When Randy Bachman learned in early 2025 that a bridge in Winnipeg was being renamed the Bachman-Turner Overpass, he knew it was time to resurrect a song he’d written — but never recorded — dedicated to his hometown. He duly regrouped with retired Bachman-Turner Overdrive vocalist Fred Turner to cut the tune. He even invited along an old friend from his time in the Canadian city.

“I went, ‘Wow, that’s incredible! I’ve got a song all about Winnipeg,’” Bachman tells Guitar Player. “I’ll rock it up with BTO. I’ll get Fred to sing on it, and I’ll get Neil to play on it.”

“Neil” would be Bachman’s Winnipeg pal from the 1960s, Neil Young, who uncorks a ragged glory end solo on the track. This isn’t the first time the two pals have appeared on record together — Young guested on Bachman’s 1997 song “Prairie Town,” and a year earlier they both collaborated on a cover of the Shadows’ “Spring Is Nearly Here” for a Hank Marvin and the Shadows tribute album.

Strangely, the two guitarists — who bonded as young players over their love of Gretsch electric guitars, a Fender combo and Hank Marvin — never started a band together in their early years. Bachman played in the Silvertones, who morphed into Chad Allan and the Expressions and scored a hit with “Shakin’ All Over,” before settling on the name the Guess Who. Young, meanwhile, performed with the Squires.

The two went their separate ways, but Bachman is happy whenever their musical paths cross, including whether in the studio, onstage, solo or with groups, including Young’s band Crazy Horse.

“Neil has always been very generous with his time,” Bachman says. “He’s invited me down to his studio. He played Toronto last year with the Horse. I went to see them, and they were phenomenal. He did every song that I or the audience ever wanted him to play — incredible songs.

“He was there with Daryl,” he says, referring to Young’s wife, actress Daryl Hannah. “I gave him an acoustic version of ‘60 Years Ago,’ and he emailed me back the next day and said, ‘I love this song. It's so historical. Daryl loves it. We're playing it on the bus all the time.’”

Bachman is currently on the road with Burton Cummings in a revamped lineup of his other famous group, the Guess Who. Their Takin’ It Back tour runs through August 25.

When you send a track to Neil for him to play on, do you give him any kind of direction.

[laughs] Let me just say this: Nobody tells Neil what to do.

That sort of figures. Still, one might assume you might given your long-standing relationship with him.

The relationship is pure respect of his artistic vision. When we did the Shadows song, there’s a part in the bridge where there’s a C7 — I’m playing rhythm and Neil’s playing lead. In that C7 there’s a B note, a C note and a C sharp note. It was like “Chopsticks.” I called Neil’s manager, Elliot Roberts, and asked, “Can I correct this mistake? There’s this weird thing in the middle.”

What was the response?

“Neil would prefer you to leave it alone and don't touch it. It was captured in the moment.” I said, “Okay.”

So that's kind of like the Godfather wants you to eat this plate of spaghetti and one meatball. You don't ask for another meatball.

Neil has said that your old band, the Silvertones, was the best group in Winnipeg in the early ‘60s. He cited you as being a big influence on him.

I played lead guitar because I played violin when I was a kid. The Silvertones were a cover band — we did the hit parade and songs from England. We knew all the Shadows songs, Cliff Richards, Shane Fenton and the Fentones, Johnny Kidd & the Pirates — that’s where we got “Shakin’ All Over” from. Neil’s band would copy that, but they wanted to be different from the Ventures because every band was doing “Walk, Don’t Run.”

So Neil’s band, the Squires, was doing what the Silvertones did.

Same thing. We would play a dance and not say a word. You’d play Ventures or “Sleepwalk” so the kids could waltz. You’d play instrumentals for an hour and a half.

When I joined the Silvertones, the band had a rare thing — an amplifier. Jim Kale had a Fender Concert amp. It had two channels, and each channel had two inputs, so we could put a microphone in one for the singer to sing. We had no P.A. system, so we put rhythm guitar, bass and my guitar into that amp. That was our P.A.

Whenever we weren’t playing, Neil would call up and say, “Are you guys playing a gig next weekend? Can we borrow the amplifier?”

Oh, so he liked your equipment.

Well, he wanted to be Hank Marvin. My piano player had a tape recorder, and if you moved the recording head a little bit you'd get an echo like Hank Marvin. We had no pedals, but suddenly I had an echo. Play with the tape a little and there was the sound of Hank Marvin and the Shadows. Neil loved that sound. That's why we played together on the Hank Marvin and the Shadows tribute album.

What do you remember about Neil’s playing style back then?

We were both very good players. He was like me — you're clumsy, and you do it night and day, and you get smoother and smoother. Everybody's clumsy at first. Just try to play an F chord. I mean, it's the hardest chord on guitar, whether they're using a barre with your finger or your thumb. It's really tough to play.

Did you guys hang out and play together?

No. He lived on one side of town, I lived on the other. We would meet on the bus. We were friends, and we both had the same dream. We wanted to be on the radio. We wanted to be like Hank Marvin or Elvis. There’s something about the brotherhood of guitar, especially if you both have a Gretsch and you both like Hank Marvin. You’d kind of help each other. I'd say, “I'd learned this lick.” He’d say, “Oh, but I play it down here.” And I’d say, “It’s easier up here.”

Did you do this kind of thing at gigs?

Yeah, at gigs. We didn't have that much time. I would show up with Jim Kale at Neil’s gigs. We would take the Concert amp, put it onstage. Neil would plug it in and test it. We would watch him play. Or I would be playing, and he’d be watching us. He'd say, “How do you play that?” “Oh, here's how you play that. You can play your A on the second fret, or the fifth fret, or the 10th fret or whatever.” “Oh, okay.”

It’s surprising you never played in the same band. Did you both buy Gretsches around the same time?

A Gretsch [6120 Chet Atkins] finally came in to Winnipeg Music Supply, and it was pumpkin orange. We had no idea, because you'd only see a Gretsch guitar on American Bandstand, and it was black and white. So I bought the Gretsch, but it didn’t sound right because it had the Filter’Trons. The guy called me back and said, “I’ve got the twangy one. It’s got DeArmond pickups. Gimme a hundred bucks, and I’ll give you the twangy one.”

I took mine back, and Neil bought it. That became his Gretsch that he played on “Mr. Soul” and “For What It’s Worth” on American Bandstand. I’ve got the other Gretsch that I played on “Takin’ Care of Business,” “Laughing,” all that stuff. Those two guitars became famous for both of us. They’re what we learned to play on and what we wrote and recorded with.

One could ask him the same question about you, but back then did you have any sort of inkling that he was special and going to make it?

I did, yeah. Other guys came and went in his band. Other guys came and went in my band. What was consistent was us, the look in our eyes of “We don’t care what happens or who quits the band. We were going forward. If you're coming with me, enjoy the ride. If you're not coming with me, get off the bus. You’re too heavy.”

When he went to Los Angeles, did you think of going there too?

Well, we had left first in ‘65 to go and do the Kingsman “Louie Louie” tour after we had a hit with “Shakin’ All Over.” When we left town, I sent him a postcard: “Opened in New York. Met Burt Bacharach, Ashford and Simpson, Dionne Warwick. You gotta get out of Winnipeg.” So he went to Thunder Bay, met Stephen Stills and started Buffalo Springfield.

Later on, did he ever float the idea of you joining CSNY?

No. He had his own world, and I was stuck in Winnipeg. By then, My son Tal was born. When nobody offers you a job and you've got a wife and a kid, you don't go somewhere with no work. You stay where the work is.

Still, it’s surprising that the two of you never played together in a band. It seems like it would have been the most natural thing.

Well, let me say this: I envy his relationship with Stephen Stills. I would love to be Stephen Stills, the other guitar player who answers him on “Down by the River.” When you're doing an eight-minute solo, I would love to do that. It’s never happened.

He's played many times in Vancouver. I would go see him and he'd say, “Get a guitar. Come on for the encore” I’d go, “Phenomenal!” I'd walk onstage and he would yell out, “’On Broadway!’” I’d go, “What?! Can’t we do ‘Down by the River?’” “Nah.”

So we would do “On Broadway” or “Up on the Roof” — some weird Drifters song. I’d say, “Neil, I want to play ‘Down by the River.’ I want to do ‘Southern Man.’ I want to show you that I can rip on these solos.” [laughs] You would just do whatever he wants.

When Neil Young sat down for an interview with Guitar Player in 1992, grunge had upended the guitar world and reignited a long-running debate over technique versus expression. More than three decades later, his views on the 1990s return to punk-infused music still feels strikingly relevant.

“It’s just rock and roll, but it’s real rock and roll,” he told GP associate editor Jas Obrecht. “Punk and rock and roll are all the same thing. What has degenerated from it — what ‘rock and roll’ is now — is not rock and roll. It’s pop. It’s fabricated for the masses. It’s an imitation — a shoddy semblance of what it was. It’s Perry Como music compared to real rock and roll.”

Young's argument was bigger than the changing tastes of the early '90s. To him, the divide wasn't between punk and classic rock, or grunge and shred. It was between music driven by expression and music shaped for mass consumption.

“Remember when it all started?” he continued. “There was real rock and roll, and then that other music your parents listened to. It’s like rock and roll now is the music that our parents listened to. It’s, like, gone.”

That philosophy extended directly to his guitar playing. When asked what he looks for in an electric guitar solo, Young didn’t bring up speed, precision or technique— he was focused on a sensation.

“Elevation. You can feel it. That’s all I’m looking for,” he said. “You can tell I don’t care about bad notes. I listen for the whole band on my solos. You can call it a solo, because that’s a good way to describe it, but it’s really an instrumental. It’s the whole band that’s playing.”

That perspective also informed his view of formal music education. The 1980s shred boom led to a massive influx of guitarists to Berklee College of Music and music schools like the Musicians Institute. Young saw it as the beginning of the end.

“It paints a pretty doomed picture of the future, doesn’t it?” he asked. “First of all, it doesn’t matter if you can play a scale. It doesn’t matter if your technique is good. If you have feelings you want to get out through music, that’s what matters. If you have the ability to express yourself, and you feel good when you do it, then that’s why you do it. The technical side of it is a complete boring drag, as far as I’m concerned.”

Young — who has steadfastly played a 1953 Gibson Les Paul and 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe for the better part of 60 years — also acknowledged that technical virtuosity has never been his goal.

“I can’t play fast. I don’t even know the scales. A lot of the notes I go for are notes that I know aren’t there. They’re just not there, so you can hit any note.”

But his comments weren’t a dismissal of technical ability. In fact, he reserved some of his highest praise for two of rock’s most celebrated virtuosos.

“I appreciate these guys who play great. I’m impressed by metal bands with their scale guys. I mean, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genius guitar players. They’re unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber.

“But I can’t relate to it. One note is enough.”

Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, Randy Bachman became friends with another local guitar-playing teen by the name of Neil Young.

“Neil lived on one side of town, I lived on the other," Bachman told Guitar Player in 2024. "And we would both take the bus downtown and look in the window of Winnipeg Piano at this guitar and go, ‘Man, if we could ever play that...’”

The two men would grow up and go their separate ways. Young became a guitar legend in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, while also developing his solo career and launching psychedelic-folk-rockers Crazy Horse. Bachman went on to form the Guess Who — with whom he would pen hits like “American Woman” and “Undun” — before relaunching his career with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, where he delivered smash tracks like “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

Despite parting company, they never lost touch.

So when Young turned 70 in 2015, Bachman received an invitation to attend his birthday party. As he told an audience at a recent gig, this created quite a dilemma for him as he sweated over what to buy a guy who has everything.

But the occasion also resulted in Bachman meeting and having a hilarious exchange with a guitarist he’s long admired: Neil Young’s former Buffalo Springfield/CSN&Y bandmate, Stephen Stills.

“Many years ago, I got invited to Neil Young's birthday party in L.A.,” Bachman says. “He was turning 70. I’ve know him since we was 16. He’s Richie Rich, he can buy anything he wants in the whole world. What do I get him?”

Bachman soon came up with an idea that hearkened back to their days growing up in Winnipeg. Young lived along Route 70. So Bachman decided, “I’m gonna get him a Route 70 sign.”

“Rather than try to steal a sign, and get filmed doing it and be shown on Youtube,” he continues, “I called the city of Winnipeg and said, ‘This is Randy Bachman, I want to buy a road sign.

“They said, ‘It’s impossible. Nobody can buy those.’

“I said, ‘I want it for Neil Young’s birthday.’

“They said, ‘Okay.’”

Once he had the sign in hand, Bachman had to figure out how to fly it to Young’s birthday party. The reflective green sign is four-by-three feet, he says.

“When you see this thing on the highway, it looks normal,” he says. “When you've got to check it on an airplane, it’s gigantic.”

Somehow he managed to get the sign delivered and handed it over to Young at the party. Bachman doesn’t reveal Young’s reaction to his gift, but he tells what happened soon after.

“Neil goes, ‘Well, a couple friends of mine want to shake your hand.’ And I say, ‘Who?’ And he says ‘Graham Nash and Stephen Stills.’”

As Bachman explains, he’s been a fan of Stills throughout his career.

“I’ve loved Stephen still since Buffalo Springfield,” he says. “Him and Neil, the guitar duels, the songs he wrote, Crosby Stills & Nash — it’s just incredible. He's like the whole thing behind all those bands.”

Bachman felt compelled to tell Stills how big an influence he was to him.

“So I’m meeting Stephen for the first time. I go, ‘Wow you’ve really been an influence on my career.’ He says, ‘Thank you very much.’

“And I said, ‘You have no idea the ideas I got from you.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, thank you very much.’

“And I said, ‘You have no idea how many things I’ve stolen from you.’

“And he said, ‘Yes I have.’

”Here’s one of them,” Bachman says as his band kicks into the Guess Who hit “No Time.” Written by Bachman with his former Guess Who bandmate Burton Cummings, “No Time” was a big hit for the group, reaching number one in Canada and going to five on the Billboard Hot 100 after its release in November 1969.

Bachman shared a video of himself telling the story in concert on his TikTok account.

“That was our country-rock song,” Bachman explained to Songfacts. “Me and Burton trying to be like Neil and Stephen Stills.” They wrote the song at Cummings’ mother house after Bachman developed the songs main guitar line, delivered in the studio with his signature fuzz tone and performed on his 1957 Gretsch 6120 electric guitar. The instrument, which was stolen in 1976, was recovered in 2022 after an internet sleuth tracked it down.

There have been plenty of singers who sound like Bob Dylan, whether they intended to or not. Bruce Springsteen has channeled Dylan’s singing-talking style throughout his career, and Mark Knopfler has had the folk-poet’s gruff hipster inflection down since he recorded “The Sultans of Swing” with Dire Straits.

Tom Petty, Dylan’s friend and cohort in the Travelin’ Wilbury’s, could nail the higher end of Dylan’s vocal style, with his pinched and slightly flat way of launching the words out of his throat.

But the best mimic of all might be Gerry Rafferty, whose laconic delivery on the 1972 Stealer’s Wheel hit “Stuck in the Middle With You” left many convinced it was a Dylan song. With its steady strummed acoustic guitars and slinky slide lines, it sounds like a track that might have come out of the folk icon’s late-’60s/early ’70s period.

Considering all the above, how is it possible Bob Dylan got his nose out of joint over Neil Young’s plaintive vocals on a classic hit from Harvest, his 1972 acoustic folk turn?

The song was question: “Heart of Gold,” Young’s sole number one U.S. single.

Asked by Spin magazine if he disliked hearing others imitate his unmistakable style, Dylan didn’t hesitate.

“The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72, and the big song at the time was ‘Heart of Gold’,” Dylan replied.

“I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to ‘Heart of Gold.’ I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, ‘That’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.’”

A singer’s voice is their signature, and Dylan’s is like no other. So it figures that it bothered Dylan so much — enough that he spoke about it publicly.

But is it possible that he was so irked by Young’s song that he wrote a tune in response?

That’s what Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin claimed in a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone. If Heylin is correct, then Dylan’s “Forever Young” is his rebuttal to Young’s “Heart of Gold.”

“Dylan’s saying he’s forever Young, which is a dig at Neil for imitating Dylan,” Heylin suggested.

The timing almost seems to work. “Heart of Gold” came out in January 1972; Dylan first demoed “Forever Young” in June 1973 while in New York City. A year and a half seems a bit long for to harbor a grudge, but if Dylan did write it as a riposte, perhaps he ultimately decided the song was too good to leave buried in his back pages.

For the record, both men are friends and fans of each other’s work. Young spoke warmly of Dylan in a 2005 interview with Time, saying, “He’s the master. If I’d like to be anyone, it’s him. And he’s a great writer, true to his music and done what he feels is the right thing to do for years and years and years.”

Then again, he owed it to Dylan, who gave Young the honor of appearing in one of his songs, “Highlands,” from 1997: “Well, my heart’s in the Highlands / I can only get there one step at a time / I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound.”

Young repaid the favor again a few years later in “Flags of Freedom,” writing, “Their bond is everlasting / Listening to Bob Dylan singin’ / In 1963 / Watchin’ the flags of freedom flying.”

Speaking of Young, he recently revealed that he found and purchased the Gretsch 6120 electric he played years ago in Winnipeg with his first group, the Squires. He was aided in his search by Randy Bachman, his pal from his youth, and the internet sleuth who helped the Guess Who/BTO guitarist find his own Gretsch 6120 that was stolen in the 1970s.

When they were teens growing up together in Winnipeg, Randy Bachman and Neil Young used to visit their local music store and gaze at the guitars in the window. It was there that the two friends kindled their love for Gretsch, the brand behind some of the electric guitars the two rock icons have played over the years.

Both Bachman and Young would eventually buy Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins models. Bachman’s is famous as the guitar on which he wrote many hits for the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It also has an intriguing past: It was stolen in 1976 and seemingly lost for good, until an internet sleuth rediscovered it in 2021. Today It’s once again in his possession.

Young played his 6120 while he was a guitarist with the Squires, his first stable rock and roll group, which he cofounded in 1963 while living in Winnipeg. He sold the guitar at one point, but now it’s back and strung across his shoulders as he and the Chrome Hearts tour North America. And it’s thanks to Bachman.

Young told the story at a recent show with the group at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby, British Columbia, before launching into Buffalo Springfield's "Mr. Soul."

"I found this guy who tracked down guitars, and this guitar here is my guitar that I used in the Squires in Winnipeg," Young said to applause, as reported by Tom Zillich in The Abbotsford News. "I'd been looking for it for a while, just wondering what happened, you know, because I sold it in Toronto in a pawn shop or something.”

By 1965, the Squires has disbanded and Young was attempting a new musical direction playing in Winnipeg folk clubs. He no longer needed the electric guitar, so he sold it and bought an acoustic.

“I was gonna be a folk singer, so I didn't need this anymore,” he tells the audience. “That's right, I figured it out.

“So Randy introduced me to this friend of his and the guy went on the internet with an old picture from Winnipeg with this guitar, and found it, because of the grain in the wood is just so unique, and this matched it absolutely perfectly."

CTV News reports that Bachman’s friend is William Long, the same person whose internet sleuthing helped him track down his Gretsch 6120 by matching the guitar’s woodgrain pattern to other 6120s in online photos.

As Long explained to Guitar Player in 2023, he had seen online videos of Bachman’s 6120. As fan of mysteries like the 1971 D.B. Cooper hijacking, Long became intrigued about the guitar;’s whereabouts. He enhanced a frame in an old video that showed three distinctive marks on the guitar’s finish, then scrutinized more than 300 images of similar Gretsches around the world.

It took about a week to find a match in a 6120 that a Tokyo guitar shop had sold before 2016. From there he was able to track down the instrument to its Japanese owner, who had purchased the guitar not knowing its history .

“I knew instantly that was Randy’s guitar,” Long said. “The woodgrain fingerprint was a perfect match that no other guitar could have.”

Young’s reconnection with his childhood guitar is just the latest story in his long history with Bachman, who — like Young — is fond of telling stories during his shows. He recently regaled an audience with the story of how he met his hero Stephen Stills through Neil Young, leading to their hilarious exchange.

Bachman has also revealed his and Young’s history in an interview with Guitar Player, and discussed the stories behind many of his hit songs with the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, including “American Woman,” “Undun,” “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.”

