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.”

The murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, sent shockwaves through the music world. For Mark Knopfler, it also sparked an idea that would eventually become one of the most unusual songs of his solo career.

Lennon's killer was an obsessed fan, and the tragedy forced musicians everywhere to confront the darker side of fame. Knopfler found himself thinking about that subject through the lens of his own experiences, particularly a German autograph hunter named Rüdiger who regularly appeared outside Dire Straits concerts.

The idea came quickly.

“I wrote the lyrics to ‘Rüdiger’ without changing a word right after John Lennon was assassinated,” Knopfler told Vulture.

While the lyrics arrived almost immediately, the music did not. Knopfler has often described himself as a songwriter first and a guitarist second, believing that songs emerge in their own time rather than through force of will.

“There are definitely some that hang around in the junkyard out the back in bits,” he explained. “One song took 16 years. Other songs can take 16 minutes.”

In this case, he was talking about “Rüdiger.” Although the lyrics were written in the immediate aftermath of Lennon's death, the song remained unfinished until it appeared on his 1996 solo debut, Golden Heart.

The finished track — an acoustic-led number with weeping clean electric guitar lines — tells the true story of a devoted fan who followed Knopfler from show to show in search of an autograph. While Rüdiger was harmless, the song's origins reveal how Lennon's murder prompted Knopfler to reflect on the fine line between admiration and obsession.

That long gestation period was entirely in keeping with Knopfler's approach to songwriting. Rather than chase ideas that aren't working, he prefers to leave them alone until inspiration returns.

“I enjoy songwriting so much, but if it's not working, I'll get up and leave it,” he said while promoting One Deep River in 2024. “I know it'll be alright if I come back to it, eventually.”

For Knopfler, “Rüdiger” became proof of that philosophy: a song born from one of rock's darkest moments, but one that took 16 years to find its final form.

“I have been around the world, but I’ve never been to Orinda,” Latin music maestro Charo proclaims with her signature Spanish accent. “It’s such beautiful name. If I have a little girl, I will call her Orinda. I understand it is near San Francisco, and the greatest audience is there because the people are crazy like me!”

Within the first few moments talking to Charo, her infectious personality shines through even the jankiest of phone connections. It’s immediately apparent why the lady born María del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza in Murcia, Spain, lit up American television screens on shows including the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Fantasy Island and the Love Boat after she moved Stateside in the late ’60s.

GP readers eventually voted Charo as Best Classical Flamenco Guitarist in the World. Twice! Let that sink in for a moment and consider that she was trained by the most influential acoustic guitar player of all time, classical master Andres Segovia.

During her rise to fame the guitar took a back seat to her comedic persona and “cuchi-cuchi” catch phrase, even though she was already an ace on her instrument. So, she played the entertainment business game, and kept on practicing.

She says, “Little by little, I discovered how to merry the serious part with the fun part.”

Charo is still very much Charo. She can clearly entertain with her charming stories and killer comedic instinct. But over time her guitar playing has evolved from a side story to the heart of her act.

“I got a great review on the concert I did about two months ago at Pepperdine college, she reports. “And the message was incredible, it said that there were tears of happiness. People came from far away and they were so happy just to hear beautiful music. I understand because sometimes it happens to me.

“When the music goes so deep that it takes you to another level in your soul. To me, that’s worth it. As long I have the energy to put my feet on the stage, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Unlike many performers that still get stage fright most nights, even long into a successful career, Charo seems even more comfortable about being onstage than she is off it.

“Off the stage I am a cucaracha with a lot of issues,” Charo says with a laugh. “I don’t get nervous onstage because I love people and I have trained like an Olympian. When you train and train, practice and practice, you don’t get nervous because you are ready.”

“So I will talk for some time and then I’ll say, ‘Let me introduce you to a side of me that I have been hiding for a while.’ And then I’ll play the guitar the best I can.

“I go for a high energy level. And I’ll keep it up for 30 to 45 minutes going from salsa to rhumba to flamenco.”

She loves it all, but she doesn’t hesitate to name a favorite piece that we can expect to hear in Orinda at GP Presents, citing ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ by Juaquin Rodrigo and calling it “a gift from God to every musician.”

Having lived one of the more interesting lives one can imagine, Charo has developed a profound perspective.

“I feel lucky and honored to be performing for everybody in Orinda,” she says. “When you go to perform and see lots of people ready for good entertainment, it’s priceless.”

If you’re planning to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, June 20th, make plans to share the evening with Charo at the historic Orinda Theatre in Orinda, California, located in the East Bay a short ride inland from Berkeley.

And keep an eye out for a guest appearance by Charo in a new comedy starting RuPaul that’s coming to theaters this summer called Stop! That! Train!

Secure your tickets to GP Presents Charo at the Orinda Theatre on June 20.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Charo in Orinda, California, on Saturday, June 20, please send an email and put put “Charo” in the subject line. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact is greatly appreciated for confirmation.

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

EVENT DETAILS
GP Presents Charo! in Concert

Saturday, June 20

7:00 p.m.

The Orinda Theatre

Orinda, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

As the Police settled into the studio to record Synchronicity in December 1982, they were a band on the verge of breaking up. By then, the trio had spent five years rising from the ranks of London’s post-punk scene to become stadium headliners and one of the most successful acts in the world.

Most bands in that position would have been looking ahead to a long future. The Police, however, seemed determined to leave at the height of their success.

According to Andy Summers, it all came down to Sting.

“It was a tough album, period. I mean, we had been together five years and were massively successful,” he says. “Sting was obviously feeling his oats and wanted to leave the band and go out on his own. In a sort of anal way, he was ready to finish off the contract, which was five albums.”

The recording sessions at AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat have become legendary for the near-violent tension between bass guitarist Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland. Summers told Rick Beato the atmosphere became so unworkable that he hiked across the island to find Beatles producer Sir George Martin, who was staying nearby, and ask for help.

“We said we should get George Martin to come and produce us, because he owned AIR Studios, and he was just across the valley there. And so I got the job to go and get George Martin. So I walked off in the blazing Montserrat heat, knocked on the door, and he comes out.”

Summers recalls how Martin invited him inside and listened over a cup of tea as the guitarist unloaded his frustrations.

“‘We’re having some difficulty,’” he told the producer. “‘In fact, it’s like a screaming bitch fight.’”

“‘Oh yes, right. I’ve seen that before,’ he said.”

After hearing Summers out, Martin offered a few reassuring words.

“It was like he waved his magic wand,” Summers recalls. “He said, ‘Now, I think you should walk back over there. I think it’s going to be all right.’

“I hiked back to the other side of the island, and it was all right. We got to be very polite with each other: ‘Oh, would you like to do that? Oh, yes, of course. I’ll do that. Where would you like it, on the fourth fret or the fifth fret?’

“How amazing. It was the Martin Magic, I’m sure.”

Tempers cooled enough for the band to complete what would become its biggest hit, “Every Breath You Take.”

“The whole album was difficult, but ‘Every Breath You Take’ was going to go in the trash, basically. We thought it was too light and it wasn’t very good. It reached the point where we were all getting pretty tired of it and didn’t really want to do it.”

It was Summers’ contribution that ultimately saved the song.

“Sting said to me, ‘Go on, go in there and make it your own.’ We needed a guitar and I went in and almost instantly played the guitar line that is, of course, the signature of the song.”

Summers has since argued that he deserves a co-writing credit for the song’s instantly recognizable electric guitar riff. His contributions to “Every Breath You Take” are also among the reasons he and Stewart Copeland have said they are owed additional royalties from Sting.

As Summers recalls, everyone in the studio immediately recognized the song’s potential.

“The manager heard it and said, ‘I’m going straight to A&M. This is going to be a number one.’ And it was. That was our first number one in the U.S. It was number one for eight weeks straight.”

Still, the success of the song and the album — it was the band’s biggest seller — wasn’t enough to persuade Sting to stay.

“With the band’s contract fulfilled, he was ready to strike out on his own.

“Of course, any band would stay, naturally, because it was going so brilliantly well. We dominated the world. No one wanted us to break up, but Sting wanted to go and be the thing all on his own.”

Fresh off the massive success of his 2025 best-selling memoir Heartbreaker, rock legend Mike Campbell is turning the page. Today marks the release of Mission of Mercy, the fourth studio album from Campbell and his powerhouse band, the Dirty Knobs.

While he will always be associated with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Campbell’s latest 12-song set finds him pushing into unexpected territory, stretching his electric guitar–driven rock with touches of Brian Wilson–inspired pop, psych-rock excursions and even a beat-poet experiment.

“It’s my go-to project,” Campbell, 76, says via Zoom from his home in the Los Angeles area. “I just like having an outlet for all these songs I write, and they’re just the perfect outlet. We get along really well. They instinctively know me, and they follow really well.”

He adds with a chuckle, “They don’t argue too much. They’re just really good, y’know?”

Mission of Mercy was co-produced by Campbell, George Drakoulias and Martin Pradler and recorded at Hocus Pocus Studios in Los Angeles. It follows the Dirty Knobs’ 2024 release, Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits.

Campbell formed the group in 2000 as a side project to play Los Angeles clubs and showcase songs that didn’t fit elsewhere. Since Petty’s death in 2017, however, the group has become his primary creative outlet. The current lineup features former Heartbreakers (and Average White Band) drummer Steve Ferrone, guitarist/keyboardist Christopher Holt and longtime bass guitarist Lance Morrison.

The album stretches the band’s formula in several directions, from the manic “Bongo Mania” — featuring Kate Pierson of the B-52’s — to the beat-poet experiment “Vagrant” and the Brian Wilson–inspired title track. At the same time, it remains rooted in the guitar rock that has defined Campbell’s career, with an appearance by Morgane Stapleton on the gentle “More Than Gold.”

The Dirty Knobs hit the road again in July, covering the Midwest and East, while Campbell will also be doing his first orchestral show on September 12 with the Atlanta Symphony -- probably not somewhere the kid who picked up guitar when he was 16 ever expected to be.

Four albums in with the Dirty Knobs, what did you set out to do on Mission of Mercy?

Well, we always set out to have good songs. We look for the good songs and we keep doing them until we get too many, then we narrow it down and try to make sense of it. That’s just how I approach records — What’s the song? What’s the song today? Is there a good song we can record? Let’s give it a shot, and if it’s good we’ll keep it, and if not we’ll throw it out and do another one.

There was no different concept this time, but I did want to expand the songwriting a little bit — not only have the band rockin’ but have a few esoteric, melodic things here and there. I think by the fourth album it’s OK for us to take some chances.

Look no further than the title track, then.

“Mission of Mercy” is definitely a stretch for the Dirty Knobs. It was a demo I had done several years ago, and it showed up in the middle of the album. I thought it was good and worth finishing. It was very different for us, very Brian Wilson–inspired. The song actually didn’t have any guitar in it, per se, just some chords.

There was a point where I felt like, “Well, something needs to happen,” so I picked up the guitar and played some licks at the end, which kind of lifts it up from maybe a pop ballad to more of a guitar song at the end there. So that was an afterthought; the last thing I put on it was the guitar at the end, but I think it lifts the song up and gives it some edge.

What’s your litmus test for a good song, and how has that changed over the years — even from the Mudcrutch and Heartbreakers days?

I have to like it, and I have to think it’s good. It has to move me in some way. I write a lot of songs, and some of them just kind of come and go and other ones resonate deeper, and it’s the ones that resonate on some level that I tend to gravitate toward — like “Mission of Mercy.” But the process is the same for me as it’s always been: just wait for the good songs to come through.

How does the way you write or arrange now open portals for how you use the guitar that might be different than before?

Well, we have a great guitar player in the band — it’s not me. [laughs] I’m good, but this other guy, Christopher Holt, who we got in the band a couple years ago, is incredible, not only on guitar but vocals and keyboards, and he’s a fine, nice chap. But the Dirty Knobs is a guitar band, and basically we’re a rock-and-boogie band, which allows room for the guitar to express itself.

I like the guitar solos and the guitar parts to be spontaneous, as much as possible. So with Christopher and the rest of the guys, a lot of the time I don’t let them hear the song until they’re recording it. I’ll go, “Here’s the chords, and you play something in this space here, OK? 1, 2, 3, 4, go!” And then we get it and I’m like, “OK, that was good. That was it.” And they try to go, “Wait, wait, no, no, no, I made a mistake!” But that was the real beauty of it, that discovery moment.

Got a good example of that process from Mission of Mercy?

Well, I’m an egomaniac [chuckles], so I play most of the guitar solos. But there’s a song called “Vicious Hangover” which is just a party song; it reminds me of Dick Holler and the Holidays’ “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love),” just a gang of fraternity drunk guys having a good time. It’s very simple; it was written 10 minutes before the band arrived at the session.

I handed my Fender Broadcaster to Chris and said, “Here, play this on this song, and when it gets to the solo just do something,” and what you hear is the first take. He was just inspired by the guitar, and he plays an amazing couple of solos in the song.

A couple of the songs, like “Armageddon” and “Wrecking Ball,” sound like somebody was listening to their Led Zeppelin albums during the process.

“Armageddon,” I remember, I did 20 years ago, and I was thinking of “Kashmir.” It’s got a Middle Eastern type of melody in it, which I’ve always been intrigued by, so I’m certainly channeling a bit of the trance vibe of “Kashmir,” sure. And “Wrecking Ball” is just a riff; all of my stuff, if you talk about my riffs, they all kind of have a bit of a Jimmy Page thing in them, or Keith Richards. I can’t help it.

“Armageddon,” and also “No Regrets,” are fairly topical — maybe political, even. Are you comfortable in that arena?

Well, writers are affected by their environment, so that’s bound to happen. So you put it into your song the best you can, but I do make a conscious effort not to take sides or name names or any specific political points of view. I don’t think that’s my place. I’m not qualified to preach politics; some artists follow that path, and I respect them for that.

Me, I want to entertain and take your mind off that, hopefully, but it’s hard not to be affected these days by the world we’re living in and everything everybody is feeling right now with the confusion and disarray in our government and a stupid war that doesn’t seem to need to be there. Something like “Armageddon” is a perfect example of how things are going horribly wrong, but the sun won’t fade away and somehow we’ll get through this.

You wrote “I Remember” on piano, right?

Yeah. That was fun. It was done very quickly. I like writing on the piano; I’ve written some songs on the piano, like “Woman in Love,” “You Got Lucky,” even Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” Occasionally I’ll sit down at the piano; I don’t know much, but I know chords. So (“I Remember”) was just a little thing I was playing and I thought, “Well, what can I sing over this?” and a lyric came and I said, “That’s good — I’ll sing it again!” [laughs]

It’s an interesting song because it starts with the chorus and it goes through a little turnaround. There’s only one verse in the song, in the middle; the rest of it is just choruses repeating, but that just felt good to me.

Back to taking chances — “Bongo Mania”?

Yeah. [laughs] That was a lot of fun. I had this track that was just a burst of adrenaline, for fun — I can’t wait to hear Ferrone play it live. I was thinking in my mind, “Wow, this sounds just like a B-52’s song.” I’d never met them, but I’ve always liked them from their first album. There’s something really appealing about that band, the two girl singers and the guy who talks and the guitar player who was really clever. And really fun songs, party songs.

So I’ve always been a fan, and I think Kate probably comes up with a lot of the stuff, and if I had her on the song it would be amazing. It was a long shot, but I had the office call her and she called me back and we had a great conversation ... and she said, “Sure,” and she came up with a great part and made the song 10 times better.

You channel your inner beat poet into “Vagrant,” at the end of the album. That was certainly part of the Heartbreakers’ scheme over the years.

It was a joke. The night before, I was watching TV and bored and just making stuff up. The next day I came in and the band showed up and I said, “Let’s warm up. I’ve got this kind of tone poem; it doesn’t mean anything, but let’s warm up with the chords and I’ll talk over it just to get the sounds up and get everyone comfortable with the room.”

We did it one time and I just read the words off the sheets and had these kind of jazzy chords. We finished it and all had a laugh and I said, “Well, that’s enough of that, let’s get to work.” And then “Vagrant” just kept popping up as we were doing a sequence.

“Are we gonna do this? Nah, that’s a joke. Nobody’ll like it.”

Then it started to grow on me, and I started to think, like, Tom Waits or Frank Zappa might do something like this. It’s a valid approach. It’s got a sense of humor and it’s got a mood. So I thought, “Let’s just stick this at the end and see if people like it or not.”

Like I said before, it’s the fourth album. We have, like, a Brian Wilson tribute. We have a “Bongo Mania” song, and then we have a beat-poet monologue. And there’s plenty of rockers, plenty of guitar, plenty of the usual stuff you expect, but I wanted to push the boundaries a little bit and do some stuff that’s kind of whacky.

Any instruments or gear on Mission of Mercy that are different than before?

We pretty much stick to guitar, bass, drums, piano, occasional organ or keyboards. I’ve got a lot of guitars; occasionally I’d go down to the closet and say, “Here, play this one.” But mostly it was me on a Telecaster and Christopher on a Strat or a Les Paul through two little amps in the other room, and that was pretty much our basic tracking setup.

Then when the track was finished we might put piano on it, or put some guitar lines on it. But we didn’t use a plethora of guitars. It was mostly just the ones that were on hand in the room.

You’ve got a particularly interesting show coming up September 12, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. What’s that going to be like?

I’m terrified, [laughs] but excited. I always had this idea in the back of my head — in my 20s, 30s, 40s — that someday when I get old and the Heartbreakers retire, maybe I’ll get a bus and get the dogs and get some charts and go around to the colleges and perform some of the catalog with an orchestra, ’cause I love orchestral music and listen to Beethoven and Mozart and Bach a lot.

