Lenny Kaye readily acknowledges that he “didn’t know what he was doing” when he was tapped to compile the famed Nuggets compilation for Elektra Records during the early ’70s. “I had no sense of destiny or anything,” the Patti Smith Group electric guitarist tells us via Zoom from his home in eastern Pennsylvania. “And if I had thought, ‘This is going to be discussed a half century later,’ I would’ve screwed it up, simple as that.”

Ignorance, then, was bliss for Kaye and for an untold number of listeners who hold the album — full title Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968 — sacrosanct and essential, influencing generations and musical movements to come.

The two-LP set’s 27 tracks offer both a snapshot of an era and a treasure trove of unknown, obscure or under-celebrated songs — even the ones that charted when first released — by rock bands that fit the same description. “Psychedelic” was a broad term, of course; garage rock was also a generalized description for the music, and Kaye even applied “punk” in his scholarly liner notes years before it came into common practice.

“The ’60s was a quite amazingly exploratory time for the genre we call rock ’n’ roll,” Kaye explains. “Things happened so quickly that the music grew up almost as an adolescent will, sprouting from, say, ’63 through the beginning of the ’70s. The rapid-fire experimental energy was overwhelming. It’s almost like the Italian Renaissance; you have these great, larger-than-life figures.

“I believe Nuggets addresses that sense of sudden expansion of limits. It was very exciting. It was a great moment to experience … and I had the opportunity, thanks to Jac [Holzman, Elektra Records founder] to be the first in line of gathering these.”

New York native Kaye had already made a name for himself in the New York music scene as a musician (sometimes under the name Link Cromwell), writing for a variety of music publications and working at the Village Oldies record store. He was well-known enough for Esquire magazine to name him “the token rock critic” on its list of the Heavy 100 in the music business in 1970, which led Holzman to hire Kaye as an independent talent scout for Elektra.

“Jac Holzman liked rock critics, ’cause he had an intelligent label and writers enjoyed writing about [Elektra acts] Love and the Doors and Tim Buckley and all of that,” Kaye recalls.

He “didn’t get much traction” in that capacity, however, as he championed the Stooges for a third album, as well as the Sidewinders from Boston and an early incarnation of Blue Öyster Cult. Meanwhile, Holzman had broached the idea of “an album he called Nuggets which would find these kinds of rogue tracks that were overlooked — ironic because he probably could’ve signed all of these bands right off the get-go at the time.”

Kaye figured the idea was dead after he “was asked to leave” the company, “but about five or six months later their legal department called me up and said, ‘We have the rights to such and so many songs. What do we do with them?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, this is still happening? That’s crazy …’

“So we just kept going, and the rest is history.”

Holzman had a few suggestions of his own but mostly gave Kaye free rein in the process. “I just wrote up a list of songs that I liked that were slightly off the point, I guess,” he recalls. “It was mostly my favorite records. Jac told me to dig a little deeper, so some of the songs are not the ones you would expect. I didn’t put ‘Gloria,’ the national anthem of garage rock, on there; I chose another one from the Shadows of Knight catalog [‘Oh Yeah’].

“And many of them are not garage rock at all; they’re just fun songs. The Third Rail [‘Run, Run, Run’], a novelty song by some Brill Building songwriters. The Strangeloves [‘Night Time’], hardly a garage band, though they pretended to be one. Sagittarius [‘My World Fell Down’], which is a full-blown orchestration of West Coast Pop.”

Nuggets does feature some well-known bands (Leslie West’s Vagrants, the Blues Project, the Amboy Dukes, the Blues Magoos) and actual hits, such as the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard,” the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” and Nazz’s “Open My Eyes.” What they shared was a spirit and attitude that went against the grain of where rock was at the time — increasingly slick production, virtuosic prog and bombastic heavy metal.

“There was a total sense of mission,” Kaye says of his intent for Nuggets. “Me and other rock critics at the time were longing for a sense, a return. The time was right for re-evaluation, for bringing things back to perspective to the personal, to the available of someone who wanted to pick up an instrument and start from scratch. The time just called for it.

“Music is all about cycles, so if things get out of hand in one way, you know that the opposite is going to come to topple it, the way grunge wiped hair metal off the map or Elvis Presley kind of made obsolete an entire generation of pop singers and songwriters, or the Beatles changing the landscape immediately.”

Kaye feels Nuggets’ impact was even more pronounced when Sire Records reissued it in 1976, concurrent with the widespread coining of the term punk rock.

“This was during a time bands were kind of cutting the excess and looking for the root of what makes people move,” Kaye explains. He says he’s not sure why he used “punk” as a term in his liner notes. “It was just in circulation from rock writers who were looking for the truer, the short, sharp, shocked without any artistic pretensions, who wanted things to get back to the basics.

“It was just a term, really; I can’t tell you who initially came up with it. It might have gone nowhere except that it became a capital P, a label for a music style that reflected simplicity and drive and a certain ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude.

“It’s the spirit of reinvention — that’s what punk was, and what grunge was later,” he continues. “The original CBGB bands — Television, Talking Heads, Blondie — they were all so different from each other. The Ramones, who set the template for what would be punk rock — all those bands were extremely different from each other. So what you had was the sensibility of renewal; ‘We’re not gonna listen to what was there. We’re gonna start all over,’ even though you’re drawing so much from what went before. Even the Sex Pistols, with all their rhetoric, sounded as much like the Who and the Small Faces as anybody.

“We build on what has come before, but hopefully it becomes the future, and that, to me, is so important in terms of music’s evolution.”

Nuggets fans are their own legion, of course. Scores of other musicians — Kaye singles out Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie — have complimented and cited the compilation over the years.

“Then there’s that random human in Stockholm who comes up and buys me a beer and tells me Nuggets changed his life,” Kaye adds. Smith is not among them, however. “She might’ve known some of the groups,” he says, “but our reference points were more vocal harmony groups. When I first met her and she started coming into Village Oldies, I spun her ‘Mr. Hero’ by the Blue Notes, ‘Today’s the Day’ by Gray, and ‘Bristol Stomp,’ of course.”

Post-Nuggets, Kaye worked with Smith from 1975 to 1979, and again since 1996, co-producing several of her albums. He had his own band, the Lenny Kaye Connection, during the ’90s and has produced albums for Suzanne Vega, Soul Asylum, James, Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Shams and others. He hosts The Lenny Kaye Program on SiriusXM’s Underground Garage channel, while his first-ever solo album, Goin’ Local, was released July 17.

While a proposed second volume for Elektra did not happen, Nuggets has been reissued in several incarnations, including the Sire reissue and expanded box sets in 1998 and 2023. Other Nuggets releases, not involving Kaye, include Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969, Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, Come to the Sunshine: Soft Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1996, Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970 and Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets: 1965–1968.

“The lifeline of Nuggets is rather miraculous,” Kaye says. “The fact that we’re talking about it more than 50 years after this ‘oldies’ album was generated is remarkable. It’s great music. I believe Nuggets’ longevity is not just about garage rock; you really can take any genre and find great songs and make them a Nuggets. There’s always going to be an appetite for that history, and that discovery.”

Pete Townshend is hailed as one of rock’s greatest rhythm players. Even he’s not shy about his talents, telling Sound International in 1980, “in that particular area, I don’t think I’m topped.”

But when it comes to lead work, he admitted long ago he’s not much of an improviser. Most of his solos — from “I Can’t Explain” to “Love Reign O’er Me” were composed ahead of time.

“I started out as a rhythm player, and a few of my lead licks are things I’ve basically developed in recording sessions,” he told Guitar Player in May 1972. “I’ll never be able to play the kind of leads I want. I was happiest listening to Jimi Hendrix — that, to me, was like heaven.”

From early on, Townshend focused on rhythm guitar work, playing slashing chords with his windmilling right arm. By the end of the 1960s, he developed a signature style of 16th-note strumming with his motif for “Pinball Wizard,” played on a Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar, from 1969’s Tommy.

The release of Live at Leeds in 1970 gave a little evidence of his talents as a lead player. He unleashes his fury in a stunning bit of solo work on Mose Allison's "Young Man’s Blues" and plays some inspired jagged lines on Johnny Kidd's "Shakin' All Over."

Townshend has only improved as a lead guitarist since then, as heard on the Who’s “Join Together” and — a deep cut — his work on David Bowie’s “Slow Burn,” from 2002’s Heathen. Even when his solos are composed, their impact lies in his execution, and Townshend always connects with listeners emotionally rather than through acts of technical virtuosity.

But from the beginning, the Who’s true guitar player has been the bassist: John Entwistle. It’s Entwistle who takes the lead break in “My Generation,” and whose bass guitar skills came to the fore from Tommy onward, even as Townshend was improving as a lead player.

“What’s interesting is our group is, of course, that the roles are reversed. John is the lead guitar player and although I’m not the bass player he does produce a hell of a lot of the lead work,” Townshend said in the 1980 Sound International interview.

“It’s really funny to this day where you get a song like ‘Dreaming From the Waist’ [from 1975’s The Who by Numbers], when John is doing this blinding bass solo and making Alvin Lee look like he plays in slow motion, and I’m just standing there strumming a chord.

“And the audience looks at me and goes, ‘How does he do it? How does he produce that noise?’”

Part of Entwistle’s stealth is his lack of movement, combined with his penchant for dressing in dark colors.

“You see, for years nobody even knew John was there,” Townshend continued. “He used to wear all black and nobody ever put a lamp on him: if we appeared on TV you never saw him unless the camera was whipping from Roger to Keith.”

As the late Entwistle himself told Guitar Player in the November 1975 issue, “I’ve never truly considered myself a bass player. I think I'm a lead/rhythm bass player. Because the Who was a three-piece, and we tried to reconstruct the same sound as on record, I used to play most of the time with a plectrum and played rhythm figures on the bass.

“Then, when we started doing more complicated stuff with Tommy, I started playing lead figures. Occasionally before that, when the guitar went off, I'd have to take over a solo and turn everything full up and go into a solo.

“Maybe if I'd been with another band I might be one of those very tasteful bass-y players, a proper bass player, really.”

Entwistle went on to explain how he managed to make his bass cut through by switching to a Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar for live performance and using “full treble all the time. We found that it cut to the back of the audience as well, so you could hear what the bass was playing, instead of a blur.”

He also confirmed Townshend’s recollections of how his live bass work confused fans.

“It does tend to happen,” he told Guitar Player. “A lot of people in England, when ‘My Generation’ first came out, thought that Pete was playing the solo — the bass solo. And for months, when we were playing it onstage, that solo would come up, and they always used to look at Pete.

“And after the bass solo was over they used to clap for Pete. I use a very guitar-like sound, so if the audience don't know about the instruments they're obviously going to get confused.

“The offensive thing is they automatically think it's Pete. Yet they can't understand why Pete just has his hands on a chord he's just strummed, and there's a lead figure coming out, and they're still looking at him and saying, ‘How's he doing that?’”

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was that like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was especially impactful on George.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audition itself seemed almost preordained.

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

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

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

Quatro admitted she wasn’t entirely comfortable.

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

Reassured, Quatro headed out for her entrance.

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

The comment left her stunned.

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

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

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

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

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

The advice worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Buckley

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

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

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

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

Chris Cornell

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

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

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

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

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

Lou Reed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Beefheart

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Springsteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he had dreams of making it as a musician.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That ballsack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was 17 years old and found it in this local paper, The Byline Press,” he told Guitar Player in 2019. “It said, ‘Gretsch guitar, 100 bucks.’ I called the guy up and asked, ‘Is it like Eddie Cochran’s?’ He was like, ‘Who?’

“So I went to his house, and there was the guitar, the 1959 orange 6120. It was exactly what I was looking for. He was going to refinish it and make it natural. He had all of the electronics for it in a shoe box. I gave him 100 bucks, took the guitar and the shoe box, and off I went. It was destiny.”

The 6120 became his main guitar as the Stray Cats sparked a rockabilly revival on both sides of the Atlantic.

By then, Setzer had customized the instrument with a sticker depicting a 1950s pinup girl sitting on a vinyl record and replaced the original knobs with a pair of dice taken from a Monopoly board game.

“The stickers and the dice became trademarks,” he says, “but I put them on without much thought. I found the pinup girls in an old lawnmower repair shop. And I put the dice on because it didn’t have any knobs. I just got a set of Monopoly dice, drilled holes in them, and squirted in some Krazy Glue.”

The only meaningful modification the guitar received, he says, was the addition of Sperzel locking tuners. The stock Filter’Tron pickups and most of the original hardware remained untouched.

Setzer eventually retired the guitar. “It had beer spilled on it and smoke blown all over it,” he says. Besides, he already had a worthy replacement waiting in the wings.

“In about 1984, I ran into Steve Miller in a bar in Germany,” he recalls. “We talked about Gretsches and how mine was getting trashed. When I got back to New York, there was a big box waiting for me, and, to my delighted surprise, it was a 6120 from Steve Miller. And not just a 6120 but a great one!”

Setzer's original 6120 would ultimately become the basis for a Gretsch tribute model. But more importantly, it’s the guitar that launched him on a career that continues as the Stray Cats undertake their current tour — their first since his recovery from an autoimmune disorder and an inadvertent dependency issue.

Despite everything that happened to it, the original 1959 Gretsch survived, and more than six decades after Setzer bought it for $100, it remains one of the most famous rockabilly guitars ever played

As the Police settled into the studio to record Synchronicity in December 1982, they were a band on the verge of breaking up. By then, the trio had spent five years rising from the ranks of London’s post-punk scene to become stadium headliners and one of the most successful acts in the world.

Most bands in that position would have been looking ahead to a long future. The Police, however, seemed determined to leave at the height of their success.

According to Andy Summers, it all came down to Sting.

“It was a tough album, period. I mean, we had been together five years and were massively successful,” he says. “Sting was obviously feeling his oats and wanted to leave the band and go out on his own. In a sort of anal way, he was ready to finish off the contract, which was five albums.”

The recording sessions at AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat have become legendary for the near-violent tension between bass guitarist Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland. Summers told Rick Beato the atmosphere became so unworkable that he hiked across the island to find Beatles producer Sir George Martin, who was staying nearby, and ask for help.

“We said we should get George Martin to come and produce us, because he owned AIR Studios, and he was just across the valley there. And so I got the job to go and get George Martin. So I walked off in the blazing Montserrat heat, knocked on the door, and he comes out.”

Summers recalls how Martin invited him inside and listened over a cup of tea as the guitarist unloaded his frustrations.

“‘We’re having some difficulty,’” he told the producer. “‘In fact, it’s like a screaming bitch fight.’”

“‘Oh yes, right. I’ve seen that before,’ he said.”

After hearing Summers out, Martin offered a few reassuring words.

“It was like he waved his magic wand,” Summers recalls. “He said, ‘Now, I think you should walk back over there. I think it’s going to be all right.’

“I hiked back to the other side of the island, and it was all right. We got to be very polite with each other: ‘Oh, would you like to do that? Oh, yes, of course. I’ll do that. Where would you like it, on the fourth fret or the fifth fret?’

“How amazing. It was the Martin Magic, I’m sure.”

Tempers cooled enough for the band to complete what would become its biggest hit, “Every Breath You Take.”

“The whole album was difficult, but ‘Every Breath You Take’ was going to go in the trash, basically. We thought it was too light and it wasn’t very good. It reached the point where we were all getting pretty tired of it and didn’t really want to do it.”

It was Summers’ contribution that ultimately saved the song.

“Sting said to me, ‘Go on, go in there and make it your own.’ We needed a guitar and I went in and almost instantly played the guitar line that is, of course, the signature of the song.”

Summers has since argued that he deserves a co-writing credit for the song’s instantly recognizable electric guitar riff. His contributions to “Every Breath You Take” are also among the reasons he and Stewart Copeland have said they are owed additional royalties from Sting.

As Summers recalls, everyone in the studio immediately recognized the song’s potential.

“The manager heard it and said, ‘I’m going straight to A&M. This is going to be a number one.’ And it was. That was our first number one in the U.S. It was number one for eight weeks straight.”

Still, the success of the song and the album — it was the band’s biggest seller — wasn’t enough to persuade Sting to stay.

“With the band’s contract fulfilled, he was ready to strike out on his own.

“Of course, any band would stay, naturally, because it was going so brilliantly well. We dominated the world. No one wanted us to break up, but Sting wanted to go and be the thing all on his own.”

Roger Mayer is a legend. His innovations include the Octavia, a groundbreaking fuzz box that doubled signal frequencies, a sound not obtainable previously. Mayer and his effect heavily shaped albums like Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland. And then there’s his work with the Isley Brothers, whose electric guitar sound was tonally linchpinned by Hendrix and Mayer’s effects.

Those sounds influenced a young gun named Junior Marvin, who Mayer worked with in the mid 70s and who would be drafted into Bob Marley and the Wailers at a time when Marley wanted his group to evolve from what Mayer describes as a "raggedy-assed" musicians to proper reggae icons.

Mayer started from square one, tearing down Marley's rig and ensuring all involved in his midst were quite literally playing in tune. The result was what Mayer likens to perfection.

"When everything else is perfect, recording a song is pretty simple," he tells Guitar Player. “There’s nothing special about that for me," he says. "Anybody could walk into a recording studio, hit ‘record,’ and if the other things are perfect, it's gonna sound good."

It's hard to argue with that, considering Mayer's work on Marley's iconic 1975 record Exodus. "I did everything I could in the studio to talk to Bob and Junior about how they could dial in what they heard in the brains," he says.

Mayer did the job. Exodus catapulted the Wailers from a poorly produced group from the beaches of Jamaica to a powerhouse. The result was the album's title track reaching number one in Jamaica, number 14 in Germany, and the top 20 in the U.K.

Exodus's laid-back vibe meshed perfectly with Marley and Marvin's inspired guitar playing. As a result, tracks like "Three Little Birds," "Jammin'" and "Waiting in Vain" became Marley classics — and FM radio staples.

Mayer is aware of all of this — and he'll be the first to tell you that he had a feeling about Exodus from the jump, meaning greatness wasn't just intended but inherent. "That record is very well thought of," he beams.

"I knew what a hit record sounded like. We had all the puzzle pieces come into place. Like with Hendrix and the Isley Brothers, I'd helped, but it wasn't a mistake that it sounded that good."

How did you find yourself in the engineer's chair for the recording of Bob Marley's Exodus?

I had a relationship with Junior Marvin before Junior signed on to work with Bob. We'd finished recording some original material in England in December 1976, so we'd spend a lot of time together while recording, alternating between New York and London.

Were you familiar with Bob going in?

With Junior, we'd recorded at Music Mountain in Jamaica, at Electric Lady in New York and Island Studios in London, so yeah, I was aware of Bob Marley through all of that. I'd come to see him a few times, and I knew Chris Blackwell [founder of Island Records and Bob Marley cohort]. Junior knew Chris too. But it wasn't until after we finished the record with Junior, and he signed on with Bob Marley and the Wailers, that I got to work with Bob.

Having worked with Junior before, do you have a good idea of how to get him to align with Bob's goals?

Junior was recruited into Bob's band to provide the rock and roll aspect to the Wailers, which they were lacking. Before the recordings started, Bob was aware that he needed to change direction so that the music had more international appeal.

They came to be because, obviously, they'd heard the work I was doing with the Isley Brothers, Rick James, Parliament Funkadelic, and all those bands that had crossed over into the mainstream market. When I went to America with Jimi Hendrix back in '68 and then worked with Stevie Wonder, these were artists who had ties to Motown and were given free rein.

To paint a picture, the idea was that Black artists in the '70s had a very difficult time in America as far as getting recognition because the music charts were more into white rock 'n' roll than R&B and soul. It was spread apart. So after Junior joined the Wailers, it helped because they became a bit more rock 'n' roll.

