Before the British Invasion swept the Beatles across American airwaves, popular music in the United States had a distinct sound. Roger McGuinn, who co-founded the Byrds, accented by his now iconic Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string, was a big part of it.

When the Beatles landed in America on February 7, 1964, McGuinn was working as a session player and songwriter, writing songs for singer Bobby Darin’s T.M. Music company. He says that despite Paul, John, George and Ringo being relative unknowns in the States, he was aware of them.

“I was living in New York, and I was a studio musician, and also working as a songwriter in the Brill Building,” he tells Guitar Player. “And as it turned out, I think there was a CBS TV Channel 2 in New York, and there was a clip of the Beatles, maybe about two minutes long. It had girls screaming, and had the Beatles playing… I don’t know if it was ‘She Loves You,’ or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ but it was one of those songs.

“I went, ‘Man, these guys are good,’” he admits. “I realized they were using folk music chords for rock and roll. They’d come up as a skiffle band, the Quarrymen, and they’d been playing folk tunes with chords they’d developed into a rock band.”

This realization led McGuinn to change course with varied results. “I started putting folk songs to a Beatles beat and taking it to the Village [in New York City] and playing that for people in the coffee houses.

“They didn’t like it,” he adds with a laugh.

But he knew he was onto something. When George Harrison began playing a Rickenbacker 360/12 in 1964, McGuinn — who had been playing 12-string for years — picked on up as well.

The same year, McGuinn founded the Byrds with David Crosby on guitar and vocals, Gene Clark on vocals, Chris Hillman on bass guitar and Michael Clarke on drums. A 1965 tour followed, orchestrated by their press office Derek Taylor, who had worked for the Beatles in 1964 (and would again from 1968 to 1970). Through Taylor, the Byrds met the Beatles, leading to a friendship between the bands that had a profound impact on both their musical and personal lives.

That impact is evident in George Harrison’s Rubber Soul track “If I Needed Someone.” It also provides the back story to “She Said She Said,” one of John Lennon’s tracks from the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver. In August 1966, near the end of their last tour, the Beatles were visiting the Byrds. LSD was a popular drug of choice at the time, and the Byrds and Beatles dropped acid together, along with actor Peter Fonda.

It was Fonda, who, while tripping on acid, said, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

“Peter had somehow shot himself in the stomach when he was a kid,” McGuinn explains. “He died on the operating table. But they brought him back. So he did know what it was like to be dead.”

Lennon was appalled at the Fonda’s statement. Long after the party ended, still reeling from the episode, Lennon wrote “She Said She Said,” substituting a woman for Fonda, who says, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

Asked what he made of Lennon’s creation, McGuinn shrugs. “I liked it. I like the song,” he says, “I loved everything the Beatles did, really. There’s nothing that I would put down.”

Despite these connections, the friendship between the two groups is rarely discussed. But the Beatles and Byrds were tight, so tight that when the Beatles gave a press conference at Capitol Records on August 24 of that year, Crosby tagged along.

“Yeah, we were friends,” McGuinn says. “And Crosby kind of followed them around. He’d poke his head out, and whoever was interviewing the Beatles said, “Who’s that guy with the long hair over there?’ And the Beatles would say, “Oh, that’s our mate from the Byrds, David Crosby.’”

Is it true that George Harrison inspired you to start using a Rickenbacker 12-string?

Yeah. We all went to the movies and saw A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d heard that sound on the records, but I didn’t know what instrument it was. But George came out with a Rickenbacker, and it looked like a six [string] from the front.’

But he turned it sideways, and you could see six other tuning pegs, like a classical guitar, sticking out of the back. I went, "Oh, they kind of condensed the 12-string head into something good-looking.” And it sounded great. I had to get one.

What was the first Rickenbacker 12-string you had after seeing George’s?

I traded an acoustic Gibson 12-string that Bobby Darin had given me because he broke the one that I had before that. I put it up against the piano, and the piano was on casters, and it rolled, and the guitar fell down, and the neck broke off. So he brought me a new Gibson 12-string.

I also traded my five-string banjo — a Vega long-neck five-string banjo, like Pete Seeger played — and some cash, and I bought a Rickenbacker 360 12-string in a guitar store in L.A. I played it for about seven hours a day. [laughs]

Was it tough to get used to the 12-string?

Oh, Jim Dixon, who was our manager, said, “You can’t put a capo on an electric guitar, it’s just not done.” So, I had to learn a lot of scales and learn how to play all kinds of stuff up the neck. I had to practice like seven hours a day to do this. That’s how the “Eight Miles High” thing came about, because I’d been doing a lot of scales.

George influenced you, but if you listen to “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul, it’s obvious that you influenced him, too.

Well, Derek Taylor had been in London, and George gave him, I think, a three-inch reel-to-reel of “If I Needed Someone.” He came over — Derek had been living in L.A., and we were all in Laurel Canyon. He was a few houses down from me, and [Byrds bassist] Chris Hillman.

But Derek came over to my house with this three-inch reel-to-reel tape, and said, “George wants you to play this.” So I played it, and it was “If I Needed Someone.” He said he wants you to know that he got that riff from [Pete Seeger’s] “The Bells of Rhymney” [which the Byrds recorded a famous live version of in 1965].

That same year, in 1965, the Byrds and the Beatles met in August for a psychedelic experience. Can you recount that?

The Beatles had already come over to America and declared that the Byrds were their favorite group. And when they first came over, they would send a limo down to pick us up at our various locations and take us to the house that they were renting up in the Hills, in Beverly Hills.

It was the estate of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor that they had rented for, like, a week, or however long they were there for. And so, we’re coming up in the limo, and there’s all these girls, and they’re up on the fences, and there were policemen, and they took us in. The gate opened up, and we go down to this house, and that’s when we all dropped acid.

What was that like?

Peter Fonda was with us, Ringo [Starr] took acid, and Paul [McCartney] didn’t want to do it. So, George, John, and I did, and Ringo, I think, was playing with some girls in the pool.

Did Paul say why he didn’t want to drop acid, too?

No. I really didn’t have any interaction with Paul at that time. I did when we first met the Beatles in London. It was during that tour that we went over, and they billed us as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” Derek Taylor was with us, and, of course, he had been their press officer, so he introduced us to the Beatles.

I met George and John the first night, and then Paul invited me to the Scotch of St. James, his private club. We had a Scotch and Coke, went outside, and he got into his Aston Martin DB5, and we drove around London. It was really cool.

And later on, we went to a party with the Beatles and the [Rolling] Stones. The Stones told us how their butler would roll up hash joints and put them on the steps for breakfast every morning. [laughs]

Circling back to dropping acid in Beverly Hills, that’s also when you and David Crosby introduced George and John to Ravi Shankar, right?

George, John, David Crosby and I went into this big shower, like a big, maybe nine-foot-square shower, where you could sit on a ledge. And we had one guitar that we kept passing around, and that’s when we showed him some Ravi Shankar stuff — and we all were on acid.

That was especially impactful on George.

George started freaking out. [laughs] He said, “I feel like I’m dying…” And then, Peter Fonda said, “Oh, I know what it’s like to be dead.” And John Lennon said, “Oh, don’t tell me that… you’re creeping me out. This is terrible.”

George was pretty into Indian music by then, so it’s surprising that he hadn’t heard of Ravi Shankar.

Well, Jim Dixon was a producer and engineer at World Pacific Records in Hollywood, and they had Ravi Shankar as one of their artists. So we got a preview of the recordings of Ravi, and we knew about Ravi early on. That’s how we were able to tell George about him, and that he’d been an influence. He had been exposed to Indian music prior to that, but I guess he just didn’t know about Ravi Shankar.

You mentioned earlier that when you went to London, the Byrds were billed as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” But given how you fed off each other, it’s clear that it wasn’t so much about an answer as it was a call-and-response.

Well, what was going on was that America was blindsided by the British Invasion. They were looking for some kind of counter to it. I remember watching American Bandstand, and Dick Clark said, “The best Beatles antidote? It’s probably the Beau Brummels.”

And then, he’s on the phone with somebody, saying, “What? The Byrds? Oh, yeah, okay. It’s the Byrds.”

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

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

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

Bobby Darin 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Crosby

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

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

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

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

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

John Lennon and George Harrison

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When George Harrison’s "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" Les Paul was kidnapped in 1973, he called on his former sitar mentor Ravi Shankar to issue an appeal for its safe return, such was their deep-rooted connection.

The Indian musician music introduced Harrison to the Eastern tonalities he brought into the Beatles' music from 1966 onward. But Harrison didn't discover Shankar's music by chance. The late David Crosby played a key role in imbuing the Beatle with such inspiration, and one could argue that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first album to bear such flavors, wouldn’t have been the same without his input.

The dream-like, sitar-heavy journey of “Within You Without You” saw Harrison dive headfirst into this newly discovered musical realm, and it was something he’d later explore on “The Inner Light” and — in terms of its lyrical theme — his solo offering “My Sweet Lord.” Shortly after, Harrison and Shankar famously joining forces for 1971’s legendary Concert for Bangladesh as their relationship continued to grow.

But history would have likely told a very different story had Crosby not first introduced Harrison to Shankar’s work in 1965, when his group the Byrds were on a visit to England. Speaking to Music Connection in 2022, Crosby revealed how he and Harrison became sounding boards for one another’s musical discoveries — much as Jimi Hendrix and Billy Gibbons once proved to be for one another.

“I was very taken with George. I liked him a lot,” Crosby told Music Connections. “Always did, right from the start. Very sincere, very friendly, and trying hard to be a decent human being. And that appeals to me to no end.

“I had just been turned on to Ravi Shankar by a friend in the States, and I had an album by Ravi in my suitcase,” he continues. “I gave it to George.”

He knew it would be a hit with Harrison.

“Now that had repercussions,” he goes on. “George told me later that I turned him on to Indian music. I have trouble believing that. I think there were other people who helped do that. But that’s what he told me.

”George liked Indian music, got interested in it, and wound up going to India. When he was in India, he met a guru, a teacher that he liked.”

The Beatles’ early 1968 sojourn to India proved a veritable breeding ground for further musical experimentation, resulting in much of the music heard on their White Album. There was the band’s proto-heavy metal romp which McCartney did everything in his power to “dirty it up,” and the tongue-in-cheek hit that threatened to ruffle political feathers, among plenty others.

Harrison's experiments on the 1968 album possibly extended to other instruments too. He brought a Bartles fretless electric guitar to the studio while the album was being made, and there is evidence to suggest it was used on the record.

Of course, Crosby downplayed the impact his album loaning had on Harrison’s life and, indeed, the course the Beatles would later take, but history suggests he needn’t be so humble.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s fruitful songwriting partnership may have come to spearhead the Beatles, but Harrison’s sitar playing made him a guitar legend. Harrison had all but given up playing guitar, but Shankar’s music turned the tide, and he subsequently packed his bags and traveled nearly 5,000 miles to study under him in India.