When Stephen Stills and Neil Young announced the launch of a tour in 1976, fans had good reason to celebrate. The Stills-Young union had been the heart and soul of Buffalo Springfield, the late-‘60s group that — despite the guitar and songwriting talents of its members — never achieved its full promise.

Young’s entrance into Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1970 didn’t have the same thrill to it as when Stills and Young strapped on electric guitars in their Buffalo Springfield days. Although the quartet became a major act of the early ’70s, it could never match Springfield’s innovative and diverse range of music, nor did it give Stills and Young as many opportunities to put their electric guitar talents to work.

As a result, the launch of a Stills and Young tour in the summer of 1976 seemed like an opportunity to relive the excitement of 10 years earlier, when Buffalo Springfield scored a hit with Stills’ “For What It’s Worth.”

But like so much in the world of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, personalities got in the way.

The tour was a byproduct of Stills and Young’s attempt to recapture the glory of their early years in the recording studio. In February 1976, they began work on an album in Miami’s Criteria Studios, the facility where celebrated albums like Derek & the Dominos’ Layla and parts of the Eagles’ Hotel California and Fleetwod Mac’s Rumors were recorded in the 1970s.

Unfortunately, Stills and Young failed to reignite the fire of their prior union. Part of the problem was their working arrangement: Stills was a night owl and would retire by the time Young arrived at the studio in the morning. The much anticipated guitar fireworks never happened.

“The Stills/Young band was a sort of attempt to wrap up something that we had started a long time ago,” Young reflected in 1980. “It really wasn't as hot as the early stuff we did. When we were about 20 we used to lock horns a bit, and that was good for the group.”

Following a break in March, Young invited Crosby and Nash to add their vocals to the work he and Stills has recorded. Suddenly, the project began to look like the long-awaited follow-up to the quartet’s 1970 album, Déjà Vu,

But the good vibes ended when Crosby and Nash were forced to leave to complete work on what would become their 1976 album, Whistling Down the Wire, then approaching its deadline. Angered by their actions, Stills and Young erased Crosby and Nash’s contributions from the recordings and vowed to never work with them again.

Besides, Stills and Young were facing a deadline of their own. They’d booked a summer tour and needed to finish the album before then. By early June, the sessions had wrapped on what would become Long May You Run, the sole album credited to the Stills-Young Band. The disc was scheduled for a September release, and in the meantime, Stills and Young hit the road for their sold-out U.S. summer tour.

For fans, the setlist couldn’t have looked better. The show would open with the duo performing Stills’ hit “Love the One You’re With” and continue with Young’s “The Loner” and “Helpless” and a crowd-rousing performance of Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” The set would wrap with the title track from their forthcoming album, “Long May You Run,” Stills’ “Black Queen” and Young’s 1970 hit “Southern Man.” Following solo sets, the duo would end the night with a finale that included Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” and Springfield’s “Mr. Soul,” before an encore of an electrified “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”

The tour started off rough but promising, leading Stills to declare after a show in Hartford, Connecticut, “There’s no place I’d rather be than right here, playing with that guy.” As the tour continued, the two men found their groove, the harmonies and guitar solos meshing with the energy and head-cutting frenzy fans paid for.

But in reality, the shows demonstrated the growing rift between rock’s more polished and professional style, associated with Stills, and the looser, unvarnished presentation of the emerging punk movement that had more in common with Young and Crazy Horse.

Critics were largely unanimous in their assessment. The phrase “Young Hot, Stills Not” is often used when discussing newspaper reviews of the day. Whether or not it was ever used, it summed up some of the group’s early shows, when Stills’ drive for perfection forced Young to focus so intently on his vocals that he often had trouble cutting loose on guitar.

Some reviews asked why Young had even undertaken such a tour in place of the road show he’d originally had planned with Crazy Horse. According to one of Young’s associates, he’d done it to help Stills get some fire back in his belly. “It was something Neil felt he had to do.”

Stills — whose fiery temperament could lead him to behave erratically — got hung up on the reviews. Young encouraged him to let it go, but he couldn’t and would stay up late after the shows drinking. His perfectionism led him to berate the sound engineer at the July 20 show at Carolina Coliseum in Columbia, South Carolina, when he became unhappy with the stage mix.

Young decided he’d had enough. With several shows left to go, he bailed following the Columbia show. Rolling Stone reported that he’d been plagued by “a recurring throat illness” and “gone into seclusion at his Northern California ranch” at the recommendation of doctors to get some rest.

The truth was probably too harsh for Young to admit: He’d abandoned the tour without so much as a day’s notice.

As his tour bus was pulling out of Columbia, Young wondered aloud what Crazy Horse guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro was doing. Pancho’s girlfriend, part of Young’s entourage, replied, “He’s sitting in California freaking out, wondering why he’s not on the road with you. They’re all bummed out.”

Perhaps Young suddenly realized the colossal mistake he’d made by committing to the tour with Stills. Possibly he was just fed up and wanted to go home. Whatever the case, he instructed the driver to pull off the interstate and, reportedly, headed to Nashville. He telegrammed notice of his departure to Stills:

“Dear Stephen. Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil.”

Young claimed his cryptic comment was simply a reference to the fact that the tour was headed to Atlanta, but fans had to wonder if Young was thinking of the Allman Brothers’ 1972 album, Eat a Peach, the last to feature recordings with Duane Allman, who died in October 1971. The record’s title came from Duane himself. “When I’m in Georgia, I always eat a peach for peace,” he explained in an interview. Maybe it was just Young’s way of suggesting Stills quiet his demons and find some solace.

Time would heal the wounds between all four members of CSN&Y. Less than a year after swearing off future work with Crosby and Nash, Stills regrouped with them to record CSN, which included the Nash hit “Just a Song Before I Go.”

Stills and Young would reconnect again months after the tour, when Stills showed up near the end of the Band's Last Waltz show on November 25 at the Winterland Ballroom. CSN&Y would eventually regroup in 1988, and Stills and Young remain close, with the guitarist in attendance at Young’s 70th birthday party, in 2015. But the 1976 tour would mark the last attempt to reclaim the glory of their Buffalo Springfield years,

Music can be a spellbinding thing. With closed eyes and the right song on, the listener can be transported to a very specific place and time – to one’s first kiss, a time of euphoria or tragedy. Answering a fan-submitted question on his website, Paul McCartney has listed his three favorite albums, citing their ability to recall particular moments in his life as his reasons for choosing them.

“My partner and I have recently been discussing the albums and songs that have soundtracked our lives,” McCartney fan, Alex, writes. “Are there any albums that take you back to certain periods in your life? And does performing your own music evoke similar memories?”

The Beatle, who has recently reunited with his iconic Hofner bass after it went missing for half a century, was forthcoming with his answer, listing his three favorite records, but falling short of sharing the times, places, and emotions they bring flooding back.

“My favourite albums by other people,” he says, “tend to be: Music from Big Pink by the Band, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, and Harvest by Neil Young. They are the three classics that I love to listen to, and they all remind me of certain times in my life.”

Brian Wilson wrote 1966 album Pet Sounds after his crippling stage fright saw him retire from the road and seek solace in the studio. Rich with timeless classics including “God Only Knows,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” it established the guitarist and vocalist as one of his generation's finest pop arrangers.

Naturally, in the eyes of some, that puts at Beatles and the Beach Boys at odds with one another. Behind the scenes, there was a deep-rooted admiration and respect for one another. Pet Sounds proves why it ran so deep. Wilson wasn’t just a great composer; as the figurehead of the Beach Boys and a songwriter for countless other artists, he was a leader who got the most out of the players he worked with.

“That was the most fun I've ever had in the music business,” Billy Strange remembered of the recording sessions. “Glen [Campbell] and I played on the country-funk side of rock and roll, and that was the new sound in the studio.

“I’d get the call for a session, grab my Telecaster and my Fender Twin, give somebody the eight-bar solo they needed, and then pack up and hit the next session.

“We all came up through the studio ranks as sidemen, and we played with everybody,” he expands. “But there was never a time at a Beach Boys session when Brian didn't come up with something that was just absolutely amazing. He was a killer.”

“The Weight,” the only single released from the Band’s 1968 Music from Big Pink nearly didn’t make the record. Guitarist Robbie Robertson reveals one chord change saved it from the cutting room floor.

“Of course, at the time we had no idea how big it was going to become,” he tells Guitar Player in retrospect. “We were just doing our best to make music that had rhythm and soul.”

Young, meanwhile, has proven a loyalist to two prize pieces of gear for the best part of 60 years: a 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe 5E3, and Old Black, a modified 1953 Gibson Les Paul. The amp, especially, was an instant hit; even if it was luck of the draw.

“All Fender amps are different, made with different amounts of metal and windings, all these things,” he explains to GP. “The transformers are all different powered. Everything used to be loose, y'know, so every combination of specs was different.

“I got mine for $50 at Saul Bettman's Music on Larchmont in L.A. in 1967. Took it home, plugged in this Gretsch guitar, and immediately the entire room started to vibrate.

“The guitar started vibrating, and I went, ‘Holy shit!’ I turned it halfway down before it stopped feeding back.”

McCartney has also taken to Instagram to pen a touching tribute to the late Brian Wilson, expanding on the importance of his music in his life.

“Brian had that mysterious sense of musical genius that made his songs so achingly special,” he wrote. “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time. I loved him, and I was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while.

“How we will continue without Brian Wilson, ‘God Only Knows’.”

Despite the Beatles and the Beach Boys being at the heart of a musical rivalry, the pair never saw things like that. Years later, their friendship was compounded on the 2004 track “A Friend Like You.” Featured on Wilson's solo album, Gettin' In Over My Head, it marked the only time they recorded together, but iced a relationship that went far deeper.

Responding to McCartney's post, Carnie Wilson, Brian's daughter, commented, “Thank you for your friendship. He absolutely adored you. You know that.”

For close to 60 years, the heart of Neil Young’s live rig has been a very specific tweed 1959 Fender Deluxe that he controls remotely with a bespoke device called the Whizzer, which physically turns the amp's knobs when Young hits one of the foot switches on a red box onstage.

The amp itself is a four-input 1959 tweed Fender Deluxe 5E3, a 15-watter with just two volume knobs and one tone control. Young’s Deluxe is completely stock if you ignore that he’s had to replace its two 6L6 tubes. The new tubes increased the amp’s output from 15 to 19 watts after it was rebiased, causing it to run hot. In a March 1992 column for Guitar Player, Young’s guitar and amp tech Larry Cragg said he has “fans pumping a lot of air into the back of the Deluxe” since they swapped out the old tubes.

As for the Whizzer, Young came up with the idea for it in the 1970s, and his amp tech Sal Trentino made the first, a two-preset unit Young began using in 1978 on Rust Never Sleeps. His tech Rick Davis made the four-preset Whizzer in 1991.

“Its got four presets that completely control the three knobs on the top of the amp,” Craig told us. “He locks in the preset he wants, and it will always go back to that particular spot. We find that when you have the volume and tone all the way up, by turning that second volume knob up to about 10, it starts to fade away. But right before it starts to fade away, something else happens, and that has to be in exactly the right position. You can't breathe on it, or it fucks it all up.”

Young himself detailed the subtleties of the ’59 Deluxe in that same issue, in an interview with Jas Obrecht, to coincide with the release of his live album Weld.

“That's how I get the guitar sounds to change subtly,” he said of the Whizzer. “The Deluxe goes up to 12 — not 11 — and with everything floored, if you back it down to 10 and half from 12, all of a sudden it's chunky sounding on the attack. If you have it up on 12, then it just saturates completely and opens up after the attack. But if you back it down, it'll catch the attack.

“So I've got one button just to change that one thing that much.

Young offered an example of how he uses Whizzer with his Fender Deluxe.

“On a Fender Deluxe, there's tone and two volumes,” he explains. “The volume on the channel you're not using will affect the volume of the channel you are using, even when you're not plugged into it, because of the drain on the power amp. Having the ability to bring up the channel I'm not even using — so the overload thing comes on — or to change the treble here and there, those are the things I couldn't have done without this technology. Technology hasn't affected the sound, only the control of the sound.”

And when it comes to distortion, Young said it comes entirely from volume.

“There is no amp gain. We don't use a distorted effect at all. Just the Fender Deluxe.”

While some professionals might be inclined to leave a precious vintage amp at home when they tour, Young said the Deluxe is vital to his sound. When he hits the road, it goes with him.

“I couldn't go without it,” he said. “There is no spare. I've got 10 spares, but none of them sound like it.”

He pointed out that each amp performed differently as there were fewer standards in place for components in the early days of electronics.

“All Fender amps are different, made with different amounts of metal and windings, all these things,” Young said. “The transformers are all different powered. Everything used to be loose, y'know, so every combination of specs was different.”

He recalls exactly when and where this particular Deluxe came into his life.

“I got mine for $50 at Saul Bettman's Music on Larchmont in L.A. in 1967. Took it home, plugged in this Gretsch guitar, and immediately the entire room started to vibrate.

“The guitar started vibrating, and I went, ‘Holy shit!’ I turned it halfway down before it stopped feeding back.”

By the early 1990s, Young had added a small arsenal of pedals to his setup, giving him new ways to mess with his sound.

“I do a lot of things to make the sound more distorted, like by introducing an octave divider in conjunction with an analog delay, which is before the octave divider,” he said. “The routing of these things is really important — what hits first and then gets hit by something else.

"I have a line of six effects, and I can bypass them completely or dip in and grab one without going through the one in front of it. Or I can use all six of 'em or any combination that I want. I set them up in any order so that they affect each other in a certain way, and that's how I get my sound.”

Young explained that he triggers the pedals himself. “I can't imagine anyone operating it for me offstage,” he deadpanned. “No, they'd be dead.

Among the pedals were “a digital echo that I use because it has a particular gated-echo sound. When I tried it out at the Guitar Center in Hollywood, the salesmen were demo-ing all these sounds like on a Phil Collins record or the background of a Cyndi Lauper record.

"I said, ‘Let me try it for a minute,’ turned everything all the way up, except for the mix [control], and then I started playing the guitar really staccato.

“I turned the mix up and got ‘whop, whop, whop, whop,’ like this giant popcorn machine exploding kind of a sound. I like that sound, so I use it as an effect. When I've gone just about as far as I can go, I stick that on it and just hit harmonics and choke them. It splats out all this ridiculous noise all over everything. But I don't use it in a real sense to get a sound that it was meant to get.”

His most commonly used effects, he said, were “an original tube Echoplex, an MXR analog delay, a Boss flanger, and an old white Fender reverb unit with new springs that are separate. The springs are on a microphone stand that goes on the cement floor of the building. It extends up to the bottom of the stage, and the spring stands on top of the microphone stand and the wire comes through a hole in the stage completely separate.

“I can't use it if I don't do that, because if I jump onstage, the spring rattles. It has to be isolated from the surface of anything that's vibrating.”

And what if the venue won’t allow Neil Young to drill a hole in its stage?

“No, we do it. We just put a hole in the stage,” Young insisted. “There's always a way.

"It can't be very far away, because with a long wire, you lose the fidelity, the high end where the reverb lives, so the magic is gone. You've got to keep it close and really short.”

As for guitars, Young said. “I buy guitars mainly to remember something by. If I'm enjoying a place, I will try to find an old guitar in that area, and that will always remind me of when I was there. The way it sounds is the way I sounded when I was there.

“I’ve written a lot of songs on a Martin D-18 that I really like, and I stole that out of [manager] Elliot Roberts' office. I always think of Elliot's office whenever I play it.

“And there are other reasons to buy guitars. You can buy them because they're classics. I collect 'em, so I'll buy an Explorer or a Flying V or a Black Falcon or a White Falcon just because that's what it is. But I got those now, so I don't need those anymore. Material things are becoming less and less relevant to me, so I'm not contingent to buy guitars.”

Old Black, Young's modified 1953 Gibson Les Paul, is famous for having the mini-humbucker from a 1972 Gibson Firebird, rehoused in aluminium, in its bridge position. As Young explained to Guitar Player, the original pickup went missing after he dropped it off at a store for repair when it developed a bad hum.

“I went back to get it, and the store was closed and everything was gone,” he said. “I never got the pickup back, so now there have been two or three pickups in place of the original. I guess I used the Firebird pickup on all the things I played on my black guitar since 1973.”

One other constant is the addition of a Bigsby whammy bar. Young has had no interest in more modern accessories.

“It works; it's expressive,” Young said of the Bigsby. “The wang bars they have now are not expressive; they're too tight. You can go way down and come way back up and do these metal licks and still stay in tune. Big deal — stay in tune, great. You already were in tune. I go out of tune in every song, because the thing just doesn't stay in tune.

“But when you keep moving, you never know when you're in tune. It's like hand-controlled flanging. And if you have a tape repeat on, an Echoplex, and you just ever so slightly use the Bigsby, then your sound is going up and down, but the echo is always following behind it. So it's like you really have two guitars that are not only on two different attacks, but one's in a different pitch. It's a huge sound.

“I’ve got the Bigsby worn into my hand. I can't do anything else. It has to be a Bigsby.”

Back in 1993, Johnny Van Zant wrote “The Last Rebel,” a song for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s album of the same name. Its lyrics paint a picture of a defiant but tired soldier left on a battlefield: “You can see the shadow of his past written in his eyes... His friends are all gone.” Coming from a band that sang about “Sweet Home Alabama” – and did so with a decidedly southern accent – the impetus seemed obvious. But in fact, “the boy with his old guitar” who’s “got a dream that will never die” was actually someone closer to home for the singer.

“That one was about Gary,” Van Zant explains. Gary Rossington, Skynyrd’s mainstay guitarist, was the only founding member to be part of the group’s entire active career, until his death on March 5 at the age of 71 after long-term health issues, primarily heart-related, took their toll.

“I just started thinking about Gary being the last of the three who started this band,” continues Van Zant, who’s been Skynyrd’s frontman since 1987, filling the shoes of his brother Ronnie, who was killed in the October 1977 plane crash that put the band in dry dock for a decade. “We made it into him being a soldier. That was my thought with that song: He was one of the soldiers, and he fought through to the end. He was the last rebel, man. Forever.”

There’s no question that, at the time of his death, Rossington was the heart and soul of Lynyrd Skynyrd, even if his health prevented him from joining the band onstage regularly during the past couple of years. He began playing with Ronnie Van Zant and late Skynyrd guitarist Allen Collins during the mid ’60s and was the force behind Skynyrd’s resumption back in 1987. He saw the group through its 14 studio albums and numerous live sets and compilations. Rossington was writing up until the end, too, penning material for a proposed farewell album that, so far, is represented only by the aptly named 2020 single “Last of the Street Survivors.”

“I didn’t mean to be the last original, or the last man standing, but here it is,” Rossington said back in 2018, when Skynyrd announced the album and a planned two-year farewell tour that was scuttled by the COVID-19 pandemic. But that role resonated with Rossington, and he felt a purpose in playing the music he’d created with Van Zant, Collins and other deceased bandmates such as bassist-turned-third-guitarist Ed King, drummer Bob Burns, bassists Larry Junstrom and Leon Wilkeson, keyboardist Billy Powell and guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister/backup vocalist Cassie Gaines, who were also killed in the 1977 plane crash.

“It’s heavy,” Rossington acknowledged at the time. “I’m just happy to still be doing it, going out and spreading the word about Skynyrd and all the great songs, and talking about Ronnie and Allen and Steve Gaines, and Leon and Billy and all the guys we lost, just keeping them alive. And every time we play, I feel the other guys’ spirits with us, and they’re helping and making sure everything is all right. So I feel like there’s a whole bunch of people up on that stage.”

Through the group’s many incarnations, Rossington’s presence was the essential tie to the band’s legacy, a black-clad, hat-wearing, Les Paul-slinging embodiment of credibility, speaking softly but hitting hard with his guitar, whether it was the fire of “Free Bird” or the aching gentleness of “Simple Man.”

“Gary Rossington played a very integral part in the creation of all of that,” notes Rickey Medlocke, the Blackfoot founder who played drums in Skynyrd circa 1970-’71 and rejoined as a guitarist in 1996. “His presence and his talent was a very important part of the music and that band. If you go back into the early years when I first joined the band, just watching those two guys, Gary and Allen, work on those parts and the dual leads that would become great songs later on... It was Gary’s sound and the tone and his connection with Ronnie in writing the songs that brought it all together.”

