Eric Clapton says he made a “big, big mistake” selling two of the most important guitars of his career, even though he sold them for a cause close to his heart.

The 1964 Cherry Red Gibson ES-335 and “Blackie” — the legendary Stratocaster assembled with parts from a trio of 1956/’57 Strats — were among the guitars Clapton auctioned in 2004 to raise money for the Crossroads Centre, the addiction treatment facility he founded in Antigua. More than two decades later, he says he still struggles with letting them go.

Speaking to Guitar Center, Clapton explains why guitars hold such significance for him.

“If you're in a bad place and you pick up a guitar there's a strong chance you’ll get out of that,” he says. “They're very sacred things to me.”

That makes the loss of Blackie and the ES-335 particularly difficult. Together, the guitars brought $1,807,000 at the 2004 auction, which raised $7.44 million in total, with approximately $6.4 million going to Crossroads.

But Clapton says he had to keep reminding himself why he was willing to part with them.

“When the auction was going on, I had to constantly keep saying, ‘This is your purpose. You are an alcoholic, and if you don't stay sober, you won’t be able to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety,’” he says. “So this is all for that purpose. Crossroads is for that purpose. So I’m disproportionately obsessed with the survival of that place.

“My primary purpose is to stay sober, and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. That’s above me being a musician or a husband or a father. It’s the number one thing.”

The comments come as Clapton’s latest Crossroads Guitar Festival has once again put the cause in the spotlight. The event supports the Antigua-based treatment center, which Clapton established in 1998 following his own struggles with addiction.

The guitars he sold for it could hardly have been more significant to his career.

The ES-335 was a 1964 cherry-red model Clapton had acquired during his Yardbirds days and subsequently used with Cream. It featured during the band’s final run of performances in 1968, including their November show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. An Epiphone reissue of the guitar is reportedly due in 2027.

Blackie, meanwhile, became the defining Stratocaster of Clapton’s career. Inspired by his admiration for Jimi Hendrix and Steve Winwood, Clapton moved away from the Gibson Les Pauls he had favored and began playing Fender Stratocasters around 1970.

His first major Strat was a sunburst model known as “Brownie.” Blackie came together after Clapton bought six 1950s Strats from Sho-Bud in Nashville. He gave three to George Harrison, Pete Townshend and Winwood, then took the remaining three apart and assembled what he considered the best components into a single instrument.

“They were so out of fashion you could pick up a perfectly genuine Strat for two hundred or three hundred dollars,” Clapton said in the 2004 book The Stratocaster Chronicles. “So I bought all of them.”

Ahead of the auction that same year, Clapton described Blackie to Christie’s as an unusually personal instrument.

“It is such a personal thing,” he said. “I almost made this guitar myself – from different components, and I’ve never done that before or since.”

Blackie went on to become Clapton’s main guitar for years, appearing on recordings including “Cocaine,” “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Lay Down Sally.” Its history even includes a brief cameo from Todd Rundgren, who borrowed it onstage after breaking a string.

Clapton may never get either guitar back. But his latest comments make clear that, more than 20 years after the auction, he still feels the weight of what he gave up — even if he remains convinced of why he did it.

It’s with good reason that Joy Division’s 1980 hit “Love Will Tear Us Apart” consistently scores highly in various rankings of the world’s greatest basslines. Now, actor and bass player Keanu Reeves has his own small chapter in the song’s immortal legacy.

Released a month after singer Ian Curtis’ suicide, the song quickly became a defining track of the post-punk sound, with NME even crowning it the greatest single ever in 2002, despite the fact that it never appeared on a studio album.

The song has been named as Reeves’ all-time favorite, and it’s a fine example of his love of highly melodic basslines. Asked to pick one desert-island song by Stephen Colbert in 2022, he chose it with little hesitation.

Fast forward to September 21, 2026, and after introducing Peter Hook & the Light onstage at a show at the Warfield in San Francisco, the English bass icon dedicated the song to the 62-year-old Canadian.

For those uninitiated, Reeves enjoyed mild success with his alt-rock power trio, Dogstar, in the early 1990s, before his acting gigs took over his life. The band reunited in 2020 and have since released two albums, in 2023 and 2026.

Dogstar’s early days were fueled by a $300 bass he bought in a Guitar Center parking lot, but Reeves recently took possession of an innovatively wired Fender Custom Shop. It shows that his ear for tone runs deep.

The actor, who is currently on tour with Dogstar, was fortunate enough to have an off day on September 21, ahead of a San Francisco show of his own the following night. That afforded him the chance to introduce one of his heroes to the stage at the Warfield.

“The one, the only Peter Hook and the Light, playing the music we all love from then, today and tomorrow,” he beamed. He then embraced Hook before retreating to a private box, where he was seen revelling in the band’s 29-song set, which concluded with that enduring Joy Division song.

Before his tour, Hook — who plays in the band alongside his bassist son, Jack Bates — sat down to discuss his legacy with Guitar Player. He’s set to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this fall in recognition of his work in Joy Division and New Order, following Soundgarden, Bad Company, and Warren Zevon getting the nod last year.

Yet, when asked how he came up with so many memorable basslines over his career, he admitted that the secret is lost on him.

Comments on an Instagram post from Hook that showed “a couple of bass players hanging out in San Francisco” have suggested Reeves should be the one to induct Hook into the Hall of Fame in November. After Jim Carrey inducted Soundgarden and David Letterman did the same for the late Warren Zevon last year, it isn’t out of the question.

When the Beatles broke up in 1970, each member faced the daunting task of establishing a career outside the biggest band in the world. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all found varying degrees of post-Beatles success, but the transition wasn’t always easy.

Harrison, who had spent his Beatles years struggling to break through the Lennon-McCartney stronghold, came out of the gates quickest, with 1970’s All Things Must Pass a reputation-reaffirming smash. McCartney initially floundered away from the band, while Lennon and Starr also went on to enjoy solo success.

But according to Todd Rundgren, only one of the four truly managed to leave the Beatles behind.

“Ringo was maybe the only one who survived the Beatles,” he tells Vulture in a new interview. “All the other guys had some sort of issues they had to deal with. Paul McCartney, even today, is so afraid that people forget who he is that he’ll show up at a mall opening.”

While McCartney initially floundered away from the band, even questioning whether there was some truth to the ‘Paul is dead’ rumors after all, Lennon and Starr also went on to enjoy solo success. With this year’s Long Long Road his 22nd solo album, it’s hard to argue that Starr’s output over the last 56 years has been anything but tireless.

As a member of the Ringo Starr All-Star Band, Rundgren saw the drummer’s operation up close, and he felt the shadow of his former glories never hung over him.

“Ringo finally got over being a Beatle and became Ringo,” he notes. “[But] there was a time early on during the All-Starr tours where he was afraid that, if he stopped anywhere in public, he’d be mobbed to death. So he would ignore everybody.”

That had changed, Rundgren adds, by the latter years of his All-Star Band tenure, which stretched from the early 1990s to 2017. Even the first shows he played, in 1992, were some 22 years after the band’s breakup, so Rundgren concedes that Starr’s wounds and worries didn’t heal overnight.

“After the Beatles were done, he recorded some stuff but didn’t go out on tour,” the guitarist says. “He was too stage shy. Cut to 10 years later, and Ringo decides that as part of his rehabilitation he’s going to start playing again. He got into real big trouble because when he stopped playing, he didn’t know what to do with himself.

“He started hanging around with [American singer-songwriter] Harry Nilsson and getting into all sorts of mischief, and he realized that he was probably going to die unless he got into rehab. Part of the rehab was to start the All-Starr Band.”

Countless tours and eight All-Star live albums later, it’s clear the rehabilitation worked for the drummer. Rundgren has been in the news recently for a much less complimentary assessment of Taylor Swift’s songwriting, which he called “the apotheosis of mediocrity” in a recent interview.

Still, it’s not the only time Rundgren and the Beatles have crossed paths. He saved one recording session after Harrison stepped away. He’s also worked with Meat Loaf, David Bowie, and, much to his disdain, nearly jammed with Hendrix, but never quite got that feather in his cap.

Did Eric Clapton ever really know what kind of group Cream was? He formed the band with bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker in 1966, after seeing his hero Buddy Guy perform with a trio in London. Convinced his future lay in a blues-rock trio, he quit John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to make a fresh start.

What he failed to consider was that Bruce and Baker both had strong jazz backgrounds. For them, Cream was nothing less than a jazz-rock fusion outfit, one of the first in an era that would include artists like the Free Spirits (featuring guitarist Larry Coryell), Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, and Clapton's old pal Jeff Beck, to name a few.

“I thought of Cream as sort of a jazz band,” Bruce once said, “only we never told Eric he was really Ornette Coleman! Kept quiet about that.”

Like a jazz band, Cream made spirited, virtuoso improvisation a key part of their approach in concert. Together, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker introduced jamming to rock audiences, first in concert and later on albums like Wheels of Fire and Goodbye, and, following their breakup in 1968, on concert discs like Live Cream and Live Cream Volume II.

Some of the longest jams in their catalog include Wheels of Fire’s “Spoonful” (16:47) and “Toad” (16:16), Goodbye’s “I’m So Glad” (9:13), Live Cream’s “N.S.U.” (10:13) and “Sweet Wine” (15:15), and Live Cream Volume II’s “Steppin’ Out” (13:38).

And then there’s “Crossroads,” certainly the best known of the trio’s live jams. The song appeared on the second disc of 1968’s double-LP Wheels of Fire, along with other live recordings from Cream’s March 7–10 concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore and Winterland venues that same year. Recorded at Winterland on March 10, 1968, “Crossroads” comes in at a tidy 4 minutes and 18 seconds, making it one of the shorter live cuts in Cream’s catalog.

For fans of Eric Clapton’s electric guitar soloing, there is perhaps no better example of his guitar prowess. Over six verses, Clapton plays some of the most lyrical and impassioned guitar in blues rock — not just guitar wankery but lines that build and develop into statements you can recall in an instant and even sing. No less a Clapton fan than Eddie Van Halen learned the “Crossroads” solos note for note. That's how important they are.

So wouldn’t it be great if there was actually a longer version of this celebrated recording?

If the late producer Tom Dowd is to be believed, there is. Over his long career as an engineer and producer, Dowd recorded Clapton in Cream, solo and in Derek and the Dominos, which is why he was chosen to reminisce about the guitarist and his recordings for Guitar Player’s July 1985 Eric Clapton issue. In doing so, he made an admission that was tantalizing to Clapton fans.

“On the Wheels of Fire album, in the live portion, a lot of things were ultimately brought down to shorter versions than were played onstage,” Dowd said. “We did two recordings in San Francisco in three days' time — one at Winterland and the other at the Fillmore.

"'Crossroads' onstage, for instance, was never under seven to 10 minutes long. So the solos between the vocals were edited. But there was no overdubbing whatsoever on any of the live albums.”

Definitive as it may sound, Dowd’s declaration has a few problems. For one thing, nearly 60 years on, no “unedited” recordings of the Winterland "Crossroads" have surfaced. In addition, other live cuts of "Crossroads” from the group's autumn 1968 farewell tour are arranged like the Wheels of Fire track, right down to Bruce's "Eric Clapton" acknowledgement at the song's end. The group’s L.A. Forum and San Diego Sports Arena performances in October 1968 both clock in at around four minutes and change, while Cream’s November 26, 1968 presentation at the Royal Albert Hall runs the same length as the Wheels of Fire version.

If anything gives support to Dowd’s memory of the recording, it’s the moment at 2:44 where Clapton seemingly gets ahead of the beat and the players lose the “one” for a couple of measures. Did the group make a masterful save and recover before going completely off the rails? Or is this a less-than-ideal edit made to trim the song down to a more reasonable length?

Eric Clapton seems to think it was the former. The guitarist, who was interviewed by Dan Forte in that same issue as Dowd, couldn’t say if the producer was right, but he acknowledged that the group often came close to completely losing it when jamming.

GUITAR PLAYER "Cream's live version of 'Crossroads' is often cited as one of the best live cuts and live guitar solos ever recorded. Was that edited from a longer jam?"

ERIC CLAPTON "I can't remember. I haven't heard that in so long — and I really don't like it, actually. I think there's something wrong with it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we weren't lost at that point in the song, because that used to happen a lot. I'd forget where the 1 was, and I'd be playing the 1 on the 4, or the 1 on the 2 — that used to happen a lot. Somehow or another, it would make this crazy new hybrid thing, which I never liked, because it's not what it was supposed to be.

"What I'm saying is, if I hear the solo and think, God, I'm on the 2 and I should be on the 1, then I can never really enjoy it. And I think that's what happened with 'Crossroads.' It is interesting, and everyone can pat themselves on the back that we all got out of it at the same time. But it rankles me a little bit."

What’s curious is that even Clapton isn’t sure if the song was edited down — and he performed it.

But perhaps there are aspects to this we don’t know. Let’s say Dowd was right and “Crossroads” was originally much longer. Imagine Cream, out on their farewell tour in autumn 1968, decided to perform the song in its abbreviated Wheels of Fire format for one reason or another — maybe they preferred it, or figured it would let them wrap up the show faster and get out of each other’s hair. By the time of this interview, even Clapton could be excused if he'd forgotten such minor details.

Instead, what he recalled was his reaction — it rankled him. All guitarists would be blessed to feel so rankled. But then Clapton never did fully enjoy his role in Cream, where he was something of the odd man out. As Jack Bruce explained in a 2012 interview with Guitarist, Clapton thought Cream would be a blues trio and give him a chance to be like his idol, Buddy Guy. Meanwhile, Bruce and Baker were jazzheads hellbent on infusing the group’s blues-rock with freeform improvisation.

The results speak for themselves. As for "Crossroads," at any length it serves up some of the greatest guitar playing in rock and roll history.

As Rick Nielsen’s guitars, cars and memorabilia head to the Julien’s auction block in October, it’s a good time to recall some of the vintage and one-of-a-kind guitars the Cheap Trick guitarist has owned over the years. Several are among the offerings in the October 24 Rick Nielsen Collection auction.

One of the most conspicuous is the stage-played 2004 Hamer “Five Neck” Korina, which will be offered for sale publicly for the first time ever in the landmark auction.

The unusual electric is among three five-necked models Nielsen had built to his custom specs. The original orange-finished example was made in 1981. He explained its origins to Guitar Aficionado magazine.

“How did I come up with such a backbreaking idea for an instrument? Well, back at shows in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I used to stack up as many as five guitars for my guitar solo. I'd play one for a little bit, then throw it away and play the one hanging underneath it.”

This eventually led to the birth of the five-necked guitar. Nielsen originally envisioned it as a six-necked model “that spun like a roulette wheel, so that I could play one neck and then rotate to the next,” he explained. “But then I decided to go with something more conservative — five necks in a row!”

He admitted that the monster of a guitar was a chore to build, due not only to its size and wiring but because of his specifications for each of the guitars. “I wanted a 12-string and a fretless, and one that sounded like a Stratocaster and one that sounded like a Junior,” he said. “But Hamer, never to be daunted, managed to put all the ideas together and made it work.”

It was left to Hamer’s Frank Untermeyer to bring Nielsen’s creation to life.

“Rick's out of his mind, but in a wonderful way,” Untermeyer told Guitar Aficionado. “By 1981, we had already done some pretty wacky stuff for him and Cheap Trick, like the checkerboard Standard, an electric mandocello, and a 12-string bass, so we were used to the fact that they set all standards for going to the limit.

“For this guitar, we cut apart five double-cutaway Hamer Special bodies and laminated them together, and then sanded in between the necks to get that sort of swoopy look. As I recall, routing the wires through this thing was also a huge pain in the ass.”

Hamer subsequently built two more five-neck guitars for Nielsen, including the 2004 Korina model now headed to auction.

The auction guitar has had a substantial stage career of its own. Nielsen used it at the 2004 Another State of Mind benefit show at Chicago’s Metro and continued playing it through at least 2013, when Cheap Trick performed its Budokan 35th Anniversary concert at the CBGB’s John Varvatos venue in New York. The guitar also appears in an episode of Gibson Guitars’ The Collection series featuring Nielsen.

As the guitarist and songwriter behind Cheap Trick, Nielsen helped create some of the band’s most enduring songs, including “Surrender” and “Dream Police,” while his distinctive guitar work and larger-than-life stage presence helped propel the group from Rockford, Illinois, to international stardom.

Nielsen grew up around his parents’ music store and started out as a drummer before the Beatles and Rolling Stones helped turn his attention toward the guitar. He bought his first Les Paul — a 1955 Goldtop — for $65 and still owns it. Over the decades, his collection expanded to include rare and unusual instruments ranging from two 1958 Gibson Explorers to a 1963 Guild Merle Travis, one of only three ever made.

“I couldn’t sing or dance, but I was big into songwriting, and I tried to put everything I had into that,” Nielsen said. “I never wanted to be like anybody else — I just wanted to be me. I knew I was never going to be a virtuoso, so I ended up being a ‘medium-oso.’”

Now, after more than five decades of collecting, Nielsen is parting with a portion of that archive.

“I started out with one guitar, and over the years the collection just kept growing. It seemed like a good time to sell some of it — you can’t take it with you. When it’s all over, hopefully I’ll still have one guitar.”

More Rick Nielsen guitars headed to auction

The five-neck Hamer is far from the only notable guitar in The Rick Nielsen Collection.

Among the other highlights is a stage-played 1975 Hamer Standard, which Nielsen used on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert on November 10, 1977, and during Cheap Trick’s April 28, 1978 performance at Japan’s Budokan. It carries an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000.

Also offered is a sunburst 1963 Fender Stratocaster with a mint-green pickguard, chrome tremolo bridge and output jack plate, and white pickup covers and knobs. Its estimate is $40,000 to $60,000.

A 1984 Gibson Les Paul XPL is another unusual entry. The model combines the Les Paul body shape with the Explorer headstock, part of Gibson’s mid-1980s experiments with pairing the Explorer headstock with other body designs. Nielsen’s sunburst example comes with its original rectangular Gibson hardshell case and carries an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000.

The October 24 Rick Nielsen Collection auction will also include cars, stage-worn clothing, awards and other personal memorabilia. The sale will benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and will be held live at the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum at the Historic Nashville Municipal Auditorium.

Visit Julien’s Auctions to view the collection.

Keanu Reeves is back on the road with Dogstar, and ahead of the band’s upcoming tour, the actor and bass guitarist took time to talk about his history with the instrument, his influences and the gear he’s using onstage.

In a new video with No Treble and The Bass Nerds, Reeves walks through his current rig, which includes a Fender American Ultra Precision Bass and a Gallien-Krueger 2001RB Legacy head driving four 4x12 cabs.

But the conversation quickly goes beyond gear, with Reeves recalling the unlikely circumstances of his first bass purchase and the players who shaped his approach to the instrument.

“I started playing when I was 22, went to Guitar Center in Hollywood and I ended up buying a bass in the parking lot,” Reeves says. “It was a white Ibanez, four-string, with a rosewood neck for 300 bucks.”

From there, he moved on to Fender Precision Basses, although he also spent some time playing a Music Man.

“I played a MusicMan too for a little bit,” he says. “But in the progression I did a P Bass, but never did a Jazz.

“Now I like PJs,” he adds, referring to Precision basses fitted with both Precision Bass and Jazz Bass pickups, such as the Ultra and Ultra II models.

Reeves also demonstrates what Dogstar calls “Reeves’ riff,” the bass figure that became the foundation of “All in Now,” the title track and first single from the band’s new album.

His musical influences go back to some of the defining bass sounds of punk and alternative rock. Reeves cites the Ramones, Pixies bass guitarist Kim Deal and Joy Division/New Order bass guitarist Peter Hook among his favorites. At one point in the video, he plays Hook’s instantly recognizable bass line from Joy Division’s “Disorder.”

“I guess when I wanted to learn how to play when I was 22, it was the Ramones, a little punk rock. There was also the bass line to [Lou Reed’s] ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ There was Kim Deal,” he says, attempting to play Deal’s bass line from the Pixies’ “Gigantic.”

