Brad Gillis recalled getting a crash course in Randy Rhoads’ guitar playing as he became the second electric guitarist to replace him in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. The Night Ranger guitarist would take to the stage less than a month after Rhoads’ tragic death in 1982 — but first he’d have to learn the set in as little time as possible.

It helped that Irish guitarist Bernie Tormé had been rushed in to keep Osbourne’s tour on the road.

“I’d be standing at the soundboard for those shows, watching Bernie play,“ Gillis told Metal Mayhem ROC. “Because [otherwise] I sat in my room.”

But Gillis wasn’t simply whiling away his time there. Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne had provided him with the perfect tools for studying Rhoads’ guitar style.

“Sharon and the team got me a little boom box cassette player, and I had two board cassettes — which I still have — with Randy on it, from February of 1982,” Gillis reveals.

“You could hear everything crystal clear because it was recorded from the board straight to cassette,” he adds. “So I would sit in my room all day, every day for four days.”

In order to remain focused, he didn’t attend the band’s soundchecks, but he did go to the shows, which featured a stage set appropriate for the Prince of Darkness.

“I’d stand at the soundboard and look at this castle and bombs going off, and fireworks. And this castle! I’m going, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to be up there!’”

On the fifth day, Gillis told the vocalist that he felt able to take the stage. He did so on April 13, 1982, in Binghamton, New York, after a solid soundcheck beforehand.

“I said I was ready, and went in and did seven songs out of the 18 song set,” Gillis said. “Ozzy didn’t even show up for the soundcheck!”

Gillis — whose primary guitar for the tour was his red 1962 Fender Stratocaster fitted with a Floyd Rose tremolo — remained with the tour to its conclusion on August 8. Roughly four weeks later, Gillis was back on a flight to New York City to record what would become Speak of the Devil, a live double-album featuring Black Sabbath tunes recorded with Ozzy’s current band.

Although Gillis continued with Ozzy for the first few dates of the Speak of the Devil tour starting in December, he left at the end of the month to focus on Night Ranger, which by then had secured a contract and released its debut album. He was replaced by Jake E. Lee, who would remain with Osbourne for the next five years.

“I just want to play hot rock,” Gillis told Guitar Player of his decision to leave. “Whether it has melody or if it's heavy three-chord metal doesn't matter: I just want to play my ass off.”

Former Rainbow drummer Bobby Rondinelli says people should stop focusing on Ritchie Blackmore’s moodier moments. After spending three years in a lineup with Deep Purple’s cofounding electric guitarist, he argues that, while there were angry instances, they were hugely outnumbered by positive experiences.

Rondinelli performed on 1981’s Difficult to Cure, which featured the hit “I Surrender,” as well as on the 1982 follow-up, Straight Between the Eyes, which contained “Stone Cold.” He was dismissed before 1983’s Bent Out of Shape was recorded, but his overall feeling about his time with Blackmore remains positive.

“I got along with him great,” Rondinelli told VIP Rocks. “For years, we hung out together all the time, and it was great until it wasn’t. If it wasn't for Ritchie I probably wouldn’t [be here today]. He gave me my break.”

Describing Blackmore as “one of the best guitar players ever,” he continued: “He put me in the drum seat after Cozy Powell, which brought me to attention. It showed that he really had faith in me.”

He went on to offer two examples of Blackmore’s kindness.

“I remember we were playing the Budokan,” Rondinelli says. “He was used to my drum solo, because I would do a solo every night — but I kind of made a mistake. I made the mistake three times in a row, so now people think it's a part!

“After the show he hugged me and goes, ‘I know you made a mistake, but you made it like it was part of the solo. It was great!’ He was complimentary.

“After we did the San Antonio live show for MTV, he hugged me and goes, ‘Man, I wouldn’t want to be that good every night. It’s too much pressure!’”

Rondinelli, who went on to work with Quiet Riot, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult and others, reflected: “He could be the funniest guy in the world. He’s very smart, he’s very personable — and sometimes he’s not. But when he is, he's very likeable. Everybody just talks about when he’s throwing a mood, but he was a regular guy 98 percent of the time.”

Blackmore recently reunited with his former Deep Purple MkII bandmates for a performance of “Smoke on the Water” at the group’s August 12 show at Jones Beach, near his home on Long Island. The guitarist subsequently told Guitar Player he thought the reunion was an opportunity to heal old wounds, adding, “I think we realized it could be the last time we see each other.’

Roger Waters has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour, calling Sheeran a “little prick” for allowing the rapper to be dropped from the lineup over his pro-Palestinian remarks.

Macklemore was removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s U.S. tour after several venues reportedly said they would not host concerts with him on the bill. The dispute began after Macklemore made a speech supporting Palestinians during his September 4 performance at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, telling the audience he wanted people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to know they had not been forgotten and declaring, “Free Palestine.” He also performed his protest song “Hind’s Hall,” which was inspired by pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and named for Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza.

The Israeli-American Council subsequently called for Macklemore to be removed from the tour, accusing him of using the concert as a platform for what it described as a “one-sided political agenda.” The controversy intensified when Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, intervened over Macklemore’s scheduled September 25 and 26 appearances at the Massachusetts venue.

Macklemore said Sheeran told him that Kraft had rallied other stadium owners and that they had effectively given the singer an ultimatum — keep Macklemore on the tour and risk losing their venues. Kraft has confirmed that he pressured Sheeran over Macklemore’s participation at Gillette, citing what he described as the rapper’s recent actions, material shown during his New Jersey performances and a “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery” that he said had been hurtful to the Jewish community. Kraft also said his decision was not intended to deny Palestinians the right to advocate for themselves.

Sheeran has since said that Macklemore’s removal was ultimately the promoter’s decision, not his. The singer said he had spent the week trying to “build bridges” between the parties and find a solution, but that the venues and promoter had made the final call. He also said he was “not complicit” in the decision and described himself as “appalled” by the Israel-Palestine conflict, while maintaining that he does not want his concerts to become political spaces.

The fallout has continued to spread. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga and Lukas Graham — the other remaining support acts on the tour — have all withdrawn in solidarity with Macklemore and in opposition to what they described as the silencing of political expression.

Now Waters, who has been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause for years, has delivered his own verdict on the dispute.

In a video shared on social media, the former Pink Floyd bass guitarist addressed Sheeran directly.

“I just have a little message for [Sheeran],” Waters says. “There are two kinds of people in this world. There’s people who do the right thing — the rapper Macklemore would be one of those people.

“And there’s people — many of them, sadly — little f… excuse me, I nearly used the F-word then… pricks like you who do the wrong thing. Goodbye.”

Waters has previously clashed publicly with other musicians over their positions on Israel and the war in Gaza.

He responded to Disturbed singer David Draiman after Draiman said on Billy Corgan’s podcast that he wanted to “punch” Waters over what he called a “massive betrayal [of] Jews everywhere.”

Waters fired back on X, accusing Israel of carrying out “a genocide” in Gaza and attacking both Draiman and Corgan over their discussion.

“You [Corgan], being the lovely fella you are, gave this little piece of shit a chance to clarify or even modify his position,” Waters wrote. “He did. He is a psychotic racist Nazi pig.”

Waters also claimed that he had been told Draiman writes messages on bombs before they are dropped by the Israeli military on Gaza. Those claims were part of Waters’ response to Draiman and have not been independently established.

The Macklemore controversy now comes as Sheeran’s tour faces an unusual situation: the rapper has been removed from the lineup, Sheeran says the decision was made by the promoter and venues rather than him, and every remaining announced support act has subsequently withdrawn.

Everyone knows George Harrison and Eric Clapton were close. Their friendship became known to all when it was revealed that Harrison had asked Clapton to play lead guitar on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," using Lucy, the Cherry Red Gibson Les Paul he had gifted to Harrison.

But what's also well known is that their bond was strained when, in the late 1960s, Clapton fell in love with Harrison's wife, the former model and photographer Pattie Boyd.

Boyd was weeks from her 20th birthday when she began dating Harrison, and her beauty and charm were arresting. Clapton harbored a deep and unrequited love for her, which in turn fueled the burning rock track "Layla," recorded by his band Derek and the Dominos in 1970.

But that band’s demise, coupled with his inability to lure Boyd away from Harrison — as well as the death of his friend and former Dominos guitar partner Duane Allman — turned his world inside out.

“When [the Dominos] broke up, I went into that dark place,” he revealed. “I didn’t give a shit about the music anymore.”

Clapton indulged in heroin and largely stayed away from making music for the next two years. But when he finally re-emerged in 1974, he renewed his attempts to win Boyd’s affections. By then she was warming to him, not only thanks to "Layla" but also because her husband was preoccupied with his music and meditation.

To his credit, Harrison had tolerated Clapton's flirtations with his wife for years. In 1970, he had discovered them together one evening at the home of manager Robert Stigwood.

“George came over and demanded, ‘What’s going on?’” she recounted to Rolling Stone. “To my horror, Eric said, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife,’” she continued.

“I wanted to die. George was furious. He turned to me and said: ‘Well, are you going with him or coming with me?’”

But by 1974, Harrison decided he'd had enough. He challenged Clapton to a duel — not with pistols but with electric guitars, at Harrison’s Friar Park home.

“George handed him a guitar and an amp — as an 18th-century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword — and for two hours, without a word, they dueled,” Boyd recalled in a 2007 interview. “At the end, nothing was said, but the general feeling was that Eric had won.

“He hadn’t allowed himself to get riled or go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar playing was unbeatable.”

Boyd doesn’t say what effect the head-cutting duel had on her feelings for Clapton, but it seems to have helped him win her hand.

In the end, Clapton got his prize. He and Boyd married on March 27, 1979, in Tucson, Arizona. Remarkably, the following May 19, when the couple threw a reception for friends in England who had been unable to attend the wedding, Harrison showed up, as did former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

Clapton and Boyd split in 1987 and officially divorced in 1989. On reflection, Boyd says his love for her was driven in part by his competition with Harrison.

“Eric just wanted what George had,” she concluded

Clearly, time has healed wounds. Last April, Boyd took in one of Clapton’s two concerts at G Live in Guildford, held as warm-up shows for his 2026 tour.

“Fabulous to see Eric in the relatively intimate G-Live venue in Guildford on Monday evening,” she wrote on Instagram. “Great to hear ‘Old Love,’ ‘Layla’ and ‘Wonderful Tonight’ (amongst others) live again.”

And should anyone have forgotten, Harrison and Clapton once co-owned an acoustic guitar — a rare 1913 Gibson Style O acoustic archtop. The instrument was used to write songs that include Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” and Clapton’s “Let It Rain,” as well as “Badge,” the song Harrison and Clapton co-wrote that appeared on Goodbye, Cream’s 1969 farewell album. The guitar has since been dubbed Pattie, in homage to Boyd, and sold at Heritage Auctions for $200,000 on May 8, 2026.

Tony Iommi recalled how a stunt staged to surprise Black Sabbath’s new producer went dangerously wrong, leaving Bill Ward with serious burns. It wasn’t the first time the guitarist had set fire to the drummer — but it certainly was the last.

The incident took place as the band worked on their 1980 album, Heaven and Hell. It was their first record to feature Ronnie James Dio, and the band also had a new producer, Martin Birch.

Practical jokes were nothing new in Sabbath’s world, Iommi told Ultimate Classic Rock, adding that Ward expected to be the target of most of them.

“Bill, if you didn’t do anything to him, he’d always come up and go, ‘Is everything all right?’” Iommi explained. “And you go, ‘Yeah. Why?’ ‘Well, nobody’s done anything to me today!’”

There was one particular “party piece” the pair often enacted.

“We’d get the rubbing alcohol in the studio. You could put it on you and light it, and it would just burn off. You know, you wouldn’t feel it.”

They decided it was the perfect way to confuse their new producer.

“The first time he was in the studio, Bill and I planned to do this trick — I’d put the liquid on Bill and light him, and it should have burnt off.”

Iommi — who recently revealed that he tried to talk Ozzy Osbourne out of Sabbath’s final show in 2025 — went on to admit that the stunt didn’t go to plan.

“I put too much on him! I poured it on him, and lit him, and he went woof, like that, like a bomb! He’s rolling on the floor and I’m still pouring this liquid on him, thinking it was part of the joke.

“Of course, Martin Birch is freaking out; Bill’s shouting and screaming, and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s part of the joke’ — and God, it wasn’t!

“I found out afterwards that he got third-degree burns on his legs and he had to go to hospital.”

The end of the tale is no surprise: “We never did it again after that.”

More than three decades after the death of Freddie Mercury, Queen continues to perform — a reality that once seemed impossible to the band itself.

Mercury died of complications from AIDS on November 24, 1991, and in the immediate aftermath guitarist Brian May says the surviving members believed the band had reached its natural end.

How May and drummer Roger Taylor managed to carry on to this day owes something to Mercury and a gift he gave to the band in his final days.

Speaking recently with Sammy Hagar on Rock & Roll Road Trip for AXS TV, May recalled that Queen had long agreed that if any member died, the group would stop.

“I suppose what we did was give it up,” May explains. “We actually did give it up when Freddie died. We'd always said, ‘If one of us goes, that's it.’ So Roger and I both went out kind of grieving to the max and saying it's over.

“We didn’t even want to talk about it for quite a long time.”

But in the singer’s final months, Mercury — who had once fought with May over one of his most celebrated guitar solos — himself had already been laying the groundwork for the band to continue. Despite rapidly declining health, May says the frontman was determined to record as much as possible before the end.

“Freddie, in his last days, was like, ‘Okay guys, I’m not going to be here long. Just give me stuff to sing,’” May recalls. “Write me stuff on the back of a cigarette packet — whatever. Just give me stuff to sing.”

The band obliged, bringing Mercury fragments of songs so he could record vocal parts whenever he was physically able.

“And then when he'd gone… he was very undramatic about it,” May says. “He was never maudlin, ever. I never saw him cry or go into self-pity. He never did that. He was like, ‘Let’s just do it. Let’s keep doing stuff.’”

Those final recordings eventually became the foundation for Queen’s 1995 album Made in Heaven, released nearly four years after Mercury’s death. The surviving members built new arrangements around Mercury’s last vocal and piano performances.

“We made the last album, the Made in Heaven album, with the tracks Freddie had left us to play with,” May says. “It became a real labor of love because he left some lovely little bits and pieces.”

For May, Mercury’s presence is still felt whenever the band performs.

“Freddie was always inspiring,” he notes. “If he was here now, we'd be doing what we always do, I'm sure.”

In recent years, Queen has found new life touring with vocalist Adam Lambert, who has fronted the group alongside May and Taylor since 2011.

According to May, Lambert’s willingness to reinterpret the band’s classic material keeps the music from feeling frozen in time.

“Adam brings fresh views on things,” May says. “He’s not afraid to say, ‘Why don’t we try it this way or that way?’ So the songs are not fossils. They're alive and evolving with Adam.”

Lambert’s vocal range, in particular, continues to astonish the guitarist — especially when the band performs Queen’s epic ballad “Who Wants to Live Forever.”

“Sometimes he blows my mind,” he adds. “We do ‘Who Wants to Live Forever,’ which Freddie would do at times, but if he if he felt a little off color, then that was going to be a little bit too much strain for Freddie.

“Adam will always do it and always pull it off, and he’ll take it higher and higher. I’m standing there playing and sometimes I’m going, ‘What did he just do?’

“It blows my mind — the range that he has and the courage he has to morph things into a new place. I love it. I love working with that right now.”

While Queen + Adam Lambert have performed a number of the group’s biggest hits, May says there’s one song they’ll never play, out of respect for Mercury.

The band has no official plans to tour right now. Should that change, don’t expect to see them in the U.S. for the immediate future. May has said ““America is a dangerous place at the moment,” in the wake of the U.S. government killing American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota in January.

May has also sworn off performing at Glastonbury, due to the culling of badgers that has occurred at the farm where the festival is held.

In related news, Steve Vai recently revealed that he had a chance to play May’s Red Special — his home-built electric guitar — around 1980 when he was 20, and found the guitar impossible due to its incredibly baseball bat–like neck.

“Between the gauge .008 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates,” the guitar virtuoso says.

Johnny Marr is preparing to send nearly 100 guitars from his personal collection to new homes at a Christie’s auction later this week, including some prized electric guitars from his Smiths years.

But before the Manchester guitarist parts with them, he’s been looking back with Oasis’ guitarist Noel Gallagher on their long history together — including the best guitar-buying advice Gallagher says he’s ever received.

By the time Oasis entered the studio to record their debut album, Definitely Maybe, Marr was already an experienced player and collector, firmly established at the center of British guitar culture. He even loaned Gallagher his beloved 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo for the sessions, and the guitar famously appeared on the cover for the Oasis hit single “Supersonic.”

In addition to that loan, Marr gave Gallagher a piece of advice when the two went guitar shopping together. The encounter took place in Doncaster, a Yorkshire town about 60 miles from Manchester, and was only the second time the pair had hung out. Gallagher recalls trying out a Fender Stratocaster with a mind-boggling nine pickups before Marr offered some advice over a bite to eat.

“This is the best bit of advice I’ve ever been given,” Gallagher says in a Christie’s promotional video. “He buys a sandwich, and he says, ‘I’ve got to go and eat before I think about buying this guitar,’ because you should never buy a guitar with an empty stomach.”

In Marr’s case, the sandwich apparently worked. He ultimately bought the unusual Strat for £900.

“That’s £100 for each pickup,” Marr’s brother quipped when he heard about the purchase.

The guitar certainly isn’t your everyday Strat. Its cockpit-esque array of 18 toggle switches has left plenty of people scratching their heads, but Marr brought it out of hiding for his 2022 music video for “Spirit, Power And Soul.”

The advice, though, is considerably more practical than the guitar itself. Buying instruments rarely comes cheap, and an impulse decision can have expensive consequences. And Marr isn’t the only guitarist with a memorable philosophy on the subject.

Yvette Young, for instance, has warned players against buying a guitar while third-wheeling on a date — a lesson she learned the hard way.

Joe Bonamassa, meanwhile, says there’s only one factor that should really matter when considering another guitar purchase, although the obsessive collector perhaps doesn’t always follow his own advice.

Elsewhere, Jason Isbell has explained why new players should pay a little extra before leaving a store with their first guitar. He believes the right instrument can make a world of difference during those tentative first steps of a beginner’s journey.

Marr, however, hasn’t spent his career simply handing out advice. He’s been on the receiving end of some helpful words, too — most notably from Paul McCartney, who helped him grieve the death of the Smiths.

And the 62-year-old guitarist has even been dubbed “guitar Batman” for helping reunite session player Ella Feingold with her vintage Gretsch after a shipping nightmare.

As Marr prepares to part with some of the guitars that have accompanied him through his remarkable career, it seems there’s very little the Smiths guitarist can’t do — although Gallagher’s sandwich lesson might be the one piece of Marr wisdom every guitarist can afford to follow.

Tony Iommi admits he didn’t want to perform at Black Sabbath’s historic final gig in July 2025, and he also turned down an opportunity to record a final album with the band’s original lineup.

The electric-guitar icon tells Classic Rock that he was doubtful when he was approached about performing at last year’s historic Back to the Beginning show at Villa Park in Birmingham, England. The concert — Black Sabbath’s final performance — featured guest appearances from Metallica, Pantera, Guns N’ Roses and Tool, among others, who paid tribute to Sabbath. Proceeds from the event went to charity.

“I said to Ozzy: ‘I don’t think we should do it,’” Iommi says. “I said: ‘We should just let the other bands play our stuff, and us come out at the end and say thank you.’ But it was for a good charitable cause, and eventually we said okay.”

