Keith Richards is the king of putdowns. Bruce Springsteen? “To me, it’s pretentious,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. Prince? “To me, it’s kid stuff.” Guns N’ Roses? “I admire their guts. But too much posing.”

But no fellow rocker has earned the Telecaster-toting guitarist’s ire as much as Elton John. It’s bad enough that Richards has taken every opportunity to refer to John in interviews by his homely birth name, Reginald Dwight — he’s also leveled some of his harshest snipes at the piano-playing rocker. In response, Elton — a musician every bit as bitchy as Keef — has given back in equal measure.

To be fair, there’s nothing unusual about feuds between rockers. They all have egos — and opinions. Even Carlos Santana, known for his beneficent and spiritual demeanor, has a dark streak. Remember when he famously put down Kiss in 2000, launching a years-long fight between the two men?

But Keith and Elton’s spat has been among the longest-running, and certainly most enjoyable to watch, over the years.

Apparently it began at a 1975 Rolling Stones concert in Fort Collins, Colorado, during the group’s Tour of the Americas ’75. It was the band’s first road show with Ronnie Wood, who replaced Mick Taylor following his comparatively brief stint in the band. With no new album to announce — It’s Only Rock ’N Roll had come out more than seven months earlier — the band was simply trying out its new lineup and giving fans more of what they wanted.

Unfortunately, everyone got a little too much at the July 20 show in Fort Collins at Hughes Stadium. Midway through the show, the Stones brought Elton onstage to play piano and sing along as they performed their hit “Honky Tonk Women.” Introduced by Mick Jagger as “Reg from Watford,” Elton appeared onstage wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers windbreaker and a cowboy hat.

He performed “Honky Tonk Women,” then played along on another 10 songs. The Stones’ keyboardists, Billy Preston and Ian Stewart, were put off by his endless noodling. The band struggled to get him to leave, and even the audience began to boo.

As John explained in his autobiography, Rocketman, his behavior was all down to the effects of cocaine, which was quickly becoming everyone’s drug of choice in the 1970s.

“Cocaine gave me too much confidence for my own good,” he wrote. “If I hadn’t been coked out of my head when the Rolling Stones turned up in Colorado and asked me to come onstage with them, I might have just performed ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ waved to the crowd and made my exit. Instead, I decided it was going so well, I’d stay on and jam along to the rest of their set, without first taking the precaution of asking the Stones if they wanted an auxiliary keyboard player.”

“For a while, I thought Keith Richards kept staring at me because he was awestruck by the brilliance of my improvised contributions to their oeuvre. After a few songs, it finally penetrated my brain that the expression on his face wasn’t really suggestive of profound musical appreciation. I quickly scuttled off, noting as I went that Keith was still staring at me in a manner that suggested we’d be discussing this later, and decided it might be best if I didn’t hang around for the after-show party.”

Years later, Richards was still fuming. Asked in that same Rolling Stone article above what he thought of Elton’s then-current top-10 single, “I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That,” he replied, “Lovely bloke, but posing.”

Elton took the sniping in stride. But it was Richards’ next zinger that got under his skin.

When Elton’s friend Princess Diana died in 1997, he reframed his 1973 hit “Candle in the Wind,” an ode to Marilyn Monroe, as a tribute to the late member of the royal family.

Keith stuck the knife in. “Songs for Dead Blondes,” he declared of the two tunes in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that October. “I’d find it difficult to ride on the back of something like that myself, but Reg is showbiz.”

Elton responded in kind in an interview with The Daily News that same month.

“I’m glad I’ve given up drugs and alcohol,” he griped. “It would be awful to be like Keith Richards. He’s pathetic, poor thing. It’s like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go onstage and look young.

“I have great respect for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown Keith out 15 years ago. … I just think he’s an asshole and I have for a long time.”

Elton was apparently still seething in 2011 when he took aim at Richards’ new autobiography, Life, in which the guitarist revealed some details about Mick Jagger’s anatomy that would be better left unsaid.

“I was a bit put off by hearing about the bit about Mick Jagger’s penis,” Elton huffed. “If I said that [John’s songwriting partner] Bernie Taupin was a miserable twat and had a small penis, he’d probably never talk to me again. It’s like, why do that?”

With no end in sight to the feud, Ronnie Wood intervened to get the two men to call a truce. When Keef and Elton showed up for the GQ Awards in London on September 8, 2015, relations were cordial enough for them to pose for a photo together.

Apparently, all was forgiven on both sides when Elton joined the Stones for a guest appearance on the tracks “Get Close” and “Live by the Sword” from their 2023 album, Hackney Diamonds. John was thrilled to finally become part of the Rolling Stones family, alongside guests that included Paul McCartney.

But Keith couldn’t help using the collaboration for a bit of self-aggrandizement, noting that it was Elton — not the Stones — who was basking in reflected glory.

“Everyone’s a fan of the Rolling Stones. Just like Paul, Elton was like, ‘I just fucking played with the Rolling Stones.’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s no doubt you've heard Brent Mason play guitar. He’s appeared on records by Alan Jackson, Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, Brooks & Dunn, Vince Gill and Trisha Yearwood, as well as hundreds of others. His work has been heard in dozens of movies, including Bridget Jones's Diary, A Few Good Men and The Thing Called Love, as well as on such TV shows as Friends, Becker and King of the Hill.

His guitar playing have even appeared during commercial breaks for products like Budweiser, Country Time Lemonade, Dodge Trucks, Revlon and countless others. To top it off, he’s in both the Musician’s Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame Nashville Cats.

Since arriving in Nashville in the early 1980s, Mason has put his impeccable chops and uncanny versatility to ubiquitous use, making the multiple-award winner Music City's first-call picker and one of the most recorded guitarists in history.

Why have so many top-flight stars and producers called upon Mason's services?

“Man, I wish I could tell you,” he says with a laugh. “Then I could bottle it and sell it.”

Mason launches into a story about how, several years ago, he heard some fine guitar playing while relaxing on his back deck.

“My neighbor was cranking tunes next door, and the music was coming out through his opened windows,” he says. “This song by Alabama came on, and man, the guitar solo was hot! Some guy was playing a Tele and doing three-part harmonies. I was like, ‘Wow, that guy’s good.’

“Then it dawned on me: Wait a minute. That’s me! I sound amazing!

“I’ve done so many sessions, I forget ‘em sometimes.”

Pausing a moment to reflect, Mason offers this assessment of his popularity among artists and producers.

“I think it all comes down to timing, like so many things,” he says. “I was the right player at the right time when I hit Nashville”

He chuckles. “Of course, I had to wait a little while for people to realize that, but once they did get an earful of what I could do, it sounded right to them.”

