Although they started as indie-rock outsiders, the Goo Goo Dolls became mainstream rock favorites almost overnight when “Name” — an uncharacteristically mellow, acoustic guitar ballad — reached the top five of the U.S. singles chart in 1996. It was a bittersweet moment for the trio, which then featured singer/guitarist John Rzeznik, bassist Robby Takac and drummer Mike Malinin.

“We took some serious abuse from a chunk of our original fanbase,” Rzeznik recalls, “but we made a lot more new fans. I guess if people don’t want to stick with you once you break through, then what can you do?”

Undeterred by the backlash to “Name,” the band pushed further beyond its original sound three years later, when it recorded Rzeznik’s song “Iris” for the 1998 film City of Angels, giving it an orchestral arrangement. The move paid off: “Iris” reached the top 10 in the U.S. and several international charts.

The song has since become a streaming phenomenon, surpassing 3.81 billion plays on Spotify and ranking among the platform’s most-streamed tracks worldwide. The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” had edged ahead, with 3.83 billion streams at the time of writing.

“I never expected that to happen,” Rzeznik says. “It’s interesting to me that a song I wrote for a film should have such a big life of its own. I guess a lot of people will know the song and yet never even know who Goo Goo Dolls are.”

As Rzeznik tells Guitar Player, “Iris” marked a major turning point for the band, both commercially and musically.

“The scale of the success of this marked a major career shift for us as a band,” he says. “This was the one that really took everything up another level in terms of recognition and success, and it definitely shut the door on the portion of our career before that. I remember Robby and I looked at each other when the strings were being recorded, and we asked ourselves, ‘Should we really be doing this?’

“Then we both kind of agreed: Yeah, definitely. It was cool, you know? I’m glad we did it. Like anything in life, we took some shit for it, you know, but who cares? No matter what you do, you’re wrong I guess, but the rewards outweighed the crap we took from certain quarters.”

Rzeznik has long used alternate tunings to spur his creativity, and “Iris” was no exception.

“The tuning for this was B D D D D — I took the top E string off,” he explains. “I originally wrote it on a guitar with four strings, because I was trying to drop the notes in pitch, and I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

For the recording, Rzeznik brought in session guitarist Tim Pierce to play mandolin. But Pierce had other ideas. As he tells Guitar Player, he arrived prepared to play electric guitar, too, bringing his full rig to the studio.

“I thought, ‘This is a rock band. I’m not going to show up carrying a tiny mandolin case. I’m going to bring my rig and try to do some electric guitar.’ I called cartage and had them bring all my electric guitars and gear to the studio.

“I did three mandolin passes, which everybody liked. I went into the control room, and Rob Cavallo, the producer, looked at my gear and said, ‘We’ve got this other section — wanna try your hand at a solo?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ My secret plan was working.

“I found out later that the band was annoyed at me for bringing all my gear, but Rob was open-minded and said, ‘Let him play something on electric, and we’ll see what happens.’ And it started a love affair between me and the guys in the Goo Goo Dolls that's never ended.

“‘Iris’ is the biggest song I've ever played on. In some ways, it might be one of the best songs I've ever played on.”

Pierce isn’t alone in that assessment. “Iris” appeared on the Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl, released later in 1998. The album became the group’s most successful, selling more than four million copies.

Rzeznik has no qualms about Pierce’s decision to bring his electric-guitar rig to the session, especially given the results.

“I’m always much more concerned about the song than my ego,” he says, “so that means that if I think someone can come in and add something that will take it to another level, I’m happy to see what transpires. Tim Pierce played some great things on this — he came up with ideas that I would’ve never created, and the net outcome is that the song was improved.

“I learned early on that my limitations are not really limitations. I’m not a trained musician at all. Some people might consider that a limitation, but I don’t.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan was still a studio greenhorn when David Bowie invited him to play guitar on Let’s Dance in 1982.

At the time, the Texas electric blues guitarist was largely unknown outside regional circles. Vaughan had begun attracting attention with his band Double Trouble, but he had yet to release the debut album — Texas Flood — that would soon make him one of the most celebrated guitarists of his generation.

“That entire recording experience helped a whole bunch, and in a lot of ways,” Vaughan told Guitar Player in 1983. “I learned a lot about playing—particularly in terms of recording techniques — and about business.”

As album producer Nile Rodgers recalls, Vaughan quickly figured out not only how to approach the music but — just as importantly — how to fit into the room when he showed up with his “Number One” Fender Strat and 1964 Fender Vibroverb amp .

Rodgers remembers the guitarist’s reaction the first time he heard the title track in the control room.

“The look on his face when he first walked into the control room and heard ‘Let’s Dance’ was like, ‘Oh my God — I’m experiencing something important and magical. What do I do? How do I fit in on this thing? I have to get out of their way and just add spice.’

“I didn’t have to tell him anything. He instinctively knew his role was like, ‘The meal is fantastic—now here’s the dessert.’

“And, bang, he nailed it.”

Vaughan also understood that relationships in the studio mattered. Seeing how hard the musicians were working — and how little time they had to step away — he found a simple way to show his appreciation.

“He wanted to bond with them so that he’d be accepted as family, too,” Rodgers says. “He also knew we were making Let’s Dance like a Black record. White bands would book the studio for months and months, but Black records only got a few hours. We’d work an eight-hour shift because we had lower budgets than rock albums.

“So we would order our food at the beginning of the day so it was here when we took a break for lunch. We’d eat and — boom — back to work.

“Stevie saw we were doing that, and he called Sam’s BBQ in Austin, Texas, to order lunch for the day he came in. We didn’t know this, so we started putting in our lunch order, and Stevie said, ‘Y’all, I got lunch today.’

“The next thing you know, all this BBQ came in. I was like, ‘Check this dude out. He’s right up on the vibe.’ And from that moment, Stevie and I became like brothers.”

The sessions for Let’s Dance, released in 1983, would prove pivotal for both artists. The album became Bowie’s biggest commercial success, while Vaughan’s stinging blues guitar — heard on tracks like “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl” — helped give the sleek pop record an unexpected edge.

Within months of the album’s release, Vaughan issued Texas Flood and emerged as a major force in modern blues guitar — proof that the young musician who walked into Bowie’s studio eager to “add spice” was already bringing something special to the table.

Buddy Guy occupies a unique place in guitar history. He learned from blues giants including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker before going on to influence Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

As Buddy Guy enters the final week of his BG90 tour, celebrating his 90th birthday, it’s a fitting time to revisit a conversation with Guitar Player in which he explained why, despite everything that changed around him, he never felt the need to change himself. The tour, which launched in July, is scheduled to wrap up October 29 at the Graceland Soundstage in Memphis.

“I’ve learned a little more, but it’s still Buddy Guy,” he tells Guitar Player. “If you put me through a modern amplifier, somebody is going to say, ‘He don’t sound like he used to.’ Well, of course, the guitars and amps aren’t the same today. But the man is still the same. I’m using the same fingers I left Louisiana with.”

For Guy, that continuity wasn’t stubbornness so much as an understanding of where his music came from. The more he reflected on his own career, which began in 1953, the more he saw himself as part of a tradition rather than a singular talent.

“I can’t really say how my style has changed,” he said. “I used to tell T-Bone Walker, B.B., Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy, and John Lee Hooker — all those guys I learned from — that I didn’t have anything unique. Guess what they said? ‘Buddy, we got it from someone else, too.’”

The biggest lesson those legendary musicians passed on had little to do with technique.

“Oh, man, lesson number one is be cool,” Guy recalled. “They weren’t making any money, but they were having fun playing.”

Watching those pioneers of acoustic and electric blues shaped his outlook long before the genre found a larger audience through the British blues boom.

“I used to look at them and say, ‘Buddy, you ain’t never gonna be that good, and nobody is ever going to fill those shoes.’ Those guys weren’t superstars then, but I thought they were living the high life. It made me think, This is as high as you can go.

“Then the British groups got into the blues, and were able to live decently from it. But I still worked in the daytime. I drove a tow truck.”

Ironically, it was those same rock musicians who later helped introduce Guy to millions of listeners.

“It makes me feel great, because some of the things that people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan said about me have helped me more than any record company,” he said. “So many kids come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t know anything about you until I read what Eric Clapton said.’ That gives me a big lift.”

That gratitude didn’t stop Guy from acknowledging the inequalities he’d witnessed throughout his career.

“Let’s be honest — when you’re Black, it doesn’t matter how good a blues record you make, you’re not going to get it played on these big radio stations unless some super guy like Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan plays the same thing you played,” he said.

“Blues has been like that ever since I’ve been alive. It has been ignored until some rock group gets it, plays it to big audiences, and tells them whose music it is.”

Still, Guy never lost faith in either the music or the people who loved it.

“I guess that’s why we still sing the blues,” he said. “I just look at it like a prizefighter — if I don’t get in that ring and risk getting knocked out, I ain’t got a chance to win.”

Twenty years after the release of Back to Black, Amy Winehouse remains best known for her singular voice and candid songwriting. But there’s another side to her musicianship that deserves to be remembered alongside the landmark album: Winehouse was a distinctive guitarist who used the instrument to shape her songs and develop a style entirely her own.

Take it from Pete Doherty, singer and guitarist for the Libertines, who once watched Winehouse play up close. As Doherty told MusicRadar in 2024, Winehouse had a distinctive approach to the instrument.

“Listen, I’ve actually sat in a room with her and a guitar,” he said, “watching those tiny hands finding all these weird jazz chords. And her strumming patterns… crazy, off-kilter timings. She made it look so effortless.”

The anniversary celebrations have also brought Winehouse’s music back to the stage. On Wednesday, the Amy Winehouse Band reunited with original album producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi for a star-studded concert at London’s Roundhouse, performing Back to Black in full with guest vocalists including Corinne Bailey Rae, Jorja Smith and Yebba. The occasion offers another reason to revisit the musical instincts behind the album — including Winehouse’s distinctive approach to guitar.

Winehouse’s guitar playing was an extension of the same musical instincts that helped make Back to Black so distinctive. From an early age, she made electric guitar integral to her songwriting and performing, using the instrument to write songs and give them a personal touch. She first fell in love with the Fender Stratocaster as a teenager, after her older brother acquired a used model.

“It was the most beautiful thing in the world,” Winehouse recalled during a 2004 interview. “It’s such a beautiful guitar. I mean it’s got to be probably the most attractive guitar there is.”

Winehouse wasn’t supposed to play her brother’s Stratocaster, but she would carefully sneak into his room to play it whenever she had the chance. Those sessions helped her develop her chops. When she finally acquired a guitar of her own — an acoustic model — the siblings amicably swapped instruments back and forth.

“I just played every day. No one said to me, ‘You’ve got to play for at least this amount of time.’ It was all I wanted to do.

“It’s so easy to teach yourself if you have love for guitar. People say to me all the time, ‘How come you taught yourself?’ And there’s things people can show you, but the truth is, if you learn how to play guitar off someone, you just kind of learn to play it like them, you know what I mean? And that’s why I can say that while I’m not even an adequate guitarist, I’m still a distinctive guitarist. I sound different.”

Inspired by artists including Carole King, PJ Harvey and Shuggie Otis, Winehouse developed a self-taught approach that complemented her remarkable songwriting and unmistakable voice. She may not have considered herself an accomplished guitarist, but her unconventional playing helped give her music a character all its own.

The videos below offer a glimpse of Winehouse’s unusual relationship with the instrument.

First, in a 2003 performance of “Stronger Than Me” — from her debut album, Frank, released earlier that year — Winehouse captivates the studio audience on the BBC’s live music show Later… With Jools Holland. Her loose, jazz-inflected rhythm-guitar playing provides the song’s harmonic foundation.

Next, we get an up-close look at a 20-year-old Winehouse performing with nothing more than her voice and a Stratocaster at London’s Wembley Arena. The 2004 Strat Pack concert celebrated the 50th anniversary of Fender’s iconic guitar and featured an all-star lineup that included David Gilmour, Ronnie Wood and Hank Marvin.

Finally, Winehouse discusses her love of guitar — and the Stratocaster in particular — in a video celebrating the model’s 50th anniversary.

Jas Obrecht’s chance encounter with a then-unknown Eddie Van Halen on July 23, 1978, led to the guitarist’s first magazine interview, published in Guitar Player’s November 1978 issue. The two would meet again, including for a five-hour conversation in 1980 that explored Eddie’s approach to electric guitar, gear and modifications, his musical upbringing, and the techniques behind his groundbreaking playing.

Published in the magazine’s April 1980 issue, that interview found Van Halen discussing everything from his early music lessons to the importance of phrasing and his approach to guitar solos. He also shared his surprisingly dismissive initial reaction to one of Van Halen’s biggest early hits.

At the outset of the conversation, Obrecht asked Van Halen how he developed his speed. Born in the Netherlands, Eddie had moved to the U.S. with his family at age seven. His answer began with a characteristically humorous account of his classical training.

“Well, I’ll tell you. They used to lock me in a little room and go, ‘Play fast!’” he began with a laugh. “I was actually trained to be a classical pianist. I had this Russian teacher who couldn’t speak a word of English, and he would just sit there with a ruler ready to slap my face if I made a mistake.

“This started in Holland, and both my brother and I took lessons. Then when we got to the U.S. my dad found another good teacher. Basically, that’s where I got my ears developed, learned my theory, and got my fingers moving.

“Then when the Dave Clark Five and those bands came out, I wanted to go [plays the riff from ‘You Really Got Me’]. I didn’t want to go clink, clink, clink. I still play piano, and I also play violin.”

Some of that classical training found its way into Eddie’s guitar playing, even if he didn’t consciously set out to apply piano techniques to the instrument.

“Things like this are classical,” he said, demonstrating the continuous left-hand tremolo technique heard in “Spanish Fly.” “I know that had some things psychologically come out, but I don’t actually sit down at a piano and try to apply it to guitar.”

The conversation also turned to his solos — both how he approached them and what he wanted them to achieve. Asked what mattered most, Van Halen had a straightforward answer.

“Feeling,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s melodic or spontaneous. If it’s melodic and has no feeling, it’s screwed.”

That emphasis on feel informed an approach that left room for both careful composition and improvisation. Some solos were worked out in advance; others came together in the studio on the spot.

“Sometimes it’s spontaneous, sometimes it’s set,” he explained. “Like the solo in ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ was set. And the same with ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.’ By ‘set’ I mean that I figured out something melodic instead of just going for it.”

Other performances were more spontaneous.

“‘Ice Cream Man’ was one,” he said. “That was a first take. The solo in ‘You Really Got Me’ was totally spontaneous. Next time you listen to it, turn the balance to one side, because the way Ted [Templeman] produces, my guitar is always on one side. Listen to it — there’s only one guitar, no overdubs. But it sounds full.”

That willingness to improvise carried over to the stage. Although Van Halen sometimes reproduced his recorded solos, he generally preferred to take a different approach each night.

“I rarely repeat,” he said. “Sometimes I remember the way I did it on the record and kind of follow it, unless they are melodic solos like in ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ and ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.’ You know, if I start noodling around, kids go, ‘Hey, that ain’t the same song!’”

Perhaps the most surprising revelation concerned “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” a song that became a defining part of Van Halen’s early catalog. Far from recognizing its potential immediately, Eddie initially thought it was a dud — and waited six months before playing it for his bandmates.

“When I wrote ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love’ I thought it was about the lamest song I ever wrote in my life,” he remarked. “It took me six months before I even worked up the nerve to show the guys, but kids go nuts for it! I love the beginning — Am and G.”

Since the demise of the P.J. Harvey trio, it’s become increasingly rare to see Polly Jean behind a guitar onstage. On the tour for 1995’s To Bring You My Love — her third album and first proper solo release — she abandoned the instrument entirely for the first time, leaving the duty to two guitarists tasked with translating the album’s visceral textures: her longtime collaborator John Parish and session guitarist Joe Gore.

Gore recalled a recurring skepticism from fans when he joined the lineup: “‘Why? I love the way she plays!’”

“I knew what they meant,” Gore wrote in a feature for Guitar Player about his work with Harvey. “I too admired the instrumental ferocity that helped Polly attract a rabid global following and a blizzard of critical acclaim for her first three albums.”

As Harvey explained in that issue, the decision to abdicate her electric six-string responsibilities was a matter of physical economy and performance art.

“I only stopped playing live because of my singing,” she said. “My build isn't huge, so holding a guitar and singing is physically draining. I can't physically interpret the songs the way I want with a guitar.”

Ironically, Harvey was the primary architect of the album's guitar sound. While Parish was "doing more drumming than strumming," Gore noted his own role was "to splash texture and color around Polly's big riffs."

As she told us, following the 1993 dissolution of her trio, she found herself obsessed with the precision of her home recordings.

“I had no idea that I'd end up wanting to replicate my demos as much as I did,” she admitted. “I’d wanted to put a band together and let the songs develop different interpretations, but I found that I just couldn't live with that. I wanted things to be much more precise, and the only way was for me to do a lot of it myself.”

Parish and Gore were uniquely qualified for the challenge of reinterpreting Harvey’s guitar work in the live arena. Parish had discovered her when she was 17 and recruited her for his band, Automatic Dlamini, essentially serving as her instrumental mentor.

“While it's true that no one plays like Polly,” Gore noted, “John probably comes closer than anyone else.”

As for Gore, he met Harvey a couple of years earlier when interviewing her for the magazine. She was a fan of his work with Tom Waits, though they didn't actually plug in together until rehearsals in London.

Harvey may not claim virtuoso status, but her playing is defined by a singular, dramatic intensity.

“She's no hyper-technician,” Gore wrote, “but the 90-pound native of Dorsetshire renders her tough and ingenious riffs with enough violent emotion to make Tarantino flinch.”

She is also an innovator, occasionally utilizing an all-A tuning inspired by a roadie's stories of the Gary Glitter Band.

“On my last tour, my guitar roadie was talking about Gary Glitter, who he'd worked with,” Harvey told us. “He said the Glitter Band tuning was all strings to A, so I tried it out.”

Harvey called the sound “so fat and revolting. I just love the way the bottom string is tuned so low it flops like a washing line.”

But as she explained, To Bring You My Love was especially notable for the shift in how she approached her songwriting.

“For the first time, I'd start out by thinking of the mood I wanted to create,” she said. “Ninety percent of these songs started from wanting to build an atmospheric base.”

The shift in focus — from the technicality of the riff to the atmosphere of the performance — yielded a masterpiece. The album sold a million copies and produced the unlikely hit “Down By the Water,” a song about infanticide that nonetheless dominated U.S. radio.

Unburdened by the weight of the guitar, Harvey was free to inhabit the songs as a pure frontwoman, confident that her hand-picked duo would execute her vision. Of course, she also cited a more primal motivation.

“I’m having a fab-o time,” she teased. “I’ve got the most handsome band in the world, especially the guitar players. The only reason I picked them is so I can look at their behinds.”

This interview appeared in Guitar Player’s August 1976 issue.

Eric Clapton is now 31 years old. For more than a decade he has been *the* rock guitarist.

Doubtless there are “better known” guitarists such as George Harrison and rock’s “creative genius” on the instrument remains the late Jimi Hendrix, but it would be hard to find anyone to match Clapton’s longevity and consistency as a lead guitarist in the rock field.

When Hendrix’s future manager, Chas Chandler, first approached Jimi with the idea of moving to England, one of the young guitarist’s first questions was, “Will I get to meet Eric Clapton?”

In past Guitar Player readers’ polls, Eric has always placed high, winning Best Rock Guitarist four consecutive years, from 1971 to 1974, then taking a surprise first place in the blues category as a write-in candidate last year. He was also voted Overall Best Guitarist in 1973.

Beginning guitar at around age seventeen, Clapton — born March 30, 1945, in Ripley, England — was a charter member of The Yardbirds, a band whose influence is still strongly felt by many hard rock units. Here his gutsy, aggressive, improvised blues licks established Clapton as one of the first noticeable lead guitarists of that era. Like the American blues bands they emulated, The Yardbirds put the guitar leads and fills into the forefront of their overall sound.

Their first recording, Five Live Yardbirds, was released in England in 1964 when Slowhand, as he was once known, was nineteen years old. Just as the group was beginning to realize a degree of international pop notoriety, Eric quit to concentrate on the blues to be replaced on lead guitar by Jeff Beck and later Jimmy Page. Though For Your Love, the Yardbirds’ first LP released in the U.S., pictured only Beck on the cover, it was in fact Clapton’s guitar which highlighted eight of the album’s eleven tracks.

Already heavily into country blues artists like Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Boy Fuller and Robert Johnson, Clapton then joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and totally immersed himself in Chicago blues. It was during this period that the name Eric Clapton took on a somewhat mythical, cult-figure status in Britain. Like the “Bird Lives” syndrome that swept through bebop havens after the death of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, the slogan “Clapton is God” could be found scrawled on signposts, sides of buildings and even rocks across England’s countryside.

Within days after leaving the Bluesbreakers, Cream was formed. Consisting of three virtuoso soloists — drummer Ginger Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and “E.C.” on guitar — Cream was perhaps the first rock band to successfully combine a free-form musical concept with mass appeal. They were also one of the first rock groups to earn a large following based on their instrumental abilities, rather than catchy “hits,” extravagant stage acts, or personality promotion. They were simply very creative musicians and widely accepted as such.

When Cream made its “Farewell” tour in 1969, barely two years and four albums after its inception, the veteran guitarist had just turned 24.

This super-trio was succeeded by an even shorter-lived quartet, Blind Faith with keyboardist Steve Winwood, bassist Rick Grech, Baker and Clapton. After an extended hiatus from performing “live, Clapton emerged in the role of sideman to Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, his first American group [see GP, June ’70). Here he met and played with what later became the nucleus of Derek and the Dominos which also included co-guitar great Duane Allman on their premiere album, Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs.

With the Dominos’ breakup and another three-year absence from the music scene, Eric’s current lineup was formed, piece by piece, while recording 461 Ocean Boulevard at Miami’s Criteria Studios.

The following exclusive interview took place on May 7, 1976 in Los Angeles, where Clapton was putting the final overdubs on his upcoming RSO album, to be released later this year. Along with Eric’s electric, acoustic, slide and Dobro work, the LP features Ron Wood, Jesse Ed Davis and Eric’s second guitarist George Terry, plus a duet with Bob Dylan on “Sign Language.”

Here, E.C. talks about his guitar playing today and its role in his present band.

After Derek and the Dominos you had sort of a layoff from performing 'live.' How did you get back into playing guitar?

It was nothing sudden; I don’t think I’ve ever really stopped for very long. You just develop a different set of chops for concerts than you do for recording or just sitting around writing. In the last two years they’ve been getting better and better onstage. And then they kind of wear down when I’m off. When you’re in the studio, you can’t really stretch out much. You have more license to experiment onstage.

That seems the opposite policy of guitarists who say they’ll only try new licks in the studio, where they can go back and erase or redo any mistakes.

Well, in the studio what always affects me is the fact that I know I’m going to hear it back. So I don’t want to make any kind of mistake if I know there’s a chance I might hear it on the tape.

Do you still ever practice, sit down and run scales?

I never have done that, but I do sort of play around quite a lot. I can’t play just to silence, though, I have to be prompted into it by listening to something or hearing something on the radio.

In an interview Paul Kossoff said that in 1974 you were better on guitar than ever before [see GP, July ’76]. Do you think you’re still improving?

I think I’m improving all the time, in my own particular fashion. The chances are that I’m probably slipping behind the times in my tastes or my direction. But when it comes down to my personal approach and playing the guitar, I’m still learning and kind of progressing. I’m pretty sure of that. You always know when you come to a dead end, then you have to make up your mind about what you’re going to do. I haven’t felt that too many times yet.

When you get into a new style, like reggae, do you have to alter your technique much?

I don’t have to adapt much for anything like that. It’s not difficult to play that way. What I always find the most difficult is keeping up my technique of just playing lead in any situation. What I would find hardest of all would be to be featured in a jazz composition of some kind and have to play a solo lead over strange chords. But things like reggae and just popular songs of any kind are always pretty simple.

Have you ever gotten into jazz?

Well, the one thing that hung me up straight away was that technique they have of double-picking, up and down. I use both down strokes and up strokes, but I’ve never been able to do that fast thing. Any of those guys seem to be able to do that.

What about jazz chording?

Well, that’s another situation. Watch any of those guys, like George Benson or someone. The amount of fret positions they can get out of, say, three or four chords, you know, I just don’t know about that stuff. [laughs]

Being self-taught, where did your chord background come from?

I just listened to records and tried to figure out which strings they were hitting at the same time.

Instead of barre chords, you seem to play down at the nut a lot.

Those were the chords I learned. I also think when you’re using light strings, you tend to become a bit insecure about going up the neck too far with big, full chords. Because what will sound right at the bottom of the neck with light strings, by the time you’ve taken out twelve frets it could be out of tune.

You’ve played blues right from the beginning, but only recently got into playing slide which is an integral part of blues.

I always used to play slide just on the acoustic guitar, and that was never employed onstage, and consequently it never got on record either. I think what really got me interested in it as an electric approach was seeing Duane [Allman] take it to another place. There were very few people playing electric slide that were doing anything new, it was just the Elmore James licks, and everyone knows those. No one was opening it up until Duane showed up and played it a completely different way. That sort of made me think about taking it up.

Are there any similarities between your electric slide technique and Duane’s?

No, not a great amount, because I approach it more like George Harrison. Duane would play strictly blues lines; they were always innovative, but they were always in the blues vein. I’m somewhere in between him and George, who invents melodic lines often on the scales.

What do you use for a slide?

A glass tube about the width of the neck of the guitar, so I can get all the strings covered. It’s a thick one [an Isis medium].

Do you have any special guitar setup for slide?

Yes, a Gibson ES-335. But it hasn’t got a high nut, I just raise it at the bridge. I don’t play it down at the bottom much; I usually keep it up near the top [high] frets. I use the same strings as I do normally on the other guitars; Ernie Ball Super Slinky — 009, 011, 016, 024, 032, 042 [Ed. Note: Eric’s road manager, Willy Spears, says that the last time the strings were changed on this guitar was mid-1974. Normally, Clapton’s strings are changed only when they break, except for the high three which Spears sometimes changes when he feels they’re going dead. Willy says, “He won’t even let me buff them.”]

Do you play slide in standard tuning or open chords?

I use open G [low to high, D, G, D, G, B, D] most of the time, for acoustic and electric. I prefer G, because you get more of a country sound; it’s more melodic.

Do you ever use open tunings when not playing slide?

Yes, on “Tell The Truth” [Layla and Derek and the Dominos In Concert], that’s tuned in open [possibly E tuning; notation illegible in source]. But I wasn’t playing slide; I was just making chords in open tuning. If you tried to transpose them onto a straight guitar, it would be very difficult. It’s like a barre A on the 5th fret. I’m holding down the fifth and third strings in a sort of E7 shape — holding it on and taking it off.

That comes directly from Keith Richards. Some of the Stones’ things like “Street Fighting Man” [Beggars Banquet] where he’s got all these great guitar sounds — he just tunes it to an open chord and invents fingerings.

After Cream, where you were the only guitarist, how did you come to form bands that always included a second lead guitarist?

I wanted a variety of performances, because I don’t think I could do those things as well as those guys do theirs. There were certain songs that I felt required their technique. I didn’t want to just attempt it and get a second best by doing it myself.

Is there anything in particular that you look for in another guitarist?

No, it depends more on their personalities if they’re well-composed kinds of musicians who don’t have to show off. I like to have someone in the band who’s stable, you know, who can play and get on with people that really is most important. I don’t like to play with people who’ve got to prove themselves.

Did it get tiring playing in bands, like Cream, where you had to solo constantly?

Absolutely, it really did. Sometimes you just end up playing every lick you know before the end of the set, and then you’re fucked, you know, because you’re just repeating yourself over and over again. I’ve really become more devoted to the song itself and the presentation of the actual music. I think jamming, unless it’s got a goal at the end of it, is pretty much a waste of time. It’s just like exercising or something. If you’re jamming, and something comes out of it, and you make something that you can stand hearing again and has a form and turns people on, okay. I think musicians, as they grow older, usually become interested in doing something more lasting. It’s a very youthful thing to go around and jam with everyone who’s known kind of like sowing wild oats. Then you’ve just got to settle down and make everything count and make sure that it’s worthy of being heard again, not just a throwaway.

When you play with another guitarist, rather than straight rhythm chording, you often throw in little riffs and counter melodies.

As a rule, I actually prefer to play rhythm or let whoever else I’m playing with take the stage. But there are times when I just can’t resist joining in.

In the beginning, was it hard for you to coordinate singing and playing at the same time?

Well, for as long as I’ve been playing the guitar I’ve been singing and playing. Not anything difficult, you know; I couldn’t play a lead line and sing a different line independently, like what Hendrix could do.

You were one of the first people Jimi Hendrix jammed with when he went to England. What was he playing like at that stage?

He did the whole show, he did two songs and pulled out every stop. He did everything that he did for the rest of his career in those two songs. It just blew the audience away, they’d never seen anything like it before. He wasn’t into his clothes scene at that point, I think, he was just wearing jeans and a jacket of some kind. But his technique and his vibrato were just as strong.

Being a British bandleader with an all-American group, does this create any musical conflicts?

Musically, I don’t think so, because we cut our teeth on the same kind of music the blues and R&B. We were listening to the same stuff at approximately the same time just in two different places. The only real difference is in the life-styles.

What causes you to switch guitars over the years?

It’s a fad, I think. Like, at the Concert for Bangladesh I was playing a Gibson Byrdland. If you remember, Chuck Berry had a lot of publicity photographs taken with a Byrdland, and that looked like a very delicious guitar. I couldn’t get hold of an old one with the black pickups, so I got one with humbuckers instead.

Were there any feedback problems using a full-box guitar?

Yes, that’s one thing I never accounted for. You have to really be careful, especially on the low, bass strings.

What other guitars do you own?

Let’s just say I have a selection of Gibsons and Fenders and a few Martins. The Stratocaster is my basic stage guitar. I’ve also got a Switchmaster, the old Carl Perkins type and a lot of good old acoustics — f-holes and flat tops — and an old mandolin-guitar.

Do you have any specially made guitars?

I’ve got a wood-body Dobro with a Martin-type neck, reworked by Randy Wood [of Old Time Pickin' Parlor, Nashville]. I got it at George Gruhn’s shop in Nashville. I also have a 12-string made by a guitar maker in England called Zemaitis [see GP, October ’70 and April ’75]. It’s reputed to be the biggest 12-string in the world. It’s about the same dimensions as a mariachi bass. He really did a beautiful job.

What’s your main acoustic guitar?

A Martin D-28. It’s got a pickup built into the bridge called a Hot Dot [Barcus-Berry], and they’re really good. I don’t know the pros and cons about miking an acoustic live, but all the sound people I’ve worked with have said it’s a hassle, because the microphone will pick up wind and leakage from the other instruments. The dynamics just go mad if you back off three or four inches.

Do you always use a flatpick?

Yes, I use a heavy pick made by Ernie Ball. I think it’s the exact same thickness and gauge as a Fender heavy. I’ve never kept the fingerpicking up long enough. I do play around like that for my own pleasure at home sometimes, but I wouldn’t be able to cut it professionally.

What about your changes in amplifiers over the years?

Music Man is my favorite now [HD 130 Reverb), because they have dual volume controls. You can use them in the studio at low volume and still get a fair amount of distortion, just as if it were a really big amp. I also like their sound, they’re just like Fenders in fact, I think Leo [Fender] had a big part in designing them. [Actually, Tom Walker who worked for the Fender company from 1948 until 1969 was Music Man’s main designer, although many of the ideas were passed on from Leo Fender during their association in Fender’s pre-CBS days.]

Were the amps you used previously more suited to your sound at that time?

They [Music Mans] could have been used with Cream. You can get exactly the same sound as you would with a Marshall, but then you can take it down to the same sound as a Champ. It’s really got a wide range. [Roadie Willie Spears reports that Eric’s amps are beefed up, with the bias up all the way, by Walker at Music Man. This HD 130 Reverb has special open-back cabinets, as opposed to the folded horn type, with JBL 120 speakers. Eric also uses a Leslie cabinet, with JBL components, for which he has had a special foot switch devised by Keyboard Products and modified by Fred Meyers, soundman for Santana. This switch has fast/slow and on/off positions, so that the guitar can go either straight through the amp, through both the amp and the Leslie (fast or slow), or through just the Leslie at either fast or slow speeds-as on “Badge” (History of Eric Clapton and Eric Clapton’s Rainbow Concert) The only other effects pedal Clapton uses is a Cry Baby wah-wah.]

Why do you record at such low volumes?

There’s less interference, less noise. I like to record a lot of tracks as 'live' as possible, including voice. So if you’ve got a really loud amp, you’re going to leak onto everyone else’s track, and you won’t be able to sing either. I also like to record tracks without cans [headphones]; I like to hear the sound the room is making itself, rather than the balance coming through the board and into the cans. I recorded “Motherless Children” [461 Ocean Boulevard] with just a Pignose mini amp.

