Rush's reunion tour has barely begun, and already the band have been forced to postpone multiple shows. It's an unwelcome reminder of another difficult stretch nearly 50 years ago, when Alex Lifeson suffered a finger injury that derailed part of the Hemispheres tour just as Rush were becoming one of rock's biggest live attractions.

After their first show in Fort Worth since returning from an 11-year hiatus was postponed due to travel restrictions, two more shows have been rescheduled after bass guitarist and vocalist Geddy Lee contracted laryngitis and bronchitis.

“This is incredibly disappointing for all of us,” the band said in a statement. “We know many of you have made travel plans and have been counting down the days to these shows. Please know this decision was not made lightly. After more than 50 years of touring, we’ve always believed that if we’re going to step on stage, we owe you the very best performance we can give — and right now, that simply isn’t possible.”

As the statement suggests, Rush have never taken canceling shows lightly. But there was one other memorable occasion when injury forced the band off the road. In 1979, while touring Hemispheres, Lifeson broke the ring finger on his fretting hand, leading to three canceled European dates just before one of the biggest festival appearances of the band’s career.

The opening Paris show was canceled after the venue caught fire shortly before the concert, forcing the band to reroute through Belgium. Worse was still to come.

Lifeson brushed off both the injury and its cause, saying simply, “I was foolish, and I hit it,” as seen in the footage below. But the band’s press manager offered a far more colorful explanation, claiming the guitarist trapped his finger between the bed and the mattress while spending time alone with his wife — a story that has raised eyebrows ever since.

Whatever actually happened, the cancellations gave Lifeson the best chance of recovering in time for Pinkpop, where Rush shared the bill with The Police, Dire Straits, Elvis Costello, Peter Tosh and the Average White Band before a crowd of roughly 50,000.

Remarkably, there was little sign the guitarist was hampered. During a blistering performance of “La Villa Strangiato” — later considered strong enough for release on a live album — Lifeson tore through one of Rush’s most technically demanding pieces. At the start of the performance, however, Lee couldn’t resist pointing to the heavily bandaged hand.

“This finger canceled three shows on this tour,” he tells the crowd.

Lifeson had undergone a procedure to prevent mallet finger, an injury in which damage to the extensor tendon causes the fingertip to droop. Even so, Pinkpop wasn’t finished testing the band.

“One of our roadies jumped over a concrete wall with the firm idea that the ground behind it was at equal height,” Lee later recalled via 2112.net. “He didn’t know that the level was split and fell 30 feet downstairs and broke both his feet. He was immediately carried off to the hospital. We missed him very badly during the show because we had a man short on stage.”

The performance has since become one of the defining live documents of Rush’s classic era, making the circumstances surrounding it all the more remarkable.

Lifeson, meanwhile, is no stranger to playing through adversity. The guitarist has spent the past two decades managing psoriatic arthritis, which causes chronic pain and inflammation. He’s previously said that if fans notice him shaking out his hands during concerts, it’s simply part of managing the condition.

Lee’s illness has temporarily sidelined Rush’s long-awaited return to the road. But compared with the chaos of the Hemispheres tour — fires, broken fingers and canceled shows — it’s another reminder that even one of rock’s most reliable live bands hasn’t always been able to outrun bad luck.

In all the years Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury wrote and performed together, creative friction was part of the process.

But May says they didn’t see eye to eye on one of his most famous and beloved guitar solos — and had he not held firm, it likely wouldn’t have made the final cut.

“Freddie envisioned it very much as a piano song, akin to Elton John, really,” May told Total Guitar of the track “Don’t Stop Me Now,” from 1978’s Jazz.

“[He heard] powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that’s it. I played lots of rhythm guitar on it, and Freddie still said, 'No, no, no, no — it's a piano song!’”

Mercury — whom May later honored with a touching tribute on his first signature guitar — eventually came around, conceding, “‘Well, it does need a solo. I need you to take over the vocal.’”

As May explains, that kind of push-and-pull was typical of their working dynamic.

“It’s the way we thought about things,” he says. “I said, ‘Okay, give me a verse, and let me see what I can do.’

“And again, being in the studio and hearing it evolve, I could sort of hear the solo in my head before I actually picked up the guitar to do it. As very often with me, it’s a kind of little diversion. It’s a countermelody.

“It’s not the actual tune of the verse. But it’s something which goes with it, a sort of counterpoint, and it’s something I could sing. And it was just a question of transferring it to a guitar.”

In hindsight, May feels vindicated — not by theory, but by audience response.

“It’s very simple,” he concludes. “I sometimes feel a bit apologetic about it. But I do notice that when it’s played in the dancehall, it gets a reaction from people in the solo and it steps up the energy quite a bit, even from a song that’s got high energy, so I’m happy with it the way it is.”

That instinctive, vocal-like phrasing is central to May’s sound, which is built on a highly individual rig: his homemade Red Special, a Treble Booster pushing a Vox AC30 — an amp he came to with a little help from Rory Gallagher — and his famously unconventional pick: an old British coin.

Sean Ono Lennon says his fascination with dark, dissonant music can be traced back to two unlikely sources: Disney’s Fantasia and one of his father John Lennon’s heaviest Beatles songs.

Speaking with Rick Beato, Lennon reflected on the musical influences that shaped him, arguing that “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” deserves far more recognition as one of rock’s foundational heavy electric guitar moments before revealing another story behind one of the Beatles’ most sophisticated compositions.

As his work with Primus bass guitarist Les Claypool has shown, Sean Lennon has inherited more than his father’s surname. There’s a psychedelic streak to his music, but it’s the darkness that fascinates him most.

Of his early musical influences, he says, “All of my classical tastes came from the [Disney] film, Fantasia. I was obsessed.

“It might sound a little gauche, but it’s true,” he adds. “It’s actually an incredible selection of pieces. I mean, it’s Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ by Modest Mussorgsky.”

That soundtrack also introduced him to music’s darker side.

“All those notes are so dark and cool, and I think I’m really attracted to dark and dissonant notes,” he continues. “I’ve always had a love of that, and I think it’s actually because of the [Beatles] song ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ as well. That really impacted me as a kid. My dad had written this very dark riff. I really wondered where it came from.”

The John Lennon composition, which closes side one of 1969’s Abbey Road, arrived at a time when rock music was growing noticeably heavier. The Who had become synonymous with sheer volume, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck had laid much of the groundwork for heavy riffing, Blue Cheer had supercharged “Summertime Blues,” and Black Sabbath were about to codify heavy metal. Against that backdrop, Sean Lennon believes his father deserves more credit in the genre’s origin story.

“It was so unprecedented at that time,” he says of the song. “In a way, I think of it as maybe the first really heavy guitar riff. It’s so sophisticated, and it’s so unlike anything he wrote otherwise. It reminds me that ‘The Rain Song’ is unlike any other Led Zeppelin song. There are certain songs that just kind of stick out, like, ‘What was happening when that one was written?’”

Lennon then turned to another Abbey Road standout, offering a glimpse into how one of the Beatles’ most remarkable songs came together.

“‘Because’ is really shockingly complex,” he says. “The famous story is that my mom was playing ‘Moonlight Sonata’ [on piano] and my dad said, ‘Wait, stop. Can you play those chords backward, or maybe write them down for me?’ She did, and that was sort of the basis of ‘Because’—at least according to my mom.”

Beethoven’s sonata, composed in 1801, shares the same melancholy that attracted John Lennon—and later captivated his son.

Speaking to Guitar Player about his songwriting partnership with Claypool, Sean Lennon previously said that a shared love of music’s darker side is a cornerstone of their work. The stark juxtaposition of bizarre comedy and dark surrealism underpins the music of both generations of Lennons.

Meanwhile, McCartney has said he still writes songs as though John Lennon were sitting beside him, imagining how his longtime songwriting partner might respond to each new idea.

By the mid-1960s, the Beatles had left behind their matching suits and clean-cut image in favor of something far more bohemian. Rubber Soul was famously dubbed the band’s “pot album” by John Lennon, while increasingly mind-altering substances helped shape the psychedelic sounds of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It was a period of constant experimentation, both musically and chemically. As Paul McCartney later told Howard Stern, “Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict.”

Stern asked McCartney about one of the best-known stories from the making of Sgt. Pepper: the claim that Lennon was tripping on LSD while recording the album’s fourth track, “Getting Better.”

“It was crazy, because he had a little pillbox,” McCartney recalled. “He’d have his little uppers and his little downers, and he thought he was taking a little upper, and we could get on with the session.

“[Then] he comes over to me and whispers, ‘I took the wrong pill.’

“‘What did you take?’

“‘Acid.’”

A bandmate unexpectedly taking LSD isn’t the ideal recipe for a productive recording session, but McCartney remained remarkably unfazed.

“Okay,” he remembered thinking, “let’s work around that, then.”

The bigger challenge was keeping producer George Martin in the dark.

“At one point, George Martin comes in, who knew nothing about anything,” McCartney said. “He said, ‘John doesn’t look too well.’

“‘No, he’s not feeling a little under the weather,’ because we had to hide it all from George. He was a grown-up.”

Martin’s innocence wouldn’t last forever. George Harrison later revealed that he and the other Beatles once spiked the producer’s tea with LSD during a late-’60s recording session to keep the vibe going, and Martin didn’t learn what had happened until decades later.

On this occasion, though, Martin simply tried to help. Concerned for Lennon’s wellbeing, he took him up to the roof of EMI Studios for some fresh air before leaving him up there alone.

Knowing exactly what was happening, McCartney and Harrison rushed upstairs to retrieve their bandmate before he wandered off the roof's edge and plummeted to the ground.

When Stern asked whether incidents like that were debilitating or simply part of the Beatles’ creative process, McCartney suggested it was a bit of both.

“Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict, and a lot of it was very good,” he said. “So we rolled with the punches. We were pretty good at rolling with the punches; that one was quite a punch to roll with, but we did it, and we finished the track.”

It was an approach that served the Beatles well. Whether it was recording reverse electric guitar parts for “Tomorrow Never Knows” or devising Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) to spare Lennon the chore of double-tracking his vocals, the band consistently turned unexpected situations into innovations. Finishing “Getting Better” despite Lennon’s accidental acid trip was just another example of how they kept the session — and the music — moving forward.

Passion cannot be taught, and neither can a supernatural knack for what you're most passionate about. Blues enthusiast Taj Farrant is a prodigious talent that packs a ton of intensity into every performance, and Guitar Player is thrilled to partner with K.C. Turner Presents to welcome the rising star from the land Down Under to the Hopmonk Novato on the Friday after Independence Day Weekend.

Farrant’s advanced chops, huge online following and energetic performance style have earned him slots with the Experience Hendrix tour and major music festivals from Australia’s Bluesfest to Telluride’s Blues & Brews. He has collaborated with icons like Carlos Santana and Buddy Guy.

Farrant’s first full album, Chapter One, debuted at the top of the iTunes Blues Chart in 2024. Farrant has released two singles in 2026. The first was a singer-songwriter-style collaboration with his sister Jazel Farrant, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who is also a core member of Taj’s touring ensemble.

His latest single is a collaboration with Isaiah Sharkey, who won a Grammy for his work as a core member of D’Angelo’s backing band, the Vanguard. Farrant and Sharkey’s new tune is appropriately called “Texas Jam” as the seven-minute electric guitar showcase features the two trading smoking blues licks back and forth over a 12-bar form and would sound right at home at any backyard barbeque.

That’s exactly the setting for Farrant’s show at the Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, California on Friday, June 10. It’s a part of KC Turner Presents celebrated Cookout Concert Series where GP Presents has formerly teamed up to welcome the North Mississippi Allstars, Anders Osborne, and Bella Rayne.

Farrant’s blend of blues, rock and pop has audiences captivated and ever-curious about the next chapter for the next-gen guitar star. If you’re planning to be in Northern California over the weekend after Independence Day, be sure to head to the North Bay, less than an hour drive from San Francisco, and experience Taj Farrant live on Friday, July 10.

Farrant's popularity is snowballing, so secure your spot in advance, tell a friend, be sure to come to the GP Presents table on site to snag a free set of acoustic guitar strings courtesy of Martin Strings.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Taj Farrant in Novato, California, on Friday, July 10, send an email and put “Farrant” in the subject. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide their own transportation to the Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, California, and have their own accommodations in the area. Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents Taj Farrant plus Percy Howard (singer from Nus)

Friday, June 10

4:00 p.m. doors, 6:00 p.m. show

The Hopmonk Tavern (Outdoor Beer Garden Venue)

Novato, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

Joe Satriani has built his reputation on dazzling technique. But ask him what Sammy Hagar does better than he ever could, and his answer isn’t singing — it’s knowing when not to play.

The pair have spent years playing together, first in Chickenfoot and now in Hagar’s Best of All Worlds Band, celebrating the music of Eddie Van Halen. That close collaboration has given Satriani an appreciation for a side of Hagar’s musicianship that often gets overlooked.

“I’ll play too many notes, but he won’t,” Satriani tells Thinking About Guitar. “I always ask him, ‘Well, what is that?’ And of course, he doesn’t think about it. It’s totally natural to him.

“But he somehow plays the right notes with the right kind of vibrato. And that still fascinates me, as it did when I was a young kid growing up.”

Satriani says Hagar approaches the guitar like a great lead singer rather than a typical lead guitarist.

“I always thought that one of the coolest things about his guitar playing was that he somehow took the knowledge of being a really good lead vocalist and applied it to the way he played guitar,” he says. “He’s kind of a crazy shred guitar player on the one hand. But on the other hand, he’s got this editorial process that I personally recognize as being a lead singer.”

That ability to edit himself, Satriani believes, separates Hagar from many American rock guitarists.

“There aren’t many American guitar players who are well known for restraint,” he says. “I always saw that as something that would come from the U.K. or Ireland. You have these players like Eric Clapton or Brian May who just play the perfect notes. They don’t turn the amp up to eleven.

“I think [Hagar] would take that one step back from the edge of the cliff and make sure that he could pull it off. I hear it over and over again as a thing that really good lead vocalists have. And they apply it to their guitar playing.”

Hagar’s reputation has always been built first on his voice, but he arrived at guitar with a deep appreciation for melody and a $39.95 Silvertone electric guitar, which came with an amp. As per a 2024 Classic Rock interview, he got his education trying to learn every solo Eric Clapton had ever done, because.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2024, he recalled learning every Eric Clapton guitar solo he could find because “I was more into Clapton and Peter Green than, say, someone like Hendrix” — an influence that helps explain the economy and phrasing Satriani so admires today.

The Best of Both Worlds tour has just wrapped its June U.S. dates and heads to Europe for July before returning stateside in August.

Paul Gilbert has spent years adapting to hearing loss. Now, he says it’s changed the way he plays guitar for the better.

The former Racer X and Mr. Big virtuoso has lived with tinnitus and high-frequency hearing loss for more than a decade, but rather than letting it limit him, he’s developed what he calls an “inner melodic generator” — the ability to hear music in his head before he plays it.

“One of the things that hearing loss has helped me develop is what I call my inner melodic generator, and anybody can test out that part of your brain,” Gilbert tells American Musical Supply. “Take something really familiar like your own name, and say it to yourself without making any sound; you can hear it in your head. You know what it sounds like, and you can do that with melodies.”

For Gilbert, that’s become the key to improvisation.

“Having to refine that ability to hear music without sound, when I improvise, I can match that up,” he says. “I can hear the sound in my head, and then, if I can play it accurately, that’s just about the best musical experience I’ve ever had.”

It’s a very different approach from the one that made Gilbert famous.

“When I was a kid,” he says, “I wouldn’t do that as much. I learned the fingering patterns that I needed, and I’d buzz through them; it was a fiery approach. More and more, my guitar has taken on the role of singer, and man, when I get it right, it’s a glorious time to exist.”

Gilbert — whose latest album, WROC, came out February 2026 — first spoke publicly about his tinnitus around 2010 after years of playing his electric guitars through cranked tube amps. The condition left him with persistent ringing in his ears and significant high-frequency hearing loss, creating challenges that still affect him onstage.

“When things get to a certain volume, everything sounds out of tune to me,” he explains. “It’s a mystery, because no one else hears it. I’ve asked people in the audience, and they’re like, ‘No, dude, it sounds great.’ But I’m there suffering, thinking, ‘I think we’re really out.’

“Then of course, I watch the YouTube footage that a fan shot, and it sounds fantastic. So I’m in this world of hallucination.”

The problem is especially noticeable in smaller venues.

“It’s a small room with a low ceiling, so all low-end frequencies load up,” he says. “The thing I did do, which actually helped a lot, was that, because I tend to sing in a lower register, I redid a lot of my chord voicings in the higher register, so my voice isn’t fighting. I’m not singing the same note that I’m playing.

“I tend to be playing higher, jangly chords, and that’s more challenging for my brain because I’m not used to those voicings,” he adds. “I’m used to playing low chunky stuff, or even something like a cowboy C. A lot of my poppier, janglier songs that are on the WROC album have a big cowboy C chord. And boy, those chords, for some reason, are just sour. So if I play it at the eighth fret without the bass note, it seems to clean it up nicely.”

