As Andy Summers explains it, the Police’s biggest hit wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for his guitar line.

“That song was going to be thrown out,” Summers told Guitarist in 2022 of the track “Every Breath You Take.“ After making several attempts at the tune, bassist Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland were ready to give up. “Sting and Stewart could not agree on how the bass and drums were going to go.”

Summers had an idea of what the song needed — an ear-catching electric guitar riff to give it some interest. But as he says, it wasn’t about creating a starring role for himself. “It was more about keeping those other bastards happy.”

Sting took the bait.

“Sting says, ‘Well, go on then, go in there and make it your own,’” Summers recalled. “And I did it in one take. They all stood up and clapped.

“And, of course, the fucking thing went right round the world, straight to number one in America. And the riff has become a kind of immortal guitar part that all guitar players have to learn.”

The lead single from the trio’s fifth and final studio album, Synchronicity, “Every Breath You Take” became the Police’s biggest hit. It topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, spending eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 — the only time the band ever reached the summit — and went on to win Grammy Awards for “Song of the Year” and “Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.”

It was also the top-selling single of 1983 in the U.S. and the fifth best-selling single of the 1980s in the country.

Summers told Guitar Player in 2025 that he was unhappy not to have received a writing credit for the song. Discussing his guitar work on the track, he explained how he transformed the tune with his arpeggiated, chorus-tinged lines, played on his modified 1963 Fender Telecaster.

“There wasn’t a guitar part on it when Sting wrote it,” Summers explained. “It was just him singing, with this Hammond organ kind of thing, like Billy Preston or something. It didn’t sound like the Police at that point.”

The demo for the song seems to bear him out.

By the time the band recorded Synchronicity with co-producer Hugh Padgham at AIR Studios in Montserrat, its members were increasingly at odds. The delicate balance of creative visions and egos was splintering, particularly between Sting and Copeland. The album would mark the end of the group’s recording run, and the three musicians went their separate ways after touring to support it.

“I think we were in a difficult position,” Summers told Guitar Player. “Clearly, Sting wanted to leave the band, and yet we had this massive album all over the world.”

More than four decades later, Summers still believes his riff deserves recognition as a defining contribution to “Every Breath You Take.”

“I just went into the studio and I heard the chord sequence for it, and it immediately came to me to play the riff I came up with. It was very much in the Police guitar style, if you like.”

As for what inspired it, Summers believes his creation may have stemmed from his early 1980s collaborations with Robert Fripp.

“At the time I’d made one record with Robert” — 1982’s I Advance Masked — “and I think we were due to make another one. I was looking for material.”

But he says the line’s harmonic structure also owes much to the classical guitar genre.

“One of the things I had engaged with in my life, especially when I was mad about classical guitar, was the Bartok string duos,” he says. “I would listen to and try to play these beautiful Bartok things. So I had that kind of harmony in my playing, to some extent.

“Bartok would take it much farther out to add a ninth rather than a third — that kind of thing. So it fit with my mental musical landscape at the time, and it was very natural for me to play that sort of thing.”

Summers says the riff came together quickly in the studio. “When it came to the recording, we got it done on one take, actually,” he told Guitar Player.

While another guitarist might have simply strummed the song’s chords, Summers saw an opportunity to add a defining element — one he believes merits a songwriting credit.

“There’s no way that I would’ve gone in and strummed A, F sharp minor, D and E,” he says, referring to the song’s underlying chords. “What I managed to do with that guitar lick was take it into a very hip other atmosphere that was completely moody and set the song up. Instead of just strumming some really stupid chords, I made something out of it.”

That’s hard to argue with. As Summers recalls, “Every Breath You Take” was nearly tossed out before his riff helped turn it into a worldwide hit.

At the time of his Guitar Player interview, the song had passed two billion streams on Spotify alone. It has since climbed to 3.8 billion.

“Which makes my guitar riff one of the most-played riffs in history,” Summers contends. “Not too shabby.”

Indeed. The riff has become one of the most recognizable in rock history. For Summers, however, the success of “Every Breath You Take” still comes with one unresolved question: why isn’t his contribution reflected in the songwriting credits?

Robert Plant remains grateful for everything Led Zeppelin brought him — but he’s relieved to have long since moved on from that phase of his life.

Despite speculation surrounding the band’s 2007 reunion, Plant says it was always going to be a one-off as far as he was concerned. These days, he’s much happier living a less exposed life in an English village with a population of around 800.

“Tuesday night is bingo night,” Plant tells the Times. “You might win £25. Wednesday is misery corner at the local pub, where all the musicians who never quite made it on the Birmingham scene moan about their lot.”

He adds, “I’ve been a quasi big shot for so long, [but] in Worcestershire nobody gives a fuck. The most they say is, ‘All right, Bob — still doing a bit?’ ‘Well, I won five Grammys with Alison Krauss…’ ‘What’s a Grammy?’”

Plant compares the experience to living in Austin with Patty Griffin in the early 2010s.

“Patty and I walked up the street and cars would be crashing into each other. Eventually I had to say, ‘Patty, I think the Wolves are playing Arsenal on Saturday. I’ll see you soon.’”

Reflecting on his decision to leave the big time behind, Plant recalls: “Someone said, ‘Why does he turn his back on the majesty of Led Zeppelin? Why is Person A representing the power and the glory, while Plant goes to bingo in the Welsh borders?’”

He doesn’t name Jimmy Page, who’s clearly the person he’s referring to, but continues: “I’m so lucky to have grown into this guy instead of gritting my teeth and trying to keep something going. It felt like the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the king says, ‘One day, lad, all this will be yours.’ And his son says, ‘What, the curtains?’”

Countless larger-than-life fables surround Led Zeppelin’s heyday. Of that era, Plant says, “You learned that it was better not to refute any of the stories and just get on with it, because whatever Led Zeppelin was, it was definitely not glamorous.”

He adds, “My life is so much better for having worked with Jimmy Page, but you do have to deal with a very different personality. I know Roger Daltrey pretty well. He’s on the road at the moment, solo, and he’s free. I’ve been free for years.”

One thing that’s been missing from the 78-year-old singer’s recent output is new music. “I really want to write,” he explains. “But what we have going on around us right now is so vast, with a helplessness about everything and a national sense of panic in America, that my words have nothing to do with anything at all and it would just be trite.

“I want to entertain, sing as well as I can, crack jokes, send myself up and make people feel good. At this time in my life, that’s everything. That and getting out of bed.”

Metallica added another new track to their Las Vegas Sphere repertoire over the weekend, giving 1988 classic Harvester of Sorrow the giant visuals makeover. The band again kept their promise of delivering a “no repeat weekend,” with the set on Saturday (October 17) completely different from that on the preceding Thursday.

This time, though, reactions to the huge screen imagery was mixed. Many viewers were confused as they watched a man sharpening a knife blade on a whetstone while a goose – which some people thought was a duck – sat in a separate scene beside him and did what geese do.

“I mean Metallica is my most favorite band and I love Harvester of Sorrow,” one fan wrote on YouTube, “but what the hell was that?” A reply read: “I was expecting the grinding guy to harvest the goose at the end or something… I have no words.”

Additional comments included: “Graphic artist clearly took a break here” and “The duck was an odd choice,” while someone else attempted an explanation: “Geese symbolize teamwork, loyalty, vigilance, and spiritual guidance across many cultures and traditions…Although in this situation I think it represents some knuckleheaded goober got lazy and settled.”

Others pointed out that it was good to hear Harvester back in the band’s set, while one suggested: “People don't get it – the duck is Jason's bass.”

Several comments addressed the argument that Metallica shouldn’t have settled on the hi-tech Sphere to stage a residency, citing the idea that bands on stage are dwarfed by the presentation around them.The band themselves admitted to trepidation before the shows opened, with Lars Ulrich saying the concept was “overwhelming and fucking intimidating.”

He added: “We’re all fortunate enough to be able to do these shows, connect with these audiences and sort of reinvent the staging and all of it, all the time. But this is something else. This is another level.”

So much so that Slash recently reported Guns N’ Roses had considered a residency in the venue and then rejected the notion. “It’s not set up where you can set up a bunch of amps and really play live like the way we normally do,” the guitarist said. “It's really about the production, and it’s not so much about the band, although the band is playing.

“We were talking about doing it last year before this tour that we just did, and we opted for just doing a US tour and not just focusing on that one thing.”

U2 have spent five decades releasing hit albums, playing to enormous audiences and collecting 22 Grammy Awards. But for guitarist The Edge, the reason to keep going is remarkably simple: he believes the band’s greatest work may still lie ahead of them.

“We genuinely think that we might just write the best song we’ve ever written next week, or do the best show we’ve ever done next tour,” The Edge says in a new interview with The New York Times.

The band are preparing to release Carnaval De Luz on November 13, their first full-length album of new material since 2017. The interview with The Edge and frontman Bono looks back at the group’s beginnings in Dublin, when singer Paul David Hewson (Bono), guitarist David Howell Evans (The Edge), bass guitarist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. were teenagers, and considers what has kept them together half a century later.

For Bono, the band’s identity has always carried a mythic dimension. He traces that impulse in part to the names he and his bandmates adopted in their early years, taking inspiration from the Ramones, whose members performed under pseudonyms.

“We wished to escape suburbia and discover these other selves, and we gave those other selves names,” Bono says. “The Ramones were key for us, and they are really well-drawn characters.”

But the names weren’t all about constructing larger-than-life rock stars. As The Edge recalls, humor played an equally important role in the band’s early identity.

“We laughed a lot at that age,” the guitarist says. “We would laugh at each other and ourselves and that was the deal. So the names were not necessarily designed for their heroic aspect.”

He then reveals just how far the group’s early nicknames were from the grand mythology Bono describes.

“Bono’s very first name was in fact Steinrich Van Haitian Bang Bang Bang, and then I was Inchicore for a while before I became The Edge. Adam for a while was known as Mrs. Byrnes, and Larry for some reason was the Jam Jar. We were borrowing a lot from Monty Python.”

Whatever the origins of their stage names, U2 went on to become one of the world’s most successful rock bands. The Edge, meanwhile, developed into one of rock’s most distinctive electric guitar stylists, building a minimalist, texture-driven sound around the rhythmic interplay of digital delay effects.

Yet he says the band’s ambition remains rooted in the possibility of doing something better than they have done before.

And for him, that means more than writing another hit or mounting another spectacular tour. He measures the band’s achievements against what he would want to experience as a fan, particularly when music reaches beyond entertainment and engages with larger ideas.

“When we talk about the best, we’re not thinking about rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “We’re thinking about our favorite bands and what, if I’m in the audience at a show, would I want to see and hear. So it’s where rock ’n’ roll collides with activism, where rock ’n’ roll collides with ideas from fine arts.”

