.

“There were people reviewing it saying it was the loudest show they'd ever seen at the Paramount,” Mould says. “And there's been a lot of loud shows in there, I'm sure, especially a lot of stuff in the ’90s that was pretty loud.

“So I don't know. We're not trying to kill people with it anymore. I mean, I can't take it either.”

Loud or not, there's no question that Sugar's is a particularly welcome and unexpected return. Launched by Mould in 1992 after the demise of Hüsker Dü and a pair of solo albums, Sugar wasn't around long enough to get tired of. Its two albums — 1992’s Copper Blue and 1994's File Under: Easy Listening — and the brutal 1993 Beaster EP were all well-received, and songs such as “Helpless,” “Your Favorite Thing” and “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” are classics from that era in alt rock.

Mould played Copper Blue in its entirety during a 2012 20th anniversary tour, and last October he, Barbe and drummer Malcolm Travis announced live dates for May in New York and London, which led to a Love You Even Still 2026 World Tour touring through the balance of the year. After three recent sold-out dates in Mould's hometown of Minneapolis, Sugar resumes touring on September 19 at Riot Fest in Chicago, with shows running through October.

Sugar — which reconvened quietly during October of 2024 in Athens, Georgia, where Barbe is director of the University of Georgia’s Music Business Certificate Program — also recorded a trio of new songs (“House of Dead Memories,” “Long Live Love,” “Keep Looping”) in June 2025 for the occasion.

“It's feeling good,” says Mould, 65. “It feels similar — not the same. I mean, times are different. Many years have passed. All of us have a little extra wear and tear — band, audience, et cetera. But it's been really fun.

“It's been a couple of years in the making, but everybody was in a good space personally, there was interest already percolating on the business side, so the timing was good. And now here we are.”

Mould — who considers himself “the worst gear guy in the world” — says he's armed a bit differently this time out.

“It's essentially the same rig,” he says of his current setup. “It's a 4x12 with a Blackstar 100-watt tube head and a Fender Deluxe. It's the same Strats that I was playing — not the exact same blue one, but the same year, make and model. The necks are a little different, a little thinner and easier to play in my old age. So practically the same gear, just a little less firepower.”

His electric guitars are late ’80s American Standard Plus Stratocasters.

“They have the Fender Lace Sensor pickups as opposed to humbuckers,” Mould says. “I bought the first one in '88 when I was up on the farm in northern Minnesota. I stopped at a music store one day and saw it, picked it up and played it. It sounded great unplugged, so I bought it and that became the blue Strat.

“I just kept buying more of those in different colors and different neck thicknesses. I'm using a black '89 Strat Plus now. It's been my main guitar for the last eight, 10 years... 'cause it's easy to play,” he says with a laugh. “The radius of the neck is a little less, so as opposed to the big reach now it's a little shorter reach.

“And, again, my old hands don't work as well as they did 35 years ago. So a lighter touch and less of a grip is what I'm working with, but it still sounds pretty good. There are other guitar players who I've put it in their hands and said, 'Check it out,' and they say, 'What the hell is this?!' It's set up really low, really light. I think when [My Bloody Valentine's] Kevin Shields hit it he was just like, 'Wow!' A couple of my friends are like, 'This is crazy!' It's just real light — sort of lazy.”

On fly-in dates, Mould says he requests Marshall 4x12 slant stacks, preferably with Celestion Seventy 80 speakers. But he notes that “any of the big-throated Celestions are pretty good, and the Blackstar Artisan 100 is really where the sound comes from. That's the key piece of any amp stuff I’m using; there's really no other 100-watt tube amp that sounds quite like a Blackstar. The one I use was modeled after the Marshall Plexis. That's the only amp that gets close to the sound I want.

“And the Fender Deluxes all sound good; the ’65s and ’68s sound a little different, but they always work good.”

Mould calls his pedal array mostly “the same old same old,” with custom-built distortion pedals from Tym Guitars in Brisbane, Australia.

“They're sort of modeled after the MXR Distortion+, which I used forever.”

His board includes a TC Electronic Flashback looper and delay pedal, an Electro-Harmonix Freeze and a Wampler Ego Compressor. “I spent a lot of time finding the pedals that I have, that don't have a ton of levers,” Mould explains. “It's not an elaborate setup, that's for sure.”