I got to the point where I looked up and realized, well, the Heartbreakers aren’t here and I am old now. So it’s time. The day has come, and I’m just gonna go for it. We’ve got some charts that are really good. I’ll probably play some guitar throughout the show. I’m gonna do a dry run and work out the kinks with a college orchestra here in L.A. and then go to Atlanta and throw it out there and see what happens.

If it goes really well and I enjoy it, we’ll book some more, but I want to ease into it and see if I can actually do it or not.

This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the first Heartbreakers album. Is that weighing at all on you as you think about set lists and other things you want to do this year?

Well, a little bit. I mean, I’ve got a Dirty Knobs tour. I always do three or four Heartbreakers songs in the encore, usually, just ’cause I love the songs and I can do them the right way and people enjoy hearing them. So I’ll continue to do that. I love my legacy, but I don’t want to live in it.

The last thing out of the vault was July 16, 1978 — Paradise Theater, Boston, MA. Any plans for the next reissues or box sets or anything coming up?

The way that works is the Petty estate controls the catalog, and we’ve got this great engineer, Ryan Ulyate. So they come up with a reissue they want to do, Ryan mixes it, and then he sends it to me to sign off on it — but I have yet to question any of the mixes. They always sound pretty good, so I usually just go, “Yeah, that’s fine.” That’s as involved as I ever get. I’m busy with my own band, y’know?

No song is a guaranteed smash, but when it serves as the theme for a hit movie, its odds increase dramatically.

That’s what Survivor learned when they were asked to write the signature tune for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky III sequel in 1982. The result was “The Eye of the Tiger,” the title track from the group’s third album, released June 8, 1982.

The song went on to become a worldwide chart topper. But the song’s co-writers — Survivor guitarist Frankie Sullivan and guitarist/keyboardist Jim Peterik — faced a daunting task. Stallone had already chosen Queen’s 1980 monster hit “Another One Bites the Dust” for an early cut of the movie, but the song got axed — either United Artists (which produced the film) nixed it for being too old, or Queen denied permission for its use.

“I actually saw it on the film at the studio when I was there with Sly,” Sullivan confirms. Whatever the reason, the result was a make-or-break opportunity for Survivor, whose first two albums had charted at just 169 and 82, respectively.

As Sullivan explains, the deal was instigated by Tony and Ben Scotti, owners of Survivor’s label, Scotti Brothers Records, over dinner at Rao’s Italian-American restaurant in Los Angeles.

“They were all good friends,” he says. “Tony was real smart, and he said to Sly, ‘I’ve got this band, maybe we could help each other.’ Tony asked Sly to call me, which he did. That dinner was probably the best thing that ever happened to my career.”

As Sullivan explains, the deal was instigated by Tony and Ben Scotti, owners of Survivor’s label, Scotti Brothers Records, over dinner at Rao’s Italian-American restaurant in Los Angeles.

“They were all good friends,” he says. “Tony was real smart, and he said to Sly, ‘I’ve got this band, maybe we could help each other.’ Tony asked Sly to call me, which he did. That dinner was probably the best thing that ever happened to my career.”

Stallone sent Sullivan a videotape of the film, but out of caution he included only its first 10 minutes. “I called him up and said I needed to see the whole film to write the song,” Sullivan says. “Which wasn’t true — I just wanted to see what happened in the movie. I reassured him, ‘Dude, I’m not going to make bootleg copies in my garage!’ He laughed and had a copy of the movie hand-delivered.”

Sullivan admits he and Peterik felt pressure writing the song, knowing that the potential reward was immense.

“It was tense, and we were struggling to complete it,” he says. “The music took about 10 minutes, but it took three days to get the lyrics right. We had 90 percent of them, but we couldn’t come up with a title.” He found what they needed while browsing a copy of the script. “There was the part where Apollo Creed says Rocky used to have the eye of the tiger. And that was our title.”

The recording session itself took very little time. “We recorded the demo for it really quick,” Sullivan says. “I used a Les Paul into a 50-watt Marshall JMP.” As Sullivan told The Guardian in 2020, the Les Paul had a headstock break that he had repaired himself out of necessity. “I couldn’t afford another one, so I glued it back together.”

The completed demo was soon delivered to Stallone, who assumed it was the final recording. “I told him that what we had given him was the demo version, and he said, ‘What the fuck is a demo?’” Sullivan recalls with a laugh. “He said that’s the version he’s using.”

Even so, Stallone wasn’t happy with one aspect of the recording. “He asked me about the sound of the song and why old AC/DC records sounded so powerful,” the guitarist says. “And I told him about tape compression — how great it sounds when you slam it into the red.”

To demonstrate, Sullivan ran the tape and pushed the faders higher until Stallone liked what he heard. “Sly said, ‘That’s it right there.’ I was worried that it would be too distorted, but he said ‘Print it,’ and that was the version that he used in the film.”

The global success of “The Eye of the Tiger” gave Survivor the fame they needed, and brought its writers huge financial rewards.

“I had a great manager,” Sullivan says. “He was way ahead of the game with publishing, and he made sure that I got everything that was due to me. I bought a Porsche 911 and a whole load of great old electric guitars, including a few ’50s Les Pauls, an original Flying V and a lot of ’50s Strats. I’ve got over 200 blue-chip guitars.”

The memory of seeing the movie in a theater for the first time still stirs up strong feelings for Sullivan. “I actually got goosebumps. It just slammed. I was driving home afterward, and three rock radio stations were playing our song. I mean, we had Rocky III for our MTV video. How could we fail?”

Kim Thayil says he “kind of balked” at the idea of writing a memoir when the idea was first presented to him some years ago. It just felt a bit too self-aggrandizing for the Soundgarden guitarist, running counter to his “love for collective pursuits.”

Nevertheless, he ultimately acceded to co-writer Adem Tepedelen, resulting in the new A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond (William Morrow).

“I’ve always gravitated toward bands, toward superhero teams and baseball teams, more than the individual performances,” Thayil, 65, explains of his initial reticence, via Zoom from his home in Seattle. “What I loved about the Beatles or Kiss wasn’t just Paul or John; it was them working with George and Ringo.

“It was the four different faces of Ace and Gene and Paul and Peter and, ‘Omigod, they’re doing “Rock and Roll All Nite,” this is really cool!’ The overreaching concept is all these talents and stars coming together for one goal. That’s what appeals to me.”

That generosity of spirit is demonstrated through A Screaming Life’s 296 pages, which run from Thayil’s origin story — the son of immigrant Indian parents born and raised in Chicago, where he cut his musical teeth alongside high school classmate and original Soundgarden bass guitarist Hiro Yamamoto.

After graduation, the two moved to Seattle together, where Thayil earned a philosophy degree at the University of Washington and worked as a DJ on KCMU but, most importantly, started Soundgarden during 1984 with Yamamoto and his roommate Chris Cornell, who was originally a drummer before he stepped out to front the band.

The book is, as such, the first truly inside account of Soundgarden’s history, from formation to breakup in 1997 and resumption in 2010 until Cornell committed suicide seven years later. It has a photo but no text about the group’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction last year, but it does bring readers up to speed on the surviving Soundgarden members’ plans for unreleased material they were working on at the time of Cornell’s death, as well as Thayil’s other musical pursuits with a couple of MC5 spinoffs and the all-star 3rd Secret.

Thayil — who says he “may have changed some names” to protect privacy where appropriate — felt a significant weight of responsibility in telling the story, too.

“I had to make sure that people understood the kind of talent that was brought to the group,” he explains. That includes not only himself, Cornell, Hiro, bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron, but also founding drummer Scott Sundquist and bassist Jason Everman.

“They’re both very good and very talented at what they did. Even though we parted ways with them and they’re undocumented on recordings, they brought something to the table,” Thayil says. “There’s a real pride I feel in the collaboration, in the teamwork.

“My friends might think it’s nitpicking, but I want to get the story straight as best I can, and try to be as accurate as possible. I didn’t want it to be emetically driven or be patting myself on the back or entirely self-deprecating or vindictive or any of those things. I wanted to ultimately say, ‘We achieved this, and we lost things. Here are the circumstances around that achievement; here are the losses. Here’s what happened.’”

Louder Than Love

The greatest loss, of course, was Cornell, who hung himself in a Detroit hotel on May 17, 2017, at age 52, shortly after a concert at the city’s Fox Theatre. Although Thayil has equivocated over the years about whether he saw any warning signs that night, he writes in A Screaming Life that he sensed Cornell “didn’t seem right” as the band prepared for the show.

“I just remember that I thought Chris looked pained,” Thayil recalls now. “I’ve known Chris for a long time; he looked pained enough that I asked him twice, and that is not something I would normally do. But he convinced me that he was simply tired.

“And he did sleep; he went back to his dressing room after soundcheck and slept. People wanted to ask him a question about our set, or some songs, and either the tour manager or the security guy said, ‘Oh, no, he’s sleeping. He’s out.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, he was right. He wasn’t pained. He’s very tired.’ That was that.”

In the chapter entitled Slaves & Bulldozers, Thayil goes into great depth about what else he observed during the night and in the show, from its rough start to a Cornell electric guitar malfunction during “Been Away Too Long” that forced Thayil to play the only guitar part. Afterward, he relates in the book, Cornell said, “‘See, you don’t need me at all’ … and the way he said it just didn’t feel right.”

Thayil acknowledges that these are feelings he’s not shared publicly until now. “I didn’t know how to share it,” he explains. “I didn’t know how to organize the thoughts and the experiences. Even talking to people who were in the same foxhole as me, like our bandmates and some of our crew members — if I even tried to share my experiences or my thoughts with them, it was very difficult for it to come out in any way that was organizational.

“And I saw that in them. We didn’t know how to give it meaning because, ultimately, you’re devastated emotionally, and that’s the conclusion of these events or observations.

“So when you’re trying to organize the observations and the events into something that gives it coherence or meaning, you end up in the same place — it doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t change the result. You’re still devastated.

“So it was almost this futile thing: ‘I want you to know this or that.’ What does it achieve? It doesn’t make time go backwards, and you start realizing that you’re ultimately just another human being with dreams and ambitions and ultimately impotent as you experience this loss.”

Overall, however, Thayil’s disposition toward Cornell in A Screaming Life is overwhelmingly charitable and positive and, in spots, revelatory for him.

“One surprise in putting this book together,” Thayil says, “was realizing how generous Chris was in how many times he tried to maintain and address and save the band, how he tried to attend to the interests and needs of his bandmates in a constructive way. And that wasn’t always obvious, because he got so much attention as the attractive and talented frontman and singer. He was managing and kind of navigating that kind of attention, which is very difficult for many singers, which I initially did not understand.

“It really comes out, when the stories are all put together, he championed the band in many ways. There were times I felt I was alone in championing the band, but that’s not true. Now I look back on it and, no, Chris was right there, too.”

Been Away Too Long

Though gone nearly a decade, Cornell is with Soundgarden these days, too. Since coming to terms with his widow, Vicky Cornell, over the recordings the band was working on at the time of his death — along with other legal matters — Thayil, Cameron and Shepherd have been working on those songs with early band producer Terry Date. Thayil says there could “potentially be more than nine” tracks, but with no specific timetable for the finished product.

“We’re still working,” he says. “I still have things to do. So does Ben. There’s no schedule here, because it’s a different process. When you work on a record, you have both time and money budgeted out by the record company in concert with the band and management. But because this production doesn’t have a traditional schedule, it’s kind of sideways — in some ways backward and some ways forward.

“In some ways we have a final product in working with Chris’ contributions, and there is a push to have things done. But there’s a pushback, too, saying it’ll be done when it’s done, when we’re satisfied. It has to be the best for me, the best for Matt, the best for Ben — and the best for Chris. It’s going to be the best presentation of Soundgarden we can make it. We can’t do that without him looking as great as he is.”

Placing the music in the context of Soundgarden’s catalog, Thayil describes the songs as “very Soundgarden-like in terms of tone and mood. It’s quite introspective. The perspective, emotionally and creatively, is entirely different and in some ways much more powerful. It doesn’t have the variety of, say, a Down on the Upside. It doesn’t have the viscerality of Ultramega OK or the quirkiness and viscerality of a Badmotorfinger. It’s definitely going to have an overall identity and ambience. It’s going to be a very distinctively different but very Soundgarden-y work.”

During the recording process, Thayil has been using his familiar Guild S-100 (for which he has a signature model and is looking at another for the S-300), a Fender Stratocaster that he began using with Superunknown, a Gibson ES-335, for which there’s a Cornell signature model, and a Guild acoustic. The Telecasters played for Down on the Upside are gone, but Thayil has “farted around” with a Fender Jazzmaster semi-acoustic that was suggested by his guitar tech and a studio engineer.

“It’s a very interesting, curious guitar I’m trying to learn about,” Thayil says. “It has great action. It plays great. It has a cool sound, and I love it. It’s like, ‘Holy shit, this is so fun and easy to play.’

“I don’t know how long it’s been since I felt this way about a guitar; the only time in recent memory is a Guild acoustic that was custom-made for me. See, I’m not the guy who walks into a guitar store and drools. I don’t have a wish list. I’m not on a first-name basis with my gear. We acquired some gear, some new amps and pedals, my guitar tech picked out for me. But I’m not that guy who geeks out and knows every last detail.”

For now, 3rd Secret — Thayil’s band with Cameron, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Void’s Jon “Bubba” Dupree and others — is taking a back seat to the Soundgarden recording and A Screaming Life. Thayil is planning to do some signings in the Seattle area — and perhaps beyond.

“We’ll see how it goes,” he says. “If it goes well, maybe we’ll consider doing things elsewhere. I’m just learning about this process, the book publishing world.”

More than half a century since the release of “Layla,” one of the most iconic tracks in Eric Clapton’s canon, Rita Coolidge is still waiting to be credit for writing the outro’s piano lines.

Clapton's own signature is, of course, all over the eponymous 1970 track from Derek & the Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, an album with an intriguing backstory of its own. The album is a uniquely personal entry in Clapton's catalog, written and recorded while the guitarist was in the throes of longing for Pattie Harrison, the wife of his famous Beatle pal George.

While the song's signature electric guitar riff was penned by the then largely unknown Duane Allman, who guested on the record, the tune was Clapton's entirely — up to the piano coda that concludes the song's final minutes. That final icing on the cake was written by Dominos drummer Jim Gordon and singer Coolidge.

Coolidge was hardly anonymous at the time. Like Clapton and the rest of his band, she had served in Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett's band, ground zero for Derek & the Dominos. Since then, Coolidge had gone on to record with artists that included Joe Cocker, Leon Russell — who wrote Cocker's hit "Delta Lady" for her — Stephen Stills and Clapton himself on his self-titled debut solo album.

As the singer explained in a TikTok post, she was in Miami's Criteria studio — the same facility where Layla was recorded — having her photo taken to promote her 1971 debut solo album, when she heard the song being played.

“I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I recognize this music and know this music,'" she says. “They’re like, ‘You don’t know it, it’s a brand-new Eric Clapton record,’ and I said, ‘It’s my music!’ They took pictures of the veins popping out in my neck. I was so upset.”

Coolidge says, after hearing the song, she rushed to Tower Records, where, to her dismay, she found her name absent in the credits.

“I started trying to get in touch with Eric through Robert Stigwood, who was his manager at the time, and was just a mogul,” she recalls. “I got him finally on the phone, and I said, ‘I’m one of the writers, that’s my music.’ He said, ‘Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? You’re a girl. You don’t have the money to fight this. Let it go.’ And that was it.”

In her memoir, Delta Lady, Coolidge says Clapton heard her play the song during their previous recording sessions together, long before he’d woven it into “Layla’s” tapestry.

“We played the song for Eric Clapton in England,” she wrote. “I remember sitting at the piano in Olympic Studios while Eric listened to me play it. Jim and I left a cassette of the demo, hoping, of course, that he might cover it.”

Although he hasn't publicly addressed Coolidge's claims, Clapton told Guitar Player in 1985 that he had coaxed the song away from Gordon for use as the coda to "Layla."

"Jim Gordon wrote that and had been secretly going back into the studio and recording his own album, without any of us knowing it," Clapton told assistant editor Dan Forte. "And they were all love songs composed on the piano. And we caught him playing this one day and said, 'Come on, man. Can we have that?'

"So he was happy to give us that part. And we made the two pieces into one song."

While Clapton did give Gordon a co-writing credit for the song, Coolidge's part in Derek and the Dominos' short-lived legacy remains overlooked.

Steve Lukather is always a blast to chat with. And as the man who has held down Toto’s proverbial fort — along with thousands of iconic sessions — dialed in with Guitar Player to catch up, he was in rare form.

“What do you wanna know?” Luke asks, laughing. “I don’t know, man. What can I possibly tell you right now?”

Lukather, of course, knows that the world is wondering about the project he’s working on with Alex Van Halen. Rumors have ranged from Luke taking his old pal Eddie Van Halen’s place to the duo writing new music.

The facts, most of which Luke isn’t allowed to talk about, reveal that none of the above are true. What this project really comes down to is a brother and a close friend working together to pay their respects to an electric guitar legend via music.

With that said, Luke is not playing guitar on a new Van Halen album. In fact, this isn’t a Van Halen album at all, and as of now, Luke isn’t playing a lick of guitar but co-producing.

“I’m telling you, this is not throwaway shit,” Lukather says of the tracks Eddie Van Halen left behind. “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.”