That emphasis on the bass as a melodic instrument, rather than simply a rhythmic foundation, seems to have been central to Reeves from the beginning.

“Having the melody from the bass — I guess my ear always went to that... So yeah, I was drawn to that stuff.”

Dogstar’s All In Now Tour launches September 29 at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles.

Todd Rundgren has never been shy about taking aim at pop music, but his latest target is one of the biggest stars in the world. In a recent career-spanning interview, the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer argued that Taylor Swift represents everything he considers mediocre about contemporary music.

“There’s an argument to be made that she ruined music,” Rundgren told Vulture. “It’s an understandable phenomenon. It’s just that, to me, Taylor Swift is the apotheosis of mediocrity.”

Rundgren’s comments came while discussing his work on Meat Loaf’s 1977 debut, Bat Out of Hell. The album famously drew on the theatrical excesses of Bruce Springsteen, and Rundgren was asked which contemporary artist he might lampoon if he were making a similar record in 2026.

“Taylor Swift, of course,” he replied.

He then offered a theory for why female artists have become so dominant in mainstream music, arguing that the industry’s audience shifted after young men began spending more money on video games than records during the 1990s.

“So you got Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, P!nk, and many artists of that ilk,” Rundgren said.

He was considerably more complimentary toward Gaga, whom he described as “a real musician” and noted is a classically trained piano player. Swift, by contrast, came in for a much harsher assessment.

“Taylor Swift doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair,” he said. “She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer.”

Rundgren did acknowledge Swift’s enormous influence, particularly among women who have grown up with her music.

“She’s a role model for what was a very young generation of women, and now for those women’s daughters as well, because it’s mothers and daughters going to Taylor Swift shows,” he said.

Rundgren has a long history of speaking candidly about his experiences with fellow musicians. He has criticized XTC frontman Andy Partridge over his attitude during the making of Skylarking, the 1986 album Rundgren produced, and he has also taken issue with George Harrison receiving a production credit on Badfinger’s “Day After Day” after Rundgren took over production of the band’s Straight Up album.

His view on Swift stands in contrast to the praise she has received from several prominent figures in the rock world. Exodus and Slayer guitarist Gary Holt said in 2024, “I love Taylor Swift. Why all the hate? She’s an extraordinarily hard worker.” Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson has likewise praised Swift’s talent and the way she treats her touring crew, while acknowledging that he isn’t particularly familiar with her music.

A great many descriptors have been used for Robin Trower and his playing since he emerged as part of Procol Harum back in 1967.

Slack has never been one of them.

With his signature Stratocaster and endless vocabulary of solos, the London-born guitarist, songwriter and bandleader has released more than three dozen studio albums as a principal artist — including the short-lived BLT trio with Jack Bruce and drummer Bill Lordan — plus session work for Bruce and Bryan Ferry. During the past decade alone, he’s delivered eight albums, including collaborations with Maxi Priest and blues singer Sari Schorr — a remarkable output by any measure but all the more remarkable when you consider that Trower turned 81 in March and is still producing at a volume that’s leaving those half his age, and younger, in the dust.

The latest entry in the Trower travelogue is Shine, a 10-track set that came out September 25 that was produced by Trower, who also played bass as well as guitar, joined by drummer Chris Taggard, with Richard Watts, mostly, on vocals, as well as Jeff Hayes. Mining a familiar but hardly worn array of rock, blues, soul and some funk, it’s an album Trower had spoken about finishing around the time its predecessor, 2025’s Come and Find Me, came out. As he spoke to Guitar Player from Florida at the outset of his latest U.S. tour, it doesn’t sound like he’ll be taking his foot off the pedal — wah-wah or otherwise — any time soon.

Shine is an album you were talking about when Come and Find Me came out just 16 months ago. Do you feel like those, and maybe all of the albums you’ve been releasing in pretty rapid succession, are of some kind of a piece you’re creating?

I think the point behind it all, really, is I’m coming up with a lot of material, so in a way I’m always working on a couple of albums at the time. Then when the time comes for me to put an album out, I have to choose from a certain amount of songs, a group of songs that I think work together. But there’s always extra songs that will go toward the next album.

That has to be a reassuring way to work, making music more than making albums.

That’s right, yeah. Each song is treated as an individual, and I then try to put together a bunch of songs that I feel do hang together — hopefully from a lot of choices that are around.

So how large of a universe did you draw Shine from?

I think I had about six other songs that didn’t make it on this album; they just didn’t quite fit in this group. So they’ll go forward, and I’m working on a lot of new material since then, of course.

What accounts for your level of recent productivity? There aren’t many, maybe any, peers of your age that compare.

There’s no doubt about it; I have hit a bit of a purple patch the last few years. I think I’ve concentrated more on working, just making sure I play the guitar every day, and that’s where ideas come — when I’m sort of doodling about. An idea will present itself, and as long as I think I can keep working I can come up with new material.

Do you have a process you follow at this point?

Every song I write starts off with a guitar idea, basically; that is the formula. I get a guitar idea that I think could be turned into a song. I’ll work on it for an hour, and if it’s gonna be good it’ll be pretty much together by the end of the hour.

I know when a line, a guitar line, is gonna be good because it rings a bell in my body. I just know that’s what I’m looking for. Then I start to think about the top line, what the vocal line will be, and once I’ve got that nailed down I’m also working on lead guitar ideas, and melodies as well. Then I start to work on the lyrics. That is the longest part of the process; that can take me two or three days, to finish the lyrics.

There are probably some songwriters out there who will read that and think two or three days is not a long time.

[chuckles] Yeah, that’s lovely. I mean, I have taken longer than that, but not always. The ultimate sort of goal of a lyric is that it enhances the atmosphere of the song itself and fits right into the mood of it. But if you can’t reach that kind of goal, then at least have a lyric that doesn’t detract from it.

Shine and your other recent albums, certainly Come and Find Me, seem to be digging a little deeper, lyrically. There are songs about politics, mortality. Is that part of being a man of a certain age and having more experiences to draw from?

I think that’s true. I think what’s happening in the world has impacted the lyrics the last few years, there’s no doubt about it. The world is unfortunately in a much darker place at the moment. I think that gets into it. Obviously you’re going to express your worries, fears, whatever.

On “Live Your Time” on Shine, however, you strike a more optimistic tone even in that environment.

I think that’s more or less saying, “Well, we can worry ourselves to death and worry about those things we can’t really change,” and I think that lyric is just sort of pointing out that you’ve got to love yourself and live your time. That’s it — make the very most of it. Obviously we have to be concerned, but not to the detriment of our own lives. And eventually we have a moment for us to make a difference.

“The Race,” meanwhile, sounds pretty defiant — again, a kind of statement from a man of a certain age.

I really believe that. You’re always looking forward — and happy about it. If you had asked me in the ’70s, there’s no way I thought I’d still be doing it at 81. But I’m thankful for my blessings every day, so that’s it. You try to make the most of it.

What do you find you can do now, through the benefit of knowledge and experience, that you couldn’t have 40 or 50 or more years ago?

That’s a good point, because I think I try and be more organized and not quite so gung-ho as I was when I was starting out. I think now I’m more interested, for instance, in lead guitar being more melodic, having actual melodies. Obviously I still want to make it passionate and soulful, but I think that would be the difference between then and now, more melody.

Has the litmus of what works changed for you much over the years? Is it easier or harder to reach that bar you aspire toward?

I think both. Experience is a big, big help, because you bypass all the sort of clutter to get to the point, and the point is always further down the road, unfortunately. So you’re always chasing what you’re after, but that’s all part of the fun of the fair, isn’t it? When you give up is when you don’t feel like you’re growing or coming up with something fresh. The most important thing is to come up with something fresh to you, something you haven’t created before. A lot of the ingredients are very similar to what you did before, but it has that little something about it that piques your interest.

What did that in particular on Shine?

Well, “Love By Any Other Name” is maybe one of the best songs I’ve ever written. I’m fascinated by that track. It’s deep, for a start; it’s a deep piece of music. It’s also got a fabulous vocal on it by Richard. I think that combination gives it a potency which...it’s fascinating.

Any different gear on this album?

It’s all basically the same stuff I always use — my signature model Strat, Marshall amps and all the pedals from Fulltone. They keep giving me pedals since the early ’90s, and I’ve always used them since then.

As Paul McCartney once asked Elvis Presley, how are you coming along on the bass, then?

The reason I play bass is because when I’m writing I usually have in the back of my mind what the bass and drums should be doing. I’m not saying I’m a great bass player or anything, but I think the parts are key, coming up with the right part that suits the vocal, suits the guitar parts. I think that’s why I like to do the bass myself.

You released anniversary editions of some of your albums recently, like Bridge of Sighs, For Earth Below, the first Live! album. Do those at all impact on new writing and recording you do?

No, I don’t think so. I’m not one for looking back; most of those albums I haven’t heard since I made them. So, no. You just keep moving forward. You don’t want to get hung up on what was successful earlier; it might impact on what you’re trying to create, or can create.

What keeps the older songs fresh for you in concert?

I think that’s the great thing about being a three-piece — every song is a challenge every night. That’s all there is to it; you’ve got to work hard to pull them off, basically. I think that’s what keeps it on its toes. That keeps it alive.

Is a next album in motion, or even finished?

No. I’m working on something at the moment; I have a lot of spare material, but I haven’t got it pinned down to what it’s gonna be yet. I’m gonna be doing a little more recording, I think, in November, and then take some time off and come back to it in the new year.

Jane Asher has spent decades declining to revisit her relationship with Paul McCartney, even though their time together helped inspire some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs. Now, as that relationship is set to be dramatized on the big screen, she has no intention of watching.

Asher, who dated the Beatle bass guitarist for five years and became engaged to him in 1967, is being portrayed by Lucy Boynton in Sam Mendes’ upcoming four-part Beatles film series. The actor says the filmmakers did reach out to her, but she gave them the same response she has given to inquiries about her relationship with McCartney for years.

“They approached me about it, of course, but I said my usual,” Asher told The Telegraph.

Asher and McCartney met in 1963, when she interviewed the Beatles at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Their relationship quickly became serious, with McCartney eventually moving into the Asher family home. The years they spent together coincided with one of the Beatles’ most creatively fertile periods, and Asher has been connected to several McCartney compositions from the era.

The years they spent together coincided with one of the Beatles’ most creatively fertile periods, and Asher was a direct influence on several of McCartney’s songs. “And I Love Her” (from 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night),“I’m Looking Through You” (from 1965’s Rubber Soul) and “For No One” (from 1966’s Revolver) have all been associated with their relationship.

Their engagement ended in 1968, with Asher making the announcement during a BBC television appearance. McCartney married Linda McCartney the following year.

Asher, now 80, has made clear that she considers the relationship a closed chapter. She said she has turned down offers of money to talk about McCartney and has no interest in reopening the subject for the new films.

“People would offer me money to talk about it, all sorts of things,” she said. “But I won’t discuss it. It was so long ago.”

That extends to Boynton’s portrayal of her. Asked about the casting, Asher acknowledged that her onscreen counterpart is “beautiful,” but said she won’t see the finished films.

“Well, of course, Lucy is beautiful. But I won’t watch the films, otherwise everyone will ask me what I thought.”

Mendes’ The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event will tell the band’s story four times, with each movie centered on a different Beatle. Paul Mescal plays McCartney, with Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

The ensemble also includes Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey.

The project has the participation of Apple Corps and the surviving Beatles, giving Mendes access to the group’s music rights as well as their approval for the films. The four movies are scheduled to open in theaters simultaneously in April 2028.

Asher isn’t the only Beatles partner whose connection to the project has attracted attention. Boyd said earlier this year that she had not been contacted by the production about her portrayal, adding, “I could have really told them great stories.”

Ritchie Blackmore has compared his surprise return to the Deep Purple stage to coming home from war.

The legendary guitarist reunited with his former bandmates for a performance of “Smoke on the Water” at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, on August 12, 33 years after his departure from the band. And while the appearance lasted only a few minutes, Blackmore says the experience carried considerably more weight.

“I felt like I was one of the soldiers that had come back from the Western Front, and everybody thought I was dead,” Blackmore recalls. “And there I was — I was alive.”

Blackmore revisited the reunion in a new, 13-part interview series with Now Spinning magazine editor-in-chief Phil Aston, explaining that the idea came to him early one morning after he learned Deep Purple would be performing at Jones Beach, which he described as a “magnificent place.”

The electric-guitar legend had been thinking about contacting his former bandmates when the opportunity presented itself. The communication ultimately went through his wife and Blackmore’s Night co-leader, Candice Night, as Blackmore had only recently learned how to use modern phones and generally keeps his distance from technology.

“Now Candice sent the e-mail and Ian [Gillan] said, ‘Yes, of course. Welcome aboard. All the band is up for it. Come onstage for ‘Smoke’.’ I just wanted to do one song, and I thought that would be the song. It’s big over here [in the U.S.] — bigger here than it was in Europe.”

The appearance was publicized just enough to let fans know what was coming, and Blackmore says ticket sales subsequently increased.

The stakes became apparent once he actually stepped onstage. Blackmore says everyone around him was “incredibly nice” — almost to the point of “overkill” — and although he didn’t participate in a soundcheck, his roadie handled it and reported that everything sounded good.

Then came “Smoke on the Water.”

Blackmore admits that revisiting one of Deep Purple’s defining songs after more than three decades was “tricky.” Still, the response from the crowd was overwhelming.

“And I played my three or four minutes of ‘Smoke on the Water’, which seemed to go down like I just invented the cure for cancer,” he says. “The people went nuts, and half of them were sitting in water. For some reason, the venue kind of gets covered in water at certain points ’cause it is right on the water. So they’re now all sitting in the water, the front three or four rows.”

The performance also earned praise from Deep Purple’s current guitarist, Simon McBride, who described the night as “magical.” McBride acknowledged that Blackmore’s playing may not have been at the same level it was when “Smoke on the Water” appeared on 1972’s Machine Head, while adding that he would be more than happy to have the same level of ability when he reaches Blackmore’s age.

For Blackmore, though, the night was less about proving what he could still do onstage than reconnecting with people he had once shared the stage with.

“I felt very good about it because it was like playing with old friends,” he says. “Everybody was super nice and super efficient.”

That made the performance all the more meaningful — and all the more nerve-racking.

“And thank goodness it went off without a hitch, but it could have quite easily have fallen apart, and that would’ve been embarrassing,” Blackmore says.

In the end, he says the reception made him feel like a celebrity for the few minutes he was onstage, despite having little interest in celebrity himself.

“I just play the guitar — sometimes well, sometimes not so well,” he says. “But it was well worth doing.”

Blackmore says the idea had come to him almost spontaneously, and the possibility that it might be his final opportunity to share a stage with his former bandmates gave the reunion an added poignancy.

“It was a good idea that I had, and it came to me very early one morning when I was in bed. I just thought, ‘Why not?’ ’Cause we never know when we’re going to meet again, which is like a sad note in a way.”

The first part of the interview series is below.

Neil Henderson, the Scottish guitarist who played with the Bay City Rollers during the band’s formative years, has died at 73.

Henderson’s death was announced by Middle of the Road, another Scottish pop group he later joined. In a statement on Facebook, the band remembered him as its “original lead guitarist, songwriter and friend,” adding that he had been ill for some time and had been working to recover from a stroke suffered several years ago. The group offered its condolences to Henderson’s daughters, Heather and Shona, along with his family and friends.

Henderson joined the Bay City Rollers in 1970, when the group was still establishing itself in Scotland. He played on the band’s 1971 single “Keep On Dancing,” which reached number nine on the U.K. singles chart and gave the Rollers their first Top 10 hit.

He left the group the following year, reportedly after disagreements over its musical direction. His departure came well before the Bay City Rollers’ international breakthrough in the mid-1970s, when the band became one of the era’s biggest pop acts with songs including “Saturday Night” and “Money Honey.”

Henderson subsequently joined Middle of the Road, which was enjoying considerable success in Europe at the time. The group established itself as the leaders of Europop in the years before ABBA’s rise, selling more than five million records, including the international hits “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” “Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum” and “Soley Soley.” As a guitarist and songwriter for the group, Henderson contributed to songs such as “Rockin’ Soul” and “Everybody Loves a Winner.”

Henderson’s death also prompted a tribute from Stuart “Woody” Wood, the guitarist who played with the Bay City Rollers during their period of greatest commercial success. Wood said he had never met Henderson personally but noted that the band’s late bass guitarist Alan Longmuir had spoken highly of him.

“Just heard the very sad news about Neil Henderson, one of the original Bay City Rollers,” Wood wrote. “Though I never met him personally Alan spoke very highly of him. Sincere condolences to all his family and friends.”

Middle of the Road concluded its tribute by remembering Henderson’s lasting connection to the musicians he had worked alongside: “His memory will live on with all who had the pleasure of sharing the stage with him as will his music.”

More than half a century since the release of “Layla,” one of the most iconic tracks in Eric Clapton’s canon, Rita Coolidge is still waiting to be credit for writing the outro’s piano lines.

Clapton's own signature is, of course, all over the eponymous 1970 track from Derek & the Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, an album with an intriguing backstory of its own. The album is a uniquely personal entry in Clapton's catalog, written and recorded while the guitarist was in the throes of longing for Pattie Harrison, the wife of his famous Beatle pal George.

While the song's signature electric guitar riff was penned by the then largely unknown Duane Allman, who guested on the record, the tune was Clapton's entirely — up to the piano coda that concludes the song's final minutes. That final icing on the cake was written by Dominos drummer Jim Gordon and singer Coolidge.

Coolidge was hardly anonymous at the time. Like Clapton and the rest of his band, she had served in Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett's band, ground zero for Derek & the Dominos. Since then, Coolidge had gone on to record with artists that included Joe Cocker, Leon Russell — who wrote Cocker's hit "Delta Lady" for her — Stephen Stills and Clapton himself on his self-titled debut solo album.

As the singer explained in a TikTok post, she was in Miami's Criteria studio — the same facility where Layla was recorded — having her photo taken to promote her 1971 debut solo album, when she heard the song being played.

“I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I recognize this music and know this music,'" she said. “They’re like, ‘You don’t know it, it’s a brand-new Eric Clapton record,’ and I said, ‘It’s my music!’ They took pictures of the veins popping out in my neck. I was so upset.”

Coolidge said that, after hearing the song, she rushed to Tower Records, where, to her dismay, she found her name absent in the credits.

“I started trying to get in touch with Eric through Robert Stigwood, who was his manager at the time, and was just a mogul,” she recalled. “I got him finally on the phone, and I said, ‘I’m one of the writers, that’s my music.’ He said, ‘Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? You’re a girl. You don’t have the money to fight this. Let it go.’ And that was it.”

In her memoir, Delta Lady, Coolidge wrote that Clapton heard her play the song during their previous recording sessions together, long before he’d woven it into “Layla’s” tapestry.

“We played the song for Eric Clapton in England,” she wrote. “I remember sitting at the piano in Olympic Studios while Eric listened to me play it. Jim and I left a cassette of the demo, hoping, of course, that he might cover it.”

Although he hasn't publicly addressed Coolidge's claims, Clapton told Guitar Player in 1985 that he had coaxed the song away from Gordon for use as the coda to "Layla."

"Jim Gordon wrote that and had been secretly going back into the studio and recording his own album, without any of us knowing it," Clapton told assistant editor Dan Forte. "And they were all love songs composed on the piano. And we caught him playing this one day and said, 'Come on, man. Can we have that?'

"So he was happy to give us that part. And we made the two pieces into one song."

While Clapton did give Gordon a co-writing credit for the song, Coolidge's part in Derek and the Dominos' short-lived legacy remains overlooked.

Peter Frampton’s career has produced only one Grammy for the classic-rock guitarist. It’s not for Frampton Comes Alive !, the 1976 smash hit that made him a global superstar, but for Fingerprints, his 2007 instrumental album.

But at the age of 76, the guitarist measures success on his own scale.

“In my mind, I’m more successful than I’ve ever been — because I like myself, I like what I do,” Frampton told The New York Times. “I’ve always been someone who didn’t think I was good enough, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I should have felt that way a long time ago.”