Iommi notes that he hadn’t seen Osbourne since the pair performed Black Sabbath’s hit “Paranoid” at the closing ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Osbourne had publicly revealed his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis in 2020, and his condition had worsened considerably by the time of the band’s final show.

“I hadn’t seen Ozzy for a bit, and it was difficult seeing him like that,” Iommi says. “Fucking hell…”

Iommi was also concerned about Osbourne’s decision to perform a solo set before Sabbath’s closing performance at Back to the Beginning.

“I was concerned he was going to blow himself out, and by the time we came on he’d be struggling.”

Iommi has since said he believes Osbourne continued living only to perform at the show.

“I think he really just held out to do that show. I really feel — me and Geezer were talking about it — that we think he held out to do it, and just after that, he’s done it and said goodbye to the fans. And that was the end of it.”

Iommi also revealed that he had turned down an opportunity to record a final Black Sabbath album with the original lineup. Andrew Watt, who produced Osbourne’s final two albums — 2020’s Ordinary Man and 2022’s Patient Number 9 — approached Iommi about the idea in the early 2020s.

“I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy,” Iommi says. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill [drummer Bill Ward]. Also, we’d done 13, and I didn’t like the idea of: ‘Now here’s another album.’”

Iommi’s new album, From the Dark, is due for release October 23 via BMG.

Dolly Parton was honored at Monday night’s Emmy Awards with an emotional tribute from her former Steel Magnolias co-star Sally Field and a performance by Reba McEntire.

Field took the stage to remember Parton, who died August 25 at age 80, reflecting on the friendship they formed while making the 1989 film.

“If there are truly angels on Earth, then we just lost one: Dolly Parton,” Field said. “Over the years, I never stopped loving her, though we lived very far apart. I adored her from day one, how could you not? She was genuine and humble, supportive and blisteringly funny, with a bawdy sense of humor that would send any rude guy looking for a place to hide.”

Field said she did not fully appreciate at the time what Parton would come to mean to so many people.

“I couldn’t see then what a real giant Dolly was — not just as an artist, but as a human,” she continued. “She was a humanitarian whose contributions have made a profound difference in the lives of so many in her home state of Tennessee, and across our country. God bless you, Dolly Parton, my friend. I am not the only one on Earth that will love you forever and ever.”

The tribute then shifted to an archival clip of Parton introducing her 1983 song “Appalachian Memories.” Speaking about the song, Parton recalled her upbringing in the Smoky Mountains and explained why the subject was so personal to her.

“I have written a song that touches me very deep, and I’m sure that in your own way you certainly will relate to this,” Parton said. “This song, like I say, is very important to me, and I hope you like it. And if you don’t like it, well, if you don’t mind, I would rather not hear about it later, okay?”

McEntire followed by performing “Appalachian Memories,” bringing Parton’s own words about her Appalachian roots into the tribute.

Parton’s musical journey began with a little Martin acoustic guitar she received as a teen, leading her to become one of the biggest performers in country music and a beloved icon. Her death rocked the music world last month. The "9 to 5" singer died following a brief battle with cancer, after revealing just a week earlier that she had been dealing with health problems she had neglected while caring for her late husband, Carl Dean, who died in 2025. Parton’s younger sister Stella later said Dolly had kept her cancer private because “she did not want people sad.”

The Emmys tribute was the latest in a series of musical tributes to Parton. Jack White recently performed “Jolene” at a show in London, Kacey Musgraves sang “Here You Come Again” in Boston, and Olivia Rodrigo dedicated her duet with Sarah McLachlan at Daisy Chain Fields to Parton.

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine has named the four bands he believes could form a new generation of thrash metal’s Big Four — and three of his choices are no surprise.

Speaking recently with Czech Republic outlet Óčko, Mustaine was asked which bands he would select if he had to “put together a new generation” of the Big Four, the term traditionally used for Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax.

“Well, it wouldn’t be a young generation, but I do believe that there are ways to do a new ‘Big Four’,” Mustaine said (via Blabbermouth).

“I think Testament, I think Overkill, I think Exodus, and maybe Trivium,” he continued. “I don’t know. Trivium’s not really a thrash metal band, so I’d have to think about that. But I think those other three guys would be really great.”

Mustaine went on to explain why each of the three veteran thrash bands earned his consideration, beginning with Overkill’s importance to the New York-area metal scene.

“Overkill is really important on the East Coast metal scene,” he said. “Exodus, of course, I love Exodus. And I’ve been friends with Gary [Holt, guitarist] longest of all people that I’ve been friends with in the music industry.

“And Testament. Eric [Peterson, guitarist], Alex [Skolnick, guitarist]… those guys are really great guitar players. And I love when we get a chance to play with the band.”

The original Big Four emerged from the American thrash scene in the 1980s and became the genre’s most commercially prominent acts. They finally shared a stage in 2010, when all four bands played six shows as part of the Sonisphere festival series. The following year, they brought the package to Yankee Stadium in New York for what became one of the defining thrash-metal events of the era.

The four bands have reunited only sporadically since then, including appearances at Australia’s Soundwave festival in 2013 and Canada’s Heavy MTL festival in 2014.

Mustaine has previously argued that Exodus deserved to be included if the Big Four were ever expanded to a Big Five. In 2013, he named the California thrash pioneers as the band he would most want to add.

“There was nobody else at the time that had that kind of pull or that kind of importance in the metal community,” he told Radio.com, according to Blabbermouth. “Granted, it was with [late frontman Paul] Baloff, and he had a voice that you had to have an acquired taste for… but I liked him.”

Mustaine has also floated the idea of the original Big Four playing one final show together and using it as an opportunity to “pass the torch” to a new generation.

In 2022, he suggested the bands could stage the symbolic handoff at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, even if it were only for one show. The plan would have required Slayer to come out of retirement following the band’s 2019 farewell tour.

“I personally have been hoping for this for a while, and I keep asking and asking and asking,” Mustaine said at the time, revealing that he had been in contact with the other three bands. “They’re just not into it. But that’s up to them.”

As for Mustaine, he remains convinced that thrash metal can experience another resurgence. Speaking to NME earlier this year, he suggested that Megadeth’s forthcoming self-titled album could help spark renewed interest in the style and launch a new electric guitar renaissance.

“Sure I do,” he said when asked whether another thrash-metal movement was possible. “In fact, I said to the band that I think there’s going to be a renaissance when this [Megadeth self-titled] record comes out because it’s going to smack a lot of people upside of their earholes. I think people are going to say ‘I forgot what I loved about this kind of music,’ and then we’re gonna see a lot of people coming back with [a fresh take].”

ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons finally met one of his greatest musical inspirations in person Saturday, September 12, when he and Dion DiMucci found themselves performing at the same resort. Gibbons and the Bronx-born rock and roll pioneer had previously collaborated on two recordings, but those sessions took place remotely during the pandemic.

Just before Dion’s set at Mohegan Sun’s Sun Patio, Gibbons — dressed in pajamas — met his longtime hero backstage. ZZ Top was performing at Mohegan Sun Arena that same day, creating what Dion’s tour manager, Rich Nesin, recognized earlier in the week as an unlikely musical convergence.

It was, as Gibbons put it, “Texas meets the Bronx via the blues.”

“I’ve admired Dion for just about as long as I can remember,” Gibbons said after the meeting. “He has always been the ultimate rock and roller to me and still is just that. While we’ve collaborated on some recordings, we had yet to meet, and now it’s ‘live and in person’ and a truly fulfilling experience.”

Gibbons said Dion was as warm and genuine as he had imagined, adding that the two “instantly bonded over our mutual love of Jimmy Reed.”

Dion was equally delighted by the encounter.

“Billy Gibbons is one of a kind,” he said just before taking the stage. “The man has a distinctive sound on guitar; he is unique and special in every way; the way he dresses; the food he eats; the car he drives; the guitar he plays!”

Dion also offered a typically colorful description of the way Gibbons communicates with him: “The way he expresses himself when he wants to convey something to me: he sends up a smoke signal!”

The meeting was particularly fitting given the musicians’ history together. Gibbons performed on “Bam Bang Boom,” from Dion’s 2020 album Blues With Friends, and the pair reunited the following year for “My Stomping Ground,” from Dion’s Stomping Ground.

Both albums were recorded during the pandemic, with Dion’s many collaborators contributing their parts remotely. Blues With Friends features an extraordinary roster of guests including Paul Simon, Jeff Beck, Joe Bonamassa, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa and Brian Setzer, while Stomping Ground includes Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Boz Scaggs, Keb’ Mo’, Marcia Ball and Peter Frampton.

So although Gibbons and Dion had already made music together, Saturday marked the first time they had actually shared the same room.

Gibbons’ admiration for Dion stretches back decades. In a Guitar Player interview around the release of Blues With Friends, Dion recalled becoming a fan of the ZZ Top electric guitar hero around the time of Tres Hombres, if not earlier.

“I’ve been a fan of his since Tres Hombres, or maybe earlier,” Dion told Guitar Player. “He’s always had a very distinctive sound. He’s like Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker on steroids. I wanted him to do a song kind of like [Bo Diddley’s] ‘I’m a Man.’”

“This song seemed ideal for Billy,” Dion continued. “He is one of a kind — a renaissance man, a real intelligent guy, a thinker. I love the way he communicates, whether it’s writing, playing, visually or even talking. He’s got his own thing.”

Rick Springfield was still a teenager when he flew to Da Nang, Vietnam, to play for troops in 1968. What happened next still haunts his memories today.

He spent many of his formative years at an army camp in Broadmeadows, Victoria, Australia. So, using his burgeoning six-string talents to boost soldiers’ morale during a famously harrowing conflict, he likely felt it was the natural thing to do. He’d taken up the electric guitar at 13; he was 19 when he said yes to the Vietnam gig.

“We met these [soldiers], and we really got along well,” he says in a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “We stayed overnight with them,” he recalls. “I stayed in the radio shack, and we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.

“It was John Wayne time. I was a young kid,” he continues. “I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I said, ‘Oh, yeah! Let’s fire a gun!’ So I threw the mortars down, around five or six. I could have easily lost a hand.”

If it seemed like a movie while he was doing, the next day brought some serious news.

“I’d thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody,” he says. “They came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one! You got one!’ And that still has a hard place to land in me, you know? That’s really the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t find a place for that to land. It still seems like years ago, another guy, another place.”

Time is meant to be the great healer. Decades later, however, what happened that day still weighs heavily on him.

“It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it’s distant and it’s war and I didn’t really have anything to do with it, and didn’t really know what I was doing,” he says. “I was a kid playing John Wayne. But it’s pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”

Some 13 years later, Springfield’s life changed again. Yet he says he didn’t know “Jessie’s Girl” would be a hit.

The song made him a superstar, and the public’s warmth for it has never cooled in the intervening years. In fact, he even collaborated with American prog rock group Coheed & Cambria to bring a sequel, “Jessie’s Girl 2”, to life in 2020. Coheed bandleader Claudio Sanchez had spearheaded the track, with Springfield more than open to his twist on the tale.

“This is pretty much a first,” Springfield told Forbes in 2020. “As far as an artist writing a continuation of a song from another artist, it’s pretty unique. Claudio’s idea was pretty hilarious; she turned out to be a freak!”

Elsewhere, John Fogerty has revealed how escaping the Vietnam War gave birth to one of his most enduring hits.

George Harrison’s Dark Horse tour in 1974 has gone down in rock history for all the wrong reasons. The shows were plagued with issues, and the run was so bad that the Beatle wouldn’t tour again for another 17 years. For his foil, Robben Ford, the tour had a completely different set of problems.

Throughout the run, Harrison fought a losing battle with laryngitis, earning the tour its derogatory nickname, “Dark Hoarse”. Fans also resented the limited number of Beatles songs aired, and the lengthy opening set of his close friend, Ravi Shankar.

That, however, was just one side of the story. For a youthful Robben Ford, his big break was anything but. At 22, he was playing in Tom Scott’s jazz-fusion group, L.A. Express. Soon, they’d be hired as Joni Mitchell’s live band, later playing on her studio albums, Miles of Aisles and Hissing of Summer Lawn.

Harrison was in attendance at their London show, and he subsequently claimed the band for himself, ahead of hitting the road to support his fifth studio album. It was meant to be a dream gig for Ford.

“It was an amazing opportunity to be able to work with a Beatle,” he tells Thinking About Guitar with a degree of diplomacy. “George was always my favorite Beatle, but the music was very simple, and it was already done. So you learned the part, and you played the part. It wasn’t a challenging gig.”

Considering his jazz-tinted background, being reduced to a sideman playing cowboy chords wasn’t thrill-a-minute for the hotshot guitarist. His issues, though, ran deeper.

“There was no creativity asked of me in that situation,” he explains. “It was a hard tour; George couldn’t sing; he had really terrible laryngitis. We were in private planes, and sometimes we’d be in venues for 15 hours a day. The show was three and a half hours long. At the Cow Palace in San Francisco, we played twice in one day. It was really hard physically and emotionally, and mentally it was kind of rough, I have to say.”

Then there were the drugs. A day after first meeting Harrison backstage at that Joni Mitchell show in England’s capital, he was whisked into the studio. There, he said, there was “a box of cocaine on every shelf,” and that behavior didn’t change on the road.

The tour ran for 45 shows, and the whole time, Ford felt like an outsider.

“There was a lot of what went on during the ‘70s,” he says, again taking the diplomatic route. “You had all those cats, and I was 22. I had my 23rd birthday on that tour.

“So, I know these guys are older than me, and they’re doing their own thing,” he goes on. “It was very hard for me, actually. I felt like a fish out of water in that bunch, in that group of people. So, it wasn’t really fun. It was something I really kind of had to get through.”

On a positive note, he did get through it. He returned to Joni Mitchell’s side the following year before being invited to write a guitar solo for Steely Dan’s “Peg” in 1977, though he didn’t make the final cut. His next big gig would prove to be his weirdest. That’s probably why he’s largely remained a solo act since.

Thankfully, the marred George Harrison tour did little to douse his flame, and playing a Beatles classic with the man who wrote it remains a memory he holds dear.

Aerosmith's Joe Perry was born in September 10, 1950. Joe has been a pretty regular fixture in the pages of Guitar Player – the decades of the magazine's life almost mirroring his life in 'America's greatest rock'n'roll band'. In May 2005, Perry was on the cover of GP, looking back over a lifetime of guitar plaing, with thoughtful and insightful takes on Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, live performance, and much more.

It doesn't take long to figure out when you've arrived at Joe Perry's house. Sure, as the gate to his rural Massachusetts estate opens you know you're on the property of someone of serious means. And when you head down the driveway and come to a pride of sleek and dangerous-looking European sports cars – as well as a golf cart, which is perhaps an even surer sign of sprawling luxury – the case strengthens that you may be at the residence of a rock icon who has sold more than 100 million albums.

But even when you reach the rustically beautiful main house, you still may wonder if you're in the right place. After all, this elegant spread could just as well belong to a CEO, a real estate mogul, or even a politician. How do we know this is indeed the home of the legendary Aerosmith guitarist?

The answer is above you: a custom weathervane that erases all doubts – a big, glorious, rusty iron Les Paul in the sky telling you which way the wind blows.

Taking all this in, one question comes to mind: What if? What if Perry hadn't reunited with Aerosmith in 1984? What if he and Steven Tyler hadn't made amends, recommenced touring, and soon thereafter shot the "Walk This Way" video with Run D.M.C. that simultaneously made hip-hop, rap rock, and – once again – Aerosmith mainstream commodities? What if Perry wasn't in a band that plays the Super Bowl on a semi-regular basis? What if his house wasn't a virtual Noah's Ark of vintage amps and guitars?

In other words, does the 54-year-old guitarist ever look back on all that has transpired and thank the stars that he didn't end up like Uli Jon Roth or Ritchie Blackmore – a legend without the band that made him famous?

"All the time," confesses Perry, settling down in front of his big Neve console at the Boneyard, the stunning home studio where nearly every note on Honkin' on Bobo and Just Push Play, the last two Aerosmith albums, was recorded.

"We constantly reflect on the legacy of Aerosmith, and, honestly, we shake our heads in amazement. It's a miracle that we're still together after 30-plus years."

It's a bittersweet afternoon for Perry. For one thing, it will be one of his last days spent in the Boneyard, at least in its current incarnation. Along with his wife, Billie, and their youngest child, Roman, he and his studio will soon move someplace even more serene – a 120-acre Vermont farm just two hours outside of Boston. But if there's even greater cause for reflection, it's because Perry is about to share with GP readers something very close to his heart-something that, so far, no one outside of his inner circle has heard: his first solo release since rejoining Aerosmith.

The album is simply called Joe Perry, and, as the laconic guitarist gives the faders a shove and a raging symphony of soaring, scorching riffs leaps out of the monitors, a hint of joy in his eyes makes it clear that this is perhaps the most passionate, honest, and heartfelt artistic statement of his career. And, wow, is that a different headspace than the one he was in when he tracked his first solo record.

So, how come it has been so long since your last solo album?

Between all the public appearances, touring, and recording, Aerosmith is definitely a full-time job. Plus, I'm getting pretty much everything I want out of the band creatively. But I've accumulated so much of my own material concurrently-some of which I recorded after Aerosmith sessions ended-it eventually had to come out. And I didn't want it to come out somewhere down the road as outtakes in a box set.

What's the biggest difference between Joe Perry and the solo albums you did during your split with Aerosmith in the early '80s?

Back then, there was a lot of anger-a lot of "f"** you" toward the other guys. That's why I didn't want to call this a Joe Perry Project album. It's a different time, a different place, and the album was recorded for different reasons.

That was a tenuous time for Aerosmith. And right around then, Eddie Van Halen hit the scene and claimed that when he met you, you brushed him off. Is that true?

At that point, we were definitely going downhill. Our live performances were suffering, we were really messed up on drugs, and we were dealing with the stress and strain of being in the band for nearly ten years. If we had had our wits, we would have taken a nice long vacation and looked at things on a bigger scale. At the same time, Van Halen was starting this new movement in guitar, because Eddie was a genius. He was single-handedly moving guitar to a whole new level. We were the preeminent stadium headliners who were starting to crumble, and here were these young upstarts coming up, just reaching the peak of their game, ready to fill our shoes.

I mean, I loved the first Van Halen record from the moment I heard it, and what was amazing about it was that it was full of stuff I'd heard before, yet it all sounded so new. For instance, that Echoplex sound Eddie did [at the end of "Eruption"] was such an old trick that I never would have done it, because I thought it was cheesy. But Eddie was from the next generation, and everything was new to him. And he was playing to a whole new batch of kids that didn't grow up with that stuff, so it was very smart for him to use tricks like that on top of his naturally brilliant playing.

Suddenly there was this whole West Coast guitar-slinger movement that he started, and it was like, "Man, they 're beating on our door." We were feeling the heat, so, yes, I'm sure there was a certain amount of jealousy going on with us at that time.

The first time I saw Aerosmith was when you had just rejoined the band. The arena was only half full, and you guys seemed visibly angry. To this day, it still stands as one of the greatest rock concerts I've ever seen.

We were in various stages of cleaning up, and we were out touring without a new record, but we didn't care. We were rediscovering our band and seeing things in a new light. We were just as excited as the fans were that we were back – and the fans that came out then were hardcore fans that had been with us since the beginning.

That night, you played a fiery version of "Red House" and then smashed your Stratocaster and hurled the pieces over the back of your stacks.

I haven't smashed a guitar in a while. It has become a bit of a cliché. But sometimes you do it, and it's totally unexpected, because you just want to add a certain immediacy to the show-a moment people will walk away with and remember forever.

And if it's done in the right spirit, you don't even notice how hard it is to actually break a guitar like that. But you might be surprised the first time you swing one into the floor, because that thing comes back at you like a baseball bat.