You helped dial in Junior's rig on the recording, right?

After Junior joined, I sent him some of what they requested, which was some new equipment. I went and bought some guitars for Junior in New York and sent them to him after I'd modified them.

Modifications and sounds like you’d used with Jimi Hendrix and Ernie Isley?

That included some of the effects we'd used with Ernie Isley and Jimi Hendrix. And then, of course, everybody started to sit up and say, "Yeah, well, who is this new guitar player that Bob Marley's changed to?" Junior was a bit more rock 'n' roll and was a complete departure from Bob's previous records.

You were close to Junior, but did you get on well with Bob?

Everything was going very well. I got invited down to Jamaica to meet Bob just before the One Love concert, and that's when I first met him. He was a very charming guy. I asked him, "What exactly do you want me to do? How can I help you?"

Bob said, "I want to sound more international." That was the right answer, mate. I said, "For you to go forward in music and take a step forward — especially in record sales and international recognition — you have to have a record that sounds great.”

I told him, “It has to stand up to the quality of what's around." He couldn't just come from an island and not have the same technological advantages that everybody else had. If he did that, his record would have sounded a big amateurish.

So the goal with Exodus was not just to overhaul Bob's sound but to showcase what Junior brought to the party en route to national recognition.

Bob's early albums were kind of tolerated because they came from the islands, you know what I mean? People didn't expect the records to have the same sonic qualities that all the other top artists had, or some of the other artists I was working with. So, yeah… that's how I got roped into it. [laughs]

What was the first order of business once you were in the studio?

The first thing I did after meeting Bob was completely set up all the guitars for him. I'd listened to the band live and said, "The whole band's completely out of tune. For us to go forward, the first thing to do is make the band solid, if not perfect."

In reggae, that's very important, as it is with any music oriented by bass. The bass and drum sounds had to be perfect, or else you lose the magical quality of the beat. The bass guitars had suffered being in Jamaica and needed a lot of work, so we started with that.

What was it like working on Bob and Junior's guitars?

I wanted to fix that up to give off a really authentic, top-quality sound. I moved on to Bob's guitars because Junior already had a guitar that I'd previously modified and had been used in concert and in the studio. I went through all of Bob's guitars, tuned them up, and rebuilt the whole guitar.

Every guitar that had been down in Jamaica for years had to be completely pulled apart and rebuilt because of what the humidity in the tropics would do to the electrics in the guitar. Once I made sure the band was mechanically sound, and actually in tune, and sounded perfect with all the harmonics resonating, that's when we could really get started. That was the beginning of it.

How did that inform the way Junior and Bob approached songs like "Waiting in Vain," "Three Little Birds," and "Jammin'?"

My job was working with Junior to get the right guitar sounds and with Bob. Once Bob's guitar was perfectly in tune, his approach to the song became different because of the way he played. The feeling, solos, and overall feeling of the record became different. This might sound mundane, but you can only record what's there.

In my case, the actual job became making good sounds, and after that, it was recording the sound. I didn't have to do anything. The bass and guitar sounds were perfect. Bob set the people up to play the vibe, and the performances were amazing—much better than before because they were all playing in tune.

Was there a trick to getting the most out of Junior, or was it all mostly free-form and vibe-based?

They were all very highly attuned to the vibrations and the perfection of it all. So, while putting together the tracks, Junior and I would go into the studio and discuss what he wanted to do, for example, "Waiting in Vain" or "Three Little Birds." Those tracks have my touch on them with the various guitar tones, and we worked together to select the perfect tones for each track.

What went into the selection process?

That's one of the secrets! You have the have the ability, and in my case, technical ability, to change the tone, and make it fit the track. That's why every track we recorded with Jimi Hendrix sounds so accessible. It's not just a case of buying a pedal, plugging it in, and playing.

It's more complicated than that. It's having the knowledge of being in the studio and using recording equipment and consoles to know exactly what sound you have to produce in the studio to make it come out well on record.

So if it wasn't just pedals, what was it?

You have to have a whole knowledge of the whole process of recording. It's about knowing where to put microphones and how they should sound in the studio. You had to really, really know how with some of these bands back then, you know, with how to actually tailor the sound so that they can record a song.

While putting together Exodus, did you have an inclination that you were helping make a special record?

Yeah, but at the same time, I'd been in the studio many times before when lots of famous records were made. I wasn't new to what a hit record sounded like. I had a good idea of what it should sound like, so, yeah, Exodus, after the tracks were put together, sounded really good. But the magic of Exodus isn't just that it's a really good collection of songs; there's more to it than that.

Expand on that for me.

Remember: A lot of the songs on Exodus have been recorded before. They weren't new. There were previous incarnations of "Three Little Birds," from what I remember. The difference, I think, with Bob and Exodus was the actual sound of that record. It's perfect. It sounds great.

The sound of the music, and the beat, just the whole thing, makes that record sound international. It doesn't sound like a raggedy bunch of Jamaican musicians. It's interesting and culturally different, but before that, they weren't producing the international quality of music that sounded like that.

Having said that, what are you most proud of when you look back on Exodus?

I've been involved with many records, but I've been involved with very involved in three or four, like, really great records, I think. Exodus is great. The sound of it is just unbelievable. But these things don't happen by accident, right? It doesn't happen by mistake.

The people involved in that record weren't just fortuitous; my sound, equipment, and electronics are on so many hit records. That's not me boasting; it's just the truth. But Bob and Junior were a pleasure to work with and making that record didn't happen by mistake.

It's like they say: you could get a well, a well-nourished orangutan with a pencil and a piece of white paper is not going to make a great picture. It was all the right pieces at the right time. It doesn't happen otherwise.

There were many great guitar moments at this year’s Songwriters Hall of Fame, but none can top the shred fest and sheer joy John Fogerty brought to the stage last night at NYC’s Marriott Marquis.

The youthful 81-year-old and newly honored recipient of the Johnny Mercer Award (the Hall’s most prestigious award) ended his mini set with an epic, blistering jam on “The Old Man Down the Road,” beaming with fatherly pride and tearing it up on the guitar while trading licks with his sons, Shane and Tyler.

The Mercer Award is given to songwriters who are already in the Hall and ‘whose body of work is of such high quality and impact that it upholds the gold standard set by the legendary Johnny Mercer.’

Fogerty began his five-song set with a harmony-filled short version of “Oh! Susanna” in tribute to both his mother and the 19th century American composer Stephen Foster, his first musical idol. He then launched into his singalong classics “Proud Mary,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “The Old Man Down the Road,” aligning himself as a legitimate link in the American songwriting lineage.

In his 26-minute speech, the Creedence Clearwater Revival legend told of his mother playing a record when he was a child.

“It was “Oh! Susanna” and the other side was “Camptown Races.” She played both songs a couple of times and said, ‘well Johnny what do you think?’ I’ like it!’ I said.”

“And then she said something remarkable: ‘You know, Johnny, the songwriter who wrote both of those songs is Stephen Foster.’ I had never pondered that someone created these songs that my mom would sing around the house.”

For the rest of his life, Fogerty said, “I’ve wondered about that little ceremony” and the impact it had on him as he discovered other classic songwriters, and ultimately his own skill at songwriting.

The first song he wrote, he continued, was titled “Wash Day Blues,” taken from a line from a radio commercial. The eight-year-old Fogerty set the lyrics against a Muddy Waters rhythm, “one of the most powerful things I could think of at the time. And it was current.”

Fogerty then showed the audience his original songwriting notebook, which he purchased when he realized he needed to be organized if he was serious about his craft.

“I wrote down the very first words in the book: ‘Proud Mary.’ I had no idea what the phrase meant but it’s there in the book.”

An Army serviceman faced with a life choice between continuing in the service or becoming a musician, he received an official government letter in the mail a year later granting him an honorable discharge at the age of 22.

“I ran outside and started strumming my Rickenbacker electric guitar acoustically. Pretty soon I’m singing,” left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day.”

“I grabbed the notebook and there was the phrase ‘Proud Mary,’ and the word ‘riverboat.’”

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley

This year’s inductees included Kiss founders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Kenny Loggins, Alanis Morissette, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, Taylor Swift, Walter Afanasieff, Terry Britten and Graham Lyle. The artist Raye received the Hal David Starlight Award.

Billy Corgan and John Rzeznik (a 2008 Hal David Starlight award honoree) might seem like an unlikely pairing, but both shared their love and admiration for Kiss and the band’s songwriting partners Stanley and Simmons. The two sang “Rock and Roll All Night” and “Shout It Out Loud,” opting to ditch their guitars for the set.

In a red-carpet interview with Guitar Player prior to the show, Corgan said while he was a massive Rush, Yes and prog music fan growing up, “Black Diamond” was a favorite Kiss track. “Something about the atmosphere of the song and the makeup and being ten years old. I wanted to play that song a hundred times in a row.”

“I had the Kiss poster on my wall as a kid before I ever heard Kiss. That imagery was like, ‘What is this? I want to know about this.’ The music seemed to marry to the image for me, not the other way around.”

As a teen growing up in the suburbs, Corgan said “Gene challenged me in one way — the business angle — and Paul challenged me in another — to think about freedom and self-expression.

“Over time I really began to understand their brilliance as musicians and songwriters.” Gene’s bass playing, he said, “is more ‘50s doo-wop where Paul is more of a Free, Humble Pie, straightahead style. It’s a very interesting mélange of influences.”

Simmons could not attend due to a family emergency and Stanley did not perform any of his classics at the event. But he did give a pre-show interview to this magazine.

“I wanted to be a great songwriter from the beginning,” the guitarist said. “I never wrote songs to jam on. I wrote songs to sing.”

“That can seem simple when you are looking at a song like ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ or ;Heaven’s on Fire’ or ‘Lick it Up.’ But it’s elusive and deceptive. Those songs follow the same formula as a lot of the great songs that inspired me. I was inspired by everyone who was working in the Brill Building.”

He also offered a juicy anecdote specific to this magazine.

“The first time we were on Guitar Player magazine, the guitar snobs at the time were horrified, that it had sold out. Then when the sales came in and it did better than other issues, everybody liked it! It opened the floodgates, not unlike some of the stuff Kiss has done.”

Taylor Swift

Film director Steven Spielberg paid tribute to Taylor Swift, the youngest female artist to be inducted into the Hall, noting “no algorithm can replace the soul of a true original who defies the status quo.”

Spielberg noted her dedication to her craft going all the way back to when “she first picked up a 12-string guitar. Most people start with a six-string. Isn’t that right? But you were an overachiever at the age of 12.”

Swift gave an emotional 21-minute speech, acknowledging her family, collaborators and the importance of the arts.

“Everything came together when I learned to play guitar at 12. I wrote my first song after learning my first three chords. It felt easy to work incredibly hard with this.

“It felt easy to nurture something I loved so much, to watch callouses form on the tips of my tiny fingers and to become a constant observer of the human condition, because people’s feelings, passions and motivations have always fascinated me, and it was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life.”

Madison Cunningham, Brandi Carlile, Alanis Morissette & Kenny Loggins

Other notable guitar highlights of the evening were more subtle, with artists using their instruments to complement and support the song’s lyrical meaning.

Grammy Award winner Madison Cunningham performed a stunning solo acoustic take on the Tina Turner classic “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” paying tribute to the songwriters and inductees Graham Lyle and Terry Britten. Using a Martin nylon string classical guitar in a dropped tuning, Cunningham’s gentle picking set the musical bed for the song’s emotional core.

Before the show, Cunningham spoke with GP about the song’s depth and importance.

The song is a “treasure,” she said. “It’s a very 80’s sexy song that bears a lot of heartbreak within it. I’m putting a different spin on it to showcase the lyrics.”

Alanis Morissette stripped down her classic “You Oughta Know” to two acoustic guitars and her vocal. Guitarists Julian Coryell and Jason Orme effortlessly weaved beautifully played single note runs and counterpoint lines in between Morissette’s breathy and focused lyrics of love gone wrong.

Brandi Carlile paid tribute to Morissette with an equally mesmerizing acoustic version of “Uninvited,” joined by the violin duo Sistastrings.

Kenny Loggins, whose vast catalog includes many guitar-centric classics like “Footloose,” “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” “Danny’s Song,” “Danger Zone” and more told GP of his relationship with the instrument.

“The guitar always has a mind of its own. I’ll be starting a song, and I’ll hit a chord and go oh that’s different. It will change the direction of the song.” While writing the classic “Danny’s Song,” he said, “the guitar showed up and added about six different chords than it originally had.”

Fresh off the massive success of his 2025 best-selling memoir Heartbreaker, rock legend Mike Campbell is turning the page. Today marks the release of Mission of Mercy, the fourth studio album from Campbell and his powerhouse band, the Dirty Knobs.

While he will always be associated with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Campbell’s latest 12-song set finds him pushing into unexpected territory, stretching his electric guitar–driven rock with touches of Brian Wilson–inspired pop, psych-rock excursions and even a beat-poet experiment.

“It’s my go-to project,” Campbell, 76, says via Zoom from his home in the Los Angeles area. “I just like having an outlet for all these songs I write, and they’re just the perfect outlet. We get along really well. They instinctively know me, and they follow really well.”

He adds with a chuckle, “They don’t argue too much. They’re just really good, y’know?”

Mission of Mercy was co-produced by Campbell, George Drakoulias and Martin Pradler and recorded at Hocus Pocus Studios in Los Angeles. It follows the Dirty Knobs’ 2024 release, Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits.

Campbell formed the group in 2000 as a side project to play Los Angeles clubs and showcase songs that didn’t fit elsewhere. Since Petty’s death in 2017, however, the group has become his primary creative outlet. The current lineup features former Heartbreakers (and Average White Band) drummer Steve Ferrone, guitarist/keyboardist Christopher Holt and longtime bass guitarist Lance Morrison.

The album stretches the band’s formula in several directions, from the manic “Bongo Mania” — featuring Kate Pierson of the B-52’s — to the beat-poet experiment “Vagrant” and the Brian Wilson–inspired title track. At the same time, it remains rooted in the guitar rock that has defined Campbell’s career, with an appearance by Morgane Stapleton on the gentle “More Than Gold.”

The Dirty Knobs hit the road again in July, covering the Midwest and East, while Campbell will also be doing his first orchestral show on September 12 with the Atlanta Symphony -- probably not somewhere the kid who picked up guitar when he was 16 ever expected to be.

Four albums in with the Dirty Knobs, what did you set out to do on Mission of Mercy?

Well, we always set out to have good songs. We look for the good songs and we keep doing them until we get too many, then we narrow it down and try to make sense of it. That’s just how I approach records — What’s the song? What’s the song today? Is there a good song we can record? Let’s give it a shot, and if it’s good we’ll keep it, and if not we’ll throw it out and do another one.

There was no different concept this time, but I did want to expand the songwriting a little bit — not only have the band rockin’ but have a few esoteric, melodic things here and there. I think by the fourth album it’s OK for us to take some chances.

Look no further than the title track, then.

“Mission of Mercy” is definitely a stretch for the Dirty Knobs. It was a demo I had done several years ago, and it showed up in the middle of the album. I thought it was good and worth finishing. It was very different for us, very Brian Wilson–inspired. The song actually didn’t have any guitar in it, per se, just some chords.

There was a point where I felt like, “Well, something needs to happen,” so I picked up the guitar and played some licks at the end, which kind of lifts it up from maybe a pop ballad to more of a guitar song at the end there. So that was an afterthought; the last thing I put on it was the guitar at the end, but I think it lifts the song up and gives it some edge.

What’s your litmus test for a good song, and how has that changed over the years — even from the Mudcrutch and Heartbreakers days?

I have to like it, and I have to think it’s good. It has to move me in some way. I write a lot of songs, and some of them just kind of come and go and other ones resonate deeper, and it’s the ones that resonate on some level that I tend to gravitate toward — like “Mission of Mercy.” But the process is the same for me as it’s always been: just wait for the good songs to come through.

How does the way you write or arrange now open portals for how you use the guitar that might be different than before?

Well, we have a great guitar player in the band — it’s not me. [laughs] I’m good, but this other guy, Christopher Holt, who we got in the band a couple years ago, is incredible, not only on guitar but vocals and keyboards, and he’s a fine, nice chap. But the Dirty Knobs is a guitar band, and basically we’re a rock-and-boogie band, which allows room for the guitar to express itself.

I like the guitar solos and the guitar parts to be spontaneous, as much as possible. So with Christopher and the rest of the guys, a lot of the time I don’t let them hear the song until they’re recording it. I’ll go, “Here’s the chords, and you play something in this space here, OK? 1, 2, 3, 4, go!” And then we get it and I’m like, “OK, that was good. That was it.” And they try to go, “Wait, wait, no, no, no, I made a mistake!” But that was the real beauty of it, that discovery moment.

Got a good example of that process from Mission of Mercy?

Well, I’m an egomaniac [chuckles], so I play most of the guitar solos. But there’s a song called “Vicious Hangover” which is just a party song; it reminds me of Dick Holler and the Holidays’ “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love),” just a gang of fraternity drunk guys having a good time. It’s very simple; it was written 10 minutes before the band arrived at the session.

I handed my Fender Broadcaster to Chris and said, “Here, play this on this song, and when it gets to the solo just do something,” and what you hear is the first take. He was just inspired by the guitar, and he plays an amazing couple of solos in the song.

A couple of the songs, like “Armageddon” and “Wrecking Ball,” sound like somebody was listening to their Led Zeppelin albums during the process.

“Armageddon,” I remember, I did 20 years ago, and I was thinking of “Kashmir.” It’s got a Middle Eastern type of melody in it, which I’ve always been intrigued by, so I’m certainly channeling a bit of the trance vibe of “Kashmir,” sure. And “Wrecking Ball” is just a riff; all of my stuff, if you talk about my riffs, they all kind of have a bit of a Jimmy Page thing in them, or Keith Richards. I can’t help it.

“Armageddon,” and also “No Regrets,” are fairly topical — maybe political, even. Are you comfortable in that arena?

Well, writers are affected by their environment, so that’s bound to happen. So you put it into your song the best you can, but I do make a conscious effort not to take sides or name names or any specific political points of view. I don’t think that’s my place. I’m not qualified to preach politics; some artists follow that path, and I respect them for that.

Me, I want to entertain and take your mind off that, hopefully, but it’s hard not to be affected these days by the world we’re living in and everything everybody is feeling right now with the confusion and disarray in our government and a stupid war that doesn’t seem to need to be there. Something like “Armageddon” is a perfect example of how things are going horribly wrong, but the sun won’t fade away and somehow we’ll get through this.

You wrote “I Remember” on piano, right?

Yeah. That was fun. It was done very quickly. I like writing on the piano; I’ve written some songs on the piano, like “Woman in Love,” “You Got Lucky,” even Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” Occasionally I’ll sit down at the piano; I don’t know much, but I know chords. So (“I Remember”) was just a little thing I was playing and I thought, “Well, what can I sing over this?” and a lyric came and I said, “That’s good — I’ll sing it again!” [laughs]

It’s an interesting song because it starts with the chorus and it goes through a little turnaround. There’s only one verse in the song, in the middle; the rest of it is just choruses repeating, but that just felt good to me.

Back to taking chances — “Bongo Mania”?

Yeah. [laughs] That was a lot of fun. I had this track that was just a burst of adrenaline, for fun — I can’t wait to hear Ferrone play it live. I was thinking in my mind, “Wow, this sounds just like a B-52’s song.” I’d never met them, but I’ve always liked them from their first album. There’s something really appealing about that band, the two girl singers and the guy who talks and the guitar player who was really clever. And really fun songs, party songs.