What sounded right to so many Nashville record makers was the fact that Mason, along with cohorts like bassist Glenn Worf and drummer Lonnie Wilson, didn't fit in with the pristine, direct-recorded sound that had become de rigueur on country-oriented albums during much of the 1980s.

“They were doing a lot of things digitally, and they had stopped using amps on records,” Mason recalls. “You plug straight into the board, and that takes the edge off the guitar.

“I don't want to sound derogatory, but they were making records sound a little fluffy and sweet—a little too polite.

“So what we did was try to bring in more of a raucous sound, like you just walked into a club and were hearing a band tear it up. I'd go to sessions with an old, smoky amp, and I brought the roadhouse with me. That sounded pretty good with Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson and all the others.”

(For the record, it was his blazing solo on Jackson's “I Don't Even Know Your Name” that made Nashville sit up and ask, “Who the hell is Brent Mason?” )

Mason's path to session-king status began early, while growing up in Grover Hill, Ohio, “It was farmland in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “The nearest city was Fort Wayne, Indiana.” He picked up the guitar at the age of five and taught himself to play by listening to records by Merle Haggard, Chet Atkins and Buck Owens. When Mason's father, a keen country music fan, brought home a copy of Jerry Reed's Nashville Underground, the effect it had on his young son was profound.

“Jerry was unbelievable,” Mason enthuses. “Such command of the guitar. I was blown away. I studied him like you wouldn't believe, just copying every lick he played. He became a real idol of mine’

Shunning lessons, Mason continued his private study course into his teens, copying guitar parts off records and studying album sleeves for credits.

“I committed everything to memory,” he says. “I was more impressed with the session guys than the actual stars on the front cover. I listened to what Reggie Young was doing,” he says, referring to the guitarist heard on tracks by everyone from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash to Willie Nelson. “I picked apart his licks.

“And Roy Nichols, who played with Merle — I was listening to him. I was already grooming myself to be a session player. I just wanted to come to Nashville, where it was like a melting pot of everything. I wasn't sure how I was going to go about it, but I wanted to get into the business somehow.”

Mason arrived in Nashville after completing high school. Armed with his first electric guitar, a Hagstrom, he set out on his mission to infiltrate the studio session scene.

“It’s like a club nobody invites you to join,” he observes. “You have to crash your way in.”

With doors not exactly swinging open, Mason hit the nightclubs, landing a steady gig with a local Top 40 outfit, the Don Kelley Band.

“I figured I stood a good chance of getting noticed if people saw me playing live,” Mason explains. “This went on for a few years.”

During this time, he sidelined his Hagstrom for a 1968 Telecaster that he purchased for $300 at Hewgley’s Music Shop just outside of Nashville.

“I really wanted a Les Paul and a Tele, but I couldn't afford both,” he explains. “So I stuck a mini humbucker in the neck position and had two single-coils in the middle and bridge. It worked really well. I played that guitar for years.”

Just when it seemed as if Mason's club tenure would continue indefinitely, opportunity came knocking in the most unexpected of ways. Chet Atkins, who was working on a record called Stay Tuned, on which he played alongside other guitar greats, walked into a club with his buddy George Benson. The two were suitably impressed by Mason's playing, and after the set Atkins approached the unknown guitarist and asked him if he'd like to play on song that would also feature Mark Knopfler.

“It was crazy,” Mason says with a laugh. “I was looking at my calendar book and trying to act cool, like, ‘Yeah, I think I could fit that in’ Meanwhile, I'm flipping out. It was like, ‘Are you kidding? This can't be happening!’”

Mason's lively playing on the jazz-rock “Some Leather and Lace” neatly complemented the nimble lines of Atkins and Knopfler, and it was the first real signal to Nashville's munic elite that an exciting new talent was in their midst.

But the guitarist had another trick up his sleeve: his songwriting. “I was recording demos of my songs, which people liked, but they all said the same thing ‘Hey, who's playing guitar on that?’” he recalls. “Pretty soon, people started asking me to play on their records.”

The floodgates opened in a major way after Keith Whitley not only decided to record one of Mason's originals, “Heartbreak Highway.” but also asked the guitarist to play on the track. (Sadly, the cut appeared on Whitley's 1989 album, I Wonder De You Think of Me, which was released three months after his alcohol-related death.)

Starting in the early 1990s, country music began to dominate the Billboard charts, and for the next couple of decades Mason was living the studio life that he had dreamed about as a teenager.

“Every room in town was booked night and day,” he says. “I was working all the time. One week I'd do a Tim McGraw album, another week I'd have Faith Hill, and then the next week I'd be working with Lee Ann Womack. Then it would be Alan Jackson or Brooks & Dunn, and then it'd be Reba McEntire.

“It went like that for years. I used to read about how things were with the Wrecking Crew back in the States. We were experiencing the same kind of thing.”

So back to that first question about what it takes to have Brent Mason’s success. It might have something to do with listening as much as — and as well as — you play.

“You gotta watch out when you go in there,” he told Guitar World earlier this year. “Studio musicians like to play a song, jam and get loosened up to check and see if everything is clicking. But sometimes you can play too much.

“You’ve really gotta listen to the vocalist and mark down on your chart where the fields go, make sure you’re off the vocal point and make sure you understand what the artist wants.”

It’s as simple as asking, he says.

“A lot of times, you can ask the artist, ‘Hey, give me your vision of what you’re looking for on this.’ Then you can sit down with a pen and pad of paper and take notes — if you want to look real dignified.”

He laughs.

“Or you could just nod your head, and go, ‘Yeah, I got you!’”

Part of this story originally appeared in Guitar Aficionado, Volume 9, Number 3.

"It was a pivotal moment for my sound," Jimmy Page has said of when he met electronics wizard Roger Mayer in Surbiton, a suburb in southwest London not far from the guitarist’s home in Epsom and Jeff Beck’s in Wallington. It was the early 1960s, and Mayer, who had worked for the Admiralty, had begun turning his attention to electric guitar effects.

“He asked me if I needed anything for my guitar,” Page continued. “He came over to my house one day and I played him a song with electric distortion and said, ‘I want to find a way to sustain it.’ He went away and came back with this box with an on/off switch — that meant you could control the distortion.”

As Mayer told Guitar Player in 2023, Page and Beck were among his earliest customers.

"I met Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page at the same time when I first started going to local music venues where they played around here — what we called the ‘Surrey Delta’ — in ’62, ’63, when I was a teenager. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page started out playing what you might call youth clubs, where kids used to get together.”

