Anyone who’s studied Stevie Ray Vaughan’s gear would have noticed the “upside-down” tremolo on his 1959 Fender Stratocaster. Dubbed “Number One” and “First Wife,” the electric guitar was purchased from the owner of an Austin, Texas music shop in 1973. It was Stevie who replaced its right-hand whammy with a lefty.

While many have rightly assumed Stevie was emulating his left-handed heroes Otis Rush and Jimi Hendrix, there was more to it than appearances, as Stevie revealed to Guitar Player assistant editor Dan Forte in the magazine's October 1984 issue.

“Well, I started listening to people and noticed that when Otis Rush used one, he had it on the top — he played upside-down,” Steve said. “And Hendrix had the guitar upside-down, except he strung it regular.

"It seemed to me that the people who did that the best had it on top, so I moved mine.”

While Stevie liked the results, it caused difficulty with his clothing. “Sometimes it does get in the way,” he admitted. “I’ve had it tear my sleeve halfway off.”

As Forte pointed out, the position of the bar meant Stevie worked it with his palm, rather than his little finger.

“Yeah, and I've got the springs set up so I couldn't move it with my little finger anyway,” Stevie said. “It's pretty tight, with four springs tightened all the way up. That's how I can do ‘Third Stone From the Sun’ and still be in tune.

“See, I have my old [’59] Strat set up where it won't go up at all. On my newer Strats, the vibrato handles are on the bottom, in the regular place. The orange one [his Hamiltone Strat, built by James Hamilton] and Lenny, the brown one [his circa '65 composite Strat], both of their vibratos will go pretty far up and down as well, and they're set up a lot lighter. All the guitars have personalities of their own and feel completely different. They each have different sounds.”

Of course Hendrix wasn’t the only influence on SRV’s guitar playing. Albert King was another big inspiration to him. When asked by Forte about King, Stevie shared a story about the time the two bluesmen performed together on December 6, 1983, at CHCH-TV studios in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Stevie was still an up-and-comer, and King initially refused to do the show because he didn’t know who SRV was. Eventually he realized he was “Little Stevie,” the skinny kid who used to sit in with him when he played in Austin.

The show in Hamilton was one of two collaborations between the men recorded for the TV program In Session. The intimate studio performance reveals how comfortable the two men were with each other, which also results in some hilarious moments.

At one point, during "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” as Stevie solos, King casually stands up, retrieves his pipe and nonchalantly lights it.

During another of Stevie’s solos, King pulls an emery board from his pocket and begins filing his fingernails.

As Stevie revealed to GP, King had heard Stevie copping his licks on David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album and wanted to show him who the boss was at their performance.

“When that album first came out, Albert heard it,” Stevie told GP. “He said, "[sneering] Yeah, I heard you doin' all my shit on there. I'm gonna go up there and do some of yours.’

“We were doing this TV show right outside of Toronto-Hamilton, and during the lunch break, Albert went around to everybody in there looking for an emery board. I didn't think anything of it. We were jamming on the last song, ‘Outskirts of Town,’ and it comes to the solo, and he goes, ‘Get it, Stevie!’

“I started off, and I look over and he's pulling out this damn emery board, filing his nails, sort of giving me this sidelong glance. [laughs]. I loved it! Lookin' at me like, ‘Uh-huh, I got you swinging by your toes.’ He's a heavy cat.”

Have a look.

“It’s probably the best rock and roll song I’ve ever written,” Robin Trower says about Day of the Eagle, the frenetic, heavy blues track from his second solo album, 1974’s Bridge of Sighs. “It’s still a lot of fun to play, too. To pull it off successfully, you have to be slightly on the edge of making it work. There has to be some effort involved. I think that’s what makes it so exciting to play.”

Day of the Eagle ranks as the pinnacle of Trower’s career, the song that established him as a six-string force to be reckoned with. Within the framework of his power trio – which included bassist/vocalist James Dewar and drummer Reg Isidore – Trower’s guitar work is soulful, emotive, and oozing with the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, a guitarist to whom he has often been compared. 

“My three mentors are B.B. King, Albert King and Jimi Hendrix,” Trower affirms. “I don’t think it does Hendrix any service for me to be compared to him, because he was a genius. I knew not to copy anybody else. 

“For instance, with Hendrix or B.B. King, I never sat down and worked out any of their licks; I was more interested in knowing what was behind the lick – what was the feeling, the emotion that made them play it like that. If you get hung up on other people’s stuff, it may stop your own creativity from coming through.”

It starts with the riff

The songwriting process for Day of the Eagle began when Trower came up with the song’s main riff. 

“That’s where all my songs start,” he explains. “Once I came up with that, the changes followed, along with the rest of the guitar parts. And once that was done, I then wrote the song’s lyric. 

“I’m not sure anything particular inspired the lyrical matter. They were just ideas that came into my head. The most important thing for me about lyrics, though, is that they’ve got to be saying something. The sound of the words is important too.”

A Beatles legend

When it came time to record, Trower decided to capture the spontaneous live energy of his band straight to tape, with no double-tracking or studio wizardry. 

“It went down as a three-piece, live in the studio,” he explains. “First, we laid down the rhythm guitar, bass, and drums together, and then I laid down the lead work. Once that was done, Jimmy [Dewar] sang the lead vocal. I’d say we probably did two or three takes of the song before we finally got the take that we kept.”

Beyond his band’s stellar contributions, Trower credits recording engineer Geoff Emerick for capturing their sound – especially his guitar – and power. 

“The sound of not only that track, but the whole album, is down to Geoff’s vision and creative ability to capture those sounds,” Trower says of Emerick, who famously lent his talents to the Beatles masterpieces Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s. “He was an amazing engineer to work with.” 

For gear, Trower says, “I used two 100-watt Marshall heads with two 4x12 cabinets. I also had a homemade volume booster pedal, which was built for me by a friend of mine who was an electronics guy. It didn’t have a distortion unit in it, but it made it possible for me to drive the amps a little bit harder. That was the only effect used on the track. Guitar-wise, it was just a newly bought, straight-off-the-shelf black 1974 Fender Strat with the larger headstock.”

Still flying high

Day of the Eagle has proven to be a popular choice for guitarists, including Steve Stevens, who covered it on his 2008 solo effort, Memory Crash, and Pat Travers, who put it on his 2003 album, P.T Power Trio. “It’s a great compliment that people think that much of it,” Trower says.

Although Day of the Eagle failed to chart, Bridge of Sighs climbed to seven on the Billboard album chart, and its commercial success brought Trower validation as a solo artist in his own right. Fifty years on, he remains as passionate about his career as ever. “I just love to play the guitar,” he professes. “That is my drug. And that’s what keeps me still at it.” 

This interview originally appeared in the August 1992 issue of Guitar Player.

"Ain't a lot of chords to it
It's just a big beat
And I sound just like a whole band
Now you dig it, and dig my feets."
– John Lee Hooker's "Teachin' the Blues," 1961

Our search for the big beat led us to John Lee Hooker's house in Redwood City, California. At 72, Hooker can proudly look back on a career that began in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during the 1930s. Unlike his contemporaries Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, Hooker didn't play roll-and-tumble Delta jukes, choosing instead to launch his career in Memphis, singing gospel and blues.

He moved to Detroit after World War II to work by day in an auto plant and make the rounds of Black Bottom clubs by night. 1948's “Boogie Chillen',” his first R&B hit, inaugurated the most prolific recording career in postwar history (It's estimated that between 1949 and 1953 alone, Hooker cut some 70 singles on 24 different labels, using a dozen different names to avoid contractual problems). 

Other big R&B hits followed: “Crawlin' King Snake” in '49, “I'm in the Mood” in '51, and “Dimples” in '56. Hooker made his first foray into Europe in '62 and returned to find that “Boom Boom” had become his first crossover hit. 

Covers by the Animals and other British Invasion bands helped him win white audiences at home. Since then, Hooker has moved to California, recorded armloads of albums, and associated with some of the most respected names in rock and blues.

As it was in the beginning, so it is today: The very heartbeat of John Lee Hooker's music remains his unique songwriting, powerful voice, and down-home propulsive guitar. 

Like Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, and very few others, he remains a musical law unto himself, still specializing in the sparse blues and infectious boogies that first rocked the globe more than 40 years ago. As Miles Davis expressed it after a 1990 session, “John Lee, you the funkiest man alive. You sound like you buried up to your neck in mud!”

Mr. Hooker received us graciously, sat us on his couch, and tuned his electric guitar to open A. He quickly launched into an instrumental version of “Boogie Chillen',” each foot tapping to a different beat.

Watching you play “Boogie Chillen'” close up, it seems like what you're doing is very simple, and yet it's very difficult for others to get it right.

“For me, it's simple, but... [laughs].”

That was one of the first songs you recorded.

“Uh-huh.”

Did you write it when you were a young man in Mississippi?

[Nods yes].

How are you counting time with your feet?

“I couldn't tell you. It's just boogie. Just go on with it. I don't need drums.”

You often played that way in Detroit, using your feet instead of a rhythm section.

“Yeah. That first came from my stepfather, Will Moore, from whom I learned to play when I was 13. John Hammond does it too.” 

Do you usually keep your guitars tuned to a chord?

“Not really. But I use open tunings. 'Boogie Chillen',' that's in open A. For 'Boom Boom,' I've got to retune it.” [Ed. Note: Rich Kirch, John's backup guitarist, details: "John plays almost everything in open E, except for 'Boogie' – for that he usually tunes three strings up so he's in open A."] 

What do you look for in a tone?

“I look for a deep, gutty feeling. I don't use picks, so I can get that deep gut feeling. People ask, 'How do you get that?' It's just there. A lot of people try to play real fast chords – da da da da da – that's not the blues. It's synthetic. It ain't the hard, solid blues. It's a lot of speed and everything. It has no feeling to it. 

“You've got to sit down and play some [whispers] funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don't rush it. Just let it come flowing through you. I can play guitar so funky, until it brings teardrops to your eyes. It has that funky, funky tone. I'm just me.”

While most musicians stick to 12-bar blues, you seldom follow that format.

“That's for the birds. People just feel – that's the way the blues is supposed to be played. Shut your eyes, and then you'll know what you're doing. I know what notes to hit. I know what notes not to hit. I can do a 12-bar perfect – perfect. Oh, yeah. If I did, then I wouldn't be John Lee Hooker. See, I'm known for not doing it. When I'm just playing to myself I do it – 8, 12, 4, 16, 24. But ordinarily I don't do it, because it would take away a lot of my feeling. 

“You cannot learn this in a book. You feel it here [points to his heart and head], not by writing on a piece of paper. Throw that paper away! When I walk into a studio, I don't need all that stuff. I can go into a studio and in two hours' time I can record five or six songs. Sometimes it take some people three or four weeks to record one or two songs!”

Sometimes it takes a band years to make one album.

“Yeah, It does! I can make ten albums in a year, and they all come out perfect, too.”

Can you make up songs on the spot?

“Yeah. They're on the spot. I get that good feeling. But one thing I don't like – what really bugs me – is anybody telling me how to play, what to do and how to do it. Don't do that.”

Has that been a problem on your recent Chameleon and Charisma albums, since so many of the songs feature guest bands? When you recorded with Santana, for instance, you were working in a pretty straight format.

“Heavy duty. We get together on it. They know how I do it. With 'The Healer,' we did two takes – it came out perfect. 'Stripped Me Naked' [laughs].” 

What were you thinking when you wrote that?

“Well, I got stripped naked once. She took the house, the Cadillac. And the money in the bank – she took that too.”

Did Carlos come to you with the music for that song?

“He came to the house, and we sat around. Like, he talked and we would just go with things. Just me and him. I'd go to his house, we'd lay the foundation, and then he'd pass it on to the guys. And it comes out perfect every time. 'Stripped Me Naked,' that took just about two takes.”

Have your recent albums had a big impact on your career?

“Very, very big impact, because they were all-stars. But this one I got coming out now, I'm not going to have all-star everyone – just me and my band and some local people. Carlos will probably be on it. We already got a thing called 'Chill Out' on the shelf, so we'll probably use that. 

“I'm in the studio now working, getting some pretty good stuff. A lot of the stuff I did a long, long time ago, which is new to the kids now – some of my classic stuff. But the kids never heard it, so I'm doing it over. I always did want to do it that way. Now that I got a chance, I'm going to do a lot of it all over, like 'Sugar Mama,' 'Boom Boom,' and 'Dimples.'”

Those songs turned a generation of kids on to your music during the 1960s.

“That 'Boom Boom,' that 'Dimples' – turned a whole generation. It went to Europe, and then come back here and turned the whole universe on. Then different artists took to doing that song, 'Boom Boom' – Bruce Springsteen, all them. Big Joe Turner, he was doing 'Dimples'.”

Is it a compliment when people try to play like you?

“Yeah, it is. Because I know I'm doing something to be loved. If he didn't like it, he wouldn't try to do it! So it's very complimentary to me.”

Some guys feel very protective...

“Not me. I love people that do my stuff. Robert Plant, he did 'Dimples'. He sings it all the time. He's one of my favorite people. Nice guy. Every time he comes over, he tries to look me up. 

“He flew me out to New York once to meet him, paid for my hotel and everything. Had a lady with him called Big Maggie Bell from Scotland. Met her. But my hero is Bonnie Raitt. Me and her are just like this [holds two fingers together]. I guess you know that. We're real close. I've known Bonnie over the years, and I'm a guest on her tour in LA.”

A lot of your old material has recently come out on CD.

“Yeah. You know they're coming out now because we're doing big things. They're just throwing out everything now – boom. Rhino Records did one.”

That has many great tracks, but it's missing “Mad Man Blues.”

“Yeah. Oh, I love the 'Mad Man Blues'.” [Claps time and sings 'I love the Mad Man Blues' and 'I'm Gonna Kill That Woman' to the original melody].

Do you play blues when you're alone?

“Yeah, around the house I do. Yeah, I sit down in my room and just go with things I want to do, some of that old stuff that I'm trying to revive again and bring back.”

Do you work on your own guitars?

“No. The little light stuff I do, like adjusting the bridges and raising the saddles. You get beyond that, no.” 

Why do you play semi-hollow guitars?

“Well, I like 'em. You've got to do that now because the generations come and go, and the young generation, they like to dance and they want it loud. But you still can make funky loud.”

You could play a Fender.

“I could, but I don't want to. I'm plainspoken and I don't want that. This is what I like. You don't have to bring me around the bridge. This is what I like – boom. I like the tone. I always did like Gibson. Even the old-style ones.”

Why do you have a guitar with B.B. King's name on it?

“I saw it and I went and bought it. He's an old buddy of mine. I said [to the salesman] 'Give me that one.' He gave me the price – he said, 'It's a lot of money.' I said, 'I don't care. Just give it to me.' He said, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm John Lee.' He said, 'Oooh,' and he came down on the price when he found out who I was. I was signing stuff in his store.”

What's the greatest amplifier?

“I know who's got the greatest name – Fender. I've got one sitting right there [points to an old Concert]. I've got another one back there, man, a Bedrock – boy, that thing is powerful! Whoo. It's not famous, but oh, it's powerful. But Fender is a brand name, and it's the name that sells, and it's what people go for.”

How do you set the amp controls?

“Different songs, different settings. I don't like it real sharp. I like it kind of medium. Not too much bass, not too much sharp.”

Do you like reverb?