Mould is also using a Big Muff Pi in place of his Octavia pedals. He owns several of the latter, including one Shields gave him years ago, and says they “don't leave the house anymore,”

Back in the day, Sugar had enough firepower to hang with Metallica on the European festival circuit. He'd crossed paths with the group during his years with Hüsker Dü, but seeing the Metallica machine in full flight during the early ’90s was illuminating.

“I think that was the tour Metallica had two sets of everything, piggy-backing from one show to the other,” Mould recalls. “They'd show up at a festival while the other stage would move ahead of them. I think they had washers and dryers in their flight cases. It was just sort of like, 'Wow...' It was a level of touring that I'd never really seen before. It was just crazy to me, coming from punk rock.”

Mould says Sugar's focus at the moment is “to get these shows completed” before contemplating what comes next, with Barbe's university responsibilities to be taken into account.

“The goal right now is to get through all of the live work and take a beat and see how life is looking,” says Mould, who released his 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy, last year. “It could be fun to do more performing. It could be fun to do more recording. I don't know how many times that would be possible, or appropriate. I've been chugging along with my stuff and solo work. David and Malcolm have their own things.

“I guess we'll just see where it all lands at the end of the year — that's the easiest answer. There's no push to do anything right now.”

Neil Diamond had no idea what he passed up when he turned down a song his roadie, Larry E. Williams, had written. It was 1975, and Diamond was focused on cutting demos for his next album, Beautiful Noise, in Los Angeles.

Instead, the song went to recent arrivals in the City of Angels, Howard and David Bellamy — better known as the Bellamy Brothers. “Let Your Love Flow,” the duo’s debut single, didn’t just go big — it went international, topping the charts in the U.S. and Germany and reaching the Top 10 in numerous other countries.

But how the Bellamys got the song in the first place is a story in itself — and it’s all thanks to a stash of homegrown weed.

In 1974, Howard and David Bellamy were struggling musicians from Darby, Florida, with a slim résumé that included writing songs for local commercials. Their early involvement with comedian-musician Jim Stafford led David and Stafford to co-write “Spiders & Snakes,” a number-three hit for Stafford in 1974. The song’s success proved crucial to their survival in the music business.

“Jim and that song were really important because, at the time, we were broke,” David reveals. “Having that break gave us a little bit of stability and allowed us to move out to Los Angeles.”

Which is how they met Diamond’s band.

“They were doing sessions here and there, and we met them through mutual friends, and then we all became friends,” David says.

“We smoked a lot of pot together, so that was really helpful,” Howard adds with a laugh. “We had a lot of homegrown weed, so we got to know each other, and we all became great buddies.”

The brothers began cutting demos of their songs with assistance from Diamond’s backing band. One day, Diamond’s drummer, Dennis St. John, came to them with a proposition.

“He said, ‘Hey, Larry, our roadie, wrote this great song, and you guys should listen to it.’ It was ‘Let Your Love Flow.’”

By that point, the song had been rejected not only by Diamond but also by singer and guitarist Johnny Rivers.

“And when we heard the song, we were both floored,” David says. “We just thought it was a great song.

“Dennis said, ‘It sounds like something you guys would do.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re exactly right.’”

Enhanced by the haze of weed permeating the studio, the Bellamys got down to work with help from Diamond’s band and their gear.

“We used Richard Bennett’s acoustic guitars on the track,” David says. “It was a black Gibson Everly Brothers J-180 with the double pickguards. I remember Richard taking it out of the case all the time and playing it. We also used a Martin D-28 acoustic as well.”

The sessions went smoothly. “The band had played on the original demo, and it was actually arranged perfectly,” David says. “It wasn’t like you had to go in and strip it down and start all over. We cut the single in about five or six takes.”

“But the mix took three days!” Howard interjects. “We were searching for that sweet spot. I just remember those late nights with that mix and our engineer throwing his headset against the wall. It took a while, but whatever we did seemed to work in the end.”

Indeed it did. Released by Warner Bros. Records in January 1976, “Let Your Love Flow” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in May and crossed over to the Adult Contemporary and Country charts as well. David notes that their label gave the single to visiting record executives from the Netherlands, who in turn shared it with label heads in Germany. The song subsequently charted in both countries, reaching number one in Germany and Switzerland. It also enjoyed major success in Norway, Sweden, the U.K., South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

The duo have continued to thrive over the years, particularly on the country charts, with hits like “If I Said You Have a Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me)” and “Do You Love as Good as You Look” among their 26 Top 10 country singles. They’ll hit the road this year on their 50 Years of Hits tour, with an extensive run of dates. That includes their first-ever headlining show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on June 25.

