Our search For the big beat led us to John Lee Hooker's house in Redwood City, California. At 72, Mr. Hooker can proudly look back on a career that began in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during the 1930s. Unlike his contemporaries Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, Hook didn't play roll-and-tumble Delta jukes, choosing instead to launch his career in Memphis, singing gospel and blues. He moved to Detroit after World War II to work by day in an auto plant and make the rounds of Black Bottom clubs by night.

Nineteen-forty-eight's "Boogie Chillen'," his first R&B hit, inaugurated the most prolific recording career in postwar blues history. (It's estimated that between 1949 and '53 alone, Hooker cut some 70 singles on 24 different labels, using a dozen different names to avoid contractual problems.) Other big R&B hits followed: "Crawlin' King Snake" in '49, "I'm in the Mood" in '51 and "Dimples" in '56.

Hooker made his first foray into Europe in '62 and returned to find that "Boom Boom" had become his first crossover hit. Covers by the Animals and other British Invasion bands helped him win white audiences at home. Since then, Mr. Hooker has moved to California, recorded armloads of albums, and associated with some of the most respected names in rock and blues.

As it was in the beginning, so it is today: The very heartbeat of John Lee Hooker's music remains his unique songwriting, powerful voice and down-home, propulsive guitar. Like Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, and very few others, he remains a musical law unto himself, still specializing in the sparse blues and infectious boogies that first rocked the globe more than 40 years ago. As Miles Davis expressed it after a 1990 session, "John Lee, you the funkiest man alive. You sound like you buried up to your neck in mud!"

Mr. Hooker received us graciously, sat us on his couch and tuned his electric guitar to open A. He quickly launched into an instrumental version of "Boogie Chillen'," each foot tapping to a different beat.

Watching you play "Boogie Chillen’” close up, it seems like what you're doing is very simple, and yet it's very difficult for others to get it right.

For me, it's simple, but.... [laughs]

That was one of the first songs you recorded.

Uh-huh.

Did you write it when you were a young man in Mississippi?

[nods]

How are you counting time with your feet?

[laughs] I couldn't tell you. It just boogie. Just go on with it. I don't need drums.

You often played that way in Detroit, using your feet instead of a rhythm section.

Yeah. That first come from my stepfather, Will Moore, from whom I learnt to play when I was 13. John Hammond do it too.

Do you usually keep your guitars tuned to a chord?

Not really. But I use open tuning. "Boogie Chillen'," that's in open A. For "Boom Boom," I got to rekey [retune] it. [Rich Kirch, John's backup guitarist, details: "John plays almost everything in open E, except to boogie, when he usually tunes three strings up so he's in open A.]

What do you look for in a tone?

I look for a deep, gutty feelin'. I don't use picks, so I can get that deep gut feelin'. People ask, "How you get that?" It's just there. There's a lot of people try to play real fast chords — do do do do da — that's not the blues. It's synthetic. It ain't the hard, solid blues. It's a lot of speed and everything. It's got no feeling to it. You sit down and play some [whispers] funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don't rush it. Just let it come flowin' through you. I can play guitar so funky until it bring teardrops to your eyes. It got that funky funky tone. I'm just me.

While most musicians stick to 12-bar blues, you seldom follow that format.

That's for the birds. People just feel — that's the way the blues supposed to be played. The way you feel those notes or scales. Shut your eyes, and then you'll know what you're doing. I know what notes to hit. I know what notes not to hit.

I can do a 12-bar perfect— perfect. Oh, yeah. If I did then, I wouldn't be known for John Lee Hooker. See, I'm known for not doing it. When I'm just playing to myself I do it: 8, 12, 4, 16, 24. But ordinarily I don't do it, because it would take away a lot of my feelin'.

You cannot learn this in a book. You feel it here [points to heart and head], not by what you got writing on a piece of paper. Throw that paper away! When I walk into a studio, I don't need all that stuff. I can go into a studio and in two hours' time I can record five or six songs. Sometimes it take some people three or four weeks to record one or two songs!

Sometimes it takes a band years to make one album.

[laughs] Yeah! It do! I can make 10 albums in a year, and they come out perfect too.

Can you make up songs on the spot?

Yeah. They're on the spot. I get that good feelin'. But one thing I don't like — what really bugs me — is anybody tellin' me how to play. What to do and how to do. Don't do that.

Has that been a problem on your recent Chameleon and Charisma albums, since so many of the songs feature guest bands? When you recorded with Santana, for instance, you were working in a pretty straight format.

Heavy duty. We get together on it. They know how I do it. With "The Healer" we did two takes—it come out perfect. "Stripped Me Naked." [laughs]

What were you thinking when you wrote that?

Well, I got stripped naked once. She took the house, the Cadillac. And the money in the bank—she took that too.

Did Carlos come to you with the music for that song?

He come to the house, and we set around. Like, he talked and we go with things. Just me and him. I go to his house, we lay the foundation, and then he pass it on to the guys. And it come out perfect every time. "Stripped Me Naked," that took just about two takes.

Have your recent albums had a big impact on your career?

Very, very big impact, because it was all-stars. But this one I got comin' out now, I'm not gonna have all-star everyone — just me and my band and some local people. Carlos will probably be on it. We already got a thing called "Chill Out" on the shelf, so we'll probably use that.

I'm in the studio now workin', gettin' some pretty good stuff. A lot of the stuff I did a long, long time ago, which is new to the kids now. Some of my classic stuff, but the kids never heard it, so I'm doing it over. I always did want to do it that way. Now that I got a chance, I'm gonna do a lot of it all over, like "Sugar Mama," "Boom Boom," "Dimples."

Those songs turned a generation of kids on to your music during the 1960s.

That "Boom Boom," that "Dimples" — turned a whole generation. It went to Europe and told Europe, and then come back here and turned the whole universe on. Then different artists took to doing that song, "Boom Boom" — Bruce Springsteen, all them. Big Joe Turner, he was do" Dimples."

Is it a compliment when people by to play like you?

Yeah, it is. Because I know I'm doing something to be loved. If he didn't like it, he wouldn't try to do it! So it's very complimentary to me.

Some guys feel very protective . . .

Not me. I love people that do my stuff. Robert Plant, he did "Dimples." He sing it all the time. He's one of my favorite people. Nice guy. Every time he come over, he try to look me up. He flew me out to New York once to meet him. Paid for my hotel and everything. Had a lady with him called Big Maggie Bell, from Scotland. Met her.

But my hero is Bonnie. Me and her just like this [holds two fingers together] I guess you know that. We real close. I've known Bonnie Raitt over the years, and I'm a guest on her tour in L.A.

A lot of your old material has recently come out on CD.

Yeah, you know they comin' out now because we're doin' big things. They just throwin' out everything now—boom. Rhino Records did one.

That has many great tracks, but it's missing "Mad Man Blues."

Yeah. Ohhh, I love the "Mad Man Blues." [Claps time and sings "I love the Mad Man Blues" and "I'm gonna kill somebody" to the original melody.]

Do you play blues when you're alone?

Yeah, around the house I do. Yeah. Sit down in my room and just go with things I want to do, some of that old stuff that I'm trying to revive again and bring back.

Do you work on your own guitars?

No. The little light stuff I do, like adjusting the bridges and raising the saddles. You get beyond that, no.

Why do you play semi-hollowbody guitars?

Well, I like 'em. You got to do that now because the generations come and go, and the young generation, they like to dance and they want it loud. But you still can make it funky loud.

You could play a Fender

I could, but I don't want to. I'm plainspoken, and I don't want that. This is what I like. You don't got to bring me around the bridge. This is what I like — boom. I like the tone. I always did like Gibson. Even the old style, I did.

Why do you have a guitar with B.B. King's name on it?

I saw it, and I went and bought it. He's a old buddy of mine. I said [to the salesman], "Give me that one." He give me a price — he said, "It's a lot of money" I said, "I don't care! Just give it to me." He said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm John Lee." He said, "Oooh," and he come down on the price when he found out who I was. I was signing stuff in his store.

What's the greatest amplifier?

I know who got the greatest name — Fender. I got one sittin' right there [points to an old Concert]. I got another one back there, man, a Bedrock — boy, that thing is powerful! Whoo. It's not famous, but oh, it's powerful.

But Fender is a brand name, and it's the name that sells, and that's what people go for. How do you set the amp controls? Different songs, different settings. I don't like it real sharp. I like it kind of medium. Not too much bass, not too much sharp. I get different settings.

Do you like reverb?

Not really. On some of my new stuff I did. About two weeks ago, I got reverb on a couple of my really funky tunes, like "Sugar Mama." Carlos Santana says a man's tone is his face. He know. Albert Collins' tone, for instance, is spiky and sharp. It is. Oh, it's a thousand miles apart from mine. It's good, but it's his thing. You talkin' in a different world.

Do you like B.B.'s tone?

Whoo! Yeah! Are you kiddin’? Oh, yeah. My old buddy. And Albert King is funky. That old man is funky! He put that pipe in his mouth and rear his head back. He's a good man, and he gonna do things his way or no way! [laughs] He be workin' on his own bus right now.

You've used some of the same backup musicians for many years now.

Oh, yeah. My guitar player Rich is nice, nice. Whoo, he's a good guy! Boy, that guy loves me and I love him. I'm the one that brought him to California. He'd been in Chicago all his life. I been knowin' him about 12 years along. I got the guy a ticket, brought him out — he been with me ever since. I talk to him every day. He's a heck of a nice guy and good guitar player. Jim Gayette — oh, he is funky! He's a funky bass player, and funny too. He keep the band laughin' all night.

When you were starting out, would you play for a long time at night?

Before I become famous? When I was a kid? If my parents would let me I would. You hear about guys playing in Delta juke joints from nightfall until morning. No, I didn't do that. No. I would've, but I didn't. [laughs]

What was Hastings Street like when you first came to Detroit?

That was the best street in town. Everything you wanted was right there. Everything you didn't want was right there. It ain't no more now. It's a freeway now, called Chrysler Freeway. But that was a good street, a street known all over the world.

But I didn't just play on Hastings — I'd play any club on Russell, Chene, Jefferson. In them days, I was so into my music, but I had to work to survive. I was a janitor [in the Ford Rouge plant]. I pushed a broom.

What do you remember of your sessions at United Sound Studio in Detroit?

On West Grand Boulevard and Second? Still there. I would always use my amp, just plug into my old funky amps. It was Ampeg or a Silvertone.

Was your first electric guitar the Les Paul you're seen with in some of the early pictures?

Really, it was. Really good one. Before that I had some round-hole pickups [for amplifying an acoustic guitar]. No, T-Bone Walker give me my first electric guitar. Then I thought that was the best I ever seen. It was a Epiphone [archtop].

Did you use an acoustic for early sides like “Mad Man Blues"?

Yeah, that's acoustic. I had an old Stella with a pickup called DeArmond, and it fit across the round hole. You slide it in. I thought at that time it was a great, great sound.

Was Newport '63 your first big concert?

Never been so scared! My first big concert, yeah. Couldn't get my body to stop shaking!

You appeared with Muddy Waters there.

Yeah. I was good friends with Muddy.

Do you have any favorite memories of him?

Yeah, I do. I got so many I couldn't tell 'em all. He'd come to Detroit, he used to stay at my house. I had a big house in Detroit. Matter of fact, I own property there now. He never would stay in a hotel. Him and Jenny, his wife, would stay at my house. Little Walter would be with him. He was a sideman then, one of the greatest harmonica players ever lived. I think so. We would go on tour together sometimes, me and him and Little Walter,

Jimmy Rogers. Remember Jimmy Rogers? He had this old Oldsmobile, brand-new. And Little Walter was crazy, and he used to drive. Speedin' in it. He'd be boogeyinl And he'd be laughing 'cause I'd be nervous. Just a lot of good remembrances. Things I cannot ever forget. Muddy was a really good man. And he was just beginnin' to come into it really on, like I am now. Just beginnin' to climb up the ladder really high.

His last four albums were terrific.

They was. He was beginnin' to climb up to the top, and it's a hard climb. But, you know, you get there somehow. Some get there and some don't. I be one of the few giants at the top of the ladder. In my travelin' and living in God's world, I love people. My heart go out for people. I'm just a softie. I just give my heart to people, and how can I say no to the people that I know I should? I don't like hurting people.

We all like money, don't get me wrong, but it's not the greatest thing in the world, but we have to have it. Friendship, love, peace of mind, and health is the greatest thing in the world. You have to have money to survive, but — and a lot of us do — we can't let money get in the way of friendship and love and the people that put you where you at today. People put me where I'm at today. Weren't for those people, John Lee wouldn't be sittin' on top of the ladder. I'd be sitting down below.

And who put me there? The workin' people, the poor people go out and work five or six days a week, and come out to see me and go out and buy my albums, and stuff like that. Young kids. Old people. Them the people that got me there. Some stars seem to forget — well, they don't forget, but when you get to the high, they say you forget the people that blazed the path for them, the people that put them there. Wasn't no people, you wouldn't be there.

So them the people I love. I love to go in them little small clubs, funky bars, get up there singing. I walk into a lot of little clubs, and they surprised to see me in there. Say, "What're you doing in here?" And I say "I'm just like you. I'm here to have some fun and get down with you." I don't think about I'm a big star, or I got money. I don't think about that. I'm out there at a place I like, get down and have a beer with you. I don't look at me being a big star. I really don't. I really don't.

Did you ever see Elmore James?

Once. I was in Chicago. I went to the hotel where we sit there and talk. He was a nice man. A lot of people copied him too. Lot of people.

