“It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t stood on that stage and felt that love from that many people rushing over you,” Mike Campbell says. “It’s like a wave knocking you off. It’s a magical thing that you can’t really get anywhere else in life. It’s a buzz, a high, a spiritual joy.

“And that’s why we kept doing it — because there’s nothing like it.”

For most of his career, Campbell has felt that rush while performing onstage with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, where he served as lead guitarist until Petty’s death on October 2, 2017. Given that group’s deep, multi-decade catalog, Campbell would experience the audience’s intense reaction to their music time and again over the course of a single night’s performance.

But there is one song that stands out from the rest for him — a favorite that was “a dream come true” for audiences to hear every night. And it was one of the group’s very first: “American Girl.”

“A lot of songs come to mind,” Campbell tells Under the Radar about the tunes that move him. “But I guess the most important one right now, in my mind, is ‘American Girl,’ which is one of our first songs.

“All through our career, every time we would play that song, I would feel that rush of adrenaline. As if it was the first time I heard it. It always had this power to it. It connected with people.”

As it did when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performed “American Girl” at what would be their final show, at the Hollywood Bowl, on September 25, 2017, the last stop on their 40th-anniversary tour. In his recently published memoir, Heartbreaker, Campbell recalls the audience emotionally singing along with every song at the show.

“And that night at the Hollywood Bowl, that was the last song we played, and I felt it then,” Campbell says.

“So did Tom.”

Composed by Petty and recorded on July 4, 1976 — America’s bicentennial anniversary — “American Girl” was the band’s third single off its self-titled debut album.

Campbell says the song moved him when he first heard it. Notably, it was among the initial tunes he recorded with the Heartbreakers using the rare 1950 Fender Broadcaster electric guitar he purchased — along with a blackface Fender Deluxe Reverb combo — for $600 shortly before the album’s sessions.

But he also recalls another song that took longer to become one of his favorites: “Refugee.” A Petty and Campbell co-write, “Refugee” proved difficult to record when the band tracked it for their third album, 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes.

“It was so easy to write,” says Campbell, who strapped on his iconic Red Dog Fender Telecaster — a unique mutt of a guitar — for the recording session. “But when we went in the studio, under the microscope with the producer and everything, trying to make it great, it took a lot of work. We just couldn’t get it to come together for so many takes. I found myself thinking, Maybe we’ll never get this.”

What kept them going was Campbell’s four-track demo of the tune: It was so good that the band knew the song was worth the effort.

“We must have recorded that 100 times,” Campbell told Songfacts. “I remember being so frustrated with it one day that — I think this is the only time I ever did this — I just left the studio and went out of town for two days. I just couldn't take the pressure anymore, but then I came back and when we regrouped we were actually able to get it down on tape.”

“Refugee” went on to reach number 15 on the charts — the highest placement for a Heartbreakers record at the time — when it was released as a single in 1980.

“After going through something like that, it’s a beautiful thing when a stranger comes up to you, and they tell you how your music has made their life happier,” Campbell tells Under the Radar. “For instance, I’ve had several people tell me they played ‘Here Comes My Girl,’ which is a song I wrote with Tom, at their wedding because it was that important to them.

“When someone shares that kind of joy with you, or when someone just tells me a certain song of ours lifted their spirits… I mean, what more could a person want?”

Campbell is currently on tour with his group, the Dirty Knobs, through July 24, with newly added fall dates stretching to October 10, 2026.

Before Mark Knopfler wrote “Sultans of Swing,” “Money for Nothing” and countless other classics, he was chasing a different kind of story.

Prior to becoming one of rock’s most admired guitarists, Knopfler worked as a newspaper reporter, covering everything from local news to court cases. Looking back, he says those early years didn’t just prepare him for a career — they taught him how to write songs.

Though his fluid electric guitar playing made him a household name, it’s the people who populate his songs that have always set him apart. Mechanics, truck drivers, musicians, lovers and dreamers all feel startlingly authentic because, in many cases, they began as real people Knopfler observed rather than fictional characters he invented.

“It was a great thing to do as a kid,” he told Stuff in 2009. “I went to college after being a newspaper lackey, and it was a great introduction to ‘life’ as a concept, to the world in general.

“I then moved into court reporting,” he added. “I just remember it all as being a very good thing to be doing, a way to see how society is organized.”

Just as importantly, journalism taught him to listen.

“It influenced me and allowed me to meet people,” he said. “To eavesdrop too, to take stories of other people home.”

Few Dire Straits songs illustrate that better than “Money for Nothing.”

Its narrator — the disgruntled appliance-store employee mocking rock stars on MTV — wasn’t dreamed up in isolation. Knopfler overheard the man’s complaints while shopping and began scribbling lyrics on a borrowed piece of paper right there in the store.

“The lead character in ‘Money for Nothing’ is a guy who works in the hardware department in an appliance store,” he told Musician. “He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down.

“I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real. It just went better with the song; it was more muscular… I mean, that is the way people speak.”

The same curiosity drove “Private Dancer,” his quietly devastating portrait of a sex worker longing for something better. Knopfler ultimately gave the song to Tina Turner, whose recording became an international hit, but its emotional power came from the same instinct he’d developed as a reporter: observing other people’s lives and imagining the world from their perspective.

It’s why so many of Knopfler’s songs blur the line between reportage and fiction. He borrows voices, conversations and tiny everyday details, then shapes them into stories that feel lived-in rather than invented.

For Knopfler, that’s the defining difference between being a musician and being a songwriter.

“First of all, you start to think of yourself as a guitar player of sorts, and then the songwriter,” he told Forbes in 2024. “I’ve come to realize the songwriter is different from a musician.”

It’s a revealing admission from a player celebrated for some of rock’s most iconic guitar work. Knopfler may be revered for his touch and tone, but the foundation of his music was laid years earlier — in courtrooms, on newsroom assignments and in overheard conversations — where he learned that the smallest details often tell the biggest stories.

It’s among the most famous electric guitar solos in all of rock. Some consider it the best solo of all time.

But David Gilmour says he can’t play it. Which is odd, considering he’s the one who created it.

The solo in question is the second in the Pink Floyd iconic song “Comfortably Numb,” from 1979’s The Wall.

Gilmour tells Rick Beato that he “never learned” it and prefers to just wing it and do something fresh when he performs it live.

“I’m not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest,” he tells the host. “I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it sort of so ingrained in me that the various parts of it are going to find their way into what I'm doing.

“But I’ve never learned it.

"I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don’t play it,” he adds with a laugh. “To me, it’s just different every time. Why would I want to do it the same? Would it be more popular with the people listening if I did it exactly like the record? Or do they prefer that I just wander off into whatever feels like the right thing at the time? I don't know.

“I suspect they prefer it to be real and to be happening, you know? There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, ‘We’re going to end’ or ‘We’re going to do this.’ And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”

As The Wall producer Bob Ezrin explained to Guitar Player in 2024, the two solos were cut at different times, with different producers.

“The solo at the end of the song was done when Roger [Waters] and I were in a different studio, and David did that with James Guthrie,” Ezrin said. (For the record, the first solo, which takes place at 2:38 into the song, is Ezrin’s favorite of the two.)

Both solos were cut with the guitarist’s celebrated Black Strat played through a combination of Hiwatt amplifiers and his Yamaha rotary speaker cabinet.

While the first solo has a more “composed” feeling about it, the second combines a sense of being both planned and improvised. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The combination of repetition and development keeps the excitement building for two minutes, before Gilmour moves up an octave to raise the intensity another level.

That freedom to create on the fly ran counter to Pink Floyd’s meticulous approach to recording. Gilmour tells Beato the group constantly discussed each song’s development.

“All the time, on everything, on every instrument,” he attests. And while he says drummer Nick Mason never required much direction from the others on any song, Gilmour made one special request of him for “Comfortably Numb.”

“There’s a place where there’s a bass drum missing,” he explains. “I said, ‘Can you just not play that bass drum? I want that gap.’”

While guitarists ranging from Steve Morse to Joe Perry have raved to us about Gilmour’s first “Comfortably Numb” solo, Alex Skolnick tells us he prefers the second.

“Often overshadowed by the song’s first solo, that second solo somehow manages to be screaming, despite the slow tempo, and is a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” he said in our November 2024 issue. “It’s a masterclass in using space, bends, melodic development, resolution of ideas, effective tone, blues in a non-blues context and pure emotion.”

As for Gilmour, his favorite solo is on “Dogs,” from the group’s 1977 album, Animals. Sadly, he doesn’t say which of the track’s four guitar solos he’s referring to. And as he revealed recently, one of those was accidentally erased, forcing him to redo it.

Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story by Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill is the first biography to fully capture the life, music, and mystery of Jeff Beck. Drawing on more than 30 hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, the book offers the most complete portrait of Beck ever assembled

In this excerpt, Tolinski and Gill follow Beck as he joins the Yardbirds following Eric Clapton’s exit from the British blues-rock group.

Jeff Beck’s initial encounter with the Yardbirds was unexpectedly adversarial. The four remaining band members were praying for another Eric Clapton to stroll through the door, but instead they were greeted by his antithesis. Where Clapton was meticulous and stylish, Jeff Beck, with his greasy jeans and scruffy, shoulder-length hair, resembled someone who had just emerged from under a car…and probably had.

Beck’s grungy appearance made a statement. Deep down, he believed he had more to offer the Yardbirds than they had to offer him, and he wasn’t about to dress up just to win their approval. Beck recalled, “I didn’t like the band when I met them. They didn’t seem particularly eager to welcome me. It appeared they were still nursing resentment over Eric’s departure and were worried that their whole sound would disappear without him.

“They asked me rather condescendingly, ‘Can you play blues?’ I shot back, ‘What kind of blues — slow blues, jump blues, Chicago blues?’ I played a few licks, and though they seemed impressed, they advised me to ditch my echo units because ‘You don’t use an echo in Chicago blues.’ I just shook my head, wondering if they truly grasped anything. Had they ever listened to Buddy Guy, whose guitar sound was drenched in echo?”

Yardbirds rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja chuckled at Beck’s testy recounting of their initial meeting. “We were in a panic after Jimmy Page declined to join the band, and we felt like we were settling for Jeff,” he confessed. “Moreover, he was unlike the rest of us and did appear a bit rough — he was a mechanic. I remember him telling me this story about someone infuriating him, so he doused their car in paint stripper. Nervously, I thought, ‘Yes, this is just what we need in this band…’”

Despite this, Dreja understood the challenge Beck faced by joining a group that had already been together for three years. “[Bands are] closer than marriages. We had our own language and our own humor — a lot of it was Eric’s invention, I might add. Jeff was introverted and socially a bit off, but we all agreed that he was incredibly inventive, and his playing was astounding.”

And for the moment, that was enough. With “For Your Love” climbing the charts and a packed schedule of concerts, television appearances, and promotional obligations looming, there was little time to ponder whether Beck was the ideal replacement for Clapton. The Yardbirds needed a guitarist, and Beck needed a break.

His first test came quickly. The Yardbirds were scheduled to perform on March 5, 1965, at Fairfield Halls, a venue in Croydon, South London. Beck had barely a week to notify his current band, the Tridents, of his departure, learn 15 songs, and step into the shoes of what many considered England’s most respected guitarist.

Before he could face the audience, however, there was one other matter to address: his appearance. Dreja, who had absorbed a few fashion lessons from Clapton, was assigned the task of making the band’s scruffy new recruit look presentable.

“I took him off to Carnaby Street, got him a fashionable haircut, and bought him nice shirts,” Dreja recalled. “Everything happened quickly because ‘For Your Love’ was a hit and suddenly we were on theater tours and television.”

As for Clapton, he was surprised and somewhat irked that the band didn’t collapse in the aftermath of his exit. Intrigued by his successor, he discreetly attended one of Beck’s final gigs with the Tridents. He was both shocked and slightly relieved by what he witnessed. Beck’s unruly hair and “all this fucking echo” on his guitar made Eric wonder if the Yardbirds had truly comprehended what they were getting into.

Clapton’s youthful arrogance and steadfast loyalty to tradition prevented him from seeing the truth: Beck’s wild, psychedelic guitar playing wasn’t an attack on his cherished blues but a glimpse into the swiftly approaching future — one that would pave the way for innovative players like Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and, yes, Jimmy Page. For now, Clapton was merely content that his former band would be stuck with what he perceived as an unkempt barbarian.

Meanwhile, Beck had little time to think about his judgmental predecessor; he was too busy gearing up for an undoubtedly challenging couple of weeks. To many, Clapton was synonymous with the Yardbirds, and after the music press announced his departure, Eric’s devoted followers couldn’t wait to chase the new guy offstage. But Beck wasn’t going to be coerced or cowed. When he took the stage for his debut Yardbirds performance, he locked eyes with the Croydon audience with the unwavering resolve of a gunfighter at high noon. In response to someone in the crowd shouting, “Where’s Eric?” Beck defiantly retorted, “Haven’t you heard? Read the papers. He’s gone.”

And for the next 40 minutes, the guitarist did his best to make them forget Clapton had ever existed. “I tore the place apart,” Beck recounted. “The gig bolstered my confidence, but I knew our next show would be even more demanding. I was going to face Eric’s regular crowd at the Marquee and was a little nervous. Nevertheless, I also came to the realization that being part of the Yardbirds was the best break I’d ever get, so I just went for it. Fortunately, I had a fantastic night. I played ‘Jeff’s Boogie’ [an early Beck signature piece] and received a 10-minute ovation.”

There remained one more significant hurdle. The Yardbirds were set to perform at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where ardent blues enthusiasts congregated. As Beck recalled, it was “an athletic, smelly place to play,” where the audience expressed their enthusiasm by standing on each other’s shoulders and cheering or showing their disapproval with clenched fists.

“It was the first time I genuinely felt like I might get slaughtered,” said Beck. “But I was cocky. I was like, ‘All right, you lot, get a load of this!’”

Beck managed to win the skeptical crowd over, even though few thought of him as a “genuine” blues player. Unlike Clapton, he never fully embraced the music. Instead, he took some pride in being an iconoclast — a hybrid of [Gene Vincent guitarist] Cliff Gallup, Buddy Guy, and Les Paul. The audience thought he was peculiar…yet oddly intriguing.

“I vaguely recall [Yardbirds singer] Keith Relf being a purist,” said Beck. “I thought, ‘You can be a purist, and you can be broke.’ I’ll do what I believe is right. Before the Yardbirds invited me to join, I was already moving toward avant-garde and experimental music — a bit like [jazz saxophonists] Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk. I’m not comparing myself to them musically, but the essence of what I was doing involved creating the strangest sounds I could. That’s when Eric [Clapton] came down to see me and realized where his job was going.”

While Beck was finding his footing with the Yardbirds on British stages playing his ’59 Telecaster through two Vox AC30 amplifiers, “For Your Love” continued its steady ascent, peaking at number three on March 20, 1965. This success secured the band several television appearances, including spots on two of Britain’s premier music shows: Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go!

With his gleaming blonde hair and wraparound shades, Keith Relf naturally commanded the most on-camera attention. But Beck’s presence also caught the media’s eye, with some music publications even noting his passing resemblance to Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.

“I was on the telly, and suddenly I was somebody,” Beck recounted with a hint of his astonishment at the time. “It was a mind-blowing experience.”

Although Beck had no experience before a camera, his presence was magnetic. It was on these shows that the guitarist carved out a brooding persona that stuck to him like an adhesive for decades to come. With an air of smoldering indifference, his menacing nonchalance would be studied and emulated for years by future guitar legends such as Ritchie Blackmore, Joe Perry, Chrissie Hynde, and even Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel. Dark, cool, and disenchanted, Beck provided the perfect gritty contrast to Relf’s androgynous, flaxen-haired hipster.

“The fans loved Jeff,” said drummer Jim McCarty. “Eric’s shoes were still warm, but there was something about Jeff that ignited their imaginations. The way he moved, the way he dressed — to the kids, he wasn’t ‘one’ of them, he was them. The fans worshipped Eric, but they wanted to be Jeff.”

To celebrate the release of Blow by Blow, an all-star tribute concert, along with a live interview and book signing with the authors, will be held this Thursday, July 16 at the Cutting Room in New York City. Additionally, a book signing and Q&A with author Brad Tolinski will also take place the following Thursday, July 23 at Book Soup in Los Angeles.

The battle over who can legally sell Stratocaster-style guitars in Europe has escalated, with Fender filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against musical instrument retailer Thomann.

In a statement, Fender said its infringement claim is “the expected next step in the legal process” after Thomann filed a Declaration of Non-Infringement action against the company.

The latest development follows Thomann’s lawsuit, filed after Fender sent cease-and-desist letters to Harley Benton, Yamaha, PRS Guitars, LsL Instruments and other manufacturers it believes are producing “copies” of its Stratocaster electric guitar.

Thomann, which owns the Harley Benton brand, said it was acting on behalf of both major manufacturers and smaller builders, specifically naming companies including Tom Anderson, Suhr, Pensa and Maybach.

Fender, however, argues that Harley Benton guitars infringe on its Stratocaster design and says Thomann’s legal action is an attempt to secure the right to continue selling those instruments.

According to Fender, it previously sought to resolve the dispute by discussing “practical ways to differentiate products while respecting Fender’s intellectual property,” but those discussions were unsuccessful, leading Thomann to file suit and prompting Fender’s countersuit.

“Thomann isn't a small independent guitar builder,” Fender said. “It is one of the world's largest musical instrument retailers, one of Fender's largest retail partners, and the owner of Harley Benton, one of Europe's largest guitar brands.

“From the beginning, our goal was simple: have a conversation. Like many other companies across Europe, we reached out to Thomann to discuss practical ways to differentiate products while respecting Fender's intellectual property. Our preference has always been dialogue and practical solutions—not litigation.

“Unfortunately, Thomann chose a different path.Rather than continuing that dialogue, it initiated legal proceedings asking the court to determine that it can continue selling guitar body designs that Fender believes copies the iconic Stratocaster. Today's filing is Fender's response and the expected next step in the legal process.”

In the statement accompanying its Declaration of Non-Infringement filing, Thomann said it had taken legal action “for the many manufacturers, dealers and guitar makers who have shaped our industry for decades and continue to shape it.”

“We urge Fender to stop issuing cease-and-desist demands against manufacturers, distributors and dealers and to return to a fair, cooperative partnership,” the retailer said.

Fender rejects the suggestion that it has avoided cooperation, maintaining that collaboration has been central to its approach. The company says it has successfully worked with other manufacturers to modify guitar designs so they are clearly differentiated from the Stratocaster while remaining commercially viable.

“Our preference has always been to resolve these matters through direct dialogue rather than litigation,” Fender said. “In many instances, companies have chosen to work collaboratively with us to explore practical solutions, including design modifications that clearly differentiate their products while continuing to serve musicians. This matter is different.”

The countersuit marks the latest chapter in the widening dispute over Stratocaster body-shape rights. The conflict intensified after Fender secured a default judgment in a German court that it says grants it enforceable rights against guitars using the Stratocaster body shape within the European Union.

Mick Jagger says he was “stupid” to follow John Lennon’s advice — because it meant he never met his hero, Elvis Presley.