“Not really. On some of my new stuff I did. About two weeks ago, I put reverb on a couple of my really funky tunes, like 'Sugar Mama.'”

Carlos Santana says a man's tone is his face.

“He knows.”

Albert Collins' tone, for instance, is spiky and sharp...

“It is. Oh, it's a thousand miles apart from mine. It's good, but it's his thing. You're talking a different world.”

Do you like B.B.'s tone?

“Whoo, Yeah! Are you kidding? Oh, yeah. My old buddy. And Albert King is funky! He puts that pipe in his mouth and rears his head back. He's a good man, and he's going to do things his way or no way! [Laughs] He's working on his own bus right now.”

You've used some of the same backup musicians for many years now.

“Oh yeah. My guitar player Rich is nice, nice. He's a good guy! Boy, that guy loves me and I love him. I'm the one that brought him to California. He'd been in Chicago all his life. 

“I've known him about 12 years. I got the guy a ticket, brought him out – he's been with me ever since. I talk to him every day. He's a heck of a nice guy and a good guitar player. Jim Gayette – oh he is funky! He's a funky bass player, and funny too. He keeps the band laughing all night.”

When you were starting out, would you play for a long time at night?

“Before I became famous? When I was a kid? If my parents would let me I would.”

You hear about guys playing in Delta juke joints from nightfall until morning...

“No, I didn't do that, no. I would've, but I didn't [Laughs].”

What was Hastings Street like when you first came to Detroit?

“That was the best street in town. Everything you wanted was right there. Everything you didn't want was right there. It ain't no more now. It's a freeway now – Chrysler Freeway. But that was a good street, a street known all over the world. But I didn't just play on Hastings – I'd play any club on Russell, Chene, Jefferson... In those days, I was so into my music, but I had to work to survive. I was a janitor – I pushed a broom.”

What do you remember of your sessions at United Sound Studio in Detroit?

“On West Grand Boulevard and Second? Still there. I would always use my amp, just plug into my old funky amps – an Ampeg or a Silvertone.”

Was your first electric guitar the Les Paul you're seen with in some of the early pictures?

“It was. Really good one. Before that I had some round-hole pickups [for amplifying an acoustic guitar]. No, T-Bone Walker gave me my first electric guitar. Then I thought that was the best I ever seen. It was an Epiphone archtop.”

Did you use an acoustic for early sides like “Mad Man Blues”?

“Yeah, that's acoustic. I had an old Stella with a pickup called DeArmond, and it fit across the soundhole. You slide it in. I thought at that time it was a great, great sound.”

Was Newport '63 your first big concert?

“Never been so scared! My first big concert, yeah. Couldn't get my body to stop shaking!”

You appeared with Muddy Waters there.

“Yeah. I was good friends with Muddy.”

Do you have any favorite memories of him?

“Yeah, I do. I've got so many I couldn't tell 'em all. He'd come to Detroit, he used to stay at my house. I had a big house in Detroit. Matter of fact, I own property there now. He never would stay in a hotel. Him and Jenny, his wife, would stay at my house. Little Walter would be with him. He was a sideman then, one of the greatest harmonica players ever lived. 

“We would go on tour together sometimes, me and him and Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers. Remember Jimmy Rogers? He had this old Oldsmobile, brand-new. And Little Walter was crazy, and he used to drive. Speeding in it. And he'd be laughing because I'd be nervous. Just a lot of good memories, things I cannot ever forget. Muddy was a really good man. And he was just beginning to come into it, like I am now. Just beginning to climb up the ladder really high.”

His last four albums were terrific.

“They were. He was beginning to climb up to the top, and it's a hard climb. But, you know, you get there somehow. Some get there and some don't. I'm one of the few giants at the top of the ladder. In my traveling and living in God's world, I love people. My heart go out for people. I'm just a softy. I just give my heart to people, and how can I say no to the people that I know I should? I don't like hurting people.

“We all like money, don't get me wrong, but it's not the greatest thing in the world, though we have to have it. Friendship, love, peace of mind, and health are the greatest things in the world. You have to have money to survive, but – and a lot of us do – we can't let money get in the way of friendship and love and the people that put you where you are. People put me where I'm at today. If it weren't for those people, John Lee wouldn't be sitting on top of the ladder – I'd be sitting down below.

“And who put me there? The working people – people go out and work five or six days a week, and come out to see me and buy my albums, and stuff like that. Young kids. Old people. They're the people that got me there. Some stars seem to forget the people that blazed the path for them, the people that put them there. If there wasn't any people, you wouldn't be there. 

“I love to go into little clubs, funky bars, and get up there singing. I walk into a lot of little clubs, and they're surprised to see me in there. They say, 'What're you doing in here?' And I say, 'I'm just like you. I'm here to have some fun and get down with you.' I don't think about the fact that I'm a big star, or that I have money. I don't think about that. I'm out there at a place where I like to get down and have a beer with you. I don't look at myself as a big star. I really don't.”

Who were some of the other bluesmen that you enjoyed playing with?

“There are so many of them. You sure got me on the spot there. But really I enjoyed playing with Muddy when we did the Whiskey A Go-Go – me, Otis Spann, and Muddy Waters. Oh, so many it's hard to say.”

What's your opinion of Otis Spann?

“One of the greatest blues piano players ever. And a good man too. Loyal, friendly, no ego, no nothing. Just a perfect gentleman.”

Who would you consider the great slide players?

“Well, I would say Ry Cooder. He's one of the greatest. I had a cousin, he's gone now, but he was pretty great – Earl Hooker. He was a monster. Nobody could beat him. I got some of his stuff here now, man. We used to work together a lot over the years. Boy, he used to make a wah-wah talk and slide along with it. I've got that album here now, with Fred Below on drums. It's real funky.”

Have you ever played slide guitar?

“I have messed around with it. I could play slide, but I wouldn't be very good. I used to play a little harmonica and drums.”

Did you ever see Elmore James?

“Once, in Chicago. I went to his hotel where we sat and talked. He was a nice man. A lot of people copied him too, a lot of people.

Who is your favorite younger blues singer?

“Out of the younger generation of the blues singers, who was my pride and joy? Stevie Ray. I know that kid – I used to go around Austin, Texas, before anybody knew about Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan. Every time I go there, he sits in and plays. 

“We used to talk. He used to come to the dressing room, come to my hotel room. To me, he was one of the greatest young blues singers. He could do anybody – Albert King, Jimi Hendrix, George Benson – anybody's thing. I'd sit down and watch him do that. He had his own style – he did, definitely – but he could play anything else anybody could play. He'd say, 'I'm gonna play you now,' and he play me. And if he can play me, he can play anybody!”

Who's come closest to playing like you?

“Let's see. Eddie Taylor is real close. He can do it. Buddy Guy can get pretty close. He can play 'Boogie Chillen'" real good. He plays it on every show. Buddy Guy is playing so well, and I'm so happy for him. He getting a lot of recognition that he should have had a long time ago, like us all of us should have gotten. He's such a beautiful person.”

Do you admire John Hammond's playing?

“Who doesn't? We've been together a lot over the years too. Now, he can play like me! [Laughs] Yeah, he can. He'll say, 'I'm gonna play like you now, just like you,' and then he plays it and starts laughing. I say, 'If someone was outside and walking up, they'd think it's me in here playing.' 

“He's really a nice gentleman, an easygoing person too. He loves people. He talks to me about it a lot. We sit down together [imitates John Hammond's voice]: 'John, you know, you love people. We let them get away with things we shouldn't, but we don't want to hurt them.' That's the way he talks. I said, 'They think John Lee don't know any better, but I do.' You help people, you take them in. It all come back to you.”

Perhaps the measure of a truly great man is how he treats people day in and day out.

“Right! The little things in life, the love. I always believe in 'it comes back to you if you do something good.' I was taught that, and I think it does. You do good deeds, somewhere in life it's going to come back. You can only do wrong so long before you get it in some kind of way. That's my belief. 

“So, I'm happy with my life. I had a good life, and I had a rough life – I've had both. I don't try to live in the past. I can't bring back those little things. I can't change the rough things that come through, so I look for the future. You can't live in the past – a lot of people try to live in a memory. I live for today and for people today.”

Fender didn’t design the innovative-looking Gibson Flying V solidbody electric guitar, but the company deserves credit for inspiring its creation. In the mid '50s, Fender introduced the Stratocaster, whose then-futuristic design made Gibson’s guitars look rather staid.

Consequently, Gibson’s sales began to suffer.

In 1957, Gibson president Ted McCarty decided that Gibson needed to restore its image as an innovator and industry leader. 

In typical McCarty “take no prisoners” fashion, he made a series of bold moves that resulted in the development of several of the most desirable and valuable electric guitar models of all time, including the sunburst Les Paul Standard, ES-335, Explorer and Flying V, all of which made their debut in 1958.

The Flying V was one of several “modernistic” models that Gibson developed during that period. Sometime in 1956, McCarty hired artists outside of the company to come up with guitar designs with futuristic appeal. 

“I told them what I wanted and asked them to make me some sketches,” McCarty told Andre Duchossoir. “We chose the ones we liked, and then we called in [guitar foreman] Larry Allers and John Huis and asked if they could make them. You can design anything on paper, but building and producing it is a different matter.”

Only a handful of the submitted designs made it to the prototype stage. Allegedly, mockups were built and three final models were chosen from those contenders.

Gibson filed patent applications for those three guitar body designs in June 1957, with the patents eventually being granted in January 1958. This was an unusual strategy, as previously Gibson had filed patents only for engineering inventions and not cosmetic designs. 

Although model names were not submitted with the patent applications, the guitars became unofficially known as the Futura, Moderne and Flying V. 

Of these three submitted designs, only the Flying V’s shape remained unaltered through the production stage. The Futura’s body and headstock were modified to that of the Explorer, and the Moderne never went into production.

Early prototypes of the Flying V and Futura/Explorer that were built for trade shows had mahogany bodies, but before the models went into production Gibson switched to African limba wood, better known as korina.

In addition to being lighter than mahogany, korina’s pale-blond color was more in step with the prevalent aesthetic of the late '50s. 

“No one else had a korina guitar,” Gibson wood expert Wilbur Marker told Duchossoir. “That was the novelty of the thing. It was very pretty. In essence, that is the reason why we went with korina.”

When Gibson displayed the Flying V and Explorer prototypes at trade shows in 1957, they certainly generated the desired reaction from dealers. But while Gibson re-established its reputation for innovation with the guitars, that did not translate into sales. 

Most dealers thought that the models were a little too far out and space age, and those that did order them purchased only one instrument, which was generally used as a window display to attract attention. 

Orders for the Flying V far outnumbered those for the Explorer, and Gibson decided to manufacture three batches (with each batch numbering 40 guitars) of Flying Vs and one batch of Explorers.

Gibson shipping records show that only 81 Flying V guitars shipped in 1958 and 17 shipped in 1959. In early 1959, the Flying V was phased out of production. Leftover parts for unfinished guitars from the initial batch order sat dormant in the Gibson factory until the early '60s, when about 20 more Flying V guitars were completed.

The hardware on these early '60s models differs from the 1958-’59 models in several ways. They have hardware plated with nickel rather than gold, metal cap knobs instead of bonnet knobs, patent-number humbuckers rather than PAFs and a Tune-o-matic bridge with an early '60s-style retaining wire.

Although very few Flying Vs were in circulation during the late '50s, a few did manage to catch the eyes of performers like Lonnie Mack and Albert King, who immediately adopted the Flying V as their signature guitars. Mack added a Bigsby vibrato to his V, which he used to record “Wham.” 

As a left-handed guitarist, King was attracted to the V’s symmetrical shape, which accommodated his unorthodox style of keeping the guitar strung for a right-handed player and flipping the instrument over.

The Kinks’ Dave Davies was another early adopter, although his use of the Flying V started much later, in 1965. According to Davies, the airlines lost his only guitar when he came to America on tour that year, so he stopped into a shop to get a replacement. 

When he failed to find a guitar that he liked on the racks, the owner pulled from storage a dusty case that contained an original '50s V. He sold Davies the V for only $60. 

Davies’ Flying V became an iconic image of the British Invasion after he made several television appearances with it and was shown with the guitar on the cover of The Kinks' Greatest Hits! in 1966.

Demand for the rare and elusive Flying V suddenly increased due to its new exposure, which motivated Gibson to issue a new Flying V model in 1966. 

This second version of the V had a mahogany body and neck, a larger pickguard, a modified headstock shape, a triangular control knob configuration and a traditional stop tailpiece or Gibson Vibrola instead of the V-shaped string-through-body tailpiece. 

However, the new version was only marginally more successful than its predecessor. Just 111 of the guitars shipped in 1966, and the shipments decreased each year afterward, until the guitar was discontinued in 1970.

Jimi Hendrix was the most notable guitarist to adopt this second version of the V. In 1969, Gibson built a one-of-a-kind custom left-handed Flying V for him, featuring gold-plated hardware, a pearl Gibson logo headstock inlay and Trini Lopez–style split-diamond fretboard inlays. 

Hendrix famously used his custom V to perform several songs at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. Keith Richards also caught many guitarists’ attention when he played a late-'50s V at the Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park concert on July 5, 1969.

In 1971, Gibson produced the limited-edition Flying V Medallion model, which was essentially identical to the 1966 version, with the exception of its shorter peg head. The company produced only 350 Medallion Vs. 

The Flying V returned to regular production for a third time in 1975 with a version similar to the 1966 V, and since then some variation of the Flying V has remained a regular production model of the Gibson electric solidbody guitar line.

Demand for the Flying V reached critical mass in the '70s as hard-rock and metal guitarists fell for its aggressive styling. Performing with UFO, Michael Schenker played a white 1975 Gibson Flying V, which he later decorated with a distinctive black-and-white “negative” mirror-image motif. 

He got the guitar from his brother Rudolf of the Scorpions, who started collecting Flying Vs during the '70s and today owns more than 100. Flying V players from the U.K. during this period included Mark Bolan of T. Rex, Uriah Heep’s Mick Box, Wishbone Ash’s Andy Powell, Bad Company’s Mick Ralphs and Chris Spedding. 

In the United States, the V found its way into the hands of guitarists like Billy Gibbons, Rick Nielsen, Joe Perry and Paul Stanley.

Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield helped further the Flying Vs reputation as an iconic metal guitar during the '80s, but the V has also remained a favorite of rockers like Lenny Kravitz, Grace Potter and Eddie Van Halen, who used his '50s V to record several songs on 1984, including “Hot for Teacher.” 

Today, the Flying V can be seen in the hands of players representing almost every genre of popular music, from country to punk and Detroit blues to death metal. 

The guitar’s modernistic design was truly ahead of its time, but now that guitarists’ tastes have caught up to it, the V has become a timeless classic that, today, is considered one of the most successful and desirable guitar designs of all time.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram learned his first guitar licks in an after-school program at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the crossroads that many music fans consider hallowed ground. 

Ingram may be known for keeping the traditions of his hometown Delta blues alive, but that’s only half of his story. 

As it happens, influences ranging from psychedelic funk to gospel and hip-hop have their own chapters in it as well. 

Here are the five riffs that shaped his guitar playing...

1. Albert King – "I Play the Blues for You"

“I learned this at the Delta Blues Museum under my teachers Daddy Rich [Richard Crisman] and Bill ‘Howlin’ Madd’ Perry. We would learn different Albert King songs, such as ‘I Play the Blues for You,’ and one of the licks in that song influenced my playing a whole lot, because it was one of the first licks I learned in that blues pentatonic scale that I could use. I worked my way around it, and from that I built up on other stuff.”