Out of the younger generation of the blues singers, who was my pride and joy? Stevie Ray. I know that kid — I used to go around Austin, Texas, before didn't anybody know about Stevie Ray and Jimmie [Vaughan]. Every time I go there, he sit in and play. We used to talk. He used to come to the dressing room, come to my hotel room. Those days he used to wear a cap. To me, he was one of the greatest young blues singers. He could do anybody, probably — Albert King, Jimi Hendrix — do anybody's thing.

George Benson. He played jazz. I sit down and watch him do that. He had his own style — he did, definitely — but he could play anything else anybody could play. He'd say, "I'm gonna play you now," and he play me. And if he can play me, he can play anybody!

Who's come closest to playing like you?

Let's see. Eddie Taylor is real close. He can do it. Buddy Guy pretty close. He can play "Boogie Chillen" real good. He plays it on every show. Buddy Guy is playin' so well, and I'm so happy for him. He gettin' a lot of recognition that he should have had a long time ago, like us all should have got. He's such a beautiful person.

Do you admire John Hammond's playing?

Whoo! Who don't? Me and him together over the years a lot too. Now, he can play like me! [laughs] Yeah, he can. He say, "I'm gonna play like you now, just like you," and then he goes to playin' it and starts laughin’. I say, "If you was outside and you walkin' up, you think it's me in here playin'." He's a really nice gentleman. He's another easygoing person too. He love people. He's a softie. He talk to me about it a lot. We sit down together [imitates Hammond's voice]: "John, you know, you love people. We let 'em get away with things we shouldn't, but we don't want to hurt them." That's the way he talk. I said, "They think John Lee don't know any better, but I do. I just love people." You help people. You take 'em in. It all come back to you.

Perhaps the measure of a truly great man is how he treats people day in and day out.

Right! The little things in life, the love. I always believe in "it comes back to you if you do something good." I was taught that, and I think it do too. You do good deeds, somewhere in life it's gonna come back. You can do wrong so long, you gonna get it in some kind of way. That's my belief.

So I'm happy with my life. I had a good life, and I had a rough life — I've had both. I don't try to live in the past. I can't bring back those little things. I can't change the rough things that come through, so I look for the future. You can't live in the past — a lot of people try to live in a memory I live for today and for people today. This is a different world. This world changes all the time.

Richie Sambora, to the more casual listener, may be known as the Talk Box guy behind Bon Jovi’s mega-hit-cum-wedding-party-anthem Livin' on a Prayer, but beyond that is a deep-set love for the blues. 

He started playing guitar at 12, idolizing the likes of B.B. King, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton. Later on in life, they'd become far more than heroes. 

He'd go on to enjoy a strong relationship with King; Jimmy Page signed his early band, Mercy, to Led Zeppelin's Swan Song record label; and in 1995, Eric Clapton, ordered him to join a dream jam session at the Roxy. There was no asking. 

Speaking in the latest issue of Guitar Player, Sambora charts his career with candid anecdotes about life after Bon Jovi. More importantly, he also discussed being accepted by the blues community, and the moment Slowhand delivered a poetic full-circle moment to him. 

“In 1991, when I was finishing up Strange in This Town, I wrote a song, Mr. Bluesman, about a young man like me following blues guys around,” he remembers. “I asked Eric if he would play on it, and he obliged. 

“One day [in March, 1995] he called me and said, 'Richard, this is Eric...' I'm like [drops his mouth in amazement] because I'm still crazy and starstruck. He says 'Buddy, George [Harrison] and I are playing the Roxy tonight. You're going to come and jam.' 

“I'm like 'No, I'm watching the fucking Price Is Right, Eric?! … I will be there, I promise you!' Meanwhile, I'm shitting my pants.” 

Strangely, Harrison “didn’t show up”, with John Lee Hooker present instead, perhaps as a last-minute replacement as one of many legendary names in Clapton’s address book. 

“I played every lick I knew about three times faster – whatever I had to do to get through the whole thing,” Sambora continues. “Buddy's like 'Come on, come on!' and Eric's just laughing. 

“We blew the roof off the place, and we were backstage at the end. Hooker looked at me and said, 'Hey boy, was that you playing them strings up there?... You keep playing. You're good.' I got on my knees and kissed his hand.” 

It’s no doubt a moment that lives rent-free in Sambora’s mind. As he goes on to say, his own address book started filling out, and idols turned into peers and mentors.   

“Every time Buddy was around or I was anywhere near the vicinity,” he concludes, “we'd just call each other. B.B. was the same way. I was accepted by the blues community. But I did the work, man. I did the stuff. I played blues clubs for a reason and I loved every second of it.” 

Sambora released four new singles in 2024, his first new solo music since 2012’s Aftermath of the Lowdown. 

I Pray, Livin' Alone, Songs That Wrote My Life, and Believe (In Miracles) were released across consecutive weeks in April and May.   

Sambora left Bon Jovi in 2016 to have more time to spend with his family. You can read about his recent reflections on his departure from the band here.  

Head to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar Player, which includes the full interview with Sambora, alongside discussions with John Fogerty, Sue Foley, Thorn Florentine Empirial. 

This interview originally appeared in the August 1992 issue of Guitar Player.

"Ain't a lot of chords to it
It's just a big beat
And I sound just like a whole band
Now you dig it, and dig my feets."
– John Lee Hooker's "Teachin' the Blues," 1961

Our search for the big beat led us to John Lee Hooker's house in Redwood City, California. At 72, Hooker can proudly look back on a career that began in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during the 1930s. Unlike his contemporaries Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, Hooker didn't play roll-and-tumble Delta jukes, choosing instead to launch his career in Memphis, singing gospel and blues.

He moved to Detroit after World War II to work by day in an auto plant and make the rounds of Black Bottom clubs by night. 1948's “Boogie Chillen',” his first R&B hit, inaugurated the most prolific recording career in postwar history (It's estimated that between 1949 and 1953 alone, Hooker cut some 70 singles on 24 different labels, using a dozen different names to avoid contractual problems). 

Other big R&B hits followed: “Crawlin' King Snake” in '49, “I'm in the Mood” in '51, and “Dimples” in '56. Hooker made his first foray into Europe in '62 and returned to find that “Boom Boom” had become his first crossover hit. 

Covers by the Animals and other British Invasion bands helped him win white audiences at home. Since then, Hooker has moved to California, recorded armloads of albums, and associated with some of the most respected names in rock and blues.

As it was in the beginning, so it is today: The very heartbeat of John Lee Hooker's music remains his unique songwriting, powerful voice, and down-home propulsive guitar. 

Like Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, and very few others, he remains a musical law unto himself, still specializing in the sparse blues and infectious boogies that first rocked the globe more than 40 years ago. As Miles Davis expressed it after a 1990 session, “John Lee, you the funkiest man alive. You sound like you buried up to your neck in mud!”

Mr. Hooker received us graciously, sat us on his couch, and tuned his electric guitar to open A. He quickly launched into an instrumental version of “Boogie Chillen',” each foot tapping to a different beat.

Watching you play “Boogie Chillen'” close up, it seems like what you're doing is very simple, and yet it's very difficult for others to get it right.

“For me, it's simple, but... [laughs].”

That was one of the first songs you recorded.

“Uh-huh.”

Did you write it when you were a young man in Mississippi?

[Nods yes].

How are you counting time with your feet?

“I couldn't tell you. It's just boogie. Just go on with it. I don't need drums.”

You often played that way in Detroit, using your feet instead of a rhythm section.

“Yeah. That first came from my stepfather, Will Moore, from whom I learned to play when I was 13. John Hammond does it too.” 

Do you usually keep your guitars tuned to a chord?

“Not really. But I use open tunings. 'Boogie Chillen',' that's in open A. For 'Boom Boom,' I've got to retune it.” [Ed. Note: Rich Kirch, John's backup guitarist, details: "John plays almost everything in open E, except for 'Boogie' – for that he usually tunes three strings up so he's in open A."] 

What do you look for in a tone?

“I look for a deep, gutty feeling. I don't use picks, so I can get that deep gut feeling. People ask, 'How do you get that?' It's just there. A lot of people try to play real fast chords – da da da da da – that's not the blues. It's synthetic. It ain't the hard, solid blues. It's a lot of speed and everything. It has no feeling to it. 

“You've got to sit down and play some [whispers] funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don't rush it. Just let it come flowing through you. I can play guitar so funky, until it brings teardrops to your eyes. It has that funky, funky tone. I'm just me.”

While most musicians stick to 12-bar blues, you seldom follow that format.

“That's for the birds. People just feel – that's the way the blues is supposed to be played. Shut your eyes, and then you'll know what you're doing. I know what notes to hit. I know what notes not to hit. I can do a 12-bar perfect – perfect. Oh, yeah. If I did, then I wouldn't be John Lee Hooker. See, I'm known for not doing it. When I'm just playing to myself I do it – 8, 12, 4, 16, 24. But ordinarily I don't do it, because it would take away a lot of my feeling. 

“You cannot learn this in a book. You feel it here [points to his heart and head], not by writing on a piece of paper. Throw that paper away! When I walk into a studio, I don't need all that stuff. I can go into a studio and in two hours' time I can record five or six songs. Sometimes it take some people three or four weeks to record one or two songs!”

Sometimes it takes a band years to make one album.

“Yeah, It does! I can make ten albums in a year, and they all come out perfect, too.”

Can you make up songs on the spot?

“Yeah. They're on the spot. I get that good feeling. But one thing I don't like – what really bugs me – is anybody telling me how to play, what to do and how to do it. Don't do that.”

Has that been a problem on your recent Chameleon and Charisma albums, since so many of the songs feature guest bands? When you recorded with Santana, for instance, you were working in a pretty straight format.

“Heavy duty. We get together on it. They know how I do it. With 'The Healer,' we did two takes – it came out perfect. 'Stripped Me Naked' [laughs].” 

What were you thinking when you wrote that?

“Well, I got stripped naked once. She took the house, the Cadillac. And the money in the bank – she took that too.”

Did Carlos come to you with the music for that song?

“He came to the house, and we sat around. Like, he talked and we would just go with things. Just me and him. I'd go to his house, we'd lay the foundation, and then he'd pass it on to the guys. And it comes out perfect every time. 'Stripped Me Naked,' that took just about two takes.”

Have your recent albums had a big impact on your career?

“Very, very big impact, because they were all-stars. But this one I got coming out now, I'm not going to have all-star everyone – just me and my band and some local people. Carlos will probably be on it. We already got a thing called 'Chill Out' on the shelf, so we'll probably use that. 

“I'm in the studio now working, getting some pretty good stuff. A lot of the stuff I did a long, long time ago, which is new to the kids now – some of my classic stuff. But the kids never heard it, so I'm doing it over. I always did want to do it that way. Now that I got a chance, I'm going to do a lot of it all over, like 'Sugar Mama,' 'Boom Boom,' and 'Dimples.'”

Those songs turned a generation of kids on to your music during the 1960s.

“That 'Boom Boom,' that 'Dimples' – turned a whole generation. It went to Europe, and then come back here and turned the whole universe on. Then different artists took to doing that song, 'Boom Boom' – Bruce Springsteen, all them. Big Joe Turner, he was doing 'Dimples'.”

Is it a compliment when people try to play like you?

“Yeah, it is. Because I know I'm doing something to be loved. If he didn't like it, he wouldn't try to do it! So it's very complimentary to me.”

Some guys feel very protective...

“Not me. I love people that do my stuff. Robert Plant, he did 'Dimples'. He sings it all the time. He's one of my favorite people. Nice guy. Every time he comes over, he tries to look me up. 

“He flew me out to New York once to meet him, paid for my hotel and everything. Had a lady with him called Big Maggie Bell from Scotland. Met her. But my hero is Bonnie Raitt. Me and her are just like this [holds two fingers together]. I guess you know that. We're real close. I've known Bonnie over the years, and I'm a guest on her tour in LA.”

A lot of your old material has recently come out on CD.

“Yeah. You know they're coming out now because we're doing big things. They're just throwing out everything now – boom. Rhino Records did one.”

That has many great tracks, but it's missing “Mad Man Blues.”

“Yeah. Oh, I love the 'Mad Man Blues'.” [Claps time and sings 'I love the Mad Man Blues' and 'I'm Gonna Kill That Woman' to the original melody].

Do you play blues when you're alone?

“Yeah, around the house I do. Yeah, I sit down in my room and just go with things I want to do, some of that old stuff that I'm trying to revive again and bring back.”

Do you work on your own guitars?

“No. The little light stuff I do, like adjusting the bridges and raising the saddles. You get beyond that, no.” 

Why do you play semi-hollow guitars?

“Well, I like 'em. You've got to do that now because the generations come and go, and the young generation, they like to dance and they want it loud. But you still can make funky loud.”

You could play a Fender.

“I could, but I don't want to. I'm plainspoken and I don't want that. This is what I like. You don't have to bring me around the bridge. This is what I like – boom. I like the tone. I always did like Gibson. Even the old-style ones.”

Why do you have a guitar with B.B. King's name on it?

“I saw it and I went and bought it. He's an old buddy of mine. I said [to the salesman] 'Give me that one.' He gave me the price – he said, 'It's a lot of money.' I said, 'I don't care. Just give it to me.' He said, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm John Lee.' He said, 'Oooh,' and he came down on the price when he found out who I was. I was signing stuff in his store.”

What's the greatest amplifier?

“I know who's got the greatest name – Fender. I've got one sitting right there [points to an old Concert]. I've got another one back there, man, a Bedrock – boy, that thing is powerful! Whoo. It's not famous, but oh, it's powerful. But Fender is a brand name, and it's the name that sells, and it's what people go for.”

How do you set the amp controls?

“Different songs, different settings. I don't like it real sharp. I like it kind of medium. Not too much bass, not too much sharp.”