The guitarist also points to the spiritual dimension of the band’s work, a quality he believes has been central to U2’s identity rather than something to be kept separate from their music.

“And I suppose a transcendent aspect as well. We’ve never thought it was necessary to hold back our own spiritual quests and questionings from our work. They are all expressed. And when we hit a song that has a transcendent quality, that’s the peak for me.”

Even after 50 years, The Edge hasn’t lost faith in what U2 can accomplish next.

“I really think we’re in with a shout of the best songs we’ve ever written, the best tours we’ve done, still. That’s why I’m still in this band.”

Welcome to the Ultimate Beatles Guitar Quiz, where we test your knowledge of the group’s guitars and players with 20 Fab questions.

From John Lennon’s acoustic guitars to George Harrison’s electrics and Paul McCartney’s basses — it’s all here, and more. We’ve even included tricky questions about the players’ histories and songs.

All the questions are multiple choice. Sign in or register for free and see where you end up on the leaderboard. Will your guitar gently weep, will you need a little help from your friends?

Make to the end and see if you know every little thing... or if you’re nowhere, man.

David Surkamp, frontman for the prog-rock band Pavlov’s Dog, has died at age 73. No cause of death has been disclosed.

The news was shared by Abbie Steiling, the band’s violinist and mandolinist, in a social media post on October 14.

“It is with the heaviest of hearts that we share the unexpected passing of our creative force, lead singer, and dear friend, David Surkamp, on October 13th,” Steiling wrote.

“David leaves behind a legacy of endless creativity, unmistakable artistry, and a body of music that has touched lives across generations and around the world. But anyone who knew and loved him knows that his legacy reaches far beyond the songs.”

“There are no words sufficient for a loss of this magnitude. We are heartbroken. We are grateful. We will carry David, his music, and the memories created with us always. Our deepest condolences are with Saylor, Evan, and the Surkamp family as well as the Pavlov’s Dog family as we walk together through this difficult time of grief.”

Steiling noted that Surkamp’s wife, Sara, died last November at age 72, and hoped he “has found peace with the love he has missed so dearly.”

Formed in St. Louis in the early 1970s, Pavlov’s Dog developed a distinctive sound that blended progressive rock with melodic songwriting, elaborate arrangements and instruments including violin, flute and Mellotron. Surkamp’s unusually high, expressive voice became one of the band’s defining characteristics.

As a cofounder of Pavlov’s Dog, Surkamp sang lead on the band’s 1975 debut, Pampered Menial, which featured the enduring fan favorite “Julia,” as well as its follow-up, At the Sound of the Bell, released in 1976. Despite earning a devoted following, the band split toward the end of the decade.

During the hiatus, Surkamp co-founded Hi-Fi with former Fairport Convention singer Ian Matthews, exploring a more straightforward rock sound. Pavlov’s Dog reunited in 1990 for Lost in America and continued to return to the stage and recording studio over the following decades.

The group resumed activity in 2006, with Sara Surkamp joining on acoustic guitar and additional vocals. David remained the band’s central creative presence through subsequent releases, including Wonderlust, released in 2025.

Metallica have released the official video for “The Call of Ktulu,” filmed during the opening night of their Life Burns Faster residency at the Las Vegas Sphere on October 1.

The instrumental is one of the highlights of Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s 1984 second album. Inspired by the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the nearly nine-minute track takes its name from the author’s short story The Call of Cthulhu, with the creature’s name deliberately respelled as “Ktulu.” The song was co-written by James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Cliff Burton and former Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine, who received songwriting credit despite leaving the band before the album was recorded.

The Sphere performance brings the song’s ominous atmosphere to a venue built around immersive audiovisual effects. Since opening in September 2023, the 17,600-capacity arena has hosted residencies by artists including U2, Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles. Its defining features include a wraparound 16K-resolution screen and Sphere Immersive Sound, an advanced audio system designed to deliver consistent sound throughout the venue.

Metallica’s residency runs through March 13, 2027, with 24 performances scheduled on Thursdays and Saturdays. Following the format of the band’s ongoing M72 world tour, each Thursday-Saturday pairing features two completely different set lists.

Drummer Lars Ulrich said the band knew it wanted to play the Sphere after attending U2’s concert during the venue’s opening run.

“About 12 seconds into the opening night of Sphere with U2 back in ’23, I thought, ‘We have to do this. It’s completely uncharted territory,’” Ulrich said. “This residency gives us another chance to reinvent how we interact with our fans in a live setting. We are beyond excited to share this with the world … and way fuckin’ psyched to go next level!”

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 knockout 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 on 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.”

Instagram has a strange musical obsession, and it seems to have one song on repeat. Users have noticed that the platform keeps recommending Creed’s 1999 hit “Higher” for their Stories, whether they post a photo of their cat, a plate of food or a scenic view. Now the company has confirmed that a glitch in its algorithm is behind the phenomenon.

The strange recommendations first caught users’ attention in August. Some joked that Creed must have struck a deal with Meta, Instagram’s parent company, to put the song in front of as many people as possible.

“I can’t prove it but pretty sure Creed is paying META to suggest their song ‘Higher’ on all Instagram Stories,” one user wrote on X.

The jokes continued into September, when another user discovered that plenty of other people had the same experience.

“Posted on instagram about how instagram always tries to make me add Higher by Creed to my stories and it turns out it’s happening to other people. I feel like I’m uncovering a big conspiracy,” they wrote.

Another user came close to giving in. “Instagram really wanted me to add higher by creed to the picture of caesar salad I posted…they almost had me this time,” they said.

Pamela Ross, a communications specialist, told CNN that Instagram recommended the track no matter what she shared.

“Anytime I posted anything on my Instagram story, like a dinner plate or my cat or whatever — every time it recommended adding ‘Higher’ by Creed,” Ross said. “I’m not following Creed, I’m not listening to Creed. Like what millennial was in charge of this decision?”

Even Instagram’s own spokesperson seemed puzzled. “That song is always recommended to me too!!” they told CNN.

The company later confirmed that it had found a problem. “We looked into this and found that this song is being recommended to more people than intended,” the spokesperson said. Instagram’s engineering team is working on a fix, though the company has yet to explain what caused the error.

Instagram normally recommends music based on signals such as a user’s past choices and details about the photo or video they want to share. For some reason, those signals have made “Higher” an all-purpose soundtrack.

Soulja Boy’s “Turn My Swag On” has also drawn complaints from users who say it pops up too often. Instagram, however, insists that its recommendations for that track reflect genuine popularity on the platform.

“The Soulja Boy song being recommended is not a bug, and it is actually popular on IG!” the spokesperson said.

Creed released “Higher” in 1999, at the height of the band’s commercial success. The song reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Mainstream Rock chart. It also helped propel Human Clay to sales of around 12 million copies, and the single later earned double-platinum certification from the RIAA.

The song was written by Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti and singer Scott Stapp, who said he drew inspiration for the song from a recurring nightmare in which someone hunted him down and shot him. Lucid dreaming gave him a way to take control of the dream and escape, and the experience helped shape the song’s lyrics and spiritual themes.

More than 25 years later, “Higher” continues to find a new audience — or at least a captive one. Instagram’s algorithm is determined to take its users higher, whether they asked for it or not.

Metallica made a couple of changes to their setlist for the third show of their Las Vegas Sphere residency on October 8. The most notable addition was “Fade to Black,” from 1984’s Ride the Lightning [via Setlist.fm].

The residency opened October 1, with the second show following on October 3. The October 8 set was largely unchanged from opening night, with “Fade to Black” replacing “The Day That Never Comes” and “Orion” taking the place of “The Call of Ktulu.” Both “Orion” and “The Call of Ktulu” were dedicated to late Metallica bass guitarist Cliff Burton.

The band opened with “Battery,” marking the first time it had led a Metallica set since 2014. Several other songs also returned after lengthy absences: “Devil’s Dance” hadn’t been played since 2008, “...And Justice for All” since 2014, “The Outlaw Torn” since 2019 and “Now That We’re Dead” since 2021.

Metallica’s next Sphere show is Saturday, October 10, with more dates scheduled.

Metallica Las Vegas Sphere Setlist — October 8

“Battery”

“Creeping Death”

“Now That We’re Dead”

“Sad But True”

“The Shortest Straw”

“Wherever I May Roam”

“Fade to Black”

“...And Justice for All”

Kirk and Rob Doodle

“Nothing Else Matters”

“Orion”

“Lux Æterna”

“Ride the Lightning”

“The Memory Remains”

“Seek & Destroy”

“Master of Puppets”

Aerosmith will return to the stage for two exclusive concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on October 29 and November 1, with a huge lineup of guest artists joining the band.

The shows, billed as California, Dream On: Aerosmith & Friends, will feature Aerosmith alongside the Black Crowes, Run-DMC, Heart, Andrew Watt, Billy Idol, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Guns N’ Roses bass guitarist Duff McKagan, Eric Church, Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell, Marcus King, Alice in Chains bassist Mike Inez, Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, Train singer Pat Monahan, Sammy Hagar, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, Steve Stevens, Godsmack frontman Sully Erna and Tom Morello.

Also appearing will be keyboardist Adam Wakeman, guitarist Audley Freed, producer and bassist Don Was, and drummer Kenny Aronoff, with Was serving as the event’s music director. Additional artists, special guests and surprise appearances are expected to be announced in the weeks ahead.

The lineup will vary between the two nights, with final lineups to be announced at or near showtime and subject to change.

The concerts will celebrate Aerosmith’s catalog, including “Dream On,” “Sweet Emotion,” “Walk This Way,” “Janie’s Got a Gun,” “Crazy,” “Cryin’” and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

According to the announcement, Aerosmith’s influence extends across rock, pop, hip-hop and blues, with the band’s music continuing to inspire artists across generations. The band is described as a four-time Grammy Award winner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and MusiCares Person of the Year honoree.

Citi cardmembers will have access to a presale beginning Thursday, October 8, at 10 a.m. PDT through the Citi Entertainment program. Additional presales will run throughout the week, with the general on-sale beginning Saturday, October 10, at 10 a.m. PDT. Visit Aerosmith.com for more details.

The concerts will also offer VIP upgrades and experiences, including options featuring access to the pre-show Aerosmith VIP Lounge, a limited-edition Aerosmith jacket, a VIP-exclusive T-shirt and early venue entry.

Greta Van Fleet have answered the question that had been hanging over the band since May: they’re back on the road.