2. Funkadelic – "Hit It and Quit It"

“Eddie Hazel is a big inspiration to me. I love his playing. I listened to Maggot Brain almost every day; it’s one of my favorite tunes. I feel like he’s one of the most underappreciated and underrated guitarists, and he’s one of my favorite guys. Funk rock is a big inspiration to my playing, so I owe it all to him.”

3. Robert Petway (in the styles of Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix) – "Catfish Blues"

“This is ‘Catfish Blues’ two ways. The first way is the Muddy Waters way. Hendrix took that and made it a little different. I like to alternate between the two – have that traditional sound but still get contemporary every now and again. 

"I’m influenced by a lot of things. Blues music is my first love, obviously, but I’m into rock and classic rock and all sorts of other stuff. I had been playing bass, and I started on guitar around 12 or 13, and I found this Hendrix Smash Hits CD that my mom got me. From that point on, it was right to where I am now.”

4. Nate Dogg – "Never Leave Me Alone"

“I’m a die-hard Nate Dogg fan. He comes from the same city as me in Mississippi, Clarksdale, before he moved to Long Beach [California]. I listened to the bass line and listened hard to the guitar on the record, and this is basically those played together. 

"You can pretty much pull off the song in any instrumentation. My love of Nate Dogg has to do with my love of music all together. I’ve always loved his vocal style. He’s always been one of my favorite singers. I try to do some of my vibrato like him. He had this long, shaky vibrato, and sometimes I like to emulate that.”

5. B.B. King Lick

“This is an old B.B. King lick that sounds very common, but it’s definitely a lick that I love. You can incorporate it into any blues solo in 12 bars. Some of that at the end is stuff I added, but it’s B.B. King influenced. It’s not a particular tune. It’s one of his signature licks that I would add into my playing a lot.”

Visit the Christone "Kingfish" Ingram website for news, music, tour info and more.

After the 1960s blues boom, the genre began to lose traction as rock, metal, punk, rap and hip-hop took turns in music’s mainstream.

Stevie Ray Vaughan became the blues’ first great hope in many years when he arrived on the scene in 1983. Slowly, the genre came to life again as new players followed in his footsteps.

Today, blues is healthier and more diverse than ever. Whether you like your blues stately and traditional or subversive and spicy, there’s almost certainly something for you.

Gary Clark Jr. and Fantastic Negrito blend hip-hop and old-school blues, while Jack White and Samantha Fish create their blues stew with elements of rock and roots music.

And there are Megan and Rebecca Lovell, the two sisters behind blues-rock bright sparks Larkin Poe, and proponents of some of the most fiery, commanding slide-fueled noise currently in rock and roll.

To quote South Africa’s funked-up Stevie Ray Vaughan-channeling virtuoso Dan Patlansky, “This is not your daddy’s blues; this is renegade blues.”

Then there’s the classic torch carriers like Jonny Lang and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, rock-and-soul innovators like the Tedeschi Trucks Band and Marcus King, and contemporary blues-rock big hitters like Joe Bonamassa.

Although he was a guitar prodigy, opening for B.B. King at the age of eight and touring at 12, Bonamassa’s career didn’t take off until he released his 2000 debut, A New Day Yesterday.

Marketed then as the next Kenny Wayne Shepherd, he’s since carved out a more diverse path, from his soul-oriented music with Beth Hart to his own solo journey as the 2000s’ biggest blues guitar star.

A dedicated scholar of electric blues, Bonamassa paid tribute to his triumvirate of guitar heroes with the Three Kings tour in 2015. “There is no better way to sum up the music of Albert, Freddie and B.B. than to use the phrase "the Three Kings," he said.

In this awesome rendition of the Jerry Beach-penned "I'll Play the Blues For You" taken from the 2016 Live At The Greek Theatre concert film, Bonamassa does just that as he honors guitar great Albert King (1923-1992).

Albert King, whose 100th birthday it was just a fortnight ago, famously played Flying V guitars. And here you can watch Joe Bonamassa play the very same custom-built Flying V owned and played by King himself.

Made by luthier Dan Erlewine in 1971, this iconic “Lucy” Flying V has the legendary bluesman’s name inlaid across the length of the fretboard.

Look out for Kirk Fletcher too as he takes a solo around the 4:10 mark. His Les Paul tone and phrasing are a lesson in taste.

Joe Bonamassa's latest live album, Tales Of Time, is a performance of his 2021 studio album, Time Clocks. Order it here.

Alice Stuart is the only female guitarist to be a member of the Mothers of Invention. How cool is that? She was badass before badass was a word.

Stuart met Frank Zappa in 1964 and played acoustic guitar with an early version of the Mothers. She left shortly after, before the group recorded its debut album, Freak Out!, to pursue her love of electric blues.

There were few female guitar role models in the mid-’60s, when Stuart’s career took off, and like all the trailblazers I’ve interviewed, she is completely self-created.

What’s even cooler is she’s still out there playing. Make sure to catch her when you can. You can find her schedule and learn more about her here.

In an interview I read, you mentioned that Zappa taught you how to believe in yourself and your music. What was it about playing with him that helped you gain confidence?

Well, I was really trying to go in a different direction at that point. He wanted me to continue playing acoustic guitar, and he wanted to play things around the Delta stuff that I was playing.

The Mothers of Invention were a blues band then, and I wanted to start playing electric guitar, so we just basically had different ideas.

But because I was working with him and he was obviously a go-getter, it just made me think maybe I could do whatever I wanted to do. And by then I had already made my first album, [1964’s] All The Good Times.

Who were your electric guitar influences?

Probably my greatest influence on electric guitar is Roy Buchanan. I still listen to his first album and just marvel at his style.

Is that who inspired you to play Telecasters?

Yes, him and all the bare-bones kind of guitar players from the time, like Buddy Holly. I don’t think of myself as just a blues player; instead, I see myself more like a roots or Americana guitar player, with a bit of country and rock.

Were you aware of Memphis Minnie back then?

When I started recording for Arhoolie Records, [label founder] Chris Strachwitz gave me a bunch of her stuff, and I just went crazy.

I recorded her song “In My Girlish Days.” When I heard her, I thought, She’s been around for a while. She was really respected, won a bunch of guitar contests and stuff. I was really sad when I heard she’d passed away.

Do you think there’s anything uniquely feminine that women bring to the guitar, or do you think music has nothing to do with gender at all?

I definitely love to rip it up, but I also tend to play guitar like it’s an extension of my voice. I think of the melody, or, if I’m playing backup guitar, I think what’s going to accent what the other players are doing.

I played with Albert King, and he picked me up off the floor and said, “Honey, you play good guitar!” If Albert King says I can play, that’s all right with me.

I have young women come up to me all the time and say things like, “Oh, my god, you’re my role model! You’ve shown me that it can be done and that we don’t have to go back.” So that makes me feel good.

I think a lot of it is belief in yourself. It’s not like you need to think you’re better than anyone else, but you do need to feel that you’re playing on the level where you are, and not below it. You just have to know that you’re really good. No one makes me feel like I am less than I am.

***The following originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of Guitar Player***

Certain guitar solos are infused with magic. They may or may or may not be technically challenging, flashy, or otherwise virtuoso, but they have that special something that sets them apart from what came before, and they typically alert guitarists everywhere that their world has forever changed. 

What’s more, those magic solos tend to inspire legions of guitarists to attempt to unlock their technical and tonal mysteries, and permeate the six-string community’s collective unconscious, re-emerging later as direct and indirect influences on individual players’ styles. Somewhat paradoxically, however, there is no consensus on which solos have achieved this iconic status.

When we began working on this story, we came up with a lengthy list of solos to include. Our first task was to set up some guidelines. We decided to limit the list to electric rock solos, along with blues and jazz-rock fusion solos that influenced rock. We also set a limit of one solo per artist.

At that point, there were still many more than 40 solos on the list, so we had to make some hard choices. To start, guitarists who were hugely influential overall, but couldn’t be tied to an ultra-influential solo – such as Tony Iommi and George Harrison – were cut. 

We then had to narrow down our selections to just one for each artist, which was difficult for someone like Eric Clapton, whose entries at that point included “Crossroads,” his cover of Freddie King’s “Hideaway” on the Blues Breakers album, and his historic wah workout on “White Room.” Once the smoke cleared, however, we had reached consensus. 

The solos are organized chronologically – including those that fall within the same year – because we thought it would be instructive to see how they relate to each other historically. 

We hope that you like we came up with and perhaps even discover an overlooked gem or two for yourself...

1. Elmore James “Dust My Broom” (1951)

Jimi Hendrix originally called himself Jimmy James and Maurice James in homage to Elmore, and every bluesman since the ‘50s – particularly slide players – owes something to the King of the Slide Guitar. 

Played in an open-D tuning (D, A, D, F#, A, D, low to high), probably on a Kay flattop or Harmony Sovereign with a D’Armond pickup, the slide hook on this tune, and the solo based on it, reappear countless times throughout blues and rock music.

2. Les Paul “How High the Moon” (1951)

The super-syncopated, slap-back soaked runs, chukka-chukka doublestops with bluesy bends, plucky cascading figures, and idiosyncratic ornamentations in Paul’s two solos helped propel this standard up the charts, and further established Paul as the most creative electric guitar player of his generation. 

It was recorded with his “old Epiphone” – a.k.a. “the Clunker” and “the Breadwinner” – with custom-wound hot pickups and other major modifications.

3. Scotty Moore “That’s Alright, Mama” (1954)

Armed with his Gibson ES-295 through a ‘52 Fender Deluxe, Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and their bud Elvis, had no idea what a firestorm they were about to create with this early single. 

Moore’s simple, to the- point style covered the drummer-less bases quite easily with a fat tone and swinging musicality, giving this rather hillbilly ensemble some dangerous sonic heft.

His break on “That’s Alright, Mama” inspired everyone from George Harrison to Keith Richards to Jimmy Page, as well as Danny Gatton, who never missed an opportunity to throw a Moore homage in the middle of one of his famed rockabilly rave ups. 

Moore’s barking double-stops and approximation of a tic-tac bass line on “Mama” are as hooky as it gets, making this solo one of the most important ever.

4. Eddie Cochran “Sittin’ in the Balcony” (1957)

Slinging a 1955 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins Hollow Body 'G'-branded guitar with a Gibson P-90 in the neck slot, Cochran, with his iconic presence and echo-drenched tones, hugely impacted early rockers – such as Lennon and McCartney, who bonded over Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” upon meeting in 1957 – and innumerable players thereafter, particularly Brian Setzer. 

The twangy solo on Cochran’s first hit, “Sittin’ In the Balcony,” crackles with the influence of his heroes Chet Atkins, Joe Maphis, and Johnny Smith.

5. Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode” (1958)

While some people might not consider this song’s intro a “solo,” it might be the most important rock guitar part ever recorded. 

The doublestops essentially usher in the post-Elvis rock era, and the tone and balls of this iconic part would echo in the playing of George Harrison, Keith Richards, Eddie Van Halen, and Angus Young... and that's just one tenth of one percent of the players who have copped these licks. 

Listen to it again. You’ll see.

6. Hank Marvin “Apache” (1960)

A primary influence on nearly every British guitarist of a certain age, Marvin created a dreamy, echo-y sound on this #1 U.K. hit that was achieved by playing his Stratocaster – the first in England – through a Meazzi Echomatic tape delay and a Vox AC30 tube amp. 

Marvin mostly used the bridge pickup, but picked near the neck, and palmed the vibrato arm to impart his trademark twang.

7. Freddie King “Hideaway” (1960)

Freddie (a.k.a. Freddy) King cobbled “Hideaway” out of parts lifted from tunes by Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin, Robert Lockwood Jr., and even Henry Mancini. 

Between the breaks where he recycled bits of “The Walk” and “Peter Gunn,” King played stinging solos that he plucked on a P-90 equipped Les Paul using a plastic thumbpick and metal fingerpick. 

Eric Clapton did his own version of the tune on John Mayall’s 1966 album, Blues Breakers, and the success of “Hideaway” made it a launch pad for a number of other King instrumentals that would further his notoriety as one of the top blues guitarists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

8. James Burton “Hello Mary Lou” (1961)

Having turned pro as a teenager on the Louisiana Hayride, Burton was a seasoned vet by the time he became the lead player in Ricky Nelson’s band, which was featured regularly on the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

Burton was a great rock and roll player, as evidenced by his Chuck Berry-style solo on “Believe What I Say,” but he also inspired legions of pickers with his explosively twangy lead break on “Hello Mary Lou.” 

Burton’s playing on Merle Haggard’s early ‘60s hits like “Mama Tried” and “Swingin’ Doors,” inspired the late, great Roy Nichols, who said, “I learned a lot from Burton, and I copied some of his licks, but I couldn’t copy him to a ‘T’.”

9. Jeff Beck “Over Under Sideways Down” (1966)

Along with the Rolling Stones, no band inspired more hard-edged guitar-wielding maniacs than the Yardbirds. Beck’s playing on their classic garage rock anthem is, like much of his playing at this time, inspired by the groovy sounds of the sitar. 

Equal parts spacey modal madness and meth-infused pentatonic fury, it still ranks as some of Beck’s most inspired playing, and that says a lot. 

And not only was Beck’s otherworldly playing inspirational to a generation of guitarists, but his punky stage demeanor and nasty sonic streak (a ‘54 Fender Esquire into a Tone Bender fuzz and AC30), served notice to everyone that a new sheriff was in town, and he was kicking ass.

10. Albert King “Born Under a Bad Sign” (1967)

If Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix lift your licks lock, stock, and barrel, your influence has been spread very far and very wide. In fact, one can make the case that Albert King was the most influential King, just by virtue of the not-so-subtle tributes by his admirers. 

King Albert’s authoritative bends and economical phrasing are required study for anyone who wants to play blues-rock guitar. On this cut, the Velvet Bulldozer lives up to his nickname, making his Gibson Flying V moan, scream, and move mountains with sweeping bends and a stinging tone that delivers all of the nuances in his playing. 

It also proves that, even though SRV and Clapton could “do” Albert, they were never really even close. 

11. Eric Clapton “Crossroads” (1968)

This one is a giant among giants. Little did Slowhand know, after he walked off the Winterland stage in San Francisco, he had created a template setting the standard for expressive, lyrical, howling blues-rock guitar. 

Armed with a ‘64 Gibson ES-335 and a couple of non-master volume 100-watt Marshall stacks, Clapton’s first break is a textbook example of how to build a solo’s intensity, while the second manages to kick it up one more notch for maximum climax. 

Not a duff note in the bunch, impeccably phrased, and with a vibrato that’s as classy as they come, Clapton could have never played another note and he’d still be one of the most influential players ever. 

12. Jimi Hendrix “All Along the Watchtower” (1968)

One can only guess what sort of “light bulb” moment Jimi experienced when he first heard this tune from Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Maybe it was the biblical references in the lyrics, or the great melody – or perhaps just the wide-open space for improvising afforded by the four-chord progression. 

Whatever it was, the version that appeared on Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland album gave rise to one of Jimi’s most memorable solo outings. Playing soulfully and inventively using a wah and fuzz, Hendrix reinvented “All Along the Watchtower” to such a degree that it’s sometimes easy to forget who actually wrote the tune!