Lukather admits that he doesn’t know what the project will be called. “Those are Alex Van Halen questions,” he says. “I’m just here to be his sidekick, and somebody that he’s gotten very close with since Ed’s death.”

Though Lukather’s relationship with the Van Halens goes back further than that. “We’ve always been pals,” Lukather says. “It’s like Al’s missing a piece of himself. That’s how I feel. He looks at me as somebody he trusts, and who was close with Ed.”

For Lukather, the reward comes via the process. “I don’t have ulterior motives,” he says. “This is not about money. This is about love of the guys and trying to help. I’m not gonna be involved in an obvious way. So, I wish people would get the fuck off my back!” he says with a laugh.

And even if Lukather was asked to play guitar, which he isn’t, he doesn’t feel he’s the person for the job. “I’m not qualified,” he says. “Call Dweezil — he plays that shit. Call Nuno! I can name 10 guys, like Vai or Satch. I’m nowhere near qualified to start dabbling in the Van Halen world.”

What did you think about the initial rumors that you were taking over as guitarist of Van Halen?

Well, first off, that’s the most ridiculous and humorous thing I’ve ever heard. I am no more qualified to try and play like Ed Van Halen than I am to be the first man to tug my dick on the planet. [laughs] I don’t know how anybody could think that would even be a reality. Honestly, it’s laughable. I don’t play… I couldn’t… I don’t play like Ed. It’s crazy.

How far back do you and Alex go?

We’ve been friends for 45 years. I mean, I was close friends with the Van Halens, but I really love all the guys. The only guy I don’t know is David Lee Roth. I met him once or twice, but very briefly. I’ve just always been a fan since the beginning, you know? What can I say?

What are you and Alex actually working on?

Well, being a fan isn’t what it’s about. Alex needs some help. He came to me and said, “Look, I need some help with this.” I went, “How can I help?” But there’s no need for another guitar player.

Meaning you’re not playing guitar on this?

First off, Eddie played some of the most amazing shit I’ve ever heard. And it’s not pieces on the floor that have to be snapped back together and try to Mickey Mouse something together that might be sellable. These are fucking finished tracks with Ed and Al, and Ed’s playing bass on a lot of it. That’s all I can say right now because it’s a much bigger picture, and it’s Alex’s story to tell.

You can’t reveal the nature of the music, but can you expand on your role?

I am there 100 percent to be his co-producer and help him through the technical aspects. I’m not gonna play. There’s not gonna be any Lukather or Toto fingerprints on a Van Halen thing. I can fucking promise you that. I’m there to be Al’s wingman, and go, “How can I help you do this?” I’m there to go, “Want me to help you do some vocals? How do we do these mixes?” It’s about making sure that there’s quality control from somebody he trusts.

Does being a friend and a contemporary make you the right person for the job?

I can listen to stuff, and go, “I know Ed wouldn’t like that.” I can say, “I think Ed would dig that,” you know? I’m just being that third ear.

Is Wolfgang involved?

I’m hoping that Al is gonna ask Wolf to be involved on some level. I haven’t talked to Wolf in a long time. It’s sad, actually. I’d like to, you know? We sort of just got busy, and we haven’t. But I think what he’s doing is wonderful. I think he’s an incredible musician. I think if anybody is gonna play anything that’s needed, he would be qualified to do so. But there really isn’t a need for other players to come in at this point.

Surely, listening to this stuff has to be a reminder of Ed’s greatness.

We all did the tapping thing when it first came out because it was an amazing trick to learn. And after a while, guys like Satch and Steve Vai did it their own way because all the guys were doing a very derivative and obviously Van Halen thing. It just got a little tired.

But that’s not what Ed was trying to do—Ed was trying to fill out a three-piece band. The intricacy between his lead and rhythm playing at the same time was pretty peerless, man. There’s not a lot of guys who could make the racket that Eddie Van Halen did, man. It changed the world.

You won’t be disappointed in the playing; I can tell you that. Ask Steve Vai. I think somebody asked him, and Steve may have heard a few things that I’ve heard. I think he said something in the press about it. But with Ed, man, I felt the same way you did when you heard him. It was jaw-dropping, and it still is.

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.

Todd Rundgren was all of 23 when his reputation as a boy-wonder producer landed him a high-profile gig with the star act of the Beatles’ Apple Records. Badfinger were a quartet of British musicians whose name and debut single under that moniker — the Paul McCartney–penned “Come and Get It” — had been selected by the Beatles themselves.

In early 1971, they were riding high on “No Matter What,” a top-10 hit in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries. What they needed was a hit album to follow it up.

The result would be Straight Up, the Rundgren-produced album widely regarded as the British quartet’s finest, thanks in great part to its two big hits: “Baby Blue” and “Day After Day.”

But as Rundgren explains, getting there was anything but straightforward. Badfinger — guitarists Pete Ham and Joey Molland, bass guitarist Tom Evans and drummer Mike Gibbins — had already started the album twice.

The initial sessions began in January 1971 with Geoff Emerick, the Beatles’ visionary engineer on albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Emerick had coproduced Badfinger’s previous album, No Dice, which included “No Matter What.”

Unfortunately, the new sessions failed to satisfy Apple’s American arm.

“Apparently the distributor was not satisfied with it,” Rundgren tells Guitar Player. “They didn't think they could promote it, or didn't hear a single or something, and said, ‘Okay, start over.’ So the band started over with George Harrison.”

Harrison approached the project roughly six months after releasing his own landmark solo effort, All Things Must Pass. Production began in May, but Harrison was soon swept up in organizing the Concert for Bangladesh after his friend Ravi Shankar brought the humanitarian crisis to his attention.

“They got maybe five songs in and George got completely involved in the Concert for Bangladesh and told the band, ‘I’m finished. I can't do this.’ That’s when I got the call — producer number three.

“At the time I was developing a reputation for getting things done very quickly, no nonsense. The label was looking for some assurance that the record would actually get finished. That’s when I inherited the project.”

By then, Rundgren had established himself as a rising production talent through his work at Bearsville Records — the upstate New York label run by Bob Dylan manager Albert Grossman — and on projects like the Band’s 1970 album Stage Fright. He’d also launched his own solo career under the name Runt, releasing two albums that showcased his increasingly adventurous songwriting talents and production style.

With Apple demanding a fast turnaround, Rundgren took stock of what had already been recorded.

“There was a whole album by Geoff Emerick. I think we lifted a couple tunes from that,” he says. “‘Flying’ was one of them. Then the George Harrison tunes — we used some of those, although most had to have parts re-recorded. It all sounded like Phil Spector. That was George’s thing at the time.”

Spector had, of course, overseen the heavily layered Wall of Sound production on All Things Must Pass, and Harrison brought a similar approach to Badfinger’s sessions.

“So when he produced Badfinger’s record he was doing all these Spectory things, like having three acoustic guitars playing — all this overdubbing and swampy reverb printed on the drums and stuff like that,” Rundgren explains. “I had to undo some of that.

“And then we recorded probably five new songs, of which ‘Baby Blue’ was one of them — the very first thing we recorded,” he reveals. “Then somehow I had to make it all sound cohesive.”

Rundgren ultimately completed the album at Bearsville Studio.

“I took it all back to Bearsville and somehow got it to sound like one record,” he says. “Geoff Emerick was not credited, but for some reason George Harrison was credited on ‘Day After Day.’”

Fifty-five years on, the slight still irritates him.

“He gave up on the project,” Rundgren says. “The only time I ever met him he said, ‘I’m done. Do whatever you want with it. Use it or don't use it.’

“Essentially he had no time to shepherd it. I heard nothing from him during the rest of the production.”

Straight Up would go on to produce two major hits in “Baby Blue” (number nine in the U.S.) and “Day After Day” (number three). Although critics were lukewarm at the time, the album would eventually come to be regarded as Badfinger’s finest work. “Baby Blue” would enjoy a a massive cultural resurgence in September 2013 when it was used in the final scene of the hit series Breaking Bad.

Despite their remarkable good fortune to land in the Beatles’ orbit, Badfinger were plagued by disastrous management. Pete Ham died by suicide in 1975, followed by Tom Evans eight years later.

Rundgren didn’t have an opportunity to revisit the album with Harrison in the years that followed.

“I never had reason to run into him, even though I was spending a lot of time in Hawaii,” he explains. “I would always come out to Kauaʻi, and he lived on Maui, I believe. But we never did cross paths.”

In 1973, Alice Cooper was no longer just a rock star; he was the ringmaster of a high-decibel circus that thrived on shock and spectacle. But as he and his band prepared to record the masterpiece that would become Billion Dollar Babies, they lacked the perfect “curtain raiser” — a song that could encapsulate the thrill of a performance in a sold-out arena.

The solution arrived from the most unlikely of places: a folk-pop tune originally made famous by Judy Collins. What followed was a radical sonic transformation of the song, turning it into a menacing but triumphant call to arms that united fans for Alice’s grand entrance.

Billion Dollar Babies marked the start of a new era in Cooper‘s career, and he was adapting his persona to fit. The success of his 1972 hit “School’s Out” brought Cooper fame among teens and infamy among their outraged parents who feared the song would encourage rebellion and school absenteeism.

In response, he began his metamorphosis from underground shock rocker to headline-grabbing provocateur. His Billion Dollar Babies song “Elected” was part of the new image, a satire that cast Alice as a presidential candidate for the rock and roll generation.

Bob Ezrin, Cooper’s producer, had the talents for helping Alice through this evolution. His keen sense for novelty, combined with his theatrical approach to music, elevated his productions, whether by having kids sing along on the chorus of “School’s Out” or by adding a brass section on "Elected."

For Cooper’s new emergence on the world stage, Ezrin discovered a song he thought made the perfect opening track: “Hello, Hooray.”

Written by Canadian singer-songwriter Rolf Kempf, the tune had been famously covered by Collins on her 1968 album, Who Knows Where the Time Goes. At its core, the lyrics are about a performer preparing to step into the spotlight, a theme that seemed well suited to Cooper’s new persona.

But the singer needed convincing.

“I heard it and I said, ‘Bob, this is a folk song,’” he recalled on The Alice Cooper Show Radio Special. “He said, ‘No, listen to the lyrics. It’s about a guy who is about to go onstage. And he’s terrified — but he’s ready.’

“It was the perfect opening for Billion Dollar Babies.”

Together with Ezrin, Cooper reconstructed Kempf’s folk-pop tune into a bombastic declaration of Cooper’s newfound power. In addition to giving the tune new lyrics that addressed the audience, they pumped it up with an orchestral arrangement and a fusillade of cannon blasts that echo over the song’s extended outro.

But the song wouldn’t be complete without some heavy guitar licks. For that, Ezrin enlisted studio guitarist Steve Hunter, and suggested he apply some harmonized slide guitar work to the intro and solo.

Hunter’s big career moments were still largely ahead of him — handling electric guitar on Aerosmith’s “Train Kept A’ Rollin’,” tackling a tricky acoustic part on Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” and helping Lou Reed capture his first Gold record with Rock ’N’ Roll Animal — but he had great instincts for what a song needed.

Even so, he was initially skeptical of Ezrin’s approach.

“It had a great arrangement, and it had terrific parts played very well by the Alice Cooper boys,” he tells Guitar Player. “But I was taken aback when producer Bob Ezrin suggested a slide part for the song’s solo section. I had tried my hand at slide playing a few times, and I quickly discovered it was much harder than it appeared. I decided to leave the slide stuff to Johnny Winter or George Harrison.

“Luckily for me, however, I had spent five years of my youth learning how to play lap-steel — thanks to my father — and I experimented with making my lap-steel technique sound like slide guitar.”

For the session, however, Hunter showed up toting not a lap steel but a beat-up, mid-to-late-1950s Gibson electric six-string pedal steel. It was a basic model with just four pedals, but one of those was badly damaged, leaving just three pedals to work with.

“I tuned the guitar to an open E, the first pedal to an open A, and the third pedal to an A minor chord, so I would have at least one minor,” he says. “Plus, I could use the relative major/minor chord relationship to get another minor. That was just about the extent of my music theory in those days.”

“With all of its problems, when you plugged the pedal steel into a Marshall half-stack, it sounded amazing,” Hunter continues, “likely due to the fact that its pickup was probably a PAF. Whatever Bob had in mind when he envisioned a ‘slide part,’ it was a pedal-steel performance.”

Although Hunter usually approached soloing through improvisation, he and Ezrin agreed a constructed solo was what the song required.

“I worked out the solo,” he says, “then doubled the first half and played harmony to the second half. Over the chords immediately following the solo, I pushed a couple of the Gibson’s ‘chord pedals’ — which is what I called them — to follow the progression.

“The tone was pretty organic. No effect pedals. We did use outboard studio gear, such as compressors and EQ, but my guitar tones were primarily from the volume and tone controls on the amp, and the volume and tone controls on the guitar. I still love the tone of that old pedal steel on ‘Hello Hooray.’”

Unfortunately, he no longer owns the Gibson pedal steel.

“It died a sad death,” he says. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have at least kept that PAF pickup.”

As for Ezrin, his instincts were spot on. “Hello Hooray” (minus the original‘s comma) became a hit for Cooper — it reached number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and made for a grand spectacle as the opening tune on the Billion Dollar Babies tour.

“That song was the quintessential Alice opening,” Cooper says. “It was the call to arms. It told the audience, ‘The show is starting, and you’re part of it now.’”

Neil Diamond had no idea what he passed up when he turned down a song his roadie, Larry E. Williams, had written. It was 1975, and Diamond was focused on cutting demos for his next album, Beautiful Noise, in Los Angeles.

Instead, the song went to recent arrivals in the City of Angels, Howard and David Bellamy — better known as the Bellamy Brothers. “Let Your Love Flow,” the duo’s debut single, didn’t just go big — it went international, topping the charts in the U.S. and Germany and reaching the Top 10 in numerous other countries.

But how the Bellamys got the song in the first place is a story in itself — and it’s all thanks to a stash of homegrown weed.

In 1974, Howard and David Bellamy were struggling musicians from Darby, Florida, with a slim résumé that included writing songs for local commercials. Their early involvement with comedian-musician Jim Stafford led David and Stafford to co-write “Spiders & Snakes,” a number-three hit for Stafford in 1974. The song’s success proved crucial to their survival in the music business.

“Jim and that song were really important because, at the time, we were broke,” David reveals. “Having that break gave us a little bit of stability and allowed us to move out to Los Angeles.”

Which is how they met Diamond’s band.

“They were doing sessions here and there, and we met them through mutual friends, and then we all became friends,” David says.

“We smoked a lot of pot together, so that was really helpful,” Howard adds with a laugh. “We had a lot of homegrown weed, so we got to know each other, and we all became great buddies.”

The brothers began cutting demos of their songs with assistance from Diamond’s backing band. One day, Diamond’s drummer, Dennis St. John, came to them with a proposition.

“He said, ‘Hey, Larry, our roadie, wrote this great song, and you guys should listen to it.’ It was ‘Let Your Love Flow.’”

By that point, the song had been rejected not only by Diamond but also by singer and guitarist Johnny Rivers.

“And when we heard the song, we were both floored,” David says. “We just thought it was a great song.

“Dennis said, ‘It sounds like something you guys would do.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re exactly right.’”

Enhanced by the haze of weed permeating the studio, the Bellamys got down to work with help from Diamond’s band and their gear.

“We used Richard Bennett’s acoustic guitars on the track,” David says. “It was a black Gibson Everly Brothers J-180 with the double pickguards. I remember Richard taking it out of the case all the time and playing it. We also used a Martin D-28 acoustic as well.”

The sessions went smoothly. “The band had played on the original demo, and it was actually arranged perfectly,” David says. “It wasn’t like you had to go in and strip it down and start all over. We cut the single in about five or six takes.”

“But the mix took three days!” Howard interjects. “We were searching for that sweet spot. I just remember those late nights with that mix and our engineer throwing his headset against the wall. It took a while, but whatever we did seemed to work in the end.”

Indeed it did. Released by Warner Bros. Records in January 1976, “Let Your Love Flow” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in May and crossed over to the Adult Contemporary and Country charts as well. David notes that their label gave the single to visiting record executives from the Netherlands, who in turn shared it with label heads in Germany. The song subsequently charted in both countries, reaching number one in Germany and Switzerland. It also enjoyed major success in Norway, Sweden, the U.K., South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

The duo have continued to thrive over the years, particularly on the country charts, with hits like “If I Said You Have a Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me)” and “Do You Love as Good as You Look” among their 26 Top 10 country singles. They’ll hit the road this year on their 50 Years of Hits tour, with an extensive run of dates. That includes their first-ever headlining show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on June 25.

As for Neil Diamond, did he ever rue the day he passed on “Let Your Love Flow”?

“I don’t know if Neil later regretted it or not,” David says, “but he was always very complimentary about it. We’ve stayed friendly, and he’s been kind of a lifelong contact of ours ever since.”

“I tend to be a fixer,” Todd Rundgren says of his production gigs. “I get called in during a crisis.”

For Rundgren, it’s a familiar pattern: commercially viable bands stalled by perception, pressure and internal friction. The veteran musician, songwriter, guitarist and producer had his work cut out for him in 1986, when he signed on to produce XTC’s Skylarking.

The English trio — guitarist Andy Partridge, bass guitarist Colin Moulding and multi-instrumentalist Dave Gregory — were in a commercial slump. Their previous two records had failed to sell in the U.S., and Partridge’s dislike of touring meant neither the band nor its label, Virgin Records, was making much money.

