By the end of the 1980s, Bob Dylan was at a critical juncture in his career. He had journeyed through several years recording Christian-based music, and then, after a handful of poorly received albums, he was at a point of being considered a spent force.

But Dylan’s fortunes would soon turn around. While his foray with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison and Roy Orbison as part of the Traveling Wilburys would set the wheels in motion for a commercial comeback, it would be his teaming with producer Daniel Lanois that would finally reestablish his legendary status. Lanois went on to produce Dylan’s 1989 album Oh Mercy and 1997’s Time Out of Mind, both of which revitalized Dylan’s career and standing within the music community.

“He’s a very dedicated specialist and has a vast knowledge of records,” Lanois recalls today of Dylan. “He knows the records he loves. A lot of them are very old records that go all the way back to Rudy Vallée. [starts singing] ‘Swanee, how I love you, how I love you, my dear old Swanee.’

“I think Bob always appreciated the projection from the artists, the singers of that era, and I believe you can hear it in his tone as well. But it deserves to be said that Bob is not only a master of the word — he’s also a master of phrasing and has a very beautiful deep voice. And so, he’s got a lot of advantages.

“And he likes the sound of all of those records, those vibrant records from the ’50s; the early rock and roll records. And when we worked together, he recommended a bunch of those records for me to listen to. I knew some of them, and it was nice to go back to them and hear what Bob was talking about: the sound of something vibrant and unfolding, where it’s more of a document rather than building a monument.”

The approach can be heard throughout both albums, from the haunted atmosphere of “Man in the Long Black Coat” on Oh Mercy to the stark, late-career masterpiece “Not Dark Yet” on Time Out of Mind, songs that showcase the sense of space, spontaneity and emotional depth Lanois sought to capture in the studio.

To get to the heart and soul of Dylan’s artistry, Lanois worked to document Dylan’s unadulterated live-in-the-studio performances, using recording techniques the producer felt emphasized those vital elements at their best without losing any of the spontaneity.

“All of the vocals from Bob were live vocals,” Lanois says. “I might do a backup, a safety take or two, but largely we used Bob’s vocals off the floor. There’s always that feeling of something unfolding in the room.

“And so, on both of those records, you might be hearing the freshness and the vibrant vocal delivery, though there’s always a few lines that Bob wants to change or repair.

“That was interesting, especially on the first record I made with him, Oh Mercy. We were both playing acoustic guitars, and I decided to go with pickups on the guitars that then fed these little Fender amps hidden in a closet with cushions on them. So, it meant that if Bob was changing the lyrics, I wouldn’t have vocal leakage in the guitar microphone.

“And somebody might say, ‘Well, that’s a shame because you’re not miking a lovely acoustic instrument.’ But there’s something about the more metallic electric-acoustic sound that you can get from pickups. It’s part of the depth of field that shows up on that record, that Bob’s vocal is very vibrant and upfront and the guitars are a little more somber, hidden in the bushes.”

Lanois affirms that when it came to songwriting, Dylan was never satisfied with what he had written and would continue to revise his writing throughout the recording process. “Bob would come back the next day and say, ‘Dan, I think I bettered the lyrics. Let me try another third verse.’”

Dylan was also a creature of habit, preferring to record material in the dead of night, something he believed brought his music a mercurial ambience.

“It’s definitely a different feeling,” Lanois says. “We noticed in the studio that the nighttime defenses are down. Maybe it’s because you’re a little tired and so some of the morning concerns might not be there in the evening. It’s just built in. As the sun disappears, we’re meant to be in the lair rebuilding our strengths, so there’s no doubt the nighttime generally suggests satisfaction with slightly slower tempos.”

Lanois says that having the studio set up in a way that helped foster an environment that allowed Dylan to pursue whatever ideas he had was paramount to the recording process.

“When we hooked up the first time, it was in New Orleans and Bob was on tour, and he had stopped in to see how our sessions were going with the Neville Brothers,” Lanois explains. “We were making a record called Yellow Moon and it was an improvised setup. We were in a beautiful old six-story apartment building and I had the studio on one floor.

“You could think of it more like a traveling show technologically. Everything was on wheels, and at that point we’d gotten pretty good at assembling a studio, a conventional studio, because PA equipment had reached a point where you could have recording-type gear ready to roll. So I took advantage of that and made sure that I had people with me who were used to being on the road, and that worked out very well.”

Lanois says the preparation and expertise meant they could start recording at a moment’s notice, whenever Dylan wanted.

“When Bob and I began working together, we’d already solved all our problems and dealt with sound issues, so we weren’t wasting his time and could enjoy doing it. I’d have Bob’s vocal chain put together, and if he walked in saying, ‘I’m ready,’ we could get to work.”

Dylan’s lyrics are inspired by the feel of a groove, so it was critical for Lanois to create a solid rhythmic bed.

“For the making of Time Out of Mind, Bob wanted me to listen to some great old records. So we listened to those together, and I went as far as building some grooves that were based on those old records,” he recalls.

“I did them in New York with a friend who had a little home studio. We went in there and played along with old rock and roll records — for example Little Walter. And then in the end, we just took Little Walter out and saw what kind of topping we had. We were just doing drums, no harmonic information. My friend played drums and I played percussion.”

Lanois calls the tracks he created “insurance policies.”

“We were making a blues-based record and you don’t want to fall into the blues-band bag,” he explains. “The grooves were something that I could feed to the drummers. I’d send them the rhythmic preparations, and that helped us get to a more unique place.”

Lanois has the utmost respect for Dylan and is very proud of the two albums he produced for him. So does he envisage a possible third album to complete the trilogy at some point in the future?

“I’m not going to predict any kind of future work with Bob,” he says. “He is certainly one of the greats, and we managed to make two records that people are still interested in and talk about. And I think we got to a very soulful place, which I’m very proud of. But in regard to doing another record? Give Bob a call and ask him.”

Although he took influence from George Harrison, as a session player Roger McGuinn had been experimenting with 12-string guitar sounds long before he was captivated by the Beatles and Harrison’s use of the Rickenbacker 360/12.

“I always loved the sound of a 12-string because it sounds like a harpsichord,” he tells Guitar Player. “It's got so many nice overtones in it.”

After catching the Beatles' 1964 movie, A Hard Day’s Night, where Harrison brandished a 12-string Rickenbacker, McGuinn followed suit and picked up his own Rickenbacker, a 370/12. It was with this guitar that McGuinn went on to not only impact the guitar scene via his chiming clean tones but also launch folk-rock as a genre.

The proverbial musical patriarch of the folk-rock era was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song penned by Bob Dylan in 1965, which the Byrds covered and scored a hit with. At the time, McGuinn had no expectations, but when he looks back, he admits the track's importance.

“I'm happy with what we did,” he says. “I think it was innovative. I was trying to tune it for the AM radio audience, and it worked! I look back on it as a happy experience, really.”

As the ’60s progressed, McGuinn and the Byrds would influence the Beatles as well as Harrison, by turning him on to the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds eventually ventured into country, psychedelic rock and the merging of the two. His 12-string was never far from his reach, but he did eschew folk rock for a while.

Recently, though, with his Folk Den project, McGuinn has gotten back to his folk roots in its purest form.

“I just love it,” he says. “It’s historical. It's human history, and real people writing about real things that happened.

It’s something that should not get lost,” he adds. “I compare traditional folk music to Victorian architecture: You don't want to tear down a beautiful Victorian building and put up a steel and glass structure instead, right?”

What initially drew you to the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar?

Well, I’d been playing 12-string acoustic before that. I got into it because of Pete Seeger playing one, and Bob Gibson playing one. And I got into Lead Belly and the folk scene, so I was a 12-string player. Actually, I was a studio musician in New York, doing sessions for 12-string acoustic and five-string banjo for a lot of folk acts, including Judy Collins and Paul Simon.

How big of an influence was George Harrison on you as far as the 12-string electric guitar goes?

We all went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, and copied down notes about what the Beatles were playing: that Ringo played Ludwig drums, Paul had that Höfner violin bass…

And then George came out with the Rickenbacker, which looked like a six-string from the front. They’d condensed the tuning pegs into a six-string format from the front, and they had another six sticking out of the back of the headstock. It was like a classical guitar, with a channeled head.

What did you think of that?

I went, “Wow, I love the sound of that.” I’d heard 12-string sounds on the radio before, like the Searchers and the Seekers — although I learned later that they were playing six-string guitars, but with another guitarist playing octaves, or something like that. But that 12-string sound was something that I loved.

It became very popular after the Byrds had a hit with “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Yeah, after we got the hit, everybody got a Rickenbacker. The Beach Boys had one, Paul Revere & the Raiders had one. It was a new sound in rock and roll, and it came out of England.

You’re also an originator of folk rock. Is it also true that the Beatles were your inspiration for that style?

Yeah! The Beatles had first been a skiffle band called the Quarrymen, and skiffle is a form of folk music. So they were doing chords that were more than one, four and five; they were doing things that were more than subdominant and dominant chords. And they ere doing things in the middle of songs where they got into other minor chords, instead of just playing G, C and D major.

Did you ever talk with them about their influence on folk rock?

No, I never did. But there’s also a theory that the Animals invented folk rock by doing “House of the Rising Sun,” which had been a blues song that Bob Dylan recorded. But I don’t think it's the same, you know?

There’s a story that when the Byrds first heard “Mr. Tambourine Man,” David Crosby said, “The two-four folk beat isn’t going to cut it on radio.” Is that true?

Yeah. I realized when I heard the Beatles that they were onto something — that anything with a four-four beat was going to be a hit. So I rearranged “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

We had a demo that was originally recorded in New York by Bob [Dylan] and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, but Ramblin’ had too much to drink and was out of tune on the demo. [laughs] It actually wasn’t meant to be a demo; it was intended to be released, but Bob didn’t because Ramblin’ was out of tune.

So we got a copy of that, and that’s where we first learned it. And that version was four and a half minutes long, in two-four time, and out of tune.

That’s when Crosby said, “I don’t like it, man. Two-four time is never going to play on the radio.” And besides that, it was too long; radio wouldn’t play anything over two and a half minutes at that point.

Is it true that the Byrds’ manager, Jim Dickson, invited Bob to hear the Byrds rehearse the song? If so, what was his reaction?

Yeah, it was at World Pacific Studios, where we would rehearse. Jim let us come in there, play on the tape machines, and rehearse, and he invited Bob over.

Bob came over, and he was listening to us to this rock-inspired version of the song. I remember I played the song, and Bob said, “What’s that?” I said, “That’s one of your songs, man…”

He didn’t really recognize it, but he did like it and gave us his approval.

Bob was recording Highway 61 Revisited, the album where he really delved into folk rock, around the same time that the Byrds released “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Do you believe you influenced Bob’s rock leanings?

Well, you know, we all come from rock and roll. I was into Elvis and Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. And Bob had played piano in rock and roll bands when he was a kid. So Bob was already there. He already had that in his system.

Your Back from Rio record is perhaps one of the greatest star-studded albums of the ’90s. It’s got Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello, David Crosby and Chris Hillman on it. How did that come about, and how do you look back on it now?

I feel great about it. It’s probably my best commercial release.

It came about because I went on the road with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan in Europe for what was called the Temples in Flames tour.

It was 1987, and we had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune. So I showed the tune to Tom, and he and I sat down and wrote “King of the Hill.” And then, Mike Campbell came in, and he had a four-track cassette studio in a briefcase.

So he recorded a demo of it, and we took that demo, and somehow got it to Arista Records, who signed me to a record deal. And then Tom helped me out with the recording, and so did Elvis and the other Byrds. It was a pretty cool project, and I’m still really happy with how it came out.

You’ve returned to folk music in its purest form with your Folk Den project. What led you back there?

I got concerned that it was going to get lost in the shuffle. All the new folk singers were singer/songwriters, and they weren’t doing the old, traditional songs. If you look at NPR's lists of traditional songs, like, only eight of the top 100 are traditional. So traditional music got kind of swept into the dustbin of history.

Do you see the tide turning to where there’s enough quality traditional folk music out there today?

Well, it depends on where you are. If you go to Scotland, there’s plenty of it. But if you go around the United States, you’re not going to find too much of it. It’s all kind of gone, but I’m doing my bit to keep it going by putting things up.

And it’s all for free. It’s a public service sponsored by UNC, North Carolina. I’ve got over 330 folk songs up there for free download on The Folk Den at mcguinn.com.

Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz isn’t just a concert film—it’s one of rock’s most mythologized final chapters, a farewell show that somehow turned into a permanent monument.

Released in 1978, it documents the Band’s last live performance at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976. The guest list reads like a genre map of American music: Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and more.

But even in a lineup built on legend, one moment still feels slightly out of frame: Neil Diamond walking onstage to perform his 1976 hit “Dry Your Eyes.”

What, exactly, is he doing here?

Reportedly, Diamond was so energized by his performance that he issued a challenge to the next performer, Bob Dylan. Finding the folk-rock bard awaiting his entrance, Diamond stepped offstage and told Dylan, “Top that!”

To which Dylan allegedly replied, “What do I have to do—fall asleep?”

Diamond would later offer his own version of events. But first, it’s worth asking how he ended up on that stage at all.

Held on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, The Last Waltz was intended as the Band’s farewell from touring, following the toll of life on the road and growing internal strain. Guitarist Robbie Robertson decided the group should continue as a studio band, much as the Beatles had done after 1966. The concert would be a final celebration with friends and musical influences.

But almost immediately, its scope began to expand. As the concert’s main architect, Robertson wanted to showcase a wide spectrum of American music — not just contemporary singer-songwriters, but the artists — like Waters — who shaped them.

Robertson wanted Diamond onboard as a representative of New York City's Brill Building tradition and a link to the era of classic American pop songwriting.

Not everyone was convinced the guy behind hits like the Monkees’ “I'm a Believer” belonged on a stage with legends like Dylan and Waters.

Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer, noted that Robertson had just produced Diamond’s album Beautiful Noise, which featured “Dry Your Eyes,” a Diamond-Robertson cowrite. He accused Robertson of self-promotion.

“Robbie called me up and said, ‘Well, Neil is like Tin Pan Alley. That Fifties Brill Building scene, songwriters like Doc Pomus,’” Helm wrote.

“Why don’t we just get Doc Pomus?'” was Helm’s tart reply.

As the show approached and the guest list grew unwieldy, someone suggested cutting Muddy Waters. Helm was furious and threatened to walk.

“I was in a mood,” he wrote. “I snarled, ‘Go tell Robertson to tell Neil Diamond we don’t even know who the fuck he is!’”

In the end, both Waters and Diamond remained on the bill.

And, for the record, Diamond killed it. Strumming an Ovation acoustic, with backing from the Band, he turned his one-song performance into a show-stopping moment.

What happened next is a matter of legend — and debate. It was the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood, one of the evening’s guests, who started the rumor about Diamond challenging Dylan in a 1992 interview with Q magazine.

Asked for the true story by Rolling Stone in 2010, Diamond insisted his encounter with Dylan was all in good fun and took place before he went on, not after.

“He was tuning his guitar and I came over to him and I said, ‘You know, Bob, those are really my people out there,’” Diamond recalled. “He kind of looked at me quizzically.

“I said it as a joke, but I think it spurred him a little bit and he gave a hell of a performance. It was a good night and an exciting night. I was glad to be a part of it.”

Country singer-songwriter Brittney Spencer had not long gotten off the stage in the summer of 2024 when a familiar, but unexpected face poked around the corner of her dressing room.

She was part of the Outlaw Music Festival tour, which boasted the likes of Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan at the top of its stacked bill. Former Led Zeppelin powerhouse vocalist Robert Plant (with Alison Krauss) and John Mellencamp were also part of the tour, which she opened for seven dates in late July and early August.

She'd only released her debut album, My Stupid Life, in January of that year, and so the tour was a huge opportunity for her. But naturally, she never expected to interact with the big-name stars tasked with charging out that septet of gigs. Yet she did. Bob Dylan was her surprise visitor.

Writing on Instagram as she announced her upcoming four-fate run opening for Dylan and Jimmi Vaughan, Spencer reflected on that pinch-me moment.

“Two summers ago, Bob Dylan came into my dressing room after our set at Outlaw and told me he really liked my songs,” she recalls. “He was so detailed about it all that I could actually barely handle it, lol.

“He asked for my number,” she develops. “I wrote it on a napkin and gave it to him. He didn’t call. I think this is his way of calling now, and I’m picking up on the first ring.”

She'll play four consecutive dates, starting in Pittsburgh on July 12, and culminating in Guildford six days later. The shows follow a tour with Martin signature artist, Jason Isbell, and appearances at the CMA and ACM Awards. She’s also played with Bruce Springsteen and Miranda Lambert, with her star in the country world rising fast.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, but Nashville-based for nearly a decade and a half. As a teenager, the Chicks were her gateway into country music.

“They did something that made me really love songs that told stories,” she told DIY in 2024. “I knew I had to find a way of doing that, too.”

Having had a diverse musical upbringing, from singing gospel to going to jazz clubs, she was never going to be purely country. And as a black female artist, she's vying to break down barriers in the genre.

“It's hard, I always feel pushed back being a woman. There's a tension,” she tells the Beyond the Boys Club Podcast. I constantly feel like a black, plus-size woman in Nashville, and it makes me think that who I am has a limit on it and how far I can go.

“But I have to feel hopeful,” she adds. “I’ve got nothing to lose, and if I do make it, that’s an anomaly in itself. I just don’t want it to be.”

Her tour with a legend of the genre, and his backing to boot, will certainly help cast rocks at the glass ceiling. But a wider look at the guitar scene, from Diamond Rowe’s rise to be Jackson’s first black female signature artist, to Fatoumata Diawara becoming the first woman of color to receive an Epiphone signature guitar back in January, shows progress is being made.

Roger McGuinn crafted the quintessential sound of folk rock in 1965 with a Rickenbacker 12-string in hand. The Byrds’ take on Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” became a rallying cry for guitarists caught between the fading days of folk and the British Invasion.

Not long after its release on April 12, 1965 — in the same month Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, his first album to incorporate electric guitar — folk-rock became a force that would bring success to acts like Simon and Garfunkel and Buffalo Springfield.

But no artist defined it quite like McGuinn, with his chiming lines played on a Rickenbacker 360/12 and, later, his signature Rickenbacker 370/12RM. More than a decade later, his sound and style would be kept alive in the hands of new players like R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson, as well as Tom Petty gunslinger Mike Campbell and Petty himself, whose laconic drawl recalled McGuinn’s vocal style.

“The first time I heard Tom was at my manager's house in L.A.,” McGuinn told us. “He had the first Tom Petty album, or a rough of it, and said, ‘Sit down, I have something I want to play for you.’ After hearing it, I said, ‘When did I do that one?’ I was half kidding, because I knew it wasn't me.

“I thought the record was great, so we called Tom's manager and had him come over.”

McGuinn subsequently covered Petty’s “American Girl” on his 1977 album, Thunderbyrd. “After that, we became friends and toured together. He opened up for my act, and then we sang a duet at the Bottom Line and a couple of other places.”

McGuinn weighed in on other guitarists he’s known in his travels from Chicago to New York City to Los Angeles, in a career that’s spanned 60 years and counting.

Mike Bloomfield

“I went to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago when Mike Bloomfield was there. I'd been in the school for about a year before he got there. I was one of the first people to enroll and had progressed up to the advanced class. One day Mike poked me and said, ‘I’m gonna get better than you.’

“Then he emulated a bend, saying, ‘You know that sound, that mmmuimmmmm? How do you get that?’

“So I showed him how to do that — I taught Mike Bloomfield how to bend a string.”

Bob Dylan

“He didn't play electric until after we had. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ came out in the spring of ’65. I met him in the Village in New York. I saw him play hootenannies at Gerde’s Folk City a few times. I said hi to him once. That was about it.

“I think he liked [the Byrds’ version of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’] He said, ‘That‘s cool.’ He came over to the World Pacific studio in L.A., where we were rehearsing. After we played ‘All I Really Want to Do,’ he asked, ‘What was that?’ We changed it so radically that he didn’t recognize it!”

George Harrison

“The management people tried to dress us up like the early Beatles, with suits with velvet collars, but they got ripped off after about two weeks. We were glad to see them go.

“When we met the Beatles, they asked us, ‘How’d you guys get to wear jeans? We had to wear stupid suits.’ We told them about the suits, and they said, ‘Boy, we wish somebody had ripped our suits off.’

“Jim Dickson [the Byrds’ first manager and producer] was working at World Pacific, which was Ravi Shankar’s label. [David] Crosby hung around there all the time, and he'd heard Ravi in the studio. He turned us on to it, and we were all playing it on the 12-string.

“Once we became friends with the Beatles, they would send a limo to bring us to their house in the L.A. hills. One day we all took acid. We were sitting around on the bathroom floor playing guitars, and Crosby started doing all this Indian stuff on his 12-string. George was really interested in it. He‘d never heard it before. Then [the Beatles] went back and really got quite into it. Went wild with the stuff.

“We just jammed at the house. I remember going through early influences with him, and somehow we got on the subject of the very first thing we learned on the guitar. So I played a lead break from Gene Vincent’s ‘Woman Love’ or something like that, and he said, ‘That’s exactly what I learned first!’

“Neither of us learned chords right away; we learned how to pick out lead stuff and got into chords later. It was because we didn’t have any chord books.”

Gram Parsons

“I guess I was kind of tired by then [when Gram Parsons and Clarence White joined the Byrds]. [laughs] Gram was a strong musical force. I just let him go and went along with it because it was fun. I was having a good time with the country thing.

“We went to Nudie’s, the rodeo tailor, and got some country clothes and cowboy hats, and I got a Cadillac. I started listening to country radio and talking with a southern accent [laughs]. It was like Halloween for a long, extended period.

“Sweetheart of the Rodeo was a one-time adventure. I didn’t intend to permanently get into country music. After the album was finished, Chris [Hillman] and Gram wanted to do another country record, and I said, ‘No, no! Wait a minute. That’s enough.’

“They were so upset about it that they started the Flying Burrito Brothers. I really liked the Flying Burrito Brothers, but it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted to play rock and roll.”

Respectability was never the point for Alice Cooper. That doesn’t mean the shock rocker didn’t want the respect of his peers.

With 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies, he finally began to get it, ing admiration from some of rock’s most revered songwriters. No song illustrates that turning point — or Cooper’s growth as a songwriter — better than “Generation Landslide,” a sharp-eyed meditation on how commercialism, money and drugs were eroding traditional American values.

“I see them as the best lyrics I have ever written,” Cooper told rock journalist and Creem cofounder Jaan Uhelszki. “I still, to this day, remember sitting down and writing them as a flow of consciousness in the Canary Islands.

“I was leaning against a wall with a pen and a piece of paper while a big lightning storm went on, and 20 minutes later there it was.”

Billion Dollar Babies is packed with notable musical achievements, several of which are radical reworkings of existing material. “Elected” was a revamped version of the band’s debut single, “Reflected,” rewritten to match Alice’s new persona as a pop-culture provocateur. “No More Mr. Nice Guy” evolved from a song by Cooper guitarist Mike Bruce, reshaped into a pointed origin story for rock’s most notorious antihero. And there was “Hello Hooray,” a transformational take on a 1960s folk song by Canadian songwriter Rolf Kempf that would provide the bombastic overture to Cooper’s electrifying live shows.

“Generation Landslide,” however, was something else entirely: a brand-new creation with a remarkable origin story of its own.

Billion Dollar Babies was written and recorded between tour dates from August 1972 through January 1973. By early November, the band had relocated recording sessions to Morgan Studios in London while continuing to play dates across Europe. The album was nearly finished, but it was still one song short.

Complicating matters, the band had come down with the flu. The solution was to retreat to the Canary Islands for a few days of rest and recovery. While there, the band pulled together “Generation Landslide” during an impromptu rooftop jam at their hotel.

It wasn’t just the last song written for the album; according to drummer Neal Smith, it was “one of the last songs we ever wrote together,” before the group broke up in 1975.

“We went down to the Canary Islands and there was a brand-new hotel being built,” Smith recalled. “We rented the whole top of the hotel, moved in, took our equipment — just enough to set up a little studio and write a song.

“I started playing the drum beat to ‘Generation Landslide,’ Mike joined in, and in a couple of days we’d developed the song. We wrote it as a group and everyone participated. Usually last songs can be filler, but I think that was an incredible song.”

Opening with a descending acoustic guitar figure reminiscent of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” “Generation Landslide” quickly settles into a groove closer to the Who, with slashing electric guitar chords riding atop Smith’s syncopated, almost martial drum pattern. Over that ominous churn, Cooper sneers lyrics that invert the American Dream, pitting parents fighting to survive against a new generation of well-financed children indulging in sex, drugs and greed.

Lyrically, the song invites comparison to Bob Dylan’s work just a few years earlier, recalled the urgent frustrated couplets of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the magical realism of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” As Cooper told Uhelszki, Dylan himself took notice.

“After Billion Dollar Babies came out, even people like Bob Dylan and members of the Beatles started saying nice things about us, which was the final stamp of approval,” he explained. “Dylan loved ‘Generation Landslide,’ and John Lennon’s favorite song for a while was ‘Elected.’ It didn’t get better than that.”

Bass guitarist Dennis Dunaway remembers the moment just as vividly. “It’s my favorite song for many reasons,” he told Uhelszki. “Even Bob Dylan cited the lyrics as being great. We had never seen Bob Dylan compliment anybody’s lyric writing before that.”

The band made several attempts at the song in the studio. One outtake appeared on the 2001 CD reissue of Billion Dollar Babies under the title “Son of Billion Dollar Babies.” Lead guitarist Glen Buxton’s exact contributions remain unclear, given his frequent absences and performance struggles at the time. What’s known is that session ace Steve Hunter played the song’s lead guitar solo.

Hunter — who handled much of the album’s lead work, including pedal steel on “Hello Hooray” — was thrilled to tackle the track.

“It’s well written, has terrific lyrics, some great guitar parts, wonderful performances by everybody, and a very cool vibe,” he told Guitar Player in the January 2016 issue. “I was definitely looking forward to playing a solo on it.”

He and producer Bob Ezrin approached his guitar solos for Cooper with a specific philosophy. “Back in those days, guitar solos were supposed to add to the song in a couple of ways,” Hunter explained. “They had to add to the overall vibe and help move the story along based on what the lyrics were about.”

Before recording, Ezrin made sure Hunter absorbed the song in full. “I would listen to the lyrics, the melody, how the track moved from section to section,” Hunter said. “Often I’d use part of the vocal melody in the solo itself. Bob and I wanted the solo to ‘speak,’ not just fill space.”

Even so, inspiration didn’t come immediately. “After a few passes, we weren’t really happy,” Hunter recalled. “So I asked to listen in the control room — and a little louder than I’d been hearing in my headphones.

“As the song played, the Yardbirds popped into my head. Suddenly I had an approach I hadn’t tried. I ran back into the studio while the idea was still hot, and out came the solo that’s on the record.”

The result, he says, was an unconscious tribute. “It was a little tip of my hat to that great ’60s band and to Mr. Jeff Beck. Inspiration can come from anywhere — you just have to be ready when it hits.”

Despite the band’s affection for the track, “Generation Landslide” was never released as a single, although it did serve as the B-side to “Hello Hooray.”

“There was a general feeling that each of our albums was a little better than the last and that we weren’t just a flash in the pan,” Cooper told Uhelszki. “We kept raising expectations with songs like ‘Eighteen,’ ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Under My Wheels.’

“We were becoming better players, the stage act was getting tighter, and people could relate to the theatrical aspect of what we were doing. There’s a great tradition of show business in America — and we were the rock version of Hollywood. We just tap-danced across the United States.”

The saying “Don’t meet your heroes” is one worth heeding, particularly if you’re in the creative arts. The pure feelings we harbor for artists when they’re afar often become tarnished by exposure to the all-too human qualities they exhibit in person, often to extremes.

Producer Rick Rubin writes in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, “Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.”

Mark Knopfler found out as much when he had a chance to produce his boyhood idol Bob Dylan in 1983. The album he was selected for was Infidels, a record that found Dylan returning to secular music following three albums of songs inspired by his experience as a born-again Christian.

Knopfler had helped out on one of those releases, playing guitar on 1979’s Slow Train Coming, the first disc in Dylan’s “Christian trilogy.” The album arrived shortly after Knopfler’s own ascendency to guitar hero status courtesy of Dire Straits’ 1978 self-titled debut and its hit song, “Sultans of Swing.”

“I was hugely influenced by him about the age of 14 or 15,” Knopfler told Dan Forte in an interview published in Guitar Player’s September 1984 issue. “I heard Bob Dylan from the very beginning, the ‘Hard Rain’ days, and went with him all the way up, and I'm still with him. I still think he's great. Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite records.”

It’s a remarkable sentiment given that Dylan had put the guitarist through the ringer just one year before, while making Infidels. The former folk icon selected Knopfler to produce him after considering and rejecting David Bowie, Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa. Dylan felt inexperienced in the modern recording studio environment and needed someone who was up to speed with technology. His trio of rather bizarre choices suggests he was also looking to make a sea change in his musical approach and sound.

As it turns out, the songwriter had pretty much sewn things up on his own before Knopfler arrived and recording began at the Power Station in New York City, in April 1983. It was the first inkling Knopfler had that he would not be driving the sessions as much as navigating them, guiding the players through Dylan's temperamental fluctuations.

Dylan's choices for band members dictated Infidel’s strong rhythmic vibe and highly polished style. For the rhythm section he hired bass guitarist Robbie Shakespeare and drummer Sly Dunbar, a tandem better known as Sly & Robbie who found fame both as producers and as Island Records recording artists, where they also produced acts like Black Uhuru, Wailing Souls and Grace Jones.

Dylan had likewise selected former Rolling Stones lead guitarist Mick Taylor, possibly before choosing Sly & Robbie. The two had met the previous summer, and Dylan had begun showing him his new songs months before recording began.

Knopfler, for his part, brought in keyboardist Alan Clark and engineer Neil Dorfsman, who had worked on Dire Straits’ 1982 album, Love Over Gold, and Knopfler’s soundtrack for the movie Local Hero. As one of the album’s musicians, as well as its producer, Knopfler was paired with Taylor, who played slide guitar for much of the record.

The result was the sound of two virtuosos lending their fluid electric guitar chops to what many consider to be one of Dylan’s best albums from his later catalog. Combined with the strongly syncopated rhythms of Sly & Robbie, they helped Infidels achieve a remarkable, and successful, shift in style for Dylan, as exemplified by standout tracks like “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “Sweetheart Like You” and the stunning lead track, “Jokerman.”

“I suggested Billy Gibbons, but I don't think Bob had heard of ZZ Top,” Knopfler told Guitar Player. “It would have been great to have done that with Billy.”

As Knopfler would soon find out, working with his hero was anything but smooth. Dorfsman’s recollections of the sessions are vivid and excruciating.

“I don’t want to use the wrong word, here, but Bob was also a little bit of an agent provocateur, or he even had a little saboteur in him,” Dorfsman told Uncut. “If things were going maybe too well, in somebody else’s definition, he would consciously make an effort to make that stop.”

On one session, Dylan took the tinfoil wrapper from the sandwich he’d had for lunch and began flexing it, accordion style, into the microphone. ”It was just his way of saying, ‘I’m bored with this, I don’t want to do this particular song anymore,’” the engineer recalled.

Dylan also announced one night that he wanted to start recording a Christmas album immediately. “We all laughed, thinking, He’s just messing with us,” Dorfsman said. “But, of course, years later, he subsequently came out with a Christmas record. It was kind of intimidating, challenging, but also hilarious in its own crazy way.”

Tasked with keeping the sessions running smoothly, Knopfler found himself frustrated at how differently it was going from what he had initially imagined.

“I know that it really, really bothered Mark, that song choices were dictated a little bit, and were turning out to be different from the song choices he thought we were going in to do,” Dorfsman said. “I could feel the air just sort of going out of Mark a little bit, when he realized that the traditional role of the producer was not going to be in play on this record... I’m sure it was very frustrating to Mark.”

Knopfler admitted as much — albeit with admirable diplomacy — when speaking with Forte for Guitar Player.

“Was it difficult producing Dylan?”

“Yeah. You see people working in different ways, and it's good for you. You have to learn to adapt to the way different people work.

“Yes, it was strange at times with Bob. One of the great parts about production is that it demonstrates to you that you have to be flexible. Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing. You have to be sensitive and flexible, and it's fun.

“I’d say I was more disciplined. But I think Bob is much more disciplined as a writer of lyrics, as a poet. He's an absolute genius. As a singer — absolute genius. But musically, I think it’s a lot more basic. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”

Regardless of the trials he endured, Knopfler maintained his love for Dylan’s work on the album, particularly the song “I and I.” He was particularly moved by the song’s first lines: “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed / Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams / In another lifetime she must have owned the world or been faithfully wed / To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.”

“To hear the first lines of ‘I And I,’ that's enough to make anybody who writes songs want to retire,” Knopfler told GP. “It's stunning.

“Bob's musical ability is limited, in terms of being able to play a guitar or a piano,” he explained. “It's rudimentary, but it doesn't affect his variety, his sense of melody, his singing. It's all there. In fact, some of the things he plays on piano while he's singing are lovely, even though they're rudimentary. That all demonstrates the fact that you don't have to be a great technician.

“It's the same old story: If something is played with soul, that's what's important. My favorite records, by and large, aren't wonderful technical achievements, with the exception perhaps of people like Chet Atkins. But generally speaking, all you've got to do is listen to a Howlin' Wolf album. That's just soul.”

Years after his impressive post-Beatles output, George Harrison found success one more time with the Traveling Wilburys. Featuring a cast that included Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, the supergroup made a splash in 1988 with their debut single, “Handle With Care.”

But as Harrison has revealed, the band took flight spontaneously and out of necessity.

In 1987, the former Beatle was putting the touches on his eleventh studio album, Cloud Nine, his first record since 1982's Gone Troppo. Following that record, the guitarist had taken a step back from the music industry, swapping songs for comedy, as he invested in the comedy troupe Monty Python, a band of creatives who he felt shared parallels with the Beatles.