So I’ve always been a fan, and I think Kate probably comes up with a lot of the stuff, and if I had her on the song it would be amazing. It was a long shot, but I had the office call her and she called me back and we had a great conversation ... and she said, “Sure,” and she came up with a great part and made the song 10 times better.

You channel your inner beat poet into “Vagrant,” at the end of the album. That was certainly part of the Heartbreakers’ scheme over the years.

It was a joke. The night before, I was watching TV and bored and just making stuff up. The next day I came in and the band showed up and I said, “Let’s warm up. I’ve got this kind of tone poem; it doesn’t mean anything, but let’s warm up with the chords and I’ll talk over it just to get the sounds up and get everyone comfortable with the room.”

We did it one time and I just read the words off the sheets and had these kind of jazzy chords. We finished it and all had a laugh and I said, “Well, that’s enough of that, let’s get to work.” And then “Vagrant” just kept popping up as we were doing a sequence.

“Are we gonna do this? Nah, that’s a joke. Nobody’ll like it.”

Then it started to grow on me, and I started to think, like, Tom Waits or Frank Zappa might do something like this. It’s a valid approach. It’s got a sense of humor and it’s got a mood. So I thought, “Let’s just stick this at the end and see if people like it or not.”

Like I said before, it’s the fourth album. We have, like, a Brian Wilson tribute. We have a “Bongo Mania” song, and then we have a beat-poet monologue. And there’s plenty of rockers, plenty of guitar, plenty of the usual stuff you expect, but I wanted to push the boundaries a little bit and do some stuff that’s kind of whacky.

Any instruments or gear on Mission of Mercy that are different than before?

We pretty much stick to guitar, bass, drums, piano, occasional organ or keyboards. I’ve got a lot of guitars; occasionally I’d go down to the closet and say, “Here, play this one.” But mostly it was me on a Telecaster and Christopher on a Strat or a Les Paul through two little amps in the other room, and that was pretty much our basic tracking setup.

Then when the track was finished we might put piano on it, or put some guitar lines on it. But we didn’t use a plethora of guitars. It was mostly just the ones that were on hand in the room.

You’ve got a particularly interesting show coming up September 12, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. What’s that going to be like?

I’m terrified, [laughs] but excited. I always had this idea in the back of my head — in my 20s, 30s, 40s — that someday when I get old and the Heartbreakers retire, maybe I’ll get a bus and get the dogs and get some charts and go around to the colleges and perform some of the catalog with an orchestra, ’cause I love orchestral music and listen to Beethoven and Mozart and Bach a lot.

I got to the point where I looked up and realized, well, the Heartbreakers aren’t here and I am old now. So it’s time. The day has come, and I’m just gonna go for it. We’ve got some charts that are really good. I’ll probably play some guitar throughout the show. I’m gonna do a dry run and work out the kinks with a college orchestra here in L.A. and then go to Atlanta and throw it out there and see what happens.

If it goes really well and I enjoy it, we’ll book some more, but I want to ease into it and see if I can actually do it or not.

This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the first Heartbreakers album. Is that weighing at all on you as you think about set lists and other things you want to do this year?

Well, a little bit. I mean, I’ve got a Dirty Knobs tour. I always do three or four Heartbreakers songs in the encore, usually, just ’cause I love the songs and I can do them the right way and people enjoy hearing them. So I’ll continue to do that. I love my legacy, but I don’t want to live in it.

The last thing out of the vault was July 16, 1978 — Paradise Theater, Boston, MA. Any plans for the next reissues or box sets or anything coming up?

The way that works is the Petty estate controls the catalog, and we’ve got this great engineer, Ryan Ulyate. So they come up with a reissue they want to do, Ryan mixes it, and then he sends it to me to sign off on it — but I have yet to question any of the mixes. They always sound pretty good, so I usually just go, “Yeah, that’s fine.” That’s as involved as I ever get. I’m busy with my own band, y’know?

As the Kinks' rhythm and lead guitarist, Dave Davies inspired a generation of players with his innovative use of power chords and distortion.

Pete Townshend often cited the group as a major influence, and was motivated particularly by Davies’ aggressive rhythm playing and distorted tone. The Who guitarist admitted that “You Really Got Me” inspired him to write “I Can’t Explain” in a similar style. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton all took note of Davies' use of distortion, which was far more aggressive than what anyone had been doing in rock.

But Davies’ influence wasn’t limited to guitarists of rock’s 1960s wave. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi cited him as an early influence on the heavy, down-tuned riffs that defined Sabbath’s sound and acknowledged the importance of the Kinks in creating the blueprint for heavy guitar riffing. The Kinks even inspired Al Di Meola to write a jazz-fusion classic.

And then there’s Eddie Van Halen, who was a fan of the group’s straightforward but powerful approach to rock. Van Halen famously covered two songs by the Kinks: "You Really Got Me," which the California-based hard rockers released as their 1978 debut single, and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone,“ which appeared on their 1982 album, Diver Down.

To be clear, Davies appreciates that he and his brother Ray had an impact on rock and, particularly, rock guitarists.

“It’s always very flattering for people to copy you, but it’s only music, isn’t it? It is an important vehicle, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously,” Davies told Guitar Player in our March 1990 issue. “We’ve been copied more than a lot of people would care to admit. Ray’s music has impressed upon and influenced a lot of people in many different ways, but that’s good.

But, with that said, Davies wasn’t a fan of Van Halen’s take on the Kinks’ classic.

“When I first heard Van Halen’s version of ‘You Really Got Me,’ I laughed,” he said. “It just seemed so exaggerated. It really misses the point of the whole meaning of the song: four working-class guys, struggling to do something different. In the original record, you can sense that in its energy, the roughness. It’s very impure.

“The Van Halen thing; it’s very accomplished and flashy, but what does it mean?

“Whereas when the Stranglers did ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ I thought it was much more respectful, because they actually tried to get a similar snare drum sound and guitar sound, which I thought was strange. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to do that anyway.”

He laughed. “But at least it seemed more respectful to the original concept and feeling. Even the solo was like the original solo, which I thought was really nice and sweet.”

In the same interview, Davies also addressed claims that Jimmy Page had played the electric guitar solos on those early Kinks sides. Davies, who said he was all of 16 years old when he cut those solos in spring 1963, blamed Page's claim on a penchant for myth-building.

“You see, Jimmy Page was a friend of [producer] Shel Talmy’s, and was a session player who used to hang around and hope that he could get in on sessions,” he said. “And we locked him out.

“But he learned a lot, you know, like the many other people who wouldn’t admit borrowing from the Kinks. And I suppose when he became successful himself, all credit due to him, his ego was so inflated he probably thought he invented the bloody instrument anyway, being carried along on that crystal and glamour.

"It’s all an illusion, building your ego up, and eventually something’s going to pop it like a balloon and you’re back flat down on your ass again. Which is what happened, didn’t it?

“And I suppose it was a bit unfortunate of him; I thought he did me a great injustice by saying that. Besides, I can’t see anybody crazy enough to play a solo like the one on ‘You Really Got Me’ anyway.”

Kim Thayil says he “kind of balked” at the idea of writing a memoir when the idea was first presented to him some years ago. It just felt a bit too self-aggrandizing for the Soundgarden guitarist, running counter to his “love for collective pursuits.”

Nevertheless, he ultimately acceded to co-writer Adem Tepedelen, resulting in the new A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond (William Morrow).

“I’ve always gravitated toward bands, toward superhero teams and baseball teams, more than the individual performances,” Thayil, 65, explains of his initial reticence, via Zoom from his home in Seattle. “What I loved about the Beatles or Kiss wasn’t just Paul or John; it was them working with George and Ringo.

“It was the four different faces of Ace and Gene and Paul and Peter and, ‘Omigod, they’re doing “Rock and Roll All Nite,” this is really cool!’ The overreaching concept is all these talents and stars coming together for one goal. That’s what appeals to me.”

That generosity of spirit is demonstrated through A Screaming Life’s 296 pages, which run from Thayil’s origin story — the son of immigrant Indian parents born and raised in Chicago, where he cut his musical teeth alongside high school classmate and original Soundgarden bass guitarist Hiro Yamamoto.

After graduation, the two moved to Seattle together, where Thayil earned a philosophy degree at the University of Washington and worked as a DJ on KCMU but, most importantly, started Soundgarden during 1984 with Yamamoto and his roommate Chris Cornell, who was originally a drummer before he stepped out to front the band.

The book is, as such, the first truly inside account of Soundgarden’s history, from formation to breakup in 1997 and resumption in 2010 until Cornell committed suicide seven years later. It has a photo but no text about the group’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction last year, but it does bring readers up to speed on the surviving Soundgarden members’ plans for unreleased material they were working on at the time of Cornell’s death, as well as Thayil’s other musical pursuits with a couple of MC5 spinoffs and the all-star 3rd Secret.

Thayil — who says he “may have changed some names” to protect privacy where appropriate — felt a significant weight of responsibility in telling the story, too.

“I had to make sure that people understood the kind of talent that was brought to the group,” he explains. That includes not only himself, Cornell, Hiro, bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron, but also founding drummer Scott Sundquist and bassist Jason Everman.

“They’re both very good and very talented at what they did. Even though we parted ways with them and they’re undocumented on recordings, they brought something to the table,” Thayil says. “There’s a real pride I feel in the collaboration, in the teamwork.

“My friends might think it’s nitpicking, but I want to get the story straight as best I can, and try to be as accurate as possible. I didn’t want it to be emetically driven or be patting myself on the back or entirely self-deprecating or vindictive or any of those things. I wanted to ultimately say, ‘We achieved this, and we lost things. Here are the circumstances around that achievement; here are the losses. Here’s what happened.’”

Louder Than Love

The greatest loss, of course, was Cornell, who hung himself in a Detroit hotel on May 17, 2017, at age 52, shortly after a concert at the city’s Fox Theatre. Although Thayil has equivocated over the years about whether he saw any warning signs that night, he writes in A Screaming Life that he sensed Cornell “didn’t seem right” as the band prepared for the show.

“I just remember that I thought Chris looked pained,” Thayil recalls now. “I’ve known Chris for a long time; he looked pained enough that I asked him twice, and that is not something I would normally do. But he convinced me that he was simply tired.

“And he did sleep; he went back to his dressing room after soundcheck and slept. People wanted to ask him a question about our set, or some songs, and either the tour manager or the security guy said, ‘Oh, no, he’s sleeping. He’s out.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, he was right. He wasn’t pained. He’s very tired.’ That was that.”

In the chapter entitled Slaves & Bulldozers, Thayil goes into great depth about what else he observed during the night and in the show, from its rough start to a Cornell electric guitar malfunction during “Been Away Too Long” that forced Thayil to play the only guitar part. Afterward, he relates in the book, Cornell said, “‘See, you don’t need me at all’ … and the way he said it just didn’t feel right.”

Thayil acknowledges that these are feelings he’s not shared publicly until now. “I didn’t know how to share it,” he explains. “I didn’t know how to organize the thoughts and the experiences. Even talking to people who were in the same foxhole as me, like our bandmates and some of our crew members — if I even tried to share my experiences or my thoughts with them, it was very difficult for it to come out in any way that was organizational.

“And I saw that in them. We didn’t know how to give it meaning because, ultimately, you’re devastated emotionally, and that’s the conclusion of these events or observations.

“So when you’re trying to organize the observations and the events into something that gives it coherence or meaning, you end up in the same place — it doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t change the result. You’re still devastated.

“So it was almost this futile thing: ‘I want you to know this or that.’ What does it achieve? It doesn’t make time go backwards, and you start realizing that you’re ultimately just another human being with dreams and ambitions and ultimately impotent as you experience this loss.”

Overall, however, Thayil’s disposition toward Cornell in A Screaming Life is overwhelmingly charitable and positive and, in spots, revelatory for him.

“One surprise in putting this book together,” Thayil says, “was realizing how generous Chris was in how many times he tried to maintain and address and save the band, how he tried to attend to the interests and needs of his bandmates in a constructive way. And that wasn’t always obvious, because he got so much attention as the attractive and talented frontman and singer. He was managing and kind of navigating that kind of attention, which is very difficult for many singers, which I initially did not understand.

“It really comes out, when the stories are all put together, he championed the band in many ways. There were times I felt I was alone in championing the band, but that’s not true. Now I look back on it and, no, Chris was right there, too.”

Been Away Too Long

Though gone nearly a decade, Cornell is with Soundgarden these days, too. Since coming to terms with his widow, Vicky Cornell, over the recordings the band was working on at the time of his death — along with other legal matters — Thayil, Cameron and Shepherd have been working on those songs with early band producer Terry Date. Thayil says there could “potentially be more than nine” tracks, but with no specific timetable for the finished product.

“We’re still working,” he says. “I still have things to do. So does Ben. There’s no schedule here, because it’s a different process. When you work on a record, you have both time and money budgeted out by the record company in concert with the band and management. But because this production doesn’t have a traditional schedule, it’s kind of sideways — in some ways backward and some ways forward.

“In some ways we have a final product in working with Chris’ contributions, and there is a push to have things done. But there’s a pushback, too, saying it’ll be done when it’s done, when we’re satisfied. It has to be the best for me, the best for Matt, the best for Ben — and the best for Chris. It’s going to be the best presentation of Soundgarden we can make it. We can’t do that without him looking as great as he is.”

Placing the music in the context of Soundgarden’s catalog, Thayil describes the songs as “very Soundgarden-like in terms of tone and mood. It’s quite introspective. The perspective, emotionally and creatively, is entirely different and in some ways much more powerful. It doesn’t have the variety of, say, a Down on the Upside. It doesn’t have the viscerality of Ultramega OK or the quirkiness and viscerality of a Badmotorfinger. It’s definitely going to have an overall identity and ambience. It’s going to be a very distinctively different but very Soundgarden-y work.”

During the recording process, Thayil has been using his familiar Guild S-100 (for which he has a signature model and is looking at another for the S-300), a Fender Stratocaster that he began using with Superunknown, a Gibson ES-335, for which there’s a Cornell signature model, and a Guild acoustic. The Telecasters played for Down on the Upside are gone, but Thayil has “farted around” with a Fender Jazzmaster semi-acoustic that was suggested by his guitar tech and a studio engineer.

“It’s a very interesting, curious guitar I’m trying to learn about,” Thayil says. “It has great action. It plays great. It has a cool sound, and I love it. It’s like, ‘Holy shit, this is so fun and easy to play.’

“I don’t know how long it’s been since I felt this way about a guitar; the only time in recent memory is a Guild acoustic that was custom-made for me. See, I’m not the guy who walks into a guitar store and drools. I don’t have a wish list. I’m not on a first-name basis with my gear. We acquired some gear, some new amps and pedals, my guitar tech picked out for me. But I’m not that guy who geeks out and knows every last detail.”

For now, 3rd Secret — Thayil’s band with Cameron, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Void’s Jon “Bubba” Dupree and others — is taking a back seat to the Soundgarden recording and A Screaming Life. Thayil is planning to do some signings in the Seattle area — and perhaps beyond.

“We’ll see how it goes,” he says. “If it goes well, maybe we’ll consider doing things elsewhere. I’m just learning about this process, the book publishing world.”

Although he took influence from George Harrison, as a session player Roger McGuinn had been experimenting with 12-string guitar sounds long before he was captivated by the Beatles and Harrison’s use of the Rickenbacker 360/12.

“I always loved the sound of a 12-string because it sounds like a harpsichord,” he tells Guitar Player. “It's got so many nice overtones in it.”

After catching the Beatles' 1964 movie, A Hard Day’s Night, where Harrison brandished a 12-string Rickenbacker, McGuinn followed suit and picked up his own Rickenbacker, a 370/12. It was with this guitar that McGuinn went on to not only impact the guitar scene via his chiming clean tones but also launch folk-rock as a genre.

The proverbial musical patriarch of the folk-rock era was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song penned by Bob Dylan in 1965, which the Byrds covered and scored a hit with. At the time, McGuinn had no expectations, but when he looks back, he admits the track's importance.

“I'm happy with what we did,” he says. “I think it was innovative. I was trying to tune it for the AM radio audience, and it worked! I look back on it as a happy experience, really.”

As the ’60s progressed, McGuinn and the Byrds would influence the Beatles as well as Harrison, by turning him on to the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds eventually ventured into country, psychedelic rock and the merging of the two. His 12-string was never far from his reach, but he did eschew folk rock for a while.

Recently, though, with his Folk Den project, McGuinn has gotten back to his folk roots in its purest form.

“I just love it,” he says. “It’s historical. It's human history, and real people writing about real things that happened.

It’s something that should not get lost,” he adds. “I compare traditional folk music to Victorian architecture: You don't want to tear down a beautiful Victorian building and put up a steel and glass structure instead, right?”

What initially drew you to the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar?

Well, I’d been playing 12-string acoustic before that. I got into it because of Pete Seeger playing one, and Bob Gibson playing one. And I got into Lead Belly and the folk scene, so I was a 12-string player. Actually, I was a studio musician in New York, doing sessions for 12-string acoustic and five-string banjo for a lot of folk acts, including Judy Collins and Paul Simon.

How big of an influence was George Harrison on you as far as the 12-string electric guitar goes?

We all went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, and copied down notes about what the Beatles were playing: that Ringo played Ludwig drums, Paul had that Höfner violin bass…

And then George came out with the Rickenbacker, which looked like a six-string from the front. They’d condensed the tuning pegs into a six-string format from the front, and they had another six sticking out of the back of the headstock. It was like a classical guitar, with a channeled head.

What did you think of that?

I went, “Wow, I love the sound of that.” I’d heard 12-string sounds on the radio before, like the Searchers and the Seekers — although I learned later that they were playing six-string guitars, but with another guitarist playing octaves, or something like that. But that 12-string sound was something that I loved.

It became very popular after the Byrds had a hit with “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Yeah, after we got the hit, everybody got a Rickenbacker. The Beach Boys had one, Paul Revere & the Raiders had one. It was a new sound in rock and roll, and it came out of England.

You’re also an originator of folk rock. Is it also true that the Beatles were your inspiration for that style?

Yeah! The Beatles had first been a skiffle band called the Quarrymen, and skiffle is a form of folk music. So they were doing chords that were more than one, four and five; they were doing things that were more than subdominant and dominant chords. And they ere doing things in the middle of songs where they got into other minor chords, instead of just playing G, C and D major.

Did you ever talk with them about their influence on folk rock?

No, I never did. But there’s also a theory that the Animals invented folk rock by doing “House of the Rising Sun,” which had been a blues song that Bob Dylan recorded. But I don’t think it's the same, you know?

There’s a story that when the Byrds first heard “Mr. Tambourine Man,” David Crosby said, “The two-four folk beat isn’t going to cut it on radio.” Is that true?

Yeah. I realized when I heard the Beatles that they were onto something — that anything with a four-four beat was going to be a hit. So I rearranged “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

We had a demo that was originally recorded in New York by Bob [Dylan] and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, but Ramblin’ had too much to drink and was out of tune on the demo. [laughs] It actually wasn’t meant to be a demo; it was intended to be released, but Bob didn’t because Ramblin’ was out of tune.

So we got a copy of that, and that’s where we first learned it. And that version was four and a half minutes long, in two-four time, and out of tune.

That’s when Crosby said, “I don’t like it, man. Two-four time is never going to play on the radio.” And besides that, it was too long; radio wouldn’t play anything over two and a half minutes at that point.

Is it true that the Byrds’ manager, Jim Dickson, invited Bob to hear the Byrds rehearse the song? If so, what was his reaction?