Adds Van Zant, “I always thought Gary played like he acted. He was a shy guy, kinda quiet, and he had that mysterious quality, playing guitar with the long, drawn-out sustain. And the riffs he came up with and his leads were always like his personality. You could really hear the guy in his playing.”

Born in Jacksonville, Rossington found his first passion in baseball, playing sandlot and in organized leagues, with aspirations to one day join the New York Yankees. He actually met Van Zant and Burns through the sport, playing on different teams. They became interested in music as teens, however, and wound up playing the Rolling Stones’ then-current single “Time Is on My Side” in the carport of Burns’ home, the same day Van Zant had struck the drummer with a pitched ball.

“The music was changing us,” recalled Rossington, who was raised by his single mother in West Jacksonville after his father died, shortly after Gary was born. She fronted the eight dollars for his first guitar, a Sears and Roebuck Silvertone, and he later named a prized 1959 Les Paul “Berniece” after her. (It now resides in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.) “We still loved baseball, but we were connecting with the Stones, the Beatles – what we were hearing on the radio.”

And, he acknowledged with a laugh, “The girls were starting to like the rock stars better than the jocks. So there was that.”

With bassist Larry Junstrom, they formed the Noble Five, which became the One Percent before taking the name Lynyrd Skynyrd from Leonard Skinner, the strict gym teacher at Robert E. Lee High School who suspended Rossington for having long hair. Van Zant’s father, Lacy, cajoled administrators into letting the maverick aspiring rock star back into school, although Rossington ultimately dropped out to concentrate on the band.

Jacksonville had a vibrant music scene, recalls Medlocke, who got his music jones from his grandfather Paul “Shorty” Medlocke, a touring bluegrass musician. There was a preponderance of teen clubs – the Woodstock Youth Center, the Good Shepherd, the Riverside Women’s Club – as well as the Comic Book, which was all ages until midnight, when the kids were sent home and the liquor came out.

“Ronnie’s mom and dad would come out to my granddad’s dances, so that’s how I knew Ronnie – and then got to know Gary,” Medlocke says. “We all played the teen centers, and we intermingled with each other. You were able to trade conversations back and forth of who you were into, who you liked at the time, what record was out that was best. With Gary, it was all about the music. Nothing else. That’s how we all bonded.”

Exerting a particular influence on Rossington at the time was Paul Kossoff, then playing lead guitar with Free. “We saw them live once,” he remembered. “We saw them play right up close, and they just blew our minds. That’s when we really got serious about playing and working hard. We worked every day and night after that, so they helped us make it and were such an influence on us. And I just love ’em to death.”

Medlocke, meanwhile, had a front-row seat to that impact. “Paul Kossoff was so huge for Gary,” he says. “He had a 1959 Gibson Les Paul. Well, Gary ended up getting a ‘59 Les Paul. And then out of that Gary created his own thing that was a very integral part of Lynyrd Skynyrd: the sound.”

There were other sources of course, including the then-burgeoning Allman Brothers Band that was planting a flag for the South in rock and roll in a different manner than the likes of Little Richard and Sun Records’ Tennessee gang – Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.

But Rossington claimed that the idea of southern rock as a genre was not intentional on Skynyrd’s part. “We were just rock and roll, y’know?” he explained. “We were labeled southern rock through writers. ’Cause all of a sudden a lot of southern bands were doing great – us and the Allmans, Charlie [Daniels], Wet Willie, Marshall Tucker, the Atlanta Rhythm Section – it was a whole new scene taking off down here, and they needed to give it a name. I was proud to be from the South. We always were. But we didn’t think about the South as part of the sound. It’s just who we were.”

The southern heritage did come with baggage, though. “We showed the Confederate flag when we started out,” Rossington acknowledges. “We didn’t mean any kind of harm or hard feelings or anything racist. It was just ’cause we were a southern band, and we were just really proud of that, and [the flag] was more a part of the culture down there. But when it started to upset people we understood, so we stopped using it.”

Skynyrd were one of Jacksonville’s most popular bands by 1970, when they headed to Quinvy Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, to record early demos, including a first crack at “Free Bird.” Later, the group checked into the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studios with Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section guitarist Jimmy Johnson and bassist David Hood, the studio’s co-founders, who Medlocke says “really showed us what the difference between recording and playing live was all about. We really cut our teeth in there.” The band members were also still finding their way as songwriters. “We used a lot of D - C - G progressions,” Rossington told Guitar World in 1993. “It’s all about what you do with them.”

It was at Muscle Shoals, in fact, that “Free Bird” began to take flight. After some experimentation Collins found the chords for “the slow part,” as Rossington calls the song’s first half, which is how Skynyrd began to play the song in the clubs. The lyrics were inspired by a conversation Collins had with his wife, which was ultimately fleshed out by Ronnie Van Zant.

“Ronnie could never quite come up with a melody, but Allen kept playing it over and over again, and it finally clicked with Ronnie,” remembers Medlocke, who was playing drums during the sessions. “It was a magic moment.” Except, he explains, “It was actually a love song and they played it like that, and it never quite went over.”

Van Zant came up with the idea to extend the end, according to Rossington, who created the chord pattern that he and Collins began soloing over. It was the frontman who urged them to keep stretching it out.

“To us it was just a love song, and it had a lot of great guitar playing at the end for me and Allen to do,” Rossington said years later. “But it was really just a simple love song he wrote. We didn’t know it would do anything like it did, but it was mind-blowing. And it just hit.”

In 1972, the group’s onstage ferocity hooked Al Kooper, a music impresario from New York City who had played with Bob Dylan – most famously as the organist on “Like a Rolling Stone” – and founded the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, among other groups. “I heard them play for six nights in a row at a bar [Funochio’s in Atlanta],” recalled Kooper, who at the time had launched a label called Sounds of the South. “And by the sixth night, I offered to sign them.”

Skynyrd was aware of Kooper’s reputation and seduced by his stories. ”We were Hendrix freaks, and [Kooper] had played with him [on Electric Ladyland], so we wanted to hear everything we could about him,” Rossington said. Despite a lot of head-banging between their sensibilities, Kooper produced Skynyrd’s first three albums, all of which hit the Top 30 on the Billboard 200 and ultimately went Platinum, or better.

“He had a lot of ideas, but we just kinda had a band and we had all the songs written,” Rossington said. “We argued a lot, because he wanted to put in different things and different techniques or keyboard parts. We locked horns with him a few times. Ronnie and him would argue about things, and me and Allen Collins would write our own leads and have it down pat what we thought was best for the song, and [Kooper] would say, ‘No, go out and play it different’ or ‘Do this.’

“I remember on ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ Ed King did the solo and the song is in D, but Ed played it in the key of G, which worked but sounds a little different. And him and Al Kooper fought for days about that. [Kooper] hated that solo and Ed liked it, and they fought over that for a while. But it all worked out, and turns out it’s a great solo.”

There was also some drama around “Simple Man” from the band’s 1973 debut, (Pronounced ’Lĕh-’nérd ’Skin-’nérd), which Rossington wrote with Van Zant and considered one of his all-time Skynyrd favorites. “[Kooper] didn’t want us to do that song. He didn’t think it went anywhere and didn’t say much,” Rossington said. “But we loved it. So he had to go to New York on a quick weekend one time, and we recorded ‘Simple Man’ without him there. And when he got back he heard it and went, ‘Oh, wow, that’s great. Let’s do it,’ and he played organ on it, so it worked out in the end.”

“I really enjoyed the time I spent with them and the music that they made,” says Kooper, who will join Skynyrd in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. “And I think they were grateful. They had been with a couple of people before me and it didn’t work out, and it worked out this time.”

After those first three albums, however, Skynyrd hit a creative malaise due to a combination of booze, drugs and exhaustion from heavy touring, including opening for the Who. Ed King departed in 1975. That left Rossington and Collins to make Gimme Back My Bullets, Skynyrd’s lowest-selling album to date, as a two-man unit. But the addition of Gaines, who was suggested by his sister, fired things back up just in time for the group’s landmark 1976 live album, One More From the Road.

“Me and Allen were just getting by with it and doing all right with it, but we missed that third guitarist for double leads and more power-packed rhythms and stuff,” Rossington said. Skynyrd actually had several songs written quickly for a new studio album, but, Rossington noted, “We were due to do an album, and our new producer, Tommy Dowd, had [engineered] Live Cream and Wheels of Fire and a bunch of other [concert records], so it seemed like a live album was a good idea.

“We had just gotten Steve a month or two before, so he was really new and hadn’t played that much with us, and some of the songs we hadn’t gotten around to teaching him yet.” Rossington laughed at the memory. “He’d just jam along or play what he knew of ’em, and it was great and we all loved him for that. It was nerve-wracking, but it worked out better than we could’ve hoped.”

Coming in the wake of live album hits by Kiss, Peter Frampton and Bob Seger, One More From the Road was a Top 10, triple-Platinum smash, with an 11-and-a-half-minute version of “Free Bird” that eclipsed its studio predecessor, and was even a Top 40 hit.

Skynyrd took that momentum into 1977’s Street Survivors, arguably the band’s best studio effort and its highest-charting title, reaching number five. The free bird was flying high when the Convair CV-240 airplane transporting the band to a show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, crashed near Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, assistant tour manager Dean Kilpatrick and the two pilots. The rest of the band and crew suffered severe injuries. As far as Rossington was concerned, “we were through. There was no way to still be Lynyrd Skynyrd without Ronnie and Steve and Cassie. It just wouldn’t be right.”

After a bit of time, Rossington and Collins launched the Rossington Collins Band, which released two albums and disbanded in 1982. Rossington and his wife, Dale Krantz-Rossington, started the Rossington Band, which released another two albums, but the guitarist gradually warmed to the idea of putting Skynyrd back together.

“The last thing we did together as a group was have a plane crash. We’d like to go out on a better note than that,” Rossington explained in 1987, as he, Powell, Wilkeson, Ed King and drummer Artimus Pyle regrouped for a tour, with Johnny Van Zant singing. Collins had been paralyzed in a 1986 car crash but served as a co-musical director for the troupe. The trek was designed as a one-off tribute tour but quickly became a full-scale resumption that led to nine more studio albums and some rather characteristically heavy road work.

“I never dreamed it would go on this long,” Rossington said 20 years later. “We really thought it was over after [the crash]. But we got a lot of fan mail and stuff saying, ‘Please keep going, we love having you back.’ And there were so many promoters saying they were getting a lot of requests. We decided that if we could write together, get something happening that was good and new, then maybe we could go on.”

Van Zant, who put aside a new solo record deal to take part in that initial tour, says now, “I think there was unfinished business there for Gary and the other guys. Of course it was very scary, and very intimidating. The first thing I told them was, ‘Listen, I can’t be Ronnie. I’m gonna be me,’ and they said that’s what they wanted. And it worked out.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991 was the band’s first studio album since Street Survivors and the first of a streak of new music that’s so far run through 2012’s Last of a Dyin’ Breed. Four years after that, Rossington and his wife made their own album, Take It on Faith, their first outing outside of Skynyrd since the Rossington Band’s second album, in 1988. Produced by David Z, the set featured an all-star lineup of players, including the late Richie Hayward of Little Feat fame, Delbert McClinton, Bekka Bramlett, Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Winans and others, as well as songs co-written by ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons.

“It was just spontaneous,” Rossington said shortly before its release. “It only took a couple of weeks of recordings and a few overdubs and we were done. I got to use my Dobro on a song, and then I actually took a few different guitars up there to play in Nashville. I didn’t use my Les Paul a lot – maybe on half of it. I tried to get some different kinds of sounds, to sound different than Skynyrd. It was such a fun thing to do.”

Rossington had already begun having heart problems by that time, and some Skynyrd dates had to be canceled during the previous year after he suffered a heart attack. But the guitarist had no interest in succumbing to those health issues and dialing down. “I just take every day on faith,” he said. “I guess when it’s my time, I’m ready. I’d rather be playing and living life up than… Like Neil Young said, it’s better to burn out than to fade away. I’d rather just burn out in the next 10 years than sit in a rocking chair and look at the trees blowing in the wind. It’s just in my blood, y’know?

“I’m just an old guitar player, and we’ve spent our whole lives and the 10,000 hours of working to understand how to play and do it. So I think once you’ve got something going for yourself, you should keep it up and keep your craft going. When you retire, what’s next? I like to fish, but how much of that can you do, right? So I want to keep doing what I do now.”

Krantz-Rossington agreed. ”After Gary’s [2015] problem, we really had a serious talk about just letting it go for now and being happy to be alive,” she says. “But after a few days, he was just miserable, and he said to me, ‘I would much rather go out kickin’ it than sitting here in my chair.’ And that was the last time we talked about it. After that we just decided to ask for God’s mercy and do it till we drop.”

“Gary was a trouper, man,” Medlocke adds. “The guy was a tough individual.” Even when Rossington was off the road, he and Van Zant consulted with him as an active part of the band’s leadership, reporting in from the road, going over set lists and other arrangements. Van Zant’s usual salutation was, “Captain Kirk? Spock calling,” while Medlocke would discuss their shared passion for The Andy Griffith Show and Gunsmoke reruns. “He was still part of the band, even if he wasn’t there,” Van Zant says.

Both Van Zant and Rossington himself had said there would be no Skynyrd without the guitarist, with Rossington predicting, “I think it’s gonna have to end when I’m gone – not that I’m so great, but because of all the legalities and stuff.” But less than a month after his passing, the band, along with Krantz-Rossington, issued a statement that Skynyrd would indeed continue, with the approval of all other interested parties.

“I’ve been here over 27 years now,” Medlocke, says. “I’ve been here to see quite a few members move on, pass away, and it doesn’t get any easier. We had been at a crossroads several times about whether to go on or whatever, and we had always maintained that it wasn’t about each individual or anything like that. It was about the music that was created by those guys – Ronnie, Gary, Allen. So we made the decision to carry on with the music because, bottom line, the music is what is important.”

Van Zant confesses that “my heart was so broken that I couldn’t imagine going on,” but other voices intervened. “Talking to the estates and various people and talking to fans, I’m like, ‘Oh God, yeah, they’re counting on me to carry this on.’ Y’know, what kept me going was calling [Rossington] and having these conversations. He was my cheerleader. So now I’m gonna have to remember his voice to keep my spirits up and keep me going.”

What lies ahead for Skynyrd is open-ended. Van Zant and Medlocke talk about finishing an album, which would include other songs Rossington co-wrote. But mostly they want to honor their last rebel as well as those that went before him. And they flip a big middle finger to those who would say they can’t.

“People have beat us up over the years: ‘Ah, you guys ain’t nothin’ but a freakin’ tribute band,’ and ‘blah, blah, blah,’” Medlocke says. “There’s a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute bands out there, but none of them holds it as dear to their hearts as the guys who have been there as long as we have. We have the history; I played on the first [recording] sessions. We just know that we have to portray the music with the integrity and the sound and the love as close as we can to when it was originally created. It’s only right.”

“I walked in on Neil and Crazy Horse at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., on their first tour,” Nils Lofgren told Guitar Player, casting his mind back to May 1969.

“Over two nights, I watched four shows and spent the afternoons at the hotel talking with Neil and playing songs. My little group, Grin, was headed to Los Angeles, and, true to his word, when I looked him up in L.A. a few weeks later, Neil turned me on to his producer, David Briggs. They both kind of became my greatest mentors.”

It was a fortuitous set of circumstances that would change the trajectory of Lofgren’s career, setting him on a course that, along with his highly acclaimed work as a solo artist, would lead him to numerous collaborations, including joining Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984, touring in Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band in 1989 and working with many other artists, including Neil Young himself.

“A year after meeting Neil, I was 18 and living with David in Topanga Canyon,” continues the multi-instrumentalist, “and we wound up doing the After the Gold Rush album [on which Lofgren played guitar and piano and sang]. 

"That led to Crazy Horse’s first album without Neil, which was [keyboardist] Jack Nitzsche and myself, Danny Whitten on guitar and Ry Cooder guesting.

“Then everyone started dying [Whitten, along with Young’s friend and guitar tech, Bruce Berry, died of drug overdoses], and the result of that was the wake album, Tonight’s the Night [which Young released in 1975].

“Then we did the Trans album and tour in the ’80s, and in 1993 I played the MTV Unplugged special with Neil. Throughout it all, I’d also appear with him at the Bridge School Benefit concerts.”

In this candid interview clip, Neil Young details why he and Nils Lofgren have enjoyed such a long and fruitful musical relationship. “He’s part of the band and always has been part of the band,” he explains. “He’s skillful, beautiful, got a great touch, but he’s open. Most importantly, he’s listening to everything.”

Order the 2021 Neil Young and Crazy Horse album Barn featuring Nils Lofgren here.

A quartet of Grammy Awards underscores Jason Isbell’s reputation as a singer/songwriter, but his extensive catalog also finds him flexing his six-string strengths.

Along the way to mastering his mix of melody, ferocity, and restraint, Isbell’s journey intersected some serious guitar techniques.

Here are the five riffs that changed his life...

1. “The Bells of St. Mary’s” by Chet Atkins

“My uncle was into the Chet Atkins/Merle Travis style of picking,” says Isbell, “and this song was a big deal for me when I was seven years old.

“When I started writing singer/songwriter stuff, and I was depending on an acoustic guitar to accompany myself, having an understanding of these alternating thumb-picking patterns really helped me out.”

2. “Cortez the Killer” by Neil Young

“When I started coming up with melodies and chord changes on my own, this song kept coming back to me, because of the tension and release created when you hold that D note from one chord to the next.

“It creates this kind of cool suspension.”

3. “I Know a Little” by Lynrd Skynrd

“In my house, there was a big love of early Lynyrd Skynyrd – especially the guitar playing of Steve Gaines – because the band took pride in playing things that were complicated.

“This intro blew my mind, and it still does. In fact, my wife [songwriter/fiddle player Amanda Shires] showed me how similar it is to a lot of jazz-influenced Texas swing. 

"If you work up to a point where you can play that kind of guitar, you can do a whole lot of stuff.”

4. “Salt Creek” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys

“From a very early age, my grandfather would have me play rhythm guitar for him while he played mandolin, banjo, or fiddle. I got interested in bluegrass music that way, but I have my own bastardized version of it.

“I thought I had a handle on bluegrass flat picking before I moved to Nashville and discovered the checker at the grocery store is probably a better picker than you are!”

5. “Running On Empty” by Jackson Browne With David Lindley

“I started out playing slide guitar listening to people like Duane Allman, and then going back and listening to Elmore James.

“But when I heard David Lindley’s lap-steel part on this song, it really opened my eyes to a different, more melodic way of playing slide that wasn’t based of the standard licks I’d heard in blues music.”

If ever there was one guitar to out-bling them all, it would be the Gretsch White Falcon. Yet, there’s also a subtle elegance to this model that somehow allows it to pull off all the bejeweled gold hardware and sparkly plastics with class.

Designed by guitar virtuoso and Gretsch endorsee Jimmie Webster, the White Falcon was developed early in 1954 and released for production later that year or in early ’55. Like other Gretsch models of the era, it was born as a single-cutaway, fully hollowbody archtop with dual Dynasonic single-coil pickups.

It evolved into the double-cutaway styling with dual Filter’Tron humbuckers that typified Gretsches of the 1960s, as seen in this example from 1962.

There’s more to our featured example, though, some of which does meet the eye. This 1962 is, in fact, the White Falcon Stereo model, with each of its Filter’Tron humbuckers split into two pairs of three pole pieces per coil, and routed to a stereo output jack.

As described in a chart drawn up by Webster himself, the four upper switches deliver a whopping “54 colors and shadings in stereo sound.” The stereo craze didn’t quite pan out to be what some makers had hoped, though – at least not in the world of guitars – and few such models were ever made. Thus, the standard mono White Falcon is generally more worthy of consideration.

Big in looks, this guitar was also large in physical stature. Unlike the 24.6-inch scale length found on popular Gretsch models, like the 6120 Duo Jet, the White Falcon clocked a full 25.5 inches. Add to that a 17-inch width across the body’s lower bout and a depth of two inches, and it’s a pretty hefty instrument to sling on your shoulder.