The problem, as Virgin saw it, was that the band sounded too English. Rundgren’s job was to translate that identity into something more commercially legible.

He recalls a similar dynamic when he produced Grand Funk Railroad’s breakthrough album We're an American Band in 1973 — another case of a commercially successful group struggling for critical respect and radio traction.

“They weren’t getting respect,” Rundgren says. “They had conquered commercially, but they weren’t really getting played on AM radio, and critics were always hitting on them. They needed to be really different at that point, and that was part of my reputation — I’d come in, evaluate what needed to be done, and make sure it got done.”

“The Skylarking album was the same sort of situation,” he continues. “But a lot of XTC’s issues had to do with the fact that they never performed. Because they never toured to promote their records, they had to get on the radio somehow.

“But they were getting less and less radio play, partly because of the sound of the records and their approach to the material.

“Their label guy said, ‘If they don’t have some success with this new record — and if they don’t stop spending a fortune making records and never touring — we’re gonna drop them.’

“I was a fan. I thought that would’ve been horrible.”

Rundgren only got the gig because XTC’s label believed the band sounded too English. Executives compiled a list of American producers for consideration, and guitarist Dave Gregory pushed hard for Rundgren.

“I reminded Andy that Todd had produced one of his favorite New York Dolls records,” Gregory said, referring to the group’s 1973 self-titled debut. “In the absence of any better alternatives, he agreed.”

Work began at Rundgren’s Utopia Sound Studios at his home in Woodstock, New York. It didn’t take long for him to identify the group’s main problem: XTC’s identity as a studio-only band wasn’t just a limitation—it shaped how they worked.

“Because they never toured, their entire musical life took place in the studio,” Rundgren says. “Because of that, Andy would be happy to work forever on one record, because as soon as it was done, the fun was over. He got to go home, be alone, and never play that stuff again.

“So he would just drive everybody crazy.”

What might have been a creative advantage in another context instead became a pressure cooker. Rundgren and Partridge clashed repeatedly over song choices and arrangements. Where Partridge wanted a distorted electric guitar solo, Rundgren heard mandolins. When Partridge wanted yet another vocal take, Rundgren would push him to move on.

As Partridge recalled, Rundgren’s attitude was, “You can dick around with [the track] for a few hours your way if you like. I’m going up to my house. When you find out it doesn’t work your way, give me a call and we’ll record it my way.”

The strain filtered through the band. Moulding later recalled that Partridge was “so unhappy and taking it out, a little bit, on me.”

The tension eventually reached breaking point.

“Colin quit the band in the middle of making the record,” Rundgren says. “He eventually rejoined to finish it.

“So we made Skylarking under much duress.”

By the time they sat down to mix the tracks, exhaustion had set in, and the band decided they were ready to leave.

“We got through three songs and they said, ‘Okay, you finish it. We’re homesick. We’re going home.’ This was something they’d never done — leaving a project before the mixing was finished.

“As soon as Andy got home he shit all over the album to anyone who would listen. Nobody had heard the record yet, of course, but he was saying, ‘It’s the worst record we’ve ever made, blah blah blah blah blah.’ He was ready to hang it up at that point.

“And the rest, of course, is history.”

Indeed it is. Upon its release in 1986, Skylarking became a critically acclaimed hit. That wasn’t solely due to its songwriting, strong though it was. Rundgren’s sometimes baroque, psychedelic, Sgt. Pepper’s–like production delivered the radio-friendly sound XTC’s label wanted without stripping away the band’s distinctly English character.

“Perhaps it lacked the polish of some of the other recordings we had made,” Moulding said in retrospect, “but it was the character that was sewn into the record that became its strength.”

Ironically, the album’s breakthrough moment came from a track that wasn’t originally part of it. XTC initially promoted Skylarking with a video for “Dear God,” a song not included on the original pressings. Once it gained traction on MTV, it was added to later editions of the album, replacing “Mermaid Smiled.”

Skylarking went on to sell roughly a quarter-million copies in the U.S. and spent 29 weeks on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 70 — XTC’s strongest American chart showing since 1982’s English Settlement.

Much of that outcome, Rundgren suggests, came down to vision — and control.

“But what I took away from it was, first of all, what a talent Dave Gregory was — both in terms of his playing and his overall musical sensibility,” he says. “He did the orchestral chart for ‘1000 Umbrellas,’ and that’s maybe the best chart on the record, even though I did all the other charts.

“And I still see Dave. I did a couple of dates in England last November and saw him while I was there. I see him every time I’m in his neighborhood. We still get along great, and he’s still the sensible one. He tells me stories about what happened with the other guys and all the turmoil.

“And now I think it’s pretty much official: XTC is no more.”

Peter Frampton keeps himself surrounded by guitars in his Bigsby Park home studio outside Nashville. In fact, they’re just about everywhere you look, save for the computer console in front of him and the faithful service dog the room is named after, who’s lounging on a white couch nearby (“his spot,” as Frampton tells us via Zoom).

He’s flanked by a pair of Gibson SGs — “‘Cause you have to have two, and I actually have three,” he says — including a 1962 model he played with Humble Pie on one side and a ’61 on the other. Over the course of the conversation, meanwhile, the barefoot Frampton pads around the room — sans the cane his degenerative Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM) usually requires him to use — pointing out an Eventide Riptide Drive & Vibe pedal, a Dupont guitar similar to the one used by Django Reinhardt and other pieces of gear.

Reinhardt has long been one of Frampton’s heroes, and even more so now as the IBM — fortunately slow-moving enough to have allowed him to continue playing years beyond his 2019 Finale Farewell Tour — continues to rob the dexterity from his left hand.

“It’s obviously getting more and more difficult to play,” Frampton, 76, acknowledges, “but I’m still enjoying working out what I can do that’s different because of my lessened ability.

“It’s the pressure that goes, and obviously the speed of getting from one note to the other: ‘Well, that finger’s not gonna make it, so I’ll use that finger.’ I’m using thinner strings now. All the string gauges are coming down, which really helps me.

“I’m very strong with myself about that: ‘Get over yourself and play the guitar! Django had only two fingers, Pete. He only had two! Get on with it!’

“That’s me. I’ve always been like that. And I try to play as if I’ve got no problem at all.”

The resilience has certainly been on display since Frampton revealed his diagnosis. There have been four albums — including the brand-new Carry the Light, a guest-filled set that’s his first collection of all-original songs in 16 years — along with several tours (performed sitting down), a best-selling memoir and inductions into both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Frampton, a documentary directed by his keyboardist and musical director Rob Arthur, premieres June 4 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

IBM may be affecting Frampton’s hands, but clearly not the middle finger he’s giving the disorder as he continues the musical journey he began more than 60 years ago in his native England.

“I really do admire him for that,” says his son Julian Frampton, who co-produced Carry the Light. “He always says the big things don’t really matter — he handles them. It’s the little things that bother him; the crumpling of a potato chip bag will set him off. But when he got the diagnosis of having IBM, he was like, ‘Okay, what do we do next? How do we get through this?’

“That’s been his motto his whole life: When the big things happen you can’t change them, so you ride the wave, stand tall and work your way through it.”

Frampton is well aware of the gap in new material since Thank You Mr. Churchill in 2010, though he did release pieces he composed for the Cincinnati Ballet in 2013. Since then he’s issued Acoustic Classics in 2016 and two covers albums — All Blues in 2019 and the instrumental Frampton Forgets the Words in 2021.

“As soon as we announced the Finale tour, that’s when we went into the studio,” he explains. “And I said, ‘I’ve got to play as much as possible,’ for obvious reasons. ‘I want to play as much as I can until it’s not easy for me.’

“Now it almost feels like I’m starting from scratch again, like I felt I was on Wind of Change [his 1972 solo debut], because it’s been so long and I’ve had so many new ideas — either brand new or from the last six years.”

The hard-hitting “Lions at the Gate,” in particular, dates back several years. Frampton was recording “Peggy Sue” for a Buddy Holly tribute project and used the extra studio time to jam with bass guitarist Dave LaBruyere and drummer Chad Cromwell. The Framptons later recruited Tom Morello to play on the finished, politically charged track.

“If there was ever a song he should play on — the rage man himself — it’s ‘Lions at the Gate,’” Frampton says. “He took it, wow, and played in the places I left him. Then I said, ‘If you feel like harmonizing or playing with me…’ So there are some beautiful harmonies he does with me at the end that are just great.”

There are, not surprisingly, plenty of six-string heroics throughout Carry the Light’s 10 tracks. There’s compositional integrity and songwriting craft, but at the end of the day, as Julian notes, “the guitar is the star of the show.”

“That’s always the priority,” he says. “Always at the top of his list. That’s always going to shine.”

“It’s always about the guitar — the sound and the inspiration,” Frampton adds. “I play during the day and work out stuff that I came up with the night before, before I go to bed. If my girlfriend’s not here when I sleep, the acoustic guitar or an electric is on the other pillow, and Bigsby’s at the foot of the bed.

“I pick up my phone and hit ‘record’ before I pick up the guitar, because so many times the first thing you play, you’re not thinking at all. Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘What was that?!’ and it’s good that I got it recorded. You can try to play it later and it’s still me, but it’s not the same — ’cause now you’re thinking about it.

“So it’s best for me to always put the iPhone in record so I get it. That’s how they all started.”

Frampton’s famed Phenix — the 1954 Gibson Les Paul “Black Beauty” Custom recovered in 2011 after a 1980 plane crash in South America — was his primary instrument on Carry the Light. But Julian notes that “we used whatever sounded best.” That included a Dupont on the jazz-inflected “Islamorada,” featuring H.E.R., which grew out of a voice memo Julian recorded of some jazz chords.

“He’s such a jazzy guy I thought he’d like it,” Julian says. “We started writing to that a little bit and he really wanted to sing on it. But I had a vision. I said, ‘I want you to sing — but I want you to sing with your guitar.’

“He fought me on it a little bit and then eventually gave in. I was playing acoustically and he brought out his electric, and when we started playing over the chorus melody we both looked at each other and he said, ‘OK, this is an instrumental song. You won me over.’”

That kind of input, Frampton says, helped elevate his Los Angeles–based son’s role from occasional lyrical collaborator to full co-producer, spending weeks at a time in Nashville. The two had previously worked together on “Road to the Sun” from Thank You Mr. Churchill.

“I have to credit Julian with coming up with some incredible ideas that made this album so much better,” Frampton says. “Maybe if I was working with another producer, the control freak in me would’ve said, ‘I don’t think so.’ But because it was my son, we said we’re not gonna settle on any level for this album.

“That was our motto: We have to try everything. We have to try each other’s ideas — otherwise, what’s the point?”

Frampton also made a rare and previously unrecorded foray with a Fender Telecaster on “Buried Treasure,” a high-octane tribute to the late Tom Petty inspired by Frampton’s love of Petty’s Buried Treasure program on SiriusXM.

“That’s the guitar sound of Mike Campbell and Tom. That’s a Tele,” Julian explains, singing the track’s ringing riff.

“And then, for the whole album, he’s got such incredible pedals to dig in and try different effects — his Mutron, his Eventide choruses. It was so fun to play with him, with his sound, which I’d never experienced before.

“And most of the album was cut with this little SIR amp that he just loves. It’s got an incredible sound.”

Recorded primarily at Frampton’s Studio Phenix in Nashville, with overdubs at Bigsby Park and elsewhere, Carry the Light includes a number of other experiments as well. The title track incorporates a Shawnee stomp dance and chants recorded by Frampton’s guitar tech Nick Gibson with his tribal elders in Oklahoma, while Frampton pulls out the Dupont for “I’m Sorry Elle” (with Graham Nash), an ode to his granddaughter, who was born during the height of COVID — and whom he couldn’t visit for several months.

“It’s a nod to Django,” Frampton says, “even though I could never play like him. But I hinted at what I can do.”

Two tracks with jazz saxophonist Bill Evans — “Can You Take Me There” and “Tinderbox” — explore vibey terrain and deep grooves. The former evokes Marvin Gaye circa What’s Going On, while the latter features fiery instrumental exchanges between Frampton and Evans.

“‘Tinderbox’ is so varied,” Frampton says. “It’s a journey. All of a sudden you’re in a jazz bar.”

Every song on the album — which also features Sheryl Crow on “Breaking the Mold” — houses a noteworthy solo, often the first element Frampton says he came up with.

“I don’t like thinking about what I’m gonna play at all, even while I’m playing it,” he says. “I like the fresh ones, where there are new ideas and places I haven’t been before.

“I’ll do three or four takes, take a break, save those and then stop thinking. I’ll come back and do three or four more takes. Usually the first take of each batch is the best — because you don’t care.”

“I try to play as if I have no problem,” he adds. “Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Okay, this is just a thruway. I’ll just throw this one away.’ That’s usually the one that ends up being the best — because you’re not thinking.”

Frampton currently has no touring plans but will make appearances to promote both the album and the documentary. He’s already looking ahead to the next record; he and Julian recorded six additional tracks during the Carry the Light sessions, and Frampton says he already has “four embryonic ideas ready for me and Julian to sit down and do the same thing.”

“That’s what makes me feel so good,” he says. “I come from an album perspective, where you’ve got 19 to 21 minutes at most on either side. Just because you’ve got the time on a cassette or CD doesn’t mean you should put it all out.

“I’ve never been a fan of that. It’s quality versus quantity — and we’ve got more quality coming your way.”

Guitar Player Presents is partnering with AEG to welcome Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening to the stunning Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, on May 19. And you have a chance to win two tickets to the event.

There are countless Zeppelin tributes, but only one boasts the drummer who played with the real deal, including at their last live gig.

Jason Bonham — the son of Zeppelin drummer John Bonham — sat on the drum throne at London’s 02 Arena with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones for Celebration Day on December 10, 2007. Today, he keeps the Zeppelin flame burning on the road with Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening — or JBLZE — featuring “Mr. Jimmy” Sakurai on guitar.

Sakurai’s ascent from Japan's best Page tribute guitarist to the international stage is legendary. As the leader of Mr. Jimmy’s Led Zeppelin Revival, he was so convincing that the real Page traveled to Japan to watch him perform in 2012. Page was impressed and gave Sakurai his blessing to keep playing his music and copying his persona.

Sakurai’s remarkable electric guitar journey is the subject of the documentary Mr. Jimmy, which generated buzz for the guitarist when it played at the SXSW Film Festival in 2019.

In addition to Sakurai, Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening includes James Dylan on vocals, Dorian Heartsong on bass and Alex Howland on keyboards. Join them for a set “featuring the biggest radio hits Zeppelin ever wrote, plus fan-favorite deep cuts.”

Now two lucky winners will win tickets to their Mountain Winery performance. Mountain Winery is located less than an hour south of San Francisco. It’s truly one of the most spectacular venues to experience a concert in all of picturesque Northern California, so if you’re planning to be in the area on Tuesday, May 19, be sure to catch this killer classic rock show.

Secure your advance tickets now.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening in Saratoga, California, on Tuesday, May 19, please send an email and put “Bonham” in the subject. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact for confirmation is greatly appreciated.

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

EVENT DETAILS

GP Presents Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening

Tuesday, May 19

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

You’ve seen the film footage: four Beatles on a London rooftop, playing their final live performance above the streets below. Soon, you’ll be able to stand in that very same place.

Apple Corps announced today that the building at 3 Savile Row in Mayfair, London — home to the Beatles’ late-1960s headquarters and the site of their famous rooftop concert — will open to the public in 2027.

The location housed the studio where the band recorded much of what became the Let It Be project and served as the setting for their final performance, when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr staged an impromptu rooftop concert on January 30, 1969.

The new attraction, The Beatles at 3 Savile Row, will span seven floors and feature previously unseen material from Apple’s archives, rotating exhibitions, a retail store and a re-creation of the basement studio where Let It Be was recorded.

For many visitors, however, the biggest draw will simply be the chance to walk through the same rooms where the Beatles worked, rehearsed and recorded the music captured in their films and albums — and to step onto the rooftop where their time as a live band came to an end.

The Beatles launched Apple Corps in 1968 as an ambitious multimedia venture overseeing film, music, electronics, clothing and home furnishings. Its most successful arm proved to be Apple Records, which released the Beatles’ own recordings as well as solo projects by the band members and albums by artists signed to the label, including Mary Hopkin, Billy Preston and Badfinger.

McCartney and Starr recently returned to Savile Row for a look inside the building.

“It was such a trip to get back to 3 Savile Row recently and have a look around,” McCartney said. “There are so many special memories within the walls, not to mention the rooftop. The team have put together some really impressive plans, and I’m excited for people to see it when it’s ready.”

Said Starr, “Wow, it’s like coming home.”

The Savile Row project arrives as the Beatles prepare for another major cultural moment. In April 2028, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Neal Street Productions will release a four-film cinematic event directed by Sam Mendes — the first scripted project for which Apple Corps and the Beatles have granted full life-story and music rights. The films will star Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Starr, Paul Mescal as McCartney and Joseph Quinn as Harrison.

In the meantime, fans have plenty to keep them occupied. McCartney and Starr both have new albums coming out — as well as their first duet — and McCartney’s first Höfner bass guitar is the subject of the recently released documentary McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass.

In November 1964, the Who entered the studio to record “I Can’t Explain,” the single that would help launch their career.

But guitarist Pete Townshend and the session’s other guitarist, Jimmy Page, had something else on their minds that day: a woman they had both been sleeping with.

In fact, when Page arrived at the studio, the two guitarists spent much of their time talking about her.

