Eric Clapton was 21 when he left John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers in 1965, convinced he was heading toward something even deeper into the blues.

Instead, he spent the next three decades taking a remarkably circuitous route back to the place he had started.

When From the Cradle arrived in 1994, Clapton finally recognized the irony. The album was his first full-length studio statement devoted entirely to the blues since Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, and he realized he was essentially making the record he had envisioned nearly 30 years earlier.

“It’s taken a lot of courage for me to go back,” he said. “I’m really retracing my steps back to John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.”

After establishing himself as an electric-guitar blues hero with Mayall’s band, Clapton left in 1965 expecting to move into an even more hardcore blues setting. Instead, his next project was Cream, the groundbreaking power trio he formed with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.

“When I was leaving John Mayall, in my head, I was going to an even more hardcore blues situation,” Clapton said. “Which backfired. Although it came out to be a great hybrid, it wasn’t my intention to go that way.”

Cream would, of course, become one of the most important bands in rock history. But its extended improvisations, psychedelic leanings and jazz influences took Clapton somewhere very different from the stripped-down blues he had imagined.

His subsequent career took him further still. Derek and the Dominos produced “Layla,” one of the defining songs of his career, while his solo work established him as a major rock star. There were also much darker periods, including his struggle with heroin addiction and the collapse of Derek and the Dominos, after which he nearly quit music altogether.

Yet the blues remained the thread running through it all.

By the early 1990s, Clapton had reached another turning point. His Unplugged album became a huge success, winning three Grammys and giving him the confidence to follow his instincts rather than chase another rock hit. With From the Cradle, he decided to stop circling the music that had first made him want to become a guitarist and immerse himself in it completely.

“Now what I’m doing is I’m going back to that jumping-off point,” he said. “It’s almost like I’m just leaving John Mayall now, and I’m producing my own blues band.”

The phrase “jumping-off point” is particularly revealing. Clapton wasn’t simply revisiting his past. He felt as if he were finally picking up the journey he had begun in 1965.

“It’s taken me 30 years of meandering around the backstreets to get there,” he said. “And I don’t know why. I always felt very afraid of being true to myself. But right now, I want to do it.”

He was also candid about why it had taken so long. When asked whether From the Cradle was an album he could have or should have made nearly 30 years earlier, Clapton agreed.

“It’s what I intended to do after the Yardbirds, before John Mayall,” he said. “Here was a period when this was the album I would’ve made, except I wouldn’t have had the gift — I maybe would’ve had the gift, but I wouldn’t have had the technique to do it. I would’ve collapsed.”

That distinction is important. At 21, Clapton had the ambition and the blues obsession, but he didn't yet have the experience to make the record he imagined. By 1994, after three decades of playing, recording, touring and living through some extraordinary highs and lows, he felt ready.

And he wasn't taking the responsibility lightly. From the Cradle found him tackling songs associated with blues giants including Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Elmore James and Freddie King. He described Muddy Waters' songs as particularly intimidating.

“Muddy’s songs have been the hardest,” Clapton said. “His music was the first that got to me and it remains some of the most important music in my life today. I love this man so much that I want to do it absolutely perfectly and, of course, that’s not possible.”

For Clapton, the album ultimately represented something more fundamental than a return to a particular sound.

“From the Cradle is ‘me’ in terms of my musical identity,” he said. “It’s where I’ve come from and what I mean. And wherever I go in the future will be the result of this.”

After 30 years of meandering, Clapton had finally arrived back at the place he had been trying to reach all along.

It’s well known that Eric Clapton was inspired to form Cream after seeing blues legend Buddy Guy perform in London with a power trio.

What’s less widely known is that a very different influence helped shape the band’s songwriting — one that came from across the Atlantic.

“We were forming Cream when Pet Sounds came out,” Clapton recalled in a 1998 interview with Bob Mills. “And actually, believe it or not, that became the prime influence for a lot of the songwriting.”

Released in 1966 by the Beach Boys and masterminded by Brian Wilson, the album was about as far removed from British blues as a record could be. Built around layered harmonies and ornate pop arrangements, it fascinated Clapton and his future bandmates.

“We couldn't get it,” he said with a laugh. “But we would listen to that album nonstop.”

Clapton’s fascination with the Beach Boys actually began earlier. During a mid-’60s gig — while he was still playing with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers — he heard one of the group’s records playing over the venue’s sound system. It nearly made him leave Mayall.

“I was playing a gig with John Mayall, I think, and there was a DJ playing records,” Clapton recalled. “And he played ‘I Get Around.’ I was like, ‘It’s over,’ because my first reaction is always: ‘I’m quitting.’”

The moment came during a turbulent period in Clapton’s early career. After an unhappy stint with the Yardbirds, he briefly considered giving up music altogether before joining Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1965. His year with the band established him as Britain’s leading blues guitarist and gave rise to the Gibson Les Paul Standard — Clapton’s main electric guitar at that point — as a blues staple.

But even that situation wouldn’t hold for long.

After witnessing Guy perform with a power trio at London’s Marquee Club, Clapton began imagining a new kind of band.

“What that said to me was, ‘This was possible,’” he recalled years later. “It seemed to be so free — you could go anywhere.”

Clapton soon teamed up with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, forming Cream in 1966. But while the trio’s explosive blues improvisation became its signature, the band’s musical ambitions stretched further.

According to Bruce, that broader direction sometimes clashed with Clapton’s original idea.

“Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and be like Buddy Guy,” Bruce later said. “We had different ideas.”

Those ideas pushed Cream toward a far more colorful and experimental sound than a straightforward blues outfit — something later noted by musicians such as Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, who cited the band as an early precursor to progressive rock.

And if Cream’s music occasionally sounded more kaleidoscopic than traditional blues might suggest, Clapton’s own admission points to an unlikely source of inspiration: Brian Wilson’s meticulously crafted pop.

Among the top rock groups of the 1960s, few could match the live firepower of Cream. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were among the era’s most formidable players, and their extended jazz-rock excursions onstage set a standard few bands could match.

Remarkably, Clapton himself didn’t see the trio as a particularly strong live act.

“We were really limited onstage. We could go into the studio and make great records by overdubbing,” he said, as quoted by Bob Beatty in the 2022 book Play All Night! Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East. “I would play a rhythm part, and then play a lead part with a harmony to it, so you’re really talking about three guitar parts.”

Bruce had already confirmed Clapton’s viewpoint years earlier.

“Basically, Cream was two bands: a recording band and a live band,” the bass guitarist told Guitar Player in the July 1985 issue. “There was a certain amount of dissension in the band, though. I don't think Eric ever had much faith in Cream as a live band in the beginning. I remember him saying, ‘This is a good recording band, but it will never be a good live band.’

“My feeling was that we could succeed on both levels if we didn't try to approach them both from the same point of view. So the band had a split personality. It was definitely more of a jazz band onstage.”

So which group did Clapton consider the best live band of the classic-rock era? His answer was the Allman Brothers Band, who emerged just as Cream were nearing the end of their run.

“The Allman Brothers’ music was unbelievable, because they were doing all that harmony playing,” Clapton said. “Even if they played solos, they were all in harmony. It was fantastically worked out.

“The impression that I got was how much hard work they’d put into their presentation, and the fact that it wasn’t really blasted all over the airwaves. They had just quietly gone about doing a fantastic job of making really, really good music that was really well thought out. It influenced my music at the time.

“They made it okay for a band to be live all the time. Their thing was really more about live than [studio].”

Clapton’s admiration began when he first heard Duane Allman on Wilson Pickett’s late-1968 cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Driving in his car, Clapton was so struck by the guitar playing that he pulled over to listen more closely.

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

About a year and a half later, Clapton and Allman would finally meet — thanks to Dowd — and go on to record together in Derek and the Dominos.

“When Eric’s manager called me at Criteria Studios to produce the Derek and the Dominos album, I was working on Idlewild South by the Allman Brothers,” Dowd recalled to Guitar Player. “The Allman Brothers had to take a break from recording to go on the road.

“When I got off the phone, I mentioned to Duane, ‘Boy, a guitar player you’re going to love is coming here in about 10 days: Eric Clapton.’ He said, ‘Oh, man, I’d love to meet that guy’ — and he started playing me Eric’s licks.”

Dowd said something similar happened when he mentioned Allman to Clapton.

“When Eric started recording a couple of weeks later, Duane called and said they were going to be doing a concert in Miami and asked if he could drop by the studio. I turned to Eric and said, ‘There’s a chap I’ve been working with named Duane Allman.’ He said, ‘The guy that plays all those bottleneck licks?’ and he started emulating Duane on the guitar. He said, ‘I’m dying to see him play.’

“I told him they were giving a concert Saturday night, and Eric announced, ‘There will be no session Saturday night. We are going to a concert.’ After the show, I introduced them, and they came back to the studio and started trading instruments and licks.”

Clapton would ultimately credit Allman with inspiring his transition from acoustic slide to exploring the technique on electric guitar. Before Allman’s emergence, Clapton noted, most electric slide players were essentially repeating the standard vocabulary established by Elmore James. Allman, however, pushed the style into new territory.

“No one was opening it up until Duane showed up and played it a completely different way,” Clapton said. “That sort of made me think about taking it up.”

Even so, Clapton said his own slide style ultimately developed along different lines.

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

At the start of 1969, Jimi Hendrix was not a regular fixture on British television. In fact, his last appearance had come more than a year earlier, on August 24, 1967, when the electric guitar trailblazer made his fourth and final turn on Top of the Pops.

So when it was announced that Hendrix and the Experience would perform live on the January 4 edition of Happening for Lulu, anticipation ran high. The program, hosted by Scottish pop star Lulu — then best known in the U.S. for her 1966 hit “To Sir, With Love” — was hardly an obvious platform for one of rock’s most unpredictable acts. That mismatch would prove decisive.

The booking would result in Hendrix’s final appearance on British TV — and one of the most notorious. By the end of the broadcast, he had effectively ensured he wouldn’t be invited back.

The flashpoint came in the form of an unscripted tribute to Cream, the then-recently dissolved power trio featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.

Hendrix opened with a blistering, wah-drenched take on “Voodoo Chile,” then moved into “Hey Joe,” the song that had introduced him on record in late 1966. According to bass guitarist Noel Redding, producers had proposed bringing Lulu back onstage to share the final verse — an idea the band rejected outright.

Instead, just as the performance seemed to be concluding, Hendrix abruptly derailed the format.

“Well, let’s stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to Cream,” he told the audience. “Regardless of what group they might be, I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.”

With that, the Experience launched into an impromptu version of “Sunshine of Your Love.” It was loose, loud and — crucially — far longer than the show’s tightly controlled running time allowed. Producers made the decision to cut the show off in the middle of the performance, rather than run past their allotted time.

For the BBC, it was a breach of protocol they didn’t take lightly. Hendrix was subsequently barred from further appearances on BBC television and effectively shut out of its radio platforms.

He would die less than two years later, in September 1970, making the Lulu broadcast both his last British TV performance and a fitting encapsulation of his refusal to be contained by format, expectation or authority.

Looking back, Lulu has suggested the incident did more to enhance Hendrix’s legend than diminish it. Speaking years later, she recalled that the ban only amplified his appeal: the sense that anything might happen when he picked up a guitar — even, or especially, on live television.

“They wouldn’ta play him on the radio, then they wouldn’t put him on any television shows,” she recounted incorrectly, “but I think it made him more popular than ever.”

Others have framed Hendrix’s impact in similarly seismic terms. Jeff Beck would later say his arrival fundamentally reshaped the instrument’s possibilities, while Joe Walsh has ranked him alongside Beck and Clapton when naming the greatest guitar soloists — a measure of how enduring that brief, chaotic TV moment has proven to be.

How Eric Clapton came to perform on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is one of the most retold stories in Beatles lore. Frustrated by his bandmates’ indifference to the song, George Harrison invited his close friend Clapton into the studio, partly for moral support and partly to ensure the Beatles took the session seriously.

But as Harrison revealed in a 1987 Guitar Player interview, that historic collaboration quickly became reciprocal. Just weeks after the September 6, 1968, Beatles session, Clapton asked Harrison to return the favor on what would become Cream’s final studio album.

Since forming in 1966, Cream had risen to the summit of hard rock, revered for their blues-rooted psychedelia and the virtuosity of its members. Yet internal tensions — particularly between bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker — had eroded the group’s stability. By May 1968, while touring the United States, the band decided to break up. Recordings from that tour, including their definitive live version of “Crossroads,” appeared later that year on Wheels of Fire.

Running largely on fumes, Cream embarked on a brief farewell tour from October 4 to November 4, before closing the book with two final concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 25 and 26. In the weeks between the tour and those last performances, the band convened at Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles to record three new songs. The concept was simple: each member would contribute one original tune, with the three studio tracks supplemented by live recordings to complete the album.

Clapton, however, was stuck. Restless with Cream’s extended solos and psychedelic excess, he was searching for a new musical direction and struggling to find a song that fit. Earlier that year, both he and Harrison had fallen under the spell of the Band’s earthy, understated approach.

They were particularly drawn to guitarist Robbie Robertson, whose work with the Hawks — Bob Dylan’s backing band during his controversial 1965 electric tour — and later on Music from Big Pink offered a blueprint for something more grounded.

Clapton had managed to get hold of rough mixes from Dylan and the Band’s Woodstock sessions and found them revelatory.

“I got the tapes of Music from Big Pink and I thought, well, this is what I want to play — not extended solos and maestro bullshit, but just good funky songs,” he said in Conversations with Eric Clapton.

To help him make that pivot, Clapton turned to Harrison, who happened to be in Los Angeles producing Jackie Lomax’s debut album, Is This What You Want?

“He called me up and said, ‘Look, we’re doing this last album, and we’ve each got to have our song by Monday,’” Harrison recalled to Guitar Player editor-at-large Dan Forte

“I finished the verses off, and he had the middle bit already, and I think I wrote most of the words to the whole song—although he was there, and we bounced off of each other.”

Harrison later added that Ringo Starr contributed a single, memorable line. “Ringo walked in drunk and gave us that line about the swans living in the park,” Harrison said in another interview. Since Starr wasn’t in Los Angeles at the time, it’s likely his contribution came during overdubs recorded a month later at IBC Studios in London.

The initial session was stripped-down and collaborative. Harrison played rhythm guitar, producer Felix Pappalardi handled piano, and Bruce and Baker supplied the rhythm section. Clapton performed the lead electric guitar parts using his the cherry red Gibson ES-335 semihollow he purchased in 1964, playing it through a rotary speaker cabinet. Some accounts claim he used a Fender Vibratone. Although Harrison said it was a Leslie, he may have been using the name generically.

“We played the song right up to the bridge,” he recalled, “at which point Eric came in on the guitar with the Leslie. And then he overdubbed the solo later.”

The song’s title, meanwhile, emerged from a now-legendary misunderstanding.

“The story’s getting a bit tired now,” Harrison admitted, “but I was writing the words down, and when we came to the middle bit I wrote ‘Bridge.’ And from where he was sitting, opposite me, he looked and said, ‘What’s that — ‘Badge’?’ So he called it ‘Badge’ because it made him laugh.”

In retrospect, Harrison believed Clapton reached out for the same reason he had invited him into the Beatles’ orbit weeks earlier.

“I wanted Eric on ‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for a bit of moral support and to make the others behave,” Harrison said, “and I think it was the same reason he asked me to play on that session with them.”

For contractual reasons, Harrison was credited on Goodbye under the pseudonym L’Angelo Misterioso, though his involvement quickly became known in the music press. Early U.K. pressings of the album credited both Clapton and Harrison as co-writers, while the original U.S. release listed Clapton alone.

Although its opaque lyrics have more in common with the stream-of-consciousness style found on psychedelic tunes of the time, “Badge” is musically to the point, built around a concise structure that contrasts sharply with its swirling, otherworldly guitar solo. Clapton would revisit that same dynamic the following year with “Presence of the Lord,” his lone songwriting contribution to his next band, Blind Faith, and a clear signal that he was leaving Cream’s excesses behind.

Jimi Hendrix changed the music so entirely in 1966 that, within months of his arrival in England, established guitarists were wrestling with how to respond. Jeff Beck told Guitar Player, “It was a horrible time, really. Not because of him, but because of the fact that he swept us all aside and put us in a bin.”

Pete Townshend, realizing he could never better or even equal Hendrix’s guitar talents, decided to focus on his song craft. “He came along and, kind of like in early punk, just swept everything aside,” Townshend told Guitar Player in 1989, in terms remarkably similar to Beck‘s. ”I had to learn to write, and it became like a new art, from a new angle.” The results were revealed in the Who’s pioneering 1969 rock opera, Tommy.

But what about Clapton? From the start, he knew he’d met his match in Hendrix. When, just a few weeks after his arrival in London, Jimi crashed a Cream gig and asked if he could play, Clapton was so stunned by what he heard that he had to leave the stage.

Rather than run from his challenger, Clapton forged a friendship with him. He also permed his hair and plugged his electric guitar into a wah pedal, making him the first, and most visible, guitarist in rock to try to channel Hendrix’s mojo.

But inside, Clapton was as frustrated as Beck and Townshend. That was partly because Hendrix had achieved what he had hoped to when he first saw Buddy Guy perform with a trio in London. Clapton had been so thoroughly convinced by Guy that he left John Mayall and the Blues Breakers in July 1966, at the height of his fame, to form Cream, with the intention of following in Guy’s footsteps with his own power trio.

But Hendrix got their first. What’s more, Hendrix was the real deal, not a copy.

“Although I was with Cream, I had fantasies of incorporating all of that Buddy Guy–like showman stuff into my act,” Clapton told Guitar Player in 2004. “But when Jimi showed up and did it all for real, it burst my bubble. I realized then that I had to look at Cream as a band, and forget about my little solo odyssey.”

Clapton was also floored that Hendrix, an American, had come to England to find fame. Like his fellow British musicians, Clapton was looking toward America as the place to stake his claim in rock.

“What was even more of a shock was that Hendrix was part of America coming to England to take over, while we were all going to America trying to take it by storm,” he said. “Cream was cutting Disraeli Gears at Atlantic Studios in New York while he was cutting Are You Experienced in London. Then, when we came back to England with that album, no one wanted to know, and I was pissed for a little while.”

Speaking of which, Disraeli Gears is the album that most shows Hendrix’s influence on Clapton. “I was full-tilt on the wah pedal for a year-and-a-half,” he says.

But Clapton was also cutting his own path. It was here that his famed “woman tone” came about, the result of rolling off his Gibson SG’s tone control.

“I used the bridge pickup, but with the tone control all the way off, so it was all just bottom end, and then I played on the high strings, getting a really fat tone and feeding back,” he explained. “I just played like that all the time. Even with power chords, there was never any variation in my tone.

“It was much later that I came to the Stratocaster, and I think that was because of Jimi. He could get more tonal variation out of that instrument than I ever thought possible. I knew about the Buddy Holly, thin bridge-pickup sound, but I didn't know that it was possible to get the Strat to sound really big, or get it to feed back in tune-which was very easy with a Les Paul. And then, when I started playing around with the Strat, I realized it was nice to be able to play clean, too.”

Like Beck and Townshend, Clapton eventually found a path through Hendrix’s scorched earth. Through the stripped-back roots music of Band guitarist Robbie Robertson and the influence of American country guitarist Delaney Bramlett and his group, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, Clapton was led to the birthplace of the blues and the music of Robert Johnson. Unlike the world of late 1960s blues rock, there was nothing to compete with — just music from which to live and learn.