Do you plan on presenting any more older bluesmen, like the records you did with Howlin’ Wolf [The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions] and Freddy King [Burglar].

It would probably come up. Those kinds of things are usually on the spur of the moment, like within a week’s notice. There’s no one I can think of right now that I would go out of my way to do. With Wolf, on “Red Rooster,” he was very, very vehement about it being done right. Because he considered us to be English and foreigners, and therefore we wouldn’t have heard the song, right? So he just got his guitar out and said, “This is how it goes.” It’s not on the album, unfortunately, but he played it all the way through once on his own with us just sitting there listening. He was playing slide Dobro, and it was just bloody amazing! And he said, “Okay, you try it.” So we all tried playing it like him, but it didn’t really sound right, so I said, “Well, why don’t you do it with us?” And that’s the bit that got on the record.

Do you think those sessions, mixing a blues stalwart with several rock greats, come off well?

That one came off. But I am actually biased against those things. My ego told me to listen to the one I did with Howlin' Wolf, and I liked that because I like the Wolf anyway, whatever he did. He never could go wrong, because you could put him in with, oh, Buddy Rich or someone, and he’d still dominate the show. The other reason I did that session was that for a long time I’d really wanted to meet his guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, because he did some things that freaked me out when I was picking up the guitar that stuff on “Goin Down Slow,” just the weirdest playing. He’s truly amazing!

In last year’s GP readers’ poll you won Best Blues Guitarist as a write-in vote, so obviously people still think of you at a “blues guitarist.” Is that how you think of yourself?

Yes, that’s what I do best. That is really my personal style. If I’m put into any other kind of situation, I’d have to fly blind. In the blues format I can just almost lose consciousness; it’s like seeing in the dark.

A couple of weeks ahead of opening night, Dweezil Zappa’s upcoming North American tour is a work in progress — although not by design.

“Oh, it’s been a challenge,” the second-oldest and most musically prolific child of the late Frank Zappa tells us with a chuckle. “I tried doing things different this time around, in terms of prep. Since the tour was going to be in the fall we said, ‘Let’s try to rehearse in August and get everything up on its feet,’ ’cause there were a lot of new things to learn.”

“Now here we are almost two weeks before, and I’m still struggling to get to where I wanted to be back in August.”

That said, it’s certainly easy to feel confident Zappa will have the proverbial act together when his DZ20: Like Father, Like Son Tour plays the first of its 33 shows on Oct. 22 in Phoenix.

As its title indicates, the six-week trek marks 20 years of Zappa playing his father’s music, initially under the moniker Zappa Plays Zappa until acrimonious machinations with his younger siblings, who control their father’s estate, dealt him dirty.

But Dweezil was musically active and prolific even before that, releasing his own music since the 1982 single “My Mother is a Space Cadet” — co-produced by Edward Van Halen, who also played uncredited slide guitar — and the 1986 album Havin’ a Bad Day. The onetime MTV VJ also released a pair of albums with estranged brother Ahmet and some Zappa Plays Zappa recordings and has appeared on albums by his father, Spinal Tap, Weird Al Yankovic, Steel Panther, Extreme, Don Johnson, Pat Boone and others.

Zappa also offers online educational initiatives and a music camp, Dweezila, and he used his state-of-the-art multimedia studio Hikari to, among other projects, remix Deep Purple’s Machine Head for its 50th anniversary.

At 57, then, Zappa knows how to get things done, but we’ll allow him a little hand-wringing over the course of a wide-ranging and illuminating pre-tour chat, which includes a discussion of his ongoing “What the Hell Was I Thinking” project, featuring guitar solos by dozens of famous players.

Twenty years of focusing on your father’s music — does it feel like 20 years? Twenty minutes? 200 years?

Well, it’s all of the above. Time goes by so fast, but I’m always right in the thick of it. It was 2006 that I started touring, but I actually started really learning the music and changing my whole approach to guitar back in 2004, so it’s been a very long time that I’ve been working with it and living with this music.

What has immersing yourself like that done for you as a player — and composer and bandleader?

It’s as if I’ve gone to music university and I’ve gotten several degrees that I never would have planned on, because I’ve learned so much about how my dad wrote his music and what he wanted to accomplish with it, and then that trickles down into what I would like to do with my own guitar playing and any music that I write.

And it afforded me the ability to write orchestral music, which I never would have thought of doing as a kid, but over the last couple years I’ve done some different projects with different orchestras in Holland. When you’re writing music for a 100-piece orchestra, or something smaller than that, it’s a very different thing than trying to learn Randy Rhoads or Eddie Van Halen guitar solos, y’know?

Is there any one of his techniques that you’re still trying to get a grasp on?

Well, the one thing that has been the biggest challenge is to be able to play the music in a way that is commensurate with what my dad did, but then also find a way to have my own voice be available when I want it during improvisations — but not have it go too far left field to where it doesn’t feel like it’s connected to the music anymore.

So that right there is the ever-evolving skill, which is to be able to filter my playing through the Frank Zappa vocabulary and lens of influence, but then at the speed of thought be able to have my own phrases come into the music while still relating to the era that we’re playing it from.

That’s the thing I always try to do, something that stays connected to the music whether it’s by trying to recreate an exact sound or playing phrases that are very specific and might have actually been from the original solos. I rarely play complete solos note-for-note, but I do try to play specific phrases that give the identity and the flavor of the solo in the way my dad would play it, while using a sound that is evocative of that whole thing. On a lot of levels the challenge for me is always the playing, but then also creating the sound that makes it evocative enough so that you know which era it’s from.

Has that become an unconscious process over time?

To some degree. It’s the kind of thing I would relate to trying to learn a language; after all these years of doing this, I probably am speaking a fourth-grade level when it comes to playing in the style of my dad. That’s because it’s so hard; he has such a huge vocabulary, and to be able to play stuff that sounds like him and that feels like it fits the music is, I think, a very tall order.

So as I’m able to converse at this basic level, there’s other times where there might be moments that feel like there’s some sudden spark of inspiration, or that I’m channeling my dad at times. I can be in the moment and be like, “Wow, that actually didn’t sound like me; that sounded like my dad, exactly what he would have done in this situation.” Then there’s times when I’m going for something outside of that, but I like when they happen spontaneously.

Is there a holy grail kind of piece, or pieces, you’re still gunning to master?

“Gregory Peccary” is the one piece that would fit into that, and it would probably require at least five or six months of rehearsal just to be even able to play it, and I would have to put a very specific band together to be able to recreate all the things that are in that.

If you listen to that piece of music, it makes you just ask the question, Why? Why does this exist? Who would make such a thing? The fact that it got recorded, and it’s so complicated and so brilliant on so many levels — people don’t understand how complicated and ahead of its time it is. I don’t think there’s another artist who’s ever done anything remotely close to pieces like “Gregory Peccary” or “Billy the Mountain” or things where you just listen and think, “How could you do it?”

So what can we expect from DZ20?

On this tour there’s some of my own music that I’m putting into the show. Because it’s stuff that I wrote, I was having somewhat of an expectation that it would come back rather easily.

But as it turned out, when I started doing my dad’s music back in 2006, I drastically changed my guitar playing style and my technique, the way that I played. And some of this stuff I’m bringing into the show reverts back to the way I used to play, so it’s like having to re-learn that stuff again, which made it a little harder. It’s not as much about the technical aspects as it is that some of these songs just have a lot to remember — even the band is finding it hard.

I don’t read music. The band can start to learn complicated things by reading it off the page and getting a good overview of the thing; I have to sit and listen every couple of seconds and learn each little part and try to memorize the whole thing.

Why do this to yourself, then?

Well, every time I go on tour I always do something different. It’s always that challenge, and that’s what my dad did, so it’s kind of in the tradition of it all. I found myself going down a bunch of rabbit holes in terms of what I want to accomplish on the guitar, so not only just playing the music but in an area where I can improvise, I wanted to stretch and get into some new territory because I feel like I’ve always tried to bring something new and different to what I’ve done, every year, when it comes to guitar playing. I wanted to do something that was noticeably very different.

Which, given your history, is a pretty high aspiration. What do you have this time?

I call it, as a joke, “drunken pentatonics.” The idea was you would play anything that you wanted to play that would be a normal pentatonic, but you could bend from the note below it into the note, so it sounds like a slide-guitar playing.

But if you play it not that great, the tuning sounds bad, so it sounds drunken. You get this microtonal sound, which can be very cool but it requires a different way to visualize the neck, and then it also has these weird things it stresses on your hands because you’re bending from the note below to the note.

And then if you want to keep playing while that note is bent up and you use your other fingers on the string, you’re supporting that pitch by still bending the note, and it strains your hand in a different way. So it’s been a challenge to build the strength to do it and not have it sound bad.

What are you getting into with your own material?

It will depend on how much of it I get under my fingers, so at the very beginning of the tour it may be a little bit less than by the end of the tour.

There are four main things, but especially “Purple Guitar.” Somebody asked me, “Did your dad ever listen to your music, and if he did, did he have any favorite things?” I thought about that and he had come to see us play a show that I was doing in the early ’90s and we closed the show with “Purple Guitar.” He liked that song and said, “You guys should open with that,” so I took it as his request for this tour.

And then he produced a record of mine called Havin’ a Bad Day [1986] which had a song called “Electric Hoedown” on it, and I never played that song live before. So we gave that a facelift with some new instrumentation and it will be the first time we’re playing it.

And I have two other songs, one called “Shampoo Horn” and this other thing called “The Adventures of Dindoo.” That is proving to be the hardest of anything I’ve had to learn, because I wrote it on a computer and never really played it. So we’ll see if I get around to being able to play it on this tour.

Are you taking any different route to the Frank Zappa repertoire this time?

Yeah. I wanted it to feel like what it would have been like if you never heard of Frank Zappa and he walked into, like the Whisky in the ’60s, but he also had the material that he had in the mid-’70s — like the earliest formation of the band, but then also give it some of the music he did 10 or 15 years later, but in that same environment. So it’s kind of the quintessential rocking teenage combo version of everything.

And we’re a five-piece, which means the music is more in your face. There’s an immediacy to it that you don’t get in other situations. And when he did a tour with a five-piece he really limited the material to certain things and certain eras. So we’ve kind of done that, but I’ve also just taken it a bit further.

What’s the gear situation this time out?

Guitar-wise I’m bringing out a different version of the SG that I typically play. It’s the Roxy-era SG — Gibson released a handful of those — and I just put some different pickups in this one. But other than that it’s pretty much the way the guitar was designed.

And I have a different Stratocaster that I’m playing. This particular version that I’m bringing has a humbucker in the bridge and then two single-coils, so I’m able to get a lot of rhythm sounds I need for this tour. But we’re also playing the song “Wild Love” and it has a really crazy guitar solo section. This is from a live version my dad did, I think, in ’78 or something. He just goes into a totally crazy new landscape, and the tone he has is really cool ’cause it’s kind of three layers; you have a clean sound that’s in the middle, and then you have two different fuzz sounds on the left and right. It creates this 3-D image that is super cool, and he’s just doing it with the Stratocaster.

The issues with the estate and your siblings have been heartbreaking to a lot of people. Anything new on that front?

Well, I never talk to them. I’ve always been able to do what I want to do. They just tried to create problems, for no reason. It’s worked out enough at this point in time, but it’s far better to have zero communication with them.

You don’t have input to what’s released from the vaults, but if you ran the world are there things you know are in there that you’d like to see released?

They’ve exploited pretty much everything that’s ever existed, and in some cases they’ve put out things I know my dad would never have released. But, yeah, there are things that could be cultivated into another sort of Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar! series. I know I would be able to amass something like that, far better than anybody else. But nobody’s calling me to do that at this time.

Are you still working on the “What the Hell Was I Thinking?” project?

I am. It’s all fully into a computer, finally. I can actually start piecing it together and doing some finalization of it. It has — I don’t even know — 45 different guitar solos from different famous guitar players. The concept of it is that it’s a continuous piece of music that is constantly morphing from style to the character of the recording and the domain it exists in, so the ambient changes and the stylistic changes are morphing constantly through the piece. It’s an audio movie, essentially.

You had spoken previous about trying to get Jeff Beck on it. Were you able to before he passed away?

We did some stuff, but I didn’t necessarily get something exactly like what I wanted to be able to do. But we’ll see if I can manage to make it work.

What’s on there from Van Halen?

I have two guitar solos from Edward. One is like the best musical joke that we could perpetrate together; it’s kind of a “greatest hits” solo — fairly extended, like a minute long, maybe a slight bit longer, which in guitar solo length is significant.

I had these different licks I wanted him to try to incorporate into this solo; there’s probably about 15 different ones, and some of them were a real stretch because there’s this go-to, bebop style like that he did on the Wild Life soundtrack, and people weren’t familiar with this thing but I’d always known about it. He ended up using it later on, kind of tucked in there on the Balance album, but I said, “You’ve got to use that one, and you have to use a little bit of ‘Mean Streets,’ a little bit of ‘Push Comes to Shove,’ a little bit of ‘Dirty Movies,’ a little bit of ‘Ice Cream Man’...” And as we were going through it, he’d say, “I don’t even remember that lick,” and I would have to show him certain licks.

That was funny because it was a complete flip. When I did “My Mother’s a Space Cadet” at 12 years old, he was the one who was sitting with me when I was doing the solo, and I had to punch in and I had never done anything like that before. So he was saying, “When you punch in, you have to play along with what you’ve played before so it doesn’t create something that doesn’t sound like it’s naturally flowing. So here we were in a similar situation with “What the Hell Was I Thinking?” He’s improvising stuff, and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s good, but let’s punch in here” and he was gonna have to play along with what he’d just played, which was not that easy to do because he was just ripping through one lick after another. It was just a really great experience to do all that stuff with him.

And then there’s a second solo which is just a one-take, improvised thing we did at 5150, and he used his original Marshall amps so it had the old-school sound, and it’s great.

Are you privy at all to these archival recordings that Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather are working on?

I’ve heard about it. I haven’t heard any of it yet, but it’ll be interesting to hear, for sure.

Any ETA for “What the Hell Was I Thinking?”

Well, next year I kinda have some more time — I’m not going to be doing too much extensive touring, so I’m hoping I can do some major focusing on that. I haven’t recorded anybody new for awhile, but there’s definitely a lot of different guitar players out there in the world that are interesting and that are doing cool things.

So when I write the new bits that I need to do I’ll start thinking about a handful of other players I’d have on there. I’d love to get Julian Lage. It’d be nice to get John Scofield. But there’s some other guitar players who do crazy, technical things; there’s a guy named Dussias, a handful of other players I’d love to get on there.

Anything else of your own that you’re working on?

I have all these concerts that we’ve filmed over the 20 years we’ve been doing the Zappa shows. I’ve been editing and mixing those, so hopefully we’ll release a bunch of that stuff next year. And I’m doing a new guitar course that I’m gonna release next year, so with that it’d probably be a good idea to do something, even if it’s just an EP of a few different, new things — maybe the drunken pentatonic stuff I was telling you about.

After the Machine Head reissue, would you like to do more of those kinds of projects?

I would love to. That was a really fun project. I like stuff like that, the challenge of doing something new with something people are so familiar with. It’s very much like what I do with my dad’s music; you want to maintain what people love about their initial experience with it, so you don’t want to change it so much that it’s unrecognizable, but — in the case of the Deep Purple stuff — I just wanted to bring out or enhance some of the details that could just give it a new bit of power and excitement.

I love the puzzle pieces to stuff like that, when you hear it all together and then you realize this is what it sounds like when the guys play music. They were only using 16 tracks, so they were making decisions about what the finished record was going to sound like as they recorded it. You just put the mics up in the room and hope you can capture how amazing they sound. It’s great to hear stuff like that.

Zappa’s DZ20: Like Father, Like Son tour begins October 22 at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix and continues through December 5.

Joni Mitchell recalls the pain from her earliest attempts to share her songs as a young piano student.

“I got my fingers rapped with a ruler,” she tells Guitar Player. “‘Why would you want to compose music when you could have the masters under your fingers?’”

Mitchell would go on not only to compose music but to invent her own guitar language, eventually creating more than 50 alternate tunings that helped define the harmonic richness of her songwriting.

Unable to form chords traditionally because of weakness in her hands — the lingering effect of childhood polio — Mitchell began turning her guitar’s pegs into open tunings.

Today she uses more than 50 different tunings, taking her well beyond the familiar territories of open E and DADGAD.

But the tunings do more than accommodate her hands. They reshape how she hears the instrument, allowing her to approach the guitar almost like an orchestra. The result is the harmonic richness of her music, with uncommon note choices and combinations.

“I tend to think of the top three strings as muted trumpets,” she says, “or the high end of an orchestra — horn stops. I think of the midrange as viola, I guess — not violins — but the orchestra's mid-register, say French horn and viola.

“The thumb is a very sparse, eccentric bass line. Tunewise the thumb can play vertically while the rest of the fingers are swinging, which gives a funny kind of Senegalese quality to my shuffle, as if my thumb is playing a monkey chant and the rest of me is swinging somewhere in the U.S.A. — like Robert Johnson on Mars.”

The music she heard in her head

As Mitchell recalls, the tunings actually predate her guitar playing, which began when she was 18 after an early flirtation with baritone ukulele.

“I think maybe it arrived first in the piano.”

After her family moved to Saskatoon when she was 11, Mitchell briefly took piano lessons to satisfy her desire to create the music she was already composing in her head.

“I think I had a prodigious creative ability as a musician, but the community that I grew up in disallowed it. I know I wanted to compose for the piano, that I heard music in my head at the age of seven and had to learn it.

But that expression was discouraged.

“The young Mozart was encouraged by his father, and the idea of composition coming at an early age wasn't ruled out,” she offers, “but it certainly was in this little community. The idea of being an original creative person was almost anathema.”

Likewise, learning on her own was frowned upon as something for the underclass.

“Playing by ear was considered to be déclassé. It was really misunderstood and discouraged.”

And yet she was drawn to sounds and musical styles that her lessons never revealed, leaving her to search for them on her own.

“Everything that thrilled me at an early age was harmonically wide and rich,” she says. “I heard a lot of swing music and things like Frank Sinatra. In order for musicians to play that stuff you have to have a background in European harmony and structure. I was hearing and absorbing this music with no real understanding.”

Or any intention of pursuing a music career, for that matter.

“Well, I picked up the guitar — or the ukulele — at the age of 18 with no ambition to have a career in music, just to accompany bawdy drinking songs.”

The melody that changed everything

But privately she was still writing songs, and one piece of music in particular left a permanent impression: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” specifically its famous 18th variation.

“That still remains the most beautiful melody I ever heard,” she says. “I used to go down to the store where you could take a 78 and go into a glass listening booth, play it, and decide if you wanted it or not. Well, I couldn't buy it because I was a child, but I used to go in and listen from time to time. So that love of melody made me want to create music.

“My next passion was Chuck Berry and rock and roll. That took a different form. I became a dancer, a really serious dancer, doing the Lindy hop and swing dances. Then, at 18, I took up the guitar, and nobody knew who I was anymore.”

“People were always telling me I was playing things wrong”

Playing acoustic guitar brought a new complication: fretting chords. Her open tunings worked for her but confused those she performed with.

“My style was quite different. People were always telling me I was playing things wrong,” says Mitchell, who eventually acquired a Martin D-28 from a soldier in the Vietnam war and went on to composer many of her early songs with it. “When I started to write my own music, then I was the final authority on it.”

But as she later explained, the tunings also allow her to keep discovering new avenues of expression through trial and error.

“If you’re only working off what you know, then you can’t grow,” she told Acoustic Guitar. “It’s only through error that discovery is made, and in order to discover you have to set up some sort of situation with a random element—a strange attractor, using contemporary physics terms.

“The more I can surprise myself, the more I’ll stay in this business, and the twiddling of the notes is one way to keep the pilgrimage going. You’re constantly pulling the rug out from under yourself, so you don’t get a chance to settle into any kind of formula.”

When Brian Ray joined Paul McCartney’s band in 2002, he was tasked with learning more than 40 songs — in one week.

“Fortunately, I listened to the Beatles nonstop throughout my life, so I already knew most of them,” he says. “Of course, it’s much different when you’re playing in a band that, oh yeah, is led by Paul McCartney himself. Needless to say, I immersed myself in the material.”

But Ray quickly discovered that there’s a difference between how the Beatles recorded the songs and how they need to be played onstage,

“It’s one thing to listen to these songs and appreciate them as a fan, as we’ve all done,” he says. “But when you start digging into them and analyzing them, you’re just astounded by the creativity and depth. Even stuff that sounds simple isn’t simple at all. I’m constantly amazed at the brilliance in these songs, and that feeling grows stronger all the time.”

Given his rarified position, Ray has some unique insights for guitar (and bass) players looking to incorporate Fab Four material into their repertoire.

“It’s important to have respect for the Beatles’ records,” he says. “On the other hand, you don’t want to sound like karaoke. And if you’re like me and you grew up on these records, they’re part of your DNA. You’ve memorized every upstroke and downstroke.

“Given all that, I think it’s important to remember that these records were made by real humans in a room. The Beatles played what they felt, and they responded to one another. Some of their recordings were done in one take, but others required multiple takes, and each one varied from the previous recording.

“When I play with Paul, he isn't trying to play every single note on piano, guitar or bass like he did on the record. He doesn’t sing the songs like he did on record. Nobody is trying to duplicate the recordings. And that’s the advice I have for anybody who wants to play Beatles’ songs: Play them the way you feel. Use the records as a framework, and then go for it.”

However, Ray believes guitarists should attempt to approximate the Beatles’ guitar tones.

“I think this is a crucial part of putting the songs over live,” he says. “If you want to play the material in the spirit of the originals, it helps to stay true to them tonally.

“For example, when I play older Beatles songs, I’ll use a big hollowbody Gretsch along the lines of what George used at the time. I’ll dial up some EQ on my pedalboard to get them a little more trebly. When I play the rockabilly-type solo on ‘All My Loving,’ I’ll add a quick slap delay — that seems to work just fine. On later Beatles songs, I’ll veer off into SGs and Les Pauls, both of which George played.

If that sounds daunting, take heart: You don’t need a massive guitar collection to do the job. “If you’ve got a Fender and a P90 guitar, like an SG, you should be able to handle the sound of most any Beatles song,” Ray says. “Just choose the one that gets you pretty close to what you’re hearing. You can amp and EQ each guitar to get clean or dirty sounds, maybe add a bit of compression, and you’ll be fine. You don’t need to use a lot of effects.”

Because Ray also handles bass duties in the group when McCartney is playing guitar or piano, he has some unique insights to playing McCartney’s bass lines as well. Though you’ll never find the job as daunting as he did.

“For the first six months, I barely looked up because I just wanted to play the parts right, and I didn't want to get distracted by the fact that Paul McCartney was 15 feet away from me,” he says. “I would have lost my mind.”

Besides, he admits it would be impossible to replicate Macca's bass lines with the same supple touch and tone. “His touch on the fretboard was so deliberate, but at the same time so light. On some of those records, it sounds like he’s playing a fretless bass; you can hear him just gliding on those flatwound strings. His playing is idiosyncratic. Maybe it’s because he started out as a guitarist who switched to bass. Like me, it wasn’t his first instrument.

“I don’t think it’s important to use the same bass as he did. I don’t use a Hofner or a Rickenbacker. I play a 1963 Fender P Bass that looks like it’s been dragged from behind a motorcycle. It’s totally beat up, but it sounds just wonderful.

“And remember that certain parts are really hard to nail. For instance, on ‘Getting Better,’ on the first chorus he plays a wonderful walking quarter-note bass line, but on the other two choruses he mixes in sustained half notes. I want to honor that when I play it live. But one time in rehearsal I made a mistake in the chorus, and Paul asked, ‘Why don’t you just play it the same way each time?’ I said, ‘Because it’s so cool how you did it on the record.’

“I say all this with the knowledge that nobody can ever play these songs the way Paul did, but as always, what matters is that you play with spirit and love.”

As a final rule, Ray says that to most successfully perform the Beatles’ material, it's essential that you nail the solos exactly. Those, he says, “demand to be played as accurately as possible.

“Take John Lennon’s solo on ‘Get Back.’ He was mirroring Paul’s vocals. I think John had a very reverent approach to that solo because he was a songwriter. I do my best to play that solo the way John did — both solos, actually. At the end, Paul has encouraged me to stretch out a bit, so I’ll do an extra four bars or something. I’ll throw in a little B.B. King or Clapton feel — something that feels appropriate. But I wouldn’t do that without first nailing the solo that everybody knows. I couldn’t imagine playing it any other way.”

A not-so-funny but impactful thing happened to Rival Sons’ Scott Holiday on the way to making his first solo album, the just-released Topology.

The album was already well underway last October 17, when the guitarist spent an evening hanging out with friends at a bar about a block away from his house in Huntington Beach, California.

“Not getting obliterated or going too big or anything. Just hanging out and having a social night,” Holiday explains.

Shortly after midnight, he hopped on his electric bike to head home and began pulling out of the parking lot.

“The only thing I remember is a flash, and then I have a wake-up from paramedics,” Holiday tells Guitar Player via Zoom. “I have a little blank spot there, which is just no fun.”

Holiday was the victim of a hit-and-run, and the driver was never found. The guitarist broke six ribs — some in multiple spots, requiring titanium plates to fix — and “had a couple pretty good knocks on the head.”

A feared year of healing turned into about 30 days. “You can’t move, you can’t breathe, you can’t clear your throat, coughing is out of the question, a sneeze is an emergency on planet Earth,” he says. “You’re kinda in this still state, just trapped.”

But in that still state, a vision for the nine-track Topology — a “psychedelic, exploratory, maybe even poppier sounding record” released under the moniker Hol1D4y — began to coalesce.

“I’m just kind of in this delirious state, having to get real meditative and deep,” Holiday recalls. “And in that state I spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of things, and Topology was always percolating in the back of my head — ‘How am I going to get back? I’m in the middle of this and I’m inspired and I need to get healed, ’cause I got to get back to it.’

“I had already decided that I was going to sing on the album. I wondered, ‘If I’m going to use my voice and raise it up, is there something I care about enough to sing songs about it?’

“And there were a lot of things that were on my mind that I would want to share with people — things I talk about with my friends and my family and my wife, things that we get intellectual about and that resonate with me deeply.

“So I began to approach the album, song by song, in that state.”

Rival Sons spent 2025 on the road supporting its 2023 album Lightbringer. During the summer, Holiday began working on new music, writing some of it around drum tracks he solicited from bandmate Mike Miley.

“There was no idea for a solo record at all,” Holiday says. “I thought I was just writing for the next Rival Sons record.”

But Holiday began noticing that some of those things were not like the others.

“There were some songs that just felt like a different thing,” he explains.

When bassist Dave Beste asked for demos without the bass guitar parts on them, Holiday had a revelation.

“The second I went to remove the bass I decided, ‘I can’t take the bass off, ’cause I like the bass. I actually like what I’m playing.’ So I began to realize these tracks were a little more personal to me. I think they presented themselves to me as a solo project.

“And I just immediately ran with it … with a vote of confidence from the rest of the band, ’cause they all loved the material.”

Even then, Holiday thought he’d be making an instrumental album.

“But then I had a few of these tracks, like ‘Autonomatic,’ ‘Holotropic,’ that didn’t feel exactly like instrumentals,” he recalls. “I really felt like they were asking for a story, asking for a more traditional form.”

Rather than bring in guest vocalists “like we see a lot of guitar players do,” Holiday decided to step up to the mic himself. “I felt a close connection to these tunes,” he says, “and I didn’t want to take that closeness away by having somebody else sing them.

“And then I started thinking about what I wanted to sing about.”

Topology’s lyrics are undeniably — and unapologetically — cerebral and high-minded, as evidenced even by the titles mentioned as well as tracks such as “Panoptic,” “Equanimity” and “Metacognition.” Holiday even commissioned philosopher Dylan Trigg to write an explanatory essay for the back cover.

The album is, in a nutshell, “about connection,” Holiday explains. “It’s about aligning ourselves, waking up and optimizing ourselves in this material world.

“I know it sounds airy-fairy and far-out,” he says with a laugh, “but this is something that’s resonated with me for a long, long, long time.

“So that’s where I went. After the accident, I got into such a physically vulnerable state that it affected my mental vulnerability in a way I actually welcomed. It shook some stuff loose, literally and in an analogous way, that I was able to go, ‘Oh, man, I feel close to that mental, sensitive part of myself’ … and I wanted to hang onto that coming into the record and singing and using my voice, ’cause it’s different than the guitar, it’s different than bass. It’s different than drums.”

While Holiday brought in Jesse Nason to perform with an arsenal of vintage keyboards — including Moog, Oberheim and Prophet synthesizers — Topology is very much a guitar player’s showpiece.

That’s particularly true on “Crism,” a nearly 12-minute instrumental that cascades through mood and tempo changes, as well as some of Holiday’s most biting and soaring guitar solos. And surprisingly it was composed to a single drum track that Miley provided.

“We had just lost Jack DeJohnette, so we were all listening to a bunch of those wonderful records from the early ’70s, totally inspired,” says Holiday, who also cites John Coltrane, early Miles Davis and 1970s-era King Crimson as influential sources. “And I had just told the guys that for the solo record I wanted to do something like that.”

Miley’s drum track captured that vibe perfectly.

“It was different from anything he had ever sent me,” Holiday says. “I was completely blown away. I just told him, ‘It’s a masterpiece!’ I told him, ‘I’m not gonna edit it.’ Jesse came over and we plugged in and played all the way through the song five times, full takes, and I took sections from each of them and made the song.”

Holiday kept the gear for Topology “pretty simple … the cream of the crop of my goodies,” including a 1961 Gibson ES-345, a 1964 “Platypus” Firebird and a 1966 ES-330. Custom Kauer and Banker models were used for overdubs, while the acoustic guitars were a Martin OM42 and Guild F412. All of the bass parts were recorded with a Supro Huntington.

For amplifiers Holiday used some Universal Audio models but primarily stuck to a pair of small Supros — an Amulet and a 1600 Supreme. He “didn’t want to go too bananas” with effects, using Fjord Fuzz Odin octave fuzz and Fjaer reverb pedals as well as an Electro-Harmonix POG octave generator on the track “Veridream.”

But the “star of the show,” Holiday says, was a prototype from effects-maker Jeorge Tripps.

“This pedal is able to make eight presets, and I used them all and it sounds like eight different pedals,” Holiday explains. “So this is the star of the show, and I love that I made a record with a pedal that’s unavailable to the world — and may never be, who knows?”

Holiday knows that between him singing and the different playing approaches, Topology presents him in a manner that might surprise Rival Sons fans. And he’s looking forward to them hearing it.

“I didn’t overthink at all when I made this music,” he continues. “This was more like, ‘This is natural. This is what I should do. This is where the color goes, this is where the texture goes, this is how long the songs need to be.’

“It was like releasing a valve, but, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t even know that valve needed to be released, but there it is,’ and things moved a lot easier.”

As for the Hol1D4y moniker, it reflects Holiday’s interest in numerology and sacred geometry.

“I really loved this idea of using a 1 and 4. In numerology the 1 and 4 become a 5. In numerology, 5 represents: adventure, freedom, curiosity and dynamic change. In sacred geometry the number 5 represents the bridge between the physical and spiritual realms.

“So it has great significance with the things I’m talking about and felt about this project.”

Now Holiday is preparing to make Hol1D4y a live endeavor. He’s assembled a five-member band and has built three special rigs for himself and the two others who will play guitar. He’s also worked with Banker’s Matt Hughes to create a custom double-neck guitar and bass.

“Sometimes I’ll be playing bass on a verse and then I’m playing guitar on the chorus, or vice versa,” Holiday says. “I move it all around. Basically I’m gonna be super selfish and just want to play and have fun.”

Rival Sons returns to the road in late October for U.S. dates through November, followed by studio work on a new album in early 2027. Holiday hopes to launch Hol1D4y live in February or March.

“But we are going to tour this, one way or another. I promise you that. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Midge Ure is most famous for his time in Ultravox, the British new wave act whose biggest hit was 1981’s “Vienna.” But outside of the group, Ure has quite a star-studded resume that includes stints in Thin Lizzy and Rich Kids, a short-lived band formed with Sex Pistols bass guitarist Glen Matlock.

In fact, the Glaswegian guitarist was himself asked to join the Sex Pistols in 1975, when manager Malcolm McLaren was forming the punk rockers. Ure had just exited a local music store in Glasgow when he found himself in the presence of McLaren and Clash manager Bernie Rhodes.

“They were selling some slightly hot equipment from the back of the car,” he recalls. “They’d driven from London and stopped off at cities all the way up to Glasgow. Bernie Rhodes saw me coming out of the music shop and approached me and asked that I speak to his friend Malcolm McLaren who was around the corner. Malcolm told me about the New York Dolls, about his fashions with Vivienne Westwood, all of which meant nothing.