Both were interested in fuzz, which they’d heard on that record Page had spun for Mayer: the Ventures’ tune “The 2,000-Pound Bee.”

“We sat there listening to it and Jimmy said, ‘Can we do this?’ I think they went up to a music shop in Shaftsbury Avenue to have a look at a Maestro [FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone], but it didn’t have enough sustain. I said, ‘I can improve it,’ so Jimmy said, ‘Okay, Rog. See what you can do.’”

Mayer said he tweaked the circuit “from square one, really. As a scientist, I could come up with an alternative solution — one that’s better.”

As Page told Uncut, Mayer’s invention revolutionized the guitarist’s sound. "It was phenomenal," he said. "When I started taking it to sessions, the other guitarists were blown away. The blood drained from their faces. But the guys doing the arrangements loved it."

Page was less interested in what he called Mayer’s "other box,” an octave-doubler with fuzz. "It was difficult to control in the studio from the guitar, so I said it wasn’t for me," he recalled.

Another guitarist would put Mayer’s octave-doubler to use: Jimi Hendrix. The American guitarist was making waves in England by the time Mayer met him at a club in 1967. According to the inventor, two weeks later he was in the studio as Hendrix was overdubbing the solo to “Purple Haze,” using his “other box,” the Octavia.

Mayer — who would famously help another guitarist, Bob Marley, completely revamp his tone — subsequently worked with Hendrix on his next album, Axis: Bold as Love, and then accompanied him and his group on their 1968 tour of America.

As Mayer told Guitar Player in our May 2012 issue, in the days before the effects box explosion, inventors like himself often worked directly with guitarists and studio engineers to create effects to their specification, a truly bespoke approach that was essential to the development of both new sounds and the pedal market that would emerge in the 1970s. He gave us insights into his method of working with Hendrix, the guitarist who was perhaps most interested in new sounds at the time.

What were some of the sonic goals you and Hendrix discussed when you started working together?

We talked about creating new soundscapes. Jimi was most interested in making new sounds for the records, because if you were going to be successful back then, you had to have a hit record. He felt he needed to be on the cutting edge with new sounds, so we were following a sort of Formula One racing approach, where you had constant development to keep moving on.

After Hendrix’s success with the Octavia, did you think the effect should be available to other guitar players?

No. This was a time when most recording studios manufactured their own consoles and other gear, and the electronics side of it was highly proprietary and quite secretive, really. When I was making effects for Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Jimi, I was one of their best-kept secrets.

Did Hendrix express interest in having a definitive sound?

Jimi wasn’t as interested in having a definitive sound as he was in having the right sound for the soul. His sounds had to be crafted for each particular song, and Jimi knew that if he got the right tone, it could be almost magical. He and I talked about what hadn’t been done, and one of the main things was panning the signal so as to move the sound around in the mix while manipulating the echo to create different spatial awareness.

To our way of thinking, echo was a way of adding more information and color to the sound in order to create ambience and a sense of mood alteration. Like if we panned the echo left to right while changing its EQ, suddenly the guitar could sound like a spaceship coming toward you. So using a combination of tape delay and EMT echo plates, and by manipulating the delay, the panning, and the EQ, we were able to make the music move and sound more three-dimensional.

Jimi was the happiest when he was getting sounds that were spinning in his head onto records. If he had a new idea for something, it wasn’t a matter of how much it was going to cost. It was always, “When can we do it?”

Does it surprise you that the sounds Hendrix got using fuzz, wah, and feedback are still considered the holy grail by guitarists?

Well, after Jimi did “Voodoo Chile” and some other records, there really wasn’t much else you could do with a wah. Jimi was so prolific in the way he used things like feedback and distortion, so it’s pretty hard to come up with something else that sounds as fresh — especially when it has to be incorporated into the framework of a great song.

What was the most important thing you learned from Hendrix?

Dream the impossible and have the spirit to play to the edge. That’s what Jimi showed me.

It's a well-known fact that Chuck Berry was buried with a Gibson ES-355 semihollow electric guitar to keep him company in the afterlife.

But the story of how the guitar came to join Chuck in his eternal resting place hasn't been fully revealed, until now.

As his son, Charles Berry, explains, it's “a crazy story, but absolutely true.”

Berry passed away March 18, 2017, at the age of 90, in his home near Wentzville, Missouri, an exurb of St. Louis. The guitar great died with uncanny — and unfortunate — timing: His 20th studio album, Chuck, his first record in 18 years, was about to be released that June.

“After dad’s passing myself, my mother and my sister Melody were making arrangements for dad’s celebration of life, picking out the casket and all that kind of stuff,” Charles Berry tells us. “The mortuary says, ‘Mr. Berry, the casket company we work with can do anything you want. They can truly customize this casket.’ And my sister Melody says, ‘Could they, like, put a guitar on it?’

“Then mom and Melody talked some more: ‘Can we make a guitar that can go on the casket?’

“And I’m like, ‘What?! Have you lost your… No!’"

It was Melody who came up with the winning idea.

“She said, ‘How about if we make a guitar and have it inside the casket with him?’” Charles relates. “And my mom’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea!’

“They know I’m the guitar geek in the family, so they look at me and ask, ‘Can’t they do that? Or, why don’t we just use one of his guitars?’”

The idea of Chuck being buried with one of his treasured instruments would horrify most guitar fans and, especially, collectors and aficionados.

But Charles couldn’t even think that far ahead. He was focused on the physical problem of how to fit a semihollow guitar — even a thinline of the variety Chuck used for much of his career — inside a coffin.

“My head’s exploding,” he says, “’cause there’s only so much space inside, right?”

After further discussion, the two women prevailed upon him to contact Gibson to ask about customizing a guitar to fit inside the coffin.

Berry says he called the Nashville-based guitar maker and posed the question.

“There was dead silence on the other end of the phone for a minute," he says.

Eventually, he was referred to Tom Murphy, master artisan at the Gibson Custom Shop and the namesake creator of the Gibson Murphy Lab Collection. Charles says Murphy couldn’t have been nicer.

“He goes, ‘Charles, your dad is a treasure to us. We’ll just send you up a brand-new guitar and you can do whatever you want with it.'”

Gibson provided the red-finished ES-355 with a Maestro Vibrola, just like Chuck played for much of his career. Now Charles just needed a casket deep enough to accommodate his father and the ES-355.

“I had a contact with the casket company, so I got both parties on the line and said, ‘Okay, guys, you’ve got the general idea,’” he recalls. “The company found a casket in the system and said, ‘Well, y’know, there actually is enough room at the top…’

"So I said, ‘Okay, great, I’ve got to prepare for a funeral. Just keep me abreast of what’s going on.’”