Yeah, it was at World Pacific Studios, where we would rehearse. Jim let us come in there, play on the tape machines, and rehearse, and he invited Bob over.

Bob came over, and he was listening to us to this rock-inspired version of the song. I remember I played the song, and Bob said, “What’s that?” I said, “That’s one of your songs, man…”

He didn’t really recognize it, but he did like it and gave us his approval.

Bob was recording Highway 61 Revisited, the album where he really delved into folk rock, around the same time that the Byrds released “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Do you believe you influenced Bob’s rock leanings?

Well, you know, we all come from rock and roll. I was into Elvis and Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. And Bob had played piano in rock and roll bands when he was a kid. So Bob was already there. He already had that in his system.

Your Back from Rio record is perhaps one of the greatest star-studded albums of the ’90s. It’s got Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello, David Crosby and Chris Hillman on it. How did that come about, and how do you look back on it now?

I feel great about it. It’s probably my best commercial release.

It came about because I went on the road with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan in Europe for what was called the Temples in Flames tour.

It was 1987, and we had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune. So I showed the tune to Tom, and he and I sat down and wrote “King of the Hill.” And then, Mike Campbell came in, and he had a four-track cassette studio in a briefcase.

So he recorded a demo of it, and we took that demo, and somehow got it to Arista Records, who signed me to a record deal. And then Tom helped me out with the recording, and so did Elvis and the other Byrds. It was a pretty cool project, and I’m still really happy with how it came out.

You’ve returned to folk music in its purest form with your Folk Den project. What led you back there?

I got concerned that it was going to get lost in the shuffle. All the new folk singers were singer/songwriters, and they weren’t doing the old, traditional songs. If you look at NPR's lists of traditional songs, like, only eight of the top 100 are traditional. So traditional music got kind of swept into the dustbin of history.

Do you see the tide turning to where there’s enough quality traditional folk music out there today?

Well, it depends on where you are. If you go to Scotland, there’s plenty of it. But if you go around the United States, you’re not going to find too much of it. It’s all kind of gone, but I’m doing my bit to keep it going by putting things up.

And it’s all for free. It’s a public service sponsored by UNC, North Carolina. I’ve got over 330 folk songs up there for free download on The Folk Den at mcguinn.com.

Steve Lukather is always a blast to chat with. And as the man who has held down Toto’s proverbial fort — along with thousands of iconic sessions — dialed in with Guitar Player to catch up, he was in rare form.

“What do you wanna know?” Luke asks, laughing. “I don’t know, man. What can I possibly tell you right now?”

Lukather, of course, knows that the world is wondering about the project he’s working on with Alex Van Halen. Rumors have ranged from Luke taking his old pal Eddie Van Halen’s place to the duo writing new music.

The facts, most of which Luke isn’t allowed to talk about, reveal that none of the above are true. What this project really comes down to is a brother and a close friend working together to pay their respects to an electric guitar legend via music.

With that said, Luke is not playing guitar on a new Van Halen album. In fact, this isn’t a Van Halen album at all, and as of now, Luke isn’t playing a lick of guitar but co-producing.

“I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” Lukather says of the tracks Eddie Van Halen left behind. “When I heard them, I said to Al, ‘How fucking come you didn’t use these?’ And the answer was because nobody could write to it. So if you think this is a bunch of throwaway crap that we’re trying to Mickey Mouse together to suck the dollar out of poor, unsuspecting Van Halen fans, it’s not.”

Lukather admits that he doesn’t know what the project will be called. “Those are Alex Van Halen questions,” he says. “I’m just here to be his sidekick, and somebody that he’s gotten very close with since Ed’s death.”

Though Lukather’s relationship with the Van Halens goes back further than that. “We’ve always been pals,” Lukather says. “It’s like Al’s missing a piece of himself. That’s how I feel. He looks at me as somebody he trusts, and who was close with Ed.”

For Lukather, the reward comes via the process. “I don’t have ulterior motives,” he says. “This is not about money. This is about love of the guys and trying to help. I’m not gonna be involved in an obvious way. So, I wish people would get the fuck off my back!” he says with a laugh.

And even if Lukather was asked to play guitar, which he isn’t, he doesn’t feel he’s the person for the job. “I’m not qualified,” he says. “Call Dweezil — he plays that shit. Call Nuno! I can name 10 guys, like Vai or Satch. I’m nowhere near qualified to start dabbling in the Van Halen world.”

What did you think about the initial rumors that you were taking over as guitarist of Van Halen?

Well, first off, that’s the most ridiculous and humorous thing I’ve ever heard. I am no more qualified to try and play like Ed Van Halen than I am to be the first man to tug my dick on the planet. [laughs] I don’t know how anybody could think that would even be a reality. Honestly, it’s laughable. I don’t play… I couldn’t… I don’t play like Ed. It’s crazy.

How far back do you and Alex go?

We’ve been friends for 45 years. I mean, I was close friends with the Van Halens, but I really love all the guys. The only guy I don’t know is David Lee Roth. I met him once or twice, but very briefly. I’ve just always been a fan since the beginning, you know? What can I say?

What are you and Alex actually working on?

Well, being a fan isn’t what it’s about. Alex needs some help. He came to me and said, “Look, I need some help with this.” I went, “How can I help?” But there’s no need for another guitar player.

Meaning you’re not playing guitar on this?

First off, Eddie played some of the most amazing shit I’ve ever heard. And it’s not pieces on the floor that have to be snapped back together and try to Mickey Mouse something together that might be sellable. These are fucking finished tracks with Ed and Al, and Ed’s playing bass on a lot of it. That’s all I can say right now because it’s a much bigger picture, and it’s Alex’s story to tell.

You can’t reveal the nature of the music, but can you expand on your role?

I am there 100 percent to be his co-producer and help him through the technical aspects. I’m not gonna play. There’s not gonna be any Lukather or Toto fingerprints on a Van Halen thing. I can fucking promise you that. I’m there to be Al’s wingman, and go, “How can I help you do this?” I’m there to go, “Want me to help you do some vocals? How do we do these mixes?” It’s about making sure that there’s quality control from somebody he trusts.

Does being a friend and a contemporary make you the right person for the job?

I can listen to stuff, and go, “I know Ed wouldn’t like that.” I can say, “I think Ed would dig that,” you know? I’m just being that third ear.

Is Wolfgang involved?

I’m hoping that Al is gonna ask Wolf to be involved on some level. I haven’t talked to Wolf in a long time. It’s sad, actually. I’d like to, you know? We sort of just got busy, and we haven’t. But I think what he’s doing is wonderful. I think he’s an incredible musician. I think if anybody is gonna play anything that’s needed, he would be qualified to do so. But there really isn’t a need for other players to come in at this point.

Surely, listening to this stuff has to be a reminder of Ed’s greatness.

We all did the tapping thing when it first came out because it was an amazing trick to learn. And after a while, guys like Satch and Steve Vai did it their own way because all the guys were doing a very derivative and obviously Van Halen thing. It just got a little tired.

But that’s not what Ed was trying to do—Ed was trying to fill out a three-piece band. The intricacy between his lead and rhythm playing at the same time was pretty peerless, man. There’s not a lot of guys who could make the racket that Eddie Van Halen did, man. It changed the world.

You won’t be disappointed in the playing; I can tell you that. Ask Steve Vai. I think somebody asked him, and Steve may have heard a few things that I’ve heard. I think he said something in the press about it. But with Ed, man, I felt the same way you did when you heard him. It was jaw-dropping, and it still is.

Todd Rundgren was all of 23 when his reputation as a boy-wonder producer landed him a high-profile gig with the star act of the Beatles’ Apple Records. Badfinger were a quartet of British musicians whose name and debut single under that moniker — the Paul McCartney–penned “Come and Get It” — had been selected by the Beatles themselves.

In early 1971, they were riding high on “No Matter What,” a top-10 hit in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries. What they needed was a hit album to follow it up.

The result would be Straight Up, the Rundgren-produced album widely regarded as the British quartet’s finest, thanks in great part to its two big hits: “Baby Blue” and “Day After Day.”

But as Rundgren explains, getting there was anything but straightforward. Badfinger — guitarists Pete Ham and Joey Molland, bass guitarist Tom Evans and drummer Mike Gibbins — had already started the album twice.

The initial sessions began in January 1971 with Geoff Emerick, the Beatles’ visionary engineer on albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Emerick had coproduced Badfinger’s previous album, No Dice, which included “No Matter What.”

Unfortunately, the new sessions failed to satisfy Apple’s American arm.

“Apparently the distributor was not satisfied with it,” Rundgren tells Guitar Player. “They didn't think they could promote it, or didn't hear a single or something, and said, ‘Okay, start over.’ So the band started over with George Harrison.”

Harrison approached the project roughly six months after releasing his own landmark solo effort, All Things Must Pass. Production began in May, but Harrison was soon swept up in organizing the Concert for Bangladesh after his friend Ravi Shankar brought the humanitarian crisis to his attention.

“They got maybe five songs in and George got completely involved in the Concert for Bangladesh and told the band, ‘I’m finished. I can't do this.’ That’s when I got the call — producer number three.

“At the time I was developing a reputation for getting things done very quickly, no nonsense. The label was looking for some assurance that the record would actually get finished. That’s when I inherited the project.”

By then, Rundgren had established himself as a rising production talent through his work at Bearsville Records — the upstate New York label run by Bob Dylan manager Albert Grossman — and on projects like the Band’s 1970 album Stage Fright. He’d also launched his own solo career under the name Runt, releasing two albums that showcased his increasingly adventurous songwriting talents and production style.

With Apple demanding a fast turnaround, Rundgren took stock of what had already been recorded.

“There was a whole album by Geoff Emerick. I think we lifted a couple tunes from that,” he says. “‘Flying’ was one of them. Then the George Harrison tunes — we used some of those, although most had to have parts re-recorded. It all sounded like Phil Spector. That was George’s thing at the time.”

Spector had, of course, overseen the heavily layered Wall of Sound production on All Things Must Pass, and Harrison brought a similar approach to Badfinger’s sessions.

“So when he produced Badfinger’s record he was doing all these Spectory things, like having three acoustic guitars playing — all this overdubbing and swampy reverb printed on the drums and stuff like that,” Rundgren explains. “I had to undo some of that.

“And then we recorded probably five new songs, of which ‘Baby Blue’ was one of them — the very first thing we recorded,” he reveals. “Then somehow I had to make it all sound cohesive.”

Rundgren ultimately completed the album at Bearsville Studio.

“I took it all back to Bearsville and somehow got it to sound like one record,” he says. “Geoff Emerick was not credited, but for some reason George Harrison was credited on ‘Day After Day.’”

Fifty-five years on, the slight still irritates him.

“He gave up on the project,” Rundgren says. “The only time I ever met him he said, ‘I’m done. Do whatever you want with it. Use it or don't use it.’

“Essentially he had no time to shepherd it. I heard nothing from him during the rest of the production.”

Straight Up would go on to produce two major hits in “Baby Blue” (number nine in the U.S.) and “Day After Day” (number three). Although critics were lukewarm at the time, the album would eventually come to be regarded as Badfinger’s finest work. “Baby Blue” would enjoy a a massive cultural resurgence in September 2013 when it was used in the final scene of the hit series Breaking Bad.

Despite their remarkable good fortune to land in the Beatles’ orbit, Badfinger were plagued by disastrous management. Pete Ham died by suicide in 1975, followed by Tom Evans eight years later.

Rundgren didn’t have an opportunity to revisit the album with Harrison in the years that followed.

“I never had reason to run into him, even though I was spending a lot of time in Hawaii,” he explains. “I would always come out to Kauaʻi, and he lived on Maui, I believe. But we never did cross paths.”

The 1969 Woodstock festival produced some of rock’s most iconic guitar moments: Richie Havens strumming his beat-up open-tuned Guild D-40 acoustic as he improvised “Freedom.” Pete Townshend taking his Gibson SG to Abbie Hoffman’s head after the political activist interrupted the Who’s set. And Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on a white Fender Stratocaster.

Among those standouts performances is Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee leading the group through “I’m Going Home” while playing the heavily stickered and modified Gibson ES-335 he called Big Red. The instrument would go on to become one of the most recognizable and prized electric guitars in rock history, and is currently under lock and key in the possession of his daughter Jasmin.

The guitar’s legend began in 1963 when Lee purchased it for £45 with a fitted case from Jack Brentnall’s, a musical instrument store in his hometown of Nottingham, England. By the time Big Red made its live debut a few years later, Lee had already begun modifying the instrument. The first distinctive change was the addition of a Fender single-coil pickup in the middle position, between the guitar’s two PAF humbuckers, giving it a brighter, sharper tone when needed.

“I now have a Gibson which sounds like a Tele just when I want it to,” Lee explained in an August 1975 interview with International Musician & Recording World.

At the same time, he began covering the instrument with stickers: peace signs, psychedelic decals, astrological imagery and the logo of the Ten Years After Music Lovers Society. By the time Lee walked onstage at Woodstock, Big Red already looked unlike any other Gibson in rock.

“Dad was always tinkering with the guitar doing stuff with it,” Jasmin tells Guitar Player. “In early 1970, he took the Bigsby off and replaced it with a TP-6 tailpiece with fine tuners. And because of that, he put more stickers on it.”

Ironically, the guitar’s appearance was permanently frozen in time by accident. During a 1972 show at London’s Marquee Club, Lee threw the guitar in the air and smashed the neck against the venue’s low ceiling.

“He used to throw it around quite a lot onstage,” Jasmin says. “Unfortunately on this particular night he threw it up and broke the dot-inlaid neck right off the guitar.”

Lee sent Big Red to Gibson for repairs. When it returned, the original neck had been replaced with a block-inlay version, and all the stickers had been lacquered over.

“The stickers became part of the guitar,” Jasmin says. “He couldn't take any off or change them.”

Gibson’s unsolicited preservation act ultimately helped turn Big Red into an artifact of classic rock history. It also obscured the guitar’s date of manufacture. Lee referred to it as a 1958 model, but without the original neck, it’s impossible to know.

Lee continued using the guitar throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s, but as its value climbed he gradually retired it from the stage. By 1992, insurance costs forced him to place it in storage altogether.

Years later, Gibson attempted to produce a signature replica, resulting in a painstaking Woodstock 50th-anniversary re-creation in 2019.

“Gibson actually worked quite closely with Dad on this guitar,” Jasmin says. “They sent him quite a few prototypes, but he was like, ‘Nope, nope, that’s not right.’”

Today, the original Big Red remains secured in storage while its replicas hang at Dean St. Studios in London. The Lee family hopes the original instrument will eventually find a new owner who understands both its musical significance and the decades of history embedded in every scratch, modification and sticker sealed beneath its lacquer finish.

For all the mythology surrounding Van Halen’s rise, David Lee Roth says the band’s earliest songs were born in a space barely big enough for two people.

Speaking during a recent solo appearance at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, the singer became visibly emotional as he recalled the tiny room where he and Eddie Van Halen first learned how to write songs together — a place so cramped, he said, that “our knees would touch.”

The memory resonated with Roth because it reminded him of his own upbringing.

“My dad was just starting in school on the GI Bill when I happened,” Roth told the audience. “Back in 1954, the Fender Stratocaster was released, and so was I.”

For much of his childhood, Roth said, his family lived in student housing that was “about the size of the drum riser here.” His own corner of the apartment was little more than a washer-and-dryer space outfitted with cinder blocks and a foam cushion.

Years later, he encountered something remarkably similar when he first visited Eddie’s home.

“When I first walked into Ed’s, it wasn’t even a room,” Roth recalled. “It was identical to the way I grew up.”

According to Roth, you had to walk through the space to get from the backyard to the kitchen. Officially it was Eddie’s room, but in reality it was little more than a small alcove.

“The beginnings of every song we sing to you tonight, I started with Ed,” Roth said.

Eddie would sit there with an electric guitar that he couldn’t plug into an amplifier because his mother wouldn’t allow it.

“So I would have to listen to the electric guitar without an amp,” Roth remembered. “And it’d be so close that our knees would touch.”

For hours at a time, the pair would hunch over a small cassette recorder documenting riffs and ideas.

“Those first couple of years, God, how many hours did I spend leaning over like this?” Roth said. “Tape recorded on a Sony little thing with the push buttons and the cassette player. Take it home, write the lyrics and bring it back and go, ‘I think it’s a song about ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ or something. What do you got next?’”

The future rock stars were hardly living large. Roth joked that when one of them suggested having a cigarette, it usually meant sharing a single one.

“‘Hey, you wanna have a cigarette?’ He’d go, ‘Yeah,’” Roth recalled. “And that’s what we would have. The two of us, one cigarette.”

That arrangement often led to arguments.

“‘Don’t fuckin’ hotbox it. You’re lipping it.’ ‘No, fuck you, too.’ ‘Oh, fuck you twice.’”

The singer laughed as he remembered the constant friction.

“There was friction early, and we loved it.”

What struck Roth, however, was how completely that dynamic survived success.

Roughly 30 years later, he and Eddie reunited to write the two new songs that appeared on Van Halen’s 1996 Best Of Volume I collection: “Can’t Get This Stuff No More” and “Me Wise Magic.”

By then, Roth said, both men were living in what he jokingly called “tombs with a view,” and Eddie had built a multimillion-dollar recording studio packed with state-of-the-art equipment.

Yet when it came time to write, the guitarist instinctively recreated the conditions that had sparked their earliest collaborations.

Roth remembered sitting in the middle of the enormous studio reading a paperback while waiting for Eddie to arrive.

“When he came in, he put a cigarette in his mouth, came over, brought a chair right in front of me, and sat down in it and scooted forward till our knees touched,” Roth said.

“That’s how I wrote the last two songs. Full circle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the singer needed convincing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, he no longer owns the Gibson pedal steel.

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

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

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

Few of the guitars that belonged to country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons are around today. Much like the man himself — who died of a morphine-and-tequila overdose in 1973 at the age of 26 — his instruments tended to have disastrously short but eventful lives, creating exquisite, game-changing music before making an untimely exit. Many were lost in a fire at Parsons’ home in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon not long before his death.

But two that survive are very much the alpha and omega of Parsons’ guitar history. There’s his small-body 1963 Martin 00-21 flattop acoustic guitar, currently owned by his former music and romantic partner Emmylou Harris, which dates from Parsons’ earliest days as a young up-and-coming participant in the mid-’60s folk boom. Then there’s the custom acoustic made by luthier David Russell Young in 1973, an instrument that dates from Parsons’ final days and was prominently played on the legendary Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels tour of that same year. The guitar sold for $125,000 at auction in 2014.

In the decade that separates these guitars, Parsons played a key role in bringing country music out of the honky-tonks and into the forefront of rock music through his landmark work with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and as a solo artist. In the process, he opened up a rich vein of songcraft rooted in the heartbreak tropes of country balladry, yet fused with post-’60s existential angst.

It’s safe to say there would be no Eagles without Gram Parsons. Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon even played alongside him for a while in the Flying Burrito Brothers. In terms of more contemporary music, Parsons is one of the patriarchs of what we now call alt-country and Americana. His own preferred phrase was “American Cosmic Music.” Call it what you will, the whole twangy crew from Wilco to Neko Case to Jim Lauderdale to Lucius are, in one way or another, the children of Gram Parsons.

Of course, country music was at the party from the earliest days of rock and roll. The music of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis was a jumped-up shotgun wedding of country and blues, but after the British Invasion, country music fell by the wayside as rock artists started taking their music more seriously in the ’60s.

When rock musicians did perform country songs, they generally relegated it to novelty status, as heard on mid-decade hits like the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Nashville Cats” and the Beatles cover of Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally,” which exploited the witty side of country lyricism.

