John Bonham’s untimely passing in 1980 not only brought Led Zeppelin’s world-conquering antics to an end, but it also made Jimmy Page fall out of love with the instrument he’d spent the last few decades obsessing over. In his mournful haze, even mentioning the guitar around the then-jaded musician was ill-advised.

Paul Rodgers heard that advice and ignored it. It proved to be a pivotal moment in Page’s life.

“Led Zeppelin were very good to us,” Rodgers told Howard Stern two years ago. “We were the first signing on their new label, Swan Song. It was just so great because we were kind of nobodies at that point; it was so great to have somebody so monstrously big in rock and roll introduce us to the American people.”

Bad Company stayed part of the Swan Song pack for their first three albums, as Rodgers, paired with guitarist Mick Ralphs, went on to write a slew of rock anthems. But he says Bonham’s passing also impacted him, ultimately bringing the band to an end.

“It was a real shock to the system, and at that point I decided I didn’t want to tour with Bad Company anymore,” he details. “And Led Zeppelin basically stopped working at that point because Jimmy just didn’t want to play. He didn’t play for two years.”

Then, out of the blue, he got a phone call from Page, who was intending to come over to his house to visit his old friend.

“All the people around him said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t ask him to play guitar when he gets to your studio.’ I said ‘Okay.’

“So, as soon as he got to the studio, I said, ‘Hi Jimmy, did you bring a guitar? Let’s have a jam,’ and they all went, ‘Oh my God, shh, don’t do that.’

"But by the end of the evening, I have to say he was playing and he was playing brilliantly. I think, because he was in deep mourning about the loss of a good friend, a great drummer, and somebody he deeply loved, I thought, ‘The best way for anybody to bring them out of a depression like that is to do the thing they love.’”

That evening planted a seed, and though The Firm, the group they would go on to form together was short-lived, it proved an important step for Page to re-grease his wheels.

Speaking to Uncut in 2019, Page admitted that he was at a loss when Bonham died, and Led Zeppelin went down as collateral damage. Yet he has no regrets about his period of inaction.

“Paul Rodgers is one of the best singers this country has ever produced, and any musician would want him on a record,” he had said. “But if you’re asking me if I’d drifted a bit after the end of Led Zeppelin, then I’m not going to argue with that.

“I don’t want to labor the point, but it was the perfect vehicle for me to express everything I wanted to express, and it had gone before its time. You’d be asking a lot to expect lightning to strike twice in the same place like that with a whole different bunch of musicians.”

Rodgers, meanwhile, has revealed he declined an offer to appear on the forthcoming Van Halen album, spearheaded by Steve Lukather and featuring unreleased material penned by Eddie Van Halen. Lukather says he can’t believe these songs haven’t been released sooner.

British indie rock band Wet Leg have had a hugely successful past 12 months, and much of their success hinges on the “demystifying” discovery that guitarist/vocalist Rhian Teasdale made early in her career.

Following the release of their second album, Moisturizer, last July, the band embarked on a sell-out UK tour that included a show at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall, while standout shows at Glastonbury and Coachella have been the icing on the cake for a band that continues to grow.

But when it comes to the fundamentals of their songwriting, Teasdale says she’s in love with simplicity, despite the “many loser gatekeepers who want you to believe that you need 20-plus chords in a song for it to be worthy.”

Indeed, she’s making the case that guitar players only need two chords to write a “banging” song.

The guitarist, who is often seen wielding a green perspex B.C. Rich Mockingbird has been talking to The Cut about the band’s rapid rise and newfound status as Britain’s premier indie rock darlings.

Her less-is-more revelation came early in her playing days, and it’s a mindset that she’s in no rush to abandon.

“The first song I ever tried to play on guitar was ‘Molly’s Chambers’ by Kings of Leon — back when the band was super-trashy and fun,” she recalls. “It was a real epiphany to learn that you don’t have to be a virtuoso guitarist to enjoy playing music with your friends.

“It’s been a bit of a journey demystifying music-making for myself,” she adds. “I’m not from a musical household, and I even got kicked out of my GCSE music course because I was too far behind the rest of the class. There are so many loser gatekeepers who want you to believe that you need 20-plus chords in a song for it to be worthy. In reality, there are so many banging songs that literally are just two chords.”

Despite the band’s streamlined musicality, Teasdale has said she wants the world to see Wet Leg’s riff-slingers as guitar heroes, but the Isle of Wight outfit is doing so on their own terms. Don’t expect blazing guitar solos and tapping galore.

For further proof that the two-chord song formula is successful, we can look to Eddie Van Halen, a player many consider one of history’s best. As Michael Anthony once said, “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love” shows what you can do with just two chords – in this case, A minor and G major.

The song, he says, hinges on a singular lick, and was written as a nod to punk and the Ramones’ no-nonsense hitmaking. Released as part of the band’s certified diamond 1978 debut album, and a song that has racked up 276 million Spotify streams, it has proven to be a cross-generational hit, even if it flies in the face of the flair and flamboyance Van Halen was notorious for.

“It was a stupid thing to us, just two chords,” Eddie Van Halen once told Guitar World of the song’s genesis. “It didn’t end up sounding punk, but that was the intention.”

Producer Ted Templeman, meanwhile, pinned the track’s success on EVH’s “incredible” guitar playing, which perhaps suggests that a high-quality musician working within more limited confines can often produce magic moments.

That’s why Wet Leg are keeping things simple. And the buzz about them – on both sides of the Atlantic – underscores their argument with aplomb. Just don’t tell Yngwie Malmsteen.

This interview originally ran in Guitar Player’s October 1986 issue.

Steve Vai is the most exciting hard-rock guitarist since, well, Eddie Van Halen. He is as unique in his own way as Van Halen or Adrian Belew — or Allan Holdsworth, for that matter — are in theirs. Flashy, funny, and unpredictable, he boldly goes forth where no man has gone before. And now, performing for his biggest audiences ever with David Lee Roth, he may well become a touchstone for new directions in rock guitar.

On Eat ’Em and Smile, Roth’s group is rounded out by former big band drummer Gregg Bissonette and the inimitable Billy Sheehan. The pairing of players the caliber of Vai and bassist Sheehan is almost unprecedented in rock, and it works.

From the album’s opening sounds — Dave’s conversation with Steve’s talking guitar in “Yankee Rose” — it’s clear that listeners are in for an extraordinary performance. The musicians deal in swampy grooves, uptown blues, big band jazz, and heavy metal. Stunning unison fingertaps on bass and guitar break new ground. Vai laces his fills and solos with amazing whammy feats and unexpected turns. At the heart of it all is his unique personality and sense of humor — his attitude, as he calls it.

Vai first met singer David Lee Roth at a Hollywood after-hours club. At odds with the rest of his band Van Halen, Dave tapped Steve for songs for his upcoming movie Crazy from the Heat. When Van Halen reformed with singer Sammy Hagar and the Crazy from the Heat film deal fell through, Dave asked Steve to help him form a band.

The duo composed “Yankee Rose,” “Goin’ Crazy!,” “Elephant Gun,” “Big Trouble,” “Bump and Grind,” and “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?,” and brought in producer Ted Templeman to man the consoles at Fantasy Studios in California and the Power Station in New York.

On the day of this interview, Vai was home preparing for a year-long tour. Afterwards, he plans to record another solo album.

Do you feel much pressure replacing a famous guitar sound behind a famous voice?

No. I don’t feel like I was replacing Eddie, but I know we’ve got to go out there and prove ourselves. This is one of my biggest stabs, and I’m aware that every single thing I do is going to be under a microscope. But I can’t think of that, or else it’s not going to allow me to be at my best. I was nervous for about a minute, and then I said, “Forget it. It’s not worth my energy.” A lot of energy goes into being nervous.

How does playing with David Lee Roth stack up to past projects?

It’s completely different. I’m freer to do a lot more things. He pushes me; he really likes to hear a lot of guitar. When I think I’m just about to go on the verge of overplaying, he says, “No, keep going.” Dave’s very constructive. He’s a crazy man [laughs], but he really knows what he’s doing. I trust the guy. I’m thoroughly enjoying the gig, and I’m honored to be here.

What’s it like working with Billy Sheehan? Was there ever a danger of overkill?

[laughs] There always is a danger of overkill with me and him on the same stage! I had seen Billy perform before with his band Talas, and I was pretty amazed by his technical prowess. But I thought that I could never play with a guy like that. He’s really good, but he plays like a guitar player. I was nervous when I heard that he was going to be doing the gig. I thought, how is this going to work? Upon rapping with him, though, I realized that he’s a very mature musician. He respects me as a guitar player, and together we work things out. We set aside places for each guy to do his thing. There are really no weird vibes or attitudes. Our relationship gets closer every day. We do some pretty funny stuff together, which you’ll hear and see onstage.

The unison two-handed bass and guitar parts in “Shy Boy” may well be unprecedented in rock.

Yeah. See, that’s why Dave’s a really smart guy. That’s why he got Billy and me — for things like that. It’s funny — people think it sounds so amazing, but Bill and I are scratching the surface of what we’re going to be doing together in the future. Honest.

Is it tough confining yourself to 4/4 after all your time with Frank Zappa?

I can play in odd meters just as well as I can play in 4/4. But no, I don’t find it hard at all, because there are things that I have to do inside of this 4/4 framework that are different than what I had to do with Frank. Now I get to express myself more as Steve Vai, as opposed to expressing myself as Steve Vai playing Frank Zappa’s music.

Does much trial-and-error go into the parts you come up with, or do you work them out before playing them?

When I’m writing a song, my best stuff usually comes when I pick up the guitar and play. “Goin’ Crazy!” was like that. I had been working with Ry Cooder on Crossroads, and he inspired me. I’d be playing all these notes, and Ry would sit down and start tapping his foot and playing these grooves — and I felt embarrassed. God, man, this guy knows where the beat is! This guy’s got serious soul. You ask him to play thirty-second notes in 10/16 time, and forget it. But I was very moved.

One day he was warming up, getting ready to lay down a track, and I couldn’t have paid enough money to be able to watch what he did in a half-hour. Later on, I was in Dave’s basement, picked up my guitar, and said, “I wonder how he fingerpicks like that?” I started using three fingers to play this lick that I used to flatpick, and that’s how the “Goin’ Crazy!” lick came out.

Writing, for me, is a reflection of my state of mind at the time. I wrote “Big Trouble” in a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a beautiful day out, I loved being on the road, and five minutes before we had to get onto the bus, I picked up my guitar and blam — the song came out verbatim. Then there are things like “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?” which took a long time. I pieced it together a little bit each day. It’s more of a construction.

Do you come up with lyrics, too?

No. Dave comes up with all the lyrics and every ounce of vocal melodies, like he always has in the past on all those Van Halen albums. I come in with different guitar parts, and we collaborate at putting them together. Sometimes the band pieces the music together before the lyrics are written. We try to get it tight before Dave comes down and does his thing. Then he helps get the arrangement together, we work it up, and he starts doing his vocals. If he’s working on a vocal line, I might say, “Why don’t you try it like this?” And he might make suggestions about a guitar lick. It’s a really nice chemistry.

Did it take less time to record Roth's album than, say, Alcatrazz’s Disturbing the Peace?

It took less time than Alcatrazz, but more time than the average Van Halen album because we had horns to do and stuff like that. At times I didn’t know if I liked it or not, because I wasn’t quite used to Dave’s and Ted’s approach. But then I realized, boy, it’s really fun. Get in there and do it. We kept about 50 percent of what Dave sang on the basic tracks.

I’m used to sitting in the studio and tweaking and playing and punching and tweaking some more and EQ’ing and punching again. With this, it’s get in there and kill the guy with the ball. It really works.

Were you constantly aware of how the music would translate to the stage?

Yeah. A lot of it’s live, and then I doubled many of the guitar parts. I’ll give an example: The rhythm guitar in “Yankee Rose” was played all the way through, and then I doubled the whole thing verbatim. The halftime section in the middle had this nice little arpeggiated chordal thing that was kind of open and bare. So I said, “Let me try putting a solo on it. Let me try something weird.” I hooked up a couple delays set to some long delay, checked my volume, and made sure I was in tune, and they rolled the tape. They liked what I did and kept it.