The Michigan rockers have announced a massive 59-date Into the Beginning world tour for 2027, ending months of speculation that they may have split up. The run begins February 3 at Enmarket Arena in Savannah, Georgia, before Greta Van Fleet embark on an extensive North American tour through March 30. (The full schedule is below.)

The band will play 28 shows across the U.S. during the first North American leg, hitting major markets including Atlanta, Nashville, Detroit, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Fort Worth, Anaheim, Phoenix, Seattle and Denver.

After a European run in May and early June, Greta Van Fleet will return to North America in July for a second stretch of dates. That leg begins July 5 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver and includes stops in Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbus, Raleigh, the Washington, D.C., area, Hershey and Toronto before concluding July 31 at Acrisure Amphitheater in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The tour announcement comes after fans began wondering whether Greta Van Fleet had called it quits in May. The band — singer Josh Kiszka, guitarist Jake Kiszka, bass guitarist Sam Kiszka and drummer Danny Wagner — had not performed live or released new music since 2024. Speculation intensified after Jake announced his side project Mirador, and reached a peak when the group shared a career-spanning montage that ended with the message, “Thanks for the wild ride. Love, Josh, Jake, Sam and Daniel.”

The band’s new activity also arrives as they prepare to release Palace for the People, their fourth studio album, on October 9 via Republic Records. The album follows 2023’s Starcatcher, which was produced by Dave Cobb.

Greta Van Fleet’s previous touring cycle included a headline performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall in July 2024.

For the 2027 tour, Larkin Poe will support throughout the U.K. and Europe. Various North American dates will feature Arc De Soleil, Edgehill, the Kooks, Luna Li, Sana Sana Musica, Portugal. The Man, Sun Room and Friko.

North American fan pre-sale tickets begin at 9 a.m. local time October 13, with general sale starting at 10 a.m. October 15. European tickets go on general sale at 10 a.m. local time October 9, following a fan pre-sale beginning at 10 a.m. October 7.

Here are all the 2027 Into the Beginning tour dates.

February 2027

3 – Savannah, GA – Enmarket Arena
5 – Tampa, FL – Benchmark International Arena
6 – Jacksonville, FL – VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena
9 – Atlanta, GA – State Farm Arena
10 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena
12 – Rosemont, IL – Allstate Arena
13 – Omaha, NE – CHI Health Center
15 – Minneapolis, MN – Target Center
17 – Green Bay, WI – Resch Center
19 – Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center
20 – Pittsburgh, PA – PPG Paints Arena

March 2027

2 – Detroit, MI – Little Caesars Arena
3 – Cleveland, OH – Rocket Arena
5 – Boston, MA – TD Garden
6 – Albany, NY – MVP Arena
8 – Brooklyn, NY – Barclays Center
10 – Philadelphia, PA – Xfinity Mobile Arena
12 – Charlotte, NC – Spectrum Center
13 – Knoxville, TN – Food City Center
15 – Fort Worth, TX – Dickies Arena
16 – Tulsa, OK – BOK Center
19 – Anaheim, CA – Honda Center
20 – Phoenix, AZ – Mortgage Matchup Center
22 – Reno, NV – Reno Events Center
24 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena
25 – Portland, OR – Moda Center
27 – Boise, ID – ExtraMile Arena
29 – Salt Lake City, UT – Delta Center
30 – Denver, CO – Ball Arena

May 2027

15 – Munich, Germany – Olympiahalle
16 – Milan, Italy – Unipol Forum
18 – Hamburg, Germany – Barclays Arena
19 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Royal Arena
21 – Berlin, Germany – Uber Arena
22 – Prague, Czech Republic – O2 Arena
24 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Ziggo Dome
25 – Brussels, Belgium – Forest National
27 – Paris, France – Adidas Arena
28 – London, UK – The O2
30 – Birmingham, UK – Utilita Arena

June 2027

1 – Manchester, UK – Co-op Live
2 – Glasgow, UK – OVO Hydro
4 – Dublin, Ireland – 3Arena

July 2027

5 – Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena
7 – Edmonton, AB – Rogers Place
8 – Calgary, AB – Scotiabank Saddledome
10 – Winnipeg, MB – Canada Life Centre
13 – Kansas City, MO – T-Mobile Center
14 – St. Louis, MO – Chaifetz Arena
16 – Columbus, OH – Nationwide Arena
17 – Noblesville, IN – Ruoff Music Center
20 – Raleigh, NC – Lenovo Center
21 – Columbia, MD – Merriweather Post Pavilion
23 – Hershey, PA – Giant Center
24 – Uncasville, CT – Mohegan Sun Arena
26 – Gilford, NH – BankNH Pavilion
28 – Laval, QC – Place Bell
29 – Toronto, ON – RBC Amphitheatre
31 – Grand Rapids, MI – Acrisure Amphitheater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil Collins says he was surprised to discover that a reference to him in The Beatles Anthology had been removed — and he suspects Paul McCartney may have been behind the change.

Collins made the comments during a London Q&A with Steven Wilson celebrating the 45th anniversary of his 1981 solo debut, Face Value. He was discussing his cover of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which appears on the album, when he recalled seeing a reference to the recording in the original 1995 version of The Beatles Anthology.

Collins said the moment featured George Harrison discussing his version of the song, and that he was thrilled to hear the Beatles mention him.

“The one feather in my cap, which I’ll never forget, was with The Beatles Anthology.... The three got the tapes out of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ And they were playing it on the multi-track,” he said, via The Mirror.

“I thought, ‘The Beatles mentioned my name,’” Collins continued. “I went back to watch it recently and they’d taken it out. It’s not there anymore.... I don’t know, maybe McCartney didn’t like it.”

Collins did not provide evidence that McCartney had anything to do with the edit, and it is not clear why the reference was removed from the updated version of the documentary. McCartney has not publicly responded to the claim.

The suggestion is notable because Collins and McCartney have a history that dates back more than two decades. Collins described their falling-out in 2016, recounting an encounter with McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills at Buckingham Palace in 2002.

Collins said he approached McCartney with a first edition of The Beatles by Hunter Davies and asked him to sign it.

“I said, ‘Hey Paul, do you mind signing this for me?’ And he said, ‘Oh Heather, our little Phil’s a bit of a Beatles fan,’” Collins recalled. “And I thought, ‘You fuck. You fuck.’ Never forgot it.”

Collins went on to describe what he perceived as a condescending attitude from McCartney, saying the former Beatle made him feel as though it was difficult for him to have a conversation with someone of McCartney’s stature.

McCartney subsequently contacted Collins about the incident. Collins later told NME, “He’s been in touch about it because he was upset. I certainly didn’t get any flowers from him; I got more of a ‘Let’s just get on with our lives.’”

The two musicians eventually put the dispute behind them. Earlier this year Collins said he wished he had never spoken publicly about the feud, noting that they had since “made up.”

Collins’ connection to the Beatles goes beyond his brief reference in the original Antholog release. He was among the musicians who did session work on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass solo album in 1970, playing congas, but his contribution never made it onto the completed album. Years later, Harrison pranked the drummer into thinking his playing was so bad that it had to be cut.

“We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” Collins said.

The 1995 Beatles Anthology documentary was the first major project in which McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr participated in telling the story of the band themselves, with John Lennon represented posthumously through archival recordings and footage. The original Anthology series also accompanied the release of two new Beatles singles, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” both built around Lennon recordings completed by the surviving Beatles.

For its 30th anniversary, The Beatles Anthology was restored and expanded with a ninth episode, directed by Oliver Murray, while the accompanying music collection was expanded with Anthology 4, overseen by Giles Martin, son of the late Beatles producer George Martin. The updated project includes new mixes of “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” as well as “Now and Then,” which was released in 2023 and described as The Beatles’ final single.

The Beatles’ expanded Rubber Soul Special Edition is out today, October 2, giving fans an unprecedented look inside the sessions that produced one of the band’s most important albums. Alongside newly mixed versions of the 1965 classic, the release features previously unheard session recordings and home demos, including the previously unreleased John Lennon composition “Little Girl.”

But the most important story surrounding the album isn’t what listeners will hear in the newly opened vault recordings — it’s what happened inside Abbey Road Studio Two during the autumn of 1965.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The engineers would respond by citing company policy.

“‘Well, our rule book says…’”

The Beatles had little patience for rule books.

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

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

It still wasn’t enough.

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

The Beatles’ solution was simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that the expanded Special Edition is available, listeners can hear that process from a different perspective. The newly released session recordings and demos capture the Beatles working through arrangements and performances, including the long-awaited unveiling of “Little Girl.” They offer more than songs in progress. They document a band discovering that the recording studio could be as creative an instrument as a guitar or a piano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also featured actual string players rather than a synthesizer.

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

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

A not-so-funny but impactful thing happened to Rival Sons’ Scott Holiday on the way to making his first solo album, the just-released Topology.

The album was already well underway last October 17, when the guitarist spent an evening hanging out with friends at a bar about a block away from his house in Huntington Beach, California.

“Not getting obliterated or going too big or anything. Just hanging out and having a social night,” Holiday explains.

Shortly after midnight, he hopped on his electric bike to head home and began pulling out of the parking lot.

“The only thing I remember is a flash, and then I have a wake-up from paramedics,” Holiday tells Guitar Player via Zoom. “I have a little blank spot there, which is just no fun.”

Holiday was the victim of a hit-and-run, and the driver was never found. The guitarist broke six ribs — some in multiple spots, requiring titanium plates to fix — and “had a couple pretty good knocks on the head.”

A feared year of healing turned into about 30 days. “You can’t move, you can’t breathe, you can’t clear your throat, coughing is out of the question, a sneeze is an emergency on planet Earth,” he says. “You’re kinda in this still state, just trapped.”

But in that still state, a vision for the nine-track Topology — a “psychedelic, exploratory, maybe even poppier sounding record” released under the moniker Hol1D4y — began to coalesce.

“I’m just kind of in this delirious state, having to get real meditative and deep,” Holiday recalls. “And in that state I spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of things, and Topology was always percolating in the back of my head — ‘How am I going to get back? I’m in the middle of this and I’m inspired and I need to get healed, ’cause I got to get back to it.’

“I had already decided that I was going to sing on the album. I wondered, ‘If I’m going to use my voice and raise it up, is there something I care about enough to sing songs about it?’

“And there were a lot of things that were on my mind that I would want to share with people — things I talk about with my friends and my family and my wife, things that we get intellectual about and that resonate with me deeply.

“So I began to approach the album, song by song, in that state.”

Rival Sons spent 2025 on the road supporting its 2023 album Lightbringer. During the summer, Holiday began working on new music, writing some of it around drum tracks he solicited from bandmate Mike Miley.

