Mick Jagger says he was “stupid” to follow John Lennon’s advice — because it meant he never met his hero, Elvis Presley.

The Rolling Stones frontman has been busy promoting the band’s 25th album, Foreign Tongues, released last week. Their second record in three years sees the British rock legends reunite with producer Andrew Watt and Paul McCartney as they continue a remarkable late-career hot streak.

But during an appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, O’Brien was just as interested in the past as the present, prompting a simple question: Did you ever meet Elvis?

“No, I never met Elvis,” Jagger replied. “You know why? The Daily Mirror, an English tabloid that still exists, always did publicity, and there was a journalist who took the Beatles to Los Angeles to visit Elvis.

“Afterward, I remember John saying, ‘You should never meet your heroes. I’d never meet Elvis if I were you.’

“So I didn’t. I took John’s advice, which is very stupid of me.”

The Beatles’ meeting with Elvis — reportedly arranged by manager Brian Epstein — took place on August 27, 1965, at the King’s Bel Air mansion. Although the Daily Mirror had hoped to cover the encounter, the press were ultimately barred after George Harrison pushed for the meeting to remain private.

The Fab Four idolized Elvis. Lennon drew direct inspiration from him for one of the band’s darkest songs, “Run for Your Life,” while Harrison later said Presley’s music had “an incredible impact” on him because he had “never heard anything like it.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the visit, Lennon ultimately came away disappointed.

According to the Beatles’ longtime press officer Tony Barrow, Lennon wasted little time getting to the point, asking Elvis: “Why do you do all these soft-centered ballads for the cinema these days? What happened to good old rock ’n’ roll?”

Conversation soon stalled until Elvis called for guitars to be brought in and a piano wheeled into the room.

“The boys found that they could make much better conversation with their guitars than they could with their spoken word,” Barrow later wrote. “Music was their natural meeting point, their most intelligent means of communication.”

Even so, the afternoon fell well short of Lennon’s expectations — explaining why he later warned Jagger against meeting his own musical heroes.

“I’d love to have met Elvis,” Jagger said with a wry smile. “Why did I take John’s advice? But at the time, it seemed to ring true.”

O’Brien noted that Lennon famously spent the Beatles’ first trip to America asking, “Where’s Elvis?” After finally meeting him, he was left asking much the same question.

“He told me that whole story more than once,” Jagger replied. “It put me off. I wanted to keep my version of Elvis to myself. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was. Maybe my version of Elvis would have been different.”

Elsewhere during the Foreign Tongues press campaign, Jagger explained why the Stones have adopted a “bulldozer approach” in the studio, while also branding one of the band’s most beloved albums “lousy” — a view Keith Richards decidedly does not share.

More than 50 years after the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder wrapped up one of rock’s most celebrated package tours, Mick Jagger is looking back on the chaotic way it all ended.

Speaking in a new interview with The New York Times, the Stones frontman recalled the final night of the band’s 1972 North American tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where an encore with Wonder gave way to an all-out custard pie fight.

The 53-date tour, which ran from June 3 to July 26, marked an important moment for both artists. It was the Stones’ first U.S. outing since the ill-fated 1969 tour that ended with the Altamont Speedway Free Concert.

In the years between, they had released Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., a pair of celebrated albums featuring the handiwork of their new electric guitar–slinger, Mick Taylor. Wonder, meanwhile, had successfully transformed himself from Motown child prodigy into one of pop music’s brightest young stars with hits like “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” and “If You Really Love Me.”

The pairing proved to be a natural fit.

“Motown was trying to break Stevie bigger than he’d ever been,” Marshall Chess, the Stones’ executive manager, recalled. “It was a great thing for the Stones because Mick and Keith just loved Stevie. It was a great thing for Stevie because it showed him to this whole other white audience, the Stones’ audience.”

Although Wonder had yet to release the extraordinary trilogy of Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, he was already a dazzling live performer who could more than hold his own with the Stones. Night after night, he returned to the stage for the encore as he and the band tore through a mash-up of his 1966 hit “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

“That’s when Stevie was really young and full of energy, jumping up and down on stage,” Chess said. “He and Mick were dancing on stage together, then somebody came out and put a whipped cream pie in Mick’s face. It was crazy. The building was actually vibrating. You could feel it in the concrete.”

Jagger remembered that the final show took the spectacle one step further.

“We said come up and we’ll play a mash-up of ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Uptight,’ because they’re both the same beat,” he recalled. “And then someone — I can’t remember whose idea this was, it might have been mine — decides that we’re going to throw custard pies at the end, because it’s the last number of the show of the last day of the tour. It’s rather unfair for Stevie.”

Wonder, who is blind, nevertheless embraced the prank.

“So everyone’s throwing custard pie, including Stevie, and everyone ends up covered in custard pies,” Jagger said. “I loved it.”

For a tour remembered as one of the greatest double bills of the rock era, it was a suitably unforgettable finale — two of music’s biggest stars sharing the stage one last time before leaving it covered in smashed pies.

Forty-one years ago this weekend, on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Here we recall some of the most notable guitar stories from Live Aid.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

The Rolling Stones release their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, today, so it seems like the right time to visit this classic interview with Keith Richards from April 1983. It was a good time for the Stones. As GP Editor Tom Wheeler wrote in his original intro (abridged below), "In most respects the Stones have few peers, and in terms of sheer durability they have none, having somehow survived at or near the top of the rockpile for the last two-thirds of rock and roll's entire history.

"They've gone the distance and still pack a heavyweight punch: Their latest albums (Tattoo You and the live concert LP Still Life) are among their most vital works, and their most recent tour was astonishingly successful – four million fans applied for the New York tickets alone." Who would have thought that 43 years later, they would still be doing it?

Back in 1964 when Lennon and McCartney wanted to hold your hand, Jagger and Richards were walkin' the dog. Constantly compared to the Beatles and often to The Who, the Rolling Stones staked out their original turf with gritty music and a don't-mess-with-me stance. The Beatles disintegrated a dozen years ago, and the Who say they've unpacked their road cases for the last time. The Stones are in the studio, and they're not about to bid farewell to anyone.

Keith Richards stands in the eye of the hurricane. Around him swirls a rock and roll empire with 20 years history and mystery, success and excess, acclaim and controversy. He and his mates have been called many things by discerning critics and impassioned fans. One description recurs: The World's Greatest Rock And Roll Band.

Some reasons for all this are apparent. First, Keith's confederates could hardly be more impressive: Mick Jagger, rock's most prominent singer; guitarist Ron Wood, already a star when he joined the group in 1975; plus a drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, a powerhouse rhythm section revered the world over by fans and fellow musicians alike. Other strengths are equally obvious – the consistently fine Jagger/Richards compositions, the dynamic arrangements, the meticulous recording. Just as important is the way Keith Richards changes chords from G to C.

The band is built around a two-guitar sound, itself an extension of Richards' own uniqueness. He helped blur forever the line between lead and rhythm guitar, substituting a riffing technique in which melodic embellishments are grafted onto a vigorous rhythmic treatment of chords, partial chords, and low-register lines. He often employs a 5-string open tuning (with or without capo) that facilitates adding the melodic notes to a major chord--particularly the 4th, the 6th, and the 9th. Among many examples, "Brown Sugar" is a classic killer.

Keith's most obvious influence is Chuck Berry. The original "Carol" is a textbook of Berry's double-string licks and was covered on The Rolling Stones, the debut album. Keith has had a taste for Berry flavoring ever since. Perhaps his most highly stylized nod to the St. Louis rocker is his long solo in "Bitch," where Keith repeatedly turns the beat around, turns it inside out – weaving through the horns, sneaking up on the back-beat, making the style his own.

Chuck Berry adapted boogie-woogie piano techniques for the guitar's lower register, and this distinctive two-string rhythm pattern became another Stones staple. Richards made his mark on its development by sometimes slowing it down, piledriving the downbeat, and stoking up the tone to a grand raunch: a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Richards' role in the group has been analyzed countless times. The consensus: Without Keith Richards there wouldn't be a Rolling Stones. Ron Wood explains, "In other bands they follow the drummer; the Stones follow Keith, and they always have." While some have even asserted that "Keith Richards is the Rolling Stones," the guitarist himself is the first to stress that any band member's indispensability is a two-way street: "The musicians are there to serve the band. All that matters is whether something furthers the overall sound."

Keith's vision is rooted in a keen awareness of the power of the guitar – acoustic or electric – not only as a rhythm or solo instrument, but as a musical paintbrush capable of immense sonic canvases. He conceives a complex sound and knows how to get it. And yet to him a piece of music, like a real band, is a living, breathing creature existing apart from his conception of it. So while a particular project may be planned, Keith's sense of the music's own inherent magic keeps him flexible and spontaneous, adjusting as he goes.

On many contemporary recording sessions, musicians are put in compartments to minimize leakage (one instrument "leaking" into another's microphone), and the result is a compressed sound that fills every niche. Stones records are virtual opposites, roaring with heavy artillery but airy and spacious as well. While every sound counts, the spaces, the holes, are no less important.

The band's raw materials may be the deceptively simple basics of rhythm and blues, but with the air crashing around like a cyclone, the effect is complex, even abstract.

Rough edges on doubled guitars may be as important as seamless overlaps. An "extra" guitar part – mixed far in the distance to work on subconscious levels – may be as essential as obvious elements. As co-producer (credited or uncredited) on virtually every record, Keith Richards has proved to be both a master of the bold stroke and a subtle colorist, evoking not only the thunder and lightning but also a sky to put it in. For the Rolling Stones, atmosphere is everything.

For many the sound and fury of the band is a transcendental experience. Although the musicians are gifted, the songs excellent, and the recordings finely tuned, the effect is not so much that of hearing sophisticated technicians processed through state-of-the-art technology. It's more like hearing the world's greatest garage band in the world's biggest garage.

Up in his hotel room (classic Keith Richards, it is part Versailles Palace, part blues dive), Keith's dad Bert is smoking a pipe, and his son Marlon – who could dial room service before he could read – is drawing. A cassette bag is crammed with rockabilly, early Dylan, reggae, unmixed Stones, the raunchiest R&B, and more. An old Everly Brothers hit is playing, and delighted Keith Richards identifies a distinctive lead guitar lick: "Chet Atkins!"

An hour later, Keith is in the corner playing piano like Ray Charles and singing ballads to himself in a voice cracked with emotion. He plays a wistful "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and then launches into some Jerry Lee Lewis, his foot bashing the floor in tempo.

Ron Wood blows in and warmly embraces his partner-in-guitar. In minutes, the two old friends are plugged in, guitars barely in tune, jamming on a medium-tempo 12-bar blues in A. Keith leans over to the black Fender Deluxe Reverb and twists the volume knob from 2 to 6. Ron Wood grins and rips into a solo. The real Keith Richards goes a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Chuck Berry was a major influence on your guitar style.

That's quite a left hand he's got there [laughs].

Are the reports true that he punched you in the face?

Yeah, a little while back he did. I came up behind him to say hello. He didn't know it was me and didn't want to be bothered, but I got a nice note from him a little later, actually.

The "Bitch" solo is in a Chuck Berry style...

Which I do every night.

...and the beat turns around several times. Was that completely spontaneous, or semi-planned?

Maybe listeners knew a year or six months later that the beat turned around, but at the moment I wasn't conscious of that. It comes so naturally, as it's always happened, and it's always given that extra kick when the right moment comes back down again.

That's what rock and roll records are all about. I mean, nowadays it's "rock" music. But rock and roll records should be two minutes, 35 seconds long, and it doesn't matter if you ramble on longer after that. It should be, you know – wang, concise, right there. Rambling on and on, blah blah blah, repeating things for no point – I mean, rock and roll is in one way a highly structured music played in a very unstructured way, and it's those things like turning the beat around that we'd get hung up on when we were starting out: "Did you hear what we just did? We totally turned the beat around [laughs]!" If it's done with conviction, if nothing is forced, if it flows in, then it gives quite an extra kick to it.

You turn the beat around often. There's the intro to "Start Me Up," where it turns around twice in the first ten seconds, "Little Queenie," where Charlie turns around the intro, and the end of the bass part on "Street Fighting Man," which you played yourself.

Right. You can do that in a band that's got enough confidence not to collapse when it happens. It can make things much more interesting, and it sounds great as long as nobody's fazed by it. You have to be able to keep it straight, thinking about what you're doing at the moment and also about where you're going to take it. I guess that just comes from 20 years, same location.

So many of the things you play, if you were to put them on paper and analyze them musically....

What a mess [laughs]!

For example, the opening of "Start Me Up" is a simple chord change, and yet it's recognizable as the Rolling Stones. The sound is so specific. Would altering anything about it – the echo, tone setting, string gauge – change the impact?

I just can't get the things to sound any different [laughs]. They always come out just about the same when it comes to recording, because without really thinking about it I shift slowly as I go. And no matter where I start, no matter what the guitar or the string, sooner or later I'll get to where the rest of the band is going.

It's sort of a trademark sound, but it's more than that because of the way I go about getting it, working it through with what's going on, rather than getting the sound first and then pushing it on the band. A lot of it is adjusting to Ronnie, and Ronnie to me, which brings a certain continuity as well as a certain flexibility.

You've often mentioned the two-guitar sound as a cornerstone of the band. On Still Life there's a different kind of interplay – probably tighter than ever.

Well, Ron's getting better [laughs]. I think that's due to the fact that Ron and I have been working together now since '75, and the more we play together the tighter we get it.

It sounds like you and he are two sides of the same coin, like you could almost change places.

We do [laughs]. If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me. And you think at the time, "Oh, my God, what a gap," but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very un-thought-about way. We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.

When Ron joined in 1975, did the band have to make a change in the way you interact or rehearse?

No, that was the beauty of it. He was already so familiar with our stuff. After Mick Taylor left, we rehearsed for about six months with a lot of good guitar players from all over the world. And we could work with them, you know; they could work with us. But when Ronnie became available and suddenly walked in, that was it, there was no doubt. It was easy.

With Mick Taylor's style so well defined as a lead guitarist, there seemed to be a clear distinction between the two of you.

It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor. It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't a great rhythm player, so we ended up taking roles. When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally.

But also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar, and this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. But even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, "You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet." With Ron, if he drops his pick, then I can play his lick until he picks it up, and you can't even tell the difference.

Had you and Ron worked together very much before he joined the group?

Yes, for about 18 months. And I did a lot of work on Ronnie's first and second solo albums. He's never been the same since.

Have you found that your styles affected each other, now that you've been working together for several years?

Yeah, that's what's great about it. I neglect something, and he makes up for it. That's the great thing about two guitar players, because if you get it right, you know when to lift one of his licks, and vice versa, without thinking about it. He lifts more of mine than I do of his [laughs].

When the two of you are onstage, how much of your interaction is subject to change?

It depends on the sound system. If you're going to make a change, you need to hear what you're doing in the first place, so a lot of that gets down to technicalities of the stage monitoring. On our last tour in '81 we had those long ramps out to the sides of the stage. The idea of having that stage is to get out where most performers don't get with audiences of that size. Well, if the monitors aren't working out there, and you're just making signs at the sound guys instead of concentrating on your playing, then you forget it, just leave it. But if the sound's good and you can hear everything, then you tend to give it a bit more, adjust more to what's going on, change as you go.

Do you have much trouble communicating onstage at that volume?

It's all done by semaphore and eye signals. It's the only way you can really do it. But the thing is, there isn't that much need for communication or looking at each other, except when things go wrong. Otherwise the communication is just through the music. But if things are going wrong, then everybody's looking at me: "How's he going to get out of this?"

Your records have sort of an indoor sound, the effect of enclosed space. Are you happy with your outdoor concert sound?

Never totally satisfied with live things, no. If you were, you wouldn't keep trying to make it better. But I'm not disappointed with it. You just look forward to being able to do it better. You're always wondering about the people way at the back, what they're hearing. There are so many people and they're so far away – you have no idea what's being heard out there. You're hoping for the best and taking it for granted that the sound crew are doing the job for you and giving out the sound onstage as much as possible to everywhere in the place. But there's the one problem, always that nagging doubt there – they're not all getting it the way they should.

Your live versions of songs are often faster than their studio counterparts – for example, "Shattered" on Still Life. Is that intentional, to make it more exciting for the audience, or is it the adrenaline of performing?

It's the tempo of the whole gig, the adrenaline – especially the huge gigs. The show just takes its own speed from the start, and you go with it. It might be great or it might be terrible, but the tempos one night may be twice as fast as the night after. And you can always learn when you listen back, you see? You may find, "Wow, that should've been that tempo all along--we made the record too slow [laughs]!"

On the live version of "Just My Imagination," in the second half the guitar figure changes some notes and sustains others for a country feel, almost like a pedal steel feeling.

That's Ron and me doing the parts together, and you get that sustaining thing. We aren't using a pull-string or a lot of slide right now, but Ron plays pedal steel, a bit on "Shattered" and "Faraway Eyes." Country music's a part of the way we do that kind of thing, and it comes through even if it's done with straight guitars sort of pulling up against each other.

Isn't there some slide in "Neighbours" on Tattoo You?

No, but it sounds like it. Ron plays that solo, and a lot of his things on regular guitar sound like they're slide. He's wangled a way of playing it without them, because he keeps losing them [laughs]. At the start of that solo he's bending about four strings. Sounds like slide.

On Still Life's "Let Spend The Night Together," is that a 12-string doubling the vocal melody on the interlude, which ends with "keep on smilin' baby"?

That's one reason we haven't done that one a lot on stage – we could never figure a way 'round that middle bit. No 12-string – just the two run-of-the-mill guitars together, doin' it tight.

The mix of the two guitars on Still Life adjusts in places to the parts you're playing. Is that sort of detail up to your discretion?

Well, I listen for those things, but I may not be there for the first mix. Especially with live stuff, I'd rather let the guy who recorded it get his work into it. Then I get sent the dubs. From the whole tour you have several takes of each song to pick from.

The set opened with "Under My Thumb," and it's hard to get the right take, because you're playing right there early, when everybody's trying to get together and nobody knows what's going on. Every night it takes 15 minutes for the sound guys and the recording guys and everybody to fall in and get adjusted, so choosing the take for the first number requires a bit of work.

The endings, too. You always wish you could get a couple of takes of the beginning and ending of a show as good as it is in the middle. But every night it's a different problem – you're in a different place, so you see what happens when you get going and take it from there.

On recent tours you've taken occasional breaks from the outdoor arenas, getting into clubs. Do you miss the smaller venues?

Yeah, always. You hate to do the same thing all the time. I love playing the ballparks and the domes, you know. For the satisfaction of the band it gives you a terrific buzz – so many people. But by doing just one thing all the time you forget how to do anything else. You just become good at playing the domes and never learn anything else again.

I've always found that if you put in a few 3,000-seaters on the tour, and even 300, it gives the band itself a confidence quite apart from anything else. Then you can deal with 300 people or 90,000 and know how to play it. And probably the band feels that working in one of the nice old places like the Fox Theater in Atlanta is kind of more satisfying most of the time.

Because of the immediacy?

Yeah. The sound isn't dissipated totally, and you don't have to worry about the wind factor and things like that. It's much simpler and easier to get – it's just [snaps fingers] turn it up, get to it.

Didn't you change to Mesa/Boogie amplifiers on this last tour?

The '81 tour of the States was the first time we used the big Mesa/Boogie amp and speaker setups on the road, but we've been using Boogie amps in the studio since about '77, and on the stage since the '78 tour, slaving small Boogies through Ampeg cabinets.

Do you pay much attention to speakers?

No. I only think about them when I don't like 'em. If I plug in and to me it sounds like crap, then I ask a question, but otherwise, I leave it, because there are guys far more versed. I don't know what speakers are coming out every year. I find something and I stick with it for five or six years. It's like some of the gadgets I use. Guys who work with us and are close to us, will say, "You should try this: I think this is going to add to what you're doing." I might try it, although I don't go around looking at specifications and all that.

Were you using any effects onstage in '81?

An MXR analog delay on a few numbers, and a phaser on "Beast Of Burden" and on or two others.

How about the very unusual sound on "Shattered"?

That was the MXR phaser – the 100 model – and I damped the guitar. That's what gives it that sound on the studio version as well.

What kind of wireless systems were you and Ron using on the last tour? Can you get the right tones as easily?

We've been using Nady wireless things since '78, and the tone is a lot better, because cords get stepped on and knotted up and they start rattling a little bit, and you lose tone.

In the last few years there's been a new aspect of your tone – more distinct, with a slight click, almost like a slap bass in rockabilly. "Hang Fire" and "She's So Cold" are examples, and especially the last section of "Little T&A."

It's our equivalent of that rockabilly thing. I think you'll find that comes from using a lot of analog delay on Ron's guitar or my guitar or both of them, and I dampen it. That'll give you that ticka-tacka-ticka. I always use that green MXR analog delay. I'm told it's quite out of date now and old-fashioned, but I got it free and I forgot that time marches on and they make better ones or so they say. I don't know. I've worked very well with those MXR things, and they've been very reliable.

Which guitar are you playing for that sort of stripped-down rockabilly sound on "Little T&A"?

A Telecaster, a '57 set up in 5-string tuning. It's open G 5-string, without the heavy string. Right there from the bottom up it's: G, D, G, B, D. The whole idea of getting rid of the sixth string in the open tuning was having the root on the bottom.

The suspended chords in the verses of that song are typical of your riffing style.

That's just one of the things you can do with open tuning. You can get a drone going, so you have the effect of two chords playing against each other. One hangs on because you've just got to move one finger – or two at the most – to change the chord, so you've still got the other strings ringing. It's a big sound.

Mick was using an Ovation Adamas steel-string on the tour. Were you satisfied with the instrument's performance?

I think they're very nice-sounding guitars. A nice neck. But I can never get used to that shape, that... dish. They're probably the best way of amplifying an acoustic guitar and having it still sound like an acoustic. There's no doubt. Probably a million readers will write in and say the Stones don't use acoustic guitar that much onstage, so we don't know shit, but for what we need, for a couple of numbers, it's adequate.

How did you come about acquiring your new guitars?

Friends of mine introduced me to Doug Young, who built them. After seeing some of his things, I knew he was capable of exceptionally fine work, so I more or less commissioned him to build me a guitar. He ended up making me two – the red one is a gift for my girlfriend, actually. Basically, that's the lowdown.

Did you specify exactly what you wanted?

Not really. We didn't have to say very much about it. I was very impressed by the things I saw, and I wanted a similar guitar for myself. But it's also this patronage that players and builders can get involved with – Renaissance man, and all that, the old system of someone like me encouraging guys like Doug. His guitars are too good not to be given help.

So you didn't request a certain wood for the fingerboard, a certain pickup design?

Not too much, no. I said, "Make me a guitar." I figure that's the difference between working with an artist, as opposed to just anyone. I mean, if you want a suit made, you don't want to have to tell the tailor how to do everything. You want to find someone who doesn't need all that, you see? It's more, "I want to see what you can build for me." There are very few people like that. Most people, you have to sit on their ass and watch them: with Doug I just left him to it. I was in Paris for months, recording. I'd almost forgotten it was going on until I saw what he'd done.

Have you had a chance to play them in the studio yet?

Not in the studio, but I went out and banged on them a bit. I'll be back in the studio soon, and then we'll beat them into shape [laughs].

After playing hundreds of guitars, what quality in these instruments made you take notice?

It's a recognition you develop. I think, and I'm sort of instinctive about these things – sit down and play it, feel it. I knew that Doug was thinking along the same lines as myself, but far ahead, because I'm not technical. Only after the event of building it when I've got it in my hands, can I know what's right. I can't say, "Well, it was the magnificent electronics," or "the wonderful bonding of the woods," and each specific thing. It was simply a fine instrument. Lovely wood!

Can you judge the sound of an electric before you plug it in?

Maybe to a certain extent. If the neck and the action feel right, you're more than halfway home, even before hearing the electronics. Things like weight and the density of the wood indicate certain things, but you simply need to play it to really tell. And it doesn't take long.

On record you've used several very different types of guitars – Gibson Les Pauls and ES-335s, Fender Telecasters, and others. And yet a listener can tell right away that it's you, from stylistic clues, but also from the sound alone.

I use a whole load of different guitars, that's true, but they're not all that dissimilar in type. I mean, ninety percent are probably Telecasters, old ones, but more than that, you can't really separate style and sound, you see. People do separate them when they're talking about music, but all of that often misses the whole point.

You're suggesting that the style is the sound?

Yes, part of it, more than any particular tone setting or pickup or anything like that. I'll just adjust to the sound of the track as we go – the sound of the bass drum and especially Ronnie's guitar. The style is adjusting along with the sound. There's never a conscious effort to get that "Honky Tonk Woman" tone or a thing like that. You may get it or you may not. But that's not what you're thinking about. You're thinking about the track.

Some people were amazed to read in your first Guitar Player cover story that on "Street Fighting Man" there are no electric guitars.

Two acoustics, one of them put through the first Philips cassette player they made. It was overloaded, recorded on that, and then hooked up through a little extension speaker, and then onto the studio tape through a microphone.

You've paid quite a bit of attention to acoustic guitars in rock music.

Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer. But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it. You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric, or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it, and when I wrote the thing I thought, "I'm not going to get a better sound than this." And "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the same, too. That's acoustic guitar.

Early Everly Brothers records have huge acoustic guitar sounds. Were any of them influential?

Yeah, all of their records, and also there's the fact that the first major tour we ever did was supporting the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. Plenty to learn [laughs] in a real short time, following those guys around. The Everlys came on with just their trio and themselves, and it was great. On their recordings there is a certain power in the steel-string.

It's a different instrument from electric – not that different in the way you play it, but in terms of the sound. There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track. You'll be despairing, nothing working, hashing away, Take 43 on electric guitar, and somebody will say, "Why don't you try it on acoustic?" And you try it one time and you've got it.

What kind of acoustics do you like to use?

Old Martins – several types of them – and certain Gibsons, particularly old Hummingbirds.

Do you have a certain kind of room that you like to record in?

Yes, but it's hard to tell whether it'll work until we get in there. And when we find a room I hate to lose it. Over the years we've been through four or five or maybe more of these ace rooms. Sometimes you walk in and it just happens, but whether it takes a long time or not to produce the sound you want, you don't want to lose it.

We're still working in the same place now that we've been in since Some Girls, a good big room. Pathe Marconi is the name – it's EMI's studio in Paris. The room we use is what they consider their sort of storeroom for the orchestra, or a rehearsal place. It's not Studio A, B, or C. It doesn't even have a number.

How important is the sound of the room itself?

The room is as important as the band and the producer and the song and the engineer. The room is at least as important as all that to the total sound. You can't separate rock and roll music instrument by instrument. You destroy the whole structure of it. Rock and roll music can only be recorded by jamming the sound all together.

Once you've got something to work right in the studio, do you try to use all the same equipment onstage?

Yeah, pretty much, just a larger version. I've never found the Stones or anybody else made great records by using huge stacks in the studio and blasting away. You can get very powerful-sounding records playing very quietly, and with relatively small amps. Small amps turned way up have the tension you're trying to get anyway, and it sounds big. It also gets back to that recognition of the acoustic guitar and what it can do, and what you can get if you're thinking of the mix right from the beginning and all the way through the recording.

Years ago, the mixing technique on many of your records broke quite a few rules. Did you realize from the outset of your career that a new way of mixing would be necessary?

We knew we wanted it without knowing the way to get it. It was just what sounded right to us, and also because we were brought up in the era when a four-track was a rarity. We started recording at a point when the best sound you got was all air and all the room sound and everything was leakage and jammed together, and the vocal fought its battle with the rest of the instruments.

We tried it the usual way, but whenever we brought the vocals up we'd never like the mix as much. What always amazed me was that if the record was popular, most people would know the words – at least the key ones – within a few weeks, no matter how much the voice was buried. Years back, in the studio, I always thought about those other records where the voice was too far forward, so you never really got a sound. You just got a vocalist with some accompaniment.