Is it possible to have too many guitars?

I currently have four or five hundred, and, truthfully, I'll never play them all. As much as I love them, I'm getting ready to sell some off. Obviously, I'll keep the ones that have sentimental or historical value, but there are many that I'd rather have out there getting played than just sitting in a box.

The guitar parts on 'Joe Perry' sound immense. How do you get that live arena sound in a small studio?

Well, I certainly don't drag in my concert rig! People forget that the Marshall stack was designed for the stage in an era when sound systems weren't very good. Back in the day, when Jimi and the Stones were out there playing, only the vocals and maybe a couple of drums would get miked. The Marshall was essentially a miniature P.A. system for your guitar. It's supposed to sound loud, it's supposed to shake the stage, and you're supposed to feel it when you're 20 feet away. Though I tend to play quieter and cleaner than I used to, I still need at least two 50- or 100-watt stacks, because I'll always prefer to feel the guitar coming directly off my amps.

But in the studio, I find smaller speakers and cabinets tend to record better. After all, simple physics dictate that the smaller the speaker, the more sound there is in a concentrated area for the microphone to pick up. For most of Hankin' on Bobo, I used a little Epiphone amp and an old Fender Champ. Joe Perry is an amalgamation of tracks-some going back as many as ten years-and, yes, a lot of them were performed through small amps, especially an Alessandro 10-watt head and speaker cube, an [Alessandro] Working Dog combo, and a bunch of old Champs. I also used a Carr Mercury combo, Gibson combos old and new, and even a classic Danelectro, among other things.

Rocks was recorded on a 16-track machine, whereas Just Push Play employed as many as 96 tracks. Where does Joe Perry fit into that range?

When you start double- and triple-tracking guitars to get the so-called "fatter" sound, you're asking for trouble. Some of my favorite records of all time feature one guitar, one speaker, and one microphone. So, ideally, that's where you want to be. One guitar played right can sound huger than five guitars all multitracked together. The spirit of this record is more like Rocks.

When you're doing an album like this one-where you're playing nearly every instrument except the drums-how do you possibly foresee how all your tones, riffs, and vocals are going to fit together?

It's all about leaving holes in the mix. One of the biggest mistakes people make is getting sounds that sound good on their own, and then expecting them to work in the final mix. If I soloed some of the bass tracks on this record for you, you'd hear nothing but subs and say, "I can't even tell what note that is." But when you blend it in with the other parts, it all makes sense.

And the same thing is true for guitars. For example, [Aerosmith co-guitarist] Brad Whitford and I have recorded so many records together that we instinctively know how to complement each other's sound before the first mic is even set up. That's what 30 years of songwriting, plotting, and planning will do for you.

There are some fantastic solos on this album. The "Hold on Me" solo opens with an amazingly vocal-like shriek.

That's me plugged through a DigiTech Whammy pedal and an [HHB Radius3] Fat Man tube compressor. To get that "vocal" sound, you really just have to keep fooling around until you find what you're after. It's always a battle to get overdrive and sustain without losing tone. Sometimes you have to bring down the drive so that you're forced into having to work the guitar a little harder.

How did that strikingly lyrical solo on "Can't Compare" go down?

That was a shocker. I had just plugged in my [reissue] Mary Kaye Strat, and I said, "Paul, let's see if we've got a sound." We did a take, and, honestly, I don't think I've ever played anything that came from as deep inside as that solo. It's totally pure, unadulterated, and straight from the heart, and it became a mini-movement within the song. It's a love song, and the solo is just a pure musical expression of the lyrics.

Getting a great take like that is what just about every guitarist prays for when the red light goes on. Any advice on how musicians can make the magic happen more often?

Sometimes you get tracks like that when you aren't even aware you're recording, so perhaps a total dissociation from any kind of pressure is part of it. That's probably why the coolest licks sometimes happen during a song's fadeout-it's like the guitarist is thinking, "Well, the song is over. Now I can relax and cut loose." On the other hand, sometimes that pressure works for you.

But one bit of practical advice I can offer is to make sure that from the get-go your signal path is always clean. Then, if you do play something magical, you can keep it. You don't want it ruined by a 60-cycle hum or a standing wave. Even if all you have is a one-channel project studio, make sure that when you cast that net there are no holes in it. And then just let it fly.

"Push Comes to Shove" has a bit of a swung-sixteenths funk pocket.

Yeah, I wanted to have some of that "Last Child"/"Walk This Way" feel on this record because we kind of skipped that vibe on Bobo-which I was little bummed about, because it's such a big part of Aerosmith's roots.

In the early to middle '70s, Aerosmith's strategy for success was to tour the states constantly. But let's say Joe Perry was your first album. I imagine your approach to breaking in would be quite different in this day and age.

Not really. We can't control the internet or cable television, but things really haven't changed that much. You still have to prove yourself as a live band, and you still have to catch a lucky break somewhere. If you're tenacious and talented and have good songs-and if you don't quit if nothing happens right away-you'll slowly build an audience, even if you never get picked up by VH1 or MTV. There are a lot of bands out there that will never make the cover of Rolling Stone, yet they deliver live, and they can still sell a couple of thousand CDs in every town they play. And that is in your control.

Many guitarists dream of playing gigantic concerts. Are there any downsides to the big stage that aspiring rock stars don't consider?

Well, first of all, you give up a lot of your life to do those kind of shows – to be on the road all the time, to put together huge tours, and to have it all come off with that level of production. On a show-to-show basis, though, I find that because of the energy required to put on that kind of performance-the adrenaline that gets so strong it sometimes makes my hands shake – I'll just never play as good in those circumstances as I do down here in my studio. Unless you plan on standing glued in front of your amps all night, you'll never get the same level of connection with the music.

The classic example of that is Jimi Hendrix. The Jimi you hear on all those early live bootleg tapes is so different than the Jimi you hear on his records. When he was out there trying to make a name for himself, he was putting all his energy into his rock and roll shows – burning guitars and all that stuff – and his guitar playing was all over the place. He was barely in tune. Of course, there's still brilliance there, but it's a different kind of brilliance than what he was doing in the studio.

And, in a sense, the same is true of an Aerosmith show. It's a visceral, physical experience, an athletic event, really, where the music is the vehicle for something bigger and more exciting. You may not have the purest technique or play the most perfect solo of your life at a big show like that, but you will bring the audience along with you wherever you go. It's a tradeoff, and I've come to grips with that.

In your 1979 GP cover story, you said that you didn't consider yourself "much of a guitar player." Has your perception of your skills changed over the years?

As far as being a guitar technician, I still feel the same way – I don't really have any technique to speak of. Anybody who is a real guitar player can listen to my playing and know that I wasn't schooled and that I didn't study music. I don't know jazz, music theory, or any of that stuff. It's all strictly feel. If there's a certain riff I'm hearing in my head that I want to play on the guitar, I'll fumble my way through the music until I can get it happening. I know a lot of players who can play Hendrix note for note, but I can't get into that. I could have gone down the technique road, but it never appealed to me. I never like things to sound too polished.

This interview was first published in Guitar Player, May 2005. For the latest information about Joe Perry, including tour dates, visit his website.

“I’ve had an extraordinary life,” Steve Lukather says. “I’m one lucky guy.”

Indeed he is. Lukather spent the summer touring with Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band before hitting the road with Toto for their massive North American summer tour with Christopher Cross. On September 24, he’ll be back on the road with Ringo on the Fall 2026 Tour running through October 7.

But of course Luke is equally well known for his studio session work. He’s one of history’s most prolific session guitarists, contributing to over 1,500 albums across multiple genres. A definitive studio legend, he played the iconic riff on Michael Jackson’s "Beat It", the solo on Olivia Newton-John's "Physical," and tracked hits for icons like Lionel Richie, Chicago and Aretha Franklin.

“I used to go to work every day not knowing what I was gonna do,” Lukather says. “There were no rehearsals, and no demos. All we could say was, ‘What are we doing today? Who’s on the session? Who’s the artist?’

“One day it could be Alice Cooper, and the next it was writing with Bernie Taupin,” Lukather says. “I found myself in these amazing situations at a very, very young age. I just parlayed it, man. Ironically, it was an era to have cool guitar solos in pop songs. I got to play a lot of them… even the dumb ones!”

With that prolific studio career in mind, Steve Lukather kicked back with Guitar Player to look back on his working relationships — and sometimes friendships — with Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, George Benson and Eddie Van Halen.

Ringo Starr

“He’s an inspiration. I love that man so much. He’s become such a dear friend. Who would have known? If you’d told me when I was a kid, ‘Oh, yeah, when you’re, like, 69 years old, man, Ringo’s gonna be one of your best friends,’ I would have lost my shit.

“I had the great honor of working with Paul [McCartney] several times, and I became great friends with my first guitar hero, George Harrison, where we hung out and played together. So when I heard that Greg Bissonette recommended me to Ringo, saying I’d be perfect for his band, I was excited.

"He recommended me not only because I can play everybody else’s stuff, but because I’m a team player. I’ll play lead, rhythm, and I’ll even jump on bass. But it’s so much fun, and Ringo treats us so well. He just loves to be one of the guys, and man, it never gets old to turn around and look at Ringo Starr playing drums. It’s like, ‘Just pinch me now, man! Please don’t fucking let this dream end.’

“But the band is like a little family. We really do love and respect each other, and Ringo is the ultimate boss. He’s got wisdom, humor, and he’s as fast and funny as he was in A Hard Day’s Night. Plus, he still plays great! I mean, all those Beatles records had no click tracks, and all those creative, inventive parts were all Ringo, man. He’s so important to the percussion within the family of rock and roll. But he’s just fun to be around, is brilliant, and is just infectious. He still does this for fun because he loves music.”

Joni Mitchell

“I’ve always been a fan of Joni Mitchell ever since I had a girlfriend in high school who was obsessed with her music during the Blue period. And then, when Court and Spark came out, I was starting to get really interested in studio players, like Larry Carlton, because of the creativity.

“So when I got to work with Joni [on 1982’s Wild Things Run Fast and 1985’s Dog Eat Dog], I was really excited to get the call. But I was like, ‘Wow… what am I going to bring to this, man?’

“I walked into the studio, and she was sitting at the piano, playing the song that we were going to cut that day. She was going through it on her own, and singing, and man… it’s hard when you’re in a room with greatness like that. It’s hard not to be affected by it in a visceral way.

“It was so naturally wonderful and beautiful, and I could immediately hear a part in my head because that’s the job. You have to have a ranger’s ears and be able to listen to somebody play a song and hear the parts that you can add to make it something. But you don’t want to get in the way, you want to enhance the hooky part on the arpeggio or add to what she’s already got going on.

“So we started working on the tune, and it was beautiful. I had a nice little lick I came up with that she really liked, and that set the tone for it. And believe it or not, she wanted to rock and roll it up a little bit. [laughs] It was the early ‘80s, and all that shit was happening. I kind of laughed at first, but it took her out of her normal place, which some of her hardcore fans didn’t dig. And of course, I take all the shit for it. [laughs] But that was a fun record to do. She was so nice and fabulous.”

Michael Jackson/Quincy Jones

“I got the call from Quincy for ‘Beat It,’ and when I got to my parts, I initially cranked the riff out on a bunch of quadrupled Marshalls. But then Quincy called and said, ‘It’s great… but it’s too much. I gotta get this on R&B radio. Use a little Fender amp and turn down the distortion.’ That’s what you hear when the riff comes in.

“And then when I heard Michael sing, ‘Your butt is mine,’ I was just a smartass 20-something-year-old kid, and I laughed. But Quincy goes, ‘Stop it, bro. This is gonna be a big record. I’m telling you.’ I went, ‘Yeah, right!’ But it was—and still is—massive.

“But with Michael, there was nothing weird at all. He was my age, he laughed at my shit, and he thought I was amusing. He was a real pro, though what did make me laugh was his monkey, Bubbles, ripped apart the vocal booth. [laughs] That was the weirdest thing I saw. It made me laugh on the floor, of course.

“Michael was funny, man. His body language told you if he liked a part or not. He’d start dancing, and it would just be me, Quincy, and Michael, and I’d start playing something, and Michael would say, ‘What about this? You should change it to this because you don’t want that going over and over.’

“He was very collaborative. He wanted my input. And Quincy welcomed that, but he didn’t write my parts. With songs like ‘Human Nature,’ Quincy would go, ‘Make it funky for me, man. I gotta get this on R&B radio.’ I came up with that part on the spot, and that’s what ended up on the radio.

“So Michael was a pro. And Quincy was a great casting director, who had a great ear for songs and got the right guys on the right songs.”

George Benson

“I love George Benson. I was into the CTI-era records, which I grew up listening to when I was like 12 years old. [CTI was a legendary jazz record label founded by Creed Taylor in 1967.] I used to listen to all that shit when I was in junior high and early high school because I was getting into jazz, started studying music, and really learning how to learn and read music, and about harmony theory.

"I got deep into it, and I was into George. And then, when I heard him sing, I lost my shit. I go, ‘This guy sings like fucking Stevie Wonder! Are you kidding me? Where’s he been hiding that?’

“So, later on, Jay Graydon, one of my best friends and a big mentor to me, was producing George. He goes, ‘Lukey, come on over. I’m working on George’s greatest-hits album and I need a single. What do you got for me?’

“I had the opening piano riff for ‘Turn Your Love Around,’ and I brought that over to Jay’s house. And then, over a copious amount of alcohol and whatever… we wrote the song in about 20 minutes. And then, George heard it, loved it, and by the grace of God, it was a big, huge hit record. We won a Grammy for it, and that was my first. And then, I wrote three or four other songs for George.”

Eddie Van Halen

“Eddie was good to me, man. We were very encouraging to each other. But here’s the funny thing: our music hangs were not many, but our friends’ hangs were deep. We talked about our families, and everything, you know? But early on, I remember I was doing the solo to [Toto’s] ‘Girl Goodbye,’ and someone walked in with the Van Halen album.

“I was sitting there doing a few takes and shit, and then someone said, ‘Stop everything. I want you to hear something.’ He dropped the needle on ‘Eruption,’ and I’d never heard anything like that. I was like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was jaw-dropping, obviously. The first time I heard that, I was 19 years old, while working on that record, and I fell off my chair.

“I said, ‘Well, there’s really no point in continuing on anymore…’ [laughs] I was like, ‘What was that? How do you do that? Who makes that noise? I must be friends with him now.’ That’s really what I thought… and that’s kind of what happened. I met Eddie at the California World Music Festival in ’78, we got to know each other and started hanging out a lot around 1980.

“And then, we became really, really close friends. We lived near each other and had a lot in common in terms of our views on life, music, and family. And even though we didn’t play anything like each other, Ed and I were always so supportive of what each other was doing. Ed was always supportive of what I was doing and what my band was doing.

“He’d always show up at the gigs, and Ed and I would play each other’s stuff whenever we had new stuff. I remember hearing the demo for ‘Jump’ in 1983. I said to Ed, ‘There’s your number one record, Ed. Jeez.’ And when he started with Music Man, I was the tiebreaker for which pickup he liked best. He went with mine, so that was cool.”

Jason Becker looked back on his 1996 meeting with Eddie Van Halen, and listed some of the things the late guitarist had done for him.

Becker was at the start of a promising career when he was diagnosed with wasting illness ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) around 1989, aged just 20. It quickly became impossible for him to perform live and he had to leave David Lee Roth’s band, although he’s continued making music ever since.

Asked by Ultimate Guitar about the time Van Halen first came to meet him, Becker replied: “It was very bittersweet. I couldn’t really talk. My voice was so weak, and it took so much energy. [Partner] Serrana and my parents were the only ones who could barely understand me. I hadn’t started using the communication system my dad invented yet, so I didn’t say much.”

He continued: “Eddie brought me a guitar, but he went in another room with my mom and cried, and told her he felt stupid bringing it because I couldn’t play. He was very affectionate, hugging and kissing my head. He really wished David Lee Roth had come too, and had stayed in touch with me.“

The pair made a public service announcement for a health telethon run by the Muscular Dystrophy Association. At the time, Becker was struggling to breathe in a sitting position, so he had to push his lower jaw out to create an airway. Despite that, he noted, “The MDA had asked him to do a satellite thing from LA, but he wouldn't do it unless he could come meet me in person.”

Becker was still making music, albeit much more slowly, and in 1996 released second album Perspective. “He really loved it," he said of Van Halen. “He said he did music like that, but Warner Bros. didn’t want to put it out… He made Warner release Perspective and got them to give a really nice advance, which was sorely needed. He also gave my family money privately.”

He added: “ALS takes a huge toll on everyone; Eddie understood that instinctively, as does the whole guitar community and fans through the years. I wish he was here to see the non-profit Serrana and I co-founded. He would be proud, and probably involved. Through generosity from fans and others, we’ve been able to give significant financial assistance to 15 people with ALS, so far, helping them remain cared for at home, as I have been.”

Meanwhile, Alex Van Halen announced a limited-edition book titled simply Van Halen. It comes packaged with a 7-inch vinyl disc containing Glitter, a previously-unreleased demo from 1974 (although it’s been bootlegged over the years). Only the signed Collector edition remains available for pre-order, complete with clamshell case and souvenir keyring and picks.

Dave Mustaine looked back on a period of Megadeth history in which he said too many mistakes were made – leaving him feeling “queazy“ about the album they’d made.

Risk, released in 1999, was their eighth record, but it was recorded during a difficult time. Drummer Nick Menza had left and Marty Friedman was ready to go too. On top of that, Mustaine felt his position as band leader was being questioned. But he suggested there was a relatively easy way to repair the record – record a faster version.

“The band was about as fragmented as we could be,” he told Ultimate Guitar. “Marty didn’t want to be in the band anymore, we had a manager named Bud Prager…and the drummer we had at the time was Jimmy DeGrasso.”

He added: “The music on that record would have been great if it was a Dave Mustaine solo record. But I think because it said ‘Megadeth,’ people expected something a little bit faster.”

He explained why the songs had been produced at a slower pace: “The beats per minute thing popped up again. That happened during Youthanasia. Max Norman produced that record; he’d said that the secret to singles is 120 beats per minute. And after I worked with Max, I hadn’t heard that again until when we did Risk. If it didn’t say ‘Megadeth’ and said ‘Dave Mustaine,’ it would be fine as a solo record… It makes me queasy when I think about that period.”

He cited another element of the album he didn’t like: the song Crush ‘Em. “I had said that I didn’t want to do that. And Bud Prager kept insisting. He did have the credentials when he said, ‘Look, we had a number one single with Trust on the last record. You had five radio singles.’ And when someone says that, and they can back it up with the proof, you kind of want to listen to them. Because they did make things happen for us.”

But he’d come to realise that thinking had been wrong. “The other thing that was not taken into account was – we’re not a singles band. We’re a band that makes thrash metal. And like, with the [current] album, the reason it was number one is because it was approached as a thrash metal band."

With Megadeth approaching the end of their career, it’s unlikely Risk will be revisited. And maybe Mustaine doesn’t mind. “There were just, I think, too many mistakes going on in that period,” he reflected, “because there was so much fragmentation. It was being pulled in different directions. My leadership was being questioned all the time.”

Bruce Springsteen has confirmed that he used to sweat so much during concerts that it would short-circuit his favourite Telecaster, and explained how the issue was resolved.

The Boss is one of a number of big-name Tele fans who’ve been discussing their relationship with the guitar to mark its 75th anniversary.

In Fender’s official video he showed off the instrument he’s had since 1972, happily describing it as a “mutt.” He said: “When I signed my first record contract, I was going to get to buy a new guitar, and I knew I wanted a Telecaster.”