“The blues is a strange phenomenon,” he concluded in his 2004 chat with Guitar Player. “I’ve always thought it was rather funny and ironic when I'd see footage of interviewers actually asking people like John Lee Hooker what the blues is. I've heard those old guys say some really funny things — either profound or ridiculous.

“My way of putting it is that it's a set of rules imbued with deep emotion. But, of course, that doesn't really describe anything at all. The blues is a strange phenomenon, and I'm certainly not bigger than it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds for John Mayall in 1965 because he wanted to play the blues. He left Mayall one year later to form Cream with bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Backer after seeing Buddy Guy play in London and deciding a blues-rock trio was more to his liking.

Two years later, Clapton was ready to call Cream a day, despite the group's power and influence, and the fact that they were at the top of their game.

The reason? He’d heard a little roots-rock quintet called the Crackers, and was completely taken by their music.

Though they weren't famous by name, the Crackers were far from unknown. They were a group of Canadians with a U.S.-born drummer and had been called the Hawks before Bob Dylan hired them to be his touring group.

From September 1965 through May 1966, they went on the road with him, billed collectively as Bob Dylan and the Band. When Dylan went into seclusion in Woodstock, in upstate New York, they joined him, working as the Crackers, to record what became known upon its release in 1975 as The Basement Tapes.

It was selections from those sessions that Clapton first heard while on the road with Cream around 1967.

“I knew this man in L.A., who was an entrepreneur of different sorts of things,” Clapton recalled. “And he had a tape by a band called the Crackers, and he lent it to me, and I took it on the road with me. And it became my drug.

“When we would get to the end of a gig, Jack and Ginger would go off and do their stuff, and I'd put this tape on, and I'd go into another world, and it was my kind of release.”

By 1968, the Crackers were signed to a label and had a new name — or actually the old name they had with Dylan: the Band. The group consisted of guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, keyboardists Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, and drummer Levon Helm. Their debut album, Music From Big Pink, became a classic thanks to songs like “The Weight,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall Be Released.”

Rustic, rootsy and pastoral, the Band’s music was 180 degrees removed from the electric guitar–driven blues-rock that Cream were crafting. Listening to their music, Clapton heard his future.

“For someone like me who’d been born in England and worshipped the music from America, it was very tough to find a place to belong in all this,” he said. “And this band that I was listening to on this tape had it all. They were white, but they seemed to have derived all that could from Black music, and they combined it to make a beautiful hybrid.

“And for me, it was serious. It was serious, and it was grown up, and it was mature, and it told stories, and it had beautiful harmonies, fantastic singing, beautiful musicianship, without any virtuosity. Just, you know, economy, and beauty.

“And — I wanted to be in the band. So I went and told Jack and Ginger that I couldn't go on anymore. There was something else happening.”

That same year Clapton, like his friend George Harrison, visited the Band in Woodstock.

“I really sort of went there to ask if I could join the band,” Clapton continued. “I mean, I didn't have the guts to say it, you know? I didn't have the nerve. I just sort of sat there and watched these guys work.

“And I remember Robbie saying, ‘We don’t jam. There's no point sitting here and trying to, you know. We just write and work.’ And I was very impressed.”

Impressed enough that he left Cream and — after a brief, failed foray with Blind Faith — recast himself as a roots rocker with his 1970 solo album, Eric Clapton.

He would eventually perform with the Band, in 1976, at the Last Waltz, the group’s historic and star-studded farewell concert held on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. Playing with them in their final concert would be as close as he would get to joining the Band. It was a bookend to his first visit with the group in Woodstock and marked yet another turning point in his music.

“I spent the rest of my career until the Last Waltz, anyway, trying to find ways to imitate what they had. And it was an impossible dream, really, because from where I came from and from where they came from completely different worlds.”

But what Clapton learned from them remained a touchstone for his music going forward.

“It was something to do with a principle that I got from what they did, which was integrity,” he says. “Integrity, and a standard of craft that really didn't bow down to any kind of commerciality. I identified with that, and I adored it.

“And at the same time, it was very hard. It was very hard to kind of make my way with this going on and not be part of it until the Last Waltz. And in some respects, I was very relieved with the Last Waltz, because it meant that there wasn't a Band that I wasn't a part of anymore. And I could just go on and be me, and it was all right.”

Music's landscape changed dramatically in the late 1960s, as the electric guitar became a greater force of expression in rock. That was due as much to developments in amplification and effects as it was to the players who dominated the scene, like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.

Prior to then, rock and roll belonged to guitarists like Keith Richards and George Harrison, each of whom had one foot in the styles preceding the British rock boom and the other in a more expressive, blues-inspired way of playing. Harrison, in particular, eventually became enamored of the slower, single-note style of lead guitar that emerged in the playing of the Band's Robbie Robertson and his pal Clapton.

But he wanted nothing to do with the heavier rock that followed. As far as he was concerned, Clapton took electric guitar to a new and more forceful place with his rock trio Cream.

Where it went after that was simply all too much.

“As far as listening to it, I’d rather hear someone like Little Richard or Larry Williams,” he once recalled (via Rolling Stone). “I never liked all that stuff in the late '60s after Cream had broken up — all those Les Paul guitars screaming and distorting.”

Clapton had been at the heart of the British blues explosion following his departure from the Yardbirds in 1965, when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But when he left to form his own loud and lively power trio, inspired after seeing Buddy Guy play in London, he took the blues to new, rather more aggressive places.

Although Cream was a blues-rock band with strong elements of jazz mixed in, the group's fusion proved instrumental in paving the way for the hard rock and heavy metal scenes that followed. Even Clapton came to understand as much in the years after.

“I think we were one of the early heavy metal bands without knowing it,” Clapton has previously said. “After we disbanded, Led Zeppelin filled the void.”

While hard rock would give us plenty of fine virtuoso players, Harrison preferred the more expressive side of guitar work that preceded them.

“I like subtlety, like Ry Cooder and Eric Clapton,” he said. “Eric is fantastic. He could blow all those people off the stage if he wanted to, but he’s more subtle than that.

“And personally I’d rather hear three notes hit really sweet than to hear a whole lot of notes from some guitar player whose ears are so blown out he can’t hear the difference between a flat and a sharp.”

Harrison’s high praise for Clapton came just a few years after the two men reportedly performed a guitar duel over their mutual love for Pattie Boyd, Harrison's wife at the time. Clapton had become infatuated with her in 1970, leading to his anguished love letter to her, the song "Layla," from Derek and the Dominos' Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. (although that tune is now shrouded in plagiarism claims).

Intriguingly, in his Rolling Stone interview, Harrison failed to mention the guitarist he felt was responsible for the “greatest guitar solo of all time.”

During his early career, Eric Clapton launched a trio of musical acts as he built a fierce reputation as one of the finest guitar players to break out of the British blues explosion. But his dream of having his own group nearly cost him his career.

Clapton’s legend was formed during his brief tenure in the quartet John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, leading someone to spray paint “Clapton is God” on a London wall.

But soon after recording Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton in 1966, he found himself standing mouth agape as he watched Buddy Guy perform in London with a bassist and drummer.

“What it said to me was, 'This was possible,’” Clapton explained. “If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere.”

He promptly quit Mayall and secretly formed his own power-trio, Cream, with bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker. Their group was nearly revealed too soon when the three were picked at random to contribute to a compilation album featuring London's hottest players. When they did come out, Cream became rock's most groundbreaking power trio, much as Clapton had hoped.

But behind the scenes, he anguished over the band's interpersonal tensions as well as Bruce and Baker's jazz leanings.

“Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and be like Buddy Guy," Bruce later said of his and Baker's jazz-rooted tendencies. “We had different ideas."

The band was ultimately run into the ground by their greedy management, who only ever saw the band as a quick cash grab. They even approached Rory Gallagher to step into Clapton's vacated position when the trio inevitably disintegrated in 1968 after just two years .

Blind Faith became Clapton's next project. Featuring Traffic keyboardist and singer Steve Winwood, bassist Ric Grech and Baker on drums, the quartet never jelled. After the group was supported on a gig by the American group Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, Clapton saw their brand of southern-fried blues as more to his liking. He befriended frontman Delaney Bramlett, and with his pal Beatle George Harrison in tow, joined the group for a handful of gigs before launching his 1970 self-titled solo album, recorded with the support of the band.

That inevitably led to the creation of his next group, Derek and the Dominos, a quartet designed to give Clapton a degree of anonymity. Formed with members of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, the project was very close to Clapton's heart. As he revealed shortly before the release of their 1970 album, Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, he expected Derek and the Dominos to outlive its predecessors. In the end, they made it no further than one album.

There were highs and lows to their time together. Clapton's guitar tandem with Duane Allman, who guested on the record, has gone down in rock as one of the greatest the genre has ever seen. But Clapton was pained by the knowledge their guitar fusion was temporary.

“I knew that sooner or later he [Duane] was going to go back to the Allmans,” he admitted to Guitar World. “But I wanted to steal him.”

In the end, Allman died in a motorcycle accident roughly one year after Layla was recorded. Prior to his death, Derek and the Dominos, minus Allman, regrouped in early 1971 to record their followup. The sessions, Clapton said, “broke down halfway through because of the paranoia and tension. And the band just dissolved.”

“When we broke up, I went into that dark place. I didn’t give a shit about the music anymore,” Clapton told Guitar World. “I didn’t like the sound of my guitar, I didn’t like the way I played.”

Clapton’s drug usage, in particular heroin, had reached its zenith during this period. John Lennon, himself a former heroin user, recognized his friend’s struggles, and reached out to help by asking him to form a new band with him. .

A letter Lennon wrote to Slowhand in 1971 proposed they start a new supergroup together. Among his lines of persuasion, he wrote, “I really feel that I can bring out the best in you and bring back the balls in rock ‘n’ roll.”

The guitarist declined the invitation, confining the project to the annals of what could have been. Lennon’s support did little to pierce his darkness at that time.

Eventually, though, Clapton found his way back, not through blues but through the power of reggae, courtesy of Bob Marley. Clapton would go on to have his first number-one hit — and as a solo artist — with his 1974 cover of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff."

“When I came back, it was with a different point of view, a fresh enthusiasm, and a kind of open-mindedness to learn about new music,” Clapton told Guitar World. “That’s when I heard reggae. I was just like a kid in a sweet shop again.”

The story goes that Eric Clapton was inspired to form his power trio Cream after seeing Buddy Guy perform with his trio in England. With the release of their debut album, Fresh Cream, in 1966, Clapton and his group would influence American guitarist Leslie West to follow suit and pursue a power trio of his own: Mountain.

“When I heard Fresh Cream I was shocked,” the late guitarist told us in our March 2014 issue. “I couldn’t believe what the hell was going on. The guitar sounded like a voice, the voice sounded like a guitar — I didn’t know what was up.”

Cream’s next album, 1967’s psychedelic-inspired Disraeli Gears, took things up several notches, thanks to its adventurous production and arrangements, courtesy of the group’s new producer Felix Pappalardi.

“And sure enough, when Disraeli Gears came out, I looked and saw that it was produced by Felix Pappalardi,” West said.

The name was very familiar to him.

“He had produced a couple of songs for my first group, the Vagrants. I remember saying to my brother — who was the bass player in the Vagrants — ‘Holy shit, that’s the same Felix that produced us!’ My brother said, ‘So how come we don’t sound like Cream?’ He thought we sucked because we didn’t practice enough. I started practicing a lot after that.”

West went on to hire Pappalardi as the bass guitarist and producer for his 1969 debut solo album, Mountain, which included drummer N.D. Smart rounding out the power-trio lineup. Listeners assumed Mountain was the band’s name. As a result, when West and Pappalardi subsequently decided to make it official and form a band, it was a foregone conclusion they would call it Mountain.

They hired drummer Corky Laing, whose previous band, Energy, had been produced by Pappalardi. West was convinced they needed to remain a trio, but Pappalardi thought Mountain might appear to be riding the Cream's coattails, especially given his past involvement with the group. He believed the addition of a fourth member would solve the problem, so they hired keyboardist Steve Knight.

“That was because Felix didn’t want us to look or sound like Cream,” West confirmed. “And it worked on some songs — like ‘Theme From an Imaginary Western,’ ‘Don’t Look Around’ and ‘Nantucket Sleighride.’

“But we eventually dropped the keyboard. The organ was a nice pad, though, and I had to work a lot harder with the trio.”

If West was happy working with Pappalardi, he was even more thrilled when he got to play with Cream’s bassist, Jack Bruce, in his followup group, West, Bruce and Laing.

“When [Felix] decided he didn’t want to go on the road anymore, we started West, Bruce and Laing,” West says. “I think Jack Bruce was the most talented musician I’ve ever played with. If it weren’t for drugs, we might even still be playing together.”

In the same interview, West noted that he liked to keep everything simple. His electric guitar of choice in Mountain was a Gibson Les Paul Junior with a single P90 pickup. And although he didn’t play fast or use all the fingers on his fretting hand, he managed to carve out his own niche by making the most of his talents.

“I’m very lucky. I’m not a fast player and I only play with my first and third fingers, but I focused more on melody, tone and vibrato,” he said. He complemented those skills with his unique picking technique that employed pinch harmonics.

“That’s what I do best, rather than try to play fast, which I can’t. Nothing bothers me more than somebody who’s playing fast and sloppy and missing notes all over the place.

“When I was growing up, a lot of guys did speed, and when you talked to them you couldn’t understand a word they were saying. With speed-freak guitar players it’s like, ‘Where’s the downbeat?’”

West made a point of telling guitarists to keep their speed in check at every opportunity. Jared James Nichols told Guitar Player he was once the recipient of West’s wisdom when he was booked to open for the guitarist at B.B. King’s in New York City. Prior to the show, the two men had an impromptu session.

“We started jamming — it was really cool,” Nichols told Guitar Player. “Finally, he stopped playing and looked at me, and serious as can be he said, ‘Slow the fuck down!’ He meant it.”

After soundcheck, West sat down to give Nichols a bit of heartfelt advice, “He said that he really liked my vibrato and tone,” Nichols said. “I remember him saying, ‘You’ve got great feel and a nice touch. Don’t sacrifice all of that for speed.’ I’ll tell you, it meant a lot to me, and I really took it to heart.”

Cream were many things to many people, but it seems few could agree on exactly what genre the power trio belonged to.

Eric Clapton reportedly joined thinking it would be a blues trio similar to Buddy Guy’s. Jack Bruce considered the act a jazz trio. Meanwhile, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson has credited the band with the birth of progressive rock.

As Clapton himself told Guitar Player in a 1967 interview, “Our music cannot be categorized, because a lot of the material we play is not blues — it’s another thing completely, probably brand new.“

The roots of that “another thing” were the main discussion point in our July 1985 interview with Bruce. Over the course of it, the bassist revealed previously unknown facts about the formation of Cream, and made other statements that he contradicted elsewhere.

For instance, Bruce has stated in other interviews that Clapton thought he was getting a Buddy Guy–style blues trio when Cream formed, only to learn that Bruce and Baker were much more jazz-oriented in their approach, dating back to their time in the Graham Bond Organization.

But as he claims here, Clapton considered himself not a blues guitar player but a rock guitarist — quite a contradiction considering he left the Yardbirds for John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers because he was devoted to playing blues.

For that matter, Bruce didn’t just think of Cream as a jazz-rock band — he considered the trio a true jazz group.

And while Bruce didn’t mention it, after Clapton announced he was departing Cream in 1968, less than two years after it formed, the band’s management did attempt to keep it going by hiring Rory Gallagher. He declined, deciding he would rather go his own musical direction. “He felt that he would never be his own man,” his brother Dónal concluded.

Given the lack of information on record in the early days of Guitar Player magazine, the interviewer, GP associate editor Tom Mulhern, took Bruce back to the very beginning — his first meeting with Eric Clapton.

Where did you first meet Eric Clapton?

At the Windsor Jazz Festival in ’64 or ’65. He was playing with the Yardbirds, and I was with the Graham Bond Organization. We had a kind of jam at some point in this festival, and Eric was involved.

It was the first time I had actually heard of him, and I was very impressed. I think it was Graham on organ, myself on bass, Ginger Baker on drums, Eric, and some of the Yardbirds — it was so long ago, I don’t really remember who. I was playing electric bass by then — a Fender six-string.

Why did you use a six-string bass?

Well, the Graham Bond band didn’t have a guitarist. It was organ, tenor sax, bass and drums. I played six-string because I was able to do some guitar-like things at the same time. I used that bass in the early days of Cream. It was on the first record [1966’s Fresh Cream], and maybe part of the second one [1967’s Disraeli Gears].

After the festival, did you get together with Eric right away?

No. We were both in busy bands, both working very hard. But Eric used to come to Graham’s gigs. We were a cult band, even among musicians at that time.

But you did record together as the Powerhouse.

Yeah, it was before Cream. We had Eric, myself, Steve Winwood and Pete York on drums. [Ben Palmer played piano, and Paul Jones played harp.] A producer from Elektra Records, Joe Boyd, asked me to do it.

There were no thoughts of making a band at the time, but it probably helped to make the Cream thing happen later. [Bruce seemed to forget that Cream were already together but working in secret at the time of the recording.]

How did the idea of forming a group come about?

Well, I left the Graham Bond Organization — point of the knife, in fact, from Ginger. [laughs] We had a kind of fight. I played with John Mayall for a while, and I joined Manfred Mann. Ginger had the idea to form a band with Eric. Eric agreed, but only provided that I was in it, too. He was a fan of my singing, in particular. I was approached by Ginger, and we then went to his house in Neasden [a suburb of northwest London], set up our equipment, and played.

It was magic. We were just jamming that day, but blues were very common to all of us. And Ginger and I had been playing together for some time as a jazz rhythm section.

In fact, the more I think about it, the Cream was a jazz band — the only jazz band to go Platinum so far. [laughs] I think that’s what it was, and maybe that was the root of the problem with the band. Yeah, it was a jazz band.

With a blues guitarist.

We often used to talk, and Eric didn’t consider himself a blues guitarist then. He thought of himself more as a rock player. He certainly never considered himself a jazz player.

After your first jam with Eric at Ginger’s house, what was your impression?

Well, Eric at that time was a very outstanding musician. Obviously, when I’m playing with people, that’s the only thing that matters to me, not so much the way they play their axe. When we were traveling to concerts or clubs in the early days, we would have at least as good a time in the car as we would onstage. We had a record player in the car, and so we put on records and sang our hearts out on the way to gigs.

I was always very impressed by Eric’s ear. Obviously, his guitar playing was something else, and he was playing like no one else — certainly in Britain.

But then I also played a lot with John McLaughlin around that time, so it’s not a question of technique or the way that one attacks one’s instrument. It was a question of musicianship, and for me, Eric definitely had that from the word go.

As you worked more with Eric, did you find that it affected the way you played as a bassist?

Oh, much more than that. Eric introduced me to a whole new way of listening to things. I was always a kind of musical snob.

For instance, when I started out, I was a very serious double-bass player, and I never would have considered playing anything that for me wasn’t purist jazz. I was asked to join Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and I went down to hear the band with Charlie Watts on drums, Cyril Davies on harmonica, Dick Heckstall-Smith on tenor sax, Alexis on guitar, and so on. And I remember thinking that it was a rock and roll band. [laughs] I was a real purist.