Which wasn't what you were after?

Not for us, but you see, you've got to treat each type of music in the appropriate fashion. I mean, if you're mixing the Everly Brothers, then you've got those fantastic goddamn voices and you put them out front as much as you can! But even those guys never sacrificed the sound of the record for the sound of their voices. They had it all there, quite a light sound, but always very powerful as well, never wimpy.

Did record companies ever tell you or your producers and engineers that you should be mixing Mick Jagger like the Everly Brothers?

They'd try, but we set it up so there was no way they had anything to say about it. They'd complain, and we'd tell them to @#$%& off.

Do you ever splice takes, either rhythm tracks or solos?

Sometimes. Not so much on solos. We tend to record them real long – go on and on, but as long as I know that somewhere in that seven or eight or eleven minutes there is that two-and-a-half minutes that says it all, then I don't mind going on, because I'll ferret it out and find it.

Is it too soon to start talking about what's on the next album?

I can only report that it's going magnificently for us, so much stuff coming out and starting to sound real good. We've only been in the studio a little over two weeks, which is only like a warm-up, and we've cut about a dozen cassettes of tape already. Everybody's happy about it. When we're done, we'll start thinking about the next tour.

In the choruses of "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Start Me Up," the bass leaves huge holes for the guitars to fill. Does Bill Wyman get a lot of direction from you in that regard, or is that something he's always done on his own?

I would say in the late '60s, early '70s, Bill would be given more direction – not always the right direction [laughs] – but Mick and I would be more inclined to say, "Do this and that." Sometimes he comes and asks, but less and less. You know, relationships change.

But Bill, he's kind of like Charlie. He just keeps [long pause] amazing me. He just keeps getting better. He's not always what I'm expecting. I know he's good, and he's always there. But I kind of take his playing for granted. And then when I listen to what he's doing, I realize he's not always playing the same thing. He's much better than we think. You see, we're the world's worst Rolling Stones critics [laughs]. We tear the shit apart before anybody gets a chance to hear it.

Do you practice very much aside from band rehearsals for tours or recording sessions?

In a way I do, because the guitar is always there, and I always play it or the piano. I do it in bursts. You kind of wait for it. You can't force it and sit down and say, "Now I'm going to write a hit song."

You've recorded a lot of material on your own – just vocals with piano or guitar. Do you plan to ever release any of it?

No, not releasing it as such. I just do it because I like to play a lot of great songs for myself, and it helps me to write. The way I write songs is to sit down and play 25 great songs by other people and hope that one of mine drips off the end.

Have many of the songs that you've written for the Stones been composed on the piano?

Sometimes, yeah. I'm such an amateur on piano, and that can help. You play guitar every night and get to know it so well, and a lot of great songs are really accidents. On the piano, I may come across something I wouldn't have done on guitar.

You've sung lead on some of the band's hits, and sang "Little T&A" on the last tour, but none of your lead vocals are included on the album.

Well, if I sing the lead vocals, then what's he going to do [laughs]? There's quite a bit for each of us to think about already. And I do sing lots of parts with Mick, always.

For years Mick has been reported to be a proficient guitar player, and yet he only started to play a lot onstage during the Still Life tour. Why now?

I think he feels a little more confident about it. He's a fine drummer, too. And he's not bad on keyboards, in his own way – in the same way that I am, fiddling about to write and to get some interesting ideas.

One thing that's held Mick back with guitar onstage is that playing is one thing – knowing how to get an instantly good sound off the amp is another. That is something he's still got to work on. It keeps him back from doing so much, because if it doesn't sound good to him in the first six bars, he doesn't have the experience and the knowledge of dealing with the amplifier. He might be playing great, but he's got a shitty sound on the amp – and then he's got his singing to think about.

Are you playing much National or Dobro these days?

Not doing as much of that as I'd like – that goes with not living anywhere in particular. You need to sort of sit down every day and do that. I hate to travel with instruments like that. I think you just need a certain environment when you're playing like that, and since that's not the way we are able to live, and probably wouldn't anyway, I don't get as much of a chance. You know, some things you don't get as much of a chance to do as you wish you had.

For young guitarists who are into Chuck Berry or the Rolling Stones today, what do they face, trying to make records now? Compared to when you started, what's different?

24-track machines. Otherwise, not that much has changed from what we faced. There's all this stuff about new equipment and changing styles and all that, but the point is, you still face a lot of rip-off artists, and you face a lot of work.

You and Pete Townshend seem to have much in common, at least on the surface – the components of your styles, your use of the guitar, the way your bands are compared in the press. Do you feel any particular kinship with him?

You mean Trousers? Now let me see – one reason for that is probably that we started playing the same clubs almost at the same time. I never took credit for this, but apparently he said that he lifted that arm swing he does from seeing me. I don't recall doing it, but I guess if he says so, he did. It's something I've never been aware of. In certain respects, yeah, we're both coming out in the same place at the same time, more than anything else.

He was quoted as saying that there comes a time for a band to retire, to pass on the torch, so to speak, to younger bands.

I love Peter, but the time to stop is when you can't do it anymore, or when you're fed up. There's no passing on of the goddamn torches. Other people will pick them up anyway, and besides, that's not the point. I don't know if he was accurately quoted, but other people have said it anyway when they can't think of anything else to say.

You see, if rock and roll is what you do, then that's what you do, and that's all. You don't sort of say, "Oh, now I give up and I'll hand it on to this band who I think is quite good." You don't hand it on that way. Pete already handed it on, the same as we did, to some young guys that are playing now, the way we played Chuck Berry. It's not, "Here, I've got to hand you a document." It's the records that you've done that the younger players have listened to and grown up with and sat around learning.

What would you like to be doing a year from now?

Accepting a platinum record, for one thing [laughs]. I'd like nothing to change too much, just to do what we do, but be able to do it better.

After one of your court trials you commented on systems of justice and juries of your peers, and how that all related to being a musician.

Yeah, I was trying to make the point that when I am thrown in a court, or anybody like myself is thrown in court, the jury has got absolutely no experience in the musician's way of life, so they're not your peers. I know justice is often rough and so on, but they don't know what it's like to be on the road for 20 years, and I can't explain it to them now. So I was saying, give me a jury of my peers, with Chuck Berry, with Muddy Waters. And put Ron in there, too [laughs] – I mean, I can drop him a few bucks.

People keep calling you the world's greatest rock and roll band, and they have been for a long time.

It's embarrassing.

Are there any drawbacks to their saying that?

Yeah, you've gotta keep being it [laughs]! I've decided that every night there's another world's greatest rock and roll band, because one night somebody has an off gig, and some other shit band has a great gig. That's one of the great things about rock and roll – every night there's a different world's greatest band.

We've been maybe a little more consistent, for whatever reason, mainly when we're going together on a tour and also because we've managed to stick together. The chemistry – that's got nothing to do with musicianship. It's got to do with personality and characters and being able to live with each other for 20 years.

People have been predicting the end of the Stones...

...from the beginning [laughs]!

With the kind of life you seem to lead, longevity might appear to be the last thing you'd be able to gain. What's the secret?

The secret is, there is no secret. It's finding people that not only play well with you, but that you can get along with. There's no constant battle about who's Mister Big, none of those problems. When I see Charlie and Bill – I ain't seen 'em for a few weeks – it's like a pleasure. Ron says we're his closest friends. I guess that's the only secret.

Is that what it means to play in a band?

Most people don't know what a band is. People have heroes, and they copy them – I mean, we copied things very carefully when we started. But you don't get this picture and then do everything to fit it. You do what you do.

The musicians are there to contribute to the band sound. The band isn't there for showing off solos or egos. A lick on a record – it doesn't matter who played it. All that matters is how it fits. The chemistry to work together like that has to be there. You have to work on it, always – figure out what to do with it.

But basically it's not an intellectual thing you can think up and just put there. It has to be there. You have to find it.

This interview was originally published in the April 1983 issue of Guitar Player. The Rolling Stones' new album, Foreign Tongues, is out now.

Life in the studio hasn’t always been straightforward for the Rolling Stones. But as the band prepares to drop their second album in three years, having released two in the last 20 before that, it’s safe to say they’ve hit a late-career hot streak.

With Andrew Watt behind the desk once more, and Paul McCartney guesting on his second consecutive Stones record, the British blues rockers are in a rich vein of form, and it seems the writing of Foreign Tongues was in stark contrast to some of their most celebrated records, which, behind the scenes, were sometimes lethargic and drug-addled, at other times tempestuous, or quite possibly a cocktail involving all three.

“It was done pretty quickly,” Mick Jagger tells Zane Lowe of the process that has defined the Stones’ operation in the 2020s. “On the last album, Hackney Diamonds, Andrew and I had a plan. We used to be in the studio and spend ages in there, all night, trying to make up songs that weren’t written, and so we said ‘We’re going for the bulldozer approach’ so no one has too much of a chance to take a song to pieces and say, ‘I don’t really like this, I don’t think it’s going to work.’

“We wanted to do it as fast as possible, and then people get into it, and they put their own stamp on it, change it, and make it better,” he explains. “And we more or less did the same thing here. You hope to get one and a half songs done; to get one done, and everyone knows the next one sort of thing. There were good vibes in there.”

It’s an approach that, admittedly, wouldn’t have been possible when the band relocated to the south of France as tax exiles, as they turned an idyllic villa basement into their makeshift recording studio in the early 1970s.

Keith Richards, the story goes, was so deep into a drug haze at that time that he didn’t even make it into the basement some days, and it was a drug debt that is said to have seen Nellcôte raided, and a score of guitars stolen. However, one has recently and miraculously reappeared. Regardless, it’s no wonder that, as critically acclaimed as Exile on Main St. would prove to be, Jagger calls it “lousy”.

Keef, who has also been speaking to Zane Lowe, was asked how the room a band records in affects the music and its quality.

“It can be very important, and you never know until you get in there and start playing,” he notes. “You’ll always get something out of it, but some rooms you have to fight, and others, you realize that they’re welcoming you in.

“At the same time,” he counters, “you get some really good records out of rooms that initially you’re feeling you’re having to fight with. When you’ve fought, and you’ve made up, they’ve got their own character.”

Richards was one of the driving force during the making of Exile, and looks at the album more fondly.

“I think it was the first album where we didn’t have a 45 [rpm single] hit on it,” he told Guitar World in 2010. “It was an album album. All those musical styles were part of what we’d been picking up while touring America; we were soaking stuff up like sponges wherever we could find it.”

He admits that the cluster of material they took with them to France was “a work in progress,” with the band back then preferring to go the distance and thrash out the material on their own terms, and the “dusty” songs were, he says, very much a product of the environment.

With Jagger and Richards in their advancing years, it’s no surprise that the former is preferring a more wham-bam-thank-you-mam approach even if Richards is still spoiling for a fight.

“Nothing comes easy,” he says. “If it does, it’s not as good as it should be. There’s nothing like a tussle.”

The band has come a long way from the Beatles, who gifted them their first hit single. Watt is helping fuel the band’s latest resurgence, and he thinks he knows the recipe for a successful rock song.

When the Rolling Stones decamped to the south of France in 1971 to record what would become Exile on Main St., they created one of rock’s most celebrated albums. But while the record has since attained near-mythic status, Mick Jagger has never been quite as enamored with it as the critics and fans who helped turn it into a classic.

By June 10, 1972, Exile on Main St. had reached No. 1 in the U.K. and topped charts around the world. Over the decades, it came to be regarded as one of the Stones’ defining statements. Yet Jagger has long viewed the album through a different lens—one colored by memories of disorder, unfinished work and a recording process he felt largely fell on his shoulders.

“Exile is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling,” Jagger said in 2003 (via Far Out).

“I’m not too sure how great the songs are,” he continued. “It has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, [producer] Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.

“Of course I’m ultimately responsible for it, but it’s really not good, and there’s no concerted effort or intention.”

Those are striking comments about an album now widely considered a masterpiece. Yet they also reflect the reality of the sessions that produced it.

The Stones had begun work on some of the material at London’s Olympic Studios during the Sticky Fingers era before relocating, as tax exiles, to Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera. There, they converted the villa’s basement into a makeshift recording space and worked in conditions that were anything but conventional.

For Jagger, who was preparing to become a father and frequently traveled to Paris to be with his wife, Bianca, the lack of structure proved frustrating. The villa became a revolving door of musicians, friends, dealers and celebrity visitors.

“There were a lot of people who came to visit that I don’t remember,” guitarist Mick Taylor later told Classic Rock. “I don’t remember John Lennon and Yoko coming, but apparently they did.”

Keith Richards, meanwhile, was battling a serious heroin addiction. According to the band’s lore, he was often absent from sessions taking place in Nellcôte’s basement studio. The chaos that Jagger viewed as an obstacle was, for Richards, simply part of the environment.

“We didn’t start off intending to make a double album,” Richards recalled in According to the Rolling Stones. “We just went down to the south of France to make an album, and by the time we’d finished, we said, ‘We want to put it all out.’”

“The Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do,” he added. “I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time.”

Richards would later tell Guitar World that Exile represented a conscious move away from the pursuit of singles. “It was made for what it was,” he said. “It was an album.”

That difference in outlook lies at the heart of the band’s conflicting memories of the record. Richards remembers freedom. Jagger remembers trying to impose order on a situation that often seemed determined to resist it.

“I think Keith was pretty out of it for some of that period, which shouldn’t have helped, but maybe it did,” Charlie Watts once observed. “Maybe that was where the creative energies came from.”

The sessions were plagued by practical problems as well. The summer heat played havoc with instrument tuning, recording schedules were inconsistent and songs often took far longer to complete than anyone anticipated. When Richards failed to pay the dealers providing him with heroin, they sent their henchmen to the house to steal several of the electric guitars used on the sessions, including Taylor’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul, which is said to be at the heart of a dispute with the New York City Met.

What emerged from the sessions was less a carefully executed plan than a collection of performances assembled amid confusion and constant interruption.

Richards embraced that unpredictability. Jagger struggled with it.

“Mick needs to know what he’s going to do tomorrow,” Richards said in the 2010 documentary Stones in Exile. “Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock, I’m roll.”

That tension between discipline and spontaneity has always fueled the Stones. On Exile on Main St., it was amplified by circumstance, producing an album that still divides its creators even as it unites listeners.

For all of Jagger’s reservations, Richards has remained unequivocal in his assessment.

“For a year or two, it was considered a bomb,” he said in 2002. “This was an era where the music industry was full of these pristine sounds. We were going the other way. Yes, it is one of the [Stones’] best.”

More than 50 years later, Exile on Main St. remains a testament to the strange chemistry that powered the Rolling Stones at their peak: one songwriter trying to impose order, the other embracing disorder, and a classic album emerging somewhere between the two.

When the British rock scene exploded in the 1960s, the media were quick to manufacture rivalries — and few sold papers better than the supposed feud between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

But according to Paul McCartney, the reality was very different. Far from being enemies, the bands were part of a close-knit musical community that regularly crossed paths in London.

Speaking with Vernon Kay on BBC Radio 2 about the songs that shaped his life, McCartney reflected on the camaraderie shared by the era’s biggest acts while discussing “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks.

“It was a lot of fun,” McCartney recalled. “The thing I liked about it was that it was a community. Even though we’d all come from different parts of the U.K., we were all now in London, and so there was great camaraderie.

“I think the newspapers really played it up like there were terrible rivalries and we hated each other. It wasn’t true.”

McCartney then shared a story that illustrated the bond between the bands.

“John and I were down in Charing Cross Road, where our music publisher was, and we were looking enviously into the windows of all the guitar shops,” he said. “At some point, we heard, ‘Oi!’ and we looked out in the street. There’s a London taxi going along, and there’s Mick and Keith hanging out.”

The pair — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — invited them into the cab, where the conversation soon turned to the Stones’ need for a new single.

“‘Well, we haven’t got a single,’” McCartney recalled Jagger saying. “‘We need a new single.’”

McCartney immediately thought of a song the Beatles had recorded but didn’t plan to release as a standalone single.

“Me being entrepreneurial or pushy, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got one that Ringo’s done on the album, and we’re not going to release it as a single,’” he said. “‘You guys would do it great, because it’s Bo Diddley style.’”

That song was “I Wanna to Be Your Man,” which the Rolling Stones released in November 1963. It became the band’s first U.K. Top 20 hit, reaching number 12.

“That just shows the camaraderie,” McCartney then says. “We gave them a song instead of jealously guarding it, not wanting them to do it.”

The Beatles would later release the song on their second album, making it the only song shared across their discographies.

The two groups continued to cross paths over the years, including in the studio. Brian Jones sang backing vocals on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and played saxophone on the 1970 B-side “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” while Jagger sang background vocals on their 1967 recording “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

Lennon and McCartney sang on the Stones’ 1967 single “We Love You,” and Lennon performed with Keith Richards in the group the Dirty Mac for The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus event in December 1968.

Decades later, in 2023, McCartney joined the Rolling Stones on record again when he played bass on the Hackney Diamonds track “Bite My Head Off” and “Covered in You,” the latter of which is on the group’s new album, Foreign Tongues.

“I showed up as a session player,” McCartney said. “It was a really good feeling, because I wasn’t a star, I was just the bass player.

“I’m standing there playing, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’ I should be blasé and say, ‘I’ve known them for years,’ but it was special.

“You better believe when I got home that evening, I said, ‘I’ve just played with the Stones. I loved it!’”

Ronnie Wood isn’t usually in the business of looking back. But during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, promoting the Rolling Stones’ new album Foreign Tongues, the conversation kept circling back to memory — how music begins, how it’s shaped, and how it sometimes arrives already carrying emotion you didn’t plan for.

One of those moments, Wood said, came while recording “Back in Your Life,” when the session unexpectedly intersected with a week of major losses in music.

During the interview, Wood revealed he recorded a nine-minute guitar solo for the track — an expansive performance that was later edited down.

“I played a nine-minute guitar solo,” he said. “We cut it down to four or five. I was so moved that day — disappointed and sad, and I had so much feeling because Brian Wilson died that day. I’ll never forget. And that week, Sly Stone died, too. And I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s so sad.’ And it came out through my guitar, the feeling.”

What emerged in the studio, he said, didn’t feel entirely like conscious playing.

“Just one take,” Wood explained. “And I just said, ‘I didn’t do that.’ The guitar played itself. It felt that way. It’s just magic.”

That sense of instinctive performance, Wood suggested, wasn’t something that arrived late in life. It had been there from the beginning — long before stadium tours, and even before he fully understood what being a musician would mean.

He recalled getting his first guitar around the age of five.

“My brothers were eight and ten years older than me, you see? And they were both musicians and artists,” he said. “So if they played, I would play. And if they painted, I would paint.”

A borrowed instrument first sparked it all.

“A friend of theirs gave me his acoustic guitar to borrow,” Wood said. “And then he got called up to the Army and took it back. And I was so disappointed.”

His brothers stepped in, buying him a guitar on a payment plan.

“And that’s where I started.”

From those early days, Wood’s path into professional music unfolded through a series of near-accidental turns. One of the most consequential came when he briefly played bass with the Jeff Beck Group in the late 1960s, after his early band, the Birds, broke up. At the time, Jeff Beck was leaving the Yardbirds and assembling a new lineup with Rod Stewart.

“I met Jeff Beck on tour, and he said, ‘One of these days, we’ll get together,’” Wood recalled. “So my group, the Birds, split up, he left the Yardbirds, and I rang him up and I said, ‘What are we gonna do?’ He said, ‘Come on, let’s get together. I’ve got this vocalist. I don’t know if you know him — his name is Rod Stewart.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Rod.’ I met him. So he said, ‘Would you mind playing bass?’”

“I said, ‘No. I love a challenge. Let’s go.’ Boom! So that was it.”

There was just one problem: he didn’t own a bass guitar.

After borrowing one for rehearsals, Wood went to the Selmer music store in London to try to sort out a more permanent solution.

“I said, ‘Could I have that [Fender] Jazz Bass? Could I borrow it?’ And they said, ‘Yeah. You’ll have to get your parents to sign the form, you know, if you like it — promise to bring it back this afternoon.’”

He never did.

“So later on — five years later — I went back to the store and said, ‘Do you remember that Jazz Bass that went missing?’ And they went, ‘Yes, we do.’ And I said, ‘It was me, and I’ve come to pay you.’”

Wood’s teenaged adventures also included thwarting Pete Townshend in the volume wars by having Jim Marshall build him an 8x12 speaker cabinet — just before Townshend requested one for himself.

“Pete Townshend came in and went, 'You bastard!" Wood recalled. Unlike other rock and roll tales, Wood has the document to prove it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long before they became rock legends, three teenagers absorbed the raw power of American blues — and carried it into history.

In 1962, a young Jimmy Page traveled to Manchester for the American Folk Blues Festival, a tour that brought Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other blues legends from the U.S. to England. He wasn’t alone — future Rolling Stones frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in the crowd too. For these teenagers, it wasn’t just a concert. It was a revelation.

“We could hardly believe that real blues artists were going to appear here in our country,” Page recalled in David Williams’ book The First Time We Met The Blues. “They were regarded somewhat like mystic gods within our circle.”

The American Folk Blues Festival was one of the first tours to showcase authentic American blues to European audiences. While folk revivalists explored acoustic traditions, this festival brought raw, electric energy that British teens had rarely experienced firsthand.

The 1962 event was the festival's inaugural run, and the lineup at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall read like a who’s who of blues royalty: T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon.

For Page, Jagger and Richards, it was a musical awakening. Page absorbed the tone and phrasing of blues guitarists. Jagger and Richards were captivated by the rhythm, storytelling and emotional intensity. More than inspiration, it was a blueprint for their future music careers.

At the time, Page was performing in Neil Christian and the Crusaders, whose setlists mixed R&B and Top 20 material.

“But I was really keen to play the blues,” Page told Guitar Player in 2024. “And when I say 'the blues,' definitely the Chess catalog, and it was in advance of everything that was going to come.”

Page described the festival as a pilgrimage for him and fellow young blues enthusiasts. It was also where he first met Jagger and Richards.

“At the Manchester festival, I met Mick and Keith,” Page said. “They didn’t have the Stones then; they were just blues enthusiasts on a pilgrimage, like all of us, and we were in a house where the guy had just got the Howlin’ Wolf album with the rocking chair on the cover.

”Nobody had heard it up until then, but we all heard it that day. So yes, that was one life-changing thing, but everything is changing your perspective on things, broadening your outlook and opening it out.”

For Richards, who had only known these artists through crackly imported records, seeing them perform live was a visceral shock. He speaks with particular reverence about T-Bone Walker, the suave showman of the electric guitar, and his large Gibson hollowbody.

“You wouldn't be able to get me out of that place,” Richards later remarked of his dedication to seeing every note.

Within a few years, Page was experimenting in local bands, refining the riffs and textures that would eventually define Led Zeppelin. Jagger and Richards channeled that same energy into the Rolling Stones’ early blues covers, bridging the Atlantic in sound and style. The festival became a touchstone: an experience that informed every note these young musicians would play.

“I was seduced by the beauty of what a six-string instrument could do,” Page told Guitar Player.

That Manchester festival wasn’t just a show. It was a crossroads where three teenagers encountered the blues in its purest form and walked away changed. From Led Zeppelin’s heavy riffs to the Stones’ swaggering covers, traces of that night remain in every iconic lick.

Page, Jagger and Richards may have gone on to define rock music, but they never forgot the lesson the blues taught them: music is more than technique — it’s communication, connection and feeling. And it all started that night in Manchester.

The Rolling Stones built their legend on hit records that earned millions. Yet the bass heard on nearly every album they cut with Bill Wyman began life as a flimsy, bargain-bin instrument he bought in 1961 for the equivalent of $15.

Wyman cycled through an array of basses during his tenure with the Rolling Stones, from December 1962 to January 1993. Fans saw him play Voxes, Gibsons and Fenders onstage.

But in the studio, he repeatedly reached for the same unlikely weapon: the cheap Dallas Tuxedo that cost him about a week’s pay.

It was, in fact, his very first bass. Wyman had started as a guitarist, galvanized, like so many young U.K. players, by the acoustic-driven songs of skiffle king Lonnie Donegan.

“Lonnie Donegan was doing really well playing three-chord folk songs and old blues tunes. It seemed pretty simple,” Wyman told Guitar Player. “So I got a few guys together and we tried it.”

Their group, the Cliftons, played in London before the blues boom hit.

“I was playing guitar,” he says. “I wasn't interested in the bass until it became necessary for the band. I think a lot of bass players have started that way.”

Lacking a proper bass, he simply tuned his guitar down seven frets at first. “It seemed like they couldn't go any lower without the strings getting too soggy to play,” he explained.

But hearing the full power of an electrified bass guitar was an epiphany. At a dance hall show by British pop outfit the Barron Knights, Wyman encountered the full force of an electrified bass for the first time.

“I remember walking from the stairway and through the door and being floored, just rooted to the spot, by this amazing sound,” he said. “It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of the electric bass, and I was just thunderstruck by it.

“I thought, Well, I've got to get a bass, because this is where it's at. I could see the difference immediately.”

There was just one problem: money.

“When I went looking I found out that basses were something like 115 pounds,” he recalled. “I didn't have money like that. I was earning about eight pounds a week then and about to get married.”

Salvation came via his drummer in the Cliftons, who tipped him off to a Dallas Tuxedo being sold for £8 — roughly $15 at the time.

“So we went and looked at it and, sure enough, it was a mess,” Wyman said. “It had a thin, flat body with one pickup. The body was big, but it had an incredibly thin neck. The tuners were really bad, and the strings went straight over this solid piece of thing for a bridge and through a hole and hooked on the back. It was also a horrible brown color.

“But it was a bass, and it was in my price range, so we scraped half of the money together and promised him the other half later.”

Before it was even paid off, Wyman began rebuilding it. One of the first bass guitars manufactured in England, the Tuxedo featured a Les Paul–style cutaway body and a short 30.5-inch scale. Combined with its slim neck, it suited Wyman’s small hands perfectly, but he decided to reshape the oversized body into something sleeker, with short horns inspired by Gibson designs.

Armed with a cardboard template cut to the desired shape, he marked out the new curves on the body. “There was like two or three extra inches around the edge, and I went down the road to my uncle's house and cut it out with his saw.”

The glued-on frets were another liability — they buzzed badly — so he yanked them out and left them off. Though he’d never played fretless,“I figured I'd still have the lines in the fingerboard to go by if I took the frets out,” he said.

After sanding and refinishing the body, installing a Baldwin pickup and stringing it with Framus bass strings, he plugged into his “eight-watt Watkins” amp.

“It sounded fantastic,” he recalled.

Ironically, the modified Tuxedo wasn’t the bass he brought to his December 1962 audition for the Stones. At the time, he was playing a Vox Phantom through a Vox AC30 combo. Wyman later joked that the band was more impressed by the amplifier than the bassist.

“They thought, ‘Oh, really good amp; bass player's nothing special, but we'll keep him so we can use the amp.’ That was the general opinion, I have since learned. You know, they are real con artists, that lot.”

Within a month, though, he was back with the Dallas.

“It just had a sound that couldn't be beat.”

As the Stones’ fame escalated, the instrument became too valuable — and too vulnerable — for touring. “After a while I got really scared to take it on the road because I was afraid it would get stolen. That happened a lot in those days, with the kids pouring onstage and all that.”

Though it occasionally surfaced on television — including at the Stone’ 1965 appearance on Top of the Pops where they mimed to their hit “The Last Time” — the Tuxedo largely retreated into the studio. There, it became Wyman’s secret weapon.

“I've used it on nearly every single record with the exception of the Some Girls album,” he told us in 1978. “I still use it even today for recording certain songs, because the sound is so pure and deep and rich.”

When pressed for specific examples, Wyman cited two tracks from 1971’s Sticky Fingers: “I Got the Blues” and “Sister Morphine.”