Similar to other hollow Gretsch models, its body was made from laminated maple, with parallel tone bars (a fancy term for braces) supporting the pressed-arch top. As such, the tone is predominantly bright and clear through the low-output Filter’Trons, but also full, round and just a little edgy with some grit dialed in at the amplifier.

The glued-in, multi-piece maple neck wore an ebony fretboard, and by this time Gretsch was using the zero fret, which helps distinguish the company’s ’60s-era guitars.

More than all of these construction and sonic elements, though, it’s the overt esthetics that help the White Falcon make its considerable statement on any stage. Put another way, you don’t choose a guitar like this simply because you like its sound; you have to be prepared to embrace the bling, too.

In addition to the kitsch of the white finish (which usually fades to an appealing cream or butter-yellow over the years), this regal six-string sports multi-ply gold-sparkle binding and truss-rod cover, gold hardware with an elaborate G-and-chevron trapeze tailpiece and Grover Imperial tuners, a gold back-painted pickguard with falcon graphic, and faux rubies inlaid into its control knobs.

Our example sports another mechanical “tone enhancer”: dual foam-rubber dampers positioned in front of the bridge and controlled by rods attached to the two small gold knobs atop the red felt pads behind the bridge. 

These allowed you to selectively mute the three treble strings, the three bass strings or all six. Is palm muting that difficult? Apparently not. Most players ripped these contraptions from their guitars faster than you can say “tuning nightmare.”

While they were often found in the hands of a few showboat-inclined jazzers and rhinestone-bedazzled country artists in the earlier years of its release, White Falcons also made their way onstage with the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, Joe Strummer of the Clash, Neil Young (who still owns a vintage single-cutaway stereo model), and the Cult’s Billy Duffy, thereby proving it could rock just as confidently as it could roll.

Essential Ingredients

• Fully hollow double-cutaway body made from laminated maple
• Arched top braced with parallel “tone bars”
• Glued-in maple neck with ebony fretboard
• “Thumbnail” position markers
• Two Gretsch Filter’Tron pickups, wired for stereo output
• Gold-sparkle binding and truss-rod cover
• Space Control bridge and chevron trapeze tailpiece

***The following interview extract originally appeared in the December 2018 issue of Guitar Player***

Recording artists tend to get locked in a cycle. An album is followed by a tour, which is succeeded by a break that leads to another stint in the studio. And on and on it goes.

Kurt Vile has found his own way out of that rut.

The guitarist and songwriter cut his 2018 studio album, Bottle It In (Matador), at various studios in between road dates with his band, the Violators, travelling with his wife and daughters.

During those more than two years on the road, the Philadelphia native also recorded an album of duets with Courtney Barnett (2017’s Lotta Sea Lice), opened for Neil Young and saw his single “Pretty Pimpin” (from 2015’s B’lieve I’m Goin Down…) go to number one on Billboard’s Adult Alternative chart.

If life has been busy for Vile, it hasn’t hampered his productivity.

“Touring is a big part of why you end up anywhere in the world,” Vile explains. “So it’s fun to utilize that moment. You play a gig in a random place where they booked you, and then you could start your adventure from there and travel a little bit.”

The guitarist has become something of an indie-rock god in recent years. Following a brief stint in the War on Drugs, which he cofounded in 2005 with Adam Granduciel, Vile went solo in 2008, signed with Matador Records and began releasing a string of ever-better-selling albums.

Through discs like 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo and 2013’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze, he became known for his droll vocal delivery, riff-oriented songwriting, and a musical range that stretches from lo-fi folk to sprawling electric guitar jams.

Back in 2018, the guitarist took time out from a European excursion to talk with Guitar Player about the making of his eighth studio album, Bottle It In, his deep love of acoustic guitar tones and his longing for simpler times.

What’s the appeal of mixing studio dates in with your touring schedule?

You know, even if I play just one show and go into the studio, it feels more natural to me.

In what way?

When you play live, it’s the most in tune with the music you can be. When you record while you’re on the road, you can carry that energy into the studio.

Obviously, most artists cut records between tours.

There’s no way I could do that. I do everything all in together. I like to go into the studio even for a day or so, in between things. I think you can get just as much done that way as you can if you stay in there for two weeks and work on the same song.

The more time you have, the more you waste. I just figure if I go in and out of the studio while I’m touring, it makes it more natural.

I imagine that also gives you time to listen to what you’ve done and tweak things if you want.

We would definitely tweak the recordings later on and add some things. But ultimately what I wanted was for it to be as live in the studio as possible – get the basics down and then figure the rest out later, if I had to, if it wasn’t, indeed, already figured out.

Your way of touring and recording makes me think about Jackson Browne’s album Running on Empty, which he recorded live, at soundchecks, in hotel rooms and even on the bus while he was on tour.

Wow! I respect Jackson Browne, for sure. That’d be cool to actually record on the stage at soundcheck.

In some ways, when you’re traveling, you’re more relaxed. Somebody can just put a microphone on you at any point, and you’re more comfortable with it. For me, it’s a constant battle of trying to make things feel as laid-back as possible, even in the studio for this record.

Things like, if you can get away with not wearing headphones, don’t wear ’em – sing live while the band’s playing. There are all kinds of ways to make it feel more natural.

Todd Rundgren has recorded his vocals from behind the mixing console for years. He’s like, “I can do it right from here while listening off the monitors.”

Yeah, I did that for “Bottle It In,” while my buddy Stella [Mozgawa], the drummer from Warpaint, was playing drums in the next room.

That’s what this record’s all about, just interacting when I’m with somebody or, when I’m by myself, just getting the part down, like an organic moment captured. That’s what I shoot for.

It’s about knowing your town like the back of your hand. And I really do things like that in my hometown, where I can pull up to the record store and there’s a loading zone across the street, one of many in the city where I know I can just run in, get what I’m looking for and get out before I get a ticket. [laughs]

You have your own way of doing things. The leadoff song, “Loading Zone,” seems to be about that – about making the system work in your favor. What inspired that tune?

And that’s a way of life, in general. It’s like getting by on the backstreets. It’s like you’re just sticking it to the man a little bit – ’cause, obviously, the man’s always sticking it to you anyway.

Why did you choose to name this album after “Bottle It In”?

“Bottle It In” is definitely the album’s centerpiece. I’m definitely proud of it, and it’s like some kind of new territory that I stumbled onto.

When I name my albums – like Smoke Ring for My Halo was named for my favorite song on that record. I had a feeling it needed to be highlighted, otherwise it would just be a song passing by. It’s an important song.

And you know, if you get back to the heart of the matter with artists you respect, usually their classic albums are named for a song on the album. Like Neil Young: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, On the Beach. And those songs are such classics in themselves that you don’t forget them, because they’re each like a statement on their own.

So “Bottle It In” – I just had to roll with it, and I just didn’t want the song to go unnoticed.

Your songs are almost inevitably built on catchy riffs that could stand on their own, without vocals. Do you think in terms of riffs when you’re writing?

Yeah, I like blues licks and melodic folk-tinged riffs. They’ve got to be melodic, a little bit pretty, but like with the blues in there. I like to make them as hypnotic and as melodic as possible. I get lost in most of the riffs that I find myself coming back to.

On a lot of your songs, acoustic guitars provides the structure while heavily effected electric guitar adds sonic interest. Do you prefer one instrument over the other?

Well, if I had to pick a main tool, it would be the acoustic guitar. In fact, certain electric guitars that I fall in love with – and even new electric guitars that I buy – I won’t even plug them in for days sometimes after I get them. I’ll just sit on the couch and listen to how they sound acoustically and how they feel.

I kind of like the idea of sitting on a couch and hearing all the nuances. Acoustically, you can’t beat that. But then, in the studio, you can put it through an amp and all these effects – filters, phasers, delay or any kind of weirdness. Or just a punchy amp sound. It’s just an option to the guitar itself.

What are some of the effect pedals that you used on this album?

I’m not as particular with effects as I used to be, but I tend to just like to put some kind of filter or phaser on there if I can get away with it. One pedal I used was the Moog MIDI MuRF. It’s kind of an envelope filter, but a little more than that.

And the amps are really important too. These days I’m into these little brown ’50s Fender Champs. Just crank those up.

What effect are you using to make that strange vocal-like guitar sound on “Loading Zones”?

It’s a Ludwig [Phase II] guitar synth. It’s the same one used on “The Diamond Sea,” which is one of my favorite Sonic Youth songs.

Do you own that or did you borrow it from Kim Gordon?

No, I’m pretty sure their’s got stolen back in the day. I bought one. It wasn’t cheap.

What’s your main acoustic guitar on this album?

I used these little custom-made 00 Martins that Vintage Instruments in Philadelphia had made. They’re based on their favorite vintage guitars of the day, but they’re made really well.

The first one I had, I’ve been using since “Wakin on a Pretty Day” [from Wakin on a Pretty Daze]. I used it on that song, in fact. It’s a Philadelphia Folk Festival 50th Anniversary guitar. And then I have another custom 00 from later.

You have some great electric guitar tones on the record as well, like those solos on “Skinny Mini.”

That was the last song I wrote for this album. I was on tour with Courtney Barnett for Lotta Sea Lice and I developed a real sound with my pedalboard.

I was using the Moog Minifooger Chorus pedal, which I really love, and there’s something about that with my most recent white 1966 Fender Jaguar. But I’m also getting some really good sounds out of just an old green Big Muff and another crazy pedal called the [Wren and Cuff] Box of War.

For “Skinny Mini,” I played that setup through a 1950s Fender Bassman that we borrowed from a guy. He said it was an original speaker, so be really careful, and we just completely cranked it. So that’s basically just a loud 1950s Fender Bassman with a Big Muff.

You seem to have a fondness for the past. The cover photo for Bottle It In looks vintage, and you even have ringwear on it. In “Mutinies” you sing, “I think things were way easier with a regular telephone.” Other songs describe a fear of flying, and the video for “Loading Zones” is full of old cars. Do you have issues with the modern world?

Yeah, I yearn for simpler times. I’m a victim of my psyche being shocked by a million things at once. I definitely remember, in the old days, we could memorize things, like phone numbers and everything. Now my mind is much more scattered.

I always like to be surrounded by vintage gear with multicolored buttons. And I like the way guitars look when they’re old and used. When I get a new guitar it feels weird. I almost want to throw it against the wall, just to make it look normal.

I like old amps, and I have a lot of old Korg synthesizers from the ’70s. They all look so good, and they all sound good. “They don’t make ’em like they used to” is certainly true in a lot of ways. I like things to be a little worn.

Kurt Vile’s latest album, 2022's Watch My Moves, is out now on Verve.

“I hate retirement,” David Crosby grumbles. The legendary, 81-year-old singer-songwriter and guitarist announced last year that he was calling it a day on touring life (this after six decades on the road), and he’s anything but happy about it.

“It’s miserable not being able to go out and play,” he says, “but after a certain point, it is what it is. Touring is too hard for a guy my age, and tendonitis has affected my ability to play guitar. It’s tough. There’s lots of guys who love being retired, but that isn’t me. It sucks.”

Crosby reveals that he’s still making music (“I can still sing as good as ever, maybe even better”), and he’s psyched about his continuing collaboration with Becca Stevens, Michelle Willis and Michael League, better known as the Lighthouse Band, which began with 2016’s aptly named Lighthouse album.

“Whoa, boy, are they fun!” he raves. “I’ve admired them since they started. They’re such brilliant musicians and singers, and they’re fabulous people. We get along great. It was an accidental thing – I met Michael and started writing some tunes with him. The chemistry just blossomed, and then I started working with the whole band. I bring stuff out of them, they bring stuff out of me – it’s beautiful.”

In 2018, during one of his last full tours, Crosby performed with the Lighthouse Band in support of his album Here If You Listen. Their gig at the famed Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY, has recently been released in both physical and digital formats. “That was a fabulous night, and the recording we made I tremendous,” he says. “Of the live albums I’ve done, this is by far my favorite. I like it even more than Four-Way Street.”

The musician admits that coming up with a setlist was never one of his favorite aspects of touring. “That’s what happens when you’ve got a lot of songs,” he says. “It’s not so much about what to play than it is what to leave out. No matter what I did, people would always say, ‘Why didn’t you do such and such?’” He laughs. “I could have worse problems.”

A number of Crosby’s most iconic songs are featured on David Crosby & The Lighthouse Band Live at the Capitol Theatre, and here he discusses four of them – the original recordings and how he reworked them – as well as a relatively new number that sat in his garage for nearly 50 years.

1. “Guinnevere” from ‘Crosby, Stills & Nash’ by Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)

“It’s such a nice new version we did on the live album. The Lighthouse Band really loved the song, so we decided to play it together. We did it a little differently, but that’s OK. Songs aren’t static. Most people seem to have problems re-imaging their songs, particularly if they’re seen as famous or whatever.

“I never had that problem, and the Lighthouse Band were game to explore. The funny thing is, not only didn’t we play the song like it is on record, but we didn’t even play it the same way twice ourselves.

“When I wrote the song, I was playing around with an open tuning [E, B, D, G, A, D] somebody showed me. It was the first time I ever worked with anything other than standard tuning or a drop D. I retuned the guitar and started playing, and my mind was blown. That tuning game me ‘Guinnevere,’ “Déjà Vu’ and a number of other songs. It blended jazz and folk, which is a really cool place to be, although that wasn’t my intention. I was just transported by the tuning.

“Stephen [Stills] and Graham [Nash] thought it was a weird song. [Laughs] They knew it was good, but they thought it was pretty out-there. But that’s the point! That’s one of the things I liked about it. It sets a mood.”

2. “Déjà Vu” from ‘Déjà Vu’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970)

“There’s several time signatures in this song. It starts off in 6/8 and then goes to a regular 4/4, but in the chorus it goes to 7/4. At the end it goes to 4/4. I wasn’t necessarily trying to put a jazz sensibility into it; it just came out that way. I’ve heard people say, ‘It spins me around in a circle,’ and my attitude is like, ‘Good. As long as it moves you.’

“I played acoustic guitars and electric guitars when we cut it. We did a lot of takes of the song. I’ve read somewhere that we did 100 takes – that’s just crazy. We would never have done 100 takes of anything.

“Stephen and Graham thought this was another weird song [laughs], but that’s the kind of stuff I write. Plus, it was weirdo days back then. But the guys came along and got into it. Funnily enough, they picked the song as the title of the album. It wasn’t my idea. I never even suggested it.

“The new version is way different from what’s on the Déjà Vu album. It spreads out very leisurely. The chemistry of the Lighthouse Band changed it around in a really cool way.”

3. “1974” from ‘Here If You Listen’ by David Crosby (2018)

“Almost 50 years after I started this song, it’s now a reality. This is a little like ‘Tamalpais High,’ in that I had a song without any words. So what I would do was, I’d stack vocals like horns. It’s a totally valid thing to do.

“I had one of those things sitting around in my garage, and Michael League found it. He got excited: ‘Hey, this is an unfinished song!’ I said to him, ‘Hey, if you want to write some words to it, go for it, baby.’ He and the ladies jumped on the song and wrote the words.

“There’s no significance to the title other than that’s when I started to write it. They came up with the title, not me. It’s mind-blowing that something from five decades ago is now a new song, but that just speaks to the creativity of the Lighthouse Band. They’re a creativity bunch. They see something and they just do. I have to work hard just to keep up with them.”

4. “Woodstock” from ‘Déjà Vu’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970)

“Joni Mitchell gave us a demo of the song. It was just her singing and playing guitar, and it was beautiful, of course. But it was completely different from what we ended up doing with it. I loved it immediately and thought it offered us a lot of territory to explore.

“I wish I could say that I had a plan to really rock it out, but it just happened, like so many things. Stills came up with the electric intro – he had already been working around with the song. It’s the only track on the album where all of us played together in one room.

“I keep talking about chemistry – that was chemistry, boy. You drop a song on CSN and Y, and you’re gonna see stuff happen. I played acoustic, and Stephen and Neil played electric. That was one of our go-to moves – guitar heroics from those guys. We could do that because they were that good.

“I never thought it would be a single. None of us did – we thought it was too weird. At that time, our singles were ‘Marrakesh Express’ and ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,’ stuff that was a little softer. We weren’t known as a hard rock band, but we did an amazing job with this one.”

5. “Almost Cut My Hair” from ‘Déjà Vu’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970)

“I once said this was a juvenile song. It’s not a complex song; it’s simple, but I still like it. I’m not ashamed of it. I wish I could take credit for the guitar parts, but that was Stephen and Neil [Young].

“I played them the song on acoustic, and they instinctively knew what to do. They attacked it. [Laughs] I never had to show them parts. When you have guys that fucking good, you don’t need to show them anything. It was such a joy to watch them go at it.

“It’s a fun song that has some guts to it. Many, many people say that it’s one of their favorites. And I say, ‘Thank you.’” 

Order David Crosby: Remember My Name here.

Last week (January 18), we sadly lost David Crosby. 

As a founding member and guitarist for the Byrds, and later Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Crosby left a huge mark on rock with both his lyricism and guitar playing. 

Crosby wasn't the chief hitmaker or lead electric guitar player for either group, but his songwriting nevertheless served as the foundation for countless magical guitar moments. 

A perfect example is the below video of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performing Crosby's defiant counterculture anthem, "Almost Cut My Hair," to an appreciative stadium crowd in 1974. 

Filmed during the supergroup's infamous 1974 stadium tour, the video features a blazing duel between the group's two chief guitar-slingers – Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

Though the performance sounds great today, at the time, stadium rock – and the equipment that was supposed to support it – was still in its infancy. 

“We had good monitors, but Stephen and Neil were punching well over 100 db from their half stacks," Crosby told Rolling Stone in 2014. "Graham and I simply couldn’t do the harmonies when we couldn’t hear ourselves."

“The guitar duels between Stephen and Neil got really loud," added CSNY bass guitar player Tim Drummond in the same piece. "I’d just wander between the amplifiers and do my thing so I could hear myself. I was lucky I made it through that tour without ruining my ears.”

In more ways than one, the tour – recordings of which are featured on the triple-disc 2014 live album CSNY 1974 – was emblematic of its era.

"There was this weird troglodyte notion, and this wasn’t just a CSNY problem, that you’ve got to turn it up to eleven," photographer Joel Bernstein told Rolling Stone in 2014. "That’s not the case at all. You need to trust your PA mixer. 

"When the volume did come down they were playing wonderfully. They didn’t need to make it that loud.”

***This article was originally published in the October 2021 issue of Guitar Player***

David Crosby is an iconic acoustic captain at the helm of his ever-fantastic ship, always listening for a song on the wind that might lead him to some mystical, musical port of call. More than ever lately, he appears to be a man on a mission, perhaps making up for lost time.

He’s dropped five albums since 2014. Snarky Puppy ringleader and bass ace Michael League produced 2016’s Lighthouse, and they’ve continued a working relationship that Crosby regards as a band.

Otherwise, the guitarist’s primary co-captain is his son James Raymond. Crosby refers to their collaboration as Sky Trails, which is the title of their 2017 album, and James also produced the new album, For Free (BMG).

The colorful folk-rock legend sounds almost too good for having lived a pirate’s life. His voice is unbelievably unweathered. His fingerpicking and signature six- and 12-string sounds are well intact, but as Crosby reveals in this feature, there is trouble on the horizon in the form of treacherous tendonitis.

Before sailing into the sunset, he’s being as creative as possible. What he hasn’t been doing is working with the company of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It’s well documented that much love has been lost on that front. No more new musical magic is expected from the quartet, but there is a fantastic new 50th anniversary boxed-set edition of Déjà Vu featuring insightful guitar-and-vocal demos and extensive liner notes by Cameron Crowe.

What we can expect at some point, according to Crosby, is a major documentary produced by Nigel Sinclair and Tim Sexton (Sinclair recently produced the stellar Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart).

For Free gets its title from the Joni Mitchell classic that Crosby covers on the new album. He credits her for opening his eyes to alternate tunings, which he still uses to create deep, cosmic textures.

“I Think I” is a crafty composition with exceptional acoustic guitars and vocals that exemplify Crosby’s breezy, existential vibe. Steely Dan fans will dig the funky groove and jazzy changes on his collaboration with Donald Fagan, “Rodriguez for a Night.”

