When a die-hard fan spray-painted “Clapton is God” on a London wall in the middle of the British blues boom, it was evident that a modernized interpretation of the blues had successfully captured the imagination of contemporary audiences.

By Clapton's own admission, playing the blues, let alone reshaping it for a new era, required not superhuman talent but plain-old hard work. As he continued to push the genre forward in Cream — after a glimpse of Buddy Guy's live show convinced to form his own power trio —– other artists helped take it to new places in the following decades. Clapton believes Robert Cray did that better than anyone.

“It’s the most difficult thing to write, a modern blues,” Clapton told Rolling Stone in 2017 mused. “The only person I know who can do it well is Robert Cray. It comes straight out of him. I saw him recently this year, and he’s still doing it. He’s on fire, the real thing.

“I wish I could be like that,” he added. “Really, I’m a musician. I try to be a singer and songwriter, and it’s interesting to me. But I would never think of myself as that.”

Clapton, of course, speaks with humility — his success includes 17 Grammy awards. But he felt Cray had the whole package, with his guitar playing and voice working together in perfect harmony.

Despite getting a metaphorical pat on the back from a blues legend, Cray wasn't a purist. Part of his brilliance came from the fact that he peppered his blues with elements of gospel and soul, the musical styles of his upbringing. Blues was, in fact, not his primary source of inspiration.

“My dad would play gospel music on Sundays,” he tells Guitar Player. “It was Swan Silvertones, Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi — and Alabama — and all kinds of stuff like that. During the week, it would be Ray Charles, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Sarah Vaughan...

“It’s funny, because as a kid I heard all that music, and then, as kids do, of course, you listen to your own music. When I got into my late teens and picked up the blues bug, I started taking my parents’ records from the house, and then embellished that collection by buying my own records. So getting the gospel music or getting Curtis Mayfield or the Impressions was all just part of what I grew up on.”

He also played an accidental role in inspiring the hit film The Blues Brothers, having played bass previously in the house band from the film Animal House. While those two instances are comedic footnotes to a journeyman career, Cray is as authentic as modern blues can get.

Unfortunately, for all of Cray's and Clapton's mutual admiration, their friendship wouldn't last. Cray took exception to his friend's decision to sing some lines on Van Morrison's anti-lockdown song, "Stand and Deliver," and ended their relationship.

As he told Clapton, he was particularly taken aback by the lines “Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave? Do you wanna wear these chains / Until you’re lying in the grave?”

“His reaction back to me was that he was referring to slaves from, you know, England from way back,” Cray told The Washington Post.

Cray, who was born in Georgia during segregation, found the reply wanting. He was further dismayed to see a photo of Clapton and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan posing with Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in September 2021. As The Washington Post noted, Abbot had “recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state.”

In addition, Abbott is opposed to vaccination mandates, as is Clapton, who has posted statements against vaccines and described scientific data as "propaganda."

In response to the photo, Clapton's business manager Michael Eaton said at the time that posing with the governor didn't amount to an endorsement of his positions.

“[Clapton] is a great believer in freedom of choice which drives his position on vaccinations,” said Eaton. “And his views on other matters would reflect that belief in freedom of choice.”

It all brings to mind the old saying: You may lose your friends, but you never lose the blues.

Samantha Fish believes the future of blues guitar is in safe hands — and she can point to five players leading the charge.

The Kansas City guitarist, who was championed by the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Slash and Devon Allman as she emerged from the blues underground, has singled out a handful of contemporaries carrying the blues-rock torch into a new era. At the top of her list are Christone Kingfish Ingram and Derek Trucks.

“I just got off the road with Christone Kingfish Ingram, and he’s pretty amazing,” she tells Guitar World. The pair recently shared the bill on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival alongside Warren Haynes, Grace Bowers, Larkin Poe, Eric Gales and plenty of others.

Her praise for Trucks is even stronger.

“I think Derek Trucks is one of the greatest there is,” she says, “not just in blues playing but any playing. He’s an alien.”

Trucks has been performing for almost his entire life. He landed his first paid gig at age 11 and was playing blues clubs with Buddy Guy before his 13th birthday — experiences that, he later revealed, taught him one of his most important lessons about performing.

Fish’s remaining picks are no less enthusiastic.

“I like Gary Clark Jr.,” she says. “He’s very tasteful, and he’s got a great tone.

“Eric Gales is incredible,” she adds. “He just blows everybody away. Luther Dickinson is one of my favorite contemporaries, too. He’s awesome.”

As for Fish herself, she’s credited 10 albums with shaping both her life and her vibrant guitar style. Alongside the more obvious picks — “Who doesn’t have a Rolling Stones record in their top 10?” she asked Guitar Player last year — sits one intriguing outlier: the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams.

“This record came into my life fairly recently,” she explains. “I started getting hip to the Detroit rock and soul scene while I was making the Chills & Fever album. I was going through something of a musical evolution, just taking everything in, and eventually that led me to Kick Out the Jams.

“They were punk in the very early days, and that’s where my heart is. Once you get into them, though, you’re really into them. This record really affected me at a time when I wanted to feel something in a big way.”

She’s also detailed the five most important riffs in her life, saying one R.L. Burnside song shaped her musical upbringing and served as a four-minute masterclass in groove.

Fish believes today’s blues players should continue pushing the genre forward rather than treating it as something to preserve unchanged. Speaking to Guitar World last August, she argued that the music has always evolved through artists willing to challenge expectations.

“Even when Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf went electric, which is what we consider to be traditional blues now, they were outsiders. People were saying, ‘This isn’t blues.’ And now it’s our gold standard. It’s the artist’s job to push boundaries and find their voice.

“And, of course, you worry about losing people. You worry about gaining people. That’s the business side of what we do. But at the end of the day, I feel like you have to make art that you can stand by. The rest of it, it kind of sorts itself out.”

Modest Mouse have dropped guitarist Simon O’Connor from their tour lineup following allegations he sent inappropriate messages and a meme to an underage fan.

O’Connor subsequently apologized to the fan, claiming he had confused her with someone who had been harassing him.

“Simon O’Connor will not be joining us on the upcoming tour,” the band posted on Instagram. “The good news is that Seth Jabour of Les Savy Fav will be jumping in to play guitar. We look forward to being out there with you all.”

As reported here previously, the allegations surfaced last weekend on Reddit, when the fan shared screenshots of O’Connor’s messages. After realizing his error, O’Connor apologized. The woman wrote back that she had assumed someone had hacked his account.

“Wish I was hacked just had a party night and looking at everything with one eye ya know,” O’Connor replied.

“But you did blindside me with a gaggle of likes and then very little intro besides bikini pics so we are both to blame,” he wrote in a followup.

In her Reddit post, the fan explained that she was 16 at the time of their exchange, and noted that her birthday was “the first thing in my bio.” She said O’Connor had viewed a story with a countdown to her 17th birthday, and she provided screenshots to back her claims.

Responding in a Reddit post of his own, O’Connor explained that he had been trolled repeatedly by someone else who used multiple accounts and believed the fan was that person.

“After a few minutes, I realized that I had made a mistake and this was not the person who I had dealt with before,” he wrote. “I unsent the messages and immediately ceased communication. I’m genuinely sorry to the person who received those messages. They didn’t deserve to be put in that position, and I’m sorry for the stress and attention this has brought them. I know some people will choose not to believe me, and I understand that. I can’t change what’s happened. All I can do is tell the truth, take responsibility for my mistake, and apologize.”

Fans replying to Modest Mouse’s Instagram announcement have been supportive of the move to drop O’Connor.

“Good news for people who love good news,” wrote one.

“Sorry you guys had your names attached to that previous guitarist, yall are some incredible musicians and deserve better people in your corner,” wrote another.

O’Connor has played guitar for Modest Mouse since 2021 and is on their new album, An Eraser and a Maze.

During the 11 years Rush spent on hiatus, Alex Lifeson kept busy. He released two albums with his band Envy of None, appeared on records by artists across the musical spectrum and developed a peculiar habit: disappointing the musicians who hired him.

It sounds like the last thing a guitarist of Lifeson’s stature would want to do. After all, artists don’t call Alex Lifeson because they’re looking for an anonymous session player. They call him because they want the guitarist behind Rush’s most iconic textures, unusual chord voicings and endlessly inventive approach to the instrument.

But that was exactly the expectation he wanted to escape.

Not that Lifeson was ever a stranger to guest appearances. Before Rush stepped away from the stage — seemingly for good — in 2015, he had already lent his talents to outside projects, from a soaring guitar solo on Porcupine Tree’s epic “Anesthetize” to helping fellow Canadians Platinum Blonde with some lead work in 1986.

Still, his approach changed after Rush’s final tour cycle ended. In the years that followed, Lifeson wasn’t interested in simply reminding people why they loved Rush. He wanted to find out what else he could do.

“In the last four years, I’ve been doing these other projects,” he told Sweetwater in 2020, midway through his post-Rush run of collaborations. “What’s challenging and what’s so attractive to me about those projects is, when someone asks me to play on their record, I think they think that they’re going to get Alex Lifeson.”

But as anyone who has followed Rush’s constantly evolving sound knows, Lifeson has never been interested in standing still.

“What I like to do is to completely disappoint them and do something that they would never expect,” he said with a smile. “I like to come out of left field, and that’s really a lot of fun for me.”

One of his first major post-Rush collaborations came on Triumph guitarist Rik Emmett’s solo album RES9. There, Lifeson delivered a pair of more traditional blues-rock solos, showing that he could still step into a familiar language when he wanted to.

After that, however, things became much stranger.

While working with Steven Wilson collaborator Marco Minnemann on Borrego, Lifeson leaned heavily into unusual effects, reversed guitar parts, and experimental textures.

Then came an unexpected collaboration with Orange County stoner-rock veterans Fu Manchu, where he approached the guitar less as a lead instrument and more as a source of atmosphere, rhythm, and noise.

“The track was already quite dense with a riffy guitar presence, and it forced me to think in terms of rhythm, ambiance and edge,” he told Guitar World in 2018.

According to Fu Manchu guitarist Scott Hill, the band ended up with exactly the kind of contribution Lifeson was chasing: “awesome riffs, sci-fi effects, and pick slides.” Across the song’s sprawling 18-minute runtime, Lifeson had room to explore every corner of the sonic landscape.

Elsewhere, in 2019, he appeared alongside Slash, Joe Satriani, and Mick Fleetwood on Don Felder’s American Rock ’N’ Roll. That same year, he contributed mandolin and ambient guitar textures to The Mute Gods’ Atheists and Believers.

His most unconventional guest appearance may have come on Tom Morello’s solo track “I Have Seen the Way,” where he shared guitar duties with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. The song is filled with electronic glitches, heavily processed tones, and jagged, wah-soaked electric guitar sounds — a long way from the image of the classic prog-rock virtuoso many fans still carried in their heads.

That was the entire point.

Lifeson wasn’t searching for projects that allowed him to recreate the past. He wanted opportunities that pushed him outside his comfort zone, where he could experiment without becoming a caricature of himself.

“A lot of stuff now that I’m doing, I’m manipulating guitar sounds so it doesn’t sound like a guitar,” he explained. “Sometimes it sounds like a brass instrument. Sometimes it sounds like a stringed violin, or sometimes it’s just a rhythmic noise. There are so many ways you can process [the job].”

After a career spent being recognized as Alex Lifeson, the guitarist spent the years after Rush exploring what it meant to surprise people who thought they already knew what he sounded like.

Now, with Rush once again part of the conversation and the possibility of new music not entirely dismissed, those years of experimentation may prove valuable. The past decade-plus didn’t just give Lifeson new collaborators — it gave him new tools, new instincts, and perhaps new ways to turn progressive rock back up to 11.

Guitar stars from multiple generations have paid tribute to Glen Hansard, the Oscar-winning Irish singer-songwriter who died in a motorcycle crash in Dublin on July 29 at the age of 56.

Best known as the frontman of the Frames and for his starring role in the acclaimed 2007 musical drama Once, Hansard built a career that took him from busking on the streets of Dublin to international recognition. The film, which he co-created with Markéta Irglová, earned an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly,” the duet the pair wrote and performed for the movie’s soundtrack.

The Irish Independent reports that Hansard was involved in a single-vehicle crash in the early hours of Wednesday, July 29, in Dublin.

Ed Sheeran was among the first to pay tribute to a musician whose career he had closely followed.

“Heartbroken to hear the news about Glen,” a post on his Instagram Story reads. “He was such an incredible human—an incredible force. I am grateful for the times we spent together. Sending so much love to his family.”

Like Sheeran, Hansard began his career busking before finding success with his band the Frames. He later gained wider attention with his acting debut in the 1991 comedy-drama The Commitments and went on to become one of Ireland’s most respected singer-songwriters.

His career included collaborations with artists such as Eddie Vedder, an appearance on The Simpsons as an Irish busker in “In the Name of the Grandfather” (season 20), and performances alongside some of the biggest names in music. But beyond his accomplishments, it was Hansard’s warmth and generosity that left the deepest impression on those who knew him.

Writing on X following news of his death, Bono reflected on the unique presence Hansard brought to the world.

“Sometimes I would wonder if Glen Hansard really existed,” he said. “He was such an angelic presence… not otherworldly… in fact, very present this presence… A smiling rascal if you needed him to be… this most musical and mischievous archangel of Ballymun [Ireland]. No airs, plenty of graces.”

Bruce Springsteen, who shared a stage with Hansard in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 2013, also remembered his friend’s spirit.

“Here on E Street, we are heartbroken over the death of Glen Hansard,” he wrote. “We met in Ireland many years ago, and he was always nothing but a great musician, a good friend and a generous and gracious man. Always positive, smiling and ready to sing. God bless him and his loved ones.”

For guitar fans, Hansard was inseparable from one particular instrument: his Takamine NP-15 acoustic guitar, affectionately nicknamed “The Horse.”

Purchased from a Dublin music store in 1990, the guitar became his constant companion, eventually developing a large wear mark in its cedar top from years of playing.

“As rhe Horse worked harder and harder, its working-class cred began to show, as a hole started to develop in the cedar top where Glen’s fingernails and pick fell naturally on the thin finish,” a post on the Takamine website reads. “By that time Glen had developed a bond with the guitar, so rather than put it out to pasture, he just kept playing it. Today, it’s one of the most recognizable and iconic instruments in guitardom.”

Hansard began busking at just 13 years old and later credited the guitar with changing the course of his life.

“I got all my education on the street,” he told RTÉ Radio.

“My uncle’s guitar was left in my house, and I learned how to play it, and that saved me,” he said. “I was on a kind of a trajectory, getting into the drugs, just getting into that slightly dodgy spot. My girlfriend at the time gave me a Bob Dylan cassette when I was about 12 and a half, as I was heading down a rough road. I listened to Bob Dylan, and my whole world flipped.”

“I stayed in the bedroom,” he added. “I played Bob Dylan songs every day. I learned my craft. I decided music was all I cared about. My uncle was a musician. I wanted to be like him, but I also set sail towards whatever Bob Dylan was doing.”

Hansard spent the rest of his life chasing that dream, turning a love of songs, guitars and street performance into a career that inspired generations of musicians.

Even after six decades of Beatlemania, the Beatles are still capable of springing genuine surprises.

The forthcoming Rubber Soul Special Edition, which comes out October 2, will include a previously unheard John Lennon song. A home demo of “Little Girl” was discovered on a tape reel from Lennon’s archive, and so little was known about it that there hadn’t even been whispers of its existence.

Rolling Stone has had a sneak preview of the track and describes it as “a fragile, gorgeous, bittersweet little tune.” It features nothing but Lennon’s voice and acoustic guitar. The song appears to be a tender love song, putting it a world away from another Lennon composition written during the Rubber Soul sessions that contains the phrase “Little Girl” — the dark and disturbing “Run for Your Life.”

The project’s producer, Giles Martin, says the song’s sudden emergence is “surprising.”

“It came from the Lennon Estate — I think it was Sean,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was one of those things where they say, ‘Oh, and then there’s this.’

“Like with all that stuff, I wasn’t sure whether people knew about it or not, or whether it was on YouTube,” he adds. “Quite often I’ll find something and go, ‘This is amazing.’ Then someone goes, ‘Yeah, it’s on YouTube. Everybody knows about that.’ I’m always the last person to know.”

In this instance, it really is a diamond in the rough. Discovered on a Lennon tape reel, Martin ultimately spliced together two sections to complete the 2:17 recording.

Martin says discoveries like this satisfy fans’ enduring appetite for unheard Beatles music.

“Apart from ‘It’s another song that would have made the album,’ there’s an insatiable desire for something more,” he says. “But I think it’s good to see all of the pencil drawings before you see the picture.”

The exact origins of the song are still unknown, but Martin and his team have deduced that it can be no older than the summer of 1965, given that it includes a tweaked Paul McCartney hook later heard on the Help! track “I’ve Just Seen a Face.”

Yet the song’s emergence from obscurity shouldn’t be wholly surprising, given the mad-dash nature of Rubber Soul’s creation. Much of the album was written in London following the band’s U.S. tour in August 1965, with their marijuana-fueled encounters with Bob Dylan still fresh in their minds.

Their manager, Brian Epstein, and producer, George Martin, had agreed that another album in time for Christmas was good for business, despite Help! having been released only weeks earlier. The band scrambled to write new material, with many songs arriving at Abbey Road unfinished. Given those frantic circumstances, the idea that one composition slipped through the cracks — despite Beatlemania and the exhaustive documentation of the group’s career — doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

Some songs have already been rescued from those sessions, with the bluesy instrumental “12-Bar Original” eventually finding its way onto Anthology 2.

Rolling Stone reports that many of the demo’s lyrics are placeholders; there’s a lot of “I love you” and “la la la,” as though Lennon is feeling his way through the song in real time. Speculation about the inspiration for the mysterious little girl ranges from a postcard sent by a Japanese fan to a nod to Brian Wilson’s “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”

The unanswered questions only add to the track’s mystique, reinforcing the remarkable fact that, more than half a century after Beatlemania and the Beatles’ breakup, the band’s story can still produce genuine surprises.

“Little Girl” isn’t the first Lennon demo to surface decades after it was recorded, and, judging by this latest discovery, it may not be the last.

Brian May and Freddie Mercury created some of Queen’s most enduring anthems, with the guitarist’s melodic precision providing the perfect counterbalance to Mercury’s theatrical brilliance. But when asked to name the most beautiful song his late bandmate ever wrote, May doesn’t point to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Somebody to Love” or any of Queen’s other towering classics.

Instead, he chooses a far less obvious track: “It’s a Hard Life.”

Released in 1984 as the third single from Queen’s 11th studio album, The Works, the song became the band’s third consecutive U.K. top 10 hit, peaking at number six. In the U.S., however, it stalled at number 72 — a modest showing compared with many of Queen’s biggest successes.

Despite that, it remains a song that holds deep personal meaning for May. Writing in the liner notes for Queen’s Greatest Video Hits 2 compilation in 2003, the guitarist described Mercury’s composition as one of the most revealing pieces his bandmate ever created.

“To my mind, it’s one of the most beautiful songs that Freddie ever wrote,” May said. “It’s straight from the heart, and he really opened up during the creation of it.”

The song arrived during a period when Queen were still capable of producing massive hits, including “Radio Ga Ga,” “I Want to Break Free,” and “Hammer to Fall.” Yet beneath its grand arrangement — Mercury’s soaring falsetto, ornate piano work, and May’s carefully placed electric guitar lines — “It’s a Hard Life” was ultimately a deeply personal song about relationships and emotional struggle.

For May, the most memorable part was watching Mercury reveal that side of himself during the writing process.

“I sat with him for hours and hours pouring over every word and trying to get the most out of it,” he recalled. “It’s a very revealing thing about how relationships are, and he was talking about his relationship.”

The song’s famously extravagant music video, filmed in Munich, Germany, might suggest otherwise. Mercury appears in the outfit Queen jokingly called “The Giant Mediterranean Prawn,” while May wields a skull-shaped guitar that was merely a prop. The video’s lavish setting and theatrical excess seemed at odds with the song’s emotional weight — and that was partly the point.