Gilbert’s willingness to rethink something as fundamental as his chord voicings reflects the way he’s approached hearing loss in general. Rather than fighting what his ears can no longer do, he’s learned to rely more heavily on the music he hears internally.

It’s an unlikely evolution for one of rock’s most celebrated shredders — a guitarist whose early career was built on blazing technique, from Racer X to Mr. Big, and who nearly landed an audition with Ozzy Osbourne at just 15 years old.

His hearing may not be what it once was, but Gilbert has discovered that some of his most important musical development has happened after the damage was done.

Robin Trower's performance at Stockholm Concert Hall on February 3, 1975, has become one of the most celebrated live recordings of the decade. Released the following year as Robin Trower Live!, it captured the electric guitarist's power trio at the height of its powers.

But the album almost never happened.

"We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night," Trower tells Premier Guitar with a smile. "We were performing in a proper concert hall, and it sounded fantastic, which inspired us to play in top form.

"It was very refreshing, because most of the time we were playing in these hockey arenas that sounded awful. We weren't even aware that they were recording it."

At the time, Trower was touring behind Bridge of Sighs, the album that established him as one of rock's new guitar heroes on the strength of songs like "Bridge of Sighs" and "Day of the Eagle." Drawing a crowd to Stockholm Concert Hall wasn't difficult, even if the elegant, wood-paneled venue was better known as the home of the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the site of Nobel Prize ceremonies than for hosting walls of Marshall amps.

The crucial detail, however, was invisible to the band. Swedish Radio had recorded the performance without Trower's knowledge.

Only later, after receiving a tape of the broadcast — a common practice for radio stations at the time — did Trower and his band realize they had the makings of a live album.

There was just one problem. James "Jimmy" Dewar's vocal track was unusable because his microphone had picked up too much spill from the rest of the band, particularly the drums. Rather than rebuild the album in the studio — as Kiss would infamously do with much of Alive! the following year — the band kept the repairs to a minimum.

"Jimmy sang it all again," Trower says. "He polished it off in about an hour — just ran through it in real time."

Now, 50 years after the concert and nearly as many since the album's March 1976 release, Robin Trower Live! has been expanded and remixed. The new edition restores the complete 12-song performance in its original running order, replacing the seven-track LP sequence, with a fresh remix by Richard Whittaker.

For Trower, though, there was no hidden ingredient behind the performance.

"There was no magic amp or special guitar," he says. "Almost everything I owned was pretty new. I just went to Manny's, the legendary guitar shop in New York City, bought a 100-watt Super Lead Marshall, and listened to about six or eight Strats acoustically before settling on a black-and-white one with a maple neck.

"If there's any secret to my tone," he adds, "it's that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings. It's all about getting the strings to ring acoustically, and that's what translates into a great electric sound."

Ironically, Trower might never have become synonymous with the Stratocaster had Jethro Tull’s Martin Barre not nudged him toward Fender's iconic model in the first place. Although the Strat became central to his sound, Trower has long resisted comparisons to the player who defined it for a generation: Jimi Hendrix.

• Robin Trower Live! (50th Anniversary Edition) is out now. See Robin Trower for more.

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.

Everyone has a favorite guitar solo — Brian May included.

While the Queen guitarist drew tonal inspiration from Rory Gallagher and has called Ritchie Blackmore an incendiary trailblazer of electric guitar, neither man played what he considers the greatest solo ever recorded. That honor, for May, belongs to Eric Clapton on “Key to Love,” from Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton.

“It’s the hottest, burning, high-passion piece I’ve ever heard in my life — still to this day,” May reveals (via Classic Rock). “I just love it. It totally rips, and I’ll never get over that. That’s one of my great inspirations.”

Clapton was just 20 when he left the Yardbirds to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a move that coincided with what Jeff Beck later described as a streak of jealousy when his former band beat him to a U.S. breakthrough. In hindsight, though, Clapton hardly needed to worry: his brief tenure with the Bluesbreakers produced one of the defining blues-rock records of the era — an album that would go on to inspire future guitar giants, including Eddie Van Halen, who credited Clapton as a primary influence.

Though “Key to Love” runs just over two minutes, its loose, swinging groove builds toward a climactic stretch where Clapton unleashes roughly 30 seconds of unrestrained lead work.

“He burned in that solo!” May gushes. “The whole track revolves around that solo. Every time I put it on, I’m just waiting.

“John Mayall’s great,” he adds, “but you’re waiting for that moment when Eric rips out, and suddenly he’s whacking into those top notes. It’s incredible. Absolutely spine-chilling.”

May and Van Halen later paid tribute to Clapton on May’s 1983 solo EP Star Fleet Project, where the pair went head-to-head on the 13-minute blues workout “Blues Breaker.” Clapton, however, said he felt “almost insulted.”

“I think he hated it,” May said with a laugh in a 2023 interview with Guitar Player. “But he’s entitled. Eric could do anything and he’ll still be our hero. There’s probably lots of things I disagree with Eric about, but that doesn’t change anything. He’s been one of the greatest inspirations of my life, and that’ll never change.”

For May, Clapton’s playing didn’t just set a standard — it raised his own. And despite any critical remarks, the mutual respect between them is clear: they’ve shared the stage on several occasions, a quiet acknowledgment that the admiration runs both ways.

Today is Global Beatles Day.

As Paul McCartney’s longtime guitarist and occasional bass player, Brian Ray has gained unique insights into the former Beatle’s songwriting process. Over his 24 years with McCartney, Ray says he learned just how prolific — and instinctive — the songwriting partnership between McCartney and John Lennon really was.

“I asked Paul if he wrote to a title or a little melody, or a riff or something, and he said, ‘No. It was always lyrics, music, melody and guitars all at once,’” Ray told Guitar Player in 2005.

As a result, Lennon and McCartney worked quickly — and had to. “You have to remember that the Beatles did a record every six months,” said Ray, a veteran electric guitar player known for favoring a 1957 Les Paul Goldtop.

For all their productivity, however, McCartney told Ray there was one occasion when the pair hit a creative roadblock.

“Paul said that in the more than 300 songs he and John wrote, he could only remember one time where they got stuck, and that was when they were writing ‘Drive My Car.’ They thought the title wasn’t working, but they liked the song. So they took a break, had some tea, and changed it.”

What exactly changed during that tea break? Ray wasn’t saying.

“I won’t tell you the lyric they tossed, because that’s Paul’s right to do that. I don’t want to be the guy who tells everybody what ‘Drive My Car’ was originally written as. And, you know, even with the rewrite they still finished the song at the end of the day.”

As some Beatles fans know, the discarded lyric centered on “golden rings.” McCartney had mined similar imagery before with the phrase “diamond rings,” notably in “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “If You’ve Got Trouble,” a Help!-era outtake later released on Anthology 2. Lennon had also referenced them in “I Feel Fine.”

As McCartney explained to Barry Miles in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, “‘Drive My Car’” was “one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session.”

“The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal,” he said.

When McCartney presented the song to Lennon, neither could come up with a satisfactory replacement. “So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became ‘drive my car’ instead of ‘golden rings,’” he recalled.

Which means Ray was faithfully protecting a secret that McCartney himself had revealed years earlier.

The infamous “Clapton is God” graffiti that began appearing on London walls in the mid-’60s helped cement Eric Clapton’s status as Britain’s first guitar hero. Roughly a year earlier, Jeff Beck had taken his place in the Yardbirds, stepping into one of the most scrutinized jobs in British rock.

Comparisons between the two guitarists began almost immediately and never truly disappeared. Although Beck often praised Clapton’s playing, he also believed his predecessor viewed him as a rival, a suspicion that followed both men for decades.

Born on this day in 1944, Beck was revered as one of the instrument’s great innovators. He frequently spoke highly of Clapton, once calling him “the household name for electric guitar.” But he also felt there was an undercurrent of resentment stemming from the success he enjoyed after replacing Clapton in the Yardbirds.

“I know he didn’t like the fact that I took over from him in the Yardbirds and we did great,” Beck told Classic Rock.

“The general buzz of the band was that they thought they were finished when Eric left. At my debut with the Yardbirds at the Marquee, I showed them what was what, and I got a standing ovation. That was the end of that.”

Beck believed Clapton was also irritated that the Yardbirds reached America before he did. While Beck’s band was enjoying chart success and building a following across the Atlantic, Clapton was still grinding it out on the British blues circuit with John Mayall.

Years later, Beck said he received what he considered confirmation that the rivalry was real.

“I remember he invited me to this gig [in 1980] in Guildford, and I thought, Why is he asking me?” Beck recalled to Rolling Stone.

During the drive to the venue, Clapton invited him to join him onstage for a song and to use his electric guitar Blackie, the famous Fender Stratocaster he’d cobbled together. .

“On the way there, he goes, ‘Do you want to play Blackie?’” Beck recalled. “And I said, ‘Uh, I don’t know that song.’ He said, ‘No, it’s my guitar.’ I went, ‘Oh, whoops.’ First calamity of the evening.

“So I said, ‘I didn’t bring a guitar, so I’ll do that.’

“Then about a minute later, he turned around and stood at the car and goes, ‘This is not gonna be one of these blowing-off things, is it?’ I said, ‘Listen, either I play, or I don’t.’ And there was that — what’s the word — uncomfortable rivalry about it.

“I found out later from Pattie, his wife, that there definitely was — especially with the Stevie Wonder stuff. He was not too amused about me doing something successful with Stevie. I think that maybe got under his skin a bit.”

The Stevie Wonder collaboration Beck referenced dated back to the early ’70s, when the two musicians struck up an unlikely creative partnership. Beck played on and co-wrote material for Wonder’s Talking Book album and was present when Wonder came up with the central riff for “Superstition,” a figure Beck later called “the riff of the century.”

There’s little doubt Beck’s success irked Clapton, who was enduring one of the darkest chapters of his life. Derek and the Dominos had collapsed, and his drug addiction was worsening.

Those circumstances only reinforced Beck’s belief that professional jealousy had occasionally colored their relationship. Yet for all the stories of rivalry, competition and perceived resentment, Beck would eventually discover that Clapton’s feelings toward him were more nuanced than he had imagined.

That realization came while watching Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story, the 2018 documentary chronicling his life and career.

In the film, Clapton offered an assessment that caught Beck completely off guard.

“I think he was a hard rock pioneer from day one,” Clapton offered early in the film. “He was doing stuff that didn’t exist, except for him.” Later in the documentary, reflecting on Beck’s invitation to perform with him at his 2007 Ronnie Scott’s residency, Clapton said, “It was honor to get up with him in that venue. It was tremendously touching that he would want me to get up and play with him.”

For a guitarist who had spent years suspecting that Clapton viewed him as a rival, the praise came as a genuine surprise.

“I didn’t know he thought that,” Beck later admitted.

Whatever tensions may have existed between the two guitar legends over the years, hearing Clapton speak so openly and admiringly about his playing revealed a side of their relationship that Beck had never fully appreciated — one rooted not in rivalry but respect.

“The thing about Bob Dylan is you think, Oh, he’s lost his mind!

“But Bob’s very Bob,” Steve Bolton explains. “He just goes through these phases in his life.”

Bolton has first-hand experience with the folk-rock icon. After spending a year playing guitar for the British rock act Atomic Rooster in the early 1970s, Bolton was central to the group’s revival in 2016. But in-between those years, he bumped around the business, performing alongside Pete Townshend on the Who’s 1989 reunion tour and in Paul Young’s band, among various other assignments.

It was his talent as a musician that got him hired to appear alongside Dylan in the 1987 film Hearts of Fire, where Bolton performed as Spyder, the guitarist in his band.

“I received a phone call from the record company telling me they had got me a part in this Bob Dylan movie,” Bolton recalls. The guitarist was apparently treated well for his minor role in the feature. “On set, I even got my own trailer, with ‘Boltz’ written on it,” he notes.

The film was one of many left turns in Dylan’s long career. In the mid 1980s, after enduring a string of poorly received albums, he decided to venture into feature film acting for the third time, having previously starred in Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and his own 1978 movie, Renaldo and Clara.

A 1980s take on the A Star Is Born franchise, Hearts of Fire was directed by Richard Marquand, famous for films like Return of the Jedi and the 1985 thriller The Jagged Edge. In addition to Dylan, it starred actor Rupert Everett and actress Fiona Flanagan, who had a hot minute (as simply Fiona) with her 1985 single “Talk to Me.” The film is also noteworthy for including brief appearances by folk legend Richie Havens (who, unusually for him, plays an electric guitar) and U.K. pub rocker Ian Dury.

But as Bolton explains, the filming proved stressful on Marquand, not least because of Dylan’s idiosyncrasies and unfamiliarity with the process, which only added to the director’s problems.

Bolton met Dylan on set on the first day of shooting. He says the artist was in a temperamental mood and believes he didn’t like that, at six-foot-two, Bolton was noticeably taller than him.

“My first scene with him was in an old warehouse,” Bolton says. “We were rehearsing the scene and Bob came in with his Telecaster. He was going through a weird period at that time, where he wasn’t actually talking to anybody. He must have said something to the director about my height, as I was soon instructed to sit at the back on a flight case and drink a beer.”

He says Dylan seemed unable to follow basic instructions. During a scene that called for the musicians to mime onstage to a backing track, he insisted on playing his Telecaster through an amplifier, much to the displeasure of Marquand and the film crew.

“Bob’s scratching away on the guitar, and as the track came to an end, the drummer does this drum fill and the live mics come on, which is quickly followed by a bit of dialogue,” Bolton explains. “Bob’s line goes, ‘Hey, Nico, not too heavy on the drums, this ain’t World War III.’ But Richard couldn’t make Bob understand that he had to turn his guitar down in order for his line to be heard.

“An hour and a half later, Dylan still hasn’t got it right. They run through the track again and again, and each time when the mics come on, he still doesn’t turn down.

“So they decide to get a guy to lay behind Bob’s amp to turn the volume down. The director yells, ‘Cut!,’ and we get the scene.

“It was very bizarre.”

Although Bolton says his time with Dylan was brief, he finally got to share a moment alone with him while they were waiting around on set.

“We were filming this scene at the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town in London,” Bolton says. “And it’s the most incredibly boring experience, as you’re hanging around waiting, with no one telling you what’s going on until it actually is about to happen. They’ve brought in a rent-a-crowd — all these punks and weirdos — and we’re going to be miming to a really awful reggae track.”

Typical of the film’s problems, the band that was supposed to appear in the scene failed to show up.

“A new hot London band called Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction were supposed to be in this film too,” Bolton explains, “but they ended up being locked up in the slammer after something happened outside a London club.”

Bolton, however, had a copy of the lyrics for the song the band was scheduled to mime to.

As he recalls, “It goes, ‘I’m the high priest of love / I’m shooting babies from the end of my dick / This ain’t science baby / It’s magic.’

“I turned to Bob: ‘They’re the kind of lyrics you should be writing,’ I told him.

“He looks at me, pauses and says, ‘You think so?’

“And I reply, ‘No. I’m just messing with you.’”

Released in the U.K. in October 1987, Hearts of Fire was a box office failure. The film received limited release in the U.S., where it fared no better. Dylan disowned it not long afterward.

As for the director, Marquand passed away from a stroke a month before it opened.

“The film ended up killing him,” Bolton claims.

Bolton, for his part, has no regrets about the experience. He says the one thing he took from his up-close-and-personal time with Dylan was his immense understanding of music.

“His knowledge of music is quite unbelievable,” he says. “He may be just a strummer, but he knows exactly what he is doing.”

Billy Gibbons was just 19 when Jimi Hendrix famously called him America’s best young guitar player. It was a compliment that carried enormous weight. But by then, Gibbons had already earned Hendrix’s respect.

The pair first met in 1968, when Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top band, the Moving Sidewalks, landed the opening slot on a U.S. tour by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Looking back, Gibbons still isn’t sure how the young Texas psychedelic-blues outfit got the gig.

“It’s a great mystery,” he told AXS TV.

What wasn’t a mystery was Hendrix’s impact.

“We had only recently discovered Jimi Hendrix, and we quickly came to learn that here was a guy who was doing things with the Fender Stratocaster that was turning it inside out in ways the inventors never even imagined,” Gibbons recalled with a laugh.

Offstage, Hendrix was reserved. Onstage, he was transformative.

“He was a bit shy offstage, but once the lights went on, he came a-glowing,” Gibbons said. “And man, he would set about doing things with that guitar that were just otherworldly.”

For the Moving Sidewalks, every night on tour became a masterclass. The relationship took an unexpected turn when the band realized it didn’t have enough original material to fill its 40-minute opening set. Their solution was audacious: play two Hendrix songs — “Purple Haze” and “Foxey Lady” — in front of Hendrix himself.

“Dare we play this in front of Hendrix?” Gibbons remembered asking his bandmates.

The gamble paid off.

“As we wrapped it up, I remembered passing by, being spun around, and this guy grabbed me by the shoulders, and smiling, he said, ‘Man, I wanna meet you. You got a lot of nerve. I like that.’”