Do you like reverb?

“Not really. On some of my new stuff I did. About two weeks ago, I put reverb on a couple of my really funky tunes, like 'Sugar Mama.'”

Carlos Santana says a man's tone is his face.

“He knows.”

Albert Collins' tone, for instance, is spiky and sharp...

“It is. Oh, it's a thousand miles apart from mine. It's good, but it's his thing. You're talking a different world.”

Do you like B.B.'s tone?

“Whoo, Yeah! Are you kidding? Oh, yeah. My old buddy. And Albert King is funky! He puts that pipe in his mouth and rears his head back. He's a good man, and he's going to do things his way or no way! [Laughs] He's working on his own bus right now.”

You've used some of the same backup musicians for many years now.

“Oh yeah. My guitar player Rich is nice, nice. He's a good guy! Boy, that guy loves me and I love him. I'm the one that brought him to California. He'd been in Chicago all his life. 

“I've known him about 12 years. I got the guy a ticket, brought him out – he's been with me ever since. I talk to him every day. He's a heck of a nice guy and a good guitar player. Jim Gayette – oh he is funky! He's a funky bass player, and funny too. He keeps the band laughing all night.”

When you were starting out, would you play for a long time at night?

“Before I became famous? When I was a kid? If my parents would let me I would.”

You hear about guys playing in Delta juke joints from nightfall until morning...

“No, I didn't do that, no. I would've, but I didn't [Laughs].”

What was Hastings Street like when you first came to Detroit?

“That was the best street in town. Everything you wanted was right there. Everything you didn't want was right there. It ain't no more now. It's a freeway now – Chrysler Freeway. But that was a good street, a street known all over the world. But I didn't just play on Hastings – I'd play any club on Russell, Chene, Jefferson... In those days, I was so into my music, but I had to work to survive. I was a janitor – I pushed a broom.”

What do you remember of your sessions at United Sound Studio in Detroit?

“On West Grand Boulevard and Second? Still there. I would always use my amp, just plug into my old funky amps – an Ampeg or a Silvertone.”

Was your first electric guitar the Les Paul you're seen with in some of the early pictures?

“It was. Really good one. Before that I had some round-hole pickups [for amplifying an acoustic guitar]. No, T-Bone Walker gave me my first electric guitar. Then I thought that was the best I ever seen. It was an Epiphone archtop.”

Did you use an acoustic for early sides like “Mad Man Blues”?

“Yeah, that's acoustic. I had an old Stella with a pickup called DeArmond, and it fit across the soundhole. You slide it in. I thought at that time it was a great, great sound.”

Was Newport '63 your first big concert?

“Never been so scared! My first big concert, yeah. Couldn't get my body to stop shaking!”

You appeared with Muddy Waters there.

“Yeah. I was good friends with Muddy.”

Do you have any favorite memories of him?

“Yeah, I do. I've got so many I couldn't tell 'em all. He'd come to Detroit, he used to stay at my house. I had a big house in Detroit. Matter of fact, I own property there now. He never would stay in a hotel. Him and Jenny, his wife, would stay at my house. Little Walter would be with him. He was a sideman then, one of the greatest harmonica players ever lived. 

“We would go on tour together sometimes, me and him and Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers. Remember Jimmy Rogers? He had this old Oldsmobile, brand-new. And Little Walter was crazy, and he used to drive. Speeding in it. And he'd be laughing because I'd be nervous. Just a lot of good memories, things I cannot ever forget. Muddy was a really good man. And he was just beginning to come into it, like I am now. Just beginning to climb up the ladder really high.”

His last four albums were terrific.

“They were. He was beginning to climb up to the top, and it's a hard climb. But, you know, you get there somehow. Some get there and some don't. I'm one of the few giants at the top of the ladder. In my traveling and living in God's world, I love people. My heart go out for people. I'm just a softy. I just give my heart to people, and how can I say no to the people that I know I should? I don't like hurting people.

“We all like money, don't get me wrong, but it's not the greatest thing in the world, though we have to have it. Friendship, love, peace of mind, and health are the greatest things in the world. You have to have money to survive, but – and a lot of us do – we can't let money get in the way of friendship and love and the people that put you where you are. People put me where I'm at today. If it weren't for those people, John Lee wouldn't be sitting on top of the ladder – I'd be sitting down below.

“And who put me there? The working people – people go out and work five or six days a week, and come out to see me and buy my albums, and stuff like that. Young kids. Old people. They're the people that got me there. Some stars seem to forget the people that blazed the path for them, the people that put them there. If there wasn't any people, you wouldn't be there. 

“I love to go into little clubs, funky bars, and get up there singing. I walk into a lot of little clubs, and they're surprised to see me in there. They say, 'What're you doing in here?' And I say, 'I'm just like you. I'm here to have some fun and get down with you.' I don't think about the fact that I'm a big star, or that I have money. I don't think about that. I'm out there at a place where I like to get down and have a beer with you. I don't look at myself as a big star. I really don't.”

Who were some of the other bluesmen that you enjoyed playing with?

“There are so many of them. You sure got me on the spot there. But really I enjoyed playing with Muddy when we did the Whiskey A Go-Go – me, Otis Spann, and Muddy Waters. Oh, so many it's hard to say.”

What's your opinion of Otis Spann?

“One of the greatest blues piano players ever. And a good man too. Loyal, friendly, no ego, no nothing. Just a perfect gentleman.”

Who would you consider the great slide players?

“Well, I would say Ry Cooder. He's one of the greatest. I had a cousin, he's gone now, but he was pretty great – Earl Hooker. He was a monster. Nobody could beat him. I got some of his stuff here now, man. We used to work together a lot over the years. Boy, he used to make a wah-wah talk and slide along with it. I've got that album here now, with Fred Below on drums. It's real funky.”

Have you ever played slide guitar?

“I have messed around with it. I could play slide, but I wouldn't be very good. I used to play a little harmonica and drums.”

Did you ever see Elmore James?

“Once, in Chicago. I went to his hotel where we sat and talked. He was a nice man. A lot of people copied him too, a lot of people.

Who is your favorite younger blues singer?

“Out of the younger generation of the blues singers, who was my pride and joy? Stevie Ray. I know that kid – I used to go around Austin, Texas, before anybody knew about Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan. Every time I go there, he sits in and plays. 

“We used to talk. He used to come to the dressing room, come to my hotel room. To me, he was one of the greatest young blues singers. He could do anybody – Albert King, Jimi Hendrix, George Benson – anybody's thing. I'd sit down and watch him do that. He had his own style – he did, definitely – but he could play anything else anybody could play. He'd say, 'I'm gonna play you now,' and he play me. And if he can play me, he can play anybody!”

Who's come closest to playing like you?

“Let's see. Eddie Taylor is real close. He can do it. Buddy Guy can get pretty close. He can play 'Boogie Chillen'" real good. He plays it on every show. Buddy Guy is playing so well, and I'm so happy for him. He getting a lot of recognition that he should have had a long time ago, like us all of us should have gotten. He's such a beautiful person.”

Do you admire John Hammond's playing?

“Who doesn't? We've been together a lot over the years too. Now, he can play like me! [Laughs] Yeah, he can. He'll say, 'I'm gonna play like you now, just like you,' and then he plays it and starts laughing. I say, 'If someone was outside and walking up, they'd think it's me in here playing.' 

“He's really a nice gentleman, an easygoing person too. He loves people. He talks to me about it a lot. We sit down together [imitates John Hammond's voice]: 'John, you know, you love people. We let them get away with things we shouldn't, but we don't want to hurt them.' That's the way he talks. I said, 'They think John Lee don't know any better, but I do.' You help people, you take them in. It all come back to you.”

Perhaps the measure of a truly great man is how he treats people day in and day out.

“Right! The little things in life, the love. I always believe in 'it comes back to you if you do something good.' I was taught that, and I think it does. You do good deeds, somewhere in life it's going to come back. You can only do wrong so long before you get it in some kind of way. That's my belief. 

“So, I'm happy with my life. I had a good life, and I had a rough life – I've had both. I don't try to live in the past. I can't bring back those little things. I can't change the rough things that come through, so I look for the future. You can't live in the past – a lot of people try to live in a memory. I live for today and for people today.”

Born in Louisiana in 1936, it was in Baton Rouge during the mid-1950s where Buddy Guy got his indoctrination into the moves that were part and parcel of many blues guitarists’ stage acts.

“I saw T-Bone [Walker], and he played his guitar, like, flat out in front of him, but I don’t remember him putting it behind his head,” Guy recalls.

“Guitar Slim, now, he was wild. The first time I saw him, he had this big repertoire of things he used to do. In Baton Rouge, when I first saw him, I heard an electric guitar, but there was no one playing. And I was saying, ‘What the hell is this?’ All of a sudden, he walks in the door on someone else’s back, with a red suit on, playing ‘I Got Something for You,’ with a 100-foot cord that had been extended outside the club!

“His band was Ray Charles’ band from before Ray got famous. I saw that and said, ‘Well, if I ever learn how to play, I wanna play like B.B. King – but I want to act like Guitar Slim.”

Meeting Muddy Waters

However, it was not a confident Guy who arrived in the Windy City on September 25, 1957. “I didn’t think I was good enough for anything, especially when I got to Chicago and saw the Muddys and the Wolfs and all those guitar players,” Guy says.

One of his early breaks in Chicago was playing with Otis Rush at the 708 Club on East 47th Street. “I went up and played Guitar Slim stuff that I used to do, and a number by Jimmy Reed. Muddy [Waters] was living about four blocks away and somebody called and told him I sounded pretty good, and he decided to come by and see for himself.

“Muddy had a red Chevrolet station wagon. I came out of the club and could hear it rolling up. He took me out and bought me a bologna sandwich. He said, ‘I heard you were telling people you’re hungry.’ And I was! I hadn’t eaten in three days, but nobody believed me because of how I played the guitar. They said, ‘You can’t be hungry and play like that!’ So I got fed by the Mud.”

Guy embraced every opportunity to be nourished by Waters, musically as well. “I didn’t work with him,” he explains. “I was in class. I just sat in a corner, and if I ever got asked to play with Muddy, I would always learn something.”

Meeting John Lee Hooker

A fan of Hooker’s since his days playing “Boogie Chillen’,” Guy didn’t meet the Crawling King Snake until the mid ’60s when he was part of a package tour in Europe, backing a variety of American folk and blues acts. “I was the youngest one out there” Guy says, “so the promoter told me, ‘I will give you 50 dollars a week to make sure everybody wakes up to be on the bus on time.’ So I did that too.”

Guy’s moment with Hooker came one morning when the tour was in Germany and everyone was gathered in the common room of a venue. “I wanted to meet John Lee Hooker,” he recalls, “and someone was at one of the tables, kind of stammering – ‘Bah-bah-bah…’ I thought, Whoever that is, I don’t want to be bothered with him. I started playing ‘Boogie Chillen’ over in the corner with an acoustic guitar.

“Next thing I know, the guy with the stammer is coming over to talk to me. I said to myself, Oh my god, I ain’t never gonna meet John Lee Hooker, ’cause here’s someone who’s gonna keep bugging me. And the man started laughing, and he laughed until he started crying – ’cause he knew I didn’t know who he was.

“He said, ‘I’m Johnny.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to meet Johnny; I want to meet John Lee!’ and he just fell down on his knees, laughing. He said, ‘I’m John Lee, boy!’ And from that day until he died, he was my best friend.”

Buddy Guy’s reached that point in life, and in career, where he could wear the proverbial Grumpy Old Man tag with pride and purpose. But the truth is he’s anything but.

With nearly 70 years of a playing career behind him, the Chicago-based legend prefers to be a wise and wizened gentleman, a gracious and enthusiastic representative of the Old School, with a sworn mission not to let his chosen music, the blues, fade away, even as he hits the road this year with his own Damn Right Farewell Tour.

Guy, at 86, is certainly well-suited to the task. Hell, his story even sounds like a classic blues song.

Guy was born to sharecroppers in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and did his own time in the fields, getting $2.50 for every 100 pounds of cotton he would bag. He learned to play guitar first on a homemade two-string diddley bow, then on a Harmony acoustic given to him by a generous stranger.

He journeyed from the country to the city, settling in Baton Rouge before moving to the Windy City in September 1957 and being mentored by greats such as Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Slim, B.B. King, Junior Wells and many other bluesmen.

Guy was a house guitarist with Chicago’s Chess Records, and while his own style wasn’t fully appreciated by the label, it set him up for some redemption in the latter part of his career.

British artists like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page revered Guy, along with other blues guitarists, and elevated him to a status in their country that was well above what he achieved at home.

“The British Invasion is basically an American story,” Traffic co-founder Dave Mason acknowledges. “All we did is learn everything that was created there and sell it back to you – turn you on to your own music.”

In 1991, however, Guy began a “comeback” with Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, the first of 13 studio albums to date. Together, those records have earned him eight Grammy Awards – and that’s just a tip of the prizes Guy has accumulated during the past three-plus decades.

You can add a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, along with 23 W.C. Handy/Blues Music Awards and inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Musicians Hall of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

Guy also operated the Checkerboard Lounge, with L.C. Thurman, on Chicago’s South Side from 1972 to ’85. He gave up his stake three years later and in 1989 opened Buddy Guy’s Legends, where he spends each January performing a month of shows.

“That’s a dream come true for me,” Guy says of the accolades. “Sometimes I’ve had to pinch myself and say, ‘Did I really make it in there? Like the Hall of Fame and all that stuff?’ I didn’t start out thinking anything like that would happen – could happen, to be honest with you.”

