When asked to reach for greatness, most musicians dig deep into their soul for inspiration or a brainstorm that will take their performance to the top.

But when Journey were cutting their monster hit “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Neal Schon says the group’s producers had a different sort of direction for him.

“They said, ‘Play something dumb,’” the guitarist reveals in a new interview with Rick Beato.

It’s not exactly what you’d expect to hear when you’re recording a tune about holding onto faith.

But, sometimes, that’s how hits are made.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” reached the top 10 in 1981, when it was released as a single from Journey’s seventh studio album, Escape. Since then, it’s become a cultural phenomenon. In addition to its use in the 2007 series finale of The Sopranos, the song is played in the eighth inning at San Francisco Giants home games. Former Journey vocalist Steve Perry, who sings on the original, even led the hometown crowd in a singalong during the Giants’ 2014 World Series game.

Today, “Don’t Stop Believin’” is in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. It’s a credit not only to the song’s sales success — its sold more than 18 million copies — but to its cultural significance as well.

“It's crazy. When we wrote it, I thought there was something there, you know — when we were messing around with it in the studio," Neal Schon says.

"When I went back in the studio to listen after we cut it and it was coming together [in the] mix, I looked at the guys, and I go, 'I think there's something here that's special, that's going to be bigger than this whole record.'

“And not until this many decades later, did it happen. But it did happen."

And perhaps that all comes back to that request from producers Kevin Elson and Mike Stone: Play something dumb.

Schon’s response was to come up with what he calls a “chunky rhythm part” — a meat-and-potatoes chord pattern that can be heard as the song starts rolling along in top gear in the third verse.

And to the producers’ credit, it was just what the song needed.

“It's like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive, ‘Taking Care of Business' kind of rhythm part,” Schon says. “And it just kind of worked. When you listen to it, you don't even really notice it, but if you take it out, then you go, ‘What happened to it?’

“It wasn't my idea — I came up with the rhythm part,” Schon says. "But that's what a good producer will do for you — make you search a little bit."

“Don’t Stop Believin’” was a co-write between Schon, Perry and keyboardist and rhythm guitarist Jonathan Cain, who had recently joined Journey. As Schon told Guitar Player in 2023, Cain brought the chord progression, for which the guitarist suggested a Motown-style bass groove to move it along.

“Jon had the ‘Don’t stop believin’’ chorus, so we moved on trying to create the rest of the song,” he says. “I came up with the B section — ‘Strangers, waiting.’ Perry goes, ‘Oh, that’s perfect,’ so we threw it together. Those were the main pieces of the song.”

As for the famous chorus?

“It doesn’t happen until the end,” Schon points out. “I don’t think any song that’s become as big has ever had that. The first rule of songwriting is, ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!’

“But we broke it — and had a hit! And the song works because it has something very interesting and melodic moving it along.”

When recording his guitar parts, Schon used his black 1977 Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, an instrument that he used for much of Escape and Journey's subsequent tour. It fetched $250,000 at auction in 2021.

As he recalls, his big guitar contribution to the song — aside from his anthemic solo — was the rapidly arpeggiating guitar part that introduces the second verse. “It was like something you might hear in a symphony and it felt like it was helping the track move along.”

Which is definitely a far cry from playing something dumb.

But, hey, whatever works. After all, no less than Forbes magazine named “Don’t Stop Believin’” the Biggest Song of All Time in its March 2024 issue. Maybe there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.

Journey has a new drummer for the final stretch of its farewell tour. Steve Murphy, a New York-area musician who performs with the group the Hitmen, made his debut with the band Thursday night in Cleveland, stepping in for Deen Castronovo, who will be sitting out the remainder of the November dates.

Guitarist Neal Schon confirmed the change Friday, explaining that Castronovo had decided to leave the tour to address personal health matters.

"After careful consideration and an extensive year of touring, our talented longtime drummer Deen Castronovo has decided to step away to focus on personal health matters that require his attention," Schon said in a statement. "He has our full support during this time and extends his heartfelt thanks to the fans for the love, encouragement and kindness he has received."

Murphy's arrival follows a series of disruptions involving Castronovo over the past several weeks. The drummer experienced a medical emergency and left the stage during an October performance in Tulsa, Oklahoma, prompting his drum technician, Steve Toomey, to take over behind the kit. Keyboardist Jonathan Cain addressed the audience after the episode, asking them, “Have your prayers ready for Deen Castronovo, everybody.”

The drummer was back with Journey two nights later. Schon subsequently praised his return, writing that Castronovo was "back in rare form."

The situation resurfaced Tuesday in Boston, where Castronovo again departed before the show was over. Toomey, took over behind the kit, as he had in Tulsa. By Thursday, though, the band had a different plan: Murphy was in place for the entire Cleveland performance.

Cain made a point of introducing the newcomer to the audience. "We're gonna let you in on a little secret," he announced. "This is Steve Murphy's first gig with the band tonight. Can you believe this drummer, right here?"

Murphy isn't new to the touring circuit. His credits include work with the Alan Parsons Live Project and the late Cream bass guitarist Jack Bruce, and he has also performed with former Journey frontman Steve Augeri. He's evidently a Journey fan, too, having posted his own interpretations of the band's songs. In Cleveland, he took on some of Castronovo's vocal duties as well, singing lead on the classic Journey tracks "Just the Same Way" and "Anytime."

His regular bandmates in the Hitmen celebrated the opportunity afterward, posting their congratulations and calling him "a very special talent."

Schon says Murphy will remain with Journey through the end of November. The farewell tour picks back up Saturday, November 14, in Greenville, South Carolina, before concluding its current run November 28 in the band's hometown of San Francisco.

Journey is also scheduled to make up its postponed appearance at California's Stagecoach Festival next April. The band hasn't indicated whether Castronovo could be back by then.

Castronovo first joined Journey in 1998, replacing Steve Smith, and played with the band until 2015. He returned in 2021, having previously worked with Schon and Cain in Bad English.

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

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

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

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

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

Which is how they met Diamond’s band.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is Global Beatles Day.

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

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

It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Lukather's Santamental, his offbeat 2003 Christmas album featuring guitar greats Eddie Van Halen, Slash and Steve Vai, is back in print after years of being unavailable. Available through Lukather's website on CD and vinyl, it's a uniquely twisted take on the traditional holiday album.

“I wanted to do something where, when people have all their Christmas music playing on shuffle at their Christmas party, one of my songs comes on and they’re like, ‘What the fuck was that?’” Lukather says. “‘Was that “Jingle Bells”? That’s not the typical cheeseball approach to Christmas music.’”

From the album's opening track, “Joy to the World,” it's clear Lukather succeeded in his aim to “spike the musical eggnog.” The song's familiar all-white-keys descent down the major scale is reharmonized with rich, jazz-fusion-style chords and set against a fast, double-kick-powered, “Hot for Teacher”-style drum groove. It's an appropriately explosive setting for the track's guest guitarist: Lukather's dearly departed friend Eddie Van Halen.

“We recorded this album in June of 2002,” Lukather says. In addition to Van Halen trading solos with him on “Joy to the World,” Santamental features appearances by Steve Vai, Slash, Edgar Winter, Michael Landau and Lukather's son, Trevor. Through studio magic and song-licensing wizardry, it also includes a “Jingle Bells” vocal duet with Lukather's hero, Sammy Davis Jr.

“It was like a 100 degrees outside when we recorded the basic tracks,” Lukather says over lunch in Los Angeles. “But Gregg Bissonette brought in Christmas decorations. It was him on drums, John Pierce on bass, Jeff Babko on keys, and me. [Co-producer] Elliot Scheiner kept everything real — all analog, no clicks, live to tape. It was mostly just the guests who overdubbed.”

As for the surprise chord changes and inventive arrangements that help make Santamental such a standout holiday album, Lukather credits one person.

“That's all Babs,” he says. “I wish I could take credit, but I gotta give the love to Jeff Babko, legendary genius. So hip.

“Like with ‘Joy to the World’ — I told Jeff, ‘We've gotta fuck this up,’” he says with a laugh. “And then my dear brother Ed Van Halen came down. He was in retirement and hadn't played the guitar in a while, and he was a little shy, but he came in for me, man. He wouldn't have done this for anybody else.

“This was right before one of the rougher, tougher parts of his life — I've had my own bout with all that shit, so I can relate — but he came over for me. He plugged in, Elliot got a sound on him — which was easy — and then Ed said, ‘Okay, just you and me in the room,’ so I was running the tape machine.”

For anybody who might accuse Lukather of trying to make money using his guest stars' names, he wants you to know that whether you listen to Santamental on your favorite streaming service or buy a physical copy, all artist proceeds help kids.

“100 percent of this money goes to my favorite autism charity — the Ed Asner Family Center — where my son Bodhi goes,” Lukather says. “We did a big charity gig for them not too long ago and we raised enough money to build them a new place. Everybody who donated their time on this record did so because they love me and we're friends.”

From Slash's fiery solo on the Lukather/Stan Lynch original “Broken Heart for Christmas” to the odd-meter reworking of “Carol of the Bells” featuring Steve Vai and Trevor Lukather, Santamental showcases the musical chemistry of friends who've spent decades playing together. That spirit carries into “Silent Night,” inspired by the Blow by Blow era of Lukather's late friend Jeff Beck.

“When I hang out with my guitar friends, it's always like, ‘Ain't it a gas that we can do this for a living?’” says Lukather, who's been a member of multi-Platinum pop/rock juggernaut Toto for nearly 50 years and lead guitarist for former Beatle Ringo Starr for the past 14 years.

“This album is a bunch of guys getting together to play some goofy Christmas songs. If you like that sort of thing, great. If you don't, turn the channel, man. Go listen to Mariah Carey sing her Christmas song for the 10 millionth time. I believe that's on a loop in hell.”

He laughs. “No offense to Mariah.”

Ronnie Wood isn't letting the Rolling Stones' touring hiatus keep him off the road. With the band taking a break from live performances, the guitarist has been touring Europe and South America with his solo group, the Ammo Band, and has a rare U.S. solo show scheduled for March 22 at New York's Beacon Theatre. Tickets go on sale November 18.

“I’ve never had any time off,” Wood tells Rolling Stone. “Now that the Stones have got a little sabbatical, I’m making the most of it and keeping my chops together, using my fingers, and getting the blood running. It’s such a buzz, physically and mentally.”

The Rolling Stones had been expected to tour this year behind their latest album, Foreign Tongues, but Keith Richards reportedly wasn't ready to commit to another run of dates. Wood says the prospect of getting back on the road with the band remains appealing to him and Mick Jagger, but the decision rests with Richards.

“I am hoping [we’ll tour again], and so is Mick,” Wood says. “But we’re waiting for Keith to make his mind up. His attitude is ‘I’ve had enough touring for a bit,’ he said he wanted a little break.”

In the meantime, Wood has been enjoying the opportunity to revisit songs from across his career. His solo shows mix Rolling Stones favorites such as “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “It’s Only Rock and Roll” with Faces classics, solo material and covers made famous by Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner.

The guitarist says he relishes the freedom of putting together a set that draws from so many different corners of his musical life. He's also enjoying the challenge of leading his own band, which features longtime collaborators including bass guitarist Willie Weeks and drummer Andy Newmark.

“The best part is the element of risk, which is always great,” Wood says. “And each song is always on the verge of collapse. With me and Keith, we weave, but we don’t know where we’re going. With my solo band, I do drive a tight ship actually, even if I say it myself. I just love being a band leader, and I couldn’t have a better bunch of people to steer along.”

“I do think it’s a risk, this one,” guitarist Marcin says of his new single and video, “PANICATTACK.”

Then again, the Polish guitarist could say the same about nearly everything he’s done since winning the ninth season of his homeland’s TV competition Must Be the Music in 2015.

Marcin Patrzalek, 26, has combined his percussive playing style with classical, rock and Spanish influences to create a maverick approach that is distinctive — by design, and without apology.

“This is the kind of vibe I bring,” he tells Guitar Player via Zoom from Warsaw. “I like spice. I think musicians should be interesting and unapologetic. I don’t think everyone should just be wearing a black hoodie onstage and standing in one place, making sure they play the Lydian flat-7 correctly. That’s not me.”

And Marcin is well aware of why that’s the case.

“I didn’t grow up in a household where my dad was blasting Metallica and Slayer, or even like the Beatles or the Grateful Dead or something,” he explains. “I was discovering everything on my own, so I don’t have a frame of reference for, ‘Oh, this is the next step. This is what I should do.’ I just do stuff ’cause I like it, usually not what other people expect.

“Sometimes they bring a spark of controversy or discussion, but it never hurt me. It never had a negative impact on my life or career. It’s the opposite. I really want to be more bold in the choices I’m making, and more intentional.”

Nevertheless, Marcin expects “PANICATTACK” — which he’s been developing during the past two years, live and in the studio — will raise some eyebrows even among those who expect to be surprised whenever he releases something new.

With its mix of electric and acoustic guitar parts — the latter played on a prototype signature model he’s developing with Ibanez — the track has a darker, heavier bent than he’s explored before. The accompanying video follows suit. And after employing spoken word passages in the past, “PANICATTACK” also finds him vocalizing the title in a chorus kind of approach that’s more integrated as part of the song’s musical structure.

“I’ve done pieces before where I played on electric,” he says, “most notably, I guess, the ‘Art of Guitar’ track [with RJ Pasin], which ended up being really, really big for me. But with this one there is just way more meat to the electric guitar,” especially, he adds, in the middle section, which “is like a club kind of hardcore, heavy section. It’s something I think no one is really expecting of me.”

“PANICATTACK,” in fact, is filled with things Marcin hasn’t done before. Best to let him tick off the ways.

“It’s not as linear as I’ve done before. The whole song never reaches the one. The key of the song would be E minor, but in the hook it goes between B7 and A minor, so it goes between the Five and Four and never goes to the one. Same in the other verses; they stay not on the one.

“Then it goes into the club section with this four-on-the-floor beat, which I’ve never done before and is pretty rare, I think, in guitar music, and that’s the time when it does go to the one, to the E, but you’re really, really quickly slapped in the face with this thumping, super-fast abrasive, electronic section, and you also kind of leave that tonic center because it goes to the E double harmonic minor thing — E, F, G-sharp, that sort of sound.

“I wasn’t trying to think about it; I was just trying to play around the neck and this really weird stuff happened and it really shifts around a lot. I don’t think you necessarily hear it all immediately, which I like. I think I did a good job of hiding the more unique harmonies in a mainstream-sounding song. I don’t think a layperson would understand what I’m doing.”

As for his singing, Marcin — who’s experienced two panic attacks himself — was responding to a world on edge and wanted to capture that feeling with his voice as well as his guitar.

“If you want to have a clear meaning in a piece of music, it’s very hard to do, in my opinion, without some lyrical element,” he explains. “I think the subject matter is something that requires that on-the-nose treatment. It needs to be very loud and in your face, and I want it to feel like something anxiety-driven.

“I’m very proud of the fact I overcame my anxiety to put that in the song, because it’s a very new thing for me, a true vocalization. That’s another thing I’m crossing my fingers that people enjoy.”

Marcin calls “PANICATTACK” “a hint” about his next album, the follow-up to 2024’s Dragon in Harmony. “It’s like a transitional piece... that connects the ‘Art of Guitar’ and ‘How Music Works’ and all that crazy, technical stuff with Marcin to come,” he says. He promises that the album will “definitely be heavier,” with more electric guitar and strings as well as ’90s alternative rock influences — specifically Tool and Deftones. It will also feature more vocalizing, “more towards like what’s in ‘PANICATTACK,’ definitely not spoken word.”

And there will be guests — some of whom, he promises, “I think will be really, really major.”

“There’s also going to be a huge amount of melodic hooks; it’s a record of hooks, not noodles,” adds Marcin, who’s also handling all the writing, recording and music video direction himself. “I think it’s so miles ahead of the music I’ve been releasing before.”

Marcin will perform three sold-out shows in Warsaw in December before beginning a European tour in February, starting with the Art on Ice Swiss figure skating gala and then playing his own dates through April.

