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

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

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

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

For Marr, though, the value of a guitar has never been measured simply by how much noise — or how many notes — a player can get out of it. As guitarist with the Smiths and throughout his solo career, he largely shunned guitar solos, prioritized songs over showmanship and frequently criticized the cult of virtuosity that dominated rock guitar culture in the 1980s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve had an extraordinary life,” Steve Lukather says. “I’m one lucky guy.”

Indeed he is. Lukather spent the summer touring with Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band before hitting the road with Toto for their massive North American summer tour with Christopher Cross. On September 24, he’ll be back on the road with Ringo on the Fall 2026 Tour running through October 7.

But of course Luke is equally well known for his studio session work. He’s one of history’s most prolific session guitarists, contributing to over 1,500 albums across multiple genres. A definitive studio legend, he played the iconic riff on Michael Jackson’s "Beat It", the solo on Olivia Newton-John's "Physical," and tracked hits for icons like Lionel Richie, Chicago and Aretha Franklin.

“I used to go to work every day not knowing what I was gonna do,” Lukather says. “There were no rehearsals, and no demos. All we could say was, ‘What are we doing today? Who’s on the session? Who’s the artist?’

“One day it could be Alice Cooper, and the next it was writing with Bernie Taupin,” Lukather says. “I found myself in these amazing situations at a very, very young age. I just parlayed it, man. Ironically, it was an era to have cool guitar solos in pop songs. I got to play a lot of them… even the dumb ones!”

With that prolific studio career in mind, Steve Lukather kicked back with Guitar Player to look back on his working relationships — and sometimes friendships — with Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, George Benson and Eddie Van Halen.

Ringo Starr

“He’s an inspiration. I love that man so much. He’s become such a dear friend. Who would have known? If you’d told me when I was a kid, ‘Oh, yeah, when you’re, like, 69 years old, man, Ringo’s gonna be one of your best friends,’ I would have lost my shit.

“I had the great honor of working with Paul [McCartney] several times, and I became great friends with my first guitar hero, George Harrison, where we hung out and played together. So when I heard that Greg Bissonette recommended me to Ringo, saying I’d be perfect for his band, I was excited.

"He recommended me not only because I can play everybody else’s stuff, but because I’m a team player. I’ll play lead, rhythm, and I’ll even jump on bass. But it’s so much fun, and Ringo treats us so well. He just loves to be one of the guys, and man, it never gets old to turn around and look at Ringo Starr playing drums. It’s like, ‘Just pinch me now, man! Please don’t fucking let this dream end.’

“But the band is like a little family. We really do love and respect each other, and Ringo is the ultimate boss. He’s got wisdom, humor, and he’s as fast and funny as he was in A Hard Day’s Night. Plus, he still plays great! I mean, all those Beatles records had no click tracks, and all those creative, inventive parts were all Ringo, man. He’s so important to the percussion within the family of rock and roll. But he’s just fun to be around, is brilliant, and is just infectious. He still does this for fun because he loves music.”

Joni Mitchell

“I’ve always been a fan of Joni Mitchell ever since I had a girlfriend in high school who was obsessed with her music during the Blue period. And then, when Court and Spark came out, I was starting to get really interested in studio players, like Larry Carlton, because of the creativity.

“So when I got to work with Joni [on 1982’s Wild Things Run Fast and 1985’s Dog Eat Dog], I was really excited to get the call. But I was like, ‘Wow… what am I going to bring to this, man?’

“I walked into the studio, and she was sitting at the piano, playing the song that we were going to cut that day. She was going through it on her own, and singing, and man… it’s hard when you’re in a room with greatness like that. It’s hard not to be affected by it in a visceral way.

“It was so naturally wonderful and beautiful, and I could immediately hear a part in my head because that’s the job. You have to have a ranger’s ears and be able to listen to somebody play a song and hear the parts that you can add to make it something. But you don’t want to get in the way, you want to enhance the hooky part on the arpeggio or add to what she’s already got going on.

“So we started working on the tune, and it was beautiful. I had a nice little lick I came up with that she really liked, and that set the tone for it. And believe it or not, she wanted to rock and roll it up a little bit. [laughs] It was the early ‘80s, and all that shit was happening. I kind of laughed at first, but it took her out of her normal place, which some of her hardcore fans didn’t dig. And of course, I take all the shit for it. [laughs] But that was a fun record to do. She was so nice and fabulous.”

Michael Jackson/Quincy Jones

“I got the call from Quincy for ‘Beat It,’ and when I got to my parts, I initially cranked the riff out on a bunch of quadrupled Marshalls. But then Quincy called and said, ‘It’s great… but it’s too much. I gotta get this on R&B radio. Use a little Fender amp and turn down the distortion.’ That’s what you hear when the riff comes in.

“And then when I heard Michael sing, ‘Your butt is mine,’ I was just a smartass 20-something-year-old kid, and I laughed. But Quincy goes, ‘Stop it, bro. This is gonna be a big record. I’m telling you.’ I went, ‘Yeah, right!’ But it was—and still is—massive.

“But with Michael, there was nothing weird at all. He was my age, he laughed at my shit, and he thought I was amusing. He was a real pro, though what did make me laugh was his monkey, Bubbles, ripped apart the vocal booth. [laughs] That was the weirdest thing I saw. It made me laugh on the floor, of course.

“Michael was funny, man. His body language told you if he liked a part or not. He’d start dancing, and it would just be me, Quincy, and Michael, and I’d start playing something, and Michael would say, ‘What about this? You should change it to this because you don’t want that going over and over.’

“He was very collaborative. He wanted my input. And Quincy welcomed that, but he didn’t write my parts. With songs like ‘Human Nature,’ Quincy would go, ‘Make it funky for me, man. I gotta get this on R&B radio.’ I came up with that part on the spot, and that’s what ended up on the radio.

“So Michael was a pro. And Quincy was a great casting director, who had a great ear for songs and got the right guys on the right songs.”

George Benson

“I love George Benson. I was into the CTI-era records, which I grew up listening to when I was like 12 years old. [CTI was a legendary jazz record label founded by Creed Taylor in 1967.] I used to listen to all that shit when I was in junior high and early high school because I was getting into jazz, started studying music, and really learning how to learn and read music, and about harmony theory.

"I got deep into it, and I was into George. And then, when I heard him sing, I lost my shit. I go, ‘This guy sings like fucking Stevie Wonder! Are you kidding me? Where’s he been hiding that?’

“So, later on, Jay Graydon, one of my best friends and a big mentor to me, was producing George. He goes, ‘Lukey, come on over. I’m working on George’s greatest-hits album and I need a single. What do you got for me?’

“I had the opening piano riff for ‘Turn Your Love Around,’ and I brought that over to Jay’s house. And then, over a copious amount of alcohol and whatever… we wrote the song in about 20 minutes. And then, George heard it, loved it, and by the grace of God, it was a big, huge hit record. We won a Grammy for it, and that was my first. And then, I wrote three or four other songs for George.”

Eddie Van Halen

“Eddie was good to me, man. We were very encouraging to each other. But here’s the funny thing: our music hangs were not many, but our friends’ hangs were deep. We talked about our families, and everything, you know? But early on, I remember I was doing the solo to [Toto’s] ‘Girl Goodbye,’ and someone walked in with the Van Halen album.

“I was sitting there doing a few takes and shit, and then someone said, ‘Stop everything. I want you to hear something.’ He dropped the needle on ‘Eruption,’ and I’d never heard anything like that. I was like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was jaw-dropping, obviously. The first time I heard that, I was 19 years old, while working on that record, and I fell off my chair.

“I said, ‘Well, there’s really no point in continuing on anymore…’ [laughs] I was like, ‘What was that? How do you do that? Who makes that noise? I must be friends with him now.’ That’s really what I thought… and that’s kind of what happened. I met Eddie at the California World Music Festival in ’78, we got to know each other and started hanging out a lot around 1980.

“And then, we became really, really close friends. We lived near each other and had a lot in common in terms of our views on life, music, and family. And even though we didn’t play anything like each other, Ed and I were always so supportive of what each other was doing. Ed was always supportive of what I was doing and what my band was doing.

“He’d always show up at the gigs, and Ed and I would play each other’s stuff whenever we had new stuff. I remember hearing the demo for ‘Jump’ in 1983. I said to Ed, ‘There’s your number one record, Ed. Jeez.’ And when he started with Music Man, I was the tiebreaker for which pickup he liked best. He went with mine, so that was cool.”

Many fans view Pink Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut as effectively a Roger Waters solo outing, with the recording plagued by growing tensions within the band. Waters officially left Pink Floyd in 1985, and many assumed that would be the end of the group.

It wasn’t. Not long after Waters’ departure, David Gilmour and Nick Mason reconvened with plans for a new Pink Floyd album. They also brought keyboardist Rick Wright back into the fold after he had been unceremoniously fired by Waters during the making of The Wall.

The resulting album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, surfaced in 1987. But its release ignited a bitter feud and legal battle between Gilmour and Waters over the right to use the Pink Floyd name.

The dispute was eventually settled out of court, with Gilmour’s camp retaining the right to carry on as Pink Floyd. But what had caused the acrimony that had been simmering behind the scenes for years?

For longtime Pink Floyd roadie and tour manager Chris Adamson, it can be traced to one thing.

“What messed them up was the age-old thing — wives!” Adamson tells Guitar Player. “Before that, there was none of that thing going on. David and Roger really complemented each other. But then the wives got involved.”

Adamson — who recently shared his recollections of Floyd during the making of Meddle and The Dark Side of the Moon — believes the group’s internal dynamics began to fray once Gilmour and Waters entered new relationships following the breakdown of their first marriages.

“With all the original wives, the band and all of us used to go on holiday together, the wives, the kids, everyone,” he says.

That changed in the late 1970s. Waters had been married Judith Trim, but their marriage ended in 1975. While on tour in America, the bass guitarist met Carolyne Christie, who worked for EG, the management company whose roster included Roxy Music, King Crimson, T. Rex and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, among other artists.

“They ended up living together and then getting married and having two kids together and everything. But she was incredibly strong — demanding, whatever. She basically said to Roger one day, ‘What the hell do you need those other guys for?’

“And that’s when the rot set in. That started the split.”

Adamson’s recounting is given further weight in Mark Blake’s 2008 biography of Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. “Carolyne was landed gentry, and had all the attitudes associated with her class, and she seemed to have this huge effect on Waters,” Blake writes, noting that “he seemed to change completely.”

Adamson says a similar scenario played out in Gilmour’s personal life in the early 1990s. He had been married to artist and former model Virginia “Ginger” Hasenbein since 1975, but they divorced in 1990. He soon began dating English novelist and journalist Polly Samson, whom he married in 1994.

“By this time the split had happened in the band,” Adamson says, “but she pushed any chance for a reunion right out the door when she said to Dave, ‘What the hell do you need them for?’”

The Wall co-producer Bob Ezrin told Blake that Samson’s presence in the band further fueled the internal tensions.

“It wasn’t easy at first,” he said. “It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have the new woman coming in and then get involved in the career.”

Even Gilmour acknowledged in a Mojo interview that “Polly has a tendency to ruffle everyone’s feathers. I’m not aware of her having ruffled Nick or Rick’s feathers, but she certainly ruffled the management’s.”

Years later, Adamson was working with John Mayer at London’s Royal Albert Hall when he decided to approach Gilmour in the hope of mending the rift between him and Waters.

“I really did think I could get the band back together. I was at the bar with Dave and he introduced me to his new wife. She was all very friendly until she found out I was from the past. Then suddenly the long knives came out.

“I remember standing at a bar with Dave and asking him, ‘Is there any chance of you and Roger getting together?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Not a fuckin’ chance now.’”

Adamson believes the death of Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright in 2008 severed the remaining thread keeping the group’s former members united. The four musicians last shared a stage in 2005, when Pink Floyd reunited for Live 8.

Gilmour’s most recent public performance with Waters was in 2011, when he made a surprise appearance at Waters’ The Wall Live tour to perform his iconic guitar solos on “Comfortably Numb.”

In the years since, Gilmour and Waters have moved even further apart. In 2023, Samson publicly attacked Waters over his political views in a tweet in which she called him “anti-Semitic” and a “Putin apologist,” among a long list of other accusations.

Gilmour subsequently responded: “Every word demonstrably true.” Significantly, he insists Pink Floyd will not regroup.

So while Adamson believes time can heal old wounds, he thinks Pink Floyd’s rift has gone too far to repair.

“Getting the band together is never going to happen,” he says. “When Rick passed away, things continued to drift apart. And unfortunately that situation is how it is today.”

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.”

Thin Lizzy should have been everything Irish guitarist Eric Bell had ever wanted. At first, it was. But by 1973, his dream gig had become unsustainable.

“At the start, it was fabulous,” Bell tells Guitar Player. “It was my dream, come true. We formed Thin Lizzy, and it was fabulous.”

The band’s early years were a blur of hash, Guinness and, eventually, harder drugs. Bell says the musicians were permanently stoned, but that didn’t stop them from having a great time making their first three albums: 1971’s Thin Lizzy, 1972’s Shades of a Blue Orphanage and 1973’s Vagabonds of the Western World. The latter featured Bell’s best-known recording with the band, their version of “Whiskey in the Jar.”

“It was great,” says Bell, who last year released Acoustic Sessions, an album that re-imagines songs from the group’s first there albums — including “Whisky in the Jar” — in acoustic guitar arrangements.

But Bell’s relationship with drugs and alcohol was changing. He was drinking more, smoking increasingly strong marijuana and watching his social and family life fall apart. Living alone in a grungy attic in London, he reached a point where he could no longer separate performing from getting high.

Before one show, he found himself sober and unable to settle. A crowd was waiting outside, but there were no drugs available. Bell picked up his guitar and immediately felt that something was wrong.

“And it felt horrible.”

A joint eventually appeared, and Bell says the transformation was immediate.

“All of a sudden, I’m Eric Clapton,” he says, laughing.

The moment also forced him to confront how dependent he had become. “Eric, you’ve got a problem here, man,” he remembers thinking. “You can’t play when you’re straight.”

Thin Lizzy’s relentless touring schedule left little room for Bell to deal with the problem. He says he needed a few weeks away from the road, but management refused. After shows, he would tell himself to have one drink, pack up and go to bed. Instead, the whiskey and dope would come out, and the cycle would begin again.

“I couldn’t stop. And it got worse and worse.”

The breaking point came on New Year’s Eve 1973, when Thin Lizzy played Queen’s University in Belfast.

Bell arrived early and found a table in the dressing room stocked with bottles of alcohol. He tried to keep himself under control, but by the time he strapped on his Stratocaster and walked onstage, he was completely intoxicated.

“I didn’t know where I was,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I surely should have cancelled the gig.”

Instead, the band played. Bell lasted three songs.

Throughout the performance, he says, a voice in his head was telling him to leave. He knew he needed professional help and knew he could not continue, but he was too far gone to act on either realization.

Eventually, he threw his guitar into the air and kicked his amplifiers offstage before staggering away and collapsing.

A roadie ordered him back onstage. Bell was hauled to his feet and placed back onstage. Someone handed him his guitar, but no one thought to retune it.

“The guitar was completely out of tune," Bell recalls. “I must have sounded like Ravi Shankar on acid. It had to be fucking awful.”

The following day, Thin Lizzy’s management called from London, demanding to know what had happened. Bell replied that he’d quit. The band was halfway through its Irish tour. Though they tried to persuade him to stay, Bell insisted he was finished.

“They realized I wasn’t going to do it, and said, ‘Is that your last word?’ I said, ‘Yeah…’

“And they said, ‘Right — we’re getting Gary Moore to finish the tour,’ and slammed the phone down.”

Just like that, Eric Bell’s dream gig was over.

In retrospect, Bell believes the disastrous final show may have saved his life.

“I just kind of whittled about, wondering what to do with myself,” he says. “But yeah, I’d say that what happened probably saved my life.”

Bell rebounded and landed a gig with the equally hard-drinking Noel Redding later in the 1970s. He never rejoined Thin Lizzy, although he reunited with Phil Lynott in the studio for the Jimi Hendrix tribute “Song for Jimmy.” Bell says most of his playing did not make the final recording.

Thin Lizzy briefly continued with Gary Moore before replacing him with Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, whose twin-guitar harmonies would become central to the band’s sound on songs such as “Jailbreak” and “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

Bell still owns the Stratocaster he threw that night in Belfast. He has had a long time to consider what happened — and what it took to get back to playing without drugs and alcohol.

“I didn’t have the willpower to stop. I could get drunk very easily. If I had two or three whiskeys, I was anybody’s, you know?”

“And my Strat that I tossed in the air, I still have it. I think it’s finally just forgiven me. But man, it was hard. It took me forever to be able to play guitar straight again.”

For most of his career, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter has been a studio guitarist. Though he’s best known for his time in Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, he’s been a prolific studio hound for longer than he was in either group. His specialty is guitar solos, and he’s laid down countless memorable moments on records, from Dan’s “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number” to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” which he dexterously performed with a used Burns Bison electric guitar he bought for $20.

“I kind of look at guitar playing on two levels,” Baxter says. “There’s the professional studio sausage method, where you go in and grind it out, and that’s not necessarily bad. It’s good music and you’re having a good time. To get a chance to do it and be of that caliber is one of the most wonderful things that could ever happen to a guitarist. A lot of guys say it kills them. Well, it’s what you make of it.

“The other level is when you really want to play and you’re with people who accept and like what you do. My specialty, if you could call it that, is guitar solos, obviously, even though I sit back and do the I-have-a-swimming-pool rhythm guitar sound that L.A., laid-back, it’s-all-paid-for studio musicians have. I do like to play solos, and the reason [Steely Dan’s] Walter [Becker] and Donald [Fagen] called me was they needed somebody to play solos.”

Of course, sometimes the sessions are something completely out of the ordinary. Baxter shared a few of his oddest jobs with us.

Steely Dan

“Walter and Donald had a certain concept of guitar playing, and they would attempt to get as close to that as possible vis-à-vis my abilities as a player. So the solos were sort of a combination of exorcism, displays of technique and all kinds of things.”

One of the most unusual sessions was for the group’s instrumental cover of Duke Ellington’s jazz tune “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” which appeared on Pretzel Logic. Covering a 1927 jazz tune with a modern rock band wasn’t the most obvious thing to do in 1974, but Baxter didn’t flinch. Far from it. He called it “the Steely Dan song I enjoyed recording the most.”

“Everybody picked a piece of it, and I said, ‘I’ll take the trombone solo and learn it on steel guitar,’” he told Guitar Player.

As he explained to Vulture, the steel guitar was a logical substitute, given it allowed him to slide between notes, like a trombonist would. “I had the idea to try it on pedal steel. Why the hell not? I worked on it for a good amount of time, and it was fun getting through that tunnel from one end to the other and playing that beautiful solo. I wanted the challenge, and I was really satisfied.”

The Doobie Brothers

Baxter admits he is sometimes surprised by what comes out of him when he just opens up and lets inspiration fly. Sometimes it seems as if a higher power is at work, such as when he cut tracks for Donna Summer’s backup band, Brooklyn Dreams, for their album Joy Ride. Once again, he had the Burns Bison in hand.

“My solo was in a style that was like I was mumbling in tongues or speaking in dreams, using languages that have been dead for thousands of years,” he says. “After I finished playing, Juergen Koppers, the engineer, looked at me and said, ‘Was ist das?’

“I said, ‘I don’t know. You better play it back.’”

Of course, sometimes you get there with the help of a little reefer.

“The solo on ‘How Do the Fools Survive’ on the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute surprised me because that was a one-take job, where I just smoked a joint and was alone by myself with an engineer working in another room,” Baxter explains. “It was one of those lean-back-and-play things.”

Dolly Parton

Sometimes you have to color outside the lines, especially when artists find creative ways to explain what they want.

“Sometimes you get requests like, ‘Can you make it more green?’ or, ‘I need it to ooomph more,’” Baxter reveals. “So you say, ‘Okay,’ and think about all the times you’ve ever done sessions and people have said to you, ‘Boy, that really ooomphs,’ or ‘That sounds really green,’ and you start from there.”

One of his strangest requests came from Dolly Parton for the song “Baby, I’m Burnin’,” a perennial favorite from her 1978 album Heartbreaker that also served as the theme song to her 1987–1988 television series Dolly. The singer was looking for some explosive effects to play behind her vocals.

“Dolly Parton asked me to make fireworks one time,” he said. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer, and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’

“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s [pitch] transposer, slapping it back up and down. She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’

“There have been a couple of dates like that. I enjoy it. I get a lot of calls for steel guitar where they say, ‘Can you make it not sound like a steel guitar?’ That’s always a request. They want something different. They want a sound that has the fluidity of the steel guitar but doesn’t sound like ‘Six Days on the Road.’”

The Session That Never Happened

Baxter says that if you don’t know what to play, you shouldn’t.

“Sit back and wait because it’ll come.”

Or maybe it won’t. He recalls a session for Steely Dan producer Gary Katz that was like few others.

“He told me to bring all my stuff,” Baxter says. “I charged him triple scale because it was on a Saturday at a place way the hell out.”

He arrived with all his gear and set up. Then Katz played him an album’s worth of songs.

“He said, ‘Okay, I want you to listen to all these tunes and then tell me what you think we ought to do.’

“So I listened to 10 tunes, and each time one would finish I said I didn’t hear anything. When we finally finished, I said, ‘Gary, there’s really nothing you need. It sounds fine.’

“He said that was all he wanted to hear and paid me my money. Fair enough.

“You just don’t play sometimes. I found that one of the harder things to learn to say is, ‘There’s no need for it. You know, as much as I’d like to play on this track as a businessman, as a musician I know you don’t need it.’”

When Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded “Let It Be” for her 2023 album, Rockstar, it marked a historic meeting of English and Nashville music royalty.

“I just sent them a love note through their managers, and I just said what I was doing,” the late country icon told NPR in 2023. “And I said, ‘I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d love to have you sing with me on my rock album. And if you’re interested, call me at this number.’”

Dolly had already recorded “Let It Be” when she got the idea to contact Paul McCartney. “And so I contacted him. He was so gracious.