The Rolling Stones frontman has been busy promoting the band’s 25th album, Foreign Tongues, released last week. Their second record in three years sees the British rock legends reunite with producer Andrew Watt and Paul McCartney as they continue a remarkable late-career hot streak.

But during an appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, O’Brien was just as interested in the past as the present, prompting a simple question: Did you ever meet Elvis?

“No, I never met Elvis,” Jagger replied. “You know why? The Daily Mirror, an English tabloid that still exists, always did publicity, and there was a journalist who took the Beatles to Los Angeles to visit Elvis.

“Afterward, I remember John saying, ‘You should never meet your heroes. I’d never meet Elvis if I were you.’

“So I didn’t. I took John’s advice, which is very stupid of me.”

The Beatles’ meeting with Elvis — reportedly arranged by manager Brian Epstein — took place on August 27, 1965, at the King’s Bel Air mansion. Although the Daily Mirror had hoped to cover the encounter, the press were ultimately barred after George Harrison pushed for the meeting to remain private.

The Fab Four idolized Elvis. Lennon drew direct inspiration from him for one of the band’s darkest songs, “Run for Your Life,” while Harrison later said Presley’s music had “an incredible impact” on him because he had “never heard anything like it.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the visit, Lennon ultimately came away disappointed.

According to the Beatles’ longtime press officer Tony Barrow, Lennon wasted little time getting to the point, asking Elvis: “Why do you do all these soft-centered ballads for the cinema these days? What happened to good old rock ’n’ roll?”

Conversation soon stalled until Elvis called for guitars to be brought in and a piano wheeled into the room.

“The boys found that they could make much better conversation with their guitars than they could with their spoken word,” Barrow later wrote. “Music was their natural meeting point, their most intelligent means of communication.”

Even so, the afternoon fell well short of Lennon’s expectations — explaining why he later warned Jagger against meeting his own musical heroes.

“I’d love to have met Elvis,” Jagger said with a wry smile. “Why did I take John’s advice? But at the time, it seemed to ring true.”

O’Brien noted that Lennon famously spent the Beatles’ first trip to America asking, “Where’s Elvis?” After finally meeting him, he was left asking much the same question.

“He told me that whole story more than once,” Jagger replied. “It put me off. I wanted to keep my version of Elvis to myself. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was. Maybe my version of Elvis would have been different.”

Elsewhere during the Foreign Tongues press campaign, Jagger explained why the Stones have adopted a “bulldozer approach” in the studio, while also branding one of the band’s most beloved albums “lousy” — a view Keith Richards decidedly does not share.

Jennifer Finch’s fellow musicians have rallied around the L7 bass guitarist as a GoFundMe campaign for her medical care has surpassed $350,000, with donations from Garbage, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, and other prominent rock figures.

The organizer behind the fundraiser says they have been “blown away” by the support after Finch, 59, revealed she would miss L7’s forthcoming tour following multiple surgeries and setbacks from an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Finch’s friend Aubree Miller launched the GoFundMe campaign after the illness left the bassist requiring extensive at-home medical care. L7 explained that the funds raised would “allow her to remain safely at home with the care, dignity, and support she needs.” In a message on the fundraising page, Miller acknowledged that Finch has “more good days behind her than ahead.”

The announcement of Finch’s condition on L7’s Instagram page prompted an outpouring of support for the musician, who co-founded the influential Los Angeles punk band in 1985. The fundraiser has now more than doubled its original $150,000 goal, thanks in part to a number of high-profile donations.

’90s rockers Garbage contributed $8,000 to the campaign, while Green Day guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong donated $5,000 and Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament gave $4,500.

Other artists showing their support include Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan ($2,500), Bikini Kill vocalist and riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna ($5,000), Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch ($1,000), and Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto ($1,000).

Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz, along with his wife, donated $10,000, while an anonymous donor made the largest single contribution so far, giving $40,000.

At the time of writing, the fundraiser has raised more than $365,000 from nearly 5,000 donations.

In an update posted to the page, Miller expressed her gratitude for the overwhelming response.

“We are absolutely blown away by the support, love, and how far this campaign went yesterday. We are all so grateful for the community showing up far and wide to support Jennifer.”

Miller added that one comment on the fundraiser read, “You have an army behind you,” and said the message resonated deeply with Finch.

“When that comment came in, I immediately read it to Jennifer, and it touched her so much,” Miller wrote.

Miller also shared a personal story about a time when Finch came to her aid during a medical emergency, adding: “This time, Jennifer is the one who needs us.”

According to the update, the money raised so far will cover eight weeks of “supplemental in-home medical care costs.” Miller also thanked L7 and Courtney Love, saying the campaign “wouldn’t have been possible” without their support.

Despite Finch’s absence, L7 will continue with their farewell tour plans at the bassist’s request. The band has recruited Tsuzumi Okai, who has performed with Limp Bizkit and Kim Dracula, to fill in during Finch’s recovery.

Alice Cooper fans are no strangers to surprises. But earlier this year, the shock rocker still managed to raise eyebrows by hiring an unknown 22-year-old guitarist for his band.

It’s no exaggeration to say Anna Cara’s life has been turned upside down since the Newcastle, England-born shredder stepped into Nita Strauss’ studded boots while the guitarist takes time away to welcome her first child. Introduced in March with Strauss’ blessing, Cara has quickly impressed Cooper fans with her blazing playing on a collection of X-shaped Ibanez Xiphos electric guitars.

But it was Cooper guitarist Tommy Henriksen who spotted her first — on social media.

“I kept telling Ryan [Roxie, Cooper’s other guitarist], ‘You’ve got to see this kid play, man. She’s got that thing,’” Henriksen tells Guitar World. “I can’t explain it. There aren’t many people who have it, but she’s got it.”

At the time, Henriksen was looking for talent for his own band, Crossbone Skully, and the then-19-year-old Cara jumped at the chance to tour with them. It gave Henriksen the opportunity to see whether her ability extended beyond polished social media clips.

“She wasn’t doing all that stupid stuff,” he says. “I sent her a message and said, ‘I love what you’re doing. You’ve got a great vibrato and feel. Can I call you and your parents?’

“I FaceTimed them and said, ‘I like your daughter’s playing. She’s a natural. She plays like Gary Moore. She’s got the vibrato of a 55-year-old man.’”

Before long, Cara — who has also toured with Krokus frontman Marc Storace — had left Newcastle for the first time and found herself auditioning at the home of three-time Oscar nominee and Jeff Beck collaborator Johnny Depp. She nailed it.

So when Strauss announced she was stepping away from Cooper’s band to focus on motherhood, Cara found herself firmly on Alice Cooper’s radar.

“Next thing you know, he’s like, ‘Let’s bring her to Vegas to watch the show and get her familiar with everything,’” Henriksen recalls.

“Anna Cara is a beautiful, dynamic shredder in the vein of Nita, but with a style of her own,” Cooper said when introducing her to fans.

Now 23 — she celebrated her birthday on the road — Cara shows no sign of being overawed by the opportunity. Reflecting on Cooper’s recent European tour, she described it on Instagram as “an unforgettable experience” and “the chance of a lifetime.”

The whirlwind isn’t slowing down anytime soon. She returns to Cooper’s band in September while continuing to tour with Storace throughout the summer and into December.

In related news, Guitar Player recently caught up with Kane Roberts, the bodybuilder guitarist who helped revive Alice Cooper’s career in the 1980s despite having virtually no musical experience.

Phil Collins thought he’d been fired by George Harrison for more than 30 years — until the former Beatle finally let him in on the joke.

The two first met in 1970, when a 19-year-old Collins landed a £15 session (roughly $280 today) playing congas during the recording of Harrison’s first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass. Collins recorded parts for “Art of Dying,” but they never appeared on the finished album.

For decades, he thought little of it. Then, while Harrison was preparing the album’s 30th-anniversary reissue, he unearthed an old session tape and sent Collins a copy with a handwritten note.

“Dear Phil, could this be you? Love George.”

Collins later recalled to Mojo (via Guitar.com) that he eagerly listened to the tape, convinced he was finally hearing the performance he’d recorded as an unknown teenager.

Instead, he got a shock.

“The conga player sounded like a hyperactive toddler,” Collins said. “At the end, I heard George’s voice saying, ‘Can we try one without the conga player?’”

“I rewound it and played it again and again and thought, ‘Fuck… I was sacked, and I never knew!’”

He left the listening session feeling “angry, depressed and sad,” convinced he’d finally discovered why his contribution had disappeared from the album.

A few days later, Harrison called to see whether Collins had received the tape.

“I said, ‘You fucking bastard. You sent me this tape, and it turns out I was sacked!’”

Harrison burst out laughing.

When he finally caught his breath, he revealed the truth.

“Oh no, no, no — that was [famed percussionist] Ray Cooper on the congas. We made the tape as a joke for you!”

Collins admitted he eventually saw the funny side.

“We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he said.

“And yeah, I swore at a Beatle.”

Of course, Collins’ career — from Genesis to a string of chart-topping solo hits and even Disney film soundtracks — suggests he wasn’t too badly wounded by the experience.

He also wasn’t the only future star to appear on All Things Must Pass. Peter Frampton contributed electric guitar leads to Harrison’s landmark solo album years before either musician became an international superstar.

Alice Cooper says Jimi Hendrix is responsible for turning his band’s fortunes around, thanks to a simple act that helped them land a record deal.

Before breaking out as one of rock’s most iconic frontmen, Cooper rubbed shoulders with stars and soon-to-be legends. He ran the L.A. scene alongside the Doors in the ’60s and even shared a house with Pink Floyd.

But it was another, more unusual living arrangement that sparked this all-important moment.

“In 1968, we were so poor in L.A. that we were living in the Chambers Brothers’ basement in Watts during the riots,” he tells Professor of Rock, referring to the uprising in the Watts neighborhood in August 1965. “Jimi Hendrix used to come over and they'd all smoke grass together, and we'd come out of the cellar like rats.

“Jimi was buying his grass from Shep Gordon, who at the time was just this New York kid that was selling grass to all these people at the Landmark Hotel.”

Beyond his knack for selling drugs, Gordon didn’t have a lot going for him at the time. As Cooper says, Hendrix saw him as a walking target for the police.

“Jimi says, ‘You know, they're going to bust you, man. You're a young guy. You've got a lot of money and you don't have an occupation.’

“He said, ‘I know a band that needs a manager. You should be a manager.’

“So he brings us over. I opened the door, and I thought there was a smoke machine inside! I walk through this, and there's Jimi, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. They're all sitting there getting high.”

It’s not exactly the typical environment for a business meeting, but then again, this is rock and roll. It was the ‘60s, and Cooper was in the company of rock royalty — ironically, three future founding members of the so-called 27 Club.

“Shep hands me a handful of marijuana. And this is when marijuana was really illegal in LA.

“And I went, ‘That’s our manager!’” Cooper continues.

“The very next day, we were supposed to sign with Frank Zappa’s [record label, Straight]. We walked in, and Shep walked in, and they said, ‘Who's he?’ I said, ‘Oh, that's our manager.’ They said, ‘You didn't have a manager yesterday.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we got him last night.’”

An incredible 55 years later, Gordon is still Cooper’s manager and a vital ingredient in his success through the decades. Cooper says such was the informality of their arrangement, and their trust in one another, that they still don't have a contract.

The band's first album, Pretties for You, wasn’t a success, but their third album changed the record as their collaborative partnership with Bob Ezrin got off to a flying start. Ezrin later encouraged the band to revisit the Pretties for You track “Reflected,” ultimately turning it into a parody political anthem, "Elected", one of their biggest hits.

But by the mid-’70s, the original Alice Cooper Band — potently powered by Glen Buxton’s fiery lead guitar work — was no more.

“When we got Bob Ezrin, everything went through the roof,” Cooper says. “But after seven years, we never took time off. We just toured and toured. In those days, you made two albums a year.

“It was normal because if you didn't, somebody behind you was going to take you out. We had Bowie breathing down our neck. So we made two albums a year, writing these songs while on tour. The original band just burned out.”

They reunited for 2025’s The Revenge of Alice Cooper album, with Buxton, who passed in 1997, a notable absence. However, he still influenced the record courtesy of a rediscovered riff.

“I had a cassette of Glen and I, and Glen had an idea for this song he called ‘Astute Lobotomy,’” bass player Dennis Dunaway explains to Guitar Player. “And that’s all he had: the title and this riff, definitely a fiery, Glen Buxton riff.

“His spirit was in the room with us the whole time,” Ezrin adds. “We talked about him more than we talked about anything else, I think.”

That, of course, meant Buxton’s boots needed to be filled, and Bob Ezrin has told Guitar Player how they found their man.

Sometimes songs are written in a heartbeat; other times, they’re labored over or put on the shelf until the right moment comes along.

Paul Rodgers learned the poignancy of the latter the hard way.

One of Bad Company’s biggest hits, “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” actually began life as a cut for Free, the British hard rock group Rodgers fronted previously. But it took the genius of guitarist Mick Ralphs — Rodgers’ future Bad Company bandmate — to finally bring it to life, not months but years later.

“I was staying at this camp in California when I started to come up with the lyrics and music to "Feel Like Makin’ Love,’” Rodgers tells Classic Rock as he explains the song's creation. “It was an amazing place to be.”

He was 19 at the time, busy on the road with Free. Their foundations, though, were crumbling, exemplified by their two breakups in the early ‘70s. And so, Rodgers was forced to keep the song on “the back burner” until Bad Company formed.

That band, completed by Ralphs, Rodgers' Free bandmate Simon Kirke on drums, and King Crimson alumnus Boz Burrell on bass, was adopted by Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant. The band was successful from the off, with their self-titled debut album breaking into the top five in the U.K. charts.

Yet, the seed of an idea that would eventually grow into "Feel Like Makin' Love" had yet to be pulled from the dark and dusted off.

Its time came in 1974, while recording their second album, Straight Shooter on Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio at Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire.

“I played it to Mick, and I knew it still needed something,” Rodgers recalls.

In response, Ralphs turned up his guitar — most likely his Gibson Les Paul — and put some heft into the chord that leads into the chorus

“I said: ‘Yeah! That’s it.’ It’s an example of how you can have an idea floating around that you haven’t finished, then you’re with the right musician at the right time, and it just takes off.”

The simple change was all it needed, and Rodgers feels that Ralphs’ contributions took it to a whole new level. It needn’t be overtly complex.

“The thing that was nice about [the finished version] is that it goes from this very tender verse to these big, heavy chords and then comes back again,” he develops. “It gets raucous, but it’s a kinda controlled raucousness. The simplicity of it was the magic.

“I’ve always believed that most human beings go through the whole gamut of emotions from one day to the next – or even in the same hour,” he adds. “That song didn’t come from the head; somehow, it came from the heart.”

Which is exactly why it appealed to listeners. Rodgers suggests that, as love anthems go, it may be the most consequential one of the decade.

“I’ve heard it’s responsible for a whole generation being conceived,” he says with a laugh. “Although that could be an exaggeration.”

Indeed, that particular writing session bore plenty of fruit.

“We were writing furiously and getting on famously,” Rodgers recalls, noting the contrast with the tumult of Free. “‘Feel Like Makin’’ Love was just one of a batch of songs that we put down.

“The band loved it straight away; it was one of those natural sessions where everybody fell into it and felt the groove. We wanted to keep the vibe from the first album, keep it as natural as possible.”

Ralphs, who passed away aged 81 in June 2025, has previously credited David Bowie with the formation of Bad Company. The glam rock icon wrote "All the Young Dudes" for his previous band, Mott the Hoople, causing a domino effect that put him on a collision course with Rodgers, who had notably rejected the chance to join Deep Purple.

Rodgers, meanwhile, gives Ralphs credit for coining the band' name. And though Ralphs may have drawn great influence from the work of Leslie West, Paul Rodgers has revealed what he learned about guitar playing from his former bandmate, as well as Jimmy Page.

L7 bassist Jennifer Finch has been diagnosed with an “aggressive” form of brain cancer, prompting the band to launch a GoFundMe campaign to help cover her mounting medical expenses as she undergoes treatment.

The 59-year-old will miss L7’s upcoming Last Hurrah tour after multiple surgeries and complications left her requiring extensive medical care, rehabilitation and professional in-home support. Tsuzumi Okai, who has previously played with Limp Bizkit and Kim Dracula, will fill in on bass while Finch focuses on her recovery.

“Following multiple surgeries and serious complications, Jennifer now requires extensive medical care, rehabilitation, and professional in-home support,” the band said in a statement.

“Friends, family, and L7 have launched a GoFundMe to help cover these urgent expenses and allow her to remain safely at home with the care, dignity, and support she needs. The Last Hurrah Tour was planned along with Jennifer when all four of us were in good health and spirits.

“Although she will not be able to join us for the upcoming U.S. dates, Jennifer has asked us to continue with the tour as planned. We will honor her request while making her care and well-being our immediate priority.

“Please donate if you are able,” the statement continues. “And, just as importantly, please share the campaign as widely as possible. Every contribution, share, and message of support matters.”

The GoFundMe page explains that Finch’s prognosis initially appeared more hopeful.

“When she first heard the diagnosis, there was reason to believe that treatment, including a full course of radiation, would get her back to some version of normal living,” the page reads. “Unforeseen complications led to multiple surgeries and a string of difficult setbacks.”

It adds, “The level of care Jennifer needs has gone beyond what friends and family can safely provide around the clock. As we face the difficult reality that Jennifer may have more good days behind her than ahead, we are asking for help to make the time she has with her friends, family, and fans as comfortable, meaningful, and full of love as possible.”

Finch was part of L7’s founding lineup and spent 23 years with the Los Angeles punk band across two stints, appearing on five studio albums. Although often associated with grunge, L7 helped define the riot grrrl movement of the early 1990s and has influenced generations of artists.

“I was really inspired by them, and I think that’s why I wanted to have an all-girl band up on stage,” Olivia Rodrigo once told Rolling Stone. “It feels very feminine on stage, but we’re all playing power chords and screaming. There’s something fun about that.”

News of Finch’s diagnosis prompted an outpouring of support from fellow musicians and fans. Joan Jett and Garbage each responded with a black heart emoji, while Violet Grohl wrote that she was sending “so much love and strength.” Hundreds of fans also shared messages of encouragement and gratitude for Finch’s contributions to L7 and alternative rock.

Peter Frampton became one of rock’s biggest stars with the blockbuster success of 1976’s Frampton Comes Alive! But five years earlier, he’d made a career-defining gamble, walking away from Humble Pie just as the band stood on the verge of an even bigger commercial breakthrough.

Frampton had co-founded the band with former Small Faces frontman Steve Marriott in 1969, helping turn Humble Pie into one of rock’s most formidable live acts. But despite the success of 1971’s Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore — and with an even bigger hit on the horizon — he says he’d already decided it was time to leave.

“It wasn’t just the direction, it was personality-wise, as well,” Frampton tells Record Collector (via Guitar.com). “Steve and I were not on the same planet anymore, unfortunately. I loved him dearly, but he was a handful. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore.”

Frampton says the seeds of his departure had been planted well before the band’s celebrated Fillmore East performances. Ironically, the success of Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore — particularly the hit “I Don’t Need No Doctor” — only confirmed that he was making the right decision.