But country’s more somber side and growing associations with social and political conservatism (which reached a peak in Merle Haggard’s 1969 single “Okie from Muskogee”) were definitely off-putting to many late-’60s rock music fans, who started to build a dividing line between the two genres.

At Gram Parsons’ urging, the Byrds crossed that line in 1968 with Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Today, the album is hailed as an ambitious landmark work in the country-rock movement, but it was a commercial failure in its time. Chief Byrd Jim (Roger) McGuinn had intended it to be a celebration of 20th century American music thus far, from folk to electronic, but Parsons pushed things in more of a stone-country direction. With his boyish good looks, well-heeled southern charm, and prodigious musical talent, he could be very persuasive.

“Gram was really a strong musical force,” McGuinn said in 1990. “I just let him go and went along with it because it was fun. I was having a good time with it. We went to Nudie’s” — Hollywood tailor Nudie Cohn, known for his flamboyant Western-style suits — “and got some country clothes and cowboy hats. I got a Cadillac and got into the whole country thing. I started listening to country radio and talking with a southern accent. It was like Halloween or something for a long, extended period.”

By contextualizing songwriters like Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie alongside Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers, and Stax tunesmith William Bell, Sweetheart of the Rodeo broadened the perspective of the variegated sources that make up rock’s roots. The album also introduced the world to Parsons’ own prodigious songwriting gifts. The winsome bittersweet nostalgia of “Hickory Wind” and the cosmic cowboy philosophy of “One Hundred Years from Now” announced the arrival of a major new voice in popular music.

But Parsons’ time with the Byrds was short. Always restless and erratic in behavior — almost as if he knew how little time he had — Parsons went on to co-found the Flying Burrito Brothers with fellow ex-Byrd Chris Hillman in 1968. His two albums with that group — The Gilded Palace of Sin, in 1969, and Burrito Deluxe the following year — brought Parsons’ songwriting into diamond-sharp focus.

His love of country music’s florid lyrics and ostentatious costumes was matched by his choice of gear. Onstage and in the studio, he favored big, ornate cowboy guitars—Gibson J-200s and Hummingbirds and Epiphone Frontiers. With their mustache bridges and pickguards decorated with flora and fauna, these flashy guitars are very much in the same tradition as Nudie Cohn’s Western suits, which Parsons brought into vogue among rock musicians.

But his take on country tradition was uniquely his own and quintessentially rock and roll. For example, his most well-known Nudie suit, also in the Country Music Hall of Fame collection, features embroidered images of marijuana leaves and naked women.

Given his fondness for a big guitar and a filled fruit jar, not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of country music, Parsons made an ideal buddy for Keith Richards as the ’60s gave way to the ’70s. It’s an exaggeration to say that Parsons turned the Stones on to country music. Long before Parsons came along, Richards was copping licks from George Jones’ guitarist Charlie Carter when the Stones toured Texas in the mid Sixties.

But Parsons put Jagger and Richards hip to some of the music’s finer points. Gram and his soon-to-be-wife Gretchen Burrell lived for a while at Richards’ house in the South of France, where they were part of the notorious ongoing upstairs party while the Stones were working on Exile on Main St. in the grand villa’s basement.

There is some speculation that Parsons played a songwriting role on country-flavored Stones tracks like “Wild Horses,” “Dead Flowers” and “Sweet Virginia,” but such things are hard to prove. People also wonder if Parsons played guitar on any Exile tracks, though Richards says that he never did.

“But why he didn’t is a good question,” Richards said in 2004. “Gram and I would play a lot upstairs in the living area, and he would play with Mick [Taylor] a lot up there.

“But Gram was a little shy, and we were too busy to say, ‘Hey, Gram, come down here; we need another guitar.’ He would distance himself from us when we were working. He’d come and listen. a bit, but that was it.

“If I have a friend — and Gram was my friend — Mick sometimes gives off a vibe like, ‘You can’t be my friend if you’re his.’ That could have a bit to do with why Gram’s not playing on the record.”

By the autumn of 1972, Parsons was back in L.A., signed to Reprise Records as a solo artist, and at work on his first album under the deal, GP. Around that time, he came through the doors of Westwood Music, just south of UCLA, looking for a new guitar. The store’s owner, Fred Walecki, knew him well, as he’d sold Gram a few guitars and hung with him. At the time, Westwood Music was at the epicenter of L.A.’s burgeoning country, rock, and folk guitar scene.

“Gram was a party kid,” Walecki recalls. “He was in love with the spike [intravenous drugs]. but he wasn’t like some horrible nodding-out drug addict. Gram was like an angel. He was so innocent in a lot of ways.”

Parsons knew what he wanted: a guitar like the one Walecki had recently sold to Merle Haggard’s wife, which was made by luthier David Russell Young and ornamented with the maker’s extraordinary fretboard and headstock inlay work, a floral pattern often called the Tree of Life. This kind of instrument was very much in Parson’s style: flashy and floral, but also elegant and classy. Walecki commissioned Russell to build an instrument for Parsons, which became Parsons’ stage guitar. The guitar figured prominently in the Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels Tour of 1973.

The nominal goal of this traveling country-rock soap opera-cum-circus was to promote GP. The album was actually a tough sell at the time, although it is now recognized as a classic, rich in poignant southern vignettes and honky-tonk weepers like “She” and “A Song for You,” sweetened by mournful pedal steel, fiddle, and gospel vocal harmonies coming at you like Jesus and his angels beaming down from the nearest cloud.

On the record, Parsons was backed by the crème de la crème of Elvis Presley’s stage band: guitar legend James Burton, keyboardist Glen D. Hardin, and drummer Ron Tutt, as well as country legends Buddy Emmons and Al Perkins on pedal steel and Byron Berline on fiddle.

GP also benefits from angel-voiced contributions of Emmylou Harris. Chris Hillman brought the young up-and-coming singer into the fold. Walecki notes, “Chris’s idea, as I recall, was to get Emmylou Harris to come in, sing on Gram’s album, and then sing on his own album. We had quite the little society.”

Right from the start, Harris and Parsons shared a deep musical empathy, their voices twining in the best country-duo tradition of Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. For many years, Harris’s main guitar was a ’60s Gibson J-200 that Gram had given her.

Their musical bond, moreover, was starting to blossom into romance. Harris didn’t want to move in on Gram’s marriage to Gretchen, but she could see that that union was rapidly dissolving. So Emmylou chose to bide her time. If only she’d known how little was left.

Harris exerted a beneficial influence on Parsons. “When I heard the news that Emmylou and Gram had fallen in love, I was happy for them,” Walecki recounts. “Especially the news that she wasn’t tolerating the drugs and alcohol, so he was on the straight and narrow.”

But it was probably too late at that point. Even though Parsons was just in his mid 20s, his health was already seriously compromised by years of abusing booze and dope. “He was shaking the last time I saw him,” Walecki recalls. “Literally. He had pancreatitis, the same thing that killed Lowell George. It was one of those things where he could never get high ever again.”

Harris valiantly worked with Parsons to put together a follow-up to GP. Their plan was to make a duo album, again in the grand country tradition of mixed-gender duets. But Parsons wasn’t in the best of shape, and the songs weren’t coming easily without the familiar aids of drugs and alcohol.

“He was writing for the next album,” Walecki says, “and I don’t think he believed that he could go to that place and write songs without using something as a bridge to get there.”

Even so, Parsons was able to come up with two of his greatest songs, the multivalent trucker/traveling musician’s prayer “In My Hour of Darkness” and the anthemic “Return of the Grievous Angel,” tracks that would soon serve as a eulogy of sorts for the troubled singer. Harris helped him put together the former, and Boston poet Thomas Brown contributed the lyrics for the latter, which celebrated “the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels, and a good saloon in every single town.”

With this new material, some leftovers from Parson’s back pages, a few inspired covers, and superb support from Burton, Hardin, Tutt, and a cadre of top country session players, Parsons and Harris cut an album that stands as one of Parsons’ very finest moments. It was to have been titled Sleepless Nights and jointly credited to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, but fate had something else in store.

While on a vacation getaway with friends at Joshua Tree National Monument, Parsons took a fatal dose of morphine, mixed with tequila, presumably by accident. He died on September 19, 1973. After his death, Gretchen Parsons had Emmylou Harris’s name and likeness deleted from the album’s front cover. With a few changes in the running order, the disc was retitled Grievous Angel.

The epithet is ideally suited to Parsons, a man frequently described as angelic by those who knew him. But he was an angel who carried a grievous burden, one that rendered short his days on this earth but allowed him to leave behind a rich musical legacy that is still thriving today.

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

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

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

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

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

Which is how they met Diamond’s band.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By 1980, Cher was one of the biggest successes in music. A pop icon, television mainstay, and Las Vegas headliner, she was reportedly pulling in around $300,000 a week. Her name and face were instantly recognizable in entertainment.

She’d done it all — except front a rock band, stalk the stages of sweaty clubs and make hard rock record. At 44, that was what she wanted more than anything.

It wasn’t an entirely unlikely ambition. The idea wasn’t completely out of character. Cher had first found fame in the 1960s as half of Sonny & Cher, the duo she formed with Sonny Bono. With hits like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On,” they became fixtures of mid-’60s pop while projecting a deliberately off-center public image that set them apart from their peers.

“You know, ‘Cher’ has so many connotations for so many people,” she said in 1980. “It’s like, ‘How could Cher do rock ’n’ roll?’ Most of the people that we have now are too young to really remember when Sonny and I started. Even though our music wasn’t called rock ’n’ roll, we were pretty outrageous.”

For her latest reinvention, Cher decided to erase her own name. The result was Black Rose, a short-lived hard rock project that deliberately kept Cher’s involvement out of the spotlight in an effort to see what the music could do on its own.

It started in 1979 at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip. Guitarist Les Dudek — best known for his work with the Allman Brothers Band, including the lead electric guitar parts on “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica” — was there when he heard that Cher was putting a band together.

“One of my player buddies said, ‘Hey, did you hear Cher’s auditioning some players for a new project?’” Dudek recalled in a 2001 interview with .

Dudek arrived to find the room bustling with musicians that include Stephen Stills and keyboardist Mike Finnigan, who had played on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. The players quickly fell into a groove — until Cher walked in and changed the tone immediately.

“We got in there playing and turned it into a big jam session and Cher stopped it,” Dudek said. “She said, ‘Hey! I didn’t invite all you people down here for a jam session. This is for my project, dammit!’”

Dudek was impressed by her grit. By the end of the day, she had convinced him to sign on as lead guitarist.

“I said, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll help you do it!’” recalled Dudek, who soon found himself in the role of her boyfriend as well.

Taking the name Black Rose, the group rehearsed and played small Los Angeles clubs without leaning on Cher’s celebrity, testing whether the music could function outside the frame she’d spent two decades building.

Cher was signed to Casablanca Records, which agreed to release the project under those conditions. Her image was minimized: she didn’t appear on the front cover, and only surfaced in a group photo on the back of the sleeve alongside Dudek, Finnigan, Ron “Rocket” Ritchotte, Warren Ham, Trey Thompson and Gary Ferguson. With her hair cut in a punkish shag, she was barely recognizable.

Inside, the album leaned toward late-’70s polished rock — eight songs written in part by heavy hitters like Carol Bayer Sager, David Foster, and Bernie Taupin, shaped by producer James Newton Howard into a slick, guitar-forward AOR sound.

On paper, it had the components of a crossover moment. In practice, it landed in a no-man’s-land. Without internet-era visibility, Cher’s core audience often didn’t realize she was involved. Rock audiences, meanwhile, heard a record that felt too polished to carry much edge. And radio programmers, aware of the secret, tended to treat it less like a statement than a curiosity.

The critical response was blunt. People magazine wrote that Cher’s vocals were “quivering” and “over-mannered,” adding that the album would be improved if it were “rerecorded by the Group with No Singer.”

Cher, unsurprisingly, took the reaction personally.

“The critics panned us, and they didn’t attack the record,” she told Rolling Stone. “They attacked me. It was like, ‘How dare Cher sing rock & roll?’”

Commercially, Black Rose did modest business—reportedly around 400,000 copies, driven largely by curiosity and word of mouth—but it never broke through as intended.

The group dissolved in 1981.

Still, the experiment didn’t disappear so much as it echoed forward. The guitar-driven framework and harder sonic approach would resurface later in Cher’s career, when she returned to rock-oriented material with far greater success in the late ’80s, including “I Found Someone” and “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

For Dudek, the aftermath was more complicated. He later said his label, Columbia, hadn’t been informed of his involvement in a Casablanca-backed project and reacted accordingly.

“My record company was pissed,” he said. “Most likely, that Black Rose project sealed my fate with my record company.”

He was dropped soon after.

“It was a bad mistake for my music career,” he reflected. “Even though I have no regrets whatsoever about being with Cher… I totally lost my identity, but I had a great time.”

Gary Moore didn’t set out to become a blues guitarist. In the late 1980s, he was still operating inside the hard rock machinery that had defined much of his career. But a shift was already forming that would take him toward his solo breakthrough album, Still Got the Blues and, eventually, toward a very different legacy.

The idea, Moore recalled in a 2003 interview with this writer, didn’t arrive as a grand revelation. It came instead through a series of small, repeated suggestions from an unlikely source: bass guitarist Bob Daisley.

It was Daisley who had already helped shape another major career turn with his support for Randy Rhoads as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist in 1980. In 1986, after joining Thin Lizzy very briefly, Daisley was working alongside Moore and continuing to make similar kinds of quiet interventions.

“Every time I was in the dressing room,” Moore recalled, “I’d be on my own playing some blues and Bob Daisley would come in and go, ‘You know, you should make a blues album, as it would probably be the biggest thing you ever did.’

“We both laughed when he said that. But it turned out that he was right.”

Moore didn’t act on the advice immediately. The idea lingered while he continued moving through the rock circuit.

“Eventually I thought, ‘I’d love to make a blues album, but I don’t think the record company would wear it,’” he said. “That was one of those occasions where I was getting really sick of the whole rock metal scene, and I just had to get away from it.”

When he finally did make the move, the response from Virgin Records was unexpectedly receptive.

“They were right behind it when they heard what I was trying to do because it wasn’t straight blues,” Moore said. “They heard a couple of songs and went, ‘Yeah, that could be good.’”

What became Still Got the Blues was recorded quickly, often in loose, exploratory sessions with a wide cast of collaborators. Daisley was involved, along with Ozzy keyboardist Don Airey, Rolling Stones pianist Nicky Hopkins and former Thin Lizzy drummer Brian Downey. Blues legends Albert King and Albert Collins also appeared, and George Harrison contributed to the session outtake “That Kind of Woman.”

“We went in and made the album and it didn’t take too long,” Moore said. “The tracks ‘Still Got the Blues’ and ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ were actually done the same day while we were just trying out the studio room.

“And then we got Albert King to come over and play with me, and as Albert Collins was in town too, someone got him to come down, and it all just worked out really great.”

Released March 26, 1990, the album enjoyed slow and steady growth as it climbed the charts to its peak at number 83 in February 1991.

“The plan was to do a three-week tour, but six months later we were still touring,” Moore said. “It just got bigger and bigger.”

For Moore, part of the record’s impact came from its spontaneity.

“I did ‘Still Got the Blues’ in one take,” he said. “Those moments usually happen because you’re relaxed, or it’s the end of the day, or you’re just trying out the studio. You’re not even aware it’s going to be a master recording. You just play without caring — and you’re lucky if you can capture that.”

The experience also reshaped how he viewed his own career trajectory, proving that stylistic risk could pay off commercially as well as artistically.

There were moments, too, that crystallized what the record had achieved in real time.

“There was one night during the Still Got the Blues tour when I was playing the Hammersmith Odeon and I looked across the stage toward the end of the show and there’s Albert King standing there, and next to him is Albert Collins too,” Moore recalled. “That was a pretty special night.”

Still, Moore remained slightly conflicted in hindsight.

“I was very proud of it at the time, though I’m not too sure about some of it now,” he said. “But at the time I was just so pleased that you could do something exactly how you wanted and people would like it at the same time. That gave me a lot of faith in music again.”

Years later, Moore extended that blues thread further with Blues for Greeny, a tribute to Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green and to Greeny, the 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard Green had once owned and passed on to him — an electric guitar that would become central to Moore’s sound for decades.

Moore first encountered Green during a difficult period in the guitarist’s life, shortly after his departure from Fleetwood Mac.

“Peter was going through this very strange thing at the time where he had just left Fleetwood Mac and wanted to get rid of all his material possessions,” Moore said. “He came to me because he wasn’t playing at the time and said, ‘Do you want to borrow my guitar for a while?’ And I said, ‘Oh please, that’d be great.’”

What began as a loan quickly became something more permanent.

“We had become friends, so I went down to his parents’ house to pick up the guitar,” he said. “A few days later he called me up and said, ‘Do you want to buy it?’ I thought he was joking. I said, ‘Sure, but I can’t afford it.’ He said, ‘Just sell your guitar and whatever you get for it, give me that — it’ll be like swapping guitars.’”

Moore sold his Gibson SG for around £150, passing most of the money to Green, who kept only a portion. Green’s motivation, Moore later reflected, was not financial.

“He just wanted it to have a good home,” Moore said.

Moore would later be forced to sell the guitar in 2006 due to financial pressures, and it was eventually acquired by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett in 2014.

Although Moore is often credited with helping inspire Peter Green’s return to music in the 1990s, he downplayed that role.

“People say that, but I don’t agree with that,” he said. “Peter had come to one of my Blues for Greeny shows, and it was nerve-wracking because I hadn’t played for a while and we were being filmed as well. And Peter sat on my side of the stage. It was really strange.”

Moore instead credited guitarist Nigel Watson and the Peter Green Splinter Group for Green’s renewed activity.

“So it was around the same time as my Blues for Greeny, but I don’t know how much influence I really had,” he said. “I did it because I loved his music and as a way of thanking him for all those years of great music.”

In the end, Moore’s blues identity is often traced to Peter Green through the guitar, the tribute record, and the mythology that followed.

But in Moore’s own telling, the first nudge came much earlier, and far more quietly: not from legend or legacy but from Bob Daisley, who simply suggested a different path — and happened to be right.

The fun part about writing this column is learning a guitar’s back story — where and when it was made, who played it — and assessing its playability and sound.

But sometimes you get a surprise, as I did with this 1961 Watkins Rapier 3 electric. Its creator was Sid Watkins, whose company — Watkins Electric Music, or WEM — played a fascinating role in British musical-instrument engineering. Sid was not just a luthier and woodworker but something of an electronics genius as well. He designed the electronics for the Vox Phantom Synth guitar as well as the echo units used by Hank Marvin and the Shadows.

As the company grew and its product lines expanded, WEM became nearly ubiquitous in the U.K. In addition to guitars, WEM made amps and PAs used by groups like the Who, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The company even made Vox guitars to help the brand keep up with manufacturing demand during the guitar boom of the ’60s.

Watkins launched the Rapier line in 1959, and it continued until 1970. As for the surprise I mentioned earlier: There are photos of George Harrison playing a highly modified Rapier 33 that belonged to his friend Del Mandel at the Beatles’ Apple Studios in 1971, while he was producing the Radha Krishna Temple album. That’s right — a Beatle touched it!

WEM also became known beyond the U.K. through exports. At one point the company was shipping 500 guitars a month overseas, most of them to the United States.

At the risk of sounding snarky, the Rapier 3’s weirdo factor is that it’s an early British guitar that actually sounds and plays great. If you’ve ever played any of Vox’s clunky guitars, you’ll know what I mean.