Constructed out of a 1950s Tele body and an Esquire neck – as seen on the cover of 1975 album Born to Run – and costing him $185 (around $1,480 today), he had a preamp added because his cable was so long that it caused signal dropout.

He continued: “I had to insulate the entire inside of the guitar with rubber, because I was sweating so much that, halfway through the show, the guitar would short out. I’d lose all my highs and it would just sound like crap – and it was in the days when I was only using one guitar for the entire show.

“And so they insulated the entire guitar with rubber, so that when water came pouring down it continued to play.”

Illustrating his passion for the Tele, he recalled being mistakenly asked by the LA Times to write an appreciation of the Fender Strat. “I wrote this whole note back, going: ‘No! It’s a Telecaster… The Telecaster is a different animal!”

He added: “When I have this guitar on, I don’t feel like I have a guitar on … I feel like it’s some extension of your physical self. I may take it in the coffin with me if I go!”

In the early 1990s, Metallica were arguably one of the biggest bands on the planet, selling out stadiums worldwide with ease. But despite their packed schedule, two members were plotting a very different kind of side project.

Plans were mooted in 1992, at a time when Metallica and Guns N’ Roses had embarked on a massive co-headline tour – and one that nearly deafened Jeff Beck. Jason Newsted, the band’s then-bass player, says he and Kirk Hammett wanted to start a blues band.

The revelation comes from a newly unearthed interview the pair gave to Raw Power that year and republished by Sunset Vinyl. At that point, Newsted had been in the band for six years, having been sworn in to replace the late Cliff Burton. Yet the bassist says it took them that long to really hit it off and the blues was a shared passion.

“We’ve been jamming,” Hammett said, with Newsted then taking over, adding: “We’d watch one song from Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan and do our version of it.

"Everybody's taking in different influences, different than what people would expect us to be doing. Kirk and I have really been starting to indulge heavily in the blues. I listen to a lot of older folk blues and stuff and Kirk's really got turned on Robert Johnson and those kind of things."

While it was typically Newsted handling vocals – he served as backing vocalist in the band – Hammett said he’d get behind the mic “depending on how many beers I’ve had.” It was, he explains, their “after-hours indulgence.”

The proposed project band even had a HQ in mind.

“I’m building a studio in my house; it’s almost done,” Newsted revealed. “A full 24-track digital. We’ve already asked a lot of people to come and play, people that we talked about earlier, Andreas [Kisser, Sepultura] and Greg Hall from Sacred Reich, and horn players and different things. I’m going to put all kinds of stuff together. So, I can say yes, there are plans to do some other music for sure.”

“Yeah, we’re going to form a blues band,” Hammett returned. “[We want to] have a bunch of guest appearances by other musicians, and just see how it goes.”

“I’m fired up,” Newsted went on. “There’s one guy at home that I’ve been writing blues songs [with]; we’ve already got quite a few songs put together. So, when the time comes about a year from now or whatever, it’ll happen.”

But not even the best-laid plans come to fruition, with Metallica’s relentless touring schedule the likely culprit.

One name on their potential feature list was John Campbell, who was causing a stir in the New York scene. He’s one of the cool guys like [Eric] Clapton,” Newsted had purred. “He’s one of the few Mississippi Delta-style players around nowadays.”

Campbell, however, left the world all too soon, dying of a heart attack in 1993.

Hammett’s love of the blues runs deeper than his metal-minded day job suggests, and he even delivered a ‘How to play like Stevie Ray Vaughan’ Guitar World lesson in 2019.

“Ironically, I was never really into Stevie while he was alive,” he confessed at the top of his lesson. “Then, shortly after he died, I got hold of a video of him playing a live show and was just totally blown away by his timing, his tone, his feel, his vibrato, his phrasing - everything. Some people are just born to play guitar, and Stevie was definitely one of them.”

Hammett’s ownership of Peter Green’s infamous Greeny Les Paul is another sign of the guitarist’s appreciation for blues greats, so perhaps there’s time for a bluesy Metallica album yet.

The ever-outspoken Gene Simmons has opened up about Ace Frehley’s on-and-off relationship with Kiss, including a striking anecdote about his struggles with the pace of life in the band.

In his typically entertaining fashion, the bass player once recalled how he was ready to throw fists during Frehley’s audition for the band in 1973, only for his playing to change everything. Together, they produced 11 albums, as Kiss battled their way to superstardom, and cemented their place as one of America’s biggest bands.

But Frehley’s time in the band was disjointed, leaving the group twice, in 1982 and 2002. His last show was at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, with his omission from the band’s grand Madison Square Garden farewell in 2022 a sore point for the guitarist.

Simmons, who came under fire for controversial comments following his passing last November, has now suggested Frehley didn’t have it in him to go the distance with the glam rockers.

“It’s so hard for the fans. It’s heartbreaking,” he tells The Moynihan Report. “Ace had a massive influence on guitar players — Dimebag Darrell, Mike McCready, Metallica, just everybody across the line.

“But not everybody’s designed in their DNA to run a marathon,” he adds. “Some people just have a short race.”

Another player who idolized Frehley was Eddie Van Halen, and the premier shredder was reportedly eager to fill his platformed boots following his first exit. Ace had grown frustrated with the band’s change in direction, and played only a small role in the creation of Music from “The Elder” in ‘81.

“Ace told me to my face when he was leaving the band, ‘I’m gonna have a solo career ‘cause if I go out on tour again, I’m gonna kill myself,’” Simmons develops. “The psychological pressures affect different people in different ways.

“I have no problem with anything,” he says. “I’m voraciously ambitious and love the attention, money, and fame. But it doesn’t affect everybody the same way.”

Frehley’s solo career got off to a flying start. All four members of the band – completed by co-guitarist Paul Stanley and drummer Peter Criss – issued eponymous solo records in 1978. Sandwiched between the releases of Love Gun (1977) and Dynasty (1979), Frehley’s album outsold his bandmates, creating parallels with George Harrison’s first post-Beatles record, All Things Must Pass.

But as he did in November, Simmons was eager to highlight Frehley’s substance abuse problems and his struggles with life in Kiss.

“I’m not a shrink, but I think it starts with who you are in your own skin,” he believes. “Regular people every day drink themselves until they’re numb and can’t even walk, and use drugs and become drug addicts, even when nobody’s watching, just because they’re not comfortable in their own skin.

“Ace and Peter handled it for a few years, and then they were in and out of the band three different times. And it breaks the heart of fans…”

In April, Simmons opened up about the future of Kiss, with avatar shows and being bigger than Mickey Mouse as topics of conversation. Guitarist Tommy Thayer, who replaced Frehley in 2002, has now confirmed that new music is very much happening.

Speaking to Guitar World, he says he has recorded “a great new song that Paul wrote,” while detailing the band’s grandiose next steps.

“Kiss has always believed in making things an event,” he details. “So whatever new music comes, it has to feel special and have a reason for existing. You don’t make another Kiss record just because you’re supposed to make another Kiss record.”

It feels like Sammy Hagar has been in the mood for rebuilding bridges in recent months, and so he’s refused to bite back after Alex Van Halen called him a “complete idiot”.

The Red Rocker, who fronted Van Halen for four albums, has replied to his former bandmate’s comments, but sought to douse, rather than fan, the flames amid their latest dispute.

Speaking in an interview with Brazil’s Roadie Crew magazine, Alex Van Halen gave a scathing review of Hagar’s 2011 autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock. The catch is, he hasn’t even read it.

“I don’t know what he wrote,” he confessed. “And I don’t want to know. In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

Read it or not, the book did cause a stir upon its release, given that Hagar had given a frank and rather unsettling account of Eddie Van Halen’s alcohol issues and interpersonal friction within the band. The book’s tell-all nature even led one woman to file a defamation lawsuit against him, claiming his words broke a legal agreement dating back to the 1980s.

Naturally, the story flooded news feeds. It didn’t take long for the drummer’s comments to reach a man he played alongside for 13 years, across two spells, but Hagar has remained level-headed. He soon weighed in on the story, commenting on an Instagram post from Rock Celebrities.

“This comment and post are so unnecessary at this time in our lives,” he wrote. “But I guess the truth hurts sometimes. Peace already.”

Hagar has been shut out of all things Van Halen since his second tenure ended in 2005. In 2022, he blamed Alex for stopping a tribute tour for the late Eddie Van Halen– although the drummer has since turned the blame on David Lee Roth.

That prompted him to form his own tribute tour, the Best of All Worlds, with longtime bass player Michael Anthony and Joe Satriani, whom DLR actually tried to poach for his own Van Halen tribute band in the ‘90s.

Notably, neither Hagar nor David Lee Roth is playing a part in the final Van Halen record that Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather are working on together.

Usually, bitterness shared between Hagar and Alex Van Halen isn’t all that surprising, but both seem to have been burying the hatchet of late. Hagar made a heartfelt post following David Lee Roth’s sudden tour cancellation in July, and Alex shocked everyone by appearing on a TED Talk with Roth that same month. It had been 11 years since they last shared a stage.

Them again, Alex recently said the band did their best work with Roth at the helm, so it’s clear not every hatchet is on his ‘to bury’ list.

Lukather, meanwhile, can’t believe the unreleased Van Halen songs he’s currently working on haven’t seen the light of day sooner, given their quality. He’s also assured fans that the record is far from a throwaway cash grab. Steve Vai, in turn, has vouched for the reams of genius that decorate the late virtuoso’s archive.

Kim Thayil offered an intriguing description of Soundgarden’s upcoming album, which features material written and recorded by Chris Cornell before his death in 2017. And with no release date yet confirmed, it’s likely to arrive a decade after the tragedy.

Personal disputes got in the way of early plans to complete the work, but after they were resolved the band rolled into action and the end is in sight. Guitarist Thayil was heavily involved in the process, which he said were unlike his previous studio experiences.

“It was very different,” he told KOMO News. “You don’t start at one point with song ideas and demos and record the drums and build it. We had to work in a different direction. The songs were by and large done, but the recordings and the performances weren’t, except for what we had with the vocals and some drums.”

He continued: “It was very forensic in nature. And, again, spending a lot of time in the studio listening to the material… presented a lot of enthusiasm, an opportunity for us – but it's also a little bit difficult. You’re constantly balancing the duty towards the material and towards a beloved friend’s work. and our work together. So it was very unusual.”

Asked what fans should expect from what will be Soundgarden’s seventh album, following 2012’s King Animal, Thayil said: “There are quirky elements. It’s very introspective. I mean, all of our work has been somewhat that way, but this is a little bit more so. And if you can imagine a lullaby paired with psychedelia, that's kind of what's going on there.”

He said he couldn’t choose a favourite song from the expected 8-to-10 track title because it was “always changing,” and added: “We’ve been working on this on and off for a few years, and I think every song has been my favorite at some point!”

He confirmed that a release date was still under discussion, partly as a result of the band’s history since Cornell’s death. “We’re dealing with the record label, trying to work out contractual understandings. And you have to think about the promotion, the production... all those processes are in motion.

“And again, it's very different. It’s been so many years, a lot of these contractual obligations expired – so we have to kind of work them out again.”

Soundgarden will play the halftime show at the Seattle Seahawks’ season-opening game against New England Patriots on September 9. They’ll be joined by old friends Taylor Momsen and Mike McCready for the set.

Former Deep Purple vocalist Joe Lynn Turner has discussed his positive feelings about Ritchie Blackmore’s brief reunion with the band.

Blackmore made a guest appearance with the current lineup in August, performing signature track Smoke on the Water – a moment current guitarist Simon McBride said he’d been proud to have a small part in.

Turner fronted Blackmore’s band Rainbow in the early ‘80s before winding up as Ian Gillan’s replacement in Purple in 1989. That ‘Mark V’ lineup only lasted two years before Gillan returned.

Turner confirmed he’d seen video of the reunion moment, telling Cassius Morris: “I really, honestly, sincerely hope that healing had happened. I honestly hope it was not a dog-and-pony show, as we say – that it wasn’t just for publicity or notoriety. I really hope that Ritchie and Ian have sort of buried the hatchet – that they’re healing, that there’s no animosity.”

He continued: “Everybody’s so much older, and time and life is short. I hope they all realize that the nonsense everybody went through back then doesn’t mean anything compared to what they did together as a unit.”

Turner said he didn’t want to critique the actual performance, saying of Blackmore: “He’s 80 years old, he’s slowing down, he’s got certain ailments and all that. That’s not the important part. I think it shows people you’ve got to let things go. You cannot carry anger and hate – it’s absolutely destructive in our lives.”

He offered a note of positivity himself: “Those guys created incredible music. They were my heroes. I sat with my guitar and learned every Blackmore lick possible. I was honored and blessed to play with them.”

Many fans view Pink Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut as effectively a Roger Waters solo outing, with the recording plagued by growing tensions within the band. Waters officially left Pink Floyd in 1985, and many assumed that would be the end of the group.

It wasn’t. Not long after Waters’ departure, David Gilmour and Nick Mason reconvened with plans for a new Pink Floyd album. They also brought keyboardist Rick Wright back into the fold after he had been unceremoniously fired by Waters during the making of The Wall.

The resulting album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, surfaced in 1987. But its release ignited a bitter feud and legal battle between Gilmour and Waters over the right to use the Pink Floyd name.

The dispute was eventually settled out of court, with Gilmour’s camp retaining the right to carry on as Pink Floyd. But what had caused the acrimony that had been simmering behind the scenes for years?

For longtime Pink Floyd roadie and tour manager Chris Adamson, it can be traced to one thing.

“What messed them up was the age-old thing — wives!” Adamson tells Guitar Player. “Before that, there was none of that thing going on. David and Roger really complemented each other. But then the wives got involved.”

Adamson — who recently shared his recollections of Floyd during the making of Meddle and The Dark Side of the Moon — believes the group’s internal dynamics began to fray once Gilmour and Waters entered new relationships following the breakdown of their first marriages.

“With all the original wives, the band and all of us used to go on holiday together, the wives, the kids, everyone,” he says.

That changed in the late 1970s. Waters had been married Judith Trim, but their marriage ended in 1975. While on tour in America, the bass guitarist met Carolyne Christie, who worked for EG, the management company whose roster included Roxy Music, King Crimson, T. Rex and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, among other artists.

“They ended up living together and then getting married and having two kids together and everything. But she was incredibly strong — demanding, whatever. She basically said to Roger one day, ‘What the hell do you need those other guys for?’

“And that’s when the rot set in. That started the split.”

Adamson’s recounting is given further weight in Mark Blake’s 2008 biography of Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. “Carolyne was landed gentry, and had all the attitudes associated with her class, and she seemed to have this huge effect on Waters,” Blake writes, noting that “he seemed to change completely.”

Adamson says a similar scenario played out in Gilmour’s personal life in the early 1990s. He had been married to artist and former model Virginia “Ginger” Hasenbein since 1975, but they divorced in 1990. He soon began dating English novelist and journalist Polly Samson, whom he married in 1994.

“By this time the split had happened in the band,” Adamson says, “but she pushed any chance for a reunion right out the door when she said to Dave, ‘What the hell do you need them for?’”

The Wall co-producer Bob Ezrin told Blake that Samson’s presence in the band further fueled the internal tensions.

“It wasn’t easy at first,” he said. “It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have the new woman coming in and then get involved in the career.”

Even Gilmour acknowledged in a Mojo interview that “Polly has a tendency to ruffle everyone’s feathers. I’m not aware of her having ruffled Nick or Rick’s feathers, but she certainly ruffled the management’s.”

Years later, Adamson was working with John Mayer at London’s Royal Albert Hall when he decided to approach Gilmour in the hope of mending the rift between him and Waters.

“I really did think I could get the band back together. I was at the bar with Dave and he introduced me to his new wife. She was all very friendly until she found out I was from the past. Then suddenly the long knives came out.

“I remember standing at a bar with Dave and asking him, ‘Is there any chance of you and Roger getting together?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Not a fuckin’ chance now.’”

Adamson believes the death of Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright in 2008 severed the remaining thread keeping the group’s former members united. The four musicians last shared a stage in 2005, when Pink Floyd reunited for Live 8.

Gilmour’s most recent public performance with Waters was in 2011, when he made a surprise appearance at Waters’ The Wall Live tour to perform his iconic guitar solos on “Comfortably Numb.”

In the years since, Gilmour and Waters have moved even further apart. In 2023, Samson publicly attacked Waters over his political views in a tweet in which she called him “anti-Semitic” and a “Putin apologist,” among a long list of other accusations.

Gilmour subsequently responded: “Every word demonstrably true.” Significantly, he insists Pink Floyd will not regroup.

So while Adamson believes time can heal old wounds, he thinks Pink Floyd’s rift has gone too far to repair.

“Getting the band together is never going to happen,” he says. “When Rick passed away, things continued to drift apart. And unfortunately that situation is how it is today.”

Keith Richards has named the guitarist who turned him on to Fender guitars, prompting his early-career move from Gibson instruments. As the Rolling Stones rose to fame in the 1960s, he was mainly seen with a ’59 Les Paul Standard and a Hummingbird acoustic – although he played a Telecaster on occasion.

But around 1970 his change of allegiance was cemented when Eric Clapton gave him a 1950s Tele, and Richards never looked back. In a recent interview marking the guitar’s 75th anniversary, he remembered how the change came about.

“For a lot of the ’60s, my main work was with Gibsons,” Richards said. “I wanted that bottom full end. Really, I got into the Fender, especially the Telecaster, when I was hanging around with Ry Cooder for a while. We were playing around with tunings. He was showing me this five-string open tuning on G.”

He continued: “I just got interested in it, and I found [it was] the only guitar that could really sustain the chords and give you a beautiful, I don’t know – There’s no words for it. Every note is in place. And then I started to really discover what Leo [Fender] had invented. This is where I feel at home.”

He went on to say that his choice of guitar was partly down to the people he performs with. “The Stones is a two-guitar band – you try and match your guitar to what the other guy’s playing, you know? It was Brian Jones for most of the ’60s. He loved to say, ‘You play that, and in that case I’ll play this.’”

Richards – who once revealed the Stones colleague he’d found most difficult to lock in with – reflected: “I mean it’s a piece of wood with some electronics on it. But these things can take on a soul of their own. You get affectionate about these things.”

Twenty-three years ago today, Warren Zevon died of mesothelioma at the age of 56. More than two decades later, one of the most poignant reminders of his legacy came when David Letterman brought Zevon’s guitar to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

On November 8, 2025, Letterman inducted his friend into the Hall at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Beside him was an all-grey Modulus Blackknife electric guitar — the instrument Zevon had played every time he appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman, and which he had given to Letterman shortly before his death.

“It was the last time I saw Warren — that was 22 years ago,” Letterman told the audience.

Zevon’s final appearance on The Late Show took place September 30, 2002, less than a year before his death. But what happened backstage that night, away from the cameras and audience, was far more personal.

“He’s got the guitar there that he’s used every time he’s appeared on our show,” Letterman recalled. “And as we’re chatting… he picks up the guitar and he puts it in the guitar case, closes the guitar case, he hands it to me and he says, ‘Take care of this for me.’”

Letterman says the gesture brought him to tears.

“Warren and I hugged,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘Warren, I just love your music.’”

Letterman did as Zevon, saving its return to the stage for a momentous occasion.

“This is the guitar,” Letterman said at Zevon’s induction, gesturing toward the instrument beside him, “and tonight, by God, it’s going back to work.”

He handed the guitar to the Killers’ Dave Keuning, and the band launched into Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” They were joined by guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who had worked with Zevon on seven consecutive studio albums. It was a fitting tribute to an artist whose career was defined by his singular combination of literate songwriting, dark humor and hard-edged rock and roll.