“To me it’s one of his loveliest songs, and on the face of it, I think I was mortified that he wanted to make this kind of video because it’s totally distracting,” May said. “This is a Freddie indulgence, and we indulged him. With pleasure I have to say.”

That willingness to indulge each other was a key part of Queen’s creative chemistry — although May has also revealed there were moments when he had to fight to get his own ideas heard, including when he pushed to include a guitar solo on one of the band’s biggest hits.

The Beatles are set to revisit Rubber Soul, their transformative 1965 album that blended folk, baroque pop, soul, and early psychedelic experimentation — a record that captured a year when popular music was rapidly expanding in every direction. Bob Dylan was one of the artists helping push those boundaries.

Dylan’s influence could be heard in the Beatles’ increasingly introspective songwriting, particularly on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Girl,” as the band moved beyond the youthful optimism of their early years. But while the Beatles were absorbing elements of Dylan’s folk-driven approach, Dylan himself was undergoing a revolution of his own.

In 1965, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, an electrified masterpiece that pushed beyond the conventions of traditional folk and embraced the power of a full rock band. Months later, when he brought that sound to the stage — with Robbie Robertson along playing a Fender Telecaster — and the world was stunned. He was even branded “Judas” during a show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, U.K., in May 1966.many fans felt betrayed — but George Harrison, himself a songwriter constantly looking toward the future, saw the change as a natural progression.

The Beatles’ sixth album will arrive October 2 as an expansive new box set featuring a new stereo mix by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, alongside previously unheard session recordings and home demos. The collection offers fans an unprecedented glimpse into the making of a record that marked a major turning point for the band.

The shift represented by Rubber Soul had roots in the Beatles’ famous 1964 meeting with Dylan, an encounter Paul McCartney later described as a life-changing experience. Dylan introduced the band to marijuana that night, and McCartney later joked that he had discovered “the meaning of life.” The meeting helped reinforce the creative connection between two artists who were both beginning to move beyond the limits placed on them by their audiences.

For the Beatles, that meant songs that explored new emotional territory, from Lennon’s enigmatic “Norwegian Wood” and the aching “Girl” to McCartney’s elegant “Michelle” and the dark, unsettling “Run For Your Life.” The group was leaving behind the straightforward charm of its early singles and embracing something more complex.

Dylan’s own transformation was even more dramatic. When he performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, some members of the folk community reacted with outrage. By the time he toured the U.K. the following year, the backlash had intensified, culminating in the infamous moment when an audience member shouted “Judas” at his concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in May 1966.

But when Harrison saw Dylan perform his electric set at London’s Royal Albert Hall, he couldn’t understand the controversy.

“The set was in two halves, and in the first half, he came out and did his usual thing with the guitar and the harmonica,” Harrison recalled. “Then in the second half he came out with the band.”

The Beatles guitarist understood why some fans were unsettled. Many had embraced Dylan as a symbol of the folk revival and saw the electric performances as a rejection of that identity.

“A lot of them were really uptight. They were like, ‘Hey, he’s forsaken the folk,’” Harrison said. “But Bob just came out and said, ‘Well, you know, you all may know this song. Remember how it goes? Well, here’s how it goes now!’ and they just went off wailing.”

Harrison, however, saw the performance differently.

“It was a great show. I mean, it was ragged, but that is the nature of Bob: raggedy,” he said. “And all through that second half, people were getting up and walking out, and shouting, and it was controversial.”

More than 60 years later, Dylan’s decision to embrace electric guitars and instrumentation seems less like a betrayal and more like a defining moment in rock history. Musician and author Dr. CP Lee has described the “Judas” incident as one of “the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century,” capturing the divide between tradition and experimentation that defined the era.

Dylan, for his part, appeared unfazed. As recalled in the book Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, he responded to criticism of his Newport performance by telling one journalist, “They must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn’t afford it if I was in their shoes.”

And Harrison agreed with Dylan’s instinct to keep moving forward.

“It was interesting. It seemed natural,” Harrison said. “There’s a limit to what you can do just with acoustics; it didn’t seem that Bob should particularly be limited to just doing that. It seemed kind of a natural progression.”

Derek Trucks stands among the most commanding slide guitar players of his generation, known for a style that’s deeply soulful, technically fluid and unmistakably vocal in character.

His foundation was laid early. Before he reached his teens, he was already sharing stages with Buddy Guy and Bob Dylan. By 20, he had joined the Allman Brothers Band, and later co-founded the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife, Susan Tedeschi.

Asked how he developed such mastery, Trucks points to several core influences.

“I think it’s important to listen to vocalists and have that in mind,” he tells Ultimate Guitar. “It’s all ear training, it’s all intonation.”

His earliest inspirations were slide guitar pioneers Elmore James and Duane Allman. From them, he absorbed the fundamentals of lyrical phrasing — a quality that also defines electric guitarists like David Gilmour.

But the breakthrough came when he turned to Indian classical music.

“Then it was listening to a lot of Indian classical,” he says of his progression. “The sarod is a fretless instrument. That was a great way into the vocalization.”

The sarod’s fluid, gliding phrasing offered Trucks an expressive vocabulary, one that helped distinguish his guitar style from the slide legends before him.

No figure influenced him more than sarod master Ali Akbar Khan. Trucks first heard Khan at age 14 and called it “a life-changing event.”

“The power of the sound, the dedication and devotion of the musicians — it was so obvious,” Trucks said of Khan's impact upon the musician’s death in 2009. “It re-emphasized the belief in what you love about music.

“When I heard the news [of Khan’s death], it was like losing Ray Charles, or John Coltrane, or Charlie Parker, you know? There probably couldn’t be two to three musicians like him in the world.”

In a related story, Trucks — along with former Allman Brothers bandmate Warren Haynes — has credited an obscure 1997 album as another game changer for his playing.

As most Beatles fans know, John Lennon quit the group first, on September 20, 1969, bringing the Fab Four to what most would agree was an untimely end.

What many don’t know is that just two weeks before he announced his departure, Lennon proposed that the group record another album as well as release a new single in time for the holidays.

The evidence comes from a tape recording made on September 8, 1969, at Apple Corps headquarters in London, of a meeting between Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The recording exists because drummer Ringo Starr was unable to attend. He’d been taken to the hospital with intestinal complaints — Starr had a history of abdominal ailments and food allergies — and the recording was made for his benefit.

“Ringo,” Lennon explains on the tape, “you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”

But as the tape shows, Lennon wasn’t merely thinking about one more Beatles album and single — he was planning a future strategy for the group.

The key evidence is his plan for how he, McCartney and Harrison — the group’s main songwriters — would share space on future albums. He planned that each of them should be allowed four songs per album, with another two reserved for Starr, if he wished.

“When we get into the studio, I don't care how we do it, but I don't want to think about equal time,” he said. “I just want it known I'm allowed to put four songs on the album, whatever happens. I don't have to say, ‘Should we do it now?’ because I think we'll all get fed up in three weeks, or actually the album will be full because we did two of Paul’s last week or one of Ringo's or one of George’s, whatever, and, well, it's too late now. Next album.”

Lennon was also eager to abandon what he called “the Lennon and McCartney myth” about their songwriting partnership. While the two men had occasionally written together in the past — going back to their earliest days as teens struggling to play acoustic guitars — they mostly composed alone. Despite this, each of their songs was credited to Lennon-McCartney, regardless of who wrote it. Lennon suggested that, moving forward, only the sole writer should get credit.

One might think McCartney would have been thrilled by the suggestion to record a new album. He’d been despondent over Lennon’s lack of interest in the group and had corralled the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, back into the studio to record Abbey Road earlier that summer.

But he said very little in the meeting, aside from rejecting Lennon’s suggestions for a more equitable division of songs and a more accurate assigning of songwriting credits.

Lennon’s suggestion to give Harrison a larger share of each album’s real estate was in recognition of the younger guitarist’s growth as a songwriter. Over the previous year, Harrison had contributed “Old Brown Shoe,” “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” to the group’s catalog, each song as good as anything Lennon or McCartney created.

The Beatles felt strongly enough about “Old Brown Shoe” that they made it the B-side of their single “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” released the previous May 30. As for “Something,” it would become Harrison’s first, and only, Beatles A-side (albeit a double A-side) when it was released with “Come Together” on October 6, 1969.

The fact that Harrison could score placement on two singles within a matter of months, while McCartney was left out in the cold, was proof that he had become a stronger songwriter and that, moreover, his bandmates and producer had taken note.

“We always carved the singles up between us,” Lennon said to McCartney. “We have the singles market, [George and Ringo] don’t get anything! I mean, we’ve never offered George B-sides; we could have given him a lot of B-sides, but because we were two people, you had the A-side and I had the B-side.”

It’s also possible that Lennon was thinking about Harrison’s abrupt decision to quit the group the previous January 10 during a dustup with McCartney while making Let It Be. Following Harrison’s departure, Lennon and McCartney had a conversation, recorded without their knowledge at Twickenham Film Studios, about what Lennon referred to as the "festering wound" of Harrison’s discontent after years of having his songs ignored. As Lennon saw it, Harrison’s resignation wasn’t a sudden decision but the inevitable culmination of years of feeling marginalized.

To ensure only the strongest songs made Beatles albums, Lennon suggested they give away tunes that would be better suited to other performers. All three had already been doing this to some extent: Lennon had released “Give Peace a Chance” with his and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band project; McCartney had given his songs “Goodbye” and “Come and Get It” to Apple Records artists Mary Hopkins and Badfinger, respectively; and Harrison had passed his White Album reject “Sour Milk Sea” over to Apple signee Jackie Lomax.

In making his argument, Lennon specifically mentioned McCartney’s “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a pair of old-timey singalong tunes Lennon was known to have reviled.

"Wouldn’t it be better — because we didn’t really dig ‘em, you know? — for you to do songs that you dug and for ‘Ob-La-Di’ and ‘Maxwell’ to be given to people who like music like that. Like Mary [Hopkins] or whoever it is that needs a song. Why don’t you give that to them?

"The only time we need something vaguely of that quality is for a single, and for an album we can just do only stuff that we really dug. It’s a drag to put that song on an album that nobody dug, including the guy who wrote it, just because it was going to be popular. ‘Cause the LP doesn’t have to be popular in that way.”

In fairness, McCartney never said he didn’t like either song, but Lennon’s point was clear: The Beatles should choose the material most representative of them as a collective, rather than serve as each other’s backing band, a practice that had begun with the White Album and continued during the making of Abbey Road, in particular with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and McCartney’s side-two medley.

Sadly, rather than discuss the merits of Lennon’s suggestions, the three Beatles descended into a debate about Harrison’s songwriting — McCartney said his tunes had only improved that year, while Harrison argued that they’d been written even earlier — and whether or not Lennon had participated enough in recording Harrison’s songs.

“Most of my tunes, I never had the Beatles backing me,” Harrison falsely complained.

“Oh, c’mon, George! We put a lot of work in your songs, even down to ‘Don’t Bother Me,’” Lennon responded, referring to Harrison’s first song, which appeared on 1963’s With the Beatles. “We spent a lot of time doing all that, and we grooved. I can remember the riff you were playing, and in the last two years there was a period where you went Indian and we weren’t needed!”

“That was only one tune,” Harrison said. “On the last album [the White Album] I don’t think you appeared on any of my songs. I don’t mind.”

“Well, you had Eric, or somebody like that,” Lennon replied defensively, referring to Eric Clapton’s electric guitar contributions on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” recorded with Harrison’s “Lucy” 1957 Gibson Les Paul.

It’s remarkable that neither Harrison nor McCartney seemed to grasp that Lennon was, for the first time in at least a year, showing his commitment to the group’s future.

It was a missed opportunity. Soon after the meeting, Lennon and Ono departed for a September 13 performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival with an ad hoc Plastic Ono Band lineup featuring Clapton, bass guitarist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White.

By the time they returned, Lennon wanted out. On September 20, 1969, he told his bandmates he was quitting. The Beatles’ last chance to stay together had passed.

Linda Perhacs, the acclaimed singer-songwriter whose 1970 cult classic Parallelograms went on to influence generations of folk musicians, has been reported missing. Friends and collaborators — including her former manager Laurel Stearns, composer Julia Holter and DubLab co-founder Mark “Frosty” McNeill — say they have been unable to contact her for the past eight months.

In a statement shared with The New York Times, Stearns said the 82-year-old disappeared after she was discharged from an assisted living facility in Northridge, California, where she had been receiving care for dementia.

According to Stearns, Perhacs left the facility under the supervision of a legal guardian, but friends say repeated attempts to reach both the singer and her guardian have gone unanswered.

“Since that time, numerous friends and longtime collaborators report they have been unable to establish direct contact with her,” Stearns said in the statement. “Repeated attempts to communicate with her guardian have also, they say, gone unanswered.”

“Our main priority at this time is to spread awareness in hopes of finding Linda safe and comfortable,” Stearns added in an email.

Fernando Perdomo, who co-produced Perhacs’s two most recent albums, said he filed a report with Los Angeles County Adult Protective Services on Monday after efforts to locate the singer proved unsuccessful.

Perdomo also shared a video on social media explaining that he tried contacting Perhacs about six weeks ago, only to learn she had been removed from the care facility by her legal guardian.

“Her next of kin’s number, which we had — which we used to have contact with him — he’s not answering phone calls,” Perdomo said in the video. “I think he might have blocked us.”

Speaking with Page Six on Tuesday, Perdomo said, “My biggest fear is that she was just dropped off on the street somewhere.”

Stearns later clarified that the legal guardian referenced in her statement has been “unresponsive.” The guardian’s identity has not been disclosed.

On Monday, Stearns, Perdomo and three other collaborators issued a public appeal on social media asking anyone with information about Perhacs’s whereabouts to come forward.

“Please help us locate Linda to ensure her wellbeing,” they wrote.

Perhacs was working as a dental hygienist in Los Angeles during the late 1960s while writing songs in her spare time. Among her patients was Leonard Rosenman, the film and TV composer whose credits include East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, who helped launch her music career.

Although Parallelograms attracted little attention upon its 1970 release, it was rediscovered in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring acoustic guitar with Perhacs’ multilayered vocals and subtle electronic effects provided by Rosenman, Parallelograms earned a devoted following and became a touchstone for psychedelic and experimental folk artists. Those influenced by the album include Sufjan Stevens, Joanna Newsom, and Devendra Banhart.

Perhacs’ music later reached new audiences when “If You Were My Man” appeared in Daft Punk’s 2006 film Electroma. More than four decades after her debut, Perhacs returned with The Soul of All Natural Things in 2014, followed by I’m a Harmony in 2017, both of which featured collaborations with Holter.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is now half a century old, but it’s not getting any easier to play, says Brian May.

The Queen guitarist explains that the hit song is so complex it requires him to “keep my wits about me” every time he plays it.

Clocking in at nearly six minutes and containing several distinct sections, including May’s own guitar solo, the song combines elements of balladry, opera and rock in one of contemporary music’s most beguiling — and challenging — musical works.

May, who was present while singer Freddie Mercury composed the tune, says he was inspired as he heard it take shape.

“The idea for all the instrumental stuff in ‘Rhapsody’ was growing while I was listening to him developing the song,” May tells Rolling Stone. “Freddie had some amazingly lateral thought processes. It was always easier for me to play on his songs than mine, ’cause there was so much stimulation coming.”

Fifty years on, some stimulation is still required to play the song’s guitar parts, including May’s celebrated solo. Recorded with his Red Special electric guitar into a Dallas Rangemaster treble booster, a custom-built Deacy amp and a wet/dry/wet setup of multiple Vox AC30 combos, May’s big moment in “Bohemian Rhapsody” is regularly cited as one of the greatest guitar solos in rock history. Its presence in the song is entirely due to May deciding he wanted to, in effect, sing a verse on guitar.

But May says that, like the rest of the tune, it isn’t exactly ingrained in his muscle memory.

“‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is never that easy to play, even after all these years,” he admits. “I still have to keep my wits about me or I’ll fall off the train.”

Part of the challenge is, no doubt, the layered vocal harmonies. As May reveals, Queen were inspired by none other than the Beatles, whose three-part harmonies on their recordings influenced countless groups.

In particular, May says the vocals in “Bohemian Rhapsody” were influenced by the Fab Four’s “Because,” a gorgeous, complex piece of sonic magic from 1969’s Abbey Road.

“We were transfixed,” the guitarist says. “I can feel the shivers going up my spine. We thought, ‘Oh, my God, that has to be the most daring piece of pure harmony we’ve ever heard.’”

The Beatles achieved the effect by stacking their vocal harmonies in the studio to create an even bigger sound than their three singers — John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison — could produce on their own. May says that technique inspired Queen to overdub their voices countless times to create a chorale effect.

But it wasn’t just “Because.” Even an earlier track like 1964’s mesmerizing “This Boy” helped inspire Queen’s approach.

“It was everything the Beatles did,” May says. “We were able to sort of take up where the Beatles left off.”

Don’t expect to see May performing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the U.S. anytime soon. The guitarist was eyeing a Queen + Adam Lambert residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas after seeing an Eagles concert there last year.

But the Trump administration’s ICE enforcement tactics — which have been linked to numerous deaths, including those of U.S. citizens — forced him to reconsider.

“America is a dangerous place at the moment, so you have to take that into account,” May told the Daily Mail. “It’s very sad because I feel like Queen grew up in America and we love it, but it’s not what it was. Everyone is thinking twice about going there at the moment.”

It may be more than 60 years since the Kinks–Beatles rivalry was at its peak, but Dave Davies isn’t letting sleeping dogs lie.

Speaking at a new Kinks artwork exhibition at the Gibson Garage in London, the guitarist took aim at two members of the Beatles while naming the only one he says he genuinely liked.

In conversation with British tabloid The Mirror at the launch of The Kinks: Brothers, Davies didn’t hold back when asked about the Fab Four and the long-running rivalry between the two bands.

“John Lennon didn’t like the Kinks, he really didn’t,” Davies said, confirming something he has long suggested. “In fact, John Lennon didn’t really like anybody!”

Paul McCartney, who recently released his nostalgia-tinged album The Boys from Dungeon Lane, also came in for criticism. Davies said the 18-time Grammy winner “wrote a few decent songs,” but offered little more by way of praise.

Ringo Starr, who duets with McCartney on Dungeon Lane, escaped mention altogether. Instead, Davies reserved his warmest words for George Harrison.

“George Harrison was the only one I really liked,” he said. “He was the nicest guy.”

The roots of the Kinks’ rivalry with the Beatles are widely traced to a Bournemouth show in the summer of 1964, where the Kinks opened for the Liverpool band. According to later accounts, Lennon approached Davies before the show and made several cutting remarks, including a dig at the Kinks’ lack of hit records.

Writing in his 1994 autobiography, X-Ray, Kinks frontman Ray Davies suggested Lennon’s put-down stemmed from insecurity. He claimed the audience was calling for the Kinks to return to the stage for an encore just as the Beatles were preparing to perform.

If so, Lennon’s comments quickly proved ill-timed. Just days later, “You Really Got Me” topped the U.K. charts and reached the top 10 in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Ireland and Sweden. In a fitting twist, it displaced the Beatles single “A Hard Day’s Night” from the number one spot.

The song — later introduced to a new generation through Van Halen’s explosive cover — became one of electric-guitar rock’s defining moments. Davies famously slashed the speaker cone of his guitar amp with a razor blade to create the raw distortion that helped lay the groundwork for modern rock guitar.

This has already been a busy year for Davies. In March, he pushed back against transphobia accusations made by electronica artist Moby, and he has also criticized a new Kinks biography, saying it contains “misinformation.”

The renewed attention has also prompted fresh questions about a possible Kinks reunion, with Davies suggesting his relationship with older brother Ray may finally be improving.

“We enjoy each other’s company,” he recently said (via MusicRadar). “We have fluctuated between getting on really well and not getting on at all over the years, but there’s always been telepathy, since childhood... Never say never.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the response?