Given Harrison’s years out of the spotlight, Cloud Nine was a greatly anticipated record from a musician who seemed to thrive outside of the Beatles. But he had one more commitment to fulfill.

“In Europe, they make 12-inch singles, and they usually like them to have an extra song,” Harrison explained to Countdown in 1990. “So they asked me for an extra song, but I didn't have one already recorded.

“The easiest thing to do was go into the studio the next day, write a song quickly, record it, mix it and give it to them.”

His plan quickly became more interesting once he presented it to Lynne.

“That night, I had dinner with Jeff Lynne, who was having dinner with Roy Orbison,” Harrison explains in the video. “And I said, ‘Well, tomorrow I'm going to find a studio and go in someplace, make a tune, and make this record.’ So I said to Jeff, ‘Do you want to come and help?’”

Lynne, who made his name with Electric Light Orchestra’s rock-meets-classical fusion in the mid to late ’70s, was more than happy to get involved.

“So Roy Orbison said, ‘Oh, well, if you do something, call me. I'd like to come along and watch,’” Harrison continued.

All that remained was to find a vacant studio and an engineer.

“Then I thought, Well, Bob Dylan has a little studio in his garage,” Harrison recalled. ”So I called him and said, ‘Do you mind if we come along tomorrow?’”

Like Lynne, Dylan was more than happy to participate. To round things off, the group-to-be’s final member was recruited before the day was done.

“I had to go to Tom Petty’s house to pick up my guitar, which was around his house,” Harrison says. “He said, ‘Oh, good. I'll come. I was wondering what I was going to do tomorrow.”

“The next morning, I started to write a song, and I thought, ‘If Roy Orbison is going to come, it's silly to have him sitting there,. He's a better singer than everybody,’” Harrison adds. “So I wrote a part for Roy to sing, and Jeff thought that was a bit cheeky!”

The half-finished song was completed in the studio, with Lynne taking the lead to make it complete.

As for the title — “Handle With Care” — it came from the words written on a box in Dylan’s garage

It was only when the song was turned over to Harrison’s label, Dark Horse, that it was deemed too good to be a mere B-side. The label had an idea for the hastily assembled group to make an entire album, figuring with so many great songwriters on hand, they could churn something out quickly.

“If we did that one song in one day, all we need is nine days to make an album,” Harrison explains.

As the band grew into the Traveling Wilburys, it also expanded its personnel. Yet, when Petty’s right-hand guitarist Mike Campbell was drafted in to track an electric guitar solo for the song, he requested Harrison cut his own take instead.

Campbell’s solo has never seen the light of day, but thanks to Harrison’s slide guitar playing and the mastery of all involved, “Handle with Care” was an instant success — and the Wilburys went down in history as the luckiest supergroup of all time.

Why are the blues the lingua franca of guitarists everywhere? Why is the 1959 sunburst Les Paul one of the most coveted axes in the universe?

The answer to both questions has a lot to do with guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Though he is often overshadowed by Eric Clapton, Peter Green and other electric blues guitarists who emerged in the mid-1960s, Bloomfield set the pace for the disruptive fervor of that period’s youth revolution with his deep-fried mix of Chicago blues and freak-out frenzy.

The steely urgency of his guitar solos energized the music of groundbreaking artists, including Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Janis Joplin, Al Kooper and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan himself once called Bloomfield “the best guitar player I ever heard.” Many would agree.

Indeed, nothing compares with the purity of Bloomfield’s tone and the edgy fluidity of his style. Unlike other 1960s guitar icons, he never embraced big Marshall stacks, fuzz boxes, or other effects. He was all about the truth of touch, transmitted from an electric guitar down a patch cord to a combo amp.

His fate of being born Caucasian tends to pigeonhole him alongside white bluesmen, like Clapton and Green, but it is really more accurate to think of him as a contemporary and peer of guitarists like Albert King, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush. At one point in the 1970s, when Bloomfield was thinking about quitting music, B.B. King called him up and begged him not to.

Every bit the equal of rock guitar gods like Clapton and Jimmy Page, Bloomfield is nonetheless not as widely celebrated today. This is partially because his career was tragically brief. Though he was open-hearted and absolute in his devotion to the blues, Bloomfield was intense, brilliant and troubled, affirmed by his struggles with insomnia, drugs and a deep-seated discomfort with musical success.

“Mike was irrepressible,” says blues keyboardist Mark Naftalin, Bloomfield’s Butterfield bandmate and lifelong musical collaborator. “You could hardly contain his energy. He was superabundant in every characteristic: extremely emotional, extravagantly intellectual and extraordinarily capable.”

Bloomfield was still a teenager when he started venturing into the sweatbox blues clubs of Chicago’s African-American South Side, reveling in the glory of giants like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and Magic Sam, who were dishing out dirty electric blues to boozy, boisterous crowds.

Soon the young guitar player was venturing onto the stage himself, sitting in with Muddy, Wolf and others at their invitation, hanging with them and becoming very much one of them.

“Michael came up through the real, no-bullshit blues scene,” says Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, another of Bloomfield’s friends and acolytes. “I remember going to some of those blues clubs much later, in 1965, and you needed somebody to go with, otherwise you’d get your ass whipped. Today there are blues bars and people playing the blues everywhere, but Michael was one of the guys spearheading it for us back then.”

The depth of Bloomfield’s authenticity was boundless, and his roots ran deep and in many directions. He went through a folk music phase in the early 1960s, switching to the acoustic guitar, studying assiduously at Chicago’s seminal Old Town School of Folk Music, and becoming quite an accomplished fingerpicker.

He also managed a folk coffeehouse, the Fickle Pickle, where he hosted many of the great acoustic bluesmen. He even recorded with a few of them, including Yank Rachell, Sleepy John Estes and Big Joe Williams. His published memoir of his time with Williams, Me and Big Joe, conveys a sense of Bloomfield’s incredibly hungry eyes and ears.

Bob Dylan 

The early 1960s folk scene was an enormous influence for many great guitarists, singers and songwriters of that period, including Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Jerry Garcia. A common grounding in folk was one source of the incredible musical bond that Bloomfield shared with Bob Dylan.

That connection, in turn, led to the guitarist playing on Dylan’s groundbreaking 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, the performance that really put Bloomfield on the map. The hot-wired frenzy of his Telecaster set fire to the album’s epic, breakthrough radio hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The sound burned itself deep into the tender young minds of incipient rock and pop music fans, many of whom had little or no prior acquaintance with folk, blues or, for that matter, Bob Dylan.

Dylan had made a first foray into electric instrumentation on his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, but Highway 61 Revisited was a total immersion, and he could hardly have chosen a better lead guitarist for the venture than Bloomfield. The two were kindred spirits in many ways: hip, literate Jewish guys from the American Midwest, weaned on folk music, blues and early rock and roll, and drawing on it all to create a new musical idiom that people would soon be calling folk rock.

On keyboards for Highway 61 Revisited was Al Kooper, another up-and-coming young musician, songwriter and producer, who would also go on to play a key role in Bloomfield’s career. But although Dylan had surrounded himself with great players to cut Highway 61 Revisited, the sessions, which took place in the summer of 1965, were directionless.

“You wouldn’t believe what those sessions were like,” Bloomfield later recalled. “There was no concept. No one knew what they wanted to play, no one knew what the music was supposed to sound like other than Bob, who had the chords and the words and the melody... They had the best studio drummer [Bobby Gregg]. They had a bass player, terrific guy, Russ Savakus. It was his first day playing electric bass, and he was scared about that. No one understood nothing.”

Yet, from the freeform chaos, Dylan and his musicians wrested the brilliant razor-blade bite of “Tombstone Blues,” the glorious wreckage of “Queen Jane Approximately” and other marvels of sheer musical and poetic genius. The intensity of Bloomfield’s guitar work beautifully underscored the amphetamine rush of Dylan’s kaleidoscopic lyrical imagery.

Bloomfield’s guitar at the time was a 1964 Fender Telecaster, an instrument ideally suited to cut through the cacophonous sound and carnivalesque poetic fervor of Highway 61 Revisited. Bloomfield was one of the musicians who accompanied Dylan on his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, shortly before the album’s release.

Butterfield Blues Band 

Later, in the first of many curious career moves seemingly calculated to impel him away from major success, he declined Dylan’s offer to go on the road as his touring guitarist. He opted instead to throw his lot in with a new group he’d just joined, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan was a far bigger name at the time, but the Butterfield Blues Band would quickly acquire the kind of underground artistic cred that always meant far more to Bloomfield than fame or money.

Hailed as the first biracial blues group, the Butterfield Blues Band boasted Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm section of Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums, both of whom had also joined Dylan and Bloomfield onstage at Newport. Riding atop this venerable foundation were singer/harmonica ace Paul Butterfield, organ/piano man Naftalin and the guitar duo of Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop.

The band’s eponymous 1965 debut and 1966 follow-up, East-West, were essential items for any mid-1960s hipster’s record collection. Bloomfield’s churning guitar leads on tracks like the minor-key blues “I Got a Mind to Give Up Living” inspired countless guitarists, and his telepathic trade-offs with Butterfield’s harp exemplified ensemble playing at its best.

The Butterfield Blues Band was an early exponent of the blues as a platform for adventurous musical experimentation and improvisation. At the time, neither Hendrix nor Clapton had broken out yet, and Bloomfield satisfied the nascent counterculture’s hunger for a musical hero all its own—someone who had the cred of a jazz virtuoso or streetwise bluesman but who was entirely part of the new music movement coalescing around the hippie scene.

Following a triumphant debut at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966, the Butterfield Blues Band became the toast of San Francisco, ground zero for the new psychedelic rock music and culture. Bloomfield’s work had a profound influence on soon-to-be prominent guitarists, like Carlos Santana and Jorma Kaukonen.

“It was a fabulous band,” Kaukonen says. “They were amazingly tight. The combination of Michael, Elvin and Butterfield was simply incredible and powerful. The music they played.— it was the shit.”

During his tenure with Butterfield, Bloomfield traded his 1964 Telecaster for a goldtop 1956 Gibson Les Paul, an instrument remembered as one of Bloomfield’s iconic guitars. Although he always kept a Telecaster around (he replaced the 1964 with a 1966 model), Bloomfield was heavily associated with Les Pauls from about 1966 onward.

Electric Flag and Super Session 

A mercurial figure in many regards, Bloomfield suddenly and unexpectedly left the Butterfield Blues Band in 1967, saying that he wanted to give Bishop “more space.” Although the group would continue to enjoy success in the late 1960s, things were never quite the same without Bloomfield.

The guitarist’s next venture was to start his own band, the Electric Flag, in 1967 with bassist (and fellow Highway 61 Revisited alumnus) Harvey Brooks, pianist Barry Goldberg, drummer Buddy Miles, singer Nick Gravenites, and a full horn section. Rock bands of the time rarely had horn sections, but Bloomfield took his cue from soul music and the Black end of the blues spectrum.

The Electric Flag got off to an auspicious start with a high-visibility live debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and a spot in the Peter Fonda/Roger Corman counterculture feature film The Trip, for which they also provided the soundtrack.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill as Bloomfield began using heroin, the drug that ultimately killed him. Completion of the Electric Flag’s debut album, the appropriately named A Long Time Comin’, was delayed, and Bloomfield didn’t shine as brightly in this context as he had in the electric blues and folk-rock idioms. Bloomfield had already begun to lose a battle for band leadership to the brash, demonstrative Miles, who would go on to lead his own Buddy Miles Express and perform with Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.

As a result, Bloomfield was kicked out of the Electric Flag shortly after the March 1968 release of A Long Time Comin’. He was bitterly disappointed, but quickly found himself engaged in a new project with his old pal Al Kooper. As it happened, Kooper had himself just been canned from his own group, Blood, Sweat & Tears.

A resourceful producer and A&R man, as well as one of the era’s definitive Hammond B-3/keyboard stylists, Kooper decided to take the “rock musician as jazz hero” conceit to its logical conclusion, arranging a two-day all-star recording session in Los Angeles patterned after a jazz date, with plenty of space for live-in-the-studio jamming. Bloomfield was Kooper’s first choice for the lead guitar role. The ensemble was rounded out by old friends Brooks and Goldberg, along with session drummer Eddie Hoh.

The result was the 1968 release Super Session, one of the most influential albums of the late 1960s. Bloomfield displayed his considerable blues chops on tracks like the Albert King tribute “Albert’s Shuffle” and the slow blues “Really.” Other tracks showed his broad stylistic range to great advantage. “His Holy Modal Majesty” harks back to “East-West” trippiness; “Stop” is a funky Mixolydian workout, and the cover of the Curtis Mayfield song “Man’s Temptation” is an exercise in pure soul.

Surprisingly, Bloomfield played guitar on only five of the original album’s nine tracks. After the first day of recording, he departed without explanation. Kooper has speculated that Bloomfield couldn’t score dope and was unable to cope with his insomnia, leading to his hasty retreat. Fortunately, Kooper quickly recruited Stephen Stills, fresh from the recently disbanded Buffalo Springfield, to finish out the record.

Released on July 22, 1968, Super Session was a hit, peaking at Number 12 on the Billboard 200 and going Gold. The following September, Kooper and Bloomfield reunited for six shows over three nights at the Fillmore West. Once again, Bloomfield’s insomnia kicked in and he bailed midway through the schedule.

Kooper managed to save the shows by bringing in Elvin Bishop and Carlos Santana, who was then relatively unknown beyond the San Francisco music scene. The resulting recordings, issued in 1969 as The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, are loose but lively documents of Bloomfield’s blues mastery.

Gibson Les Paul Years 

The pervasive influence of the Super Session album helped boost interest in the instrument that Bloomfield is seen playing on its cover: a sunburst 1959 Les Paul Standard. Like many players at the time, Bloomfield first became interested in the Les Paul Standard, a.k.a. Burst, through Eric Clapton’s prominent use of it on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album, from 1966. He’d also spent quite a bit of time playing one that belonged to John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful.

Bloomfield acquired his 1959 Standard from guitar dealer/player/luthier Dan Erlewine in 1967, offering his Les Paul goldtop plus 100 bucks in trade. The legendary guitar can be heard on the first Electric Flag album and on both of Bloomfield’s albums with Kooper, among other recordings. His use of the 1959 Les Paul helped to elevate the Burst’s status, particularly among guitarists in the United States. Prior to then, Les Paul goldtops commanded higher prices than sunburst Standards, but by 1967 the market had flipped, and the Burst would go on to become one of the most desirable electric guitars of all time.

Bloomfield ended the 1960s in top form. He scored the radical chic film Medium Cool, worked with Janis Joplin on her album I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! and performed on Chess Records’ all-star Fathers and Sons album with Muddy Waters, blues piano great Otis Spann, Paul Butterfield, Stax bass guitarist Donald “Duck” Dunn, Sam Lay and Buddy Miles. The guitarist also released his first solo album, It’s Not Killing Me, in 1969.

Sadly, Bloomfield’s popularity began to fade as the 1970s wore on. An Electric Flag reunion and the short-lived group KGB both fizzled. He hit a low scoring several “artistic” porn films for San Francisco’s notorious Mitchell Brothers, including Hot Nazis, Rampaging Dental Assistants and Sodom and Gomorrah, in 1974 and 1975. Bloomfield still managed to deliver quality work strewn amid the dross, including 1973’s Triumvirate album with Dr. John and John Hammond, Jr., a handful of albums for the Takoma label, and an instructional album recorded for Guitar Player magazine, If You Love These Blues, Play ’Em as You Please.

During the late 1970s, Bloomfield gigged sporadically around the Bay Area with various incarnations of Mike Bloomfield and Friends, sometimes returning to the acoustic blues and ragtime idioms he had explored in his pre-fame days.

“I worked with him on and off through most of the 1970s,” Naftalin says. “Our work together tapered off quite a bit. He had really gone into not a very good place. I wasn’t gonna follow him there.”

One final scene of triumph was Bloomfield’s gig with Bob Dylan at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater on November 15, 1980. A Mike Bloomfield fan to the very end, Dylan had sought him out and brought him onstage to revisit their mutual moment of glory, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bloomfield played the show in his bedroom slippers. A few months later, on February 15, 1981, Bloomfield was found dead in the front seat of his 1965 Chevrolet Impala. He died from a heroin overdose.

Several days passed before his body was identified and claimed at the city morgue.

“Michael Bloomfield is an important figure in American music,” Kaukonen concludes. “It’s tragic that he died the way he did. He made the blues accessible to a lot of guys like me. He loved life so much. There weren’t enough hours in the day for him to get done all he needed to get done.”

“I don’t want another guitar player. I want him!”

“Those were the nine words that completely changed my life,” Charlie Daniels recalled of Bob Dylan’s proclamation to producer Bob Johnston after hearing the relatively new studio musician play on the first 1969 Nashville Skyline session. “That just about blew my mind when I heard that! It was incredible news to me.

“Dylan’s regular guitarist wasn’t available that day, so Bob [Johnston], who was one of my dearest friends, had contacted me. I was only supposed to stay for one song, but as soon I finished, I was packing up to leave when Dylan asked Bob, ‘Where’s he going?’ and I wound up playing on the whole album.”

The results of those very special sessions include the songs, “I Threw It All Away,” “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” “Country Pie” and “Lay Lady, Lay.” Daniels’ superb musicianship not only led to him being invited to play on Dylan’s next two albums, Self Portrait and New Morning but also brought him studio work with Ringo Starr, Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger, the Marshall Tucker Band and others.

However, Daniels — who died in 2020 — freely admitted, “I realized early on that I wasn’t cut out to be the quintessential studio musician. From the time I was a child, I dreamed of getting up onstage and entertaining people.”

Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on October 28, 1936, Daniels convinced his parents to buy him a cheap guitar while still a child.

“It was an old Kay with a large neck, which was difficult for a kid with small hands to play, and the sound was pretty iffy. The first decent guitar I ever owned, though, was back in the ’50s, when I had my first rock band. It was a Gibson archtop that I used before I switched over to a custom-made Gretsch.

“Nowadays, my main guitar is a limited-edition southern rock version of a Les Paul.”

Taking early inspiration from country music stars like Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff and the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts, Daniels had his first solo success in 1973 with his debut single “Uneasy Rider,” a hilarious tale of a hippie whose car breaks down in front of a redneck bar. After forming the first incarnation of the Charlie Daniels Band the following year, the group hit pay dirt in 1979 with the million-selling Grammy-winning single “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and the accompanying triple-Platinum Million Mile Reflections album.

Overnight, the band went from playing theaters to performing in arenas. Their varied repertoire would eventually include the songs “The South’s Gonna Do It (Again),” “Long-Haired Country Boy,” The Legend of Wooley Swamp,” “Simple Man” and “In America.” But Daniels gratefully acknowledges Bob Dylan for getting the ball rolling. “Dylan was very generous by listing musician credits on those albums I played on when I was still basically unknown, which really raised my profile to a lot of people.”

When did you first become aware of Bob Dylan?

The first thing that really hit me was “Like a Rolling Stone,” which started charting big in ’65, and then the album Highway 61 Revisited, which was produced by Bob Johnston. I was really taken with Dylan because of his uniqueness. He opened up a lot of doors for me, not that I thought I could ever write like Bob Dylan, because nobody else can.

It was the inspiration I got from his freedom that he basically introduced to the record business. You could express your own individual ideas, even if it took you five or even 10 minutes to do it, rather than, say, three minutes and 40 seconds, which was the way singles were released then. You could put words together any way you wanted to, and if it didn’t make sense to anybody but you, that was all right. He had no boundaries to jump across. He had no envelopes to push, and he’s still doing things his way.

How did you happen to move your whole life to Nashville?

It was back in 1967 when Bob Johnston took the place of Don Law, who was a legendary A&R man at Columbia Records who’d worked with a lot of great artists, like Johnny Cash, and who was retiring at the time. I’d always wanted to live there, so I made the move, and Bob started getting me session work.

Before you actually met Dylan, did you have any pre-conceived notions of what he was going to be like?

Personally, I had no watermark to go by, but the press had portrayed him as this reclusive genius. I can’t speak for Dylan, but I think after his [July 29, 1966] motorcycle accident, when he was holed up in Woodstock for a year, he didn’t want to be pestered by the press the way he was before, when it seemed like everyone wanted to interview Bob Dylan.

Did you have a chance to meet Dylan before the first recording session?

Yes, because Bob Johnston had already been his regular producer for a few years by then. They both came into town a little earlier, so I had a chance to hang out with both of them and got to know Dylan a little bit before going into the studio with him. All I can say is that from that very first meeting, he couldn’t have been any nicer.

While sitting in with Dylan and the other musicians for the first time to record, were you feeling nervous and intimidated, knowing that these guys were Nashville’s A-team?

Not at all, because I’d actually worked with some of those guys before. I was totally comfortable, and you know what? They turned out to be some of the most relaxing recording sessions I’ve ever been a part of. There was nothing uptight about it. I mean, I didn’t know what to expect, or what kind of sessions Dylan did, or favored. Whatever it was going to be, I was ready for it.

What do you think you did that impressed Dylan so much that he invited you to stay after the first song?

I knew I was honored to be there, so I made sure I was going to do the very best I knew how to do. I was really into everything Dylan was doing. Every single note that he sang. Every single note he played on his guitar I tried to interpret as best I could, and it worked. Everything was incredibly relaxed. Nothing pushy. There was no, “Do this. Do that. Let’s do that guitar solo over.” It was more, “Hey, what you played on that last song, that was really good!”

It sounds like there was more camaraderie among the musicians than competitiveness.

Exactly. That’s what made it all work. One of the great things was that Dylan left you to do what you felt you did best, and that to me, as far as Nashville Skyline was concerned, was one of the greatest charms of that album. It was pretty much, “Here is the song. Here are the chords.” You just played it through a couple of times and everyone jumped on it and left it up to you to create a part that would work. Everything was very straight-ahead, very music oriented.

What’s the story behind “Nashville Skyline Rag”?

It sounds like all the musicians were really having a blast. Well, Dylan played the acoustic lead guitar on one take. Let’s see, [guitarist] Norman Blake was there. I think Dylan played one take on piano. I played one on the electric guitar. It was just something Dylan wrote and wanted to do. He started playing it. Everybody just fell in, and we cut it.

Any special memories of “Country Pie”?

Mainly coming up with my chicken-pickin’ guitar part that I played on my new Telecaster. The first couple of times I heard the song, it just seemed like my part would fit in, so I started playing it. Dylan also liked it. It was actually Bob Wilson who started off the song with that genius piano lick that you would think would be totally out of character before I came in with my solo.

It was just obvious that this approach was very different from what most musicians had probably done on previous Dylan sessions. This new thing with a couple of new players and me and Bob was gonna work. It was going to be something that he liked and that very much fit the song. So, yes, I remember being very pleased with the guitar part I’d come up with.

Of the nine tracks on Nashville Skyline that you played on, do you have a particular favorite?

I do. The very first time I heard “Lay, Lady, Lay,” I almost fell on the floor because it was a new chord progression. Now it’s been used a lot, but at that particular time I had never heard that arrangement of chords put together in that way. It just floored me. I like the whole album, but if I had to pick a favorite that really blew me away, it would have to be “Lay, Lady, Lay.”

On “Lay, Lady, Lay,” he sounded like he was actually singing to a woman, like it was his love song to her. I mean, there’s a lot of love in that song and a lot of emotion, at least to me. I don’t know if I can describe it any better than that. I don’t think anybody else can describe the way Dylan feels about his own music, but yes, I agree, the song was a real departure for him.

On Nashville Skyline, were the instruments and vocals recorded live in the studio?

There might have been some over-dubbing, but Bob Johnston went to great lengths to minimize any leakage while we were recording. I remember they had the most awful-looking apparatus with foam rubber and tape set up between Dylan’s guitar and where the vocal mic was so they wouldn’t have any trouble recording his guitar and his voice together.

How many sessions did it take for all of the recording to get wrapped up?

Actually, 15 sessions were booked, but we wrapped everything up in about eight or nine of them. We did get paid for all of them though.

Fifty years later, what is your fondest recollection of the album?

It really evokes pretty nice memories of the times I spent working with all of those great people on it. Everyone just playing music and having a great time. I still consider it my all-time favorite Dylan album, and not just because I played on it, or for personal reasons. I like every song on it, the arrangements and just everything about it. All I can say is that working with Dylan was not only a very pleasant experience, it was all straight-forward, very laid back, and really a lot of fun.

When you worked with Dylan again on Self Portrait, was it hard to replicate the vibe of the Nashville Skyline sessions?

Well, it was really a very different kind of thing, but it was still a great vibe. I remember when we were recording the old Everly Brothers hit “Let It Be Me,” and he was playing all the wrong chords: I felt kind-of funny telling that to Bob Dylan, but he just said, “Can you teach them to me?” [laughs] Thinking about it now, I don’t think there was anything unusual about it.

In May 1970, during the New Morning sessions, you, Dylan, George Harrison and drummer Russ Kunkel were involved in a mammoth 10-hour session. How did that come about?

Well, I’d just come to New York with Bob Johnston, who was working for CBS at the time, and he invited me along for some company. We were actually on our way to join up with a Leonard Cohen tour in Amsterdam that I was going to be a part of. So anyway, I’m in my hotel room when Bob calls and says, “Would you like to come down to the studio to play bass with George Harrison, Dylan and Russ Kunkel?”

I said, “Well, sure!” It was a very relaxed day. There was nothing particularly planned. Someone would holler out something like, “Hey, Bob, play ‘Gates of Eden,’ and he would sing as much as he could remember, because it was an old song of his.

It was a highly, highly unusual day, and one I wouldn’t trade for anything. It was a truly memorable experience. [Many songs from the session, including “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “Yesterday,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and “Da Doo Ron Ron,” have been heavily bootlegged. Only a few have been officially released, including “If Not For You,” which appears on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.]

What was it like playing with George Harrison?

I loved it. He was a real sweet guy. You know, sometimes you get around some people who are that famous, and there’s not too much to like, but not with George. I mean, the Beatles, of course, are legendary, and George himself was legendary, but he was just like someone you’d known for a long time, and that’s just really the way we all interacted as musicians.

I understand George actually made you a very special employment offer.

Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about. [laughs] It was actually kind of funny. Paul had just announced to the press that he was leaving the Beatles. As a joking sort of thing, George turns to me and says, in that famous British voice, “Charlie, would you like to be a Beatle…to play bass?” It was a total joke of course, but it was just that kind of session where everybody there was just totally relaxed.

I’m sure you’re familiar with a song George Jones recorded, called “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes?” about some of the musical greats we’ve lost and others we probably will in the near future. So who someday is going to fill the shoes of Charlie Daniels and Bob Dylan?

Those are two pretty iconic names. Well first off, I don’t look at myself as being iconic in the way Bob Dylan is. I wouldn’t put myself in that category. I appreciate if other people think of me that way, but I don’t feel like I’m going to leave a hole in the water that nobody else can close up. If I’ve been a tributary into the river of whatever American music is, and if some people consider me an influence on it, or if they want to build on what I’ve started, then I’m very humbled by that.

For 15 years, John Fogerty refused to play the hits and timeless tunes he wrote and recorded with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Driven by bitterness over the exploitative contracts he had signed and the legal battles with his former label boss, Saul Zaentz, Fogerty turned his back on CCR classics like “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son” and "Proud Mary.” He felt that if he performed them, the enemy would profit, and that was simply intolerable.

His long, self-imposed ban finally ended spontaneously one night in Hollywood — with a little help from Bob Dylan.

The year was 1987 and the location was North Hollywood’s Palomino Club, a revered venue known for its country-rock heritage. Onstage, the acoustic blues legend Taj Mahal was playing an electric set. In the audience, three rock icons were watching him play: George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Fogerty.

“I’d gone there to see Taj Mahal, who I love, and sat down,” Fogerty recalled in a video newly posted to TikTok. “And at some point I heard a rumor that George Harrison was there, that he was in this cloak room. So I went in and talked to George for a little bit.

“Then I heard a rumor that Bob Dylan was somewhere in the room. I didn’t know until later that George and Bob were great friends — they were really tight — and they had arrived together.”

Mahal was aware of the famous guests in attendance, and soon, Fogerty recalls, Harrison and Dylan had joined the performer onstage.

“I’m usually kinda shy, but for some reason [I thought], Man, I hope they have another guitar!” he said with a laugh, recalling the event. “Please call me up there!”

Soon enough, Mahal told Fogerty to come up and join them.

At some point the crowd started calling out for the musicians to play their own tunes. Dylan led the group through “Watching the River Flow,” and Fogerty recalled Harrison playing “Honey Don’t,” a Carl Perkins hit the Beatles recorded in 1964.

“And then the crowd starts, ‘John, John! C’mon! Play ‘Proud Mary’!” he recalls. “And this was during the time that I had sworn off playing my own songs from the Creedence Days because of legal and emotional entanglements.”

Fogerty admits he was feeling “stubborn.” He had avoided this moment for half his career. He wouldn't do it.

But then, standing to his left, the famously reclusive Bob Dylan — a man who himself had often wrestled with audience demands to perform his classic tunes — leaned over to Fogerty.

“He turns to me and he goes, ‘John, if you don’t play ‘Proud Mary,’ everybody’s gonna think it’s a Tina Turner song.’”

The air went out of Fogerty's stubborn resistance. He realized Dylan was absolutely right.

“Proud Mary” had been CCR’s first big hit, a tune Fogerty had written in the throes of an almost mystical inspiration.

“I realized I had just written what you’d call a classic,” he told Guitar Player in 2024, reflecting on the song. “I was awestruck. I was excited, trembling. I was almost scared of it. It was almost as if you’d walked into a room and discovered some amazing treasure and secret. And at that first moment, I was terrified that this might be it, that I would never get to do this again.”

CCR took the tune to number two on the singles chart, the group’s first significant showing there. It was one of the many hits Fogerty composed and released with CCR — and performed with his Fireglo Rickenbacker 325 semi-hollow electric guitar — in 1969.

But it was Ike and Tina Turner’s 1971 rendition of the song that brought it to an entirely new level. Although it didn’t reach the chart heights of CCR’s version (number four was the best it could do), their take on “Proud Mary” was explosive and quickly became a show-stopping number in their concerts.

Turner had made the song her own by opening it with one verse performed at a slow, bluesy pace before launching into a fast funk that got every member of the audience out of their seat. Tina and her trio of background singers, the Ikettes, shimmied in their sparkling mini dresses, while Tina, gyrating furiously, held the spotlight.

By the late 1980s, Turner was a solo artist at the peak of her game, with monster hits and sell-out shows where “Proud Mary” remained a centerpiece. Fogerty was enjoying a resurgence of his own with his hit album Centerfield.

But Dylan’s logic was — as Fogerty would later admit — “irrefutable.” No one was talking about the original “Proud Mary.” Tina Turner owned it now.

Stunned by Dylan’s argument, Fogerty finally gave in. He looked out at the cheering audience, looked back at his fellow legends onstage, and with a laugh and a profound sense of release, introduced the song with a grin.

“We’re going to do this because Bob Dylan asked me to,” he stammered. “Holy mackerel!”

“Proud Mary" erupted from the stage, performed by its author for the first time in 15 years. It was a joyous, cathartic moment, and according to Fogerty, he had a “great time” playing his own work again.

While Fogerty didn't immediately embrace his CCR catalog, this impromptu jam session — spurred by Dylan’s insightful comment — was the moment the dam broke. Afterward, Fogerty began the long process of reclaiming his musical legacy for himself and his fans.

The event would go down in history for another reason. Soon after, Harrison and Dylan formed the Traveling Wilburys with Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. The Palomino quartet became known as the Silver Wilburys, a nod to the Silver Beatles, the embryonic precursor to the Beatles that featured Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was very bizarre.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan hasn’t been shy about picking fights with his fellow artists. Over the years he’s had beefs with Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, “American Pie” songwriter Don McLean, and even John Lennon, who he felt had copied his musical style on at least one too many occasions.

But one group in particular got his ire in the late 1970s, after the born-again Dylan began writing almost exclusively on Christian themes. From roughly 1979 to 1981, he explored evangelical Christianity in the music for his three-album "gospel trilogy," which consists of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love.

Around the same time, the Satanic Panic was brewing. It would come to full force in the 1980s as moral outrage over alleged cases of Satanic ritual abuse spread through the U.S. In the lead-up to it, Kiss were singled out for supposedly encouraging satanism, largely thanks to the long-standing rumor that their name — which the band spelled in all caps, like an acronym — stood for Knights in Satan’s Service, something which the band denied for years.

Apparently Dylan never got the memo. While performing in Arizona in 1979, he became fed up when the unruly crowd began calling out for his more popular, secular tunes. When one of them yelled out “rock and roll!,” the folksinger used the occasion to provide a bit of spiritual advice.

“If you want rock and roll, you go down and rock and roll,” he said according to the Portland Mercury. “You can go and see Kiss and you can rock and roll all the way down to the pit.”

What was especially odd about Dylan’s remark was that he had himself claimed to take a cue from the band to paint his face white for some shows on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975 and 1976.

In Martin Scorsese's 2019 Netflix documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue, he said the revue’s violinist, Scarlet Rivera, took him to see the group perform in Queens. But Dylan didn’t meet her until 1975, by which point Kiss were famous and no longer playing clubs. Most likely it was all a fabrication made in jest.

Whatever the case, Dylan’s acknowledgement of the group certainly pleased its bass guitar player, Gene Simmons. A longtime admirer of Dylan, he was thrilled to have the folk icon acknowledge his group.

Years later, in 1991, while Dylan was in-between projects, Simmons decided to test his luck and see if the singer would write a song with him.

“Everybody buys lottery tickets. What are their chances of winning? Not much,” Simmons explained to The Pulse of Radio. “So what? There is a chance you can win, and I’m like that.

“So I called his manager: ‘Can I speak with Bob?’

“‘What do you wanna talk to him about?’

“‘I… I wanna write a song with Bob.’”