“And then about 20 minutes into the conversation, he says, ‘I’m putting a band together. Would you join?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, because you haven’t asked me what I do. You don’t know if I’m a guitarist or a drummer or a singer or a musician at all. I just happen to be coming out of a music shop.’”

Ure was sporting short hair at the time, when everyone else was wearing their hair long.

“I must have looked the part rather than sounded the part,” he reasons. “It seemed that was what he was looking for. He was looking for a band that he could dress up in Vivienne’s clothes to sell some bondage trousers. I have to say, he chose the right guys. I would have been the wrong guy.”

Thin Lizzy

However, Ure proved to be the right choice for Thin Lizzy. He was quickly hired for his brief stint with the Irish rockers after Gary Moore had quit the band in the middle of an American trek in 1979 to support their album Black Rose: A Rock Legend.

“It was my first ever time in America, and I didn’t get to see much of it, as I was in a hotel room with Scott Gorham, working out harmony guitar parts,” Ure recalls. “I spent most of the night just rerunning those things because I was petrified of getting it wrong because every song had a harmony guitar part, every tune. And then I had to walk out in front of 30,000 people and hope and pray that I wasn’t going to make any massive blunders. And I probably did. But they were very gracious and very forgiving.”

Ure was working late in the studio when the offer to join Thin Lizzy came via a phone call from the group’s bass-playing frontman, Phil Lynott. Ure and Lynott’s friendship dated back several years to Glasgow, when Lynott was fronting a three-piece Thin Lizzy.

“I’d seen him play a tiny club just after Philip had set up Thin Lizzy after singing with Skid Row with a young 16-year-old Gary Moore,” says Ure. “I absolutely fell in love with Phil’s voice and his songwriting. I had bumped into him in Glasgow when I was playing in a band and he was wandering around the streets of Glasgow about to play at a university that night and I took him back to my mum’s house and she gave him egg and chips and fed him.

“And he remembered this years later when I moved to London. We bumped into each other again coming out of an underground in London and he said, ‘You’re that kid. I know exactly who you are.’ We just hung out together and became friends. Philip was a great guy, but I wouldn’t trust him with my girlfriend or my wife.”

Lynott may have also been thinking of Ure at that moment, as Ure had co-written the Black Rose track “Get Out of Here.”

By the time Ure returned home from the studio, a plane ticket, several cassettes of music and a list of songs he needed to learn were waiting for him, together with a directive that first thing next morning a driver would take him to London’s Heathrow airport so he could board the Concorde and fly to New York City.

“I was supposed to learn all the songs on the plane, which I couldn’t do,” he explains, “then get a connecting flight down to New Orleans, and meet up with the band there.”

Ure also brought along his main electric guitar at the time, a Yamaha SG-2000 that he first bought in 1976. But a few dates into the Thin Lizzy tour, he was told that the guitar needed to go.

“They decided it wasn’t cool enough and so, they swapped it out for a Les Paul Junior,” he says. “It was a really old Les Paul Junior, which might have been similar to the one that Gary was using. And I had two Marshall stacks, which were deafening. I’d never heard anything so loud in my life!”

Kate Bush

In 1982, Kate Bush was assembling a band to accompany her for a live performance at the Prince’s Trust Rock Gala concert. Ure was one of the musicians invited by Bush to join her backing band. During rehearsals for the show, Ure witnessed first-hand how much of a taskmaster the “Running Up That Hill” singer really was.

“She was an absolute perfectionist,” he remembers of Bush. “She would in a wonderfully kind of way, basically tell you, you weren’t doing a very good job, ‘Let’s run that again, let’s just make sure we get that part in.’ In the band was also Phil Collins on drums, Pete Townshend on guitar and Mick Karn from Japan and she didn’t hold back with those guys either. She would say, ‘No, no, it’s not quite right, let’s just do that one more time.’ She knew what she wanted.”

Robert Fripp

When Ure invited King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp to contribute his six-string atmospherics to several tracks on Ure’s 1996 solo album Breathe, it came with a caveat.

“When I asked him if he would do some of his Frippertronics and soundscapes and stuff on one of my albums, he was more than happy to do it, but asked, ‘Can I bring my Japanese students with me?’” explains Ure. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ So, he brought these 40 Japanese students along, who all had cameras, and were taking photographs of everything that Robert said and did.

“And so, Robert sat in the big room with me, while they [students] were in the control room. And he said, ‘This is Midge, this is his record. Midge does this, Midge does that.’ And they’re all taking photographs.

“And then he says, ‘I’m going to play this over a B minor, and this is,’ you know, whatever. And then he starts layering up these wonderful Frippertronics with his electronics. And it was amazing to watch him doing it in real time while he was teaching these 40 Japanese guitar students. It was quite incredible.”

Ure continued to run into Fripp, usually backstage at various ’80s festivals, where Fripp’s wife, Toyah Willcox, and Ure have been regulars on the retro festival circuit. “Robert is such a placid, lovely guy,” he says. “He is there walking around with his guitar strapped around his neck, doing scales — just playing scales, talking to you, chatting away. He still practices six hours a day! I’ve never practiced in my life. That’s why I’m not as good as him.”

In addition to his own bands — Yes, Asia, GTR, the Syndicate, the In Crowd/Tomorrow — Steve Howe has served as a hired gun for a number of other artists, appearing on albums for the sometimes incongruous likes of Queen, Bee Gees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Dixie Dregs, Dream Theater, William Shatner and others.

One of his earliest, meanwhile, was on Lou Reed, the self-titled debut album by the iconoclastic New York rocker fresh out of the Velvet Underground. Both he and Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman found themselves recruited for the album in January 1972 when Yes were woodshedding new ideas at Morgan Studios in London during a break between legs of its world tour supporting its then-current album Fragile. Reed was in another studio at Morgan working on his album.

“We were in two separate buildings, but they were right across the road,” Howe recalls. “So, for Rick and I, it was about the simplest session we ever did. We just walked across the road, into another building.

“Lou was great. He played us two songs, demos; they were very simplistic — voice, maybe a keyboard and a guitar. He said, ‘They’re the two songs we’re doing.’ I think he gave us chord charts, or we made chord charts, ’cause I don’t read music so notation’s no use to me at all. As long as I’ve got a chord chart I can navigate my way through pretty much anything.

“I remember the studio had the old-fashioned kind of booths, separation booths, and the drummer, Clem Cattini, was in the corner. Basically we spent the afternoon doing those songs.”

Howe says he was not particularly a Reed fan at the time, however. “I wasn’t really big on American bands from that era,” he explains. “We liked the Byrds pretty much exclusively. Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, blah, blah … it’s sort of like they were too American for us. We were into this other sort of prog/psychedelic music at the time.”

Which of the Lou Reed album’s 10 tracks Howe appeared on remains a matter of guesswork all these years later, as any published credits for the project have always been general. (Caleb Quaye and Paul Keogh also played on the album.) The moody, atmospheric album-closer “Ocean” — first attempted with the Velvet Underground for 1970’s Loaded — is a likely candidate, with Wakeman’s cascading piano and carefully deployed guitar licks throughout, along with the loping “Lisa Says.”

“It was very smart ’cause he got us in there and he got us to contribute, which is better than telling us, ‘Here’s what you’re gonna play,’” Howe remembers. “All I know in music is to contribute — not copying, not simulating or repeating, but actually contributing. I’m sure it was good for us.

“I think all guest appearances, I almost never turn them down. They always surprise you, and I like surprise — like when I stood in for Stone the Crows [at the Great Western Festival, summer of 1972]; I didn’t know I was gonna do that. Even with Queen [for the title track for Innuendo, 1991], I didn’t know I was going to do that until about two hours before.

“They also wanted spontaneous playing, because they didn’t have a part for me. I could’ve gone in and said, ‘Okay, what do you want me to play?’, but they said, ‘Just play anything. Do what you do.’ So they understood me quite thoroughly, that I wasn’t going to come in and play a ditty, a tune on top of it. They really wanted me to improvise.”

An “almost” on Howe’s guesting resume, meanwhile, came early when he was booled into London’s Olympic Sound Studios during May of 1969 at a session for Ella Fitzgerald’s album Ella, which came out later that year.

“I was in very early years … and was known as a bit of a jazzer, even though I couldn’t play jazz. I went there on a bus — the number. 13 from Holloway to Putney — with my 175,” he says, referring to the Gibson ES-175 electric guitar that has been mainstay throughout his career. “And when I get there, who do I pass in the corridor? Ella Fitzgerald. So I’m like, ‘Wow, Ella … Where’s she going? I just got here.’

“They told me, ‘Okay, well, set your amp up and we’ll do something,’ and lo and behold in the control room there were people like Mick Jagger standing there. I don’t know what they were doing there. I think Ron Wood was there. I think the drummer was one of the most famous drummers in the world; I can’t remember if it was Mick Fleetwood or Charlie Watts. I thought, ‘This is good,’ but I’ve forgotten who it was — obviously you don’t forget Mick Jagger’s in the control room.

“I recorded something, but I don’t know what, or if it was used, and I doubt that anybody in the world knows what it is. But if anybody does, give me a call, please.”

Howe is currently recuperating from “an essential operation” that scuttled Yes’s plans to promote its latest album, Aurora, which came out in April. The group will be returning to the road next May for dates in the U.K. and also plans to tour in Japan and North America.

Tears for Fears guitarist Roland Orzabal says he wasn't convinced about the hit potential of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" when the group recorded it 40 years ago. And neither, he adds, was his bandmate, Curt Smith.

But thanks to a chance riff he came up with on his Fender Stratocaster, the song generated enough interest to keep its creator from throwing it away.

Released on the group’s 1984 album, Songs From the Big Chair, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was in fact Tears for Fears' second number-one single, following on the success of its predecessor, "Shout," which had ascended to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

Now three-times Platinum, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is the band's top-selling track of all-time, winning the Brit Award for Best Single in 1986 and helping drive Songs From the Big Chair to five-times Platinum sales. Tears For Fears recast it as "Everybody Wants to Run the World" to raise money for the African famine relief organization Sport Aid in 1986.

Amid its prominent synthesizers and drum machines, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is awash in electric and acoustic guitars played by Orzabal, who handled the song’s first break — the “rhythm solo,” as he calls it — and a second burning guitar solo played by the band’s touring guitarist, Neil Taylor.

Orzabal says his indoctrination into the guitar universe began "around the age of 13, 14," while he was growing up in Bath, England.

"A guy on the same street as me introduced me to bands like Budgie, Uriah Heep and a band called Led Zeppelin or something like that,” he says with a laugh. “I didn't like it at first, 'cause I was into glam rock. It took a long time for that music to wash over me. And, of course, once you start trying to copy Jimmy Page it becomes a little bit off-putting. But I appreciate a lot of those artists now.”

Today, Orzabal’s guitar collection numbers about 50 specimens, including the walnut Fender model known as "The Strat" he played on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Manufactured from 1980 to 1983, this deluxe version of the Fender Stratocaster offered nine pickup combinations and featured gold hardware, a colored headstock and a unique bridge.

But as Orzabal explains, guitar didn't figure much in Tears for Fear's music at that point. Roughly six months before writing and recording Songs From the Big Chair, the band released the single “Mother’s Talk,” a track they’d recorded with great difficulty, using primarily synthesizers.

“It had been a very painful process,” Orzabal says of that song’s creation. “It had been mainly synthesizer and marimbas and xylophones. There wasn't much rock about it. Chris Hughes [who produced the group's 1983 debut, The Hurting] was brought back in to produce us, and he changed it all around. It was a difficult process, but the record company seemed to like it.”

With a month off to write songs for the new album, Orzabal retired to his home in Bath, England, and got to work using his walnut Strat, a Prophet 5 synthesizer and a LinnDrum rhythm box. “The downstairs had no furniture in it, so there was a lot of echo,” he says. “I would copy the drum parts from certain records into the drum machine. It gave me confidence knowing that had produced a great song, and I would write to those beats.”

One of those rhythms was from "Waterfront" by Simple Minds. “Just that simple ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump,” Orzabal says. "So that was the bass drum and the snare. There was another track by Lynx called ‘Throw Away the Key,’ and that had a very strange high-hat part. And I had this other pattern to counteract the high-hat part and put that in.” Together, the three rhythm tracks inspired the compelling shuffle rhythm that is the hallmark of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

“And then,” Orzabal continues, “I tuned my guitar's E string down to D, and I came up with this riff.” He sings the percolating arpeggiated guitar line that opens the song. “I didn't really think anything of it, to be honest with you. It didn't have the depth of the other material I'd been working on.

“But my wife at the time liked it. So I thought, Okay, maybe I'm wrong."

Once in the studio, Orzabal shared his songs, which were still in their early stages of creation. They included “Shout” and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which at the point was called "Everybody Wants to Go to War.” Although Orzabal wasn’t convinced of the latter’s value, Hughes and the duo's label rep, David Bates, were immediately interested.

“Chris and David were adamant about it,” he recalls. “They wanted some kind of drive-time American hit — whatever that was — and they thought this could be. But neither Curt nor I were convinced. So Chris said, ‘All right, we'll do a proper day's recording on the other songs, and at the end of the day we'll put up the beats and just jam and muck around with it.’ "

When they finally returned to the song, its appeal slowly became apparent to its creator. “At some point I realized that it shouldn't be ‘Everybody Wants to Go to War,’ which was an annoying title,” Orzabal says. “We recorded it with Curt singing it. I didn't want to sing it — I didn't want anything to do with it.”

Besides, Orzabal had enough to do playing his walnut-bodied Strat. “I'd just bought it for its looks alone,” he says of the instrument. “It had gold everywhere. Where you would have the bridge tone control, you had a [nine-position] pickup selector switch. I played the guitar through a Boss compressor — I remember it was blue [most likely the Compression Sustainer CS-2 pedal, released in 1982] — into a Roland JC-120 with the chorus on. That's all.”

When it came time to record a solo, Orzabal took a chordal approach to the job. “The rhythm solo is my kind of thing, but it was a lot of drop-ins — all kinds of things just to sort of get the shape of it.”

But when Hughes and Bates decided he song needed a blazing-hot solo for the song’s outro, Orzabal knew it wasn’t his thing. “At the end they decided to put on a real, proper lead guitar solo,” he recalls, “and the first thing we said, without thinking, was ‘Neil Taylor.’ Neil had been floating around Tears for Fears for awhile, but he wanted to do his own thing. But we always knew he had a very idiosyncratic way of playing —far better than us when it comes to playing lead.”

Orzabal recalls that as recording proceeded, they often felt the beat needed to be faster. “We thought it was too slow, so every time we would record on it, we would put it up at least two percent,” he says. As a result, he says, the pitch "ended up between D and E flat.”

Released on March 22, 1985, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” began its chart ascent, reaching number one in the U.S., Canada and New Zealand, and number two in the U.K., Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands. The song’s music video went into regular rotation on MTV and became a staple of the channel through much of that year,

Forty years on, Tears for Fears now have seven studio albums to their credit, including last year's The Tipping Point, the group's first in 18 years. October 25 will see the release of Songs for a Nervous Planet, which includes a set from the band’s latest tour plus four new studio tracks. It will be accompanied by Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film), which screens in theaters on October 25 and 26 (tearsforfearsfilm.com). Orzabal and Smith are also about to start work on the next Tears for Fears album, with the former predicting that "there will be more guitar" this time around.

As for the popularity of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Orzabal says he’s gotten used to it, as well as fans’ reactions when it’s performed in concert. “You’re never really surprised by the hits,” he says. “What’s shocked me was that people were so keen to listen to the new material, and so patient. When Curt decided to do [2022’s] ’The Tipping Point’ as the first song of the show, I was a bit nervous of opening with a new track. But moving from that into ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ — it was just fantastic. It’s the old and the new, and it all works together.”

Before he became one of rock’s most distinctive guitarists, Brian May was a teenager in southwest London trying to find his musical voice. Like many aspiring British players of the era, he was captivated by the guitar heroes emerging from the local club scene. But two musicians in particular would fundamentally alter the way he thought about the instrument: Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Speaking about his formative years in a school band called 1984, May recalled regularly performing soul covers by Sam & Dave and Otis Redding before Britain’s psychedelic explosion changed everything.

“We played a mixture of adapted soul stuff,” he said. “It was just pre-psychedelia. We used to try and do a couple of songs of our own. Luckily, as time went on, Pink Floyd, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix came along, and we started doing that.”

The first major revelation came from Eric Clapton during the guitarist’s tenure with the Yardbirds.

“Clapton was unbelievable, just so sparkling and fluid,” May said. “He was what turned me away from the Shadows style and sent me back to listening to B.B. King, Bo Diddley, and all those people I’d heard before.”

At the time, May admitted he had underestimated the blues, viewing it largely as a repetitive form.

“I thought it was all the same: 12-bar blues, and that was it,” he explained. “I didn’t realize the depth or emotion there was in it until I saw Eric Clapton doing it. That somehow made it accessible for me.”

Inspired by Clapton’s playing, May began tracing the guitarist’s influences and immersing himself in the records that had shaped the British blues boom.

“I went back and listened to his influences,” he said. “I listened to Clapton very closely, and to people like Mike Bloomfield on the first album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.”

May was equally enthralled by Jeff Beck, who replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds and pushed the electric guitar into increasingly adventurous territory.

“I couldn't believe what he could do,” May recalled. “I remember seeing him put the guitar down, make it feedback, and play a whole tune without even touching the fingerboard. That was the first time I saw a Les Paul guitar. I saw a gig at the Marquee soon after Beck had joined, and Eric Clapton came on and jammed at the end. That was pretty amazing; I'll never forget that.“

But even the combined impact of those two British guitar giants could not prepare him for what came next.

After years of developing his own expressive approach to the instrument, May believed he was beginning to achieve the sounds he heard in his head.

“I was beginning to make the guitar sort of talk,” he recalled. “I always wanted the guitar to play for people, to talk the same way a vocal did and have feeling in it.”

Then he encountered Hendrix.

“When I saw Hendrix, I thought, Oh my God. This guy is doing everything that I was trying to do.”

The experience was humbling.

“He just made me feel like I couldn’t play,” May said. “It makes you feel very uncomfortable when you thought you knew everything that was going on, and then suddenly somebody comes along who seems to be doing all sorts of things you hadn’t even thought of.”

Initially, May suspected that some of Hendrix’s seemingly impossible sounds might have been studio trickery. Hearing the guitarist’s conversation-like soloing on “Stone Free,” he wondered whether recording techniques were responsible.

That skepticism vanished when he saw Hendrix perform live at London’s Savoy Theatre while supporting the Who.

“He completely blew me away,” May said. “I thought, ‘He’s it.’”

The impact was so overwhelming that May believed even one of Britain’s biggest bands couldn’t compete.

“The Who couldn’t follow him in those days,” he said. “Anybody in the world would find it hard to follow Hendrix.”

The lessons May absorbed from both players would remain central to his own style. From Clapton, he learned that blues guitar could communicate emotion and nuance — even if he did once earn Slowhand’s wrath when he and Eddie Van Halen dedicated a blues jam to the guitarist that Clapton called “so horrible.” From Hendrix, he discovered that the instrument’s expressive possibilities were far broader than he had imagined.

Those influences would eventually help shape the singular voice May developed with Queen — a style capable of singing, soaring, and, just as he had always wanted, making a guitar talk.

“I've always played what I wanted to play and fortunately for me, I've always played with artists whose music I liked, so I really fitted in at the time,” Albert Lee tells Guitar Player. The country guitar legend has performed and recorded with artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman, to name but a few. He even participated in the supergroup Biff Baby’s All-Stars, featuring Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather and Steve Morse.

But one legendary act he played with remains a career highlight: the Everly Brothers.

“I did a long stint with them,” explains Lee. “During the ’70s they'd broken up and weren’t speaking to each other, so I got to know Don really well. He was playing at a local bar once a week with some old friends, and that turned into a regular thing and it was great fun.

“By that time, I was doing the occasional session in Los Angeles too, and because I didn't have an acoustic guitar with me, I used to borrow one or two of his guitars to take to the sessions. He was fine with it and would say, ‘Take this one, it's amazing.’ He then gave me one of his own Gibson J-200s and it's one of my treasured possessions now.”

Guitar Player asked Lee to look back on five of his memorable moments playing with rock’s finest artists.

Eric Clapton

“I was working on a session for a week with an artist called Marc Benno and at the end of the week, Eric's manager said that Eric had just done a tour without a second guitarist and so, how did I fancy going out with him? I thought, ‘Well, that's great, yes.’

“At the time I was just about to get my first real album released, so I don't know if I did a good thing or a bad thing, but I dropped the promotion of my new record and went out with Eric and it was great fun because we were all friends from the ’60s. I think he liked having me around and it worked really well because our styles are so different. I've heard most of the guys who played with him tried to sound like him, but I didn’t, I just did what I do. And likewise, he did the same thing, too.

“I was with him for five years, and during that period he fired his whole band twice, but I managed to survive. He was very happy for me to do a song or two during the show, he’d say, ‘Go on, Albert,’ and he’d go and sit behind the amp and have his brandy and lemonade and a cigarette. He was really enthused to have me around at that time. Then after five years he decided that I wasn't wanted anymore. I have to say that we're still good friends and since then, I've done most of the Crossroads concerts.”

Ritchie Blackmore

“I did an album with Jon Lord called Gemini Suite [in 1971] and Ritchie, because of his moods, decided he didn't want to do it, so Jon thought, Well, I'll get somebody else to do it. And it was good fun. Ritchie and I knew each other as he used to be with the Outlaws, an English country band that wore Western shirts and played instrumentals and also backed [English rock and roll singer] Mike Berry for a while in the ’60s.

“Ritchie and I played in this studio band called Green Bullfrog with producer Derek Lawrence who was friends with all the guys in that band. Derek had a lot of free studio time and told me, ‘Come tomorrow and we'll put down some tracks, with any songs you want to do,’ and that's how that all came about. He did have some kind of record deal, but rather than having to deal with the contracts for all those different record companies, he decided to give us nicknames. You can tell who's who, though.

“Ritchie did a few sessions with different people in the early years and he did a lot of sessions with [English record producer] Joe Meek, who was getting some very commercial sounds that people weren't getting at that time. Ritchie has always been really friendly with me and has always said nice things about me in articles.”

Jerry Lee Lewis

“I've always been a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis. There was a period in the early ’70s when American record companies were getting records done in London with well-known British names, so we did a record [The Session, 1973] for Mercury Records and there were lots of artists on it. It was a lot of fun. Jerry always lived up to his reputation as ‘the Killer’ back then. He liked what I was doing and compared with some of the guitar players who were on it, I guess my sound was more to his liking, because of his country background.

“There was this one time at Wembley Arena in London and I was playing with Duane Eddy and I just happened to be walking down the hallway when Jerry's roadies called out to me: ‘Come down and say hello to Jerry.’ I was a bit nervous but I went in and said hello. His manager then pulled me aside and said, ‘Jerry’s guitar players have been drinking all day. Do you want to get up and play with Jerry?’ Of course, I said yes. Little Richard was on the show as well and he'd already done his set. They had agreed that Jerry would close the show so I was up there playing with Jerry and it was discussed that for the encore Little Richard would come on, and it all got pretty wild.”

The Crickets

“I'd always been a huge Buddy Holly fan. I was at a record launch party for my band Heads Hands & Feet and Ric Grech was there and we got to talking over a drink. I had missed Buddy when he and the Crickets came over to England for the first time. Ric said that the Crickets were coming over that weekend and that I better come along. Glen Hardin, the piano player, wasn't going to be able to make it in time because he was finishing up a tour with Elvis Presley, so they asked me to fill in.

“We had a little rehearsal a few days later and it was a lot of fun. We did the first gig at the Speakeasy in London, the late-night drinking establishment. It went really well, and at the end of the night Jerry Allison said, ‘Do you want to do the whole tour?’ So, I did.

“They shared lots of stories with me about touring America back then. It was quite difficult, driving overnight and hardly getting any sleep. Some of them were bus tours and other times they were in a van or a big car with a lot of instruments. And the buses weren’t like nowadays, with bunks and whatever; these were old-school buses, so you’d travel overnight sitting up.

“Then that February day, the heating had broken down on the bus and it was miserable. Buddy decided he couldn’t face it one more night, so he decided to rent a plane, a four-seater for him and his band. But Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were really putting pressure on the guys, saying, ‘Oh God, I'd really like to get off that bus for a day,’ and we all know the rest of what happened. The weather was bad and the pilot was only about 21 and not really familiar with using flight instruments for night flying.”

Eddie Van Halen

“[The supergroup] Biff Baby’s All-Stars was actually started by Sterling Ball, Ernie Ball’s son. When I was with Heads Hands & Feet, Ernie and his son came along to our gig because they'd heard ‘Country Boy’ on the radio and they wanted to see this English band playing country music.

“I got really friendly with the family and I started to play local gigs with Sterling, who then put a band together and it developed from there. We did a lot of gigs.

“There was this one gig we did on a weekend during the NAMM show. By that time the Balls had gotten really friendly with Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather and Steve Morse, and we all played this show together. Eddie didn't want to play ‘Country Boy.’ He told me, ‘No, I don’t want to play on that’ because his style was so different from country, but I said, ‘You just do what you do with the tapping bit,’ and he did and he loved it.”

Sammy Hagar certainly gets his due as a singer, frontman, band leader, songwriter and, of course, liquor and restaurant entrepreneur. That he’s also a solid guitar player is often lost in the mix.

That, however, could have something to do with those who have stood beside him throughout his 54-year recording career.

The Red Rocker came to prominence in 1973 as the frontman for Montrose, collaborating with Ronnie Montrose over the course of two albums — Montrose and Paper Money — and favorites such as “Bad Motor Scooter” and “Rock the Nation.”

After Montrose changed the lineup in 1975, Hagar embarked on a solo career and scored his own batch of hits (“There’s Only One Way to Rock,” “I Can’t Drive 55” and more). He also teamed with Journey’s Neal Schon in 1983 for the short-lived supergroup HSAS, which released the live album Through the Fire in 1984.

The following year, Hagar performed with Eddie Van Halen at the first Farm Aid concert, then went on to spend 11 years with Van Halen, recording four number one albums with the band following the departure of David Lee Roth. (Hagar would return for one more tour in 2004 and record three new songs for The Best of Both Worlds compilation.)

He worked with Schon again and, later, Joe Satriani in the side project Planet Us. Satriani would also join Hagar in another supergroup, Chickenfoot, and later become part of Hagar’s Best of All Worlds Band in 2024. In between, Hagar brought Vic Johnson into his bands the Waboritas and the Circle.

That’s a lot of electric six-string firepower to be attached to in one career, and Hagar does not take those associations for granted. He loves to talk about his good fortune, too — which he did with us via Zoom from Maui as he prepares for a new run of Best of All Worlds dates beginning June 13 in St. Louis. Here he tells us about four guitar greats he’s played with who aren’t Eddie Van Halen (we’ll leave that discussion for another day).

Ronnie Montrose

“Ronnie was on fire. That’s the way he played — like it’s burning. He wasn’t that fast. He wasn’t a shredder. He played well, and he played really fiery.

“I learned how to play guitar from Ronnie. I learned more from Ronnie than Eddie as a guitarist. I still play more like Ronnie Montrose today. He really inspired my guitar playing.

“When he got into his Town Without Pity era, he started playing more like what Joe Satriani plays — with that sound and that vocal style. He probably would’ve gotten even better; he just had some real head problems. I’ve never seen a guy like that. He fired everybody. The second you had one smidgen of success with him, he broke up the band.

“Montrose — we were about to explode. We were gonna be the American Led Zeppelin, and he couldn’t take it. I don’t know what it was. He was afraid of success. He’d sit there in the studio holding his face like, ‘Oh God, what are we gonna do?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck, let’s jam! Let’s make some music.’

“He was so tormented, man. I don’t know why; I think it must’ve been some far-out childhood thing that happened to him. I mean, come on — the guy shot himself in the head. It’s horrible. [Montrose died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 3, 2012.]

“That broke my heart when he did that. It made me think, Could somebody have helped him? What happened here? How do you let some guy do that? I wasn’t around, but if I’d been around and knew he was in that kind of condition, I would’ve put this guy in a hospital or taken him under my wing. I would’ve helped.”

Neal Schon

“Neal’s been my friend forever. Before Journey broke, we were buddies. We used to play shows together, and he would always come jam with me when I’d play Winterland [in San Francisco]. Neal just walks around with a fuckin’ guitar around his neck. He takes it off to shower, and that’s probably it. He probably fucks with a guitar around his neck. He’s just always playing.

“He’s a great, melodic player. He uses the whole neck and makes it look like a toy. I can tell a Neal Schon solo instantly because he plays a really cool, melodic lick, and then he goes [scats] — just spills out all these crazy, whacked-out notes. I don’t know if any of them are real notes, but if you’re not hitting bad notes, it doesn’t matter.

“I could say, ‘Let’s write a song, Neal,’ and he’ll write a song in five minutes. Him and Joe Satriani — they’re so frickin’ prolific, it’s scary. And it’s ’cause he’s got the guitar on all the time, so he’ll think, ‘Here’s what I was playing a couple minutes ago. This could be a song.’ That’s Neal.”

Vic Johnson

“I call him Vic ‘Right Hand’ Johnson all the time. He’s got a right hand like The Edge, like Pete Townshend. He can shred — his left hand’s great — but his right hand, man, he kicks off a groove and you don’t need to hear the drums. He puts it right in the pocket.

“He was never in a band till he got in my band, and he was kind of a sideman. Earlier on, if he’d had a superstar singer — a Sammy Hagar, a David Lee Roth or a Robert Plant or somebody — Vic would’ve been much more famous as a guitar player.

“Vic’s got the biggest, fattest sound. When I pick up his guitar, his strings are really fat — big ol’ fat strings. I can’t play ’em. I can’t bend ’em, but he’s got those big, ol’ strong hands, and he gets a lot of tone out of there.

“Joe [Satriani], Neal Schon — Eddie, when he heard Vic play — they all go, ‘Yeah, he’s got a cool tone.’ Vic’s pretty much a simple Ronnie Montrose-style guitar player like me, but he’s got the baddest tone of all of us.”

Joe Satriani

“Joe’s got the same thing Jeff Beck had, and that’s that he can make the guitar sing. He’s got the tone and the touch — his vibrato and the way he uses his whammy bar — like Jeff Beck. Songs like ‘Summer Song’ or ‘Surfing With the Alien’ sound like there’s a singer in the band.

“He’s one of the few instrumentalists who can carry it to where you can tolerate it. When I go see an instrumentalist, by about the third song I’m going, ‘Well, when’s the singer coming out?’ ’Cause I’m getting bored. But Joe will play the next tune and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a cool melody!’ In my head, it’s like he’s singing it.

“I think Joe could be one of the best guitar players on the planet right now. Look — he taught Steve Vai how to play, so Steve will never be better than him. He taught Kirk Hammett how to play, so Kirk will never be better than him. ’Cause you can’t outdo the teacher.

“Joe knows exactly what Eddie was playing; that’s why I love having him in this band. He studied it. He watched live tapes, he saw him live, he listens to the records and knows exactly what Eddie was doing. That’s the difference between him and some kid in a music store playing ‘Eruption’ exactly like Eddie. Joe knows what he’s doing, and he knows what Eddie was doing, and that’s different from simply emulating somebody.

“He’s a genius, honest to God. I’m not joking about his intelligence. He’s super smart. When you interview him, his answers are so thoughtful and so deep. I love the guy.

“Lemme say one bad thing about him so you don’t think I’m kissing his ass too much: He plays too fuckin’ loud. And he doesn’t need to play that loud ’cause he has in-ears. But he’s used to not having a singer, so he thinks, ‘I gotta be the loudest thing.’ [laughs] We’re still working that out.”

More often than not, Samantha Fish is the only guitar player in her band. But she has a good history of playing nice with others.

The Kansas City, Missouri, native has been at it since she was a teenager, and recording since 2009’s Live Bait with her Samantha Fish Blues Band. Over the years she’s teamed with Cassie Taylor and Dani Wild as Girls With Guitars and teamed with Texas titan Jesse Dayton on 2023’s Grammy Award-nominated Death Wish Blues. She’s also had albums produced by fellow guitarists such as Mike Zito, Luther Dickinson, Jon Spencer, Bobby Harlow of the Go and Martin Kierszenbaum.

“The music community is so special,” Fish tells us from her current residence in New Orleans. “I’m not talking about any specific region; it’s just a great community of musicians and people playing real instruments as we kind of tiptoe into this digital and, daresay, AI age. I’ve always been encouraged by people older than me and by my peers to grow and explore and not take any shortcuts or anything like that.”

Fish’s collaborative acumen, meanwhile, has been best demonstrated on stage, where she’s been shown an open door from a wealth of colleagues — opportunities she certainly does not take for granted.

“Every time I’m onstage with a guitar player I feel like I learn something,” Fish acknowledges. “You watch their technique and approach and think about how that applies to how I do it. I feel like you can only do what you can do; I’ve gone toe to toe with people before and tried to turn it into a competition, like a lot of people do … and try to see who can out-gun each other.