The Rapier 3 originally sold at the bargain price of 29 guineas, or $85, about a third of what a Fender Stratocaster cost at the time. But don’t let that fool you. These are well-made instruments.

At first look, this is an inviting glossy fiesta-red guitar not unlike a Strat, with three pickups, a vibrato bar, offset cutaways, a toggle switch and three knobs. As it turns out, there actually is something weird here, and it’s hiding in those knobs. Their functions aren’t as straight ahead as you might think.

The first knob is a rotary pickup selector with four detented stops. The next two are global volume and tone controls. As for the toggle, used in conjunction with the rotary knob it allows you to employ only the middle pickup. But depending on what setting you’re using, it also can act as a tone bypass and/or a kill switch. It only took me about an hour to figure that out.

But my patience was rewarded when I discovered a bunch of cool sounds and switch combinations along the way. This guitar is deep! It goes from rich-sounding jazz tones to really cool phasey rhythm guitar sounds and the thinnest banjo-like setting I’ve ever heard on a guitar without active EQ or processing. I’m not sure what you’d use that for, but I couldn’t stop playing the Status Quo song “Pictures of Matchstick Men” with it. The middle two pickup settings are where this guitar really comes to life, with usable clean tones that sound great with overdrive or distortion.

The maple neck is skinny and fast, and has a rosewood fingerboard with 22 frets, plus a zero fret. The neck is relatively straight, but the truss rod seems to have plenty play left on it. In addition, there’s a Hi/Lo vibrato that works cleanly and offers little resistance. But while it’s great for playing surf rock, there will be no dive-bombing on this guitar.

Note that the sticker on the pickguard is right in the strum path. The original one disappeared years ago, but I replaced it with an aftermarket sticker that I’ve already managed to scratch up.

In sum, this guitar is light, easy to play and sounds great.

Despite its features and history, the Watkins Rapier 3 never really achieved cult status. They can still be found online for well under a thousand bucks.

I bought the guitar shown here from its original owner, Francisco, whom I met on Facebook Marketplace. He and his brothers played in bands all through the ’60s and ’70s and this was the guitar he used.

When I showed up at his house to pick up the guitar, he and his brothers were in their garage amid drums, keyboards, guitars, amps, mixers, exercise equipment and a man-fridge. Classic. The guys were so friendly, and Francisco gave me a great deal on the guitar. My thanks to Paul Connet for getting the stickers off (sorry Francisco) without harming the finish.

Contact me with questions or pics of your whack jobs. I may even write about them.

Back in 2006, Phil Manzanera was three years removed from Roxy Music’s latest reunion and back in the mix as a hired gun, working for the likes of Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Chrissie Hynde, among others, as well as recording his own albums. But a stint as David Gilmour’s right-hand man was a welcome addition to the regimen.

“I met David when I was 15, the week he joined Pink Floyd,” Manzanera tells us via phone from his home in Sussex in the English countryside — next door to Gilmour’s, in fact. “Pink Floyd was the coolest band in the world back then, them and the Soft Machine.”

The two guitarists maintained their friendship, and Manzanera co-wrote the single “One Slip” with Gilmour for Pink Floyd’s 1987 comeback album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Fast forward 19 years and Gilmour was preparing for his own comeback with On an Island, his first solo outing in 22 years and his first album since Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell in 1994. He recruited Manzanera to co-produce with himself and Chris Thomas, as well as play guitar on three of the album’s 10 tracks — joining a corps that included Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright and latter-day bassist Guy Pratt, along with David Crosby, Graham Nash, Robert Wyatt, Jools Holland, Georgie Fame and others.

“David doesn’t need a producer,” Manzanera says, “but he likes to have company to bounce his ideas off of, or to say, ‘I’ve got 10 ideas — any of these any good?’”

Manzanera created a chart on which he noted which pieces of music might work well together.

“There were 153 little bits, so I would take it to my studio and go back the following week and say, ‘Bit number 78 with bit number 13, and then a bit of number 121.’ And David would say, ‘What’s that?’ and I’d say, ‘That’s you. You did that!’” He laughs. “He’d either go with it or wouldn’t, but he did go with a lot of the stuff.

“He just had too much stuff accumulated and wanted a bit of help to sort it out. I’m used to doing albums and things.”

Working alongside Gilmour at his houseboat studio Astoria and his studio in Sussex, Manzanera helped him complete the album. Nearby sat Gilmour’s circa-1954 Stratocaster with the serial number 0001, which he purchased in 1978 and reportedly used on “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”

“I’d just sit there and have his number 0001 Strat next to me, looking at it,” Manzanera says. “It was just a lot of fun.”

Manzanera adds that all concerned were well aware that Gilmour “hadn’t done anything in a while… so I was just trying to be supportive of him, as a friend, and wanting him to succeed.”

He’s also an unabashed Gilmour fan.

“I love his voice,” Manzanera notes. “Obviously everyone goes on about the guitar, which is fantastic, but I just love that voice. It’s so unique. He does a lot of stuff so well — still does it so well. It’s amazing.”

After On an Island’s release in March 2006, Gilmour recruited Manzanera to be part of the band for a spring and summer tour supporting the album, along with Wright and Pratt.

“When we did ‘Wish You Were Here,’ I got to play it on the actual acoustic 12-string he played on the original, so that was a lot of fun, too.”

Manzanera also co-produced Gilmour’s next album, 2015’s Rattle That Lock, playing both acoustic guitar and keyboards on the album and again joining Gilmour on tour during 2015 and 2016.

In between, he was part of the production team for 2014’s The Endless River — to date the final Pink Floyd album. Intended as a tribute to Wright, who passed away in 2008, the 18 instrumental tracks were built from recordings made during sessions for Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell, with additional material added nearly two decades later.

“We were in David’s kitchen one day — this is after Rick died — and there were all these tapes,” Manzanera recalls. “David asked, ‘Do you fancy having a listen and see if you can make anything out of it?’

“So I went away for six weeks and listened to every scrap. I loved Rick’s Farfisa organ from the early Pink Floyd albums, so I particularly chose bits that had it. That was such a unique aspect of Floyd that hadn’t been spotlighted enough.”

After cutting and pasting clips together, Manzanera felt he could create something cohesive from the recordings. Gilmour liked what he heard, but Manzanera was concerned about playing it for Nick Mason.

“I thought, How am I gonna play this to Nick? I’ve taken a few liberties with his drums — one bit from here, one bit from there. Finally I thought, Right, I’m gonna turn the lights off, put the screen saver on and put the music on and just not look at him.

“He listened to it and said at the end, ‘Yeah, there might be something there.’ Phew!”

After a break of a few months, Gilmour pushed everyone into the studio to finish the recording.

“David said, ‘Look, why don’t we all go into the studio at the same time and try and finish this off together?’”

Gilmour recruited his wife, the English novelist and writer Polly Samson, to compose lyrics for the album’s only non-instrumental track, “Louder Than Words.” With assistance from producer Youth, “we all worked together and got it done,” Manzanera says.

The Endless River hit number one in quite a few countries around the world, including the U.K., and number three on the Billboard 200 in the U.S.

Manzanera — who received an Order of the British Empire honor in 2024 — tells many of his other stories in his 2024 memoir Revolución to Roxy, and has brought his An Evening of Words and Music show to the U.S. Current dates include Space in Chicago on May 18, the Shank in Milwaukee on May 19 and the Quinlan Room in Minneapolis on May 20 (tickets and other details via manzanera.com).

In the studio, the guitarist is also prepping a 51st-anniversary reissue (scheduled for September 11) of Mainstream by his pre-Roxy band Quiet Sun, as well as a brand-new album by the band. There will also be a boxed-set edition of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, remastered by Steven Wilson and due out this fall.

“It’s a really great package, with lots of extra stuff on it,” Manzanera says. “I’ve been waiting for this for years, ’cause it’s one of my favorite albums. I heard the Dolby Atmos mix that Steven did; there’s lots of great things Eno had done that I never heard before… ’cause back then you were constrained by the length of sides on vinyl. If you had extra stuff you couldn’t use it, but now it will have a chance to be heard, which is exciting.”

Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz isn’t just a concert film—it’s one of rock’s most mythologized final chapters, a farewell show that somehow turned into a permanent monument.

Released in 1978, it documents the Band’s last live performance at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976. The guest list reads like a genre map of American music: Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and more.

But even in a lineup built on legend, one moment still feels slightly out of frame: Neil Diamond walking onstage to perform his 1976 hit “Dry Your Eyes.”

What, exactly, is he doing here?

Reportedly, Diamond was so energized by his performance that he issued a challenge to the next performer, Bob Dylan. Finding the folk-rock bard awaiting his entrance, Diamond stepped offstage and told Dylan, “Top that!”

To which Dylan allegedly replied, “What do I have to do—fall asleep?”

Diamond would later offer his own version of events. But first, it’s worth asking how he ended up on that stage at all.

Held on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, The Last Waltz was intended as the Band’s farewell from touring, following the toll of life on the road and growing internal strain. Guitarist Robbie Robertson decided the group should continue as a studio band, much as the Beatles had done after 1966. The concert would be a final celebration with friends and musical influences.

But almost immediately, its scope began to expand. As the concert’s main architect, Robertson wanted to showcase a wide spectrum of American music — not just contemporary singer-songwriters, but the artists — like Waters — who shaped them.

Robertson wanted Diamond onboard as a representative of New York City's Brill Building tradition and a link to the era of classic American pop songwriting.

Not everyone was convinced the guy behind hits like the Monkees’ “I'm a Believer” belonged on a stage with legends like Dylan and Waters.

Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer, noted that Robertson had just produced Diamond’s album Beautiful Noise, which featured “Dry Your Eyes,” a Diamond-Robertson cowrite. He accused Robertson of self-promotion.

“Robbie called me up and said, ‘Well, Neil is like Tin Pan Alley. That Fifties Brill Building scene, songwriters like Doc Pomus,’” Helm wrote.

“Why don’t we just get Doc Pomus?'” was Helm’s tart reply.

As the show approached and the guest list grew unwieldy, someone suggested cutting Muddy Waters. Helm was furious and threatened to walk.

“I was in a mood,” he wrote. “I snarled, ‘Go tell Robertson to tell Neil Diamond we don’t even know who the fuck he is!’”

In the end, both Waters and Diamond remained on the bill.

And, for the record, Diamond killed it. Strumming an Ovation acoustic, with backing from the Band, he turned his one-song performance into a show-stopping moment.

What happened next is a matter of legend — and debate. It was the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood, one of the evening’s guests, who started the rumor about Diamond challenging Dylan in a 1992 interview with Q magazine.

Asked for the true story by Rolling Stone in 2010, Diamond insisted his encounter with Dylan was all in good fun and took place before he went on, not after.

“He was tuning his guitar and I came over to him and I said, ‘You know, Bob, those are really my people out there,’” Diamond recalled. “He kind of looked at me quizzically.

“I said it as a joke, but I think it spurred him a little bit and he gave a hell of a performance. It was a good night and an exciting night. I was glad to be a part of it.”

“I tend to be a fixer,” Todd Rundgren says of his production gigs. “I get called in during a crisis.”

For Rundgren, it’s a familiar pattern: commercially viable bands stalled by perception, pressure and internal friction. The veteran musician, songwriter, guitarist and producer had his work cut out for him in 1986, when he signed on to produce XTC’s Skylarking.

The English trio — guitarist Andy Partridge, bass guitarist Colin Moulding and multi-instrumentalist Dave Gregory — were in a commercial slump. Their previous two records had failed to sell in the U.S., and Partridge’s dislike of touring meant neither the band nor its label, Virgin Records, was making much money.

The problem, as Virgin saw it, was that the band sounded too English. Rundgren’s job was to translate that identity into something more commercially legible.

He recalls a similar dynamic when he produced Grand Funk Railroad’s breakthrough album We're an American Band in 1973 — another case of a commercially successful group struggling for critical respect and radio traction.

“They weren’t getting respect,” Rundgren says. “They had conquered commercially, but they weren’t really getting played on AM radio, and critics were always hitting on them. They needed to be really different at that point, and that was part of my reputation — I’d come in, evaluate what needed to be done, and make sure it got done.”

“The Skylarking album was the same sort of situation,” he continues. “But a lot of XTC’s issues had to do with the fact that they never performed. Because they never toured to promote their records, they had to get on the radio somehow.

“But they were getting less and less radio play, partly because of the sound of the records and their approach to the material.

“Their label guy said, ‘If they don’t have some success with this new record — and if they don’t stop spending a fortune making records and never touring — we’re gonna drop them.’

“I was a fan. I thought that would’ve been horrible.”

Rundgren only got the gig because XTC’s label believed the band sounded too English. Executives compiled a list of American producers for consideration, and guitarist Dave Gregory pushed hard for Rundgren.

“I reminded Andy that Todd had produced one of his favorite New York Dolls records,” Gregory said, referring to the group’s 1973 self-titled debut. “In the absence of any better alternatives, he agreed.”

Work began at Rundgren’s Utopia Sound Studios at his home in Woodstock, New York. It didn’t take long for him to identify the group’s main problem: XTC’s identity as a studio-only band wasn’t just a limitation—it shaped how they worked.

“Because they never toured, their entire musical life took place in the studio,” Rundgren says. “Because of that, Andy would be happy to work forever on one record, because as soon as it was done, the fun was over. He got to go home, be alone, and never play that stuff again.

“So he would just drive everybody crazy.”

What might have been a creative advantage in another context instead became a pressure cooker. Rundgren and Partridge clashed repeatedly over song choices and arrangements. Where Partridge wanted a distorted electric guitar solo, Rundgren heard mandolins. When Partridge wanted yet another vocal take, Rundgren would push him to move on.

As Partridge recalled, Rundgren’s attitude was, “You can dick around with [the track] for a few hours your way if you like. I’m going up to my house. When you find out it doesn’t work your way, give me a call and we’ll record it my way.”

The strain filtered through the band. Moulding later recalled that Partridge was “so unhappy and taking it out, a little bit, on me.”

The tension eventually reached breaking point.

“Colin quit the band in the middle of making the record,” Rundgren says. “He eventually rejoined to finish it.

“So we made Skylarking under much duress.”

By the time they sat down to mix the tracks, exhaustion had set in, and the band decided they were ready to leave.

“We got through three songs and they said, ‘Okay, you finish it. We’re homesick. We’re going home.’ This was something they’d never done — leaving a project before the mixing was finished.

“As soon as Andy got home he shit all over the album to anyone who would listen. Nobody had heard the record yet, of course, but he was saying, ‘It’s the worst record we’ve ever made, blah blah blah blah blah.’ He was ready to hang it up at that point.

“And the rest, of course, is history.”

Indeed it is. Upon its release in 1986, Skylarking became a critically acclaimed hit. That wasn’t solely due to its songwriting, strong though it was. Rundgren’s sometimes baroque, psychedelic, Sgt. Pepper’s–like production delivered the radio-friendly sound XTC’s label wanted without stripping away the band’s distinctly English character.

“Perhaps it lacked the polish of some of the other recordings we had made,” Moulding said in retrospect, “but it was the character that was sewn into the record that became its strength.”

Ironically, the album’s breakthrough moment came from a track that wasn’t originally part of it. XTC initially promoted Skylarking with a video for “Dear God,” a song not included on the original pressings. Once it gained traction on MTV, it was added to later editions of the album, replacing “Mermaid Smiled.”

Skylarking went on to sell roughly a quarter-million copies in the U.S. and spent 29 weeks on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 70 — XTC’s strongest American chart showing since 1982’s English Settlement.

Much of that outcome, Rundgren suggests, came down to vision — and control.

“But what I took away from it was, first of all, what a talent Dave Gregory was — both in terms of his playing and his overall musical sensibility,” he says. “He did the orchestral chart for ‘1000 Umbrellas,’ and that’s maybe the best chart on the record, even though I did all the other charts.

“And I still see Dave. I did a couple of dates in England last November and saw him while I was there. I see him every time I’m in his neighborhood. We still get along great, and he’s still the sensible one. He tells me stories about what happened with the other guys and all the turmoil.

“And now I think it’s pretty much official: XTC is no more.”

Brian Eno may have described himself as a “non-musician,” but his experiments with electronic processing helped shape the early sound of 1970s glam art-rockers Roxy Music — and the evolving guitar style of the band’s six-string architect, Phil Manzanera.

Though Eno’s tenure in the group lasted just two albums, the sonic partnership between the two musicians pushed the electric guitar into new territory and would eventually spill over into the short-lived experimental live project 801.

“I loved Brian's treatments on my electric guitar because in those days there was only a fuzz box and a wah-wah pedal available,” Manzanera tells Guitar Player. “There was nothing else to give you any kind of tonal variation. And no one had ever done that before — using the guitar as a sound source for inputting into a VCS3 synthesizer and then filtering it.”

At the center of those experiments was the EMS VCS3, a compact British synth that Eno used to process Manzanera’s guitar signal.

Before long, the pair had built a collaborative technique using a pair of Revox tape recorders, using Sel-Sync multitracking and varispeed controls to manipulate sound in real time.

“Brian and I had built up a little system between us where we both had Revox tape recorders… so we could bung things backwards and forwards to each other,” Manzanera explains. “I would react to it, and he would improvise with what he was doing to my guitar. I would then hear it and play in a certain way that would go back in slightly differently. It was totally innovative.”

The result was more than altered guitar tone. What the two created was essentially a feedback loop between performance and processing, where each pass reshaped the next.

“It was what Hendrix and the Velvet Underground were doing, but one step further,” he says. “I was creating the feedback and using the whammy bar and everything, and Brian was capturing it all. And then you’d hear both things at the same time — it was like it was superimposed.”

With Sel-Sync and varispeed, the pair effectively turned the studio itself into an instrument, manipulating pitch, timing and texture as the music unfolded.

“There was no one else doing it with a guitar,” Manzanera adds. “And I’ve never heard anyone else do it since.”

Eno’s description of himself as a “non-musician” became central to his public persona, though Manzanera suggests the reality was more complicated.

“Though Brian may have called himself a non-musician, he was obviously applying musician-type criteria to everything he did,” he says. “By 1973, when we started doing his first solo album, Here Come the Warm Jets, you can hear the musician in him because he’s singing melodies and writing lyrics. There’s a certain expansion of the whole concept of being a non-musician.”

After Eno left Roxy Music in 1973 to pursue his solo career, Manzanera continued developing the sonic system they had built together.

“I had the guy who built the original VCS3 make me a guitar version of it,” he says. “And that’s what you hear on the track ‘Amazona.’ It’s me using that EMS VCS3 guitar synth, with the Revox and the speeding up and slowing down. If you listen to it, it sounds at times like an underwater guitar.”

Even after Eno’s departure, the two continued collaborating. On John Cale’s track “Gun,” Eno once again processed Manzanera’s guitar solo.

By 1976, after Roxy Music went on hiatus, Manzanera and Eno reunited to form the experimental live group 801 alongside bass guitarist/vocalist Bill MacCormick, drummer Simon Phillips and classically trained keyboardist Francis Monkman.

The band’s name came from a lyric in Eno’s song “The True Wheel,” from his 1974 solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). The idea was to translate their studio-based experiments into a live environment.

“On reflection, it sounds like some sort of weird Eno art project,” Manzanera says. “We went into this cottage in Gloucestershire and spent a week just hanging out and talking about ideas for projects. And that’s what we came up with.”

The group’s experimental spirit, however, sometimes collided with musical practicality.

“Trying to get Eno to understand what a 13/8 time signature was — particularly on the track called ‘East of Asteroid’ — proved rather challenging,” Manzanera says with a laugh.