To Simmons’ surprise, Dylan was game.

“And all of a sudden, within two days, an unmarked van shows up at my house, and Bob gets out with an acoustic guitar in his hand, and tells his driver, ‘I’ll see you at the end of the day,’ comes up, and we start strumming. I mean, it was just like that.”

Simmons was thrilled, but he decided to save the song — “Waiting for the Morning Light” — for himself rather than give it to Kiss. It finally came out in 2004 on Simmons’ second solo album, Asshole.

“Bob came up with the chords, most of them, and then I took it and wrote lyrics, melody, the rest of it,” he explained. “We understood each other right away. He picked up an acoustic guitar, and we just tossed it back and forth: ‘How ’bout this, how ’bout that?’

“And he started to strum, because he — at least with me — tended to talk and strum guitar at the same time. And as soon as I heard the first three or four chords, I went, ‘Wait, wait, what’s that? Do that again.’ So I went and started to write a lyric around that.”

A second song from that session, “Na, Na, Na, Na,” was released later on 2017's Gene Simmons Vault, a collection of his demos from 1966. to 2016.

Oddly, shortly after the release of Asshole, Simmons found himself in a new feud with another unlikely adversary: Carlos Santana. The spiritual guru of guitar took issue not with Kiss but with the bassist himself.

“He's not a musician, he's an entertainer,” the guitarist declared. “A musician is Coltrane, Bob Marley. Kiss is Las Vegas entertainment, so he wouldn't know what music is anyway. That's why he wears all that stuff.

“Simmons hides his talent beneath costumes and makeup. A musician doesn’t need the mask or the mascara. There’s a difference between an entertainer and a musician.”

In response, Simmons would say only, “Not everyone likes the same meal.”

But the words stung, and four years later, he shot back during an interview for Kiss’s then-new Sonic Boom album.

"It's time for us to go out and show the little boys how the big boys do it," the bassist declared. "I'm sick and tired of these bands like Carlos Santana looking at his shoes and thinking that's a rock concert. Get off the stage!"

Unlike Dylan, Santana probably won’t be getting a request to collaborate with Simmons.

With the Byrds, Roger McGuinn gifted us chiming electric 12-string anthems like “Turn, Turn, Turn,” riff-laden cuts like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and proto-country-rock classics like Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Beyond that, there’s his appearance alongside Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue, wild LSD trips with John Lennon and George Harrison, and notable collaborations with Tom Petty, not to mention his profound influence over Petty and his partner in crime, Mike Campbell.

All of this is to say that McGuinn isn’t just an unassuming electric and acoustic guitar (and banjo) hero — he’s also lived one hell of an eventful life. It was with that in mind that McGuinn dialed in with Guitar Player to peel back the curtain on his relationships with his early mentor, the 1960s singer Bobby Darin, as well as David Crosby, Lennon and Harrison, Dylan, Petty and Campbell.

Bobby Darin 

“I first met him at the Crescendo Club, where he offered me a job. I took it because I was looking to, well, actually, Barry Maguire [“Eve of Destruction”] had invited me to be part of the New Christie Minstrels, and I got my picture taken with them on the cover of TV Guide with the band. But I told Bobby that, and he said, ‘Nah, that’s a bad idea. That’s too big a group. You’ll get buried in a group that size.’

“Bobby offered me twice as much, so I took the gig and stayed with him for about a year and a half. Then he quit performing for a while, moved to New York, and became a songwriter in the Brill Building.

“But he was a mentor to me. I followed him around, and I used to ask him questions about the music business, and I told him I’d like to get into the movies. He came up with a script from [American actor and director] Jackie Cooper at one point, and it turned out to be something I didn’t want to do. But I did move to New York, and I became a studio musician at that point.

“But the script from Jackie Cooper was about a banjo player. I said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ And then, I read the whole script, and it was about a banjo player. Bobby had remembered that I wanted to get into a movie, so he wrote this movie for me to be the lead in, but it was about a heroin addict. [laughs]

“I said, ‘Oh, Bobby, I don’t think I can do this,’ so I turned him down. I never did a movie with or for anybody. I didn’t work in Hollywood, but I’m still a banjo player.

“Bobby was a boss. It wasn’t like a friendly, ‘we’re buddies’ relationship. But he was kind and mentored me. He really cared about my growth as a musician and artist. I was with him the night he discovered Wayne Newton [the famed Las Vegas singer, known for his signature hit “Danke Schoen”].

“We were in Vegas, had a show in the main showroom, and were walking around the casino. Around the corner was the lounge where the acts who don’t play in the main room perform. And it was the Newton Brothers [Wayne and Jerry]. Bobby saw Wayne, and said, ‘Him. I’m gonna sign him.’ And he did.”

David Crosby

“He taught me how to drive. [laughs] I didn’t drive when I lived in Chicago — and this is 1960 — while I was working with [the folk group] the Limeliters. But after I left Chicago, David had this old Chevy convertible with four-inch seat belts that he got out of a DC-3. You know, he was really into safety.

“So he taught me how to drive in that. And with a good sense of humor, he took me to the corner of La Cienega and Sunset with a stick shift, and I wasn’t familiar with clutching and putting the thing in first gear and getting around the corner, but I did it.

“But in the Byrds, I think for the vocals, he was definitely important. And guitar-wise, he was a good rhythm player, but he didn’t play any lead, and I didn’t like his songwriting all that much. It was different from what we wanted to do. So I’d say his vocals were the main asset.

“And he and I were friends. I met him in 1960, and then, when we were getting the Byrds together, we were still friendly and having a good time. But tensions rose when people were getting songs on the record and other people weren’t.

“It became difficult. I think the final blow to me was when he said, ‘You guys are not good enough musicians to be playing with me.’ I didn’t think it was right, so Chris [Hillman] said, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of David.’ I agreed, and we went up and asked him to leave, and that was that. But we did him a big favor because he got into a ‘better’ band after that with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.”

John Lennon and George Harrison

“I first met them in London in late ’65 or ’66. They were all really friendly, and they just loved the Byrds. We were having a great time together, and so I maintained a friendly relationship with all of them. I don’t think there was a rivalry. We were all friends. I don’t remember being rivals with the Beatles, or anybody! And the Bible says to seek one’s own glory is not glory, so I don’t think like that.

“But they were inspirational. Everybody I ever ran into inspired me to do something. I did take acid with them in Laurel Canyon, but my first LSD experience was in San Francisco in 1960, when it was still legal. The acid came from the Sandos Labs. It was on a sugar cube wrapped in aluminum foil and cost $10. [laughs] I was living in a commune in Russian Hill. That was my first acid experience.

“But when we and the Beatles took it in Laurel Canyon, I don’t think it really helped anything musically. It just got you high. [laughs] For me, it was just recreational. But I quit doing it because I had a bad trip. It was iffy. You could have a really fun time or a really bad time.

“I remember, later on, when Paul McCartney was playing at the Forum in LA. It was sold out, and I called up the Forum, and somebody backstage picked up the phone. I said, ‘This is Roger McGuinn from the Byrds.’ He got Paul, and Paul said, ‘Oh, come on down. I’ll get you in!’ So we were friendly.

“And I remember back during John Lennon’s Lost Weekend in LA, with Harry Nilsson. I was at the Record Plant. They were in one of the studios, and I walked by, and they invited me in. I played with them. I said, ‘You know, I didn’t fill out a W-4 form…’ [laughs] I just did it for old times’ sake, just to be friendly. John said, ‘Well, you’re the only one…’ I think that was the last time I talked to John.

“And then George I saw quite often when he was hanging out with Tom [Petty] at his house. We talked about guitars and stuff, and George really got into the ukulele and gave one or two to Tom. They’d be playing it, and we all really had a good time. We were just all hanging out and being friends.”

Bob Dylan 

“Bob and I were neighbors in Malibu. He used to come over to my house, and he liked my house! I remember I was on the road, and I’d just bought this house in Malibu, and I got a call from my real estate agent, and she said, ‘I’ve got Bob Dylan here. He wants to talk to you.’

“Bob got on the line, and he said, ‘I want to buy your house.’

“I said, ‘Well, I just bought it, man. I wanna keep it. I love it.’ [laughs] He would come over to my house, and I don’t know if he wanted to see me or the house, you know? [laughs]

“But he’d come over, and we’d play pool. At one point he saw a basketball hoop out in the back, and he asked me if I had a basketball. I didn’t, but I got one the next day.

“So we we’re playing basketball in the back by the carport, and he said, ‘I want to do something different.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, man?’ He said, ‘I don’t know… like a circus.’

“And that’s what the Rolling Thunder Revue was. I got to New York, and I saw him again, and he invited me on the Rolling Thunder tour, and that was how that worked.

“If you’ve ever seen The Big Bang Theory, Bob is like Sheldon. [laughs] It’s like… he’s out there. He thinks in abstractions. And social graces are different. He doesn’t really have a conversation with you; he talks in abstractions a lot. I love the guy like a brother. But… he’s a little… challenging to have a friendship with.

“So he likes me at times. [laughs] He goes hot and cold. He liked me when we were hanging out together in Malibu. He liked me on the Rolling Thunder tour. He liked me when I did the 30th anniversary thing at Madison Square Garden with him. He was happy about my performance at that. I remember he told Tom Petty and George Harrison, ‘Wow, Roger really stole the show!’ He was very positive about that.

“So I know he’s liked me at times. I love the guy. And I loved performing with him. I loved singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ with him.”

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell 

“I met Tom in 1976, when I was getting ready to do an album for Columbia Records. I had most of the songs ready to go, but I needed a couple of extra songs to fill it out. And my manager was around the corner playing records and tapes, and I couldn’t see what he was putting on. And he put ‘American Girl.’

“I said, ‘When did I record that?’ [laughs] And he said, ‘It isn’t you!’ And I said, ‘I know. It’s a great song. Who is it?’

“And he said, ‘It’s this new guy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.’ I said, ‘I want to meet him.’

“So the next day they arranged a meeting, and I got to meet Tom. We became friends, and I invited them to come to New York to play at the Bottom Line with me. We remained really good friends until his death.

“And I was honored because when I read Mike Campbell’s book [the 2024 memoir Heartbreaker]: There was one point where he was talking about playing like Roger McGuinn. I thought that was fun, you know? Mike’s a good friend, too, and I congratulated him on a really fun book to read. It brought back a lot of good memories.

“But Tom was great. He was very gracious, very kind, and a friendly person. Some of my favorite memories are hanging out with him and George Harrison at his house in L.A. and just jamming. It was great working with him on [McGuinn’s 1991 album] Back From Rio. And the way that came about was a direct result of being on the Temples and Flames tour in Europe with Tom and Bob.

“We had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune, but I didn’t have any words for it. I showed the tune to Tom, and he liked it, and we sat there in the hotel room and wrote down ‘King of the Hill.’ And Mike Campbell had a four-track cassette recorder — a little kind of mini studio in a briefcase — so he came into the hotel room and recorded the demo of ‘King of the Hill.’

“That somehow got to Clive Davis, and they gave us a record deal, so it came out of that. Tom was a great songwriter. He described it as being from outer space. He didn’t want to investigate it too hard because he thought it might go away. I’ve had that, too. Some songwriters say that it comes from maybe from God, where you’re just getting the Holy Spirit telling you to write stuff.”

There have been plenty of singers who sound like Bob Dylan, whether they intended to or not. Bruce Springsteen has channeled Dylan’s singing-talking style throughout his career, and Mark Knopfler has had the folk-poet’s gruff hipster inflection down since he recorded “The Sultans of Swing” with Dire Straits.

Tom Petty, Dylan’s friend and cohort in the Travelin’ Wilbury’s, could nail the higher end of Dylan’s vocal style, with his pinched and slightly flat way of launching the words out of his throat.

But the best mimic of all might be Gerry Rafferty, whose laconic delivery on the 1972 Stealer’s Wheel hit “Stuck in the Middle With You” left many convinced it was a Dylan song. With its steady strummed acoustic guitars and slinky slide lines, it sounds like a track that might have come out of the folk icon’s late-’60s/early ’70s period.

Considering all the above, how is it possible Bob Dylan got his nose out of joint over Neil Young’s plaintive vocals on a classic hit from Harvest, his 1972 acoustic folk turn?

The song was question: “Heart of Gold,” Young’s sole number one U.S. single.

Asked by Spin magazine if he disliked hearing others imitate his unmistakable style, Dylan didn’t hesitate.

“The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72, and the big song at the time was ‘Heart of Gold’,” Dylan replied.

“I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to ‘Heart of Gold.’ I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, ‘That’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.’”

A singer’s voice is their signature, and Dylan’s is like no other. So it figures that it bothered Dylan so much — enough that he spoke about it publicly.

But is it possible that he was so irked by Young’s song that he wrote a tune in response?

That’s what Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin claimed in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone. If Heylin is correct, then Dylan’s “Forever Young” is his rebuttal to Young’s “Heart of Gold.”

“Dylan’s saying he’s forever Young, which is a dig at Neil for imitating Dylan,” Heylin suggested.

The timing almost seems to work. “Heart of Gold” came out in January 1972; Dylan first demoed “Forever Young” in June 1973 while in New York City. A year and a half seems a bit long for to harbor a grudge, but if Dylan did write it as a riposte, perhaps he ultimately decided the song was too good to leave buried in his back pages.

For the record, both men are friends and fans of each other’s work. Young spoke warmly of Dylan in a 2005 interview with Time, saying, “He’s the master. If I’d like to be anyone, it’s him. And he’s a great writer, true to his music and done what he feels is the right thing to do for years and years and years.”

Then again, he owed it to Dylan, who gave Young the honor of appearing in one of his songs, “Highlands,” from 1997: “Well, my heart’s in the Highlands / I can only get there one step at a time / I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound.”

Young repaid the favor again a few years later in “Flags of Freedom,” writing, “Their bond is everlasting / Listening to Bob Dylan singin’ / In 1963 / Watchin’ the flags of freedom flying.”

Speaking of Young, he recently revealed that he found and purchased the Gretsch 6120 electric he played years ago in Winnipeg with his first group, the Squires. He was aided in his search by Randy Bachman, his pal from his youth, and the internet sleuth who helped the Guess Who/BTO guitarist find his own Gretsch 6120 that was stolen in the 1970s.

“If Dylan hadn’t said some of the things he did, nobody else was going to say them,” George Harrison once noted of the folk-rock icon. “Can you imagine what a world it would be if we didn’t have a Bob Dylan? It would be awful.”

At the very least, a world without Dylan would have made a poorer existence for Harrison. While much is made of his long and complicated friendship with Eric Clapton — one that saw them duel with guitars for the hand of Pattie Boyd — Harrison’s relationship with Dylan was something approaching a spiritual connection.

Harrison had first heard the folk icon while the Beatles were in Paris in 1964, after a DJ gave a copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney. All four of the Fabs fell in love with the album, which included classic tracks like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

“He was doing what everybody else tried to do after him — saying whatever he wanted to say in song,” Harrison wrote of Dylan in his 1980 autobiography, I Me Mine.

The Beatles and Dylan met later that year, in August, while the group was performing in New York. Although, initially, Lennon bonded with Dylan more closely than the others, Harrison’s quiet nature resonated with the folk guitarist’s reserved personality. Harrison later told Rolling Stone that Dylan “was like me in many ways, a bit of a loner.”

Dylan felt the connection too. Unlike Lennon, Harrison wasn’t copying his music or sartorial style. Dylan also seemed to sense that Harrison wasn’t getting his due in the group, where his songwriting talents were overshadowed by Lennon’s and McCartney’s.

“George got stuck with being the Beatle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney,” Dylan noted to Rolling Stone. “Well, who wouldn’t get stuck?

“If George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he’d have been probably just as big as anybody.”

From the start, Harrison had been the odd man out in the Beatles. The youngest member of the group, he stood in the creative shadow of Lennon and McCartney, whose songwriting talents outshone his own.

His embrace of the sitar in late 1965 was the first sign that Harrison was a stray among the flock. His attempts to learn the instrument marked the start of his journey away from guitar. Between late 1966 and the summer of 1968 he studied the instrument with sitar master Ravi Shankar, and only picked up the guitar when required for recording.

His long walk back to the instrument began in June 1968, while he was in California filming Shankar for Raga, the 1971 movie about the sitarist released by Apple Films. Despite two years of rigorous sitar study, Harrison realized he would never come close to mastering the instrument.

Flying home to England, he made a stop in New York City, where, by coincidence, he happened upon his pal Clapton and the guitarist who had come to define everything that rock guitar was in 1968: “I checked in the hotel in New York,” Harrison wrote. “Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton happened to be staying there.”

Enjoying the familiarity of his fellow guitarists, it seemed to Harrison that he had at last found a place where he fit in, and where he was accepted as an individual, not as a Beatle.

“I thought, Well, maybe I’m better off to get back into being a guitar player, songwriter, whatever I’m supposed to be,” he recalled. “Because I’m never gonna be a sitar player. Because I’ve seen a thousand sitar players in India who are twice as better than I’ll ever be!”

But Harrison was still insecure about his contributions to the Beatles, and the growing creative tensions within the group were fraying his nerves. That September, seeking the companionship he’d enjoyed with Hendrix and Clapton, he invited Clapton to perform the lead electric guitar parts on the Beatles’ recording of his song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” one of four songs he had on the group's 1968 White Album. It was the first time any of the Beatles had dared to make a move without the approval of the others.

But his sense of confidence was about to get a huge boost. In November, Dylan invited him to spend Thanksgiving in Woodstock with him and the Band, the Canadian-American roots group that had briefly served as his backup band. Harrison eagerly accepted. Beyond his love for Dylan's music, he, like Clapton, was taken by the fluid electric lead guitar work of the Band’s guitarist, Robbie Robertson, which approximated the sound of slide guitar.

It was there, in Woodstock, that Harrison and Dylan made their lifetime connection during a visit that lasted several days. But in spite of their familiarity, things didn’t begin smoothly.

“I was hanging out at his house, with him, [his wife] Sara and his kids,” he wrote in I Me Mine. “He seemed very nervous and I felt a little uncomfortable — it seemed strange, especially as he was in his own home.

Around the third day, he wrote, “we got the guitars out, and then things loosened up.” Harrison encouraged his host to give him some lyrics, something along the lines of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” his rapid-fire proto-rap 1965 folk-rock tune.

“I was saying to him, ‘Write me some words,’ and thinking of all this: Johnnie‘s in the basement, mixing up the medicine type of thing, and he was saying, ‘Show me some chords, how do you get those tunes?’”

Before too long, they were composing the music and words to their first of two songs: “I'd Have You Anytime.”

“I started playing chords, like major sevenths, diminisheds and augmenteds,” Harrison wrote, “and the song appeared as I played the opening chord and then moved the chord shape up the guitar neck. The first thing I thought was: Let me in here / I know I’ve been here / Let me into your heart.

“I was saying to Bob, ‘Come on, write some words.’ He wrote the bridge: ‘All I have is yours / All you see is mine / And I’m glad to hold you in my arms / I’d have you anytime.’

“Beautiful! — and that was that.”

Years later, in Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, his wife, Olivia, said he was “talking directly to Bob” in the song.

“He’d seen Bob, and then he’d seen Bob another time, and he didn’t seem as open. And so that was his way of saying, ‘Let me in here, let me into your heart.’

“And he was very unabashed and romantic about it in a sense. I found that he had these love relationships with his friends. He loved them.”

Warmed by his experience in Woodstock, Harrison returned to England with a new sense of purpose and confidence. It was not lost on Harrison that, by writing with Dylan, he had achieved something his Dylan-loving bandmates had not.

Roughly a month later, in early January 1969, as the Beatles got to work recording Let It Be, Harrison began to assert himself for the first time. Unhappy with McCartney’s bossiness and the sour mood of the sessions, on January 10, he walked out and briefly quit the group.

Harrison’s departure was a wake-up call to the others. Almost immediately afterward, Lennon and McCartney had a discussion about how they had disregarded his musical contributions for years. When Harrison returned, he had a new sense of purpose and self-assuredness, which became apparent with the recording of the group's final album, 1969's Abbey Road. Among its many tracks, Harrison's — "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" — stand out as two of its finest.

That fact wasn't lost on his bandmates. In September 1969, Lennon put forth a proposal that would have given himself, McCartney and Harrison four songs apiece on any future Beatles album. Given what had transpired in the past, it was a remarkable show of equity, although unfortunately, one that came too late.

“Quirky.” That’s the word singer Rita Coolidge chooses when talking about Bob Dylan.

The folk legend has baffled many of his collaborators over the years. Former Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell recalls Dylan’s confusion over drum machines, remarking, “It won't follow me? What good is it?” Folk-rocker Roger McGuinn remembers how the guitarist fought to have his name taken off their co-write “Ballad of Easy Rider” because he was disappointed to discover the movie wasn’t the low-budget B-movie he had assumed it was.

Coolidge discovered Dylan’s temperamental nature for herself when she was singing backing vocals on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He composed the acoustic guitar–driven hit for the 1973 Sam Peckinpah western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which starred Dylan alongside singer-songwriter — and Coolidge’s future husband — Kris Kristofferson in the part of Billy the Kid. Coolidge had the small role of Maria.

She first met Dylan and his wife, Sara, on the movie’s set in Mexico City. Like many others, she found his ways a little odd.

“Bob would go into the wardrobe truck and decide which hat he was going to wear that day,” she told the Church Studio. “And then, for the next scene, if he was able to get another hat, he would.

“He had a thing.

“One day, I was at the house. Sara said, ‘Let me show you something.’ She opened the door and the closet was stacked this high with hats.

“So Bob was wearing his hats home. He'd go to work the next morning and Peckinpah would go, ‘Where's the hat you had last night?’ ‘Don't have it anymore.’

“They were all in his closet.”

In addition to acting in the film, Dylan wrote its score and songs, which included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Coolidge was among the background singers on the track and recalls Dylan’s habit of making changes on the fly without alerting anyone.

“We’re trying to sing background with him, but he kept changing the lyrics,” she recalls. “So we'd get to the part where we're supposed to be singing with him — he's singing something else.

“He did that once at a Christmas party, or a New Year's Eve party,” she adds. “He was playing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ and he kept rewriting lyrics, and everybody's trying to sing along. He's like, ‘No way, that's not the way I'm doing it tonight.’

“He’s a quirky guy.”

Consisting of just two short verses and a refrain, and lasting all of two and a half minutes, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” speaks directly to the scene for which it was written, showing the death of a frontier lawman, played by movie western actor Slim Pickens.

With its stark lyrics and bare-bones structure — the chords and melody are virtually the same from one line to the next — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was a beguiling tune with a strong spiritual bent at a time when evangelicalism and the spiritual movement were growing. The tune became a global hit and is notable as one of Dylan’s most famous post-1960s songs. It’s been covered by many artists, including Eric Clapton, Randy Crawford and, most famously, Guns N’ Roses, who gave the acoustic-rock classic an electric update.

Coolidge — who inspired Leon Russell to write Joe Cocker’s hit song “Delta Lady” — has certainly worked with her fill of unpredictable musicians. Kristofferson, with whom she released three albums, once famously landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s Nashville yard around 1969 just to hand him his demo tape. Coolidge was also both mystified and angered when Eric Clapton used her song “Time” — which she wrote with drummer Jim Gordon — as the piano coda for the Derek and the Dominos hit “Layla,” without giving her credit. She’s continue to crusade for a co-write on social media and in interviews.

Bob Dylan’s transformation from acoustic folk singer to electric folk-rocker dismayed his hardcore folk fans in 1965. But one folkie who never cared for Dylan’s music suddenly took notice of what he was he was doing. And he liked it.

Jerry Garcia was a folkie in the early 1960s, but his preference was for traditional bluegrass, not the topical folk that was Dylan’s standard in his early years.

Ironically, it was when Dylan went electric that Garcia and his Grateful Dead bandmates — then performing as the Warlocks — took notice of him. The album that made them a convert was Dylan’s 1965 release Bringing It All Back Home.

“Before that, I was too much of a folkie to really like what he did,” Garcia reveals in a video interview recently uploaded to the Grateful Dead’s YouTube channel. “I was not that much into his topical songs. I didn’t really like the sound of his voice that much.

“But Bringing It All Back Home had some moments of real amazing poetic beauty and just the sound of the instruments on it and on some of the tracks was just gorgeous.

“I thought ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was one of the prettiest things I’d ever heard, and as soon as I heard it I immediately wanted to perform the song. That was when his songs started speaking to what the freak on the street was experiencing.”

Garcia would go on to praise Dylan’s early electric albums, include 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, as his “heavily melodic renaissance,” thanks in part to the contributions of guitarist Robbie Robertson.

“All those passing chords … the relative minor substitutions that sort of characterize those songs, the moving second lines that happen in them. All those things are signatures of that era of Dylan’s writing,” Garcia told David Gans, “the kind of melody which you hear but he doesn’t sing.”

As for “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Garcia went on to play the tune many times with the Grateful Dead. Dylan and the Dead would tour together in 1987, during which time they performed the song live.

As the former Grateful Dead leader noted, Bringing It All Back Home saw Dylan abandon the protest music of his earlier period and begin to write more personal and even confessional songs, often using surreal and opaque lines and references, which became a staple of the emerging psychedelic rock genre. Among its most famous electric songs are three that open the album: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “She Belongs to Me” and “Maggie’s Farm.” Like the other cuts on side one, they feature

But it’s on side two that Dylan returns to his acoustic roots with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Although recorded on the same day as the other three songs, January 15, 1965, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was a fairly new song written earlier that month, and Dylan wanted to get it recorded while it was still fresh.

As he explained, it was inspired by Gene Vincent’s “Baby Blue.”

"I had carried that song around in my head for a long time and I remember that when I was writing it, I'd remembered a Gene Vincent song,” Dylan said in the sleeve notes to Biograph. “It had always been one of my favorites, ‘Baby Blue’… It was one of the songs I used to sing back in high school. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”

He most certainly was. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is considered one of the greatest kiss-off songs ever written, a parting of the ways with no chance of reconciliation. The identity of Baby Blue has never been revealed, but Dylan performed it as his final song at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival after his electric set was booed, making it an apt, if bitter, farewell to the folk scene.

While he was lead guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell helped create a considerable number of now-classic songs in the heartland rock canon.

Today, some of the electric guitars Campbell used on those songs are famous in their own right. There’s his Broadcaster — the guitar he says “I can’t live without” — that featured on “American Girl,” the band’s third single, as well as his famous Red Dog Telecaster, heard on their 1980 hit “Refugee” and recently the focus of two new Fender Tribute models.

There are others, and they all have great stories, but nothing like the pair of tales Campbell tells about his 1962 Gibson Les Paul “SG” Junior, the guitar famously heard on the outro guitar solo from “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” the second single from Tom Petty’s 1989 solo record, Full Moon Fever.

“Great story about this,” Campbell tells Gibson TV. “I was in Hartford, Connecticut on tour, and I went for a walk, and I passed a video store. No guitars anywhere. I just walked in.

“And somehow in the conversation, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we have a couple of guitars.’ And this is one of them.”

Campbell has no idea why a video store had a pair of guitars inside, but it didn’t matter. He liked what he saw and decided to strike a deal.

“They had two in the back, and I bought them both,” he says. “It was like, I don't know, 120 bucks. I'm just lucky that way.”

As Campbell explains, while SGs feature minimal electronics, they are excellent-playing tone machines. “These are wonderful because they've just got the one pickup, one volume, one knob,” he says. “They play great. They're nice and lightweight.”

Campbell had the guitar with him by chance while he, Petty and producer Jeff Lynne were doing overdubs on “Runnin’ Down a Dream.”

“Tom and Jeff and I were working on the record, and it was one of the few songs that Tom and I wrote where we're gonna have an ending where the guitar is going to just go on for a while,” he explains.

“I pulled this guitar out, and I think I had an Ampeg amp or something. I was doing one of those licks on the solo,” he says, as he demonstrates it on the guitar. “And I remember Jeff was there, and he went like this.” Campbell lowers his sunglasses and makes a surprised face. “It's hard to impress Jeff. So, yeah, that was a good sign.

“But that was it — that was this guitar. It just happened to be there that day. I didn’t go looking for it. I just picked it up.”

It turned out to be a happy accident.

But there’s a bad accident to go with that story.

In 1986, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers supported Bob Dylan on his True Confessions tour. The tour was on its third-to-last stop, at the L.A. Forum on August 3, 1986, when tragedy struck. As Campbell recalls, the band was in between songs and Dylan was talking to the audience.

“I had this guitar on, and I’m standing there, trying to be cool,” Campbell elaborates. “And I kind of went like this to scratch my ears or whatever. And Bob was talking to the audience going on with some important spiel about something.

“And the strap came loose and [the volume control] was wide open. And it went ka-blam! Loud! You know, this thing's loud.”

“Bob turned around like, ‘What the fuck were you doing back there? I'm trying to talk up here!’”

Campbell looked down to see the headstock had split cleanly away from the neck.

“And my heart just broke, because I love that guitar, you know. I just thought they're gonna repair it, but it'll never be the same.

“But it kind of is,” he says. “They did a great job, and you can't even tell. It tunes good and plays good, and I still use it, you know? And it gets the job done every time.”

As Campbell has told us before, that wasn’t his only noteworthy encounter with Bob Dylan. Two years earlier, the folk-rock icon sought him out for advice on buying a drum machine after he heard Campbell had used a LinnDrum to help him compose “The Boys of Summer,” his 1984 hit cowrite with Don Henley. But as Campbell explained, the technology mystified Dylan.

When Roger McGuinn inadvertently co-wrote “The Ballad of Easy Rider” with Bob Dylan for the Easy Rider soundtrack in 1969, he couldn’t have known that he was writing an anthem for the counterculture.

Then again, given McGuinn’s carefree nature and association with the laid-back vibe of the late-1960s hippy movement, perhaps he had an inclination that the folky track would come to define one of cinema’s greatest soundtracks.

What’s more, the song came at a time when, save for 1967’s The Graduate, film soundtracks featured orchestral scores rather than contemporary music. Easy yet Rider’s soundtrack was punctuated with songs of the day by Steppenwolf, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and McGuinn’s own group, the Byrds. To that end, his “Ballad of Easy Rider” drove home the point that Easy Rider was more than just another film — it was a work of art with a message.

McGuinn agrees. “I think it's great,” he tells Guitar Player. I love Steppenwolf, and it's really well done. You know, the songs they chose were really appropriate for the movie. And I thought the movie was a really good representation of the whole hippy thing, with LSD and pot.”

Of course, McGuinn wasn’t alone in putting together “The Ballad of Easy Rider.” He had help from Bob Dylan. The story goes that Peter Fonda — who co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the film — gave Dylan a private screening of Easy Rider in New York City, and asked him to write a theme for the movie.

Dylan didn’t like the film and was surprised to see it was a big-budget production. Rather than agree to write a song for it, he scrawled a verse on a napkin and told Fonda, “Give this to McGuinn. He’ll know what to do with it.”

Dylan’s response was characteristically cryptic, but he was right: McGuinn did know what to do with it. “I guess he knew I was able to take it and run with it,” McGuinn says with a shrug.

As for why, McGuinn credits his friendship with the enigmatic songwriter. “He and I had been friends,” McGuinn says. “When I lived in Malibu, he used to come over to my house, and we’d play guitars and shoot pool. So he handed the verse to me as a surrogate, I guess.”

Once McGuinn finished the song, he, Fonda, Byrds drummer Gene Parsons and Dennis Hopper — Fonda’s cowriter and costar in Easy Rider, as well as its director — hit the studio at Columbia Records to cut the simple track, which features McGuinn on guitar and vocals, and Parsons on harmonica.

McGuinn says he never got to talk with Dylan to see if he liked the song, nor did he have input from him while writing it. All he had was his prior experience and a hunch about what would work.

“I wasn't really a prolific songwriter,” McGuinn says. “I had a whimsical attitude about writing songs. Gene Parsons had turned me on to sea shanties around that time.

“But I wasn't really trying to convey a big message or anything like that. I wasn't a protest songwriter. I just wrote songs that appealed to me.”

Once he learned he’d received a songwriter credit for the song, Dylan insisted his name be taken off it. “He called me up at about three o’clock in the morning a couple of weeks later,” McGuinn says. “Bob said, ‘What’s this credit? I don’t need the money. You can take it off.’

“I said, ‘Okay.’ He didn’t want any association with it because he didn’t like the movie.”

Like most who participated in the making of Easy Rider, Dylan and McGuinn had no sense that the film and its music would become halcyon. But it did, and while Dylan may have disliked it, McGuinn is proud of their work and the film.

“We had no idea it was going to be a blockbuster,” McGuinn says. “But that’s the way it was.

“It was like the people who didn’t go to Woodstock, and then they saw what it became. I think Bob didn’t think it was going to be a successful movie and didn’t want his name associated with it. But people like it.”

You worked closely with Peter Fonda on Easy Rider. How did you two become friends?

I first met Peter back when I was working with Bobby Darin in Las Vegas. I used to do my 15-minute folk segment with him and then leave, and I’d walk up and down the strip in Vegas and go to different shows and stuff.

One night, Bobby said, “I’d like to take you out after the set, so stick around tonight because my wife and this young actor are coming over to see us, and it’s his first movie.”

So I stuck around, and [Darin’s wife, the film actress] Sandra Dee showed up with Peter Fonda. It turned out that Peter and I had a common friend, [Eugene] Stormy McDonald. Stormy had been a friend of mine since high school, and he was one of Peter’s best friends in college when they were in Tucson, Arizona. So that’s when I met Peter. It was around 1962, probably. And we maintained a friendship the whole time ever since then.

For the film, Peter wanted to use Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” but couldn’t get copyright clearance, which led him to ask Bob to write the theme song for Easy Rider. How did it become a co-write between you two?

Peter flew to New York and screened the movie in a private screening room for Dylan. And Dylan wrote down some notes on a paper napkin, and said, “Here… give this to McGuinn. He’ll know what to do with it.” And then Peter flew back, gave me the napkin, and I finished the song.