Far from grumpy this day at his Chicago home, Guy is characteristically generous and engaging, happy to tell his story and fully aware that the tale is a microcosm of the blues in general. His conversation is free-form but always passionate and engaging, not unlike his fluid and often dynamic solos. Summing up his career, he modestly asserts, “I did the best I could.”

That “best” has always been good enough, and some of the best we’ve been lucky to hear all these years.

“My parents had no radio or anything like that at first,” Guy says of his youth in Lettsworth, where his first musical influence was the church. “They finally got this old radio that you had to put an antenna on your shotgun house to use, and if it was cloudy or raining you couldn’t hear nothin’ except for static. It had to be a clear day for you to hear.

“You could hear these random records coming out of Tennessee, mostly. And then Chess was opening in Chicago, and that’s when I started hearing Little Walter and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and people like that.

“Before that you’d maybe find one person out in the country with a phonograph that you had to wind up to make it play the 78. So I’d hear a little bit here and there.”

First Guitars

“I was in the country, where you’d have little sandlot baseball teams. And that was about it,” Guy continues. “There’d be baseball on Sundays, because it was work all the other days of the week. I said to myself, I want to do something the rest of the kids can’t do. And I thought, I want to play the guitar. I’d heard the late Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker – all those great blues players. I just wanted to do something that the average person ain’t gonna be able to do.”

He began modestly, to say the least. Guy’s diddley bow was homemade from a piece of wood and two wires pulled from a window screen. It was limiting, he says, ”but I’d play it all the time.”

His fervor for the instrument didn’t immediately have the full buy-in of his family, however. “My brothers and sisters used to tell my mama, ‘Get him outta here with that noise!’ he remembers, laughing. “I knew it was noise ’cause I didn’t know how to play nothin’, but I kept fooling around with it. And finally, when I learned how to play, my oldest sister – she passed away, it’ll be two years this year – she looked at me one day and said, ‘Now you can come on in with that noise.’”

Flash forward to Baton Rouge, where Guy says “a stranger saw me sitting on my sister’s porch one day with them two strings on the piece of wood, and he just said, ‘Son, you could probably learn how to play if you had a real guitar.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I didn’t know who he was. He said, ‘Will you be sitting here tomorrow?’ I said yeah, and he comes by the next day and says, ‘Let’s go! I’m gonna get you a guitar.’

“And he bought me a Harmony guitar with six strings on it. I was staying with my sister, and when she came home from work she said, ‘Whoa, what is this? A country boy with a guitar!’”

It wasn’t long before Guy had his eureka moment. “The first thing I learned how to play was ‘Boogie Chillen’,’ by John Lee Hooker,” he says. “When I figured that out, I walked a mile and found every distant relative I had and said, ‘Look! Listen!’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, that kind of sounds pretty good there.’ And I was afraid to quit. I played it so long my fingers started bleeding.”

Electric Guitars

While in Baton Rouge, Guy learned about using a pickup to amplify his guitar, as John Lee Hooker, Lonnie Johnson and others had begun to do. “That’s what all of them was doing. There weren’t no Strats and all that until later,” he says.

Guy started playing electric guitar “a little bit before I left Baton Rouge. I think it was a Gibson, but there was another guy named Big Poppa. He had a band, and I was too shy to sing back then – ’til I learned how to drink a shot of wine first,” he says with a laugh.

“Big Poppa bought the guitars. He said, ‘I’ll buy you a guitar, but you’ve got to come play in my band. I wouldn’t sing, but I played and finally made a little noise in Baton Rouge.

“A friend of mine had left Baton Rouge and gone to Chicago. His wife got killed and he came back. He said to me, ‘Man, you should go to Chicago!’ I thought, As soon as I save up a little money I’m gonna come and see it, and if I don’t like it, I’ll come back.

“I got to Chicago on September the 25th, 1957. And I’m still here.”

***The following interview extract originally appeared in the January 2019 issue of Guitar Player***

When Guitar Player catches up with Richard Lloyd at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, it’s early in the afternoon on what is shaping up to be a pretty good day.

“Later on, I’m going out with my wife to eat sweet potatoes,” the guitarist reports. “And then I’m going to see Alice Cooper tonight.”

Lloyd even manages to find a silver lining in the fact that his car just broke down. “I had to replace the battery, but I needed a new battery anyway,” he says. “So it’s good and good.”

Car troubles aside, Lloyd has every reason to be happy these days. Several decades into his career, he remains a hero to generations of outsider guitarists who had their musical senses ignited by his seminal work in the ’70s with Television, or perhaps by his playing in the early ’90s with Matthew Sweet or his solo output that began with 1979’s Alchemy.

His latest solo album is titled The Countdown. The 10-song effort finds Lloyd singing and playing guitar with as much fire and urgency as ever on a collection of sharp, snappy tunes that fuse punk energy with pop, rock, soul and jazz sensibilities.

It’s all accented by his trademark jagged, exploratory guitar work, high-tension licks and hot-wire soloing – or as he calls it, “fragmented spits of notes.”

Take, for example, the album’s title track, which ends The Countdown in a swirl of burbling organ, squalling guitars and buzzing feedback.

“It was this idea I had of space flight,” Lloyd explains. “I had the opening riff and then the rhythm part, and the vocal was all off the cuff. It’s kind of a jam. I loved doing it.”

One of his favorite things about the track is that it reaches back, almost full circle, to his earliest experiences with the guitar.

“There’s a track on that song that’s all feedback,” Lloyd explains. “And that was what I would do when I first started playing guitar as a teenager. Back then, I didn’t know how to move my left hand on the neck. So I just used the tremolo bar to make airplane and motorcycle sounds for the first couple of weeks, until I could get my hand to play the barest part of a chord. I wasn’t actually playing with my fingers as much as I was playing with the electricity.”

For Lloyd, discussions about music often have a dynamic element to them, with energy either harnessed or reacted to instinctively, and sometimes in an almost supernatural way. This sensibility is evident even in his explanation for why he picked up the guitar after initially cutting his teeth as a drummer.

“I was playing drums one day,” explains Lloyd, who was born in Pittsburgh but moved to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan while in grade school, “and all the color went out of me. It was like The Wizard of Oz, where Kansas is in black and white and Oz is in color.

“All of a sudden I was in Kansas. And then a voice came to me in an audio hallucination, you might say. And it said, ‘You must play a melody instrument.’ And the guitar was my choice out of those possibilities. Because I didn’t want to play the damn violin.”

What happened to Lloyd once he started playing the guitar is a story that has now become the stuff of legend.

He befriended a kid from Brooklyn named Velvert Turner, who was not only a fellow budding guitar player but also happened to be a protégé of Jimi Hendrix.

“According to Velvert’s mother,” Lloyd recalls, “he was standing in front of the television one day and saw Jimi performing. And he started jumping up and down saying, ‘I have to meet that guy!’ And apparently he sought out Jimi, and Jimi took Velvert under his wing as, like, his little brother.”

Lloyd pauses.

“I mean, that’s the story I’ve heard. And knowing Velvert, who passed on in 2000, I believe it. Because he was a wacky kinda guy. A magical-thinking kind of fellow. I was, too. I am, still.”

Hendrix gave guitar lessons to Velvert, who in turn would show his friend Richard everything he had learned, in effect making Lloyd a once-removed student of Jimi’s.

Through Velvert, Lloyd also got to see Hendrix perform several times in New York City – “In my mind it was like looking into a nuclear reactor,” he says about watching Jimi perform – and spent time with Jimi in recording studios.

Lloyd also has an oft-told story about unintentionally insulting Hendrix one night at a gig billed as the Black Roman Orgy, at which point the guitar god “smacked me in the face, the stomach and the face again.

“I thought to myself, He punches a pretty good punch for a scrawny black guy,” Lloyd recalls. (His other thought: “How can I absorb this energy?”)

Hendrix was far from the young Lloyd’s only brush with guitar greatness. For instance, there was the time in the early ’70s when he wound up performing onstage in Boston with John Lee Hooker.

“I just walked into the dressing room and sat myself down. You could do that back then, if you had the cojones,” Lloyd says. “And John Lee Hooker called over to me and he said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I play guitar.’ He told me, ‘I’m going to invite you up onstage, and you better get up there, because if you don’t, I’ll have to turn the lights on and chase you down.’”

About three-quarters of the way through that night’s show, Lloyd recalls, “I heard him announce, ‘I’m going to invite up a new guitar player. Let’s have a warm hand for Richie Lloyd!’ He called me Richie, which nobody else did. But he certainly could.”

As for any advice Hooker had for the young guitarist? “He told me to take all the strings but one off my guitar, and learn that one string up and down the fretboard. And then after I did that, to add a second string, and so on. Basically, he taught what I call ‘vertical knowledge.’ And it was great advice.

“Of course,” Lloyd adds, “I couldn’t afford a set of strings. So I didn’t do it.”

For all of Lloyd’s proclamations of elbow rubbing with legends like Hendrix and Hooker, what is perhaps most remarkable about his guitar playing is that when he emerged with Television, his first true band, he exhibited a style that seemed almost completely untethered to traditional rock or blues idioms.

Rather, together with singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine, Lloyd created one of the most unique and forward-thinking guitar albums of the ’70s or any era: Television’s 1977 debut, Marquee Moon.

And while the band is commonly lumped in with the New York City punk scene (and was the first rock group to perform at CBGB, paving the way for the Ramones and others), Lloyd never saw Television as being so easily classifiable.

“We were once called ‘four guys with a passion’ by the director of Rebel Without a Cause,” he says, referring to Nicholas Ray, who helmed the 1955 teenage drama. “I thought that was pretty good.

“And I remember [Atlantic Records co-founder and president] Ahmet Ertegun said, ‘I can’t sign them to Atlantic because this is not earth music.’ I love that line – although I was going to the bathroom when he said it to [legendary producer] Jerry Wexler.”

Television only lasted through one more album, 1978’s Adventure, before splitting. Afterward, Lloyd embarked on a solo career that, despite strong showings like 1986’s Field of Fire, never seemed to truly take off.

In the early ’90s, he and Verlaine restarted Television, and he recorded and toured off and on with the band until exiting in 2007.

His only true intersection with the mainstream music world came via his association with alt-rocker Matthew Sweet, and in particular the jagged, skronky guitar lines (“someone once likened it to Coltrane, like shards of glass,” he says) that Lloyd added to the musician’s power-pop albums Girlfriend and Altered Beast.

As for what a guy like Sweet saw in a player like Lloyd? “I wish I knew,” Lloyd says. “I mean, I guess it’s that thing about a high-octane sort of guitar ace who comes in and…”

Lloyd trails off and starts again.

“I always go in and say, ‘I’m probably going to capsize this song,’ you know? I remember with Matthew, I would play something and then everyone [in the studio] would go, ‘Okay, we’re finished.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, that was full of mistakes.’ And Matthew would tell me, ‘Your mistakes are better than most people’s good stuff!’”

Lloyd pauses, and then returns to a common theme.

“It’s a certain energy I have, I guess. And when that energy gets loose, I’m just sitting back and watching. It’s almost like I’m not playing. The electricity is playing me.”

That energy is all over The Countdown, from the curlicue (and admittedly “Marquee Moon”-like) licks that kick off the opening track, “Wind in the Rain,” to the jaunty single-note runs in “Whisper” to the squalling lead lines in “Down the Drain.”

Lloyd says he and his band recorded quickly in the studio, and he kept his gear likewise streamlined.

His main guitars were a Supro Black Holiday, a Vintage Guitars Strat-style model and an Epiphone Casino, which he plugged into a Vox AC30 and a Supro Black Magick.

Pedals were minimal as well – an Echoplex, an “old Boss overdrive,” an MXR Carbon Copy and a DigiTech FreqOut, which, Lloyd says, “is essentially a feedback machine. I used that specifically on the song ‘The Countdown,’ because you can be at a low volume and still get good feedback. I didn’t have to turn the amps on 10 and be in a room with earplugs and, uh, you know, flying saucers.”

In addition to writing, recording and singing the material on The Countdown, Lloyd also created the artwork that adorns its cover.

“I’ve been painting for about three years now,” he says. “I suffer – or maybe I’m blessed – with synesthesia, where one sense blends into another. So when I’m playing music, I see a lot of color tones, blues and reds and greens, and when I’m painting it’s a very musical experience.

“The auditory realm and the visual realm are both very, very strong in human beings. So I like to delve into both of them.”

Lloyd hasn’t been one to live in the past. After nearly a lifetime of residing in New York City, he left for Chattanooga almost three years ago.

“My wife’s parents are here,” he explains. “And when we were looking for a new apartment in New York, we were finding things that were a third of the space for the same price, so we said ‘to hell with this.’”

Meanwhile, despite his newfound affection for painting, the guitar remains his first love, and he’s still a student of his craft.

“I’m practicing an awful lot now, trying to get good,” Lloyd says. “I mean, Segovia, a great classical guitarist, was asked when he was 70 or something, ‘Now that you’re a master of the guitar…’ And he went, ‘No, no, no. The guitar is the master. I’m just the student.’ You can never get to the bottom of what the guitar can do.”

Lloyd continues.

“The original impulse that drove me to play music has not dissipated at all. It’s sort of like a pool ball getting hit. It continues to roll until it hits something else, and then that ball keeps going.

“I’m still in motion from those original impressions that I got from listening to AM radio when I was nine and 10 years old.”

What is comes down to is that, even with his unusually colorful past, Lloyd is still very much living in the present.

“People talk about the good old days, but the good days are today,” he says. “And in a year or two they’ll be the good old days. But right now are the good days. I totally believe that. I wake up happy and I go to sleep happy. And in between, you know, I’m pretty okay.”

Order The Countdown by Richard Lloyd here.

As musical acts go, the Tedeschi Trucks Band is a large, family-style affair consisting of a dozen of the finest, top-caliber musicians.