By the end of the tour, the musicians were spending evenings together in Hendrix’s hotel room, listening to records and talking guitars. During one listening session, Hendrix reportedly asked Gibbons how Jeff Beck produced some of the sounds heard on the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth.

Gibbons’ answer put Hendrix’s influence into perspective.

“Jimi, it would probably surprise you to know that Jeff Beck is probably listening to your record, trying to figure out what you’re doing at the same time!”

The lessons Gibbons absorbed during that tour stayed with him long after Hendrix’s death in 1970. In fact, one of Hendrix’s guitars helped shape a key ZZ Top recording nearly a decade later.

“When we recorded that song, I was playing the Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix gave me when we were traveling together,” Gibbons told Music Radar of ZZ Top’s “A Fool for Your Stockings.” “For some reason, the guitar wasn’t working through the amp. We wound up plugging the guitar straight into the board, and that’s why it’s such a clean tone on that track.”

Hendrix’s influence extended beyond gear. The Experience’s three-piece format helped inspire ZZ Top’s own lineup, though Gibbons later admitted it took years for the band to find an identity beyond the blues tradition Hendrix had so radically expanded.

Even today, the Strat Hendrix gave him remains part of Gibbons’ arsenal. Speaking to Premiere Collectibles in 2020, he revealed that the guitar “still gets a good whoopin’ in the studio every once in a while.”

Most fans know Joe Satriani as the guitarist David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen approached for the post–Eddie Van Halen tribute tour that never got off the ground.

But according to Satriani, Roth first tried to recruit him decades earlier — for a band that would play Van Halen songs while Eddie was still alive and active.

Speaking to Thinking About Guitar, Satriani recalled receiving a call from Roth in the mid-’90s.

“In the mid ’90s, David Lee Roth called me; he wanted to put together a band to do Van Halen songs,” the guitarist says. “He went on and on about how we were the only guys who could really do it right, and he had all these crazy plans.”

It’s unclear exactly when the conversation took place. Roth briefly reunited with Van Halen in 1996 before the band moved on with Gary Cherone, whose stint as frontman led to the release of Van Halen III in 1998.

Whatever the timing, Satriani says he immediately questioned the premise.

“I said, ‘But Dave, Ed’s still alive! He’s still making amazing records. He’s still on tour. What guitar player would ever try to imitate him while he’s still working? It makes no sense.’

“‘Of course, I said, ‘Look, I’m not the guy.’”

For Satriani, stepping into Eddie Van Halen’s role while the guitarist was still recording and performing was unthinkable. As a lifelong admirer of Eddie’s electric guitar work, he had no interest in trying to recreate it while its creator was still actively pushing the instrument forward.

The idea resurfaced years later under very different circumstances.

Following Eddie Van Halen’s death on October 6, 2020, Satriani was contacted by Roth and Alex Van Halen about participating in a tribute project honoring the late guitarist. Reports later emerged that former Metallica bass guitarist Jason Newsted had also been approached, though the project ultimately stalled. Alex Van Halen would later place the blame on Roth.

“When he and Alex called me after Ed had passed away, it made a little bit more sense,” Satriani says. “Even though I tried to convince them I was not the person who could do it justice.”

Rather than take the role himself, Satriani suggested two guitarists he felt would be better suited to the challenge: his former student Steve Vai and Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt. In the end, the project never materialized.

Satriani would eventually find himself playing Van Halen music onstage, albeit in a different setting. In 2024, he joined Sammy Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, performing material spanning Hagar’s tenure with the band and the broader Van Halen catalog. While Hagar says Satch isn’t the best man for the job, he credits him with bringing “his own thing to the music.”

The tour was widely praised by fans and critics alike, but Satriani’s latest recollection reveals that his connection to Van Halen’s legacy almost began nearly 30 years earlier — thanks to an unexpected phone call from Roth and a proposal he simply couldn’t get behind.

Thomann, the world’s largest music retailer, is suing Fender in an effort to halt the company’s cease-and-desist campaign against guitar makers that use Stratocaster-style body designs.

In doing so, Thomann says it is standing up not only for its own Harley Benton brand, but also for other manufacturers affected by Fender’s legal action.

For weeks, Fender has been sending cease-and-desist letters to U.S. guitar makers such as PRS Guitars, as well as retailers of S-style electric guitars across Europe and the U.S.

The campaign stems from a December 2025 ruling by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, which determined that the Stratocaster’s body shape qualifies as a copyrighted work.

Since May, Fender has cited that decision in demanding that manufacturers and retailers cease production and sales of Stratocaster-style guitars. In addition, the company has called on them to recall instruments already sold and provide customer and sales data.

Fender CEO Edward “Bud” Cole said in June that Fender is not suing anyone, but simply enforcing its intellectual property rights. The company’s position directly affects Thomann, particularly its Harley Benton line of guitars.

However, Thomann says its lawsuit is about more than protecting its own interests.

“We used to be a small music store ourselves and know exactly where we have come from,” Thomann CEO Hans Thomann says. “Many of those affected do not have the financial and legal means to conduct such a legal dispute. We therefore see it as our responsibility to have this matter clarified in court not only for our own company, but for all parties involved.”

Thomann also notes that the Düsseldorf ruling was a default judgment issued after the defendant — a Chinese seller of Stratocaster-style guitars — failed to appear in court. By pursuing its case, Thomann hopes to have the copyright claim tested in a fully contested trial.

There is a personal side to the dispute as well. Thomann debuted in 1954, the same year Fender introduced the Stratocaster. Since then, the retailer has carried Fender products alongside S-style guitars made by numerous other manufacturers.

At the heart of Thomann’s case is the claim that form follows function — that the Stratocaster shape is not merely artistic but functional as well. The guitar’s double cutaways provide upper-fret access and help balance the body, making them practical design elements. Thomann also argues that Fender has benefited from the shape’s ubiquity, which can be seen in everything from Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein to the rise of the Superstrat.

Thomann is not seeking financial damages, but rather a determination that the use of an S-style body shape does not constitute copyright infringement.

With nearly 60 years of hindsight, having the Jimi Hendrix Experience open for the Monkees back in 1967 was clearly not a good idea.

Then again, it should have seemed so at the time — but not to Micky Dolenz, who considers himself “the one to blame for that little bit of insane rock and roll trivia.”

The lead singer of Monkees hits such as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m a Believer,” Dolenz was an early Hendrix fan, from when he was playing in New York City as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and before his fateful move to England and the formation of the Experience there.

“I had seen him in New York at the Cafe Au Go Go with John Hammond,” Dolenz tells us. “His claim to fame was he’s the guy who plays guitar with his teeth.”

A little more than a year later, Dolenz spied Hendrix again with his new band members: drummer Mitch Mitchell and bass guitarist Noel Redding.

“I was at the Monterey Pop Festival and all of a sudden, onstage comes this trio dressed up in crazy stuff. And I look and say, ‘Hey, that’s the guy that played guitar with his teeth!’”

Dolenz was dazzled by Hendrix’s performance, which included him famously setting his Fender Stratocaster on fire and smashing the electric guitar to pieces.

“I remembered him… and I was blown away by him and, of course, his talent, and by Noel Redding and Mitch, too,” Dolenz recalls. “It was the most incredible rock blues that we’d ever heard. I was dumbfounded, as everybody was.”

That was in June 1967, by which time Dolenz and the Monkees had a hit NBC TV series, three chart-topping, multi-Platinum albums and three number one singles to their credit. At the time, they were in the midst of planning their first major U.S. tour.

“We were looking for an opening act,” Dolenz remembers, “and I suggested him to the producers of the show. I said, ‘Y’know, he’s very theatrical,’ which he was, of course. And the Monkees, to me, was essentially a theatrical act. We were a TV show, right?

“So I thought it was a good mix, and I loved his music. That had a lot to do with why I recommended it. I was like, ‘Wow, this would be great.’”

File that under “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

Hendrix and company took the tour — over the strenuous objections of Chas Chandler, Hendrix’s producer/manager, who knew the Experience’s electric church would not play well to a female-dominated teen crowd bent on worshipping Dolenz and Monkees mates Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork, with whom Hendrix had become friendly at Monterey. Hendrix was subsequently Tork’s house guest in Laurel Hills, California as well.

Dick Clark, who promoted the tour, recalled later, “I’m positive that there must have been some concerns and skepticism raised, because anybody could have seen it was not a compatible coupling... That’s what [the Monkees] wanted, and the deal was made.

“They fancied themselves as being an attractive coupling. It wasn’t, and the audience was totally lost.”

The tour began on July 8, 1967 in Jacksonville, Florida, about two months after the release of Hendrix’s Are You Experienced album, followed by a sea cruise the next day to celebrate Mitchell’s birthday before a show in Miami that night. The reception was predictable, with Monkees-mania ruling and the Experience playing to chants of “We want the Monkees!” and “We want Davy!”

Less than two weeks into the tour Chandler met with Clark, who agreed to take the band off the bill. The promoter concocted a story that they’d received complaints — including one from the Daughters of the American Revolution — that Hendrix’s performance was “too erotic,” leading to the Experience being “barred from the tour” after eight shows.

Hendrix himself spoke to New Musical Express about the situation some time after.

“Firstly they gave us the ‘death’ spot on the show — right before the Monkees were due on. The audience just screamed and yelled for the Monkees. Finally, they agreed to let us go on first and things were much better. But we were not getting any billing — all the posters for the show just screamed out ‘Monkees!’

“Then some parents who brought their young kids complained that our act was vulgar. We decided it was just the wrong audience. I think they’re replacing me with Mickey Mouse.”

“He felt bad, we felt terrible,” Dolenz says now, “but he knew it wasn’t our fault, and we knew it wasn’t his fault. It comes with the territory. We knew he was still great, and believe you me, Jimi Hendrix would have done just fine without opening for the Monkees.”

Nevertheless, Dolenz adds, “We all became quite good friends. He was very kind, quiet, very gentle, not at all like his onstage persona. We really had a good time hanging out together.”

The Hendrix story is one Dolenz is fond of telling during his Songs and Stories solo shows. He is currently on his 60 Years of the Monkees tour, with dates running to November 13.

Despite a $2 million royalties lawsuit currently playing out in a London courtroom, Stewart Copeland says his relationship with former Police bandmate Sting remains intact.

Copeland and Police electric guitar player Andy Summers are suing Sting, the band’s singer and bass player, over unpaid royalties they claim are owed to them. But Copeland tells Billboard that the legal battle is largely being handled by accountants and lawyers.

“They’re all arguing away,” he says. “For me, it’s, ‘Lemme know how it works out…’”

In fact, Copeland says he and Sting remain in regular contact, discussing “kids, Instagram memes, and bullshit” rather than legal disputes.

“I’m happy that we get along just fine,” he explains. “And it’s not because of satanic impulses or any of the human infirmities of jealousy, greed, pride, whatever. It’s because we had a spell where our music universes overlapped and we created some incredible stuff. We really achieved everything we needed to achieve.”

The comments come amid an ongoing dispute over Police royalties. The biggest development since the case was filed in January was the revelation that Sting had paid his former bandmates more than $800,000 after the lawsuit began — a figure Summers and Copeland argue falls well short of what they are owed.

For Copeland, however, the key to maintaining the friendship is simple: he and Sting no longer have to work together.

“As I’ve been saying a lot recently, Sting and I make music for different reasons, and it has a different place in our lives,” he says. “So we get along great as long as we’re not trying to make music together.”

That wasn’t always the case. During the Police’s rise from the late-’70s punk and new-wave scene to global superstardom, tensions between Sting, Copeland and electric guitar player Andy Summers became legendary. Although the trio sold tens of millions of albums and produced classics such as Synchronicity, the relationship between the band members was often volatile.

When the band reunited for a world tour in 2007, Copeland says they even brought in professionals he likens to marriage counselors to help smooth over old tensions.

The approach worked. The reunion proved successful enough for the band to extend the tour by another six months.

Nearly two decades later, Copeland suggests the old conflicts have finally been put into perspective. The music was worth it, the friendships survived, and the lawyers can worry about the rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That video launched a career,” King says.

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

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

From the Van Halens to the Gallaghers, rock history is full of famous musical siblings. But few brotherly relationships were as formative — or as complicated — as the one between Gregg and Duane Allman.

Although Gregg helped found the Allman Brothers Band and wrote some of its most enduring songs, he spent much of his life measuring himself against his older brother. As he admits in a new documentary, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, that admiration never really faded.

The film, which opens in theaters today, explores Gregg Allman’s life and career. In doing so, it also shines a light on Duane Allman’s brief but hugely influential life through the eyes of those who knew him best. Among them is Gregg, who recalls how a childhood rivalry over an electric guitar eventually forged one of rock’s most celebrated musical partnerships.

“My brother was walking through the house one day,” Gregg remembers, “and that’s when he looked at it, like, ‘What have you got there that’s making that sound? How are you doing that?’”

Gregg was the first of the brothers to pick up the instrument, much to Duane’s annoyance.

“You’re not supposed to be doing cool stuff,” Gregg recalls his older brother thinking. “Big brothers will do it first.”

The pair battled over the family’s lone guitar until their mother stepped in.

“She had to buy another one to keep peace in the family,” Gregg says with a bittersweet smile. “And when she did, she bought two electrics. I got a Fender, and he got a Gibson, and we just started playing.”

What began as a source of friction soon became the foundation of an unusually close bond.

“We became closer and closer,” Gregg says. “It was wonderful to watch it happen, because I admired him so much. Then we started becoming equal. That was such a good feeling.”

By the time the Allman Brothers Band broke through with songs such as “Midnight Rider” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” Duane had emerged as one of the most respected guitarists of his generation. His reputation grew even further when Eric Clapton recruited him for Derek and the Dominos, creating one of rock’s most celebrated guitar pairings.

But Duane’s rise was cut tragically short. Just months after the release of At Fillmore East, he died in a motorcycle accident in Macon, Georgia, at the age of 24.

More than five decades later, Gregg still struggled to talk about his brother without emotion.

“I spent my life trying to impress him,” he says after a long pause. “Well, the first 20 years of it, anyway.”

More than 50 years after Duane’s death, Gregg’s admission offers a revealing glimpse into the bond that powered one of rock’s greatest bands.

Grace Bowers has returned to YouTube, relaunching her channel with a wholly new approach just months after quitting the platform altogether.

The young hotshot guitarist had proclaimed her discomfort at being gawked at by older generations, insisting that she wanted to appeal to her own age.

Her U-turn comes with a change of tack, as she ruminates on the person and player she was when she broke out several years ago, and on the one she is today.

“Let’s try this again, huh?” she writes on her channel’s community page. “I’m making changes. I’m not bothered by just comments; I’m bothered by the things I had to deal with in real life. Things I didn’t think about when I was 14, posting videos for fun.”

She goes on to say that her focus is now on making “music for the girls in the front row. Not the weird dude with a tripod tryna look up my shorts.”

The guitarist broke out at a young age by uploading cover songs to the platform, quickly garnering the respect of some big-name players and the press. But she’s also had to contend with sexism and agism, as she’s forged a career that’s seen her release an acclaimed blues album, Wine on Venus, in 2025, jam with Peter Frampton, and play the Grammys.

Bowers has previously stated that she wants to pivot away from the blues to explore other musical styles, and her Ozzy tribute last year certainly proves she has the chops. It appears she wants to unshackle herself from the ‘savior of the blues’ that she’s had bandied around her, given her age and profile.

“I’m not a prodigy,” she asserts. “I’m not carrying a torch. I’m not here for old heads to sexualize me, as I have been for the past few years. I’m creating music that I have never felt is so true to who I am.

“I’m not letting anyone push me around anymore,” she continues. “I’ve been through a lot this year as I get ready to turn 20 next month. You’re either in it with me or not. I’m not who you want me to be, and I can’t wait for this next era of music.”

A follow-up post later said to expect less guitar content, although music videos seem to still be on the cards as she tees up a new release.

Based on the reels she has recently posted on both Instagram and YouTube Shorts, her content now appears to be taking a more informative, biographical approach. Reels have covered everything from ‘How to get into music as a teenager’ to speaking out against AI to promoting women’s rights.

It’s a bold and defiant move from a guitarist who has been seen as blue guitar’s next best thing – we won’t use the phrase ‘torch bearer’ – for many years now. She is, in effect, stepping away from the fanbase that has gotten her this far, but it’s also a move that puts her creative and personal wants and needs before all else.

What doesn’t change is Bowers’ talents, and if she wants to put them towards art that she is more personally attached to, that can only yield great results.

Samantha Fish admits she used to be trigger-happy with her lead playing, piling on ideas whenever she was given a solo spot. It took some blunt studio advice to change how she thinks about the role of the guitar in a song.

Guitar solos are one of the most demanding forms of electric guitar expression. Get them right, and they can define a career — Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” didn’t just showcase technique, it reshaped what the instrument could be. Get them wrong, though, and they risk coming off as self-indulgent at best, or meme-worthy at worst.