“There was no idea for a solo record at all,” Holiday says. “I thought I was just writing for the next Rival Sons record.”

But Holiday began noticing that some of those things were not like the others.

“There were some songs that just felt like a different thing,” he explains.

When bassist Dave Beste asked for demos without the bass guitar parts on them, Holiday had a revelation.

“The second I went to remove the bass I decided, ‘I can’t take the bass off, ’cause I like the bass. I actually like what I’m playing.’ So I began to realize these tracks were a little more personal to me. I think they presented themselves to me as a solo project.

“And I just immediately ran with it … with a vote of confidence from the rest of the band, ’cause they all loved the material.”

Even then, Holiday thought he’d be making an instrumental album.

“But then I had a few of these tracks, like ‘Autonomatic,’ ‘Holotropic,’ that didn’t feel exactly like instrumentals,” he recalls. “I really felt like they were asking for a story, asking for a more traditional form.”

Rather than bring in guest vocalists “like we see a lot of guitar players do,” Holiday decided to step up to the mic himself. “I felt a close connection to these tunes,” he says, “and I didn’t want to take that closeness away by having somebody else sing them.

“And then I started thinking about what I wanted to sing about.”

Topology’s lyrics are undeniably — and unapologetically — cerebral and high-minded, as evidenced even by the titles mentioned as well as tracks such as “Panoptic,” “Equanimity” and “Metacognition.” Holiday even commissioned philosopher Dylan Trigg to write an explanatory essay for the back cover.

The album is, in a nutshell, “about connection,” Holiday explains. “It’s about aligning ourselves, waking up and optimizing ourselves in this material world.

“I know it sounds airy-fairy and far-out,” he says with a laugh, “but this is something that’s resonated with me for a long, long, long time.

“So that’s where I went. After the accident, I got into such a physically vulnerable state that it affected my mental vulnerability in a way I actually welcomed. It shook some stuff loose, literally and in an analogous way, that I was able to go, ‘Oh, man, I feel close to that mental, sensitive part of myself’ … and I wanted to hang onto that coming into the record and singing and using my voice, ’cause it’s different than the guitar, it’s different than bass. It’s different than drums.”

While Holiday brought in Jesse Nason to perform with an arsenal of vintage keyboards — including Moog, Oberheim and Prophet synthesizers — Topology is very much a guitar player’s showpiece.

That’s particularly true on “Crism,” a nearly 12-minute instrumental that cascades through mood and tempo changes, as well as some of Holiday’s most biting and soaring guitar solos. And surprisingly it was composed to a single drum track that Miley provided.

“We had just lost Jack DeJohnette, so we were all listening to a bunch of those wonderful records from the early ’70s, totally inspired,” says Holiday, who also cites John Coltrane, early Miles Davis and 1970s-era King Crimson as influential sources. “And I had just told the guys that for the solo record I wanted to do something like that.”

Miley’s drum track captured that vibe perfectly.

“It was different from anything he had ever sent me,” Holiday says. “I was completely blown away. I just told him, ‘It’s a masterpiece!’ I told him, ‘I’m not gonna edit it.’ Jesse came over and we plugged in and played all the way through the song five times, full takes, and I took sections from each of them and made the song.”

Holiday kept the gear for Topology “pretty simple … the cream of the crop of my goodies,” including a 1961 Gibson ES-345, a 1964 “Platypus” Firebird and a 1966 ES-330. Custom Kauer and Banker models were used for overdubs, while the acoustic guitars were a Martin OM42 and Guild F412. All of the bass parts were recorded with a Supro Huntington.

For amplifiers Holiday used some Universal Audio models but primarily stuck to a pair of small Supros — an Amulet and a 1600 Supreme. He “didn’t want to go too bananas” with effects, using Fjord Fuzz Odin octave fuzz and Fjaer reverb pedals as well as an Electro-Harmonix POG octave generator on the track “Veridream.”

But the “star of the show,” Holiday says, was a prototype from effects-maker Jeorge Tripps.

“This pedal is able to make eight presets, and I used them all and it sounds like eight different pedals,” Holiday explains. “So this is the star of the show, and I love that I made a record with a pedal that’s unavailable to the world — and may never be, who knows?”

Holiday knows that between him singing and the different playing approaches, Topology presents him in a manner that might surprise Rival Sons fans. And he’s looking forward to them hearing it.

“I didn’t overthink at all when I made this music,” he continues. “This was more like, ‘This is natural. This is what I should do. This is where the color goes, this is where the texture goes, this is how long the songs need to be.’

“It was like releasing a valve, but, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t even know that valve needed to be released, but there it is,’ and things moved a lot easier.”

As for the Hol1D4y moniker, it reflects Holiday’s interest in numerology and sacred geometry.

“I really loved this idea of using a 1 and 4. In numerology the 1 and 4 become a 5. In numerology, 5 represents: adventure, freedom, curiosity and dynamic change. In sacred geometry the number 5 represents the bridge between the physical and spiritual realms.

“So it has great significance with the things I’m talking about and felt about this project.”

Now Holiday is preparing to make Hol1D4y a live endeavor. He’s assembled a five-member band and has built three special rigs for himself and the two others who will play guitar. He’s also worked with Banker’s Matt Hughes to create a custom double-neck guitar and bass.

“Sometimes I’ll be playing bass on a verse and then I’m playing guitar on the chorus, or vice versa,” Holiday says. “I move it all around. Basically I’m gonna be super selfish and just want to play and have fun.”

Rival Sons returns to the road in late October for U.S. dates through November, followed by studio work on a new album in early 2027. Holiday hopes to launch Hol1D4y live in February or March.

“But we are going to tour this, one way or another. I promise you that. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Did Eric Clapton ever really know what kind of group Cream was? He formed the band with bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker in 1966, after seeing his hero Buddy Guy perform with a trio in London. Convinced his future lay in a blues-rock trio, he quit John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to make a fresh start.

What he failed to consider was that Bruce and Baker both had strong jazz backgrounds. For them, Cream was nothing less than a jazz-rock fusion outfit, one of the first in an era that would include artists like the Free Spirits (featuring guitarist Larry Coryell), Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, and Clapton's old pal Jeff Beck, to name a few.

“I thought of Cream as sort of a jazz band,” Bruce once said, “only we never told Eric he was really Ornette Coleman! Kept quiet about that.”

Like a jazz band, Cream made spirited, virtuoso improvisation a key part of their approach in concert. Together, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker introduced jamming to rock audiences, first in concert and later on albums like Wheels of Fire and Goodbye, and, following their breakup in 1968, on concert discs like Live Cream and Live Cream Volume II.

Some of the longest jams in their catalog include Wheels of Fire’s “Spoonful” (16:47) and “Toad” (16:16), Goodbye’s “I’m So Glad” (9:13), Live Cream’s “N.S.U.” (10:13) and “Sweet Wine” (15:15), and Live Cream Volume II’s “Steppin’ Out” (13:38).

And then there’s “Crossroads,” certainly the best known of the trio’s live jams. The song appeared on the second disc of 1968’s double-LP Wheels of Fire, along with other live recordings from Cream’s March 7–10 concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore and Winterland venues that same year. Recorded at Winterland on March 10, 1968, “Crossroads” comes in at a tidy 4 minutes and 18 seconds, making it one of the shorter live cuts in Cream’s catalog.

For fans of Eric Clapton’s electric guitar soloing, there is perhaps no better example of his guitar prowess. Over six verses, Clapton plays some of the most lyrical and impassioned guitar in blues rock — not just guitar wankery but lines that build and develop into statements you can recall in an instant and even sing. No less a Clapton fan than Eddie Van Halen learned the “Crossroads” solos note for note. That's how important they are.

So wouldn’t it be great if there was actually a longer version of this celebrated recording?

If the late producer Tom Dowd is to be believed, there is. Over his long career as an engineer and producer, Dowd recorded Clapton in Cream, solo and in Derek and the Dominos, which is why he was chosen to reminisce about the guitarist and his recordings for Guitar Player’s July 1985 Eric Clapton issue. In doing so, he made an admission that was tantalizing to Clapton fans.

“On the Wheels of Fire album, in the live portion, a lot of things were ultimately brought down to shorter versions than were played onstage,” Dowd said. “We did two recordings in San Francisco in three days' time — one at Winterland and the other at the Fillmore.

"'Crossroads' onstage, for instance, was never under seven to 10 minutes long. So the solos between the vocals were edited. But there was no overdubbing whatsoever on any of the live albums.”

Definitive as it may sound, Dowd’s declaration has a few problems. For one thing, nearly 60 years on, no “unedited” recordings of the Winterland "Crossroads" have surfaced. In addition, other live cuts of "Crossroads” from the group's autumn 1968 farewell tour are arranged like the Wheels of Fire track, right down to Bruce's "Eric Clapton" acknowledgement at the song's end. The group’s L.A. Forum and San Diego Sports Arena performances in October 1968 both clock in at around four minutes and change, while Cream’s November 26, 1968 presentation at the Royal Albert Hall runs the same length as the Wheels of Fire version.

If anything gives support to Dowd’s memory of the recording, it’s the moment at 2:44 where Clapton seemingly gets ahead of the beat and the players lose the “one” for a couple of measures. Did the group make a masterful save and recover before going completely off the rails? Or is this a less-than-ideal edit made to trim the song down to a more reasonable length?

Eric Clapton seems to think it was the former. The guitarist, who was interviewed by Dan Forte in that same issue as Dowd, couldn’t say if the producer was right, but he acknowledged that the group often came close to completely losing it when jamming.

GUITAR PLAYER "Cream's live version of 'Crossroads' is often cited as one of the best live cuts and live guitar solos ever recorded. Was that edited from a longer jam?"

ERIC CLAPTON "I can't remember. I haven't heard that in so long — and I really don't like it, actually. I think there's something wrong with it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we weren't lost at that point in the song, because that used to happen a lot. I'd forget where the 1 was, and I'd be playing the 1 on the 4, or the 1 on the 2 — that used to happen a lot. Somehow or another, it would make this crazy new hybrid thing, which I never liked, because it's not what it was supposed to be.

"What I'm saying is, if I hear the solo and think, God, I'm on the 2 and I should be on the 1, then I can never really enjoy it. And I think that's what happened with 'Crossroads.' It is interesting, and everyone can pat themselves on the back that we all got out of it at the same time. But it rankles me a little bit."

What’s curious is that even Clapton isn’t sure if the song was edited down — and he performed it.

But perhaps there are aspects to this we don’t know. Let’s say Dowd was right and “Crossroads” was originally much longer. Imagine Cream, out on their farewell tour in autumn 1968, decided to perform the song in its abbreviated Wheels of Fire format for one reason or another — maybe they preferred it, or figured it would let them wrap up the show faster and get out of each other’s hair. By the time of this interview, even Clapton could be excused if he'd forgotten such minor details.