Why do you think Bob had that sort of faith in you, considering how vague his direction was?

I guess he realized that I was a good arranger of his material, like I’d done with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and so on. I wrote the tune, and then I wrote the second verse, and of course, he got a credit for it.

Do you know the origin of Dylan’s lyrics for the verse he gave you? Did they come from him watching the film?

Yeah, he saw the film. He saw the movie in that private screening room, and he didn’t like the ending of it. He didn’t think Peter and Dennis should have gotten shot like that at the end. And I think he thought it was going to be a low-budget B-movie. [laughs]

So the scale of the movie put Bob off?

Yeah. He didn’t want his name to be associated with it. So he just wrote down, “The river flows…” and if you look at the end of the movie, there’s a helicopter shot of a river around the place where Peter gets shot.

His verse goes, “The river flows, it flows to the sea, wherever that river flows, that’s where I want to be, flow river flow.” He wrote that, like, sort of chorus: “Let your water wash down.” And then I came up with the second verse: “All they wanted was to be free, and that’s the way it turned out to be.”

Is it true Dennis Hopper was initially confused by your meaning?

Yes. Dennis and I were getting on the elevator at Columbia Studios, and he said, “Hey, what’s that mean: ‘All they wanted was to be free, and that’s the way it turned out to be?’” I said, “Think about it, Dennis.”

And he went, “Oh, wow, man… that’s heavy.” [laughs]

You mentioned earlier that Bob received a writing credit for the song and that he wanted no association with it. But did he at least like the song?

No, no. I never… we never talked about the subject. But I figured it out… I mean, it was obvious what happened, and that even though he wasn’t super happy with the credit, you know… Bob is not the kind of guy that you can have a normal conversation with. [laughs] He talks in abstractions. But I think that’s natural because he’s a poet. It’s how he thinks.

What gear did you use on the film version of “The Ballad of Easy Rider,” and how did that differ from the Byrds’ re-recorded version that came later?

The guitar that I used on that, I think, was a Martin 12-string. But on the soundtrack, first of all, it was just Gene Parsons on harmonica, and me with the acoustic guitar and on vocals. That was it. It was just two instruments.

All I remember is that Dennis and Peter showed up when we recorded it. We booked a studio at Columbia Records, and it was just me and Gene Parsons. We did that because it was supposed to be like an acoustic thing, so we really didn’t need the whole band for it.

But on the Byrds' version, I definitely used different gear. It’s a whole other recording. That was my Rickenbacker 12-string, and Clarence White had his Telecaster with the B-Bender. And then, we had bass and drums, and everything.

It also featured an orchestra.

Yes. Our producer, Terry Melcher, added an orchestra, which sounded pretty. I remember Candice Bergen and Terry were a couple at the time, and so Candice came and listened to the playback of the orchestrated version of “Easy Rider.” And she said, “Oh, that’s so beautiful.”

The weariness of the lyrics seem to represent that the ’60s revolution was taking too long to come. Was that your intention?

Well, that’s kind of too philosophical for me to comment on. [laughs] I was just happy to be working, be on the road, and be recording. I was having a good time. So I didn’t really feel the weariness that you’re talking about.

Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Fairport Convention are among the many artists who’ve covered “The Ballad of Easy Rider.” Why do you think it’s resonated with so many people?

I have no idea! I guess they liked it. [laughs] I heard Bruce's version, but I don’t remember Tom or Fairport’s versions.

But it’s great! It’s always an honor when somebody covers your song. It had a good melody. I’m happy with how the melody came out, and it’s got some nice fingerpicking in it. And with the Byrds' version of it, the one with the orchestra and everything, it really is a very, very pretty recording.

While it’s the theme song to a counterculture film, it’s gentle, folky and almost biblical in its imagery. The song resonates with listeners regardless of their political affiliation. Was that irony sort of the point?

Well, it’s a melancholy song because two guys got killed. And all those two guys wanted was to be free — you know, it’s talking about how they got freed of their bodies but not freed of their cares and worries. So that was the kind of freedom that I was talking about.

Aside from The Graduate, Easy Rider was one of the first films to feature a soundtrack of contemporary songs rather than a score. Did you have a sense of how influential the film and its soundtrack would be?

I didn’t really know at first. And I guess I was kind of surprised at how popular it became. But from what Peter told me, the records that were on the soundtrack were there just as a placeholder, and he was going to have some other kind of music. But they saw it so many times with the placeholder music that they got to liking it that way.

Do you see parallels between the state of the country now and 1969 when Easy Rider came out?

No, not so much. We had a similar division of philosophies, I guess, you could say. But back then, we had the Vietnam War, and people who were pro war, and people who were against it. And we have a lot of that type of division now. I guess that’s the main similarity. But I think there was more of a freewheeling spirit back then.

Forty years ago on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day and through 40 years of memories (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Four decades later, we still remember these most notable guitar stories from Live Day.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

There’s an obvious reason Mike Campbell called his memoir Heartbreaker. Over his career, he’s been most famous for his work with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, where he served as both guitarist and co-writer on many of Petty’s hits.

But for much of that time, Campbell enjoyed a career apart from the Heartbreakers. In 1981, he made one of his first forays outside the group as a sideman to Stevie Nicks when she cut Bella Donna, her monster-selling solo debut away from her gig with Fleetwood Mac. Other projects would follow with the Spinners and Dwight Twilley.

But the guitarist made his first significant stand as a songwriter in his own right in 1984 when he co-wrote “The Boys of Summer” with Don Henley, who was cutting his second solo effort following the premature demise of Eagles.

As Campbell explained to Guitar Player, the song took shape with the help of a synthesizer and a LinnDrum drum machine. The LinnDrum was the second such unit produced by Linn Electronics, which pioneered the use of acoustic drum samples in a programmable rhythm machine in the early 1980s.

The LinnDrum was a big step forward in Campbell’s studio arsenal. Prior to owning it, he wrote songs by creating drum loops off records and writing atop them.

“I wrote ‘Refugee’ to a drum loop I got off of a record. ‘Here Comes My Girl’ I wrote to a drum loop,” he said of composing two of Petty’s biggest early hits. “I didn't have a drummer in my demo studio at home, so I would make drum loops before there were drum machines. That was just business as usual.

“Now I had this machine that will do the drum loop for me, but I could program it any way I wanted. I was just having fun with it.”

The news about Campbell’s LinnDrum magic quickly spread, bringing him attention from an unlikely artist: Bob Dylan. The guitarist had just competed 1983’a Infidels, the Mark Knopfler–produced album that marked his return to secular music following three records inspired by his experience as a born-again Christian. After Campbell's success with "The Boys of Summer," Dylan enlisted him as he went to work on 1985’s Empire Burlesque.

Dylan was thrilled by “The Boys of Summer” and told Campbell he would like a hit as well. As Campbell recalled to Vulture.com, the folk-rocker was fixated on the idea that he had used a drum machine on the song and thought that might be the secret to recording a hit.

“I was at a session one day and he told me, ‘Wow, “The Boys of Summer” is a big hit. Did you use the drum machine on that? Do you still have it?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’

"And he went, ‘Could you bring it down tomorrow? I’d like to have a hit, too.’”

Dylan was no doubt impressed by Campbell’s songwriting talent. But he also assumed the guitarist had a magic touch with the LinnDrum, or else why not buy one of his own?

"In his mind, I’m the same guy who did it," Campbell says, "so it would work for him."

Campbell brought the drum machine to a session, but as he explains, Dylan couldn’t understand the most fundamental aspect of using it, or any rhythm box for that matter: It's the machine that sets the beat.

“He didn’t play along with the drum machine and got frustrated,” Campbell says. “I don’t know how he didn’t comprehend that. He was playing freestyle.

“After a few minutes Bob and the engineer look over at me, and Bob goes, ‘That doesn’t sound right.’

"He looked at me like it’s my fault.”

Once Campbell explained the protocol, Dylan was taken aback.

“And he responds, ‘You mean it won’t follow me? Well, what good is it?’

“He was dead serious.”

Campbell put the misunderstanding down to the guitarist’s unique perspective and approach to music. Despite having the world’s greatest drummers at his beck and call, he felt he needed the drum machine to create a hit — but only if it could follow him.

“It’s a thin line between child and genius,” Campbell concludes. “I love the guy.”

Campbell recalled yet another time when he and Dylan attempted unsuccessfully to write together. Dylan is famous for his insightful, inspired poetic lyrics.

Despite this, “The first thing he said was, ‘Do you have any lyrics?’” Campbell recalls. “I’m not joking. It was hilarious. I had never written a lyric in my life. That was a big deal, even if the song never worked out.”

Campbell and Dylan’s paths would continue to cross, both in the studio and in his career with the Heartbreakers, who toured with the folk-rock legend on the True Confessions Tour in 1986. Campbell came “this close” to performing with Dylan on “Handle With Care,” the 1988 breakout hit from the Traveling Wilburys, the late-1980s supergroup featuring Dylan, Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison.

As Campbell revealed to Rolling Stone, he cut the song’s original slide guitar solo, only to suggest Harrison try it instead — which he did, resulting in the tune’s indelible lead guitar break.

“I thought — because I was intimidated, you know, I'm sitting there with George and Jeff — ‘Okay, I'll try something,’” Campbell explained. “That wasn't my best, but I had a hunch that he could pull something out with the slide that would be more in the soul of the song, which he did.

“I just handed him the guitar, I had handed him a slide. The amp was already set up, and he just did it. Took the pressure off me!”

In addition to celebrating the release of his memoir, Campbell recently collaborated with Fender on two reproductions of his famous "Red Dog" Telecaster, the guitar behind "Refugee." The instrument is offered as a Custom Shop limited-edition model and as a Fender Stories Collection edition.

In the Beatles’ evolution from rock and rollers to psychedelic rock innovators, no figure looms larger than Bob Dylan. It was Dylan who introduced the group to pot, a drug that would have a transformative affect on their artistry, leading them to LSD and the psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It may not be an exaggeration to call August 28, 1964 one of the most significant dates in Beatles history. It was on that day that the Fab Four met the Voice of a Generation, who. turned them on to pot.

At the dawn of 1964, as Beatlemania descended on the U.S. shores, Dylan was the indisputable leader of the folk music movement centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village. He’d just released his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, his first LP to feature entirely original compositions. As with his previous albums, Dylan focused on social themes, including poverty and racism.

But as he prepared to make his next album, the aptly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he was eager to leave behind the socially conscious “finger-pointin’ songs,” as he called them, and write about love and personal matters, themes more common to pop than to folk.

Although Dylan had originally dismissed the Beatles’ music as “bubble-gum,” he was floored by “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the single that had helped the group break through in the U.S. when it was released in late December 1963. Somehow, Dylan didn’t take notice of the song until the following February. He and a few friends had packed up a station wagon and were headed across the country to meet with “people in bars, miners,” Dylan said, in an attempt to drum up inspiration to help his lyrics move beyond topical themes to matters of immediate personal concern.

They were in Colorado when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came on the radio. Dylan “nearly jumped out of the car,” recalled his tour manager Victor Maymudes, who was along on the ride.

“Did you hear that?” Dylan asked his friends. “Fuck! Man, that was great!”

When he returned to New York City that March, the folksinger promptly bought his first electric guitar, an instrument with which he would ultimately transform his music and make his break from folk. “They were doing things nobody was doing,” he recalled of the Beatles, explaining their influence on him and his decision to go electric.

“Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid … I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”

Remarkably, almost simultaneously, Dylan had made his own deep impression on the Beatles. That previous January, during an 18-day residency at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, the group had discovered his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and were captivated by it.

“I think Paul got the record from a French DJ,” John Lennon recalled. “And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris we didn't stop playing it. We all went potty on Dylan.”

Given their admiration for one another, the Beatles and Dylan were eager to meet. As it happened, they had a mutual friend, journalist Al Aronowitz. In spring 1964, while in England on assignment for the Saturday Evening Post, Aronowitz had met Lennon and subsequently covered the Beatles’ return to the U.S. for a tour that August. When the road show arrived in New York, Aronowitz arranged for the meeting to take place.

On August 28, as the group returned to its suite at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan following a performance at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, Aronowitz rode in from Woodstock with Bob Dylan in a blue Ford station wagon driven by Maymudes. Parking around the corner from the hotel, the men barreled through the throng of teenagers surrounding the Delmonico and made their way up to the floor where the Beatles and their entourage were entrenched.

There they were met by a battalion of police assigned to protect the group, and a throng of reporters, deejays and performers — including folk artists the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary — who were waiting to meet with the Beatles.

The three men were quickly whisked into a room, where the Beatles were waiting with their manager, Brian Epstein, and a few others. Introductions were made. Dylan was offered a drink and asked for cheap wine. With none available, the Beatles sent their roadie Mal Evans out to buy some.

While they waited for Evans to return, Dylan suggested they smoke some weed. He fully expected the Beatles were into pot. Aronowitz had even brought his own personal stash along as a special treat for them.

When they told Dylan they didn’t touch the stuff, he was perplexed.

“But what about the song?” he asked.

“What song?” John replied.

“The one that goes, ‘And when I touch you I feel happy inside,’” he said, referencing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “‘I get high, I get high, I get high.’”

The Beatles looked around at one another.

“Those aren’t the words,” Lennon finally replied. “It’s ‘I can’t hide.’”

Dylan may have got the words wrong, but he wasn't entirely incorrect in assuming the Beatles were experienced pot smokers. They had tried it once before, while performing in Hamburg in 1960, but were unimpressed by its effects.

“I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time,” Harrison recalled in the Beatles’ Anthology. “Everybody was saying, ‘This stuff isn’t doing anything.’

"It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, ‘This stuff doesn't work, man.’”

Now, however, with their hero offering to turn them on — and despite the heavy police presence beyond their door — the Beatles decided to give pot another chance. After making sure the room was secure, Dylan rolled a joint and gave it to Lennon, who nervously handed it off to Ringo Starr.

“My royal taster,” Lennon said.

Starr took a puff and continued dragging on it, apparently unaware he was supposed to pass the joint along. Upon consuming it, he announced that it had no effect on him. Meanwhile, Dylan and Aronowitz had rolled joints for each of the others, including Epstein.

“Soon, Ringo got the giggles,” Aronowitz wrote years later, and “the rest of us started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically.”

Eventually, the entire group was experiencing its first real high.

McCartney was particularly struck by the drug’s effect. He recalled feeling like he was “thinking for the first time” and told Evans, who had since returned with Dylan’s cheap wine, to follow him around with a notebook and write down everything he said.

“Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, ‘There are seven levels!’” he said. “And we pissed ourselves laughing.”

Following their meeting with Dylan, the Beatles moved in a more decisive folk direction. Their next album, Beatles for Sale, saw Lennon put his Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric to greater use on folk-influenced songs like "No Reply" and "I'm a Loser," tunes that, like Dylan's, were confessional in nature.

The trend would continue over the next year on Help! — where Lennon played a Framus Hootenanny 12-string acoustic on the highly personal "Help!" and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" — and on Rubber Soul's "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)."

Equally notable, the Fab Four became confirmed potheads. Ultimately, marijuana would help Lennon dig deeper into his psyche and write some of his most personal songs. It would also lead the group to explore new ways of presenting their music.

“You would smoke a joint and then sit down at the piano and think, Oh, this might be a great idea!” McCartney explained in his autobiography, Many Years from Now.

The Beatles’ pot use peaked in 1965 during the making of their second feature movie, Help!, where they smoked it to help pass time on the set waiting for filming to begin.

“The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension,” Lennon said. “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.”

The Beatles’ effect on Dylan would become evident on his next album, Bringing It All Back Home, half of which featured him backed by an electric rock band. Among the record’s tracks is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song whose surreal and at times psychedelic-inspired lyrics have often been interpreted as a tribute to LSD.

Dylan’s embrace of electric rock, along with the development of his intimate, confessional style of songwriting, eventually marked the end of his involvement with the folk scene. The final break came the following July 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, when he performed with an electric band, leading the folk movement to disown him.

While his new sound alienated his folk-loving admirers, not all of them were put off by it. Many stuck with Dylan as he continued his evolution from folk singer to rock artist. In the process, they discovered that, drugs and fashion aside, the hippie lifestyle was not so different from that of the folkies. For that matter, both shared common ideals of peace, ecology, racial harmony and sexual equality.

“The hippies went for the rock and roll of the British Invasion groups and of Bob Dylan after he scandalized the folk purists by adopting the electric guitar,” Charles Perry writes in The Haight-Ashbury: A History. “ A lot of hippies, in fact, were folkies who had followed Dylan in his switch to rock.”

Thanks to gigs with Whitesnake, Alice Cooper, Dokken, and Winger, Reb Beach has had quite the career. But teaching Bob Dylan how to tune a guitar in the late ‘80s might make the cut as his most surreal moment.

It’s unlikely that Bob Dylan is the first player that springs to mind when Floyd Rose tremolos are mentioned, and that’s with good reason. Over his 60-plus-year career, Dylan has mostly played acoustic guitars and some rather familiar electrics from the 1960s, such as Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters, Gibson SGs and Les Pauls and various Gretsch models.

So when the folk-rock icon found himself with a Floyd Rose–equipped guitar slung over his shoulder, he had no idea what to do with it.

It was 1987 and Dylan was shooting Hearts of Fire , his largely panned semi-autobiographical musical drama. Rock singer Fiona had been cast as Dylan’s love interest. Beach was her guitarist at the time and was recruited to perform in the film as part of Dylan's back band.

As Beach tells Masters of Shred, while on the set, Beach saw Dylan trying to tune a Floyd Rose-equipped guitar and becoming increasingly frustrated by the effort. It was Beach who stepped in to help.

“‘Excuse me, Mr. Dylan?,'" Beach said. "'Hi, I'm Reb, I'm playing in your band. I just wanted to tell you, that's a Floyd Rose. It's a whammy bar, and you have to tune it from these fine tuners here on the bridge.”

That may have been Dylan’s first and last time handling such an instrument. They certainly didn't make a good first impression.

“He said, ‘Oh, these newfangled things!’ He took it off, didn't even try to tune it, and picked up another guitar,” Beach expands.

Though their first interaction was a rather embarrassing one, Dylan and Beach sparked a friendship that would last the rest of the shoot.

“We played the blues,” he recalls. “The next morning at breakfast, I hear this, ‘Hey, Whammy Bar!’ I turn around. It’s Bob Dylan: ‘Let's jam the blues again today.’ And we did. We jammed the blues every day.”

Beach’s nickname would stick, with the guitarist recalling how “he called me Whammy Bar for those two weeks of shooting. It's really cool.”

Beach wouldn’t get much screen time, and in the shots that made the film, Dylan is playing two fixed bridge guitars – a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul. He's a man of creature comforts.

Speaking of Dylan and Telecasters, Robbie Robertson's heavily modded Tele, played by Dylan and Eric Clapton during his time as Dylan's foil, was sold at auction last year for $650,000. That was the guitar that the folk hero played when he first went electric, making it a pivotal part of his storied career.

Two years after his jams with Dylan, Beach said Winger's hit "Seventeen" rescued the band from the brink, and earned them a spot in hair-metal folklore in the process.

Reflecting on his accomplished career with Guitar Player, he revealed how a few pints down the pub gave him the Dutch courage to tackle his "Witness" solo.

What is a guitarist without a guitar? In September 1966, George Harrison all but gave up playing the instrument when he embarked on a spiritual journey that began with his study of the sitar. With the Beatles just a few months away from recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harrison traveled to India to begin formal lessons with sitar master Ravi Shankar.

As he discovered, his education wasn’t performed over a matter of hours-long sessions, nor was it strictly about the sitar. Indian music is inextricably linked with meditation and philosophy. Hindus believe music is God, and the ragas of Indian music are extended hymns to the creator. Studying the sitar is a devotion that takes a lifetime, and which has but one aim: to reveal God.

Far from daunted, Harrison threw himself into his lessons. He was eager to find something for himself, if not of himself. After some three years of global fame as a member of the world’s most popular rock and roll band, he was suffering an identity crisis that had been some time coming.

“You see your pictures and read articles about George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and John Lennon,” he told a reporter in August 1963, when the Beatles were still unknown in the United States. “But you don’t actually think, Oh, that’s me. There I am in the paper. It’s funny. It’s just as though it’s a different person.”

By 1966, Harrison was known around the world, but his thoughts and ideas were concealed behind the Beatles’ identity. “The funny position I was in was that, in many ways, you know, this whole focus of attention was on the Beatles,” he recalled years later. “So in that respect I was part of it. But from being in them, an attitude came over, which was John and Paul’s.”

Like Lennon and McCartney, Harrison aspired to write songs, and while the few he’d composed were strong enough to stand alongside theirs, his tunes were given less time and consideration by the band and its producer, George Martin. Harrison had even begun to lose his sense of guitar craft. He blamed the band’s constant touring and the hordes of screaming teens at their shows for his inability to develop and improve.

But in his studies with Shankar, and eventually with the help of meditation, Harrison found a way to grow not just as a musician but as a person too. The work consumed him. “[The sitar] has taken over one hundred percent of my musical life,” he told Disc and Music Echo in May 1967, eight months after he began his work with Shankar, and just days before the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that featured his Indian raga–inspired track “Within You Without You.”

“I still love rock, pop and electronic music. But there’s more to get immersed in, for me, in Indian [music]. I shall try to write more songs, and I think it can all be integrated into the Beatles quite nicely if I can keep improving.”

And then, in the summer of 1968, as abruptly as he’d abandoned the guitar, Harrison recommitted to it. He’d even written a song in which the instrument played a central role: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It was one of four Harrison compositions included on The Beatles, the group’s so-called White Album, recorded and released that year.

Unlike many of his contributions from the past two years, the new songs were contemporary rock and roll tunes. Stylistically, however, there was nothing in the Beatles’ catalog quite like them.

Then, the following May, for just the second time, one of Harrison’s songs was selected as a B-side for a single. “Old Brown Shoe” may not have had the pop appeal of the A-side, “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” but it was a rollicking good rock and roll song, full of snarling lead guitar licks and a propulsive bass line played by Harrison himself.

This was but a glimpse of what was to come later that year with the release of Abbey Road, which featured two of Harrison’s best songs: “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” “Something” was so good that it was issued as an A-side single. Even Lennon said, “I think it’s about the best track on the album.”

By then it was impossible not to notice a transformation not only in Harrison’s songwriting but also in his guitar playing. More melodic and bluesy than usual, his lead lines were mellifluous, filled with vocal-like bends and moments of sustained beauty as he basked in the spaces between the notes, bending strings and working a sensuous vibrato.

His guitar playing was impeccable, nowhere more so than on drummer Ringo Starr’s Abbey Road song, “Octopus’s Garden,” where Harrison’s lines moved like liquid, imparting the sense of wonder and joy at the heart of the song.

It was clear that a change of some sort had taken place in Harrison. He wasn’t simply a better guitarist or songwriter – he had become stylistically whole.

Robert Johnson may have allegedly made a deal with the devil in exchange for his guitar talents, but George Harrison had committed to reaching God and become an even finer guitarist than before, not to mention a stronger songwriter and more confident creative artist.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The Beatles were slowly but surely breaking up. Over the next year, Harrison would finally emerge as an independent artist with what many consider to be the finest solo Beatle album, All Things Must Past.

In his remarkable career, 1970 is indelible as the year George Harrison came into his own as a songwriter and guitarist.

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE

He was known as the Quiet Beatle, but George Harrison always stood out distinctly. As the group’s lead guitarist, he frequently had his brief moment in the spotlight, not the least when the Beatles made their U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.

There may be no more thrilling guitar moments from that first show than Harrison’s confidently fluid solo on “Till There Was You,” delivered with a cocky nonchalance, or his effortless guitar break on “I Saw Her Standing There,” performed while hopping in his boots and smiling at the audience as his fingers danced over the fretboard. His exuberance and charm were in sharp contrast to Lennon and McCartney’s more serious and occasionally clashing temperaments.

“He was a catalyst in the band,” recalled Beatles friend, artist and former Manfred Mann bassist Klaus Voormann. “Paul and John were so different, and George was bringing a certain peace into the setup. George was right in the middle between those two characters.”

He was also the moodiest of the foursome. His premiere solo composition, 1963’s “Don’t Bother Me,” was a minor-key surf-beat tune that told the world to keep its distance. The sentiment contrasted sharply with Lennon and McCartney’s love songs, whose first-person point of view made them appear to be direct messages to their female teenage fans.

Harrison could be acerbic (consider his break-up song “Think for Yourself”), indifferent (“If I Needed Someone”) and bitter (“Taxman”). But he could be tender as well, as in his two compositions from 1965’s Help!, “I Need You” and “You Like Me Too Much.”

“George had two incredible personalities,” Starr said. “He had the ‘love, bag of beads’ personality, and the ‘bag of anger.’ He was very black and white.”

He saved the colors and shades for his guitar work. Harrison’s style was a deft fusion of Buddy Holly’s rhythm/lead work, Chuck Berry’s double-stop riffing and Carl Perkins’ sprightly country and rockabilly style, which included chordal arpeggios and single- and double-string bends.

“He was clearly an innovator,” Eric Clapton recalled. “George, to me, was taking certain elements of R&B and rock and rockabilly and creating something unique.”

Harrison’s jazz influences, which included Django Reinhardt, were less obvious but could be overt at times, as on his polished solo for “Till There Was You.”

It was largely through his guitar work that Harrison distinguished himself in the Beatles’ early years. His songwriting contributions were scant, but more than any of the band’s members he lent signature elements to their sound.

During the recording of “Don’t Bother Me” on September 11, 1963, it was Harrison who pushed George Martin, unsuccessfully, to get a different guitar sound using a fuzz box. In the end, they applied tremolo from a Vox AC30 to Lennon’s guitar, probably his 1958 Rickenbacker 325, making this recording, as Andy Babiuk notes in Beatles Gear, “the group’s first evident use in the studio of an electronic effect on the guitar sound.”

On 1965’s “I Need You” and the “Ticket to Ride” B-side “Yes It Is,” Harrison treated his guitar with evocative volume swells, performed with assistance from Lennon. “I could never coordinate it,” he said of his attempts to use an expression pedal, while describing how “John would kneel down in front of me and turn my guitar’s volume control.”

Remarkably simple and employed just a few times in the Beatles’ extensive catalog (including at the tail end of McCartney’s Revolver track “Here, There and Everywhere”), the effect is nevertheless one of Harrison’s many memorable sonic signatures.

His instrument choices were equally notable. In 1964, Harrison received a prototype of Rickenbacker’s new 360/12 12-string guitar and quickly put it to use on the recording of the single “I Call Your Name” and the group’s third album, A Hard Day’s Night. For the next year and a half, the guitar made appearances throughout the Beatles’ recordings, including on “Ticket to Ride,” from Help!, and Harrison’s Rubber Soul contribution “If I Needed Someone,” where it outlined the song’s signature melody, which was itself inspired by Roger McGuinn’s riff from the Byrds track “The Bells of Rhymney,” also performed on a 360/12.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA

But no instrument was as consequential to the sound of the Beatles’ music, rock and roll, or Harrison’s own development as a musician than the sitar. He had first encountered it on the set of the group’s 1965 film, Help! “There were some Indian musicians in a restaurant scene, and I first messed around with one there,” he recalled.

Harrison felt there was something familiar about Indian music. “It was as if I already knew it,” he said. “When I was a child, we had a crystal radio with long- and shortwave bands, and so it’s possible I might have already heard some Indian classical music.” According to Harrison biographer Joshua Greene, his mother used to listen to the weekly broadcast Radio India when she was pregnant with George, “hoping it would bring peace and calm” to him.

As his curiosity grew, Harrison purchased a sitar from a shop on London’s Oxford Street called Indiacraft. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit,” he recalled.

It was summer 1965. That October, the Beatles began the recording sessions for Rubber Soul. Lennon had a new song called “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and was unhappy with how it was coming along.

“We went through many different versions of the song,” he said. “It was never right, and I was getting very angry about it.” The Beatles often turned to unusual sounds when they felt a song was lacking something special. Lennon asked Harrison if he could double his acoustic guitar line on the sitar. “He was willing to have a go, as is his wont,” Lennon said.

The result transformed both the song and popular music.

The following March, the Rolling Stones followed suit by ornamenting their new single “Paint It Black” with a sitar riff written and performed by Brian Jones, who had studied the instrument under Ravi Shankar’s student Harihar Rao. The track became the first rock and roll record with a sitar to hit the top of the charts, and launched a mini craze for the instrument.

The increased demand was felt particularly by New York session multi-instrumentalist Vincent Bell, who suddenly found himself hauling his heavy sitar from gig to gig. Worn out by the effort, Bell created a portable electric sitar based on an electric guitar design, which was then developed into a production model under Danelectro’s Coral brand.

Eventually, the sound of his electric sitar was heard on late-’60s hits like the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” Joe South’s “Games People Play” and many others.

The strains of Indian music became even more evident on the Beatles’ next album, Revolver, where Harrison introduced his first full-fledged sitar track, “Love You To.” Still untrained on the instrument, he applied blues-style licks to it, creating a subgenre of his own somewhere between Delta blues and Indian raga.

The growing influence of Indian music was evident on Paul McCartney’s stinging guitar solo for Harrison’s “Taxman,” a flourish made all the more ironic by the fact that Harrison himself had been unable to muster the performance.

McCartney also lent Indian-style ornamentation to his vocals on the fadeout to Harrison’s “I Want to Tell You,” an element that likewise appeared in Lennon’s backward vocals on “Rain,” recorded during Revolver.

Similarly, Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” was played as a heavy droning raga, as was “And Your Bird Can Sing.” On the latter, over a droning E chord played by Lennon and Harrison on their Epiphone Casinos, Harrison and McCartney performed a baroque lead-guitar harmony, composed by Harrison, that incorporated quick half- and whole-step bends. The result is one part Bach, one part Nashville pedal-steel guitar and one part Indian raga. It provided further evidence of the Eastern influence that was seeping into Harrison’s music.

But it was also a sign of his growing desire for something new. Revolver was, like all of the Beatles’ albums, followed by a tour, but one that proved to be disastrous. They were harassed and threatened in Manila after they unintentionally stood up Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos. In the United States, they were under attack for Lennon’s remark to London’s Daily Standard that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

The group had already decided this would be its final tour, and Harrison couldn’t have been happier.

The last stop was at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29. As the airliner carrying the Beatles’ back to England lifted off from LAX the next evening, he turned to a reporter onboard the plane to cover the group’s tour. “Well, that’s it,” he said flatly. “I’m not a Beatle anymore.”

ROUND TRIP

With no recording sessions scheduled until late November, the Beatles had nearly three months free. Lennon took a role in the satirical pacifist movie How I Won the War, shot in Spain, where he was joined by Starr. McCartney vacationed and scored music for the feature film The Family Way.

Harrison, for his part, left for India to begin his studies with Shankar.

The two men had first met in London the previous June. “The press had been trying to put me and him together since I used the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood,’” Harrison recalled. “They started thinking: ‘A photo opportunity – a Beatle with an Indian.’ So they kept trying to put us together, and I said ‘no,’ because I knew I’d meet him under the proper circumstances, which I did. He also came round to my house, and I had a couple of lessons from him on how to sit and hold the sitar.”

Now Shankar welcomed his new student on a houseboat in the Himalayas, where they spent five to eight hours a day in lessons. Harrison found Shankar’s generosity touching, in particular given that he was the world’s most famous sitarist. “The moment we started, the feelings I got were of his patience, compassion and humility,” he said.

“The fact that he could do one of his five-hour concerts, but at the same time he could sit down and teach somebody from scratch the very basics: how to hold the sitar, how to sit in the correct position, how to wear the pick on your finger, how to begin playing. We did that, and he started me going on the scales. And he enjoyed it, he wasn’t grudging at all, and he wasn’t flash about it either.”

Sitting with the sitar for such long periods made Harrison’s hips sore, so Shankar brought in a yoga teacher to teach him exercises. Harrison also began his indoctrination in Indian religion.

“Ravi had a really sweet brother called Raju, who gave me a lot of books by wise men,” Harrison said. He recalled a life-changing passage from one of them, written by Swami Vivekananda, which said, “If there’s a God you must see him, and if there’s a soul we must perceive it. Otherwise it’s better not to believe.”

The words were a revelation to Harrison who, as a Catholic, had been raised in the Christian tradition to take God’s existence on faith. “For me, going to India and reading somebody saying, ‘No, you can’t believe anything until you have direct perception of it’ – which was obvious, really – made me think, Wow! Fantastic! At last I’ve found somebody who makes some sense,” he said.

Away from the Beatles, studying sitar and opening his mind to spiritual insights, Harrison was transformed. “It was the first feeling I’d ever had of being liberated from being a Beatle or a number,” he said.

Harrison’s self-discovery was made comically ironic by the fact that Shankar had asked his famous student to conceal his identity. “Ravi Shankar wrote to me before I went out to Bombay, and in the letter said, ‘Try to disguise yourself – couldn’t you grow a moustache?’” Harrison obliged and liked it so much that he wore one for much of his life.

For the next 21 months, Harrison rarely picked up a guitar unless he had to for recording sessions to or compose.

In December 1967, he told an interviewer that he had trouble remembering guitar chord changes, an exaggeration undoubtedly, but also an indication of how deeply he had immersed himself in his sitar studies.

He’d written the Sgt. Pepper’s song “Within You Without You,” as well as the “Lady Madonna” B-side, “The Inner Light,” for Indian instruments. Likewise, other songs from this period, including “It’s All Too Much,” “Only a Northern Song” and “Blue Jay Way,” were composed as droning tunes on the electronic organ, an instrument reminiscent of the harmonium, which is integral to many forms of Indian music.

Harrison had also begun to make a documentary about Shankar, to be released by Apple Films, part of the Beatles’ new Apple Corps multimedia conglomerate. (The movie was issued in 1971 as Raga.)

In June 1968, he and his teacher trekked out to California to shoot at Big Sur. Shankar had been patient with his student’s sporadic progress, but he also knew the sitar was a daily commitment. In addition to his duties with the Beatles, Harrison was now helping to run Apple and undertaking a film project. Like any good teacher, Shankar tried to guide his student to the right choice.