At the front of it all is the husband-and-wife team of slide virtuoso Derek Trucks and singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi.

Now some 12 years into their history, the Tedeschi Trucks Band has just issued a quartet of albums as sprawling and packed with musical virtuosity as the group itself.

Released under the umbrella title I Am the Moon, it consists of 24 new songs, with a total running time of more than two hours, presented in easily digestible servings as I. Crescent, II. Ascension, III. The Fall and IV. Farewell.

This avalanche of new music is the result of a period of feverish creativity, when the band was forced off the road due to the global shutdown in the wake of COVID-19.

The inspiration for the project came after TTB member Mike Mattison suggested the band should read the epic 12th century Persian poem Layla and Majnun, written by Nizami Ganjavi, which inspired “Layla,” the classic-rock tune penned by Eric Clapton.

Connections and coincidences between the song’s history and Trucks’ and Tedeschi’s own backgrounds are many: Trucks was named after Derek and the Dominoes, the banner under which Clapton released Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs on November 9, 1970, the very day Tedeschi was born.

Trucks has worked extensively with Clapton in the past, so his interest in the poem was already piqued.

“I had been meaning to read it for about 15 years,” he tells Guitar Player. “So when Mike proposed the idea, it wasn’t with the idea of making a record; it was more of a nice thought exercise for the whole band to be on the same page, because we were all stuck at home.”

Given the tragic nature of Layla and Majnun and its tale of unrequited love, one might naturally expect I Am the Moon to be a collection of maudlin, downbeat songs.

In fact, it is far from it.

Covering a broad spectrum of blues, soul and gospel, the record explodes with joyful, powerful and positive music.

“The poem details a sense of longing,” Tedeschi explains. “And I think the alternative ways of viewing that desire just seemed to fire up everybody’s imaginations. The songs sound positive even when, sometimes, lyrically, they are perhaps a little dark.”

Naturally, the four records are overflowing with killer guitar playing. Trucks’ slide playing has never sounded so expressive, and on the tracks where he and Tedeschi trade solos, the enthusiasm leaps from the grooves.

“The whole band is really thrilled with what we’ve created,” Tedeschi says, “and I think we all appreciated that this was a special project that we were really able to focus on.”

Trucks concurs. “It came together better than we could ever have hoped for,” he says. “We certainly didn’t think that we were going to write this much music, but we could tell that something special was going on as we were recording.”

Could this project have happened without lockdown and the enforced layoff from touring that it dictated?

DEREK TRUCKS The amount of time that we had available was definitely what allowed us to do this. Another aspect of that is, between us, we’ve been on the road for maybe 20 years without a break, and the fact that we were forced to stop gave us the chance to regenerate our creative spark.

Even though the pandemic and lockdown were really terrible for so many people, it was, ironically, kind of a perfect storm for us as a band.

Given that there is so much new music, did you always envisage that you would release it in stages, over four separate albums?

SUSAN TEDESCHI When we started recording and putting the songs up on the board, we realized that there was way more material than one record’s worth. I think we were all of one mind that the way records used to be made, where a great album would last between 30 and 40 minutes, was a much better approach from an artistic point of view.

It’s such a sweet spot for running time, and you can really focus your attention on the music. I think the CD format is largely to blame for the increasing length of albums, where there was so much more available space. Whereas when records only came out on vinyl, the optimum sound quality was around 20 minutes or so per side. The way we’ve divided it up means each set of songs works perfectly on vinyl.

You already had a big live repertoire. With the new songs added in, what would you be looking at?

TRUCKS It’s about 150 or so. When we did the Beacon Theatre [in New York City] a year ago, we performed about 118 songs over the course of seven shows, and that wasn’t everything we could have played.

TEDESCHI When we’re writing set lists, we run out of space because there’s so many songs we want to play. [laughs] We’ve already done some shows where we played the first record in its entirety, and I think we’ll do that for all four of the albums.

How do you keep so many songs stage-ready?

TRUCKS We use our soundchecks every day as a rehearsal, and we also set up a small rehearsal room at the venues where we can work on ideas and tighten up problematic parts or whatever, just with little amps. When we haven’t done a song for a long time, we need to really kick it around.

Given how many songs you recorded, the sequencing of the albums must have been quite a challenging process, I imagine.

TRUCKS We really spent a lot of time on that. We realized very early on that there was way too much music for a single album. A few more weeks down the line, I asked a good friend of mine, Jud Strickland, if he could sequence the four albums. He really got into the details. 

He had a card for each song with tempos, time signatures, what key it was in and what kind of feel each song had. I’d gotten way too close to the process, so he really managed to pull everything together on that front.

What were your go-to guitars for the albums?

TEDESCHI I used my ’93 Tele a lot. I was planning on using a whole bunch of guitars, but we were literally writing and recording ideas off the floor, live, thinking we might go back and add or redo some parts, but that never happened, and we kept the first versions pretty much as we came up with them on the spot.

That meant that we ended up mostly using the gear that we take out live. I actually played a Gretsch White Falcon a little bit, plus I used a guitar that I stole from Derek that I really love, which is a Custom Shop replica of Eric Clapton’s Beano guitar [as used on the John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album].

He had a couple of those made, and he gave one to Derek, but I’ve been playing it a lot. I also used a ’30s Martin 00-17 for a lot of the acoustic work.

TRUCKS I think the vast majority is the B2B [Brother to Brother] Dickey Betts reissue SG. I also used a ’65 Gibson ES-335 and a ’30s L-00. And I played an old National resonator guitar and an old Gibson Roy Smeck as well. 

With the exception of the acoustic guitars, we generally take the guitars on the road that we record with.

What were your amp choices? There are some seriously great tones all over the record.

TEDESCHI I mostly used my Fender ’64 Deluxe Reverb that I’ve had for years. I don’t use much in the way of effects. I have a Vox wah-wah pedal and a Moollon Zeppelin overdrive, but that’s pretty much it.

TRUCKS The main tracking amp for me was a ’64 Fender Deluxe Reverb, which has an incredible sound. I also used a Vibrolux occasionally and a little tweed Deluxe that I used here and there, plus a real old lightning-bolt Supro.

When you’re both working out your respective guitar parts, how much planning goes into who plays what? It must be difficult enough anyway to carve out your own sonic space with such a big band.

TEDESCHI I guess that’s pretty much become an instinctive, organic thing for us now. Of course, we already play so differently from each other, as Derek plays in open E tuning and I’m in standard.

Derek tends to use an SG a lot, so I would instinctively opt for my Tele, for the mix of humbucker and single-coil sounds. We try to avoid both using humbuckers, although the tone of the Beano Les Paul is very different from Derek’s SG, so that is an exception.

Sometime Derek will play all the parts on a particular song for the record if I’m concentrating on the vocals, but then I’ll figure out for the live show how to cover some of those guitar parts.

TRUCKS A lot of it is definitely instinctive at this point. Plus, since I’m in open E, if a song calls for open cowboy chords, that’s already a non-starter for me.

A lot of times it depends on who writes the song. Whoever writes it, the other tends to fold in around that. With so many years behind us now, we have a real instinct for what works. When we do find that something just isn’t working, we’ll really drill down on our parts.

You both have strong individual styles. What do you think is the secret to getting started and finding your own voice on the guitar?

TEDESCHI I think the best start is to find out who you like to listen to and try to play along to their records. For me that was Magic Sam, the three Kings, Otis Rush, Johnny Guitar Watson and T-Bone Walker.

I did five world tours with B.B. King, and I also used to tour with John Lee Hooker, so those experiences were unbeatable in really steeping myself in the traditions and roots of the blues. I learned so much.

When you start to study your favorite records, you begin to hear licks and phrases, which you unconsciously adapt to your own playing. But in doing that, they morph into an essential part of your own vocabulary as a musician.

The next thing you need to do is get up and play live, because that’s where you really forge your own identity. Then you see what does and doesn’t work with an audience, and you learn how to build a solo and the importance of rhythm.

TRUCKS Rhythm is so important. I think when people have blind spots in their music, it’s often due to rhythmic limitations. That’s where listening to great drummers can be inspiring. Playing the guitar isn’t just ripping and playing solos, although that can be incredible fun. [laughs]

TEDESCHI Finding your tone is crucial. That often comes down to experimentation. Make sure everything you play is musical, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

TRUCKS I started out when I was so young, so I was kind of lucky in that regard. By playing and meeting a lot of people and listening to what they were doing and recommending to me, I found things that really moved me. And that was where I drew inspiration from.

The more you listen, the more you find what moves you, and at some point you stumble across combinations that no one’s really come up with before. And that’s the entry point for discovering your own unique thing.

I think the starting point is always to absorb what you love about other people’s playing, because in the end, every player is a combination of their influences. No matter who your guitar heroes are, you always know what they were listening to.

But then the secret to their success is similar to how a great chef tastes food: Those legendary guitarists took their influences and found something in there that spoke to them and allowed their own identity to shine through.

Obviously, Duane Allman and being born into those waters were the starting points for me, followed by Delta blues and the three Kings. But then I really got interested in Indian classical music.

Do you think it’s important to listen to musicians who don’t play the guitar?

TRUCKS Totally. I really love tenor sax players, like Wayne Shorter, John Gilmore and John Coltrane. Things like that became the bedrock for me. People should be open to all areas of music, because you don’t know where inspiration might come from.

What sparked your interest in Indian music?

TRUCKS I got into it through our good friend Colonel Bruce Hampton. A drummer that was playing in his band, Jeff Sipe, turned me on to Pakistani qawwali music and Indian classical music artists like Ali Akbar Khan, who was really the guy for me. I really dove right into it for quite a period.

Later on with Kofi [Burbridge, Tededschi Trucks’ former keyboard player and flautist, who died in 2019], we’d really dig into those scales. I would go sit in on some of Ali Akbar Kahn’s classes at San Rafael in California.

Whenever we were out west, Ali would let us drop in and check things out. To say I studied would maybe be taking it too far, as I didn’t spend enough time, but I definitely did investigate it in depth.

When you started to explore Indian music and discovered the different microtonal subtleties, did you immediately connect that with slide guitar, where the fine microtonal nuances are something that is very particular to slide playing?

TRUCKS Yeah. The fact that I’m essentially playing a fretless instrument and the sarod is a fretless instrument was one of those little epiphanies that you get when you’re exploring music. I realized that, with slide, you’re really singing through your instrument. There are no frets on the human voice.

The melodies are so incredibly strong in a lot of Indian classical music, and that was something that really hit me. What Ali Akbar Khan did was very modal when he was exploring those ragas, and it was almost like the rules changed in mid-melody. It could be based on whether it was an ascending or descending melody.

Things like that just totally captured my imagination and opened up new pathways to expressing myself on the guitar.

Do you feel restricted when you’re not playing slide and you’re working with frets and a more definite sense of where notes sit?

TRUCKS I feel like it just gives me different ways to explore. There’s an Indian electric mandolin player that I listen to a lot, Srinivas, and when you hear him play you can’t even tell that it’s a fretted instrument.

I sometimes think about his approach when I’m playing without a slide. It’s a way to blur the lines between fretted and slide playing.

Did you ever learn solos note-for-note from old records?

TRUCKS Yeah, I definitely borrowed/stole a lot of lines from horn players. [laughs] Any time that I’d hear a phrase or a melody that really pulled my ear, I’d try to work out what they were doing and adapt it for guitar.

I think with horn players and the fact that they’re not playing the guitar, they can come up with ideas and approaches that you hadn’t imagined before.

What’s funny is when you find something like that on the guitar, it’s almost like you’re saying, “Oh yeah? That’s been sitting there on the neck the whole time and I never knew?” [laughs]

TEDESCHI T-Bone Walker’s “Here in the Dark” and “Right Place, Wrong Time” by Otis Rush were two real favorites. But as I said, even though you play what they played, you find that your own personality starts to change the way lines are phrased, and that’s when you start to put your own stamp on ideas that you hear other people play.

I would say playing with Derek has really improved my playing. I realized how dynamic a player he is, and that’s opened my eyes to the idea of being more patient and letting a solo build up.

He can play super loud or pin-drop quiet. It’s all about using dynamics to tell a story. It’s been such fun to play with Derek.

Do you think you brought influences to each other that you hadn’t previously been aware of?

TEDESCHI Definitely. When we first started dating, Derek would kid about how we had brought these new artists to each other. He didn’t know who Magic Sam was, and Derek liked a lot of people that I wasn’t familiar with, like Sun Ra and some really weird and wacky stuff.

The funny thing is that I went to jazz school, and he knows way more than I do about jazz, that’s for sure. [laughs] He can hear something and identify the artist in two seconds, whatever their instrument.

We both liked Wes Montgomery and Grant Green before we met each other.

TRUCKS That was one of the real fun things when we first got together, to explore our mutual likes and trade favorites.

Let’s discuss some of the tracks in detail. “Playing With My Emotions” sounds like you’re trading lines on the solo.

TEDESCHI Yeah, that’s right. That was a really fun one to play. Derek wanted us to both take lines on the solo, and I think it worked out really well. It has a joyful spirit to it.

TRUCKS That’s one of the tunes where we basically wrote it and played it in the studio. The trades were very spontaneous, we just went for the take right there on the floor. We don’t do that a whole lot on our records, so it was nice to get that on the album.

“Yes We Will” sounds like you are both taking a solo as well. There is a flavor of B.B. King’s work with the Crusaders on this one.

TEDESCHI Yes, I take the first one and Derek takes the second one. That is another real bluesy track, like “Playing With My Emotions.” Those two songs really reflected a lot of the live dynamic that Derek and I have, where we will often trade solos or call-and-response guitar lines.