“We started out doing acoustic without drums, [then] acoustic with drums, electric guitar, pianos, keyboards, and then heavy… we did it all,” he recalls.

“That’s what I loved about Humble Pie, to start with,” he continues. “But our direction was kind of chosen for us by what we put on the live record, and I knew that everyone was going to expect that — and only that — from then on, on record.”

Frampton chose to leave before Humble Pie released Smokin’ in March 1972. The album became one of the band’s biggest commercial successes, earning Gold certification after Frampton had been replaced by former Colosseum guitarist Clem Clempson.

“I decided to leave before the record came out,” Frampton says. “I believed it was going to be a small hit, not knowing it was going to be a much bigger hit than I thought, and then it would be much more difficult for me to leave.”

In hindsight, the timing looked risky. But Frampton’s gamble paid off. Five years later, Frampton Comes Alive! became one of the best-selling live albums in history, turning him into an international superstar.

Ironically, Frampton has since admitted that the phenomenal success of Frampton Comes Alive! also marked his least favorite period as a musician, as burnout and the pressures of fame took their toll. Even so, his decision to walk away from Humble Pie at the height of its ascent ultimately paved the way for the solo career that made him a rock icon.

Alex Van Halen has never been shy about preferring one era of Van Halen over another, and he believes David Lee Roth brought something to the band that no one else could replace.

While Sammy Hagar fronted Van Halen through its most commercially successful years, Alex says the group’s defining chemistry belonged to the original lineup.

Speaking with KazaGastão, the drummer reflected on what made Roth such an essential part of Van Halen’s rise.

“To me, Dave was a poet. It was the confluence of the complete opposite ends of the spectrum that made it happen. And it was brilliant soup — until it wasn’t.”

Roth fronted Van Halen on the band’s first six albums before leaving in 1985 to pursue a solo career. The relationship had already begun to fracture by then, and Eddie Van Halen’s secret recording session playing the electric guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” proved to be the final breaking point.

Looking back, though, Alex says those disagreements disappeared after Eddie’s death in 2020.

“That’s the important part: Remember the good times,” he said. “All the fights and disagreements that we had went by the wayside when Ed passed.

“Dave was the first person I called. He’s the only person I called, because it goes beyond words. It goes beyond the fact that we made music together and traveled together. We were kindred spirits.”

When the interviewer asked about Sammy Hagar — who replaced Roth in 1985 and sang on four studio albums with the band — Alex acknowledged what they accomplished together but insisted Van Halen’s defining chemistry belonged to the original lineup.

“There was good music made and all that, but the essence and the spirit and the balls-to-the-wall was the first model,” he said. “Everybody has a peak in their life, and he wasn’t there during that time period. We did our best work with Dave.”

For Alex, part of that success came from Roth’s unpredictable personality, which he says fueled the band’s creativity rather than undermining it.

“Dave was a restless guy,” he explained. “He couldn’t settle on one thing for one day. The next day, he is on something else. Some people might think it is a negative, and it is if it’s left alone to fester and become something it shouldn’t be. But you need conflict. You need contradiction. You need friction. Without friction, you’ve got no heat. Without heat, you’ve got nothing.

“A creative environment is an extremely difficult thing to foster and to keep in check and keep it balanced. Now, you don’t want to be completely balanced because then it becomes inert. Then it becomes predictable. We were very concerned about ending up doing the same thing over and over again.”

Alex also argued that Roth’s greatest contribution wasn’t his vocals or stage antics but his ability to connect with audiences.

Although Roth’s larger-than-life personality often put him at odds with those around him, Alex insisted he was “never in competition with anybody.”

“We stole the show because Dave had a way of connecting with the people, which was extremely important,” he said. “He has that skill, and nobody’s going to stop that. I don’t care what anybody says. I love the guy.

“Music is about people. People don’t really remember what you played. They remember how you made them feel.”

Meanwhile, songwriter Desmond Child recently reflected on his difficult songwriting sessions with Van Halen and Roth, while Joe Satriani revealed that Roth approached him about a Van Halen tribute tour in the 1990s — an experience that left the guitarist stunned by what he saw as disrespect toward Eddie Van Halen.

It’s not hard to get Little River Band guitarist Graeham Goble to reminisce about “Reminiscing.” The 1978 single was the Australian group’s most successful in the U.S., peaking at number three on both the Billboard 200 and Cash Box charts.

It was named Australian Record of the Year at the 1978 King of Pop Awards and was honored by Broadcast Music International (BMI) for five million plays on American radio, the most for any Australian pop song up to that point.

It was also, somewhat surprisingly, a favorite of the late John Lennon during his affair with former assistant May Pang, which continued from the mid 1970s to the latter years of the decade .

“She wrote in her book, Loving John, that they would lay in bed listening to ‘Reminiscing,’” Goble says, “and he was asking her to play it again and again and again. That was pretty amazing.”

Originally released as the second single from LRB’s fourth album, Sleeper Catcher, “Reminiscing” can be found on the new LRB compilation, Ultimate Hits. Still in Melbourne where the band was formed, Goble has nothing but fond memories of “Reminiscing” and all that came in its wake.

“It was inspired by my love of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s musicals, ’cause I was 12 years of age when we got a black-and-white television in Adelaide,” Goble explains. “The programs I immediately loved were all the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals — all of that American romantic era. A lot of my songwriting, but particularly ‘Reminiscing,’ was about the life I wished I had, putting myself into those situations I saw in the movies.

The song arrived in April 1977, when the group was in Melbourne for a TV appearance. “We were in the green room, just playing our guitars,” Goble says. “The lead guitarist, David Briggs, was showing me some jazz chords, one of which was a C9 chord, a shape I never knew about.

“When I came home after the television show, I picked up my Martin 000-18 acoustic and played that chord. Immediately, I had this melody and lyric, all at the same time, almost like it was a spiritual download that just flowed through me. In about a half an hour, the whole thing was finished, and I had this very different song with key changes and quite a lot of jazz chords — quite a sophisticated piece!”

As Goble recalls, the Little River Band made two attempts at recording the song before they struck gold. “The keyboard player I wanted for it was Peter Jones, and he was not available,” he says. “So I was forced to pick another player, and it didn’t work. And then we did it with a second player and that didn’t work out, either.

“Then I heard Peter Jones had come back into town. So under protest from some of the guys, mainly from [vocalist] Glenn Shorrock, they reluctantly agreed to give it a third go. As soon as we sat down with Peter, the whole thing came together. Our guitarist Beeb [Birtles] played a syncopated riff from the third verse to the very end of the song, which I really loved. It was a lovely lift to the latter part of the record.”

In addition to “Reminiscing,” Sleeper Catcher included “Lady,” another song with which the LRB would make their name in America. Although Goble and the band were convinced they’d recorded something special, their label, Capitol, had trouble hearing it. “We waited five weeks with no response,” Goble says.

“They eventually Telexed us and said, ‘We think the album is great but we can’t hear any singles’ — and they had ‘Reminiscing’ and ‘Lady,’ our two biggest singles of all time!”

Eventually the label decided to take a chance on “Reminiscing.” “They said, ‘But we really don’t know if it will connect at all.’ Within a couple weeks it went ballistic, right to number one in New York and number three on Billboard.”

Goble calls it “our pinnacle song. It’s double any other song we’ve ever had in terms of listens. It’s been in a lot of movies, and a lot of soundtracks. Sinatra said he thought it was the best ’70s song in the world, though he never recorded it.

“But when John Lennon calls your song one of his favorites, does that really matter?”

By the time he joined the Eagles in January 1974, Don Felder had a history with some of the era’s defining guitarists and songwriters. Growing up in Gainesville, Florida, he befriended Duane Allman (who taught him slide), Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon, who would precede him in the Eagles.

Felder recently spoke with us about his adventures with all three guitarists. Here, he keeps the stories coming with anecdotes about another Gainesville pal named Tom Petty, as well as Joni Mitchell and his onetime Eagles’ co-guitarist Joe Walsh.

Tom Petty

“When I first met him I was teaching at Lipham Music, not getting paid but for every hour they would give me a $10 credit. So it would add up and I could use that money to upgrade my amp or my guitar or strings or stuff. Tom was like Stephen Stills — very enthusiastic. They both had charisma onstage; you really liked them, and they sold you on what they were doing.

“I remember the first time I went to see Tom perform, he had these two guitar players who were just plugged in and turned up way too loud. Tom was playing bass. He didn’t want to play bass. He was like, ‘A frontman shouldn’t be playing bass,’ and I wanted to go, ‘Well, Paul McCartney might disagree with you about that.’ But Tom also wanted to play guitar so he could write.

“So I went to see this show and he comes on and he’s got this blonde hair and he’s flipping his hair and shaking it. These two girls are standing next to me — why I chose to stand between two girls I’ll never know [laughs] — but they’re going, ‘Oh, he’s so great! He’s so this and that, and I love his voice!’ And he was kind of singing like Bob Dylan; that’s what was happening at the time, so he sounded more like a Bob Dylan knockoff than Tom Petty.

“But his two guitar players were horrible. I went to a rehearsal after that and said, ‘You stop playing when Tom’s singing. When Tom’s not singing, you can play. When he moves away from the mic, you can play and solo and do whatever you want. But these are songs. You have to support the vocals, not just play all over them.’

“So I kind of helped them a little bit. Then I moved to Boston and we lost touch. I didn’t really hear about him until his first album came out a few years later.”

Joni Mitchell

“Before I joined the Eagles I was working with a guy named David Blue. He was a New York kind of country-folk artist. He wrote ‘Outlaw Man’ for the Eagles’ Desperado album, and Graham Nash produced his album [1973’s Nice Baby and the Angel]. David Lindley played on the album, and I was hired to go work with David Blue on the road…and wound up playing with Crosby & Nash, who were headlining, after David Lindley got sick.

“David Blue really appreciated all the stuff I had done for him, and he was really good friends with Joni Mitchell. He said, ‘Joni’s making an album. She’d love to have you come in and play on it.’ I used to see her sitting outside this little deli, less than a quarter mile from my house.

“I’d go there a lot to eat breakfast, and she’d be sitting outside smoking a cigarette and having this little, teeny cup of the darkest espresso you can imagine. I’d always say hello to her, and Brian Wilson would be sitting in the same booth, having the same thing every day — exactly like he did over and over and over until he passed.

“So I went into the studio with her and gave her a hug. I don’t even remember the song or the title, what it was, and I don’t even know if they used it. [Editor’s note: They didn’t.] It was just really wonderful to have met her and have had the honor of playing with her, and being able to say hello to her at the deli. Just a lovely, lovely, really wonderful, talented person.

“And if you want to talk about originality, she was probably the most original female singing guitarist ever. Her tunings, her chord progressions, her vocal melodies over these complicated guitar changes were just spectacular. I don’t know any other female that’s been able to even come close to that level of quality and talent, to tell you the truth.”

Joe Walsh

“Well, Joe has a unique style of his own, and I love it. He and I really have diverse backgrounds, but out of complete respect for each other and admiration for each other, we were able to play together. Before he ever joined the Eagles, I did some shows with him; he had a band called Joe Walsh & Friends, and we opened for Elton John at Dodger Stadium. He had a TV show called Joe Walsh & Friends, too; I went down and jammed on a couple of songs with him for that.

“We would do this tango, this dance. Without having a conversation about it, we understood that when somebody goes up and starts playing high, you should be supporting underneath them — slower, lower, an octave down, a contrapuntal melody to what was happening up there.

“And then when he starts winding his way down, I’d start winding my way up. So we’d have this very subtle interplay between us, without saying a word, just by listening to what somebody was doing. And if they were off on a really hot run, you just support them.

“That’s really why I wrote the music bed which became ‘Hotel California.’ Joe had just joined the band and I wanted to do that thing we did together on an Eagles record. Glenn [Frey] and I had done something like that on a song right after I joined the band, but it was not of the same caliber or quality of what we did for ‘Hotel.’

“Joe comes up with great parts, so when we were tangoing back and forth he says, ‘We need to do something like diddly-diddly-diddly here.’ So I said, ‘What is diddly-diddly-diddly?’ and he goes [sings part], and if you listen to that progression, it’s a descending chromatic chord progression. It changed chords on every bar, going down, going down, going down, and then it comes back again.

“So we had to figure out what the diddly-diddly-diddly was on every bar so it went with the chord change on that bar. We literally recorded it bar by bar.”

Nita Strauss may be on maternity leave from the rock and roll road, but she’s still been playing plenty of guitar for an audience of a special one.

On May 28, Strauss and her husband, drummer Josh Villalta, welcomed their first child, Maxwell James. Strauss tells us via Zoom from home in Louisiana that she’s “just loving this season now, with a vengeance,” including playing music in Max’s nursery, where she keeps a couple of her signature Ibanez JIVA electric guitars and a Marshall JCM 900 half-stack.

“It’s a good vibe in our nursery, let me tell ya,” Strauss says as Max coos in the background. “He’s just sort of listening in awe right now. I wish everybody listened to me with as much awe as he does,” she adds with a laugh. “It’s fun; I’ve got two of my tour JIVAs in here and a nice comfy chair to sit in, so it’s a good practice setup.”

She adds that, with normal infant needs, Max “has more wardrobe changes than I do these days.”

There’s no drum kit in the nursery — yet — but Strauss reports that dad is getting into the act as well.

“Josh, he’s always just tapping on things and moving Max in the rhythm of different songs. The drummer vibe is already strong — which is terrifying.”

Strauss’ pregnancy required a leave of absence from her regular gig with Alice Cooper’s band during this year’s touring cycle, but we’ll be hearing something new from her next month. Strauss recorded an instrumental version of “1979” for Sending Hearts to All My Dearies — A Tribute to the Smashing Pumpkins, a band-sanctioned salute that comes out digitally August 14 and on vinyl October 16.

Her involvement with the project started during the pandemic, around the time she and Villalta were moving from Los Angeles.

“We were driving out of California,” she recalls. “It was a really emotional time, during the pandemic. Josh and I bought our first house and we loaded up the car and the dogs and everything. I had really held all the emotion in.

“Then we got on the freeway and the radio started playing ‘1979,’ and that unlocked that emotional block I had built up during the move and packing, and I just burst into tears. It just took me back to high school and cruising around in the car with my friends, listening to Smashing Pumpkins.”

Given the massive popularity of “1979,” Strauss didn’t assume the song was still available when she signed onto the project.

“I threw out ‘1979,’ thinking there’s no way that song is still available — and it was. [English singer Barns Courtney does a vocal version of it as well on the tribute, which also features contributions from Tame Impala, Des Rocs, Between the Buried and Me and others.] So I was excited, and I got to put a pretty unique spin on the song.”

Doing it as an instrumental fits that description, of course.

“The first thing I think anybody would’ve thought of is, Who are you gonna get to sing on it? But when I recorded this I hadn’t even put out any music with singers. That was pre-‘Dead Inside’ [with David Draiman], pre-any of the guest vocalist stuff I’ve done. I had only approached making my music from an instrumental standpoint. It didn’t occur to me until much later on, when it was finished, that maybe I should’ve gotten a singer on it.

“But I enjoy putting that kind of spin on songs that I like. And ‘1979’ has such a great melody that lent itself so easily to play on guitar. It just felt natural to approach it from that standpoint.

“I think it came out cool. When I listened back, I had sort of forgotten how many liberties I took with it, especially with the shuffle of the tempo at the very beginning; it starts out very moody and half-time, very different. But I did play it with a lot of reverence for the band and for the original track. I hope that comes across to the band and to the fans.”

In addition to “1979” and playing for baby Max, Strauss has also started work on her third solo album, the follow-up to 2023’s The Call of the Void.

“I started working on that about a year and a half ago, with the idea I was going to be taking some time off,” she says. “I’ve got 10 or 11 songs banked and pretty well fleshed out, sort of ready for either solos or guest singers. It’s in a good place, so it’s looking like new music by the end of this year or next year.”

She’ll resume her regular gameday duties with the Los Angeles Rams during the upcoming NFL season as well, and Strauss plans to be back in the Cooper camp for its next tour. (Anna Cara took her place during maternity leave.) Cooper is currently touring Europe with the Hollywood Vampires and will be promoting a new memoir, Devil on My Shoulder, this fall.

“Bringing a stroller and all the baby stuff on the road is gonna present a new challenge,” she acknowledges. But Max may well earn his keep as well.

“Oh, I guarantee he’s gonna make his way into the show when we go out with Coop,” Strauss says. “There’ll be some Billion Dollar Babies gag or something that they want to do.

“One fun thing about the Coop tour is everybody’s put to work onstage, everybody from the merch girl to the stagehands to anybody and everybody. My guitar tech is out in a black jumpsuit killing Alice at one point or another in the show. So if Max is out on tour, they’re gonna make him work.”

George Harrison never had any interest in reuniting the Beatles after the band’s breakup in 1970. While several members collaborated during their solo years — David Bowie even claimed he, John Lennon and Paul McCartney once discussed forming a group — the Fab Four never returned to the studio or stage together.

But Harrison hadn’t completely soured on his former bandmates. As he revealed in a 1974 press conference, he was open to forming a new band with one Beatle in particular.

The Beatles’ breakup came at an unfortunate time for Harrison. After years of being overshadowed by the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, he was flourishing as both a writer and guitarist. Songs like “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun” and “Old Brown Shoe” proved he could match his bandmates as a songwriter, while his increasingly distinctive guitar work established him as one of rock’s most original stylists.

The release of All Things Must Pass, his ambitious 1970 solo debut, vindicated years of frustration. Powered by the hits “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life,” it became the most commercially successful solo album by any former Beatle in the immediate aftermath of the split.

By 1974, Harrison was preparing to launch the tour behind Dark Horse with a band that included organist Billy Preston, bassist Willie Weeks, drummer Andy Newmark and a young Robben Ford. During a press conference promoting the tour, he made it clear that a Beatles reunion held little appeal — but revealed there was one former bandmate he’d happily work with again.

“It’s all a fantasy, the idea of putting the Beatles back together again,” he said, as recounted in the book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters. “If we ever do that, the reason will be that we are all broke. I’d rather have Willie Weeks on bass than Paul McCartney. That’s the truth, with all respect to Paul.

“Paul is a fine bass player,” he admitted, “but he’s a bit overpowering at times.”

Elsewhere in the press conference, Harrison expressed his fondness for drummer Ringo Starr, calling him a player with “the best backbeat I’ve ever heard.”

But in the end, it was Lennon whom he held in the highest regard.

“John’s gone through all of his scene, but he’s like me, he’s come back around,” Harrison said. “To tell the truth, I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney. But it’s nothing personal. It’s from a musical point of view.”

Harrison may also have been remembering Lennon’s generosity during a September 1969 meeting, when he suggested future Beatles albums should feature a more equal distribution of songs among the four members. Lennon also said he regretted not giving Harrison and Starr the lucrative B-sides to Beatles singles so they could gain greater exposure — and make more money. Two weeks later, Lennon privately announced he was leaving the band, rendering the proposal moot.

Harrison had already worked with Lennon on the latter’s 1971 solo album, Imagine, contributing lead and slide guitar to several tracks. He also played Dobro on “Crippled Inside,” demonstrating the musical chemistry the two still shared.

Aside from his work with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison continued recording and performing as a solo artist until his death in 2001.