He made a suggestion that would prove consequential.

“He was the one who said to me, try to find my background, or some root,” Harrison recalled. “What’s my roots? The first thing that meant something really that I could call a root was riding down the road on my bike and hearing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ coming out of somebody’s house.”

Elvis Presley, not surprisingly, had been a major influence on each of the Beatles, as he had on millions of teens in America, Britain and Europe. “So from there I went from Los Angeles to New York on my way home,” Harrison continued. “That was the last time I really played sitar. I checked in the hotel in New York, [and] Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton happened to be staying there.”

Enjoying the familiarity of his fellow guitarists, it seemed to Harrison that he had at last found a place where he fit in, and where he was accepted as an individual, not a Beatle.

“I thought, Well, maybe I’m better off to get back into being a guitar player, songwriter, whatever I’m supposed to be,” he recalled. “Because I’m never gonna be a sitar player. Because I’ve seen a thousand sitar players in India who are twice as better than I’ll ever be!”

A NEW GUITAR

Harrison returned to London and the White Album sessions that summer with a new commitment to his craft. The change in his guitar tone and playing style is evident on several White Album tracks made almost immediately after his epiphany, most notably “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” and “Sexy Sadie.” The former song, recorded over June and July, features some of Harrison’s most blues-inflected licks, which serve throughout the track as a second vocal line to Lennon’s own.

From this point on, bends and vibrato began to play a more prominent role in Harrison’s guitar playing, and with good reason. The months spent practicing sitar had strengthened his fingers and given him greater control over his instrument.

Coincidentally, in August, Clapton presented Harrison with a guitar that would significantly change his sound: a cherry-red 1957 Gibson Les Paul that Harrison dubbed Lucy. Its fuller, fatter tone gave his guitar playing a more assertive edge on many of the later-recorded White Album tracks, which most likely included “Birthday,” “Helter Skelter,” “Savoy Truffle” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” on which Clapton applied his lead parts using the guitar.

Though Harrison viewed Clapton and Hendrix as peers, he had no aspirations to be a guitar hero like them. He saw himself more in the spirit of Bob Dylan – a songwriter whose lyrics speak to matters of the heart and soul.

Moreover, both he and Clapton were infatuated with the roots-oriented folk-rock of Dylan’s backup group, the Band. Since serving as Dylan’s support in 1965, they’d released their own album, 1968’s Music from Big Pink, recorded in Woodstock, where the five bandmates lived communally, not far from Dylan.

The Band’s earthy mix of acoustic and electric guitars, stripped-down ballads and uptempo songs appealed to Harrison. Certainly, no group from the era had a greater impact on Clapton. Upon hearing Big Pink, he decided to break up Cream and pursue a more blues-based style of music.

In particular, Harrison and Clapton were taken by guitarist Robbie Robertson’s fluid lead playing, which approximated the sound of slide guitar. Unaware that blues guitarists like Muddy Waters used a slide, Robertson had worked for years to develop a vibrato technique that mimicked the effect.

Harrison and Clapton were also undoubtedly captivated by Big Pink’s opening sound of Robertson’s Telecaster through keyboardist Garth Hudson’s Black Box, a homemade rotary speaker cabinet. Subsequently, Clapton played his Les Paul through a Leslie rotary speaker on “Badge,” the track from Cream’s Goodbye album that he wrote and recorded with Harrison’s assistance. Harrison would also use a Leslie 147RV – a gift from Clapton – on several tracks on Abbey Road and Let It Be.

In the end, it was an encounter with Dylan that gave Harrison the confidence he needed to assert his songwriting talents to the other Beatles.

In November 1968, with the White Album sessions behind him, Harrison accepted an invitation from Dylan to spend Thanksgiving with him and the Band in Woodstock. There in the idyllic wilds of upstate New York, he once again felt the camaraderie he’d experienced meeting Clapton and Hendrix in New York the previous June.

While staying at Dylan’s house, the guitars came out, and soon Harrison’s harmonically inventive chord changes were weaving together with Dylan’s lyrics in a pair of brand-new songs: “I’d Have You Anytime,” which would eventually appear on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass solo debut, and “When Everybody Comes to Town,” which Harrison retitled “Nowhere to Go,” and which has never been officially released.

There in Woodstock, thousands of miles from England, it was not lost on Harrison that, by writing with Dylan, he had achieved something his Dylan-loving bandmates had not.

SONIC SIGNATURE

There was yet one more guitarist who would play an important role in Harrison’s development.

Delaney Bramlett had grown up poor in Pontotoc, Mississippi, and struggled to make a living in his teens, working as a sharecropper before joining the U.S. Navy to escape poverty. He had taken up guitar at age eight and after his discharge settled in Los Angeles, where he got a job in the Shindogs, the house band for the musical variety TV show Shindig!

The Shindogs’ lineup featured a number of notable and soon-to-be-famous musicians, including guitarist James Burton, pianist Leon Russell, bassist Larry Knechtel and keyboardist Billy Preston. (Preston, for his part, worked with the Beatles during the making of Let It Be in early 1969 and was signed to Apple Records by Harrison, who produced his debut album for the label.)

Outside of the Shindogs, Bramlett had worked with Russell and J.J. Cale and written tunes with Mac Davis and Jackie DeShannon. In 1967, he’d met and married singer Bonnie Lynn O’Farrell.

They joined forces as Delaney & Bonnie and landed a contract with Stax Records, where they released their debut album and established their trademark fusion of soul, gospel and R&B.

Their second album, Accept No Substitute, issued on Elektra the next year, featured an extended band that included Russell, bassist Carl Radle, keyboardist Bobby Whitlock and drummer Jim Keltner, as well as saxophonist Bobby Keys, trumpet player Jim Price and backing vocalist Rita Coolidge.

Harrison met Bramlett in October 1968 while on a visit to Los Angeles to deliver the White Album masters to Capitol and was taken by his easygoing personality and colorful background.

By the time the Delaney & Bonnie and Friends tour landed on England’s shores in 1969, the Beatles were on the verge of breaking up, as was Clapton’s post-Cream act, Blind Faith. The American troupe joined Blind Faith’s tour as the opening act and soon found their spirited performances earning them greater applause than the headliner.

Clapton was drawn to the group’s music and fun-loving spirit and requested to join them onstage as a guest. By the tour’s end, he was asking if he could be in the band.

Clapton’s participation would set in motion the next stage in his career: Delaney & Bonnie and their backing musicians formed the core of the band on his self-titled 1970 solo debut. Afterward, Clapton would team up with Radle, Whitlock and drummer Jim Gordon, a recent addition to Delaney & Bonnie’s company, to form Derek and the Dominos.

It didn’t take long for Harrison to follow Clapton’s lead. After witnessing Delaney & Bonnie’s December 1 performance at the Royal Albert Hall, he asked Bramlett if he could tag along on the group’s tour. The band picked him up at home the next morning to find Harrison waiting with a gift for Bramlett: a custom Fender Rosewood Telecaster he’d received from the guitar maker at the end of 1968 and used during the making of Let It Be and Abbey Road.

The tour was a fun and relaxing break for Harrison. It was also here that, through Bramlett, he added a new element to his guitar style: slide. Harrison credited Bramlett for instructing him on how to use the device, but as Bramlett told Harrison biographer Simon Leng in his book While My Guitar Gently Weeps, he merely showed Harrison his technique.

“One time he asked me if I would teach him how to play slide, and later, George said I’d taught him how to play it,” Bramlett explained. “But I didn’t teach him anything. George already knew how to play guitar; he just wanted to know my technique – what I thought about it and what I did. All I did was teach him my style of playing.”

Whatever the case, slide guitar soon became a signature element of Harrison’s sound. His brief tour with Delaney & Bonnie also provided him with the basic material for his first solo hit, “My Sweet Lord.”

“He said, ‘Say you were going to write a gospel song, how would you start it?’” Bramlett told Leng. Bramlett began scatting “Oh my Lord,” while Rita Coolidge joined in with “Alleluia!”

It was a sound that Harrison, deeply into his spiritual journey, would not forget.

SOLO STARDOM

By the dawn of 1970, all the elements of Harrison’s guitar style were in place. The Beatles, on the other hand, were falling apart.

Though the band hadn’t made their breakup officially known, McCartney was busy working on his solo debut and Lennon was active with his wife, Yoko Ono, on their Plastic Ono Band project, which had briefly included Clapton on guitar.

On January 27, Lennon invited Harrison to participate in the recording of a new song for the group called “Instant Karma!” “John wanted to record it in a day and release it the next day,” Harrison said.

Stopping by Apple Corps on his way to the session at Abbey Road Studios, Harrison ran into American record producer Phil Spector, who was in London at the invitation of the Beatles’ new business manager, Allen Klein. Harrison encouraged Spector to come along and oversee the “Instant Karma!” session. It was a fortuitous decision for both men. Noting that McCartney and Lennon were actively pursuing their post-Beatles careers, Spector encouraged Harrison to get busy doing the same.

Until then, Harrison had been more actively involved in other artists’ careers than his own, producing Apple Records signings like Preston and Jackie Lomax, and giving them his songs to record. They included, for Lomax, “Sour Milk Sea,” written in early 1968, and, for Preston, his latest completed effort, “My Sweet Lord.”

Harrison considered Spector’s suggestion, and, shortly after the “Instant Karma!” session, he invited the producer to hear his songs. “I went to George’s Friar Park [estate], which he had just purchased, and he said, ‘I have a few ditties for you to hear,’” Spector recalled. “It was endless! He had literally hundreds of songs… He had all this emotion built up when it released to me. I don’t think he had played them to anybody.”

Harrison’s trove included many songs the Beatles had rejected. Among them were “Isn’t It a Pity,” first offered to the group during the making of Revolver, and numerous tunes from the Beatles’ Let It Be period, including “Let It Down,” “Wah Wah” and, the song that would give his debut solo album its title, “All Things Must Pass.”

In its finished form, All Things Must Pass featured 18 songs – including two versions of “Isn’t It a Pity” and a cover of Dylan’s “If Not for You,” from his 1970 album New Morning – spread over two vinyl albums. The set was supplemented by a third disc, titled Apple Jam, that featured informal workouts recorded with the album’s musicians, including Clapton, Starr, Delaney & Bonnie, and members of their band.

All Things Must Pass was released on November 27, 1970. In the U.S., Harrison’s debut single, “My Sweet Lord,” was issued a few days earlier to help build excitement for the album. It wasn’t necessary. Beatles fans were eager for new music from their idols, even if they were now solo artists.

All Things Must Pass quickly reached the top of the charts in the U.S., U.K. and many other major markets. In the U.S., the album and the “My Sweet Lord” single simultaneously held the top spots on their respective charts, a feat known as a “Billboard double.”

It would take another year and a half before another Beatle, Paul McCartney, achieved the same.

For the millions who had followed the Beatles, Harrison’s transformation was remarkable. Looking for something to satisfy his soul, he found a way to express himself and, in doing so, become a consummate guitarist and songwriter.

Even today, 50 plus years after the Beatles’ breakup, Harrison’s legacy as a guitarist remains strong, while his music is more popular than ever, with “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” besting even longtime favorites like “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude” on streaming music charts.

Harrison, who died in 2001, might not be surprised.

“People always say I’m the Beatle who changed the most,” he noted in his later years. “But, really, that’s what I see life is about. The whole thing is to change and try to make everything better and better.”

Order George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass here.

Stars of Jim Irsay’s renowned guitar collection will be on display at Indiana University Bloomington for the next year as part of an exhibition called Amped IU.

Aside from his day job as the owner, chairman, and CEO of NFL's Indianapolis Colts, Irsay is an avid collector of history-steeped six-strings, and the new exhibition aims to celebrate the music and stories that ice his collection.

The wider exhibition highlights the story of modern guitar and will be housed in the McCalla building of IU Bloomington’s campus. It will run from September 27, 2024, to September 2025.

Among the businessman's collection is Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, bought by Irsay at auction for $4.5 million in 2022. At that time, it became the second most valuable guitar to be sold at auction, beaten only by another Cobain guitar – his heavily modified Martin D-18E MTV Unplugged acoustic guitar.

That gives a sense of perspective as to how illustrious many of the guitars in Irsay's ever-growing collection are.

But, as Irsay himself says, the collection isn’t simply buying up guitars for his own personal glory. He wants to preserve key pieces of music history, and share them with the world.

“I am thrilled to preserve and protect another piece of American culture that changed the way we looked at the world,” Irsay said of his eye-watering Mustang purchase in '22.

Moreover, a portion of the proceeds went to Kicking The Stigma, Irsay's national initiative to raise awareness about mental health issues, and erase the stigma around them. This, he said, made the purchase “even more special to me.”

The initiative was also the beneficiary of a mammoth auction of Steve Vai gear later that year. The collection included a myriad of electric guitars, acoustics, rack effects units, amplifiers, and even a motorbike.

David Gilmour's Black Strat, heard on Comfortably Numb, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, and Money, and bought for $3.975m, and Bob Dylan’s infamous Newport Folk Festival Stratocaster, are also key parts of Irsay's collection. The latter was bought for nearly $1m after it was found in the back of a woman's attic.

The new exhibition will hold a grand opening event on September 27 (12-5 p.m.), which coincides with the IU Family Weekend.

It will feature, for one day only, the gems of Irsay's stable, among them guitars played and owned by Jerry Garcia, Kurt Cobain – expected to be that multi-million dollar Mustang – Eric Clapton, and many other legendary musicians.

There will also be a guided tour of the gilded collection on opening day, alongside performances from IU Jacobs School of Music students.

Some of the vintage guitars set to be on display for the full duration of the exhibit include an 1850s CF Martin guitar, a 1910 Gibson Model U Harp Guitar, and a 1939 Rickenbacker Silver Hawaiian Lap Steel, together helping chart the instrument’s evolution.

Two ‘59 builds – a Sunburst Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul Standard – will also feature, alongside a 1964 Firebird V.

Beyond guitars, it will feature artifacts from game-changing artists such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, and Paul Stanley.

Irsay has been adding to his collection, driven by a love for music, history, and pop culture, for decades. It has been exhibited across the USA in recent years as a “traveling museum,” while numerous artifacts have also been loaned to museums and nonprofits for display and research.

Readers can register for self-guided tours via the IU website.

A historic and heavily modified Bob Dylan/Robbie Robertson Telecaster has sold at auction for $650,000. 

One of the key headlines of Julien's two-day auction at the Hard Rock Café in New York, Robertson used the guitar extensively on stage and in the studio with Bob Dylan and The Band. 

“When Bob Dylan went electric, nearly sixty years ago, this Fender Telecaster was one of his most crucial weapons,” says Alan Light of the guitar's rich history. 

That means it was used throughout 1965, and featured on Dylan's 1966 classic, Blonde on Blonde. 

It also featured every night on Dylan’s 1966 world tour, including his infamous performance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, during which an audience member shouted “Judas!” at Dylan. When he and the Band subsequently launched into Like a Rolling Stone, this Tele was in Dylan's hands. 

The guitar continued to be a workhorse for Robertson long after that historic tour’s end, with the guitarist using it on records he made with Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Ringo Starr. 

The much-used instrument was also played by Eric Clapton, on stage with The Band, in 1974. 

A 1965 Fender Telecaster with a 25.5" scale-length guitar, maple neck, and maple cap fingerboard with 21 frets, Robertson stripped away its original black finish in 1970, preferring a natural aesthetic. 

Remnants of its original finish can be seen beneath the neck place and where the pickguard and control plate meet. 

Its neck pickup and pickguard were replaced by the time of the Band's Rock of Ages performance in 1971. A three-ply white-black-white pickguard and a chrome-covered Gibson patent number humbucker, which it still has today, were the choice replacements. 

The Telecaster also features a Bigsby B16 bridge, a modification made circa 2000, replacing the guitar’s original bridge. As Julien’s explains, the change was made in an “unorthodox” manner.  

“The B16, which normally mounts to the top of the guitar and replaces its existing bridge entirely, was routed in order to set the entire device beneath the surface of the top,” it says. “This unique and unorthodox modification allowed the installation of the B16 without changing the fundamental string geometry of the guitar.” 

The guitar had been estimated to sell for $500,000 - $700,000, meaning it fell comfortably within the upper limits of such guesswork, receiving nine bids. 

However, it’s a figure that pales in comparison with the $2.9m that John Lennon’s 12-string Framus, used on Help!, sold for at the same auction. That figure makes it one of the most expensive guitars to have been sold at auction. 

Head to Julien’s for more information about the Telecaster and Framus, and the other high-profile instruments that fell under the hammer at the firm's most recent “Music Icons” auction. 

Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson has passed away aged 80 following a long-term illness. A statement from Robertson’s manager published by Variety explains the late musician was, “surrounded by his family at the time of his death, including his wife, Janet, his ex-wife, Dominique, her partner Nicholas, and his children Alexandra, Sebastian, Delphine, and Delphine’s partner Kenny. He is also survived by his grandchildren Angelica, Donovan, Dominic, Gabriel and Seraphina.

“Robertson recently completed his fourteenth film music project with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Six Nations of the Grand River to support a new Woodland Cultural Centre.”

Robertson enjoyed a decades-long working relationship with Scorsese that began with 1978’s The Last Waltz – the Band's "farewell concert appearance" – where he is credited as a producer and performer. A string of Scorsese collaborations followed, from 1980’s Raging Bull to 2019’s The Irishman.

Most recently, Robertson had composed the music for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film described by Variety as “engrossing from the get-go, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson's steady-heartbeat score.”

Robertson’s most recent solo album, 2019’s aptly titled Sinematic, was a look back on his own past, with “Dead End Kids” recalling his Toronto teen years and “Once Were Brothers” celebrating his time with the Band.

Remembering his formative years in this WGBH interview, Robertson said, “I grew up in Toronto, and right across the lake, in Buffalo, there was a disk jockey by the name of George 'Hound Dog' Lorenz…And he played a record one night called ‘Ain't That Lovin' You Baby’ by Jimmy Reed. And the mood, the groove and the sound of this record was something that made me think this is a home for me. I know this thing from somewhere. And I'm going to find out where that comes from.

“It put me on a mission as a very young kid. I wrote songs when I was 15 years old for Ronnie Hawkins, joined Ronnie Hawkins when I was 16, and went to the fountainhead of rock and roll, the Mississippi Delta when I was 16 years old.”

Robertson’s professional career began during the mid ‘50s while cutting his teeth on the Toronto music scene. He soon caught the attention of rock and roller Ronnie Hawkins whose band, the Hawks, Robertson worked with extensively, picking up tips from Telecaster master Roy Buchanan during his brief tenure with the group.

Comprising famed drummer Levon Helm, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, keyboardist/saxophonist Garth Hudson and Robertson, the Hawks parted ways with Hawkins in 1964, later adopting the name Levon and the Hawks.        

Although Robertson originally played bass in Hawkins’ band, he subsequently switched to playing guitar and developed a unique style notable for pedaling open strings during solos and pinch harmonics, as heard on John Hammond’s influential 1965 album So Many Roads. “On that record, the Fender Telecaster became a slashing, piercing sword, eliciting our first thoughts of, What is that, and how do I do it?” wrote GP contributor Michael Ross.

When the Hawks teamed up with Bob Dylan for his 1965/1966 world tour the group drew greater attention, including notoriously hostile reactions from Dylan’s acoustic folk diehards. 

After a change of name to simply the Band, their debut album Music from Big Pink arrived in 1968. Considered a roots-rock classic, Eric Clapton (with whom Robertson collaborated numerous times) cited the LP as a major inspiration, while Roger Waters called it one of the most influential rock and roll records ever made.

Although the Band reformed in 1983, by this stage Robertson had established a successful career in the film industry while focusing his efforts as a solo artist. Co-produced with Daniel Lanois, his Billboard top 40 self-titled debut solo album appeared in 1987 and received a Grammy nomination.

Speaking of his approach to making music, Robertson told the Toronto International Film Festival, “With the Band, it became like a theater group and I would write something and think, He could play this part. And just when you least expect it [somebody else] comes in and takes over the thing, then boom where are we? Writing and directing these things was an interesting position to me in music. And it was different than other bands.

“It is a storytelling process for me, and after the Band I didn’t know how to turn that off, so I did the songwriter version of it. My solo records are like going back to a place – a place where these sounds and these words and everything originate from.”

On a late-August evening in 1964, a car ferried Bob Dylan from his home in upstate New York to the Delmonico Hotel in New York City for a historic meeting with the Beatles. The date has gone down in history as the night Dylan turned the English pop group onto grass.

It’s assumed that this initiation took the Fab Four down a path to the mind-expanding experimentalism that resulted in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band less than three years later. But that night was also significant for the bonds that were created.

The Beatles had been Dylan fans since their stay in Paris in January of that year, when they’d first heard him by way of his album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Simultaneously, Dylan was falling for the Beatles’ breakthrough U.S. hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which was playing nonstop on the radio in anticipation of the group’s American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show that February.

Dylan famously misheard Lennon’s lyric “I can’t hide” as “I get high,” which convinced him the British hit makers were both hip to the herb and, considering those gentler times, shockingly barefaced about their drug intake. (He was wrong on both counts.)

Following their initial meeting, the Beatles and Dylan moved in and out of each other’s orbits for the next few years. John Lennon may have seemed the Beatle most likely to form an alliance with Dylan, given the folk-rock singer’s obvious influence on his own music of the period. In the end, however, it was George Harrison to whom Dylan took.

Their friendship was sealed during a retreat at Dylan’s Woodstock home over Thanksgiving 1968. It continued on to Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, where Dylan was the featured guest, through the late 1980s, when both men were part of the all-star Traveling Wilburys group, and beyond.

Given Harrison’s and Dylan’s growing friendship in the late 1960s, it’s not surprising that both men make appearances in each other’s stories. Harrison’s songwriting was influenced by Dylan’s emotional and spiritually insightful lyrics, and he was emboldened in his efforts after his stay at Dylan’s home. His religious path may have influenced Dylan’s own spiritual awakening in the late 1970s.

Musically, though, it seems arguable that the guitarist’s sense of harmonic complexity had an impact on Dylan’s music. There is a Harrison-like plangent beauty in “Lay, Lady, Lay,” a Nashville Skyline track composed around the time of the Beatle’s visit. With its chromatically descending chord sequence – a key-center shift that Harrison himself employed to evoke emotional turbulence – the song is like nothing else in Dylan’s early songbook.

In this classic clip from August 1971, the pair run through the Dylan-penned number “If Not for You” in preparation for the Concert for Bangladesh.

Opening Dylan’s October 1970 LP New Morning, the song also appears on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass solo album released the following month.

Order The Concert for Bangladesh film here.

The following appeared in the December 2019 issue of Guitar Player

"It’s thrilling, after all of this time, to be both making new noises and rediscovering things I found stimulating at a very early age,” Robbie Robertson says.

That sentence could conceivably sum up the legendary, songwriter/guitarist’s artistic career. Before the world had discovered Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, John Hammond’s 1965 album, So Many Roads, helped introduce many blues fans to the full glory of the electric guitar. As wielded on that record by Jamie “Robbie” Robertson, the Fender Telecaster became a slashing, piercing sword, eliciting our first thoughts of “What is that, and how do I do it?”

Rife with energy and an almost punk attitude, it was an amalgam of twang and deep R&B roots unlike anything we had heard before – the bite of Muddy Waters’ slide interpreted through the fingers of a 22-year-old white boy who had been playing chicken-wire bars from Toronto to Arkansas for six years.

The history has become legend. For the uninitiated, it’s recounted in Robertson’s autobiography, Testimony. He joined Ronnie Hawkins’ group, the Hawks, at 16. In 1964, the Hawks went on their own and eventually backed the newly electrified Bob Dylan. The group then left Dylan and went from being a band to the Band, before breaking up and marking their dissolution with an iconic all-star 1976 concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film The Last Waltz.

The book leaves off there, but Robertson went on to score music for a number of movies, act in a couple, and make five solo records, including his latest, 2019’s Sinematic (Universal). Like his memoir, Sinematic draws from his past. “Dead End Kids” recalls his teen years in Toronto, while in “The Shadow” he evokes a crime-fighting radio show hero from his youth. And in “Once Were Brothers,” the guitarist celebrates his time with the Band and mourns its members who have passed on.

For Robertson, the past is never very far away. At a very early age, he found stimulation in the music of Chuck Berry. A recent acquisition is a custom shop version of the Gibson ES-350T that Berry played, ordered for Robertson by his son Sebastian as a birthday present. “The sound of his guitar on those early records was never matched by the ones that he used later,” Robertson says. “He went to a 335 [or an ES-355], which is easier on the hands and more comfortable to play. But the sound of this 350 with the original-gauge guitar strings was something. I couldn’t wait to plug it in to see if it still had that sound, and it’s exactly the same thing.”

Back then, of course, guitar strings came in only one gauge – fairly heavy, and with a wound G – but players seeking to play blues and country bends soon discovered workarounds involving the use of banjo strings to create a light-gauge set. Legend has it that the method was invented by James Burton, while playing the Louisiana Hayride television show.

Fred Carter, who also played on the program, may have learned it from him, and he hipped Robertson to the trick when they shared guitar duties with Ronnie Hawkins. Robertson reveals that there were two approaches to the system. “Sometimes they would use banjo strings for just the first and second strings. That way the rhythm wasn’t thinner when you were playing on the low strings,” he explains. “And sometimes you moved them all down” – by which he means some players would use unwound banjo strings for the highest three strings and then shift the guitar strings such that the wound G became the D, the D became the A, and so on.

These days, he says his favorite strings are D’Addario, with the gauge adjusted for the instrument.

The teenage Robertson actually began in Hawkins’ band as a bassist. “The bass player had just left. I was doing that while I was learning the guitar parts,” he recalls. “Fred Carter was going to be leaving, and I was taking over for him. When I started, I played a regular Fender bass – a Precision – and then I discovered a six-string bass and played that for a while. When I took over on guitar, the next bassist played a regular bass. But when Rick Danko joined the band, he played the six-string bass for a while because he was originally a guitarist. The six-string bass was kind of a transitional instrument. I love it. I have a couple of them.”

Robertson eventually switched to guitar, and by the time he left Hawkins’ employ, he had developed a unique voice on the instrument, two hallmarks of which are pinch harmonics, where the string is caught between the pick and the nail of the first finger, and a penchant for pedaling open strings during his solos. Both were already in evidence by the time he recorded with John Hammond.

“Those harmonics usually come about as an accident,” he says “I decided to take this accident to the next level and figure out how to play a whole solo like that. It would put the note I was playing up an octave. Sometimes you hit a note like that and it doesn’t do anything, and sometimes it does. I got so I could get those harmonics to sing and to ring out for a long time, not just be a little hit. I figured out the distance [between the nut and the bridge] where they really chimed out. It became part of my thing.”

You can hear those harmonics on So Many Roads and Hammond’s I Can Tell (which contains some of the most blistering Telecaster tone by Robertson, or anyone) and, later, on songs by the Band, like “King Harvest (Will Surely Come).” The pedaling will appear as an open G or E string droning while Robertson works his way up the neck, both filling out the sound and providing additional tension. “That was me trying to pretend I was two guitar players,” he says.

Robertson’s exploration of new guitar sounds comes from developing his own take on old technology rather than from adopting new gizmos. By the time of the Band’s final concert, he had fully switched from Teles to Strats and was soon using the whammy bar in distinctive ways. One method was to wiggle the arm for a vibrato as personal as any other guitarist’s finger shake. Another involved using the bar to lower the pitch of strummed chords, giving them a sound almost like bagpipes. “I first started doing that on Planet Waves, with Bob Dylan,” Robertson says. “Sometimes I also use it to create a change of pitch like you get with tabla, as opposed to just making the strings quiver. It’s still part of the arsenal.”

It is indeed. On Sinematic, Robertson occasionally combines his whammy bar work with another old sound: that of the wah-wah pedal. Like the vibrato arm, the guitarist has managed to take an effect used for half a century and somehow put a personal stamp on it. “It’s an expression pedal,” he says. “To me, it’s closer to singing and talking than just playing. I can get more vowels out of it. Sometimes I use it just to get that midrangey squawk. But when I plug into the pedal, I usually have trouble keeping my foot off of it. I want to make it talk. For years, whenever I was doing something with Eric Clapton, he would say, ‘Why don’t you do your wah-wah pedal thing?’ He always enjoyed the way I approach it.”

Robertson’s drive to wrest new sounds out of old pedals could be compared to a junkie’s efforts to experience the rush of that first hit, but in a much healthier way. “I really like interesting sonics, so I’m always searching for something that reminds me of the early days in rock and roll, when I would hear a guitar sound that sent a chill down my spine,” he says. Unlike the junkie, he is often successful, and his may be the most emotional use of the wah since Hendrix.

The guitarist even developed a personal approach to the Stratocaster’s design to accommodate his right-hand technique. “I used to use a flat pick and National steel finger picks on my middle and third fingers, so I could play three notes at the same time without strumming,” he explains. “When I was doing that, the middle pickup of a Stratocaster was always in my way. We guitarists all got used playing around it, but I thought, Why are we doing that? I wasn’t a big fan of the middle pickup anyway; it sounded a little doinky.”

So for the Band’s farewell concert, Robertson decided some changes were in order. In addition to having his red ’54 Strat bronzed, he moved the middle pickup next to the bridge pickup, turned it around and had the pair wired together in series, like a humbucker. He left the neck pickup in place and an open space in the middle. Problem solved. “The three-way switch is set so the front position is the neck pickup, center position is all the pickups, and back position is the back two pickups,” he says. “I don’t like a five-position switch. I find I bump it all the time.”

Robertson may also have been one of the first guitarists to replace his Strat’s knobs with knurled metal Tele knobs for easier volume and tone swells. In addition to a limited-edition replica of the Bronze Strat, Fender’s custom shop has made a number of guitars for Robertson. “One has a Moonburst finish instead of a sunburst,” he says. “Then I have one that is Capri blue, and all the hardware is brass, which looks quite beautiful. The pickguard is amber and clear, so you can see all the mechanics inside.”

As on Eric Clapton’s signature instruments, the guitars Fender makes for Robertson contain a preamp controlled by what is normally the second tone control. The guitarist’s grit comes mainly from the amplifier, most recently a Vox AC30. “I have it as a separate top and bottom,” he says “I like the top to be beside me so I can play with the knobs.”

His evocative wah sounds often come from the pedal pushing the Vox’s input. “I adjust the amp so it sings nicely,” he explains. “I love it when an amp really speaks and cries out. The horn-like distortion on Sinematic’s ‘Street Serenade’ comes from pushing the amp to a place where it becomes like a trumpet. That’s my favorite kind of distortion. I’m not crazy about pedal distortion, though some people use it beautifully.”

That said, he has found some non-wah pedals he likes, including a distortion. “I have a BAE Royaltone Fuzz,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going on inside this thing, but I plug into it and I immediately feel like I’m getting somewhere.” He also reveals that he uses a compression pedal to create some of the atmosphere on his cleaner noir-style solos. “I use the Electro-Harmonix Platform,” the guitarist says. “It’s an extreme setting that controls the volume with the compression, almost like a backward effect.”

Eight years passed between Robertson’s 2011 solo record, How to Become Clairvoyant, and Sinematic, but the guitarist was far from idle in the intervening years. “I was spending a lot of time writing the autobiography,” he says. “I was also working on music for Martin Scorsese movies. When I had some time, I would sit down, think about a song idea and mess around with that. Making Sinematic wasn’t about, ‘It’s time for me to make a record. Let’s write a bunch of songs, go in and record them.’ It happened over time, because I’m not on a schedule of making a record to do a tour. That’s not my program. I write songs and record music when I’ve got something up my sleeve.”

Sinematic opens with “I Hear You Paint Houses,” featuring a guest appearance by Van Morrison in a vocal duet with the guitarist. The title refers to a euphemism hit men would use when discussing a job. The three stabbing sounds behind the song’s hook are typical of the appropriately cinematic sounds Robertson has created throughout his recorded work. Here, the shards are generated through his preferred primal method. “I’m not going into any pedals to make it sound that way,” he reveals. “It’s just my fingers and the amp.”

Though Robertson uses minimal technology when creating his guitar sounds, he takes a broader approach to the recording process. Consider the acoustic guitar part on “Hardwired.” For that track, Robertson recorded the instrument and then used the modern method of copying and pasting it over and over again. It’s typical of the way this artist manages to stay simultaneously current and timeless. “Some of these tools weren’t available years ago,” he says by way of explanation. “But now they are.” Without being slavish to the technology, he incorporates the latest techniques and manages to still sound like himself.

The credits on Sinematic cryptically list help from Terry and the Octo Pirates, who turn out to be the band of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “Paul was a guitar player and always had his own band,” Robertson explains. “The guitarist, Terry Davidson, was the head of the band for a while. I would sometimes be working on a piece of music and they would be around, and sometimes a couple of them would play on a track that I was doing.”

In addition to this solo record, Robertson was also working on a movie, Once Were Brothers, which takes its name from the song on Sinematic. Based on Testimony, the film captures the rise and demise of the band that defined the concept of Americana and influenced everyone from Eric Clapton to Elton John.

Asked if we’ll have to wait eight years for the next record, Robertson replies, “I don’t think so. I have stuff in the works that might connect with the next movie I’m going to work on. I’m already starting to stir up that pot.”

Order Sinematic by Robbie Robertson here.

As surely as Robert Johnson lived the blues, Johnny Winter spent his life in them.

Born albino, Winter discovered early in life that some cultures considered albinos gods, while others abused and ostracized them. It was between these two extremes that Winter found himself throughout his life.

Blessed with talent, he blew minds with his fiery guitar work and had major labels falling over themselves to sign him. He helped advance electric blues into arenas in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

But his career, while marked by flashes of brilliance, was marred by greedy managers, drug addiction and an industry that came to view him as an oddity. What remained through it all was his worship of blues.