“[The sitar] has taken over one hundred percent of my musical life,” he told Disc and Music Echo in May 1967, eight months into his studies. “I think it can all be integrated into the Beatles quite nicely if I can keep improving,” he added.

And indeed he did. His journey with sitar would take him full circle back to guitar in the summer of 1968, when he realized he lacked the time necessary to study the instrument. By integrating the techniques he learned on sitar into his guitar playing, he developed the more legato and finger-vibratoed style of playing heard in his work from that point forward, extending to the slide work that became his signature. For all that, Crosby may take credit for initiating.

"God bless me," the guitarist said. There are many who would tell him the same.

"We wanted to be a band that had heavy guitars but also songs with strong melodies and choruses. That’s the school I grew up in,” Paul Stanley says, reflecting on the birth of Kiss, the group he co-founded some 50 years ago. “It was coming more from the Brill Building kind of writers than headbanging. 

"The idea was to combine some of the old Tin Pan Alley sensibilities with the Beatles’ style of songwriting and make it more guitar-driven, like Led Zeppelin, or the Rolling Stones and the Who. Interestingly, most of it was about rhythm guitar, which is the foundation of everything. Without it, everything falls apart.” 

From humble roots in Queens, New York, through equal measures of talent, ambition, hard work and self-belief, Paul Stanley willed himself into becoming a rock star. His Kiss persona is the Starchild after all, and he’s been championed as one of rock’s greatest frontmen. In concert, he’s part game-show host, part gospel preacher, espousing the life-affirming spirit of anthemic, fist-waving rock and roll thunder. 

More than most guitarists, Stanley embraces his vital role as a rhythm player. Think of him as the bastard child of Keith Richards’ raucous riffery, the arena-rock power-chord majesty of Pete Townshend and the boogie-rock splendor of Humble Pie’s Steve Marriott. 

And like all three of those guitarists, Stanley has taken to the task with a mixture of swagger and attitude. His rowdy rhythms and arena-ready riffs on Kiss classics like “Strutter,” “Got to Choose,” “C’mon and Love Me,” “Rock and Roll All Nite” and countless others were the sonic fuel that helped transport four struggling New York City musicians into superstardom and, decades later, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

Throughout Kiss’s storied career, both on record and in concert, lead guitarists Ace Frehley, Vinnie Vincent, Mark St. John, Bruce Kulick and Tommy Thayer have done the heavy lifting as fleet-fingered six-string soloists. But on the rare occasion when Stanley steps up to peel off a guitar solo, it’s always special, memorable and instantly hummable. 

Neither a flashy soloist nor a speed merchant, Stanley makes each note count. He’s a distinctive stylist plucked from the George Harrison school of guitar playing, who hunkers down and takes the time to meticulously craft picture-perfect guitar solos that tell a story within a song.

When Stanley chooses to lay down a solo, whether it’s the exquisite Kossoff-flavored slow-hand finery on “Hold Me, Touch Me,” the searing metallic attack on “I Stole Your Love” or the epic David Gilmour–esque sonic flights of atmospheric fancy on “A World Without Heroes,” it’s always melodically inventive and in service to the song. 

For much of the band’s ’70s heyday, his arsenal of axes leaned heavily on Gibson guitars, including the L6-S Midnight Special, Flying V, Firebird, Explorer and EDS-1275 double-neck. That all changed in the late ’70s with the introduction of Stanley’s first signature guitar, the Ibanez PS10, which became his go-to six-string. 

Through the decades, his onstage rigs included models from a wide range of brands, including Hamer, B.C. Rich, Steinberger and, of course, Gibson. Stanley later aligned with Washburn and Silvertone on the creation of new signature models, but he is now back in the fold with Ibanez and involved in the development and design of his own line. 

Now, as Kiss end their live career, Stanley graciously sat down with Guitar Player for a talk about his guitar journey — how it all began, and the sights and sounds from along the way. Sit back and enjoy his most in-depth and comprehensive conversation about all things guitar.

What’s your earliest memory of seeing a guitar? 

Probably Eddie Cochran or Elvis. And with that you get Carl Perkins and everyone else from that era who fits the model — the guitar player as a frontman. But I’d go with Eddie Cochran and Elvis. 

What made you want to play guitar? 

The guitar was the messenger of rock and roll — the primary instrument. Certainly, you’ve got Little Richard with a piano, but the guitar was always the instrument of rock and roll. People think about the guitar solos and lead playing, but it was really the strumming — that was the call to arms. That’s usually what you heard first. 

What was your first guitar, and how did you come to own it? 

I bugged my parents, and for my 13th birthday I figured that I’d finally got them to get me an electric guitar. And as it turned out, they got me a really crappy used nylon-string guitar. I was heartbroken, because nobody that I had seen on American Bandstand or in [rock and roll concert promoter] Alan Freed’s shows, or rock and roll movies, like The Girl Can’t Help It — nobody was playing an acoustic nylon-string guitar. So I looked at it and put it under the bed and didn’t pull it out for quite a while. 

But as I would eventually learn, to play guitar with some sort of depth and understanding, you really should start out playing an acoustic guitar. I think that an acoustic guitar is so much less forgiving, and it also requires nuances that the electric guitar doesn’t — or it does so in a different way. So at the end of the day, I think I was fortunate that I started out with an acoustic guitar. 

How long did you play acoustic before you got your first electric? 

Probably a year or so, if not more. My parents, God love them, they thought love meant denying your kids certain things, to toughen them up. So my first electric guitar I bought myself, and it was a two-pickup and pretty much a three-quarter-sized Vox copy of a Strat. It was a salmon color that Fender also used, one of their classic DuPont-type colors.

Where did you buy that guitar? 

Back then, 48th Street was the holy land for guitars and amps. I used to do an almost weekly pilgrimage down there. I’d take a bus and a subway down to maybe 50th Street and then walk over there and go into all the guitar stores. It was very different then. Now you go in and they want you to play the instruments, much like bookstores. 

If you went into a bookstore back then and pulled out a book, they’d say, “You’re going to buy that?” and it was very much the same with musical instruments. They were basically behind glass, and if you wanted to try something, you had to show them the money. Their first question was, “Are you buying today?” And if you said yes, they’d say, “Let me see the money.” 

So I wound up buying my first guitar on 48th Street, but not at Manny’s. Manny’s was like the premier instrument store, with drums, guitars and woodwinds — everything. I would just go down there and drool and wait for rock stars to come in so I could see the people I’d seen on television. 

I saw Hilton Valentine, who was the guitar player from the Animals. I also saw Leslie West. Leslie, God love him — he looked like Jimi Hendrix if Jimi Hendrix weighed 400 pounds. So it was exciting for me, and I made it a weekly trip. 

What gear did you have circa 1967–’68? 

I could only afford one guitar at a time, so at that point I had an SG Les Paul that cost me $120 at a pawn shop right near Tompkins Square Park in New York City. There used to be a pawn shop there, and my mom had hawked a diamond ring, which was wonderful, and got me a Fender Twin Reverb. I had no pedals or anything like that. 

The people who I was most enamored with and the bands that I saw at the Fillmore East were plugged into amplifiers. Hendrix had pedals, as did some other guitar players, but for the most part your sound came from a great guitar and usually a Marshall amp, and if you couldn’t get that sound, you needed a new amp or a new guitar. 

Prior to that, I had a Hagstrom 12-string electric guitar, because I couldn’t afford a Rickenbacker and I was very into the Byrds, and for that you needed a 12-string. Then I got rid of that and got the SG Les Paul. And from there, for quite a while, I would trade out a guitar to get a different one. 

My next guitar after the SG Les Paul was a Gibson double-cut Les Paul, which was $200. Guitars were not out of reach at that point. Dan Armstrong on 48th Street had all these classic vintage guitars and a wall full of mid-’50s to ’59 and ’60 Les Pauls: gold tops, sunbursts. 

The expensive ones could be $700, $800, which to me was a fortune. But compared to what they wound up being valued at now, they were attainable. Guitars were not investments at that point. People weren’t buying them like art or stocks. 

What was your practice regimen? Were you picking up songbooks and learning from those, and slowing down records to learn and master parts? 

Early on, I realized that I didn’t want to be the flashy lead player. As much as I admired them and wanted much to be like them, I became much more involved with being a rhythm guitarist. Very often, rhythm guitar was looked at as what you do before you can play lead. And there were certainly consummate guitar players who, yes, they could play lead guitar, but that wasn’t their wheelhouse, really. 

Whether it was Keith Richards or Pete Townshend — or even David Crosby or one of the greatest right hands ever, Richie Havens — that was more fascinating to me: not what the left hand was doing, but what the right hand was doing. 

When my son, Evan, started playing guitar — and by the way, he’s just a smoking great guitar player — in the beginning I said to him, “Right now it’s all about your right hand. It’s all about your wrist. It’s all about your palm. It’s all about those subtleties.” And that, I think, is a great foundation to start with. 

How far you want to go after that is really up to you. I mean, Jimmy Page is just a killer rhythm player who happens to also be a spectacular lead player and arranger. But his rhythm playing is as good as anybody’s, and better than most. 

What was the first holy grail guitar that you bought? 

Well, I started collecting guitars in the mid-’70s, when I could finally afford to have more than one guitar. And I found myself wanting to acquire a prime example of what were the top guitars. At that point, the word went out and people started bringing guitars to our shows, and when we would pull in there’d be people standing out back with guitar cases. So it made it really fun. 

The first guitar I bought that was of that stature was a ’58 sunburst Les Paul with cream humbuckers, and I paid $2,200 for it, which was a fortune. I wound up with nine guitars that were really outstanding examples of each specific model, and the start of it was the ’58 sunburst. 

Let’s talk about some of the guitars you used early on with Kiss. 

Early on I played a Gibson Les Paul ’54 reissue that came out in the ’70s. The first really good guitar I had was a 1960 Gibson SG Les Paul, which is when they were making the transition from Les Paul guitars to what later became SG guitars. 

I also had a custom-made guitar, a half Flying V. It was made by a guy in the Village named Charlie LoBue [who also made Gene Simmons’ basses early on]. It was stolen at our first New York gig, with [first-wave punk artist] Wayne County. 

Then one of my favorite guitars, a Gibson Firebird, got wrecked. This guy, Corky Stasiak, who was the assistant engineer on Destroyer, knocked it over in the studio and broke the neck off. It couldn’t be repaired. 

So Gibson made me a copy of it. Ultimately, I lent the copy to somebody, and they sold it. [laughs] 

Were you using some of these vintage guitars in the studio, onstage or both? 

I would use them in the studio. I would never take them on tour, for a couple of reasons. The look of the band has always been so specific that the idea of being up there with a sunburst Les Paul wasn’t character consistent. So ultimately I wound up designing the Ibanez PS10, which really was based upon all my favorite Gibson guitars. 