In her early days recording and performing live, Fish was eager to demonstrate everything she could do as a blues guitar player, often at the expense of the music itself.

“When I was young, any time I got the opportunity to do a guitar solo, I’d throw in every trick,” she tells Guitar Interactive Magazine. “I’m in the blues world, so at a lot of jam sessions it’s about improvising around the original form, and I’d be like ‘Here’s this lick, here’s this lick.’”

That instinct — which is common among developing players trying to prove themselves — meant the focus often drifted away from the song. What she needed was a reset in perspective.

That moment arrived during the sessions for her 2015 album, Wild Heart, when she was working with Luther Dickinson.

“I was trying to do a solo — ‘trying’ being the operative word here – and he came in like, ‘It’s all bullshit!’” she recalls. “He said, ‘There’s a melody in the song; you can hear the hook when you’re singing. You need to cop that and build something around it — create a counterhook and build off that.’”

“I’ve realized that’s what you do; you create a hook, you build off of that, you weave something exciting, and if you can return to that hook at the end of the solo when it comes to fruition, that’s where the cheers come from,” Fish notes. “There’s something about that return to the earworm.”

The lesson stuck. Rather than treating solos as a showcase for technique, Fish began approaching them as extensions of the song’s central melody—something to serve the composition rather than overwhelm it.

“In music, what are we trying to do other than write great melodies that really engage with people?” she ponders. “As a guitar player, I was getting bogged down with trying to show what I could do. Sometimes the best approach is to lie back, listen, breathe; come up with a real simple idea, and figure out how to execute it with the most drama and dynamics.”

Looking back, she now considers her early approach a misstep, even describing her debut-era instincts as “shitty.” Her recent work, including Paper Doll Live, reflects a more disciplined, song-first philosophy that highlights how far her playing and writing have evolved.

While few guitarists have built a more distinctive voice than David Gilmour, there's one player whose position he has long envied: Eric Clapton.

Not because Clapton is more famous, or because of his technique, but because of the freedom his blues background affords him.

“I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy of Eric Clapton’s position,” Gilmour says. “He has his wealth of material, and he's such a consummate blues player that he's got a wealth of other people's material that he can play that's not so well known. He can take out a new band every time.

“That would be a nice position to be in. Then reality kicks in. But I'm not in that position.”

It's a surprising admission from a guitarist whose own catalog includes some of rock's most celebrated solos. Yet Gilmour has never viewed himself as a traditional blues player in the Clapton mold.

In fact, he says his signature style was shaped partly by necessity.

“I wasn't gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Rick Beato in 2024. “There were years when I was younger when I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn't ever really going to happen.”

Rather than chase technical flash, Gilmour gravitated toward melody and phrasing, drawing inspiration from early hero Hank Marvin.

“Hank was just playing a tune,” he said. “I think I come from there.”

That melodic approach would become the cornerstone of Gilmour's playing with Pink Floyd, helping him forge a style that stood apart from both blues traditionalists and the generation of electric guitar heroes obsessed with speed. He’s said before that his style is “an amalgamation of folk and blues.” As a young guitarist, he studied the work of Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Peter Green, borrowing ideas while gradually developing a voice of his own.

“You bend a note, hold it, then shake it,” he said of his vibrato technique in a 1983 interview. “It's kind of like the way classically trained singers hold a note for a couple of seconds, then add vibrato. I've always enjoyed listening to guitarists who do that well — players like Peter Green.”

Even after decades at the top of the guitar world, during which heÆs performed some of the most-loved guitar solos, Gilmour has remained surprisingly self-critical. Speaking to Guitar World in 1998, he admitted that “about once a year, I have sort of an attack of a guilty conscience about my abilities, so I'll sit and run through a couple of scales.”

That lingering insecurity may help explain his admiration for Clapton's position. Gilmour can appreciate the freedom that comes with being able to draw from a vast blues repertoire, even if pursuing that path would have meant abandoning the qualities that made him unique in the first place.

As Gilmour himself once observed, he can try to sound like Jeff Beck, Clapton or Hendrix, “but it never works.” He only ever sounds like David Gilmour.

Years before Joe Walsh scored solo hits and sawed up hotel rooms with the Eagles, the guitarist was making his mark with the hard rock trio the James Gang. Which is how he came to meet and jam with Jimi Hendrix backstage at a club in 1970 where both acts were billed along with Sly & the Family Stone.

“It was in Youngstown, Ohio,” Walsh said in a 2012 interview with Howard Stern. The James Gang was opening the show and sharing a dressing room with Hendrix.

“We finished, came in, and he’s sitting playing his guitar,” the “Rocky Mountain Way” composer recalls. “And I come in with mine, and we had a jam. I showed him my guitar, and he showed me his.”

Walsh confirms that Hendrix was every bit as sensational as other guitarists have said. When he performed, he notes, the response was “‘what the hell are we doing?’ “That was generally thought by the community."

While he says Hendrix was a “wonderful” guy, his friendliness did little to diminish the weight of his reputation.

“Of course I’m intimidated by him,” Walsh confesses. “I mean, he had an aura; he had feathers on! It was terrifying.”

Still, Walsh had the presence of mind to take notes, hoping to extract the secrets behind Hendrix’s electric guitar magic during “three or four minutes” that felt like a master class.

“I paid attention to his guitar, like, how heavy or light the strings were, and what the action was, because he was a tough one,” says Walsh, who notes that his own guitar was a Les Paul.

“Because he was left-handed, everything was backward. That’s why he sounded like that. None of us right-handed guitar players could do what he was doing. And that’s why we couldn’t crack the code.”

Walsh leaned further into that theory speaking with Guitar Player last year, noting, “It was like you almost had to be on acid to conceive what he was playing.

“One of the reasons people have such a hard time playing like Jimi is that he used an upside-down right-handed Strat, so he had his tremolo bar on the top, by the low-E string,” he explained. “It’s so hard to play like that when you have a regular Strat with a tremolo bar below the high-E string. It requires a different technique.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan used a left-handed tremolo on his iconic right-handed "Number One" Stratocaster primarily as a tribute to Hendrix, whose music he first heard on an album that had been tossed in the trash. Nevertheless, while SRV may have come closest to capturing Jimi’s sonic soul, no one could top him, as Walsh attests.

“I have been around the world, but I’ve never been to Orinda,” Latin music maestro Charo proclaims with her signature Spanish accent. “It’s such beautiful name. If I have a little girl, I will call her Orinda. I understand it is near San Francisco, and the greatest audience is there because the people are crazy like me!”

Within the first few moments talking to Charo, her infectious personality shines through even the jankiest of phone connections. It’s immediately apparent why the lady born María del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza in Murcia, Spain, lit up American television screens on shows including the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Fantasy Island and the Love Boat after she moved Stateside in the late ’60s.

GP readers eventually voted Charo as Best Classical Flamenco Guitarist in the World. Twice! Let that sink in for a moment and consider that she was trained by the most influential acoustic guitar player of all time, classical master Andres Segovia.

During her rise to fame the guitar took a back seat to her comedic persona and “cuchi-cuchi” catch phrase, even though she was already an ace on her instrument. So, she played the entertainment business game, and kept on practicing.

She says, “Little by little, I discovered how to merry the serious part with the fun part.”

Charo is still very much Charo. She can clearly entertain with her charming stories and killer comedic instinct. But over time her guitar playing has evolved from a side story to the heart of her act.

“I got a great review on the concert I did about two months ago at Pepperdine college, she reports. “And the message was incredible, it said that there were tears of happiness. People came from far away and they were so happy just to hear beautiful music. I understand because sometimes it happens to me.

“When the music goes so deep that it takes you to another level in your soul. To me, that’s worth it. As long I have the energy to put my feet on the stage, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Unlike many performers that still get stage fright most nights, even long into a successful career, Charo seems even more comfortable about being onstage than she is off it.

“Off the stage I am a cucaracha with a lot of issues,” Charo says with a laugh. “I don’t get nervous onstage because I love people and I have trained like an Olympian. When you train and train, practice and practice, you don’t get nervous because you are ready.”

“So I will talk for some time and then I’ll say, ‘Let me introduce you to a side of me that I have been hiding for a while.’ And then I’ll play the guitar the best I can.

“I go for a high energy level. And I’ll keep it up for 30 to 45 minutes going from salsa to rhumba to flamenco.”

She loves it all, but she doesn’t hesitate to name a favorite piece that we can expect to hear in Orinda at GP Presents, citing ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ by Juaquin Rodrigo and calling it “a gift from God to every musician.”

Having lived one of the more interesting lives one can imagine, Charo has developed a profound perspective.

“I feel lucky and honored to be performing for everybody in Orinda,” she says. “When you go to perform and see lots of people ready for good entertainment, it’s priceless.”

If you’re planning to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, June 20th, make plans to share the evening with Charo at the historic Orinda Theatre in Orinda, California, located in the East Bay a short ride inland from Berkeley.

And keep an eye out for a guest appearance by Charo in a new comedy starting RuPaul that’s coming to theaters this summer called Stop! That! Train!

Secure your tickets to GP Presents Charo at the Orinda Theatre on June 20.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Charo in Orinda, California, on Saturday, June 20, please send an email and put put “Charo” in the subject line. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact is greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide their own transportation to the Orinda Theatre in Orinda, California, and have their own accommodations in the area. Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS
GP Presents Charo! in Concert

Saturday, June 20

7:00 p.m.

The Orinda Theatre

Orinda, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

When Brent Hinds left Mastodon after 25 years, Marcus King stepped up to help one of his guitar heroes get back on the road. Months later, King says he was forced to kick Hinds off the tour as the guitarist's increasingly erratic behavior spiraled into backstage chaos.

Hinds co-founded the Atlanta progressive metal outfit alongside Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor in 2000. Then, to the shock of the band’s fanbase, Mastodon announced its split with Hinds after 25 years together in March 2025. At the time, Kelliher described it as “a hard decision we all had to make.”

Following his departure, Hinds focused on his solo work, and King — a longtime admirer of his genre-blurring talents — invited him out on tour.

Speaking during a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, King hailed Hinds as “the fucking man,” but admitted their time working together was regretfully short-lived.

“Brent and Mastodon kind of had a mutual agreement that he would leave the band, so he was doing his solo thing, and he’s one of my heroes,” King explained. “I was like, ‘I’ll take you out, sure,’ and he just threw it together somehow.

“Then I ended up having to kick him off the tour, which broke my heart,” he added. “But he kind of forced my hand.”

King, who has been candid about his own struggles with alcohol and substance abuse — he once got so drunk he doesn’t remember buying a vintage electric guitar — said he could relate to some of Hinds’ behavior during that period.

The split from Mastodon had clearly been difficult. Several months after leaving the band, Hinds publicly blasted his former bandmates, calling them “horrible humans,” before later claiming that “they kicked me out of the band for embarrassing them for being who I am.”

Still, King had a tour to run.

According to the guitarist, the breaking point came after an incident involving a member of Hinds’ touring camp.

“The night in question, I walked outside, and he had this tour manager named Angela, and she was crying, and my tour manager was holding her, and she was crying,” King recalled. “I was like, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘I walked into the dressing room, and Brent was peeing on the floor. I said, “No, no, you have to stop.” So then he peed in his mouth.’”

King laughed as he recounted the story, calling the incident “hilarious,” but acknowledged that it had deeply upset the tour manager.

After that, he said, Hinds’ place on the tour became increasingly difficult to justify.

“I was ready to fix it,” King continued. “But his whole band and crew were like, ‘It’s not working.’ He was just, just partying a little too much.”

Despite the chaos, King’s recollections were ultimately affectionate. Following Hinds’ death in a motorcycle crash in August 2025, he attended the guitarist’s funeral, where the story took on a life of its own.

“At his funeral, I told Matt Pike that story,” King said. “He was like, ‘Yeah … and? That’s normal.’”

Hinds would later contribute what is believed to be his final recorded guitar solo to The Marcus King Band’s “Red Door,” playing his trusted Banker Ironman SG-style guitar on the track.

“He slept on the living room couch for a week (or two, who’s counting) with the Marcus King Band at the house they rented down in Macon, Georgia, while they were writing and recording their latest record, Darlin’ Blue, at Capricorn Studios,” Banker Guitars wrote on Instagram.

“Ever the stubborn perfectionist, he managed to do 278 takes before landing on the one he liked best.”

In the months since Hinds’ death, his former Mastodon bandmates have also spoken openly about the difficulty of moving forward without their longtime friend and collaborator. The band’s recent single, “Your Ghost Again,” marks its first release since his passing.

“I understand that, from a fan’s perspective, we never really addressed it. We just couldn’t; it was too much,” Dailor said in an interview shared on the band’s social channels. “I know Brent’s not there, and I know it’s weird, and it’s hard, and some people might be like, ‘Well, I don’t want to listen to it because Brent’s not there, and I’m hurting about that,’ but we are too. I’m still unpacking it.”

When Duane Allman died following a motorcycle crash in October 1971, it nearly became an even greater tragedy for the Allman family.

According to the new documentary Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul, Gregg Allman nearly died from a heroin overdose on the same night his brother was killed.

At the time, the Allman Brothers Band was on the verge of a breakthrough. Their landmark live album, At Fillmore East, had established the group as one of America’s premier rock acts, while Duane had further raised his profile through his celebrated electric guitar work with Eric Clapton on Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Then, on October 29, everything changed.

Riding his Harley-Davidson Sportster in Macon, Georgia, Duane swerved to avoid a flatbed truck that turned in front of him and lost control of his motorcycle. Though he survived the initial crash, the severity of his internal injuries wasn’t immediately apparent. He died later that evening at the age of 24.

As Gregg’s friend Chank Middleton recalls in the documentary, he and Gregg had been waiting at the hospital when a doctor assured them Duane would survive. Believing the worst was over, they left.

Hours later, Allman Brothers Band roadie Joseph “Red Dog” Campbell arrived at Gregg’s home with devastating news.

“When I opened the door, I could look at Red Dog’s face and tell that Duane had died,” Middleton says in the film. “And I just told Red Dog, ‘Man, don’t tell him now.’ When I said that, I could hear Gregg’s voice coming out the bedroom from behind me. I could hear his voice saying, ‘Don’t tell me what?’”

What happened next nearly turned one loss into two.

According to Devon Allman, Gregg and Middleton had bought heroin after leaving the hospital.

“They copped some heroin. They got high. And my dad OD’d,” Devon says. “And Chank was like… He literally thought for a second, he thought he lost them both. And they revived my dad, but there for a minute he thought, ‘They just both died tonight.’”

Gregg, who died on May 27, 2017, also reflects on Duane’s death in the documentary and how his perspective on the loss changed over time.

“For a long time, I’d get drunk and rave and rant about, ‘He was short-changed,’” Gregg says. “Then I grew up. He didn’t get short-changed, he had a blast. He had a good ol’ time.”

Directed by James Keach, Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces the singer’s life from birth to death through his music, friendships and seven marriages, including his highly publicized marriage to Cher.

The film also chronicles his decades-long battle with addiction. Over the years, Gregg entered rehab 14 times before ultimately overcoming dependencies on cocaine, heroin, alcohol and cigarettes. He remained sober until his death from liver cancer in 2017.

By the summer of 1969, John Fogerty had taken Creedence Clearwater Revival from obscurity to the upper reaches of the charts. “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River” had all been number two hits. But they were punctuated by singles that failed to make much of a dent: “I Put a Spell on You,” “Lodi” and “Commotion.”

“I said, well, basically I’m now a one-hit wonder,” the guitarist toldRick Beato. “And I also realized It took us so long to get here; now you only get five minutes to do the next step because the spotlight will move on to Led Zeppelin or somebody.  It’ll just be over for you if you don’t come up with it now.'"

Fogerty was afraid everything he built was going to be lost if the band didn’t have another hit, and fast. Which is one reason why CCR released a total of three albums in 1969: Fogerty was on fire, writing new songs at every turn.

“Fogerty told us that if we were ever off the charts, then we would be forgotten,” drummer Doug Clifford told Goldmine in 2013. “To make it worse, it might sound funny, but we had double-sided hits, and that was kind of a curse, as we were burning through material twice as fast. If we'd spread it out, we would not have had to put out three albums in one year.”

The guitarist was taking inspiration from everywhere, and in 1969 it was impossible to not be affected by the Vietnam War. It was a catalyst behind the decade's counterculture revolution. Anti-war sentiment was a rallying cry for the rock and roll generation when they gathered that August in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival, where CCR had made a late-night stand.

When Fogerty looked at the news, he saw all the young men wounded and dying in the conflict. But he also saw how advantage was keeping many of the country’s politically privileged men from going to fight and die in a war their own fathers insisted was necessary.

He was enraged. And he put it all in one song: “Fortunate Son,” from the group’s third album of 1969, Willy and the Poor Boys.

But unlike other songs he labored over, Fogerty says “Fortunate Son” came out in a blast.

“’Fortunate Son’ was the shortest song I ever wrote — about 20 minutes,” he tells Beato. “This is 1969. All the political and cultural stuff, is just brewing in my mind.”