More than 50 years after the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder wrapped up one of rock’s most celebrated package tours, Mick Jagger is looking back on the chaotic way it all ended.

Speaking in a new interview with The New York Times, the Stones frontman recalled the final night of the band’s 1972 North American tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where an encore with Wonder gave way to an all-out custard pie fight.

The 53-date tour, which ran from June 3 to July 26, marked an important moment for both artists. It was the Stones’ first U.S. outing since the ill-fated 1969 tour that ended with the Altamont Speedway Free Concert.

In the years between, they had released Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., a pair of celebrated albums featuring the handiwork of their new electric guitar–slinger, Mick Taylor. Wonder, meanwhile, had successfully transformed himself from Motown child prodigy into one of pop music’s brightest young stars with hits like “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” and “If You Really Love Me.”

The pairing proved to be a natural fit.

“Motown was trying to break Stevie bigger than he’d ever been,” Marshall Chess, the Stones’ executive manager, recalled. “It was a great thing for the Stones because Mick and Keith just loved Stevie. It was a great thing for Stevie because it showed him to this whole other white audience, the Stones’ audience.”

Although Wonder had yet to release the extraordinary trilogy of Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, he was already a dazzling live performer who could more than hold his own with the Stones. Night after night, he returned to the stage for the encore as he and the band tore through a mash-up of his 1966 hit “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

“That’s when Stevie was really young and full of energy, jumping up and down on stage,” Chess said. “He and Mick were dancing on stage together, then somebody came out and put a whipped cream pie in Mick’s face. It was crazy. The building was actually vibrating. You could feel it in the concrete.”

Jagger remembered that the final show took the spectacle one step further.

“We said come up and we’ll play a mash-up of ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Uptight,’ because they’re both the same beat,” he recalled. “And then someone — I can’t remember whose idea this was, it might have been mine — decides that we’re going to throw custard pies at the end, because it’s the last number of the show of the last day of the tour. It’s rather unfair for Stevie.”

Wonder, who is blind, nevertheless embraced the prank.

“So everyone’s throwing custard pie, including Stevie, and everyone ends up covered in custard pies,” Jagger said. “I loved it.”

For a tour remembered as one of the greatest double bills of the rock era, it was a suitably unforgettable finale — two of music’s biggest stars sharing the stage one last time before leaving it covered in smashed pies.

Forty-one years ago this weekend, on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Here we recall some of the most notable guitar stories from Live Aid.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

“You don't rehearse for something like that,” George Thorogood says of his Live Aid set. “We just got up there and did what we do and got off.”

George Thorogood’s performance with the Destroyers was one of the guitar highlights at Live Aid, held 41 years ago this weekend to raise funds for famine relief in Africa. His star had been rising since the 1982 release of Bad to the Bone, along with the hit single of its title track, placing him alongside Stevie Ray Vaughan, ZZ Top and the Fabulous Thunderbirds as one of the day’s key purveyors of blues rock.

And while a few other guitarists featured that day likely don’t have fond memories of their Live Aid experiences, the same can’t be said for Thorogood. The event had pleasant surprises in store for the Gibson ES-125–toting guitarist.

For that matter, we’ll argue his set was the best electric guitar moment at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium on that sunny July afternoon.

While other acts had time to prepare for their Live Aid moment, Thorogood came in cold. He was enlisted only the night before, after another group — reportedly Tears for Fears — canceled, and performed after flying in across the country, from San Francisco.

Even more impressive, he brought in two bona fide blues legends to play with him and the Destroyers: Bo Diddley and Albert Collins. They joined in on renditions of "Who Do You Love?" and "Madison Blues," respectively, with Elmore James' "The Sky Is Crying" in the middle.

The fret-burning interplay between the elder guitarists and the younger Thorogood — wearing his slide on his little finger — made for lively, raucous fun.

As it turns out, the special guests were requested by Live Aid’s organizers.

"They wanted to have some blues artists that were connected to African backgrounds," Thorogood says. "They had B.B. King playing in Holland, but they knew I had connections with people in the blues industry.

"We'd been close to Albert for years, and we knew him pretty good. It was kind of tough to line them up on such short notice, just like us, but they rose to the occasion and I think we did pretty good.”

Although he flew in from the other coast, Thorogood said the Destroyers had a home field advantage in Philly. "We were very fortunate it was being held in the Tri-State area, the Delaware Valley," he says. "We're from there, and that helped."

He was particularly happy that the band was introduced by actor George Segal, who was a friend. And meeting Jack Nicholson, who hosted the Philadelphia portion of the event, was a thrill. The actor, then in the peak years of his career, was riding high at the box office for his role in the critically acclaimed film Prizzi's Honor, released the previous month.

"I see a man walking across the stage when the curtain was drawn, and he's pointing at me, and he's walking up to me, and he's got, like, a bowling shirt on.

"He says, 'Georgie!' and I went, 'Jack? Jack Nicholson? You know who I am?' He says, 'Yeah, Georgie, I always follow the rough boys.’

"So there was that."

When the British blues scene bloomed in the 1960s, with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers at the forefront, Ronnie Wood often found himself at the heart of it all. He enjoyed enduring friendships with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, played with Jeff Beck, and later lived with Jimi Hendrix. He watched it unfold and played a key part.

At the start of his career, he was simply a budding guitarist with lofty ambitions, holding the work of Yardbirds – at the point with Eric Clapton – in high regard. Then, one night, he found himself pulled out of the crowd to perform with them. It’s here, he says, that his friendship with Clapton began.

“I used to gauge my music by seeing the Yardbirds at the Crawdaddy,” Wood said at a Q&A to promote his autobiography in 2015. “They were a big influence on me.”

The Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, Surrey, was one of the Yardbirds’ usual haunts throughout their various eras, with their tri-fecta of guitar greats: Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck. It was one of the shows with the latter that saw Wood plant the seeds for him playing in Beck’s solo project after the Yardbirds broke up, first as a guitarist, then relegated to bass. But he’d found himself part of Yardbirds folklore long before that.

“One night, Keith Relf, the singer and harmonica player, was ill, and Chris Dreja [guitar], Jim McCarty [drums], Paul Samwell-Smith [bass], and Eric Clapton said, ‘Does anybody in the audience play harmonica?’ and all my friends pushed me up, and he said, ‘He does!’ Suddenly I’m on stage with the Yardbirds; I did ‘I’m a Man’ and a few [other] songs.”

It would have been a night to savor for this moment alone. But there was more to come.

“They sent for me afterward,” he remembers. “They said, ‘Get that guy backstage who looks like Cleopatra.’ Eric and I stayed close after that.”

Wood would, in fact, steal a bass to play with Jeff Beck several years later, and at the Q&A, he was asked to break down why the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s band proved to be, in his own words, a “breeding ground” for incredible guitar players.

“There was a lot of ambition within guitar players to spread the word,” he believes. “They were sort of like, ‘Have you heard this lick?’ Jeff Beck is still like that to this day. He’s like a kid in a toy shop with his guitar and his riffs; ‘Can you do this?’ ‘No, but I’ll give it a damn good try.’ There was a camaraderie.”

Elsewhere, Wood’s story intertwines with that of Pete Townshend, with the loudness wars that would redefine the future of amplifiers, and an argument over a particular innovation at the core of their relationship.

He’s just released his latest album with the Rolling Stones, which Mick Jagger says was created with a “bulldozer approach.”

Bill Haley & His Comets 1954 single "Rock Around The Clock" was not the first rock’n’roll record – it wasn’t even Bill Haley’s first rock’n’roll record – but it was the first to go to number 1 in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and the song that heralded the arrival of the music across the world.

If you want to point to a single moment that changed rock’n’roll, the guitar solo on "Rock Around The Clock" would fit the bill. Played not by Bill Haley, or by Franny Beecher (the lead guitarist for the Comets 1954-62) but by a little known session player called Danny Cedrone.

“What an awesome player,” said Danny Gatton. “His "Rock Around The Clock" lick was the first guitar solo that really knocked me on my ass.” Cedrone recorded the solo in seconds – in fact, it was a solo he’d already recorded on another track by Bill Haley – and re-used, either due to time pressure, or because it was his party-piece. He never lived to see the impact it would have.

Danny Cedrone was a New York guitarist who had his own band, The Esquire Boys, and would guest with Bill Haley and the Saddlemen, Haley’s pre-Comets country band, who were regulars on the South Jersey music circuit. As jump-blues merged into rock’n’roll, so the Saddlemen loosened up a little and recorded some of the earliest rock’n’roll and rockabilly records, covering Jackie Brenston’s "Rocket 88" in 1951, and the following year, a song called "Rock The Joint".

For "Rock The Joint", Cedrone laid down his party piece, a solo that Haley’s piano player Johnny Grande said was his “gimmick”: jazzy, yet played at breakneck speed, it has a final run down that still slackens jaws today. Its genius was not recognized commercially – "Rock The Joint" sold modestly – but it pointed to a new direction for Haley's band.

Fast-forward to April, 1954. The Saddlemen are now the less-country, infinitely more rock'n'roll Comets, and going into the studio for their first recording for Decca records. Legend has it that the session was fraught: the band were late, Cedrone had missed rehearsals, the producer spent too long recording the planned A-side, “Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town)”, and by the time they came to Rock Around The Clock, Sammy Davis Jr was waiting impatiently at the studio door for his session.

With the clock ticking, they ran through the song twice and – expediency needed – someone suggested that Cedrone lay down his “Rock The Joint” solo again.

British rockabilly guitarist Darrel Higham thinks it was reused as a 'good luck charm'. "This solo was so groundbreaking that it was considered a ‘lucky’ solo," he told Guitarist magazine. "I think Bill Haley was a very superstitious man and "Rock This Joint" did such a great deal to advance his career that when he came to record "Rock Around The Clock", I think they thought, ‘Well, let’s throw in that lucky solo again…’ So Danny Cedrone played it exactly the same as he did on "Rock The Joint". It’s an iconic solo, absolutely iconic.”

It fit perfectly. Played on a ‘46 Gibson ES-300 with a single P-90 pickup through an 18-watt Gibson BR-1 amplifier, it was shredding, 50s-style.

“It’s the best solo of all time in rock and roll,” Brian Setzer told us, “copied by everyone from metal dudes to rockabillies to blues guys. Here’s why: Guitar solos were not really even being played that often in rock and roll at that time. It was all new.

“I think Danny Cedrone had played with Lionel Hampton,” he says. “I believe he was a jazz guitarist. Here’s what I think happened, because I know how these things work: They told him, ‘None of this jazz stuff. This is a new music called rock and roll. You really have to play it wild.’ And that’s what he came up with.

“It’s this crazy new sound that has jazz influences, but it’s not jazz. It’s still one of the hardest solos to learn. Unfortunately, right after he played that solo, he had an accident and died. Terrible. I don’t think he ever got to perform it.”

He didn’t. After the session – for which he was paid $21 (about $260 in today’s money) – Cedrone went back to his regular life. “Rock Around the Clock" was released as the B-side to "Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town)" in May and made only a modest dent in the charts.

On 7 June, Cedrone recorded again with the Comets, playing rhythm on Shake, Rattle & Roll. Ten days later, and three days before his 34th birthday, Cedrone went out to buy sandwiches for his family, tripped on the stairs, and died of a broken neck.

He never saw his solo become legendary. Because “Rock Around the Clock” had a second life. The following year, actor Glenn Ford was making a movie about juvenile delinquency called "The Blackboard Jungle." His son Peter was a rock’n’roll fan who had flipped "Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town)" and discovered that the B-side was more exciting. When the director came around to visit, he heard “Rock Around the Clock” and put it over the opening credits to the movie.

It was electric. “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” was the first rock song ever to be used in a motion picture,” says Peter. “Teenagers — misunderstood, lonely and rebellious — had discovered a touchstone with which they could identify. Teens at that time had been islands unto themselves, unaware that thousands of others were just like them.”

“By July 5, 1955, seven months after [director] Richard Brooks first heard my 78-rpm copy of the record at my house, “Rock Around the Clock” was the top-selling single in the nation. It stayed on the charts for eight weeks, eventually selling more than 25 million copies.”

The world of guitar playing would never be the same again. Bill Haley paid tribute to Cedrone's playing and his vision: “He, I think, recognized even before I did, that we had something going,” he said.

By 1997, Britpop was running out of steam. Oasis’ Be Here Now failed to become the defining statement many had hoped for, and the movement quickly faded.

Three years later, an unknown band called Coldplay emerged with its debut album, Parachutes — which celebrates its 26th anniversary this month — and helped define what came next.

The song that changed everything was “Yellow.”

It was so good, it even made a fan of the notoriously hypercritical Noel Gallagher.

“When I heard ‘Yellow’ for the first time, I immediately picked up the guitar and went, ‘Fucking bastards, why didn’t I write that?’” the Oasis guitarist told Pitchfork in 2011.

“I feel that way about a lot of their songs.”

Gallagher was far from alone. Today, “Yellow” has been streamed more than three billion times on Spotify, but the song might never have existed had Coldplay not stepped outside the studio for a break one night.

The song didn’t exist when the band checked into Rockfield Studios in Wales in November 1999 to record Parachutes. For that matter, Coldplay itself was barely known, having formed in London just two years earlier.

Its independently released Safety EP had attracted little attention, but the follow-up, The Blue Room, earned enough acclaim to secure a deal with Parlophone and pave the way for the band’s debut album.

Even then, the recording process got off to a rocky start.

“We’d done one session a few months before in London,” frontman Chris Martin recalled, “which hadn’t gone so well. So we were going there ’cause it was kind of a make-or-break session.”

Former Parlophone A&R executive Dan Keeling said Martin’s perfectionism had led to clashes with an earlier producer before the band regrouped at Rockfield with producer Ken Nelson.

“We’d been in the studio with another producer and they’d fallen out straight away on the first day of pre-production,” Keeling told The Independent in 2020. “The producer and Chris Martin were locking swords. That was going nowhere.”

Rockfield proved a much better fit. The storied Welsh studio — where Oasis, the Stone Roses and Brian Eno had all recorded — provided a relaxed atmosphere that suited both the band and Nelson.

It also provided the inspiration for “Yellow.”

As Martin recalls, the band was taking a break outside while recording “Shiver” when Nelson looked up at the remarkably clear night sky.

“It was so beautiful outside,” Martin said. “All four of us were outside, and Ken, he was like, ‘Look up there, lads! Look at the stars.’

“He literally said, ‘Look at the stars’ — which is the first line of that song.”

Back inside, Martin picked up an acoustic guitar and began building a song around Nelson’s remark while the band waited for a broken piece of studio equipment to be repaired. He was especially struck by the word “stars” and deliberately exaggerated the “r” in a high register, imitating one of his musical heroes.

“I was thinking about Neil Young, and I started to do a Neil Young impression to try and make everyone giggle,” he told Howard Stern in 2011.

Martin was playing in one of his preferred alternate tunings, which gave the song’s simple chord progression its shimmering character.

“I like to use strange tunings on the guitar,” he told Stern. “And then the rest just come out.”

Within about 10 minutes, nearly the entire song was finished.

Only the title remained.

“I got the title from the Yellow Pages,” Martin said.

Writing “Yellow” proved far easier than recording it.

“The problem we had with ‘Yellow’ was getting the tempo just right,” Nelson told Sound on Sound. “A beat either side of the tempo we picked didn’t have the same groove. It lost the feel of it.”

The band also discovered that analog tape wasn’t delivering the sound they wanted.

“We tried it a few different ways … and we were never really happy,” Nelson explained. “We ended up using Pro Tools,” before transferring the finished recording back to tape — a process that convinced him of the benefits of combining digital recording with analog warmth.

For the session, Martin played a circa-1996 Vincente Tatay Tomas Spanish acoustic guitar, while guitarist Jonny Buckland used his Fender Classic Series ’72 Telecaster Thinline semihollow through two Fender Twin Reverb combos.

“Jonny has a Fender Twin Reverb, and he has all these delays going into it,” Nelson said. “I just wanted to have the option of a bit more dryness.”

His solution was to split Buckland’s signal between the two amps, recording one wet and one dry before blending them together in the final mix.

The contrast between Martin’s acoustic and Buckland’s crunchy, delay-soaked electric gave “Yellow” much of its distinctive character, blending folk, rock and dreamy textures into something that resisted easy categorization.

Appropriately enough, Martin has never been entirely sure what the song is actually about.

“What’s it about? I don’t know,” he said. “Just someone awesome.”

“Yellow” wasn’t the first single from Parachutes. That distinction belonged to “Shiver,” which reached No. 35 in the U.K. after its March 2000 release.

But when “Yellow” arrived three months later, everything changed.

Coldplay had just embarked on its first headlining tour, including an appearance at Glastonbury, when the single was released on June 26.

“I remember hearing that song and thinking, ‘That sounds like a hit,’” Keeling recalled. “It’s epic but at the same time it’s not. It’s pared back and natural. I remember feeling the sky was the limit.”

He was right.

“Yellow” climbed to No. 4 on the U.K. Singles Chart and became Coldplay’s international breakthrough, reaching audiences across Europe and Australia before cracking the U.S. Top 50 and introducing the band to American listeners.

Twenty-six years after Parachutes introduced the world to Coldplay, “Yellow” remains one of the band’s defining songs. Its appearance in the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, where it was performed in Mandarin by singer Katherine Ho, introduced it to a new generation of listeners and helped spark a lasting resurgence in China.

Among the song’s countless live performances, one of the most memorable came at the 2011 memorial service for Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Before beginning the song, Martin told the audience that Coldplay had once played “Yellow” for Jobs a decade earlier.

“We played this song for Steve 10 years ago, and he said it was shit,” Martin joked as the audience laughed. “He said we’d never make it.”

Undoubtedly, Jobs, like Noel Gallagher, would have eventually come around.

As a certified shred wizard and guitar teacher to the stars, Joe Satriani knows what it takes to reach the upper echelons of guitar playing prowess. For others to follow in his footsteps, though, he says there are two “small realities” to get acquainted with.

From Steve Vai, who once turned up on his doorstep with an electric guitar bereft of strings, to Kirk Hammett, Alex Skolnick, and Primus’s avant-garde virtuoso, Larry LaLonde, Satriani has a track record of helping players reach nosebleed-inducing heights. But he also understands that many budding players are preoccupied with speed and technicality as they plot their path to the summit of Shred Mountain.

But before a note has even been played in a guitar lesson led by the 15-time Grammy nominee, there are some home truths to reinforce. What they are, he’s revealed in a new interview with Andy Guitar.

“Right away, musicians have to be told some real realities, which is, you might be fast, you might be slow, that doesn’t really matter,” he underscores. “It’s going to come if you practice, or it’s not going to come if you don’t practice. So, that’s settled right away.”

The second reality hinges on this concept and is far more pertinent.

“Don’t waste hours, weeks, and years trying to get to 224 beats per minute on the metronome. No one’s ever going to want to come see you do that, so who cares?” he continues. “But if you don’t know the psychological impact of a Lydian mode or Lydian dominant mode, and why they’re different, and how they’re going to affect the audience differently, then you can’t really call yourself a composer.”