The specs came off a bunch of guitars that I loved, and the construction was based on a mahogany body with a maple cap, and a mahogany neck, so it was very familiar. And if you play one, it feels very familiar, because the specifics — as far as the measurements and construction and all the hardware go — are classic. They’re tried and true.

A glam-rock hero inspired the creation of your cracked mirror Ibanez Iceman guitar.

Yes, that’s right. My mirror Iceman guitar was actually not a unique or original idea. Noddy Holder from Slade had a top hat with these huge circular mirrors on it. So when they hit Noddy’s top hat with the lights, these beams seemed to come out of his head. It was such a cool idea, and that’s where the idea for the mirrored guitar came from. In many ways, Slade was the English counterpart to us. They wrote these great anthems. Live, they were simple, but, boy, did they put their boot up your ass!

Humble Pie were one of your primary influences for the sound of Kiss. 

Yes, they most certainly were one of the inspirations behind Kiss’s sound. Steve Marriott was a terrific rhythm player. Seeing them perform at the Fillmore and watching Steve Marriott command and preach to an audience was something that inspired me, and his approach was something that I wanted to do onstage, but in my own way. 

In terms of your chord choices, positions and inversions, who were you channeling?

In the early days of Humble Pie, Steve Marriott and Peter Frampton created a sound like one big guitar. That was a part of the template for what I wanted to do. I’ve always wanted Kiss to be like one big guitar, which means that the other guitarist and I play different inversions. The goal was to do something that one guitar couldn’t, but play it in a way so that it becomes like one big guitar. 

My first exposure to the blues was Albert, Freddie and B.B. King and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. I really appreciated what they were doing, but I was more intrigued with where things went from there. 

Still, I think to do your best as a musician, you need to be exposed to a variety of music that’s outside of what you innately do. That’s why there are Kiss songs where I can point out the Spinners; there are Kiss songs where I can point out the Four Tops, Free — all kinds of groups. 

I grew up listening to opera and show tunes and R&B, and I went to bluegrass hootenannys and over to the Village and saw Dave Van Ronk at the Gaslight Cafe. For me, it was all about funneling everything that I was exposed to and loved into something else. 

With Keith Richards, when I heard things like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Brown Sugar,” I didn’t realize that he was playing in open G, so a lot of my playing was about using sus chords and trying to get that feel. It wasn’t until, gosh, the ’70s that I realized I could take my low E string off and tune to an open G. So a lot of my playing was rhythm-based. 

My songs and a lot of the riffs I came up with were based on my limitations, which sometimes can be your biggest asset. I might start a lick and not know where to go and just throw in something basic. That’s what I did with [1976’s Destroyer cut] “God of Thunder.” I had the beginning of the riff and I didn’t know where to go, so I bent those chords after the riff. 

With “I Want You” [from 1976’s Rock and Roll Over], I had the riff and I didn’t know where to go halfway through it, so I did a bunch of hammer-ons on the G string. So I was inspired by a lot of people and took what I could within the scope of what I could do, or wanted to do. 

With songs like “Flaming Youth,” “Shout It Out Loud”, “Comin’ Home” and countless others, I hear a lot of Pete Townshend in your playing and approach. 

Well, if an orchestra played the same figures the same way time and time again, it would get repetitious. But it’s how you build on a theme, and that theme can be chordal; it can be a riff. But to me, the best themes don’t stay stagnant; they evolve as the song evolves. 

Back to Zeppelin, Jimmy is Beethoven. Jimmy uses textures and layers, different kinds of guitars, and builds parts and elaborates on themes. I’ve said to him, “The first time I saw Zeppelin, I was 17, and it raised the bar for me to a level that I felt I can’t achieve. But it’s important to know that that level exists.” 

Jimmy Page reigns supreme as your guitar god. 

I was aware of the lineage and the history of the role of the hot-shot guitar hero in the Yardbirds, starting with Eric Clapton who left to join John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and was replaced by Jeff Beck, who at one point was joined by his friend Jimmy Page. 

Although I didn’t see that lineup, I saw the Yardbirds in New York after Beck had left and Jimmy was playing lead. When I saw the Yardbirds live, I was blown away by his ability to play what had already been done and still give it his own interpretation. For me, in many ways, he was the future. 

What was interesting about the guitar players in the Yardbirds is how they all had a love for the blues and took it in different directions, particularly when you listen to Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, who seemed less purist and more adventurous. It’s interesting to note that both the Jeff Beck Group, which Beck formed after his stint in the Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin virtually came about at the same time. 

Led Zeppelin’s first show as Led Zeppelin was October of 1968, and they were rehearsing before that. The Jeff Beck album Truth came out in late July of ’68, so both in a sense were incubating at the same time. 

It’s interesting how Jimmy Page’s vision of what was possible was so much broader and wider. He understood the complexities and subtleties of producing and arranging and brought that to his band. 

As brilliant as Jeff Beck was, that’s something he couldn’t do, whether it was the limitations of the people he played with, which he himself has said he found frustrating, or just the fact that Jimmy Page consistently turned out to be a visionary. Beck had to use his phenomenal guitar talents to compensate for a lack of interesting or original material. 

Ace loved Jimmy Page. He very much had a Page sensibility to his playing. The idea of having another guitar player, at least to me, was to play the stuff I couldn’t. I had no problems holding down the fort in terms of chords and rhythms, but somebody had to blow the roof off with a wailing solo, and Ace really had the goods. 

As much as Ace loved Clapton, Beck and Hendrix, and he really did, there’s so much Page and so much swagger in his early playing. It’s so clear and so obvious that some of Ace’s signature licks are very much inspired by Jimmy Page. There’s a lot in “100,000 Years” [from Kiss’s self-titled 1974 debut]. There’s loads of things there that are, at least for my money, quintessential Page. 

Let’s talk about your guitar interplay with Ace. What made that chemistry work for such a long time as a complementary partnership? 

Ace was a very good rhythm player and really played methodical solos. His solos made sense. They weren’t noodling. They were thematic, and as a rhythm guitar player he was solid and could play more than your basic first position. So it helped to create what I wanted to do, which was have that sound of one big guitar. And as I said, that has always meant two people playing different inversions and playing tight enough that it’s something that neither one could do on their own. Ace and I played well together. We really did.

In the studio when you’re working up songs, was there a lot of discussion between you and Ace coming up with complementary parts for each to play? 

Thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of that. We didn’t have to work at it. It was intuitive, and we were both capable of playing rhythm, and that gave us the flexibility and the ability to pretty instinctively play different inversions of chords and do things that at least to our ears were sonically pleasing. 

What was the process in terms of layering guitars? Would you change up guitars if you were doubling a rhythm track yourself? Would you try an SG and then bring in a Les Paul, or would you pretty much stick with the same guitar? 

Depends on what we were doing. At one point, we would record a guitar part, and then we would vari-speed the tape ever so slightly when we doubled it so that between the two guitars there was much more of a shimmer as opposed to just doubling it. That’s something Bob Ezrin taught us. For the most part, a “double” meant doubling my part, not changing and using another guitar. 

I think that, at least for this kind of music, you can overthink it. It’s not unlike when we were in the studio at one point with one producer and he brought in all these amps and said, “Well, this sounds like a Marshall and does this, this and this, and this amp sounds like a Fender.” And I said, [laughing] “Well, if it sounds like a Marshall, then let’s just get a Marshall.” 

All the bands and all the people that I loved and saw and inspired me, they were basically playing a Gibson guitar plugged into a Marshall amp. And if you got a Gibson guitar and a Marshall amp and it didn’t sound good, you either needed a new Gibson guitar or a new Marshall amp. It was just that simple. 

Even in the last decade, there have been times where guitar players and other bands have said, “Your guitar tone is so great. What are you using?” And it’s a guitar and an amp and all those other things that people use to try to replicate that vintage sound. I think they’re on the wrong track. It’s in your hands and it’s in your guitar and amp. 

With respect to your lead playing, I definitely hear a lot of Paul Kossoff, with that great slow vibrato. When I was speaking with Bob Ezrin about your guitar solos, he described them as vocal melodies that are beautifully constructed. 

Bob is right. I tend to think melodically and vocally when I play a solo. It’s not enough to me to play scales. I’d rather memorize a solo based upon a melody as opposed to a scale. 

Your solo on “A World Without Heroes” from (Music From) The Elder may be your shining moment as a lead player. Did you experiment in the studio to come up with that, or was it prepared beforehand as a written solo? 

I just created it while in the studio. It had an emotional feel to the song, and all I was doing was connecting to that. A solo has got to be so much more than playing in the right key. It’s about the expressiveness and the emotion. I think that comes more from a solo that somebody can sing. That’s going to have more emotion in it than somebody doing acrobatics. I may be impressed by the acrobatics, but it does nothing for me emotionally. 

I’m not that kind of player, and I’m not interested in others who do that. I certainly respect and appreciate people who can play with dazzling speed and cram more notes into a measure than the average player, but it does nothing for me. It’s an exercise in futility. It’s nothing more than gibberish. 

With Ace, and then later with Vinnie Vincent, Mark St. John, Bruce Kulick and Tommy Thayer, how much input would you have into their solos? 

I have to say that when Ace was great, he was great, and he came up with so many memorable parts and solos. I can’t remember anything that he was told to do, except the run up in “Love Gun,” which is from a Blues Magoos song called “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet.” Deep Purple nicked that same run. 

But other than that, Ace really came up with some very identifiable and really stellar guitar solos, not because they were incredibly intricate but because they made a lot of sense and some of it was counterpoint to what we were playing rhythmically. He did some very interesting things. 

So when it came to working with Ace, I don’t remember ever suggesting anything to him. He took the reins and galloped on. I can say that there are solos later on after Ace was gone, that, if I didn’t play them, I sang them to the guitarist and they learned it. I will say that many of the solos and pieces on Creatures of the Night certainly sound familiar to me. I mean, just because I can’t play something doesn’t mean I can’t sing it, right?

Gear Tour

T.J. Silljer, Paul’s End of the Road guitar tech, fills us in on the Starchild’s stage arsenal for Kiss’s final shows.

When it comes down to it, all it takes for Paul Stanley to get his game on is a guitar plugged straight into an amp. ”We have tried different things in the rig, as far as modular effects or overdrives,” explains T.J. Silljer, Stanley’s guitar tech on the End of the Road tour. 

“But at the end of the day, we usually just plug directly into the amp and Paul ends up saying, ‘Nothing sounds better than a great guitar plugged straight into a great amp.’ We only use one channel on the amp for the whole show. 

“If he wants a little less gain, he uses his volume knob to clean it up a bit. That’s one of my favorite things about Paul: I love how old school he is with regard to guitar.”