I was very fortunate in meeting Eric because he expanded my listening. He introduced me to the Delta blues players, for instance: Skip James, Robert Johnson. Eric gave a lot of credit to Black guys. The blues guys were really ripped off by a lot of white musicians, and that hasn’t changed.

But over the years, Eric has actually exposed guys like Skip James, who was great back in the ’20s, but wasn’t really well known in the ’60s. Eric introduced a lot of people to guys like Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Bob Marley and so on.

He opened my ears to something that I may never have even heard otherwise. He made me listen to different things that have proved very important in my development. And he made me listen to certain things in a certain way.

I had been working on the way I played for some time, and had gotten into a lot of trouble because I believed that the bass could do certain things. Instead of just playing root notes, the bass could be a melodic instrument in a band. It had been my belief since I was 16 or 17, although I encountered problems from people who didn’t understand what I was trying to do, and I got fired from bands.

Eric didn’t change the way I played the bass, but he opened my ears to a lot of things I might have missed.

When Buddy Guy played London's Marquee Club in 1965, Eric Clapton was in the crowd. He was so impressed by the bluesman's power trio, it prompted him to quit the Bluesbreakers and form Cream, the rock world's first supergroup.

Recruiting Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce — two players with lofty reputations in jazz spheres who also helped kickstart the progressive rock boom of the ‘70s — Clapton set about making his dream a reality. The trio began rehearsing in secret in July 1966.

But as Manfred Mann vocalist Paul Jones reveals, he accidentally stumbled upon their classified project when he was asked to put together a dream team of his own for a new compilation album.

Speaking to Mojo, Jones says it all began when Elektra Records was preparing its 1966 sampler album, What's Shakin', to show off its new roster of rock artists. The label was setting up shop in London and realized it needed more local representation on the disc, and Jones was asked to form a band comprising some U.K. musicians.

“They had the Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Butterfield, Al Kooper and Tom Rush,” Jones recalls. “[Producer] Joe Boyd said, ‘Look, we can’t do this without one British act. We’ve asked the Yardbirds and so on, and they all say no… could you put together a band?’”

Bruce was the first name that came to Jones' mind. The bass player promptly agreed to the project and asked who else he was eyeing up. Jones said Clapton, noting that the guitarist had just left the Bluesbreakers and might be available.

“Yeah, of course, he would be anybody’s first choice,” Bruce said. “Anybody else?”

“It’d be great if we could get Ginger Baker on drums,” Jones suggested.

“There was a silence,” he tells Mojo. “Then, Jack said, ‘How much do you know?’

"I said, ‘About what?’"

Bruce paused. "‘Oh, nothing,’” he said.

Jones had no idea the dream group he'd suggested was a real thing.

“I had just put together Cream," he says, "and they were already rehearsing!”

Despite Clapton, Bruce and Baker having their irons in another fire, the trio signed up to Jones' project, which saw him play harmonica, with Steve Winwood (then in the Spencer Davis Group) assuming vocal duties and Ben Palmer on piano. However, this expanded Cream lineup was denied when Baker, as the official line goes, became unavailable. Winwood called on his bandmate Pete York to fill the vacant drum seat.

That excuse, it later came to be known, was a fib. In fact, Baker said it would be “really stupid” for Cream's three members to feature on the track “when we’re about to burst onto the world.”

Dubbed Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, the group recorded three songs that made it onto What's Shakin': Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" (soon to be covered by Cream), Memphis Slim's "Steppin' Out," and "I Want to Know," reportedly written by Jones but credited to his wife, Sheila McLeod.

An unknown blues track was also recorded at the session but not used. Clapton told Guitar Player in 1992, “the slow blues was never issued, so they must have it on tape at Elektra somewhere. It was pretty good, too.”

The group's star appeal was somewhat diminished as several of the artists were under contract to other labels. As a result, Jones was credited under the pseudonym Matthew Jacobs, a combination of his two son’s names. Winwood went down as Steve Angelo.

Years later, long after the tornado of technicality that was Cream had wreaked havoc on both sides of the Atlantic, then disintegrated, Bruce said that Clapton, as the token blues player, had his work cut out in the group.

“I think Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and he would be sort of like Buddy Guy standing out the front,” he posited. “And then I thought, 'Great, I can be a composer and get some songs out there.' I think Ginger just wanted to conquer the world, like Genghis Khan. We had different ideas.

“Meanwhile, the management was thinking, ‘Let’s milk this for all it’s worth because it ain’t going to last.'”

When the band, as their management predicted, did fall apart, Rory Gallagher was eyed up as a replacement for Clapton, believing there was plenty more bags of cash to be made from the Cream name. He ultimately declined, but Cream’s experimentalism left a huge imprint on a music scene that would never be the same again.

Jethro Tull are considered a forebear of the British progressive-rock movement, alongside the likes of Yes and Pink Floyd. But founder and frontman Ian Anderson has often pointed the spotlight at acts who came before them.

While he says an obscure, John McLaughlin-laced jazz record inspired the '70s prog boom, he also hails Eric Clapton as a prog-rock progenitor, thanks to his guitar work in Cream, a group that arose from a pair of acts that were fertile breeding grounds for music's most progressive musicians.

One of them, the Graham Bond Organization, was a progressive-jazz act that featured the bass talents of Jack Bruce and the drumming ferocity of Ginger Baker, who for several years performed alongside McLaughlin in the group.

The other, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, was a blues-rock group that was a stepping stone for Clapton's rise and eventual coalition with Bruce and Baker in the power-trio Cream.

It was this merging of progressive jazz and blues-rock that Anderson believes made progressive rock possible.

“The entrée into the world of performing, particularly in the underground, trendy clubs like the Marquee Club, was to get on the blues bandwagon, because that’s what people were doing in the later part of ‘67 and early part of ‘68,” Anderson explained to Vintage Rock in 2018.

“Graham Bond was kind of a precursor of that thing that became progressive rock. And, of course, when [Baker and Bruce] left Graham Bond and set out as Cream, that became something that moved Eric Clapton along from just being a blues guitarist.”

Anderson points to the group's 1967 psychedelic rock album, Disraeli Gears, as the pivotal record that help give prog its liftoff.

Anderson believes album tracks like "Tales of Brave Ulysses," "Sunshine of Your Love" and "White Room," which featured an intro in the jazz-like 5/4 time signature, demonstrate that "though they had their roots in blues, they were also going somewhere else.”

Remarkably, Cream began life as Clapton's attempt to replicate the outfit of his idol, Buddy Guy. He said he was inspired after watching Guy lead his power trio through a performance the Marquee in London.

“What it said to me was 'this was possible,’” Clapton said. “If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere.”

And indeed they did. It's fair to say Anderson was similarly inspired. After launching Tull as a blues group with guitarist Mick Abrahams, Anderson pivoted the band toward more ambitious climes as he felt it was the band’s best chance at securing longevity.

Much of that effort was possible thanks to the addition of guitarist Martin Barre, who played a significant role in their quest for sonic reinvention.

Cream’s prog-rock credentials have also been underscored by former Rush bass guitar player Geddy Lee, who named the band the most influential of his career.

Rush, like Tull, had heavy blues-rock roots, hence one of their earliest tours supporting Rory Gallagher, which proved an education for Alex Lifeson. Bands like Cream helped them cross those borderlines.

“They were such an important band to me,” he says. "Jack Bruce’s bass playing was just out of this world. Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, I mean, they were the ultimate trio."

A vintage Gibson acoustic guitar previously owned by George Harrison and Eric Clapton is up for sale on Reverb for a cool $949,999.

Even more enticing, there’s evidence the guitar — a 1913 Gibson Style O — was used by Harrison as he and Clapton composed “Badge” in Clapton’s garden during a visit to Los Angeles in 1968. “Badge” was the hit single from Goodbye, the final album released by Clapton’s power trio Cream in 1969.

Harrison would later take the middle eight from “Badge” as the inspiration to write “Here Comes the Sun,” one of his most famous songs, which appeared on the Beatles’ 1969 album, Abbey Road.

The Gibson Style O was photographed in Harrison’s hands as he and Clapton played in a garden, as seen in the documentary Eric Clapton; Life In 12 Bars. Reportedly, the two men were workshopping “Badge” during this session, which Cream and Harrison would record at Wally Heider Studios, in Hollywood, on November 21.

At some time in its history the Gibson ended up with Delaney Bramlett, one half of the music duo Delaney & Bonnie, who have their own history with Harrison and Clapton. Both men fell for the group’s country-rock stylings in 1969 and performed onstage with their troupe, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, when they arrived in England that year.

The group of musicians would go on to perform on Clapton’s self-titled 1970 solo debut, while their keyboardist, Bobby Whitlock, would help Clapton form Derek & the Dominos. Both Whitlock and Clapton would also perform on Harrison’s 1970 solo masterpiece, All Things Must Pass.

Given its shared history with Harrison and Clapton, the guitar was eventually nicknamed Pattie, a reference to Pattie Boyd, who was married to Harrison from 1966 to 1977, and to Clapton, from 1979 to 1989. Boyd was the muse behind Harrison’s “Something” as well as Clapton’s “Layla.”

While the guitar’s provenance is enticing, the Gibson Style O has its own historic charms. The model was produced as early as 1902 but was restyled and reintroduced as the “new” Style O in 1908. Its unusual appearance included a scroll, similar to that found on Gibson’s F style mandolins, and featured 15 frets clear of the body rather than the then-standard 12. The cutaway was not the typical deep circular shape but was instead flat.

Despite its striking appearance, the Style O was not popular with performers. Its thick top tended to muffle the volume, and the large neck made fretting difficult. Big Bill Broonzy was among the few notable guitarists who played the model, which might explain its appeal to Harrison and Clapton, both of whom were fans of the blues guitarist. The Style O disappeared from Gibson’s price list in 1924.

The Harrison–Clapton-owned Style O features a variety of modifications, including an aftermarket tailpiece, all of which helped to authenticate it.

Eventually, Pattie wound up in RCA Victor’s Victor Vault before finding its way to Reverb. The company produced a video detailing the guitar’s history, as seen below.

As Beatles guitar fans will note, Pattie isn’t the only guitar shared by Harrison and Clapton. In 1968, Clapton gifted Harrison his Cherry Red 1957 Gibson Les Paul, which Clapton then went on to play when tracking his lead guitar work on Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” from the Beatles’ 1968 White Album.

Lucy, as Harrison named the guitar, was later stolen from Harrison’s home and held for ransom, which led Harrison to launch a televised plea for its safe return. The guitar is now part of Harrison’s guitar collection owned by his family.

In addition, Pattie isn’t the only Harrison guitar Delaney Bramlett owned. At some point Harrison gifted him his 1969 Fender Rosewood Telecaster, famously seen in the Beatles’ Let It Be film and the 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. Bramlett sold it at auction in 2003, two years after Harrison’s death, where it was purchased for $434,750 by an intermediary for Harrison’s widow, Olivia.

When Gibson announced a special Murphy Lab reissue of Eric Clapton’s 1958 Gibson Les Paul Custom last month, it didn’t quite paint the full picture.

Sure, it was Slowhand's favorite and famed triple-humbucker Les Paul for quite some time, but it's also a guitar that Albert Lee has owned since 1979, and under his care, it's passed through some rather distinguished hands. Clapton may have put the guitar on the map, but it’s far more traveled than that.

Lee often frequented the guitar shop, Selmer, on London’s Charing Cross Road, which is where his tale with the Les Paul begins.

“Every Saturday I'd come up on the train to see what was in Selmer's," Lee says. "So they opened up this guitar case, and there's a brand-new Les Paul Custom,” he recounts to Guitar World. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll join your band!’" he says with a laugh.

“I played that guitar throughout the early ’60s. And then this guy persuaded me to sell it to him. He pestered me and pestered me. I let it go, and I regretted it for a long, long time.”

Fast forward to 1978 and Lee is the fresh face in Eric Clapton’s touring band.

“I remember the first day, chatting with Eric. For some reason, I had a picture of my old guitar with me, you know, and I showed it to him,” he says. “I told him how much I missed that guitar. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I've got one of those at home somewhere.’”

Lee had forgotten about their conversation almost as soon as he’d had it. But it stayed at the forefront of Clapton’s mind.

“The next day at rehearsals,” Lee remarks, “the roadie walked in with this big case and opened it up, and it's Eric's Les Paul Custom for me to play.

“I guess it was mine,” Lee says with a smile.

“From there on, I used it on the whole tour. Eric never asked for the guitar back. He was happy that I was enjoying it and using it onstage.”

It turns out the guitar has a very prestigious history.

Under Clapton's ownership, it was featured on Disraeli Gears , where the guitarist wielded it to create his "woman tone" by switching to its bridge pickup and rolling down the tone control. The Custom was also played at countless Clapton-related shows in the 1960s and '70s, where it made history with other famous artists of the day.

“From Paul Kossoff to Eric and John Lennon and George Harrison playing it,” Lee quips. “I’d no idea Eric used it with Derek and the Dominos [where he employed it for slide guitar]. Great bit of history there.”

Clapton can't recall what happened to the guitar after Disraeli Gears. He thinks it ended up in Kossoff's hands when Free and Blind Faith, Clapton’s post-Cream supergroup, toured together. He says the two groups jammed together “quite a lot.” In the end, Kossoff got the guitar and used it on Free's debut album, Tons of Sobs.

The Les Paul wound up back in Clapton’s possession in time to be used for his cameo with John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band at the Toronto Rock n’ Roll Revival in September 1969.

From one Beatle to another, the Custom would star when he and George Harrison toured with Delaney and Bonnie, later in 1969.

While researching the guitar’s patchy but fascinating history for Gibson’s new replica, Michael Doyle found evidence of Harrison playing the guitar onstage — with Clapton on Harrison’s Stratocaster.

Clapton then used the guitar for his prominent slide work on Derek and the Dominos' Layla. The Custom was chosen because Clapton didn't like its skinny frets.

If you can't get on with a guitar because the frets aren't right for you, what do you do?" asks Doyle. "Well, set it up for slide.”

The guitar’s history post–’78 has been a little less star-studded. After Clapton had removed the pickguard and pickup covers, he restored the guitar to its former glory and found it simply too good to share. Until, of course, he gave it away to Albert Lee.

Rory Gallagher was slated to join Cream — the revolutionary power trio featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker — after Clapton announced his departure from the group in 1968, less than two years after it formed.

So claims Donal Gallagher, the guitarist's brother, who says Cream's management saw the young Irish rocker as a way to keep the group alive and continue to reap the financial rewards.

History remembers Cream as the band that brought psychedelic, hard rock stylings to electric blues. Clapton was inspired to form a free-wheeling three-piece after watching Buddy Guy at London’s Marquee Club in 1965. The result was Cream, so named for the talents of its players, who represented the best in British blues and jazz in the mid 1960s. Despite their deserved legendary status, the band imploded after constant in-fighting — particularly between bass player Bruce and drummer Baker — pushed Clapton to the brink..

Speaking to Guitar World in 1997, Baker recounted when the band’s inevitable death knell rang.

“After a gig in Texas in 1968, Eric came to me and said, ‘I’ve had enough.’ And I said, ‘So have I.’ And that was it. We decided, for different reasons, that it was all over.

"When Cream died, it died. Short of murder, we couldn’t solve a problem between us.”

Donal Gallagher says that's when Cream's backers eyed Rory, who thought the blues guitar player was a worthy successor to Clapton.

By November 1968, Gallagher was forging quite the reputation with his own power trio, Taste. Allegedly even Jimi Hendrix was a fan. When asked how it felt to be the world’s greatest guitarist, Jimi reportedly replied, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Rory Gallagher.”

Although Gallagher's notoriety in guitar circles was growing exponentially, commercial success evaded him. Cream’s management believed they had the power to change his fortunes.

“It was very much a management thing — ‘Find somebody to replace Clapton,’” Dónal revealed in a 2009 interview with Guitar World. Gallagher, however, wasn’t for the taking.

“Rory was known to them, and they got on well,” his brother continues. “But Rory wouldn't have any of it. He said, ‘Musically, there's no way I'd try and fill somebody else's shoes, especially Eric's.’”

Dónal said Rory knew accepting the offer would have been a “fast track” to fame and money, but he wasn’t looking for shortcuts.

“He felt that he would never be his own man,” Dónal concludes.

Like Eric, Rory was a devotee of blues, but there is no guarantee he would have fit with Cream any better than Clapton had. As Bruce explained to Guitarist in 2012, he believed Clapton was the odd man out in Cream, considering his two bandmates were far better versed in jazz.

“Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and be like Buddy Guy,” Bruce said. "We had different ideas.”

Ultimately, Rory’s quest led Taste to breakup two years later as a solo career beckoned. His talents have become more widely recognized since his untimely passing in 1995. Evidence of that was clear when his heavily worn 1961 Stratocaster sold at auction for $1.16 million late last year. Thanks to a successful campaign to ensure the Strat remained on Irish soil, the guitar was donated to the National Museum of Ireland.

Joe Bonamassa, a vocal supporter of the decision, was given a chance to play two of Rory’s other Fenders ahead of the auction. He's set to play a series of tribute shows to his hero in Ireland later this year, something he's called it “the biggest challenge of my musical life”.

Meanwhile, Gallagher has been honored with a statue in Belfast, although eyebrows were raised after a crucial detail appeared to be wrong.

Billy Gibbons was 20 years old when he formed ZZ Top, and the power trio has defined his life ever since. With the dawn of the ‘70s just over the horizon, Gibbons had shaped his band around two of his biggest influences ± Cream and Jimi Hendrix — in 1969, and his legacy might not still be being talked about today if it weren’t for the way they inspired the bright-eyed guitarist.

“Make no mistake, ZZ Top didn’t just happen upon becoming a trio because it was easier; it’s a lot more challenging,” he tells Classic Rock of the band’s origins. “Hendrix and Cream were at the top of the chart as far as ZZ Top’s book was concerned, and it was through those early influential days of attempting to emulate those sounds and styles that brought us together.”

The band’s foundations were laid while he was still strutting his stuff in his pre-ZZ outfit, Moving Sidewalks. Before the British blues explosion had properly ignited, Gibbons was turned on by the psychedelic sounds of Roky Erikson’s 13th Floor Elevators, molding a very similar sound. Their less-than-subtle nod of a single, "99th Floor," paved the way for a change-making touring opportunity.

“That release led to additional airplay and touring opportunities, including teaming up with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, who became our friends and mentors,” he told Guitar Player last year. “As I remember it, I played a Fender Jazzmaster through a Vox Super Beatle, and a Hohner harp through a Fender Bassman.”

Seeing Hendrix up close sparked something in Gibbons. It’s an experience he relives with CR.

“We toured with him in 1968. It was a real mind-bender and eye-opener, to say the least,” he remembers. “As most now know, Jimi Hendrix, either consciously or subconsciously, made a decision to invent things to do with a Fender Stratocaster that it had not necessarily been intended for. He did it very well, too.

“I was 18 at the time,” he details, “and somehow the organizers saw fit to book us in the hotel room across the hall to his room. That was convenient to ask him the obvious question: ‘How do you do that?’

“I remember that this was a long time before hotels had stereos in their rooms, and each day there would be the delivery of a rather heavy and cumbersome hi-fi console player that was the size of a small Buick. It was dutifully installed for Hendrix to be able to listen to his favorite discs.

“The one I really remember him playing the ass off,” Gibbons goes on, “was the first Jeff Beck Group album, Truth. Hendrix was mad about it, totally OTT [over the top] about Jeff’s playing.”