“‘I Got the Blues’ was probably one of the best songs I ever did with that one,” he said. “‘Sister Morphine,’ from the same LP, is another — a lot of the slow, bluesy things, the ballady things, songs where I wanted it to sound like a string bass. I can sort of slide on it because there are no frets, and I can almost get a little bit of that slap sound playing it with the thumb. I play every other bass with a pick, but I use my thumb on that one.

“It's the most amazing guitar. Everybody that tries it is flipped out.”

The $15 bass that underpinned a rock and roll empire sat behind glass at Wyman’s Sticky Fingers restaurant in central London until its closure in 2021. Wherever it is now, it remains a priceless piece of gear that helped shape one of the greatest — and most lucrative — music catalogs in rock history.

English producer Steve Lillywhite has worked with some of the biggest bands on either side of the Atlantic, but he says nothing compares to the misery of making a record with the Rolling Stones in 1986.

Remarkably, it was a pretty good album: Dirty Work. Among its tracks were a pair of solid hits: “One Hit (To the Body)” and “Harlem Shuffle.” But tensions within the group were at a head. The animosity was so high that the Stones didn’t even tour for the album.

All of which points to just how bad the sessions were for Lillywhite, who was building an impressive portfolio as a producer. After early successes with the Psychedelic Furs, Peter Gabriel and U2’s breakthrough album, War, Lillywhite was recruited by Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and company to produce Dirty Work. It was the band’s first album for Columbia Records following a then-staggering $28 million, four-album deal.

From the outside, it looked like a major opportunity for an ascendant producer. In reality, it was anything but harmonious.

“I worked with Keith and Mick when they were not talking to each other at all,” Lillywhite tells the Word in Your Ear podcast. He estimates the longtime collaborators were together “maybe one hour out of the whole time that we were making the record.”

Although the Stones had already released three albums in the 1980s, this was a deeply fractured period in the band’s history. Jagger and Richards were locked in a power struggle over musical direction, while CBS — Columbia’s parent company—was actively encouraging solo projects, widening the rift between them.

Richards was still furious over Jagger’s decision to release She’s the Boss, his 1985 solo debut, which featured guest appearances by Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck. In his 2010 memoir Life, Richards memorably likened the album to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, quipping that “everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it.”

It was hardly fertile ground for creativity. Still, the band pushed ahead with writing and recording what would become their 18th studio album, even as its two leaders remained openly hostile.

“It was hell,” Lillywhite says. “They literally weren’t in the same room. One would come up to me and say, ‘Blah blah blah,’ and then I’d go and repeat it to the other one. I was Henry Kissinger!” he adds, invoking the U.S. diplomat famed for negotiating détente and conflict resolution.

“I’m not the alpha male in any part of my life—except in a recording studio,” Lillywhite continues. “I’m very matter-of-fact. I’ve always said the role of a producer is to take responsibility for the quality of the end product. You have to know when to let things breathe and when to step in—and when there’s trouble ahead, cut it off before it becomes a real problem.”

Despite the dysfunction, Lillywhite held the line and delivered a record that eventually went platinum in three countries.

For Richards and Jagger, of course, conflict was nothing new. Speaking to Guitar Player, Richards once recalled being locked in a kitchen with Jagger until they’d written a song, as the band transitioned from covers to originals. Richards has also fallen out spectacularly with others over the years — most notably Elton John, after a particularly disastrous Stones gig. It wasn’t only Jagger who felt the chill.

Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have co-written scores of Rolling Stones hits. They include number-ones like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud,” “Paint It, Black,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Brown Sugar,” “Angie” and “Miss You.”

But as he reveals to Guitar Player, songwriting wasn’t part of his and Mick Jagger’s game plan originally. The Stones were a blues group and were content to play electric guitar–driven covers of classic tracks by the blues masters.

”Songwriting is something I got thrown into out of necessity,” Keith says. “It would never have occurred to me to be a songwriter. I wanted to be a guitar player.

“And then suddenly you’re successful with your first record, which is cover jobs, but luckily of great songs which nobody had ever heard or can’t remember. There was no idea of going beyond that, except suddenly the first album is outselling the Beatles. And they’re going, ‘Next!’ And you’re thinking, How many other great songs are out there?
As Keith explained, the first song he and Mick Jagger wrote wasn’t for themselves. It was for Marianne Faithfull, and it went to the top of the charts: “As Tears Go By,” from June 1964.

“Suddenly, ‘Oh, we’re songwriters,’ with the most totally anti-Stones sort of song you could think of at the time. When you start writing, it doesn’t matter where the first one comes from. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

But creating the song took a special effort from the Stones manager, Andrew Loog Oldham.

“Andrew locked Mick and myself into a kitchen in this horrible little apartment we had,” Richards recalled. “He said, ‘You ain’t comin’ out’ — and there was no way out. We were in the kitchen with some food and a couple of guitars, but we couldn’t get to the john, so we had to come out with a song.

“In his own little way, that’s where Andrew made his great contribution to the Stones. That was such a fart of an idea, that suddenly you’re gonna lock two guys in a room and they’re going to become songwriters. Forget about it.

“He had no idea, but it was worth a try, and it worked. In that little kitchen Mick and I got hung up about writing songs.”

Despite the success of “As Tears Go By,” it took a while before Keith and Mick hit on a tune they felt good about.

“We were writing these terrible pop songs that were becoming top 10 hits. I thought, ‘What are we doing here playing the fucking blues and writing these horrible pop songs and getting very successful?’ They had nothing to do with us, except we wrote ’em.”

It wasn’t until they wrote their 1966 A-side “The Last Time” that they came up with a song they felt was suited to the Rolling Stones.

“It took us a while to come up with ‘The Last Time,’” Richards says. “That was the first one we came up with where Mick and I said, ‘This is one we can lay on the guys.’ At the time we were already borrowing songs from the Beatles — ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ — because we were really hard up for singles. So they gave us a hand.

“In retrospect, during the ’60s the Stones and the Beatles were almost the same band, because we were the only ones in that position. We would work with each other instead of against each other. Which is very interesting, because for the most part people were either a Beatles or a Stones man, where 10 years earlier you’d have been an Elvis or a Buddy man.”

Richards — who would go on to create novel new guitar sounds by playing his axe through a cassette recorder for their hit “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — says he was stunned by his and Jagger’s success as songwriters.

“But at the same time it’s humbling, because you realize, ‘Hey, I didn’t write this. I just happened to be around when it came by.’ People today run themselves into a corner thinking they actually create these things.

“The idea that you create songs can fuck you up, because then it’s all on your back. Treat it in a lighter way and say, ‘This is what I do.’ If you can write one song, you can write 900. They’re there.”

As a young guitarist on London’s mid-1960s music scene, David Gilmour had a chance to catch any number of famous and up-and-coming musical artists. He was still a couple of years from joining Pink Floyd when he decided to stop into Blaises Club, a gambling casino located in a hotel basement, on December 21, 1966.

“When I was living in London, and I was completely broke — and this is long before I joined Pink Floyd — there was a club in South Kensington called Blaises,” he tells Rick Beato. “And if you were a member of that club — and it cost five pounds or something to be a member — you could go free from Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Thursday. So I'd go there quite a lot, because it was free.

“And one night, I went in there, and it was rammed with people. All the Beatles, and all the stones were in there. I thought, This is a little bit unusual!”

Gilmour soon discovered what had drawn London’s biggest musical acts to the club that night. Following a set by Brian Auger and the Trinity, a slim figure made his way onstage.

“A kid came in with a guitar case, got up on the stage, opened his guitar case and put [the guitar] on the wrong way round,” GIlmour recalls. “He plugged into an amp and started, and the entire place was just —.”

He gives a look of astonishment.

“Jaws dropped. It was absolutely extraordinary.

“I went out the next day, trying to find records by this character Jimi Hendrix. And there was James Hendricks, of [American vocalese trio] Lambert, Hendricks, Lambert and Ross.

“But he didn’t exist.

In fact, Hendrix’s first record, “Hey Joe,” had been released five days earlier, on December 16, 1966, but perhaps the spellings of his first and last names confused record shop workers. Either way, Hendrix’s first album, Are You Experienced, wouldn’t come out until May 12, 1967, nearly five months later. When it did, Gilmour was ready, with money in hand.

“As soon as it came along,” he says, “I thought, Yes, Jimi!! I want a slice of that!”

Gilmour became such a Hendrix devotee that he sought out every opportunity to see him perform. That led to his extraordinary experience running the PA for the guitarist's set at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.

“I helped mix the sound for Hendrix at the Isle of Wight in 1970," Gilmour revealed to Prog magazine in 2019. “Not a lot of people know that.”

The 1970 festival, the last of three consecutive music events on the island, was held from August 26 to 30 and is acknowledged as the largest music festival of its time, even bigger than Woodstock. Artists who performed include Rory Gallagher, the Doors, the Who, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and Free, among many others.

Hendrix performed in the early hours of August 31 with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Billy Cox. His set, however, was plagued by problems from the sound system, with the chatter from the security personnel’s walkie-talkies heard at one point during his performance of “Machine Gun.”

Although Pink Floyd’s sound system was used for the festival, the group didn’t perform. Gilmour says he was there simply as an attendee.

“I went down to go to it and I was camping in a tent, just being a punter,” he told Prog. “And I went backstage where our main roadie guy, Peter Watts, was trying to deal with all the mayhem, with Charlie Watkins of [British musical instrument maker] WEM, and they were very nervous. They were going to have to mix Hendrix’s sound. I did some mixing stuff in those days, and they said ‘Help! Help!’ so I did."

Gilmour recalled working from the side of the stage with a WEM Audiomaster mixer. He would eventually come to own the very guitar strap Hendrix used at the Isle of Wight and attach it to his Black Strat, the famed Fender electric guitar he played on classic Pink Floyd cuts like “Money,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb.”

“My lovely wife Polly [Samson] bought me, as a present, a Jimi Hendrix strap, that you can see,” he told Prog. As he explained to the interviewer, it was not a copy of a Jimi Hendrix strap but the real thing. “No, the Jimi Hendrix strap, that he’s [wearing at] a lot of his later shows, at the Isle of Wight in 1970,” he explained.

He added that he didn’t get a chance to meet Hendrix at the festival. “Not then. I had met him previous to that, once,” he offers. “I didn’t know him.”

Despite his fondness for Hendrix’s style and choice of main guitar — a Fender Stratocaster — Gilmour never attempted to emulate him. His own style is slower, more fluid than fiery, owing in large part to his inability to play fast.

“I wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Beato in a previous interview. “There were years when I was younger where I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn’t ever really going to happen.”

In related news, Gilmour recently revealed that he is at work on his followup to last year’s solo record, Luck and Strange.

Legendary recording engineer Glyn Johns earned a place in Beatles history when he became the first producer after George Martin to work on a project with the group. He was hired in late 1968 to oversee the sessions for the project that resulted in the group's final album, Let It Be, and which were documented in the 2021 series The Beatles: Get Back.

But as he explains in a new interview with Rick Beato, he was surprised to get the call in the first place. Johns initially crossed paths with the Fab Four when he was still a fresh face on the scene and working as engineer on the Rolling Stones' 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request. The project saw him, coincidentally, manning the console alongside Jimi Hendrix's producer of choice, Eddie Kramer

“John and Paul came and sang backup on a Stones session, so I met them then,” he explains. “I was just the engineer. They barely acknowledged my existence.”

So Johns was shocked when, roughly a year later, McCartney hunted him down for an ambitious project to record the Beatles as they rehearsed for what would be their first public concert since the summer of 1966. What's more, the rehearsals themselves were to be filmed for a TV special that would include the live performance.

“The call from Paul to proceed with the idea he'd had was a complete shock. I thought it was Mick Jagger taking the piss,” Johns says with a laughs. “I was obviously, like the rest of the world, a fan of the Beatles.

“It was a very unusual project,” he continues. “Paul's idea was to do a live concert and perform new music. And so the film that became [the] Let It Be [album] was just a documentary of how we were going to prepare for that show. And then the live show was to be filmed, and that would be released as the piece.

“That didn't come about, as we all know. The rest of the band didn't really get the idea. It was a bit far-fetched, but it would have been really interesting.”

Although Johns was hired to engineer those sessions, which took place in London's Twickenham Studios, he found himself serving as producer in the absence of George Martin. He continued in that role after the sessions moved to the Beatles' studio at their Apple Corps headquarters in London's Savile Row.

“George Martin attended on the odd day for a little while and facilitated the equipment when we moved to the Beatles' office studio in Savile Row, " John says. "It became apparent as the sessions went on that I was required to play a little bit more of a role than just the engineer.”

Johns continued to work on the tapes from those sessions in the months that followed. He was even on hand to produce the late–February 1969 sessions at Trident Studios for the Abbey Road track "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." But by the time the group settled down to work on that album in earnest that summer, Johns was long gone.

“I started the Abbey Road sessions, and then I went off to America to do something,” he recalls. “They very sensibly decided to go back to George and Geoff Emerick, who finished [the album]. And thank God they did, because it ended up much better than when I left it. I can tell you.”

In related news, a brand-new Beatles Anthology box set has been announced, with McCartney suggesting that John Lennon’s spirit haunted the making of the first Anthology release in 1995.

New York City’s Met Museum is contesting claims made by former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor that he owns the “Keithburst” Les Paul that's set to star in its new 500-strong exhibition of vintage guitars.

In July, a source close to Taylor said the guitarist was “mystified as to how his property found its way into the Met’s collection,” having been stolen while the Stones were recording Exile on Main St. in France in 1971. Drug dealers took a total of eight guitars — including a Bigsby-loaded 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard belonging to Taylor — from the Stones' villa, Nellcôte, after Keith Richards failed to shell out for heroin he'd scored off them during the recording sessions.

Richards himself owned the Les Paul in the mid 1960s and performed with it in the Stones' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. He sold it to Taylor in '67 when the guitarist was performing with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The Les Paul returned to the Stones' stable when the band hired Taylor to replace founding member Brian Jones in 1969.

Prior to then, the guitar had been photographed with Jimmy Page and used by Eric Clapton, who borrowed it from Richards for an early Cream performance after his own "Beano" Les Paul was stolen in 1966.

Met officials contest Taylor's claims that he owned the electric guitar in their collection, and say the instrument was not among those stolen from Nellcôte.

The museum states that a man named Adrian Miller became the guitar’s owner in 1971, but doesn’t explain how he came to take ownership of it.

It’s believed that Miller ultimately sold the guitar to Heavy Metal Kids founder Cosmo Verrico, who, as per an interview with the New York Times, “can’t recall how Miller acquired the guitar.”

The guitar had first resurfaced at a 2004 Christie’s auction, where it failed to sell. Taylor made no claim of ownership when the guitar went on the block, and it was purchased two years later by Swedish producer and Cardigans guitarist Peter Svensson.

The Les Paul was next owned by Dirk Ziff, who loaned it to the Met in 2019 as part of its Play it Loud exhibition in 2019. It was among the more than 500 golden age guitars Ziff donated to the museum earlier this year in what the Met has called a “landmark gift.” Those instruments are set to be exhibited later this year.

Taylor’s camp is refusing to back down. The New York Times says his manager, Marlies Damming, has formally requested that the museum “make the guitar available so that we can inspect it, and confirm its provenance one way or the other.”

There’s plenty more mileage in this story, it seems, as the mystery of what happened to the guitar endures. Its ties to one of the Stones' most celebrated albums, recorded in Nellcôte’s basement, pepper the story with even greater interest.

“It's got a raw sound quality, and the reason for that is that the basement was very dingy and very damp,” Taylor told the Guardian of the Exile sessions in 2010. “The roof leaked, and there were power failures. We had to deal with all that and go with the flow.”

Musicians would come and go from the sessions. “You didn't know who anybody was,” recalls Rolling Stone journalist Robert Greenfield, who visited the villa to interview Richards. Drug use was rife, even with children present.

A drug bust forced the band to retreat once more, this time to America, where the tapes were reassessed and turned into the resulting double-album Exile on Main St. under the guidance of Stones' lead singer Mick Jagger.

Keith Richards is the king of putdowns. Bruce Springsteen? “To me, it’s pretentious,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. Prince? “To me, it’s kid stuff.” Guns N’ Roses? “I admire their guts. But too much posing.”

But no fellow rocker has earned the Telecaster-toting guitarist’s ire as much as Elton John. It’s bad enough that Richards has taken every opportunity to refer to John in interviews by his homely birth name, Reginald Dwight — he’s also leveled some of his harshest snipes at the piano-playing rocker. In response, Elton — a musician every bit as bitchy as Keef — has given back in equal measure.

To be fair, there’s nothing unusual about feuds between rockers. They all have egos — and opinions. Even Carlos Santana, known for his beneficent and spiritual demeanor has a dark streak. Remember when he famously put down Kiss in 2000, launching a years’ long fight between the two men?

But Keith and Elton’s spat has been among the longest running, and certainly most enjoyable to watch, over the years.

Apparently it began at a 1975 Rolling Stones concert in Fort Collins, Colorado during the group’s Tour of the Americas ’75. It was the band’s first road show with Ronnie Wood, who replaced Mick Taylor following his comparatively brief stint in the band. With no new album to announce — It’s Only Rock ’N Roll had come out more than seven months earlier — the band was simply trying out its new lineup and giving fans more of what they wanted.

Unfortunately every one got a little too much at the July 20 show in Fort Collins at Hughes Stadium. Midway through the show, the Stones brought Elton onstage to play piano and sing along as they performed their hit “Honky Tonk Women.” Introduced by Mick Jagger as “Reg from Watford,” Elton appeared onstage wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers windbreaker and a cowboy hat.

He performed “Honky Tonk Women,” then played along on another 10 songs. The Stones’ keyboardists, Billy Preston and Ian Stewart, were put off by his endless noodling. The band struggled to get him to leave, and even the audience began to boo.

As John explained in his autobiography, Rocketman, his behavior was all down to the effects of cocaine, which was quickly becoming everyone’s drug of choice in the 1970s.

“Cocaine gave me too much confidence for my own good,” he wrote. “If I hadn’t been coked out of my head when the Rolling Stones turned up in Colorado and asked me to come onstage with them, I might have just performed ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ waved to the crowd and made my exit. Instead, I decided it was going so well, I’d stay on and jam along to the rest of their set, without first taking the precaution of asking the Stones if they wanted an auxiliary keyboard player.”

“For a while, I thought Keith Richards kept staring at me because he was awestruck by the brilliance of my improvised contributions to their oeuvre. After a few songs, it finally penetrated my brain that the expression on his face wasn’t really suggestive of profound musical appreciation. I quickly scuttled off, noting as I went that Keith was still staring at me in a manner that suggested we’d be discussing this later, and decided it might be best if I didn’t hang around for the after-show party.”

Years later, Richards was still fuming. Asked in that same Rolling Stones article above what he thought of Elton’s then current top-10 single, “I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That,” he replied, “Lovely bloke, but posing.”

Elton took the sniping in stride. But it was Richards’ next zinger that got under his skin.

When Elton’s friend Princess Diana died in 1997, he reframed his 1973 hit “Candle in the Wind,” an ode to Marilyn Monroe, as a tribute to the late member of the royal family.

Keith stuck the knife in. “Songs for Dead Blondes,” he declared of the two tunes in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that October. “I’d find it difficult to ride on the back of something like that myself, but Reg is showbiz.”

Elton responded in kind in an interview with The Daily News that same month.

“I’m glad I’ve given up drugs and alcohol,” he griped. “It would be awful to be like Keith Richards. He’s pathetic, poor thing. It’s like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go onstage and look young.

“I have great respect for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown Keith out 15 years ago. … I just think he’s an asshole and I have for a long time.”

Elton was apparently still seething in 2011 when he took aim at Richards’ new autobiography, Life, in which the guitarist revealed some details about Mick Jagger’s anatomy that would be better left unsaid.

“I was a bit put off by hearing about the bit about Mick Jagger’s penis,” Elton huffed. “If I said that [John’s songwriting partner] Bernie Taupin was a miserable twat and had a small penis, he’d probably never talk to me again. It’s like, why do that?”

With no end in sight to the feud, Ronnie Wood intervened to get the two men to call a truce. When Keef and Elton showed up for the GQ Awards in London on September 8, 2015, relations were cordial enough for them to pose for a photo together.

Apparently all was forgiven on both sides when Elton joined the Stones for a guest appearance on the tracks “Get Close” and “Live by the Sword” from their 2023 album, Hackney Diamonds. John was thrilled to finally become part of the Rolling Stones family, alongside guests that included Paul McCartney.

But Keith couldn’t help using the collaboration for a bit of self-aggrandizement, noting that it was Elton — not the Stones — who was basking in reflected glory.

“Everyone’s a fan of the Rolling Stones. Just like Paul, Elton was like, ‘I just fucking played with the Rolling Stones.’”

Keith Richards once called Jimmy Page “one of the best guitar players ever known,” but believes his talents were overwhelmed in Led Zeppelin.

The Rolling Stones' linchpin and Page, who started life as a session musician before forming a brief tandem with Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds, rose through the ranks amid the British blue boom of the 1960s. As such, there is a great degree of adoration for one another.

Indeed, Page, speaking to Uncut, called his counterpart a “true devotee of the Chess catalog,” which paved the way for a mutuality that has never broken.

“It was similar to me and Jeff [Beck], where we’d just sort of lock in,” he adds. “Because there’s an automatic sort of mutual respect for each other that’s built up over the years.”

But while Richards has bags of superlatives to throw Page’s way, he says the band often sounded “hollow” as a result of the powerhouse drumming of John Bonham; a rambunctious ingredient to Zeppelin’s larger-than-life sonic boom.

“I love Jimmy Page, but as a band, with John Bonham thundering down the highway in an uncontrolled 18-wheeler, no,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Jimmy is a brilliant player, but I always felt there was something a little hollow about it.”

His comments followed similar remarks made nine years earlier, in a video posted directly onto his website.

“As a band, I felt they were aptly named, but they never took off for me, musically,” he said. “At the same time, Jimmy Page is one of the best guitar players ever known, and Bonham was a hell of a powerhouse drummer. Although I think he was heavy-handed. That's where the 'led' comes in.”

But, he adds, “if you want to cut the story short: Led Zeppelin was Jimmy Page.”

In the wake of Richards' Rolling Stone chat, Page hit back when talking to Classic Rock, but kept his response tactful and diplomatic.

“Keith can say what he wants. He’s Keith Richards,” the guitarist quipped. “I think he’s done some amazing work. I respect his playing.

“[But] I’m not sure what he means by calling Led Zeppelin hollow. I think he’s got his tongue in his cheek. What we did was really cool.”

It's an interesting point of friction. United by their deep-seated love for traditional American blues, the players have followed similar paths and influences. But when it came to the beating hearts of their respective bands, John Bonham and Charlie Watts, who kept the Stones ticking until between 1963 and his death in 2021, were, stylistically speaking, worlds apart.

Richards has gone on record multiple times during his career to say that he and the Stones “needed” Charlie Watts. The way he described Watts' playing to Howard Stern last year shows what he really wanted from his drummer.

“He had feel,” Richards explained with great enthusiasm. “He had intelligence. Rock and roll doesn't necessarily need the whole battery of drums. It's got to do with when not to hit. If you're making music, silence is your canvas.”

The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither band would have succeeded in the manner they did had they swapped drummers. Led Zeppelin’s take on the blues was heavier, more animalistic. The Stones were slinkier, a little more prim and proper, to borrow a well-used British phrase. Which drummer one prefers is a matter of preference.

Meanwhile, Richards has been discussing the differences between the guitar players he shared studios and stages with across the Stones' various eras, and he says one player was the wrong fit. Equally, he once told Guitar Player that Jeff Beck, who almost joined the Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Bluesbreakers in his early days, wouldn't have worked because he was “an individualist.”

He's also revealed how acoustic guitars, alternate tunings, and a cassette recorder saved two stone-cold hits from the cutting room floor, while Harvey Mandel believes he was better suited to the Stones than Ronnie Wood, the man he lost the gig to in 1976.

Forty years ago on July 13, the Live Aid concerts kicked off at London’s Wembley Stadium with the British rock group Status Quo. Armed with Telecasters and described by organizer Bob Geldof as “ordinary blokes with long hair and denims,” the group opened the day’s festivities with the 12-bar rock of John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over the World.” It sent an unintentional but perceptible message that, even in the synth-saturated mid 1980s, “the boys and girls with guitars” — as Geldof described them — would rule the day.

Live Aid did rule, on that day and through 40 years of memories (as well as 20 years for its follow-up event, Live 8). True to Fogerty’s anthem, the benefit for African famine relief was a global event, ping-ponging between Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, as well as locales in Europe, Australia and Japan. Styled as a “global jukebox,” Live Aid presented most of the biggest acts at the time to nearly two billion viewers in 169 countries. Along the way it raised about $140 million for the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which Geldof launched with the all-star “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single released eight months prior.

Live Aid’s 20 or so hours of music played out as a day for guitar heroics that were at times notable, notorious, triumphant and tepid. The players came from the worlds of rock, metal, blues and jazz, and nearly three dozen of them went on to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Four decades later, we still remember these most notable guitar stories from Live Day.

Led Zeppelin: Like a Lead Balloon

Led Zeppelin grounded itself immediately after drummer John Bonham died in September 1980, with the three surviving members going their own ways. But with Jimmy Page’s the Firm and Robert Plant both on the road, circumstances dictated an ascent back up the stairway to heaven, if just for one day. Plant was the first to sign on and wanted Page to be involved — but not necessarily to get the Led out.

“The original idea was not to do a Robert Plant set as such, but something a little lighter — like the Honeydrippers,” Plant said at the time, referring to an ad hoc all-star band he’d put together to record an EP of rock and R&B oldies in 1984.

“As Jimmy was part of the Honeydrippers I phoned him and said, ‘Would you like to be part of it?’ He did, and as we got to talking about it, we said, ‘While we’re doing it, why not do two of our [Led Zeppelin] songs?’ The whole thing really evolved.”

It ultimately sounded better in discussion than onstage. With former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on keyboards rather than bass, Paul Martinez from Plant’s band on bass, and Chic’s Tony Thompson and Phil Collins on drums, the shambolic three-song set felt like a genuine moment for the euphoric crowd at JFK Stadium, but not beyond.

Collins, who had flown in on the Concorde to play at both the London and Philly shows, introduced Zeppelin after playing solo piano renditions of a couple of his hits. He hadn’t rehearsed, and it showed, as did any lack of plan between him and Thompson on songs — “Rock and Roll,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” — that really weren’t made for two drummers.

Jones also had a small amount of rehearsal on the day of the show, Page — who busted out his Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck electric guitar for the occasion — sounded out of tune at times, and Plant was a bit hoarse from playing the night before in Detroit. To make matters worse, the stage monitors reportedly weren’t working properly. Plant later termed the performance “horrendous.”

The dissatisfaction was evident during a tense post-show interview with MTV’s Alan Hunter, which Collins dominated when the others proved truculent. The drummer later wrote in his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, “If I’d known it was to be a two-drummer band, I would have removed myself from the proceedings long before I got anywhere near Philadelphia.”

Collins, who’d played on Plant’s first two solo albums and toured with him in 1983, also took exception to Page laying blame for the failure on him for “bashing away cluelessly and grinning.” Collins noted, “If you look at the video, you can see Jimmy dribbling [cocaine] onstage, Robert not hitting the notes and me miming, playing the air.”

Not surprisingly, Page, Plant and Jones refused to allow the performance to be included on Live Aid’s subsequent official DVD release. Led Zeppelin would have more satisfying reunions at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert in 1986, its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1995 and the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, which is, as of now, its final performance.

The Who: Before They Got Old

There are several tellings of how the Who came to be part of Live Aid’s London program, the group’s first time onstage since breaking up after a farewell tour in late 1982. In his memoir, Is That It?, Geldof says Townshend suggested it after he invited the guitarist to take part on his own. That led to a series of protracted negotiations with singer Roger Daltrey, who refused to play with drummer Kenney Jones, and bassist John Entwistle, who refused to not play with Jones.