By that point the Who were building a loyal following in London’s clubs, but their first single, “Zoot Suit,” released under the name the High Numbers, had failed to chart. Their next record needed to work. Townshend wrote “I Can’t Explain” with a clear objective — to capture the explosive sound producer Shel Talmy had recently helped create with the Kinks.

Talmy had produced the Kinks’ breakthrough hits “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” which served as Townshend’s template. The Kinks records had reset the expectations for British guitar-driven pop, and Townshend was deliberately aiming at that compressed, aggressive sound.

Talmy liked “I Can’t Explain,” but he wasn’t entirely confident the young band could deliver a tight studio performance. Keith Moon’s timekeeping could be unpredictable, and Townshend himself felt he wasn’t yet much of a lead guitarist.

So Talmy reinforced the session. The English vocal trio the Ivy League was brought in to supply backing vocals, and two session players were hired as insurance. The identity of the substitute drummer remains unknown, but the guitarist was Page, a favorite of Talmy’s and one of London’s busiest studio musicians.

Page’s presence later fueled speculation that he played the distinctive guitar solo on “I Can’t Explain.” Townshend has always rejected that idea. “The solo’s me,” he told Guitar World in 1995. “Jimmy doesn’t play like that.”

Townshend already knew Page from the London music scene — and from a more personal connection.

“Jimmy was a friend of mine,” he continued. “We’d had a mutual girlfriend. She’d been going out with Jimmy before and was still, you know… kinda hooked on him for a little longer than I was comfortable with.”

The situation, he admitted, left both young guitarists unusually entangled.

“Anyway, she was much older than us. We were 19 or 20 and she was about 30. And a fucking sexy woman! She’d obviously fucked him to death and then proceeded to fuck me to death. And we had her in common. We were both kind of cross-eyed with this woman.”

So when Page showed up at the studio that day, the conversation quickly drifted from guitars to their shared romantic history.

“We just started to talk about what we always talked about,” Townshend said. “‘How's Anya?' ‘How is she? What’s she going through? Has she called you? Has she called me?’”

Only after a while did Townshend ask the obvious question.

“And then I said to him, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m here to give some weight to the guitar. I’m going to double the rhythm guitar on the overdubs.’”

Townshend had no objection. The two discussed their electric guitars and settled on their parts easily.

“He said, ‘What are you going to play?’ ‘A Rick 12,’ I told him. And he said, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll play a…’ whatever it was. It was all very congenial.”

Keith Moon, however, was less accommodating. Furious that another drummer had been brought in, he confronted the session player directly.

“Keith was over in the corner,” Townshend recalled, “telling the drummer, ‘Get out of the fucking studio or I’ll kill ya. Only Keith Moon plays the drums on a Who record!’”

Somehow, amid the tension — and while Townshend and Jimmy Page compared notes about the same woman they’d both been seeing — the band captured “I Can’t Explain,” the single that would launch the Who’s rise.

More importantly, “I Can’t Explain” confirmed for Townshend the group had a future.

“We had a hit record, ‘I Can't Explain,’” Townshend told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in November 2025. “I was driving my mom's little yellow van back to Ealing, where we lived in West London. I heard it on the radio, and that was it. I thought, Wow, I'm communicating. I have an audience.”

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.”

When Steve Cropper heard the mixes of his final album, he knew exactly what he thought of it.

“I finished the mixes about a week and a half before Steve passed, and we brought a CD to him at the medical facility,” songwriter and producer Jon Tiven recalls. “He called me the night before he passed to tell me how much he loved it. He was playing it for everyone who came to visit him, telling them it was the best record he’d ever made.”

That album — Watching the Tide — will arrive later this year, serving as a poignant final statement from one of the most influential guitarists in soul and rock history.

The record was largely completed before Cropper’s death in December, with 10 of its 11 tracks finished beforehand. Recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio C, the album again pairs him with Tiven and is being released under the banner Steve Cropper & the Midnight Hour.

Like its predecessor Friendlytown, the project brings in a notable roster of collaborators. Eric Clapton appears on the lead single “Ticket First,” released May 7, while Ronnie Wood contributes to “Until Now.” Other guests include Billy Gibbons and Brian May, with May joining Cropper on the aptly titled “My Angels Are Calling.”

“Making music was Steve’s greatest joy,” Tiven says. “Steve was so encouraged by Friendlytown. He was adamant he wanted to do another record.”

Cropper’s career stretched back more than six decades. As the guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s — the house band for Stax Records — he helped define the sound of southern soul and co-wrote classics including “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” “Knock on Wood,” and “In the Midnight Hour.”

Beyond his work at Stax, Cropper built a formidable résumé as a session player and producer, working with artists such as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Jeff Beck, Ringo Starr and Rod Stewart. He also appeared onscreen as a member of the Blues Brothers Band.

Along the way he earned multiple Grammys, including one for “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” and another with Booker T. & the M.G.’s for the 1995 track “Cruisin’.”

Despite that legacy, Cropper kept his advice to young guitarists simple. In one of his final major interviews, with Total Guitar in 2024, he said, “Do not get into this business for money. Do it for fun — and if you’re good, somewhere along the way someone will pay you.”

He described his own approach to the instrument as practical. “I use it as a tool,” he said of the electric guitar. “I couldn't afford to hire another guitarist on a lot of Stax records, so I learned to play rhythm and lead at the same time so when I was soloing the rhythm wouldn't drop out.”

Watching the Tide is scheduled for release Aug. 28 via Provogue Records / Artone Label Group.

When Mick Jagger walked into a London studio to record vocals for the new Rolling Stones album, he found an unexpected guest waiting for him.

“I turned up one day to do my vocals in London, and there's this bloke standing there, with his back to me, with this long gown on,” Jagger recalled during an invitation-only event on Tuesday, May 5. “And when he turned around, he was covered in lipstick.”

The man turned out to be Robert Smith of the Cure — someone Jagger had never met before.

“And I said, ‘You are Robert Smith from the Cure!’ And he said, ‘Yeah!’” Jagger told the crowd.

“So I said, ‘Well, while you're here, then you better go and do something.’”

The impromptu encounter led to a collaboration that will appear on the Stones’ upcoming album, Foreign Tongues, due July 10.

Jagger shared the story Tuesday during a conversation with Conan O'Brien in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he appeared alongside the Stones’ electric guitar tandem of Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood to discuss the new record and preview a few tracks.

O’Brien quickly imagined an alternate version of the moment.

“What if it hadn’t been Robert Smith,” he said, “and you said, ‘Let’s do a track,’ and you found out later he was there to fix the air conditioning?”

Foreign Tongues arrives less than three years after the Stones’ 2023 release, Hackney Diamonds, which topped charts worldwide, won a Grammy Award and achieved multi-Platinum status.

Like that record, the new album features several collaborations and previously developed recordings. Among them is a track featuring founding Stones drummer Charlie Watts, captured during one of his final recording sessions before his death in 2021, as well as a collaboration with Paul McCartney recorded during the Hackney Diamonds sessions.

The album will be introduced by the lead single, In the Stars, released digitally May 5 alongside the opening track, Rough and Twisted.

At the start of the Brooklyn event, O’Brien also shared an anecdote that illustrated Jagger’s enduring curiosity about audiences — even after decades of performing.

The two first met backstage at the 96th Academy Awards, where O’Brien was host and Jagger made a surprise appearance to present the Oscar for Best Original Song.

While waiting backstage, O’Brien recalled hearing someone behind him repeatedly ask, “How’s the crowd? How’s the crowd?”

“And I turned around, and it was you,” he told Jagger. “We had never met.

“And I said, ‘What the fuck do you care how the crowd is? You’re Mick Jagger! They’re just gonna urinate when they see you come out.’ Which they did.”

“But it was the Oscars,” Jagger replied with a laugh.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter,” O’Brien said. “I just loved that you were like, ‘How are they? How are they?’ I think you're gonna be okay. Something tells me they’re going to know you and be happy that you’re there.”

O’Brien added that the band’s attention to its audience can still be heard in the music of Foreign Tongues.

“I’m always trying to get people to understand that no one gets to the level that you guys are at. It’s an unheard-of situation,” he said. “But one of the components is — which you can hear on this record again and again and again — ‘We want to make this great.’”

Guitar Center asked its store leaders to identify the songs customers play most often in its locations — and, surprisingly, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” didn’t take the top spot.

The survey, conducted across Guitar Center stores nationwide, highlights the electric guitar riffs employees hear most frequently from customers testing instruments. The results reveal a mix of classic-rock staples and modern favorites — with a few long-standing guitar-store clichés ranking lower than expected.

“We went out to our store leadership with a survey and said, ‘Write your most overplayed songs and tell us about any anecdotes — whatever you have,’” Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto tells Rolling Stone.

“It actually turned out to be a really consistent list,” Dalporto adds. “Across stores and across regions, people are generally playing the same types of songs.”

So what came in at number one? Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” followed by Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Other well-known guitar-store staples — like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” with its ubiquitous riff by Ritchie Blackmore, and Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” which features Randy Rhoads’ signature riff — might seem like obvious contenders. Dalporto notes that the former has been “torturing our associates for decades.”

The absence of “Stairway to Heaven” is notable. The song’s popularity among music-store guitarists was famously spoofed in the film Wayne's World, where a sign warns customers not to play the classic. Guitar Center even displayed similar signs in its own stores for years.

The company lifted that tongue-in-cheek ban last year after YouTuber Døvydas invited Dalporto to play “Stairway to Heaven” with him.

Dalporto says he sympathizes with employees who hear the same riffs day after day.

“These songs are played a lot,” he says. “They’re often not played well. So you hear them over and over. But when someone nails it, you can tell — and the store staff really appreciates it when someone is awesome.”

The 10 most-played riffs at Guitar Center

1. Metallica — “Master of Puppets”

2. Guns N’ Roses — “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

3. The White Stripes — “Seven Nation Army”

4. Nirvana — “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

5. John Mayer — “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room”

6. Metallica — “Enter Sandman”

7. Tool — “Schism”

8. Ozzy Osbourne — “Crazy Train”

9. Nirvana — “Come as You Are”

10. Deep Purple — “Smoke on the Water”

Paul McCartney has collaborated with scores of artists over the decades, from Elvis Costello to Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Johnny Cash.

But he has never recorded a proper duet with his former Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr — until now.

Titled “Home to Us,” the track is a featured moment on McCartney’s upcoming solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, due May 29. The record was produced by Andrew Watt, whose recent credits include Dark Matter by Pearl Jam and Hackney Diamonds by the Rolling Stones.

The collaboration, however, didn’t come together entirely smoothly, as McCartney and Starr reveal in separate conversations.

Speaking on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Starr explains that the song began life two years ago as a jam between him and Watt, who lives down the street from him.

“I went down, and there was a kit in his studio,” Ringo says, “and he played guitar and we jammed.”

When Starr began working on his new album, Long Long Road, he thought the track might be right for it.

“I said, Andrew, send me that bit we did of the jamming. He never did,” he deadpans.

As McCartney revealed at a listening party for The Boys of Dungeon Lane, he heard their jam and began crafting it into a song. When Watt called Starr to ask him to add more drums to it, Ringo was, McCartney says, “a bit pissed.”

Nevertheless, McCartney pressed on with the track, writing lyrics about growing up in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool. It was there that he first joined forces with John Lennon and George Harrison — and where he and Lennon began crafting their earliest songs together on acoustic guitars.

“Even though where we lived was a little rough, it was home to us,” McCartney says.

Confusion continued to reign over their track, even after McCartney sent the demo to Starr to add vocals. Rather than sing the entire song, Starr recorded only the chorus, leading McCartney to assume that the drummer didn’t like the track.

After the two former Beatles talked it through, however, everything fell into place. Starr returned to the studio to record additional drums, and the song ultimately evolved into a true collaboration.

In all likelihood, the misunderstanding came down to Starr’s lack of experience, McCartney joked, noting with a laugh: “Ringo’s never done a duet with one of the Beatles.”

According to Billboard, the finished track has a distinctly Beatles-esque feel, featuring tempo shifts, key changes and layered harmonies. Among the voices joining McCartney and Starr are Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas.

It’s been a busy period for McCartney. In addition to preparing the new album, he’s been celebrating the release of the documentary McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass, which chronicles the search for his long-missing Höfner 500/1 violin bass. The instrument disappeared in 1972 and was finally recovered in 2024 after the Lost Bass Project launched a global hunt for the legendary guitar.

Jim Peterik has composed plenty of hit songs. Perhaps most notable is “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, a band he founded in 1978.

But way back in 1970, the guitarist managed to craft a tune for his jazz-rock group the Ides of March that shot up to number 2 on the Billboard charts. Dubbed “Vehicle,” it became the fastest-breaking single in the history of Warner Bros. Records at the time.

Peterik wrote the song to win back a girlfriend with the offer to be the ride to her dreams. The song’s distinctive brass horn section bursts out, demanding attention and hooking the listener’s ears.

Nevertheless, Peterik thought “Vehicle” was a throwaway at best. Instead, it became an enduring hit, known to many even if they can’t place the name of the group that recorded it.

“There was no game plan or demographic research done,” Peterik says of the song. “We were mainly thinking, ‘How do we get that girl in the front row to throw her panties at us?’

“We were pretty clueless. All we knew was that every time we played ‘Vehicle’ at a dance, people would be partying. We didn't value the song at all. It was just this fun tune that people danced to.”

With its distinctive horn figures, “Vehicle” sounded to many listeners of the time like a new track from Blood, Sweat & Tears. But Peterik wasn’t thinking of that group when he wrote it, nor did he suspect he had a potential hit on his hands.

“I didn't know what made it work,” he offers. “The horn riff was a call to arms that everyone remembers, but I was 19 years old then, and it took many, many years for me to define what was really special about that song. It's not like you can go into a laboratory and create a hit with the same formula: ‘Okay, I did it. I'll just do it again.’”

The Ides cut “Vehicle” live, except for the lead vocals.

“We knew the song so well that we didn't need a guide vocal,” Peterik explains. “All the brass is blaring together, and one thing that I don't think I've ever told anybody is that I doubled all the horn lines with a Les Paul and a Maestro Fuzz-Tone. People would ask, ‘How did you get that ballsy brass sound?’ Well, the secret weapon was the Maestro, which I got right after we cut the track, and I just added it.”

Ironically, Peterik’s electric guitar was dealt a pair of blows during the recording.

“I had an awesome Fender Dual Showman and a red Epiphone Riviera, and I broke a string during take one, so Larry [Millas, co-guitarist] lent me his sunburst Epiphone Riviera for take two, as he was playing organ.”

Take two was perfect, but a studio technician made the kind of error every recording artist fears.

“The second engineer managed to erase 13 seconds of take two, which we liked, and we thought our lives were over,” Peterik says. “So he edited the first part of take one onto take two, which shouldn't have worked, as this is before click tracks. But it was perfect.

“So what you hear is 13 seconds of my red Epiphone, and the rest, including the solo, is Larry's sunburst Epiphone.”

Incidentally, notes Peterik, his red Epiphone is on the “One Hit Wonder” wall at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Which is kind of cool,” he admits.

As for that solo, which he cut live, Peterik says he was influenced by one of the era’s axe gods.

“I was channeling my god — Jeff Beck — but I ran out of licks,” he admits. “I usually played right through to the horn reprise, but I just gave up and left this hole, and the drummer did this magnificent fill that he had never done before. He turned my mistake into something brilliant. You can't plan that shit.”

Peterik notes that the overdrive on the solo isn’t the Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

“The first engineer, Dick Dearborn, told me I was playing too loud, so he decided to take the output from the Showman, plug it directly into the mixer, and distort it by overdriving the board's transistor preamp.”

Peterik says he wasn’t a big fan of the Fuzz-Tone and didn’t mind setting it aside. “I was never happy with that cheesy overdrive, even after it almost became a famous sound. Board overdrive. No effects. That's the solo.”

Released as a single in March 1970, “Vehicle” shot up the charts.

And yet, not surprisingly, then–Warner Bros. president Joe Smith pushed Peterik to repeat the song’s success.

“And I came up with ‘Superman,’” says Peterik, who would connect with Frankie Sullivan and form Survivor in 1978. “It's hard to clone something like that, though. ‘Vehicle’ was an original creation out of whole cloth, whereas ‘Superman’ was like a carbon copy. It had the same DNA. But ‘Superman’ didn't even reach the top 50.

“As time went on, I started to learn more about what makes a great record great — the beats, the repetition, the cadence of the vocal and lyrics — but I'm still not an expert.”

One of the earliest examples of psychedelic rock came courtesy of a folkie, of all people. Donovan, the Scottish troubadour, delivered the genre to 1966 rock fans via Sunshine Superman, a Trojan horse as it were for psychedelia’s entry into the mainstream.

When Sunshine Superman was released in the U.S. in September 1966, it not only topped the Billboard charts, it made Donovan a superstar and introduced elements of world music, Celtic mythology and Swinging London into the mainstream pop universe. The inspiration for it came from his girlfriend, Linda Lawrence.

“It's very important to remember that love songs are very important,” Donovan says about his extraordinary musical achievement, “and the love story of Linda — my muse and sunshine supergirl — and mine is all over this album.”

The story goes that he and Lawrence broke up prior to the album’s creation, and that his longing for her fueled its songs. Apparently so did drugs: “Sunshine” was a popular 1960s term for LSD.

Produced and recorded by Mickie Most in London at EMI and at Columbia Records in Hollywood, Sunshine Superman was Donovan’s most successful album, peaking at number 11 on the U.S. charts and remaining on Billboard’s Top LPs chart for six months. (Due to contractual disputes, the album wasn’t released in the U.K. until 1967.) Among the album’s tracks are two that became instant hits: “Sunshine Superman” and “Season of the Witch.”