Fogerty had the music together and “a vague idea” of the subject matter. He took it and nothing else — not even an acoustic guitar — into a room to do some writing.

“But I literally went into the bedroom with a little tablet and a pen, thinking the song was going to be called ‘Favorite Son.’” It’s a phrase used by state delegates when nominating a presidential candidate.

Aside from that, however, Fogerty says, “I had no lines of the song at all.

“And suddenly I’m sitting there, and I [thought], ‘Some folks are born, made to wave…’ Oh, that's pretty good!

“And somewhere, ‘Favorite Son’ flipped into ‘Fortunate Son.’”

As for Fogerty’s fears of slipping down the charts and becoming obsolete, he didn’t have to worry. “Fortunate Son” was released as a double A-side single with “Down on the Corner,” the lead track from Willy and the Poor Boys. Both songs reached number three on the charts, and helped keep CCR’s fortunes alive.

Fogerty has spent much of his post-CCR days fighting to reclaim the rights to the material with which he made his name. His new album is a celebration of that battle ending after 50 tireless years. The pain of the band's demise also saw him give away his prized Rickenbacker 325.

“I was hurt. I was damaged. I gave it away to end that chapter of my life,” he said of his decision to leave it behind. Yet, miraculously, it wound up back in his hands, perhaps standing as a precursor for what was about to follow.”

When Brad Paisley partnered with Fender last year to resurrect one of the company’s most notorious Telecaster finishes, the project was about more than a clever play on his surname. It represented the culmination of a decades-long fascination with one of Fender’s strangest and most short-lived creations.

The Paisley Red Telecaster debuted in 1968, when Fender — then under CBS ownership — attempted to capitalize on the psychedelic spirit of the era. Alongside the equally flamboyant Blue Flower finish, the guitar featured colorful Cling-Foil wallpaper applied directly to the body and covered with a translucent burst finish. It was Fender’s attempt to pay tribute to the Summer of Love.

The look was unforgettable. The execution was not.

The thick decorative paper, inexpensive adhesives and heavy polyester clear coats proved to be a disastrous combination. The finishes cracked, chipped and peeled prematurely, becoming victims of the same cost-cutting measures that defined much of Fender’s CBS era. By 1969, the experiment was over. Production ceased, and many owners stripped or refinished their electric guitars altogether.

That should have been the end of the story.

Instead, decades later, the forgotten finish found an unlikely champion in Paisley.

“It’s unreal that my own name is one of the coolest finishes I think Fender has ever done,” he said when Fender unveiled his signature Limited Edition Brad Paisley 1967 “Lost Paisley” Telecaster in 2024. “This is an attempt to show what this lost color could have been. It’s the best guitar I’ve ever had.”

Long before Fender enlisted him to help revive the design, Paisley had been on a mission to track down surviving examples of original Paisley Telecasters and restore them whenever possible. That was easier said than done. With relatively few produced — estimates generally place the number between 300 and 400 — most had long since been refinished, their psychedelic origins buried beneath later paint jobs.

Still, the hunt fascinated him.

“There’s nothing more beautiful to me than a ’50s Blackguard Tele, a ’54 Strat, or an original Paisley Tele — any of those things that frequently got stripped and mutilated,” he told Rick Beato. “Some of those refins are the best guitars I’ve ever had. It’s therapy to be able to take something and restore it.”

The obsession eventually led him to master builder Bill Crook. Together, they began trying to reverse-engineer the original Paisley finish, assuming that uncovering an authentic example hidden beneath a refinish would be nearly impossible.

Then fate intervened.

“Let me find the right guitar first,” Paisley told Crook.

That search led him to Chicago Music Exchange, where he asked if they had a refinished 1968 Telecaster for sale.

“They said, ‘Yeah, we have a black one, but it’s not a good paint job,’” Paisley recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t care.’

“I pick it up, it’s a good guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna turn this into a Paisley.’”

Crook agreed to take on the project. But once the guitar arrived, something caught his eye.

“He gets it, throws the thing on a guitar stand, and is looking at it hanging on the wall,” Paisley explained. “He looks at the way that the black finish is cracking, and he goes, ‘No.’”

Crook removed the neck and neck plate for a closer inspection. Beneath the black paint was exactly what Paisley had spent years searching for.

“There’s a paisley staring at him,” Paisley said. “He took the finish off with thinner, and that’s 100 percent original paper.

“I had accidentally bought a Paisley Tele, thinking I would turn it into a Paisley Tele!”

The story became even more remarkable when Paisley tracked down the guitar’s original owner. According to Paisley, the owner had purchased the instrument at a discount because the Paisley models weren't selling and later sprayed it black in his backyard.

What had spent decades disguised beneath an amateur refin was suddenly revealed as one of Fender’s rarest late-'60s guitars.

Paisley named the instrument La Brea, comparing it to a fossil preserved in the famous Los Angeles tar pits.

“I called it La Brea because it’s like a fossil in a tar pit,” he said.

Today, the guitar could command tens of thousands of dollars on the vintage market. But for Paisley, its value has little to do with money. After years spent chasing lost Paisley Telecasters, he had finally stumbled across the real thing by complete accident.

Sharon Osbourne spent much of 1984 trying to keep Ozzy Osbourne out of trouble. Then he went on tour with Mötley Crüe.

According to Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, Sharon repeatedly flew out to the tour after hearing reports of the chaos unfolding backstage each night. Eventually, she confiscated Mötley Crüe’s after-show passes and banned them from bringing guests backstage in an effort to protect Ozzy from the nonstop partying surrounding the young band.

“Put it this way, Sharon was not happy with us,” Lee recalled during a recent appearance on The Zach Sang Show.

The tour, which paired Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon lineup with Mötley Crüe in support of Shout at the Devil, has since become one of hard rock’s most infamous road outings. Stories from the trek — including Ozzy’s notorious ant-snorting incident — have become part of rock folklore.

But Lee says those tales barely capture the atmosphere that surrounded the tour, one that ultimately left Ozzy physically and emotionally spent by its conclusion.

“Some people lost brain cells, marriages,” Lee said. “She’d get called out. Like, ‘The Mötley guys are bringing shitloads of girls backstage after the show; it’s a fucking party everywhere.’”

According to Lee, Sharon would often fly in after hearing reports of the band’s latest exploits.

“She took all of our after-show passes from us,” he recalled. “We’re no longer allowed to have any guests backstage. She cut us off.”

The restriction didn’t go over particularly well with Mötley Crüe.

“We made special shirts that had a smiley face with a bullet hole in it, and it said ‘The No Fun Tour,’ because she came out and just literally shut it down,” Lee said. “She was like, ‘There is no way this is going to continue.’”

Looking back, Lee admits Sharon had good reason to be concerned.

“When I say ‘continue,’ I’m talking about ’til-the-wheels-fall-off shit,” he added. “It was bad for Ozzy to be around.”

By the end of the tour, Lee says the toll on Ozzy had become impossible to ignore.

“I remember Ozzy coming out towards the end of the tour,” he recalled. “He came out in, like, tighty-whitey Hanes underwear, some boots, and that’s it. He had been up for days partying. I mean, days.

“He finally stumbles out to the microphone, and he just starts crying. Then he just turned away and walked right off the stage. First song. Came out, started crying, and left. That was it. The tour was done. It was time for him to go home and get some rest.”

The atmosphere wasn’t just hard on Ozzy. The tour also became notorious for clashes between members of the two camps, most notably guitarists Jake E. Lee and Mick Mars.

In a 2019 interview with Tone-Talk, Lee recalled that he and Mars frequently clashed during the run and claimed that some members of Mötley Crüe had even floated the idea of replacing Mars with him.

“Nikki [Sixx] and Tommy wanted me in the band,” Lee told Tone-Talk in 2019 (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “They wanted me to replace Mick. You can understand that — better looking and a better player. But Mick’s in-law or whatever was funding the band, so that didn’t happen.”

According to Lee, tensions eventually boiled over when Mars called him a “slant-eyed Japanese bastard.”

“I did not like that,” Lee said. “I hadn’t heard it since I was in grade school, and it pissed me off. I was gonna beat the fuck out of him, but [Ratt guitarist] Robbin Crosby, who was six-five, came up to me, picked me up and said, ‘C’mon, Jake. None of that shit matters.’ And he carried me out of the room.”

Between Sharon Osbourne’s efforts to rein in the partying, Ozzy’s deteriorating condition and tensions between members of the two bands, the Bark at the Moon/Shout at the Devil tour earned its reputation as one of hard rock’s most chaotic road adventures.

When the Rolling Stones decamped to the south of France in 1971 to record what would become Exile on Main St., they created one of rock’s most celebrated albums. But while the record has since attained near-mythic status, Mick Jagger has never been quite as enamored with it as the critics and fans who helped turn it into a classic.

By June 10, 1972, Exile on Main St. had reached No. 1 in the U.K. and topped charts around the world. Over the decades, it came to be regarded as one of the Stones’ defining statements. Yet Jagger has long viewed the album through a different lens—one colored by memories of disorder, unfinished work and a recording process he felt largely fell on his shoulders.

“Exile is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling,” Jagger said in 2003 (via Far Out).

“I’m not too sure how great the songs are,” he continued. “It has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, [producer] Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.

“Of course I’m ultimately responsible for it, but it’s really not good, and there’s no concerted effort or intention.”

Those are striking comments about an album now widely considered a masterpiece. Yet they also reflect the reality of the sessions that produced it.

The Stones had begun work on some of the material at London’s Olympic Studios during the Sticky Fingers era before relocating, as tax exiles, to Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera. There, they converted the villa’s basement into a makeshift recording space and worked in conditions that were anything but conventional.

For Jagger, who was preparing to become a father and frequently traveled to Paris to be with his wife, Bianca, the lack of structure proved frustrating. The villa became a revolving door of musicians, friends, dealers and celebrity visitors.

“There were a lot of people who came to visit that I don’t remember,” guitarist Mick Taylor later told Classic Rock. “I don’t remember John Lennon and Yoko coming, but apparently they did.”

Keith Richards, meanwhile, was battling a serious heroin addiction. According to the band’s lore, he was often absent from sessions taking place in Nellcôte’s basement studio. The chaos that Jagger viewed as an obstacle was, for Richards, simply part of the environment.

“We didn’t start off intending to make a double album,” Richards recalled in According to the Rolling Stones. “We just went down to the south of France to make an album, and by the time we’d finished, we said, ‘We want to put it all out.’”

“The Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do,” he added. “I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time.”

Richards would later tell Guitar World that Exile represented a conscious move away from the pursuit of singles. “It was made for what it was,” he said. “It was an album.”

That difference in outlook lies at the heart of the band’s conflicting memories of the record. Richards remembers freedom. Jagger remembers trying to impose order on a situation that often seemed determined to resist it.

“I think Keith was pretty out of it for some of that period, which shouldn’t have helped, but maybe it did,” Charlie Watts once observed. “Maybe that was where the creative energies came from.”

The sessions were plagued by practical problems as well. The summer heat played havoc with instrument tuning, recording schedules were inconsistent and songs often took far longer to complete than anyone anticipated. When Richards failed to pay the dealers providing him with heroin, they sent their henchmen to the house to steal several of the electric guitars used on the sessions, including Taylor’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul, which is said to be at the heart of a dispute with the New York City Met.

What emerged from the sessions was less a carefully executed plan than a collection of performances assembled amid confusion and constant interruption.

Richards embraced that unpredictability. Jagger struggled with it.

“Mick needs to know what he’s going to do tomorrow,” Richards said in the 2010 documentary Stones in Exile. “Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock, I’m roll.”

That tension between discipline and spontaneity has always fueled the Stones. On Exile on Main St., it was amplified by circumstance, producing an album that still divides its creators even as it unites listeners.

For all of Jagger’s reservations, Richards has remained unequivocal in his assessment.

“For a year or two, it was considered a bomb,” he said in 2002. “This was an era where the music industry was full of these pristine sounds. We were going the other way. Yes, it is one of the [Stones’] best.”

More than 50 years later, Exile on Main St. remains a testament to the strange chemistry that powered the Rolling Stones at their peak: one songwriter trying to impose order, the other embracing disorder, and a classic album emerging somewhere between the two.

Deep Purple guitarist Simon McBride says he was given complete freedom to be himself when he joined the band. Even so, there are certain parts of the group's iconic catalog he daren't change.

The Irishman — who had previously worked with Purple vocalist Ian Gillan, keyboardist Don Airey and drummer Ian Paice on various side projects — was handpicked as Steve Morse's successor in 2022. He initially joined as a stand-in while Morse took a leave of absence to care for his ill wife, before eventually becoming the band's full-time guitarist.

McBride's transition into Deep Purple has been notably smooth. His blues-based style has made him an immediate fit within the group's sound.

"We had a fantastic 20-odd years with Steve Morse, who is a magnificent player," Gillan told Planet Rock last month. "Steve's roots are in southern rock, and that's a bit more languid than our style. So when Simon came in, [we were] back in business. It's like 1970s Purple with modern touches."

Speaking to Guitar Interactive as the band prepares to release SPLAT!, their second album with McBride, the guitarist says he was handed the keys to the Deep Purple Lamborghini with "zero pressure" to emulate any of the players who came before him.

"The only pressure came from me," he says with a laugh. "When I first started, I was only stepping in for Steve. I was just a session dude. When I became part of the band, they didn't want another Ritchie Blackmore, they didn't want another Steve Morse or Tommy Bolin.

"They said, 'You're here because of you. We don't want you to sound like Steve, we don't want you to sound like Ritchie. We've done that.' It was great to hear."

Even so, McBride says joining a band with more than five decades of history requires a certain amount of restraint.

"Obviously, when you join a band like Deep Purple with such a history of songs and great guitarists, you have to be respectful," he says. "There's certain things I can't change, like 'Highway Star' — I think if I changed the solo on that I would probably get shot."

He learned just how attached audiences are to some of those classic guitar parts while performing in South America.

"I remember playing in South America, there were 65,000 people, and the first song was 'Highway Star,'" he recalls. "I go for the solo, and 65,000 people sang that solo back to me, so I was like, 'Thank God I didn't change that fucking thing!'

"You have to appreciate that certain solos are little constructed pieces of music within a song. There are other songs where you can change and improvise; there are parts of the 'Smoke on the Water' solo I love, and there are parts where I mix it up a bit."

McBride appreciates that there are more than five decades of history behind Deep Purple. While he is mindful of preserving some of the band's most celebrated moments, he also knows he can't lose himself in the process.

"If you try to play like somebody else, you'll never ever truly be yourself as a player — you'll end up just being a clone," he says. "It's one of the reasons I don't play a Strat. As soon as I pick up a Strat, I instantly want to play Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimi Hendrix."

Instead, McBride typically plays a PRS 408, a guitar that helps distinguish him from the players who came before him.

Elsewhere, Blackmore recently reflected on the night Christopher Cross filled in for him in Deep Purple, while David Coverdale has spoken about the "uncomfortable spiral downward" that marked Tommy Bolin's brief tenure in the band.

Phoebe Bridgers has just played her first shows since 2023, with a short run of dates concluding at Madison Square Garden. She will see out the rest of the year with performances in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

But for a time, the indie folk singer-songwriter feared a freak accident at home could significantly alter the way she played guitar—or even halt her performing career altogether.

“I fucked up my finger like a year and a half ago,” she told Guitar World in 2020. “It stopped me from playing E and F, which were in so many of my songs.”

“I was cutting stems on flowers, and the knife flipped and just hacked right on my knuckle,” she said. “Since then, it’s been really stiff, and it hurts like shit. I hope that one day it heals, but that’s been making me more experimental with chords [and tunings].”

Across guitar history, similar physical setbacks have often led to new approaches on the instrument rather than ending playing careers. Tony Iommi reworked his fretting technique after losing the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident, Django Reinhardt developed an influential vocabulary despite severe fretting-hand limitations, and Jerry Garcia adapted his picking approach after losing the middle finger on his right hand in childhood. In each case, physical constraint reshaped technique rather than shutting it down.

For Bridgers, the injury pushed her toward a more exploratory approach to harmony and tuning. “I play guitar in a weird way,” she said. “When I met Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, who produced both my records [2017’s Stranger in the Alps and 2020’s Punisher], I was basically a folk artist. It was sounding a little basic.”

Now, she says, she tends to “fuck up the thing that I just wrote,” adding, “I try to trick myself into writing a song in an open tuning and not even worry about what the chords look like and focus on the melody instead.”

For Joni Mitchell, open tunings became a long-term solution to hand issues stemming from childhood polio, forming the foundation of a highly individualized harmonic system built across dozens of tunings. Bridgers, who encountered Mitchell’s music early on, leaned further into alternate tunings after her own injury.

She often uses open Db, achieved by tuning her Danelectro ’56 baritone guitar to open A and placing a capo on the fourth fret.

The injury ultimately accelerated her use of alternate tunings and nonstandard chord shapes, reshaping aspects of her guitar approach. For many players, hand injuries remain among the most feared outcomes, but in Bridgers’ case it became a constraint that redirected her harmonic language.