“And then I thought, Well, we got to have Ringo, because that’s the last of the Beatles. So I asked Ringo if he would do it. Same thing: ‘I’d be glad to do it.’”

The recording was another milestone in the career of Parton, the hit-making singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist, who turns 80 on January 19.

But it turns out she had already met both Beatles years earlier, in the 1970s. What’s more, each occasion had been memorable for reasons that had nothing to do with the Beatles.

Dolly met McCartney and his first wife, Linda, on June 16, 1974, backstage at Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee. Paul and Linda were in town with their family for a six-week stay, during which time they recorded a quartet of non-album singles with their group Wings, including the number three hit “Junior’s Farm.”

During their time in Nashville, the McCartneys decided to attend the Grand Masters Fiddling Contest taking place at Opryland. When intermission came, they were invited backstage, where they met Dolly and country star Porter Wagoner and were photographed by Jack Corn for a story in The Tennessean.

Coincidentally, the event was special for another reason: It marked the last appearance Dolly and Wagoner made together in the 1970s. They had teamed up as a duo in 1967, a few years after Dolly left behind her family and first Martin guitar and set off on a music career. She and Wagoner had performed their final concert as a duo one week before meeting the McCartneys, on June 9. (Their split was the impetus for her to write her hit “I Will Always Love You” as thanks to Wagoner for all he had done for her career.)

A few years and a cross-country journey later, Dolly met Ringo Starr courtesy of Ken Mansfield, the former U.S. manager of the Beatles’ Apple Records, as well as a Grammy Award–winning producer. The time was the late 1970s, and the place was Los Angeles, where Mansfield was luring Nashville stars in an attempt to break the rock-and-roll stronghold on clubs along the Sunset Strip. Waylon Jennings and Dolly were among the country artists who picked up their acoustic guitars and made the move west.

Several years before then, Starr had settled in Los Angeles, where he remained close with Mansfield. As a lifelong country music fan, the former Beatle was thrilled with the Nashville expatriates and spent one memorable evening watching Waylon Jennings perform and hanging out with him afterward.

It turned out Starr was eager to meet Dolly.

“He was very intrigued by Dolly’s career,” Mansfield wrote in his entertaining 2007 memoir, The White Book. Dolly was, he writes, “a giant Beatles fan and, knowing that I had worked with them, had jokingly mentioned that someday she would like to meet them, Ringo in particular.”

In short order, Mansfield arranged dinner at his home for a small group, including Dolly and Ringo. Neither knew the other would be there.

“Both invitees were thrilled at the surprise,” Mansfield wrote, “and the intimacy of the evening really made the whole thing very special.”

Special — but not eventful. That is, not until Mansfield’s friend Stewart Levine crashed the party. Levine was a producer of note, with clients who included Simply Red, B.B. King, Lionel Richie, Sly Stone, Patti LaBelle and Joe Cocker. He was also a huge Dolly Parton fan and was dying to meet her. Unfortunately, Mansfield insisted the guest list should be small, “to keep the focus on just Ringo and Dolly spending time together.”

Levine didn’t care. Shortly after dinner, he rang Mansfield’s doorbell. When the host answered the door, the producer muscled his way in, leading to a noisy confrontation.

As the men argued in the hallway, Dolly suddenly appeared. Seeing Levine, she stopped in her tracks and stared at him wide-eyed.

“After a very pregnant pause, Dolly began to speak and in a stuttering, shaky voice asked Stewart if he was Stewart Levine, the famous producer,” Mansfield wrote.

Struggling to comprehend what was happening, Levine mumbled “yes” as Dolly gazed lovingly at him.

“She continued to explain that in her lifetime she never expected that she would ever get the chance to be in the same room with Stewart Levine, let alone have the privilege of meeting him,” Mansfield wrote. “She went on further saying that she was a giant fan of his and had absolutely adored him from afar for quite a long time.

“She then delivered the fatal blow by announcing that she was going to have to leave the room for fear that she would no longer be able to contain herself and might jump his bones right in front of everyone,” Mansfield recalled.

“She made an abrupt about-face, as if fearful of being unable to control her emotions, and returned to the living room.”

The men stood speechless for a long while. Eventually they made their way to the living room where Dolly and the others were waiting. As they appeared, everyone burst into laughter.

It had all been a joke. Hearing the commotion after Levine forced his way in, Mansfield’s wife explained to Dolly that the producer was infatuated with her, and Dolly decided to have a little fun at his expense.

“I think Stewart was so stunned by what had gone down that he wasn't even the least bit disappointed that Dolly didn’t really have the hots for him,” Mansfield wrote.

Although Dolly had met her second Beatle that evening, she managed to make the night memorable for an entirely different reason.

My love of weird electric guitars has helped me meet many people who share my fascination for these instruments. Around the time I began contributing to Guitar Player 25 years ago, I met kindred spirit Mike Robinson, who ran the site MyRareGuitars.com. It was from there that he eventually started Eastwood Guitars, where he has been re-creating some of the vintage guitar world’s hard-to-find classic whack jobs.

The La Baye 2x4 was the first guitar off his line way back in 2014, and it is still in production. The example shown here is from the second run, in 2024, and is the second piece I’ve bought from Eastwood.

Originally made in 1967 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, by luthier Dan Helland, the La Baye 2x4 grew out of an idea Helland had developed around 1964 or ’65 while working at Henri’s Music, an area music-store chain owned by Henri Czachor.

Around the same time, Holman-Woodell Inc. of Neodesha, Kansas, had begun making guitars for Wurlitzer, the piano and organ manufacturer, but that arrangement fell apart in 1967 when the guitars’ finishes began to flake. Helland entered the picture soon after, combining his unconventional two-by-four bodies with Holman-Woodell necks in an attempt to keep the company in the guitar business.

Unfortunately, the La Baye 2x4 was an absolute flop, selling only about 45 instruments, including 12-string and bass models. But 10 years later, Devo’s Bob Mothersbaugh (a.k.a. Bob 1) used one in a couple of the group’s videos, most notably the quirky and jerky rendition of the Stones’ classic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which helped cement the guitar’s cult status.

The shape recalls Les Paul’s Log guitar, the crude two-by-four lab guitar that was the basis for his experiments with solidbody guitar design. (Helland’s son says his father wasn't aware of the Log.) But whereas Paul’s design was essentially a neck-through design, the La Baye 2x4 features a two-by-four body bolted to a neck, similar to the original design.

Due to the lack of space on the front of the guitar, the control knobs are located on the upper bout, which proves to be pretty convenient. But other than the look of this guitar, there’s nothing weird about it. This is a quality build, with modern and familiar components.

It’s not the easiest thing to play while sitting, but the La Baye 2x4 is really meant to be onstage anyway. Some players find the guitar a bit headstock-heavy and opt to move the strap pins around to compensate for this, but I find it’s quite comfortable to play while standing just as it is. The neck is fast, the medium-jumbo frets are dressed beautifully, the action is low, and the neck contour is quite reminiscent of a modern Fender, Charvel, Ibanez or Schecter with a modern C-shape.

The original La Baye 2x4 came stock with Holman-Woodell pickups, just like the ones used on the 1960s American-made Wurlitzer guitars. Eastwood fitted this baby with a pair of nicely voiced P90-style pickups, each with its own set of volume and tone controls. In the spirit of P90s, these single-coils are bright and loud, but the neck pickup offers plenty of jazz mojo with the tone dialed back a bit, so it’s a versatile-sounding guitar as well.

There’s a three-way pickup selector, Kluson-style tuners, and a Tune-o-matic intonatable bridge. As an option, I was able to order mine with a “Les Trem” vibrato that works very smoothly. The 22-fret maple neck has a rosewood fingerboard and cream binding with mother-of-pearl dot inlays.

I bought mine new, from the factory, for about $800; the tremolo was an additional cost of $200. That seems like a bargain considering that original La Bayes from the 1960s are fetching from three to six thousand online.

Obviously, it rules because of its looks, but it’s also a great-playing and great-sounding guitar. I’d be more than happy to play this for a whole set. Weighing in at around six pounds, it’s light and versatile. And man, what an attention-getter!

Thanks to Mike Robinson at Eastwood for walking me through the order process. Important to note, I didn’t identify myself as being from a guitar magazine; I wanted to be treated just as he’d treat anyone. I was not disappointed. The guitar is a great value; it shipped in a gigbag just when they said it would, and I received email updates with shipping status. Nice job, guys!

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.

Chris Adamson has spent six decades working behind the scenes with some of the biggest names in music, from Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan to the Byrds, Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden and AC/DC. He’s been a roadie, a tour-production chief and just about everything in between, building a career that has taken him from the back of a newly purchased van to the biggest stages in the world.

Adamson was just 17 when he got his first taste of life on the road, driving the members of his hometown band, the Rats, around Hull, England. One of those members was a young guitarist named Mick Ronson. From there, Adamson’s career grew alongside rock history, putting him in the orbit of artists including Peter Green, Roger McGuinn and Frank Sinatra.

He has been at the forefront of the touring world ever since, and his passion for the work remains as strong as it was when he started. In fact, at an age when many people would be thinking about retirement, Adamson is busier than ever.

“I’ve just finished some dates with Guns & Roses and currently doing a week with Bruno Mars,” he tells Guitar Player during a break in his hectic schedule. “And then at the start of September, I’ve got Iron Maiden for couple of shows, and after that I’m doing AC/DC.”

Guitar Player asked Adamson to take us behind the stage door and share with us stories of a few artists he’s worked for.

Mick Ronson

“He was the first person I ever worked with when I was 17. We had a band called the Rats in my hometown of Hull in England, and Mick was a guitarist in the band. It was a four-piece: drums, bass, guitar and a singer. And back then, it was all fun and weekend entertainment, and we used to just play pubs and small things, but nobody in the band had a van. So I bought one, and I used to drive him and the band about. I was a commodity. [laughs]

“We used to play a lot of Jeff Beck stuff, like ‘Beck’s Bolero.’ Mick was so into Jeff Beck, big time. He was an exceptional guitarist and used to only play Fender Stratocasters. He had two of them. He didn’t have a Les Paul when we were playing together in the Rats.

“Years later, after I’d left them, I came back to Hull to see my mom and went round to see John Cambridge, the Rats’ drummer. Mick was there, as well as this couple who were on the settee working out if they had enough money just to buy a packet of cigarettes. And it was David and Angie Bowie!

“Mick was a guy who died way before his time. Unfortunately, the majority of the band all died through cancer, due to smoking as they all smoked like chimneys. And Mick was the first one to go.”

Peter Green

“For me, Peter was the best guitar player ever, by far. He was magic. He could make a guitar sing. And he was just a really nice guy.

“We had been doing some shows in Munich at a place called the Circus Krone-Bau and we had a day off before going to Vienna. Peter went off to a commune, but it wasn’t the usual commune, with all hippies and all that sort of stuff. They were all businessmen, and they gave Peter a bad tab of acid. He was never the same person again. It completely destroyed his brain.

“He then came back with this tape of gibberish, and some strange woman that he’d just met. And from then on, when he’d do the shows, on some nights he’d be completely normal, while on other nights he just kept playing even though the band had finished the song. He would be miles away playing because the acid affected him badly.

“After he finally left the band, his parents had him committed because he was giving away all the money from his royalties. He was really messed up. He grew his fingernails really long, and ended up being a gravedigger for a while, digging graves somewhere around Wimbledon.”

Roger McGuinn

“Roger was brilliant, and a really nice, lovely guy. I worked for him for a couple of years when he was with the Byrds. We had a 12-foot truck that we used to carry the equipment in, and that was it. It was all very low-key. He hadn’t reached the level of stadiums and arenas and all that yet.

“He would play with just a little combo set-up. He would use a 12-string Rickenbacker played straight into a Fender Twin and a compressor as there weren’t many pedals and things like that around at the time. It was very straightforward. He didn’t do a great deal; he just played the guitar bits. Back in those days, you didn’t have racks of guitars like they do now where they play 20 electric guitars with the guitar tech tuning every one. All he had was a couple of guitars and that was it.

“Clarence White, the other guitarist in the band, used to have a premonition about alcohol killing him. And then one day, he got killed by a drunk. He was putting his guitars in the trunk of his car, and a drunk driver came and hit him while he was doing it.”

Frank Sinatra

“Frank was planning to retire in the 1990s and so they wanted somebody to handle the production as he was coming over to England for some shows. He did four shows at the Royal Albert Hall and four shows at the Festival Hall.

“It was fantastic. One of his management people gave me Frank’s two gold SM-58 microphones that had his name engraved in them to look after. And I can honestly say that I slept with these things under my pillow because I was that fucking paranoid of somebody stealing them or losing them! So they never left my side.

“I did get a rollicking one night from one of his people, as his mic cable was dirty. He had gotten a bit of dust on his hands because I hadn’t washed it enough. And there were certain things we had to put in his dressing room to make sure the room was how he wanted it.

“Later, my uncle’s health was deteriorating fast, and he was a huge Frank Sinatra fan. I wanted to take him to the Breeders’ Cup horse racing in Chicago. Prior to going there, I went to visit my assistant, who had gotten married, and her dad was there along with Frank. I got to chatting to Frank and mentioned that I was going to be in Chicago. And he said, ‘I’m going to be there, too.’

“About five days later, I called him and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got an hour. Come over to the hotel.’ So I told my uncle that we were going to this particular hotel because it had a great breakfast. And when we got there, I had to say who he was actually seeing. And so, he met him and Frank sat down and talked to us for way over two hours.

“And that’s when you found out who the real Frank Sinatra was: not all the shit you always hear about the gangster things. Frank was a very caring person.”

There are so many legendary Peter Hook bass lines spanning Joy Division, New Order and Monaco. His bass playing almost stands alone on those songs as the driving melody.

When Guitar Player catches up with Hooky, as he’s better known, he and his fellow bass-wielding son Jack Bates are preparing for their North American tour with Peter Hook & the Light. Following his 2007 split from New Order, Hooky formed the group in 2010 with the sole purpose of performing Joy Division and New Order songs live.

While the chasm between Hooky and his old New Order bandmates seems as wide and deep as ever, he has found great reflection, solace and pride playing bass alongside Jack, who is himself a touring member of the Smashing Pumpkins.

“I remember when you took us to get my first bass and the guy in the shop said he would give us a discount if you played some Joy Division on it,” Jack says, laughing. It was a green Yamaha RBX. Jack still has it.

Understanding his father’s bass philosophy requires understanding his relationship with instruments themselves. Hooky started with what he calls “the 30-quid one” in 1976 — an Echo copy of a Gibson SG, wrapped in bin bags by the music shop owner in Manchester. The seller wanted five more pounds for a hard case. Hooky passed. He needed it for bus fare home.

The Hondo that followed was worse — a Rickenbacker copy that literally fell apart mid-performance. During the opening song of a gig, Hooky struck an open E and the string jumped right off the neck.

“It was such a shit guitar,” he remembers. His stepfather fabricated a holder to keep the strings in the nut.

But it was that Hondo that became legendary in Hooky’s telling, used in his early Joy Division performances with singer Ian Curtis, guitarist Bernard “Barney” Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris. The group grew out of their previous outfit, Warsaw.

“I had the Hondo with a little curl on the top,” he explains. “Whenever these kids ran forward to spit at Ian, I would bang the curl in their ear. I got seven in one night! Unfortunately, it used to knock the guitar out of tune, which used to make Barney frown like fuck. So it was the price I paid for protecting Ian.”

Everything changed when he discovered the Yamaha BB1200S. He’s owned 10 of them. He still has four. It’s become his instrument of choice — the one that allowed him to play the likes of “Blue Monday,” “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “True Faith” and countless other iconic New Order tracks and finally achieve the tonal clarity he’d been chasing through years of inferior equipment.

“The first Yamaha I got, which was the 600, was stolen in America,” Hooky says with a smirk. It was 1980 and New Order were on their first U.S. tour. “Everything was stolen. They just broke into the van and drove it all off. I went to Manny’s on 48th Street, which was a very, very famous music store. It’s gone now. I bought a [Yamaha] 800. [Producer] Martin Hannett was the guy who told me to get an Alembic preamp, which was a stereo preamp, but I was never actually happy with the sound of the 800. Then when I saw the 1200S, I thought, ‘Jesus, this is the one!’”

Jack, meanwhile, started on one of Hooky’s instruments before getting his own. His father mentions buying him a Flea bass many years ago — “and that was a shit guitar,” Hooky says. “I thought, If I ever see that Flea, I’m going to give him a right mouth.” It’s delivered with such genuine Manchester frustration and black humor that only Hooky could pull off.

Here’s something that might shock guitar players: Peter Hook cannot tune by ear. Cannot play by ear. His mother used to say, “you couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket — and she wasn’t wrong,” he says with a laugh.

“Barney would come over and go, ‘Your bass is out of tune.’ And I’d have to turn it around so that he could tune it.”

When electronic tuners arrived, Hooky bought two immediately.

“I was free,” he says, and you can hear the genuine relief in those three words. Hooky has gone on to create some of the most distinctive bass lines in rock history.

Jack has no such problems. Hooky looks at this ability with something between envy and wonder.

“He’s got a gift that I don’t have,” he acknowledges. “He can pick up a riff by ear, where I can’t. So when I was fifth in line for the Rolling Stones [in the early 1990s], if Mick Jagger had come to me and put a gun to my head and said, ‘Play “Satisfaction,”’ I would just have said, ‘Pull the trigger, Mick.’”

When Jack was 18, he played his first gig with his father in Hooky’s band Monaco. He’s since been the touring bassist for the Smashing Pumpkins for more than a decade now. That the Pumpkins are considerably larger than anything his father is currently doing both amuses and impresses Hooky.

“The band he’s in now is much bigger than we are and he takes it all in his stride and then comes back to us,” he says. “The only problem we get is that I’ll play a riff and he’ll go, ‘You’re playing that wrong.’ And I’ll go, ‘I’m not — I fucking wrote it!’ But usually he is right.”

It was the Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan who made this happen. Hooky met Corgan when the Pumpkins leader was 14 — a shy kid who didn’t eat or speak — at a dinner Hooky hosted in Chicago. Years later, Corgan’s band was selling out arenas.

When Hooky was playing in Chicago with the Light, Jack suggested asking Corgan to sing “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Hooky dismissed the idea — until Jack got in touch with Corgan on social media himself. Corgan said yes.

“Billy Corgan came down, sang ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ with us, and then fucking stole my son. Cheeky bastard,” Hooky jabs, but there’s unmistakable warmth underneath the complaint. “Billy’s done a great job of turning Jack into a great man. I can’t thank him enough for that. They look after him like royalty.”

To return the favor — at a massive Pumpkins stadium show in Mexico with more than 50,000 people — Corgan invited Hooky to play “No Love Lost,” one of the oldest Joy Division songs, as the final track of their set. Hooky didn’t even know they’d come offstage to go back for an encore.

“So we had quite a few puzzled Mexicans,” he laughs.

What separates Hooky’s playing from nearly every other bassist is something most musicians don’t understand until they try to replicate it: his right hand. Jack explains.

“The more traditional bass players are used to just being the rhythm with the drums,” he says. “Then you try to play like him, which is the complete opposite of that. You sort of have to forget everything.”

This is why experienced American session bassists often can’t nail Hooky’s songs. They get the notes right, but the rhythm of the right hand — the propulsive, almost percussive quality that makes a Hooky bass line dance — eludes them.

“When they try and learn the songs, their left hand is always playing the right frets. So they’ve got the notes, but it’s the rhythm of the right hand that freaks people out,” Hooky notes. “They can’t get it right.”

Jack, having grown up hearing these lines, having absorbed them through his genetic material and countless hours of exposure, can replicate his father’s playing with uncanny precision. “You can’t tell that there’s two people playing it. Yeah. Rhythm and everything is exactly the same,” Hooky says with genuine pride.

When asked about his favorite Joy Division or New Order bass lines, Hooky becomes philosophical and hugely self-effacing.

“I’ve been insanely lucky to not get overdrawn at the riff bank yet. Sometimes I listen to the likes of ‘24 Hours,’ ‘She’s Lost Control’ or ‘Disorder’ and think, Okay now, how did I manage that? Or if you go on the internet, there’s always somebody playing ‘Ceremony’ or ‘Blue Monday’ or something. I’m like, ‘Wow, this is incredible stuff,’ and I had no idea how I did it.”

Hooky says his bass line for New Order’s “Age of Consent” is a particular favorite of his. He wonders aloud why Jack doesn’t write his own material, why he doesn’t have his own band.

“He doesn’t have to be in my shadow, because he’s such a great bass player,” Hooky says, genuine conviction in his voice. “He can play any style I can’t.”

But Jack is where he wants to be — playing with his father, carrying the legacy forward. He quickly brushes off the pressure you would expect with such musical heritage.

“You know what? It’s just fun. If I can help the people who want to listen to his music — if I can help that happen — then that’s great. That’s the way I see it. I want to go everywhere because there’s people that want to hear him play, and I want to help that. So I don’t see it as a job, really.”

Jack and Peter kick off their North American tour this weekend with Peter Hook and the Light. They will be playing the full New Order Get Ready album as part of the Joy Division/New Order series they have now been touring for years. This particular album was made during a rare moment of harmony with frontman Bernard Sumner in the latter years of Hook’s time in New Order.

“On Get Ready, both Bernard and I rediscovered our friendship and it made the actual making of the LP very enjoyable for that,” Hooky says. “It was the same friendship we had when we started the band Warsaw in 1976. We worked together so well with [producer] Steve Osborne, and me and Barney never fell out because he took it all out on Steve.

“So, you know, it did actually work in that respect. When we finished the record, we were very, very together. The record — I don’t know why — it’s the most enjoyable to play out of all of the ones we’ve done.”

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction looms this November, but the other members of Joy Division/New Order aren’t planning to attend. Hooky will accept on behalf of the fans. There’s bitterness there — “I would rather die than be anywhere near them bastards,” he offers — but also an almost defiant pride in continuing alone.

One has to ask what Ian Curtis might make of the occasion.

“Ian was always Joy Division’s biggest fan, and it was always him that would look to drive the rest of us on and pick us up whenever we were down. He used to always say to me, ‘We’re going to be big in Brazil. We’re going to be big in Mexico. We’re going to be big in Portugal.’