“I’m already getting angry DMs asking for other countries and continents,” he says. “That is actually going to happen. The tour is going to grow; I’m hoping to announce more cities very early next year. And as that is happening, I’m going to be revealing more and more of the album, more of the concept. There’s a lot going on.”

Joe Satriani found two very different things to admire in Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. One seemed capable of taking electric-guitar playing somewhere entirely unexpected with every performance. The other could hold a listener’s attention through an entire solo without ever seeming to run short of ideas.

Speaking with Q1043 New York, Satriani reflected on the contrasting styles of the two British guitar greats — and former Yardbirds members — whose influence helped shape his own musical development.

“That generation was very interesting, because they produced so many different personalities on guitar,” he said (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar). “And if I could take two, like you talk about Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Completely different personalities as people and as musicians.”

Beck’s playing was an adventure in itself. Satriani recalled listening to his records and sometimes wondering where the guitar had gone, only for Beck to reappear with something completely unexpected.

“And his way of playing was so unusual. And then he would try things that were just so outrageous and sometimes they didn’t work out, but that was part of the experience. You got to experience Jeff Beck trying stuff out. And he would innovate because he couldn’t help himself but invent things every time he played.”

Clapton’s appeal was rooted in something quite different. Satriani was fascinated by his command of the solo, particularly his ability to develop an idea without losing the listener along the way. Cream’s “Crossroads” offered a prime example.

“What I heard was this unique thing — and this is really nitpicking for musicians — but Eric had this ability to sustain interest for whatever length of time he was given to play a solo. And ‘Crossroads’ is a perfect example. You start listening to it, and he doesn’t burn out.”

For Satriani, that consistency was remarkable. Clapton never seemed to exhaust his ideas or struggle to find his way through a performance. Beck, on the other hand, was prepared to risk failure in pursuit of something new.

“And you’d hear Jeff Beck try things and crash and burn and go out of tune and then come back in and do something else brilliant. And we’re talking about two equally brilliant guitar players that I love and are part of the foundation of my musicianship. But Eric’s thing that I noticed really early on was, ‘How does he do that? How does he sustain interest?’”

Satriani has previously gone into greater detail about the impact Beck had on him. In a 2023 Facebook post, he described the late guitarist as “a genius, a stunning original,” praising his seemingly endless capacity to surprise.

“He had an enormous impact on my guitar playing, my musicianship, and my soul,” Satriani wrote. “When I was a beginner, I would spend hours trying to jam along with his solo albums. I found his approach to the instrument so inspiring.”

He also remembered being drawn to Beck’s unconventional arrangements and aggressive guitar tones, adding that the guitarist was always unmistakably himself.

Clapton left an equally important mark. In a 2021 interview with Classic Rock, Satriani picked out From the Cradle as one of his favorite records from the guitarist’s blues period.

“I loved the way he approached that record by recording everything live. I was a fan of Clapton ever since I started playing guitar but that record was really remarkable.”

Brian Eno turned down the chance to reunite with Roxy Music for their 2022 farewell tour, citing environmental concerns, according to guitarist Phil Manzanera.

The band had not performed live in more than a decade when they embarked on their 50th-anniversary tour, which concluded with a sold-out show at London's O2 Arena in October 2022. It proved to be their final run of concerts, with Manzanera subsequently confirming that Roxy Music would never play live again.

Despite Eno's departure in 1973, Manzanera says the band hoped to bring him back into the fold for the occasion.

“In true Eno fashion he said, ‘I’m not flying anymore for environmental reasons,’” Manzanera tells Vulture.

Manzanera isn't inclined to second-guess his former bandmate's explanation.

“I’ll choose to believe it. He’s the same guy I met in 1971.”

Eno had made his reluctance to reunite clear well before the farewell tour. In a 2012 interview with The Independent, he said he had no interest in touring with Roxy Music again, despite maintaining good relationships with his former bandmates.

“It’s simply not my temperament to look back, which is why, for example, I could never tour with Roxy Music again,” he explained. “I keep telling them I don’t want to do it. They are nice people; they understand.”

For Manzanera, the 2022 shows provided an opportunity to give Roxy Music the kind of farewell he felt the band had long deserved, complete with a visual presentation befitting its legacy. The guitarist has also explained that the logistical challenges of touring Europe after Brexit helped convince the group to call it a day rather than try to extend their run.

“It was the first time we were ever able to play with the appropriate and well-presented iconography of Roxy Music,” he says.

“For a band like Roxy, that’s very important, because it’s always about music and image. I was finally able to show people what I do without the equipment blowing up. I could say good-bye. There will never be another Roxy gig.”

Eno's departure from Roxy Music didn't end his musical partnership with Manzanera. The two continued working together on the guitarist's solo projects, including his 1975 album Diamond Head, and as part of the 1976 music project 801.

Manzanera has previously told Guitar Player about the important role Eno played in shaping the sound of Roxy Music's first two albums. The pair frequently worked together, with Eno processing Manzanera’s electric-guitar signal through his electronic equipment and contributing to the performances.

“He and I used to do a lot of stuff together where he would treat my guitars through his EMS VCS3 synthesizer, and we both had Revox tape recorders,” Manzanera explained.

“So when you heard us doing stuff together, you’d have heard my guitar signal with echoes and distortion, and stuff like that, but you also would have heard my treated guitar sound through Eno’s oscillators and filters and things. He also had a DeArmond pedal modified to control the speed of our Revox tape recorders.”

Although Roxy Music have retired from the road, their legacy continues to receive attention through archival releases. The band is celebrating its 1973 album For Your Pleasure with a Super Deluxe Edition featuring previously unheard songwriting demos, studio outtakes, live recordings and previously unreleased performances.

Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins gave each other's careers a significant boost in 1967 with the song “Both Sides, Now.” But in a new interview with The Guardian, Collins says Mitchell, the song's writer, wasn't happy that she scored a major hit with it before Mitchell had a chance to record it herself.

Collins says she first heard the song — and met its writer — thanks to an early-morning phone call from Al Kooper, the musician and producer who played the signature organ lines on Bob Dylan's ”Like a Rolling Stone” and founded Blood, Sweat & Tears.

“I’m 48 years sober, but in the old days I drank,” Collins says. “One night in 1967, I was passed out and the phone rang at about 3 a.m. It was my friend Al Kooper. He said he’d been at a club and had run into this woman, Joni, who wrote songs. He put her on the phone and she sang ‘Both Sides, Now’ over the phone. It was brilliant. I said: ‘I’ll be right over.’ I recorded it the next day and it became a huge hit.”

Collins included her recording on her 1967 album Wildflowers. Released as a single in October 1968, it climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 by December and reached number six in Canada. The following year, it won a Grammy for Best Folk Performance. The recording also peaked at number three on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart and has since become one of Collins' signature songs.

“I don’t think Joni was too happy that I was the first to record it, but she was very generous and I’ve since recorded many of her songs. She was unknown then, so I’m proud that I was able to help introduce her to the world. She’s one of the great writers of all time.”

Mitchell has credited a passage in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King with inspiring the song. In the book, the protagonist looks down at the clouds from an airplane while traveling to Africa. Mitchell happened to be reading the passage on a flight of her own when the idea for the song struck.

“I was reading ... Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson ... is also up in a plane. He's on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”

As with much of Mitchell's music, “Both Sides, Now” makes use of an alternate tuning. The song is played in open D (D-A-D-F#-A-D). In early live performances, Mitchell played it in G, using a capo at the fifth fret. For her 1969 studio recording, she placed the capo at the fourth fret of her 1956 Martin D-28, putting the song in F# major.

Mitchell recorded her own version for her second album, 1969's Clouds, before revisiting the song in a lush orchestral arrangement for her 2000 album Both Sides Now. But the success of Collins' recording had already created a curious situation: Because Collins released it first and took it into the Top 10 before Mitchell had secured a recording contract, many listeners assumed it was Collins' song.

The confusion persisted even after Mitchell released her own orchestral version. According to a 2001 report in the Globe and Mail, archived on Mitchell's official website, several people actually asked the songwriter how she had managed to get Judy Collins to let her have the song.

Twenty-five years ago today, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr reunited with George Harrison for the last time. The three surviving Beatles met for lunch in New York on November 12, 2001, while Harrison was receiving treatment for cancer. Just 17 days later, he was dead, aged 58.

Looking back on that final visit, McCartney recalled an afternoon filled with laughter and reminiscences rather than sadness. He also remembered an unusually tender moment between two friends who had known each other since childhood.

“We held hands,” McCartney told Uncut seven years later. “It’s funny, even at the height of our friendship, as guys, you would never hold hands. It just wasn’t a Liverpool thing. But it was lovely.”

“But it was really lovely, and the years just stripped back,” McCartney said of the visit.

Rather than dwell on Harrison's illness, the two friends found themselves reminiscing about their shared past. McCartney recalled one exchange in particular, when Harrison expressed frustration at being moved between treatment facilities.

“One of the things I remember him saying, because he’d been moved from Switzerland to a clinic in New York, and then to a clinic somewhere else because you sort of follow the treatment, he said ‘Can’t we just stop in one place?’ And I was going, ‘Yeah! Let’s go to Speke Hall!’”

Speke Hall, a Tudor manor house in Liverpool, was not far from the neighborhoods where the two musicians had grown up. McCartney's suggestion was a playful invitation to return to familiar surroundings, far removed from the medical treatment that had come to dominate Harrison's final months.

Their friendship had begun long before Beatlemania, when the two boys discovered they shared a passion for rock and roll and electric guitars.

“I first met George a long time ago, on the school bus,” McCartney told Uncut. “We occasionally would sit next to each other on the bus, and we found we had rock and roll in common, and guitars. Eventually, we made a guitar together. It turned out more like a Hawaiian guitar.

“It was a block of wood with strings on it. When I say we made it, I have to hand it to George, he was more the engineer than me. I stood by and made a few useless suggestions. Those kinds of things brought us closer together. We became friends.”

That friendship would eventually change the course of popular music. When McCartney and John Lennon realized neither of them had the skill to play lead guitar, McCartney knew exactly whom to recommend.

“Eventually, when we were looking for a guitar player, I suggested to John that I had this friend who was really good. So George came along one night, on an empty bus, on the top deck, somewhere around Woolton where John lived. And he pulled out his guitar and played ‘Raunchy,’” he said, referring to Bill Justis’s 1957 hit song. “And that was it — he was in the band.

“He was a bit too young, almost out of the age range for us, a little too baby-faced, but he was just a great player.”

Harrison joined the Quarrymen, the group that would evolve into the Beatles, while still a teenager. He would go on to become one of the most distinctive guitarists in rock, contributing to some of the band's most enduring recordings before establishing a successful solo career.

Looking back on their final meeting, McCartney captured the lifelong affection he felt for his friend.

“It was good,” he recalled. “It was like we were dreaming. He was my little baby brother, almost, because I’d known him that long.”

Queen were a unique band in that all four members individually wrote songs that topped the charts. Even the Beatles, whose songs have reached number one in the U.S. and U.K. a combined 38 times, can’t claim that distinction.

“Somebody to Love,” released on 1976’s A Day at the Races, turns 50 today (November 12). For Brian May, the song was not only a spiritual successor to their operatic epic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but also an example of the band’s songwriting “sausage machine” operating at full tilt.

The track’s elaborate arrangements included layers of vocals designed to evoke a gospel choir, alongside an extravagant approach to May’s guitar harmonies that gave them an orchestral quality. There’s also one of the guitarist’s trademark melodic guitar solos, played with the neck and middle pickups of his Red Special out of phase to produce a “screamy” tone. But, speaking previously to Absolute Radio, May said the song was all about Freddie Mercury.

“Freddie wanted to be Aretha Franklin, you have to bear this in mind,” he said. “That explains everything. He loved Aretha, and this was his gospel epic.”

May, whose self-penned hits include “We Will Rock You,” “I Want It All” and “The Show Must Go On,” understood Mercury’s vision. He was happy to take a back seat as, five albums into their career, Queen’s songwriting machine was running smoothly.

“It kind of followed in the steps of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in the sense that we were building up these multiple vocal parts, but this time we were being a gospel choir instead of an English choir,” May recalled. “Freddie came in very well prepared with a lot of vocal parts, and we just worked our way through them.

“It became something we called the sausage machine. We sort of followed our instincts, or whoever was leading at the time, and it’s a very good feeling. I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, this is going to be something great.’”

May’s description of the process suggests a band working with an almost assembly-line efficiency, with everyone knowing their parts and contributing to a larger whole. It was a rather different experience from the disagreements that surrounded the writing of “Don’t Stop Me Now”, or the raised eyebrows that followed Mercury’s proposed album title.

Following Mercury’s death, the remaining members of Queen performed the song with George Michael at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium in London on April 20, 1992. The performance has since become one of the most celebrated interpretations of the song.

“People like Mr. Michael — it was staggering to work with people of that caliber,” May later said of the performance (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “Without any kind of falseness, he was one of the great surprises to most people of the evening. I think in most people's feelings, he got closest to the range of Freddie himself.”

May has since clarified his position on touring and the future of Queen, while pouring cold water on hopes of a residency at the Sphere. He has also been looking back on Queen’s historic performance behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest, reflecting on the difficult feelings that revisiting the show has brought back.

Jimmy Page hasn’t been on a concert tour in more than a quarter-century, and the Led Zeppelin guitarist has no plans to change that. But while the prospect of returning to life on the road holds little appeal, he insists he hasn’t lost his desire to play.

Page, 82, last toured in 2000, when he joined forces with the Black Crowes for the Excess All Areas run. The collaboration brought together the legendary guitarist and the American rock band for a series of performances built around their shared love of blues and rock and roll. The tour was cut short after Page suffered a back injury, forcing the cancellation of its remaining dates.

Although he hasn’t embarked on another tour since, Page hasn’t entirely disappeared from the stage. His most high-profile appearance came in 2007, when he reunited with Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham for Led Zeppelin’s celebrated one-off concert at London’s O2 Arena. He also joined the Foo Fighters at Wembley Stadium that year, before performing alongside Leona Lewis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony.

In the years since, however, opportunities to see Page perform have become increasingly scarce. His most recent public appearance was at the 2023 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where he paid tribute to Link Wray with a performance of “Rumble.”

Now, speaking to The Sun (via LedZepNews.com) at the Music Industry Trust Awards in London, Page has explained why fans shouldn’t expect a return to touring. It’s the relentless travel and hotel-room routine that puts him off, rather than any waning enthusiasm for music.

“The whole sort of, ‘living out of a suitcase, bags go down at seven in the morning and then you leave for the plane at midday’, that doesn’t really appeal to me any more,” he says.

The guitarist is nevertheless keen to make one thing clear: he’s not finished playing.

“But the idea of playing does, and I am still playing – of course I am,” he adds.

That puts Page in contrast with his former Led Zeppelin bandmate Robert Plant, who continues to make touring a central part of his musical life. Plant recently announced a new series of U.K. and Ireland shows for summer 2027.

The five dates begin June 19 at Hampton Court Palace in London, with further performances at Lincoln Castle on June 24 and Scarborough Open Air Theatre on June 26. Plant will then play the Piece Hall in Halifax on June 27 before closing the run at Trinity College in Dublin on June 29.

Jimi Hendrix could soon have a place in your pocket. The late guitar legend has been chosen to represent Washington state in the U.S. Mint’s American Innovation $1 Coin Program, which issues limited-run coins celebrating notable American innovators.

Hendrix is the first musician selected for the initiative, which began in 2019 and recognizes notable innovators and inventions from across the country. Previous selections include Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for California and NASA for Texas. The 57-coin series will also include representatives from the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories.

Washington Governor Bob Ferguson made the final selection from a shortlist of five candidates put forward by a committee, citing both Hendrix’s musical achievements and his connection to the state.

“Picking just one example from the most innovative state in the nation was difficult, but Jimi Hendrix’s historic innovation on guitar and his deep roots in Washington make him a great choice to represent our state,” Ferguson says.

Hendrix’s nomination is now with the U.S. Mint, which will develop a design for the coin. The Secretary of the Treasury has final approval, and the finished dollar is scheduled to enter circulation in 2029.