Chuck's public viewing revealed the results of his family's effort. The ES-355 was mounted inside the coffin's lid, angled to match the guitarist's usual playing position, with the headstock pointed toward his feet. Between the strings was a white guitar pick bearing an image of a young Chuck playing a Gibson.

The viewing, held prior to the funeral on April 9, at the Pageant club in St. Louis, was attended by hundreds of mourners, including fans and fellow musicians like Paul Shaffer and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, who offered an impromptu eulogy. The Rolling Stones sent a guitar-shaped floral arrangement with a note that read, “Thank you for the inspiration,” while letters were read from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Paul McCartney and Little Richard.

The Gibson guitar displayed in the casket proved to be a memorable and touching tribute to Chuck. But apparently no one really thought the instrument would go with him to his final resting place.

“They were asking at the end of the service, ‘Mrs. Berry, we can take it out?’” Charles recalls. “And she goes, ‘No, no, no,’ it should go with him.’

“So when they’re about to say the benediction, they start to close the casket, and there was a gasp from everybody. There were probably 500 guitarists in the place, and I could hear, ‘Oh my god, they’re closing the casket with that guitar in it!’

“And that’s where it still is, right now.”

Berry owned several Gibson ES guitars over the years, including ES-335, 345 and 355 models. He famously played an ES-350T to drive his amp into distortion on his breakthrough hit, “Maybellene,” from 1955. That guitar is now on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Charles still owns two of his father’s guitars and oversees the loan and donation of other instruments. He says Chuck “would go back and forth between the 335 and 345. But as soon as he got ahold of that first 335 he loved that, ’cause it still gave the full hollow-body tone but was a little smaller, a little heavier than the 350T.”

He adds that Chuck was especially fond of the 345 and 355 for their Varitone circuit and stereo outputs.

“He really liked the Varitone switch and twin outputs, so you could have the bridge pickup going one place and the neck pickup going to another. After 1968 or ’70, he used two Fender Dual Showman — two of those monsters — onstage, and he would get a Y-cord and plug the neck pickup into one amp and the neck pickup in the other and drive both of them.

“The secret weapon was the Varitone switch, because then he could change the phasing between the two pickups and get some sounds that were incredible.”

Berry liked the ES-355 so much that it was seen in his hands for much of his career from the 1970s onward. Fittingly, Gibson unveiled the Chuck Berry 1970s ES-355 as a limited-edition Murphy Lab Aged guitar in 2021.

Berry’s guitar tone and stylings would ultimately prove influential to a generation of guitar players, including John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and countless others, several of whom “borrowed” his music for compositions of their own.

His stage moves, including his famous duck walk, would also inform Michael J. Fox’s antics in the movie Back to the Future, where the actor performs a rousing version of Chuck’s hit “Johnny B. Goode” in the movie’s Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance scene. But while Chuck’s guitars are accounted for, the Gibson ES-345 Fox used remains at large and is the focus of a search launched by Gibson.

Apple has announced Fleetwood Mac: The Chain, the first fully authorized documentary about the band, premiering January 29, 2027. Directed by Frank Marshall, the film will tell Fleetwood Mac’s story through new interviews, archival material and the recollections of its members.

Fleetwood Mac was a storied group with an eight-year history when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined them in late 1974. The group was founded by guitarist Peter Green, bass guitarist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood after the trio departed John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1967. The band eventually added McVie’s then-wife Christine as keyboardist and singer, and endured several lineup changes through the early 1970s.

But aside from a few Green-era singles — including “Albatross,” “Oh Well” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Pronged Crown)” — and 1973’s “Hypnotized,” cut by the group with guitarist and singer Bob Welch, they never enjoyed mainstream success.

That all changed once Buckingham and Nicks joined. The debut album from this lineup, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac would make them one of the 1970s’ most famous hit groups and pave the way for its smash follow-up, 1977’s Rumours.

It was shortly before Rumours’ release that Buckingham sat down with Guitar Player for what would be an increasingly rare press opportunity with the guitarist. His conversation with Dan Forte was among the first to detail not only how he and Nicks came to join the group but also his gear in his early years with the Mac.

The story behind Fleetwood Mac’s most successful lineup is legendary. After playing with their group Fritz for years, Buckingham and Nicks tried to make a go of it on their own. In 1973 they recorded their sole album, Buckingham Nicks, using a lineup of studio musicians that included guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who would go on to be Nicks’ main man in her hugely successful solo career.

The album was tracked by engineer Keith Olsen at Sound City studio in the San Fernando Valley. Everyone involved loved what they had created, but the album — which received a deluxe reissue from Rhino last year — failed to make a dent upon its release in September 1973.

Roughly a year later, Mick Fleetwood was looking for a studio in which to record Fleetwood Mac’s follow-up to Heroes Are Hard to Find. He visited Sound City, where he got his first listen to Buckingham and Nicks.

“About two months before we ended up cutting Fleetwood Mac [in January/February 1975], Mick was looking for a studio to use,” Buckingham explained. “Someone haphazardly turned him onto this place in San Fernando Valley called Sound City. So he talked to Keith Olsen out there, and Keith put on ‘Frozen Love’ from the Buckingham Nicks album to show him what the studio sounded like and what his work was like.”

Fleetwood loved what he heard in the duo’s music and performance, although as Buckingham explained to GP, the drummer wasn’t shopping for new musicians. Fleetwood Mac was intact at that point with guitarist and frontman Welch. “[Olsen] wasn't trying to showcase us,” Buckingham said, “because Bob Welch was already in the band at that time.”

That changed in just a matter of days.

“A week later Welch decided to leave the group, and Mick just acted intuitively and called up Keith to get in touch with us,” Buckingham explained.

Buckingham and Nicks had dinner with Fleetwood and the McVies, and by the end of the evening were invited to join the band and start recording on a tight schedule.

“We rehearsed for about two weeks and then just cut the LP,” Buckingham stated.

The guitarist was certainly familiar with Fleetwood Mac’s music. “Peter Green, oddly enough, had a little bit of influence on me,” he says. “I really liked his style of playing where a few notes mean a lot — even one note.”

That style would typify Buckingham’s tastefully minimal approach to performing solos and fills. At the same time, he said he felt no pressure to live up to any period of Fleetwood Mac’s history.

“There was never any conscious effort to try to fit into their styles other than, say, doing their [old] songs onstage,” he said. “But even so, I didn't listen to those records and try to copy what was on them. We just started playing, and that was what came out.