Clever electric guitar comes courtesy of session legend Dean Parks (Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Steely Dan), who also wrote the music for the soldier song “Shot at Me.” There are some catchy commercial hooks here as well, including “River Rise,” which features backing vocals courtesy of another cat from the Steely Dan camp, Michael McDonald.

Most cuts feature Crosby’s acoustic at the core, and he’s a better guitar player than he often gets credit for, considering how much attention is paid to his voice and character. He’s actually quite humble about his playing and understands why most of the guitar cred from his crew has gone to Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

“Naturally it would go to them, man,” he says. “Those guys are lead players and have different levels of competency.”

Crosby is a true acoustic guitar aficionado, and he can’t help himself from boasting a bit about his awesome collection. He still uses most of it, including his classic Martins from the Woodstock era.

Perhaps his most infamous Martin is his six-to-12-string conversion D-18. Martin has released limited-edition signature versions, first as the D-18DC in 2002, and then as the D-12 David Crosby, featuring a reversed string course in the third slot, in 2009.

Guitar Player fortuitously caught up with Croz on the heels of recent features with other notable 12-string appreciators from his generation, Leo Kottke and Taj Mahal.

How did your six-string roots start you down the 12-string path?

It’s an interesting story. The first guitar I bought was made by a banjo company that produced a 12-string guitar. Bob Gibson [an American folk singer and a key figure in the 1950s/’60s folk revival] played one, and he was one of the folk guys I liked, so I got one too.

But the first good one was a Martin D-18 that I bought at a music store in Chicago when I was living there. When I moved to California, I took it to Jon Lundberg in Berkeley and asked him to convert it to a 12-string because I was entranced with 12-strings. He did, and to this day it’s the best.

Kottke is going to argue with me about this, but I have a handful of the best 12-strings existing in the world. That one is still the king. It’s better than my D-45 12-string from the Martin Custom Shop, which is killer fucking good. Or my Roy Smeck Gibson that the folks at Alembic converted into a 12-string, and that looks exactly as if there had been a Roy Smeck Gibson 12-string.

Or the copy Martin made of my D-18 for the prototype of my signature 12-string. That has an ebony neck, and it is still hanging on my wall. I truly love 12-strings, and the best one I’ve ever had is still that first one.

Why?

Every single one is different, like snowflakes. Maybe it’s the wood combination. Maybe it’s all the love I’ve poured into it over the years. I’ll line them all up and let you play them, and you’ll come to the same conclusion. Although I’ve got to say that the D-45 rings like a bell.

The original modified D-18 has 12 frets to the body, correct?

Yeah, that puts the bridge a little further back, and for some reason that works. I don’t know why. It is what it is.

What inspired you to have the modification done in the first place?

It was the sound of the guitar. It sounded so good as a six-string, and I should have left it like that, but I was enthralled with the 12-string, so I took the chance, and it worked, out of sheer luck.

Why were you so enthralled with the 12-string? Who was turning you on at that time?  

Bob Gibson and Pete Seeger are the two that jump to mind. I just liked 12-strings right away, and I still do. I was playing that D-18 conversion last night.

It’s interesting that you come to the 12-string from a folk perspective and wind up in the Byrds, perhaps the most famous jangling-rock outfit ever, yet you jump to an electric Gretsch six-string and Roger McGuinn does all the jangling on a 12-string Rickenbacker, correct?

Yeah, it’s not me, it’s Roger. He was always a much better guitar player than me. When he got one of the first Rickies, it sounded like a glass avalanche. Unbelievable. He’s such a gifted musician. He basically does one thing, but he does it really well. He’s also brilliant at voicing something into a different form, like turning “Mr. Tambourine Man” from a terrible goddamned demo into that brilliant record.

I started out playing a Gretsch Tennessean in the Byrds, but then switched pretty quickly to a Country Gentlemen, which was a better guitar.

Even more interesting is that you wind up returning to the acoustic for the act that defines folk rock, Crosby, Stills & Nash. In fact, you all start out on acoustic for that, right?

Yeah, Stephen and I are both crazy about acoustic guitars. Graham likes them, but it’s not quite the same. Stephen and I kind of worship them. We love them a lot. We each have multiple stunning guitars, and that’s why we fall in love with them. I have five Martin D-45s.

What were you thinking when Martin re-introduced the D-45 in the late ’60s?

We knew that Martin had the best wood stashed, because they’d been buying it before anybody else, and that they’d uncorked their stash of Brazilian rosewood, which is now gone. And they had a stash of top wood that they thought was their absolute best. They combined them, and that was irresistible to us.

We could get one for about five grand, and as far as we were concerned that was the best guitar anybody was making. I think we were right. I have three of those 1969 D-45s. They’re the ones with all the wear from being played at the concerts. I also have one made of koa, and it’s a mind-boggling guitar with an unbelievable sound.

Can you share the story of “Wooden Ships” from the Crosby, Stills & Nash debut in 1969?

I wrote it on that 12-string [longtime tech John Gonzales says Crosby refers to the guitar as “the Wooden Ships 12-string”]. I’d say that 90 percent of the chord changes are mine. I brought the music to Stephen and Paul Kantner. Stephen added a couple of very significant changes that really helped.

We were on my boat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was docked at a friend’s house and they both came down to visit. We wrote it right there, sitting in the main cabin. Paul gave me some key lyrics that started it going really well. You can guess which verse Stephen wrote: “Horror grips us...” [laughs]

That’s in standard tuning, but you were into alternates, as evidenced by the haunting sound on “Guinnevere.” How did you arrive at that unique tuning?

A kid from the Midwest showed me that tuning that, from low to high, goes E B D G A D, and I got “Guinnevere” and “Déjà Vu” out of it. I’ll tell you what got me started: My brother turned me on to jazz early on and I liked some keyboard players, including Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. They’d play chords that were like huge freaking tone clusters. Thick stuff. My hand wasn’t good enough to play them in standard tuning.

Some guitar players can approach playing the same stuff as a piano player, using closed positions in standard tuning, but the guitarist can only produce six notes, so the piano player has got you by at least four. I couldn’t do it, but in alternate tunings, different inversions of the chords came up. I started to get to those strange, mystical places I wanted to go.

The chords on “Déjà Vu” can be found simply by barring the top three strings at the 3rd and 5th frets. It’s a matter of which order you pick the notes. I fingerpick with my thumb and first three fingers. The rhythm on “Guinnevere” goes 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, which is actually very normal.

The main guitar is one of the 1969 D-45s. There are a couple of guitars along with it on the intro, and one of them is probably the 12-string. There are a couple of guitars on “Déjà Vu,” but I’m not sure which ones. We didn’t record it until the Déjà Vu album [released in 1970], but I had the music early on when I was leaving the Byrds and started hanging out with Stephen Stills.

The 50th anniversary edition of Déjà Vu includes the demos for “Almost Cut My Hair” and “Laughing,” which isn’t on that record but becomes a signature guitar track on your solo debut [If I Could Only Remember My Name, 1971]. Can you offer some guitar insights?

I’ll guess that I’m playing one of the ’69 D-45s on “Almost Cut My Hair.” That song is in standard tuning, although it might be dropped a whole step for the demo. “Laughing” is in an alternate tuning that, from low to high, goes D G D D A D, and again the demo might be dropped a whole step from the full studio version.

The vibe that tuning summons is similar to the slow section on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Did you get that from Stills, or did he get it from you?

More he got it from me. The people who taught me the most were Joni [Mitchell] and Michael Hedges. Stephen got into tunings pretty much right away, but he was a blues player, so he could take them to a different place than I could. Joni and Michael worked tunings to the most sophisticated level. They’re both geniuses at it.

And once I found out what kind of music I could write – “Guinnevere” being a good example – I loved it. So, of course, I kept exploring tunings. Over and over again, my best stuff is in alternate tunings.

“Music Is Love” [from If I Could Only Remember My Name] is another example, although I can’t remember that exact tuning right now [low to high, D A D G B D, and the original recording is dropped a half step]. That’s another good example of the original 12-string’s sound.

“I Think I” from the new album has a classic Crosby sound, perhaps in some kind of C tuning.

It’s in an alternate tuning that’s been very good for creating several songs, although I can’t say exactly what it is right now. There are two acoustic parts on there. Steve Postell played the beautiful acoustic lead at the end, and I played the fingerpicking part on one of the 1969 D-45s.

“Other Side of Midnight” is a lovely cosmic tune with a killer chord progression. What’s the guitar story?

You’re going to be pissed, because there isn’t one. Every single sound on that recording is synthesized. My son James played all the guitar sounds on a computer. He’s that good at it. You shouldn’t be able to do that, but he can. I’m not sure if we should allow him in the country. [laughs]

Who’s playing the high chimey intro on “Shot at Me”?

One of the best guitar players in the world, Dean Parks, wrote the music and played on that song. The lyrics are about guys coming back from the sandboxes in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. It wrecks them and really screws them up.

Do you still take your vintage Martins on the road?

I’ve been taking two of the three ’69s, even though it’s crazy to do so because they’re worth, like, a hundred grand each. But I’ve been taking them on the road anyway because they’re that good. I also have a Gibson J-200 made out of Brazilian rosewood from their custom shop that I have taken on the road.

And I have some guitars made by Roy McAlister up near Seattle. He showed up at my door one day saying he’d made me a guitar. It was a triple-0 body style, and I prefer dreadnoughts, but he mentioned that he was the guy at Santa Cruz Guitars who had made the copy of my 12-string, which is another one I have. So I invited him in, and it was one of the best guitars I’d ever touched. It’s still the one closest to the bed. I’ve given five of his guitars away to other players, and I have five others that he made, including a mind-boggling 12-string. I take four of his guitars on the road.

Including the 12-string?

No, when I play 12-string in the live show it’s an electric made by Alembic.

How do you electrify your acoustics?

We have gone through the stages of the cross when it comes to pickups. I don’t use any pedals. The signal goes straight to the house, and I have two monitors: one for my voice and one for my acoustic guitars. I use a Magnatone amp for the electrics. [John Gonzales reports that the acoustics all have D’Addario EXP16 strings and Fishman Matrix Infinity undersaddle piezo pickup systems that feed into Radial J48 direct boxes. The electric Alembic 12-string was custom built around 1970, and the Magnatone amp is a Twilighter.]

How are your hands?

I’ve got tendonitis in both. I can play, but I’m down to about 80 percent of what I used to be able to do, and it’s steadily deteriorating. The middle finger on my right hand doesn’t bend well. I had an operation done, but that actually made it worse.

I’m not trying to whine and snivel here. I’ve just got to cope with this reality. I’d guess I’ve got about another year to play guitar, if I’m lucky. It’s not a solvable problem. That’s just how it is. I’ve been playing for 70 years. I’ve had a good run, man.

Can you do any more tours?

I don’t think I can tour anymore. Well, maybe limited, but I do think I can make a couple more records. I’d like to do another Lighthouse record with Michael League and that lineup, but he lives in Spain now, so we’ll see.

James and I have already started the next record. They don’t pay us for them anymore, but we didn’t start doing them for money in the first place. We started doing them because we loved doing them, and we still love doing them. Albums are still our art form. They are what we have based our life on, and we still love making music. They are what we are going to leave behind.

Grab your copy of For Free here.

It’s early – barely past sunrise – in Nils Lofgren’s area of Arizona, not far from Scottsdale. But the veteran multi-instrumentalist is awake and into his day, accompanied by Rose, the 95-pound mixed-breed Lofgren and his wife, Amy, rescued last year. She and the couple’s 14-year-old Chihuahua, Outlaw Pete, meanwhile, are still asleep.

“I like getting up super early, sometimes in the dark,” Lofgren, 72, says. “When I’m on the road it’s different; I can’t sleep because of the performance adrenalin. But at home, when I’m able to get a little sleep, I’m an early riser.”

Lofgren isn’t one to waste any of that time, either. He’s been a recording artist since he was a teenager in the band Grin – which got its break thanks to the patronage of Neil Young and his co-producer, the late David Briggs, who made Lofgren part of Crazy Horse for 1970’s After the Gold Rush.

Lofgren is now in the midst of his third tour of duty with Crazy Horse, back in the saddle since 2018 and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro’s retirement from the group. He’s made two pandemic projects with the band: Barn, recorded June 2020 in, as the title indicates, a converted barn, dubbed Studio in the Clubs, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains; and World Record, released this past November, made with Rick Rubin at his Shangri-La studio in Malibu.

Lofgren has also logged a solo career that he began with a self-titled effort in 1975 and has been part of the E Street Band since replacing Little Steven Van Zandt in 1984, playing on eight of Springsteen’s studio albums.

He served tours of duty with Ringo Starr’s first two All-Starr Bands, co-wrote with the late Lou Reed on 1979’s The Bells (along with songs that became part of Lofgren’s 2019 album, Blue With Lou), and he was the lead guitarist on onetime Foreigner frontman Lou Gramm’s first solo album, Ready or Not, in 1987.

Stalwart is a more fitting term for Lofgren than journeyman, and given his multi-instrumental skills – guitar, keyboards, accordion. banjo, pedal and lap steel, mandolin – virtuoso is not out of the question.

He spoke with Guitar Player just as World Record was rolling out and Springsteen began tuning up to hit the road…

It’s been a long time since you’ve done any touring. What are your expectations for this year?

We’ve got a great body of work, so you brush up on it. Bruce has a new album of his favorite soul and R&B songs [2022’s Only the Strong Survive], and it’s obvious that’ll be in there. But, y’know, we’re used to improvising, never following a set list, which is something Neil doesn’t follow either.

I think the last show we played with Neil, up in Canada, it was 20 minutes before the show and we were waiting for a set list we know we will not follow, and Neil just said, “Guys, I don’t want to write a set list. Let’s just walk out and do whatever comes.”

That’s extraordinary, to be able to walk out with no set list and just wing it. And it worked out great ’cause it’s Neil and Crazy Horse.

Same thing with Bruce – there’s a lot of improvisation. So I just get ready like I always have and hope for the best that it works out.

You like it unpredictable, don’t you?

It’s not for everybody. It’s like the difference between a classical musician, who can sightread the most complicated thing you put in front of them and play it, but if you asked them to improvise the blues they say, “No, I don’t do that.”

I studied classical accordion for 10 years, from five to 15, then picked up the blues guitar as a hobby, just ’cause all my heroes were, like, B.B. King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Clapton…all of ’em. And I was just playing it for fun, never thinking I could be a professional musician.

You have your solo career, of course, but you’re such a band guy, too. Do you have a preference?

I’m lucky to have both, and I’m blessed to be part of two really great bands. And occasionally I’ve been lucky through the years to moonlight with Willie Nelson and Branford Marsalis and other great people.

And it was probably a blessing I didn’t have a hit record when I was 18. It might have killed me and would certainly have precluded going out with other great bands. But I still remember when I was 18, walking into David Briggs’ home in Topanga and driving his little VW to Neil’s home to record After the Gold Rush. I still remember saying, “Wow, it’s nice not to be the bandleader.”

All these nonmusical responsibilities disappear and everything is just musical. I just embraced that, and I still do.

You made an album with Springsteen that came out during the pandemic [2020’s Letter To You], but it’s Crazy Horse that kept you busiest, between Barn and World Record, which were two very different recording experiences.

For sure. We had a ball making Barn, and there was a great, very earthy, realistic documentary [Barn, directed by Young’s wife, Daryl Hannah] of friends for 50-some years. And as we kept going through Barn, of course, we talked about touring, and we wanted to play, but COVID kept that from happening.

But Neil talked about writing again, and he would keep in touch with us. And at one point he said, “Hey, it might be summer, maybe a little earlier.” Then out of the blue he said, “Look, I have the songs, can you make May 1st work?”

He didn’t exactly have the songs like he used to, though, did he?

I was surprised. I’m used to working pretty quickly with Neil, especially when it’s Crazy Horse. Usually it’s 11, 12 days – a kind of a whirlwind, catch-it-as-you’re-learning, super-live, no-headphones approach, which is really cool.

And all of a sudden he said, “We’re gonna probably be 21 days, because I need some time to figure out what I’m gonna play. I wrote these songs walking and kind of singing, chugging, rapping, whatever into a Dictaphone. So I need some extra time.”

What was that figuring-out process like?

It was this organic, beautiful thing that we did. It was an exploratory thing. The songs weren’t full arrangements that were mapped out.

Billy [Talbot, bassist] and I were at least on top of some chord progressions, but Neil didn’t know what he was going to play from song to song. He kept jumping from instrument to instrument, and so did I. I’d go to the pump organ or the accordion; he’d pick up a guitar or go to the piano.

It was kind of musical chairs sometime, and days sometimes before we figured out what he and I should play for each song. ’Cause he said, “I’ve never written an album without an instrument.” It was a very fresh, very new kind of thing for us.

When most people think of Crazy Horse, they think of Tonight’s the Night or Rust Never Sleeps or Ragged Glory – the grungey, distorted guitar stuff. But when you’re involved, it tends to be gentler and more subtle. Are you the guy that tames the beast?

[laughs] I don’t know. Certainly, the obvious nuances, the different instruments and the accordion and any keyboard are what I add to it. Also, just the tonality of my singing.

Y’know, the band’s got an enormous history of great stuff and what Danny [Whitten] and Frank did. Poncho did an amazing job for 37 years, especially the heavy rock and grunge sound. But it’s obvious that when I’m in the band we’re able to jump around and have more sounds and be more nuanced.

But the heavy thing – that sneaks in here and there with me too.

The heaviest moment on World Record is “Chevrolet,” another long, 13-and-a-half-minute guitar epic. How did that come about?

When I heard it I thought, Yeah, this’ll be a great two-guitar track. I got out the black [Gretsch] Falcon and cranked it way up to where it was starting to take off in my hands a little bit, not unlike Neil and Old Black [Young’s customized 1953 Les Paul].

I’d overdriven the sound and turned it way up, and it really had a great sound with Old Black. And all of a sudden we were playing it, and we got into this hellacious, long jam. I think it was like 14, 15 minutes.

Neil called me about it later and he said, “Y’know what? We got the single edit, which is only 11 minutes, but we put three minutes back in ’Chevrolet.’” I said, “Great!”

It definitely has the live, off-the-floor feel we associate with Crazy Horse. Was that the case?

We kept trying it. We’d just come in every couple days and play the song again, just two or three times, and move on, and I think they used one of the earlier ones for the album.

There was one time where it got really crazy. Neil was playing lead and I started doing some counterpoint, and then it just smoothed out into the groove. I said, “Well, that sounds like you went into a rough town and had a lot of misadventures, and now you’re back on the highway, just cruising at 45, taking it easy.”

I like that. I thought it was a great thing and a bit of self-discovery as a band.

You’re playing pedal-steel now, I see.

For the first time, yeah. I’m kind of a beginner pedal-steel player. I got to spend so much time with the great Ben Keith on the road and in studios, way back to Tonight’s the Night. He was such a great inspiration to me.

I’m still kind of a decent beginner on it, but when we were gonna do “I Walk With You” I had it in my room and ran it through this little [Electro-Harmonix] POG that makes it sound like a pipe organ that’s being distorted, ’cause I didn’t know what to play on that song and I didn’t want to just crank up the black Falcon and have it be a rough guitar.

I thought, Man, the pedal steel, if I overdrive it through this little POG…. And I said, “Neil, can you come in my room?” I played the sound for him and he said, “Man, you got to get this instrument over in the main room,” which I did.

So there’s a couple songs I played pedal steel on for the first time forever, which for me was a kick, because as a beginner you’re a little cautious. It’s not like improvising the blues on a Strat, but it worked.

Sometimes knowing a little less turns into more, because you have to compensate for what you don’t know.

I remember on After the Gold Rush, when they asked me to do it, I was 18. They said, “We’re gonna put you on piano, too, as well as guitar and singing.” I said, “Well, I’m not a professional piano player,” but they were like, “Yeah, but you played accordion your whole life. You’ll come up with something good.”

And I just did these simple parts and they worked. At my most creative, I was very deliberate and simple, and that left a lot of space that was appealing to David Briggs and Neil. That’s something I’ve never forgotten.