Zevon had graduated from session musician and jingle composer to celebrated solo artist. His early session work included appearances with the Turtles and the Everly Brothers, as well as guitarist David Lindley. Wachtel, meanwhile, was a crucial collaborator throughout Zevon’s career, and also drafted him to play keyboards on the Everly Brothers’ 1972 album Stories We Could Tell and its subsequent tour dates.

Zevon’s greatest commercial success came with 1978’s Excitable Boy, which Wachtel co-produced with Jackson Browne. The album produced his signature song, “Werewolves of London,” featuring Fleetwood Mac bass guitarist John McVie.

According to Zevon biographer James Campion, even that song nearly slipped through the cracks.

“Werewolves of London” was fleshed out during a booze-filled jam session, Campion recalled, but Zevon had consumed enough that he forgot the whole thing the following day.

“The next day, he forgot the whole thing,” Campion said. “He comes in the studio and Jackson's in there at the board, and Waddy says, ‘Play that song — that thing you played last night.’ ‘What song?’ ‘Y’know, the ‘Werewolf’ song.’ Warren’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

“He forgot!”

Zevon’s final Late Show appearance, meanwhile, produced another moment that has become inseparable from his legacy. Letterman asked him if he had learned anything about life and death over the course of his lifetime. Zevon’s answer was characteristically concise: “How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

Alex Van Halen has reignited his long-running feud with Sammy Hagar, calling his former Van Halen bandmate a “complete idiot” while dismissing Hagar’s 2011 autobiography, Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock.

The latest round of insults comes via an interview with Brazil’s Roadie Crew magazine. The recently knighted drummer was asked to offer his thoughts about the autobiographies written by Van Halen’s two classic-era frontmen: David Lee Roth’s Crazy From the Heart and Hagar’s Red.

His assessment of Roth’s book was largely positive, describing it as “quite entertaining” and saying it “faithfully reflects [Roth’s] sense of humor.”

“While the text is somewhat abstract and occasionally loses the thread, it remains a very interesting perspective on that era,” Alex added.

He was far less charitable when it came to Hagar, whose book chronicled some of Eddie Van Halen’s struggles with alcoholism and included other unflattering accounts of the guitarist. Alex dismissed the book out of hand.

“I don't know what he wrote, and I don't want to know,” the drummer said. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.”

Alex’s latest comment is just the latest volley in a war of words that has gone on for years. In 2024, he disparaged Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, which featured former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony alongside Hagar, guitarist Joe Satriani and drummer Jason Bonham, saying the lineup wasn’t “doing the band justice.”

Hagar had reportedly invited Alex to join the tour in an attempt to put their differences aside. When the drummer didn’t respond, Hagar grew increasingly frustrated.

“Al, you’re fine. Just leave me alone. I’ll leave you alone. Everything’s good,” Hagar told Rolling Stone in 2025. “I’m making you money, by the way, Al. I’m out there selling Van Halen records and keeping the name alive, keeping the music alive.”

In the same interview, Hagar suggested that Alex was “angry” because “he seems like he doesn’t want to play drums or can’t play drums anymore.”

Hagar later criticized Alex’s 2024 autobiography, Brothers, in which the drummer largely ignored Hagar’s years in Van Halen, calling the omission “blasphemy.” The singer took another shot at Alex last March, comparing their relationship to the famously fractured partnership between Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters.

“I’m the biggest Pink Floyd fan,” Hagar told Classic Rock. “I see David Gilmour say, ‘I will never play with Roger Waters again,’ and I know what he means. I feel that way about Alex Van Halen. They’re negative people.”

Hagar also explained why he remains enthusiastic about the Best of All Worlds project, arguing that the lineup offers the closest thing fans can get to the Van Halen experience today.

“Because frickin’ Mike Anthony’s in the band, I feel good about playing a lot of Van Halen stuff, ’cause no one will ever hear it again,” he said. “That was the biggest part of my career — everybody’s career, for God’s sake. It was the biggest band in the world.”

Notably, Alex recently spoke glowingly of Roth, calling the former Van Halen singer “a poet” and saying, “We did our best work with Dave.” His contrasting views of Van Halen’s two classic-era frontmen underscore just how little the decades-old feud with Hagar has faded.

By the summer of 1969, John Fogerty had taken Creedence Clearwater Revival from obscurity to the upper reaches of the charts. “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River” had all been number two hits. But they were punctuated by singles that failed to make much of a dent: “I Put a Spell on You,” “Lodi” and “Commotion.”

“I said, well, basically I’m now a one-hit wonder,” the guitarist toldRick Beato. “And I also realized It took us so long to get here; now you only get five minutes to do the next step because the spotlight will move on to Led Zeppelin or somebody.  It’ll just be over for you if you don’t come up with it now.'"

Fogerty was afraid everything he built was going to be lost if the band didn’t have another hit, and fast. Which is one reason why CCR released a total of three albums in 1969: Fogerty was on fire, writing new songs at every turn.

“Fogerty told us that if we were ever off the charts, then we would be forgotten,” drummer Doug Clifford told Goldmine in 2013. “To make it worse, it might sound funny, but we had double-sided hits, and that was kind of a curse, as we were burning through material twice as fast. If we'd spread it out, we would not have had to put out three albums in one year.”

The guitarist was taking inspiration from everywhere, and in 1969 it was impossible to not be affected by the Vietnam War. It was a catalyst behind the decade's counterculture revolution. Anti-war sentiment was a rallying cry for the rock and roll generation when they gathered that August in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival, where CCR had made a late-night stand.

When Fogerty looked at the news, he saw all the young men wounded and dying in the conflict. But he also saw how advantage was keeping many of the country’s politically privileged men from going to fight and die in a war their own fathers insisted was necessary.

He was enraged. And he put it all in one song: “Fortunate Son,” from the group’s third album of 1969, Willy and the Poor Boys.

But unlike other songs he labored over, Fogerty says “Fortunate Son” came out in a blast.

“’Fortunate Son’ was the shortest song I ever wrote — about 20 minutes,” he tells Beato. “This is 1969. All the political and cultural stuff, is just brewing in my mind.”

Fogerty had the music together and “a vague idea” of the subject matter. He took it and nothing else — not even an acoustic guitar — into a room to do some writing.

“But I literally went into the bedroom with a little tablet and a pen, thinking the song was going to be called ‘Favorite Son.’” It’s a phrase used by state delegates when nominating a presidential candidate.

Aside from that, however, Fogerty says, “I had no lines of the song at all.

“And suddenly I’m sitting there, and I [thought], ‘Some folks are born, made to wave…’ Oh, that's pretty good!

“And somewhere, ‘Favorite Son’ flipped into ‘Fortunate Son.’”

As for Fogerty’s fears of slipping down the charts and becoming obsolete, he didn’t have to worry. “Fortunate Son” was released as a double A-side single with “Down on the Corner,” the lead track from Willy and the Poor Boys. Both songs reached number three on the charts, and helped keep CCR’s fortunes alive.

Fogerty has spent much of his post-CCR days fighting to reclaim the rights to the material with which he made his name. His new album is a celebration of that battle ending after 50 tireless years. The pain of the band's demise also saw him give away his prized Rickenbacker 325.

“I was hurt. I was damaged. I gave it away to end that chapter of my life,” he said of his decision to leave it behind. Yet, miraculously, it wound up back in his hands, perhaps standing as a precursor for what was about to follow.”

Thin Lizzy should have been everything Irish guitarist Eric Bell had ever wanted. At first, it was. But by 1973, his dream gig had become unsustainable.

“At the start, it was fabulous,” Bell tells Guitar Player. “It was my dream, come true. We formed Thin Lizzy, and it was fabulous.”

The band’s early years were a blur of hash, Guinness and, eventually, harder drugs. Bell says the musicians were permanently stoned, but that didn’t stop them from having a great time making their first three albums: 1971’s Thin Lizzy, 1972’s Shades of a Blue Orphanage and 1973’s Vagabonds of the Western World. The latter featured Bell’s best-known recording with the band, their version of “Whiskey in the Jar.”

“It was great,” says Bell, who last year released Acoustic Sessions, an album that re-imagines songs from the group’s first there albums — including “Whisky in the Jar” — in acoustic guitar arrangements.

But Bell’s relationship with drugs and alcohol was changing. He was drinking more, smoking increasingly strong marijuana and watching his social and family life fall apart. Living alone in a grungy attic in London, he reached a point where he could no longer separate performing from getting high.

Before one show, he found himself sober and unable to settle. A crowd was waiting outside, but there were no drugs available. Bell picked up his guitar and immediately felt that something was wrong.

“And it felt horrible.”

A joint eventually appeared, and Bell says the transformation was immediate.

“All of a sudden, I’m Eric Clapton,” he says, laughing.

The moment also forced him to confront how dependent he had become. “Eric, you’ve got a problem here, man,” he remembers thinking. “You can’t play when you’re straight.”

Thin Lizzy’s relentless touring schedule left little room for Bell to deal with the problem. He says he needed a few weeks away from the road, but management refused. After shows, he would tell himself to have one drink, pack up and go to bed. Instead, the whiskey and dope would come out, and the cycle would begin again.

“I couldn’t stop. And it got worse and worse.”

The breaking point came on New Year’s Eve 1973, when Thin Lizzy played Queen’s University in Belfast.

Bell arrived early and found a table in the dressing room stocked with bottles of alcohol. He tried to keep himself under control, but by the time he strapped on his Stratocaster and walked onstage, he was completely intoxicated.

“I didn’t know where I was,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I surely should have cancelled the gig.”

Instead, the band played. Bell lasted three songs.

Throughout the performance, he says, a voice in his head was telling him to leave. He knew he needed professional help and knew he could not continue, but he was too far gone to act on either realization.

Eventually, he threw his guitar into the air and kicked his amplifiers offstage before staggering away and collapsing.

A roadie ordered him back onstage. Bell was hauled to his feet and placed back onstage. Someone handed him his guitar, but no one thought to retune it.

“The guitar was completely out of tune," Bell recalls. “I must have sounded like Ravi Shankar on acid. It had to be fucking awful.”

The following day, Thin Lizzy’s management called from London, demanding to know what had happened. Bell replied that he’d quit. The band was halfway through its Irish tour. Though they tried to persuade him to stay, Bell insisted he was finished.

“They realized I wasn’t going to do it, and said, ‘Is that your last word?’ I said, ‘Yeah…’

“And they said, ‘Right — we’re getting Gary Moore to finish the tour,’ and slammed the phone down.”

Just like that, Eric Bell’s dream gig was over.

In retrospect, Bell believes the disastrous final show may have saved his life.

“I just kind of whittled about, wondering what to do with myself,” he says. “But yeah, I’d say that what happened probably saved my life.”

Bell rebounded and landed a gig with the equally hard-drinking Noel Redding later in the 1970s. He never rejoined Thin Lizzy, although he reunited with Phil Lynott in the studio for the Jimi Hendrix tribute “Song for Jimmy.” Bell says most of his playing did not make the final recording.

Thin Lizzy briefly continued with Gary Moore before replacing him with Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, whose twin-guitar harmonies would become central to the band’s sound on songs such as “Jailbreak” and “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

Bell still owns the Stratocaster he threw that night in Belfast. He has had a long time to consider what happened — and what it took to get back to playing without drugs and alcohol.

“I didn’t have the willpower to stop. I could get drunk very easily. If I had two or three whiskeys, I was anybody’s, you know?”

“And my Strat that I tossed in the air, I still have it. I think it’s finally just forgiven me. But man, it was hard. It took me forever to be able to play guitar straight again.”

Ry Cooder stands as one of the most influential and idiosyncratic guitarists in American music. He’s a restless stylist whose work has reshaped how roots traditions are understood and applied in a modern context.

Cooder emerged in the late 1960s as a prodigiously knowledgeable student of blues, folk, country and early rock and roll. Although he wasn’t widely known among the record-buying public, he was in demand as a session guitarist, which is how he came to work with the Rolling Stones in 1969. Keith Richards has long credited Cooder’s open tunings and feel for American vernacular styles as a formative influence on the Rolling Stones’ turn toward roots-based songwriting in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Beyond his impact on fellow electric and acoustic guitarists, Cooder’s own career defies easy categorization. His early solo albums reimagined traditional material with scholarly rigor and emotional immediacy, while his session work made him a first-call collaborator for artists ranging from Captain Beefheart to Randy Newman. In later decades, he expanded his scope further, becoming an acclaimed film composer and a cultural bridge-builder through projects such as Buena Vista Social Club, which helped bring Cuban music to a global audience.

As he explained to Guitar Player in an interview that ran in our November 1993 issue, his introduction to guitar came almost as an act of grace following a devastating childhood accident.

“When I was about four and a half, I had this accident where I blinded myself in one eye with a kitchen knife. I had lots of little toy cars, and I was prying loose this part from one of them. The knife slipped and went right up into me, just sliced my eye right in half. Couldn’t do anything about it. Took it out.

“So I was despondent, quite withdrawn at that point. I just didn’t know what to do. I was a sensitive little kid. It was pretty rough. It was terrible trying to adjust and make sense out of such a horrendous thing, because kids don't think bad things are really going to happen, unless they're from El Salvador or South Central Los Angeles. They grow up knowing that down there, but your average little white kid, born and raised under more or less copacetic circumstances, cannot imagine personal danger like that. So I kind of went into a tailspin.

“Well, my folks were very good friends with this classical viola player who was blacklisted, Leo Breger. My dad's a big classical music fan, and they would listen to records and talk about conductors.

“So one night I’m laying in bed while they were out in the living room. I couldn’t sleep in those days; I was scared to go to sleep. He brings this thing in — I still have it — a Sears Silvertone tenor four-string. I’m laying on my back, and he puts it down on my stomach.

“I said, ‘What's that?’ And he said, ‘This is a guitar.’ Strum. Whoa! Right into the flesh.

“Hallelujah! Thank God! That was a rare example of some kind of intervention, of getting what you really need. And it went on from there. It was a way to make myself feel good.”

Cooder’s earliest lessons consisted of casual instruction from his father.

“My dad could play D, G and C chords and sing with the tunes, so I said, ‘What do I do?’ ‘Well, you put your hands here and put your hands there.’ So it gave me a place to go in my mind.

“Music was there, but how to get into it? How do you approach Handel or Beethoven? It wasn't the kind of household where you'd take professional piano or violin lessons. There wasn't that kind of vibe, and the guitar is, after all, do-it-yourself. You can make of it what you want to, and that's the great thing about it. It can be anything and everything to all kinds of people.”

He soon found inspiration from an unexpected encounter.

“One day I was waiting for the summer camp bus in front of my house. We lived by Douglas Aircraft, up here in Santa Monica, on the poor side of town. I had my guitar. I was going to take it to camp because I didn’t care for the activities. I thought if they would leave me alone, I'd sit under the tree and play.

“And this aircraft worker in his dungarees is walking along with his lunchbox. He sees me sitting there with a guitar, and he says, ‘Hi. You play that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, kind of.’ And he goes, ‘I play a little. I’m a hillbilly.’ Whips out his flatpick, man, and wailed on it. Shit like I heard on the radio, Joe Maphis. This aircraft worker could rip and tear.

“He was somebody. I never knew his name; I never saw him again. I was too shy and too terrified to ask him who he was. I'll never forget that, though.

“When I was a kid, I was very attentive, and if I heard about somebody who was good or about a record, I'd run out. In those days, it was one-on-one, face-to-face. You could sit down with Jesse Fuller or Gary Davis or anybody.

“When I was little, I used to listen to the words on Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory on Folkways. I wore it out. And then later we got to see these folk players, and they weren't big talkers. What did anybody ever say? ‘Where's that big-legged woman at?’ is what Bukka White was always asking.

“You know, ‘When am I going to get paid?’ says Brownie McGhee. It was just the atmosphere of the people. It was so amazing, what they radiate out.”

It’s no secret that Joe Bonamassa has assembled one of the most formidable electric guitar collections in modern blues.

Over the years, the guitarist has acquired some remarkable pieces: Tommy Bolin’s Les Paul, Lowell George’s once-lost Dumble Super Overdrive, a “museum-grade” Martin acoustic and a small army of vintage Gibson Les Paul ’Bursts.

But when it comes to the purchase that means the most to him, Bonamassa doesn’t hesitate.

Speaking recently on the No Cover Charge podcast, the bluesman revealed that his favorite acquisition isn’t the rarest or most valuable guitar in his vault — it’s the one he dreamed about as a kid.

“My favorite purchase was the one that meant the most to me,” he says. “The Howard Reed Strat. That was the one that meant the most because I had that guitar on my wall when I was 10 years old.

“Some people had Farrah Fawcett — I had the Howard Reed Strat.”

Reed isn’t exactly a household name. The guitarist briefly played with Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps in the 1950s. But his Stratocaster occupies a unique place in Fender lore.

Finished in custom black by Fender, it stands apart from the standard Brown Sunburst Stratocasters offered at the time.

“I will definitely say it’s the first one with a factory black custom color finish,” Bonamassa told Guitar Player in our January 2024 issue. Reed ordered the guitar from McCord Music Company in Dallas in 1955. “There are three definitive pictures from the late ’50s of Howard Reed playing the guitar.”

Bonamassa finally acquired the instrument in 2011 — on a day he remembers vividly.

“I [bought it] the day that I played the Ryman for the first time,” he says, referring to Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. “I couldn’t believe I was in the same room as it. I had a reasonable expectation of what a Strat weighs.”

What he discovered was unexpected.

The Reed Strat tips the scales at 10 pounds — roughly three pounds heavier than a typical Stratocaster. Decades of heavy use have also left their mark, including significant wear on the back where the finish has been rubbed away through years of playing.

“It’s heavy,” Bonamassa admits, “but it ultimately represents my journey in the music business more than any of the guitars I can pull out.”

The guitar’s significance goes back to Bonamassa’s childhood.

“It was a Guitar World centerfold and I still have the original poster,” he says. “I had it tacked on my wall, and I thought it was the coolest Strat on the planet. I never thought that [25] years later I’d be picking it up.”

Today the instrument has come full circle. Bonamassa has loaned the guitar to the museum at the Ryman, where it’s displayed as part of the venue’s tribute to Nashville’s musical legacy.

And while the Reed Strat may be the most meaningful guitar he owns, Bonamassa has recently been reflecting on his gear collection more broadly — sharing advice on the best way to mic a guitar amp and revealing how the Los Angeles wildfires prompted him to rethink his gear-hoarding habits.

Ironically, though, the guitarist who most shaped Bonamassa’s playing wasn’t known for a Strat at all. His biggest inspiration built his reputation with a Telecaster.

Tony Levin recalled the experience of working on John Lennon’s final album Double Fantasy as a positive and upbeat one. The Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Stevie Nicks bassist said Lennon made things so easy that anyone could have done his job.

While Levin was naturally aware of the ex-Beatle’s status, he didn’t know about the background to Double Fantasy, which marked a return to form after several years in the doldrums. That return to form was to remain in potential only when Lennon was shot dead weeks after the album’s launch in 1980.

Levin recently told Vinyl Guide that producer Jack Douglas had recommended him for the sessions. He recalled that Lennon’s first words when they met were, “They tell me you’re good. Just don’t play too many notes.”

“There was some tension in the air,“ Levin added, ”good tension, not at all a negative tension… He would be playing this piece and suddenly he’d say, ‘Stop! Stop fooling around!’ — like it wasn’t his idea. ‘Stop fooling around. Let’s do the take.’ And one-two, he’d count it off and that would be the take.”

Lennon was fooling around plenty, Levin added.

“I could tell he was really enjoying jamming and playing. In between takes he’d start playing, let’s say, Buddy Holly pieces and really having a ball with it. But later I realized that he hadn't been doing that in a long time.”