For the solo at the end, Dave said, “You should try to do something that’s going to be very animated in the video.” He had seen the Alcatrazz video where I shove the guitar between my legs and throw it down, so he wanted something like that. I said, “Hey, sure. What am I here for?”

Were the talking wah-wah guitar and vocal exchanges at the beginning of “Yankee Rose” cut at the same time?

Oh, yeah. When Dave and I first started doing that, we sat and just talked to each other for hours like that.

Was the opening of “Shy Boy” recorded at a high volume?

[laughs] When we did that, I was in the studio, as opposed to sitting in the control room or being isolated from my amps. I ran over to the amp at the beginning of that song, got down, and let it feed back like crazy. I ended up doubling that really fast lick when the band comes in. And then I just played through the whole song with one guitar — a couple of punches here and there.

How did you and Billy cut the unison duet?

That whole thing was almost all done live. I cleaned up a couple parts on it — I’m not going to tell you, “Yeah, sure, I went into the studio, plugged in, and just wailed.” That happens a lot on this record, but there are times where I wanted to clean up little things. The very first part of the “Shy Boy” solo was done on the original track, and it wasn’t doubled. I just played along and then stopped. I overdubbed the second part, the real fast thing, and doubled it. You can hear it when it comes in: it’s panned left and right.

For the siren effect, I switched on my delay, which was set to like a 792-millisecond delay with a lot of echo. I hit a harmonic and pulled up on the tremolo bar. If the pitch rises slowly, the echo pitch rises too, but it’s a little delayed. This creates a real dissonance.

Is that your horn arrangement in “I’m Easy”?

Yeah. I wrote the score and directed the horn section. You should have seen it: I had snakeskin pants on, my hair was flipped out, and I was sitting in this director’s chair with a baton in one hand and a big score in the other. Twelve of New York’s best studio players were there, and I’m going, “Okay, now, can you make this a little more staccato over here?” [laughs] That was a pretty straight-ahead arrangement.

I loved doing that — Berklee training, you know. I’ve always written big band charts. I have a stack of orchestra scores that I’m waiting to hear one of these days when I’ve got the money to have them done. I love big band music. Listen to Frank Sinatra and Count Basie at the Sands — incredible stuff, man, conducted and arranged by Quincy Jones. It’s so big, it’s like heavy metal in a sense. There’s a lot of energy to it.

What inspired you to play blues fills through that track?

I originally comped through the whole thing with a tinkly clean guitar tone, but it was a lot more complicated. It was real voice-leading and had a lot of movement. Ted gave me the idea to maybe put bluesy-sounding guitar over the whole thing. So after I recorded the laid-back comp guitar, we did the horns. Then I did the guitar over the top of it with my pink Jackson.

My tone and everything I play on that is a reflection of Ted Templeman getting me to do it, because I always view myself as being the world’s worst blues player. I’m always thinking, “This isn’t working; this isn’t happening.” I enjoy it in a sense, but I’m not an authentic blues player. But Ted kept saying, “It sounds good. Keep going.” So I said okay, and just did it.

How do you finger the very last note of the solo?

I just tapped it with my right-hand finger. It’s not a harmonic, but you can do it with your tongue right on the harmonic [picks up guitar and quickly demonstrates]. Sounds great and feels tingly.

How do you think up strange approaches like that?

It’s weird; I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. It’s like walking into a room where there’s a putter and a cup five yards away. You hit the ball, you know it’s going to go right into the cup, and it does. You’d scare the greatest putter alive.

Sometimes you just know when it’s going to connect. You don’t know why it does it, and you can try it again but it will never happen. Every now and then when I’m playing, that happens. I feel like I’m in a frenzy or something. I could know a solo perfectly, but when I get in front of people and play it, I might do something completely different that’s twice as good. I feed off of other people’s energy. When the sound is there and the attitude is right, I get so excited.

I wonder if it’s good for me sometimes. I just get crazy. And with Dave, this is the situation where it happens most of all.

How did you put together “Ladies’ Nite in Buffalo?”

The whole album was written, but there was a certain area that we wanted to attack that wasn’t quite established by Dave yet — something in a dance area, something that had sort of a cool New York sound. I went to work and came in with a completed demo, except for the vocals. My demo was much more elaborate, but Ted decided to chop a lot of stuff out, which was probably for the best of the song.

We had all the parts, and we just exchanged some of the spots, like the chorus became the bridge. Then Dave just did his vocals on top of it.

It’s interesting how that riff expands as it goes along.

There were originally three different guitars — one track just for solos, one for the chorus melody, and one for stuff so it all overlapped. When we were recording it, the band needed a scratch guitar track to lay parts down with, so I said, “Okay, let me try to play all three guitar parts at the same time.”

I threw on my guitar, didn’t even tune up or play with the settings on the amp, and bang — one time through, we did it. I was going to redo all the guitars later on, but Ted liked the feel that I produced just from sitting in there with no pressure or anything.

Of course, being an artist I hemmed and hawed: “I want to do it again. There are mistakes, blah blah, woof woof.” But they convinced me that it was really beautiful the way it was.

Did you double part of the solo?

Yeah, the second half. It’s funny — I started out with a completely different solo in mind, and just when the tape was rolling, I said, “Ah, the hell with it,” and that’s what came out.

At the beginning of the solo, I hit a note and used the bar to play a melody. The second half of the solo was originally the first half — the sextuplets. I decided to build it, add some speed to it, and climax — that’s a high G that I’m stretching to. And doubling always gives something like that a nice effect.

What was your approach on “Goin’ Crazy!” and “Tobacco Road”?

“Goin’ Crazy!” is just one pass all the way through, except for the solo, because I wanted to have a rhythm guitar underneath it.

“Tobacco Road” was almost one take all the way through; I broke a string during the solo, and I had to punch in the last lick. One of the most uncanny things that ever happened to me in the studio occurred during “Tobacco Road”: if you listen to the last time Dave sings “In the middle of Tobacco Road,” the guitar goes bill and says “tobacco” right along with Dave. It’ll never happen again in a million years.

Of all the songs on the album, “Elephant Gun” seems to have the most Vai-like characteristics.

Yeah, the sort of high-energy approach. I literally did that one time through and then doubled it. We were in a rush to finish it, and we had another few minutes in the studio before Cyndi Lauper had her time booked. I said, “Let me double this. I know what it’s going to sound like.” And nobody thought I could do it in five minutes. I said, “Just let me try it. Roll the tape.” Plugged in, rolled the tape, and boom — done.

You must have a phenomenal memory.

No. I just work really hard. I’ve got a good memory, but it’s short. We worked out a lot of “Elephant Gun” in the basement. Bill and I are doing a lot of stuff in there together.

Did you work out the “Big Trouble” solo in advance?

I knew what I was going to do. First, I did the song with the band and doubled it. There was one lick in the bridge section that I couldn’t get quite right; I had to do it a couple of times. We did a first take on the solo, but it was a little sloppy here and there, so I did the same thing again and the parts were cleaned up. I had a blast doing that solo. It always moves me.

Your fills in that tune come in at the same volume as Dave’s vocals.

I was riding the guitar on the mix because I knew where all the fills are. So every time there was a fill, I’d throw it up there.

A few seconds into the solo, you get a very different tone for a few notes.

Where it sort of sounds like an Indian from Venus?

You take the Floyd Rose tremolo bar, turn it around so the handle’s back over the fine tuner for the high E, and pull up on it. I bounce the bar on my hand. The most traditional way of playing the vibrato bar is to just push it down. I have my guitars rigged so that I can pull up on the bar so the strings go sharp. I do that by routing out the guitar.

You can raise the pitch when the bar is in standard position, but it’s cooler when you turn it around and bounce it. I don’t pull it all the way back, but just enough to make it go sharp about a half- or whole-step. If you do it real sharp and fast, it gives a cute little effect. If you push back or pull up far enough on the bar, the strings fret out. That’s how I got the little mouse sound.

What’s the first sound in the “Bump and Grind” solo?

You take a scruffy pick and scratch it across the high strings. That solo sounds like ponies on ice. And then there’s one sound where I pulled the B string off the fingerboard.

I also ran up to the microphone stand and went rrrr, rubbing my strings on it and hitting the volume control so the echo would produce that effect. Originally, that solo started off really different. There was a lot of hammering, but I wanted to stay away from that a little bit. The last part of “Big Trouble,” where it plays really fast, is all hammer stuff.

What can you say about “That’s Life”?

I recorded it with a big Ibanez jazz guitar, just bopping through the chords. You should see the arrangement that we did beforehand — it was completely balls-to-the-walls. I was really rocking it out, and that’s the way we’ve decided to do it onstage.

At 33 minutes, Eat ’Em and Smile is a fairly short album. Were other songs recorded?

A lot of songs. We had quite a few, but we wanted to print the album at a very hot level in the disc. When you do that, you have to keep it short because the louder you cut and the more bottom you have on the record, the deeper the grooves are.

What guitars did you use for the project?

I recorded about 80 percent of the album with my green Charvel [a Strat-style model, serial number 3733]. The others were the pink Jackson and a couple of Guilds. I used a Coral Electric Sitar on a couple things, but it never made it to vinyl. I also had a beautiful Guild 12-string and a Fender 12-string, and I may have used an Ibanez on a couple of tracks for background things.

How did you route your signal?

For my live setup, I went directly into the amps — either the Carvin X-100Bs or, for the dirty stuff, Marshalls that were modified by Lee Jackson or Jose Arredondo. On “Shy Boy” and “Tobacco Road,” the Jackson-modified amp is on the left and the Jose amp is on the right. A lot of the other stuff is just the Carvin amp going directly into a cabinet, and that’s it.

I split the amps in stereo with a Roland SDE-3000 delay and miked it from there, and maybe I went into a Boss overdrive or something. I used a little AMS digital reverb on a couple of things, and an Eventide SP-2016 signal processor that does everything — you can make your own effects. It’s got auto-panning, stereo panning, stereo chorusing, stereo flanging, big rooms, little rooms. It has this one patch called “dual robots.” It’s ridiculous, really amazing.

There are a couple of songs where the tone was put through maybe a pitch-bend or a little Harmonizer.

Do you sense competition with other rock guitarists?

Consciously, I don’t participate in competing with them. But subconsciously I can’t tell you whether I do or not. I would suspect that somewhere in there, Steve Vai is a very competitive person. I would very much not mind being in the greatest rock band of the day. Everybody is striving for something out there. But I really don’t feel like I’m competing with people, because everybody expresses themselves differently. There’s enough success to go around.

More than most players, you’ve managed to push far past your roots.

My influences are the same as anybody’s, in the sense that they are events. But when people play an instrument, it’s very personal because they are creating a complete reflection of their personality. What you create is what you are, and what you are is a product of your experiences in life. I don’t mean to say that if somebody is a sloppy player, they’re a sloppy person. It goes far beyond probably what you or I can analyze, but it’s there and it’s naked. If you’ve got your head on straight enough, you can see right into it. There’s no hiding who you are when you create music.

I could sit here and say I love Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Sure, they inspired me, but what brought me to be turned on by that music? Attitude is a big part of the way you play. I practiced endlessly when I was young. I still do, but what I do now is the way I feel now. An event that happens tomorrow could completely change the way you approach everything. You could have the same equipment and know the same scales, exercises, and bends, but they’re going to sound completely different. You’re a different person.

So your personal relationships have more impact on your style than other musicians do?

Exactly. There was a point in my late teens where I thought it was really cool to be miserable and hate things and think that people were assholes, because then people gave me my space. And then I realized that it was just an act of my ego and that I was becoming a miserable person. The world started to take on an ugly glow.

I reached a point in life where, through the grace of God, I went into a dark night of the soul. I realized that many of the things I loved to do weren’t good for me, and I said I don’t need this. I can play you tapes that I made back then, and you wouldn’t believe the same cat was doing it. “Chronic Insomnia” [from Vai’s Flex-Able Leftovers] came out of that period, as well as darker things that I can’t even bring myself to listen to.

And that stuff wasn’t an accident — I could duplicate it for years. But I don’t want to go there anymore; there are other places I can go now. I was very lucky to have supportive people around me. My parents were the greatest. God bless them. Going on the road with Frank Zappa at such a young age was a bit traumatic, but I started appreciating other people’s efforts. I began to realize that you have to be compassionate to the way anybody expresses himself and try to home in on the beautiful things that a person tries to do. I became a happier person, and I was able to relate to people better.