13. Peter Green “Black Magic Woman” (1968)

B.B. King once said of Green, “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” After establishing himself as a masterful blues stylist in John Mayall’s band, Green quickly evolved both as a player and a songwriter with Fleetwood Mac. 

On his D minor tour-de-force “Black Magic Woman,” Green pulls off an incredibly captivating melody, and his beautiful phrasing and soulful bending on a Les Paul with “magnetically out of phase” pickups was pure gold. 

Carlos Santana made the song a huge hit on Abraxas, and Green was also influential on Irish blues rocker Gary Moore, who would own – and eventually sell – Green’s famous Gibson. 

14. Robert Fripp “21st Century Schizoid Man” (1969)

Fripp’s serpentine solo on this alarmingly virtuosic track combines a supersaturated sustained tone with atypical intervallic movement, non-bluesy bends and trills, and note choices and phrasing that had more in common with Coltrane than Clapton. 

Playing a three-pickup ‘59 Les Paul Custom through a Marshall stack and probably either a Burns Buzzaround or a Colorsound Tone Bender, he recorded the seminal progressive rock solo.

15. Jimmy Page “Heartbreaker” (1969)

Selecting the most influential Page solo led to a heated debate. 

But the squawking tone of a ‘58 Les Paul into a Marshall SLP 1969 Super Lead, maniacal cluster picking, wicked hammer-ons and pull-offs, and behind-the-nut G-string bending in the first solo on “Heartbreaker” – not to mention the smoking second solo – explain why everyone from Brian May to Steve Vai to Steve Morse have hailed it as a definitive guitar solo.

16. B.B. King “The Thrill is Gone” (1969)

With a tone sweeter and thicker than molasses, B.B. King graced this song with one of his most emotive blues solos of all time. King knew what the tune called for in context of the highly produced album Completely Well (his first with strings), and it wasn’t about showboating. 

Far from it, judging by the way he grooves so succulently behind the beat. Besides being a big hit for B.B., “The Thrill is Gone” showed guitarists the power of playing slow and cool. 

In an era when Johnny Winter was introducing blues-rock shredding, B.B. King’s huge vibrato and deep soul defined what “playing from the heart” was all about. 

17. Leslie West “Mississippi Queen” (1970)

Leslie West’s massive and massively influential tone on Climbing! – which included “Mississippi Queen” – was created by playing through a Sunn Coliseum P.A. head and four 4x12 speaker cabinets. 

“The head had four microphone inputs and a master volume control, huge transformers and gigantic KT88 tubes, and the cabinets were loaded with Eminence speakers, which never hurt your ears, even with the treble all the way up,” West told GP in 2010. 

He was playing Gibson Les Paul Juniors at the time, and used a single-cutaway 1956 Jr. with a single P-90, strung with La Bella Electric Guitar strings (with a .010 banjo string for the high E and the other strings moved down one to create a light-gauge set) on the track. 

The song reached #21 on the Billboard charts, assuring that West’s signature sound was heard across the country and around the world.

18. Duane Allman “Statesboro Blues” (1971)

By 1970 Duane Allman and Dickey Betts had forged one of the most iconic guitar sounds of all time with their harmonized melodies on songs like “Revival” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” 

But as far as slide players went, few at the time got more acclaim than Duane himself, after the 1971 release of The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East. Duane’s slick phrasing and fat, singing tone on the opening track of the double live album was inspired by hearing Taj Mahal’s rendition of the song with Jesse Ed Davis on slide. 

Sonny Landreth, who remembers seeing the Allman Brothers at the time, recalls: “That huge tone that Duane got when he played slide on a Les Paul through a Marshall was a real game changer. I don’t remember anyone else who had a sound like that back then.”

19. John McLaughlin “Meeting of the Spirits” (1971)

Although he had already done revolutionary work with Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Miles Davis, and as a solo artist, McLaughlin’s combination of molten Gibson-through-cranked-Marshall distortion, impossibly fast and complex yet ultra-precise picking, and unique phrasing on The Inner Mounting Flame shattered all existing concepts of “electric guitarist” and lit the fuse of fusion.

20. Ritchie Blackmore “Highway Star” (1972)

Actually a harmonized pair of solos, the tasty bends, rapid-fire triplets, and whammy manipulations on this Strat-into-a-Marshall-amp (via a reel-to-reel tape recorder preamp) solo make it one of Blackmore’s most memorable.

The Deep Purple guitarist’s influence on legions of rock and metal shedders from Morse to Malmsteen to Mustaine is undisputable.

21. Billy Gibbons “La Grange” (1973) 

Gibbons made his mark on this classic shuffle with two solos. 

The first, done on a ‘55 Strat, enters screaming with that classic rear pickup Fender bite, before Gibbons flips to the front pickup for a swinging double-stop workout and some liquid pentatonic runs delivered with his impeccable sense of time and swing. 

But it’s the track’s second solo that the guitarist is most famous for, and the one that every hard rock player would study, due to Gibbons’ insane pinch harmonics. With his “Pearly Gates” ‘59 Les Paul, the Reverend squawks, grunts, and chokes out so many pinch harmonics that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so damm bad ass. 

22. Brian May “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975) 

Brian May’s touch, tone, and orchestral instincts have proven impossible to imitate, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. 

His majestic lines on this classic are quintessential May, with precise picking, impeccable phrasing, and a bold, loud sound. 

The solo’s placement in the mix was influential, informing how bands such as Boston and Styx featured their solos. You’ve got to assume Dr. May’s harmonized lines at the end of the song got Tom Scholz’s attention as well.

23. Larry Carlton “Kid Charlemagne” (1976)

Carlton was already a session legend known for his smooth-as-silk lines that were reminiscent of Wes, Pass, and Trane when he cut this Steely track. 

But when Mr. 335 combined a rock dude’s tone with a jazzer’s harmonic sensibilities, he created the standard by which every jazz rocker would be judged. 

Ask Steve Lukather, Robben Ford, or Mike Stern what impact this solo had on them. 

Alright then.

24. Carlos Santana “Europa (Earth’s Cry, Heaven’s Smile)” (1976)

Santana masterfully caresses the tune’s main melody with his trademark singing sustain and thick tone, never quite giving up the goods until the outro solo where he lets it all hang out in an outpouring of soulful yet wicked playing. 

He displays a fluid, tactile control at all times, and his tone is more open-sounding and less compressed than in recent years. 

And when he kicks the wah on, look out – he ratchets up the intensity tenfold, just when you think it can’t go any higher. Simply put, “Europa” is a study in pace, melodicism, and space – as well as good, old fashion burning!

25. Al Di Meola “Race with Devil on Spanish Highway” (1977)

Sure, there were people who could play fast before Di Meola, but nobody had made it such a central part of their deal before Big Al came along. 

Di Meola’s picking ability coupled with his sick, self-described “mutola” technique raised the bar for audacious shred and players interested in pushing the limits of picking. 

Far from being a pattern-minded monotone shredder, Di Meola’s Latin influences and his compositional sense have always made his displays of virtuosity supremely musical. 

And for all of the shred haters, Di Meola proved that the emotional impact of many notes is just as valid as a few well-placed ones. 

26. Eddie Van Halen “Eruption” (1978)

What can you say about this cadenza from hell? Cut in 1978, this has to be one of the most influential pieces of guitar playing ever. 

EVH took a Strat with a humbucker, an MXR Phase 90, and a plexi Marshall, and then played some supercharged Clapton licks that boggled just about every 6-stringer’s mind in the world. 

It was Van Halen’s two-handed tapping that truly grabbed everyone’s attention, however, and made this the most recognizable solo of the next two decades. “Eruption” made an impact on millions of rock dudes and seemingly every kid who set foot inside a Guitar Center.

27. Allan Holdsworth “In the Dead of Night” (1978)

As Bill Bruford put it, this solo was, “94 seconds of liquid passion married to a blinding technical facility that was to go down in the annals of rock guitar history. 

"All the hallmarks of his brilliant playing were there in this solo: poise, pace, melody, the Slonimsky interval jumps, the whammy bar, and all over a killer groove.”

28. Mark Knopfler “Sultans of Swing” (1978) 

When Mark Knopfler released this fingerpicked two-pickup masterpiece, he showed guitarists that you don’t need distortion or a plectrum to rock. 

With a Strat on the bridge and middle pickups, a Fender Twin Reverb and a Roland JC-120, Knopfler played two deft, bouncy solos that referenced Chet Atkins with snappy popped notes, crying bends, and clever arpeggios. 

Along the way he influenced just about every clean tone for the next 20 years. When people talk about an “out of phase” Strat tone, they’re talking about this tune.

29. Michael Schenker “Rock Bottom” (1979)

The 1970s was a great time for live records, with classics from Frampton, Lizzy, and Ted Nugent, but one of the sweetest solos to grace a double LP came from UFO’s Michael Schenker. 

The extended break on this tune has everything great about Schenker: melody, dynamics, tone for days, and burning. 

This lead would fascinate rockers all over the world, including George Lynch, Vinnie Moore, Akira Takahashi, and Kirk Hammett.

30. David Gilmour “Comfortably Numb” (1979)

Few solos can match the vibe of Gilmour’s work on this iconic piece. 

Playing a ‘79 black Stratocaster with a ‘62 neck and DiMarzios through Hiwatts and Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker cabinets, Gilmour transformed what are essentially blues licks into a signature statement that affected the molecules in myriad musical minds. 

This is arguably his crowning achievement as a soloist.

31. Angus Young “You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

It serves to reason that a song that is all about getting it on should have a solo that is sexy, right? 

Damn straight. 

Young’s turn on this global hit finds him harnessing his kinetic blues tendencies into a steamy, attitude-laden solo that is actually kind of funky. 

His tasteful major pentatonic flavorings as well as his gorgeous tone – thanks to a wound up old Marshall and a Gibson SG – are the icing on the cake of his impeccable groove, intonation, and phrasing.

32. Randy Rhoads “Crazy Train” (1980)

After Van Halen, it wasn’t easy for an L.A. rocker to make a mark, but Randall Rhoads did so in a big way on his debut with Ozzy. 

Rhoads took what he had gleaned from Mick Ronson, Gary Moore, and Bach, and synthesized it into this metal tour de force. 

He wasn’t the first guy to blend classical music and rock, but he was absolutely the gateway drug for players like Zakk Wylde and Tom Morello.

33. Stevie Ray Vaughan “Pride and Joy” (1983)

The second cut on SRV’s debut album, Texas Flood, “Pride and Joy” blasted onto the airwaves courtesy of a great melody, catchy lyrics, and a gamechanging solo in which Vaughan threw down a barrage of killer licks with a gargantuan tone from his Fender/Dumble rig. 

SRV’s deft songwriting and his Albert King/Hendrix-influenced style succeeded in making what was fundamentally a classic “tay-hass” shuffle into a huge AOR hit that every classic rocker is expected to cover in perpetuity. 

Bottom line is, after SRV came along, anyone who thought they could play blues with fire and passion got a schoolin’ the size of Texas.

34. Yngwie Malmsteen “Black Star” (1984)

Mike Varney’s rep as a finder of great guitarists was already solid when he wrote about a kid from Sweden with a funny name in 1983. 

Many players’ first exposure to Malmsteen was on this shred fest. With his blinding speed, dazzling classical arpeggios, gorgeous Strat-into-Marshall tone, and larger than life vibrato, he didn’t raise the bar for rock technique – he obliterated it. 

Yngwie changed the game forever with this one, just ask any rocker who has swept an arpeggio since then.

35. George Lynch “The Hunter” (1985)

Dokken's George Lynch has inspired countless rock and metal players for nearly 30 years with his perfect blend of structured melodicism and off-the-rails fury – all in the space of a 16-bar solo. 

This solo is a perfect example, as he eases into it with memorable, understated melodic motifs that are helped along with some thick-ass tone and sick vibrato. 

Halfway through, however, Lynch begins to turn up the jets. Alternate picking, sweep picking, and legato playing become one within a single winding phrase, giving him a sound and style that are difficult to ape. 

However, Lynch did show the way for shred-obsessed guitarists on how to structure a meaningful statement in the middle of a tune and leave an everlasting mark. In fact, his solos are the only thing that don’t sound dated about Dokken.

36. Kirk Hammett “Master of Puppets” (1986)

Kirk Hammett’s influences include his teacher Joe Satriani, Michael Schenker, and Thin Lizzy. And nowhere are those influences more prominent than on this tune. 

Hammett’s whammy bar work and speed picking would inspire countless kids to notch their mids, cram their theory, and play blazing solos over chugging grooves.

37. Joe Satriani “Always with Me, Always with You” (1987)

Satriani is obviously known as a master technician, but it’s his melodic side that has left the biggest imprint on guitardom. 

This sweet ballad showcases Satch’s singing tone, skillful ornamentation, and ability to blend the tasty with the jaw dropping. 

The reach of this solo is apparent in hundreds of instrumental guitar records, country ballads, movie soundtracks, and car commercials.

38. Kurt Cobain “Come As You Are” (1991)

Although he took about as many solos and Johnny Ramone, the late Nirvana guitar anti-hero played a memorable one in this song from 1991. 

Presumably using a Boss DS-1 for dirt and an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone chorus for the warbly modulation, Cobain simply quoted the vocal melody in a snotty, vibey way, and the kids went crazy. 

Suddenly, young players – many with a sanctimonious disdain for ‘80s-style wanking – were taking a break from strumming through songs and trying their hands at playing single-note lines.

39. Zakk Wylde “No More Tears” (1991)

Logic dictates that Zakk Wylde was doomed to failure when he got the gig with Ozzy. 

A blond kid with a Les Paul? Really? 

But then people got a taste of his huge tone, squealing harmonics, and rapid-fire pentatonics and a new star was born. 

On this tune Zakk channeled Rhoads, Billy Gibbons, and Frank Marino into a solo that was emblematic of the new generation of metalheads.

40. Dimebag Darrell “The Great Southern Trendkill” (1996)

The post-Van Halen, post-Randy Rhoads world was in dire need of a champion when Darrell Abbott came on the scene. 

He took the styles of those guys, mixed in some Ace Frehley, some Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a heapin’ helpin’ of moonshine and created the ass-kicking solo here. 

Dime made it cool to love Holdsworth, EVH, and Billy Gibbons all in the same song.

On his sixth studio album, 2020 Visions, maverick guitarist Stephen Dale Petit has created a blues record unlike any other.

For one thing, it’s a concept record. For another, it presents a dystopian view of society, America in particular, with themes of factionalism, tribalism and alienation, all through the lens of someone gazing into the not-too-distant future.

In this case, that someone is an expat (Petit moved to England from California in the mid ’80s) who penned much of the material back in 2017 but is only now seeing his album – and a good many of his prescient predictions – become a reality.

 “I guess it’s pre-dystopian, to make up my own term,” Petit says in a distinct British accent.

“Having not lived in America for so long, I’m kind of imagining what it must be like for a parent who arrives home after a trip. You walk into the house and the kids are going crazy, the rooms are all torn apart, and you go, ‘What have you done to the place?’ The son says, ‘She did it,’ and the daughter says, ‘He did it.’

“That’s my feeling about the polarization in America and how savage and how indoctrinated ideologically everything seems to be.”

Petit traveled to Nashville and cut 2020 Visions with producer Vance Powell back in 2017, and if various, unforeseen circumstances had not upended his plans, he would have released the album the following year.

A cancer diagnosis – Stage 4, as it turned out – threw his world into a tailspin, and for much of 2018 he had to curtail most professional activities while dealing with treatment.