As for Neil Diamond, did he ever rue the day he passed on “Let Your Love Flow”?

“I don’t know if Neil later regretted it or not,” David says, “but he was always very complimentary about it. We’ve stayed friendly, and he’s been kind of a lifelong contact of ours ever since.”

Sammy Hagar has responded to Alex Van Halen calling him “a complete idiot” — and while he was happy to joke about the insult, he had more serious questions for his former bandmate.

Speaking with SiriusXM’s Eddie Trunk on Thursday, September 17, Hagar argued that Alex continues to dismiss the success of Van Halen during Hagar’s time in the band. He also criticized Alex’s new book project, saying his former bandmate is doing “a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

“Guilty as charged, first of all,” Hagar said with a laugh when Trunk asked about Alex’s comments. “I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet.”

Alex Van Halen made the remark earlier this month when he was asked about Hagar’s 2011 autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, in which the singer related unflattering stories about the Van Halen brothers, including accounts of Eddie Van Halen’s alcoholism. The late guitarist is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric-guitar players of his generation.

“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know,” Alex replied. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

The drummer had already demonstrated his disregard for Hagar by avoiding any mention of his time with Van Halen in his 2024 memoir, Brothers. While promoting the book, he declared that the band’s best years came before Hagar’s arrival in 1985, when the group consisted of the Van Halen brothers, bassist Michael Anthony and original singer David Lee Roth.

“What happened after Dave left is not the same band,” Alex said while promoting Brothers in 2024. “I’m not saying it was better or worse or any of that … but the magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing; when we were willing to try anything.”

Alex — who recently reunited with Roth for a TEDx talk — has since praised Roth as “a poet” and said, “We did our best work with Dave.”

Hagar told Trunk he takes issue with that characterization.

“I want to call Alex out and say, ‘Dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar,’” he said. “You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’” Hagar was referring to the nickname for the group’s years with him as its frontman. “We sold 40-some million records, four number-one albums, and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying, ‘No, that never happened.’ You don’t even want to acknowledge it.”

“That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right, for Eddie, for me, for Mikey, for anybody.

“I’m asking Alex, like, why? Come clean. What’s your problem? Just come out and say it.”

Hagar speculated that Alex is still upset about his book, and possibly Cabo Wabo, the cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, launched by the band in 1990. Hagar bought out his bandmates after the venture encountered legal and financial problems, then reversed its fortunes. He went on to sell his Cabo Wabo brand tequila for $91 million. That success reportedly became a point of contention between Hagar and the band.

“Maybe if I knew what [Alex’s] problem was, I could fix it,” Hagar continued. “But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem. It just never happened.”

Hagar also criticized Alex’s latest book project, Van Halen, which combines a photo collection with an unreleased early Van Halen demo. The limited-edition book from Genesis Publications carries a price tag of $475.

“Alex wants to just keep releasing all this old stuff and these photographs and charging people for old pictures that you could find on the internet,” Hagar said. “You should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

Hagar launches his Van Halen-celebrating Best of All Worlds Tour residency in Las Vegas tonight. Trunk asked him what he would do if Alex showed up. Hagar made it clear he’d welcome the drummer with open arms — and a kiss.

“Alex? Oh, come in. Oh, 100 percent, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips. … I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”

As rock duos go, few have forged a partnership like Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Between May’s mastery of his iconic Red Special guitar and Mercury’s ear for a hit, the pair took Queen to the top of the charts and the rock world.

Usually, May says in a new interview, Mercury’s ideas were inspired. But there was one occasion when the singer’s latest suggestion left his bandmates less than convinced.

“He was very good at coming up with titles,” May tells Planet Rock. “And he would be quite secretive. He’d say, ‘I have this great idea. Do you want to know what it is?’ Generally, the idea would be really good. And we’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, Freddie. Okay, that’s pretty good.’”

But even the most prolific songwriting talents can have an off day.

“This particular day, he said, ‘I’ve got this great idea,’” May recalls. “‘You know Michael Jackson’s album Bad? I had this great idea. Tell me what you think. No one’s ever done this. I think we call our album Good.’

“There was a sort of silence in the room,” the guitarist continues. “[We thought], ‘Well, yeah, maybe,’ but there was this feeling of, ‘Probably no.’”

It was, May concedes, one of the singer’s few duds.