So how did a folkie come to be a psychedelic pop artist?

“I was known as a folkie, yes, but my parents always played high-quality jazz at home, so that style was with me, as well,” he tells Guitar Player. “I was playing ‘Sunshine Superman’ in a kind of funky Latin-jazz way, and Mickie Most said, ‘That's the single! What do you hear on it?’

“I said, ‘A harpsichord, congas, bass and a jazz guitar.’

“I didn't have a band, you see, so Mickie introduced me to the jazz arranger John Cameron, and John said, ‘I love the song. Don't worry — I know what you need.’”

Among the musicians hired for the London session were Jimmy Page, who played the repeating guitar lick using a volume pedal for variation in attack, and John Paul Jones on bass. The two future members of Led Zeppelin would also feature on Donovan’s 1968 proto–heavy metal masterpiece, “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

As for “Season of the Witch,” Donovan explains that its creation owes a lot to Scottish folk guitarist Bert Jansch.

“Bert Jansch taught me the descending pattern of the Am down to the G bass to the F# bass to the F bass, and also the shape of the D9 chord,” he explains. “The D9 helped me crack the song.”

The tune took shape in Jansch’s kitchen, where guests included his collaborator John Renbourn and the folk musician Shawn Phillips, who joined in, playing lines on a 12-string guitar.

“Bert always had players from all over Europe stay with him,” Donovan explains. The folk singer doesn’t say if drugs were involved, but his memory of the night comes courtesy of what Renbourn told him.

“John said that I played ‘Season of the Witch’ for seven hours straight, all night and into the dawn,” he reveals. “I didn't know what I had. I didn't know that I had something that would last this long.”

“Season of the Witch” is one of the album tracks cut in Hollywood. As Donovan explains, he and Phillips picked up some local musicians to help them achieve the rock-combo sound they wanted. Rather than playing acoustic guitar as he usually did, Donovan played electric on the track.

“When we recorded it, I used my first electric guitar — a white Telecaster — and started chunking the chords. Mickie said, ‘That's it!’ Then we added the spooky, Dracula-movie organ, bass and drums.

“It's funny — the engineers wouldn't let us turn up the bass because the signal was going into the red.”

Most changed their minds by invoking the name of Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, which owned Epic, Donovan’s U.S. label.

“Mickie said, ‘Listen, Clive Davis in New York just gave me three million dollars to record three British bands. Do you think if I called him and asked for a little bit more bass that he'd give it to me?’

“The engineers looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, Mr. Most, you can turn up the bass.’”

Donovan has said he believes his greatest contribution to music was the idea of fusing different styles. But while Sunshine Superman stands today as an early example of his achievement, he explains that he was aiming for a higher goal.

“The idea was this, and it was very simple — bring all world music together,” he says. “I wasn't in one genre like all the other bands at the time. I didn't have to do just jazz, blues or pop.

“I thought, If we're really going to be talking about unity, consciousness, meditation, peace, brotherhood and the coming together of all nations, this was going to have to be done musically.

“That was the concept.”

David Lindley is perhaps the greatest sideman of all time, and it’s nearly time to pay tribute to the man once again. GP Presents is proud to re-team with roots guitar maestro Papa Mali along with former Lindley drummer/percussionist Wally Ingram at the hip Chickie Wah Wah club in New Orleans during the Jazz & Heritage Festival to throw a Lindley-themed hootenanny.

“Mr. Dave” was a master of myriad stringed instruments and a lap steel slide virtuoso. His multi-faceted talents as a player and vocalist made Lindley the sideman to the stars including Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder and Bonnie Raitt. His slide playing was a huge influence on Ben Harper and Sonny Landreth. All gave heartfelt praise and glorious anecdotes about Lindley in GP’s November 2024 tribute feature.

Lindley also founded and fronted the pioneering world rock band El Rayo-X, and he eventually logged lots of miles touring his Twango Bongo duo with Ingram. He’ll provide the heartbeat for this evening of Lindley tunes spearheaded by reggae and blues guru Papa Mali. The event is also Papa's birthday bash, and a who's who of his funky NOLA krewe will pass through what’s become an annual tradition.

When Lindley passed on March 3, 2023, Mali and Ingram quickly decided to turn Papa’s birthday party gig into a Lindley tribute at the newly renovated Chickie Wah Wah. GP Presents got involved in 2024 when a parade of Lindley lovers brought his diverse catalog to life.

Featured guest artists for the 2026 celebration include: Bernie Larsen of El Rayo-X, Jordan Zevon performing the songs of Warren Zevon with pianist Jordan Summers (Wild Honey Orchestra), Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz (ALO), the Iguanas, Dave Easely, Lindley student Kota Kato, Lindley disciple Lorenzo Piccone, bass ace Casandra Faulconer and more TBA.

Lindley mastered everything from violin to banjo, mandolin, dobro and bouzouki, to name just a few. He was an expert in Hawaiian-style slide blues, and Piccone honors him in that style playing lap steel on a Weissenborn.

Lindley was most renowned for his searing electric lap-steel slide as heard on Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” and featured on many El Rayo-X favorites including his signature tune, “Mercury Blues.”

Here’s a classic live video of Lindley ripping “Mercury Blues” live with El Rayo-X in 1981.

El Rayo-X was one of the first rock bands with a heavy reggae influence. Papa Mali carried that inspiration forward with his work in the Killer Bees as well as the cosmic, rhythmic blues that underlies his extensive solo career.

“Wally and I go back to the early ’80s when we both were playing in reggae bands,” Mali recalls. “He is the reason I knew Lindley as anything other than a fan. My first personal encounter with Mr. Dave was the day after I witnessed a now-legendary performance by he and Ry Cooder at Jazz Fest in May of 1994.

“Wally started playing with Dave some years later and introduced me at a show,” Mali continues. “After that he would always say hello and want to talk about guitar stuff. I once asked if he’d sign a ’60s Airline guitar. His reply was, ‘Now, why would you want to mess up this perfectly nice guitar?’ But he obliged.

“Wally and I plan to keep doing this annual tribute show as long as artists and fans keep supporting it.”

If you’re planning to be in the New Orleans area during the second weekend of Jazz Fest, which happens over the first weekend in May, be sure to show your support for David Lindley by coming to see Papa Mali, Wally Ingram, and a fabulous lineup of talents playing his music on a wide variety of stringed instruments.

Get your tickets now.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see the David Lindley tribute in New Orleans, send an email with “Lindley Tribute” in the subject and simply include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go.

Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide his or her own transportation to Chickie Wah Wah in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Sunday, May 3, and have his or her own accommodations in the area.

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EVENT DETAILS

Guitar Player Presents David Lindley Tribute at Papa Mali’s Birthday Bash

Sunday, May 3

Chickie Wah Wah

2828 Canal StreetPhone: (504) 541-2050

10 pm doors, 10:30 pm show; Ages 21+

Free Martin strings

Buy Tickets

The Doors, the E Street Band, Patti Smith, Dr. Dre, Dionne Warwick and the Band were honored this past weekend at the fourth annual American Music Honors. Presented by the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, the event celebrates artists who have demonstrated artistic excellence, creative integrity and a longstanding commitment to the value of music in our national consciousness.

“I didn’t get the Doors at first,” E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt said during his speech honoring the L.A.-based band. Growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, he admitted to holding a distinct East Coast prejudice against anything West Coast. “If you didn’t come from the Eric Clapton school of electric guitar playing, you were irrelevant.

“The truth is their music was just too sophisticated for me to understand. They’re some of the most cinematic compositions in rock history.”

As an example, he pointed to “Light My Fire,” the group’s breakout 1967 hit. “‘Light My Fire’ alone is all you need,” he said. “Robby Krieger’s chords are insane in this song. The verse is crazy, the chorus is crazy, Ray Manzarek’s intro ties it all together with a simple melody, which is equally crazy. It comes across as a beautiful, flowing, accessible river. Very simple but extraordinarily complicated.”

Jamming was all the rage in the late ’60s, Van Zandt added, but the Doors took a different approach.

“Unlike everybody else, who were just soloing to solo, with the Doors we were witnessing the creation of live cinéma vérité. Their solos were adventurous. The written part of the composition was just the beginning.”

Although Krieger could not attend the event due to an illness in the family, the band’s founding drummer, John Densmore, accepted the award.

During his speech, Densmore recalled the Doors’ first rehearsal, where they jammed on “All Blues” by Miles Davis and a Muddy Waters song. He said he was unimpressed with singer Jim Morrison until Manzarek pulled him aside and handed him some of Morrison’s lyrics — an early version of “Soul Kitchen.” Reading them, he recognized a unique fusion.

“Poetry and rock and roll,” he said. “I’m down!”

The spry 81-year-old drummer later joined Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen for a loose but reverential take on “Light My Fire.”

“I haven’t played this song since the CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] dance back in 1967,” Springsteen joked.

Patti Smith, meanwhile, acknowledged the importance of legendary ’60s folk guitarist Bobby Neuwirth and playwright Sam Shepard as early guiding lights in her career. Neuwirth, she said, encouraged her to transform her poems into songs.

“I never thought of that myself,” she explained. “Everything for me was poetry. And it was Sam Shepard who told me I should have some guitar behind me. These two men sent me on my way. And then it was Lenny Kaye who first played guitar for me, and things evolved organically,”

Smith later joined Springsteen for a performance of “Because the Night,” a song they ultimately co-wrote after Springsteen realized he couldn’t find the lyrical voice needed for its emotional center.

“Her music fused poetry and rock and roll in a way that felt ancient and revolutionary,” he said. “It reminds us that music can still be dangerous, it can still be sacred, and it can still be free.”

Jon Landau, who famously declared in 1974, “I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” inducted the E Street Band.

“They are the heartbeat behind some of the most powerful songs ever written,” Landau said. “They built the sound that feels like home to millions and millions of people.”

Landau also referenced Tom Morello’s observations about the E Street Band’s sound. The Rage Against the Machine guitarist — and a frequent E Street Band guest — was mystified by what he heard in the records.

“He said to me, ‘These arrangements shouldn’t really work, but they do. And magnificently so.’”

Springsteen also recognized the talents of New Jersey native Dionne Warwick and the immense impact she had on his music.

“I’ve listened to her music consistently my entire life. She has the most elegant voice in the history of pop music. It is so sophisticatedly sexy, totally singular, deeply original while remaining deceptively casual.

“She was always there at the service of the song and lyric,” he added. “They are performances that will live forever. Most of them are from the greatest partnership between a singer and a writing team in pop music history — Burt Bacharach and Hal David.”

Max Weinberg paid tribute to the Band with an informative speech about their importance to the American music landscape.

“The Band conjured up a musical alchemy, a blend of rhythm and blues, rockabilly, gospel, folk, American work songs, soul, Scottish reels, blues, country and western,” he said. “There was very little they did not incorporate into their music.”

The three-and-a-half-hour show, held at Monmouth University in Long Branch, New Jersey, featured a wide range of memorable musical moments. Flavor Flav and Chuck D raised the energy in the 700-seat theater with a raucous, heavy version of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” complete with Springsteen fist-pumping from the front row.

Steve Earle sang the Doors’ Morrison Hotel classic “Roadhouse Blues,” while Smith offered a sublime take on “The Crystal Ship,” from the group's debut album. Amy Helm — daughter of the Band’s Levon Helm — delivered a soulful performance of the Band classic “Up on Cripple Creek,” joined by drummer Charley Drayton.

Disciples of Soul guitarist Marc Ribler served as the event’s musical director, leading a house band of New Jersey/New York music veterans.

The Springsteen Archives museum is scheduled to open in June with a two-night grand opening concert entitled Music America: The Songs That Shaped Us. The event will feature performances reflecting the diverse history of American music. Artists scheduled to appear include Jon Bon Jovi, Jackson Browne, Jimmie Vaughan, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Rosanne Cash, Kenny Chesney, Gary Clark Jr., Dion, Tony Trischka and Sister Sadie, Dropkick Murphys, Shemekia Copeland, Valerie June, Keb’ Mo’, Nils Lofgren, Darlene Love, Public Enemy, David Sancious, Mavis Staples, Trombone Shorty and the New Breed Brass Band.

Freddie Mercury was the consummate rock-and-roll showman. In both his songs and performances with Queen, he gave everything he had to make the audience feel part of the story. A song like “We Are the Champions” demonstrates this clearly. Although it begins as a reflection on the trials of show business, the song ultimately becomes an anthem for the audience: not “I am the champion,” but “We are the champions.”

So it was fitting that the final song on Queen’s last album with Mercury should celebrate the stage itself. “The Show Must Go On” fills that role, and like “We Are the Champions,” it functions both as a reflection on Mercury and as a message to the band’s fans.

As guitarist Brian May explains, the song was also an attempt to confront Mercury’s battle with AIDS, the illness that would claim his life on November 24, 1991.

“It’s a long story, that song,” says May, the track’s main composer, “but I always felt it would be important because we were dealing with things that were hard to talk about at the time. In the world of music, you could do it.”

The song began during a jam between drummer Roger Taylor and bass guitarist John Deacon.

“‘The Show Must Go On’ came from Roger and John playing the sequence, and I started to put things down,” May explained. “At the beginning it was just this chord sequence, but I had this strange feeling that it could be somehow important, and I got very impassioned and went and beavered away at it.”

When May felt he had something worth developing, he arranged a writing session with Mercury to discuss the theme and lyrics. But the singer was already too frail to work for long.

“We only wrote one verse together — that was all we managed that afternoon — but it was enough to push me forward with the song.”

The concept they devised centered on a clown who is suffering but must still paint on a smile.

Over the following days May continued shaping the piece, adding a bridge inspired by Pachelbel's Canon and completing the lyrics.

One line in particular arrived, as he later described it, like “a gift from God.”

“I woke up one morning with this image of butterflies in my head, and I thought I would love to hear Freddie sing: ‘My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies.’ I thought: this is Freddie. And he’s not going to write it for himself, because he wasn’t going to thrust himself forward in that way. But I can write it for him. I wanted to put those words in his mouth.

“And it was a gift from God. I don’t even know where those lyrics came from.”

May finished the demo himself, although the melody was pitched so high that he had to sing the guide vocal in falsetto. He played it for Mercury the next time the singer was able to come into the studio.

“By that time he was suffering a lot. He could hardly stand,” May said of the session. “I played him some of the demo, with me singing, which went incredibly high and was very difficult. In the past Freddie was always shouting at me, like, ‘It’s too fucking high! You’re making me ruin my beautiful voice!’”

This time, Mercury had no complaint.

Once the band completed the backing track — with May, as usual, playing his homemade Red Special electric guitar — he raised the issue again.

“I said, ‘Fred, I don’t know if this is going to be possible to sing.’ And he went, ‘I’ll fucking do it, darling,’” May recalled to Rolling Stone in 2010.

Mercury fortified himself with a drink.

“So he downed a couple of vodkas, neat, then propped himself up on the desk and worked his way through singing all of that song,” May later told Total Guitar. “And it was amazing. I think he did three or four takes, and he absolutely smashed that vocal. It’s like he reached into a place that even he’d never got to before.

“I remember saying to Freddie, ‘I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Don’t force yourself to do this if it’s not going to feel good.’ But he said, ‘I’ll fucking do it, Brian!’ And he did. And it was beautiful. I think it’s one of his finest performances of all time. It’s incredible.”

Built on a dramatic, ascending chord progression and one of May’s most orchestral guitar arrangements, “The Show Must Go On” ultimately became one of the most powerful recordings in Queen’s catalog.

The song was released on October 14, 1991, as the final single from the album Innuendo — the last Queen album released during Mercury’s lifetime. Too ill to appear in the music video, Mercury is absent from the promo clip, which instead uses archival footage drawn from the band’s earlier videos and live performances spanning 1982 through 1991.

Roughly a month later, on November 23, Mercury released a statement confirming that he had AIDS. He died the following day.

In hindsight, “The Show Must Go On” stands as one of Mercury’s most poignant performances — a recording that captured his determination to keep singing even as his health failed. The title proved tragically prophetic: the singer was gone, but the music endured.

After the Grammy Award–nominated success of her 2025 album Paper Doll, Samantha Fish is following up with Paper Doll Live, recorded October 7 at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The set — 16 songs digitally, 15 on CD and nine on LP — arrives June 12, with Fish and her band joined by the McCrary Sisters on backing vocals.

“Rounder Records started talking about it sometime in the spring of last year, and many fans have been asking for it for years. It was just never the right time,” Fish tells us via Zoom. “Paper Doll really lent itself to the stage. I've noticed every song from that record really does work well when you bring it to the stage, and I feel like the audience has really gotten ahold of it and gets it.

“I think the label heard that potential and they thought it would be a great time to put it out. It's nice when everybody is on the same page.”

Paper Doll Live is arguably Fish’s first — or at least most authentic — concert souvenir. Her first-ever album, Live Bait in 2009, was an independent release that led to her first recording contract with Ruf Records.

But with the hindsight of 17 years and 12 albums in between, Fish now considers it “a really shitty one. I did it myself; I burned the discs on my laptop, so it was very bootleg, and not very good. I didn't have any experience recording or getting good sounds. We literally walked into that thing to capture something.”

Her other live presentation came on 2012’s Girls With Guitars Live, certainly better but a shared experience with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith.

So Fish considers Paper Doll Live to be “my first real, real one,” demonstrating her growth as a player, singer and bandleader over that time.