“Nobody believed in Joy Division more than him, and so to receive that recognition and to be inducted alongside loads of other bands that we admired so much — he would have absolutely bloody loved that.”

What emerges from an hour of conversation between Hooky and Jack is something rarely seen in rock music: a genuine, uncomplicated love between a father and son who also happen to be musical partners.

“We have a typical family love-hate relationship. We fall out and make up,” Hooky says. “I love him to death and I always will. So it’s just as easy as that. As a father, I’m immensely proud of all of them. It’s wonderful. To be honest with you, it’s very special.”

Jack’s commitment is equally clear. “No matter where I am, I will always break my neck to get back from a Pumpkins show to make one of his gigs,” he says, “because there’s nothing better than doing that.”

Peter Hook & the Light launch their North American tour on August 22 in Cincinnati. Visit PeterHookandTheLight.live for complete tour information.

Jan Hammer is nothing but appreciative when it comes to considering the roster of guitar players he’s recorded and toured with since joining the original Mahavishnu Orchestra back in 1971.

“I must have done something right to get them all interested,” the Czechoslovakian-born, Grammy Award–winning keyboardist tells us via phone from the New York suburb where he resides. “I listened to guitar players, and obviously I was influenced as far as playing on the synthesizer by the approach to melodic improvisation and the tone. It just brought me into the whole big family of guitarists, and I have always been amazed that if I was playing somewhere, how many guitar players would come and see me play.”

Hammer was born in Prague. His father was a doctor who played music to help him pay for medical school, while his mother was the well-known jazz vocalist Vlasta Pruchova. Hammer started playing piano when he was four and began touring and recording professionally as a teenager.

His time at the Prague Academy of Musical Arts was cut short by the Warsaw Pact’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; he finished his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, after which he became part of jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan’s band and moved to New York City. (He became a U.S. citizen during 1978.)

Hammer says the allure of guitar players — including Mahavishnu’s John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck (with whom he recorded six studio albums), Al Di Meola (four), Journey’s Neal Schon (two) and others — was their ability to do something he could not.

“There’s a certain flow I couldn’t achieve on a keyboard, meaning a piano, even electric,” he explains. “It’s something to do with vibrato and bending and slides and these things I kept hearing in my head but couldn’t translate until I got deeper into electronic stuff and using some pitch-shifting gizmos on my electric piano.

“But it wasn’t until I got my hands on a Mini Moog [synthesizer] where I said, ‘Okay, this is it’ and found my recognizable voice. Then I could start improvising and trading solos in a way that wouldn’t be possible on a piano. It really allowed me to play with these guitarists in a different way.”

Beyond those collaborations, Hammer has released nearly three dozen albums of his own and won Grammy and Emmy Awards for his work on TV’s Miami Vice. These days, the 78-year-old considers himself “pretty much retired,” but he’s certainly satisfied by his legacy and is happy to share stories about some of the artists he spent time with during his career.

Miles Davis

“I had just moved to New York City to go on the road with Sarah Vaughan, and I’m at home and get a call: ‘Come over tomorrow morning. Miles’ house.’ I said, ‘Okay.’

“I’d never met him before, but coming from eastern Europe, for me Miles was basically God. I knew every single record, every note he ever played. He was probably the strongest influence on my approach to improvisation.

“So I went over to his house and John [McLaughlin] was there, Steve Grossman, and it was very smooth, just workshopping something. It was exciting. He gave these cryptic directions — like, for instance, he was really into the rhythm section of Crosby, Stills & Nash. He said, ‘Make it feel like that groove,’ and I said, ‘Wow, great. That’s totally up my alley,’ because, among many other rock bands, I loved Crosby, Stills & Nash. I don’t know if people realized how much that groove had to do with their appeal, so it was really a very positive sign from Miles.

“There was all kinds of recording going on, but Keith Jarrett was the first call [for Davis], so I tried not to get my hopes up. But after I spent a year on the road with Sarah Vaughan, we ended up putting together Mahavishnu, and that made up for not being able to play in Miles’ band. He would come to see us, and I remember hanging out in the dressing room, talking about stuff, which was cool.”

John McLaughlin

“I didn’t know about him until I saw him with Tony Williams in Boston when I first came over, and he totally blew my mind. And then later, in New York City, we would meet; there was the loft scene, which was sort of like jam sessions where people would come over, and we had a nice place with a drum kit, electric piano and everything.

“One time we invited John and Billy Cobham, and it went really well, and eventually I was asked to join the band that was being formed, Mahavishnu Orchestra.

“Once we started going we knew exactly what was happening and what we were doing. The impact was immediate. It’s hard to predict, but you feel things, profound things changing around in the music. Some musicians, jazz musicians, were looking down on it, like, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to be rock stars,’ or whatever.

“But it was all music, and the type of improvisations were doing and the fresh influences we included made it a big revolution.

“Playing with [McLaughlin] was, again, totally smooth. I knew what he wanted and he knew what I wanted, and the five of us were really clicking so well. It was an amazing combination of people. John was super dedicated, like obsessively so, and it shows up in his incredible virtuosity and technique.

“You cannot do anything else but just follow him — I don’t mean in a religious sense, but to put up on what he was doing, musically. You have to be on top of everything, so I tried to do that, and I discovered something in my musical history that was very valuable to the whole enterprise of the band that I didn’t know I had. I had these trains of musical history that I learned about, and it was very valuable.”

Jeff Beck

“Jeff and I were inspiring each other for many years. We met in Switzerland. I was there with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff was there with Beck, Bogert & Appice, and it happened to also be Jeff’s birthday. We ended up staying at the same hotel and at his birthday party, and Jeff and I started talking about different things we have in common, what kind of music we liked.

“And it was really interesting that we had so much in common; people think I was much more of a jazz player, but I liked rock and rhythm and blues, and Jeff was really intrigued and we talked about possibilities of working together on something.

“It wasn’t until a year or more later that we ended up recording on Wired. There was no need to develop anything; it was all organic, and we just clicked right away. He came over and I had picked up his instruments at the airport, and when he opened the guitar case, it was empty. His guitar got stolen. In my studio we had a nice little Strat, probably early ’70s, blond wood, for anybody to use, so Jeff picked it up and played it on ‘Blue Wind’ — it wasn’t even his guitar.

“That was the first thing we did together, and the first take, the first layer was just me playing drums and Jeff playing the rhythm, and the lick. We played the whole thing through, just me and him, and we overdubbed whatever else was needed. He did the solo. I did the bass on a Moog. It was just an amazing experience.

“When we worked together was usually up to him, because he had periods where he wouldn’t be interested in doing anything, and then all of a sudden he would call up and we’d go out on tour. In ’76 we did a big tour, did a live record and everything, and in ’77 we went to Australia.

“And then a couple of months later we were supposed to be going to Japan and God knows where else, and he just pulled the plug, totally unexpected. Me and my group were left hanging. That was kind of a drag, but I was ready to do it, any time he wanted, because he was just a fantastically gifted person — but mercurial.”

Al Di Meola

“We had these parallel groups, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, so we were aware of each other. Then Al invited me to play on [1977’s] Elegant Gypsy, and everything grew out of there. He kept asking me to play on following things. Again, I don’t know how to describe it, but Al is an incredibly gifted guitarist, and we worked together really well.

“Al always had this Spanish undertone to what he did; he worked in the Phrygian mode, which is the basis of a lot of his approach to music with the Spanish guitar that’s electric. One time we were rehearsing and one of the guys said, ‘I think I’ve got Phrygian poisoning,’ which was very funny.

“The most interesting thing we worked on was Electric Rendezvous [1982], with just the two of us with electronics and synthesizers. Phil Collins played drums on one tune and Bill Bruford played on one tune. That was really interesting, and then also playing live on tour with Steve Gadd, which was just an amazing treat.”

Tommy Bolin

“He was a revelation. He was one of the people who can actually play amazingly, without any effort. He was really not working at it, and it just came out totally naturally.

“I met him through Jeremy Steig, the flute player. We went to the studio once with Tommy and Billy Cobham, and then I ended up playing on his album [1975’s Teaser]. It was funny: we were supposed to start and the studio was all set up, and Narada Michael Walden was late because he was stuck in traffic. The drums were all miked up, so I said, ‘All right, let me have a go,’ and I ended up playing drums on the album as well, which was great fun.

“Bolin was just an amazing creature, and I cannot get over how terrible it was that he went away so soon.”

Neal Schon

“Neal is a complete beast, a natural source of incredible music. It just bursts out of him; he cannot help it. He cannot stop.

“We met when I was touring with Jeff, and Journey was the opening act. We’d go to sound checks in the afternoon, and after we finished they were setting up for Neal, so I just got on Billy Cobham’s kit and we started jamming, me on drums and him playing all these incredible rhythm riffs. I don’t know if people realize that, as great a lead player he is, he’s also an amazing rhythm player. I guess you have to be to write all the Journey hits.

“After we did it a couple of times, that’s how the idea of Neal and I making a couple of albums together came about [1981’s Untold Passion and 1982’s Here to Stay]. We were unfortunately... I don’t want to say pulled back, but there was competition. Journey’s big album [Escape, featuring “Don't Stop Believin’”] was coming up at the same time, so the label didn’t put their best effort on our behalf. I was really disappointed. Over the years I played on a couple of things with him, together, but over long distance. I did the same with Beck, too.”

Eddie Van Halen

“We did a one-off [the Les Paul & Friends concert August 18, 1988 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music] that was just fantastic. I got involved, again, because it was all about guitars and I loved it, even though I was not playing guitar. With Eddie, it was breathtaking; the energy coming out of him. He can walk into the room and he’s already going. I was really impressed.

“He was telling me he knew my records and he was talking about how much he liked this and that. He kept going on about the tune called ‘Jetstream,’ which was the Black Sheep album [1978]. He was going on and on about the solo I played on that, and I was just thinking, Wow, you really do know my records. I did not expect that.”

Randy Bachman’s relationship with Bob Seger goes back to the early days of both men’s careers, thanks to the latter’s Detroit becoming a hotbed for the former’s Guess Who via CKLW-AM radio just across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

And during the mid ’70s, the friendship nearly became a studio relationship.

According to Bachman, in 1975 Seger approached him about producing his next album, which would be the breakthrough Night Moves the following year. Bachman says Seger and his Silver Bullet Band “opened about 250 dates” for Bachman-Turner Overdrive at its commercial peak, with the Canadian quartet’s Not Fragile album at number one on both sides of the border and riding a batch of hits that included “Takin’ Care of Business,” “Let It Ride,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Roll on Down the Highway.”

“When we hit number one, my manager, Bruce Allen, said to me, ‘Who do you want to open for you? You can pick anybody you want’,” Bachman recalls. “I said, ‘Bob Seger’ and he said, ‘Who?’

“I said, ‘He’s got these great songs: ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man’ and ‘2 + 2 = ?,’ and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll try to find him’ and I said, ‘He’s somewhere in Michigan.’

“So [Allen] called around and finally found him and got him to be our opening act. We’d go on the road together and we were kind of good buddies.”

At the time, Seger had recently returned to his original label, Capitol Records, after a three-album stint on Reprise. His 1975 set Beautiful Loser was his most successful to date, and he’d record the landmark Live Bullet concert set in its wake. Well aware of BTO’s success, Seger approached Bachman about being part of his next move.

“He said, ‘Would you help me write and produce me new album. I’m not sure what to do’,” Bachman tells us. “His record company was like, ‘Will you do a new album? We really like what you’re doing’ and blah, blah, blah. I think he felt like a lot was riding on whatever he’d do next.”

Bachman was tempted but unavailable. “I said, ‘I’d love to, but I’m still producing BTO. I’ve got five kids at home who don’t know who I am and I’m producing a Canadian band called Trooper, for fun.

“I don’t have time to do another band’,” Bachman remembers, “But I said, ‘I’ll give you my old producer, Jack Richardson, who produced the Guess Who.’

“So I connected Jack Richardson with Bob Seger, and — click, click — he has a big hit and makes a fortune.”

Richardson produced only one song, but it was the right one — the title track for Night Moves, which came out the following year. The nostalgic ode — about Seger’s fling with a woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while her boyfriend was in military service — was recorded at the producer’s Nimbus Nine studio in Toronto. It was one of several the two worked on together, including a pair of other Seger originals and a cover of the Supremes’ Motown hit “My World Is Empty Without You.”

It was the last of the four they recorded, and only two members of Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, bass guitarist Chris Campbell and drummer Charlie Allen Martin, were still in the studio. Richardson brought in local musicians Joe Miquelon on electric guitar and Doug Riley on organ, along with four female backup singers. Poco’s Paul Cotton later overdubbed a guitar solo that was subsequently left off the track.

Seger’s manager, Ed “Punch” Andrews, did not like “Night Moves” and did not submit it to the label. Richardson did, however, and Capitol executives insisted it not only be included but also be the title track and first single. Good move, that: “Night Moves” made its way to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 — Seger’s first Top 10 single — and was certified double Platinum, opening the door to another 18 Top 20 singles. The Night Moves album, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October, hit number eight on the Billboard 200 and has been certified six-times Platinum.

Seger, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012, has been out of sight since ending his Roll Me Away: The Final Tour on November 1, 2019, in Philadelphia. While no 50th anniversary plans have been revealed for Night Moves yet, he recently announced a 20th anniversary reissue of his Face the Promise album, featuring four bonus tracks, three of which are previously unheard.

David Bowie had a thing for unlikely collaborations. Over the years, he shared vocals with artists ranging from John Lennon and Tina Turner to Mick Jagger and even the big-band-era crooner Bing Crosby.

But none of those encounters delivered the creative firepower of “Under Pressure,” the 1981 hit that brought Bowie together with Freddie Mercury and Queen. The song not only paired up two of the rock world’s most talented vocalists — it also delivered one of rock’s most recognizable bass lines.

Bowie and Mercury weren’t exactly strangers. Their paths had crossed years before either man became a star. They first met in 1969, when Bowie played a lunchtime show at Ealing Art College, where Mercury was studying. Mercury, still going by his birth name, Freddie Bulsara, helped Bowie arrange tables into a makeshift stage for his performance. Two years later, around the time Bowie was making Hunky Dory, they met again at London’s Kensington Market. Mercury, working a clothing stall, reportedly tried to sell the future glam star a pair of platform boots.

By 1981, though, neither man needed an introduction. Bowie was riding the success of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), his first number-one U.K. album since Diamond Dogs, which featured the chart-topping single “Ashes to Ashes.” Queen, meanwhile, had just enjoyed one of the biggest American hits of their career with “Another One Bites the Dust,” a number-one in the U.S.

Their meeting point was Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. Queen were working on what would become Hot Space, while Bowie was in the area working on “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” for the erotic horror movie Cat People. Bowie, possibly curious to see what his competition was up to, stopped by for a visit and stayed to add backing vocals to Queen’s “Cool Cat” (though he later decided he didn’t want them used).

“Bowie kept popping into the studio,” Mercury recalled in 1985. “And we were jamming to some of his songs and some of ours. We had a few bottles of wine and things.”

The “things” included copious amounts of cocaine, according to coproducer Reinhold Mack. “There was so much blow, but I needed a clear mind,” he told Mojo. As for songs, Queen and Bowie jammed on Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way From Memphis” and “All the Young Dudes,” the latter written by Bowie, along with Cream’s “I Feel Free” and “N.S.U.”

Eventually, Bowie suggested that instead of playing other people’s songs, they should make one of their own. Queen had an unfinished song titled “Feel Like,” which became the basis for “Under Pressure.” Bowie quickly took control of the session, no mean feat considering that he was dealing with Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon — four musicians who were hardly lacking in opinions.

“Freddie and David locked horns, without a doubt,” May told Mojo in 2017, “but that’s when the sparks fly, and that’s why it turned out great.”

“We were all very pig-headed,” Taylor said, “but Bowie was probably as pig-headed as the four of us put together.”

Deacon had a considerably harsher take on Bowie’s behavior.

“He was quite a little Hitler in a way when he got going,” he said. “He was pushing us and being dominant, you know. I didn't mind, but Brian took offense to it because he didn’t like being told what to do.”

May had originally played much more guitar on the track, giving it a much more rock ’n’ roll vibe.

“It sounded like the Who,” the guitarist recalled. “It sounded massively chord-driven.

“I remember saying to David, ‘Oh, it sounds like the Who, doesn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, well it’s not going to sound like the Who by the time I’ve finished with it!’”

May reportedly got fed up with the whole thing and left early, with the result that no one was there to look after his contributions. In the end, much of his heavy electric guitar was edited out of the final mix. Even the main riff he had played on electric guitar was replaced by acoustic guitar parts that had originally been recorded as a demo.

While some present at the session say the song was recorded in its entirety that night, others recall a vocal session between Mercury and Bowie recorded one or two weeks later, in New York City at the Power Station. They include Jon Bon Jovi, who was an assistant at the studio, owned by his second cousin Tony Bongiovi.

“It was literally the biggest recording studio in the world at the time,” he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2024. “One day, I looked through the control room door, and I watched David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sing ‘Under Pressure.’ I saw them sing that vocal.”

His account is backed up by Peter Freestone, Mercury’s personal assistant, in his 2001 book, An Intimate Memoir.

“The first of the two sessions for Under Pressure was twenty-four hours and the second, a couple of weeks later and 4,000 miles away in New York when Freddie and Bowie finished off the track at the Power Station, was a session which lasted another 18 hours.”

Despite the time spent on the track, May says no one was sure what to do with the song.

“There were continual disagreements about how ‘Under Pressure’ should be put out or if it should even be put out at all,” the guitarist said.

Ultimately, Queen and Bowie agreed to release “Under Pressure” as a single in October 1981. The result was Queen’s first U.K. chart-topper since “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Bowie’s first since “Ashes to Ashes.” In the U.S., the song reached a respectable number 29 and has remained a radio staple there ever since.

With Bowie’s death in 2016 — 25 years after Mercury’s — “Under Pressure” became a memorial to a now-bygone era of rock royalty. The song gained a new life in the weeks after, reappearing on charts around the world and reaching number five on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.

Even Brian May’s feelings about “Under Pressure” have softened. What once carried the tension of its difficult creation has come to represent something else: the unlikely chemistry between Queen and Bowie, captured in a recording that outlived all of them.

“Looking back now, I think it’s a very special, significant song for us,” he says. “But I would love to sit down quietly on my own and remix it.”

Ritchie Blackmore, Cozy Powell and Ronnie James Dio were sitting around a fireplace at a French château, drinking and trying to write songs for Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll. The problem was, they weren’t getting anywhere.

So Powell decided it was time to confess something.

“We were all very bored,” Blackmore recalled in a 2024 Instagram Q&A. “And we were getting a little bit kind of irritated because we were not coming up with any ideas.

“And Cozy said, ‘Okay, I have to own up.’ And we looked at him, because we'd been drinking, as usual, and we said, ‘You have to own up about what?’ He said, ‘Are you ready?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I like ABBA.’”

Blackmore didn’t waste a moment replying.

“To which I went, ‘Oh my God. I love ABBA.’ And then Ronnie goes, ‘Yes. So do I.’”

And just like that, three of hard rock’s biggest names discovered they were all secretly fans of Sweden’s biggest pop group.

“And with that, Cozy runs off to get all the ABBA songs and to play them,” Blackmore continued. “And we played, for hours, all the ABBA songs, around the fireside in this chateau. We should have been writing our own songs, but it was much better to listen to ABBA.”

The truth is, Blackmore has never been shy about his love of ABBA. He confessed it in December 1979, during an interview with U.K. weekly music magazine Sounds while promoting Rainbow’s album Down to Earth. The interviewer had asked about his taste in music.

“I like popular music and I like ABBA very much,” he replied. “Enjoy them. But there’s so much stigma involved with it — like, ‘You can’t do this because you’re a heavy band’ — and I think that’s rubbish. You should do what you want.”

More than four decades later, he was still saying essentially the same thing.

“I think ABBA was the best band,” Blackmore said in the 2024 Q&A. “I always listened to ABBA when I was a kid. It was so melodic, and it just worked. It was fantastic. And they are probably my favorite band of all time. And I know it’s uncool to say that in certain areas. But they were wonderful.”

But Blackmore’s appreciation for ABBA eventually went beyond listening to their records. In 1980, he had the chance to meet Agnetha Fältskog, one of the group’s two singers. The meeting reportedly led to talk of a possible collaboration.

On January 18 that year, Rainbow were playing at Stockholm’s Johanneshovs Isstadion on their Down to Earth world tour when Fältskog showed up. In his 2006 book Black Knight: Ritchie Blackmore, author Jerry Bloom recalled Rainbow keyboardist Don Airey’s account of what happened next.

“[Agnetha] came down to a soundcheck in Stockholm. Cozy and me were playing something and she walked in and there was consternation — she was so beautiful. I think they had a meeting the next day; it was going to be Rainbow with Agnetha, we were going to do an album with her.

“I remember it well because there was a Russian ice-skating troupe and it was their day off so we took over the ice rink but all the Russians came down to watch and they were standing around with Russian hats on so we started playing ‘Kalinka’ and they all started dancing and that’s when Agnetha Fältskog walked in and everything stopped.”

Blackmore later confirmed that he had met Fältskog and that their respective management teams had discussed the possibility of working together. Nothing came of it. Fältskog eventually embarked on her solo career, releasing her first English-language solo album, Wrap Your Arms Around Me, in 1983.

Which brings us to the album track “Once Burned, Twice Shy.” There’s an electric guitar part on the song that sounds remarkably like Blackmore.

That alone wouldn’t prove much. Plenty of guitarists can sound like Blackmore, and the guitarist officially credited on the track is Lasse Wellander, the talented Swedish session guitarist who played on numerous ABBA recordings.

Still, listen closely to the phrasing and tone — and especially the slide guitar — and it’s hard not to hear echoes of Blackmore.

Compare it with a couple of examples of Blackmore’s slide playing with Deep Purple and Rainbow:

So did Blackmore actually play on Fältskog’s recording? For now there’s no proof he did. As for Wellander, the credited guitarist on “Once Burned, Twice Shy,” he died in 2023.

