After a slow start to his recording career, Neil Diamond began breaking through in 1966, placing “Solitary Man” at number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 and then landing his first Top 10 hit with “Cherry, Cherry” (number six) just three months later.

He also had a number one hit that year — just not as a performer. Diamond wrote “I’m a Believer,” which the Monkees took to the top of the charts.

“The head of my record company was very angry — I’d given away a number one hit — but I was thrilled,” Diamond told us some years ago. “See, I was a songwriter, first and foremost. I kind of reluctantly became a recording artist, you know? I wanted to write songs and have other people record them … but nobody would record my stuff, so I had to sing the songs myself.”

That reluctance came after a difficult apprenticeship. During an eight-year stretch in the early ’60s, Diamond was fired by five different songwriting houses.

“So having the Monkees get the number one was as good as if I had recorded it, honestly,” he added.

Interestingly, Diamond — who recorded a version of the song for his 1967 album Just for You — considered “I’m a Believer” to be a country song when he wrote it; he envisioned country music star Eddy Arnold recording it.

“I thought it would be a great song for him,” Diamond noted. Music executive Don Kirshner, who knew Diamond from New York’s Tin Pan Alley and was working with the Monkees’ TV producers, steered it to the group instead.

“We had a lot of great songs from great songwriters,” recalls the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, who sang lead on “I’m a Believer.” “Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Sedaka, Carole Bayer Sager… Neil Diamond. It was the best of the best. You had to pinch yourself when you got these songs.”

Diamond — who also wrote “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)” for the Monkees — pitched “I’m a Believer” to the Fifth Estate as well; the group included it on its 1967 album Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead.

The guitarist performed the song faithfully in concert for decades but revisited it on his 2010 covers album Dreams, treating it as “a very gentle, reflective ballad,” played with acoustic guitar accompaniment. The approach he said “opened the song up completely. It opened my eyes about exploring that direction with some of the other songs as well … That’s what keeps it exciting.”

Diamond went on to score 38 Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of popular music’s most iconic performers, sequined shirts and all. He has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has received a Kennedy Center Honor and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

He stopped touring in 2018 after announcing a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis and has largely stepped back from music since, making only rare public appearances — although he did support A Beautiful Noise, the 2022 stage musical based on his life.

Now Diamond is re-emerging, somewhat. This week saw the release of Wild Heart, his first album of new songs since Melody Road in 2014. The material actually dates back to Home Before Dark (2008), his chart-topping second collaboration with producer Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers).

Rubin — fresh off his American Recordings work with Johnny Cash — first teamed with Diamond on 12 Songs in 2005. Using a small circle of players that included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, Billy Preston, Jellyfish’s Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Beck guitarist Smokey Hormel, Rubin pushed Diamond toward a stripped-down, live-in-the-room approach. Campbell, Tench and Hormel returned for Home Before Dark.

“I did listen to a bunch of the artists that Rick produced,” Diamond said at the time, “but there were a lot of early things that Rick liked that he wanted me to hear. We set up a meeting at his place, sat down and listened to music and chatted … every week for maybe six months.

“And for the most part what Rick played were my early records — things I hadn’t heard or thought about in decades. It was an interesting learning experience to go back to my old material and get a fresh take on it.”

Rubin’s goal was simple: strip the music down to Diamond’s voice, guitar and the song itself. Diamond initially resisted.

“I hadn’t played guitar on my records since ‘Cherry, Cherry’ and ‘Kentucky Woman,’ thinking there were other guitar players who could do it much better,” he said. “Pretty much every day I would argue that point with Rick. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted my voice and my playing, as unadorned and truthful and minimalist as possible.”

It didn’t take long for Diamond to come around.

“Three or four recordings into this thing I realized he was absolutely right and began to enjoy the playing and singing experience. I realized I could perform my music with the simplicity of just my voice and guitar.”

Tench remembers the sessions fondly, noting that the musicians had to “twist Diamond’s arm a little bit.”

“But the songs are just wonderful and he’s a great guy and really fun to be with — and obviously he’s a great songwriter,” Tench said. One night during the Home Before Dark sessions, Diamond asked the band to stay late. Campbell agreed on one condition: “Sure, if you’ll play ‘Cherry Cherry’ with us.”

“And so we played ‘Cherry Cherry’ with Neil,” Tench recalled, “and that was a treat.”

Campbell remembers the sessions just as fondly.

“We had a lot of fun,” he says. “Neil was real excitable. He’d come in with a song he wrote the night before and say, ‘That’s great, that’s great … Oh wait, maybe I’m just suffering from new-song euphoria.’ He had a great sense of humor and was really supportive of the players, and he had a lot of stories about the old days. We had a blast.”

Squeeze canceled their concert at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, on Thursday night after a tour bus worker was fatally crushed in an accident on the venue’s property.

According to FOX 5 DC, the worker was underneath a tour bus when equipment supporting the vehicle malfunctioned, causing the bus to fall on top of him. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The worker’s identity has not been publicly released.

Wolf Trap subsequently announced that the evening’s performance had been canceled.

“There was an accident involving a member of the community at Wolf Trap National Park today, tragically resulting in a loss of life,” the venue said in a statement. “Out of respect, tonight’s show has been canceled.”

Squeeze expressed their condolences in a statement of their own.

“Squeeze are deeply saddened and shocked by an incident that occurred at the venue earlier today, which resulted in the loss of a life,” the band said. “After discussions with the venue and the relevant authorities, the decision was made to cancel this evening’s performance. We will work with the promoter and venue regarding the possibility of rescheduling the show and will communicate further information to ticket holders as soon as it is available. Our thoughts remain with everyone affected by this tragic event.”

Squeeze are currently touring North America in support of Trixies, their first album of new material in eight years. Released in March, the album has an unusual history: It features songs written by founding members Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook around the time Squeeze formed in 1973, but which remained unrecorded for more than five decades.

Formed in London in 1973, Squeeze became one of the defining British new wave bands of the late 1970s and early ’80s, with enduring songs including “Up the Junction,” “Pulling Mussels From the Shell,” “Cool for Cats” and “Tempted.” Difford and Tilbrook have remained at the center of the band through its various breakups and reunions.

Squeeze’s North American tour is currently scheduled to continue Friday, September 4, at Rose Music Hall in Huber Heights, Ohio.

Billy Gibbons confirmed that the death of ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard will not bring an end to the band.

Beard passed August 17, at the age of 77 after spending 57 years in the trio, mostly with Gibbons and Dusty Hill, who died in 2021. The bass guitarist was replaced by Elwood Francis.

Beard hadn’t been on the road for some time as a result of his illness, with Michael Monahan taking his place on their current tour. The trip resumed in Eagle Pass, Texas, on August 21, after a handful of cancellations..

“Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas,” Gibbons told Variety in a statement. “His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top.

“The band which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on, as he had wished.”

The fact that Beard was the only member of ZZ Top without facial hair has been commented on for decades, with some unaware that the drummer always used his birth name.

Ultimate Classic Rock reported that, in their early years, neither Gibbons nor Hill had grown whiskers. The change came when the band returned from a two-year hiatus in 1979.

“I had a beard, but it wasn’t near the beard[s] they had,” Beard said. “I shaved it right after we got back together when I saw.”

Added Gibbons, “Frank didn’t mind being beardless. After all, he had the name – and he could go in the shopping mall without being interrupted.” In a separate interview he admitted: “We’d gotten really, really lazy. Nobody had bothered to shave. In simple terms, that’s exactly how it started.”

Hill’s death leaves Gibbons as the group’s only surviving original member. Asked in 2018 about the secret to their longevity, the electric-guitar slinger told Rock And Roll Garage, “There are two lingering questions. One of them says, ‘How does the guy with the name Frank Beard end up playing between you two guys with two-foot chin whiskers?’ We still don’t know!

“And the second question is, ‘Gosh, you guys have held it together longer than most marriages.’ The secret is, of course, two words: separate buses.”

Carol Kaye’s bass lines have graced countless iconic albums and singles, TV themes and film soundtracks of the 1960s and early 1970s. Her work can be heard on classic tracks running the gamut from Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” to “River Deep – Mountain High” by Ike & Tina Turner and Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright.”

With more than 10,000 recordings to her credit, Kaye is considered the most recorded bass guitar player of all time, but she actually started out as a session guitarist in the late 1950s. That’s her playing rhythm guitar on Ritchie Valens’ 1958 classic “La Bamba.” She also played electric guitar on the Beach Boys hits “Surfing’ U.S.A.” and “California Girls.”

In 1963 though, fate stepped in and forever changed her career trajectory.

“During the surf-rock craze, it was increasingly difficult to even like to play guitar on those dates,” she recalls. “Unlike the earlier sessions, it was not fun.

“So late in 1963, when a bass player didn't show up at Capitol Records, I was elected to play someone's Fender Precision. All of a sudden, it was fun to play music again, and I knew then that by playing and creating bass parts I could do studio work and be happy, and take care of my family.”

A combination of simplicity and ingenuity lay at the heart of Kaye’s distinctive bass tone.

“I only played with a hard pick but could quickly turn my tone knobs to simulate either a thick ‘fingers’ sound or a clicky high-end, like on the Nancy Sinatra dates,” she explains. “My pick-style was creating big waves in the recording industry in L.A., and suddenly all the producers had to have me. They loved my sounds and the funky parts I could create.”

Kaye also became an esteemed member of L.A.’s famed Wrecking Crew. (Notably, she chose not to be honored when the Crew was inducted in the Rock Hall last year.) The group of go-to session musicians was pivotal to forging Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions.

“Phil was fun and good to work for back in the ’60s, he paid us all well,” Kaye recalled of working with Spector. “He was a genius at sounds, and innovated so many things. He put extra mikes on the drums and guitars and was the first to use headphones for all the studio musicians in the studios.”

Looking back over her career Kaye recalls one memorable session in 1973 for Barbra Streisand’s hit single — and signature song — “The Way We Were,” the title track to her film and album of the same name. The date illustrates the importance of Kaye’s role in any session she was hired for.

As she recalls, the session for the December 1973 recording was huge. It included both a band and full orchestra, with Streisand herself singing live.

“For the first time in years, you saw everybody you had been recording with. All the string players, horn players were there, and it was fantastic to all play together in that large studio.”

But Kaye had no room to develop her own bass lines.

“Marvin Hamlisch, the songwriter, didn't want me to change any part of his written-out bass line in his arrangement,” she reveals.

As the session got underway, it was clear the song had legs.

“You knew it was going to be a biggie hit,” Kaye says.

But as the hours dragged on, nothing good was coming of it.

“Streisand, being a top pro, did about 33 straight takes,” the bassist recalls. “Nothing was wrong; we just hadn't hit that ‘hair-raising’ hit-take yet. The tune was sort of losing its potency.”

Kaye decided to try something different.

“I thought, To heck with playing the part as it was written. I just started playing. I was inventing on the bass.”

Drummer Paul Humphrey glanced over at Kaye.

“He smiled and changed his drum part too,” she recalls.

“And boom! The take came to life.

"I remember looking over at the booth where Barbra was, and she was holding a long note, while I was filling with arpeggios on the bass part, our eyes met and it was electricity. You knew this was the take. Man, was that fun.”

That was as close as Kaye got to Streisand.

“I wanted to meet her,” she says, “but the whole orchestra — probably 50 to 60 people — surrounded her.”

Besides, Kaye — always the most popular session bassist — had an early morning film call.

“I had to leave,” she says, “but that was a special date. A nice date with good feeling."

Alex Van Halen is now a knight — and he received the honor in the Dutch city where he and Eddie spent their childhood.

The Van Halen drummer and co-founder was knighted Tuesday, September 1, in Nijmegen, the city where the brothers grew up before their family emigrated to the United States. Van Halen, who was born in Amsterdam, was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw), one of the Netherlands’ highest civilian honors.

The 73-year-old musician attended the ceremony at the Berchmanianum, the academy building of Radboud University, where Nijmegen mayor Hubert Bruls presented him with the royal decoration and praised his role in writing a “remarkable chapter in the history of rock music.”

Van Halen was characteristically modest when reflecting on the honor.

“My cousin organized most of this. I’m very grateful,” he said. “I think institutions like this are important in people’s lives because it adds a dignity and a gravity to what we do. Whether it’s actually deserved or not, that’s another question. But we can live up to it. That’s the whole thing, is you got to have something to live up to.”

Van Halen also signed Nijmegen’s Book of the City, a ceremonial volume reserved for distinguished visitors. His name now appears alongside those of Bruce Springsteen and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.

The ceremony had particular resonance given Van Halen’s enduring connection to Nijmegen. Alex and Eddie were born in Amsterdam and moved with their family to Nijmegen when they were young. The brothers lived there until their family emigrated to the United States in 1962, eventually settling in Pasadena, California.

“Alex still feels a connection with Nijmegen,” the city said in a statement, “and Nijmegen in turn honors the band.”

The connection between the Van Halen brothers and the city has been celebrated before. In 2019, part of Nijmegen’s Hunnerpark was temporarily renamed Van Halenplein, while a mural honoring Eddie was unveiled there.

Alex and Eddie went on to form the band that would bear their family name in California. After years of playing clubs and backyard parties, Van Halen broke through with its self-titled 1978 debut and became one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Alex and Eddie remained the constants throughout the band’s nearly five-decade history, until Eddie’s death in 2020.

Alex’s thunderous, precise drumming was a fundamental part of the band’s sound, powering classics including “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” “Unchained,” “Panama,” “Jump” and “Hot for Teacher.” Van Halen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

Now, Van Halen is also working to preserve another part of that history: a collection of previously unreleased recordings he and Eddie made together.

Steve Lukather, who has been assisting Van Halen with the project, has been effusive about what he has heard. Speaking to Guitar Player earlier this year, Lukather dismissed the idea that the recordings are merely scraps being assembled for the sake of releasing something with Eddie’s name attached to it.

“I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” Lukather said. “When I heard them, I said to Al, ‘How fucking come you didn’t use these?’ And the answer was because nobody could write to it. So if you think this is a bunch of throwaway crap that we’re trying to Mickey Mouse together to suck the dollar out of poor, unsuspecting Van Halen fans, it’s not.

“These are fucking finished tracks with Ed and Al, and Ed’s playing bass on a lot of it.”

Steve Vai has also heard some of the recordings. He recalled visiting Eddie at his home studio, where the guitarist pulled tapes from a room filled with archival recordings.

“I was up at Edward’s house once, in his studio,” Vai told Guitar Player. “He invited me. He had a room filled with tapes, and he was pulling them out and we were listening. He would just sit and record and play.

“And I’m listening to this stuff and, I’ll tell you, nobody plays like they do when they’re sitting in their room alone. It was a whole library of tapes, and it was such great stuff.

“So I’m sure there’s a lot there to play with, and it’ll be great,” Vai says. “And I’m really glad Alex is working with Luke. More than anybody I knew through the years, Luke and Edward were like this.” Vai crosses his fingers. “So that’s the best guy to help with this.”

Led Zeppelin are often credited for creating some of the heaviest music in the hard-rock canon. But Jimmy Page, the group’s main songwriter, was anything but one-dimensional in his output.

Perhaps no track in the band’s catalog demonstrates this better than “The Rain Song,” the second cut on Zeppelin’s fifth album, 1973’s Houses of the Holy. Combining guitar work inspired by folk, blues and jazz with a sentimental orchestral score and Robert Plant’s romantic lyrics, “The Rain Song” is a track you either skip over or submit to.

But where did the inspiration for such an atypical Zeppelin track come from? Apparently from a Beatle: George Harrison.

Page explained the song’s genesis to former Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. As he revealed, Harrison — newly solo following the Beatles’ breakup — was discussing Zeppelin’s music with the band’s drummer, John Bonham.

“George was talking to Bonzo one evening and said, ‘The problem with you guys is that you never do ballads.’ I said, ‘I’ll give him a ballad,’ and I wrote ‘Rain Song,’ which appears on Houses of the Holy.

“In fact,” Page continued, “you'll notice I even quote ‘Something’ in the song's first two chords.”

Page — who tuned his electric and acoustic guitars to D G C G C D for the track — does in fact follow the same descending progression heard in the verse from Harrison’s “Something,” from major to major 7 to 7.

The irony is that Harrison himself took his opening lyrics to “Something” from the James Taylor song “Something in the Way She Moves,” from Taylor’s 1968 self-titled debut. Harrison knew Taylor’s song well, since the folk singer was among the artists signed to the Beatles Apple label. Both he and Paul McCartney had been key in bringing Taylor aboard, and even contributed performances to his debut.

Harrison was correct in his appraisal of Zeppelin’s catalog, and Page was resolute in making his response. “The Rain Song” is profoundly unlike anything else the band created.

Page seemed the know the band was treading far from their well-beaten path. His working title for the tune was “Slush,” a word that among the Brits informally refers to something overly sentimental. The song’s orchestral passages, performed by bass guitarist John Paul Jones on a Mellotron, recall Muzak, the anonymous easy-listening music once commonly played in department stores for ambience.

While the song has its detractors (Rolling Stone’s reviewer slagged it and “No Quarter” as “drawn-out vehicles for the further display of Jones’ unknowledgeable use of Mellotron and synthesizer”), “The Rain Song” touched a nerve in many record buyers and future musicians, including producer Rick Rubin.

"I don't even know what kind of music this is,” Rubin declared in a 2010 artists picks feature for Rolling Stone. “It defies classification. There's such tasteful, beautiful detail in the guitar, and a triumphant feel when the drums come in — it's sad and moody and strong, all at the same time. I could listen to this song all day. That would be a good day."

And while there’s no denying that it’s the odd duck among the vibrant rockers on Houses of the Holy, “The Rain Song” is a fitting entry in a catalog that defied convention and both established and expanded the hard-rock repertoire. The track arguably paved the way for the power ballad.

While we don’t know if Harrison ever had a response to “The Rain Song,” we do know he wasn’t a fan of the heavier guitar sounds that players like Page pursued in the wake of Cream-era Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

For that matter, we have a record of when Harrison first heard about Led Zeppelin in a January 1969 recording session during the making of Let It Be. Asked if he’s heard the album from Jimmy Page’s new band, Harrison seems a bit confused.

“Jimmy Page? Is he the one that was in the Yardbirds?” he asks.

Told it is indeed the very same Jimmy Page, Harrison pointedly demurs.

“Uh… I think is lunch ready?” he replies.

For years, the Who believed the original tapes for The Who by Numbers were gone.

That seemed like a reasonable assumption. The 1975 album had been recorded on two-inch multitrack tape, decades before digital storage made it possible to keep virtually unlimited copies of a recording. And in 2008, a catastrophic fire at Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed or damaged a vast archive of recordings, including tapes belonging to artists ranging from Billie Holiday and Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry, Tom Petty, Soundgarden and Steely Dan.

The Who by Numbers was widely believed to have been among them.

It wasn't. The tapes were sitting in plain sight at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. The person who eventually found them was Brian Kehew — a musician and keyboard technician who had worked with the Who, but whose expertise as an archivist and recording historian had turned him into something resembling a musical private detective.

Kehew had been called to Sunset Sound to examine tapes the Who had left behind. It was the sort of archival job that usually produces something interesting but hardly earth-shattering: a forgotten overdub, an alternate take or a stray piece of studio history.

Instead, he found the original multitrack tapes for The Who by Numbers.

“The band had been looking for the tapes for years, but this was one place they hadn’t thought to check,” Kehew explained in a 2024 interview with The New York Times.

The discovery was far more valuable than simply recovering a master recording. The tapes contained the original multitracks from the sessions, along with Pete Townshend’s demos and additional material that had not made the original album. Their survival has now made possible an expanded reissue of The Who by Numbers that would otherwise have been impossible in its present form.

Due out October 30, the super-deluxe edition of The Who by Numbers brings together 92 unreleased tracks and mixes, including 11 of Townshend’s original demos for the album. Among the gems is the recently revealed early mix of “Imagine a Man,” with vocals by Townshend.

For Townshend, the album is an unusually intimate document of the Who. Released in 1975, it followed Quadrophenia and preceded Who Are You, but its songs were considerably more inward-looking than the band’s grandest rock statements.

“The Who by Numbers is a tricky album to talk about,” Townshend says in an official statement accompanying the reissue. “It’s the only one where I allowed songs that were so personal to be used by the Who.”

Roger Daltrey sees that vulnerability as one of the album’s greatest strengths.

“In some ways, The Who by Numbers is my favorite [Who] album,” he says. “Songs like ‘Imagine a Man,’ ‘How Many Friends’ and ‘However Much I Booze’ expose our vulnerabilities, and the album is wonderful for that.”

The album had been recorded at Shepperton Studios’ soundstage in Surrey, England, using Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio. The same mobile recording setup had been used on Quadrophenia, while Shepperton had also hosted sessions connected with Rory Gallagher’s Irish Tour ’74 and Bad Company’s early albums.

But the reason The Who by Numbers tapes wound up in California was what happened next: the album was mixed at Sunset Sound, and the original two-inch multitrack reels remained at the Hollywood studio.

There they stayed, apparently forgotten.

Kehew was uniquely qualified to recognize what he had found. Alongside Kevin Ryan, he co-authored Recording the Beatles, an exhaustive examination of the equipment, techniques and recording practices used at Abbey Road Studios. He had also helped locate previously lost recordings by artists including Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie.

And unlike many archive specialists, he had a personal history with the Who. Kehew had worked as a touring musician and keyboard technician with the band, giving him both the technical knowledge to understand the tapes and the familiarity to recognize their significance.

The timing was particularly fortuitous. Kehew had recently joined forces with fellow industry veteran Danny White to establish Master Tape Rescue, an effort devoted to locating and preserving recordings that might otherwise disappear.

For Kehew, the Who by Numbers tapes became the kind of discovery that makes archival work worthwhile. What began as a routine examination at Sunset Sound had uncovered not only an album everyone thought was lost, but a far richer record of how the Who made it — from Townshend’s demos to performances that never appeared on the original LP.

In related news, Townshend and Daltrey have each confirmed they have reconciled with drummer Zak Starkey and are rehearsing again. The Who wrapped up their farewell tour last October but have remained open to future performances.

Queen had their share of disagreements over the years that the original classic quartet was still together.

Guitarist Brian May and singer Freddie Mercury disagreed over whether or not to put an electric guitar solo on one of the group’s biggest hits. May also thought the singer was overdoing it when he pushed the lead guitar to the fore on the final choruses to “We Are the Champions” until it clashed with the vocals. And he was dismayed when the band recorded the backing track to their hit “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” in his absence.

But those were minor grievances compared to the intraband controversy that continues over one of Queen’s cult favorites: “I’m in Love With My Car.” The song was written by drummer Roger Taylor as a coy ode to drivers who feel too much affection for their automobiles.

Among its choice lyrics were the couplets, “When I'm holding your wheel / all I hear is your gear. / When my hand’s on your grease gun / oh, it’s like a disease, son.”

“Brian was like, ‘Is this a joke?’” Taylor recalls in an interview with Mojo. “I said, ‘Look at all those people out washing their cars on a Sunday morning, lavishing attention on them — they probably love their cars more than they love their wives.’

“It’s a valid lyric, I think, but kind of tongue in cheek, too, obviously... cars and girls — what else is there?”

But what really bothered May was the decision to place the song on the B-side to Queen’s monumental 1975 hit “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Because publishing royalties are split evenly between a record’s A and B sides, the arrangement meant Taylor’s joke of a song went on to earn a fair sum of money.

“We were aware of the injustice of ‘I’m in Love With My Car’ making as much money as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’” May explained to Mojo. “It was a real sticking point for the band and it’s good we got through it.

“I think our sense of humor saved us. How long did it take me to get over it? Oh, quite a while.”

The resentment even surfaced in the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, where May’s onscreen character complains about Taylor’s song getting an unfair advantage.

Apparently, May and Taylor have clashed on other occasions, including when the guitarist took a hand with the drummer’s songs.

“I think Roger would say to you that it’s very simplistic with him,” May says. “He thinks in barre chords on the whole. My contribution would be to come in and make the melodies work better.

“It’s a humble task but that’s what I’ve done on Roger’s songs — add a bit of color.”

Taylor is unhappy with the insinuation.

“Not really, no!” he snorts. “I don’t only think in barre chords — that’s a slightly arrogant statement to make.

“Brian’s a perfectionist and he will chase down the detail, but that didn’t mean I was going to let him fuck up my songs!”

His grievances aside, the drummer takes comfort knowing his royalty haul from “I’m in Love With My Car” continues to get under May’s skin.

“He’s never forgiven me,” the drummer says. “And I’ve never stopped laughing about it!”

Olivia Rodrigo closed out her inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival on August 30 with a very special guest: Stevie Nicks, who joined the pop star for a moving performance of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.”

Rodrigo had already brought out Alanis Morissette for “Ironic” and Sarah McLachlan for “Building a Mystery” and “Angel” during her festival-closing set. But the biggest surprise came when Rodrigo briefly left the stage, then returned hand-in-hand with Nicks.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Stevie Nicks!” Rodrigo announced as the crowd erupted.

The two then performed “Landslide,” accompanied only by longtime Nicks collaborator Waddy Wachtel on acoustic guitar. They traded vocals on the verses before joining together in harmony on the chorus, giving the Fleetwood Mac classic a striking cross-generational resonance.

For Nicks, “Landslide” has always been a deeply personal song. She wrote it in 1973, when her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham was under strain and she was beginning to wonder whether her lifelong dream of a music career would ever come true.

Nicks and Buckingham had traveled to Aspen, Colorado, where Buckingham began rehearsals for a one-month tour with the band of former Everly Brothers singer Don Everly. Buckingham expected the job to provide enough money for the couple to get by for a while, but Everly ended the tour early.

Buckingham returned to Aspen frustrated and angry. After a fight with Nicks, he took her car and left her there.

With help from her parents, Nicks bought a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Distraught, she went to the home of their friend and producer Keith Olsen.

“She sat on the couch crying that she and Lindsey had had this fight,” Olsen recalled. “I got my guitar out and handed it to her and said, ‘Go in the bedroom and write about it.’ And that’s what she did. I fell asleep on the couch.”