“I’ve never felt any need to try to fit into anyone else's shoes. I just do what I do, whatever. Maybe one of the reasons Fleetwood Mac has been able to survive for so long is that they've been able to change.”

On the recording of Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham used a Fender Stratocaster for his electric work. “Before I joined the band I'd been playing a Stratocaster, which I love dearly, but for some reason it didn't sound quite full enough live,” he said.

Onstage, Buckingham favored the white 20th anniversary model Gibson Les Paul Custom he was frequently photographed with at the time. The Strat would be set aside and used only for the Fleetwood Mac hit “Over My Head.” “I keep it tuned to open D onstage for ‘Over My Head,’” Buckingham said.

Sometime after recording Fleetwood Mac, Buckinham had Rick Turner from Alembic install his Stratoblaster onboard preamp booster in the guitar. His Turner-modified Strat, with the Stratoblaster gain at maximum and played through Hiwatt Custom 100 amps, would go on to become the celebrated guitar sound on Rumours.

“I still use a Stratocaster more in the studio than the Gibson,” Buckingham explained to GP, “but the Les Paul seems to be a very good, basic, solid stage guitar with a lot of output and fullness. I'm really happy with it.”

He also required an acoustic guitar for live performances of “Landslide,” the Stevie Nicks composition that became both a hit and a signature tune for her in the group.

“For ‘Landslide’ my acoustic is an Ovation onstage, although I used a Martin D-18 on the recording,” Buckinham said. “The Ovation’s got a built-in pickup; it’s great. It doesn’t really sound like an acoustic guitar, but it works so much better live than to mic a real acoustic.”

Around the time of this interview, and following the recording of Rumours, Buckingham switched from Hiwatts to Marshall Plexi 1959SLP heads.

“I used to use Hiwatts, but they all of a sudden somehow became real dirty-sounding,” he explained. “So I got Marshall 100-watts, and they seem to have a lot of bite. I use these tape recorder guts for fuzz.”

An important part of his sound back then resulted from the preamp from a Sony two-track tape recorder that he used in front of his amp.

“When I got out of Fritz and started doing lead, I bought a Sony 630 tape recorder deck for demo tapes,” he said. “Then I got an Ampeg four-track and started using the Sony two-track for slap echo and effects like that with the preamp output of the deck into an amp. It's just an amazing fuzz device.

“Since then I've taken the guts out of the preamp and put them in a little box, and that's what I use both onstage and in the studio. I also use a Roland Space Echo and a Cry Baby wah.”

But the gear meant nothing without Buckingham’s technique and background, which was itself unusual for a guitarist in 1970s rock. He grew up in the early 1960s during the folk boom.

“I listened to stuff like the Kingston Trio and Ian and Sylvia, which didn't highlight any really hot guitar,” he said. “I listened to Chet Atkins a little bit. The Travis-style, three-finger picking pattern got me into what I’m doing now.”

Buckingham was referring to his deft use of fingerpicking, which continued through his career in rock and became a hallmark of his playing style.

“That's the funny thing — I still don't use a flatpick,” he said. “I always use my fingers onstage; I kind of thrash out the lead with my fingernails. I don't use any picks at all, just the bare meat. My fingernails take quite a pummeling sometimes, but it's just something you get used to — I've got a lot of calluses on the ends of my fingers. The only time I ever used fingerpicks was for bluegrass banjo, but I never used a flatpick for anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he had dreams of making it as a musician.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guitar that helped Joni Mitchell write timeless hits like “Both Sides, Now,” and “The Circle Game” survived a war zone, airline damage and years on the road, only to vanish around 1970.

Mitchell’s first four albums are the works on which she established herself as a folk talent for the ages. They not only introduced her singular voice and vision but also produced a durable repertoire that includes “Chelsea Morning,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock,” as well as the entirety of Blue — widely regarded as her masterpiece and one of the greatest albums of all time.

Remarkably, one guitar was central to each of those recordings: a 1956 Martin D-28. And before Mitchell became its keeper, it had already lived a full life.

She discovered the instrument while performing for troops at Fort Bragg. Although Mitchell is often associated with the 1960s counterculture, she told the CBC, “I was not a part of the anti-war movement.” Like other entertainers, including Bob Hope, she made a point of performing for servicemen. “I went the Bob Hope route because I had uncles who died in the war, and I thought it was a shame to blame the boys who were drafted.”

At the time, she was playing “a small-bodied Martin that didn’t have very good bass response.” One night after a show, an officer approached her.

“There was a captain there who’d been to Vietnam and returned, and he had two instruments that he’d taken with him,” Mitchell told Guitar Player. “I guess this whole place was a battlefield, and shrapnel hit his tent and demolished one guitar. The only surviving thing was a Martin D-28, which I’d always wanted but couldn’t afford.

“One night after I’d played, he told me, ‘Joni, you’re better than Peter, Paul and Mary, and you should have this guitar,’ and he told me the history of it. Being an independent girl, I said, ‘I couldn’t take it as a gift, but I’ll buy it off you.’

“So he sold it to me for nothing — really, far less than its value at the time. That guitar, which I used for at least my first four albums, was superb.

“It was a better D-28 than anybody ever heard. It was a 1956, built at a time when Martin was very selective. Their craftsmanship was at its pinnacle, I think. It wasn’t so mass-produced. Every acoustic player who ever touched that guitar just drooled over it.”

Its intonation, in particular, set it apart. A unique guitar stylist, Mitchell has long relied on open and alternate tunings, which she adopted after childhood polio made it difficult for her to form standard chord shapes. Those tunings demand an instrument that can maintain clarity and balance even under unusual string tensions.

“I need really good intonation,” she explained to Acoustic Guitar. “One of the signs of really good intonation is how flashy the harmonics are with a light touch. You should be able to get them to bloom like jewels.”

In that respect, the D-28 was ideal. “It just seemed to eat that up,” she told Guitar Player. “It traveled well, through hot and cold, and it was my true love.”

Unfortunately, life on the road took its toll. “It got cracked on the airlines,” Mitchell recalled. “Its face got crushed. It was repaired, but it never sounded right. It just died.

“After that, I became very promiscuous with guitars, and I could never find one with that balance and resonance.”

Soon afterward, the guitar disappeared entirely.

“It finally was stolen off a carousel in Maui, of all places, and that was the end of it. In the years that followed, I searched and bought old Martins, but nothing compared.”

In 1993 or ’94, she came close to recapturing the magic when she acquired a Martin D-45. That search also led her to Collings Guitars.