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

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

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

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

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

Same thing. We would play a dance and not say a word. You’d play Ventures or “Sleepwalk” so the kids could waltz. You’d play instrumentals for an hour and a half.

When I joined the Silvertones, the band had a rare thing — an amplifier. Jim Kale had a Fender Concert amp. It had two channels, and each channel had two inputs, so we could put a microphone in one for the singer to sing. We had no P.A. system, so we put rhythm guitar, bass and my guitar into that amp. That was our P.A.

Whenever we weren’t playing, Neil would call up and say, “Are you guys playing a gig next weekend? Can we borrow the amplifier?”

Oh, so he liked your equipment.

Well, he wanted to be Hank Marvin. My piano player had a tape recorder, and if you moved the recording head a little bit you'd get an echo like Hank Marvin. We had no pedals, but suddenly I had an echo. Play with the tape a little and there was the sound of Hank Marvin and the Shadows. Neil loved that sound. That's why we played together on the Hank Marvin and the Shadows tribute album.

What do you remember about Neil’s playing style back then?

We were both very good players. He was like me — you're clumsy, and you do it night and day, and you get smoother and smoother. Everybody's clumsy at first. Just try to play an F chord. I mean, it's the hardest chord on guitar, whether they're using a barre with your finger or your thumb. It's really tough to play.

Did you guys hang out and play together?

No. He lived on one side of town, I lived on the other. We would meet on the bus. We were friends, and we both had the same dream. We wanted to be on the radio. We wanted to be like Hank Marvin or Elvis. There’s something about the brotherhood of guitar, especially if you both have a Gretsch and you both like Hank Marvin. You’d kind of help each other. I'd say, “I'd learned this lick.” He’d say, “Oh, but I play it down here.” And I’d say, “It’s easier up here.”

Did you do this kind of thing at gigs?

Yeah, at gigs. We didn't have that much time. I would show up with Jim Kale at Neil’s gigs. We would take the Concert amp, put it onstage. Neil would plug it in and test it. We would watch him play. Or I would be playing, and he’d be watching us. He'd say, “How do you play that?” “Oh, here's how you play that. You can play your A on the second fret, or the fifth fret, or the 10th fret or whatever.” “Oh, okay.”

It’s surprising you never played in the same band. Did you both buy Gretsches around the same time?

A Gretsch [6120 Chet Atkins] finally came in to Winnipeg Music Supply, and it was pumpkin orange. We had no idea, because you'd only see a Gretsch guitar on American Bandstand, and it was black and white. So I bought the Gretsch, but it didn’t sound right because it had the Filter’Trons. The guy called me back and said, “I’ve got the twangy one. It’s got DeArmond pickups. Gimme a hundred bucks, and I’ll give you the twangy one.”

I took mine back, and Neil bought it. That became his Gretsch that he played on “Mr. Soul” and “For What It’s Worth” on American Bandstand. I’ve got the other Gretsch that I played on “Takin’ Care of Business,” “Laughing,” all that stuff. Those two guitars became famous for both of us. They’re what we learned to play on and what we wrote and recorded with.

One could ask him the same question about you, but back then did you have any sort of inkling that he was special and going to make it?

I did, yeah. Other guys came and went in his band. Other guys came and went in my band. What was consistent was us, the look in our eyes of “We don’t care what happens or who quits the band. We were going forward. If you're coming with me, enjoy the ride. If you're not coming with me, get off the bus. You’re too heavy.”

When he went to Los Angeles, did you think of going there too?

Well, we had left first in ‘65 to go and do the Kingsman “Louie Louie” tour after we had a hit with “Shakin’ All Over.” When we left town, I sent him a postcard: “Opened in New York. Met Burt Bacharach, Ashford and Simpson, Dionne Warwick. You gotta get out of Winnipeg.” So he went to Thunder Bay, met Stephen Stills and started Buffalo Springfield.

Later on, did he ever float the idea of you joining CSNY?

No. He had his own world, and I was stuck in Winnipeg. By then, My son Tal was born. When nobody offers you a job and you've got a wife and a kid, you don't go somewhere with no work. You stay where the work is.

Still, it’s surprising that the two of you never played together in a band. It seems like it would have been the most natural thing.

Well, let me say this: I envy his relationship with Stephen Stills. I would love to be Stephen Stills, the other guitar player who answers him on “Down by the River.” When you're doing an eight-minute solo, I would love to do that. It’s never happened.

He's played many times in Vancouver. I would go see him and he'd say, “Get a guitar. Come on for the encore” I’d go, “Phenomenal!” I'd walk onstage and he would yell out, “’On Broadway!’” I’d go, “What?! Can’t we do ‘Down by the River?’” “Nah.”

So we would do “On Broadway” or “Up on the Roof” — some weird Drifters song. I’d say, “Neil, I want to play ‘Down by the River.’ I want to do ‘Southern Man.’ I want to show you that I can rip on these solos.” [laughs] You would just do whatever he wants.

Former Van Halen bandmates Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth are set to appear at an event this week, but it doesn’t look to be the reunion many Van Halen fans will be hoping for.

The Van Halen drummer and their three-time vocalist are set to appear at a TEDxFargo event in North Dakota this Thursday, July 30, 11 years after Van Halen wrapped touring A Different Kind of Truth. That final show, at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4, 2015, would prove to be the band’s last, with Eddie Van Halen passing five years and two days later.

Now the pair, who have both been booked as guest speakers at the event, are set for a surprise reunion of sorts, but don’t expect them to be sharing the stage in a physical sense. They’ve been booked for a “virtual talk” together with artist Robert Vargas, the man responsible for the EVH mural on the side of Guitar Center Hollywood.

“Three icons. One stage. One conversation you won’t want to miss,” the event’s official announcement states. The filming, it adds, will take place this week and will be uploaded to YouTube in the coming weeks for those who can’t attend the event in person.

It should be a fascinating conversation, given the duo’s checkered past. On the one hand, Van Halen blames Roth for the failed Van Halen tribute tour. On the other, he recently praised singer’s talent and work in Van Halen, saying, “We did our best work with Dave.”

“To me, Dave was a poet,“ Van Halen said. “It was the confluence of the complete opposite ends of the spectrum that made it happen. And it was brilliant soup — until it wasn’t.”

The TEDxFargo event features more than 40 guest speakers across two days, taking place at the Brewhalla entertainment space. It’s an unlikely place to see two musicians who conquered the music world reunite alongside Eddie’s revolutionary talents.

It will also be a surprise public appearance from Roth, given that just last week he was forced to pull the plug on his current U.S. tour, which has seen him reminiscing about his early songwriting adventures with Eddie. Sammy Hagar then offered some kind words of support to the man he replaced in 1985.

The TEDxFargo announcement comes as Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather continue to complete one last Van Halen album, which is made up of material EVH recorded before his passing. Lukather says the material left him stunned, but it looks like both Roth and Hagar have been frozen out of the project.

Bad Company frontman Paul Rogers has already declined an invitation to get involved, while former VH bass guitarist Michael Anthony believes the record doesn’t need a singer.

Modest Mouse guitarist Simon O’Connor has been accused of sending inappropriate messages to a minor on Instagram.

The allegations were made over this past weekend on Reddit and included screenshots that allege he sent a sexually explicit meme to the 16-year-old fan and a suggestive message about her “bikini pics.”

O’Connor has responded to the allegations by saying he mistook the fan’s account for that of someone else who has been following him.

The claims emerged on Reddit when the fan shared screenshots of her conversation with O’Connor. After liking the guitarist’s posts, the fan had received a DM from the guitarist that said “SIMON calls your bluff BUZZ”, alongside a picture of people playing the game Simon Says. A second screenshot included a suggestive meme. O’Connor then sent an apology, to which the fan said she assumed his account had been hacked.

“Wish I was hacked just had a party night and looking at everything with one eye ya know,” O’Connor replied. The fan responded, “ohh boy get a good night of sleep.”

Connor then wrote, “But you did blindside me with a gaggle of likes and then very little intro besides bikini pics so we are both to blame.“ He then unsent the message and sent another that read, ”I did it again.“

The fan wrote that although she is now 17, this had happened while she was 16. She also shared a screenshot showing O’Connor had viewed a post of a countdown to her 17th birthday.

“for context i am currently 17 years old but this happened right before my birthday, so i was still 16. i have a public instagram but its very niche, ive been following bands i like for a while so i have been following simon for a few years. late at night i checked stories and i spam liked whatever it was simon had put on his story. he came into my DMs and sent me an erotic image (to say the least) while giving me the excuse he had been partying or whatever, continuing to message me. my age is the first thing in my bio. i reached out to several people within the indie music fandom and nobody with a platform cared. i think more people should know about this. im hesitant to put screenshots here but i do have them!”

O’Connor responded to the allegations in a Reddit post of his own, saying he thought the fan was another person who has repeatedly reached out to him through social media accounts.

“Throughout my adult life, there has been a person who has popped up from time to time with the intention of, for lack of a better term, messing with me. This person creates multiple social media accounts and deletes them… but always posts similar photos that I often recognize from previous accounts. After a long night, I picked my phone up to discover that a similar profile had been interacting (“likes” to be specific) with some of my instagram posts and stories. I assumed that this was the same person I had dealt with before and, with poor judgement, I decided to reach out with a tasteless meme, a sticker that read “Simon calls your bluff,” and an attempt to indicate that I recognized the “barrage of likes” and similar photo content from the previous profiles…. Almost a “gotcha.” After a few minutes, I realized that I had made a mistake and this was not the person who I had dealt with before. I unsent the messages and immediately ceased communication.

“I'm genuinely sorry to the person who received those messages. They didn’t deserve to be put in that position, and I’m sorry for the stress and attention this has brought them.

“I know some people will choose not to believe me, and I understand that. I can’t change what's happened. All I can do is tell the truth, take responsibility for my mistake, and apologize.”

O’Connor joined Modest Mouse in 2021 and contributed to their latest album, An Eraser and a Maze, released this past June.

The British Invasion was reaching its height when the Rolling Stones made their first tour of America in 1965. Session guitar ace Waddy Wachtel cut school to see them perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on May 1. Although the Stones were typically greeted by throngs of screaming fans wherever they appeared, the Brooklyn crowd gave them an atypically cool reception.

“People were there to see the Tokens, this vocal group from New York who were opening for them,” the guitarist recalls. “They left when the Stones came on.

“The place was almost empty, and there’s the Stones coming out, starting with ‘Not Fade Away.’ It was so fantastic. It just took you away.”

Wachtel would go on to become a top-tier guitarist himself, performing with the likes of Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks, Warren Zevon, Bob Dylan, and many others. Given his résumé, it’s no surprise he eventually crossed paths with Richards. The first time came while Wachtel was on tour with Ronstadt’s band.

“When we were on tour in England back in the mid ’70s, Keith came to the show and we spent a lot of quality time together,” he remembers

It must have been time well spent, because Richards had Wachtel in mind when he formed his backing group, the X-Pensive Winos, for his 1988 debut solo album, Talk Is Cheap.

“I got a call from an English attorney saying Keith was trying to find me. I went, ‘Well, you found me — why don’t you give him my number?’ The guy said, ‘Listen, he’s at Larrabee Studios.’

“They were working on the Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll movie,” he says, referring to the 1987 Chuck Berry biopic for which Richards served as guitarist and bandleader.

“He says, ‘Give him a call.’”

“So I called Keith up, and he says, ‘Waddy, I’m putting a band together, and you’re the other guitar player.’ I went, ‘Really?!’ He says, ‘Really. No auditions for this band. You’re it,’ which knocked me out of the park.”

When Wachtel joined Richards and drummer Steve Jordan for rehearsals in New York City, he learned Keith had even picked out the guitar he wanted him to play.

“Keith goes, ‘You don’t need to bring a guitar.’ So I get there and open up this case he had for me.” Inside was a Gibson Les Paul TV model, the same instrument that had been Wachtel’s first electric guitar.

“I open it up and there it is. I go, ‘Well, this is my first electric guitar!’ He goes, ‘Yeah, that’s the ‘Tumbling Dice’ guitar.’”

Wachtel went on to play on all three of Richards’ solo albums with the Winos and co-produce the second, 1992’s Main Offender. He says Richards was a joy to work with through all of it.

“There’d be times where things would bog down — you know how it is in the studio. Things break down, and you can’t get the right setup. I’d look at him and go, ‘Keith, I’m sorry it’s taking so long.’ He’d say, ‘No worries, mate, no worries. I’ve been here before. It’s no biggie.’”

One memory, in particular, sums up Richards’ history and his effortless cool. It comes from when they were tracking Main Offender at the Site in San Rafael, California.

“One day we were in this living room area — Keith’s bedroom was above it. We were taking a break, late afternoon, and he went upstairs to lie down for a bit. We were watching TV, and all of a sudden this Beatles concert comes on — at Shea Stadium or something like that. It was just monstrous screaming — girls losing their minds.

“We’re sitting there watching this, and all of a sudden Keith comes walking down the stairs. He looks at the TV from across the room and just goes, ‘Done that.’

“Steve and I looked at each other and went, ‘Yeah, right. It’s that guy.’

“He’s such a lovely guy — so warm and personable and beautiful. But he’s that guy — he’s that Rolling Stone who was screamed at for the first five years. They never heard anything they were playing onstage.”

Unless, of course, you count that first Rolling Stones show Wachtel caught years earlier in Brooklyn.

Stevie Nicks’ relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, and the magic and drama it created during their time in Fleetwood Mac, is well documented. Her brief romance with Joe Walsh, however, is discussed far less often. For the Eagles guitarist, though, the relationship had a lasting impact — particularly on his approach to songwriting.

The pair dated in the mid-1980s, when both were deep into their respective solo careers. It was also a period when Walsh was still struggling with the drug and alcohol addictions that had already left their mark on the Eagles in the previous decade.

“She was special,” Walsh told Howard Stern in 2024. “We were seeking refuge in each other’s presence. There was [the drug] part of it, but we were both on the road, we had careers, and we were both lonely.”

Stern focused on the power-couple dynamic, and on the fact that Nicks seemed to have the complete package. Walsh, however, was less interested in romanticizing the relationship.

“The relationship came and ran its course, as rock and roll relationships do,” he said. “I don’t think either of us could have committed to a lasting relationship in this state that we were in. What made it possible was that we toured and spent all that time together.”

Eventually, they drifted apart. But before they did, Nicks played a role in Walsh’s 1985 solo album The Confessor.

“She rode shotgun with me on that album, and gave me some direction,” Walsh said. “She’s really good at the craft of songwriting. Left to my own devices, I will have 85 pieces of paper with a couple of words on each.”

Walsh’s approach to songwriting has always been somewhat ad hoc. At a spoken-word event in West Hollywood in 2012, he described the process this way:

“There’s a room in my head where I have all these bits and pieces, and when it’s time to write a song, I take them and put them on a table like a jigsaw puzzle and see what fits.”

His most popular and enduring songs often emerged from that unconventional process. “Life’s Been Good,” for example, was assembled from seemingly unrelated ideas, while “Life in the Fast Lane” grew out of a coordination exercise Walsh played on electric guitar to help him warm up before shows.

The lyrics to “Rocky Mountain Way,” meanwhile, came to him as he was mowing the lawn. He was so excited that he left the mower running while he wrote them down and inadvertently cut down his neighbor’s rose bushes.

There was spontaneity in Walsh’s process, and an element of discovery. Nicks, by contrast, was far more deliberate. Her songs began as stories, with the music coming later.

“It starts with a little inspiration; something will happen to me,” she told CBS of her approach to songwriting. “If a man walks by and smiles at me, and I go, ‘What a beautiful smile,’ I might write ‘The smile is the only thing I saw…’, then the poem is begun. If it gets finished and I think it’s good, then I’ll sit down at the piano.”

Walsh would eventually come to realize that his addictions had to be addressed before it was too late. His substance abuse was beginning to hurt the people around him.

“The hardest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask for help,” he said. “But there’s life after addiction, and it’s good.”

Today, Walsh is focused on making sure the Eagles go out in style, as their record-breaking Las Vegas Sphere residency looks set to be their final curtain call.

Jimi Hendrix fans are getting a new view of his life courtesy of Eric Barrett. The former Hendrix roadie recounts his adventures with the electric-guitar hero in his book, Experienced: On the Road With Jimi Hendrix and Beyond, out August 4 from Diversion Books.

Barrett began working with Hendrix on May 23, 1968, when the guitarist performed in Milan, Italy, at a trouble-plagued gig where the local electrical supply caused his amplifiers to malfunction. Hendrix took out his frustrations on the equipment — and on the 21-year-old Barrett, who suddenly understood why Hendrix’s previous roadie had quit mid-tour.

But as Barrett reveals in an excerpt from the book published by The Sunday Times, Hendrix was all sugar the next day, apologizing for his outburst and assuring him that everything would be fine going forward.

“When you were around Jimi you instantly knew you were in the presence of a star,” Barrett explains. “Of course I agreed to stay. I’d have agreed to just about anything when he spoke like that.”

Even when he was on his best behavior with his crew, Hendrix smashed guitars left and right during that short tour of Italy and Switzerland. Barrett made a point of telling him which guitars were good to pummel, hoping it would prevent him from taking out his anger on a pristine new model. It didn’t always work.

“I remember one really beautiful Fender Stratocaster; I watched in horror as he destroyed it during the encore in Bologna,” Barrett writes.

“Backstage after the show, I asked him, ‘Why?’ I remember his response as if it were yesterday. ‘Eric, I just couldn’t get any more out of it, man. I squeezed every note and every sound that guitar was ever going to give me. It had nothing left to give.’”

One of Barrett’s most memorable shows with Hendrix came near the end of the guitarist’s life, at the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1970. The performance is notable for many reasons, including the fact that David Gilmour lent a hand with Hendrix’s sound that night.

Barrett remembers it for another reason: He claims in his book that he spent roughly two minutes playing guitar while Hendrix repaired a split in his pants that threatened to reveal his manhood.

As he tells it, Hendrix busted a seam while performing his acrobatic moves onstage — and he wasn’t wearing underwear. Barrett immediately knew something was wrong when Hendrix gestured to him in a way he hadn’t before.

“Jimi moved over to the side of the stage as he played and said, ‘Can you get me a safety pin and a towel?’” Barrett writes. “I raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve split my pants. And I’m not wearing any underwear.’”

Bassist Billy Cox recalled that the mishap occurred after Hendrix did the splits in the middle of “Foxey Lady.” Cox and drummer Mitch Mitchell jammed to cover for him as Hendrix slipped behind his amplifier to repair his pants.

Barrett writes that Hendrix showed him the chords to play while he mended the split.

“All the crew and artists watching from the side of the stage — Pete Townshend from the Who among them — laughed at how zealously I attacked the whammy bar,” Barrett writes. “I got so into the feedback coming out of the amps, I started smacking the guitar with my fist.

“Eventually Jimi took control again and emerged to cheers and applause. My two minutes as a rock god were over. For a few glorious moments I’d played lead guitar for the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the largest music festival yet staged.”

Suspiciously, no guitar can be heard on the recording during the bass-and-drum solo. Instead, we hear roughly two minutes of improvised jamming from Cox and Mitchell, accompanied by radio interference that crept into Jimi’s rig.

The Isle of Wight performance would be among the last Hendrix played. He died less than three weeks later, on September 18, 1970.

David Bowie worked with many guitarists throughout his long career, from Mick Ronson to Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew and Reeves Gabrels. But there was one player he returned to several times, from the 1970s to the final years of his life: Earl Slick.

What did the Brooklyn-born guitarist give him that no other player did?

“I have theories about that,” Slick tells Guitar Player via Zoom, from the kitchen of his home in New York City, while smoking a morning cigarette and opening a bottle of Gatorade. “One of the things was that, when it came down to needing that rock and roll guitar player, that was always me or Mick. And Mick left us a long time ago.” (Ronson died in 1993.)

As for the others?

“All those guys are wonderful,” Slick says. “But none of them are rock players. So he came back to me for that. That’s when I got called in.”