There’s a strange bittersweet irony in Hendrix’s Beck obsession. In search of a more receptive audience, he soon traveled to the UK and proceeded to blow everyone who laid eyes and ears on him away. So much so that Beck, a man who the guitarist was humbly obsessed with, considered quitting the business entirely.

“Oddly enough, Hendrix was all too willing and ready to include blues licks in his arsenal of guitar offerings, which had fallen out of favor in the States with most black entertainers,” Gibbons adds. “I got to play onstage with him at the time, but it was what went on behind the scenes that really captured the magic of the moment.”

And so, by the time the Moving Sidewalks disbanded a year later, Cream were at the height of their powers, and Hendrix was making serious waves on the other side of the Atlantic. Gibbons was keen to channel some of that energy into his new endeavor, with the things he learned from his hangs, on and of the stage, with Hendrix stuffed tightly into his back pocket.

Eric Clapton’s ZZ Top legacy can be seen slung around Gibbons’ shoulder every time he steps on stage; his ‘59 ‘Pearly Gates’ Les Paul. Seeing Clapton’s Sunburst Gibson Les Paul on the back cover of his Bluesbreakers record prompted him to track down the out-of-production guitar and own one for himself.

He too had taken a leaf out of Clapton’s book and decided to grow his fingernails, and that left its mark on his beloved electric guitar.

“What I hadn’t counted on was that the fingernail of the little finger started digging into the pickguard, leaving scratches,” he says.

Today, the Reverend is still going strong and says new music from ZZ Top – the first since bassist Dusty Hill’s passing – and his solo project, the BFGs is on the way. Without Hendrix and Cream’s influence, Gibbons may have never hopped off the psychedelic rock train and be the man that is so celebrated today.

Cream were a revelation when they emerged on London's blues scene in 1966. Until the power trio's arrival, blues guitar had typically been slow, intentional and emotional. Unlike others before them, Cream — Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker — brought rock and roll fire, flair and ferocity to the genre — along with a fair helping of jazz-inspired jamming — and in doing so helped change the game.

Yet despite comprising three superlative musicians — including Clapton, who had forged a formidable reputation with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers — Bruce believes the group was, from its start, destined to pull itself apart.

His comments — from a 2012 interview with Guitarist conducted two years before his death — centered on the supergroup’s creative apex, 1967’s Disraeli Gears.

“I think Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and he would be sort of like Buddy Guy standing out the front," Bruce offered. "And then I thought, Great, I can be a composer and get some songs out there. And I think Ginger just wanted to conquer the world, basically, like Genghis Khan or somebody. We had different ideas.

“Meanwhile, the management was thinking, ‘Let’s milk this for all it’s worth because it ain’t going to last. So let’s get them out there and make them play every toilet in the US for as long as they’ll last before they go barmy or kill each other.’”

What management never imagined, according to Bruce, is that Cream would not only become an influential blues-rock crossover act but also cross the pond and catch fire in America.

“[They] thought it was going to be an all-star band that would fill the blues clubs, and maybe be a nice festival attraction,” Bruce said. “They never thought it would spread; they never thought it would get to America; they never thought we’d have hit songs. They had absolutely no bloody idea. And when you look at it, it’s a miracle that it happened.”

Bruce was certainly correct about Clapton's aims. Seeing Buddy Guy perform live at London's Marquee Club in 1965 inspired him to sever ties with the John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and launch his own group.

"What [Guy's performance] said to me was 'This was possible,’” Claton recalled of the change-making show decades later. “If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere. With Jack in my filing cabinet, I was thinking about that as a way of breaking free.”

But Clapton's Guy-inspired foundation would form just one facet of the group's musical direction. Bruce was eager to take the blues to new places.

“Eric was really into the blues and he knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t know," the bassist said. "So I was being a bit presumptuous by saying, 'I love the blues', but I’d want to take it a step further and use the language of the blues as a way to write music for us. I always thought I could really change the world through music.”

in fact, both Bruce and Baker had jazz backgrounds, unlike Clapton. The late Peter Brown, who co-wrote lyrics to Cream songs like "White Room" and "Sunshine of Your Love," believed that helped Clapton elevate his playing to new heights.

“They didn’t put Eric down,” he said of Bruce and Baker. “They didn’t say, 'You don’t know enough about chords, or, You don’t know enough about jazz to play with us.' What they did say was: 'You’re a terrific player with terrific feeling, and if you play with us then this thing will happen. The magic will come.'”

The magic came and went, with Cream disintegrating after four studio albums, leaving behind an untouchable legacy.

Reflecting on what they left behind, Bruce mused, “I think you always would like another go.

“You’re never quite happy about it,” he said. “There’s definitely things that could be changed and, obviously you only hear the mistakes. But once it’s finished, it’s finished.”

By the mid-’60s, Eric Clapton was one of the hottest guitar players on the planet, spearheading a new and exciting virtuoso guitar movement. Transitioning from John Mayall’s Bluesbreaker's slow licks to Cream’s adrenalized blues solidified his reputation, but it couldn’t have been forged without Buddy Guy laying the foundations for him.

From Howlin' Wolf to B.B. King and beyond, a litany of talent helped propel blues guitar playing into the spotlight, but Clapton believes that no artist changed the perception of what a guitarist could do like Guy.

Speaking at the bluesman’s inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, Clapton said: “Buddy did far more than just hold his own. In my humble opinion, he stole the show.”

In 1963, Guy had been part of the Folk Festival of the Blues LP which, recorded over several nights in Chicago, also featured Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Boy Williamson.

“He let everyone know that he was the new dangerous kid on the block,” Slowhand extends. “It is still one of the great debut albums of any artist in any genre and it started me on a relentless mission to find out just who this man was.”

A deep dive into his piecemeal discography ensued, with many becoming “milestone recordings” for the guitarist.

He'd starred on Chess Records tracks since 1958, often featuring on songs by Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, and Little Walter, “and no matter how great the song or the performance, my ear would always find him out,” says Clapton.

“He stood out in the mix simply by virtue of the originality and vitality of his playing.”

It wasn’t just his playing that encapsulated his attention, either. Despite plying their trades on different sides of the Atlantic ocean, he saw a lot of himself in Guy's story.

“He was a younger blues musician in a field totally dominated by much older guys. I could identify with him,” he says. “There he was, standing beside the masters of his craft, holding his own and confidently pushing the blues into the 20th century.”

In ‘65, he was able to see his idol live, backed by a bass player and drummer for a show at London’s prestigious Marquee Club. It proved a change-making moment in Clapton’s career.

During his Hall of Fame speech, he'd called the show “earth-shattering,” with Guy playing electric, forward-thinking blues and pulling out tricks – like playing with his teeth – that Hendrix would later make his own.

“What it said to me was 'this was possible,’” he recalled in a 2005 interview. “If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere. With Jack [Bruce] in my filing cabinet, and being in a fairly rigid structure like John Mayall's band, I was thinking about that as a way of breaking free.”

Clapton left the Bluesbreakers a year later, in ‘66, with Peter Green craftily talking his way into the spot he'd vacated. Suddenly the guitarist could spread his wings like he’d admirably watched Guy do.

Clapton has previously gone on record calling Guy the greatest guitar player alive. When the Dallas Observer asked for his response to such an accolade, he was quick to repay the compliment while remaining characteristically humble.

“It's nice of Eric to say that, but I still have to go out and prove that I can play a few licks,” he had said. “I don't take that for granted. Hell, if Eric says that I am the greatest guitar player ever, then maybe I am.”

The argument over whose talents are better could rage on for centuries after both are long gone, but what cannot be understated is how much Guy excited Clapton.

Without his sonic influence, and seeing the flexibility a trio could give him, Clapton may never have gone on to form Cream and elevate the blues to another level. Just like he felt Guy did when he first played his way into the scene.

The thorny subject of the greatest guitar solo of all time has long been a fiercely contested debate, probably because every solo is different. How do you compare, say, “Comfortably Numb” with “Crazy Train,” or “Stairway to Heaven” with “Sultans of Swing”? It’s impossible. Still, public opinion ebbs and flows, and we wanted to find out which solos currently rank among our readers as the greatest of them all.

So we ran a poll on GuitarPlayer.com to find out and here we present the results. We’ll take a look at the stories behind the songs and find out just what made those lead guitar breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

20. Gary Moore | “Still Got the Blues”

GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990)

The definitive blues guitar ballad.

Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales.

Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains one of the most raw and expressive blues tracks, with Moore almost fighting his guitar at points, yet never failing to deliver the goods

19. Metallica | “Fade To Black”

GUITARIST: Kirk Hammett (1984)

Metallica’s first ballad features some of Kirk’s most epic playing.

Recorded at Flemming Rasmussen’s Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen in February and March 1984, Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s sophomore album, was more progressive and stylistically greater in scope than the all-out thrash assault of their debut, Kill ’Em All. That change is evident on “Fade to Black,” which features acoustic guitars and a nonstandard structure more akin to the “Stairway to Heaven” school of songcraft. But it is the song’s timeless melodic solo that most vividly signals a stylistic shift in guitarist Kirk Hammett’s playing. And the signature element he employs for the last solo is arpeggios.

“I have been playing that song for so long now,” Kirk tells our sister publication Total Guitar. “For the very last solo, I know how I want to start it, but then I am in an area where I can improvise for 16, 18 or 24 bars, and then [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] will hit a certain fill, which means that it’s up and it’s time for the arpeggio part. And then I just slide right into those arpeggios.” And they are arpeggios played on two strings, Hammett specifies. “When guitar players first started incorporating arpeggios into their playing, before the whole Yngwie sweep-picking thing, arpeggios were played on two strings – not three or four strings,” he explains. “And that was what the vogue was at the time in the 1980s, so I have been playing those for a long time. I use my middle finger just to anchor my position on the neck.”

That’s a great tip from the man who plays the solos. But how should you tackle them yourself? First, there are two essential scales you’ll need to know: the B natural minor scale and the B Phrygian mode, both shown below. These cover you for the entire opening 30 bars, which, let’s face it, is a lot of music, so this is a good reason to learn a couple of shapes if ever there was one.

To make it simpler, most of your time is spent in the natural minor scale. Not until around bar 20 will you find yourself briefly landing on the C note, which appears in the Phrygian mode. The bottom line is that Hammett improvises this part of the solo live – and these are the shapes he uses.

Up next are those two-string arpeggio shapes, and they’re 16th notes – all of them! At 142 bpm, it’s pretty fast, but Hammett doesn’t pick every note, opting to use pull-offs to make those rapid licks easier. It’s definitely something to experiment with and if you’re still struggling, you could try adding in an occasional hammer‑on, too.

18. Steely Dan | “Kid Charlemagne”

GUITARIST: Larry Carlton (1976)

Messin’ with the “Kid.”

Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos, but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying.

“I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself.

Despite the acclaim, Carlton was, and remains, nonplussed. “When the record came out, there was a wonderful review of the tune in Billboard and they raved about the solo,” he says. “I put the record on and listened to it with my wife, and at the end of it I said, ‘I don’t know. It just sounds like me.’”

17. Cream | “Crossroads”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song.

It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God.

Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship.

Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one” in the first verse of his second solo break, thereby throwing off his phrasing. That’s perfectionism for you. For everyone else, this four-minute track remains a source of fascination more than 50 years on.

16. Eric Johnson | “Cliffs Of Dover”

GUITARIST: Eric Johnson (1990)

Heavenly tones from the Texan great.

This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain.

“I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw him live, and his tones were the best I’d ever heard. I wondered how this guy was getting all of these sounds out of his Strat. I’d never seen anybody have such a forward-thinking rig like that.”

15. Prince | “Purple Rain”

GUITARIST: Prince (1984)

The Purple One’s defining guitar moment.

The epic outro to “Purple Rain” – which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself – stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals.

It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks.

Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes in live performance. While there are many great live renditions of this track, his half-time performance for 2007’s Super Bowl in Miami is the stuff of legend. Shredding alone onstage in the middle of a storm, Prince seemed to be living the moment for which this song was written.

14. Deep Purple | “Highway Star”

GUITARIST: Ritchie Blackmore (1972)

Race with devil on English highway.

“I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out – and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression – D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on the guitar, and I believe that that’s why it stood out and why people have enjoyed it so much.

“Over the years, I’ve always played that solo note for note, but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whisky. [Keyboardist] Jon [Lord] would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster, and he would get very annoyed about it.”

13. Guns N’ Roses | “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

GUITARIST: Slash (1988)

A game of two halves.

Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced.

Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it all together, which is the mark of any great guitar solo. Remarkably, although Slash’s riff was responsible for the song’s creation, he wasn’t fond of the song originally. “We were a pretty hard driving band, and that was sort of an uptempo ballady type of a thing,” he said. “So it’s grown on me over the years.”

12. Ozzy Osbourne | “Crazy Train”

GUITARIST: Randy Rhoads (1980)

Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback.

The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career – and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor.

There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret.

The shredder performed the solo with his customized Jackson guitar through a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s while sitting in the control room. “We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp.”

11. Michael Jackson | “Beat It”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1982)

Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing.

Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind.

Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’” And he did it for free.

10. The Beatles | “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four.

By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior.

Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are appropriately tear-jerking, weaving a dramatic narrative that builds to a shattering climax.

9. Chicago | “25 OR 6 TO 4”

GUITARIST: Terry Kath (1969)

Wah-drenched ecstasy.

This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978.

Though his superb playing graced many tracks – notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority – there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic despair.

Kath most likely played his Gibson SG Standard, as pictured on Chicago Transit Authority’s inner sleeve, using his favored string set, as revealed to GP: the high E string from a tenor set and a standard set for the rest, moved down one string (i.e. high E for the B string, B for the G string, and so on).

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd | “Free Bird”

GUITARIST: Allen Collins (1974)

The Bird is the word.

As it happens, the four-minute-and-24- second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled).

The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together, we liked the sound of the two guitars, and I could’ve gone out and played it with him. But the way he was doin’ it, he was just so hot! He just did it once and did it again, and it was done.”

7. Dire Straits | “Sultans Of Swing”

GUITARIST: Mark Knopfler

An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory.

Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler – schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz – who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads.

Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” – that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos.

The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins-style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would be enough, but the outro solo is the real attention-grabber, on which Knopfler builds to a dazzling set of spitfire 16th-note arpeggios – cleanly played, precise and rousing every time you hear it.

6. The Jimi Hendrix Experience | “All Along The Watchtower”

GUITARIST: Jimi Hendrix (1968)

The greatest solo in a cover version.

This song tops any list of covers that are better than the original. Guitarists invariably refer to it as a Hendrix cover rather than a Bob Dylan original, proof of how much Hendrix made it his own. Jimi’s rhythm playing is astounding, both in the intro and in the deft chord/ melody work of the verses, and of course, there’s the small matter of four guitar solos to consider. The man many refer to as the best of all time makes the most of his Strat and Marshall rig here, but it’s his offering at the 2:20 mark that we’re interested in. Following an opening run of octaves, he gets into his stride with a typically blues-based minor pentatonic approach in C#.

At 2:32, the main solo explodes into a trademark combination of rhythm and lead, plus funky scratching on muted strings. It’s worth playing along with the scratches, trying to keep a loose wrist and consistent down-up strumming. Those few beats alone will teach you a lot about Jimi’s groove and feel.

To get the sound, select a bridge-position single-coil pickup, dial in delay at around 350ms, add compression for sustain and opt for a Vox wah pedal or something similar. You’ll hear the wind begin to howl.

5. Eagles | “Hotel California”

GUITARISTS: Don Felder & Joe Walsh (1977)

Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights.

The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39.

As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#, so, if the higher guitar plays an F#, the lower guitar will play a D, and so on.

This nugget of information can take you a long way to mastering those descending arpeggios. We won’t go as far as to say you could easily work it out by ear, but if you know the chords to the song, it’s possible to jam along. And you can’t say that about many of the solos on this list!

4. Queen | “Bohemian Rhapsody”

GUITARIST: Brian May (1975)

It might just be the biggest rock song of all time.

Following Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death and a cameo moment in 1992’s Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a trigger point for a worldwide outpouring of affection and respect for Queen. Their renewed popularity would continue into the new millennium as Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You musical and the band’s discovery of a different way to exist behind frontman Adam Lambert brought their music to a new generation.

And “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Unsurprisingly, it’s Queen’s best-known song, and its brief nine-bar solo is a short and sweet musical interlude, bridging the verses to lead into what’s become known as the song’s “operatic section.” Those two words alone should warn you that this song shouldn’t work. There’s no chorus and, aside from two verses, no repetition. But of course it does work, and Brian May’s solo is the perfect melodic break.

His phrasing is loose and natural, moving across the backbeat rather than sticking to a rigidly timed grid. The fastest licks are expressive bursts, rather than repetitive noodling, and his articulate pre-bend and vibrato technique demonstrates his beautiful touch. Somehow, within the confines of the complex structure of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this solo is made to order.

3. Led Zeppelin | “Stairway To Heaven”

GUITARIST: Jimmy Page (1971)

Heaven-sent soloing.

From the moment Jimmy Page plays the opening run on his ’59 Fender Telecaster, right through to the flurry of notes and the wailing bend that completes it, this is guitar-solo perfection – a masterpiece of composition. Rather than wander aimlessly, Page creates a song within a song.

The opening phrases set the scene, as he adds notes to the pentatonic scale to follow the song’s final chord progression. A rapid mid-solo repeating lick raises the bar before a game of question-and-answer with a haunting overdubbed guitar leads into that last flurry and bend. As we say, it’s all about the composition: licks that track the chord changes, the contour of the melody and the pacing of the widdly bits all take the listener on a journey.

Three takes were recorded (the other two allegedly still survive, presumably locked in a Led Zeppelin vault somewhere), all of them improvised, although Page has reportedly said that he had worked out the opening line. But while we’re all certainly curious to hear those solos, let’s face it: They’re not going to be any better than the one we’ve come to know and love all these years.

2. Van Halen | “Eruption”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1978)

Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world.

With its mix of fast legato hammer‑ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mind-blowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon.

Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.”

His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are a bluesy affair, whose virtuoso legato licks perhaps recall the mojo of Jimmy Page’s breakdown solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a theme Eddie develops over the following eight bars, taking notes from the major and minor pentatonic scales to add chromatics.

His tapping finale is probably one of the least understood solo sections in rock history. Eddie’s taps are not always on the beat, which makes for tricky timing changes as he switches from tapping the first and fourth sextuplet notes to the third and sixth notes. From start to end, “Eruption” is a masterpiece that would take most guitarists a lifetime to perfect.

1. Pink Floyd | “Comfortably Numb”

GUITARIST: David Gilmour (1979)

Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves.

In a 1992 interview with MTV’s Ray Cokes, Gilmour was asked what he thinks of Keith Richards’ theory that songs, lyrics and guitar solos are “just out there in the air and you sort of grab them.” Gilmour agreed. “I think he’s right. They sort of appear as if they are out there in the air. But I don’t know how they get there.” But the best ones he said, just happen. “The best ones do, but often you work very hard and struggle over them.”

Gilmour's two "Comfortably Numb" solos are certainly among his best, and it’s easy to understand why our readers voted his efforts to be the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of those two solos qualifies for inclusion? Whichever way you go — and granted, most fans prefer the first solo to the second — there's certainly plenty to justify the song's position at the top.