That perspective has come through both the highs and lows of his career, as well as the physical challenges he has faced in recent years. Frampton recalls the first sign that something might be wrong. It was 2009, when he was 59. He and his son, Julian, were on a rare road trip to Big Sur to reconnect and write songs together.

“Julian said, ‘Let’s run up this hill.’ Normally I would beat him, and I didn’t,” Frampton says from his home studio in Nashville. “It felt like there were insects in my legs, like they were vibrating.”

Frampton later learned that he had Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a progressive muscle-wasting disease that weakens the arms and legs. He was diagnosed around 2014 after suffering several falls at home and onstage, but he didn’t publicly reveal the diagnosis until 2019.

His career had already taken him through extraordinary highs and lows. In recent interviews he’s said the success of Frampton Comes Alive! overwhelmed him — and that its hastily recorded follow-up, I’m in You (1977), was a mistake. Suddenly he was everywhere — on the radio, TV and posters on fans’ walls, with his famed Fenix Les Paul electric guitar.

“The pressure was so great,” he said. “There was absolutely no need to do I’m in You then and there. The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

His career slowed afterward as musical tastes shifted. Years later, speaking at The Art of Music event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last year, Frampton said it was then that he began planning for the next phase of his career.

“That’s when I sort of stopped working and basically just started writing on my own and getting ready for something that was to come.”

His evolution since then resulted in what may be his most personal — and political — record. Carry the Light, released earlier this year, found the guitarist reflecting on life, family and the current political climate, with assistance from friends that include Graham Nash, Sheryl Crow and Tom Morello.

The album developed over three years, as he and his son, Julian, reconnected following the COVID-19 pandemic. Just before then, Frampton became a grandfather for the first time.

But the joy of that milestone was tempered by the effects of IBM. Since revealing his diagnosis, Frampton has made fewer appearances. He surprised attendees at the 2025 NAMM music show with an appearance at the Martin Guitar booth, where he first hinted he was recording Carry the Light. But standing — and even playing guitar — has become more difficult, forcing him to adjust how he frets chords and notes.

While he’s unsure whether he’ll tour again — his last tour, Let's Do It Again!, concluded in November 2025 — he remains hopeful and is keeping positive.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must be so upset,’ and, yeah, I am. But you can fix the little things,” Frampton says.

“But big things never worried me, because they’re the things you can’t do anything about. If I don’t accept what I have, I’m going to be mad for the rest of my life.”

Olivia Rodrigo’s “The Cure” started with a guitar mistake — and ended with Dan Nigro having to Melodyne a piano to match an acoustic guitar that was 15 to 20 cents sharp.

Speaking to the Song Exploder podcast, Rodrigo and her co-writer and producer Nigro broke down the making of the song, which Rodrigo has called her favorite track on her latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love.

The song began with a conversation Rodrigo had with a friend while sitting next to him in his Jeep. She told him that she was in love, but also miserable much of the time, and that she wanted to write love songs.

“He’s like, ‘You have to write about how you’re actually feeling. You can’t pretend to write a certain way. You can’t write in the way that you think you’re supposed to feel.’”

A few days later, Rodrigo started writing “The Cure” on her couch with an acoustic guitar. And although she admits, “I’m not great at guitar,” that turned out to be an advantage.

“I was trying to play a chord and I played it wrong. I messed up where my fingers were, but it actually just sounded cool. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ A wonderful thing about being a novice is sometimes you make a happy accident.”

When she brought the song to Nigro, they worked out the guitar part and added a bridge. But when it came time to record it, Nigro didn’t exactly follow standard acoustic-guitar recording procedure.

Rather than set up microphones specifically for the guitar, he used two microphones that were already positioned above his piano.

“These two microphones that are up on my piano were there,” he says. “And instead of micing the guitar properly, I literally just stood on the piano bench and played the guitar into the two piano mics. It was a really rough take, and then [Olivia] recorded her vocals to my guitar.”

That rough guitar recording became the foundation for the vocals — and created a second, rather unusual recording problem. Nigro says he deliberately avoided pitch correction on Rodrigo’s vocals, leaving the two vocal tracks to rub against each other slightly and preserve the song’s uneasy character.

“There’s no Auto-Tune, and there’s no Melodyning or anything,” he says. “They’re just her vocal tracks; they kind of rub a little bit in spaces [and] that makes it feel unsettling. And I feel like as much as we have all the modern tools that we can, like, make a vocal feel perfect, it felt imperfectly perfect.”

But the guitar itself wasn’t quite in tune. Nigro had recorded the part so quickly that he hadn’t checked the tuning, leaving the instrument 15 to 20 cents sharp.

“My guitar is actually about 15 to 20 cents sharp, and so I ended up having to tune every other instrument to the guitar and the vocal because I didn’t want to mess with it,” he says. “When I played the piano, because the piano was actually in tune, I had to Melodyne the piano to be in tune with the guitar.”

So while Melodyne wasn’t used to clean up Rodrigo’s vocals, it was used to make the properly tuned piano conform to the accidentally sharp guitar.

That imperfection became part of the character of “The Cure,” a song Rodrigo describes as “very tense.” Nigro deliberately kept building that tension into the second verse, withholding the drums when listeners might expect them to arrive.

“I think everyone thinks when they hear it for the first time that the drums are about to come in, but they don’t,” he says.

When the drums and strings finally arrive, Rodrigo says the payoff feels earned — the same philosophy that shaped the song’s guitar recording in the first place: rather than polish away every imperfection, they kept the elements that made the track feel human and unsettled.

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter has played on hundreds of recordings as a member of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, as well as in his long career as a session musician. He has two essential pieces of advice for guitarists, which he shared during a conversation about performance with co-hosts Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden.

The men were appearing on an episode of the podcast Really? no, Really?. Titled “Guitars & Guided Missiles: Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s Extraordinary Career,” the episode offers an examination of both Baxter’s history and his unique approach to the guitar and problem solving.

“I only give two lessons,” Baxter tells Alexander. “One is use a metronome. ’Cause if you can't groove, you're not gonna get any work.”

But it’s lesson number two that takes the conversation in a different direction. Baxter — who has riffed on the hidden charms of modern electric guitars — introduces the concept by pointing to Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

“If you ever watch Oscar Peterson play, he's playing, but you can hear him going [scats]. Basically, he's singing. And I always tell anybody who wants to learn to play the guitar to sit down and sing while you play, because eventually you'll be able to connect singing the melodies in your head to your fingers.

“And that's how you get what the psychologists call 'flow,' where you remove the conscious piece. That's what most people do when they're improvising — they’re actually translating the voice in their heads to their fingers.”

Alexander agrees, offering a powerful illustration of Baxter’s point from his own viewing history.

“I remember watching a great documentary years ago about Isaac Stern, the violinist, in China. There was a section where he was teaching protégés — I mean, really gifted young violinists — and he was doing a master class.

“And this young woman got up and she played, you know, 16 bars of a piece, and it sounded great. And he went, ‘Yeah, put the instrument down. Sing it. Sing what you just played.’ And she sang it. And he said, ‘Now, pick up the instrument and sing it as you play it.’ And it transformed her playing. And I thought that was remarkable.”

Baxter explains that singing while playing is transformational because it forces a musician to shape their phrasing, adding nuance, interest, and expression to the performance.

“The melodies usually are pretty close, but the phrasing is, I would say, 60 percent of why people enjoy what you play,” Baxter says. “It’s how you play it, not necessarily what you're playing.”

September 25 is Dolly Parton Day, a fitting date for celebrating the life and music of the late country icon because it can be written as 9/25 — a numerical nod to her signature song, “9 to 5.”

Guitarists marveled for years at Parton’s ability to fret a guitar while wearing her famously long acrylic nails. But those glamorous extensions — part of her signature look — did more than make her guitar playing a little more challenging. They also helped her write one of her biggest hits.

Parton died August 25 at age 80, leaving behind a seven-decade career as a singer, songwriter, actress and philanthropist. Among her many achievements, she wrote thousands of songs and earned 11 Grammy Awards, while her Imagination Library distributed more than 300 million books to children around the world.

But “9 to 5” remains one of Parton’s most instantly recognizable songs. Written for the 1980 comedy of the same name, it became her first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, earned her two Grammys in 1982 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

And the story of how she wrote it is wonderfully Dolly Parton.

The movie starred Parton alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three office workers who plot to get even with their sexist, egotistical boss. Fonda had championed Parton for the role, and Parton agreed to appear on the condition that she would have a chance to write the theme song.

The song came to her while she was on the set, with her guitar back in her trailer. And, fittingly for a movie about office workers, Parton found an unlikely substitute for a typewriter: her fingernails.

“I was bored always in between takes because they have so much time between setups with lighting,” she explained on The Graham Norton Show. “And you just sit around, and what are you going to do?”

Part of her deal with Fonda was that she would get to write the theme song. But without her guitar at hand, she began experimenting with the sound of her acrylic nails.

“I would take my nails, and because it was acrylic nails it makes like a percussive sound,” Parton explained. “It sounds like a typewriter, too.”

She began clacking her nails together to create a rhythm while jotting down words and ideas inspired by what she was seeing around the set.

“So I just started to write little words and things that I would see, and things I would think that would fit with that day-to-day nine-to-five job. Then I’d go back at night to my hotel room and put those things down,” she said.

The idea stuck. And the sound of those nails eventually became part of the finished recording.

Parton even gave her manicure an official credit on 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, the album on which the song appeared.

“I have a credit on the back of the album that says, ‘Nails by Dolly!’”

That little detail is one of those perfect Dolly Parton stories: her trademark look wasn’t simply decoration. She found a way to make it part of the music.

And those nails had long presented another musical challenge for Parton. How, exactly, did she manage to fret an acoustic guitar while wearing them?

Her solution was to work around them. Parton explained that she often used open tunings and barre chords, allowing her to play without having to curl her fretting fingers as much. She also favored the three-quarter-sized acoustic guitars she had played since her youth.

There were limits, though.

“If I’m really serious about it, I just have to saw ’em down!” she said.

Much of Parton’s distinctive guitar style comes from her rhythmic right hand. Her playing combines the Maybelle Carter-style “thumb and flick” approach with the alternating bass technique associated with players such as Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Her thumb picks out bass notes while her first finger flicks down across the strings to sound the corresponding chord.

You can hear and see that approach in action when Parton performs the title track from her 1973 album, My Tennessee Mountain Home, all while sporting her trademark nails. Her picking-hand nails even tap against the guitar’s body, adding another percussive element to the performance.

It’s a fitting reminder of something that came through in so much of Parton’s music: she could turn just about anything into an instrument — even her fingernails.

Country music legend Dolly Parton was never a stranger to collaboration. While songwriting sessions with Linda Ronstadt and Kenny Rogers are classic examples of more predictable team-ups, she was always happy to go a little off-piste, too, as her 2025 collaboration with Mötley Crüe attests.

However, it was Irish rockers U2 who got the honor of recording Parton’s last-ever song with her, and Bono says her passing has now made it too painful to listen to.

The Irish band have sold an estimated 175 million records during their career. They’ll be looking to give that figure a shot in the arm when they release Carnaval de Luz, their first album in over a decade, this November. But following Parton’s passing at 80 last month, one song from the new batch is getting more attention than most.

“When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song,” Bono tells Rolling Stone of “Torn,” a song that Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid also helped write.

“And you can hear that,” he adds. “I can’t even listen to it now.”

The track will close the band’s first full-length record of new music since Songs of Experience in 2014. Mind you, the band has already released two EPs — Days of Ash and Easter Lily — this year. They’re dead center in a purple patch right now.

Like many U2 songs before it, the original idea for their duet drew influence from Irish folk music. Parton wasn’t overly fond of the suggested sketch, with Bono saying she quipped, “That’s a little too Irish for me,” when it was first presented to her. In classic Parton fashion, the tireless songstress had a backup plan in her back pocket.

“She said, ‘I got this song. It’s called ‘Torn’; do you wanna see where you can take it somewhere else, maybe?’” he recalls.

Details about the song are still closely guarded at this point, but it has been revealed that Daniel Lanois, who has worked with U2 before as well as the likes of Neil Young, Peter Gabriel and Willie Nelson, plays pedal steel on the track. It’s a hire that ensures the signature Parton flavor comes from more than just her belted vocals.

An official press release from the band, meanwhile, describes “Torn” as “a tender country song detailing broken family ties, that holds wider resonances.”

Not only is it another unlikely collaboration from an artist who remained unpredictable and vivacious until the very end, it feels like a dream for Bono that it even happened.

“It’s very moving to have had these intimacies with such a figure,” he says. “The fact that they’re not there now, in any way you can call back, other than through her songs, is very sobering.”

The news comes as Parton’s estate deals with an increasingly complicated aftermath of her death. On September 23, a Tennessee judge granted a temporary restraining order against her nephew Bryan Seaver and his security company, following allegations from Parton’s estate that he had made threatening statements toward employees, attorneys and business partners. Seaver, who served as Parton’s head of security and announced her death last month, has denied making threats and called the restraining order a “publicity stunt.”

Parton was laid to rest at a private Nashville ceremony at the end of August, and was the subject of a teary tribute at the Emmys just two weeks later.

Her career would begin with just one little guitar, and would go on to span a staggering eight decades. During that time, she released 49 studio albums, with her last, Rockstar, showing another side to the singer once more.

It was an album that Steve Albini had wanted to produce before his passing, but it was U2 who got the honor of one last studio trip with the Queen of Country.

Lonnie Mack’s beloved 1958 Gibson Flying V is heading to auction, along with the 1962 Magnatone Custom 440 combo and strap he used throughout his career. The Flying V — number 7 off Gibson’s production line — has a starting bid of $300,000 and is expected to rise when it goes under the hammer at Heritage Auctions.

For guitar players, though, the significance of the instrument goes well beyond its rarity. Mack never quite became a household name, but serious players knew his power and influence. Through his mix of blues, country and soul, he left an indelible impression on a young Stevie Ray Vaughan — who would eventually help bring his hero’s career back from the brink.

When Vaughan discovered Jimi Hendrix’s music via a lucky dumpster find, his life was irrevocably changed. He never had the chance to meet Hendrix, but when another pillar of his musical inspiration needed a helping hand, Vaughan was able to be his hero.

“Lonnie was a big influence on me,” the bluesman said in Guitar Player’s April 1985 issue, speaking during a break in a recording session at Austin’s Cedar Creek Studio. Mack’s career, playing and comeback via Strike Like Lightning, which he co-produced with Vaughan, were key topics of conversation.

“A lot of people don’t realize how big an influence he is on today’s guitar players in general, especially when it comes to phrasing,” Vaughan said. “That first album of his, The Wham! Of That Memphis Man, is the first record I ever bought. Actually, my brother Jimmie first turned me on to Lonnie, but I beat him to the punch getting the album to the house.”

After the success of his debut album, Mack struggled to properly follow it up, with subsequent records suffering from poor promotion. Compounding matters, as the British Invasion took hold in the States — the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan debut came the year after Wham! was released — his opportunities and prominence began to wane.

During his bleakest spell on the fringes of the music business, Mack was reportedly selling Bibles out of the back of his car. He was later hired to play bass on the Doors’ 1970 album Morrison Hotel, where he can be heard on “Roadhouse Blues” and “Maggie M’Gill.”

It was the better part of a decade later that Mack and SRV crossed paths. The meeting proved fortuitous for both men.

“Stevie impressed the hell out of me,” Mack said in that same interview. “He wasn’t right for the South band [Mack’s group], which was country-rock, but he was definitely a great player.”

“I was playin’ the Rome Inn in Austin, and we had just hit the opening chords of ‘Wham!’ when this big guy walked in,” Vaughan recalled. Little did he know he was playing Mack’s biggest hit in front of the man himself.

“He looked just like a great big bear,” Vaughan added. “As soon as I looked close at his face, I realized who he was, and naturally he was blown away to hear us doing his song. We talked for a long time that night, and he wanted to produce us. So it’s kind of ironic the way things turned out.”

Indeed, plans were made, and in 1985, Vaughan and Mack wound up working together on Strike Like Lightning, Mack’s comeback record. Vaughan co-produced the album, helping bring the guitarist back into the spotlight.

Mack had essentially one guitar throughout his career, and he didn’t need anything else. It was a red 1958 Gibson Flying V, number 7 off Gibson’s production line. A quick look at it reveals that he was more than happy to modify the guitar, with a metal bar running across the split in the V to accommodate a Bigsby vibrato. The guitar was also sent to Gibson for its distinctive refinish in 1963, the same year his debut LP was released.

Notably, the guitar has more than Mack’s own history attached to it. On Strike Like Lightning, it was plugged into some of SRV’s most distinctive tonal weapons.

First, it ran through the guitarist’s fabled Ibanez Tube Screamer, with the signal then feeding into a mic’d Fender Vibroverb, another piece of Vaughan’s arsenal.

Their album together had plenty of poetry to it. The Wham of That Memphis Man was the first record SRV ever bought, and together, they reworked its instrumental title track, renaming it “Double Whammy” for obvious reasons.

A year after its release, Mack was asked by Guitar World how he arranged the song with his biggest fan. His response typified the informal chemistry between the two.

“I’d just say, ‘go!’” he laughed. “I’d say, ‘Okay, you play rhythm, take the second solo,’ like that; we never worked anything out in detail.”

For more SRV, check out our recently republished 1984 Guitar Player interview, taking in everything from Dumbles to strippers and crazy gigs.

American pop-punk band New Found Glory has found a fitting way to pay tribute to their late guitarist, Chad Gilbert — they’re headed to Disney World.

Gilbert was part of the Coral Springs, Florida, band’s founding lineup in 1997 and went on to build a cult following across 11 albums. In recent years, he battled multiple forms of cancer and earlier this month tragically passed away at age 45.

There’s been an outpouring of love for the guitarist from across the music scene, and now his surviving bandmates have found a fitting way to honor his memory by going ahead with a series of shows at Epcot at the Disney World resort in their home state.

The shows were arranged before Gilbert’s passing, but they’ve now taken on a different meaning.

“We want to thank everyone for the overwhelming amount of love and tribute posts for Chad these past few days,” the band says in an official statement via Instagram. “Seeing how deeply he touched so many lives means everything to us, and we know he would be so proud to see it.”

The band also announced that it was pulling out of its upcoming appearance at Aftershock Festival to give its members time to grieve. Though taking place before the festival, the Epcot shows will be the band’s first since Gilbert’s death, and they will go ahead as planned. In doing so, the band will unite two of Gilbert’s biggest passions.

“Anyone who knew Chad knew that he was a massive Disney fan,” the post continues. “Our shows at Epcot were dates he was so excited for and he was actively planning to be on stage with us there. He had already worked on the setlists with us and was practicing as much as possible to be ready.

“Because of how much he wanted to play these shows, taking the stage at Epcot feels like the right way to honor him, and what he would want us to do. Our plan from the beginning with him was to announce our Epcot sets ahead of time, so we feel it’s only appropriate to share them with you now as we prepare to play in his memory.”

Given his illness, Gilbert — whose main electric guitars were Les Pauls and Telecasters — had been unable to play many shows with the band in recent years. Real Friends guitarist David Knox has been filling in for him at recent shows, but Gilbert was able to return to the stage for a show in Nashville on June 8, performing two songs from a motorized scooter as his daughter watched on. He underwent brain surgery in March after struggling to control his left hand.

At Epcot, the band will play three shows each night at America Gardens Theatre in the American Adventure pavilion, at 5:30 p.m., 6:45 p.m. and 8 p.m. The shows will take place September 28 and 29 as part of the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival.

“Every note we play and every word you sing at Epcot is for Chad,” the band concludes. “Thank you all for wrapping us in so much love, understanding, and support as we come together to honor his legacy.”

Meanwhile, Blink-182 bassist and Fender signature artist Mark Hoppus has paid an emotional tribute to the guitarist, who touched the lives of many.

“Chad was the best friend to every person he met,” he writes. “The most positive and creative force in any room he walked into. These past years he fought his sickness with the soul of a joyous, courageous warrior. With dignity, love, and gratitude. He never complained once, only kept saying how lucky he was. For everything. Today we lost a good one, and the world won’t be the same.”