Earl Slick was not a constant in David Bowie’s universe. Few were. But the guitarist — born Frank Medeloni nearly 73 years ago — was a mainstay. He arrived in 1974, following the demise of the Spiders From Mars and Ronson’s exit, to perform on Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour. He played on the Young Americans and Station to Station albums soon after, then returned in 1983 for the Serious Moonlight Tour as a last-minute replacement for Stevie Ray Vaughan, who famously lent his electric guitar stylings to Let’s Dance, Bowie’s 1983 commercial smash.

Nearly 20 years would pass before Slick came back once again on the tour for Bowie’s 2002 album, Heathen. That led to him working on its follow-up, Reality, and performing on the subsequent A Reality Tour, a celebrated groundbreaking global stint that was the biggest and longest of Bowie’s career.

It was there that he witnessed Bowie’s heart attack on June 23, 2004 while onstage in Prague, along with his subsequent decline.

“It was amazing how he went from looking great to looking pretty ill — like, overnight,” Slick says. “We were just a month shy of a year being out.”

Bowie recovered, but he canceled the remaining shows and never toured again. Slick returned for his penultimate album, 2013's The Next Day, making him the only guitarist to have worked with Bowie over such an extended range of the performer's career.

The music from Slick’s latter tenures with Bowie is generously chronicled on the upcoming box set David Bowie 6. I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002–2016), due out September 12. It’s the latest and, theoretically, last in a series of massive completist collections, and features Bowie's final albums, including Reality and The Next Day, as well as the A Reality Tour live album and a previously unreleased recording from the 2002 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Also included is “Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary),” a track from Slick’s 2003 solo album, Zig Zag. Co-written with and featuring Bowie, it hit the Top 10 on several U.K. charts when it was re-released there last year.

It all serves to underscore the vital position Slick held with Bowie during the final era of his career, making this an apt time for him to weigh in on his impactful years with the chameleon of rock.

Was there much difference being Bowie’s “rock” guitarist compared to other things you’ve done?

Well, with David I did have to have a pedalboard to cover 40 years of recordings or whatever. And I hate pedals, especially overdrive pedals. But you needed certain things. You definitely needed two delay pedals just to cover “Heroes,” just to get it bouncing all over the place.

But I got a lot of free rein from David. I could literally change up bits and bobs during a show, and he liked it, actually. If you look through the concert videos, you’ll see really weird arrangements of songs and stuff. ’Cause you get bored if it’s the same song every night, so sometimes you change things up, and he liked that I did that. I had a lot of freedom to just ad lib, everywhere.

You’d been out of the Bowie orbit for about 15 years when he reached out to you around 2002. How did that come about?

Omigod. Reeves had left and David was looking for a guitar player, so his people tracked me down through a web site. It was called Slick-something-or-other, and it had all these old demos we kept putting out. That’s how he found me.

The webmaster called and said, “I just got this email. It’s a New York number and they seem to really want to get in touch with you.” He said it was from Isolar, and I said, “I know exactly who that is. It’s David.” [Isolar was the name for pair of Bowie’s tours in 1976 and 1978.]

The A Reality Tour was Bowie’s last and, many think, one of his best. What was your experience with it?

That was a fun record to play live, especially the rockers — the title track and stuff. It was the best touring band I ever played in with David. The combination of people — it was absolutely drama free, and I’ve never seen him that relaxed and happy on a tour, ever.

It was also the tour that was notoriously ended by his health issues. What do you recall from that Prague date when he had his heart attack?

It was a really weird gig. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was hotter than hell in the place, and I could see he was having a hard time hitting some notes. I thought he was just baked. We were all baked.

I think we were doing “The Jean Genie,” and he goes to me, “Keep vamping, just jam” — this, while he’s having a heart attack. Then he started grabbing his chest and the tour managers came over and dragged him off.

A few minutes later, he comes back and joins us. He lasted about a measure or two and then he walked off. They said that he had a blocked nerve, whatever that is, and that diagnosis was wrong.

We did the Hurricane Festival in Germany a couple days later; I went over to talk to him, and he was feeling horrible. We did the whole show and then we got a phone call saying, “Sit tight for a couple of days. David needs to rest. We’re gonna take a few days off.”

So we just hung out in Hamburg. Nobody’s saying anything to us.

And then we get phone calls saying, “Guys, we’re done. You gotta go home.” We didn’t get an explanation; we all knew he was probably getting some kind of surgery, but we weren’t getting any details about it.

When we did “Heroes” at the Hurricane Festival, I swear to God it’s one of the best vocal performances he ever did of it. Two hours later, probably, he was in the hospital.

Was the idea of him playing live again ever broached?

It was. We were working on The Next Day; just as I finished up my work on the track “Set the World on Fire.” We were listening back in the control room and he looks at me and goes, “This would just kick ass live.” I looked at him ready to say something, and he goes, “Don’t even think about it.” [laughs]

That was the discussion we had about going on tour again. That was the whole discussion, and he said, “Don’t think about it.” I could see it in his eyes. I’d been with him so long, I knew he was dead serious. He ain’t going nowhere.

It was disappointing, because I really thought we would have at least one good tour left in us. This was the summer of 2013, so it’s possible that he might’ve been ill already, with the cancer. We’ll never know, but I think it’s a possibility.

The Next Day was another kind of odd reconnection, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was typical David. He started making that record around 2011, I think, and everybody who was brought in had to sign an NDA. I’m talking to some of the guys on the phone and nobody says a word.

In the meantime, this friend of mine, a surgeon, he built a car, a Cobra, and I had this blues gig I was doing near his house in Montclair, New Jersey. I go visit and he says, “Let’s go for a ride in the Cobra before we go to the gig.”

We drove for a little bit, and then the car started to do weird shit, like sputtering and stalling out. So he stops the car and two seconds later a big flame comes out of the engine. We call 911 and the fire department comes, and the cops come, and there’s TV. I guess one of the reporters figured out I was in the car and the word gets out on the Internet.

The next day I get a text from Bowie: “Oh God, I saw this accident. Are you okay?” I write back, “Yeah, I’m great, I’m fine. How are you?” “Good.” Then I get a few more messages over the course of the next day or two, like, “How you doin’? What have you been up to lately?” This is not a typical thing with him.

So finally I’m like, “Okay, are you trying to get to a point? What is it?” And he was, “Well, we’re making this record, and I need you to come in for a week or so and work on it.”

I swear to God, if we hadn’t blown up the car, I might not have been on that record. That’s just him: It’s out of sight, out of mind sometimes, and then it’s, “Wait a minute — Slicky could do this or that.”

Was there a standard operating procedure when you worked together?

We’d sit there and brainstorm, especially on the overdub bits. Both of us always like to have some kind of melodic lick in there somewhere, some signature in the song, and we’d just knock ideas around.

Like the lick on “Valentine’s Day,” the signature lick at the beginning, we sat there and bounced it around for about 10 or 15 minutes and that lick popped out and there it was. A lot of that kind of stuff was done on the fly; we never spent lots of time. As soon as we heard something that clicked, that was it. That’s the best stuff, when it just comes out from outer space or something.

What is your sense of the late-period Bowie compared to your previous years with him?

Well, back in the early days — this not speaking out of school, ’cause it’s pretty well known — a lot of drugs were involved, and a lot of cocaine. Between the drugs and him having management problems and all that, he was on another planet.

And then as the years went on he changed, like we all do. In the 2000s a sense of humor was there that was never there in the early days. He was funnier than hell, and he was more approachable. He turned into... I wouldn’t say a different person, but the real him came out.

How did you approach guitar choices for your work with Bowie?

I love Telecasters. I’ve always been a Tele player. But for the Heathen tour he said, “We do need a humbucker on some of this,” so I grabbed some Les Pauls, and by the A Reality Tour I was using pretty much my Les Pauls most of the show. I don’t think I used my Teles at all on that. I did have a Strat I used for a few things, but most of it was Les Paul.

Having “Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary)” on the box set is a nice postscript, especially after its success last year in the U.K.

That’s a weird one. I was living in Portland [circa 2002], and I just started to toodle around with my guitar, and all of a sudden I started coming up with stuff and recording bits and pieces. I ended up with a lot of them, so I called up Mark Plati and said, “When you get some time maybe we can cut an instrumental record. I got some good ideas.”

I didn’t realize he was in the studio when I called him. David was there, and David says, “Earl, I heard Mark say you guys were gonna do some recording. Maybe I’ll play some tambourine or something. Maybe I’ll even sing one, or we can write one.”

So I sent him a half-dozen bits and he picked the one that eventually turned into “Isn’t It Evening.” We recorded it, and we released it during the A Reality Tour, which turned out to be a bad idea, because my record got buried in there.

So I just sat with that track for years and thought, One of these days, I’ll release it as a single. Then Penguin Books approached me about the memoir [Slick’s recently published Guitar: Life and Music with David Bowie, John Lennon and Rock and Roll’s Greatest Heroes]. I said, “Ah, that’s the time to do it!”

So we rearranged it and it came out about two months after the book. It got on the charts and we had a hit single. Funny how timing works. And I’m really glad it’s on the box set, because it turned out to be his last hit.

In George Martin, the Beatles had a producer who excelled at thinking outside the box. Martin‘s innovative studio techniques and openness to new ideas made him the ideal producer for a group as wildly creative as the Beatles.

But he was only human, and like most people he preferred to wrap up the workday at a reasonable hour.

That didn‘t always sit well with the Beatles, particularly in their later years, when recording sessions frequently carried over past midnight..

“Some of the people here — the engineer, for instance — would always be trying to go home at 5:30, and we'd be trying to make history,” George Harrison says in the 1991 Beatles Anthology documentary as he, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sit in Abbey Road Studios.

The Beatles certainly knew how to fight fatigue. When performing night-long sets in Hamburg in the early 1960s, they‘d take Preludin, an appetite suppressant and stimulant with effects similar to amphetamines — a.k.a. speed, or uppers — to help them stay awake.

Which is how they managed to get Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to work after hours on one particular night in the late 1960s: by lacing a pot of tea — prepared by their roadie, Mal Evans — with speed.

“Mal had this big teapot,” Harrison explained. “It was a big aluminum teapot, and I remember one specific incident where he made a pot of tea, and we doused the tea with uppers.”

Evans proceeded to take cups of tea up to the control booth overlooking the studio. "‘Cause they were asking, ‘Can we go home now?’” Harrison continues. “‘No, you can’t, you bastard. Have a cup of tea!’

“And then they were up there until 11 o‘clock at night.”

“Yeah, and then they didn’t want to go home,” McCartney adds. “They wouldn‘t let us leave.”

It was only when the 1995 documentary first aired that Martin learned about the episode.

Ironically, Harrison and John Lennon's first time taking LSD came after a dentist friend spiked their coffee.

It wasn‘t all fun and games, though. McCartney's love of pot got him busted in Japan. And American singer-songwriter James Taylor — who signed to the Beatles' Apple label in 1968 — claimed his heroin use influenced Lennon's decision to try the drug. He subsequently became addicted.

In the years after the Beatles broke up, John Lennon found a kindred spirit in an unlikely musician: Frank Zappa.

The iconoclastic composer and guitarist was an odd choice for Lennon. Zappa's music was avant garde and frequently irreverent. Lennon, on the other hand, was a pop songwriter. At the time he and Zappa met in 1971, he was on the verge of releasing his heartfelt ode to peace, "Imagine."

That said, Lennon had his experimental side too, as did his wife and musical partner, Yoko Ono. But the former Beatle wasn't just inspired by Zappa's music — he also liked Zappa's attitude when it came to leadership of his band, the Mothers of Invention.

As the former Fab revealed in his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, he was unhappy dealing with artistic differences in the Beatles and, especially, with how he believed he was portrayed in the media alongside Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

“I’m sick of reading things that say Paul is the musician and George is the philosopher. I wonder where I fit in, what was my contribution?” he mused.

“I’d sooner be Zappa and say, ‘Listen, you fuckers, this is what I did, and I don’t care whether you like my attitude saying it. That’s what I am, you know, I’m a fucking artist, and I’m not a fucking PR agent or the product of some other person’s imagination.

"Whether you’re the public or whatever, I’m standing by my work," he added, "whereas before I would not stand by it.”

It didn't take long for Lennon to meet his new hero. It happened on June 6, 1971, in an unusual introduction that Zappa recalled on The Frank Zappa Interview Picture Disk, released in 1984.

“A journalist in New York City woke me up, knocked on the door, and is standing there with a tape recorder and goes, ‘Frank, I’d like to introduce you to John Lennon,’ waiting for me to gasp and fall on the floor,” he said.

“I said, ‘Well, Okay. Come on in.’ And we sat around and talked, and I think the first thing he said to me was, ‘You’re not as ugly as I thought you would be.’ I thought he had a pretty good sense of humor, so I invited him to come down and jam with us at the Fillmore East.”

Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were engaged in a two-night stand at the famed New York CIty venue for June 5 and 6. The shows were being recorded and would be released that August as Fillmore East — June 1971.

Lennon and Ono came out for the encore that second night and played for half an hour with the group. The couple were well-suited to Zappa’s idiosyncratic musical approach, and the show was a success.

Although Zappa didn't include the Lennon and Ono songs on the initial release of Fillmore East – June 1971, the recordings appeared roughly one year later on the couple's 1972 double-album set, Some Time in New York City.

A sprawling album containing songs inspired by the couple's growing activism for peace and justice, Some Time in New York City was a divisive effort among Lennon's fans. The politically themed content on the first disc was at times blunt and unvarnished, while the second disc showed the couple's more avant-garde side via recordings from a 1969 UNICEF charity concert in London (featuring George Harrison) and the Fillmore East concert.

But the fans' disappointment was nothing compared to what Zappa must have felt when he discovered Lennon and Ono had remixed one of the Fillmore East tracks and claimed it as their own.

“There’s a song that I wrote called ‘King Kong’ which we played that night," Zappa explained. "And I don’t know whether it was Yoko’s idea or John’s idea, but they changed the name of the song to ‘Jamrag.’

“[They] gave themselves writing and publishing credit on it, stuck it on an album, and never paid me. It was obviously not a jam session song: It’s got a melody, it’s got a bass line; it’s obviously an organized song. [It was a] little bit disappointing.”

In remixing the track, Lennon and Ono removed the vocals sung by Mothers members — and former Turtles — Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. Only Ono's wailing vocals were retained.

“After they had sat in with us, an arrangement was made that we would both have access to the tapes,” Zappa explained. “He wanted to release it with his mix, and I had the right to release it with my mix, so that’s how that one section came out.”

Because Zappa was legally prevented from releasing his version of the Lennon-Ono jam until 1992, his mix of the recording didn't come out until it was featured on Playground Psychotics, one of the last releases before his death the following year. The set was also included on the 2022 expanded edition of Fillmore East – June 1971.

Although Lennon and Zappa had connected creatively, their relationship didn't last. Lennon was clearly eager to continue collaborating. It was around this same time that he asked Eric Clapton to form a new band with him that would pull him out of his drug troubles and “bring back the balls in rock ‘n’ roll.”

The former Beatle would continue to collaborate — and with more mutually satisfying results — in the coming years. In 1974, he and Elton John joined together for the recording of Lennon's hit song "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night." Months later, in January 1975, Lennon and David Bowie would join forces to write and record the hit track "Fame" and cut a cover of Lennon's Beatles-era song "Across the Universe," both from Bowie's Young Americans album.

Lou Koller, the frontman of New York hardcore band Sick of It All, has died at the age of 59 following a battle with esophageal cancer.

Koller’s death was announced by Sick of It All on July 24. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2024, forcing the band to cancel a European tour while he underwent treatment. After intensive treatment, he was declared cancer-free in May 2025, but the cancer later returned.

“It’s with unbelievable sadness that we announce to our worldwide hardcore family the passing of our brother Lou Koller,” the band said in a statement. “The level of loss that we feel at this time is overwhelming.”

This year would have marked Sick of It All’s 40th anniversary.

Koller formed the band in Queens, New York, in 1986 with his brother Pete and Armand Majidi, who played electric guitar and drums, respectively. The original lineup also featured bass guitarist Craig Ahead, who joined in 1987. The group became one of the defining acts of the New York hardcore scene, releasing 12 studio albums and building an international audience through decades of touring.

Sick of It All released its debut album, Blood, Sweat and No Tears, in 1989. Their profile grew during the early 1990s with albums that included Just Look Around and Scratch the Surface, the latter released in 1994 and widely regarded as one of the key hardcore albums of the decade.

The band’s longevity was unusual in a scene often associated with short-lived groups and rapidly changing lineups. But Koller said the relationship between the band and its audience remained central to hardcore.

“Hardcore is a double-edged sword,” he told Louder in 2016. “There are so many aspects of it that I love and that I cherish, but there are also so many parts of it that I fucking hate and despise. For the loving aspect it’s the family part, which is still true. And it’s not like in those cheesy hardcore songs that are about ‘the crew’; it’s more ‘if you need something then I got you.’”

Koller remained Sick of It All’s lead vocalist throughout its career, as the band continued to release albums and tour internationally. Later releases included Death to Tyrants in 2006, Based on a True Story in 2010, The Last Act of Defiance in 2014 and Wake the Sleeping Dragon! in 2018.

Describing his influences, Koller said, “It's a combination. When I first started, I really didn't know how to do anything, but I wanted to sound as hard and as rough as the singer, John Brandon, from Negative Approach and also Chris, the singer of Crumbsuckers because he also sounded like John Brandon.

“But now, for the last 10 years or so, I still try to emulate that, but I try to have a bit more range. One of my favorites is Lemmy from Motörhead because he had such a rough voice, but he had this melody, too. He could hit the notes but was just a great vocalist.”

Koller announced his cancer diagnosis in June 2024, saying that a tumor had been found in his esophagus and that the cancer had extended into his stomach. Sick of It All subsequently canceled its European tour as he began treatment. The band later announced that Koller had been declared cancer-free, but the disease returned.

Sick of It All’s statement following Koller’s death paid tribute to his presence both onstage and off.

“Lou had the power to raise everyone’s spirits at our shows with a smile and a sarcastic comment, and he won people over wherever we played, from every culture and every corner of the world,” the band said. “His battle is over now and he can finally rest. Hopefully he can somehow still see and feel the beautiful, positive mark he left on the world.”

Koller is survived by his wife, Maureen, and their daughter, according to the band’s statement.

Buddy Guy once had to reassure Albert King that he wasn’t trying to steal his guitar tricks.

The two blues legends were often booked on the same shows, and Guy recalls one particularly funny encounter during a soundcheck in Montreal. King, who was famously protective of his distinctive guitar style, spotted Guy sitting in the audience — and immediately turned his back.

“I didn’t play a lot with Albert, but we were often on the same show,” Guy told Guitar Player. “I’ll never forget one time in Montreal when Albert was doing his soundcheck. I was sitting in the audience, and he turned his back to me after he saw me out there. He said, ‘I ain’t going to let you see a damn thing.’

“I had to tell him, ‘Man, you’re left-handed. I can’t take shit from you no way, because I’m right-handed.’”

King was left-handed, but that wasn’t the only unusual aspect of his playing. He played a right-handed electric guitar upside down, with the high E string on top, and also used unorthodox alternate tunings.

Even so, King may have had reason to be cautious around Guy. He was certainly not shy about strutting his stuff in front of other guitarists, having famously shared stages with Rory Gallagher, B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others.

Both King and Guy were known for their aggressive string-bending techniques and their sliding into pentatonic boxes. Neither man used a whammy bar, and perhaps King thought Guy might steal some ideas about technique from him.

As Guy revealed to Guitar Player, he did experiment once with a whammy bar early in his career while recording for Chess Records.

“I cut a side at Chess using a whammy bar, but they weren’t ready for it. They were like, ‘Nobody wants to hear that.’

“These days, though, I don’t put a whammy bar on my guitars. Honestly, I stopped back when I was using very light strings because it made them break easier, and I couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones.”

Guy also never attempted to play slide guitar, explaining that the technique required too much precision for the wild, attention-grabbing style he had developed.

“It’s because I was always wanted to be like Guitar Slim, and you can’t be wild and play a slide. You’ve got to be precise. You’ve got to sit there, and make that tone — like Derek Trucks.