“Most of Freddie’s ideas were excellent.”

The suggestion might have been rejected, but the choice of Bad as a reference was fitting given Queen’s connection to Michael Jackson. Jackson was a huge admirer of the band and, when asked if he was a Queen fan, reportedly replied, “I’m not a Queen fan, I’m a Freddie Mercury fan.” He regularly attended Queen shows at the L.A. Forum, and the two eventually became friends.

By 1983, Mercury and Jackson were collaborating on music, recording three songs together, although only one — “There Must Be More to Life Than This” — would eventually be released.

It wasn’t the only occasion when May and Mercury found themselves on different wavelengths. When it came to one of Queen’s biggest hits, the singer initially resisted the idea of May adding a guitar solo. In that case, though, May ultimately got his way — and Mercury was grateful that he did.

Elsewhere in the interview, May was asked to clarify a key detail about the Red Special. The six-string was famously built by May and his father when the guitarist was a teenager, and it famously incorporated wood from a fireplace.

But exactly whose fireplace was it?

“If we’d have taken our fireplace out, the house would have fallen down,” May jokes. “It was a piece of somebody’s fireplace that my dad had saved. He had a workshop with lots of bits and pieces that he’d saved from all over, thinking it might come in handy. I still have the rest of the fireplace, so I could actually make another neck.”

The Red Special remains central to May’s legacy, and he has recently gifted his old friend Tony Iommi a custom-made left-handed version. Steve Vai, meanwhile, has gone for a more radical tribute and has recalled how difficult the original model was to tame.

For Deep Purple fans, Ritchie Blackmore’s first appearance with the group in 33 years was a huge cause for celebration. Inviting him onstage to play “Smoke on the Water” was a very public demonstration of the friendship that has developed between Blackmore and vocalist Ian Gillan, but the singer has revealed there’s much more to the story.

Last month, Blackmore revealed that his surprise reunion with Deep Purple was his idea, but Gillan has now suggested the appearance had effectively been in the cards for some time.

“I wasn’t really surprised it happened,” he tells Classic Rock. “I’ve been in touch with Ritchie for quite a long time now, and we’re on very good terms. All the nonsense from the past is now water under the bridge.

“We’re getting on great,” he adds. “So as we were in the area, I wasn’t that surprised [to see him], but I was very pleased.”

Blackmore’s history with Deep Purple has been turbulent. He left the band he co-founded for the first time in 1975 after his relationship with Gillan had broken down, then departed for good in November 1993. He subsequently reformed Rainbow before largely turning his attention to Blackmore’s Night.

Blackmore’s ongoing health issues mean he can only perform at venues within driving distance of his Long Island home, making the band’s stop at Northwell at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, an ideal opportunity for the reunion. Gillan accepts that, for fans, seeing the two men together onstage provided a clear sign that any animosity between them has long since dissipated.

“But as far as I’m concerned,” he continues, “the closure was years ago. So I hadn’t even thought about it. But definitely it was a public demonstration of friendship, and good memories.”

Naturally, Classic Rock was eager to press Gillan on the possibility of Blackmore making another appearance alongside Deep Purple in the future. He’s not so sure.

“I don’t know,” he says. “The reason we did it there was because Ritchie only lives around the corner. So, I don’t know, but he’s always welcome.”

The band’s current lead guitarist, Simon McBride, has also come to Blackmore’s defense after some criticized the quality of his performance on the night. McBride was perfectly happy to have his spotlight temporarily stolen and enjoyed standing side by side with the band’s founding guitarist.

Blackmore’s cameo has also delighted his former Rainbow and Deep Purple singer, Joe Lynn Turner. Another of his former bandmates, meanwhile, has claimed he isn’t as much of a tough guy as his reputation suggests.

The Guitar Center Guitar-A-Thon is officially underway, and running now 'til October 7, you can find up to 30% off an absolutely massive selection of gear. I've spent hours combing through the inventory, and thankfully, this isn't just a clearance bin of unwanted accessories.

We're talking substantial discounts on heavy-hitting electric guitars, acoustic guitars, bass guitars, guitar pedals, and guitar amps from top-tier names like Fender, Epiphone, Sterling by Music Man, and MXR.

Guitar-A-Thon usually heralds the start of the Black Friday guitar deals, so it’s well worth stopping by for a browse to see what early deals you can pick up ahead of the rush!