“The same dealer who sold me the D-45 introduced me to a new guitar maker called Collings, who fancies himself Martin reincarnated,” she said. “He’s making Martin clones, but in the old way — a small number a year, with the details that fell by the wayside as Martin moved into mass production.

“I picked up two more instruments that I think are really superb: a baby guitar with a 14-fret neck and a dreadnought. I need the long necks for my tunings, although I enjoy the wide, old 12-fret necks. So now I have an arsenal of acoustics to suit my music for the first time in my career.”

Mitchell’s legacy continues to deepen. Her archival collection, Joni Mitchell Archives — Vol. 4: The Asylum Years, recently earned her the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album, and she is set to receive a lifetime achievement honor from the Juno Awards — further recognition of an artist whose music helped define an era.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did you think of that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

His vital position in Bowie’s world was underscored last year in the box set David Bowie 6. I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002–2016). There among Bowie’s final albums, songs and performances was “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 in 2024.

Guitar Player asked Slick 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.

Welcome to the Ultimate Eric Clapton Guitar Quiz, where we test your knowledge of his guitars and music with 10 questions.

From the celebrated electric guitars he played in the Yardbirds and Cream to the acoustic guitar he co-owned with George Harrison — they’re all here. We’ve even included some difficult questions about songs and live shows.

All the questions are multiple choice. Sign in or register for free and see where you end up on the leaderboard.

Welcome to the Ultimate Beatles Guitar Quiz, where we test your knowledge of the group’s guitars and players with 20 Fab questions.

From John Lennon’s acoustic guitars to George Harrison’s electrics and Paul McCartney’s basses — it’s all here, and more. We’ve even included tricky questions about the players’ histories and songs.

All the questions are multiple choice. Sign in or register for free and see where you end up on the leaderboard. Will your guitar gently weep, will you need a little help from your friends?

Make to the end and see if you know every little thing... or if you’re nowhere, man.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie Mercury may hold the record for history’s most profitable half hour in the bathtub.

In May 1979, as Queen were preparing to record The Game at Musicland Studios in Munich, Queen’s lead singer stepped into a bathtub in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel and emerged 30 minutes later with a new song fully formed: “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

Grabbing an acoustic guitar, he quickly worked out the tune in his hotel room.

“’Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or 10 minutes,” he confirmed to Melody Maker in 1981. “I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline, because I simply had to write within a small framework.”

As quickly as Mercury wrote it, Queen got to work tracking it in the studio.

“We recorded that song, really, six months before the rest of the album,” drummer Roger Taylor explained in a 1989 interview for In the Studio With Redbeard.

“It took half an hour to record. I remember he came in the studio. He says, ‘My dear, I just wrote this in the bath,’ and he did. He'd just been lying in the bath, and there it was. It was very simple, very easy, and it had a great fresh sound to it.”

As it turned out, everyone was present for the session except Brian May, who had been at the studio late the night before. In his absence, Mercury strapped on an acoustic guitar to lead Taylor and bass guitar player John Deacon through the song.

“It always happens: If I go out for a couple of hours, they create something else,” May humorously griped to In the Studio with Redbeard in 1989.

“I came back and they'd already put down the backing track. Roger just had the live drums, Freddie had played acoustic guitar — ‘cause that rhythm on there is Freddie. I don't think I played any of that.”

While he’s most often thought of as a singer and piano player, Mercury was also a talented guitarist. “Certainly in the early days he used the guitar as much as the piano to write songs,” May wrote in his Queen in 3D book.

May also notes that Mercury had solid rhythm chops, especially on acoustic.

“Freddie was really a good acoustic player. He was very modest about it, but he could really play the acoustic guitar very well in an inimitable, very frenetic kind of style.

“I can still his kind of horny fingers hitting the strings — Freddie doing his Elvis, very successfully.”

As May revealed in a February 2008 interview with Guitar and Bass magazine, Mercury even attempted to record the song’s guitar solo.

“He did the original solo on ‘Crazy Little Thing,’” the guitarist confirmed, “on a version that got lost, and I had to redo it. He was very good in a particular style of his own.”

While Mercury’s guitar solo is absent from the recording, we do have May’s, which is widely considered one of his best. Remarkably, it doesn’t feature his homemade Red Special.

In fact, by his own account, May was railroaded into using a Telecaster by producer Reinhold Mack, who decided that classic model was best suited to the song’s vintage rock-and-roll style.

“I said, ‘Well, I can make my guitar sound like a Telecaster, like those old rock and roll records,’” May told In the Studio with Redbeard. “And he said, ‘If you want it to sound like a Telecaster, play a Telecaster.’”

May did so, calling it “one of the few times I ever played something that wasn't my regular guitar.” Taylor, who both plays and collects guitars, delivered a rarity from his vault.

“I used one of Roger's really old, beat-up, natural-wood Telecasters,” May told Guitar Player in our January 1983 issue. “I got bludgeoned into playing it. That was Mack's idea.

“I said, ‘I don't want to play a Telecaster. It basically doesn't suit my style.’ But ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was such a period piece, it seemed to need that period sound.

“So I said, ‘Okay, Mack, if you want to set it up, I'll play it.’ He put it through a Mesa/Boogie, which is an amplifier I don't get on with at all. It just doesn't suit me. I tried it, and it sounded okay.”

It may have sounded “okay” to May’s ears, but it was an absolute knockout to everyone else. May’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” solo is a stunning example of his ear for giving a song exactly what it needs — and in a style that has no equal in Queen’s catalog.

For that matter, it wasn’t the first time May had to fight over a solo. As he told Total Guitar, he had to push to convince Mercury to let him track a solo on Queen’s 1979 hit “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

With "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" completed, the band took a break from making The Game, during which time they performed at the Saarbrücken Open Air Festival in Germany that August.

Meanwhile, their label, eager for something new to release, took “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” for an advance single, releasing it in the U.K. in October 1979. The song quickly reached number two, leading the group to launch a short tour — dubbed, appropriately, Crazy — where they played a number of theater dates in the U.K. from November through December.

By December, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” had been released in the U.S., where it quickly began moving up the charts. Queen were back at work on The Game when it hit the top of the charts, becoming the group's first U.S. single to do so.

Roger Taylor recalled the strangeness of hearing the song had reached peak position in the States while they were still recording The Game in Germany.

“It seemed unreal because we were on the other side of the world, and we hadn't even finished the album, which the single was from,” he told In the Studio With Redbeard. “We were still working on it. And we thought, We’re off to a good start here!”

“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” would continue to pay dividends as a radio staple and popular cover tune. But for Taylor, the best of these rewards came in the form of a compliment from no less than John Lennon.