But a missing credit doesn’t close the case. Uncredited appearances are hardly unheard of. In one of the most famous examples, Eric Clapton’s lead guitar work and solo on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” were left unattributed on the White Album.

So for now, the Blackmore theory remains just that: a theory. Until Blackmore or Fältskog settles the question, we can only speculate. But given Blackmore’s long-standing love of ABBA — and the fact that he and Fältskog discussed working together — it’s a pretty fascinating rock and roll “what-if.”

By the time the Beatles broke up in late 1969, they had recorded and released more than 200 songs — most of them originals — and left dozens more in the vault. While the bulk of those unissued tracks ranged from rough demos to jams, several were completed recordings that they rejected for one reason or another.

Among them was the first song written for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the tune was a heavy riff-rocker built on a modified three-chord blues progression.

From the start of the Beatles’ recording career, Starr was given a vocal spot on each of their albums (except for 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night) in order to please his fan base. Because he wasn’t a songwriter in the group’s early years, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or Lennon and McCartney cast-offs like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” from 1963’s With the Beatles.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the second category. According to Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, Lennon knew it was not his finest work.

“I wrote it. It's the funniest thing I've ever done,” Lennon told Coleman, who attended the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965, and wrote about it for the magazine's February 27 issue,. “Listen to the words,” Lennon said, laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”

Despite Lennon’s disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm guitar, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electrics, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman reported, McCartney was happy with the vibe the group was creating.

“Paul thought the sound was one of the best ever,” he wrote.

The song is notable as one of the first Beatles tracks on which McCartney played guitar, joining Harrison to perform its driving riff with his Epiphone Casino hollowbody electric. Interestingly, in the same week that it was recorded, the Beatles also cut “Ticket to Ride,” “Another Girl” and “The Night Before,” three Help! songs that were among the first to feature McCartney playing guitar solos and leads.

“Hey, listen, hear that play by Paul?” John asked Coleman at one point. “He’s been doing quite a bit of lead guitar work this week.”

McCartney’s sudden emergence as a guitarist during this week in the group’s history may help to explain Starr’s rather unusual shout out leading into the guitar solo on “If You’ve Got Trouble.” On previous recordings, he had made a habit of announcing Harrison’s solo breaks, calling out “All right, George,” on “Boys,” and “Rock on, George, one time for Ringo,” on “Honey Don’t.”

But on “If You’ve Got Trouble,” he says the rather unusual, “Oh, rock on, anybody!” Perhaps the Beatles had yet to decide whether Harrison or McCartney would play the solo; according to George Martin’s notes, Ringo’s vocals (which he double-tracked) were recorded before the solo was laid down.

That job eventually fell to Harrison, who delivered what is easily his most uninspired solo in the Beatles’ catalog. Perhaps everyone realized by the night’s end that the song was hopeless. Although the song received mono and stereo mixes on February 20 and 23, respectively, it was ultimately abandoned.

Remarkably, that February 20 mix session saw the Beatles record yet another song that wouldn’t be released for years. “That Means a Lot” was a McCartney tune played in a heavy, R&B style, with a thudding beat and a medium tempo similar to “Ticket to Ride.” It would be subjected to a remake one month later, on March 30. Dissatisfied with the results, the Beatles gave the song to American singer P.J. Proby, whose version reached number 24 on the U.K. charts that September.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” was nearly released in 1984 when former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick prepared the recording for inclusion on the group’s unreleased rarities album, Sessions. His work included cutting the first verse, thereby shortening the song by 20 seconds.

But after the surviving Beatles blocked the album, “If You’ve Got Trouble” remained unreleased until it was included in its full length on Anthology 2 in 1996. Commenting on the song, music critic Ian MacDonald called it “the only unmitigated disaster in the Lennon–McCartney catalog.”

Even George Harrison was unsparing in his criticism. “It’s the most weird song,” he commented in the Beatles’ Anthology book. “I’ve no recollection of ever recording it. It’s got stupid words and is the naffest song. No wonder it didn’t make it onto anything.”

Over a 56-year recording career, Paul Rodgers has collected guitar players like a connoisseur collecting fine wines. They’re pulled in by the soulful power of his voice, and he embraces what the combination, and combustion, of that with their playing can do to a song.

Consider the company English-born Rodgers — a solid rhythm guitarist himself, as well as a pianist — has kept, starting with the late Paul Kossoff in Free between 1969 and 1973, the band that put both men on the rock and roll map.

After that he joined forces with Mott the Hoople’s Mick Ralphs in the recently minted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group Bad Company, for six albums defined by brawny, muscular but still sophisticated hard rock that had few peers for success during the ’70s. (The new Can't Get Enough: A Tribute to Bad Company demonstrates the group's continuing influence, with Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke joining on tracks like "Shooting Star" and "Feel Like Makin' Love" with Halestorm, Blackberry Smoke and Def Leppard's Joe Elliott and Phil Collen.)

Then for his next trick? No less than Jimmy Page in the short-lived band the Firm, delivering a pair of powerhouse albums and Billboard Mainstream Rock chart toppers such as “Radioactive” and “All the King’s Horses.”

Rodgers went on to join forces with drummer Kenney Jones in the Law, then spent five years alongside Brian May in Queen + Paul Rodgers, another supergroup collaboration that brought May and drummer Roger Taylor back on the road and also yielded two live albums and 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks, the first Queen-related studio album since 1995’s Made In Heaven.

Rodgers maintained his impressive six-string relationships outside of his band affiliations, too, and through his seven solo albums — Jeff Beck, Joe Bonamassa, Steve Cropper and Slash among them.

“I don't really know the secret of how guitarists create their own unique sounds,” he tells us, “but I know a good guitar sound when I hear it.”

Here he shares some reflections about some of the best he’s worked with.

Paul Kossoff (Free)

“Koss was my friend and guitar player extraordinaire from before the formation of the band Free. We had met at a jam session. He came up onstage at a blues club in London, the Fickle Pickle, and blew me away with his powerful sound and his fluid electric guitar work. We played like we had been playing together for a long time, There was an instant rapport between us.

“His Gibson Les Paul was, as we used to say, ‘the bees’ knees.’ At the time, Eric Clapton was doing the Les Paul–Marshall stack thing and was playing at the Marquee just across town on Wardour Street in the West End.

The London music scene was referred to as experiencing a blues boom. The blues was the music we all listened to, the likes of B.B. King, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

“Paul was one of those instantly recognizable players. You could identify him from just a few notes or chords, as in the opening chords of ‘All Right Now.’ Such a full spectrum of sound — all the high tones and all the low, with just a hint of crunch. I think the uniqueness is in the fingers, but you have to have the right gear too, and Koss had one hell of a great sound, even to this day. He was my soulmate guitarist, and we were in sync musically. Sad we lost him when he was just 25. Such a tragedy.”

Mick Ralphs (Bad Company)

“We were ‘label buddies.’ Both our groups, Free and Mott the Hoople, signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records. I would see Mick in the office on Bodine St., Notting Hill Gate. Then Mott the Hoople and my next band, Peace, toured the U.K. together. I got to know Mick and liked him as a person — always friendly and so funny.

“We started writing songs together, and songs being the lifeblood of any band, the songwriting turned into a band, Bad Company. He had ‘Can’t Get Enough;’ Mott's Ian Hunter did not feel it suited the band's style, so when Mick played it for me I told Mick that the song was a hit and that I would love to sing it — and we were off to the races on our first album.

“Mick was often, described as a nuts-and-bolts guitar player, but to me he was always so much more than that. Being both a brilliant songwriter and guitarist. One of the great things about his sound was that he was multi-dimensional.

“Take ‘Rock Steady’ or ‘Burning Sky’ or ‘Silver, Blue and Gold,’ and of course the unstoppable ‘Can’t Get Enough’ or ‘Movin’ On.’ If you picture each song or track and focus on the guitar, not just the part he chose to play but the actual sound, each song is a a one-off — never been done before or since. Although there have been lots of copycat attempts — which is the highest praise, I’m told.

“In each song his sound perfectly matched and enhanced the mood and atmosphere of the lyrics — dark, moody and mysterious ‘Electricland’ or the blatantly rock and roll ‘Preacher.’ To me he was, and will forever and always be extremely inspirational. I believe that Mick made Bad Company what it is with his unique and varied guitar sounds.

“I can’t say how he got the variety of sounds he did. They broke the mold when they made him. I’m so happy we learned about our Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction while he was still alive. He was very happy when he heard the news.”

Jimmy Page (The Firm)

“We kind of fell together after I had built a studio in my London home, with the help of a designer, Steve Hoyland, and made a solo album Cut Loose — coincidently the same name as the smash hit American movie at that time.

“But Jimmy and I got together in that studio and began to create music. It was a very mind-expanding, creative and exhilarating time for me. Jimmy would bring along music for me to write lyrics to; the first serious song was ‘Midnight Moonlight Lady,’ and his guitar layering on that is superb — a beautiful, introspective sensitive and deeply personal piece of music.

“I would bring songs along that I had written, like ‘Radioactive’ and ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed,’ and it was pure magic watching him add his signature touches. We weren’t together long — as agreed, two years — but we left our mark on the tapestry of the story that is rock and roll.”

Brian May (Queen)

“I always admired Queen from afar. They had such a good sound. Every word from Freddie and every note from the band was crystal clear.

“When I heard ‘I Want to Break Free,’ the guitar solo was mouth-watering — so good. When we played that song together live, I would always turn around from the end of our 30-foot thrust in the center of huge arenas and watch and listen. Every time it just blew me away.

“‘The Show Must Go On’ is another great song. The passion and commitment is breathtaking, and Brian’s guitar totally matched the incredible moments in that song. His sound burns and pierces the very heart of things. He played ‘All Right Now’, with his massive chord sound, banks of Vox AC30s hooked up together. He uses a six-pence, which is an old silver U.K. coin, for a plectrum, which gave the strings a metallic overtone. After a show the stage was littered with them.”

Jeff Beck

“Now, Jeff Beck took no prisoners. He was outstanding amongst outstanding guitar players, in a league of his very own out in the stratosphere.

“Don't believe me? Listen to ‘Shapes of Things’ with Rod Stewart. The solo on that recording can't fail to blow your gaskets. He was a towering monster on guitar. There's also a track he did in the same time period, the B-side of ‘Tallyman.’ Just listen and you will know what I'm talking about. Actual words fail me, he was just so gut wrenchingly awesome.

“In 2002, Jeff invited me to perform a couple songs with him in London at the Royal Festival Hall. Sharing the stage with him was an exhilarating experience and one that I will never forget. I remember touring with Jeff, Ann Wilson and Deborah Bonham in 2018. Jeff and I would, flip-flop: One night he would close the show, the next night I would close with my solo band. It was so surreal on the nights when he was closing to stand at the side of the stage with my wife, Cynthia and listen to Jeff. It was absolutely breathtaking.”

Steve Cropper

“Steve Cropper was a staple in my listening and learning curve. He followed the emotion of the song and was the gold standard by which I viewed every guitar player. His playing really moved me.

“Steve was a sensitive yet powerful member of Otis Redding’s band on the Otis Blue album, the first vinyl album I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash, and my first love in terms of music. I still have that album. Steve Cropper, Duck Dunne, Al Jackson and Booker T Jones — the core band on ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ — build it incredibly to a climax that moved me to tears, the band working with Otis to tear your heart out.

“And Steve is such a big part of that emotional climb, hitting just the right notes in just the right place — sometimes chordal, sometimes playing lead. He was very, very restrained, nothing flashy or extraordinary until required, as in ‘Rock Me Baby,’ which has such an incredible groove.

“And when he lets it loose on the solo — every note counts with Steve. I was blessed to work with him a few times, most recently in 2021 on his last solo album, Fire It Up. We cowrote a song together: ‘She's So Fine.’ He’s sadly missed, but his contribution to music will always be remembered and appreciated.”

Slash

“Slash played on ‘The Hunter,’ a Steve Cropper/Albert King song on my Tribute to Muddy Waters blues album in 1993, and gave the recording his own inimitable interpretation of the blues with a fiery solo and some outstanding rhythm guitar playing. I think Slash is influenced by all the right people, old-school and blues, with his powerful Les Paul and his Marshall stack. He has great stage presence, witnessed when he joined me and performed at Woodstock in 1994. He was ripping it up in the rain and sounding good with Andy Fraser on bass and Jason Bonham on drums.

“I invited him up for a jam when Queen and I played in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005. The crowd loved it and so did I. Most recently we performed together as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington on the CMT Awards show. That same year I also sang on his latest album, Orgy of the Damned, on which Slash's guitar playing once again shines a light on the blues with his excellent sound and unique style, pure gold, raw and bluesy.”

Joe Bonamassa

“When I first met Joe, he told me that he was a huge Free fan, which impressed me, because most people in America are aware of Bad Company, not Free, other than ‘All Right Now.’ He had taken a deep dive into Free’s catalog, and the songs that he preferred weren’t the commercial songs, which intrigued me — songs like ‘Walk in my Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’

“So when he asked me to join him at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2011 to record a live DVD, I accepted. And which songs did we decide to play? ‘Walk in My Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’ Joe and his band were tight and nailed both songs. I really like his tone and sound and his phrasing is blinding liquid.

In 2024 Joe organized a tribute album to B.B. King, B.B. King's Blues Summit 100 [out February 6, 2026]. He asked me to record a track and I chose ‘The Night Life.’ I have always liked that track; the sentiment spoke to me. The next generation of guitar greats has arrived, and Joe is leading the way.”

Marty Stuart’s enviable collection of historic guitars and country-music memorabilia is rooted in the same deep love for country’s rich legacy that inspires his music. More than a collection of rare instruments, it’s a personal mission to preserve pieces of American musical history before they’re lost forever.

As a boy growing up in Mississippi, Stuart collected autographs, set lists and used guitar picks from country musicians who passed through his hometown. In 1972, at just 14 years old, he joined bluegrass legend Lester Flatt’s band, putting him in an ideal position to acquire memorabilia and forge friendships with many of the artists whose legacies he would later help preserve.

With the rise of the 1980s urban-cowboy phenomenon, Stuart watched traditional country music fall out of fashion. Vintage electric and acoustic instruments and priceless artifacts were disappearing into pawnshops, private collections and overseas buyers, convincing him that someone needed to safeguard the genre’s history.

“The old-timers were kind of disregarded and put out to pasture,” he says. “Their costumes, manuscripts, instruments, and all things pertaining to the old world of country music were being forgotten. The guitars at the time were either going to George Gruhn’s or they’d get traded in pawnshops around town. Japanese collectors would come to Nashville and buy up country culture. It seemed like the family jewels were getting away.”

That conviction only deepened after Stuart joined Johnny Cash’s band in 1980. During a U.K. tour with Cash, he visited the London Hard Rock Cafe, which had recently begun displaying celebrity guitars and music memorabilia.

“I really understood and respected what they had going on,” Stuart recalls. “All the way back home to America, I kept going, ‘I know my mission. I’m going to self-appoint myself to save as much country-music old-world culture as I can.’ I see it as American culture and a great part of our story that’s been squandered, pawned and thrown away. So I got serious.”

The instrument that perhaps best embodies that mission is the sunburst 1954 Fender Telecaster that belonged to country-rock pioneer Clarence White. More than just White’s stage guitar with the Byrds, it’s one of the most influential Telecasters ever built.

White’s ’54 Telecaster was fitted with one of the earliest Parsons/White B-Benders, a groundbreaking mechanical device developed by White and Byrds drummer Gene Parsons that allowed a guitarist to raise the pitch of the B string by a whole step, recreating the soaring, weeping sound of a pedal steel.

The idea came to Parsons during a 1967 recording session for country duo Vern and Rex Gosdin. White wanted to bend a string behind the nut while simultaneously playing harmonics higher up the neck and joked that he’d need “a third hand” to pull it off. Parsons, a former machinist as well as a drummer and multi-instrumentalist, began wondering if a mechanical third hand could do the job instead.

His first prototype used a floor pedal, but White wasn’t interested.

“If I wanted to play pedal steel,” he told Parsons, “I’d play pedal steel!”

Working together, the pair devised a system of levers, springs and fulcrums activated by the guitar’s upper-bout strap button. By pushing down on the neck and releasing it, White could smoothly bend the B string while continuing to fret and pick normally. Parsons built the original mechanism from pedal-steel parts mounted to the back of White’s Telecaster beneath a wooden frame and Masonite cover. Later versions would become far more refined, but the original remains unlike any B-Bender that followed.

That’s exactly how Stuart prefers it.

“It’s an indescribable guitar,” he says. “You could put a hundred Telecasters in a row, and when you plug this guitar in it just has a voice all its own. It is absolutely one of the most magical guitars I ever played.”

The guitar’s unique personality isn’t down to the B-Bender alone. A hot-wound Stratocaster neck pickup crafted by pedal-steel legend Red Rhodes contributes to its unmistakable tone, giving the Tele a voice Stuart considers impossible to duplicate.

Stuart’s connection to the instrument stretches back long before he owned it. Clarence’s brother, bluegrass mandolin ace Roland White, was the man who got the teenage Stuart his job with Lester Flatt. Stuart later lived in Roland’s Nashville home and became close with Clarence’s widow, Susie White.

In 1980, Stuart traveled to Susie’s home in Elkhorn City, Kentucky, intending to buy a 1954 Stratocaster she had decided to sell. Knowing how deeply Stuart admired her late husband’s playing, she also brought out Clarence’s Telecaster and invited him to spend some time with it.

“She said, ‘That’s what you really want, isn’t it?’” Stuart recalls. “I said, ‘Absolutely, I would love to have it.’ She said, ‘Let me think about it.’

“Later in the afternoon, she said, ‘I’d be happy to sell it to you.’ So she sold me the ’54 Strat, Clarence’s Tele, a couple of his Nudie suits and a lot of Byrds memorabilia for $1,450.

“I couldn’t believe it. I had basically laid my checkbook on the table and said, ‘Susie, name your price.’ She could have asked for far more and I would gladly have paid.”

The Clarence Tele has occupied a central role in Stuart’s music ever since. It can be heard on “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” from Saturday Night, and has remained his constant companion onstage for decades.

The $1,450 price tag has become one of vintage guitar’s great bargains, but Stuart has never viewed Clarence as a collector’s trophy. For him, it’s a working instrument, a singular musical voice and a tangible piece of American history — the very kind of cultural treasure he set out to preserve when he made that promise to himself on the flight home from London.

When Eric Clapton asked Phil Collins to produce Behind the Sun in 1985, he wasn’t looking for someone to reinvent him. He’d already worked with legendary producers, played with everyone from John Mayall to Derek and the Dominos, Cream and Blind Faith, and long since earned his place among rock’s greatest electric guitar players.

Behind the Sun would become an important turning point in Clapton’s career. After a period in the early 1980s when he remained highly respected but had slipped from the commercial heights he’d reached in the previous decade, the album marked the beginning of a renewed run of mainstream success. Its eventual hit single “Forever Man” helped reintroduce Clapton to a wider audience and set the stage for the resurgence that would follow later in the decade.

But Collins understood something important: his job was not to show Eric Clapton how to play guitar. It was not to impose his own identity on one of rock’s most distinctive musicians. It was to find what was missing — and help bring it back.

Looking back years later, Collins recalled listening to Clapton’s previous album, Money and Cigarettes, and feeling that something wasn’t quite connecting. The playing was unmistakably Clapton, but Collins felt the guitarist had stopped pushing himself creatively.

“Money and Cigarettes was a little lame,” Collins told Rock and Roll Garage. “I think he was on automatic pilot. I kicked him out of that and made him start writing.”

Home recording was beginning to transform the way musicians worked, and Collins was one of its biggest advocates. He encouraged Clapton to keep some basic recording equipment at home so ideas wouldn’t disappear before they became songs. Clapton never became the home-recording enthusiast Collins hoped he might, but he did start keeping a cassette recorder close by. Song ideas accumulated, melodies were captured before they were forgotten, and little by little they became the foundation of Behind the Sun.

The same instinct shaped the way he approached Clapton’s guitar playing. Many producers earn an artist’s trust by identifying what needs to change. Collins seemed to earn it through enthusiasm — but that enthusiasm was backed by a willingness to make decisions.

“It was great with Phil,” Clapton told Guitar Player in July 1985, “because he’s a real fan.”

Whenever Clapton played a solo and asked what Collins thought, the answer rarely varied. “It’s dynamite, man. Dynamite!” Collins would say. Clapton would shake his head. “No, it isn’t.”

The exchange became almost comical, but it revealed something important. “I felt like I could have played anything, and he’d love it,” Clapton admitted. “That’s great from a producer.”

Far from flattering Clapton, Collins was attempting to quiet his inner critic and help rebuild his confidence. It worked. Rather than laboring over a single “perfect” guitar solo, Clapton would attempt a handful for his producer’s consideration.

“I’d do three or four solos on a song and say, ‘You sort it out,’” he told Guitar Player.

Clapton admitted that after hearing the same solo several times, he’d become tired of it, unable to judge it objectively anymore. Collins, by contrast, delighted in the painstaking work of listening, comparing, and assembling performances from multiple takes. On “Just Like a Prisoner,” Clapton recalled, Collins edited the finished solo together from a much longer performance, choosing the moments that best served the song rather than insisting on a flawless take from beginning to end.

It’s an aspect of Collins’ production style that’s often overlooked. Known publicly as a drummer, songwriter and frontman, he approached the studio less as a taskmaster than as a curator, convinced that the best performance was usually already there if you listened carefully enough.

One of Collins’ favorite memories came after the album was supposedly finished. Clapton rang to say he’d written one more song. It was “Behind the Sun.”

Instead of returning to a commercial studio, Clapton arrived at Collins’ house carrying little more than an acoustic guitar. Collins later laughed at the irony of finding himself responsible for recording Eric Clapton’s guitar without the experienced engineers he normally leaned on. For a producer who had spent years behind the drum kit, the prospect was both exhilarating and faintly terrifying.

The song they captured that day became the album’s title track.

Perhaps the clearest indication that Collins’ approach had worked came not years later in an autobiography or retrospective interview, but while the album was still new. Asked where Collins ranked among the producers he’d worked with, Clapton first named the legendary Tom Dowd before immediately adding, “Phil is a different kettle of fish. I love him, and he’s a great musician also, so he’s got another angle.”