Whenever a major event drops, my eyes immediately dart toward the big manufacturers, and I was pleased to see a massive $267 slashed off the Fender Player II Stratocaster HSS. This isn't last decade's surplus; the Player II series brings heavily requested upgrades like rolled fingerboard edges and the triumphant return of real rosewood.

At $622.99, down from $889.99, getting your hands on this limited-edition Ocean Turquoise beauty feels like an absolute steal. The HSS pickup configuration is what really sells it for me, giving you everything from glassy, classic Strat chime in the neck to a thick, punchy humbucker roar in the bridge.

If the low-end is more your territory, however, the Sterling by Music Man DarkRay Electric Bass Guitar is sitting at a hefty $336 discount, bringing it down to $1,263.99. This is essentially a dream collaboration for modern rock and metal bassists, taking the iconic, punchy StingRay platform and shoving a custom Darkglass 2-band active preamp straight into it.

The built-in Alpha and Omega distortion circuits mean you can dial in earth-shattering, modern grit right from the control plate without ever touching a pedalboard. Having spent time putting the DarkRay through its paces, we can confidently say the Galaxy Shimmer finish looks just as good as this bass sounds.

If you’re interested in adding to your pedalboard, you really can't walk away from a gear purge like this without treating yourself to a new stompbox, and the MXR M94SE Fat Sugar Drive immediately caught my attention.

Reduced from $139.99 to a very comfortable $94.99, this sparkly pink pedal houses one of the most sought-after overdrive circuits in modern pedal history. It’s essentially Way Huge’s acclaimed Sugar Drive - a meticulous Klon Centaur clone - stuffed into a rugged, pedalboard-friendly MXR enclosure. It works beautifully as a transparent clean boost to push your tube amp into natural breakup, or you can crank the drive for a thick, harmonically rich overdrive that refuses to get muddy.

If none of those happen to strike a chord with you, don’t stress - these are just a few of my personal favorites. With hundreds of items heavily marked down across the entire site, I highly recommend brewing yourself a coffee and browsing the full sale for yourself.

Guitar Center may have picked an unexpectedly good time to launch a competition for artists who want to open for Ed Sheeran.

The store’s new Open for Legends campaign launched August 19, offering undiscovered musicians the chance to perform before Sheeran on the December 11 date of his Loop Tour in Mexico City. At the time, it was a pretty straightforward proposition: submit an original song and you could win what Guitar Center calls “a life-changing opportunity.”

Now, following the fallout over Macklemore’s departure from Sheeran’s tour, the prize has acquired a little extra comic timing. Sheeran has lost not only Macklemore but all of his remaining support acts, meaning Guitar Center’s competition is suddenly offering a spot in a lineup that has become considerably less crowded.

Submissions for the competition remain open through October 7, so there’s still plenty of time for an aspiring opener to throw their hat — or guitar pick — into the ring.

Of course, Guitar Center had no way of knowing what would happen when the competition launched. Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s current US shows earlier this week after making a pro-Palestine speech calling for peace in Gaza during a September 4 show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

The American hip-hop artist, best known for his 2012 hit “Thrift Shop,” was subsequently dropped from the tour after the Israeli-American Council lobbied for his removal. Sheeran said on September 15 that he was “appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine,” while clarifying that “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision.” The development also prompted Roger Waters to call Sheeran “a little prick” for not standing behind Macklemore.

Sheeran’s Irish folk backing band, Boega, and his remaining support acts have since followed Macklemore out of the tour.

In an Instagram statement posted yesterday (September 16), Boega said it was stepping away following “the silencing of Macklemore.”

“We are a traditional Irish band who never saw ourselves playing in stadiums of that size, and that opportunity is not lost on us,” the statement says. “We have been friends with Ed for over 10 years now and will continue to be. We believe in dialogue as a means of progressing the plight of the Palestinian people.

“As musicians, playing to those crowds every night is the stuff of dreams, but to play in venues that silence anyone advocating for a Free Palestine is simply not an option for us,” they continue. “We were there for Macklemore’s performance and speech. We fully supported the message... Go back and read the transcript if you’re in doubt.”

Boega has a long history with Sheeran, having performed during his 2017 Glastonbury headline set before returning to his side for the Loop Tour.

The other support acts who have now left include Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator FINNEAS, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe. In his own statement, Fender signature artist FINNEAS said that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.”