What are the drawbacks of being a rock guitar hero?

Well, I never really saw myself that way, so it’s hard for me to comment. There are so many great players, I can’t consider myself a hero. I’m a reckless player. I’m sloppy sometimes, but I love playing. It’s very hard for me at times, and then sometimes it’s so easy, I just lose my mind.

The kids are going to listen to what I do, and if they like it, they’ll try to cop some of it. And then they’re going to realize that this is the starting point, and that they’ve got to take it a lot higher than this. So to stroke myself and say, “I’m a guitar hero” will be very embarrassing in the future when somebody comes along and does what I’m doing at a technically infinite level.

What do you think the future holds for rock guitar?

I can visualize what the next step could be, but I’m not sure I can explain it. It’s an approach where there’s no technical or physical limitations — except, of course, the impossible ones. This kid might be in kindergarten or whatever, but somebody’s going to come along who thinks of something like speed with a completely different attitude than what everybody thinks of it now.

Speed is just going to be a silly device to make a very serious point. I could even see myself doing it, but it would take total concentration for a long period of time to develop this new approach. This person will do things that nobody else is doing, whether it be with unequivocal speed, vibrato bar work, a new device that could be put on a guitar, or a new piece of outboard gear. It could be anything. But it will take imagination and a certain personality. And then, of course, everybody will jump on it.

What are your views on young players mimicking their favorite guitarists?

Jumping on something right away and copying it verbatim shows you where you’re standing. It’s an insecurity statement. I don’t want to freak anybody out, but it’s saying, “I can’t come up with things on my own. I’ve got to grab this.” This is not to say that it’s not beneficial to cop somebody else’s stuff. I’ve copped a lot of Hendrix; that’s how I got the basic foundation of my whole way of approaching chords.

But there’s a fine line between inspiration and loss of identity. That’s something kids should be really careful of. Ask yourself; you’ll always know. When you’re doing it, there’s a little voice that’s telling you whether it’s the right thing to do, or whether you’re doing too much of it. You’ve got to listen to that voice and believe it.

It’s always fun to do what somebody else is doing, and maybe even play it faster or with more vibrato, but still, you’re better than that because you’re your own person and you can be original.

What’s your ultimate goal?

My goal in life is to be internally happy. I love music, but there are other things. To sit here and say, “Well, my goal is to have my own studio, to make my own records” — that’s petty. I can make my own music on a cassette player if I want. One match, and the whole studio is gone. One axe, and my hand is off. One car accident, and I might never see you again.

I accept that these things are possible, but believe me, I have a great time in life. I very much appreciate being able to do what I like. You might laugh, but if I wasn’t a musician, I probably wouldn’t mind being a mailman. Look at it — you get to exercise. You get to walk in the rain and sun; you meet people. It’s your attitude that’s going to make you happy.

It’s awfully nice to know that you can make somebody else happy, too, but the only way that you can do that is to first make yourself happy.

When all is said and done, your sense of humor seems to be at the very heart of your playing.

Good. I don’t want people to think I’m too serious. All the musicians who are reading this have a sense of humor. Apply it to your music. That’s where all the diversity comes from.

On 7 July, 1967, the Beatles released All You Need Is Love, a song that seemed to capture the spirit of the Summer of Love. The song had been debuted live just twelve days earlier, in extraordinary circumstances: in front of a load of friends – including Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon and Graham Nash – for a BBC broadcast that went live to 14 different countries and an audience of over 400 million.

Now that's a pressure gig.

The Our World program was not intended to be the global launch of the new Beatles single All You Need Is Love, but that's how it turned out. Our World was the first ever international satellite television show, with segments from all the participating countries. The UK's segment featured The Beatles, with a song either written by John Lennon especially for the occasion, or chosen because its message could be easily understood by its international audience. (McCartney thinks it was the latter.)

The backing track for the song had already been laid down at Olympic studios a couple of weeks before and overdubs added at Abbey Road. The One World broadcast cued up the performance as though the viewers were catching the band just as they were about to nail the final take. It wasn't a complete ruse: Lennon was singing live, McCartney playing bass live, and George Harrison would play guitar live. (Live drums would have leaked into the other mics, so Ringo was spared.)

Below is the original broadcast and a new colorised version.

The way sound Engineer Geoff Emerick remembers it, the day before the broadcast, Brian Epstein talked the band into rush-releasing the performance as a single.

"John, of course, was keen," says Emerick, in his book Here, There And Everywhere, "it was his song, after all. It didn't take much effort to talk Paul into it, either... Only George Harrison was reluctant; presumably he was worried that he might muff his solo, even though it was only four bars long. He was finally persuaded when George Martin assured him that we could stay late afterward and do any necessary repair work.”

Of the performance itself, he adds: "John came through like a trouper, delivering an amazing vocal despite his nervousness and the plug of chewing gum in his mouth that he forgot to remove just before we went on air. Paul's playing, as always, was solid, with no gaffs, and even George Harrison's solo was reasonably good, though he did hit a clunker at the end."

He did hit a clunker – seemingly starting to play after the fourth bar, before stopping to let the orchestra in. An easy mistake to make, it's meant that the solo (around 4:08 on the original video, 1:19 on the new version) has appeared on "Worst Solos Ever" lists ever since.

Which is harsh. Everyone makes mistakes, after all. The question is: Why didn't they fix it later? The following day, Lennon laid down a new vocal and Ringo added new drum parts – why didn't the guitarist perfect his solo?

It's a question that's vexed Beatles fans and guitar players for decades.

Emerick thinks that Harrison was just assured it could be fixed in production: “From the very first playback, the four Beatles were knocked out by what they were hearing. Harrison winced a little during his guitar solo, but Richard [assistant engineer Richard Lush] took the initiative and reassured him, saying, 'It'll be fine; we'll put a little wobble on it and it will be great.' In the end, all we had to do was add the effect and duck the last bad note.”

The band were also up against a tight deadline. The single was released on July 7, just 12 days after the performance, a quick turnaround in 1967.

And maybe The Beatles were no longer striving for perfection. In his definitive book, Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald suggests that, after the rigours of Sgt Pepper, the band were happy to leave in some imperfections.

To paraphrase Lennon: there's nothing you can play that can't be played. It's easy. Unless, that is, there's 400 million people watching.

The corporate buyouts of Fender and Gibson in the mid to late 1960s have long been perceived as a trigger for a significant dip in the quality of musical instrument manufacturing. But a session guitarist wants to dispel that belief. In fact, he points to the Beatles’ breakout success as the cause for the era’s production chaos.

The claim comes from Brad Allen Williams, who has worked with Alabama Shakes guitarist Brittany Howard, jazz drummer Nate Smith, and soul singer Bilal, amongst others. Of course, he acknowledges that the two biggest guitar firms of the period underwent tough changes at this time, which today are blemishes on their histories. Yet he feels the root of the problems can be traced back to February 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

It was the dawning of a turbulent time for instrument makers, with corporate buyouts, an overwhelming surge in demand, and experiments with production techniques creating a perfect storm that flooded the market with subpar instruments.

Two electric guitar giants, Fender and Gibson, were both on the end of buyouts that dramatically changed their operations. CBS acquired Fender for $13 million in 1965, with Leo Fender facing a staggering production backlog and health issues. He was happy to sell up. Gibson, meanwhile, was acquired by Norlin in 1969, while Baldwin assumed control of Gretsch upon the founders’ retirement.

For years, many guitarists have pointed to CBS’s cost-cutting measures as the reason its reputation started to slide, as it bid to churn out the instruments the market was ravenous for by any means necessary. Some view its moves as quantity over quality, and similar stories have been spun about the Norlin and Baldwin-era operations, too.

Williams, though, wants musicians to take a step back and assess the bigger picture.

“I don’t want to rage bait, but I am about to argue against probably one of the most widely held and uncontroversial beliefs about vintage guitars,” he says in an Instagram post. “That’s this idea that the big corporate acquisitions and mergers of the 1960s were what caused the decline in quality of the major American guitar brands. I don’t think it was.

“I do think quality was declining around the time,” he notes, “I just think that in most cases that was already well underway by the time the actual mergers happened, and if I had to affix a turning point, it would be the same date for every American guitar and drum company: February 9, 1964. That’s when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

Culturally, the Beatles’ five-song performance was a landmark moment. It was, for the likes of Tom Petty, Gene Simmons, Joe Perry, and Nancy Wilson, among so many others, the singular moment that made them want to pick up an instrument and play. That, from a supply-and-demand perspective, was troublesome.

“This was such a seismic pop culture moment that it caused this massive overnight sudden spike in demand,” Williams says. “And all these companies were blindsided. When Ted McCarty started at Gibson in 1948, total production was around 2,000–3,000 guitars a year [other sources claim the figures are around 1,100 and 3,700].

“By the time he was burnt out and leaving in 1966, that was over 100,000 guitars a year,” he expands. “When Leopeningnder sold to CBS in January 1965, Fender was something like $9 million in inventory backordered. In a later interview, he said that with the Fender Mustang alone, they were 150,000 units backordered.

“I don’t care who owns the company; if you’re trying to ramp up your production rate that fast, something’s got to give,” he adds. “You’re going to have a lot of people making guitars, amps, and drums who have never made them before.” One of the first things CBS did once it assumed control of the Big F was to expand its production operations, with new facilities opened in hopes of chipping away at those daunting backorder numbers. But he believes by the time their new corporate owners tweaked production and processes, these companies were already on the slide.

“Vintage Gibson collectors know that, 1969 with the Norlin era is not a hard cut off of the quality,” Williams continues. “You start to notice things changing as early as 1965 or 1966.”

He uses Ludwig “flinging” drums out of its factory before their finishes had even dried as evidence of “the environment these guitars were made in.”

“So, I don’t really think that the corporate buyouts were the cause,” he concludes. “I think they were more the effect.”

It’s a fascinating perspective. Music lovers are quick to point to the incredible impact the Beatles’ success had on Western musicians, and the list of future stars seduced by rock’ n’ roll after watching the Beatles on that February evening in 1964 underscores the romanticism swirling around that night. But there was a darker side to the story that is spoken about far less.

Still, CBS produced some iconic guitars despite its mounting challenges, and Stratocaster enthusiast Walter Trout believes CBS-era builds don’t deserve the bad rep they get. The Beatles helped reshape the music industry in a myriad of ways, but did their success also come at a price?

Few legacy bands can boast final albums as strong as Rush’s Snakes & Arrows and Clockwork Angels. The one-two of modern prog gems saw them bowing out of their recording career in style, but beyond their long-playing epics and extra-heavy guitar sounds, there was a surprise reunion happening behind the scenes.

The band had teamed up with producer Nick Raskulinecz after 2002’s lukewarm Vapor Trails, and for 2007’s Snakes & Arrows, they descended on Grandmaster Studios in Los Angeles.

Raskulinecz, who has also worked with Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, and Deftones, was eager to tap into the spirit of old-school Rush on albums. Lifeson adopted an acoustic-guitar-first approach after a chat with David Gilmour on Snakes…, and then, in 2012’s Clockwork Angels, the band returned to their concept album format, as heard on their cosmic song suite “2112”.

“As a Rush fan, I know what kind of record I wanted Rush to make, and I had a pretty good idea of what the other Rush fans wanted, too,” Raskulinecz told Rick Beato last year.

Their relationship, he says, began with a cold open: an ambitious Raskulinecz emailed the group to “see if they’d be interested in working with some young American kid,” but by then they’d already started working with someone else. Weeks later, that partnership had soured, and the door was opened to him.

For Raskulinecz, tapping into the vintage Rush sound meant rekindling the flames of one of their most important pieces of gear in the 1970s and early '80s. Then the strangest coincidence happened.

As Rush embraced a new, synth-powered era in the 1980s, bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee embraced the Moog Taurus pedals, a foot-controlled synth, as he looked to juggle playing several instruments at once.