Then he offered a compliment few producers ever receive.

“If I could get the two of them to produce a record together,” he laughed, “that would be it for me. They’re my ideal producers.”

For a guitarist who had worked with some of the most respected producers of the previous twenty years, it was remarkable praise. It also confirmed something Collins himself understood about production: it wasn’t about imposing your personality on another artist. It was about creating an environment in which they could become more fully themselves.

The irony, of course, is that the only people who weren’t completely convinced were the executives at Warner Bros. After hearing the completed album, the label decided it needed stronger commercial singles. Clapton returned to the studio with Ted Templeman and Lenny Waronker, recording additional tracks — including “Forever Man” — before Behind the Sun was finally released.

It’s easy to view that episode as a rejection of Collins’ work. In reality, it says more about the priorities of mid-1980s record companies than it does about the album he and Clapton had made. By the label’s standards, the record needed bigger hits. By Clapton’s standards, he’d just worked with one of his ideal producers.

Nearly forty years later, that’s the story that endures. Phil Collins never taught Eric Clapton how to play guitar. He simply reminded one of the greatest guitarists in rock history that he already knew how.

Why are the blues the lingua franca of guitarists everywhere? Why is the 1959 sunburst Les Paul one of the most coveted axes in the universe?

The answer to both questions has a lot to do with guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Though he is often overshadowed by Eric Clapton, Peter Green and other electric blues guitarists who emerged in the mid-1960s, Bloomfield set the pace for the disruptive fervor of that period’s youth revolution with his deep-fried mix of Chicago blues and freak-out frenzy.

The steely urgency of his guitar solos energized the music of groundbreaking artists, including Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Janis Joplin, Al Kooper and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan himself once called Bloomfield “the best guitar player I ever heard.” Many would agree.

Indeed, nothing compares with the purity of Bloomfield’s tone and the edgy fluidity of his style. Unlike other 1960s guitar icons, he never embraced big Marshall stacks, fuzz boxes, or other effects. He was all about the truth of touch, transmitted from an electric guitar down a patch cord to a combo amp.

His fate of being born Caucasian tends to pigeonhole him alongside white bluesmen, like Clapton and Green, but it is really more accurate to think of him as a contemporary and peer of guitarists like Albert King, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush. At one point in the 1970s, when Bloomfield was thinking about quitting music, B.B. King called him up and begged him not to.

Every bit the equal of rock guitar gods like Clapton and Jimmy Page, Bloomfield is nonetheless not as widely celebrated today. This is partially because his career was tragically brief. Though he was open-hearted and absolute in his devotion to the blues, Bloomfield was intense, brilliant and troubled, affirmed by his struggles with insomnia, drugs and a deep-seated discomfort with musical success.

“Mike was irrepressible,” says blues keyboardist Mark Naftalin, Bloomfield’s Butterfield bandmate and lifelong musical collaborator. “You could hardly contain his energy. He was superabundant in every characteristic: extremely emotional, extravagantly intellectual and extraordinarily capable.”

Bloomfield was still a teenager when he started venturing into the sweatbox blues clubs of Chicago’s African-American South Side, reveling in the glory of giants like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and Magic Sam, who were dishing out dirty electric blues to boozy, boisterous crowds.

Soon the young guitar player was venturing onto the stage himself, sitting in with Muddy, Wolf and others at their invitation, hanging with them and becoming very much one of them.

“Michael came up through the real, no-bullshit blues scene,” says Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, another of Bloomfield’s friends and acolytes. “I remember going to some of those blues clubs much later, in 1965, and you needed somebody to go with, otherwise you’d get your ass whipped. Today there are blues bars and people playing the blues everywhere, but Michael was one of the guys spearheading it for us back then.”

The depth of Bloomfield’s authenticity was boundless, and his roots ran deep and in many directions. He went through a folk music phase in the early 1960s, switching to the acoustic guitar, studying assiduously at Chicago’s seminal Old Town School of Folk Music, and becoming quite an accomplished fingerpicker.

He also managed a folk coffeehouse, the Fickle Pickle, where he hosted many of the great acoustic bluesmen. He even recorded with a few of them, including Yank Rachell, Sleepy John Estes and Big Joe Williams. His published memoir of his time with Williams, Me and Big Joe, conveys a sense of Bloomfield’s incredibly hungry eyes and ears.

Bob Dylan 

The early 1960s folk scene was an enormous influence for many great guitarists, singers and songwriters of that period, including Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Jerry Garcia. A common grounding in folk was one source of the incredible musical bond that Bloomfield shared with Bob Dylan.

That connection, in turn, led to the guitarist playing on Dylan’s groundbreaking 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, the performance that really put Bloomfield on the map. The hot-wired frenzy of his Telecaster set fire to the album’s epic, breakthrough radio hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The sound burned itself deep into the tender young minds of incipient rock and pop music fans, many of whom had little or no prior acquaintance with folk, blues or, for that matter, Bob Dylan.

Dylan had made a first foray into electric instrumentation on his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, but Highway 61 Revisited was a total immersion, and he could hardly have chosen a better lead guitarist for the venture than Bloomfield. The two were kindred spirits in many ways: hip, literate Jewish guys from the American Midwest, weaned on folk music, blues and early rock and roll, and drawing on it all to create a new musical idiom that people would soon be calling folk rock.

On keyboards for Highway 61 Revisited was Al Kooper, another up-and-coming young musician, songwriter and producer, who would also go on to play a key role in Bloomfield’s career. But although Dylan had surrounded himself with great players to cut Highway 61 Revisited, the sessions, which took place in the summer of 1965, were directionless.

“You wouldn’t believe what those sessions were like,” Bloomfield later recalled. “There was no concept. No one knew what they wanted to play, no one knew what the music was supposed to sound like other than Bob, who had the chords and the words and the melody... They had the best studio drummer [Bobby Gregg]. They had a bass player, terrific guy, Russ Savakus. It was his first day playing electric bass, and he was scared about that. No one understood nothing.”

Yet, from the freeform chaos, Dylan and his musicians wrested the brilliant razor-blade bite of “Tombstone Blues,” the glorious wreckage of “Queen Jane Approximately” and other marvels of sheer musical and poetic genius. The intensity of Bloomfield’s guitar work beautifully underscored the amphetamine rush of Dylan’s kaleidoscopic lyrical imagery.

Bloomfield’s guitar at the time was a 1964 Fender Telecaster, an instrument ideally suited to cut through the cacophonous sound and carnivalesque poetic fervor of Highway 61 Revisited. Bloomfield was one of the musicians who accompanied Dylan on his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, shortly before the album’s release.

Butterfield Blues Band 

Later, in the first of many curious career moves seemingly calculated to impel him away from major success, he declined Dylan’s offer to go on the road as his touring guitarist. He opted instead to throw his lot in with a new group he’d just joined, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan was a far bigger name at the time, but the Butterfield Blues Band would quickly acquire the kind of underground artistic cred that always meant far more to Bloomfield than fame or money.

Hailed as the first biracial blues group, the Butterfield Blues Band boasted Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm section of Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums, both of whom had also joined Dylan and Bloomfield onstage at Newport. Riding atop this venerable foundation were singer/harmonica ace Paul Butterfield, organ/piano man Naftalin and the guitar duo of Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop.

The band’s eponymous 1965 debut and 1966 follow-up, East-West, were essential items for any mid-1960s hipster’s record collection. Bloomfield’s churning guitar leads on tracks like the minor-key blues “I Got a Mind to Give Up Living” inspired countless guitarists, and his telepathic trade-offs with Butterfield’s harp exemplified ensemble playing at its best.

The Butterfield Blues Band was an early exponent of the blues as a platform for adventurous musical experimentation and improvisation. At the time, neither Hendrix nor Clapton had broken out yet, and Bloomfield satisfied the nascent counterculture’s hunger for a musical hero all its own—someone who had the cred of a jazz virtuoso or streetwise bluesman but who was entirely part of the new music movement coalescing around the hippie scene.

Following a triumphant debut at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966, the Butterfield Blues Band became the toast of San Francisco, ground zero for the new psychedelic rock music and culture. Bloomfield’s work had a profound influence on soon-to-be prominent guitarists, like Carlos Santana and Jorma Kaukonen.

“It was a fabulous band,” Kaukonen says. “They were amazingly tight. The combination of Michael, Elvin and Butterfield was simply incredible and powerful. The music they played.— it was the shit.”

During his tenure with Butterfield, Bloomfield traded his 1964 Telecaster for a goldtop 1956 Gibson Les Paul, an instrument remembered as one of Bloomfield’s iconic guitars. Although he always kept a Telecaster around (he replaced the 1964 with a 1966 model), Bloomfield was heavily associated with Les Pauls from about 1966 onward.

Electric Flag and Super Session 

A mercurial figure in many regards, Bloomfield suddenly and unexpectedly left the Butterfield Blues Band in 1967, saying that he wanted to give Bishop “more space.” Although the group would continue to enjoy success in the late 1960s, things were never quite the same without Bloomfield.

The guitarist’s next venture was to start his own band, the Electric Flag, in 1967 with bassist (and fellow Highway 61 Revisited alumnus) Harvey Brooks, pianist Barry Goldberg, drummer Buddy Miles, singer Nick Gravenites, and a full horn section. Rock bands of the time rarely had horn sections, but Bloomfield took his cue from soul music and the Black end of the blues spectrum.

The Electric Flag got off to an auspicious start with a high-visibility live debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and a spot in the Peter Fonda/Roger Corman counterculture feature film The Trip, for which they also provided the soundtrack.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill as Bloomfield began using heroin, the drug that ultimately killed him. Completion of the Electric Flag’s debut album, the appropriately named A Long Time Comin’, was delayed, and Bloomfield didn’t shine as brightly in this context as he had in the electric blues and folk-rock idioms. Bloomfield had already begun to lose a battle for band leadership to the brash, demonstrative Miles, who would go on to lead his own Buddy Miles Express and perform with Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.

As a result, Bloomfield was kicked out of the Electric Flag shortly after the March 1968 release of A Long Time Comin’. He was bitterly disappointed, but quickly found himself engaged in a new project with his old pal Al Kooper. As it happened, Kooper had himself just been canned from his own group, Blood, Sweat & Tears.

A resourceful producer and A&R man, as well as one of the era’s definitive Hammond B-3/keyboard stylists, Kooper decided to take the “rock musician as jazz hero” conceit to its logical conclusion, arranging a two-day all-star recording session in Los Angeles patterned after a jazz date, with plenty of space for live-in-the-studio jamming. Bloomfield was Kooper’s first choice for the lead guitar role. The ensemble was rounded out by old friends Brooks and Goldberg, along with session drummer Eddie Hoh.

The result was the 1968 release Super Session, one of the most influential albums of the late 1960s. Bloomfield displayed his considerable blues chops on tracks like the Albert King tribute “Albert’s Shuffle” and the slow blues “Really.” Other tracks showed his broad stylistic range to great advantage. “His Holy Modal Majesty” harks back to “East-West” trippiness; “Stop” is a funky Mixolydian workout, and the cover of the Curtis Mayfield song “Man’s Temptation” is an exercise in pure soul.

Surprisingly, Bloomfield played guitar on only five of the original album’s nine tracks. After the first day of recording, he departed without explanation. Kooper has speculated that Bloomfield couldn’t score dope and was unable to cope with his insomnia, leading to his hasty retreat. Fortunately, Kooper quickly recruited Stephen Stills, fresh from the recently disbanded Buffalo Springfield, to finish out the record.

Released on July 22, 1968, Super Session was a hit, peaking at Number 12 on the Billboard 200 and going Gold. The following September, Kooper and Bloomfield reunited for six shows over three nights at the Fillmore West. Once again, Bloomfield’s insomnia kicked in and he bailed midway through the schedule.

Kooper managed to save the shows by bringing in Elvin Bishop and Carlos Santana, who was then relatively unknown beyond the San Francisco music scene. The resulting recordings, issued in 1969 as The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, are loose but lively documents of Bloomfield’s blues mastery.

Gibson Les Paul Years 

The pervasive influence of the Super Session album helped boost interest in the instrument that Bloomfield is seen playing on its cover: a sunburst 1959 Les Paul Standard. Like many players at the time, Bloomfield first became interested in the Les Paul Standard, a.k.a. Burst, through Eric Clapton’s prominent use of it on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album, from 1966. He’d also spent quite a bit of time playing one that belonged to John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful.

Bloomfield acquired his 1959 Standard from guitar dealer/player/luthier Dan Erlewine in 1967, offering his Les Paul goldtop plus 100 bucks in trade. The legendary guitar can be heard on the first Electric Flag album and on both of Bloomfield’s albums with Kooper, among other recordings. His use of the 1959 Les Paul helped to elevate the Burst’s status, particularly among guitarists in the United States. Prior to then, Les Paul goldtops commanded higher prices than sunburst Standards, but by 1967 the market had flipped, and the Burst would go on to become one of the most desirable electric guitars of all time.

Bloomfield ended the 1960s in top form. He scored the radical chic film Medium Cool, worked with Janis Joplin on her album I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! and performed on Chess Records’ all-star Fathers and Sons album with Muddy Waters, blues piano great Otis Spann, Paul Butterfield, Stax bass guitarist Donald “Duck” Dunn, Sam Lay and Buddy Miles. The guitarist also released his first solo album, It’s Not Killing Me, in 1969.

Sadly, Bloomfield’s popularity began to fade as the 1970s wore on. An Electric Flag reunion and the short-lived group KGB both fizzled. He hit a low scoring several “artistic” porn films for San Francisco’s notorious Mitchell Brothers, including Hot Nazis, Rampaging Dental Assistants and Sodom and Gomorrah, in 1974 and 1975. Bloomfield still managed to deliver quality work strewn amid the dross, including 1973’s Triumvirate album with Dr. John and John Hammond, Jr., a handful of albums for the Takoma label, and an instructional album recorded for Guitar Player magazine, If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em as You Please.

During the late 1970s, Bloomfield gigged sporadically around the Bay Area with various incarnations of Mike Bloomfield and Friends, sometimes returning to the acoustic blues and ragtime idioms he had explored in his pre-fame days.

“I worked with him on and off through most of the 1970s,” Naftalin says. “Our work together tapered off quite a bit. He had really gone into not a very good place. I wasn’t gonna follow him there.”

One final scene of triumph was Bloomfield’s gig with Bob Dylan at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater on November 15, 1980. A Mike Bloomfield fan to the very end, Dylan had sought him out and brought him onstage to revisit their mutual moment of glory, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bloomfield played the show in his bedroom slippers. A few months later, on February 15, 1981, Bloomfield was found dead in the front seat of his 1965 Chevrolet Impala. He died from a heroin overdose.

Several days passed before his body was identified and claimed at the city morgue.

“Michael Bloomfield is an important figure in American music,” Kaukonen concludes. “It’s tragic that he died the way he did. He made the blues accessible to a lot of guys like me. He loved life so much. There weren’t enough hours in the day for him to get done all he needed to get done.”

Suzanne Vega never imagined “Luka” would become one of the defining songs of the late 1980s. She also never thought that, decades later, she’d reveal just how personal it really was.

Vega wrote the song in 1984 as the story of an abused child told in the first person. But when her manager suggested it could become a hit, Vega couldn’t see it.

“It’s a small song about an abused boy,” she tells Guitar Player today. “I didn’t really see it hitting the charts or anything. But he argued with me and said he thought that it had an important message.”

That conviction set in motion a lengthy studio process that transformed Vega’s sparse acoustic composition into the polished recording that reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987.

“The production was the biggest thing to deal with,” she says. “Once he made his argument to me that he thought it could be a hit, I was like, ‘Okay, sure, knock yourself out.’ We spent quite a bit of time on the production because they wanted it to fit into the radio-friendly format.”

Producer Steve Addabbo and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye were brought in to help shape the song for radio without sacrificing its intimacy.

“We spent a lot of time on the different parts, like the drum parts,” Vega recalls. “I think it was Anton Sanko’s opening synthesizer chords that made it this ear-catching thing before you hear my opening guitar chords. I think what makes the song radio-friendly is the synthesizer part, the drums and especially the electric guitar solo of Jon Gordon, that has that ringing sound that was very much like U2 at the time. The minute it went to radio, it just hit everywhere it went. It was almost like an instant hit overnight.”

Although the finished recording sounds effortless, Vega says it came together only after painstaking work in the studio.

“I did my guitar part over and over again because Steve was meticulous,” she says. “He’s a terrific engineer. And I’m not a natural in the studio. I’m a good performer live, and I do what it takes to get my message and my song across live. But in the studio, I needed to do it over and over again.

“Today, whenever I hear ‘Luka’ on the radio, it sounds thick, full and fresh. It doesn’t sound labored over. But that’s because of Steve.”

Vega also credits Addabbo with teaching her how to record.

“He was a mentor because he taught me how to work in the studio,” she says. “When I first started working with him in my early 20s, I was very green. He would keep me in there until I got it right. Sometimes he’d have me come into the control room and listen to what I had done, and after listening I’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s not quite right,’ and I’d have to go back and do it again.

“So he really taught me my chops and how to play the guitar in a certain way, how not to exaggerate. He also taught me how to sing with the microphone — not to sing too softly and not to shout. He was a good, patient teacher.”

For the sessions, Vega played the Guild F-47 that was her acoustic guitar of choice during those years.

“I used the Guild in the early days,” she says. “At one point I switched over to Taylor and then for a while I used a Yamaha. In fact, someone from Yamaha just showed up one day at my hotel room and gave me a guitar, so I said, ‘Thank you.’

“I also had a custom Yamaha guitar, which ended up being stolen from the front of my apartment when I lived in Tribeca. To this day, I can’t believe it hasn’t surfaced somewhere since it had my name right on it in mother-of-pearl inlays. So somewhere, somebody has my Yamaha from when it was taken from the front of my building.”

“Luka” reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Vega’s highest-charting U.S. single. Its place in pop culture was cemented years later when it turned up in an episode of The Simpsons.

“It was so random, and so out of context,” Vega says, laughing. “The Simpsons are very funny. I remember going, ‘He’s driving under a bridge, and he comes out singing it.’ I was actually kind of touched by the fact that they would even think to use it.”

But the song’s greatest impact came not from the charts or television, but from the people who heard themselves in it.

“I was writing about a private issue, so it didn’t really occur to me that all these other people would identify with the song,” she says. “And they did. I got many, many letters from people who told me their story and their experiences. That was cathartic for me because, in the end, I understood that, in a way, that’s what was meant to happen.

“Somehow, I had provided a service by writing the song and allowing people to express themselves. There was one girl who wrote to me and said because of the song, she was able to tell others what was happening to her, and she feels it saved her life. I was getting letters like that.”

For decades, Vega maintained that “Luka” had been loosely inspired by a child she had observed playing outside her apartment building. It wasn’t until 2021 that she revealed the song had actually been rooted in her own childhood experiences.

“I was too afraid to reveal myself, so I didn’t want people to know that it was about me,” she says. “I had hidden the abuse for most of my life. Never talked about it, never revealed it. So to be known for that very thing was a little weird for me, but I felt that I had done the right thing in creating the character of Luka and that I could hide behind.”

Looking back nearly four decades later, Vega sees “Luka” as something much bigger than the hit single she never expected to have.

“The success of ‘Luka’ has been one of the highlights of my life,” she says. “In the end, it was not just a pop song, but something that, in a way, I was meant to do.”

The story behind the fuzz pedal’s creation is well known to most guitarists, but it goes a little something like this. The effect was born on July 12, 1960, while country superstar Marty Robbins was cutting the song “Don’t Worry” at Bradley Film & Recording Studios in Nashville, better known as the Quonset Hut. Hired for the session was guitarist Grady Martin, who brought along his Danelectro UB-2 six-string bass guitar.

Studio house engineer Glenn Snoddy was running the board, a newly installed custom-built recording console featuring Langevin 116 tube amplifiers. Martin’s guitar, used for the song’s solo, was being sent directly into the console, rather than through an amp.

To everyone’s surprise, when Snoddy played back the take, Martin’s six-string bass sounded like a swarm of bees.

In a 2014 interview with the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM)’s Oral History Program, Snoddy attributed the problem to one of the board’s 35 output transformers.

“Prior to making the transformers, they misjudged the windings somehow or other, and there were 250 volts going through the winding instead of the transformers,” he said. “And one malfunctioned at the exact time that Grady was playing his guitar solo through it and it caused this sound, which we called later a fuzz tone sound.”

According to Snoddy, it was Martin who suggested they keep it.

“Grady said, ‘Why don’t we just use that on this record?’” the engineer recalled in the 2010 book How Does It Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear.

Martin’s advice was well taken. Released in February 1961, some six months after it was recorded, “Don’t Worry” became Robbins’ seventh number one on the country chart, and crossed over to the pop chart, where it peaked at number three.

But before that happened, Snoddy’s fuzz circuit had died, taking with it that magic sound. By then, artists were calling the Quonset Hut to ask if they could get the fuzz tone on their recordings. Snoddy decided to replicate the circuit in a pedal format with an old friend, engineer Revis Hobbs. Together the pair set to work on a circuit design using transistors, and re-created the fuzz sound by clipping the signal, progressively squaring off the waveform.

“I got some transistors, and we rigged up a thing, and we eventually sold it to Gibson,” he recalled.

Gibson introduced the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone the following year, in 1962. Although the pedal initially met with a muted public response, it finally took off in 1965 after Keith Richards used an FZ-1 to record his lead riff on the Rolling Stones hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Ever since, fuzz has been an essential part of the electric guitar tone arsenal.

But between Snoddy’s circuit failing and the birth of the FZ-1 are at least three recording artists who helped maintain interest in the effect, all of which helped launch it to its rightful place as an essential pedal in guitarists’ rigs.

The first is the man behind the six-string bass guitar on that transformational session: Grady Martin. As an established Nashville player, Martin knew a thing about making hit records. By 1961, he’d already enjoyed a long career as one of country music’s most in-demand guitarists and become a member of the Nashville A-Team, who, like their counterparts in L.A., the Wrecking Crew, would define the sound of numerous records, including Marty Robbins’ 1959 hit “El Paso.”