The bassist was also struck by Lennon’s style of working with wife and musical partner Yoko Ono.

“We would alternate [his] songs with Yoko's, which were… not only different musically, but she didn’t play an instrument. So she couldn't direct you in how to play it. So it was a different kind of experience, trying to come up with the groove or even the, not groove, but the basis of how to play her pieces.”

“John didn’t give any input on it,” he continued. “He was like the tea boy! He’d say, ‘Hey, you want some tea?’ [he’d] stay in the control room. [It was] very respectful and very impressive that they had that relationship.”

Referring again to Lennon’s comfortable attitude to the studio, Levin remembered: “John comes over and plays guitar for you and sings a song, and it’s there. It’s like, you know, 10,000 bass players could have played the right part on that song. And I was lucky to be the one who was there in the room.”

Eric Clapton disliked his 1992 album Unplugged so much that he tried to talk then Warner Brothers president Lenny Waronker out of releasing it. But more than 40 years later, Slowhand admits that the record changed the world’s perception of him.

Unplugged was recorded live in England as part of the MTV music series of the same name, which spawned a number of similar releases. The Clapton record — which features pared-down versions of “Layla,” “Tears in Heaven,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and more — won three Grammys and became the best-selling live album of all time.

Clapton recalled his backstage negotiations in a recent interview with Guitar Center.

“I didn’t want it out,” he admits. “There’s a $100 bill on the wall of Lenny Waronker’s office that he won from me, because I said, ‘I bet you $100 it won’t even go into the top 50.’

“I wanted to do a deal with them, to put it out as a limited edition — just 500 copies or something. I just didn’t want to hear it anymore… I had a real aversion to it for a long time.”

Its success made him think again.

“I found out over the next 20 years or so that the Clapton on that album is the one people know. Because a lot of what I was doing before Unplugged was either too far one way or too underground or too poppy,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Well, I have to listen to this again.

“So, yeah, I have to acknowledge it — but I still have a funny thing about it. It’s just a little bit polite or something to me.”

One thing he doesn’t regret his his use of Martin guitars during the MTV filming session, which proved a godsend for both player and manufacturer. Chris Martin IV, the executive chairman of C.F. Martin & Company, once said the the album “saved the Martin guitar” brand while renewing interest in 000-style instruments.

“When I was a kid I saw a Martin dreadnought,” Clapton said of a memorable day in London. “There was a crowd gathered round this guitar case, and they opened the lid, and there was a dreadnought in there. I thought, Wow! One one day I’m going to have one of those. That’s the most beautiful shape. Picasso could have done that!”

His relationship with Martin continues with the recent release of his Crossroads 2026 range,

Christopher Cross apologized to Canadian fans for the latest round of trade-war measures taken by the U.S. against its northern neighbor, and jokingly predicted his comments might get him kicked out of his home country.

The guitarist was performing in Toronto on August 30 when he paused the show to speak out on Donald Trump’s introduction of new tariffs and his presidential signing order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Canada has responded by announcing its own new tariffs, meaning that citizens of both nations could pay more for products as leaders Trump and Mark Carney continue to disagree.

“I want to tell you how much we love your country and appreciate your country very much,” Cross told the crowd at the RBC Amphitheatre. “I’m just very sorry and embarrassed that we have an asshole for a president.”

Cross then urged Canadians not to give up on America.

“We have an election coming up, and we’re gonna do our best to fix it,” he continued. “Then we’ll be buying all your shit again and you’ll be buying all our shit. We can be victims of corporate greed together!”

“Enough of my preaching here,” he said, wrapping up. “I’m sure you’ll be reading in the paper where I’ve been ejected from my country. But that’s okay — I wanted to say what I had to say.”

Cross — who once filled in for Ritchie Blackmore on Deep Purple’s first U.S. tour in 1970 — isn’t the first artist to speak out on the latest trade war escalation. In a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, guest host Jelly Roll noted that toilet paper was included in the list of products subject to tariffs.

“You have to admit, there is something poetic about it being so expensive to wipe our ass just because the president’s full of shit,” he said.

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson made his own point during the band’s August 29 concert in Toronto, referring to Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario and his previous rebadging of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

“We got here, we crossed Lake Ontario, we will be crossing the Gulf of Mexico,” Dickinson told fans in Toronto. “It’s a ridiculous state of the world.”

Frank Zappa was fiercely passionate about music. When he loved an artist, he praised them to the hilt; when he thought an act was subpar, he was equally willing to let them know it.

Ian Anderson’s Jethro Tull fell firmly into the latter category. Zappa took repeated shots at the band, leaving Anderson — himself a huge Zappa fan — particularly stung. Years later, Anderson offered a theory for the electric guitar virtuoso’s hostility: he believed Zappa felt threatened by the success of British rock bands.

Zappa was never one to dilute his opinions. He took digs at the Beatles on the Mothers of Invention’s 1968 album We’re Only in It for the Money, and he expressed his dislike of the Velvet Underground and the “merchandising” nature of the Doors. In the late ’80s, he even incorporated a reggae-flavored version of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” into his live shows.

So when Anderson received an unexpected message from Zappa near the end of his life, he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“When Frank Zappa was terminally ill, I received a message to say he would like me to call him,” Anderson told Classic Rock in 2023. “I’d never met him. I was a fan, but my instinct was he really didn’t like Jethro Tull, so it was a little odd.”

Zappa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1990 and died on December 4, 1993. Anderson wanted to return the call, but nerves got the better of him.

“I dialed the number three times,” Anderson recalled. “But each time I hung up in panic; I was embarrassed. What do you say to a dying man?”

Anderson never got another chance. Zappa died just weeks later, leaving the Tull frontman to regret his hesitation.

“From what I heard, he’d wanted to talk to a few people, just to say hi, and I was one of them,” Anderson said. “It wouldn’t have changed anything. Except I would have had my first and last words with one of the great original composers and performers of rock music history.”

Anderson has subsequently offered some insight into why Zappa may have had such a problem with Tull and other successful British bands.

“He rather resented us British bands — Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and so on,” he once told BBC Radio 2 (via Far Out). “We were going over there [to the U.S.] and making tons of money. Seemingly while he was struggling to run his band.”

Zappa’s former personal assistant, Pauline Butcher, offered a broader explanation for the lengths he went to establish himself as an artist.

“He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He didn’t play their kind of music, he didn’t even like it,” she told Classic Rock. “If he was going to get himself heard, he was going to have to do something radically different.

“He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s clothes,” she added. “All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.”

Whatever motivated Zappa’s attacks, they were difficult for Anderson to reconcile with his own admiration for the musician.

“People like Frank Zappa were rather disdainful of the British Invasion. They felt somehow threatened by it,” he said. “The memories I have were quite personally upsetting because I was a huge Frank Zappa fan. But he badmouthed us a couple of times publicly, and that was a bit hard to take.”

In related news, Zappa’s his former guitarist Adrian Belew has recalled his sobering last encounter with the late musician.

Anderson, meanwhile, has shared why he’s glad Jethro Tull rejected Woodstock and why he feels guilty about the band’s name.

In the years since Freddie Mercury’s passing, his former fiancée Mary Austin has kept a low profile. Their nontraditional relationship has fascinated Queen fans for decades.

Now, in a rare interview, Austin describes the singer’s final weeks and described his final days as the British press hounded him, waiting outside his home and doctors’ offices, desperate for any news about the Queen singer’s deteriorating health.

Austin knew better than most what was happening behind the scenes. They remained close friends after he came out as bisexual, at a time when it was still very much taboo. When Mercury died in 1991, he left much of his estate to her.

Speaking with The Guardian, Austin reveals the chaos of the singer’s final weeks, and the lengths the press went to in pursuit of a story.

“They’d wait for him when he had doctors’ appointments and had to leave the house,” she says. “Freddie needed decoys. It got chaotic.”

Austin remembers one particularly grim exchange that showed just how intensely the British media was watching Mercury.

“The British media had a huge impact and sculpted the way he lived his life,” she says. “I remember a bike was coming through to collect [a] film. The courier asked if there was any news and someone shouted, ‘No, he’s not dead yet.’”

Mercury died on November 24, 1991, aged 45, having publicly confirmed that he had AIDS just one day earlier. Austin was with him during his final hours, when he was on morphine and drifting in and out of consciousness.

“I was holding his hand,” she recalls. “He was on morphine and in and out of consciousness, and he fell back to sleep. I stood there for quite a while, and he finally came round again, and he just said, ‘My old faithful.’ So I felt a bit like a dog. I wasn’t flattered.”

It was a typically Mercury moment in a relationship that had begun more than 20 years earlier. Austin met him in 1970, before Queen had released a record. They became lovers and eventually got engaged, but in 1976 Mercury told Austin he was bisexual, bringing their romantic relationship to an end.

That didn’t end their relationship. Quite the opposite: Austin remained one of the most important people in Mercury’s life.

“All my lovers ask me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s impossible,” Mercury said in 1985. “The only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else. We believe in each other; that’s enough for me.”

Austin was around even before Queen had settled on its name. She recalls sitting in on a band meeting when Brian May suggested Build Your Own Boat. Mercury countered with Queen.

“They asked what I thought,” Austin remembers. “I said I preferred Build Your Own Boat.”

Did she really?

“Oh, no. I thought it was a terrible name. But Brian was my friend. I’d just met Freddie.”

Austin would remain part of Mercury’s inner circle for the rest of his life. After his death, she became the keeper of much of his personal archive — and eventually discovered something extraordinary in the boxes he had left behind.

Among Mercury’s belongings were handwritten lyrics for songs including “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Killer Queen” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But Austin initially couldn’t bring herself to read them.

“I couldn’t look at the lyrics,” she says. “I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.”

Eventually, she changed her mind, and the discovery helped inspire Freddie Mercury: A Life in Lyrics, a new book exploring his songwriting and the life behind his words.

Austin also reveals that one Queen song was written about her. She doesn’t definitively say whether “Love of My Life” was inspired by their relationship, but she confirms that “Lily of the Valley,” from 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, was.

And there are still things Austin won’t discuss. Mercury entrusted her with the location of his ashes and asked her to keep it secret. She has honored that request for more than three decades.

It’s perhaps the clearest indication of the extraordinary place Austin occupied in Mercury’s life: She was the woman he loved, the friend he trusted and, after his death, the person he relied on to protect some of his most private wishes.

Meanwhile, a breakthrough moment in Queen’s history, their famous concert behind the Iron Curtain, is being released in 4K.

Of all the guitars Robert Fripp has played, one stands out: the now-iconic 1959 Gibson Les Paul Custom he played across King Crimson’s classic works and his collaborations with artists that include David Bowie.

In 1967, a young Robert Fripp responded to a newspaper advertisement from Bournemouth-based brothers Michael and Peter Giles. They were looking for a singing keyboardist for a new project. Fripp could neither play keyboards nor sing, but he applied anyway and got the gig. The resulting band, Giles, Giles and Fripp, established an iconic songwriting partnership that laid the groundwork for prog-rock progenitors King Crimson.

A year after that advert went to print, the trio released their only album, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp. Its hazy blend of jangling psychedelic pop, jazz, and classical music failed to find an audience, but it made a fan of a businessman by the name of Angus Hunking, whose generosity would make it possible for Fripp to buy the ’59 Custom.

“I bought it when Giles, Giles and Fripp were just about to become King Crimson,” Fripp tells Guitar World of the Les Paul’s origin story. “King Crimson were lent £7,000 by a businessman called Angus Hunking. He took an interest in us, and I believe £2,000 came in cash in a briefcase.”

Soon after, Fripp and Michael Giles, with whom he would form King Crimson, were shopping for a guitar in London’s West End.

“We went to a music shop on Shaftesbury Avenue,” Fripp says. “In the window was this Les Paul for £400.

“I asked for a cash discount. The shop assistant, a young man I disliked because of his attitude, said, ‘I could phone up Eric Clapton, and he’d come and buy it.’ And I thought, Then why haven’t you phoned him already?”

Fripp called the clerk’s bluff from a mile away.

“This young man was lying to me, and I didn’t like him,” he quips, before haggling a deal for £380.

According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, £380 in 1968, the year King Crimson formed, is equivalent to around £5,900 (approx. $8,000) in today’s economy. It wasn't an insignificant amount of money, even if it only made a small dent in their briefcase. Realistically, though, it would sell for far more than that were he to pop it on eBay.

“I went online today, and I found a pristine model the same as mine, advertised at $139,000,” Fripp gasps. “And that was an instrument without provenance.”

As he explains to GW, the guitar proved to be a workhorse. It featured on the band’s first seven records, breaking sonic ground again and again between 1969’s In the Court of the Crimson King and Red five years later. It would also be used to record his “celestial” guitar parts on David Bowie’s “Heroes,” which has sold 2.3 million copies worldwide.

The album’s title track has gotten a new lease of life in recent months thanks to its inclusion in the smash TV series Stranger Things.

Beyond that, the guitar would also be used during his collaborations with synth wizard Brian Eno.

After decades of toil, his staple guitar caught a break when a second ‘59 LP, bought in New York in 1978, took its place. Had he not stood his ground against that snarky guitar shop clerk, Robert Fripp’s story might read rather differently.

In related news, Fripp has laughed off rumors that King Crimson were back in the studio, while his interesting comments on Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing have piqued the interest of many.

“We’re at a very interesting vortex,” Billy Gibbons says of his little ol’ band from Texas. “The band is enjoying being a hybrid. The legacy of ZZ Top solidified sometime in the not-too-distant past. I purposely say solidified, as in, it can’t be broken up. You could take a sledgehammer to it and the ZZ Top legacy would remain intact.”

That’s quite a statement considering that the original ZZ Top lineup is gone. With the recent death of drummer Frank Beard, coming five years after that of bass guitarist Dusty Hill, in 2021, Gibbons is the lone surviving member. Today, he plays his elecric guitar alongside bassist Elwood Francis and drummer Michael Monahan.

Carrying on without his longtime partners has been an emotional cross to bear. But his former bandmates made it easier by handpicking their replacements, as he explains in a new interview with Texas Monthly.

Gibbons said he received a call from Beard about eight months ago to say he wasn’t feeling up to performing.

“He said, ‘I’m experiencing some weakness in my bass drum foot, maybe up into the calf a little bit,’” Gibbons recalled. “We talked about Mike on that call. It was Frank’s suggestion that Mike keep his seat warm. I said, ‘Are you saying he’s the guy?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I think he felt like he was leaving us in a lurch. And to reassure him, I said, ‘Well, to be quite honest, I think we’re going to be just fine.’ Frank’s remark was, ‘Yeah, that’s what worries me.’ So at least we had a laugh.”

He said the situation was similar with Hill, who passed 10 days after he and Gibbons last spoke.

“Dusty went so quickly. It was stunning,” Gibbons said. He recalled sending Hill back to Texas after he appeared unwell on their post-COVID tour.

“After the performance, I said, ‘Dusty, go to Texas. Go to the doctor. We’ve got a few days off,’” Gibbons recalled. “He said, ‘If for any reason my return is tardy, give it to Elwood. Elwood knows everything. He’s been with us 30 years. You didn’t know this, but Elwood used to teach me bass parts.’ Dusty passed 10 days later.”

He recalled how Francis first fired up the group when he arrived.

“When Elwood stepped in, Frank really lit up. Frank was a curmudgeon. Across 50 years, I rarely saw the guy smile unless he was trying to poke fun at somebody. But once Elwood took the stage, I’d turn around and see Frank constantly looking at Elwood and smiling and laughing at the novelty of having this new guy who was on fire.”

Gibbons said Monahan had a similar impact, although the guitarist admitted their first show gave him a moment’s pause.

“I’d gotten into costume, and as I approached the stage, I was harboring a sense of slight uncertainty,” he recalled. “Then it struck me. I said, ‘Well, it is going to be slightly different, but you’ve been doing this for fifty years. Don’t change anything.’”

Gibbons said he’s received words of support from his fellow musicians that have confirmed he and the band are on the right path.

“I’ve gotten so many calls and texts from friends the last few days that have been reassuring,” the singer noted. “I got a nice one from Keith Richards. He didn’t say the show must go on. He just said, ‘I heard about it. I’ve done it.’ That’s all he said. It meant a lot and gave me a lot to think about.

“For me, the sun isn’t setting,” he continued. “I see it as a bright light. It’s not so different, but then again it is. We miss Dusty and Frank. We loved these guys. They were everything. And yet we’re following their instructions.”

ZZ Top’s U.S. tour continues through mid-October before traveling to Central and South America.

The Liverpool Cavern Club was famous as the spot where the Beatles found local fame in the early 1960s. It was there that Brian Epstein first saw the group on Thursday, February 9, 1961, and got the idea to manage the band, which led to their signing with George Martin’s Parlophone label the following year.

The club was such an important part of Beatles history and so beloved by the locals that in 1973, Liverpool officials allowed the Cavern to be purchased by the Merseyrail underground railway to create a ventilation shaft. When that proved unnecessary or infeasible, the property was turned into a parking lot. (Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?)

A new Cavern Club was built across the street, and it was there, on December 14, 1999, that original Beatle Paul McCartney made an appearance to promote his new album, Run Devil Run. For the occasion, he brought with him not one but two fellow legends: former Deep Purple drummer and founder Ian Paice, and guitar legend David Gilmour.

Paice and Gilmour had good reason to be on hand. Both had participated in the recording of Run Devil Run, an album that saw McCartney cover a dozen rock and roll classics and three originals. The album’s creation followed a year of mourning for McCartney’s wife and Wings partner, Linda.

McCartney wanted to cut the album quickly, just as the Beatles’ first albums had been made. To that end, he enlisted Chris Thomas — who had helped engineer the Beatles’ 1968 White Album and played keyboards on four of its cuts — to produce the album in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, where much of the Beatles catalog was tracked.

Gilmour, who played electric guitar and lap steel on the album, was certainly no stranger to McCartney, having played guitar solos on tracks from his albums Give My Regards to Broad Street, from 1984, and Flowers in the Dirt, from 1989. Even before then, Gilmour had been among the many guitarists — including Pete Townshend, Hank Marvin, Laurence Juber and Denny Laine — who performed on McCartney and Wings’ star-studded “Rockestra Theme,” from that group’s final album, 1979’s Back to the Egg.

The guitarist’s work on Run Devil Run occurred during a quiet period in his career. Pink Floyd had put out their 14th studio album, The Division Bell, in 1994, and would not release another until their final record, 2014’s The Endless River. All was likewise quiet on Gilmour’s solo career front.

In fact, two public performances were the main activities in Gilmour’s career following The Division Bell: They comprised McCartney’s 1999 Run Devil Run promotion and an appearance with the Who at their 1996 concert in London’s Hyde Park, a celebration of the group’s return to the stage after a seven-year hiatus. Gilmour performed on a pair of tunes from Quadrophenia, singing "The Dirty Jobs" and playing guitar on "Love Reign O'er Me.”

The guitarist’s performance with McCartney — during which he played a rather well-worn blonde Fender Telecaster — came close to satisfying a desire he’d had for years to play with the Beatles.

“I really wish I had been in the Beatles,” Gilmour told Mojo in 2016. “[They] taught me how to play guitar; I learnt everything. The bass parts, the lead, the rhythm, everything. They were fantastic.”

Recalling his participation in Run Devil Run, Gilmour told the magazine the experiencing brought him back to his childhood.

“I’m a kid, really,” he said. “You get into Studio Two at Abbey Road, you’re sitting there with Paul McCartney, and your guitar is plugged in. You think that’s an ordinary day’s work, but of course, it isn’t; it’s magical!”

And as Gilmour revealed in that same interview, it was he who convinced McCartney to perform a Beatles song at the Run Devil Run promotion at the Cavern: “I Saw Her Standing There,” the first song on the the first Beatles album, 1963’s Please Please Me.