Alone in Olsen’s bedroom, Nicks found herself thinking about the mountains she had just left behind.

“When you’re in Colorado and you’re surrounded by these incredible mountains, you think ‘avalanche,’” she later explained. “It meant the whole world could tumble around us and the landslide would bring you down.”

The song came quickly. When Olsen awoke, Nicks played him the new composition — one that would eventually become one of Fleetwood Mac’s most enduring songs after Buckingham and Nicks joined the group in 1975.

But “Landslide” was about more than the uncertain future of Nicks’ relationship with Buckingham. She was also confronting the possibility that the music career she had dreamed about since childhood might never happen.

That uncertainty found its way into one of the song’s most poignant lines: “Even children get older, and I’m getting older too.”

Years later, Nicks explained the song’s significance in the liner notes to Crystal Visions: The Very Best of Stevie Nicks.

“I wrote ‘Landslide’ about whether or not I was going to give it all one more chance,” she wrote. “You know the rest of the story.”

The rest of the story included Fleetwood Mac, whose arrival would transform Nicks’ career. “Landslide” became one of the group’s signature songs and, more than five decades after Nicks wrote it, remains a meditation on uncertainty, change and the fear of watching one version of your life disappear.

At Daisy Chain Fields, Nicks seemed to recognize something of her younger self in Rodrigo.

“She reminds me of me, when I was her age a hundred years ago,” Nicks told the crowd after the performance. “And I’m somewhat awestruck that she could do all this. Because it’s so hard, you have no idea, putting this [festival] together with all of these people. And she’s done it, with this grace.”

Rodrigo created Daisy Chain Fields in the spirit of the ’90s Lilith Fair, bringing together artists including Bikini Kill, the Breeders, Chappell Roan and Garbage. Net proceeds from the festival supported organizations advocating for women and girls, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood and the National Women’s Law Center.

Queen have unveiled a new 4K trailer for Queen: Budapest, the band’s landmark 1986 concert film, ahead of its 40th-anniversary release in theaters this fall.

Set to the group's hit “We Are the Champions,” the 100-second trailer previews the newly restored film, which captures Queen performing in Budapest on July 27, 1986, during the Magic tour. The concert was a historic event: Queen became the first major Western rock band to perform a stadium show behind the Iron Curtain.

The footage has been remastered in 4K by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production, using material shot by 17 cameras around the concert. The original multitrack tapes have also been remastered for the new release.

“It’s going to be definitively the most real experience ever of us, Queen, in our glory days,” Brian May said when the anniversary edition was announced. “I think people will get lost in it and even forget they’re watching a film.”

The new trailer offers glimpses of Queen both onstage and behind the scenes, capturing the scale of the band’s historic visit to Hungary at the height of their live power.

For May — who performs with his Red Special home-made electric guitar in hand — the significance of the concert went far beyond the performance itself. Fans in Eastern Europe had spent years listening to Queen through bootleg recordings, making the chance to see the band in person an extraordinary moment.

“For years, fans behind the Iron Curtain had been able to listen to Queen music only on illegal cassettes. It was a forbidden thing to listen to rock bands like us, so to see them play in a live show would have been unthinkable,” May said.

“This concert, when they could finally come and see us live in person and interact with us, was a huge emotional moment for them and also for us. It felt like a very big deal — you could feel that incredible energy,” May added. “There will never be an event quite like that again.”

Queen: Budapest will arrive in theaters and select IMAX venues on October 7, followed by a wider release on October 30 in Blu-ray, DVD, triple-vinyl, double-CD and digital formats.

Boston guitarist Tom Scholz has shared a rare live recording of “More Than a Feeling,” captured during the band’s 2017 Hyper Space tour — and it offers a glimpse of Boston onstage that fans have never officially been given before.

The recording arrives as Boston celebrates the 50th anniversary of their legendary self-titled debut album, which was released on August 25, 1976. Earlier this week, the band announced an expanded edition of Boston featuring previously unreleased “lost demos.”

Now Scholz has reached further into the vaults, sharing what he calls “one of the last available recordings” of the band performing its signature song live.

In a new Facebook update shared August 27, he explained that the recording isn’t a polished studio reconstruction, but an unvarnished document of the band in concert.

“Everyone is familiar with the recording of ‘More Than a Feeling’ Brad [Delp] and I performed in 1976, so now, 50 years later, I’d like to offer one of the last available recordings of the song performed live by the band Boston in 2017,” he detailed.

“This is not a studio remix of a multitrack recording, but the actual stereo feed from the mixing console to the sound system speakers. The mistakes (mostly mine), and oddities of a live mix in a large venue are all there. Gary Pihl has edited some actual video footage from the show. Enjoy!”

The release is notable because, despite Boston’s extensive history on the road and the existence of numerous unofficial concert recordings, the band has never issued an authorized live album.

But Scholz’s post ultimately looks far beyond the 2017 performance. Fifty years after Boston transformed his career, he’s still reflecting on just how unlikely that breakthrough was.

“In 1975, with singer Brad Delp and drummer Jim Masdea, I finished my final demo recording number six of my songs that were recorded, arranged, played and produced the way I wanted to hear them. I wasn’t expecting any success,” he explained in the Facebook update. “My demos had been universally rejected for years — now I was just making one last recording of my best songs before I threw in the towel at age 29.

“I was not surprised when almost every record company rejected them again — including Epic,” Scholz remembered. “By now, I figured my musical tastes were just a lot different than most people’s, but surprisingly, after Epic had a good listen to “More Than a Feeling,” Brad and I received a contract offer. (Thank you Tom Werman at Epic for having ears!)”

Even then, Scholz wasn’t convinced that signing a record deal would lead to a hit. After years of rejection, he had little reason to expect otherwise. What he did have was the chance to finally make what he considered a real record — albeit one that was still being created in his basement.

The rest is rock history. Boston became a blockbuster, “More Than a Feeling” became an enduring classic with a memorable electric guitar riff, and the music Scholz had nearly abandoned ended up reaching millions of people.

Half a century later, he’s still hearing from listeners about what those songs have meant to them.

“After six years of discouragement, Boston suddenly blanketed the radio airwaves! The ultimate success was the result of you, our listeners and fans,” he said. “The variety of stories I’ve heard of people who were helped through hard times by this music (I’m one of those stories!), and the number of lives that have been saved by the donations made possible, have all made the enormous work effort more than worth it.

“Thank you all for an amazing run.”

Tim Curry, the actor and singer who became an icon as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, died August 25 at age 80. But outside his film and television work, Curry left behind one particularly strange piece of musical history: “I Do the Rock,” his 1979 one-hit wonder that turned a rapid-fire catalog of celebrities, politicians and cultural figures into a gloriously theatrical rock song.

“I do the rock — it’s stimulating,” Curry said in the original press material for Fearless, the album that contained the song.

The line was more than a joke. Curry was serious about his music career, even as his success in Rocky Horror threatened to make him permanently associated with Frank-N-Furter. The Fearless press material described Curry as an artist who had entered rock without being weighed down by its traditions, instead bringing his own “wit, intelligence and panache” to the form.

For Fearless, Curry reunited with two musicians he had worked with on his 1978 debut album, Read My Lips: composer and keyboardist Michael Kamen and guitarist Dick Wagner. This time, Wagner and Kamen produced the record together, with Wagner also playing guitar and contributing to several of its songs.

Wagner was hardly an anonymous studio player. His résumé included extensive work with Alice Cooper as well as Lou Reed and Kiss, frequently working alongside session ace Steve Hunter. Wagner brought a formidable rock pedigree to Curry's deliberately theatrical music.

“Tim and I got along really well,” Wagner recalled in a 2013 interview with AntiMusic. “We wrote a lot of songs together for his album.” Wagner said Curry had asked him and Kamen to produce Fearless, and that they produced it, played on it and wrote songs with Curry.

Wagner also offered a particularly revealing assessment of Curry's musical ambitions: “He’s an intellectual actor really who wanted to have a singing career too.” He acknowledged that the career did not ultimately work out as Curry had hoped, but added, “we did make some good music together.”

One of those pieces of “good music” was “I Do the Rock,” the album's gloriously eccentric centerpiece. Written by Curry, the song turns a rapid-fire catalogue of celebrities, politicians, intellectuals and pop-culture figures into a declaration of purpose. Its lyrics name-check everyone from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Albert Einstein and Friedrich Nietzsche to Liza Minnelli, Farrah Fawcett, John Travolta, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

The musicians surrounding Curry were every bit as serious. Wagner played lead and acoustic guitar, Kamen supplied keyboards, oboe and synthesizer, and the rhythm section included Motown bassist Bob Babbitt and drummer Charles Collins. David Sanborn contributed alto saxophone, while Bob Kulick also played guitar.

The result was an unusual collision of Curry's theatrical instincts and a genuine late-'70s rock band. A contemporary HiFi/Stereo Review called “I Do the Rock” a “tour de force,” describing it as Noel Coward–style patter about the political, social and jet-set personalities of the day, backed by a riff.

“I Do the Rock” became Curry's only U.S. Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at number 91 in late 1979. Fearless itself reached 53 on the Billboard 200, making it the most commercially successful album of Curry's recording career.

The album was recorded at the Hit Factory in New York and Long View Farm Recording Studio in Massachusetts, with a formidable cast of musicians including Motown bassist Bob Babbitt, drummer Charles Collins, guitarist Bob Kulick, keyboardist Bette Sussman and saxophonist David Sanborn.

For Curry, though, the point was never simply to prove that he could make a rock record. He wanted to step outside the safety of his most famous character and connect with an audience as himself.

His music career ultimately didn't become the second act he had envisioned. But Fearless remains a fascinating record of Curry trying to make that transition — backed by musicians of serious rock pedigree and determined to be taken seriously as more than Frank-N-Furter.

For an actor who spent his career inhabiting unforgettable characters, it was one of the rare occasions when Tim Curry was determined to let audiences hear the artist underneath them.

Boston marked the 50th anniversary of their self-titled debut album by announcing a 50th-anniversary edition — although it won’t arrive until 2027. But Impex Records said the upcoming version will differ from previous reissues because it’s being assembled in collaboration with bandleader Tom Scholz.

The guitarist, inventor and producer endured steep challenges to deliver the original record, first released on August 25, 1976. His exacting audio requirements and determination to retain control of the product made its path to success a difficult one.

In fact, it took seven years to complete the 11-track project.

“I started around 1969,” he told Classic Rock in 2023. “That was when I wrote my first song, Foreplay. It’s ironic that the first piece I ever wrote appeared on a best-selling 17-million-plus album.

“From there it was a long, long string of doing everything from buying time in so-called professional recording studios. Back in the ’70s that was incredibly expensive. Then, after I had blown enough money doing that and realized it was just gonna cost too much, I decided I would put my own little demo studio together.”

Scholz received a series of rejections before Epic signed Boston — and demanded that the tracks they’d heard be re-recorded in a “proper” studio.

“I knew I couldn’t… I’d gotten used to working alone,” he said.

That’s when producer John Boylan offered a sneaky solution. “I would make the record in my basement and wouldn’t tell anybody, and he would take a couple guys he knew out to L.A.,” Scholz explained. “They would record some songs out there, and Epic would think all the recording was done in L.A.”

Former coguitarist Barry Goudreau recalled the episode in an interview with Guitar Player.

“All of us, except for Tom, flew out to California and did some recording out there to give the label the impression that we were recording the album in L.A. with John Boylan,” he said. “But Tom was just doing it in the basement, and pretty much replicating what he’d already done on the demo. And if you compare the two, they’re really close.”

Regardless, Boston’s record hit pay dirt, with hits like "More Than a Feeling" — which beautifully merged acoustic and electric guitars — "Peace of Mind" and "Foreplay/Long Time." The album continues to receives airplay on classic rock radio to this day.

Impex described the 2027 release as “the most authentic version of this oft-reissued classic,” and added, “Wishing to offer something truly unique to the millions of Boston fans who’ve supported the band through the years, Tom has — for the very first time — dug deep into his massive archive of recordings to find the long-lost, previously unreleased demos he famously shopped to the labels before being signed by Epic Records.

“He painstakingly restored and remastered these elusive treasures with the help of producer, digital expert and Boston guitarist Gary Pihl, exclusively for this 50th-anniversary release.”

Full details have yet to be revealed, but the anniversary package is available for pre-order now in black vinyl, gold vinyl and SACD/hybrid formats.

A recording of John Lennon and Paul McCartney working on Beatles classic “Day Tripper” has been released, after having lived in storage since it was made in 1965.
The final version of the song was released in December that year, as a double-A side with “We Can Work It Out,” and reached number one in the U.K. and number five in the U.S.. Both songs were tracked during sessions for their sixth album, Rubber Soul.

In the newly released “Day Tripper (Songwriting Work Tape),” John Lennon and Paul McCartney are heard laying down the structure and trying vocal styles using an acoustic guitar and an electric.

At one point they cut the take with a fit of the giggles, then later Lennon says “I can’t balance this…” after another attempt. Later still, the pair giggle again after Lennon’s delivery of the line ‘I tried to please her.’

The song was created by Lennon, initially as a folk-rock style piece, before McCartney helped with a verse and they turned it into the trademark style. “Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right?“ Lennon told Playboy in 1980. “Usually on a ferry boat or something. But [the song] was kind of [saying], ‘You're just a weekend hippie.’”

In his the 1997 memoir, Many Years From Now, McCartney described it as “a tongue-in-cheek song about someone who was committed only in part to the idea. Whereas we saw ourselves as full-time trippers.”

The work tape is one of a number of bonus tracks to be packaged with the special edition of Rubber Soul, which arrives on October 2. Produced by Giles Martin with assistance from engineer Sam Okell, the box set also includes new stereo and Dolby Atmos versions of the record, the Capitol edition as released in the U.S., and the original British mono mix. It’s available for pre-order in multiple formats.

Former White Stripes drummer Meg White has become the unwitting subject of a bizarre controversy after the U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail secretly followed and photographed her friend in Detroit, mistakenly believing she was White — even after the woman told the scandal sheet it had the wrong person.

The British rag published an article and more than a dozen photographs of the woman on August 6, boasting that it had found the “reclusive female music megastar” and would reveal her “secret new life,” including what it claimed were the first public images of White in 17 years. Instead, The Mail had been following and photographing a completely different person: a friend of White’s.

According to The Mail’s own account, the newspaper approached the woman after following and photographing her and accused her of being the former White Stripes drummer. She laughed and told the reporters they had mistaken her identity.

The outlet published the story anyway, with senior reporter Joe Hutchison writing that the newspaper ultimately concluded the woman was White because she politely responded “thank you” after being complimented on the White Stripes’ music.

The Mail has since quietly removed the article and photographs from its website without issuing a correction or editor’s note explaining their disappearance.

More than a dozen photographs showed the unsuspecting woman getting out of a vehicle and socializing with two other people outside a Detroit restaurant. A music-label executive who worked on multiple White Stripes releases and is close friends with both White and the woman who was photographed told U.K. newspaper The Guardian that neither woman knew she was being followed.

“Neither Meg nor the friend that was pictured had any idea they were being stalked and, if they had, they for sure would not have voluntarily chosen to be featured in anything having to do with The Daily Mail,” the executive said on condition of anonymity.

The source also confirmed that White is well and continues to live privately in Detroit.

“I can also assure you that Meg is well and is living the private life she chooses and deserves in Detroit,” they added.

White has maintained an exceptionally low public profile since the White Stripes split in 2011. The drummer, whose playing was hailed for its raw power and use of space, was named one of Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest drummers of all time in 2016.

When the White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, White declined to attend and instead sent a message of gratitude through her former bandmate, Jack White, the electric guitar innovator celebrated for his use of unconventional vintage guitars

“I spoke with Meg White the other day, and she said that she’s very sorry she couldn’t make it here tonight,” White said in his acceptance speech, “but she wanted me to tell you that she’s very grateful. And to all of the folks who supported her in all the years, it really means a lot to her.”

The Mail offered no explanation for why it continued to pursue and photograph the woman after she had told its reporters they had the wrong person.

The newspaper’s error was subsequently confirmed by singer-songwriter Karen Elson, Jack White’s ex-wife. In a since-deleted social media post, Elson identified the photographed woman as a friend of Meg White and described her as someone “who we also love tremendously.”

Representatives for Meg White did not respond to The Guardian’s requests for comment.

Rare footage of Jimi Hendrix’s iconic 1969 Woodstock performance has been unearthed, filmed by a 22-year-old drama student who managed to sneak onto the stage and capture the guitarist from just 15 feet away with a video camera.

Hendrix closed out the legendary festival in Bethel, New York, on August 18, 1969, performing with his newly formed band Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, also known as the Band of Gypsys. The lineup featured bass guitarist Billy Cox, guitarist Larry Lee, percussionists Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez, and drummer Mitch Mitchell, who had also played with the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Now, on the 57th anniversary of the performance, the newly released film Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock — A Second Look offers a fresh look at the historic set, including footage that had remained unseen for decades.

The footage was shot by Albert Goodman, a 22-year-old drama student who found his way onto the stage during Hendrix’s performance. Goodman reportedly hid behind a friend carrying a guitar to gain access, then positioned himself behind percussionist Juma Sultan. Because he was assumed to be part of the professional film crew hired to document the festival, he was able to remain onstage and record the performance using two open-reel videotapes.

The resulting footage puts the electric-guitar innovator remarkably close to the camera, with the guitarist appearing just 15 feet away as he performs several songs from the set. Among the newly unearthed material are performances of “Purple Haze,” “Voodoo Child,” “Message to Love” and Hendrix’s famous interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” along with rare footage of “Hear My Train a Comin’.” Footage of “Message to Love” is featured below.

Goodman’s story took another unexpected turn in the days following Woodstock. While hitchhiking, he happened to meet a driver who was friends with people working with Hendrix. After Goodman told him about the footage he had captured at the festival, the driver arranged for the student to screen it for Hendrix himself.

Goodman ultimately kept the recordings stored away for three decades before making them available to Hendrix’s family. They can now be seen in Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock — A Second Look, which premiered on YouTube on August 18.

The film offers another perspective on one of rock history’s most celebrated performances — and footage that came remarkably close to never being seen at all.

The Beatles’ business empire is about to get a new chapter.

Universal Music Group and Apple Corps have unveiled a new exclusive, long-term global partnership that will expand how The Beatles’ brand is managed and presented to fans around the world. The agreement will bring together Apple Corps’ stewardship of the Beatles’ legacy with UMG’s global expertise in music, merchandising, retail and fan experiences.

It’s a far cry from the way the Beatles’ licensing business began.

In early 1964, as Beatlemania landed in America, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was facing a problem almost no music manager had ever encountered before. U.S. companies wanted to put the Beatles’ name and image on everything they could sell.

There were offers for electric and acoustic guitars, dolls, wigs, T-shirts, clocks, games, jewelry and countless other products. Overwhelmed, Epstein told his lawyer David Jacobs to find someone who could take over the Beatles’ increasingly lucrative merchandising business.

Jacobs turned to an entrepreneur named Nicky Byrne. Byrne agreed to handle the business through two companies: Stramsact in Britain and Seltaeb — “Beatles” spelled backward — in the United States.

In return, Byrne proposed that his company would receive 90 percent of the money, leaving just 10 percent for NEMS and the Beatles.

It was a remarkable proposal. More remarkable still, Epstein accepted.

He simply had no idea how valuable the Beatles’ name was about to become in the American marketplace.

Epstein was a gifted manager with a remarkable instinct for the Beatles’ image. But his background was running his family-owned NEMS record shop in Liverpool, not international merchandising. And there was little precedent for what was happening. Even Elvis Presley had never generated a consumer frenzy on the Beatles’ scale.

Tony Bramwell, a NEMS executive, later explained that they were thinking about the arrangement much like a record deal: the company making and selling the products would do the work, while the Beatles simply collected a percentage.

They were about to discover just how badly they had misjudged the market.

In February 1964, during the Beatles’ first American trip, Epstein was bombarded with samples and offers from manufacturers. He directed all of them to Byrne, who had already established himself in New York as the man handling the Beatles’ merchandising.

The money quickly began pouring in. The Reliant Shirt Corporation paid $100,000 for a license and sold more than a million Beatles T-shirts in three days. Remco Toys had made 100,000 Beatles dolls and already had orders for another 500,000. A company selling Beatles wigs was producing them faster than it could keep up with demand. Seltaeb would eventually license more than 150 different products.

Then Epstein received a check for $9,700. He was impressed, but wondered how much of that Byrne was owed.

“Nothing Brian,” Byrne replied. “That’s your 10 percent.”

in an instant, Epstein realized the colossal blunder he’d made. He had effectively handed Byrne control of a potential merchandising gold mine and kept only a fraction of the proceeds.

To his credit, Epstein ordered Jacobs to renegotiate the contract immediately. In August 1964, the Beatles’ share was raised to 49 percent.

But by then, the original agreement had created a much larger problem. Epstein and Byrne became embroiled in a bitter legal fight over the contract, licensing rights and money owed.

The timing was disastrous. Major American retailers that had been eager to sell Beatles merchandise suddenly faced uncertainty over who had the authority to license the band’s name. Woolworth’s, J.C. Penney and other companies cancelled or refused to finalize deals worth a reported $78 million. The legal battle dragged on for nearly three years.

By then, the Beatlemania frenzy had cooled. Estimates of the money the Beatles and NEMS lost as a result of the Seltaeb affair have reached $100 million. That figure is an estimate of potential income rather than a precise accounting, but there’s little doubt that enormous sums were left on the table.

In Epstein’s defense, he had no playbook to follow. The Beatles were creating something new: a pop group whose name had become a global consumer brand almost overnight. American businesses saw the opportunity immediately. Epstein took longer to understand it.

Today, of course, the Beatles’ name is one of the most valuable brands in popular culture. Apple Corps has spent decades building systems for protecting and developing the group’s intellectual property, while UMG has become a global force in music, merchandising and brand management. The new partnership reflects how sophisticated the business surrounding the Beatles has become.

It also shows just how far the Beatles’ commercial operation has come since 1964, when their first major American merchandising deal nearly gave away the store.

Years later, John Lennon was characteristically blunt about the episode: “On the business end he [Epstein] ripped us off on the Seltaeb thing.”

But for whatever business instinct he lacked, Epstein had the gift of seeing what the Beatles could become. The Seltaeb affair showed that seeing their potential and knowing how to turn that potential into money were two very different things.

For Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969 was the year that nearly everything went their way. The group released three albums over those 12 months, as well as four singles that — between their A and B sides — garnered them eight hits: “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Lodi,” “Green River,” “Commotion,” “Down on the Corner” and “Fortunate Son.”

Each of those songs was written by the group’s frontman, John Fogerty, as were the hits they released in 1970.

All of which left a bad taste in the mouths of his bandmates: his brother, and fellow guitarist, Tom, drummer Doug Clifford and bass guitarist Stu Cook. All felt they were being deprived of a chance to have their tunes recorded and earn songwriting royalties.

So as CCR prepared to make Pendulum, their sixth studio record, in November 1970, his bandmates demanded a meeting.

“I got sort of surprised — kind of shanghaied — into this,” Fogerty told Rick Beato. “And everybody was demanding, ‘We want to all write songs, and we want to make up our own parts on the records’ — that sort of thing. And it was basically an ultimatum.”

Fogerty had resisted these sorts of demands in the past, certain that only he knew how to lead the group to the top of the charts..

“I don’t think we would’ve found any success some other way had I not written any songs or had someone else been the lead singer,” he told Guitar Player in 2024. “Me and the fellas would’ve been playing down at a local club somewhere until the moment the wives all started saying, ‘Well, you better get a real job now.’”

But as he noted, people want recognition for their talents. “At some point human beings are the way they are. They get jealous of that guy getting the attention, or they want to try doing what he’s doing. But that’s why there’s just one quarterback on a good team.”

This time, however, the band was adamant. “It was clear at this meeting that the band was going to be no more if I didn’t acquiesce,” he told Beato.

“So, of course, I did,” he continued. “I mean, the band was a beloved thing to me, and I guess it probably comes off as sounding a little haughty, or maybe arrogant... I knew how to get there and make it.

“And, of course, we were way up in the clouds as far as showbiz success. And so I thought that was enough of a reason; that success was the reason.

“But, in my point of view, the other fellas didn’t actually realize what it took for us to be sitting there.”

Fogerty gave in. But as the sessions for Pendulum arrived, he found that nothing had actually changed.

“So November comes, we start showing up at the studio,” he explained. But no one, aside from him, was bringing in songs. “So I start filling in the gap.”

One of those gap fillers was “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” a song that he says “is literally about Creedence breaking up.”

“The setting for that was, there could be a blue sky, but way over there, out of your vision, is a storm or rain clouds. Something in the upper atmosphere is pushing the rain over and it falls on you, but you look up, and it's a clear sky.

“And to me, here is our band going up in the bluest sky you ever saw, and yet everybody’s grumbling and unhappy and miserable. And I couldn’t understand that. That was what caused me to write this song."

Released as a single in January 1971, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart — a rather soft showing considering the numerous top-five singles that preceded it.

But for whatever reason, the track struck a chord with listeners in the digital age. Today, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” is CCR’s most popular track, with more than two billion streams on Spotify alone. It’s followed by “Fortunate Son,” which currently sits at 1.7 billion.

Pendulum would be the final album to feature all four CCR members. Afterward, Tom would leave the band, and the brothers remained estranged through to his death in 1990. The remaining members broke up in 1972 following the release of Mardi Gras.

It took decades, but Fogerty finally came around to playing his songs again. After being coaxed by Bob Dylan to perform “Proud Mary” at an impromptu live performance in 1989, he eventually came around to reclaiming his musical past.

In 2016, with the help of his wife, Fogerty reacquired the Fireglo Rickenbacker 325 semi-hollow that had been among his key electric guitars during his years with the group, and began taking tentative steps to return to the stage. In August 2025, he issued Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, which features re-recordings of his newly reclaimed CCR material.