Martin liked the sound of Snoddy’s failing circuit so much that he made at least two other fuzz-guitar songs with it. “Tippin’ In” and “The Fuzz,” both instrumentals, were recorded on January 12, 1961 and issued together as a single that same month — before the February release of “Don’t Worry.” Neither was a hit for Martin, but “The Fuzz” likely sealed the deal when it came to the effect’s name.

Martin’s adoption of the fuzz effect didn’t go unnoticed by Snoddy, who appreciated the guitarist’s keen ear for sound. Unfortunately, the circuit was dead by the time those sides were out and “Don’t Worry” was climbing the charts.

What pushed Snoddy to re-create the effect in a pedal? He said the final straw was when Bradley had to turn away Nancy Sinatra when she came looking to use the sound on her next record.

"We had an artist, Nancy Sinatra, that called and wanted to come in and make a record,” the engineer explained. “When she got there, we had to tell her that the console that was causing that sound, the amplifier, had quit, and we couldn't do it anymore.

“They didn't like that at all,” he said with a laugh. “I told [Quonset Hut owner and producer] Harold Bradley that I'd have to see if I could make one and get it going."

So is Nancy Sinatra the mother of the fuzz pedal? It’s a little hard to imagine the young singer was interested in Snoddy’s fuzz sound. Consider that, in 1961, Sinatra was just launching her career as a teenybopper singer of saccharine love songs that often featured orchestrations, not fuzzed-out guitars. Her confidently sassy breakthrough success “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” was still four years away.

What's more, Sinatra was recording for her father’s new label, Reprise, located in Los Angeles. Frank Sinatra had recorded his own early Reprise sides in L.A., at United Recorders. Why would Nancy look to record in Nashville? And would a raunchy guitar sound really be in keeping with the sweet-girl image she was cultivating in 1961?

Whatever the case, let's take Snoddy at his word; Sinatra, after all, would have had license to record wherever she damn well pleased. But note that she didn’t cut a song with fuzz guitar until her 1967 hit, “You Only Live Twice,” the theme from the James Bond film of the same name.

But another dusky-voiced young singer getting a start on her career did use the fuzz effect on a single in 1961. What’s more, she did it in Nashville, just a few months after “Don’t Worry” came out.

Ann-Margret was just 20 years old and on her way to a successful career as a vocalist and movie actress when she released her first single for RCA Victor, the heartfelt “Lost Love,” early that year. Soon after, she followed it up with the very fuzzy — and more adult — “I Just Don’t Understand.”

Recorded at RCA Victor Studio B, Nashville on May 9, 1961, and produced by Chet Atkins, “I Just Don’t Understand” features Billy Strange on electric fuzz guitar. Strange, who would go on to record for the Beach Boys as part of the Wrecking Crew, reportedly had his guitar tone altered by overdriving the input preamp on a channel of the recording console. (He would even go on to record his own version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction.”)

“I Just Don't Understand" was a hit for Ann-Margret, reaching 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1961 and furthering fuzz guitar’s entry into the American psyche.

To be clear, there’s little chance Snoddy misremembered Ann-Margret as Nancy Sinatra. As an RCA Victor artist, she was unlikely to record in a rival studio like the Quonset Hut, which catered largely to artists on Decca, MGM and Columbia, the latter of which bought the studio from Bradley in 1962.

But Ann-Margret’s chart success says something about the popularity of fuzz in 1961, before the development of the Fuzz-Tone. Had Snoddy not put the sound in a box, chances are someone else would have.

As for Grady Martin, he continued to use the fuzz effect well after Snoddy’s circuit kicked the bucket, creating a quartet of sides that, retrospectively, slot neatly into the garage-rock genre.

In February 1962, Martin used fuzz on both sides of his single “Twist and Turn”/“Good Good Good,” released in April 1962. He employed it as well on two other songs cut at this session: “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Big Bad Guitar,” both included on the 1963 album That Good Grady, cut with the Slewfoot Five.

Two years later, those same two recordings would be reissued with vocal overdubs and credited to Beauregard and the Tuffs. No doubt it was this raucous cut of “Ramblin’ Rose” that inspired the MC5’s version from their 1969 album, Kick Out the Jams, which in turn launched a new wave of garage rock that gave birth to punk.

Given that Snoddy’s circuit was long gone by the time Grady cut those sides, it’s anybody’s guess how he achieved his fuzz effect. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if he used the FZ-1.

For Beatles fans, the forthcoming expanded edition of Rubber Soul promises a wealth of new discoveries, from revealing session outtakes to the previously unheard John Lennon composition “Little Girl.” But the most important story surrounding the album isn't what listeners will hear in the vault recordings — it's what happened inside Abbey Road Studio Two during the autumn of 1965.

The sessions marked the moment when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr stopped accepting the technical limitations imposed by EMI Studios. Instead, they began demanding that the recording process itself become part of their creative vision—a philosophy that would lead directly to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

By late 1965, the Beatles had become students of sound. Between tours, they were listening obsessively to records coming from America. Motown singles leaped from radio speakers with deep bass and crisp percussion. The Byrds’ jangling Rickenbackers electric guitars shimmered with remarkable brilliance. Compared with these productions, the Beatles felt their own records reflected EMI’s conservative engineering philosophy more than the sound they heard in their heads.

For years, EMI’s procedures had emphasized technical accuracy and consistency. The company’s recording standards had been developed during an era dominated by classical music and traditional pop. Engineers were expected to produce clean, balanced recordings while staying within carefully defined operating practices.

The Beatles had reached the point where those rules were getting in the way. Paul McCartney later recalled the constant tug-of-war between the band and EMI’s engineering staff during the Rubber Soul sessions:

“EMI had very firm rules about that, which we always had to break,” he told Mark Lewisohn in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “It wasn’t a willful arrogance, it was just that we felt we knew better.”

McCartney was particularly unhappy with the muffled sound of his bass guitar on the group’s recordings. He’d been told it was necessary to keep the bass low to prevent needles from jumping out of the groove of the vinyl record. But he noticed the records from America had full, prominent bass and suffered not in the least.

“‘What do you mean we can’t have bass?,’” he recalled asking in one conversation with Abbey Road’s staff. “‘I was down the disco last night and I heard a record with that kind of bass!’”

The engineers would respond by citing company policy.

“‘Well, our rule book says…’”

The Beatles had little patience for rule books.

“‘They’re out of date, come on, let’s move!’”

One of the defining moments came during the recording of “Nowhere Man.” The Beatles wanted the electric guitars to be dazzlingly bright, with far more treble than EMI normally permitted. Norman Smith, the band’s recording engineer since 1962, turned the high-EQ potentiometer all the way up.

It still wasn’t enough.

“‘But that’s all I’ve got,’” McCartney recalled Smith replying. “‘I’ve only got one pot and that’s it!’”

The Beatles’ solution was simple.

“‘Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that,’” McCartney replied. “’And if that’s not enough we’ll go through another lot of faders.

“‘Try it for us. If it sounds crappy, okay, we’ll lose it. But it just might sound good.’”

Often, it did. McCartney believed Smith and his fellow engineers quietly enjoyed breaking the rules alongside the band.

“You’d then find, ‘Oh, it worked!’ and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who’d put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of all those things.”

That spirit of experimentation transformed Rubber Soul into a turning point in the Beatles’ career. The studio became a laboratory, and the band began taking creative control of the recording process itself. No longer was the control room simply documenting performances. Musicians, producer and recording engineers had become collaborators, working together to create sounds that had never before been heard on a pop record.

When Geoff Emerick succeeded Norman Smith as the Beatles’ principal recording engineer in 1966, he inherited a band that no longer viewed the studio as a place with limitations. Working alongside producer George Martin, Emerick embraced the same willingness to challenge EMI convention, helping the Beatles realize increasingly ambitious ideas on Revolver.

Microphones moved closer than the rule book allowed. Tape machines were manipulated in novel ways. Artificial Double Tracking, tape loops, extreme compression, and radically reimagined instrument sounds became part of the group’s expanding sonic vocabulary.

By the time work began on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, experimentation had become the norm rather than the exception. The studio itself was now an instrument—every knob and every tape machine another means of expression.

And it all began during the Rubber Soul sessions, when four musicians decided they would no longer accept limitations.

As listeners explore the newly released outtakes and alternate performances — including the long-awaited unveiling of “Little Girl” — they’ll hear more than songs in progress. They’ll hear a band discovering that the recording studio could be as creative an instrument as a guitar or a piano.

That’s the true legacy of Rubber Soul. It wasn’t simply the bridge between Beatlemania and psychedelia. It was the moment the Beatles stopped recording records and started inventing them.

For all that's made of Stevie Nicks’ songwriting partnership with former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, her friendship with Tom Petty was arguably as big an influence on her career, certainly the solo half of it.

“In 1976, I’d been in Fleetwood Mac for about a year when I heard Tom Petty’s debut,” Nicks wrote about the guitarist in a 2004 tribute for Rolling Stone. “I became a fan right then.

“I loved the way Tom’s Florida swamp-dog voice sounded in cahoots with Mike Campbell's guitar and Benmont Tench's keyboards. Tom had the same influences we had — the Byrds, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash — but he dropped in lots of serious old blues. I became such a fan that if I hadn’t been in a band myself, I would have joined that one.”

Nicks didn’t hide her enthusiasm from Petty. The guitarist said that when he and Nicks met in 1978, he felt overwhelmed.

“She was this absolutely stoned-gone huge fan,” he told American Songwriter. “And it was her mission in life that I should write her a song.”

Nicks didn’t have to wait long for that to happen. In 1980, she prepared to record her debut solo album, Bella Donna. The producer chosen was Jimmy Iovine, the man behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 1979 breakthrough, Damn the Torpedos. Iovine was at work on Hard Promises, the group’s 1981 followup, when he took on Nicks’ album.

The overlap between those productions meant Petty got a chance to hear Nicks’ album in progress. There was one thing both he and Iovine agreed on — they couldn’t hear a hit single on it. (Perhaps “Edge of Seventeen” hadn’t been recorded yet?)

“Both Tom and Jimmy said to me, in a brutally honest way, ‘You don’t have a single on this record,” Nicks recalled. “Tom is a great and loyal friend, but he’s also honest like that.”

Iovine asked Petty to write a song for Nicks. What he came up with was “Insider,” a song he wrote in a style he thought suited her.

"When I wrote that song, I wrote it very quickly — I mean maybe in 10, 15 minutes," he told Melody Maker in 1981. "I just wrote it all down on paper and then I just picked up the guitar and tried to sing each line out. It took me maybe an hour to do that."

Petty said Iovine was thrilled with the song.

“I remember bringing it to him, and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’” The praise stung Petty. He had begun to wonder if he was making a mistake giving the tune away. “I was really attached to it,” he recalled

By the time Nicks was recording it, Petty was glum about the whole endeavor. He recalled being in the studio as she was cutting her harmony vocals and how she could read the concern on his face.

“She walked back in and said, ‘How was it?’ I said, ‘It’s amazing,’” Petty told Musician in 1981. “She said, ‘I can tell by the look on your face, you don’t wanna give me this song. I’m giving it back to you right now.’ I really thought a lot of her for that.”

Feeling guilty, Petty offered Nicks a replacement he and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell had just written: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” As Campbell recalled, he began writing the tune off a chord progression inspired by the drum intro to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

“I just put different chords to that feel, and gave it to Tom and he wrote these great words,” the guitarist explained in a video, where he demonstrated the song using his Fender Broadcaster, the same electric guitar he played on the song’s original recording.

“And we were working with Jimmy Iovine at the time, and he thought the song would work better as a duet, and he was actually right. So Stevie Nicks ended up singing along with Tom on this song.”

Petty said Nicks was thrilled with the new track.

“She says, ‘Wow! That’s why I wanted you to write me a song — it’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s what you do,’” he told Musician. “‘Insider' sounds like what I do.'

“And I thought, How dumb of me to think that she'd want me to write like her."

Sung as a duet by Nicks and Petty, with backing support from the Heartbreakers, “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” became the debut single from Bella Donna. The song rose quickly in the chart to peak at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming both Nicks’ and the Heartbreakers’ biggest hit on that ledger.

Not everyone thought Petty made the right decision by giving it away. “Insider” appeared on Hard Promises, with backing vocals from Nicks and her sister, Lori. But while Petty thought highly of the tune, it failed to grab listeners or critics, one of whom singled out drummer Stan Lynch’s “cymbal-pinged weirdness” on the recording. The drummer wasn’t thrilled.

“As a trade-out for 'Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,' I didn’t think it was a good bargain at all,” Lynch said. “I remember [the discussion], ‘Well, we got “Insider,"' and I’m going, ‘Bad trade!’”

Nicks’ and Petty’s friendship endured for the remainder of his life. And, like a good friend, he was able to give her tough love when she needed it. After a stint in rehab in the early 1990s, she was insecure about relaunching her career and asked for his help writing songs.

“I didn't really expect the reaction I got, which was, ‘No, I won't,’” she wrote in Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘You are one of the premier songwriters in this business. Just write some great songs — that's what you do.’”

When they finally toured together in 2006, Petty gave her a platinum sheriff's badge inlaid with 24-karat gold and diamonds that read, To Our Honorary Heartbreaker. “It's probably the most beautiful piece of jewelry a man has ever given me, ever,” Nicks said.

Petty's sudden death from an accidental drug overdose on October 2, 2017, devastated her. “The loss of Tom Petty has just about broken my heart,” she said when she accepted the 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year Award; Petty won it the year before. “He was a great father and he was a great friend, and he was one of my best friends. My heart will never get over this.”

The Beatles drew inspiration from all over the musical map — Motown, acoustic folk, rockabilly and beyond. But one of the darkest lines ever sung by the band can be traced directly to a 1950s rock and roll record by Elvis Presley.

John Lennon turned the lyric into “Run for Your Life,” the closing track on Rubber Soul — a song he would later call his least favorite Beatles recording.

The track is about to return to the spotlight as the Beatles prepare to release a Super Deluxe edition of Rubber Soul on October 2, expanding the landmark 1965 album with new stereo mixes by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, unreleased session recordings and demos, and the original mono version.

The lyric appears in Presley’s 1955 Sun Records single “Baby, Let’s Play House,” written by Arthur Gunter. Early in the song, Presley delivers a line that’s as blunt as it is unsettling: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”

The phrase stuck with Lennon. Nearly a decade later, he borrowed it almost verbatim for the opening line of “Run for Your Life” before building the rest of the song around the same jealous premise, warning its subject that if he ever caught her with another man, “that’s the end.”

Years later, Lennon admitted the song wasn’t something he thought much about at the time.

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from Elvis.”

The track ultimately became the closer on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ sixth studio album and one often regarded as the point where the band fully embraced the LP as an artistic statement rather than simply a collection of songs.

It was also the first Beatles album to hint at the psychedelic era through increasingly adventurous studio experimentation. George Harrison famously introduced the sitar to the band’s sound on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” while Paul McCartney used a fuzz bass tone on Harrison’s “Think for Yourself,” reflecting the group's growing willingness to expand its sonic palette.

“Run for Your Life,” however, had simpler origins than many of the album’s other songs. Lennon later described it as a quick composition built around the Presley lyric that had caught his ear years earlier.

“I wrote it around that,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was that important.”

In hindsight, the song also reflected something about Lennon’s state of mind at the time. As McCartney later noted in his memoir Many Years From Now, Lennon’s lyrics often revealed a possessiveness that contrasted with McCartney’s own outlook on relationships.

“John was always on the run, running for his life,” McCartney wrote. “He was married; whereas none of my songs would have ‘catch you with another man.’ … I wasn’t as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song.”

Even if Lennon dismissed the track as a throwaway, there was little chance of replacing it. With the holiday season approaching, the Beatles were racing to finish Rubber Soul in time for its December 1965 release.

The album’s final recording session — which began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and stretched into the early hours of the next morning — saw the band record McCartney’s “You Won’t See Me” and Lennon’s “Girl,” while also adding overdubs to “Wait.” With the deadline looming, there simply wasn’t time to write and record another song. “Run for Your Life” remained in place as the album’s closing number.

And while Lennon would later call it his “least favorite Beatles song” and say he “always hated” it, at least one of his bandmates felt differently.

“It was sort of a throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of,” Lennon later said. “But it was always a favorite of George’s.”

As most Beatles fans know, John Lennon quit the group first, on September 20, 1969, bringing the Fab Four to what most would agree was an untimely end.

What many don’t know is that just two weeks before he announced his departure, Lennon proposed that the group record another album as well as release a new single in time for the holidays.

The evidence comes from a tape recording made on September 8, 1969, at Apple Corps headquarters in London, of a meeting between Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The recording exists because drummer Ringo Starr was unable to attend. He’d been taken to the hospital with intestinal complaints — Starr had a history of abdominal ailments and food allergies — and the recording was made for his benefit.

“Ringo,” Lennon explains on the tape, “you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”

But as the tape shows, Lennon wasn’t merely thinking about one more Beatles album and single — he was planning a future strategy for the group.

The key evidence is his plan for how he, McCartney and Harrison — the group’s main songwriters — would share space on future albums. He planned that each of them should be allowed four songs per album, with another two reserved for Starr, if he wished.

“When we get into the studio, I don't care how we do it, but I don't want to think about equal time,” he said. “I just want it known I'm allowed to put four songs on the album, whatever happens. I don't have to say, ‘Should we do it now?’ because I think we'll all get fed up in three weeks, or actually the album will be full because we did two of Paul’s last week or one of Ringo's or one of George’s, whatever, and, well, it's too late now. Next album.”

Lennon was also eager to abandon what he called “the Lennon and McCartney myth” about their songwriting partnership. While the two men had occasionally written together in the past — going back to their earliest days as teens struggling to play acoustic guitars — they mostly composed alone. Despite this, each of their songs was credited to Lennon-McCartney, regardless of who wrote it. Lennon suggested that, moving forward, only the sole writer should get credit.

One might think McCartney would have been thrilled by the suggestion to record a new album. He’d been despondent over Lennon’s lack of interest in the group and had corralled the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, back into the studio to record Abbey Road earlier that summer.

But he said very little in the meeting, aside from rejecting Lennon’s suggestions for a more equitable division of songs and a more accurate assigning of songwriting credits.

Lennon’s suggestion to give Harrison a larger share of each album’s real estate was in recognition of the younger guitarist’s growth as a songwriter. Over the previous year, Harrison had contributed “Old Brown Shoe,” “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” to the group’s catalog, each song as good as anything Lennon or McCartney created.

The Beatles felt strongly enough about “Old Brown Shoe” that they made it the B-side of their single “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” released the previous May 30. As for “Something,” it would become Harrison’s first, and only, Beatles A-side (albeit a double A-side) when it was released with “Come Together” on October 6, 1969.

The fact that Harrison could score placement on two singles within a matter of months, while McCartney was left out in the cold, was proof that he had become a stronger songwriter and that, moreover, his bandmates and producer had taken note.

“We always carved the singles up between us,” Lennon said to McCartney. “We have the singles market, [George and Ringo] don’t get anything! I mean, we’ve never offered George B-sides; we could have given him a lot of B-sides, but because we were two people, you had the A-side and I had the B-side.”

It’s also possible that Lennon was thinking about Harrison’s abrupt decision to quit the group the previous January 10 during a dustup with McCartney while making Let It Be. Following Harrison’s departure, Lennon and McCartney had a conversation, recorded without their knowledge at Twickenham Film Studios, about what Lennon referred to as the "festering wound" of Harrison’s discontent after years of having his songs ignored. As Lennon saw it, Harrison’s resignation wasn’t a sudden decision but the inevitable culmination of years of feeling marginalized.

To ensure only the strongest songs made Beatles albums, Lennon suggested they give away tunes that would be better suited to other performers. All three had already been doing this to some extent: Lennon had released “Give Peace a Chance” with his and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band project; McCartney had given his songs “Goodbye” and “Come and Get It” to Apple Records artists Mary Hopkins and Badfinger, respectively; and Harrison had passed his White Album reject “Sour Milk Sea” over to Apple signee Jackie Lomax.

In making his argument, Lennon specifically mentioned McCartney’s “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a pair of old-timey singalong tunes Lennon was known to have reviled.

"Wouldn’t it be better — because we didn’t really dig ‘em, you know? — for you to do songs that you dug and for ‘Ob-La-Di’ and ‘Maxwell’ to be given to people who like music like that. Like Mary [Hopkins] or whoever it is that needs a song. Why don’t you give that to them?

"The only time we need something vaguely of that quality is for a single, and for an album we can just do only stuff that we really dug. It’s a drag to put that song on an album that nobody dug, including the guy who wrote it, just because it was going to be popular. ‘Cause the LP doesn’t have to be popular in that way.”

In fairness, McCartney never said he didn’t like either song, but Lennon’s point was clear: The Beatles should choose the material most representative of them as a collective, rather than serve as each other’s backing band, a practice that had begun with the White Album and continued during the making of Abbey Road, in particular with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and McCartney’s side-two medley.

Sadly, rather than discuss the merits of Lennon’s suggestions, the three Beatles descended into a debate about Harrison’s songwriting — McCartney said his tunes had only improved that year, while Harrison argued that they’d been written even earlier — and whether or not Lennon had participated enough in recording Harrison’s songs.

“Most of my tunes, I never had the Beatles backing me,” Harrison falsely complained.

“Oh, c’mon, George! We put a lot of work in your songs, even down to ‘Don’t Bother Me,’” Lennon responded, referring to Harrison’s first song, which appeared on 1963’s With the Beatles. “We spent a lot of time doing all that, and we grooved. I can remember the riff you were playing, and in the last two years there was a period where you went Indian and we weren’t needed!”

“That was only one tune,” Harrison said. “On the last album [the White Album] I don’t think you appeared on any of my songs. I don’t mind.”

“Well, you had Eric, or somebody like that,” Lennon replied defensively, referring to Eric Clapton’s electric guitar contributions on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” recorded with Harrison’s “Lucy” 1957 Gibson Les Paul.

It’s remarkable that neither Harrison nor McCartney seemed to grasp that Lennon was, for the first time in at least a year, showing his commitment to the group’s future.