Born in Seattle in 1942, Hendrix left his hometown to pursue a career as a musician, initially backing artists including Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. His breakthrough came after moving to England in 1966 and forming the Jimi Hendrix Experience with British musicians Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. Within months, his explosive playing had made him the talk of the London music scene, leaving established stars like Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend scrambling .

Hendrix approached the electric guitar as an instrument with possibilities that extended far beyond conventional playing. He turned amplifier feedback into a musical tool, pushed fuzz and wah effects into new territory and combined the language of the blues with psychedelic rock. His performances also helped establish the Fender Stratocaster as one of rock’s defining instruments.

Nearly six decades after his death in 1970, Hendrix remains a touchstone for guitarists across generations. His combination of blues phrasing, psychedelic experimentation and fearless use of distortion and feedback helped expand the instrument’s vocabulary — and his recordings continue to offer a daunting benchmark for anyone who picks up an electric guitar.

Ask Joe Bonamassa about the most memorable moment he’s witnessed at a concert, and he doesn’t take long to answer. He immediately points to a performance by Jeff Beck at the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Bridgeview, Illinois.

It wasn’t simply because Beck had chosen to play one of the most stirring operatic compositions of all time. As he performed it with bassist Rhonda Smith, keyboardist Jason Rebello and drummer Narada Michael Walden, nature itself joined the performance — leaving Bonamassa speechless.

“My best Crossroads memory: 2010, Jeff Beck playing Nessun dorma,” he says in a social media post. “I was watching him play it from the stands.

“I snuck out front and as he was playing it, and it was starting to crescendo. This storm cloud had come over, and the clouds were purple. It was the most amazing visual to go along with some of the most amazing guitar playing I’ve ever heard in my entire life — that was Jeff Beck.”

The video clip captures exactly what Bonamassa witnessed: as the aria reaches its famous climax, a wide shot reveals dark clouds gathering above Beck as he delivers his dramatic finale.

Nessun dorma, popularized by opera legend Luciano Pavarotti, tells the story of a prince determined to win the affections of an uninterested princess. Written by Giacomo Puccini for his opera Turandot, it was first performed in 1926. Its closing declaration, “Vincerò” (“I will win”), later became synonymous with the 1990 soccer World Cup.

In 2010, Beck — who died in 2023 aged 78 — explained why he’d chosen the aria.

“I’m looking away from rock and roll into proper, serious melodies, which, for me, has been a good playground to look into,” he said.

“Pavarotti never ceases to amaze me. The bellowing — the big, deep, proper opera singing — is something I love. I was keen to try Nessun dorma, which he sang magnificently. My guitar is not a voice, and it’s not his voice; I played it like a spirited, bluesy thing. I was trying to make the guitar do things it’s not supposed to do.”

Prince's legendary performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony may have been more than a spectacular display of electric-guitar playing. According to revelations from an unreleased documentary about the musician, it was also an opportunity to settle a score with Rolling Stone.

The guitarist reportedly felt slighted after being omitted from the magazine’s 2003 list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. And when he took the stage the following year alongside Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood and Dhani Harrison to honor George Harrison, he apparently had something to prove.

Prince’s contribution to the Beatles classic became one of the most celebrated guitar performances of his career. Stepping forward for an extended solo, he unleashed a breathtaking display of melodic playing, high-speed runs and showmanship before tossing his guitar into the air and strutting offstage.

As a New York Times Magazine feature on an epic, nine-hour Prince documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Ezra Edelman revealed in 2024, the performance may have carried a more personal message.

“On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura,” the magazine wrote. “But the film gives it a new context. Questlove, on the screen, talks about his disbelief, the previous year, when Rolling Stone made a list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, and Prince was left off it.”

The documentary reportedly suggests that Prince didn’t forget the omission, waiting for an opportunity to make his feelings known.

“Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage — at an event associated with [founder] Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone — was, in part, an act of revenge,” the article continued. “There’s spite and aggression in the performance. But there’s also pain — in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers.”

Whatever his motivation, the performance left a lasting impression on his fellow musicians. Petty, who was onstage with Prince that night, recalled recognizing that something extraordinary was happening as the guitarist launched into his solo.

“You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on.’ He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here,’” the late singer-songwriter told The New York Times in 2016, reflecting on Prince’s career following his death.

The performance has since become one of Prince’s most enduring musical moments, with Guitar Player previously naming it one of the greatest guitar solos in music history.

And perhaps Rolling Stone eventually got the message, too. In 2023, the magazine expanded its 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time ranking to 250 players, finally giving Prince his due with a number 14 placement. Then, in May 2026, it went considerably further. Its new 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time list placed Prince’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” performance at number 15 — while awarding the top spot to his solo on “Purple Rain.”

It’s quite a turnaround for a publication that had once left him off its list of the world’s greatest guitarists.

There’s an unfortunate footnote to the documentary revelations that originally brought Prince’s alleged motivation to light. Despite Edelman’s extensive work and access to the musician’s archives, his film will not be released. In February 2025, Netflix and Prince’s estate announced an agreement to scrap the project, with the estate instead developing a separate documentary featuring material from Prince’s vault.

Mick Jagger only needs a television and an acoustic guitar to get the songwriting juices flowing — even if what's on the screen is rubbish. The Rolling Stones frontman says he recently found himself writing song ideas while watching TV at home, eventually having to switch off the distraction to keep the inspiration coming.

“I was sitting watching the TV last night in my flat,” Jagger tells Uncut (via Guitar.com). “I picked up my acoustic guitar and wrote four different things. I said, ‘Turn the TV off. This is rubbish!’ It was quite late and I was banging out these tunes. I put the TV back on after I’d done two.”

But the creative spark hadn't run its course. “Then I thought, ‘Hang on, I’ve got this idea…’ I turned off the TV and wrote two more.”

Jagger — whose songwriting partnership with Keith Richards ranks among the most successful in rock history — is careful to point out that the ideas aren't necessarily finished songs.

“I’m not saying they’re finished songs — they’re more like sketches. I thought, ‘Well, this is good going. You’ve got to do this every day.’ That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been writing quite a lot. But for what I don’t know.”

The Rolling Stones recently released their 27th studio album, Foreign Tongues, following 2023's Hackney Diamonds. But they haven't confirmed plans to tour behind the new record. Their last road run came in 2024, in support of Hackney Diamonds. And according to bandmate Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards may be the one holding things up.

“Mick and I have already been promoting a little bit,” Wood said. “But we're waiting for Keith to settle down what he wants to do for his future, because he's a bit road weary at the moment. He said, ‘I don't want to do any more touring for a bit.’ So I thought, Well, I’m not gonna sit back and wait. So I’m going to get out there and play.”

Wood has since done just that with his AMMO band. Jagger, meanwhile, is already looking ahead to 2027, with the possibility of more live performances on his mind — whether with the Rolling Stones or on his own.

“I’d really like to do some shows,” he admits. “So that’s in my head. But if not the Stones, then any show!”

Willie Nelson has revealed that he twice asked his wife to let him die while battling COVID in 2022. The country legend has previously discussed his fight with the virus, but in his new memoir, The Last Leaf (via People), he offers a more detailed account of just how close he came to death.

The 93-year-old recalls waking up in his tour bus bed alongside Annie, his wife since 1991, and realizing how seriously ill he was.

“The distance from the bed to the bathroom is less than five feet. But I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t breathe.”

Annie activated a nebulizer to ease his chest congestion and gave him oxygen, but neither seemed to help. Around that time, the COVID test she'd administered came back positive.

“Paxlovid had just come out, and I knew [bandmate] Mickey Raphael had a prescription, which he gave to us,” Annie recalled. “By this time, you could breathe, but barely. We gave our drivers, Tony and Gates, the option to fly home, but they said no. They drove us back to Austin.

“In the back of the bus, you stayed isolated and grew sicker. I wasn’t sure you would make it. I alerted Dr. Greenwood that we were on our way and asked to have a mobile monoclonal antibody guy meet us.”

Nelson — well-known for his passion for weed — asked Annie how she'd known what to do.

“I’d worked all this out for months,” she told him. “I knew there was a good chance you’d catch it. I knew I needed to be ready. I also knew that taking you to a hospital was not an option. You’d have no chance of privacy, and hospitals are hotbeds of deadly viruses.”

When they arrived home, Nelson was carried to their bedroom, which Annie said “was already fitted out like a hospital.” But while they waited for the medication to take effect, his condition continued to deteriorate.

“Every labored breath caused you incredible pain,” she recalled. “I wanted to do more, but I’d done all I could. I just had to sit there and watch you suffer. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Nelson, who remembered “feeling excruciating pain in every cell of my body,” then asked Annie: “Am I right in remembering that I said, ‘Annie, you need to let me go’?”

She confirmed he had.

“But you wouldn’t let me,” he continued.

“What I actually said was, ‘Willie, if you die, I’ll kill you,’” she replied. “And you said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a minute.’ You were thinking about reincarnation, but I didn’t want to hear about reincarnation. I wanted you to understand that I was not about to let you go.”

The doctor returned the following day with medication that he warned could either cure Nelson or kill him. The singer's response was straightforward: “Either way, just give it to me.”

The treatment worked, but Annie told him he spent two weeks in “utter hell.”

Nelson then asked her one more time: “Did I ask you to let me die?”

“Yup, twice,” she replied. “The whole thing was a nightmare.”

The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity — and My Longest Love Affair is available now via Penguin Press.

Buddy Guy was a hero to the electric guitar players of the British blues boom. When he first arrived in England with his trio in the mid-1960s, his high-energy style, built around amp overdrive, feedback and a potent mix of raw emotion and technical skill, made a lasting impression.

But while the blues guitar legend helped inspire a generation of British players, he felt they took his approach to extremes — particularly when it came to volume.

Guy even had to warn Jimi Hendrix about what awaited him in the clubs where those guitarists played. And Hendrix, as Guy points out, was hardly known for keeping things quiet.

“You’ll laugh, but I thought he used to play too loud,” Guy says of Hendrix in the December 2025 issue of Guitar World. “When I first came up, Muddy Waters and those guys had two little speakers at each corner of the blues club, and it was a clean sound.”

The British players, however, had a different idea of how loud the blues should be.

“When the British guys started playing, they had stacks of Marshalls! After I got to know Jimi, I’d go see him and [warn him], ‘Before you go in there, you ain’t gonna hear nothing.’ That type of sound just took over.

“That clean sound went away because, with the amplifiers, it was a dogfight. And then all the special effects came in, and Jimi, I think he was one of the greatest that ever took advantage of the special effects, because a lot of people used them after him.”

Despite their different approaches to the blues, Hendrix was a huge admirer of Guy, even going to see him perform in 1967. The two eventually met in New York, where Guy initially mistook Hendrix's signature stage moves for his own.

“I got invited to play in New York City. I was putting on the ‘Buddy Guy show,’ with my guitar behind my back and throwing it around,” he told Guitar Player of their first meeting. “And somebody said to me, ‘Look out, man, that’s Jimi Hendrix over there!’ — ’cause those were Jimi’s moves.

“But I said, ‘So what? Who the hell is that?’

“Eventually, Jimi came over to me and introduced himself. He said, ‘I just canceled a gig, ’cause I wanted to see you.’ And that’s how we became friends.”

Still, Guy wasn't interested in following Hendrix down the road of elaborate effects and increasingly adventurous guitar sounds. He preferred to stick with the blues players who had shaped his own musical upbringing.

“I was into Arthur Crudup, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and all the old blues guys,” Guy told GP on a separate occasion. “I wasn’t into all the special effects. I liked what Hendrix was doing when I heard it. But I decided to let him have that. I figured my time would come.”

Eric Clapton was another guitarist captivated by Guy's playing. In fact, Clapton has said that seeing Guy's power trio perform in London inspired him to leave John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and form Cream.

In related news, Guy has discussed the one thing every guitarist needs to play the blues and reflected on his slightly unusual relationship with his son.

“He didn’t know who I was until he could turn 21 and get into the blues clubs,” Guy has revealed. “He said, ‘Dad, I didn’t know you could play like that!’”

Tom Petty used music to raise his eldest daughter, Adria, introducing her to records he felt she needed to hear and encouraging her to study them closely. But when he caught her listening to one particular band, the “American Girl” songwriter decided it was time for a musical intervention.

As the driving force behind the Heartbreakers and a key member of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, Petty was one of the most beloved figures in American rock. He died in 2017, aged 66 — a loss his longtime foil, Mike Campbell, is still grieving. But his influence extended well beyond his catalog of timeless hits.

Born in November 1974, Adria arrived two years before Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released their self-titled debut, growing up alongside her father's burgeoning career. She has since established herself as a director, making music videos for Beyoncé, Coldplay, Kings of Leon and others.

In a new interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, Adria recalls how her father used records as a way to teach her about music.

“My dad would always walk in the room and throw a CD or a piece of vinyl on the bed, [and say] ‘Tell me what you think of this,’” she remembers. “We would sit down after I listened to it a lot and discuss it. I would listen to every record with my liner notes out, look at all the lyrics, look at who played on it, look at everything the artist intended, and then talk about it with him.”

Those listening sessions helped foster a lifelong connection between the two, while giving Adria an education that would inform her own creative career.

“There was a long love of music between us,” she says. “Just sort of, ‘Why is something good?’”

Not that they always agreed on what qualified. During her teens, Adria developed a taste for some bands that left her father less than impressed. Aerosmith, in particular, raised a few concerns.

“There were a lot of things I liked in my teens that he was really upset by,” she says. “In particular Aerosmith’s [1989 album] Pump was very concerning to him. When I was listening to, ‘Janie's Got a Gun,’ he was like, ‘I need to intervene here’ and he went and bought me a bunch of records.”

Among his counterprogramming were albums by Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, including the latter's landmark Highway 61 Revisited. Petty was evidently hoping to broaden his daughter's musical horizons — and perhaps steer her away from what he considered a questionable detour.

The Hendrix recommendation is particularly interesting given the connection between the two guitarists. Although Hendrix is rightly celebrated for his solos, his rhythm playing was equally essential to his sound, even if it sometimes took a back seat to his more spectacular lead work. Petty shared that appreciation for the less flashy side of guitar playing, famously calling rhythm playing “a lost art” in a rediscovered 1997 interview with Guitar Player.

ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons has teamed up with Lithuanian singer, songwriter and theatrical performer Vidas Bareikis, who records as VB by the Sea, for a new single, “NPC,” released today, November 11.

The collaboration came together in unusual circumstances. Bareikis and Gibbons recorded the track in a hotel conference room in Tallinn, Estonia, just hours before ZZ Top kicked off its world tour.

In a November 8 Instagram post, Bareikis shared the story behind the session, describing how he and his team arranged to meet Gibbons before the show.

“To record @billyfgibbons, we had to fly to Tallinn for the first concert of ZZ Top’s world tour.

“Just a couple of hours before the show, we met in a hotel conference room that @talaz_ had already transformed into a recording studio. And in about an hour, we recorded my most incredible feature collaboration to date.

“And what made it so incredible wasn’t just the fact that we were working with a rock legend of this caliber, but even more so his rock ’n’ roll energy, kindness, and amazing sense of humor.

“Thank you, Billy, for the inspiration!”

Produced by Karolis Talutis, Martin Guigui, Brian A. Witkin and Gibbons, “NPC” marks Bareikis's debut release with Pacific Records.

The song takes its title from the video game term non-player character, referring to a character whose actions and dialogue are determined by programming rather than an actual player. Bareikis uses the concept to poke fun at people who go through life on autopilot, following predictable routines and chasing money, status and social approval without questioning their choices.

“NPC” is also the first preview of The Game, Bareikis's forthcoming concept album, which explores ambition, relationships, competition, success and failure through a video game-inspired narrative. The record blends rock music with theatrical storytelling, reflecting Bareikis's background in both disciplines.

Bareikis is an established performer in Lithuania, where his work spans music and theatre. A singer, songwriter, composer and theatre director, he has directed 26 theatrical productions and received the country's prestigious Golden Stage Cross award. He has also won multiple M.A.M.A. Awards, Lithuania's equivalent of the Grammys.

Gibbons, meanwhile, has spent more than five decades as one of rock's most recognizable guitarists. Best known as the founding guitarist and vocalist of ZZ Top, he first made his mark with psychedelic blues-rock group Moving Sidewalks, which opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He has also released solo material and collaborated with a range of musicians beyond his work with the Texas trio, including legendary rocker Dion DiMucci.