The tone is legendary. Gilmour’s signal chain consisted of his iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that he could hold notes as long as he wanted. As in his live rig, he combined a WEM 4x12 cab with a Yamaha rotary speaker lower in the mix, to add subtle modulation. The epic delay was added in the mix.

The first solo, in D major, uses the Strat’s neck and bridge pickups together, permitted by a custom switching arrangement. His phrasing here is the more unconventional of the two, with arpeggios and sliding passages. Gilmour’s use of the bar for vibrato – aided by its shortened tremolo arm – again distinguishes him from typical bluesers, inspiring many a fusion player in the process. He rakes into the beginning of many of the phrases, similar to Brian May, extracting all the excitement he can from every note.

By comparison, the outro solo’s licks are more standard, with phrases similar to Hendrix’s. The passages at 4:57 and 5:12 could be from “All Along the Watchtower” or “Foxey Lady,” but in this epic track few listeners would make the connection. It sounds both masterful and improvised at the same time. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The result is stunningly well written, with a combination of repetition and development that keeps the excitement building for two minutes. The Hendrix-style blues lick returns at 5:27, longer and more intricate than before. The aggressive double-stops first appear at 5:15, and by 5:35 he has turned that idea into a motif.

For the climax, Gilmour shoots up an octave just when it seems he’s wrung every inch of expression from his maple neck. He descends back down the neck, incorporating one of his spectacular three-fret bends on the way, and finishes with another take on that double stop motif. It has all the excitement of an improvised performance, and all the structure of a careful composition.

Both solos share brilliant rhythmic awareness. Gilmour uses triplets, sextuplets, 16th and 32nd notes freely, within the same phrase. And check out the effect at 5:10 when he plays a lick in 16th notes and then immediately repeats and expands in sextuplets. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Though it would be another year and change before they went supernova with The Dark Side of the Moon, it was in 1971 that Pink Floyd laid down one of their greatest epics, the side-length prog-funk odyssey Echoes.

Having spent years attempting to settle on a sonic direction in the wake of the departure of Syd Barrett in 1968, Echoes was the sound of a band finally locking into place, and was arguably the moment David Gilmour became one of rock's preeminent guitar heroes.

Though one can't discount his sublime, funky, none-smoother soloing throughout, perhaps Gilmour's most famous moment on the song comes at around the halfway mark, when the guitarist creates a series of otherworldly, screeching, bird-like sounds on his electric guitar.

“That,” Gilmour explained to GP in a 2009 interview, “is an oscillation created by having a wah pedal plugged in the wrong way around, and it has nothing to do with the strings.

“The noise it makes is unbelievably loud and horrible, so you have to have a volume pedal after it, and then a delay, and you have to turn the volume pedal way down. You put your heel all the way down on the wah, and then those noises come out when you manipulate the volume and tone controls on the guitar.”

The wah pedal quirk, Gilmour says, was far from intentional, and came about as “a serendipitous accident that happened in about 1969 or 1970.

“A roadie had plugged the wah in the wrong way, and I stomped into it and got this incredible screaming noise,” Gilmour told GP. “But, you know what they say – waste not, want not.”

Aside from its tonal innovations and Gilmour's inspired performance, Echoes also showcased Floyd's ability to balance envelope-pushing arrangements and concepts with memorable melodies and genuine hooks, a balance the band would take to the pop charts less than two years later on Money, and to the very top of the pops in 1979 with Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.

London's Brixton Academy has hosted its fair share of epic events in its history as a live music venue. However, few of those featured two generation-defining guitarists sharing the same stage — which is exactly what happened in November 1985 when Pete Townshend and David Gilmour came together for what would be known as Deep End Live.

The project, billed initially as Pete Townshend with Dave Gilmour and Deep End, played two nights (the second of which thankfully was captured on film) at the U.K. venue in support of Townshend's Double "O" charity, aiding those with drug and alcohol issues, and victims of domestic violence, as well as providing support for underprivileged musicians.

The Deep End band, which included Townshend, Gilmour and a whopping 16 other members, featured session greats such as Simon Phillips on drums and Chucho Merchán on bass, as well as a full brass section.

Highlights of the nearly 90-minute performance include Townshend's version of “After the Fire,” originally written for Roger Daltrey's album Under a Raging Moon, Screamin' Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” the Who anthem “Won't Get Fooled Again” and the Townshend solo tune “Give Blood” — the latter, driven by the intricately cascading assault of Gilmour's looping riff. Townshend and crew never sounded better performing this underrated classic, which closes the show on a high.

A third show was expected to take place in Brixton, with talk of a potential tour that included international dates. But surprisingly poor ticket sales led to those plans being axed.

In an interview with David Letterman just weeks after the shows took place, Townshend explained how the project freed him up creatively. "I played anything I wanted to play,” Townshend said of the show's eclectic set list. "I did ‘Put a Spell on You,'… I did a Miles Davis song called ‘Walking.’ I did old blues things, and I did kind of early Who things. I had such a good time. It reminded me that music first has to be fun."

Gilmour was armed on the night with a couple of 1984 reissues, including his now iconic EMG SA single-coil–loaded Candy Apple Red Strat (which would go on to sell at auction in 2019 for $615,000), which he played through a combination of two Fender Twin Reverbs and Mesa/Boogie Mark I. His effects included a Boss HM-2, CE-2 Chorus and DD-2 Delays, as well as his famous MXR rack-mounted Digital Delays.

Townshend kept it simple with a pair of thinline Washburn acoustics, which he occasionally swapped out for a Takamine EN-10C, now housed within London's Hard Rock Cafe Vault.

Deep End wasn't the first time the pair had worked together, as just the year prior, Townshend had penned lyrics for the tracks “Love on the Air" and “All Lovers Are Deranged” from Gilmour's second studio album, About Face. Gilmour would return the favor by lending guitar parts to tracks on Townshend's fifth solo record, White City: A Novel.

Had this project been a success, you can't help but wonder what might have been — particularly as both Gilmour and Townshend were in transitional periods with Pink Floyd and the Who, respectively. Luckily, we have this performance captured for us to enjoy.

Earlier this month, David Gilmour released his sixth solo studio album, Luck and Strange, with tour dates kicking off next month that include stops at the Circo Massimo in Italy, the Intuit Dome, Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl and London's Royal Albert Hall.

Meanwhile, Townshend celebrated 60 years of the Who in 2024 and expects more shows from the band in the future. He recently dropped a solo collection Live In Concert 1985–2001, a 14-CD box set which features even more cuts from the Deep End shows, including a fun performance of the Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup–penned track (later made famous by Elvis Presley), That's All Right, Mama.

During the course of an illustrious career that has lasted more than 50 years, Steve Hackett has consistently explored a diverse musical cocktail, delving into everything from prog-rock and classical to blues and beyond. 

After making a name for himself as a guitarist with several English outfits in the late 1960s, including pop-rockers Quiet World, he came to worldwide acclaim with the English prog-rock group Genesis in 1971, featuring singer Peter Gabriel, drummer Phil Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist Mike Rutherford. 

Hackett’s highly skilled technique and stylistically mixed bag were integral contributions to the group’s ever-evolving sound on the six studio albums he contributed guitar to, but he departed Genesis in late 1977 to pursue a hugely prolific solo career that continues today. 

Along the way, Hackett found time in the mid 1980s to assemble the short-lived supergroup GTR with Steve Howe from Yes, as well as appear as guest guitarist on numerous recordings by artists such as Box of Frogs, John Wetton and Steven Wilson, to name but a few. 

Yet, it’s his early work with Genesis that saw him inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, firmly solidifying his position in the pantheon of influential guitar greats. 

An innovative and creative guitarist of the highest order, he set the standard for many of the approaches and techniques that have become the vocabulary of any modern-day guitarist’s modus operandi. His pioneering use of right-hand tapping is but one example. 

Exceptionally proficient on both acoustic and electric guitars, Hackett has a visionary six-string approach that’s informed by the musical masters, stretching from the works of Baroque composer and keyboardist J.S. Bach right to the unorthodox six-string artistry of the late great Jeff Beck. 

“It always comes back to Bach and Beck,” Hackett affirms. “If it’s first-inversion chords, and churchy changes, it’s all Bach, while Beck informs my every note on electric guitar. Before players like him, guitars used to just go ‘twang.’ Then they learned to sustain and scream and impersonate a woman’s voice and imitate brass instruments.

“I was fooled when I first heard the Stones doing ‘Satisfaction,’ as I thought it was a brass section or a trumpet. I had no idea at the time that it was a guitar! I realized at that moment, that was where the guitar was heading, that it was going to be impersonating all these things. Guitar was the synthesizer before the synthesizer.” 

The following five songs, all from Hackett’s Genesis oeuvre, showcase some of his finest envelope-pushing moments on record. “I think we were very good for each other, and I think I pushed them as much as they pushed me,” he says of his time with the group. “It wasn’t always easy at times, and we struggled to keep a lid on some of the arguments, but Genesis at its best was absolutely mighty.”

“Horizons” Foxtrot (1972)

“I was writing very, very slowly and noodling away on this thing for about a year. I had no idea that Genesis would use it, but I played it one day to the band, and Phil was the first one to say, ‘I think we should use that, as it sounds like there ought to be applause after it.’ It was surprising, as I was still the new boy with the band. 

“I played it on a friend’s borrowed Yamaha steel-string. Whenever I’ve played it in recent times, it’s usually on a nylon-string guitar, which seems to suit it better. 

“It’s a Bach variation in spirit. If you’re really looking for where it came from, there’s a reference to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. While the Foxtrot album is pretty much a futuristic-sounding album, there are moments where it goes right back to that great keyboard player, Johann Sebastian Bach. No one’s ever been quite that good since.

“It was done in one take, though I had to do four to get it right. The strings on the Yamaha are grouped very closely together on its narrow fretboard. 

“The song’s length was influenced by ‘The Earle of Salisbury,’ by English composer William Byrd, who was before Bach. I first heard John Renbourn do a version on his album Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & Ye Grene Knyghte. It was a great record that he did just prior to forming Pentangle with Bert Jansch. 

”I loved the idea that the tune, written by a Tudor composer, was just the perfect little piece, at only a minute and half long, so I too deliberately wrote something to last a minute and a half. Therefore, it was able to slot into the Genesis canon without disturbing the waters too much, as an interlude to ‘Supper’s Ready,’ which is an epic tune. 

“We never did anything quite that long before or after. I’m proud of it as a little piece. It’s written in an ancient style, and though not the work of a modern brain. It’s the work of a brain impersonating the old masters.”

“Firth of Fifth” Selling England by the Pound (1973)

“Tony came in with the initial idea for the tune. Peter liked the melody line and said it sounded very much like the blues, but to me it seemed more like gospel in a way, as the verse has a gospel feel to it. The song’s strength is characterized by the instrumental work throughout it. It’s the thing that people refer to as typically progressive, but at the time we didn’t know that we were doing something that was going to be referred to as progressive. 

“I really like it a lot. Tony originally had the melody on piano, and then we tried it on flute, but I wanted to try it on guitar as I had just gotten hold of a certain combination of toys: an Echoplex and a Colorsound Tone Bender fuzz box, which was a copy of a Marshall Supa Fuzz.

“Along with my 1957 goldtop Les Paul, which went into a 1971 100-watt Hiwatt amp, the serendipity of those things coalesced into this perfect guitar solo for that song. It’s probably the most well-known one in the Genesis canon — the go-to one. 

“It was based a little bit on the work of the French minimalists, as the melody itself is very Erik Satie–esque. The way I interpreted it was to do it with bends, so it sounded weird, sustaining and unheard of. I got to do a three-and-half-minute guitar solo in the middle of another tune, which itself came out to something like 10 minutes. 

“It’s a substantial part of the song, and I think it’s a beautiful piece of music. And for me it’s all about the guitar solo. 

“I’d like to think that I’m sufficiently detached to say that’s where the song soars and is at its best. It’s a memorable and very melodic solo, and it’s there in the pantheon. You know it and can hum it, and my mom likes it so much she tears up every time she hears it. It showcases the band using rock instruments but sounding at their most symphonic. ‘A rock group impersonating an orchestra’ comes very close to describing it. One of Genesis’s best.”

“Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist” The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)

“This song really came together out of Mike and I working together. He was playing these chordal parts, and I wrote a lead line over the top of them. It’s got this very haunting rhythm to it, but it’s also very melodic and quirky and fits the album perfectly. We were trying to be very different from everything we’d done before, and though there were moments when we succeeded, at other times there are moments on the album where I feel it wanders off the plot, as double albums tend to do.

“Phil had started experimenting with recording his voice at half speed, so that when you played it back you had this kind of Mickey Mouse–sounding voice. It was a trick he used more and more after he became the lead singer of Genesis. 

“You’ve got to remember this was crafted during the era of Peter Gabriel as lead singer, with Phil doing backup. Here you got a glimpse at some of those vocal textures that Phil would employ later when he could do it himself. 

“He was a guy full of ideas and obviously full of a lot of suppressed ideas, and with very clever rhythmic ideas. Sometimes he’d be able to take a melody and change the whole feel by changing the rhythm of it. 

“I think maybe if he had gained a little more confidence in an album or two’s time, he probably would’ve taken that track and made it swing a little bit more. It does something that’s more angular and stranger. 

“I again used my Gibson Les Paul, an H&H transistor amp and the Tone Bender fuzz box. I was also using two Leslie cabinets. Because this was before chorus and pitch shift had been invented, I’d put my guitar through the Leslie to give it a chimey sound. I had one track that was Leslie-d and one that went straight. 

“With the Les Paul not being a very bright-sounding guitar, I had to turn up the treble quite a bit or give it some kind of boost in that department, but because it was a very gutsy guitar, it sounded very smooth.”

“It” The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)

“Mike had this Shergold electric 12-string and liked to put it in strange tunings. I’m not sure exactly what tuning he had for this, but the main thrust of it came from a guitar-strumming idea and from that we all added things to it. There’s quite a lot of lead guitar work, which I wrote and which was also doubled on keyboard. 

“It’s got a quirky lyric from Peter too, and I felt we were sounding a little bit like what other bands were doing with the 12-string at the time — a bit like the Byrds — while the guitars and synth together were sounding a bit like Yes. 

“The tune came together very much live and was at its strongest in the live setting, where Peter would depict a Puerto Rican punk with a leather jacket with makeup on. There was also this very lifelike dummy that was brought on for ‘It’ during the live performance. And because there were strobes on either side of the stage, you couldn’t tell which was the real Peter Gabriel and which was the very lifelike dummy, as this thing looked uncannily alive even at close quarters. 

“I think the live presentation of ‘It’ was all-important to making this thing work, especially as it was the tour de force that closed the album.”

“Ripples” A Trick of the Tail (1976)

“It was typical of Genesis to use more than one 12-string guitar. Mike and I both had acoustic Zemaitis 12-string guitars. As he was playing right down the bottom of the neck and getting all those open-string sounds, I decided to do something else a whole octave higher up the fretboard, as I wanted to sweeten it and make it very chocolate box. 

“You’ll be forgiven for thinking that my part was recorded at half speed; it was actually done in real time. When we got to the middle section, it just kept paddling around a few changes, so I thought it needed something to save the day. 

“I was working with a piece of kit called the EMS Synthi Hi-Fli. It had the ability to cut off the front of the note, a bit like fading it in, so it sounded like you were playing backward. It also had a compressor that made the notes sustain for a very long time and kept the same dynamic, and with a very thin kind of distortion. I never really found any other piece of kit that really distorted quite like that thing. 

“So I did a forward guitar solo that attempted to sound like a backward guitar solo, and then we put a pre-echo on it. And because this is preempted by genuine backward stuff, you get this highly confusing combination of what’s forward and what’s backward. I also wanted to come up with a melody that would be memorable. 

“People always mention ‘Firth of Fifth’ as my best guitar melody, but actually I’m very fond of this one because of the sort of poignant nature of the way the guitar functions on it. It doesn’t really sound much like a guitar at all; it sounds more like something that Chopin might have written for a string section. It’s my personal best. 

“It’s a brilliant little tune. The sound is very subtle, unique and very atmospheric, and very Genesis, and very much what we got into on the subsequent album, Wind & Wuthering, which followed, and which had that sort of poignant thing going on too. 

“I think Mike picked up on what I was trying to do at the time, writing things that could be part of very romantic film scores. I think it’s one of Genesis’s best little tunes, and it’s got the best of what 12-strings can do and the best of what an electric guitar can do.”

For more on Steve Hackett, visit his website. His new album Foxtrot at Fifty, is available to buy and stream now

This article originally appeared in the June 1967 issue of Guitar Player.

Cream is just that – three jazz veterans skimmed off the top of British rock. Since their U.S. arrival a year ago, they have continued to groove growing audiences with one of the best avant-garde sounds in the electric scene.

Their sound has firm roots in the extemporaneous beat of 20-year-old drummer, Ginger Baker. But what has made Cream rise to the top is the mindbending styles of guitarists Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. 22-year-old Eric, whose lead guitar unwinds on top of the staging provided by Jack and Ginger, has been called one of the best artists of his kind in the world – by such guitarists as Mike Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia.

Eric Clapton is a veteran of the original and much-lauded Yardbirds, and has worked with blues artist John Mayall.

“I was 19 when I left the Yardbirds. I intended to give up then. But John Mayall offered me a job and I took it because I needed the bread, and I needed some kind of identity too, because I was very down.“

Eric played with Mayall for a year and a half and picked up the double cutaway Gibson he still uses today. He worked lead as well – as setting-up most of the group’s new arrangements. Finishing that gig, he left for Greece.

“I was about 20 or 21 and I took some musicians with me. We had this big thing about working our way around the world as a band. We got to Greece and broke up.“

Then, there was the time in Greece that Clapton had to escape from a club...

“I couldn’t get my amp out of the club because they would have cut my hands off, so I just managed to get away with my guitar.“

After that, Eric returned to the States and joined up again with Mayall, remaining with him until Cream was formed. Eric had started playing the guitar at 16, a Kay electric with an old Vox amp his parents had bought for him. He claims his “hanging-around“ with guitarists was the reason for his dismissal from the art school near London that he was attending. He began by teaching himself to play folk-blues.

“I found out all I could about the different Delta styles – people like Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton. The musical thought which was going through the whole thing interested me, and it still does. I find it incredibly fascinating because there ware a lot of things which just can’t be explained – like the inventiveness going around at that time.“

Blues echoes throughout Eric’s work, whether he is trying to play blues or not – but it is a different style of blues, Eric’s own style.

“Everything I play is structurally blues,“ he says. “If you ask me to play baroque or Indian music, or something except blues, I wouldn’t be able to. Whether or not I’m playing pure blues isn’t the point, but whether or not I’m playing it good or bad is.“ 

Since he began playing in Cream almost two years ago, Eric feels he has grown – that he has learned to expand on his sense of timing. As we have seen, he admits his sound is not strictly blues because Cream is unique, a mixture of the different styles each of the trio brought with him to the group.

“Our music cannot be categorized, because a lot of the material we play is not blues – it’s another thing completely, probably brand new.“

Jack Bruce is a quiet Scotsman who came to Cream from Manfred Mann. He plays bass and writes and sings most of the vocals, but he does not claim to be a “lyric writer or poet.“ 

“When I write words for songs they are very simple thoughts that could come to anyone’s mind – that normally occur to people.“

When he was 13, Jack had studied both the bass and the cello, but circumstances allowed the cello to win out during his earlier years.

“There happened to be a bass in school which I played because it was there. It was a big bass and I was only about four feet tall, so I tried standing on chairs and things but it really didn’t work. 