“You’ve got a non-musician saying, ‘Where do I come in to play anything at all? What could I possibly play?’ It was a devilish little experiment.”

Even when tackling more familiar material, such as the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” — among the most experimental tracks in the Fab Four canon — the band approached it with studio-style thinking.

“Brian was playing single notes, but then he made up a sort of sound tape cassette, which started at the beginning of the track and ran throughout the whole track live,” Manzanera explains. “He was chopping up bits of radio interviews and all sorts of stuff, à la the Beatles in some ways.”

801 performed only three concerts. Their final show — on September 3, 1976, at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall — was recorded and released later that year as 801 Live, the group’s only album.

“It was one of those things that could only last a short amount of time before people started rebelling against Eno,” Manzanera says. “Especially Francis Monkman, who was not used to having a non-musician throw abstract sounds at him. It was a devilish little experiment.

“And then Brian left and went to work with Bowie in Berlin. And that seemed like forever, and so I hardly ever saw him again.”

Despite the band’s brief lifespan, 801 Live has developed a lasting cult following — helped in part by the clarity of its recording.

“It was one of the first albums where we didn’t bother with the room mics,” Manzanera explains. “We just close-miked everything, and because of that you can really hear the musicianship in incredible detail.”

For Manzanera, the project remains a rare moment when experimentation, musicianship and timing all aligned.

“We rehearsed for six weeks and only did three gigs, so we seemingly appeared out of nowhere, were incredibly good quite frankly, and then we quickly left the building,” he says. “It was short and sweet, and all captured on that one album.

“And all over the world, whenever people hear 801 mentioned, they’ll write in swearing allegiance to it. That’s incredible. There’s obviously a whole bunch of devoted people who absolutely love it.”

When Eric Clapton brings his Crossroads Guitar Festival back to Austin, Texas, this fall, he’ll be joined by a guitarist who played a pivotal role in one of the most important turning points of his life.

For the first time, Pete Townshend will appear at the festival, scheduled for September 26 and 27 at the Moody Center. The event marks the seventh edition of Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival and coincides with the 28th anniversary of the Crossroads Centre Antigua, the addiction recovery facility Clapton founded in 1998.

Townshend’s appearance comes full circle. More than 50 years ago, the guitarist helped stage the comeback that pulled Clapton out of one of the darkest periods of his life.

The two men go back to the early days of the British rock scene. Townshend remembered first seeing Clapton in Richmond, southwest London, in 1963, before either guitarist had achieved widespread fame.

“Eric Clapton was a myth in Richmond where we played, even in 1963,” Townshend recalled. “I remember seeing him at a bus stop looking very, very posy, I thought.”

If Clapton already carried an aura, it only grew over the next few years through his work on electric guitar with the Yardbirds, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and later Cream. But by the early 1970s his career had stalled. Following the breakup of Derek and the Dominos, Clapton had retreated from public life amid a severe heroin addiction.

He released no new albums and made only one high-profile appearance: performing at the Concert for Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison in August 1971.

Townshend decided to intervene. Rather than stage an intervention, he devised something far more dramatic: a pair of all-star comeback concerts at London’s Rainbow Theatre on January 13, 1973.

Now remembered as Eric Clapton's Rainbow Concert, the shows featured an ensemble of Clapton’s friends and collaborators. Townshend himself joined on guitar alongside Ronnie Wood, while Clapton’s former Blind Faith bandmate Steve Winwood played keyboards. The band was rounded out by former Blind Faith bassist Ric Grech and Traffic drummer Jim Capaldi.

“Pete actually dug me out of the hole that I was getting deeper into,” Clapton said in a 1989 interview with Sue Lawley. “I think he was instrumental in getting me to look at life as a proposition again, because I had gone into a real hermit-like existence.”

Without Clapton’s full awareness, Townshend assembled the musicians and coordinated the event to force his friend back onto the stage.

“Pete organized all my old mates — musicians — to put on a concert specifically to get me out of it,” Clapton said. “To get me back on my feet again.”

Townshend later recalled the motivation more bluntly.

“We really missed him,” he said. “And there’s this feeling that it was a genuine waste of talent.”

Convincing Clapton to take part was no easy task. When Townshend first approached him shortly before Christmas 1972, Clapton had little interest in returning to the stage. Rather than wait for him to change his mind, Townshend simply pushed ahead.

“Me and the father of the girl Eric was living with at the time organized this concert and bullied him into doing it,” Townshend told the New Musical Express on the eve of the show. “He didn’t want to do it.”

Getting him performance-ready proved another challenge.

“I had to prop him up and teach him how to play again,” Townshend later recalled. “The guy had shut himself away for the better part of two years.”

On the night of the show, Clapton appeared onstage with a heavy beard and a white suit, letting Townshend handle much of the talking between songs. But once the music began, Clapton quickly reclaimed the spotlight with his playing. The shows marked the first time he played Blackie, his now-iconic Fender Stratocaster.

The set functioned as a sweeping tour of his career, touching on material from Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos and his solo work. Among the songs performed were “Crossroads,” “Badge,” “Layla,” “Bell Bottom Blues,” “Blues Power,” “Let It Rain” and the J.J. Cale cover “After Midnight.”

The Rainbow Concert proved to be a turning point. Within a year Clapton had overcome his heroin addiction and returned to recording, releasing 461 Ocean Boulevard in 1974. The album — featuring his hit cover of “I Shot the Sheriff” — became one of the most successful of his career.

More importantly, the experience planted a seed that would eventually shape Clapton’s life beyond music.

After achieving lasting sobriety in 1987, he founded the Crossroads Centre Antigua in 1998 to help others struggling with addiction, a mission that later inspired the creation of the Crossroads Guitar Festival itself.

Looking back years later, Clapton admitted the Rainbow performance itself was far from perfect.

“I had a good time doing it,” he wrote in Clapton: The Autobiography. “It was when I listened to the tapes afterwards that I realized that it was well under par. Everyone made mistakes.

“But Pete was the only friend who had refused to take no for an answer.”

One night at New York’s Record Plant in 1973, guitarist Steve Hunter stepped out into the lobby for a cigarette, taking a break from another session.

Across from him, the door to Studio C opened.

Out walked producer Jack Douglas.

“You feel like playing?” Douglas asked.

Within minutes, Hunter was inside the room with Aerosmith — cutting a solo that would end up on “Train Kept A Rollin’,” one of the breakout tracks from the band’s early career.

The moment was casual. The stakes, for the band, were not.

Douglas, who died May 11 at age 80, made one of his most consequential studio decisions that night. Although he had been hired as the engineer on Get Your Wings, he quickly established himself as its producer. The record helped define Aerosmith’s early identity, but it also exposed where they needed to improve.

At the center of it was guitarist Joe Perry.

Douglas later described Perry’s playing as raw, instinctive, and unpredictable — a strength in some contexts, a liability in others.

“Joe was a guy who played from the gut,” he recalled on The Magnificent Others With Billy Corgan. ”All feel, and at that time, very little technique, but the greatest feel ever.

“And dangerous. Really, because he didn't care what key he went into, and sometimes that was great.”

But certain tracks demanded something tighter.

“A couple of those songs needed the discipline that they didn't have at that point,” he said.

Douglas’s solution was decisive — and controversial. He brought in outside guitarists to handle key solos.

He turned to two seasoned session players, Hunter and Dick Wagner, both known for their transformative electric guitar work with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed.

Before making the call, Douglas checked in with frontman Steven Tyler.

“When I approached Steven about it first, he was like, ‘Absolutely, I totally get it. You know, I totally get it. You sell it, but I get it.’”

For Perry, however, the decision landed hard.

“Joe took it really badly,” Douglas said. “It was hard for Joe, but it was only a couple of tunes: ‘Same Old Song and Dance’ and ‘Train Kept a Rollin.’”

Hunter’s involvement came almost by accident.

Speaking to Guitar Player, he recalled stepping away from another Record Plant session when Douglas appeared in the hallway.

“I went out into the lobby to have a cigarette,” Hunter said. “And right across from me is the door to Studio C, which is the smaller studio. The door opens and it’s Jack Douglas. He looks at me and says, ‘You feel like playing?’”

Hunter walked into the studio, met the band, and cut the solo in just a few takes.

“I never got any bad vibes off of anybody,” he recalled. “They all seemed kinda tired, like they had been working really hard to finish the album. But I never got any kind of vibe about whether they liked me being there or not.”

Behind the scenes, the decision created friction.

“Of course we were on the fence about bringing in sidemen to play some of the stuff, but we kind of made a deal with the devil because we wanted our shot at a second record,” Perry later told Total Guitar. “Brad [Whitford] and I weren’t happy about it, but that’s what it was going to take to keep us on the label and keep us going.”

“For better or worse, we opened that door, but that was certainly the last time.”

Whitford recalled to Guitar World that Douglas had the unenviable task of breaking the news to the band.

“And of course, that went down like a lead balloon.

“At first you fight, and you’re a little bit angry, and then you get sad to where you’re like really bummed out that you can’t do it. And the thing was that we’d done some good stuff and could play good stuff, but the tracks required some real finesse.”

In time, both guitarists came to see Douglas’s decision differently. What felt like a setback during the making of Get Your Wings ultimately became part of the learning curve that helped Aerosmith sharpen its identity.

“In this early phase, I faced great frustration,” Perry wrote in his autobiography, Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith. “I wanted to know more than I knew. I wanted to play more than I was capable of playing, and I wanted to realize a sound that eluded me.

“Jack Douglas helped enormously. He became a great teacher. But Jack can only work with what we gave him, and I wanted to give him more. We all did.”

After a slow start to his recording career, Neil Diamond began breaking through in 1966, placing “Solitary Man” at number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 and then landing his first Top 10 hit with “Cherry, Cherry” (number six) just three months later.

He also had a number one hit that year — just not as a performer. Diamond wrote “I’m a Believer,” which the Monkees took to the top of the charts.

“The head of my record company was very angry — I’d given away a number one hit — but I was thrilled,” Diamond told us some years ago. “See, I was a songwriter, first and foremost. I kind of reluctantly became a recording artist, you know? I wanted to write songs and have other people record them … but nobody would record my stuff, so I had to sing the songs myself.”

That reluctance came after a difficult apprenticeship. During an eight-year stretch in the early ’60s, Diamond was fired by five different songwriting houses.

“So having the Monkees get the number one was as good as if I had recorded it, honestly,” he added.

Interestingly, Diamond — who recorded a version of the song for his 1967 album Just for You — considered “I’m a Believer” to be a country song when he wrote it; he envisioned country music star Eddy Arnold recording it.

“I thought it would be a great song for him,” Diamond noted. Music executive Don Kirshner, who knew Diamond from New York’s Tin Pan Alley and was working with the Monkees’ TV producers, steered it to the group instead.

“We had a lot of great songs from great songwriters,” recalls the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, who sang lead on “I’m a Believer.” “Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Sedaka, Carole Bayer Sager… Neil Diamond. It was the best of the best. You had to pinch yourself when you got these songs.”

Diamond — who also wrote “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)” for the Monkees — pitched “I’m a Believer” to the Fifth Estate as well; the group included it on its 1967 album Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead.

The guitarist performed the song faithfully in concert for decades but revisited it on his 2010 covers album Dreams, treating it as “a very gentle, reflective ballad,” played with acoustic guitar accompaniment. The approach he said “opened the song up completely. It opened my eyes about exploring that direction with some of the other songs as well … That’s what keeps it exciting.”

Diamond went on to score 38 Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of popular music’s most iconic performers, sequined shirts and all. He has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has received a Kennedy Center Honor and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

He stopped touring in 2018 after announcing a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis and has largely stepped back from music since, making only rare public appearances — although he did support A Beautiful Noise, the 2022 stage musical based on his life.

Now Diamond is re-emerging, somewhat. This week saw the release of Wild Heart, his first album of new songs since Melody Road in 2014. The material actually dates back to Home Before Dark (2008), his chart-topping second collaboration with producer Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers).

Rubin — fresh off his American Recordings work with Johnny Cash — first teamed with Diamond on 12 Songs in 2005. Using a small circle of players that included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, Billy Preston, Jellyfish’s Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Beck guitarist Smokey Hormel, Rubin pushed Diamond toward a stripped-down, live-in-the-room approach. Campbell, Tench and Hormel returned for Home Before Dark.

“I did listen to a bunch of the artists that Rick produced,” Diamond said at the time, “but there were a lot of early things that Rick liked that he wanted me to hear. We set up a meeting at his place, sat down and listened to music and chatted … every week for maybe six months.

“And for the most part what Rick played were my early records — things I hadn’t heard or thought about in decades. It was an interesting learning experience to go back to my old material and get a fresh take on it.”

Rubin’s goal was simple: strip the music down to Diamond’s voice, guitar and the song itself. Diamond initially resisted.

“I hadn’t played guitar on my records since ‘Cherry, Cherry’ and ‘Kentucky Woman,’ thinking there were other guitar players who could do it much better,” he said. “Pretty much every day I would argue that point with Rick. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted my voice and my playing, as unadorned and truthful and minimalist as possible.”

It didn’t take long for Diamond to come around.

“Three or four recordings into this thing I realized he was absolutely right and began to enjoy the playing and singing experience. I realized I could perform my music with the simplicity of just my voice and guitar.”

Tench remembers the sessions fondly, noting that the musicians had to “twist Diamond’s arm a little bit.”

“But the songs are just wonderful and he’s a great guy and really fun to be with — and obviously he’s a great songwriter,” Tench said. One night during the Home Before Dark sessions, Diamond asked the band to stay late. Campbell agreed on one condition: “Sure, if you’ll play ‘Cherry Cherry’ with us.”

“And so we played ‘Cherry Cherry’ with Neil,” Tench recalled, “and that was a treat.”

Campbell remembers the sessions just as fondly.

“We had a lot of fun,” he says. “Neil was real excitable. He’d come in with a song he wrote the night before and say, ‘That’s great, that’s great … Oh wait, maybe I’m just suffering from new-song euphoria.’ He had a great sense of humor and was really supportive of the players, and he had a lot of stories about the old days. We had a blast.”

These days Iron Maiden looks like a band of brothers as it circles the globe on its Run for Your Lives World Tour. But the new documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, which opens in theaters Thursday, May 7, shows that harmony wasn’t always the case during the British metal institution’s 51-year career.

One sequence in particular revisits an early onstage rivalry between founder and bass guitarist Steve Harris and frontman Bruce Dickinson shortly after Dickinson joined the band in 1981, replacing the late Paul Di'Anno.

“They literally were pushing each other out of the way,” guitarist Adrian Smith recalls via Zoom from Turks and Caicos.

“Steve had put a lot of work into the band from the very start, and I think his vision was to have the bass upfront rather than standing in the back propping everything up,” Smith explains. “And I think that’s great. Bass players make the whole thing swing along — when the bass drops out, it’s horrible in any band.

“So Steve had this vision of the bass being upfront, which made the whole thing unique. There aren’t many bands like that. He wanted to be more forward than usual.”

Dickinson, however, had a different view of the stage hierarchy.

“Bruce was old school: ‘I’m the lead singer. I’m the frontman. Center stage is mine!’” Smith says with a laugh. “There was definitely friction there.”

That left Smith and fellow guitarist Dave Murray largely staying out of the way.

“Dave and I were pretty easygoing,” Smith says. “We had our space. But watching that was something. I remember it was in America when it really came to a head — that’s in the film. They were literally barging into each other onstage.

“I think Steve wondered at the time whether he’d made the wrong decision bringing Bruce in, that Bruce was just too full-on. But that’s the way Bruce is. To this day he gets wound up onstage and gives it everything.”

In the end, Smith says, the tension helped define the band’s dynamic.

“It worked out for the better,” he says. “I think it made us stronger when we resolved it and moved forward. Bruce drove the band in a different way than Steve — just with pure onstage intensity. He took the whole thing to another level, entertainment-wise.”

Smith himself has experienced Iron Maiden from both inside and outside. The guitarist left the band in 1990 and later played on solo albums by Dickinson, who departed Maiden in 1993 before both returned in 1999.

“When I came back I had a different perspective,” Smith says. “I could see the band for what it was and appreciate it more.”

That time away also changed him as a guitarist.

“Before Maiden I was fronting a band and was as much a singer as a guitarist,” he says. “After I left I played with different people. I worked with Roy Z, who’s a brilliant musician — a virtuoso. He taught me quite a bit.”

Smith continues to seek out those kinds of musical challenges today, including his side project with Richie Kotzen, Smith/Kotzen, which released its second album, Black Light / White Noise, last year.

“Hopefully that rubs off and you elevate your game,” Smith says. “If you’re still learning at this stage of the game, that’s a good thing.”

One example came from rethinking how Maiden’s classic songs were played live.

“Songs like ‘Run to the Hills’ and ‘The Number of the Beast’ were recorded in the key of D back in the day,” Smith explains. “That’s actually kind of a lightweight key on guitar compared with E, where you’ve got that big bottom string.

“I always felt we were missing something slightly, sonically. In the studio you can compensate for that, but live you can’t. So when I came back I started playing them in drop D. It added a bit of texture and gave them more muscle.”

Meanwhile, Iron Maiden’s global tour continues. The Run for Your Lives trek resumes May 21 in Greece and will travel through Europe, North America, Central and South America, New Zealand, Australia and Japan.

The band will actually be in Australia when it’s inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on November 14 in Los Angeles and has given no indication it plans to attend the ceremony.

Looking ahead, Smith says Maiden plans to take 2027 off, a break he expects to spend working more with Smith/Kotzen.

How many pickups should a guitar have? One? Two? Three?

How about 64?

That’s the total number of active pickups in the PolyMap system, a new experimental electric guitar developed by audio engineer David Wieland of Dark Art Guitars.

“Traditional electric guitars have two or three pickups and you have to decide while playing which ones are active,” Wieland explains in a video demonstration of the system. “This can limit what is possible with the playing, which is why I developed PolyMap.”

Traditional electric guitars rely on just two or three pickups to capture the vibration of the strings. Those pickups shape everything from a Stratocaster’s glassy bite to a Les Paul’s thick growl. PolyMap blows up that model entirely. Instead of a handful of magnets, the experimental instrument uses 64 individual pickups arranged in a grid, allowing software to combine them into virtual pickups placed anywhere along the string.

The project is Wieland’s entry in the AES Student Design Competition 2026, where it also serves as his master’s thesis.

“It’s a polyphonic guitar pickup system that detects each string individually at eight different locations,” he says. “Then in software, you can decide which pickups are active, how they are blended, and apply various effects.”

At the heart of PolyMap is an 8×8 pickup grid that samples each of the guitar’s six strings at eight positions along its length. In total, the instrument houses 64 active pickups, each feeding a carefully designed signal path.

Those digital signals pass through buffered, bandwidth-controlled analog stages before entering eight multichannel analog-to-digital converters. From there, the data is aggregated into a Multichannel Audio Digital Interface (MADI) stream and transmitted over a single coaxial cable, which also delivers 12 volts of DC power to the pickups. The system outputs its stereo signal at 24-bit/48 kHz resolution.

Once recorded into a DAW, a specially designed plugin lets users shape their performance via two modes. Manual mode gives players direct control over each pickup’s level, phase, pan and micro-delay. Virtual mode allows users to position a simulated pickup beneath each string while the software blends signals from the sensor grid in real time.

Because the system captures the strings at multiple points simultaneously, players can also reshape the tone of the “virtual pickup” itself — dialing in sounds that mimic everything from vintage passive pickups to ultra-clean modern designs.