“It's just about 15 years of putting hard work into your craft,” she says. “I think I'm better at what I do now all around. I think I'm a better writer, a better singer, a better guitar player, a better musician just all-around.

“I think I have more confidence in what I'm doing. I know the sounds I want. Maybe I still don't know what I'm doing, but I like to think I do.

“It's just a confidence, and I've got a lot of records behind me at this point, so there's a lot of material. The band on this record is incredible, and everybody gels so well together. That makes it easy to just go in and hit ‘record’ and do it.”

Paper Doll Live features extended treatments of several Fish songs, including “Black Wind Howlin’,” along with a biting rendition of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.”

“Any time you have a song fade out on a record, you've got to figure out what you're gonna do live,” Fish notes. “I thought ‘Lose You’ was gonna be damn near impossible to recreate live because on the Paper Doll album it's so lush and all of the guitar parts are kind of squished. I used all kinds of different guitars to create that sound.

“But it became really fun to play. We kinda messed with the arrangement. The same with ‘Don't Say It,’ another song that faded on the record and we had to come up with an ending for it. I think the ending we have is exciting and dynamic, and it takes it to a new place, and that's what you're supposed to do in a live setting. You're supposed to kind of reimagine the songs, even if they're brand new.”

Paper Doll Live opens with MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams,” which morphs into Paper Doll’s title track.

“We used to have it as our walk-out music when I was on the Faster tour,” Fish explains. “We walked out to it every night, and it's such a great song. You hear it every night and it's just getting drilled in. When I started touring with Jesse Dayton for the Death Wish Blues show after that, I was like, ‘We're walking out to this great song every night. Can we just play it?’ It's such a great show-opener.

“So we started playing it and it was kind of like serendipitous, 'cause [MC5 manager] John Sinclair ended up writing our liner notes for Death Wish Blues, so there was this kind of connection that feels important. And after that I just kept playing the song, 'cause it kicks ass and people like it and request it.”

The song also continues Fish’s “love affair with Detroit” that began with 2017’s Chills & Fever, which she recorded in the Motor City with Bobby Harlow of The Go, who also helmed Paper Doll.

“I've always loved the music that came out of there — the soul, the rock and roll,” Fish says. “There's just some really great musicians from Detroit, really easygoing, cool people. I love it.”

Fish is also pleased with the older material included on Paper Doll Live, including an extended version of the gentler “Dream Girl.”

“It's a different side to this rock and roll blues show,” she says. “There's a soft element to it.”

The set also includes North Hill Country–influenced songs such as “Black Wind Howlin’” and “Poor Black Mattie.” And the McCrary Sisters are a particular highlight for Fish.

“That's my favorite part, really, is them and their stacked voices,” she says. “I love great singers and I love harmonies, so to be able to really stack them and layer parts like that...They are just the best in the business at it.

“They've been doing it for years, and doing it well. They come in and were such a dream to work with and just came out and nailed it. It was great.”

Fish is currently touring the U.S. through May 31 and heads to Europe in June and July. She has additional U.S. dates set for the fall, including a festival in Telluride, Colo., and a Halloween show with Dayton at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood. But her attention will soon turn to Paper Doll’s follow-up, which she says is “currently in the writing phase.”

“It's just sort of this amorphous group of feelings that I'm trying to sort through to make songs and melodies that are catchy to me,” Fish says. “I know that's right around the corner, so I've kinda started digging my heels in a bit and committing to the writing process.”

Like parts of Paper Doll, the next album may be influenced by the sparkly silver Gibson ES-335 she purchased before the album at Eddie’s Guitars near St. Louis.

“That was quite the hit,” she says of the electric guitar. “I'm hoping I can ride that one for maybe one more record.

“That's kind of how guitars work for me; I don't really seek them out. Something will come across my path or I'll see it in a shop and go, ‘That's the one,’ and then I'm really happy about it. I like that; if I was constantly seeking them out and I got something that was like, ‘Oh, I rushed into this, I didn't really want it,’ then I've got a weird relationship with it. So I usually wait for them to come to me, and I know it when it shows up.”

Freddie Mercury may hold the record for history’s most profitable half hour in the bathtub.

In May 1979, as Queen were preparing to record The Game at Musicland Studios in Munich, Queen’s lead singer stepped into a bathtub in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel and emerged 30 minutes later with a new song fully formed: “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

Grabbing an acoustic guitar, he quickly worked out the tune in his hotel room.

“’Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or 10 minutes,” he confirmed to Melody Maker in 1981. “I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline, because I simply had to write within a small framework.”

As quickly as Mercury wrote it, Queen got to work tracking it in the studio.

“We recorded that song, really, six months before the rest of the album,” drummer Roger Taylor explained in a 1989 interview for In the Studio With Redbeard.

“It took half an hour to record. I remember he came in the studio. He says, ‘My dear, I just wrote this in the bath,’ and he did. He'd just been lying in the bath, and there it was. It was very simple, very easy, and it had a great fresh sound to it.”

As it turned out, everyone was present for the session except Brian May, who had been at the studio late the night before. In his absence, Mercury strapped on an acoustic guitar to lead Taylor and bass guitar player John Deacon through the song.

“It always happens: If I go out for a couple of hours, they create something else,” May humorously griped to In the Studio with Redbeard in 1989.

“I came back and they'd already put down the backing track. Roger just had the live drums, Freddie had played acoustic guitar — ‘cause that rhythm on there is Freddie. I don't think I played any of that.”

While he’s most often thought of as a singer and piano player, Mercury was also a talented guitarist. “Certainly in the early days he used the guitar as much as the piano to write songs,” May wrote in his Queen in 3D book.

May also notes that Mercury had solid rhythm chops, especially on acoustic.

“Freddie was really a good acoustic player. He was very modest about it, but he could really play the acoustic guitar very well in an inimitable, very frenetic kind of style.

“I can still his kind of horny fingers hitting the strings — Freddie doing his Elvis, very successfully.”

As May revealed in a February 2008 interview with Guitar and Bass magazine, Mercury even attempted to record the song’s guitar solo.

“He did the original solo on ‘Crazy Little Thing,’” the guitarist confirmed, “on a version that got lost, and I had to redo it. He was very good in a particular style of his own.”

While Mercury’s guitar solo is absent from the recording, we do have May’s, which is widely considered one of his best. Remarkably, it doesn’t feature his homemade Red Special.

In fact, by his own account, May was railroaded into using a Telecaster by producer Reinhold Mack, who decided that classic model was best suited to the song’s vintage rock-and-roll style.

“I said, ‘Well, I can make my guitar sound like a Telecaster, like those old rock and roll records,’” May told In the Studio with Redbeard. “And he said, ‘If you want it to sound like a Telecaster, play a Telecaster.’

May did so, calling it “one of the few times I ever played something that wasn't my regular guitar.” Taylor, who both plays and collects guitars, delivered a rarity from his vault.

“I used one of Roger's really old, beat-up, natural-wood Telecasters,” May told Guitar Player in our January 1983 issue “I got bludgeoned into playing it. That was Mack's idea.

“I said, ‘I don't want to play a Telecaster. It basically doesn't suit my style.’ But ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was such a period piece, it seemed to need that period sound.

“So I said, ‘Okay, Mack, if you want to set it up, I'll play it.’ He put it through a Mesa/Boogie, which is an amplifier I don't get on with at all. It just doesn't suit me. I tried it, and it sounded okay.”

It may have sounded “okay” to May’s ears, but it was an absolute knock out to everyone else. May’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” solo is a stunning example of his ear for giving a song exactly what it needs — and in a style that has no equal in Queen’s catalog.

For that matter, it wasn’t the first time May had to fight over a solo. As he told Total Guitar, he had to push to convince Mercury to let him track a solo on Queen’s 1979 hit “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

With "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" completed, the band took a break from making The Game, during which time they performed at the Saarbrücken Open Air Festival in Germany that August.

Meanwhile, their label, eager for something new to release, took “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” for an advance single, releasing it in the U.K. in October 1979. The song quickly reached number two, leading the group to launch a short tour — dubbed, appropriately, Crazy — where they played a number of theater dates in the U.K. from November through December.

By December, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” had been released in the U.S., where it quickly began moving up the charts. Queen were back at work on The Game when it hit the top of the charts, becoming the group's first U.S. single to do so.

Roger Taylor recalled the strangeness of hearing the song had reached peak position in the States while they were still recording The Game in Germany.

“It seemed unreal because we were in the other side of the world, and we hadn't even finished the album, which the single was from,” he told In the Studio With Redbeard. “We were still working on it. And we thought, We’re off to a good start here!”

“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” would continue to pay dividends as a radio staple and popular cover tune. But for Taylor, the best of these rewards came in the form of a compliment from no less than John Lennon.

“I remember actually one of the things which made me very proud,” Taylor said, “was that John Lennon said in some article... ‘I heard the Queen record and it made me wanna get back in the studio.’”

The former Beatle would soon do just that, recording what would be his final album, Double Fantasy, in 1980.

“And I thought, Wow, fantastic!” Taylor remarked. “To have actually had any little dent on somebody like Lennon is great.”

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

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 John Lennon. Nearly a decade later, he used it as the starting point for a Beatles song — one that would eventually appear on the band’s landmark 1965 album, Rubber Soul.

That song was “Run for Your Life.”

Lennon borrowed Presley’s line almost verbatim for the song’s opening lyric. From there he built the rest of the track around the same jealous premise, warning the song’s subject that if he ever caught her with another man, “that’s the end.”

Years later, Lennon would admit 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 group’s sixth studio album and one often regarded as the point where the Beatles fully embraced the idea of the LP as an artistic statement rather than simply a collection of songs.

It was also the first record on which they presaged the dawn of psychedelic rock by using the studio to change the sound of their instruments. The sessions saw the Beatles experimenting with new textures and instrumentation. 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.”

“Run for Your Life,” however, had simpler origins than other tracks on the album. Lennon later described it as a quick composition built around the Presley line 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 it being replaced. With the holiday season approaching, the Beatles were racing to finish Rubber Soul in time to be released for Christmas 1965.

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 create another song. “Run for Your Life” remained in place as the album’s closing number.

And while Lennon later called it his “least favorite Beatles song” and said 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.”

Tom Petty almost gave away one of his biggest hits.

For years, “Don’t Do Me Like That” sat forgotten in his catalog, a song he considered too simple to bother with. By the time he began recording Damn the Torpedoes with producer Jimmy Iovine in 1978, the track was already five years old, and Petty was ready to hand it off to another band entirely.

It took a persistent producer and a blunt comment from a studio assistant to convince him otherwise.

As Petty later explained, the song’s origins were surprisingly humble.

“It’s based on something my dad used to say,” he said.

His father’s expression was a simple plea for respect. In Petty’s hands, though, it became something darker. In the song’s story, a jilted friend warns the narrator that the same fate could happen to him, planting a seed of suspicion about his girlfriend.

It made for a compelling narrative hook. Combined with the song’s straightforward chord structure and driving beat, “Don’t Do Me Like That” was clearly a strong tune for Mudcrutch, the band he and guitarist Mike Campbell performed with prior to the formation of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

But Petty didn’t hear anything in the song that hinted at its hit potential.

“I didn’t think it was that great,” he said in Paul Zollo’s Conversations With Tom Petty. “I thought it was just a little bit too simple.”

Mudcrutch had already recorded a demo, and by the time Petty and the Heartbreakers began work on Damn the Torpedoes with producer Jimmy Iovine, the song was five years old. At the outset of the sessions, Iovine wanted to hear everything Petty had written — even the throwaways. That’s how he came across “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

“Jimmy is a thorough type of guy,” Petty said. “He went through all my old songs and suggested we record this one.

“Initially we didn’t want to do it because we wanted no ties to the past. But we cut it in one night.” Their version put Benmont Tench’s organ out in front of Campbell, whose predominant electric guitar on the Damn the Torpedoes sessions was his 1950 Fender Broadcaster.

“We recorded a few takes, played it back a couple of times, then put it away,” Petty said.

Despite Iovine’s enthusiasm for the track, Petty still had doubts. To his ears, the song sounded too much like the J. Geils Band, another guitar-and-organ-driven rock group. It even bears a passing resemblance to their 1975 hit “Must of Got Lost,” with both songs punching out their titles in a similarly staccato style over the chorus.

“I thought maybe I should give it to the J. Geils Band,” Petty told Zollo. “I could hear Peter Wolf doing that.”

“And Jimmy said, ‘Are you crazy? This is a hit.’ He wouldn’t let me give it away.”

Wolf, however, recalls the story a little differently. According to him, the offer actually arrived.

“One day I got this call from Jimmy Iovine’s office confirming my address,” Wolf said. “Then I got this package with a cassette in it. It was in Tom’s handwriting: ‘Don’t Do Me Like That.’ And there was a note: ‘Hey, I think this would be a cool song for you. I think you and the band can really do something with it.’”

Meanwhile, Petty had finally been persuaded to include the track on Damn the Torpedoes.

“When the album was finished, our assistant engineer said, ‘I really hate to speak up, but you should get this tape out and listen again,’” Petty recalled. A fresh listen changed his mind. “We thought it sounded pretty good — and it turned out to be the first hit from the album.”

As for why the J. Geils Band never recorded it, Wolf says the timing simply wasn’t right.

“It was in the midst of stuff,” he explained. “Maybe we thought we had the songs for our album: ‘We’ll do it on the next one.’”

“I called Jimmy — and I think Tom — and said, ‘Love the song. I’m not sure we’re going to get to it, but I do like it.’” (In fact, the J. Geils Band performed the song in tribute to Petty in 2022.)

Years later, Wolf said the story came up again during one of his last conversations with Petty.

“I explained the whole thing — we were in the mixing process or something,” he said. “And Tom told me, ‘I’ve got to thank you for that. When you didn’t end up doing it, everybody talked me into putting it on the record. And it became one of my big, big hits.’”

Released on November 5, 1979 as the lead single from Damn the Torpedos, “Don’t Do Me Like That” went to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s the group’s only song to reach the top 10 of that chart, and became even more popular in Canada, where it peaked at number three.

Petty was thrilled with the outcome — but perhaps no one was happier than his father.

“My father never asked for royalties, but he was pleased that I used his saying,” Petty said. “He’s given me a dozen since, but none of them are as good.”

Sheryl Crow’s songs have long carried the weary perspective of someone grinding through life’s daily tests. Whether she’s singing about relationships or just the challenge of getting through the day, her music often finds meaning in the struggle — from “My Favorite Mistake” to “Every Day Is a Winding Road” and “Strong Enough.”

But few songs caused her as much trouble as “Leaving Las Vegas,” one of the key tracks from her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club. The song seemed to capture the frustrations Crow was living through at the time — a 30-year-old musician staring down a now-or-never moment in her career.

She had already paid her dues: working the dive-bar circuit, singing backup for Michael Jackson and Don Henley, and recording a slickly produced album that was ultimately shelved. But in 1992, things began to change when her then-boyfriend, Kevin Gilbert, introduced her to a loose collective of musicians he jammed with in Los Angeles. Crow began sitting in, and the chemistry was immediate.

Those informal Tuesday-night sessions at producer Bill Bottrell’s studio became the foundation of Tuesday Night Music Club, named for the group of musicians who collaborated with Crow on its songs. Filled with rootsy Americana tunes and plenty of acoustic and electric guitars, the album soon yielded three hits: “All I Wanna Do,” “Strong Enough” and “Can’t Cry Anymore.”

Success, however, brought friction. Disputes over songwriting credits surfaced almost immediately, and no song sparked more controversy than “Leaving Las Vegas.”

The track captures the sense of world-weariness at the heart of both the album and Crow’s songwriting. Perhaps no line in the song summed up her life at that moment better than: “Such a muddy line between the things you want and the things you have to do.”

But Crow didn’t write that lyric. In fact, like much of Tuesday Night Music Club, the song was a collaborative effort between Crow and the musicians who made up the Tuesday Night Music Club.

The song’s title and central idea were also drawn from John O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas. O’Brien was a friend of Tuesday Night Music Club guitarist David Baerwald, who shares a writing credit on the song.

Released as the album’s third single, “Leaving Las Vegas” cracked the Top 75. Crow’s real breakthrough would arrive a few months later with “All I Wanna Do.” Still, “Leaving Las Vegas” performed well enough to land her a spot playing it on Late Night With David Letterman on March 21, 1994.

Afterward, Letterman asked Crow the song was autobiographical. Flustered, she answered, “Sort of.” After all, she had left Los Angeles before and understood something about starting over, and she related to the frustrations in the song. The moment hardly called for nuance, and saying “not exactly” might have sounded evasive.

Her co-writers didn’t see it that way. Some accused Crow of trying to claim the song as her own. Even before the interview, tensions had been building as the album’s success grew and some members of the Tuesday Night Music Club felt their contributions were being overshadowed by Crow’s rising profile.

Then the situation took a darker turn. O’Brien died by suicide shortly after Crow’s television appearance. His family publicly cleared her of any connection to his death, but some fans accused her of co-opting the experiences described in his novel.

Crow says the episode was devastating.

“I wasn’t the girl next door anymore. I was just — I was really broken,” she says. “It took me a long time to absolve myself from it, even though I’d never known him. But to have been sort of tricked — it was definitely a dark moment.”

Crow would go on to win three Grammy Awards on behalf of Tuesday Night Music Club, including Best New Artist. Her fanbase exploded album overnight, and included one fan who gifted her a 1959 Telecaster after her ’59 reissue Tele was stolen.