That last phrase is interesting. Cory Wong used similar words last year when dividing the internet when he set his bar for guitar excellence, even if that excludes icons of the instrument like Stevie Ray Vaughan. The difference is, where Wong’s focus was on players needing to know what note they’re playing at all times from a theoretical standpoint, Satriani’s focus is less on the fundamentals. It’s about what the note means in the wider context.

“When is this note the right note, and when is it a wrong note?” he asks. “You know it’s not really right or wrong; it’s cause and effect. That’s a hard thing to teach people. We’re in control, but only if you know.”

Way back in 1992, Neil Young told Guitar Player that music schools and the future of rock are doomed if the emphasis is wrongly placed on honing flawless technique over feel, with the belief that one note is enough. Ironically, he used Joe Satriani as an example of a “high caliber” musician who is taking the guitar to new heights, but whose speedy playing style he can’t relate to on a personal level.

David Gilmour, meanwhile, pivoted to a more tuneful playing style – championing one heartfelt, rung-out note over burning the maple fretboard of his Black Cat Strat when it came to guitar solos – but that move was practically forced upon him. He says he could not shred, no matter how hard he tried, so he learned to use simplicity as a weapon. Wolfgang Van Halen, meanwhile, says his dad aligns with this mindset far more than his reputation would suggest.

How do you play the opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night,” the Beatles’ hit single released on this day in 1964?

More than 60 years later, no one can say with complete certainty.

One of the most recognizable sounds in rock history has inspired decades of debate among musicians, scholars and Beatles obsessives. Even George Harrison gave conflicting accounts over the years of exactly what he played, and with John Lennon, Harrison and producer George Martin all gone, the mystery may never be fully solved.

Part of the challenge is that what listeners hear as a single chord is actually the combined sound of as many as four instruments: Martin’s piano, Lennon’s Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric, Harrison’s Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string electric and Paul McCartney’s Höfner bass. Some analyses omit Martin’s contribution altogether, but however you account for the parts, the famous opening can’t be reproduced faithfully by a single guitarist.

“We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack album, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning,” Martin explained. “The strident guitar chord was the perfect match.”

Indeed it was. More than six decades later, the chord remains a favorite subject for YouTube creators, with countless videos attempting to decode its secrets. But one of the earliest serious investigations appeared in the pages of Guitar Player magazine in 2005, roughly a year before YouTube’s public rollout.

The investigator was Dr. Jason I. Brown, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who used a mathematical technique known as Fourier transform to decompose the recording into its component frequencies.

As Brown explained, one of the most common transcriptions at the time defined the chord as G, D, F, C, D and G, all played on a single guitar. The Beatles Complete Scores, meanwhile, described it as a composite chord made up of G, D, G, C, D and G played by Harrison on his Rickenbacker 12-string, D, G, C and G played by Lennon on his Gibson acoustic-electric, and a low D played by McCartney on bass.

To test those theories, Brown analyzed a one-second digital recording of the chord. After applying a Fourier transform to the audio, he rounded the 48 loudest frequencies to their nearest semitone.

“These are the notes that comprise that marvelous chord,” he wrote. The analysis identified nearly two dozen distinct pitches spanning nearly five octaves: A2, D3, F3, G3, A3, C4 (middle C), D4, G4, A4, C5, D5, G5, B5, C6, D6, E6, F#6, G#6, A6, D7, E7, F7 and G7.

“We see now why the most popular versions of the chord must be wrong,” Brown wrote. “Each shows a low G2 being played, but this note is definitely not included in the frequency analysis. Examining the frequencies, I found that one D3 is louder than the others, which suggests it is a bass note played by McCartney—but it was impossible to match the other low notes to Harrison’s 12-string, even taking into account the notes played on Lennon’s six-string.”

The breakthrough came when Brown stopped assuming the sound came entirely from guitars.

“With a bit more deductive work, I found the presence of the piano did indeed solve the frequency problem,” he wrote. “The important point is that the piano is there because the math says it is.”

Brown’s conclusion doesn’t answer every question surrounding the famous opening chord, and it’s unlikely the debate will ever disappear entirely. But it does explain why generations of guitarists have struggled to recreate it: they were trying to play what was never the work of a single guitar in the first place.

The Rolling Stones release their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, today, so it seems like the right time to visit this classic interview with Keith Richards from April 1983. It was a good time for the Stones. As GP Editor Tom Wheeler wrote in his original intro (abridged below), "In most respects the Stones have few peers, and in terms of sheer durability they have none, having somehow survived at or near the top of the rockpile for the last two-thirds of rock and roll's entire history.

"They've gone the distance and still pack a heavyweight punch: Their latest albums (Tattoo You and the live concert LP Still Life) are among their most vital works, and their most recent tour was astonishingly successful – four million fans applied for the New York tickets alone." Who would have thought that 43 years later, they would still be doing it?

Back in 1964 when Lennon and McCartney wanted to hold your hand, Jagger and Richards were walkin' the dog. Constantly compared to the Beatles and often to The Who, the Rolling Stones staked out their original turf with gritty music and a don't-mess-with-me stance. The Beatles disintegrated a dozen years ago, and the Who say they've unpacked their road cases for the last time. The Stones are in the studio, and they're not about to bid farewell to anyone.

Keith Richards stands in the eye of the hurricane. Around him swirls a rock and roll empire with 20 years history and mystery, success and excess, acclaim and controversy. He and his mates have been called many things by discerning critics and impassioned fans. One description recurs: The World's Greatest Rock And Roll Band.

Some reasons for all this are apparent. First, Keith's confederates could hardly be more impressive: Mick Jagger, rock's most prominent singer; guitarist Ron Wood, already a star when he joined the group in 1975; plus a drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, a powerhouse rhythm section revered the world over by fans and fellow musicians alike. Other strengths are equally obvious – the consistently fine Jagger/Richards compositions, the dynamic arrangements, the meticulous recording. Just as important is the way Keith Richards changes chords from G to C.

The band is built around a two-guitar sound, itself an extension of Richards' own uniqueness. He helped blur forever the line between lead and rhythm guitar, substituting a riffing technique in which melodic embellishments are grafted onto a vigorous rhythmic treatment of chords, partial chords, and low-register lines. He often employs a 5-string open tuning (with or without capo) that facilitates adding the melodic notes to a major chord--particularly the 4th, the 6th, and the 9th. Among many examples, "Brown Sugar" is a classic killer.

Keith's most obvious influence is Chuck Berry. The original "Carol" is a textbook of Berry's double-string licks and was covered on The Rolling Stones, the debut album. Keith has had a taste for Berry flavoring ever since. Perhaps his most highly stylized nod to the St. Louis rocker is his long solo in "Bitch," where Keith repeatedly turns the beat around, turns it inside out – weaving through the horns, sneaking up on the back-beat, making the style his own.

Chuck Berry adapted boogie-woogie piano techniques for the guitar's lower register, and this distinctive two-string rhythm pattern became another Stones staple. Richards made his mark on its development by sometimes slowing it down, piledriving the downbeat, and stoking up the tone to a grand raunch: a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Richards' role in the group has been analyzed countless times. The consensus: Without Keith Richards there wouldn't be a Rolling Stones. Ron Wood explains, "In other bands they follow the drummer; the Stones follow Keith, and they always have." While some have even asserted that "Keith Richards is the Rolling Stones," the guitarist himself is the first to stress that any band member's indispensability is a two-way street: "The musicians are there to serve the band. All that matters is whether something furthers the overall sound."

Keith's vision is rooted in a keen awareness of the power of the guitar – acoustic or electric – not only as a rhythm or solo instrument, but as a musical paintbrush capable of immense sonic canvases. He conceives a complex sound and knows how to get it. And yet to him a piece of music, like a real band, is a living, breathing creature existing apart from his conception of it. So while a particular project may be planned, Keith's sense of the music's own inherent magic keeps him flexible and spontaneous, adjusting as he goes.

On many contemporary recording sessions, musicians are put in compartments to minimize leakage (one instrument "leaking" into another's microphone), and the result is a compressed sound that fills every niche. Stones records are virtual opposites, roaring with heavy artillery but airy and spacious as well. While every sound counts, the spaces, the holes, are no less important.

The band's raw materials may be the deceptively simple basics of rhythm and blues, but with the air crashing around like a cyclone, the effect is complex, even abstract.

Rough edges on doubled guitars may be as important as seamless overlaps. An "extra" guitar part – mixed far in the distance to work on subconscious levels – may be as essential as obvious elements. As co-producer (credited or uncredited) on virtually every record, Keith Richards has proved to be both a master of the bold stroke and a subtle colorist, evoking not only the thunder and lightning but also a sky to put it in. For the Rolling Stones, atmosphere is everything.

For many the sound and fury of the band is a transcendental experience. Although the musicians are gifted, the songs excellent, and the recordings finely tuned, the effect is not so much that of hearing sophisticated technicians processed through state-of-the-art technology. It's more like hearing the world's greatest garage band in the world's biggest garage.

Up in his hotel room (classic Keith Richards, it is part Versailles Palace, part blues dive), Keith's dad Bert is smoking a pipe, and his son Marlon – who could dial room service before he could read – is drawing. A cassette bag is crammed with rockabilly, early Dylan, reggae, unmixed Stones, the raunchiest R&B, and more. An old Everly Brothers hit is playing, and delighted Keith Richards identifies a distinctive lead guitar lick: "Chet Atkins!"

An hour later, Keith is in the corner playing piano like Ray Charles and singing ballads to himself in a voice cracked with emotion. He plays a wistful "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and then launches into some Jerry Lee Lewis, his foot bashing the floor in tempo.

Ron Wood blows in and warmly embraces his partner-in-guitar. In minutes, the two old friends are plugged in, guitars barely in tune, jamming on a medium-tempo 12-bar blues in A. Keith leans over to the black Fender Deluxe Reverb and twists the volume knob from 2 to 6. Ron Wood grins and rips into a solo. The real Keith Richards goes a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Chuck Berry was a major influence on your guitar style.

That's quite a left hand he's got there [laughs].

Are the reports true that he punched you in the face?

Yeah, a little while back he did. I came up behind him to say hello. He didn't know it was me and didn't want to be bothered, but I got a nice note from him a little later, actually.

The "Bitch" solo is in a Chuck Berry style...

Which I do every night.

...and the beat turns around several times. Was that completely spontaneous, or semi-planned?

Maybe listeners knew a year or six months later that the beat turned around, but at the moment I wasn't conscious of that. It comes so naturally, as it's always happened, and it's always given that extra kick when the right moment comes back down again.

That's what rock and roll records are all about. I mean, nowadays it's "rock" music. But rock and roll records should be two minutes, 35 seconds long, and it doesn't matter if you ramble on longer after that. It should be, you know – wang, concise, right there. Rambling on and on, blah blah blah, repeating things for no point – I mean, rock and roll is in one way a highly structured music played in a very unstructured way, and it's those things like turning the beat around that we'd get hung up on when we were starting out: "Did you hear what we just did? We totally turned the beat around [laughs]!" If it's done with conviction, if nothing is forced, if it flows in, then it gives quite an extra kick to it.

You turn the beat around often. There's the intro to "Start Me Up," where it turns around twice in the first ten seconds, "Little Queenie," where Charlie turns around the intro, and the end of the bass part on "Street Fighting Man," which you played yourself.

Right. You can do that in a band that's got enough confidence not to collapse when it happens. It can make things much more interesting, and it sounds great as long as nobody's fazed by it. You have to be able to keep it straight, thinking about what you're doing at the moment and also about where you're going to take it. I guess that just comes from 20 years, same location.

So many of the things you play, if you were to put them on paper and analyze them musically....

What a mess [laughs]!

For example, the opening of "Start Me Up" is a simple chord change, and yet it's recognizable as the Rolling Stones. The sound is so specific. Would altering anything about it – the echo, tone setting, string gauge – change the impact?

I just can't get the things to sound any different [laughs]. They always come out just about the same when it comes to recording, because without really thinking about it I shift slowly as I go. And no matter where I start, no matter what the guitar or the string, sooner or later I'll get to where the rest of the band is going.

It's sort of a trademark sound, but it's more than that because of the way I go about getting it, working it through with what's going on, rather than getting the sound first and then pushing it on the band. A lot of it is adjusting to Ronnie, and Ronnie to me, which brings a certain continuity as well as a certain flexibility.

You've often mentioned the two-guitar sound as a cornerstone of the band. On Still Life there's a different kind of interplay – probably tighter than ever.

Well, Ron's getting better [laughs]. I think that's due to the fact that Ron and I have been working together now since '75, and the more we play together the tighter we get it.

It sounds like you and he are two sides of the same coin, like you could almost change places.

We do [laughs]. If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me. And you think at the time, "Oh, my God, what a gap," but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very un-thought-about way. We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.

When Ron joined in 1975, did the band have to make a change in the way you interact or rehearse?

No, that was the beauty of it. He was already so familiar with our stuff. After Mick Taylor left, we rehearsed for about six months with a lot of good guitar players from all over the world. And we could work with them, you know; they could work with us. But when Ronnie became available and suddenly walked in, that was it, there was no doubt. It was easy.

With Mick Taylor's style so well defined as a lead guitarist, there seemed to be a clear distinction between the two of you.

It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor. It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't a great rhythm player, so we ended up taking roles. When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally.

But also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar, and this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. But even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, "You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet." With Ron, if he drops his pick, then I can play his lick until he picks it up, and you can't even tell the difference.

Had you and Ron worked together very much before he joined the group?

Yes, for about 18 months. And I did a lot of work on Ronnie's first and second solo albums. He's never been the same since.

Have you found that your styles affected each other, now that you've been working together for several years?

Yeah, that's what's great about it. I neglect something, and he makes up for it. That's the great thing about two guitar players, because if you get it right, you know when to lift one of his licks, and vice versa, without thinking about it. He lifts more of mine than I do of his [laughs].

When the two of you are onstage, how much of your interaction is subject to change?

It depends on the sound system. If you're going to make a change, you need to hear what you're doing in the first place, so a lot of that gets down to technicalities of the stage monitoring. On our last tour in '81 we had those long ramps out to the sides of the stage. The idea of having that stage is to get out where most performers don't get with audiences of that size. Well, if the monitors aren't working out there, and you're just making signs at the sound guys instead of concentrating on your playing, then you forget it, just leave it. But if the sound's good and you can hear everything, then you tend to give it a bit more, adjust more to what's going on, change as you go.

Do you have much trouble communicating onstage at that volume?

It's all done by semaphore and eye signals. It's the only way you can really do it. But the thing is, there isn't that much need for communication or looking at each other, except when things go wrong. Otherwise the communication is just through the music. But if things are going wrong, then everybody's looking at me: "How's he going to get out of this?"

Your records have sort of an indoor sound, the effect of enclosed space. Are you happy with your outdoor concert sound?

Never totally satisfied with live things, no. If you were, you wouldn't keep trying to make it better. But I'm not disappointed with it. You just look forward to being able to do it better. You're always wondering about the people way at the back, what they're hearing. There are so many people and they're so far away – you have no idea what's being heard out there. You're hoping for the best and taking it for granted that the sound crew are doing the job for you and giving out the sound onstage as much as possible to everywhere in the place. But there's the one problem, always that nagging doubt there – they're not all getting it the way they should.

Your live versions of songs are often faster than their studio counterparts – for example, "Shattered" on Still Life. Is that intentional, to make it more exciting for the audience, or is it the adrenaline of performing?

It's the tempo of the whole gig, the adrenaline – especially the huge gigs. The show just takes its own speed from the start, and you go with it. It might be great or it might be terrible, but the tempos one night may be twice as fast as the night after. And you can always learn when you listen back, you see? You may find, "Wow, that should've been that tempo all along--we made the record too slow [laughs]!"

On the live version of "Just My Imagination," in the second half the guitar figure changes some notes and sustains others for a country feel, almost like a pedal steel feeling.

That's Ron and me doing the parts together, and you get that sustaining thing. We aren't using a pull-string or a lot of slide right now, but Ron plays pedal steel, a bit on "Shattered" and "Faraway Eyes." Country music's a part of the way we do that kind of thing, and it comes through even if it's done with straight guitars sort of pulling up against each other.

Isn't there some slide in "Neighbours" on Tattoo You?

No, but it sounds like it. Ron plays that solo, and a lot of his things on regular guitar sound like they're slide. He's wangled a way of playing it without them, because he keeps losing them [laughs]. At the start of that solo he's bending about four strings. Sounds like slide.

On Still Life's "Let Spend The Night Together," is that a 12-string doubling the vocal melody on the interlude, which ends with "keep on smilin' baby"?

That's one reason we haven't done that one a lot on stage – we could never figure a way 'round that middle bit. No 12-string – just the two run-of-the-mill guitars together, doin' it tight.

The mix of the two guitars on Still Life adjusts in places to the parts you're playing. Is that sort of detail up to your discretion?

Well, I listen for those things, but I may not be there for the first mix. Especially with live stuff, I'd rather let the guy who recorded it get his work into it. Then I get sent the dubs. From the whole tour you have several takes of each song to pick from.

The set opened with "Under My Thumb," and it's hard to get the right take, because you're playing right there early, when everybody's trying to get together and nobody knows what's going on. Every night it takes 15 minutes for the sound guys and the recording guys and everybody to fall in and get adjusted, so choosing the take for the first number requires a bit of work.

The endings, too. You always wish you could get a couple of takes of the beginning and ending of a show as good as it is in the middle. But every night it's a different problem – you're in a different place, so you see what happens when you get going and take it from there.

On recent tours you've taken occasional breaks from the outdoor arenas, getting into clubs. Do you miss the smaller venues?

Yeah, always. You hate to do the same thing all the time. I love playing the ballparks and the domes, you know. For the satisfaction of the band it gives you a terrific buzz – so many people. But by doing just one thing all the time you forget how to do anything else. You just become good at playing the domes and never learn anything else again.

I've always found that if you put in a few 3,000-seaters on the tour, and even 300, it gives the band itself a confidence quite apart from anything else. Then you can deal with 300 people or 90,000 and know how to play it. And probably the band feels that working in one of the nice old places like the Fox Theater in Atlanta is kind of more satisfying most of the time.

Because of the immediacy?

Yeah. The sound isn't dissipated totally, and you don't have to worry about the wind factor and things like that. It's much simpler and easier to get – it's just [snaps fingers] turn it up, get to it.

Didn't you change to Mesa/Boogie amplifiers on this last tour?

The '81 tour of the States was the first time we used the big Mesa/Boogie amp and speaker setups on the road, but we've been using Boogie amps in the studio since about '77, and on the stage since the '78 tour, slaving small Boogies through Ampeg cabinets.

Do you pay much attention to speakers?

No. I only think about them when I don't like 'em. If I plug in and to me it sounds like crap, then I ask a question, but otherwise, I leave it, because there are guys far more versed. I don't know what speakers are coming out every year. I find something and I stick with it for five or six years. It's like some of the gadgets I use. Guys who work with us and are close to us, will say, "You should try this: I think this is going to add to what you're doing." I might try it, although I don't go around looking at specifications and all that.

Were you using any effects onstage in '81?

An MXR analog delay on a few numbers, and a phaser on "Beast Of Burden" and on or two others.

How about the very unusual sound on "Shattered"?