The multi-pickup architecture also opens the door to unusual effects. By introducing timing offsets between sensors, the system can create delay and diffusion effects. Players can even route signals independently — sending the lower strings to a bass guitar rig, for example, while the higher strings feed a traditional guitar amp.

PolyMap isn’t commercially available yet, but Wieland has published the project’s hardware designs, software and documentation on GitHub for anyone interested in exploring the system.

If it eventually reaches the market, he estimates the guitar would cost around $2,000.

“I would say at the very least six months until we can even talk about how the final system looks,” Wieland says. “Realistically, it’s probably going to be next year before it’s possibly available.”

At first, Joe Satriani wasn’t sure how to respond to one of Steve Vai’s most elaborate new recordings.

The track arrived dense, layered, and saturated with guitars — the kind of maximal arrangement Vai is known for pushing to extremes.

Satriani remembers his immediate reaction:

“What am I gonna play on this song that’s got 18 Steve Vai guitar tracks on it?”

It wasn’t frustration so much as recalibration. After decades of working with Vai in different contexts, this was something else entirely: a fully formed sonic environment already overflowing with guitar ideas before he even entered the picture.

The track is “Dancing,” the Spanish-flavored latest single from the SatchVai Band, which also includes bassist Marco Mendoza, guitarist Pete Thorn, and drummer Kenny Aronoff. The song is an interpretation of a piece by Italian singer Paolo Conte and is accompanied by a humorous video featuring 13 dancers, including Aronoff and mutual friend Brendon Small of Metalocalypse fame.

“I found that track in the early ’80s and just fell in love with it,” Vai says. “I kept listening to it through the years and imagined it as a guitar piece. I sent it to Joe and said, ‘I’ve got a crazy idea. I want to turn all the horns into guitar parts and beef up the arrangement.’

“I thought he’d say, ‘What are you, crazy? This isn’t rock and roll.’ But he came back and said, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna play on this, but I trust your insanity,’ so we did it.”

Vai says the third single was originally intended to be Satriani’s “Mayhem,” but both agreed “Dancing” offered a better left turn creatively.

Satriani agrees the choice worked precisely because of its unpredictability.

“It is good, because it is so different,” he says. “It showcases some of Steve’s bizarre ideas about what you can do with the guitar and arrangement — like a peek into the genius of Steve. I remember thinking, ‘This is the craziest idea Steve has ever had,’ and when it came together it was just pure fun.”

The SatchVai collaboration began decades earlier in suburban Long Island, where a teenage Vai studied guitar under Satriani. Vai says those early lessons rarely felt formal.

“We’d sit in his backyard with two electric guitars, no amplifiers, and we’d sit back-to-back and just play,” he recalls.

What began as instruction quickly turned into long improvisation sessions — an early training ground built entirely on listening and reaction rather than technique.

That shared instinct resurfaced decades later when the idea of recording together finally became unavoidable.

A 2024 co-headlining tour accelerated things. The two began jamming at the end of shows, and informal ideas evolved into full exchanges of compositions.

Vai sent Satriani two pieces that became “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1” and “Pt. 2.” From there, momentum took over.

“We said, ‘Come on, let’s do it. It’s time,’” Vai says.

Satriani says timing was crucial. Both musicians were no longer operating under the pressure of proving themselves.

“I’m glad we waited for this,” Satriani says. “Now we’re older, and we’ve had a crazy roller coaster of success. If we’d done it earlier, we would’ve brought that anxiety into the studio and had pressure from outside sources. Doing it now, we were able to let it just happen.”

The SatchVai album weighs in at 10 songs — “I Wanna Play My Guitar” is the only one with vocals — and has been mixed and mastered. It has no title or release date yet, however, though the pair is anxious for fans to hear the full body of work.

When the album does finally drop, Satriani and Aronoff will resume with Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds band for summer shows, while Vai will be back with the all-star King Crimson adjunct Beat for a European tour during June and July. They also each voice a desire work on their next solo projects, which will leave the prospect of SatchVai as a going concern somewhat up in the air.

“Joe and I kind of work in the moment,” Vai says. “We never even talked about putting a band together until it just happened, because the time was right. I think that’s going to be the M.O. moving forward.

“I know that we are interested in getting back to being our own generals and entering back into our own creative impulses on a solo level, but SatchVai was such a fun process, and it was easy and creative and fun, I can’t imagine not working together again, even if in the future it’s just sharing tracks and creating like that.”

Melissa Etheridge says an intense cannabis experience in 2003 fundamentally reshaped her outlook on life and helped prepare her for one of the most difficult moments she would face the following year.

Speaking with Joel Madden on the interview series Artist Friendly, the acoustic-strumming singer-songwriter recalled how an unexpectedly powerful edible experience triggered a profound shift in her thinking about spirituality, mortality and personal well-being.

“My big moment was 2003,” says the guitarist, who recently told Guitar Player how a trip to a music store to learn about effects pedals changed her approach to playing electric guitar.

Some might assume her life-changing event came when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. But Etheridge says the real turning point happened months earlier.

At the time, despite her reputation as a rock star, Etheridge says she had largely avoided drugs and heavy drinking.

“I’d been a rock and roller, but I wasn’t a drinker. I didn’t do drugs,” she explains. “I fooled around a little bit more than I should have, but the drugs and substances — I was never addicted to anything. I was a good little rock star.”

That changed one evening when she and a girlfriend experimented with homemade cannabis edibles.

Her partner, a baker from the Midwest, misjudged the potency.

“She said, ‘It calls for a quarter cup of cannabis. Well, a cup is going to be great!’” Etheridge recalls with a laugh.

The results were far stronger than they expected.

“So I eat one. Then, ‘Oh, it’s not working.’ Then you eat another one. Then you get the munchies and you eat three,” she says. “I took what I call a heroic dose of cannabis.”

Etheridge unwittingly followed in the footsteps of previous artists, like the Beatles, who discovered the life-changing effects of hallucinogenics — or in her case, a dose of pot big enough to have a hallucinogenic effect.

What transpired, she said, was a profound experience that felt less recreational than spiritual.

“I came back a changed person the next morning,” she said.

Etheridge compares the state she reached to one that can be achieved through meditation or yoga, though she described psychedelics as “a shortcut.”

“It really opened my mind to the spiritual nature of reality and the law of attraction — how you manifest things, how important our minds are in running this whole thing,” she explains.

The experience also challenged the religious framework she grew up with.

“It started to crumble the Midwestern Methodist mindset that I’d been in my whole life and really changed my philosophy on life,” she notes.

Months later, when doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer, Etheridge found herself reacting differently than she might have before.

“I went, ‘Oh. I had already died,’” she reveals.

Etheridge described the experience as a kind of existential shift that removed her fear of death.

“There’s a point in that sort of enlightenment where you realize, ‘Oh — death.’ I’ve died, so I’m not afraid of death anymore,” she says. “It’s hard to explain.”

Madden suggested the experience sounds like a sense of peace with mortality.

“Exactly,” Etheridge replies. “So all of a sudden this cancer was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is just me shedding something.’”

The diagnosis ultimately prompted a series of life changes. Etheridge says she altered her diet, reassessed stress in her life and reconsidered how she prioritized her own well-being.

“Stress is the biggest thing,” she explains. “I changed how I looked at the world, how I held the world.”

She also began focusing more intentionally on self-care.

“I started thinking about myself more, taking care of myself before making sure everybody else was all right,” Etheridge says. “Little things like that really make a difference.”

Jim Peterik has composed plenty of hit songs. Perhaps most notable is “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, a band he founded in 1978.

But way back in 1970, the guitarist managed to craft a tune for his jazz-rock group the Ides of March that shot up to number 2 on the Billboard charts. Dubbed “Vehicle,” it became the fastest-breaking single in the history of Warner Bros. Records at the time.

Peterik wrote the song to win back a girlfriend with the offer to be the ride to her dreams. The song’s distinctive brass horn section bursts out, demanding attention and hooking the listener’s ears.

Nevertheless, Peterik thought “Vehicle” was a throwaway at best. Instead, it became an enduring hit, known to many even if they can’t place the name of the group that recorded it.

“There was no game plan or demographic research done,” Peterik says of the song. “We were mainly thinking, ‘How do we get that girl in the front row to throw her panties at us?’

“We were pretty clueless. All we knew was that every time we played ‘Vehicle’ at a dance, people would be partying. We didn't value the song at all. It was just this fun tune that people danced to.”

With its distinctive horn figures, “Vehicle” sounded to many listeners of the time like a new track from Blood, Sweat & Tears. But Peterik wasn’t thinking of that group when he wrote it, nor did he suspect he had a potential hit on his hands.

“I didn't know what made it work,” he offers. “The horn riff was a call to arms that everyone remembers, but I was 19 years old then, and it took many, many years for me to define what was really special about that song. It's not like you can go into a laboratory and create a hit with the same formula: ‘Okay, I did it. I'll just do it again.’”

The Ides cut “Vehicle” live, except for the lead vocals.

“We knew the song so well that we didn't need a guide vocal,” Peterik explains. “All the brass is blaring together, and one thing that I don't think I've ever told anybody is that I doubled all the horn lines with a Les Paul and a Maestro Fuzz-Tone. People would ask, ‘How did you get that ballsy brass sound?’ Well, the secret weapon was the Maestro, which I got right after we cut the track, and I just added it.”

Ironically, Peterik’s electric guitar was dealt a pair of blows during the recording.

“I had an awesome Fender Dual Showman and a red Epiphone Riviera, and I broke a string during take one, so Larry [Millas, co-guitarist] lent me his sunburst Epiphone Riviera for take two, as he was playing organ.”

Take two was perfect, but a studio technician made the kind of error every recording artist fears.

“The second engineer managed to erase 13 seconds of take two, which we liked, and we thought our lives were over,” Peterik says. “So he edited the first part of take one onto take two, which shouldn't have worked, as this is before click tracks. But it was perfect.

“So what you hear is 13 seconds of my red Epiphone, and the rest, including the solo, is Larry's sunburst Epiphone.”

Incidentally, notes Peterik, his red Epiphone is on the “One Hit Wonder” wall at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Which is kind of cool,” he admits.

As for that solo, which he cut live, Peterik says he was influenced by one of the era’s axe gods.

“I was channeling my god — Jeff Beck — but I ran out of licks,” he admits. “I usually played right through to the horn reprise, but I just gave up and left this hole, and the drummer did this magnificent fill that he had never done before. He turned my mistake into something brilliant. You can't plan that shit.”

Peterik notes that the overdrive on the solo isn’t the Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

“The first engineer, Dick Dearborn, told me I was playing too loud, so he decided to take the output from the Showman, plug it directly into the mixer, and distort it by overdriving the board's transistor preamp.”

Peterik says he wasn’t a big fan of the Fuzz-Tone and didn’t mind setting it aside. “I was never happy with that cheesy overdrive, even after it almost became a famous sound. Board overdrive. No effects. That's the solo.”

Released as a single in March 1970, “Vehicle” shot up the charts.

And yet, not surprisingly, then–Warner Bros. president Joe Smith pushed Peterik to repeat the song’s success.

“And I came up with ‘Superman,’” says Peterik, who would connect with Frankie Sullivan and form Survivor in 1978. “It's hard to clone something like that, though. ‘Vehicle’ was an original creation out of whole cloth, whereas ‘Superman’ was like a carbon copy. It had the same DNA. But ‘Superman’ didn't even reach the top 50.

“As time went on, I started to learn more about what makes a great record great — the beats, the repetition, the cadence of the vocal and lyrics — but I'm still not an expert.”

Nineteen-seventy-six was the year punk broke — a moment when a cultural and musical revolution reshaped the landscape of popular music. In England, one band was about to lead the charge and etch itself permanently into the public psyche: the Sex Pistols.

Among the witnesses to their birth was journeyman guitarist Chris Spedding. At the time, Spedding was one of England’s most in-demand session players, contributing guitar to recordings by artists such as Jack Bruce, John Cale, Donovan, Elton John and David Essex, and later Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney and Joan Armatrading.

Spedding first saw the band perform in March 1976 at London’s famed 100 Club.

“When I first saw them, there were about 15 people in the audience and 10 people in the audience when they'd finished,” Spedding recalls today. “I sort of immediately saw that this is what we needed in rock music at the time — something like this with new blood.

“When I heard them, it was obvious that the A&R people from the record companies weren't coming to see them. They had this reputation of putting people off.

“So I said to [their manager] Malcolm McLaren, ‘What you guys need — and what the current wisdom at the time was — is a three-song demo with the best three songs. If a record company hears something they like, they're going to sign you. They're not going to sign you by coming down to see you.’”

Spedding offered to lend a helping hand. On May 15, 1976, he took the group into Majestic Studios in Clapham — a studio that had previously been a cinema — to record a three-track demo, with Spedding handling production duties.

“I said to them, ‘Okay, I can help you guys,’ because I’d been around studios a lot and I knew how to make a demo,” he says. “I went to one of their rehearsals at their place in Denmark Street and listened to all their songs, made notes of the titles and said, ‘These are the three songs we’re doing: “Problems,” “Pretty Vacant” and “No Feelings.”’ They hadn't written ‘God Save the Queen’ at that time, otherwise I'd have probably included that too.”

Spedding chose Majestic Studios because he had worked there previously while contributing electric guitar to Brian Eno’s 1974 debut solo album Here Come the Warm Jets.

“I remembered getting a good sound out of that studio,” he says. “And it was a 16-track studio too, because I didn't want to go into a 24-track studio with all the bells and whistles. The Sex Pistols had never been in a proper studio before, but the session was done very quickly. We went in one day around 11 o'clock to set up, and by five o'clock that afternoon we were finished with the three songs.”

The demo helped secure the group a record deal with EMI Records, which released their debut single “Anarchy in the U.K.” later that year. Spedding also passed the demo on to producer Chris Thomas, who would go on to produce the band’s debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, released by Virgin Records in October 1977.

As the band’s notoriety grew, some questioned Spedding’s early involvement with the group.

“I had a run-in with a music business journalist in a nightclub who thought he was helping me out by saying, ‘Chris, you better watch your reputation because you've been associated with the Sex Pistols,’” Spedding recalls.

“So I said to him, ‘Well, each to his own — but when did you hear them?’
‘Oh, I've not heard them, but everybody knows they're terrible,’ came the journalist’s reply.

“And that was it. I don't think that guy lasted very long as a music journalist. He got it totally wrong. I got them their deal with EMI. And I got them their producer, Chris Thomas. So the whole thing, as far as I was concerned, was a success.”

In the studio, Spedding made sure the band’s raw live spirit translated onto tape.

“I would help them out by listening to their instruments, making sure there were no buzzers or rattles that most musicians don't hear,” he says. “If you're attuned to studio sound, when there's a rattle on the snare drum, for example, you'd hear it and try to get rid of it. But of course Paul Cook’s drums sounded fantastic. So did Steve Jones. I even brought my own amp down so he wouldn't have one that gave up the ghost while running.”

“I also made sure they could hear everything clearly in their headphones and got them to run through the song from start to finish. At the same time, without them knowing, I’d ask the engineer to push record and they’d play it perfectly with no nervousness about it.

“I knew that any musician who's never been in the studio before might start getting nervous once they see the red light. So we went through the songs quickly by fooling them into thinking I wasn't recording the takes. I never made them play things over and over again. They knew the songs. They only needed to play them once, and once we had a good sound I wanted to keep that spontaneity.”

Over the years, rumors have persisted that Spedding — not Pistols guitarist Steve Jones — played the guitars on those early recordings.

“I'm not the sort of guy who's going to go in with a group that has a perfectly fine, accomplished guitar player and start playing all his parts,” Spedding says. “He's going to get pissed off at me, and it wouldn't accomplish anything.

“I had been playing for about 20 years and Steve Jones had only been playing for about two years, but I couldn't think of any way of playing Sex Pistols music better than he did. So I wasn't about to say, ‘I want to produce you — and then play all the guitar parts.’”

Few guitar buyers have had to look down the end of a loaded gun when they arrived to make a purchase.

Lance Vanley is one of them. Vanley — who, with his uncle Jeremiah, forms the guitar core of southern rockers Treaty Oak Revival — was intrigued when he spotted an Arctic White Fender Stratocaster listed on Facebook Marketplace for just $300. The electric guitar was priced right, but something didn’t add up.

“The serial number didn’t make any sense,” he says.

Online research led him to an unusual conclusion: the guitar was built in Korea from U.S. parts.

“The guys on the Fender online forums were like, ‘Hey, if you see one of these, buy it. You’re never gonna see it again.’”

Lance arranged to meet the seller at his home. After texting that he had arrived, he watched the garage door open.

“I could see him standing in the corner, and I could see his hands doing a motion — and having been around guns I knew it was him loading a magazine.

“As soon as the garage door fully opens I hear a clicking sound, and I’m like, ‘Great. Am I about to get robbed in broad daylight in front of his house, by him?’ I didn’t know what was gonna happen.

“He comes over and says, ‘You have any weapons on you?’ I’m like, ‘I have a knife in my pocket; it’s just to open stuff.’ He literally police-patted me down… and then he goes, ‘You never know who you’re meeting these days.’ Then he put his gun up and we walked into the house. That was pretty crazy.

“And I still have that Strat.”

He now has considerably more purchasing power thanks to Treaty Oak Revival’s rise. The Odessa, Texas–based southern rock quintet has released three studio albums, two of them Gold-certified. Its latest, 2025’s West Texas Degenerate, debuted at number 21 on the Billboard 200 and topped both the Top Rock Albums and Americana/Folk Albums charts.

It also earned two Academy of Country Music Award nominations. The band has notched five Platinum and 13 Gold singles, with “Bad State of Mind” reaching the Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart and the Top 20 on Hot Country Songs.

Last year, the band expanded internationally with a four-date headlining tour in Australia.

“This whole experience has just been wild,” Lance says, recalling drawing pictures of himself performing onstage in fifth grade, “rocking out in front of the whole world.”

Despite a 10-year age gap, Lance and Jeremiah reject a traditional mentor dynamic.

“I would say it’s almost more like brothers than an uncle-nephew situation,” says Lance, 32.

“We’ve always been around each other,” adds Jeremiah, 42, the band’s elder statesman. “We’re from a music family… there’s always music when we’re together. It’s pretty natural.”

Both have played guitar for roughly the same length of time. Jeremiah started at 18 after switching from bass — and earlier, trombone. Lance picked up guitar at nine and took lessons from a friend of his father’s, who had recorded a Christmas album.

“‘Meant to Live,’ by Switchfoot — that was the first song I learned,” Lance says.

Jeremiah — an accountant before the band broke through — laughs at the memory. “Lance would always come around playing that Switchfoot song.”

His own influences ran heavier. “Van Halen, Metallica… Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Paul Gilbert. I was watching G3 videos all the time.”

Lance says watching his uncle’s early bands shaped his path. “That showed me you could just hang out with your friends and play music,” he says. “That definitely pushed me toward starting bands.”

After failed school projects, a call from Jeremiah changed things. “We’re just jamming in the back of a vacuum shop on Monday nights. You want to come by?” Lance recalls. “And it went from there.”

Treaty Oak Revival — which also features guitarist and singer Sam Canty, drummer Cody Holloway and bassist Dakota Hernandez — continues touring behind West Texas Degenerate. The band plays Stagecoach on April 25, with U.S. dates running into August. A fourth album is not yet underway, but it’s in the conversation.

“There’s probably bits and pieces we haven’t put together yet,” Lance says.

Jeremiah adds that once touring slows, the band plans to write in Dallas. “We’ll rent a spot, get a few days in, cut some songs. That’s usually how it goes.”

“We’re still on the album tour,” he says. “But we’re also thinking ahead — what do we want to do next?”