Instead, what he recalled was his reaction — it rankled him. All guitarists would be blessed to feel so rankled. But then Clapton never did fully enjoy his role in Cream, where he was something of the odd man out. As Jack Bruce explained in a 2012 interview with Guitarist, Clapton thought Cream would be a blues trio and give him a chance to be like his idol, Buddy Guy. Meanwhile, Bruce and Baker were jazzheads hellbent on infusing the group’s blues-rock with freeform improvisation.

The results speak for themselves. As for "Crossroads," at any length it serves up some of the greatest guitar playing in rock and roll history.

Jane Asher has spent decades declining to revisit her relationship with Paul McCartney, even though their time together helped inspire some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs. Now, as that relationship is set to be dramatized on the big screen, she has no intention of watching.

Asher, who dated the Beatle bass guitarist for five years and became engaged to him in 1967, is being portrayed by Lucy Boynton in Sam Mendes’ upcoming four-part Beatles film series. The actor says the filmmakers did reach out to her, but she gave them the same response she has given to inquiries about her relationship with McCartney for years.

“They approached me about it, of course, but I said my usual,” Asher told The Telegraph.

Asher and McCartney met in 1963, when she interviewed the Beatles at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Their relationship quickly became serious, with McCartney eventually moving into the Asher family home. The years they spent together coincided with one of the Beatles’ most creatively fertile periods, and Asher has been connected to several McCartney compositions from the era.

The years they spent together coincided with one of the Beatles’ most creatively fertile periods, and Asher was a direct influence on several of McCartney’s songs. “And I Love Her” (from 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night),“I’m Looking Through You” (from 1965’s Rubber Soul) and “For No One” (from 1966’s Revolver) have all been associated with their relationship.

Their engagement ended in 1968, with Asher making the announcement during a BBC television appearance. McCartney married Linda McCartney the following year.

Asher, now 80, has made clear that she considers the relationship a closed chapter. She said she has turned down offers of money to talk about McCartney and has no interest in reopening the subject for the new films.

“People would offer me money to talk about it, all sorts of things,” she said. “But I won’t discuss it. It was so long ago.”

That extends to Boynton’s portrayal of her. Asked about the casting, Asher acknowledged that her onscreen counterpart is “beautiful,” but said she won’t see the finished films.

“Well, of course, Lucy is beautiful. But I won’t watch the films, otherwise everyone will ask me what I thought.”

Mendes’ The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event will tell the band’s story four times, with each movie centered on a different Beatle. Paul Mescal plays McCartney, with Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

The ensemble also includes Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey.

The project has the participation of Apple Corps and the surviving Beatles, giving Mendes access to the group’s music rights as well as their approval for the films. The four movies are scheduled to open in theaters simultaneously in April 2028.

Asher isn’t the only Beatles partner whose connection to the project has attracted attention. Boyd said earlier this year that she had not been contacted by the production about her portrayal, adding, “I could have really told them great stories.”

Sometimes a song becomes something bigger than a hit. It strikes a nerve with its audience and becomes an anthem that unites listeners with its message.

Brian May had no idea Queen were on the verge of recording such a momentous tune as the group set out to make News of the World, their sixth album, in 1977. Frontman Freddie Mercury had been working on a song designed to encourage audience participation. But when he first presented it to May, bass guitarist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor at a rehearsal, they didn’t get it.

Part of the problem was its lyrics, in which Mercury moved from complaints about having paid his dues to telling his audience his climb to the top had been “no bed of roses.”

Worst of all was the title: “We Are the Champions.”

“Our initial sense of it was that it was something very big-headed,” May told Guitar Player. “We all looked at Fred and said, ‘Really?’

“But he had a very clear view of it. It was aimed at an audience that wanted to feel a togetherness and a power and an optimism. He knew people would sing it.”

More than a gifted vocalist, Mercury was a performer who knew how to unite an audience. Which was only appropriate, considering that Queen had decided to bring them into the show with News of the World,

The genesis of this approach came after Queen’s 1977 show at Bingley Hall in Stafford, England, where the audience sang along loudly and enthusiastically to every song.

“We did an encore and then went off,” May explained in a BBC interview that year, “and instead of just keeping clapping, they sang ‘You'll Never Walk Alone‘ to us, and we were just completely knocked out and taken aback.”

As they began to work on News of the World, the band was inspired to write tracks that would harness that collective energy. May brought along “We Will Rock You,” sensing its stomp-clap rhythm and simple vocal refrain would be good way to bring the audience together. Mercury, meanwhile, envisioned “We Are the Champions” as a theme that would unify fans in a moment of collective celebration.

“This was the first album where we contemplated audience participation,” May told Guitar Player. “Up until that point, we were sort of tentative. We didn't expect the audience to sing along because they didn't in those days. It was a big transition for us to realize that the audience was part of the show, and we decided to encourage that.”

As he explained, this shift in audience behavior was evident more in England and Europe than in America.

“This phenomenon started in Europe way before in the states,” he said. “And I used to prefer that people didn't sing, to be honest. I liked them to hear all the delicate nuances of what we were doing. I found it kind of annoying, as if it was getting in the way of Freddie’s vocals. It's funny to look back on that.”

Regarding “We Are the Champions,” May recalls that it was recorded in what was a typical fashion for Queen at the time.

“Normally, [Mercury] would put down the piano part with Roger and John live, and when it was good enough — after three or four takes — that would be what we used. And that's pretty much what happened with ‘Champions.’”

Working that way allowed May to think about his guitar parts while the others were recording their parts. But sometimes his best ideas came later, as they did for “We Are the Champions.” Roughly two weeks after initially completing his part, he added two new guitar tracks of bell-like chimes using his Red Special electric guitar.

Panned in stereo on the song’s second verse, they ping-pong from speaker to speaker during the lines “It’s been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise,” adding a bit of decoration as the arrangement builds to a new high ahead of the chorus.

“I remember listening to it in the car the day it was to be mixed and thinking that my guitar wasn't good enough,” he explained. “I told them to give me one more go and planned that little piece in stereo that happens in verse two, which I really like, it's that sort of bell effect between two guitars. So I know I did some extra work on this one in the light of having lived with it for a couple of weeks.”

May also added some guitar lines — “the lead guitar responses to Freddie’s vocal, particularly at the end,” he said. But when listening to them in the final mix, he felt they were too obtrusive.

“We were very wary of that, because we liked order in our music,” he said. “But the guitar in that case was kind of competing with Freddie’s vocal.”

However, Mercury felt it was exactly what the song needed: a contest of wills. He told May, “No. The guitar is fighting with the vocal here, and that’s the way it should be.”

“That song doesn’t have a solo as such,” May said, “and I don’t think it’s ever needed one.”

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 said. “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 said that, 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 recalled. “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 wrote that 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.

September 25 is Dolly Parton Day, a fitting date for celebrating the life and music of the late country icon because it can be written as 9/25 — a numerical nod to her signature song, “9 to 5.”

Guitarists marveled for years at Parton’s ability to fret a guitar while wearing her famously long acrylic nails. But those glamorous extensions — part of her signature look — did more than make her guitar playing a little more challenging. They also helped her write one of her biggest hits.

Parton died August 25 at age 80, leaving behind a seven-decade career as a singer, songwriter, actress and philanthropist. Among her many achievements, she wrote thousands of songs and earned 11 Grammy Awards, while her Imagination Library distributed more than 300 million books to children around the world.

But “9 to 5” remains one of Parton’s most instantly recognizable songs. Written for the 1980 comedy of the same name, it became her first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, earned her two Grammys in 1982 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

And the story of how she wrote it is wonderfully Dolly Parton.

The movie starred Parton alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three office workers who plot to get even with their sexist, egotistical boss. Fonda had championed Parton for the role, and Parton agreed to appear on the condition that she would have a chance to write the theme song.

The song came to her while she was on the set, with her guitar back in her trailer. And, fittingly for a movie about office workers, Parton found an unlikely substitute for a typewriter: her fingernails.

“I was bored always in between takes because they have so much time between setups with lighting,” she explained on The Graham Norton Show. “And you just sit around, and what are you going to do?”

Part of her deal with Fonda was that she would get to write the theme song. But without her guitar at hand, she began experimenting with the sound of her acrylic nails.

“I would take my nails, and because it was acrylic nails it makes like a percussive sound,” Parton explained. “It sounds like a typewriter, too.”

She began clacking her nails together to create a rhythm while jotting down words and ideas inspired by what she was seeing around the set.

“So I just started to write little words and things that I would see, and things I would think that would fit with that day-to-day nine-to-five job. Then I’d go back at night to my hotel room and put those things down,” she said.

The idea stuck. And the sound of those nails eventually became part of the finished recording.

Parton even gave her manicure an official credit on 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, the album on which the song appeared.

“I have a credit on the back of the album that says, ‘Nails by Dolly!’”

That little detail is one of those perfect Dolly Parton stories: her trademark look wasn’t simply decoration. She found a way to make it part of the music.

And those nails had long presented another musical challenge for Parton. How, exactly, did she manage to fret an acoustic guitar while wearing them?

Her solution was to work around them. Parton explained that she often used open tunings and barre chords, allowing her to play without having to curl her fretting fingers as much. She also favored the three-quarter-sized acoustic guitars she had played since her youth.

There were limits, though.

“If I’m really serious about it, I just have to saw ’em down!” she said.

Much of Parton’s distinctive guitar style comes from her rhythmic right hand. Her playing combines the Maybelle Carter-style “thumb and flick” approach with the alternating bass technique associated with players such as Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Her thumb picks out bass notes while her first finger flicks down across the strings to sound the corresponding chord.

You can hear and see that approach in action when Parton performs the title track from her 1973 album, My Tennessee Mountain Home, all while sporting her trademark nails. Her picking-hand nails even tap against the guitar’s body, adding another percussive element to the performance.

It’s a fitting reminder of something that came through in so much of Parton’s music: she could turn just about anything into an instrument — even her fingernails.

Macklemore is turning the controversy surrounding his departure from Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour into a new run of shows centered on his support for Palestinians.

The rapper announced the Free Palestine Tour Thursday, with initial dates set for Dublin, Paris and London. Additional artists and U.S. dates will be announced soon, he said, with all proceeds from the tour set to benefit organizations supporting Palestinians. The Dublin date is scheduled for October 26, with the Paris and London dates to follow.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s Loop Tour following comments he made during a September 4 performance at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore told the crowd that one reason he wanted to join the tour was to be able to say “Free Palestine” from stadium stages, and he performed his 2024 protest song “Hind’s Hall.”

Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the remainder of the U.S. leg of the tour. Sheeran has said the decision was made by the tour’s promoter, Messina Touring Group, after venues indicated they would not host the shows if Macklemore remained on the bill.

Several of Sheeran’s other supporting acts — including Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and Beoga — subsequently withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Sheeran also incurred the ire of former Pink Floyd bass guitarist Roger Waters, a longtime supporter of Palestinian causes, who called him "a little prick" in a video about Macklemore’s removal from the Loop tour.

Sheeran has continued the Loop Tour, performing largely on his own after the supporting acts departed.

At his September 19 concert in Philadelphia, Sheeran addressed the controversy from the stage. He said he had made “mistakes” and apologized to fans, while also describing the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic and unjustifiable.” Sheeran said he wanted his shows to be about “unity and humanity, not politics,” but acknowledged that the controversy had placed him in the middle of a debate over freedom of speech and the conflict.

Macklemore, meanwhile, said the experience had convinced him that artists should use their platforms to speak out even when doing so carries consequences.

“What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage,” he wrote in announcing the new tour. “When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.”

He said he spent the past week reaching out to other artists who have publicly supported Palestinians and began discussing a new tour. Macklemore acknowledged that the project has come together quickly, with artists, schedules and other details still being finalized.

“But this is a moment of momentum, and there is work to be done,” he wrote. “So we’re going on tour.”

The first announced dates are in Dublin, Paris and London, with artist announcements and U.S. dates to follow. Macklemore is directing fans to his website to sign up for updates and first access to tickets. The presale is scheduled to begin Monday, September 28, at 10 a.m. local time, with the general on-sale beginning Wednesday, September 30, at 10 a.m.

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.”

The concert film documenting Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance and the original Black Sabbath lineup will hit cinemas worldwide October 28, giving fans another chance to experience the historic July 5, 2025 farewell at Birmingham’s Villa Park.

Tickets for Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning go on sale Thursday, September 24, at 10 a.m. ET via the official Back to the Beginning website.

The sold-out concert marked Ozzy’s final live performance, taking place just 17 days before his death. It also reunited Black Sabbath’s original lineup — Ozzy on vocals, Tony Iommi on electric guitar, Geezer Butler on bass and Bill Ward on drums — for the first time in more than two decades.

Ozzy performed a solo set before joining Iommi, Butler and Ward for Black Sabbath’s closing performance. The event also featured appearances from a remarkable collection of artists influenced by the band, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, Gojira, Halestorm and Mastodon.

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine served as the concert’s musical director, while Jason Momoa hosted the event.

“There’s never been anything like that that’s happened in the history of rock and roll,” Morello says in the film. “[Black Sabbath] gets to play their final show basically in the Ground Zero of where they created heavy metal.”

For Iommi, the performance provided a fitting conclusion to Black Sabbath’s story.

“It was a closure for the band and it was a good way to go out, I think,” the guitarist says.

Butler describes the atmosphere somewhat differently, recalling the overwhelming response from the crowd.

“To me it was like pure love,” he says. “It was just a wave of love. It’s the only way I can describe it really. I mean I could feel it as if it is like tangible.”

Ward, meanwhile, says the return to Birmingham felt almost surreal.

“Felt completely at home in a place where I belong,” the drummer says. “It almost felt like I was in a dream.”

The idea for the Back to the Beginning concert came from Sharon Osbourne, who managed Ozzy and oversaw the event. She says the singer had a simple motivation for returning to the stage.

“Back to the Beginning came about because I asked Ozzy what would really make him happy,” Sharon says. “And he said the only thing that would make him happy was if he could perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to say goodbye and thank you.”

The concert sold out within minutes and brought together generations of musicians and fans to celebrate Black Sabbath’s legacy. In addition to the main acts, the event featured all-star appearances from musicians including Ronnie Wood, Steven Tyler, Sammy Hagar, Billy Corgan, Yungblud, Nuno Bettencourt, Vernon Reid, Jake E. Lee, K.K. Downing, Rudy Sarzo, Chad Smith and Travis Barker.

The concert film has been mixed in Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound and is designed specifically for theatrical presentation, allowing audiences to experience both the scale of the Villa Park production and the intimacy of Ozzy’s farewell.

The film will screen worldwide for a limited time beginning October 28. Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. ET Thursday, September 24.

No other solo acoustic performer wows a crowd like the cat that graced GP’s cover when we put a spotlight on the 50 Greatest Acoustic Players of All Time in 2017.

Nearly a decade later at 71 years of age, Tommy Emmanuel has seen and done it all, yet manages to stay fit as a fiddle and have a fresh perspective at every show.

Emmanuel keeps his chops razor-sharp and understands that’s not enough to keep a broad audience engaged. In addition to using multiple acoustics that mix up the set from a guitar perspective, he delivers insane amounts of energy, a keen sense of humor and a fair amount of motivational speaking as he drops personal anecdotes from his storied career.

The Endless Road, a long-awaited documentary about Emmanuel’s remarkable journey from the Australian outback to Music City, U.S.A., is finally being released on October 2. It follows the story of a child guitar prodigy who dedicated his life to becoming the world’s greatest acoustic guitar player — and the struggles he faced along the way.

The film explores Emmanuel’s relationship with his hero and mentor, Chet Atkins, and includes one of the last on-camera interviews with Tommy’s brother, Phil Emmanuel. The documentary has screened at numerous film festivals, earning critical praise and multiple awards.

Beginning October 2, the film will be available to rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and Google, with additional platforms coming soon.

We’ve done several GP Presents events with Emmanuel and players of all stripes always come out of the woodwork to hear his powerful Maton tone, appreciate his melodic mastery, and walk away feeling inspired to try a new technique.

Emmanuel just wrapped up his annual Guitar Camp U.S.A. in Nashville, about which he told Guitar Player, “I don’t care if you suck, and I don’t care if you are frigging brilliant. If I see you love it, I’ll do anything to help you.”

Come show Tommy how much we all appreciate the excellence he relentlessly represents in the guitar community at the Guild Theatre, where intimacy meets superb production quality.

Emmanuel doesn’t play many rooms this size, plus he’s got local faves Jack Tuttle and Scott Gates opening this date on his Living in the Light tour, so it’s a great idea to get your tickets now.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Tommy Emmanuel in Menlo Park, California, on Wednesday, September 23, send an email and put “Emmanuel” 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 Guild Theatre in Menlo Park, California, and have their own accommodations in the area. Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS
GP Presents Tommy Emmanuel, plus Jack Tuttle and Scott Gates

Wednesday, September 23

7:00 p.m. doors, 8:00 p.m. show

Guild Theatre

Menlo Park, CA

We'll be handing out free packs of Martin strings

Ella Langley is on the verge of making Billboard history with “Choosin’ Texas” — a song whose unlikely origin involves Miranda Lambert, a kangaroo and a story about getting pulled over by a cop.

The 27-year-old country star — whose main axe is a Gibson SJ-200 acoustic — has emerged as one of 2026’s breakout acts. Five tracks from her fourth album, Dandelion, have surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify alone, helping the singer-songwriter from Hope Hull, Alabama, connect with a huge audience.

But “Choosin’ Texas” has left the rest in the dust, amassing more than 694 million Spotify streams and climbing to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

Released in October 2025 as the lead single from Dandelion, the song didn’t reach No. 1 until February. It hasn’t budged since, and this week it is expected to notch its 23rd week at the summit — breaking a record held by Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

Carey’s festive smash has spent 22 weeks at number one since first reaching the top in 2019. The achievement helped cement her status as the “Queen of Christmas,” and for the past seven years, her 22-week run has been the benchmark Langley is now poised to surpass.

“Choosin’ Texas,” meanwhile, is a country song in the classic tradition of heartbreak and romantic rejection, told from the perspective of a jilted lover. And its inspiration is about as far removed from the Billboard Hot 100 as you can imagine.

“I wrote it with one of my favorite artists, Miranda Lambert,” Langley told iHeartCountry in April. Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor also receive writing credits on the hit.

“We were at a writer’s retreat, and she [Lambert] was telling me this story of how she had a kangaroo in her passenger seat,” Langley explains. “She got pulled over, and the cop was like, ‘Oh, you have Texas plates.’ And I said, ‘Well, she’s from Texas, I can tell.’

“We all latched onto that story of ‘he picked the other girl.’ We’ve all had a crush at one time who was more into someone else.”

The kangaroo, it turns out, belongs to Lambert, making the song’s origin story even more unusual. The animal’s name has never been publicly revealed, but its appearance at a writer’s retreat helped inspire a song that is now on the verge of surpassing one of Mariah Carey’s most enduring chart records.

Nearly a year after its release, “Choosin’ Texas” shows no sign of slowing down. If it reaches 23 weeks at number one this week as expected, Langley will have a new Billboard record — thanks, in part, to a kangaroo.

In related news, the undisputed queen of country, Dolly Parton, was recently honored at the Emmys, while another fast-rising country star has opened up about making a fan out of Bob Dylan.

Footage of David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen sharing a stage for the first time in more than a decade has surfaced online, offering a rare glimpse of the former Van Halen bandmates together in public.

The appearance took place July 30 at a TEDx event in Fargo, North Dakota, where Roth and Van Halen joined artist Robert Vargas for a conversation titled “Beyond Boundaries: How Human Experience Informs Art and Music.” It wasn’t a Van Halen reunion performance, but the two musicians did reflect on their long and often complicated history together.

“It’s a gas to be here,” Roth declared in the opening moments of the conversation. “This is also a step towards world peace.”

The event marked Roth and Van Halen’s first public appearance together since Van Halen’s final concert at the Hollywood Bowl on October 4, 2015. Although the pair have remained in contact over the years, their relationship has had its share of ups and downs.

Van Halen, in particular, has been candid about the disagreements that derailed plans for a Van Halen tribute tour following the death of his brother, electric-guitar hero Eddie Van Halen, in 2020. He previously told Rolling Stone that the breaking point came when he asked Roth to acknowledge Eddie during the proposed shows.

“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” Van Halen said, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.’ And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave fuckin’ popped a fuse. … The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”

More recently, however, Van Halen has spoken warmly about Roth’s contributions to the band, praising his talent and the music they created together.

“We did our best work with Dave,” he said.

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

The Fargo conversation didn’t attempt to resolve the pair’s differences, but both men acknowledged their long history of clashing — sometimes literally.

“Alex and I are famous for that,” Roth said. “Oh my God, there should be a star in front of three different clubs in Hollywood where we practiced Brazilian jiu-jitsu over the set list.”