I was definitely always pushing for us to get into more blues as that is such a big part of my roots and also Derek’s, so it’s very much a tribute to B.B. King.

You cover a wide range of styles on the album. A track like “So Long Savior” is a rollicking gospel number. Like many great gospel songs, the bleakness of the lyrics is in opposition to the spirit in which the message is delivered.

TEDESCHI It’s definitely a tribute to gospel music, but the acoustic feel is a little like Bukka White, where Derek plays a line and I sing it back. It is definitely rooted in the call-and-response of gospel music.

“La Di Da” has an interesting rhythmic pulse, and the solo on there is sublime. It is short, yet packs so much emotion and melody. Did you work out what you’d play beforehand?

TRUCKS That was just done live on the floor. Sometimes when you’re tracking, you think the track sounds really good, so I’m not going to leave a space for the solo, I’m just going to go for it, which does put quite a lot of pressure on me, because then I’m thinking that I really hope I don’t blow this, and we all have to start again. [laughs] 

It’s mildly intimidating. You really don’t want to fuck up.

One of the simplest, yet most effective songs is “I Can Feel You Smiling.” The slide solo on there is particularly sublime.

TRUCKS That’s one of my favorite tunes on the record. Again, it kind of played itself. It was another time where I thought I should just go for the solo as we were recording.

The other thing that can be intimidating is when you record a perfect track and leave a space for the solo; then there’s a whole world of pressure to make that solo count. It gives you a lot to live up to. [laughs]

TEDESCHI That is a really beautiful song. It definitely has a mixture of [Malagasy slide guitarist] D’Gary crossed with Dolly Parton. [laughs]

For the band, is the live experience more important than making records?

TRUCKS I think that is where our heads were for a long time. This band is incredible live. I do think that there is something very enjoyable about recording though, and I think that is almost a lost art.

There are times when people don’t spend the time to craft a really great record because they’re rushing to get back on the road. I think the only way you can make a lasting statement is by making great records.

I also think it limits a band if they aren’t creating the best record that they can. Your recorded music is your legacy. That’s what we have for all the great artists who are no longer with us.

As an artist, writing music and finding new things to say is really important. At a certain point, what you see with many acts is that they’re still playing the same songbook forever, and there’s only so much you can say.

The key point, though, is that whenever you bring new material in, it refreshes everything, gets everyone excited and inspired, and takes what we do to another level.

Order I Am the Moon (I. Crescent, II. Ascension, III. The Fall and IV. Farewell) here.

Today, on the anniversary of his passing, we remember Irish blues-rock legend Rory Gallagher.

Born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland, the first pieces Gallagher attempted to play were cowboy songs and Irish folk tunes on acoustic guitar, beginning at age nine.

American rock ‘n’ rollers such as Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry had an early impression on the budding guitarist, though he discovered blues, à la Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, by way of Lonnie Donegan’s British skiffle hits.

At 15, Gallagher joined the Fontana Show Band, which toured England and Ireland. The constant work helped refine his playing, but the commercial nature of the repertoire caused him to look elsewhere for artistic satisfaction, jamming with the group's drummer and bassist in small clubs throughout Europe.

By 1966, Gallagher had formed Taste, the now legendary blues-rock trio, comprised of Eric Kitteringham on bass, Norman Demery on drums, and Gallagher on guitar, vocals, and, occasionally, saxophone.

In 1969, the group signed with Polydor Records, but had disbanded by the following year, at which point the guitarist began to pursue a solo career in earnest.

Throughout the ‘70s, Gallagher recorded a steady stream of solos albums, picking up legions of fans along the way and establishing himself as one of the era’s most influential guitarists.

In this interview extract from the March 1978 issue of Guitar Player, Gallagher talks about his various musical styles and techniques and the gear he used to arrive at his distinctive, energetic sound.

What he has to say about blues and rock ‘n’ roll should be required reading for any guitarist...

Hypothetically, if you were teaching blues guitar at a school, how would you go about it?

I’d keep it within a reasonably rigid blues framework, just to keep it on center. A lot of it would depend on what music the student had been exposed to.

I mean, if your parents were interested in music anyway – your father, for instance, had a couple of Bill Broonzy or Lonnie Johnson albums – or you were brought up listening to jazz programs on the BBC where they'd slot in the odd blues thing, you'd obviously have a head start.

Otherwise, you'd probably get into blues through rock 'n' roll – through Chuck Berry or maybe “High Heeled Sneakers” by Tommy Tucker. Then with the Rolling Stones era, you could sneak into the blues thing that way.

In my case, I started on the proverbial Lonnie Donegan skiffle music trail, where I heard Lonnie doing Leadbelly songs, such as “Rock Island Line” and “Bring Me A Lil' Water Silvy.”

Before I even owned records by Woody Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy, I used to get library books out in Cork – because you couldn't buy the albums in Britain – and I’d learn the lyrics to these songs.

But at the same time I was interested in rock 'n' roll – such as Buddy Holly. Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino. I was listening to both of these strains, because at lots of points they'd cross.

Once you get beyond the Chuck Berry/Eddie Cochran thing, you begin to figure out that you've got Broonzy at one end of the scale – and that goes right back to the old tradition of Charley Patton – then John Lee Hooker has the Detroit electric blues style, which evolved from his acoustic style.

And you also get the Josh White sort of folkie style of blues. You just have to listen to a lot of records.

Which records do you think are essential for someone who wants to get into blues?

I suppose you'd have to go back to one of the main sources, say, either Robert Johnson, Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell, or Leadbelly. The two Robert Johnson records [King Of The Delta Blues Singers, Vols. I & II] are obviously cornerstones; you'd have to get at least one of those.

It’s pretty hard to zone in on it, because some guys mightn't get into Robert Johnson and might prefer, say, Willie McTell. But if we try to break it down to the key blues albums, I think that a Robert Johnson record would have to be included.

Then Blind Boy Fuller is another favorite of mine, especially that album With Bull City Red and Sonny Terry, with “Pistol Slapper Blues” on it.

I think that Broonzy album where he does “Banker’s Blues” [The Young Big Bill Broonzy] is an important one, because he was broadening the scale.

It’s different from the ones he made around 1950, where it was blues plus ballads.

The Best Of Muddy Waters [reissued as Sail On] is definitely an archetypal electric blues album.

Do you think albums by people such as Elmore James and Howlin’ Wolf are important listening?

Oh yeah. You'd have to get The Real Folk Blues by Wolf, with “Spoonful” and “Shake For Me” [reissued in part on Howlin’ Wolf: the Chess Box] for Hubert Sumlin’s electric blues guitar.

He's the great undiscovered, underrated lead player. And Wolf himself harks back vocally to Charley Patton, and, besides, he plays a little bit of slide guitar here and there, too – like on “Down In The Bottom.”

And his harmonica playing is important, even though everyone seems to write it off as just, “He plays harmonica.” I think he plays good gut-bucket harmonica.

Which of Elmore James's albums would you single out?

Its hard to pin down one album for him, because there are so many oddball ones. I've got one on Ember Records – just sort of a bargain label – and it was reruns of some of his stuff, like “Sunnyland,” “Standing At The Crossroads.” and “Dust My Broom” yet again.

I find that any Elmore James album is good.

What about the older country blues players?

In terms of intensity, Son House has to be listened to. Of all the blues players, that's probably the closest connection with Africa. I've got that one album, with “John the Revelator.” [The Legendary Father Of Folk Blues] That's an ace album.

If people come to hear you in concert, and they want to learn how to play guitar themselves, do you think it's more important for them to buy your records or these old records you spoke of?

To learn guitar? Well, I write a lot of my own stuff, so it's a cross between ego and the heritage thing.

If you want to play like Rory Gallagher, I think you'd buy my records. But if you want to pick up on whatever echoes of the bluesmen that I respect and love, certainly go ahead and buy some blues records.

In my case, I’d say the obvious influences would be Hubert Sumlin, Earl Hooker, and Buddy Guy, electrically; and, acoustically, Blind Boy Fuller and Blind Blake, though I can't get anywhere near what Blake does.

But you see, I never started out to become a strict recreator of the blues or even a modern young bluesman, as it were. I mean, I wanted to be me.

I'm a huge blues fan, but I still have a bit of Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly hovering around in my head, plus certain folk people, such as Doc Watson – a pretty wide range of listening.

What type of instrument would you recommend for an acoustic blues novice to start on?

With acoustic guitar, for the first couple of years at least, I think you should leave a wound third string on and really build up strength in the fingers. In other words, don't try bending strings the first week you buy the guitar.

Kids are lucky nowadays; you can get a Yamaha or something, and the cheaper model guitars are much better quality than they were years ago when you got this stuff with terrible action.

The first guitar I got cost just over four pounds, which was about twenty dollars then, in the good old days.

After a while you get that urge to say, “To hell with this – I’m going to bend this string,” instead of sliding up. But you have to build that up.

But do you think a student should start out with, say, a wooden Yamaha or a metal-bodied National such as you sometimes play?

Well, lets put it this way: If you're a kid with ears the size of the moon and an amazing sense of direction, who heard Son House or Blind Boy Fuller or any of the National steel-body players and said, “They're the people I want to play like,” then go ahead and buy the National, because that's a great place to start.

But if you start with a National. you're talking about a guitar that weighs quite a bit.

Do you use a wound or an unwound third string on the National?

A wound third, because the numbers I happen to play need that fairly stiff action. I don't do any Broonzy-type bending with light strings on the National, whereas on a Martin acoustic I probably would.

Do you use an acoustic onstage?

I do; I play a Martin D-35. I use the National for things like “Pistol Slapper Blues,” which I play faster than Blind Boy Fuller did, and a J.B. Hutto song called “Too Much Alcohol,” which he plays electric, of course.

There's always the nature of the banjo in the National, I find, and you have to play it sort of like that. I do anyway.

Do you play acoustic with a plectrum or your fingers?

With a plectrum and the fingers. I fool around with National metal fingerpicks and the plastic ones sometimes.

How is your Martin set up?

Well, that's set up with the same strings, because at present I'm doing numbers like Leadbelly’s “Out On The Western Plain,” where the tuning is D - A - D - G - A - D [low to high]. It’s [open] D tuning, except that the G remains a G [rather than major third/F#.]

What do you use for an electric guitar?

I have two different electrics. I have a [Fender] Stratocaster with Fender light gauge Rock And Roll strings, which I use for basic playing and some slide work in straight tuning.

I also have a [Fender] Telecaster for A tuning and other open tunings, for songs like “Bullfrog Blues.”

Why the Stratocaster?

Well, that's the eternal argument among Fender fans. Buddy Holly had a Strat, and as a child you go after the appearance of a guitar; I don't care what anyone says. You look at the shape of the thing, and that's it. I've tried Gibsons, but I'm not a great fan of humbucking pickups.

Why is that?

Because as you bring down the volume from 10 to 9 to 8, after that – forget it; the guitar loses its sensitivity and drive.

Whereas with the single-coil or P-90 pickups – one of the old Gibson units with the black or white plastic covers – the volume control goes down nice and gradually, and even at 6 the guitar is still doing something.

Why do you usually switch to the Telecaster for slide?

I like a good bright tone, and I like the out-of-phase sound you can get with the switch set between the normal positions on a Strat.

Its comfortable, the scale seems right, and I like having the machine heads on one side – it just seems to make sense.

But if you want, say, a more luxurious, fatter sound, the Gibson guitar certainly would do the job, and it's got an extra fret – if anybody ever touches that fret; I'm sure they don't.

I thought it had a certain steel guitar type of tone which would work well with slide, but I was frustrated with the rhythm [neck/front] pickup – I thought it was too thin. So I put a Strat pickup there, and it remained that way for a year.

Then I said, “To hell with it – I’ll do the Telecaster à la Strat,” so now I've got two Strat pickups and a Tele lead pickup and a five-way Strat toggle switch.

It’s like the best of both worlds with the Telecaster lead pickup, which is slightly hotter than a Stratocaster’s.

What do you use for a slide?

It depends; I shift around. I sometimes use a bottleneck on my ring finger for electric stuff; otherwise I've got two stainless steel tubes, which I sometimes use on my small finger or the ring finger. They get a more stinging, Muddy Waters sound.

You get a different sound depending on what slide you use. For instance, if you're playing slide on a National with a glass slide, forget it.  You have to have something like steel or, even better, copper. Son House used copper, and I've got one of those as well.

What type of amplification do you use?

For years I used a Vox AC30, which is the best all-around European amp I've ever come across. I still have it. The Shadows used to use them, and the Beatles used them, so you know it was the popular amp.

But I found that when using the [Dallas Rangemaster] treble booster, that along with the treble boost you got a built-in gain, because the transistors were fairly primitive.

If I used the normal input – which was very bassy, as opposed to the brilliant input – I could get that nice rough edge without getting into a very fuzzy sound.

I used that for years, and I've had odds and sods in between, but then I moved on to an old Fifties tweed Fender Twin, which I still have.

Then I got into a tweed Fender Bassman, and recently I got a Fender Concert, which is an old brown one, from around 1959, with four 10” speakers.

I use a Hawk booster through that just to roughen it up a bit, or if it's a quiet number I plug straight in and keep the guitar clean sounding.

Do you think it's advantageous to learn acoustic before moving on to electric?

Well, I played acoustic for two or three years before I bought an electric. I wasn't particularly interested in electric for the first couple of years, because I was a Lonnie Donegan fan.

I think it's better to start on acoustic and then get into electric, but you could get into a fistfight over that. I mean, some people would say, “To hell with acoustic guitar; it never existed. You've got to get a solidbody right away.”