Gilbert is survived by his wife and daughter, as well as his mother, Jackie, and brother, Brian.

Macklemore is turning the controversy surrounding his departure from Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour into a new run of shows centered on his support for Palestinians.

The rapper announced the Free Palestine Tour Thursday, with initial dates set for Dublin, Paris and London. Additional artists and U.S. dates will be announced soon, he said, with all proceeds from the tour set to benefit organizations supporting Palestinians. The Dublin date is scheduled for October 26, with the Paris and London dates to follow.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s Loop Tour following comments he made during a September 4 performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore told the crowd that one reason he wanted to join the tour was to be able to say “Free Palestine” from stadium stages, and he performed his 2024 protest song “Hind’s Hall.”

Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the remainder of the U.S. leg of the tour. Sheeran has said the decision was made by the tour’s promoter, Messina Touring Group, after venues indicated they would not host the shows if Macklemore remained on the bill.

Several of Sheeran’s other supporting acts — including Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and Beoga — subsequently withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Sheeran also incurred the ire of former Pink Floyd bass guitarist Roger Waters, a longtime supporter of Palestinian causes, who called him "a little prick" in a video about Macklemore’s removal from the Loop tour.

Sheeran has continued the Loop Tour, performing largely on his own after the supporting acts departed.

At his September 19 concert in Philadelphia, Sheeran addressed the controversy from the stage. He said he had made “mistakes” and apologized to fans, while also describing the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic and unjustifiable.” Sheeran said he wanted his shows to be about “unity and humanity, not politics,” but acknowledged that the controversy had placed him in the middle of a debate over freedom of speech and the conflict.

Macklemore, meanwhile, said the experience had convinced him that artists should use their platforms to speak out even when doing so carries consequences.

“What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage,” he wrote in announcing the new tour. “When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.”

He said he spent the past week reaching out to other artists who have publicly supported Palestinians and began discussing a new tour. Macklemore acknowledged that the project has come together quickly, with artists, schedules and other details still being finalized.

“But this is a moment of momentum, and there is work to be done,” he wrote. “So we’re going on tour.”

The first announced dates are in Dublin, Paris and London, with artist announcements and U.S. dates to follow. Macklemore is directing fans to his website to sign up for updates and first access to tickets. The presale is scheduled to begin Monday, September 28, at 10 a.m. local time, with the general on-sale beginning Wednesday, September 30, at 10 a.m.

The controversy surrounding Nirvana’s final album, 1993’s In Utero, has been well documented. The band had deliberately set out to make a rawer, less polished follow-up to Nevermind, enlisting Steve Albini to record the album in just 10 days. But reports that executives at their label, DGC, were unhappy with the finished record’s abrasive sound and commercial potential led to a contentious post-production process.

Nirvana ultimately stood by most of Albini’s work, but they did bring in Scott Litt to remix “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies,” both of which would become singles. While Kurt Cobain said he felt the vocals weren’t prominent enough in Albini’s original mixes, bass guitarist Krist Novoselic has now revealed that he had a rather different objection to “Heart-Shaped Box” — one he had raised with Cobain and Albini while the album was being recorded.

The trio — Kurt Cobain on guitar and vocals, Krist Novoselic on bass and Dave Grohl on drums — had decided to go back to basics ahead of their session with Albini. They wanted the album released warts and all, despite concerns that its roughness would make it an unsuccessful follow-up to Nevermind.

But by the time they decided to remix All Apologies and Heart-Shaped Box, as Novoselic told Mojo, the latter song had been nagging at the bassist for a while.

“That was the thing with Steve. It felt like once the record was done it was completely done,” he said. “That’s when the record label kinda stepped in and said, ‘Hey!’ We had a confrontation about the situation.”

He continued: “But you know why we had to remix Heart-Shaped Box? You should hear the original version of that song — the guitar solo has this effect on it. It just sabotages the whole song. Steve and Kurt were colluding!

“I would go to Kurt, ‘Why are you sabotaging this beautiful song by putting this hideous abortion in the centre of it?’ He’d be like, ‘Well, I think it sounds cool.’”

He added that he couldn’t clearly remember the reasons Cobain and Albini offered for having tracked it that way. “Some statement against commercial radio or something — the popular mainstream aesthetic… I dunno!”

When Litt was hired to remix the two tracks, Novoselic reflected: “Maybe I should have spoke up at the time [of recording].”

But he countered his own position: “I think it’s a great-sounding record. It’s a highly artistic record. I don’t know who else could have produced it except Albini.

“It’s my favorite Nirvana record, and I’ll tell you why. There was a lot of stuff going on with the band; externally and internally, there was a lot of pressures. But when we walked through that door we left all that stuff outside the door. We just played music, we worked together really well, we were laughing, we were concentrating, we were open.

“And that really shows on the record. We didn’t mess around. Nobody got bombed, everybody was focused and clear-headed. I’m really proud of it, it’s a beautiful record.”

He went on: “Sometimes the lyrics on In Utero are really creepy. I listen to ’em now and it’s like, ‘Why didn’t I hear that back then?’”

Black Sabbath’s first manager said it was important that their 1969 demo tapes be released so fans could hear the development of Tony Iommi as a world-changing guitarist.

The tracks were laid down in Birmingham during the brief period when the band called themselves Earth, with a sound that was still rooted in blues and jazz. They’d started out as the Polka Tulk Blues Band in 1968 before shortening the name to Polka Tulk, then becoming Earth. They took on their best-known name in August 1969.

Jim Simpson looked after their affairs in those early days and was instrumental in making the recordings, which he wanted to release in 2025 as Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes. Those plans were stalled after Sharon Osbourne stepped in, and the masters have since been handed over to the band.

In an interview earlier this year (via Blabbermouth), Simpson explained what he thought had gone wrong.

“The sleeve notes, which I wrote, talked about those great days when Birmingham established itself as the U.K. home of rock and roll. And it exalted some of the names that were coming through and the people who made us famous musically.

“It ended up by saying, ‘At the end of the decade came along one band who would not only change the face of music in the U.K., but create their own style and go on to world domination.’ I didn’t mention Black Sabbath, electric guitarist Tony Iommi, bass guitarist Geezer Butler, singer Ozzy Osbourne and drummer Bill Ward. It irked somebody.”

No release plans have been revealed, although Iommi said in July 2026 that they’d appear “at some point.” Simpson said: “Right at the beginning I was told that the band didn't want it to happen.” He went on to argue that, regardless of the musicians’ concerns, it was important for the music to be heard.

“They were a blues band when I met them,” he emphasised. “And the album’s nine tracks. It starts off with four blues tracks [and] a couple of jazz tracks, because of Tony Iommi's love of gypsy jazz. The two jazz tracks are both called Song For Jim. One featured Tony on guitar, the other featured Tony on flute. We’d already recorded one with guitar, so we recorded it again with flute. And he did a good job.

“They all did a good job. But after the first few tracks, the remaining four tracks get towards, but never quite reach, what you know of as Black Sabbath. It slowly got heavier and heavier. It’s a historical document. Any real Black Sabbath fans will really want to hear this.”

Earlier this year, Iommi — who joined fellow flautist Ian Anderson in Jethro Tull for a few weeks in 1969 before returning to Sabbath to apply what he’d learned — said he’d enjoyed listening to the Earth recordings. “It’s weird when you hear stuff from so long ago; all these things crop up that you forgot about,” he told Rolling Stone. “I sat listening to them all, and it was good because there’s some jazzy stuff and bluesy stuff we done on them where we just used to jam. On a lot of the jams, it was all guitar, and I forgot about half of that. I can’t play that now.”

Joe Satriani recalled two twists of fate that turned the title track of his 1989 album Flying in a Blue Dream into one of his favorite pieces of all time. In a recent interview with Guitar.com he said he’d been working on another track, titled “Big Bad Moon,’ but realized it wasn’t working at that point. That’s when another thought occurred to him.

“I had a memory of when I was a kid, having these flying dreams as I was trying to go to sleep,” he said. “It just filled me with a kind of musical inspiration… I suddenly picked up this acoustic guitar and I heard these chords. I tuned the guitar to an open F for some reason — maybe because I kept thinking a low C was the note I was hearing in my head — and I started playing these chords that sounded right to me.”

Once he’d mapped out the piece, he told himself: “That’s really interesting. You’ve never done that before.” He added: “This was all happening minute by minute. I got so excited that I completely forgot about ‘Big Bad Moon’ and just focused on this. I had my Tascam four-track cassette recorder — a great, fun little deck — and I was busy recording bits of it as I was writing.”

He was still wondering about the music’s direction as he listened back.

“The funniest thing came to my mind: Frank Sinatra,” he said. “Very often, Frank would start a song and tell you a story in a colloquial, American spoken way of singing. By the end of his melody, not only would the register move up and up, but he’d finally say the word that is the chorus at the very end.

“I thought, ‘That’s my model. That’s what I have to do here, because I’m telling a story, but it’s about flying.’ As I get to the height of the story, I need to be high up in the sky flying around. I started to think, ‘Just pace it the way that Frank Sinatra would have paced it. Go slowly, go way behind the beat, just go late, late, late, and then move your way up.’”

When it came to recording the full track, fate intervened once again, this time in the form of a radio broadcast that introduces the music. Satriani said he’d been encountering constant interference issues at the Coast Recorders studio in San Francisco because the room wasn’t set up for high-gain guitars at high volume.

“We were sitting there laughing, like, ‘How are we going to record this part if it’s so noisy?’ Every time I turned the volume knob from two to three, I’d get a different radio station. At one point, we heard this kid’s voice coming through, talking about something… it sounded like an old 1950s Art Linkletter radio show or TV show from when we were kids.”

Producer John Cuniberti decided to try recording the voice onto the leader tape ahead of Blue Dream. Satch — who recently listed the “small realities” that every player needs to know — remembered:

“As soon as the kid says, ‘And sometimes afterwards they like each other, and sometimes they don’t,’ the leader ended, the magnetic tape hit the heads, and the guitar chords came pounding in. We were like, ‘Damn!’ The timing was just too good to be true for a song written about being a kid having flying dreams.”

Elliott Randall’s electric-guitar solo on Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years” is one of those performances that sounds almost impossible to have happened spontaneously. But that’s essentially how it came together: Randall had no solo written, no elaborate rig and no particular plan beyond responding to the track in front of him.

The result became one of the most celebrated guitar solos in rock. Jimmy Page has reportedly called it his favorite solo of all time, while readers of our sister publication, Guitar World, selected it as the 40th greatest guitar solo ever in a poll several years ago.

Written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, “Reelin’ in the Years” appeared on Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. Fagen and Becker knew they had a great song, but they were struggling to find the right guitar solo to complete it. So they called on Randall, whom they knew from their days playing in the backing band for Jay and the Americans and who had also played on several of the duo’s pre–Steely Dan demos.

“They were having trouble finding the right ‘flavor’ solo for ‘Reelin,’ and asked me to give it a go,” Randall told Guitar World several years ago. Presumably, Dan’s guitarists Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Denny Dias and Becker himself had given the solo a try without success.

“Most of the song was already complete,” Randall adds, “so I had the good fortune of having a very clear picture of what the solo was laying on top of. They played it for me without much dialog about what I should play.

“It just wasn’t necessary because we did it in one take and nothing was written.”

As Randall explained in a 2007 interview with Guitar Player, the performance heard on the record was, more precisely, his first recorded take. He had done an earlier run-through that several people in the studio felt was even better, but the tape machine hadn’t been armed.

“I never plan a solo in advance,” Randall said. “If I did, it wouldn’t be improvisation, which to me is one of the most exciting things about being a soloist. What you hear on the Steely Dan record is the first recorded take of my response to the track.”

The experience had a lasting effect on Steely Dan’s recording process. “From then on, Katz [Steely Dan’s producer] never let a run-through go by without ensuring that it was being recorded,” Randall recalled.

Randall’s approach was remarkably straightforward. He recorded the solo on his ’63 Fender Stratocaster, which featured a PAF humbucker in the neck position, plugged directly into an Ampeg SVT amp and miked with a single AKG 414.

“The SVT wouldn’t have been my first choice for an amp, or even my fifth choice,” Randall said. “But it was the only amp in the studio that night. My Strat has been my number one axe since 1965.”

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter played the harmony parts, while Randall handled the entire lead performance — intro, answers, main solo and ending — as one continuous take.

“The whole solo just came to me, and I feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to play it,” Randall said.

That spontaneous quality is central to Randall’s view of studio playing. As a longtime producer and session musician, he says his job is to help make the best possible recording while responding to what the artist and producer want from him.

“My job as a studio musician is to facilitate the making of the best possible recording,” he said. “As I’ve also been a producer since the ’60s, I have specific ideas about how to do that, but if I’m not the producer of a session, it behooves me to make my clients happy.

“And if they are asking for ‘classic Randall,’ I have to determine what their concept of that is. Of course, I do love when someone wants me to be ‘collaboratively creative.’”

There is even more Randall on the four-channel quadraphonic mix of “Reelin’ in the Years,” which contains additional lead fills that aren’t heard in the more familiar two-channel stereo version.

Beyond his legendary work with Steely Dan, Randall has performed and recorded with artists ranging from the Doobie Brothers to Asia and James Galway. He has also worked as a producer, teacher, clinician and technological consultant to major musical-instrument manufacturers.

But for many guitarists, it’s those few minutes on “Reelin’ in the Years” — improvised in the studio and captured on tape before anyone had quite decided what the solo should be — that remain his signature.

Queen’s first-ever live performance was organized by drummer Roger Taylor’s mother to raise money for charity. The young musician, however, felt the band still had a long way to go as they stepped offstage together for the first time. Surprisingly, he says Freddie Mercury was the weak link.

Winifred Taylor had arranged for the band to play a concert for the British Red Cross. It was a group that Mercury, then known as Freddie Bulsara, had assembled from the ashes of Smile. The show took place in Truro, Cornwall, in June 1970, and was originally intended to be a Smile performance. Queen would take the mantle instead. Bass player John Deacon wouldn’t join until the following year, so the bass spot was filled by Taylor’s friend Mike Grose. Brian May rounded out the trio with his homemade Red Special electric guitar.

May and Mercury, as history remembers, became a formidable songwriting partnership. There were occasional arguments over guitar solos, songs written in the bath, and songs that possess a strange kind of magic. Yet for Taylor, who has just released his latest solo album, Violence Insane In a Beautiful World, there were few signs of the majestic history that lay ahead of them that day.

“I think we were paid £50, which was an enormous amount in those days,” he tells the BBC. “We had just started Queen then, and Freddie hadn’t really developed his voice, his vocal capacities, to the full.

“He sounded quite alarming some of the time,” he recalls. “He sounded a little bit like a strangled sheep at times, with a very fast falsetto. But of course he kind of invented himself out of it all.”

Mercury’s strongest assets were slow to reveal themselves.

“We didn’t realize at the time what a great musician he was,” Taylor admits. “A great piano player. A fantastic songwriter. We didn’t know what a gem we had at first.”

That gem, of course, was still rough around the edges at that first show in Truro City Hall.

Another key aspect of the band’s trademark sound took shape in the local area. Roughly 10 miles northwest of Truro, the band found remarkable natural reverb in the caves at Chapel Porth beach, St. Agnes. There, they would refine their vocal harmonies.

“I think we must have been in caves because it sounds bigger,” Taylor says. “The sound rattles everywhere.”

Despite the bumpy first show, the band’s potential soon became much clearer, with their self-titled album arriving three years later. It peaked at number 24 in the U.K. charts, despite May’s dissatisfaction with its production.

Speaking to Guitar Player about the album’s troubled and involuntarily rushed recording in 2021, May said they didn’t have the chance to flex their muscles until its follow-up. The record was still an important first step, though — the moment when Queen began putting paint on the proverbial canvas.

Queen’s success wasn’t forged after one humble charity gig. Mercury would go on to blossom into one of rock’s most distinguished and cherished talents, though May says there was at least one occasion when he left the group speechless. Not all of Mercury’s ideas were solid gold.

It’s been 35 years since Mercury’s all-too-soon passing in 1991, at just 45. His legacy shows no signs of waning. Now, one of the band’s most infamous and controversial concerts is set for a 40th-anniversary theatrical release, bringing a monumental moment in rock history to the big screen in 4K.

“There will never be an event quite like that again,” May said of that show. The same could be said of Mercury — even if Taylor thought his first gig was less than perfect.

A fight over Dolly Parton’s entertainment empire has spilled into public view, with her longtime manager accusing her nephew and former security chief of intimidation, threats and an escalating effort to extract money from the late singer’s estate.

Danny Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager and head of She’s Alive, the corporation that oversees her businesses, has filed for a restraining order against Brian Seaver, Parton’s nephew, who was dismissed as head of security for Parton’s properties last week. Seaver was the person who publicly announced Parton’s death on August 25 in a video.

According to The New York Times, Nozell’s filing accuses Seaver of launching “an obscene, deliberate and escalating campaign of threats” in an effort to obtain money from Parton’s estate.

The filing includes a series of text messages that appear to show Seaver making increasingly aggressive threats. In one message sent to at least one partner of Dollywood, someone identified as Seaver wrote that he would become “the hand of retribution for my entire family.”

In another message, dated September 3, Seaver referred to himself as a “killer” and claimed he had sold $27 million worth of arms and ammunition to Haitian police on the day the “9 to 5” singer/songwriter and guitar player died.

Other messages allegedly threatened to “set up a podcast dedicated to ruining Dolly’s brand partnerships and telling the violations these people have done on us.” The message also included a demand for payment.

Parton’s businesses include Dollywood, her SongTeller hotel and Life of Many Colors museum that is set to open this month.

Seaver and his security company had protected Parton and her properties for many years. But according to Nozell’s complaint, the operation was far from a conventional security detail. He describes it as “a heavily armed, paramilitary-style force” with access to military-grade weapons.

Nozell and other Parton business associates reportedly became increasingly alarmed as Seaver made demands in the period surrounding Parton’s death. Some have left, while others have hired their own security teams, according to the filing.

Seaver has defended his conduct and his work protecting Parton and her family in comments to TMZ.

“We remain unshakably resolved to fulfill her final directive to protect her family, and we refuse to be intimidated by those whose actions we believe are being taken in bad faith and with the intent to profit from the life of someone who willingly gave so much,” he said.

Steve Howe is known for being one of rock’s great virtuosos on both electric and acoustic guitar, but he has another, much more unexpected skill — he plays the washboard.

It goes back to Howe’s childhood in London, when he was growing up during the skiffle boom of the late 1950s that influenced musicians ranging from the Beatles to Pink Floyd. The British skiffle craze drew heavily from American folk, blues and country music, and washboards were a common part of the sound.

Howe was also listening to plenty of American roots music at home. His parents’ record collection included artists such as Tennessee Ernie Ford and Chet Atkins, and Atkins in particular showed Howe how much rhythmic and percussive detail could be pulled from an acoustic instrument.

So while Howe would eventually become famous for his guitar playing, he also picked up a few other instruments along the way. The washboard was one of them — and it eventually landed him an unlikely studio gig with producer Trevor Horn.

Horn was working with former Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren on the 1983 album Duck Rock when he needed someone who could play washboard. As Howe tells it, there weren’t exactly a lot of candidates.

"One of my hidden skills is definitely the washboard,“ he tells Guitar Player. “On my own albums I’ve done quite a lot of washboard. I think it’s terrific. I think it’s a brilliant instrument, totally underrated.

"I have a story; one day the phone rang and it was Trevor Horn, and he said to me, 'I’ve got something going on with a recording here. It’s Malcolm McLaren, and he wants a washboard. Don’t you play washboard?'

“I said, 'Yes, I’m the best in London,' and he says, 'Well, you’re the only one in London. I can’t find anybody who plays it. Come in.' So I went a few days later and played on some track Trevor was producing.

“I quite like that story."

It wasn’t just a one-off for Howe, either. He continued to use the washboard on his own recordings, including his 1993 solo album The Grand Scheme of Things.