Townshend, however, subsequently accused Geldof of blackmailing and bullying the band into being part of the show. In his memoir, Who I Am, Townshend wrote, “When Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off...‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking math. And do the fucking show!’”

Geldof denies he blackmailed or bullied the guitarist but makes no secret of how important it was for the Who to be part of Live Aid.

“I live, die and swear by this band,” he explained recently. “I really minded that the Who reformed and did it, ’cause it’s significant. I felt that 20 million people would watch that; if five percent of them contribute, we’re home.”

Though Townshend contended that “the Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show,” the four-song evening set — part of a killer chain that included U2, Dire Straits, Queen and David Bowie — was one of the day’s most exciting, despite any flaws — and stage monitor issues. “My Generation,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled with vintage Who energy. Townshend was in full, furious, windmilling form, while Daltrey opened his shirt, twirled his microphone and jogged around the stage like a marathoner in training.

Even Townshend would acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that “we all felt proud to be there” and happily helped Paul McCartney close the show with “Let It Be,” with the two rock icons hoisting Geldof on their shoulders at the end of the song.

Bob Dylan: Too Rolling Stoned

It was another Live Aid collaboration that probably looked good on paper.

Bob Dylan, who’d sung on USA for Africa’s famine relief single “We Are the World,” was chosen to close the show in Philadelphia and in turn recruited Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood. The trio, along with Faces/occasional Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian McLagan, gathered at Wood’s New York home to rehearse, with Dylan ultimately choosing two deep cuts — “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When the Ship Comes In” — along with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind” to play on the night.

There was undoubtably tension in the air at JFK Stadium, not only because of the occasion but also because the trio was directly following Mick Jagger’s explosive performance — backed by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and with Tina Turner guesting — at a time when Jagger and Richards were on the outs.

What’s more, Dylan’s performance was followed by a group performance of the hit “We Are the World” that would close the event.

“The sound guys had no idea we were going on,” Richards recalled the following year. “Here’s three guys with acoustic guitars and they were getting ready for [sings] ‘We Are the World’ with 50 people behind us.

“They were tuning up and we were trying to play,” Richards explained a few years later. “It was like, ‘shut ’em up, Bill Graham, or we’ll shoot the lot of them!’ Bob and I kept looking at each other like, ‘Where’s the blindfolds and the last cigarettes?’ But it was all for a good cause, so what the hell?”

Their performance was plagued by problems. The stage curtain had fallen in front of the stage amplifiers, preventing Dylan, Richards and Wood from hearing each other and causing them to play out of sync. When, early on, a string broke on Dylan’s guitar, Wood gave him his and used a cheap instrument a crew member handed him. The new guitar was out of tune. Wood wound up playing slide on only one of the strings.

Dylan, meanwhile, caused a stir when he suggested that, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million, maybe, and use it...to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to banks.” While Live Aid did eventually spawn the charity Farm Aid, Dylan’s comment showed he had no grasp of the event’s purpose. “Something so simplistic and crowd-pleasing was beyond belief,” Geldof wrote. “[Dylan] displayed a complete lack of understanding of the issues raised by Live Aid.”

Seven other notable guitar moments...

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, on hiatus after his sophomore solo album About Face in 1984, played with Bryan Ferry’s band during the Roxy Music frontman’s four-song set in London.

Five of B.B. King’s songs from his set at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, including “Why I Sing the Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” were carried as part of the global telecast.

Dire Straits, which was in the midst of its own 12-show run at Wembley Arena next door, was joined by Sting to recreate his guest vocal on “Money for Nothing.”

David Bowie tapped Kevin Armstrong, who had played on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack, as his guitarist for Wembley Stadium. Bowie subsequently asked Armstrong to be a fifth member in Tin Machine after he played on the group’s debut album (he turned it down), while Armstrong co-wrote the title track to Bowie’s Outside album in 1992.

Pat Metheny sat in with Santana for its five-song set in Philadelphia, which included “Brotherhood,” “Open Invitation” and “Right Now” (verify song title — may need clarification).

Chic was on hiatus but Nile Rodgers brought his guitar to Philadelphia to play with Madonna (“Love Makes the World Go Round”), and the two of them joined Thompson Twins for a rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

After landing in Philadelphia, Phil Collins first got onstage with Eric Clapton for his set, which included Cream’s “White Room,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” and “She’s Waiting” from the Collins-produced Behind the Sun album

A 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard stolen from former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor in 1972 has finally turned up — in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The guitar, which Taylor purchased from Stones guitarist Keith Richards, was used on the group’s 1972 album, Exile on Main St., and was among a number of instruments stolen near the end of the album’s sessions.

It was included in the more than 500 guitars from the golden age of American guitarmaking given to the Met earlier this year in what the museum called a “landmark gift.”

The 1959 sunburst Les Paul, which featured an aftermarket Bigsby tailpiece, was originally played by Richards, who used it during the Rolling Stones’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1964. He sold it to Taylor in 1967, when the then 18-year-old guitarist was joining John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers as a replacement for Peter Green, who left to form Fleetwood Mac with former Bluesbreakers John McVie and Mick Fleetwood.

Taylor joined the Stones in 1969 following the group’s firing of founding member Brian Jones. The 1959 Les Paul was among the electric guitars used on their celebrated 1969 tour of America, captured on the 1970 album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, where it was played by Richards; Taylor played his 1958 Les Paul Standard.

By the middle of 1971, the Stones were living in France as tax exiles, in a rented villa named Nellcôte, where they recorded Exile on Main St. The 1959 Les Paul was once again on hand for those sessions and was among the instruments stolen from the house one day. The theft was reportedly carried out by drug dealers from Marseille after Richards failed to reimburse them for the heroin he and others were consuming during their stay.

Friends and visitors were able to freely come and go at Nellcôte at any hour of the day, making it easy for thieves to slip into the house. The crime was said to have taken place in broad daylight while the villa’s occupants were watching TV.

“That’s how loose and stupid it was out there,” former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman said of Nellcôte.

In addition to Taylor’s Les Paul, the robbers took numerous guitars belonging to Richards, a bass guitar belonging to Wyman and a saxophone owned by Bobby Keys, a session player who appeared on numerous Stones recordings.

The New York Post first reported on the discovery of Taylor’s guitar in the Met’s collection. The outlet said Taylor’s business manager and partner, Marlies Damming, confirms the Les Paul is the one Richards sold to Taylor. A source told The Post, “Taylor says he never received compensation for the theft and is mystified as to how his property found its way into the Met’s collection.”

The Post said a rep for the Met did not immediately provide a comment, nor did it hear back from Dirk Ziff, the collector who made the donation.

Typical of guitars with clear or stained finishes, the Les Paul's unique woodgrain pattern acts as a fingerprint. In the case of this particular example, dark figuring near the cutaway, along the edge of the top’s lower bout, is a key to its identity.

Beyond its association with Richards and Taylor, the guitar has a storied history. Before Richards sold it in 1967, the Les Paul was played by Jimmy Page, who was photographed with it at a recording session for Stones manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham.

In 1966, Eric Clapton borrowed it for a July 31 show with his new group Cream after his own Les Paul — heard on the Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album — was stolen from a church hall where the group had been rehearsing..

In addition to its use on Rolling Stones albums, the 1959 Les Paul made an appearance during the group's infamous performance at the Altamont Free Concert in Tracy, California, on December 6, 1969. The show was plagued by violence perpetrated by the Hells Angels, resulting in the murder of concertgoer Meredith Hunter.

Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones in 1975 and was replaced by Ronnie Wood, the third guitarist to play opposite Richards in the band.

Richards has commented on the comfort he feels performing with Wood, likening it to the interplay he enjoyed with founding guitarist Jones, where each player could easily move between rhythm and lead without much thought. Richards told Guitar Player in 1983 that while Taylor was a talented guitarist, he never connected with him in the same way.

“It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor,” he explained. “It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't as great as a rhythm player. So we ended up taking roles.

“When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally, but also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar.

“And this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. Even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, ‘You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet.’”

Taylor’s Les Paul is among just a few stolen guitars to resurface years after they disappeared. In 2021, an internet sleuth helped Randy Bachman find his Gretsch 6120 — famously used on Guess Who tracks like “Undun” and Bachman-Turner Overdrive hits like “Takin' Care of Business” — which had been stolen in 1976. Paul McCartney’s first Höfner bass was recovered in 2024 more than 50 years after it disappeared from a van parked in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood.

“There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track,” Keith Richards says. “You’ll be despairing, nothing working, hashing away. Take 43 on electric guitar, and somebody will say, ‘Why don’t you try it on acoustic?’

“And you will try it one more time and you’ve got it.”

Although he’s famous for playing a range of electric guitars — from Gibson Les Pauls to Fender Telecasters to Strats — acoustic guitar has always proved to be the perfect foil to Keith Richards’ electric work. The instrument has been part of the Stones’ musical makeup from early on, and it became a key part of the roots-rock sound the Rolling Stones began cultivating in 1968, around the time they began work on Beggar’s Banquet.

The timing is significant in Stones history. The group had hit a new plateau with the release of Between the Buttons in January 1967. The album produced a pair of chart-topping U.S. hits, “Ruby Tuesday” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” released together as a double A-side single, and showed musical growth with its range of styles, including baroque rock and psychedelia.

But the album’s release was followed by a period of creative confusion. Shortly afterward, Richards, Mick Jagger and guitarist Brian Jones were each arrested on drug charges. Between appearances in court and jail terms, the group was rarely together in the studio at the same time

Through it all, the Stones attempted to keep up with the growing psychedelic rock movement by recording Their Satanic Majesties Request, an album that, despite its many brilliant moments and songs, was considered a failure upon its release in December of that year.

The Stones needed a creative reset. As it happened, Richards had spent much of the previous year digging into old blues recordings from the 1920s and ’30s. That led him to explore open tunings, marking the start of his journey to the five-string open G tuning he’s used since around late 1968/’69.

“I started to use open tunings on Beggars Banquet,” he told us in his cover feature in the November 1977 issue. “During that long recording lay-off after Between the Buttons, I got rather bored with what I was playing on guitar—maybe because we weren't working, and it was part of that frustration of stopping after all those years, and suddenly having nothing to do. So my playing sort of stopped, along with me.

“Then I started looking into some ‘20s and ’30s blues records. Slowly, I began to realize that a lot of them were in very strange tunings. These guys would pick up a guitar, and a lot of times it would be tuned a certain way, and that's how they'd learn to play it. It might be some amazing sort of a mode, some strange thing.

“And that's why for years you could have been trying to figure out how some guy does this lick, and then you realize that he has this one string that is supposed to be up high, and he has it tuned down an octave lower.

That eventually led him to try open-D tuning (low to high, D A D F# A D) “which I used on Beggars Banquet,” he said.

Around the same time, Richards discovered a new tool that helped him capture the sort of gritty, low-fi sound of those early blues records: the compact cassette recorder. Created by Phillips and released to the public in 1964, the technology was still best suited to voice recording at the time, but the results suited Richards just fine.

"I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of acoustic guitar,” he wrote in his book, Life. “That grinding dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder....

“Playing acoustic, you'd overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as pickup and amplifier at the same time. We were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell.”

The combination of acoustic guitar, open tunings and the cassette recorder as signal processor came together in April 1968 with the recording of two new songs: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man.”

As Richards recalls, he used a Gibson Hummingbird tuned to open D (low to high, D A D F# A D) and capoed “to get that really tight sound. And there was another [acoustic] guitar over the top of that, but tuned to Nashville tuning. I learned that from somebody in George Jones' band in San Antonio in [1964]… Both acoustics were put through a Phillips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker.”

While “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” features leads (played by Richards) and rhythm (played by Jones) on electric guitar, “‘Street Fighting Man’ was all acoustic guitars,” Richards tells Guitar Player. “Everything there was totally acoustic. The only electric instrument on there is the bass guitar, which I overdubbed afterwards.”

But Richards’ acoustic guitar treatment was just one part of the track’s magic. It owes much as well to Charlie Watts’ drum kit of choice.

“Charlie was playing his little 1930s drummer’s practice kit,” Keith recalls. “It was all sort of built into a little attaché case, so some drummer who was going to his gig on the train could sort of open it up—with two little things about the size of small tambourines without the bells on them, and the skin was stretched over that.

“And he'd set up this little cymbal, and this little high-hat would unfold. Charlie sat right in front of the microphone with it. I mean, this drum sounds massive. When you're recording, the size of things has got nothing to do with it. It’s how you record them.

At the same time, Richards acknowledges that acoustic guitar is another tool and that much of its sound is down to what you do with it, as he proved on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man.”

“Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer,” he says. “But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it.

“You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it. and when I wrote the thing I thought, I’m not going to get a better sound than this.”

Keith Richards has shared guitar duties in the Rolling Stones throughout his more than 60 years with the group. But as he revealed to Guitar Player, one guitarist never felt to him like a comfortable fit.

From the very start, the Rolling Stones’ sound was built around two guitarists: Richards and Brian Jones. Together, they shared lead and rhythm work: Richards employing electric guitar licks and lines learned from Chuck Berry records, while Jones played slide guitar — a rarity among British guitarists at that time — and wove his rhythm work around Richards’ melodic fills.

By 1969, Jones was kicked out the group after his drug use made him unreliable and a pair of drug arrests in England made it unlikely he could perform in America for the group's 1969 U.S tour. His replacement was Mick Taylor, a young Les Paul–toting electric blues guitarist who made a name for himself with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers after Peter Green departed to form Fleetwood Mac in 1967.

Taylor was a powerful addition to the Stones, bringing fluid blues licks and a muscular electric guitar tone that stood in stark contrast to Richards’ riffier rock-and-roll style. For many, this marked the start of the Stones’ greatest era, when they released landmark albums like Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock and Roll.

But perhaps the best example of the Richards–Taylor tandem can be heard on the group’s 1970 live album, Get Yer Ya’s-Ya’s Out, where the guitarists trade off solos song by song, panned left (Taylor) and right (Richards), giving listeners a chance to hear each in his best element, particularly on “Sympathy for the Devil.”

But by 1975, Taylor was gone, replaced by Ron Wood, who remains Richards’ sidekick to this day. While some lamented Taylor’s absence, Richards is not among them. As he told Guitar Player in our April 1983 issue, he and Taylor were not the ideal team when it came to the Stones’ classic sound.

“It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor,” he explained. “It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other.

“As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't as great as a rhythm player. So we ended up taking roles.

“When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally, but also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar.

“And this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. Even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy.

“But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, ‘You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet.’”

On the other hand, Richards explained, Wood was a natural for the Stones. No rehearsals or changes of any kind were needed when he joined the band in 1975.

“No, that was the beauty of it. He was already so familiar with our stuff. After Mick Taylor left, we rehearsed for about six months with a lot of good guitar players from all over the world. And we could work with them, you know, they could work with us.

“But when Ronnie became available and suddenly walked in, that was it. There was no doubt. It was easy.”

Richards said the interplay between them was so easy that one would naturally fill in for the other.

“If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me,” Richards said.

“And you think at the time, Oh, my God, what a gap, but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very unthought-about way. We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.”

Richards says that sort of easy interaction has a lot to do with his and Woody’s long partnership and the Stones’ continued longevity.

“A lick on a record — it doesn't matter who played it. All that matters is how it fits. The chemistry to work together like that has to be there. You have to work on it. Always. Figure out what to do with it.

“But basically it's not an intellectual thing you can think up and just put there. It has to be there. You have to find it.”

If Pete Townshend initially felt awkward onstage, he quickly found his comfort zone. By the early years of the Who’s existence, Townshend had developed a repertoire of stage moves that made him one of the most dynamic guitar players to grace a stage in the 1960s and ’70s.

Equipment trashing was saved for the end of the shows, but long before then fans would have seen the guitarist perform his signature moves: the flying leap, the feedback pose and — perhaps most famous of all — the windmill, an arm-swinging acrobatic display in which he strikes the strikes the strings of his electric guitar with a sweeping motion from above or below.

Townshend uses the move like physical punctuation, emphasizing a downbeat or adding drama to a sustained chord. And while it’s associated with him and no one else, he’s never taken credit for creatingn it. Rather, he says Keith Richards did it first around 1964, in one of the Rolling Stones’ earliest performances.

“[The Who] supported the Stones for two shows,” Townshend explained in 2012 in an interview with David Letterman. “They were young, they were brand new and they had one hit, with a Chuck Berry song called ‘Come On.’ I met them backstage and they were all very charming.

"As the curtain opened, Keith Richards is doing this,” Townshend said, standing up to demonstrate the windmilling motion. "I was thinking, Wow, that’s so cool! I thought it was part of his thing.

“A couple of weeks later, we supported them again in a club in south London. I’m watching carefully, waiting, and he didn’t do it.”

At the first chance, Townshend asked Richards why he didn't perform the windmill.

“He went, ‘What?’” Townshend recalled. “I can’t tell you what exactly what he said, but the inference was, ‘I’m Keith Richards. Do you really think I’m gonna do ballet?’ That was the inference.”

Richards had actually addressed the matter some 30 years earlier in our April 1983 issue.

“I never took credit for this. but apparently he said that he lifted that arm swing he does from seeing me,” Keef said. “I don't recall doing it, but I guess if he says so, he did. It's something I've never been aware of.”

Of course, pnce Richards denied performing the move, Townshend felt free to adopt it for himself. After years of working at it, he had the windmill perfected by the time the Who became a global touring act in the 1970s. By then he was saving the move for the big downbeat at the top of “Baba O’Riley” to bring the audience to its feet. Townshend made it look powerful and athletic, and even easy.

But as he told Guitar Player in our October 1989 issue, the antic is fraught with danger

“As soon as we'd hit ‘Baba O'Riley,’ I'd go djaaang, swing, swing, all my fingernails would just get broken off across,” he said. “And from then on I would be in absolute agony for the rest of the tour. I wouldn't be able to sleep. You know, at night my hand would be throbbing.

“And the other thing is, when you swing your arm and you've got a cut finger, blood pours out of it at a great rate, and it goes all over your strings.

“I’ve seen a lot of people do arm swings,” he added, “and I've never seen anybody do it right.”

Townshend explained that most guitarists who imitate the move splay their fingers out and use them to strum the guitar at the critical point of contact. That’s doing it wrong.

“The right method is to bleed, you know?” he said. “Your hand and the pick have to connect with the fucking strings.

“You don't open your fingers up and just sort of slap.

“And you have to be able to do it in a downward direction as well as an upward direction. Doing it from the top is right easy, but coming up from below...you know, you're going around, the string catches under your fingernail, carves it back, pulls it out and then goes poing, backwards. If you get it wrong.”

Townshend had decided by the time of our interview he was finished with the windmill. Like his habit of playing loudly — which resulted in deafening tinnitus — the windmill was destined to become a relic of his past.

“I just don't want to do that anymore. It's another example of the way that I developed a way of working which is disabling.”

Of course, he could hardly stop himself. The guitarist continues to perform the windmill in concert to this day — just quite a bit more carefully.

The Who have announced the group will play its last U.S. shows in August and September this year. However, despite his recent admission that playing live doesn’t “fill my soul” anymore, Townshend has offered hints that the band may take to stages again outside of the U.S.

The story behind the fuzz pedal’s creation is well known to most guitarists, but it goes a little something like this. The effect was born on July 12, 1960, while country superstar Marty Robbins was cutting the song “Don’t Worry” at Bradley Film & Recording Studios in Nashville, better known as the Quonset Hut. Hired for the session was guitarist Grady Martin, who brought along his Danelectro UB-2 six-string bass guitar.

Studio house engineer Glenn Snoddy was running the board, a newly installed custom-built recording console featuring Langevin 116 tube amplifiers. Martin’s guitar, used for the song’s solo, was being sent directly into the console, rather than through an amp.

To everyone’s surprise, when Snoddy played back the take, Martin’s six-string bass sounded like a swarm of bees.

In a 2014 interview with the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM)’s Oral History Program, Snoddy put the problem down to one of the board’s 35 output transformers.

“Prior to making the transformers, they misjudged the windings somehow or other, and there were 250 volts going through the winding instead of the transformers,” he said. “And one malfunctioned at the exact time that Grady was playing his guitar solo through it and it caused this sound, which we called later a fuzz tone sound.”

According to Snoddy, it was Martin who suggested they keep it.

“Grady said, ‘Why don’t we just use that on this record?’” the engineer recalled in the 2010 book How Does It Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear.

Martin’s advice was well taken. Released in February 1961, some six months after it was recorded, “Don’t Worry” became Robbins’ seventh number one on the country chart, and crossed over to the pop chart, where it peaked at number three.

But before that happened, Snoddy’s fuzz circuit had died, taking with it that magic sound. By then, artists were calling the Quonset Hut to ask if they could get the fuzz tone on their recordings. Snoddy decided to replicate the circuit in a pedal format with an old friend, engineer Revis Hobbs. Together the pair set to work on a circuit design using transistors, and re-created the fuzz sound by clipping the signal’s sine wave to a square wave.

“I got some transistors, and we rigged up a thing, and we eventually sold it to Gibson,” he recalled

Gibson introduced the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone the following year, in 1962. Although the pedal initially met with a muted public response, it finally took off in 1965 after Keith Richards used an FZ-1 to record his lead riff on the Rolling Stones hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Ever since, fuzz has been an essential part of the electric guitar tone arsenal.

But between Snoddy’s circuit failing and the birth of the FZ-1 are at least three recording artists who helped maintain interest in the effect, all of which helped launch it to its rightful place as an essential pedal in guitarists’ rigs.

The first is the man behind the six-string bass guitar on that transformational session: Grady Martin. As an established Nashville player, Martin knew a thing about making hit records. By 1961, he’d already enjoyed a long career as one of country music’s most in-demand guitarists and become a member of the Nashville A-Team, who, like their counterparts in L.A., the Wrecking Crew, would define the sound of numerous records, including Marty Robbins’ 1959 hit “El Paso.”

Martin liked the sound of Snoddy’s failing circuit so much that he made at least two other fuzz-guitar songs with it. “Tippin’ In” and “The Fuzz,” both instrumentals, were recorded on January 12, 1961 and issued together as a single that same month — before the February release of “Don’t Worry.” Neither was a hit for Martin, but “The Fuzz” likely sealed the deal when it came to the effect’s name.

Martin’s adoption of the fuzz effect didn’t go unnoticed by Snoddy, who appreciated the guitarist’s keen ear for sound. Unfortunately, the circuit was dead by the time those sides were out and “Don’t Worry” was climbing the charts.

What pushed Snoddy to re-create the effect in a pedal? He said the final straw was when Bradley had to turn away Nancy Sinatra when she came looking to use the sound on her next record.

"We had an artist, Nancy Sinatra, that called and wanted to come in and make a record,” the engineer explained. “When she got there, we had to tell her that the console that was causing that sound, the amplifier, had quit, and we couldn't do it anymore.

“They didn't like that at all,” he said with a laugh. “I told [Quonset Hut owner and producer] Harold Bradley that I'd have to see if I could make one and get it going."

So is Nancy Sinatra the mother of the fuzz pedal? It’s a little hard to imagine the young singer was interested in Snoddy’s fuzz sound. Consider that, in 1961, Sinatra was just launching her career as a teenybopper singer of saccharine love songs that often featured orchestrations, not fuzzed-out guitars. Her confidently sassy breakthrough success “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” was still four years away.

What's more, Sinatra was recording for her father’s new label, Reprise, located in Los Angeles. Frank Sinatra had recorded his own early Reprise sides in L.A., at United Recorders. Why would Nancy look to record in Nashville? And would a raunchy guitar sound really be in keeping with the sweet-girl image she was cultivating in 1961?

Whatever the case, let's take Snoddy at his word; Sinatra, after all, would have had license to record wherever she damn well pleased. But note that she didn’t cut a song with fuzz guitar until her 1967 hit, “You Only Live Twice,” the theme from the James Bond film of the same name.

But another dusky-voiced young singer getting a start on her career did use the fuzz effect on a single in 1961. What’s more, she did it in Nashville, just a few months after “Don’t Worry” ‘came out.

Ann-Margret was just 20 years old and on her way to a successful career as a vocalist and movie actress when she released her first single for RCA Victor, the heartfelt “Lost Love,” early that year. Soon after, she followed it up with the very fuzzy — and more adult — “I Just Don’t Understand.”

Recorded at RCA Victor Studio B, Nashville on May 9, 1961, and produced by Chet Atkins, “I Just Don’t Understand” features Billy Strange on electric fuzz guitar. Strange, who would go on to record for the Beach Boys as part of the Wrecking Crew, reportedly had his guitar tone altered by overdriving the input preamp on a channel of the recording console. (He would even go on to record his own version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction.”)

“I Just Don't Understand" was a hit for Ann-Margret, reaching 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1961 and furthering fuzz guitar’s insinuation into the American psyche.

To be clear, there’s little chance Snoddy misremembered Ann-Margret as Nancy Sinatra. As an RCA Victor artist, she was unlikely to record in a rival studio like the Quonset Hut, which catered largely to artists on Decca, MGM and Columbia, the latter of which bought the studio from Bradley in 1962.

But Ann-Margret’s chart success says something about the popularity of fuzz in 1961, before the development of the Fuzz-Tone. Had Snoddy not put the sound in a box, chances are someone else would have.

As for Grady Martin, he continued to use the fuzz effect well after Snoddy’s circuit kicked the bucket, creating a quartet of sides that slot neatly into the garage-rock genre.

In February 1962, Martin used fuzz on both sides of his single “Twist and Turn”/“Good Good Good,” released in April 1962. He employed it as well on two other songs cut at this session: “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Big Bad Guitar,” both included on the 1963 album That Good Grady, cut with the Slewfoot Five.

Two years later, those same two recordings would be reissued with vocal overdubs and credited to Beauregard and the Tuffs. No doubt it was this raucous cut of “Ramblin’ Rose” that inspired the MC5’s version from their 1969 album, Kick Out the Jams, which in turned launched a new wave of garage rock that gave birth to punk.

Given that Snoddy’s circuit was long gone by the time Grady cut those sides, it’s anybody’s guess how he achieved his fuzz effect. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if he used the FZ-1.

Rock and roll is full of intriguing "nearly happened" moments. Jeff Beck could have joined the Yardbirds, Rudy Sarzo nearly didn’t join Ozzy Osbourne’s band (a move that kickstarted his long career), and Dave Navarro had the chance to team up with Slash in Guns N’ Roses.

And then there's Harvey Mandel, the former Canned Heat guitarist who made his name with his deft two-handed tapping techniques in the 1970s. Mandel says he nearly became a Rolling Stone, but one person stopped that from happening.

It started with a phone call from Mick Jagger in the middle of the night in 1976. As is often the case in these stories, Mandel assumed he was being pranked.

“I thought it was somebody goofing around at first,” he tells Guitar World. “But after I talked with him on the phone for a few minutes, I realized this was Mick Jagger.

“They were in Germany at the time, and he said, ‘Well, we want you to come to Germany…’ He didn’t really say it was an ‘audition’ to join the Stones; he wanted me to come and play to be a part of the record.”

Mandel jumped at the opportunity. For that reason alone, his playing can be heard on "Hot Stuff" and "Memory Hotel" from the Stones’ 1976 album, Black and Blue. It was the first studio album since 1971's Sticky Fingers that the band had tracked without second guitarist Mick Taylor, who left the band two years earlier.

Richards had handled most of the record’s guitar parts with Wayne Perkins, who had previously recorded with the Wailers and Joni Mitchell. Yet, despite Mandel’s excellent playing and best efforts to fit in, he says Richards blocked his path to a permanent spot in the band.

“Ronnie Wood came in the next day, and Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards were pals,” Mandel explains. “They grew up together and hung out. Mick Jagger wanted me to play. Keith Richards wanted Ronnie Wood — who won out because Keith had the power to insist that it was Ronnie Wood, or else. So I kind of got aced out.”