Fair enough, but I think they're missing out. Even if you're going to become the consummate 1978 electric guitarist, I think you're missing out on an awful lot, if only for the fun of playing an acoustic guitar at home as a hobby.

And it's nice to go from the acoustic, where even at the best of times the action is fairly taut, to the electric with light strings, where you float around like jelly. If you're always playing on light-gauge strings, you'll never really build up strength and subsequently real volume without turning up your amp yet again.

Are there any other techniques that you can adapt from acoustic to electric?

If you never played acoustic the odds would probably be three-to-one that you might never get into, say, playing with a plectrum and fingers or ever get interested in the various acoustic right-hand things.

I think if you're just playing with a flatpick full-time, you're only half playing the guitar.

So would you advise learning to fingerpick with bare fingers, with fingerpicks, or with a plectrum and the fingers?

Well, if you could wave a magic wand, you should tell the person to try all forms and be familiar with them all – anything instead of just using the plectrum alone.

I think at some point in every song you're going to need the fingers.

If you're interested in classical guitar, it's nice to get a couple of years training at that, and then you'd have very strong hands, and you could skip thumbpicks and metal picks or whatever.

Do you use fingerpicks mainly for volume, or do you use them for a specific sound?

I would use them for volume, you know, and to save wear and tear.

If I were a highly developed thumb-and-fingers person I’d just use the bare skin, but you do get the real sharp, biting sound with the metal claws.

Gary Davis just used the one plastic fingerpick, and he seemed to make great sense out of that.

So you think it's very important for a student to learn to use their fingers as well as a pick.

Yeah, even if they never touch folk or blues music. Of course, the sky's the limit nowadays, and I suppose for Chuck Berry rock 'n' roll it doesn't matter too much, but even Keith Richards uses his fingers on things like “Honky Tonk Woman.”

Do you think it's important for a guitarist to learn to read music?

I did it by ear, listening to records. I never had a teacher, and I regret that I can’t read music. I went into the library once and got Teach Yourself How To Read Music or something, and it said, “Sit down at your piano.” We didn't have a piano, so that went down the chute.

Then I worked out F, A, and C and gave up, because I was too impulsive, and I was already delighted that I could play “Lost John” and a couple of other songs.

Then, next thing, I was playing blues and rock 'n' roll, which is fairly instinctive and primitive stuff anyway. But later on you start getting beyond the open tunings and ragtime blues, you know, and you're listening to someone like Diango Reinhardt or modern jazz guitarists, even bossa nova stuff like Charlie Byrd, and you begin to feel a little inadequate if you're an all-around guitar fan.

So you get a couple of books on chords and try to make sense of that. That's where the reading would probably come in; it would help if you were a bit of a jazz fan.

When recording with other musicians, do you find that not knowing written music limits your ability to communicate ideas in the studio?

No, that's no problem. Because you can hum it to them or play it on the guitar. I don't think that's the drawback; the only drawback is if you were interested in playing a classical piece verbatim, or you wanted to play a Charlie Christian solo and really wanted to find out all the notes that he played and the harmony and theory thing behind it.

Sometimes you say. “To hell with it; it doesn't matter anyway,” but it kind of does matter. I’d say a year or two of just learning a little bit of theory wouldn't do any harm. Even tablature foxes me; I have no head for mathematics.

What advice could you give in terms of practicing the guitar?

Well, it's like the old cliché: You have to love the instrument and the idea of the instrument and the whole aura of the thing, and that will dictate how much you practice, really.

I don't think you have to sit down for eight hours a day or anything, but if you're really interested, you'll probably do that anyway in the early stages – and even after that, between trying to write songs and experimenting with notes and loosening your fingers.

I think you're bound to get in an hour or two a day anyway, although some guys say they only play five minutes a day outside the gig.

Could you offer any advice for guitarists wanting to become professionals?

If you wanted to get into, say, electric blues, I’d get into a band as soon as possible, no matter how bad it is.

Don’t be too proud – get into some kind of band; get playing with a drummer. That's essential for electric blues.

If you want to play acoustic music on your own, just hurry up and get a gig if you can; get out there and play in front of people.

You feel that playing in front of people is an important thing to do as soon as possible?

Yes, it brings something out. I know for a fact that if I'm off the road for a long spell, even if I'm rehearsing like mad and playing a lot at home, the real crunch comes when I get out in front of people.

The things you thought were really hot in rehearsal don't make any sense, because quite often you've forgotten the basic drive.

In rehearsals sometimes the basics get glossed over, because you're fooling around too much with the frilly stuff. If you get out there in front of an audience, drop your pick or break a string, that toughens you up, and it brings out projection in your playing.

You have to direct your playing somewhere – unless you want to sit in a room like the painter looking at the painting he's just done, and he won't show it to anybody.

You do get people like that, who think there's no one in the city who's good enough to play with. But even acoustic players should get to a folk club and listen to other people, play with other people.

There's always a thin line between studying the old records by the old masters and trying to develop yourself. I think both can be done at the same time, because if you forget the old masters, you miss out on a whole heritage and a whole world, really.

But you shouldn't get too clogged up with the old stuff to the point where you won't be moving on yourself, because you won't end up like an old master yourself anyway, you know.

Order the Rory Gallagher 1971 debut solo album 50th anniversary edition here.

Once described as, “an oasis of chaos in a desert of suburban calm,” Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames was a musical hotbed of the '60s and a mecca for the most talented blues-rock guitarists of the era.

Started by promotor Arthur Chisnall in the mid-‘50s, by the following decade the club had become one of the most important venues in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

Known for its weekend jazz nights, the Eel Pie Island Hotel was also famous for hosting concerts by American blues guitar players including Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker – all of which were attended by a young Jeff Beck.

Other guitar heroes of the British blues boom such as Peter Green and Eric Clapton are also known to have frequented Eel Pie Island, as did the Rolling Stones who were offered a residency there in the early ‘60s.

“There was a bit of a scene in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in Richmond,” said British space rock veteran and Hawkwind founder Dave Brock. “That’s where I met Eric [Clapton] and a load of other people who used to hang out in the L’Auberge coffee bar. We always used to hang out there before going over to Eel Pie Island. That was where it all happened in our era.

“I loved going over there and listening to jazz. Later on, they had blues artists playing there… Arthur Chisnall, was an innovator because he’d book all these different blues artists in. Arthur Chisnall got so many people into blues and jazz – Eric Clapton, the Yardbirds and Jeff Beck.”

“The dressing room at Eel Pie was behind the stage, up one flight of stairs,” recalled the late Terry Clemson of British blues rockers Downliners Sect. “The walls were covered in graffiti, mainly written by the Rolling Stones. That wall would be worth thousands of pounds if it existed today!”

While American blues-influenced bands like the Rolling Stones and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers trod the notoriously rickety boards of Eel Pie Island early on, by the mid-‘60s, the British Isles – let alone Eel Pie Island – could not contain the blues boom it had so lovingly nurtured.

And as this wave of new music swept beyond U.K. shores towards the U.S., the British Invasion began to kick off, ultimately bringing blues back to its land of origin.

John Lee Hooker’s career began in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during the 1930s. Unlike his blues guitar contemporaries Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, Hooker didn't play roll-and-tumble Delta jukes, choosing instead to launch his career in Memphis, singing gospel and blues.

He moved to Detroit after World War II to work by day in an auto plant and make the rounds of Black Bottom clubs by night. 1948's "Boogie Chillen'," his first R&B hit, inaugurated the most prolific recording career in postwar history. (It's estimated that between 1949 and 1953 alone, Hooker cut some 70 singles on 24 different labels, using a dozen different names to avoid contractual problems.) 

Hooker made his first foray into Europe in '62 and returned to find that "Boom Boom" had become his first crossover hit. Covers by the Animals and other British Invasion bands helped him win white audiences at home. 

Here he is performing "Boom Boom" with the Groundhogs live on BBC television in 1964:

The following John Lee Hooker interview extracts originally appeared in the August 1992 edition of Guitar Player…

Your songs turned a generation of kids on to the blues during the 1960s.

That "Boom Boom," that "Dimples" – turned a whole generation. It went to Europe, and then come back here and turned the whole universe on. Then different artists took to doing that song, "Boom Boom."

What do you look for in a tone?

I look for a deep, gutty feeling. I don't use picks, so I can get that deep gut feeling. People ask, "How do you get that?" It's just there. A lot of people try to play real fast chords – da da da da da – that's not the blues. It's synthetic. It ain't the hard, solid blues. It's a lot of speed and everything. It has no feeling to it.

You've got to sit down and play some [whispers] funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don't rush it. Just let it come flowing through you. I can play guitar so funky, until it brings teardrops to your eyes. It has that funky, funky tone. I'm just me.

While most musicians stick to 12-bar blues, you seldom follow that format.

That's for the birds. People just feel – that's the way the blues is supposed to be played. Shut your eyes, and then you'll know what you're doing. I know what notes to hit. I know what notes not to hit. I can do a 12-bar perfect – perfect. Oh, yeah. If I did, then I wouldn't be John Lee Hooker.

See, I'm known for not doing it. When I'm just playing to myself I do it: 8, 12, 4, 16, 24. But ordinarily I don't do it, because it would take away a lot of my feeling. You cannot learn this in a book. You feel it here [points to his heart and head], not by writing on a piece of paper. Throw that paper away!

When I walk into a studio, I don't need all that stuff. I can go into a studio and in two hours' time I can record five or six songs. Sometimes it takes some people three or four weeks to record one or two songs!

Is it a compliment when people try to play like you?

Yeah, it is. Because I know I'm doing something to be loved.

Perhaps the measure of a truly great man is how he treats people day in and day out.

Right! The little things in life, the love. I always believe in "it comes back to you if you do something good." I was taught that, and I think it does. You do good deeds, somewhere in life it's going to come back. 

You can only do wrong so long before you get it in some kind of way. That's my belief. So I'm happy with my life. I had a good life, and I had a rough life – I've had both. 

I don't try to live in the past. I can't bring back those little things. I can't change the rough things that come through, so I look for the future. You can't live in the past – a lot of people try to live in a memory. 

I live for today and for people today.

Explore John Lee Hooker's catalog here.

The traditional blues players from the 1920s through the ’60s established many popular song structures, chords and guitar techniques. It’s testament to the quality and enduring popularity of these artists that so much of the identity of their playing can still be heard in today’s blues music. 

Less well known is that blues is at the heart of much of the rock and metal that would emerge from the ’70s on – so there’s something for everyone to learn. What more reason do you need to follow our lesson on some core blues basics?

Classic Blues

Get jamming the easy way, with a simple, traditional repeating boogie riff in the style of the great John Lee Hooker (Ex. 1). Based around an A root note, this line can easily be taken through a standard 12-bar blues progression (A - D - E) by shifting the pattern up one string to a “D shape” riff and down one string set for the E chord.

Ex. 2 uses the rhythm and blues groove first popularized by Bo Diddley in his self-titled 1955 single and known today as the “Bo Diddley beat.” It’s been adapted by many artists, including the Rolling Stones in “Not Fade Away,” Bruce Springsteen in “She’s the One” and George Michael in “Faith.”

This catchy groove is all about the rhythm and timing, so strum slowly at first, then try using some other chords you know. To achieve the desired feel, keep your picking hand moving in a continuous, uninterrupted down-up-down-up manner with the underlying 16th-note pulse, even during the rests.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was famed for the shuffle rhythms and ferocious lead work he’d coax from his “Number One” Strat. In Ex. 3, a blues bass line is woven around an open A5 power chord. You get the weight of the chord while the bass line outlines a more sophisticated A7 harmony. Listen to SRV’s “Pride and Joy” and “Rude Mood” for inspiration.

Ex. 4 shows a blues turnaround inspired by Eric Clapton, who adapted Robert Johnson-style changes to electric blues guitar. Playing fingerstyle will help make all the melody notes and the descending bass notes ring out clearly.

Funk-rock blends nicely with blues rhythms, as Jimi Hendrix demonstrated in many of his classic tracks. Ex. 5 is informed by his style and employs one of his favorite chords (the 7#9, often dubbed “the Hendrix chord”) played in both E and C. In the single-note part of the riff, you can pull the 5th-fret G note slightly sharp for an even bluesier flavor.

B.B. King was famed for his soulful touch and his quivering “butterfly” vibrato technique, which is deftly employed with the A note in Ex. 6. To emulate B.B.’s signature sound, aim for a quick wobble of the string but without too much pitch change. Rest the base of your fretting finger on the side of the fretboard then “flutter” your hand around this pivot point to create the vibrato. It’s easier than using pure finger strength, and it’s pure B.B.

In blues circles, a mini sweep across the strings is referred to as a rake. This drag of the pick is more of a percussive effect, so the notes don’t need to be perfectly fretted. You can even mute the strings entirely as you pick, so that the rake notes are pitchless “chucks.” We’ve written picking directions for the rakes here (Ex. 7). Notice how the quarter-tone bend in bar 1 provides a blues edge too.

Playing two notes at once is a great way to thicken up your guitar sound. This is an effective thing to do to help avoid the dreaded “tone dropout” you might experience when soloing in a power trio. Ex. 8 is inspired by John Mayer, and in bar 2 we’re playing a line that descends the B and high E strings in diatonic 3rds strings, sweetly harmonizing the key of A minor.

From Eric Clapton to Joe Bonamassa, great blues guitarists seem to have a never-ending vocabulary of stock phrases, yet they somehow always sound authentic. The key is to use the minor or major pentatonic scale as a foundation and keep your solos simple at first. In Ex. 9, we’re playing a very triplet-y phrase based on the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G) and presenting ideas that can be reimagined in myriad ways.