An official video for “NPC” is expected to follow, along with live performances in December.

Paul McCartney has been declared a billionaire by Forbes, which estimates the former Beatle's fortune at $1.4 billion, making him the world's third-wealthiest musician.

Only Jay-Z, whose wealth is estimated at $2.8 billion, and Taylor Swift, at around $2 billion, rank higher. According to Forbes, approximately $350 million of McCartney's fortune comes from his time with the Beatles. But it's what he did beyond the band that helped turn him into a billionaire.

The magazine notes that, six decades after singing that he “don't care too much for money,” McCartney has “sung, sued, countersued, toured and toiled his way to a $1.4 billion fortune.”

During the height of Beatlemania in the mid-'60s, however, the Fab Four saw surprisingly little of the money their success generated. Their record deal reportedly earned McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr less than a penny for every record sold. McCartney described the arrangement to Forbes in 2017 as “basically a slave contract.”

As the Beatles approached their end in 1969, McCartney began taking steps to ensure his future earnings would be on different terms. He established MPL Communications, a music publishing company that would protect his interests as a solo artist, while steadily expanding its catalog.

Among his acquisitions were the publishing rights to songs by Beatles inspiration Buddy Holly, along with Broadway scores and Christmas standards. The strategy has proved enormously lucrative, generating royalties whenever those songs are played or performed. As Forbes puts it, “Anytime 'Blue Suede Shoes' is streamed or a high school theater group performs Grease, McCartney gets paid.”

The magazine estimates MPL is now worth at least $250 million. Meanwhile, McCartney's solo career has produced 20 albums, and he has also worked to reclaim rights to the Beatles' back catalog. The band's company, Apple Corps, now generates around $50 million annually through streaming, vinyl sales and merchandise.

Of course, McCartney's considerable wealth is hardly a secret. His fame has long made his financial success a subject of public fascination, and in 1986 he was asked a particularly direct question: “Do you feel guilty about having so much money?”

His answer reflected his working-class upbringing in Liverpool, where he grew up in a council house watching his parents struggle to make ends meet.

“No,” he replied, before elaborating on why he didn't feel the need to apologize for his fortune.

“That was one of the things I thought, ‘God, this is going to be awkward because if I get money, I'm going to turn out like all those people who sort of [say] 'I'm sorry, I did well.' But I think, ‘Sod it,’ you know?

“I'd feel guilty if I had a fleet of Cadillacs and used a lot of petrol all the time,” he continued. “But I don't do that. I try to do good stuff with my money, I try to help a lot of things. I don't shout about it, so I'm not known as a great charity person. But I believe you shouldn't shout about it, [otherwise] I think it's more like a publicity stunt: ‘I've just given to save the children!’”

Although McCartney has generally preferred to keep his philanthropy out of the spotlight, he has supported a number of causes publicly. A vegetarian since 1975, he has long championed animal rights and regularly donated to PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). His late wife, Linda McCartney, also helped establish a successful plant-based food business.

He has additionally performed at numerous benefit events, including Live 8 in 2005 and One World: Together at Home during the COVID-19 pandemic. But he has never been particularly interested in publicizing his charitable contributions.

“I don't feel uncomfortable with it,” he added. “I think if I didn't have it, someone else would have it. And at least I feel like, to some degree, it's in good hands because I know what I do, and I'm into conservation. I'm into peace. I'm certainly not into any power trips.”

McCartney has plenty of musical activity on the horizon, too. He is set to reunite with Ringo Starr and Joe Walsh at VetsAid 2027. The two surviving Beatles have also announced a major new Beatles experience in their hometown of Liverpool.

The night Steve Vai left David Lee Roth's band, Eddie Van Halen called him out of the blue.

“I didn't even know how he knew,” Vai recalls. “He said, ‘You have to come over to my house,’ and we kind of struck up a friendship that was very heavy for, like, four months where we were virtually talking every day. It was weird.”

The timing was remarkable. Vai had spent the previous few years occupying the guitar spot in Roth's solo band — a role that inevitably invited comparisons with the man he'd replaced. But rather than becoming rivals, Vai and Eddie would develop a close friendship that lasted decades.

It's well documented that, after leaving Van Halen, Roth turned to Vai to launch his solo career — and, perhaps more importantly, make a play for Eddie's guitar-hero throne. Vai, however, has consistently maintained that he approached the job with respect, not competition.

Speaking with wrestler-turned-podcaster Chris Jericho alongside Joe Satriani — with whom Vai has just released the debut SatchVai album, The Sea of Emotion — Vai looked back on how he approached the high-profile assignment.

“I sharpened my knives,” he jokes when asked about joining Roth. “When Edward hit the scene and that first record came out, I remember thinking, ‘game on.’ He raised the bar for all of us.”

Still, Vai says he was nervous about joining Roth's band for only about a minute before embracing what was a hugely intimidating job. The partnership proved successful, even if Vai has since acknowledged that he was relatively inexperienced at the time.

Their debut, Eat 'Em and Smile, turned 40 this year and went platinum, as did its 1988 follow-up, Skyscraper. But that marked the end of Vai's time with Roth — and the beginning of an unexpected friendship.

How Eddie knew Vai had left Roth's band remains a mystery. Maybe it was coincidence, but the timing was extraordinary: On the very day Vai's tenure with Roth ended, his supposed rival reached out to welcome him into his world. Whatever tension might have existed between them gave way to a remarkably close friendship.

That friendship also gave Vai a rare opportunity to hear guitar riffs and solos that have yet to see the light of day — although Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather are working to change that.

“During that period, I’d go up to his house and he would play me this amazing stuff because Edward was like an audio pack rat,” Vai continues. “He was showing me the studio that was being built at the time and he would just go in there and he'd record by himself all you know tons and tons of stuff. I just thought, ‘Make a solo record,’ but [he’d say], ‘No, I’m Van Halen.’”

Satriani, whom Roth touted in the 1990s, has since taken on an Eddie Van Halen-adjacent role in Sammy Hagar's Best of All Worlds band. Hagar has been full of praise for the way Satriani has approached the job. But Vai isn't convinced anyone can truly replicate his late friend's magic.

“I've heard so many people play his songs, play his parts, some people more authentically than others, some people more personally like themselves, and some people it's just an abysmal disaster,” he laughs. “But I’m yet to hear anybody, especially myself, have that DNA in their fingers.”

It's a big part of why Vai has refused to reproduce Eddie's solos note for note.

Meanwhile, after reports emerged that a second Crossroads film was in the works, with Vai potentially reprising his infamous shredding role, the guitarist has since shut down the rumors, explaining how a misunderstanding sparked the story.

Mike Campbell has found ways to keep Tom Petty close, even as he continues to come to terms with the loss of his longtime bandmate and musical partner.

Nearly nine years after Petty's death, the Heartbreakers guitarist says the grief remains very much a part of his life.

“It was like losing your right arm. Very hard — and a surprise — and I’m still grieving,” Campbell tells The Sun in a new interview.

Petty died aged 66 on October 2, 2017, less than a week after he and the Heartbreakers played their final concert together at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. His death was subsequently attributed to an accidental overdose involving several prescription medications, including painkillers he had been taking for a hip injury.

Campbell's connection with Petty stretched back nearly half a century. The two first crossed paths in 1970, when Campbell auditioned for Mudcrutch, the Florida band that preceded the formation of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The guitarist knew almost immediately that Petty was someone special.

“Tom was instantly unforgettable,” Campbell tells The Sun. “Of course, he had the long blond hair but he also had a swagger.

“He had this vibe around him of knowing where he was going — and he was smarter than anybody else in the room.

“The whole rock star thing came later. Tom lived at home [with his parents Earl and Kitty] and was a hippie dude like me.”

Their partnership would eventually produce some of rock's most enduring songs, among them “American Girl,” “Refugee,” “Don’t Do Me Like That” and “I Won’t Back Down.” But Campbell says the bond between them went well beyond what they accomplished in the studio or onstage.

“Tom and I were close, not necessarily to hang out all the time, but our musical and spiritual connection was about as strong as anybody can have,” he says.

That connection is something Campbell still feels when he takes Heartbreakers songs on the road with his current group, the Dirty Knobs. The set includes material he co-wrote with Petty, including “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “You Got Lucky.”

For Campbell, revisiting the songs is a way to maintain a connection with his old friend.

“I like to perform Heartbreakers songs to keep them alive, to remember and revisit my time with Tom,” he says. “It is bittersweet but there are moments when I feel his spirit. He’s right behind me, saying, ‘Go man, go!’

“You might never get over the loss of your brother or your father or your mother or your best friend but you learn to cope. That’s what grief is.”

Campbell's latest comments arrive alongside the release of Origins 1971-1978, a box set issued November 6 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It revisits the group's early years, before their commercial breakthrough with 1979's Damn the Torpedoes.

The surviving Heartbreakers also recently had an opportunity to revisit that legacy together. In September, Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair reunited for the first time since Petty's death, performing at the Americana Music Awards at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Country star Chris Stapleton joined them for the special appearance, as they worked through a selection of the band's best-loved songs.

As Mike Love’s health remains a concern, the Beach Boys have cancelled what was supposed to be their final show of 2026, adding to a growing list of scrapped dates and further clouding the band’s touring future.

The group had planned an extensive summer tour this year, but most of those dates were eventually cancelled because of an unspecified health issue affecting Love, the only original member still performing with the Beach Boys.

Two upcoming Florida shows, scheduled for November 11 and 12, have quietly been replaced by performances from John Stamos and the California Sound. The group features core members of the Beach Boys’ touring lineup, but it can't use the Beach Boys name, whose exclusive legal trademark is held by Love.

Now, the band has also pulled the plug on its November 13 show at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Bristol, Virginia. That leaves just one date on the Beach Boys’ itinerary: a May 8, 2027, performance in Alberta, Canada. That show was itself previously cancelled before being rescheduled.

Whether it will actually happen is another question. Two performances in Cincinnati and Nashville last month were widely framed as potentially Love’s final appearances with the Beach Boys. Stamos, who has a long history with the group, made no secret of the emotions surrounding the Nashville show.

“Tonight, at the Ryman, sharing the stage with Mike, I want to be completely present,” he wrote in a social media statement. “Hear every harmony, familiar joke and cheer… I want to cherish every second without feeling those seconds slipping away. That’s what I’m giving him.”

Love, for his part, told The New York Times in an email that he was concentrating on recovering from his health issues. But he also made clear how much performing still means to him, saying that “being onstage this past weekend fed my soul and gave me an incredible lift.” He added, “I’m putting my full energy into rehab so I can get back to the music and the best fans in the world.”

Concerns about Love’s health have been building for some time. Fans had already expressed alarm over his appearance during the Beach Boys’ 2025 tour, and the extensive cancellations this year have only added to the worry.

Al Jardine, another founding member who now tours with the Pet Sounds Band, was particularly troubled by what he saw when he encountered his former bandmate in October. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Jardine called Love’s condition “shocking” and said the experience had left him “really depressed”.

Jardine said Love had been “going through some health issues for quite a while”. Asked whether he thought the Beach Boys should continue performing with Love in his current condition, he didn't mince words.

“I would hope not,” he said. “That’s just not right, that I can see. Obviously, he’s a total pro. He wants to be onstage, but he just doesn’t know how not to do it. He doesn’t know what else to do, so I think he’s trapped.”

Stevie Wonder gave staff at a Greater Manchester restaurant a night to remember on November 8, stopping in for a meal after his sold-out Manchester concert — and leaving behind a £1,000 tip.

The soul legend had just performed at the city's 23,000-capacity Co-op Live arena as part of his Songs in the Key of Life 50th anniversary tour when he made an unexpected visit to Cafe Continental on Melbourne Street in nearby Stalybridge.

For the restaurant's owners, it was a dream visit they hadn't dared count on. They shared their excitement in a Facebook post the following day, along with a photo of Wonder chatting with them.

“Surreal things happen now and again. This is one of them! Pleasure to welcome Mr Stevie Wonder to the restaurant to close off his tour!” they wrote.

As co-owner Ryan Robinson explained to the Manchester Evening News, Wonder's entourage had been visiting for some time. Members of his touring band had become regular customers over the previous 18 months, while the singer's eldest daughter, Aisha, had also stopped by when visiting the U.K. The restaurant had first come to their attention through a TikTok video spotted by the daughter of Wonder's head of security.

“Every time they've visited, they've been like 'Stevie might come', and we were always just thinking that it would be amazing but we never expected anything from it,” Robinson said.

The call finally came on the night of the concert: Wonder was coming in, and the restaurant had to get ready in a hurry. Robinson described the last-minute preparations as “a bit of a scramble.”

The “Superstition” hitmaker arrived with his wife, younger daughter and members of his band and entourage. Robinson told Manchester's Finest the party was exceptionally down-to-earth and polite.

And then came the £1,000 tip — a generous surprise that gave the restaurant staff another reason to remember a night that was already pretty special.

Wonder still has one more U.K. date on his itinerary: a November 11 performance at Glasgow's OVO Hydro. After that, he'll head back to the U.S.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will share a stage again in January, giving Beatles fans a rare opportunity to see the two surviving members of the band perform together. The occasion is the 10th anniversary of VetsAid, Joe Walsh’s annual benefit concert for U.S. military veterans.

The show is set for January 29, 2027, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. McCartney and Starr will be joined by an eclectic lineup featuring The Killers, The War on Drugs, St. Vincent and Lucius, with more performers still to be announced.

The VetsAid appearance will mark McCartney and Starr's first time sharing a stage since December 20, 2024, when Starr made a surprise appearance during the final night of McCartney's Got Back tour at London's O2 Arena. The two Beatles performed “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Helter Skelter.”

They've since reunited in the studio, too. Starr appeared on McCartney's latest album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, marking the former bandmates' first-ever duet on record with “Home to Us,” a reflection on their shared Liverpool roots.

For Walsh, the 2027 concert represents a milestone for an event he's organized annually since 2017. The Eagles guitarist — who is also Starr's brother-in-law — announced the lineup on social media, saying he'd “hit the jackpot” with the bookings.

VetsAid directs proceeds toward established veterans' charities, with an emphasis on organizations providing comprehensive support for former service members and their families, including physical, mental, emotional and spiritual care. The 2027 concert will benefit veterans in Nevada.

General ticket sales begin November 13 at 10 a.m. local time. Presales start November 10 at 10 a.m. local time.

Heart’s Ann Wilson and her sister Nancy had one mission when they performed “Stairway to Heaven” at the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors: impress Led Zeppelin. But standing in front of the band’s surviving members — and an audience packed with some of the world’s biggest stars — nearly got the better of them.

“We both kind of looked at each other with these big owl eyes,” Wilson recalled of the moments before they walked onstage.

The sisters ultimately pushed through their nerves, delivering a performance that moved the Zeppelin members to tears. And when they met Jimmy Page and Robert Plant afterward, they got the reaction they’d hoped for.

“They were very happy and said they really liked our performance,” Wilson tells Guitar World in a new interview. “That was a big deal because so many bands have tried to cover Zeppelin, and they don’t enjoy being covered by people that don’t feel it.”

The December 2, 2012, ceremony was a landmark moment for Wilson, who had grown up studying Page’s guitar work.

“Starting out as a guitar player, I’d sit at Jimmy Page’s knee and learn everything I could from the Zeppelin records,” she said, speaking metaphorically. “The thing about Jimmy is that method or scales don’t even figure in his repertoire. It’s just so crazy and dissonant: I guess it’s right-brain stuff.

“My favorite guitar moments are latter-day songs like ‘The Crunge’ or ‘No Quarter.’ Over the years we’d cross paths, and those guys always walked around with a serious gravitas. You didn’t feel like going up because they had their own atmosphere.”

Wilson also recalled the experience in a 2024 interview with Matt Pinfield of 955KLOS, describing how the scale of the production didn’t fully hit her until the afternoon rehearsal.

“I actually saw the production that had been planned for ’Stairway’ and all the different choir singers, and the way it all unfolded and got bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said. “And then I was like, ’Holy shit,’ that is going to be great."