But behind her fame, the Tuesday Night Music Club was falling apart. It would be three years before she released a follow-up. Titled simply Sheryl Crow, the self-produced 1996 album was written amid the emotional fallout of Tuesday Night Music Club and served as a declaration of independence.

“My only objective on this record was to get under people’s skin,” Crow said, “because I was feeling like I had so much shit to hurl at the tape.”

Chris Thompson was the new guitarist and vocalist with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1976. And his first single with the group couldn’t have been bigger: “Blinded by the Light,” a cover of a deep cut from Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.

“I could have died and been happy then,” Thompson says, recalling the single’s chart-topping success in the United States.

Thompson was born in England and raised in New Zealand, where he began working as a musician. He returned to the U.K. in 1973, yearning for success, and in one fell swoop, he found it. “Having a number one in America and being hugely successful is all I ever really hoped I’d be able to do,” he says.

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band was an unlikely group to have a radio hit. The English act was founded by keyboardist Mann, who’d had success with his self-named pop group in the 1960s and their 1968 cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mighty Quinn,” a number-one hit in the U.K. and a number 10 in the U.S.

By the early 1970s, Mann had abandoned pop and founded the Earth Band, which was known for its prog-rock leanings. But Mann clearly had a desire to create more radio-friendly fare.

According to Thompson — who joined the group when guitarist Mick Rogers departed in 1975 — Mann had a list of songs that included a few Springsteen cuts. “Blinded by the Light” was the first they worked on in the studio, but not before putting it through its paces on the road.

As it happens, its success was far from guaranteed.

“We played ‘Blinded by the Light’ all the time at gigs to try and figure out what worked and what didn’t,” he says. “Funnily enough, it didn’t work at all. Audiences just didn’t like it. We’d play the song, and people would disappear. It was a toilet break song.”

But Mann and Thompson were certain “Blinded by the Light” had untapped potential. “It was very different,” Thompson admits. “But it was basically our shot at having a pop hit, or to become a crossover rock and pop band.”

Although Thompson says audience response to the song left the band without “much confidence” in it, Mann was “relentless.”

“We just went for it until it was on the record.”

They succeeded. “Blinded by the Light” might have been a dud for Bruce Springsteen, but it paid off for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, who released it as the lead single from their 1976 album, The Roaring Silence.

It was all good — except for that “little issue” with the song’s lyrics. Shockingly, Springsteen’s phrase “cut loose like a deuce” was replaced by what sounds suspiciously like, in Mann's version, “wrapped up like a douche," although Thompson contends he sang "deuce."

It didn’t hurt the song’s airplay or sales, and may have even helped by giving it a boost of notoriety. In the end, the record gave Chris Thompson what he coveted most: enduring success in America as a professional musician.

“I worked so hard as a boy to learn to play guitar and how to play and sing together,” Thompson says. “It was the culmination of all the work I’d put in, and it pretty much means everything to me.”

Why did the band want to record “Blinded by the Light?”

Manfred was sent the Greetings From Asbury Park album by a DJ named Ed Sciaky from Philadelphia. Manfred went through that and actually found three songs that he wanted to do, and when I joined the band he already had “Blinded by the Light” on his list.

That was one of the first songs that I played with him. In fact, I don’t think I’d be wrong to say that doing that song was the reason that Mick Rogers left the band. He didn’t want to do that song. But Manfred believed in it. He was right, of course.

What was the process of arranging the Earth Band’s version, which is much different from Springsteen’s?

It started with Manfred and I on piano, just kind of going through it and talking about the ideas that we might have. And then, like everything from the Earth Band, it was a long process of weeks and weeks playing, just working on how the arrangement could go. We had quite a few different ideas, and when we got to the point where we thought, “Okay, this is it,” we went into the recording studio, and Manfred didn’t like anything anymore. [laughs]

So how did you come to the version that we hear on The Roaring Silence?

We had to kind of change it. Actually, the engineer found Manfred doodling around while we were recording and came up with the actual introduction of the song, you know, that electric piano introduction. It came from the jams we were having, but before that, we had cellos going, and everybody felt it was kind of boring. Like everything with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, it developed over a very long time.

What guitars, amps and pedals were you using then?

I was playing a new [Gibson] Les Paul from 1975, which is now an old Les Paul. [laughs] It was the first-ever Les Paul that I had. I never had enough money to buy a Les Paul before that. Before that, I was playing cheap Hofners and stuff like that. It was pretty fantastic for me to be able to play a Les Paul like that.

With the Les Paul, I had a chorus pedal and one of those round Fuzz Face pedals. I had that, a 50-watt Marshall amplifier and a 4x12 speaker cabinet. That’s what I used all the time with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. I’ve still got it right behind me. I’m looking at that amplifier right now.

The credits say Dave Flett played lead. Is that accurate, or did you play some lead on the track too?

I was playing what I call the “chorus guitar.” Dave played all the in-between licks — you know, all those little things, and the solo.

Was Dave’s rig much different from yours?

Dave used a [Gibson] Flying V. With that, he used a 100-watt Marshall and lots more pedals than I had. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what his pedals were, but he used a lot. But he also used a lot of straight sounds because he liked the sound of the Flying V, which, as you know, is totally different from the Les Paul.

You handled the lead vocals on “Blinded by the Light,” except for the final verse, which was done by Manfred. How did that shake out?

Well, Manfred… actually, yeah… he does do the last verse. [laughs] You’re right! But he actually wanted Bruce to do it. Manfred got a number for Bruce when he was on the road and gave him a call, asking if he would like to sing on it. I think he woke him up!

Anyway, he turned down the opportunity, and we wanted another voice for that verse, so it’s Manfred singing on that.

Infamously, there was a lyrical snafu between “deuce” and “douche.” You said you were singing “deuce” but it came out sounding like “douche.” Did you try to fix that in the studio?

You know… it was all down to the second engineer, who had forgotten to line up a thing called an azimuth on the tape recorder. It had to be lined up every day on the old tape machines; it lines up how the tape moves across the 16 or 24 tracks on the recorder head. [An incorrectly set azimuth can cause distortion in tape recordings.] So he forgot to line it up on the day I was doing the vocal, and so when we did the mix, "deuce" came out sounding like “douche.”

The Americans picked up on it. Manfred and I were sent by Warner Brothers to go to 50 radio stations in about three weeks and explain that it wasn’t “douche.” [laughs] We explained that it was actually “deuce” and that it was a physical problem with the recording.

I think the song got played so much because of that. People didn’t know what the lyric was. They’d say, “Play that ‘douche’ song!” [laughs] But the more it was played, the more it became a standard on the radio. I think it was a good thing.

Did you ever get the chance to meet Bruce in person and talk with him about “Blinded by the Light?”

Yes, I did! I think it was in about 1979, and we were playing in Zurich, and he was playing there, too. We played two nights, and he was playing the night after us. The promoter asked if we wanted to go to dinner with Bruce because we had a day off in between or whatever.

I said, “Absolutely.” So I went out to dinner with him and Steven Van Zandt. Manfred didn’t come. He was probably embarrassed about waking Bruce up to ask him if he would sing on the song! [laughs]

How did Bruce feel about the Earth Band’s version of the song?

We went out to a fondue restaurant. I sat next to Bruce, and we talked generally about what we liked and didn’t like about America. Really, it was funny because we were both fans of Denny’s restaurants. So we started talking about that, and then he told stories, pretty much like he does when he’s onstage.

And then, I said to him, “Bruce, what did you think about ‘Blinded by the Light?’” He took a little while to reply, and he said, “What’s the other band that you’re playing in at the moment?” By this time I'd begun playing with a band called Night and we had a hit with our song “Hot Summer Nights.”

So I said, “Oh, you mean Night?” He said, “Yeah…” He said, “What’s that song you do with ‘Night’ in the title?” I said, “Oh, it’s called ‘Hot Summer Nights.’”

He said, “I like that song.” [laughs]

So he didn’t like our version of “Blinded by the Light.” I’ve since found out that he hated it. Yeah, he really disliked it.

Do you know why?

He was upset that it had “douche” in it — and that we’d actually changed some of the words. Because “wrapped up like a deuce” were not the original words. They were “cut loose like a deuce" — and I didn’t really want to sing that. I don’t know why.

I saw Bruce again a couple of years ago. He was playing close to where I live in Belgium, so we got together and had a chat. But I couldn’t get him to talk about it. He was very happy to take some photos with me, but I couldn’t get him to talk about it.

Looking back, what does “Blinded by the Light” mean to you?

All I ever wanted to do was be successful in the music business. I went to England and found it very difficult to get a job. And then I got a job with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and the first song I recorded with them basically went to number one in America! It was such a fantastic thing for me.

The Who may have retired from the road, but Pete Townshend says the band could still have another album in them.

The possibility is surprising given that singer Roger Daltrey has previously expressed little interest in making another record. The group’s last release, 2019’s Who, sold poorly, leading Daltrey to complain about streaming economics and the modern music marketplace.

“There’s no record market any more,” he told Uncut. “Everybody talks about streaming, but have you seen what artists get from that? It’s a joke.

“It was great to get an album out there, something that the fans liked, and I was really proud of it. But far too much money was spent making it.”

But it wouldn’t be the Who if Townshend weren’t contradicting his longtime partner. The guitarist raised the possibility of a new record in an Instagram post showing off his new writing studio, formerly owned by “Never Gonna Give You Up” singer Rick Astley.

“It’s mine now,” Townshend wrote. “I’m loving it. Great sound. I’m very spoiled.”

When a commenter replied, “There’s no way you’re gonna do another Who album,” Townshend shot back: “You might be wrong. Roger wants to give it a try.”

They certainly have no shortage of material. Townshend is famously prolific and has said he has hundreds of unfinished pieces of music—many of which he has considered completing with the help of artificial intelligence.

“I’ve got about three hundred and fifty, four hundred and fifty pieces of music,” he said. “Now, a lot of it is probably terrible. I’ve managed to wade through about half of it.”

He added that he’s interested in experimenting with platforms such as Suno, which can generate songs from text prompts, to help finish some of the fragments.

“It might be some hits.”

Townshend has previously joked that AI could even recreate the style of the band’s classic era.

“If I told A.I., ‘Write a load of Pete Townshend songs like he used to in 1973,’ a lot of Who fans would be really pleased.”

But his more recent comments suggest he’s serious about using the technology to help shape his backlog of unfinished material.

The Instagram post also gave Townshend an opportunity to reveal his current songwriting setup, centered around a laptop and a pair of Genelec speakers. (No guitars, electric or acoustic, were in sight, but we assume they’re not far away.)

“I use a MacBook. The sequencer is an MPC Live III. I use it on the road like a portastudio,” he wrote, referring to the old multitrack recorders once made by Tascam.

Should the Who convene for another album, the stripped-down approach would at least address one of Daltrey’s chief complaints: the high cost of making records in the modern era.

Nick Lowe’s long, durable career has been built on decades of indelible pop songs — “Cruel to Be Kind,” “So It Goes” and “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” among them.

But the bass-playing Brit-pop original freely admits he misjudged two of the songs that would become his most enduring calling cards. He wasn’t convinced “Cruel to Be Kind” had the goods, only to watch it become his best-known hit in both the U.S. and the U.K.

He had similarly modest expectations for a tune he wrote in the early 1970s for his pub-rock group, Brinsley Schwarz: “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”

“I remember quite clearly, I woke up one morning and had this idea for a song called ‘(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding,’” he told Guitar Player in 2024. “I thought, That's a real mouthful. It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but it is actually an original idea. I couldn't believe that I'd actually made up something that no one else had done before.”

Brinsley Schwarz recorded it for their final studio album, 1974’s The New Favourites of…. Their version was decidedly folk rock, sung earnestly, if somewhat languidly, by Lowe. Released as a single, it failed to chart.

As far as Lowe was concerned, it had its chance — and blew it.

“When the Brinsleys split up, that should've been the end of it,” he told Stereogum in 2021. “That's what happens to bands' songs when they split up, the songs go in the dustbin of history. The song was never a hit, it never caused much of a stir at all when we did it originally."

The track, however, had one very devoted admirer: Elvis Costello. By 1977, Costello was a rising star in Britain’s punk and new wave scene, and Lowe was producing his records. While working on Costello’s third album, 1979’s Armed Forces, the singer suggested to Lowe that he and the Attractions cut a version of it.

In his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Costello wrote that Lowe’s original “seemed almost tongue-in-cheek, a take on that brief period after flower power when Tin Pan Alley staff songwriters seemed to say ‘Hey, let's get in on some of this crazy ‘peace’ and ‘love’ stuff that the kids are digging today.’ ”

It was Lowe who proposed reframing the song as something far more forceful — a full-throated rebuke of war, belligerence and bigotry.

The result was a powerhouse track, arguably the closest thing to an anthem in Costello’s deep catalog. Over the Attractions’ taut groove, his heavily reverberated voice carries a mix of urgency, anger and sincerity rarely heard before or since in rock and roll. In his reworking, the song’s title shifts from a question to a challenge — and by the final refrain, a demand.

Despite its obvious punch, the track made its debut months before the release of Armed Forces, and in unlikely fashion: as the B-side of the 1978 Lowe single “American Squirm,” where it was credited to Nick Lowe and His Sound. The snarling vocal and stampeding rhythm section were unmistakably Costello and the Attractions. The only visual clue was the sleeve photo, which showed Lowe wearing Costello’s horn-rim prescription sunglasses and holding the singer’s Fender Jazzmaster electric with his name emblazoned on its fretboard.

It might have languished there were it not for Costello’s American label, Columbia. Fearing U.S. listeners wouldn’t connect with the strictly British themes of the Armed Forces track “Sunday’s Best,” the label replaced it with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding.”

It was an uncharacteristically astute move. The song quickly became a fan favorite, and Costello’s rendition emerged as the definitive version.

“It was he who really popularized that song,” Lowe told journalist Shawn Conner in 2017. “It's been covered by loads of people, and it would've disappeared if it wasn't for him.”

Even so, the song’s most consequential windfall arrived years later — courtesy of the 1992 romantic thriller The Bodyguard, starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. Its soundtrack became a commercial juggernaut, selling 10 million copies in its first year, fueled by Houston’s towering rendition of the Dolly Parton song “I Will Always Love You.”

Tucked among the album’s tracks was “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” covered in an uptempo Northern Soul vein by vocalist Curtis Stigers.

Lowe had no idea the song was in the film, let alone on its soundtrack.

Then the checks started arriving.

He remembers the first one vividly. He assumed it was a mistake.

“A million dollars. I won’t be coy. A million fucking bucks,” he told Mojo in 1994. “What can I say? It was just the most enormous stroke of luck.”

The windfall changed the practical realities of his career.

The check “paid for a couple of tours, a decent bus and some good hotels — ones where we wouldn’t get our stuff stolen and we could have separate rooms,” he told Music and Musicians. “Also, I could pay the band. And I could start making another record. Without the check, I don’t think it would’ve happened at all.”

Ironically, the song’s appearance in the film is almost imperceptible. While interviewing Lowe, Fresh Air host Terry Gross asked where it was used.

“I haven’t got a clue,” he replied. “I haven’t even seen it. I know lots of people who have seen it, and they all tell me that my song isn’t in it at all.

“Even my mother, who has ears like a Mum, has sat and watched it, and she said she couldn’t hear it anywhere. But I presume that it’s on a car radio or something playing in the background.”

Keen listeners spotted its brief appearance around the film’s 33-minute mark. Roughly 10 seconds of Stigers’ recording surfaces as Houston’s character opens a letter containing a death threat.

Lowe’s mum may have missed it, but those few seconds delivered the biggest payday of her son’s life.

A fan attending a concert by Machine Gun Kelly is fine after falling through an opening onstage during the singer’s performance at the O2 Arena on Thursday, March 5.

The incident happened while Kelly was performing his 2020 hit “Bloody Valentine.” The unidentified fan was among several attendees invited onstage to dance with him.

As the group moved forward, one of the fans stepped along the stage runway and suddenly plunged through a gap in the floor.

Video of the fall, which quickly spread across TikTok, captures the shocking moment. A caption on one version reads: “Omg, you can hear the bang!” — seemingly referring to the loud sound heard when she fell.

The clip begins with Kelly kneeling and playing guitar licks on a pink electric guitar while the fans dance around him. The woman moves close to the performer before the group begins walking down a catwalk together.

Moments later, she appears to miss a large gap in the stage and suddenly drops through it.

“Oh my God, hold up,” Kelly says in the video after witnessing the moment. “Are you okay?”

Crew members and others onstage quickly helped the fan climb out of the opening as the music paused.

The fall appears to have occurred on a runway-style stage extension, where fans had been invited to walk behind Kelly during the song. According to some reports, the opening in the floor was likely part of the stage’s mechanical setup.

Another video captured Kelly speaking with the fan onstage, shortly afterward. She reassured those around her that she was fine and even attempted to apologize.

Kelly assured her she didn’t need to apologize.

“The first time I’ve ever sold out the O2, and that’s the first time anyone’s ever fallen off the stage, dude. That’s fucking dope,” he can be heard telling her.

After sharing a hug, Kelly gave her his hat as a personal keepsake.

“I wear this hat every fucking day,” the singer said, adding that it was a gift from a friend. “It’s special, but fuck that, it’s yours.”

The show was part of Kelly's Lost Americana Tour, which supports his 2025 album of the same name and includes dates across the U.K., Ireland and beyond.

In related news, MGK guitarist Sophie Lloyd told Guitar Player about the guitar solos that changed her life.

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."