The drummer has also had his share of disagreements with Sammy Hagar, who replaced Roth in the Van Halen lineup. In 2024, he disparaged Hagar’s Best of All Worlds tour, which featured former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony alongside Hagar, guitarist Joe Satriani and drummer Jason Bonham, saying the lineup wasn’t “doing the band justice.” Most recently, Alex slammed Hagar, calling him “a complete idiot” for comments he made about Eddie Van Halen in his autobiography Red.

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

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

Dave Grohl didn’t realize “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was destined to become the defining song of Nirvana’s career when the band recorded it for their 1991 album Nevermind. In fact, Grohl thought two other songs from the record — “In Bloom” and “Lithium” — were more likely to become hits.

The Foo Fighters leader now looks back on “Teen Spirit” as a great song and a defining moment in rock history, but he has never considered it Nirvana’s best single — or even the best song on Nevermind.

At the time, he said, the band had little sense of how dramatically the song was changing their fortunes. Nirvana was touring in its van and largely operating in “our little bubble,” with the impact of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” becoming apparent only when they arrived at venues to play.

“I didn’t really think much of ‘Teen Spirit’ at first. I thought it was just another one of the jams that we were doing,” he tells Mojo. “But ‘Teen Spirit’ was one we kept coming back to because the simple guitar lines were so memorable.

“We played a show in Seattle [at the OK Hotel, on April 17, 1991] to get gas money to go down to Los Angeles to record the record. We set it up at the last minute, it was an afternoon gig and we played that song for the first time and the audience went nuts. I don’t know if it was the rhythm or the melody but people got caught on it pretty quick.

“With Nevermind, I thought ‘In Bloom’ was going to be the ‘smash hit’ off the record, or ‘Lithium.’ I thought ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was just another album cut. We recorded it pretty quickly, and I think it was one of [producer] Butch Vig’s favorites, and it soon became pretty clear that it would be the special song on the record. But, of course, at that point we didn’t think anything was going to happen with the record.

“The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. Then it would be, ‘Holy shit, these people are nuts!’”

While “Teen Spirit” established the quiet/loud dynamic for which Nirvana became celebrated — along with Kurt Cobain’s grainy, distorted and chorused electric guitar tone — Grohl believes its music video was the key to giving the group an identity with which fans could relate.

“People heard the song on the radio and they thought, ‘This is great,’ but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, ‘This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they’re tearing up their fucking high school!’

“So I think that had a lot to do with what happened with the song. But do I think it’s the greatest single of all time? Of course not! I don’t even think it’s the greatest Nirvana single.” He cites two songs, the Beatles’ “Revolution” and the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” as examples of songs he puts in the category of the greatest singles of all time. But “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?

“Give me a break!” he says. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a great moment in time… but there’s better.”

Given Warren Haynes’ assortment of band affiliations, solo recordings and collaborations, it takes a proverbial scorecard, or maybe a spreadsheet, to adequately track his long and accomplished career.

It dates back to the Asheville, North Carolina, native’s tenures with David Allan Coe, the Nighthawks and the Dickey Betts Band, the latter of which led to him joining the Allman Brothers Band for its reformation in 1989. Haynes and bassist Allen Woody concurrently started Gov’t Mule, while Haynes landed in the Grateful Dead spin-off the Dead and worked with a prodigious list of others — the Derek Trucks Band, the Gregg Allman Band, Joe Bonamassa, Peter Frampton, John Scofield, Mountain, Trombone Shorty, Michael McDonald, Walter Trout and Dolly Parton.

And that really is just naming a few.

He’s orchestrated quite a career, but Haynes really raised some eyebrows when he started playing with orchestras, as documented on his new album, Dreams & Songs: A Symphonic Journey, out September 18. It started during August 2013, when he became part of Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration concerts honoring the late Grateful Dead mainstay and expanded into Dreams & Songs.

The new live album finds Haynes marrying his electric guitar firepower with orchestrations that complement, rather than overwhelm, the songs. The set list spans Haynes’ entire career, with plenty of surprises — if you had an orchestral “Whipping Post” on your bingo card, congratulations — and arrangements by an all-star cadre of conductors that includes David Campbell, Vince Mendoza, Chris Walden, Jim Gray and Sean O’Loughlin.

The album, co-produced with Don Was, hails from a one-night 2019 stand at the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in Asheville, with the 64-piece Asheville Symphony and a band that included ABB bandmate Oteil Burbridge on bass and John Medeski on keyboards. Rich Daniels of Chicago’s City Lights Orchestra has been the Dreams & Songs conductor throughout, and the road goes on for the concept amidst Haynes’ other endeavors — including a pair of shows next March at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

In the meantime, Haynes is gearing up for Gov’t Mule’s next outing, a co-headlining run with Ziggy Marley that starts September 23. With the Dreams & Songs album on the horizon, he chatted with us via Zoom about the unique challenges of surveying his body of work with such lavish accompaniment.

Because you don’t have enough on your plate [Haynes laughs], what led you down this path?

Well, the whole thing goes back, I guess, around 10 years, when I got the offer to do the Garcia Symphonic Celebrations, doing Garcia’s music with a symphony. At that time I had never worked with a symphony at all; it wasn’t something I had given a lot of thought to, although I had thought about it in the back of my mind. So when they made me that offer I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. I’d be honored to do that. I guess I better focus and see what happens…” And that grew into my own thing with an orchestra.

It’s a different animal than the Mule, or everything else you’ve done.

In the beginning it was a little intimidating, but like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it. After two tours I did that way, I got a much better understanding of what it would be like to work up arrangements of songs from my last 30-something years, and since there was a vast amount of songs to choose from, we were able to concentrate on just choosing the songs that would work really well in that setting, not just do rock music or jazz or pop music with a symphony just for the sake of doing it.

A lot of this was to prove a point and do something unique that kind of went beyond where I think rock bands have taken symphonic treatments in the past… and not just sound like the orchestra was glued onto a bunch of pre-existing arrangements. I wanted improvisation to be a big part of this. I really wanted to focus on, “Okay, how do I make this where every song takes an interesting transformation with the orchestral treatment?”

I was pretty confident we could, given all the catalogs to choose from — the Dead catalog, Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule, my solo work. There was a lot of stuff to choose from. We sent it to a lot of amazing arrangers and tried to fit each arranger to each song and focus on their strengths. It was a tedious process, but amazing. I’m really happy with the way it all went.

Were there any previous rock band/symphony collaborations that provided a model for Dreams & Songs in any way?

Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall [from 1959] — what a wonderful treatment that was. It wasn’t a full orchestra, but that was a great inspiration for me. Otherwise, Zappa’s London Symphony Orchestra records were something really special. Most of the stuff I’ve heard or heard about through the years I’ve not paid attention to. This was more, “How can we do it in a way that’s unique and fits into our normal philosophy we preach all the time?”

You mention the importance of improvisation, which seems the anathema to what an orchestra does. How did you strike the balance?

There are times when the orchestra just lays out and the band is improvising and the symphony can come back in on cue. I’ll cue Rich Daniels, the conductor, and he’ll cue the orchestra when to come back in.

Another way is that we’ll improvise to what the symphony is playing in certain parts that are more open and allow for it. And then there’s certain songs where what the symphony is playing was originally an improvisation that now has been orchestrated. Between those three things, there’s a lot of interesting applications that are kind of unique.

Which of the arrangements did you find most surprising, and even transformative for their songs?

Steven Bernstein did a really New Orleans-ish treatment of “Black Peter” that I think is really cool. There’s a lot of Dixieland-ish stuff that’s being read by the orchestra that kind of gives it an improv vibe that’s straight from New Orleans.

And Medeski’s take on “Thorazine Shuffle” was really interesting, the way he kind of applied this avant-garde treatment to it, but well within the boundaries of classical music and orchestration. John has that background, and one of the reasons I chose him to arrange that song and for “Instrumental Illness” is based on that. He’s the right person to do those two songs in particular.

Did you envision the Dreams & Songs presentation as something that would reflect and take stock of your whole career?

Oh yeah. When the Asheville Symphony Orchestra reached out about doing something together, my initial response was, “Huh? What would that be?” I was intrigued by the concept, but I didn’t have any definite ideas.

Then my wife, Stefani, and I were talking about it, and she said, “Well, what if you did a retrospective type of approach, where you can choose things from all the different paths you’ve been traveling down the past several decades?” I thought, That makes sense. It gave me a lot of stuff to choose from, and a reason to do it.

Once we started looking at it that way, it became a whole different kind of concept. I looked at this whole set list, starting and ending with “Dreams and Songs” and closing the first set with “Terrapin Station” and closing the second set with “Whipping Post” was like a journey.

We change the sequence in the live shows we’ve done so far, and we’ll continue to change it in the future, but for this particular event I felt really good about the way it flowed and the way it bobs and weaves.

The real key is, “Does it take it somewhere beyond where it was, and is that a good thing?” It’s just a song-by-song process and that intangible thing where you go, “Wow, this really sounds amazing.”

Doing “Whipping Post” like this seems a little ballsy.

Well, you know, “Whipping Post” is the ultimate closer for the show. It’s interesting: Medeski and I were saying how that song is almost a symphonic arrangement on its own; the way the original version of it — even in the studio version — has that climb at the end [sings]. That whole thing is very symphonic, and the Allman Brothers Band used to do it with the timpani [played by Butch Trucks] and the ending and all that stuff, and the different movements. It was kind of crying out for it.

And also it’s one of my all-time favorite Allman Brothers songs, without question, and improvising on “Whipping Post” has always been just an amazing experience. It’s one of the great improv songs of all time, I think. And for someone like me, who played it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, to do it with an orchestra was a really cool challenge. It’s kind of a roller-coaster ride.

The song order is non-sequential, of course, but which of them do you think best represents the “beginning” of the story?

Probably “Broken Promised Land” from my first solo record. That really works well with the symphony, and the original version had [backing vocalist] Alfreda Gerald answering my guitar solo and this version has Jasmine Muhammad doing her own take of the same thing, but with the orchestration, and it’s one of the highlights of the show.

That moment where she and I are doing call-and-response and the orchestra comes back in at the end — it’s so powerful. You can feel and hear the audience kind of rise up. It’s one of the few times during the program that they actually are applauding in the middle of the song.

So from a chronological standpoint, that’s the song that meant something the earliest on in my career and turned out to be the only song from my first solo record that was included in this program.

What else has a particularly profound connection here?

I picked “Just Another Rider,” the song Gregg and I wrote together. There’s an interesting connection there that most people don’t realize. I think the Allman Brothers rehearsed that song but never performed it and never recorded it. It was written toward the end of that whole run, and there was a moment where it looked like we might actually perform or record it, but we never went further in that recording direction.