“This teacher there was an old-time bass player and he was really great. He told me to go away and come back when I was big enough, so in the meantime I played cello. I started playing bass again after I left school and I picked it up in two days. It was a natural thing.“

Charlie Mingus was one of the first musicians to influence Jack. “He was doing the same things I was, only he was doing them better,“ he says. 

Jack played with several groups and found he would be better off with an electric, because as the music grew louder, his string bass was coming on weaker and weaker.

“I didn’t know anything about amplification, so I just got these amplifiers and tied bits of wire from one to another in this big, huge pile. It was a fantastic sound, but it blew me up, so I decided I had to go and buy some real stuff.“

This led Jack to get a Fender six-string bass and a Vox amp. Cream has two albums out on Atco labels, Fresh Cream, and more recently, Disraeli Gears. Jack claims things simply happened during their recording sessions.

“We don’t really know what songs we’re going to do when we go into the studio. I read an article in a magazine lately about how the Beatles recorded Baby You’re A Rich Man, and the way they did it is almost exactly the same way we record. We get a good sound track and then fool around with it.“ 

The group recorded Disraeli Gears in four days as sort of an “impromptu thing.“ Eric calls the album “kind of a cross between what we are like in the studio and what we’re like on stage.“

Both Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton record through the board, instead of using an open mic. 

“I’ve been forced to go through the board,“ says Jack. “In England, they heard my sound and it was so unlike any bass sound that they thought it was wrong, and would take my amp away.“

When recording they use only one amplifier apiece, a Marshall. But on stage they build a different sound, using two separate 100-watt amps, each amp running through two large cabinets, with each cabinet holding four twelve-inch speakers. They don’t rely on feedback for intensity. Eric is opposed to feedback because he admits he has never been able to really control it.

“You see,“ he says. “our sound is like an old blues sound, but heavily amplified. The sound I’ve always wanted and like is the sound that all those people used on the very early records of Muddy Waters, you get it? It’s that sound, only much louder. I think a lot of people are getting hung-up about getting mechanical sound. They’re trying to invent ways of doing it to hide the fact they can’t do it with their fingers.“

So Cream makes music, their own kind of music. Blues, rock, jazz, call it what you want. Even they have difficulty defining it.

As Jack says, “You can talk about the things that happen when you’re making music, but you can’t talk about the music itself because it’s a sound. It doesn’t translate the same way words do.“

In 1979, Japanese engineer Susumu Tamura created the game-changing Maxon OD808. Subsequently rebranded for Ibanez as the TS808 Tube Screamer, this tube-sounding distortion/boost pedal with midrange-enhanced sound quickly became a must-have for legions of guitarists following its use by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson. It’s gone on to inspire countless imitations by scores of pedal makers ever since.

Guitar Player spoke with Tamura-san, who resides in Matsumoto, Japan, about this legendary stompbox...

What was the first pedal you designed when you started working for Maxon?

It was a phaser, the PT999. I really liked the sound of its spatial spread, which was not present in pedals like fuzz, distortion, booster and wah.

Did you design any distortion pedals before the OD808?

The OD880 was my first overdrive design, and it was popular and used by the very famous Japanese guitar player Char. With the OD808, the design goal was not to obtain the overdrive effect alone but to create the sound of the guitar amplifier and overdrive pedal combined.

Did you play guitar yourself?

I could not play the guitar – same as Leo Fender – but I could tune one. However, during the development of the 19-inch rack Harmonizer, called the Harmonics Delay HD 1000, I was forced to learn music theory.

I understand that the OD808 was designed to compete with the Boss OD-1, but that you wanted it to have a more tube-like sound. Were there any particular tube amps that you used as references?

At that time, I mainly used Fender tube amplifiers for development and audio tests of the pedal, specifically a 1968 Fender Twin Reverb and a Vibrolux Reverb. Occasionally, I used a Marshall 1959 Super Lead.

Did you use any guitar players to help voice the OD808?

The final determination of almost all of Maxon’s pedals was done by [guitar instructor] Shiro Tanigawa. [Tanigawa also created the sample settings that appeared in Maxon manuals].

What were some of the challenges to creating a solid-state circuit that would sound and feel like a tube circuit?

The main challenge was to avoid a dramatically changed effect that didn’t leave any of the guitar’s original sound, like fuzz and distortion pedals of the time. I wanted to create an effect with the original sound of the guitar remaining, and with a softer distortion.

Also, the nuances of the player’s picking needed to come out, and it was challenging to implement that as a component of the total system of guitar, pedal and amplifier while also creating a synergy with the amplifier.

Can you tell us about the different op amps used for the OD808 and TS808?

At the time, the first operational amplifiers that I evaluated for trial manufacture were the Fairchild UA741 and Motorola MC174. All were imported goods, and the price was more than 20 times the current price. They were so expensive that I hesitated to use them for Maxon products. The Fairchild UA1458 and Motorola MC1458 were also offered. However, the price was almost the same as the UA741.

The UA1458 was eventually adopted for the earliest OD808/TS808 narrow-case pedals. The OD808/TS808 were both remodeled several years later to use the Raytheon RC4558, which had improved audio characteristics to the UA1458. After that, the RC4558, JRC NJM4558 and [Texas Instruments] TI RC4558 were installed, depending on the production lot.

How did Maxon start making effects for Ibanez, and did you make any changes to the OD808 circuit when it became the TS808?

At that time, Maxon did not have the ability to export products abroad on its own. Therefore, Maxon concentrated on domestic sales only, and overseas export was supplied under the export company Hoshino Gakki’s Ibanez brand or the U.S. Buyers brand. Back then, almost all products, in addition to the TS808 and OD808, were supplied with the same circuit and the same specifications but under different brands. 

Until we shut off the product supply from Maxon to Ibanez in 2003, there were some models with different names and designs, but the contents were basically the same. I think you can easily find Maxon’s printing and engraving on the printed circuit board or battery lid of vintage Ibanez pedals. These are proof that the pedals are the same as the Maxon versions.

Who came up with the name Tube Screamer?

The name was suggested by the Sam Ash Music family, by Jerry’s son Sammy Ash [Jerry is the son of founder Sam Ash]. We first visited Sam Ash Music at West 48th Street, Manhattan, and talked to [Jerry’s son] Richard Ash. Since Sammy was familiar with the sound of pedals, Richard told me to speak with him.

At this time, we brought a prototype of the Micro Teacher Mini Amp GA-10 [a 1970s-era pedal-size amp] and asked Sammy to evaluate it. When I connected the external speaker terminal of GA-10 to the input of the guitar amplifier, it suddenly made a screaming sound.

Sammy asked, “Do you know how the Cry Baby pedal got its name?” “Yes,” I said, “it sounds like a baby crying.” And he said, “This sounds like a screaming tube amp.” So when the Maxon OD808 Overdrive Pro was born, Ibanez’s overdrive was named the TS808 Tube Screamer Overdrive Pro.

Can you talk about the pedals you designed after the OD808?

The OD9/TS9 and other models that are successors to the OD808 are also overdrives that I designed. I worked on most of the pedals Maxon released from 1974 to around 1985. and these include distortion, auto wah, compressor, analog delay, digital delay, multi-effector and the Digitally Controlled Processor [DCP] series. The development of wireless microphones became my main job from around 1986 to 2000.

You must be very proud of the revolution in guitar distortion effects that you started by creating the OD808.

Thank you. I am very honored. When designing it, I did not dream that the 808 would become so famous. At the time, if a guitar was considered vintage, it received high evaluation, so I was jealous of the guitar. I never thought that a pedal would ever be considered vintage. I also think that it is wonderful that the same 808 has continued to be loved.

Do you have a favorite story about the 808?

At the time that I designed the 808, we exhibited several pedals of the prototype TS808 that we completed after working all night at Musikmesse in Frankfurt. Then, a sad incident happened to me.

On the evening of the first day of the show, a TS808 prototype was missing. On the second day, another one was missing. A trading company person who was there comforted me by saying, “That pedal is surely wonderful. The unpopular pedals are not stolen.”

It’s virtually impossible to pare decades of rock and roll down to a top-ten list. There are, however, some guitar solos every player needs to know about.

Here are some of the greatest ever committed to record...

10. "Statesboro Blues" by The Allman Brothers Band from 'At Fillmore East' (1971)

Guitarist: Duane Allman

Although the end of "Layla" may be more memorable to most folks, Allman’s Statesboro slide show verifies his title as the undisputed king of bottleneck guitar. 

Slick as oil but with the ability to stop on a dime, Allman not only redefined how slide guitar was played but also created a recycling market for empty Coricidin bottles.

9. "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses from 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)

Guitarist: Slash

While Axl swayed and sashayed like Steve Wonder around his mic stand, Slash laid back with his Les Paul, patiently waiting for his turn in the spotlight. 

Then, with his blistering ascent up the E harmonic minor scale – which kicks the second solo of this tune into high gear – the top-hatted genius single-handedly breathed new life into wah-pedal sales.

8. "Crossroads" by Cream from 'Wheels of Fire' (1968)

Guitarist: Eric Clapton

Slowhand? Not on this track. Clapton pulls out every blues-rock move in his lick-tionary for this roadhouse romper. 

The true voodoo of this solo lies at the crossroads where major and minor pentatonic tonalities meet, mingle and blast off from E.C.’s fretboard. 

Ol’ Scratch surely smiled when he heard this one.

7. "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne from 'Blizzard of Ozz' (1980)

Guitarist: Randy Rhoads

You almost wonder if Ozzy named this tune after hearing Rhoads’ white-knuckled rock and roll ride up and down the F# minor scale. 

What more could you want in a metal guitar solo? Tapping, rakes, bends, trills ascending legato runs... 

Rhoads set Eighties guitarists on the rails of neoclassical rock with this one. All aboard!

6. "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin from 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)

Guitarist: Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page's "Stairway” solo is nothing short of divine. 

His resolution to the natural F note in the opening minor pentatonic lick of the solo couldn’t have been more perfect if the Almighty himself had chosen the note.

5. "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits from 'Dire Straits' (1978)

Guitarist: Mark Knopfler

Sultan says, “Spend less time making your harem moan and more time making your guitar cry and sing!” 

For those of you who’ve learned the outro solo the lazy way – playing eighth-note triplets for the daunting Dm, Bb and C arpeggios – get your fingers back to the wood shed. 

Those are 16th notes that the “Sultan of Strat” rips off.

4. "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd from 'Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd' (1973) 

Guitarist: Gary Rossington and Allen Collins

To paraphrase Adrian Belew in King Crimson’s "Indiscipline," "I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks…” 

This could go on forever – kinda like the outro solo to "Free Bird," in which guitarists Rossington and Collins double each other for most of this pull-off parade. 

It’s impressive not because of the degree of difficulty of the licks but because of the sheer volume they need to recall – 27, including variations!

3. "Eruption" by Van Halen from 'Van Halen' (1978) 

The Holy Grail for all aspiring rock guitarists. Learn Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and you’ve earned some serious bragging rights. 

But if you really want props, you’ve got to tame the whole volcano, not just the tremolo picking and tapping sections.

2. "All Along the Watchtower" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 'Electric Ladyland' (1968)

Jimi Hendrix offers plenty of reason to get excited in his "Watchtower" solo. 

Besides his masterful manipulation of the C# minor pentatonic scale, Hendrix’s wah-drenched octave climb and the double-stops in the latter half bear out his gift for melodic embellishment. 

It’s enough to make any cat growl.

1. "Little Wing" by Stevie Ray Vaughan from 'The Sky Is Crying' (1991)

With little bits of Jimi, Wes and Mayfield, and a whole lotta soul, SRV exhibits exceptional dynamic prowess throughout, making this reverent Hendrix cover his own. 

A seemingly lost art among modern-day guitarists, Vaughan’s R&B-style chord melody is like priceless art. It should be both admired and studied.

Most guitarists who have plugged into a whirling, sound-warping, Doppler effect-inducing Fender Vibratone can recall the major impression that playing through a rotary-speaker cabinet made on them. It’s unlikely any compact electronic rendition of the effect will fully satisfy them.

The occasionally crosspollinated worlds of vibrato and chorus have been immensely popular with guitarists in their many forms since they first became available. From the late-’60s Univox Uni-Vibe to the mid-’70s Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and today’s contemporary re-creations of those and other beloved analog pedals, each is an electric guitar classic in its own right.

But the trail begins with the granddaddy of them all: the Fender Vibratone. Produced from 1967 to 1972, it’s a hulking electromechanical sound swirler that produced what is still the most hypnotic and enveloping version of this effect.

Fender licensed the Vibratone from an original rotary-speaker design by inventor Don Leslie, who introduced his rotary-speaker cabinet for use with Hammond organs in the 1940s. The most popular of these units were formidable beasts that contained their own power amplifiers as well as two different types of rotary speakers.

That trenchant swirl you hear from a great Hammond player like Jimmy Smith, Booker T. Jones, the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench and the E Street Band’s Danny Fenderici is most often the result of a big Leslie Model 122, 142 or 147.

Aptly called Tone Cabinets, these beasts weighed upward of 150 pounds, were housed in louvered wood cabinets, and included a built-in tube amp, a 15-inch woofer firing downward into a ported rotating drum, and a dual-horn tweeter that spins on a horizontal plane. (One of the horns is a dummy that simply acts as a counterweight to its partner to maintain balance.)

A crossover splits the lower and higher frequencies between the woofer and horn, respectively, and both the drum rotor and horn spin, speed up and slow down at different rates, creating a veritable maelstrom of sound when the drum and horn are spinning at full tilt.

Standing in a room or onstage amid such a storm of sound can be a heady experience. Indeed, play through a Leslie and you’ll discover why many guitarists will never settle for anything less than the sound of a true rotary-speaker cabinet.

While guitarists have lusted after the rotary-speaker effect virtually since its incarnation, and occasionally adapted Leslies for use with the six-string, these cabinets really weren’t well suited to the instrument. Aside from being huge and monstrously heavy, the contribution of the upper tweeter section was often regarded as less than ideal for reproducing the guitar’s frequency range, and the built-in amp was seen as redundant, since most guitarists were already plugged into standard amps that they liked. What’s more, the Leslie cabinet took its power through a cable connected to the organ, making the adaptation of one for guitar a particularly complicated endeavor.

As it happened, the Fender Vibratone was based on the somewhat smaller, black Tolex-covered Leslie Model 16, which required the use of an external amplifier and contained only a single 10-inch speaker firing forward into a rotating 15-inch foam drum, which threw the sound out through ports in the sides and top of the cab. The result was a sound that lived in the guitar’s midrange band and emanated via a more portable and user-friendly unit.

Like the Model 16, the Vibratone included a devoted cable set and interface/crossover, which connects between the speaker output of a traditional guitar amp and the rotary cabinet. This was equipped with a two-button foot switch for changing between the cab’s slow (chorale) and fast (tremolo ) speeds, and switching your amp’s signal between its internal speaker and the Vibratone speaker.

Introduced at the height of the psychedelic-rock movement, the Vibratone was one of several popular effects that helped bring acid-tinged sonics to many prominent recordings.

Jimi Hendrix tapped one for “Little Wing” and “House Burning Down,” and the Byrds, Cream, Pink Floyd, Todd Rundgren and scads of other artists all dove in, too. 

Later, Stevie Ray Vaughan famously broke out a Vibratone for several songs on his album Couldn’t Stand the Weather, the title track included, although it’s relatively low in the mix and he doesn’t appear to have found the speed switch.

If you’re looking to acquire the real thing for use today, be sure it’s in good mechanical condition and has a fully functioning foot switch and interface. And make sure that you’re prepared to haul around a 70-pound, 29 x 21 x 15-inch box in an age where such things are no longer considered compact and portable.

Alternatively, try to forget that addictive, unreproducible, in-the-room sound and make do with a modern Uni-Vibe clone – which, of course, is why the Uni-Vibe was invented in the first place – or Fender’s Pinwheel rotary-speaker pedal, which features three different rotary-speaker emulations, including the Vibratone.

Essential Ingredients

• Ported rotating drum
• 10-inch speaker
• Chorale (slow) and tremolo (fast) speeds
• Cable set and interface between amp and cab
• Two-button foot switch

Keith Richards may not be renowned for the liquid blues improvisations that so many Les Paul players can boast, but he was unquestionably the first British rock star to embrace the then-discontinued Gibson solidbody.

Richards was first seen using his ’Burst in 1964 on the Rolling Stones’ second U.S. tour.

More Les Pauls were added to his arsenal during the decade, only to be replaced with Telecasters in the 1970s, once he was fully into his bluesier style.

Richards bought this 1959 ’Burst second-hand in London, in the latter part of August 1964. “It was my first touch with a really great, classic rock and roll electric guitar, so I fell in love with them for a while,” he told Guitar magazine in 1997.

The original owner, John Bowen, purchased the guitar – serial number 93182 – new in 1961 and had it fitted with an aftermarket Bigsby vibrato.

The guitar is easily identified by dark figuring near the cutaway on the top’s lower bout.

Jimmy Page was photographed with the guitar at a session for Stones manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham, either checking it out or using it for the recording.

Likewise, Eric Clapton borrowed the ’Burst when Cream played at the 1966 Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival.

These appearances led some to speculate, erroneously, that the guitar had been owned by all three men.

Richards parted with the ’Burst in 1967, when he sold it to future Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, then performing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

The guitar re-entered the Stones’ world in 1969 when Taylor joined up, and it appeared on the 1969 American tour, where it was used for slide work, tuned to open G for “Honky Tonk Women” and open D for “Street Fighting Man.”

The guitar was among the haul of instruments stolen during the making of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main St. Thieves took several guitars owned by Richards, Taylor and bassist Bill Wyman after Richards failed to pay drug dealers for the heroin being consumed at Nellcôte, the French villa where Exile was recorded.

The New York Post reported in July 2025 that the guitar has shown up in a collection of vintage guitars gifted to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2025.

The world’s first supergroup, Cream existed for a scant two years – from July 1966 to November 1968 – during which time they recorded four albums.

Guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker pioneered a fusion of blues rock that directly influenced a generation of musicians and the course of rock music over the next decade.

Before Cream came along, most British pop music stuck fairly rigidly to a verse/chorus format, and any instrumental solo was generally confined to repeating the melody.

Cream changed all that.

For example, they took the two-note riff that comprised Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” and stretched it from two and a half minutes to six and a half – and that was just the studio version. They also exaggerated and improvised around it with a dazzling display of virtuosity.

This wasn’t a new idea, but it had been largely confined to jazz, a style that by the mid ’60s, as Frank Zappa remarked, “wasn’t dead, it just smelled funny.”

The dynamic that propelled Cream hinged on Baker’s and Bruce’s jazz backgrounds and Clapton’s blues roots.

Clapton might not have had the kind of musical knowledge and technique that Baker and Bruce possessed, but he had a gift that allowed the group to justify its audacious name.

“I was full of very big ideas about what I felt we could do,” Bruce explained. “It was sort of rewriting the blues, if you like. I felt there was the possibility of a new kind of language with this band.”

More significantly, Cream proved that there was an audience for the music.

Their first album, Fresh Cream, released at the end of 1966, went Top 10 in the U.K. and spent four months in the chart.

Within a year, fuel-injected blues bands such as Ten Years After, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and the Jeff Beck Group were reaping the benefits.