MAIN GUITARS: Ibanez PS10 (Black, Gold, Cracked Mirror, Rhinestone) Gibson Custom Shop “Custom” V Modified by Billy Rowe Ibanez PS60 (used as breakers) According to Siljer, “Each V was customized to suit Paul’s specifications. Body contour, neck profile, frets, hardware, finish and pickups were all changed to make a unique Paul Stanley version of a Gibson classic. 

“Paul doesn’t want to play the same thing everyone else is playing, so he prototyped his own version of the V, making changes to the neck, hardware, body, finish, frets, pickups and adding a custom tailpiece. He wanted a great-playing and great-feeling guitar, but also wanted a unique piece of art you can’t find anywhere else.” 

PICKUPS: Ibanez PS10 Seymour Duncan SH-1N ‘59 Seymour Duncan SH-14 Custom 5 Gibson V Seymour Duncan SH-1N ‘59 Silljer Pickups True Heritage P.A.F. 

STRINGS: PS10 Ernie Ball Custom Gauge 13–52 Gibson V Ernie Ball Beefy Slinky 11–54 PICKS Dunlop celluloid .73 

GUITAR TUNINGS: D standard on all guitars 

AMP & CABINET: ENGL Paul Stanley signature model Marshall 1960B Cabinet 

“Paul knows exactly the sound he is looking for,” Silljer explains. “When playing the PS10 guitars, we have the Duncan Custom 5 in the bridge. That pickup is straight rock and roll tone, and his custom ENGL amp was built around this guitar and pickup. 

“With this guitar-and-amp combination, we usually run everything at 12 o’clock and make small adjustments from there. For the Gibson V, we run a slightly lower-output PAF-style pickup I wound, and I bump up the gain to match output for the front of house.” 

STRAPS: Custom leather beaded strap by Carlino Guitars

MICS: Shure SM58 

For more information, visit paulstanleyguitars.com

When it comes to session guitarists, Steve Lukather is at the top of the list. Wikipedia claims he has recorded tracks on more than 1,500 albums, and while the web encyclopedia is known to get a thing or two wrong, we’re not about to dispute that fact.

Though he’s known best for his work with Toto, Lukather has played on countless hit records for artists that include Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Quincy Jones, Peter Frampton, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson… The list goes on. He’s also enjoyed an acclaimed solo career for over 30 years.

GP’s Matt Blackett sat down with Luke for an interview several years back, and in this excerpt, Lukather talks about four of the most surprising moments he’s ever had in his life as a session guitarist – which just goes to show that even a seasoned pro like Steve can be in for a shock once in a while.

Let’s talk about Lionel Richie’s “Running with the Night."

He called me and said, “I want you to play a solo on this song of mine.” It was right after “Beat It,” and everybody wanted to get a rock guy to solo on pop/R&B stuff. I show up with my ’Burst and Rivera-modded Deluxe Reverb, and I cranked it all the way up.

He plays me the song, and I just started noodling through the whole thing. I said, “I think I’ve got it. Let’s do it.” He said, “You just did.” I said, “Come on! I was just kind of wanking my way through.” He goes, “I love it. It’s fantastic! You don’t need to do it again.” That was a 10-minute session.

There was no chart or anything?

I showed up blind, man. We never got demos. We never got to rehearse. I think James Carmichael, his producer, had a road map, but it was all A minor. I said, “Let me fuck around with it,” and they rolled the tape.

GP’s Jude Gold called your “Running with the Night” performance a “zero-take solo.” Do you have any other zero-take sessions?

I once did a solo on a David Crosby record without ever hearing the song. We had done one song and Crosby said, “Luke, do a solo on this other track.” I love Croz, but I was trying to finish up because I wanted to go hang with Danny Kortchmar – he was the other guitar player. We’d been there all day. 

Crosby said, “Let me play you the song.” I said, “No, man. What key is it in? Roll the tape.” With all due respect, I knew it wasn’t going to be “Giant Steps” or anything like that. I just reacted to what I was listening to. I played the solo in one take and it was done. He said, “You bastard! You never even heard the song!”

You’ve told the “Beat It” story a million times [Lukather played guitar and bass on the 1982 Michael Jackson track, which features an Eddie Van Halen solo]. What’s another Thriller story?

“Human Nature” had no guitar part on it. The running joke was that Steve Porcaro wrote the song, so it’s really a Toto song with Michael Jackson singing [Porcaro played keyboards in Toto]. 

I had been working with Quincy Jones since his The Dude record, and I came up with a lot of parts for that. I’d get a chord sheet and come up with these quirky little muted parts. So Quincy knew I did that, and he called me and said, “Look, this is a great pop song, but it’s not funky. I need you to funk it up.”

I started noodling around, and I came up with the entire guitar part. It was all me. I wrote that part on the spot, to the point where he gave me arranging credit on the record, and we got nominated for a Grammy. We didn’t win, but it was nice for him to give us the credit. 

We were all over that Thriller record – me, Steve Porcaro, [Toto keyboardist] David Paich and [Toto drummer] Jeff Porcaro.

What about the Tubes’ “Talk to Ya Later”?

David Foster was producing the record, and he said, “I need you to co-write a song with Fee [Waybill, Tubes singer].” I had never met Fee, and some of the other guys in the band were pissed off that they brought in a ringer. I didn’t know until I got there that there was any bad vibe at all.

So it was me, [drummer] Prairie Prince, Foster and Fee. I came up with the opening riff, and we ran with it and came up with the song. It was written and recorded in less than an hour. I overdubbed a bunch of guitars on it, and I also played bass, because the Tubes’ bass player refused to play on the track. He said, “It’s not a Tubes song. It wasn’t written by us.” And it was their first hit!

For the solo at the end, there was one track left, and I had to do the thing in one pass. At the very end of it, it’s a little flat, but they wouldn’t let me fix it. There were certain imperfections on records back then. 

All the records of my childhood have things like the tambourine being way on top of the beat or something. But there’s a charm to the strings being out of tune, or the horns being a little off. It’s a vibe. Nobody cares. The standard for that is a lot different now.

“It’s an apocalyptic vision of the world crumbling into pieces,” David Crosby told Guitar Player of “Wooden Ships,” the sometimes moody, often turbulent anti-war rocker that appeared on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled debut album in 1969.

Although written at the height of the Vietnam War, it has become one of the late guitarist’s most enduring numbers.

And in his last interview with us, in November 2022, he noted with irony and dismay that “everything in the song feels like it’s coming true today. How weird is that?”

Three Guitarists Walk Onto a Boat…

Oddly, the visions of doomsday foretold in “Wooden Ships” (“Horror grips us as we watch you die/all we can do is echo your anguished cries”) were written on the water during an idyllic period in Crosby’s life. He’d just bought a boat, Mayan, and docked it in Fort Lauderdale. To christen the vessel, he invited his new bandmate Stephen Stills and Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner for a fun and peaceful hang.

“Stephen and I had just started CSN with Graham [Nash],” Crosby recalled. “We weren’t intentionally writing material for what became our first record. But that’s what happened.”

The three musicians had acoustic guitars on hand – Crosby brought his Martin D-18, which had been converted to a 12-string – and spent a good chunk of time merrily strumming away in the boat’s cabin.

“I already had some pieces of a song, and before you knew it, we took what I had and blew it up into ‘Wooden Ships,’” Crosby says. “It was a significant moment for me, because I realized, Wow, you don’t have to write this shit all by yourself; you can collaborate with other people. I found out that I really liked it.”

Crosby says the bulk of the song’s chord changes and the melodies are his. “Stephen added some chords, and he wrote words to the second verse,” he recalls. “A lot of the stuff at the front was Kantner – it sounds like him. The guitar intro was Stills. It’s a good mixture of talents. I don’t work with chumps.”

One thing that Crosby neglected to bring aboard was any kind of tape recorder. “I wouldn’t have needed it anyway,” he cavalierly attests. “The song was so fucking good, there’s no way I’d forget it.”

Stephen Stills: MVP

A few months later, Crosby, Stills & Nash convened at Wally Heider Studios in Hollywood to cut their debut record. “We liked working at Wally’s,” Crosby says. “What you played was what came back to you.”

To record “Wooden Ships,” he played an electric 12-string that Alembic had built for him. “That’s probably the best guitar I ever had. I’m pretty sure I put it through a Fender Twin. I got a great sound.”

Recording the basics with drummer Dallas Taylor went smoothly. Crosby believes they had a keeper in two or three takes. “We had fun with it. Things were new and we were excited,” he says. “Those hard guitar chords in the beginning, that’s me. Stephen played bass and lead guitar.”

“Wooden Ships” contains multiple examples of Stills’ bravura soloing. One minute, he’s firing off bracing rock, the next he’s in a mellow jazz-like mode. “His playing is breathtaking,” Crosby marvels. “He didn’t plan anything out because he didn’t have to. The guy’s good, man. He took a few whacks at it, and we picked the best one.”

The Song Doesn’t Remain the Same

Because of a messy contract dispute, Paul Kantner’s name didn’t appear as a co-writer of “Wooden Ships” on the original May 1969 release of Crosby, Stills & Nash. When the matter was resolved, the Airplane recorded their own chilled-out version of the song and included it on their album Volunteers.

In another strange twist, the 1969 Woodstock festival saw both bands – Crosby, Stills & Nash, joined by Neil Young, and the Jefferson Airplane – perform the song during their sets.

“I thought it was cool for the fans because they got two very different visions of the song,” he enthuses. “At the end of the day, the song is really good. It’s got lots of imagination and flavor. I think that’s why it’s lasted.”

Order Crosby, Stills & Nash here.

“I hate retirement,” David Crosby grumbles. The legendary, 81-year-old singer-songwriter and guitarist announced last year that he was calling it a day on touring life (this after six decades on the road), and he’s anything but happy about it.

“It’s miserable not being able to go out and play,” he says, “but after a certain point, it is what it is. Touring is too hard for a guy my age, and tendonitis has affected my ability to play guitar. It’s tough. There’s lots of guys who love being retired, but that isn’t me. It sucks.”

Crosby reveals that he’s still making music (“I can still sing as good as ever, maybe even better”), and he’s psyched about his continuing collaboration with Becca Stevens, Michelle Willis and Michael League, better known as the Lighthouse Band, which began with 2016’s aptly named Lighthouse album.

“Whoa, boy, are they fun!” he raves. “I’ve admired them since they started. They’re such brilliant musicians and singers, and they’re fabulous people. We get along great. It was an accidental thing – I met Michael and started writing some tunes with him. The chemistry just blossomed, and then I started working with the whole band. I bring stuff out of them, they bring stuff out of me – it’s beautiful.”

In 2018, during one of his last full tours, Crosby performed with the Lighthouse Band in support of his album Here If You Listen. Their gig at the famed Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY, has recently been released in both physical and digital formats. “That was a fabulous night, and the recording we made I tremendous,” he says. “Of the live albums I’ve done, this is by far my favorite. I like it even more than Four-Way Street.”