“It was a chemo and radiation regime every day for two months,” he says. “Brutal stuff. I’m all clear now, thank goodness, but it takes a while for you to get back up to speed.

“I did a couple of shows during that time, and it was strange, because I experienced this sort of artificial energy while performing, almost like a weird caffeine kick or something. But that drops off and your body’s completely reeling. Basically, it put me out of action for a good year.”

Once his doctors gave him the go-ahead to proceed with his normal life and career, Petit was set to release the album in late March of 2020 when the COVID pandemic threw a wrench into that idea.

A tour to support the album was nixed, and while he waited for lockdown to be lifted, he decided to release the record digitally.

“We finally got physical copies out in the fall of 2020, once brick-and-mortar stores began to open up again,” he explains.

“The whole thing was this crazy double-whammy. First I had my own health issues to sort out, and then this global pandemic knocked out the rest of the world. In a way, the second thing wasn’t so hard on me because of what I’d just gone through, but it was a really insane time.”

He laughs. “Is this where I say, ‘All’s well that ends well?’”

Another thing that distinguishes 2020 Visions from most other blues albums is its sound, a unique and revolutionary sonic approach that owes as much to art rock, emo, punk, metal and even jam bands as it does to traditional blues.

On the nine-minute space-age epic “The Fall of America,” Petit exorcises demons as he explores every possible shattering cry and wail his guitar can emit.

In an equally virtuoso performance on another extended track, “Zombie Train,” he goes for broke, firing off supersonic, freak-out solos and shards of psychedelic lines while leading his ace band – bassist Sophie Lord and drummer Jack Greenwood – on a slinky, cosmic and soul-drenched jam journey.

“Sputnik Days,” co-written with his legendary friend (and quasi-mentor) Mick Taylor, is a sublime yet exhilarating dream that offers Petit a showcase for celebrating the lyrical power of bent notes and harmonics.

And those are just some of the highlights. There’s also incendiary re-workings of classics like “Steppin’ Out” and “Long Tall Shorty,” on which the guitarist goes full throttle, summoning the spirits of blues greats while fearlessly claiming the songs as his own.

“Blues is the essence of what I do, but I don’t let it dictate where I can go,” Petit notes. “I just let my instinct guide me. Otherwise, I’m just re-creating what’s been done before, and what’s the point of that?

“It’s like people doing ‘Caldonia,’ which is a great song that’s been a blues standard for 50 years. On any given day, there’s a hundred bands playing it, and I think, Why would they do that, especially if they’re not going to do something new with it?

“I try to take various essences, flavors, colors and styles, but I want to bring them into the present. I want to sound like today. There’s enough people stuck in yesterday, and that’s just not for me.”

As a teenager in California, you hung out with some early metal stars of the day, including Randy Rhoads and George Lynch. Were you much of a shredder?

Not really, no. I more or less decided that I would never develop those kinds of chops. For a good while, I sat on my parents’ sofa, playing my guitar and pondering.

I’d just seen B.B. King – I even got a chance to meet him. There was something about the blues that had touched me deeply, because it’s a cry of the soul. It felt so authentic, especially when compared to the phoniness that was around at the time.

I considered all that stuff out of L.A. contaminated by the ethos of Hollywood, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. On top of that, George Lynch tried to steal my girlfriend.

Oh, well, that would sure turn you off metal.

[laughs] It didn’t help. But yeah, prior to that, I was playing lots of rock covers like everybody else – “Rocky Mountain Way” and stuff like that.

After the revelation of seeing B.B. King, how did you do your homework and absorb the blues?

It actually started with Chuck Berry. My parents listened to the Beatles and the Stones, who both name-checked Chuck. They covered him and talked about the debt they owed him. They celebrated him.

I went out and bought Chuck Berry Is on Top, which was on Chess Records, and from there I started checking out other people on the label: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter. It happened really quickly.

I imagine you felt like an outlier in L.A. Everybody was getting into the Sunset Strip shred-metal scene while you’re digging into older stuff.

I was very much out of anybody else’s orbit. I just didn’t participate in their scene. But it was a conscious decision. At first I felt a bit awkward, but the magnetic pull of the blues was too strong.

Now, you did a bit of reverse engineering. You went to the U.K. because you were inspired by their blues players, but those were the same people who revered American blues artists.

You’re absolutely right. I was getting the echo of the echo, so to speak. But the way that it was marketed, whether it was Cream or Hendrix or even the Beatles, it was all about appealing to youth. I was young – a generation out, perhaps, but I was still a youth.

How do I put this? I just thought of England and Europe as angular, whereas America was square. There was something coming out of England that felt like a way in. To me, a player like Mick Taylor was a revelation in the beginning, more than even somebody like Peter Green. Hendrix was immediate.

I was hearing all this stuff long after it was released by listening to friends’ older brothers’ records. It all just started to percolate and simmer.

But yeah, I decided to go to England because I just wasn’t thrilled with what I was getting in America.

You became friends with Mick Taylor. How did you two meet?

I went to a show of his, and then it turned out that I knew his manager. Also, I had spoken to somebody in a restaurant adjoining the club who turned out to be his best friend. She had a dog named Roxie, and my dog was named Roxie.

The stars aligned, basically. It was fate. Mick and I met up and hit it off. He was such an important player to me in terms of understanding overbends. We all started doing two-and two-and-a-half-step overbends from hearing Crusade [by John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, 1967], specifically the song “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Mick was 17 at the time, and I started listening to it when I was 17. I was like, Oh this guy did this at my age. Incredible!

Did Mick take you under his wing?

He did. I think he was expecting a Stones freak initially, so he was pleasantly surprised that my interest was more in the blues stuff and the John Mayall records. He toured with me as a special guest, and I think he’s on three of my albums.

The way “The Fall of America” came about is interesting: Mick was living with me. I’d just come back from a trip to L.A., where I’d seen the Kills. The band’s guitar player, Jamie Hince, is fond of hooking the thumb over the neck to make chords – an old bluesman’s trick. I thought, Wow, yeah, I should try some more of that.

I started to noodle around, and Mick came into the room; actually, he was sort of lingering in the doorway while going to make some tea or whatever. He would listen to me sometimes, but he wouldn’t say anything.

So this one time he was listening, and I knew he was there. I was playing around with this riff, and finally he said, “That’s so powerful. It’s really intense and hypnotic.” Then he left to go into another room but not before saying, “It needs to go to E.” And that’s why it goes to an E at the end.

I was inspired by seeing the Kills, but Mick, to his credit, knew not to interrupt me till the right time. He could sense something was being born.

You also became friends with Eric Clapton. That must be pretty remarkable.

Oh yeah. We met through mutual friends. In the beginning, it was like a dream coming true, and you can’t quite believe it – you’re hanging with one of your heroes.

Then it changes and you’re dealing with a human being, and through that process, when you’re actually becoming friends, it goes through phases and you get closer and closer. All of that stuff happened.

Any preconceived notions I had of what he was like went out the window pretty early. He was nothing like what I expected.

Do you two sit down and play together?

Oh, no. No, no, that’s not happened, at least not yet.

He’s commented on your playing and has been quite complimentary.

Yeah, that’s brilliant, isn’t it? It’s mind-blowing, really. You hope for it, but you tell yourself not to expect it.

What kind of impact did Eric have on your playing?

Oh, a lot. [laughs] In my journey, I got my head around overbends, so I went back to the people who started it. Albert King did overbends left, right and center. I would listen to him, but I couldn’t figure him out. This was all before YouTube. I had to do it by ear.

Now, if you overbend by two steps, the note has a different tone than if you just fret honestly on the neck. It’s not dishonest – it’s just got a whole different thing. The tone is different; the timbre of the way the string vibrates is different.

With Eric, I heard the solo he did on Cream’s “I’m So Glad,” and he’s doing different things. I was knocked out.

That and the “Steppin’ Out” solo – I was literally speechless. I know that’s an overused figure of speech, but that’s how I felt. My whole foundation was rocked. Just when I thought I might be getting somewhere with the guitar, I heard this and thought, Holy shit!

You’ve put out some terrific albums, but 2020 Visions feels like a breakthrough. The electric guitar sound is wild, trippy and dramatic, and it’s not typical of how most blues guitarists sound. And you have more than one sound.

I’ve spent years thinking and working on this. To me, tone and textures are every bit as important as what you’re playing. I don’t want to sound like anybody else, and I don’t understand why other people would want to.

What I’m seeking is some sort of a sonic texture that’s unique. It’s not quirky or weird, like it’s a novelty or gimmick; rather, it’s related to what the music is addressing. It’s a style. It’s a sonic style as opposed to a musical style.

It’s easy to say, “I want to sound unique.” It’s quite another thing to pull it off.

It is. One big thing that’s helped me was getting an original Marshall JTM45. It’s part of the toolbox that enables me to do this. I hate to say that, because the amp was stupidly expensive.

I didn’t want it to be true, but the way those amps were designed with the negative-feedback loop, it stacks harmony when you’re sustaining a note. It’s more of a musical instrument than just an amp.

Let’s talk about some of the songs on the album. The title track is blues, but it’s got a very pronounced punk rock side to it.

Sure, sure. I mean, I’m playing blues licks, no doubt, but it’s got another thing. You know, I never really used to like Iggy Pop until I read that he went to Chicago and tried to be a blues guy for, like, six months. Then I kind of understood.

The guitars on the song are trashy and reckless. It’s like they collide off each other.

As well they should. The guitars on the chorus are just driving and out of control, but there’s the call-and-answer guitar to the vocal. It’s got a bluesier, warmer sound. But I’m purposely trying to smear notes, bitter to sweet.

You’re very rough with your guitar on “The Fall of America.” Every riff, power chord and solo is brutal. It’s not festival-tent blues.

It’s designed not to be that at all. There are people who can do that beautifully and brilliantly, and my hat is off to them. It’s just something that doesn’t interest me. I guess I take my sensibilities from the British musicians of the ’60s and ’70s. They were making new art.

That sounds pretentious, but they weren’t just making an archive of what was happening in the room. They were using all the tools of technology to create something unique in that moment, and it was as far from field recordings as you could get.

At nine minutes long, the song is epic. For much of it, it seems like you’re having fun exploring tones.

Oh, I am, I am! Yeah, we went on for a bit, but hey, America’s a big country. [laughs] The subject of what’s going on is a big subject. I’d never written a nine-minute song before, but it went where it wanted.

“Roxie’s Song” is altogether different. It’s a tight, beautifully constructed instrumental.

Yes, Roxie was my miniature schnauzer, and she died. With this record, there was a musical concept. I wanted it to be an honorific homage to the bent note on the guitar.

“Roxie’s Song” has a really long bend, which is the sad part. Obviously, I was gutted that my dog was dead, and I was missing her like nothing else.

But what about the happy times? So there are middle bits where it’s sort of like in summer grass and how she had to hop around to be seen. There are fun bits and moments of exhilaration, like how you play chase with your dog, or how they go crazy when you walk in the door.

How did you and Mick Taylor collaborate on writing “Sputnik Days”?

That was another one of those times when he heard me working on something, but rather than lingering in the doorway, he felt compelled to pick up a guitar.

He co-wrote it with me. It sums up what I aspire to: It’s rooted properly in deep blues while living in the present and being aware that we have tomorrow to look forward to.

One song that is very reverential to the blues is the very short instrumental “On Top.”

Yeah. That’s Sophie Lord playing bass and doing some serious chording – lovely tone clusters as the bedrock. I don’t mind going there – you know, the reverential thing – but it’s why it’s short as well.

“Zombie Train” has a bit of funky soul to it. It’s got a bit of a ’70s feel, but again, it sounds very current. And it’s a great showcase for everybody in the band.

Oh, yes, for sure. That’s another one on which Sophie is front and center. It was sort of showcased for the bass. Both Sophie and Jack Greenwood play brilliantly throughout the record.

“Zombie Train” is this spoken-song verse, and I really loved being able to stretch out on the guitar solos. It’s another long one, and it’s closer to us being a jam band or something.

You have all these Beatles connections. Ringo Starr does a spoken intro on the song “The Ending of the End,” the album’s artwork was done by Klaus Voormann, and you’re photographed by Pattie Boyd.

Yeah, it’s something. Actually, Pattie photographed me for two album covers. You know, my parents played the Beatles; they were part of my musical journey.

When I met Jimmy Page the first time, we talked through it and he agreed. He said, “Well, yeah, they’re rooted in the blues.”

The Beatles are like blues songs with pop choruses. “Can’t Buy Me Love” is a blues progression, and so is “She’s a Woman,” “Lady Madonna,” “I Feel Fine” and on and on.

“Yer Blues,” obviously.

Sure. That was a great one.

You recently started playing the Gibson Custom Modern Flying V.

I did. That’s a whole different experience because it’s so lightweight, and it kind of folds into you. You’re almost wearing it. It’s an insane guitar, and I love it.

On 2020 Visions, I mostly played a cherry-red [ES-]355 reissue. It’s the star of the record. It’s like the Cadillac of guitars. It’s semi-hollow, and it just feels like a proper guitar. I grew up hating 355s. I thought solid-body guitars were the only real guitars. Lately, I’ve done a complete turnaround.

Is there anybody in the current crop of blues guitar players who stands out to you?

There’s some great players. Connor Selby, Toby Lee – those are two off the top of my head.

It’s hard for me to criticize anybody, because I think anybody doing it should be applauded. If they’re out there and playing, they’ve already accomplished so much.

At the same time, so much current blues has become formulaic – the sounds and just the concept of what a blues record in the modern age should be.

A lot of that has to do with people being concerned about airplay. I’m unsure how it all happens. Is it the artist? The producer? These people can be great players, but it’s hard for me to listen to another blues song that’s produced the same way or with the same approach.

Sometimes I can’t get past it, but that’s a personal problem. It’s got nothing to do with anybody else.

Order Stephen Dale Petit’s 2020 Visions here.

Almost as disturbing as Tommy Bolin’s death itself (on December 4, 1976) was the fact that the 25-year-old musician's fatal drug overdose occurred just when he was emerging as a noted guitarist in progressive rock and jazz-rock circles.

After being summoned to fill the shoes of first Joe Walsh in James Gang and later Ritchie Blackmore in Deep Purple, Bolin could have easily been saddled with the title of 'best replacement guitarist.'

But his less publicized musical history reveals a journeyman musician whose versatility was matched by a restlessness to work and learn, the end result crystallizing into Bolin's own electric guitar style.

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Bolin dropped out of high school at sixteen, and migrated to Denver where he formed a band called Zephyr in 1968. 

He recorded on two of the group's three albums: their eponymous 1969 debut and 1971's Going Back to Colorado.

After serving a blues guitar apprenticeship on the road with Albert King for a year, he made his way to New York and its budding jazz-rock scene in 1973.

His reputation had expanded to the point where Billy Cobham picked him for the session work on Spectrum, the drummer's noted solo debut that Jeff Beck often credits as a major influence in sparking his jazz pursuits.

Months later, Joe Walsh recommended Tommy for the lead slot in James Gang. He appeared on two of the group's albums in the one year he was with the band: Bang in 1973 and Miami in 1974.

In mid-summer of 1975, Bolin replaced Blackmore in Deep Purple, co-writing seven of the tunes on their Come Taste The Band LP.