What was working with Rick Rubin like for Crazy Horse? It seems like it could have been a Godzilla versus Mothra situation, since Neil tends to like to keep hold of the reins on his albums.

I think Neil in general is reticent to turn over that type of control, but I think this time he just wanted to show up and just be the guitar player and the singer and not always have that producer’s hat on. Rick allowed that for him, and it worked really well.

I got there early, so I saw Rick one afternoon, sitting in the sun on the porch. I went up and we had a nice chat about music and history. He learned a lot about me, I learned about him. And Rick was helpful in kind of giving me some tips, or old records to check out, just for a general place to aim at, ’cause we had a million instruments.

We had so many options it was unreal. Everyone was wide open to anything and everything. Obviously, the main goal was to come up with something that they both felt good about.

You’ve got a full schedule with Springsteen this year. What happens if Neil decides to take Crazy Horse out, too?

[sighs] I’m in two great bands, so it’s complicated. I’d love it if Neil and Bruce let me make their touring schedules so I could weave back and forth in both bands, but of course no one’s gonna let me do that, so I just do the work that’s in front of me.

And if Neil goes out and has to get somebody else, that’s how it’ll have to be, y’know?

Are you working on another album of your own?

I am, and you know what? I’m pretty far along. I’m feeling really good about it. It’s got rough stuff, gentle stuff. I’m not in a rush. I’ve been chipping away at it all year. I’m hoping to be done by the end of the year and maybe get it out in the spring.

It’s just this little mom-and-pop operation my wife, Amy, and I have [Cattle Track Road Records]. We’ve been doing that since the early ’90s, when I parted ways with the music industry. And it’s very healthy for me to do my own music.

It doesn’t replace performing, but it gives me a creative outlet, and I’m excited about the record.

I find it hard to imagine 1972 was 50 years ago.

This is in large part due to the fact that I was born on June 5th of that monumental leap year. What? You didn’t know 1972 is the longest year by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard? With the added day, plus two seconds, the six-string purveyors of the day took full advantage of the extra time on both electric guitars and acoustic guitars.

As this new decade was still revving its engines, rock and roll was expanding in 1972. With the guitar at the forefront, there was glam rock, shock rock, prog rock, southern rock and even jazz rock. What’s more, there was the further development of soft rock and heavy metal alongside the burgeoning reggae and country rock genres.

Also on the rise was a reverence for the album format. Thanks to my older brother Louis and his well-fortified stereo system, our Jersey Shore home was consistently shaking at the rafters with all the rock 1972 had to offer. I soaked it all in from my very beginnings.

All things considered, it’s safe to say I was born into this collection of essential guitar moments from 1972.

Let There Be Rock

By the second year of the tumultuous 1970s, the world of rock had expanded into subsets that celebrated everything from platform shoes and glitter to fake blood and guillotines, and even included electrified southern-fried country and blues.

This trifecta of disparate approaches garnered a worthy collection of guitar moments, starting with David Bowie’s fab The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. 

Bowie’s brilliance is matched by the prodigious playing of guitarist Mick Ronson.

Ex. 1 shows something similar to Ronson’s opening salvo in “Ziggy Stardust,” where open chords and arpeggiation patterns combine to make the prototypical glam-rock arena riff.

Shifting to the dark side, Ex. 2 takes its cue from the title track of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, highlighting the vibe of the incendiary E Dorian riff played by shock-rock stalwarts Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce.

Completing the trio is an iteration of the Am riff of “One Way Out” (Ex. 3), from the Allman Brothers Band’s quintessential southern rock album Eat a Peach, courtesy of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

All three original tunes are as celebrated today as they were in 1972, from arenas to local watering holes.

Opening Lines

The ’70s was the decade of Detroit Iron, when nearly everyone drove a hot rod. If they weren’t cranking an eight-track, they were listening to an FM rock station, which was in the beginning stages of a transformation to the album-oriented rock (AOR) format.

Nothing had you leaning over to pump up the volume faster than a great guitar intro. Elliott Randall’s opening A major pentatonic licks in the Steely Dan FM staple “Reelin’ In the Years,” from Can’t Buy a Thrill, was a top contender.

Ex. 4 is inspired by and loosely based on this classic intro solo.

Ex. 5 brings to mind the dreamy relative major and minor arpeggios and modulating bends immortalized in that track.

Another classic is the unforgettable opening of the Bowie-penned glam-rock anthem “All the Young Dudes,” recorded by Mott the Hoople.

These are just two of the many songs that reeled you in from the first notes and entertained every type of rock apostle, both young and old, as they cruised America’s highways.

Hammer of the Gods

Two of the three bands considered the creators of heavy metal released records in 1972. With Led Zeppelin between Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy, the void was filled by Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and Deep Purple’s Machine Head.

Ex. 6 closely illustrates what Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi laid down on Vol.4’s “Snowblind,” with his signature power chording and speaker-melting gain in check.

As for Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, he was in his creative prime at the time that the group dropped its magnum opus, Machine Head. Much like Zep’s fourth outing, Machine Head featured timeless tunes that have proven their longevity to this day, including the venerable “Smoke on the Water.”

While the opening riff has ascended into a ubiquitity for rock guitarists the world over, Ritchie’s fiery solo over a power chord backdrop in the key of G minor showcases such signature Blackmore-isms as pre- (or “ghost”) bends, adjacent-string rolls and 16th-note linear flurries.

This is all on display in Ex. 7, which presents a reworking of some key licks from this solo.

Though in its infancy at the time, metal began with these pioneering bands and with albums and moments like these.

Everyone is Experienced

But 1972 wasn’t all about high-gain licks and riffs. The influence of Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, was felt across the guitar pantheon. Indicative of the time were a pair of low-gain opening riffs from two different worlds but in no less capable hands.

Ex. 8 is patterned after a moment from one of prog rock’s most endearing releases, Close to the Edge, where perpetual ambassador Steve Howe threw down biting Hendrix-like chordal comping ideas in the key of E minor at the top of “Siberian Khatru.”

Ex. 9 offers a taste of the kind of dynamic-duo guitar work of the Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons on the endearing hit “Listen To the Music,” a moment that still motivates muscle-car drivers of yore to turn up the volume at the first hammer-on into that E/G# triad.

Groove Collective

But cleaner tones and booty-shaking grooves were also heard in 1972, thanks to the impact of a Jamaican film called The Harder They Come, which starred musician Jimmy Cliff. While the movie was released to much fanfare (on the very same day I started my journey to 50), it was the film’s soundtrack that made history, as it’s widely regarded as the world’s introduction to reggae.

Ex. 10 is inspired by the infectious opening groove heard in the Cliff classic “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” which features hallmark reggae rhythm guitar approaches with its tightly voiced top-string triads, anchored to the upbeat and treated with some staccato phrasing.

Back on the mainland, James Brown and Al Green were creating some of their most significant works. The Godfather of Soul put Hearlon “Cheese” Martin’s lock-tight precision into the limelight with “Get On the Good Foot” from the album of the same name.

An homage to Martin’s hypnotic single-note staccato phrasing is paid in Ex. 11.

Adding to the title tracks explored, the beloved gem from Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together features the sultry guitar of work of Mabon “Teenie” Hodges perfectly nested between Green’s enthralling vocal performance.

Looking at Ex. 12 reveals a remodeling of four bars from this treasured work.

Unplugged

Although the era of the chimerical Les Paul/Marshall monster had fully arrived by 1972, it didn’t quell the acoustic guitar’s substantial presence, which had solidified in the 1960s.

In fact, acoustic guitars were behind some of the most successful single releases of the year, including Paul Simon’s controversial “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” America’s mesmerizing “Ventura Highway” and soft-rock troubadours Seals and Crofts’ irresistible “Summer Breeze.”

The main themes of all three songs have been reinterpreted in Examples 13–15.

Aside from Simon’s syncopated voice-led triads, the other two riffs make ample use of the acoustic guitar’s penchant for open strings.

Not to be outdone by his American counterparts, Canadian-born Neil Young released the best-selling record of the year with Harvest, which boasted the number one hit “Heart of Gold.”

A rendition of the perfectly sparse presentation of Em and D chords is found in Ex. 16.

Outro

With countless guitar moments still to gush over, it’s important to note that 1972 was also brimming with superbly constructed albums that had massive impact and further bolstered the emerging AOR radio format.

The year delivered classics that featured now-mythic guitarist pairings, including the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (Keith Richards and Mick Taylor), Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick (Martin Barre and Ian Anderson), Genesis’s Foxtrot (Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford), and the Eagles’ self-titled debut (Bernie Leadon and Glenn Frey), which helped bring country rock to prominence.

Before the year was out, Deep Purple went on to release the Made in Japan live album, and Stevie Wonder released his own pair with Music of My Mind and the seminal Talking Book.

The latter gave the world the funk-rock classic “Superstition,” which features a punchy Hohner Clavinet keyboard riff that has been appropriated by guitarists in countless cover bands.

If all these moments and genre births are any indication of the benefits to an augmented leap year, I say bring on the next one UTC.

Canadian guitarist and singer-songwriter Daniel Lanois has produced albums for such legends as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson.

Alongside Brian Eno he has also co-produced a number of U2 albums, including 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby.

Friendly and forthcoming, he is the polar opposite of the stereotypical paranoid producer who jealously guards his studio secrets.

His unspoken attitude seems to be, why not share a good idea if it will help someone make better music?

The following interview extracts originally appeared in the June 1993 issue of Guitar Player…

What's your favorite way to record guitars?

“It's very important to record musicians as physically close together as possible. You and I are sitting about two feet apart; if we were playing acoustic guitars, we wouldn't have to wave or ask someone to turn up the cans.

“That's why I like to use two amplifiers with each guitar. Once sits right next to you; that's your personal monitor. Then I put another amp of the same type down the hall, splitting the signal with a Morley splitter box.

“I track both amps, but I usually end up using the isolated sound, which still sounds close and personal even if the amps are three rooms apart. I usually place a single dynamic mic fairly close to the speaker, but off-center.”

How about acoustic guitars?

“My main acoustic is this little Guild student model from the late '60s. It's not real loud, but it's fantastic for recording. I keep it in an open tuning; F - F - C - F - A - C low to high, or sometimes F - F - C - F - F - C.

“I don't use a pick. I sometimes mike the guitar, but more often I use these early-'80s Lawrence pickups that The Edge turned me on to.

“Pickups can actually be more musical than the pure instrument. You get additional harmonics that you don't hear acoustically.

“If you're a real purist, this idea makes no sense. But I like to take advantage of the personality of the guitar, pickup, and amp.”

Is board EQ part of the equation?

“I don't rely on board EQ to get a good sound, but I will use it to create a stranger sound.

“I'll give away one of my secret techniques: Say you've just spent a few hours mixing a song with a lot of effects, crazy EQ, and so on. Put that song away and play every other song on the record through that same mix. I guarantee that at least two or three songs will have something fantastic.

“That technique has directed me towards a lot of strange approaches that I never would have come up with normally.”

Any other mixing advice?

“There isn't room for everything to be big. Take Jimi Hendrix records as an example: The guitars are big and powerful, but the drums are like jazz kit recordings. They sound beautiful, but the snares aren't as big as a house and the kick drums don't occupy the whole spectrum.

“Something might serve the music better if it has its own little corner. That doesn't mean it's less important than the foreground, but not everything can be the icing on the cake.”

To what extent are you the architect of the guitar sounds on records you produce?

“Most guitar players have a big rig that they've worked on and put sounds into, and I usually don't mess with that. But quite often I suggest alternative rigs, usually simpler ones.

“The big rig is generally in the band room, and there's a more informal one in the console area where you're working out parts.

“For example, Bono has this old green Gretsch that we often do D.I. just to work out chords. That may sound great, so the guitar works its way into Edge's hands, and we record it that way.

“Nine times out of ten, if you just plug in to work out a part, you actually end up with a pretty good sound. In fact, a lot of Edge's sounds on Achtung Baby were recorded on this little solid state practice amp we had in the control room instead of the AC30.”

Is it possible to make a great record with an inexpensive 4-track machine and a couple of Shure mikes?

“No problem! Cheap recordings can be musical. I know people who recorded on PortaStudios and were never able to replicate the warm, overdriven sounds of those machines in big studios.

“Some of that quality comes from EQ-ing tracks when you bounce them. The version of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" on the Neville Brothers Yellow Moon was recorded on an Akai 12-track in my apartment.

“We mixed onto a good Sony cassette machine, and I never got a better mix, so we ended up putting the cassette mix on the final album."

How about mics?

“You don't necessarily need expensive mikes. I've always recorded Bono's vocals through a Shure SM58 or 58 Beta.

“Some of the best guitar recordings are done with inexpensive dynamic mikes. I almost always use a Beyer 88 or Shure 57 or 58, though if you want a really pure vocal or acoustic recording, you might have to go with a great tube mike.

“Sometimes technical limitations just mean you have to be resourceful, and resourcefulness never goes out of fashion.

“We were going to record Achtung Baby in a house outside Dublin using Edge's big Neve console, but they couldn't get it ready in time, so we recorded most of it through a cheap Soundcraft console – basically a P.A. board.

“We did use some external Neve preamps, but the board itself sounded great.

“Remember, energy and ideas override technology. If you have the technology, use it. But if you haven't got the cash, don't worry.”

Browse the Daniel Lanois catalog here.

Back in the early spring of 2020, Joe Satriani was conducting business much as he had been for the past 30 years. He had a new record, Shapeshifting, set for release, and his concert schedule was full. “And then the pandemic hit, and everything went upside-down,” he says.

The guitarist went ahead with release plans for the album, but he was forced to reschedule all of his 2020 dates. “Not as easy as it sounds,” he points out, “because you don’t want to be hit with cancellation fees. Fortunately, we had great relationships with promoters and we were able to work things out.”

He sighs. “And then we had to do it again.”

With the COVID pandemic proving to be a stubborn beast, Satriani was placed in the unenviable position of pushing his rescheduled 2021 dates to this year. And as of this writing, that might not be the end of the tour rejigging.

“Everything is in flux because you just can’t predict what will happen,” he says. “I’m pretty sure COVID-19 is going to become endemic by the end of summer, and we’re hoping that we can start the tour in the fall. Everybody’s vaccinated and follows protocols. 

"The problem is the restrictions on quarantine and what that does to a budget. We’re a tight band and crew, and the last thing you want to do is go out on tour and have one person get sick. You can lose a fortune in a week on tour.”

He lets out an exasperated groan. “Part of me is so bored with talking about the nuts and bolts of all of this,” he says. “I like making music and talking about music, but this is the reality we’ve been facing. It’s been a rough time.”

Beyond touring upheavals, Satriani faced a more devastating blow late last year when his friend and manager, Mick Brigden, died suddenly following an accident on his property in Santa Rosa, California. 

To say that artist and manager were joined at the hip would be a vast understatement – for the past three decades, Brigden, whose history dates back to working with groups like Humble Pie and the Rolling Stones in the early ’70s, represented one client: Joe Satriani.

“There’s so much I could say about Mick,” Satriani says. “He helped me in so many ways, and he was the kind of guy who made things happen. He was so into music and the artist state of mind, and because of that he made all the work we did fun and challenging. He was the perfect person to guide me, and he was fully involved with everything I did right up till the moment he passed away.”

He pauses.

“In fact, the day he died, I told him that I was going to be sending him mixes of the new album.”

Satriani is referring to his just-issued record, The Elephants of Mars. It’s his 19th studio album and his first for the earMUSIC label following his longtime association with Sony.

For Satch, who traditionally favored the collaborative spirit of recording with other musicians in the same room, the safety protocols imposed by Covid dictated a new path: He would record all of his guitar tracks at his San Francisco home studio, while his small group of guest players (drummer Kenny Aronoff, bassist Bryan Beller and keyboardist Rai Thistlethwayte) would beam their parts in from various points on the globe.

Co-producer Eric Caudieux, whose work with the guitarist began on 1998’s Crystal Planet, kept things moving remotely from Los Angeles. “Once I got used to the idea that I was going to be stuck at home for a while, I decided to take advantage of the fact that there was no time clock,” Satriani says.

“I didn’t have to do basics in 10 days and get everybody home. I didn’t have to do overdubs in three weeks. I didn’t have to mix in just two weeks. We had a blank slate, and in a way that was exciting.”

Perhaps due to his homebound status while recording, Satriani sounds more restless than ever on The Elephants of Mars – and that’s a good thing. There’s an aspirational, almost transformative quality running through much of the album, best exemplified by the progressive showpiece “Sahara” and the cinematic-tinged title cut, on which the guitarist sheds his readily identifiable classic rock tone and embraces a more slippery, exotic tone.

He doesn’t forsake rocking entirely – the slinky and swaggering “Blue Foot Groovy” is boisterous stuff – but the emphasis here is on exploring new themes and textures, and Satriani’s intellectual curiosity takes him to some unexpected places.

On a trio of cuts – “E 104 St. NYC 1973,” “Pumpin’” and “Night Scene” – he folds a distinct jazz-fusion flavor into his blues-rock foundation, and the results are startling. “I wanted to make an album that I hadn’t done before in terms of the scope – the kinds of compositions, instrumentation, mixing...all of it.” Satriani says.

“Eric Caudieux was part of my last record, and we both felt the same way. The idea was to stretch things out, take our time with the arrangements and try to create a new level of drama.

“As an artist, I never feel like I want to stay in any one lane, but this record really feels like the guardrails have been lifted and all bets are off.”

Does the weight of being called a virtuoso or “guitar god” ever feel like too much? Do you feel as if you have to do something amazing on each song?

[laughs] I don’t know. I kind of feel like I do that all on my own because of the way music sounded to me ever since I was a kid. When I heard the Dave Clark Five play “Glad All Over,” I thought that was amazing.

There are so many songs I could name. But I don’t think of it in technical terms; when something’s right, it’s right. When I hear something that’s nailing the message, to me that’s the highest level of technique.

I’m so unimpressed by the display of physical technique in the wrong place. I’ve always felt that way. And that’s why I’ve always been able to enjoy music played by guitar players of any genre, because I’m not really interested in that.

When I’m sitting down and practicing something, yeah, I’ll seek out some example from some player that can stretch the way I’m trying to play. But I won’t apply that to my music unless I think it’s the right thing to do at the right time.

Of course, the concept of what qualifies as “amazing” is so subjective. To some, Neil Young playing a solo on one string is brilliant, while others would opine that it’s too simplistic.

Sure. I grew up listening to Neil, so yeah, to me, he’s part of my musical fabric. I never questioned what he played, not once. Comparing guitarists… I mean, how can you compare Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page? They’re both geniuses, and they’re both courageous and daring.

At some point you can’t argue this case, because if you don’t recognize it as a valid argument, then you can’t even join in the conversation – it feels absurd. If somebody doesn’t understand the beauty in what Neil Young is doing, then it’s better just to walk away.

On a lot of this record, you move away from what people consider to be your signature sound. Why?

I’d done it before. There are a couple of times across my catalog where I specifically turned that quality up. With The Extremist, I wanted to make a tribute to my classic rock roots, and every decision we made was based on that. The funny thing was, it came out at the height of grunge.

When I did Shapeshifting, I was thinking the same thing. I just had this idea that these particular songs would benefit from a real nod to some of the classic-rock ways of recording rock guitar songs.

This time around, I thought, No, I’m not going to do that. The songs would dictate how they should sound. I wasn’t trying to impose any parameters on the sound.

As opposed to other albums, you recorded this entire record remotely.

Yes, and every guitar part was done in my home studio. It was all recorded DI, and every guitar sound is from the SansAmp plugin.

That must have felt so different to you. You’ve always said that you love being in a room with other musicians.

I do. I love it. There were many times when I’d take a break from recording this album and I’d play along with some song by Chickenfoot [his former group with Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Chad Smith] to re-live those moments.

There’s something so great about recording live in the studio and getting two or three songs done in an afternoon. But then you go, Okay, I did that. Time to move on.

But there’s also something great about being left alone so you can play as many stupid ideas as you want and not feel like someone’s looking over your shoulder. Doing that opens the floodgates to the emotions in a way that you never experience in a public situation.

Let’s talk about some of the new songs. The title track feels very cinematic. Ever thought of doing movie soundtracks?