Wood, who had risen through the ranks as a bass player in the Jeff Beck Group and as an electric guitar player in the Small Faces, is still a Rolling Stone today. But Mandel still believes he was better suited to the job.

“Ronnie was a nice guy,” he says. “I played at his club and hung out with him a couple of times. But let’s face it: he ain’t no Mick Taylor, and he’s no Harvey Mandel. He’s what I call a C-plus guitar player.”

It’s a bold claim, but he feels Wood’s greatest asset was one that the band already had in its ranks.

“He had the show, and he could jump around and be part of the craziness, but he never impressed me as an actual player,” he concludes. “So, I think they would have been much better off musically if I was the one playing because they didn’t need Ronnie Wood for the show. Mick Jagger was the show.”

Mandel’s full chat with GuitarWorld.com is due to be published later this month.

There are plenty of musical "what ifs" out there in the ether. From the possibilities of the Beatles continuing to make music together throughout the 1970s, to a world where Bob Dylan never went electric, to the debated direction that Jimi Hendrix's music may have taken had he lived beyond 27. However, a scenario where Jeff Beck joined the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd probably wasn't on anyone's bingo card.

But that's exactly what the British guitar icon revealed to Alice Cooper in a chat in 2010.

As Beck explains it in the recently resurfaced video clip, he was completely unaware that the remaining members of Pink Floyd were hesitant to approach him about joining the band. He tells Cooper he "didn't know until about a week ago that they were after me," and said they were "all afraid to come and ask me to be in the band."

This all seems to have occurred during the mid to late 1960s, when Beck, following his stint with the Yardbirds, was already a legend on electric guitar. The band found themselves at a crossroads due to fragile frontman Syd Barrett's declining state caused by a combination of psychedelic drug use and mental health problems.

Surprisingly, Beck wasn't sure if he'd even seen the band perform at the time. "I may have seen them at the Speakeasy Club in London," he tells Cooper. "But because it was so dark in there, and they were all prismatic, they could have changed personnel every day, and you wouldn't have noticed."

David Gilmour, of course, ended up being the perfect fit for the role, but considering Pink Floyd's psychedelic and somewhat cosmic soundscapes of the time, Beck's scorching solo work could have fit right in — and then some.

Of course, the Floyd collab happened in part with Beck when he contributed guitar parts on Roger Waters' 1992 album, Amused to Death. He also shared the stage with David Gilmour on more than one occasion.

Later on in the short video clip, Beck reveals that he found himself flirting with another legendary band only a few short years later, as the Rolling Stones were hunting for a new guitarist after Mick Taylor's departure in 1975. However, as he tells it, it was a nonstarter and clearly never truly in the cards.

"I'd already agreed to do the Blow by Blow album. It was all set," Beck explains. "They said, 'Come over and play a couple of tracks.' That's what I did. And then when I went to go, they went, 'Where are you going?!'"

Despite the opportunity, Beck knew it wasn't the right fit. "Me and Keith would never have got on," he tells Cooper bluntly. "They were gloriously sloppy... on an Olympic scale. But that's the miracle of the Stones. I kind of like the fact that they're a sloppy bar band. I think that makes it cool."

"I asked Charlie at the end, 'Do you guys know any endings?' He says, 'No, we really don't. We never practiced. We just stop the song somewhere.'"

Ultimately, Beck clearly had no regrets about any missed opportunities, and even suggested his old bandmate Ronnie Wood for the job. "It's a good job I recommended him, isn't it?" he says before sharing one final amusing interaction with the band's bassist, Bill Wyman. "I actually picked Bill's bass guitar up and started playing like Larry Graham, and dust flew off. It smelled like an antique shop. And he said, 'Oi, you're going to break a string!' I went, 'All right, Bill.' Yeah, I'll leave that one alone."

"I couldn't feel the calling," Beck says. "There was something going on up there that definitely would have prevented either of those from happening."

In the end, we all benefited musically from the direction that all of the parties involved went. However, you still can't help but wonder what Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" or the Stones' "Start Me Up" would have sounded like with Beck's unique approach to the instrument—and unfortunately, we'll never know.

You have to hunt through Beck's YouTube channel for more from this candid interview with Cooper. However, another clip from the sit-down shows the guitarist discussing his love of Les Paul, whom he had described as his "hero" and a "musical pioneer" on more than one occasion, stating:

"He was the first guy that came out with a fast, very trebly-sounding guitar with a slap echo, you know, in '49 or something," Beck explained, feeling that he's had to defend Paul's legacy at times.

Beck also recounts a story where he was being interviewed. "I remember some snotty journalist laughing when I said Les Paul because he was so passé," Beck recounted. "And I said, 'Excuse me, pal, without him, I wouldn't be here, and a good many of you bastards wouldn't either.'" Well said, Jeff. Well said.

This interview with the late Andy Johns was originally published in the May 2010 issue of Guitar Player.

By 1972, producer/engineer Andy Johns already had a hall of fame caliber resume, having worked with Free, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and many others. But it was then that he began work on a record that would come to be regarded as a milestone for everyone involved, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. Now, with the reissue of Exile dominating the music biz, Johns looks back on the wild times of making that record.

What were some of the guitar rigs that Keith and Mick Taylor used?

“The majority of the time in the south of France they had these Ampegs that were very high wattage, I remember someone saying they were 300 watts, which seemed crazy to me because they were 2x12 combo amps, but they were jolly loud. I thought they were fantastic and I’ve never seen them anywhere else. At the time, the Stones had an endorsement with Ampeg. Some of the tracks on Exile were left over from previous sessions and those would have Fender Twins. 

“Stop Breaking Down was a Fender Twin for both of them. 80 percent was the Ampeg setup. Keith had a very nice Tele and Mick would play a Gibson ES-335 and a Les Paul. He also had an Epiphone; I guess it was a Casino. Then we had a week off when Bianca Jagger was having a baby and when we got back all the guitars had been stolen – every last one. So Stu [Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart] went out and got some more. So, take a song like Rocks Off; the two rhythm guitars are a ’55 or ’56 Telecaster – a very good sound.”

What do you recall about the tracking the guitars on Tumbling Dice? How did those sessions go?

“The recording for Tumbling Dice went on for about two weeks. I had 40 or 50 reels of tape. Trying to get everyone in the same room at the same time in a good mood was very tough. The arrangement was being changed around a lot. It was tough to get a groove on that one and it was tried in various different formats. 

“I remember Keith sitting in his chair playing the refrain over and over again for two or three hours without moving. That was in the afternoon before anybody got there. He was trying to lock in the hypnotic part of the vibe. Keith was relentless. You could tell when you had a great take but it was Keith who had to say, ‘Yeah, that’s it.‘ He was sort of running the music.

“In the end we got a very good take up until the breakdown. Charlie had a bit of a mental block about the breakdown and outro section, so we did an edit section and Jimmy Miller played the ending. I suggested that we double track the drums. Charlie said, ‘Well I’ve never done that before.‘ I said, ‘Let’s just give it a shot to thicken it up.‘ So he played the double-tracked drums up until the breakdown and then Jimmy Miller doubled his drums in the end. That one went on and on and on. 

“I think Rocks Off took a bit of time, too. It wasn’t so much that we’d work for 12 hours and not have anything to show for it. It was more about getting everyone in the room at the same time willing to work without any distractions.”

What tune was the easiest to record from a guitar standpoint?

“Probably All Down the Line. Happy was also pretty easy. I think we got that the first day.”

What can you say about the interplay between Mick Taylor and Keith Richards?

“Mick would play the top lines. Keith would write the songs most of the time, Mick [Jagger] would come up with the lyrics and melody, and Mick Taylor would just play around whatever they came up with. There was a little bit of tension from time to time. I remember once, Keith said, ‘You play too fucking loud. I can’t work with you in the room right now,’ which is a great line coming from Keith. That was just band politics that evening.

“The thing that astonished me about Mick Taylor is that he would come up with something different every take and it was usually just faultless. Intonation on slide can be a little tough, but he would jump two, three octaves, and the note was always spot on and his vibrato was excellent. I had a very joyous time listening to him. 

“Mick had the technique of having a bottleneck on his little finger and then he would play chords with the other three fingers. He would play live on everything – he didn’t do overdubs. He would play exceptionally well on every take. And Keith, well, he came up with those magical rhythm parts that the songs were based upon.”

What was it like when they were all playing together?

“In those days you knew you weren’t going to get anything good until Keith started leaning over and looking at Charlie and then Bill got up out of his chair. They could play really shabby. Then, over the course of five minutes, it would turn from fairly shabby into magic. It was my job to capture those magic moments.”

What involvement have you had with the Exile reissues?

“I did a voice over on the DVD part of the package. I’ve done tons of interviews. But I haven’t had any musical involvement. I talked to Keith about the reissue a couple of months ago. I said, ‘Shit man, I should be doing that because I know more about it than anyone.’ I said, ‘I should send you the new Steve Miller that I’m working on, it’s Chicago blues.’ He said, ‘You send me yours and I’ll send you mine,’ and of course I sent it to him and he never sent me anything. So they didn’t let me put my hands on it, which is a drag.

“I think it has something to do with me turning Mick Jagger down years ago. I had shaken hands with Les Dudek on a Wednesday. We were in the workshop at the old Record Plant. Les asked me to do his record and I said yes and he said let’s shake on it, so we did. The next day Mick calls and asks if I want to come to Paris to do an album. I said, ‘Fuck, of course I do but I can’t. I shook hands with somebody yesterday.’

“I should have just called Les Dudek and said, ‘Listen mate, you’re going to have to wait,’ but I was trying to be honorable. And Mick said, ‘I don’t understand.’ I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for that.”

Did you have any sense at the time that Exile would come to be regarded as such an important album?

“I knew that from my end it was the most important thing that I had ever worked on, and I had worked on Sticky Fingers, and worked with George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Jethro Tull, Free, Clapton, and, of course, Led Zeppelin. But for me this was the most important project that had come down the pike and I was fixated on it.

“I think I knew more about what was on the tapes than anybody else because I was concentrating so hard. I knew what all the details were and that’s why in the end Mick said, ‘Here are the tapes, go mix the bloody thing. You’ve got three days. Goodbye.’ Everyone else was sick of the damn thing.

“It was as important a part of my life as anything had been. It was like going to school in a way because I learned about perseverance. I also learned that there was another way to live, beyond the norm as it were, because there was some behavior that was… I don’t know. It was all good fun.

“It was an epic production. It went on for a very long time. I’d never worked in that fashion before, living in the south of France on the Mediterranean with the Rolling Stones. And at that time you’ve got to remember that the Beatles had broken up and the Beach Boys weren’t doing much – the Rolling Stones were the center of the bloody universe for rock and roll. And rock and roll back then meant a little bit more than it does now. 

“It had social significance, breaking down the establishment and all that. It represented the way a generation felt about things. It had more meaning than it does now. Now it’s just, ‘Oh I like that music, I’ll buy it or download it.’ 

“Back then it was almost like a bloody religion and the Stones were at the center of everything. So if you could put yourself in my shoes, you’re at the center of the universe, you’re working with the Stones in the south of France, you’re working at Keith Richards' house, you’re getting paid really well, and you’re only 21 so you have your youth, and the music is just fabulous. What is there to complain about?”

"So who does every kid that picks up a guitar want to be?” producer Andrew Watt asks. “You want to be Keith Richards, right? That’s the whole fucking thing! So making this record and working with the Rolling Stones, earning their trust, was the honor of my lifetime.” 

Watt, at 32, is still a little giddy from working with the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band on their new album, Hackney Diamonds, and who can blame him? 

Even though he’s arguably the music industry’s hottest producer, having collaborated with everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Eddie Vedder to Miley Cyrus, the native New Yorker is still buzzing from his time producing the Stones and their legendary guitar duo of Richards and Ronnie Wood. 

“I’ve seen the Rolling Stones play countless times,” he continues. “I said to Keith, ‘It’s like you plucked a freak from behind the barricade and let him produce your album.’” 

Watt is a fanboy for sure, and his enthusiasm — not to mention his impressive collection of electric guitars and amps — resonates throughout Hackney Diamonds, arguably the Stones’ best work since 1978’s Some Girls. 

But despite his genuine love for the band, he was no pushover, prompting singer Mick Jagger to comment, “We got a producer called Andy Watt who kicked us up the ass.” 

Watt told Guitar Player just how hard he put the boot in...

How did this project come together? 

In our initial conversations, the band explained that they were facing some creative roadblocks. There was a lot of stop-and-start in their initial process, so it became my job to help facilitate slamming the ball in the end zone. 

It must’ve been intimidating to tell Keith Richards to get his ass in gear. 

I don’t think that ever happened. He’s armed with a knife at all times! [laughs] But the band had given me a clear directive, and in my line of work, results are what matter. So I didn’t waste time bullshitting. I just tried to make it clear that it was time to focus and get to work. 

How did you do that? 

I had a bass and just started playing with Keith. I was of the mind that if I could earn his respect as a player, then I could communicate with him musically and offer suggestions chord-wise or inversion-wise or tone-wise or whatever. And we just got into it. 

Then, when we started recording the basic rhythm tracks in L.A., I sat next to Keith in the live room across from Mick and Ronnie. That was an extremely important part of the process for me. I wanted to make sure the sounds were good, and as we were going through the takes, I was able to remember the performances, because I was right there. If we got a good take, we just moved on immediately. 

After we did the basic tracking of roughly 23 songs, we got into overdubs. I think it was during the overdub sessions that I really earned Keith’s respect and trust. It was very important to me that all of his parts were done before Mick added his final vocals, and we really worked hard together to accomplish that. 

What was it like to work with Keith and Ronnie? How prepared were they, or did you guys work out arrangements in the studio? 

Many of the songs had been developed over time. So after we listened to whatever the most recent demo was, everyone would start familiarizing themselves with the song, and we would play it a few times until everyone had it down cold. 

And this is where it gets interesting: Instead of using the final take, we would use the previous take, because it still had that spark of spontaneity — the take where people were still searching. 

The worst part of contemporary music is how producers often kill a performance in search of perfection. 

I make loop-based music with some of my other clients, but I don’t want to hear the Stones like that. No one wants to hear the Stones on some grid. 

Can you talk a bit more about how Keith and Ronnie work together? 

Listen to a classic Stones song like “Beast of Burden.” You can’t tell who’s playing lead and who’s playing rhythm, and if you muted one of them, it would sound sparse. They fill the holes together so beautifully, and that’s apparent on the whole record. 

Take a song like “Angry.” They pause to exchange licks, one handling the rhythm while the other responds. They watch, listen and engage in this incredible musical dialogue. If you want to really check it out for yourself, I purposely mixed it so 90 percent of Keith’s parts are on the left and Ronnie’s are on the right.

There are at least two tracks I’d love to know more about. The first is “Bite My Head Off,” featuring Paul McCartney on that gnarly fuzz bass. 

This is part of a much longer story, but essentially, I was working with both Paul and the Stones during roughly the same period. The Stones’ regular bassist, Darryl Jones, isn’t on the album at all because he was on tour, so everybody was taking turns playing bass, including me, Keith, Ronnie and Bill Wyman. 

One day, while speaking with Paul, I thought, Why not invite him to play bass on a song? I realized it was a significant request: Can we get someone from the Beatles to play in the Stones? But surprisingly, both Mick and Paul were like, Sure, no problem, sounds like fun. They were so nonchalant. 

I reviewed the list of songs slated for recording. The typical choice might have been to place him on one of the ballads, such as “Dreamy Skies.” However, I thought, how cool would it be to play on the most aggressive punk-rock track on the album? I knew Paul loved to rock, and they had a great time recording “Bite My Head Off.” They were all laughing like teenagers. 

How did Paul achieve that fantastic distortion on his bass? 

As Paul and I were becoming friends, I decided to get him a gift. I got him another lefty ’64 Hofner, similar to the one he played in the Beatles. However, I added a twist: my guitar tech installed a Univox Super Fuzz circuit on the Hofner that could be activated with a switch. 

When I gave it to Paul, he said, “This is an incredibly thoughtful gift, but why? I already have my Beatles Hofner — why another one?” I was like, “Just plug it in and give that extra switch a try.” Suddenly his eyes widened, and he just started ripping on it. I told him to bring it to the recording session, and he couldn’t stop laughing. 

I shared the song with Paul the day before, and when we entered the studio with the band, he brought out the bass. During the breakdown section of the song, he activated the Super Fuzz switch, and it was complete carnage! Everyone was like, “What the fuck was that?” It was hilarious and so cool. 

I think we recorded just three takes of that song, but almost immediately, Keith and Ronnie were on their feet, and Mick dragged the mic into the middle of the room and the roof left the building. 

I think Paul really enjoyed that he was just a guy in a band again with friends that he’s known for 60 years. It had been a long time since he was with equals, just plugging in his bass and doing a session. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face for a very long time. 

Did Keith and Ronnie use any unexpected guitars or amps on the album? 

Keith brought in his usual amp rig, which consists of four amps that he’s been using for a long time — a setup that’s well documented. However, just to switch things up, I brought in five amps that had been worked on by the late and legendary Howard Dumble. Keith was particularly drawn to one of the Dumble-modified 1958 Fender Twins, which he used for a bunch of his overdubs. It just had a magical sound. 

Also, in addition to his ’54 Tele and Gibson ES-355, Keith also played a Dan Armstrong guitar on a few tracks. One of my all-time favorite performances by Keith is a version of “Midnight Rambler” at a gig at the Marquee Club in 1971. 

You can watch it online. He’s playing a Lucite Dan Armstrong guitar, and it sounds incredible. Unfortunately, it was stolen years ago, so I bought a ’69 just like it and brought it in, and he used it on some tracks. 

Keith also used a ’55 TV Yellow Gibson single-cut Les Paul Junior on “Angry” and “Mess It Up.” Ronnie used the Junior on “Bite My Head Off,” but most of the time he played his Strat, which is either a ’54 or ’55, and the Zemaitis he used on the Faces’ hit “Stay With Me.” It was pretty funny. 

Every time he plugged the Zemaitis in, we’d make him play “Stay With Me,” and everyone would sing along at the top their lungs.

One of the best tracks on the album is Mick and Keith’s powerful duet of Muddy Waters’ classic “Rollin’ Stone” [called “Rolling Stone Blues” on the album]. From what I understand, that was your idea. 

Yeah. During our overdub sessions, Keith and I started talking in a more personal way. One day I just asked him how he met Mick, and he told me the story. He said he saw this kid getting on the train in Dartford and under his arm were two albums: The Best of Muddy Waters and the first Chuck Berry album. 

Both were Chess Records imports, which were almost impossible to find in England at that time. Keith said, Mick “was either going to be my best friend or I was going to rob him.” [laughs] They, of course, wound up being best friends and started playing together. 

But The Best of Muddy Waters was important for another reason. One of the tracks on the album — “Rollin’ Stone” gave the band its name. The idea of asking them to play that song didn’t hit me right away, but the germ of the idea was there. 

So when did the idea of having Mick and Keith play “Rolling Stone Blues” click? 

It didn’t happen immediately. One day, while hanging out with Keith in New York, he was sitting with me talking. But I found it hard to focus on his words because he had an old Martin acoustic in hand, and he was playing the most primal blues I had ever heard in my life. 

Not many people can play blues like that. Robert Johnson could, Muddy Waters could, and Keith Richards certainly can. He seemed possessed by something, channeling the essence of the blues. 

It wasn’t about complexity; it was about having it in your soul, and Keith had it in spades. It was surprising. I never really thought of him playing a slow Robert Johnson blues, but it’s what he really loves. So I made a mental note of it. 

After that experience, I told Mick that I thought he and Keith should do a straight acoustic blues for the album. Mick found the idea intriguing but was initially noncommittal, given the many other songs we had to complete. 

But as the record started falling into place, I pushed him again on the idea. Sometimes that goes well, and other times it does not. [laughs] 

Suddenly, I heard a change in his voice, and he said firmly, “I have 23 songs I’m trying to write the lyrics for. I don’t have any blues lyrics.” So I retreated a little bit and didn’t push. That’s where things stood with Mick. 

So what led to the change? 

At one point, Keith began telling me the story about how the band got its name, and as he was telling me that, I just asked the dumbest question: Have you guys ever played “Rollin’ Stone” before? He thought for a second and said, no they hadn’t — which sorta surprised him. 

They had played every other Muddy Waters song, but ironically, never that song. And that’s when I pounced and asked whether he would consider playing it for this record. Keith said he knew it backwards and forward, but the decision ultimately rested with Mick. 

I said, “Give me a second and I’ll call him.” So I went in the other room, and I called him. I was excited and said, “You don’t have to write any blues lyrics because you can just tackle Muddy’s ‘Rollin’ Stone.’” 

There was a long pause on the phone. At first, I thought he was going be angry that I was pushing the blues idea again, but then he just said, “Okay, when do you want to do it?” We were finishing up our overdub session, so I suggested doing it that day. 

As Mick made his way to the studio, Keith began playing the song. And now the hairs were raising on everyone’s arms in the studio. They were finally going to record the song that inspired the band’s name. 

The sound of Keith’s guitar is so powerful on that track. How did you accomplish that mixture of acoustic resonance and electric distortion? It’s undeniably unique. 

I made the decision with Paul Lamalfa, my engineer, that we would record on tape, because there was no better way to capture the essence of the moment. The goal was to capture the magic of two musicians in a room. 

We aimed to re-create the vibe of Muddy’s original recording, and if there were ever two guys who could do it, it was Keith and Mick. 

Keith, along with his guitar tech, Pierre De Beauport, and I listened closely to Muddy’s original recording as a reference. We were like, “Is that an electric guitar?” It seemed unlikely; he was playing acoustic back then, yet the sound was so heavy because of the way he played and how it was recorded. 

So I said, “I have an acoustic 1930 Gibson L-4 with me,” which is like the L-1 guitar associated with Robert Johnson. Keith was like, “Oh, let me see it.” And so he started playing the song. He could play it beautifully, but it’s not an easy guitar to play. It was made before guitars had truss rods, so there was no way to really adjust the action. 

But this is when the universe does its thing. 

We started looking at these two pictures of Robert Johnson. There’s the one of him with a cigarette, and there’s the other one of him with the hat [shot from] further away. And we noticed in the photo of him with the cigarette that he had a capo on the second fret of his guitar. Keith caught that. So we all asked, Why is there a capo on the second fret? What does that mean?  

Most Robert Johnson songs are in the key of E and A. We theorized that maybe he tuned down the guitar a full step, to D, and put a capo on the second fret to bring the guitar back up to E so that the strings were looser and he could play and bend easier. So Pierre did exactly that with the L-4, then he handed it to Keith, who found it played effortlessly — like butter. 

Then we debated whether to record using an acoustic or an electric guitar. Meanwhile, Mick was on his way, and we needed a plan. Ultimately, we settled on trying it both ways and deciding later. We set up microphones for the L-4’s acoustic sound, and Pierre added a lipstick pickup to it, so we could rout a signal through all four amps in Keith’s setup, located in another room. 

The funny thing was, the volume was so loud from Keith’s amps that the electric sound from the other room began bleeding into the acoustic mic, creating a fantastic blend. 

Mick used a bullet microphone for his harmonica, that we routed through one of my Dumble-modified Fender Champs from the ’50s. He also used another mic for his vocals. However, as they played, Mick kept moving closer to Keith. Then Mick stood up, rendering the vocal mic unnecessary because he was right next to the room microphone that was capturing Keith’s guitar. 

Ultimately, the recording consisted primarily of this single room mic, along with a subtle mix of the four amps and a touch of the bullet microphone, which added an extra layer of edge to the harmonica. 

Neither of them wore headphones. It was simply the two of them, playing together. By the fourth take, they began to anticipate each other’s moves and complete each other’s musical sentences. While Keith crafted guitar licks, Mick responded on the harmonica, and they synchronized perfectly. It was an incredible demonstration of their yin-and-yang chemistry that had been developed over six decades. 

Without overstating it, I feel this recording encapsulates the essence of their enduring relationship. 

You were a witness to a genuine moment of music history. 

It was heavy. It’s probably the most important thing I’ll ever record.

Hackney Diamonds by the Rolling Stones is out now and available to buy or stream

On this day, in 1964, the Rolling Stones made their historical debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. The band kicked off their appearance on live national television to rapturous applause with a rendition of Chuck Berry’s Around and Around (originally the flip side to his 1958 Johnny B. Goode single).

Later in the show, the Stones performed their Time Is On My Side single. It was already creeping up the Billboard Hot 100 charts by the time the band appeared. It eventually peaked at number 6 the following month. It was the Stones' first hit on American soil as the British Invasion got underway following the Beatles’ record-breaking appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show earlier in February that year (when an estimated 73 million Americans tuned in to watch). 

As is obvious from the video, the audience struggles to contain themselves and Sullivan has to ask for quiet several times when trying to introduce them. In fact, CBS got many complaints after the broadcast and Ed Sullivan is said to have declared: “I promise you they’ll never be back on our show. It took me 17 years to build this show and I’m not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks.” 

The Stones’ manager tried to change Sullivan’s mind, but Ed wrote back before he would even consider booking them again, "I would like to learn from you, whether your young men have reformed in the matter of dress and shampoo.” 

But for guitar players, The Rolling Stones’ appearance is most notable for Keith Richards’ use of a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard. According to Gibson’s Head of Product Development, Mat Koehler, this was “the shot heard around the world,” that eventually brought the now iconic ‘Burst to the fore of the electric guitar world.

GP spoke to Richard Henry, a UK-based guitar dealer who has traded numerous ‘Bursts over the years, including the famous ‘Greeny’ Les Paul Standard. Now owned by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett the same guitar once belonged to guitar heroes Peter Green and Gary Moore.

He has also crossed paths with the infamous ‘Keith ‘Burst’ – a guitar that has passed through the hands of many a guitar legend over the decades…

Speaking of Richards’ old axe Henry told us: “The previous owner was a guy called John Bowen, who traded it in at Selmers [music store in London]. Keith bought it from there and famously used it on The Ed Sullivan Show in ’64.

“Later [in 1966] Clapton used it at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. Jimmy Page also used it in the studio. Ian Stewart, the Stones’ Road Manager, sold it to Mick Taylor who used it with the Bluesbreakers. Taylor brought it back into the Stones’ camp when he joined the band. There’s footage of him playing it at Hyde Park [in 1969.]

The rumors are it either got stolen at the Marquee [Club in London], or it got stolen in France at Villa Nellcôte. It then eventually ended up in the hands of Cosmo Verrico from the Heavy Metal Kids. He had it for a short while and then sold it to [UFO and Whitesnake guitarist] Bernie Marsden.

“Bernie had it for about a week and flipped it. Later it went to a guy called Mike Jopp who owned it for many years. Dave Brewis at Rock Stars Guitars sold it for Mike to an American investor. I think it currently resides in a private collection in New York.

“Someone asked me what I thought was the most historically important ‘Burst. I said it’s not Jimmy Page’s. It’s not Peter Green’s [Greeny]. It’s not Mike Bloomfield’s. It’s not Eric Clapton’s. And it’s not Jeff Beck’s. It’s Keith Richards’ because he was the first pop star to use a ‘Burst.”

Elsewhere on the show, Brian Jones plays a prototype Vox MK III “Teardrop” guitar  and Bill Wyman plays his trusty Framus Star Bass. 

Keith Richards is interviewed in the current issue of Guitar Player, onsale now and available to buy here.

“Who does every kid that picks up an electric guitar want to be?” asks producer Andrew Watts. “You want to be Keith Richards, right? That’s the whole fucking thing!”

The incomparable Keith Richards is the cover star of the latest issue of Guitar Player magazine, in a wide-ranging interview with both Keith and producer Andrew Watts that provides some insights into the making of the Rolling Stones' brilliant new album, Hackney Diamonds, as well as his incredible career and some of the many musicians he’s played with.