“Taurus opened up so many possibilities for me, and it opened up this way of looking at what I do,” he told Moog in 2012. “Originally, I started to use it to fill out the bass when I played rhythm guitar on my double-neck guitar; I didn’t want to lose the sound of the bass. But they also had the ability to create other synth-y sounds, so we started playing around with that on songs like ‘Xanadu’ to add more melody in our music. It set us on a whole tangent.”

But after 1982’s Signals, they fell out of favor in Rush’s studio experiments. Fast forward 30 years, and those pedals were embedded in Raskulinecz’s mind.

“When you hear them come in, it adds a low-end bump, but [when I suggested using Taurus pedals on Clockwork Angels], they didn’t have any,” he reveals. “We had to rent Taurus pedals from a Toronto rental company. We get them shipped, and they’re their pedals.

“Geddy’s down on the floor looking at them, and he’s like, ‘That’s our modded switch,’ because he had a mute mod switch on his. So, we rented the pedals they used on the old albums and tours.

“The band were psyched,” he adds. “Those were elements that I was able to bring to the table, not to rip off or copy, but for it to feel [like Rush]. Just like on Clockwork Angels, we homage ‘Bastille Day’, ‘Anthem’, and like four or five other songs on parts because I’m like, ‘Dudes, don’t be scared to do that. Those are your riffs!”

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2012, Raskulinecz noted that, for Clockwork Angels, they swapped from “the original T-1s that they had in the ‘70s” to the newer T-3s.

“Let me tell you,” he beamed, “the new version kicks ass!”

As the band continues their highly anticipated reunion tour – which has recently hit a series of minor setbacks – Lee isn’t ruling out writing more music together. But they have to survive the tour first, though.

Elsewhere, guitarist Alex Lifeson has reflected on why he chose Gibsons over PRS during a crucial moment in his career.

Much – some would say too much – has been written about Taylor Swift’s marriage to NFL star Travis Kelce, but away from all the gossip-waffle there was a surprise Beatles-themed sub-plot.

Paul McCartney was among the litany of celebrities in attendance for the pair’s big day, and he dusted off a Fab Four classic at the ceremony to mark the occasion. Sources (via People) say the 84-year-old, of whom Swift is a long-term admirer, performed the early Beatles track “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at the wedding reception, 62 years after he last played it.

McCartney had co-written the song in 1963 with his inimitable hitmaking partner, John Lennon, and it was the first song the group ever recorded on a four-track. It would go on to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for the band and kickstart a run of 20 record-breaking chart-topping singles in the States.

“These four youngsters have created an international stir with ‘Beatlemania,’ and have hit our shores with unprecedented impact,” Billboard wrote at the time, with their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show right around the corner.

The song would go on to close out that show, which Jimi Hendrix had watched with the Isley Brothers. Still, after making the set list for a show at New York’s Paramount Theatre on September 20, 1964, it was never played again, either by the Beatles, Paul McCartney, or John Lennon as solo acts.

It’s perhaps quite fitting that the song would eventually rear its head again before a modern-day pop star who has enjoyed a fandom arguably as fierce and passionate as Beatlemania. Swift has also gone on to break a score of the Beatles’ long-standing chart records, including the most weeks in the US Billboard Top 200 and the fastest trio of number-one albums in the UK.

However, it was British pop act Robbie Williams who finally toppled the Beatles’ record of 15 number one albums back in March. And he did it with a record that featured Tony Iommi, no less.

Swift has often spoken in reverence about the Beatles, and when she got the chance to sit down with McCartney for a chat in November 2020 for Rolling Stone, it was his ability to play all the instruments on a solo record that stood out to her.

“To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, 'I can do all this on my own if I have to,” she had said.

The ever-humble McCartney, however, played it down, citing his first solo album in particular as a necessity rather than a statement of individualism.

“With [1970’s] McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself,” he noted.

When J.J. Cale died in July, 2013, he left behind not only a stunning body of work filled with gorgeous songs and tasteful guitar playing, but a whole load of guitar players who discovered him via YouTube and were left wondering: "What kinda crazy guitar is THAT?"

Believe it or not, this electric guitar – that was Cale's number one guitar for many years – started life as a Harmony H162 acoustic guitar (pictured below).

When it was severely damaged during a flight, military-trained electronics expert Cale, who had also worked as a sound engineer, set about transforming it.

Marc O'Hara of The Unique Guitar Blog says: "He took the back off of the guitar, and put a cutaway on it. He used a series of metal rods and anchors to hold the body together.

"He also installed five pickups on the guitars top plus. Four of the pickups are Gibson, two of which are low impedance for recording direct. The other bar type pickup came from a Sears Silvertone guitar, it was manufactured by Dan Electro. It also had a Fishman piezo pickups in the saddle. The guitar has three high impedance outs and one low. These pickups would occasionally be swapped out. The low impedance pickups were the ones that allowed him to plug directly into a recording console, much like Les Paul's personal guitar.

"This guitar had seven control knobs, countless wires, buttons and switches, four outputs, and a big red light. He never bothered to put the back of the guitar on again. That way so he would have easy access for repairs and adjusting the action by means of a couple coins he had wedged into the thing."

Watch J.J. talk through the guitar in this clip (including describing how he punched a hole in it with a hammer so that he can fit a microphone!):

It shouldn't work, but it did. The guitar was used on many of his early, classic records.

It deteriorated over the years and became unsalvageable, even for Cale.

"I played a Stratocaster for some time after that," said Cale, "and also messed around with Les Pauls and 335s. The Harmony was good because it was an acoustic guitar and that got me into songwriting.”

See him in action with it, playing his classic song After Midnight, at Paradise Studios in LA, 1979, with Leon Russell. J.J.'s wife Christine Lakeland and session ace Bill Boatman are also on guitar.

The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes.

Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time.

Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the Allmans were all about musically or any other way. But they kept touring, state by state, city by city, going across the country, establishing themselves as the best live band around, and building a base.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened.

It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained.

“This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach.

They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment — offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made — not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy — the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmore East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

“New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade — and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights — March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 — as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs.

“I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go.

“When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine.

“Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.”

Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out.

“I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could.

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth.

Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers.

Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette remembers another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately.

“We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio.

“We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it.

“This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[Atlantic executive] Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, and that a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.”

Walden won out and was proven right when the record — “people priced” at three dollars below standard list for a double album — slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album.

“All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches — from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.”

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends.

“He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that.

“I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte.

“He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him.

Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old.

“And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

Tim Lerch is a phenomenal guitarist. Specializing in jazz and blues, he leads his own trio and is a long-time member of Pearl Django, one of the most respected groups in the Hot Club style popularized by Django Reinhardt.

Lerch is an absolute master fingerstyle guitarist who is supremely comfortable in duo and solo settings. He’s had the benefit of studying one-to-one with legendary jazz guitarists such as Joe Pass, Joe Diorio, Lenny Breau and Ted Greene, the American fingerstylist and author of the classic reference book Chord Chemistry.

His lesson focuses on some of his favorite chord moves. In it he covers chord forms for minor and major II V I sequences, use of half-whole and diminished based chords, sophisticated chromaticism and melodic approaches within chord changes.

As there's a lot to take from this article, start by learning the examples as written, guided by Tim’s clear video demonstrations on his 2000 Fender Custom Shop ’51 Nocaster Relic Reissue. Once you’re familiar with each concept, explore moving them through a selection of different keys, or perhaps find alternative fingerings on different sets of strings.

Once you’ve finished the lesson, put these new shapes and concepts to work in the music you play. Pick a familiar tune — perhaps a jazz standard or a blues-based piece — and explore some of ideas within the context of playing real music. Don’t worry if things feel a little contrived at first. Be patient, play these ideas little but often and you’ll be using them naturally and easily in no time at all.

Example 1a: Dm7b5 phrase

Tim begins by using the same voicing in different ways by moving in parallel. Here you're using the initial chord form to spell out a Dm7b5 (D-F-Ab-C), albeit with some decorative melodic motion with the highest voice on the second string.

Example 1b: G7#9b9#5 phrase

By moving this exact voicing up a minor 3rd, physically raised by three frets, you can use the exact same chord form along with melodic decoration to outline a G7#9b9#5 chord (G-D-D#-F-Ab-A#), the V7 in the chosen key of C minor.

Example 1c: Cm(maj7)/A phrase

This time you're shifting up by a major 3rd, four frets in distance to give you the Im (the minor one chord). Specifically, you're outlining Cm6/9 (C-Eb-G-A-D), although the melodic extensions give you all of these intervals plus the mysterious sounding maj7 (B).

Example 1d: Dm7b5 - G7#9b9#5 - Cm(maj7)/A

Finally, Tim connects these voicings together to create one cohesive musical phrase, neatly outlining a minor II V I in the key of C minor.

Example 2: Dmadd9 - Bbmadd9 - Cmaj7

For the second example, Tim’s using a beautiful wide-spaced voicing featuring a semitone cluster situated between the third and fourth strings, and maintains cohesion in terms of shape.

Initially he positions this chord at the 10th fret to create Dmadd9 (D-F-A-E), functioning as the IIm chord in the key of C. He moves this down four frets to spell out Bbmadd9 (Bb-Db-F-C), although this could also be reinterpreted as G7sus(#9b5), to provide an altered V7 sound.

Finally, he moves this voicing down a semitone, albeit with a modified root, for a resolving Cmaj7 (C-E-G-B).

Example 3: Ebmaj9/G - Bmaj9/D# - Abmaj9/C - D7#9 - G6

For this cinematic progression in the key of G, Tim’s using a shifting Major 9th voicing with the 3rd positioned as the lowest note.

Initially he selects both Ebmaj9/G (Eb-G-Bb-D-F), and Bmaj9/D# (B-D#-F#-A-C#), which when considered along with the destination key of G major gives a set of harmonic changes associated with the legendary tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.

However, Tim breaks from this pattern for the second bar, dropping down to Abmaj9/C (Ab-C-Eb-G-Bb), and D7#9 and b9 (D-F#-A-C-E#/Eb), to provide a clear V7 to I (D7-G) resolution to end the phrase.

Example 4a: Em7 - A/Bb - Dmaj9

For the next set of transferable shapes, Tim once again is outlining a IIm7 V7 Imaj7 progression. Here, you're in the key of D major (D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#), and both the IIm7 (Em7) and Imaj7 (Dmaj9) come directly from this note pool. The V7 adds tension, derived from the A half-whole diminished scale (A-Bb-B#-C#-D#-E-F#-G).

In this example it’s possible to think of the V7 from two perspectives, either as an A triad with a flattened 9 (A-C#-E-Bb), or as a Bb diminished triad with a major 7th (Bb-Db-Fb-A), exactly the same notes, just with enharmonic respellings.

Example 4b: Em7 - A13b9 - Dmaj9

The beauty of the half-whole diminished scale is in its symmetry, so here you can see the exact same voicing transposed down by a minor third, or down three frets. As the scale repeats via this intervallic leap, you stay completely in the scale but highlight a different selection of notes.

Example 4c: Em7 - C(b9) - A7#9 - Dsus2

Similarly, you can also move up by a minor third, this time up three frets, to allow the use of C(b9) (C-E-G-Db) as the V7. Again, this is possible as all the notes are coming from the host A half-whole scale (A-Bb-B#-C#-D#-E-F#-G).

Example 4d: Sophisticated V-I moves up the fretboard

In this example, Tim shows all four possible resolutions for this symmetrical voicing.

Example 4e: Dm7(maj7) voicings to imply A7alt, resolving to Dmaj9

Again, Tim connects each A7alt voicing — consider how the notes also create variations of Dm7/maj7 — with additional melodic activity on the second string before finally resolving to a sweet-sounding Dmaj9.

Example 5a: Cm9 - F7alt (descending series) - Bb6/9

This collection of connected examples feature a useful voicing for spelling out an altered dominant 7th V7 chord. As Tim points out, the initial form can be considered from multiple perspectives, such as the 3-b7-#9-#5-R of D7alt, or the b7-3-6-9 from Ab13.

Here however, he suggests not worrying too much about the specific intervals within each selection; simply move the chord form in descending parallel motion to create a smooth connected chord melody. Use this voicing to create consonance, tension and release while traveling between Cm9 (IIm), F7alt (V7) and Bb6/9 (I).