The musician admits that coming up with a setlist was never one of his favorite aspects of touring. “That’s what happens when you’ve got a lot of songs,” he says. “It’s not so much about what to play than it is what to leave out. No matter what I did, people would always say, ‘Why didn’t you do such and such?’” He laughs. “I could have worse problems.”

A number of Crosby’s most iconic songs are featured on David Crosby & The Lighthouse Band Live at the Capitol Theatre, and here he discusses four of them – the original recordings and how he reworked them – as well as a relatively new number that sat in his garage for nearly 50 years.

1. “Guinnevere” from ‘Crosby, Stills & Nash’ by Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)

“It’s such a nice new version we did on the live album. The Lighthouse Band really loved the song, so we decided to play it together. We did it a little differently, but that’s OK. Songs aren’t static. Most people seem to have problems re-imaging their songs, particularly if they’re seen as famous or whatever.

“I never had that problem, and the Lighthouse Band were game to explore. The funny thing is, not only didn’t we play the song like it is on record, but we didn’t even play it the same way twice ourselves.

“When I wrote the song, I was playing around with an open tuning [E, B, D, G, A, D] somebody showed me. It was the first time I ever worked with anything other than standard tuning or a drop D. I retuned the guitar and started playing, and my mind was blown. That tuning game me ‘Guinnevere,’ “Déjà Vu’ and a number of other songs. It blended jazz and folk, which is a really cool place to be, although that wasn’t my intention. I was just transported by the tuning.

“Stephen [Stills] and Graham [Nash] thought it was a weird song. [Laughs] They knew it was good, but they thought it was pretty out-there. But that’s the point! That’s one of the things I liked about it. It sets a mood.”

2. “Déjà Vu” from ‘Déjà Vu’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970)

“There’s several time signatures in this song. It starts off in 6/8 and then goes to a regular 4/4, but in the chorus it goes to 7/4. At the end it goes to 4/4. I wasn’t necessarily trying to put a jazz sensibility into it; it just came out that way. I’ve heard people say, ‘It spins me around in a circle,’ and my attitude is like, ‘Good. As long as it moves you.’

“I played acoustic guitars and electric guitars when we cut it. We did a lot of takes of the song. I’ve read somewhere that we did 100 takes – that’s just crazy. We would never have done 100 takes of anything.

“Stephen and Graham thought this was another weird song [laughs], but that’s the kind of stuff I write. Plus, it was weirdo days back then. But the guys came along and got into it. Funnily enough, they picked the song as the title of the album. It wasn’t my idea. I never even suggested it.

“The new version is way different from what’s on the Déjà Vu album. It spreads out very leisurely. The chemistry of the Lighthouse Band changed it around in a really cool way.”

3. “1974” from ‘Here If You Listen’ by David Crosby (2018)

“Almost 50 years after I started this song, it’s now a reality. This is a little like ‘Tamalpais High,’ in that I had a song without any words. So what I would do was, I’d stack vocals like horns. It’s a totally valid thing to do.

“I had one of those things sitting around in my garage, and Michael League found it. He got excited: ‘Hey, this is an unfinished song!’ I said to him, ‘Hey, if you want to write some words to it, go for it, baby.’ He and the ladies jumped on the song and wrote the words.

“There’s no significance to the title other than that’s when I started to write it. They came up with the title, not me. It’s mind-blowing that something from five decades ago is now a new song, but that just speaks to the creativity of the Lighthouse Band. They’re a creativity bunch. They see something and they just do. I have to work hard just to keep up with them.”

4. “Woodstock” from ‘Déjà Vu’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970)

“Joni Mitchell gave us a demo of the song. It was just her singing and playing guitar, and it was beautiful, of course. But it was completely different from what we ended up doing with it. I loved it immediately and thought it offered us a lot of territory to explore.

“I wish I could say that I had a plan to really rock it out, but it just happened, like so many things. Stills came up with the electric intro – he had already been working around with the song. It’s the only track on the album where all of us played together in one room.

“I keep talking about chemistry – that was chemistry, boy. You drop a song on CSN and Y, and you’re gonna see stuff happen. I played acoustic, and Stephen and Neil played electric. That was one of our go-to moves – guitar heroics from those guys. We could do that because they were that good.

“I never thought it would be a single. None of us did – we thought it was too weird. At that time, our singles were ‘Marrakesh Express’ and ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’ stuff that was a little softer. We weren’t known as a hard rock band, but we did an amazing job with this one.”

5. “Almost Cut My Hair” from ‘Déjà Vu’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970)

“I once said this was a juvenile song. It’s not a complex song; it’s simple, but I still like it. I’m not ashamed of it. I wish I could take credit for the guitar parts, but that was Stephen and Neil [Young].

“I played them the song on acoustic, and they instinctively knew what to do. They attacked it. [Laughs] I never had to show them parts. When you have guys that fucking good, you don’t need to show them anything. It was such a joy to watch them go at it.

“It’s a fun song that has some guts to it. Many, many people say that it’s one of their favorites. And I say, ‘Thank you.’” 

Order David Crosby: Remember My Name here.

Last week (January 18), we sadly lost David Crosby. 

As a founding member and guitarist for the Byrds, and later Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Crosby left a huge mark on rock with both his lyricism and guitar playing. 

Crosby wasn't the chief hitmaker or lead electric guitar player for either group, but his songwriting nevertheless served as the foundation for countless magical guitar moments. 

A perfect example is the below video of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performing Crosby's defiant counterculture anthem, "Almost Cut My Hair," to an appreciative stadium crowd in 1974. 

Filmed during the supergroup's infamous 1974 stadium tour, the video features a blazing duel between the group's two chief guitar-slingers – Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

Though the performance sounds great today, at the time, stadium rock – and the equipment that was supposed to support it – was still in its infancy. 

“We had good monitors, but Stephen and Neil were punching well over 100 db from their half stacks," Crosby told Rolling Stone in 2014. "Graham and I simply couldn’t do the harmonies when we couldn’t hear ourselves."

“The guitar duels between Stephen and Neil got really loud," added CSNY bass guitar player Tim Drummond in the same piece. "I’d just wander between the amplifiers and do my thing so I could hear myself. I was lucky I made it through that tour without ruining my ears.”

In more ways than one, the tour – recordings of which are featured on the triple-disc 2014 live album CSNY 1974 – was emblematic of its era.

"There was this weird troglodyte notion, and this wasn’t just a CSNY problem, that you’ve got to turn it up to eleven," photographer Joel Bernstein told Rolling Stone in 2014. "That’s not the case at all. You need to trust your PA mixer. 

"When the volume did come down they were playing wonderfully. They didn’t need to make it that loud.”

***This article was originally published in the October 2021 issue of Guitar Player***

David Crosby is an iconic acoustic captain at the helm of his ever-fantastic ship, always listening for a song on the wind that might lead him to some mystical, musical port of call. More than ever lately, he appears to be a man on a mission, perhaps making up for lost time.

He’s dropped five albums since 2014. Snarky Puppy ringleader and bass ace Michael League produced 2016’s Lighthouse, and they’ve continued a working relationship that Crosby regards as a band.

Otherwise, the guitarist’s primary co-captain is his son James Raymond. Crosby refers to their collaboration as Sky Trails, which is the title of their 2017 album, and James also produced the new album, For Free (BMG).

The colorful folk-rock legend sounds almost too good for having lived a pirate’s life. His voice is unbelievably unweathered. His fingerpicking and signature six- and 12-string sounds are well intact, but as Crosby reveals in this feature, there is trouble on the horizon in the form of treacherous tendonitis.

Before sailing into the sunset, he’s being as creative as possible. What he hasn’t been doing is working with the company of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It’s well documented that much love has been lost on that front. No more new musical magic is expected from the quartet, but there is a fantastic new 50th anniversary boxed-set edition of Déjà Vu featuring insightful guitar-and-vocal demos and extensive liner notes by Cameron Crowe.

What we can expect at some point, according to Crosby, is a major documentary produced by Nigel Sinclair and Tim Sexton (Sinclair recently produced the stellar Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart).

For Free gets its title from the Joni Mitchell classic that Crosby covers on the new album. He credits her for opening his eyes to alternate tunings, which he still uses to create deep, cosmic textures.

“I Think I” is a crafty composition with exceptional acoustic guitars and vocals that exemplify Crosby’s breezy, existential vibe. Steely Dan fans will dig the funky groove and jazzy changes on his collaboration with Donald Fagan, “Rodriguez for a Night.”

Clever electric guitar comes courtesy of session legend Dean Parks (Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Steely Dan), who also wrote the music for the soldier song “Shot at Me.” There are some catchy commercial hooks here as well, including “River Rise,” which features backing vocals courtesy of another cat from the Steely Dan camp, Michael McDonald.

Most cuts feature Crosby’s acoustic at the core, and he’s a better guitar player than he often gets credit for, considering how much attention is paid to his voice and character. He’s actually quite humble about his playing and understands why most of the guitar cred from his crew has gone to Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

“Naturally it would go to them, man,” he says. “Those guys are lead players and have different levels of competency.”

Crosby is a true acoustic guitar aficionado, and he can’t help himself from boasting a bit about his awesome collection. He still uses most of it, including his classic Martins from the Woodstock era.

Perhaps his most infamous Martin is his six-to-12-string conversion D-18. Martin has released limited-edition signature versions, first as the D-18DC in 2002, and then as the D-12 David Crosby, featuring a reversed string course in the third slot, in 2009.

Guitar Player fortuitously caught up with Croz on the heels of recent features with other notable 12-string appreciators from his generation, Leo Kottke and Taj Mahal.

How did your six-string roots start you down the 12-string path?

It’s an interesting story. The first guitar I bought was made by a banjo company that produced a 12-string guitar. Bob Gibson [an American folk singer and a key figure in the 1950s/’60s folk revival] played one, and he was one of the folk guys I liked, so I got one too.

But the first good one was a Martin D-18 that I bought at a music store in Chicago when I was living there. When I moved to California, I took it to Jon Lundberg in Berkeley and asked him to convert it to a 12-string because I was entranced with 12-strings. He did, and to this day it’s the best.

Kottke is going to argue with me about this, but I have a handful of the best 12-strings existing in the world. That one is still the king. It’s better than my D-45 12-string from the Martin Custom Shop, which is killer fucking good. Or my Roy Smeck Gibson that the folks at Alembic converted into a 12-string, and that looks exactly as if there had been a Roy Smeck Gibson 12-string.

Or the copy Martin made of my D-18 for the prototype of my signature 12-string. That has an ebony neck, and it is still hanging on my wall. I truly love 12-strings, and the best one I’ve ever had is still that first one.

Why?

Every single one is different, like snowflakes. Maybe it’s the wood combination. Maybe it’s all the love I’ve poured into it over the years. I’ll line them all up and let you play them, and you’ll come to the same conclusion. Although I’ve got to say that the D-45 rings like a bell.