Hackney Diamonds is a true return to form for the band that has already been compared to some of their 70s classics, and features a range of guest stars, from Stevie Wonder to Lady Gaga, former bassist Bill Wyman, and one Paul McCartney – although it’s far from the first time that a Beatle has played on a Stones record. Lennon and McCartney wrote the Stones’ first hit, I Wanna Be Your Man, and were fast friends and collaborators.

“The Beatles and the Stones have been basically joined together at the hips from the beginning,” says Richards. “We were totally different bands, but we knew each other well. I think we first met them in the fall of ’62, when they came down to see us play in London, and from there, every now and again, we’d get in touch. Later, John and Paul sang on We Love You and on Dandelion. 

“We’ve always sort of been in touch,” he says. “Ronnie [Wood] and I used to hang with George Harrison quite a bit in the 1970s, so there’s always been an open door between the Beatles and the Stones. We were the only ones that knew what it’s like to have that extreme kind of fame in the 1960s, so that created a bond.”

Producer Andrew Watt was also working with McCartney during the recording of the album and, with the Stones without regular bass player Darryl Jones, he suggested McCartney drop by the sessions. McCartney brought a ‘64 Hofner Violin bass that Watt had given him as a gift, modded with a Univox Super Fuzz circuit. He used it on the track Bite My Head Off. “During the breakdown section of the song, he activated the Super Fuzz switch and it was complete carnage,” says Watt. “Everyone was like, ‘What the fuck was that?’”

In the interview, Richards opens up about his five-string Fender Telecaster tuned to open G [G, D, G, B, D]. Is it because it automatically creates a great blend with a standard six-string? we asked.

“Yeah, that’s part of it,” says Keith. “That’s the sound of a Stones record: a five-string with a six-string on top, and Ronnie. It always creates a beautiful blend. A great example is how it sounds with Ronnie’s Dobro on [the Hackney Diamonds track] Dreamy Skies. You always have to play around with the amps a bit, but guitars are amazing things. You can make an orchestra out of them with just a simple blend.”

Does eliminating the low sixth string open the mix up so that other instruments can be properly heard? “Yes! It’s always been the mystery to me why so much space opens up for other instruments by taking off the bottom string,” he says. “You’re right, but I can’t really put my finger on a reason why, but somehow that one extra note disappearing allows for all kinds of other instruments to come through. It’s just one of those things, I guess.”

The interview touches on life without Charlie Watts (“I still have conversations with the fucker”), the appearance of Bill Wyman on the album (“a reunion of sorts”) and the long-standing story of the time that the Stones auditioned Jeff Beck after the departure of Mick Taylor, in 1974.

“We felt that Jeff had his own furrow to plow and that he was not a team man,” says Richards. “He was a soloist to the max. He was such an individualist. It wouldn’t have worked with the Stones at all. We’re all about teamwork.

“But don’t get me wrong, he was a tremendous player. The odd times we got together, I was always amazed by the stuff that he did with his tremolo bar. He was one of the best, man, and he’s going to be missed.”

Read the full interview with Keith and Andrew Watt in the latest issue of Guitar Player, onsale now and available to buy here.

It's been a long, long time since we last got a studio album of new material from the Rolling Stones – 18 years, to be exact.

The band returned to their blues roots on 2016's energetic covers LP, Blue & Lonesome – their last new release before the death of their long-serving drummer, Charlie Watts, in 2021 – but now, we finally have some new material to chew on in the form of "Angry."

The lead single from a new LP from the band called Hackney Diamonds, "Angry" is a feisty little tune that sneers in the face of all the cries of "hang it up already!" You can check out its music video below.

Once you get past the novelty of the Stones – all three of whom are either 80 or rapidly approaching 80 – releasing a new album in 2023, there's actually quite a bit to dig into on this song. 

Yes, there's all the riffwork and tasty Keith Richards/Ronnie Wood electric guitar weaving you could ask for, and yet another emphatic performance from the ever-ageless Mick Jagger, but what's especially interesting is that the band doesn't necessarily play everything safely.

There's a very 21st century sheen to “Angry“'s chorus, but, just as they did with disco on “Miss You“ 45 years ago, the Stones use only the modern spices they need, while refraining from blind trend-chasing, and remaining true to themselves. 

Hackney Diamonds is said to contain 12 tracks, though no details about the other 11 have been revealed by the band's representatives as of yet.

In another nod to modern times, Hackney Diamonds was produced by Andrew Watt, who – aside from his best-selling work with Post Malone – has worked with legends like Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, and Elton John. The album is set for an October 20 release via Geffen, and can be pre-ordered here.

For more info on all things Rolling Stones, visit the band's website.

The Space Age inspired an era of fanciful guitar designs, like Gibson’s 1958 entrants, the Flying V and Explorer. Not as well known, but no less revolutionary, was Ampeg’s 1969 Dan Armstrong guitar, a comparatively late arrival that was just as eye catching and memorable. 

The guitar featured a clear body made of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), a substance that had been around since the 1930s and offered commercially as Plexiglas, Lucite and Perspex. 

Decidedly modernistic for its day, the Dan Armstrong electric guitar featured an outré design that kept it from being a major hit in the commercial sense, but its uptake by several star players quickly enshrined its status as an odd-duck classic.

The guitar was the product of a collaboration between New York City musician and guitar repairman Dan Armstrong and Ampeg, which then as now was best known for its big bass amps. 

The company had been looking to shake up its image and product line, and when Armstrong approached its representatives with his idea for a clear guitar at the 1968 NAMM show, Ampeg signed him up to work on its line of Grammer guitars. 

Armstrong allegedly brought in New York City guitar dealer and repairman Matt Umanov to assist with the guitar’s design, and Bill Lawrence, who shared space in Armstrong’s workshop, made the pickups. 

Offered in both guitar and bass versions starting in 1969, the instrument had so little in common with Ampeg’s offerings that it has almost always been known simply as the Dan Armstrong “Plexi” or “Lucite” guitar, or the “see-through” guitar.  

“We used Perspex because it’s hard and consistent, and you don’t have to worry about grain,” Armstrong told Guitar magazine’s Jeffrey Pike in 1973. “It gives good sustain, rather like a steel guitar.” 

Unfortunately, the material was both heavy – the guitars weighed an average of 10 pounds – and difficult to work with. 

“Everybody thinks you mold this stuff,” Armstrong said. “You don’t. The body is carved out of a solid board of plastic, like carving out of wood, except that instead of sanding it to finish, you polish it off. Boy, it’s expensive stuff!” 

In addition to its synthetic body, the guitar featured a pickguard and headstock overlay of Formica, which had found popular use in the making of dining tables and kitchen and bathroom counters since the late 1930s. 

Its faux wood-grain finish was itself possibly a nod to the emerging use of wood paneling in home decor, which would dominate in the early 1970s.  

One of the guitar’s more notable features was its removable pickup, which slid into and out of a channel routed in the body at the bridge position. The unit clipped directly into the rest of the electronics and was secured in place with a thumb screw on the guitar’s back. 

Noting that guitarists’ tastes for pickups was fairly fickle by the late ’60s, Armstrong and Lawrence produced six different pickups for the guitar in different output strengths and voicings called Rock, Country and Jazz and offered them in both bass and treble versions. 

Keen-eyed readers will note that the guitar has a three-way toggle switch in addition to its tone and volume controls, despite being a single-pickup instrument, but this was used for tone changes and muting, rather than for pickup selection.  

In one of its few nods to convention, the guitar carried a maple neck with a 24-fret rosewood fretboard and a 24.75-inch scale length. It attached to the body from the rear and was secured at the front with four bolts beneath the pickguard. 

The guitar’s bridge was likewise standard and arguably under-engineered with respect to the rest of the instrument, being a simple unit with a flat steel plate and single wood saddle piece, much like that used on many Danelectro guitars.

Notably, on the instrument featured here, the bridge has been modified to a Gibson Tune-o-matic. 

Launched in 1969, the Ampeg Dan Armstrong guitar’s biggest star endorsement came courtesy of the Rolling Stones, then raging through a transatlantic tour. Keith Richards embraced the Lucite guitar wholeheartedly, while Bill Wyman occasionally played the bass through his revolutionary new Ampeg VST and “fridge” cab. 

Faces (and future Stones) guitarist Ronnie Wood also took up the guitar, as did Arthur Lee of Love, Steppenwolf’s John Kay, Lou Reed (then with the Velvet Underground) and Spirit’s Randy California. 

Later adoptees included Joe Perry, Greg Ginn, Mike Campbell, Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and Television’s Tom Verlaine.   

The original production run of Ampeg Dan Armstrong guitars lasted only until 1971, and Armstrong himself moved to London in the early ’70s, where he continued repairing guitars and inventing related gear. 

He launched a wood-bodied guitar similar to his design for Ampeg, but most notable among his efforts was a line of small, cube-like effects units that plugged straight into the guitar’s output jack: the Orange Squeezer compressor, Green Ringer octave-fuzz, Blue Clipper fuzz, Purple Peaker frequency booster, Red Ranger linear booster, and Yellow Humper low and midrange booster (originally designed as a bass booster).  

The see-through guitar has been reissued several times over the years, both by Ampeg and as a licensed offshore production. Dan Armstrong passed away in 2004.

The mid-to-late ’60s psychedelic movement was a remarkable time when rock musicians began to see themselves as sonic pioneers, creating new sounds and developing innovative musical approaches.

The scene tends to be viewed, retrospectively, as limited to a few years of activity, mostly in London and on the U.S. West Coast. But in fact it was a much larger phenomenon that drove music, gear and production in innovative ways that are still relevant to this day.

But it had another impact, as well, in how it made us hear and think about sound.

I was born in the early 1960s and came of age, musically speaking, during the psych-rock boom. For my seventh birthday, I received a copy of the Doors’ Strange Days, an ambitious but odd record on which the band and their engineer, Bruce Botnick, experimented with electronics and new recording methods.

It joined my small but growing collection of albums, which included the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, a disc that gave the flowering psychedelic movement such gems as “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “In My Life,” with its baroque faux-harpsichord solo.

But I was about to go deeper into psychedelia’s ether.

About a year later, my collection came to include Their Satanic Majesties Request, one of the most reviled albums in the Rolling Stones’ catalog. Although it’s often dismissed as the group’s failed attempt to copy Sgt. Pepper’s, to my young ears it was a remarkable and even magical record.

Its wild sounds entranced me: bassist Bill Wyman’s heavily filtered vocals on “In Another Land,” the synthesizers that rendered wind effects and wild swoops on “2,000 Light Years From Home,” and the hammers and saws that popped up for no apparent reason on “She’s a Rainbow.”

But without a doubt, my favorite sound was Keith Richards’ distorted tremolo guitar tone on “Citadel,” one of the heaviest songs the Stones have ever written or recorded.

I don’t doubt for a second that Their Satanic Majesties Request molded and even warped my brain. It opened my mind to the magic of sound, which is how I’ve gravitated toward music, more than through stylistic choices.

It also made me question how those sounds were created, which sent me off on discoveries beyond the guitar and helped attune my ears to the intricacies of tone and frequency.

More than Sgt. Pepper’s, Satanic Majesties is the album that, for me, defines sonic experimentation and 1960s psychedelic music, with its indulgent and frequently headlong approach to songwriting, arranging and production.

It’s in that spirit of curiosity and discovery that we invite you to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, beginning with the tripped out “Citadel” lyric video…

Brian May doesn’t recall particulars about every Queen show. But there is one – roughly 50 years ago at London’s Imperial College, where the guitarist had previously studied physics as an undergrad – that sticks with him.

Why?

For one, it was Queen’s first gig to be reviewed in a newspaper – and if you’re wondering, yes, it was a positive write-up.

For another, because, in the 75-year-old guitarist’s words, “We had our full complement – we knew we finally had the right people in the band.”

These people, of course, were drummer Roger Taylor, with whom May had previously played in the late-’60s rock-pop-blues-progressive outfit Smile, Zanzibar-born singer Farrokh Bulsara, who by that time was answering to the name Freddie Mercury, and fresh-faced bassist John Deacon.

“So that was a big deal, for starters,” May says. But beyond the good reviews and winning combination of players onstage, May also recalls that performance being a standout thanks to the audience’s reaction.

“We had our first album coming out, and it felt like, for the first time, people knew what to expect from us,” he says. “The effect was phenomenal, because instead of going onstage and trying to persuade people that they might like what we do, we went onstage to a crowd of people who knew our music and wanted it. And they were giving us the energy to propel us to make those sounds that they’d cottoned on to.

“The feeling was incredible – it was like having your finger in a dam and a little trickle of water is coming out, and then suddenly the whole thing breaks down and you have this great, wonderful flood of energy.”

Today, Queen may not look quite the same – Mercury passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1991, and Deacon retired from music toward the end of that decade. But that flood of energy persists, with May and Taylor continuing to rock arenas the world over with current singer Adam Lambert.

50 years after the release of their self-titled debut album in July 1973, Queen remain as resonant, beloved and popular as ever. The 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody smashed box office records to become the all-time highest-grossing music biopic, with worldwide receipts of nearly $1 billion and a quartet of Academy Awards to its name.

As for the music? Using just one metric, Spotify, as an example, “Bohemian Rhapsody” has racked up well over two billion streams on its way to becoming the most-listened-to classic-rock song on the service, but Queen’s next four top-streamed tracks – “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Under Pressure” and “We Will Rock You” – all handily dwarf the numbers of anything by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and many of their other rock-legend peers.

It’s a “phenomenon,” as May puts it, and one that seemingly has no end.

As for how he explains it? Despite Queen’s much venerated flair for grand and wildly dramatic musical gestures, “our songs were never elitist,” May says. “At their core, they were songs about the joys and the sorrows and the pain that every man, woman and child feels.

“They express the extreme emotions of non-extreme people – people that think they’re ordinary. And I think that’s why they have aligned with listeners.”

Voted by Guitar Player readers as one of the greatest solos of all time, May’s sonorous lead tone in “Bohemian Rhapsody” was created using a Rory Gallagher-inspired rig comprising a Vox AC30, a Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster and little else.

“I used delays and stuff, but the fundamental tone that you hear is the [Red Special] and the treble booster and the AC30,” May told GP.

During the recording session, the 28-year-old maestro tracked rhythm guitar parts as the song came together in distinct sections. Along the way, the team felt a solo was needed to inject a different melody into the work and May decided he would approach it as if he were singing a verse on his instrument.

Although he has no idea where the melody came from, the guitarist recalls that he could hear the idea in his head long before the red light came on. And as is so often the case, after a few passes it was clear the first take was the best.

So how might today’s guitarist go about recreating that kind of magic? One approach could be to take some inspiration from the effects units in May’s current live rig as used during the epic Queen + Adam Lambert concerts.

Greg Fryer has been custom-building guitar gear for the Queen legend since the mid-‘90s, and his Treble Booster Touring unit was recently spotted in the live rig. Described as having “a balanced sound with sweet harmonic detail and smooth treble definition,” a new batch is currently in the pipeline, according to the Fryer Guitars website.

Other effects units in May's rig include a Dunlop DCR2SR Cry Baby Rack Module and a TC Electronic G-Major 2 multi-effects rack unit.

And if you're looking for some official Brian May gear including electric guitars and amplifiers you need look no further than the Brian May Guitars website. There you can find a plethora of Red Special-style six strings along with the new Vox signature series amps.

The following appeared in the November 2020 issue of Guitar Player.

Mick Taylor’s 1958 Les Paul Standard isn’t the most famous example of that model, but as the ’Burst that Charlie Watts is holding aloft on the cover of Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, it’s one of the most seen.

Taylor revealed that the guitar had an aftermarket Bigsby B7 vibrato when he purchased it, but he fitted the guitar with a factory-stock nickel-plated stop tailpiece, which is how it appeared during his tenure in the Rolling Stones, from 1969 to 1974.

The guitar had its original Kluson keystone tuners at the time, but these were later changed out for Grovers.

As it happens, that isn’t the only modification Taylor made. Apparently, he swapped out its double-black PAF pickups at some point.

The guitar, which is now one of many Stones guitars in the collection of Hard Rock International, has been thoroughly inspected by Hard Rock guitar tech Kip Elder, who confirms the pickups currently in the guitar are not original.

“We got a 10.2k-ohm reading for the bridge pickup, which typically registers about 8.5k,” he told VintageGuitar.com.

The guitar was frequently confused with the 1959 Keith ’Burst over the years, but Elder confirms that the first digit of its serial number is an eight.

Taylor played the guitar at the Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert on December 6 and can be seen performing with it in a video for “Love in Vain,” from the group’s 1972 tour. (It can easily be identified by the screw holes left from the Bigsby.)

Taylor still owned the guitar when Guitar Player interviewed him in the early 1980s, but Jeff Nolan, Hard Rock’s director of memorabilia, says the company purchased it from him around that time.

The finish has faded to a beautiful lemon ’burst since the guitar’s heyday, but as Nolan attests, “It’s an absolutely gorgeous example. I see so many ’Bursts in my job that I wanted to dislike this guitar. But it’s so, so good.

“It’s incredibly resonant, and the action is still perfect, even after all these years of not being in use.”

Keith Richards may not be renowned for the liquid blues improvisations that so many Les Paul players can boast, but he was unquestionably the first British rock star to embrace the then-discontinued Gibson solidbody.

Richards was first seen using his ’Burst in 1964 on the Rolling Stones’ second U.S. tour.

More Les Pauls were added to his arsenal during the decade, only to be replaced with Telecasters in the 1970s, once he was fully into his bluesier style.

Richards bought this 1959 ’Burst second-hand in London, in the latter part of August 1964. “It was my first touch with a really great, classic rock and roll electric guitar, so I fell in love with them for a while,” he told Guitar magazine in 1997.

The original owner, John Bowen, purchased the guitar – serial number 93182 – new in 1961 and had it fitted with an aftermarket Bigsby vibrato.

The guitar is easily identified by dark figuring near the cutaway on the top’s lower bout.

Jimmy Page was photographed with the guitar at a session for Stones manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham, either checking it out or using it for the recording.

Likewise, Eric Clapton borrowed the ’Burst when Cream played at the 1966 Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival.

These appearances led some to speculate, erroneously, that the guitar had been owned by all three men.

Richards parted with the ’Burst in 1967, when he sold it to future Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, then performing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

The guitar re-entered the Stones’ world in 1969 when Taylor joined up, and it appeared on the 1969 American tour, where it was used for slide work, tuned to open G for “Honky Tonk Women” and open D for “Street Fighting Man.”

The guitar was among the haul of instruments stolen during the making of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main St. Thieves took several guitars owned by Richards, Taylor and bassist Bill Wyman after Richards failed to pay drug dealers for the heroin being consumed at Nellcôte, the French villa where Exile was recorded.

The New York Post reported in July 2025 that the guitar has shown up in a collection of vintage guitars gifted to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2025.

When asked in 2018 why he thought the 1960s created so many great blues guitarists – including himself, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page – Jeff Beck had a ready response that reached high, deep and wide.

“We were down on our luck until the blues arrived,” he replied. “And it became natural music for us. We became disciples. We had to discover more. Anyone who ever had the slightest fascination with music had to find out what that sound was and where it came from. Me, Eric and Jimmy Page were stricken to the soul. We were obsessed. Thank God we were.”

For Jeff Beck, the blues was just one part of a lifelong journey that encompassed rock and roll, fusion, soul, instrumental and electronica.

Deeply curious, innately inventive, he followed his muse where it led him. The first stringed instrument to arouse his interest was the zither, as heard in the theme song for the 1949 British film noir The Third Man. Anton Karas’s haunting title composition was an international hit that year, a tune that rang in his five-year-old ears.

“The people next-door-but-one had a zither, and that was actually the first stringed instrument that I touched,” Beck revealed to Jamie Crompton in Guitarist’s 2009 cover story. “There’s a scoop for you.”

It was shortly afterward, at the age of six, that he first heard the electric guitar. Les Paul and Mary Ford’s 1951 hit “How High the Moon” was playing on the radio, and Paul’s layered guitars, slathered with slapback echo, caught his ears. “What’s that sound?” he asked his mother. “An electric guitar,” she replied. From that point on, he was all in.

Years later, “The Third Man Theme” would be the first thing Beck attempted to pick out when he played a guitar. But it took years before he actually had the instrument in his hands. “My mum wanted me to learn piano, as learning the guitar was just not done,” Beck said. “I used to spend the money for piano class on model airplanes and mark my own books to make it look like I was going to lessons.”

With the help of an uncle he tried his hand at violin, but his efforts were no better. “It sounded so murderous that he switched me to cello, which is an instrument that I love,” Beck revealed. “I started plucking it because I didn’t get on with bowing, and he just stopped me and said, ‘Get out.’ No patience at all.”

Beck’s fascination with guitar – like that of all guitarists born toward the end of World War II – follows the instrument’s arc in popular culture. He was born Geoffrey Arnold Beck on June 24, 1944, to Arnold and Ethel Beck. The family lived at 206 Demesne Road, Wallington, some 10 miles south of London. He had one sister, Annetta, born some four years before. Music was a big feature of their house. Ethel played piano, and her baby grand was displayed in the family’s living room. “My mum played beautifully,” Beck told Guitarist.

As he could best remember, his first experience with guitar took place around the age of 12 or 13, in 1956 or 1957. “I was at a friend’s house who was slightly spoiled,” he told Crompton. “He had a record player, a tape recorder, a guitar – all the toys.” The guitar was unloved, evident by the absence of several strings. “I started playing around with it and he said, ‘Do you wanna borrow it?’ I said, ‘Yes please!’

I remember carrying it home in the rain and taking my coat off to wrap around it to protect it. Right then, I felt a kind of protective thing towards the guitar.” With no access to guitar strings, Beck replaced the missing ones with the control-line wire from a motorized model airplane, “the kind that made the model fly round in circles,” he said.

While his parents tried to direct their son’s interests to Andrés Segovia and Django Reinhardt, Beck was, like most kids his age, drawn to the emerging strains of rock and roll. Between his sister’s growing record collection and the nightly pop broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg, he developed an aficionado’s appreciation for the raft of guitar players in that early rock and roll era.

But it was the 1957 comedy musical film The Girl Can’t Help It that made the strongest impression on him. The movie featured cameos by Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino and the Platters. But it was Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps’ mimed performance of their hit “Be-Bop-a-Lula” that most deeply affected Beck. In particular, he was taken by the playing of Vincent’s guitarist, Cliff Gallup.

Though he had left Vincent by the time the film was released, Gallup cut some 35 sides with the singer, and Beck quickly set about finding every one of them. “I knew then that I wanted to play the lead guitar breaks,” Beck said, “the fiery stuff like Cliff Gallup. I didn’t just want to be a strummer.”

While Gallup influenced his interest in the guitar as a lead instrument, Buddy Holly helped him set his eyes on owning a Fender Stratocaster. Fenders were not available in England, and Beck couldn’t have afforded one anyway. So he enlisted his neighbor, a handyman named Jack, to build him a Strat copy for five pounds. Neither Beck nor Jack knew anything about scale lengths or fret placements, which were crudely approximated.

The results were far from perfect, but the instrument intonated well enough when capoed at the fifth fret, and Beck learned he could bend any flat notes to pitch – shades of things to come.

He had yet to pay Jack when he gave his first performance at a local youth club with another boy playing a cello as a substitute for a stand-up bass. Their appearance went over well and even got a positive mention in the local paper. But Jack was in the audience and sore about the money he was owed. “[He] made a complete twat out of me by telling everyone that I hadn’t paid him for it,” Beck recalled. “Five quid! I’d just been the belle of the ball and he said, ‘Right, I’m going to tell you all about your mate Jeff – you owe me five quid, ya cheapskate bastard!’ I thought, Right, for that, you won’t get the money!”

By the middle of 1960, Beck was finally in possession of a proper guitar, a Guyatone LG-50, and playing in his first band, having joined the Bandits, an instrumental act that was supporting Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent impersonators on a U.K. summer tour. “I was speaking to Hank Marvin about this recently and he played a similar one,” Beck told Guitarist in 2009. It had purfling around the body and a maple veneer, so it wasn’t such a bad old thing. It was about 25 pounds. Proper money when you haven’t got 25 pence!”

By this point, Beck, all of 16, had begun to attend Wimbledon College, an art school similar to those that became destinations for John Lennon, Pete Townshend, David Bowie and other musicians attempting to delay their entry into working-class society. “They had good meals” was about all Beck could say about his time there.

His true desire was to land a spot performing with a working band. The Deltones were a semi-pro local covers band, with players in their 20s, slightly older than Beck. He liked their sound and, as it happened, had known their guitarist Ian Duncombe, who, like Beck, was a Cliff Gallup disciple. Beck began sitting in on rehearsals and, when Duncombe announced he was leaving, asked to take his spot. An audition was arranged at which Beck showed up with his latest acquisition: a Burns Vibra-Artiste with a translucent cherry red finish and three Trisonic pickups – although Beck recalled the guitar as having “about six pickups and a hundred knobs on it. I never knew what any of them did.”

Beck won the audition, but that wasn’t enough for him. He insisted that his longtime friend John Owen accompany him on rhythm guitar. Either due to Beck’s talents or the Deltones’ lack of options, they agreed to the arrangement. As it happened, Owen had a white Fender Telecaster, and Beck managed to convince him to swap, as the Tele would be a more appropriate lead instrument. It worked, for a time, but when Owen reclaimed the guitar, Beck was stuck again with his Burns.

But with Fender guitars now available in England, he set his sights on owning one. “Me and a friend got a train and a bus up to London from Croydon and we asked a porter where all the guitars were,” he recalled.

“He happened to know and said Charing Cross Road, so we jumped on a bus, ran upstairs and looked out the window for guitar stores. My mate suddenly said, ‘Oh my God!’ We belted down the stairs, stumbling over one another, ran in front of all the traffic and there we found a Tele and a Strat in the window of Jennings Musical Instruments,” he said, referring to the original Vox Amplifier Shop, at 100 Charing Cross Road. “We stood there motionless, salivating, for at least five minutes and my mate said, ‘Shall we go in?’ I said, ‘No, no we can’t go in!’ We were completely freaked out.

“After a while we went in, and I said, ‘I’d like to try the Fender Stratocaster please,’ and the guy said, ‘Yes gentlemen, certainly, sir, you are intending to buy it, are you?’ We didn’t have a pot to piss in but we said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

“Another shop in Charing Cross Road we used to bug was called Lew Davis. There we discovered a slap-back echo device” – most likely a Binson Echorec – “and we were in heaven. We made friends with a sales guy who used to let us play any guitar in the shop. He was great, he’d leave us alone and say, ‘Just don’t nick anything! We never did, and they couldn’t get rid of us.’ Then some 15-year-old kid would come in and his dad would buy him a Strat outright for cash. Case and all! Strap, strings, pick… We’d sit there scowling.”

Determined to get a Strat for himself, Beck appealed to his mother for the £147 required. She agreed to pay a deposit, allowing him to take possession of the instrument on credit. Now duly in debt, Beck quit art school to become a full-time working musician.

On May 22, 1961, he left Wimbledon College just in time for the Deltones to splinter. He briefly worked with Gene Vincent imitator Gordon Paterson, who performed under the nom de plume Cal Danger, and joined Deltones singer Johnny Del in his new group, the Crescents. But musically he was rudderless.

He found a direction in 1963 courtesy of a friend, Ian Stewart. A pianist, Stewart was a founding member of the Rolling Stones, who had become stars of London’s Marquee Club, in Oxford Street. Since 1962, the venue had been the home of Blues Incorporated, the seminal blues act founded by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, who brought the songs and sounds of the Mississippi Delta to England.

Stewart loaned Beck a cartload of blues albums, including Folk Festival of the Blues, a compendium of Chicago’s electric blues scene that featured key figures like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Buddy Guy. “I just wore out the album,” Beck said. He was particularly moved by Guy’s prowess on his Fender Strat. “It was total manic abandon that broke all the boundaries. Long, developing solos, just the opposite of all the pop stuff at the time.”