These days, Howe is focused on getting back to full strength after undergoing surgery earlier this year. Yes is now scheduled to hit the road in early May next year, with plans to perform its 1971 album Fragile and more in the U.K. before heading to Japan. North American dates are also being planned, with details still to come.

Suzi Quatro believes she deserves a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and after more than half a century of breaking ground for women in rock, she has certainly paid her dues.

When the 22-year-old Quatro released her first single, “Rolling Stone,” in 1972, she was a rock and roll outlier. Propelled by Peter Frampton’s guitar playing, the song may only have been a commercial success in Portugal, but Quatro was doing something far more significant: beating down a door that had long been locked for women rockers.

The bass player and vocalist, full of rock’s trademark attitude, has been recognized as the world’s first “Rock Chick”, inspiring a generation of female-powered acts to follow in her wake. The Runaways and Heart are two vital examples, while Joan Jett has recalled being inspired by Quatro because “she had the guts to get on stage and play” at a time when women were grossly underrepresented in rock.

Nearly 55 years after “Rolling Stone” introduced her to the world, Quatro is still going strong, as defiantly punk and Detroiter as ever. She has enjoyed — and sometimes endured — a chaotic career, one she was happy to regale in a new interview with the Guardian.

And some of her stories demonstrate exactly the kind of professional resolve that has kept her onstage for more than half a century. For Quatro, the golden rule has always been simple: whatever happens, the show must go on.

“We were doing a show once, going down a storm, and I had a section with the drummer,” Quatro, a trained percussionist, remembers. “Then the P.A. blew, and all the audience could hear were drums. We looked at each other and went, ‘Right, let’s go!’

“So, we did a 15-minute drum solo together, because whatever happens onstage, the golden rule is you have to make it work. Everybody thought it was part of the show.”

She has had to improvise through considerably more embarrassing situations, too. Quatro says most of her fan interactions are great, but there are always exceptions.

“A couple of years ago I was coming out to do my final song, and everybody had their hands up for a high-five,” she recalls. “So did a little bit of that, and one girl grabbed my hand, held on to it with a death-grip, and tried to pull me off the stage. I tried to pull back, and my entire jumpsuit ripped, right across my ass.”

Eventually, she broke free and shuffled back toward her onstage monitor, where she — “very professionally!” — finished the song sitting down.

“As soon as the song was over, the monitor guy came and put a towel around my waist, and I walked off,” Quatro adds. “I wish I could find that girl because I would love to give her a piece of my mind. I was really upset.”

The incidents are funny in retrospect, but they also speak to the attitude that has defined Quatro’s career. She has spent decades proving that she belongs onstage, and she has no intention of stopping until she feels she can no longer deliver at her own standard.

Freedom is her latest studio album. It’s her 18th solo album overall, and her first since Face to Face, a collaborative record with KT Tunstall in 2023. As the title suggests, she isn’t ready to have her wings clipped yet.

“When I was 35, a journalist stupidly asked me, ‘When are you going to retire?’” she remembers. “I said, ‘I will retire when I go on stage, turn my back on the audience, shake my ass, and there’s silence.’”

The sentiment hasn’t truly changed some 40 years later, although Quatro has updated the punchline.

“When I got to 65, I said, ‘I will retire when I go onstage, turn my back on the audience, and my ass shakes by itself’,” she laughs. “I’m 76 now, but at 75 I gave my final quote on this subject, and it was serious — I will retire when I go on stage and do not deliver to my standard. When I feel that, I’m done.”

That distinguished, generation-inspiring career has led many fans to call for Quatro’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Quatro herself says it would be a “no-brainer.” Yet she has never even received a nomination, while Oasis and Iron Maiden were among those getting the nod in the British-heavy class of 2026.

Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde are also notable members of Quatro’s fan club, having followed the path she blazed in the 1970s. With more than 55 million albums sold, the case for recognition is one Quatro clearly feels is worth making.

Still, after everything she has endured onstage and off, she isn’t letting the omission stop her.

“It used to bother me, but now I’ve read up on lots of people who aren’t in it, and I’m in good company,” she says. “I just hope they’re not waiting for me to die so they can do it posthumously.”

Johnny Marr has just made headlines after selling nearly 100 guitars from his collection for just shy of $5 million at auction. That’s a lot of cherished instruments to let go of, but it turns out he only feels he — and every player, in fact — needs three specific guitars.

During last week’s Christie’s auction, the former Smiths guitarist saw several of his historic instruments fetch six-figure sums. A whopping £3,649,280, or around $4.87 million, was spent during the auction, with the money going to selected charities.

During a recent interview with one-time Top Gear host Chris Evans for Virgin Radio, Johnny Marr made it clear why he was happy to slim down his collection. He was asked a hypothetical question: If he could only have three guitars in his life, what would he choose? He answered it with ease.

First up is a bona fide classic electric guitar.

“So, you get a Gibson ES-335, ideally from between 1961 and 1963,” he says. “The reason is that they’re versatile, and they have a really rich, dark sound, made famous by Eric Clapton in Cream.”

As he says, one of Clapton’s main Cream workhorses was a 1964 Gibson ES-335 in its usual and iconic Cherry Red finish. As Guitar World reports, conflicting stories exist about how he got the guitar, but the most likely scenario is that he acquired it in 1968, which is why it became such an important instrument for Cream during the London dates of Cream’s farewell tour just weeks later.

It stayed in his collection until 2004, when it was auctioned off for his Crossroads charity. It sold for $847,500. That lineage, in turn, inspired Marr to get his own mid-’60s Cherry Red 335, with a ’63 model heard across his latest solo album, The Age of Everything.

“They just do a thing that other guitars can’t do,” he says.

Next up, Marr picks a guitar even closer to home.

“The other guitar, in all honesty, you get my signature Jag,” he explains. “The reason is because of the way my signature Jag sounds; you don’t have to get a Rickenbacker, and you don’t have to get a Gretsch, a Jazzmaster or a Strat, because, inadvertently, I ended up designing a guitar that does all the things [those three guitars do].”

Marr’s signature Fender Jaguar first arrived in 2012, with key features including a four-position Tele-style pickup selector that replaced the Jag’s high-pass filter and individual pickup on/off switches, allowing players to flit between the bridge position, both pickups in parallel or both in series.

Its bridge saddle is also inspired by Fender Mustang guitars, which have better tuning stability when abusing the whammy bar. It became one of Fender’s best-selling signature guitars.

An updated version arrived last year, and Marr reinvented the Jag all over again. New lipstick pickups and a whole new pickup system were noteworthy changes.

“I would have said you need a Rickenbacker for that jangle, and you need a Strat for that slinky sort of thing, and maybe a Gretsch for that ringing thing,” Marr extends. “Well, because all of those are encompassing sort of my sound, I realized after I designed my Jag, it did all three.”

Last but not least, he unplugs to complete the trio.

“Then I’d get a Martin acoustic guitar, a D-28, because if you’ve got to be able to play the acoustic,” he quips. “It’s a little bit of a clumsy comparison, but if you can’t, it’s like learning to drive an automatic car, then getting into a manual.

“Being able to play acoustic makes you infinitely better on the electric, and vice versa,” he reasons.

For Marr — a player with a hatred for satin necks and Yngwie Malmsteen — those guitars are the holy trinity. Other players may disagree, but it’s a versatile trio whichever way you look at it.

Elsewhere, he’s talked about his strange method to avoid impulse buying guitars, explained how Paul McCartney came to his aid when the Smiths broke up, and what made his songwriting tandem with Morrissey magic.

James Hetfield has named Tony Iommi as the single biggest influence on his rhythm guitar playing and songwriting — and pointed specifically to Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave” as a masterclass in riff construction.

“Tony Iommi is the riff lord, in my mind, and he is the one that has inspired me the most out of any guitar player for my rhythm guitar playing and songwriting,” Hetfield says in the latest episode of James Hetfield’s Riff Life on SiriusXM’s Maximum Metallica.

Discussing “Children of the Grave,” Hetfield breaks down what makes Iommi’s playing so effective, from the song’s central electric guitar riff to the way the guitarist uses chords, percussion and effects to expand its sound.

“Obviously, Tony is the riff lord and everyone starts the song together on the one riff,” he says. “Tony plays off that riff, goes in to hit the big giant chords, which opens the song up. I really love the drum overdub that they did to help with that percussion of the riff and the real cool ghostly guitar sounds at the very, very end.”

Hetfield’s admiration for Iommi is hardly surprising. Metallica took up the mantle of heavy metal’s original architects when they emerged in the 1980s, with Black Sabbath’s influence running throughout the band’s music. Iommi acknowledged that lineage in 2024, saying it was “brilliant to hear about other musicians liking what I’d done, taking the same kind of idea and improving on it, evolving it into their own sound.”

Metallica made that connection especially clear at Black Sabbath’s star-studded “Back to the Beginning” farewell show last year, performing “Johnny Blade” from Sabbath’s 1978 album Never Say Die! — a deeper cut rather than one of the band’s most obvious classics.

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has been equally emphatic about what Black Sabbath’s four original members mean to heavy music. Reflecting on the band’s influence ahead of the farewell show, he said:

“If it wasn’t for those four guys, man, we might still be just kind of like wandering around in the dark. But the fact that they created a genre — not only created it, but then developed it and then turned it into like a few different things over the course of their career — is completely awe inspiring to me and my peers musically.”

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.

New Found Glory guitarist and co-founder Chad Gilbert died Sunday, September 20, at age 45 following a yearslong battle with cancer.

Gilbert’s wife, Lisa Cimorelli, and his New Found Glory bandmates announced his death on social media, saying he died peacefully in his sleep surrounded by family and friends.

“On the morning of September 20th, Chad Everett Gilbert passed away peacefully in his sleep,” they wrote. “He left this world surrounded by friends and family and took his final breaths with his wife and mother by his side, just as he wished.”

“We are devastated and shocked by how quickly he left us, yet so grateful for how peacefully and smoothly he went. The amount of visitors that crowded the hospital lobby at a moment’s notice is a testament to how beloved and cherished Chad was, and always will be,” the statement continued. “He was a legendary musician, but his favorite accomplishment was being a husband and father. His biggest dreams came true.”

Gilbert had been undergoing treatment for metastatic pheochromocytoma, a rare adrenal cancer, since 2021. In February, he underwent emergency brain surgery after experiencing weakness in his left hand and leg and doctors discovered three tumors in his brain. The surgery was successful, but revealed that his cancer had progressed to adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), a different and more aggressive form of adrenal cancer.

Just four months later, Gilbert returned to the stage in his hometown of Nashville. On June 8, he played guitar with New Found Glory during “Hit or Miss” and “My Friends Over You” from a motorized scooter.

“I got to play a show in front of my daughter, something I truly never thought I’d get to do again,” he wrote on Instagram after the performance. He also thanked “all the nurses and doctors, my amazing team that have kept me alive through my battle.”

Gilbert remained open about his determination to keep making music and spending time with his family throughout his treatment. Speaking to People in April, he said, “I got my dream in my family, and to have done so many things creatively.

“I always wanted to play music, and I got that, but my biggest dream was to be married to a beautiful wife that would love me and have a daughter,” he said of his daughter, Lily, who was 5 at the time. “That was my dream, so I accomplished my dream.”

Gilbert co-founded New Found Glory in Florida in 1997 and served as the band’s lead guitarist and songwriter for nearly three decades. The group went on to release more than a dozen albums and become one of the defining bands of the pop-punk era.

He favored Gibson Les Paul electrics for much of his time with the group before switching to Telecasters, whose light weight was easier on his spine.

“Chad’s guitar playing, songwriting, humor, and relentless drive helped shape New Found Glory for nearly three decades,” his bandmates wrote. “Through more than a dozen albums, endless tours around the world, and more accolades than we ever could have imagined, Chad challenged all of us to grow as musicians, performers, and human beings.”

“While we are devastated to lose him, we are so grateful for the incredible life he lived, the memories we shared, and the brotherhood we had. His influence will always be part of New Found Glory and his spirit will be felt on every stage we stand on, with every note we play,” they continued. “Rest in peace, Chad. We love you forever ❤️.”

Gilbert is survived by his wife and daughter, as well as his mother, Jackie, and brother, Brian.

“Back in the early 1980s, there were no other girls out there that could play like I could play,” Lita Ford says. “And I had to prove it was me playing those songs, because nobody could accept it.”

These days, it’s a well-established fact that Ford knows her way around an electric guitar. From her groundbreaking work in the 1970s with all-female hard rockers the Runaways to her string of shredding, glam-tinged melodic metal efforts in the ’80s and early 1990s, Ford has remained a highly visible figure in the rock-guitar world for more than 40 years.

And in recent years she has also been celebrated as a major influence on a new generation of guitar-playing front women, in particular Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, who credits Ford with “kicking the door down” for waves of female six-string slingers.

To make that happen, however, Ford occasionally had to do some actual kicking. As she explains, you may underestimate her skills as a guitarist, but you’ll do so at your own peril.

“I remember one time around ’81, there was a guy in the front row at a show,” Ford recounts. “He was right up against the stage, and he had an unopened can of beer. While I was playing, he shook that beer. I was watching him do it, but he didn’t know I could see him. I was acting like I didn’t see him.

“I knew he was gonna spray me down with his beer, so I waited for him to get the can up, and as he was about to pop the little tab, I walked over and kicked him in the wrist as hard as I could. I know I broke his wrist, because I used to wear these great big clodhopper platform shoes onstage!”

Ford lets out a laugh. “But it was like, Dude, you’re gonna spray me with that? I don’t think so. If someone spits at me, I spit back.”

As Ford tells it, her indoctrination into rock and roll came very early in life. Born in England, she moved with her family to Long Beach, California, at age four. Before she was even a teenager, she says, she was already taken with the heaviest sounds of the era.

“I asked my mother for a guitar,” she recalls. “And she bought me this Sears acoustic model. I ended up giving it away to my girlfriend, and I got another guitar that was a step up from Sears — it was, I don’t know, maybe a Bloomingdale’s model or something. I was playing heavy metal on this acoustic guitar. It was all Black Sabbath and Deep Purple riffs, but it just didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t have the balls I was looking for.”

After a cousin chaperoned Ford to a 1971 Black Sabbath concert at the nearby Long Beach Arena, she knew exactly what she needed. “I saw Tony Iommi, and I had to have a Gibson SG,” she says. “I just loved the darkness and the low end of the sound. I went to this hospital where my mom worked, and I bullshitted my way in and got a job. I saved up $375 from that job and bought myself a chocolate-colored SG.”

Ford was still playing that SG when, a few years later, she joined the Runaways at the tender age of 16; it’s the guitar that can be heard on the band’s classic, self-titled 1976 debut. At that time, however, she needed to update her amplifier.

“I had been using my father’s reel-to-reel,” Ford says, laughing. “It was this huge thing, and it had an echo on it that sounded like a delay, which was great. It was like, Wow, I’ve got effects and everything! It was bizarre, but it worked. But once I was in the Runaways, I used a Marshall.”

Later in 1976, Ford augmented her Runaways gear with a pair of eye-catching Hamer Standards — one black, one white. These Gibson Explorer–inspired guitars became her main instruments throughout the rest of her tenure with the band and can be heard on the Runaways’ later albums.

Ford says she enjoyed her time in the Runaways, but the group’s explicit punk stance proved somewhat suffocating, considering that she’d grown up on a steady diet of Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, and Jimmy Page.

“I would go home and learn stuff like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ — all the riffs, all the solos,” she says, “because that was the type of stuff I wanted to play in the band. But when I got into rehearsal, we would end up doing, you know, ‘Cherry Bomb.’ It was always that chunky, straight-ahead thing.”

It wasn’t until the Runaways dissolved in 1979 that Ford finally found the space to spread her guitar wings.

“I really took over my own self,” she continues. “I cut my hair and changed my clothes. I came up with my own style, my own look, my own way of playing.”

She also swapped out her guitars. “I got into B.C. Rich,” says Ford, who rediscovered her stolen B.C. Rich Mockingbird through an audition. “They became my home away from home. [B.C. Rich founder] Bernie Rico, Sr. was just fantastic, and I was always over there carving out new ideas and helping to make new stuff.

“They would make anything I asked them to make. By the end of the ’80s, I had a stack of different B.C. Rich guitars, and I would play them all in concert, because I wanted to show them off.”

By the latter part of the decade, Ford was also enjoying the success of a bona fide hit record: 1988’s Lita. Her third solo effort overall, the album spawned two hit singles — the hard-rocking “Kiss Me Deadly” and the ballad “Close My Eyes Forever,” sung as a duet with Ozzy Osbourne — and eventually became her first Platinum-seller.

Ford stuck to her guitar-playing guns, so much so that when she saw hard rock’s popularity declining in the early ’90s, she opted to bow out altogether rather than change her music to suit prevailing trends. “The music scene was changing,” she says. “Grunge was kickin’ in, and I was getting tired. So I said, ‘It’s a good time to disappear.’ What else was I gonna do? Go be a country star?”

Ford spent roughly 15 years away from the music scene before returning. It wasn’t easy to dive back in.

“Not at all,” Ford says. “It wasn’t like riding a bike. I had to relearn how to do it. I hadn’t been playing guitar all those years I was away. I even had to get used to wearing clothes again. Because I was living on a deserted island, all I wore was Billabongs. Then all of a sudden it was, ‘My God, I’ve got on high heels and leather pants!’”

Nevertheless, Ford has been fully back in the creative swing of things ever since. As for the music, it remains true to her heavy metal roots.

“Yeah, absolutely,” she says. “If it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. It never really goes away.”

Nearly 40 years have passed since Johnny Marr walked away from the Smiths. It was 1987 when a communication breakdown between the guitarist and the group’s frontman, singer Morrissey, caused him to leave the group.

But as he tells Britain’s Channel 4 News in a new interview, he still has fond regard for the group and the years when he and Morrissey crafted the group’s catalog of cherished songs.

Marr explains that the Manchester scene in the 1980s was home to Factory Records, which was known for acts like Joy Division and New Order. The Smiths chose to go with a rival label, Rough Trade.

“I was working in a clothes shop when the band was formed, and other Mancunian musicians used to come into the shop, and most of them were on Factory Records,” Marr explains. “So because of the shop, I knew everyone on Factory, and it was the obvious thing to do to sign to Factory. And that became a narrative.”

Factory Records owner Tony Wilson never signed the Smiths, to his great regret. But Marr says that was unlikely to have happened.

“I was never going to sign Factory. Personally I would never let that happen because it was just too obvious, and it wasn’t that kind of music either.”

Factory acts “weren’t guitar bands per se,” Marr says. “They were doing other things with funk and keyboards... different, almost like non-guitar bands. So it was very deliberate that we were going to be a guitar band, and that was my role in it.”

Marr also reveals how he and Morrissey wrote together. Although sometimes their sessions took place separately — Marr writing the music and passing a tape off to Morrissey — he says of the early days of their writing, “We’d get together face to face, and I’d go, ‘I’ve got this.’ And then I’d record it on the tape machine and he’d take the cassette away.”

Later, “when I’d made a few hundred quid,” he purchased a Tascam Portastudio. “I would make these slightly more elaborate demos with a little drum machine and about three or four guitars on top, and then I’d get on my motorbike and ride round because he lived around the corner 10 minutes [away], and I’d drop it through his letterbox.”

But Marr’s fondest memories are of the making of the group’s 1986 third album, The Queen Is Dead. He recalls how he and Morrissey would sit just a few feet apart with a Walkman cassette player between them.

“It was amazing,” he says. “It was magic. I’d literally have the guitar and I’d have the cassette machine between my knees and I’d go, ‘I’ve got this one.’ And I’d press record.

“I think when I pressed ‘record’ the two of us breathed in, and then when I finished we then breathed out. That’s what it felt like.

“Any songwriter will tell you it’s the best feeling in the world.”

Marr also reveals that he wrote songs in threes, anticipating how Morrissey, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce would embellish his chords with their contributions.