“But I feel like the best musical things happen when it’s more of a conversation. So for me it’s, ‘What can I say that’s going to add to and elevate this?’ That’s how I approach jamming with people. That’s the most honest way to do it, not come with my stuff and outgun somebody.”

Fish, who released her latest studio album, Paper Doll, last year and Paper Doll Live earlier this year, recently announced this year’s edition of her Shake ’Em Down Tour, joined by Cedric Burnside and Daddy Long Legs for 14 dates starting December 2 in Pensacola, Florida, and wrapping up 18 days later in Louisville. She’s also writing songs for her next album, which Fish says “is still pretty vague to me. It’s taking a shape, but I’m not ready to say what that is — ’cause it will probably change.”

In the meantime, Fish took a few minutes to sit down and reminisce about some of her favorite onstage playing encounters.

Eric Gales

Among Fish’s career highlights is performing at Eric Clapton’s 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles, collaborating with Eric Gales on her “Black Wind Hollow” during her set and then joining him for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” and the Alabama State Troupers’ “Going Down,” the latter with Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

“That was one of those incredible invitations. I’ve always wanted to perform at Crossroads since, I think, 2010 when I stumbled on a DVD recording of the concert. That was just one of those things I put on the bucket list in my brain, in the back of my head, that if it ever happens again it would mean so much to be included.

“So when they invited me and wanted me to play with him — done! I’d played with Eric before, and he’s really one of the best, such an incredible performer and player. The way he puts together melodies, his note selection, he’s otherworldly. He takes you to space and back.

“To get the opportunity with him, and Kingfish as well, was really special. I felt like these are my friends. We’re in the blues community, so it’s special. Crossroads is a super-curated thing; I let them tell me what they wanted to do. I can’t remember if we chose ‘I Put a Spell on You’ or if they did; it might have been a request. It’s a big production and they’ve got this rotating stage; on one side somebody’s performing and on the other side it’s frantically trying to get our stuff set up so that when it rotates we’re ready to go. To put on that kind of a show it requires so much planning, to the minute. To the second, actually.

“There wasn’t any rehearsal; I sent Eric the song, ‘Black Wind Hollow,’ and we knew the others. We kind of talked out the changes and everything. But Eric’s band is so good, and they’re standards. There’s so many versions of them, I knew it would be something we could do really well together.”

Buddy Guy

“Buddy Guy somebody I’ve gotten the opportunity to perform with a few times, on the road opening shows and stuff. We played in Central Park together; Bobby Rush was there, too, so that was a cool show. He is one of the best conversationalists on guitar there is, hands down. He’s such an expert when it comes to that.

“I’ve learned a lot from Buddy over the years. He’s the truth; he tells the truth when he’s up there, and it’s nice to be able to bounce something back to him. Recently he was in New Orleans and I went to see the show and went backstage just to say hello. And he’s like, ‘You’re getting up, right?’ I had not planned on that, but of course I’m not gonna say no to an opportunity to learn something.”

Walter Trout

“Walter Trout is one of the first musicians I remember going to see as a young player, when he’d come to Kansas City and perform. I used to frequent this club called Knuckleheads a lot, and he was somebody the owner of the club was like, ‘You need to come see this guy. He’s gonna teach you something.’

“And he did. The guy is a very powerful guitar player, incredible story, incredible songs. It’s been awhile since we’ve played together, but it’s always great when we get the chance.”

Joe Bonamassa

“I’ve gotten to do the super jams on some of his cruises, and he’s a fun one to play off of, to go toe-to-toe with, as you say. He’s really super expressive and melodic, and he has way different ideas than I do, so it’s kind of fun to hear the way he puts notes together. That’s the fun part.

“I know he has a lot of amps up there — he’s definitely more into gear than I am — but it’s not as loud as you think. It’s workable. He’s got a lot of taste, and his band just sounds exceptional. They’re pristine.”

Slash

“I did a Slash tour, and that just made my little kid heart so happy, ’cause I was such a Guns N’ Roses fan. Do you know how many speeding tickets I got on Appetite for Destruction? So many that they almost took my license away. I told him that and he laughed — or gave me a pity chuckle. I’m not sure.

“He came out and played ‘I Put a Spell on You’ with us, and it was fun just to get to play with an icon like Slash, ’cause he’s such a great player and you can just tell it’s him in the way he plays. We did some back and forth; I wait a lot when I’m playing with somebody, ’cause I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.

“I was more or less sitting back, waiting to hear what he was gonna say and take my time to respond. That’s always a good way to approach playing with anybody, I think.”

Luther Dickinson

The lead singer and guitarist for the North Mississippi Allstars, Luther Dickinson produced two of Fish’s albums — 2015’s Wild Heart and 2017’s Belle of the West — and she calls him “one of my favorite guitar players to play with. He’s really melodic and fun. Every time I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in with him or whatever, he’s just got a way of building melodies and a dynamic, and his tone is some of my favorite guitar tone out there. And every time you play with him, it’s different. We never do the same thing twice.”

Jesse Dayton

“We did that Death Wish Blues album [2023] and a whole collaborative tour and got nominated for a Grammy together. I’ve always been the only guitar player in my band for the longest time, so when Jesse and I started working together it introduced this opportunity for me to approach things differently, and I learned so much from that time period.

“We were on the road together for 18 months, and it was fun for me to approach the guitar from this other level — ‘What can I do to complement the lead right now? What can I play in front? Behind?’ It made me a stronger guitarist. Just to have that back-and-forth dynamic was really, really cool.

“And he’s such an explosive player! That [King double-cut hollowbody] guitar he’s got is so big. The sound of it is just monstrous. For me it was, ‘All right, I’ve got to figure out how to complement this — not compete sonically but take up a different space.’ It was really fun and really interesting.”

Aerosmith's Joe Perry was born in September 10, 1950. Joe has been a pretty regular fixture in the pages of Guitar Player – the decades of the magazine's life almost mirroring his life in 'America's greatest rock'n'roll band'. In May 2005, Perry was on the cover of GP, looking back over a lifetime of guitar plaing, with thoughtful and insightful takes on Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, live performance, and much more.

It doesn't take long to figure out when you've arrived at Joe Perry's house. Sure, as the gate to his rural Massachusetts estate opens you know you're on the property of someone of serious means. And when you head down the driveway and come to a pride of sleek and dangerous-looking European sports cars – as well as a golf cart, which is perhaps an even surer sign of sprawling luxury – the case strengthens that you may be at the residence of a rock icon who has sold more than 100 million albums.

But even when you reach the rustically beautiful main house, you still may wonder if you're in the right place. After all, this elegant spread could just as well belong to a CEO, a real estate mogul, or even a politician. How do we know this is indeed the home of the legendary Aerosmith guitarist?

The answer is above you: a custom weathervane that erases all doubts – a big, glorious, rusty iron Les Paul in the sky telling you which way the wind blows.

Taking all this in, one question comes to mind: What if? What if Perry hadn't reunited with Aerosmith in 1984? What if he and Steven Tyler hadn't made amends, recommenced touring, and soon thereafter shot the "Walk This Way" video with Run D.M.C. that simultaneously made hip-hop, rap rock, and – once again – Aerosmith mainstream commodities? What if Perry wasn't in a band that plays the Super Bowl on a semi-regular basis? What if his house wasn't a virtual Noah's Ark of vintage amps and guitars?

In other words, does the 54-year-old guitarist ever look back on all that has transpired and thank the stars that he didn't end up like Uli Jon Roth or Ritchie Blackmore – a legend without the band that made him famous?

"All the time," confesses Perry, settling down in front of his big Neve console at the Boneyard, the stunning home studio where nearly every note on Honkin' on Bobo and Just Push Play, the last two Aerosmith albums, was recorded.

"We constantly reflect on the legacy of Aerosmith, and, honestly, we shake our heads in amazement. It's a miracle that we're still together after 30-plus years."

It's a bittersweet afternoon for Perry. For one thing, it will be one of his last days spent in the Boneyard, at least in its current incarnation. Along with his wife, Billie, and their youngest child, Roman, he and his studio will soon move someplace even more serene – a 120-acre Vermont farm just two hours outside of Boston. But if there's even greater cause for reflection, it's because Perry is about to share with GP readers something very close to his heart-something that, so far, no one outside of his inner circle has heard: his first solo release since rejoining Aerosmith.

The album is simply called Joe Perry, and, as the laconic guitarist gives the faders a shove and a raging symphony of soaring, scorching riffs leaps out of the monitors, a hint of joy in his eyes makes it clear that this is perhaps the most passionate, honest, and heartfelt artistic statement of his career. And, wow, is that a different headspace than the one he was in when he tracked his first solo record.

So, how come it has been so long since your last solo album?

Between all the public appearances, touring, and recording, Aerosmith is definitely a full-time job. Plus, I'm getting pretty much everything I want out of the band creatively. But I've accumulated so much of my own material concurrently-some of which I recorded after Aerosmith sessions ended-it eventually had to come out. And I didn't want it to come out somewhere down the road as outtakes in a box set.

What's the biggest difference between Joe Perry and the solo albums you did during your split with Aerosmith in the early '80s?

Back then, there was a lot of anger-a lot of "f"** you" toward the other guys. That's why I didn't want to call this a Joe Perry Project album. It's a different time, a different place, and the album was recorded for different reasons.

That was a tenuous time for Aerosmith. And right around then, Eddie Van Halen hit the scene and claimed that when he met you, you brushed him off. Is that true?

At that point, we were definitely going downhill. Our live performances were suffering, we were really messed up on drugs, and we were dealing with the stress and strain of being in the band for nearly ten years. If we had had our wits, we would have taken a nice long vacation and looked at things on a bigger scale. At the same time, Van Halen was starting this new movement in guitar, because Eddie was a genius. He was single-handedly moving guitar to a whole new level. We were the preeminent stadium headliners who were starting to crumble, and here were these young upstarts coming up, just reaching the peak of their game, ready to fill our shoes.

I mean, I loved the first Van Halen record from the moment I heard it, and what was amazing about it was that it was full of stuff I'd heard before, yet it all sounded so new. For instance, that Echoplex sound Eddie did [at the end of "Eruption"] was such an old trick that I never would have done it, because I thought it was cheesy. But Eddie was from the next generation, and everything was new to him. And he was playing to a whole new batch of kids that didn't grow up with that stuff, so it was very smart for him to use tricks like that on top of his naturally brilliant playing.

Suddenly there was this whole West Coast guitar-slinger movement that he started, and it was like, "Man, they 're beating on our door." We were feeling the heat, so, yes, I'm sure there was a certain amount of jealousy going on with us at that time.

The first time I saw Aerosmith was when you had just rejoined the band. The arena was only half full, and you guys seemed visibly angry. To this day, it still stands as one of the greatest rock concerts I've ever seen.

We were in various stages of cleaning up, and we were out touring without a new record, but we didn't care. We were rediscovering our band and seeing things in a new light. We were just as excited as the fans were that we were back – and the fans that came out then were hardcore fans that had been with us since the beginning.

That night, you played a fiery version of "Red House" and then smashed your Stratocaster and hurled the pieces over the back of your stacks.

I haven't smashed a guitar in a while. It has become a bit of a cliché. But sometimes you do it, and it's totally unexpected, because you just want to add a certain immediacy to the show-a moment people will walk away with and remember forever.

And if it's done in the right spirit, you don't even notice how hard it is to actually break a guitar like that. But you might be surprised the first time you swing one into the floor, because that thing comes back at you like a baseball bat.

Is it possible to have too many guitars?

I currently have four or five hundred, and, truthfully, I'll never play them all. As much as I love them, I'm getting ready to sell some off. Obviously, I'll keep the ones that have sentimental or historical value, but there are many that I'd rather have out there getting played than just sitting in a box.

The guitar parts on 'Joe Perry' sound immense. How do you get that live arena sound in a small studio?

Well, I certainly don't drag in my concert rig! People forget that the Marshall stack was designed for the stage in an era when sound systems weren't very good. Back in the day, when Jimi and the Stones were out there playing, only the vocals and maybe a couple of drums would get miked. The Marshall was essentially a miniature P.A. system for your guitar. It's supposed to sound loud, it's supposed to shake the stage, and you're supposed to feel it when you're 20 feet away. Though I tend to play quieter and cleaner than I used to, I still need at least two 50- or 100-watt stacks, because I'll always prefer to feel the guitar coming directly off my amps.

But in the studio, I find smaller speakers and cabinets tend to record better. After all, simple physics dictate that the smaller the speaker, the more sound there is in a concentrated area for the microphone to pick up. For most of Hankin' on Bobo, I used a little Epiphone amp and an old Fender Champ. Joe Perry is an amalgamation of tracks-some going back as many as ten years-and, yes, a lot of them were performed through small amps, especially an Alessandro 10-watt head and speaker cube, an [Alessandro] Working Dog combo, and a bunch of old Champs. I also used a Carr Mercury combo, Gibson combos old and new, and even a classic Danelectro, among other things.

Rocks was recorded on a 16-track machine, whereas Just Push Play employed as many as 96 tracks. Where does Joe Perry fit into that range?

When you start double- and triple-tracking guitars to get the so-called "fatter" sound, you're asking for trouble. Some of my favorite records of all time feature one guitar, one speaker, and one microphone. So, ideally, that's where you want to be. One guitar played right can sound huger than five guitars all multitracked together. The spirit of this record is more like Rocks.

When you're doing an album like this one-where you're playing nearly every instrument except the drums-how do you possibly foresee how all your tones, riffs, and vocals are going to fit together?

It's all about leaving holes in the mix. One of the biggest mistakes people make is getting sounds that sound good on their own, and then expecting them to work in the final mix. If I soloed some of the bass tracks on this record for you, you'd hear nothing but subs and say, "I can't even tell what note that is." But when you blend it in with the other parts, it all makes sense.

And the same thing is true for guitars. For example, [Aerosmith co-guitarist] Brad Whitford and I have recorded so many records together that we instinctively know how to complement each other's sound before the first mic is even set up. That's what 30 years of songwriting, plotting, and planning will do for you.

There are some fantastic solos on this album. The "Hold on Me" solo opens with an amazingly vocal-like shriek.

That's me plugged through a DigiTech Whammy pedal and an [HHB Radius3] Fat Man tube compressor. To get that "vocal" sound, you really just have to keep fooling around until you find what you're after. It's always a battle to get overdrive and sustain without losing tone. Sometimes you have to bring down the drive so that you're forced into having to work the guitar a little harder.

How did that strikingly lyrical solo on "Can't Compare" go down?

That was a shocker. I had just plugged in my [reissue] Mary Kaye Strat, and I said, "Paul, let's see if we've got a sound." We did a take, and, honestly, I don't think I've ever played anything that came from as deep inside as that solo. It's totally pure, unadulterated, and straight from the heart, and it became a mini-movement within the song. It's a love song, and the solo is just a pure musical expression of the lyrics.

Getting a great take like that is what just about every guitarist prays for when the red light goes on. Any advice on how musicians can make the magic happen more often?

Sometimes you get tracks like that when you aren't even aware you're recording, so perhaps a total dissociation from any kind of pressure is part of it. That's probably why the coolest licks sometimes happen during a song's fadeout-it's like the guitarist is thinking, "Well, the song is over. Now I can relax and cut loose." On the other hand, sometimes that pressure works for you.

But one bit of practical advice I can offer is to make sure that from the get-go your signal path is always clean. Then, if you do play something magical, you can keep it. You don't want it ruined by a 60-cycle hum or a standing wave. Even if all you have is a one-channel project studio, make sure that when you cast that net there are no holes in it. And then just let it fly.

"Push Comes to Shove" has a bit of a swung-sixteenths funk pocket.

Yeah, I wanted to have some of that "Last Child"/"Walk This Way" feel on this record because we kind of skipped that vibe on Bobo-which I was little bummed about, because it's such a big part of Aerosmith's roots.

In the early to middle '70s, Aerosmith's strategy for success was to tour the states constantly. But let's say Joe Perry was your first album. I imagine your approach to breaking in would be quite different in this day and age.

Not really. We can't control the internet or cable television, but things really haven't changed that much. You still have to prove yourself as a live band, and you still have to catch a lucky break somewhere. If you're tenacious and talented and have good songs-and if you don't quit if nothing happens right away-you'll slowly build an audience, even if you never get picked up by VH1 or MTV. There are a lot of bands out there that will never make the cover of Rolling Stone, yet they deliver live, and they can still sell a couple of thousand CDs in every town they play. And that is in your control.

Many guitarists dream of playing gigantic concerts. Are there any downsides to the big stage that aspiring rock stars don't consider?

Well, first of all, you give up a lot of your life to do those kind of shows – to be on the road all the time, to put together huge tours, and to have it all come off with that level of production. On a show-to-show basis, though, I find that because of the energy required to put on that kind of performance-the adrenaline that gets so strong it sometimes makes my hands shake – I'll just never play as good in those circumstances as I do down here in my studio. Unless you plan on standing glued in front of your amps all night, you'll never get the same level of connection with the music.

The classic example of that is Jimi Hendrix. The Jimi you hear on all those early live bootleg tapes is so different than the Jimi you hear on his records. When he was out there trying to make a name for himself, he was putting all his energy into his rock and roll shows – burning guitars and all that stuff – and his guitar playing was all over the place. He was barely in tune. Of course, there's still brilliance there, but it's a different kind of brilliance than what he was doing in the studio.

And, in a sense, the same is true of an Aerosmith show. It's a visceral, physical experience, an athletic event, really, where the music is the vehicle for something bigger and more exciting. You may not have the purest technique or play the most perfect solo of your life at a big show like that, but you will bring the audience along with you wherever you go. It's a tradeoff, and I've come to grips with that.

In your 1979 GP cover story, you said that you didn't consider yourself "much of a guitar player." Has your perception of your skills changed over the years?

As far as being a guitar technician, I still feel the same way – I don't really have any technique to speak of. Anybody who is a real guitar player can listen to my playing and know that I wasn't schooled and that I didn't study music. I don't know jazz, music theory, or any of that stuff. It's all strictly feel. If there's a certain riff I'm hearing in my head that I want to play on the guitar, I'll fumble my way through the music until I can get it happening. I know a lot of players who can play Hendrix note for note, but I can't get into that. I could have gone down the technique road, but it never appealed to me. I never like things to sound too polished.

This interview was first published in Guitar Player, May 2005. For the latest information about Joe Perry, including tour dates, visit his website.

Carol Kaye’s bass lines have graced countless iconic albums and singles, TV themes and film soundtracks of the 1960s and early 1970s. Her work can be heard on classic tracks running the gamut from Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” to “River Deep – Mountain High” by Ike & Tina Turner and Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright.”

With more than 10,000 recordings to her credit, Kaye is considered the most recorded bass guitar player of all time, but she actually started out as a session guitarist in the late 1950s. That’s her playing rhythm guitar on Ritchie Valens’ 1958 classic “La Bamba.” She also played electric guitar on the Beach Boys hits “Surfing’ U.S.A.” and “California Girls.”

In 1963 though, fate stepped in and forever changed her career trajectory.

“During the surf-rock craze, it was increasingly difficult to even like to play guitar on those dates,” she recalls. “Unlike the earlier sessions, it was not fun.

“So late in 1963, when a bass player didn't show up at Capitol Records, I was elected to play someone's Fender Precision. All of a sudden, it was fun to play music again, and I knew then that by playing and creating bass parts I could do studio work and be happy, and take care of my family.”

A combination of simplicity and ingenuity lay at the heart of Kaye’s distinctive bass tone.

“I only played with a hard pick but could quickly turn my tone knobs to simulate either a thick ‘fingers’ sound or a clicky high-end, like on the Nancy Sinatra dates,” she explains. “My pick-style was creating big waves in the recording industry in L.A., and suddenly all the producers had to have me. They loved my sounds and the funky parts I could create.”

Kaye also became an esteemed member of L.A.’s famed Wrecking Crew. (Notably, she chose not to be honored when the Crew was inducted in the Rock Hall last year.) The group of go-to session musicians was pivotal to forging Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions.

“Phil was fun and good to work for back in the ’60s, he paid us all well,” Kaye recalled of working with Spector. “He was a genius at sounds, and innovated so many things. He put extra mikes on the drums and guitars and was the first to use headphones for all the studio musicians in the studios.”

Looking back over her career Kaye recalls one memorable session in 1973 for Barbra Streisand’s hit single — and signature song — “The Way We Were,” the title track to her film and album of the same name. The date illustrates the importance of Kaye’s role in any session she was hired for.

As she recalls, the session for the December 1973 recording was huge. It included both a band and full orchestra, with Streisand herself singing live.

“For the first time in years, you saw everybody you had been recording with. All the string players, horn players were there, and it was fantastic to all play together in that large studio.”

But Kaye had no room to develop her own bass lines.

“Marvin Hamlisch, the songwriter, didn't want me to change any part of his written-out bass line in his arrangement,” she reveals.

As the session got underway, it was clear the song had legs.

“You knew it was going to be a biggie hit,” Kaye says.

But as the hours dragged on, nothing good was coming of it.

“Streisand, being a top pro, did about 33 straight takes,” the bassist recalls. “Nothing was wrong; we just hadn't hit that ‘hair-raising’ hit-take yet. The tune was sort of losing its potency.”

Kaye decided to try something different.

“I thought, To heck with playing the part as it was written. I just started playing. I was inventing on the bass.”

Drummer Paul Humphrey glanced over at Kaye.

“He smiled and changed his drum part too,” she recalls.

“And boom! The take came to life.

"I remember looking over at the booth where Barbra was, and she was holding a long note, while I was filling with arpeggios on the bass part, our eyes met and it was electricity. You knew this was the take. Man, was that fun.”

That was as close as Kaye got to Streisand.

“I wanted to meet her,” she says, “but the whole orchestra — probably 50 to 60 people — surrounded her.”

Besides, Kaye — always the most popular session bassist — had an early morning film call.

“I had to leave,” she says, “but that was a special date. A nice date with good feeling."

The Liverpool Cavern Club was famous as the spot where the Beatles found local fame in the early 1960s. It was there that Brian Epstein first saw the group on Thursday, February 9, 1961, and got the idea to manage the band, which led to their signing with George Martin’s Parlophone label the following year.

The club was such an important part of Beatles history and so beloved by the locals that in 1973, Liverpool officials allowed the Cavern to be purchased by the Merseyrail underground railway to create a ventilation shaft. When that proved unnecessary or infeasible, the property was turned into a parking lot. (Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?)

A new Cavern Club was built across the street, and it was there, on December 14, 1999, that original Beatle Paul McCartney made an appearance to promote his new album, Run Devil Run. For the occasion, he brought with him not one but two fellow legends: former Deep Purple drummer and founder Ian Paice, and guitar legend David Gilmour.

Paice and Gilmour had good reason to be on hand. Both had participated in the recording of Run Devil Run, an album that saw McCartney cover a dozen rock and roll classics and three originals. The album’s creation followed a year of mourning for McCartney’s wife and Wings partner, Linda.

McCartney wanted to cut the album quickly, just as the Beatles’ first albums had been made. To that end, he enlisted Chris Thomas — who had helped engineer the Beatles’ 1968 White Album and played keyboards on four of its cuts — to produce the album in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, where much of the Beatles catalog was tracked.

Gilmour, who played electric guitar and lap steel on the album, was certainly no stranger to McCartney, having played guitar solos on tracks from his albums Give My Regards to Broad Street, from 1984, and Flowers in the Dirt, from 1989. Even before then, Gilmour had been among the many guitarists — including Pete Townshend, Hank Marvin, Laurence Juber and Denny Laine — who performed on McCartney and Wings’ star-studded “Rockestra Theme,” from that group’s final album, 1979’s Back to the Egg.

The guitarist’s work on Run Devil Run occurred during a quiet period in his career. Pink Floyd had put out their 14th studio album, The Division Bell, in 1994, and would not release another until their final record, 2014’s The Endless River. All was likewise quiet on Gilmour’s solo career front.

In fact, two public performances were the main activities in Gilmour’s career following The Division Bell: They comprised McCartney’s 1999 Run Devil Run promotion and an appearance with the Who at their 1996 concert in London’s Hyde Park, a celebration of the group’s return to the stage after a seven-year hiatus. Gilmour performed on a pair of tunes from Quadrophenia, singing "The Dirty Jobs" and playing guitar on "Love Reign O'er Me.”

The guitarist’s performance with McCartney — during which he played a rather well-worn blonde Fender Telecaster — came close to satisfying a desire he’d had for years to play with the Beatles.

“I really wish I had been in the Beatles,” Gilmour told Mojo in 2016. “[They] taught me how to play guitar; I learnt everything. The bass parts, the lead, the rhythm, everything. They were fantastic.”

Recalling his participation in Run Devil Run, Gilmour told the magazine the experiencing brought him back to his childhood.

“I’m a kid, really,” he said. “You get into Studio Two at Abbey Road, you’re sitting there with Paul McCartney, and your guitar is plugged in. You think that’s an ordinary day’s work, but of course, it isn’t; it’s magical!”

And as Gilmour revealed in that same interview, it was he who convinced McCartney to perform a Beatles song at the Run Devil Run promotion at the Cavern: “I Saw Her Standing There,” the first song on the the first Beatles album, 1963’s Please Please Me.

“Managing to persuade him to sing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ at the Cavern, with me doing the John Lennon parts, was absolutely fantastic,” he said.

“I’ve been in the Who, I’ve been in the Beatles, and I’ve been in Pink Floyd,” Gilmour concluded. “Top that, motherfucker!”

The performance was released as a DVD, Live at the Cavern Club, in 1999.

Buddy Guy just turned 90 on July 30. As he undertakes his BG90 tour, he looks back on some 70 years of experience as a blues guitarist, performing on stages all over the world.

From the two-string diddly bow he made as a boy growing up in Louisiana to his first proper guitar — gifted to him by a stranger — to his rise in Chicago, where he was mentored by greats like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Guitar Slim, Guy rose to become a blues guitarist in his own right.

But as Guy tells Guitar Player, his blues expertise came the hard way. He was essentially a self-taught player, with little formal training beyond a couple of lessons with a high school music teacher who, to Guy’s chagrin, couldn’t show him the things he really wanted to learn.

“I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to go to high school,” he recalled to Guitar Player in our January 1999 issue. “And they had a music teacher there, and I thought, ‘My God, I’ve got what I’ve always wanted. I’m gonna let this guy teach me how to play the guitar.’

“I went in, and the teacher showed me some scales, and I said, ‘I don’t wanna play that; I wanna play like this’ — I had a Muddy Waters record and a John Lee Hooker record at the time. He looked at me and said, ‘I can’t teach you that.’

“So I said, ‘Well, then I can’t take a music class!’

“I was so excited by the way Muddy played the slide, how B.B. King squeezed the strings, and how Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker played their things. I said, ‘If they don’t teach this in school, I’ve got to find it myself.’

“Nowadays,” Guy continued, “young people have advantages that I didn’t have. It wasn’t until 20 or 30 years ago that you even saw blues written in music notation — they claimed they couldn’t write it.”

Guy built on that natural guitar talent with a wealth of knowledge and skills he gained over his formative years. He then passed that knowledge on to players like Eric Clapton, who saw Guy onstage in England in the mid-1960s and was moved to form his own blues trio, Cream.

His influence lives on in a new breed of guitarists. That includes players like Gary Clark Jr., John Mayer and Jonny Lang, who learned to play blues authentically by watching — and learning — from the master, who honed his craft with a Fender Stratocaster in his hands.

One tremendous benefit that Guy did have — after moving to Chicago in 1957 — was seeing Chicago blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Wayne Bennett, Matt Murphy and Earl Hooker when they were at the height of their powers.

But no matter what a musician’s cultural advantages — or disadvantages — might be, Guy maintains that anyone with enough heart can play the blues.

“If you love the blues, you can play it. Every interview I’ve ever had, I get asked ‘Can a white man play the blues?’ I hate that question! It’s a human being, man. If I had eight fingers on my left hand, then I would say, ‘No, a white man probably can’t play like me.’

“But these guys, man — the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, this young Jonny Lang, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, to name a few — there’s some things they do that I wish I had known.

“Look at athletes — boxers, football players, baseball players — they come in all sizes and all colors, and all those guys are great. Music is the same way. There’s no advantage or disadvantage. If you want to learn this thing, man, and you love it the way I love it, you can do it.”

Ritchie Blackmore’s ruthlessness is the stuff of rock lore. After forcing out Ian Gillan and dismissing bass guitarist Roger Glover from Deep Purple, he blindsided the remaining members in 1975 by bolting to form Rainbow. One album into that venture, he fired everyone but singer Ronnie James Dio and continued to rotate musicians in and out as they failed to meet his unforgiving standards.

That relentless, almost surgical pursuit of perfection was felt far beyond his own ranks; it reverberated through the generation of electric guitar players raised on his records. As Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins told Guitar Player in 1995, “Pound for pound, he’s one of the best soloists in history, but he’s such a dick that he’ll probably never get the credit he deserves.”

No one understood the paradox better than Blackmore himself. Asked one year later about his reputation for being difficult, he didn’t deflect. He indicted the entire enterprise.

“I hate show biz. I hate people who confine themselves to the system,” he told Guitar Player. “Why does everyone have to do the right interview at the right time, be on the right program, be politically correct, say the right things and be at the right parties? That gets up my nose. Why can’t I just play the guitar? It’s all I want to do.”

He wanted to play guitar so badly that the social glue binding bands together often became collateral damage. An early encounter with Eric Clapton makes the point.

“He was the big thing in the area back in ’67,” Blackmore recalled. “He was God — it said so all through London, so I believed it.”

When he saw Clapton perform, however, he was unsettled by his patience.

“He played very slowly with vibrato, which no one I knew bothered with because they were too interested in playing as fast as they could,” Blackmore said. “My feeling was, if you play vibrato you’re wasting time. ‘C’mon, let’s get on to the next note and show off!’

“I said to him, ‘You play with all this vibrato. That’s very different.’

“That was very stupid to say in retrospect. Of course he plays with vibrato, and why not?

“But I felt that he was the strange person to put so much emphasis on the vibrato. It was very pleasurable to the ear, but I thought he could be playing other notes.”

Of course a wide, vocal-like vibrato would become one of Blackmore’s signatures, fused with the velocity — and inhuman stage volume and guitar thrashing — that defined his early style. In time, he recognized the lesson.

“That’s thanks to Eric Clapton in a way,” he admitted. “It’s only now that it dawns on me that the guy knew what he was playing way back then, and I was the idiot for saying, ‘Why are you playing with a vibrato? Why are you bothering?’ That’s embarrassing.

“He was into Freddie King, but that didn’t do it for me then. Those guys were too slow for me. I wanted to hear something fast. Let’s go here!

“I was always so nervously charged that I had to be fast. I learned in reverse. I learned to be fast and now I’m trying to slow down and say something. Playing a fast solo, I suppose, is a bit like having two-second sex.”

If the bravado was bracing, the insecurity beneath it was even more revealing. Blackmore has long suggested that his difficulty with bandmates stemmed less from arrogance than from self-doubt.

“I’d love to play with another guitarist, although I’m still insecure, so that guitarist couldn’t be better than me,” he said. “I still go through life being very unsure of what I’m doing, and I cover that by appearing confident, as if I know exactly what I’m doing.

“But I have no idea. There’s a constant searching. Some days I tell myself I can play. And other days I think, ‘I’ve been playing for 38 years and I’m still floundering. Why am I so miserable with my guitar playing? I can’t seem to get it down!’ I’ll hear my solos and think, ‘Why did I accept that? I know damn well I can play better than that.’”

The studio, he conceded, is the most unforgiving environment of all.

“My best stuff is live, because I don’t have time to think; I just get on with it. But in the studio, I very rarely feel at ease. If someone points to me and says, ‘Play — we’re going to test you to see how good you are,’ I get self-conscious and disintegrate.

“I need a psychiatrist with me when I’m in the studio, going, ‘It’s all right, Ritchie. Nobody hates you, nobody’s testing you, nobody’s watching you.’”

He laughed at the absurdity — but only to a point.

“Sometimes I’ll talk to the producer: ‘Does the engineer play the guitar?’ ‘Yes, I think he does a bit.’ ‘How much? What is he into?’ Then I’ll have to sit behind the engineer, because I don’t want him looking at what I’m playing, because I’ll interpret that as him thinking I’m not playing very well. I took up the guitar because I felt insecure at school, and that insecurity is still there — that strange introversion.”

For English singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist Ralph McTell, the third time was the charm. After striking out with two released versions of his 1970s classic “Streets of London,” the U.K. folk singer finally scored a hit when his third attempt at the gently fingerpicked folk classic met with approval from audiences, turning McTell’s fortunes around and garnering him his biggest hit of his career.

By then, some 10 years had passed since McTell wrote the tune as a 21-year-old playing for change in France.

“I was in Paris in the very cold winter of 1965,” McTell tells Guitar Player. “It was bitter and no one was busking, and people were sleeping out on the hot-air gratings over the Paris Metro. I noticed these old guys had taken their boots off on, put them under their head, and were sleeping out in the cold. And I thought, Now, there's a subject to write about here!