That was the MXR phaser – the 100 model – and I damped the guitar. That's what gives it that sound on the studio version as well.

What kind of wireless systems were you and Ron using on the last tour? Can you get the right tones as easily?

We've been using Nady wireless things since '78, and the tone is a lot better, because cords get stepped on and knotted up and they start rattling a little bit, and you lose tone.

In the last few years there's been a new aspect of your tone – more distinct, with a slight click, almost like a slap bass in rockabilly. "Hang Fire" and "She's So Cold" are examples, and especially the last section of "Little T&A."

It's our equivalent of that rockabilly thing. I think you'll find that comes from using a lot of analog delay on Ron's guitar or my guitar or both of them, and I dampen it. That'll give you that ticka-tacka-ticka. I always use that green MXR analog delay. I'm told it's quite out of date now and old-fashioned, but I got it free and I forgot that time marches on and they make better ones or so they say. I don't know. I've worked very well with those MXR things, and they've been very reliable.

Which guitar are you playing for that sort of stripped-down rockabilly sound on "Little T&A"?

A Telecaster, a '57 set up in 5-string tuning. It's open G 5-string, without the heavy string. Right there from the bottom up it's: G, D, G, B, D. The whole idea of getting rid of the sixth string in the open tuning was having the root on the bottom.

The suspended chords in the verses of that song are typical of your riffing style.

That's just one of the things you can do with open tuning. You can get a drone going, so you have the effect of two chords playing against each other. One hangs on because you've just got to move one finger – or two at the most – to change the chord, so you've still got the other strings ringing. It's a big sound.

Mick was using an Ovation Adamas steel-string on the tour. Were you satisfied with the instrument's performance?

I think they're very nice-sounding guitars. A nice neck. But I can never get used to that shape, that... dish. They're probably the best way of amplifying an acoustic guitar and having it still sound like an acoustic. There's no doubt. Probably a million readers will write in and say the Stones don't use acoustic guitar that much onstage, so we don't know shit, but for what we need, for a couple of numbers, it's adequate.

How did you come about acquiring your new guitars?

Friends of mine introduced me to Doug Young, who built them. After seeing some of his things, I knew he was capable of exceptionally fine work, so I more or less commissioned him to build me a guitar. He ended up making me two – the red one is a gift for my girlfriend, actually. Basically, that's the lowdown.

Did you specify exactly what you wanted?

Not really. We didn't have to say very much about it. I was very impressed by the things I saw, and I wanted a similar guitar for myself. But it's also this patronage that players and builders can get involved with – Renaissance man, and all that, the old system of someone like me encouraging guys like Doug. His guitars are too good not to be given help.

So you didn't request a certain wood for the fingerboard, a certain pickup design?

Not too much, no. I said, "Make me a guitar." I figure that's the difference between working with an artist, as opposed to just anyone. I mean, if you want a suit made, you don't want to have to tell the tailor how to do everything. You want to find someone who doesn't need all that, you see? It's more, "I want to see what you can build for me." There are very few people like that. Most people, you have to sit on their ass and watch them: with Doug I just left him to it. I was in Paris for months, recording. I'd almost forgotten it was going on until I saw what he'd done.

Have you had a chance to play them in the studio yet?

Not in the studio, but I went out and banged on them a bit. I'll be back in the studio soon, and then we'll beat them into shape [laughs].

After playing hundreds of guitars, what quality in these instruments made you take notice?

It's a recognition you develop. I think, and I'm sort of instinctive about these things – sit down and play it, feel it. I knew that Doug was thinking along the same lines as myself, but far ahead, because I'm not technical. Only after the event of building it when I've got it in my hands, can I know what's right. I can't say, "Well, it was the magnificent electronics," or "the wonderful bonding of the woods," and each specific thing. It was simply a fine instrument. Lovely wood!

Can you judge the sound of an electric before you plug it in?

Maybe to a certain extent. If the neck and the action feel right, you're more than halfway home, even before hearing the electronics. Things like weight and the density of the wood indicate certain things, but you simply need to play it to really tell. And it doesn't take long.

On record you've used several very different types of guitars – Gibson Les Pauls and ES-335s, Fender Telecasters, and others. And yet a listener can tell right away that it's you, from stylistic clues, but also from the sound alone.

I use a whole load of different guitars, that's true, but they're not all that dissimilar in type. I mean, ninety percent are probably Telecasters, old ones, but more than that, you can't really separate style and sound, you see. People do separate them when they're talking about music, but all of that often misses the whole point.

You're suggesting that the style is the sound?

Yes, part of it, more than any particular tone setting or pickup or anything like that. I'll just adjust to the sound of the track as we go – the sound of the bass drum and especially Ronnie's guitar. The style is adjusting along with the sound. There's never a conscious effort to get that "Honky Tonk Woman" tone or a thing like that. You may get it or you may not. But that's not what you're thinking about. You're thinking about the track.

Some people were amazed to read in your first Guitar Player cover story that on "Street Fighting Man" there are no electric guitars.

Two acoustics, one of them put through the first Philips cassette player they made. It was overloaded, recorded on that, and then hooked up through a little extension speaker, and then onto the studio tape through a microphone.

You've paid quite a bit of attention to acoustic guitars in rock music.

Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer. But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it. You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric, or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it, and when I wrote the thing I thought, "I'm not going to get a better sound than this." And "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the same, too. That's acoustic guitar.

Early Everly Brothers records have huge acoustic guitar sounds. Were any of them influential?

Yeah, all of their records, and also there's the fact that the first major tour we ever did was supporting the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. Plenty to learn [laughs] in a real short time, following those guys around. The Everlys came on with just their trio and themselves, and it was great. On their recordings there is a certain power in the steel-string.

It's a different instrument from electric – not that different in the way you play it, but in terms of the sound. There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track. You'll be despairing, nothing working, hashing away, Take 43 on electric guitar, and somebody will say, "Why don't you try it on acoustic?" And you try it one time and you've got it.

What kind of acoustics do you like to use?

Old Martins – several types of them – and certain Gibsons, particularly old Hummingbirds.

Do you have a certain kind of room that you like to record in?

Yes, but it's hard to tell whether it'll work until we get in there. And when we find a room I hate to lose it. Over the years we've been through four or five or maybe more of these ace rooms. Sometimes you walk in and it just happens, but whether it takes a long time or not to produce the sound you want, you don't want to lose it.

We're still working in the same place now that we've been in since Some Girls, a good big room. Pathe Marconi is the name – it's EMI's studio in Paris. The room we use is what they consider their sort of storeroom for the orchestra, or a rehearsal place. It's not Studio A, B, or C. It doesn't even have a number.

How important is the sound of the room itself?

The room is as important as the band and the producer and the song and the engineer. The room is at least as important as all that to the total sound. You can't separate rock and roll music instrument by instrument. You destroy the whole structure of it. Rock and roll music can only be recorded by jamming the sound all together.

Once you've got something to work right in the studio, do you try to use all the same equipment onstage?

Yeah, pretty much, just a larger version. I've never found the Stones or anybody else made great records by using huge stacks in the studio and blasting away. You can get very powerful-sounding records playing very quietly, and with relatively small amps. Small amps turned way up have the tension you're trying to get anyway, and it sounds big. It also gets back to that recognition of the acoustic guitar and what it can do, and what you can get if you're thinking of the mix right from the beginning and all the way through the recording.

Years ago, the mixing technique on many of your records broke quite a few rules. Did you realize from the outset of your career that a new way of mixing would be necessary?

We knew we wanted it without knowing the way to get it. It was just what sounded right to us, and also because we were brought up in the era when a four-track was a rarity. We started recording at a point when the best sound you got was all air and all the room sound and everything was leakage and jammed together, and the vocal fought its battle with the rest of the instruments.

We tried it the usual way, but whenever we brought the vocals up we'd never like the mix as much. What always amazed me was that if the record was popular, most people would know the words – at least the key ones – within a few weeks, no matter how much the voice was buried. Years back, in the studio, I always thought about those other records where the voice was too far forward, so you never really got a sound. You just got a vocalist with some accompaniment.

Which wasn't what you were after?

Not for us, but you see, you've got to treat each type of music in the appropriate fashion. I mean, if you're mixing the Everly Brothers, then you've got those fantastic goddamn voices and you put them out front as much as you can! But even those guys never sacrificed the sound of the record for the sound of their voices. They had it all there, quite a light sound, but always very powerful as well, never wimpy.

Did record companies ever tell you or your producers and engineers that you should be mixing Mick Jagger like the Everly Brothers?

They'd try, but we set it up so there was no way they had anything to say about it. They'd complain, and we'd tell them to @#$%& off.

Do you ever splice takes, either rhythm tracks or solos?

Sometimes. Not so much on solos. We tend to record them real long – go on and on, but as long as I know that somewhere in that seven or eight or eleven minutes there is that two-and-a-half minutes that says it all, then I don't mind going on, because I'll ferret it out and find it.

Is it too soon to start talking about what's on the next album?

I can only report that it's going magnificently for us, so much stuff coming out and starting to sound real good. We've only been in the studio a little over two weeks, which is only like a warm-up, and we've cut about a dozen cassettes of tape already. Everybody's happy about it. When we're done, we'll start thinking about the next tour.

In the choruses of "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Start Me Up," the bass leaves huge holes for the guitars to fill. Does Bill Wyman get a lot of direction from you in that regard, or is that something he's always done on his own?

I would say in the late '60s, early '70s, Bill would be given more direction – not always the right direction [laughs] – but Mick and I would be more inclined to say, "Do this and that." Sometimes he comes and asks, but less and less. You know, relationships change.

But Bill, he's kind of like Charlie. He just keeps [long pause] amazing me. He just keeps getting better. He's not always what I'm expecting. I know he's good, and he's always there. But I kind of take his playing for granted. And then when I listen to what he's doing, I realize he's not always playing the same thing. He's much better than we think. You see, we're the world's worst Rolling Stones critics [laughs]. We tear the shit apart before anybody gets a chance to hear it.

Do you practice very much aside from band rehearsals for tours or recording sessions?

In a way I do, because the guitar is always there, and I always play it or the piano. I do it in bursts. You kind of wait for it. You can't force it and sit down and say, "Now I'm going to write a hit song."

You've recorded a lot of material on your own – just vocals with piano or guitar. Do you plan to ever release any of it?

No, not releasing it as such. I just do it because I like to play a lot of great songs for myself, and it helps me to write. The way I write songs is to sit down and play 25 great songs by other people and hope that one of mine drips off the end.

Have many of the songs that you've written for the Stones been composed on the piano?

Sometimes, yeah. I'm such an amateur on piano, and that can help. You play guitar every night and get to know it so well, and a lot of great songs are really accidents. On the piano, I may come across something I wouldn't have done on guitar.

You've sung lead on some of the band's hits, and sang "Little T&A" on the last tour, but none of your lead vocals are included on the album.

Well, if I sing the lead vocals, then what's he going to do [laughs]? There's quite a bit for each of us to think about already. And I do sing lots of parts with Mick, always.

For years Mick has been reported to be a proficient guitar player, and yet he only started to play a lot onstage during the Still Life tour. Why now?

I think he feels a little more confident about it. He's a fine drummer, too. And he's not bad on keyboards, in his own way – in the same way that I am, fiddling about to write and to get some interesting ideas.

One thing that's held Mick back with guitar onstage is that playing is one thing – knowing how to get an instantly good sound off the amp is another. That is something he's still got to work on. It keeps him back from doing so much, because if it doesn't sound good to him in the first six bars, he doesn't have the experience and the knowledge of dealing with the amplifier. He might be playing great, but he's got a shitty sound on the amp – and then he's got his singing to think about.

Are you playing much National or Dobro these days?

Not doing as much of that as I'd like – that goes with not living anywhere in particular. You need to sort of sit down every day and do that. I hate to travel with instruments like that. I think you just need a certain environment when you're playing like that, and since that's not the way we are able to live, and probably wouldn't anyway, I don't get as much of a chance. You know, some things you don't get as much of a chance to do as you wish you had.

For young guitarists who are into Chuck Berry or the Rolling Stones today, what do they face, trying to make records now? Compared to when you started, what's different?

24-track machines. Otherwise, not that much has changed from what we faced. There's all this stuff about new equipment and changing styles and all that, but the point is, you still face a lot of rip-off artists, and you face a lot of work.

You and Pete Townshend seem to have much in common, at least on the surface – the components of your styles, your use of the guitar, the way your bands are compared in the press. Do you feel any particular kinship with him?

You mean Trousers? Now let me see – one reason for that is probably that we started playing the same clubs almost at the same time. I never took credit for this, but apparently he said that he lifted that arm swing he does from seeing me. I don't recall doing it, but I guess if he says so, he did. It's something I've never been aware of. In certain respects, yeah, we're both coming out in the same place at the same time, more than anything else.

He was quoted as saying that there comes a time for a band to retire, to pass on the torch, so to speak, to younger bands.

I love Peter, but the time to stop is when you can't do it anymore, or when you're fed up. There's no passing on of the goddamn torches. Other people will pick them up anyway, and besides, that's not the point. I don't know if he was accurately quoted, but other people have said it anyway when they can't think of anything else to say.

You see, if rock and roll is what you do, then that's what you do, and that's all. You don't sort of say, "Oh, now I give up and I'll hand it on to this band who I think is quite good." You don't hand it on that way. Pete already handed it on, the same as we did, to some young guys that are playing now, the way we played Chuck Berry. It's not, "Here, I've got to hand you a document." It's the records that you've done that the younger players have listened to and grown up with and sat around learning.

What would you like to be doing a year from now?

Accepting a platinum record, for one thing [laughs]. I'd like nothing to change too much, just to do what we do, but be able to do it better.

After one of your court trials you commented on systems of justice and juries of your peers, and how that all related to being a musician.

Yeah, I was trying to make the point that when I am thrown in a court, or anybody like myself is thrown in court, the jury has got absolutely no experience in the musician's way of life, so they're not your peers. I know justice is often rough and so on, but they don't know what it's like to be on the road for 20 years, and I can't explain it to them now. So I was saying, give me a jury of my peers, with Chuck Berry, with Muddy Waters. And put Ron in there, too [laughs] – I mean, I can drop him a few bucks.

People keep calling you the world's greatest rock and roll band, and they have been for a long time.

It's embarrassing.

Are there any drawbacks to their saying that?

Yeah, you've gotta keep being it [laughs]! I've decided that every night there's another world's greatest rock and roll band, because one night somebody has an off gig, and some other shit band has a great gig. That's one of the great things about rock and roll – every night there's a different world's greatest band.

We've been maybe a little more consistent, for whatever reason, mainly when we're going together on a tour and also because we've managed to stick together. The chemistry – that's got nothing to do with musicianship. It's got to do with personality and characters and being able to live with each other for 20 years.

People have been predicting the end of the Stones...

...from the beginning [laughs]!

With the kind of life you seem to lead, longevity might appear to be the last thing you'd be able to gain. What's the secret?

The secret is, there is no secret. It's finding people that not only play well with you, but that you can get along with. There's no constant battle about who's Mister Big, none of those problems. When I see Charlie and Bill – I ain't seen 'em for a few weeks – it's like a pleasure. Ron says we're his closest friends. I guess that's the only secret.

Is that what it means to play in a band?

Most people don't know what a band is. People have heroes, and they copy them – I mean, we copied things very carefully when we started. But you don't get this picture and then do everything to fit it. You do what you do.

The musicians are there to contribute to the band sound. The band isn't there for showing off solos or egos. A lick on a record – it doesn't matter who played it. All that matters is how it fits. The chemistry to work together like that has to be there. You have to work on it, always – figure out what to do with it.

But basically it's not an intellectual thing you can think up and just put there. It has to be there. You have to find it.

This interview was originally published in the April 1983 issue of Guitar Player. The Rolling Stones' new album, Foreign Tongues, is out now.

If you thought Black Friday was still months away, Guitar Tricks has just pulled a fast one by dropping this mega Summer Black Friday offer on one-year of lessons a whole five months early – get a full access 12-month subscription for just $99; that works out as $8.25 per month and is a massive $861 saving on the full price. This deal runs until 7 August.

In a nutshell, Guitar Tricks is home to over 11,000 technique, style and song lessons, while this deal also bags you personalised learning plans, Bootcamp sessions, and e-books designed to help beginners and intermediate players make genuine progress. As part of this deal, beginners will also get their hands on the Ultimate Beginner Bundle, loaded with newbie-friendly material such as power drills, the 100 Essential Licks Series, a guitar goal planner and more.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to pick up the instrument, or to up your 6-string game, this is your cue. There’s not been a better deal all year. And what’s more, Guitar Tricks is our number one online guitar lessons pick for most players.

Want a look at the highlights of what’s included? I’ve created a comprehensive list, highlighting the best bits from this mega sale.

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Laying the foundations of this plan is Guitar Tricks’ 12-month annual full access to the entire learning platform. Whether you need the structured Core Learning system that can provide human feedback or are sharpening up your technique, there are over 11,000 tutorial videos to dive into. To put this into perspective, annual full access typically costs $359; that saving is worth the package alone.

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Ideal for intermediate players, GT’s Premium Bootcamp comes completely free with this bundle, usually priced at $79. This unlocks one full bootcamp course to help refine your technique or deepen your understanding of a specific area. If there’s a skill you’ve been meaning to master, like fingerpicking or alternate picking, you can enroll in a bootcamp dedicated to it. These long-form lessons are a great way to dig deeper into your playing and finally conquer a technique that’s been holding you back.

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The freebies keep coming, including the 100 Licks Series module. Typically priced at $79, you will get full access to this video series that introduces 100 different licks that are a must-know for any guitarist. Split across genres, from blues to rock and metal, this is a fantastic module for expanding your lick library.

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GT’s Beginner Guide e-book is also included for free, down from $29. It’s an incredibly useful reference tool for new players, highlighting common pitfalls and offering structured practice routines that help build solid technique. Whether you’re just starting out or brushing up on the basics, this guide makes tackling those tricky chords a whole lot smoother.

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An often overlooked part of learning is guitar maintenance, so I was very pleased to see Guitar Tricks include its Setup Guide e-book with this bundle for free. Instead of falling into common mistakes, this shows you how to handle the fundamentals: string changes, truss rod adjustments, and cleaning practices to keep your guitar in tip-top shape.

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When Mastodon released their latest single, “Your Ghost Again”, last month, drummer Bran Dailor hit the band’s relative silence regarding the passing of former guitarist, Brent Hinds, head-on.

“I understand that, from a fan’s perspective, we never really addressed it, he said in an interview promoting the track. “We just couldn’t; it was too much. Some people might be like, ‘Well, I don’t want to listen to it because Brent’s not there, and I’m hurting about that,’ but we are too. I’m still unpacking it.”

Hinds and Mastodon had split in March 2025, with YouTuber and Mastodon superfan Ben Eller drafted in at the last minute for the Tool in the Sand festival, before recruiting Canadian prog fusion ace Nick Johnston permanently. Six months later, Hinds was killed in a motorcycle crash in his hometown of Georgia.

The band paid a brief tribute to him following their next show, in Alaska, with Dailor’s voice breaking as he spoke of the “beautiful and creative” Hinds. But otherwise, Mastodon have been quiet about the virtuoso with whom they spent 25 years, writing eight albums, and scoring a Grammy win for the 2017 track “Sultan’s Curse.”