Example 5b: Cm9 - F7alt (descending series) - Bb6/9 (variation)

Your second ambiguous shifting example introduces some chromatic sliding between these F7alt voicings.

Example 5c: Cm9 - F7alt (descending series) - Bb6/9 (variation)

For the third variation, Tim introduces ascending motion, although again sticking to the same shape moved wholesale along the fretboard.

Example 6: Blues groove in A minor

This example uses small first inversion triads (3-5-R), derived from the D major scale (D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#). Tim initially demonstrates this by harmonizing the entire scale using these three-note voicings, following this specific pattern: D-Em-F#m-G-A-Bm-C#dim-D.

The transcribed musical example below uses a selection of major and minor options but juxtaposes these sounds over an A bass note. This creates the modal tonality of A Mixolydian (A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G), perfect for creating melodic chordal passages in an A blues progression. Make sure to observe all the expressive slides and embellishments, as these really help to convey the bluesy feeling to this simple but highly effective chordal concept.

Example 7a: Parallel 13th chord shapes with the blues scale

Tim's final concept sticks with a static, grooving bluesy theme, although here you're shifting to a Bb7 tonality (Bb-D-F-Ab).

For the first pair of musical examples, Tim begins by defining an effective voicing for Bb13, although he’s selectively focusing on just the b7, 3, 6 and root (Ab-D-G-Bb). The trick here is to move this voicing in parallel along the top four strings, harmonizing a blues scale (R-b3-4-b5-5-b7), to create riffs, licks and lines, like a section in a swinging big band.

Example 7b: Stacked 4th chord shapes with the blues scale

For the final examples, Tim uses the same type of movement, but this time he selects a quartal voicing, constructed by stacking perfect 4th intervals, initially providing the 6, 9, 5 and root of Bb (G-C-E-Bb), but again moved in parallel through the Bb blues scale (Bb-Db-Eb-Fb-F-Ab).

Don McLean scored more than a hit when he released “American Pie” as a single in 1971. He created an iconic song that has continued to resonate with the public some 55 years later.

The song offers a kaleidoscopic journey through the social upheaval that transformed America in the 1960s. For years, McLean famously declined to explain its enigmatic lyrics, preferring to let the mystery endure.

Even so, “American Pie” remained the centerpiece of his live performances, a showstopper that had audiences singing every word.

McLean — who recorded “American Pie” with a Martin D-28 acoustic guitar — has said the lyrics sprang from a deep sense that something precious had been lost in the decade they chronicle.

“Basically in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction,” he said in a 2015 interview with Christie’s, when his handwritten 18-page manuscript of the song’s lyrics sold for $1.2 million. “Life is becoming less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense.”

He expanded on that in an interview with People that same year, noting, “There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’”

Although McLean generally avoided discussing the song’s meaning — or spoke only in broad terms about its themes — he has become more forthcoming in recent years. In a 2022 documentary and subsequent interviews, he connected the song to the end of the “happy 1950s,” the turbulence of the 1960s and the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, whose 1958 hit “Chantilly Lace” made him one of rock and roll’s earliest stars.

In the documentary, McLean explained his reluctance to be explicit about the characters in his lyrics. For example, he pointed to his mention of James Dean, telling Forbes it was evidence that he wasn’t being entirely opaque.

“I said James Dean in the song,” he explained. “If I meant Elvis or Bob Dylan, I would have said their names.”

He also said the “thorny crown” worn by the king in his song should make it plain that he wasn’t referring to Presley.

“If you want to think the king is Elvis you can, but the king in my song has a thorny crown. That’s Jesus Christ.”

Elsewhere, he uses wordplay, writing “Lenin read a book on Marx” as a reference to John Lennon, whom he noted had read Marx and “wanted socialism.”

But “American Pie” is also deeply, and tragically, personal. McLean has said its emotional core emanates from an early grief concealed within the song’s opening verse about the death of Holly and “his widowed bride.”

At the age of 15, McLean had a premonition that his father was going to die. He told his grandmother, who asked why he said that. “Because it’s going to happen,” he replied.

A few days later, his father passed away, “right in front of me,” he told The Guardian. “I cried for two years. I blamed myself.”

That grief, he has said, was one reason he refused for decades to explain “American Pie.” The song carried the weight of everything he felt had been lost, both in his own life and in America.

“I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable,” he told the newspaper. “It’s indescribable.”

Some songs capture a moment and then fade away. Others refuse to quit. The Goo Goo Dolls’ 1998 smash “Iris” belongs firmly in the latter camp, and frontman John Rzeznik says Taylor Swift deserves some of the credit for introducing it to a new generation of fans.

Originally written for the soundtrack to City of Angels, starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, “Iris” quickly outgrew its cinematic origins to become one of modern rock’s most enduring songs. Nearly three decades later, Rzeznik believes a combination of high-profile covers and viral social media moments has helped keep the song alive.

“I think the song was embraced by the next generation because a couple of iconic artists covered that song, and social media moments,” he tells Q1043 New York.

“I credit someone like Taylor Swift for letting me sing that song with her at Madison Square Garden many years ago,” he adds.

Rzeznik made a surprise appearance during Swift’s 2011 show at the iconic venue, performing “Iris” alongside the pop superstar before an audience packed with teenage fans.

“[The audience] were actually really, really welcoming,” he recalls. “I was shocked, because I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ At that point in time, Taylor Swift fans were all teenagers.”

More recently, “Iris” found itself at the center of a viral social media trend sparked by Drew Barrymore, with celebrities including Dwayne Johnson, Anne Hathaway and Sharon Stone sharing nostalgic looks back at the 1990s.

“I’m grateful to all of them for it,” Rzeznik says. “And I’m really grateful every night that I get to play that song. The most gratifying part of it is when I take the microphone and just turn it into the audience and let them go; I’ll take my earplugs out, and I’ll just listen to the audience.”

In 2026, “Iris” is a member of Spotify’s exclusive Billions Club, with nearly 3.5 billion streams on the platform. The song has become the defining hit of the Goo Goo Dolls’ career, but Rzeznik has admitted he still regrets one aspect of its recording.

Written from the perspective of an angel longing to become human, Rzeznik felt the song needed a guitar solo to complete its emotional arc. The problem, he later admitted, was that he couldn’t come up with one he was happy with, so producer Rob Cavallo turned to veteran session guitarist Tim Pierce.

Pierce had originally been hired to record a mandolin part, but after arriving with a van full of electric guitars and amplifiers—a move that reportedly irritated the band—he was invited to take a shot at the solo. His soaring slide guitar lines became one of “Iris”’ defining musical moments, even if Rzeznik initially wished he had played them himself.

Any disappointment was short-lived. Pierce later told Guitar World that “Iris” remains the biggest hit of his career, and his work with the Goo Goo Dolls began a relationship that has continued for nearly three decades.

Beyond its memorable solo and heartfelt lyrics, “Iris” also showcases one of Rzeznik’s most inventive acoustic guitar performances. While the song has become a staple for everyone from pub musicians to arena headliners, many covers overlook one of its defining features: it was written in an unusual alternate tuning that few players bother to recreate.

With the arrival of the 4th of July weekend, I was more than surprised to see the sheer number of sales currently live for guitar players. Nearly every major music retailer has launched a sale of one kind or another, making it the perfect opportunity to bag some quality guitar gear for less.

It feels like the dust has only just settled on the Prime Day guitar deals, yet here we are with an even bigger selection of sales. These are far more guitar-focused, though, with loads of deals on electric guitars, guitar amps, pedals, and guitar-specific accessories; there’s pretty much something for everyone out there at the moment.

I’ve rounded up all 10 of the best sales for guitarists right now for your perusal. I’m expecting many of these to end once the weekend is done, though, so act quickly if you see something you need to add to your rig.

🇬🇧 In the UK?

With Sammy Hagar, Van Halen produced four multi-Platinum, chart-topping albums and a string of massive singles. But the Red Rocker says one key song was left out of the band’s catalogue after Alex Van Halen unfairly dismissed it.

Hagar’s arrival to replace David Lee Roth came after the band had already begun expanding its use of keyboards—most notably on “Jump,” which had been recorded and released during the Roth era on the album 1984. Once inside the group, Hagar says he continued to encourage Eddie Van Halen to explore that direction further, helping pave the way for more keyboard-driven material in the Hagar-fronted period.

While Eddie Van Halen remained the band’s primary songwriter — he once described himself as both the group’s spark plug and engine — Hagar was also contributing ideas of his own. The guitarist was energized by the creative dynamic Hagar brought into the fold, but his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen, proved a stumbling block when Hagar pitched his song “Eagles Fly.”

“I showed them that song, and Eddie’s going, ‘Wow, wow, wow,’” Hagar told Total Rock. “And Alex goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. It sounds like John Denver, it’s cool,’ and moved on.”

But the drummer’s assessment would come back to haunt him. In 1987, Hagar was working on what would become I Never Said Goodbye, his ninth solo album and first since joining Van Halen. The record saw Eddie Van Halen acting as co-producer alongside Hagar and David Thoener (AC/DC, David Bowie, Kiss), with Eddie contributing bass throughout the sessions. Together, the trio resurrected “Eagles Fly,” transforming it from a stripped-back acoustic idea into a polished, contemporary power ballad.

“When it came out, Alex heard it, and he goes, ‘Hey, why the fuck didn’t we put that on a Van Halen record?’” Hagar recalled. “I went, ‘Well, Al, if you don’t remember, I can remember you said it sounded like John Denver’ — because I was playing it on acoustic guitar.”

The song has since become a personal favorite of Hagar’s, and he has suggested its origins reflect the broader creative tensions within the band at the time.

“I had a vision,” he said, though he added, “it wasn’t a dream. I was wide awake, and I had a feeling I was in a special place. Eddie loved it.”

At the time, Hagar says Alex Van Halen was resistant to him bringing outside ideas into the band unless they fit a strict internal division of labor.

“He was about his brother writing the music, and me writing the lyrics and the vocals,” Hagar said.

The dispute over “Eagles Fly” has since become one of several lingering “what-if” moments from the Hagar era — particularly given the commercial dominance of the band’s first album with him on vocals, 5150.

In hindsight, Hagar’s frustration appears less about a single rejected song and more about how songwriting authority was distributed within the band at the time — an internal balance that often sat uneasily alongside its commercial peak.

Elsewhere, Hagar has continued to revisit his Van Halen years in interviews, while guitarist Joe Satriani has also reflected on Eddie Van Halen’s playing and influence, highlighting aspects of his technique that he found particularly singular and difficult to replicate.

Muse, Jack White and the Strokes are all celebrating new album releases this year, but for Muse’s Matt Bellamy, the biggest moment came backstage at Coachella, where he found himself reflecting on just how rare their longevity has become.

Standing with White and Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., Bellamy had what he described as a “pinch me” moment.

“I was backstage chatting to them, and I went, ‘Fuck, we’re still here!’” Bellamy tells NME. “We were like, ‘We’re the guitarists from the 2000s! We did it!’ It was so cool.”

The conversation prompted Bellamy to look back on the early days of Muse, when the band emerged as outsiders during a rapidly shifting rock landscape.

“Three things were going on back then,” he says. “The end of Britpop, nu-metal in America, and then the new exciting thing was the Strokes, the White Stripes — that retro rock and roll thing.”

Muse, he says, “didn’t fit in with any of those things.”

Even so, Bellamy believes White helped reshape rock guitar at a time when lead playing had largely fallen out of favor, doing so with some left-field retro gear choices, including budget electric guitars and amps.

“He’s a real lead guitarist,” Bellamy says of the White Stripes founder. “In every song, he’s doing pretty busy solos.

“Solos were something I was trying to push down a little bit. I feel like when we first came up, the guitar solo was already an embarrassing thing to do. If anything, I would say that Jack White brought it back.”

Bellamy’s admiration for White’s playing was underscored when he was asked whether he’d ever consider joining White and Hammond in a modern-day, guitar-heavy answer to the Traveling Wilburys.

His answer suggested he’d rather leave the blues to White.

“They would embarrass me with how good they are,” he says. “There might be a couple of things that I can do, but if it comes to blues, then he’s going to kill me!”

Van Halen had a rule: No one in the band played on anyone else’s records.