Born in Beaumont, Texas, in 1944, Winter began playing guitar at age 11, inspired by blues artists like Muddy Waters and B.B. King. After cutting his first record at 15, he was stuck on a music career.

“That was the most exciting time,” he recalled in 2008. “I made my first record and I started playing in nightclubs, and I had my first drink. All the stuff was brand new, and you could be driving to the gig and hear your record on the radio.”

Winter played clubs throughout Houston and Austin, impressing electric-blues fans with his guitar work, an incendiary meld of rock and blues chops unlike anything heard before.

His break came in December 1968 when he was featured in a Rolling Stone story about the Texas music scene. Major labels came calling, and Winter was soon under contract to Columbia for what was reportedly the largest advance in the recording industry’s history at that time: $600,000.

Soon after, he released Johnny Winter and Second Winter, each helping to establish him as a formidable talent.

As a child, Winter had dreamed of playing with Muddy Waters. He got his chance in 1974 when he and other young blues guitarists joined together in concert with older artists from the Chicago blues scene.

Winter went on to produce a quartet of albums for Waters, earning the elder bluesman Grammy awards and giving his career a well-deserved boost.

Sadly, Winters’ own career suffered over the years. A pair of former managers capitalized on his earlier recordings, earning money from them while Johnny never saw a penny. He dealt with heroin addiction in the 1970s and suffered health ailments in his later years.

He hit his stride again in the 1980s, recording for Alligator Records, and by the mid ’90s he was focused more on performing, where he showed that he’d not lost one bit of his brilliance. A stunning slide player, Winter used a metal slide cut from a pipe purchased at a plumbing supply store.

Perhaps no track demonstrates his furious slide work as well as his cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” from Second Winter.

He played many guitars throughout his career but favored Gibson Firebirds, in particular a 1963 Firebird V.

“That first one I ever bought is my favorite because I’ve played it so long and I’ve gotten used to it,” he said. “There’s nothing it can’t do.”

When it came to playing the blues, you could say the same about Johnny Winter. “It’s a living music,” he once said of the genre. “For me, blues is a necessity.”

Order Crossroads Guitar Festival 2007 here.

With his folk guitar jangling and surreal lyrics, Bob Dylan more than perhaps anyone laid the groundwork for psychedelic rock’s more fanciful abstractions.

His raw-boned tunes were transformed into baroque-pop balladry by psychedelic-rock trailblazers like the Byrds (“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “All I Really Want to Do”), the 13th Floor Elevators (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) and Manfred Mann (“The Mighty Quinn”).

But many other groups found in Dylan’s songs inspiration for their own peculiar musical explorations.

While his early tunes like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” are charged with mysticism, Dylan’s lyrics had largely lost their fanciful edge and turned dark, more surreal and menacing by the writing of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.

Songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and “Highway 61 Revisited” describe danger zones and deals to be avoided, pointing the way to psychedelia’s darker side.

This menacing style can be heard in everything from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”

Dylan could still be playful: A tune like “Desolation Row” presages the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, with its mix of historical and literary characters, fanciful themes and flirtations with fatality.

Speaking of which, it was Dylan who turned the Fab Four on to pot, which inspired the earliest psychedelic stirrings of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s music and the group’s nascent studio trickery.

And lest anyone forget, it was Dylan whose look, sound and music inspired a young Black guitarist to let his processed hair go natural and begin singing in his own imperfect style in the clubs of Greenwich Village.

As Jimi Hendrix, he became the biggest guitarist in late-’60s rock and scored his highest-charting U.S. hit with a transformative reworking of Dylan’s own psychedelic nightmare, “All Along the Watchtower.”

Browse the Bob Dylan catalog here.

His mentor was Woody Guthrie. His protégé was Bob Dylan. Between the two of them, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has been the Johnny Appleseed of song, sowing the nation’s roots music in grounds both rural and urban. Although Dylan called him “the king of folk singers,” Elliott defies categorization and exemplifies genres such as cowboy, hillbilly, bluegrass, blues, and rock. 

He has been equally comfortable performing with Pete Seeger, Tom Waits, Flea, and Beck. Homages flow from adherents such as the Rolling Stones, former members of the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, and Bruce Springsteen. Among his accolades are two Grammys and the Presidential National Medal of Arts. Johnny Cash observed of Elliott, “Nobody has covered more ground. He’s got a song and a friend for every mile behind him.”  

That journey is the subject of A Texas Ramble, a recent documentary, and the earlier Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, by his daughter Aiyana. The scope extends, quoting Guthrie’s anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” which Elliott recorded, “from California to the New York Island/From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters.”

Now 90 [Elliott has turned 91 since this interview was published in Guitar Player] this ultimate maverick long ago fulfilled the dreams he first wove in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. “Brooklyn made me want to be a cowboy. I didn’t groove there very well,” he says. 

“I always wanted to be out west in the wide-open spaces, riding horses, working cattle and singing ‘Red River Valley’ while picking my 12-dollar Collegiate guitar, made out of cigar boxwood. My mother bought it for me when I was 13, before I showed any interest, although I’d been listening to Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch.” 

His wanderlust inspired by a friendship with a local Danish sailmaker, Elliott ran away from home with his friends, “future beatnik poets” Don Finkel and Carl Margolies, in April 1947, when he was 15. “We’d drink beer in a subterranean bar, near what became the Gaslight on MacDougal Street,” he says. “I suggested we hitchhike to Chicago to hear [trumpeter] Bunk Johnson’s jazz band.” 

Along the way Elliott made a detour and, while passing through Washington, D.C., took a job grooming saddle horses with Jim Eskew’s Ranch Rodeo and Wild West Show. “I’d sleep in a tent with 60 horses three feet from their hind feet,” he says. “I was in heaven. We had a rodeo clown, Brahmer Rogers, who played hillbilly songs on guitar and banjo. I played some banjo but never got good at it.”

Three months later he was back home, but, perhaps stirred by his time on the road, Elliott’s passion for the guitar began to flourish. His old Collegiate emerged from the closet. 

“I’d bring it to school and played for my fellow students on the front stoop, singing cowboy songs,” he recalls. “Some kids even clapped.” Roy Acuff was his first singing influence, followed by Gene Autry, the Louvin Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, and Lonnie Johnson, whom Elliott would eventually meet at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village in 1961. 

During the summers of 1947 and 1948, Elliott played in Washington Square Park with budding folk artists Tom Paley, Erik Darling, Harry Smith, Roger Sprung, and Fred Gerlach. “Fred played Lead Belly songs on a 12-string guitar,” he recalls. “His girlfriend was Tiny Ledbetter, Lead Belly’s niece.” 

A turning point came in 1951 when Elliott met his kindred spirit, Woody Guthrie. “Paley gave me his phone number,” he says. Guthrie invited him over before calling it off. “He said, ‘Don’t come today. I got a bellyache.’ It turned out he had a ruptured appendix. He went right in the hospital. The first time I met him he was lying in bed. I visited Woody there two days running.” 

By this point Elliott had acquired a slightly shopworn Gretsch guitar for $75 from a music store on lower Third Avenue. He took the guitar with him to visit Guthrie and again soon after when he and a school chum made a trek to California in the friend’s Plymouth Coupe. In California, he met then-aspiring actor James Dean, the ex-boyfriend of Elliott’s bride-to-be, June. 

“Something about Dean reminded me of Woody,” he says. “Strumming along on guitar, I improvised a song, just part of our conversation. Thoughts and feelings came out about Woody being sick in the hospital. I couldn’t remember it five minutes later. Even now, I don’t remember how the words were or sounded. It was a moment in history.” 

Three months later, Elliott was back in New York City and performing under the name Buck Elliott. He reconnected with Guthrie at a party in the Village. “When I arrived, Woody was in an upstairs closet tuning his guitar and warming up,” he says. “He had his harmonica. They made requests. He charged five cents per, like a human jukebox. Somebody requested, ‘Blue Tail Fly.’ He said, ‘That’s a Burl Ives song. I get 15 cents extry for playing Burl.’ 

“Woody was playing a small-size Gibson. He was so proud owning that. He always teased me about the piece of junk my Gretsch was. Woody was hard on guitars. He’d been through several previous guitars that were full of holes, wrecked, cracked, and bent.” 

Elliott lived with Guthrie from 1951 to 1953, but performed with him only once, as a guest at a concert in Newark. “I wasn’t known yet,” he explains, “just Woody’s sidekick.” Elliott would eventually come into his own, but he needed to do some living. It happened soon enough.

“In 1953, I met Jack Kerouac, a friend of my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “He’d come to her apartment and read to us his manuscript of On the Road. Over three days sitting on the floor and drinking six big bottles of red wine, we all took turns reading from it. That stirred my desire to hit the road myself.” 

That summer he and a pair of friends and fellow musicians, Frank Hamilton and Guy Carawan, traveled by car from New York City to New Orleans, with his Gretsch in tow. “We performed on street corners. Farmers would take their hats off, shaking each other down, and collect money for us,” he recalls. 

“We were meeting real hillbillies, sometimes sleeping overnight in their homes up in the Smoky Mountains. Frank was 17 and played banjo like a wizard. He later started the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago where they teach five-string banjo and guitar picking. Guy, who owned the car, was 21. He was a passionate singer who later introduced ‘We Shall Overcome.’” 

By the time he returned to New York City, Elliott had matured into a solid performer. “Jack sounds more like me than I do,” Guthrie once declared. Although Elliott developed his own rugged strumming and picking style and plaintive approach to song, he remained a champion for his mentor and his music. 

In 1961, Elliott would meet a fellow disciple 10 years his junior. “I had just gotten back from touring in Europe for six years with banjo master Derroll Adams,” he says. “I took a bus to visit Woody at Greystone Park Hospital in New Jersey. Woody was devastatingly sick and could barely speak. There was this strange kid from Minnesota visiting him. He introduced himself to me as Bob Dylan.”

Just 19, Dylan had moved to New York City in January 1961, intent on meeting Guthrie and launching his career in the Greenwich Village folk scene. 

“I had about five records out on the English label Topic,” Elliott recalls. “He told me he had all of them and mentioned those he liked best.” Elliott’s influence on the young folk singer was evident to those who saw his early shows. “The first time I heard him perform, people in the audience poked me saying, ‘He’s doing your stuff. He sounds just like you,’” Elliott says. “He sounded good, but I didn’t think he sounded like me at all. 

"I appeared with Bob at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village. They put up a piece of cardboard and somebody wrote, ‘Now Appearing: Son of Jack Elliott.’ I suppose I was a father figure to him. We played guitar and harmonica like little Woody clones.” 

Like Guthrie, both men racked their harmonicas in metal braces hung around their necks. “Bob would always leave his in the upward position,” Elliott says, whereas he allowed his to rest on his chest behind his guitar, where the sharp metal would invariably come into contact with his guitar and scratch off the varnish. 

Elliott says he grew weary of the whole enterprise. “I said, ‘We sound like the Harmonica Brothers, and anyway I’m tired of scratching my guitar, so I’m gonna quit playing. Have at it, Bobby!’ That’s when I officially stopped playing harmonica in my shows in order to get rid of that copycat element.” 

When Dylan made his controversial shift to electric guitar in 1965, the folk community was appalled. Pete Seeger had witnessed the singer’s electric debut at the Newport Folk Festival that year and had to be restrained from severing Dylan’s guitar cable with a hatchet. 

“My reaction wasn’t as strong as Pete Seeger’s,” Elliott notes. “But I could never put it into words. The new music was so different from his previous music, and I’m always shocked by anything electric. I’m not into electric gadgets, although I admire some of it. I never had an electric guitar. I never learned the real art of playing electric.” Ironically, he did play electric for Dylan. 

In 1975, Dylan saw Elliott perform at the Other End – then the temporary operating name of New York City’s famed Bitter End folk club – and invited him to join his plan for the Rolling Thunder Revue. “He spoke about his idea of a bus tour of small venues around the country with him, Joan Baez, Bobby Neuwirth, and myself,” Elliott recalls. “Patti Smith was there. Bob, Patti, Bobby, and I got up on the stage and sang.”

A few months later, Elliott was performing at the venue again when Neuwirth showed up. “Neuwirth came to the gig and then called Bob in California,” he says. “Neuwirth handed me the phone. Bob said, ‘We’re gonna do the tour in November starting in New York City.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Bang! Those eight seconds is how the tour began.” 

For the stint, Elliott borrowed a Fender Telecaster from fellow performer T-Bone Burnett. “I played two songs on it with the band, one of which was Jesse Fuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues,’” Elliott says. “I usually play that as an opener to get warmed up." 

The Revue also saw Elliott perform in Dylan’s 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, which he filmed prior to and during the tour. “It’s a collection of Revue performers,” Ellott explains. “With a cameraman, Bob shot 200 hours of 35-millimeter Technicolor film. Sam Shepard wrote the script. I had fun as a would-be actor in mysterious and dense little dramatic scenes.”

Elliott has formed many other musical friendships over his long career, including with Todd Snider, the late John Prine, and Johnny Cash.

“I looked up to Johnny Cash. Of course, I was only five-eight and he was six-eight, so I had no choice,” Elliott jokes. “But he was a fine friend.” Although they performed together only once – a rendition of Cash’s “Take Me Home” on his ABC series, The Johnny Cash Show, in 1969 – Cash recorded Elliott’s song “A Cup of Coffee” on his 1966 album Everybody Loves a Nut. 

Once, while visiting Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge at a Hollywood recording studio, Elliott was surprised to discover a small trio of famous players in the room.

“Kris said, ‘There’s someone who loves you in Studio A,’” Elliott relates. “There were two gentlemen playing guitar when I got there: I recognized David Bromberg. The other guy was a Beatle, whom I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be George Harrison. I looked around to see if I could recognize anybody else. There was Ringo, winking at me. I winked back. I thought, Well, that’s cool.” 

From 2002 to 2006, Elliott joined Odetta and Josh White Jr. for the Glory Bound tour, honoring White’s father, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie. “Odetta’s mother gave me the name Ramblin’ in 1954,” he reveals. He comes by the name honestly. Despite an extensive discography, Elliott prefers being on the road and performing live to audiences. “I like the spontaneity,” he says simply. 

These days he plays a D’Angelico acoustic gifted to him by Bob Weir. “I had been playing a Martin D-28, a lovely guitar with a beautiful tone,” he explains. “But it’s big. Now I got arthritis in the shoulder from having to hold up my elbow parallel with the ground. I can’t hold that guitar anymore.” 

He’s had other age-related issues to deal with. Last summer, Elliott celebrated his 90th birthday, an event that was intended to go down with a bang. 

“Originally, the entire Guthrie family was going to host it at the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on August 1, at the end of my first post-pandemic tour,” he says. “But I had a little hospital episode that wasn’t serious but managed to collapse the tour. Consequently, I lost my birthday party at the Center.” 

Elliott has since recovered and been on the road, playing in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and California. He recently performed his music with actor Robert Carradine at a gala Beverly Hills celebration of Jack Kerouac’s centennial. And on June 26, Arlo Guthrie’s daughter Sarah Lee performed with him at the 25th edition of the Kate Wolf Festival. 

“There’s a lot of Woody in her,” he says of his mentor’s granddaughter. “Once, I was admiring the pond on Arlo’s farm. Little Sarah growled, ‘You shouldn’t swim in that pond. There’s catfish in there.’ I thought it was Woody talking to me.”

On this day, 110 years ago, folk guitar legend Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma.

In the early 1930s, the budding singer-songwriter set off for Texas where he began to pursue a musical career.

In the throes of the Great Depression, Guthrie hit the road playing guitar and singing in saloons.

In 1937, he ended up in California where he landed a job at Los Angeles radio station KFVD singing traditional and original songs.

Using the station as a platform, Guthrie began to speak out on a range of social issues and he soon became a voice for the disenfranchised.

In 1940, the young musician moved to New York City, recording his landmark Dust Bowl Ballads album that year.

While in New York, Guthrie co-founded a collective of politically minded musicians known as the Almanac Singers.

Members of the group included such notables as Cisco Houston, Josh White, Lee Hays, Sis Cunningham, Burl Ives and Pete Seeger, among others.

From the Almanacs came the Weavers – the highly influential folk band that did much to encourage the American folk music revival during the 1950s and beyond.

Becoming disillusioned with the music biz, Guthrie temporarily left New York in the early ‘40s.

“I got disgusted with the whole sissified and nervous rules of censorship on all my songs and ballads,” he once wrote.

During the war years, Guthrie returned to the Big Apple where he met a like-minded individual by the name of Marjorie Mazia, a professional dancer.

Marrying in 1945, the couple had four children: Cathy, Arlo, Joady, and Nora.

Towards the late ‘40s, however, Guthrie’s health took a turn for the worse. Suffering from Huntington's disease, he hit the road again and eventually ended up in Florida where he worked on his third novel, Seeds of Man.

By 1954, his symptoms had become severe and he was arrested in New Jersey before being admitted to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.

Arlo Guthrie recalled his memories in a 1988 BBC Arena documentary:

“When he went to the hospital for the first time and my mom went to visit him, a big German doctor psychologist type says, ‘Excuse me, Mrs Guthrie, but your husband has delusions of grandeur. He says he’s written a book. He says he’s a singer.’

“And my mom said, ‘No, he’s really done all these things.’

“The guy couldn’t believe it. He thought he had a real case! And he didn’t.

“As surprising as it was to the doctor, the world finds it surprising.”

And in this poignant BBC clip from 1964, Seeger introduces his old friend – then hospitalized – to the world…

Influencing generations of musicians, Guthrie has left an indelible mark on guitar culture and was of major importance to countless luminaries, including Bob Dylan.

“Bob Dylan once said, ‘You can listen to his songs and learn how to live.' That line sums up what my life has evidenced,” said Nora Guthrie.

“His songs, his art, his personal journal entries, his essays full of clear and sometimes explosive ideas, have been there all my life teaching me how to live.”

On September 30, Boston Celtic punk supremos Dropkick Murphys will be releasing an acoustic guitar album titled This Machine Still Kills Fascists containing lyrics written by Woody and curated by Nora Guthrie.

“I collected lyrics on all kinds of topics… lyrics that seemed to be needed to be said – or screamed – today,” she said.

“Woody Guthrie, he’s the original punk,” adds Dropkick Murphys co-founder Ken Casey.

“He went against the grain, he fought the good fight, he spoke up and sang about his beliefs. I’m motivated by reading what he wrote and am inspired by his courage.

“One man and a guitar – it’s powerful stuff.”

Browse the Woody Guthrie catalog here.

Canadian guitarist and singer-songwriter Daniel Lanois has produced albums for such legends as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson.

Alongside Brian Eno he has also co-produced a number of U2 albums, including 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby.

Friendly and forthcoming, he is the polar opposite of the stereotypical paranoid producer who jealously guards his studio secrets.

His unspoken attitude seems to be, why not share a good idea if it will help someone make better music?

The following interview extracts originally appeared in the June 1993 issue of Guitar Player…

What's your favorite way to record guitars?

“It's very important to record musicians as physically close together as possible. You and I are sitting about two feet apart; if we were playing acoustic guitars, we wouldn't have to wave or ask someone to turn up the cans.

“That's why I like to use two amplifiers with each guitar. Once sits right next to you; that's your personal monitor. Then I put another amp of the same type down the hall, splitting the signal with a Morley splitter box.

“I track both amps, but I usually end up using the isolated sound, which still sounds close and personal even if the amps are three rooms apart. I usually place a single dynamic mic fairly close to the speaker, but off-center.”

How about acoustic guitars?

“My main acoustic is this little Guild student model from the late '60s. It's not real loud, but it's fantastic for recording. I keep it in an open tuning; F - F - C - F - A - C low to high, or sometimes F - F - C - F - F - C.

“I don't use a pick. I sometimes mike the guitar, but more often I use these early-'80s Lawrence pickups that The Edge turned me on to.

“Pickups can actually be more musical than the pure instrument. You get additional harmonics that you don't hear acoustically.

“If you're a real purist, this idea makes no sense. But I like to take advantage of the personality of the guitar, pickup, and amp.”

Is board EQ part of the equation?

“I don't rely on board EQ to get a good sound, but I will use it to create a stranger sound.

“I'll give away one of my secret techniques: Say you've just spent a few hours mixing a song with a lot of effects, crazy EQ, and so on. Put that song away and play every other song on the record through that same mix. I guarantee that at least two or three songs will have something fantastic.

“That technique has directed me towards a lot of strange approaches that I never would have come up with normally.”

Any other mixing advice?

“There isn't room for everything to be big. Take Jimi Hendrix records as an example: The guitars are big and powerful, but the drums are like jazz kit recordings. They sound beautiful, but the snares aren't as big as a house and the kick drums don't occupy the whole spectrum.

“Something might serve the music better if it has its own little corner. That doesn't mean it's less important than the foreground, but not everything can be the icing on the cake.”

To what extent are you the architect of the guitar sounds on records you produce?

“Most guitar players have a big rig that they've worked on and put sounds into, and I usually don't mess with that. But quite often I suggest alternative rigs, usually simpler ones.

“The big rig is generally in the band room, and there's a more informal one in the console area where you're working out parts.

“For example, Bono has this old green Gretsch that we often do D.I. just to work out chords. That may sound great, so the guitar works its way into Edge's hands, and we record it that way.

“Nine times out of ten, if you just plug in to work out a part, you actually end up with a pretty good sound. In fact, a lot of Edge's sounds on Achtung Baby were recorded on this little solid state practice amp we had in the control room instead of the AC30.”

Is it possible to make a great record with an inexpensive 4-track machine and a couple of Shure mikes?

“No problem! Cheap recordings can be musical. I know people who recorded on PortaStudios and were never able to replicate the warm, overdriven sounds of those machines in big studios.

“Some of that quality comes from EQ-ing tracks when you bounce them. The version of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" on the Neville Brothers Yellow Moon was recorded on an Akai 12-track in my apartment.

“We mixed onto a good Sony cassette machine, and I never got a better mix, so we ended up putting the cassette mix on the final album."

How about mics?

“You don't necessarily need expensive mikes. I've always recorded Bono's vocals through a Shure SM58 or 58 Beta.

“Some of the best guitar recordings are done with inexpensive dynamic mikes. I almost always use a Beyer 88 or Shure 57 or 58, though if you want a really pure vocal or acoustic recording, you might have to go with a great tube mike.

“Sometimes technical limitations just mean you have to be resourceful, and resourcefulness never goes out of fashion.

“We were going to record Achtung Baby in a house outside Dublin using Edge's big Neve console, but they couldn't get it ready in time, so we recorded most of it through a cheap Soundcraft console – basically a P.A. board.

“We did use some external Neve preamps, but the board itself sounded great.

“Remember, energy and ideas override technology. If you have the technology, use it. But if you haven't got the cash, don't worry.”

Browse the Daniel Lanois catalog here.

In 1970, Mick Ronson changed the musical fortunes of David Bowie, a struggling singer-songwriter with two novelty hits behind him.

Together, and with their band the Spiders From Mars, they reinvented Bowie musically and created some of glam-rock’s best-loved albums: Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups.

Afterward, Ronson struggled to match that initial success, despite a catalog of collaborations that included some of rock’s biggest names: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Ian Hunter, Roger McGuinn, Morrissey, John Mellencamp and many others.

Although Ronson’s career was defined by his time with Bowie, there was a significant before and after.

In the 1960s, he played in various groups from his hometown of Hull, including the Mariners, who were advised by the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman to change their name to the King Bees around the time Bowie was fronting a group called Davie Jones and the King Bees.

He was also a member of the Rats, whose main claim to fame was the 1967 single “The Rise and Fall of Bernie Gripplestone.”

“Mick was the best guitarist in Hull, so when he left to head down south and join Bowie, I was pretty upset,” recalls Benny Marshall, the Rats’ lead singer and a close friend of Ronson’s.

“John Cambridge, our drummer, had played with Bowie on Space Oddity [his second album, a.k.a. David Bowie]. He was the bloke who went back to Hull in January 1970 with the brief to find Ronson and bring him to London. He found Mick marking out the lines on the municipal football pitch.”

Cambridge did as instructed, and Bowie and Ronson were introduced at the Marquee club, where Bowie was playing on February 3, 1970.

Two days later, Ronson had learned the riffs and song arrangements well enough to back Bowie, Cambridge and bassist/producer Tony Visconti for a John Peel Radio 1 show live in concert at the Paris Theatre in London’s Lower Regent Street.

They played 15 songs, including a new number, “Width of a Circle,” and plenty of material from Bowie’s recently released self-titled second album.

Reaction was positive, and Ronson moved into Bowie’s Haddon Hall apartment on Southend Road in Beckenham, becoming part of the family. The timing of his arrival was perfect: Bowie wanted to make a hard-rock album. 

As Visconti said later, “We respected groups like Cream, but we didn’t have that in us. We needed someone to be [that] important element, and that somebody was Mick Ronson.”

In terms of his personality, Ronson was a good fit. Everyone loved Ronson’s laconic Northern humor too, especially Bowie, whose father and mother came from Yorkshire and Lancashire, respectively. He’d tease Ronson and get just as good back.

But it was, of course, his guitar playing that stunned them.

“He floored us,” Visconti said. “When David and I met him, we knew he’d fit in looks-wise, but we had no idea what was coming until he picked up his Les Paul and played for us.

“He really didn’t have to be taught the few songs we’d already worked up with John Cambridge. Mick watched our hands on the guitar and bass necks, and he just knew what to play, but he didn’t say much.

“We thought he was just a cool, silent type. Later we found out that our apartment in Beckenham was very ‘big time’ for him, and he was simply overwhelmed.”

Visconti insists Ronson came to Trident Studio in September 1969, when the David Bowie/Space Oddity album was being finalized.

“Mick came to the mix of ‘Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ and was persuaded to play a little guitar line in the middle part and joined in the handclaps on the same section,” he says.

But if he did, he isn’t credited.

Ronno’s first recorded work with Bowie was on the remade and rocked-out single “Memory of a Free Festival Part 1/Part 2,” recorded in September 1969 and released to zero chart success in June 1970.

In April, sessions began for The Man Who Sold the World, featuring the core band of Bowie, Ronson, Visconti and former Rats drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey.

It was a brilliant album, full of Ronson’s crunching heavy-metal attack allied to arcane Wagnerian, dystopian lyrics.

His contributions to Bowie tracks such as “She Shook Me Cold,” “Running Gun Blues” and the epic “Width of a Circle” cemented his place in Bowie’s orbit, leading the singer to call him, with a smug smile, “my Jeff Beck.”

As it happened, both Bowie and Ronson were huge fans of Beck’s Truth album. Marshall says, “[Mick] knew all the licks, except ‘Beck’s Boogie,’ which he dissected but couldn’t master. It infuriated him.

“In 1968, the Rats had supported Beck at the Cat Ballou in Grantham, and afterward Ronno asked him to show him the fast run at the beginning. So Beck plays it, and Mick says, ‘No, play it slower.’ Beck said, ‘If I play it any slower, I’ll stop!’ But he was patient, and Mick learned that riff.”

The Man Who Sold the World had not been a commercial breakthrough, but it added to Ronson’s confidence.

Visconti and Ronson had masterminded the sound and dashed off the arrangements, while Bowie canoodled with his new bride, Angie. 

“She Shook Me Cold,” the dirtiest song he ever wrote, was directly about Mrs. Bowie, but it was Ronson who provided the Jimi Hendrix-style intro and the power-trio setting à la Cream.

Later, Angie lamented the fact that Ronson didn’t receive the publishing he deserved.

“In terms of kudos and feeling that one is valued, it would have been nice for Mick Ronson to have had publishing credits,” she said.

Visconti’s departure from the group saw the arrival of bassist Trevor Bolder. It also gave Ronson his in.

“[Visconti had] done all the string and piano arrangements, so it was my chance to fill the gap,” Ronson said.

“I’d never done it before, but I could read and write music, and I’d watched Tony at Haddon Hall, writing in the basement, saw how he did the charts, and I’d help out.”

Ronson had already written a mini-score for four recorders, used in the break of “All the Madmen.” It was a start.

“I thought, Well, if you can do that then so can I,” he said. “I went out for dinner with [singer] Dana Gillespie, who had tracks that needed strings, and David said, ‘Oh, Mick’ll do that!’ [Like Bowie and Ronson, Gillespie was managed by Tony Defries’ MainMan company.]

“I never had, but it was great. David pushed me forward. That was his thing. He made stuff happen.”

With Visconti gone, Bowie was now heavily reliant on Ronson. His next album, 1971’s Hunky Dory, saw the emergence of his new quartet, featuring Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey, a taut group that gave his folkie tunes their strong rock underpinnings.

Ronson finally got his credit as the arranger of its songs “Changes,” “Life on Mars?,” “Kooks,” “Quicksand” and the Biff Rose cover “Fill Your Heart,” which was copied virtually note for note from the original.

In retrospect, many have noticed how similar the sound of Hunky Dory is to Michael Chapman’s Fully Qualified Survivor, the 1970 album on which Ronson had made his debut.

Ronson’s burgeoning role extended to instructing hired gun Rick Wakeman for his now iconic piano parts on “Life on Mars?” The Royal College of Music-trained keyboardist (and future Yes member) didn’t mind the input.

“He was a tremendous human being, with oodles of talent,” Wakeman said.

Bowie producer/engineer Ken Scott points to “the great orchestral versions that Ronno put together. [They’re] even more brilliant when you consider he had this habit of running out of time.

“I remember him rushing in 10 minutes before the session, running up to the bathroom and locking himself in so he could find the privacy to finish writing. He’d come out with a huge grin and a stack of charts.”

By the time the band assembled for the followup, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Ronson’s talents were in full bloom.

On the epic “Five Years,” his string section whipped up the hysteria, while on “Suffragette City,” it was Ronno who came up with the funky, lurching ARP synthesizer sound that many mistake for saxophones.

But working with Bowie had its challenges for Ronson, a now 25-year-old who, until recently, had been a practicing Mormon.

In January 1972, shortly before the Ziggy Stardust sessions were complete, Bowie told Melody Maker he was gay, or, more accurately, bisexual.

Ronson admitted he found it hard to deal with at first. “It embarrassed me,” he said. “I wondered what people would say about me. I knew my family in Hull would get flak. I gave dad a car when I left for London, and people threw red paint over it.”

Aside from his own feelings about it, Ronson understood Bowie was playing with his image as a way to keep the media engaged. “Personally, it was a bit of a shock,” he admitted, “but Bowie manipulated the media again and again.”

Overall, Ronson approached the Ziggy Stardust project with slight suspicion. The explicitness of “Suffragette City” and the discarded track “Sweet Head” concerned him.

“He worried about the lyrics,” Angie says. “I told him. ‘Look, all these people are waving their arms in freedom thanks to you. It may not be what you’re used to in Hull, but accept it.’ Then he’d simmer down and be happy.”

If Ziggy Stardust was a Ronson tour de force, the follow-up, Aladdin Sane, was a mixed blessing for him.

His contributions were immense, but so were those of recently arrived pianist Mike Garson, whom Ronson had auditioned and later advised to “make yourself indispensable. That’s what David likes. Don’t just be a session man.”

Certainly, Ronson lived up that credo. His work on Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced with Bowie the August after Ziggy Stardust, effectively rescued Reed’s career after his debut solo album had bombed.

“It was a good experience for me,” Ronno said. “Lou’s guitar was always out of tune, so I’d kneel in front of him and tune it properly. He didn’t care, ’cause he was so laid-back.”

Without his contribution, Transformer might never have got off the ground.

“It came out pretty well,” Ronson said. “Though I didn’t know what the hell [Lou] was talking about half the time. He’d say stuff like: ‘Can you make it sound a bit more grey?’”

Fortunately the album was a roaring success.

“Transformer is easily my best-produced album,” Reed said. “That has a lot to do with Mick Ronson. His influence was stronger than David’s, but together, as a team, they’re terrific.”

By 1973, though, it seemed that Ronson had become dispensable, along with Woody Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder, both of whom had been dropped for having the gall to protest when they discovered that new arrival Garson was making 10 times their salary.

The guitarist’s relations with Bowie were frosty when, on October 20,1973, Ronson played with Bowie onstage for the last time in that decade.

Only 200 people saw the appearance in the flesh, shot for NBC’s The Midnight Special. Dubbed “The 1980 Floor Show,” the concert featured Bowie serenading French singer/actress/model Amanda Lear with “Sorrow,” a 1966 hit for the Merseys that Bowie would record for 1973’s Pin Ups, an album on which he covered songs from the Swinging London era.

He and singer Marianne Faithfull also duetted on Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” But Bowie hated the end result, which he derided as “shot abysmally.”

This was the night Ziggy Stardust truly left the building, which may explain why a smiling Bowie ended each song with an affectionate pat on Ronson’s white satin-clad back.

As the wingman was increasingly sidelined, MainMan, his and Bowie’s mutual management company, promised him the earth.

He was to be the next superstar off the production line, said manager Tony Defries. In the summer of ’73, having finished his sessions for Pin Ups, most of which he’d arranged, as usual, Ronson returned to the Château d’Hérouville studios outside Paris and made his solo debut album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue.

Bowie chipped in from a distance, gifting the songs “Growing Up and I’m Fine,” “Pleasure Man/Hey Ma, Get Papa” and “Music Is Lethal.”

RCA weren’t overjoyed with what it heard, and the album’s release date was put back more than six months, to 1974.

Within months, Ronson was back in another band, joining Mott the Hoople for what would be their final single, “Saturday Gigs.”

Ronson and frontman Ian Hunter had bonded back when Mick had knocked out a string arrangement for Mott’s “Sea Diver,” but the other band members resented the arrival of this “rock star” in their midst, with MainMan and RCA sending limos for their boy while Mott traveled together in a bus.

Tired of the conflict, Hunter split the band.

Ronson went back to his solo career. Bowie didn’t take part in the follow-up album, Play Don’t Worry, but he allowed Ronson to use the backing track from their cover of the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat,” which had been recorded for an American attempt at a Pin Ups album that was discarded soon after.