Now, as the first anniversary of his passing at 51 draws near, the band has released a short film addressing Hinds’ shock departure from the group and his subsequent and untimely death.

“I wasn’t ready to address it,” Dailor says of his speech at the Alaska State Fair. “I didn’t even know what happened. But I also feel like doing all this will hopefully be really beneficial for a lot of the people that are looking at us and being like, ‘Yo, you’re leaving us hanging.’ I totally understand that, and to the fans, I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to be there for them when that happened because I couldn’t for myself.”

The film sees Dailor, alongside guitarist Bill Keliher and bass player and vocalist Troy Sanders, sitting in an Atlanta movie theater, watching archival footage of the band, including a “bright-eyed, busy-tailed” Hinds as they got their big break supporting Iron Maiden in Scandinavia in 2005.

Vitally, they also address his demons, and how he was never able to “switch off” his destructive tendencies.

“There was a certain level that Brent would get to where I just had to excuse myself,” Dailor says. “He wanted you to come into the abyss.”

It was this part of Hinds’ demeanor, they said, that forced the band’s hand. A band meeting was called.

“I had written a very long letter of all the reasons why I’m unhappy. And all the reasons that we’ve tried and pleaded and begged and tried to keep this together, being forever hopelessly optimistic, but to no avail,” says Sanders.

“I started reading my letter, and not even halfway through, Brent realized that all of my issues were directed at him. And it’s the same stuff we’ve had dozens of band meetings about in the past. Before I’m halfway through, he stands up and walks out of the practice space. And that’s the last time I ever saw him.”

Following his departure from Mastodon, Hinds was taken on tour by Marcus King and even recorded a guitar solo with the group. But once more, his wild antics became his undoing. He was reluctantly kicked off the tour.

“We really were coming from a place of love, like maybe if we maybe this will be like some kind of bottom for him; we had to set some boundaries,” says Dailor. “We just wanted that beautiful, amazing creature, Brent, who played incredibly ripping and beautiful solos back. We desperately wanted that guy. But, he showed us time and time again that that person wasn’t coming back without some kind of dramatic change.”

Life in the studio hasn’t always been straightforward for the Rolling Stones. But as the band prepares to drop their second album in three years, having released two in the last 20 before that, it’s safe to say they’ve hit a late-career hot streak.

With Andrew Watt behind the desk once more, and Paul McCartney guesting on his second consecutive Stones record, the British blues rockers are in a rich vein of form, and it seems the writing of Foreign Tongues was in stark contrast to some of their most celebrated records, which, behind the scenes, were sometimes lethargic and drug-addled, at other times tempestuous, or quite possibly a cocktail involving all three.

“It was done pretty quickly,” Mick Jagger tells Zane Lowe of the process that has defined the Stones’ operation in the 2020s. “On the last album, Hackney Diamonds, Andrew and I had a plan. We used to be in the studio and spend ages in there, all night, trying to make up songs that weren’t written, and so we said ‘We’re going for the bulldozer approach’ so no one has too much of a chance to take a song to pieces and say, ‘I don’t really like this, I don’t think it’s going to work.’

“We wanted to do it as fast as possible, and then people get into it, and they put their own stamp on it, change it, and make it better,” he explains. “And we more or less did the same thing here. You hope to get one and a half songs done; to get one done, and everyone knows the next one sort of thing. There were good vibes in there.”

It’s an approach that, admittedly, wouldn’t have been possible when the band relocated to the south of France as tax exiles, as they turned an idyllic villa basement into their makeshift recording studio in the early 1970s.

Keith Richards, the story goes, was so deep into a drug haze at that time that he didn’t even make it into the basement some days, and it was a drug debt that is said to have seen Nellcôte raided, and a score of guitars stolen. However, one has recently and miraculously reappeared. Regardless, it’s no wonder that, as critically acclaimed as Exile on Main St. would prove to be, Jagger calls it “lousy”.

Keef, who has also been speaking to Zane Lowe, was asked how the room a band records in affects the music and its quality.

“It can be very important, and you never know until you get in there and start playing,” he notes. “You’ll always get something out of it, but some rooms you have to fight, and others, you realize that they’re welcoming you in.

“At the same time,” he counters, “you get some really good records out of rooms that initially you’re feeling you’re having to fight with. When you’ve fought, and you’ve made up, they’ve got their own character.”

Richards was one of the driving force during the making of Exile, and looks at the album more fondly.

“I think it was the first album where we didn’t have a 45 [rpm single] hit on it,” he told Guitar World in 2010. “It was an album album. All those musical styles were part of what we’d been picking up while touring America; we were soaking stuff up like sponges wherever we could find it.”

He admits that the cluster of material they took with them to France was “a work in progress,” with the band back then preferring to go the distance and thrash out the material on their own terms, and the “dusty” songs were, he says, very much a product of the environment.

With Jagger and Richards in their advancing years, it’s no surprise that the former is preferring a more wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach even if Richards is still spoiling for a fight.

“Nothing comes easy,” he says. “If it does, it’s not as good as it should be. There’s nothing like a tussle.”

The band has come a long way from the Beatles, who gifted them their first hit single. Watt is helping fuel the band’s latest resurgence, and he thinks he knows the recipe for a successful rock song.

We’ve only just recovered from an absolutely massive 4th of July weekend for deals, but Guitar Center has seen fit to drop a brand new sale to tempt all guitar players. It’s in conjunction with Schecter Guitars, so the theme is very much geared towards lovers of heavy guitar music, but with up to 25% off a range of guitars, amps, and pedals, there really is something for everyone here.

The sale runs from July 9th to August 5th, so there’s plenty of time for you to land a deal. It includes brands like Schecter, Jackson, and Ibanez for your heavy fix, but if you’re more of a traditional player, there are still plenty of great deals on heavyweights like Fender and Gibson.

One of the best deals I’ve seen so far is on this Schecter C-1 Platinum. It's got a massive $288 reduction and is packing a serious spec to go with its stunning looks. In the bridge position, you'll find an EMG humbucker, and the neck has a Sustainiac, which allows for infinitely sustaining lead tones. Add in a Floyd Rose tremolo, and you've got a lot of guitar for well below the $1,000 mark.

Next up, I spied a sweet discount on the iconic Roland Jazz Chorus JC-120. This iconic guitar amp rarely gets any money off, so if you want the ultimate clean base for a pedalboard, then it’s well worth your money with an incredible $300 reduction. I know many guitar players who gig these, and if you like to get your tone from your pedals, it’s the ultimate pedal platform.

Finally, there’s a bunch of Boss pedals discounted in the sale, but this Boss TR-2 Tremolo caught my attention thanks to the ultra-low price. An 18% price cut sees it fall to just $89.99, and if you value simplicity from your pedals, it’s a really great shout with its simple three-knob operation. As you might expect, it's packing all the typical Boss build quality, making it a great choice for gigging guitarists.

Some artists – AC/DC, the Ramones – find their sound and lock in. David Bowie never stood still.

In a new interview, Placebo frontman Brian Molko has revealed the advice the legendary musical chameleon gave to him.

In a new interview, Placebo frontman Brian Molko revealed the advice Bowie gave him. "It reminds me of what David Bowie said to me," he said, "and he said this to everyone. He would always ask you a question: 'Are you comfortable with what you're doing?' And the answer would normally be, Yeah, actually, I am. And then he'd say, 'Well, you're doing it wrong. You need to step out of your comfort zone."

“Never play to the gallery,” Bowie once said. “Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.”

But it was what he said immediately afterward that has often been echoed in the years since his passing in 2016.

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in,” he quipped, “you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of. Go a little bit out of your depth.

“When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

That’s why Bowie felt the need to invent new personas and recalibrate his musical identity in periodic intervals. It’s why “Uncle Arthur”, the skiffling baroque pop ditty that opens his self-titled debut album, is a million miles apart from the throbbing and shadowy jazz-blues-electronica song, “I Can't Give Everything Away,” that closed his final record nearly half a century later. And that's a comparison that could be made across his sprawling discography.

By exploring new sounds and new aesthetics, he continuously challenged himself. He never made the easy move.

Even still, there came a point where, like a certain time lord, he got sick of shedding his skin only to pretend to be someone else. He craved a new kind of discomfort.

“I was happy to buy into the idea of reinvention,” he once told BBC Radio 6 Music. “I got quite besotted with the idea of just creating character after character, and there was a point in the '80s where I felt my characters were getting in the way of myself as a writer, and I endeavored to kill them off and start writing for myself.”

Elsewhere, Earl Slick has reflected on his nerve-wracking debut in Bowie's band, while Jeff Beck, who Bowie had wanted for the Spiders From Mars, proved to be the one that got away.

When Neil Young sat down for an interview with Guitar Player in 1992, grunge had upended the guitar world and reignited a long-running debate over technique versus expression. More than three decades later, his views on the 1990s return to punk-infused music still feels strikingly relevant.

“It’s just rock and roll, but it’s real rock and roll,” he told GP associate editor Jas Obrecht. “Punk and rock and roll are all the same thing. What has degenerated from it — what ‘rock and roll’ is now — is not rock and roll. It’s pop. It’s fabricated for the masses. It’s an imitation — a shoddy semblance of what it was. It’s Perry Como music compared to real rock and roll.”

Young's argument was bigger than the changing tastes of the early '90s. To him, the divide wasn't between punk and classic rock, or grunge and shred. It was between music driven by expression and music shaped for mass consumption.

“Remember when it all started?” he continued. “There was real rock and roll, and then that other music your parents listened to. It’s like rock and roll now is the music that our parents listened to. It’s, like, gone.”

That philosophy extended directly to his guitar playing. When asked what he looks for in an electric guitar solo, Young didn’t bring up speed, precision or technique— he was focused on a sensation.

“Elevation. You can feel it. That’s all I’m looking for,” he said. “You can tell I don’t care about bad notes. I listen for the whole band on my solos. You can call it a solo, because that’s a good way to describe it, but it’s really an instrumental. It’s the whole band that’s playing.”

That perspective also informed his view of formal music education. The 1980s shred boom led to a massive influx of guitarists to Berklee College of Music and music schools like the Musicians Institute. Young saw it as the beginning of the end.

“It paints a pretty doomed picture of the future, doesn’t it?” he asked. “First of all, it doesn’t matter if you can play a scale. It doesn’t matter if your technique is good. If you have feelings you want to get out through music, that’s what matters. If you have the ability to express yourself, and you feel good when you do it, then that’s why you do it. The technical side of it is a complete boring drag, as far as I’m concerned.”

Young — who has steadfastly played a 1953 Gibson Les Paul and 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe for the better part of 60 years — also acknowledged that technical virtuosity has never been his goal.

“I can’t play fast. I don’t even know the scales. A lot of the notes I go for are notes that I know aren’t there. They’re just not there, so you can hit any note.”

But his comments weren’t a dismissal of technical ability. In fact, he reserved some of his highest praise for two of rock’s most celebrated virtuosos.

“I appreciate these guys who play great. I’m impressed by metal bands with their scale guys. I mean, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genius guitar players. They’re unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber.

“But I can’t relate to it. One note is enough.”

British guitar icon Jonny Marr has used his social following to help an American session guitarist recover her lost vintage guitar. But how it ended up in a guitar store several states away is something only FedEx knows.

Based in Western Massachusetts, Ella Feingold, whose resume includes work with Janet Jackson and Bruno Mars, was expecting the delivery of a 1960s Gretsch 6105 hollow-body after purchasing it online. Then it disappeared without a trace.

“FedEx lost my guitar,” she tells her Instagram followers in a newly posted reel. “It was supposed to show up at my house, but it just completely disappeared. It was scanned on the truck; it was like 30 minutes away from my house. Then nothing.”

Hoping to speak to a customer service representative to get to the bottom of the case, Feingold was infuriated to be left dealing with AI chatbots that do little to answer her questions or help her recover the guitar.

Luckily, her friend Marr, who gifted Feingold one of his Signature Special Jaguar guitars last year, stepped in to put some pressure on FedEx and rectify the situation.

Posting on X, he wrote: “So FedEx just loses guitars now? Belonging to renowned guitarist Ella Feingold, too. And one that was scanned and reported to be on the truck? How does that happen? You need to DM her and find her guitar.”

The post may not have had the desired effect in rousing FedEx into action, but given Marr’s status – and 298,000 followers on the platform – the guitar was found by one of his followers: a guitar store over 1,000 miles away. Everyone was very confused.

“I got hit up by a guitar store in Memphis, Tennessee,” Feingold reveals. “They’re like, ‘Hey, a random Gretsch guitar just showed up at our store. We don’t know where it came from, but we saw Johnny Marr’s post, and we’re wondering if this may be your guitar.’

“Don’t ask me how a guitar that was coming to Western Massachusetts somehow ends up in Memphis, Tennessee, of all places.

“I have to thank Johnny Marr, who’s like guitar Batman, who’s a real guitar hero, for finding it,” she adds. “Johnny, I love you, man.”

For FedEx, Feingold opted for some rather more colorful language that we won’t repeat here. The guitar is now making its way to its intended Massachusetts home, but it likely never would have made it there had Marr not stepped in. Now she can get back to being a funk guitar ace.

The former Smiths guitarist is set to sell over 100 guitars from his collection, including six-strings used to record and perform seminal Smiths cuts. But don’t expect to find any satin-finished necks amongst them; his disdain for them runs deep.

Having taught at Berklee College of Music for over 30 years and helped shape a serial Grammy winner into the guitarist he is today, Tomo Fujita knows what separates a good guitar player from a great one. But he feels being obsessed with reaching the next level is a pitfall that ensnares too many players.

John Mayer, undoubtedly a generational guitar hero, is his most famous student, but Fujita has also imparted his wisdom to Soulive’s Eric Krasno and Lettuce’s funk maverick Adam Smirnoff. Beyond them still, countless other players desperate to make a name for themselves on the electric guitar have passed through his office over the last three decades.

Yet those fresh-faced, highly aspirational players are a stark contrast to Fujita’s zen-like demeanor. He isn’t obsessed with being the best of the best, and he feels other guitarists would benefit from taking a break from the chase and learning to be at peace with their talents.

“No matter your field, you want to do excellently,” he tells Zakk Kuhn in a new interview. “You want to get better. You want to go to the next level. But you can do that too much; always chasing the next level or trying to prove something.

“This is what happened to me. I’d work so hard, then I’d see somebody else, and I’d get disappointed or jealous because they were doing so well. It’s natural. We’re human.”

Fujita once famously told a then-unknown John Mayer to quit college and only return when he’d achieved something as a songwriter. The intention was for Mayer to learn to connect with his music and the messages of his songs, rather than being blindsided by technique and book-smart knowledge.

It proved a pivotal moment in Mayer’s career, and Fujita wants that story to resonate with other players, too. Players need to stop focusing solely on the technical aspects of their craft.

“Balance is important,” he nods. “Just like how you need to eat good food, exercise, and sleep well for your health. So, for my mental health, I started to teach myself not to expect too much, too fast.

“If I have a gig in LA, but there’s a snowstorm, and I have to rebook, years ago, I would be so upset because nothing was happening [with my career],” he continues. “But there’s nothing you can do about the weather; you don’t have to hurry. That’s number one.

“Number two is don’t compare yourself to others,” he adds. “If you look around, then you look at yourself, and you fix something, good. You’ve learned from other people. But you don’t have to put yourself down.

“To this day, I don’t think I’m an amazing guitar player. I always have to work on something. But I’m satisfied as long as I’m just above the middle, not the top. If I try to go to the top, I’ll be disappointed.”

Indeed, one quick scroll on social media and you can find umpteen players who seem leagues above us, the scroller, and that can be devastatingly disheartening. For Fujita, being the best isn’t his goal, because if it were, he’d be fighting a losing battle. It’s about players being kind to themselves first and foremost. In doing so, players can learn to be satisfied with being better than many, and to find their level where they lose sight of others’ virtuosity.

When it comes to improvising and jam sessions, Joe Bonamassa recognizes that the days of mindless shredding are long gone: “It’s so unappealing to watch that go down,” he believes. Once more, his mindset is about taste over a need to assert authority over his peers.

“You wanna make music for music’s sake and not your sake,” he says.

Meanwhile, Mayer has reflected on another huge moment in his career after his label’s dismissal of his songs brought him to tears. What happened next, just as that infamous conversation with Fujita did, would go on to define his career.

Whether they’re played in a club, a theater or a stadium, most rock shows are sweaty affairs for musicians. But what’s it like to perform on some of the coldest stages on Earth?

From Metallica’s record-breaking 2013 Antarctica expedition to Van Halen performing in a blizzard and Tesseract gracing a stage made entirely of ice, rock history has delivered some frosty gigs. As far as experiences go, there’s nothing quite like them.

Thrash-metal giants Metallica entered the record books 13 years ago when performing a 10-song set in a packed-out dome near the Argentine Antarctic Base Carlini. In doing so, they became the first musical act to have played a show on all seven of the Earth’s continents.

The 120-strong audience comprised Coca-Cola competition winners from across Latin America, research station scientists from Russia, South Korea, China, Poland, Chile, Brazil and Germany, along with the ship’s crew.

“Part of the deal was we couldn’t disturb the environment, the penguins, and all the incredible wildlife down there,” drummer Lars Ulrich said of the show in 2023 (via Metal Hammer).

Not only was it the first metal show where penguins were of paramount importance, but it also meant that the band had to ditch their tube amps and anything else that might get loud.

The solution was to send the band’s live feed to the audience via headphones, essentially turning the performance into a silent headbangers’ ball. At a time when digital amp modelers were still looked upon dubiously by gear nerds, the band turned to Fractal.

“The initial question is, can we make this work?” James Hetfield’s tech, Chad Zaemisch, later told Guitar World. “From a technician’s point of view, you don’t want to say to the guy you’re working for that what you’re doing is not going to be as good as before.”

Yet, the show went down without a hitch, and Metallica has stayed loyal to Fractal’s Axe Fx modeler ever since. But other bands haven’t been so lucky.

In 1995, Van Halen were in Denver on the Balance tour when a freak blizzard whipped through the city. The weather conditions deteriorated as the show went on, leading to snow accumulating onstage. Still, the band refused to cut the show short, given that so many fans had made the effort to get there. Even with frozen fingers, Eddie Van Halen and company tore through a 21-song set.

It’s a sentiment that U.K. progressive metal band Tesseract can relate to. Two years after Metallica’s glacial gig, the seven-string guitar advocates made their own way into the record books.

As part of Jägermeister’s Ice Cold series of shows at Snow Village in Kittila, Lapland, they became the first band to perform on top of a structure made completely out of ice.

Snow Village in Kittila is built each year from 44 million pounds of snow and 78,000 pounds of ice, and while it looked impressive, the onstage temperature of -4°F was anything but. As Metal Hammer reports, several band members suffered a loss of feeling in their hands after just the first song of soundcheck.

“One of the main challenges is keeping the instruments at the same temperature,” Amos Williams, the band’s bass guitar player, explained. “If the strings become colder during the set, then tuning will become a massive issue.”