Randy Bachman’s relationship with Bob Seger goes back to the early days of both men’s careers, thanks to the latter’s Detroit becoming a hotbed for the former’s Guess Who via CKLW-AM radio just across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

And during the mid ’70s, the friendship nearly became a studio relationship.

According to Bachman, in 1975 Seger approached him about producing his next album, which would be the breakthrough Night Moves the following year. Bachman says Seger and his Silver Bullet Band “opened about 250 dates” for Bachman-Turner Overdrive at its commercial peak, with the Canadian quartet’s Not Fragile album at number one on both sides of the border and riding a batch of hits that included “Takin’ Care of Business,” “Let It Ride,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Roll on Down the Highway.”

“When we hit number one, my manager, Bruce Allen, said to me, ‘Who do you want to open for you? You can pick anybody you want’,” Bachman recalls. “I said, ‘Bob Seger’ and he said, ‘Who?’

“I said, ‘He’s got these great songs: ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man’ and ‘2 + 2 = ?,’ and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll try to find him’ and I said, ‘He’s somewhere in Michigan.’

“So [Allen] called around and finally found him and got him to be our opening act. We’d go on the road together and we were kind of good buddies.”

At the time, Seger had recently returned to his original label, Capitol Records, after a three-album stint on Reprise. His 1975 set Beautiful Loser was his most successful to date, and he’d record the landmark Live Bullet concert set in its wake. Well aware of BTO’s success, Seger approached Bachman about being part of his next move.

“He said, ‘Would you help me write and produce me new album. I’m not sure what to do’,” Bachman tells us. “His record company was like, ‘Will you do a new album? We really like what you’re doing’ and blah, blah, blah. I think he felt like a lot was riding on whatever he’d do next.”

Bachman was tempted but unavailable. “I said, ‘I’d love to, but I’m still producing BTO. I’ve got five kids at home who don’t know who I am and I’m producing a Canadian band called Trooper, for fun.

“I don’t have time to do another band’,” Bachman remembers, “But I said, ‘I’ll give you my old producer, Jack Richardson, who produced the Guess Who.’

“So I connected Jack Richardson with Bob Seger, and — click, click — he has a big hit and makes a fortune.”

Richardson produced only one song, but it was the right one — the title track for Night Moves, which came out the following year. The nostalgic ode — about Seger’s fling with a woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while her boyfriend was in military service — was recorded at the producer’s Nimbus Nine studio in Toronto. It was one of several the two worked on together, including a pair of other Seger originals and a cover of the Supremes’ Motown hit “My World Is Empty Without You.”

It was the last of the four they recorded, and only two members of Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, bass guitarist Chris Campbell and drummer Charlie Allen Martin, were still in the studio. Richardson brought in local musicians Joe Miquelon on electric guitar and Doug Riley on organ, along with four female backup singers. Poco’s Paul Cotton later overdubbed a guitar solo that was subsequently left off the track.

Seger’s manager, Ed “Punch” Andrews, did not like “Night Moves” and did not submit it to the label. Richardson did, however, and Capitol executives insisted it not only be included but also be the title track and first single. Good move, that: “Night Moves” made its way to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 — Seger’s first Top 10 single — and was certified double Platinum, opening the door to another 18 Top 20 singles. The Night Moves album, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in October, hit number eight on the Billboard 200 and has been certified six-times Platinum.

Seger, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012, has been out of sight since ending his Roll Me Away: The Final Tour on November 1, 2019, in Philadelphia. While no 50th anniversary plans have been revealed for Night Moves yet, he recently announced a 20th anniversary reissue of his Face the Promise album, featuring four bonus tracks, three of which are previously unheard.

David Bowie had a thing for unlikely collaborations. Over the years, he shared vocals with artists ranging from John Lennon and Tina Turner to Mick Jagger and even the big-band-era crooner Bing Crosby.

But none of those encounters delivered the creative firepower of “Under Pressure,” the 1981 hit that brought Bowie together with Freddie Mercury and Queen. The song not only paired up two of the rock world’s most talented vocalists — it also delivered one of rock’s most recognizable bass lines.

Bowie and Mercury weren’t exactly strangers. Their paths had crossed years before either man became a star. They first met in 1969, when Bowie played a lunchtime show at Ealing Art College, where Mercury was studying. Mercury, still going by his birth name, Freddie Bulsara, helped Bowie arrange tables into a makeshift stage for his performance. Two years later, around the time Bowie was making Hunky Dory, they met again at London’s Kensington Market. Mercury, working a clothing stall, reportedly tried to sell the future glam star a pair of platform boots.

By 1981, though, neither man needed an introduction. Bowie was riding the success of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), his first number-one U.K. album since Diamond Dogs, which featured the chart-topping single “Ashes to Ashes.” Queen, meanwhile, had just enjoyed one of the biggest American hits of their career with “Another One Bites the Dust,” a number-one in the U.S.

Their meeting point was Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. Queen were working on what would become Hot Space, while Bowie was in the area working on “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” for the erotic horror movie Cat People. Bowie, possibly curious to see what his competition was up to, stopped by for a visit and stayed to add backing vocals to Queen’s “Cool Cat” (though he later decided he didn’t want them used).

“Bowie kept popping into the studio,” Mercury recalled in 1985. “And we were jamming to some of his songs and some of ours. We had a few bottles of wine and things.”

The “things” included copious amounts of cocaine, according to coproducer Reinhold Mack. “There was so much blow, but I needed a clear mind,” he told Mojo. As for songs, Queen and Bowie jammed on Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way From Memphis” and “All the Young Dudes,” the latter written by Bowie, along with Cream’s “I Feel Free” and “N.S.U.”

Eventually, Bowie suggested that instead of playing other people’s songs, they should make one of their own. Queen had an unfinished song titled “Feel Like,” which became the basis for “Under Pressure.” Bowie quickly took control of the session, no mean feat considering that he was dealing with Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon — four musicians who were hardly lacking in opinions.

“Freddie and David locked horns, without a doubt,” May told Mojo in 2017, “but that’s when the sparks fly, and that’s why it turned out great.”

“We were all very pig-headed,” Taylor said, “but Bowie was probably as pig-headed as the four of us put together.”

Deacon had a considerably harsher take on Bowie’s behavior.

“He was quite a little Hitler in a way when he got going,” he said. “He was pushing us and being dominant, you know. I didn't mind, but Brian took offense to it because he didn’t like being told what to do.”

May had originally played much more guitar on the track, giving it a much more rock ’n’ roll vibe.

“It sounded like the Who,” the guitarist recalled. “It sounded massively chord-driven.

“I remember saying to David, ‘Oh, it sounds like the Who, doesn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, well it’s not going to sound like the Who by the time I’ve finished with it!’”

May reportedly got fed up with the whole thing and left early, with the result that no one was there to look after his contributions. In the end, much of his heavy electric guitar was edited out of the final mix. Even the main riff he had played on electric guitar was replaced by acoustic guitar parts that had originally been recorded as a demo.

While some present at the session say the song was recorded in its entirety that night, others recall a vocal session between Mercury and Bowie recorded one or two weeks later, in New York City at the Power Station. They include Jon Bon Jovi, who was an assistant at the studio, owned by his second cousin Tony Bongiovi.

“It was literally the biggest recording studio in the world at the time,” he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2024. “One day, I looked through the control room door, and I watched David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sing ‘Under Pressure.’ I saw them sing that vocal.”

His account is backed up by Peter Freestone, Mercury’s personal assistant, in his 2001 book, An Intimate Memoir.

“The first of the two sessions for Under Pressure was twenty-four hours and the second, a couple of weeks later and 4,000 miles away in New York when Freddie and Bowie finished off the track at the Power Station, was a session which lasted another 18 hours.”

Despite the time spent on the track, May says no one was sure what to do with the song.

“There were continual disagreements about how ‘Under Pressure’ should be put out or if it should even be put out at all,” the guitarist said.

Ultimately, Queen and Bowie agreed to release “Under Pressure” as a single in October 1981. The result was Queen’s first U.K. chart-topper since “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Bowie’s first since “Ashes to Ashes.” In the U.S., the song reached a respectable number 29 and has remained a radio staple there ever since.

With Bowie’s death in 2016 — 25 years after Mercury’s — “Under Pressure” became a memorial to a now-bygone era of rock royalty. The song gained a new life in the weeks after, reappearing on charts around the world and reaching number five on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.

Even Brian May’s feelings about “Under Pressure” have softened. What once carried the tension of its difficult creation has come to represent something else: the unlikely chemistry between Queen and Bowie, captured in a recording that outlived all of them.

“Looking back now, I think it’s a very special, significant song for us,” he says. “But I would love to sit down quietly on my own and remix it.”

Ritchie Blackmore, Cozy Powell and Ronnie James Dio were sitting around a fireplace at a French château, drinking and trying to write songs for Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll. The problem was, they weren’t getting anywhere.

So Powell decided it was time to confess something.

“We were all very bored,” Blackmore recalled in a 2024 Instagram Q&A. “And we were getting a little bit kind of irritated because we were not coming up with any ideas.

“And Cozy said, ‘Okay, I have to own up.’ And we looked at him, because we'd been drinking, as usual, and we said, ‘You have to own up about what?’ He said, ‘Are you ready?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I like ABBA.’”

Blackmore didn’t waste a moment replying.

“To which I went, ‘Oh my God. I love ABBA.’ And then Ronnie goes, ‘Yes. So do I.’”

And just like that, three of hard rock’s biggest names discovered they were all secretly fans of Sweden’s biggest pop group.

“And with that, Cozy runs off to get all the ABBA songs and to play them,” Blackmore continued. “And we played, for hours, all the ABBA songs, around the fireside in this chateau. We should have been writing our own songs, but it was much better to listen to ABBA.”

The truth is, Blackmore has never been shy about his love of ABBA. He confessed it in December 1979, during an interview with U.K. weekly music magazine Sounds while promoting Rainbow’s album Down to Earth. The interviewer had asked about his taste in music.

“I like popular music and I like ABBA very much,” he replied. “Enjoy them. But there’s so much stigma involved with it — like, ‘You can’t do this because you’re a heavy band’ — and I think that’s rubbish. You should do what you want.”

More than four decades later, he was still saying essentially the same thing.

“I think ABBA was the best band,” Blackmore said in the 2024 Q&A. “I always listened to ABBA when I was a kid. It was so melodic, and it just worked. It was fantastic. And they are probably my favorite band of all time. And I know it’s uncool to say that in certain areas. But they were wonderful.”

But Blackmore’s appreciation for ABBA eventually went beyond listening to their records. In 1980, he had the chance to meet Agnetha Fältskog, one of the group’s two singers. The meeting reportedly led to talk of a possible collaboration.

On January 18 that year, Rainbow were playing at Stockholm’s Johanneshovs Isstadion on their Down to Earth world tour when Fältskog showed up. In his 2006 book Black Knight: Ritchie Blackmore, author Jerry Bloom recalled Rainbow keyboardist Don Airey’s account of what happened next.

“[Agnetha] came down to a soundcheck in Stockholm. Cozy and me were playing something and she walked in and there was consternation — she was so beautiful. I think they had a meeting the next day; it was going to be Rainbow with Agnetha, we were going to do an album with her.

“I remember it well because there was a Russian ice-skating troupe and it was their day off so we took over the ice rink but all the Russians came down to watch and they were standing around with Russian hats on so we started playing ‘Kalinka’ and they all started dancing and that’s when Agnetha Fältskog walked in and everything stopped.”

Blackmore later confirmed that he had met Fältskog and that their respective management teams had discussed the possibility of working together. Nothing came of it. Fältskog eventually embarked on her solo career, releasing her first English-language solo album, Wrap Your Arms Around Me, in 1983.

Which brings us to the album track “Once Burned, Twice Shy.” There’s an electric guitar part on the song that sounds remarkably like Blackmore.

That alone wouldn’t prove much. Plenty of guitarists can sound like Blackmore, and the guitarist officially credited on the track is Lasse Wellander, the talented Swedish session guitarist who played on numerous ABBA recordings.

Still, listen closely to the phrasing and tone — and especially the slide guitar — and it’s hard not to hear echoes of Blackmore.

Compare it with a couple of examples of Blackmore’s slide playing with Deep Purple and Rainbow:

So did Blackmore actually play on Fältskog’s recording? For now there’s no proof he did. As for Wellander, the credited guitarist on “Once Burned, Twice Shy,” he died in 2023.

But a missing credit doesn’t close the case. Uncredited appearances are hardly unheard of. In one of the most famous examples, Eric Clapton’s lead guitar work and solo on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” were left unattributed on the White Album.

So for now, the Blackmore theory remains just that: a theory. Until Blackmore or Fältskog settles the question, we can only speculate. But given Blackmore’s long-standing love of ABBA — and the fact that he and Fältskog discussed working together — it’s a pretty fascinating rock and roll “what-if.”

Brian May has been warning about the dangers of AI for years, going back to his 2023 interview with Guitar Player when he warned, “I think we might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene.”

Now May has revealed an AI version of a Queen album cover to argue his case that humans don’t need the emerging technology.

The guitarist prompted a large language model platform to generate the cover image of 1980’s The Game — which featured the hit “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” — and what he got back urged him to restate his position.

“I asked Meta AI to show me what the cover of The Game album looked like,” May posted on Instagram. “This is what it gave me. Good job, eh?” He continued: “So this is the kind of intelligence that will soon be ruling the world? Well, great. Maybe this is the time to realize we actually don’t need AI!”

He turned fully serious as he addressed current plans to build AI service centers around the U.K., despite local community concerns over the establishments’ energy and water consumption. “I believe the price we are about to pay for this ‘inevitable’ development is way too high,” he said.

“We must not allow these hideous data centers to be built. They will destroy our beautiful country — like they are already destroying beautiful America.”

The electric guitar hero finished with a message to new British prime minister Andy Burnham, whose honeymoon period has been attracting calls for major political turnarounds. “Dear Andy — you must stop it now. Before it’s too late,“ May said.

Meanwhile, Spotify announced plans to badge music created by AI, to make users better aware of what they’re hearing. “Spotify is rolling out the ability to label artists as being an ‘AI Persona,’” the streaming platform said via X.

“The label can only be applied by creators themselves, or by Spotify if [we] detect an artist to be AI-generated. Artists labelled as an AI Persona will be excluded from personalised recommendations.”

The move follows the huge increase in tracks created via large language modelling systems. Rival platform Deezer recently confirmed that over 50 percent of daily uploads were non-human compositions. An earlier study suggested that 97 percent of listeners can’t tell the difference between a “real” composition and one created using AI.

Minimalism met rock in 1972 when Pete Townshend wrote “Baba O’Riley.” The song’s cyclic, arpeggiating riff was inspired by the work of avant-garde composer Terry Riley and became the driving rhythmic force behind “Baba O’Riley,” the anthem that is itself the launch pad for Who’s Next, the band’s landmark 1972 album.

Although it’s often described as a synthesizer line, Townshend created the riff on a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 home organ by using its “Marimba Repeat” setting, which gives it the sort of synthetic, percolating rhythmic pulse associated with early electronic synthesizer music.

As hooks go, it’s a great one, grabbing listeners’ ears, pulling them in and holding them hostage for the track’s full five-minute length.

Producer Tom Werman was among the listeners captivated by Townshend’s synth-like line. As it turns out, he liked it so much that he took it for his own when recording a pair of hits for Cheap Trick later in the decade.

The idea first struck him while recording “Surrender,” from the group’s 1978 album, Heaven Tonight. Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen wrote the tune as a "rock nursery rhyme" about his own youthful perception of his parents' "weirdness.”

“I wrote it at home late one night,” he told Guitar Player. “I was playing an unplugged electric guitar, and I had a rhythm thing going on. Then I started singing to myself: ‘Mother told me, yes, she told me, I’d meet girls like you.’ It kind of sounded like a nursery rhyme to me, only it was a rock nursery rhyme for somebody in high school wearing a leather jacket.

“I wrote down lyrics as I went. It was all kind of stream of consciousness, but a lot of it was true. ‘Mommy’s all right, daddy’s all right, they’re just a little bit weird.’ Whose parents aren’t weird? My parents were weird.” (This from a guy who plays a five-necked guitar?)

While hearing Nielsen pound out the song’s opening chords on his electric guitar, Werman had an idea. Maybe it was the song’s theme of teenage alienation that brought the music of Pete Townshend to mind. After all, the producer said, “Pete Townshend was always my main musical inspiration.”

Whatever it was, Werman got it in his head to use Townshend’s “Baba O’Riley” riff behind Nielsen’s power chords. “I just plain stole it,” he admitted.

“I took the keyboard riff from ‘Baba O’ Riley’ by the Who and I put it in ‘Surrender,’ because it sounded good and it supported Rick’s signature riffs,” Werman tells Guitar Player. “That was my main contribution to it.”

The song made the perfect opener for Heaven Tonight, an album of power-pop tunes made with radio-friendly production that positioned Cheap Trick as a group ready for arenas.

“I just loved what we did with ‘Surrender,’” Werman says. “We were all excited about the track. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it got a lot of airplay.

“Normally the song that opens up side one of an album is your choice for the strongest song on the record, and the first song on side one of Heaven Tonight was ‘Surrender.’ But there could have been a lot of those, because there are so many good songs on the album.”

Released as a single in June 1978, “Surrender” got Cheap Trick in the Hot 100 — at number 62 — and helped push Heaven Tonight to number 48. In Japan, the album notched in at number 11. Executives at the Japan headquarters of their label, Epic, took note and decided to release Cheap Trick at Budokan, a live document of the group’s recent spring concerts at the Tokyo arena.

That, in turn, gave “Surrender” a boost months later when At Budokan was released in the U.S., in February 1979. The album had a slow-burn success, thanks to the radio hits “I Want You to Want Me” and the group’s cover of the Fats Domino hit “Ain’t That a Shame.”

By then, Werman and Cheap Trick were ready to release Dream Police, the group’s fourth studio album. The record had been completed for months but was left on the shelf while At Budokan rode the charts, setting the stage for what would be the group’s most commercially successful studio album.

Dream Police was the perfect statement of Cheap Trick’s musical intentions, featuring longer songs with more ambitious production, including orchestrations. And for the album’s title track, Werman once again took inspiration from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”

“That synthesizer riff turned up again in the song ‘Dream Police,’” he says. “It was almost the same thing, and was done in half-time.”

It also featured actual string players rather than a synthesizer.

“Rick did a real string chart for ‘Dream Police,’” Werman confirms. “I think that’s the only time we used real strings on any song, except I used double cello on ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ to double the bass.

“That album was a big deal. Initially, Heaven Tonight sold about seven or eight hundred thousand, which was a big improvement over its predecessor, In Color, which had sold about three hundred thousand copies. Then Dream Police sold a little over a million, so we were on the way up.”

By the time the Beatles broke up in late 1969, they had recorded and released more than 200 songs — most of them originals — and left dozens more in the vault. While the bulk of those unissued tracks ranged from rough demos to jams, several were completed recordings that they rejected for one reason or another.

Among them was the first song written for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the tune was a heavy riff-rocker built on a modified three-chord blues progression.

From the start of the Beatles’ recording career, Starr was given a vocal spot on each of their albums (except for 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night) in order to please his fan base. Because he wasn’t a songwriter in the group’s early years, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or Lennon and McCartney cast-offs like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” from 1963’s With the Beatles.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the second category. According to Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, Lennon knew it was not his finest work.

“I wrote it. It's the funniest thing I've ever done,” Lennon told Coleman, who attended the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965, and wrote about it for the magazine's February 27 issue,. “Listen to the words,” Lennon said, laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”

Despite Lennon’s disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm guitar, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electrics, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman reported, McCartney was happy with the vibe the group was creating.

“Paul thought the sound was one of the best ever,” he wrote.

The song is notable as one of the first Beatles tracks on which McCartney played guitar, joining Harrison to perform its driving riff with his Epiphone Casino hollowbody electric. Interestingly, in the same week that it was recorded, the Beatles also cut “Ticket to Ride,” “Another Girl” and “The Night Before,” three Help! songs that were among the first to feature McCartney playing guitar solos and leads.

“Hey, listen, hear that play by Paul?” John asked Coleman at one point. “He’s been doing quite a bit of lead guitar work this week.”

McCartney’s sudden emergence as a guitarist during this week in the group’s history may help to explain Starr’s rather unusual shout out leading into the guitar solo on “If You’ve Got Trouble.” On previous recordings, he had made a habit of announcing Harrison’s solo breaks, calling out “All right, George,” on “Boys,” and “Rock on, George, one time for Ringo,” on “Honey Don’t.”

But on “If You’ve Got Trouble,” he says the rather unusual, “Oh, rock on, anybody!” Perhaps the Beatles had yet to decide whether Harrison or McCartney would play the solo; according to George Martin’s notes, Ringo’s vocals (which he double-tracked) were recorded before the solo was laid down.

That job eventually fell to Harrison, who delivered what is easily his most uninspired solo in the Beatles’ catalog. Perhaps everyone realized by the night’s end that the song was hopeless. Although the song received mono and stereo mixes on February 20 and 23, respectively, it was ultimately abandoned.

Remarkably, that February 20 mix session saw the Beatles record yet another song that wouldn’t be released for years. “That Means a Lot” was a McCartney tune played in a heavy, R&B style, with a thudding beat and a medium tempo similar to “Ticket to Ride.” It would be subjected to a remake one month later, on March 30. Dissatisfied with the results, the Beatles gave the song to American singer P.J. Proby, whose version reached number 24 on the U.K. charts that September.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” was nearly released in 1984 when former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick prepared the recording for inclusion on the group’s unreleased rarities album, Sessions. His work included cutting the first verse, thereby shortening the song by 20 seconds.

But after the surviving Beatles blocked the album, “If You’ve Got Trouble” remained unreleased until it was included in its full length on Anthology 2 in 1996. Commenting on the song, music critic Ian MacDonald called it “the only unmitigated disaster in the Lennon–McCartney catalog.”

Even George Harrison was unsparing in his criticism. “It’s the most weird song,” he commented in the Beatles’ Anthology book. “I’ve no recollection of ever recording it. It’s got stupid words and is the naffest song. No wonder it didn’t make it onto anything.”

History remembers Car Wheels on a Gravel Road as Lucinda Williams’ breakthrough — an album that helped define Americana and reshaped the singer-songwriter landscape.

Gurf Morlix recalls it differently. As Williams’ former guitarist and bandleader, his stylistic touch and musical fingerprints are all over the record and the three years it took to create it. The album’s liner notes bear this out in a brief but telling dedication: “To Donald, Ciambotti & Gurf: Thanks for the years of hard work & joy & the blood you sweat over this.”

But long before Car Wheels became a touchstone, Morlix was grinding it out on the margins, shaped by a hard-earned realism that never left him.

As an aspiring musician in Buffalo, New York, Morlix felt trapped in a local scene that “didn’t really seem conducive to making a living.” He wasn’t looking for hits or fame; Morlix was an old-school man’s-man type with a big heart and a warm, outlaw-country tone that felt pulled from an earlier era — music built for the twang-hungry faithful rather than the charts.

Still, nothing came easily.

“I had a bit of talent,” he tells Guitar Player. “But I couldn’t find like-minded people who wanted to play the same kind of music I did.

“I decided that Austin was the place to go — a great live music scene, hip college town and cheap rent. I was in heaven.”

So began the first of many moves that would define his life and career.

Lucinda Williams was part of that same Austin ecosystem, although Morlix didn’t meet her there. By the mid ’80s, he had pushed further west to Los Angeles, where their paths finally crossed.

“I’d moved out there ‘cause the Austin music scene started seeming a little small for me,” Morlix says. “She came out from Austin to do a sorta high profile gig. She was rehearsing a band of L.A. musicians. Her guitar player, David Grissom, was gonna fly out from Austin for the gig, but they asked me if I’d do some of the rehearsals just for fun.”

The chemistry was immediate, and Morlix soon became a fixture in Williams’ band. By the late ’80s he was serving as her bandleader.

“It worked well,” he says. “After a while, she moved out there, and I fell into playing with her. Bass, at first, and then lead guitar. We started doing gigs, and it worked well.”

Creatively, the two were aligned in a way that felt effortless. “It just worked organically,” Morlix explains. “She’d play me a new song, and I’d start playing along. Usually, I’d come up with the musical hooks right there, on the first or second pass. It was so natural.”

By 1988, Williams was ready to record her first album since 1980’s Happy Woman Blues. Until then, commercial success had eluded her. That changed with Lucinda Williams.

“We weren’t sure what would happen,” Morlix explains. “We had to do it really fast because of financial considerations and time constraints. We barely had any time to think. We made it in a week or two.”

The response was immediate and emphatic. Critics raved, and Williams was suddenly being mentioned alongside the era’s most respected songwriters, thanks to songs like “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad” and “Passionate Kisses.” The album is often credited with helping launch the alt-country movement. Morlix — as its producer, bandleader, and guitarist — was stunned by the reaction.

“It got played around the country,” he recalls, “though we didn’t know it. They cobbled together a national tour, and we were completely surprised to find lots of people showing up at the shows.”

Momentum carried Williams into the ’90s and 1992’s Sweet Old World, a slicker, more polished record that proved her success was no fluke. That same year, Mary Chapin Carpenter scored a major hit with her cover of “Passionate Kisses,” earning Williams a Grammy for Best Country Song at the 1994 awards.

For Morlix, however, the shine was wearing off. The larger budget for Sweet Old World brought new pressures — and new frustrations.

“And lots of time to overthink things,” he says. “As producer, I was actually having to look for places we could spend money. I had told the A&R person I could make the album for a tenth of our budget. He said, ‘Don’t ever say that. That’d ruin it for all of us.’”

An old-school musical maverick with a strong moral compass was now colliding head-on with the machinery of the music business. Those tensions would intensify during the making of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Between February and March 1995, Williams and Morlix were back in Austin recording the album’s initial sessions. Williams, however, was unhappy with her vocals. “I was trying to grow,” she told Billboard in 2018, reflecting on the album’s 20th anniversary. “I didn’t want to make another Sweet Old World.”