It was a missed opportunity. Soon after the meeting, Lennon and Ono departed for a September 13 performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival with an ad hoc Plastic Ono Band lineup featuring Clapton, bass guitarist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White.

By the time they returned, Lennon wanted out. On September 20, 1969, he told his bandmates he was quitting. The Beatles’ last chance to stay together had passed.

The idea that Lenny Kaye is releasing his first solo album — the new Goin’ Local (Yep Roc) — now, at the age of 79 and after more than 60 years of performing, comes as a surprise.

Make that a shock.

The New York–born Kaye (née Kusikoff), who now makes his home in eastern Pennsylvania, is best known as the guitarist and chief lieutenant in the Patti Smith Group, which he was part of from 1974 to 1979 and, since 1996, co-producing three of her albums during that second tenure.

He curated the acclaimed 1972 compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 and produced albums for Soul Asylum, Suzanne Vega, James, Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Shams and others, and guested on R.E.M.’s 2011 album Collapse Into Now.

The Rutgers University grad has also written for a number of music publications and has penned a pair of books — You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon in 2004 and 2022’s Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll... — as well as co-writing Waylon Jennings’ autobiography in 2012.

He’s still playing select shows with Smith — including a Riot Fest slot on Sept. 20 in Chicago — and maintains what he calls a “goth/psyche/jam band” called Adrift. And he hosts The Lenny Kaye Program on SiriusXM’s Underground Garage channel.

That’s a lot, but somehow an album of his own never made it to the docket — even though he did start his own band, the Lenny Kaye Connection, during the late ’70s and contributed a track to Daddy Rockin’ Strong: A Tribute to Nolan Strong and the Diablos in 2010. Goin’ Local features 12 songs written over the course of decades, and he started recording six of them during the early 2010s with Patti Smith bandmate and bassist Tony Shanahan.

He gets his rock on for the title track and “A Friend Like You,” but the overall tone is more gentle, nuanced and reflective — even sentimental — on songs such as “Let’s Make a Memory,” “Be That As It May,” “The Things You Leave Behind” and “Solstice,” which he co-wrote with Smith.

There’s a hint of bemusement as Kaye talks about the project via Zoom, guitars and a keyboard visible in the background alongside a handsome wood bookcase.

So how have you managed to get this far along without doing an album of your own?

Well... [laughs] To be honest, you always make yourself the lowest priority on the list. It’s not as if I’ve been sitting around over the years; I’m always doing a lot of stuff, and sometimes you just don’t get to something like the album. Basically, the time wasn’t right. I had an assemblage of songs, but I’d keep writing, and when I felt like the songs I had made a whole, that’s when I decided it was time to reveal them to the world.

And it was helped by the fact that out here in northeast Pennsylvania I found a studio close to my home, called Mix-o-Lydian, where I could just call up the guy [Don Sternecker] and say, “Hey, let’s record this afternoon,” and go over there and work on songs without any sense of direction or commercial sensibility, or trying to create a different persona for myself. You do that several times and you start finishing things that began far too long ago.

So when I finally had enough I thought, “This is who I am at this moment in time. It’s ready to be heard.”

How big of a body of work were you drawing from?

I don’t write many songs — one or two a year, perhaps, when I feel the need to examine an emotional intersection in my life or talk about something in time and space. I believe songs need to be written. There are so many songs out there, and I’m just not one to kind of churn ’em out. I feel like they need to have a place in this world of music.

Have you tried to do an album at any point before?

I did some work in the ’90s with my band at the time — Tony Shanahan on bass, Mark Sacco on drums — then the juggernaut of Patti reappeared and that kind of got shelved. Then I did some sessions with Tony and Mark around 2010, 2012; six of the Goin’ Local songs actually began then. I never completed them, but I got to see what they were like. Then over intervening times I’ve written other songs, some of them acoustic-based.

And a lot of those became part of Goin’ Local.

The album is not quite as rockin’ as people might assume, given my history. But it felt like this new persona for me — vulnerable, honest. I’m not trying to surf on any genre here; I have my goth/psych/jam band Adrift, which is darker and louder and noisier. But this album is just me, as open-hearted as I can be.

Were you surprised by that as well?

I’ve always had a romantic streak. I’ve always liked so many different kinds of music, and I don’t like to be confined by genre. I just did what felt natural. Patti said to me — and I appreciated this — “I’ve never heard you sound like this before,” and I agree. It’s a way for me to reveal some of my inner feelings and wear my heart on my sleeve for many of the songs.

I’m very many things. I know I have a great reputation for garage rock, and I love garage rock, but it was the music I made as a teenager, and whatever I’ve done in the past, for me as an artist it’s in the past. Over the years I’ve moved through many musics to understand them. I love free jazz. I love country-western music, even though I’m a fairly substandard steel player. I love folk music. I love reggae. You name the genre, and I’ve spent time unlocking its secrets and bringing it into my music.

I feel at this point I can draw upon 60 years of living music and seeing where it’s placed me and seeing how I can develop further as a musician. I’m very work-oriented and very future-oriented. I have no desire to rest on my supposed laurels. What I’m most interested in, when I get up every morning, is what I’m working on, the songs that are taking shape in my head now.

One of the best solos on the album is on “A Friend Like You,” which is a Stephan Eichar song. What led you to do your own version of that?

There’s not a lot of co-writes on the record, ’cause a lot of it took shape in my living room, when I’m sitting there with a guitar. I found that song in Paris one time when I was there in the ’90s; I just heard it on the radio, and I liked it. I was able to buy a copy of it at the local store, and it set off a sense that I might be able to write lyrics, English lyrics, to it — which I did, with Stephan’s encouragement.

There are two guitar solos in there, and there were in his version, too. The first one is kind of strong but plain, the second one is a little more amped-up. So I was able to kind of embrace this build within the guitar solo, and I think it came out particularly well.

“Solstice” was written with Patti. What’s the story there?

That’s one of the oldest songs on the album, that and the title track. We came about it in the way that things usually come with us; there’s an idea aligned with an interesting guitar lick, and then an expanse of it as it grows.

And as this one grew, Patti felt it reflected my new persona and my sense of the celestial, possibly from my years as a science-fiction fan. She said, “You should sing it,” and so I did. It was kind of left aside for a while, and then I felt it had quality and kind of revisited it, and it grew into its own animal — especially the last half, which was kind of an open plane waiting for something, and I was happy to have the opportunity to fill it.

Maybe the nicest story here is “Yes I Will,” which you wrote to lyrics by your uncle, Larry Kusik — who wrote some notable songs himself, like “A Time for Us” [from the 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet] and “Speak Softly, Love” [a.k.a. “Love Theme from The Godfather].

My Uncle Ku was great. I made my first record with him, this folk-protest song [“Crazy Like a Fox”] that he wrote with his partner Ritchie Adams. I was in a band called the Zoo, playing Rutgers fraternity houses, but I’d never been in a studio before, so it was kind of exciting. It came out on a record under a pseudonym, Link Cromwell; it wasn’t a hit, which is probably good for me, since it would’ve changed the trajectory of my life. But it gave me a sense that I could be a part of music in some way, shape or form. I just didn’t know how.

With “Yes I Will,” toward the end of his life I would go up to the Upper East Side, where he lived. I would take him out in the car and we’d look at his old neighborhood, go have dinner somewhere. One day I asked him for some lyrics and he gave me that beautiful, beautiful song which, to me, is one of the most simple expressions of fealty.

I put it to music and went up to the hospital to sing it to him. He said, “Thank you,” and the next morning he passed. So I was able to tell him how much his encouragement and inspiration meant to me.

What’s the relationship between Lenny the songwriter/artist and Lenny the guitar player like?

All these pieces are part of the puzzle to me. I’m not a virtuoso. I’m not trained. I don’t read music, unfortunately; if I’d known I would be playing guitar 60 years later I might have learned how to understand those notes so I could pick up a piece of sheet music and understand its theory. [laughs]

But I’ve learned how to be myself. Perhaps that’s encouraged other skills — for one, improvisation, playing by ear, getting a sense of the neck of the guitar and where to go without sometimes knowing what the scale is or what the note is. I’m very instinctual as a player; I think that helped me very much with Patti that I didn’t bring a raft of Chuck Berry licks to her music, that I was able to move with her breathing in a way that was very mobile.

All the songs I’ve learned, all the ones I’ve forgotten, all the musics that I’ve spent time in, trying to figure out how the one-drop in reggae works — all of that kind of funnels into who I am as a musician. I believe there’s a definite connect with dexterity and musical imagination that makes these geniuses apparent. I’m not that. I’m more of a journeyman guitarist, rhythm-based, and when I take a solo I like it to sing like my voice sings during a song, that it’s not just a flurry of notes that have no destination.

I’m an intuitive player. I don’t analyze what I play; I might analyze it later to figure out why this particular chord progression did what it did, but I don’t think about the persona. I think about the music. I think about the space between one note and the next, because that’s music in the present tense. As a musician I just feel like I can draw on 60 years of experience of not knowing where the song is going and trying to figure out my way in it. Sometimes it requires me closing my eyes and imagining what I want to play, and hopefully those notes fall into my hand.

What’s your instrument situation these days?

My main guitar is a 60th Anniversary ’68 Fender Stratocaster that the band gave me on my 60th birthday back in 2006. It’s my main instrument, and what distinguishes it is it only had one pickup, the middle pickup... ’cause I never flicked a switch. I never played the treble. I never played the bridge pickup. I just played the middle pickup, full volume, full tone.

One day I came in and my guitar tech at the time had taken out everything so I just had the one pickup; he cut the pickguard and it was just me and the volume knob. Point and shoot. I call it the Eunichcaster, and really that’s all I need. That’s my main guitar.

Anything else around that might make our mouths water?

I don’t know if they’ll make mouths water, but they quench my thirst. I have a couple of oldies. I have a 1964 Stratocaster that I bought after my 1962 Stratocaster was stolen in Chicago; I love that guitar, and I have a ’68 Les Paul Custom that Cesar Diaz, the great amplifier technician, sold me. When I moved to Pennsylvania he turned out to be a neighbor, and he was always busting my chops — “You think you know how to play the blues? I’ll cut the top two strings off your guitar and we’ll see how well you play!”

And one day he says, “You don’t have a Gibson?!” I had an SG, but he was still like, “You don’t have a Gibson,” so he sold me this guitar. And it’s a really great Gibson because in ’68 they changed something; I’m not enough of an obsessive to know exactly what that is, but I would always play it for special occasions, or an overdub.

And in Adrift I wanted a heavier sound, so I’ve recently started playing it all the time in that band. I always thought Les Pauls would be harder to play than a Stratocaster. Not true; it’s really simple, and it sounds great. That guitar has so much great work to it.

So I’ve gone over to the dark side in the Fender-Gibson wars. I also have a beautiful Mosrite 12-string, and the acoustic guitar that I play is a Collings, which I have to say is the most beautiful acoustic guitar I’ve ever played, just so resonant and such a great sound. I’ve had it for over 20 years now, so it’s really settled into how I play guitar.

Amps and pedals?

I’ve downsized considerably over the years, and actually I’m amazed at how much better I sound. I have a Magnatone 213 from the early ’60s, which has real vibrato and just sounds so silken. I have a ’65 Fender Princeton that I usually use for recording and in my solo show, and if I need more firepower I have a Fender Deluxe reissue with a Celestion in it to give it a little more chest.

For pedals and effects I try to keep it simple, ’cause you can have so many doo-dads. Once I get my sound I’m not gonna change it that much; I might change a guitar here and there if a performance needs something radically different, but my pedalboard is the basic food groups — Fulltone [Fulldrive] 2 for the push, Boss digital delay, a Julie chorus, which I find to be quite shimmery, and then a wild-card spot where you can put a phaser or a weird reverb or something you might need, even though I hardly ever step on it.

I’m really pretty basic as a guitar player, especially live; I find that you’re not going to hear a lot of the subtleties — maybe in the studio you will. But live you stick on the fuzz tone and you’re good to go.

You mention the guitar theft rather casually.

I’ve lost so many guitars over the years. I remember in the mid-’70s we were playing Chicago, the Aragon Ballroom, and I put my ’57 Strat in its case and left it in the dressing room for the crew to pick up, and when we got to the next stop, Detroit, I opened it up and no ’57. The ’62 went; they took our entire equipment truck — again in Chicago, including the T-shirt that I left on my amp the night before.

I lost a beautiful Fender Precision bass in that as well, and my white Les Paul with the Lion of Judah inlay on the headstock. I’ve never seen any of them since. I have to say that my current Strat, the 60th Anniversary one, I would miss that one.

But, y’know, they’re a piece of wood and strings. Instruments are tools. If I’m in a good place and the instrument is not unfriendly, I’ll be able to play the same on it as I might with my own gear. The only thing you can’t replace in my sound is me. [chuckles]

Can we expect another album from you in less than the, whatever 60 or so years it took to get Goin’ Local?

I certainly hope so! [laughs] I have songs that weren’t right for this record that I have in my back pocket, and I’ve written at least three songs since then. So I’m just gonna keep going, because at this point in my creative life I have no expectations. I don’t particularly understand how the music business works or how people acquire what you do anymore. I just like doing this, and at this point I’m free to do what’s in my heart. I’m a slow worker; I don’t think there’s gonna be another record in the next three months, but I do have eight songs with Adrift, which is kind of a different side of my personality.

You’re the master of your domain, as it were.

I’m just having a really good time, because I’ve earned it. I’ve done pretty much what I’ve needed to do, so all this is a bonus beat. It’s so rare to be able to make a career and a financial living in music, and I’m so grateful I’ve been able to keep my head above water. I’m not a rich rock star; my only indulgence is a couple of beautiful guitars and my 1961 Thunderbird.

I’m enjoying this album. I’m enjoying taking it out on the road; at this point I’m just a solo artist, ’cause it’s portable and affordable, so I’m up there like the folk singer I always hoped I would be — before I saw the Beatles. [laughs]

Unlike Slash, Dave Navarro, Zakk Wylde, John 5 and other more outwardly recognizable Los Angeles electric-guitar heroes, Joe Bonamassa can often walk through a bustling music store totally unnoticed.

I once watched him emerge from the vintage department at Guitar Center Hollywood while I was in the middle of judging a blues guitar contest in the main room. Even after he strolled straight through the proceedings to say hi to me for a minute, nobody else involved seemed to notice that there was a world-famous bluesman in their midst.

A better example of Bonamassa’s guitar-store stealth occurred in a Reno guitar shop some years back. Tempted by a pristine ’87 Marshall Silver Jubilee head (“I can’t have too many of those”), Bonamassa asked for the price.

“The guy at the counter said, ‘It’s $4,000,’” says Bonamassa. “I asked him why the price was so high, and he said, ‘Well, Slash used Jubilees for the Guns N’ Roses tone, and now this kid Joe Bonamassa is using them, so it’s $4,000.’”

Earlier this year, Bonamassa announced that he was putting the brakes on gear collecting. After amassing an enviable collection of more than 600 guitars — including numerous original Gibson Les Paul ’bursts, rare Fender Strats in original custom colors, Tommy Bolin’s 1960 “Bolin Burst” Les Paul and a mint 1958 Gibson Korina Flying V he purchased for more than $400,000 — Bonamassa says he’s reached “a saturation point.”

“I’d like to get to the stuff that I own and discover the sounds that I can get out of those pieces, before it just starts piling up and piling up and piling up.”

But throughout the years, one thing has been true about everything he’s bought: He plays it.

“I play what I own,” he explains. “There are no glass cases in my house, and I’m not a huge believer in hanging guitars by their necks. I wouldn’t want to be hung by the scruff of my neck on permanent display, and I think a guitar feels the same way—especially if it’s glued together, like an eight-pound Les Paul.”

According to Bonamassa, it doesn’t matter if you’re holding millions of dollars’ worth of guitars or just 800 bucks’ worth. “The trick with guitar collecting,” he says, “is to ask yourself, ‘If these were worth nothing at the end of the day, would I still love them and play them?’ If the answer is yes, you’re doing all right.

“If your dream guitar is a beat-up 1965 Harmony Rocket that’s been through a fire and a flood and looks like somebody took it into the backyard and shot holes into it with an old pistol, then that’s your dream guitar.”

There are plenty of ways to make a rock song stand out. You can write a killer riff. You can turn up the amps. You can have your singer scream about the hardships of life on the road.

Or, if you’re AC/DC in 1975, you can throw some bagpipes into the middle of the song.

That is exactly what happened with “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll),” the immortal AC/DC anthem that combines the Angus and Malcolm Young’s electric guitar attack with one of the most unlikely sounds ever to appear on a classic rock record.

And in honor of Bagpipe Appreciation Day, it’s worth revisiting the story behind how Bon Scott came to play them on the song, a tale as entertaining as the finished recording.

The bagpipes weren’t part of the song when AC/DC first began working on it. During a studio jam, however, producer George Young — the older brother of Angus and Malcolm Young — remembered that Scott had once been involved with a pipe band and suggested they try adding bagpipes to the song.

Scott agreed.

There was just one problem.

He didn’t play pipes in the band.

“I was the drummer!” Scott reportedly admitted when it became clear that the rest of the band had assumed he knew how to play the instrument.

Rather than abandon the idea, Scott did what any self-respecting rock frontman would do: he went out and bought a set of bagpipes.

The pipes reportedly cost him $479 Australian — about $650 U.S. dollars in 1975 — an eye-watering amount of money at the time. As AC/DC bassist Mark Evans later recalled, that kind of money could have bought “two Strats.” (A new Fender Stratocaster retailed for approximately $325 to $395 at the time.)

Scott then had to work out how to play the things.

The result was one of the most distinctive arrangements in rock. The bagpipes don’t merely appear as a novelty sound pasted over the song. They become part of the song’s architecture, answering Angus Young’s guitar in a brilliantly strange call-and-response passage before the band charges back into the main riff.

It was also, unsurprisingly, a nightmare to reproduce live.

The bagpipes’ drone is fixed to a particular pitch, meaning the rest of the band had to tune around them. According to Evans, AC/DC played the song live only around 30 times, and the bagpipes themselves were eventually destroyed after Scott left them at the edge of a stage and fans got hold of them.

The song’s famous bagpipe part also became increasingly inseparable from Scott himself. After his death in 1980, Brian Johnson chose not to sing “It’s a Long Way to the Top” out of respect for his predecessor.

Angus Young later recalled that the song’s title came from a note Bon Scott had scribbled in a book.

“And then Bon had that little scribble on the back of his book,” Young said. “‘It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll,’ which said it all, you know, especially for a band like us.”

The quote gets to the heart of what made the song work. Beneath the bagpipes, the riff and the swagger, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is about the grind of trying to make it as a rock band — the endless travel, the bad food, the cheap hotels and the hard work required to reach the top.

The irony is that AC/DC found a way to make that long road even stranger by adding bagpipes to a hard-rock song — and having a drummer learn to play them.

David Bowie worked with many guitarists throughout his long career, from Mick Ronson to Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew and Reeves Gabrels. But there was one player he returned to several times, from the 1970s to the final years of his life: Earl Slick.

What did the Brooklyn-born guitarist give him that no other player did?

“I have theories about that,” Slick tells Guitar Player via Zoom, from the kitchen of his home in New York City, while smoking a morning cigarette and opening a bottle of Gatorade. “One of the things was that, when it came down to needing that rock and roll guitar player, that was always me or Mick. And Mick left us a long time ago.” (Ronson died in 1993.)

As for the others?

“All those guys are wonderful,” Slick says. “But none of them are rock players. So he came back to me for that. That’s when I got called in.”

Earl Slick was not a constant in David Bowie’s universe. Few were. But the guitarist — born Frank Medeloni nearly 73 years ago — was a mainstay. He arrived in 1974, following the demise of the Spiders From Mars and Ronson’s exit, to perform on Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour. He played on the Young Americans and Station to Station albums soon after, then returned in 1983 for the Serious Moonlight Tour as a last-minute replacement for Stevie Ray Vaughan, who famously lent his electric guitar stylings to Let’s Dance, Bowie’s 1983 commercial smash.

Nearly 20 years would pass before Slick came back once again on the tour for Bowie’s 2002 album, Heathen. That led to him working on its follow-up, Reality, and performing on the subsequent A Reality Tour, a celebrated groundbreaking global stint that was the biggest and longest of Bowie’s career.

It was there that he witnessed Bowie’s heart attack on June 23, 2004 while onstage in Prague, along with his subsequent decline.

“It was amazing how he went from looking great to looking pretty ill — like, overnight,” Slick says. “We were just a month shy of a year being out.”

Bowie recovered, but he canceled the remaining shows and never toured again. Slick returned for his penultimate album, 2013's The Next Day, making him the only guitarist to have worked with Bowie over such an extended range of the performer's career.

The music from Slick’s latter tenures with Bowie is generously chronicled on the upcoming box set David Bowie 6. I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002–2016), due out September 12. It’s the latest and, theoretically, last in a series of massive completist collections, and features Bowie's final albums, including Reality and The Next Day, as well as the A Reality Tour live album and a previously unreleased recording from the 2002 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Also included is “Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary),” a track from Slick’s 2003 solo album, Zig Zag. Co-written with and featuring Bowie, it hit the Top 10 on several U.K. charts when it was re-released there last year.

It all serves to underscore the vital position Slick held with Bowie during the final era of his career, making this an apt time for him to weigh in on his impactful years with the chameleon of rock.

Was there much difference being Bowie’s “rock” guitarist compared to other things you’ve done?

Well, with David I did have to have a pedalboard to cover 40 years of recordings or whatever. And I hate pedals, especially overdrive pedals. But you needed certain things. You definitely needed two delay pedals just to cover “Heroes,” just to get it bouncing all over the place.

But I got a lot of free rein from David. I could literally change up bits and bobs during a show, and he liked it, actually. If you look through the concert videos, you’ll see really weird arrangements of songs and stuff. ’Cause you get bored if it’s the same song every night, so sometimes you change things up, and he liked that I did that. I had a lot of freedom to just ad lib, everywhere.

You’d been out of the Bowie orbit for about 15 years when he reached out to you around 2002. How did that come about?

Omigod. Reeves had left and David was looking for a guitar player, so his people tracked me down through a web site. It was called Slick-something-or-other, and it had all these old demos we kept putting out. That’s how he found me.