Play Don’t Worry was excellent in parts. Although he wasn’t a natural songwriter, Ronson did himself proud on the opening “Billy Porter,” “Empty Bed” and versions of two songs by Pure Prairie League, whose 1972 album Bustin’ Out featured his guitar and string arrangements.

While Slaughter on 10th Avenue was being mixed, Ronson returned to the studio with Bowie to create demos for the future Diamond Dogs tracks “1984” and “Dodo.”

His work wouldn’t appear on the finished album, a creepy, avant-garde affair, but his trademark guitar style did in the shape of “Rebel Rebel,” almost a Spiders From Mars pastiche riff, played now by Bowie.

According to Ronson’s wife, Suzi, “When Mick heard Diamond Dogs, he wasn’t exactly depressed. He just thought, Oh, that’s Dave going out on a limb. But he would have done that record like a shot.”

Instead Ronson embarked on a mercifully brief solo tour, including a show at London’s Rainbow Theatre in February 1974, where he had strings and woodwind sections and, on backing vocals, the Thunderthighs – Karen Friedman, Dari Lalou and Casey Synge – who famously appeared on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and Mott the Hoople’s “Roll Away the Stone.”

Cast into the spotlight, Ronson didn’t appear overly confident. The ultimate sideman was too modest to carry this off.

Bowie watched on from the wings and offered words of encouragement during the intermission, but decided against making a guest appearance.

After Bowie, where does one go? Ronson produced and played on Ian Hunter’s self-titled 1975 debut solo album.

That same year, he moved to New York City, rented a place on Hudson Street near the Meatpacking District and enjoyed the city with his best friend Hunter, who had provided safe haven via Mott the Hoople, Mott, and the Hunter Ronson Band.

This is where they met Bob Dylan, who invited Ronson to join his band of gypsies, the Rolling Thunder Revue, after a meet engineered by Dylan’s main fixer, Bob Neuwirth.

That evening began at the Bitter End, on Bleecker Street. “We weren’t Dylan fans at all,” Suzi Ronson says. “Mick thought he sounded like Yogi Bear. But Ian took us anyway, and Dylan played [his 1976] Desire album, and he was mezmerising, better than David.

“Then we went to the Bottom Line, where Mick got thrown out three times for being drunk and disorderly.”

Back at the Bitter End, Hunter recalls “the whole place going insane ’cause Dylan was singing with Neuwirth and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And Neuwirth [sees] Mick and says to Dylan, ‘Go and ask him!’”

In Ronson’s version, “[Neuwirth] was with this guy,” he recalled. “And I looked at this bloke he was with and thought, Wait a minute, I know you! And, of course, it was Dylan. And we talked, and he said, ‘We’re going on the road. Why don’t you come with us?’

“I honestly thought it was a hoax. Then Dylan phoned me, said the tour was going to happen and would I be there? Like a shot!”

“That tour rescued Mick’s professional life,” Suzi says.

Ronson was soon back with Hunter, appearing on You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic and Welcome to the Club.

With his solo career on hold, he became a full-time producer. He worked with Van Morrison, John Mellencamp, Roger McGuinn and Meat Loaf backup singer Ellen Foley. He even contributed guitar to the title track from David Cassidy’s 1976 album, Getting It in the Street.

Despite his signature guitar style and tone, Ronson became engrossed in writing string arrangements.

“He lapsed into the language of strings,” Hunter says, “but he was a bit lazy, ’cause if it was interesting he’d do it using 15 tracks and one guitar track.

“He wrote arrangements on Marlboro Light fag packets. But he could be persnickety and picky if he was involved. He could have matured into a world-famous musician again, but he’d meet people on the street and, next thing, he’s doing a Mexican punk band.”

“But he was great with fans. He’d invite them back for tea, he’d return their phone calls. Sometimes he could be the big guy and show off, so he wasn’t perfect, gorgeous as he was. I considered him like family, so there were arguments.

“One time he disappeared to Sweden for a project when we were in the middle of something, so I had a go. And he just said, ‘Look, I’ve done Bowie and I’ve done you, so I’m allowed to fuck up,’ and we just collapsed into laughter.”

In the late 1980s, Ronson’s health began to cause concern. He was diagnosed with liver cancer, something he neither made a secret of nor chose to acknowledge as a threat. Instead he threw himself into projects such as Morrissey’s 1992 album, Your Arsenal.

Speaking with Classic Rock, Morrissey said, “Mick told me that he alone wrote the main guitar hooks for ‘Starman,’ ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and others – not just hooks, really, but grand choruses in themselves – but a share of publishing wasn’t ever on offer for him.

“When you consider his solos in ‘Time’ and ‘Moonage Daydream,’ then you can guess that they were his own creations.”

A fan of both Ronson and Bowie, Morrissey was intrigued by letters Bowie sent to his old guitarist chum during the making of Your Arsenal.

“One day at breakfast, I asked Mick why Bowie wrote so often,” Morrissey recalled, “and he said, ‘He keeps asking me what you’re like in the studio,’ and then he exploded with laughter.

“I have no idea why this was so hilarious. I think Bowie had interest in Mick only as much as it was in his nature to like anyone.”

Certainly, Bowie was impressed by Your Arsenal enough that he invited Ronson to work with him on his 1993 studio album, Black Tie White Noise.

He also kicked off a fine version of “All the Young Dudes” with Bowie and Hunter at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, 1992, which was the last time his fans saw him onstage.

One year later, on April 29, 1993, Ronson died of liver cancer at age 46.

He spent his last hours in the company of Hunter, Suzi and sister Maggi at Tony Defries’ house on Hasker Street in West London.

Ronson didn’t die penniless, but he wasn’t wealthy by rock star standards.

“He bought the house in Woodstock on Glasco Turnpike [in New York State] because he made money out of my records and Ellen Foley’s Night Out,” Ian Hunter says. “His car was an old Toyota Corolla that sounded like a hair dryer.”

Hunter summed up the gloomy finale in his Ronno elegy “Michael Picasso,” from 1977’s The Artful Dodger: “You turned into a ghost surrounded by your pain/And the thing that I liked the least was sitting round Hasker Street, lying about the future.”

“As a rock duo, I thought we were as good as Mick and Keith.”

“What is remarkable is that he was so overlooked, and he still is,” Morrissey said of Ronson. “Has Mick ever been on the cover of a major British music magazine? Even when he died? He was by nature extremely humble. He was just happy to be there.”

Though he was the first of many great guitarists Bowie would adopt, champion and cast aside, Ronson continued to hold a place in his heart after their split, perhaps more than any other who followed him.

“Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character,” Bowie admitted years afterward.

“He was very much a salt-of-the-earth type, the blunt northerner with a defiantly masculine personality, so what you got was the old-fashioned yin-and-yang thing.

A year before Bob Dylan went electric with a sunburst Fender Stratocaster at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a bluesman who hadn’t recorded and had rarely performed since the 1930s stunned the festival’s crowd of 15,000 spectators with an electrifying performance of his own.

Just weeks earlier, Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James had been recovering from cancer treatments in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital when John Fahey and two friends tracked down the 61-year-old legend and persuaded him to play again.

His re-emergence came during the 1960s blues revival at a time that also saw the “rediscovery” of Bukka White, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi John Hurt and others, who played to new audiences and scored record deals.

Armed only with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, Skip James captivated the Newport audience with his high falsetto and spidery fingerpicking that often commanded all 10 of his fingers.

“Skip at Newport ’64 was just transcendent. It was incredible,” recalls Dick Waterman, who witnessed the performance and later managed James’ career until his death in 1969.

“He sat down and he set his fingers down on the fretboard, and he took a breath and hit the first note of ‘Devil Got My Woman,’ and it was just incredible. Just shivers even at the memory of it.”

It’s safe to say no one else at Newport was playing blues guitar the way James did at the time – not House and not White, who were also on the bill in 1964.

Instead of the more commonly used open-G and open-E major-key tunings, James played in a D-minor tuning, which lent songs like “Hard Time Killing Floor” and “Cypress Grove” an ominous tone. The tuning was so particular that it became associated with Bentonia, Mississippi, James’ hometown, through a succession of players.

“In other regional styles of Delta blues, you may have an open-tuned guitar where the minor gets introduced against the major chord,” says Ryan Lee Crosby, a Massachusetts-based blues artist who learned Bentonia blues from Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, the last living musical link to James.

“But in the Bentonia style, it’s a minor chord, where major notes get added on top, so the tension between the major and minor is inverted.”

This differentiator sets up the darker, minor-key sound of Bentonia standards, but there are also other structural differences – or, rather, a lack of structure, as there are no choruses and few turnarounds in Bentonia blues, and no set number of times to repeat a pattern.

The droning, hypnotic tones come from ringing the open strings with the thumb or forefinger while fingerpicking, and frailing across the strings with the others.

While James doesn’t have the household-name recognition of B.B. King, Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson, his influence has never been stronger among blues and folk musicians. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a folk collective that launched the careers of Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons and Leyla McCalla, carries his penchant for freeform, minor-key romps.

Emerging blues guitarists and singers like Buffalo Nichols and Adia Victoria wear his influence even more prominently.

“I came into Skip James’ music at the perfect time in my life,” says Victoria, who discovered him around the time she got her first guitar, at age 21. 

“I felt spoken to in a way that I’d never felt spoken to. I felt reached and seen. And I felt like, through Skip James, I became more in touch and aware of my culture as a Black southerner, in a way that I hadn’t been before.”

James’ 1960s revival didn’t last long. Before his cancer roared out of remission in 1967, his handlers squandered the considerable buzz he had created at Newport. By the time Waterman helped him get a record contract in late 1965, more palatable blues artists like Hurt were getting more attention, gigs and money.

It didn’t help that James, by all accounts, was a proud man who felt his playing was of higher artistic merit than his contemporaries on the folk blues scene.

“He was a very different, difficult, contrary kind of person,” Waterman says. “In other words, Skip had a huge ego and he loved to be flattered, and the best way to get along with Skip was to be flattering and tell him how great he was. 

"He felt he himself was performing at a much, much higher level, which may or may not be true, depending on how you look at it. He definitely was not ‘one of the guys.’”

Bentonia, Mississippi, sits atop the hills that rise above the vast alluvial Delta, where blues music evolved at sharecropper plantations and juke joints, makeshift venues where laborers could find music and moonshine.

Like many former farming outposts across the South, Bentonia is bisected by a railroad whose trains don’t bother stopping anymore. The only thing riding these rails are freighters headed north and south on the same tracks that dropped Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago.

The Blue Front Café, considered the oldest juke operating in Mississippi, still stands next to the tracks in the center of town. Behind the cinderblock façade and barred front doors, locals mosey in to buy cigarettes and sundries, lingering sometimes to talk to the proprietor, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes.

At 74, Holmes is not only an elder statesman – he’s also the last of the Bentonia bluesmen.

The walls of the Blue Front are covered with faded posters and snapshots of the Bentonia Blues Festival, which Holmes has run for five decades. Music equipment is everywhere – microphone stands at half mast, guitars mounted onto the cinderblock and shiplap walls, a pair of dusty Peavey guitar amps on the floor under a pile of cables.

On a folding card table, copies of his eighth album, the Grammy-nominated Cypress Grove (Easy Eye Sound, 2019), are stacked for sale. Holmes recorded the collection of potent and haunted performances from the Bentonia canon – the title track, “Hard Times” and “Devil Got My Woman” were part of the original 26 sides James recorded for Paramount Records for $40 in 1931 – with the Black Keys at Dan Auerbach’s studio in Nashville.

“There’s an urgency with getting any of these types of people in the studio, older musicians that are sort of one of a kind,” Auerbach says. “The whole thing just felt like a blessing, really, just to be able to get to do it. And to share the love of the music and live in Jimmy’s world for a little bit.”

Holmes didn’t learn the Bentonia blues from James, who played the Blue Front occasionally. James and another Bentonia artist, Jack Owens, both learned from a man named Henry Stuckey, who lived in the area and, for a time, on the Holmes farm.

Stuckey allegedly learned the open D-minor tuning from a group of Bahamian soldiers he met in France during World War I and brought it home. Owens began to teach Holmes off and on beginning in the late ’70s, and by the ’90s the pair were playing daily at the Blue Front.

“I picked up some licks from him, which I was doing all along, but he was a hard act to follow,” Holmes says. 

“He wanted me to learn it, and I think now, from a divine perspective, he wanted me to learn it but he didn’t know how to teach it. He would come every day and say, ‘Boy, let’s play. You’ve got to learn to do this.’”

Over the past few years, Holmes has taken on the role of instructor to younger players who visit him at the Blue Front. Robert Connelly Farr, a Mississippi native who lives in Vancouver, B.C., reinterprets his lessons into thunderous back-alley blues, while Mike Munson’s adaptations are fully absorbed into his singer-songwriter compositions. Ghalia Volt, who honed her one-woman-band craft while busking in Brussels, Belgium, frequently shows up to perform at the juke.

Neither Victoria nor Nichols have made a similar pilgrimage to Bentonia, but James’ influence is a strong undercurrent in both artists’ music. On A Southern Gothic (Warner Bros.), Victoria’s third album, the Bentonia sound manifests in the eerie tension, tuning and fingerpicking on songs like “Magnolia Blues” and “Carolina Bound.”

“That D-minor tuning lends itself to some of the more melancholic aspects of human emotion, and combining that tuning with his voice, that falsetto, was very plaintive, mournful, but it could also sound manic, as well,” Victoria says. 

“His style of singing is what my internal voice sounded like. You can hear that weariness. You can hear that wisdom and that defiance, as well. It’s like a combination of dark and light that really spoke to me – that startled me, really.”

Nichols discovered James on a blues compilation when he was 12 or 13, he says, but didn’t seek out a full James collection for another five years. As a metalhead at the time, Nichols was already familiar with drop-D tuning, so transitioning to open D-minor tuning wasn’t too much of a stretch.

He eventually left behind his shredding for the organic tones of an acoustic guitar and a country-folk blues sound. For Nichols, the most enduring influence of James on his own playing isn’t what he played as much as his individualism.

“Whenever he would play songs that weren’t his, he would always make sure to play in his own style,” Nichols says. “That’s always stuck with me, because I’ve never really been the type to learn other people’s music. The two or three Skip James songs that I play are the two or three that I know. This music to me is supposed to be individual and be about the expression of the player.”

True to his word, on his cover on the James composition “Sick Bed Blues” from his 2021 self-titled debut album (Fat Possum), Nichols speeds up the tempo and improvises on the original licks with his own slide-accented descending figure.

Such improvisation is a central feature of the Bentonia sound. Holmes maintains that the songs are impossible to transcribe because they’re never played the same way twice. That’s due in part to playing from the heart, he says, but also because guys like Owens were uneducated.

“If you told Jack Owens, ‘I want you to do four counts of ‘Hard Times,’ he wouldn’t know what you’re talking about,” Holmes says. “‘Uh, can you run me an E chord?’ Have no idea what you’re talking about. Even though he could do it, but he was unaware he was doin’ it.” 

Adds Nichols, “You hear the way he plays, and the biggest challenge is you can’t really sit down and transcribe it because it’s not very predictable. 

"The way he’s going to play, it all relates to the way he sings, and if you hear him do three recordings of the same song, it’s always going to be a little different. I had to unlearn a lot of the sort of technical precision and rely more on the feeling of it.”

Victoria agrees that playing the music riff-for-riff is missing the point. James understood how to use the guitar to serve his purpose of telling honest stories. Emulating him or anyone else takes the heart out of the music.

“Skip James’ music is an invitation to use your imagination to press forward in what he did,” she says. “He’s already done that. He’s mastered that, so there’s no point in trying to replicate it. 

"But I think that he still serves a valuable lesson of how can you give sound to your mood and your world, and how can you swathe your storytelling in this oral blanket.

“And to stay out of your way,” she adds. “If the story is good, the guitar should serve you. The guitar should never be a crutch behind a lack of insight in your story. I think that was the brilliance of Skip James. His storytelling was as brilliant as his guitar playing, and vice versa.”

Browse the Skip James catalog here.

For '50s-era guitarists who would soon be playing rock and roll, the Fender Telecaster hit the music industry with the impact of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Leo Fender's so-called "plank" ushered in the era of the commercially successful solidbody – echoing the immense industrial and social impact of Henry Ford's Model T. While Ford was never one of Fender's idols, the car maker bestowed the wonders of the automobile upon the masses by standardizing a sound design, streamlining production techniques, and lowering costs.

Likewise, Fender's "Model T" – initially called the Esquire, then the Broadcaster, and finally the Telecaster – was a powerful, affordable tool that helped a vast community of working guitarists ignite a cultural revolution.

The tumult was so far-reaching that Gibson was compelled to introduce the Les Paul to compete with the Tele – and Leo himself was inspired to develop the Stratocaster in an attempt to make its older sibling obsolete.

These three models are still modern music's most important guitars – and they all have Leo Fender's 1949 "standard guitar" prototype to thank for kick-starting their enduring glory.

THE ARCHTOP ERA

As twilight fell on the Big Band era toward the end of World War II, small combos playing boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, western swing, and honky-tonk formed throughout the United States.

Many of these outfits embraced the electric guitar because it could give a few players the power of an entire horn section.

Pickup-equipped archtops had reigned in these late-'40s dance bands, but the increasing popularity of roadhouses and dance halls created a growing need for louder, cheaper, and more durable axes.

Players also needed faster necks and better intonation to play what the country boys called "take-off lead guitar," and Rickenbacker Bakelites and other '30s-era solidbodies failed to deliver.

Custom-made solidbodies such as Merle Travis' Bigsby – as well as kitchen-table contraptions like Les Paul's "Log" – pointed in the right direction, but were beyond the means of the average player.

The demand for better electric guitars was as obvious as their reality was elusive.

ENTER LEO FENDER

Fender recognized the vast potential for an electric guitar that was easy to hold, easy to tune, and easy to play.

He also recognized that players needed guitars that would not feed back at dance hall volumes like the typical archtop. (Many guitarists had to stuff rags into their elegantly crafted guitars to stop the howling.)

In addition, Fender sought a tone that would command attention on the bandstand and cut through the noise in a bar.

By 1949, he had conceptualized the perfect tone – a clear, bell-like sound with distinct highs and lows, but devoid of muddled midrange frequencies that Fender considered "fluff" – and began working in earnest on what would become the first Telecaster at the Fender factory in Fullerton, California.

Although he never admitted it, Fender seemed to base his practical design on the Rickenbacker Bakelite. One of the Rickenbacker's strong points – a detachable neck that made it easy to make and service – was not lost on Fender, who was a master at improving already established designs. (He once said, "It isn't a radically different thing that becomes a success; it is the thing that offers an improvement on an already proven item.")

Not surprisingly, his first prototype was a single-pickup guitar with a detachable hard rock maple neck and a pine body painted white. The seeds of revolution were sown.

THE ESQUIRE

Don Randall, who managed Fender's distributor, the Radio & Television Equipment Company, recognized the commercial possibilities of the new design and made plans to introduce the instrument as the Esquire Model. (Although Randall – the company's de facto namesmith – gave the Esquire its moniker, Fender supported the name, saying that it "sounded regal and implied a certain distinction above other guitars.")

In April 1950, Radio-Tel started promoting the Esquire – the first Fender 6-string officially introduced to the public. The company prepared its Catalog No. 2, picturing a black single-pickup Esquire with a tweed form-fit case.

Another picture showed Jimmy Wyble of Spade Cooley's band holding a blonde Esquire. These debut models, with a planned retail price of $139.95, exhibited the utilitarian shape of thousands of Fender guitars to come.

"The Esquire guitar features a new style of construction which vastly improves the useability of this type of instrument," Randall wrote. The claim was further embellished by stating that the guitar could be played "at extreme volume," and that the fast neck was an aid to easy fretting.

Randall added, "The neck is also replaceable and can be changed by the owner in approximately ten minutes time. This feature eliminates costly repairs and refretting."

Fender believed that the neck was strong enough to resist warping without a trussrod. If a neck did warp, he planned to mail the customer a new one in a shipping tube.

Unfortunately, the necks didn't turn out to be as tough as Fender claimed. Randall reported that the necks on his samples had warped badly while traveling to the 1950 summer trade shows, and asked that the new guitars be outfitted with reinforced necks.

Initially, Fender had been contentious about the extra effort it would take to design and manufacture reinforced necks, but then a test guitar in his lab suffered the same problem.

Faced with mounting evidence that his guitar truly needed a reinforced neck, Fender bought a routing plate to install trussrods on October 3, 1950.

Randall's primary marketing ploy was to establish the Esquire in music instruction studios, reasoning that the affordable, practical guitar would be a hot commodity in those circles. In addition, a healthy response for the one-pickup version would prime the market for the more expensive two-pickup model that Fender already had in mind.

In fact, Fender's choice of a 3-position lever switch – which allowed three distinct guitar tones – probably coincided with his plans to add a rhythm pickup.

Fortunately, the Esquire's body design easily lent itself to both one- and two-pickup configurations. Ultimately, all production models had cavities routed for two pickups because Fender wanted players to have the option of adding a pickup in the future. (The one-pickup models hid an empty cavity under the pickguard.)

The two-pickup Esquires were manufactured with the second (rhythm) pickup positioned under the strings near the end of the fingerboard. Fender shielded the rhythm pickup with a metal cover to cut high harmonics and to emphasize fundamental tones.

A handy blend control knob mixed the rhythm pickup signal with that of the lead pickup when the pickup selector was in its lead position.

Putting the selector in the middle position activated the rhythm pickup alone.

In the forward position, the rhythm pickup was also selected, but along with a capacitor that rolled off high frequencies. (Fender called this sound "deep rhythm," and reasoned that guitarists could use the position to play bass lines.)

Dual-pickup Fender guitars featured these same electronics until 1952.

Although the single-pickup guitars used capacitors to mimic the mellow sound of a rhythm pickup, the real thing sounded better. Jimmy Bryant, who epitomized the new wave of postwar electric-guitar wizards, liked the jazzier sound of the dual-pickup guitar, as did Fender himself.

THE BROADCASTER

The factory finally went into full production in late October or early November 1950, and the name Randall chose for the dual-pickup guitar was "Broadcaster."

Musical Merchandise magazine carried the first announcement for the Broadcaster in February 1951 with a full-page insert that described it in detail. The guitar had what Randall called a "Modern cut-away body" and a "Modern styled head." And what player could resist the "Adjustable solo-lead pickup" that was "completely adjustable for tone-balance by means of three elevating screws"?

Finally, the industry had an up-to-date production solidbody. (Fender sold 87 Broadcasters on the guitar's initial release in January 1951.) Many people took note – including Gretsch, who claimed the Broadcaster name infringed on the company's trademark "Broadkaster." Faced with this fact, Randall wrote a letter to his salespeople on February 21, advising them that Radio-Tel was abandoning the Broadcaster name and requesting suggestions for a new one.

On February 24, Randall, who had some good ideas of his own, announced that the Broadcaster was renamed the "Telecaster."

The Broadcaster-to-Telecaster name change cost Radio-Tel hundreds of dollars and derailed the initial marketing effort. Brochures and envelope inserts were destroyed, and some unlucky worker had to clip the word "Broadcaster" from hundreds of headstock decals with a pair of scissors.

For several months, the new twin-pickup guitars sported nothing but the word "Fender." Years later, collectors would coin the term "No-caster" for these early-to-mid-'51 guitars.

TELE TWEAKS

In 1952, Fender replaced the Telecaster's blend control circuit with a conventional tone control.

Now the switch's rear position selected the lead pickup, the middle position selected the rhythm pickup, and the front position delivered the "deep rhythm" sound.

Teles were equipped this way until the mid-'60s, when the modern switch setup was introduced: the middle position selected both pickups, the front position selected the rhythm pickup, and the rear position selected the lead pickup.

One drawback of the 1952 to mid-'60s wiring is obvious today: The wiring made a two-pickup combination impossible unless the player delicately positioned the spring-loaded switch between settings.

However, once players learned this trick, they received a tonal surprise: Different models produced different dual-pickup sounds, depending on the rhythm pickup's magnetic polarity.

The "between" setting – which helped define the mystique of vintage Telecasters – could offer the robust tone provided by both pickups or produce a snarly growl similar to the Stratocaster's half-switch sound. (James Burton, playing his '53 Telecaster, exploited this unique tone on Ricky Nelson's "Travelin' Man.")

However, it was the Tele's lead pickup that captured the hearts of most players.

Early "level-pole" units offered outstanding tone with significant bass content and non-offensive highs (although manufacturing inconsistencies caused a small number of these pickups to produce an out-of-balance, bass-heavy low-E sound).

In mid-1955, Fender staggered the polepiece heights as he had on Strat pickups. The results were mixed. The volume balance from string to string was better, but the Tele's overall sound was harsher.

In 1953, the factory began notching the two outer brass bridge pieces under the low E and high E, which allowed a lower adjustment for these strings. By 1954, Telecasters employed steel bridges again, but they were rounded and made from a smaller-diameter stock than the 1950 bridges.

By 1958, the bridge pieces were changed yet again to a threaded stock with less mass, and the factory stopped putting the strings through the body.

In 1959, Fender introduced the Telecaster Custom and Esquire Custom, fancy versions of the originals with white binding that helped protect the edges from wear. These guitars had Jazzmaster-like rosewood fingerboards, which looked more traditional and wore better than one-piece maple necks.

Some early-'60s, pre-CBS Custom Telecasters had necks capped with maple fingerboards made in the same manner as the necks capped with rosewood. However, at no time during the pre-CBS years did Fender regularly produce Customs with the older-style maple neck. (The only exceptions may have been unlikely special orders.)

While the standard Telecasters and Esquires came with blonde finishes, the Customs were offered with sunburst finishes. A few even had more expensive custom colors.

THE PLAYER'S PERSPECTIVE

In the early 1950s, a broad spectrum of Tele players established themselves in combos – even young blues guitar legend-to-be B.B. King spanked the plank.

With its versatile sound, ease of playing, and reasonable cost, what better guitar to yellow with perspiration and cigarette smoke?

Most serious students could afford the $189.50 price, ensuring a new guitar generation would grow up on Fenders. Still, most players preferred top-of-the-line instruments, and almost all professional jazz guitar and pop players employed something other than a Fender.

And after Fender introduced the Stratocaster in '54, the Tele wasn't even Fender's top-of-the-line ax.

Then an interesting thing happened. By the late '50s, the Telecaster was becoming an integral part of the session player's arsenal.

California-based guitarist Howard Roberts endorsed Gibson and Epiphone but also played an old Telecaster on countless rock sessions, as did Tommy Tedesco. These players knew what models recorded best and pleased record producers.

The Telecaster and its solidbody cohorts produced the teenage sound that proclaimed a guitar generation gap: old versus new, jazz and pop conformity versus rock rebellion.

At the same time, the Tele was heard increasingly on pure country recordings, treading in the big-box domain of Chet Atkins and Hank Garland (who sounded anything but twangy).

As the '60s unfolded and rock guitar playing matured, the Telecaster's role, onstage and off, solidified. While the guitar played a small part in the rise and fall of instrumental rock and surf music, Steve Cropper played one with Booker T. and the MGs, as did the Ventures' Nokie Edwards.

James Burton and Tele moved from Ricky Nelson's band to TV's Shindogs, all the while chalking up hours as L.A.'s premier session stylist in rock and country.

Much of the British Invasion had the look of Rickenbackers and Gretsches, but Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck recorded many of their milestone sides with the Yardbirds on a Telecaster and Esquire, respectively.

Mike Bloomfield chose a Tele for his highly influential mid-'60s work with Paul Butterfield and Bob Dylan, and Jimmy Page played one on Led Zeppelin's first album and on the solo of "Stairway to Heaven."

As Roy Buchanan told Guitar Player in '76, "The Telecaster sounded a lot like a steel, and I liked that tone. I like the old Teles because of the wood, the way the pickups are wound, the capacitors, and the whole works."

THE TELE LEGACY

By the late '60s, it was clear the Telecaster had shaken the foundations of the music industry. The Tele – and the host of solidbody models introduced as a result of its success – changed the way the world heard, played, and composed music.

Ironically, Leo Fender, who worked incessantly after '51 developing new models such as the Strat, Jazzmaster, and Jaguar (and then, in the '70s and '80s, formulating Music Man and G&L; models), had a very hard time topping what he accomplished in his first go-round.

"Everyone thought his first guitar was his best, but no one would tell him that," said longtime friend and pioneering electric stylist Alvino Rey in the '80s.

The Tele was Leo Fender's Model T, but, unlike the old Fords, it didn't go away.

For thousands of guitarists, the Telecaster is still state of the art – an enduring battle ax for rock, country, or anything amplified.

• Upgrade your Tele tone with the best Telecaster pickups

On this day, in 1965, Bob Dylan released his first top 40 Billboard Hot 100 single, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” 

Clocking in at just two minutes and 20 seconds, this lively song may be punchy but it is jam-packed with profound rhymes reflecting mid-’60s counterculture that many have likened to a prototypical rap style.

But Dylan was influenced by beat poetry of another kind.

As a student in the late ‘50s, it was the literary works of Beat Generation writers – notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg – that captured the young musician’s imagination. Indeed, the song’s title is partly inspired by Kerouac’s ’58 novella The Subterraneans, while Dylan's fast-paced lyrical stream is indicative of the late author’s Benzedrine-fueled writing style.

Harlan Howard (1927-2002) once described country music as “three chords and the truth,” and the same thing could be said for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” 

If you want to play along, this simple I-IV-V strummer is all cowboy chords (E/Em, A7 and B7) pitched up using a capo on the fifth fret.

These standard blues chords, along with the song's title, show Dylan’s increasing tendency at the time towards incorporating elements of rock ‘n’ roll in his music. 

“It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business',” Dylan told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is the lead track from Dylan’s fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home. With electric guitars featuring heavily in the recording, this album signaled a change in direction away from his acoustic guitar-led songs of the early ‘60s.

Although the recording alienated some fans it was the first of Dylan’s LPs to break into the top 10. Since its release, “Subterranean Homesick Blues" has remained popular while being covered numerous times by artists as diverse as Mountain, Jim Weider and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Considered a progenitor of music videos, this clip accompanying the song first appeared in the 1965 English tour documentary, Don’t Look Back. 

The one-shot film features legendary beat poet Allen Ginsberg and musician Bob Neuwirthand conversing in the background. They, along with Donovan, wrote the lyric cards Dylan flips through as the song progresses.

Browse Bob Dylan's catalog here.

On this day in 1971, Carole King released her second album, Tapestry. Considered an era-defining masterpiece this Grammy Award-winning multi-platinum LP remained on the Billboard 200 for several years throughout the decade.

While King’s unparalleled output as a songwriter has seen her heralded as one of the most influential musical artists of all time, Tapestry was her breakthrough album as solo performer.

Embellishing the recording was King’s long-time collaborator Danny Kortchmar – an ace session guitarist and producer whose phenomenal list of credits also includes James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, David Crosby and Graham Nash.

“For the Tapestry sessions, we were cutting three tracks a day at A&M studios,” Kortchmar told Guitar Player. 

“Everybody was in the room sitting very close together, playing live. For a lot of the songs we had chord sheets, but for ‘It’s Too Late,’ Carole sat at the piano and played the song; I just had to absorb it.

“When it came to the solo, I was told, ‘Play something melancholy.’ I was using a Telecaster and probably a Princeton amp. I think I did two or three passes, and everybody seemed pretty pleased.

“I have to be honest: At the time, I wasn’t feeling crazy about my playing on it. I thought it was kind of lazy. I had no idea that the song was going to be a Number One record, and that I was going to be listening to it in supermarkets and drug stores my whole life.

“Over the years, I’ve learned to dig the solo, and I realized that what I played was very authentic and fit the song perfectly.”

Buy Tapestry here.

As Peter Frampton noted, there was no shortage of guitarists at the Concert for Bangladesh. And while some of the electric guitars that were played at one or both shows are famous – consider Eric Clapton’s “Brownie” Strat, which he used for the second show after abandoning the Gibson Byrdland he played in the first set – others remain mired in mystery. 

Here’s a guide to the main examples wielded at the concerts.

1. George Harrison’s Mystery Strat

Harrison spent much of the show playing a stripped Fender Strat with a ’50s maple neck, a guitar whose background has baffled many. Its only known appearances were at the Concert for Bangladesh and on The Dick Cavett Show two months later, when Harrison sat in on slide guitar with Gary Wright and the Wonder Wheel. 

Some believe he rented it from Manny’s Music in Manhattan, but it’s unlikely he would have had the same guitar twice. And as Molland says, “I don’t think he would’ve rented a guitar for a show like that.” 

Perhaps it was a gift from Clapton, who had purchased six mid-’50s Strats for a bargain price at the Sho-Bud guitar shop in Nashville, and given three of them to Pete Townshend, Steve Winwood and Harrison. 

Another theory is that the Bangladesh Strat is a late ’50s-early ’60s transitional model that featured a maple neck and three-ply pickguard, and that Harrison had simply stripped it of its finish, just as he and Lennon had done with their Epiphone Casinos around the time of the White Album. 

“There was a phase in England, where everybody wanted their Fender guitars stripped,” Frampton says, “including me, [Humble Pie bassist] Greg Ridley and [Small Faces/Faces multi-instrumentalist] Ian McLagan. Ian and I were pretty handy, so we got a paint stripper, got all the paint off and put polyurethane varnish on. None of us realized at the time how we were destroying the value of those guitars.” 

Of course, many players of the time simply gave their now-priceless guitars – like Harrison’s rosewood Telecaster – away to friends. Harrison related the story of how he gave this particular Strat to Spike Milligan: “He was at my house one day with Peter Sellers.  

Peter was playing the drums, Spike was playing the piano, and I was playing guitar. Then Spike got off the piano and wanted to play the guitar, so I plugged him in to this Strat through a little Champ amplifier. 

He said, ‘Oh, I haven’t played for 30 years,’ but he just picked it up and it sounded like Django Reinhardt or something. And I thought, Well, that’s good. So when he left, I put it in the case, and put it and the Champ in Peter Sellers’ boot and told him, ‘When you drop Spike off give him this. It’s the Strat from the Concert for Bangladesh.’” 