“When I came out, I didn’t ever think I was a good guitar player, so I was trying to make people pay attention. I got that from Guitar Slim.

“I remember when I first saw his show. At the start, all I heard was a guitar. And then he came in the front door playing. I turned to see he had a 150-foot-long cable. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be wild like Guitar Slim, and I want to be able to shake my wrist like B.B. King.’ But who can?”

Guy is currently on the road with his Buddy Guy 90 tour, which continues through September 2026. The run includes dates across the U.S., with upcoming performances scheduled in cities including Chicago, Atlantic City, Nashville and Denver.

David Lee Roth has canceled almost all of the remaining dates on his current U.S. tour — and received an unexpected message of support from his longtime rival, Sammy Hagar.

The original Van Halen singer launched the tour in April and later extended the run through September. But on July 23, all but one of the remaining dates were removed from Roth’s official website without explanation.

Roth had been scheduled to play six shows between July 23 and September 4. As of now, the only date still listed is an August 7 appearance in Sturgis, South Dakota.

The news prompted a surprisingly sympathetic response from Hagar, the singer who replaced Roth in Van Halen in 1985. The two have spent much of the past four decades taking shots at each other, but Hagar took a markedly different tone when addressing Roth’s tour cancellation.

In a seemingly earnest video message, delivered while sipping a tequila cocktail, Hagar said he had heard about the canceled dates from former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony. He also invited Roth to join him and Anthony at an upcoming Las Vegas show.

“Hey Dave, Sammy here. I just got a call from Michael Anthony as I’m sitting down having my favorite cocktail, I don’t have to tell you that this is about your tour getting cancelled,” Hagar said.

“And I want say from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I hope you’re well. I hope there’s not a physical problem.”

Hagar then acknowledged that both he and Roth have continued to perform songs from their former band almost six years after the death of guitarist Eddie Van Halen.

“Honestly, Mike and I love the fact that you’ve been out there doing it, supporting the greatest band in the world that we were both part of,” he said. “And, yeah, I’m really sorry. That’s fucked up... You and I, Mikey, Al [Alex Van Halen], Ed, cannot be replaced.

“So, when you’re ready to carry on, you go, brother. Mike and I support you.”

Hagar then invited Roth to join him and Anthony at their Las Vegas residency in September.

“Come on, join us, sing a couple of songs, MC the damn show. Come out and just do what the fuck you do, which is pretty damn entertaining,” Hagar said.

“Anyway, hope you’re well, I really do. God bless, brother.”

The message is a striking departure from the singers’ usual public exchanges. Hagar replaced Roth in Van Halen in 1985, and the two spent much of the following decades criticizing each other in interviews and through the press.

They did manage to share a stage again in 2002, when Roth and Hagar both took part in a Van Halen tour. But the reunion did little to permanently settle their long-running rivalry, and the two continued to clash in the years that followed.

They were still taking shots at each other as recently as last year, when Roth mocked Hagar’s claim that he had been visited by the ghost of Eddie Van Halen.

Hagar’s latest message, then, is an unusually warm gesture from one former Van Halen frontman to the other — particularly given their history.

Brian May has been crowned the greatest rock guitarist of all time, topping a 2020 Total Guitar poll and finishing second in a 2012 Guitar World readers’ poll. But the Queen legend has never been one to wax lyrical about his own abilities. In fact, when May was asked to name the guitarists who truly left him humbled, he pointed to a late ’90s great whose playing he considered nothing short of elemental.

May’s own rags-to-riches story is the stuff of rock legend. He built the Red Special with his father out of materials that included wood from an old fireplace, then went on to fill stadiums around the world and sell millions of records with Queen. Yet he has often been remarkably self-deprecating about what he can do with his homemade electric guitar in his hands.

He once said his playing sounded like “an angry wasp” next to Jimi Hendrix’s cataclysmic guitar work, while describing Ritchie Blackmore as a “fireball” who influenced his playing like few others. But in 2019, May made it clear that another Stratocaster-slinging guitarist had left an equally profound impression on him.

“This is the kind of guitar playing that melts me,” he wrote on Instagram, sharing a clip of Stevie Ray Vaughan performing “Life Without You” from his 1985 album Soul to Soul (via FarOut).

“Stevie Ray Vaughan, lost in a world of his own, here allows his fingers to be a channel for the burning passions inside him. Like Jimi Hendrix, he effortlessly makes his guitar sing to us, speak to us of wonders beyond words. Even with both hands behind his back!”

May went on to express his regret that he never met Vaughan.

“I so wish I had met SRV,” he wrote. “But one of the favorite moments in my life was when one of his friends told me, after he was gone, that he liked my playing. This man was truly one of guitar playing’s greatest champions. An elemental monster.”

May wasn’t the only legendary guitarist to draw a comparison between Vaughan and Hendrix. Jeff Beck, who toured with the Texan bluesman, once told Vaughan to his face that he reminded him of Hendrix — a comparison that Vaughan reportedly took to heart.

May, meanwhile, had discovered Hendrix in a far less glamorous setting: he found one of the guitarist’s albums in the trash, an encounter that sparked an obsession with his firebrand playing. But he never lost his own voice along the way.

That individuality is ultimately what makes both Hendrix and May such towering figures in the history of rock guitar, even if May has always been quick to downplay his own greatness.

“All I ever did, really, was play the way I feel and make the guitar my voice,” he once said. “I play like I would like to sing. I’m not the world’s greatest singer. I’m not the world’s greatest guitarist either, but thank you for saying so. I can speak with the guitar; I can make it sing; and that’s all I do. It just comes inside.”

And while May has been humbled by more than one guitar hero over the years, his own body of work — from Queen’s greatest recordings to his solo career and beyond — makes clear that he has long since earned his place among the electric guitar’s most distinctive voices.

When Jimi Hendrix first performed in London, he blew everyone’s minds – and seemingly every player worth their salt has since claimed to have been there for those changemaking early shows. Eric Clapton was certainly there. And while he recognized Hendrix as a generational talent, he also believed that the guitarist’s original backing band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was “a mistake.”

Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were three of the hottest guitar players in London when Hendrix arrived on British shores, and the American guitarist quickly found himself at the center of the scene. One of his first performances was an impromptu jam with Cream in October 1966, just days after his arrival.

His introduction to the British music scene quickly became the stuff of legend. Beck has said Hendrix changed the game; Paul McCartney has recalled watching the then-unknown guitarist play to an empty club; and Robert Fripp considered him something more than a mere guitarist.

By the time of his death four years later, Hendrix had released four landmark albums, written some of the most iconic riffs and solos ever committed to tape, and helped kickstart an electric-guitar revolution. Yet Clapton’s assessment of the trajectory of his career makes for interesting reading.

“I think the best I knew him was at the beginning,” Clapton said in a 1973 interview uploaded to YouTube by Quentin Melson.

Upon the recommendation of the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, the Animals’ bass guitarist Chas Chandler became Hendrix’s manager and brought him to London. Chandler had ambitions of creating a backing band that would spotlight Hendrix’s virtuosity while introducing him to a British scene that was becoming increasingly adventurous and technically accomplished.

The result was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, completed by bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. But Clapton didn’t believe the lineup was necessarily the best possible vehicle for Hendrix’s talents.

“I thought it was a bit of a mistake,” he said. “I thought it was a hype really; I felt from the first that he should have had at least an American band, whether they were white or black didn’t matter, as long as they knew the music they were playing.”

Hendrix’s approach to the blues was indeed different from what British audiences – and many British musicians – were accustomed to hearing. But Clapton believed Chandler had assembled the Experience in a hurry.

“I felt that Chas had really just picked up two free musicians who were in the rock field loosely,” Clapton explained. “I think Mitch, before that, was playing with Georgie Fame and was more into the jazz thing,” while Redding had been playing pop and rock in bands including the Loving Kind.

It’s easy to understand why Clapton felt Chandler might have been trying to put square pegs in round holes in a bid to capitalize on Hendrix’s extraordinary talents. But, as Clapton acknowledged, the results quickly spoke for themselves.

“They really got into it very quickly,” he said. “I thought at first that it could have been a better band, or a bigger band. But it worked in the end, obviously. He’d been in London for about a week when he got the Experience together, and he had the whole club on its feet. They couldn’t believe it. He could have been up there on his own; he didn’t need anyone else.”

Hendrix had crossed the Atlantic to make his name after struggling to establish himself in the United States. His early career had included stints backing Little Richard, although his relationships with the singer and other bandleaders were complicated by his growing reputation as a ladies’ man.

Clapton, ultimately, wanted the best for Hendrix because he understood just how high the guitarist’s ceiling was. In that same 1973 interview, he compared Hendrix to Howlin’ Wolf. And years later, he recalled one of the first times he saw the guitarist play.

“We were playing at the London Polytechnic the day Jimi arrived in England, and Chas Chandler brought him to see us,” Clapton told Uncut in 2012. “He got up and played Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’. Even today I don’t know many people who can play that. It’s a very, very tough piece of music. But Jimi did it, and then he put the guitar behind his back, and I thought, ‘My god, this is like Buddy Guy on acid.’”

Hendrix’s dazzling showmanship actually scuppered Clapton’s plans for a “solo odyssey,” forcing him to focus instead on life in a band.

Yet while Beck was reportedly so overwhelmed by Hendrix’s arrival that he briefly considered retiring, Clapton’s response was far less apocalyptic.

“I fell in love with him,” he said. “I think Ginger [Baker] and Jack [Bruce] felt threatened because they could see he was going to corner the market, for sure. But I felt an incredible sense of relief that there was somebody else on the planet who was as devoted to that music as I was. Of course, he was a showman. But he knew what the blues was about.”

Hendrix would ultimately become the barometer against which trailblazing guitar playing was measured. Leslie West, for example, said he knew he was onto something with Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” when the song won Hendrix’s approval.

Maybe Chandler simply got lucky with the band he assembled. Or perhaps Hendrix was destined for success with just about any musicians behind him. Either way, Clapton’s early doubts about the Experience didn’t diminish his awe at the man at its center.

“He could have been up there on his own,” he said. “He didn’t need anyone else.”

Australian percussive acoustic-guitar wizard Tommy Emmanuel has played some huge gigs in his life. But few can have been more impactful than the time he and Martin Taylor entertained inmates at a high-security prison.

Emmanuel has headlined Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium and Paris’ Olympia, where the Beatles enjoyed a historic 18-day residency in 1964. He has even upstaged Les Paul on his own turf — though he later lived to regret it. But in a new interview, the guitarist has reflected on one of the most unique audiences ever to experience his virtuosic yet calming presence.

“I’ve played to 15 inmates who are in there for life, for murder,” he tells Zakk Kuhn. “They were allowed to watch YouTube on Thursday afternoons for 45 minutes, and they all chose me to watch. So the prison system asked if I would come and meet with them. What a weird thing to think. But it was so wonderful.”

The first encounter came when Emmanuel was being filmed for an interview. As the cameras started rolling, Kuhn jovially asked him about his favorite film. Emmanuel answered The Shawshank Redemption, praising its “dialogue, story, and happy ending” — but the guitarist’s prison experience would soon go far beyond discussing a movie about life behind bars.

“A year later I came back with [guitarist] Martin Taylor,” he explains. “We were doing our swing music show, and we played to a much bigger group in an open space, and I can’t tell you the feeling of playing for these guys. We did about an hour set, and a big black guy came up afterward, and he just grabbed me in a bear hug, and he whispered in my ear, ‘We escaped for an hour.’ It was unbelievable.”

The prison, Emmanuel says, was San Quentin in California, the historic facility that has held inmates including Charles Manson and is the only prison in the state that houses a death row.

“There were four stages of security, and everyone was in there for life,” he recalls. “The first time I went in, I got into the third layer of security, and then all the alarms went off, and it was a lockdown; there was a fight between two gangs, and one guy was dead, stabbed to death right there. And I saw him. I saw blood everywhere. It was awful.”

The prison hospital was directly next to where Emmanuel was at that moment. “He was on a table, and he was wide open,” the guitarist says.

But the shocking incident didn’t stop the guitarist from going ahead with the performance.

“I kept going because I knew there were 12 guys in that room down there that I wanted to meet,” he states. “I had good security, but the guy who did the murdering was in a one-man cage like an animal. He really looked like a wild animal, but I didn’t want to engage with him. He’d just taken a life.”

That would have been enough of a brush with mortality to make many musicians turn around. Emmanuel is glad he didn’t.

“The guy who’d been there the longest was the guy who really advocated for me to come there,” the guitarist explains. “His name was Marty, and he gave me a beautiful painting that he’d done. It was the story of Jesus, and it was all in little pictures, and he so carefully drew it and gave it to me.

“They knew exactly what they wanted me to play,” he continues. “They’d already got in a conference about it. So I had to play ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ and ‘Guitar Boogie.’ They had a list for me, and they were saying, ‘Can you please play this for us?’”

It was an eye-opening experience from start to finish — and certainly very different from Emmanuel’s typical gig day.

“Sometimes Marty would speak up and say, ‘Would you mind showing us how you do that?’” he goes on. “They were just quiet-speaking guys who’d been in there a long time. The guards knew them very well, and there was a feeling of peace and collaboration in that room. It was quite different from what just happened outside. But that’s life for you.”

By now, Emmanuel is used to having unique fans. He has been gifted a guitar by a dying fan and once received a guitar lesson from Chet Atkins in a dream. His career has been anything but straightforward — and even by the standards of one of acoustic guitar’s most extraordinary performers, serenading murderers at San Quentin was an experience unlike any other.

Delaney Bramlett had plenty of famous musical friends, including George Harrison and Eric Clapton. But few were closer to him than Duane Allman.

The Allman Brothers Band guitarist befriended Bramlett in the late 1960s and became a member of the extended musical family surrounding Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. Allman played on several of the group’s recordings, and in 1970, he gave Bramlett a beautiful three-tone sunburst 1961 Fender Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard.

As Bramlett told Guitar Player, the gift was a remarkably personal gesture from a friend who had become like family.

“Duane had left the Allman Brothers to tour with my band,” Bramlett told the magazine in its March 1996 issue. “Sometimes he’d play my goldtop, and most of the time I’d play his Strat ’cause I liked it so much. We were gigging in New York, and he had to go to Macon for some reason. My brother found the Strat in his room with a note he left: ‘To Delaney, my best friend. Wear it in good health.’”

Bramlett said the last time he saw Allman was at the funeral of bluesman King Curtis, who had died in August 1971. Allman died just over two months later, on October 29, while Bramlett was on the road in western Oregon.

“My brother got a call that Duane had got killed,” Bramlett recalled. “He wouldn’t tell me till I got through the show. So the next thing I knew I was at Duane’s funeral.”

The gift was especially generous considering that Bramlett had once refused to return a guitar that Allman desperately wanted back: the first electric guitar he had ever owned.

In 1961, Allman’s mother bought him a cherry-red double-cutaway 1959 Gibson Les Paul Junior to stop him from constantly borrowing his brother Gregg’s Teisco Silvertone. Allman eventually pawned the Gibson. Sometime later, Bramlett acquired an electric guitar that sounded suspiciously like the one Allman had lost.

“I called Duane to brag about it, and he said, ‘Does it have a big scrape across the back?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘That was my first electric guitar. I pawned it and forgot where. Can I have it back?’ And I said, ‘No way. This is a real good ’un.’”

Bramlett’s recollection of his guitars wasn’t always entirely accurate. In the same Guitar Player interview, he told a story about another famous instrument in his collection: a rare 1913 Gibson Style O archtop that had previously belonged to Eric Clapton and George Harrison.

According to Bramlett, he and Clapton discovered the guitar while they were touring in support of Clapton’s debut solo album.

“We used to keep our eyes peeled for guitars,” Bramlett said. “We found this neck stickin’ out of a Dumpster, grabbed it out, and there it was. One of the real rare ones. It had a broken neck, but other than that, it was a beauty.”

The story, however, doesn’t line up with the guitar’s documented history.

Clapton had acquired the 1913 Gibson by 1968, and he and Harrison used it during the songwriting sessions that produced some of their most important work. The guitar is associated with “Badge,” the Clapton-Harrison co-write that appeared on Cream’s final album, Goodbye, as well as “Here Comes the Sun” and other songs Clapton and Harrison composed in the late 1960s. Clapton later passed the guitar to Bramlett around 1970.

The instrument eventually became known as “Pattie,” a nod to Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s former wife who later married Clapton. The guitar was listed for nearly $1 million on Reverb in May 2025 before being offered by Heritage Auctions in November of that year, where it failed to sell.

Bramlett’s collection grew to include other famous guitars, including Harrison’s 1968 Rosewood Telecaster, which is now back with Harrison’s estate. He sold Allman’s Les Paul Junior in 1999, and many of Bramlett’s remaining guitars were sold off following his death in 2008. While Bramlett may have been a little loose with the details of how he acquired one of the most historically significant guitars he ever owned, there’s no question that he was the keeper of some extraordinary instruments.

Fifteen years after her death on July 23, 2011, Amy Winehouse remains best known for her singular voice and candid songwriting. But there’s another side to her musicianship that tends to get overlooked: Winehouse was an accomplished guitarist who used the instrument to shape her songs and develop a style that was entirely her own.

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

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

From an early age, Winehouse made electric guitar integral to her songwriting and performing, using the instrument to pen her songs as well as perform them with a unique personal touch. She first fell in love with the Fender Stratocaster as a teenager, after her older brother acquired a used model.

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

Winehouse wasn’t supposed to play her brother’s Stratocaster, but she would carefully sneak into his room and play it whenever she had the chance. By doing so, she slowly began to develop her chops. And when she finally acquired her own guitar — an acoustic model — the siblings amicably swapped instruments back and forth.

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

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

Inspired by the likes of Carole King, PJ Harvey and Shuggie Otis, Winehouse’s self-taught musicianship and remarkable gift for songwriting resulted in a unique playing style that perfectly complemented her voice and songwriting.

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

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

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

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

Mick Jagger has opened up about his friendly rivalry with David Bowie — and the period when he believes the late songwriter was at “his most Stones-y.”

The two artists emerged from the London rock scene in the mid-to-late 1960s, with the Rolling Stones scoring their first chart success in the wake of the Beatles’ breakthrough and Bowie launching into the mainstream with 1969’s “Space Oddity.”

They remained close throughout their careers, and Jagger says Bowie’s competitiveness brought out the best in both of them.

“We were competitive. David was so competitive,” Jagger tells Conan O’Brien. “I was made competitive by David — I had to be competitive back.”

Unlike Jagger, who has maintained the image of a swaggering, sharp-tongue blues rocker throughout his career, Bowie shed his skin constantly, changing personas from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and many other incarnations.

But there was one period when Jagger felt Bowie was getting particularly close to the Stones’ sound.

“There isn’t one David Bowie. There’s kind of like a slowly evolving David Bowie, [and] there’s jump cuts,” Jagger says. “When he was doing ‘Jean Genie’ [from 1973’s Aladdin Sane], he was very Stones-y, you know? That was a very Stones-y period.

“So he would come over and play me ‘Jean Genie,’ like ‘Do you wanna listen?’”

Naturally, Jagger was keen to hear the track. And he immediately recognized some familiar influences, including Mick Ronson’s Keith Richards–inspired electric guitar riffing.

“I said, ‘God, you nicked all my things’” Jagger says with a laugh. “[And he said], ‘Yeah, I know, man. But it’s like an homage to you.’”

Bowie didn’t mention Jagger when discussing the song’s origins in his 2002 book, Moonage Daydream: The Life & Times of Ziggy Stardust; he cited Iggy Pop and American actress Cyrinda Foxe as inspirations. But he did acknowledge the Rolling Stones’ influence on the track.

“I wanted to get the same sound as the Stones had on their first album on the harmonica,” he said. “I didn’t get that near to it, but it had a feel that I wanted — that ’60s thing.”

And Bowie didn’t stop there. Aladdin Sane also featured his adrenalized take on the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” further supporting Jagger’s contention that Bowie was in a particularly Stones-y phase.