“Then I thought, Well, I can't write about Paris, as there already was a song called ‘The Poor People of Paris.’

"So decided I ought to write about the area that I knew about, which was London. The song is not about homelessness — it’s about alienation, about people that choose to live within society, but outside of it, like the city rough sleepers. I already had the music, and so I wrote the lyrics on top. It originally had three verses, but I added the fourth verse later, as I didn't think it ended properly.”

Though he had the song in his pocket at the time of his first album, 1968’s Eight Frames a Second, he left it off the disc due to its subject matter. “I had first offered the song to a friend of mine who was a semi-professional folk singer” McTellrecalls. “But he said, ‘Oh, no, that's too sad, I wouldn't want to do that.’”

McTell worried that the song would meet a similar reaction from audiences. But he was surprised.

“I remember the first time I performed it in a club, and thought he was absolutely right. There was a deadly silence for what seemed like ages after the song had finished,” he says. “And then a thunderous applause engulfed the room.”

By the time he was making his second album, 1969’s Spiral Staircase, he had more confidence in the tune. His producer, Gus Dudgeon — who would go on to find fame recording Elton John — was ecstatic upon hearing it. “He said, ‘You must put it on the record.’ And so we did.”

This initial recording was released but failed to attract any notice. In the meantime, McTell had some good exposure when he was booked to perform at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1970. His set, performed on August 30, was warmly received by the crowd. (Also scheduled for that day was Jimi Hendrix with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Billy Cox, though they didn't go on until the early hours of the 31st.)

Holding onto hope, McTell recorded "Streets of London" again for his 1971 U.S. album, You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here, where it suffered the same fate as his initial version.

The story would have ended there were it not for McTell’s manager’s insistence that it was hit material. Three years after making his second recording of the song, the guitarist went for a third attempt. “I again rerecorded it, in one take too, and gave it to Warner Brothers,” he says. "And bang, there was the hit!"

Released as a single on Warner’s Reprise label in 1974, “Streets of London” climbed the U.K. charts, peaking at number two. “My manager never wavered in his belief that ‘Streets of London’ had a future,” McTell says. The song went on to win McTell an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically in 1975. By then it had been a decade since he wrote it.

For the earliest version of the tune, McTell played a Gibson J-45, purchased when he was 20. For the third, and most popular recording of it he played "a handmade guitar by a mate of mine called Keith Johns,” McTell reveals. “He only made a few guitars, and it was a copy of a black Gibson J-200, married to the neck of a J-45. It happened to be in the studio, so I used that guitar with a capo placed on the second fret.” As for his fingerstyle approach to the instrument, McTell employed a technique heavily informed by his love of early American blues players like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller.

While “Streets of London” has allowed McTell to forge a prolific career, the song is better known in the United States via an early cover version recorded in 1971 by Roger Whittaker. “In the States, more people know Roger's version than they do of mine,” McTell says. “It’s the same in Germany too. When I listen to Roger’s version — and because I know my song — I actually can hear he's reading the lyric on one of the verses. I can hear that he's looking at the script.”

As it happens, “Streets of London” has proven a choice track for many performers. “A friend of mine did some research on it and found out that there over 400 registered covers,” McTell exclaims. “And there are thousands more on YouTube. It’s incredible. I don't want to single anyone out, but one of the versions that I'm very fond of is by the late Sinéad O'Connor. She did a lovely take of it, which somehow captures the naivety of someone who really cares about the situation.

“And I certainly did care about the situation when I wrote the song, but I was put off my own song by the slight negative reactions at the time about it being sad. I'm still amazed that the song has become almost a standard now. I still enjoy playing it and I love the reaction it gets. I usually invite the audience to join in if they remember any of the words, and they seem to want to join in too, which is great.”

Although he’s built up quite a catalog over his six-decade-long career, McTell doesn’t mind that “Streets of London” has forever marked him as a one-hit wonder. “I’m proud of that song, and I feel very fortunate,” he says. “I know it changed my life. I think there are many talented musicians and singers and writers out there that have never managed to get a song away, and I'm the first to acknowledge my weaknesses.

“I nod to people with bigger talent than me and better musicians and better writers. But I've been one of the lucky ones.”

All sorts of animals are represented in the Los Angeles area home of Twin Temple’s Alexandra and Zachary James — including game trophies and skeletons of a full-term baby they’ve named Rose and of an adult known as Charles, the latter from the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London that was nicknamed Bedlam for its gruesome psychiatric care practices.

“We’re collectors of all things kind of weird and macabre,” Alexandra acknowledges, “and our whole house is kind of like one giant… I was going to say ‘living,’ but dead memento mori. It’s like late ’50s to late ’60s records and a bunch of dead humans around. We’ve always been drawn to the darker side of things, darker stories in life.”

There’s also an elephant in Twin Temple’s room these days.

The group, which the married couple formed after tenures in other bands, has been operating since 2017 and started releasing its self-identified “satanic doo-wop” two years later. Though the sound has more in common with the Countrypolitan brand of the late ’50s and ’60s, the duo’s macabre and sometimes bloody imagery along with defining songs such as “Satan’s a Woman,” “I Am a Witch,” “Burn Your Bible” and “Let’s Have a Satanic Orgy” have courted favor from the metal and punk realms, including tours with Danzig and Ghost, among others.

It’s been a niche affair, but visible enough for someone like MAGA personality Alex Jones to decry Twin Temple as an “embodiment of pure evil.”

But the group really became international news this summer when country artist Charley Crockett dropped Twin Temple as an opening act after learning about the Jameses’ practices and stage proclivities. That led to the duo’s July 29 appearance on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, while Jack White invited them to open for him on September 29 at the Hollywood Palladium.

“It was shocking at first,” guitarist Zach tells us via Zoom. “We were a few days out from the [Crockett] shows starting. But I think all the support that everyone has shown since that’s happened has been so cool…and now we get to play a show with [White], which we’re obviously looking forward to. Overall we’re excited more people are hearing about the project — especially right now.”

The hubbub has, in fact, been fortuitous as Twin Temple will be releasing its fourth album, Doomed Lovers, on October 9. Produced by Shooter Jennings and recorded in the iconic Studio 3 at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, its eight songs find the duo at its most ambitious, lushing up its throwback melodies with a 37-piece Bulgarian orchestra, adding a romantic sweetness and sophistication to the dark underpinnings of Alexandra’s lyrics. The first single is called “Haunt Me,” which is exactly what Twin Temple is trying to do.

“I’m really inspired by the darker side of American history, and music,” says Alexandra. She faced profound and even horrific bigotry growing up mixed race (Korean-Caucasian) in the San Francisco Bay Area, an experience that’s impacted her worldview. “I love a good murder ballad. Obviously I love, like the necrotic, satanic lyrics of black metal. And then I love classic American storytelling, which I feel lives strongly in country music. Nobody can tell a story like Willie Nelson, or Loretta Lynn.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, this is a gimmick. You’re not really Satanists. You don’t really mess with all that stuff.’ Well, come into our house and you will find we’re about that life. And definitely all these things kind of seep their way into my imagination, I think.”

Alexandra adds that Doomed Lovers follows “a four- or five-year really dark period for the duo,” both personally and professionally as it dealt with a variety of business issues before launching its own Pentagrammaton Records label. But she and Zach are, deservedly, all smiles about a current state of affairs that is, indeed, well beyond doom. And while their partnership is an equal collaboration, we took Zach aside for a look how guitar fits among Twin Temple’s sacraments, satanic and otherwise…

To deal with the obvious first — has it surprised you that Twin Temple and your music frightens people the way it does?

For sure, yeah. It’s interesting. It’s been entertaining to watch it unfold. I think it’s also a very American thing, being such a Christian nation. I think America is more satanic than anything, but that’s a whole other story. But it’s definitely a very American thing. We got to Europe and I’ve never had that kind of conversation there.

Part of it may be that Twin Temple doesn’t sound particularly satanic, or what most consider satanic.

Right. With, like, metal, it’s expected to have this kind of imagery. So part of this is cognitive distortion. It’s unexpected. People don’t think it’s real. It’s a really organic and natural thing, though. It wasn’t like we sat down one day and said, “Oh, I think it would be really interesting if we smashed these two seemingly opposite things together.” We were just really trying to develop something that truly represented us together. That’s how it came about.

How did you make your way into Satanism?

It’s something me and Alex both share. We feel like people are born Satanist. It’s just a way of viewing the world to us. It was really like finding there was a language and a vocabulary that did that. I think to us Satan is a symbol of rebellion and free will and autonomy. It’s part of this broader idea of the Left-Hand Path, which is kind of a humanist view. It’s a celebration of the human existence and the physical body as opposed to the repression and control that other religions like to propagate.

It was more of a discovery of, “Oh, this is what this is.” Punk rock, to me, has a lot of through lines with a lot of these same ideas that kind of push back against and subvert society norms and question things. For me, once I found that it made the whole thing resonate even more, and become even deeper.

What’s the chicken and the egg here? Did the music precede the Satanism, or was it created out of that?

Me and Alexandra had bands in the past. We came up in the punk rock scene in Los Angeles; that’s where it started. We were playing music together, and we had these shared values and way of viewing the world. We viewed Twin Temple as our magical child, where we merge everything we love together, as our relationship deepened and as our love deepened. It’s a vessel for our true will, which gets into Aleister Crowley and the ideas of Thelema — the idea of knowing yourself and finding what you’re supposed to be doing here, and then doing that unapologetically.

So I think it was kind of a process of us both finding that. And a refinement process, too. We’re still refining what we truly want to be doing, and getting more and more detailed every day.

When did you start playing guitar?

It kind of started unconsciously when I was a few years old. Somehow I got ahold of a toy plastic guitar. I’ve seen home videos of me kinda hitting that thing and singing to a camera tripod. I think there was a natural inclination to make music, and that resurfaced in my early teens, when I started to find my own musical tastes. I got into punk rock again, as mentioned, and at that point I wanted to consciously pursue music and I found, like, Johnny Thunders. I dug his playing.

And then I went backward, to Chuck Berry. I remember sitting down in a room with some friends and trying to learn the rock-and-roll pinkie stuff that Chuck made famous, and at that point really committing and being like, “I want to be able to make this sound. I want to emulate that,” because I enjoy it so much.

You can certainly hear that journey back in time when you listen to Twin Temple.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was just an exploration of finding the punk rock guitar players, Keith Richards even, and hearing little licks and going, “What is that from?” and listening to different blues artists and stuff. I think that’s at the core. I also think that, stylistically, it’s not about perfection. I think perfection is boring. It’s more about conveying an attitude and a feeling. I think Johnny Thunders’ mantra was it’s not what you play it’s how you play it. As much as I love musicianship, and that’s all part of it, when it comes to lead guitar work I’m far more fascinated with the imperfections and just, like, classic American rock and roll guitar. That’s what I’ve always loved, and still do.

What were some of the most impactful discoveries along the way?

I think, again, you could track it back to Johnny Thunders covering “Love is Strange,” like Mickey Baker and stuff like that. At the same time I’m listening to the local AM oldies stations and getting exposed to all this music. And then I think as I dig deeper I start figure out all these through-lines, like Lieber and Stoller to Phil Spector, Phil Spector to Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson to the Ramones. It’s like this strange lineage that just goes deeper and deeper. I loved things I was hearing, and I just got more and more obsessed and wanted to know more, wanted to know who did that, where did they get that from, how did they do that? A lot of obsessive listening for sure.

What particularly surprised you in that process?

I think Link Wray was a big one for me. There was so much attitude and emotion on his playing, but it’s also so simple. He’s not a flashy guitar player, but what an incredible guitar player he is. I mean, “Rumble,” that got banned for inciting riots! That was very inspiring.

And, again, songs like “Love Is Strange” and digging into Mickey Baker’s solo instrumental work and what an incredible guitar player he is. I think also it’s really tone-driven for me; I’ve always been very, very obsessed and interested in sound. I feel like the wrong guitar tone can ruin a great lick. It’s all part of the conversation, and the palette — like Bo Diddley, just a really emotive and cool tone and, again, simple but it conveys so much more to me. Obviously I respect someone who can face-melt with a lead, but that’s just not the stuff I’m looking for.

Certainly Twin Temple doesn’t entirely lend itself to displays of screaming guitar. How do you pick your shots?

With the records, I view the guitar in two different ways. There’s the lead guitar element, then there’s the more arranged, ensemble element, and I’m writing for it in different ways. I think in the songwriting process, as we’re sonically visualizing the arrangements, it’s like, “Okay, this song would be cool if there was a guitar part” or “This is a great opportunity for a counter melody, why don’t I put it on guitar ’cause it’s more kind of a rock and roll song.”

So it’s letting the song dictate where the guitar goes, and it’s usually an intuitive process. There’s not a lot of logic. It’s not like, “Well, we’re at the second chorus, so we better put a guitar solo in here” or something. I try to just let it naturally happen, but obviously I’m always gonna inject little moments, little blues lines or something. It’s just a different vibe. It’s trying to invoke the period we’re embracing, which is the late ’50s to early ’60s in particular, just kind of drawing from all that spinning around.

Has your gear changed over time to accommodate that?

Yeah, it did. In the early days I was a little more punk. There was more distortion, so using overdrive pedals all the time, or trying to push a tube amp. My old rig was very Johnny Thunders–coded; it was like a Twin Reverb and a Les Paul Junior, P90s. I remember when I was younger, before there were so many pedals and stuff, trying to find ways to mod out a master volume on the Twin. If you turn it up to 10 it’s going to sound great, but it’s also ear-splitting loud, so I never could get the tone right.

As soon as Twin Temple started I shifted to primarily clean tones. I shifted over to just strictly single coils. I think the first record is totally clean; there’s some tube breakup to give it an effect, but there’s no overly distorted guitars. There’s my Gibson 355, which is humbuckers but there’s a distinct change over to clean and, “Okay, we’re going to use reverb, we’re going to use tremolo and we’re going to use slap,” and then keeping it very period.

But for the newest record I expanded and used some fuzz for the first time. There were two songs where we used fuzz, like a Maestro copy, the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” OG fuzz pedal. To me that was fun to bring in. You listen to the “Zippity Do Dah” record, which Billy Strange claims is one of the first fuzzes on record; he had a power tube go out during the session, which I always thought was cool. So it’s been fun to incorporate a little different tone and this record and just kind of bring in that, and an Ennio Morricone vibe as well.

Is there a particular writing process you and Alexandra have developed?

I think it changes a bit song to song, but on the whole Alexandra will bring a lyric and a melody idea, and typically I’ll write the accompaniment. Obviously we dip into each other’s creative processes throughout as well — she’ll bounce lyrics off me, and as we’re arranging I’m bouncing ideas off her all the time, like, “Oh, what if we do this” or whatever. So it’s collaborative along the way. We’re both very opinionated; there have been songs that we’ve torn our hair out for weeks at a time and we have to push pause on them and come back when we’re both amenable to one another’s opinion. [laughs]

“Haunt Me” is a good example of giving the guitar some prominence, but within the stylistic parameters.

I think that was the second song we decided to use some fuzz on. It’s layered with Bass VI and some of the rhythm guitars — this is the first time we’ve done this — it was chords on the baritone guitar because we wanted it to feel really, just heavy, a lot of body without having to rely too much on distortion. To me the voicing of the chords was referencing Link Wray as well; in “Rumble” I noticed in his voicings he’d have a lot of low fifths in the chords, and that gives it a lot of weight and meat.

Then there’s a rhythm guitar that’s just playing cowboy chords, but it’s on a baritone which, again, more heaviness. And then there’s that counter on the fuzz guitar which is doubled and the Bass VI, which to me has an early Stones feel. So, yeah, there’s a lot of references in there for the guitar. I think the overall theme is this American gospel kind of vibe, so trying to keep it within that wheelhouse was a goal as well.

What baritone did you use?

The baritone was a Danelectro, and we got a Fender Bass VI. On this record we went kind of crazy down the Bass VI rabbit hole. It was my technique to double the Bass VI with the tick-tack bass sound and the double bass and little walking lines in-between. It was funny ’cause now people EQ the kick drum to give you that cutting sound, but back then they had a mono speaker and not a lot of kick drums, so they wanted this extra layer to help the bass cut through. I love that sound, and us and Shooter got really obsessed with Bass VI on this record. We had the Squier Bass VI, we had a Fender Bass VI, we had the Dano baritone — I even strummed the Dano baritone with Bass VI strings at one point in time.

So you were like satanic mad scientists in the studio.

[laughs] Yeah, absolutely. We had things we knew we wanted to hear and sounds we were looking for, so there was a lot of experimentation — a bit of slap on the Bass VI, some spring reverb, just a lot of work dialing in the sound and using that as a template moving forward to other songs.

What else is in the guitar arsenal these days?

I do have a ’64 Fender Jag that I use on all the records; that’s my go-to. It’s the guitar Billy Strange was using back in those songs, and I love the real thin, cutting tone. Especially in these arrangements you need a guitar that’s going to cut, tone-wise. I also have an early, mid-’60s Barney Kessel archtop that I use on a lot of stuff, and I love Barney Kessel. He taught Phil Spector how to play guitar and is just a really cool player.

I use it a lot unplugged as well on the records; there’s a lot of flatwound, unplugged archtop for some of the acoustic tones. I don’t take the vintage ones on tour, though. I use reissues; I’ve got a ’54 Les Paul reissues with a P90 that I really love, and then I feel like the Twin Temple guitar I started with was the Gibson 355 Custom, like Chuck Berry but it’s a black finish instead of his cherry red.

Doomed Lovers’ title track gives the guitar some more space as well.

Yeah, I feel like that song is everything firing all at once. We actually had an entirely different version of that. We recorded it and it was “done,” and we had a week left in the sessions. There was something about it that just wasn’t right. I sat at the piano and stripped it back to the basic chords and melody and ended up reworking the entire song; by the time we got to the bridge the whole sonic identity just fell into place and the guitar work fell into place.

I’m a big fan of Jack Nitzsche, who was an arranger for Phil Spector and many others; he did a lot of this really great arranged kind of arpeggio work with guitars, where there’s this classical that meets rock ’n’ roll. So I feel like sonically in the chorus drawing on that, there’s this harmonized, arpeggiated guitar part that’s kind of a slow ensemble piece where there’s an acoustic archtop, an electric guitar and they’re all blending to kind of add to that. The bridge is kind of a nod to Tommy Tedesco; he’s a really playful, always has these nice little licks, but they’re kind of unhinged, like off a few notes, just something slightly weird about it, and I really love that.

So I think the bridge was one quick pass, a couple little noodles and we just left it ’cause everything else was so arranged. I like when the lead guitar has a kind of frantic, unhinged moment like that.

Were the songs written with the orchestra in mind?

That’s been a creative goal for a very long time… so it was a nightmare come true. Getting to have that on the record was just incredible. It was part of the thought process from the start, and we worked with another arranger who helped us notate all the ideas for the orchestra. It was incredible having that palate, knowing that we’ were going to have that instrumentation and being able to think that expansively. On the last record [2023’s God Is Dead] we had one song with strings, but it was very different; we had one player come in and just overdub and stack.

But to have the full orchestra, to just move the air and have them all playing together…I feel like the string parts we reference are very romantic and classic, so it was fun to have that palate. The strings were done in Bulgaria, but we were live streaming and it was like four in the morning on Skype and sitting in the darkness and watching it happen. It was so incredible. And hearing them talk about it and humming parts between takes and stuff… The musicians were getting a kick out of it as well. They said a lot of times they’re doing little calls for TV show or movies, so to have music with identity was refreshing for them as well.

How was the experience of working with Shooter?

It was great. He came to our show at the Wiltern in 2022. He just bought tickets and came to the show and a mutual friend was like, “Hey, Shooter’s here.” So we met him and quickly bonded over our shared love all things weird and all things classic American rock and roll. He proposed the idea of making a record, and over a long-winded couple of years the timing worked out.

And he’s got Studio 3 over at Sunset Sound, which he’s dubbed Sunset Mountain. It’s the room where Prince recorded Purple Rain; the grand piano we got to record a bunch of the songs on was the Purple Rain piano. There’s just so much history there, so it was cool to be able to work in that room and be part of that history.

And Shooter is such a supporter, and so knowledgeable as well when it comes to that music, too. It was fun to be able to collaborate with him. He played piano on a few of the tunes as well, so we got to bust out some Floyd Kramer stuff and explore that Countrypolitan sound. He’s well-versed in it but hasn’t done much of that on his records, so it was a fun lane for us to explore together.

Are there more songs that you did during the sessions but didn’t release?

Yeah, there’s a batch we started with — like, again, the original version of “Doomed Lovers” was completed but is unreleased, so there are some songs that didn’t make the cut, or that got repurposed. A lot of times we end up reworking songs, whether it be keeping the lyrics or keeping a root, but, “Let’s try this as a ballad” or “Let’s try this with more of a groove or a rhythm.” We do like to explore, and because of that sometimes things get scrapped and we come back to them in a different way. So yeah, there are some more songs, but I don’t think they’ll ever be heard. You never know, though.

Do you feel like Doomed Lovers is a lane Twin Temple will stay in? Where do you see it growing from here?

I think we’re always gonna love classic American music, and I think the heart of that is the late ’50s, early ’60s period. But it pans from the Brill Building in New York with Lieber and Stoller and Doc Pomus and all those great songwriting teams and even the producers — Shadow Morton and the Shangri-Las, and we really love all that stuff. Then to Nashville in that same period you’ve got RCA [Studios], and then out in Hollywood you’ve got Gold Star and Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche and even Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood.

I feel like there’s so much to explore and learn and even just to reference. There’s more ideas but I think it’s always gonna be classic American. It’s always gonna be rock and roll. I’m not sure where the muse will take us next but it’ll always be always gonna be grounded in that, for sure.

Don Felder’s education with the Eagles is the reason he has an extensive collection of electric and acoustic guitars and equipment. It’s not just Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

His current studio setup includes a total of 19 instruments and 15 amps, but none of them are simply gathering dust. Instead, he employs them all to pursue the kind of results he achieved with Eagles classics like “Hotel California.”

“I loved and learned a lot playing in a band that had three electric guitar players,” Felder told Dr. Music, adding that it applied equally to his time alongside Joe Walsh and Glenn Frey as it had to his stint with Bernie Leadon and Frey.

“You can’t all play Gibson Les Pauls at the same time,” he continued. “The tonality of it — you can’t separate them. They’re just too unique.

“So if I play a guitar track on a Les Paul, I need to play another part on a Strat or a Tele or on a PRS or on different pickups. It’s always a different combination, so you don’t wind up with everything on the same bandwidth.”

He cited an example. “If I played a Les Paul, Walsh played a Strat, Glenn would play his Les Paul Junior that had different pickups. And we had these different amps. You could really define exactly the tone and the player in their own little space.”

Felder noted, “You need to place things sonically in separate positions. That was the [biggest] thing we learned making records where we had three guitar players playing at the same time.”

Of course, Felder’s guitar history goes back further than the Eagles. As he recently told Guitar Player, while growing up in Florida he crossed paths with everyone from Duane Allman to Tom Petty, Stephen Stills and his old Eagles bandmate Leadon.

Which is likely why he thinks it takes more than 10,000 hours of practice to become a solid guitar player.

“Well, 10,000 hours is only the beginning,” he said. “That gets you there, but you’ve got to stay there. Any time you start resting on your laurels when it comes to playing, you’re making a big mistake.”

Felder’s current North American tour dates run until November 6.

Suzanne Vega didn’t set out to change the music business. But by the end of the 1980s, the New York singer-songwriter had done exactly that in two very different ways.

Her success helped convince a record industry dominated by male executives that a woman with an acoustic guitar and a notebook full of original songs could be a major commercial success. Then, almost by accident, her voice on “Tom’s Diner” became an important tool in the development of a technology that would transform the way the world listened to music.

Vega had risen through New York’s folk-music scene before breaking through with her second album, the platinum-selling Solitude Standing in 1987. The record produced her signature U.S. Top 5 hit, “Luka,” and her success helped open the door for a new generation of women singer-songwriters.

“I think I was perceived as someone who had opened the door for women’s success,” Vega tells Guitar Player. “I think I showed the businessmen that this was a template that would work. And they saw that with Tracy Chapman, and then they saw that with all these other wonderful dynamic women, like Sinéad O’Connor and many that came out in the ’90s. And it continues today. There are so many women making all kinds of music and I think that’s the way it should have always been.”

At the time, much of the music business still regarded a woman writing her own songs and accompanying herself on guitar as an anomaly. Vega remembers being regarded as a novelty because she played guitar and wrote her own songs.

“When I was up and coming, a lot of people sort of thought that it was odd to have women playing guitars,” she says. “They thought of it as a ’70s movement or something, so I was still considered a novelty because I played guitar and wrote my own songs. Everyone thought of me as being both retro and futuristic. And I thought this was nonsense. Why shouldn’t women play the guitar and write songs? And of course, all these women before me had already been doing it.”

In 1989, Vega became the first woman to headline the long-running Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. The occasion was marred by a death threat from a stalker that prompted police to insist she wear a bulletproof vest for the performance.

“I was happy to be headlining Glastonbury Festival, but I certainly did not enjoy that whole drama that was going on backstage,” she recalls. “That was totally unexpected, but fortunately, it all ended fine. It all dissipated. The next day, it was never repeated. The threat stopped, and we were able to all go on with our lives.”

But Vega’s influence would soon extend far beyond the artists who followed her.

“Tom’s Diner,” the spare a cappella song that opened Solitude Standing in 1987, had been only a minor hit when it was released as a single in Europe that year, reaching number 58 in the U.K. Its stripped-down arrangement, however, made Vega’s voice unusually exposed — and that would prove significant a few years later.

In the early 1990s, German electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg was working on technology that would allow digital audio files to be compressed dramatically while retaining as much of their perceived sound quality as possible. He used the a cappella recording of “Tom’s Diner” as a reference while testing and refining the technology, helping make the song part of the story behind the development of the MP3 format.

Vega was eventually dubbed “the mother of the MP3.”

“I didn’t know what to make of it at first,” Vega says. “When I was told this story, I thought, what the heck is an MP3? But in the end, I am sort of tickled that I am part of history in a sense, that they used my voice to refine this thing called the MP3.

“I eventually met Karlheinz Brandenburg, and he’s a lovely man, very funny, and kind of a mad scientist type of person. And so, I enjoy that I have a role in history, and a small role in the technology of music.”

When she followed Solitude Standing with Days of Open Hand in 1990, Vega had the budget and freedom that came with a successful album. Rather than replicate the formula of its predecessor, she and her collaborators took a more experimental approach. The record received good reviews but failed to match the commercial impact of Solitude Standing.

“First of all, any formula you think is going to work, it’s not going to,” Vega says. “People give you advice and say, ‘Oh, here’s how it’s done.’ And the fact is that it’s all kind of the Wild West. You just have to do what works.

“After Solitude Standing was a big hit, I had a big budget and lots of time to make the follow-up album. And we worked really hard on that album probably for a whole year, getting every guitar part squeaky clean, and spending so much time looking at everything with a fine-toothed comb. And the album in the end did okay.”

Ironically, the song that made the biggest commercial impact that year was not on Days of Open Hand at all. British production duo DNA turned Vega’s a cappella “Tom’s Diner” into a dance track and scored a major hit.

“The thing that really did well in 1990 was this remake of ‘Tom’s Diner’ by two boys in a studio who had very little money, but had just a brilliant idea,” explains Vega. “They put together this funky remix of ‘Tom’s Diner’ on a weekend! And that was the thing that hit big that year.

“My album got pretty good reviews, but it didn’t hit the way that their version of ‘Tom’s Diner’ did. This taught me that all the good intentions and all the money and all the time that you put into something isn’t always the thing. The thing is the idea. Does the idea connect with an audience?

“And so that was a big learning point for me. I learned to trust my instincts more. So, the 99.9F° album, which came after both ‘Tom’s Diner’ and Days of Open Hand, was much wilder and much freer and was just a lot more fun. And I think that’s one of the most important things I learned.”

Bobby Whitlock was all of 22 when he and Eric Clapton set about forming Derek and the Dominos in England during the summer of 1970. A talented singer, organist and guitarist from Memphis, Whitlock forged a friendship with Clapton unlike any other musician. Beyond serving as his partner in the group’s creation, he was Clapton's co-writer on many of the songs on Derek and the Dominos’ only studio album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

“‘I Looked Away’ was the very first one,” Whitlock told Guitar Player. “And then ‘Anyday,’ and then ‘Tell the Truth.’ It felt really natural for us to write together, because we were friends first and we weren’t writing to make money or anything like that. We were just writing songs to have something we could play together.”

The two men would go on to perform on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, lending their talents to — among other tracks — Harrison’s 1970 hit single, “My Sweet Lord.”

But it was with their own songs that they would make music history, along with bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon, as Derek and the Dominos. Toward the end of August, the quartet settled into Criteria Studios in Miami to begin their fruitful sessions for Layla.

But as close as they were, Whitlock understood that there was a deeper connection between Clapton and Duane Allman. The Allman Brothers Band guitarist was a late arrival to Derek and the Dominos. Although the Allmans weren’t famous at the time, Clapton knew Duane's guitar talents from his session work for Atlantic recording artists, in particular Wilson Pickett, whose 1969 cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” featured Duane's blazing fretwork.

“I remember hearing ‘Hey Jude’ by Wilson Pickett and calling either [Atlantic president] Ahmet Ertegun or Tom Dowd, and saying, ‘Who’s that guitar player?’” Clapton said. “To this day, I’ve never heard better rock guitar playing on an R&B record.”

As it happened, the Allman Brothers Band was playing a benefit concert at the Miami Beach Convention Center on the night of August 26, the first day of the Dominos’ sessions. Clapton and the band attended, after which Allman accompanied them back to Criteria for a jam. He never left.

Playing together — Clapton on Brownie, the 1956 Fender Stratocaster he’d purchased in 1967 during his tenure with Cream; Allman with his gold-top 1957 Gibson Les Paul — the two guitarists seemed to read each other’s moods and minds. “The sound of those two guitars together was perfect and complementary,” Whitlock said. “You just couldn’t have asked for anything better than that.”

As Whitlock explained, Clapton and Allman’s friendship was as symbiotic as their guitar playing. He witnessed many moments of camaraderie between them and recalls the profound impact it had on his own awareness of what they were accomplishing in the studio.

“One night after we had finished up recording for the day, we went on back to Eric’s room,” he recalled. “We were all drinking whisky and playing guitars, and I was listening to Eric and Duane talking about Robert Johnson, Elmore James and so on, and playing Bill Broonzy stuff.

“But I was standing there, leaning up against the wall and taking all this in, knowing that this is some really important stuff that’s going down, and I’m a witness to it. And these two young guys — we were all in our 20s — they were like two old, sage black blues guys talking it over with a bottle of whisky, and then playing the music, right there.

“And it was then that I took the photo of Eric and Duane together that’s in the album gatefold. It was the one time I felt truly privileged to be there, at the right time, the right place, and in the right frame of mind.”

Whitlock was also present when Allman worked his magic on Layla’s title track, devising the seven-note opening lick that is the song’s calling card. “Duane suggested it, and he came up with it,” Whitlock confirmed. “We already had the song together, but it just started out completely different when we worked it up in England. And Duane said, ‘How about starting it this way?’”

Perhaps playing off the desperation in Clapton’s lyrics, Allman cleverly lifted the first half of the opening melody from Albert King’s “As the Years Go Passing By,” where the bluesman sings, “There is nothing I can do if you leave me here to cry.” Whitlock recalls that, originally, Allman played the line slower than it appears on the recording. “It was Eric’s idea to play it fast,” he said. “Duane played it, but Eric sped it up.”

For all the great music and communal spirit that arose from those sessions, Clapton at one point disowned the album. Speaking of the Dominos in 1985, the guitarist groused, “We were a make-believe band. We were all hiding inside it: Derek and the Dominos — the whole thing.”

But Whitlock saw the artifice as something else — a chance for a band led by a world-famous guitarist known to many as "God" to stand on its own merits.

“It’s great music,” said Whitlock, who passed away August 10, 2025. “And it’s real. It became a success on its own, not because of promotion and not because of Eric Clapton.

“I remember when we were doing our tour of the United States. We were riding in a station wagon somewhere up in Minnesota, heading to a gig, and ‘My Sweet Lord’ comes on the radio. At the time, it was the number-one record in the country.

"And there we were, four guys in a car, heading to some little gig somewhere. I mean, we were the guys on a number-one record, and nobody even knew who the hell we were!”

“That’s my gift from the songwriting gods,” Randy Bachman says.

That gift is “Takin’ Care of Business,” Bachman’s 1974 hit single with Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO), and a staple of classic-rock radio ever since. But as the Canadian-born guitarist reveals to Guitar Player, his gift took a lot of hard work, rejection and patience to earn. Although it’s part of the BTO catalog, the song dates back to Bachman’s earlier group, the Guess Who, for whom he penned hits like “Undun” and co-wrote other smashes, like “American Woman” and “These Eyes,” with keyboardist and singer Burton Cummings.