So how did Eddie Van Halen end up delivering one of the most famous guest electric guitar solos of all time on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”?

According to the guitarist, everyone else in the band was out of town, and he figured no one would mind — or even notice — if he made one exception. Speaking years later, Van Halen explained why he broke the band’s longstanding policy against outside sessions, why he never accepted payment for the performance, how he rearranged part of the song before recording his iconic solo and why those last-minute changes left Steve Lukather and the Thriller team scrambling behind the scenes.

Released in 1982, “Beat It” became one of the biggest singles of the decade and helped propel Michael Jackson’s Thriller to historic success. Producer Quincy Jones enlisted Toto guitarist Steve Lukather — who tracked the song’s now-iconic opening riff and much of the album — before calling on Van Halen, then rock’s biggest guitar hero, to record the solo.

Speaking on Piers Morgan Live alongside LL Cool J, Van Halen was asked why he hadn’t been paid for the session.

“Well, I didn’t ask for anything,” he replied.

“It was about 20 minutes out of my life,” he said. “Quincy had called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it, and the honest-to-God truth, it was the band’s policy that we didn’t do things outside of the band at the time.”

Even so, he figured he could quietly make an exception.

“Everybody’s out of town, so I had no one to ask,” he said laughing. “I figured, who’s going to know if I play on this black kid’s record?”

He was joking, of course. “Beat It” became a worldwide smash, with estimated sales exceeding 10 million copies, and Van Halen’s unmistakable solo became one of its defining moments. Alex Van Halen has since suggested the appearance only heightened tensions within the band, calling it one of the factors that contributed to David Lee Roth’s departure and eventual solo career with Steve Vai.

Despite describing the session as little more than 20 minutes of work, Eddie said he did far more than simply improvise a solo.

“The funniest thing of all was I actually rearranged the song,” he explained. “The section they wanted me to solo over had no chord changes underneath it, so I had to rearrange the song. And then Michael came in, and I said, ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind, I changed your song,’ and he listened and went, ‘No, I really like that high, fast stuff you do!’”

According to Lukather, those last-minute changes created a major headache behind the scenes.

Speaking on the Roundtable with Drew podcast, he recalled that Van Halen’s decision to move the solo required engineers to physically edit the two-inch master tape, damaging the SMPTE time code that kept the various recordings synchronized.

“We had to make the song backward,” he said. “Quincy had cut another version with Michael’s vocals quintupled; they really worked hard on that vocal. Then they sent the tape up to Ed’s house to Donn [Landee, his engineer], and they cut the two-inch tape, which fucked the SMPTE code, which means they couldn’t sync up the master.

“So they had a two-inch tape with Michael’s pristine vocals, and then Ed decided he wanted the solo [somewhere else], so he put it together and sent it back to him, and it wouldn’t sync back up.”

Lukather said reconstructing the master became an exhausting process. Along the way, his own quadruple-tracked rhythm guitars — “I had to make this right for Eddie,” he quipped — were reduced to a double-track, while a Marshall stack was swapped for a Fender Deluxe to give the track a warmer sound better suited to Jackson’s R&B audience.

When Van Halen reflected on Jackson during his Piers Morgan Live appearance — recorded four years after the singer’s death — he also pushed back against the allegations that had surrounded the pop icon.

“He was a sweet guy, is all I know,” he said. “He got accused of a lot of things, [but] I think he wanted to remain a kid himself.”

Lukather, meanwhile, remains part of the conversation surrounding Eddie Van Halen's musical legacy. Although he has insisted he won't play on what is expected to become the final Van Halen album, he has been working with Alex Van Halen as the drummer continues developing the project. Steve Vai has also praised the quality of Eddie's unreleased material, further fueling anticipation for the long-rumored release.

If there’s one thing you can always count on, it’s that July 4th means big guitar deals, and this year, it’s the Les Paul that steals the show. Whether you’re a longtime fan or just curious to see what all the fuss is about with this famous singlecut, now is the time to grab one and add it to your collection.

This stunning guitar shaped the sound of rock ‘n’ roll and has been the axe of choice for some of music’s biggest icons, but unfortunately, they’re usually not cheap!

The good news is I’ve tracked down some sweet Les Paul deals at shops like Guitar Center, Sweetwater and Musician’s Friend, with savings up to $899 off. That’s not just for the fancy Gibsons, either. Yes, I’m a huge Gibson fan (13 out of my 25+ guitars are from them!), but I’ve got a soft spot for Epiphone, too. They’re making some seriously awesome guitars these days that combine classic looks and modern appointments, and they are way more wallet-friendly.

So, whether you’re looking to score your first Les Paul or add another beauty to your collection, check out my favorite Epiphone and Gibson deals from the July 4th sales below.

Rush's reunion tour has barely begun, and already the band have been forced to postpone multiple shows. It's an unwelcome reminder of another difficult stretch nearly 50 years ago, when Alex Lifeson suffered a finger injury that derailed part of the Hemispheres tour just as Rush were becoming one of rock's biggest live attractions.

After their first show in Fort Worth since returning from an 11-year hiatus was postponed due to travel restrictions, two more shows have been rescheduled after bass guitarist and vocalist Geddy Lee contracted laryngitis and bronchitis.

“This is incredibly disappointing for all of us,” the band said in a statement. “We know many of you have made travel plans and have been counting down the days to these shows. Please know this decision was not made lightly. After more than 50 years of touring, we’ve always believed that if we’re going to step on stage, we owe you the very best performance we can give — and right now, that simply isn’t possible.”

As the statement suggests, Rush have never taken canceling shows lightly. But there was one other memorable occasion when injury forced the band off the road. In 1979, while touring Hemispheres, Lifeson broke the ring finger on his fretting hand, leading to three canceled European dates just before one of the biggest festival appearances of the band’s career.

The opening Paris show was canceled after the venue caught fire shortly before the concert, forcing the band to reroute through Belgium. Worse was still to come.

Lifeson brushed off both the injury and its cause, saying simply, “I was foolish, and I hit it,” as seen in the footage below. But the band’s press manager offered a far more colorful explanation, claiming the guitarist trapped his finger between the bed and the mattress while spending time alone with his wife — a story that has raised eyebrows ever since.

Whatever actually happened, the cancellations gave Lifeson the best chance of recovering in time for Pinkpop, where Rush shared the bill with The Police, Dire Straits, Elvis Costello, Peter Tosh and the Average White Band before a crowd of roughly 50,000.

Remarkably, there was little sign the guitarist was hampered. During a blistering performance of “La Villa Strangiato” — later considered strong enough for release on a live album — Lifeson tore through one of Rush’s most technically demanding pieces. At the start of the performance, however, Lee couldn’t resist pointing to the heavily bandaged hand.

“This finger canceled three shows on this tour,” he tells the crowd.

Lifeson had undergone a procedure to prevent mallet finger, an injury in which damage to the extensor tendon causes the fingertip to droop. Even so, Pinkpop wasn’t finished testing the band.

“One of our roadies jumped over a concrete wall with the firm idea that the ground behind it was at equal height,” Lee later recalled via 2112.net. “He didn’t know that the level was split and fell 30 feet downstairs and broke both his feet. He was immediately carried off to the hospital. We missed him very badly during the show because we had a man short on stage.”

The performance has since become one of the defining live documents of Rush’s classic era, making the circumstances surrounding it all the more remarkable.

Lifeson, meanwhile, is no stranger to playing through adversity. The guitarist has spent the past two decades managing psoriatic arthritis, which causes chronic pain and inflammation. He’s previously said that if fans notice him shaking out his hands during concerts, it’s simply part of managing the condition.

Lee’s illness has temporarily sidelined Rush’s long-awaited return to the road. But compared with the chaos of the Hemispheres tour — fires, broken fingers and canceled shows — it’s another reminder that even one of rock’s most reliable live bands hasn’t always been able to outrun bad luck.

Nearly everything you need to know about Charlie Christian can be learned from the compilation album Charlie Christian — The Genius of the Electric Guitar. Released on Columbia Records in 1987, this album has most of his classic performances, including “Rose Room,” “Seven Come Eleven,” “Wholly Cats,” “Air Mail Special” and other great sides. Charlie gave us a lot in his all-too-brief career, before he died on March 2, 1942, at the age of 25.

Charlie Christian was born in Dallas in 1919 before his family resettled in Oklahoma. The Christians were poor, even by the low standards for a Black family of that era. Charlie was deeply influenced by Blind Lemon Jefferson and saxophonist Lester Young, and may have also drawn inspiration from guitarist Eddie Lang. I long to understand how he became a brilliant innovator, but maybe it’s a naive question.

I recall asking Buckethead about his guitar influences, only for him to reply, “The rides at Disneyland.” Sometimes one has to refrain from asking such questions and just accept what is. Charlie Christian seems like a case in point. He was what he was.

Charlie’s instrument of choice was a Gibson ES-150 electric hollowbody guitar with a single blade pickup. His model of electric guitar was commonly sold with a Gibson EH-150 tube amp, which had a single 10-inch speaker and produced 15 watts. Although he also played a Gibson ES-250 guitar through an EH-185 amp, Christian favored the ES-150. With this setup, he created a sound that has been likened to a “distorted saxophone.”

His big break came when he auditioned for the Benny Goodman Sextet in September 1939. Alongside band members Lionel Hampton on vibraphone, pianist Fletcher Henderson, bassist Artie Bernstein and drummer Nick Fatool, Christian became an integral part of the Goodman sound. He toured the states and was heard on the radio, and his contributions come through loud and clear on this album.

Reportedly, Charlie contributed significantly to the band’s songwriting but was not credited. However, it’s here that we find his legacy, swinging hard and cutting through all the disadvantages.

The first Christian solo I learned from this album is from “Rose Room,” and it still amazes me. I never let this solo leave my fingertips and I review it every three or four months. I’ve looked at it from every angle, and the more I analyze it, the more I’m taken by its simplicity.

I honestly don’t know if Charlie knew it, but he superimposes the minor 6th arpeggio over dominant 7th chords. If presented with an F7 chord, he’d play (from the 3rd fret, 1st string in 3rd position) G, Eb, C, A and (2nd fret, 3rd string, then back to 3rd position), G, F, Eb and C. Presto! This C minor 6 arpeggio is now an F9 arpeggio that creates an otherworldly beauty.

I think another factor in Charlie’s influence over a generation of guitarists is that his concepts are “doable.” On “Seven Come Eleven,” Charlie basically plays the blues over the “I Got Rhythm” A sections, thereby giving us mere mortals permission to solo over these changes without Pat Martino or Charlie Parker looming over our shoulders.

Over the B section, Charlie incorporates minor-6th arpeggios with phrases that are lovely and high level but still very “guitar friendly.” These phrases usually remain in one position that throw us a lifeline of understanding. What he did with his reasonably sized toolbox was incredible. He showed us all the way.

Charlie suffered from tuberculosis and was forced to leave the Goodman tour in June 1941 to be hospitalized. I’ve read that while he was there, a “friend” paid a visit, bringing him reefer and prostitutes. The following day Charlie Christian was dead.

His legacy is substantial. He rose above his poor upbringing, broke the color barrier with Goodman, and basically risked his life to rise above the prejudice of that time while he redefined the role and voice of electric guitar. Along the way he almost inexplicably becoming one of the most influential electric guitarists of the 20th century.

Listen and you’ll find an innovator who laid the groundwork for jazz, blues and rock electric guitar playing, and did it all in just two-and-a-half years before his untimely death.

In all the years Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury wrote and performed together, creative friction was part of the process.

But May says they didn’t see eye to eye on one of his most famous and beloved guitar solos — and had he not held firm, it likely wouldn’t have made the final cut.

“Freddie envisioned it very much as a piano song, akin to Elton John, really,” May told Total Guitar of the track “Don’t Stop Me Now,” from 1978’s Jazz.

“[He heard] powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that’s it. I played lots of rhythm guitar on it, and Freddie still said, 'No, no, no, no — it's a piano song!’”

Mercury — whom May later honored with a touching tribute on his first signature guitar — eventually came around, conceding, “‘Well, it does need a solo. I need you to take over the vocal.’”

As May explains, that kind of push-and-pull was typical of their working dynamic.

“It’s the way we thought about things,” he says. “I said, ‘Okay, give me a verse, and let me see what I can do.’