The audience was another revelation.

“It’s like all these super famous people from all walks, not just music, but politics and television and movies. It was amazing. It was really a never-to-be-forgotten experience.”

Still, the sisters had to get past those last-minute jitters. As Wilson recalled, they looked at each other just before taking the stage and made a decision.

“We just decided not to. We just went, ’We’ll do this later. Let’s just go out right now and keep our eyes on the ball and do the song the way we know we can and make it good.’ The mission was to please the Led Zeppelin guys, really. And I think we did."

Afterward, the reception included a meal Wilson jokingly described as a “rubber chicken dinner.”

Wilson is the subject of the upcoming documentary Ann Wilson: In My Voice, arriving November 25.

Geese have honored Television guitarist Richard Lloyd following his death, performing a cover of the band's 1978 song “Ain't That Nothin'” during a November 7 concert in Philadelphia.

“Rest in peace, Richard Lloyd,” frontman Cameron Winter told the crowd at the Fillmore before the band launched into a brief rendition of the Television classic. Lloyd died earlier that day, aged 75, at his home in Tennessee following a battle with cancer.

The performance came after Geese played their own song “2122,” with the band retaining much of the upbeat instrumental arrangement of Television's original. Winter, however, brought a darker, more brooding quality to the song with his distinctive vocal delivery, giving the punk-rock classic a different character.

It wasn't the first time Geese had paid homage to the New York punk pioneers. In 2024, Winter and company used their Geesefest residency to perform another Television favorite, “Marquee Moon,” the title track from the band's landmark 1977 debut album.

Geese have also acknowledged the similarities between the two groups. Speaking to GQ in 2025, the band welcomed comparisons to their fellow New York rockers, while Winter was mindful of making sure their guitar riffs didn't come across as a “rip off” of Television songs such as “Guiding Light.”

The November 7 show was the first of two consecutive nights Geese had scheduled at the Fillmore. They returned to the Philadelphia venue on Sunday and are due to continue their 2026 North American tour with two shows in Boston on Tuesday, November 10.

Lloyd's death followed news in August that he had been diagnosed with bile duct cancer. Television had appealed to fans for financial support to help cover the cost of his treatment.

His passing comes less than four years after Television frontman Tom Verlaine died in January 2023, aged 73. The band's bass guitarist, Fred Smith, also died earlier this year, in February, aged 77.

Among those paying tribute to Lloyd following the news were Johnny Marr, whose guitar playing with the Smiths was heavily influenced by Television, and fellow musician Lloyd Cole.

Dweezil Zappa is back on the road and GP Presents is thrilled to partner with AEG Entertainment to welcome him in the Bay Area on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. His DZ20: Like Father, Like Son Tour celebrates 20 years scaling the musical mountain of material composed by his father Frank, and playing it authentically onstage with fresh energy.

“It’s an ever-evolving skill to be able to filter my playing through the Frank Zappa vocabulary and lens of influence,” Dweezil told GP’s Gary Graff, “but then at the speed of thought be able to have my own phrases come into the music. I rarely play complete solos note-for-note, but I do try to play specific phrases that give the identity and the flavor of the solo in the way my dad would play it, while using a sound that is evocative of the era.”

That’s a big part of the big fun that happens whenever Dweezil plays his father’s music, the authentic classic rock-era tones he achieves with the historic gear he brings. Here’s what to expect on DZ20:

“I’m bringing a Roxy-era SG with some different pickups, and I’m bringing a Stratocaster with a humbucker in the bridge and two single-coils, so I’m able to get a lot of rhythm sounds I need for this tour. But we’re also playing ‘Wild Love’ and it has a crazy guitar solo section. This is from a live version my dad did around ’78.

“He goes into a totally crazy new landscape, and the tone he has is really cool ’cause it’s kind of three layers; a clean sound in the middle, and two different fuzz sounds on the left and right. It creates this 3D image that is super cool, and he’s just doing it with the Stratocaster.”

Dweezil is playing a few of his own compositions on this tour as well, including one that was a favorite of Frank’s.

“He came to see us play a show that I was doing in the early ’90s and we closed the show with ‘Purple Guitar,’” Dweezil recalls. “He liked that song and said, ‘You guys should open with that,’ so I took it as his request for this tour.”

We’ve done GP Presents promotions for several of Dweezil Zappa’s shows in the past, and they’re always thrilling in totally different ways and with different ensembles. Dweezil’s band for this tour is a “rocking teenage combo five-piece extravaganza” featuring Kurt Morgan on bass, Ryan Brown on drums, Bobby Victor on keys, and Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Scheila Gonzalez.

“I wanted it to feel like you walked into the Whisky in the ’60s, but as if he also had the material of the mid-’70s, Dweezil explains. “So it’s kind of the quintessential rocking teenage combo version of everything. A five-piece means the music is more in your face. There’s an immediacy. And when he did a tour with a five-piece he really limited the material to certain things and certain eras. So, we’ve kind of done that, but I’ve also taken it a bit further.”

Come help support our favorite Zappa son celebrate two decades paying tribute to his father Frank on the DZ20 tour!

Our multi-generational Zappa salute happens on the last Sunday night in November, the 29th. If you’re planning to be in San Francisco over Thanksgiving Weekend, be sure to make plans with fellow Zappa zealots and get tickets for great seats in advance.

For more Dweez, read GP‘s October 2026 interview in which he talk in detail about DZ20, plus working with Eddie Van Halen and his ongoing project, “What the Hell Was I Thinking?”

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see GP Presents Dweezil Zappa in San Francisco, send an email and put “DZ20” in the subject line. Please include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go.

Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide his or her own transportation to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, November 29, and have his or her own accommodations in the Bay Area.

Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents and Another Planet Entertainment welcome Dweezil Zappa

Sunday, November 29

The Castro Theatre

San Francisco, CA

8:00 p.m. show

Free Martin Strings at the GP Presents table in lobby

Opeth were forced to pull the plug on a concert in Colombia just hours before showtime after Mikael Åkerfeldt became so ill that he couldn’t make it through a single song at soundcheck.

The Swedish progressive metal band was due to perform November 8 at Royal Center in Bogotá as part of its ongoing Latin American tour. The trek began November 1 in Santiago, Chile, and is scheduled to wrap up November 11 in Mexico City.

The cancellation was announced on social media just hours before Sunday’s scheduled performance.

“Colombian brothers and sisters, it is with great regret that we must announce the cancellation of today’s show in Bogotá,” Opeth bass guitarist Martín Méndez said in a video shared on Facebook. “Our frontman, Mikael, has come down with a virus; he is suffering from a fever, vomiting, and diarrhea.

“We even attempted a soundcheck, but it proved impossible to get through even a single song. A doctor has also examined him and confirmed that it is indeed a virus.

“We are truly sorry that we cannot perform this concert, but we are only human. Our hope now is for Mikael to recover quickly so that we can go on to play the final show of the tour in Mexico.

“Thank you for your understanding and for your unwavering support.”

The setback comes as Opeth approach the end of a touring run that will be followed by an extended break. Earlier this month, bassist Martin Mendez told Brazil’s 89 A Rádio Rock that he and his bandmates plan to “take a pretty long break” once the Latin American dates are complete.

Åkerfeldt has previously spoken about the toll touring can take on him. In a February interview with Blabbermouth, he admitted that he doesn’t “particularly enjoy touring that much,” despite considering the performances themselves the high point.

“The shows in themselves are the highlight of the day, I would say,” he explained. “But if you’re not feeling it, they can also be a bit of a curse. I’ve been battling insomnia connected to touring, like nervousness. I put a lot of pressure on myself for some reason — more now than before.

“The insomnia has made me feel quite wobbly and insecure when we play shows. Once I’m up there, it’s kind of business as usual. After a couple of songs, I don’t feel as wobbly, and after a while, I might be able to enjoy it.”

Del Casher, the guitarist, session musician and inventor whose work helped bring the wah-wah pedal into the world of electric guitar, has died at the age of 88.

Casher died October 1 following a battle with cancer, according to a GoFundMe campaign established to support his wife, Eiko. News of his death was reported November 9.

Although Casher enjoyed a long career as a performer, composer and studio musician, his most enduring contribution came in the mid-1960s, when he recognized the musical possibilities of a tone-control circuit that would eventually transform the sound of electric guitar.

Working with Vox and its American parent company, Thomas Organ, Casher helped turn the circuit into a foot-operated effect that allowed guitarists to sweep through frequencies, producing the distinctive vocal-like sound that gave the wah pedal its name.

The story began in 1966, when Casher was working as a consultant for Vox and performing with the company's Ampliphonic Orchestra. He noticed that a variable tone control on one of the company's amplifiers produced an intriguing wah-like effect when adjusted from one position to another.

He immediately recognized its potential for guitar. "I want to sound like I can compete with a trumpet or a trombone," he recalled telling the company's engineering team, describing the expressive quality he wanted to achieve.

Casher persuaded the engineers to adapt the circuit into a foot-operated pedal, allowing guitarists to control the effect while playing. The development involved Thomas Organ engineers Brad Plunkett and Les Kushner, building on an earlier midrange-boost circuit developed by Vox engineer Dick Denney. Casher helped refine the sound for guitar and championed the idea at a time when the company's management envisioned the device primarily as an effect for trumpet and other horn players.

"They thought I was a crackpot," Casher later recalled.

Determined to demonstrate what the pedal could do, he recorded a promotional album showcasing its possibilities across blues, jazz, rock, country and other styles. He then took the prototype to music stores and industry events, demonstrating the effect to guitarists and trying to generate interest. The response was initially disappointing.

Casher even tried pitching the idea to James Brown, explaining that he believed the wah-wah represented the future of music. The Godfather of Soul wasn't convinced.

"I was describing to James Brown that the wah-wah pedal is really a thing of the future," Casher recalled. Brown's response was that he thought it was "a passing fad."

Casher eventually found a more receptive audience in Frank Zappa, with whom he had worked before the wah-wah's development. According to Casher, he gave Zappa a pedal and encouraged him to introduce the effect to Jimi Hendrix. Zappa helped bring it to Hendrix's attention, and the guitarist would go on to make the wah-wah an integral part of his sound.

Hendrix's use of the effect on his groundbreaking 1968 album Electric Ladyland helped establish it as one of rock's defining guitar sounds. His performance at Woodstock the following year further cemented its place in the electric guitar vocabulary.

Other major players quickly embraced the effect. Eric Clapton put it to memorable use with Cream on "White Room," while Jimmy Page, David Gilmour and Tony Iommi were among the guitarists who incorporated its distinctive vocal quality into their own playing. The wah-wah would become a staple of rock, funk and countless other styles.

Casher had actually been recording with the effect before many of those famous performances. Through his association with composer Vic Mizzy, he brought the wah-wah into film soundtracks, including The Traveling Saleslady and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, helping establish its distinctive voice beyond the recording studio.

Born in Hammond, Indiana, Casher moved to Hollywood after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. One of his first major opportunities came as a guitarist on The Lawrence Welk Show. He subsequently toured with the Three Suns, the instrumental pop group behind the 1958 hit "Twilight Time."

It was while traveling with the group that Casher developed another important invention, the Ecco-Fonic, a portable tape-echo device that allowed musicians to use studio-style effects in live performance.

Casher also became an accomplished Los Angeles session musician, working alongside members of the celebrated Wrecking Crew. His career brought him into contact with performers including Gene Autry, Frank Sinatra and Sonny & Cher. He appeared alongside Elvis Presley in the 1964 film Roustabout and Jerry Lewis in The Patsy that same year.

His inventive streak extended well beyond the wah-wah. Casher developed the Fender Electronic Echo Chamber and helped introduce Roland's early guitar-synthesizer technology to American audiences. His work as a composer and producer continued for decades, including music for the children's television series The New Zoo Revue, for which he produced, arranged and performed on more than 200 episodes. He also composed the guitar-driven theme for NBC's Los Angeles newscasts, which remained in use for 18 years.

Despite the enormous influence of the wah-wah pedal, Casher sometimes felt his contribution to guitar history had been overlooked. In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, he expressed satisfaction at having helped introduce the effect but wished more guitarists knew about his role.

"I feel gratified that I was there at the beginning," he said. "I would just like guitar players to think of me once in a while. The only thing I ask is: remember me."

Steve Vai is dismissing reports that he's interested in reprising his role as guitar villain Jack Butler in a potential Crossroads sequel, explaining that a possible reunion with Ralph Macchio at NAMM was blown out of proportion.

Vai addressed the rumors while appearing with longtime friend and former guitar teacher Joe Satriani on Eddie Trunk's SiriusXM show, where the pair were discussing their new collaborative album, The Sea of Emotion, released November 6 under their SatchVai banner. .

The rumors surfaced earlier this month, when it was reported that a follow-up to the 1986 cult classic might be in the works. Screenwriter John Fusco and Macchio, who played aspiring blues guitarist Eugene “Lightning Boy” Martone, had apparently been discussing ideas for an anniversary project.

“And I said, 'We should do the freaking sequel.' He's like, 'No shit, really? Do you have an idea?' I said, 'Yeah, I have an idea for it.' So Ralph and I have talked about it. We've got a plan,” Fusco told Guitar World.

The report also claimed that “Steve Vai is game to reprise his role as metal-blues guitar master Jack Butler.”

But in a new interview with Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM, Vai pushed back on that suggestion, making clear that he has no plans to return to the movie.

“Well, that is a very funny rumor that I've been reading too. No,” he said (via UCR).

Asked whether there was anything to the sequel talk, Vai explained how a possible meeting with Macchio had apparently morphed into something much bigger.

“I think what happened was — and I'll just say this — I was contacted by somebody that said, 'Hey, you're going to be at NAMM. I know Ralph Macchio, and I spoke to him, and we thought it would be nice for you guys to meet.'”

The two haven't seen each other since making the movie, although Vai says he's heard from people over the years that Macchio has asked after him.

“I haven't seen him since I made the movie. And all through the years I've had people come up to me and say, 'Hey, I saw Ralph and he said to say hello,' and I would say, 'Well, when you see Ralph, you tell him I said hello.'”

A get-together at NAMM to mark the movie's 40th anniversary is still a possibility, Vai says. But that's apparently as far as things go.

“So there's a potential that we'll be able to kind of get together and chat during NAMM. And I think that got leaked, and you know how rumors are – it turned into, 'there's a rematch.'”

As for why he's not interested in making another Crossroads, Vai pointed to the scale of the original production and the challenge of recreating its most famous sequence: the climactic electric guitar duel between Jack Butler and Macchio's Eugene Martone.

“That movie was a $30 million production or whatever it was, and required a tremendous amount of direction and work. And how do you do something like that now? Like, how do you make a scene that stands up to [that one]? You know, you need a movie studio.”

Tributes have been shared for Television guitarist and co-founder Richard Lloyd, with Johnny Marr and Lloyd Cole among those remembering the influential musician, who died Saturday at the age of 75.

Marr, whose guitar playing with the Smiths was heavily influenced by Television's pioneering sound, remembered Lloyd as “a true inspiration,” while Cole praised the guitarist's contribution to the songs that made the band so distinctive.

“R.I.P Richard Lloyd. A seeker and finder and a true inspiration with and without the guitar,” Marr wrote on Instagram. “It was an honour to know him and a blessing to have been a fan. Thank you Richard. Carry on my friend.”

Cole, meanwhile, recalled seeing Television just once, but said Lloyd's playing made a lasting impression.

“RIP Richard Lloyd. I only saw Television once – all those amazing riffs that drive the songs – Richard played them all,” he wrote on X.

Television’s Instagram also shared a statement on social media following the death of their co-founder.

“We are so very sad that Richard Lloyd has today passed away at the age of 75,” the band wrote. “Deepest condolences to Sheila and to all of his family and friends.”

Lloyd died at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, following a battle with cholangiocarcinoma, a form of bile duct cancer. His family confirmed that his wife, Sheila, and their dog, Willie Mays, were with him when he died. He had been diagnosed with the disease in March.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Lloyd moved to New York as a child and became immersed in the city's emerging underground music scene. In 1973, he joined forces with singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine, bass guitarist Richard Hell and drummer Billy Ficca to form Television.