Hey, I’m ready! [laughs] Sure, why not? The song feels like a movie – it’s about giant, sentient elephants roaming a newly terraformed Mars. You should be thinking cinematic. The track took years to put together, and for the longest time we didn’t know how it would wind up.

Funnily enough, the guitar solo was one take, and it’s just crazy. But that’s what you can do when you’re left to your own devices and you don’t have this time clock going. You can set it up so that you can capture these things, and there’s nothing about an exterior schedule that forces you not to do that.

“Blue Foot Groovy” is a completely different animal. It’s gritty, raw rock and roll. It would’ve made a great ’70s Rod Stewart song.

Yeah, I think it would! I was thinking of Sammy Hagar when I started writing it. The title started out as “Blue Foot,” because I had a series of songs that weren’t as complicated as some of the other Chickenfoot songs. Sammy and I were talking about the possibility of eliminating bridges.

Anyway, it was a bit of a nugget that blew up afterward. And then I kept trying to come up with a title and everybody kept saying, “No, ‘Blue Foot Groovy’ – that’s what the title is.”

Three of the tracks – “E 104th St. NYC 1973,” “Pumpin’” and “Night Scene” – have a lot of jazz fusion in them.

Yeah. Earlier you asked me about dodging the classic-rock thing, and see, once you remove a singular goal in production, you’re also removing barriers from what you can write and play.

There’s no way to have that relaxed, sprawling, lyrical, yet fusiony kind of improvisation on a piece like “E 104th St.” unless you allow that to happen and just write about a vibe and a point in your personal history and how you experienced that.

That track was funny. I had two drum loops in the demo – one was straight and one was swinging – and the combination was so messed-up sounding, but it was so curiously attractive. It was difficult for the guys to figure out how they were actually going to interpret it. Eventually, they made it sound smooth as silk because they’re so cool and they’re so good at what they do.

But my improv on top of the demo was actually over these two loops that were fighting each other. Should it be straight hip-hop or swing jazz? That was one of the funny things I put out to the guys, and they had to figure out how to rectify straight and swing at the same time.

You play a seven-string on “Through a Mother’s Day Darkly.” Are you a good seven-string player?

[laughs] Well, as I’m playing I’m always reminding myself, “That’s a B string, Joe. That’s a B string.” So the answer is no, I guess. But I’m a spirited musician. I try to think like Hendrix and Page, because they were so fearless and they went where they wanted. You’ve got all these incredible performances in all kinds of genres.

I recorded that track really fast. I pulled out my JS6 signature prototype that was turned into a seven-string. I hadn’t played it in years; it had been in its case, and the strings were never changed. They were so loose because they’d lost their tension, but I found that interesting. I just wrote the song based on that tactile response and the fact that it was such a weird Mother’s Day, in lockdown.

What other electric guitars did you use?

Basically the guitars that I was touring with and keep at home: the [Ibanez JS1CR] chrome signature model guitar, the red MCO and a prototype for a paisley guitar. That’s pretty much it. I think there’s a sitar on there.

For acoustic guitars, I used a Martin and my JSA model. Usually when I go into a studio, we bring 200 guitars. I don’t know why, and maybe there’s 15 or 20 that we play. A lot of that has to do with the moment.

It’s the same thing with amps. This is the first album I’ve ever made where I didn’t use any exterior amplifier. I have all the amps in the world that anybody should have, but every time I AB’d an amp against the DI guitar going through the SansAmp, the SansAmp delivered more Joe than anything else.

“Delivering more Joe” – we like that.

That’s basically what it is. I know that’s a really weird thing to come out of my mouth, but that’s what it comes down to. At the end of the record, Eric and I were scratching our heads going, “How is this possible?” It’s pretty funny.

Pick up a copy of The Elephants of Mars here.

On this day, 50 years ago, Led Zeppelin released the “Rock and Roll” single with “Four Sticks” as its B-side. Both songs appeared on the band’s best-selling untitled 1971 album widely known as Led Zeppelin IV (also dubbed ‘the four symbols album’.)

Featuring a guest performance by Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart, “Rock and Roll” initially came together during a spontaneous jam while recording “Four Sticks.”

“We’d just finished a take and John Bonham did the drum intro [from Little Richard’s ‘Keep A-Knockin' (But You Can't Come In)'] and we just followed on,” Jimmy Page told an interviewer back in 2010. 

“I started doing pretty much half of that riff you hear on ‘Rock and Roll’ and it was just so exciting that we thought, ‘let’s just work on this’… It was just so spur-of-the-moment the way that it just came together more or less out of nowhere.”

Renowned for their spontaneity both on stage and in the studio, all four members of Led Zeppelin are credited as songwriters on “Rock and Roll.” The only other song on the album to receive a four-way split is the band's interpretation of Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks.”

This recording features one of the most sampled drum tracks in music history. Indeed, drummer John Bonham’s standout sound inspired the band to explore the song further.   

“I heard the drum sound in the hallway, that iconic drum sound,” Page told the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show. “The minute I heard that sound on these reflective surfaces, I said, ‘We’re gonna revisit that number.’”

In this 1995 clip from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions, Led Zeppelin can be seen and heard keeping the jams alive with a characteristically "tight but loose” rendition of “When the Levee Breaks.”

With Neil Young toting his faithful Old Black modified Goldtop, this rare moment captures Robert Plant also strapping on an electric guitar, creating a rough and ready trio of Les Pauls.

Visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for more information.

With their long-awaited new album – Radiate Like This – due to land in May, Warpaint are currently warming up to hit the road again.

It’s been a while. The quartet’s latest long-player follows up 2016’s Heads Up and, like so many other lockdown records, was tracked with band members in separate locations.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever made an album like that,” said founding guitarist and vocalist Emily Kokal. “But in a weird way, it made us take our time with everything. The process felt more meditative, less rushed.”

And while the music world eagerly awaits the release of Warpaint’s most recent studio effort, here Kokal takes time to reminisce about some of her earliest musical memories.

What are some of your earliest memories of music?

My parents had the Police album Ghost in the Machine and I remember “Spirits in the Material World” being one of my favorites. But the first thing I sang along to was the song “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” [from Zenyatta Mondatta.]

My mom says they were some of my first words. [laughs] After a few weeks of hearing it, one day I just started singing along!

Also, she used to sing “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor to me every night. She would sing five or six songs to me every night and I think that’s a big part of why I became a musician.

What made you want to write songs?

When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I remember listening to the War album by U2, being struck by the seriousness of the lyrics, and asking my mom, “What does it mean, ‘We eat and drink while tomorrow they die?’”

To me, as a kid, it was a powerful image. As was the album cover. I was just so transfixed by it as a child. I was attracted to how much it made me feel a little bit afraid.

That was a turning point. I realized then that music can be rebellious, but also something people can use to help and educate each other.

What was the first song you learned to play?

I come from a pretty musical family and my grandmother had a piano. There were all sorts of books in the bench – stuff like Frank Sinatra and Engelbert Humperdinck – so I learned a little bit about music from that.

As far as guitar goes, my mom had a Beatles book and I learned “I Will.” That was the first time I taught myself guitar chords.

What was your first band, and did you do any covers?

When I was 20, I was in a band called Little Two’s in Eugene, Oregon. And if you listen to the record, I sung a little moment of “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the song “Shabasta.”

The first song that I ever covered properly was “Looking for You” [by Nino Ferrer.] Theresa [Wayman, Warpaint guitarist and vocalist] and I played it together when we were teenagers in high school. That was the first thing we ever did together. We learned it together, played the same chords and sang in harmony.

Which of your songs would you play to someone who’s never heard your music before?

“Burgundy.” I think it’s one of the most live-sounding recordings we have. The vocal was recorded at the same time as the music. I think it lands close to our vibe.

Is there an electric guitar solo you’d hold up as one of the best there is?

“Maggot Brain.” George Clinton told [Eddie Hazel] to think of the saddest thing he could – that his mother had died. I get emotional even thinking about it. It’s so powerful. It has such a primal voice.

Is there a riff you wish you’d written?

“1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” by Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t know he wrote riffs like that. I always thought Hendrix was cool, but when I heard that song it instantly became my favorite.

Is there a song that reminds you of home when you’re out on the road?

My mom is a huge fan of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Jackson Browne so I grew up with a lot of really emotional, heavy folk music, and the Bonnie Raitt cover of Joni Mitchell’s “That Song About the Midway” gets me every time. I can’t even remember a time in my life without that song. 

Bonnie Raitt nailed it in a bluesy fashion. It’s beautiful. I have a soft spot for the musical sincerity of that time. I miss the sincerity of that era, but I think it’s coming round again. It’ll be less cool to be cool as the political climate gets a little bit darker.

Have you got any songwriting tips?

To any aspiring songwriters, I would recommend trying to have your lyrics ready as soon as possible because once you have the melody it can be really hard to go back and try to plug in phonetically. Try to come with your purpose right away.

I often write in rhyme naturally, so that happens almost of its own accord. But I think trying to come in with an emotion later is tricky. I personally try to capture the feeling of the lyrical content, but I have made things very difficult for myself in the past trying to figure out lyrics later. I can change a melody easily if the lyrics are already there.

Are there any Warpaint songs you had to really fight to get finished?

“New Song” nearly didn’t make it. It was one of the last songs to be included [on Heads Up.]

Jen [Lee Lindberg, Warpaint bassist] gave me her demo which was mostly the whole song, and I was trying to work things out lyrically, but I got a little intimidated by it. I changed it a lot and I kind of gave up on it. But then I played it to Jake [Bercovici] our producer and he was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This song is done!’

Ultimately, I like to feel the least amount of resistance when it comes to writing music. Otherwise, I feel like I’m getting in my own way. I just want to be a conduit for whatever’s coming through me.

Pre-order the new Warpaint album Radiate Like This here.

Growing up, I was exposed to many great artists through the wall separating my bedroom from that of my two older sisters. Lucky for me, my siblings had great taste. “We” listened to Hendrix, the Incredible String Band, the Easy Rider soundtrack and the Beatles, to name a few. It was in this manner that I discovered Buffalo Springfield's Again.

Released in 1967 on Atco Records, it was the second of three Buffalo Springfield releases and, in my opinion, it’s their finest record. Years later when, as an adult, I put Buffalo Springfield Again on my turntable, my appreciation was more mature, but the result was the same. Then and now, I love this LP.

With a lineup that featured Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay on guitars and vocals, Bruce Palmer on bass and Dewey Martin on drums and vocals, Buffalo Springfield comprised a stylistically eclectic range of influences, yet their sound held together seamlessly while their vocals reigned supreme.

Buffalo Springfield Again almost reminds me of a Beatles record with its range of folk, country and psychedelia, all of which somehow coalesce under the banner of country rock, a genre the group helped to define in the late 1960s with albums like this one. In addition to the group’s five members, Buffalo Springfield Again features a talented cast that includes James Burton on Dobro, co-producer Jack Nitzsche on piano and members of the Wrecking Crew. It’s a tasty stew of talent.

The record kicks off with Young’s “Mr. Soul.” Young is the rare artist who can successfully cover a lot of ground, from extreme raw angst to an almost feminine melancholy. “Mr. Soul” is from his “Cinnamon Girl” songwriting template, a catchy rocker with great guitar hooks and an infectious melody.

It’s followed by Furay’s “A Child’s Claim to Fame,” which encompasses and predates the definitive California country sound we’ve come to know, with Burton’s Dobro contributing playfully to the party.

“Everydays” is a Stills tune that finds the group playing its mutated version of jazz, but it’s never naïve or overreaching. Stills has a knack for a great melody, and the drone notes, distorted electric guitar and harmonies make this track Buffalo Springfield’s unique take on the genre.

“Expecting to Fly” is another Young composition, and it brings to my mind the Moody Blues’ “Knights in White Satin,” which was released a scant week before this album. “Bluebird” is another Stills tune with more absolutely great guitar tones, and one that sounds like it could have been on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu.

My favorite track is “Hung Upside Down,” and it’s the song I usually play for the uninitiated. Harmony “woman tone” guitars invite us in, and the song takes hold, never letting you go. The melody is haunting, and the Young-and-Stills tandem kill it. The louder I play this song, the better it sounds.

“Sad Memory” is a Richie Furay original that could have been played in a lonely folk coffee shop. ”Good Time Boy” is an Otis Redding-style track that shows Furay’s versatility with a catchy R&B groove, while Young’s “Broken Arrow” closes the record. As for this last cut, the band’s ambition might have exceeded the end result. My personal grading for this erratic track might hover around a C-plus. That said, it’s still a great record.

The story goes that when Stills suggested Young join CS&N, Graham Nash was against it. After Young himself suggested Nash listen to the Young-and-Stills guitar tandem, he had a change of heart. What I find interesting about this duo is that they don’t play the traditional roles of any classic guitar team but instead seem to slip in and out of a deep conversation and often speak at the same time.

To me, Stills and Young are underrated for some things and possibly overrated for other things, but their rock-guitar duo thing is vastly underappreciated (see Déjà Vu’s “Woodstock” below). They play together as totally generous narcissists who know each other completely.

I always mention Buffalo Springfield Again when discussing noteworthy pop with my pals. Many folks aren’t aware of the record, or perhaps they simply forgot about it. Either way, I suggest spending some time with it, preferably in the same room as your speakers.

Get your copy of Again by Buffalo Springfield here.

Jim Campilongo has 14 critically acclaimed instrumental records available on vinyl, CD and digital download here.

“It was a sincere plea to one of my musical heroes to stick around and keep sharing his gifts with the world,” says Nils Lofgren, speaking about his driving rocker “Keith Don’t Go (Ode to the Glimmer Twin).”

Featured on the guitarist’s eponymous 1975 debut album, the song has become one of Lofgren’s most enduring tracks (he’s never played a show without performing it), and over the years he says the sentiments behind it have grown in meaning.

“Throughout the decades, I have greater appreciation for the people who created the music that inspired me,” he says. “And while Keith Richards is alive and well – nothing to do with the song, of course – I’m happy knowing that my tribute to him has meant so much to so many people.”

The Lost Recording

The song’s origins date to 1973, when Lofgren, a sometime member of Crazy Horse, was part of Neil Young’s band for the Tonight’s the Night album and its subsequent tour. That record had been made in tribute to Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, both of whom died of drug overdoses.

“When we hit the U.K.,” Lofgren recalls, “I kept running into Keith Richards’ friends, who were quite worried about him. It was a recurring part of our conversations – they were very concerned about his health. Nobody wanted to see Keith join other rock legends who died way before their time.”

Lofgren originally dismissed such worries, but he eventually took them to heart and set about putting his feelings to music.

Armed with a forceful riff he had already laid down on cassette, he seized on a title (“‘Keith Don’t Go’ – that’s pretty direct”) and quickly wrote out lyrics. “Once I had the concept, the actual writing didn’t take long,” he says. “The whole thing came pouring out.”

At the time, Lofgren was leading his band Grin. They recorded a version of the song with his producer and friend David Briggs, who was also Neil Young’s producer, and with assistance from Young himself.

“Neil was passing through town, and he joined us in the studio,” Lofgren says. “He sang and played piano on the track, which was great because he doesn’t normally play piano on other people’s sessions.”

The recording was never released, and Lofgren didn’t even know its whereabouts until Bob Dawson at Bias Studios in Springfield, Virginia, discovered the master many years later. The track was subsequently included on Lofgren’s 2014 box set, Face the Music.

“It’s actually my favorite version of the song,” the guitarist says. “I like my own recording, but there’s something about Neil’s haunting voice that gets to me.”

“Everything Just Flew”

A year later, Lofgren signed a solo deal with A&M. With Briggs at the helm, and working with the rhythm section of bassist Wornell Jones and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, he set about recording a group of numbers, including “Keith Don’t Go.”

In pre-production, Briggs worked vigorously with Lofgren and Jones to get the songs down cold. “It was a smart approach,” Lofgren says. “When Aynsley joined us, he could respond to two guys who were really confident about the material. Everything just flew.”

For the song’s raging rhythm tracks and searing lead solo, Lofgren paired a Fender Strat electric guitar with a blackface Super Reverb guitar amp that he bought in the 1960s. “That amp had great speakers,” he says. “When you dialed it to seven or eight, it started to saturate and got really warm and ballsy. I loved that sound.”

What Does Keith Think?

Surprisingly, “Keith Don’t Go” was never issued as a single, but thanks to its lyrical theme, it quickly took on a life of its own and became a fan favorite at shows.

“People really caught on to it,” Lofgren says. “I mean, who doesn’t love Keith and the Stones? It’s amazing when I play it live, particularly in the U.K. People yell out the simple chant. It’s always a joyful experience.”

As for the big question – has Keith Richards ever mentioned the song to him? – Lofgren laughs. “No, he hasn’t,” he says. “I don’t even know if he’s heard it. I’ve been blessed to have met him a number of times, and he’s always been super friendly, but no, it’s never come up.”

Lofgren balks at the idea of ever mentioning it to Richards himself. “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” he says. “Whatever he feels about it, or if he’s heard it, the bottom line is it came from the heart and the words speak for themselves. It was an emotional sentiment to a musical hero, and I would hope it were taken as such, if he ever hears it.”

Buy Face the Music here.

Happy birthday to Neil Young!

The multiple Grammy Award-winning artist and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee celebrates his 76th today. A true rock ‘n’ roll veteran Young first rose to prominence in the ’60s as a member of Buffalo Springfield and is currently set to release his latest studio album –­ Barn – on December 10.

Since the late ‘60s, Young has famously relied on a heavily modified Gibson Les Paul Goldtop known as Old Black. Notable for its black refinish and customized electronics and hardware this road worn axe has been his main squeeze for over half a century and is the true definition of a player’s electric guitar.

Although the Gibson Les Paul Model aka Goldtop (released in 1952) was originally fitted with dual P-90s featuring white plastic covers, Old Black has been modified with a Gibson Firebird pickup in the rear/bridge position (the P-90 pickup in the front/neck position has a matching metal cover).

Derived from the Kalamazoo-era Epiphone mini humbucker (itself a derivative of the Seth Lover-designed PAF), original Firebird humbuckers are constructed of two bobbins wound with 42 AWG wire and have around 15% less turns than a PAF on account of their smaller size. Being underwound, their DC resistance is lower, and a comparatively brighter tone is produced.

However, unlike PAFs and other mini humbuckers which have a single Alnico bar magnet positioned below ferrous polepiece screws and slugs, Firebird pickups utilize a pair of Alnico bar magnets located near the strings – one ‘blade’ in each coil – along with steel reflector plates located underneath and above the bobbins.

All things considered this produces a characteristic sparkle, bite and directness not unlike that of a single coil, but with a raunchier, more aggressive tone.

Filmed in 1990 at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, this live clip of Young and the Crazy Horse band performing “Country Home” (from the Ragged Glory album) features some stellar guitar leads. Perfectly capturing Young’s matchless sound, the full range of Old Black’s sweet singing tones embellished with some masterful Bigsby vibrato can be heard in all its ragged glory.

Pre-order Barn here.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse have shared "Song Of The Seasons," the first single from the group's forthcoming album, Barn.

A beautiful, acoustic guitar- and harmonica-driven tune, the song recalls – rather than the high-gain glory of Young's most famous work with Crazy Horse – the homespun, country-tinged folk-rock of his early '70s commercial peak.

“This is the first track of Barn, our new album with Crazy Horse," Young wrote of the tune in a statement to fans on the Neil Young Archives. "It’s the oldest song on the record, written about this time last year.” 

You can give the song a spin below.

Featuring Nils Lofgren on guitar, and the rhythm section of bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina – who have been with Crazy Horse since their founding as The Rockets in 1968 – Barn is the follow-up to 2019's Colorado, and was recorded “high in the Rockies” via the Le Mobile Recording Studio.

"These are new times, with new songs and feelings after what our world has been through and continues to face," Young wrote in a Neil Young Archives post discussing the album's creation in June.

"This music we are making for our souls. It's like a fresh water on a desert. Life is going on."