Sheeran is scheduled to play his next show in Philadelphia on September 19. As for the December 11 date in Mexico City, Guitar Center is still looking for the artist who will get the chance to open for him.

And if the current trajectory is anything to go by, that artist may want to start learning a few extra songs.

In brighter news for the store, Guitar Center is also seeking guitarists to test the first prototypes from its in-house guitar brand. Players who take part will have to sign an NDA and leave their phones at the door, as the store wants to keep its “revolutionary” new designs top secret.

Mike Campbell has spent nearly his entire musical life at the center of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. From the band’s formation in the mid-’70s through Petty’s death in 2017, Campbell was Petty’s closest musical collaborator, co-writing songs including “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “You Got Lucky” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” while creating the guitar parts that helped define “American Girl,” “Breakdown” and countless other Heartbreakers classics.

Now, nearly a decade after Petty’s death, Campbell and his surviving original bandmates have returned to the stage together. Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bass guitarist Ron Blair reunited as the Heartbreakers at the 2026 Americana Honors & Awards in Nashville on September 16, performing with Chris Stapleton.

It was the first time the four surviving original members had played together as the Heartbreakers since Petty’s death in 2017. The band performed “American Girl” and “Breakdown,” while later Heartbreakers Steve Ferrone and Scott Thurston joined them for “You Wreck Me.”

The sight of the band back together is a reminder of their strength as a unit. Although Blair quit in 1982, he rejoined 20 years later. Lynch left in 1994, but returned for the group’s 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and remained in touch with his bandmates.

For Campbell, the key to the Heartbreakers was his relationship with Petty and their shared commitment to the music. Even after Petty began releasing solo material, the Heartbreakers remained a going concern.

“The reason why the Heartbreakers didn’t break up was because Tom and I had a brotherhood,” Campbell told Guitar Player in 2025 around the publication of his memoir Heartbreaker, a chronicle of his guitar journey.

“It’s hard to define, but no matter what happened from day one with him, the music came first. Whatever we might have agreed or not agreed, we agreed that the music was more important than anything else. We couldn’t let that fall apart, no matter what.”

Campbell says each member of the band had a distinct role.

“I was a peacemaker. I mean, guys in bands have different roles. Tom was a leader. I was a kind of a peacemaker. Benmont was a genius. Stan was a ball of fire, and Ron was the quiet, solid bass player. I embraced my role, and if there was a conflict that might break the band up, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I’m going to get in there and negotiate to keep it going. And we did.”

Paired with Petty, Campbell brought a distinctive musical sensibility to the Heartbreakers’ songwriting.

“I think I brought a musicality that Tom wasn’t capable of,” Campbell said. “I had guitar techniques and musical influences that I could express to him in his songs, or present to him as my music, that he couldn’t have done on his own.

“In fact, there was one instance when I gave him something that sounded like a Heartbreakers song, and he said, ‘That sounds too much like me. Go do something that I can’t do.’”

Campbell knows his career might have turned out differently had he not met a guitarist and songwriter with Petty’s gifts.

“Lord knows what would’ve happened if Tom and I never met,” he said. “As I wrote the book, I realized how many miracles have happened to me through timing, luck, divine intervention. I started with nothing, and these songs came to me from somewhere. There were chance encounters with my heroes, and of course, there was my relationship with Tom.”

“We had our brotherly friction here and there, but there was a deep love that kept us together through all the rough times.”

It’s a relationship that began with Petty’s fledgling band Mudcrutch. Campbell recalls that when the two first jammed together, Petty essentially told him to join the group.

“Tom was like that. He was undeniably dynamic. He was driven, and he could convince you to go on the road with him. ‘I’m going down this path. Come with me.’ He had that great leadership quality, and I was sitting duck for that kind of thing.”

Campbell also remembered one of the few times he pushed back against Petty, during the making of Damn the Torpedoes, when he asked for a bigger piece of the pie.

“That’s a perfect example of our relationship, me going, ‘Don’t you think dah, dah, dah?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, but I’m Tom Petty.’ I couldn’t really argue with that. I could say, ‘Well, yeah, but I’m Mike Campbell,’ and he would go, ‘Nobody knows who that is.’ So it was checkmate, and even though it stung a little bit, I had to give him credit. Tom would always give it to you straight, and I couldn’t argue with that.”

Among the songs that have come to define Campbell’s contribution to the Heartbreakers is “American Girl.” Campbell says the track didn’t fully come together until he found the guitar riff that would become one of the band’s signature musical statements. He has also discussed the Fender Broadcaster, the electric guitar at the heart of tracks like “American Girl”.