The group became one of the first bands to establish a regular presence at CBGB, the Manhattan club that would become the epicenter of New York's burgeoning punk movement. But Television stood apart from many of their contemporaries, favoring intricate arrangements and extended instrumental passages over punk's more stripped-down approach.

Central to that sound was the guitar interplay between Lloyd and Verlaine. Their contrasting styles gave Television a distinctive musical identity, with interlocking lines, angular riffs and extended solos that pushed the possibilities of a two-guitar rock band.

The partnership reached its peak on Television's 1977 debut, Marquee Moon. The album's 10-minute title track remains one of rock's defining guitar performances, with Lloyd and Verlaine trading and intertwining melodic phrases across an expansive instrumental journey. Songs including "See No Evil," "Friction" and "Venus" further showcased their remarkable chemistry.

Television released a second album, Adventure, in 1978 before splitting later that year. Their influence, however, continued to grow, helping lay the groundwork for generations of post-punk, alternative and indie rock bands. Marr's tribute offers a particularly telling example of the reach of their guitar innovations.

Lloyd's career extended well beyond Television. He went solo with Alchemy in 1979 and went on to release a series of albums, including Field of Fire (1986) and The Countdown (2018). He also became a sought-after collaborator, contributing his distinctive guitar work to several albums by Matthew Sweet, including Girlfriend (1991), Altered Beast (1993) and 100% Fun (1995).

Television reunited in the early 1990s, releasing a self-titled third album in 1992. Lloyd continued performing with the group before departing in 2007 to concentrate on his solo career. He also chronicled his experiences in the New York rock scene in his 2017 memoir, Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB's and Five Decades of Rock and Roll.

Lloyd's death comes less than four years after Verlaine died in January 2023, aged 73.

Richard Lloyd, the co-founding guitarist of Television whose intricate, interlocking guitar work helped redefine rock music in the 1970s, has died at the age of 75.

Lloyd died Saturday, November 7, at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, according to a statement from his family reported by Rolling Stone. His wife, Sheila, and their dog, Willie Mays, were with him. The cause of death was cholangiocarcinoma, a form of bile duct cancer. He was diagnosed with the disease in March.

Born October 25, 1951, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Lloyd grew up with an interest in music and initially studied drums before turning to guitar. After moving to New York, he became part of the city's burgeoning underground rock scene, where he would help lay the groundwork for American punk.

In 1973, Lloyd joined forces with singer-guitarist Tom Verlaine, bass guitarist Richard Hell and drummer Billy Ficca to form Television. The group became a fixture at CBGB, the downtown Manhattan club that would serve as a launching pad for the New York punk movement. Lloyd later claimed that he had helped establish the venue as a rock club by arranging for Television to play there in 1974, opening the door for other emerging acts.

Television's 1977 debut, Marquee Moon, remains one of rock's most influential guitar albums. Its 10-minute title track, in particular, showcased the remarkable musical chemistry between Lloyd — playing a 1961 Fender Stratocaster — and Verlaine, on a late-’50s Jazzmaster. Rather than relying on the power chords and blunt aggression associated with punk, the two guitarists developed an intricate musical conversation built on intertwining melodies, unexpected harmonic turns and extended instrumental passages.

The album also featured the songs "See No Evil," "Friction" and "Venus." Television followed it with Adventure in 1978, but internal tensions and limited commercial success contributed to the band's breakup later that year.

Lloyd launched a solo career with Alchemy in 1979, followed by Field of Fire in 1986 and the live album Real Time in 1987. He also established himself as a distinctive collaborator, most notably contributing guitar to Matthew Sweet's acclaimed albums Girlfriend (1991), Altered Beast (1993) and 100% Fun (1995). His jagged, unpredictable playing provided a striking counterpoint to Sweet's melodic power pop.

Television reunited in the early 1990s, recording a self-titled third album in 1992 and periodically performing together in the years that followed. Lloyd eventually departed in 2007, continuing to record and perform under his own name. His later solo releases included The Radiant Monkey (2007), The Jamie Neverts Story (2009), Rosedale (2016) and The Countdown (2018).

Lloyd also documented his remarkable journey through the New York rock scene in his 2017 memoir, Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB's and Five Decades of Rock and Roll.

In a 2023 interview with Guitar Player, Lloyd discussed The Countdown, his approach to recording and the connection between his music and visual art. He described experiencing synesthesia, a condition in which the senses overlap, explaining that playing music brought colors to mind and painting felt like a musical experience.

“I’ve been painting for about three years now,” he said. “I suffer — or maybe I’m blessed — with synesthesia, where one sense blends into another.”

Read the full Guitar Player interview with Richard Lloyd here.

While Norman’s Rare Guitars has built its reputation as one of the world’s premier vintage guitar shops, Norman Harris’ influence extends far beyond buying and selling old instruments. For decades, he’s also used the store’s considerable reach to help young musicians find an audience.

That side of Harris’ legacy is highlighted in the recent documentary Norman’s Rare Guitars, which explores not only the store’s celebrity clientele and vintage electric and acoustic guitar treasures but also the musicians who’ve found exposure through its popular “Guitar of the Day” videos.

“The way he helps struggling artists that come through the store, like, ‘Hey, come play a song, we’ll put it on our YouTube channel,’” Joe Bonamassa says in the film.

“And you can sit on that sofa, and you can play, and they’ll put it out,” adds Malcolm McDowell. “It’s such an important place for a young musician to go and get a little exposure. He nurtures.”

A quick scroll through the store’s YouTube channel reveals countless young players showcasing everything from blues and country to rock and fingerstyle guitar. For many, the videos provided exposure they might not have found elsewhere.

“He’s finding musicians and bands that he thinks are worth breaking, sets them up in here, and makes them play,” actor Kiefer Sutherland says. “He’s actually making a difference.”

One musician who benefited directly from that exposure is slide guitarist ace Sarah Rogo, who later became a regular presenter on the channel.

“Norm’s platform definitely helped elevate my platform a lot,” she says. “With the YouTube algorithm, someone will punch in the name of a unique guitar, and Norman’s Rare Guitars is the first place that pops up, and they’ll see me playing the guitar. Billy Gibbons called the store one day and said, ‘Who’s that girl playing the resonator guitars?’”

But perhaps the most notable success story to emerge from the channel is Marcus King.

Mark Agnesi, who managed the store before joining Gibson, remembers filming a young King during a visit to the shop.

“I remember when he came into the store,” Agnesi recalls. “We start rolling the video, he starts playing, and then he opens his mouth and starts singing. It stopped you dead in your tracks; it was like, ‘Oh my god, I am watching the real deal right now, this kid is gonna have a serious career.’”

Agnesi’s prediction proved accurate. Since then, King has released seven albums, earned a Grammy nomination, and landed signature gear deals with Gibson and Orange.

“That video launched a career,” King says.

The clip eventually surpassed two million views, and Bonamassa was among those who took notice. According to Agnesi, Bonamassa’s reaction was simple: it wasn’t a question of whether King would make it, but when — and that time was already arriving.

As Harris puts it in the film, “giving back is very important.” Through Norman’s Rare Guitars, he’s done far more than connect players with vintage instruments; he’s helped connect promising musicians with the audiences they needed to reach.

Anika Nilles has a particular Rush song she'd love to bring back to the band's set list — one that hasn't been performed live in more than 40 years.

The drummer, who joined Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson for their Fifty Something reunion tour earlier this summer, has already developed a wish list of material she'd like to tackle with the Canadian rock legends. One track in particular stands out: “Kid Gloves,” from the band's 1984 album Grace Under Pressure.

“I told Geddy, if I can ever have a wish list song, can we do that one? And he was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” she tells USA Today. “I play it a little bit in the dressing room just for fun. I love the grooves, the buildup and everything. I love the harmonies and the vibe.”

It's a deep cut with a long history in Rush's live repertoire. “Kid Gloves” featured regularly in the band's concerts during the 1984 tour supporting Grace Under Pressure, but hasn't appeared in a set since. According to Setlist.fm, its last outing came during the first of two Honolulu shows in November of that year, where it was played between “Closer to the Heart” and “YYZ.”

Nilles has had some formidable expectations to contend with since taking over the drum stool once occupied by the late Neil Peart, who died in 2020 following a private battle with cancer. But she's made a strong impression on Rush fans, earning praise for her musicianship as well as the humor she's brought to the reunion. She's also spoken warmly about the support she's received from Lee and Lifeson as she's found her footing in the band.

That relationship will enter a new phase next year when Rush brings its Elevate From the Norm residency to the Sphere in Las Vegas, beginning May 21, 2027. Nilles has been to the city only once before, so the prospect of performing at the cutting-edge venue — and getting to explore Las Vegas — is especially appealing.

“Everything is new for me there,” she says. “I saw video of No Doubt and Metallica and U2 and that was great.”

For Lee, the residency is an opportunity he once thought Rush had missed. When the band announced the shows, he reflected on how perfectly the venue's visual capabilities would complement the elaborate production Rush has built its live shows around.

“When I first heard of Sphere, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, what a shame that Rush is no longer touring, because this venue sounds tailor made for the kind of visual attitude with which we have always designed our shows,'" he said in a press release. "Normally we spend months designing the visual effects for our shows and this scenario seemed like the cherry on top of the ice cream for our design team. But life is nothing if not surprising and now, here we are, living and touring in the present tense and we are able to make that particular dream come true."

The first round of presales for Rush's Las Vegas residency begins today, November 6, with additional presales scheduled for next week. Tickets go on sale to the general public November 13. More information is available at the band's official website.

Nile Rodgers has accused critics of being hypocritical for objecting to his use of artificial intelligence, arguing that people who routinely rely on AI-powered technology shouldn't take issue with his using it to create a music video.

The Chic co-founder sparked a backlash on Instagram earlier this week after sharing a behind-the-scenes clip of himself being digitally captured for an upcoming project. Rodgers described the process as “creating an AI me,” calling it “next level” and expressing excitement about the finished result.

“I envisioned stories with incredible environments and music. It’s future time!” he wrote, citing the Eagles' residency at Las Vegas' Sphere as inspiration.

Not everyone was enthusiastic. Several Instagram followers questioned his decision to embrace AI. One expressed disappointment, another suggested there were better ways to preserve his legacy, and a third asked: “What is happening with old artists using AI?!”

Rodgers wasn't prepared to accept the criticism. Responding to one commenter who dismissed AI-generated content as “some kind of magic for old ppl,” the producer challenged them to wait until they'd seen the finished work.

“Do you have a problem with CGI? I can’t believe you’d go on record without even seeing what I’m doing.

“Oh well… sending love anyway. Let me know after you see the work if you feel the same way your brain is taking you❤️.”

The project turns out to be a video for Rodgers' 2020 charity recording of ‘The Christmas Song,’ featuring Rebecca Ferguson. Subsequent posts offered a glimpse of the production, including images of the two performers alongside an enormous fuzzy creature, a collection of cuddly animals in the audience, and a festive green-and-gold title card.

When another follower questioned the decision to use AI for a charitable project, Rodgers offered a more detailed account of the creative process, insisting the technology hadn't simply been left to generate the visuals on its own.

“We created everything. Mood boards, storyboards and did it the same way we’d do a film,” he explained.

“The AI did what we told it to do and we painstakingly created every second you’ll see on the screen. My director is a TV director. We did it setup by setup. If this were a traditional film, it would’ve cost about $100,000.”

Rodgers, who has famously played a white Stratocaster through nearly all his career, also turned the criticism back on his detractors, arguing that their everyday reliance on technology makes their objections difficult to justify.

“By the way, you’re using AI daily. You just hit me on Instagram. You’re being hypocritical. It’s OK for you to use AI in your way, but you have problem with my way. Do you use Google, or get driving directions? Look at your own daily actions and check how much you use AI. Love, Nile.”

The finished video is scheduled to arrive November 20. But Rodgers' explanation of the project also revealed a more personal reason for making it: his own experience with cancer and the encouragement he received from a young child during his recovery.

“When I had my 1st bout of cancer, it was a child who coached me and gave me courage to fight,” he wrote.

“I know a lot of children who are bedridden and ill. Their main form of entertainment is the iPad or other such devices. I produced ‘The Christmas Song’ to give them a little joy during the holiday season.”

Rodgers said the video would give the song's storyline a playful twist, while introducing him to a new creative circle. He plans to share additional previews as the team works toward the November 20 release.

This isn't the first time Rodgers has spoken out in favor of AI. As Consequence previously reported, he defended generative technology in 2023, dismissing the argument that AI-generated music is “fake” as something that “sounds like noise to me.”

“The drum machine and sequencer have been wonderful tools. There are bands that could never have had a record if it wasn’t for a sequencer,” he said.

For Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, making a record together was inevitable.

It was just a question of when. Now, 52 years after Satriani began giving Vai guitar lessons while they were teenagers growing up on Long Island, it’s happened.

The Sea of Emotion, which comes out November 6, is a labor of love the two guitar heroes have spent much of the last two years making between other projects. Those include Satriani’s membership in Sammy Hagar’s Van Halen-saluting Best of All Worlds Band and Vai’s assignment to the Robert Fripp seat in the King Crimson spin-off Beat.

For guitar fans, it’s the arrival of a sonic summit meeting that’s been on many a wish list. For Satriani, 70, and Vai, 66, it’s the culmination of a lifetime of work and mutual admiration.

Vai remembers those lessons with Satriani as “glorified jam sessions,” sitting back-to-back in Satriani’s backyard, playing unamplified and learning to intuit what each other were doing.

“That was an incredible training,” Vai tells us during a joint Zoom with Satriani. “When you do something like that, you develop a listening atmosphere, so to speak. For me that’s one of the highlights of being a musician, sharing that space with somebody else.”

Their ambitions led each to California for long careers spent mostly in parallel as they released their own albums and worked in bands: Satriani with Deep Purple, Mick Jagger, the Greg Kihn Band and the all-star Chickenfoot; three-time Grammy Award winner Vai with Frank Zappa, Alcatrazz, David Lee Roth and Whitesnake. They intersected on many occasions, primarily during the Satriani-organized G3 tours that started in 1996.

During 2024, meanwhile, Satriani and Vai toured together with their own bands and teamed up on the encores. When management suggested having something original to play together, they recorded “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1,” which set the idea of a full-fledged band of their own, and an album, in motion.

This year SatchVai released two more songs — “I Wanna Play My Guitar,” featuring Glenn Hughes on vocals, and “Dancing” — while completing The Sea of Emotion remotely, with producer/keyboardist Eric Caudieux assembling contributions from a rotating cast of musicians. Drummer Kenny Aronoff and bass guitarist Marco Mendoza joined SatchVai on tour during the summer, along with guitarist Pete Thorn.

The album runs a wide stylistic gamut, from the hard-charging “Mayhem” and “Bronco Freight Train” to the lively “Dancing,” an interpretation of a song by Italian singer Paolo Conte. “The Feeling I Know” builds majestically from a quiet start, while “Old Sins Have Long Shadows” leans toward fusion. The centerpiece, of course, is the three-part “The Sea of Emotion,” more than 17 minutes of collaborative combustion that pushes the pair to new peaks of prowess.

Neither Satriani, who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, nor Vai, who is based in San Diego, was in need of a career statement at this point, but The Sea of Emotion is certainly one. Call it a summit or a master class; it’s how two generational talents finally found a moment to join forces and do something they, and the rest of the world, have been waiting for.

So... what took so long?

SATRIANI [laughs] We certainly thought that when the time was right, it would happen. We couldn’t figure out ahead of time, with our schedules, like, “This year we’re gonna do it” or something like that. We knew a project like this was gonna take us away from all those other things we wanted to do. So without talking about it, we figured it would happen when it happened. And it did, quite organically.

VAI It’s something we always considered in the back of our minds, but we were forging our careers and we had a lot of ideas for our solo music. This album had a little bit of an odd chronology, because Joe and I had all these other gigs going on, and the evolution of making the record was kind of organic. We never actually sat there and thought, “Hey, do you want to make a record together?” It just happened. We knew.

All good things come to those who wait, then.

SATRIANI I’m glad we waited for it, in a way. Now we’re remarkably older, and we’ve had this benefit of a crazy roller coaster of success. So there was such a relaxed attitude toward, “What are we gonna write?” and “What kind of album are we gonna do?” We simply never talked about it.