Still, everyday accidents remain a risk for any player working with tools at home. Jeff Beck famously injured the tip of his index finger while chopping carrots in 2010, an incident that required surgery and renewed attention to hand protection among professional guitarists.

Bridgers is also an advocate for rubber bridges on her acoustic guitars, which produce a more muted, percussive response suited to her playing style. The concept originated in early DIY modifications before becoming a more widely adopted tonal option among indie and experimental players.

James “Blood” Ulmer once recalled growing up in South Carolina, where he was exposed to two kinds of blues.

“Down South we had two kinds of blues,” he said in a 1990 interview with Guitar Player. “One that was forbidden, and one that wasn’t.”

The young Ulmer was particularly drawn to the music of a local guitarist named Johnny Wilson.

“Mr. Johnny Wilson would play some shit on the guitar that would make you wanna fuck,” he recalled. “Every time I’d tell Mama, I’d get my ass beat just for listening to Johnny Wilson.”

Another local musician, Alton Smith, played a gentler style that earned the approval of Ulmer’s mother. Yet it was Smith’s approach that lingered longest in the future guitarist’s mind.

“He would accompany himself so that you wouldn’t think that what he was playing was it,” Ulmer said. “You could always imagine something else.”

Ulmer, who died June 3 at the age of 86, spent the next six decades building a body of work defined by that very idea — music that suggests more than it states. Through his fusion of blues, free jazz, funk, and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic philosophy, he developed a guitar language that influenced generations of musicians while earning a reputation as one of the instrument’s most original voices.

Critics struggled to categorize his music. His records drew from gospel, Delta blues, jazz, rock, and funk, often simultaneously, producing a raw, angular style that resisted any single label. In 1982, Newsweek called him “the most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery.”

Yet the origins of Ulmer’s approach lay far from New York’s avant-garde scene, in rural South Carolina.

Born in St. Matthews, Ulmer began playing guitar at age seven in his father’s gospel quartet, the Southern Sons. He sang baritone and learned the discipline of performing in church long before encountering jazz or experimental music.

“My father instigated the whole deal,” Ulmer recalled in a 1990 interview. “All I did was follow orders.”

The church provided structure, but the blues provided revelation. After graduating from high school in 1958, Ulmer headed north to Pittsburgh, where he performed with vocal groups including the Savoys and the Del-Vikings, the pioneering interracial doo-wop group known for hits such as “Come Go With Me” and “Whispering Bells.”

In Pittsburgh, he encountered a teenage guitar prodigy named George Benson.

“Every time he sees me, he reminds me that he used to teach me to play the guitar, and he actually did,” Ulmer said years later.

Though rooted in gospel and blues, Ulmer absorbed a new musical vocabulary from Benson, including modern jazz guitar styles associated with players such as Grant Green and Kenny Burrell. Those lessons expanded his harmonic and rhythmic thinking and pointed him toward more open-ended forms of expression.

By the early 1960s, Ulmer had relocated to Ohio, where he formed Blood and the Bloodbrothers and worked with organist Hank Marr. He later moved to Detroit, a city he described as both demanding and formative.

“Detroit was a tough music town,” he said. “Full of very musical people.”

There, Ulmer began developing the guitar approach that would define his career. Working with a band called Focus Novii, he experimented with freer improvisation and what he called “unison tunings,” in which multiple strings are tuned to the same pitch or octave. Rather than traditional chordal harmony, the approach emphasized drones, open intervals, and shifting tonal centers.

“A drone is like a key to me,” Ulmer explained. “You’re in unison; you ain’t got no chords. But you can move the tonal center of the guitar.”

That concept became central to his musical identity. Combined with thumb-picked attack and blues phrasing, it produced a sound that felt both archaic and forward-looking at once.

Frustrated by the limitations of Detroit’s club circuit, Ulmer eventually moved to New York and entered the city’s jazz underground. He secured a residency at Harlem’s Minton’s Playhouse and began working with drummer Rashied Ali, whose polyrhythmic approach pushed his playing into new territory.

Ali eventually introduced Ulmer to Ornette Coleman.

The saxophonist was immediately impressed.

“I moved in with Coleman,” Ulmer recalled, “and studied his harmolodic theory for a year.”

Coleman’s harmolodic concept aimed to free melody from fixed harmonic hierarchy, allowing greater musical equality and improvisational freedom. Ulmer later emphasized that he had already been moving in that direction independently, but Coleman provided an articulated framework.

Ulmer became one of the key interpreters of harmolodic music, translating its principles into a distinctive guitar language that helped shape the emerging jazz avant-garde of the 1970s.

That role was cemented with a series of landmark recordings beginning with 1978’s Tales of Captain Black, featuring Coleman and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma. The album — which established his identity with a Gibson Byrdland electric guitar — introduced a wider audience to Ulmer’s aggressive, open-ended approach.

Its follow-up, Are You Glad to Be in America?, expanded the palette further, blending funk, free improvisation, and political edge into a sound unlike anything else of the era.

Throughout the 1980s, Ulmer continued to refine his vision on albums including Freelancing, Black Rock, and Odyssey. The latter, featuring drummer Warren Benbow and violinist Charles Burnham, was named Album of the Year in The Village Voice critics poll and is widely regarded as a high point in his discography. The 1980s also saw him adopt the Steinberger guitar — notably featured on his album Blues Preacher — for its unique solid-body tone and stability.

Despite critical acclaim, commercial success remained limited. Ulmer’s music resisted categorization, existing between blues, jazz, rock, and the avant-garde. Still, his influence steadily expanded.

Through projects such as Music Revelation Ensemble and Phalanx, along with extensive touring in Europe, Japan, and the United States, he became a touchstone for younger musicians drawn to his refusal to compromise.

In the end, Ulmer’s career returned to the insight he first encountered as a child — music as possibility rather than conclusion.

As he put it, “You could always imagine something else.”

Few musicians committed more fully to making that idea audible.

Bruce Springsteen rallied an army of guitarists to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary and the opening of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music on June 4 and 5. Over two nights, an eclectic mix of artists — including Jimmie Vaughan, Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow, Rosanne Cash, Jon Bon Jovi and Jackson Browne —interpreted musical selections representing the history of American music.

Part academic history lesson, part Ken Burns documentary, part TED talk — and with 100 percent commitment from every artist onstage — Music America: The Songs That Shaped Us was a joyous homage to the power of song and the melting pot of artists responsible for America’s rich musical heritage.

Instruments as varied as tribal percussion, drums, horns, guitar, voice and turntables fleshed out a song list that encompassed jazz, folk, rock, Irish, blues, gospel, bluegrass, country, hip-hop and R&B.

A highlight of the concerts was the time-honored blues jam, which featured Springsteen trading licks with Clark, Vaughan, Nils Lofgren and Disciples of Soul guitarist Marc Ribler (the show’s musical director) on the Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland classic “Farther On Up the Road.”

In addition to jamming with the Boss, Vaughan represented the electric blues genre, and specifically Texas blues. As part of the second night’s show, Vaughan brought his Texas swagger front and center with a solid performance of “Texas Flood,” the Larry Davis-penned classic famously recorded by his late brother, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“Electric guitars were invented right here in America,” Vaughan told Guitar Player In a pre-show interview. “I’m a student of the Texas guitar players, and the Mississippi/Louisiana area. I love all the guitar playing. There’s a lot of guitar players in Texas and the Southwest, and all over America.

“How do you talk about something so vast and worldwide? You couldn’t have Texas without the blues. But we couldn’t do it without every state. It’s American and it spread all over the world.”

While the electric guitar was the link for most performances on the closing night, the acoustic guitar was front and center for most of the first night’s musical selections. Jazz, blues, folk, country and early gospel were highlighted. Narration and historical context provided in between songs by the Center’s Executive Director and historian Bob Santelli as well as by performers, like Keb’ Mo’.

“A whole lot of us would be doing nothing without Robert Johnson,” the guitarist noted before launching into Johnson’s classic “Crossroads.”

The spirit of Woody Guthrie was well-represented, with Springsteen and Kenny Chesney duetting on “This Land Is Your Land,” while Springsteen and Rosanne Cash sang the immigrant ballad “Deportee.” Boston’s Dropkick Murphys performed a raucous “Shipping Up to Boston,” which features lyrics by Guthrie, and then joined Springsteen for an energetic performance of the Boss’ Guthrie-inspired “American Land.”

Cash also performed the Appalachian ballad “The Parting Glass” and the Carter Family’s “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” with her husband, John Leventhal, joining her on guitar. Cash — who is the daughter of Johnny Cash and step-daughter of Carter Family core member June Carter Cash — recognized the importance of Mother Maybelle Carter’s pioneering pick-strum style. She recalled learning the technique directly from the source.

“When I was 18, I went on tour with my dad," she said. “The Carter Family and Carl Perkins were on that tour. I spent a lot of time in the dressing room with the Carter women, and they took the time to teach me those old Appalachian ballads. I owe a tremendous debt to those women. I learned those songs and my vision expanded.”

Springsteen kicked off night two’s tribute to pop, soul and rock music with a pair of Elvis Presley songs from different eras: the ’50s hit “Jailhouse Rock” and his early ’70s rocker “Burning Love.”

The significance of Chuck Berry’s guitar playing and lyrical wordplay was captured by Jon Bon Jovi on “Johnny B. Goode” and Steve Van Zandt on “Bye Bye Johnny.”

“Chuck Berry. He wrote the lyrics, baby,” Van Zandt told the crowd.

Sheryl Crow showed her musical depth with admirable interpretations of “I Fall to Pieces,” the 1961 Patsy Cline country-pop crossover hit, a solo acoustic rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and then inviting Springsteen, former Dylan guitarist Larry Campbell and his wife Teresa Williams on stage for an emotional take on “I Shall Be Released.”

Gary Clark Jr. showcased the funkier side of Jimi Hendrix with a fuzz and phaser-filled version of the relatively obscure “Power of Soul” (a.k.a. “Power to Love”), from Band of Gypsys, while rock pioneer Dion performed his classics “The Wanderer” and “Abraham, Martin and John.”

Nils Lofgren paid tribute to his longtime friend Neil Young with “Rockin’ in the Free World,” shredding guitar leads and sharing vocals with Bon Jovi.

The shows were a kickoff for the opening of the museum, a 30,000-square-foot facility situated on the Monmouth University (NJ) campus. The Center serves as a hub for research, education, exhibitions, and public programming focused on American music and its role in American history and culture.

An exhibit titled America's Instrument: The Evolution of the Electric Guitar includes a variety of guitars Springsteen has used over the years, including the Fender Telecaster he purchased for $185 in late 1972/early 1973 from Jersey Shore guitar shop owner and luthier Phil Petillo. The guitar — which features a 1953 Esquire neck and a 1951 Telecaster body — is seen on the cover of his 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run. Springsteen retired it in 2005 and it now resides in the Center.

The Center’s opening celebration was a two-week event and included two smaller shows that preceded the main event.

The first of these was The Native American Music Experience, which celebrated Indigenous musicians’ contributions to popular music. It featured performances by a solid roster of artists from multiple tribes across America, a group Santelli says has been “under-appreciated, disrespected and ignored for far too long.”

Colorado acoustic fingerstyle guitarist Cary Morin played deft bluesy licks on a detuned guitar on his original “Live a Little.” Using a Weissenborn lap steel, Pura Fé’s soothing melodic playing, subtle slide riffs and ethereal vocals were a highlight of the evening’s performances.

New Mexico’s Levi Platero, a Navajo Nation native and 2016 Native American Music Award recipient for Best Blues, ripped explosive minor blues and volume swell riffs on his Fender Stratocaster on his originals “Start Over” and “Work Hours.”

Florida’s Osceola Brothers high-energy set featured aggressive guitar playing and explosive fuzz-driven riffs and solos from guitarist Cameron Osceola. Celebrated Mohawk guitarist and two-time Juno winner Derek Miller performed with actor and vocalist/harmonica player Gary Farmer.

In addition, a visual gallery paid tribute to key Native American artists that include blues pioneer Charley Patton, Jesse Ed Davis and Link Wray. The evening ended with a singalong jam on the Redbone top-five hit “Come and Get Your Love,” written by Native Americans Pat and Lolly Vegas.

The second event was America 250: A Jersey Shore Celebration of the Nation’s Music Heritage, which featured a cast of locals and legends performing songs in a format similar to the two larger events. They included blues guitarist Sonny Kenn, ace acoustic picker Pat Guadagno and recent American Idol finalist and indie singer/songwriter Jake Thistle, with musical direction coordinated by guitarist/songwriter Gordon Brown.

"My career has been all over the map," Vince Gill acknowledges. "It's been real traditional country; it's been real pop. It still rocks pretty good; it's bluesy — all these things. I never wanted to do just one thing over and over."

Since emerging in the mid 1980s as a country crossover hit maker, Gill has released a string of impeccable solo albums that showcase his sterling songcraft, his high, lonesome, Orbison-esque tenor voice, and his formidable six-string prowess.

But Gill also found time for side projects, like the Time Jumpers, a loose collection of musicians who present bluegrass and Western swing concerts in Nashville. And since 2017, he’s been a member of the Eagles, playing alongside Joe Walsh as the country-rock legends continue their reign.

Yet despite his versatility, Gill is, at heart, a country musician.

"I feel a real commitment to traditional country music because I think it's waning from popularity and people don't hear it so much anymore," Gill told Guitar Aficionado in 2017. "So I want to stick up for it. There will always be an element in me that wants to be reverent toward great traditional music. People don't realize how soulful country music can be. It can be just as soulful as Ray Charles."

Gill’s devotion to the genre — along with his philanthropy — were the impetus for him to receive the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the CMAs this past November. As he explained to Guitar Aficionado, he grew up in a guitar-centric environment, which ended up shaping his destiny.

"My father played a little bit, and he had an old Harmony, a Gibson ES-125, and a banjo, too," Gill recounted.

"Those are the first instruments I remember being around as a little kid. My dad also had a little tenor guitar, which was like an ES-125 as well. It only had four strings on it, so it was easy for my little hands to make chords on it. That's where I got going, until my hand got big enough to play all six strings.

"When I was 10, my father and mother got me for Christmas-in 1967, I think, a red Gibson ES-335 and a Fender Super Reverb amp, and I was on my way. I had my own gear and a red coil cord, and I was a force to be reckoned with."

That guitar, which now resides in the Country Music Hall of Fame, served Gill well in many teenage rock bands.

But by the time of his sophomore year in high school, he'd become obsessed with bluegrass music. Shortly after graduating, he acquired a guitar that is still one of the cornerstones of his collection: a 1942 Martin D-28 herringbone acoustic in mint condition.

"It cost $2,500 in 1975, which was a lot of money," he recalled. "I traded in a newer Martin I had, a ’71 D-41, plus $1,600, and I got that guitar."

As Gill explained to CBS Mornings in 2019, he and a friend were at a bluegrass festival in the mid 1970s when he found the guitar with which he’d create his future.

“I saw this guy, and he had it in a case and had a sign on it: ’Pre-War D-28 $2,500.’

“So I said, ‘Can I see that guitar?’ and he said, ’Kid, can you afford it?’ I said, ‘No, sir, but I’d sure, like to see it.

“So he opened up the case, and it was this guitar. And I had a newer Martin from like, 1971. I said, ‘Would you consider a trade?’ He goes, ‘Hell, no!’ He was a crafty old dude.

“And so I gave him, like, 1,600 bucks and my guitar. It was all the money I had in the world. It was every dime, and I was broke… But I had a gig for a couple hundred bucks a week. And I figured I’d be all right.”

The D-28 was with Gill during his early professional bluegrass tenures with Ricky Skaggs’ Boone Creek and Byron Berline's Sundance, a journey that also took him from Oklahoma, where he was born, to Louisville and Los Angeles.

That Martin is the subject of his song "This Old Guitar and Me," where he describes its magical nature and beautiful voice, while documenting its adventures.

What he doesn’t mention in the song is the wear and tear the D-28 acquired over its years of service.

“Pretty much remember every scratch I put in it,” he says in a video posted to TikTok. “I was playing it one day, and our dog — Tillie, I think the name was — jumped up and scratched the hell out of it.”

Martin guitars became something of an obsession for Gill, who had about 50 of them when he spoke with Guitar Aficionado. Among the specimens he has owned are a 1928 000-45 and a pair of 1936 000-28s, including one in a rare shade-top, or sunburst, finish.

"I also have two OM-45s, which are extremely rare," he added. "Rarer than the D-45. Martin only made 41 of the OM-45s"

One of these, a 1930 model, was a 50th birthday gift from Gill's wife, singer and guitarist Amy Grant.

"She knows what to get," he explained, laughing "She calls [Nashville vintage dealer] George Gruhn or somebody like that and says, 'What doesn't he have that he really likes? What's the nicest thing you've got?"

Gill's 1936 000-28 shade-top Martin was also a gift from Grant. He returned the favor by buying her a Gibson Nick Lucas model.