Morlix saw it differently. Despite his reservations about the record’s production, he loved the sounds he’d achieved on Sweet Old World. “I was playing a Telecaster, through either a blackface Fender Twin, or a Vox Super Beatle head going into a Marshall 4x12 cabinet,” he says. “I have never heard a better-sounding and more versatile tremolo than on that Vox amp.”

By his estimate, they’d completed nearly 90 percent of the album when Williams pulled the plug. She scrapped the sessions and relocated to Nashville, where she began spending time with guitarist and songwriter Steve Earle, who was close with producer Ray Kennedy. Before long, Williams asked Earle and Kennedy to re-record material she and Morlix had already tracked.

For Morlix, it was almost too much. He stepped down as producer and eventually walked away from Williams entirely, although he continued playing guitar as Car Wheels dragged on for the next three years.

“We were working on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road for forever and ever it seemed,” he says with a sigh. “She wasn’t feeling very good those days. The longer it went on, the worse it got.

“Making music is supposed to be joyful. What we were going through was not. Finally, it came to a head, and I quit.”

His exit coincided with Williams’ breakthrough. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road propelled her into the mainstream, powered by songs like “Metal Firecracker,” the Blaze Foley tribute “Drunken Angel,” the hip-hop-inflected “Joy” and the swaggering title track. The album reached number 65 on the Billboard 200, went Gold in the U.S., and was met with near-universal acclaim.

While Williams’ profile exploded, Morlix retreated.

“I didn’t pay much attention,” he insists. “It was all too fresh and raw.”

Commercial success changed nothing for him. “I learned that I can make great music with musicians I enjoy being around,” he says. “Getting out of that situation was the best move I’ve ever made.”

Morlix believes he’s never been fully credited for his role in shaping Car Wheels. Some associated with the album have suggested little of his playing made the final cut.

“All I know is they had a lot of guitarists come in to try playing in place of me, and to add other parts,” he counters. “Every part I played got used in the final mixes. The person who mixed it told me the producer stressed that there were to be no politics involved in the mixing process.”

Even so, he remains ambivalent about his own work on the record.

“The parts I played on Car Wheels, all of which are used on the album, were done with my 1956 Gretsch Duo Jet electric through a blackface Fender Pro Reverb,” he recalls.
“But it wasn’t my amp. I wasn’t quite happy with the sounds we got. I had hoped to redo my parts, but things got dark, and I decided I’d had enough.”

After leaving Williams’ band, the two artists diverged sharply. Morlix opted for a quieter path, focusing on his solo career and steering clear of the spotlight.

“I don’t have any regrets,” he says. “I did it all my way.

“I’ve turned down big money gigs with famous people ’cause I couldn’t see myself feeling good about having to play that music every night. And I’ve turned down offers from musicians I respect ‘cause the timing didn’t seem right, or something similar. I’ve been so lucky to be able to do what I do with no compromises.”

Listen closely to any Lucinda Williams album recorded since Car Wheels, and Morlix’s influence still lingers. The sonic vocabulary he helped establish remains baked into her music.

“I don’t really think about that,” Morlix says. “But I do know that we were on the ground floor of Americana music. There were not many similar acts at the time, but these days there are tens of thousands of people wanting to be part of it. It’s overwhelming.”

Morlix never left the music behind. Since stepping away from Williams, he’s released 19 solo albums, most recently 2025’s Bristlecone.

“Songwriting is not easy,” he says. “But it’s so rewarding when people tell you they are moved by a song you’ve written.”

He still plays daily and continues collecting gear. “I’ve got so many instruments and amps,” he says with a laugh. “I look at them as colors to paint with. My taste keeps evolving. I don’t play any better than I used to, but my desire to create keeps me moving.”

When asked to reach for greatness, most musicians dig deep into their soul for inspiration or a brainstorm that will take their performance to the top.

But when Journey were cutting their monster hit “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Neal Schon says the group’s producers had a different sort of direction for him.

“They said, ‘Play something dumb,’” the guitarist reveals in a new interview with Rick Beato.

It’s not exactly what you’d expect to hear when you’re recording a tune about holding onto faith.

But, sometimes, that’s how hits are made.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” reached the top 10 in 1981, when it was released as a single from Journey’s seventh studio album, Escape. Since then, it’s become a cultural phenomenon. In addition to its use in the 2007 series finale of The Sopranos, the song is played in the eighth inning at San Francisco Giants home games. Former Journey vocalist Steve Perry, who sings on the original, even led the hometown crowd in a singalong during the Giants’ 2014 World Series game.

Today, “Don’t Stop Believin’” is in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. It’s a credit not only to the song’s sales success — its sold more than 18 million copies — but to its cultural significance as well.

“It's crazy. When we wrote it, I thought there was something there, you know — when we were messing around with it in the studio," Neal Schon says.

"When I went back in the studio to listen after we cut it and it was coming together [in the] mix, I looked at the guys, and I go, 'I think there's something here that's special, that's going to be bigger than this whole record.'

“And not until this many decades later, did it happen. But it did happen."

And perhaps that all comes back to that request from producers Kevin Elson and Mike Stone: Play something dumb.

Schon’s response was to come up with what he calls a “chunky rhythm part” — a meat-and-potatoes chord pattern that can be heard as the song starts rolling along in top gear in the third verse.

And to the producers’ credit, it was just what the song needed.

“It's like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive, ‘Taking Care of Business' kind of rhythm part,” Schon says. “And it just kind of worked. When you listen to it, you don't even really notice it, but if you take it out, then you go, ‘What happened to it?’

“It wasn't my idea — I came up with the rhythm part,” Schon says. "But that's what a good producer will do for you — make you search a little bit."

“Don’t Stop Believin’” was a co-write between Schon, Perry and keyboardist and rhythm guitarist Jonathan Cain, who had recently joined Journey. As Schon told Guitar Player in 2023, Cain brought the chord progression, for which the guitarist suggested a Motown-style bass groove to move it along.

“Jon had the ‘Don’t stop believin’’ chorus, so we moved on trying to create the rest of the song,” he says. “I came up with the B section — ‘Strangers, waiting.’ Perry goes, ‘Oh, that’s perfect,’ so we threw it together. Those were the main pieces of the song.”

As for the famous chorus?

“It doesn’t happen until the end,” Schon points out. “I don’t think any song that’s become as big has ever had that. The first rule of songwriting is, ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!’

“But we broke it — and had a hit! And the song works because it has something very interesting and melodic moving it along.”

When recording his guitar parts, Schon used his black 1977 Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, an instrument that he used for much of Escape and Journey's subsequent tour. It fetched $250,000 at auction in 2021.

As he recalls, his big guitar contribution to the song — aside from his anthemic solo — was the rapidly arpeggiating guitar part that introduces the second verse. “It was like something you might hear in a symphony and it felt like it was helping the track move along.”

Which is definitely a far cry from playing something dumb.

But, hey, whatever works. After all, no less than Forbes magazine named “Don’t Stop Believin’” the Biggest Song of All Time in its March 2024 issue. Maybe there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.

When Eric Clapton asked Phil Collins to produce Behind the Sun in 1985, he wasn’t looking for someone to reinvent him. He’d already worked with legendary producers, played with everyone from John Mayall to Derek and the Dominos, Cream and Blind Faith, and long since earned his place among rock’s greatest electric guitar players.

Behind the Sun would become an important turning point in Clapton’s career. After a period in the early 1980s when he remained highly respected but had slipped from the commercial heights he’d reached in the previous decade, the album marked the beginning of a renewed run of mainstream success. Its eventual hit single “Forever Man” helped reintroduce Clapton to a wider audience and set the stage for the resurgence that would follow later in the decade.

But Collins understood something important: his job was not to show Eric Clapton how to play guitar. It was not to impose his own identity on one of rock’s most distinctive musicians. It was to find what was missing — and help bring it back.

Looking back years later, Collins recalled listening to Clapton’s previous album, Money and Cigarettes, and feeling that something wasn’t quite connecting. The playing was unmistakably Clapton, but Collins felt the guitarist had stopped pushing himself creatively.

“Money and Cigarettes was a little lame,” Collins told Rock and Roll Garage. “I think he was on automatic pilot. I kicked him out of that and made him start writing.”

Home recording was beginning to transform the way musicians worked, and Collins was one of its biggest advocates. He encouraged Clapton to keep some basic recording equipment at home so ideas wouldn’t disappear before they became songs. Clapton never became the home-recording enthusiast Collins hoped he might, but he did start keeping a cassette recorder close by. Song ideas accumulated, melodies were captured before they were forgotten, and little by little they became the foundation of Behind the Sun.

The same instinct shaped the way he approached Clapton’s guitar playing. Many producers earn an artist’s trust by identifying what needs to change. Collins seemed to earn it through enthusiasm — but that enthusiasm was backed by a willingness to make decisions.

“It was great with Phil,” Clapton told Guitar Player in July 1985, “because he’s a real fan.”

Whenever Clapton played a solo and asked what Collins thought, the answer rarely varied. “It’s dynamite, man. Dynamite!” Collins would say. Clapton would shake his head. “No, it isn’t.”

The exchange became almost comical, but it revealed something important. “I felt like I could have played anything, and he’d love it,” Clapton admitted. “That’s great from a producer.”

Far from flattering Clapton, Collins was attempting to quiet his inner critic and help rebuild his confidence. It worked. Rather than laboring over a single “perfect” guitar solo, Clapton would attempt a handful for his producer’s consideration.

“I’d do three or four solos on a song and say, ‘You sort it out,’” he told Guitar Player.

Clapton admitted that after hearing the same solo several times, he’d become tired of it, unable to judge it objectively anymore. Collins, by contrast, delighted in the painstaking work of listening, comparing, and assembling performances from multiple takes. On “Just Like a Prisoner,” Clapton recalled, Collins edited the finished solo together from a much longer performance, choosing the moments that best served the song rather than insisting on a flawless take from beginning to end.

It’s an aspect of Collins’ production style that’s often overlooked. Known publicly as a drummer, songwriter and frontman, he approached the studio less as a taskmaster than as a curator, convinced that the best performance was usually already there if you listened carefully enough.

One of Collins’ favorite memories came after the album was supposedly finished. Clapton rang to say he’d written one more song. It was “Behind the Sun.”

Instead of returning to a commercial studio, Clapton arrived at Collins’ house carrying little more than an acoustic guitar. Collins later laughed at the irony of finding himself responsible for recording Eric Clapton’s guitar without the experienced engineers he normally leaned on. For a producer who had spent years behind the drum kit, the prospect was both exhilarating and faintly terrifying.

The song they captured that day became the album’s title track.

Perhaps the clearest indication that Collins’ approach had worked came not years later in an autobiography or retrospective interview, but while the album was still new. Asked where Collins ranked among the producers he’d worked with, Clapton first named the legendary Tom Dowd before immediately adding, “Phil is a different kettle of fish. I love him, and he’s a great musician also, so he’s got another angle.”

Then he offered a compliment few producers ever receive.

“If I could get the two of them to produce a record together,” he laughed, “that would be it for me. They’re my ideal producers.”

For a guitarist who had worked with some of the most respected producers of the previous twenty years, it was remarkable praise. It also confirmed something Collins himself understood about production: it wasn’t about imposing your personality on another artist. It was about creating an environment in which they could become more fully themselves.

The irony, of course, is that the only people who weren’t completely convinced were the executives at Warner Bros. After hearing the completed album, the label decided it needed stronger commercial singles. Clapton returned to the studio with Ted Templeman and Lenny Waronker, recording additional tracks — including “Forever Man” — before Behind the Sun was finally released.

It’s easy to view that episode as a rejection of Collins’ work. In reality, it says more about the priorities of mid-1980s record companies than it does about the album he and Clapton had made. By the label’s standards, the record needed bigger hits. By Clapton’s standards, he’d just worked with one of his ideal producers.

Nearly forty years later, that’s the story that endures. Phil Collins never taught Eric Clapton how to play guitar. He simply reminded one of the greatest guitarists in rock history that he already knew how.

Guitar Player Presents is proud to partner with AEG to welcome ZZ Top with special guest Cheap Trick for a double set of classic guitar rock on a scenic mountain top.

Billy Gibbons has spent more than five decades proving that feel beats flash. His playing is instantly recognizable, whether it’s the fat, vocal-like lead tone, the economy of his phrasing, or the way he threads blues, boogie and rock into riffs that have become part of the electric guitar canon. Songs like “La Grange,” “Tush,” “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Gimme All Your Lovin’” remain master classes in serving the song while leaving an unmistakable signature.

Rick Nielsen has built a career on the same principle from a different angle. A world-class collector of vintage guitars and one of rock’s great entertainers, he’s also the architect behind Cheap Trick’s blend of Beatles-worthy hooks, hard rock muscle, and razor-sharp rhythm guitar. From the enduring power of At Budokan to the band’s latest material, Nielsen’s inventive playing and infectious stage presence have made Cheap Trick one of rock’s most consistently rewarding live acts.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see ZZ Top and Cheap Trick in Saratoga, California, on Saturday, August 8, send an email and put “ZZ Trick” in the subject line. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide their own transportation to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, and have their own accommodations in the area. Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents ZZ Top with special guest Cheap Trick

Saturday, August 8
5:30 p.m. doors, 7:30 p.m. show
The Mountain Winery
Saratoga, CA

We’ll be handing out free packs of Martin strings.

Suzanne Vega never imagined “Luka” would become one of the defining songs of the late 1980s. She also never thought that, decades later, she’d reveal just how personal it really was.

Vega wrote the song in 1984 as the story of an abused child told in the first person. But when her manager suggested it could become a hit, Vega couldn’t see it.

“It’s a small song about an abused boy,” she tells Guitar Player today. “I didn’t really see it hitting the charts or anything. But he argued with me and said he thought that it had an important message.”

That conviction set in motion a lengthy studio process that transformed Vega’s sparse acoustic composition into the polished recording that reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987.

“The production was the biggest thing to deal with,” she says. “Once he made his argument to me that he thought it could be a hit, I was like, ‘Okay, sure, knock yourself out.’ We spent quite a bit of time on the production because they wanted it to fit into the radio-friendly format.”

Producer Steve Addabbo and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye were brought in to help shape the song for radio without sacrificing its intimacy.

“We spent a lot of time on the different parts, like the drum parts,” Vega recalls. “I think it was Anton Sanko’s opening synthesizer chords that made it this ear-catching thing before you hear my opening guitar chords. I think what makes the song radio-friendly is the synthesizer part, the drums and especially the electric guitar solo of Jon Gordon, that has that ringing sound that was very much like U2 at the time. The minute it went to radio, it just hit everywhere it went. It was almost like an instant hit overnight.”

Although the finished recording sounds effortless, Vega says it came together only after painstaking work in the studio.

“I did my guitar part over and over again because Steve was meticulous,” she says. “He’s a terrific engineer. And I’m not a natural in the studio. I’m a good performer live, and I do what it takes to get my message and my song across live. But in the studio, I needed to do it over and over again.

“Today, whenever I hear ‘Luka’ on the radio, it sounds thick, full and fresh. It doesn’t sound labored over. But that’s because of Steve.”

Vega also credits Addabbo with teaching her how to record.

“He was a mentor because he taught me how to work in the studio,” she says. “When I first started working with him in my early 20s, I was very green. He would keep me in there until I got it right. Sometimes he’d have me come into the control room and listen to what I had done, and after listening I’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s not quite right,’ and I’d have to go back and do it again.

“So he really taught me my chops and how to play the guitar in a certain way, how not to exaggerate. He also taught me how to sing with the microphone — not to sing too softly and not to shout. He was a good, patient teacher.”

For the sessions, Vega played the Guild F-47 that was her acoustic guitar of choice during those years.

“I used the Guild in the early days,” she says. “At one point I switched over to Taylor and then for a while I used a Yamaha. In fact, someone from Yamaha just showed up one day at my hotel room and gave me a guitar, so I said, ‘Thank you.’

“I also had a custom Yamaha guitar, which ended up being stolen from the front of my apartment when I lived in Tribeca. To this day, I can’t believe it hasn’t surfaced somewhere since it had my name right on it in mother-of-pearl inlays. So somewhere, somebody has my Yamaha from when it was taken from the front of my building.”

“Luka” reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Vega’s highest-charting U.S. single. Its place in pop culture was cemented years later when it turned up in an episode of The Simpsons.

“It was so random, and so out of context,” Vega says, laughing. “The Simpsons are very funny. I remember going, ‘He’s driving under a bridge, and he comes out singing it.’ I was actually kind of touched by the fact that they would even think to use it.”

But the song’s greatest impact came not from the charts or television, but from the people who heard themselves in it.

“I was writing about a private issue, so it didn’t really occur to me that all these other people would identify with the song,” she says. “And they did. I got many, many letters from people who told me their story and their experiences. That was cathartic for me because, in the end, I understood that, in a way, that’s what was meant to happen.

“Somehow, I had provided a service by writing the song and allowing people to express themselves. There was one girl who wrote to me and said because of the song, she was able to tell others what was happening to her, and she feels it saved her life. I was getting letters like that.”

For decades, Vega maintained that “Luka” had been loosely inspired by a child she had observed playing outside her apartment building. It wasn’t until 2021 that she revealed the song had actually been rooted in her own childhood experiences.

“I was too afraid to reveal myself, so I didn’t want people to know that it was about me,” she says. “I had hidden the abuse for most of my life. Never talked about it, never revealed it. So to be known for that very thing was a little weird for me, but I felt that I had done the right thing in creating the character of Luka and that I could hide behind.”

Looking back nearly four decades later, Vega sees “Luka” as something much bigger than the hit single she never expected to have.

“The success of ‘Luka’ has been one of the highlights of my life,” she says. “In the end, it was not just a pop song, but something that, in a way, I was meant to do.”

For Beatles fans, the forthcoming expanded edition of Rubber Soul promises a wealth of new discoveries, from revealing session outtakes to the previously unheard John Lennon composition “Little Girl.” But the most important story surrounding the album isn't what listeners will hear in the vault recordings — it's what happened inside Abbey Road Studio Two during the autumn of 1965.

The sessions marked the moment when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr stopped accepting the technical limitations imposed by EMI Studios. Instead, they began demanding that the recording process itself become part of their creative vision—a philosophy that would lead directly to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

By late 1965, the Beatles had become students of sound. Between tours, they were listening obsessively to records coming from America. Motown singles leaped from radio speakers with deep bass and crisp percussion. The Byrds’ jangling Rickenbackers electric guitars shimmered with remarkable brilliance. Compared with these productions, the Beatles felt their own records reflected EMI’s conservative engineering philosophy more than the sound they heard in their heads.

For years, EMI’s procedures had emphasized technical accuracy and consistency. The company’s recording standards had been developed during an era dominated by classical music and traditional pop. Engineers were expected to produce clean, balanced recordings while staying within carefully defined operating practices.

The Beatles had reached the point where those rules were getting in the way. Paul McCartney later recalled the constant tug-of-war between the band and EMI’s engineering staff during the Rubber Soul sessions:

“EMI had very firm rules about that, which we always had to break,” he told Mark Lewisohn in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “It wasn’t a willful arrogance, it was just that we felt we knew better.”

McCartney was particularly unhappy with the muffled sound of his bass guitar on the group’s recordings. He’d been told it was necessary to keep the bass low to prevent needles from jumping out of the groove of the vinyl record. But he noticed the records from America had full, prominent bass and suffered not in the least.

“‘What do you mean we can’t have bass?,’” he recalled asking in one conversation with Abbey Road’s staff. “‘I was down the disco last night and I heard a record with that kind of bass!’”

The engineers would respond by citing company policy.

“‘Well, our rule book says…’”

The Beatles had little patience for rule books.

“‘They’re out of date, come on, let’s move!’”

One of the defining moments came during the recording of “Nowhere Man.” The Beatles wanted the electric guitars to be dazzlingly bright, with far more treble than EMI normally permitted. Norman Smith, the band’s recording engineer since 1962, turned the high-EQ potentiometer all the way up.

It still wasn’t enough.

“‘But that’s all I’ve got,’” McCartney recalled Smith replying. “‘I’ve only got one pot and that’s it!’”

The Beatles’ solution was simple.

“‘Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that,’” McCartney replied. “’And if that’s not enough we’ll go through another lot of faders.

“‘Try it for us. If it sounds crappy, okay, we’ll lose it. But it just might sound good.’”

Often, it did. McCartney believed Smith and his fellow engineers quietly enjoyed breaking the rules alongside the band.

“You’d then find, ‘Oh, it worked!’ and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who’d put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of all those things.”

That spirit of experimentation transformed Rubber Soul into a turning point in the Beatles’ career. The studio became a laboratory, and the band began taking creative control of the recording process itself. No longer was the control room simply documenting performances. Musicians, producer and recording engineers had become collaborators, working together to create sounds that had never before been heard on a pop record.

When Geoff Emerick succeeded Norman Smith as the Beatles’ principal recording engineer in 1966, he inherited a band that no longer viewed the studio as a place with limitations. Working alongside producer George Martin, Emerick embraced the same willingness to challenge EMI convention, helping the Beatles realize increasingly ambitious ideas on Revolver.

Microphones moved closer than the rule book allowed. Tape machines were manipulated in novel ways. Artificial Double Tracking, tape loops, extreme compression, and radically reimagined instrument sounds became part of the group’s expanding sonic vocabulary.

By the time work began on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, experimentation had become the norm rather than the exception. The studio itself was now an instrument—every knob and every tape machine another means of expression.

And it all began during the Rubber Soul sessions, when four musicians decided they would no longer accept limitations.

As listeners explore the newly released outtakes and alternate performances — including the long-awaited unveiling of “Little Girl” — they’ll hear more than songs in progress. They’ll hear a band discovering that the recording studio could be as creative an instrument as a guitar or a piano.

That’s the true legacy of Rubber Soul. It wasn’t simply the bridge between Beatlemania and psychedelia. It was the moment the Beatles stopped recording records and started inventing them.

For all that's made of Stevie Nicks’ songwriting partnership with former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, her friendship with Tom Petty was arguably as big an influence on her career, certainly the solo half of it.

“In 1976, I’d been in Fleetwood Mac for about a year when I heard Tom Petty’s debut,” Nicks wrote about the guitarist in a 2004 tribute for Rolling Stone. “I became a fan right then.

“I loved the way Tom’s Florida swamp-dog voice sounded in cahoots with Mike Campbell's guitar and Benmont Tench's keyboards. Tom had the same influences we had — the Byrds, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash — but he dropped in lots of serious old blues. I became such a fan that if I hadn’t been in a band myself, I would have joined that one.”

Nicks didn’t hide her enthusiasm from Petty. The guitarist said that when he and Nicks met in 1978, he felt overwhelmed.

“She was this absolutely stoned-gone huge fan,” he told American Songwriter. “And it was her mission in life that I should write her a song.”

Nicks didn’t have to wait long for that to happen. In 1980, she prepared to record her debut solo album, Bella Donna. The producer chosen was Jimmy Iovine, the man behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 1979 breakthrough, Damn the Torpedos. Iovine was at work on Hard Promises, the group’s 1981 followup, when he took on Nicks’ album.

The overlap between those productions meant Petty got a chance to hear Nicks’ album in progress. There was one thing both he and Iovine agreed on — they couldn’t hear a hit single on it. (Perhaps “Edge of Seventeen” hadn’t been recorded yet?)

“Both Tom and Jimmy said to me, in a brutally honest way, ‘You don’t have a single on this record,” Nicks recalled. “Tom is a great and loyal friend, but he’s also honest like that.”

Iovine asked Petty to write a song for Nicks. What he came up with was “Insider,” a song he wrote in a style he thought suited her.

"When I wrote that song, I wrote it very quickly — I mean maybe in 10, 15 minutes," he told Melody Maker in 1981. "I just wrote it all down on paper and then I just picked up the guitar and tried to sing each line out. It took me maybe an hour to do that."

Petty said Iovine was thrilled with the song.

“I remember bringing it to him, and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’” The praise stung Petty. He had begun to wonder if he was making a mistake giving the tune away. “I was really attached to it,” he recalled

By the time Nicks was recording it, Petty was glum about the whole endeavor. He recalled being in the studio as she was cutting her harmony vocals and how she could read the concern on his face.

“She walked back in and said, ‘How was it?’ I said, ‘It’s amazing,’” Petty told Musician in 1981. “She said, ‘I can tell by the look on your face, you don’t wanna give me this song. I’m giving it back to you right now.’ I really thought a lot of her for that.”

Feeling guilty, Petty offered Nicks a replacement he and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell had just written: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” As Campbell recalled, he began writing the tune off a chord progression inspired by the drum intro to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

“I just put different chords to that feel, and gave it to Tom and he wrote these great words,” the guitarist explained in a video, where he demonstrated the song using his Fender Broadcaster, the same electric guitar he played on the song’s original recording.

“And we were working with Jimmy Iovine at the time, and he thought the song would work better as a duet, and he was actually right. So Stevie Nicks ended up singing along with Tom on this song.”

Petty said Nicks was thrilled with the new track.

“She says, ‘Wow! That’s why I wanted you to write me a song — it’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s what you do,’” he told Musician. “‘Insider' sounds like what I do.'

“And I thought, How dumb of me to think that she'd want me to write like her."

Sung as a duet by Nicks and Petty, with backing support from the Heartbreakers, “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” became the debut single from Bella Donna. The song rose quickly in the chart to peak at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming both Nicks’ and the Heartbreakers’ biggest hit on that ledger.

Not everyone thought Petty made the right decision by giving it away. “Insider” appeared on Hard Promises, with backing vocals from Nicks and her sister, Lori. But while Petty thought highly of the tune, it failed to grab listeners or critics, one of whom singled out drummer Stan Lynch’s “cymbal-pinged weirdness” on the recording. The drummer wasn’t thrilled.