But “Takin’ Care of Business” wouldn’t see the light of day until well after Bachman left the Guess Who in May 1970.

“That took me six or seven years to write,” he says. “I started it about ’67 at Scepter Studios in New York, where the Guess Who were recording.” Scepter had achieved fame in the early 1960s as the label for the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers. The studio, though less successful, is notable now as the place where the Velvet Underground cut much of their debut record, The Velvet Underground & Nico, in April 1966.

At the outset, Bachman says, “I was trying to write a song like the Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ — a day in the life of a guy — rather than write a love song.

“In fact, I was actually writing about Stanley Greenberg, who was the son of Florence Greenberg, who owned Scepter Records. She managed the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, and she wrote [the Shirelles’ 1962 hit] ’Soldier Boy.’

“Her son Stanley Greenberg was the engineer, and he was blind. And every day coming to work, he would wear a white button-down shirt, a tweed tie, tweed jacket, tweed pants and brogue shoes. And this is in August in New York, when it’s 95 above and 95 humidity! We’re wearing ripped shirts, cut-off pants, ripped jeans and clogs, and he’s coming to work in a suit.

“We’d ask, ‘Stanley, why are you dressed this way? It’s so hot out there!’ He’d say, ‘I want to look like George Martin. I know this is what he wears.’

“‘Okay, you look like George Martin,’ I told him. ‘I want to write a song about you.’

“I wanted to call it ‘White Collar Man,’ ’cause he wore that white button-down shirt every day.”

Bachman decided he would tag along with Stanley that evening to draw inspiration for his song.

“So we leave at 10 o’clock at night,” Bachman continues. “And I asked him, ‘So what happens in the morning when you get up and go to work?' And he says, ‘Well, it’s crowded, and I take the 8:15 into the city.’

"And I start thinking: I wake up in the morning, the alarm clock’s warning, I take the 8:15 into the city. ‘And then what?,’ I asked him. He says, ‘I smell makeup and hairspray. The girls on the train are trying to do their makeup to look pretty for their jobs. And then I walk to work and start my slavin’ job to get my pay.’

“I thought, Great! There’s a song!"

While the verses that Bachman wrote up hewed closely to the song as it’s known today, the familiar chorus and its refrain were nonexistent. As Bachman explains, “Originally, when we got to the hook, the song stopped and we sang, ‘White Collar Man,’ the same as [sings] ‘Paperback Writer.’

The song’s debut was anything but successful.

“I played it for Burton Cummings, who hated it,” Bachman recalls. “He said, ‘The verses are great — but "White Collar Man?" Gag me with a drumstick! I’m never gonna do this song. We’ll get sued by Lennon and McCartney. Let me change the hook.’ I said, ‘No, it’s my song. I’ll find the hook!’

“So that song never made it onto any Guess Who album.”

By the latter half of 1970, Bachman was on his own, having left the Guess Who when tensions with Cummings reached the breaking point. He formed Bachman-Turner Overdrive with his brothers, guitarist Tim and drummer Robbie, and bassist and lead vocalist C.F. Turner. But Bachman hadn’t forgotten about “White Collar Man.”

“I’m driving to a gig one night,” he recalls, “and this DJ on the radio, who I knew very well, says, ‘This is Daryl B on CFUN radio, takin’ care of business!’ I thought, What a song title!”

Arriving at the gig, Bachman learned Turner had lost his voice and couldn’t sing. “So I had to sing the last set on a Saturday night in a rock and roll club,” he says. “And I’m not a singer.”

Staring down disaster, Bachman gamely took on vocal duties but was limited in what he could perform given his skills. After leading the band through improvised versions of various tunes, including Santana’s ”Oye Como Va" — “I don’t know Spanish but it was on the radio and everybody loved dancing to it, so I sang it phonetically” — Bachman was at a loss for what to play.

“And then a little light went on in my head,” he says. “I thought, This is your big chance for ‘White Collar Man!’ Put it together with the ‘takin’ care of business’ line you just heard on the radio. The band can’t say no — they are your hostage.

“I said to them, ‘Just play these three chords and follow me!’ And I starting singing, ‘You get up every morning the alarm clock’s warning...’ And when I got to the hook, I started singing, ‘Takin’ Care of Business.’”

By the next chorus he had the band singing along with him. “And I answered them with ‘Every day!’ and ‘Every way!’

“And then — boom — it hit me: This is a classic!”

The group recorded it a few weeks later, with Bachman playing his 1957 Gretsch 6120 electric guitar and taking lead vocals for the first time “Fred told me, ‘You should sing this,’” Bachman recalls of the session. “'You’ll be, like, my relief pitcher.’ It felt like a real BTO song.”

Released on Bachman-Turner Overdrive II, “Takin’ Care of Business” was released as a single in January 1974 and began a slow march up the charts, reaching number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 that August and remaining on the chart 20 weeks, the longest of any BTO song.

Although BTO called it quits in 1980, they reformed several times, most recently in 2023, albeit with a revised lineup that includes Bachman’s son Tal on vocals, guitar and piano. The reunion was a welcome celebration for Bachman, who was already glowing after recovering his Gretsch 6120, which was stolen in 1976.

As for “Takin’ Care of Business,” it lives on today on classic-rock radio, commercials, film and TV. The phrase has also become part of the modern lexicon for hourly and salaried employees everywhere, a richly deserved reward for Randy Bachman’s long, hard work.

“Of course, I could never play like him. I never tried. Only an idiot competes with Eddie Van Halen.”

So said Steve Vai to Rolling Stone in 2020, as he reflected on his friendship with Eddie. Vai certainly spoke from wisdom — after all, he was David Lee Roth’s guitarist after Roth left Van Halen. He knew what would be expected of him and that he needed to cut his own path to avoid being compared to and overshadowed by the great Eddie Van Halen.

“When I joined David Lee Roth’s band, it was great opportunity for me to play such well-constructed rock songs,” Vai said. “Of course, nobody can play them like Edward, but you do your best.”

Eddie was certainly aware of the guitarist who had taken his place alongside Roth. And while Ed knew his own talents were immense, he remained humble and believed other guitarists had something to teach him. Allan Holdsworth for example: Ed was a huge fan of the guitar giant and did everything he could to help him land a recording contract. With Ed, there was never competition, just a desire to play guitar and keep getting better.

So he kept his eye on Vai and was pleasantly surprised at what he heard. Unlike the numerous EVH clones, Vai combined his limits-stretching electric guitar techniques with lyrical melodies. Joe Satriani — who stepped into Ed's shoes on last year's Best of All Worlds tour — might impress you with his bluesy fusion, and Yngwie Malmsteen with his neoclassical chops. But Vai combined an almost operatic beauty with the sort of avant-garde eccentricities of his former employer, Frank Zappa.

And when Eddie heard Vai apply his magic to his own songs in Roth’s band, he was duly impressed.

“I’m going, ‘This guy is better at what I do than I am’, you know?” Eddie told interview Shaun Baxter in 1995.

“But,” Ed added, “ he lacked the vibe… the feel. He was technically very proficient but stiff. It always made me feel bad in a way. Because it made me feel like, ‘Wow, is that how people perceive me?’ ”

Vai stayed with Roth from 1985 through 1989, during which time he performed on the singer’s albums Eat ‘Em and Smile and Skyscraper. Once he was out, Ed felt it was safe to give him a call.

“The day after I left David Lee Roth’s band — I don’t know how Edward found out — but he called me,” Vai told Rolling Stone. “That was the start of a nice relationship and friendship.”

Vai recalled that they hung out frequently over a six-month period, during which he visited Ed’s 5150 Studios and was treated to private listening sessions of his work tapes. “He played me stuff that was never released,” Vai recalled. “I said, ‘Why don’t you make a solo record?’ And he always felt that the Van Halen records were his solo records.

"But this stuff he was playing me was really quite nice. It was all the things we loved about the way he played.”

While Ed considered Vai the one guitarist who out–Van Halened him, Vai believes Ed was a rock and roll game changer with only one peer.

“If I had to use my intuition,” he said, “it’s Hendrix, it’s Van Halen, in rock guitar. So many great guitarists came along and contributed, but those guys just did something for us that reshaped not just the way we played instruments, but the way we write the music, the way we dress, and the way we act onstage. It goes really deep. So I firmly feel that he was one of those monoliths.”

Vai certainly has his own share of fans who consider him a game changer. Tosin Abasi recently spoke of working 16 hours a day in a salmon processing factory in Alaska to buy his Steve Vai signature guitar.

For those who want to channel some of Steve's guitar mojo, his three top guitar tips will prove worthwhile.

When Randy Bachman learned in early 2025 that a bridge in Winnipeg was being renamed the Bachman-Turner Overpass, he knew it was time to resurrect a song he’d written — but never recorded — dedicated to his hometown. He duly regrouped with retired Bachman-Turner Overdrive vocalist Fred Turner to cut the tune. He even invited along an old friend from his time in the Canadian city.

“I went, ‘Wow, that’s incredible! I’ve got a song all about Winnipeg,’” Bachman tells Guitar Player. “I’ll rock it up with BTO. I’ll get Fred to sing on it, and I’ll get Neil to play on it.”

“Neil” would be Bachman’s Winnipeg pal from the 1960s, Neil Young, who uncorks a ragged glory end solo on the track. This isn’t the first time the two pals have appeared on record together — Young guested on Bachman’s 1997 song “Prairie Town,” and a year earlier they both collaborated on a cover of the Shadows’ “Spring Is Nearly Here” for a Hank Marvin and the Shadows tribute album.

Strangely, the two guitarists — who bonded as young players over their love of Gretsch electric guitars, a Fender combo and Hank Marvin — never started a band together in their early years. Bachman played in the Silvertones, who morphed into Chad Allan and the Expressions and scored a hit with “Shakin’ All Over,” before settling on the name the Guess Who. Young, meanwhile, performed with the Squires.

The two went their separate ways, but Bachman is happy whenever their musical paths cross, including whether in the studio, onstage, solo or with groups, including Young’s band Crazy Horse.

“Neil has always been very generous with his time,” Bachman says. “He’s invited me down to his studio. He played Toronto last year with the Horse. I went to see them, and they were phenomenal. He did every song that I or the audience ever wanted him to play — incredible songs.

“He was there with Daryl,” he says, referring to Young’s wife, actress Daryl Hannah. “I gave him an acoustic version of ‘60 Years Ago,’ and he emailed me back the next day and said, ‘I love this song. It's so historical. Daryl loves it. We're playing it on the bus all the time.’”

Bachman is currently on the road with Burton Cummings in a revamped lineup of his other famous group, the Guess Who. Their Takin’ It Back tour runs through August 25.

When you send a track to Neil for him to play on, do you give him any kind of direction.

[laughs] Let me just say this: Nobody tells Neil what to do.

That sort of figures. Still, one might assume you might given your long-standing relationship with him.

The relationship is pure respect of his artistic vision. When we did the Shadows song, there’s a part in the bridge where there’s a C7 — I’m playing rhythm and Neil’s playing lead. In that C7 there’s a B note, a C note and a C sharp note. It was like “Chopsticks.” I called Neil’s manager, Elliot Roberts, and asked, “Can I correct this mistake? There’s this weird thing in the middle.”

What was the response?

“Neil would prefer you to leave it alone and don't touch it. It was captured in the moment.” I said, “Okay.”

So that's kind of like the Godfather wants you to eat this plate of spaghetti and one meatball. You don't ask for another meatball.

Neil has said that your old band, the Silvertones, was the best group in Winnipeg in the early ‘60s. He cited you as being a big influence on him.

I played lead guitar because I played violin when I was a kid. The Silvertones were a cover band — we did the hit parade and songs from England. We knew all the Shadows songs, Cliff Richards, Shane Fenton and the Fentones, Johnny Kidd & the Pirates — that’s where we got “Shakin’ All Over” from. Neil’s band would copy that, but they wanted to be different from the Ventures because every band was doing “Walk, Don’t Run.”

So Neil’s band, the Squires, was doing what the Silvertones did.

Same thing. We would play a dance and not say a word. You’d play Ventures or “Sleepwalk” so the kids could waltz. You’d play instrumentals for an hour and a half.

When I joined the Silvertones, the band had a rare thing — an amplifier. Jim Kale had a Fender Concert amp. It had two channels, and each channel had two inputs, so we could put a microphone in one for the singer to sing. We had no P.A. system, so we put rhythm guitar, bass and my guitar into that amp. That was our P.A.

Whenever we weren’t playing, Neil would call up and say, “Are you guys playing a gig next weekend? Can we borrow the amplifier?”

Oh, so he liked your equipment.

Well, he wanted to be Hank Marvin. My piano player had a tape recorder, and if you moved the recording head a little bit you'd get an echo like Hank Marvin. We had no pedals, but suddenly I had an echo. Play with the tape a little and there was the sound of Hank Marvin and the Shadows. Neil loved that sound. That's why we played together on the Hank Marvin and the Shadows tribute album.

What do you remember about Neil’s playing style back then?

We were both very good players. He was like me — you're clumsy, and you do it night and day, and you get smoother and smoother. Everybody's clumsy at first. Just try to play an F chord. I mean, it's the hardest chord on guitar, whether they're using a barre with your finger or your thumb. It's really tough to play.

Did you guys hang out and play together?

No. He lived on one side of town, I lived on the other. We would meet on the bus. We were friends, and we both had the same dream. We wanted to be on the radio. We wanted to be like Hank Marvin or Elvis. There’s something about the brotherhood of guitar, especially if you both have a Gretsch and you both like Hank Marvin. You’d kind of help each other. I'd say, “I'd learned this lick.” He’d say, “Oh, but I play it down here.” And I’d say, “It’s easier up here.”

Did you do this kind of thing at gigs?

Yeah, at gigs. We didn't have that much time. I would show up with Jim Kale at Neil’s gigs. We would take the Concert amp, put it onstage. Neil would plug it in and test it. We would watch him play. Or I would be playing, and he’d be watching us. He'd say, “How do you play that?” “Oh, here's how you play that. You can play your A on the second fret, or the fifth fret, or the 10th fret or whatever.” “Oh, okay.”

It’s surprising you never played in the same band. Did you both buy Gretsches around the same time?

A Gretsch [6120 Chet Atkins] finally came in to Winnipeg Music Supply, and it was pumpkin orange. We had no idea, because you'd only see a Gretsch guitar on American Bandstand, and it was black and white. So I bought the Gretsch, but it didn’t sound right because it had the Filter’Trons. The guy called me back and said, “I’ve got the twangy one. It’s got DeArmond pickups. Gimme a hundred bucks, and I’ll give you the twangy one.”

I took mine back, and Neil bought it. That became his Gretsch that he played on “Mr. Soul” and “For What It’s Worth” on American Bandstand. I’ve got the other Gretsch that I played on “Takin’ Care of Business,” “Laughing,” all that stuff. Those two guitars became famous for both of us. They’re what we learned to play on and what we wrote and recorded with.

One could ask him the same question about you, but back then did you have any sort of inkling that he was special and going to make it?

I did, yeah. Other guys came and went in his band. Other guys came and went in my band. What was consistent was us, the look in our eyes of “We don’t care what happens or who quits the band. We were going forward. If you're coming with me, enjoy the ride. If you're not coming with me, get off the bus. You’re too heavy.”

When he went to Los Angeles, did you think of going there too?

Well, we had left first in ‘65 to go and do the Kingsman “Louie Louie” tour after we had a hit with “Shakin’ All Over.” When we left town, I sent him a postcard: “Opened in New York. Met Burt Bacharach, Ashford and Simpson, Dionne Warwick. You gotta get out of Winnipeg.” So he went to Thunder Bay, met Stephen Stills and started Buffalo Springfield.

Later on, did he ever float the idea of you joining CSNY?

No. He had his own world, and I was stuck in Winnipeg. By then, My son Tal was born. When nobody offers you a job and you've got a wife and a kid, you don't go somewhere with no work. You stay where the work is.

Still, it’s surprising that the two of you never played together in a band. It seems like it would have been the most natural thing.

Well, let me say this: I envy his relationship with Stephen Stills. I would love to be Stephen Stills, the other guitar player who answers him on “Down by the River.” When you're doing an eight-minute solo, I would love to do that. It’s never happened.

He's played many times in Vancouver. I would go see him and he'd say, “Get a guitar. Come on for the encore” I’d go, “Phenomenal!” I'd walk onstage and he would yell out, “’On Broadway!’” I’d go, “What?! Can’t we do ‘Down by the River?’” “Nah.”

So we would do “On Broadway” or “Up on the Roof” — some weird Drifters song. I’d say, “Neil, I want to play ‘Down by the River.’ I want to do ‘Southern Man.’ I want to show you that I can rip on these solos.” [laughs] You would just do whatever he wants.

Buddy Guy once had to reassure Albert King that he wasn’t trying to steal his guitar tricks.

The two blues legends were often booked on the same shows, and Guy recalls one particularly funny encounter during a soundcheck in Montreal. King, who was famously protective of his distinctive guitar style, spotted Guy sitting in the audience — and immediately turned his back.

“I didn’t play a lot with Albert, but we were often on the same show,” Guy told Guitar Player. “I’ll never forget one time in Montreal when Albert was doing his soundcheck. I was sitting in the audience, and he turned his back to me after he saw me out there. He said, ‘I ain’t going to let you see a damn thing.’

“I had to tell him, ‘Man, you’re left-handed. I can’t take shit from you no way, because I’m right-handed.’”

King was left-handed, but that wasn’t the only unusual aspect of his playing. He played a right-handed electric guitar upside down, with the high E string on top, and also used unorthodox alternate tunings.

Even so, King may have had reason to be cautious around Guy. He was certainly not shy about strutting his stuff in front of other guitarists, having famously shared stages with Rory Gallagher, B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others.

Both King and Guy were known for their aggressive string-bending techniques and their sliding into pentatonic boxes. Neither man used a whammy bar, and perhaps King thought Guy might steal some ideas about technique from him.

As Guy revealed to Guitar Player, he did experiment once with a whammy bar early in his career while recording for Chess Records.

“I cut a side at Chess using a whammy bar, but they weren’t ready for it. They were like, ‘Nobody wants to hear that.’

“These days, though, I don’t put a whammy bar on my guitars. Honestly, I stopped back when I was using very light strings because it made them break easier, and I couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones.”

Guy also never attempted to play slide guitar, explaining that the technique required too much precision for the wild, attention-grabbing style he had developed.

“It’s because I was always wanted to be like Guitar Slim, and you can’t be wild and play a slide. You’ve got to be precise. You’ve got to sit there, and make that tone — like Derek Trucks.

“When I came out, I didn’t ever think I was a good guitar player, so I was trying to make people pay attention. I got that from Guitar Slim.

“I remember when I first saw his show. At the start, all I heard was a guitar. And then he came in the front door playing. I turned to see he had a 150-foot-long cable. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be wild like Guitar Slim, and I want to be able to shake my wrist like B.B. King.’ But who can?”

Guy is currently on the road with his Buddy Guy 90 tour, which continues through September 2026. The run includes dates across the U.S., with upcoming performances scheduled in cities including Chicago, Atlantic City, Nashville and Denver.

Australian percussive acoustic-guitar wizard Tommy Emmanuel has played some huge gigs in his life. But few can have been more impactful than the time he and Martin Taylor entertained inmates at a high-security prison.

Emmanuel has headlined Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium and Paris’ Olympia, where the Beatles enjoyed a historic 18-day residency in 1964. He has even upstaged Les Paul on his own turf — though he later lived to regret it. But in a new interview, the guitarist has reflected on one of the most unique audiences ever to experience his virtuosic yet calming presence.

“I’ve played to 15 inmates who are in there for life, for murder,” he tells Zakk Kuhn. “They were allowed to watch YouTube on Thursday afternoons for 45 minutes, and they all chose me to watch. So the prison system asked if I would come and meet with them. What a weird thing to think. But it was so wonderful.”

The first encounter came when Emmanuel was being filmed for an interview. As the cameras started rolling, Kuhn jovially asked him about his favorite film. Emmanuel answered The Shawshank Redemption, praising its “dialogue, story, and happy ending” — but the guitarist’s prison experience would soon go far beyond discussing a movie about life behind bars.

“A year later I came back with [guitarist] Martin Taylor,” he explains. “We were doing our swing music show, and we played to a much bigger group in an open space, and I can’t tell you the feeling of playing for these guys. We did about an hour set, and a big black guy came up afterward, and he just grabbed me in a bear hug, and he whispered in my ear, ‘We escaped for an hour.’ It was unbelievable.”

The prison, Emmanuel says, was San Quentin in California, the historic facility that has held inmates including Charles Manson and is the only prison in the state that houses a death row.

“There were four stages of security, and everyone was in there for life,” he recalls. “The first time I went in, I got into the third layer of security, and then all the alarms went off, and it was a lockdown; there was a fight between two gangs, and one guy was dead, stabbed to death right there. And I saw him. I saw blood everywhere. It was awful.”

The prison hospital was directly next to where Emmanuel was at that moment. “He was on a table, and he was wide open,” the guitarist says.

But the shocking incident didn’t stop the guitarist from going ahead with the performance.

“I kept going because I knew there were 12 guys in that room down there that I wanted to meet,” he states. “I had good security, but the guy who did the murdering was in a one-man cage like an animal. He really looked like a wild animal, but I didn’t want to engage with him. He’d just taken a life.”

That would have been enough of a brush with mortality to make many musicians turn around. Emmanuel is glad he didn’t.

“The guy who’d been there the longest was the guy who really advocated for me to come there,” the guitarist explains. “His name was Marty, and he gave me a beautiful painting that he’d done. It was the story of Jesus, and it was all in little pictures, and he so carefully drew it and gave it to me.

“They knew exactly what they wanted me to play,” he continues. “They’d already got in a conference about it. So I had to play ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ and ‘Guitar Boogie.’ They had a list for me, and they were saying, ‘Can you please play this for us?’”

It was an eye-opening experience from start to finish — and certainly very different from Emmanuel’s typical gig day.

“Sometimes Marty would speak up and say, ‘Would you mind showing us how you do that?’” he goes on. “They were just quiet-speaking guys who’d been in there a long time. The guards knew them very well, and there was a feeling of peace and collaboration in that room. It was quite different from what just happened outside. But that’s life for you.”

By now, Emmanuel is used to having unique fans. He has been gifted a guitar by a dying fan and once received a guitar lesson from Chet Atkins in a dream. His career has been anything but straightforward — and even by the standards of one of acoustic guitar’s most extraordinary performers, serenading murderers at San Quentin was an experience unlike any other.

Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, also known as the Beano album, was released on the Decca label 60 years ago, on July 22, 1966. There are many groundbreaking aspects to the record, not the least of which is Clapton’s marriage of a Les Paul through a cranked Marshall amplifier, the electric guitar equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.

This magic coupling was defined by the hands of a spry 21-year-old. His youthful mastery is jaw dropping, and his iconic sound is now a guitar industry standard that at that time reinvigorated interest in the almost forgotten Gibson Les Paul model.

Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck weren’t yet fully developed, Pete Townshend was more of a rhythm guy, Ritchie Blackmore wasn’t really a blues guy, Jimi Hendrix wouldn’t release Are You Experienced until a year later, and groups like Love, Jefferson Airplane, Them, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Creedence Clearwater Revival and other young acts of the day couldn’t stay in the same ring as Clapton.

Most guys were struggling to intonate bends and trying not to fall off the log. Meanwhile, E.C. was like Larry Bird.

Clapton wasn’t just all sound. He could swing. Pre-Blues Breakers guitarists like Bill Jennings, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and dozens, if not hundreds, of others might swing harder, but they didn’t have his Les Paul-with-Marshall-on-10 sound and an innate sense of beyond-their-years phrasing.

There are many timeless moments on the Beano LP. The major 7th feedback note that ends “Steppin’ Out” is unexpected and sonically imaginative. I almost feel the floor of the recording studio vibrating on the “Key to Love” solo. It’s like a jacked stallion busting out of the gate.

“Have You Heard” has a great violent blues solo that sounds like Clapton is pissed he had to wait so long to play it. The Clapton vocal track, “Ramblin’ on my Mind,” introduced a generation of young kids to Robert Johnson, priming listeners to search for the source.

It’s not a perfect album. John Mayall ain’t no Steve Winwood, the multiple guitar tracks sometimes sound cluttered, and while “What I’d Say” might have been a showstopper in a London nightclub, it could have been left off the record. That said, the high points are stellar, and it’s all there on Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton.

In the years since its release, Clapton has sometimes put his foot deep into his mouth, but his doing so makes sense to me.

He famously refused to turn down at the Beano sessions. Engineers in lab coats were shocked at his ear-shattering volume. His “you’re with me or you’re against me” musical focus screams out from the grooves, along with an innate English aesthetic that was structured, organized and almost militaristic.

Clapton went on to grow a Bob Ross-style Afro that might have been a tribute to Hendrix, but he’d never play as loose, sexy and beautifully Black as Jimi did. All that said, when I listen to Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, I don’t care about the ups and downs of decades with Eric Clapton; I just hear a young man reinventing electric blues.

When young students ask me what inspired me when I was learning, I might play them the swinging genius Clapton exhibits on “Hideaway,” where he whips the Freddie King gem into his vision. Yet, more times than not, it underwhelms the uninitiated listener.

I think I get it. The world is filled with blues lawyers playing ’59 Les Pauls and clowns like Steven Seagal playing beefed-up pentatonics. Listeners shouldn’t be confused by this, because not hearing the importance and impact of Eric Clapton on Blues Breakers is like watching Citizen Kane and observing, “Oh, it’s only a black-and-white movie.”

Clapton could reach the pre-internet youth with a guitar that sounded like a flamethrower, wrapped in a tidy white package with an acute fashion sense. He repackaged and reinterpreted the blues for a generation, and spliced blues into rock.

“Clapton is God” is too much for anyone to live up to, but Eric Clapton is undeniably one of the most influential and inspiring guitarists of his generation. Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton proves that with each listen.

Ozzy Osbourne knew he’d found a gem in the wild when he landed Randy Rhoads as his guitarist in late 1979. Rhoads was a virtuoso whose skillful use of two-handed tapping, intricate scale patterns and whammy-bar dive bombs gave Osbourne’s early solo albums the guitar pyrotechnics metal required in the early 1980s.

But Rhoads’ talent came at a cost to Osbourne, the former Black Sabbath singer who died a year ago on July 22. The guitarist practiced nearly all the time, including after hours on tour, which could drive Ozzy mad.

At the dawn of 1982 — the final year of his life — Rhoads received a custom pedalboard, one intended solely for practice, that would solve this problem. The board was built to his specifications by Jon Graves and Domenic Turlace of Zeus Audio Systems in Alhambra, California, which made a line of guitar pedals as well as mini guitar amps designed for practice. Randy’s pedalboard was presented to him on New Year's Eve, 1981, roughly two months into the tour for Ozzy’s second solo album, Diary of a Madman.

Keen-eyed Guitar Player readers got their first — and likely only — look at the board in a photo of Rhoads, taken by photographer Neil Zlozower, that ran in our November 1982 Rhoads tribute issue. Spread across two pages, the photo showed the guitarist practicing on a sofa alongside three of his electric guitars: his 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom, Jackson Concorde and Karl Sandoval Custom Polka Dot Flying V.

Sitting on the floor in front of them was the tiny pedalboard, bearing a few obscured devices.

Two months after the photo ran, Graves and Turlace described the board in Guitar Player’s January 1983 issue in response to a reader’s question.

Although it was small, the pedalboard included a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine, three MXR pedals — a 6-Band graphic equalizer, a Commande Time Delay and a Micro Chorus — and a Zeus 8401 Mini Amp. Red in color, and roughly the size and dimensions of a brick, the 8401 mini amp had controls for preamp, volume and tone, plus preamp and external speaker outputs. A second amp with a 4 1/2–inch speaker was also provided for the Dr. Rhythm.

And because Ozzy was driven to distraction by Rhoads’ constant practicing, the pedalboard included an accessory designed to keep him happy.

"A unique feature is the 'Ozzy Jacks,' added at Ozzy Osbourne's request,” Turlace explained to GP. “These jacks provide separate signals from the gui­tar amp and rhythm machine for a head­phone mix, while shutting off the main speaker."

According to Graves, Ozzy had also requested a remote switch so that he could turn the pedalboard off from the next hotel room while on the road, because Randy tended to play into the wee hours. He probably wasn’t joking. It was never added.

The entire thing was built into an ABS plastic case salvaged from a Casio keyboard. (Some might say it’s the best use ever made of a Casio keyboard.) In addition, the lid included a battery pack as well as an AC adapter. Graves designed the pedalboard so that the battery would shut off when the lid was closed.

As a final touch, the board boasted a gold-plated plaque that read "Custom made by Zeus Audio Systems for Randy Rhoads,” along with his Rolls-Royce–style logo, bearing two R's.

In their response to our reader's question, the builders made clear they had no desire to repeat their efforts. “Anyone wishing to duplicate the pedalboard,” they said, “will have to build one themselves.”

Sadly, Rhoads would not get to use the device for long. He died tragically on March 19, 1982, when the small plane in which he was a passenger crashed during a tour stop in Leesburg, Florida.

Two years before Sammy Hagar became the lead singer and second guitarist in Van Halen, his former bandleader had some remarkably harsh words for his guitar playing.

“I just don’t think he is a good guitarist,” Ronnie Montrose told Guitar Player in 1983. “He’s adequate for what he does and just ends up using every cliché in the book. Although he does that well.”

Montrose was not some random critic. He had formed the hard-rock band that bore his name in 1973, with Hagar as its lead singer, and had fired him after the band’s first two albums. Hagar had since gone on to a successful solo career and would soon become one of the most famous singers in hard rock.

But Montrose still believed his former bandmate was a limited musician.

“I set that band up to be an experimental, integral, working rock and roll ensemble,” he explained in the October 1983 issue of Guitar Player. “I wanted it to become the American version of Led Zeppelin, because they were able to do acoustic things as well as metal. They were able to bring their audience with them. I wanted to get to the point where our audience would allow us to experiment.

“Unfortunately, it was not a creative situation, because the members of the ensemble were not of a creative nature. Sammy was the only one who had enough ambition to attempt creativity, but he was musically uneducated. A guitar to him was an accompaniment to vocals and a rock and roll performance.

“On the way home from a European tour, I told Sammy he had to go his own way and do what he was going to do, because I wanted to move in a different direction toward something that was more musically exciting and of a broader scope. I’m not saying this with any malice, but he has stayed on the same musical level, working in the same narrow rock vein.”

Montrose had formed his namesake band in 1973 with Hagar, bassist Bill Church and drummer Denny Carmassi. Their self-titled debut arrived the following year and became a landmark of American hard rock, with Hagar’s powerful vocals helping establish the band’s sound.

But the partnership did not last. Montrose and Hagar parted ways in 1975, and the singer went on to build a successful solo career. By the time Montrose gave his 1983 interview, Hagar had released several albums under his own name and was an established rock star.

Montrose, however, remained unimpressed by Hagar’s abilities as a guitarist.

When asked why he had never played in a band with another guitarist, he admitted that he enjoyed jamming with other six-stringers. But he had never considered Hagar a suitable musical partner.

“There’s never been any question of allowing Sammy to pick up a guitar,” Montrose said. “There was no way you could ever interplay in a jam with him.”

By 1983, Montrose was pursuing a musical path that was far removed from the heavy rock of his namesake band. After leaving Montrose, he had moved into increasingly experimental territory and released Open Fire, a 1978 all-instrumental album featuring acoustic guitar, mandolin, synthesizer and a 30-piece orchestra.

The record was not a commercial success. In fact, Hagar apparently enjoyed telling a story about the reaction of one particularly unhappy Montrose fan.

“The best line I’ve heard about that album from a Montrose fan was told to me by Sammy Hagar,” Montrose recalled. “Sammy was playing somewhere in the South, and the guy came up and asked if he had heard my latest album. When Sammy said he had, the guy said, ‘Boy, I bought a copy of that thing, took it home and put it on, and it fucking made my stereo gag.’”

Montrose was amused by the story, but he did not regret making the album.

“Warner Brothers was shell-shocked by that album, but I opened up an audience with it that I will never regret,” he said. “That album enabled me to do a soundtrack for a Canadian film about skiing called Powderheads. It also enabled me to go to Japan with Tony Williams.”

But Montrose’s career would never reach the commercial heights enjoyed by Hagar, who blamed the guitarist’s self-destructive tendencies for his lack of success. Just two years after the guitarist offered his assessment of his former singer, Hagar joined Van Halen, replacing David Lee Roth and embarking on a new chapter that would make him one of the biggest stars in rock.

Montrose, meanwhile, remained committed to the idea that he had been more than the heavy-metal electric guitar player who first made his name with Hagar.

“People who wondered who the real Ronnie Montrose was had to see he was both,” he said.