"She really likes Gibson guitars," he said. "This one was built around the same year as her mother was born, so there's a connection there. I like that kind of thing."

Of course, when it comes to sentimental value, nothing can compare to the treasured 1959 Gibson Les Paul ’Burst he acquired from a dying friend. But that's another story.

Mark Knopfler has long been regarded as one of the premier electric guitar fingerstylists in the game. In recent years, though, Knopfler says, his playing has moved even more in the fingerstyle direction.

Though he still has reverence for the guitar pick, the Dire Straits man says that his move toward fingerstyle has been one of the byproducts of his overall shift in technique in the 2020s.

Speaking to Guitar Player in a 2024 interview, Knopfler revealed that he's “started using more and more fingerpicking and less and less plectruming.

“I think lack of use, plus three bouts of COVID, probably phased out the plectrum for me. I just kept losing them and would be fingerpicking more — not necessarily fingerpicking better, just more. And it proved to be just a bit more comfortable for me.”

That said, Knopfler — self-effacing throughout his discussion with GP — is on no high horse about his fondness for fingerpicking, even saying that using a pick is inherently better.

“I want to bow to the plectrum and say it’s a superior thing,” Knopfler said. “It’s louder. It’s faster. It’s got a better signal. It’s the best amplifier there is. I didn’t give it up until recently. I was capable of playing things with a plectrum quite a lot, and I would do all the rhythm parts with one all the time.”

Elsewhere in his chat with GP, Knopfler — to an arguably ridiculous extent — went in further on what he sees as the deficiencies as his playing, saying that his “grip on the guitar has gotten even worse.

“[His] songwriting — it takes you away from concentrating on playing, and it accentuates the simplicity of a lot of my stuff that I want out of the guitar,” the guitarist said.

“I’ve almost become a sort of a half-player in the sense that I only tend to play half the notes that are there that I could play, and my fingering is all wrong. I don’t hold the neck properly; I hold the neck like a plumber holds a hammer, not in a proper, artistic way.”

Paul McCartney says he often found himself consulting an old songwriting partner while writing his latest solo album, The Boys from Dungeon Lane.

The record is an ode to the Liverpool streets, landmarks and memories that shaped McCartney's youth — territory he famously explored decades earlier alongside John Lennon in some of the Beatles' most celebrated songs.

“My collaborator was probably one of the best writers of the century,” McCartney tells The Guardian. “So, yeah, you're going to miss him.”

As the Beatles' principal songwriters, McCartney and Lennon spent years in constant creative dialogue, challenging and inspiring one another both in conversation and through song. Their shared memories of Liverpool often became fertile ground for that exchange.

When the pair turned their attention to childhood memories in late 1966, Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever,” inspired by the grounds of a Salvation Army children's home near where he grew up. McCartney answered with “Penny Lane,” a vivid portrait of the Liverpool street and surrounding neighborhood where he, Lennon and George Harrison spent time as teenagers.

Nearly 60 years later, McCartney found himself revisiting the same landscape while writing The Boys from Dungeon Lane. Even without Lennon by his side, he says the conversation continued.

“I kind of know he would've known it,” McCartney says. “I can gauge his reaction: ‘That's good, stick that in.'”

The imagined exchanges were a reminder of a partnership that helped define popular music — and of the loss that came when Lennon was murdered in 1980.

“But that's life,” McCartney says. “You lose people.”

The subject of loss is one McCartney has thought about increasingly as he has grown older. He recalls Beatles producer George Martin, who was older than the band members, warning him that aging inevitably means watching friends and colleagues pass away.

“Now I'm probably at that age,” McCartney says, “and I'm very conscious of that, having lost John and George — two big touchstones for anything we're talking about.

“So, yeah, you do miss them,” he continues. “I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.' It's not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it's life, and it's what we've got.'”

McCartney and Lennon grew up together and learned to write songs together, face to face, with acoustic guitars in hand. While one half of the partnership has been gone for more than four decades, McCartney's comments suggest that, in some ways, the conversation never really ended.

Alice Cooper didn’t just inspire Lzzy Hale’s taste in music — he helped her learn to embrace being different.

The Halestorm frontwoman says hearing Cooper’s 1971 classic “I’m Eighteen” as a child was a defining moment, one that ultimately gave her permission to stop worrying about fitting in.

"When I was about 11 years old, the song that really got me was Alice Cooper’s ’I’m Eighteen,’’ from Love It to Death," Hale tells Metal Hammer. “I actually ended up taking the CD to a sleepover, and the girls all looked at me like I was an alien from outer space.”

Rather than discouraging her, the experience helped confirm that she was on her own path.

“Now as an adult, I’m out here owning my weird, and it probably was because of Alice Cooper,” she says. “He gave me permission to find my own path.”

Hale was discussing the 10 albums that changed her life, a list that includes Cooper’s Love It to Death alongside records by Black Sabbath, Jeff Buckley and Soundgarden. But Cooper’s album stands apart because of the impact it had on her at such a formative age.

Speaking previously with Guitar Player, Hale recalled discovering the record in the mid-1990s, just before she and her younger brother, Arejay, began the musical journey that would eventually become Halestorm.

“My friends were listening to Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey; I was listening to classic rock from my parents’ generation,” she said. “They gave me a few records, like, ‘Listen to this. This is real rock,’ and Love It to Death, and it hooked me right away.”

After the sleepover, Hale told her father that the other girls thought she was weird because of the music she liked.

“I said, ‘I don’t know, Dad. They didn’t like my music. They think I'm weird,’” she remembered.

His response stayed with her.

“He said that was a good thing. He said, ‘You listen to Alice Cooper not because the other kids listen to it. You listen to Alice Cooper because you love it, and that's amazing.’”

Looking back, Hale sees that moment as a turning point — the point at which she stopped trying to follow the crowd and started trusting her own instincts.

“I didn’t care if nobody else liked my music. I liked it, and that was enough,” she told Guitar Player. “It can be hard at times to find your crew — the people like you. But then once you find them, you can develop and become a force to be reckoned with.”

For Hale, Alice Cooper’s music didn’t just introduce her to hard rock. It helped her realize that being different wasn’t something to hide — it was something to build a life around.

Hale has proven to be a trailblazer, too, becoming Kramer’s first female signature artist with her X-shaped Voyager guitar, and was also named Gibson’s first female Brand Ambassador. Her pre-programmed defiance, she says, is her superpower.

“I didn’t care if nobody else liked my music. I liked it, and that was enough,” she tells Guitar Player. “It can be hard at times to find your crew — the people like you. But then once you find them, you can develop and become a force to be reckoned with.”

Few guitarists have shaped rock music more profoundly than Eddie Van Halen. But according to Jesus and Mary Chain co-founder William Reid, that influence came with a downside.

“I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing,” Reid says. “I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ’80s and ’90s because so many people copied him.”

Reid made the remarks during a recent interview with Stereogum alongside his brother and bandmate, Jim Reid. The conversation began with a discussion about simplicity, creativity and the virtues of working within limitations, but eventually turned to the late Van Halen guitarist and the impact he had on generations of electric guitar players.

“Not having a lot of equipment forces you to be more inventive,” Jim Reid says. “I can play guitar, but only just. It’s kinda deliberate. I play guitar to the level I need to.

“Sometimes knowing too much about making music gets in the way, and it ends up back to Eddie Van Halen again.”

William Reid was even less charitable.

“I think guitar players should never learn scales,” he says before describing Van Halen as one of “the worst guitar players in the world.”

“I can’t stand Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing. I think he ruined rock guitar all through the ’80s and ’90s because so many people copied him. And I just couldn’t get any of that playing as fast as you fucking can and cramming as many notes in one second as you could.”

It’s a remarkable criticism of a guitarist whose influence remains virtually unmatched in rock. Following the release of Van Halen in 1978 and the groundbreaking instrumental “Eruption,” Van Halen inspired countless players to rethink what could be done on the instrument, ushering in an era of technical innovation that dominated guitar culture throughout the 1980s.

Yet Reid’s criticism isn’t really aimed at Van Halen’s abilities as a player. Rather, it’s directed at the wave of imitators who followed in his wake and embraced speed and technical prowess as ends in themselves.

As an example of the kind of musician he admires, Reid pointed to Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook.

“I listen to Peter Hook’s bass riffs,” he says, “and I think that’s a thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever conjure up.”

The comparison underscores a divide that has existed in rock music for decades. On one side are players who push the technical boundaries of the instrument. On the other are musicians who place a higher value on mood, melody and memorable parts than sheer virtuosity.

The Jesus and Mary Chain have long belonged to the latter camp. Formed in Scotland in 1983, the band became one of alternative rock’s most influential acts, helping lay the groundwork for the shoegaze movement with its blend of pop melodies, feedback and noise.

Whether fans agree with Reid or not, his comments are a reminder that one of rock’s oldest arguments remains unresolved: Is great guitar playing about technical achievement, or about creating something unforgettable with the fewest possible notes?

Chrissie Hynde is the latest artist to speak out against fans filming concerts on their phones, and she isn't mincing words.

In a two-page letter posted to social media, the Pretenders electric guitar–slinging frontwoman lamented what she called an “unpleasant fog hanging over the heads of all artists” and questioned why concertgoers feel compelled to document every moment instead of experiencing it.

“Why do people have to film or take pictures at concerts or museums?” she asked. “Why do people have to know how many steps they take every day? What difference does it make?

“You can plaster a venue with signs requesting ‘No cameras,’ but people don't respect it. It's as if people feel entitled, even though the artist clearly has asked them not to do it.”

Hynde pointed to Bob Dylan's phone-free concerts as proof that even direct requests from major artists often go ignored.

“Bob Dylan ensures that phones are sealed in a bag before a show,” she wrote. “You would think an artist of his stature could make a simple request, and the audience would respect it. No chance. People will still sneak in a camera or a phone. It's like a weird compulsion that people can't control.”

Dylan isn't alone. Artists like Tool, Ghost and Kate Bush have adopted phone-free policies or appealed to fans to keep devices out of sight during performances. But Hynde's frustration goes beyond simple concert etiquette.

“It reminds me of monkeys wanking in full view of the people standing around their enclosure,” she said. “No one seems to understand why artists don't like it. If you've ever had a mosquito buzzing around your head when you're trying to go to sleep, you will get a vague idea of what it's like to have people filming your show or taking photos while you're on stage.

“If Jesus Christ were to walk into a room, the first thing everyone would do would be to pull out their phone. Can someone please explain?”

The comments are consistent with Hynde's long-standing preference for genuine, lived experiences. The singer-guitarist, who has played the same 1965 Ice Blue Telecaster since the 1980s, has often reflected on the formative experiences that shaped her career, from forcing her way into London's punk scene to memorable encounters with Motörhead bass guitarist Lemmy Kilmister.

For Hynde, the problem isn't technology itself. It's the feeling that too many people are watching life through a screen instead of participating in the show.

Steve Farris holds a distinction no guitarist envies: he may have been a member of Kiss for the shortest time in the band’s history.

The future Mr. Mister guitarist was effectively hired and fired during the sessions for Kiss’s 1982 album Creatures of the Night. Yet during his brief stint in the band’s orbit, he accomplished something few people can claim: he sang lead vocals on the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” with Kiss.

At the time, Kiss were searching for a replacement for departing guitarist Ace Frehley. Their commercial peak was behind them, and as work began on what would become Creatures of the Night, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were auditioning players to help revitalize the band.

Farris was playing original music with a group that included three members of country-rock veterans Poco when an unexpected opportunity arrived during a packed show at the Blue Lagoon Saloon in Marina del Rey.

“I play a set, and in that band I had lots of guitar solos. The place was packed,” he tells Vertex Effects. “After the set, some tall guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Ace Frehley’s leaving Kiss. Will you be interested in auditioning?’

“And I’m like, ‘Well, I eat peanut butter and jelly every day, and my Volkswagen Rabbit doesn’t start unless I push it off the clutch. Yeah, I would do that.’”

The man scribbled a phone number on a napkin, and Farris hurriedly assembled an audition tape featuring demos and “anything I could find that showed I played guitar well.”

“Two weeks later, I get a call,” he recalls. “It’s Paul Stanley. He says, ‘Gene and I listened to your tape last night, and we really liked it. We’re down at the Record Plant cutting a record, and we’re having guys come and play on the record. It’s kind of an audition. Want to come down?’”

The answer was obvious.

The next day, Farris arrived at New York’s Record Plant carrying little more than a guitar, a few pedals and a dream.

“I’ve got my Valley Arts Strat, a Goodrich pedal, and a CE-1 Chorus,” he says. “They’re in Studio Four, I’m walking [down the corridor], and Tom Petty’s coming out of one studio, Luther Vandross is on the phone [in another].”

After spending three hours waiting in the hallway while other players auditioned, Farris finally got his shot.

“They’re in the control room, and they hand me a cable. There’s a Marshall in the other room,” he recalls. “Gene and Paul are standing there looking at me.”

He was asked to play an eight-bar solo. Then he played it again.

The response was immediate.

“Can you dye your hair black? Can you wear high heels?”

Farris answered yes to both questions.

“Fuck man,” they replied. “We got the guy.”

“They’re going nuts,” he says. “They say, ‘Don’t cut your hair, we’ll see you Tuesday.’ I was the guy after two solos. The second take is what you hear on the record.”

But the celebration proved premature.

When Farris returned the following week for a full-band rehearsal, Kiss asked him to do something he hadn’t expected: sing.

As Farris explains, he’s not a singer. But he knew he needed to be.

“I realized at one moment, ‘Wow, I’m going to take a stab at this. If I don’t sing, I don’t get the gig,’” he says. “It’s one of those moments. So I have the dubious distinction of having played ‘Honky Tonk Women’ with Kiss, with me singing lead vocal. I wish I had that tape.”

The audition didn’t go as planned. Although Simmons and Stanley loved his guitar playing, they ultimately decided he wasn’t the right fit. Farris remained involved in the Creatures of the Night sessions, but the permanent job eventually went to Vinnie Vincent — the guitarist Ace Frehley would later criticize for playing “too fast.”

More than four decades later, Farris can still laugh about the experience.

“I still do interviews about that freaking solo,” he says.

Not bad for the shortest-serving member in Kiss history.

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first encounter with Jimi Hendrix didn’t come from some carefully curated record collection or a mentor’s recommendation. It came out of a trash bin.

As Vaughan recalled to Guitar Player in 1989, his brother Jimmie returned from a gig in Dallas one night with a discarded Hendrix album he’d found behind a club.

“The first time | ever heard Jimi’s name was when my brother brought home a record of his. | guess it was around '67, and Jimmie had found it in a trash bin. He recognized it because he'd seen a short paragraph about Jimi Hendrix in a magazine, and he knew he was supposed to be something really happening.”

“He put it on the record player, and what could you do but say ‘Yeah!’” Stevie laughed. “It really knocked my socks off.”

At the time, Vaughan was still a teenager — barely 15 — and like so many of his generation, he learned guitar the hard way: by listening repeatedly until the music gave up its secrets. Hendrix’s records became a private master class in his room.

“I remember getting my little stereo — an Airline with the cardboard satellite speakers — and I would mic that up with a Shure PA that I had in my bedroom.

“For some of my first gigs, I’d rent four separate reverbs, and I’d have all this set up in my room. Of course, the parents were at work. I would go in there and floorboard it—dress up as cool as I could and try to learn his stuff.”

No instruction — just repetition, obsession, and a willingness to chase every nuance of the music on his electric guitar.

But Hendrix wasn’t just another technical hurdle. For Vaughan, he was proof that the blues could be something larger.

By the time SRV was famous and speaking publicly about Hendrix, he was pushing back against the idea that his music was untouchable. In his view, Hendrix wasn’t an outsider to the blues tradition — he was one of its most radical extensions.

“Some people don’t see that Jimi Hendrix was a blues player,” he said. “I hear it in the way he approaches things. Even though he wasn’t ashamed at all of doing some things differently, I still hear the roots of the old style.”

That perspective carried directly into SRV’s playing. Hendrix material wasn’t something he kept at arm’s length; it was part of his live arsenal. And he never treated that decision as controversial.

“For some reason, there seems to be a thing about it being sacrilegious to play Jimi Hendrix’s music. I think he would call bullshit on that,” he said from a London limo in 1988. “I may be wrong, but it seems he would want his music to be out there, just as accessible as anyone else’s.

“Hendrix was not scared to take [his] influences and incorporate them into his music,” he added. “Now, some people look at that as ripping people off. If it’s added to, and it comes out as yourself… it’s still got a new bite to it.”

Which is exactly what SRV did throughout his career. He honored Hendrix while cutting his own path as he stunned both David Bowie and Eric Johnson, and left Jeff Beck to compare him to his old friend Jimi.

Fittingly, Hendrix never left Stevie’s setlist. Vaughan’s final live performance closed with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” a full-circle moment that underscored how deeply the connection ran.

When the Beatles arrived at Olympic Studios in May 1967, Eddie Kramer and the staff knew it wouldn’t be a typical session.