“As a trade-out for 'Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,' I didn’t think it was a good bargain at all,” Lynch said. “I remember [the discussion], ‘Well, we got “Insider,"' and I’m going, ‘Bad trade!’”

Nicks’ and Petty’s friendship endured for the remainder of his life. And, like a good friend, he was able to give her tough love when she needed it. After a stint in rehab in the early 1990s, she was insecure about relaunching her career and asked for his help writing songs.

“I didn't really expect the reaction I got, which was, ‘No, I won't,’” she wrote in Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘You are one of the premier songwriters in this business. Just write some great songs — that's what you do.’”

When they finally toured together in 2006, Petty gave her a platinum sheriff's badge inlaid with 24-karat gold and diamonds that read, To Our Honorary Heartbreaker. “It's probably the most beautiful piece of jewelry a man has ever given me, ever,” Nicks said.

Petty's sudden death from an accidental drug overdose on October 2, 2017, devastated her. “The loss of Tom Petty has just about broken my heart,” she said when she accepted the 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year Award; Petty won it the year before. “He was a great father and he was a great friend, and he was one of my best friends. My heart will never get over this.”

The Beatles drew inspiration from all over the musical map — Motown, acoustic folk, rockabilly and beyond. But one of the darkest lines ever sung by the band can be traced directly to a 1950s rock and roll record by Elvis Presley.

John Lennon turned the lyric into “Run for Your Life,” the closing track on Rubber Soul — a song he would later call his least favorite Beatles recording.

The track is about to return to the spotlight as the Beatles prepare to release a Super Deluxe edition of Rubber Soul on October 2, expanding the landmark 1965 album with new stereo mixes by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, unreleased session recordings and demos, and the original mono version.

The lyric appears in Presley’s 1955 Sun Records single “Baby, Let’s Play House,” written by Arthur Gunter. Early in the song, Presley delivers a line that’s as blunt as it is unsettling: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”

The phrase stuck with Lennon. Nearly a decade later, he borrowed it almost verbatim for the opening line of “Run for Your Life” before building the rest of the song around the same jealous premise, warning its subject that if he ever caught her with another man, “that’s the end.”

Years later, Lennon admitted the song wasn’t something he thought much about at the time.

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from Elvis.”

The track ultimately became the closer on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ sixth studio album and one often regarded as the point where the band fully embraced the LP as an artistic statement rather than simply a collection of songs.

It was also the first Beatles album to hint at the psychedelic era through increasingly adventurous studio experimentation. George Harrison famously introduced the sitar to the band’s sound on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” while Paul McCartney used a fuzz bass tone on Harrison’s “Think for Yourself,” reflecting the group's growing willingness to expand its sonic palette.

“Run for Your Life,” however, had simpler origins than many of the album’s other songs. Lennon later described it as a quick composition built around the Presley lyric that had caught his ear years earlier.

“I wrote it around that,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was that important.”

In hindsight, the song also reflected something about Lennon’s state of mind at the time. As McCartney later noted in his memoir Many Years From Now, Lennon’s lyrics often revealed a possessiveness that contrasted with McCartney’s own outlook on relationships.

“John was always on the run, running for his life,” McCartney wrote. “He was married; whereas none of my songs would have ‘catch you with another man.’ … I wasn’t as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song.”

Even if Lennon dismissed the track as a throwaway, there was little chance of replacing it. With the holiday season approaching, the Beatles were racing to finish Rubber Soul in time for its December 1965 release.

The album’s final recording session — which began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and stretched into the early hours of the next morning — saw the band record McCartney’s “You Won’t See Me” and Lennon’s “Girl,” while also adding overdubs to “Wait.” With the deadline looming, there simply wasn’t time to write and record another song. “Run for Your Life” remained in place as the album’s closing number.

And while Lennon would later call it his “least favorite Beatles song” and say he “always hated” it, at least one of his bandmates felt differently.

“It was sort of a throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of,” Lennon later said. “But it was always a favorite of George’s.”

Tony Iommi has announced his first solo album in years, From the Dark, and given fans an early taste with the release of its lead single, “World Alone.”

The album, due October 23 via BMG, arrives little more than a year after Black Sabbath’s farewell Back to the Beginning concert in Birmingham, England, and marks a new chapter for the pioneering heavy metal guitarist.

“World Alone,” which premiered today during a special streaming event in Iommi’s hometown near Birmingham’s Black Sabbath Bridge, pairs the guitarist with acclaimed Norwegian vocalist Jorn Lande. Driven by Iommi’s trademark downtuned riffs and soaring lead guitar work, the song is accompanied by a dystopian-themed video in which a character known as “The Believer” must survive a twisted video game to find salvation.

Lande sings on all eight tracks on From the Dark and shares songwriting credits with Iommi throughout the album. The lineup is completed by bass guitarist Becky Baldwin and drummer Karl Brazil, while Iommi co-produced the record with longtime collaborator Mike Exeter.

“It’s an album we’ve really enjoyed making,” Iommi said. “We’re not trying to prove anything — it’s a great album, it rocks!”

According to the track list, From the Dark opens with “Over the Violent Sun” before moving through songs including “Black Times,” “World Alone,” “Beyond the Dead,” “Stormwatcher,” “Death Wake,” “Return of the Arbalist” and the closing epic, “Legacy.” Lande’s lyrics explore dystopian themes, mortality and resilience, while Iommi’s guitar work remains rooted in the crushing, riff-driven style that helped define heavy metal.

A limited-edition seven-inch vinyl single of “World Alone,” backed with an instrumental version, will be released September 4. The song will also be featured on Gibson’s Learn to Play Guitar app.

From the Dark will be available in multiple vinyl and CD editions, including deluxe versions featuring expanded packaging and bonus tracks.

Iommi’s return comes after an eventful few years. In 2023, he collaborated with the Birmingham Royal Ballet on Black Sabbath – The Ballet, while 2025 saw the original Black Sabbath lineup reunite for the landmark Back to the Beginning farewell concert in Birmingham — Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance before his death just weeks later.

Widely regarded as one of the architects of heavy metal, Iommi helped forge Black Sabbath's groundbreaking sound after adapting his electric-guitar playing style following the industrial accident that cost him the tips of two fingers early in his career. Across six decades, he has earned Grammy Awards, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and numerous honors in the U.K., including being appointed an MBE earlier this year.

With From the Dark, Iommi returns to center stage with his first collection of new solo material since 2005’s Fused, proving that the creative spark behind some of heavy metal’s most influential riffs continues to burn.

The idea that Lenny Kaye is releasing his first solo album — the new Goin’ Local (Yep Roc) — now, at the age of 79 and after more than 60 years of performing, comes as a surprise.

Make that a shock.

The New York–born Kaye (née Kusikoff), who now makes his home in eastern Pennsylvania, is best known as the guitarist and chief lieutenant in the Patti Smith Group, which he was part of from 1974 to 1979 and, since 1996, co-producing three of her albums during that second tenure.

He curated the acclaimed 1972 compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 and produced albums for Soul Asylum, Suzanne Vega, James, Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Shams and others, and guested on R.E.M.’s 2011 album Collapse Into Now.

The Rutgers University grad has also written for a number of music publications and has penned a pair of books — You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon in 2004 and 2022’s Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll... — as well as co-writing Waylon Jennings’ autobiography in 2012.

He’s still playing select shows with Smith — including a Riot Fest slot on Sept. 20 in Chicago — and maintains what he calls a “goth/psyche/jam band” called Adrift. And he hosts The Lenny Kaye Program on SiriusXM’s Underground Garage channel.

That’s a lot, but somehow an album of his own never made it to the docket — even though he did start his own band, the Lenny Kaye Connection, during the late ’70s and contributed a track to Daddy Rockin’ Strong: A Tribute to Nolan Strong and the Diablos in 2010. Goin’ Local features 12 songs written over the course of decades, and he started recording six of them during the early 2010s with Patti Smith bandmate and bassist Tony Shanahan.

He gets his rock on for the title track and “A Friend Like You,” but the overall tone is more gentle, nuanced and reflective — even sentimental — on songs such as “Let’s Make a Memory,” “Be That As It May,” “The Things You Leave Behind” and “Solstice,” which he co-wrote with Smith.

There’s a hint of bemusement as Kaye talks about the project via Zoom, guitars and a keyboard visible in the background alongside a handsome wood bookcase.

So how have you managed to get this far along without doing an album of your own?

Well... [laughs] To be honest, you always make yourself the lowest priority on the list. It’s not as if I’ve been sitting around over the years; I’m always doing a lot of stuff, and sometimes you just don’t get to something like the album. Basically, the time wasn’t right. I had an assemblage of songs, but I’d keep writing, and when I felt like the songs I had made a whole, that’s when I decided it was time to reveal them to the world.

And it was helped by the fact that out here in northeast Pennsylvania I found a studio close to my home, called Mix-o-Lydian, where I could just call up the guy [Don Sternecker] and say, “Hey, let’s record this afternoon,” and go over there and work on songs without any sense of direction or commercial sensibility, or trying to create a different persona for myself. You do that several times and you start finishing things that began far too long ago.

So when I finally had enough I thought, “This is who I am at this moment in time. It’s ready to be heard.”

How big of a body of work were you drawing from?

I don’t write many songs — one or two a year, perhaps, when I feel the need to examine an emotional intersection in my life or talk about something in time and space. I believe songs need to be written. There are so many songs out there, and I’m just not one to kind of churn ’em out. I feel like they need to have a place in this world of music.

Have you tried to do an album at any point before?

I did some work in the ’90s with my band at the time — Tony Shanahan on bass, Mark Sacco on drums — then the juggernaut of Patti reappeared and that kind of got shelved. Then I did some sessions with Tony and Mark around 2010, 2012; six of the Goin’ Local songs actually began then. I never completed them, but I got to see what they were like. Then over intervening times I’ve written other songs, some of them acoustic-based.

And a lot of those became part of Goin’ Local.

The album is not quite as rockin’ as people might assume, given my history. But it felt like this new persona for me — vulnerable, honest. I’m not trying to surf on any genre here; I have my goth/psych/jam band Adrift, which is darker and louder and noisier. But this album is just me, as open-hearted as I can be.

Were you surprised by that as well?

I’ve always had a romantic streak. I’ve always liked so many different kinds of music, and I don’t like to be confined by genre. I just did what felt natural. Patti said to me — and I appreciated this — “I’ve never heard you sound like this before,” and I agree. It’s a way for me to reveal some of my inner feelings and wear my heart on my sleeve for many of the songs.

I’m very many things. I know I have a great reputation for garage rock, and I love garage rock, but it was the music I made as a teenager, and whatever I’ve done in the past, for me as an artist it’s in the past. Over the years I’ve moved through many musics to understand them. I love free jazz. I love country-western music, even though I’m a fairly substandard steel player. I love folk music. I love reggae. You name the genre, and I’ve spent time unlocking its secrets and bringing it into my music.

I feel at this point I can draw upon 60 years of living music and seeing where it’s placed me and seeing how I can develop further as a musician. I’m very work-oriented and very future-oriented. I have no desire to rest on my supposed laurels. What I’m most interested in, when I get up every morning, is what I’m working on, the songs that are taking shape in my head now.

One of the best solos on the album is on “A Friend Like You,” which is a Stephan Eichar song. What led you to do your own version of that?

There’s not a lot of co-writes on the record, ’cause a lot of it took shape in my living room, when I’m sitting there with a guitar. I found that song in Paris one time when I was there in the ’90s; I just heard it on the radio, and I liked it. I was able to buy a copy of it at the local store, and it set off a sense that I might be able to write lyrics, English lyrics, to it — which I did, with Stephan’s encouragement.

There are two guitar solos in there, and there were in his version, too. The first one is kind of strong but plain, the second one is a little more amped-up. So I was able to kind of embrace this build within the guitar solo, and I think it came out particularly well.

“Solstice” was written with Patti. What’s the story there?

That’s one of the oldest songs on the album, that and the title track. We came about it in the way that things usually come with us; there’s an idea aligned with an interesting guitar lick, and then an expanse of it as it grows.

And as this one grew, Patti felt it reflected my new persona and my sense of the celestial, possibly from my years as a science-fiction fan. She said, “You should sing it,” and so I did. It was kind of left aside for a while, and then I felt it had quality and kind of revisited it, and it grew into its own animal — especially the last half, which was kind of an open plane waiting for something, and I was happy to have the opportunity to fill it.

Maybe the nicest story here is “Yes I Will,” which you wrote to lyrics by your uncle, Larry Kusik — who wrote some notable songs himself, like “A Time for Us” [from the 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet] and “Speak Softly, Love” [a.k.a. “Love Theme from The Godfather].

My Uncle Ku was great. I made my first record with him, this folk-protest song [“Crazy Like a Fox”] that he wrote with his partner Ritchie Adams. I was in a band called the Zoo, playing Rutgers fraternity houses, but I’d never been in a studio before, so it was kind of exciting. It came out on a record under a pseudonym, Link Cromwell; it wasn’t a hit, which is probably good for me, since it would’ve changed the trajectory of my life. But it gave me a sense that I could be a part of music in some way, shape or form. I just didn’t know how.

With “Yes I Will,” toward the end of his life I would go up to the Upper East Side, where he lived. I would take him out in the car and we’d look at his old neighborhood, go have dinner somewhere. One day I asked him for some lyrics and he gave me that beautiful, beautiful song which, to me, is one of the most simple expressions of fealty.

I put it to music and went up to the hospital to sing it to him. He said, “Thank you,” and the next morning he passed. So I was able to tell him how much his encouragement and inspiration meant to me.

What’s the relationship between Lenny the songwriter/artist and Lenny the guitar player like?

All these pieces are part of the puzzle to me. I’m not a virtuoso. I’m not trained. I don’t read music, unfortunately; if I’d known I would be playing guitar 60 years later I might have learned how to understand those notes so I could pick up a piece of sheet music and understand its theory. [laughs]

But I’ve learned how to be myself. Perhaps that’s encouraged other skills — for one, improvisation, playing by ear, getting a sense of the neck of the guitar and where to go without sometimes knowing what the scale is or what the note is. I’m very instinctual as a player; I think that helped me very much with Patti that I didn’t bring a raft of Chuck Berry licks to her music, that I was able to move with her breathing in a way that was very mobile.

All the songs I’ve learned, all the ones I’ve forgotten, all the musics that I’ve spent time in, trying to figure out how the one-drop in reggae works — all of that kind of funnels into who I am as a musician. I believe there’s a definite connect with dexterity and musical imagination that makes these geniuses apparent. I’m not that. I’m more of a journeyman guitarist, rhythm-based, and when I take a solo I like it to sing like my voice sings during a song, that it’s not just a flurry of notes that have no destination.

I’m an intuitive player. I don’t analyze what I play; I might analyze it later to figure out why this particular chord progression did what it did, but I don’t think about the persona. I think about the music. I think about the space between one note and the next, because that’s music in the present tense. As a musician I just feel like I can draw on 60 years of experience of not knowing where the song is going and trying to figure out my way in it. Sometimes it requires me closing my eyes and imagining what I want to play, and hopefully those notes fall into my hand.

What’s your instrument situation these days?

My main guitar is a 60th Anniversary ’68 Fender Stratocaster that the band gave me on my 60th birthday back in 2006. It’s my main instrument, and what distinguishes it is it only had one pickup, the middle pickup... ’cause I never flicked a switch. I never played the treble. I never played the bridge pickup. I just played the middle pickup, full volume, full tone.

One day I came in and my guitar tech at the time had taken out everything so I just had the one pickup; he cut the pickguard and it was just me and the volume knob. Point and shoot. I call it the Eunichcaster, and really that’s all I need. That’s my main guitar.

Anything else around that might make our mouths water?

I don’t know if they’ll make mouths water, but they quench my thirst. I have a couple of oldies. I have a 1964 Stratocaster that I bought after my 1962 Stratocaster was stolen in Chicago; I love that guitar, and I have a ’68 Les Paul Custom that Cesar Diaz, the great amplifier technician, sold me. When I moved to Pennsylvania he turned out to be a neighbor, and he was always busting my chops — “You think you know how to play the blues? I’ll cut the top two strings off your guitar and we’ll see how well you play!”

And one day he says, “You don’t have a Gibson?!” I had an SG, but he was still like, “You don’t have a Gibson,” so he sold me this guitar. And it’s a really great Gibson because in ’68 they changed something; I’m not enough of an obsessive to know exactly what that is, but I would always play it for special occasions, or an overdub.

And in Adrift I wanted a heavier sound, so I’ve recently started playing it all the time in that band. I always thought Les Pauls would be harder to play than a Stratocaster. Not true; it’s really simple, and it sounds great. That guitar has so much great work to it.

So I’ve gone over to the dark side in the Fender-Gibson wars. I also have a beautiful Mosrite 12-string, and the acoustic guitar that I play is a Collings, which I have to say is the most beautiful acoustic guitar I’ve ever played, just so resonant and such a great sound. I’ve had it for over 20 years now, so it’s really settled into how I play guitar.

Amps and pedals?

I’ve downsized considerably over the years, and actually I’m amazed at how much better I sound. I have a Magnatone 213 from the early ’60s, which has real vibrato and just sounds so silken. I have a ’65 Fender Princeton that I usually use for recording and in my solo show, and if I need more firepower I have a Fender Deluxe reissue with a Celestion in it to give it a little more chest.

For pedals and effects I try to keep it simple, ’cause you can have so many doo-dads. Once I get my sound I’m not gonna change it that much; I might change a guitar here and there if a performance needs something radically different, but my pedalboard is the basic food groups — Fulltone [Fulldrive] 2 for the push, Boss digital delay, a Julie chorus, which I find to be quite shimmery, and then a wild-card spot where you can put a phaser or a weird reverb or something you might need, even though I hardly ever step on it.

I’m really pretty basic as a guitar player, especially live; I find that you’re not going to hear a lot of the subtleties — maybe in the studio you will. But live you stick on the fuzz tone and you’re good to go.

You mention the guitar theft rather casually.

I’ve lost so many guitars over the years. I remember in the mid-’70s we were playing Chicago, the Aragon Ballroom, and I put my ’57 Strat in its case and left it in the dressing room for the crew to pick up, and when we got to the next stop, Detroit, I opened it up and no ’57. The ’62 went; they took our entire equipment truck — again in Chicago, including the T-shirt that I left on my amp the night before.

I lost a beautiful Fender Precision bass in that as well, and my white Les Paul with the Lion of Judah inlay on the headstock. I’ve never seen any of them since. I have to say that my current Strat, the 60th Anniversary one, I would miss that one.

But, y’know, they’re a piece of wood and strings. Instruments are tools. If I’m in a good place and the instrument is not unfriendly, I’ll be able to play the same on it as I might with my own gear. The only thing you can’t replace in my sound is me. [chuckles]

Can we expect another album from you in less than the, whatever 60 or so years it took to get Goin’ Local?

I certainly hope so! [laughs] I have songs that weren’t right for this record that I have in my back pocket, and I’ve written at least three songs since then. So I’m just gonna keep going, because at this point in my creative life I have no expectations. I don’t particularly understand how the music business works or how people acquire what you do anymore. I just like doing this, and at this point I’m free to do what’s in my heart. I’m a slow worker; I don’t think there’s gonna be another record in the next three months, but I do have eight songs with Adrift, which is kind of a different side of my personality.

You’re the master of your domain, as it were.

I’m just having a really good time, because I’ve earned it. I’ve done pretty much what I’ve needed to do, so all this is a bonus beat. It’s so rare to be able to make a career and a financial living in music, and I’m so grateful I’ve been able to keep my head above water. I’m not a rich rock star; my only indulgence is a couple of beautiful guitars and my 1961 Thunderbird.

I’m enjoying this album. I’m enjoying taking it out on the road; at this point I’m just a solo artist, ’cause it’s portable and affordable, so I’m up there like the folk singer I always hoped I would be — before I saw the Beatles. [laughs]

There are plenty of ways to make a rock song stand out. You can write a killer riff. You can turn up the amps. You can have your singer scream about the hardships of life on the road.

Or, if you’re AC/DC in 1975, you can throw some bagpipes into the middle of the song.

That is exactly what happened with “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll),” the immortal AC/DC anthem that combines the Angus and Malcolm Young’s electric guitar attack with one of the most unlikely sounds ever to appear on a classic rock record.

And in honor of Bagpipe Appreciation Day, it’s worth revisiting the story behind how Bon Scott came to play them on the song, a tale as entertaining as the finished recording.

The bagpipes weren’t part of the song when AC/DC first began working on it. During a studio jam, however, producer George Young — the older brother of Angus and Malcolm Young — remembered that Scott had once been involved with a pipe band and suggested they try adding bagpipes to the song.

Scott agreed.

There was just one problem.

He didn’t play pipes in the band.

“I was the drummer!” Scott reportedly admitted when it became clear that the rest of the band had assumed he knew how to play the instrument.

Rather than abandon the idea, Scott did what any self-respecting rock frontman would do: he went out and bought a set of bagpipes.

The pipes reportedly cost him $479 Australian — about $650 U.S. dollars in 1975 — an eye-watering amount of money at the time. As AC/DC bassist Mark Evans later recalled, that kind of money could have bought “two Strats.” (A new Fender Stratocaster retailed for approximately $325 to $395 at the time.)

Scott then had to work out how to play the things.

The result was one of the most distinctive arrangements in rock. The bagpipes don’t merely appear as a novelty sound pasted over the song. They become part of the song’s architecture, answering Angus Young’s guitar in a brilliantly strange call-and-response passage before the band charges back into the main riff.

It was also, unsurprisingly, a nightmare to reproduce live.

The bagpipes’ drone is fixed to a particular pitch, meaning the rest of the band had to tune around them. According to Evans, AC/DC played the song live only around 30 times, and the bagpipes themselves were eventually destroyed after Scott left them at the edge of a stage and fans got hold of them.

The song’s famous bagpipe part also became increasingly inseparable from Scott himself. After his death in 1980, Brian Johnson chose not to sing “It’s a Long Way to the Top” out of respect for his predecessor.

Angus Young later recalled that the song’s title came from a note Bon Scott had scribbled in a book.

“And then Bon had that little scribble on the back of his book,” Young said. “‘It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll,’ which said it all, you know, especially for a band like us.”

The quote gets to the heart of what made the song work. Beneath the bagpipes, the riff and the swagger, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is about the grind of trying to make it as a rock band — the endless travel, the bad food, the cheap hotels and the hard work required to reach the top.

The irony is that AC/DC found a way to make that long road even stranger by adding bagpipes to a hard-rock song — and having a drummer learn to play them.

It was the song that made Simon & Garfunkel musical legends. Yet if it hadn’t been for the foresight of a producer — and the work of a handful of session musicians — we might never have heard of the duo.

Written by a 21-year-old Paul Simon, the original bare-bones acoustic guitar version of “The Sounds of Silence” was one of the earliest songs of his career. The darkness greeted in its opening line was literal.

“I wrote it in the bathroom in my parent’s house because the room was tiled, so there was an echo,” Simon told Uncut. “I used to turn the lights off and leave the water running. It was like white noise.”

Simon knew “The Sounds of Silence” was a step up from anything he’d composed before. “My brother says it was amazing that I wrote it, because everything I’d written before that was way below it in quality.

“I just took it as, ‘That’s a good one, I could close my act with this one.’”

On the strength of the song alone, Simon & Garfunkel secured a recording contract with Columbia Records. The duo recorded their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., in 1964 under the watchful eye of producer Tom Wilson, who had recently produced Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’.

The album featured the song under the slightly altered title “The Sounds of Silence,” but when Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was released, it went nowhere. The commercial failure led to the duo’s untimely split. Simon headed to London, immersing himself in the city’s burgeoning folk-rock scene, while Garfunkel returned to his college studies.

Back in the U.S., folk-rock was gaining traction. Bob Dylan was leading the way, while the Byrds’ jangly guitar interpretation of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” gave the genre an additional boost by topping the U.S. charts. As folk-rock swept the nation, “The Sounds of Silence” began receiving marginal airplay on some East Coast college radio stations.

Wilson became aware of the song’s growing popularity. Having recently produced Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, an album that saw Dylan introduce electric instruments into his music and expand his audience in the process, Wilson believed “The Sounds of Silence” could achieve a similar result if it were augmented with electric instruments and drums.

Without informing Simon & Garfunkel, he decided to overdub the original recording with bass, drums and electric guitars. Among the musicians he called was session guitarist Al Gorgoni, who had already worked with Dylan and would go on to appear on countless recordings by some of the biggest names in popular music.

“I was one of the first-call players, so we got called for almost everything,” Gorgoni tells Guitar Player today. “Tom Wilson was a very successful producer, but not a hands-on producer. What he did was call the right people and turn them loose in the studio. In this case, it was to add a rhythm section to the two guys singing with a guitar accompaniment.”

Wilson also brought in Dylan session drummer Bobby Gregg, bassist Bob Bushnell and second guitarist Vinnie Bell. Having booked the studio for a three-hour block, the four musicians set up their gear and prepared to record.

Gorgoni armed himself with a Gibson L-5 and an Ampeg amp. Bell, meanwhile, had his own preferred setup, which Gorgoni says he regularly arranged as the go-to rig for sessions in the various studios where they worked.

With Wilson at the helm and Roy Halee engineering, tracking began. But the session quickly proved difficult. Because the original recording had no drums and had not been recorded to a click track, its tempo was inconsistent, repeatedly faltering throughout the song.

“It was chaotic,” Gorgoni reveals. “We had to match the recording. They even tried using echo, but that didn’t disguise the uneven tempo.”

The guitarist recalls that Wilson’s hands-off method meant the musicians were left to their own devices.

“There was no arranger or any real guidance for the players from the booth, either. So they kept playing the track until we made up our parts. They made lots of takes. Eventually they chose the one that became the hit.”

Released as a single in September 1965, the revamped version of “The Sounds of Silence” aligned perfectly with the folk-rock sound dominating the airwaves. The new mix connected with a wider audience, and the single slowly began its ascent up the American charts, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on January 1, 1966. The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” knocked it out the following week, but the song returned to number one on January 22.