“It was the greatest,” Marr says. “We’ve got three new Smith songs. I can’t wait to hear what the words are. I can’t wait to hear what the vocals are, what the bass is, what Andy does, and what Mike does.

“Man, it was magic!”

Marr is celebrating the results of his guitar auction, held September 16 at Christie’s. Nearly 100 guitars — electrics and acoustics — from Marr’s collection went under the hammer, raising more than £3.6 million for the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the Autistic Society.

The guitarist spoke about a few of the instruments in his Channel 4 interview, highlighting the 1959/1960 Gibson ES-355 he got when the Smiths signed to Sire Records in the U.S. (and which sold at the auction for £204,800).

“We were about to do our record deal with Sire Records in America and the head of Sire Records was a really famous guy called Seymour Stein, and he’d been around since the ’60s. I was getting these stories out of him about the Rolling Stones, and he happened to say that he got Brian Jones a couple of guitars in the ’60s. So I saw my opportunity there, and I said to him, ‘Well, look, Seymour, if you get me a guitar, we’ll sign.’

“True to his word. We trudged across in the snow to 48th Street, New York.”

Marr found what he wanted at We Buy Guitars.

“I looked through the window and I saw that hanging up on the wall. And then I darted back to the hotel that we stayed in, and I started playing it. And the very first thing I played was ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.’ And I always say that guitar definitely had that song in it. I mean, I know it was. It might seem a little cosmic, but I know that certain instruments have music in them.”

Ed Sheeran apologized to fans at his Philadelphia concert Saturday night, acknowledging that he had made “mistakes” in his response to the controversy that has engulfed his tour and speaking publicly for the first time about his views on the war in Gaza.

“I’ve had to take and make difficult decisions, and I am making mistakes, and I am so, so sorry,” the acoustic guitarist told the crowd at Lincoln Financial Field, according to multiple reports.

The singer, who has traditionally avoided political commentary, said he could no longer remain silent about the humanitarian crisis.

“I’ve tried in my career to not be a political commentator of any kind because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics,” he said. “But this is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore.”

Sheeran condemned the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack while expressing strong criticism of the devastation in Gaza.

“What happened in Israel and at the Nova Music Festival on October 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain,” he said. “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians’ lives, children’s lives. And the systemic injustice we’re seeing unfold in the West Bank, it cannot be overlooked.”

He also addressed the broader free-speech dispute that has left him performing without any supporting acts.

“This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people that have opposing views, and everyone here can stand beside people that they don’t agree with on everything, but they can all agree on singing these songs,” Sheeran said.

The Philadelphia show was Sheeran’s first since his U.S. tour erupted into controversy over the removal of Macklemore, who had said “Free Palestine” from the stage during a September performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Sheeran subsequently said the decision to remove Macklemore was made by the tour’s promoter after venues indicated they would not allow the rapper to perform.

Messina Touring Group said venues on the remaining U.S. dates had told the promoter they would not allow concerts to proceed with Macklemore on the lineup, potentially forcing the cancellation of the tour.

The decision prompted the other supporting acts to withdraw in solidarity. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham and Sheeran’s touring band Beoga all announced that they would no longer participate. Finneas wrote that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed” and said, “I stand with Palestine and its people.”

The controversy also prompted Sheeran to speak out about the role of venues in determining what performers can say onstage. Before Saturday’s concert, he said he was “deeply worried” about venues requiring artists to have their content approved in advance.

“This happens in so many places that I perform around the world,” he said, “but it should never happen in the free world.”

Sheeran had faced criticism for initially declining to take a public position on the conflict, including from former Pink Floyd bass guitarist Roger Waters, who criticized him on social media and called him “a little prick.” The controversy also created an unintentionally awkward twist for Guitar Center, which had launched a contest in August offering undiscovered musicians the chance to open for Sheeran on the December 11 date of his Loop Tour in Mexico City.

In Philadelphia, Sheeran said he still wanted his concerts to provide a place where people with opposing views could come together.

“My concerts have always been a safe space for everyone, and that matters hugely to me,” he said.

Yes guitarist Steve Howe is happy to entertain inquiries about his health — especially after postponing the group’s tour plans during the spring to undergo “an essential operation that requires recovery time.”

But he also doesn’t have a lot to say about it.

“I don’t want to dwell on it too much; if I start talking I’ll go somewhere I don’t want to go,” he tells us via Zoom from his home in the English countryside. “I had this major thing and it was pretty difficult, and it’s gonna take some time to get me back to normal.

“But I’m keeping up my playing and my momentum. It’s been three months now since I had the operation, so I’m making progress, slowly.

“So we rescheduled everything we had this year for next year and hopefully everything will be hunky dory and we’ll be back around and try and do all the things we were going to do this year.”

Yes will, in fact, hit the road early next May to play its 1971 album Fragile and more, first in the U.K. and then in Japan, with dates to be announced. North America is also in the band’s sights, with details still being determined, too.

Howe has had plenty to consider during his downtime, meanwhile. Yes did release Aurora — its 24th studio album and third in less than five years, and third consecutive album produced by Howe — during June. Weighing in at nearly an hour, including bonus tracks, it leans even further into the hallmarks of Yes’ progressive sound, with one epic in the four-part, 13:44 suite “Countermovement.”

And while, like its immediate predecessors — 2021’s The Quest and 2023’s Mirror to the Sky — Yes made use of file sharing and other technology, there were also more opportunities for band members to get together now that frontman Jon Davison and bassist Billy Sherwood are spending more time in the U.K., where Howe and keyboardist Geoff Downes reside. (Drummer Jay Schellen remains a full-time U.S. resident.)

On top of that, Yes has just come out with a 25th anniversary edition of Magnification, an album that found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame troupe working with an orchestra again for the first time since its second album, Time and a Word, in 1970. It was also the only Yes album recorded as a quartet (no full-time keyboardist, though late drummer Alan White played some piano) and the last Yes album to feature co-founder Jon Anderson before his acrimonious departure in 2004.

So Howe, robust and in good humor, is eager to make up for lost time now, with plenty to review and look forward to in the not too distant future.

It must have been frustrating to have a new album and tours on the runway and have to put the brakes on everything earlier this year.

It’s immensely disappointing; I feel it probably more than anybody else because I’m the subject matter of it. I had ambitious goals that we just had to postpone ’til next year. But we still put Aurora out; it was in the process, so we couldn’t really stop it. Sometimes the world doesn’t wait for you and other times it does, so you have to make judgment calls.

This has been the most productive period for Yes since, really, the ’70s. Are these last three albums of a piece, do you think?

Yeah, yeah. To my mind these are a sort of trilogy, obviously, a set towards continuing that Yes doesn’t exclusively rely on its old material, and there is a creative pulse in the band. The Quest was like a golden opportunity, and then we did Mirror to the Sky and stepped up a bit and got more compelling. And Aurora is the pinnacle of our achievement, to us. But primarily I’m happy we’ve been able to make new music. That’s a beautiful thing. We want it to be in respect of the past music but we don’t want to cheapen it by pastiching some features of our music together. We got it completely with a blank piece of paper and start saying, “What do we got?”

With you producing, of course, this really is your representation of Yes and what it is at this point in time.

It’s been joyful to produce Yes for three albums. I’ve helped to do that all through my career, but never have I had credit — and also the authority to do something I wanted to do. I’ve tried to make it as fun and as pleasant, as nice as possible. This wasn’t a moment for me to become dominant and sort of call all the shots. But like an orchestra, a conductor does have a job to do; although I don’t primarily do conducting I do have a responsibility — I do have a possibility, that’s a better word, of being able to steer this where it has the history kind of wrapped up in it but takes it somewhere new.

Everybody loves a big Yes epic. What’s the story of “Countermovement” on Aurora?

I surprised them with that one. We had two songs floating around, and neither of them had been developed a great deal. One day I thought, This is sort of untidy; maybe I can do a ‘Luminosity’ on it, or a ‘Mirror to the Sky.’ I think this album needs this.

They weren’t in the same keys and they weren’t at the same tempos, but that didn’t put me off them. And then I had two instrumentals that were viable, and I was happy to offer them to Yes. So what I did was kind of transplant those two instrumentals into the two songs and sort of jiggle around with it, a bit like a jigsaw trying to find out how they fitted together.

To be honest it was longer once, and we got some advice that maybe that idea’s gone a bit far, so we brought them back in, trimmed them back so it was back into a conceivable shell.

So that’s what happened, and everybody grew to like it, and I think it does the album a pile of good.

How many times during Yes’s history have you heard the words, “It needs to be shorter?”

[laughs] Well, I suppose, straightaway, “Roundabout” was a bit too long for Atlantic. There’s been easier times and there’s been harder times. And you do have to consider length. I mean, Tales (of Topographic Oceans) was a colossal undertaking.

I don’t mind if somebody says “It’s too long” or “Can you make it longer?” Most probably the answer to both is “no.” But one must never be flippant about advice. It comes to you for a reason. That’s how I used to bounce back from criticism in the ’70s, when people would say, “What do you think about the press not liking your music anymore?” You learn to flow easily within criticism and not be undermined, which is an important ingredient.

There’s an acoustic segment in “Countermovement,” during the “Anytime Soon” section, that seems to make direct reference to “Your Move.” Deliberate?

No. It’s fortunate that whenever I pull that Portuguese guitar out, something happens. The first time everybody heard it was “Your Move,” so it has a constant link to that. But after that came things like “Wonderous Stories” and “Nine Voices” and now part of “Anytime Soon.” I don’t think it’s a total reference, but there are only so many things I can play on that guitar because of the tuning. “Wonderous Stories” was a test; in fact, “Nine Voices” was a test, in a way. But I like bringing that out and having that familiar sound. I also like the newer sounds.

But one of the sounds I like best, of course, the oldest sound I’ve got is my [Gibson ES-]175. That is again all over the soloing of this album, as it’s been throughout the years of me playing other guitars. It’s generally appeared again because it’s my best guitar.

On the other side of the spectrum on Aurora is “All Hands on Deck,” a three-minute jolt of total energy. Were you just in that mood on that day?

I don’t like Yes becoming a pomp sort of band, without any rock and roll. Without rock and roll we’re asleep at the wheel. We’ve got to be a rock band; I guess that’s partly why that song is there, the reason it’s brazen and bravado-ish. I like the rock ’n’ roll element being in Yes, and that’s what that song is.

When it started out, I just had a chorus — [sings] “all hands on deck” — and I thought people might like that, just for a change, instead of a page of endless lyrics. And they didn’t; they said, “Is there just a little bit more?” So I wrote some more and it’s still quite sparse. It’s not a big story, but it is about a sinking ship, which could be a metaphor for just about anything — a sinking band, a sinking planet, a sinking environment, whatever you like.

You bust out the washboard again for “Jambustin’,” one of the bonus tracks.

One of my hidden skills is definitely the washboard. On my own albums I’ve done quite a lot of washboard. I think it’s terrific. I think it’s a brilliant instrument, totally underrated.

I have a story; one day the phone rang and it was [producer] Trevor Horn, and he said to me, “I’ve got something going on with a recording here. It’s Malcolm McLaren, and he wants a washboard. Don’t you play washboard?” I said, “Yes, I’m the best in London,” and he says, “Well, you’re the only one in London. I can’t find anybody who plays it. Come in.” So I went a few days later and played on some track Trevor was producing. I quite like that story.

Is this current burst of creativity continuing? Are you starting on the next one yet?

No, we haven’t, for one big reason: due to my operation we put everything on hold. But there are some ideas that have been floated around a little bit, and as this period of a year goes through, in a few months we might choose to do something, but we don’t tell anybody when we’re doing it. So the answer is [leans into screen and whispers] “no.”

The Magnification reissue is the other major Yes release this year. What kind of perspective do you have on that album 25 years on?

I don’t know whether you remember the old TV series with Phil Silvers in it [The Phil Silvers Show, a.k.a. Sergeant Bilko]? He used to say, “Oh, it’s hell, Sarge.” So that would be my first answer; “Steve, what do you think of Magnification?” “It was hell, Sarge.”

It was really difficult, and it shouldn’t have been because there were only four of us in the band. The only reason it’s passably good is because I put my foot down and said, “Those mixers are just awful.” I couldn’t believe it; the bass, drums and the guitar became a sort of backstory to the orchestra. So I insisted that even though it was against all odds for the schedule to allow us to do it, I was going to listen to the album and make notes.

These are the days of faxes, as well, so you can imagine they’re sitting in the studio and they get the first fax, “at .02 do this, at 10 seconds the guitar needs to be focused. Can you turn it up there?” I went through the album thoroughly and gave them faxes, every song, and said, “It’s got to be like this. You can’t put this out without me liking it.” So, yeah, I went through that, and the only reason I can listen to it is because that sort of detail went into it.

How do you feel about the songs, in hindsight?

Oh, any of its pitfalls are overshadowed, I think, by the adventurousness of what we did there. Some of the songs were pretty adventurous. They did take arrangements to a good level. So I’m fairly happy about that. A couple of the songs shouldn’t have been there, ’cause they weren’t really good. But I think Yes sometimes compensates with a bit of charm in a song; “It’s not a great song, but it’s quite charming,” I might say to myself.

Yes toured with Deep Purple a couple of years ago, and we recently saw them reunite, for a song with one of your contemporaries, Ritchie Blackmore. What did you make of that?

I thought it was great. They’re such a lovely bunch of guys, and their lead guitarist [Simon McBride] is fantastic. To have the balls or, let’s say, the gall on both sides of that endorsement, that Ritchie was prepared to come back and play the song and also they were prepared to open it up so that he could… There you are.

Music tells all sorts of stories in one second. It’s a bit like when Art went back with Paul and you had Simon & Garfunkel again, and what a moment. What a joy. But it doesn’t mean all unions are good, because they’re not; the Union Tour of Yes [1991–’92] was unbelievably difficult, for instance.

You’ll be doing the postponed Fragile tour dates in the U.K. and Japan next year. What else is on the docket?

Something will be happening pretty big for next year with touring in the U.S. but we cannot specify anything about that at the moment. After Japan we won’t be playing the Fragile tour anymore; we’ve got a brilliant idea — I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you it’s absolutely brilliant. [laughs] I’m kidding, but we’ve got an idea and it seems to hang together and it’s a little different. That’s what I think keeps Yes alive, is difference. The same isn’t enjoyable. You don’t want to just add a little thing to it, a twist in the tale. You want it to be different.

After all these years, has your view of what progressive rock is changed?

It starts with the word “freedom” — to do any musical molding, any musical style-referencing. It has to have structure; Chris [Squire] was a big advocate of that. He’d say, “Steve, yeah, that’s a really nice guitar solo, but I hope you appreciate the structure.” So we weren’t the kind of band where everybody improvised. “Five Per Cent for Nothing” might sound like that, but it wasn’t. That meant you worked together to make something that did have improvisation but it also had structure.

And I think there’s the beauty of being able to put in any musical reference, whether it’s washboard [chuckles] or folk or jazz or… Blues was the thing we avoided the most, but there’s still a little bit of it in there. Really what it is is the most marvelous hodgepodge. It has to combine things, ’cause if it doesn’t it’s just a song and it doesn’t resonate. It might be a nice song, but you can’t call it prog ’cause nothing happens to it.

“For me, Martin is the songwriter’s guitar,” says British folk-rock phenom Jake Bugg, knocking out a few cool voicings backstage on one of Martin’s new 00L-16E models. “Maybe it’s the warmth, or the midrange quality, but if you just hold a chord and really listen, it’s like the guitar is trying to tell you where to go.”

That’s as good a description of the magic of a good guitar as you’re likely to hear. And it’s the unspoken philosophy behind Martin’s latest “refresh” of one of their less storied guitar lines, the oft under-the-radar 16 Series. Indeed, Martin launched 11 brand new 16 models — with three new finishes: Cherry Cola, Blue Denim and Cream — on September 15 with much fanfare, cocktails, hot chicken, and buzz aplenty at SoBro’s uber-hip InDo Nashville event space as the kick-off event for the city’s annual AmericanaFest celebrations.

Packed to the gills, the afternoon bash included excellent solo performances by Bugg, Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter Brandy Clark, Canadian country star Tenille Townes, as well as Gunnar and Matthew Nelson and rising American acoustic duet Marfa. Notable attendees sipping bevvies included YouTube guitar instruction powerhouse Marty Schwartz, vintage guitar authority George Gruhn, Martin CEO Thomas Ripsam and roots rock legend Webb Wilder.

Evident among the throng was a small fleet of local pickers adorned with silver clothing and silver head-to-toe makeup. Why the silver, you ask? Well, it’s a nod to the adventurous spirit of the revamped 16 line, and their cool cast of custom colors, the type of thing literally no one wants to see on a D-28 or D-18.

“That’s what so fun about the 16 line for us,” says Martin’s Director of Product Management, Joey Osisek, a.k.a. Joey O. “With the 28 and 18s, we’re very aware of maintaining a certain tradition there—in a way, we’re almost shadow boxing with that legacy, and even those materials and finishes.

“But the 16s never had that consistent identity, so it’s much more open-ended, and we’re able to really have fun with it. I’m telling ya,” Osisek laughs, “we’re going to get weird with it, brother.”

Weird is good! But a little history first. Martin's style 16 dates back to 1961, when the company introduced it as an affordable, understated alternative to its more ornately appointed instruments. It offered mahogany guitars built to style 18 construction standards, but with simpler trim. The 16s briefly resurfaced in the 1980s as a catch-all designation for trade show specials that were not for wider sale, but allowed Martin to experiment with outside-the-box designs.

Soon after, the first D-16s reached general release in mahogany, ash, walnut, and koa, and by the early ’90s, the D-16 was featuring scalloped, forward-shifted bracing, along with tortoise binding and pickguards. In the decade to follow, the 16 Series became Martin’s outlet to explore more “outside” tonewoods, construction methods and body configurations, eventually settling into the acoustic-electric, all-solid-wood niche most players know today.

In a sense, then, the 16 series was the perfect line for a funky refresh, and that was certainly the impression the Nashville launch was intended to convey. In addition to the three new finishes, the lineup comprises 11 new models, and marks a genuine departure in body-shape terms. The range now features three very rarely seen body shapes in the Martin canon, from intimate, responsive 00Ls and warm, punchy sloped-shoulder dreads to powerful Jumbos, a balanced Grand Performance cutaway, and a room-filling Grand Jumbo 12-string.

The new DSS-16E is Martin's first-ever short-scale slope-shoulder Dreadnought, with a 24.9-inch scale, akin to a certain other noted maker’s best-known acoustic. (“Keep in mind,” notes Osisek, “the first dreadnought Martin ever built was a slope-shouldered dread for Gibson, so that’s part of our legacy, too.”) The built-in electronics have shifted, too. The outgoing generation used Martin's in-house E1 preamp, while the new models switch to an L.R. Baggs Element preamp (a sonic upgrade that trades away the E1's built-in tuner).

Where the refresh really announces itself, though, is in its finishes. Bold gloss-top finish options including Blue Denim, Cherry Cola, Cream, Black Smoke and 1935 Burst sit alongside more traditional natural tops with a vintage tint. While the price tag on the 16s is typically less than the Standard series, it’s worth noting that this is decidedly not a “budget line.” Each guitar is still handcrafted in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with all-solid-wood construction.

As the afternoon strummed on, Martin set up a Wheel-of-Fortune-style prize wheel somewhere near the bar (sorry, details get hazy at this point…) and a clutch of lucky winners wobbled off with a small run of Series 16 accessories and lifestyle merchandise, including Blue Denim and Cherry Cola steins, a Cherry Cola ringer T-shirt, a Blue Denim corduroy hat, and a Blue Fade leather strap. (Hey, how come I didn’t walk away with any swag!).

For those of you who missed this one-of-a-kind Martin Sweet 16 party, here are the salient details of each of the new Style 16 models.

00L-16E (1935 Burst, Black Smoke, Blue Denim. $2,499.99 each)

A slope-shoulder 00 body pairs a gloss spruce top with satin solid mahogany back and sides for a warm, woody voice with punchy mids and controlled lows. It runs the short 24.9" scale with scalloped X-bracing, built for fingerstyle players and songwriters who want touch and response from a compact body.