Cream’s albums sold in huge numbers in the U.S., and their gigs were standing room only. But the relentless touring took its toll. Weeks spent on the road in America poured fuel on the volatile relationship between Baker and Bruce.

Well over five decades later, the group’s few albums comprise its stunning legacy.

“I think we were one of the early heavy metal bands without knowing it,” Eric Clapton has said. “After we disbanded, Led Zeppelin filled the void.”

Order Fresh Cream here.

Cream were a tight, powerhouse electric blues trio when they recorded their debut album, Fresh Cream, in 1966.

Shortly before its release, Eric Clapton came face-to-face with a force of nature called Jimi Hendrix and promptly permed his hair and upped his guitar game.

By the time Cream cut their 1967 follow-up, Disraeli Gears, in New York City over five days, they had integrated psychedelia’s surreal lyrics into a heavier riff-oriented blues-rock style.

By this point Clapton had begun playing a 1964 Gibson SG painted with psychedelic images by the Dutch art collective the Fool, an instrument that was key to the harmonically rich, vocal “woman tone” that would characterize his playing during this era.

He had also, notably, picked up a wah pedal that he slathered all over “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and through a fuzz box on “We’re Going Wrong” and “SWLABR” (an acronym for “She Was Like a Bearded Rainbow”).

Cream tempered their psychedelia against more traditional blues on their next two records, Wheels of Fire and Goodbye, by which time both psychedelic rock and the group itself were calling it a day.

Clapton’s longest-lasting contribution to the genre may well be his singular "woman tone" which remains both a hallmark of the era and a Holy Grail for many guitarists more than 50 years on.

In this classic clip from 1968, Clapton explains what each knob of his Fool SG does before  going on to play some signature Cream-era licks. 

First he gets something resembling his trademark "woman tone" before he turns up the treble.

But it gets even better. 

Clapton then engages his wah pedal and plays a few more licks before carefully explaining – and demonstrating – his "woman tone" around 2:00.

Browse the Cream catalog here.

As the name implies, Aclam’s product designers were inspired by Eric Clapton’s legendary Cream-era “woman tone” to create the Spanish company’s latest release, and the result promises an impressive shortcut to that sound.

But I feel it’s also important to say up front that this product shouldn’t be written off by players uninterested in chasing Clapton’s Gibson SG-into-Marshall Super Lead sounds of more than half a century ago.

The truth is, if you just need an extremely well-built Marshall-in-a-box (MIAB) overdrive for any situation in the broad range of rock sonic stylings – one that also happens to carry a nifty bonus feature – read on.

Based in Barcelona, Spain, Aclam was founded as a guitar-accessory maker around 10 years ago, and segued into high-quality, boutique-grade effects pedals shortly after that.

As such, the Woman Tone is housed in an extremely rugged custom box that hints at another of the company’s products: the Smart Track pedalboard and pedal-locking system it introduced in 2018 [reviewed in GP Holiday 2018], with easy-access fasteners built into slots at each side of the housing to eliminate the need for Velcro or Dual Lock.

Otherwise, it’s simply a handsome pedal by any measure, with custom Gibson-style black top-hat knobs, and graphics designed by Marijke Koger, the former leader of the Dutch art collective The Fool, which famously painted Clapton’s SG.

As many guitarists already know, Clapton achieved his “woman tone” by rolling down his guitar’s tone control, but this only produces the correct throaty, silky, vocal tone when injected into a cranked Marshall or a suitable fuzz, overdrive or distortion pedal capable of evoking that sound.

In that respect, it’s best to approach it as a straight-up, Plexi-voiced overdrive first and foremost.

The controls include gain and volume, plus an overdrive on/off foot-switch to the right side of the enclosure, with its own LED indicator.

Added to these are the eponymous Woman Tone control between the other two knobs, plus the Woman Tone on/off switch to the left of the enclosure, which is only functional when the overdrive effect itself is on.

In addition, a dip switch inside the pedal can be turned on for a darker tone, if you desire it.

The input and output are on the pedal’s front face, with a center-negative nine-volt DC power jack between them.

Aclam explains that the pedal’s Woman Tone control responds equally well to a range of pickup types thanks to a “custom pickup simulation circuit” that emulates the response of a vintage humbucker.

I tested the Woman Tone pedal with a Gibson 1959 Les Paul Reissue and an early ’60s-style Fender Stratocaster into a tweed Deluxe-style 1x12 combo and a Friedman Dirty Shirley Mini amp head and 2x12 cab.

I truly dug the pedal from several perspectives.

First off, as hinted at above, this is simply a great-sounding overdrive pedal by any measure. The voicing is certainly in the cranked-vintage-Marshall ballpark, but that’s a broad and extremely versatile crunch and lead tone for many genres and playing styles anyway.

Setting aside the woman tone feature, the pedal makes achieving classic-rock sounds a breeze. But the pedal is also dynamic and expressive when applied to other styles as well, adapting to everything from roots and alt to indie and other more-contemporary gain-ramping needs.

The gain control offers a usable range, from mild dirt to floored-tube amp mayhem, and the volume control packs a real punch and can drive an amp hard, so I mostly kept it below the halfway point.

As for the Woman Tone setting, it takes you straight to the stated destination, delivering a round, fluty, singing tone that can be strangely inspiring in a variety of musical settings.

Just as it’s achieved with most electric guitars, full-on woman tone is best attained here by rolling the Woman Tone knob all the way down, although some players might find subtler gradients that are useful to them. (I also found the factory preset preferable to the darker tone available from the internal switch, but your tastes might vary.)

As for the elephant in the room: Yes, you can achieve the same thing in most instances by rolling down your guitar’s tone knob, but the Woman Tone pedal delivers it at the stomp of a switch, without taking your right hand from its picking position.

It may also offer other benefits to players seeking to achieve the sound with their guitars set to middle-position pickup selections, or those with shared tone controls, and so forth.

Even if you consider its eponymous leftward foot switch and related knob a mere bonus, it’s a great-sounding and versatile overdrive that deserves an Editors’ Pick Award.

Specifications:

• CONTROLS: Gain, Woman Tone, volume. Foot-switches for pedal on/off and Woman Tone
• EXTRAS: True-bypass switching, LED indicator for each foot-switch. Center-negative 9VDC adaptor input
• SIZE: 5.25” x 3.25” x 1.875” (excluding feet and knobs)
• BUILT: Assembled in Spain

Visit Aclam for more information.

On this day in 1996, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus film finally saw its commercial release.

Initially intended as a means of promoting the Rolling Stones' 1968 album Beggars Banquet on British television, this unmissable concert movie was put together in December that year and features a host of talent including Jethro Tull, the Who, Taj Mahal and Marianne Faithful.

The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus is infamous for a number of reasons. Sadly, it was the last time founder Brian Jones would appear with the band due to his untimely death the following July.

Riddled with controversy, the production was withheld from being aired on the BBC by the Stones as they deemed their performance unsatisfactory.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg revisited the abandoned project in 1992 but aborted his mission when it was discovered that key footage was missing.

Miraculously, further material was unearthed the following year in the Who’s private archive by producers Michael Gochanour and Robin Klein who finalized the cut that was eventually released on this day in 1996.

A particular highlight of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus is the performance of the Beatles’ “Yer Blues” (from their eponymous 1968 LP known as the White Album) by John Lennon’s supergroup the Dirty Mac.

Comprising Lennon on vocals and rhythm guitar, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, this short-lived dream team delivers a truly unforgettable rendition.

Lennon’s searing vocals and Clapton’s masterful lead work using his 1964 Gibson ES-335 semi-hollow render the performance extraordinary.

Bolstered by a stellar rhythm section, this one-off show by the Dirty Mac is the stuff of rock and roll legend.

Order The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Mick take you under his wing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you two sit down and play together?

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

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

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

What kind of impact did Eric have on your playing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yer Blues,” obviously.

Sure. That was a great one.

You recently started playing the Gibson Custom Modern Flying V.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Order Stephen Dale Petit’s 2020 Visions here.

When Leslie West passed away on December 23, 2020, at age 75, the list of guitar legends queueing up to honor him told its own story.

Many of them are among the players who appear on the new release Legacy: A Tribute to Leslie West (Mascot label Group), featuring contributions from such luminaries as Slash, Zakk Wylde, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Morse and Martin Barre, all of which highlights West’s towering influence over rock and roll’s many diverse strains.

To the uninitiated, West is best remembered for “Mississippi Queen,” an essential hard rocker from the classic rock canon.

Anyone with a deeper interest in the music West created, both as a member of Mountain and under various solo and band guises, would know his work is crammed with thundering riffs and exquisitely expressive soloing.

It’s a veritable treasure chest packed with memorable, moving songs.

In acknowledging the guitarist’s monumental influence, nearly everyone sooner or later (and often immediately) seizes upon the same word: tone.

The sound that West achieved with a P-90-loaded Gibson Les Paul Junior has been consistently cited as one of the most distinctive in rock music. His sonic signature is a thick, singing tone that has both weight and depth, and a vibrato that can sustain a note for days.

His phrasing is all about economy. The man wasted not a single note to overplaying, or tried to dazzle with bombastic flurries of speed.

As he said many times, his aim was to create solos that could be sung, and music that moved the heart and soul, rather than impressed minds with its technical prowess.

He was born Leslie Weinstein, in New York City, 1945, but grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, before returning to New York and living in several neighborhoods.

After his parents divorced, he shortened his surname to West, gaining an air of showbiz cool as he cast off his Jewish ethnicity.

He discovered the power of rock and roll as a child when he attended what he thought was a taping of The Jackie Gleason Show, the comedian’s popular CBS television program. “My uncle used to write for Jackie Gleason, and my grandmother used to take me to all the tapings,” West recalled.

“One summer, she took me to see Jackie Gleason’s American Scene Magazine [Gleason’s show from 1962 to 1965], but there was a replacement. Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey had the stage show instead, and you know who was the guest on the show? Elvis Presley.

“That’s when I started playing guitar – saw that son of a bitch come out and go, ‘Well it’s one for the money,’ and thought, I gotta play this thing.”

West’s first taste of success came as a member of the Vagrants, a blue-eyed soul group from Long Island that scored a couple of minor regional hits with “I Can’t Make a Friend,” in 1966, and a burning cover of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect,” in 1967.

A fascinating clip from this time, filmed in 1966 for the American-British teen movie, Disk-O-Tek Holiday, shows the Vagrants performing “Oh, Those Eyes,” with West stepping forward for a great solo in an otherwise fairly unmemorable song.

He mimes to the music with a 12-string Danelectro, but his main axe at that point was a 1958 sunburst Fender Stratocaster that he bought with his bar mitzvah money.

“When the Vagrants started, we all wanted new guitars, so I traded it in for – get this – a Kent,” he once revealed. “A red Kent with three pickups! It was disgusting.”

Although the Vagrants never achieved much success, playing in the band introduced him to multi-instrumentalist songwriter and producer Felix Pappalardi, who oversaw some of the group’s work.

When West parted ways with the Vagrants in 1969 to pursue a solo career, Pappalardi came along to produce and play on his solo album, Mountain.

Although the record was named for the guitarist’s larger-than-life physique, by the time it hit the stores West had proposed launching a power trio with that title and asked Pappalardi to come onboard, along with drummer N.D. Smart.

West had good reasons to pick the talented producer, not the least being that he had worked with Cream, the ultimate supergroup, producing their 1967 psychedelic breakthrough, Disraeli Gears, as well as the two albums of theirs that followed: 1968’s bluesy Wheels of Fire and 1969’s swan song, Goodbye.

While it was obvious for Rolling Stone to describe Mountain as a louder version of Cream, given Pappalardi’s background, it was also accurate.

Mountain’s music was packed with explosive, dynamic blues and rock masterpieces that could sit comfortably alongside the likes of Hendrix, the Who and Ten Years After, all of whom performed that year at Woodstock, where Mountain appeared on the second day of the festival.

They scored the gig – only their third show as a band – due to the fact that they shared an agent with Hendrix.

“We were getting five grand for it, which was incredible money for your third show in 1969,” West revealed.

At the dawn of the age that brought forth a new breed of powerhouse guitar hero, his guitar playing immediately resonated with listeners hungry for unique voices.

West always said he wasn’t a fast player – all that mattered to him were tone and a desire to have a vibrato like a classical violinist.

As he said in 1987, “I’m no great guitarist technically, but you wanna know why people remember me? If you take a hundred players and put them in a room, ninety-nine of ’em are gonna sound the same.

“The one who plays different…that’s the one you’re gonna remember. I learned that you should think about the song, think about the chords you’re playing behind. Most of my solos come right out of those chords. You play the notes within the chords and try to pick a melody from there.”

His powerful guitar tone was matched by his equally imposing declamatory vocals.

The contrast with Pappalardi’s softer voice does much to belie the clichéd description of Mountain’s music as the forerunner of heavy metal. That simplistic tag overlooks how broad the scope of their music was, with both light and shade in their sound and across their albums.

West’s guitar tone was as immense as the man himself.

His reputation was built on his use of the humble Les Paul Junior with a single P-90 pickup. West saw the advantage of having the extra space that a single-pickup guitar gave him when it came to generating his distinctive use of pinched harmonics.

“You gotta have the Junior to do ’em right, because of the single pickup,” he said once, when demonstrating his technique.

“See the way the strings can bend down when you hit ’em? If there was a neck pickup, it’d be in the way. You bury the pick with your thumb and you have all the room you need.”

By the time the first Mountain album was recorded, West had a couple of Juniors from the 1950s, both a single and a double-cutaway.

“The single-cutaway had a better sound than the other one,” he said. “I used to string them with standard sets of La Bella strings, but I’d substitute a .010-gauge A banjo string for the high E string and move the other five strings down one slot, because you couldn’t get extra-light sets at that time.”

When it came to amplifying West’s gutsy approach, a happy accident led him to finding the perfect fit.

“It was just two Sunn stacks with the [Sunn] Coliseum PA heads,” he explained. “They were Hendrix’s old amps, re-Tolexed and reconed.

“See, the PA heads had those four inputs and a master volume, which started the distortion thing for me. This was years before guitar amps had master-volume controls. The head had huge transformers and gigantic KT88 tubes, and the cabinets were loaded with Eminence speakers, which never hurt your ears even with the treble all the way up.”

It was that amp that appeared on 1970’s Climbing!, Mountain’s debut album, which included the song that would forever be linked with West: his raging hard rocker, “Mississippi Queen.”

“I’d turn the mic volume and the master all the way up, and overdrive the thing like crazy,” he said.

Arriving on the heels of their Woodstock performance, Climbing! received strong reviews and reached number 17 on the Billboard chart, propelled by both “Mississippi Queen” and “Theme For an Imaginary Western,” a song written by Cream bassist Jack Bruce for his first solo album.

By this time, Smart had moved on to join Great Speckled Bird and Corky Laing had come onboard, solidifying Mountain’s most celebrated lineup.

West’s talents were widely lauded by the rock cognoscenti. When the Who arrived in New York City in 1971 to record what would become Who’s Next, Pete Townshend asked him to perform in the studio with the group so that they could track the songs as a live act and eliminate guitar overdubs.

Although West’s recordings with the band were unused after the Who subsequently remade the album back in England, some of them‚ including an early version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” showed up as bonus cuts on reissues of Who’s Next and on an extended version of the leftovers compilation Odds and Sods.       

Mountain’s second album was, in the minds of many, their best. Nantucket Sleighride came out in 1971, peaking at number 16, one spot higher than their debut.

Among the highlights were West’s opening track, the hard-charging “Don’t Look Around,” his funk-boogie “You Can’t Get Away” (a worthy successor to the similar “Mississippi Queen”) and Pappalardi’s haunting “Travellin’ in the Dark.”

But it was the title track that showed Mountain at their best, a prog-like mini opera about whalers leaving for sea and the perils they faced.

Key to the drama was an instrumental centerpiece that showed all four musicians – by now Mountain had been fortified with keyboardist Steve Knight – whipping up a formidable storm of hard rock, powered along by West’s gloriously overdriven power chords.

Oddly, this fragment served as the theme tune for Britain’s long-running political discussion show Weekend World, in the 1970s.

Unaware of its use, West was apparently bemused by the enthusiastic response the song would get when Mountain performed it in the U.K.

The end of 1971 saw Mountain release Flowers of Evil, comprising a side of live tracks recorded at New York City’s Fillmore East that same year, and a side of new studio tracks.

The fact that the band could deliver only one side of original material demonstrates how their relentless workload had drained their creative energies. Worse, relations between West and Pappalardi had begun to deteriorate.

The guitarist explained in later interviews that the change came when the bassist claimed a quarter of writing royalties for “Mississippi Queen,” despite having written what West called “a handful of notes.”

As the guitarist admitted, drug use exacerbated their problems, and after a 1972 U.K. tour, Mountain broke up.

It was here that the Cream connection reared its head again, when in 1972, West and Laing teamed up with Jack Bruce to form the supergroup West, Bruce and Laing.

The lineup generated intense record industry interest, with Columbia signing the band to a lucrative contract deal.

Why Dontcha, their 1972 debut album, was a worthy entry into West’s catalog, but is inferior not only to the previous Mountain studio albums but also to Bruce’s work with Cream.

While it sold well, the band struggled with their follow-up, Whatever Turns You On, which just scraped into Billboard’s top 100.

By then, fighting had taken its toll. West, Bruce and Laing split up. Joined tenuously by their contractual obligations, they issued one last disc, the 1974 concert album Live ’n’ Kickin’.

For a band that had been together just 18 months, it was a fruitful union, albeit a short-lived one that produced little of consequence.

Apparently, the time apart had done West and Pappalardi some good. In an unlikely turn of events, Mountain reformed to tour Japan in 1973 and released the live album Twin Peaks.

After extensive touring both overseas and in the States, they released a new studio album, Avalanche, in 1974. While not a bad disc, it again fell short of the first two Mountain records, and the group carried on touring until the end of the year, when they broke up once again.

West continued to play live and recorded a couple of solo albums, including 1975’s The Great Fatsby and 1976’s The Leslie West Band.

He was rumored to have been in line for a shot at replacing Mick Taylor in the Stones, a match-up that seemed ideally suited on paper, given the way that guitar duties were divided between Taylor and Keith Richards during Taylor’s tenure.

Unfortunately for West, Ron Wood, who seemed born to be a Rolling Stone, snagged the spot, returning that group’s sound to the organic interweaving of guitars that had been its modus operandum prior to Taylor’s arrival.

West briefly lost his love for music in 1977, only to be reinvigorated by the emergence of Van Halen’s self-titled 1978 debut album.

While Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnical electric guitar technique might seem a million miles away from West’s deeply blues-rooted approach, he was a huge admirer of the elder man’s playing.

As the two formed a friendship, West’s desire to play returned, even as the brand of music he was known for fell from favor.

Perhaps the only concession he made to the emergence of the era of shred was in his change in equipment. In addition to abandoning his Les Paul Junior for a variety of pointy 1980s axes, he developed a particular fondness for headless guitars.

West also began to introduce some subtle whammy-bar histrionics into his playing, perfectly exemplified in his 1992 appearance on The Dennis Miller Show, in which West was at his most commanding, plugging a Steinberger into a pair of Marshall stacks as he roared through “Mississippi Queen” before making a segue into “Nantucket Sleighride.”

Mountain would continue to reform sporadically over the subsequent decades, although without Pappalardi, who was shot dead by his wife in 1983 under suspicious circumstances.

Released in 2007, their Bob Dylan covers album, Masters of War, was an unlikely entry in the group’s catalog but was much better than might have been expected.