Realizing perhaps that in his work with these two bands, coupled with a solo effort (Teaser), he'd written 33 songs in four albums, Bolin signed with Columbia to pursue his own career.

He had been touring with his own band following the release of his LP Private Eyes when he was found dead in a Miami hotel room.

The following interview extract was conducted on October 7, just two months before his death, and originally appeared in the March 1977 issue of Guitar Player…

What did you learn from playing behind Albert King?

I learned a lot about lead; learned that you don't have to blow your cookies in the first bar.

At that time, I was playing everything I knew when I took a lead. And he said, "Man, just say it all with one note."

He taught me that it was much harder to be simple than to be complicated during solos. If you blow your cookies in the first bar, you have nowhere to go.

Blues is really good that way. It teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you're playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.

The neatest compliment I ever got was when I was playing with Albert King at an indoor concert in Boulder, Colorado. He used to let me take solos, and I was very into playing that day.

After the concert he came up to me and said, " You got me today, but I'll get you tomorrow."

I really respect him. He's a beautiful player.

Why all the interest in so many styles, and how did you handle them all?

They were just gigs that came up. I'd rather work than not. I was very lucky to be able to play in all those extremes.

It was difficult following a guy like Ritchie Blackmore. When someone is the focal point of a group like he was, it's very hard to replace them. After a while, it just got to be pointless.

The way I got involved in jazz-rock was through a flute player named Jeremy Steig. He played on the second Zephyr album.

He showed me various jazz relationships and put them into a rock perspective, and then through him I met a lot of New York people like Cobham and [keyboardist] Jan Hammer.

Cobham called me for the Spectrum session, and I said, "I don't know how to read, man." He said it was okay.

So I went to the studio, and he handed me a chart. I told him again I didn't again I didn't know how to read, so we had a day of rehearsal, then cut the album in two days.

In rehearsal I'd just find out the changes – for example, Am to D9 to G6 to E13 – and play around those chords and changes.

I learned quite a bit through those people. You can't help but learn. All the different styles I've played have really helped me as a guitarist and helped me develop my own way of playing.

I have my own style, but it's different for each kind of music. There are certain little characteristic things every player has.

Browse the Tommy Bolin catalog here.

Great blues tone isn't rocket science – you just need to get a happening sound in your head, and then use the right tools to replicate the magic.

All great players have specific guitars, amps, and effects that are essential to their sound.

Some, like B.B. King, used the same setup for decades – in his case, a Gibson ES-355 through a Lab Series combo or a Fender Twin Reverb – while others tweak their systems incessantly in the pursuit of groovier tone.

Stevie Ray Vaughan favored one guitar – a Stratocaster – and a few key effects throughout his career, but he experimented a great deal with amps and speakers.

No matter which player you choose to emulate, it's important to understand that merely replicating every detail of their gear is no guarantee that you're going to sound exactly like them.

Tone is, after all, 90% touch and 10% hardware.

Buddy Guy would sound like himself no matter what equipment he used, and the same holds true for most great players.

Still, some guitars and amps can inspire you to play a certain way, and using rigs similar to the ones used by players you respect may help you zone in on a killer sound that can later be morphed into something uniquely yours.

ERIC CLAPTON

"Clapton Is God" graced many a structure in the late '60s, and for good reason – he practically wrote the book on how to play blues-rock electric guitar.

Attaining a credible Clapton sound requires that you first determine which period in his long career you like best.

During his time with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Clapton famously used a late-'50s Gibson Les Paul Standard through a model 1962 Marshall 2x12 combo.

Part of the secret here is that Clapton's amp was equipped with KT66 output tubes, which have a more refined midrange and clearer top end than either EL34s or 6L6s.

With Cream, Clapton went to high-volume heaven with 100-watt Marshall heads and 4x12 cabs.

He also used a Vox wah-wah and, occasionally, a fuzz.

After his Les Paul was stolen, Clapton played a '61 SG-style Les Paul, and then a Gibson ES-335 for Cream's farewell concert.

With Blind Faith, Clapton used a Gibson Firebird through a Fender Showman.

He then switched to maple-fretboard Strats through Fender tweed Champs during his Derek & The Dominos/"Layla" period.

Both setups yielded tones that rate among Clapton's best.

ALBERT COLLINS

The "Iceman" had one of the most original tones around – just listen to his fabulous sting on such classic cuts as "Frosty," "Too Many Dirty Dishes," "Iceman," and "Put the Shoe on the Other Foot."

Collins certainly did things his own way.

He played a beat-up Fender Telecaster, with a Gibson humbucker in the neck position, that he tuned to open Fm.

He used a capo – often at the fifth or seventh position – and he snapped and popped his strings with his thumb and forefinger.

Collins also favored '70s-era Fender Quad Reverb amps (100 watts into four 12s), and he used a 100' cord.

This latter detail allowed him to get friendly with the audience, while the added cable capacitance helped defrost his icy highs.

ALBERT KING

Almost every blues guitar player "borrows" something from Albert King – even Stevie Ray Vaughan based his blistering style on King's mammoth bends and lightning-bolt stabs.

Almost no one tries to duplicate the left-handed bluesman's gear, however, which isn't too surprising, considering that King played a flipped-over Gibson Flying V with the low-E string closest to the floor.

According to repair ace Dan Erlewine (who built King's replica V, "Lucy"), Albert strung his guitar .009, .012, .024W, .028, .038, .050, and tuned it C, F, C, F, A, D (low to high.)

Steve Cropper, who produced a number of King's albums, offers a different tuning – C, B, E, F#, B, E (low to high) – which he says allowed King to create a one-finger Em chord by raising F# to G. (Another important aspect of King's tone was that he played exclusively with his fingers.)

Onstage, King often plugged into an Acoustic 370 solid-state guitar amp driving a 2x15 enclosure with a built-in high-frequency horn – a real pawnshop prize!

While a Flying V is the way to go here, just about any quality, dual-humbucker guitar can be coaxed into the Albert zone.

Consider, however, that Otis Rush gets a chillingly similar sound with a Fender Strat!

Amps? That's a good question, as almost nothing available sounds anything like an old Acoustic 370.

Our advice is choose an amp (or amp channel) with enough clean headroom to preserve your note attack. Crank the volume, but go easy on the distortion – King's tone was big and bold, not squashed and compressed.

B.B. KING

The King of the Blues' sweet, singing tone stands out as one of the great guitar sounds of all time.

King's original tone recipe was a Gibson ES-355 through a long-discontinued Gibson Lab Series 2x12 combo amp.

From the '80s, he played a Gibson Lucille model stereo guitar, which features a TP-6 fine-tune tailpiece and no f-holes.

King used both pickups simultaneously and strung his guitar with light-gauge Gibsons (.009-.042).

Though he favored vintage Lab Series amps, he often ran through a Fender Twin Reverb onstage.

Replicating B.B. King's sound requires running your amp's output stage fairly hard, while avoiding the fuzzier distortion produced by high-gain channels or stompboxes.

T-BONE WALKER

Often called the father of electric blues, T-Bone Walker helped establish the guitar as a featured lead instrument in the 1940s.

Guitarists inspired by Walker's playing (or his flashy stage moves) include Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Wes Montgomery, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Billy Gibbons, Albert King, Otis Rush, Michael Bloomfield, and Duane Allman.

Walker cut his teeth on primitive acoustic-electrics, but his signature ax was a blonde, maple-bodied Gibson ES-5 that he bought at the peak of his career in the early 1950s.

Walker held the guitar perpendicular to his body (when he wasn't playing it behind his head or between his legs), and it's likely that he plugged into a Gibson tube amp.

T-Bone Walker forged the basic vocabulary of rock and roll using double-stops, half- and quarter-step bends, and his patented, third-to-second-string unison bends.

His unorthodox playing style probably created a little extra string lift and snap, and he preferred his tone dry, clean, and relatively bright compared to jazz guitar players of the time.

A deep-bodied guitar – preferably with P-90-style, single-coil pickups – running through a reasonably clean-sounding tube amplifier are essential ingredients for T-Bone tone.

STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN

Stevie Ray Vaughan forged a sound that defines big blues tone.

Five basic ingredients are required here:

• Rosewood fretboard Fender Strat strung with heavy-gauge strings (Vaughan used GHS sets as heavy as .013-.060)
• Ibanez Tube Screamer overdrive (either a TS-9 or an older TS-808)
• Rotating speaker (he favored vintage Fender Vibratones, but you may wish to substitute a stompbox-sized simulator here)
• Vox wah wah pedal
• Fender tube amp with four 10" speakers

Vaughan often combined amps – Fender Super Reverbs with 1x15 Fender Vibroverbs, Marshall and Dumble rigs with Fender combos, and so on.

Heavy electric guitar strings are an important part of the Vaughan recipe, but remember that Stevie tuned down a half-step – you'll want to do the same if you plan on performing his gargantuan bends on girthy gauges.

Choose your Strat carefully for lightness and resonance, and set your amp's controls to produce a clear, beefy clang from the neck pickup. (Fender Super Reverbs do this naturally.)

Larry McCray’s new album, Blues Without You, is his first record of original material since 2007. McCray burst onto the scene as a major new voice in blues guitar way back in 1991, with the release of his debut album, Ambition, followed two years later by Delta Hurricane.

It looked like he was destined for the sort of mainstream crossover appeal enjoyed by the likes of Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but his blues train started to derail.

By 2001, without a record deal, McCray was releasing his music on his own label. He’d resigned himself to the possibility that his major-label days were behind him, when Joe Bonamassa called to ask if he’d record for Bonamasssa’s label, KTBA (Keeping the Blues Alive).

The result is Blues Without You, not only McCray’s career-best record but also one of the strongest blues guitar albums released for many years. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that there will be a better blues record released in 2022.

McCray presents the same kind of two-fisted combo that made giants like B.B. and Freddie King such formidable artists, with not only the ability to play blisteringly effective solos but also a voice that can rival the best blues singers from any bygone age.

McCray’s soloing is both fluid and visceral; he is unafraid to hang on to a couple of notes until every last drop of emotion and soul has been wrung from them.

The release of Blues Without You will be accompanied by a documentary that reveals the ins-and-outs of McCray’s hookup with Bonamassa, and shows both men and co-producer Josh Smith working out ideas for the record.

The film also demonstrates that McCray’s stalling career was in part due to poor management from his former manager, Paul Coch, who died in 2021 in a car accident.

It makes for compelling viewing and reveals McCray to be a deeply humble, emotional man who truly appreciates getting a second bite of the cherry.

It must feel good to be back on a label that has prominence in the industry.

Yes, absolutely. Sometimes, when things don’t work out, you have to make peace with yourself. That’s what I was doing, and then the opportunity just kind of fell into my lap. I am very pleased with how the record turned out. It’s my best album by far.

In the documentary, you use an acoustic guitar to perform many of the songs that subsequently turned up on the album in electrified form. They were such strong performances. Was there ever any thought of recording them that way?

I’ve been trying to get that done for the last 25 years, and I couldn’t. I’ve never been one to use race as an excuse for what you can’t achieve. I don’t know if my image wasn’t palatable to the people who make these decisions, who had the control, or if they just weren’t interested in my brand of music. But with that said, there was never a plan to make this anything but an electric guitar album.

Watching the documentary, you seem very humble about your own talents. Do you think perhaps the way that your career became derailed undermined your sense of where you should be in terms of recognition?

I guess it’s not really that important what I think about my music; it’s what the people think. I’ve spent over 40 years making music, and if somebody wanted to give me an opportunity, it’s not like I sat on my ass and didn’t work for it. I’ve played every honky-tonk and every dive.

I’ve played some high places and some low places, and a lot in-between. If the powers that be don’t accept what you do, there are some doors that you can’t open yourself. I put albums out on my own label, and I worked constantly, but I never had the means to promote them properly.

There are some parallels with you and your label mate Eric Gales, in that you both lost your way career-wise for some time, and now you’ve both just released career-best albums on KTBA.

I knew Eric at the start of his career. We’ve been friends since the late ’80s. Eric was always my go-to when anybody was talking about who was a great blues guitarist.

He was such a talent even then; I knew him when he was just a kid. He used to come out to my house and we’d sit up late playing guitar. He’d play guitar and I’d listen. [laughs]

I’m a non-political and a non-controversial person, but when you look at it straight on, I wonder how people could justify why someone like Eric or me couldn’t get opportunities in the music business.

I think, fundamentally, sometimes people can get judged by two different standards. I’ve been away from the game too long to just make that a focus, but I know I worked my ass off to do everything that I could.

Blues Without You is a very organic, timeless album. Was that a deliberate attempt to re-create the warmth of those classic blues albums from the early 1970s that B.B. and Albert cut?

I don’t have to try, because that’s who I am. I’m just being myself. When I look back on my career, that’s what I’ve always been, and I guess that’s just how it comes out. [laughs]

It seems like there are a lot of church and gospel influences in your vocals. Was that something you grew up with?

No. I was raised around that, but I was raised differently. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, so I didn’t get the chance to pursue that gospel side of music. My parents converted to that when I was about six years old. I did hear that music, and it had an influence on me, for sure.

You are the kind of singer who sounds like they’re living every word that they say, so presumably the lyrics of a song are very important to you.

I sing about life. And I sing about it in a way that everyone can relate to, whether it’s being sick, not having money, relationship problems or whatever it might be. I feel every word that I’m singing.

We all need to feel whole, and I hope that’s what my music helps people to achieve. I call my music “good-time, feel-good music.” I don’t want to be technical or nothing, trying to win the respect of people who care about those things; I want to win the hearts and souls of people – what people feel in their heart.

You always have great phrasing on your solos and fills. A prime example of this is your playing on “Without Love It Doesn’t Matter,” where you leave gaps between phrases, almost as if to allow the listener time to digest what you just played.

Exactly, that’s right. It isn’t necessary to play any more than that. Whenever I play something on my guitar, I try to channel what I call the four greats: B.B., Freddie and Albert King, and Albert Collins.

I think of Albert Collins as the razor. He slashed, cut and sliced with his guitar. B.B. was class and elegance. Freddie was raw power with both his vocals and guitar. And Albert King played the crying, weeping guitar.

My playing draws from all those four guys every time I take a solo. If I want cut, elegance, power or a real weeping feel, I tap into one of those four guys.

“No More Crying” is such a great southern soul ballad with the same emotional resonance of Vince Gill’s “Go Rest High on That Mountain” and an ability to comfort someone dealing with loss.

I co-wrote that with a youngster that I influenced, Aaron Sarkar, who was 30 years my junior. We met at a B.B. King concert when he was working in hospitality there. He was 15 years old at the time, and I remember him saying that he wanted a musical career.

Fifteen years later, he came to my house and he was showing me some words that he’d written. He said they’d come to him and he wrote them down in about five minutes.

As soon as he read the words to me, I automatically had those chord changes. I just sang it exactly as it is, the first time I tried it. It just came in an instant. It was the easiest song I ever wrote.

The turnaround in your career is very much echoed by the sentiment behind “Don’t Put Your Dreams to Bed.”

Definitely. I wrote that with my girlfriend, Peggy Smith. We thought of that concept together. That was another song that was real easy to put together. I think a lot of the best songs do come very easily, as if they were just meant to be.

It is interesting that the song “Blues Without You” was dedicated to your former manager, Paul Coch. Obviously you had plenty of good times together, but I know he also caused problems for your career at times.

Although we had a lot of rough roads and went through some tough things together, I certainly didn’t hate the man. We spent 34 years together, you know? He definitely did work very hard to try to help me get success, but he just didn’t have the right people skills.