The webmaster called and said, “I just got this email. It’s a New York number and they seem to really want to get in touch with you.” He said it was from Isolar, and I said, “I know exactly who that is. It’s David.” [Isolar was the name for pair of Bowie’s tours in 1976 and 1978.]

The A Reality Tour was Bowie’s last and, many think, one of his best. What was your experience with it?

That was a fun record to play live, especially the rockers — the title track and stuff. It was the best touring band I ever played in with David. The combination of people — it was absolutely drama free, and I’ve never seen him that relaxed and happy on a tour, ever.

It was also the tour that was notoriously ended by his health issues. What do you recall from that Prague date when he had his heart attack?

It was a really weird gig. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was hotter than hell in the place, and I could see he was having a hard time hitting some notes. I thought he was just baked. We were all baked.

I think we were doing “The Jean Genie,” and he goes to me, “Keep vamping, just jam” — this, while he’s having a heart attack. Then he started grabbing his chest and the tour managers came over and dragged him off.

A few minutes later, he comes back and joins us. He lasted about a measure or two and then he walked off. They said that he had a blocked nerve, whatever that is, and that diagnosis was wrong.

We did the Hurricane Festival in Germany a couple days later; I went over to talk to him, and he was feeling horrible. We did the whole show and then we got a phone call saying, “Sit tight for a couple of days. David needs to rest. We’re gonna take a few days off.”

So we just hung out in Hamburg. Nobody’s saying anything to us.

And then we get phone calls saying, “Guys, we’re done. You gotta go home.” We didn’t get an explanation; we all knew he was probably getting some kind of surgery, but we weren’t getting any details about it.

When we did “Heroes” at the Hurricane Festival, I swear to God it’s one of the best vocal performances he ever did of it. Two hours later, probably, he was in the hospital.

Was the idea of him playing live again ever broached?

It was. We were working on The Next Day; just as I finished up my work on the track “Set the World on Fire.” We were listening back in the control room and he looks at me and goes, “This would just kick ass live.” I looked at him ready to say something, and he goes, “Don’t even think about it.” [laughs]

That was the discussion we had about going on tour again. That was the whole discussion, and he said, “Don’t think about it.” I could see it in his eyes. I’d been with him so long, I knew he was dead serious. He ain’t going nowhere.

It was disappointing, because I really thought we would have at least one good tour left in us. This was the summer of 2013, so it’s possible that he might’ve been ill already, with the cancer. We’ll never know, but I think it’s a possibility.

The Next Day was another kind of odd reconnection, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was typical David. He started making that record around 2011, I think, and everybody who was brought in had to sign an NDA. I’m talking to some of the guys on the phone and nobody says a word.

In the meantime, this friend of mine, a surgeon, he built a car, a Cobra, and I had this blues gig I was doing near his house in Montclair, New Jersey. I go visit and he says, “Let’s go for a ride in the Cobra before we go to the gig.”

We drove for a little bit, and then the car started to do weird shit, like sputtering and stalling out. So he stops the car and two seconds later a big flame comes out of the engine. We call 911 and the fire department comes, and the cops come, and there’s TV. I guess one of the reporters figured out I was in the car and the word gets out on the Internet.

The next day I get a text from Bowie: “Oh God, I saw this accident. Are you okay?” I write back, “Yeah, I’m great, I’m fine. How are you?” “Good.” Then I get a few more messages over the course of the next day or two, like, “How you doin’? What have you been up to lately?” This is not a typical thing with him.

So finally I’m like, “Okay, are you trying to get to a point? What is it?” And he was, “Well, we’re making this record, and I need you to come in for a week or so and work on it.”

I swear to God, if we hadn’t blown up the car, I might not have been on that record. That’s just him: It’s out of sight, out of mind sometimes, and then it’s, “Wait a minute — Slicky could do this or that.”

Was there a standard operating procedure when you worked together?

We’d sit there and brainstorm, especially on the overdub bits. Both of us always like to have some kind of melodic lick in there somewhere, some signature in the song, and we’d just knock ideas around.

Like the lick on “Valentine’s Day,” the signature lick at the beginning, we sat there and bounced it around for about 10 or 15 minutes and that lick popped out and there it was. A lot of that kind of stuff was done on the fly; we never spent lots of time. As soon as we heard something that clicked, that was it. That’s the best stuff, when it just comes out from outer space or something.

What is your sense of the late-period Bowie compared to your previous years with him?

Well, back in the early days — this not speaking out of school, ’cause it’s pretty well known — a lot of drugs were involved, and a lot of cocaine. Between the drugs and him having management problems and all that, he was on another planet.

And then as the years went on he changed, like we all do. In the 2000s a sense of humor was there that was never there in the early days. He was funnier than hell, and he was more approachable. He turned into... I wouldn’t say a different person, but the real him came out.

How did you approach guitar choices for your work with Bowie?

I love Telecasters. I’ve always been a Tele player. But for the Heathen tour he said, “We do need a humbucker on some of this,” so I grabbed some Les Pauls, and by the A Reality Tour I was using pretty much my Les Pauls most of the show. I don’t think I used my Teles at all on that. I did have a Strat I used for a few things, but most of it was Les Paul.

Having “Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary)” on the box set is a nice postscript, especially after its success last year in the U.K.

That’s a weird one. I was living in Portland [circa 2002], and I just started to toodle around with my guitar, and all of a sudden I started coming up with stuff and recording bits and pieces. I ended up with a lot of them, so I called up Mark Plati and said, “When you get some time maybe we can cut an instrumental record. I got some good ideas.”

I didn’t realize he was in the studio when I called him. David was there, and David says, “Earl, I heard Mark say you guys were gonna do some recording. Maybe I’ll play some tambourine or something. Maybe I’ll even sing one, or we can write one.”

So I sent him a half-dozen bits and he picked the one that eventually turned into “Isn’t It Evening.” We recorded it, and we released it during the A Reality Tour, which turned out to be a bad idea, because my record got buried in there.

So I just sat with that track for years and thought, One of these days, I’ll release it as a single. Then Penguin Books approached me about the memoir [Slick’s recently published Guitar: Life and Music with David Bowie, John Lennon and Rock and Roll’s Greatest Heroes]. I said, “Ah, that’s the time to do it!”

So we rearranged it and it came out about two months after the book. It got on the charts and we had a hit single. Funny how timing works. And I’m really glad it’s on the box set, because it turned out to be his last hit.

It was the song that made Simon & Garfunkel musical legends. Yet if it hadn’t been for the foresight of a producer — and the work of a handful of session musicians — we might never have heard of the duo.

Written by a 21-year-old Paul Simon, the original bare-bones acoustic guitar version of “The Sounds of Silence” was one of the earliest songs of his career. The darkness greeted in its opening line was literal.

“I wrote it in the bathroom in my parent’s house because the room was tiled, so there was an echo,” Simon told Uncut. “I used to turn the lights off and leave the water running. It was like white noise.”

Simon knew “The Sounds of Silence” was a step up from anything he’d composed before. “My brother says it was amazing that I wrote it, because everything I’d written before that was way below it in quality.

“I just took it as, ‘That’s a good one, I could close my act with this one.’”

On the strength of the song alone, Simon & Garfunkel secured a recording contract with Columbia Records. The duo recorded their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., in 1964 under the watchful eye of producer Tom Wilson, who had recently produced Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’.

The album featured the song under the slightly altered title “The Sounds of Silence,” but when Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was released, it went nowhere. The commercial failure led to the duo’s untimely split. Simon headed to London, immersing himself in the city’s burgeoning folk-rock scene, while Garfunkel returned to his college studies.

Back in the U.S., folk-rock was gaining traction. Bob Dylan was leading the way, while the Byrds’ jangly guitar interpretation of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” gave the genre an additional boost by topping the U.S. charts. As folk-rock swept the nation, “The Sounds of Silence” began receiving marginal airplay on some East Coast college radio stations.

Wilson became aware of the song’s growing popularity. Having recently produced Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, an album that saw Dylan introduce electric instruments into his music and expand his audience in the process, Wilson believed “The Sounds of Silence” could achieve a similar result if it were augmented with electric instruments and drums.

Without informing Simon & Garfunkel, he decided to overdub the original recording with bass, drums and electric guitars. Among the musicians he called was session guitarist Al Gorgoni, who had already worked with Dylan and would go on to appear on countless recordings by some of the biggest names in popular music.

“I was one of the first-call players, so we got called for almost everything,” Gorgoni tells Guitar Player today. “Tom Wilson was a very successful producer, but not a hands-on producer. What he did was call the right people and turn them loose in the studio. In this case, it was to add a rhythm section to the two guys singing with a guitar accompaniment.”

Wilson also brought in Dylan session drummer Bobby Gregg, bassist Bob Bushnell and second guitarist Vinnie Bell. Having booked the studio for a three-hour block, the four musicians set up their gear and prepared to record.

Gorgoni armed himself with a Gibson L-5 and an Ampeg amp. Bell, meanwhile, had his own preferred setup, which Gorgoni says he regularly arranged as the go-to rig for sessions in the various studios where they worked.

With Wilson at the helm and Roy Halee engineering, tracking began. But the session quickly proved difficult. Because the original recording had no drums and had not been recorded to a click track, its tempo was inconsistent, repeatedly faltering throughout the song.

“It was chaotic,” Gorgoni reveals. “We had to match the recording. They even tried using echo, but that didn’t disguise the uneven tempo.”

The guitarist recalls that Wilson’s hands-off method meant the musicians were left to their own devices.

“There was no arranger or any real guidance for the players from the booth, either. So they kept playing the track until we made up our parts. They made lots of takes. Eventually they chose the one that became the hit.”

Released as a single in September 1965, the revamped version of “The Sounds of Silence” aligned perfectly with the folk-rock sound dominating the airwaves. The new mix connected with a wider audience, and the single slowly began its ascent up the American charts, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on January 1, 1966. The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” knocked it out the following week, but the song returned to number one on January 22.

Simon, still living in London, knew none of this. The first he heard about the new version was when he picked up a copy of the music trade magazine Cashbox. Reportedly, when he heard what Wilson had done to his song, he was enraged.

“I’m not surprised he didn’t like it,” Gorgoni says. “The recording is crude in my view, but it proves the power of a song. Paul is a great songwriter and also an excellent guitar player. And he was part of the new breed of singer-songwriters who were writing more sophisticated lyrics as the pop music scene was evolving.”

Soon afterward, Simon returned from London and reunited with Garfunkel. At the request of their record label, the duo quickly recorded an album titled Sounds of Silence to capitalize on the single’s momentum.

The strategy worked. The album produced two more Top 10 U.S. hits, “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock.” Simon & Garfunkel’s career was back on track.

Over the years, Simon has acknowledged how those three hours Wilson and the musicians labored in the studio transformed not only the song but his life. Had the musicians not managed to build a new arrangement around its uneven tempo, Simon & Garfunkel might never have made their mark on popular music.

“I’m sure he and Art were happy to have such a great career,” Gorgoni says. “And it was launched by that recording.”

Delaney Bramlett had plenty of famous musical friends, including George Harrison and Eric Clapton. But few were closer to him than Duane Allman.

The Allman Brothers Band guitarist befriended Bramlett in the late 1960s and became a member of the extended musical family surrounding Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. Allman played on several of the group’s recordings, and in 1970, he gave Bramlett a beautiful three-tone sunburst 1961 Fender Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard.

As Bramlett told Guitar Player, the gift was a remarkably personal gesture from a friend who had become like family.

“Duane had left the Allman Brothers to tour with my band,” Bramlett told the magazine in its March 1996 issue. “Sometimes he’d play my goldtop, and most of the time I’d play his Strat ’cause I liked it so much. We were gigging in New York, and he had to go to Macon for some reason. My brother found the Strat in his room with a note he left: ‘To Delaney, my best friend. Wear it in good health.’”

Bramlett said the last time he saw Allman was at the funeral of bluesman King Curtis, who had died in August 1971. Allman died just over two months later, on October 29, while Bramlett was on the road in western Oregon.

“My brother got a call that Duane had got killed,” Bramlett recalled. “He wouldn’t tell me till I got through the show. So the next thing I knew I was at Duane’s funeral.”

The gift was especially generous considering that Bramlett had once refused to return a guitar that Allman desperately wanted back: the first electric guitar he had ever owned.

In 1961, Allman’s mother bought him a cherry-red double-cutaway 1959 Gibson Les Paul Junior to stop him from constantly borrowing his brother Gregg’s Teisco Silvertone. Allman eventually pawned the Gibson. Sometime later, Bramlett acquired an electric guitar that sounded suspiciously like the one Allman had lost.

“I called Duane to brag about it, and he said, ‘Does it have a big scrape across the back?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘That was my first electric guitar. I pawned it and forgot where. Can I have it back?’ And I said, ‘No way. This is a real good ’un.’”

Bramlett’s recollection of his guitars wasn’t always entirely accurate. In the same Guitar Player interview, he told a story about another famous instrument in his collection: a rare 1913 Gibson Style O archtop that had previously belonged to Eric Clapton and George Harrison.

According to Bramlett, he and Clapton discovered the guitar while they were touring in support of Clapton’s debut solo album.

“We used to keep our eyes peeled for guitars,” Bramlett said. “We found this neck stickin’ out of a Dumpster, grabbed it out, and there it was. One of the real rare ones. It had a broken neck, but other than that, it was a beauty.”

The story, however, doesn’t line up with the guitar’s documented history.

Clapton had acquired the 1913 Gibson by 1968, and he and Harrison used it during the songwriting sessions that produced some of their most important work. The guitar is associated with “Badge,” the Clapton-Harrison co-write that appeared on Cream’s final album, Goodbye, as well as “Here Comes the Sun” and other songs Clapton and Harrison composed in the late 1960s. Clapton later passed the guitar to Bramlett around 1970.

The instrument eventually became known as “Pattie,” a nod to Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s former wife who later married Clapton. The guitar was listed for nearly $1 million on Reverb in May 2025 before being offered by Heritage Auctions in November of that year, where it failed to sell.

Bramlett’s collection grew to include other famous guitars, including Harrison’s 1968 Rosewood Telecaster, which is now back with Harrison’s estate. He sold Allman’s Les Paul Junior in 1999, and many of Bramlett’s remaining guitars were sold off following his death in 2008. While Bramlett may have been a little loose with the details of how he acquired one of the most historically significant guitars he ever owned, there’s no question that he was the keeper of some extraordinary instruments.

When Zakk Wylde joined Ozzy Osbourne’s band, he had a tall order to fill: living up to the legacy of Osbourne’s previous guitarists Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee, as well as Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.

Although he was barely 20 at the time, Wylde was up for the challenge. His bravado led to 1987’s No Rest for the Wicked, a bona fide metal masterpiece, loaded with touches of glam-meets-doom. The album was on-point for the 1980s.

“Going into it, I felt like I was standing where my heroes stood,” Wylde tells Guitar Player. “I came in after Jake and Randy, so — kind of like in baseball — I felt like I was the new catcher. And being a Sabbath freak, and loving all the stuff with Randy and Jake, it felt like I was wearing the Yankee pinstripes, so to speak.”

But paying homage to Sabbath and Ozzy’s 1980s solo work wasn’t going to cut it for the next album, 1991’s No More Tears. By the early ’90s, guitar music was changing, and Wylde knew that he and the music he made with Ozzy needed to change with it.

Which was just fine by Wylde, who had been listening to plenty of country and southern-tinged rock, like the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He would inject those sounds into his guitar work on No More Tears.

And perhaps no song demonstrates it better than “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” a song that was and remains Ozzy Osbourne’s only top-40 hit as a solo artist.

“It’s like learning about foods from different countries and then mixing little parts of each into some new recipe,” Wylde says, explaining his meld of southern rock and metal. “The next thing you know, it’s like, ‘Wow, this tastes amazing! What is this?’”

Wylde boils the essence of “Mama, I’m Coming Home” down to his Ozzy’s shared chemistry, as well as the song’s lyrics, which were written by Motörhead bassist Lemmy Kilmister. As the story goes, Ozzy gave Lemmy a tape with of demos and expected to hear back from him in about a week. The bassist returned with lyrics for three of the songs within just hours. One of those was “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”

As Ozzy explained in the liner notes for his 1997 compilation, The Ozzman Cometh, the tune’s melody had been in his head for some time.

“I had been walking around with the melody in my head for a couple of years but never got a chance to finish it until I was working with Zakk on the No More Tears album,” he wrote. “At that time Zakk and I were doing a lot of writing on the piano.”

As for the song’s title? “‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ was always something I’d say on the phone to my wife near the end of a tour.”

It’s not hard to see why Ozzy favored the song, with its strong melody and lyrics and Wylde’s mix of pretty acoustic and heavy electric guitar. Ozzy loved the tune so much that he included it in his final solo set at his and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell concert. It was the only song in his solo set that didn’t come from 1980’s The Blizzard of Ozz.

Ozzy clearly wasn’t alone in his affection for “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” The song has been covered by everyone from Carrie Underwood to Jelly Roll. Asked why he thinks the song resonates so strongly with people, Wylde shrugs.

“I think it’s just because it’s a ballad. That’s it right there.”

No More Tears, and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” specifically, saw you incorporating a diverse range of styles into your playing. How did that come about?

I used to sit up in front of the tour bus, and we’d be listening to the Eagles and Neil Young all night. So I was listening to that as we were going into the second album, No More Tears, and I started listening to more Allman Brothers, which was always around when I was growing up.

Southern rock was a big influence on your playing around that time.

Yeah. So I started getting into the Allmans, Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker and Molly Hatchet. I was listening to a lot of that when we were working on No More Tears, and that’s where a lot of the chicken-pickin’ stuff that came from. I was also into Albert Lee, who was like the first Yngwie. [laughs]

So the intro to “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” that’s all Skynyrd, Allmans, Albert Lee and country bends.So that was creeping into the music.

It’s funny, because at Back to the Beginning, Oz was like, “Zakky, we should do some writing.” He goes, “I really liked it when you started going through your Allman Brothers phase because it was heavy, but also melodic. It was just bashing all the time. We should do some more stuff like that.” So when I look back on that record, that’s pretty much where my head was at.

Can you remember what it was like for you and Ozzy as you were initially working “Mama, I’m Coming Home” out?

Me and [Wylde’s wife] Barb had an apartment in Burbank on Case Avenue, near a drug rehab. I think it was called Cry for Help, and it was across the street from this squatter's house It was a complete shoot and stab area, if you know what I mean. [laughs]

That’s where Ozzy and I wrote it, jamming on piano. I remember driving Ozzy over there in my car. I pulled into the driveway, and it was like rusted-out cars on cinderblocks, the grass was four feet high, the windows were smashed in, shutters were crooked, and there was a couch sitting on the front lawn with springs hanging out. [laughs]

I remember as we pulled into the driveway, Oz looked at me terrified, and was like, “Sharon’s paying you, isn’t she?” [laughs] And I go, “Oz, it’s a lot nicer on the inside!”

I couldn’t stop laughing. And he was looking at me, going, “Are you fucking with me?! Please tell me you’re fucking with me. At my age, my heart can’t handle things like this.” [laughs]

So we jammed on the piano, and Ozzy had that melody. I don’t know if it was just his love for the Beatles, but if you listen to those Sabbath records and everything he did with Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee, but Ozzy is just the king of melody.

Once you two had the song worked out, how did Lemmy enter the picture with the lyrics?

Oz just called him up in the afternoon: “Lemmy, can you write some lyrics?” And three hours later, Lemmy had three different sets of lyrics. [laughs] He thought it was gonna take Lemmy a couple of days just to get something that he was happy with. But Lemmy just went, “Here, I’ve got a bunch of lyrics for you right here.”.

When it came time to record “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” how did that go down?

Obviously, the solo is just my love for the Eagles — Joe Walsh and Don Felder. Even the lick at the end, that’s from “Hotel California.” It’s a Joe Walsh lick.

But as far as the rest of it goes, it’s all layered guitars, like what Jimmy Page did. It’s the Jimmy Page guitar army! [laughs]

How did you approach the acoustic opening portion of “Mama, I’m Coming Home?”

The intro is a 12-string and a six-string, and I’m doing octaves as well. So there’s actually three guitars going on there at the same time, That one came out really pretty.

It is pretty. And then it gets very heavy thereafter.

Yeah. Just before the second chorus, where Ozzy sings “I’ve seen your face a hundred times,” we have this lead in to it that goes dun, dun, dun— that’s complete Eagles right there. [laughs] It’s just a harmony line, so that’s a complete Don Felder and Joe Walsh kind of thing. And like I said before, I was learning from, and listening to all those bands, and digesting it to where it was in my DNA.

What guitars and amps did you use while recording “Mama, I’m Coming Home?”

I had my Les Pauls: I probably used the Grail, the Rebel, or my guitar with the red bull’s eye. It was one of those. For amps, it was the Marshall JCM800s, you know, the 100-watt heads, the 2203s, with 6550 Groove Tubes.

For the acoustic intro, I didn’t have the acoustics I use now, which are the Gibson Dove and the Wylde Audio acoustics. We could have rented a six or 12-string.

“Mama, I’m Coming Home” must have meant a lot to Ozzy, as it was the only solo song he chose to sing at Back to the Beginning that wasn’t from The Blizzard of Ozz record.

It was always part of the set. I remember when we played it back for the first time after it was done, we were all like, “Wow!” We were all excited about it. Yeah, Oz liked it.

I just look at when we did that song as a magical time. The second album, No More Tears, was a magical time for me, because I look back on listening to the Eagles, the Allmans, Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, Molly Hatchet, and all that stuff that was sneaking into my playing. And obviously, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” was a byproduct of that.

Oz loved all that stuff, too. Like when we’d be listening to “Hotel California,” or whatever, Oz would go, “God, this is so good. I remember when this first came out,” and he be telling me about all the time Sabbath did a show with Skynyrd or the Eagles. [Black Sabbath and the Eagles performed at the California Jam on April 6, 1974, along with a host of other popular groups of the day.] He would be like, “Wow, that was pretty insane!” And if you look at those lineups, it was pretty crazy. But anyway, I look back on that all as just a magical time, man.

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.”

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.