The original modified D-18 has 12 frets to the body, correct?

Yeah, that puts the bridge a little further back, and for some reason that works. I don’t know why. It is what it is.

What inspired you to have the modification done in the first place?

It was the sound of the guitar. It sounded so good as a six-string, and I should have left it like that, but I was enthralled with the 12-string, so I took the chance, and it worked, out of sheer luck.

Why were you so enthralled with the 12-string? Who was turning you on at that time?  

Bob Gibson and Pete Seeger are the two that jump to mind. I just liked 12-strings right away, and I still do. I was playing that D-18 conversion last night.

It’s interesting that you come to the 12-string from a folk perspective and wind up in the Byrds, perhaps the most famous jangling-rock outfit ever, yet you jump to an electric Gretsch six-string and Roger McGuinn does all the jangling on a 12-string Rickenbacker, correct?

Yeah, it’s not me, it’s Roger. He was always a much better guitar player than me. When he got one of the first Rickies, it sounded like a glass avalanche. Unbelievable. He’s such a gifted musician. He basically does one thing, but he does it really well. He’s also brilliant at voicing something into a different form, like turning “Mr. Tambourine Man” from a terrible goddamned demo into that brilliant record.

I started out playing a Gretsch Tennessean in the Byrds, but then switched pretty quickly to a Country Gentlemen, which was a better guitar.

Even more interesting is that you wind up returning to the acoustic for the act that defines folk rock, Crosby, Stills & Nash. In fact, you all start out on acoustic for that, right?

Yeah, Stephen and I are both crazy about acoustic guitars. Graham likes them, but it’s not quite the same. Stephen and I kind of worship them. We love them a lot. We each have multiple stunning guitars, and that’s why we fall in love with them. I have five Martin D-45s.

What were you thinking when Martin re-introduced the D-45 in the late ’60s?

We knew that Martin had the best wood stashed, because they’d been buying it before anybody else, and that they’d uncorked their stash of Brazilian rosewood, which is now gone. And they had a stash of top wood that they thought was their absolute best. They combined them, and that was irresistible to us.

We could get one for about five grand, and as far as we were concerned that was the best guitar anybody was making. I think we were right. I have three of those 1969 D-45s. They’re the ones with all the wear from being played at the concerts. I also have one made of koa, and it’s a mind-boggling guitar with an unbelievable sound.

Can you share the story of “Wooden Ships” from the Crosby, Stills & Nash debut in 1969?

I wrote it on that 12-string [longtime tech John Gonzales says Crosby refers to the guitar as “the Wooden Ships 12-string”]. I’d say that 90 percent of the chord changes are mine. I brought the music to Stephen and Paul Kantner. Stephen added a couple of very significant changes that really helped.

We were on my boat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was docked at a friend’s house and they both came down to visit. We wrote it right there, sitting in the main cabin. Paul gave me some key lyrics that started it going really well. You can guess which verse Stephen wrote: “Horror grips us...” [laughs]

That’s in standard tuning, but you were into alternates, as evidenced by the haunting sound on “Guinnevere.” How did you arrive at that unique tuning?

A kid from the Midwest showed me that tuning that, from low to high, goes E B D G A D, and I got “Guinnevere” and “Déjà Vu” out of it. I’ll tell you what got me started: My brother turned me on to jazz early on and I liked some keyboard players, including Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. They’d play chords that were like huge freaking tone clusters. Thick stuff. My hand wasn’t good enough to play them in standard tuning.

Some guitar players can approach playing the same stuff as a piano player, using closed positions in standard tuning, but the guitarist can only produce six notes, so the piano player has got you by at least four. I couldn’t do it, but in alternate tunings, different inversions of the chords came up. I started to get to those strange, mystical places I wanted to go.

The chords on “Déjà Vu” can be found simply by barring the top three strings at the 3rd and 5th frets. It’s a matter of which order you pick the notes. I fingerpick with my thumb and first three fingers. The rhythm on “Guinnevere” goes 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, which is actually very normal.

The main guitar is one of the 1969 D-45s. There are a couple of guitars along with it on the intro, and one of them is probably the 12-string. There are a couple of guitars on “Déjà Vu,” but I’m not sure which ones. We didn’t record it until the Déjà Vu album [released in 1970], but I had the music early on when I was leaving the Byrds and started hanging out with Stephen Stills.

The 50th anniversary edition of Déjà Vu includes the demos for “Almost Cut My Hair” and “Laughing,” which isn’t on that record but becomes a signature guitar track on your solo debut [If I Could Only Remember My Name, 1971]. Can you offer some guitar insights?

I’ll guess that I’m playing one of the ’69 D-45s on “Almost Cut My Hair.” That song is in standard tuning, although it might be dropped a whole step for the demo. “Laughing” is in an alternate tuning that, from low to high, goes D G D D A D, and again the demo might be dropped a whole step from the full studio version.

The vibe that tuning summons is similar to the slow section on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Did you get that from Stills, or did he get it from you?

More he got it from me. The people who taught me the most were Joni [Mitchell] and Michael Hedges. Stephen got into tunings pretty much right away, but he was a blues player, so he could take them to a different place than I could. Joni and Michael worked tunings to the most sophisticated level. They’re both geniuses at it.

And once I found out what kind of music I could write – “Guinnevere” being a good example – I loved it. So, of course, I kept exploring tunings. Over and over again, my best stuff is in alternate tunings.

“Music Is Love” [from If I Could Only Remember My Name] is another example, although I can’t remember that exact tuning right now [low to high, D A D G B D, and the original recording is dropped a half step]. That’s another good example of the original 12-string’s sound.

“I Think I” from the new album has a classic Crosby sound, perhaps in some kind of C tuning.

It’s in an alternate tuning that’s been very good for creating several songs, although I can’t say exactly what it is right now. There are two acoustic parts on there. Steve Postell played the beautiful acoustic lead at the end, and I played the fingerpicking part on one of the 1969 D-45s.

“Other Side of Midnight” is a lovely cosmic tune with a killer chord progression. What’s the guitar story?

You’re going to be pissed, because there isn’t one. Every single sound on that recording is synthesized. My son James played all the guitar sounds on a computer. He’s that good at it. You shouldn’t be able to do that, but he can. I’m not sure if we should allow him in the country. [laughs]

Who’s playing the high chimey intro on “Shot at Me”?

One of the best guitar players in the world, Dean Parks, wrote the music and played on that song. The lyrics are about guys coming back from the sandboxes in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. It wrecks them and really screws them up.

Do you still take your vintage Martins on the road?

I’ve been taking two of the three ’69s, even though it’s crazy to do so because they’re worth, like, a hundred grand each. But I’ve been taking them on the road anyway because they’re that good. I also have a Gibson J-200 made out of Brazilian rosewood from their custom shop that I have taken on the road.

And I have some guitars made by Roy McAlister up near Seattle. He showed up at my door one day saying he’d made me a guitar. It was a triple-0 body style, and I prefer dreadnoughts, but he mentioned that he was the guy at Santa Cruz Guitars who had made the copy of my 12-string, which is another one I have. So I invited him in, and it was one of the best guitars I’d ever touched. It’s still the one closest to the bed. I’ve given five of his guitars away to other players, and I have five others that he made, including a mind-boggling 12-string. I take four of his guitars on the road.

Including the 12-string?

No, when I play 12-string in the live show it’s an electric made by Alembic.

How do you electrify your acoustics?

We have gone through the stages of the cross when it comes to pickups. I don’t use any pedals. The signal goes straight to the house, and I have two monitors: one for my voice and one for my acoustic guitars. I use a Magnatone amp for the electrics. [John Gonzales reports that the acoustics all have D’Addario EXP16 strings and Fishman Matrix Infinity undersaddle piezo pickup systems that feed into Radial J48 direct boxes. The electric Alembic 12-string was custom built around 1970, and the Magnatone amp is a Twilighter.]

How are your hands?

I’ve got tendonitis in both. I can play, but I’m down to about 80 percent of what I used to be able to do, and it’s steadily deteriorating. The middle finger on my right hand doesn’t bend well. I had an operation done, but that actually made it worse.

I’m not trying to whine and snivel here. I’ve just got to cope with this reality. I’d guess I’ve got about another year to play guitar, if I’m lucky. It’s not a solvable problem. That’s just how it is. I’ve been playing for 70 years. I’ve had a good run, man.

Can you do any more tours?

I don’t think I can tour anymore. Well, maybe limited, but I do think I can make a couple more records. I’d like to do another Lighthouse record with Michael League and that lineup, but he lives in Spain now, so we’ll see.

James and I have already started the next record. They don’t pay us for them anymore, but we didn’t start doing them for money in the first place. We started doing them because we loved doing them, and we still love doing them. Albums are still our art form. They are what we have based our life on, and we still love making music. They are what we are going to leave behind.

Grab your copy of For Free here.

Legendary singer-songwriter and guitarist David Crosby has died at the age of 81.

A pioneer of the 1960s folk rock movement, Crosby co-founded the Byrds along with Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark in 1964. The following year, the Byrds released their era-defining debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, scoring the band a top ten hit on the Billboard charts.

Further success followed, however, by late ’67 Crosby had parted ways with the Byrds due to musical differences.

The following year, he formed the supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash along with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and the Hollies’ Graham Nash.

Released in 1969, the trio’s debut album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, peaked at the number 6 position on the Billboard charts.

Adding ex-Buffalo Springfield member Neil Young, the group performed at the Woodstock festival before releasing the Billboard number one Déjà Vu album in 1970 as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

In 1971, Crosby launched his debut solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name. His last, For Free, arrived in 2021.

Speaking of his recorded work in a 2021 interview, Crosby told Guitar Player: “Albums are still our art form. They are what we have based our life on, and we still love making music. They are what we are going to leave behind.”

Shortly before he passed away, Crosby joked on Twitter that heaven was “overrated… cloudy.”

Soon after, tributes began to pour in from across the music world.

“I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times,” wrote Nash, “but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years.”

"He was without question a giant of a musician," said Stills, "and his harmonic sensibilities were nothing short of genius. The glue that held us together as our vocals soared, like Icarus, towards the sun.

"I am deeply saddened at his passing and shall miss him beyond measure.”

"David was an unbelievable talent - such a great singer and songwriter" tweeted the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson. "And a wonderful person."

Nils Lofgren paid tribute with a touching rendition of Tim Hardin's "Black Sheep Boy."

"Dear Croz, Rest in Peace and Song, old friend," he wrote.

After its raucous birth in the 1950s and early demise following Buddy Holly’s death, Chuck Berry’s imprisonment, Elvis Presley’s Army enlistment and Little Richard’s spiritual rebirth, rock ‘n’ roll shriveled up.