For whatever reason, people sometimes found it hard to work with him. I know Joe had tried to contact me years ago to do this, but Paul didn’t tell me. That was just one of many incidents that happened over the years.

In some ways there wasn’t a whole lot that I could have done. Maybe I could have found another manager, but I couldn’t find someone else who was interested.

The closing track, “I Play the Blues,” is a solo acoustic and vocal piece, which is a great way to close the album, as a real contrast to what has gone before.

I did think that we were going to do it with the band, but Joe thought it would be nice to do the stripped-down acoustic guitar version. We did the whole album in seven days, and that was the last song that we recorded.

I did a lot of singing and playing in that week, and by that time my voice was starting to feel a little rough. Joe thought the slight rawness in my voice really worked for the song, although I do think that maybe I could have sung it better if I’d had a chance for my voice to recover slightly. But that’s all that I had left.

When it comes to playing solos, do you plan beforehand what you’ll do?

No, I never do. I always just play straight through without any preparation, in one pass or maybe two passes at the most. I do like to warm my chops up before I record, maybe for an hour or so.

What were you playing on the album?

I only took one guitar with me, a Les Paul Deluxe, as I was flying and I couldn’t really take any more than that. I used a lot of Joe’s guitars and amps.

Joe has so much great gear that there isn’t anything that I could have taken with me that would have been any better anyway. [laughs]

You’re very much a Gibson guy, although I believe way back you used to play a Strat.

That’s right. In fact I played an Ibanez before the Strat. What happened was that I went over to England, and I saw Gary Moore playing. When I heard his humbuckers, I thought, Okay, there’s a bigger bear in the woods; I need to keep up here. [laughs]

As soon as I got back to the States, I bought a tobacco-brown Flying V, which I played a lot. That was when I also discovered that I really liked Les Pauls as well, and the 335 came soon after that.

I like to switch my tones a lot, even in the middle of a solo, where I’ll flip from one pickup to another. I know Albert King always did that. I think it takes the solo on more of a journey through different tonal ranges.

Things must be very busy for you now that the album is being released.

Yeah. I’m also doing some things with Devon Allman and the Allman Brothers Revue right now, and I’m starting to book a lot of dates for myself.

Everything is really starting to build up, and I’m determined that I’m going to make the most of every opportunity to make up for a lot of lost time.

Order Blues Without You here.

Award-winning blues guitarist Larry McCray has released the second single – “Breaking News” – from his forthcoming album Blues Without You.

Produced by Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith, Blues Without You will be released on March 25 via Keeping the Blues Alive Records (KTBA Records.)

One of the great bluesmen of the American Rust Belt, McCray holds a very special place in Bonamassa’s heart.

“Larry McCray is a legend,” he says. “In the spirit of B.B. King, Luther Allison and Little Milton, Larry is among the greats.”

Over the years, McCray has performed alongside some of the biggest names in blues guitar including B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Albert King, John Mayall, Johnny Winter, Robert Cray, Keb’ Mo’, Jimmie Vaughan and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

Guesting on Larry McCray’s latest 12-track long-player are Joe Bonamassa, Warren Haynes, Joanna Connor, and Reese Wynans.

Speaking of Blues Without You, McCray said, “Writing this album made me feel proud, as it allows others to see me as more than a blues musician.

“The songs are reflective of my broad taste in music styles and the subject matter, although personal at times, is relatable to anyone’s life. Hopefully, the words and message of the songs will help others express their feelings in a similar synopsis."

Following up The Gibson Sessions, Blues Without You is McCray’s first album in seven years and is a result of having hooked up with a team of people whom he feels are kindred spirits.

“I feel totally reborn, with a whole new career,” says the guitarist, “and I'm optimistic about what the future holds.

“But truthfully speaking, sometimes I do wish it would have happened 30 years ago. I would have been much more qualified for the job at that age than at 62.”

It’s never too late, we say!

Pre-order Blues Without You here.

The Gibson Flying V didn’t get off the ground very easily. Along with the Explorer, the design divebombed following its late ‘50s debut. Less than 100 of these original korina body examples are recorded shipping between ’58 and ’59, making it a very rare (and valuable) axe indeed.

Those old Gibson “modernistic” electric guitars were notoriously ahead of their time. It would be years before the Flying V really began to fly.

In the late ‘60s, Gibson relaunched the model, albeit in a different guise with a mahogany body. Following in the footsteps of Albert King, Hendrix famously played a Flying V and from there the progressive solidbody started to come into its own in the world of hard rock.

Fast forward to the ‘80s heyday of metal and the Flying V is riding high with Gibson launching numerous permutations of the model.

Among the countless metal guitarists synonymous with the Flying V-style design are brothers Rudolf and Michael Schenker of Scorpions, K. K. Downing of Judas Priest, and Dave Mustaine of multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning thrash pioneers Megadeth.

Now a veteran of the metal scene, Mustaine has been honored by Gibson with the release of a brand-new signature model – the Dave Mustaine Flying V EXP.

“I think that the Gibson Flying V is such an icon as far as guitars are concerned,” says original ‘big four’ thrash guitar hero Mustaine.

“If you ask someone to draw a guitar, they’ll draw a Flying V.”

Part of Gibson’s Dave Mustaine Collection, the Dave Mustaine Flying V EXP is available in a choice of two finishes: Antique Natural and Silver Metallic.

Priced $2,799, this signature Flying V boasts a longer 25.5” scale mahogany neck with a swanky 24-fret, compound radius ebony fingerboard uniquely featuring mother-of-pearl “teeth” inlays.

While the mahogany body of the Dave Mustaine Flying V EXP follows the traditional Flying V form, the guitar’s headstock profile deviates from the original arrow-shaped peghead and is borrowed from its sibling solidbody, the Gibson Explorer.

Black chrome hardware includes Grover Mini Rotomatic tuners along with a Nashville Tune-O-Matic bridge and stop tailpiece.

Working closely with one of the best pickup builders in the business, this Flying V has been endowed with a dual set of Dave Mustaine Signature Seymour Duncan Thrash Factors. Employing “custom Dave Mustaine wiring” the guitar’s controls comprise a three-way selector switch along with a master tone and independent pickup volume pots topped with retro ‘witch hat’ knobs.  

An accessory kit and custom hardshell case are included.

Visit Gibson for more information.

We recently asked some of the world's top guitar players to choose their favorite solos. There was, however, one catch: They had to refrain from the obvious choices. In other words, no Hendrix, Clapton, Gilmour, et cetera.

Here’s what Eric Johnson had to say…

1) Wes Montgomery | “Caravan” from ‘Movin’ Wes’

GUITARIST: Wes Montgomery

“It’s classic Wes Montgomery – totally swinging and improvising over the changes. It’s part chords and a lot of single-note sections, and it’s all great. It’s hard to pick just one Wes solo, but this one is particularly smokin’.”

2) Albert King | “Crosscut Saw” from ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’

GUITARIST: Albert King

“Albert King always knocks me out. He gets such a great tone in this solo, and his phrasing is extraordinary. I know Eric Clapton is a fan. He’s covered this song and plays the solo almost note for note.”

3) John Lee Hooker | “Boogie Chillen’” (single)

GUITARIST: John Lee Hooker

“Check out the original 1948 version of this song. It’s incredible that this was recorded before rock and roll, because John pretty much set the foundation for everything that was to follow. The playing is flat-out extraordinary.”

4) The Electric Flag | “Texas” from ‘A Long Time Comin’’

GUITARIST: Mike Bloomfield

“Mike Bloomfield is so fiery on this cut. He’s hitting on all cylinders. I was very influenced by Mike Bloomfield. I used to listen to him a lot.”

5) The Monkees | “Valleri” from ‘The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees’

GUITARIST: Louis Shelton

“He worked a lot during the Wrecking Crew days, and this is one of his best solos. Here in the middle of a pop song that got on the radio, he slipped in this blazing, fleet-fingered solo that just shines.”

The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd. “The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes. Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time. Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the Allmans were all about musically or any other way. But they kept touring, state by state, city by city, going across the country, establishing themselves as the best live band around, and building a base.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened. It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained. This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach. They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment – offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made – not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy – the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmores East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

 “New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade – and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights – March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 – as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs. “I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go. When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine. “Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.” Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out. I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could. 

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth. Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers. Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette recalls another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately. “We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio. “We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it. This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[Atlantic executive] Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, and that a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.”

Walden won out and was proven right when the record – “people priced” at three dollars below standard list for a double album – slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album. “All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches – from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’ 

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.” 

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends. “He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that. I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte. “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him. Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old. And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

As its name suggests a blues turnaround is a section of music that comes at the end of a verse, giving it harmonic interest and resolution and leading the song back to the start of a new verse, which is almost always a repeat of the first, in terms of form.

Generally speaking, a turnaround occurs in the last two bars of a blues or jazz standard, whether it’s an eight-, 12-, 16-, 24- or 32-bar form. In the context of a standard 12-bar blues progression, the melody generally concludes at the beginning of the 10th bar, so instead of simply sitting on the tonic, or “one,” chord for two more bars, a chordal turnaround is inserted in bars 11 and 12 to maintain interest and forward momentum and create a strong setup for a repetition and “looping” of the progression.

Turnaround licks are typically improvised and are generally built around the framework of four chords (two per bar), usually I-IV-I-V but sometimes the jazzier I-VI-ii-V (lowercase Roman numerals indicate minor-type chords). As you’ll see in this lesson, there are many variations on these two basic forms.

The chord types may be diatonic or non-diatonic (based on the parent scale of the key, or not) and are also influenced by the style of blues (major versus minor). It’s generally understood that professional players will be familiar with the harmonic intricacies generated by the many permutations of these two basic forms.

In both parts of this two-part lesson, we’ll study lead licks played over blues guitar turnarounds in the styles of 10 of the genre’s most influential players of all time. Each player will be represented with three examples that cover major and minor keys, and because some licks can often be interchanged between major and minor keys, our examples will start on the same root note and feature a range of grooves and tempos.

Instead of illustrating the turnaround in isolation, the examples are presented as they would occur in the last four bars of a 12-bar blues progression – bars 9 through 12. And because turnarounds are also frequently used as intros, these examples can also serve as useful ways to kick off a song or guitar solo in a blues tune.

Because turnarounds customarily occur at the end of the vocal melody, they provide a clear space and musical opening that the guitarist can fill, whether they’re soloing or not. Not surprisingly, different players have their own approach to turnarounds. Some plow through the changes with pentatonic-based ideas, taking little heed of the chords, while others carefully target notes in each underlying chord to create a melodic shape.

It takes practice to deftly negotiate this sequence and make your playing sound relaxed and casual, but the time spent doing so will improve your improvisational and soloing skills tremendously. The turnaround contains all the chords of the blues but in condensed form, so you really need to keep on top of the changes and nail those target notes.

Technique Focus: Scale Choices

To get the most out of this lesson, make sure you can play these scales in all five CAGED positions and familiarize yourself with the suggested applications. 

MINOR PENTATONIC: R-b3-4-5-b7

Use this form in the I-chord position over the I, IV and V chords. It can also be transposed to start on the root of the V chord but can only be transposed to the root of the iv chord in a minor key. Also, you can freely add the blues-scale’s b5 passing tone to this scale.

MIXOLYDIAN MODE: R-2-3-4-5-6-b7

Use in tonic position over the I chord. It can also be transposed to the IV and V chords.

MAJOR PENTATONIC: R-2-3-5-6

Use in tonic position over I and V. It can also be transposed to the IV chord. Also, you can freely add the blues-scale’s b5 passing tone to this scale, as the b3.

PHRYGIAN-DOMINANT MODE: R-b2-3-4-5-b6-b7

Play this scale over the V or V7 chord in a minor key. This is the harmonic minor scale’s fifth mode and is the same as playing the tonic harmonic minor scale of that key.

THE B.B. KING “BLUES BOX”: R-2-4-5-6

Use in tonic position over all chords, but bend the B string only a half step when playing over the IV chord.

SUPER-LOCRIAN MODE: R-b2-b3-3-b5-b6-b7

Use in root position over an altered-dominant chord, such as 7b9, 7#9, 7b5, 7#5, or any combination of these. This is the same as playing the melodic minor scale rooted a half step above the altered[1]dominant chord’s root.

Let’s begin with a T-Bone Walker–style lick played over a I-IV-I-V turnaround in the key of G (G7 C9 G7 D7aug). T-Bone’s jazzy and harmonically adept style has influenced countless players, and echoes of his pioneering approach can be heard in the playing of guitarists ranging from Chuck Berry to Jimmy Page.

Walker’s solos frequently featured the major second (or ninth) and major sixth from the Mixolydian mode (in this case, the notes A and E from G Mixolydian: G A B C D E F), as demonstrated in bars 9 and 12 of Ex. 1. Notice that the minor third, relative to G, Bb, is played over, and only over, the IV chord, where it effectively highlights the b7 of C9.

Walker’s style also informs the i-iv-i-V minor turnaround in the key of A minor shown in Ex. 2. Here, the IV chord is dominant in bar 10 (D9) but minor (iv, Dm) in bar 11, during the turnaround. To avoid any harmonic clashes, you can play the tonic A minor pentatonic scale (A C D E G) over both incarnations of the IV chord, as demonstrated here.

That unusual lick in the first bar is created by applying an augmented triad to the root of the V chord and then ascending in whole tones, referencing the whole-tone scale) This is a harmonically sophisticated idea and showcases T-Bone’s musical depth.

Presented in the key of A major, Ex. 3 offers a phrase played over a jazzy I-VI-ii-V turnaround in T-Bone’s style. To negotiate the more complex chord movement in this example, the A Mixolydian mode (A B C# D E F#G) is extended over the dominant VI chord (F#7) to imply an F#7b9 sound (via the note A), which is a move frequently employed by jazz guitarists, such as T-Bone’s contemporary back in the 1940s, the great Charlie Christian.

In bar 12, the fifth of the ii chord, Bm7 (E) is highlighted, followed by a walk down the A minor pentatonic scale over the E7 chord, which includes what would be the #5 tension tone of that chord, C (or B#).

The great B.B. King is another blues guitarist celebrated for his impeccable note choices and phrasing. B.B.’s signature go-to pattern was a hybrid major-/minor-pentatonic “blues box,” which is based around the root note of the song’s key (typically played on the B string), with the major sixth played below it and the major second, perfect fourth and perfect fifth played above it. The guitarist would typically bend the major second up a half step to the minor third, or up a whole step to the major third, and would also often bend the fifth up a whole step to the major sixth, or one and one half steps to the minor seventh. In so doing, the guitarist would greatly expand his palette of note choices and musical colors.

Ex. 4 features King-style licks played over the final four bars of a 12-bar blues in the key of Bb, with a harmonically complex bass-line “walk-up” turnaround in bars 11 and 12 that features the use of a first-inversion chord and a diminished seven, but this can be approached as a more straightforward I-IV-I-V turnaround.

Ex. 5 offers an example of how B.B. would solo over the last four bars of a minor blues progression in the key of B minor that includes a i-bVI-ii-V turnaround (Bm Gmaj7 C#m7b5 F#7#9). The bVI chord (in this case, Gmaj7) is commonly encountered in a minor blues progression; it can be either major (with or without the major seventh) or dominant, but never minor.