“And again, being in the studio and hearing it evolve, I could sort of hear the solo in my head before I actually picked up the guitar to do it. As very often with me, it’s a kind of little diversion. It’s a countermelody.

“It’s not the actual tune of the verse. But it’s something which goes with it, a sort of counterpoint, and it’s something I could sing. And it was just a question of transferring it to a guitar.”

In hindsight, May feels vindicated — not by theory, but by audience response.

“It’s very simple,” he concludes. “I sometimes feel a bit apologetic about it. But I do notice that when it’s played in the dancehall, it gets a reaction from people in the solo and it steps up the energy quite a bit, even from a song that’s got high energy, so I’m happy with it the way it is.”

That instinctive, vocal-like phrasing is central to May’s sound, which is built on a highly individual rig: his homemade Red Special, a Treble Booster pushing a Vox AC30 — an amp he came to with a little help from Rory Gallagher — and his famously unconventional pick: an old British coin.

Sean Ono Lennon says his fascination with dark, dissonant music can be traced back to two unlikely sources: Disney’s Fantasia and one of his father John Lennon’s heaviest Beatles songs.

Speaking with Rick Beato, Lennon reflected on the musical influences that shaped him, arguing that “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” deserves far more recognition as one of rock’s foundational heavy electric guitar moments before revealing another story behind one of the Beatles’ most sophisticated compositions.

As his work with Primus bass guitarist Les Claypool has shown, Sean Lennon has inherited more than his father’s surname. There’s a psychedelic streak to his music, but it’s the darkness that fascinates him most.

Of his early musical influences, he says, “All of my classical tastes came from the [Disney] film, Fantasia. I was obsessed.

“It might sound a little gauche, but it’s true,” he adds. “It’s actually an incredible selection of pieces. I mean, it’s Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ by Modest Mussorgsky.”

That soundtrack also introduced him to music’s darker side.

“All those notes are so dark and cool, and I think I’m really attracted to dark and dissonant notes,” he continues. “I’ve always had a love of that, and I think it’s actually because of the [Beatles] song ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ as well. That really impacted me as a kid. My dad had written this very dark riff. I really wondered where it came from.”

The John Lennon composition, which closes side one of 1969’s Abbey Road, arrived at a time when rock music was growing noticeably heavier. The Who had become synonymous with sheer volume, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck had laid much of the groundwork for heavy riffing, Blue Cheer had supercharged “Summertime Blues,” and Black Sabbath were about to codify heavy metal. Against that backdrop, Sean Lennon believes his father deserves more credit in the genre’s origin story.

“It was so unprecedented at that time,” he says of the song. “In a way, I think of it as maybe the first really heavy guitar riff. It’s so sophisticated, and it’s so unlike anything he wrote otherwise. It reminds me that ‘The Rain Song’ is unlike any other Led Zeppelin song. There are certain songs that just kind of stick out, like, ‘What was happening when that one was written?’”

Lennon then turned to another Abbey Road standout, offering a glimpse into how one of the Beatles’ most remarkable songs came together.

“‘Because’ is really shockingly complex,” he says. “The famous story is that my mom was playing ‘Moonlight Sonata’ [on piano] and my dad said, ‘Wait, stop. Can you play those chords backward, or maybe write them down for me?’ She did, and that was sort of the basis of ‘Because’—at least according to my mom.”

Beethoven’s sonata, composed in 1801, shares the same melancholy that attracted John Lennon—and later captivated his son.

Speaking to Guitar Player about his songwriting partnership with Claypool, Sean Lennon previously said that a shared love of music’s darker side is a cornerstone of their work. The stark juxtaposition of bizarre comedy and dark surrealism underpins the music of both generations of Lennons.

Meanwhile, McCartney has said he still writes songs as though John Lennon were sitting beside him, imagining how his longtime songwriting partner might respond to each new idea.

By the mid-1960s, the Beatles had left behind their matching suits and clean-cut image in favor of something far more bohemian. Rubber Soul was famously dubbed the band’s “pot album” by John Lennon, while increasingly mind-altering substances helped shape the psychedelic sounds of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It was a period of constant experimentation, both musically and chemically. As Paul McCartney later told Howard Stern, “Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict.”

Stern asked McCartney about one of the best-known stories from the making of Sgt. Pepper: the claim that Lennon was tripping on LSD while recording the album’s fourth track, “Getting Better.”

“It was crazy, because he had a little pillbox,” McCartney recalled. “He’d have his little uppers and his little downers, and he thought he was taking a little upper, and we could get on with the session.

“[Then] he comes over to me and whispers, ‘I took the wrong pill.’

“‘What did you take?’

“‘Acid.’”

A bandmate unexpectedly taking LSD isn’t the ideal recipe for a productive recording session, but McCartney remained remarkably unfazed.

“Okay,” he remembered thinking, “let’s work around that, then.”

The bigger challenge was keeping producer George Martin in the dark.

“At one point, George Martin comes in, who knew nothing about anything,” McCartney said. “He said, ‘John doesn’t look too well.’

“‘No, he’s not feeling a little under the weather,’ because we had to hide it all from George. He was a grown-up.”

Martin’s innocence wouldn’t last forever. George Harrison later revealed that he and the other Beatles once spiked the producer’s tea with LSD during a late-’60s recording session to keep the vibe going, and Martin didn’t learn what had happened until decades later.

On this occasion, though, Martin simply tried to help. Concerned for Lennon’s wellbeing, he took him up to the roof of EMI Studios for some fresh air before leaving him up there alone.

Knowing exactly what was happening, McCartney and Harrison rushed upstairs to retrieve their bandmate before he wandered off the roof's edge and plummeted to the ground.

When Stern asked whether incidents like that were debilitating or simply part of the Beatles’ creative process, McCartney suggested it was a bit of both.

“Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict, and a lot of it was very good,” he said. “So we rolled with the punches. We were pretty good at rolling with the punches; that one was quite a punch to roll with, but we did it, and we finished the track.”

It was an approach that served the Beatles well. Whether it was recording reverse electric guitar parts for “Tomorrow Never Knows” or devising Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) to spare Lennon the chore of double-tracking his vocals, the band consistently turned unexpected situations into innovations. Finishing “Getting Better” despite Lennon’s accidental acid trip was just another example of how they kept the session — and the music — moving forward.

Passion cannot be taught, and neither can a supernatural knack for what you're most passionate about. Blues enthusiast Taj Farrant is a prodigious talent that packs a ton of intensity into every performance, and Guitar Player is thrilled to partner with K.C. Turner Presents to welcome the rising star from the land Down Under to the Hopmonk Novato on the Friday after Independence Day Weekend.

Farrant’s advanced chops, huge online following and energetic performance style have earned him slots with the Experience Hendrix tour and major music festivals from Australia’s Bluesfest to Telluride’s Blues & Brews. He has collaborated with icons like Carlos Santana and Buddy Guy.

Farrant’s first full album, Chapter One, debuted at the top of the iTunes Blues Chart in 2024. Farrant has released two singles in 2026. The first was a singer-songwriter-style collaboration with his sister Jazel Farrant, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who is also a core member of Taj’s touring ensemble.

His latest single is a collaboration with Isaiah Sharkey, who won a Grammy for his work as a core member of D’Angelo’s backing band, the Vanguard. Farrant and Sharkey’s new tune is appropriately called “Texas Jam” as the seven-minute electric guitar showcase features the two trading smoking blues licks back and forth over a 12-bar form and would sound right at home at any backyard barbeque.

That’s exactly the setting for Farrant’s show at the Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, California on Friday, June 10. It’s a part of KC Turner Presents celebrated Cookout Concert Series where GP Presents has formerly teamed up to welcome the North Mississippi Allstars, Anders Osborne, and Bella Rayne.

Farrant’s blend of blues, rock and pop has audiences captivated and ever-curious about the next chapter for the next-gen guitar star. If you’re planning to be in Northern California over the weekend after Independence Day, be sure to head to the North Bay, less than an hour drive from San Francisco, and experience Taj Farrant live on Friday, July 10.

Farrant's popularity is snowballing, so secure your spot in advance, tell a friend, be sure to come to the GP Presents table on site to snag a free set of acoustic guitar strings courtesy of Martin Strings.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Taj Farrant in Novato, California, on Friday, July 10, send an email and put “Farrant” in the subject. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

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

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents Taj Farrant plus Percy Howard (singer from Nus)

Friday, June 10

4:00 p.m. doors, 6:00 p.m. show

The Hopmonk Tavern (Outdoor Beer Garden Venue)

Novato, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

Joe Satriani has built his reputation on dazzling technique. But ask him what Sammy Hagar does better than he ever could, and his answer isn’t singing — it’s knowing when not to play.

The pair have spent years playing together, first in Chickenfoot and now in Hagar’s Best of All Worlds Band, celebrating the music of Eddie Van Halen. That close collaboration has given Satriani an appreciation for a side of Hagar’s musicianship that often gets overlooked.

“I’ll play too many notes, but he won’t,” Satriani tells Thinking About Guitar. “I always ask him, ‘Well, what is that?’ And of course, he doesn’t think about it. It’s totally natural to him.

“But he somehow plays the right notes with the right kind of vibrato. And that still fascinates me, as it did when I was a young kid growing up.”

Satriani says Hagar approaches the guitar like a great lead singer rather than a typical lead guitarist.

“I always thought that one of the coolest things about his guitar playing was that he somehow took the knowledge of being a really good lead vocalist and applied it to the way he played guitar,” he says. “He’s kind of a crazy shred guitar player on the one hand. But on the other hand, he’s got this editorial process that I personally recognize as being a lead singer.”

That ability to edit himself, Satriani believes, separates Hagar from many American rock guitarists.

“There aren’t many American guitar players who are well known for restraint,” he says. “I always saw that as something that would come from the U.K. or Ireland. You have these players like Eric Clapton or Brian May who just play the perfect notes. They don’t turn the amp up to eleven.

“I think [Hagar] would take that one step back from the edge of the cliff and make sure that he could pull it off. I hear it over and over again as a thing that really good lead vocalists have. And they apply it to their guitar playing.”

Hagar’s reputation has always been built first on his voice, but he arrived at guitar with a deep appreciation for melody and a $39.95 Silvertone electric guitar, which came with an amp. As per a 2024 Classic Rock interview, he got his education trying to learn every solo Eric Clapton had ever done, because.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2024, he recalled learning every Eric Clapton guitar solo he could find because “I was more into Clapton and Peter Green than, say, someone like Hendrix” — an influence that helps explain the economy and phrasing Satriani so admires today.

The Best of Both Worlds tour has just wrapped its June U.S. dates and heads to Europe for July before returning stateside in August.

Few guitar performances have stunned audiences quite like Prince’s appearance at George Harrison’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction on March 15, 2004.

Joining Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood and Harrison’s son, Dhani, for a tribute performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Prince stepped forward at the song’s climax and unleashed a breathtaking solo on his custom Hohner Mad Cat electric guitar. Blending fluid technique, fearless phrasing and effortless showmanship, he left viewers — and even his fellow performers — in awe.

Billy Gibbons was one of them.

Although the ZZ Top guitarist had long admired Prince as a songwriter and showman, he admits he had no idea just how formidable he was as a guitarist until that performance.

“I didn’t really know Prince to be that accomplished as a guitarist,” Gibbons told Dan Rather for AXS TV. “I knew he held a guitar, but I didn’t really see him play it much. But that one appearance at the close of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction awards really caught me off guard, and I started listening intently.”

The revelation came at just the right time. Not long afterward, while ZZ Top were on tour, Gibbons found himself crossing paths with Prince in New York City.

“I was in Manhattan, and we had made an appearance,” Gibbons recalled. “It was late at night, and I was looking for a place to get something to eat.”

His favorite late-night spot in the Meatpacking District was closed for renovations, but the venue across the street was buzzing.

“There was another place that had recently opened. I had never seen it before, but there was great fanfare going on. I saw Brazilian-looking dancers up on top of the bar. The music was so loud, I said, ‘Well, I gotta go.’”

After taking a look around, Gibbons says, “A large guy came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He said, ‘Somebody wants to speak to you.’”

The man pointed toward a lone figure sitting in a banquette. It was Prince.