More than a decade later, the pair would turn their friendly rivalry into an actual collaboration. In 1985, Jagger and Bowie recorded a cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” to raise money for Live Aid’s famine-relief efforts.

The song became a major hit, but the accompanying video captured something that the track itself couldn’t quite contain: two of rock’s biggest stars hamming it up, dancing through the streets and looking like they were having an absolute blast trying to outdo the other.

“Stairway to Heaven” is one of the most famous rock songs ever recorded. It’s also one of the most overplayed. So overplayed, in fact, that it has been banned from guitar stores, immortalized in Wayne’s World and become the subject of a long-running copyright battle over its opening guitar figure.

But Robert Plant once went a step further: He paid a radio station to stop playing it.

The Led Zeppelin singer revealed the story in a 2002 interview with NPR, recalling a drive through Oregon that ended with a speeding ticket — and an unusual pledge to a local community radio station.

“I was in Portland, Oregon,” Plant said. “I was driving along in my car, heading for Lincoln City, which is out on the coast. I wanted to drive down to Eureka.

“Just before the black-and-white [the highway patrol] caught me doing 90mph, [I was listening to] KBOO.”

KBOO is a volunteer-run community radio station that was founded in 1964. At the time of Plant’s drive, the station had a tongue-in-cheek approach to raising money from its listeners.

“It had this amazing music,” Plant recalled. “It was kind of a mixture of sad outtakes of doo-wop and a very droll DJ, who sounded like somebody from Marin County in 1967.”

Then the DJ made an offer Plant couldn’t refuse.

“The guy came on saying they were looking for sponsorships: ‘Please send in $10’ or whatever, and if people in the area did that, KBOO would promise never to play ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” Plant explained. “So I called him up and pledged my money. I was one of the KBOO sponsors.”

It’s unclear exactly how much Plant paid. Some reports have claimed he donated $10,000, but there’s no concrete evidence to support that figure. Plant’s own story suggests the pledge may have been closer to the station’s suggested $10.

Either way, he was apparently willing to pay to avoid hearing his own band’s biggest song.

Plant’s apparent ambivalence toward “Stairway to Heaven” contrasts with Jimmy Page’s longstanding enthusiasm for the track. Page has described wanting the song to begin with a “fragile acoustic guitar,” played like “a poor man’s ‘Bourrée’ by Bach,” before the addition of recorders gave the opening a medieval quality. From there, the song gradually builds into a blues-rock epic before exploding into one of the most celebrated guitar solos in rock history.

Page has also discussed the unusual tonal possibilities created by the Gibson EDS-1275 electric guitar he used to perform the song live, switching between its 12-string and six-string necks. The guitar had been discontinued when Page acquired it via special order, but his use of the guitar on tour inspired Gibson to bring the model back in 1974.

As for Plant, though, the song’s greatest achievement may be that he once paid money not to hear it.

Ozzy Osbourne knew he’d found a gem in the wild when he landed Randy Rhoads as his guitarist in late 1979. Rhoads was a virtuoso whose skillful use of two-handed tapping, intricate scale patterns and whammy-bar dive bombs gave Osbourne’s early solo albums the guitar pyrotechnics metal required in the early 1980s.

But Rhoads’ talent came at a cost to Osbourne, the former Black Sabbath singer who died a year ago on July 22. The guitarist practiced nearly all the time, including after hours on tour, which could drive Ozzy mad.

At the dawn of 1982 — the final year of his life — Rhoads received a custom pedalboard, one intended solely for practice, that would solve this problem. The board was built to his specifications by Jon Graves and Domenic Turlace of Zeus Audio Systems in Alhambra, California, which made a line of guitar pedals as well as mini guitar amps designed for practice. Randy’s pedalboard was presented to him on New Year's Eve, 1981, roughly two months into the tour for Ozzy’s second solo album, Diary of a Madman.

Keen-eyed Guitar Player readers got their first — and likely only — look at the board in a photo of Rhoads, taken by photographer Neil Zlozower, that ran in our November 1982 Rhoads tribute issue. Spread across two pages, the photo showed the guitarist practicing on a sofa alongside three of his electric guitars: his 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom, Jackson Concorde and Karl Sandoval Custom Polka Dot Flying V.

Sitting on the floor in front of them was the tiny pedalboard, bearing a few obscured devices.

Two months after the photo ran, Graves and Turlace described the board in Guitar Player’s January 1983 issue in response to a reader’s question.

Although it was small, the pedalboard included a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine, three MXR pedals — a 6-Band graphic equalizer, a Commande Time Delay and a Micro Chorus — and a Zeus 8401 Mini Amp. Red in color, and roughly the size and dimensions of a brick, the 8401 mini amp had controls for preamp, volume and tone, plus preamp and external speaker outputs. A second amp with a 4 1/2–inch speaker was also provided for the Dr. Rhythm.

And because Ozzy was driven to distraction by Rhoads’ constant practicing, the pedalboard included an accessory designed to keep him happy.

"A unique feature is the 'Ozzy Jacks,' added at Ozzy Osbourne's request,” Turlace explained to GP. “These jacks provide separate signals from the gui­tar amp and rhythm machine for a head­phone mix, while shutting off the main speaker."

According to Graves, Ozzy had also requested a remote switch so that he could turn the pedalboard off from the next hotel room while on the road, because Randy tended to play into the wee hours. He probably wasn’t joking. It was never added.

The entire thing was built into an ABS plastic case salvaged from a Casio keyboard. (Some might say it’s the best use ever made of a Casio keyboard.) In addition, the lid included a battery pack as well as an AC adapter. Graves designed the pedalboard so that the battery would shut off when the lid was closed.

As a final touch, the board boasted a gold-plated plaque that read "Custom made by Zeus Audio Systems for Randy Rhoads,” along with his Rolls-Royce–style logo, bearing two R's.

In their response to our reader's question, the builders made clear they had no desire to repeat their efforts. “Anyone wishing to duplicate the pedalboard,” they said, “will have to build one themselves.”

Sadly, Rhoads would not get to use the device for long. He died tragically on March 19, 1982, when the small plane in which he was a passenger crashed during a tour stop in Leesburg, Florida.

Coming up with a band name can be an exhausting task. It has to be memorable, capture something about the music and, in the modern age, be unique enough to Google without being impossible to spell or pronounce.

Ian Anderson learned the hard way that it also helps to know what the name means.

The Jethro Tull frontman says he was left “embarrassed” when he discovered that his band was named after an actual 18th-century agriculturalist — and that by then, it was already too late to change it.

Anderson made the confession in an interview with AXS TV’s Dan Rather, explaining that the band had gone through a series of names in its early days as it tried to establish itself on the late-1960s London circuit.

“To me, it was a nice made-up name invented by the booker in our manager and agent’s office,” Anderson said. “We kept changing our name in the very early days. And when they suggested Jethro Tull, I said, ‘Okay,’ because I was anxious to be seen to be taking advice and accepting management encouragement.”

The band had previously performed under names including Navy Blue, Ian Henderson’s Bag o’ Nails and Candy Coloured Rain. None of them stuck. Jethro Tull did — although Anderson had no idea who Jethro Tull actually was.

“Nobody told me at that time that Jethro Tull was an 18th-century agriculturalist who invented the seed drill, and of course is in the history books,” he said. “When I was at school, I only did a very small amount of history, and we didn’t cover that particular era. So, I didn’t know that Jethro Tull was a real historical character.”

Anderson says he learned the truth a couple of weeks later. By then, however, the band had secured a residency at the Marquee Club, one of London’s most important rock venues.

“I think it was a couple of weeks later that I found that out,” he said. “I was rather embarrassed to realize we were named after a dead guy who invented the seed drill, but at that point, we’d just been given the residency at the Marquee club.”

So the name stayed.

“He, too, was a musician as it turned out,” Anderson added, with a hint of a smile. “Over the years, I’ve always felt rather guilty about the identity theft. It’s just as well I don’t have his credit cards.

“But I feel kind of embarrassed about it. So a couple of years ago, I thought, ‘I should really try and push Jethro Tull, the historical character, back to number one on Google Jethro.’”

That may be a difficult task. The band has released 24 studio albums, toured the world countless times and, most famously, beat Metallica to the first Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 1989. The success of 1971’s Aqualung alone has probably made the band’s name impossible to dislodge from the top of any search engine.

Anderson also discussed the guitarists who influenced him — and the one who convinced him to focus on the flute instead.

“In my generation, it’s hard to imagine people who didn’t want to be Hank Marvin,” he said of the Shadows guitarist. “Hank Marvin had this wonderful clean tone on a single-coil Fender Strat. And that was a sound that captivated people.”

Then came Eric Clapton.

“When I heard Eric Clapton, I wanted to be a flute player because I knew I wasn’t going to be in that league as a guitar player,” Anderson said.

Jethro Tull released its 24th album, Curious Ruminant, last year. And while Anderson may still feel a little guilty about borrowing the name of an 18th-century agricultural pioneer, the band has now been using it for nearly six decades — making a name change considerably more awkward than it would have been back in 1968.

Two years before Sammy Hagar became the lead singer and second guitarist in Van Halen, his former bandleader had some remarkably harsh words for his guitar playing.

“I just don’t think he is a good guitarist,” Ronnie Montrose told Guitar Player in 1983. “He’s adequate for what he does and just ends up using every cliché in the book. Although he does that well.”

Montrose was not some random critic. He had formed the hard-rock band that bore his name in 1973, with Hagar as its lead singer, and had fired him after the band’s first two albums. Hagar had since gone on to a successful solo career and would soon become one of the most famous singers in hard rock.

But Montrose still believed his former bandmate was a limited musician.

“I set that band up to be an experimental, integral, working rock and roll ensemble,” he explained in the October 1983 issue of Guitar Player. “I wanted it to become the American version of Led Zeppelin, because they were able to do acoustic things as well as metal. They were able to bring their audience with them. I wanted to get to the point where our audience would allow us to experiment.

“Unfortunately, it was not a creative situation, because the members of the ensemble were not of a creative nature. Sammy was the only one who had enough ambition to attempt creativity, but he was musically uneducated. A guitar to him was an accompaniment to vocals and a rock and roll performance.

“On the way home from a European tour, I told Sammy he had to go his own way and do what he was going to do, because I wanted to move in a different direction toward something that was more musically exciting and of a broader scope. I’m not saying this with any malice, but he has stayed on the same musical level, working in the same narrow rock vein.”

Montrose had formed his namesake band in 1973 with Hagar, bassist Bill Church and drummer Denny Carmassi. Their self-titled debut arrived the following year and became a landmark of American hard rock, with Hagar’s powerful vocals helping establish the band’s sound.

But the partnership did not last. Montrose and Hagar parted ways in 1975, and the singer went on to build a successful solo career. By the time Montrose gave his 1983 interview, Hagar had released several albums under his own name and was an established rock star.

Montrose, however, remained unimpressed by Hagar’s abilities as a guitarist.

When asked why he had never played in a band with another guitarist, he admitted that he enjoyed jamming with other six-stringers. But he had never considered Hagar a suitable musical partner.

“There’s never been any question of allowing Sammy to pick up a guitar,” Montrose said. “There was no way you could ever interplay in a jam with him.”

By 1983, Montrose was pursuing a musical path that was far removed from the heavy rock of his namesake band. After leaving Montrose, he had moved into increasingly experimental territory and released Open Fire, a 1978 all-instrumental album featuring acoustic guitar, mandolin, synthesizer and a 30-piece orchestra.

The record was not a commercial success. In fact, Hagar apparently enjoyed telling a story about the reaction of one particularly unhappy Montrose fan.

“The best line I’ve heard about that album from a Montrose fan was told to me by Sammy Hagar,” Montrose recalled. “Sammy was playing somewhere in the South, and the guy came up and asked if he had heard my latest album. When Sammy said he had, the guy said, ‘Boy, I bought a copy of that thing, took it home and put it on, and it fucking made my stereo gag.’”

Montrose was amused by the story, but he did not regret making the album.

“Warner Brothers was shell-shocked by that album, but I opened up an audience with it that I will never regret,” he said. “That album enabled me to do a soundtrack for a Canadian film about skiing called Powderheads. It also enabled me to go to Japan with Tony Williams.”

But Montrose’s career would never reach the commercial heights enjoyed by Hagar, who blamed the guitarist’s self-destructive tendencies for his lack of success. Just two years after the guitarist offered his assessment of his former singer, Hagar joined Van Halen, replacing David Lee Roth and embarking on a new chapter that would make him one of the biggest stars in rock.

Montrose, meanwhile, remained committed to the idea that he had been more than the heavy-metal electric guitar player who first made his name with Hagar.

“People who wondered who the real Ronnie Montrose was had to see he was both,” he said.

Four years after Montrose gave his assessment of Hagar, no less than Eddie Van Halen weighed in on Sammy’s guitar talents. Speaking to Guitar Player alongside the singer for an interview in the October 1987 issue, Van Halen noted Hagar’s passion and ability to inspire.

“He gets the point across very well,” Eddie said. “He’s a soulful player. He’s inspired the hell out of me, writing-wise. I ripped one of his licks off — which he ripped from Neal Schon,” he added with a laugh.

But it was Sammy who got the last laugh — at the expense of his former guitarist.

“Actually, it’s an old Ronnie Montrose lick that was invented by Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck,” he said.

Offered Van Halen, “You do it best.”

Tommy Emmanuel was just 11 when his father died. In the aftermath, he found solace in the music of Chet Atkins, a guitar hero who would become, in effect, a surrogate father.

“My father had just passed away, and I would live inside Chet's albums. He was my world,” the acoustic guitar marvel tells Guitar Player.

But listening to Atkins' music was not enough. Emmanuel wanted to reach the man who had given him so much comfort, and so the young Australian guitarist wrote to his hero.

“I wrote a letter telling him that I was his big fan in Australia, and that I was trying to play like him,” he continues. “He wrote back and sent me a nice photograph, and we stayed in touch.”

Atkins remained a constant presence in Emmanuel's thoughts. The young guitarist was particularly fascinated by the way Atkins could make his electric guitar sound almost like a harp, weaving harmonics and natural notes together to create something that seemed, to Emmanuel, almost impossible to reproduce.

“Chet Atkins totally pioneered that sound, and he was the first to record it,” Emmanuel says. “I was 16 when I first heard it, and I couldn't figure out the technique.”

The answer came to Emmanuel in a dream.

“I had a dream where Chet came out with his red guitar, and he showed me how,” he says. “When I woke up the next morning, I got my guitar and I figured it out by remembering the dream. It was as if my subconscious worked it out and told my conscious self how to do it.”

The technique involves reaching the picking hand over the fretboard and pinching out harmonics by placing the index finger at a harmonic location on the same string as a fretted note below, then plucking with the thumb — all while incorporating natural notes on other strings.

It is a demanding technique, one that requires the player to make several things happen at once while maintaining enough control to allow every note to speak. Emmanuel eventually heard Lenny Breau — whom Atkins discovered and championed in the 1960s — perform it and realized just how far the technique could be taken.

“Lenny took it to a level that no one else has reached ever since,” he says.

“It is a beautiful technique, and the key is making sure the harmonic and natural notes ring out with bell-like qualities together. When you do it at speed, the ear shouldn't know which one is which. They should all blend together.

“The further your thumb is away from your index finger when you pluck down, the more note you'll get out of the harmonic. You want the string to speak, but if your index finger and thumb are too close together you'll choke the sound out of the harmonic.

“You've got to concentrate. It requires great strength in your left hand to hold down positions with real control and clarity.”

Emmanuel uses the technique liberally in his performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And as he explains, there is no shortcut to mastering it.

“You've got to practice until your hand aches like hell,” Emmanuel says. “Many players don't sound clear, like a bell. They sound fuzzy from being too focused on the right hand without having a strong enough foundation from the left hand.”

All the while, Atkins remained at the top of Emmanuel's mind. Seven years after first contacting the guitar master, the young guitarist found another way to reach him.

“When I was about 18, a friend recorded me playing in his lounge room, and sent the tape to Chet. I got a mysterious letter out of the blue from Chet that included his office address and phone number. It said, ‘When you come to America, call me, and we'll get together.’ I couldn't believe it.”

Emmanuel eventually made the journey to America, relocating from Australia to Nashville in 1997. Two years later, Atkins honored him with the title of Certified Guitar Player, recognizing his lifetime contribution to the art of fingerpicking.

For Emmanuel, the moment represented something far more profound than a professional accolade. The man whose records had once given solace to a grieving 11-year-old was now standing before him, acknowledging him as one of the world's great fingerstyle guitarists.

“I was stunned and so moved by this gesture of appreciation from my hero,” Emmanuel wrote on Facebook. “And as he handed it to me, he said, ‘Don't let your kids play with it, they'll drop it on their toes!’

“It was a great night in my life. I played ‘Guitar Boogie’ with its composer, Arthur Smith, ‘Windy and Warm’ with Chet and Paul Yandell, a spirited set with my brother, Phil, and finished the night out jamming with all my pals at the Chet Convention. Ahhh, those were the days!”

“There are a million different ways to play these silly things,” Vince Gill says of electric guitar, “and I enjoy finding subtle ways of being different on any instrument I play.”

For Gill, those subtle differences often begin with his hands. His fretting and picking fingers allow him to make the guitar speak with a fluency and nuance that can change dramatically from one instrument to the next. And while he is perfectly comfortable with a pick, he often prefers to let his fingers do the talking.

He notices the difference particularly when he plays a Telecaster.

“What’s interesting about a Telecaster is the way you pull with the meat of your finger sounds different than with a pick,” he explains. “Those subtle differences are important to how the note blooms.”

When he plays a Stratocaster, fingerstyle is Gill’s preferred approach.

“When I play a Strat, most of the time, I play it with my fingers. I learned that from Mark Knopfler, who plays everything with the meat of his fingers,” Gill says. “It is shocking how different it sounds. With a pick, it’s very precise, but with fingers, it’s three times rounder and sweeter.”

Gill finds it remarkable that so many guitarists immediately reach for a pick rather than take the time to develop their technique with their fingers. To him, the hands are one of the most important parts of a player’s sound — far more important than simply owning the right gear.

“Most people don’t understand how much your hands have to do with it,” he notes. “I did a show with Keith Urban where we were the resident guitar players. He had his rig set up, and he said, ‘Vince, come over here and play through this.’ I plugged in, played, and he goes, ‘You just sound like you.’

“It’s funny. You can buy a Marshall and a ’59 Les Paul, but you’re not going to sound like Jimmy Page. You may want to, but the reason we all sound like we do is because of our hands, as much as anything.”

The Telecaster, of course, has long been a central part of Gill’s sizable guitar arsenal. He says he first became interested in the instrument after he “stumbled upon Albert Lee.”

“Albert Lee was such a huge inspiration as far as me wanting a Telecaster.”

Gill’s first Telecaster was a white 1953 model he purchased in 1978. He has owned plenty of Telecasters since then, but none has come close to matching that first one.

“I have had probably 20 or 30 since, and none can hold a candle to it,” Gill says.

He bought the guitar from an Oklahoma City guitar shop owned by Bob Woods.

“He and Larry Briggs, who is huge in the vintage world, had gotten together for a big guitar trade. I was in the store just hanging out. Bob had taken in all these guitars, including that white ’53 Telecaster. I played it and said, ‘Oh my God, this one suits me right here. What will you take for it?’ He said, ‘$450.’ I said, ‘Okay, sold.’ It became the iconic guitar of my life.”

The guitar’s finish is original, as is nearly everything else, with the exception of the front pickup and a couple of pots.

“The front pickup wore out, but the back pickup is original,” he says. “The whole point of that guitar is the back pickup.”

Gill’s fluid string bends have occasionally led people to assume that his Telecaster is equipped with a B-Bender. Nothing could be further from the truth. He recalls a session with Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash’s band, the Cherry Bombs, when Hank DeVito was the steel player.