DSS-16E (1935 Burst, Black Smoke, Cherry Cola. $2,499.99 each)

Martin's first-ever short-scale slope-shoulder Dreadnought, also on the 24.9" scale. Solid spruce top over solid mahogany back and sides, ebony fingerboard and bridge, 20 frets, open-gear nickel tuners. A warm, punchy dreadnought voice in a more compact-feeling package.

J-16E (1935 Burst, Cream, Black Smoke. $2,599.99 each)

The Jumbo body in the lineup, aimed at players who want bold volume and deep bass for stage work. The Cream finish is built with a solid spruce top over solid East Indian rosewood back-and-sides—the one rosewood guitar among the three Jumbo finishes—giving it extra low-end depth and shimmer compared to its mahogany siblings.

GPC-16E ($2,599.99)

A Grand Performance cutaway with 000 depth, finished in a more traditional natural top with vintage tint rather than the bold gloss colors. It's pitched as the balanced, comfortable option in the range, a stage-ready cutaway for easy upper-fret access.

Grand J-16E 12-String ($2,599.99)

A Grand Jumbo 12-string, also in natural top with vintage tint, built for lush shimmer, rich overtones, and room-filling sound. The big, chorus-textured option for broad strummed chords or layered accompaniment in a live set.

Duncan Sheik, the singer-songwriter behind the 1996 hit “Barely Breathing” and the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening, has died at 56. He passed away Thursday night, September 17, in a Manhattan hospital from heart failure leading to cardiac arrest, according to The New York Times.

Sheik’s loved ones confirmed his death Friday, saying he was “surrounded by love.”

“The world has lost a singular talent, and deeply influential voice in music and theater,” his family wrote on Instagram. The statement remembered Sheik as a “father, husband, son, brother, and friend,” praising “his sensitivity, wit, intelligence, and depth of spirit he brought to those who knew and loved him.”

The news came a day after Sheik’s family revealed on Instagram that he had been “receiving medical care” and was in “critical but stable condition.” They declined to share further medical details at the time and asked for privacy.

Sheik released his self-titled debut album in 1996, with “Barely Breathing” becoming a major pop hit. Driven by Sheik’s acoustic-guitar playing, the song reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 55 consecutive weeks on the chart. It earned Sheik a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance in 1998.

“It kind of took on a life of its own,” Sheik said of the song in a 2015 interview with Broadcast Music, Inc. He had previously revealed that “Barely Breathing” was inspired by his real-life pursuit of a woman who was involved with another man.

His subsequent albums, including 1998’s Humming, 2001’s Phantom Moon and 2002’s Daylight, did not match the commercial success of his debut. But Sheik was already moving in a different direction, beginning a career as a composer for musical theater in the early 2000s.

That work culminated in Spring Awakening, his collaboration with lyricist and book writer Steven Sater. Based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play, the musical took eight years to develop before reaching Broadway in 2006. Sheik and Sater used a rock score to explore the sexuality, repression and emotional turmoil of its teenage characters.

Spring Awakening became a major Broadway success, winning eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Sheik won Best Orchestrations and shared the award for Best Original Score with Sater. The pair also won a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album.

Sheik continued to write for the stage, including the music and lyrics for American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. The musical premiered in London in 2013 before opening on Broadway in 2016.

At the time of his death, Sheik was preparing for the Off-Broadway premiere of Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, a musical adaptation of the manga by Moyoco Anno for which he wrote the music and lyrics. The production was scheduled to begin performances September 25, with an official opening set for October 15.

Sheik’s family cited both “Barely Breathing” and Spring Awakening among his greatest accomplishments, writing that “Duncan’s artistry touched many and leaves an indelible mark on the cultural landscape.”

They also thanked “his fans, friends, collaborators, and the artistic community” for the outpouring of love, adding that Sheik’s “musical legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.”

Sheik is survived by his mother and siblings, as well as his daughter, Inez, whom he welcomed in 2018 with his wife, Nora Ariffin.

The new documentary about Neil Peart arrives at a particularly significant moment for Rush. More than six years after the drummer’s death, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are back onstage, with German drummer Anika Nilles behind the kit for the band’s Fifty Something tour.

And one of the songs Nilles has had to tackle is “Tom Sawyer” — a Rush classic so closely associated with Peart that she initially wondered whether she wanted to play it at all.

“When we were going to play it for the first time, she just stopped and said, ‘Yikes. I don’t know if I want to play this one,’” Lee recalled in an interview with Planet Rock.

The moment takes on a different resonance now that Nilles has actually performed the song onstage with Rush. The band launched its Fifty Something tour in June, marking Lee and Lifeson’s first extended run together since Rush’s final show in 2015.

The tour also coincides with the arrival of Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple, a new documentary exploring the drummer’s artistry and influence. The film features interviews with Lee and Lifeson, archival footage of Peart and appearances from fellow drummers including Stewart Copeland, Chad Smith, Gavin Harrison and Danny Carey. Nilles is also featured.

Rush’s decision to retire after their 2015 R40 tour was largely driven by Peart. Speaking to Rolling Stone at the time, Lifeson said the drummer — who died of cancer in 2020 — had found it “increasingly difficult” to perform at the level he expected of himself. The anniversary run was intended as a dignified farewell.

Yet Lee and Lifeson eventually decided they weren’t finished with Rush. After Lee presented Lifeson with a now-or-never ultimatum, the pair committed to reviving the band.

They sought out Nilles after a recommendation from Lee’s guitar tech, who had worked with her while she was touring with Jeff Beck. Her background outside the traditional progressive-rock sphere offered a useful degree of separation from Rush’s past, something the duo welcomed.

Lifeson had previously revealed that countless drummers contacted them just “minutes” after Peart’s death. Nilles’ unexpected appointment proved a more thoughtful antidote.

Still, stepping into Rush’s world — and particularly its catalog — came with its own pressures.

“It’s really fun to watch Anika as she starts to know the songs,” Lee said. “It’s one thing to play it for the first time and work out what parts have to be, essentially, Neil Peart’s parts — and what parts she can make her own.

“That has been wonderful to watch, and really exciting for Al and I, because now she doesn’t have to think about it. She’s just grooving out.”

But the learning curve wasn’t always smooth.

“She didn’t know our music very well. She knew a couple of the big songs. And of course, every drummer on Earth knew Neil and his reputation,” Lee continued. “She knew ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and when we were going to play it for the first time, she just stopped and said, ‘Yikes. I don’t know if I want to play this one.’”

Released on Rush’s landmark 1981 album Moving Pictures, “Tom Sawyer” became one of the band’s defining songs and a permanent fixture of their live shows. For the recording, Lee famously swapped his usual Rickenbacker 4001 for a pawn-shop Fender Jazz Bass, while Lifeson later admitted he essentially “winged” the guitar solo — preferring spontaneity to the sterility that can come from endless retakes.

The single reached No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 25 in the U.K., but those numbers barely capture the song’s cultural impact — or the pressure it places on any drummer attempting to play Peart’s parts.

“She was kind of nervous because of the importance of that,” Lee said. “But we talked through it, we worked through it. The fills were not the hardest part for her — she could play those no problem. It’s the feel — sitting in that groove that the song has.

“She’s clued in now. It’s really lovely to see.”

That learning process has since moved from the rehearsal room to the stage. Nilles is now performing alongside Lee and Lifeson on Rush’s Fifty Something tour, with keyboardist Loren Gold handling additional parts and helping free Lee from some of the multitasking he juggled in Rush’s classic lineup.

For now, Lee and Lifeson have framed the tour as a celebration of Rush’s legacy. They have also not ruled out writing new music together.

Lifeson, for his part, has found solace in reflecting on his late bandmate, recently describing the “serene, peaceful” process of writing a tribute song to Peart, an experience that helped him through what he called a deeply “difficult” time.

Now, with Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple revisiting the drummer’s life and influence and Rush back on the road, Nilles is helping Lee and Lifeson keep that music alive. She may have initially looked at “Tom Sawyer” and thought, “Yikes,” but she’s now playing the song with Rush onstage.

Volume was certainly a point of notoriety, and perhaps pride, for Sugar during its four-year run during the early and mid 1990s. The group was “somewhere between oppressively and astonishingly loud,” says bass guitarist David Barbe in the new online mini-documentary Changes: The Story of Sugar.

Is it still the case now that the trio is reunited and touring for the first time since 1995?

“I can't tell,” singer-guitarist Bob Mould tells us. “I think so. It is not as loud at my microphone as it used to be. I'm using half the amps I did in the loud Sugar days.”

Nevertheless, social media comments gave a different perspective following Sugar’s August 15 show at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre.

“There were people reviewing it saying it was the loudest show they'd ever seen at the Paramount,” Mould says. “And there's been a lot of loud shows in there, I'm sure, especially a lot of stuff in the ’90s that was pretty loud.

“So I don't know. We're not trying to kill people with it anymore. I mean, I can't take it either.”

Loud or not, there's no question that Sugar's is a particularly welcome and unexpected return. Launched by Mould in 1992 after the demise of Hüsker Dü and a pair of solo albums, Sugar wasn't around long enough to get tired of. Its two albums — 1992’s Copper Blue and 1994's File Under: Easy Listening — and the brutal 1993 Beaster EP were all well-received, and songs such as “Helpless,” “Your Favorite Thing” and “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” are classics from that era in alt rock.

Mould played Copper Blue in its entirety during a 2012 20th anniversary tour, and last October he, Barbe and drummer Malcolm Travis announced live dates for May in New York and London, which led to a Love You Even Still 2026 World Tour touring through the balance of the year. After three recent sold-out dates in Mould's hometown of Minneapolis, Sugar resumes touring on September 19 at Riot Fest in Chicago, with shows running through October.

Sugar — which reconvened quietly during October of 2024 in Athens, Georgia, where Barbe is director of the University of Georgia’s Music Business Certificate Program — also recorded a trio of new songs (“House of Dead Memories,” “Long Live Love,” “Keep Looping”) in June 2025 for the occasion.

“It's feeling good,” says Mould, 65. “It feels similar — not the same. I mean, times are different. Many years have passed. All of us have a little extra wear and tear — band, audience, et cetera. But it's been really fun.

“It's been a couple of years in the making, but everybody was in a good space personally, there was interest already percolating on the business side, so the timing was good. And now here we are.”

Mould — who considers himself “the worst gear guy in the world” — says he's armed a bit differently this time out.

“It's essentially the same rig,” he says of his current setup. “It's a 4x12 with a Blackstar 100-watt tube head and a Fender Deluxe. It's the same Strats that I was playing — not the exact same blue one, but the same year, make and model. The necks are a little different, a little thinner and easier to play in my old age. So practically the same gear, just a little less firepower.”

His electric guitars are late ’80s American Standard Plus Stratocasters.

“They have the Fender Lace Sensor pickups as opposed to humbuckers,” Mould says. “I bought the first one in '88 when I was up on the farm in northern Minnesota. I stopped at a music store one day and saw it, picked it up and played it. It sounded great unplugged, so I bought it and that became the blue Strat.

“I just kept buying more of those in different colors and different neck thicknesses. I'm using a black '89 Strat Plus now. It's been my main guitar for the last eight, 10 years... 'cause it's easy to play,” he says with a laugh. “The radius of the neck is a little less, so as opposed to the big reach now it's a little shorter reach.

“And, again, my old hands don't work as well as they did 35 years ago. So a lighter touch and less of a grip is what I'm working with, but it still sounds pretty good. There are other guitar players who I've put it in their hands and said, 'Check it out,' and they say, 'What the hell is this?!' It's set up really low, really light. I think when [My Bloody Valentine's] Kevin Shields hit it he was just like, 'Wow!' A couple of my friends are like, 'This is crazy!' It's just real light — sort of lazy.”

On fly-in dates, Mould says he requests Marshall 4x12 slant stacks, preferably with Celestion Seventy 80 speakers. But he notes that “any of the big-throated Celestions are pretty good, and the Blackstar Artisan 100 is really where the sound comes from. That's the key piece of any amp stuff I’m using; there's really no other 100-watt tube amp that sounds quite like a Blackstar. The one I use was modeled after the Marshall Plexis. That's the only amp that gets close to the sound I want.

“And the Fender Deluxes all sound good; the ’65s and ’68s sound a little different, but they always work good.”

Mould calls his pedal array mostly “the same old same old,” with custom-built distortion pedals from Tym Guitars in Brisbane, Australia.

“They're sort of modeled after the MXR Distortion+, which I used forever.”

His board includes a TC Electronic Flashback looper and delay pedal, an Electro-Harmonix Freeze and a Wampler Ego Compressor. “I spent a lot of time finding the pedals that I have, that don't have a ton of levers,” Mould explains. “It's not an elaborate setup, that's for sure.”

Mould is also using a Big Muff Pi in place of his Octavia pedals. He owns several of the latter, including one Shields gave him years ago, and says they “don't leave the house anymore,”

Back in the day, Sugar had enough firepower to hang with Metallica on the European festival circuit. He'd crossed paths with the group during his years with Hüsker Dü, but seeing the Metallica machine in full flight during the early ’90s was illuminating.

“I think that was the tour Metallica had two sets of everything, piggy-backing from one show to the other,” Mould recalls. “They'd show up at a festival while the other stage would move ahead of them. I think they had washers and dryers in their flight cases. It was just sort of like, 'Wow...' It was a level of touring that I'd never really seen before. It was just crazy to me, coming from punk rock.”

Mould says Sugar's focus at the moment is “to get these shows completed” before contemplating what comes next, with Barbe's university responsibilities to be taken into account.

“The goal right now is to get through all of the live work and take a beat and see how life is looking,” says Mould, who released his 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy, last year. “It could be fun to do more performing. It could be fun to do more recording. I don't know how many times that would be possible, or appropriate. I've been chugging along with my stuff and solo work. David and Malcolm have their own things.

“I guess we'll just see where it all lands at the end of the year — that's the easiest answer. There's no push to do anything right now.”

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.”

Sammy Hagar has responded to Alex Van Halen calling him “a complete idiot” — and while he was happy to joke about the insult, he had more serious questions for his former bandmate.

Speaking with SiriusXM’s Eddie Trunk on Thursday, September 17, Hagar argued that Alex continues to dismiss the success of Van Halen during Hagar’s time in the band. He also criticized Alex’s new book project, saying his former bandmate is doing “a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

“Guilty as charged, first of all,” Hagar said with a laugh when Trunk asked about Alex’s comments. “I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet.”

Alex Van Halen made the remark earlier this month when he was asked about Hagar’s 2011 autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, in which the singer related unflattering stories about the Van Halen brothers, including accounts of Eddie Van Halen’s alcoholism. The late guitarist is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric-guitar players of his generation.

“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know,” Alex replied. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

The drummer had already demonstrated his disregard for Hagar by avoiding any mention of his time with Van Halen in his 2024 memoir, Brothers. While promoting the book, he declared that the band’s best years came before Hagar’s arrival in 1985, when the group consisted of the Van Halen brothers, bassist Michael Anthony and original singer David Lee Roth.

“What happened after Dave left is not the same band,” Alex said while promoting Brothers in 2024. “I’m not saying it was better or worse or any of that … but the magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing; when we were willing to try anything.”

Alex — who recently reunited with Roth for a TEDx talk — has since praised Roth as “a poet” and said, “We did our best work with Dave.”

Hagar told Trunk he takes issue with that characterization.

“I want to call Alex out and say, ‘Dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar,’” he said. “You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’” Hagar was referring to the nickname for the group’s years with him as its frontman. “We sold 40-some million records, four number-one albums, and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying, ‘No, that never happened.’ You don’t even want to acknowledge it.”

“That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right, for Eddie, for me, for Mikey, for anybody.

“I’m asking Alex, like, why? Come clean. What’s your problem? Just come out and say it.”

Hagar speculated that Alex is still upset about his book, and possibly Cabo Wabo, the cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, launched by the band in 1990. Hagar bought out his bandmates after the venture encountered legal and financial problems, then reversed its fortunes. He went on to sell his Cabo Wabo brand tequila for $91 million. That success reportedly became a point of contention between Hagar and the band.

“Maybe if I knew what [Alex’s] problem was, I could fix it,” Hagar continued. “But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem. It just never happened.”

Hagar also criticized Alex’s latest book project, Van Halen, which combines a photo collection with an unreleased early Van Halen demo. The limited-edition book from Genesis Publications carries a price tag of $475.

“Alex wants to just keep releasing all this old stuff and these photographs and charging people for old pictures that you could find on the internet,” Hagar said. “You should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen.”

Hagar launches his Van Halen-celebrating Best of All Worlds Tour residency in Las Vegas tonight. Trunk asked him what he would do if Alex showed up. Hagar made it clear he’d welcome the drummer with open arms — and a kiss.

“Alex? Oh, come in. Oh, 100 percent, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips. … I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”

As rock duos go, few have forged a partnership like Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Between May’s mastery of his iconic Red Special guitar and Mercury’s ear for a hit, the pair took Queen to the top of the charts and the rock world.

Usually, May says in a new interview, Mercury’s ideas were inspired. But there was one occasion when the singer’s latest suggestion left his bandmates less than convinced.

“He was very good at coming up with titles,” May tells Planet Rock. “And he would be quite secretive. He’d say, ‘I have this great idea. Do you want to know what it is?’ Generally, the idea would be really good. And we’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, Freddie. Okay, that’s pretty good.’”

But even the most prolific songwriting talents can have an off day.

“This particular day, he said, ‘I’ve got this great idea,’” May recalls. “‘You know Michael Jackson’s album Bad? I had this great idea. Tell me what you think. No one’s ever done this. I think we call our album Good.’

“There was a sort of silence in the room,” the guitarist continues. “[We thought], ‘Well, yeah, maybe,’ but there was this feeling of, ‘Probably no.’”

It was, May concedes, one of the singer’s few duds.

“Most of Freddie’s ideas were excellent.”

The suggestion might have been rejected, but the choice of Bad as a reference was fitting given Queen’s connection to Michael Jackson. Jackson was a huge admirer of the band and, when asked if he was a Queen fan, reportedly replied, “I’m not a Queen fan, I’m a Freddie Mercury fan.” He regularly attended Queen shows at the L.A. Forum, and the two eventually became friends.

By 1983, Mercury and Jackson were collaborating on music, recording three songs together, although only one — “There Must Be More to Life Than This” — would eventually be released.

It wasn’t the only occasion when May and Mercury found themselves on different wavelengths. When it came to one of Queen’s biggest hits, the singer initially resisted the idea of May adding a guitar solo. In that case, though, May ultimately got his way — and Mercury was grateful that he did.

Elsewhere in the interview, May was asked to clarify a key detail about the Red Special. The six-string was famously built by May and his father when the guitarist was a teenager, and it famously incorporated wood from a fireplace.

But exactly whose fireplace was it?

“If we’d have taken our fireplace out, the house would have fallen down,” May jokes. “It was a piece of somebody’s fireplace that my dad had saved. He had a workshop with lots of bits and pieces that he’d saved from all over, thinking it might come in handy. I still have the rest of the fireplace, so I could actually make another neck.”

The Red Special remains central to May’s legacy, and he has recently gifted his old friend Tony Iommi a custom-made left-handed version. Steve Vai, meanwhile, has gone for a more radical tribute and has recalled how difficult the original model was to tame.

For Deep Purple fans, Ritchie Blackmore’s first appearance with the group in 33 years was a huge cause for celebration. Inviting him onstage to play “Smoke on the Water” was a very public demonstration of the friendship that has developed between Blackmore and vocalist Ian Gillan, but the singer has revealed there’s much more to the story.

Last month, Blackmore revealed that his surprise reunion with Deep Purple was his idea, but Gillan has now suggested the appearance had effectively been in the cards for some time.

“I wasn’t really surprised it happened,” he tells Classic Rock. “I’ve been in touch with Ritchie for quite a long time now, and we’re on very good terms. All the nonsense from the past is now water under the bridge.

“We’re getting on great,” he adds. “So as we were in the area, I wasn’t that surprised [to see him], but I was very pleased.”