Barn – which was produced by Young and Niko Bolas – is set for a December 10 release via Reprise. You can preorder the album here, and check out its tracklist below.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Barn:

1. Song of the Seasons
2. Heading West
3. Change Ain’t Never Gonna
4. Canerican
5. Shape of You
6. They Might Be Lost
7. Human Race
8. Tumblin’ Thru the Years
9. Welcome Back
10. Don’t Forget Love

Lying awake under the moonlight in rural Acadian Louisiana, Dylan LeBlanc absorbed the nightly riot of sounds rising from the nearby swamps. Hooting owls, a chorus of insects and the eerie shriek of wild cats made up the evening soundtrack outside the wooden shack where he wrote much of 2019’s Renegade, his fourth album and his first for ATO Records.

“It’s so quiet out there, but the insects and the animals are very, very loud,” he says. “I remember seeing a bobcat and hearing it scream, and just listening to the different sounds of nature.”

You can hear the mystery and tension of bayou country all over Renegade, though not in the traditional sense. This is LeBlanc’s least-Americana sounding album to date. Ethereal vocals float above drums awash in reverb. Keyboards shimmer, and guitars crackle on the verge of breaking up, then soar into scorching leads.

LeBlanc was biding his time between tours, living on a self-sustaining farm near Lafayette where he worked in exchange for a cottage to live in, when he began writing Renegade. The Shreveport, Louisiana, native often made the two-hour drive to New Orleans, soaking up life experiences that he poured into his songs. “A lot of the songs were other people’s stories,” he says. “You meet these characters who have seen things that you couldn’t even imagine.

“When I wrote ‘Bang Bang Bang,’” he says by way of illustration, “I had met a very old African-American man who in the Civil Rights era was married to a white woman and had a mixed child. And they were both shot in a riot. It caused so much hate in him. The song is about how long it took him to let that go and how hate breeds more hate and doesn’t help anything.”

LeBlanc brought his new songs and the eerie vibe of the swamp back to Nashville to cut his new album in three days, shedding his singer-songwriter skin and plugging in with his backing band, the Pollies. He and the group set up with producer Dave Cobb, put up some mics and let the licks fly.

“Dave wants it as live as possible, which was great, because I feel like we are a pretty good live band,” LeBlanc says. “And we’d been playing a lot of those songs, at least half of them, for about six, seven, eight months on the road. So when we got in there, we were pretty well oiled and ready to smash it home.”

I hear people like Tom Petty and Peter Buck in your playing. Who are your biggest guitar influences?

Lindsey Buckingham is one of my favorite guitar players. I just love the way he plays. It’s so peaceful and melodic. George Harrison’s another big one. Obviously, Mike Campbell is a big influence. Peter Buck is amazing. I love Django Reinhardt. I love Neil Young.

That’s an eclectic group. What is it about them that you gravitate to?

They don’t overplay. Guitar should be utilized for making a song really interesting. It should be enhancing a song sonically and making it more interesting. Mike Campbell, for instance, and Lindsey Buckingham, they play the hook. They come up with great hooks on their guitars, and that is really invaluable when it comes to songwriting.

That makes me think of Campbell’s opening hook on “American Girl,” which is just one jangling open chord.

Yeah, one chord. Everything about that song is a hook. The bass line’s a hook. That was Tom Petty’s best ability, musically, as far as I’m concerned. He wrote 10 different hooks in every single song.

Were you ever into more virtuosic players?

I like guys like Leo Kottke, Tommy Emmanuel – just great guitar players who do instrumental stuff. I never was into really fast players. At some certain point, guitar solos became uncool, so on my new album I tried to play as many different solos as I possibly could that were melodic and interesting.

What techniques or tricks did you pick up from those guys?

A lot of the things that I learned from them have to do with your right hand. Like how they switch back and forth from different picking patterns. I really pay attention to that more than I would pay attention to how fast they’re playing, or whatever.

I had a conversation with Chris Wood from the Wood Brothers, who, to me, is one of the best bass players of our time. He and I were talking about how important rhythm is, and how there’s rhythm in everything. There’s rhythm in the lead part. You can’t do anything without it.

We need to put it into young players’ heads that they need to study rhythm more than they need to study anything else. And your right hand is where the rhythm is – unless you’re left-handed.

There’s a lot more electric guitar on Renegade than on your previous albums. What prompted you to pick up the electric?

I started playing acoustic guitar with this band called the Pollies, and they’re just a really solid rock and roll band. But sonically, it just didn’t get that edge that I was looking for. So I started writing songs geared to this band – songs that I knew we would be able to bring alive in a heavier, broader way that was bigger and more driving.

I wanted to create a live show that got people’s energy up and hearts pumping. Make people move. I just thought, this is our moment to bring great, cool, melodic songs back in a really forceful way that makes people go, “Wow!”

On “Born Again,” there’s some interplay and harmony guitar parts that are straight out of Thin Lizzy.

We always loved that kind of what I call “guitarmony.” [Pollies guitarist] Jay Burgess and I always did that growing up. We’re from the South, and the Allman Brothers were a really big influence on us, as were Wilco and stuff like that. We listened to a lot of records where the guitarists harmonize their parts.

You get some cool atmospheric tones. What amps and pedals were you using?

I used a ’65 Fender Deluxe Reverb. Jay used a ’74 Princeton. There was a Super Reverb from the ’60s that Cobb used on the electric guitar that he played. All the overdrive is an Electro-Harmonix LPB-1 Nano pedal. To me, it makes the amp sound like it’s naturally breaking up. I’ll use this other boost on my Box of Rock reverb pedal. I just leave that on, and then I hit the LPB-1 for the overdrive.

I pretty much just played a ’61 Reissue SG the entire time. I played a 1960 Gibson J-200 on all the acoustic tracks and a 1945 000-15 Martin. It was amazing.

Any other favorites in your collection?

I have a Duesenberg Starplayer TV Fullerton that I play all the time. I also have a Gibson ES-390. it’s a smaller-bodied hollowbody guitar based on the old 330. And then I have an ES-359, which is also a smaller-bodied Gibson Sunburst.

I usually carry about four electric guitars and two acoustics with me on the road, and they all have different tunings for different songs. I love them dearly.

Do they each have certain qualities that draw you to them?

Yeah. I love hollowbody guitars just because they’re so warm. I never really liked a guitar that was too bright, especially for electric guitar. I like a neck pickup that has a very thick and warm tone to fill up space when you’re playing rhythm and a bridge pickup that cuts through for when you want to play a lead or a solo. That’s why I bought my Duesenberg, because it does that really well.

Dave Cobb has become the most in-demand producer in Nashville. What did you like about working with him?

He records everything. He’s very much got that Rolling Stones mentality where he just hits “record” and you literally record everything all day. You don’t turn the tape machine off. And it was just live, man. What you hear is what you get. It’s just us playing and jamming in RCA Studio A, live as hell and just banging them out.

Buy Renegade here.

If you’re an acoustic cat who uses multiple tunings for a solo or singer-songwriter set, it’s essential that you maneuver from one to the next efficiently to keep momentum. Even if you have great ears, it’s smart to have a digital tuner (and a backup battery) handy at all times. A surefire way to lose an audience’s attention is by making copious fine-tuning adjustments by ear and accounting for your instrument’s every little idiosyncrasy.

If your acoustic guitar has cheap tuners, consider upgrading them. It’s relatively easy and affordable. For that matter, if you have multiple acoustics, designate one for each of your main tunings, and use the following logic to flow from there.

Group Tunes by Tunings

If you have a significant collection of songs in different tunings, consider creating a master set list that groups them by tuning rather than title or artist. You’ll want to mine a particular tuning for a few songs before moving on, but probably not more than three in a row. Your opener should not be your most exotic tuning. Save that like a pitcher would a change-up or a curve. Throw a few fastballs down the middle first.

Consider Overall String Tension

Using standard tuning as a barometer, alternate tunings will either increase or decrease overall tension as you tune up or down. For example, open E is an upward move, since the fifth, fourth and third strings go up in pitch a whole step, a whole step and a half step, respectively. Open G, on the other hand, is a downward dive, as the sixth, fifth and first strings each drop a whole step. Some tunings include moves in both directions, leaving overall string tension relatively unchanged.

If your set involves songs in multiple alternate tunings, group them according to the direction of their tuning. Pretend you’re operating an elevator with stops on multiple floors. If you tuned down for your first move and you have another tuning that’s even lower, it makes sense to deal with both in the same section of a set. Consider them the lobby and the basement.

The same applies to raised-tension tunings. Those are the top floors. Let’s consider tension-neutral maneuvers to be stops at various doors on the same floor. The logic is to economize motion by moving from door to door, rather than from one end of the hallway to the other.

Know Your Neighbors

From standard tuning, drop the sixth string a whole step to land in drop-D tuning, which is commonly used to add a tad of grungy bottom end. Drop the first string down a step as well to achieve double drop-D tuning, and you’re ready to play authentic versions of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Cinnamon Girl” and the Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water.”

Now drop the fifth string from A to G, and you’re in open G, where you’ll find most of the Stones’ biggest hits. Undo the previous maneuver and lower the second string a whole step, to A, and you’re in DADGAD, which had a modal quality illustrated by Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin’s “Black Mountain Side” and “Kashmir.”

Lower the third string a half step, to F#, and you’re in open D, ready to play authentic Delta blues. From there, it’s easy to make a cool move that puts you back in standard, but a whole step deeper. Lower the fifth string a whole step, to G, lower the fourth string a whole step, to C, and drop the third string a half step, to F. Now all your standard tunes have more bottom end, and it’s easier to hit the high notes in the vocal melody, so save the songs on which you could use a little help for this “lower standard.”

Play the above in reverse, and you’ll wind up back in true standard.

Plan Your Banter

Talking while tuning is an art. You don’t want to slow your tuning process down too much, but having a story ready that you can easily tell about the previous or upcoming song will make the time pass more quickly for the audience.

Some masters of banter include Trace Bundy and Andy McKee, who actually explain tuning maneuvers as they perform them, using creative techniques that hold the general public’s interest and thrill guitar zealots hungry for geeky information.

Talk is cheap, but solid information is invaluable

On this day in 1969, Dick Cavett's "Woodstock show" aired on American television. Filmed the previous day just hours after the Woodstock festival drew to a close, this historic episode features Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills – all of whom dropped in to perform and talk music following “the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the world.”

“We have two people who just happen to be passing through the studio looking for a payphone that works in New York,” says Dick Cavett. “They are Stephen Stills and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.” 

Still reeling from the spectacle of the Woodstock festival he played earlier that morning, Stephen Stills walks on camera and carefully places down his Martin D-28 acoustic guitar, the festival mud barely dry on his trousers.

Jimi Hendrix was due to appear on the same show, however, following the guitarist’s late appearance at the Woodstock festival he was unable to attend.

“Where do you suppose Hendrix is?” asks Dick Cavett. “Asleep!” comes the answer. “He finished sometime about ten [o’clock],” adds Crosby.

Though Mitchell did not play at the Woodstock festival (she was invited but her manager advised her not to!) the now famous Dick Cavett “Woodstock show” was her television debut. Inspired by the stories regaled to her by boyfriend Graham Nash, Mitchell penned the song “Woodstock” which appeared on her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon.

That same year, a cover version of “Woodstock” was recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for their Déjà Vu album, while the song became a number one hit for Matthews Southern Comfort in the UK.

While this episode of The Dick Cavett Show is famous for being Joni Mitchell’s first TV appearance, it is equally infamous for being the first time the F-bomb was dropped on American TV as Jefferson Airplane sing, “Up against the wall motherfucker!” during their live rendition of “We Can Be Together.”

A new live album and concert film showcasing the earliest known live performance footage of Neil Young will be released next month as Young Shakespeare. 

Recorded on January 22, 1971 at a Young solo performance at The Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut, the album features early performances of a number of Young's biggest hits – “Old Man,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “A Man Needs a Maid,” and “Heart Of Gold” – from over a year before their eventual release on Young's seminal, chart-topping 1972 album, Harvest.

Set for a March 26 release via Reprise Records, the album will be available on vinyl, CD, DVD, and digitally, or in a Deluxe Box Set Edition containing the album in all four formats.

You can get a preview of the album and film, a clip of Young performing "Tell Me Why" at the Shakespeare, below.

Young Shakespeare is “a more calm performance," Young said in a statement, "without the celebratory atmosphere of Massey Hall [a reference to Young's Live at Massey Hall 1971 album] captured live on 16mm. Young Shakespeare is a very special event. 

"To my fans, I say this is the best ever – one of the most pure-sounding acoustic performances we have in the archive.”

To preorder Young Shakespeare, step right this way. You can check out its cover art and tracklist below.

For more on Young and his music, stop by neilyoungarchives.com.

Neil Young – Young Shakespeare 

1. Tell Me Why
2. Old Man
3. The Needle and the Damage Done
4. Ohio
5. Dance Dance Dance
6. Cowgirl in the Sand
7. A Man Needs a Maid/Heart Of Gold
8. Journey Through the Past
9. Don’t Let It Bring You Down
10. Helpless
11. Down by the River
12. Sugar Mountain

Meryl Streep revealed awhile back that Neil Young gave her a guitar lesson to help her prepare for her role in the 2015 film Ricki and the Flash, in which Streep plays an aging rocker.

Turns out there’s a video snippet of their meeting, and you can watch it above.

Using a black Fender Strat through a Fender amp, Young coaches the three-time Academy Award winner on the finer points of playing rock guitar. The video opens with Young dialing in a distorted tone on the amp and Streep plunking away on the Strat.

“All I did was I turned everything all the way up,” he explains. “That’s what you always do. Everything!”

After Streep hands over the guitar, Young spends a minute doing some impromptu riffing.

The film's director, the late Jonathan Demme, set up the meeting between Young and Streep, who received guitar lessons from others after she and Demme decided she should actually play the instrument in the movie.

“From our first conversation, we agreed it was going to have to be live performance which, as you know, is a departure,” Demme told Entertainment Weekly. “On most movies, [performance] is done through playback [i.e. post-production dubbing]. So we agreed implicitly that Meryl, who did not play guitar, was going to have to learn to play electric guitar credibly.”

Walter Trout is the ultimate blues survivor. At the time that he received his liver transplant in 2014, he was literally days from death, having spent eight months in the hospital waiting for a donor organ. 

He dwelled a further six months in recuperation before returning home 120 pounds lighter and realizing he had no memory whatsoever of how to play the guitar. Relearning to play from scratch was a huge undertaking, further hindered by the muscle-wasting effects of his illness that left him unable to press a string against the neck.

Six years and five albums down the line, Trout has recorded Ordinary Madness (Provogue), a career-best collection of songs that broadens his blues-rock palette with hints of Tom Petty, Pink Floyd and Americana.

Recorded in Robby Krieger’s Los Angeles studio using gear owned by Krieger, James Burton and Dwight Yoakam, Ordinary Madness finds Trout reflecting on matters of life and death honestly and, occasionally, with flashes of humor. 

The affable guitarist shared an endless supply of anecdotes and reminiscences as he revealed the making of this remarkable album.

The lyrics on the new album are deeply personal. Was it therapeutic to put so many of your innermost thoughts and feelings out there?

I have a lot of latent self-doubt and inner demons that still rage. I can face them now without resorting to drink and drugs like I used to do. I’ve gone 32 years without touching either, but I still have therapy. When I’ve been riding in the van between gigs, sometimes I’ll get self-reflective and try to do some work on myself by writing down thoughts about how I feel. 

A lot of the lyrics came out of that notebook, and they originally weren’t meant to be lyrics. They were me trying to take an honest look at who I am. They’re also dealing with aging, I’m gonna be 70 years old next time. So there you go! It’s a record about demons, relationships and aging. It’s a happy ditty. [laughs]

Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on the music business. How will you compensate for the loss of your touring revenue?

This summer was going to be my best tour ever. I’m 69 and still climbing that ladder of success, and it’s very exciting to me. We’ve just done a great album, and we can see that there are greater heights to hit. We had some fantastic shows booked with some incredible artists, big festivals. It is a huge hit financially.

The new album is very commercial and is really more a roots/Americana album than a straightforward blues-rock album. How happy are you with it?

I am really happy with it. This is me trying to stretch as a songwriter. I was trying to write songs and not think I need to keep something as a 12-bar blues. I’ve done 24 albums of original songs, and I want to stretch myself.

“Wanna Dance” has a harder edge than your usual guitar sound.

That’s one of those songs about mortality. I’d been listening to one of my favorite bands, Neil Young & Crazy Horse — those records where you have the two raw and nasty guitars playing off each other. After I recorded it and I played it for my kids, I said I was thinking of Neil Young, and my son said, “I think it’s more Neil Van Halen.” I took that as a compliment.

“My Foolish Pride” may be the most commercial radio–friendly track you’ve recorded. Your vocal work is exceptional.

For an old guy, I’m still singing okay. Sometimes I put it on and think, Wow, is that me? [laughs] I found a note that I’d written about myself in my notebook, and when I read it, it looked like a song lyric, so I had to write the rest of it. Melody-wise, I think Jackson Browne might have been an influence.

“Heartland” has a touch of Tom Petty about it — a roots-rock vibe.

I’m a huge fan of Petty and that genre. I had a dream about a TV show I was watching called Heartland, and I woke up in the middle of the theme at the end of it, and thought to myself I didn’t like the show much but I did like the theme tune. 

Then I realized that, of course, there is no show! So I quickly grabbed a guitar and recorded the idea into my phone. That was the first verse and melody. A free one from the universe. [laughs]

“Final Curtain” has a great octave riff immediately followed by a hypnotic melody line. Is that a harmonica doubling up on the octaves?

Yes. I was thinking of doing something hard rocking but keeping it bluesy. I tried to think of different ways to play the lick at the start. I was thinking of old Rod Stewart records, where he’d have a fiddle play that idea. That inspired me to add an octave part and then sometimes double that on harmonica to make that unique sound.

“Up Above My Sky” has a really atmospheric, almost Pink Floyd feel.

It didn’t really have a title in the beginning. My producer nicknamed it “Wowee Floyd.” That was the Strat but played through one of Robby Krieger’s amplifiers, as we were using his studio, which is full of old Doors equipment. I can’t remember which amp it was, though. I dreamed the title and my wife came up with the lyrics.

“OK Boomer,” the album’s closing song, is its hardest-rocking track. The line, “I love my music loud, I’m geriatric and I’m proud” is a killer.

I’ve always been a guy who, if someone says something critical about me, I wanna own it. Years ago, somebody sent me an email saying I played too many notes and I was too loud. I grabbed that and put it on one of my T-shirts, in huge letters. It’s the same with the implied insult in “Okay, boomer,” when the younger kids say it. I also thought after all the heaviness on this album, a little levity to finish off would be good.

“The Sun Is Going Down” goes through many changes, from the psychedelic vocal intro to the big gear transition halfway through.

That’s one my favorites. I had the lick and the verse progression. We recorded it with the two verses and the solo, but then I had this idea for a lick to take it into the fast part. I showed it to the guys, and we spontaneously gravitated to where it went. 

I did tack on the ending. Teddy [Andreadis], the keyboard player, said we need a really cool ending. The lick was in D minor and he said we should end in Bb. He showed me his idea to do that, and we added that on.

What were you using for guitars and amps?

Guitar-wise, all the solos are the lightweight “road” Strat that Scott Lenz in San Diego built for me, plugged into the Mark Four Boogie I use live. It is very light, and it has Seymour Duncan pickups that he custom made for me.

It sounds very close to the ’73 Strat that I used for years but couldn’t carry on with, as it was so heavy and was causing shoulder problems for me. “OK Boomer” was tried with Robby Krieger’s old SG at first, and one of James Burton’s paisley Teles is on the rhythm track for “Heartland.”

I used Dwight Yoakam’s custom-built Gibson for the acoustic parts. There is some fantastic gear in Robby’s studio. I tried a few different amps for some of the rhythm tracks. I didn’t use any pedals, of course, although I think the producer may have tweaked a few parts on some songs.

What do you work on when it comes to your guitar playing?

I’m still trying to find new licks and new places on the guitar, and because I broke the pinkie on my left hand, I’m trying to figure out ways to do things with three fingers instead of four. I broke it three times last year, and they took a bone out of my leg to help repair it. It is coming back, but it will never be where it used to be, so that is an adjustment, for sure. I literally play with the hand I’ve been dealt. [laughs]

• Walter Trout's new album, Ordinary Madness, is out now via Provogue.