“Hank said, ‘Can I play your guitar?’” Gill recalls. “He strapped it on and started jerking and pulling on the neck. He goes, ‘Where’s the B-Bender?’ I said, ‘There isn’t one.’ He says, ‘Yeah, there is. I hear it every night.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just my fingers.’ I didn’t even know that there was such a thing.”

For Gill, that story gets to the heart of what makes a guitarist’s voice distinctive. The instrument matters, of course. So do the amplifier, pickups and technique. But ultimately, the sound comes from the player—and from the countless small decisions made by the hands holding the guitar.

“Slide guitar used to be more unusual,” Bonnie Raitt once noted. “Now it's on every beer and truck commercial. Every TV sitcom has slide guitar.”

She should know. She’s not only the most famous female slide player — Raitt’s signature guitar work once anchored one of the biggest franchises in television history. And it happened without her even realizing she’d been drafted.

In 1988, Peter Cetera was at work on his third solo album, One More Story. In need of some high-octane energy, he turned the studio into a revolving door of music stars, recruiting Madonna, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and Oak Ridge Boys bass singer Richard Sterban.

For the track “Save Me,” Cetera wanted a very specific sting, so he called the best in the business.

“He asked if I would come in and play slide on this song, and I did,” Raitt told Guitar Player in 1989.

At the time, Raitt was still one year away from the career-defining explosion of her breakthrough album, Nick of Time. While she wasn't yet a household superstar, she was already a "musician's musician" who knew exactly how to serve a track.

“I basically consider myself an accompanist on the guitar," she explained. "When there's a groove going I can really slide on just about anything.

“I don't really have a lot of chops, not being a schooled musician. I tend to play guitar the same way on a lot of different songs. I play the same Muddy Waters lick over and over.”

By 1989, her Cetera session was behind her, and Raitt’s world had shifted. Nick of Time was a juggernaut, spawning hits like the title track and her cover of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love.”

But while she was busy supporting her breakthrough album, her electric slide work for Cetera was making a very different kind of splash. She discovered it had become a TV theme song musician by accident.

“One day I'm sitting in my house channel surfing,” she said. “All of a sudden this theme song comes on, and it's my solo!”

The confusion was immediate. As she watched the screen, the gritty, Muddy Waters-inspired licks she’d recorded in a dark studio were now a soundtrack to a sun-drenched montage of lifeguards prancing on the beach in spandex.

“There are babes jumping up and down, flopping every which way. I'm going, 'Give me a break!” she said, laughing. “I was going, ‘That guy's copping my song.’

“And then I realized it was me!”

Cetera had licensed “Save Me” to the producers of a new NBC action-drama called Baywatch. Featuring David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, the show was a high-stakes look at L.A. County lifeguards — and the song was a literal lyrical match. With lines about being “caught in raging water” and needing someone to “throw me the rope,” it was the perfect backdrop for the show's soon-to-be-famous rescue scenes.

As it turned out, Raitt’s tenure as a primetime guitar hero was brief. NBC axed Baywatch after just one season. When the show was resurrected for syndication — eventually becoming a global phenomenon with over a billion viewers — Cetera’s music proved too expensive. The producers pivoted to a more budget-friendly theme, Jimi Jamison’s “I’m Always Here.”

As for Raitt, she didn’t do badly herself. Nick of Time topped the Billboard 200 chart, and went on to sell five million copies and win three Grammy awards, including Album of the Year. It launched a winning streak in her career that continues to this day.

Jennifer Finch, the bass guitarist behind Los Angeles punk group L7, has died. Her death comes only days after the announcement that she was battling an aggressive form of brain cancer. She was 59.

Finch’s L7 bandmates Suzi Gardner, Donita Sparks and Dee Plakas confirmed the news in a statement shared on social media.

“With a very heavy heart we announce that our beloved bandmate, friend, and fellow troublemaker Jennifer Finch has passed away today,” they wrote. “She had a long courageous fight with brain cancer and was loved by many wonderful friends, musical peers and fans worldwide. We love you Jennifer.”

In a separate statement shared by the band’s publicist, L7 described Finch as a “true original” whose “fierce spirit, humor and boundless creativity helped shape L7 and changed all of our lives forever.”

“Jennifer was a true original who lived entirely on her own terms, and the impact she made on music, art and everyone lucky enough to know her cannot be measured,” the band said. “We love her beyond words and will carry her with us always. Rest in power our dear friend.”

Finch announced her withdrawal from L7’s Last Hurrah farewell tour earlier this month to deal with her health, which required extensive medical care and in-home support.

The news of her death has prompted an outpouring of tributes from across the music world, including from Tom Morello, Garbage, Violet Grohl and Courtney Love.

“God bless her. An important fixture of the LA scene, a super cool person, a true artist with a kind and welcoming heart,” Morello wrote. “I loved, respected and admired her greatly. She will be missed.”

Love, who performed with Finch in the pre-Hole band Sugar Babydoll, honored her memory with a photo tribute.

Finch joined L7 in 1986, becoming part of the band’s best-known lineup alongside Gardner, Sparks and Plakas. Her bass playing helped power Bricks Are Heavy, the 1992 album that brought L7 a wider audience in the alt-rock scene.

She left L7 in 1996 and went on to perform with Other Star People and the Shocker before returning to L7 following the band’s 2014 reunion. She also worked as a photographer, writer and visual artist.

In May, L7 announced the Last Hurrah, a farewell tour scheduled to begin in October. Although Finch was forced to withdraw from the tour due to her cancer diagnosis, the band said she asked them to continue with the shows as planned.

A GoFundMe campaign to help cover FInch’s medical costs has raised almost $400,000 at the time of writing. Finch’s family and friends continue to accept donations toward the ongoing archive project through GoFundMe. Some of those proceeds will also go toward preserving Finch’s legacy by creating an archive of her artistic and creative work.

Pete Townshend is hailed as one of rock’s greatest rhythm players. Even he’s not shy about his talents, telling Sound International in 1980, “in that particular area, I don’t think I’m topped.”

But when it comes to lead work, he admitted long ago he’s not much of an improviser. Most of his solos — from “I Can’t Explain” to “Love Reign O’er Me” were composed ahead of time.

“I started out as a rhythm player, and a few of my lead licks are things I’ve basically developed in recording sessions,” he told Guitar Player in May 1972. “I’ll never be able to play the kind of leads I want. I was happiest listening to Jimi Hendrix — that, to me, was like heaven.”

From early on, Townshend focused on rhythm guitar work, playing slashing chords with his windmilling right arm. By the end of the 1960s, he developed a signature style of 16th-note strumming with his motif for “Pinball Wizard,” played on a Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar, from 1969’s Tommy.

The release of Live at Leeds in 1970 gave a little evidence of his talents as a lead player. He unleashes his fury in a stunning bit of solo work on Mose Allison's "Young Man’s Blues" and plays some inspired jagged lines on Johnny Kidd's "Shakin' All Over."

Townshend has only improved as a lead guitarist since then, as heard on the Who’s “Join Together” and — a deep cut — his work on David Bowie’s “Slow Burn,” from 2002’s Heathen. Even when his solos are composed, their impact lies in his execution, and Townshend always connects with listeners emotionally rather than through acts of technical virtuosity.

But from the beginning, the Who’s true guitar player has been the bassist: John Entwistle. It’s Entwistle who takes the lead break in “My Generation,” and whose bass guitar skills came to the fore from Tommy onward, even as Townshend was improving as a lead player.

“What’s interesting is our group is, of course, that the roles are reversed. John is the lead guitar player and although I’m not the bass player he does produce a hell of a lot of the lead work,” Townshend said in the 1980 Sound International interview.

“It’s really funny to this day where you get a song like ‘Dreaming From the Waist’ [from 1975’s The Who by Numbers], when John is doing this blinding bass solo and making Alvin Lee look like he plays in slow motion, and I’m just standing there strumming a chord.

“And the audience looks at me and goes, ‘How does he do it? How does he produce that noise?’”

Part of Entwistle’s stealth is his lack of movement, combined with his penchant for dressing in dark colors.

“You see, for years nobody even knew John was there,” Townshend continued. “He used to wear all black and nobody ever put a lamp on him: if we appeared on TV you never saw him unless the camera was whipping from Roger to Keith.”

As the late Entwistle himself told Guitar Player in the November 1975 issue, “I’ve never truly considered myself a bass player. I think I'm a lead/rhythm bass player. Because the Who was a three-piece, and we tried to reconstruct the same sound as on record, I used to play most of the time with a plectrum and played rhythm figures on the bass.

“Then, when we started doing more complicated stuff with Tommy, I started playing lead figures. Occasionally before that, when the guitar went off, I'd have to take over a solo and turn everything full up and go into a solo.

“Maybe if I'd been with another band I might be one of those very tasteful bass-y players, a proper bass player, really.”

Entwistle went on to explain how he managed to make his bass cut through by switching to a Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar for live performance and using “full treble all the time. We found that it cut to the back of the audience as well, so you could hear what the bass was playing, instead of a blur.”

He also confirmed Townshend’s recollections of how his live bass work confused fans.

“It does tend to happen,” he told Guitar Player. “A lot of people in England, when ‘My Generation’ first came out, thought that Pete was playing the solo — the bass solo. And for months, when we were playing it onstage, that solo would come up, and they always used to look at Pete.

“And after the bass solo was over they used to clap for Pete. I use a very guitar-like sound, so if the audience don't know about the instruments they're obviously going to get confused.

“The offensive thing is they automatically think it's Pete. Yet they can't understand why Pete just has his hands on a chord he's just strummed, and there's a lead figure coming out, and they're still looking at him and saying, ‘How's he doing that?’”

Derek Trucks was already a force in the blues when Eric Clapton came calling in 2006.

The guitarist had joined the Allman Brothers Band as a teenager and by his early 20s had established himself as one of the most accomplished players of his generation — particularly when it came to slide guitar. So when Clapton reached out to him, it was a significant moment in Trucks’ career.

But Trucks didn’t initially know it was Clapton calling.

“I was here at home playing poker with my grandfather and dad and brother and a bunch of friends, and I remember just getting a call on my cellphone,” Trucks says in a recent interview with Alan Paul.

“It was like, ‘Hello. This is a message for Derek Trucks. This is Eric Clapton. This may sound like a hoax but it’s not,’” Trucks recalls. “It was amazing. I was like, ‘What is going on?’ [The message said], ‘When you get a chance, call me back.’’

This was 2006, when returning an international call wasn’t always as simple as tapping a name in your contacts. Trucks says he needed a specific international calling plan to return the call.

“I had to go down to the Verizon store the next day and get an international plan so I could call him back.”

As it turned out, the call was legitimate. Clapton invited Trucks to join the sessions for The Road to Escondido, his 2006 collaboration with J.J. Cale that also featured a star-studded cast of musicians.

Despite his experience, Trucks suspects Clapton’s invitation was a kind of audition — “more of a ‘make sure we could hang and make sure you’re not a total knucklehead’ situation,” he said.

Apparently, Trucks passed the test. He would go on to join Clapton’s touring band in 2007, and the pair continued to collaborate over the years. They reunited for The Breeze: An Appreciation of J.J. Cale in 2014, an album celebrating the influential songwriter whose music had shaped both guitarists.

But the relationship began with a missed call, a voicemail and a trip to the Verizon store to buy an international calling plan — because when Eric Clapton calls, you probably want to make sure you can call him back.

“It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t stood on that stage and felt that love from that many people rushing over you,” Mike Campbell says. “It’s like a wave knocking you off. It’s a magical thing that you can’t really get anywhere else in life. It’s a buzz, a high, a spiritual joy.

“And that’s why we kept doing it — because there’s nothing like it.”

For most of his career, Campbell has felt that rush while performing onstage with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, where he served as lead guitarist until Petty’s death on October 2, 2017. Given that group’s deep, multi-decade catalog, Campbell would experience the audience’s intense reaction to their music time and again over the course of a single night’s performance.

But there is one song that stands out from the rest for him — a favorite that was “a dream come true” for audiences to hear every night. And it was one of the group’s very first: “American Girl.”

“A lot of songs come to mind,” Campbell tells Under the Radar about the tunes that move him. “But I guess the most important one right now, in my mind, is ‘American Girl,’ which is one of our first songs.

“All through our career, every time we would play that song, I would feel that rush of adrenaline. As if it was the first time I heard it. It always had this power to it. It connected with people.”

As it did when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performed “American Girl” at what would be their final show, at the Hollywood Bowl, on September 25, 2017, the last stop on their 40th-anniversary tour. In his recently published memoir, Heartbreaker, Campbell recalls the audience emotionally singing along with every song at the show.

“And that night at the Hollywood Bowl, that was the last song we played, and I felt it then,” Campbell says.

“So did Tom.”

Composed by Petty and recorded on July 4, 1976 — America’s bicentennial anniversary — “American Girl” was the band’s third single off its self-titled debut album.

Campbell says the song moved him when he first heard it. Notably, it was among the initial tunes he recorded with the Heartbreakers using the rare 1950 Fender Broadcaster electric guitar he purchased — along with a blackface Fender Deluxe Reverb combo — for $600 shortly before the album’s sessions.

But he also recalls another song that took longer to become one of his favorites: “Refugee.” A Petty and Campbell co-write, “Refugee” proved difficult to record when the band tracked it for their third album, 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes.

“It was so easy to write,” says Campbell, who strapped on his iconic Red Dog Fender Telecaster — a unique mutt of a guitar — for the recording session. “But when we went in the studio, under the microscope with the producer and everything, trying to make it great, it took a lot of work. We just couldn’t get it to come together for so many takes. I found myself thinking, Maybe we’ll never get this.”

What kept them going was Campbell’s four-track demo of the tune: It was so good that the band knew the song was worth the effort.

“We must have recorded that 100 times,” Campbell told Songfacts. “I remember being so frustrated with it one day that — I think this is the only time I ever did this — I just left the studio and went out of town for two days. I just couldn't take the pressure anymore, but then I came back and when we regrouped we were actually able to get it down on tape.”

“Refugee” went on to reach number 15 on the charts — the highest placement for a Heartbreakers record at the time — when it was released as a single in 1980.

“After going through something like that, it’s a beautiful thing when a stranger comes up to you, and they tell you how your music has made their life happier,” Campbell tells Under the Radar. “For instance, I’ve had several people tell me they played ‘Here Comes My Girl,’ which is a song I wrote with Tom, at their wedding because it was that important to them.

“When someone shares that kind of joy with you, or when someone just tells me a certain song of ours lifted their spirits… I mean, what more could a person want?”

Campbell is currently on tour with his group, the Dirty Knobs, through July 24, with newly added fall dates stretching to October 10, 2026.

Before Mark Knopfler wrote “Sultans of Swing,” “Money for Nothing” and countless other classics, he was chasing a different kind of story.

Prior to becoming one of rock’s most admired guitarists, Knopfler worked as a newspaper reporter, covering everything from local news to court cases. Looking back, he says those early years didn’t just prepare him for a career — they taught him how to write songs.

Though his fluid electric guitar playing made him a household name, it’s the people who populate his songs that have always set him apart. Mechanics, truck drivers, musicians, lovers and dreamers all feel startlingly authentic because, in many cases, they began as real people Knopfler observed rather than fictional characters he invented.

“It was a great thing to do as a kid,” he told Stuff in 2009. “I went to college after being a newspaper lackey, and it was a great introduction to ‘life’ as a concept, to the world in general.

“I then moved into court reporting,” he added. “I just remember it all as being a very good thing to be doing, a way to see how society is organized.”

Just as importantly, journalism taught him to listen.

“It influenced me and allowed me to meet people,” he said. “To eavesdrop too, to take stories of other people home.”

Few Dire Straits songs illustrate that better than “Money for Nothing.”

Its narrator — the disgruntled appliance-store employee mocking rock stars on MTV — wasn’t dreamed up in isolation. Knopfler overheard the man’s complaints while shopping and began scribbling lyrics on a borrowed piece of paper right there in the store.

“The lead character in ‘Money for Nothing’ is a guy who works in the hardware department in an appliance store,” he told Musician. “He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down.

“I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real. It just went better with the song; it was more muscular… I mean, that is the way people speak.”

The same curiosity drove “Private Dancer,” his quietly devastating portrait of a sex worker longing for something better. Knopfler ultimately gave the song to Tina Turner, whose recording became an international hit, but its emotional power came from the same instinct he’d developed as a reporter: observing other people’s lives and imagining the world from their perspective.

It’s why so many of Knopfler’s songs blur the line between reportage and fiction. He borrows voices, conversations and tiny everyday details, then shapes them into stories that feel lived-in rather than invented.

For Knopfler, that’s the defining difference between being a musician and being a songwriter.

“First of all, you start to think of yourself as a guitar player of sorts, and then the songwriter,” he told Forbes in 2024. “I’ve come to realize the songwriter is different from a musician.”

It’s a revealing admission from a player celebrated for some of rock’s most iconic guitar work. Knopfler may be revered for his touch and tone, but the foundation of his music was laid years earlier — in courtrooms, on newsroom assignments and in overheard conversations — where he learned that the smallest details often tell the biggest stories.

It’s among the most famous electric guitar solos in all of rock. Some consider it the best solo of all time.

But David Gilmour says he can’t play it. Which is odd, considering he’s the one who created it.

The solo in question is the second in the Pink Floyd iconic song “Comfortably Numb,” from 1979’s The Wall.

Gilmour tells Rick Beato that he “never learned” it and prefers to just wing it and do something fresh when he performs it live.

“I’m not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest,” he tells the host. “I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it sort of so ingrained in me that the various parts of it are going to find their way into what I'm doing.

“But I’ve never learned it.

"I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don’t play it,” he adds with a laugh. “To me, it’s just different every time. Why would I want to do it the same? Would it be more popular with the people listening if I did it exactly like the record? Or do they prefer that I just wander off into whatever feels like the right thing at the time? I don't know.

“I suspect they prefer it to be real and to be happening, you know? There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, ‘We’re going to end’ or ‘We’re going to do this.’ And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”

As The Wall producer Bob Ezrin explained to Guitar Player in 2024, the two solos were cut at different times, with different producers.

“The solo at the end of the song was done when Roger [Waters] and I were in a different studio, and David did that with James Guthrie,” Ezrin said. (For the record, the first solo, which takes place at 2:38 into the song, is Ezrin’s favorite of the two.)

Both solos were cut with the guitarist’s celebrated Black Strat played through a combination of Hiwatt amplifiers and his Yamaha rotary speaker cabinet.

While the first solo has a more “composed” feeling about it, the second combines a sense of being both planned and improvised. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The combination of repetition and development keeps the excitement building for two minutes, before Gilmour moves up an octave to raise the intensity another level.

That freedom to create on the fly ran counter to Pink Floyd’s meticulous approach to recording. Gilmour tells Beato the group constantly discussed each song’s development.

“All the time, on everything, on every instrument,” he attests. And while he says drummer Nick Mason never required much direction from the others on any song, Gilmour made one special request of him for “Comfortably Numb.”

“There’s a place where there’s a bass drum missing,” he explains. “I said, ‘Can you just not play that bass drum? I want that gap.’”

While guitarists ranging from Steve Morse to Joe Perry have raved to us about Gilmour’s first “Comfortably Numb” solo, Alex Skolnick tells us he prefers the second.

“Often overshadowed by the song’s first solo, that second solo somehow manages to be screaming, despite the slow tempo, and is a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” he said in our November 2024 issue. “It’s a masterclass in using space, bends, melodic development, resolution of ideas, effective tone, blues in a non-blues context and pure emotion.”

As for Gilmour, his favorite solo is on “Dogs,” from the group’s 1977 album, Animals. Sadly, he doesn’t say which of the track’s four guitar solos he’s referring to. And as he revealed recently, one of those was accidentally erased, forcing him to redo it.

Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story by Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill is the first biography to fully capture the life, music, and mystery of Jeff Beck. Drawing on more than 30 hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, the book offers the most complete portrait of Beck ever assembled

In this excerpt, Tolinski and Gill follow Beck as he joins the Yardbirds following Eric Clapton’s exit from the British blues-rock group.