“Well, that was what I did on a lot of songs: I’d try to find a part that could be powerful and help the song as much as the vocal. That’s what I always thought — ‘It’s what George Harrison might do.’ These things, I don’t know… it’s just another miracle. I have an ability to hear that, and with Tom, I think that’s what endeared him to me. I could take his Bo Diddley four chords and turn them into something that was maybe a little better than he would’ve done on his own. If you take a lot of those guitar parts out, like on “Breakdown” and stuff, it’s not the same song.”

Campbell singles out “American Girl” as perhaps the best song the Heartbreakers ever did.

“There’s something about it, yeah.”

The song also carries a poignant connection to Petty. “American Girl” was the final song Campbell and Petty played together, during the Heartbreakers’ final show at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017.

“I don’t ever think of ‘American Girl’ as the last song we ever played together unless somebody brings it up,” Campbell says. “It’s like one of the first songs we ever played together. I don’t have a sad attachment to it — it’s too much of an optimistic burst of joy.”

“But I am glad we played that song together at the Hollywood Bowl, and we played it together for decades. Every time we played it, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. There’s something about it that’s just inspired and poetic and exuberant. It’s the Heartbreakers, that tonality we found that day between the keyboards and the guitar harmonics and the energy and the riffs.”

“That was the sound of our band. That’s what we sounded like when we were at our best. And that’s what we tried to do after that. That’s the sound we worked for.”

Campbell said he doesn’t second-guess Petty’s decision to continue touring in 2017 despite his worsening hip problems. The Heartbreakers’ 40th anniversary tour ended with the Hollywood Bowl shows, and Petty died a week later.

“That was the plan. It was kind of business as usual. I know that Tony, our manager, spoke to him and gave him options like, ‘We can postpone this. You can get your surgery now.’ Tom said, ‘I need to be out there. I want to play with the band, and we’re going to do it. I’ll be okay.’ So I have no second thoughts about it. I don’t beat myself up like that. I miss them — same with Howie — but I did all I could.”

Brad Gillis recalled getting a crash course in Randy Rhoads’ guitar playing as he became the second electric guitarist to replace him in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. The Night Ranger guitarist would take to the stage less than a month after Rhoads’ tragic death in 1982 — but first he’d have to learn the set in as little time as possible.

It helped that Irish guitarist Bernie Tormé had been rushed in to keep Osbourne’s tour on the road.

“I’d be standing at the soundboard for those shows, watching Bernie play,“ Gillis told Metal Mayhem ROC. “Because [otherwise] I sat in my room.”

But Gillis wasn’t simply whiling away his time there. Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne had provided him with the perfect tools for studying Rhoads’ guitar style.

“Sharon and the team got me a little boom box cassette player, and I had two board cassettes — which I still have — with Randy on it, from February of 1982,” Gillis reveals.

“You could hear everything crystal clear because it was recorded from the board straight to cassette,” he adds. “So I would sit in my room all day, every day for four days.”

In order to remain focused, he didn’t attend the band’s soundchecks, but he did go to the shows, which featured a stage set appropriate for the Prince of Darkness.

“I’d stand at the soundboard and look at this castle and bombs going off, and fireworks. And this castle! I’m going, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to be up there!’”

On the fifth day, Gillis told the vocalist that he felt able to take the stage. He did so on April 13, 1982, in Binghamton, New York, after a solid soundcheck beforehand.

“I said I was ready, and went in and did seven songs out of the 18 song set,” Gillis said. “Ozzy didn’t even show up for the soundcheck!”

Gillis — whose primary guitar for the tour was his red 1962 Fender Stratocaster fitted with a Floyd Rose tremolo — remained with the tour to its conclusion on August 8. Roughly four weeks later, Gillis was back on a flight to New York City to record what would become Speak of the Devil, a live double-album featuring Black Sabbath tunes recorded with Ozzy’s current band.

Although Gillis continued with Ozzy for the first few dates of the Speak of the Devil tour starting in December, he left at the end of the month to focus on Night Ranger, which by then had secured a contract and released its debut album. He was replaced by Jake E. Lee, who would remain with Osbourne for the next five years.

“I just want to play hot rock,” Gillis told Guitar Player of his decision to leave. “Whether it has melody or if it's heavy three-chord metal doesn't matter: I just want to play my ass off.”