West’s heavyweight guitar-and-vocal combo powered many of the tracks to hard-rocking heights that allowed him to take ownership of the songs.

Perfect examples of the Mountain blitzkrieg approach are “Everything Is Broken,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

West’s ability to shift from those powerhouse vocals to a softer, more reflective treatment was perfectly showcased on his acoustic guitar reading of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” before it morphs into a dinosaur-sized stompathon.

West recorded a number of solo albums for various labels over the years and continued to tour extensively, even through the various health problems that dogged him throughout his life.

He had managed to deal with long-standing addiction problems only to be diagnosed with diabetes in the mid 1980s, and then had further problems when he developed bladder cancer around the turn of the millennium.

West recovered but had new issues with his diabetes, which led to him having to have his right leg amputated at the knee in 2011.

He continued to play live shows and record, even after so many setbacks. He lost a considerable amount of weight which undoubtedly improved his overall health, but sadly he died from a cardiac arrest in 2020.

West’s legacy is clear in the number of artists who sought to work with him during his career and in the tributes that were reported at the time of his passing.

Even if he were remembered only for “Mississippi Queen,” that one song would be enough to cement him as one of the most strident axe-slingers in the history of a genre not short on killer guitarists.

However, West had so much more to offer, and an exploration of his back catalog will reveal numerous riches, not only from his early period of success with Mountain but also right through to the later blues guitar albums that he recorded as a solo artist.

In truth, you can’t go far wrong with any of his albums, as any Leslie West solo is a masterclass in tone, touch and taste from the ultimate “feel” player.

Order Legacy: A Tribute to Leslie West here.

On this day, in 1966, the psychedelic supergroup known as Cream – comprising Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker – released their debut album, Fresh Cream.

Bolstered by the pioneering pop-rock single I Feel Free the album hit the U.K. top ten in January 1967 – the same month it was launched in the U.S.

Although many people associate Cream-era Clapton with an SG Standard, in this 1966 promotional TV clip of the band miming to “Wrapping Paper and “Sweet Wine” the young guitarist can be seen playing a Gibson Les Paul Standard.

Famously using a ‘Burst paired with a Marshall in the 1966 Bluesbreakers sessions, a 21-year-old Clapton established a touchstone of blues-rock guitar tone.

However, by the time the Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album was released in July ’66, Clapton was already rehearsing with Cream – during which time his beloved ‘Beano’ ‘Burst was stolen.

While Clapton never got a chance to record or perform in public with Cream using the Beano ‘Burst he did manage to borrow a few guitars in the meantime, notably Keith Richards’ Bigsby-fitted 'Burst (as used on the Rolling Stones 1964 The Ed Sullivan Show appearance.)

Before the summer was out, Clapton would score another ‘Burst – this time from Andy Summers – using it to record Fresh Cream with. Unfortunately, the precious instrument would suffer a headstock break within months, prompting Clapton’s move towards a Gibson SG Standard.

Though the guitarist acquired a third ‘Burst towards the end of Cream’s short two-year lifespan that guitar did not hang around for long. It’s fair to say Clapton had a run of bad luck with ‘Bursts in the early days. Nonetheless, he did much to popularize the now iconic electric guitar during the ‘60s. Indeed, the single-cutaway Les Paul has since become Gibson’s most successful electric guitar design.

Buy Fresh Cream here.

On this day, in 1967, the world’s first supergroup – comprising Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker – released their breakthrough second album, Disraeli Gears. A touchstone of ‘60s psychedelia this hard rock masterpiece broke the power trio in America and became a top-ten platinum-selling classic.

And yet despite the band’s success all was not well in the Cream camp. Part way through their gargantuan Spring 1968 US tour the end was already in sight when they decided to call it a day. 

Forming in July 1966, the group spent a mere two years making music together before officially announcing their forthcoming disbandment in July 1968.

Later, in October 1968, Cream set out on their American “Farewell" tour. Returning to England the following month, they played their final two shows of the era on home turf. 

"On 26 November, 1968, Cream played their final two shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London," wrote Clapton in his 2007 autobiography. "Before the gig started, I just wanted to get it over with, but once I was up on stage, I became quite excited. I thought it was great that we could do this and keep our heads high, and walk away from the whole thing with a fair amount of good grace."

For the sake of posterity, the BBC captured both of the band’s performances and the footage was later assembled into a rockumentary that was screened on UK television in 1969.

Bruce later recalled that by this stage the reaction to Cream was so great “we looked at each other and thought 'Are we doing the right thing?' There was a feeling of regret but nobody was able to step forward and say 'Oh, let's not do this!'"

Indeed, the crowd’s reaction to their rendition of the top ten single “Sunshine of Your Love” says it all.

As the BBC narrator in this clip points out, “The Cream have played together for only two years, but in that time have almost singlehandedly given rock a musical authority which only the deaf cannot acknowledge... Eric Clapton: a 23-year-old ex-stained-glass window designer, rated by most as the finest instrumentalist of his kind in the world.” 

Although Cream were originally together for a relatively brief period their heavy, psychedelic blues style became a huge influence on electric guitar players as rock music progressed throughout the ‘70s.

And with its signature blues-based riff ploughed through a wall of Marshall amplifiers “Sunshine of Your Love” ultimately set a template for hard rock and metal.

Buy Disraeli Gears and other Cream classics here.

Today marks both the beginning and end of Jimi Hendrix’s short but dazzling career at the forefront of rock guitar. On October 1, 1966, he appeared live at London Polytechnic, joining Eric Clapton and Cream onstage for a rendition of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” where he cemented his place as the premier guitarist of the era. 

Clapton later stated that his life was never the same again.

Exactly four years after, on October 1, 1970, Hendrix was buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton, Washington.  

Shortly after the death of his friend, Clapton temporarily retreated from music. “The night that he died, I was supposed to meet him at the Lyceum [Theatre, London] to see Sly Stone play,” recounts Clapton in an emotional 1979 interview.  “I brought with me a left-handed Stratocaster… I could see him, but we never got together. The next day, whack, he was gone.”

News of Hendrix’s sudden passing on September 18, 1970, in London sent shockwaves around the world. “If you’re much over 30, the odds are you’ve never heard of Jimi Hendrix,” said ABC reporter Gregory Jackson. 

Nowadays, over half a century later, the exact opposite is true. Indeed, since his death, Hendrix has increasingly become an inspiration for electric guitar players of all ages.

Many popular 12-inch guitar speakers are based on classics made by Celestion in the ’60s and early ’70s. 

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise the hallowed British manufacturer has been less known through the years for 10-inch speakers, which just didn’t figure much in its vintage catalog.

However, the company has gone to great lengths to change that in recent years. Celestion’s G10 Greenback delivered that classic crunchy flavor in a smaller driver more than a decade ago. The G10 Gold has won many fans, and the G10 Vintage has long been considered a great-sounding sleeper by many guitarists. 

Now, the new G10 Creamback and VT Jr. are here, offering two new flavors and price points for fans of that special something only 10s can deliver.

I tested each speaker in an extension cabinet made from solid pine and measuring 22 by 20 by 10.5 inches. It was fed by a tweed Deluxe-style amp and a Friedman Small Box head with the master reined in to keep the output safe for these particular speakers. 

My guitars were a Nik Huber Orca 59 (a Les Paul–like dual-humbucker model) and a Fender Telecaster.

G10 Creamback

Three flavors of 12-inch Creamback speakers have become big hits for Celestion in recent years: the G12M and G12H with ceramic magnets, and the Alnico Cream. With that in mind, it makes sense that a 10-inch version would follow in their wake. 

This speaker has a 96dB efficiency rating - pretty lively and respectable for a 10 - a 20-ounce ceramic magnet and a power-handling rating of 45 watts.

As with the bigger Creambacks, the G10 Creamback immediately displays its lineage from several decades of Greenback production with a muscular, slightly mids-forward performance that feels instantly British and overtly classic rock at that. 

Hit with cleans from either amp, it’s a sweet, detailed and appealing speaker with little propensity toward treble spikes and a good overall balance. Lows are decently full for a single 10, promising fuller bass still from a pair in the right cab.

Pushed with some overdrive, the G10 Creamback segues nicely into that blend of smoothness and aggression that the better Celestions do so well. There’s just a little grittiness in the upper mids to enhance the texture, a notable characteristic of the G12M Greenback line. 

Yet it displays more solidity in the lows than the existing G10 Greenback, and good balance throughout the range, with neither mud nor harshness in evidence anywhere. The immediacy that fans of good 10-inch speakers praise is there in abundance, along with enjoyable dynamics that make it a very playable speaker.

VT JR.

Previously available only as an OEM unit for amp manufacturers, the Chinese-made VT Jr. was mostly found in relatively affordable smaller combos. The speaker is an appealingly cost-effective option to the general market offering. 

Something of a little brother to the 12-inch V-Type, the VT Jr. is intended as a versatile and well-balanced 10 that blends the best of Celestion’s vintage and modern characteristics. 

It carries a 20-ounce ceramic magnet and displays an efficiency rating of 95 dB (about average for a 10). It has power-handling capabilities of 50 watts, which, as with the G10 Creamback, should make it more than robust for the smaller combos in which it’s likely to be used, and sturdy in 2x10 and 4x10 extension cabs.

Fed by either amp, and either guitar, the VT Jr. proved itself a very likable speaker and a good all-rounder for a wide variety of music. It has the focus and detail to pump out clean chicken-pickin' from the Telecaster, while still handling overdrive from either amp without too much blare or brashness anywhere in the frequency spectrum. 

Overall, its balance is pretty good.  It’s a relatively neutral-sounding speaker, albeit within the realm of Celestion voicings, and displays enhanced articulation compared to many other 10-inch speakers in this price range.

Auditioned back to back with the G10 Creamback, the VT Jr. is perhaps a somewhat smaller-sounding speaker. It’s just a touch thinner-sounding, and less rich and deep than more expensive 10s. 

But that’s more a reflection of the Creamback’s impressive body, texture and muscularity relative to the format than any overt failing on the part of the VT Jr. This is a good guitar speaker in its own right and should offer an affordable upgrade to many players seeking to replace more-generic 10s.

With these two new models in the oft-underserved 10-inch sector, Celestion is providing great new options in the budget and boutique ends of the market. As a result, it’s now much easier for guitar players to dial in their ideal tones. Well done!

Specifications 

• PRICE: $115 street
• POWER HANDLING: 45 watts
• EFFICIENCY: 96db (1W/1M)
• NOMINAL IMPEDANCE: 8Ω (as tested) or 16Ω
• WEIGHT: 3.5 lbs
• BUILT: UK

• PRICE: $59 street
• POWER HANDLING: 50 watts
• EFFICIENCY: 95db (1W/1M)
• NOMINAL IMPEDANCE: 8Ω (as tested) or 16Ω
• WEIGHT: 3.5 lbs
• BUILT: China
• CONTACT: Celestion

Cream put their unique stamp on many blues covers and always credited the songs’ composers, but it was their original material that blazed new trails and defined the sound of an era, as the band’s blues-laced compositions transmogrified into epic, purple-polka-dot-laden guitar odysseys.

And talk about guitar tones! Remember, this was the dawn of the amplifier as an integral part of the tone chain. Clapton was still primarily a Gibson man, and his vintage Les Paul and SG tones (delivered by overdriven, ambient-miked Marshall and Fender amps) were thick, juicy, and deliciously atmospheric. Studio cohorts Felix Pappalardi and Tom Dowd were among the first U.S. producers and engineers to generate an industry-wide buzz with their sound, and from Eric Johnson to Edward Van Halen, the entire Cream catalog has long served as a benchmark for guitar tone enthusiasts worldwide.

We’ll kick off this historic blast from the past by inducting Cream’s version of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads” into the Lick Library Hall of Fame, thereby rendering it exempt from the following list.

Now, let’s dig deep into the vault to rediscover 10 timeless original Cream riffs.

10. “Dance the Night Away” 

Disraeli Gears (0:00-0:15)

The chimey jangle of this irresistible psych-pop gem reveals that Clapton was as infatuated with West Coast country rockers The Byrds as he was with Chicago blues guitarists during the recording of Disraeli Gears. (Check out his “raga rock” solo later in the track.) On the song’s signature intro riff, Clapton overdubs two electric 12-strings—probably a Fender XII—arpeggiating slightly different Am and identical D/F# voicings an octave apart. Note that the higher octave part (Gtr. 2) lays out until the third repeat. Pay attention to the staccato marks on beat four of bar 2 and dig that magical mushroom vibe.

9. “N.S.U.” 

Fresh Cream (0:04-0:36)

Like a raging rock and roll nursery rhyme, the intro and verse figures on this tune pit Baker’s thunderous toms and Clapton’s partially open-voiced C arpeggios (Gtr. 1) against Bruce’s sly, off-the-beat bass and vocals, making the first two bars of each verse feel like the beat has been turned around. Clever! Choral “whoa”s float dreamily over Clapton’s driving quarter-note power chords (each voiced with the 5 in the bass for extra girth) and syncopated single-note and double-stop overdubs (Gtr. 2). The dramatic cut to A in the second ending precedes a two-bar rest followed by a snare drum cue and pounding V chord (G) that segues to the next verse. To complete the second verse, play bar 1 four times and continue as written until you hit the second ending. Here, substitute a bar of 2/4, then jump back and transpose bars 2 through 6 of the remaining progression (including the repeat) down a minor third to generate D/A-C/G-A-D/A-C/G-F#. Play the rests and last bar as written and you’re there. (Also on Live Cream, Volume I.)

8. “Sleepy Time Time” 

Fresh Cream (0:04-0:15)

Clapton’s snaky 12/8 lines converge from opposite directions on this tune, making the track a great example of contrary motion applied in a dreamy, electrified country blues vibe. Gtr.1’s descending motif concentrates on the b7, 6, 5, 4, b3, and 3 (Bb, A, G, F, Eb, and E), while Gtr. 2 doubles the 5-b7-root-based bass line. I’d long assumed that the harmonic intervals formed during beat one in bars 2 and 3 were chromatic tritones that outlined B7-C7, but the first interval is actually a perfect fourth and the second a major third—another tasty twist that reinforces the notion that Cream’s blues often sounded more, well, purple. (Also on Live Cream, Volume I.)

7. “Outside Woman Blues”

Disraeli Gears (0:00-0:17)

Clapton’s legendary “woman tone”—achieved by rolling the treble off of his neck-position humbucker and blasting through an overdriven Marshall—is all over Disraeli Gears and is particularly evident on the response portion of this main riff. In fact, it’s likely that the nickname refers to Clapton’s second guitar overdub (Gtr. 2) on this track. (Gtr.1 doubles this part two octaves lower sans “woman tone.”) My biggest surprise in reexamining the riff was that Clapton played a straight E7 chord in bar 1, not the E7#9 he incorporated into the reunion shows. The first four repeats of bar 1 constitute the intro, and the verse features only two repeats of this figure plus the riff in bars 2 and 3. Repeat this four-bar move, then play two bars of a B7#9 V chord followed by the response riff to complete the 12-bar progression.

6. “Politician”

Goodbye (0:00-0:21)

Interestingly, this elephantine blues riff began its life in a slightly different form. An early recording (documented on BBC Sessions) contains an altered version in which the b3-3 move on beat two (F-F#) is replaced by the 3 and 4 (F# and G). Both riffs take the same tact, approaching key chord tones from their lower chromatic neighbors, but this now-standard version definitely packs a bigger wallop. The staccato eighth-notes on the and of beats one, two, and four are crucial phrasing elements, so don’t ignore them. (Also on Wheels of Fire and Live Cream, Volume II.)

5. “I Feel Free”

Fresh Cream (1:15-1:47)

Framed in one of the most elaborate productions by Jack Bruce and lyricist Pete Brown, Clapton’s exquisitely composed solo seems atonal at times, but closer inspection reveals it’s actually outlining harmonies a third above the background vocal melody. Study this one carefully: From Clapton’s impeccable vibrato and unusual note choices to his spot-on pre-bends, precise melodic bends and releases, and knack for thematic development, every lick is a lesson in itself. Clapton sticks with his neck-pickup “woman tone” until the very last phrase, where, in a move that’s been making grown men cry for forty years, he switches to the bridge pickup. Gtr. 2 provides another fine example of Clapton’s prototypical power chording, and is clearly a model for Edward Van Halen’s fabled “brown sound.”

4. “Badge”

Goodbye (1:07-1:17)

Perhaps the most tremendous titanium-testicles moment at Cream’s 2005 concerts was when Clapton held an Am7 and basked in up to 16 seconds of uproarious man-cries before launching this signature chordal interlude. Honestly, the collective roar at Madison Square Garden made any other major event held there sound like a little league game. Clapton’s beautiful Leslie swirl sounds downright religious on the original studio recording. The phrase begins mid-measure with an ascending root-position D arpeggio followed by anticipated G/C, G/B, and G arpeggiations that lead back to a full bar of D. The ghosted open D on the downbeat of bar 1 is barely audible. (I once heard a rumor that George Harrison played this part. Hmm.... Any opinions?)

3. “Tales of Brave Ulysses”

Disraeli Gears (0:21-0:30)

This mystical track and its cousin, “White Room” (call it a tie for third place), both utilize D and G5 power chords over a descending D-C-B-Bb bass line that Clapton has admitted borrowing from the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.” Bruce does alter the bass part to D-F-G-Bb, complete with chromatic passing tones, in the second half of the verse, but the only major difference in the “White Room” verse progression is the Bb5 and C5 chords injected into beats three and four of bar 2. This studio version of “Tales...” also features a single-note wah-wah overdub that doubles the bassline one octave higher, probably on the D string. (Also on Live Cream, Volume II.)

2. “Steppin’ Out”

Live Cream, Volume II (0:15-0:29)

Dating back to his pre-Bluesbreakers days, Clapton initially recorded this signature rave-up instrumental in 1965 with an ad-hoc group called the Powerhouse (featuring Jack Bruce and Steve Winwood) for an album entitled What’s Shakin’ before re-cutting the definitive version with John Mayall later that year. Cream’s frequent live versions of “Steppin’ Out” became an up-tempo tour-de-force for Clapton’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations, which often stretched for fifteen minutes or more. The ingeniously simple head alternates between identically fingered I, V and I figures (G-D-G) played on adjacent string groups, and shifts from straight to swing eighth-note feels every two bars. Follow the D.C al fine indicator back to the top and stop at the fine sign to complete the 12-bar form. (Historians will note that Ritchie Blackmore paraphrased this head in Deep Purple’s “Lazy.”)

1. “Sunshine of Your Love”

Disraeli Gears (0:00-0:17)

It’s fascinating to trace how the number one Cream riff of all time—a pillar of rock radio for over three decades now—evolved over the years at concerts after its initial appearance on Disraeli Gears. The song’s primordial syncopated theme—a twice-repeated single-note riff followed by a chordal version enhanced with raked and heavily vibrated double stops—is notated in bars 1 through 4. For complete authenticity, play the D7-D7-C7-D7 as straight eighth-notes, then add the sixteenth-note slide on the repeat. Variation 1 shows how Clapton eventually fleshed out the descending 5-b5-4 (A-Ab-G) line by adding a pedal D above each note, while Variation 2 incorporates a pair of major-third intervals built from the A and Ab. Both feature different ending phrases in bar 2, which are yours to mix and match at will. Pass it on! (Also on Live Cream, Volume II.)