2. 1963 Martin D-28 

Bob Dylan bought this Martin in the late ’60s and used it for 10 years, according to his repairman, Larry Cragg, who bought the guitar from him in 1977 for $500. Cragg, who nicknamed it Bob, kept the guitar unplayed in its original case and in a humidity- and temperature-controlled environment until he sold it at auction in 2017 for $396,500.

3. Harptone L-6NC

This six-string acoustic guitar, with its zero-fret design and unique headstock shape and double-neck truss rod, is currently on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York City. It’s said to have been a gift to Harrison from Peter Drake, the pedal-steel master who played on All Things Must Pass. 

Harptone asked Drake to give a few guitars to the Beatles to try out, and Ringo Starr liked his so much that the company made him a signature model. Harrison owned and used at least four, including this guitar and an L-12NC 12-string that he purchased for approximately $150 prior to recording the White Album. 

Badfinger members used the 12-string on the sessions for All Things Must Pass and Badfinger bassist Tom Evans played it at the Concert for Bangladesh. Harrison played the L-12 when he guested on Splinter’s 1974 debut album, The Place I Love, and gave it to member Bobby Purvis. The guitar was auctioned in 2005 and sold to a private collector. It appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum’s Concert for Bangladesh exhibit in 2005–2006.

4. 1958 Gibson Explorer

This is the Explorer on which Don Preston delivered his fiery solo on “Jumpin Jack Flash,” inspiring Eric Clapton to get one of his own. The Explorer was among the 'Modernistic' solidbody designs Gibson developed alongside the Flying V and Moderna in the late '50s (although it is believed no Moderna guitars ever made it into production.) Preston’s guitar is from the model’s first year, when Gibson shipped just 19 instruments, making it one of the most valued guitars on the vintage market.  

5. Gibson Byrdland 

A rental or a guitar that he owned? Nobody seems to know when Clapton picked up the Byrdland he played at the early show on August 1, but his choice of the guitar continues to be a source for discussion among guitarists.

Some believe it was a 1950s model, pointing to the rounded cutaway, which was sharper on 1960s models. Others point to the double parallelogram inlays and black pickguard, which are typical for the 1960s ES-350T thinline model. Some claim that the body looks deeper than a Byrdland or 350T, suggesting that it’s an L-5 CES. But other features – including the headstock’s “torch” inlay, white-outlined truss-rod cover, gold-plated tuners, f-hole bindings, multi-ply body binding and the tailpiece – strongly suggest it’s a Byrdland. Even Clapton said so.

Buy the Concert for Bangladesh on CD and vinyl here.

Fifty years ago, Bangladesh was in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Millions of refugees in what was formerly East Pakistan were fleeing genocidal massacres and rape in the Bangladesh War of Independence, as well as lingering devastation from the 1970 Bhola cyclone, the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, that left at least half a million dead in its wake. 

The people were starving, but their plight was largely unknown in the West. Ravi Shankar knew he had to do something to bring attention and aid to the country. The famed Indian sitarist reached out to his friend George Harrison and asked him to do what only a famous former Beatle could do: Bring musicians and fans together to help end the disaster.

What Harrison and Shankar achieved was a massive benefit concert that was the first of its kind. Held 50 years ago this summer, on August 1, the Concert for Bangladesh gathered rock and roll’s royalty in New York City for a pair of shows to raise money for – and awareness of – the humanitarian crisis unfolding halfway around the globe. 

In a matter of weeks, Harrison managed to secure participation from such luminaries as his fellow former Beatle Ringo Starr, keyboardist Billy Preston, pianist and guitarist Leon Russell, bassist and longtime Beatle friend Klaus Voormann, studio guitar ace Jesse Ed Davis, Zappa collaborator Don Preston, the up-and-coming band Badfinger, and a number of other musicians and singers. 

Together with Shankar and his fellow musicians, they performed a pair of sold-out concerts at Madison Square Garden, including a 2:30 p.m. matinee and 8:00 p.m. show.

The concerts drew 40,000 people and raised $250,000 for UNICEF, while the 1971 triple live album and 1972 documentary of the show eventually raised millions more. Even before the concert took place, Harrison had released his single “Bangla Desh” on the Beatles’ Apple label. The track, which detailed the plight of the Bangladeshi people, was put into heavy rotation in the lead-up to the shows, bringing the single to number 23 on the Billboard charts. 

Harrison’s achievement would prove nothing short of a miracle. No rock and roll musician had attempted anything like it before, and no template existed for a show of this size and with guests of such stature. 

The Concert for Bangladesh would cement the notion of a moral imperative for rock and rollers to do their part for those in need, as it laid the groundwork for the charity concerts that followed in the 1980s and beyond, including Live Aid and Farm Aid. 

Yet in the days before the show, Harrison was filled with doubt and insecurity. He hadn’t performed in front of a large crowd since the Beatles’ final tour, in 1966. But those wild shows were scripted affairs lasting roughly 30 minutes, with the band’s performance entirely secondary to the sight of the four mop tops shaking their bodies onstage. 

Concerts had grown up in the intervening years and become listening experiences. And this particularly lengthy two-show stint – from the planning to the staging to the musicians, many of whom were flying in from the U.K., India, and various parts of the U.S. – was all on Harrison’s shoulders. Many performers, like Leon Russell, had canceled other appearances, at great expense, to participate. 

As Harrison noted, “Nobody’s getting paid.” He was so focused on the concert’s purpose that he seemed to forget its sheer star power, and openly fretted that nobody would care enough to buy tickets.

Remarkably, among all his friends in the show, Harrison would be kept waiting, wondering and worrying over the attendance of two who were his closest: Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. At the time, Clapton was deep into the throes of heroin addiction and uncertain of his ability to perform. Dylan, meanwhile, was a recluse, having given his last live performance in 1969, at the Isle of Wight. 

But Harrison was among the best-connected people in rock at the time. As the August 1 concert date approached and Clapton increasingly looked like a no-show, he turned for help to another friend: Peter Frampton. 

Harrison had known the guitarist, then in Humble Pie, for a couple of years. Frampton tracked guitars on singer Doris Troy’s self-titled album, produced by Harrison for the Beatles’ Apple Records, and he played acoustic guitar on All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s third solo record. 

As it happened, Frampton and Humble Pie were touring in the U.S. that summer and spending time in New York City, where they were mixing their 1971 live breakthrough, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, recorded the previous May 28 and 29.

“On the weekends, we’d fly off to perform, opening the bill for many different artists, and on weekdays we’d be at Electric Lady Studios in New York with Eddie Kramer, mixing the Rockin’ the Fillmore album,” Frampton recalled to Guitar Player. 

“I knew I was going to see George’s shows, and I asked if he needed me to play guitar, but they were overbooked with guitarists. So I wished him all the best with the show and told him I’d come see it.” 

Unexpectedly, Frampton found himself invited to dine with Harrison and his wife, Patti, while they were in Manhattan. “Afterwards, we went back to the Pierre [Hotel], and he invited me up to their suite,” Frampton explains. 

“There were two electrics sitting by the window, and maybe one or two little amps. George asked if I wanted to play some guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ trying to keep my excitement under control. 

“And without a word, he just started running through the songs they were going to do. My mind started going 14,000 miles an hour. I couldn’t understand why we were doing this if the guitar positions for the concert were filled. We must’ve played six to 10 songs, and he was checking me out to see if I was up to speed, which, of course, I was. How can you not be when it comes to the Beatles’ songs?” 

In the days afterward, Frampton flew south to play a couple of shows with Humble Pie. Back in New York City, the behind-the-scenes drama escalated as the August 1 concert date arrived. Frampton returned on the day of the show. 

“I’d missed the first one, but I planned to go to the second, and so I picked up my tickets and backstage pass,” he says. “I watched the entire show, and at the end, I made my way to the side of the stage. Terry Doran [Harrison’s personal assistant] saw me, and his eyes got really big. He said, ‘Where have you been?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’ve been on the road.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but we had no way of getting hold of you!’”

Confused, Frampton explained that no one had asked for his number, adding that Harrison knew he would see him following the show. “And Terry says, ‘Well, George wants to speak to you!’ So as he takes me backstage, he pulls me right into Bob Dylan, who gives me the ‘I could slice your head off with the back of my hand’ kind of look.”

Meeting up with Harrison, Frampton says he learned that Clapton had been bedridden while in New York City and unable to make any rehearsals. 

“This was during his heavy drug phase,” Frampton says. “Whether he had some or was trying to give them up, I don’t know. But when he wasn’t able to rehearse, they tried to get hold of me, because they wanted me there – just in case. I asked George and Terry, ‘You mean you wanted me to play?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’”

In the end, a cameraman from the film crew provided Clapton with methadone, making him well enough to perform both shows. “I’m glad that Eric was able to play somehow, since a lot of people would’ve been very disappointed if he didn’t, especially George,” Frampton says. 

“The last thing I wanted to be was a stand-in for Eric Clapton. I would’ve done it if George had gotten hold of me and the situation was more dire. But I’ll never know how dire it actually was.” 

According to Joey Molland, it was a closer call than Frampton knew. At the time, Molland was a member of the Welsh rock group Badfinger, one of Apple Records’ most prominent signings, thanks to their early hit “Come and Get It,” written and produced by Paul McCartney. 

The group had performed on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Harrison had taken over producing the group for their 1971 album, Straight Up, in late May 1971. But as he found himself sidelined by the Bangladesh benefit, the sessions stalled and he invited the group to perform at the concerts. 

Molland, bassist Tom Evans, and guitarist Pete Ham performed on acoustic guitars, while Badfinger drummer Mike Gibbins played percussion. In addition, Ham assisted Harrison on his captivating performance of “Here Comes the Sun.” 

“We went to New York 10 days before the concerts,” Molland explains. “George had arranged for rhythm section rehearsals at the Steinway store in downtown Manhattan, where they had a big room upstairs. 

"It was a lot of fun, going over the intros, outros, and the sequencing of events within songs. I think we rehearsed Monday through Friday, and on the Saturday we went to the Garden to do a couple of hours of dress rehearsal.”

Molland confirms Clapton had been a no-show. But while Frampton believes the guitarist was already in New York City, Molland contends he was still in England. 

“I believe George sent a car for Clapton, and each day he stayed in his house,” he says. 

“I wasn’t privy to what was happening to him, and I don’t like to speculate, but he was going through something. But on Friday night, two nights before the show, he got on the plane in London, was in New York Saturday morning and was at the rehearsal in the afternoon. He had his parts together. I didn’t see him screw up, but mind you, I was really concerned about my own guitar parts.”

The dress rehearsal was the first time the members of the main band played together, though second drummer Jim Keltner had yet to show up. “Otherwise, the whole band was there, including Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, the Hollywood Horns and Jim Horn, and the backup singers with Don Nix,” Molland says. 

Given that Clapton played a Fender Stratocaster on All Things Must Pass the previous year, Molland expected him to show up with one or two. “But yes, Eric Clapton showed up, and he was playing a Gibson Byrdland, one of those beautiful, blonde Chuck Berry guitars, which we thought was a bit odd,” he says. “But everybody was enjoying it.” 

Just as the dress rehearsal wrapped up, Bob Dylan made his appearance, much to everyone’s surprise. “There had been rumors that ‘someone’ might come up, and we thought it’d be John [Lennon],” Molland explains. “But we had finished the rehearsal and were sitting in the auditorium, waiting for our cars, when Bob Dylan walked onstage with his harmonica stand and a small acoustic guitar, and started singing his songs for about 40 minutes. 

“George, Ringo, and Leon ran down to the stage, and they played a few songs all together before they put together that part of the set for the show. It was great to see them working through vocal harmonies.”

Reportedly, Dylan was still harboring doubts about performing at such a large event, much to Harrison’s frustration. ”Look, it’s not my scene, either,” Harrison told him. “At least you’ve played on your own in front of a crowd before. I’ve never done that.” Even after the dress rehearsal, Dylan remained noncommittal, giving Harrison one more thing to worry about. 

“I’m sure George was nervous,” Molland says. “He hadn’t played in front of an audience for a few years, and he had never played these songs live. Plus, the whole event was on his shoulders. He wasn’t sure if anybody was going to come.” 

But of course they did. Fans descended on Madison Square Garden to buy up tickets, and the two shows quickly sold out. Given the number of guitarists in the show, it’s difficult to track every guitar used over the two concerts. Harrison played a stripped Fender Stratocaster of unknown provenance, as well as a pair of Harptone acoustics: an L-6NC and an L-12NC. 

While Clapton played the Byrdland for the first show, he switched to his “Brownie” Stratocaster for the second concert. Don Preston arrived with his Gibson ’58 Explorer, a model that particularly excited Molland. “It’s just an incredible guitar,” he enthuses. “It always astounded me how good they sound, and how light they were.” 

Molland has a clear recollection of the acoustics he and his Badfinger bandmates played. “All of them were late-’60’s models, and they were used when we got them. I played a Gibson J-50, as I enjoyed the smoother tone.

"Tommy had brought his D-41, but he never played it; George had his Harptones and said he might be able to get some for us, but that never came together, so Tommy borrowed George’s 12-string. Pete played a Martin D-28. And there were no acoustic amps or pickups back then, so we were all mic’d up, and we sat next to the horn section. I was worried people wouldn’t be able to hear the acoustic guitars. But it turned out okay, because you can hear us on the record.

“We were a little bit nervous about playing right and doing the job well, so it wasn’t fun for us, but it was really exciting: the place being sold out, people losing their minds and doing something for the good of it all.” 

For Molland, one of the show’s highlights was organist Billy Preston’s impromptu dance during the band’s performance of his hit “That’s the Way God Planned It.” 

“He started to dance across the stage toward us, rolling his arms and skittling his legs,” the guitarist recalls. “And we were sitting on stools playing acoustic guitars, thinking, My God, he’s gonna run into us! But both shows went off as planned.”

In the end, Dylan showed up. Following his performance of “Here Comes the Sun” with Pete Ham, Harrison picked up his Fender Stratocaster and reviewed the set list taped to its body to see what was next: “Bob?” it read. Harrison looked around anxiously. To his relief, Dylan was making his way to the stage, his 1963 Martin D-28 strapped on and a harmonica in the holder around his neck.

“He had his guitar on and his shades,” Harrison recalled. “He was sort of coming on, coming [pumps his arms and shoulders]… It was only at that moment that I knew for sure he was going to do it.” Harrison turned to the microphone to deliver the biggest applause line of the show: “I’d like to bring on a friend of us all, Mr. Bob Dylan!”

The Concert for Bangladesh was a triumph of ingenuity and musical talent, a spur-of-the-moment project that launched a new concept in concerts. Its benefits, however, would take years to reach the afflicted country. Those involved in the concert’s planning, including Apple manager Allen Klein, neglected to register the event for tax-exempt status in the U.S. and U.K., with the result that millions in tax dollars were held up for years. 

But ultimately, the album and film would raise and deliver an estimated $45 million, and Harrison would pass along the wisdom he gained from the experience to Bob Geldof when he launched Live Aid, ensuring that event’s estimated £50 million found its way to victims of the Ethiopian famine. Harrison’s groundbreaking humanitarian work continues to inspire musicians around the world.

On this day, in 2005, the guitar world lost one its most groundbreaking and influential artists, Frederick Lincoln Wray, Jr. aka Link Wray. Though Wray released many critically acclaimed recordings throughout the course of his decades-long career he is widely known for his 1958 hit “Rumble.”

A tense, brooding electric guitar instrumental that swings from prowling open chord distortion to a violent outburst of frenetic strumming and back again “Rumble” has often been cited as a missing link between blues and hard rock.

Like many other career-defining tracks such as Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and ZZ Top’s “Tush,” Link Wray & His Ray Men’s “Rumble” came together extremely fast – in this case during an impromptu stage request.

While performing at a record hop in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1957, pioneering rock ‘n’ roll deejay Milt Grant requested Wray and his band play a ‘stroll’ (a popular rockabilly dance of the late ‘50s) in order to introduce the Diamonds – a band who were at the time riding high on the success of their hit “The Stroll.”

Though Wray was not au fait with the number and felt unsure how to kick things off, his younger brother, Doug, quickly sprang into action with a drum beat. Suddenly, inspiration struck like a bolt of lightning and Wray’s iconic Dsus2/E riff was born. 

Spiced up with a cheeky B7 and a descending E minor pentatonic lick it’s the epitome of cowboy chord cool.

Wray’s older brother, Ray, then grabbed the vocal mic and placed it in front of the guitarist’s cranked Premier amp. Saturated in natural distortion and pulsating with tremolo the souped-up sound drove the audience wild.

“The only mic they had back in those days was just the singer’s – they didn’t mic the amps or anything,” recalled Wray. “You couldn’t even hear [bassist] Shorty, and Doug was playing so loud because he was playing with the butt ends of his sticks, so all you could really hear was me and Doug.

“And the kids, they just went ape and were screaming over me… We had to play it about four times for the kids. They kept hollering and screaming, banging on the stage, “Play that weird song! Play that weird song!”

“That weird song” (also referred to by Wray as “Oddball”) was released the following March titled “Rumble.”

Clocking in at just under two-and-a-half minutes, this short, sharp shock of rock was immediately powerful enough to get itself banned on radio – inevitably adding to its kudos and mystique.

Down the line, countless guitar players have been quoted as fans of this game-changing, career-breaking classic, including Bob Dylan (“'Rumble' is the best instrumental ever”) and Pete Townshend ("If it hadn't been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar.”)

And in this clip from the brilliant 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, Jimmy Page can be seen listening to this landmark seven-inch immersed in reverence. “I listened to anything with guitar on when I was a kid that was being played,” he tells Jack White and the Edge.

“But the first time I heard “Rumble” – that was something that had so much profound attitude to it… It really does.”

Browse Link Wray's catalog here.

As one of the world’s top-call Dobro slide and non-pedal steel players, Cindy Cashdollar has worked with Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Asleep at the Wheel, Ryan Adams, Rod Stewart, Leon Redbone and many others. Considering the range of musicians she’s performed with, it’s no surprise that she’s equally at home playing country, blues, rock, folk and Texas swing. In addition to being an amazing sideman, she can shred like the best of them.

When did you start playing slide?

I started playing guitar when I was in sixth grade, and then I heard somebody playing Dobro, and I liked it. So I took up Dobro when I was about 19 or 20. There were these mini music festivals that you could go to on this woman’s farm outside of Woodstock, [New York], and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band would be playing. That really made an impression on me. There was also a lot of bluegrass, country and folk at those shows.

Can you explain the evolution of the steel guitar?

A lot of folks refer to it as a Dobro, but that’s a bit confusing, because Dobro is a patent name. The steel guitar was developed [by Joseph Kekuku near the end of the 19th century] and used to perform Hawaiian music. Acoustic blues musicians began to follow suit by using a slide to fret their strings. Then the pickup was invented, and the six-string lap steel became prominent.

And then they just kept adding strings. A non-pedal steel guitar has necks in different tunings, and you’re constantly switching between the necks for the tuning that you need. So the instrument went from a six-string neck to an eight-string neck, and then to a double-neck and a triple-neck. There’s even been a four-neck non-pedal steel. It’s like a coffee table! My triple-neck steel has a three-way pickup switch, so I can switch necks right in the middle of a solo.

What are your favorite guitars?

I’ve got a bunch of different kinds of slide guitars, both electric and acoustic six-string, and I just love them all for different reasons. I’ve got the funky old Stella square-neck six-string and an old metal-body National Tri-Cone. I had a double-neck non-pedal steel – a six-string Asher lap steel. They were made in the ’20s, and they have a hollow neck. It’s a really beautiful sound, almost like a baritone. I’m also really fond of my new lap steel made Harvey Citron of Citron Guitars

Do you have any female steel-guitar influences?

Marion Hall was the first steel player that I was aware of – a female playing all that cool, western-swing rockabilly back in the ’50s and ’60s. Marion told me, “I always showed up on time, I was always in tune, and I always played to the singer.” Those were her three rules.

I still think it’s a little tough getting acceptance as a female in the business. You have to have your shit together, or you have to show that you’re willing to work hard. When [Asleep at the Wheel front man] Ray Benson heard my demo tape, he said, “Well, I can tell you’re a Dobro player, but I’ll give you six months.” He saw that I was trying so hard and working my ass off, and I think the rest of the band did, too. They knew I was serious.

Buy Cindy Cashdollar’s Waltz For Abilene here.

The great blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded for Paramount from 1927 through 1928. As one of the earliest blues recording artists, he was among the first to attain exposure via disc. This, together with his genius, made him a monumental contributor to the blues as we know it.

Dubbed the father of Texas blues, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s influence has impacted many musicians, such as Lead Belly, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Patton and Chet Atkins, who called Jefferson “one of his first fingerstyle influences.”

His music has been recorded by a diverse crew that includes Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Phish and the Beatles, who covered his song “Match Box Blues” as “Matchbox,” learning it via Carl Perkins. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named the song one of the 500 that shaped rock and roll.

That said, much of Jefferson’s history is conjecture, contradictory or unknown. The son of sharecroppers, he was born blind, or partially blind, in Texas, in 1893 or 1894. He died sometime after 1930 either by exposure, a heart attack or foul play. In any event, his recordings survive, and they are, fortunately, filled with certainty and truth.

Jefferson’s blues guitar playing was similar to ragtime piano, with a counterpoint that implied a left- and right-hand piano approach. “Low Down Mojo Blues” is terrific example of his command of the guitar, as he stabs and caresses triads interlaced with turnarounds. “Match Box Blues” features a wonderful melody, as does “Bootin’ Me Bout,” where he knowingly lays down a strong downbeat. “Lemon Worried Blues” almost sounds like two guitarists, yet it’s relaxed with none of the posturing of virtuosity that might distract from the melody.

While you may not wish to learn a Jefferson piece note for note, you can easily cherry-pick from his goldmine of turnarounds, bass runs and clever dominant-7th triads, and his piano-like approach. His guitar style is like a mini-orchestra of players who prefer whisky to wine, and his playing perfectly supports his fiery singing.

There are many reissues of his Paramount sides. Browse Blind Lemon Jefferson albums here.

Roughly a year following the release of Joni Mitchell’s David Crosby-produced 1968 debut album Song to a Seagull the young artist gave her first major concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Among the sold-out crowd were her parents and partner, Graham Nash, along with fellow folk luminary Bob Dylan.

Though the acoustic guitar heroine's record company Reprise had planned to release a recording of the gig it would take over half a century to finally see the light of day. 

Better late than never!

More than 50 years have passed since that fateful Saturday but Mitchell can still recall the events of the evening in fine detail. 

“I flew my parents [Bill and Myrtle] in for the show,” she writes in the liner notes for Archives, Vol. 2: the Reprise Years. “We walked over to Carnegie Hall from the Plaza Hotel. Graham was wearing a floor-length maxi coat, black velvet, but with a pink-and-white chiffon tie-dye scarf. And I was wearing a green-and-white plaid coat. I’ve still got it. It looked like something from a Dickens play. My mother was embarrassed to be seen with us…

“My father came forward and said, ‘Oh, Myrt, she looks like a queen in those rags.’ I loved him for that. Thank God for Papa. He gave me back myself.”

In a performance that garnered rave reviews Mitchell opened her set with “Chelsea Morning,” a lyrically tactual song inspired by the surroundings of her Chelsea District apartment in Manhattan. 

The opening number “Chelsea Morning” is available now to stream for free here.

Joni Mitchell’s Archives, Vol. 2: the Reprise Years (1968-1971) 10-LP and 5-CD sets and 3-LP Live at Carnegie Hall, 1969 vinyl sets are due for release on November 12. 

Visit Joni Mitchell’s website for more information.

If ever a guitar maker qualified for the prize of having the most guitars in the hands of world-dominating rock stars while remaining unrecognized as a brand name, it would be Tony Zemaitis. His custom-made guitars have been played by artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Marc Bolan, Donovan, Bob Dylan, David Gilmour, Peter Frampton, Ronnie Wood, Ronnie Lane, James Honeyman-Scott…

And yet, outside of enthusiast and collector’s circles, if you had mentioned the name Zemaitis in the U.S.A. in the pre-Internet days, most music fans and guitarists alike would have drawn a blank. On the other hand, describe “one of those fancy, engraved metal-front electric guitars shaped like a Les Paul,” and suddenly many of those same people would know exactly what you were talking about.

The guitar maker was born Antanus Casimere Zemaitis in London, in 1935, to Lithuanian-born parents. He became serious about luthiery in the 1960s after making a few guitars for his own use while playing in blues clubs around the city. Zemaitis first became known for crafting finely wrought acoustic guitars, which found their way to Hendrix, Clapton and Donovan, among others. But he began to concentrate on making electric guitars in the ’70s and into the ’80s, and those instruments garnered more attention.

Zemaitis’s concept of a metal-fronted guitar came from discussions with Clapton in 1969, who had wondered what a silver guitar would sound like. The notion stuck with the luthier, and sometime later he added a plain aluminum metal front to an early electric test guitar and found it helped eliminate feedback, and even seemed to improve tuning and intonation.

He built his first such instrument for Groundhogs guitarist Tony McPhee in 1971 and made another one later that year for Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood. The latter instrument’s metal plate was tooled by shotgun engraver Danny O’Brien, whose handiwork became an essential part of the Zemaitis look.

Wood’s use of his Zemaitis with the Faces on the popular TV show Top of the Pops helped launch a craze for the distinctive-looking guitars, and a year later he commissioned a second, slightly different Zemaitis with a black body and a round, more centralized metal plate, a style now known as a “disc front.”

Devoid of their ornate metal plates, the instruments themselves are relatively straightforward, albeit high-quality custom-made guitars. Zemaitis used his own in-house bridge and tailpiece designs, which usually displayed further engraving, and sometimes even carried the model name, as in the rare left-handed example from 1983 pictured here.

He favored the 24-fret necks that were often seen as an upgrade in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and toward the latter part of that era he sometimes added elaborate switching options to the electronics, as seen below.

Seeking a new original look to rival that of his metal-front guitars, Zemaitis also built several examples with elaborately “tiled” mother-of-pearl tops, which both Wood (below) and Honeyman-Scott would also own.

In the latter part of his career, the luthier made only some eight or 10 guitars per year, and his production was never much higher than that during the peak years of the ’70s and ’80s. He retired in 2000 and passed away in 2002. He had been in discussions to license his designs to another manufacturer at the time of his death, and the Zemaitis brand was reborn with the blessing of his wife, Ann, and son, Tony Junior, in the Japanese-made guitars of Zemaitis International.

The most desirable of the guitars are still engraved by Danny O’Brien. Meanwhile, original Zemaitis guitars made by Tony himself are more desirable than ever on the collector’s market.

Essential Ingredients

• Solid mahogany body with ornately etched metal top
• Glued-in mahogany neck
• Ebony fingerboard with 24 frets
• Dual humbucking pickups with elaborate switching
• Zemaitis in-house bridge and tailpiece

Visit the Zemaitis website to check out their current line-up of guitars.

GP would like to thank Rumble Seat Music for showing us this incredible 1983 Zemaitis Custom De Luxe.

Denny Freeman – an Austin, Texas-based guitarist who played with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Bob Dylan, and more – has died at the age of 76. Multiple close friends confirmed his death, which came just weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer.

Born in Orlando, Florida on August 7, 1944 and raised in Dallas, Freeman first moved to Austin in 1970. Having played in a rock band called the Corals in Dallas, Freeman quickly helped put together a group called Paul Ray & the Cobras once in Austin. In the mid-1970s, an up-and-coming young blues guitarist by the name of Stevie Ray Vaughan joined the Cobras, and began sharing lead guitar duties with Freeman.

As Stevie Ray – along with his brother, Jimmie Vaughan, and his Fabulous Thunderbirds – put Austin and its blossoming blues scene on the map in the late 1970s and early '80s, Freeman became a member of the house band at Antone's, a legendary club that served as the scene's epicenter. 

At Antone's, Freeman backed up a laundry list of blues guitar greats, including Albert Collins, Otis Rush, Lazy Lester, and Hubert Sumlin. All the while, Freeman remained close with the Vaughan brothers, even living with them for a time, prompting Freeman to joke – once he had become one of the world's premier blues guitarists – that Stevie Ray still owed him $30 in back rent.

Later on, Freeman played piano with James Cotton and Jimmie Vaughan, and spent a number of years in Taj Mahal's touring band after moving to Los Angeles in 1992.

Additionally, Freeman worked with soul legend Percy Sledge and fellow blues great Doyle Bramhall, and even co-wrote Blondie's 1999 track, “Boom Boom in the Zoom Zoom Room.”

Freeman's most high-profile gig, however, came in 2005, when he joined Bob Dylan's backing band. Lending guitar work to Dylan's hugely acclaimed, chart-topping 2006 album, Modern Times, Freeman remained with Dylan until 2009, playing hundreds of shows with the iconic songwriter on his Never Ending Tour.

All the while, Freeman also maintained a prolific solo output, releasing seven genre-blending albums under his own name.

In a 2006 remembrance of Antone's owner Clifford Antone, journalist and record executive Bill Bentley said that Antone once said to him, “Denny Freeman was the greatest guitarist alive and it wasn't fair that every single person didn't know it.”

A 1965 Fender XII 12-string electric guitar once owned by Bob Dylan is headed to the auction block.

Put up for auction by Gotta Have Rock and Roll, the guitar was used by Dylan during the 1965 New York City recording sessions for Highway 61 Revisited and, subsequently, the early New York City sessions for Dylan's 1966 double-album, Blonde on Blonde.

This Fender XII is said to be one of “only a handful” of its kind, as it features a pearloid pickguard, instead of the tortoiseshell pickguard found on most XIIs.

Featuring an alder body, sunburst finish, amp-style knobs, and a rosewood fingerboard, the guitar comes with a letter of provenance from Dylan’s management – confirming that this was indeed the XII used in the early Blonde on Blonde sessions – and a certificate of authenticity from former Fender Artist Liason Jody Carver.

“I have inspected the 1965 Electric XII, serial no L72261, and can confirm (due to the unique wood grain figuring at the end of the fingerboard) that this was the instrument given to Bob Dylan by the Fender company," the letter from Carver reads.

“[This] is the one that can be seen on the Bob Dylan sessions in Columbia Studios attended by myself and my nephew Artie Martell in 1965."

Two other letters confirming the guitar's authenticity – one from George Gruhn and one from Clive Brown – are also included with the guitar, in addition to a Dylan-owned strap and the guitar's original touring case.

Bidding for the Bob Dylan-owned 1965 Fender XII is open now, and starts at $215,000. The guitar is expected to sell for $350,000 – $500,000.

For more info on the guitar, stop by gottahaverockandroll.com.

This quartet of guitars defined George Harrison's musical output in the late 1960's, both with and without The Beatles. 

Learn more about these amazing instruments – how they were acquired, what they were used on, and where they ended up afterwards – in our feature below.

1. Gibson J-200

Harrison bought his sunburst Gibson J-200 while in the U.S. in 1968 and used it briefly over the following year. Abbey Road technical engineer Brian Gibson told Beatles Gear author Andy Babiuk that Harrison played the J-200 when recording his original acoustic demo of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the studio on July 25, 1968. 

Photos from the White Album sessions show him using it, and he presumably played it on the recording of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that appears on the album.

Sometime after the record’s completion in late 1968, Harrison gave the guitar to Bob Dylan, who posed with the instrument on the cover of his 1969 release, Nashville Skyline. The J-200 was among the guitars Dylan used when he performed at the Isle of Wight on August 31, 1969.

2. 1957 Gibson Les Paul

Harrison’s Les Paul began life as a goldtop and was briefly owned by the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian. He traded it to McCoys guitarist Rick Derringer in exchange for an amp after Sebastian’s failed during their groups’ tour. 

Derringer described the Les Paul as “a very, very used guitar, even when I got it,” and took it to Gibson to be refinished in the same red used at the time for the company’s SG models. 

Unhappy with the guitar’s performance and feel after its refinishing, he sold it to Dan Armstrong’s guitar store in New York City. A few days later, Eric Clapton purchased the guitar but seldom played it. 

In August 1968, he gave it to Harrison, who dubbed it Lucy and used it on the White Album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road. The guitar was stolen from his Beverly Hills home during a 1973 burglary and sold. Harrison negotiated with the Les Paul’s buyer for its return and kept the guitar until his death.

3. 1961 Fender Stratocaster

Harrison’s 1961 Strat is one of two in Sonic Blue finish purchased for Harrison and Lennon in 1965 while they were recording Help! These were the first Fender guitars owned by the Beatles. Harrison used his Strat extensively on Rubber Soul, including on the track “Nowhere Man.” 

In 1967, he painted it with fluorescent Day-Glo paint and dubbed it Rocky. In this guise, the guitar made appearances that year in the Beatles’ live performance of “All You Need Is Love” on Our World, the first global satellite TV program, and in the film Magical Mystery Tour, during the segment where the Beatles mime to “I Am the Walrus.” 

Harrison continued to use the guitar with the Beatles and began to employ it for slide work around 1969 or 1970. On the advice of Ry Cooder, he raised the bridge and used heavier-gauge strings, noting, “and then I found it was a much better sound.”

4. Fender Rosewood Telecaster

Although Harrison and Lennon owned Stratocasters, and McCartney had an Esquire, the group were forever associated with Rickenbacker and Gretsch guitars, which they performed with. 

In the summer of 1968, Don Randall, Fender’s head of sales at the time, worked out a deal to provide the Beatles with a raft of the company’s gear, including a then-new Rosewood Telecaster for Harrison, which he received at the end of 1968 and put to use in January 1969 as the Beatles began work on Let It Be. 

The guitar can be seen in the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert at Apple Corps, the group’s last public performance. Harrison continued to use the guitar during the making of Abbey Road before giving it to Delaney Bramlett, who auctioned it in 2003. The winning bid of $434,750 was placed by an intermediary for Harrison’s widow, Olivia.