Four years after Montrose gave his assessment of Hagar, no less than Eddie Van Halen weighed in on Sammy’s guitar talents. Speaking to Guitar Player alongside the singer for an interview in the October 1987 issue, Van Halen noted Hagar’s passion and ability to inspire.

“He gets the point across very well,” Eddie said. “He’s a soulful player. He’s inspired the hell out of me, writing-wise. I ripped one of his licks off — which he ripped from Neal Schon,” he added with a laugh.

But it was Sammy who got the last laugh — at the expense of his former guitarist.

“Actually, it’s an old Ronnie Montrose lick that was invented by Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck,” he said.

Offered Van Halen, “You do it best.”

Tommy Emmanuel was just 11 when his father died. In the aftermath, he found solace in the music of Chet Atkins, a guitar hero who would become, in effect, a surrogate father.

“My father had just passed away, and I would live inside Chet's albums. He was my world,” the acoustic guitar marvel tells Guitar Player.

But listening to Atkins' music was not enough. Emmanuel wanted to reach the man who had given him so much comfort, and so the young Australian guitarist wrote to his hero.

“I wrote a letter telling him that I was his big fan in Australia, and that I was trying to play like him,” he continues. “He wrote back and sent me a nice photograph, and we stayed in touch.”

Atkins remained a constant presence in Emmanuel's thoughts. The young guitarist was particularly fascinated by the way Atkins could make his electric guitar sound almost like a harp, weaving harmonics and natural notes together to create something that seemed, to Emmanuel, almost impossible to reproduce.

“Chet Atkins totally pioneered that sound, and he was the first to record it,” Emmanuel says. “I was 16 when I first heard it, and I couldn't figure out the technique.”

The answer came to Emmanuel in a dream.

“I had a dream where Chet came out with his red guitar, and he showed me how,” he says. “When I woke up the next morning, I got my guitar and I figured it out by remembering the dream. It was as if my subconscious worked it out and told my conscious self how to do it.”

The technique involves reaching the picking hand over the fretboard and pinching out harmonics by placing the index finger at a harmonic location on the same string as a fretted note below, then plucking with the thumb — all while incorporating natural notes on other strings.

It is a demanding technique, one that requires the player to make several things happen at once while maintaining enough control to allow every note to speak. Emmanuel eventually heard Lenny Breau — whom Atkins discovered and championed in the 1960s — perform it and realized just how far the technique could be taken.

“Lenny took it to a level that no one else has reached ever since,” he says.

“It is a beautiful technique, and the key is making sure the harmonic and natural notes ring out with bell-like qualities together. When you do it at speed, the ear shouldn't know which one is which. They should all blend together.

“The further your thumb is away from your index finger when you pluck down, the more note you'll get out of the harmonic. You want the string to speak, but if your index finger and thumb are too close together you'll choke the sound out of the harmonic.

“You've got to concentrate. It requires great strength in your left hand to hold down positions with real control and clarity.”

Emmanuel uses the technique liberally in his performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And as he explains, there is no shortcut to mastering it.

“You've got to practice until your hand aches like hell,” Emmanuel says. “Many players don't sound clear, like a bell. They sound fuzzy from being too focused on the right hand without having a strong enough foundation from the left hand.”

All the while, Atkins remained at the top of Emmanuel's mind. Seven years after first contacting the guitar master, the young guitarist found another way to reach him.

“When I was about 18, a friend recorded me playing in his lounge room, and sent the tape to Chet. I got a mysterious letter out of the blue from Chet that included his office address and phone number. It said, ‘When you come to America, call me, and we'll get together.’ I couldn't believe it.”

Emmanuel eventually made the journey to America, relocating from Australia to Nashville in 1997. Two years later, Atkins honored him with the title of Certified Guitar Player, recognizing his lifetime contribution to the art of fingerpicking.

For Emmanuel, the moment represented something far more profound than a professional accolade. The man whose records had once given solace to a grieving 11-year-old was now standing before him, acknowledging him as one of the world's great fingerstyle guitarists.

“I was stunned and so moved by this gesture of appreciation from my hero,” Emmanuel wrote on Facebook. “And as he handed it to me, he said, ‘Don't let your kids play with it, they'll drop it on their toes!’

“It was a great night in my life. I played ‘Guitar Boogie’ with its composer, Arthur Smith, ‘Windy and Warm’ with Chet and Paul Yandell, a spirited set with my brother, Phil, and finished the night out jamming with all my pals at the Chet Convention. Ahhh, those were the days!”

“There are a million different ways to play these silly things,” Vince Gill says of electric guitar, “and I enjoy finding subtle ways of being different on any instrument I play.”

For Gill, those subtle differences often begin with his hands. His fretting and picking fingers allow him to make the guitar speak with a fluency and nuance that can change dramatically from one instrument to the next. And while he is perfectly comfortable with a pick, he often prefers to let his fingers do the talking.

He notices the difference particularly when he plays a Telecaster.

“What’s interesting about a Telecaster is the way you pull with the meat of your finger sounds different than with a pick,” he explains. “Those subtle differences are important to how the note blooms.”

When he plays a Stratocaster, fingerstyle is Gill’s preferred approach.

“When I play a Strat, most of the time, I play it with my fingers. I learned that from Mark Knopfler, who plays everything with the meat of his fingers,” Gill says. “It is shocking how different it sounds. With a pick, it’s very precise, but with fingers, it’s three times rounder and sweeter.”

Gill finds it remarkable that so many guitarists immediately reach for a pick rather than take the time to develop their technique with their fingers. To him, the hands are one of the most important parts of a player’s sound — far more important than simply owning the right gear.

“Most people don’t understand how much your hands have to do with it,” he notes. “I did a show with Keith Urban where we were the resident guitar players. He had his rig set up, and he said, ‘Vince, come over here and play through this.’ I plugged in, played, and he goes, ‘You just sound like you.’

“It’s funny. You can buy a Marshall and a ’59 Les Paul, but you’re not going to sound like Jimmy Page. You may want to, but the reason we all sound like we do is because of our hands, as much as anything.”

The Telecaster, of course, has long been a central part of Gill’s sizable guitar arsenal. He says he first became interested in the instrument after he “stumbled upon Albert Lee.”

“Albert Lee was such a huge inspiration as far as me wanting a Telecaster.”

Gill’s first Telecaster was a white 1953 model he purchased in 1978. He has owned plenty of Telecasters since then, but none has come close to matching that first one.

“I have had probably 20 or 30 since, and none can hold a candle to it,” Gill says.

He bought the guitar from an Oklahoma City guitar shop owned by Bob Woods.

“He and Larry Briggs, who is huge in the vintage world, had gotten together for a big guitar trade. I was in the store just hanging out. Bob had taken in all these guitars, including that white ’53 Telecaster. I played it and said, ‘Oh my God, this one suits me right here. What will you take for it?’ He said, ‘$450.’ I said, ‘Okay, sold.’ It became the iconic guitar of my life.”

The guitar’s finish is original, as is nearly everything else, with the exception of the front pickup and a couple of pots.

“The front pickup wore out, but the back pickup is original,” he says. “The whole point of that guitar is the back pickup.”

Gill’s fluid string bends have occasionally led people to assume that his Telecaster is equipped with a B-Bender. Nothing could be further from the truth. He recalls a session with Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash’s band, the Cherry Bombs, when Hank DeVito was the steel player.

“Hank said, ‘Can I play your guitar?’” Gill recalls. “He strapped it on and started jerking and pulling on the neck. He goes, ‘Where’s the B-Bender?’ I said, ‘There isn’t one.’ He says, ‘Yeah, there is. I hear it every night.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just my fingers.’ I didn’t even know that there was such a thing.”

For Gill, that story gets to the heart of what makes a guitarist’s voice distinctive. The instrument matters, of course. So do the amplifier, pickups and technique. But ultimately, the sound comes from the player—and from the countless small decisions made by the hands holding the guitar.

Peter Gabriel spent a decade building Genesis from a group of school friends into one of progressive rock’s most ambitious bands. He had formed the band in 1967 and fronted it through its transformation into a major international act.

But by 1975, following the group’s ambitious double concept record The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he was gone. Gabriel’s departure from Genesis was driven by a combination of personal and professional pressures, but his first solo single turned that moment of uncertainty into song.

“Solsbury Hill,” released in 1977, was inspired by what Gabriel described as a spiritual experience atop the hill in Somerset, England — one that helped him come to terms with leaving behind the band he had led for close to a decade.

“It’s about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get,” Gabriel later said of the song. “It’s about letting go.”

The song itself sounds like a musical expression of that leap into the unknown. Built around a complex, Travis-picked acoustic guitar part in an unusual 7/4 meter, “Solsbury Hill” was recorded at the very end of the sessions for Gabriel’s self-titled debut album. The guitarist who played that intricate part, Steve Hunter, initially wasn’t sure he could pull it off.

Famous for his work with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, Hunter was among the studio musicians — alongside the likes of Robert Fripp — selected by Gabriel and producer Bob Ezrin to help launch the singer’s career away from Genesis.

“In my opinion, ‘Solsbury Hill’ is one of the most perfectly written and produced pop songs ever,” Hunter says. “It was also one of the most interesting sessions for me. We were doing the album and Peter was having some trouble with a couple of lines of lyrics in ‘Solsbury Hill,’ so we kept putting it off.”

Ezrin was unhappy with Gabriel’s original last line of the chorus. By the time the singer came up with the solution, the sessions were nearly over.

“It ended up being the last song we recorded,” Hunter says. “Literally, the day after we recorded it, all the New York musicians were scheduled to fly back to New York. Robert Fripp had already flown back to England because he had sessions scheduled. I didn’t even know if we were going to record it.”

Hunter’s introduction to the tune came during a private session with Gabriel and Ezrin.

“Bob and Peter took me into Bob’s office at Nimbus 9 Studio up in Toronto. Peter played it for me on the piano, and I realized it was in an odd meter, which petrified me, because I’d never played in an odd meter before, other than 5/4.”

The song is mostly in 7/4, switching to 4/4 for the final two measures of the chorus. Despite his trepidation, Hunter was immediately impressed by the composition.

“I thought it was an amazing song. You could tell right away just from the piano and the vocal.

“Bob said, ‘I have this idea. I thought we could do some Travis picking on this, with acoustic guitars.’ He showed me what he was looking for, because he plays guitar, so between he, Peter and I, we worked out the guitar part.

“Again, I was petrified, ’cause now I had to play Travis picking and adjust it to play in 7/4, and I wasn’t sure I was gonna be able to do that. But the song is so well written that when I sat down to work out the guitar part, it just sort of fell under my fingers, and it really wasn’t a burden.”

Hunter used a Martin acoustic to record his part, triple-tracking the guitar to create the distinctive shimmering effect heard on the finished recording.

“I recorded three acoustic guitars playing the same thing. The first was recorded at normal speed, and we changed the speed of the tape a tiny bit slower and faster for the other two takes to get a very small difference in tuning. When you hear the three of them together, it’s this beautiful chorus effect.

“It was a fabulous thing, and probably one of the most difficult things I had done up to then. But it was really good for me to do it, and I’m really, really proud of that song.”

That intricate acoustic pattern became the musical foundation for Gabriel’s first major statement outside Genesis. “Solsbury Hill” went on to become a Top 20 hit in the U.K., peaking at number 13, and reached number 68 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S.

But its real significance was more personal. Gabriel had spent nearly 10 years leading the band he had helped create. Now he was standing on his own, with no guarantee that the next step would work.

The song’s message was to let go of what he had built and accept the uncertainty of what might come next. Nearly five decades later, “Solsbury Hill” remains one of the clearest musical documents of that leap — a song about leaving Genesis behind, and finding the courage to discover what came after.

Derek Trucks was already a force in the blues when Eric Clapton came calling in 2006.

The guitarist had joined the Allman Brothers Band as a teenager and by his early 20s had established himself as one of the most accomplished players of his generation — particularly when it came to slide guitar. So when Clapton reached out to him, it was a significant moment in Trucks’ career.

But Trucks didn’t initially know it was Clapton calling.

“I was here at home playing poker with my grandfather and dad and brother and a bunch of friends, and I remember just getting a call on my cellphone,” Trucks says in a recent interview with Alan Paul.

“It was like, ‘Hello. This is a message for Derek Trucks. This is Eric Clapton. This may sound like a hoax but it’s not,’” Trucks recalls. “It was amazing. I was like, ‘What is going on?’ [The message said], ‘When you get a chance, call me back.’’

This was 2006, when returning an international call wasn’t always as simple as tapping a name in your contacts. Trucks says he needed a specific international calling plan to return the call.

“I had to go down to the Verizon store the next day and get an international plan so I could call him back.”

As it turned out, the call was legitimate. Clapton invited Trucks to join the sessions for The Road to Escondido, his 2006 collaboration with J.J. Cale that also featured a star-studded cast of musicians.

Despite his experience, Trucks suspects Clapton’s invitation was a kind of audition — “more of a ‘make sure we could hang and make sure you’re not a total knucklehead’ situation,” he said.

Apparently, Trucks passed the test. He would go on to join Clapton’s touring band in 2007, and the pair continued to collaborate over the years. They reunited for The Breeze: An Appreciation of J.J. Cale in 2014, an album celebrating the influential songwriter whose music had shaped both guitarists.

But the relationship began with a missed call, a voicemail and a trip to the Verizon store to buy an international calling plan — because when Eric Clapton calls, you probably want to make sure you can call him back.

It’s not hard to get Little River Band guitarist Graeham Goble to reminisce about “Reminiscing.” The 1978 single was the Australian group’s most successful in the U.S., peaking at number three on both the Billboard 200 and Cash Box charts.

It was named Australian Record of the Year at the 1978 King of Pop Awards and was honored by Broadcast Music International (BMI) for five million plays on American radio, the most for any Australian pop song up to that point.

It was also, somewhat surprisingly, a favorite of the late John Lennon during his affair with former assistant May Pang, which continued from the mid 1970s to the latter years of the decade .

“She wrote in her book, Loving John, that they would lay in bed listening to ‘Reminiscing,’” Goble says, “and he was asking her to play it again and again and again. That was pretty amazing.”

Originally released as the second single from LRB’s fourth album, Sleeper Catcher, “Reminiscing” can be found on the new LRB compilation, Ultimate Hits. Still in Melbourne where the band was formed, Goble has nothing but fond memories of “Reminiscing” and all that came in its wake.

“It was inspired by my love of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s musicals, ’cause I was 12 years of age when we got a black-and-white television in Adelaide,” Goble explains. “The programs I immediately loved were all the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals — all of that American romantic era. A lot of my songwriting, but particularly ‘Reminiscing,’ was about the life I wished I had, putting myself into those situations I saw in the movies.

The song arrived in April 1977, when the group was in Melbourne for a TV appearance. “We were in the green room, just playing our guitars,” Goble says. “The lead guitarist, David Briggs, was showing me some jazz chords, one of which was a C9 chord, a shape I never knew about.

“When I came home after the television show, I picked up my Martin 000-18 acoustic and played that chord. Immediately, I had this melody and lyric, all at the same time, almost like it was a spiritual download that just flowed through me. In about a half an hour, the whole thing was finished, and I had this very different song with key changes and quite a lot of jazz chords — quite a sophisticated piece!”

As Goble recalls, the Little River Band made two attempts at recording the song before they struck gold. “The keyboard player I wanted for it was Peter Jones, and he was not available,” he says. “So I was forced to pick another player, and it didn’t work. And then we did it with a second player and that didn’t work out, either.

“Then I heard Peter Jones had come back into town. So under protest from some of the guys, mainly from [vocalist] Glenn Shorrock, they reluctantly agreed to give it a third go. As soon as we sat down with Peter, the whole thing came together. Our guitarist Beeb [Birtles] played a syncopated riff from the third verse to the very end of the song, which I really loved. It was a lovely lift to the latter part of the record.”

In addition to “Reminiscing,” Sleeper Catcher included “Lady,” another song with which the LRB would make their name in America. Although Goble and the band were convinced they’d recorded something special, their label, Capitol, had trouble hearing it. “We waited five weeks with no response,” Goble says.

“They eventually Telexed us and said, ‘We think the album is great but we can’t hear any singles’ — and they had ‘Reminiscing’ and ‘Lady,’ our two biggest singles of all time!”

Eventually the label decided to take a chance on “Reminiscing.” “They said, ‘But we really don’t know if it will connect at all.’ Within a couple weeks it went ballistic, right to number one in New York and number three on Billboard.”

Goble calls it “our pinnacle song. It’s double any other song we’ve ever had in terms of listens. It’s been in a lot of movies, and a lot of soundtracks. Sinatra said he thought it was the best ’70s song in the world, though he never recorded it.

“But when John Lennon calls your song one of his favorites, does that really matter?”

By the time he joined the Eagles in January 1974, Don Felder had a history with some of the era’s defining guitarists and songwriters. Growing up in Gainesville, Florida, he befriended Duane Allman (who taught him slide), Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon, who would precede him in the Eagles.

Felder recently spoke with us about his adventures with all three guitarists. Here, he keeps the stories coming with anecdotes about another Gainesville pal named Tom Petty, as well as Joni Mitchell and his onetime Eagles’ co-guitarist Joe Walsh.

Tom Petty

“When I first met him I was teaching at Lipham Music, not getting paid but for every hour they would give me a $10 credit. So it would add up and I could use that money to upgrade my amp or my guitar or strings or stuff. Tom was like Stephen Stills — very enthusiastic. They both had charisma onstage; you really liked them, and they sold you on what they were doing.

“I remember the first time I went to see Tom perform, he had these two guitar players who were just plugged in and turned up way too loud. Tom was playing bass. He didn’t want to play bass. He was like, ‘A frontman shouldn’t be playing bass,’ and I wanted to go, ‘Well, Paul McCartney might disagree with you about that.’ But Tom also wanted to play guitar so he could write.

“So I went to see this show and he comes on and he’s got this blonde hair and he’s flipping his hair and shaking it. These two girls are standing next to me — why I chose to stand between two girls I’ll never know [laughs] — but they’re going, ‘Oh, he’s so great! He’s so this and that, and I love his voice!’ And he was kind of singing like Bob Dylan; that’s what was happening at the time, so he sounded more like a Bob Dylan knockoff than Tom Petty.

“But his two guitar players were horrible. I went to a rehearsal after that and said, ‘You stop playing when Tom’s singing. When Tom’s not singing, you can play. When he moves away from the mic, you can play and solo and do whatever you want. But these are songs. You have to support the vocals, not just play all over them.’

“So I kind of helped them a little bit. Then I moved to Boston and we lost touch. I didn’t really hear about him until his first album came out a few years later.”

Joni Mitchell

“Before I joined the Eagles I was working with a guy named David Blue. He was a New York kind of country-folk artist. He wrote ‘Outlaw Man’ for the Eagles’ Desperado album, and Graham Nash produced his album [1973’s Nice Baby and the Angel]. David Lindley played on the album, and I was hired to go work with David Blue on the road…and wound up playing with Crosby & Nash, who were headlining, after David Lindley got sick.

“David Blue really appreciated all the stuff I had done for him, and he was really good friends with Joni Mitchell. He said, ‘Joni’s making an album. She’d love to have you come in and play on it.’ I used to see her sitting outside this little deli, less than a quarter mile from my house.

“I’d go there a lot to eat breakfast, and she’d be sitting outside smoking a cigarette and having this little, teeny cup of the darkest espresso you can imagine. I’d always say hello to her, and Brian Wilson would be sitting in the same booth, having the same thing every day — exactly like he did over and over and over until he passed.

“So I went into the studio with her and gave her a hug. I don’t even remember the song or the title, what it was, and I don’t even know if they used it. [Editor’s note: They didn’t.] It was just really wonderful to have met her and have had the honor of playing with her, and being able to say hello to her at the deli. Just a lovely, lovely, really wonderful, talented person.

“And if you want to talk about originality, she was probably the most original female singing guitarist ever. Her tunings, her chord progressions, her vocal melodies over these complicated guitar changes were just spectacular. I don’t know any other female that’s been able to even come close to that level of quality and talent, to tell you the truth.”

Joe Walsh

“Well, Joe has a unique style of his own, and I love it. He and I really have diverse backgrounds, but out of complete respect for each other and admiration for each other, we were able to play together. Before he ever joined the Eagles, I did some shows with him; he had a band called Joe Walsh & Friends, and we opened for Elton John at Dodger Stadium. He had a TV show called Joe Walsh & Friends, too; I went down and jammed on a couple of songs with him for that.

“We would do this tango, this dance. Without having a conversation about it, we understood that when somebody goes up and starts playing high, you should be supporting underneath them — slower, lower, an octave down, a contrapuntal melody to what was happening up there.

“And then when he starts winding his way down, I’d start winding my way up. So we’d have this very subtle interplay between us, without saying a word, just by listening to what somebody was doing. And if they were off on a really hot run, you just support them.

“That’s really why I wrote the music bed which became ‘Hotel California.’ Joe had just joined the band and I wanted to do that thing we did together on an Eagles record. Glenn [Frey] and I had done something like that on a song right after I joined the band, but it was not of the same caliber or quality of what we did for ‘Hotel.’

“Joe comes up with great parts, so when we were tangoing back and forth he says, ‘We need to do something like diddly-diddly-diddly here.’ So I said, ‘What is diddly-diddly-diddly?’ and he goes [sings part], and if you listen to that progression, it’s a descending chromatic chord progression. It changed chords on every bar, going down, going down, going down, and then it comes back again.

“So we had to figure out what the diddly-diddly-diddly was on every bar so it went with the chord change on that bar. We literally recorded it bar by bar.”

Nita Strauss may be on maternity leave from the rock and roll road, but she’s still been playing plenty of guitar for an audience of a special one.

On May 28, Strauss and her husband, drummer Josh Villalta, welcomed their first child, Maxwell James. Strauss tells us via Zoom from home in Louisiana that she’s “just loving this season now, with a vengeance,” including playing music in Max’s nursery, where she keeps a couple of her signature Ibanez JIVA electric guitars and a Marshall JCM 900 half-stack.

“It’s a good vibe in our nursery, let me tell ya,” Strauss says as Max coos in the background. “He’s just sort of listening in awe right now. I wish everybody listened to me with as much awe as he does,” she adds with a laugh. “It’s fun; I’ve got two of my tour JIVAs in here and a nice comfy chair to sit in, so it’s a good practice setup.”

She adds that, with normal infant needs, Max “has more wardrobe changes than I do these days.”

There’s no drum kit in the nursery — yet — but Strauss reports that dad is getting into the act as well.

“Josh, he’s always just tapping on things and moving Max in the rhythm of different songs. The drummer vibe is already strong — which is terrifying.”

Strauss’ pregnancy required a leave of absence from her regular gig with Alice Cooper’s band during this year’s touring cycle, but we’ll be hearing something new from her next month. Strauss recorded an instrumental version of “1979” for Sending Hearts to All My Dearies — A Tribute to the Smashing Pumpkins, a band-sanctioned salute that comes out digitally August 14 and on vinyl October 16.

Her involvement with the project started during the pandemic, around the time she and Villalta were moving from Los Angeles.

“We were driving out of California,” she recalls. “It was a really emotional time, during the pandemic. Josh and I bought our first house and we loaded up the car and the dogs and everything. I had really held all the emotion in.

“Then we got on the freeway and the radio started playing ‘1979,’ and that unlocked that emotional block I had built up during the move and packing, and I just burst into tears. It just took me back to high school and cruising around in the car with my friends, listening to Smashing Pumpkins.”

Given the massive popularity of “1979,” Strauss didn’t assume the song was still available when she signed onto the project.

“I threw out ‘1979,’ thinking there’s no way that song is still available — and it was. [English singer Barns Courtney does a vocal version of it as well on the tribute, which also features contributions from Tame Impala, Des Rocs, Between the Buried and Me and others.] So I was excited, and I got to put a pretty unique spin on the song.”

Doing it as an instrumental fits that description, of course.

“The first thing I think anybody would’ve thought of is, Who are you gonna get to sing on it? But when I recorded this I hadn’t even put out any music with singers. That was pre-‘Dead Inside’ [with David Draiman], pre-any of the guest vocalist stuff I’ve done. I had only approached making my music from an instrumental standpoint. It didn’t occur to me until much later on, when it was finished, that maybe I should’ve gotten a singer on it.

“But I enjoy putting that kind of spin on songs that I like. And ‘1979’ has such a great melody that lent itself so easily to play on guitar. It just felt natural to approach it from that standpoint.

“I think it came out cool. When I listened back, I had sort of forgotten how many liberties I took with it, especially with the shuffle of the tempo at the very beginning; it starts out very moody and half-time, very different. But I did play it with a lot of reverence for the band and for the original track. I hope that comes across to the band and to the fans.”

In addition to “1979” and playing for baby Max, Strauss has also started work on her third solo album, the follow-up to 2023’s The Call of the Void.

“I started working on that about a year and a half ago, with the idea I was going to be taking some time off,” she says. “I’ve got 10 or 11 songs banked and pretty well fleshed out, sort of ready for either solos or guest singers. It’s in a good place, so it’s looking like new music by the end of this year or next year.”

She’ll resume her regular gameday duties with the Los Angeles Rams during the upcoming NFL season as well, and Strauss plans to be back in the Cooper camp for its next tour. (Anna Cara took her place during maternity leave.) Cooper is currently touring Europe with the Hollywood Vampires and will be promoting a new memoir, Devil on My Shoulder, this fall.

“Bringing a stroller and all the baby stuff on the road is gonna present a new challenge,” she acknowledges. But Max may well earn his keep as well.

“Oh, I guarantee he’s gonna make his way into the show when we go out with Coop,” Strauss says. “There’ll be some Billion Dollar Babies gag or something that they want to do.

“One fun thing about the Coop tour is everybody’s put to work onstage, everybody from the merch girl to the stagehands to anybody and everybody. My guitar tech is out in a black jumpsuit killing Alice at one point or another in the show. So if Max is out on tour, they’re gonna make him work.”

The Rolling Stones release their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, today, so it seems like the right time to visit this classic interview with Keith Richards from April 1983. It was a good time for the Stones. As GP Editor Tom Wheeler wrote in his original intro (abridged below), "In most respects the Stones have few peers, and in terms of sheer durability they have none, having somehow survived at or near the top of the rockpile for the last two-thirds of rock and roll's entire history.

"They've gone the distance and still pack a heavyweight punch: Their latest albums (Tattoo You and the live concert LP Still Life) are among their most vital works, and their most recent tour was astonishingly successful – four million fans applied for the New York tickets alone." Who would have thought that 43 years later, they would still be doing it?

Back in 1964 when Lennon and McCartney wanted to hold your hand, Jagger and Richards were walkin' the dog. Constantly compared to the Beatles and often to The Who, the Rolling Stones staked out their original turf with gritty music and a don't-mess-with-me stance. The Beatles disintegrated a dozen years ago, and the Who say they've unpacked their road cases for the last time. The Stones are in the studio, and they're not about to bid farewell to anyone.

Keith Richards stands in the eye of the hurricane. Around him swirls a rock and roll empire with 20 years history and mystery, success and excess, acclaim and controversy. He and his mates have been called many things by discerning critics and impassioned fans. One description recurs: The World's Greatest Rock And Roll Band.

Some reasons for all this are apparent. First, Keith's confederates could hardly be more impressive: Mick Jagger, rock's most prominent singer; guitarist Ron Wood, already a star when he joined the group in 1975; plus a drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, a powerhouse rhythm section revered the world over by fans and fellow musicians alike. Other strengths are equally obvious – the consistently fine Jagger/Richards compositions, the dynamic arrangements, the meticulous recording. Just as important is the way Keith Richards changes chords from G to C.

The band is built around a two-guitar sound, itself an extension of Richards' own uniqueness. He helped blur forever the line between lead and rhythm guitar, substituting a riffing technique in which melodic embellishments are grafted onto a vigorous rhythmic treatment of chords, partial chords, and low-register lines. He often employs a 5-string open tuning (with or without capo) that facilitates adding the melodic notes to a major chord--particularly the 4th, the 6th, and the 9th. Among many examples, "Brown Sugar" is a classic killer.

Keith's most obvious influence is Chuck Berry. The original "Carol" is a textbook of Berry's double-string licks and was covered on The Rolling Stones, the debut album. Keith has had a taste for Berry flavoring ever since. Perhaps his most highly stylized nod to the St. Louis rocker is his long solo in "Bitch," where Keith repeatedly turns the beat around, turns it inside out – weaving through the horns, sneaking up on the back-beat, making the style his own.

Chuck Berry adapted boogie-woogie piano techniques for the guitar's lower register, and this distinctive two-string rhythm pattern became another Stones staple. Richards made his mark on its development by sometimes slowing it down, piledriving the downbeat, and stoking up the tone to a grand raunch: a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Richards' role in the group has been analyzed countless times. The consensus: Without Keith Richards there wouldn't be a Rolling Stones. Ron Wood explains, "In other bands they follow the drummer; the Stones follow Keith, and they always have." While some have even asserted that "Keith Richards is the Rolling Stones," the guitarist himself is the first to stress that any band member's indispensability is a two-way street: "The musicians are there to serve the band. All that matters is whether something furthers the overall sound."

Keith's vision is rooted in a keen awareness of the power of the guitar – acoustic or electric – not only as a rhythm or solo instrument, but as a musical paintbrush capable of immense sonic canvases. He conceives a complex sound and knows how to get it. And yet to him a piece of music, like a real band, is a living, breathing creature existing apart from his conception of it. So while a particular project may be planned, Keith's sense of the music's own inherent magic keeps him flexible and spontaneous, adjusting as he goes.

On many contemporary recording sessions, musicians are put in compartments to minimize leakage (one instrument "leaking" into another's microphone), and the result is a compressed sound that fills every niche. Stones records are virtual opposites, roaring with heavy artillery but airy and spacious as well. While every sound counts, the spaces, the holes, are no less important.

The band's raw materials may be the deceptively simple basics of rhythm and blues, but with the air crashing around like a cyclone, the effect is complex, even abstract.

Rough edges on doubled guitars may be as important as seamless overlaps. An "extra" guitar part – mixed far in the distance to work on subconscious levels – may be as essential as obvious elements. As co-producer (credited or uncredited) on virtually every record, Keith Richards has proved to be both a master of the bold stroke and a subtle colorist, evoking not only the thunder and lightning but also a sky to put it in. For the Rolling Stones, atmosphere is everything.

For many the sound and fury of the band is a transcendental experience. Although the musicians are gifted, the songs excellent, and the recordings finely tuned, the effect is not so much that of hearing sophisticated technicians processed through state-of-the-art technology. It's more like hearing the world's greatest garage band in the world's biggest garage.

Up in his hotel room (classic Keith Richards, it is part Versailles Palace, part blues dive), Keith's dad Bert is smoking a pipe, and his son Marlon – who could dial room service before he could read – is drawing. A cassette bag is crammed with rockabilly, early Dylan, reggae, unmixed Stones, the raunchiest R&B, and more. An old Everly Brothers hit is playing, and delighted Keith Richards identifies a distinctive lead guitar lick: "Chet Atkins!"

An hour later, Keith is in the corner playing piano like Ray Charles and singing ballads to himself in a voice cracked with emotion. He plays a wistful "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and then launches into some Jerry Lee Lewis, his foot bashing the floor in tempo.

Ron Wood blows in and warmly embraces his partner-in-guitar. In minutes, the two old friends are plugged in, guitars barely in tune, jamming on a medium-tempo 12-bar blues in A. Keith leans over to the black Fender Deluxe Reverb and twists the volume knob from 2 to 6. Ron Wood grins and rips into a solo. The real Keith Richards goes a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Chuck Berry was a major influence on your guitar style.

That's quite a left hand he's got there [laughs].

Are the reports true that he punched you in the face?

Yeah, a little while back he did. I came up behind him to say hello. He didn't know it was me and didn't want to be bothered, but I got a nice note from him a little later, actually.

The "Bitch" solo is in a Chuck Berry style...

Which I do every night.

...and the beat turns around several times. Was that completely spontaneous, or semi-planned?

Maybe listeners knew a year or six months later that the beat turned around, but at the moment I wasn't conscious of that. It comes so naturally, as it's always happened, and it's always given that extra kick when the right moment comes back down again.

That's what rock and roll records are all about. I mean, nowadays it's "rock" music. But rock and roll records should be two minutes, 35 seconds long, and it doesn't matter if you ramble on longer after that. It should be, you know – wang, concise, right there. Rambling on and on, blah blah blah, repeating things for no point – I mean, rock and roll is in one way a highly structured music played in a very unstructured way, and it's those things like turning the beat around that we'd get hung up on when we were starting out: "Did you hear what we just did? We totally turned the beat around [laughs]!" If it's done with conviction, if nothing is forced, if it flows in, then it gives quite an extra kick to it.

You turn the beat around often. There's the intro to "Start Me Up," where it turns around twice in the first ten seconds, "Little Queenie," where Charlie turns around the intro, and the end of the bass part on "Street Fighting Man," which you played yourself.