Simon, still living in London, knew none of this. The first he heard about the new version was when he picked up a copy of the music trade magazine Cashbox. Reportedly, when he heard what Wilson had done to his song, he was enraged.

“I’m not surprised he didn’t like it,” Gorgoni says. “The recording is crude in my view, but it proves the power of a song. Paul is a great songwriter and also an excellent guitar player. And he was part of the new breed of singer-songwriters who were writing more sophisticated lyrics as the pop music scene was evolving.”

Soon afterward, Simon returned from London and reunited with Garfunkel. At the request of their record label, the duo quickly recorded an album titled Sounds of Silence to capitalize on the single’s momentum.

The strategy worked. The album produced two more Top 10 U.S. hits, “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock.” Simon & Garfunkel’s career was back on track.

Over the years, Simon has acknowledged how those three hours Wilson and the musicians labored in the studio transformed not only the song but his life. Had the musicians not managed to build a new arrangement around its uneven tempo, Simon & Garfunkel might never have made their mark on popular music.

“I’m sure he and Art were happy to have such a great career,” Gorgoni says. “And it was launched by that recording.”

Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, also known as the Beano album, was released on the Decca label 60 years ago, on July 22, 1966. There are many groundbreaking aspects to the record, not the least of which is Clapton’s marriage of a Les Paul through a cranked Marshall amplifier, the electric guitar equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.

This magic coupling was defined by the hands of a spry 21-year-old. His youthful mastery is jaw dropping, and his iconic sound is now a guitar industry standard that at that time reinvigorated interest in the almost forgotten Gibson Les Paul model.

Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck weren’t yet fully developed, Pete Townshend was more of a rhythm guy, Ritchie Blackmore wasn’t really a blues guy, Jimi Hendrix wouldn’t release Are You Experienced until a year later, and groups like Love, Jefferson Airplane, Them, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Creedence Clearwater Revival and other young acts of the day couldn’t stay in the same ring as Clapton.

Most guys were struggling to intonate bends and trying not to fall off the log. Meanwhile, E.C. was like Larry Bird.

Clapton wasn’t just all sound. He could swing. Pre-Blues Breakers guitarists like Bill Jennings, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and dozens, if not hundreds, of others might swing harder, but they didn’t have his Les Paul-with-Marshall-on-10 sound and an innate sense of beyond-their-years phrasing.

There are many timeless moments on the Beano LP. The major 7th feedback note that ends “Steppin’ Out” is unexpected and sonically imaginative. I almost feel the floor of the recording studio vibrating on the “Key to Love” solo. It’s like a jacked stallion busting out of the gate.

“Have You Heard” has a great violent blues solo that sounds like Clapton is pissed he had to wait so long to play it. The Clapton vocal track, “Ramblin’ on my Mind,” introduced a generation of young kids to Robert Johnson, priming listeners to search for the source.

It’s not a perfect album. John Mayall ain’t no Steve Winwood, the multiple guitar tracks sometimes sound cluttered, and while “What I’d Say” might have been a showstopper in a London nightclub, it could have been left off the record. That said, the high points are stellar, and it’s all there on Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton.

In the years since its release, Clapton has sometimes put his foot deep into his mouth, but his doing so makes sense to me.

He famously refused to turn down at the Beano sessions. Engineers in lab coats were shocked at his ear-shattering volume. His “you’re with me or you’re against me” musical focus screams out from the grooves, along with an innate English aesthetic that was structured, organized and almost militaristic.

Clapton went on to grow a Bob Ross-style Afro that might have been a tribute to Hendrix, but he’d never play as loose, sexy and beautifully Black as Jimi did. All that said, when I listen to Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, I don’t care about the ups and downs of decades with Eric Clapton; I just hear a young man reinventing electric blues.

When young students ask me what inspired me when I was learning, I might play them the swinging genius Clapton exhibits on “Hideaway,” where he whips the Freddie King gem into his vision. Yet, more times than not, it underwhelms the uninitiated listener.

I think I get it. The world is filled with blues lawyers playing ’59 Les Pauls and clowns like Steven Seagal playing beefed-up pentatonics. Listeners shouldn’t be confused by this, because not hearing the importance and impact of Eric Clapton on Blues Breakers is like watching Citizen Kane and observing, “Oh, it’s only a black-and-white movie.”

Clapton could reach the pre-internet youth with a guitar that sounded like a flamethrower, wrapped in a tidy white package with an acute fashion sense. He repackaged and reinterpreted the blues for a generation, and spliced blues into rock.

“Clapton is God” is too much for anyone to live up to, but Eric Clapton is undeniably one of the most influential and inspiring guitarists of his generation. Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton proves that with each listen.

When Zakk Wylde joined Ozzy Osbourne’s band, he had a tall order to fill: living up to the legacy of Osbourne’s previous guitarists Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee, as well as Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.

Although he was barely 20 at the time, Wylde was up for the challenge. His bravado led to 1987’s No Rest for the Wicked, a bona fide metal masterpiece, loaded with touches of glam-meets-doom. The album was on-point for the 1980s.

“Going into it, I felt like I was standing where my heroes stood,” Wylde tells Guitar Player. “I came in after Jake and Randy, so — kind of like in baseball — I felt like I was the new catcher. And being a Sabbath freak, and loving all the stuff with Randy and Jake, it felt like I was wearing the Yankee pinstripes, so to speak.”

But paying homage to Sabbath and Ozzy’s 1980s solo work wasn’t going to cut it for the next album, 1991’s No More Tears. By the early ’90s, guitar music was changing, and Wylde knew that he and the music he made with Ozzy needed to change with it.

Which was just fine by Wylde, who had been listening to plenty of country and southern-tinged rock, like the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He would inject those sounds into his guitar work on No More Tears.

And perhaps no song demonstrates it better than “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” a song that was and remains Ozzy Osbourne’s only top-40 hit as a solo artist.

“It’s like learning about foods from different countries and then mixing little parts of each into some new recipe,” Wylde says, explaining his meld of southern rock and metal. “The next thing you know, it’s like, ‘Wow, this tastes amazing! What is this?’”

Wylde boils the essence of “Mama, I’m Coming Home” down to his Ozzy’s shared chemistry, as well as the song’s lyrics, which were written by Motörhead bassist Lemmy Kilmister. As the story goes, Ozzy gave Lemmy a tape with of demos and expected to hear back from him in about a week. The bassist returned with lyrics for three of the songs within just hours. One of those was “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”

As Ozzy explained in the liner notes for his 1997 compilation, The Ozzman Cometh, the tune’s melody had been in his head for some time.

“I had been walking around with the melody in my head for a couple of years but never got a chance to finish it until I was working with Zakk on the No More Tears album,” he wrote. “At that time Zakk and I were doing a lot of writing on the piano.”

As for the song’s title? “‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ was always something I’d say on the phone to my wife near the end of a tour.”

It’s not hard to see why Ozzy favored the song, with its strong melody and lyrics and Wylde’s mix of pretty acoustic and heavy electric guitar. Ozzy loved the tune so much that he included it in his final solo set at his and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell concert. It was the only song in his solo set that didn’t come from 1980’s The Blizzard of Ozz.

Ozzy clearly wasn’t alone in his affection for “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” The song has been covered by everyone from Carrie Underwood to Jelly Roll. Asked why he thinks the song resonates so strongly with people, Wylde shrugs.

“I think it’s just because it’s a ballad. That’s it right there.”

No More Tears, and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” specifically, saw you incorporating a diverse range of styles into your playing. How did that come about?

I used to sit up in front of the tour bus, and we’d be listening to the Eagles and Neil Young all night. So I was listening to that as we were going into the second album, No More Tears, and I started listening to more Allman Brothers, which was always around when I was growing up.

Southern rock was a big influence on your playing around that time.

Yeah. So I started getting into the Allmans, Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker and Molly Hatchet. I was listening to a lot of that when we were working on No More Tears, and that’s where a lot of the chicken-pickin’ stuff that came from. I was also into Albert Lee, who was like the first Yngwie. [laughs]

So the intro to “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” that’s all Skynyrd, Allmans, Albert Lee and country bends.So that was creeping into the music.

It’s funny, because at Back to the Beginning, Oz was like, “Zakky, we should do some writing.” He goes, “I really liked it when you started going through your Allman Brothers phase because it was heavy, but also melodic. It was just bashing all the time. We should do some more stuff like that.” So when I look back on that record, that’s pretty much where my head was at.

Can you remember what it was like for you and Ozzy as you were initially working “Mama, I’m Coming Home” out?

Me and [Wylde’s wife] Barb had an apartment in Burbank on Case Avenue, near a drug rehab. I think it was called Cry for Help, and it was across the street from this squatter's house It was a complete shoot and stab area, if you know what I mean. [laughs]

That’s where Ozzy and I wrote it, jamming on piano. I remember driving Ozzy over there in my car. I pulled into the driveway, and it was like rusted-out cars on cinderblocks, the grass was four feet high, the windows were smashed in, shutters were crooked, and there was a couch sitting on the front lawn with springs hanging out. [laughs]

I remember as we pulled into the driveway, Oz looked at me terrified, and was like, “Sharon’s paying you, isn’t she?” [laughs] And I go, “Oz, it’s a lot nicer on the inside!”

I couldn’t stop laughing. And he was looking at me, going, “Are you fucking with me?! Please tell me you’re fucking with me. At my age, my heart can’t handle things like this.” [laughs]

So we jammed on the piano, and Ozzy had that melody. I don’t know if it was just his love for the Beatles, but if you listen to those Sabbath records and everything he did with Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee, but Ozzy is just the king of melody.

Once you two had the song worked out, how did Lemmy enter the picture with the lyrics?

Oz just called him up in the afternoon: “Lemmy, can you write some lyrics?” And three hours later, Lemmy had three different sets of lyrics. [laughs] He thought it was gonna take Lemmy a couple of days just to get something that he was happy with. But Lemmy just went, “Here, I’ve got a bunch of lyrics for you right here.”.

When it came time to record “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” how did that go down?

Obviously, the solo is just my love for the Eagles — Joe Walsh and Don Felder. Even the lick at the end, that’s from “Hotel California.” It’s a Joe Walsh lick.

But as far as the rest of it goes, it’s all layered guitars, like what Jimmy Page did. It’s the Jimmy Page guitar army! [laughs]

How did you approach the acoustic opening portion of “Mama, I’m Coming Home?”

The intro is a 12-string and a six-string, and I’m doing octaves as well. So there’s actually three guitars going on there at the same time, That one came out really pretty.

It is pretty. And then it gets very heavy thereafter.

Yeah. Just before the second chorus, where Ozzy sings “I’ve seen your face a hundred times,” we have this lead in to it that goes dun, dun, dun— that’s complete Eagles right there. [laughs] It’s just a harmony line, so that’s a complete Don Felder and Joe Walsh kind of thing. And like I said before, I was learning from, and listening to all those bands, and digesting it to where it was in my DNA.

What guitars and amps did you use while recording “Mama, I’m Coming Home?”

I had my Les Pauls: I probably used the Grail, the Rebel, or my guitar with the red bull’s eye. It was one of those. For amps, it was the Marshall JCM800s, you know, the 100-watt heads, the 2203s, with 6550 Groove Tubes.

For the acoustic intro, I didn’t have the acoustics I use now, which are the Gibson Dove and the Wylde Audio acoustics. We could have rented a six or 12-string.

“Mama, I’m Coming Home” must have meant a lot to Ozzy, as it was the only solo song he chose to sing at Back to the Beginning that wasn’t from The Blizzard of Ozz record.

It was always part of the set. I remember when we played it back for the first time after it was done, we were all like, “Wow!” We were all excited about it. Yeah, Oz liked it.

I just look at when we did that song as a magical time. The second album, No More Tears, was a magical time for me, because I look back on listening to the Eagles, the Allmans, Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, Molly Hatchet, and all that stuff that was sneaking into my playing. And obviously, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” was a byproduct of that.

Oz loved all that stuff, too. Like when we’d be listening to “Hotel California,” or whatever, Oz would go, “God, this is so good. I remember when this first came out,” and he be telling me about all the time Sabbath did a show with Skynyrd or the Eagles. [Black Sabbath and the Eagles performed at the California Jam on April 6, 1974, along with a host of other popular groups of the day.] He would be like, “Wow, that was pretty insane!” And if you look at those lineups, it was pretty crazy. But anyway, I look back on that all as just a magical time, man.

Lenny Kaye readily acknowledges that he “didn’t know what he was doing” when he was tapped to compile the famed Nuggets compilation for Elektra Records during the early ’70s. “I had no sense of destiny or anything,” the Patti Smith Group electric guitarist tells us via Zoom from his home in eastern Pennsylvania. “And if I had thought, ‘This is going to be discussed a half century later,’ I would’ve screwed it up, simple as that.”

Ignorance, then, was bliss for Kaye and for an untold number of listeners who hold the album — full title Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968 — sacrosanct and essential, influencing generations and musical movements to come.

The two-LP set’s 27 tracks offer both a snapshot of an era and a treasure trove of unknown, obscure or under-celebrated songs — even the ones that charted when first released — by rock bands that fit the same description. “Psychedelic” was a broad term, of course; garage rock was also a generalized description for the music, and Kaye even applied “punk” in his scholarly liner notes years before it came into common practice.

“The ’60s was a quite amazingly exploratory time for the genre we call rock ’n’ roll,” Kaye explains. “Things happened so quickly that the music grew up almost as an adolescent will, sprouting from, say, ’63 through the beginning of the ’70s. The rapid-fire experimental energy was overwhelming. It’s almost like the Italian Renaissance; you have these great, larger-than-life figures.

“I believe Nuggets addresses that sense of sudden expansion of limits. It was very exciting. It was a great moment to experience … and I had the opportunity, thanks to Jac [Holzman, Elektra Records founder] to be the first in line of gathering these.”

New York native Kaye had already made a name for himself in the New York music scene as a musician (sometimes under the name Link Cromwell), writing for a variety of music publications and working at the Village Oldies record store. He was well-known enough for Esquire magazine to name him “the token rock critic” on its list of the Heavy 100 in the music business in 1970, which led Holzman to hire Kaye as an independent talent scout for Elektra.

“Jac Holzman liked rock critics, ’cause he had an intelligent label and writers enjoyed writing about [Elektra acts] Love and the Doors and Tim Buckley and all of that,” Kaye recalls.

He “didn’t get much traction” in that capacity, however, as he championed the Stooges for a third album, as well as the Sidewinders from Boston and an early incarnation of Blue Öyster Cult. Meanwhile, Holzman had broached the idea of “an album he called Nuggets which would find these kinds of rogue tracks that were overlooked — ironic because he probably could’ve signed all of these bands right off the get-go at the time.”

Kaye figured the idea was dead after he “was asked to leave” the company, “but about five or six months later their legal department called me up and said, ‘We have the rights to such and so many songs. What do we do with them?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, this is still happening? That’s crazy …’

“So we just kept going, and the rest is history.”

Holzman had a few suggestions of his own but mostly gave Kaye free rein in the process. “I just wrote up a list of songs that I liked that were slightly off the point, I guess,” he recalls. “It was mostly my favorite records. Jac told me to dig a little deeper, so some of the songs are not the ones you would expect. I didn’t put ‘Gloria,’ the national anthem of garage rock, on there; I chose another one from the Shadows of Knight catalog [‘Oh Yeah’].

“And many of them are not garage rock at all; they’re just fun songs. The Third Rail [‘Run, Run, Run’], a novelty song by some Brill Building songwriters. The Strangeloves [‘Night Time’], hardly a garage band, though they pretended to be one. Sagittarius [‘My World Fell Down’], which is a full-blown orchestration of West Coast Pop.”

Nuggets does feature some well-known bands (Leslie West’s Vagrants, the Blues Project, the Amboy Dukes, the Blues Magoos) and actual hits, such as the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard,” the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” and Nazz’s “Open My Eyes.” What they shared was a spirit and attitude that went against the grain of where rock was at the time — increasingly slick production, virtuosic prog and bombastic heavy metal.

“There was a total sense of mission,” Kaye says of his intent for Nuggets. “Me and other rock critics at the time were longing for a sense, a return. The time was right for re-evaluation, for bringing things back to perspective to the personal, to the available of someone who wanted to pick up an instrument and start from scratch. The time just called for it.

“Music is all about cycles, so if things get out of hand in one way, you know that the opposite is going to come to topple it, the way grunge wiped hair metal off the map or Elvis Presley kind of made obsolete an entire generation of pop singers and songwriters, or the Beatles changing the landscape immediately.”

Kaye feels Nuggets’ impact was even more pronounced when Sire Records reissued it in 1976, concurrent with the widespread coining of the term punk rock.

“This was during a time bands were kind of cutting the excess and looking for the root of what makes people move,” Kaye explains. He says he’s not sure why he used “punk” as a term in his liner notes. “It was just in circulation from rock writers who were looking for the truer, the short, sharp, shocked without any artistic pretensions, who wanted things to get back to the basics.

“It was just a term, really; I can’t tell you who initially came up with it. It might have gone nowhere except that it became a capital P, a label for a music style that reflected simplicity and drive and a certain ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude.

“It’s the spirit of reinvention — that’s what punk was, and what grunge was later,” he continues. “The original CBGB bands — Television, Talking Heads, Blondie — they were all so different from each other. The Ramones, who set the template for what would be punk rock — all those bands were extremely different from each other. So what you had was the sensibility of renewal; ‘We’re not gonna listen to what was there. We’re gonna start all over,’ even though you’re drawing so much from what went before. Even the Sex Pistols, with all their rhetoric, sounded as much like the Who and the Small Faces as anybody.

“We build on what has come before, but hopefully it becomes the future, and that, to me, is so important in terms of music’s evolution.”

Nuggets fans are their own legion, of course. Scores of other musicians — Kaye singles out Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie — have complimented and cited the compilation over the years.

“Then there’s that random human in Stockholm who comes up and buys me a beer and tells me Nuggets changed his life,” Kaye adds. Smith is not among them, however. “She might’ve known some of the groups,” he says, “but our reference points were more vocal harmony groups. When I first met her and she started coming into Village Oldies, I spun her ‘Mr. Hero’ by the Blue Notes, ‘Today’s the Day’ by Gray, and ‘Bristol Stomp,’ of course.”

Post-Nuggets, Kaye worked with Smith from 1975 to 1979, and again since 1996, co-producing several of her albums. He had his own band, the Lenny Kaye Connection, during the ’90s and has produced albums for Suzanne Vega, Soul Asylum, James, Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Shams and others. He hosts The Lenny Kaye Program on SiriusXM’s Underground Garage channel, while his first-ever solo album, Goin’ Local, was released July 17.

While a proposed second volume for Elektra did not happen, Nuggets has been reissued in several incarnations, including the Sire reissue and expanded box sets in 1998 and 2023. Other Nuggets releases, not involving Kaye, include Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969, Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, Come to the Sunshine: Soft Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1996, Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970 and Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets: 1965–1968.

“The lifeline of Nuggets is rather miraculous,” Kaye says. “The fact that we’re talking about it more than 50 years after this ‘oldies’ album was generated is remarkable. It’s great music. I believe Nuggets’ longevity is not just about garage rock; you really can take any genre and find great songs and make them a Nuggets. There’s always going to be an appetite for that history, and that discovery.”

Peter Gabriel spent a decade building Genesis from a group of school friends into one of progressive rock’s most ambitious bands. He had formed the band in 1967 and fronted it through its transformation into a major international act.

But by 1975, following the group’s ambitious double concept record The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he was gone. Gabriel’s departure from Genesis was driven by a combination of personal and professional pressures, but his first solo single turned that moment of uncertainty into song.

“Solsbury Hill,” released in 1977, was inspired by what Gabriel described as a spiritual experience atop the hill in Somerset, England — one that helped him come to terms with leaving behind the band he had led for close to a decade.

“It’s about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get,” Gabriel later said of the song. “It’s about letting go.”

The song itself sounds like a musical expression of that leap into the unknown. Built around a complex, Travis-picked acoustic guitar part in an unusual 7/4 meter, “Solsbury Hill” was recorded at the very end of the sessions for Gabriel’s self-titled debut album. The guitarist who played that intricate part, Steve Hunter, initially wasn’t sure he could pull it off.

Famous for his work with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, Hunter was among the studio musicians — alongside the likes of Robert Fripp — selected by Gabriel and producer Bob Ezrin to help launch the singer’s career away from Genesis.

“In my opinion, ‘Solsbury Hill’ is one of the most perfectly written and produced pop songs ever,” Hunter says. “It was also one of the most interesting sessions for me. We were doing the album and Peter was having some trouble with a couple of lines of lyrics in ‘Solsbury Hill,’ so we kept putting it off.”

Ezrin was unhappy with Gabriel’s original last line of the chorus. By the time the singer came up with the solution, the sessions were nearly over.

“It ended up being the last song we recorded,” Hunter says. “Literally, the day after we recorded it, all the New York musicians were scheduled to fly back to New York. Robert Fripp had already flown back to England because he had sessions scheduled. I didn’t even know if we were going to record it.”

Hunter’s introduction to the tune came during a private session with Gabriel and Ezrin.

“Bob and Peter took me into Bob’s office at Nimbus 9 Studio up in Toronto. Peter played it for me on the piano, and I realized it was in an odd meter, which petrified me, because I’d never played in an odd meter before, other than 5/4.”

The song is mostly in 7/4, switching to 4/4 for the final two measures of the chorus. Despite his trepidation, Hunter was immediately impressed by the composition.

“I thought it was an amazing song. You could tell right away just from the piano and the vocal.

“Bob said, ‘I have this idea. I thought we could do some Travis picking on this, with acoustic guitars.’ He showed me what he was looking for, because he plays guitar, so between he, Peter and I, we worked out the guitar part.

“Again, I was petrified, ’cause now I had to play Travis picking and adjust it to play in 7/4, and I wasn’t sure I was gonna be able to do that. But the song is so well written that when I sat down to work out the guitar part, it just sort of fell under my fingers, and it really wasn’t a burden.”

Hunter used a Martin acoustic to record his part, triple-tracking the guitar to create the distinctive shimmering effect heard on the finished recording.

“I recorded three acoustic guitars playing the same thing. The first was recorded at normal speed, and we changed the speed of the tape a tiny bit slower and faster for the other two takes to get a very small difference in tuning. When you hear the three of them together, it’s this beautiful chorus effect.

“It was a fabulous thing, and probably one of the most difficult things I had done up to then. But it was really good for me to do it, and I’m really, really proud of that song.”

That intricate acoustic pattern became the musical foundation for Gabriel’s first major statement outside Genesis. “Solsbury Hill” went on to become a Top 20 hit in the U.K., peaking at number 13, and reached number 68 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S.

But its real significance was more personal. Gabriel had spent nearly 10 years leading the band he had helped create. Now he was standing on his own, with no guarantee that the next step would work.

The song’s message was to let go of what he had built and accept the uncertainty of what might come next. Nearly five decades later, “Solsbury Hill” remains one of the clearest musical documents of that leap — a song about leaving Genesis behind, and finding the courage to discover what came after.

It’s not hard to get Little River Band guitarist Graeham Goble to reminisce about “Reminiscing.” The 1978 single was the Australian group’s most successful in the U.S., peaking at number three on both the Billboard 200 and Cash Box charts.

It was named Australian Record of the Year at the 1978 King of Pop Awards and was honored by Broadcast Music International (BMI) for five million plays on American radio, the most for any Australian pop song up to that point.

It was also, somewhat surprisingly, a favorite of the late John Lennon during his affair with former assistant May Pang, which continued from the mid 1970s to the latter years of the decade .

“She wrote in her book, Loving John, that they would lay in bed listening to ‘Reminiscing,’” Goble says, “and he was asking her to play it again and again and again. That was pretty amazing.”

Originally released as the second single from LRB’s fourth album, Sleeper Catcher, “Reminiscing” can be found on the new LRB compilation, Ultimate Hits. Still in Melbourne where the band was formed, Goble has nothing but fond memories of “Reminiscing” and all that came in its wake.

“It was inspired by my love of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s musicals, ’cause I was 12 years of age when we got a black-and-white television in Adelaide,” Goble explains. “The programs I immediately loved were all the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals — all of that American romantic era. A lot of my songwriting, but particularly ‘Reminiscing,’ was about the life I wished I had, putting myself into those situations I saw in the movies.

The song arrived in April 1977, when the group was in Melbourne for a TV appearance. “We were in the green room, just playing our guitars,” Goble says. “The lead guitarist, David Briggs, was showing me some jazz chords, one of which was a C9 chord, a shape I never knew about.

“When I came home after the television show, I picked up my Martin 000-18 acoustic and played that chord. Immediately, I had this melody and lyric, all at the same time, almost like it was a spiritual download that just flowed through me. In about a half an hour, the whole thing was finished, and I had this very different song with key changes and quite a lot of jazz chords — quite a sophisticated piece!”

As Goble recalls, the Little River Band made two attempts at recording the song before they struck gold. “The keyboard player I wanted for it was Peter Jones, and he was not available,” he says. “So I was forced to pick another player, and it didn’t work. And then we did it with a second player and that didn’t work out, either.

“Then I heard Peter Jones had come back into town. So under protest from some of the guys, mainly from [vocalist] Glenn Shorrock, they reluctantly agreed to give it a third go. As soon as we sat down with Peter, the whole thing came together. Our guitarist Beeb [Birtles] played a syncopated riff from the third verse to the very end of the song, which I really loved. It was a lovely lift to the latter part of the record.”

In addition to “Reminiscing,” Sleeper Catcher included “Lady,” another song with which the LRB would make their name in America. Although Goble and the band were convinced they’d recorded something special, their label, Capitol, had trouble hearing it. “We waited five weeks with no response,” Goble says.

“They eventually Telexed us and said, ‘We think the album is great but we can’t hear any singles’ — and they had ‘Reminiscing’ and ‘Lady,’ our two biggest singles of all time!”

Eventually the label decided to take a chance on “Reminiscing.” “They said, ‘But we really don’t know if it will connect at all.’ Within a couple weeks it went ballistic, right to number one in New York and number three on Billboard.”