“He said, ‘I just would like to talk guitar.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place.’”

The two spent the next two hours, as Gibbons puts it, “peeling the onion,” swapping ideas and techniques until nearly dawn.

“We sat for a good two hours talking about how to do this and how to do that. This was now going on till 4:30, five in the morning. And I said, ‘By the way, can you teach me how to play that guitar figure that opens up your great song “When Doves Cry”?’

“And he said, ‘Well, I fell into it by accident. I haven’t been able to play it like that ever since. Let’s go learn it!’

“But yeah,” Gibbons says with a laugh, “Prince was a prince.”

Paul Gilbert has spent years adapting to hearing loss. Now, he says it’s changed the way he plays guitar for the better.

The former Racer X and Mr. Big virtuoso has lived with tinnitus and high-frequency hearing loss for more than a decade, but rather than letting it limit him, he’s developed what he calls an “inner melodic generator” — the ability to hear music in his head before he plays it.

“One of the things that hearing loss has helped me develop is what I call my inner melodic generator, and anybody can test out that part of your brain,” Gilbert tells American Musical Supply. “Take something really familiar like your own name, and say it to yourself without making any sound; you can hear it in your head. You know what it sounds like, and you can do that with melodies.”

For Gilbert, that’s become the key to improvisation.

“Having to refine that ability to hear music without sound, when I improvise, I can match that up,” he says. “I can hear the sound in my head, and then, if I can play it accurately, that’s just about the best musical experience I’ve ever had.”

It’s a very different approach from the one that made Gilbert famous.

“When I was a kid,” he says, “I wouldn’t do that as much. I learned the fingering patterns that I needed, and I’d buzz through them; it was a fiery approach. More and more, my guitar has taken on the role of singer, and man, when I get it right, it’s a glorious time to exist.”

Gilbert — whose latest album, WROC, came out February 2026 — first spoke publicly about his tinnitus around 2010 after years of playing his electric guitars through cranked tube amps. The condition left him with persistent ringing in his ears and significant high-frequency hearing loss, creating challenges that still affect him onstage.

“When things get to a certain volume, everything sounds out of tune to me,” he explains. “It’s a mystery, because no one else hears it. I’ve asked people in the audience, and they’re like, ‘No, dude, it sounds great.’ But I’m there suffering, thinking, ‘I think we’re really out.’

“Then of course, I watch the YouTube footage that a fan shot, and it sounds fantastic. So I’m in this world of hallucination.”

The problem is especially noticeable in smaller venues.

“It’s a small room with a low ceiling, so all low-end frequencies load up,” he says. “The thing I did do, which actually helped a lot, was that, because I tend to sing in a lower register, I redid a lot of my chord voicings in the higher register, so my voice isn’t fighting. I’m not singing the same note that I’m playing.

“I tend to be playing higher, jangly chords, and that’s more challenging for my brain because I’m not used to those voicings,” he adds. “I’m used to playing low chunky stuff, or even something like a cowboy C. A lot of my poppier, janglier songs that are on the WROC album have a big cowboy C chord. And boy, those chords, for some reason, are just sour. So if I play it at the eighth fret without the bass note, it seems to clean it up nicely.”

Gilbert’s willingness to rethink something as fundamental as his chord voicings reflects the way he’s approached hearing loss in general. Rather than fighting what his ears can no longer do, he’s learned to rely more heavily on the music he hears internally.

It’s an unlikely evolution for one of rock’s most celebrated shredders — a guitarist whose early career was built on blazing technique, from Racer X to Mr. Big, and who nearly landed an audition with Ozzy Osbourne at just 15 years old.

His hearing may not be what it once was, but Gilbert has discovered that some of his most important musical development has happened after the damage was done.

Buddy Guy occupies a unique place in guitar history. He learned from blues giants including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker before going on to influence Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

As the blues legend prepares to celebrate his 90th birthday in July by returning to the road on his BG90 tour, it’s a fitting time to revisit a conversation with Guitar Player in which he explained why, despite everything that changed around him, he never felt the need to change himself.

“I’ve learned a little more, but it’s still Buddy Guy,” he told Guitar Player in 2001. “If you put me through a modern amplifier, somebody is going to say, ‘He don’t sound like he used to.’ Well, of course, the guitars and amps aren’t the same today. But the man is still the same. I’m using the same fingers I left Louisiana with.”

For Guy, that continuity wasn’t stubbornness so much as an understanding of where his music came from. The more he reflected on his own career, which began in 1953, the more he saw himself as part of a tradition rather than a singular talent.

“I can’t really say how my style has changed,” he said. “I used to tell T-Bone Walker, B.B., Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy, and John Lee Hooker — all those guys I learned from — that I didn’t have anything unique. Guess what they said? ‘Buddy, we got it from someone else, too.’”

The biggest lesson those legendary musicians passed on had little to do with technique.

“Oh, man, lesson number one is be cool,” Guy recalled. “They weren’t making any money, but they were having fun playing.”

Watching those pioneers of acoustic and electric blues shaped his outlook long before the genre found a larger audience through the British blues boom.

“I used to look at them and say, ‘Buddy, you ain’t never gonna be that good, and nobody is ever going to fill those shoes.’ Those guys weren’t superstars then, but I thought they were living the high life. It made me think, This is as high as you can go.

“Then the British groups got into the blues, and were able to live decently from it. But I still worked in the daytime. I drove a tow truck.”

Ironically, it was those same rock musicians who later helped introduce Guy to millions of listeners.

“It makes me feel great, because some of the things that people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan said about me have helped me more than any record company,” he said. “So many kids come up to me and say, “I didn’t know anything about you until I read what Eric Clapton said.’ That gives me a big lift.”

That gratitude didn’t stop Guy from acknowledging the inequalities he’d witnessed throughout his career.

“Let’s be honest — when you’re Black, it doesn’t matter how good a blues record you make, you’re not going to get it played on these big radio stations unless some super guy like Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan plays the same thing you played,” he said.

“Blues has been like that ever since I’ve been alive. It has been ignored until some rock group gets it, plays it to big audiences, and tells them whose music it is.”

Still, Guy never lost faith in either the music or the people who loved it.

“I guess that’s why we still sing the blues,” he said. “I just look at it like a prizefighter — if I don’t get in that ring and risk getting knocked out, I ain’t got a chance to win.”

Last week saw a flurry of Prime Day guitar deals as Amazon's second biggest sale of the year arrived early. It saw awesome deals on beginner-level guitars, accessories, guitar pedals, and tool kits for guitar players, and was easily the biggest sale I've seen so far.

Sadly, the main sale ended on June 26th, so if you're looking for some of the best Prime Day deals, you've missed the boat. Not all is lost, though. Some of the deals are still hanging around, and I've put every single one into one handy article for you. These definitely won't be around much longer, though, so move quickly if you want to take advantage.

Guitars

Pedals

Amps

Accessories

Tools

Alternative sales

🇬🇧 In the UK?

By the time Robert Smith first stepped onstage with the Cure in the late 1970s, the band was already unlike anything else in Britain’s post-punk landscape. Angular and brooding, melodic yet mercurial, the Cure’s sound was built as much on mood as on notes.

And at the heart of it all was Smith’s electric guitar — raw, textural, and often deliberately “wrong.”

As he told Guitar Player in our September 1992 issue, it all has to do with how he hears music — not as technically perfect but as floating in a world where Earth’s physics don’t apply. It’s why he deliberately messes with the pitch of his guitar, sometimes by using modulation pedals, other times by adjusting the varispeed on a tape recorder, or — more likely, and more simply — by detuning his high E string “by a few cents” with his electronic tuner.

“I don't know what it adds,” he said, “but the guitar just doesn't sound quite right to me normally.”

While detuning is a common tool among guitarists looking for heavier or darker tones, Smith has wielded it like a sculptor, reshaping his guitar into something far more individually expressive.

On early albums like Seventeen Seconds and Faith, Smith would often detune his guitar a whole step or more, giving tracks like “A Forest” a ghostly, underwater quality. Rather than add lush overdubs or rely on synths to build atmosphere, he leaned into the natural warble and drift that comes from slack strings and unanchored tuning.

“And the way you play affects the perceived tuning,” he added, explaining that both he and former Cure guitarist Porl Thompson have completely opposite playing styles. “If Porl and I tune together and play the same thing, but he plays hard and I play soft, it will sound completely off.”

That sense of fragility became a trademark. Whether it was the jangling melancholy of Pornography or the dream-pop shimmer of Disintegration, Smith’s use of alternate tunings and semi-detuned guitars helped define the Cure’s evolving sound. In the studio, it gave songs an otherworldly tension — chords didn’t resolve in the usual way, and melodies floated oddly above shifting harmonic foundations.

“A lot of the things on our record that sound like heavy chorusing are actually just detuned instruments,” Smith told Guitar Player. “The only drawback to that is that onstage it's very confusing sometimes, especially with a lot of phasing effects going on. It turns into this overwhelming pulsing sound, and you can't hear anything.”

In the studio, however, Smith has more ability to create textures as he pleases. “I often defy the tuners, particularly with keyboard overdubs,” he says. “I even change the speed of the tape to detune some parts.”

This can sometimes have unintended results, such as when he forgot to reset the tape deck’s varispeed control while working on the hit “Friday I’m in Love,” from the Cure’s 1992 album Wish. The song is a quarter-tone sharp, halfway between D and E flat.

“I was playing with the varispeed and forgot to turn it off,” Smith explained. “But the whole feel changed, and the fact that it's the only song on Wish that's not in concert pitch really lifts it out and makes it sound different. After working on the record for months, hearing something a quarter-tone off makes your brain take a step backwards.”

Smith’s aesthetic extends to his gear, as it has from the start. One of his prized studio guitars has been a Fender Jazzmaster fitted with a pickup from a cheap Woolworth’s Top 20 electric guitar, which he says he bought for £20 in 1978.

“I took it in to record our first album, along with a little WEM combo amp,” he says of the Woolworth Top 20. “[Manager/producer] Chris Parry, who was paying for the record, said, ‘You can’t use that!’”

Smith decided to get a Fender Jazzmaster after spotting Elvis Costello playing one on an appearance on Top of the Pops.

“We went out and bought a Fender Jazzmaster, and I immediately had the Top 20 pickup installed in it,” he said. “That really upset Chris. I played the entire Three Imaginary Boys album through a Top 20 pickup.”

It’s a brilliant guitar,” he added, “though I actually bought it because of how it looked.”

While that may upset purists, it’s the reason Smith has been such a unique and influential guitarist and continues to shape music today as he collaborates with Olivia Rodrigo and the Rolling Stones on their new albums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the album almost never happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was that like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was especially impactful on George.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is Global Beatles Day.

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

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

It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone has a favorite guitar solo — Brian May included.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is Global Beatles Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was very bizarre.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gamble paid off.

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

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

Gibbons’ answer put Hendrix’s influence into perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea resurfaced years later under very different circumstances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boosters

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

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

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

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

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

Fuzz

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

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

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

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

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

Overdrive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distortion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audition itself seemed almost preordained.

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

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

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

Quatro admitted she wasn’t entirely comfortable.

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

Reassured, Quatro headed out for her entrance.

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

The comment left her stunned.

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

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

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

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

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

The advice worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you spot a Texas guitar player by hearing him?

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

What's the blues scene like in Austin?

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

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

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

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

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

“Just listened.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

What specifics did you get from various players?

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

Who were the main blues players you heard on records?

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

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

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

How did you meet Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton?

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

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

Was he basically a blues drummer when you found him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that to get a variety of tones?

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

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

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

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

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

Texas Flood sounds like there are hardly any overdubs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you usually record pretty loud?

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

What about Voodoo Chile?

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

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

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

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

You don't use the Super Reverbs now?

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

Was John Hammond in the studio for the first album?

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

Do you have any guitars not in the Strat family?

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

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

Do you play slide in open tuning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about the old beat-up one?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do any of your Strats have maple necks?

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

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

Which guitars have you recorded with most?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who works on your guitars?

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

Do you string all the Strats the same?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the turnaround on that song – IIVs?

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

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

“I don't know any of that stuff.”

What about the chord voicings you use?

“I just look for things that sound right.”

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

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