So Gregg decided to do it on his solo record [2011’s Low Country Blues], and it’s a really cool version, but it doesn’t utilize this horn line I had written for the song. So I was able to go to Steven Bernstein and say, “Hey, can you incorporate this horn line into this arrangement?”

That wound up being one of my favorites, and the way he breaks it down to all string bass at the end and the band lays out and Medeski and Greg Osby solo on top of all the acoustic bass is just beautiful. That’s one of the highlights for me, and that’s a song that’s probably lesser known to a lot of people.

This being a retrospective project, what kind of perspective did it give you on everything you’ve done?

It’s never gone unnoticed that I found myself on the inside of the two institutions that are the pillars of the jam band scene — the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. That’s a big deal. I had the Allman Brothers for 25 years, and my experience with the Dead camp is a little more limited — more with Phil Lesh and Friends than anything.

But the two tours I did with the Dead, I have extremely fond memories of those, and my relationships with all those guys. Bob [Weir] and I played a lot through the years. Mickey [Hart] and Billy [Kreutzmann] and I play. I was honored to be inside of that to the extent I was.

It seemed like after Garcia died and the Dead disbanded, the Allmans kind of took the mantle. Did it feel like that at the time?

Somebody was talking the other day about how those two worlds have kind of overlapped now — Oteil being part of Dead & Co., and myself and Jimmy Herring and Derek [Trucks] having all done stuff with Phil through the years. I think there’s something poetic about the whole… I don’t know if it’s symbiotic, but in some ways they’re very different and in some ways they interconnect.

Having the opportunity to be involved with both to the extent I was, as a songwriter as well as a singer and musician, it’s something that I’m very proud of and learned a lot from. That’s the only way that particular set of knowledge can be achieved, by being on the inside and being included in that inner sanctum. To be able to pick the brains of the original members from time to time was a really special thing.

So what did you learn that you couldn’t have known before you got inside like that, even as a knowledgeable fan?

I remember Dickey Betts telling me one time that the big difference between the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers was that the Dead has this way of relaxing and waiting for the magic to occur, and the Allman Brothers were impatient and forced the magic to happen. And he looked at it, as I do, that both things are equally beautiful — they’re just different approaches, and in some way an East Coast/West Coast kind of thing.

Do you have some new music on the horizon?

There’s a lot of stuff I’ve been writing that’s somewhere in between [2015’s] Ashes & Dust and [2024’s] Million Voices Whisper that will be for an upcoming solo project; there are some songs that actually go back as far as Ashes & Dust, and some that are brand new.

I’m also thinking about an instrumental jazz-influenced sort of record, which has been on my radar for a long time but I still haven’t done it. That’ll probably include some collaborations as well.

I would love to do a Gov’t Mule record with Kevin Scott, who’s our new bass player and is fantastic. Those are things that are dangling in front of us at the moment, so we’ll see what’s next on the horizon. Going all the way back to the COVID lockdown, I’ve just been really excited about getting as much material recorded as possible and actively writing as much as I can. That’s carried forward, and the whole process has been very inspirational.

The Beatles have shared an early version of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” from the forthcoming expanded special edition of Rubber Soul, which comes out October 2.

Titled “Second Version — Take 2,” the recording is the first version of the classic song, recorded on the first day of sessions for Rubber Soul. Written by John Lennon, “Norwegian Wood” is significant for George Harrison’s sitar part, marking the first time the Indian classical instrument was heard on a contemporary pop song.

Harrison first encountered the instrument on the set of the group’s 1965 film Help!. “There were some Indian musicians in a restaurant scene, and I first messed around with one there,” he recalled.

Harrison felt there was something familiar about Indian music. “It was as if I already knew it,” he said. “When I was a child, we had a crystal radio with long- and shortwave bands, and so it’s possible I might have already heard some Indian classical music.”

As his curiosity grew, Harrison purchased a sitar from a shop on London’s Oxford Street called Indiacraft in the summer of 1965. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit,” he recalled.

That October, the Beatles began working on Rubber Soul. The group was recording its initial attempts at “Norwegian Wood” and Lennon was unhappy with how it was coming along.

“We went through many different versions of the song,” he recalled. “It was never right, and I was getting very angry about it.”

The Beatles were always keen to use new instrumentation on their recordings. Lennon asked Harrison if he could double his acoustic guitar line on the sitar. “He was willing to have a go, as is his wont,” Lennon said.

The result transformed both the song and popular music. The following March, the Rolling Stones followed suit by ornamenting their new single “Paint It Black” with a sitar riff written and performed by Brian Jones, who had studied the instrument under Ravi Shankar’s student Harihar Rao. The track became the first rock and roll record with a sitar to hit the top of the charts, and launched a mini craze for the instrument.

The increased demand was felt particularly by New York session multi-instrumentalist Vincent Bell, who suddenly found himself hauling his heavy sitar from gig to gig. Worn out by the effort, Bell created a portable electric sitar based on an electric guitar design, which was then developed into a production model under Danelectro’s Coral brand.

Eventually, the sound of his electric sitar was heard on late-’60s hits like the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” Joe South’s “Games People Play” and many others.

As for Harrison, his interest in sitar grew in the months after recording “Norwegian Wood.” He composed the song “Love You To,” from the Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver, around several Indian classical instruments, including sitar.

Then, in September 1966, he all but gave up playing guitar when he embarked on a spiritual journey that began with his study of the sitar. With the Beatles just a few months away from recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harrison traveled to India to begin formal lessons with sitar master Ravi Shankar.

For the next 21 months, Harrison rarely picked up a guitar unless he had to for recording sessions or to compose. But by the summer of 1968, he gave up studying the instrument after Shankar encouraged him to seek his musical roots. Harrison realized then that rock and roll was where he belonged.

“I thought, Well, maybe I’m better off to get back into being a guitar player, songwriter, whatever I’m supposed to be,” he recalled. “Because I’m never gonna be a sitar player. Because I’ve seen a thousand sitar players in India who are twice as better than I’ll ever be!”

The “Norwegian Wood” outtake is the third advance release from the forthcoming Rubber Soul set. Apple previously released “Michelle (Take 1)” and an early songwriting work tape of the Rubber Soul–related single “Day Tripper.”

Van Halen have dug deep into the band’s vault and are pulling out their earliest known song for release as part of a super-limited-edition book.

“Glitter”, which was written with original bass player Mark Stone in 1974, is being offered up as a surprise addition to Van Halen, a new book penned by drummer Alex Van Halen. It runs 312 pages, features never-before-seen images of the band, and exhaustively chronicles their entire history, but it also includes a relic from their earliest musical steps.

The song has circulated in bootleg form for decades, but this marks the first official, high-quality release, with Alex Van Halen continuing a trend he kickstarted with “Unfinished” in 2024. That song, the last he and Eddie Van Halen ever worked on, was released alongside his book, Brothers, which detailed the Van Halen siblings’ journey from childhood to rock immortality. This time, he’s going right back to the beginning.

Its release predates the band’s debut album and the revolution-starting track, “Eruption”, which arrived four years later, in 1978. It would be one of Stone’s last acts in the band, having been replaced by Michael Anthony later in ‘74 – a role he maintained until Wolfgang Van Halen glued the band back together for 2010’s A Different Kind of Truth. Recently, however, Alex has insisted Anthony was asked to join the reunion.

The book is currently available for pre-order and is priced at $475/£345. The signed limited edition version is being presented in two bindings: the Deluxe boxed set (copies 1–350, already sold out) and the Collector boxed set (copies 351–1,500), after which the chance for fans to get their hands on the surprise 7” picture disc will be gone.

“Written, curated, and personally signed by Alex, Van Halen is the official chronicle of the band, ” says Genesis Publications. “The book traces the brothers’ journey from their childhood in Pasadena, California, and the band’s early days playing backyard parties, to the release and world tour of their chart-topping album 1984.

“Featuring a dynamic blend of iconic photography alongside rare and never-before-seen images, and with exclusive access to Alex Van Halen’s private archives, Van Halen offers a personally guided tour through the band’s legendary rise.”

There’s another side to the release, too. Alex Van Halen has made the headlines this week after calling former vocalist Sammy Hagar “a complete idiot” concerning what he wrote in his 2011 autobiography. Though the 73-year-old admits he’s never read the book, he’s distanced himself from the Red Rocker’s version of accounts of his time in the band.

Hagar has since responded, calling for peace rather than retaliating. But it’s clear that Alex Van Halen is trying to establish a sense of distance between their two books. Notably, too, he’d recently stuck the knife into Hagar by saying that Van Halen did their best work with David Lee Roth – which goes against Hagar’s own beliefs.

Fans won’t have to wait too much longer for more Van Halen, with Steve Lukather assuring fans the band’s forthcoming album is of high quality.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has revealed that his last ever conversation with Ozzy Osbourne was the night before the Prince of Darkness' death.

Ozzy died on July 22, 2025, just weeks after the Back To The Beginning farewell show at his hometown of Birmingham, England.

Tony Iommi told the Loudwire Nights radio show: "I spoke to him the night before he passed.

"He said to me, ‘I really feel tired and really worn out’. I said, ‘Well, you’re bound to really, it’s been a lot of stress and pressure and stuff like that’.

"And the next thing, the next day, gone."

He has struggled to accept that Ozzy was no longer with us, he said, and explained that even the final show was difficult because of Ozzy's mobility issues. “It was difficult because seeing Ozzy sitting in a throne is not the way I see him.

"Always onstage, he's been running around and [would] pull a face jokingly. We always had a little laugh onstage and enjoy when he'd run about.”

“But at Back to the Beginning, of course, he's in a throne and I couldn't see him, which felt very unusual. But it was a great moment, and I'm really glad we could get the opportunity to do it, because I mean, God, we didn't know he was going to go that quick. But he did... There's memories that will remain there, from rehearsals to the whole thing... I am glad that we could do that gig."

Iommi releases a new solo album, From The Dark, on October 23. The album sees him joined throughout by Jorn Lande, who shares writing credits on all songs, as well as bassist Becky Baldwin and drummer Karl Brazil, co-produced by Tony and Mike Exeter, his long-time creative partner, co-writer, producer and audio engineer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campbell remembers the sessions just as fondly.

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

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

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

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

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

Squeeze expressed their condolences in a statement of their own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaye decided to try something different.

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

Drummer Paul Humphrey glanced over at Kaye.

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

“And boom! The take came to life.

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

That was as close as Kaye got to Streisand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Van Halen was characteristically modest when reflecting on the honor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There they stayed, apparently forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taylor is unhappy with the insinuation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you all for an amazing run.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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