With some minor pentatonic basics under our belts, we can expand these ideas into something more sophisticated, using fast pentatonic flurries, as demonstrated in Ex. 10. Legendary bluesman Buddy Guy often plays fast flurries of notes, straight from the minor pentatonic scale. That means the shape feels familiar but you’ll be delivering more “angular” phrased licks.

Blues isn’t only about minor keys. Listen to Freddie King’s “Hide Away” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Need Your Love So Bad.” Both of these songs feature extensive use of the major pentatonic scale (intervallically spelled 1, 2, 3, 5, 6). The simple lick shown in Ex. 11 is designed to help get you started with this warm-sounding set of notes. Watch out though. There’s a bluesy minor note in there too – the 5th-fret C, right before the last dyad (two-note chord).

The previous lick hinted at an idea we’re going exploring more fully in our next example – mixing up parallel major and minor pentatonic scales in solos. Why bother? Well, the combination of “happy” major and “serious” minor scales sounds way more sophisticated than sticking to just one or the other. Ex. 12 keeps things simple, but this idea is a key part of blues, so experiment!

21st Century Blues

Whether it’s the fuzz-fuelled lo-fi riffing of the White Stripes and the Black Keys, or the Zeppelin-like hard rock sensibilities of Rival Sons and Greta Van Fleet, it’s fair to say that blues has evolved somewhat in recent years.

Though many of the chords and scales owe a debt to earlier forebears, many bands are putting their own stamp on blues with retro-inspired drive tones and tone-bending effects like octavers and wild fuzz distortions. Here we’re looking at a few of the tricks and riffing tropes of the current generation of blues players.

Dan Auerbach

Spiky fuzz distortion tones have been a big part of the signature retro sounds of the aforementioned bands. The riff shown in Ex. 14 is designed to make good use of a dirt pedal. If you’re using a regular drive pedal, keep the treble high, roll off a little bass and experiment with your amp’s EQ and gain.

From Robert Johnson and Elmore James to Derek Trucks, Gary Clark Jr. and Auerbach, slide guitar has long been at the heart of blues. The simple electric slide lick shown in Ex. 15 will help you develop this tricky technique.

Place your slide on your 3rd or 4th finger and aim directly over the fret you’re playing (not behind it). Use your 1st finger to dampen the strings behind the slide and suppress unwanted string noise and overtones. Additionally, it helps to use your pick hand to mute the strings your not playing on at the moment.

Contemporary bands’ minor pentatonic riffs owe as much to ’70s rock as they do to early blues. The pentatonic riff shown in Ex. 16 could easily be a Black Keys tune, a Led Zeppelin line, or you could slow it down and give it a traditional “Hoochie Coochie Man” treatment. It describes an E minor tonality, so the 6th string can be used as your tonal center to “bounce” the other notes off.

The advent of multi-track recording in the ’70s saw bands double-tracking guitar riffs. In recent years, duos like Royal Blood have used switching systems to recreate the effect in live performances. The layered riff in Ex. 17 is ideal for two guitars.

We take this idea further in Ex. 18. Here, we’re playing a simple melodic line on top of our previous riff. To make sure it stays riffy, we’re following the same rhythm for both lines – no solo widdle here! It’s based on the E minor pentatonic scale (E, G, A, B, D) throughout.

If you’re playing in a guitar-drums duo, White Stripes-style, you’ll need to fill out your sound. Ex. 19 covers plenty of notes to provide a full backing sound, then punctuating them with some fat-sounding power chords. For more weight, think about using an octaver effect as Jack White and Auerbach and Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr might do.

Even simple minor pentatonic licks can kick a song’s proverbial rear end. Ex. 20 demonstrates this with a lick inspired by Auerbach’s fretwork on the Black Keys song “Eagle Birds.”

We recently asked some of the world's top guitar players to choose their favorite solos. There was, however, one catch: They had to refrain from the obvious choices. In other words, no Hendrix, Clapton, Gilmour, et cetera.

Here’s what Eric Johnson had to say…

1) Wes Montgomery | “Caravan” from ‘Movin’ Wes’

GUITARIST: Wes Montgomery

“It’s classic Wes Montgomery – totally swinging and improvising over the changes. It’s part chords and a lot of single-note sections, and it’s all great. It’s hard to pick just one Wes solo, but this one is particularly smokin’.”

2) Albert King | “Crosscut Saw” from ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’

GUITARIST: Albert King

“Albert King always knocks me out. He gets such a great tone in this solo, and his phrasing is extraordinary. I know Eric Clapton is a fan. He’s covered this song and plays the solo almost note for note.”

3) John Lee Hooker | “Boogie Chillen’” (single)

GUITARIST: John Lee Hooker

“Check out the original 1948 version of this song. It’s incredible that this was recorded before rock and roll, because John pretty much set the foundation for everything that was to follow. The playing is flat-out extraordinary.”

4) The Electric Flag | “Texas” from ‘A Long Time Comin’’

GUITARIST: Mike Bloomfield

“Mike Bloomfield is so fiery on this cut. He’s hitting on all cylinders. I was very influenced by Mike Bloomfield. I used to listen to him a lot.”

5) The Monkees | “Valleri” from ‘The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees’

GUITARIST: Louis Shelton

“He worked a lot during the Wrecking Crew days, and this is one of his best solos. Here in the middle of a pop song that got on the radio, he slipped in this blazing, fleet-fingered solo that just shines.”

The co-founder of Canned Heat, Alan Wilson was a guitarist, harmonica player and occasional vocalist who fronted the pioneering blues-rock jam band on its two biggest hits, “On the Road Again” and “Going Up the Country.” Here are five reasons he remains a guitar legend…

1. Son House

Born in Arlington, Massachusetts on July 4, 1943, Wilson was a shy child who preferred records and books to playing. By his teens he’d picked up guitar and developed an interest in jazz, but his preference turned to blues after a friend spun a Muddy Waters record for him. Wilson developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre and performed as a solo artist on Boston’s coffeehouse circuit.

In 1964, the 20-year-old helped bring 62-year-old blues pioneer Son House out of retirement after tracking down the forgotten bluesman at the request of producer John Hammond Sr. After years of neglecting his music, House had forgotten how to play his old songs. Hammond recalled that Wilson taught the bluesman “how to play like Son House again” and assisted him on the recording of his 1965 album, Father of the Delta Blues, playing blues guitar and blowing harmonica.

2. Encyclopedic Musical Knowledge

Wilson relocated to California in the mid 1960s to help his friend John Fahey, then a student in UCLA’s folklore master’s program, write a thesis on Delta blues pioneer Charley Patton. Fahey nicknamed the nearsighted and bookish guitarist Blind Owl, a name that stuck with Wilson for the rest of his short life.

In Los Angeles, Wilson was introduced to fellow blues enthusiast “Big Bear” Bob Hite, who played him selections from his extensive collection of rare 78s. When Hite began singing along to the music, Wilson, who had brought along his guitar, began to accompany him. With a few friends, they formed a nascent version of Canned Heat, a jug band group they named after Sterno, the ethanol- and methanol-based cooking fuel that provided a cheap and often fatal high for destitute alcoholics and addicts.

3. Canned Heat

By 1966, Canned Heat had transformed into a capable boogie blues-rock act that was among the first to extend its tunes into long jams during live performances. The group signed to Liberty Records in 1967 and had its first hit with “On the Road Again,” a song that has its origins in Tommy Johnson’s “Big Road Blues,” recorded in 1927.

Though Hite was the group’s main singer, it was Wilson who took lead on the song, singing it in an unearthly falsetto he copied from his Delta blues hero Skip James. Canned Heat had their first major performance that year at the Monterey Pop Festival, where Jimi Hendrix and the Who made their U.S. debuts.

Wilson played a white Fender Mustang, wearing a metal slide on his pinkie. He’d switched to a 1954 Les Paul gold-top by the time Canned Heat played at Woodstock, in 1969. The concert saw them perform the song that would define both the group and the festival, “Going Up the Country,” a remake of “Bull Doze Blues” written by country blues singer Henry Thomas. Sung once again by Wilson, “Going Up the Country” was subsequently released as a single and became an international hit, thanks in part to its prominent use in Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 Woodstock documentary.

4. Close to Nature

Wilson developed a deep interest in botany and conservation and frequently slept outdoors, usually at Hite’s house, to be closer to nature. His 1969 song “Poor Moon” was written out of concern that humans would pollute the moon, and he wrote an essay called “Grim Harvest” that expressed concern for the fate of California’s redwoods.

5. John Lee Hooker

In May 1970, Canned Heat supported their idol John Lee Hooker in the studio for the making of the double album Hooker 'n Heat. Hooker, whose disregard for song format made him notoriously difficult to follow, was impressed by Wilson’s ability to keep up with him, noting “you musta been listenin’ to my records all your life.”The bluesman was also struck by Wilson’s prowess on the harp, calling him “the greatest harmonica player ever.” 

Tragically, on September 3, 1970, before the album’s release, Wilson was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates in his sleeping bag outside Hite’s house. Wilson, who suffered from depression, had attempted suicide before. It’s unknown if his death was accidental or intentional.

Browse Canned Heat music here.

B.B. King called her the “best damn slide player working today.” Indeed, with a glass slide on the second finger of her left hand, Bonnie Raitt coaxes a voice from her Fender Stratocaster as tough, sensuous and expressive as her own. Here are five reasons she remains a blues guitar legend…

1. Philadelphia

Her decades-long career almost didn’t happen. Born in Burbank, California, in 1949, to the Broadway musical star John Raitt and pianist Marjorie Haydock, Raitt began playing guitar at a young age before attending Radcliffe College and majoring in Social Relations and African studies.

While there, she got friendly with blues promoter Dick Waterman and moved with him and other musicians to Philadelphia. “It was an opportunity that young white girls just don’t get,” she said, “and as it turns out, an opportunity that changed everything.”

2. “Runaway”

Raitt was opening for “Mississippi” Fred McDowell at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village in 1970, when a reporter from Newsweek caught her performance and began to spread the word about her. Soon after, she signed with Warner Bros. and released her self-titled debut.

Raitt’s record sales were modest, but in 1977 she had her commercial breakthrough with a bluesy remake of Del Shannon’s 1961 hit, “Runaway.” The song raised her profile, and in 1980, she appeared as herself in the film Urban Cowboy, singing “Don’t It Make Ya Wanna Dance.”

3. Perseverance

The 1980s proved tough, as Warner dropped Raitt and she battled substance abuse. In 1988, she met producer Don Was while recording a track for the Disney tribute album Stay Awake, and the two subsequently worked on her 10th album, 1989’s Nick of Time. Featuring the singles “Nick of Time,” a cover of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love” and “Have a Heart,” the record went to the top of the charts and swept the Grammys.

Raitt’s streak rolled along with Luck of the Draw, Longing in Their Hearts and the live Road Tested, and she turned in a Grammy-winning performance of “I’m in the Mood” with John Lee Hooker on his album The Healer. Her career has continued to thrive ever since, with her last five studio albums reaching into the Billboard Top 20, and 2012’s Slipstream debuting at the top of the Rock and Blues Albums charts.

4. Political Activism

A politically active artist, Raitt advocates against the use of nuclear energy and is a founding member of Musicians United for Safe Energy. In 1979, she organized five concerts for MUSE at Madison Square Garden, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and many others, resulting in the album and film No Nukes. Raitt has also financed headstones for the graves of several blues legends, including Fred McDowell and Memphis Minnie.

5. Accolades

In March 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2002 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As the blues’ premier female guitarist, she continues to enthrall and inspire.

Playing blues guitar is as much about attitude as it is technique. If you’re suffering in either department, put some power back into your playing with this advice from electric guitar blues heroes of the past and present.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

“Your sound is in your hands as much as anything. It’s the way you pick and the way you hold the guitar, more than it is the amp or the guitar you use.”

Roy Buchanan

“Use circle picking to play faster. Start by playing with your pick at an angle. Hit the string with one edge of the pick and you’ll find that you’re in position to come back on the upstroke with the opposite edge. Then, alternate pick with a rotating motion in either a clockwise or counterclockwise circle. The pick, while not changing its angle in relation to the string, is circling that area of the string. It’s not done with the wrist, but with the fingers holding the pick.”

Bonnie Raitt

“Incorporate the feel of what someone plays into your style, rather than the actual notes. You just want to nail the emotion of how an artist’s singing and playing is making you feel, and how those feelings transform your own playing.”

Jack White

“If you want to keep things raw, try limiting yourself to only two guitars on a track.”

Rory Gallagher

“You must perform for an audience, because the real crunch happens when you get in front of people. You may discover that some things you played in rehearsal don’t make any sense because you fooled around too much with the frilly stuff and forgot the basic drive of the song. Playing live also teaches you to deal with situations like dropping your pick or breaking a string – as well as forcing you to project.”

Eric Johnson

“Remind yourself that you’re free to feel great instead of reserved or insecure. When you’re feeling good, you’re more apt to take chances onstage, and if you make a bunch of mistakes, it won’t matter. It’s almost like you’re the instrument, and the music is flowing through you like electricity.”

Ry Cooder

“Play a new thing every day. Learning one new passing chord, or a note combination, will get you moving towards something that will serve you later on. Someday, a song will come along that all of those things will relate to.”

Hubert Sumlin

“Take a note from me, put it with your own notes, and make it you.”

John Lee Hooker

“Forget about the fancy chords and just concentrate on a funky beat.”

Jeff Beck

“Overindulgence in anything is wrong – whether it’s practicing 50 hours a day or eating too much food. I’ve tried to keep it so that I’m able to execute the ideas that come out, but practicing too much depresses me. I get good speed, but then I start playing nonsense because I’m not thinking. A good layoff makes me think a lot. It helps me get both things together – the creativity and the speed.”