“Olympic gets the call: The Beatles are coming in,” Kramer tells Rick Beato in a new interview. “Holy shit, that’s royalty.”

The band had just completed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but their creativity showed no signs of slowing. Sessions soon began for the songs that would become Magical Mystery Tour.

But when Abbey Road was unavailable, the Beatles decided to record outside their usual home for the first time. The session would produce “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” and give Kramer — who would soon go on to engineer many of Jimi Hendrix’s most celebrated recordings — a front-row seat to one of John Lennon’s most inspired studio moments.

“The session started at 7:00 p.m., and we finished at 7:00 a.m. the next morning,” Kramer recalls. “We tracked it, overdubbed it and mixed it all in one night. Bam, done. Thank you. Gone.”

What stuck with him most, however, was watching Lennon stumble across the song’s distinctive keyboard sound.

“We’ve got the table full of junk, all kinds of stuff,” Kramer says. “On ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’ there’s a sound that goes [imitates the song’s warbling synth solo]. So John, being John, looks at the table and he says, ‘What’s all this, then?’ I said, ‘Well, this is left over from a previous session.’

“There was this beautiful wooden speaker cabinet with an amplifier in it and a series of little keyboards. And one was a Clavioline, a French electronic instrument for musique concrète.

“So I said, ‘Look, it’s a keyboard. You can play the note, but you can shake the keyboard from side to side to get vibrato.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s great then. Let me have a go.’”

Lennon put on a pair of headphones and, within minutes, had worked out the part and recorded it. The Clavioline's wobbly lead remains one of the defining sounds of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and one of the instrument’s most famous appearances on a hit record.

The session also offered a glimpse of how differently Olympic operated from Abbey Road. A former theater converted into a recording studio in 1966, Olympic prided itself on being more contemporary and rock-oriented than Abbey Road, which was built for classical and pop music.

“We were the competitors, let’s face it,” Kramer says. “And I think we had a better shot at it because I think our stuff was more aggressive, more state-of-the-art.”

According to senior engineer Keith Grant, the pace surprised the Beatles.

“I do a lot of orchestral work and you naturally push people along. The Beatles said that this was the fastest record they’d ever made,” he recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “They were used to a much more leisurely pace. They kept on playing, version after version, then we spooled back to the one they liked and overdubbed the vocals.”

The Beatles were impressed enough to return to Olympic a few weeks later. On June 14, they recorded the backing track for “All You Need Is Love,” which they would perform on the global television broadcast Our World on June 25. Producer George Martin wanted a prerecorded track available in case technical problems derailed the live transmission.

Kramer was once again behind the console.

“I got the call: ‘Eddie, the Beatles are coming back, you wanna do it?’” he recalled to Guitar World in 2012. “I said, ‘Yeah, lovely.’

“They were so disarming and so great in the studio. They were very targeted about what they’d come in to achieve. They were wonderful.”

The Who’s Roger Daltrey says his band invented heavy metal — and he believes the evidence is already on the record.

Most fans credit Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath with creating heavy metal in the late 1960s, forging a darker and heavier sound in industrial Birmingham after Iommi abandoned the Stratocaster-style guitar he nearly launched the band with.

But others have long argued they helped lay the groundwork. Paul McCartney famously tried to “dirty up” rock music with the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” while Blue Cheer turned Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” into one of proto-metal’s defining early statements.

Daltrey’s argument, however, has less to do with specific songs than with the Who’s sheer volume, aggression, and use of feedback at a time when few bands were operating at that intensity.

“We were just different than everybody else,” Daltrey tells Rolling Stone. “Americans don’t really know the Who from the early ’60s, but as the drummer of Deep Purple [Ian Paice] said recently in a magazine, ‘The Who started it all.’ We were the first heavy metal band.”

For proof, Daltrey points to Pete Townshend’s pioneering use of Marshall amplification and the destructive stage theatrics that later became synonymous with hard rock.

“Jim Marshall invented the 4×12, 100-watt stack for Pete Townshend,” Daltrey said. “All the guitar smashing that Jimi Hendrix became famous for, in his style, was basically copied from Pete Townshend.”

In truth, Ronnie Wood laid the groundwork for the 4x12 stack, but there’s some truth to Daltrey’s claim. Townshend’s quest for ever-louder stage volume helped push amplifier design into new territory, laying groundwork for the massive guitar tones that would later define hard rock and metal. The Who’s confrontational performances and instrument destruction also established a blueprint for the genre’s rebellious spirit.

Daltrey even argues that albums like The Who Sell Out and Tommy helped elevate rock into something more ambitious and theatrical.

“We elevated rock to be maybe up its own ass in a way, you could say it,” he said.

Whether that makes the Who the inventors of heavy metal is another question entirely.

While the band undeniably influenced rock’s volume, attitude, and presentation, many fans still view Sabbath as the group that fully established metal as a distinct musical language. Iommi’s downtuned riffs, ominous songwriting, and industrial heaviness created a sound that countless bands would follow.

Other musicians have also staked their own claims. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page both argued that the guitar riff in “Beck's Bolero” was among heavy metal’s earliest defining moments — although they never agreed on who actually wrote it.

Ultimately, the strongest argument for Sabbath may be the reaction the band provoked.

“When Sabbath first played in the USA, people were frightened of us,” Iommi once told Classic Rock. “They thought we’d turn them into a frog! It was very peculiar. They were frightened to death!”

That sense of menace and shock became central to heavy metal’s identity — and it’s a large part of why many fans still place Sabbath on the throne, even if the Who helped build the stage beneath it.

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 says. “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 says, 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 recalls. “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 says 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.

Most stolen guitars never find their way back to their owners. Lita Ford's electric did — when a guitarist auditioning for her band walked into her studio carrying it.

The instrument in question was a beloved B.C. Rich Mockingbird that Ford had long assumed was gone for good.

“It was a gorgeous guitar, a turquoise-green Mockingbird, ebony fretboard, no fret inlays,” she tells Guitarist.

Then, during auditions for her band, Ford got a shock.

“There was a time when I was auditioning guitar players,” she explains. “They were coming over to my studio, and one guy comes in with that turquoise guitar. I looked at it and I thought, That's my guitar.

"And he looks at me and says, ‘Oh yeah, isn't this a great guitar?’”

Rather than confront him, Ford listened as the guitarist explained how he'd come to own the instrument.

According to Ford, he told her: “‘I bought it off some guy on the street for 350 bucks. Can you believe that? It's my favorite guitar ever.’”

What happened next may be even more surprising than the guitar's reappearance.

“I just couldn't take it away from him,” Ford says. “I let him have it. Of course, he didn't get the audition, but he got to keep the guitar, and he didn't know it was mine.”

That decision makes Ford's story especially unusual. Recoveries of famous stolen guitars are rare enough in rock history; cases where the original owner knowingly lets the instrument disappear a second time are even rarer.

Among the better-known recovery stories is George Harrison's Cherry Red "Lucy" Gibson Les Paul, heard on the Beatles' “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which eventually found its way back to him after being stolen. Nuno Bettencourt was likewise reunited with his double-neck Washburn after it disappeared in one of rock's more brazen stage thefts.

Other famous instruments remain missing, however, including Eric Clapton's "Beano" Les Paul, Harrison's 1965 Rickenbacker and Joe Satriani's Pearly prototype.

Occasionally, thefts produce unexpected twists. After Sonic Youth's gear was stolen in 1999, Patti Smith gifted Thurston Moore a Fender Jazzmaster that later proved to be an exceptionally rare instrument. Former Guns N' Roses guitarist DJ Ashba's prototype signature model surfaced on Pawn Stars, while Randy Bachman recovered his prized 1957 Gretsch 6120 some 45 years after it disappeared.

The most remarkable recovery story may belong to Paul McCartney's 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass. Long presumed lost, the instrument became the focus of an international search effort after McCartney casually wondered about its whereabouts in 2019. The resulting Lost Bass project tracked it to an attic in England more than 50 years after it was stolen during the sessions for Wings' Red Rose Speedway. McCartney has since been reunited with the bass and performed with it again, as well as appeared in a documentary about its disappearance, McCartney: The Lost Bass.

As one of the most recorded guitarists in history, Louie Shelton has stories to tell about recording tracks by Boz Scaggs (“Lowdown”), Whitney Houston (her global breakthrough “Saving All My Love for You”) and Lionel Richie (“Hello”), among dozens of others.

But one gig hit particularly close to home — not for Shelton but for Guitar Player.

“I was playing at the Flamingo in Las Vegas with Seals & Crofts,” Shelton recalls of his time with the soft-rock duo from the 1970s. “There was another similar group that was alternating with us. On this particular night, the guitar player of the other group broke his foot, so I had to fill in for him for that show.”

Years later, Shelton had a chance meeting with the anonymous guitarist.

“I never knew who he was until much later, when I walked into the offices of Guitar Player magazine in Monterey, California, to introduce myself to the president,” he says. “And he says to me, ‘You may not remember me, but you filled in for me once in Las Vegas.’ It was Guitar Player magazine founder Bud Eastman!”

Shelton has spoken to us about his time recording for the Monkees. Here, he tells us tales behind two other sessions: one famous, one infamous.

Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown”

By the 1970s, having made a name for himself through his session work, Shelton decided to expand his horizons by moving into production. Over the next decades he produced albums for soft-rock acts that included his friends Seals & Crofts, Art Garfunkel, and England Dan & John Ford Coley. But he still found himself in demand for studio recording.

“When I did a lot of those big records like the Boz Scaggs, Whitney Houston and Lionel Richie records, I wasn’t even a session player,” he states. “I would occasionally get called asking if I could come in for a session on guitar. And I’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’

“But I had moved into producing Seals & Crofts and was officially a producer on the Seals & Crofts records. And when I started producing Seals & Crofts, I had used [future Toto members] David Paich, Jeff Porcaro and David Hungate [keyboards, drums and bass, respectively].”

In the fall of 1975, Paich, Porcaro and Hungate were at work on Silk Degrees, Boz Scaggs’ 1976 album. After years without a hit — including a memorable session with Duane Allman — Scaggs would score big with Silk Degrees, making him a breakout star and going five time Platinum.

“When David got the gig to do the Boz Scaggs gig, he thought I would be the right guy to join that little group. So he called me and asked me if I wanted to do it.

One of Shelton’s favorite moments on record is the fiery solo he put to tape on “Lowdown.” Scaggs has referred to the song — little more than a two-chord vamp from Em9 to A6 — as “an accident” that didn’t have “a chance in hell” of becoming a hit. Still, they all liked the song and put it on the album as the opener to side two.

“The solo was an improvised thing where they just simply asked me to fill in the spaces,” Shelton says. “We had a chord chart and they instructed me to play something from bar 38 or whatever. All of that stuff was spontaneous. Nothing was planned. I was just listening to the song and reading the chord chart and I improvised something straight off the cuff.

“And it was all a first take. There was no going back and punching in or planning a solo. I just played a clean rhythm with my Telecaster through a ’69 Fender Princeton Reverb amp throughout the song until it was time to play some guitar lines. Then when it came to the guitar solo, I had a little distortion pedal, a basic Boss pedal that cost $30, that I clicked on to add some color to the solo.”

Shelton’s solo was exactly the element the track needed to help it crossover from disco to rock. When a Cleveland disc jockey decided to play “Lowdown” right off the album — it hadn’t been released as a single yet — it quickly caught on with listeners, leading other radio stations to follow suit. It became the album’s breakout hit, serving as a gateway to Silk Degrees’ chart-topping success.

John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album

But not every session is as successful. Shelton was among the many guitarists — including Larry Carlton — hired to perform on John Lennon’s 1975 solo album, Rock ’n’ Roll. Produced by Phil Spector, the album was made over one year, from October 1973 to October 1974, during a time when Lennon was deep into partying and drinking.

The sessions were so loose that no one can be sure exactly who played on what songs. Carlton says that while he and Leon Russell attempted a recording of “Bony Moronie” with Lennon, the session ended in failure, yet both performers are credited on the album.

Shelton’s experience was quite similar.

“The session was very disorganized,” he recalls. “John pretty much didn’t have much say as far as the arrangement or anything else on that album. When John showed up for the session, Jim Keltner, the drummer on the session, introduced me to him, and John couldn’t have been nicer.

“But Spector, who was producing the session, came in late wearing a black cape, a top hat and the darkest sunglasses he could find. He was supposed to bring in an old Stax R&B record that he and John wanted us to cover for the session, but Spector didn’t have the record with him. They had to send his driver back to the hotel to retrieve it.”

While they waited for the producer to return, Shelton and Lennon chatted.

“We had a conversation about my playing on the Monkees’ ‘Last Train to Clarksville,’” he recalls. “John told me that I had a done a great job on it. But I told him that I was just copying George Harrison!

“It was a great opportunity to just have a chat with him, because I was a big Beatles fan. I was the kind that, even though I'm a guitar player that liked to listen to the jazz guys like Wes Montgomery and others, I’d also grab the next Beatles record and take it home and really listen to it with my sound system. So I was flattered that I even got to do that one session with John.”

When the driver finally returned with the record, Spector ordered Shelton and the crew to listen to the record and figure out their parts by ear.

“We had a lot of musicians in the room, but none of us were given a chart,” the guitarist explains. “Usually there's at least a chord chart. If you’ve got five or six musicians, you’d want to give them a chord chart but, instead we had to listen to the record and do our own chord charts.”

At the outset of Shelton’s session career, his gear had been limited to just a ’64 Fender Telecaster and a ’64 Fender Super Reverb combo. “Before all the session gigs, I could only afford one guitar, as we didn’t make a lot of money playing the club,” he explains. “So if I wanted a different guitar, I had to trade my old one.

“But as the sessions became regular work, I was able to I buy an ES-335, a Fender Strat, a Gibson Byrdland and a bunch of acoustic guitars. But the Telecaster was my main electric guitar, and still is to this day. The Tele seems to handle just about everything.”

For months after the session, Shelton heard nothing about it, and no new Lennon album was released. Spector had been taking the master tapes home at night and they “disappeared” some time after the sessions wrapped.

“The master tapes from the sessions went missing and because of that, John and Phil had a falling out,” Shelton says. “A couple of years after my session, Phil got into a car accident in L.A. and they found those tapes in the boot of his car. And that’s when the album, with the session that I played on, finally came out.”

He was a link in a chain of New Orleans pianists that includes Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Allen Toussaint and James Booker.

But the late Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack started out as a guitar player in the early 1950s, intent on playing country blues until he was dissuaded from the idea. In his autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of Dr. John the Night Tripper, Mac described how his first teacher, Fats Domino guitarist Walter “Papoose” Nelson, steered him away from trying to become a Lightnin’ Hopkins clone.

“Papoose listened to my chops and said, ‘Man, you can’t play that outta-meter, foot-beater jive and get a job.’ He insisted I learn to read music and got me listening to guys like Billy Butler and Mickey Baker.”

Mac became a session player at J&M Studios in New Orleans, backing artists such as Earl King, James Booker and Lee Dorsey, as well as Little Richard and Professor Longhair, with whom he also performed.

Beyond session work on electric and acoustic guitar, Rebennack played in his own band, Mac Rebennack and the Skyliners, and performed with his high school friend Ronnie Barron throughout New Orleans.

Guitar would likely have remained his main instrument if it hadn’t been for an incident on Christmas Eve in ’61.

“We was at a motel in Jacksonville, Florida, getting ready to go to a gig, when our singer Ronnie Barron disappeared,” Rebennack recalled. “I found him being pistol-whipped by the motel owner, who’d caught Ronnie with his old lady.

“As I tried to wrestle the gun away from the guy, it went off. I looked down and saw the second finger of my left hand dangling by a thread.”

Doctors managed to reattach the finger, and a short spell playing primarily bass guitar, Mac eventually regained most of its use and returned to playing guitar. “I just developed a way to play around it, like Django.”

At the same time, Rebennack went on to develop his talents as a premier New Orleans–style pianist, blending funk, boogie-woogie, blues and jazz into a unique, syncopated, “double-fisted” approach. In the mid 1960s, he created his Dr. John the Night Tripper persona and, in 1973, scored a top-10 hit with “Right Place, Wrong Time.”

Rebennack continued to play guitar on records and stages and, according to his friend, guitarist Shane Theriot — who has no shortage of great Dr. John stories — owned a Gibson ES-335 semihollow purchased from James Burton. Mac told Guitar Player in 1994 that many of the tunes on his then-new album, Television, were worked up on his original choice of instrument.

“I find that some grooves lay almost directly out of the guitar, just from the nature of the instrument being something that you stroke,” he said. “The whole concept of the New Orleans rhythm style is to support the rhythm section. If you play a solo, you’ve gotta keep enough of a comp going so the groove don’t get lost.”

Had he not been injured, there’s every reason to believe Mac would have continued as a first-call regional guitarist. Instead, the injury redirected him toward piano — and, ultimately, immortality as Dr. John the Night Tripper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for the famous chorus?

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

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

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

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

Which is definitely a far cry from playing something dumb.

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