Blackmore’s history with Deep Purple has been turbulent. He left the band he co-founded for the first time in 1975 after his relationship with Gillan had broken down, then departed for good in November 1993. He subsequently reformed Rainbow before largely turning his attention to Blackmore’s Night.

Blackmore’s ongoing health issues mean he can only perform at venues within driving distance of his Long Island home, making the band’s stop at Northwell at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, an ideal opportunity for the reunion. Gillan accepts that, for fans, seeing the two men together onstage provided a clear sign that any animosity between them has long since dissipated.

“But as far as I’m concerned,” he continues, “the closure was years ago. So I hadn’t even thought about it. But definitely it was a public demonstration of friendship, and good memories.”

Naturally, Classic Rock was eager to press Gillan on the possibility of Blackmore making another appearance alongside Deep Purple in the future. He’s not so sure.

“I don’t know,” he says. “The reason we did it there was because Ritchie only lives around the corner. So, I don’t know, but he’s always welcome.”

The band’s current lead guitarist, Simon McBride, has also come to Blackmore’s defense after some criticized the quality of his performance on the night. McBride was perfectly happy to have his spotlight temporarily stolen and enjoyed standing side by side with the band’s founding guitarist.

Blackmore’s cameo has also delighted his former Rainbow and Deep Purple singer, Joe Lynn Turner. Another of his former bandmates, meanwhile, has claimed he isn’t as much of a tough guy as his reputation suggests.

Guitar Center may have picked an unexpectedly good time to launch a competition for artists who want to open for Ed Sheeran.

The store’s new Open for Legends campaign launched August 19, offering undiscovered musicians the chance to perform before Sheeran on the December 11 date of his Loop Tour in Mexico City. At the time, it was a pretty straightforward proposition: submit an original song and you could win what Guitar Center calls “a life-changing opportunity.”

Now, following the fallout over Macklemore’s departure from Sheeran’s tour, the prize has acquired a little extra comic timing. Sheeran has lost not only Macklemore but all of his remaining support acts, meaning Guitar Center’s competition is suddenly offering a spot in a lineup that has become considerably less crowded.

Submissions for the competition remain open through October 7, so there’s still plenty of time for an aspiring opener to throw their hat — or guitar pick — into the ring.

Of course, Guitar Center had no way of knowing what would happen when the competition launched. Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s current US shows earlier this week after making a pro-Palestine speech calling for peace in Gaza during a September 4 show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

The American hip-hop artist, best known for his 2012 hit “Thrift Shop,” was subsequently dropped from the tour after the Israeli-American Council lobbied for his removal. Sheeran said on September 15 that he was “appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine,” while clarifying that “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision.” The development also prompted Roger Waters to call Sheeran “a little prick” for not standing behind Macklemore.

Sheeran’s Irish folk backing band, Boega, and his remaining support acts have since followed Macklemore out of the tour.

In an Instagram statement posted yesterday (September 16), Boega said it was stepping away following “the silencing of Macklemore.”

“We are a traditional Irish band who never saw ourselves playing in stadiums of that size, and that opportunity is not lost on us,” the statement says. “We have been friends with Ed for over 10 years now and will continue to be. We believe in dialogue as a means of progressing the plight of the Palestinian people.

“As musicians, playing to those crowds every night is the stuff of dreams, but to play in venues that silence anyone advocating for a Free Palestine is simply not an option for us,” they continue. “We were there for Macklemore’s performance and speech. We fully supported the message... Go back and read the transcript if you’re in doubt.”

Boega has a long history with Sheeran, having performed during his 2017 Glastonbury headline set before returning to his side for the Loop Tour.

The other support acts who have now left include Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator FINNEAS, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe. In his own statement, Fender signature artist FINNEAS said that “artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.”

Sheeran is scheduled to play his next show in Philadelphia on September 19. As for the December 11 date in Mexico City, Guitar Center is still looking for the artist who will get the chance to open for him.

And if the current trajectory is anything to go by, that artist may want to start learning a few extra songs.

In brighter news for the store, Guitar Center is also seeking guitarists to test the first prototypes from its in-house guitar brand. Players who take part will have to sign an NDA and leave their phones at the door, as the store wants to keep its “revolutionary” new designs top secret.

Mike Campbell has spent nearly his entire musical life at the center of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. From the band’s formation in the mid-’70s through Petty’s death in 2017, Campbell was Petty’s closest musical collaborator, co-writing songs including “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “You Got Lucky” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” while creating the guitar parts that helped define “American Girl,” “Breakdown” and countless other Heartbreakers classics.

Now, nearly a decade after Petty’s death, Campbell and his surviving original bandmates have returned to the stage together. Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bass guitarist Ron Blair reunited as the Heartbreakers at the 2026 Americana Honors & Awards in Nashville on September 16, performing with Chris Stapleton.

It was the first time the four surviving original members had played together as the Heartbreakers since Petty’s death in 2017. The band performed “American Girl” and “Breakdown,” while later Heartbreakers Steve Ferrone and Scott Thurston joined them for “You Wreck Me.”

The sight of the band back together is a reminder of their strength as a unit. Although Blair quit in 1982, he rejoined 20 years later. Lynch left in 1994, but returned for the group’s 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and remained in touch with his bandmates.

For Campbell, the key to the Heartbreakers was his relationship with Petty and their shared commitment to the music. Even after Petty began releasing solo material, the Heartbreakers remained a going concern.

“The reason why the Heartbreakers didn’t break up was because Tom and I had a brotherhood,” Campbell told Guitar Player in 2025 around the publication of his memoir Heartbreaker, a chronicle of his guitar journey.

“It’s hard to define, but no matter what happened from day one with him, the music came first. Whatever we might have agreed or not agreed, we agreed that the music was more important than anything else. We couldn’t let that fall apart, no matter what.”

Campbell says each member of the band had a distinct role.

“I was a peacemaker. I mean, guys in bands have different roles. Tom was a leader. I was a kind of a peacemaker. Benmont was a genius. Stan was a ball of fire, and Ron was the quiet, solid bass player. I embraced my role, and if there was a conflict that might break the band up, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I’m going to get in there and negotiate to keep it going. And we did.”

Paired with Petty, Campbell brought a distinctive musical sensibility to the Heartbreakers’ songwriting.

“I think I brought a musicality that Tom wasn’t capable of,” Campbell said. “I had guitar techniques and musical influences that I could express to him in his songs, or present to him as my music, that he couldn’t have done on his own.

“In fact, there was one instance when I gave him something that sounded like a Heartbreakers song, and he said, ‘That sounds too much like me. Go do something that I can’t do.’”

Campbell knows his career might have turned out differently had he not met a guitarist and songwriter with Petty’s gifts.

“Lord knows what would’ve happened if Tom and I never met,” he said. “As I wrote the book, I realized how many miracles have happened to me through timing, luck, divine intervention. I started with nothing, and these songs came to me from somewhere. There were chance encounters with my heroes, and of course, there was my relationship with Tom.”

“We had our brotherly friction here and there, but there was a deep love that kept us together through all the rough times.”

It’s a relationship that began with Petty’s fledgling band Mudcrutch. Campbell recalls that when the two first jammed together, Petty essentially told him to join the group.

“Tom was like that. He was undeniably dynamic. He was driven, and he could convince you to go on the road with him. ‘I’m going down this path. Come with me.’ He had that great leadership quality, and I was sitting duck for that kind of thing.”

Campbell also remembered one of the few times he pushed back against Petty, during the making of Damn the Torpedoes, when he asked for a bigger piece of the pie.

“That’s a perfect example of our relationship, me going, ‘Don’t you think dah, dah, dah?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, but I’m Tom Petty.’ I couldn’t really argue with that. I could say, ‘Well, yeah, but I’m Mike Campbell,’ and he would go, ‘Nobody knows who that is.’ So it was checkmate, and even though it stung a little bit, I had to give him credit. Tom would always give it to you straight, and I couldn’t argue with that.”

Among the songs that have come to define Campbell’s contribution to the Heartbreakers is “American Girl.” Campbell says the track didn’t fully come together until he found the guitar riff that would become one of the band’s signature musical statements. He has also discussed the Fender Broadcaster, the electric guitar at the heart of tracks like “American Girl”.

“Well, that was what I did on a lot of songs: I’d try to find a part that could be powerful and help the song as much as the vocal. That’s what I always thought — ‘It’s what George Harrison might do.’ These things, I don’t know… it’s just another miracle. I have an ability to hear that, and with Tom, I think that’s what endeared him to me. I could take his Bo Diddley four chords and turn them into something that was maybe a little better than he would’ve done on his own. If you take a lot of those guitar parts out, like on “Breakdown” and stuff, it’s not the same song.”

Campbell singles out “American Girl” as perhaps the best song the Heartbreakers ever did.

“There’s something about it, yeah.”

The song also carries a poignant connection to Petty. “American Girl” was the final song Campbell and Petty played together, during the Heartbreakers’ final show at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017.

“I don’t ever think of ‘American Girl’ as the last song we ever played together unless somebody brings it up,” Campbell says. “It’s like one of the first songs we ever played together. I don’t have a sad attachment to it — it’s too much of an optimistic burst of joy.”

“But I am glad we played that song together at the Hollywood Bowl, and we played it together for decades. Every time we played it, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. There’s something about it that’s just inspired and poetic and exuberant. It’s the Heartbreakers, that tonality we found that day between the keyboards and the guitar harmonics and the energy and the riffs.”

“That was the sound of our band. That’s what we sounded like when we were at our best. And that’s what we tried to do after that. That’s the sound we worked for.”

Campbell said he doesn’t second-guess Petty’s decision to continue touring in 2017 despite his worsening hip problems. The Heartbreakers’ 40th anniversary tour ended with the Hollywood Bowl shows, and Petty died a week later.

“That was the plan. It was kind of business as usual. I know that Tony, our manager, spoke to him and gave him options like, ‘We can postpone this. You can get your surgery now.’ Tom said, ‘I need to be out there. I want to play with the band, and we’re going to do it. I’ll be okay.’ So I have no second thoughts about it. I don’t beat myself up like that. I miss them — same with Howie — but I did all I could.”

Brad Gillis recalled getting a crash course in Randy Rhoads’ guitar playing as he became the second electric guitarist to replace him in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. The Night Ranger guitarist would take to the stage less than a month after Rhoads’ tragic death in 1982 — but first he’d have to learn the set in as little time as possible.

It helped that Irish guitarist Bernie Tormé had been rushed in to keep Osbourne’s tour on the road.

“I’d be standing at the soundboard for those shows, watching Bernie play,“ Gillis told Metal Mayhem ROC. “Because [otherwise] I sat in my room.”

But Gillis wasn’t simply whiling away his time there. Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne had provided him with the perfect tools for studying Rhoads’ guitar style.

“Sharon and the team got me a little boom box cassette player, and I had two board cassettes — which I still have — with Randy on it, from February of 1982,” Gillis reveals.

“You could hear everything crystal clear because it was recorded from the board straight to cassette,” he adds. “So I would sit in my room all day, every day for four days.”

In order to remain focused, he didn’t attend the band’s soundchecks, but he did go to the shows, which featured a stage set appropriate for the Prince of Darkness.

“I’d stand at the soundboard and look at this castle and bombs going off, and fireworks. And this castle! I’m going, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to be up there!’”

On the fifth day, Gillis told the vocalist that he felt able to take the stage. He did so on April 13, 1982, in Binghamton, New York, after a solid soundcheck beforehand.

“I said I was ready, and went in and did seven songs out of the 18 song set,” Gillis said. “Ozzy didn’t even show up for the soundcheck!”

Gillis — whose primary guitar for the tour was his red 1962 Fender Stratocaster fitted with a Floyd Rose tremolo — remained with the tour to its conclusion on August 8. Roughly four weeks later, Gillis was back on a flight to New York City to record what would become Speak of the Devil, a live double-album featuring Black Sabbath tunes recorded with Ozzy’s current band.

Although Gillis continued with Ozzy for the first few dates of the Speak of the Devil tour starting in December, he left at the end of the month to focus on Night Ranger, which by then had secured a contract and released its debut album. He was replaced by Jake E. Lee, who would remain with Osbourne for the next five years.

“I just want to play hot rock,” Gillis told Guitar Player of his decision to leave. “Whether it has melody or if it's heavy three-chord metal doesn't matter: I just want to play my ass off.”

Former Rainbow drummer Bobby Rondinelli says people should stop focusing on Ritchie Blackmore’s moodier moments. After spending three years in a lineup with Deep Purple’s cofounding electric guitarist, he argues that, while there were angry instances, they were hugely outnumbered by positive experiences.

Rondinelli performed on 1981’s Difficult to Cure, which featured the hit “I Surrender,” as well as on the 1982 follow-up, Straight Between the Eyes, which contained “Stone Cold.” He was dismissed before 1983’s Bent Out of Shape was recorded, but his overall feeling about his time with Blackmore remains positive.

“I got along with him great,” Rondinelli told VIP Rocks. “For years, we hung out together all the time, and it was great until it wasn’t. If it wasn't for Ritchie I probably wouldn’t [be here today]. He gave me my break.”

Describing Blackmore as “one of the best guitar players ever,” he continued: “He put me in the drum seat after Cozy Powell, which brought me to attention. It showed that he really had faith in me.”

He went on to offer two examples of Blackmore’s kindness.

“I remember we were playing the Budokan,” Rondinelli says. “He was used to my drum solo, because I would do a solo every night — but I kind of made a mistake. I made the mistake three times in a row, so now people think it's a part!

“After the show he hugged me and goes, ‘I know you made a mistake, but you made it like it was part of the solo. It was great!’ He was complimentary.

“After we did the San Antonio live show for MTV, he hugged me and goes, ‘Man, I wouldn’t want to be that good every night. It’s too much pressure!’”

Rondinelli, who went on to work with Quiet Riot, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult and others, reflected: “He could be the funniest guy in the world. He’s very smart, he’s very personable — and sometimes he’s not. But when he is, he's very likeable. Everybody just talks about when he’s throwing a mood, but he was a regular guy 98 percent of the time.”

Blackmore recently reunited with his former Deep Purple MkII bandmates for a performance of “Smoke on the Water” at the group’s August 12 show at Jones Beach, near his home on Long Island. The guitarist subsequently told Guitar Player he thought the reunion was an opportunity to heal old wounds, adding, “I think we realized it could be the last time we see each other.’

The concert film documenting Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance and the original Black Sabbath lineup will hit cinemas worldwide October 28, giving fans another chance to experience the historic July 5, 2025 farewell at Birmingham’s Villa Park.

Tickets for Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning go on sale Thursday, September 24, at 10 a.m. ET via the official Back to the Beginning website.

The sold-out concert marked Ozzy’s final live performance, taking place just 17 days before his death. It also reunited Black Sabbath’s original lineup — Ozzy on vocals, Tony Iommi on electric guitar, Geezer Butler on bass and Bill Ward on drums — for the first time in more than two decades.

Ozzy performed a solo set before joining Iommi, Butler and Ward for Black Sabbath’s closing performance. The event also featured appearances from a remarkable collection of artists influenced by the band, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, Gojira, Halestorm and Mastodon.

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine served as the concert’s musical director, while Jason Momoa hosted the event.

“There’s never been anything like that that’s happened in the history of rock and roll,” Morello says in the film. “[Black Sabbath] gets to play their final show basically in the Ground Zero of where they created heavy metal.”

For Iommi, the performance provided a fitting conclusion to Black Sabbath’s story.

“It was a closure for the band and it was a good way to go out, I think,” the guitarist says.

Butler describes the atmosphere somewhat differently, recalling the overwhelming response from the crowd.

“To me it was like pure love,” he says. “It was just a wave of love. It’s the only way I can describe it really. I mean I could feel it as if it is like tangible.”

Ward, meanwhile, says the return to Birmingham felt almost surreal.

“Felt completely at home in a place where I belong,” the drummer says. “It almost felt like I was in a dream.”

The idea for the Back to the Beginning concert came from Sharon Osbourne, who managed Ozzy and oversaw the event. She says the singer had a simple motivation for returning to the stage.

“Back to the Beginning came about because I asked Ozzy what would really make him happy,” Sharon says. “And he said the only thing that would make him happy was if he could perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to say goodbye and thank you.”

The concert sold out within minutes and brought together generations of musicians and fans to celebrate Black Sabbath’s legacy. In addition to the main acts, the event featured all-star appearances from musicians including Ronnie Wood, Steven Tyler, Sammy Hagar, Billy Corgan, Yungblud, Nuno Bettencourt, Vernon Reid, Jake E. Lee, K.K. Downing, Rudy Sarzo, Chad Smith and Travis Barker.

The concert film has been mixed in Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound and is designed specifically for theatrical presentation, allowing audiences to experience both the scale of the Villa Park production and the intimacy of Ozzy’s farewell.

The film will screen worldwide for a limited time beginning October 28. Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. ET Thursday, September 24.

Roger Waters has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour, calling Sheeran a “little prick” for allowing the rapper to be dropped from the lineup over his pro-Palestinian remarks.

Macklemore was removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s U.S. tour after several venues reportedly said they would not host concerts with him on the bill. The dispute began after Macklemore made a speech supporting Palestinians during his September 4 performance at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, telling the audience he wanted people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to know they had not been forgotten and declaring, “Free Palestine.” He also performed his protest song “Hind’s Hall,” which was inspired by pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and named for Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza.

The Israeli-American Council subsequently called for Macklemore to be removed from the tour, accusing him of using the concert as a platform for what it described as a “one-sided political agenda.” The controversy intensified when Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, intervened over Macklemore’s scheduled September 25 and 26 appearances at the Massachusetts venue.

Macklemore said Sheeran told him that Kraft had rallied other stadium owners and that they had effectively given the singer an ultimatum — keep Macklemore on the tour and risk losing their venues. Kraft has confirmed that he pressured Sheeran over Macklemore’s participation at Gillette, citing what he described as the rapper’s recent actions, material shown during his New Jersey performances and a “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery” that he said had been hurtful to the Jewish community. Kraft also said his decision was not intended to deny Palestinians the right to advocate for themselves.

Sheeran has since said that Macklemore’s removal was ultimately the promoter’s decision, not his. The singer said he had spent the week trying to “build bridges” between the parties and find a solution, but that the venues and promoter had made the final call. He also said he was “not complicit” in the decision and described himself as “appalled” by the Israel-Palestine conflict, while maintaining that he does not want his concerts to become political spaces.

The fallout has continued to spread. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga and Lukas Graham — the other remaining support acts on the tour — have all withdrawn in solidarity with Macklemore and in opposition to what they described as the silencing of political expression.

Now Waters, who has been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause for years, has delivered his own verdict on the dispute.

In a video shared on social media, the former Pink Floyd bass guitarist addressed Sheeran directly.

“I just have a little message for [Sheeran],” Waters says. “There are two kinds of people in this world. There’s people who do the right thing — the rapper Macklemore would be one of those people.

“And there’s people — many of them, sadly — little f… excuse me, I nearly used the F-word then… pricks like you who do the wrong thing. Goodbye.”

Waters has previously clashed publicly with other musicians over their positions on Israel and the war in Gaza.

He responded to Disturbed singer David Draiman after Draiman said on Billy Corgan’s podcast that he wanted to “punch” Waters over what he called a “massive betrayal [of] Jews everywhere.”

Waters fired back on X, accusing Israel of carrying out “a genocide” in Gaza and attacking both Draiman and Corgan over their discussion.

“You [Corgan], being the lovely fella you are, gave this little piece of shit a chance to clarify or even modify his position,” Waters wrote. “He did. He is a psychotic racist Nazi pig.”

Waters also claimed that he had been told Draiman writes messages on bombs before they are dropped by the Israeli military on Gaza. Those claims were part of Waters’ response to Draiman and have not been independently established.

The Macklemore controversy now comes as Sheeran’s tour faces an unusual situation: the rapper has been removed from the lineup, Sheeran says the decision was made by the promoter and venues rather than him, and every remaining announced support act has subsequently withdrawn.