Jeff Beck’s initial encounter with the Yardbirds was unexpectedly adversarial. The four remaining band members were praying for another Eric Clapton to stroll through the door, but instead they were greeted by his antithesis. Where Clapton was meticulous and stylish, Jeff Beck, with his greasy jeans and scruffy, shoulder-length hair, resembled someone who had just emerged from under a car…and probably had.

Beck’s grungy appearance made a statement. Deep down, he believed he had more to offer the Yardbirds than they had to offer him, and he wasn’t about to dress up just to win their approval. Beck recalled, “I didn’t like the band when I met them. They didn’t seem particularly eager to welcome me. It appeared they were still nursing resentment over Eric’s departure and were worried that their whole sound would disappear without him.

“They asked me rather condescendingly, ‘Can you play blues?’ I shot back, ‘What kind of blues — slow blues, jump blues, Chicago blues?’ I played a few licks, and though they seemed impressed, they advised me to ditch my echo units because ‘You don’t use an echo in Chicago blues.’ I just shook my head, wondering if they truly grasped anything. Had they ever listened to Buddy Guy, whose guitar sound was drenched in echo?”

Yardbirds rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja chuckled at Beck’s testy recounting of their initial meeting. “We were in a panic after Jimmy Page declined to join the band, and we felt like we were settling for Jeff,” he confessed. “Moreover, he was unlike the rest of us and did appear a bit rough — he was a mechanic. I remember him telling me this story about someone infuriating him, so he doused their car in paint stripper. Nervously, I thought, ‘Yes, this is just what we need in this band…’”

Despite this, Dreja understood the challenge Beck faced by joining a group that had already been together for three years. “[Bands are] closer than marriages. We had our own language and our own humor — a lot of it was Eric’s invention, I might add. Jeff was introverted and socially a bit off, but we all agreed that he was incredibly inventive, and his playing was astounding.”

And for the moment, that was enough. With “For Your Love” climbing the charts and a packed schedule of concerts, television appearances, and promotional obligations looming, there was little time to ponder whether Beck was the ideal replacement for Clapton. The Yardbirds needed a guitarist, and Beck needed a break.

His first test came quickly. The Yardbirds were scheduled to perform on March 5, 1965, at Fairfield Halls, a venue in Croydon, South London. Beck had barely a week to notify his current band, the Tridents, of his departure, learn 15 songs, and step into the shoes of what many considered England’s most respected guitarist.

Before he could face the audience, however, there was one other matter to address: his appearance. Dreja, who had absorbed a few fashion lessons from Clapton, was assigned the task of making the band’s scruffy new recruit look presentable.

“I took him off to Carnaby Street, got him a fashionable haircut, and bought him nice shirts,” Dreja recalled. “Everything happened quickly because ‘For Your Love’ was a hit and suddenly we were on theater tours and television.”

As for Clapton, he was surprised and somewhat irked that the band didn’t collapse in the aftermath of his exit. Intrigued by his successor, he discreetly attended one of Beck’s final gigs with the Tridents. He was both shocked and slightly relieved by what he witnessed. Beck’s unruly hair and “all this fucking echo” on his guitar made Eric wonder if the Yardbirds had truly comprehended what they were getting into.

Clapton’s youthful arrogance and steadfast loyalty to tradition prevented him from seeing the truth: Beck’s wild, psychedelic guitar playing wasn’t an attack on his cherished blues but a glimpse into the swiftly approaching future — one that would pave the way for innovative players like Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and, yes, Jimmy Page. For now, Clapton was merely content that his former band would be stuck with what he perceived as an unkempt barbarian.

Meanwhile, Beck had little time to think about his judgmental predecessor; he was too busy gearing up for an undoubtedly challenging couple of weeks. To many, Clapton was synonymous with the Yardbirds, and after the music press announced his departure, Eric’s devoted followers couldn’t wait to chase the new guy offstage. But Beck wasn’t going to be coerced or cowed. When he took the stage for his debut Yardbirds performance, he locked eyes with the Croydon audience with the unwavering resolve of a gunfighter at high noon. In response to someone in the crowd shouting, “Where’s Eric?” Beck defiantly retorted, “Haven’t you heard? Read the papers. He’s gone.”

And for the next 40 minutes, the guitarist did his best to make them forget Clapton had ever existed. “I tore the place apart,” Beck recounted. “The gig bolstered my confidence, but I knew our next show would be even more demanding. I was going to face Eric’s regular crowd at the Marquee and was a little nervous. Nevertheless, I also came to the realization that being part of the Yardbirds was the best break I’d ever get, so I just went for it. Fortunately, I had a fantastic night. I played ‘Jeff’s Boogie’ [an early Beck signature piece] and received a 10-minute ovation.”

There remained one more significant hurdle. The Yardbirds were set to perform at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where ardent blues enthusiasts congregated. As Beck recalled, it was “an athletic, smelly place to play,” where the audience expressed their enthusiasm by standing on each other’s shoulders and cheering or showing their disapproval with clenched fists.

“It was the first time I genuinely felt like I might get slaughtered,” said Beck. “But I was cocky. I was like, ‘All right, you lot, get a load of this!’”

Beck managed to win the skeptical crowd over, even though few thought of him as a “genuine” blues player. Unlike Clapton, he never fully embraced the music. Instead, he took some pride in being an iconoclast — a hybrid of [Gene Vincent guitarist] Cliff Gallup, Buddy Guy, and Les Paul. The audience thought he was peculiar…yet oddly intriguing.

“I vaguely recall [Yardbirds singer] Keith Relf being a purist,” said Beck. “I thought, ‘You can be a purist, and you can be broke.’ I’ll do what I believe is right. Before the Yardbirds invited me to join, I was already moving toward avant-garde and experimental music — a bit like [jazz saxophonists] Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk. I’m not comparing myself to them musically, but the essence of what I was doing involved creating the strangest sounds I could. That’s when Eric [Clapton] came down to see me and realized where his job was going.”

While Beck was finding his footing with the Yardbirds on British stages playing his ’59 Telecaster through two Vox AC30 amplifiers, “For Your Love” continued its steady ascent, peaking at number three on March 20, 1965. This success secured the band several television appearances, including spots on two of Britain’s premier music shows: Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go!

With his gleaming blonde hair and wraparound shades, Keith Relf naturally commanded the most on-camera attention. But Beck’s presence also caught the media’s eye, with some music publications even noting his passing resemblance to Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.

“I was on the telly, and suddenly I was somebody,” Beck recounted with a hint of his astonishment at the time. “It was a mind-blowing experience.”

Although Beck had no experience before a camera, his presence was magnetic. It was on these shows that the guitarist carved out a brooding persona that stuck to him like an adhesive for decades to come. With an air of smoldering indifference, his menacing nonchalance would be studied and emulated for years by future guitar legends such as Ritchie Blackmore, Joe Perry, Chrissie Hynde, and even Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel. Dark, cool, and disenchanted, Beck provided the perfect gritty contrast to Relf’s androgynous, flaxen-haired hipster.

“The fans loved Jeff,” said drummer Jim McCarty. “Eric’s shoes were still warm, but there was something about Jeff that ignited their imaginations. The way he moved, the way he dressed — to the kids, he wasn’t ‘one’ of them, he was them. The fans worshipped Eric, but they wanted to be Jeff.”

To celebrate the release of Blow by Blow, an all-star tribute concert, along with a live interview and book signing with the authors, will be held this Thursday, July 16 at the Cutting Room in New York City. Additionally, a book signing and Q&A with author Brad Tolinski will also take place the following Thursday, July 23 at Book Soup in Los Angeles.

Mick Jagger says he was “stupid” to follow John Lennon’s advice — because it meant he never met his hero, Elvis Presley.

The Rolling Stones frontman has been busy promoting the band’s 25th album, Foreign Tongues, released last week. Their second record in three years sees the British rock legends reunite with producer Andrew Watt and Paul McCartney as they continue a remarkable late-career hot streak.

But during an appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, O’Brien was just as interested in the past as the present, prompting a simple question: Did you ever meet Elvis?

“No, I never met Elvis,” Jagger replied. “You know why? The Daily Mirror, an English tabloid that still exists, always did publicity, and there was a journalist who took the Beatles to Los Angeles to visit Elvis.

“Afterward, I remember John saying, ‘You should never meet your heroes. I’d never meet Elvis if I were you.’

“So I didn’t. I took John’s advice, which is very stupid of me.”

The Beatles’ meeting with Elvis — reportedly arranged by manager Brian Epstein — took place on August 27, 1965, at the King’s Bel Air mansion. Although the Daily Mirror had hoped to cover the encounter, the press were ultimately barred after George Harrison pushed for the meeting to remain private.

The Fab Four idolized Elvis. Lennon drew direct inspiration from him for one of the band’s darkest songs, “Run for Your Life,” while Harrison later said Presley’s music had “an incredible impact” on him because he had “never heard anything like it.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the visit, Lennon ultimately came away disappointed.

According to the Beatles’ longtime press officer Tony Barrow, Lennon wasted little time getting to the point, asking Elvis: “Why do you do all these soft-centered ballads for the cinema these days? What happened to good old rock ’n’ roll?”

Conversation soon stalled until Elvis called for guitars to be brought in and a piano wheeled into the room.

“The boys found that they could make much better conversation with their guitars than they could with their spoken word,” Barrow later wrote. “Music was their natural meeting point, their most intelligent means of communication.”

Even so, the afternoon fell well short of Lennon’s expectations — explaining why he later warned Jagger against meeting his own musical heroes.

“I’d love to have met Elvis,” Jagger said with a wry smile. “Why did I take John’s advice? But at the time, it seemed to ring true.”

O’Brien noted that Lennon famously spent the Beatles’ first trip to America asking, “Where’s Elvis?” After finally meeting him, he was left asking much the same question.

“He told me that whole story more than once,” Jagger replied. “It put me off. I wanted to keep my version of Elvis to myself. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was. Maybe my version of Elvis would have been different.”

Elsewhere during the Foreign Tongues press campaign, Jagger explained why the Stones have adopted a “bulldozer approach” in the studio, while also branding one of the band’s most beloved albums “lousy” — a view Keith Richards decidedly does not share.

Jennifer Finch’s fellow musicians have rallied around the L7 bass guitarist as a GoFundMe campaign for her medical care has surpassed $350,000, with donations from Garbage, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, and other prominent rock figures.

The organizer behind the fundraiser says they have been “blown away” by the support after Finch, 59, revealed she would miss L7’s forthcoming tour following multiple surgeries and setbacks from an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Finch’s friend Aubree Miller launched the GoFundMe campaign after the illness left the bassist requiring extensive at-home medical care. L7 explained that the funds raised would “allow her to remain safely at home with the care, dignity, and support she needs.” In a message on the fundraising page, Miller acknowledged that Finch has “more good days behind her than ahead.”

The announcement of Finch’s condition on L7’s Instagram page prompted an outpouring of support for the musician, who co-founded the influential Los Angeles punk band in 1985. The fundraiser has now more than doubled its original $150,000 goal, thanks in part to a number of high-profile donations.

’90s rockers Garbage contributed $8,000 to the campaign, while Green Day guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong donated $5,000 and Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament gave $4,500.

Other artists showing their support include Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan ($2,500), Bikini Kill vocalist and riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna ($5,000), Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch ($1,000), and Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto ($1,000).

Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz, along with his wife, donated $10,000, while an anonymous donor made the largest single contribution so far, giving $40,000.

At the time of writing, the fundraiser has raised more than $365,000 from nearly 5,000 donations.

In an update posted to the page, Miller expressed her gratitude for the overwhelming response.

“We are absolutely blown away by the support, love, and how far this campaign went yesterday. We are all so grateful for the community showing up far and wide to support Jennifer.”

Miller added that one comment on the fundraiser read, “You have an army behind you,” and said the message resonated deeply with Finch.

“When that comment came in, I immediately read it to Jennifer, and it touched her so much,” Miller wrote.

Miller also shared a personal story about a time when Finch came to her aid during a medical emergency, adding: “This time, Jennifer is the one who needs us.”

According to the update, the money raised so far will cover eight weeks of “supplemental in-home medical care costs.” Miller also thanked L7 and Courtney Love, saying the campaign “wouldn’t have been possible” without their support.

Despite Finch’s absence, L7 will continue with their farewell tour plans at the bassist’s request. The band has recruited Tsuzumi Okai, who has performed with Limp Bizkit and Kim Dracula, to fill in during Finch’s recovery.

Alice Cooper fans are no strangers to surprises. But earlier this year, the shock rocker still managed to raise eyebrows by hiring an unknown 22-year-old guitarist for his band.

It’s no exaggeration to say Anna Cara’s life has been turned upside down since the Newcastle, England-born shredder stepped into Nita Strauss’ studded boots while the guitarist takes time away to welcome her first child. Introduced in March with Strauss’ blessing, Cara has quickly impressed Cooper fans with her blazing playing on a collection of X-shaped Ibanez Xiphos electric guitars.

But it was Cooper guitarist Tommy Henriksen who spotted her first — on social media.

“I kept telling Ryan [Roxie, Cooper’s other guitarist], ‘You’ve got to see this kid play, man. She’s got that thing,’” Henriksen tells Guitar World. “I can’t explain it. There aren’t many people who have it, but she’s got it.”

At the time, Henriksen was looking for talent for his own band, Crossbone Skully, and the then-19-year-old Cara jumped at the chance to tour with them. It gave Henriksen the opportunity to see whether her ability extended beyond polished social media clips.

“She wasn’t doing all that stupid stuff,” he says. “I sent her a message and said, ‘I love what you’re doing. You’ve got a great vibrato and feel. Can I call you and your parents?’

“I FaceTimed them and said, ‘I like your daughter’s playing. She’s a natural. She plays like Gary Moore. She’s got the vibrato of a 55-year-old man.’”

Before long, Cara — who has also toured with Krokus frontman Marc Storace — had left Newcastle for the first time and found herself auditioning at the home of three-time Oscar nominee and Jeff Beck collaborator Johnny Depp. She nailed it.

So when Strauss announced she was stepping away from Cooper’s band to focus on motherhood, Cara found herself firmly on Alice Cooper’s radar.

“Next thing you know, he’s like, ‘Let’s bring her to Vegas to watch the show and get her familiar with everything,’” Henriksen recalls.

“Anna Cara is a beautiful, dynamic shredder in the vein of Nita, but with a style of her own,” Cooper said when introducing her to fans.

Now 23 — she celebrated her birthday on the road — Cara shows no sign of being overawed by the opportunity. Reflecting on Cooper’s recent European tour, she described it on Instagram as “an unforgettable experience” and “the chance of a lifetime.”

The whirlwind isn’t slowing down anytime soon. She returns to Cooper’s band in September while continuing to tour with Storace throughout the summer and into December.

In related news, Guitar Player recently caught up with Kane Roberts, the bodybuilder guitarist who helped revive Alice Cooper’s career in the 1980s despite having virtually no musical experience.

Phil Collins thought he’d been fired by George Harrison for more than 30 years — until the former Beatle finally let him in on the joke.

The two first met in 1970, when a 19-year-old Collins landed a £15 session (roughly $280 today) playing congas during the recording of Harrison’s first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass. Collins recorded parts for “Art of Dying,” but they never appeared on the finished album.

For decades, he thought little of it. Then, while Harrison was preparing the album’s 30th-anniversary reissue, he unearthed an old session tape and sent Collins a copy with a handwritten note.

“Dear Phil, could this be you? Love George.”

Collins later recalled to Mojo (via Guitar.com) that he eagerly listened to the tape, convinced he was finally hearing the performance he’d recorded as an unknown teenager.

Instead, he got a shock.

“The conga player sounded like a hyperactive toddler,” Collins said. “At the end, I heard George’s voice saying, ‘Can we try one without the conga player?’”

“I rewound it and played it again and again and thought, ‘Fuck… I was sacked, and I never knew!’”

He left the listening session feeling “angry, depressed and sad,” convinced he’d finally discovered why his contribution had disappeared from the album.

A few days later, Harrison called to see whether Collins had received the tape.

“I said, ‘You fucking bastard. You sent me this tape, and it turns out I was sacked!’”

Harrison burst out laughing.

When he finally caught his breath, he revealed the truth.

“Oh no, no, no — that was [famed percussionist] Ray Cooper on the congas. We made the tape as a joke for you!”

Collins admitted he eventually saw the funny side.

“We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he said.

“And yeah, I swore at a Beatle.”

Of course, Collins’ career — from Genesis to a string of chart-topping solo hits and even Disney film soundtracks — suggests he wasn’t too badly wounded by the experience.

He also wasn’t the only future star to appear on All Things Must Pass. Peter Frampton contributed electric guitar leads to Harrison’s landmark solo album years before either musician became an international superstar.

Alice Cooper says Jimi Hendrix is responsible for turning his band’s fortunes around, thanks to a simple act that helped them land a record deal.

Before breaking out as one of rock’s most iconic frontmen, Cooper rubbed shoulders with stars and soon-to-be legends. He ran the L.A. scene alongside the Doors in the ’60s and even shared a house with Pink Floyd.

But it was another, more unusual living arrangement that sparked this all-important moment.

“In 1968, we were so poor in L.A. that we were living in the Chambers Brothers’ basement in Watts during the riots,” he tells Professor of Rock, referring to the uprising in the Watts neighborhood in August 1965. “Jimi Hendrix used to come over and they'd all smoke grass together, and we'd come out of the cellar like rats.

“Jimi was buying his grass from Shep Gordon, who at the time was just this New York kid that was selling grass to all these people at the Landmark Hotel.”

Beyond his knack for selling drugs, Gordon didn’t have a lot going for him at the time. As Cooper says, Hendrix saw him as a walking target for the police.

“Jimi says, ‘You know, they're going to bust you, man. You're a young guy. You've got a lot of money and you don't have an occupation.’

“He said, ‘I know a band that needs a manager. You should be a manager.’

“So he brings us over. I opened the door, and I thought there was a smoke machine inside! I walk through this, and there's Jimi, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. They're all sitting there getting high.”

It’s not exactly the typical environment for a business meeting, but then again, this is rock and roll. It was the ‘60s, and Cooper was in the company of rock royalty — ironically, three future founding members of the so-called 27 Club.

“Shep hands me a handful of marijuana. And this is when marijuana was really illegal in LA.

“And I went, ‘That’s our manager!’” Cooper continues.

“The very next day, we were supposed to sign with Frank Zappa’s [record label, Straight]. We walked in, and Shep walked in, and they said, ‘Who's he?’ I said, ‘Oh, that's our manager.’ They said, ‘You didn't have a manager yesterday.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we got him last night.’”

An incredible 55 years later, Gordon is still Cooper’s manager and a vital ingredient in his success through the decades. Cooper says such was the informality of their arrangement, and their trust in one another, that they still don't have a contract.

The band's first album, Pretties for You, wasn’t a success, but their third album changed the record as their collaborative partnership with Bob Ezrin got off to a flying start. Ezrin later encouraged the band to revisit the Pretties for You track “Reflected,” ultimately turning it into a parody political anthem, "Elected", one of their biggest hits.

But by the mid-’70s, the original Alice Cooper Band — potently powered by Glen Buxton’s fiery lead guitar work — was no more.

“When we got Bob Ezrin, everything went through the roof,” Cooper says. “But after seven years, we never took time off. We just toured and toured. In those days, you made two albums a year.

“It was normal because if you didn't, somebody behind you was going to take you out. We had Bowie breathing down our neck. So we made two albums a year, writing these songs while on tour. The original band just burned out.”

They reunited for 2025’s The Revenge of Alice Cooper album, with Buxton, who passed in 1997, a notable absence. However, he still influenced the record courtesy of a rediscovered riff.

“I had a cassette of Glen and I, and Glen had an idea for this song he called ‘Astute Lobotomy,’” bass player Dennis Dunaway explains to Guitar Player. “And that’s all he had: the title and this riff, definitely a fiery, Glen Buxton riff.

“His spirit was in the room with us the whole time,” Ezrin adds. “We talked about him more than we talked about anything else, I think.”

That, of course, meant Buxton’s boots needed to be filled, and Bob Ezrin has told Guitar Player how they found their man.