“The strings are ice, and that’s making our fingers pretty dead,” Williams told Total Guitar from backstage. “I’ve actually got a heat pad on my palms [under my glove].”

“The bit I’m worried about,” he added, “is snow getting into [our gear], because it isn’t, basically, water? Hopefully nothing’s going to short-circuit.”

Unlike Metallica’s carefully controlled Antarctic performance, neither Van Halen nor Tesseract had the luxury of insulating themselves from the elements. Together, they prove that some of rock’s greatest gigs are remembered not just for the songs that were played, but for the conditions the bands overcame to play them.

It’s not often major manufacturers skip an iteration of a product entirely (imagine if Apple skipped the next iPhone?), but this is exactly what happened with the Mesa/Boogie Mark VII 1x12 Combo. You’ll notice that the Mark VI simply doesn’t exist, and that’s because Mesa spent so long developing it that they opted to skip version 6 and head straight for number 7. It’s also the first Mesa guitar amp to be released during the era of Gibson ownership, making it a standout for many reasons.

The Mark VII includes many nods to the storied history of Mesa amps, and it’s a far cry from the origins of hot-rodded Fender Princetons that gave Randall Smith the platform to start building his own amps. It’s got three channels, and each channel has three different modes, offering what’s essentially a highlight reel of Mesa amps over the years.

Channel 1, based on the classic modded Fender amps, offers a clean, fat, and crunch operation, paying homage to the roots of these classic tube amps. Channel 2 has fat, crunch, and MKVII modes for classic rock crunch. Channel 3 has the rare MKIIB mode, the first of the Mesa amps with a buffered effects loop, the holy grail IIC+ mode, and a MKIV option.

Each channel has the ability to switch in the onboard 5-band EQ section, so you can drastically or subtly alter the tone of your current channel at will. There are also power modes for each channel, with 90W, 45W, and 25W operation available. The EQ section features separate reverb controls for each channel, so you can drench your clean tone while keeping your high gains tight. The FX loop is also switchable per channel.

Moving to the back panel, it’s just as busy as the front with a myriad of options to select from. Each channel has its own option for selecting cabinet simulations, with seven for each channel available via a rotary knob. There’s a DI line output, headphone out, XLR direct out with CabClone impulse response, ground lift switch, and a USB output. Dual 8 and 4ohm speaker outputs sit alongside FX loop send and returns, with a MIDI input for the footswitch, and MIDI Thru/Out and separate MIDI in connectors.

In the preamp section, we have 5x Mesa 12AX7 tubes with 4x Mesa 6L6 tubes in the power amp section, although these can be swapped for EL84 tubes if you prefer. It’s got a 1x12 Celestion Custom 90 speaker, known as the ‘Black Shadow’, with a 50 oz ceramic magnet to help deliver the headroom needed to handle channel 3. The whole thing is housed in a marine-grade, Baltic birch cabinet.

Pulling it out of the box, the Mark VII 1x12 may be comparatively small, but it weighs an absolute ton. It takes quite some effort just to lift it out by the handle, and at nearly 60 lbs, this isn’t an amp you’ll enjoy lifting into the trunk of your car. All of the additional extras are packed into the back of the amp, so to get them out, I have to unscrew the panel. Alongside the footswitch, packed inside are four heavy-duty casters, which are a necessity to install thanks to the heavy weight of the amp.

The cabinet itself is reassuringly solid, with the Black Shadow speaker rear-mounted to the baffle in the center of the frame. The tubes drop down a good portion of the open part of the back panel, shielded by a black cage. On the opposite side, the gigantic transformer takes up a lot of real estate, and on my review model, there’s some leftover transformer varnish that’s dripped down and hasn't been wiped off.

Everything feels well applied on the front panel, with the innumerable knobs and switches reacting nicely to my inputs. The corners of the amp all feature robust protectors, and it includes a good-quality amp cover to keep it safe during travel. I took the Mesa to several recording sessions from home, and although the weight is really something, I don’t doubt its ruggedness when it comes to touring.

When I first switched it on to start dialing in some sounds, I have to admit to feeling a little bit overwhelmed with the options. With three channels that each have three different voices, three power modes, and their own 3-band EQs, it’s hard to know where to start. Thankfully, Mesa includes a handy setup laminate on the top of the amp that gives users a good starting point.

Essentially, what we have here are three different channels: clean, crunch, and lead. Of course, with three amp modes per channel, there’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s the easiest way to break it down. Each channel has an individual EQ, so you can dial in very precise tones for each and switch between them. The reverb is also channel-specific, so you can crank it for the clean stuff, then pull it back for high gain, which is handy.

There’s also a footswitchable additional EQ, which you can sculpt via the sliders at the far end of the front panel. This might be just to change the tone of the core sound, or you can use it to boost certain frequencies. With 5 bands, it’s very flexible, although once you set it, it’s the same for every channel. The FX loop is also switchable for each channel so that you can bring your time-based effects in and out at the push of a button.

Moving to the back panel, there are some very useful options for using the amp at home. I start with the direct XLR out into my audio interface to record some direct tones. You can unplug the speaker here (make sure it’s fully unplugged), and the amp automatically engages the built-in reactive load so that silent recording is possible.

Each channel has a selection of 8 built-in cabinet IRs, and you can load your own into the amp too when connecting it via the USB slot to your laptop or PC. You can also use it in this way with headphones if you just want to practice silently; just remember to unplug the speaker, as the headphone out doesn’t defeat it automatically.

It feels like Mesa has really thought of any use case, making what is a very loud tube amp usable at home, in the studio, or onstage. The footswitch is excellent, giving you complete control over every aspect of the front panel, and the options for recording and silent practice make it probably the most flexible amp I’ve ever played. If you value simplicity, though, this definitely isn’t the amp for you.

I took the Mesa Mark VII Combo to my local recording studio for a bunch of sessions, and boy, is this thing capable. Using it as a clean pedal platform, the tones are very Fender-esque, and I didn’t need to do any tweaking to my pedalboard’s gain staging to get it sounding how I wanted. It took a multitude of pedals with ease, whether I was laying on phase-shifted distortion, modulated delays, or soaring shimmer reverbs.

I was also taken aback by the speaker's sound when played clean. There’s no boxiness at all, and it sounds incredibly full for what is a relatively small 1x12 combo amp. With the three power modes, you can get as much headroom as you like, and with the 90-watt mode, there’s a lot of clean headroom available. It also makes it usable at lower volumes, although the 25-watt mode is still deafeningly loud.

The built-in, tube-driven spring reverb is a really nice touch. It’s very similar to what you’d get on a vintage Fender amp, although to my ear the tail was a little smoother sounding. You can set it individually for each channel, so I used plenty of the clean sound but dialed it back for the rhythm and lead tones.

Moving to crunch tones, these are a bit rounder and smoother than your classic Plexi sounds, but it’s not a million miles away. For playing power-chord heavy rhythms with plenty of palm muting, it works great though, delivering a super satisfying rhythm tone that works great in a full band setup. It goes from a nice crunch all the way to a thrashy rhythm sound, so there’s plenty of flexibility just in this channel.

Moving to the high-gain channel, I’m greeted by a searing tone that works perfectly with a drop-tuned baritone guitar. It’s tight in the low end with plenty of midrange punch and a lovely smooth top. Here you can get a whole range of heavy guitar tones, whether it’s 80s-style lead sounds or chugging metal rhythms.

With it set to 90 watts and cranked, it makes more sound than any 1x12 combo has any right to, whilst still managing to sound controlled. When I used it this way in a recording session for a metal band, there were many a riff face in the control room as I chugged my way through some Meshuggah-inspired riffs.

There are no two ways about it, this is a guitar amp that is probably too expensive for a lot of guitar players. But when it’s capable of pretty much any guitar tone you can think of, the price suddenly doesn’t seem like such a huge barrier. If you want one tube amp that can genuinely do it all, then the Mesa/Boogie Mark VII 1x12 Combo is an investment you won’t regret.

The only real downside I found with it is the weight, which is really quite excessive. It’s a necessary evil due to the amount of electronic wizardry that’s packed into the unit, but it would definitely make me think twice about gigging it, even with the included heavy-duty casters attached.

It’s an inspired guitar amp, though. With such a plethora of tones at your fingertips, I found myself coming back to the Mesa again and again, despite having a couple of Fender and Orange tube amps at my disposal. The sheer flexibility of it enabled it to work just as well for some metal recordings I did as it worked on country guitar playing, and the option to use it silently at home sealed the deal.

Specifications

• Launch price: $3,849 | £3,999 | €4,137
• Type: Tube combo
• Origin: USA, UK-made speaker
• Output: 90 Watts RMS, switchable to 45 or 25W
• Speaker: 1x12 Celestion Custom 90
• Channels: 3
• Controls: Bass, Mid, Treble, Presence, Gain, Volume, 3x Reverb, plus extra modes and switchable Graphic EQ
• Connectivity: 1 x 1/4" input, 4 x 1/4" (4/8/16 ohm), 1 x 1/4" (line out), 1 x XLR (cabinet simulator), FX loop, 2 x 5-pin DIN (In, Out/Thru), 1 x Type B USB (IR loading), 1 x 1/4" headphones,
• Footswitch: 6-button footswitch included
• Weight: 58 lbs, 26.3 kg
• Dimensions: 18.25 x 18.75 x 11.5"
• Contact: Mesa/Boogie

Call him Forrest Gump, if you want (or Zelig), but Don Felder played with Duane Allman, Stephen Stills, Tom Petty and Bernie Leadon — all before he left his native Gainesville, Florida.

Though he’d worked with the jazz-rock band Flow, singer-songwriter David Blue and Crosby & Nash during the early ’70s, Felder really made his name when he joined the Eagles in 1974. He stayed with the group until his controversial dismissal in 2001, co-writing “Hotel California” as well as “Victim of Love,” “Visions” (on which he also sang lead), “Those Shoes,” “Too Many Hands” and “The Disco Strangler.”

On his own, meanwhile, he’s released four solo albums — including the all-star guest-packed American Rock ’n’ Roll in 2019 and last year’s The Vault — Fifty Years of Music — and contributed to the soundtracks of Heavy Metal and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He also published a bestselling memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001), in 2008.

Right now you can find Felder on the road, opening shows for the Guess Who — with Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman — into August. During a tour break, he took a few minutes to tour us through his famous guitar friends and their impact on his life and career.

Duane Allman

“Duane and Gregg used to live during the summer in Daytona Beach with their mom. There were no gigs, really, for local bands in Gainesville except fraternity parties and this one bar named Dub’s Steer Room, which me and [Tom] Petty and everybody played at one time or another. So we would go to Daytona Beach with my band with Bernie [Leadon] and play on the pier. I was in Rufus Thomas’s backup band one weekend, and we would play little dance clubs for teens and that kind of stuff.

“And then we met Duane and Gregg. We went into this bar after we finished playing and listened to them play. They had a drummer named Maynard who was missing his front teeth, and he played smiling, with no teeth. I don’t remember who was playing bass. But they were amazing. They were by far superior to every other band that I had ever seen live.

“So we became friends. When they got off work and we got off work, we’d go over to a little deli and have eggs at one o’clock in the morning, eat breakfast before we went to bed. And because Bernie and I lived in Gainesville, we’d have to drive over and do a show and then drive back that night because we couldn’t afford a hotel. So quite frequently we’d go over to the Allmans’ house after we ate breakfast and crash there.

“One day we were there, Duane picked up a slide; he was sitting on the floor playing slide with this Coricidin bottle. I said, ‘How do you do that? You’ve got to show me how to do that!’ I’d never played slide before, so he showed me the basic tuning and how to pull down on the fifths and slowly bend a little flat on the minor third and those sorts of really basic things. But he was light years ahead of any and everybody I’d ever seen play slide.

“Slide, to me, is a lot nastier than fretted guitar. It gets really raw, and the only other slide I’d ever seen played was some old African American blues players that just tuned to open tuning and would be playing not just notes but mostly just sliding around. Duane took it to a whole other level of it being melodic, where you could copy or repeat parts — it wasn’t just somebody playing a million notes. He’d taken the sound of that instrument and made it actually his own, with all new sounds and feelings and everything.

“So I never really tried to copy because, like I said, he was light years ahead of me, and I play a lot simpler, more melodic stuff, because I’m not a shredder. You should just be able to take the skills you learn from other people and make your own stamp, like your own signature, the way Duane did.

“We were in battles of the bands in Gainesville; there was this store, Lipham Music, that provided any band in central Florida with drums, bass, PA, mics, guitars, amps, anything — on credit. They had a yearly battle of the bands in the parking lot, and I have the distinct honor of having lost three battles of the bands to the Allman Brothers.

“It didn’t matter what name they were playing under; I remember the last one, it was the Allman Brothers Band with Dickey Betts, the whole band, and they were just ferocious. They were on fire. Then they disappeared; they just took off, and the next thing I knew it was At Fillmore East, and they were off and running.”

Stephen Stills

“The drummer in one of my first bands, the Continentals, met Stephen at a frat party and told us about him. I think Stephen Stills had gone to some military high school and hated it and went AWOL and showed up in Gainesville and got enrolled in Gainesville High School for his senior year. I was 14 or 15, something like that, and my mom would drive us around, because we didn’t have driver’s licenses or cars, to do these little gigs, like playing for women’s tea parties where they had finger sandwiches and cups of tea and they’d be discussing flower gardens, and we’d be sitting in the corner with two acoustic guitars, playing and singing, kind of putting some music in the room.

“And in that band, the Continentals, we were playing fraternity parties, and we would play Gatorland, which was a bar right on the corner across the field from the University of Florida football field, and on Saturdays right after home football games that bar would just fill up, packed, hundreds of people jammed in there to drink and party and celebrate or whatever it was. So we’d play that and Dub’s Steer Room and a bunch of sleazy little clubs around town.

“Stephen was never a shredder, but he had great charisma, and his voice was great. He was in the Gainesville High School choir — I was, too. He was very enthusiastic, and as soon as he graduated Stephen left Gainesville and moved out to California. The next time I saw or heard from him it was Woodstock and it was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on stage. I was, ‘Oh my God, that’s Stephen! What’s he doing up there?! Holy cow!’ Then I went, ‘Hell, if he can do it, I can do it.’ It gave me renewed enthusiasm about pursuing music as a full-time career.”

Bernie Leadon

“A couple weeks after Stephen moved to California I had gotten on a Greyhound bus and rode up to Lake City, probably an hour or an hour and a half, and I played a little women’s tea party by myself. I played acoustic and sang for the gals, and I came back and got off the bus and expected my mom to pick me up.

“And this guy comes walking up and he saw I had a guitar and said, ‘Are you Don Felder?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I went to the music store and asked who the best guitar player was in Gainesville, and they said you. Then I called your mom and asked if it would be okay if I picked you up and brought you home.’

æNow, that was a long time ago; you’d never let your kid get in a stranger’s car and drive off today. So I went, ‘Okay,’ and put my guitar in the back.

“Bernie had a beautiful Martin guitar and he had his banjo back there, too. So he comes into my house and my bedroom and sits down and just plays all this amazing flatpicking stuff. Then he takes out his banjo and just slays me with his talent on that, too. So we put together two bands — he was in the Continentals after Stephen left, which later became the Maundy Quartet, which was much more English-sounding to go with the British Invasion.

“Then I went and got a really good Martin and we had a bluegrass band that would play during the week at barbecues and stuff like that. We had a guy who worked for the Florida Fish and Game Commission who had a plane that could land on lakes, so we would fly all over the place in this little state plane — which was probably unauthorized use — and go play these little barbecues and stuff around central Florida, then fly back and go home.

“So Bernie was a really key person in my music development. He really broadened my country and bluegrass skills beyond what I ever knew, because when I met him I was more into electric guitars and rock and roll than flatpicking and banjo. But since we had those two bands I was forced to learn how to do other stuff, which I’m grateful for now, of course.

“It turned out as soon as Bernie graduated he moved to California, too; he was from California originally and just did not really like Gainesville. The next thing I know he’s in the Flying Burrito Brothers and working with Gram Parsons and really worked his way into that California deal out there. He kept calling me: ‘What are you doing in New York? The music business isn’t happening there — move to California! It’s happening here.’ Finally I took his advice and packed up and drove across the country.”

Desmond Child has written for a litany of rock greats, but in the mid-’90s, Van Halen became the one that got away.

The producer and songwriter has helped shape hits like Aerosmith’s swaggering “Dude (Looks Like a Lady”, Bon Jovi’s talkbox-powered “Livin’ On A Prayer”, and Kiss’s disco hit, “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”. He’s got a proven track record of helping rock songs resonate with massive audiences, which often puts him in high demand.

Yet, remarkably, he found himself in line to work with both David Lee Roth, whose commercial star was waning, and his former band, Van Halen, within just a few months in 1996. Both gigs ended up intertwining in an unexpected way.

First, he was in line to enter songwriting sessions with Diamond Dave when the singer rocked up to their first meeting armed with two things: a cassette and strippers.

“He was going to explain what his music was all about, so he gave me a cassette and said, ‘Put this on,’ and it was like real old-fashioned stripper music,” Child told Chuck Shute. “Then all of a sudden the strippers, who wear trench coats, fedoras, and stiletto heels with nothing on underneath, slip in, and then they start doing all these moves. And this was in an office that was like a little closet.”

For most artists, this would seem a surprising and highly unprofessional move – even if it did hit the nail on the head, aesthetically – but for David Lee Roth, it feels incredibly on-brand.

“Then suddenly he turns off the music," says Child, "and they jump up, grab their coats, and they say, ‘Give us a call if you want some more inspiration!’” 

There was no second meeting, although Child says that was on Roth.

“He didn’t come back, maybe I didn’t enjoy the strippers enough for his taste,” he jokes. But he see the singer again not long after.

“I think Hagar had left, and now they were looking for a new lead singer,” he says, referring to his potential collaboration with Van Halen. “I was recommending Mitch Malloy, who is a great rock singer. I thought he could pull it off and, you know, he had the golden locks.”

Malloy would go on to audition for the gig, which Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone ultimately got. But for Child, his time with the band was about to get a whole lot weirder. Dave Lee Roth was still in the picture, and about to make a brief return to the band.

“I went up there, and he [David Lee Roth] shows up, top down, looking like a video shoot,” he says. “Then he gets out of the car, and before you know it, no song was started, and I had to leave. He came in there and busted it all up. I never got asked back.”

It’s strange that Van Halen were even considering outside help with their songwriting, considering the fallout of Eddie’s secret guest solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. The rule in the band was ‘Van Halen, nothing else.’ Maybe that, rather than Roth’s actions, was the reason the collaboration never happened.

But how did Roth know what was going on?

“Somebody must have tipped him off,” Child guesses. “Who knows how that transpired, like ‘We’re writing with Desmond Child, we don’t need you!’ There was a high school-ness to it all.”

Either way, the party was crashed, and Van Halen never worked with Desmond Child. Instead, they pressed on with Cherone and released Van Halen III in 1998 before going on hiatus.

As for Roth, who had handpicked Steve Vai to help launch his solo career, he went on to form the DLR Band with future Rob Zombie and Mötley Crüe guitarist John 5, but not before he tried to recruit Joe Satriani for a Van Halen tribute band. Satch couldn’t believe the cheek of it.

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.”