“Managing to persuade him to sing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ at the Cavern, with me doing the John Lennon parts, was absolutely fantastic,” he said.

“I’ve been in the Who, I’ve been in the Beatles, and I’ve been in Pink Floyd,” Gilmour concluded. “Top that, motherfucker!”

The performance was released as a DVD, Live at the Cavern Club, in 1999.

Dolly Parton was laid to rest Friday in a private funeral attended only by immediate family, according to her great-niece, Lainey Parton.

Parton died August 25 at age 80 following what her representatives described as a “brief battle with cancer.” Her funeral was held August 28 in Nashville, with the singer’s representatives previously saying the small, private service was being held “at Dolly’s request.”

Details of the service have not been made public. Parton was likely laid to rest beside her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville, according to People. Dean died in March 2025 and was interred in a mausoleum at the cemetery.

A large plaque at the site bears both Dean and Parton’s names, their wedding date and a pair of intertwined wedding bands, along with images of two houses, including the home where Parton grew up. She left home at age 18, leaving behind a battered Martin acoustic guitar to launch a career that would make her a star and beloved figure.

Lainey shared her first public thoughts about the funeral in an Instagram post on August 29, accompanying her words with throwback photos of herself with her great-aunt.

“This is a really hard post for me to make. I wanted to wait until after my granny was laid to rest yesterday before I tried to put any of this into words,” Lainey wrote.

“From the time I was little, my granny always had a way of making me feel like I was enough. She never made my dreams feel too big or made me feel like I couldn’t do something. She believed in me before I even knew how to believe in myself,” she continued. “Most people can think of at least one bad memory with everyone in their family. I honestly can’t think of one with her.”

Lainey also reflected on the special role Parton played in her life, writing, “Because she couldn’t have kids of her own, she always made us feel like we were hers. She loved us that way, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.”

She recalled singing with Parton on her Smoky Mountain DNA album while she was a freshman in high school. Despite being nervous, Lainey said, Parton “had a way of making me feel like nothing bad could happen. She made me feel safe, confident, and like I belonged right there beside her.”

That support continued as Lainey grew older. When she told Parton she wanted to attend beauty school rather than college, Dolly “never questioned” the decision. She financially supported her through school and helped her launch her career.

“She didn’t just tell me to chase my dreams, she helped me get there,” Lainey wrote.

Lainey also recalled the opportunities she shared with Parton, including appearing in a movie with her, and said she was grateful to have those memories — things she could “watch, hear, and hold onto” after her death.

“It still doesn’t feel real that she’s gone,” Lainey wrote. “I’m going to miss her voice, her laugh, her hugs, and just knowing she was there. I’m even going to miss those 4 AM calls, and I’d give anything to see her name pop up on my phone again.”

She thanked those who had reached out with messages, flowers and other gestures of support, saying she had “noticed every single one” of them.

“I feel incredibly lucky that I got to call her my granny,” Lainey concluded. “Thank you for always believing in me, loving me, and making me feel like I could do anything. I love you, Granny. Always. 🤍.”

For most of his career, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter has been a studio guitarist. Though he’s best known for his time in Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, he’s been a prolific studio hound for longer than he was in either group. His specialty is guitar solos, and he’s laid down countless memorable moments on records, from Dan’s “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number” to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” which he dexterously performed with a used Burns Bison electric guitar he bought for $20.

“I kind of look at guitar playing on two levels,” Baxter says. “There’s the professional studio sausage method, where you go in and grind it out, and that’s not necessarily bad. It’s good music and you’re having a good time. To get a chance to do it and be of that caliber is one of the most wonderful things that could ever happen to a guitarist. A lot of guys say it kills them. Well, it’s what you make of it.

“The other level is when you really want to play and you’re with people who accept and like what you do. My specialty, if you could call it that, is guitar solos, obviously, even though I sit back and do the I-have-a-swimming-pool rhythm guitar sound that L.A., laid-back, it’s-all-paid-for studio musicians have. I do like to play solos, and the reason [Steely Dan’s] Walter [Becker] and Donald [Fagen] called me was they needed somebody to play solos.”

Of course, sometimes the sessions are something completely out of the ordinary. Baxter shared a few of his oddest jobs with us.

Steely Dan

“Walter and Donald had a certain concept of guitar playing, and they would attempt to get as close to that as possible vis-à-vis my abilities as a player. So the solos were sort of a combination of exorcism, displays of technique and all kinds of things.”

One of the most unusual sessions was for the group’s instrumental cover of Duke Ellington’s jazz tune “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” which appeared on Pretzel Logic. Covering a 1927 jazz tune with a modern rock band wasn’t the most obvious thing to do in 1974, but Baxter didn’t flinch. Far from it. He called it “the Steely Dan song I enjoyed recording the most.”

“Everybody picked a piece of it, and I said, ‘I’ll take the trombone solo and learn it on steel guitar,’” he told Guitar Player.

As he explained to Vulture, the steel guitar was a logical substitute, given it allowed him to slide between notes, like a trombonist would. “I had the idea to try it on pedal steel. Why the hell not? I worked on it for a good amount of time, and it was fun getting through that tunnel from one end to the other and playing that beautiful solo. I wanted the challenge, and I was really satisfied.”

The Doobie Brothers

Baxter admits he is sometimes surprised by what comes out of him when he just opens up and lets inspiration fly. Sometimes it seems as if a higher power is at work, such as when he cut tracks for Donna Summer’s backup band, Brooklyn Dreams, for their album Joy Ride. Once again, he had the Burns Bison in hand.

“My solo was in a style that was like I was mumbling in tongues or speaking in dreams, using languages that have been dead for thousands of years,” he says. “After I finished playing, Juergen Koppers, the engineer, looked at me and said, ‘Was ist das?’

“I said, ‘I don’t know. You better play it back.’”

Of course, sometimes you get there with the help of a little reefer.

“The solo on ‘How Do the Fools Survive’ on the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute surprised me because that was a one-take job, where I just smoked a joint and was alone by myself with an engineer working in another room,” Baxter explains. “It was one of those lean-back-and-play things.”

Dolly Parton

Sometimes you have to color outside the lines, especially when artists find creative ways to explain what they want.

“Sometimes you get requests like, ‘Can you make it more green?’ or, ‘I need it to ooomph more,’” Baxter reveals. “So you say, ‘Okay,’ and think about all the times you’ve ever done sessions and people have said to you, ‘Boy, that really ooomphs,’ or ‘That sounds really green,’ and you start from there.”

One of his strangest requests came from Dolly Parton for the song “Baby, I’m Burnin’,” a perennial favorite from her 1978 album Heartbreaker that also served as the theme song to her 1987–1988 television series Dolly. The singer was looking for some explosive effects to play behind her vocals.

“Dolly Parton asked me to make fireworks one time,” he said. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer, and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’

“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s [pitch] transposer, slapping it back up and down. She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’

“There have been a couple of dates like that. I enjoy it. I get a lot of calls for steel guitar where they say, ‘Can you make it not sound like a steel guitar?’ That’s always a request. They want something different. They want a sound that has the fluidity of the steel guitar but doesn’t sound like ‘Six Days on the Road.’”

The Session That Never Happened

Baxter says that if you don’t know what to play, you shouldn’t.

“Sit back and wait because it’ll come.”

Or maybe it won’t. He recalls a session for Steely Dan producer Gary Katz that was like few others.

“He told me to bring all my stuff,” Baxter says. “I charged him triple scale because it was on a Saturday at a place way the hell out.”

He arrived with all his gear and set up. Then Katz played him an album’s worth of songs.

“He said, ‘Okay, I want you to listen to all these tunes and then tell me what you think we ought to do.’

“So I listened to 10 tunes, and each time one would finish I said I didn’t hear anything. When we finally finished, I said, ‘Gary, there’s really nothing you need. It sounds fine.’

“He said that was all he wanted to hear and paid me my money. Fair enough.

“You just don’t play sometimes. I found that one of the harder things to learn to say is, ‘There’s no need for it. You know, as much as I’d like to play on this track as a businessman, as a musician I know you don’t need it.’”

Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton didn’t set out to form a supergroup. It was just by luck that they discovered the extraordinary sound that happened when they put their voices together.

The proof came in 1987, when Trio turned that discovery into one of the biggest country albums of its era. It spent five weeks at number one on Billboard’s country chart, reached number six on the Billboard 200, won a Grammy and eventually sold millions of copies.

But the three singers had heard the magic more than a decade earlier. Soon after Ronstadt and Harris became friends in the early 1970s, they discovered they had a shared obsession.

“One of the first things we said to each other when we met was, ‘Who is your favorite girl singer?’” Harris recalled in a 1999 CBS interview. “And we both said, ‘Dolly.’”

The opportunity to meet their favorite singer came soon enough. Harris learned that Parton was in Los Angeles and invited her to her house.

“I called Linda and said ‘Dolly is coming over,’” Harris remembered.

Ronstadt arrived, Parton picked up an acoustic guitar, and the three began singing old songs. They quickly discovered that their voices did something none of them could do alone.

“The three voices create a fourth voice in a way,” Harris said.

Parton remembered the moment in a 2026 interview.

“So we started singing whatever that song was, and boy, I mean, everybody that was standing around in the room … it was just like a stillness. It was so beautiful.”

Parton was struck by how naturally the three voices fit.

“You would have thought we’d been singing together our whole lives,” she said. “It was such a beautiful sound.”

They took that sound to television, appearing together on Parton’s Dolly! variety show in 1976.

Then they tried to make a record. The first attempt came in 1978 when they recorded songs including “Mr. Sandman,” “Evangeline,” “My Blue Tears” and “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Unfortunately, nothing came of the effort. Each had a successful solo careers, and busy schedules, not to mention recording contracts with different labels.

While some of those recordings eventually surfaced on their individual albums, their dream of a trio remained just that.

Until 1986. The three reunited in the studio with producer George Massenburg, this time with a better idea of what they were trying to capture. They didn’t attempt to turn three superstar singers into a conventional vocal group. Instead, they let the songs determine how the voices should fit.

“We’d start a song where we try with everybody each singing a different part,” Ronstadt explained. “We’d just wait until the song would decide which way it liked best.”

Harris, who contributed acoustic guitar along with vocals, agreed. “The song would actually tell us once we would try.”

That is the secret you can hear throughout Trio. Parton’s high, unmistakable mountain voice, Harris’ crystalline phrasing and Ronstadt’s power remain completely distinct, yet the three constantly reshape themselves around the song.

The result was an album that sounded effortless — despite the fact that it had taken nearly a decade to get there.

And the women never seemed to lose sight of what made the whole thing special.

After Parton’s death in August 2026, Ronstadt remembered not just the records they made together, but the person she had known for decades.

“One of the most extraordinary musical experiences of my life was recording with her,” Ronstadt said.

In the end, Dolly was more than the singer Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris both loved. She was the musical connection that brought three singular voices into the same room — where, for a moment, they sounded less like three stars and more like a group that had been singing together all their lives.

Pink Floyd roadie and production manager Chris Adamson saw much of what went on behind the scenes during the group’s halcyon days in the 1970s, becoming firmly entrenched within the band’s inner circle.

“I was with them for a good 10 years, having begun working for them from around the time of Meddle,” Adamson recalls today. “I was with them through Obscured by Clouds, The Dark Side of the Moon and right up to them starting The Wall album. I was just a roadie but, in those days, I worked for the band full-time. They didn't tour like you do now, where you have a set period, and you build up to it and go. In those days, you'd even go out and do a couple of gigs on a weekend, or whatever else came in.

“And then when you weren't doing that, you did other things. I would take their wives out shopping. I even dug a pond for David Gilmour at his house in Epping Forest once. You just did all that sort of stuff. You became like a domestic helper, a butler of sorts. A jack of all trades, which was enjoyable.”

During the group’s recording sessions for The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road Studios, Adamson was there front and center. He provided the title to “Any Colour You Like,” which he explains was one of his catchphrases: “Any color you like; they're all blue.” He also contributed several spoken-word fragments to two of the album’s tracks.

“The first voice you hear on that album is me,” Adamson reveals. He appears soon after the ticking clock on the opening track, “Speak to Me.” “I say, ‘I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years…’ I also do the bit at the end of ‘Money.’”

He explains that the statements he and the other participants provided were answers to questions posed by the band.

“We were in the studio one day and Roger just gave us these cards with questions on them. We went and sat in the studio and you had to just read the questions to yourself. One was, ‘Do you think you’re going mad?’ Another was, ‘What do you think of the dark side of the moon?’ and ‘When was the last time you had a fight?’”

Adamson recalls some of the other participants.

“There is the Irish-sounding guy who was the doorman at Abbey Road, a guy called Roger ‘the Hat’ Manifold, who was a roadie and used to work for a band called Love Affair. There's also a woman on it too, Puddie, who at the time was going out with Pink Floyd road manager Peter Watts. She's the one who says, ‘Cruisin' for a bruisin’.’

“And the other two people on there are Henry McCullough, the guitarist out of Wings, and his wife. Ironically, the question they were answering was, ‘When was the last time you had a fight?’”

McCullough’s answer — “I don't know. I was really drunk at the time” — can be heard at the end of “Money.”

Part of Adamson’s job involved working closely with David Gilmour, particularly when setting up his electric guitars, amps and effects in the recording studio. It was a responsibility he took on from the moment he came onboard. In this role, he inadvertently became responsible for one of the most unusual sounds on “Echoes,” recorded during the Meddle sessions.

“Where you hear what sounds like a seagull screeching was due to me being in a rush one day wiring all of David’s pedalboard,” Adamson explains. “That caused me to wire the wah-wah pedal the wrong way around. So when he went to switch it on, that was the sound he got, but David loved it.

“So then I had to have that incorporated into his pedalboard so that he could play it. I had a switch made that would switch it back to a regular wah-wah pedal or switch it so he could get that screeching sound whenever he wanted. So that all came about from just an accident of me rushing and plugging it in the wrong way.”

In keeping with Floyd’s experimental spirit, the success of The Dark Side of the Moon encouraged the group to begin hatching plans for an album built entirely around non-musical sounds. Tentatively titled Household Objects, the project would eventually be shelved, but not before the band created material from everything from cans and bottles to a vacuum cleaner. Adamson was assigned to seek out the objects.

“They were going to use objects, such as airplane elastic that could be stretched over a table with a matchbox under it to get a bass sound,” he explains. “And a stiff brush on a wooden floor for a snare sound.

“I spent ages with Rick going around department stores buying bits of things that you could make any kind of noise from. And eventually we'd got three basic tracks down. When we came to put some footsteps on one track, though, we could never get them in sync. And that’s where we found out that the metronome we were using at Abbey Road Studios was always going out of tempo on the sixth beat. So all the tracks became useless. They did end up using a lot of bits and pieces from the tracks on other albums.”

Adamson considers Gilmour “one of those magical guitar players with such an identifiable sound.” To him, the three principals of Pink Floyd — Gilmour, Waters and Wright — were all masters of sonic exploration.

“It was the age when synthesizers of all sorts started to appear with loads of sounds,” he says. “And they all used to use Binson Echorecs too, which were delay units made out of a metal disc in Italy. They had these heads around it where you could set the delay or could change it. On a lot of the tracks, when you hear Roger playing bass, it’s being played through a Binson and then through an Echoplex.”

Adamson says tape echo was a commonly used effect, with the band employing various tricks to extend the loop.

“They’d have a two-inch tape machine, and then positioned right across the room we'd have a drumstick and use it to hold the length of tape while it spun so we could get a really long loop to create a delay. They were real explorers of music.”

The critical and commercial success of The Dark Side of the Moon transformed Pink Floyd from a cult band into one of the biggest groups on the planet. For Adamson, who had been there through the experiments, the breakthrough was as dramatic as it was unexpected.

“The Floyd were a sort of cult band before then, but that album just launched them into the stratosphere,” says Adamson. “I don't know why it did, but it did, and it just happened at the right time. It was monstrous.”

For someone who had spent years wiring pedalboards, hunting down odd noises and doing whatever jobs the band needed, Adamson had witnessed the transformation from unusually close range. Pink Floyd had gone from an experimental cult act to a global phenomenon — and he had been there for the strange, messy and often accidental moments that helped make it happen.

Adrian Belew took a particular approach to his voluminous body of work for others, outside of his membership in King Crimson and the Bears and his solo albums.

“I was always confident I’ll find something that’s unique to me and that will work for their music,” Belew — whose résumé includes David Bowie, Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails and many more — tells us via Zoom from his home in north-central Tennessee. “That’s what it’s all about for me. They don’t ask me to come in and play like somebody else. They don’t give me instructions very much. They just let me go and I’ll give them a few different choices and then go in and do them.”

The exception to that rule? Paul Simon. Belew was the first non-African musician to play on Simon’s celebrated Graceland album, which turned 40 this month. He created parts on his Roland GR700 guitar synthesizer for “The Boy in the Bubble,” “Crazy Love, Vol. II” and the horn riff for “You Can Call Me Al,” as well as straight guitar on “Under African Skies.”

“Paul Simon was one person who had everything very specific,” Belew says. “‘I want you to play this’ [sings the “You Can Call Me Al” riff], and then I would play it and he’d say, ‘Okay, now try it with a little bit of tremolo on there … No, not that. Try it this way’

“He usually had something very specific in mind, so it was working with him to get that.”

The culture-blending Graceland, in fact, was as much of a surprise for Belew as it was for Simon’s listeners. The electric guitar virtuoso was two albums into his solo career when he got the call to come to the Record Plant in New York to work on Simon’s new album.

“I was booked in there by myself, with Paul and Roy [Halee], his engineer,” Belew recalls. “I came in a little early, and Roy was playing some music in the studio control room. It was African music. I thought, Wow, this is confusing; maybe he’ll switch to the Paul stuff in a minute.

“So I went in and listened for a while, and then Paul arrived and he said, ‘Let’s get some coffee out here, just kinda get to know each other.’

“And I said, ‘Oh, I just was hearing that music; I guess Roy had the wrong tape up’ — I made a joke. Paul said, ‘How so?’ I said, ‘That’s not your music, right?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, it is.’ I said, ‘Well, okay. I don’t really get that,’ and he said, ‘Well, great, come into the control room and I’ll play you some stuff. I have words for all this stuff, some words, so I’ll sing them to you, the words that I do have.’”

The first song, Belew remembers, was “The Boy in the Bubble,” which opens the album. “He stood next to me, his mouth pretty close to my ear, and he sang these parts. That gave me absolute chills — I mean, Paul Simon singing quietly in your ear like that? Come on. And then, of course, I understood: ‘My God, this guy has completely revisited his career and done something entirely different to it. And genius.’”

The rest of the process was largely trial and error as Belew, Simon and Halee worked on the other songs.

“Every day I was just searching for sounds,” Belew says. “I had all these programs; I would basically say, ‘Okay, lemme think about this,’ and then go play something with that sound. Then I’d try another one. That was the process. The beginning of ‘You Can Call Me Al,’ originally the horn section was me; I had built, like, four different types of saxophone sounds.

“It was a lengthy process, just deciding which of my sounds he wanted in his music. And invariably he would always say, ‘Can I see that guitar?’” Belew laughs. “And then he sat there and sat there and played the sound for 10 minutes.”

Belew is justifiably proud to have been part of Graceland, which was top five on the Billboard 200 chart and certified five-times Platinum. Critically acclaimed — albeit criticized by some for violating a United Nations–mandated cultural boycott of still-apartheid South Africa — Graceland won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1987 and in 2006 was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.