The epicene years from 1960 to 1964 had been a formative but difficult period in which garage rock bands claimed back a piece of the teen pop charts before the British Invasion groups led the way to a rock ‘n’ roll victory.

Those spirited rebels were anything but monolithic. Many brought together influences of early rock, folk, blues, soul, trad jazz and more.

It’s hardly surprising that the old formulas for songwriting and music production were inadequate to the aims of these young and ambitious performers.

Something had to change, and in 1965, it did, largely due to the work of guitarists.

Fuzz effects, once novelty devices on songs like the Venture’s “The 2000 Pound Bee,” were used in earnest by players like Jeff Beck and Keith Richards for their otherworldly tones, along with already established effects like tremolo and reverb.

It was Beck, too, who introduced the sonorities of Indian music to rock ‘n’ roll with his guitar, soon to be followed by George Harrison and Brian Jones, who did likewise by learning the rudiments of the sitar.

What followed was a radical reconfiguring of teen “beat” music.

In the hallowed halls of recording studios like London’s Abbey Road and Trident, this took place with serious application of orchestras, Mellotrons, electric pianos, harpsichords, organs and early Moog synthesizers.

In the dingy basements and dirty garages of teen bands in the U.S., it was evidenced instead by a deconstruction of norms: screamed vocals and fuzzed-out guitars plied against primitive, pummeling beats.

In either form, this was psychedelic rock.

The shocking new sounds fired off synapses in ways familiar to those who had taken LSD.

The drug had become popular in California’s youth culture, primarily in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead were at the epicenter of Ken Kesey’s acid-fueled happenings, as well as in Los Angeles, where Byrds guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby dropped LSD with the Beatles in the summer of 1965.

Within months, both of those bands would dramatically change their musical direction as acid opened their minds to new approaches to sound.

By late 1966, in London, a newly arrived guitarist christened Jimi Hendrix was conjuring up his own singular brand of psychedelic guitar rock.

He needed nothing more than a Stratocaster and Marshall stack to do so, but with assistance from early effects guru Roger Mayer, Hendrix blew down the walls and signaled the birth of a potent brew of blues-based psychedelia that redefined the electric guitar.

Rock ‘n’ roll was never the same.

On this day in 1971, Carole King released her second album, Tapestry. Considered an era-defining masterpiece this Grammy Award-winning multi-platinum LP remained on the Billboard 200 for several years throughout the decade.

While King’s unparalleled output as a songwriter has seen her heralded as one of the most influential musical artists of all time, Tapestry was her breakthrough album as solo performer.

Embellishing the recording was King’s long-time collaborator Danny Kortchmar – an ace session guitarist and producer whose phenomenal list of credits also includes James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, David Crosby and Graham Nash.

“For the Tapestry sessions, we were cutting three tracks a day at A&M studios,” Kortchmar told Guitar Player. 

“Everybody was in the room sitting very close together, playing live. For a lot of the songs we had chord sheets, but for ‘It’s Too Late,’ Carole sat at the piano and played the song; I just had to absorb it.

“When it came to the solo, I was told, ‘Play something melancholy.’ I was using a Telecaster and probably a Princeton amp. I think I did two or three passes, and everybody seemed pretty pleased.

“I have to be honest: At the time, I wasn’t feeling crazy about my playing on it. I thought it was kind of lazy. I had no idea that the song was going to be a Number One record, and that I was going to be listening to it in supermarkets and drug stores my whole life.

“Over the years, I’ve learned to dig the solo, and I realized that what I played was very authentic and fit the song perfectly.”

Buy Tapestry here.

Growing up, I was exposed to many great artists through the wall separating my bedroom from that of my two older sisters. Lucky for me, my siblings had great taste. “We” listened to Hendrix, the Incredible String Band, the Easy Rider soundtrack and the Beatles, to name a few. It was in this manner that I discovered Buffalo Springfield's Again.

Released in 1967 on Atco Records, it was the second of three Buffalo Springfield releases and, in my opinion, it’s their finest record. Years later when, as an adult, I put Buffalo Springfield Again on my turntable, my appreciation was more mature, but the result was the same. Then and now, I love this LP.

With a lineup that featured Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay on guitars and vocals, Bruce Palmer on bass and Dewey Martin on drums and vocals, Buffalo Springfield comprised a stylistically eclectic range of influences, yet their sound held together seamlessly while their vocals reigned supreme.

Buffalo Springfield Again almost reminds me of a Beatles record with its range of folk, country and psychedelia, all of which somehow coalesce under the banner of country rock, a genre the group helped to define in the late 1960s with albums like this one. In addition to the group’s five members, Buffalo Springfield Again features a talented cast that includes James Burton on Dobro, co-producer Jack Nitzsche on piano and members of the Wrecking Crew. It’s a tasty stew of talent.

The record kicks off with Young’s “Mr. Soul.” Young is the rare artist who can successfully cover a lot of ground, from extreme raw angst to an almost feminine melancholy. “Mr. Soul” is from his “Cinnamon Girl” songwriting template, a catchy rocker with great guitar hooks and an infectious melody.

It’s followed by Furay’s “A Child’s Claim to Fame,” which encompasses and predates the definitive California country sound we’ve come to know, with Burton’s Dobro contributing playfully to the party.

“Everydays” is a Stills tune that finds the group playing its mutated version of jazz, but it’s never naïve or overreaching. Stills has a knack for a great melody, and the drone notes, distorted electric guitar and harmonies make this track Buffalo Springfield’s unique take on the genre.

“Expecting to Fly” is another Young composition, and it brings to my mind the Moody Blues’ “Knights in White Satin,” which was released a scant week before this album. “Bluebird” is another Stills tune with more absolutely great guitar tones, and one that sounds like it could have been on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu.

My favorite track is “Hung Upside Down,” and it’s the song I usually play for the uninitiated. Harmony “woman tone” guitars invite us in, and the song takes hold, never letting you go. The melody is haunting, and the Young-and-Stills tandem kill it. The louder I play this song, the better it sounds.

“Sad Memory” is a Richie Furay original that could have been played in a lonely folk coffee shop. ”Good Time Boy” is an Otis Redding-style track that shows Furay’s versatility with a catchy R&B groove, while Young’s “Broken Arrow” closes the record. As for this last cut, the band’s ambition might have exceeded the end result. My personal grading for this erratic track might hover around a C-plus. That said, it’s still a great record.

The story goes that when Stills suggested Young join CS&N, Graham Nash was against it. After Young himself suggested Nash listen to the Young-and-Stills guitar tandem, he had a change of heart. What I find interesting about this duo is that they don’t play the traditional roles of any classic guitar team but instead seem to slip in and out of a deep conversation and often speak at the same time.

To me, Stills and Young are underrated for some things and possibly overrated for other things, but their rock-guitar duo thing is vastly underappreciated (see Déjà Vu’s “Woodstock” below). They play together as totally generous narcissists who know each other completely.

I always mention Buffalo Springfield Again when discussing noteworthy pop with my pals. Many folks aren’t aware of the record, or perhaps they simply forgot about it. Either way, I suggest spending some time with it, preferably in the same room as your speakers.

Get your copy of Again by Buffalo Springfield here.

Jim Campilongo has 14 critically acclaimed instrumental records available on vinyl, CD and digital download here.

In 1971, rock and roll guitar was barely in its teens. But, remarkably, what started as R&B- and western-swing-infused three-chord rave-ups had grown to incorporate elements of folk, Chicago blues, modal jazz, Indian classical music and flamenco. The music of the 1960s – especially that of the Beatles – proved that the pop charts could deliver expressive, high-quality artistry that rivaled that produced in jazz clubs and symphonic halls. The music of the time also became the de facto voice of one of the most significant cultural upheavals in American history.

As the new decade dawned, musicians were presented with a blank canvas on which they created what can rightfully be seen as the rock era’s belle époch. Indeed, many famous artists released their defining masterpieces during this fertile 12-month period.

Guitar Player has celebrated the 50th anniversary of this magic year with features on some of the greatest albums from 1971. Now, with it just about over, let’s have one final celebration of the albums, artists and guitarists that made the year so significant.

Power (Chords) to the People

The Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy was an ambitious project that established them as major players, but it was 1971’s Who’s Next that is often considered their crowning achievement.

Ex. 1 is loosely based on the pugilistic power chords Pete Townshend delivers during epic anthems like “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The consummate rock rhythm player, Townshend didn’t merely “strum.” Rather, he attacked his strings with powerful percussive jabs, pioneering a style that would evolve into punk and metal in the hands of the next generation. When playing this example, try using a short, controlled wrist motion, striking the lowest strings with extra oompf! 

Going for Soul

A 2020 Rolling Stone poll cited Marvin Gaye’s 1971 release What’s Going On as the greatest album of all time, and though polls are subjective and art isn’t easily quantifiable, the album’s merit is unquestionable. Gaye’s emotive vocals and heartfelt lyrics are front and center on this song cycle about a Vietnam vet returning home to find his country in turmoil. However, the unsung heroes of this and many other great Motown releases are the Funk Brothers, a loose collection of studio musicians who played uncredited on dozens of hits.

Ex. 2 recalls guitarist Robert White’s pulsating chord work on the title track, a clever combination of jazz harmony and funk rhythm. To play the percussive “scratch” strums (indicated by Xs), simply loosen your fret-hand’s grip on the neck without taking your fingers off the strings. This will effectively mute the strings, so that, when strummed, they produce the hollow, pitchless “chick” sound that is a signature of funk guitar.

Sticking It to the '70s

The Rolling Stones were indisputably one of the most popular and influential musical acts of the ’60s. As the decade drew to a close, however, dark clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon. The band experienced the death of founding member Brian Jones and watched in horror as the Hells Angels security detail they hired for a 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway murdered one attendee and brutalized several others. 

They also sought to extricate themselves from management and recording contracts. Come 1971, the band returned with their own label, a new iconic tongue-and-lips logo, and arguably their finest record to date, Sticky Fingers.

Around this time, Keith Richards had fully embraced open-G tuning (low to high: D, G, D, G, B, D), and Ex. 3 takes inspiration from his clever riffage and chord voicings on such Stones classics as “Brown Sugar” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” 

Meeting of the Masters

Miles Davis was a pioneer of multiple styles of jazz, including bebop, cool, hard-bop, and modal jazz, and when he incorporated electronic instruments and rock beats on 1969’s Bitches Brew, jazz-rock fusion was born. 

Two years later, former Davis guitarist John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a quintet that blended jazz harmony and improvisation, Indian classical scales and rock instrumentation into an incendiary mix. Their 1971 debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, was a hit with rock audiences and established them as the premier fusion band of their time.

Ex. 4 is modeled after “Meeting of the Spirits,” a track that begins with McLaughlin’s hauntingly exotic arpeggiated chords before exploding into an impassioned exploration around the Phrygian-dominant mode (1, b2, 3, 4, 5, 6, b7). 