“I remember actually one of the things which made me very proud,” Taylor said, “was that John Lennon said in some article... ‘I heard the Queen record and it made me wanna get back in the studio.’”

The former Beatle would soon do just that, recording what would be his final album, Double Fantasy, in 1980.

“And I thought, Wow, fantastic!” Taylor remarked. “To have actually had any little dent on somebody like Lennon is great.”

Tony Iommi has spent his entire professional life using two prosthetic fingertips – which he calls his “thimbles.” The Black Sabbath guitarist was working in a sheet metal factory in his teens when a machine severed the middle and ring fingers of his right, fretting hand.

All evidence suggests the thimble haven’t held him back in the six decades since. “They’re all right,” he tells Guitar World. “I have to keep the fingertips in shape when I’m on tour. I change the leather parts every couple of weeks, and it’s a bit of a hassle, but I’ve got used to it.

“I put tape on those fingers, and then I put a bit of glue on the tape and push the thimble until it holds on. They used to fall off, and it was a bloody pain, trying to find them. ‘Where is it? It’s on the floor somewhere!’”

Iommi confirms he’d struggle to get through a show if anything went wrong with the prosthetics. “I couldn’t get through the gig, because I couldn’t touch the strings,” he says. “The bone is right under the skin. One time, years ago, when it did come off, I fretted a string and it sliced right through my finger. There was blood all over the place!

He adds: “But I can play with the two other fingers — I learned to use my little finger in the early days because I had to.”

Last month Iommi told Classic Rock he was grateful to the U.K.’s National Health Service for continuing to provide prosthetics since 1966. “But the thing is, they send me a whole rubber arm,” he explained. “I’ve asked them, ‘Why not just send a hand?’ But apparently they can’t do that.

“And they sometimes send me five arms at a time. So I chop the fingers off and throw the arms in the bin. The dustmen must be thinking, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on here? Has he bumped someone off?’”

Iommi releases his new solo album, From the Dark, on October 23.

Rodrigo y Gabriela may be the most impactful guitar duo of this millennium. Their singular combination of Gabriela Quintero’s flamenco-inspired rhythmic genius with Rodrigo Sánchez’s laser-precision melodies is universally appealing. Since 2006’s self-titled LP launched them internationally, the Grammy-winning duo has sold millions of albums and concert tickets at venues including Radio City Music Hall, Royal Albert Hall and the White House.

They are both highly influential players. Their long and close relationship with Yamaha has been instrumental in the modernization of its nylon-string line. Gabriela was included in GP’s 2017 list of the top 50 acoustic guitar players of all time. And yet Rodrigo y Gabriela still stands alone, blazing its own distinct sonic trail followed by a dedicated global fan base including about a half million unique monthly listeners on Spotify.

They’ve always had a hard rock influence, mostly evidenced by Rodrigo, who has contributed more electric guitar over time, peaking on their 2023 release, In Between Thoughts…A New World. Their new release, OurHome (September 18, ATO), marks a return to the acoustic duo format at its core. There is some electric, however, most notably on the lead single “Monster” and the final track, “Simurgh,” featuring smoldering melodic licks from former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman.

One of Sánchez’s primary influences, Friedman resides in Tokyo, and his connection reflects the record’s deep Japanese inspirations. Most remarkable is the story behind the epic acoustic-and-electric track “Monster,” which was inspired by a story of the same name by acclaimed manga creator Naoki Urasawa. Urasawa in turn created the captivating illustrated video for “Monster,” which is a must-see with over a quarter million YouTube views in its first three months.

Other guests include Friedman’s wife, Hiyori Okuda, who plays cello on several cuts, and jazz superstar Hiromi, who adds otherworldly piano to “Akatsuki.” Yukihiro Atsumi plays acoustic on “Is in Your Pocket.”

In a Zoom conversation from their studio in Ixtapa, Mexico, Rodrigo and Gabriela reveal how the whole project nearly went a completely different direction. As it turns out, the death of their cherished studio cat inspired the title track and helped them find their way to OurHome.

Isn’t it crazy to consider that after all these years there’s not another prominent duo consistently doing anything quite like your pairing, either on nylon strings, steel strings, or one of each?

RODRIGO Well, first, it’s nice to hear that perception of this band. Before we started recording OurHome, we recorded a whole other album with a famous producer in Los Angeles with a full band including some recognizable names in the rhythm section. But something wasn’t right about it, especially with the production. It sounded awesome, but it wasn’t Rodrigo y Gabriela, so we started over.

The first song written for this album was “OurHome,” and it was inspired by the passing of our beloved cat that lived here in the studio, Pelusa. That gave us the idea of going back to the acoustic guitar, at least for me, because I was writing this song for Pelusa on my acoustic guitar, at home. I discovered the melody, and when I came to the studio the next day to show it to Gab, she loved the tune. She understood where it came from. It was very touchy for both of us.

Please tell more about Pelusa’s personality and how her passing influenced the music.

GABRIELA Colette [French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette] said that there are no ordinary cats, because each one is an individual, a full universe. Pelusa was a particularly commanding and demanding kitty that we called “Her Meow Highness” because she was a complete queen with zero tolerance.

I have a rescue place for kitty cats, and she was there with all my other beautiful babies, but then she tested positive for feline leukemia, which is very contagious. They told me I should put her down, but I couldn’t do it, so she became the studio kitty. Despite the prognosis that she would die very soon, she stayed healthy for five years. When she was here, it was so incredible because she trained me. She would meow at me like, “I want this, or I want that. Fuck that guitar!” And I’d be like, “Okay, sure!”

But then she got a kidney disease common in cats, and I knew that it was time to let her rest. We held a ceremony here at the studio with our whole touring and studio staff to say goodbye. It was beautiful. That was when we were still searching and experimenting with our musical direction, like, “Should we go electric again?” We did that cool demo in Los Angeles with the band, but we were essentially just fucking around. When Pelusa passed, that’s the message that really hit me and touched me.

Rod was super sad. He wrote and showed me the melody to her song. I came up with harmonies and a bridge. We just let everything flow with the two acoustic guitars, and in less than a day we had the track. That was Pelusa’s message for me on that song, and I actually wrote lyrics to it. The lyrics were basically Pelusa saying, “Stop messing around. Stop bullshitting. Just play your guitars. Go back to where you truly belong. Be authentic.”

Sometimes that’s the gift of death. It makes you face the reality of what is truly important for each person. That’s the meaning of “OurHome.” We didn’t have the title yet, but we knew it was a Pelusa tune, and her message from beyond saying, “You two shut up and play.” [laughs]

How did you get the title, and how does that connect to the album’s Japanese theme?