If we’d tried it before, when we were really trying to prove ourselves and take advantage of our sudden successes, we would’ve brought that anxiety into the studio and would’ve had a lot of pressure from outside sources, labels and things like that. Doing it now, we were able to let it just happen.

VAI When people who know Joe and I listen to it, they’ll obviously know if something was Joe’s or mine. And there are songs here like that.

But there are others that were just an idea, a couple of chords or a riff or something, and we built them up going back and forth with each other. I don’t collaborate like that very often; I’m usually the master and commander of every note, so it was really great to be in an environment where it was so creative.

SATRIANI What keeps coming to my mind is coming to terms with the fact that we’ve made this record that has this compositional weight to it that’s really something. It’s not a record that I would’ve made on my own, and I don’t think Steve would’ve made on his own.

Somehow when we get together we make this third thing we weren’t expecting that’s really greater than the sum of its parts. That’s how it feels now that I’ve forgotten all the fader moves and the edits and everything; I can just listen as a normal human being, and these songs are intense. They’re beautiful and unexpected and have all these cool little Easter eggs everywhere. It’s just really nice.

Easter eggs? Explain...

SATRIANI The biggest one, really, is the fact there’s a recording of us playing when we were teenagers that I had made during a guitar lesson we were doing in my childhood bedroom. Steve kept that tape and transferred it to digital and decided to write a song based on those few minutes of us trying to work out a lesson built around something I was writing at the time.

If people didn’t know this story they’d probably think it’s the weirdest introduction to a song they’ve ever heard, but what a perfect way for “The Sea of Emotion, Part 3” to start — going back to an actual recording of us playing as teenagers. I think that’s pretty amazing.

Making the album, what did you learn about each other and each other’s playing that you didn’t know — or could not have known from the ways you’ve worked together before?

VAI I think for me, many things were reinforced based on my perspective of what I was expecting — things like quality of melody, quality of rhythm, instincts for ideas and sections and things like that. One of the things that didn’t surprise me was Joe’s instantaneous inventiveness, just sitting there and playing. The riffs come organically, frequently, and they just sound so inspired. I’m in the next room going, “What is he doing?! We’ve got to record that and make a song out of it!” It’s constant, and it’s cool. It was constant inspiration and education.

SATRIANI I had this sort of revelation the other day, when I was listening to the album. I was surprised because I thought I knew how crazy Steve was, but as we progressed writing and recording this album remotely, you’d be waiting a day or a week or a month for the other part to arrive. And then you’d get it and you’d think, “What the hell is that?! That’s insane!” And that happens over and over again.

So I thought I knew how crazy Steve was until we got to the very end of the record, and I thought, “I did not know he was that crazy!”

VAI [laughs] I can’t help it. Sorry.

SATRIANI I even went back to his other records, like, “How did I miss that?” And, no, he’s been more conservative in the past. He got even crazier on this album, where I thought maybe he would have done the opposite.

VAI I blame you for that.

So how reactive were you to each other during this process? Did the interaction really make Steve crazier, and then what did that bring out of Joe?

VAI The nice thing is I don’t think we felt limitations from the outside world...from what the industry is doing, from what technology is doing. I would receive something from Joe, and to reflect on what he was just saying, I was feeling the same way. It’s rare to hear something innovative and new in just a little riff or something, but there were so many of those.

Like, I remember when I received the “Zoot Suit Riot” solo. I was stunned. In the back of your mind, you’re not competing but you’re trying to up your game based on how the other guy is upping his game. For me that means you’ve got to go a little more crazy. You’ve got to think a little bit more out of the box.

So after I heard that “Zoot Suit Riot” solo and especially the little, tickling riff on the end of it [sings], I’m like, “What the fuck is he doing?!” Then it’s like, “Okay, I’m taking the straitjacket off. What can I do? Where’s the weird Steve Vai?” — within reason.

SATRIANI [laughs] No. No reason.

VAI So the riffs turn more into a guilty pleasure as opposed to being appropriate for the songs, and that was fun. It was so fun. I think we both went to places we may never have gone on our own. It needed that chemistry, that chemical soup of both of our DNAs. It was really fantastic.

SATRIANI The first time I heard “Zoot Suit Riot” I thought, This is a Steve Vai show. In my mind, I could see how Steve would set the stage up, what he would wear, how the song would go down based on the entire presentation beyond just the cool guitar parts and the interesting melody and all the cool rhythms. I just never write music like that.

So all of a sudden I’m in this position where I’m hearing it and I’ve got to grow into this, somehow. Steve has offered this amazing piece of music up, and I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna play, because I’ve never inhabited it before. So it doesn’t surprise me that I would play something that would surprise Steve, because he’s surprised me.

And that whole process played out over and over again on this record. There are spots in each song where one of us offered something and the other one would respond like, “Wow, that’s crazy. What am I gonna do now? I’ve got to somehow up my game in this fun process.”

“Dancing” is emblematic of that. What’s the story there?

VAI Many years ago, in the early ’80s, I found this Paolo Conte track; he’s an Italian, kind of pop singer, very famous. I just fell in love with it and kept listening to it through the years, and I would keep imagining it as a guitar track. So I kept it in the back of my mind and just thought, “Well, one day...,” ’cause I wanted to do it with another guitar player.

When we started doing this album, I sent it to Joe and said, “I got a crazy idea here. I love this track. I want to make all the horns that are on it the guitar tracks and beef up the arrangement.” I thought he’d say, “What, are you crazy? This is not rock and roll!” or whatever, but he came back and said, “I don’t know what I’m gonna play on this, but I trust your insanity,” so we did it.

SATRIANI I like the idea that it showcases some of Steve’s bizarre ideas about what you can do with the guitar and the guitar arrangement of a song. It was really a product of just pure fun, me putting on my guitar and going, “What the hell am I gonna play on this track that’s got, like, 18 Steve Vai guitar tracks on it?”

Glenn Hughes recently announced a retirement from touring and live performances due to health reasons. That must make it mean more to have him singing on “I Wanna Play My Guitar.”

SATRIANI I have great memories of that session. That was the only time Steve and I were together at a session for this record. We were at the Harmony Hut, Steve’s studio, and Eric was there with us, along with Glenn. That was pretty magical, just watching Glenn sing.

And, y’know, the odd part about it is I’m the only one who ever hired Glenn Hughes to not sing on an entire album. This was What Happens Next [Satriani’s 2018 album featuring Hughes on bass guitar], and it was the funniest thing just to watch him not be able to sing, ’cause in-between takes he’d be singing things that would’ve been appropriate for the songs. He just couldn’t help it. I thought, “Oh, damn, I should’ve written a vocal album for him.”

So it was really great to watch him sing on this, just hour after hour getting better and better with every vocal take he’d do, and just trying different things. He’s a magical singer.

Was there any particular piece of gear or some kind of technique that was part of the album what you felt was brand new or, just out of the ordinary?

SATRIANI Well, the main weird thing is that Steve and I recorded this album not using any amplifiers and microphones on our guitars, I don’t think, other than the recording from years back.

VAI I used my [signature Carvin] Legacy [amp] for the rhythm on “Part 3,” but that was it. There were a couple of really nice moments that were a little left of center for what we normally do, such as “The Sea of Emotion, Part 2” and the nylon-string Joe plays. That’s a really beautiful part, and very different from the past.

SATRIANI Today, if you’re 18 years old making an album, the thought of going into a studio with microphones and engineers is, like, so old-school. Everyone goes direct. They’re all using plug-ins and some way of just recording directly.

Steve and I love the art of recording with microphones and speakers and outboard gear and tape and everything. We have so much experience with the traditional way of recording guitar.

I’ve done a lot of DI recording over the years, but I still really love being in a studio, the whole chaotic circus element of it, and watching an engineer with a great set of ears find the right tone.

How about guitars?

SATRIANI I used my ’58 Esquire again. It’s been on every record since ’92, when I picked it up. I used it for a slide solo on “Bronco Freight Train.” Everything else was pretty normal — just my most recent [Ibanez] JS guitars that happened to be hanging out in the room for those few days where I’d be home. And I always use this crazy choral sitar Sterling Ball made for me that’s a seven-string, sitar-style neck and harp strings. That was one of the more bizarre instruments I used.

VAI All my guitars were pretty conventional, but one of the things I like to do is try to experiment with the existing gear that’s available and do things with it maybe I haven’t done before. The DigiTech Whammy Pedal has so much potential in creating sounds and riffs that are not just the conventional thing. The solo I did on “Part 2” of “The Sea of Emotion” — at the end there’s these chord changes, and I’m doing this fast, kind of hammering riff, and the whammy bar is used to change the register of the riff on various notes. That was something I hadn’t really done, so it was more of a stretching of an existing piece of gear.

SatchVai looks like a going concern, then?

VAI Joe and I kind of work in the moment. We never even talked about putting a band together until it just happened; it just felt like the time was right. So I think that’s gonna be the M.O. moving forward.

I know that we are interested in getting back to being our own generals and entering back into our own creative impulses on a solo level. But it was such a fun process, and it was easy and creative. I can’t imagine not working together again, even if in the future it’s just sharing tracks and creating like that.

SATRIANI Really, the most important thing is we created the music. We made a fantastic album. To me that’s the most important thing. That’s always been my main desire, to make an original album. You can play 300 shows a year, or 10, but if there’s no document, if there’s no original music, you’re kind of nowhere. That’s the thing that’ll always be there and stand the test of time. People can go and visit it any time, no matter where we are.

AC/DC’s Brian Johnson has recalled how he wrote the lyrics to “You Shook Me All Night Long” in a matter of hours — and how Malcolm Young immediately recognized the song’s potential. The story comes from a 2011 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, whose full 38-minute interview with the singer has just been released on YouTube.

Johnson joined AC/DC in 1980, following the death of former frontman Bon Scott, as the Australian rockers began work on the follow-up to 1979’s Highway to Hell. The resulting album, Back in Black, would become one of rock’s biggest records. Its opening track, “You Shook Me All Night Long,” was also the first song Johnson wrote with guitar-playing brothers Angus and Malcolm Young.

“The first song I had to write was ‘You Shook Me All Night Long,’” Johnson recalled. “And I remember sitting there. This is when my passion with cars comes in. The first line I wrote was, ‘She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman…,’ and I went, ‘I’m writing it with cars again.’

“And I give it to Mal the next morning. He’s going, ‘Are you writing about cars?’ I went, ‘No, I’m trying to get the women and the car.’ And he says, ‘Ah, no worries, man. It sounds great.’ And that was it.”

Johnson said Malcolm was still raving about the song the morning after they recorded it. The guitarist wanted to hear it again, prompting Johnson to make a bold assessment of what they had created.

“We just had a little cassette player in this little house we had. And then the next morning, Mal put it on again. He said, ‘I’m gonna listen to this again, mate.’ I sat, and I just went, ‘Y’know, I think that might be the best rock and roll song I’ve ever heard in my life.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m telling you, I think that’s the best rock and roll song.’ And Mal said, ‘You could be right, mate.’”

The song came together quickly, Johnson explained, partly because he knew the pressure was on to deliver a worthy follow-up to Highway to Hell. In a separate interview with Absolute Radio, he recalled that Angus and Malcolm already had the title in mind when they began working on the track.

“The boys had a title,” he said. “Malcolm and Angus said, ‘Listen, we’ve got this song. It’s called ‘Shook Me All Night Long.’ That’s what we want the song to be called.’ And if you listen to the chords, [the chorus] just fell into place, so I can’t claim any credit on that thing.”

Johnson also remembered feeling the need to impress his new bandmates as he tackled his first songwriting assignment.

“It was as quick as it had to be, which was that night. I guess I had to try and impress somebody,” he said. “It was just a thing that came at the time, and I still think it’s one of the greatest rock and roll riffs I’ve ever heard in my life.”

History has certainly been kind to the song. “You Shook Me All Night Long” became one of AC/DC’s signature tracks and their first single to reach the U.S. Top 40. It remains one of the band’s most popular recordings, with more than 1.8 billion streams on Spotify.

Rush will celebrate two classic albums when they take over the Las Vegas Sphere for a five-show residency next summer. The performances will mark another milestone in the Canadian prog giants’ celebrated return to the stage, with full-album renditions of 2112 and Moving Pictures planned for the run.

Rush seemed to have exited stage left for the last time in the summer of 2015, only to make a surprise comeback last year. Former Jeff Beck drummer Annika Nilles, the gutsy musician chosen to fill the late Neil Peart’s drum throne, will join Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson for the newly announced shows.

The five performances will take place at the futuristic venue on May 21, 23, 26, 28 and 30. The setlists will include full performances of 1976’s transformative album, 2112, and Moving Pictures, the 1981 release that went five-times Platinum.

In an official statement, bass player and vocalist Lee said he and Lifeson are working hard to concoct “some new madness” to suit the high-tech venue (via Rolling Stone).

When Moving Pictures gets played in full, Lifeson will get to revisit one of his favorite guitar solos in a venue that would have seemed like science fiction when the idea was first dreamed up during a bitterly cold Quebec winter. The guitarist has singled out his work on “Limelight” as a particular source of pride.

“I remember recording this solo because we had speakers set up outside to catch the delays and some echoes,” he told Behind The Vinyl in 2016.

Moving Pictures was recorded at Le Studio (later renamed Studio Morin Heights), where the band had also made the previous year’s Permanent Waves. It would become something of a second home for Rush, who went on to record Signals, Grace Under Pressure, Presto, Roll the Bones and Counterparts there.

Lifeson says his Hentor Sportscaster and beloved ES-355, “Whitey,” accounted for much of the guitar work on the album. The “Limelight” solo, meanwhile, finds him at perhaps his most expressive.

“I really am proud of this solo,” he said. “We did it in five or six takes, and we did a compilation of those takes to arrive at what we have. But what really moves me about this solo is its lonely character, which really fits the mood and tone of the lyrics that Neil wrote about this song.”

Peart wrote “Limelight” about his discomfort with the public and media attention that the trio’s success had brought them. Lifeson was keen to extend that sense of isolation through his 26-bar solo.

“It's a very elastic solo,” he added. “It moves around, and the delays cascade and overlap. It ends with a very high point – literally a high point, high E string at the top of the neck – and it's a very dynamic build.”

That emphasis on dynamics, and on making a solo contribute to a song's narrative, is something Lifeson has also discussed when talking about Envy of None's second album with Guitar Player. The project helped him rediscover his love of soloing.

Speaking to Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett last year, Lifeson also reiterated the importance of knowing when to stop rather than overworking a part.

“I really wanted to echo that feeling,” he said. “But I find after five or six takes, I start repeating myself. I get bored with it. I'm impulsive when it comes to that sort of thing, whereas Geddy needs to hear everything wrong before he knows what's right. So he'll spend hours and hours doing stuff. I like to spend minutes.

“It has a lot of languid movements; bends and pulls and drops, and notes that come in and creep up,” he said of the solo. “And when I first heard the comp, I thought it really reflected the emotional character of the song; of being disconnected and living a life that's on a stage and not real.”

During Rush's hiatus, Lifeson found himself being hired by a multitude of different bands, and he says he enjoyed shattering their expectations. He's also credited a Beatle with inspiring the band's reunion – although Lee has a different account of what brought Rush back together.

Keith Richards isn't in a hurry to get the Rolling Stones back on the road, according to bandmate Ronnie Wood, who says the guitarist wants a break from touring.

The Stones released their latest album, Foreign Tongues, in July, but have yet to announce any live dates in support of it. Wood says he and Mick Jagger have already begun promoting the record, but their plans for the road depend on Richards deciding what he wants to do next.

In a new interview with Otro Día Perdido, Wood explained why he's chosen to get out and play rather than wait for his bandmates.

“Well, we had a great producer with Andrew Watt,” Wood says. “He helped us with Hackney Diamonds, and then we did a continuation in a way through to the album called Foreign Tongues. And that's where we've left it at the moment.

“And Mick and I have already been promoting a little bit. But we're waiting for Keith to settle down what he wants to do for his future, because he's a bit road weary at the moment. He said. ‘I don't want to do any more touring for a bit.’ So I thought, Well, I'm not gonna sit back and wait. So I'm going to get out there and play.”