Tapping Into English Moods

Without a doubt, 1971 was a landmark year for progressive rock, a style of music that drew heavily on European classical influences.

Ex. 5 is an homage to guitarist Steve Howe’s use of classical guitar techniques to enliven songs such as “Roundabout” and the solo piece “Mood for a Day” that were featured on Yes’s brilliant album Fragile.

Another significant prog release from 1971 was Genesis’s Nursery Cryme. Although not as well-known as Fragile, the record did herald the debut of Steve Hackett, a guitarist who employed fretboard tapping several years before Eddie Van Halen.

Ex. 6 recalls his approach on “Return of the Giant Hogweed,” but unlike Van Halen, Hackett would tap the strings with the edge of his pick instead of using a fingertip. 

A Case of the Blues

Although often labeled as a folk artist, Joni Mitchell drew inspiration from many sources. Throughout her storied career, the eclectic composer has melded elements of jazz, pop, blues, and electronica in with her songwriting and has collaborated with artists as varied as David Crosby, Charles Mingus and Pat Metheny. 

Mitchell often wrote and performed in a wide variety of open tunings, many of her own design, but for 1971’s Blue, her instrument of choice was often a four-string Appalachian dulcimer.

Because of variances in string thickness, it’s impossible to match the dulcimer’s tuning and timbre on a standard guitar, but for Ex. 7’s approximation of “A Case of You,” we tuned the top two strings down a whole step, to A and D, respectively, and the G string up a whole step to A, resulting in two unison A strings. This makes our tuning, low to high, E, A, D, A, A D.

If you stick to the top four strings, it evokes the droning unisons, octaves and 5ths associated with dulcimer tunings. Perhaps the larger lesson here is inspirational and not technical. Mitchell’s fearless artistic exploration and constant experimentation is a beautiful reminder to step outside of our comfort zones. 

My Back Pages

As 1971 dawned, Led Zeppelin – the supergroup that Jimmy Page had formed in the wake of the Yardbirds’ dissolution – was already in full flight, but it was their fourth album (generally referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, but officially named by the four cryptic symbols that adorned a sticker on the album’s wrapper) that would cement their legacy as the greatest hard rock band of all time.

Ex. 8 is inspired by the outro to “Black Dog” and demonstrates Page’s clever appropriation of country and blues licks to extend rock’s lead vocabulary beyond simple pentatonic scales. Centered on an A dominant-7 tonality, it makes effective use of b3, b5, and b7 color tones (the C, Eb, and G notes, respectively).

For our final example, we’ve chosen to template what is perhaps the most culturally iconic and controversial guitar lick from 1971; Page’s intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” Recent lawsuits have pointed out a similarity to Spirit’s 1969 track “Taurus,” but to our ears, both songs are based on a common musical trope – an A minor chord arpeggio with a bass note that descends down in half steps. Its use in rock music predates Spirit (Google: Ace of Cups “Simplicity” 1968). And, like a 12-bar blues shuffle, it’s arguably fair game when songwriting.

What makes Page’s take on this cliché stand out is his incorporation of contrary motion between the outer voices, with ascending notes on top pitted against descending bass notes. This is a cleverly appealing compositional move, which we’ve also used for Ex. 9.

Although we’ve covered several albums with an enduring legacy, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the major releases that turned 50 this past year. David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, the Doors’ L.A. Woman, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, John Lennon’s Imagine, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story, and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On are among the many great albums making a compelling case that 1971 was in fact the guitar’s – and modern music’s – greatest year.

Roughly a year following the release of Joni Mitchell’s David Crosby-produced 1968 debut album Song to a Seagull the young artist gave her first major concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Among the sold-out crowd were her parents and partner, Graham Nash, along with fellow folk luminary Bob Dylan.

Though the acoustic guitar heroine's record company Reprise had planned to release a recording of the gig it would take over half a century to finally see the light of day. 

Better late than never!

More than 50 years have passed since that fateful Saturday but Mitchell can still recall the events of the evening in fine detail. 

“I flew my parents [Bill and Myrtle] in for the show,” she writes in the liner notes for Archives, Vol. 2: the Reprise Years. “We walked over to Carnegie Hall from the Plaza Hotel. Graham was wearing a floor-length maxi coat, black velvet, but with a pink-and-white chiffon tie-dye scarf. And I was wearing a green-and-white plaid coat. I’ve still got it. It looked like something from a Dickens play. My mother was embarrassed to be seen with us…

“My father came forward and said, ‘Oh, Myrt, she looks like a queen in those rags.’ I loved him for that. Thank God for Papa. He gave me back myself.”

In a performance that garnered rave reviews Mitchell opened her set with “Chelsea Morning,” a lyrically tactual song inspired by the surroundings of her Chelsea District apartment in Manhattan. 

The opening number “Chelsea Morning” is available now to stream for free here.

Joni Mitchell’s Archives, Vol. 2: the Reprise Years (1968-1971) 10-LP and 5-CD sets and 3-LP Live at Carnegie Hall, 1969 vinyl sets are due for release on November 12. 

Visit Joni Mitchell’s website for more information.

On this day in 1969, Dick Cavett's "Woodstock show" aired on American television. Filmed the previous day just hours after the Woodstock festival drew to a close, this historic episode features Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills – all of whom dropped in to perform and talk music following “the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the world.”

“We have two people who just happen to be passing through the studio looking for a payphone that works in New York,” says Dick Cavett. “They are Stephen Stills and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.” 

Still reeling from the spectacle of the Woodstock festival he played earlier that morning, Stephen Stills walks on camera and carefully places down his Martin D-28 acoustic guitar, the festival mud barely dry on his trousers.

Jimi Hendrix was due to appear on the same show, however, following the guitarist’s late appearance at the Woodstock festival he was unable to attend.

“Where do you suppose Hendrix is?” asks Dick Cavett. “Asleep!” comes the answer. “He finished sometime about ten [o’clock],” adds Crosby.

Though Mitchell did not play at the Woodstock festival (she was invited but her manager advised her not to!) the now famous Dick Cavett “Woodstock show” was her television debut. Inspired by the stories regaled to her by boyfriend Graham Nash, Mitchell penned the song “Woodstock” which appeared on her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon.

That same year, a cover version of “Woodstock” was recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for their Déjà Vu album, while the song became a number one hit for Matthews Southern Comfort in the UK.

While this episode of The Dick Cavett Show is famous for being Joni Mitchell’s first TV appearance, it is equally infamous for being the first time the F-bomb was dropped on American TV as Jefferson Airplane sing, “Up against the wall motherfucker!” during their live rendition of “We Can Be Together.”

Following the smash success of their Grammy award-winning 2007 debut LP Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have once again teamed up with producer T Bone Burnett (guitarist with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue). 

The duo’s much-anticipated follow up album – Raise the Roof – is due out on November 19 and features a host of stellar guitarists including Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, Bill Frisell, and Buddy Miller.

“We wanted it to move,” says Krauss. “We brought other people in, other personalities within the band, and coming back together again in the studio brought a new intimacy to the harmonies.”

“You hear something, and you go, ‘Man, listen to that song, we got to sing that song!’” adds Plant. “It’s a vacation, really – the perfect place to go that you least expected to find.”

Consisting of twelve new tracks, Raise the Roof showcases songs by a variety of artists such as Merle Haggard, The Everly Brothers, and British folk guitar hero Bert Jansch, as well as the Plant/Burnett-penned “High and Lonesome,” and the Grammy-nominated Lucinda Williams classic “Can’t Let Go.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have today shared their cover of Randy Williams’ composition “Can’t Let Go.” Powered by a locomotive rhythm, Plant and Krauss duet, “I got a big chain around my neck, And I’m broken down like a train wreck,” while Frisell provides some exemplary reverberated twang tones on electric guitar backed by Hidalgo on acoustic guitar.

Pre-order your copy of Raise the Roof by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss here.

David Crosby has revealed details of his upcoming eighth studio album, For Free, and shared its first single, River Rise.

An instantly catchy folk number, the track sees Crosby pair up with Michael McDonald, trading lead vocal lines with the Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers man over the top of a primarily acoustic guitar-driven arrangement. Listen to it below:

Produced by Crosby's son James Raymond, the album also features a host of other artists, including Donald Fagen – also of Steely Dan – and the multi-Grammy Award-winning Sarah Jarosz, as well as a number of musicians who appeared on Crosby's 2017 album Sky Trails, like saxophonist Steve Tavaglione and drummer Steve DiStanislao.

Says Raymond: “River Rise came from wanting to write something very evocative of California, but almost with a country-song perspective – something that speaks to the empowerment of the everyman or everywoman.”

The album is so titled as it features a cover of Joni Mitchell's For Free, taken from her 1970 record, Ladies of the Canyon. 

“Joni's the greatest living singer-songwriter, and For Free is one of her simplest,” Crosby says. “It’s one of my favorite songs because I love what it says about the spirit of music and what compels you to play.”

On the track Donald Fagen penned exclusively for the record, Crosby explains: “Steely Dan's my favorite band and I've admired Donald a long time, so that was a thrill for us.”

David Crosby's new album For Free arrives July 23 via BMG.

In a new, wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone, David Crosby revealed that he is struggling with tendonitis that may leave him unable to ever play guitar again.

In the interview - which also covered Crosby's political views, his struggles with the financial fallout of the coronavirus and the recent death of his son - Crosby revealed that his attempts to treat the tendonitis have thus far proven unsuccessful.  

“I get trigger-finger tendonitis in my hands,” Crosby said. “I went in to get it fixed and it didn’t work. Now I’m in a tremendous amount of pain in my right hand. It’s entirely possible that I may never play guitar again.”

If unable to play, Crosby said that he may still tour, but will only sing onstage. He also conceded that his age, coupled with the uncertainty of the coronavirus fallout, leaves him unsure about those future touring plans.

“The thing that happens to me is I’m not sure I’ve got a next year,” he says. “I’m almost 80 years old. So when you take away my next year, you might have just taken the last one I got.”

On a brighter note, Crosby says he is still hard at work on his upcoming solo album, which he says will be called "Lifting Force" or "Lift." Featuring the likes of Michael McDonald and Donald Fagen, it will be the follow-up to Croz's most recent solo effort, 2018's Here if You Listen.

“We’ve got three singles. I’ve never had singles before, but I’ve got three of them this time," Crosby said. "I got one we wrote with Michael McDonald that’s just killer. That’s 'River Rise' and Michael sings harmony with me on it. He and I kill it. When we sing together, it’s scary.

“And then we’ve got a song that I wrote with Donald Fagen. It’s really fucking good, man. I’m so honored he gave us a set of words.

“I think people are going to love the record. I think people are going to like the music. And that is great. That is what I’m holding onto, fiercely, to try and get through all the crazy. And there’s a lot of crazy.”