RODRIGO We’ve been touring in Japan since 2006 or ’07, and we even recorded an album there, [2008’s] Live in Japan. So we’ve had a long connection with the Japanese fans, but we’ve always been busy on tour. Last year, when we were in the middle of writing this album, we asked our management to organize a tour to Australia and Japan with a break afterwards so we could stay in Japan on holiday.

GABRIELA It was all very magical because, on our last day in Australia and our first day off, when we were walking down in Melbourne and talking about many things, we got this message very clear from Pelusa. And it was the seeds of what OurHome really means. It’s about what makes you feel alive, happy and fulfilled. It doesn’t come from drugs or anything artificial. It’s something that comes from within.

Playing guitar is incredible. A lot of players would agree that playing guitar is like a nectar — something so sweet that it’s very hard to describe. But sometimes we musicians can get lost in our artistry. So we were talking about those things and agreed. Now that we have this Pelusa track, that’s the direction.

Everything we love and care for can be in our music. And it can be something from within, to share with the world, instead of trying to please the world, have more fans, more followers, get bigger venues and blah blah blah. So, OurHome started there. Like, stop fucking around. Be yourself. Play what you love to play. And then everything can become your home when you vibrate with high energy.

As we were talking about this, Rod said, “Yes, that’s our home.” Then we looked up, and right there on the side of a building was a sign that said, “Our Home!”

And a photo of that sign became your album cover. If you had any doubt, there’s the universe shouting that you’re on the right path.

RODRIGO Exactly. And then the next day, we traveled to Japan for the first time on holiday and experienced a major connection with the country, the people and the culture. We came back with fresh ideas and at some point I said to Gaby, “I know this sounds crazy, but how about recording the album in Japan?”

The title track is an interesting blend of acoustics that’s brisk and driving. And then just when you think you know where the tune is going, a string section enters to raise the dynamic and literally take it home. How did that come about?

RODRIGO First, we had to find a studio, and Marty Friedman helped us find one in Tokyo where they spoke fluent English [NK Sound Tokyo]. We wanted to add another layer but were hesitant to go beyond our acoustics in the same way we had done on the previous album. We asked ourselves what instrument could help add the right textures, and we decided on cello. Marty Friedman’s wife is a classical cellist, and since Marty was going to be a part of the album, it was a perfect match to invite her. Hiyori Okuda plays cello on “OurHome,” “Akatsuki,” “Flying Underground,” “Quicksand,” “Monster,” “Astrum in Corpore,” “Is in Your Pocket,” “Hinomaru Twins” and “Simurgh.”

How does your Yamaha endorsement factor into your Japanese obsession?

RODRIGO The first time we went to Japan, they came to see us play and we signed a deal with them right away because they understood what we needed when we were playing gigs like the Fuji Rock Festival or supporting Muse at Wembley Stadium. We needed custom guitars and pickups.

You’re referring to the development of Yamaha’s multi-element Atmosfeel pickup and preamps system?

RODRIGO Exactly. Back in the day there was nothing like that, especially for nylon strings.

You two were the poster artists for the NX Series when it launched in 2020, with Rodrigo representing the NTX with its thinner neck and body, and Gabriela the NCX with its more traditional neck and depth. If I remember correctly, the NTX5 and NCX5 were essentially like Japanese production versions of your personal performance instruments, which are customized with highly specific extras that most mortal players in standard gig situations might not really require. Is that still the status?

RODRIGO Exactly.

GABRIELA My guitar has nine different piezo pickups placed all around the inside to catch the sound everywhere I tap on the guitar. Yamaha has been so great to us, and we’re so grateful to them. The whole Yamaha team came to the studio one day to see what we were playing and hear the recordings.

There are two great videos for “Monster,” the official illustrated one, and the “making of” that reveals your process in the studio. The backstory is remarkable. You wrote “Monster” based on a manga of the same name by Naoki Urasawa, who in turn created the illustrated video. How did he know about the song in the first place?

RODRIGO That connection came about on the tour last year. We were already playing that track, just testing the waters. Gab told the crowd in Japan the story of “Monster” being inspired by Urasawa’s story. He’s a megastar there. Everyone in Japan is aware of him. Someone on the promoter’s team knew him and told him. And then he turned out to be a big fan of ours because he plays guitar.

He wanted to meet us. We both wanted to go see Eric Clapton at the Budokan, so they put us together backstage. He had two books of Monster, one with a drawing for Gabriela and one for me. And he also had two of our Metaevolution albums for us to sign. [laughs] It was crazy. He came to the studio where we were recording, loved the song and suggested that we collaborate by having him do the video for “Monster.” We were so happy, like, “Are you kidding?”

What did you think when you saw the video depicting his process of illustrating the two of you?

GABRIELA It’s incredible because that landscape where we are playing in the drawing is a very special landscape in the story of Monster. It was like, if you’re a Star Wars fan, imagine that you met George Lucas and then he put you in a scene on one of the planets or something!

The illustration develops so slowly that it literally draws you in. First you see the outlines, then it starts to fill in, and finally there’s the full color image.

GABRIELA See, that’s Pelusa’s message. When you act from a place of real authenticity, truly honest with yourself, and then you do the best you can being led by what you love and what makes you feel alive — things like that happen naturally, without the industry trying to put you with this person or that person. We are so tired of that bullshit. We want to collaborate with people who want to collaborate with us. For so many years it was trying to do all of this, and finally we were like, fuck all that. We’re going to do what we love the way we want to do it.

That’s what happens when you listen to your cat. They know things.

GABRIELA They definitely do.

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 returns to the spotlight as the Beatles release a Super Deluxe edition of Rubber Soul today, 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.”

The Beatles’ expanded Rubber Soul Special Edition is out today, October 2, giving fans an unprecedented look inside the sessions that produced one of the band’s most important albums. Alongside newly mixed versions of the 1965 classic, the release features previously unheard session recordings and home demos, including the previously unreleased John Lennon composition “Little Girl.”

But the most important story surrounding the album isn’t what listeners will hear in the newly opened 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.

Now that the expanded Special Edition is available, listeners can hear that process from a different perspective. The newly released session recordings and demos capture the Beatles working through arrangements and performances, including the long-awaited unveiling of “Little Girl.” They offer more than songs in progress. They document 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the singer needed convincing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, he no longer owns the Gibson pedal steel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Tedesco, finding the guitar became a mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tedesco felt a glimmer of hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then it was gone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was it difficult producing Dylan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.