This entire turnaround is skillfully negotiated by hitting just the right “color tones” over each chord, all achieved in this example with just the B minor pentatonic scale (B D E F# A), with the major second, C#, added, which is borrowed from the B Dorian mode (B C# D E F# G# A).

B.B. also had a penchant for occasionally beginning a turnaround lick before the turnaround begins, as in bar 10 of Ex. 6, which leads into a jazz-flavored I-VI-ii-V turnaround in the key of Bb major (Bb7 G7 Cm7 F7).

The turnaround phrase begins by chromatically encircling the third of the tonic Bb chord, D. This creates tension, which is resolved perfectly on beat one of bar 11 by landing squarely on the Bb root note. In bar 12, the tonic major arpeggio, Bb, flows into a chromatically descending blues-scale phrase (resolving on Eb, the b7 of F7), which beautifully outlines the Cm7-F7 chord change.

The legendary Albert King was famed for his wide, howling “over-bends” of a minor third (equal to three frets) and sometimes a major third (equal to four frets) and fiery delivery, as exemplified in the line played in the key of C over Ex. 7’s descending I-I7-IV-iv-I-V turnaround. The apparent complexity of this six-chord sequence can be approached as a more basic I-IV-I-V turnaround and negotiated with nothing more than the tonic C blues scale (C Eb F Gb G Bb), as demonstrated here.

The minor pentatonic or blues scale (which additionally includes the b5) can indeed almost always be applied as a blanket approach over an entire turnaround sequence, but it is only really effective when the relevant chord tones are targeted, as demonstrated in Ex. 8, an Albert King-style i-iv-i-V turnaround in the key of C minor.

Notice how the phrasing here is always anticipating the chord changes. This is the only way to achieve slick and musical results. Albert is often thought of as a “simplistic” player, but this clear sophistication belies that view.

Played in the key of C major, Ex. 9 is another Albert-inspired turnaround phrase, one that illustrates an even looser approach to the basic I-IV-I-V turnaround. Here, a strong C minor pentatonic (C Eb F G Bb) lick is forced over the sequence and resolves satisfyingly to the V chord, G7.

This approach exemplifies a great way to start getting your turnaround chops together. Simply think of the sequence as a bar and a half on the I chord followed by two beats on the V, but be sure to anticipate the resolution to the V chord, as shown here. A “late” resolution – meaning on the beat – will just sound wrong in this context!

Peter Green was a precocious master of the blues. His signature finger vibrato and controlled phrasing were already fully developed by the time he joined John Mayall’s backing group, the Bluesbreakers, at the tender age of 19.

The melodic lick played in the key of C minor over the descending i-iv-i-v-i-V7 descending turnaround in Ex. 10 illustrates how adept Green’s approach was when dealing with a complex minor-key turnaround such as this (with the use of both minor and dominant V chords and inversions), using nothing more than the tonic minor pentatonic scale, in this case C minor pentatonic.

Also in the key of C minor, Ex. 11 offers another Green-style lead phrase, this one played over two bars on the iv chord, Fm, followed by a i-bVII-bVI-V turnaround: Cm Bb6 Ab7 G7 Cm. The chromatic bVI7-V7 chord sequence (Ab7 G7) is very common in minor turnarounds but can be approached as a regular i-V7 sequence since the bVI chord shares critical notes with the tonic minor chord, namely the root and minor third.

Notice how the C minor pentatonic melody is used to generate altered-dominant tensions over the all-important G7 chord in bar 12, with the tonic note, C, phrased on the upbeat. Green really knew how to nail a solo!

The blues scale contains the über-cool b5 interval, a note that is all too frequently employed merely as a passing note for creating fast licks. In Ex. 12’s I-I7-IV-iv-I-V turnaround in the key of C (C7 C7/Bb F/A Fm/Ab C/G G7), inverted chords are used to create an pleasingly effective descending harmony line. Notice also how the phrase effectively resolves to the V chord, G7, illustrating total rhythmic and harmonic control.

Let’s wrap up this first half of our lesson with three examples in the style of the great Eric Clapton, Green’s Bluesbreakers predecessor. Clapton’s blues playing with the Bluesbreakers in the mid-’60s demonstrated a deep understanding of the genre that belied his youth and suburban background. His phrasing has always been impeccable, infused with fiery licks and B.B. King-style “thumb off the neck” finger vibrato.

In Ex. 13, the climbing bass line of a I-I7-IV-#IVdim-I-V7 turnaround in the key of E (E E7/G# A A#dim7) is juxtaposed by a contrary-motion descending melody line, resolving tidily to the V chord, B7.  

Oblique unison bends figured prominently in Clapton’s early soloing style, and they’re featured in bar 11 of Ex. 14, at the start of a i-iv-i-V-i minor turnaround in the key of E minor. This simple lick is typical of Clapton’s economical phrasing style, outlining the four turnaround chords with precision and clarity.

Played in the key of E major, our final Clapton-style example, Ex. 15, illustrates the effectiveness of the major pentatonic scale, in this case E major pentatonic (E F# G# B C#) when applied to a I-IV-I-V turnaround sequence.

Notice how the fourth, A, borrowed from the parallel E minor pentatonic scale, is added to provide the root of the IV chord, A7, on beat three of bar 11. It’s important to note here that you should avoid playing the tonic major third (in this case, G#) over the IV chord (A7, in this case), as doing so creates an unpleasant harmonic clash.

Next time, we’ll finish up our lesson with a fresh batch of blues turnaround lick and phrases in the styles of Carlos Santana, Gary Moore, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robben Ford and Larry Carlton. See you then!

Former Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden has announced a new solo album, Kings.

His first solo effort since 2014, Kings is Marsden's tribute to BB, Albert, and Freddie King, and features 10 covers and two King-inspired instrumentals as bonus tracks. It's set for a July 23 release via Conquest Music/Little House Music.

The LP is also the first of a series of planned Inspirations albums from Marsden, inspired by when ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons asked him, “Bernie, wouldn't it be great if we could all record the songs we grew up with as we learned to play the guitar?”

A second Inspirations album, Chess (which aims to pay tribute to the legendary Chicago blues label of the same name) is due out later this year.

Marsden is also set to embark on a tour to promote Kings, Chess, and his 2019 memoir, Where's My Guitar? The shows will feature both storytelling and music, and will take place from early September through late October 2021 throughout England.

You can check out a full list of the dates at conquestmusic.co.uk.

Yes, many blues and rock licks are cliches, but there’s a good reason for that – they sound so cool that listeners and guitarists want to hear and play them again and again.

For those willing to pay their dues and play the blues, these licks are a rite of passage and a continuous source of inspiration. They are the foundation on which a solid house of blues is built.

Presented here for your edification are 12 classic blues guitar phrases, each with a certified pedigree. You can drop any of these into a blues-based progression and come out smiling. Or you can play them in sequence over a standard 12-bar blues to create one very hip solo, as we’ll do for the very last step of this lesson.

Before we dive in, let’s take a look at three blues scale patterns that form the basis of our 12 licks. A quick run through these shapes will help wake up our hands and minds.

The first pattern, Figure 1, is a full-blown A blues scale in 5th position. Notice that it contains the root, b3rd, 4th, b5th, 5th, and b7th degrees of an A major scale. All of the licks that we’ll look at here will be presented in the context of an A major blues.

The second pattern, Figure 2, is a reduced version of this same scale, which includes only the root, b3rd, 4th, 5th, and b7th. This compact shape, known colloquially as the “Albert King Box” – because King virtually lived there after he signed with Stax/Volt Records in 1966 – is an especially finger-friendly position.

The third pattern, Figure 3, commonly called the “B.B. King Box” (because he spent so much time there from the Sixties onward), contains the same scale degrees as the previous box but covers more of the fingerboard.

Now, with fingers poised and minds focused, let’s begin our journey from Mississippi to Texas, with pertinent stops in Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans.

Our first lick, Figure 4, is a striking opening phrase to be played over a I chord. T-Bone Walker showcased similar hot licks in his "Description Blues" and "Alimony Blues." 

The bends to the b5th (Eb) and the true blue note (between C and C#) establish a solid blues tonality. Resolving to the root (A) of the I chord allows us the opportunity to follow with a lick that can chart an entirely new course, which is exactly what we see next.

B.B. King employed a lick like the one shown in Figure 5 in his track "Sweet Little Angel" from Live at the Regal. The bends to the b5th (Eb) and the b7th (G) tantalize our auditory nerves before resolving smoothly to the 4th (D), which is the root of the IV chord.

Any listing of the great blues guitar licks would have to include its fair share of B.B. King-isms, and this one is no exception. Figure 6 is the classic I chord lick, popularized by B.B. on countless tunes, including "Please Love Me," and appropriated globally by blues merchants everywhere. 

The bend of the b7th (G) to the root (A) should be executed with the pinkie, backed up by the ring, middle, and index fingers. Accurate intonation and a steady wide vibrato are paramount to make this bad boy sing.

Figure 7 is the classic Albert King lick. Prominently displayed in "Crosscut Saw" and "Born Under a Bad Sign," it hovers and swoops like bird of prey. Start with your ring finger, using it for the full-step bend and the repeat of the root (A). Use your index finger for the b3rd (C) and the bend and vibrato'd major 3rd (C#).

Breaking free momentarily from the tyranny of the scale, Figure 8 purveys a sliding IV6-to-IV9 chord pattern beloved by the likes of Johnny Moore (who played with Charles Brown in the 1940s) and T-Bone Walker. This particular example, with a root-4th (A–D) dyad thrown in, was used by the underrated Lonnie Mack in "Down and Out." Perform the slide with your index finger, nicking the dyad with your pinkie.

Considered by many to be the first electric guitar hero, Mike Bloomfield favored tangy bends like the one shown in Figure 9 in "Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong" and "I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living."

Bend the b7th (G) of the scale to the root (A) with your ring finger, and hold the bend while you add in the b3rd (C) with your pinkie. The resulting dyad (A–C) provides the 5th and b7th of the IV chord, reinforcing its bluesy, dominant 7th flavor.

B.B. King had been heard tweaking up the tension in his solos with this slippery triplet pattern, shown in Figure 10. The quarter-note bend that begins each beat imparts an elastic feel that is quite captivating. B.B. played this one on "Three O’Clock Blues," and it's entirely possible that Eric Clapton learned it from that breakthrough hit.

The mighty T-Bone cut heads in tunes like "Strolling with Bones" with this powerful diminished chord voicing, shown in Figure 11. Dig that the root (A), b5th (Eb), and b3rd (C) are right out of the A blues scale, while the 6th (F#) hints at the A Mixolydian mode. Low to high, use your index, ring, middle, and pinkie fingers on this chord, and don’t ignore that quarter-step bend.

B.B. flashed a similar climactic lick to this one (Figure 12) in King of Guitar. Start with your index finger, switching to your ring finger for the full-step bend of the 5th (E) to the 6th (F#). 

Walk down the chromatic run (E-Eb-D) with your ring, middle, and index fingers. Articulate the half-step bend with your ring finger. Note the use of Eb as a passing tone between E and D, and the half-step bend from the B to C – neither of these twists belongs to the A blues scale.

B.B. steps up to the plate once more with this lick (Figure 13) in a King’s Special vein. Bend up to the 3rd (C#) with your ring finger, holding it while you play the 5th (E) with your pinkie. Vibrato the root (A) with your index finger like a hummingbird.

Freddie King continues this run (Figure 14) much like the ones to be found in "Torn Down." The use of the b5th (Eb) – played straight on rather than bent up to – is more characteristic of jazz than blues, but the pattern makes for a dandy turnaround lick over the I chord when you want to maintain a scalar approach.

This last lick (Figure 15), probably has its roots in the work of B.B. King, but credit Jimi Hendrix and his version of "Red House" with securing it a spot in the Blues Hall of Fame. 

Make sure that you barre fret 5 with your index finger after the blue note bend at fret 8. Use one continuous upstroke to zip down the run to the 5th (E). Play the root (A) with your ring finger, crossing over it with your middle finger to access the 5th.

Figure 16 presents a very straightforward take on our 12 licks. We’re simply playing them in a row, as presented, with a few slight modifications in rhythm. Try doing the same yourself. 

Remember all of these licks can be moved up or down the fretboard, which means that you can fit them into just about any key. So find a lick or two that you like and practice it up and down the neck.

A 1967 Gibson Flying V played extensively by Albert King is going up for auction.

The first guitar of King's to ever come up for auction, the Flying V was the blues guitar legend's go-to instrument both onstage and in the studio from 1967-1972. Consequently, the guitar powered some of King's best-known recordings, such as “Born Under a Bad Sign” and “I’ll Play the Blues for You.”

Inscribed with the words “Love / you / Albert King,” the guitar was gifted to King by Gibson after his first Flying V, "Lucy," was lost. It is said to be the Flying V that inspired none other than Jimi Hendrix – after he watched King give a particularly ferocious performance – to purchase a V of his own.

King's Flying V will go under the hammer as part of Julien's Auctions' Icons & Idols Trilogy: Rock ’N’ Roll auction, which is scheduled to take place on December 1 and 2.

It's expected to fetch between $300,000 – $500,000.

For more info on the auction, stop by juliensauctions.com.

In the blues - music that, according to Willie Dixon, “tells the truth” - it’s advisable to start with blue notes as opposed to blues notes. The order truly distinguishes the “real deal” of the blues from other forms of music.

As America’s most original art form, the blues results from the glorious commingling of African and Anglo influences. It’s an oversimplification to say that its basic harmony (I–IV–V) comes from Europe and its melody (the blues scale) from Africa, but that’s a start.

The blues scale - perhaps derived from Middle Eastern pentatonic scales, and shown in Figure 1 - appeared initially in the field hollers of slaves. Prominent in this scale are the “blues notes”: the b3rd (Bb), b7th (F) and b5th (Db) [Figure 1B]. These notes give the scale a distinctive dissonance, particularly when played against major chords.

When emancipated blacks switched from banjo to guitar after the Civil War, they eventually began to imitate bluesy vocal swoops by bending the strings. Pioneering blues guitar players became focused on the b3rd and b7th notes [Figure 1C], which they idiosyncratically bent the microtone of a quarter step. 

These “true blue notes” are located in between the b3rd and major 3rd, and between the b7th and major 7th, respectively, and help to produce the profound sound of the blues.

Here we have a few classic licks that feature blue notes. In Figure 2, the bent b3rd (Bb) resolves to the root (G) in measure 1, whereas the bent b7th (F) in measure 2 hangs suspended, creating vibrant musical tension and anticipation. Most blues cats pull down on the b3rd with their index finger and bend the b7th up with their ring finger or pinkie.

In the mid Sixties, master string-bender Albert King regularly squeezed out tart licks similar to the ones in Figure 3. 

Again, the bent b3rd resolves to the root, though placing the root up an octave, on beat 1 of measure 1, gives a feeling of uplift, not finality. The bending of the b3rd on the high E string, followed in measure 2 with resolution to the root on the B string, is an oft-imitated King trademark.

Chicago West Siders Magic Sam, Otis Rush and Buddy Guy favored blue note–laced descending runs, as shown in Figure 4. Dig the less-common b7th bend, with resolution to the root, in measure 2 (4th string), a Freddie King favorite.

Trains figure both lyrically and musically in the blues, and blues guitarists often emulate steam whistles. Dyads like those in Figure 5 - found in Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” - enable this effect. As usual, both the bent b7th and bent b3rd (last half of measure 1) resolve to the root (measure 2).