As he’d done with Cliff Gallup, Beck made exhaustive work studying the electric blues guitar greats, developing new skills and techniques. He put together the Nightshift, a blues act that played some of the music’s hot spots, including Eel Pie Island – a former trad-jazz spot that had shifted its musical affiliation with the emerging blues boom – and was even contacted by John Mayall as he was putting together the Bluesbreakers. In the end, Beck ended up with the Tridents, a blues act led by brothers John and Paul Lucas and which the Nightshift had supported at Eel Pie Island.

As a document of this period, the Tridents’ 1964 live Eel Pie recording of “Nursery Rhyme,” from the 1991 Beckology compilation, reveals the guitarist’s gifts with hammer-ons and pull-offs, trills,

It was September 1964, and it’s here that Jeff Beck the guitar hero begins to emerge. By this point he was playing a white Fender Telecaster through a Vox AC30 Top Boost, supplemented by a Binson Echorec, which he used to create spontaneous freak-outs, as well as an early homemade fuzz box.

“There wasn’t an ounce of musical sense to it,” he said in the liner notes, “but they loved it because it was different.”

It was a lesson that would serve him well for years to come.

Ever browsed through Willie Dixon’s songwriting credits?

It’s a sobering experience, a Rosetta Stone of popular music crammed with hits that anyone with half a grasp of blues, soul, rock, pop and even punk will recognize: “You Shook Me,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Bring It on Home,” “Talk to Me Baby,” “You Need Love” (which Jimmy Page adapted for Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”), “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” “Evil,” “Back Door Man”…

They are songs that have been immortalized by Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Muddy Waters, Etta James, the Doors, Canned Heat, UFO, Grateful Dead, Johnny Thunders, Tom Petty, New York Dolls and many others.

Arguably, it was the Rolling Stones who turned the wider world on to Dixon’s most pivotal song. 

On November 20, 1964, the Stones appeared on the British TV pop music show Ready Steady Go! to perform their ninth single, “Little Red Rooster.”

In what has since become an iconic clip, Mick Jagger stalks the stage, alternately mouthing lyrics and blowing his harp while Brian Jones minces a sideways glance into the camera as he hits the song’s slide lick on his teardrop-shaped Vox Mark III teardrop guitar.

A bassist, producer and the blues’ most prolific songwriter, Dixon was accustomed to his songs achieving a higher profile than him.

For years he’d been spinning gold for Chicago blues artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley and others. He’d also played bass on many of the Chicago blues sides we now cherish.

And in an electric-blues obsessed 1960s Britain, his tunes would fatten up the set lists of just about every R&B band.

You might suppose that the Stones and other English groups lifted Dixon songs from imported Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter 45s.

That did happen, but as Dixon revealed in his essential 1990 biography, I Am the Blues, he made tapes of his music to help players like Brian, Mick and Keith in their studies.

“Kids would come and say they liked our music and want to sing our music,” Dixon said. “Sometimes I’d write it out for ’em. Sometimes I’d put it on a tape. That’s how the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds got their songs.”

The great man died of heart failure in California on January 29, 1992. He never did become as recognizable as the artists he helped to break through, but everyone knows his songs.

Order The Willie Dixon Story: I Am the Blues here.

***The following appeared in the February 2020 issue of Guitar Player***

Even a cursory look at Waddy Wachtel’s credits is enough to boggle the mind. During his decades-long career, the guitarist has toured and recorded with the Everly Brothers, Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and dozens – no, hundreds – more.

“I came out from New York to Los Angeles in the late ’60s at just the right time,” he says. “The studio scene was changing, and I was able to get in with the right producers and musicians. It’s been an amazing ride. Sometimes I’ll just look at the guitar pick in my fingers and go, ‘It’s all your fault!’”

Wachtel considers himself a “rock and roll specialist.” “People call me when they want me to generate the kind of rhythm that gets a song going,” he explains. But he’s no slouch when it comes to tossing out searing, hook-filled improvised leads.

“When I started out, I found a way of emulating steel guitar on my Les Paul,” Wachtel recalls. “For years, I did that ‘phony steel guitar’ thing, like on Randy Newman’s ‘Rider in the Rain.’ People would hire me for rhythm, but then they’d always ask me to lay down some phony steel-guitar lines as well.”

During his career, Wachtel has seen many players come and go from the L.A. studio scene, but he’s still standing, and his dance card remains filled.

“A lot of great players can’t adapt to the studio thing because they think it’s about them,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong: I have an ego, too, and I love to grab the reins and go for it, but I never forget that it’s all about the song. The song always dictates what you should do. I’m very traditional in my approach. I don’t like to use effects, and I always think, What’s the best way to accompany the singer and the song? That’s what you’re there for.”

He’s performed alongside many newbies who went on to become music greats, but he’s also found himself standing in a studio next to bona fide legends. Asked if he’s ever been starstruck, Wachtel laughs. “I got over that quick,” he says. “One of my first gigs was working with the Everly Brothers. Once you meet them, you’re kind of set for anybody else who comes your way.

“Although one time I did have the distinct honor and pleasure of having John Lennon look in my face and go, [adopts British accent] ‘Hello, Waddy.’ I just about fell apart!”

Recently, Wachtel has been turning heads with his new band, the Immediate Family, which features fellow session legends Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel and Steve Postell.

Below, he recounts the recording of six classic cuts he’s had a hand in. “I must say, it was difficult to choose just six,” he says. “I’ve been privileged to play on so many great and important records with unbelievable artists. This list could easily have been much, much longer.”

1. “That’ll Be the Day” by Linda Ronstadt from ‘Hasten Down the Wind’ (1976)

“When I started doing sessions, producers always told me, ‘Don’t play lead when we’re cutting basics. Don’t change the volume on your guitar. Just play rhythm and we’ll do solos later.’ But music affects me. I get excited and I let spontaneity take over. There are times when music has to be perfectly composed, and there are other times when it has to be spontaneous. ‘That’ll Be the Day’ was very much the latter.

“I had just started working for Linda. We had recorded a couple of pretty things, but ‘That’ll Be the Day’ was going to be our first rock and roll track together. We rehearsed it a few times. Peter Asher was the producer, and Andrew Gold was the other guitarist on the session.

“While we were recording, I just felt a solo coming up. Something inside kept saying, You gotta go for it! So I flicked my Strat into an out-of-phase setting and let it rip. I improvised the whole thing. Then Andrew did a solo – it was something he had planned out – and at the end of it we did a harmony thing together.

“We did a few passes, but I think the first one was the keeper. That always happens. Everybody was thrilled. I remember that song was the first time I actually heard myself on the radio. I was standing outside one day and ‘That’ll Be the Day’ was playing in somebody’s car. My solo came screaming out of the speakers, and I went, ‘Hey, all right! Nice!’”

2. “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon from ‘Excitable Boy’ (1978)

“I’m very proud of this song – I co-wrote and co-produced it. Everybody knew it was a terrific song, but for some reason it was one of the hardest rhythm tracks to lay down. The band was me, Warren, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. I don’t know why, but we went all night trying to find the right take. We must have run through it 60 times.

“Finally, at five in the morning, [co-producer] Jackson Browne looked at me and said, ‘Which take do you like?’ And I said, ‘Take two is the one.’ We listened back, and that was it. It was definitely the one. The rhythm was extraordinarily great.

“I wanted to work on the solo, but I told the guys, ‘This could take a while. Maybe you should split.’ The engineer stayed, so I just set myself up with my Les Paul, my cigarettes, an ashtray and a drink. I had an idea to try a slide solo, something dirty and greasy. The solo spot came up, and I laid it down. Then I told the engineer, ‘Keep that one and let me do a harmony.’ I did the harmony and said, ‘We’re done.’ He was freaking out: ‘That sounds amazing!’

“I called Jackson at home and told him he’d better get back to the studio. He went, ‘What are you talking about? I just walked in the door!’ I said, ‘I know, but I think I nailed it.’ So he came back, and when he heard the solo he said, ‘I can’t believe it. That sounds fucking great!’ So again, spontaneity.”

3. “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks from ‘Bella Donna’ (1981)

“Stevie wrote the song after hearing the Police’s ‘Bring On the Night.’ She was very inspired by the echo-driven guitar track that Andy Summers played, that rolling and repeating kind of sound. [Producer] Jimmy Iovine played the demo for me.

“It was very intense and dramatic, and he said, ‘I want it like that.’ I told him, ‘Well, I don’t use echo, so I’ll just play it.’ He was like, ‘What do you mean? You can play that without echo?’ So I showed him how I wanted to play it, really strong and forceful. Then the band went out – it was me, Russ Kunkel [drums], Bob Glaub [bass], Bobbye Hall [percussion], Roy Bittan [piano] and Benmont Tench [piano, organ] – and we just nailed it.

“People think it’s a loop, but I’m playing that part throughout the song – me on my sunburst ’60 through a Marshall! The funny thing about it is, it’s become the longest song in Stevie’s set. I’ve played it live with her, of course, and there have been times when she’s extended it to 12 minutes onstage. She will even go off and take a break, but the band will still be playing.

“You can’t fake your way through it; you’ve got to play it strong the whole time, and you have to use your whole arm on your picking hand. I’ve had to get that arm ready before a tour just to play that song. It’s a very physical experience. By the end of two minutes, I’m starting to hurt.”

4. “Oh Sherrie” by Steve Perry from ‘Street Talk’ (1984)

“My dear friend Niko Bolas was engineering the song. He thought it needed a really cool and nasty eighth-note rhythm, so he called me to play on it. I went to the studio and met Steve Perry, and then Niko and I sat down to work on it. I laid down a rhythm part – I think I did two takes – and we listened back. It sounded great. The song had a nice grind to it. All good.

“Then I noticed there was this big open spot in the song. I asked Niko, ‘What’s going to happen there? Sounds like a place for a solo.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Steve is thinking of a saxophone solo.’ To which I said, ‘Oh, no, he’s not! Give me a track. I know what this needs!’ And I just went for it.

“What you hear on the song is what I instantly heard in my head. I just let it scream. I kind of played the melody of the vocal, but I threw in some double-stops. Steve came in and went, ‘Wow! That sounds incredible!’ We touched up a couple of parts, but it was basically as I heard it. I just had to do it. It was a rock song. It needed a guitar solo. A saxophone? Are you joking?”

5. “Take It so Hard” by Keith Richards from ‘Talk Is Cheap’ (1988)

“What a great experience! I played on the whole album and was in the band with Keith. Working with Keith, it’s always a matter of listening to what he’s doing and knowing how to respond.

“He’s got that big fat humbucker sound, so I couldn’t use a Les Paul; I had to go for a Strat sound. We kind of counter-rhythmed off each other, but we didn’t talk about it. Keith played the rhythm in the first verse, and I came in with little chops and hits.

“The track was cut live, and Keith had his rhythm thing going. This was another one of those moments when I said, ‘I’m gonna play a solo.’ It was obvious to me what I needed to do. I just grabbed the melody and worked in and around his rhythm playing.

“Keith was so happy. Anybody else could have said, ‘Yeah, nice try, kid. I’ll take it from here,’ but Keith isn’t like that.”

6. “Anybody Seen My Baby” by the Rolling Stones from ‘Bridges to Babylon’ (1997)

“I’m honored to be one of the few guitarists not in the Rolling Stones to have played on one of their records.

“The guys were recording in Los Angeles for a couple of months, and next thing I knew [drummer] Jim Keltner and I were with them in the studio. I played rhythm on a couple of things. One day [producer] Don Was said, ‘On “Anybody Seen My Baby?” you’re gonna play lead.’ I was surprised: ‘Oh, really? Me? Well, okay.’

“Mick really loved the Isley Brothers song ‘That Lady’ and the phased guitar solo on it, so he mentioned it to me. I played rhythm on the whole thing, and there are some spots where I’m doing these long notes, but on the end solo that’s me playing those phased melody lines. Everybody dug it.

“I had a history with Keith, but it was great to get a ‘yo’ from both of the captains – him and Mick.”

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The words classic and Vox might bring to mind that musical-instrument manufacturer’s iconic three-letter logo inscribed on the front of a 1960s British amp. But Vox guitars had their brief moment in the spotlight too during those heady years of the British Invasion.

These quirky cousins of the familiar AC30 and AC15 combos established a look that remains familiar today, even if the instruments themselves are less well known than the tube amps they accompanied in the catalogs of Jennings Musical Industries (JMI), the brand’s original owner.

Consider the 1966 V223 Mark XII 12-string shown here. Many guitarists will be familiar with its six-string sibling, the Mark VI, which Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones famously used. It’s a strikingly original design, but Vox had created others before it came up with this teardrop-shaped model.

Desiring a guitar line to accompany its amps, which were rapidly attaining broad popularity, JMI commissioned the London Design Centre in 1962 to come up with a design, resulting in the original Vox Phantom series.

More coffin shaped than the rounder Mark series that joined the fold in ’63, the Phantoms were assembled in JMI’s Dartford plant using necks and other parts made in Recanati, Italy, by guitar maker Eko, along with some U.K.- sourced components.

The Phantom and Mark series were produced through the ’60s, taxing JMI’s already overstretched facilities. In 1966, the company moved guitar production over to the Eko factory, and both lines show signs of this quirkily stylish Italian manufacture.

Despite its very different looks, the Mark XII is essentially laid out like a Stratocaster, with three similar single-coil pickups (Strat-like in themselves, yet with a telltale rectangular cover), three control knobs and a three-way switch.

The vibrato tailpiece found on this Mark XII would be odd on any 12-string, and not very desirable from a tuning standpoint. Regardless, it’s a cool visual feature and makes for some bold and unusual sounds.

The unit was a JMI creation called the Hank B. Marvin, named for the influential guitarist of the Shadows, a U.K. beat group best known for its instrumental hit “Apache.” The design was essentially taken from the Bigsby template, with a roller bar added to aid string tension.

Other unusual construction features of the Mark XII include the channeled metal double-T bar, which is set within the bolt-on neck for stability, a clip-on padded back cover to guard against buckle rash, and a zero-fret in place of the traditional string nut.

The 12-string Vox models arrived in ’65 after George Harrison popularized the electric 12-string sound the year before with his Rickenbacker 360/12. The Mark XII hit the U.S. market in ’66, the year this example was made.

A glance at the Vox U.S.A. price list for that year shows the V223 Mark XII retailed for $369.90, plus $44.90 for the Deluxe plush-lined contoured case, which was about $50 more than you’d have paid for a Fender Stratocaster of the same era.

In addition to Brian Jones’ endorsement back in the day, various models of Vox six- and 12-strings were seen in the hands of guitarists with Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Hollies and the Dave Clark Five.

Come the new wave, the Cure’s Robert Smith would play a Mark VI when assisting as guitarist with Siouxsie and the Banshees, and, later still, Coldplay’s Chris Martin would strap on a Mark VI.

In any era, the model’s styling remains as distinctive as ever.

Essential Ingredients

• Bolt-on maple neck with internal “double-T bar” support
• Ebony fingerboard
• 25-inch scale length
• Hank B. Marvin vibrato unit
• Three single-coil pickups
• Distinctive “teardrop” body shape

Guitar Player would like to thank RetroFret for showing us this fantastic example.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram’s 2019 debut, Kingfish, was that rare thing in music – the arrival of a devastatingly talented, fully formed young artist, seemingly from nowhere. But in Ingram’s case, his point of origin was Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town often cited as the birthplace of the Mississippi Delta Blues, so perhaps that holds an explanation for his preternatural abilities: There was something in the water.

Two years later, Ingram proved he was no fluke when he delivered an even stronger set, 662, on which he widened his musical net in surprising and thrilling ways while maintaining his earnest commitment to the blues.

Nominated for a Grammy the first time around, Ingram won the award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for 662 at last year’s ceremony.

“Sometimes I think this is all happening to someone else,” Ingram says with a good-natured laugh. “When they called my name at the Grammys, I was like, What? I don’t believe it. I’ve got to tell you, that was a long walk to the stage. But a happy one.”

For the first six months following 662’s release, Ingram was more or less sidelined from performing due to national COVID restrictions. Now that he’s back on the road, his shows feel like victory laps.

“Man, I love playing so much,” he says. “Being home for something like two years was frustrating, because I had a new album and I wanted to work that material into the set. We’re all locked in with touring now, and things feel really great.”

Recently, Ingram reworked his 662 track “Another Life Goes By” with indie hip-hop star – and fellow Mississippian – Big K.R.I.T. The two disparate talents come off like kindred spirits and blend seamlessly on one of Ingram’s most powerful and personal songs, and the resulting collaboration, dubbed “Another Life Goes By (Mississippi Mix),” is stirring stuff.

“That’s kind of a hint at where I want to go next,” the guitarist says.

He’s been working on songs with his steady musical partner, Tom Hambridge (the noted rock and blues producer helmed both of Ingram’s albums), and he’s looking to push himself in new ways vocally for album number three.

“I definitely want to do more with my singing than I have before,” he reveals. “I also want to do things more on the urban and R&B side – some soul, live instrumentation, kind of a Barry White-Luther Vandross vibe,” he says.

With a laugh, he adds, almost emphatically, “Of course, it’ll have my fierce guitar playing. That goes without saying.”

For years we’ve heard things like “rock is dead” and “nobody cares about jazz.” But rarely do you hear people say that about the blues. As a musical form, it seems to keep on truckin’.

Oh, yeah, well, I can tell you why: Blues is life. Blues is deep-feeling music, and everybody can relate to it. We’re always going to experience some blues in our lives, no matter what’s going on. It doesn’t matter what genre is on the Billboard Hot 100 – blues is life. It’s all around us. Everybody’s got the blues in ’em. It’s all we’ve got.

That said, you’re one of the leading lights of the new blues. Does that make you feel a certain weight of responsibility?

First off, thanks for saying that about me. The way I feel is, anytime you’re lauded, it’s going to feel like pressure, because you have to live up to people’s expectations. I think about the different periods of the blues and where I am today. People expect you to play a certain way or be a certain kind of person. I try not to think too much on it and just concentrate on the music. That’s what got me here in the first place.

Even though you’re steeped in tradition, it feels as if you’re trying to push the blues forward. You’re not a rigid purist.

No, no, I don’t want to be a purist. I definitely want to feel like today, you know? I borrow some from rock – I get into distortion. At this moment, I’m adding more intros and outros and different transitions into my shows. I put in little rap references.

In the studio, I’m trying to do more with rappers or whatever. I just released a remix of one of my songs with Big K.R.I.T. Slowly but surely, I’m going in that direction. And I want to reach more young kids, especially young black kids. They should know about our history and the blues. To get that done, you have to venture out into the world a little bit. You have to add some hip-hop, a little bit of neo-soul and R&B. It’s all about reaching out.

You don’t turn your back on blues classics, however. I love your versions of “The Thrill Is Gone” and “I Put a Spell on You.” You manage to get inside a feeling of intimacy in both of them, but you also make them sound incredibly spooky.

Oh, definitely. I just try to think about what the original artists were trying to convey. Talking about “I Put a Spell on You,” man, I love Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I know he was a freaky, weird, spooky guy, and that’s all in the song. I have a semi-deep voice, if you will, so when I sing that song, I try to make it extra gravelly. I want you to go “Oooh!” the moment you hear me sing it. [laughs]

Other than that, I just get in there and do the songs – and that’s how they came out. I didn’t think about reworking them. But I like doing some older songs, no doubt. Maybe the young fans can hear me doing them, and then they’ll go back and learn about the original old guys. That’s kind of the point, really.

Would you ever consider doing an album or even an EP of all covers?

Most definitely, but I would probably do that in the future. Right now, I want to concentrate on my own music and getting my own messages out there. But sure, there are plenty of songs I love that I could work into a covers album. You want to put some time into something like that. I’ll do it one day.

As you said, you recently worked with Big K.R.I.T., and you’ve recorded with Rakim in the past. What do you think blues guitarists can learn from hip-hop?

I think they can both learn from each other. When I think about the lyricism of some rappers, to me it’s similar to guitar players who are very advanced technically. They both have incredible skills, but how do they use them, you know?

There are some rappers who can intertwine being lyrical with rapping off a feel. That’s what I’m talking about. Guitar players can learn from rappers – like storytelling and how to take your audience on a journey. You can do the same thing with your solos and chord progressions, but rap can give you a new way of looking at things. Actually, I think the two music forms are very connected.

When did you start listening to rap?

I’ve been listening to rap pretty much all my life. I wouldn’t say I’m a super fan of everybody now, but I love the old stuff, like the old West Coast stuff and the old ’90s East Coast stuff.

I want to incorporate more of that into my music, but it can’t just be all about putting a rapper on a song. I want it to be more about the whole song – having a cool beat and adding some Delta blues slide guitar.

There’s a lot of great hip-hop production, and I think there’s a parallel with the blues. That gritty and raw sound is something I’m really cool with. And when it comes to the soul vibe, you have that West Coast Dr. Dre clean sound. There are a lot of parallels that I can explore.

What about other genres? Do you listen to straight-up pop, folk, classical?

Oh yeah. I learned about classical when I was in school. I listened to composers like Beethoven and Antonio Vivaldi. I love lots of music – Thundercat, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin...guys in that lane. There’s no limit to what I like, and I don’t want to limit what I listen to.

Look at somebody like Jimmy Page. Led Zeppelin began as a screaming blues-rock band, but soon he incorporated California folk and Celtic music into their sound.

Yeah, definitely. And maybe I could add different African and tribal beats. I’d be open to that, for sure.

When young fans come up to you at shows, do they ever mention any other young blues players that they’re following?

They do, sure. I’ve had a lot of people come up and mention Eric Gales, Lance Lopez, Chris Duarte. There’s a lot of cats they talk about – Django Knight. The list goes on and on. The young fans are cool, man. They’re passionate.

And how about you? Any younger blues players that you are following?

Oh, for sure. I mean, I’ve got some friends out of the deep South. There’s Sean McDonald out of Georgia, and there’s a Georgia cat who goes by the name of Jayy Hopp. There’s D.K. Harrell, who’s like a B.B. King disciple – he’s great.

There’s tons of different guys out there. I can tell you another good one – Marquise Knox.

Okay, what’s more nerve-racking: playing the White House or opening for the Rolling Stones? [Ingram performed for Michelle Obama at the White House as part of the Delta Blues Museum band in November 2014.]

[laughs] I would say both are pretty nerve-racking, and both are really high honors, of course. But if I had to go for just one, I’d go for the most recent – opening for the Stones. I mean, it was such a huge place, Hyde Park. Playing for all those people, you don’t know how they’re going to respond to your music, because they’re not there for you. I played two sets, and I think it came off great.

Did you get to spend any time with the Stones? Did you meet Keith?

No, man, I didn’t. [laughs] And that was what’s funny. [Rolling Stones touring drummer] Steve Jordan caught up to me, like, 10 minutes before their set, and I think that was by accident. That was the closest I got to any of the Stones. I think they were pretty tight backstage due to COVID.

I imagine you’re a Stones fan, especially of their early blues period.

Oh yeah. But not just the early stuff – they’ve got later songs I like. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and of course “Miss You.” But sure, I like the early stuff. The early Stones were so influenced by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and all the greats. I love it all.

You recently came out with you own signature Fender Telecaster.

That’s right, just a few months ago. I’m so happy with that.

Talk a little about what you wanted in your own guitar. Was it something you had been planning for a while?

I just wanted to have something that I could emulate my sound with. Everyone knows I have a sound that’s more of a Les Paul thing, a really overdriven sound. So I got with the Fender people, and I developed some custom pickups that give me more of a growling tone.

The guitar’s got an ash body, two high-output humbuckers, a ’70s headstock – it’s pretty much everything that I wanted. And it looks beautiful, too. You want a guitar that looks incredible and gives you the sound.

Anybody who’s ever seen you play is bowled over by your natural presence. You’re such a confident, commanding performer. Tell me, do you ever have a bad night on stage?

[laughs] Here’s how I look at it: If I’m playing a certain song during the first part of my set, and if I’m not comfortable at that point, then it’s not a good show for me. Nobody else knows it – the band, my manager, the crowd. Maybe to them the whole show was great.

But for me, if I’m not in the groove at a certain point in the beginning of the show, then I feel like I’m not onboard. It doesn’t happen that often – thankfully! [laughs]

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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.

The Rolling Stones have announced the official digital release of their new (and improved) “2000 Light Years From Home” music video.

Appearing on the Stones' distinctly psychedelic 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request and as the B-side of the “She’s a Rainbow” single, the Jagger/Richards-penned song was recorded at Olympic Studios in London.

The Summer of Love was a celebration of freedom for many, though Mick Jagger spent a small part of it banged up in Brixton prison on drugs charges where it is believed he wrote the song’s lyrics.

Having already dipped their toes in the psychedelic waters with the Between the Buttons LP earlier in the year, 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request saw the Stones fully immerse themselves in lysergic experimentation before swiftly returning to stripped-down roots rock with Beggars Banquet in 1968.

“The whole acid thing was a phenomenon,” recalled Keith Richards in a radio interview. “It hit with a bang. I don’t know what people really made of it. I still don’t, actually. Nobody knows what they made out of LSD…

“I tried it out, but I didn’t get carried away with it by myself, but a lot of people around me were definitely out there for quite an extended period of time. And probably didn’t come back.”

Directed by Peter Whitehead (1937-2019) – the notable filmmaker and author behind the Rolling Stones documentary Charlie Is My Darling: Ireland 1965 – the 1967 “2000 Light Years From Home” video has been resurrected in style.

Featuring staged performances by Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman, the A.V. Club describes “2000 Light Years From Home” as “one of the highlights of The Rolling Stones’ brief psychedelic phase.”

The new "2000 Light Years From Home" music video can be viewed on the Rolling Stones' popular YouTube channel and is just hours away from its premiere.

Be among the first to watch it by clicking the notification button...

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

Just as Jeff Beck plugged into a Tone Bender to mimic a sitar on the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” Keith Richards ran his 1959 Gibson Les Paul into a Gibson Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone to perform the lick he’d originally written for horns on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (released June 5, 1965, one day after the Yardbirds’ single).

While no one would mistake that Stones’ hit for a psychedelic rock record, it did help popularize the fuzz-tone effect, which would become a staple of the 1960s psychedelic rock sound.

No less influential was Brian Jones’ use of a sitar on the group’s 1966 gloom-rock hit, “Paint It Black.”

Although it was released in May 1966, some six months after the Beatles gave the sitar its rock debut on Rubber Soul’s “Norwegian Wood,” “Paint It Black” was issued as a single and went to the top of the U.S. and U.K. charts, giving it broader exposure.

And, like Beck, Richards would imitate the instrument’s sound with his guitar on the Stones’ next single, “Mother’s Little Helper.”

Soon after, they dipped a toe in the psychedelic waters with Between the Buttons, using a range of baroque instruments, including dulcimer, harpsichord and recorder, on tracks like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Yesterday’s Papers,” and sprinkling it with traces of old-time music-hall brass.

It was but a prelude to the Stones’ full-on plunge into psychedelic rock with 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Here, the group both adopted and created some of the sonic tropes of the emerging genre.

Richards’ handiwork is well represented with the crunchy tremoloed guitar riff on “Citadel,” one of the Stones’ heaviest rock tracks, and the snaky lead lines on “2000 Man.”

On “2,000 Light Years From Home,” Keef dons a fuzz bass to deliver that song’s proto-punk one-note solo.

Although their follow-up, Beggars Banquet, marked a hard turn toward stripped-down roots rock, the Stones’ imprint is all over early psychedelic rock.

And in this hilarious radio interview, Richards recalls his memories of this heady time (at least the few that remain!)

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

It was the 1960s, and everything was groovy. Musicians pushed the boundaries of sonic expression and experimentation, with guitarists boldly leading the way.