Goble calls it “our pinnacle song. It’s double any other song we’ve ever had in terms of listens. It’s been in a lot of movies, and a lot of soundtracks. Sinatra said he thought it was the best ’70s song in the world, though he never recorded it.

“But when John Lennon calls your song one of his favorites, does that really matter?”

Nita Strauss may be on maternity leave from the rock and roll road, but she’s still been playing plenty of guitar for an audience of a special one.

On May 28, Strauss and her husband, drummer Josh Villalta, welcomed their first child, Maxwell James. Strauss tells us via Zoom from home in Louisiana that she’s “just loving this season now, with a vengeance,” including playing music in Max’s nursery, where she keeps a couple of her signature Ibanez JIVA electric guitars and a Marshall JCM 900 half-stack.

“It’s a good vibe in our nursery, let me tell ya,” Strauss says as Max coos in the background. “He’s just sort of listening in awe right now. I wish everybody listened to me with as much awe as he does,” she adds with a laugh. “It’s fun; I’ve got two of my tour JIVAs in here and a nice comfy chair to sit in, so it’s a good practice setup.”

She adds that, with normal infant needs, Max “has more wardrobe changes than I do these days.”

There’s no drum kit in the nursery — yet — but Strauss reports that dad is getting into the act as well.

“Josh, he’s always just tapping on things and moving Max in the rhythm of different songs. The drummer vibe is already strong — which is terrifying.”

Strauss’ pregnancy required a leave of absence from her regular gig with Alice Cooper’s band during this year’s touring cycle, but we’ll be hearing something new from her next month. Strauss recorded an instrumental version of “1979” for Sending Hearts to All My Dearies — A Tribute to the Smashing Pumpkins, a band-sanctioned salute that comes out digitally August 14 and on vinyl October 16.

Her involvement with the project started during the pandemic, around the time she and Villalta were moving from Los Angeles.

“We were driving out of California,” she recalls. “It was a really emotional time, during the pandemic. Josh and I bought our first house and we loaded up the car and the dogs and everything. I had really held all the emotion in.

“Then we got on the freeway and the radio started playing ‘1979,’ and that unlocked that emotional block I had built up during the move and packing, and I just burst into tears. It just took me back to high school and cruising around in the car with my friends, listening to Smashing Pumpkins.”

Given the massive popularity of “1979,” Strauss didn’t assume the song was still available when she signed onto the project.

“I threw out ‘1979,’ thinking there’s no way that song is still available — and it was. [English singer Barns Courtney does a vocal version of it as well on the tribute, which also features contributions from Tame Impala, Des Rocs, Between the Buried and Me and others.] So I was excited, and I got to put a pretty unique spin on the song.”

Doing it as an instrumental fits that description, of course.

“The first thing I think anybody would’ve thought of is, Who are you gonna get to sing on it? But when I recorded this I hadn’t even put out any music with singers. That was pre-‘Dead Inside’ [with David Draiman], pre-any of the guest vocalist stuff I’ve done. I had only approached making my music from an instrumental standpoint. It didn’t occur to me until much later on, when it was finished, that maybe I should’ve gotten a singer on it.

“But I enjoy putting that kind of spin on songs that I like. And ‘1979’ has such a great melody that lent itself so easily to play on guitar. It just felt natural to approach it from that standpoint.

“I think it came out cool. When I listened back, I had sort of forgotten how many liberties I took with it, especially with the shuffle of the tempo at the very beginning; it starts out very moody and half-time, very different. But I did play it with a lot of reverence for the band and for the original track. I hope that comes across to the band and to the fans.”

In addition to “1979” and playing for baby Max, Strauss has also started work on her third solo album, the follow-up to 2023’s The Call of the Void.

“I started working on that about a year and a half ago, with the idea I was going to be taking some time off,” she says. “I’ve got 10 or 11 songs banked and pretty well fleshed out, sort of ready for either solos or guest singers. It’s in a good place, so it’s looking like new music by the end of this year or next year.”

She’ll resume her regular gameday duties with the Los Angeles Rams during the upcoming NFL season as well, and Strauss plans to be back in the Cooper camp for its next tour. (Anna Cara took her place during maternity leave.) Cooper is currently touring Europe with the Hollywood Vampires and will be promoting a new memoir, Devil on My Shoulder, this fall.

“Bringing a stroller and all the baby stuff on the road is gonna present a new challenge,” she acknowledges. But Max may well earn his keep as well.

“Oh, I guarantee he’s gonna make his way into the show when we go out with Coop,” Strauss says. “There’ll be some Billion Dollar Babies gag or something that they want to do.

“One fun thing about the Coop tour is everybody’s put to work onstage, everybody from the merch girl to the stagehands to anybody and everybody. My guitar tech is out in a black jumpsuit killing Alice at one point or another in the show. So if Max is out on tour, they’re gonna make him work.”

More than 50 years after the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder wrapped up one of rock’s most celebrated package tours, Mick Jagger is looking back on the chaotic way it all ended.

Speaking in a new interview with The New York Times, the Stones frontman recalled the final night of the band’s 1972 North American tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where an encore with Wonder gave way to an all-out custard pie fight.

The 53-date tour, which ran from June 3 to July 26, marked an important moment for both artists. It was the Stones’ first U.S. outing since the ill-fated 1969 tour that ended with the Altamont Speedway Free Concert.

In the years between, they had released Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., a pair of celebrated albums featuring the handiwork of their new electric guitar–slinger, Mick Taylor. Wonder, meanwhile, had successfully transformed himself from Motown child prodigy into one of pop music’s brightest young stars with hits like “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” and “If You Really Love Me.”

The pairing proved to be a natural fit.

“Motown was trying to break Stevie bigger than he’d ever been,” Marshall Chess, the Stones’ executive manager, recalled. “It was a great thing for the Stones because Mick and Keith just loved Stevie. It was a great thing for Stevie because it showed him to this whole other white audience, the Stones’ audience.”

Although Wonder had yet to release the extraordinary trilogy of Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, he was already a dazzling live performer who could more than hold his own with the Stones. Night after night, he returned to the stage for the encore as he and the band tore through a mash-up of his 1966 hit “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

“That’s when Stevie was really young and full of energy, jumping up and down on stage,” Chess said. “He and Mick were dancing on stage together, then somebody came out and put a whipped cream pie in Mick’s face. It was crazy. The building was actually vibrating. You could feel it in the concrete.”

Jagger remembered that the final show took the spectacle one step further.

“We said come up and we’ll play a mash-up of ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Uptight,’ because they’re both the same beat,” he recalled. “And then someone — I can’t remember whose idea this was, it might have been mine — decides that we’re going to throw custard pies at the end, because it’s the last number of the show of the last day of the tour. It’s rather unfair for Stevie.”

Wonder, who is blind, nevertheless embraced the prank.

“So everyone’s throwing custard pie, including Stevie, and everyone ends up covered in custard pies,” Jagger said. “I loved it.”

For a tour remembered as one of the greatest double bills of the rock era, it was a suitably unforgettable finale — two of music’s biggest stars sharing the stage one last time before leaving it covered in smashed pies.

By 1997, Britpop was running out of steam. Oasis’ Be Here Now failed to become the defining statement many had hoped for, and the movement quickly faded.

Three years later, an unknown band called Coldplay emerged with its debut album, Parachutes — which celebrates its 26th anniversary this month — and helped define what came next.

The song that changed everything was “Yellow.”

It was so good, it even made a fan of the notoriously hypercritical Noel Gallagher.

“When I heard ‘Yellow’ for the first time, I immediately picked up the guitar and went, ‘Fucking bastards, why didn’t I write that?’” the Oasis guitarist told Pitchfork in 2011.

“I feel that way about a lot of their songs.”

Gallagher was far from alone. Today, “Yellow” has been streamed more than three billion times on Spotify, but the song might never have existed had Coldplay not stepped outside the studio for a break one night.

The song didn’t exist when the band checked into Rockfield Studios in Wales in November 1999 to record Parachutes. For that matter, Coldplay itself was barely known, having formed in London just two years earlier.

Its independently released Safety EP had attracted little attention, but the follow-up, The Blue Room, earned enough acclaim to secure a deal with Parlophone and pave the way for the band’s debut album.

Even then, the recording process got off to a rocky start.

“We’d done one session a few months before in London,” frontman Chris Martin recalled, “which hadn’t gone so well. So we were going there ’cause it was kind of a make-or-break session.”

Former Parlophone A&R executive Dan Keeling said Martin’s perfectionism had led to clashes with an earlier producer before the band regrouped at Rockfield with producer Ken Nelson.

“We’d been in the studio with another producer and they’d fallen out straight away on the first day of pre-production,” Keeling told The Independent in 2020. “The producer and Chris Martin were locking swords. That was going nowhere.”

Rockfield proved a much better fit. The storied Welsh studio — where Oasis, the Stone Roses and Brian Eno had all recorded — provided a relaxed atmosphere that suited both the band and Nelson.

It also provided the inspiration for “Yellow.”

As Martin recalls, the band was taking a break outside while recording “Shiver” when Nelson looked up at the remarkably clear night sky.

“It was so beautiful outside,” Martin said. “All four of us were outside, and Ken, he was like, ‘Look up there, lads! Look at the stars.’

“He literally said, ‘Look at the stars’ — which is the first line of that song.”

Back inside, Martin picked up an acoustic guitar and began building a song around Nelson’s remark while the band waited for a broken piece of studio equipment to be repaired. He was especially struck by the word “stars” and deliberately exaggerated the “r” in a high register, imitating one of his musical heroes.

“I was thinking about Neil Young, and I started to do a Neil Young impression to try and make everyone giggle,” he told Howard Stern in 2011.

Martin was playing in one of his preferred alternate tunings, which gave the song’s simple chord progression its shimmering character.

“I like to use strange tunings on the guitar,” he told Stern. “And then the rest just come out.”

Within about 10 minutes, nearly the entire song was finished.

Only the title remained.

“I got the title from the Yellow Pages,” Martin said.

Writing “Yellow” proved far easier than recording it.

“The problem we had with ‘Yellow’ was getting the tempo just right,” Nelson told Sound on Sound. “A beat either side of the tempo we picked didn’t have the same groove. It lost the feel of it.”

The band also discovered that analog tape wasn’t delivering the sound they wanted.

“We tried it a few different ways … and we were never really happy,” Nelson explained. “We ended up using Pro Tools,” before transferring the finished recording back to tape — a process that convinced him of the benefits of combining digital recording with analog warmth.

For the session, Martin played a circa-1996 Vincente Tatay Tomas Spanish acoustic guitar, while guitarist Jonny Buckland used his Fender Classic Series ’72 Telecaster Thinline semihollow through two Fender Twin Reverb combos.

“Jonny has a Fender Twin Reverb, and he has all these delays going into it,” Nelson said. “I just wanted to have the option of a bit more dryness.”

His solution was to split Buckland’s signal between the two amps, recording one wet and one dry before blending them together in the final mix.

The contrast between Martin’s acoustic and Buckland’s crunchy, delay-soaked electric gave “Yellow” much of its distinctive character, blending folk, rock and dreamy textures into something that resisted easy categorization.

Appropriately enough, Martin has never been entirely sure what the song is actually about.

“What’s it about? I don’t know,” he said. “Just someone awesome.”

“Yellow” wasn’t the first single from Parachutes. That distinction belonged to “Shiver,” which reached No. 35 in the U.K. after its March 2000 release.

But when “Yellow” arrived three months later, everything changed.

Coldplay had just embarked on its first headlining tour, including an appearance at Glastonbury, when the single was released on June 26.

“I remember hearing that song and thinking, ‘That sounds like a hit,’” Keeling recalled. “It’s epic but at the same time it’s not. It’s pared back and natural. I remember feeling the sky was the limit.”

He was right.

“Yellow” climbed to No. 4 on the U.K. Singles Chart and became Coldplay’s international breakthrough, reaching audiences across Europe and Australia before cracking the U.S. Top 50 and introducing the band to American listeners.

Twenty-six years after Parachutes introduced the world to Coldplay, “Yellow” remains one of the band’s defining songs. Its appearance in the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, where it was performed in Mandarin by singer Katherine Ho, introduced it to a new generation of listeners and helped spark a lasting resurgence in China.

Among the song’s countless live performances, one of the most memorable came at the 2011 memorial service for Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Before beginning the song, Martin told the audience that Coldplay had once played “Yellow” for Jobs a decade earlier.

“We played this song for Steve 10 years ago, and he said it was shit,” Martin joked as the audience laughed. “He said we’d never make it.”

Undoubtedly, Jobs, like Noel Gallagher, would have eventually come around.

How do you play the opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night,” the Beatles’ hit single released on this day in 1964?

More than 60 years later, no one can say with complete certainty.

One of the most recognizable sounds in rock history has inspired decades of debate among musicians, scholars and Beatles obsessives. Even George Harrison gave conflicting accounts over the years of exactly what he played, and with John Lennon, Harrison and producer George Martin all gone, the mystery may never be fully solved.

Part of the challenge is that what listeners hear as a single chord is actually the combined sound of as many as four instruments: Martin’s piano, Lennon’s Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric, Harrison’s Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string electric and Paul McCartney’s Höfner bass. Some analyses omit Martin’s contribution altogether, but however you account for the parts, the famous opening can’t be reproduced faithfully by a single guitarist.

“We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack album, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning,” Martin explained. “The strident guitar chord was the perfect match.”

Indeed it was. More than six decades later, the chord remains a favorite subject for YouTube creators, with countless videos attempting to decode its secrets. But one of the earliest serious investigations appeared in the pages of Guitar Player magazine in 2005, roughly a year before YouTube’s public rollout.

The investigator was Dr. Jason I. Brown, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who used a mathematical technique known as Fourier transform to decompose the recording into its component frequencies.

As Brown explained, one of the most common transcriptions at the time defined the chord as G, D, F, C, D and G, all played on a single guitar. The Beatles Complete Scores, meanwhile, described it as a composite chord made up of G, D, G, C, D and G played by Harrison on his Rickenbacker 12-string, D, G, C and G played by Lennon on his Gibson acoustic-electric, and a low D played by McCartney on bass.

To test those theories, Brown analyzed a one-second digital recording of the chord. After applying a Fourier transform to the audio, he rounded the 48 loudest frequencies to their nearest semitone.

“These are the notes that comprise that marvelous chord,” he wrote. The analysis identified nearly two dozen distinct pitches spanning nearly five octaves: A2, D3, F3, G3, A3, C4 (middle C), D4, G4, A4, C5, D5, G5, B5, C6, D6, E6, F#6, G#6, A6, D7, E7, F7 and G7.

“We see now why the most popular versions of the chord must be wrong,” Brown wrote. “Each shows a low G2 being played, but this note is definitely not included in the frequency analysis. Examining the frequencies, I found that one D3 is louder than the others, which suggests it is a bass note played by McCartney—but it was impossible to match the other low notes to Harrison’s 12-string, even taking into account the notes played on Lennon’s six-string.”

The breakthrough came when Brown stopped assuming the sound came entirely from guitars.

“With a bit more deductive work, I found the presence of the piano did indeed solve the frequency problem,” he wrote. “The important point is that the piano is there because the math says it is.”

Brown’s conclusion doesn’t answer every question surrounding the famous opening chord, and it’s unlikely the debate will ever disappear entirely. But it does explain why generations of guitarists have struggled to recreate it: they were trying to play what was never the work of a single guitar in the first place.

The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often and rightly proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. Fifty years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock and roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album At Fillmore East really was.

It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, when it came out in July 1971, the band was something of a commercial flop.

Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple in the marketplace. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold fewer than 35,000 copies, and the following year’s Idlewild South did only marginally better despite two singles, “Midnight Rider” and “Revival.” The band struggled to understand why.

“When the first record came out at number 200 with an anchor and dropped off the face of the earth, my brother and I did not get discouraged,” Gregg Allman recalled, a few years before his death in 2017. “But I thought Idlewild South was a much better record, and when that died on the vine, I thought, Damn, maybe we were wrong about this group.”

But the lackluster sales didn’t match the increasingly large and rabid crowds the band drew on its relentlessly paced tours. Fans loved the Allman Brothers’ rare combination of blues, jazz, rock and country, and their willingness to play until somebody pulled the plug. Finally, it dawned on the band and its management that a live album was the only way to capture the group’s real essence.

What resulted was a recording of two shows at New York City’s famed Fillmore East, an album that still stands as a testament to a great band at the peak of its power. Sadly, it would prove to be the final record completed by guitarist Duane Allman, who died shortly after its release. As such, it has become an epitaph for both him and the Allman Brothers Band 'Mark 1'.

“That album captured the band in all their glory,” producer Tom Dowd said in a 1998 interview. Dowd, who died in 2002, was behind the boards for nearly a dozen Allman Brothers albums, including At Fillmore East, and worked with everyone from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Cream and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“The Allmans have always had a perpetual swing sensation that is unique in rock. They swing like they’re playing jazz when they play things that are tangential to the blues, and even when they play heavy rock. They’re never vertical but always going forward, and it’s always a groove.”

Certainly, the improvisation and length of the tunes on At Fillmore East was more similar to jazz than rock, with just seven songs spread over four vinyl sides, capturing the Allmans in all their bluesy, sonic fury. “You Don’t Love Me” and “Whipping Post” both occupied full album sides, while “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” clocked in at 13 minutes.

Still, from the clarion slide guitar of “Statesboro Blues” that opens the album to the booming timpani roll of “Whipping Post” that closes it, there is nary a wasted note in the 78 minutes of Fillmore’s music.

Propelled upward and onward by bassist Berry Oakley, whose free-range style uniquely roamed the middle of the band’s sound, and the rhythmic onslaught of double drummers Jaimoe and the late Butch Trucks, the group seemed ready to blast off in any direction at any time.

Dickey Betts and Duane Allman spurred each other on to new heights of fretboard ferocity and creativity while pioneering guitar harmonies. Gregg Allman’s authentic blues singing and surging organ vamps kept even the most ambitious jams firmly rooted to terra firma.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what makes Fillmore a great album,” Betts offers. “The thing is, we were a hell of a band and we just got a good recording that captured what we sounded like.” Adds Jaimoe, “Fillmore was both a particularly great performance and a typical night.”

To truly understand the album, it helps to recognize just how hungry and desperate the band was at the time of its release. Then-manager and Capricorn Records president Phil Walden readily admitted he had begun to consider cashing in his chips and cutting his losses.

“It seemed like I had just been wrong and that they were never going to catch on,” Walden, who died in 2006, said in a 1990 interview. “People just didn’t grasp what the Allmans were all about musically or any other way. But they kept touring, state by state, city by city, going across the country, establishing themselves as the best live band around, and building a base.”

Gregg Allman said the band played more than 300 nights in 1970, traveling most of the off days, a claim that seems only a slight exaggeration. As they continued to crisscross the country, jammed together in first a Ford Econoline van and then a Winnebago, their sound evolved and deepened.

It’s a process well known to the hardcore tape traders who exchange copies of these shows like so many pieces of holy grail. But there was a price to pay. “That kind of schedule puts a lot of wear and tear on your ass,” Allman said.

Recalls booking agent Jonny Podell, “I started booking the band in June 1969. Phil Walden said, ‘Get them dates. I don’t care if it’s Portland, Oregon, on Monday and Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.’ I tried to do a little better, but that’s what we did, and they never complained.

“This was run like a machine, like a military unit. There were six in the band, and management provided them with first five, then six crew, making maybe $100 a night, which was pretty unusual for the time and really quite extravagant.”

The first two weeks of September 1971, just after At Fillmore East was released, provide a snapshot of the band’s grueling schedule. The Allmans played Montreal on September 3 and Miami the following night. They had five days off, during which they went into Miami’s Criteria Studios with Dowd and laid down the first tracks for Betts’ “Blue Sky,” which would appear on their next studio album, Eat a Peach.

They then played September 10 in Passaic, New Jersey, the following night in Clemson, South Carolina, and the night after that in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The band then had three days off and played September 16 in New Orleans.

“Don’t ask me how we did it, because I don’t know,” the band’s onetime tour manager Willie Perkins offered. “My own naïveté probably helped me, because we just did what was asked and made the gigs that were booked. But God! We used to call them ‘dartboard tours,’ because it seemed like someone had made the bookings by throwing darts at a map. We were zigzagging everywhere.”

With all that hard touring paying off and their fan base steadily growing by word of mouth, the band decided that it needed to capitalize on its concert success. The solution became apparent: Record a live album.

“We simply realized that we were a better live band than studio outfit because we were always ready to experiment — offstage as well as on, I may add,” Gregg explained. “And the audience was a big part of what we did up there, which is something that couldn’t be duplicated in a studio. A light bulb finally went off: We need to make a live album.”

Once the decision to record live was made — not an obvious choice in 1971, when live rock albums were still in their infancy — the choice of venue was simple. Promoter Bill Graham was an early and important supporter of the band, booking the Allmans repeatedly in his bicoastal rock emporiums, the Fillmore East, in New York, and the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, where they established themselves as an elite band.

The Allman Brothers Band had made their Fillmore debut on December 26, 1969, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears for three nights. Graham promised he would have them back soon and often, paired with more appropriate acts. Two weeks later, they opened four shows for Buddy Guy and B.B. King at the Fillmore West. The following month they were back in New York for three nights with the Grateful Dead. These shows were crucial in establishing the band and exposing it to a wider and more sympathetic audience.

Something particularly special was happening between the Allman Brothers and fans in New York, which remained their most supportive audience throughout their career (they played their final show there, at the Beacon Theatre, on October 28, 2014). In those dark ages of rock promotion, the Fillmores were a significant step above all other venues.

“The Fillmores were so professionally run, compared to anything else at the time,” Perkins says. “And Graham would gamble on acts, bringing in jazz and blues and the Trinidad/Tripoli String Band, and he had taken a chance on the Brothers, which everyone appreciated and remembered. He never paid anyone top dollar at the Fillmore. A lot of bands went off to other promoters as a result, and Bill would feel like they had turned their back on him. But we loved playing there.”

“New York crowds have always been great,” says Betts, who parted ways with the Allman Brothers in 2000. “But what made the Fillmore a special place was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had, and you could feel his influence in every single little thing at the Fillmore.”

“He called a spade a spade — and not necessarily in a loving way,” Allman added. “Mr. Graham was a stern man, the most tell-it-like-it-is person I have ever met, and at first it was off-putting. But he was the most fair person, too, and after knowing him for while, you realized that this guy, unlike most of the other fuckers out there, was on the straight and narrow.”

To cut the album, the band was booked into the Fillmore for three nights — March 11, 12 and 13, 1971 — as the middle act between opener Elvin Bishop and headliner Johnny Winter. The label and the band both wanted Dowd to produce the recording, but he was in Ghana working on recording the movie soundtrack for Soul to Soul, a concert featuring Wilson Picket, Aretha Frankin, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and Booker T & the MGs.

“I got off a plane from Africa and called Atlantic to let them know I was back, and Jerry Wexler said, ‘Thank God! We’re recording the Allman Brothers live, and the truck is already booked,’” Dowd said. “So I stayed up in New York for a few days longer than I had planned.”

A mobile recording studio was parked on the street outside the theater, with Dowd and a small crew set up inside. “It was a good truck, with a 16-track machine and a great, tough-as-nails staff who took care of business,” Dowd recalled. “They were all set to go.

“When I got there, I gave them a couple of suggestions and clued them as to what to expect and how to employ the 16 tracks, because we had two drummers and two lead guitar players, which was unusual, and it took some foresight to properly capture the dynamics.”

Years later, the band members insisted the horn would have worked out fine.

“Juicy was playing baritone and would play basically along with the bass,” Gregg Allman said. “We knew we were recording three nights and probably just figured we’d get it the next night if it didn’t work out. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of times to do it because we didn’t want to go back and overdub anything, because then it wouldn’t have been a real live album. “

Adds Jaimoe, “Dowd started flipping out when he heard the horn, but that’s something that could have worked. There’s no way that it would have ruined anything that was going on. It wasn’t distracting anyone, and it was so powerful.”

Betts probably sums up the Allman Brothers’ thought process best. “We were just having fun, and everyone dug it,” he says. Though it was wiped from a few tracks (no one can quite remember which), Doucette’s fine harp playing adds an extra dimension to “You Don’t Love Me” and “Done Somebody Wrong.”

“Doucette had played with the band a lot, so he was a lot more cohesive with what they were doing,” Perkins states. “Duane loved horns, but he would also listen to reason, and I don’t think he put up any fight with Dowd.”

Doucette was actually a frequent performer with the band, an old friend of Duane’s who had been offered a full-time position in the band but turned it down because he didn’t want it to “feel like a job.” “Duane was trying to shoehorn me in there,” Doucette explains. “He and I were great friends and we really liked playing together and hanging out.

“I wouldn’t trade playing in the Allman Brothers for anything, but they were complete. They didn’t really need me, and I wasn’t a joiner. I wanted my relationship with the band exactly how it was, and I asked Duane if I could do that. I said, ‘I’ll show up, I’ll play, you pay me, we’ll laugh and have fun, I’ll split.’”

The harmonica player says Duane not only wanted him as a member but fully intended to add a horn section to the Allman Brothers’ lineup. “The plan was to bring on the horns full time,” Doucette says. “Duane would have liked to have 16 pieces. Duane had six different projects that he wanted to do, and he just thought he could do it all at once on the same bandstand.”

Each night after playing, the band and Dowd would head uptown to the Atlantic Records studio and listen to playbacks of the night’s performance. “We would just grab some beers and sandwiches and go through the show,” Dowd explained. “That way, the next night, they knew exactly what they had and which songs they didn’t have to play again.”

The band was thrilled just to be able to listen back to what they had played, a rare occurrence at the time. “We loved having that opportunity,” Betts says. “We just thought, Hey, this is cool! I didn’t know I did that. That sounds pretty neat. We were just enjoying ourselves, because we would get a chance to listen to our performances. We didn’t do a lot of [mixboard] recordings, and we weren’t real hung up on the recording industry anyhow. We just played, and if they wanted to record it, they could.