Wood is currently touring in support of Fearless: Anthology 1965–2025, a career-spanning compilation that draws on his work with the Birds, the Creation, the Jeff Beck Group, Faces, the Rolling Stones and his solo projects.

Richards' reluctance to tour may also be influenced by his arthritis. In a 2023 interview with BBC Radio 4's Today, he discussed the condition and its effect on his playing.

“I don’t have any pain: it’s a sort of benign version. [But] I think if I’ve slowed down a little bit it’s probably due more to age.”

Wood's Fearless tour wraps up November 10 with a performance at the Movistar Arena in Santiago, Chile.

The making of the Rolling Stones' landmark 10th album, Exile on Main St., was turbulent at best. Despite Keith Richards' drug issues, disjointed sessions, gear theft and plenty of internal disharmony, however, the band emerged with a classic.

Much of the album was recorded at the Stones' French retreat, Nellcôte, using relatively modest recording equipment. That didn't stop it from making a huge impact on audiences in the US and UK. And Richards believes the recording technology that followed actually made it harder to capture the kind of performances that had made the album so special.

Writing in his 2010 autobiography, Life, the guitarist posed a pertinent question.

“Very soon after Exile…, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn’t know what was really going on,” he said. “How come I could get a drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that’s like someone shitting on a tin roof?”

Eight years separate the Stones' self-titled debut, recorded at London's fabled Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street, and the release of Exile. In the intervening years, the Beatles had helped push recording technology forward, with Rubber Soul marking a particularly revolutionary moment. The band employed clever studio tricks to expand the possibilities of recorded music, and as the record industry boomed, other artists and engineers followed suit.

But Richards wasn't convinced that more sophisticated technology necessarily meant better recordings. Much like guitarists who believe that no matter how advanced amp modeling technology becomes, it will never quite replicate the magic of a cranked tube amp, he felt that the recording industry had lost sight of what mattered.

“Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they’re swimming back,” he said. “I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all. And that’s why it would take so long to do things.”

He singles out the recording of Goats Head Soup, the Stones' follow-up to Exile, as an example. Engineer Rob Fraboni, Richards recalls, was caught up in the “notion that if you didn’t have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn’t know what you were doing.” The album was a commercial success, but Richards wasn't sold on the approach to recording it.

“The bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles,” Richards recalled. “You’re playing in this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it.”

Exile, by contrast, captured the Stones playing together in the basement at Nellcôte, with the musicians feeding off one another rather than being isolated in separate recording spaces.

“It’s the sound they make together, not separated,” Richards argued. “This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it’s just totally against the whole grain of what music should be.”

There's an interesting wrinkle to Richards' argument, though: Stones frontman Mick Jagger has also expressed reservations about Exile's sound, suggesting that the disarray surrounding the band at the time found its way onto the record.

The Stones' last two albums – 2023's Hackney Diamonds and this year's Foreign Tongues – were recorded with producer Andrew Watt, who has his own innovative ideas about making records sound their best. Whether Richards has warmed to the modern recording process is another question.

Upscaled footage of Led Zeppelin’s performance at the Bath Festival in June 1970 has appeared online, capturing the band giving “Immigrant Song” its live debut, months before the track was released.

The three-day festival of blues and progressive music saw Led Zeppelin headline a bill that included Pink Floyd, Colosseum, Santana, Steppenwolf and John Mayall, whose lineup at the time included Peter Green. The show would prove a turning point for the band.

Guitarist Jimmy Page had built Led Zeppelin from the ashes of the Yardbirds in the late 1960s. Although his plans to develop a partnership with Jeff Beck had fallen short of expectations — producing a song the pair argued over for decades — Page had succeeded in assembling a band that would help pave the way for heavy metal. Its biggest early successes, however, had come on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Bath Festival performance helped change that, winning over British audiences as an estimated 200,000 people gathered for a show that stretched to around three hours. The band reportedly played five encores.

More than 80 minutes of footage from the event emerged online in August, described as “a monumental addition to the Led Zeppelin canon.” Now, YouTube account The Unfinished Self has enhanced the footage of the band performing “Immigrant Song” to 4K resolution.

The video finds Page dressed in a knee-length coat and fisherman’s bucket hat, attacking what appears to be his “Number 1” Les Paul like it owes him money. Legend has it that the Bath Festival performance was captured on a multitrack recorder, but the recording was subsequently destroyed because the band didn't consider its performance good enough.

What's particularly interesting is how the roughness of this version of “Immigrant Song” adds to the track's cut and thrust. Rather than playing the tremolo-flecked chords that feature in the studio recording's verses, Page continues hammering away at the riff. The performance's ragged edges give the song an even more animalistic quality. Its mystery chord is also present.

The set came after the release of the band's extreme second album, Led Zeppelin II, which was also intended as a retort to the group's early critics, including one Rolling Stone reviewer who dismissed Page's songwriting as “weak, unimaginative.”

The festival itself was chaotic in several respects. The gates were knocked down, allowing a huge influx of people onto the site, while Fairport Convention got stuck in traffic and had to hitch a ride with the Hells Angels to reach the Royal Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet, Somerset.

According to organizer Freddy Bannister, the bikers subsequently took control of security and began beating up attendees. Bannister, who had sold his family home to pay the bands in advance, eventually had to pay the Angels to leave, as he recalled in Louder Sound.

Despite the mayhem, the event's success would help inspire a young Michael Eavis to create Glastonbury Festival, whose inaugural edition took place just months later, with T. Rex headlining.

Elsewhere, Jimmy Page's best-kept secret has opened up about making pedals for some of the world's greatest guitar players.

Music's landscape changed dramatically in the late 1960s, as the electric guitar became an increasingly powerful force of expression in rock. That evolution owed as much to advances in amplification and effects as it did to the players who came to define the era, including Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.

At the same time, guitarists like Keith Richards and George Harrison were taking a different approach, drawing on the styles that preceded the British rock boom while developing a more expressive, blues-inspired way of playing. Harrison, in particular, came to appreciate the slower, single-note lead style heard in the playing of the Band's Robbie Robertson and his friend Eric Clapton.

But he wanted little to do with the heavier rock that followed. In his view, Clapton had already taken the electric guitar somewhere new and more forceful with his power trio Cream.

Where the instrument went after that, however, was simply too much for his taste.

“As far as listening to it, I’d rather hear someone like Little Richard or Larry Williams,” he once recalled (via Rolling Stone). “I never liked all that stuff in the late '60s after Cream had broken up — all those Les Paul guitars screaming and distorting.”

Clapton had been at the forefront of the British blues explosion following his departure from the Yardbirds in 1965, when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But after leaving to form his own loud and energetic power trio, inspired by seeing Buddy Guy play in London, he helped push the blues into considerably more aggressive territory.

Although Cream was fundamentally a blues-rock band, with strong elements of jazz woven into its sound, the group's musical fusion helped pave the way for the hard rock and heavy metal scenes that followed. Even Clapton came to recognize the band's influence in the years afterward.

“I think we were one of the early heavy metal bands without knowing it,” Clapton has previously said. “After we disbanded, Led Zeppelin filled the void.”

While hard rock would go on to produce plenty of accomplished virtuosos, Harrison remained more drawn to an expressive, understated approach to guitar playing than to the excesses of the genre.

“I like subtlety, like Ry Cooder and Eric Clapton,” he said. “Eric is fantastic. He could blow all those people off the stage if he wanted to, but he’s more subtle than that.

“And personally I’d rather hear three notes hit really sweet than to hear a whole lot of notes from some guitar player whose ears are so blown out he can’t hear the difference between a flat and a sharp.”

Harrison's praise for Clapton is particularly interesting given the complicated history between the two men. They had reportedly engaged in a guitar duel over their mutual love for Pattie Boyd, Harrison's wife at the time. Clapton had become infatuated with Boyd around 1970, inspiring his anguished declaration of love in "Layla," from Derek and the Dominos' Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs (although the song has since become the subject of plagiarism claims).

Intriguingly, in his Rolling Stone interview, Harrison made no mention of the guitarist he considered responsible for the “greatest guitar solo of all time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Vai is set to return for the sequel to the cult 1986 movie Crossroads, according to the film's original star and screenwriter. The supernatural spin on the life of blues legend Robert Johnson was written by John Fusco and starred Ralph Macchio. The two have been discussing ways to continue the story ever since the film's release.

“Ralph and I, we call, and he’s like, ‘Man, you know we should do some kind of anniversary thing,’” Fusco told Guitar World. “I said, ‘We should do the freaking sequel.’ He's like, ‘No shit, really? Do you have an idea?’ So Ralph and I have talked about it. We’ve got a plan.”

Fusco wouldn't reveal much about the project, beyond promising that Crossroads II would be “exciting to music fans, to blues purists.” Macchio, who played guitar prodigy Eugene Martone opposite Vai's Jack Butler, a guitarist in the service of Satan, offered a few more clues.

“It would be years and years later, less about Eugene and more about someone relevant today,” he said. “I can’t go into a deep dive on that stuff, but I haven't given up on it.”

Vai, meanwhile, made clear that he knows where his character stands.

“I know Ralph wants to kick my ass. Jack Butler needs his revenge!”

Although Crossroads flopped at the box office, the story of Eugene's encounter with bluesman Willie Brown and their subsequent battle for their souls found a much larger audience on home video. Most of the film's music was arranged by Ry Cooder, but Vai composed key passages for the climactic guitar duel, including Eugene's Trick Bag, which Eugene performs to defeat Butler and the Devil.

In 1997, Vai revisited the performance with fellow Zappa alumnus Mike Keneally, demonstrating that he still had an affection for a performance that would become a formative moment for generations of guitarists.

One of them was Nita Strauss, who recalled the film's impact in an interview with Guitar Player.

“When I was 13 I saw Steve Vai in Crossroads. He was so cool and charismatic. At the time I had a guitar, but I hadn’t fallen in love with it yet. I remember watching Steve Vai and thinking, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me that you could do that with a guitar? That is so cool!’”

The Doors’ guitarist Robby Krieger has confirmed that his wife of more than 50 years, Lynn Ann Veres, died last week at age 79. The couple married in 1972, when they were both in their mid-20s.

“I am so sorry I can’t share this news in person,” Krieger wrote on Instagram. “After more than 50 years of love and marriage, my wife Lynn Ann Veres passed away peacefully.” Referring to their son, he added: “Waylon and I were with her until the end. Will miss her so much. Your thoughts and prayers will be appreciated.”

Krieger did not disclose the cause of her death, although some reports suggested she had been battling a long illness. Among those offering condolences, Joe Satriani wrote, “So sorry Robby,” while Phil Soussan and Rudy Sarzo also sent messages of support.

Lynn was the inspiration behind the Doors’ song “Love Her Madly,” released in 1971. The track, which features the lyrics “Don’t you love her madly? / Don’t you need her badly? / Don’t you love her ways? … Don’t you love her as she’s walkin’ out the door / Like she did one thousand times before?” was one of the band’s biggest hits.

Appearing on L.A. Woman, the song reached Number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. “This was about my girlfriend, and now my wife,” Krieger told LA Weekly in 2012. “She had a bad temper, and when she’d get mad, she’d slam the door, and the house would shake.”

According to various accounts, Lynn had initially pursued Doors singer Jim Morrison after meeting him in 1966. She and Krieger eventually got together when they were both single, marrying on Christmas Day 1972. Their son, Waylon — who has since performed alongside his father — was born in September 1973.

Krieger dedicated his 2021 memoir, Set the Night on Fire, to Lynn, describing her as a “fireball spirit” and “the only person I've ever met who lets me be me.”

Queen’s landmark 1986 concert in Budapest is getting a new lease on life with the November 6 release of the restored Queen Budapest film on Blu-ray, DVD and digital.

But for Brian May, revisiting the performance is more emotionally demanding than nostalgic. Speaking in a new interview with Rolling Stone Canada, the guitarist describes how watching the newly restored footage transports him back to the pressures of performing with Queen at the height of its success.

The guitarist and drummer Roger Taylor attended the film’s premiere, where they got an early look at the newly restored footage. The experience left both feeling drained.

“Somebody asked Roger how he felt, and he said, ‘I feel exhausted,’” May recalls. “And that’s exactly how you feel — because you get emotionally dragged through that whole thing.”

Watching himself perform brings back the anxieties that accompanied life on the road, he explains. “It’s almost like you’re there and you’re still worried about, did you make a mistake or did that sound right, and you’re back in all those personal issues that you had at the time. It is an exhausting experience for us to look at it.”

The Budapest concert took place during Queen’s 1986 Magic tour, when the band was enjoying one of the biggest periods of its career. A year after its triumphant Live Aid appearance, Queen had played two sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium and was now taking its show across Europe.

Budapest represented a particularly significant stop. Playing behind the Iron Curtain, Queen was part of a historic moment for Western rock music in Eastern Europe.

“We’re now back out in Europe, in Budapest, behind the Iron Curtain, where no rock group has ever been able to play, and it’s a monumental moment,” May says. “It really is.”

The concert was extensively filmed by Hungarian cinematographers, with cameras also following the band around the city and documenting moments away from the stage.

“There are all sorts of little insights into what we were doing offstage as well as onstage, and I think it’s beautiful,” May says.

The restoration brings new life to both the picture and sound. The visual work was handled by a New Zealand team whose credits include The Lord of the Rings, while Queen oversaw the audio restoration.

For May, the experience of watching the film ultimately goes beyond the uncomfortable memories. Stepping back from the performance, he can appreciate how well the four musicians worked together.

“I feel proud,” he says. “Detaching yourself, I think that it’s a good band, very well in touch with each other, very well-oiled machine, and it’s a great moment. I’m glad it was captured.”

Ritchie Blackmore has announced a run of six Blackmore’s Night shows, following the cancellation of the band's previous tour dates due to health issues. The Deep Purple co-founder, 81, will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his medieval folk-rock band with concerts in March 2027.

The band announced the dates via social media: “Blackmore’s Night embraces their 30 year anniversary with a limited tour in March of 2027. So dust off that garb, grab your dancing shoes and get ready to sing and dance and celebrate the incredible 30-year journey.”

Blackmore was forced to call off his last scheduled tour in 2025 after playing just two of its six shows, citing “medical reasons.” The cancellation came two years after he suffered a heart attack.

He later explained that he had a “long history of lumbar and neck herniated discs” requiring regular injections and had recently begun suffering from “debilitating migraines.” Poor traveling conditions triggered a severe attack.

“I couldn't stop vomiting,” he continued. “The room wouldn't stop spinning and I was extremely dizzy to the point of not being able to stand. The doctors came to the conclusion that my official diagnosis was severe vertigo.” He added: “Hope to see you all one day again when I’m healthy.”

Candace Night, his wife and musical partner, discussed his health issues in an August 2025 interview, shortly before the canceled tour.

“There's three main issues with him that are going on,” Night explained. “He has a heart issue — he had a heart attack a couple of years ago, so we stay on top of that.

“He's got gout, so that's difficult,” she added. “It's affecting his feet really badly. And it's starting in his forefinger, so it's hurting the mobility in that. He just had an injection for that. And his back, of course, which has always been an issue.”

Blackmore next appeared onstage during his Deep Purple guest spot in August, when he joined his former colleagues for a performance of the classic “Smoke on the Water.”

“It was tricky,” he reflected afterward. “I didn’t play anything too technical, as I felt I should stick to the rudiments of being simple. I still lost my place at one point, but it’s not why I was there.

“I was there to heal any wounds — but there weren’t any wounds. Everyone was like, we were in the army, all along the Western front and we were all getting together again. Very emotional moment.”

In related news, Deep Purple have canceled their touring plans in light of singer Ian Gillan’s health issues.

Blackmore’s Night will play the following shows in March 2027. Check their tour page for updates.

March 6: Newton Theatre, Newton, NJ

March 11: Landmark on Main, Port Washington, NY

March 13: District Music Hall, Norwalk, CT

March 19: Bearsville Theatre, Woodstock, NY

March 21: Suffolk Theatre, Suffolk, NY

March 27: Bergen PAC, Englewood, NJ