Right. You can do that in a band that's got enough confidence not to collapse when it happens. It can make things much more interesting, and it sounds great as long as nobody's fazed by it. You have to be able to keep it straight, thinking about what you're doing at the moment and also about where you're going to take it. I guess that just comes from 20 years, same location.

So many of the things you play, if you were to put them on paper and analyze them musically....

What a mess [laughs]!

For example, the opening of "Start Me Up" is a simple chord change, and yet it's recognizable as the Rolling Stones. The sound is so specific. Would altering anything about it – the echo, tone setting, string gauge – change the impact?

I just can't get the things to sound any different [laughs]. They always come out just about the same when it comes to recording, because without really thinking about it I shift slowly as I go. And no matter where I start, no matter what the guitar or the string, sooner or later I'll get to where the rest of the band is going.

It's sort of a trademark sound, but it's more than that because of the way I go about getting it, working it through with what's going on, rather than getting the sound first and then pushing it on the band. A lot of it is adjusting to Ronnie, and Ronnie to me, which brings a certain continuity as well as a certain flexibility.

You've often mentioned the two-guitar sound as a cornerstone of the band. On Still Life there's a different kind of interplay – probably tighter than ever.

Well, Ron's getting better [laughs]. I think that's due to the fact that Ron and I have been working together now since '75, and the more we play together the tighter we get it.

It sounds like you and he are two sides of the same coin, like you could almost change places.

We do [laughs]. If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me. And you think at the time, "Oh, my God, what a gap," but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very un-thought-about way. We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.

When Ron joined in 1975, did the band have to make a change in the way you interact or rehearse?

No, that was the beauty of it. He was already so familiar with our stuff. After Mick Taylor left, we rehearsed for about six months with a lot of good guitar players from all over the world. And we could work with them, you know; they could work with us. But when Ronnie became available and suddenly walked in, that was it, there was no doubt. It was easy.

With Mick Taylor's style so well defined as a lead guitarist, there seemed to be a clear distinction between the two of you.

It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor. It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't a great rhythm player, so we ended up taking roles. When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally.

But also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar, and this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. But even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, "You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet." With Ron, if he drops his pick, then I can play his lick until he picks it up, and you can't even tell the difference.

Had you and Ron worked together very much before he joined the group?

Yes, for about 18 months. And I did a lot of work on Ronnie's first and second solo albums. He's never been the same since.

Have you found that your styles affected each other, now that you've been working together for several years?

Yeah, that's what's great about it. I neglect something, and he makes up for it. That's the great thing about two guitar players, because if you get it right, you know when to lift one of his licks, and vice versa, without thinking about it. He lifts more of mine than I do of his [laughs].

When the two of you are onstage, how much of your interaction is subject to change?

It depends on the sound system. If you're going to make a change, you need to hear what you're doing in the first place, so a lot of that gets down to technicalities of the stage monitoring. On our last tour in '81 we had those long ramps out to the sides of the stage. The idea of having that stage is to get out where most performers don't get with audiences of that size. Well, if the monitors aren't working out there, and you're just making signs at the sound guys instead of concentrating on your playing, then you forget it, just leave it. But if the sound's good and you can hear everything, then you tend to give it a bit more, adjust more to what's going on, change as you go.

Do you have much trouble communicating onstage at that volume?

It's all done by semaphore and eye signals. It's the only way you can really do it. But the thing is, there isn't that much need for communication or looking at each other, except when things go wrong. Otherwise the communication is just through the music. But if things are going wrong, then everybody's looking at me: "How's he going to get out of this?"

Your records have sort of an indoor sound, the effect of enclosed space. Are you happy with your outdoor concert sound?

Never totally satisfied with live things, no. If you were, you wouldn't keep trying to make it better. But I'm not disappointed with it. You just look forward to being able to do it better. You're always wondering about the people way at the back, what they're hearing. There are so many people and they're so far away – you have no idea what's being heard out there. You're hoping for the best and taking it for granted that the sound crew are doing the job for you and giving out the sound onstage as much as possible to everywhere in the place. But there's the one problem, always that nagging doubt there – they're not all getting it the way they should.

Your live versions of songs are often faster than their studio counterparts – for example, "Shattered" on Still Life. Is that intentional, to make it more exciting for the audience, or is it the adrenaline of performing?

It's the tempo of the whole gig, the adrenaline – especially the huge gigs. The show just takes its own speed from the start, and you go with it. It might be great or it might be terrible, but the tempos one night may be twice as fast as the night after. And you can always learn when you listen back, you see? You may find, "Wow, that should've been that tempo all along--we made the record too slow [laughs]!"

On the live version of "Just My Imagination," in the second half the guitar figure changes some notes and sustains others for a country feel, almost like a pedal steel feeling.

That's Ron and me doing the parts together, and you get that sustaining thing. We aren't using a pull-string or a lot of slide right now, but Ron plays pedal steel, a bit on "Shattered" and "Faraway Eyes." Country music's a part of the way we do that kind of thing, and it comes through even if it's done with straight guitars sort of pulling up against each other.

Isn't there some slide in "Neighbours" on Tattoo You?

No, but it sounds like it. Ron plays that solo, and a lot of his things on regular guitar sound like they're slide. He's wangled a way of playing it without them, because he keeps losing them [laughs]. At the start of that solo he's bending about four strings. Sounds like slide.

On Still Life's "Let Spend The Night Together," is that a 12-string doubling the vocal melody on the interlude, which ends with "keep on smilin' baby"?

That's one reason we haven't done that one a lot on stage – we could never figure a way 'round that middle bit. No 12-string – just the two run-of-the-mill guitars together, doin' it tight.

The mix of the two guitars on Still Life adjusts in places to the parts you're playing. Is that sort of detail up to your discretion?

Well, I listen for those things, but I may not be there for the first mix. Especially with live stuff, I'd rather let the guy who recorded it get his work into it. Then I get sent the dubs. From the whole tour you have several takes of each song to pick from.

The set opened with "Under My Thumb," and it's hard to get the right take, because you're playing right there early, when everybody's trying to get together and nobody knows what's going on. Every night it takes 15 minutes for the sound guys and the recording guys and everybody to fall in and get adjusted, so choosing the take for the first number requires a bit of work.

The endings, too. You always wish you could get a couple of takes of the beginning and ending of a show as good as it is in the middle. But every night it's a different problem – you're in a different place, so you see what happens when you get going and take it from there.

On recent tours you've taken occasional breaks from the outdoor arenas, getting into clubs. Do you miss the smaller venues?

Yeah, always. You hate to do the same thing all the time. I love playing the ballparks and the domes, you know. For the satisfaction of the band it gives you a terrific buzz – so many people. But by doing just one thing all the time you forget how to do anything else. You just become good at playing the domes and never learn anything else again.

I've always found that if you put in a few 3,000-seaters on the tour, and even 300, it gives the band itself a confidence quite apart from anything else. Then you can deal with 300 people or 90,000 and know how to play it. And probably the band feels that working in one of the nice old places like the Fox Theater in Atlanta is kind of more satisfying most of the time.

Because of the immediacy?

Yeah. The sound isn't dissipated totally, and you don't have to worry about the wind factor and things like that. It's much simpler and easier to get – it's just [snaps fingers] turn it up, get to it.

Didn't you change to Mesa/Boogie amplifiers on this last tour?

The '81 tour of the States was the first time we used the big Mesa/Boogie amp and speaker setups on the road, but we've been using Boogie amps in the studio since about '77, and on the stage since the '78 tour, slaving small Boogies through Ampeg cabinets.

Do you pay much attention to speakers?

No. I only think about them when I don't like 'em. If I plug in and to me it sounds like crap, then I ask a question, but otherwise, I leave it, because there are guys far more versed. I don't know what speakers are coming out every year. I find something and I stick with it for five or six years. It's like some of the gadgets I use. Guys who work with us and are close to us, will say, "You should try this: I think this is going to add to what you're doing." I might try it, although I don't go around looking at specifications and all that.

Were you using any effects onstage in '81?

An MXR analog delay on a few numbers, and a phaser on "Beast Of Burden" and on or two others.

How about the very unusual sound on "Shattered"?

That was the MXR phaser – the 100 model – and I damped the guitar. That's what gives it that sound on the studio version as well.

What kind of wireless systems were you and Ron using on the last tour? Can you get the right tones as easily?

We've been using Nady wireless things since '78, and the tone is a lot better, because cords get stepped on and knotted up and they start rattling a little bit, and you lose tone.

In the last few years there's been a new aspect of your tone – more distinct, with a slight click, almost like a slap bass in rockabilly. "Hang Fire" and "She's So Cold" are examples, and especially the last section of "Little T&A."

It's our equivalent of that rockabilly thing. I think you'll find that comes from using a lot of analog delay on Ron's guitar or my guitar or both of them, and I dampen it. That'll give you that ticka-tacka-ticka. I always use that green MXR analog delay. I'm told it's quite out of date now and old-fashioned, but I got it free and I forgot that time marches on and they make better ones or so they say. I don't know. I've worked very well with those MXR things, and they've been very reliable.

Which guitar are you playing for that sort of stripped-down rockabilly sound on "Little T&A"?

A Telecaster, a '57 set up in 5-string tuning. It's open G 5-string, without the heavy string. Right there from the bottom up it's: G, D, G, B, D. The whole idea of getting rid of the sixth string in the open tuning was having the root on the bottom.

The suspended chords in the verses of that song are typical of your riffing style.

That's just one of the things you can do with open tuning. You can get a drone going, so you have the effect of two chords playing against each other. One hangs on because you've just got to move one finger – or two at the most – to change the chord, so you've still got the other strings ringing. It's a big sound.

Mick was using an Ovation Adamas steel-string on the tour. Were you satisfied with the instrument's performance?

I think they're very nice-sounding guitars. A nice neck. But I can never get used to that shape, that... dish. They're probably the best way of amplifying an acoustic guitar and having it still sound like an acoustic. There's no doubt. Probably a million readers will write in and say the Stones don't use acoustic guitar that much onstage, so we don't know shit, but for what we need, for a couple of numbers, it's adequate.

How did you come about acquiring your new guitars?

Friends of mine introduced me to Doug Young, who built them. After seeing some of his things, I knew he was capable of exceptionally fine work, so I more or less commissioned him to build me a guitar. He ended up making me two – the red one is a gift for my girlfriend, actually. Basically, that's the lowdown.

Did you specify exactly what you wanted?

Not really. We didn't have to say very much about it. I was very impressed by the things I saw, and I wanted a similar guitar for myself. But it's also this patronage that players and builders can get involved with – Renaissance man, and all that, the old system of someone like me encouraging guys like Doug. His guitars are too good not to be given help.

So you didn't request a certain wood for the fingerboard, a certain pickup design?

Not too much, no. I said, "Make me a guitar." I figure that's the difference between working with an artist, as opposed to just anyone. I mean, if you want a suit made, you don't want to have to tell the tailor how to do everything. You want to find someone who doesn't need all that, you see? It's more, "I want to see what you can build for me." There are very few people like that. Most people, you have to sit on their ass and watch them: with Doug I just left him to it. I was in Paris for months, recording. I'd almost forgotten it was going on until I saw what he'd done.

Have you had a chance to play them in the studio yet?

Not in the studio, but I went out and banged on them a bit. I'll be back in the studio soon, and then we'll beat them into shape [laughs].

After playing hundreds of guitars, what quality in these instruments made you take notice?

It's a recognition you develop. I think, and I'm sort of instinctive about these things – sit down and play it, feel it. I knew that Doug was thinking along the same lines as myself, but far ahead, because I'm not technical. Only after the event of building it when I've got it in my hands, can I know what's right. I can't say, "Well, it was the magnificent electronics," or "the wonderful bonding of the woods," and each specific thing. It was simply a fine instrument. Lovely wood!

Can you judge the sound of an electric before you plug it in?

Maybe to a certain extent. If the neck and the action feel right, you're more than halfway home, even before hearing the electronics. Things like weight and the density of the wood indicate certain things, but you simply need to play it to really tell. And it doesn't take long.

On record you've used several very different types of guitars – Gibson Les Pauls and ES-335s, Fender Telecasters, and others. And yet a listener can tell right away that it's you, from stylistic clues, but also from the sound alone.

I use a whole load of different guitars, that's true, but they're not all that dissimilar in type. I mean, ninety percent are probably Telecasters, old ones, but more than that, you can't really separate style and sound, you see. People do separate them when they're talking about music, but all of that often misses the whole point.

You're suggesting that the style is the sound?

Yes, part of it, more than any particular tone setting or pickup or anything like that. I'll just adjust to the sound of the track as we go – the sound of the bass drum and especially Ronnie's guitar. The style is adjusting along with the sound. There's never a conscious effort to get that "Honky Tonk Woman" tone or a thing like that. You may get it or you may not. But that's not what you're thinking about. You're thinking about the track.

Some people were amazed to read in your first Guitar Player cover story that on "Street Fighting Man" there are no electric guitars.

Two acoustics, one of them put through the first Philips cassette player they made. It was overloaded, recorded on that, and then hooked up through a little extension speaker, and then onto the studio tape through a microphone.

You've paid quite a bit of attention to acoustic guitars in rock music.

Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer. But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it. You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric, or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it, and when I wrote the thing I thought, "I'm not going to get a better sound than this." And "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the same, too. That's acoustic guitar.

Early Everly Brothers records have huge acoustic guitar sounds. Were any of them influential?

Yeah, all of their records, and also there's the fact that the first major tour we ever did was supporting the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. Plenty to learn [laughs] in a real short time, following those guys around. The Everlys came on with just their trio and themselves, and it was great. On their recordings there is a certain power in the steel-string.

It's a different instrument from electric – not that different in the way you play it, but in terms of the sound. There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track. You'll be despairing, nothing working, hashing away, Take 43 on electric guitar, and somebody will say, "Why don't you try it on acoustic?" And you try it one time and you've got it.

What kind of acoustics do you like to use?

Old Martins – several types of them – and certain Gibsons, particularly old Hummingbirds.

Do you have a certain kind of room that you like to record in?

Yes, but it's hard to tell whether it'll work until we get in there. And when we find a room I hate to lose it. Over the years we've been through four or five or maybe more of these ace rooms. Sometimes you walk in and it just happens, but whether it takes a long time or not to produce the sound you want, you don't want to lose it.

We're still working in the same place now that we've been in since Some Girls, a good big room. Pathe Marconi is the name – it's EMI's studio in Paris. The room we use is what they consider their sort of storeroom for the orchestra, or a rehearsal place. It's not Studio A, B, or C. It doesn't even have a number.

How important is the sound of the room itself?

The room is as important as the band and the producer and the song and the engineer. The room is at least as important as all that to the total sound. You can't separate rock and roll music instrument by instrument. You destroy the whole structure of it. Rock and roll music can only be recorded by jamming the sound all together.

Once you've got something to work right in the studio, do you try to use all the same equipment onstage?

Yeah, pretty much, just a larger version. I've never found the Stones or anybody else made great records by using huge stacks in the studio and blasting away. You can get very powerful-sounding records playing very quietly, and with relatively small amps. Small amps turned way up have the tension you're trying to get anyway, and it sounds big. It also gets back to that recognition of the acoustic guitar and what it can do, and what you can get if you're thinking of the mix right from the beginning and all the way through the recording.

Years ago, the mixing technique on many of your records broke quite a few rules. Did you realize from the outset of your career that a new way of mixing would be necessary?

We knew we wanted it without knowing the way to get it. It was just what sounded right to us, and also because we were brought up in the era when a four-track was a rarity. We started recording at a point when the best sound you got was all air and all the room sound and everything was leakage and jammed together, and the vocal fought its battle with the rest of the instruments.

We tried it the usual way, but whenever we brought the vocals up we'd never like the mix as much. What always amazed me was that if the record was popular, most people would know the words – at least the key ones – within a few weeks, no matter how much the voice was buried. Years back, in the studio, I always thought about those other records where the voice was too far forward, so you never really got a sound. You just got a vocalist with some accompaniment.

Which wasn't what you were after?

Not for us, but you see, you've got to treat each type of music in the appropriate fashion. I mean, if you're mixing the Everly Brothers, then you've got those fantastic goddamn voices and you put them out front as much as you can! But even those guys never sacrificed the sound of the record for the sound of their voices. They had it all there, quite a light sound, but always very powerful as well, never wimpy.

Did record companies ever tell you or your producers and engineers that you should be mixing Mick Jagger like the Everly Brothers?

They'd try, but we set it up so there was no way they had anything to say about it. They'd complain, and we'd tell them to @#$%& off.

Do you ever splice takes, either rhythm tracks or solos?

Sometimes. Not so much on solos. We tend to record them real long – go on and on, but as long as I know that somewhere in that seven or eight or eleven minutes there is that two-and-a-half minutes that says it all, then I don't mind going on, because I'll ferret it out and find it.

Is it too soon to start talking about what's on the next album?

I can only report that it's going magnificently for us, so much stuff coming out and starting to sound real good. We've only been in the studio a little over two weeks, which is only like a warm-up, and we've cut about a dozen cassettes of tape already. Everybody's happy about it. When we're done, we'll start thinking about the next tour.

In the choruses of "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Start Me Up," the bass leaves huge holes for the guitars to fill. Does Bill Wyman get a lot of direction from you in that regard, or is that something he's always done on his own?

I would say in the late '60s, early '70s, Bill would be given more direction – not always the right direction [laughs] – but Mick and I would be more inclined to say, "Do this and that." Sometimes he comes and asks, but less and less. You know, relationships change.

But Bill, he's kind of like Charlie. He just keeps [long pause] amazing me. He just keeps getting better. He's not always what I'm expecting. I know he's good, and he's always there. But I kind of take his playing for granted. And then when I listen to what he's doing, I realize he's not always playing the same thing. He's much better than we think. You see, we're the world's worst Rolling Stones critics [laughs]. We tear the shit apart before anybody gets a chance to hear it.

Do you practice very much aside from band rehearsals for tours or recording sessions?

In a way I do, because the guitar is always there, and I always play it or the piano. I do it in bursts. You kind of wait for it. You can't force it and sit down and say, "Now I'm going to write a hit song."

You've recorded a lot of material on your own – just vocals with piano or guitar. Do you plan to ever release any of it?

No, not releasing it as such. I just do it because I like to play a lot of great songs for myself, and it helps me to write. The way I write songs is to sit down and play 25 great songs by other people and hope that one of mine drips off the end.

Have many of the songs that you've written for the Stones been composed on the piano?

Sometimes, yeah. I'm such an amateur on piano, and that can help. You play guitar every night and get to know it so well, and a lot of great songs are really accidents. On the piano, I may come across something I wouldn't have done on guitar.

You've sung lead on some of the band's hits, and sang "Little T&A" on the last tour, but none of your lead vocals are included on the album.

Well, if I sing the lead vocals, then what's he going to do [laughs]? There's quite a bit for each of us to think about already. And I do sing lots of parts with Mick, always.

For years Mick has been reported to be a proficient guitar player, and yet he only started to play a lot onstage during the Still Life tour. Why now?

I think he feels a little more confident about it. He's a fine drummer, too. And he's not bad on keyboards, in his own way – in the same way that I am, fiddling about to write and to get some interesting ideas.

One thing that's held Mick back with guitar onstage is that playing is one thing – knowing how to get an instantly good sound off the amp is another. That is something he's still got to work on. It keeps him back from doing so much, because if it doesn't sound good to him in the first six bars, he doesn't have the experience and the knowledge of dealing with the amplifier. He might be playing great, but he's got a shitty sound on the amp – and then he's got his singing to think about.

Are you playing much National or Dobro these days?

Not doing as much of that as I'd like – that goes with not living anywhere in particular. You need to sort of sit down every day and do that. I hate to travel with instruments like that. I think you just need a certain environment when you're playing like that, and since that's not the way we are able to live, and probably wouldn't anyway, I don't get as much of a chance. You know, some things you don't get as much of a chance to do as you wish you had.

For young guitarists who are into Chuck Berry or the Rolling Stones today, what do they face, trying to make records now? Compared to when you started, what's different?

24-track machines. Otherwise, not that much has changed from what we faced. There's all this stuff about new equipment and changing styles and all that, but the point is, you still face a lot of rip-off artists, and you face a lot of work.

You and Pete Townshend seem to have much in common, at least on the surface – the components of your styles, your use of the guitar, the way your bands are compared in the press. Do you feel any particular kinship with him?

You mean Trousers? Now let me see – one reason for that is probably that we started playing the same clubs almost at the same time. I never took credit for this, but apparently he said that he lifted that arm swing he does from seeing me. I don't recall doing it, but I guess if he says so, he did. It's something I've never been aware of. In certain respects, yeah, we're both coming out in the same place at the same time, more than anything else.

He was quoted as saying that there comes a time for a band to retire, to pass on the torch, so to speak, to younger bands.

I love Peter, but the time to stop is when you can't do it anymore, or when you're fed up. There's no passing on of the goddamn torches. Other people will pick them up anyway, and besides, that's not the point. I don't know if he was accurately quoted, but other people have said it anyway when they can't think of anything else to say.

You see, if rock and roll is what you do, then that's what you do, and that's all. You don't sort of say, "Oh, now I give up and I'll hand it on to this band who I think is quite good." You don't hand it on that way. Pete already handed it on, the same as we did, to some young guys that are playing now, the way we played Chuck Berry. It's not, "Here, I've got to hand you a document." It's the records that you've done that the younger players have listened to and grown up with and sat around learning.

What would you like to be doing a year from now?

Accepting a platinum record, for one thing [laughs]. I'd like nothing to change too much, just to do what we do, but be able to do it better.

After one of your court trials you commented on systems of justice and juries of your peers, and how that all related to being a musician.

Yeah, I was trying to make the point that when I am thrown in a court, or anybody like myself is thrown in court, the jury has got absolutely no experience in the musician's way of life, so they're not your peers. I know justice is often rough and so on, but they don't know what it's like to be on the road for 20 years, and I can't explain it to them now. So I was saying, give me a jury of my peers, with Chuck Berry, with Muddy Waters. And put Ron in there, too [laughs] – I mean, I can drop him a few bucks.

People keep calling you the world's greatest rock and roll band, and they have been for a long time.

It's embarrassing.

Are there any drawbacks to their saying that?

Yeah, you've gotta keep being it [laughs]! I've decided that every night there's another world's greatest rock and roll band, because one night somebody has an off gig, and some other shit band has a great gig. That's one of the great things about rock and roll – every night there's a different world's greatest band.

We've been maybe a little more consistent, for whatever reason, mainly when we're going together on a tour and also because we've managed to stick together. The chemistry – that's got nothing to do with musicianship. It's got to do with personality and characters and being able to live with each other for 20 years.

People have been predicting the end of the Stones...

...from the beginning [laughs]!

With the kind of life you seem to lead, longevity might appear to be the last thing you'd be able to gain. What's the secret?

The secret is, there is no secret. It's finding people that not only play well with you, but that you can get along with. There's no constant battle about who's Mister Big, none of those problems. When I see Charlie and Bill – I ain't seen 'em for a few weeks – it's like a pleasure. Ron says we're his closest friends. I guess that's the only secret.

Is that what it means to play in a band?

Most people don't know what a band is. People have heroes, and they copy them – I mean, we copied things very carefully when we started. But you don't get this picture and then do everything to fit it. You do what you do.

The musicians are there to contribute to the band sound. The band isn't there for showing off solos or egos. A lick on a record – it doesn't matter who played it. All that matters is how it fits. The chemistry to work together like that has to be there. You have to work on it, always – figure out what to do with it.

But basically it's not an intellectual thing you can think up and just put there. It has to be there. You have to find it.

This interview was originally published in the April 1983 issue of Guitar Player. The Rolling Stones' new album, Foreign Tongues, is out now.

When Neil Young sat down for an interview with Guitar Player in 1992, grunge had upended the guitar world and reignited a long-running debate over technique versus expression. More than three decades later, his views on the 1990s return to punk-infused music still feels strikingly relevant.

“It’s just rock and roll, but it’s real rock and roll,” he told GP associate editor Jas Obrecht. “Punk and rock and roll are all the same thing. What has degenerated from it — what ‘rock and roll’ is now — is not rock and roll. It’s pop. It’s fabricated for the masses. It’s an imitation — a shoddy semblance of what it was. It’s Perry Como music compared to real rock and roll.”

Young's argument was bigger than the changing tastes of the early '90s. To him, the divide wasn't between punk and classic rock, or grunge and shred. It was between music driven by expression and music shaped for mass consumption.

“Remember when it all started?” he continued. “There was real rock and roll, and then that other music your parents listened to. It’s like rock and roll now is the music that our parents listened to. It’s, like, gone.”

That philosophy extended directly to his guitar playing. When asked what he looks for in an electric guitar solo, Young didn’t bring up speed, precision or technique— he was focused on a sensation.

“Elevation. You can feel it. That’s all I’m looking for,” he said. “You can tell I don’t care about bad notes. I listen for the whole band on my solos. You can call it a solo, because that’s a good way to describe it, but it’s really an instrumental. It’s the whole band that’s playing.”

That perspective also informed his view of formal music education. The 1980s shred boom led to a massive influx of guitarists to Berklee College of Music and music schools like the Musicians Institute. Young saw it as the beginning of the end.

“It paints a pretty doomed picture of the future, doesn’t it?” he asked. “First of all, it doesn’t matter if you can play a scale. It doesn’t matter if your technique is good. If you have feelings you want to get out through music, that’s what matters. If you have the ability to express yourself, and you feel good when you do it, then that’s why you do it. The technical side of it is a complete boring drag, as far as I’m concerned.”

Young — who has steadfastly played a 1953 Gibson Les Paul and 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe for the better part of 60 years — also acknowledged that technical virtuosity has never been his goal.

“I can’t play fast. I don’t even know the scales. A lot of the notes I go for are notes that I know aren’t there. They’re just not there, so you can hit any note.”

But his comments weren’t a dismissal of technical ability. In fact, he reserved some of his highest praise for two of rock’s most celebrated virtuosos.

“I appreciate these guys who play great. I’m impressed by metal bands with their scale guys. I mean, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genius guitar players. They’re unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber.

“But I can’t relate to it. One note is enough.”

Call him Forrest Gump, if you want (or Zelig), but Don Felder played with Duane Allman, Stephen Stills, Tom Petty and Bernie Leadon — all before he left his native Gainesville, Florida.

Though he’d worked with the jazz-rock band Flow, singer-songwriter David Blue and Crosby & Nash during the early ’70s, Felder really made his name when he joined the Eagles in 1974. He stayed with the group until his controversial dismissal in 2001, co-writing “Hotel California” as well as “Victim of Love,” “Visions” (on which he also sang lead), “Those Shoes,” “Too Many Hands” and “The Disco Strangler.”

On his own, meanwhile, he’s released four solo albums — including the all-star guest-packed American Rock ’n’ Roll in 2019 and last year’s The Vault — Fifty Years of Music — and contributed to the soundtracks of Heavy Metal and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He also published a bestselling memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001), in 2008.

Right now you can find Felder on the road, opening shows for the Guess Who — with Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman — into August. During a tour break, he took a few minutes to tour us through his famous guitar friends and their impact on his life and career.

Duane Allman

“Duane and Gregg used to live during the summer in Daytona Beach with their mom. There were no gigs, really, for local bands in Gainesville except fraternity parties and this one bar named Dub’s Steer Room, which me and [Tom] Petty and everybody played at one time or another. So we would go to Daytona Beach with my band with Bernie [Leadon] and play on the pier. I was in Rufus Thomas’s backup band one weekend, and we would play little dance clubs for teens and that kind of stuff.

“And then we met Duane and Gregg. We went into this bar after we finished playing and listened to them play. They had a drummer named Maynard who was missing his front teeth, and he played smiling, with no teeth. I don’t remember who was playing bass. But they were amazing. They were by far superior to every other band that I had ever seen live.

“So we became friends. When they got off work and we got off work, we’d go over to a little deli and have eggs at one o’clock in the morning, eat breakfast before we went to bed. And because Bernie and I lived in Gainesville, we’d have to drive over and do a show and then drive back that night because we couldn’t afford a hotel. So quite frequently we’d go over to the Allmans’ house after we ate breakfast and crash there.

“One day we were there, Duane picked up a slide; he was sitting on the floor playing slide with this Coricidin bottle. I said, ‘How do you do that? You’ve got to show me how to do that!’ I’d never played slide before, so he showed me the basic tuning and how to pull down on the fifths and slowly bend a little flat on the minor third and those sorts of really basic things. But he was light years ahead of any and everybody I’d ever seen play slide.

“Slide, to me, is a lot nastier than fretted guitar. It gets really raw, and the only other slide I’d ever seen played was some old African American blues players that just tuned to open tuning and would be playing not just notes but mostly just sliding around. Duane took it to a whole other level of it being melodic, where you could copy or repeat parts — it wasn’t just somebody playing a million notes. He’d taken the sound of that instrument and made it actually his own, with all new sounds and feelings and everything.

“So I never really tried to copy because, like I said, he was light years ahead of me, and I play a lot simpler, more melodic stuff, because I’m not a shredder. You should just be able to take the skills you learn from other people and make your own stamp, like your own signature, the way Duane did.

“We were in battles of the bands in Gainesville; there was this store, Lipham Music, that provided any band in central Florida with drums, bass, PA, mics, guitars, amps, anything — on credit. They had a yearly battle of the bands in the parking lot, and I have the distinct honor of having lost three battles of the bands to the Allman Brothers.

“It didn’t matter what name they were playing under; I remember the last one, it was the Allman Brothers Band with Dickey Betts, the whole band, and they were just ferocious. They were on fire. Then they disappeared; they just took off, and the next thing I knew it was At Fillmore East, and they were off and running.”

Stephen Stills

“The drummer in one of my first bands, the Continentals, met Stephen at a frat party and told us about him. I think Stephen Stills had gone to some military high school and hated it and went AWOL and showed up in Gainesville and got enrolled in Gainesville High School for his senior year. I was 14 or 15, something like that, and my mom would drive us around, because we didn’t have driver’s licenses or cars, to do these little gigs, like playing for women’s tea parties where they had finger sandwiches and cups of tea and they’d be discussing flower gardens, and we’d be sitting in the corner with two acoustic guitars, playing and singing, kind of putting some music in the room.

“And in that band, the Continentals, we were playing fraternity parties, and we would play Gatorland, which was a bar right on the corner across the field from the University of Florida football field, and on Saturdays right after home football games that bar would just fill up, packed, hundreds of people jammed in there to drink and party and celebrate or whatever it was. So we’d play that and Dub’s Steer Room and a bunch of sleazy little clubs around town.

“Stephen was never a shredder, but he had great charisma, and his voice was great. He was in the Gainesville High School choir — I was, too. He was very enthusiastic, and as soon as he graduated Stephen left Gainesville and moved out to California. The next time I saw or heard from him it was Woodstock and it was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on stage. I was, ‘Oh my God, that’s Stephen! What’s he doing up there?! Holy cow!’ Then I went, ‘Hell, if he can do it, I can do it.’ It gave me renewed enthusiasm about pursuing music as a full-time career.”

Bernie Leadon

“A couple weeks after Stephen moved to California I had gotten on a Greyhound bus and rode up to Lake City, probably an hour or an hour and a half, and I played a little women’s tea party by myself. I played acoustic and sang for the gals, and I came back and got off the bus and expected my mom to pick me up.

“And this guy comes walking up and he saw I had a guitar and said, ‘Are you Don Felder?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I went to the music store and asked who the best guitar player was in Gainesville, and they said you. Then I called your mom and asked if it would be okay if I picked you up and brought you home.’

æNow, that was a long time ago; you’d never let your kid get in a stranger’s car and drive off today. So I went, ‘Okay,’ and put my guitar in the back.

“Bernie had a beautiful Martin guitar and he had his banjo back there, too. So he comes into my house and my bedroom and sits down and just plays all this amazing flatpicking stuff. Then he takes out his banjo and just slays me with his talent on that, too. So we put together two bands — he was in the Continentals after Stephen left, which later became the Maundy Quartet, which was much more English-sounding to go with the British Invasion.

“Then I went and got a really good Martin and we had a bluegrass band that would play during the week at barbecues and stuff like that. We had a guy who worked for the Florida Fish and Game Commission who had a plane that could land on lakes, so we would fly all over the place in this little state plane — which was probably unauthorized use — and go play these little barbecues and stuff around central Florida, then fly back and go home.

“So Bernie was a really key person in my music development. He really broadened my country and bluegrass skills beyond what I ever knew, because when I met him I was more into electric guitars and rock and roll than flatpicking and banjo. But since we had those two bands I was forced to learn how to do other stuff, which I’m grateful for now, of course.

“It turned out as soon as Bernie graduated he moved to California, too; he was from California originally and just did not really like Gainesville. The next thing I know he’s in the Flying Burrito Brothers and working with Gram Parsons and really worked his way into that California deal out there. He kept calling me: ‘What are you doing in New York? The music business isn’t happening there — move to California! It’s happening here.’ Finally I took his advice and packed up and drove across the country.”