“We were young and headstrong,” he adds. “‘We’re gonna play. You do what you want.’”

The power of the music captured on At Fillmore East was in the group improvisation, the fact that six extremely unique musical voices were expressing themselves as one complete entity. At the heart of the group’s sound was Betts and Duane Allman, who reinvented the concept of two-guitar rock bands. Rather than having one player who was primarily a rhythm player backing a soloist, the group had two dynamic lead players.

While Duane Allman is probably most remembered and revered for his dynamic slide playing, he was a fully formed, mature guitarist. Betts, while often in Allman’s shadow, was also a wide-ranging, distinct stylist from the start. The pair had a broad range of techniques for playing together, often forming intricate, interlocking patterns with one another and/or bassist Berry Oakley, setting the stage for dramatic flights of improvised solos. And, uniquely, they often played harmonies together, a true rock and roll innovation that has been picked up on by countless bands.

“From our first time playing together, Duane started picking up on things I played and offering a harmony, and we’d build whole jams off of that,” Betts says. “We worked stuff out naturally because we were both lead players. We got those ideas from jazz horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane and fiddle lines from western swing music. I listened to a lot of country and string [bluegrass] music growing up. I played mandolin, ukulele and fiddle before I ever touched a guitar, which may be where a lot of the major keys I play come from.

“It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. Most bands with two guitarists either have everything worked out or stay out of each other’s way, because it’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. But it was very natural how Duane and I put our guitars together. He would almost always wait for me, or sometimes Oakley, to come up with a melody, and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony.”

The two drummers had a similarly easy and unique playing style, heard to full and perfect effect on At Fillmore East. Trucks and Jaimoe rarely played the same thing at the same time. Instead they played complementary parts that pushed the band to great heights and offered not only increased power but greater depth.

Trucks provided a hard-driving beat while Jaimoe deepened the groove and pushed up against the songs with all kinds of interesting concepts and rhythms. Jaimoe was deeply rooted in jazz and often played patterns and riffs straight off of Jimmy Cobb’s work on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. He had also introduced the band to the album and to John Coltrane, both of which had a huge impact on the Allmans. This jazz influence can be heard throughout the expansive but never long-winded playing on At Fillmore East.

The symbiotic relationships between the two drummers and two guitarists carried throughout the band, which functioned like one organism with a single giant beating heart. Says Doucette, “You take any one of the six guys out and the whole thing doesn’t exist. This was a band of men. There weren’t any kids in it, despite our young ages. We’d all worked. We’d all been on the road and taken responsibility, and it came through in the music.”

Also central to their strength and appeal was the depth and maturity of Gregg Allman’s songwriting and singing. Though just in his early 20s, he conjured up the power and world-weary heaviness of the greatest blues singers.

Recalls Doucette, “I knew Duane for a long time but had never heard Gregg sing until the first time I played with the Allman Brothers Band. Gregory starts playing that organ and singing, and I went, Woah. Now here’s a guy who’s in worse pain than I am. He pushed all that pain into his music and combined it with his artistry into something very special and unique.”

Doucette remembers another Fillmore East date when Albert King came to jam with the group on a slow blues. “He’s up there in a lime-green suit, sucking on his pipe and doing his thing,” he says. “Then Gregg starts singing, and Albert damn near bit through his pipe. He’s never heard this voice before, and he’s looking around, literally swiveling his head trying to figure out who’s singing, and he sees this skinny blonde behind the organ just killing it and couldn’t believe it was him.”

Using only the last two nights recorded at the Fillmore, the Allman Brothers ended up with enough great material left over to fill more than half of their follow-up album, Eat a Peach, including the epic nearly 44-minute “Mountain Jam,” performed directly after the 23-minute “Whipping Post” heard on Fillmore.

“We just felt like we could play all night, and sometimes we did,” Betts recalls. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

A few months after cutting the album, the members were in Capricorn Records’ Macon, Georgia, studio laying tracks when they learned that the live album was done and cover art had to be selected immediately.

“We wanted to come up with something, because, left to their own devices, the people at Atlantic did horrible things,” Gregg recalled. “I mean, these were the people who superimposed a picture of Sam and Dave onto a turtle [for the cover of the soul duo’s Hold On I’m Coming album]! We wanted to make sure that the cover was as meat and potatoes as the band, so someone said, ‘Let’s just take a damn picture and make it look like we’re standing in the alley waiting to go onstage.’”

Photographer Jim Marshall arrived and snapped the group sitting on their road cases outside the Macon studio.

“We were up at daylight to take the photo for the album cover, and we were all in a real grumpy mood,” Betts recalls. “The photographer wanted us out there then, and we thought it was dumb. We figured it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the cover was or what time we took it.

“This dude Duane knew came walking down the sidewalk, and Duane jumped up and ran over and got a joint from this guy, then came back and sat down. We were all laughing, and that’s the photo captured on the cover. If you look at Duane’s hand, you can see him hiding something there. He had copped and sat down with a mischievous grin.”

On the backside of the album, the crew stood in the musicians’ place, probably the first and last time roadies have ever been so prominently featured on an album cover. “That was my brother’s idea,” Gregg revealed. “The crew always played a special role in our band. It goes back to the very beginning, when we lived off the disability checks of Red Dog and Twiggs [Lyndon, tour manager]. It was like, ‘Want a job? Got any money?’ Putting them in a damn picture was the least we could do. They were the unsung heroes.”

The crew members at the time considered themselves a part of the band. They were paid the same $90-a-week salary, and the word was Duane issued an edict that if money was tight the crew should always be paid first. “We felt like we were part of the band,” says crew member Kim Payne, one of those featured on At Fillmore East. “It was truly more of a brotherhood than any kind of employee/employer relationship. Everyone was equal.”

Adds road manager Perkins, “Once, on my birthday, Duane asked for a $100 advance. I said, ‘Are you sure? You’ve already taken a lot,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure.’ So I filled out the receipt, he signed it, I gave him $100 and he handed it to me and said, ‘Happy birthday. Make sure that goes to my account and not the band’s.’”

“Duane truly appreciated everybody and understood that everybody was a piece of a puzzle,” Jaimoe says. “We all play together and every part is equally important, and that goes for the bus driver too. What you gonna do? Play all night and then drive the bus? Duane always said, ‘We’re all equal in this band.’ And that included the crew.”

Just 90 days after recording the album and just before its release, the Allman Brothers Band closed the Fillmore East down. The group was personally selected by Graham to be the hallowed venue’s final band after he had shocked everyone by announcing he was shutting the doors. “He closed the Fillmore with three nights and wanted us on all three, which I though was the kindest gesture and coolest thing,” Allman said.

“We were just dumbstruck when we found out that we were gonna close the Fillmore,” Butch Trucks said. “Can you think of a bigger honor at that time? Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they’d have to play last, and Graham said, ‘Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride.

“The next-to-last night, we played until the morning, and we did things that we had never thought of before or since. Those are the moments that have always made this thing work.”

Graham’s insistence that the relatively unknown Allman Brothers must be the Fillmore East’s final band must have seemed bold, even wacky, to most observers. But just weeks after the club shuttered its doors for good, At Fillmore East came out, forever linking the band and the venue in the pop-culture pantheon. Yet, the recording was almost never released in its extended, double-album form. “Atlantic/Atco rejected the idea of releasing a double-live album,” Walden said.

“[Atlantic executive] Jerry Wexler thought it was ridiculous to preserve all these jams. But we explained to them that the Allman Brothers were the people’s band, that playing was what they were all about, and that a phonograph record was confining to a group like this.”

Walden won out and was proven right when the record — “people priced” at three dollars below standard list for a double album — slowly became a hit and the Allman Brothers became the most heralded band in the nation. Rolling Stone proclaimed the Allmans “the best damn rock ’n’ roll band” in the country, and by the fall, At Fillmore East was the Allman Brothers Band’s first Gold album.

“All of a sudden, here comes fame and fortune,” Gregg recalled. “In a three- or four-week period, we went from rags to riches — from living on a three-dollar-a-day per diem to, ‘Get anything you want, boys!’”

Still, things were not easy within the band. They entered Criteria Studios with Dowd and recorded three songs in just about a week, then took a break and returned to the road for a short run of shows, ending on October 17, 1971, at the Painter’s Mill Music Fair in Owings Mill, Maryland. It had been a trying few months, with drugs and the band’s hard-charging lifestyle catching up with many of them, including Duane.

“Duane never stuck a needle in his arm, but he would snort heroin a lot,” Trucks said. “One night in the summer of ’71, in San Francisco, Duane followed me to my hotel room and jumped in my face. He said, ‘I’m pissed off! When Dickey gets up to play, the rhythm section is pumping away, and when I get up there you’re laying back and not pushing at all.’ I looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘Duane, you’re so fucked up on that smack that you’re not giving us anything.’

“He looked me in the eye and walked out the door. I think he knew I was telling him the truth and that’s what he wanted to hear. He needed someone to tell him what he already knew. It was one of the few times I had the balls to get in his face.”

“It was nuts,” Doucette adds. “Everything was everywhere.”

With almost everyone in the band and crew struggling with heroin addictions, Duane, Oakley, Payne and crew member Red Dog flew to Buffalo and checked into the Linwood-Bryant Hospital for a week of rehab. A receipt shows the band’s general bank account purchased five round-trip tickets on Eastern Airlines from Macon to Buffalo for $369. Gregg was supposed to go as well, and a hospital receipt shows he was one of the people for whom a deposit was paid. Apparently, he changed his mind at the last minute.

The group spent less than a week in rehab, and then checked out. Duane spent a day in New York City, visiting with guitarist John Hammond and other friends.

“He came over to my loft and we played acoustic guitars and had a blast for hours,” Hammond recalls. “I so wish I had taped it! He seemed to be in really good spirits, his head clear and excited to go on. Things were happening for them. The live album had come out and was a hit, and they were playing bigger places. Their star was rising. Which seemed exactly as it should be.

“We talked about him perhaps producing an album for me. There were all these songs that I played in my show that I talked to him about recording, and he said that he would like to be involved. There was nothing concrete, but he was talking business: what percent he would take, and this and that.

“I was not a business guy like that, and he was very together about the band, his finances, dealing with the business end of things. He was a very bright guy who knew how talented he was and wasn’t going to take himself lightly.”

Duane returned to Macon on October 28, 1971. That night, he visited Red Dog, the roadie who had been in rehab with him and whose loyalty to the guitarist was profound enough to call him an acolyte.

“He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to slide back into doing heroin, to make sure I was all right,” Red Dog recalled in a 1986 interview. “He sat on my couch, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eye, and said, ‘You haven’t done any, have you?’ and I said, ‘No, man.’ And I fired right back on him: ‘Hey, have you?’”

The next day, Duane called Thom Doucette in Florida to check in on his old friend. Doucette had abruptly left the band on the road and returned home because of his own struggles with addiction. He had cleaned himself up and was thrilled to hear a vitality in his friend’s voice that indicated he too was overcoming his problems.

“He sounded great,” Doucette says. “He jumped through the phone, with an urgency in his voice, that shouted, ‘It’s me. It’s Duane! I’m back!’

“He goes, ‘You doing all right?’ and I said, ‘Man, never better. I’m grooving and the fish are running. This is it, baby.’ He said, ‘I’ll be down tonight. I already booked a reservation. I’m gonna ride down to the office, get my mail and get some money. We’ll go fishing, and then we’re going back to work.’ I wasn’t so sure about going back to work with the band, but I was so happy to hear from him.”

Shortly after hanging up with Doucette, Duane rode his motorcycle over to the group’s communal home, The Big House, where they were getting ready for a birthday party for Oakley’s wife, Linda. After visiting for a while, Duane got on his Harley-Davidson Sportster, which had been modified with extended forks that made it harder to handle.

Coming up over a hill and dropping down, Duane saw a flatbed lumber truck blocking his way. He pushed his bike to the left to swerve around the truck, but realized he was not going to make it and dropped his bike to avoid a collision. He hit the ground hard, the bike landing atop him.

Duane was alive and initially seemed okay, but he fell unconscious in the ambulance and had catastrophic head and chest injuries. As word of the accident began to circulate to band members and other family friends around Macon, many people began to drift toward the waiting room at the medical center.

“I was at my house when I got the call and went to the hospital,” recalls band friend and producer Johnny Sandlin. “I was hoping it wasn’t too bad and was planning on going in to see him. Guys were ending up in the emergency room from messing around with horses or bikes all the time.”

As the group gathered, someone emerged from the operating room with the unthinkable news: Duane had died in surgery three hours after the accident. The cause of death was listed as “severe injury of abdomen and head.”

“It was just unacceptable that he was gone,” Trucks remarked. “Unfathomable. I walked around stunned for weeks.”

At his funeral, Red Dog placed a joint in Duane’s pocket. Gregg gave his brother a silver dollar. Someone else added one of the Coricidin bottles Duane used as slides.

“We were all in shock,” Linda Oakley said. “It was like our guts had been torn out.”

Cowboy guitarist Scott Boyer, an old friend of Duane and Gregg’s summed up the feeling of the entire band and larger musical community: “It was inconceivable how someone that alive could be dead.”

Duane had lived to see the band’s breakthrough coming, but was not able to fully experience it.

“We worked so hard so long to get there. Then, bam! He was gone,” Gregg Allman said. “At the time, I thought, Shit, my brother really got shortchanged, because he never quite got to see what he had accomplished. I felt that way for years, but I’ve slowly come to realize that he left a hell of a legacy for dying at the age of 24 years old.

“And a lot of it has to do with the Fillmore album. I still listen to it and I marvel at how fresh his licks are and how great his tone is. That boy was one of a kind, man, just like Oakley was. The chance that all six of us would meet up and form a band is, like, unbelievable.”

Allman paused for a second to exhale a long breath and lets out a little chuckle.

“If you want to hear what I’m talking about, go get you that album.”

Don McLean scored more than a hit when he released “American Pie” as a single in 1971. He created an iconic song that has continued to resonate with the public some 55 years later.

The song offers a kaleidoscopic journey through the social upheaval that transformed America in the 1960s. For years, McLean famously declined to explain its enigmatic lyrics, preferring to let the mystery endure.

Even so, “American Pie” remained the centerpiece of his live performances, a showstopper that had audiences singing every word.

McLean — who recorded “American Pie” with a Martin D-28 acoustic guitar — has said the lyrics sprang from a deep sense that something precious had been lost in the decade they chronicle.

“Basically in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction,” he said in a 2015 interview with Christie’s, when his handwritten 18-page manuscript of the song’s lyrics sold for $1.2 million. “Life is becoming less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense.”

He expanded on that in an interview with People that same year, noting, “There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’”

Although McLean generally avoided discussing the song’s meaning — or spoke only in broad terms about its themes — he has become more forthcoming in recent years. In a 2022 documentary and subsequent interviews, he connected the song to the end of the “happy 1950s,” the turbulence of the 1960s and the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, whose 1958 hit “Chantilly Lace” made him one of rock and roll’s earliest stars.

In the documentary, McLean explained his reluctance to be explicit about the characters in his lyrics. For example, he pointed to his mention of James Dean, telling Forbes it was evidence that he wasn’t being entirely opaque.

“I said James Dean in the song,” he explained. “If I meant Elvis or Bob Dylan, I would have said their names.”

He also said the “thorny crown” worn by the king in his song should make it plain that he wasn’t referring to Presley.

“If you want to think the king is Elvis you can, but the king in my song has a thorny crown. That’s Jesus Christ.”

Elsewhere, he uses wordplay, writing “Lenin read a book on Marx” as a reference to John Lennon, whom he noted had read Marx and “wanted socialism.”

But “American Pie” is also deeply, and tragically, personal. McLean has said its emotional core emanates from an early grief concealed within the song’s opening verse about the death of Holly and “his widowed bride.”

At the age of 15, McLean had a premonition that his father was going to die. He told his grandmother, who asked why he said that. “Because it’s going to happen,” he replied.

A few days later, his father passed away, “right in front of me,” he told The Guardian. “I cried for two years. I blamed myself.”

That grief, he has said, was one reason he refused for decades to explain “American Pie.” The song carried the weight of everything he felt had been lost, both in his own life and in America.

“I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable,” he told the newspaper. “It’s indescribable.”

Nearly everything you need to know about Charlie Christian can be learned from the compilation album Charlie Christian — The Genius of the Electric Guitar. Released on Columbia Records in 1987, this album has most of his classic performances, including “Rose Room,” “Seven Come Eleven,” “Wholly Cats,” “Air Mail Special” and other great sides. Charlie gave us a lot in his all-too-brief career, before he died on March 2, 1942, at the age of 25.

Charlie Christian was born in Dallas in 1919 before his family resettled in Oklahoma. The Christians were poor, even by the low standards for a Black family of that era. Charlie was deeply influenced by Blind Lemon Jefferson and saxophonist Lester Young, and may have also drawn inspiration from guitarist Eddie Lang. I long to understand how he became a brilliant innovator, but maybe it’s a naive question.

I recall asking Buckethead about his guitar influences, only for him to reply, “The rides at Disneyland.” Sometimes one has to refrain from asking such questions and just accept what is. Charlie Christian seems like a case in point. He was what he was.

Charlie’s instrument of choice was a Gibson ES-150 electric hollowbody guitar with a single blade pickup. His model of electric guitar was commonly sold with a Gibson EH-150 tube amp, which had a single 10-inch speaker and produced 15 watts. Although he also played a Gibson ES-250 guitar through an EH-185 amp, Christian favored the ES-150. With this setup, he created a sound that has been likened to a “distorted saxophone.”

His big break came when he auditioned for the Benny Goodman Sextet in September 1939. Alongside band members Lionel Hampton on vibraphone, pianist Fletcher Henderson, bassist Artie Bernstein and drummer Nick Fatool, Christian became an integral part of the Goodman sound. He toured the states and was heard on the radio, and his contributions come through loud and clear on this album.

Reportedly, Charlie contributed significantly to the band’s songwriting but was not credited. However, it’s here that we find his legacy, swinging hard and cutting through all the disadvantages.

The first Christian solo I learned from this album is from “Rose Room,” and it still amazes me. I never let this solo leave my fingertips and I review it every three or four months. I’ve looked at it from every angle, and the more I analyze it, the more I’m taken by its simplicity.

I honestly don’t know if Charlie knew it, but he superimposes the minor 6th arpeggio over dominant 7th chords. If presented with an F7 chord, he’d play (from the 3rd fret, 1st string in 3rd position) G, Eb, C, A and (2nd fret, 3rd string, then back to 3rd position), G, F, Eb and C. Presto! This C minor 6 arpeggio is now an F9 arpeggio that creates an otherworldly beauty.

I think another factor in Charlie’s influence over a generation of guitarists is that his concepts are “doable.” On “Seven Come Eleven,” Charlie basically plays the blues over the “I Got Rhythm” A sections, thereby giving us mere mortals permission to solo over these changes without Pat Martino or Charlie Parker looming over our shoulders.

Over the B section, Charlie incorporates minor-6th arpeggios with phrases that are lovely and high level but still very “guitar friendly.” These phrases usually remain in one position that throw us a lifeline of understanding. What he did with his reasonably sized toolbox was incredible. He showed us all the way.

Charlie suffered from tuberculosis and was forced to leave the Goodman tour in June 1941 to be hospitalized. I’ve read that while he was there, a “friend” paid a visit, bringing him reefer and prostitutes. The following day Charlie Christian was dead.

His legacy is substantial. He rose above his poor upbringing, broke the color barrier with Goodman, and basically risked his life to rise above the prejudice of that time while he redefined the role and voice of electric guitar. Along the way he almost inexplicably becoming one of the most influential electric guitarists of the 20th century.

Listen and you’ll find an innovator who laid the groundwork for jazz, blues and rock electric guitar playing, and did it all in just two-and-a-half years before his untimely death.

Passion cannot be taught, and neither can a supernatural knack for what you're most passionate about. Blues enthusiast Taj Farrant is a prodigious talent that packs a ton of intensity into every performance, and Guitar Player is thrilled to partner with K.C. Turner Presents to welcome the rising star from the land Down Under to the Hopmonk Novato on the Friday after Independence Day Weekend.

Farrant’s advanced chops, huge online following and energetic performance style have earned him slots with the Experience Hendrix tour and major music festivals from Australia’s Bluesfest to Telluride’s Blues & Brews. He has collaborated with icons like Carlos Santana and Buddy Guy.

Farrant’s first full album, Chapter One, debuted at the top of the iTunes Blues Chart in 2024. Farrant has released two singles in 2026. The first was a singer-songwriter-style collaboration with his sister Jazel Farrant, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who is also a core member of Taj’s touring ensemble.

His latest single is a collaboration with Isaiah Sharkey, who won a Grammy for his work as a core member of D’Angelo’s backing band, the Vanguard. Farrant and Sharkey’s new tune is appropriately called “Texas Jam” as the seven-minute electric guitar showcase features the two trading smoking blues licks back and forth over a 12-bar form and would sound right at home at any backyard barbeque.

That’s exactly the setting for Farrant’s show at the Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, California on Friday, June 10. It’s a part of KC Turner Presents celebrated Cookout Concert Series where GP Presents has formerly teamed up to welcome the North Mississippi Allstars, Anders Osborne, and Bella Rayne.

Farrant’s blend of blues, rock and pop has audiences captivated and ever-curious about the next chapter for the next-gen guitar star. If you’re planning to be in Northern California over the weekend after Independence Day, be sure to head to the North Bay, less than an hour drive from San Francisco, and experience Taj Farrant live on Friday, July 10.

Farrant's popularity is snowballing, so secure your spot in advance, tell a friend, be sure to come to the GP Presents table on site to snag a free set of acoustic guitar strings courtesy of Martin Strings.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Taj Farrant in Novato, California, on Friday, July 10, send an email and put “Farrant” in the subject. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide their own transportation to the Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, California, and have their own accommodations in the area. Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents Taj Farrant plus Percy Howard (singer from Nus)

Friday, June 10

4:00 p.m. doors, 6:00 p.m. show

The Hopmonk Tavern (Outdoor Beer Garden Venue)

Novato, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

In Rainbow’s eight-album catalog, “Stargazer” stands as the band’s masterpiece — an eight-and-a-half-minute epic from 1976’s Rising. Ritchie Blackmore certainly thinks so. When Guitar Player asked him earlier this year to name Rainbow’s defining songs, he singled it out alongside “Man on the Silver Mountain” and “Long Live Rock and Roll.”

But Blackmore remembers “Stargazer” as much for what didn’t make it into the final mix. The guitarist says two musicians who helped shape the song ultimately saw their finest contributions disappear from the finished recording — one because it was deemed too elaborate, the other simply because the tape ran out.

Rainbow cut Rising at Munich’s Musicland Studios shortly after Led Zeppelin completed Presence there. As the group settled into the sessions, an engineer played the band “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” from Zeppelin’s then-unreleased album. Blackmore says he recognized the challenge posed by Jimmy Page’s stunning electric guitar work and Robert Plant’s vocal performance. It immediately raised the stakes for Rainbow.

“It was a threat for us, as that song was overwhelmingly good,” he exclaims. “It was hard to follow that. I really thought it was incredible. It was a brilliant riff by Pagey. A very weird riff. Of course Planty sang brilliantly, and I thought, ‘We have to follow this?! We better write something that good.’”

Blackmore believes Rainbow answered the challenge with “Stargazer,” the fantasy epic he and Ronnie James Dio wrote together during rehearsals. The song tells the story of a wizard who enslaves thousands to build a towering stone monument from which he hopes to fly to the stars.

“Ronnie and I wrote that together; I came up with the riff at home and the progressions. Ronnie sang it brilliantly, within a couple of takes,” Blackmore says.

Dio also contributed one of the song’s defining musical moments. “He came up with going up to the key of B riff — that little part there,” Blackmore says, referring to the refrain “Where is your star?”

“It was so nice to have someone else do some of the writing. I was overjoyed. I was so used to doing it all myself for so long.”

Clocking in at nearly eight and a half minutes, “Stargazer” builds to one of Blackmore’s most blistering solos before riding out over a hypnotic vamp backed by an orchestra. To create the dramatic finale, Rainbow hired 28 members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of conductor Rainer Pietsch. Blackmore’s instructions were simple.

“I said, ‘Look, there’s a song we have written, basically two chords, A minor and G, and I want you to improvise and play this particular riff.’ I showed him the riff. I said, ‘If you would like to, do some ad libbing yourself, as we will be ending the song with a long, two-minute fade out.’”

Pietsch spent the weekend preparing his arrangement. But when Blackmore and Dio heard the results, they felt the orchestra overwhelmed the song rather than strengthened it.

“Ronnie and I thought it was too busy. We wanted to hit home the main riff of the song. And the conductor was so pleased with what he had written, but it was too much. It didn’t work.

“So we brought him into the control room. Ronnie said, ‘You tell him it’s too busy.’ I said, ‘No, you tell him.’ We were both apprehensive to break the news.

“In the end Ronnie told him it was too busy. So we asked him to rewrite it again, with the main riff being prominent, not flowery and busy. He played it again, but it was still too flowery.

“So we had to talk with him again, saying that the main riff — the simple riff — had to be with power, directness and simplicity. Rainer was so demoralized at this point that all we left in was the 28-piece orchestra playing the riff, which is what you hear now.”

Pietsch wasn’t the only musician to leave the session disappointed. Blackmore had also hired what he describes as “a brilliant gypsy violinist” to improvise over the song’s extended fade. The performance was everything he’d hoped for — until the tape machine reached the end of the reel.

“As the song was fading out, the violinist was playing his heart out, and it sounded fantastic,” Blackmore recalls. “Unfortunately the reel came to an end. And we wanted so badly to have him playing this gypsy part at the end.

“The man came into the control room to hear his playing, which was brilliant, and we had to embarrassingly say to him that everything he had just played wasn’t recorded because the stupid tape ran out. He was not amused.”