Even better? “He was the first person who ever sent me a Gold record, even though I’d been on many Gold records again,” says Belew, who also played on Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors album the same year and on Simon’s follow-up, The Rhythm of the Saints, in 1990. “I’ll always love him for that. He’s a great guy.”

These days, Belew is busy with Beat, joining King Crimson bandmate Tony Levin and guitarist Steve Vai in recreating the Crimson catalog of the early ’80s. (Tool’s Danny Carey played drums through the group’s recent tour of Europe; Terry Bozzio will take his place for a North American tour that begins October 9 in Santa Cruz, California.) With Robert Fripp’s blessing — and periodic assistance — the troupe has been a hit with fans and released a live album last year, and Belew says the continued demand is surprising, but only to a degree.

“I knew from all my years on Facebook and things there was sort of a pent-up need for this music, and the last King Crimson didn’t play any of it, so I wanted to bring the music back and give it its day,” explains Belew, who’s planning to focus on his solo work next year.

“The real surprise is that this music is really as timeless as I thought it was, and it’s being enjoyed by all age groups now — not just old guys. There’s never been anything like it, before or since, in terms of the compositions and the way the band played together, with lots of different, odd time signatures and so many things going on at once. And yet part of the body of it was singable melodies and things you could relate to. It wasn’t just all outside, heavy instrumentals.”

Belew promises that Beat will be expanding its repertoire during the new dates, too.

“We’re adding in some of the double-trio music from the ’90s, maybe another surprise or two,” he says. “I figure that having four or five different pieces, taking out some of the others and also having a completely different drummer approach … the object for me is to make sure the show is different enough that even if you’ve seen it before you’ll walk out going, ‘I’m glad I saw it again.’ That’s the goal.”

The Who said goodbye to performing last year. Now they’re rehearsing again.

Roger Daltrey revealed the unexpected development during his solo show at Las Vegas’ Encore Theatre, where he made a passing reference to the Who’s current rehearsals while performing “Who Are You” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” According to The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Daltrey said the rehearsals “sounded great.”

The revelation comes less than a year after the Who completed what was billed as their final tour. The Song Is Over wrapped in October 2025, bringing the band’s latest farewell to a close — or so it seemed.

There’s no word yet on what the Who are rehearsing for, or whether the sessions will lead to new performances. But the news is particularly striking because the band’s future appeared decidedly uncertain after the farewell tour, with Daltrey and Pete Townshend having repeatedly described the run as their last.

And there’s another remarkable twist: Zak Starkey is apparently back behind the drum kit. Starkey was the Who’s drummer from 1996 until 2025, when he was fired in the chaotic run-up to the farewell tour. Daltrey’s solo-band drummer Scott Devours ultimately replaced him for the shows.

Now Starkey has confirmed that he has reunited with the Who for rehearsals.

“The rehearsal was great,” Starkey said in an Instagram post. “I don't think we've ever rehearsed as tough as that. Usually, we drink tea and talk about what time we're going home!”

Whatever comes next, the reunion represents a remarkable development that could lead to a performance or recording. While Daltrey has historically been skeptical about the necessity of a new record, Townshend — whose electric guitar exploits are a thing of legend — has expressed a strong desire to record a follow-up to their 2019 album, WHO.

The primary constraint on their timeline is Daltrey's vocal longevity. Townshend noted that ensuring the 82-year-old frontman's voice stays in good shape amidst minor health issues is their central priority for future commitments

Daltrey has even suggested that his own solo career may be nearing its conclusion. In May, he said that after 17 years of touring with various solo bands, “a less grueling life becomes more attractive.”

“After finishing the Who's final tour of the U.S., it's time for me as a solo artist to possibly do the same,” Daltrey said. “After touring solo with different bands of musicians for the last 17 years, a less grueling life becomes more attractive — I'll see.”

Daltrey has also already ruled out one potential destination if the Who do return to the stage. Asked about Las Vegas’ Sphere, he said he wasn’t convinced the venue suited the band.

“I think the management may have had talks about playing there, but when I think about it, I don't know whether it really interests me,” Daltrey told the Review-Journal. “I think the Sphere's got its place... it is an extraordinary thing, but I like the energy from a show just to come from the stage.”

A video showing Les Paul’s longtime home, workshop and recording laboratory in Mahwah, New Jersey, in its final days before demolition has surfaced, offering a look inside the property before it was razed earlier this month.

The video was shot by guitarist, collector and recording-studio owner Perry Margouleff, who narrates the footage as he walks through the deteriorating property. It shows the rooms and workspaces where Paul developed his ideas for the solidbody electric guitar, recording techniques and other musical innovations over several decades.

Paul’s Mahwah home was demolished this month after the property was sold for a reported $990,000. The property had remained largely intact after Paul’s death in 2009, although much of the equipment associated with his work was eventually moved elsewhere.

Margouleff says in the video that he learned that the property was scheduled to be demolished and went there with a friend to document it.

“It made me sick,” Margouleff says in the video. “That house was not just where Les Paul lived. It was his workshop; his journey of dreams.”

Margouleff is a longtime collector of American guitars and vintage recording equipment. He also founded Pie Studios on Long Island’s North Shore, where artists including the Rolling Stones and Bad Brains have recorded.

His video focuses on the condition of the Mahwah property and the significance of its rooms to Paul’s work. He also raises questions about the decision to demolish the house and directs criticism toward Michael Braunstein, executive director of the Les Paul Foundation.

“A name kept coming up when trying to get to the bottom of who did this,” Margouleff says. “Michael Braunstein moved all the gear to Los Angeles and apparently sold the property to be razed.”

Braunstein previously described the Mahwah property as essentially “four walls” in discussing the decision to move Paul’s equipment. Much of the equipment associated with Paul’s recording work is now housed at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood, which opened in March 2025.

The Mahwah property had a long history of visitors from the music world. Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen were among the guitarists known to have visited Paul there.

Paul’s son Gene has also criticized the handling of his father’s legacy. In an August 25 Facebook post, he said Braunstein “took control of everything” following Paul’s death.

“The entire family found ourselves on the outside looking in,” Gene wrote. “We are seldom consulted about anything regarding my father’s estate, his money, or his legacy. Suffice it to say, we have never been happy about this arrangement.”

In a subsequent statement, Gene expanded on his concerns about the Mahwah property, saying Braunstein had told him after Paul’s death that having the home designated as a historic landmark, or otherwise preserving it, was impossible. Gene says he accepted that explanation for years, along with the idea that the only practical alternative to demolition would have been turning the property into a museum.

He now questions both assumptions, arguing that preservation did not necessarily require the home to operate as a museum. He also says he has begun looking into whether the property could have qualified for historic designation and whether such a nomination was ever pursued.

“My father’s Mahwah home wasn’t simply an old house where a famous man once lived,” Gene said. “It was a place where Les Paul lived, worked, experimented and helped change the way the world makes and records music.”

Gene now describes the years of deterioration before the demolition as “demolition by neglect.”

For now, the video provides a record of what remained of the property shortly before it was demolished, while Gene Paul’s questions leave open a broader issue: whether Les Paul’s Mahwah home could have been preserved, and whether that possibility was ever seriously pursued.

Even the most celebrated, seemingly indomitable guitar players have influences; they have heroes they try to emulate. David Gilmour, a master craftsman of guitar solos, is no exception. In fact, following in the footsteps of one guitarist left him terrified.

Gilmour once said that he developed his “tuneful” approach to soloing after a reluctant acceptance that, try as he might, he would never be a shredder. It helped him weave into his own lane. But it wasn’t always like that.

In 1985, a decade after Pink Floyd were arguably at the height of their powers and had successfully followed up The Dark Side of the Moon with an album that exhausted Gilmour, he spoke to Guitar Classics. In the interview, he was asked to dissect his guitar-playing DNA.

“I was a blues fan, but I was an all-around music fan,” he explained of his early days (via Far Out). “For me, it was Lead Belly through B.B. King and later Eric Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen and anyone you care to mention.”

His influences were widespread, and he wasn’t closed off to newer players bringing fresh ideas to the table. In fact, he celebrated those innovators, adding: “Mark Knopfler has a lovely, refreshing guitar style. He brought back something that seemed to have gone astray in guitar playing.”

He tried to copy a number of those players, to extract knowledge from them. But for a man who has written more iconic solos than most, there was one player he held in even higher regard.

“I was trying to learn 12-string acoustic guitar like Lead Belly,” he says. “At the same time, I was trying to learn lead guitar like Hank Marvin and later Clapton. All of those different things had their moments and filtered through my learning process. These days I don’t listen to other people to steal their licks, although I’m sure Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen still influence me.”

As for the solo he wishes he wrote, he name-drops Peter Green’s cut on Fleetwood Mac’s 1968 instrumental track, “Albatross”. Years later, he was asked to cover the song at Mick Fleetwood & Friends’ tribute concert to Green, at London’s Palladium on February 20th, 2020. Green would die just months later.

Fleetwood had personally invited Gilmour to feature. It put the fear of God into him.

“He had so much reverence for Peter Green’s playing and who Peter was and the songs,” the drummer told Rolling Stone. “He initially got cold feet. He was like, ‘I don’t know if I can interpret Peter’s work. It’s so amazing. Maybe I can’t do that…At the moment, I’m sort of passing on the idea. But later on, if this happens, I may gather enough courage.’”

Gather the courage he did, but with a degree of separation between him and Green. He opted to play pedal steel, rather than electric guitar.

Yet the song proves the point that all guitarists have their muses. Green has said that “Albatross” was written in direct reference to two tracks: Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” and “The Last Meal”, a John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers track from Clapton’s revered era with the group. He had craved a bluesier take on Hawaiian-style playing, and the song stuck to Gilmour like glue.

Meanwhile, Gilmour has named this player as one every guitarist should study. He’s also confessed to never learning one of his most famous solos.

Eddie Van Halen’s arrival on the scene in the late 1970s bowled over a generation of guitar players and kickstarted a shred revolution. But it wasn’t just contemporary players left aghast; plenty of the old guard were won over, too.

Eric Clapton had a famous disagreement with the virtuoso regarding their definition of the blues. But ZZ Top’s bandleader, a perennial bridge between the classic bluesmanship of the three Kings and fresh, outside-the-box thinking, understood Van Halen’s mind-boggling approach from the start.

“I knew him well from the very first record,” Gibbons told Eddie Trunk shortly after his counterpart’s passing in 2020 (via Far Out). “And he was actually, as it came to pass, a neighbor, very close to the house back in Los Angeles.”

Naturally, it didn’t take long for the two players, who have made plenty of innovations on the electric guitar, to link up.

“I first heard the words, ‘Hey, man, there’s a guy that plays some interesting guitar riffs, maybe you should get together,’” he recalls, “only to discover that sitting in the record bin was the first Van Halen record. They had already picked up steam, and fortunately, I was able to go out and catch a live show, and that blew my mind. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, these guys have got it going on.’”

That was often people’s reaction when they first heard Van Halen play. Hearing “Eruption” for the first time was game changing for Alex Skolnick; Jerry Cantrell says EVH and Jimi Hendrix “tilted the world on its axis.” Joe Satriani, meanwhile, said that he “scared the hell out of a million guitarists because he was so damn good” (via BBC).

Gibbons was equally as moved.

“He was always ready to deliver,” he said. “Even [with] the most ferocious riffs and with that technique, it was really gratifying to be in front of a guy who genuinely appreciated and enjoyed every single moment.

“Eddie’s technical prowess is nearly unsurpassed,” he then said. “When it comes to hammer-ons, he’s one of the guys who not only did it best, but did it fast; he did it furiously.”

Two-handed tapping was, of course, Eddie Van Halen’s calling card. It’s a technique that would go on to dominate the next decade-plus of guitar music. It saw his left hand constantly hammering, and he has credited Jimmy Page for the inspiration.

Yet others have claimed they invented tapping first, with Harvey Mendal saying Eddie copied it from him. Rocky Athas and Brian May have also been mentioned. And while Joe Satriani once said he started tapping before hearing any of his soon-to-be-hero’s music, Gibbons was experiencing the exact stroke of fated luck.

“Eruption,” never intended as a solo, was released in 1978, after being recorded in September ’77. Five years earlier, Gibbons did a bit of tapping himself on the Tres Hombres cut “Beer Drinkers and Hellraisers.”

As it turns out, it came about spontaneously.

“Totally by accident,” Gibbons assured Guitar Player in February 2016. “As Frank Beard — our man with no beard — waited for the tape to roll, I was attempting to illustrate with Dusty [Hill, bass] the high note for the bass guitar track.

“I held the low fret down and tapped the high octave, and that did it. Dusty leaned back and said, ‘Man, do that and do it again!’”

He says he never fully incorporated it into the ZZ sound out of respect for Eddie’s legacy.

“Well, it’s still in the technique corral,” he said, nodding. “Van Halen made it a regular thing, and now it’s a genuine part of the player’s approach to shred. I dig it.”

For years, Dolly Parton knew which emotional song would be played in her memory when she passed away. But no matter how obvious a choice, it wasn’t her own.

Thinking ahead, she’d also prepared a song to be released on he 100th birthday in 2046, whether she was there for the centenary or not.

“I’m sure they’ll be playing ‘I Will Always Love You’ when I die, just like they did with Whitney Houston,” Parton told Entertainment Weekly in 2014 (via Billboard). She released the song in 1974, as a tribute to her music industry mentor Porter Wagoner as she moved on toward a solo career. Houston’s version also became a hit in 1992.

Parton recalled of Houston’s 2012 funeral: “When they picked her coffin up and started in on that song, I started to cry, and I thought, ‘Oh my Lord.’ That’s when it hit me that she was really gone.”

Nevertheless, Parton preferred a different song for her own memorial — and it’s not even one of her own. Instead, it’s an old gospel number.

“There’s a song called ‘If We Never Meet Again,’” she explained. “It’s an old country-gospel church song that talks about, ‘If we never meet again this side of Heaven, I will meet you on that beautiful shore: ‘Where the charming roses bloom forever and where separations come no more.’

“That was my daddy’s favorite. We did sing it at his funeral, and I would like it to be sung at mine.”

Parton, who died on August 25 at age 80 after a brief battle with cancer, spent some time thinking about her legacy, because in 2015 she prepared a song which isn’t to be released until her centennial year. It’s titled “My Place in History” and it’s locked in a time capsule, complete with a CD player in case the format has been lost to time by then.

The capsule can be seen at Dollywood's DreamMore Resort and Spa in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where it was placed on display when the establishment opened in 2015. In her 2020 memoir Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (via Mental Floss), she recalled being told she’d be “long dead” by the time the box was to be opened.

“I said, ‘Well, maybe not… I’ve seen people live to be older than that.’ It’s kind of weird or strange that they would ask me to write this mystery song. I don’t know if I want to live to be 100 or not. But you never know. I might, and if I do, I’m going to be at that opening.”

When Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded “Let It Be” for her 2023 album, Rockstar, it marked a historic meeting of English and Nashville music royalty.

“I just sent them a love note through their managers, and I just said what I was doing,” the late country icon told NPR in 2023. “And I said, ‘I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d love to have you sing with me on my rock album. And if you’re interested, call me at this number.’”

Dolly had already recorded “Let It Be” when she got the idea to contact Paul McCartney. “And so I contacted him. He was so gracious.

“And then I thought, Well, we got to have Ringo, because that’s the last of the Beatles. So I asked Ringo if he would do it. Same thing: ‘I’d be glad to do it.’”

The recording was another milestone in the career of Parton, the hit-making singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist, who turns 80 on January 19.

But it turns out she had already met both Beatles years earlier, in the 1970s. What’s more, each occasion had been memorable for reasons that had nothing to do with the Beatles.

Dolly met McCartney and his first wife, Linda, on June 16, 1974, backstage at Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee. Paul and Linda were in town with their family for a six-week stay, during which time they recorded a quartet of non-album singles with their group Wings, including the number three hit “Junior’s Farm.”

During their time in Nashville, the McCartneys decided to attend the Grand Masters Fiddling Contest taking place at Opryland. When intermission came, they were invited backstage, where they met Dolly and country star Porter Wagoner and were photographed by Jack Corn for a story in The Tennessean.

Coincidentally, the event was special for another reason: It marked the last appearance Dolly and Wagoner made together in the 1970s. They had teamed up as a duo in 1967, a few years after Dolly left behind her family and first Martin guitar and set off on a music career. She and Wagoner had performed their final concert as a duo one week before meeting the McCartneys, on June 9. (Their split was the impetus for her to write her hit “I Will Always Love You” as thanks to Wagoner for all he had done for her career.)

A few years and a cross-country journey later, Dolly met Ringo Starr courtesy of Ken Mansfield, the former U.S. manager of the Beatles’ Apple Records, as well as a Grammy Award–winning producer. The time was the late 1970s, and the place was Los Angeles, where Mansfield was luring Nashville stars in an attempt to break the rock-and-roll stronghold on clubs along the Sunset Strip. Waylon Jennings and Dolly were among the country artists who picked up their acoustic guitars and made the move west.

Several years before then, Starr had settled in Los Angeles, where he remained close with Mansfield. As a lifelong country music fan, the former Beatle was thrilled with the Nashville expatriates and spent one memorable evening watching Waylon Jennings perform and hanging out with him afterward.

It turned out Starr was eager to meet Dolly.

“He was very intrigued by Dolly’s career,” Mansfield wrote in his entertaining 2007 memoir, The White Book. Dolly was, he writes, “a giant Beatles fan and, knowing that I had worked with them, had jokingly mentioned that someday she would like to meet them, Ringo in particular.”

In short order, Mansfield arranged dinner at his home for a small group, including Dolly and Ringo. Neither knew the other would be there.

“Both invitees were thrilled at the surprise,” Mansfield wrote, “and the intimacy of the evening really made the whole thing very special.”

Special — but not eventful. That is, not until Mansfield’s friend Stewart Levine crashed the party. Levine was a producer of note, with clients who included Simply Red, B.B. King, Lionel Richie, Sly Stone, Patti LaBelle and Joe Cocker. He was also a huge Dolly Parton fan and was dying to meet her. Unfortunately, Mansfield insisted the guest list should be small, “to keep the focus on just Ringo and Dolly spending time together.”

Levine didn’t care. Shortly after dinner, he rang Mansfield’s doorbell. When the host answered the door, the producer muscled his way in, leading to a noisy confrontation.

As the men argued in the hallway, Dolly suddenly appeared. Seeing Levine, she stopped in her tracks and stared at him wide-eyed.

“After a very pregnant pause, Dolly began to speak and in a stuttering, shaky voice asked Stewart if he was Stewart Levine, the famous producer,” Mansfield wrote.

Struggling to comprehend what was happening, Levine mumbled “yes” as Dolly gazed lovingly at him.

“She continued to explain that in her lifetime she never expected that she would ever get the chance to be in the same room with Stewart Levine, let alone have the privilege of meeting him,” Mansfield wrote. “She went on further saying that she was a giant fan of his and had absolutely adored him from afar for quite a long time.

“She then delivered the fatal blow by announcing that she was going to have to leave the room for fear that she would no longer be able to contain herself and might jump his bones right in front of everyone,” Mansfield recalled.

“She made an abrupt about-face, as if fearful of being unable to control her emotions, and returned to the living room.”

The men stood speechless for a long while. Eventually they made their way to the living room where Dolly and the others were waiting. As they appeared, everyone burst into laughter.

It had all been a joke. Hearing the commotion after Levine forced his way in, Mansfield’s wife explained to Dolly that the producer was infatuated with her, and Dolly decided to have a little fun at his expense.

“I think Stewart was so stunned by what had gone down that he wasn't even the least bit disappointed that Dolly didn’t really have the hots for him,” Mansfield wrote.

Although Dolly had met her second Beatle that evening, she managed to make the night memorable for an entirely different reason.