The hallucinogenic effects of mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD, are credited to have contributed to the creation of a new “psychedelic” sound, with guitarists developing a unique and colorful palette of fuzzed-out – and sometimes just plain weird – tones, inspiring generations of players to come.

While we don’t encourage you to indulge in hallucinogenics, we do suggest you grab your guitar, as we begin our adventure into psychedelic guitar playing.

One simply cannot revisit the 1960s without paying tribute to the Beatles, who began as a mop-topped pop quartet, but soon morphed into a psychedelic songwriting juggernaut with multiple iconic album releases spanning 1966 and 1967, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.

On 1966’s Revolver, George Harrison can be heard going into full bizarre mode, adding time-warped backward guitar (lead guitar lines that are recorded and then played backwards during the song) on “I’m Only Sleeping.”

In addition, Indian music’s heavy influence on Harrison and the psychedelic sound in general can be heard in his sitar-like motifs from “She Said She Said,” also from Revolver.

See Ex. 1 for a riff inspired by this song, and pick near your guitar’s bridge to emulate the sitar’s timbre.

Along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones ventured into this brave new world with album releases like 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, featuring the track “2,000 Light Years from Home.”

After a 40-second intro of some rather terrifying processed atonal piano musings, Keith Richards enters with a palm-muted single-note guitar riff, which sounds as if it could be the persistent ticking of a clock from an imaginary episode of the bizarre 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. (In fact, a similar guitar line, albeit less rhythmical, appears in the show’s actual theme music.)

No fuzzy tones here – Richards simply goes with an understated clean electric guitar sound, allowing the staccato jabs of his palm-muted notes to do the talking.

See Ex. 2 for a line inspired by this same track.

Try moving it around the neck in various keys and octaves to experience different shades of mystery. 

March 1965 was a monumental month for the up-and-coming British guitarist Jeff Beck. Upon Jimmy Page’s recommendation, Beck was asked to join the Yardbirds, famously replacing Eric Clapton.

Those were big shoes to fill, but Beck did not lack confidence or imagination. And while his stint with the band lasted just 20 months, his influence from this period, as well as his solo career that followed, would be felt by scores of guitarists.

A great example of Beck pushing sonic boundaries can be heard in the Yardbirds’ 1966 single “Over Under Sideways Down.”

Here the guitarist adds a wildly strange melodic motif, which, while initially met with some skepticism by his bandmates, came to be widely regarded as the song’s signature hook.

Beck combines some deft single-string playing with a gnarly tone. See Ex. 3 for a similar line, inspired by this song. 

The next stop on our magical musical tour brings us to the legendary Jimi Hendrix. His trippy songwriting combined R&B-influenced rhythm playing with soaring guitar solos, steeped in blues and drenched in fuzz.

Jimi somehow managed to control, at will, the beast that is amplifier feedback, creating new tripped-out sonic journeys for his audience.

Hendrix regularly summoned, as if by magic, all manner of new sounds from his guitar. With the song “Fire,” from the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut 1967 album, Are You Experienced, he introduced himself with a guitar solo consisting of a veritable onslaught of stinging string bends and vibratos.

Ex. 4 brings to mind this face-melter. Note that I’ve added an octave-up doubling effect to further capture Jimi’s sound, as this is something he employed frequently via his Octavia pedal.

This pedal, designed specifically for Jimi by his sound technician, Roger Mayer, doubled every note one octave higher, while adding fuzz. It often sounded as if Jimi’s guitar was tearing apart at the seams.

While discussing Jimi, let’s give a nod to another great guitarist from a later generation who was influenced by Hendrix’s psychedelic sound, namely Prince, whose musical legacy continues to live on despite his untimely death in 2016.

An iconoclast, Prince often fused his R&B/funk/soul foundation with elements of pop, rock, jazz or whatever suited him in the moment.

One of his 19 top-10 hits, the single “When Doves Cry,” off of 1984’s smash album, Purple Rain, went to number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, where it stayed for five weeks.

Prince notably played every instrument on the track. The song bursts through the speakers with a virtuosic unaccompanied electric guitar line, which seems to answer the question “What would Jimi Hendrix sound like if he were still alive today – after having taken a trip to Mars?”

Prince tips his hat to the master more directly with his choice of tone, as he employs Hendrix’s signature combination of fuzz and octave doubler.

The entire intro solo is masterfully played, darting around in fits and starts, and Ex. 5 is inspired by Prince’s wicked opening statement.

We return to the 1960s with another purveyor of the psychedelic movement: the San Francisco–based band Jefferson Airplane.

In the classic song “White Rabbit,” from their seminal 1967 release, Surrealistic Pillow, songwriter Grace Slick’s lyrics evoke 1960s drug culture while guitarist Jorma Kaukonen weaves sinewy lines over a brooding rhythm.

Kaukonen accomplishes this by deftly employing an exotic scale, another element of the psychedelic sound. While the song is broadly in the key of A major, the intro and verses center around a chord progression of F# to G, which is technically out of key.

Kaukonen navigates these chords using the 5th mode of harmonic minor, commonly referred to as Phrygian-dominant.

Harmonic minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, #7) is nearly identical to natural minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7), the only difference being its raised 7th scale degree. Note how this creates an unusual augmented 2nd interval (one and one half steps) between the 6th and 7th degrees.

The term “5th mode” simply means that Phrygian-dominant’s root is the 5th degree of the harmonic minor scale. This is the note that will sound like “home.” 

In “White Rabbit,” Kaukonen employs F# Phrygian-dominant (F#, G, A#, B, C#, D, E), the 5th mode of B harmonic minor (B, C#, D, E, F#, G, A#). But you can take off your thinking cap and mellow out to Ex. 6, a trippy line inspired by this song.

Note the aforementioned augmented 2nd interval between the G and A# in the last bar.

Many critics consider the release of the Byrds' 1966 single “Eight Miles High” to be the dawn of the psychedelic era.

Influenced by the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, it is led by the twang of Roger McGuinn’s signature 12-string Rickenbacker electric.

The song as a whole juxtaposes droning instrumental sections with hauntingly beautiful vocal harmonies in much the same way that McGuinn’s playing ebbs and flows between sitar-like melodies and fiery bursts of single notes.

Ex. 7 is reminiscent of his alternately melodic and frenzied playing throughout the song.

Note that you can use an octaver, set to double an octave higher, to approximate the sound of McGuinn’s 12-string, as I have done here. 

In 1966, along with his brother Sly, guitarist Freddie Stone co-founded the dynamic psychedelic funk ensemble Sly & the Family Stone. 

The band drew inspiration from a myriad of styles – R&B, rock, church music and beyond – and Freddie’s nuanced playing was an integral part of their rhythmic foundation.

But rather than in-your-face raucousness, he preferred to pick his spots, his guitar often peeking out from inside the band to add subtle textures.

For example, in their 1968 hit single “Everyday People,” a cry for racial harmony which still resonates today, Stone interjects just a few fuzzed-out bass notes here and there. They never fully grab the spotlight, but they make an important sonic contribution nonetheless, adding a touch of psychedelia.

In 1969’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” the guitarist fires up his wah pedal and alternates between funky strummed 9th chords and staccato single-note phrases.

Ex. 8 is not unlike his approach throughout the song. A master of understatement, Stone could convey so much, often with just a few notes. 

Spanning decades, with some original band members still going strong as Dead and Company, the Grateful Dead’s music inspired an intense devotion from their Deadhead fans, who faithfully followed the band from show to show as they crisscrossed the country.

The band’s songs, often crafted to be long jams when played live, left plenty of room for late master improviser Jerry Garcia to work his magic.

While many of the players above utilized varied and often strange tones, Garcia often chose a simple clean tone for his electric musings, allowing his colorful note choices and imaginative rhythmic sense to hypnotize audiences. 

Ex. 9 is inspired by Garcia’s effortlessly fantastic playing throughout “Dark Star,” the Grateful Dead’s 1968 single, and showcases one rhythm – the quarter-note triplet – throughout the four-bar phrase, with only occasional respites.

Tension is certainly created by the sheer repetition, but more subtly, it is the way its lilting rhythm sits atop and “rubs” against the song’s straight-eighths feel that grabs our attention and keeps us hooked for the duration.

It’s the sort of magic Jerry Garcia could seemingly conjure on demand, night after night.

The 1960s psychedelic movement, spearheaded by a wave of innovative guitarists unafraid to break down traditional norms of playing and tone, directly reflected the tumultuous political and social times they inhabited.

Many more recent iconic bands, such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, My Morning Jacket and the Flaming Lips, owe a debt of gratitude to the risks these players took as they created music that often seemed to be the stuff of dreamscapes.

Have a question or comment about this month’s lesson? Feel free to reach out to Jeff Jacobson on Twitter @jjmusicmentor or at jeffjacobson.net.

Jeff offers private guitar and songwriting lessons virtually.

On this day in 1996, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus film finally saw its commercial release.

Initially intended as a means of promoting the Rolling Stones' 1968 album Beggars Banquet on British television, this unmissable concert movie was put together in December that year and features a host of talent including Jethro Tull, the Who, Taj Mahal and Marianne Faithful.

The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus is infamous for a number of reasons. Sadly, it was the last time founder Brian Jones would appear with the band due to his untimely death the following July.

Riddled with controversy, the production was withheld from being aired on the BBC by the Stones as they deemed their performance unsatisfactory.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg revisited the abandoned project in 1992 but aborted his mission when it was discovered that key footage was missing.

Miraculously, further material was unearthed the following year in the Who’s private archive by producers Michael Gochanour and Robin Klein who finalized the cut that was eventually released on this day in 1996.

A particular highlight of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus is the performance of the Beatles’ “Yer Blues” (from their eponymous 1968 LP known as the White Album) by John Lennon’s supergroup the Dirty Mac.

Comprising Lennon on vocals and rhythm guitar, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, this short-lived dream team delivers a truly unforgettable rendition.

Lennon’s searing vocals and Clapton’s masterful lead work using his 1964 Gibson ES-335 semi-hollow render the performance extraordinary.

Bolstered by a stellar rhythm section, this one-off show by the Dirty Mac is the stuff of rock and roll legend.

Order The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus here.

You can’t visit the place where hill country blues, the hypnotic strain of blues that developed in the kudzu-wrapped hills of northern Mississippi, had its 1990s heyday. The elders – Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, chief among them – are no longer alive. And the club where they performed outside Chulahoma, Mississippi, is long gone.

There has been no greater embodiment of the rural blues that germinated in the hill country than Junior’s Place, the famed juke joint owned by the often-bawdy bluesman Kimbrough.

Like the music played within its walls, it was an unpretentious place, a simple, wood-frame building shielded from the elements by sheets of rusted tin roofing, with a dirt parking lot and frontage along a lonesome state highway.

Kimbrough’s juke had few rules, and most were scrawled onto white paper signs posted outside the door: No drugs or outside booze were allowed into the club, but patrons could buy cold beer from an upright refrigerator, and homemade corn whisky, once they went inside.

The building had been a church and a general store before it became the juke unofficially known as Junior’s Place, ostensibly because it had no formal name.

Sunday was the day to be there, usually, and the music went all night. Of course, it wasn’t the first juke in the area, and it wasn’t the last. But during the ’90s, Junior’s Place hosted countless performances by Kimbrough and Burnside, who often recruited their kids and grandkids to back them on drums, bass and sometimes a second guitar.

Cedric Burnside, a grandson of R.L., whose 2021 album, I Be Trying, won a Grammy, started playing drums in jukes before he was a teenager.

“By age 10, I was good enough to play in the juke joints,” he says. “Mr. Kimbrough used to give me about five dollars every weekend when I got done playing. I think he gave that to everybody, even the grown folks.”

What Cedric brought to the music was crucial, though. Percussion and rhythm are key to the hill country blues sound. Unencumbered by the strictures of 12-bar Delta blues and I-IV-V chord progressions, Hill country songs can repeat licks and motifs almost until they become trance inducing, propelled by the rhythmic, slide-accented guitar figures.

Where Chicago blues polished and electrified the Delta blues, the music in the hill country remained a primal country blues. The full expression usually isn’t a concisely crafted song, except on recordings. In a juke setting, the songs became background for dancing. And in the long tradition of American roots music, and especially blues, lyrics and licks from one song are often mixed into other songs.

While McDowell, Junior and R.L. wrote a lot of their own songs, some, like “John Henry,” were part of the oral tradition.

Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars attests to one unspoken but important rule of hill country blues, though. “The main lesson I learned from playing at Junior’s is to never clear the dance floor,” he says. “R.L. could keep a room dancing by himself with his syncopated fingerpicking.”

Because performances could go from early evening until dawn, Cedric says, “there was a lot of repetition of songs. But also, they played some songs a lot because people had favorites. One was ‘All Night Long’ by Junior Kimbrough. Even though he had several songs, he sometimes played that song four or five times in the same night, ’cause people were requesting it that much.”

The roots of hill country blues are West African, particularly in the focus on rhythm and drums, but also the fife, an instrument played in hill country blues by the late Otha Turner.

Enslaved people in America were forbidden to have drums after their overseers discovered they could be used to communicate with each other. Following the Civil War and Emancipation, though, drums resumed their place in African-American culture and expression. The fife-and-drum tradition is an outgrowth of that.

“The differences in Delta, Chicago and hill country are kind of tough, but it’s real,” says Kenny Brown, who played sideman to both R.L. and Junior for decades, and now leads his own group while also collaborating with artists like the Black Keys.

“And it’s fun music and it’s happy music, most of it, and it’s more concentrated on the groove and the rhythm. A lot of the hill country stuff, I believe, was strongly influenced by the fife-and-drum bands.”

In the early ’90s, two events brought a critical spotlight to this corner of the South. First, the Robert Mugge documentary Deep Blues, narrated by hill country blues champion Robert Palmer, a music writer who penned an authoritative book of the same name in 1982, featured R.L. and other blues artists from the region.

Then, a fledgling new label in nearby Oxford called Fat Possum Records began a campaign to record the region’s country blues artists. R.L. and Junior were first, with the raw, uncompromising Too Bad Jim and All Night Long, respectively, in 1992.

R.L. found a new, young audience in punk, garage and indie-rock circles after opening for Jon Spencer and the Blues Explosion on tour. “When we did this stuff with Jon Spencer, we got to play for younger kids, and they loved it,” Brown says.

“We played a little louder, and I don’t know if it was any faster or not, but that kind of evolved into more of an electric, rocking band than the duo stuff did.”

The style of blues that became recognized as hill country in its modern form traces back to Mississippi Fred McDowell, who worked as a farm laborer and played country blues at parties on weekends.

Musicologist Alan Lomax recorded his first sessions in 1959 on one of his trips through the South, but as the folk-blues scene heated up in the mid ’60s, McDowell began to record more. His repertoire combined traditional and gospel songs with his own compositions that became foundational to the hill country canon.

“Wished I Was in Heaven Sitting Down,” from the Lomax recordings, was later recorded by R.L., and “61 Highway,” from McDowell’s 1969 album I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll, is recognized as a key composition in the genre.

Other signature hill country tunes, like “Drop Down Mama,” “Going Down South” and Bukka White’s “Shake ’Em on Down,” were key songs in McDowell’s sets.

Brown met McDowell at the Memphis Country Blues Festival in 1969 but didn’t get to play with him. He did, however, come to know Johnny Woods, a harmonicist who recorded and performed with McDowell.

“I learned a lot from Johnny about Fred’s playing,” he says. “It took me years to figure out what he was talking about. He’d say, ‘Frail it man, frail it!’ I figured out what he meant: It’s like your thumb and your index finger are going back and forth, and as your thumb’s going down and your finger’s going up, it creates a lot of rhythm.

“R.L. Burnside and I, we both got to doing pretty much that same kind of thing when we were playing together on two guitars, and that created that sound.”

Brown wasn’t the only blues fanatic listening to how McDowell played guitar. Keith Richards, Mick Taylor and the Rolling Stones were inspired enough to record a faithful cover of his song “You Got to Move” on Sticky Fingers in 1971, with Taylor playing the slide licks on a 1954 Fender Telecaster.

Aerosmith delivered their own take on their 2004 blues covers album, Honkin’ on Bobo, setting the tune to a rock and roll arrangement over a Bo Diddley beat.

McDowell’s note placement was very intentional. He used a slide to drive the tunes, but his flourishes often were a series of well-placed notes without flashy tricks like slide-ins, hammer-ons or pull-offs.

One of the most important things McDowell did, other than write and play music, was to teach his neighbor R.L. Burnside how to play blues. Although 22 years his junior, a teenage R.L. latched onto his mentor’s rhythmic style of playing. A few years on, he would accompany McDowell on gigs at house parties and juke joints in the area.

“Him and my Big Daddy were really, really great friends,” Cedric says, using his preferred name for his grandfather. “They shot craps and drank a bunch of moonshine and stuff together.”

Burnside lived in Chicago for a period in the ’50s but soon returned to northern Mississippi. In 1967, George Mitchell recorded him in Coldwater for the Arhoolie label, which helped him get gigs. Like other hill country bluesmen, his music career ebbed and flowed, and he worked on a farm to supplement his income when the gigs weren’t there.

He formed the Sound Machine with his sons and in 1981 put out Sound Machine Groove, a record that reflected the times. Playing electric guitars, the band somehow aligned country blues with danceable funk and soul.

The next time R.L. recorded, though, would be with Brown by his side and Calvin Jackson, his son-in-law, on drums. Titled Too Bad Jim, and released in 1994, it was the first of a six-album studio run before his death in 2005.

The record found a wider audience for the genre, thanks in large part to the intervention of Jon Spencer, who brought R.L. on tour. That led to a creative partnership in the studio, as well. The band backed R.L. on a pair of albums, 1996’s A Ass Pocket of Whiskey and 1997’s Mr. Wizard, which modernized the hill country sound.

Brown has vivid memories of moving to north Mississippi in the early ’60s. Across the street from his family’s home, Otha Turner and Fred McDowell would host picnics and play music all weekend. That experience primed his interest for when Mississippi Joe Callicott moved in next door, when Brown was 10 years old.

Callicott had recorded with George Mitchell the same year as R.L., and cut songs for the U.K. label Blue Horizon on a Memphis session that included Furry Lewis. Soon after his arrival, Brown began woodshedding guitar licks with him during a period in American music when most kids his age were listening to the Beatles.

Callicott taught Brown the tunings and techniques of hill country blues. Tuning his guitar to open G, which he called Spanish tuning, Callicott laid the instrument in his lap and used a pocket knife as a slide.

When Callicott passed away in 1969, Brown picked up open E tuning from Bobby Ray Watson, who also showed him how to play slide licks in the standard position. He says he and Johnny Woods would get together and “ramble the whole weekend from different parties to juke joints” playing music.

In 1971, Brown met R.L., and they became fast friends over their love of hill country blues. For a slide, Brown used a glass Coricidin bottle, a deep-well 11/16 socket or a ¾-inch piece of copper he cut at his construction job.

They played house parties and juke joints throughout the ’70s and ’80s, and when Fat Possum came looking for R.L., Brown went with him, backing him on albums beginning with Too Bad Jim.

While the hills heated up with new fans, better tours and bigger album sales, the next generation of hill country artists were taking notes. Junior’s sons, Kenny, Robert and David, were learning alongside their father, as were Cedric and his uncles Duwayne and Garry Burnside. Lightnin’ Malcolm, Eric Deaton and others from the scene were coming up.

The ones who have arguably made the widest impact, though, are the Dickinson brothers, Luther and Cody, and their friend Cedric. The Dickinsons are the sons of Memphis musician Jim Dickinson, who had played piano on the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” and produced Big Star, the Replacements and Ry Cooder.

Luther recalls that he first heard and saw hill country blues on a 1982 episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood that featured Otha Turner and Jesse Mae Hemphill performing fife-and-drum music. Although Luther didn’t get to meet McDowell, his mother carried him to his funeral in utero, and he studied his music from audio and video recordings.

He did meet Turner, though, a decade later at the Memphis Heritage Festival. Turner took him to Junior’s Place for the first time just as Fat Possum was getting off the ground and preparing to record R.L. and Junior.

“Once we befriended the musical families of Otha Turner, the Burnsides and the Kimbroughs, it was on, wide open,” Dickinson says. “They had a juke joint and we had a recording studio. We learned from our peers as well as studying the elders.

“On tour with Burnside in ’97, I would sing along and learn his later style, and then compare that to the earlier, more virtuosic style of his solo guitar work in the ’70s.”

Dickinson’s hill country education was immersive. He became a regular at Junior’s Place, getting to know R.L. and Junior as well as their extended families, and picking up their playing techniques. He began to think about “using folk music forms as frameworks for improvisation,” a concept he put into practice a few years later with the North Mississippi Allstars.

“I had grown up with open tunings, finger picking and slide guitar from my father and his partners, Ry Cooder mainly,” he says. “The hill country guitarists inspired me to play open-tuned, finger-picked slide guitar, electric and loud as hell, but have it respond like an acoustic guitar while using amp response and feedback to create sustain with the slide.”

Luther produced Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, the 1998 album Turner recorded with his Rising Star Fife & Drum Band, and would drive him to performances. By then, Dickinson had formed the Allstars with his brother, Cody, and bassist Chris Chew.

The Allstars put together everything he had learned about hill country blues, from the songbook to the licks and even the fife-and-drum percussion, at times. The band’s 2000 debut, Shake Hands With Shorty, drew together the hill country traditions with Allman Brothers-style improvisation and Chew’s gospel harmonic sense.

“I wanted to orchestrate the riffs of Fred McDowell and the solo acoustic work of R.L. Burnside with a rock and roll band,” Dickinson says. “At first, we strove to be as traditional as possible. But we eventually opened up and began using the blues songs as vehicles for ensemble improvisation, finding portals for extended jams.”

Dickinson toured with R.L. around the time Cedric took over the drum chair from his father, as the hill country scene started to attract hipster attention in the mid ’90s. All the while, though, Cedric was paying close attention to what his Big Daddy was playing on guitar.

“I would sit there and watch him and look at his coordination, how his fingers moved while he was playing, what time his lyrics would be in, because the music was so unorthodox,” Cedric says. “It was a really crazy rhythm, but he made it sound really great, and so I always wanted to do that. I always wanted to play the guitar and sing, just like my Big Daddy did.”

Dickinson gave him his first guitar, a yellow Harmony acoustic, after the tour, and his uncle Garry showed him open G tuning and some picking and fretting patterns.

“I was playing in open G a lot, and I wrote most of my songs in that tuning and loved it,” Cedric says. “But Garry showed me a little bit in standard, and I was not playing in standard at the time.

“He showed me a pattern in E and then he showed me a pattern in A, and he said this pattern that you did in A, you can go to G and do the same thing. You know, you can go to C and do the same thing, all the way down the fretboard. I was like, ‘Okay, let me just try it in all of them then.’”

Cedric stayed up nights, into the early morning hours some days, practicing chords, change-ups and licks in open G and standard tuning.

“When I got on the guitar, I just played with sounds, and I remember some of the top players looking at me, and they’re like, ‘Man, that is so crazy like that. It’s backwards.’ And it may well be backwards, but if it sounds good, I’ll go with it. That’s where I’m at, even right now today.”

By the time Junior’s Place burned to the ground in 2000, two years after Junior passed away, the scene had matured. The Allstars had landed hill country blues on the jam-band circuit and national television, and they brought everyone with them.

Duwayne played in the band for a few years, and for their performance at Bonnaroo in 2004, they brought R.L. and the extended family onstage for a one-off set released later that year as Hill Country Revue.

Unlike other regional blues styles, hill country blues isn’t a dying art, thanks to Brown, the Burnsides, the Kimbroughs and the Dickinsons, as well as Otha Turner’s granddaughter Sharde Thomas, the Black Keys and scores of artists who have taken its influence in new directions.

“I can’t help but be hill country in whatever I write,” Cedric says. “I just let it flow. I don’t try to force anything. If it comes out what somebody might call weird, I just let it come out weird. My heart is just old-school music. That’s all I’ve been around my whole life, and that sound was embedded in me. It’s in my blood, you know, so I just gotta let it do its thing.”

On his sixth studio album, 2020 Visions, maverick guitarist Stephen Dale Petit has created a blues record unlike any other.

For one thing, it’s a concept record. For another, it presents a dystopian view of society, America in particular, with themes of factionalism, tribalism and alienation, all through the lens of someone gazing into the not-too-distant future.

In this case, that someone is an expat (Petit moved to England from California in the mid ’80s) who penned much of the material back in 2017 but is only now seeing his album – and a good many of his prescient predictions – become a reality.

 “I guess it’s pre-dystopian, to make up my own term,” Petit says in a distinct British accent.

“Having not lived in America for so long, I’m kind of imagining what it must be like for a parent who arrives home after a trip. You walk into the house and the kids are going crazy, the rooms are all torn apart, and you go, ‘What have you done to the place?’ The son says, ‘She did it,’ and the daughter says, ‘He did it.’

“That’s my feeling about the polarization in America and how savage and how indoctrinated ideologically everything seems to be.”

Petit traveled to Nashville and cut 2020 Visions with producer Vance Powell back in 2017, and if various, unforeseen circumstances had not upended his plans, he would have released the album the following year.

A cancer diagnosis – Stage 4, as it turned out – threw his world into a tailspin, and for much of 2018 he had to curtail most professional activities while dealing with treatment.

“It was a chemo and radiation regime every day for two months,” he says. “Brutal stuff. I’m all clear now, thank goodness, but it takes a while for you to get back up to speed.

“I did a couple of shows during that time, and it was strange, because I experienced this sort of artificial energy while performing, almost like a weird caffeine kick or something. But that drops off and your body’s completely reeling. Basically, it put me out of action for a good year.”

Once his doctors gave him the go-ahead to proceed with his normal life and career, Petit was set to release the album in late March of 2020 when the COVID pandemic threw a wrench into that idea.

A tour to support the album was nixed, and while he waited for lockdown to be lifted, he decided to release the record digitally.

“We finally got physical copies out in the fall of 2020, once brick-and-mortar stores began to open up again,” he explains.

“The whole thing was this crazy double-whammy. First I had my own health issues to sort out, and then this global pandemic knocked out the rest of the world. In a way, the second thing wasn’t so hard on me because of what I’d just gone through, but it was a really insane time.”

He laughs. “Is this where I say, ‘All’s well that ends well?’”

Another thing that distinguishes 2020 Visions from most other blues albums is its sound, a unique and revolutionary sonic approach that owes as much to art rock, emo, punk, metal and even jam bands as it does to traditional blues.

On the nine-minute space-age epic “The Fall of America,” Petit exorcises demons as he explores every possible shattering cry and wail his guitar can emit.

In an equally virtuoso performance on another extended track, “Zombie Train,” he goes for broke, firing off supersonic, freak-out solos and shards of psychedelic lines while leading his ace band – bassist Sophie Lord and drummer Jack Greenwood – on a slinky, cosmic and soul-drenched jam journey.

“Sputnik Days,” co-written with his legendary friend (and quasi-mentor) Mick Taylor, is a sublime yet exhilarating dream that offers Petit a showcase for celebrating the lyrical power of bent notes and harmonics.

And those are just some of the highlights. There’s also incendiary re-workings of classics like “Steppin’ Out” and “Long Tall Shorty,” on which the guitarist goes full throttle, summoning the spirits of blues greats while fearlessly claiming the songs as his own.

“Blues is the essence of what I do, but I don’t let it dictate where I can go,” Petit notes. “I just let my instinct guide me. Otherwise, I’m just re-creating what’s been done before, and what’s the point of that?

“It’s like people doing ‘Caldonia,’ which is a great song that’s been a blues standard for 50 years. On any given day, there’s a hundred bands playing it, and I think, Why would they do that, especially if they’re not going to do something new with it?

“I try to take various essences, flavors, colors and styles, but I want to bring them into the present. I want to sound like today. There’s enough people stuck in yesterday, and that’s just not for me.”

As a teenager in California, you hung out with some early metal stars of the day, including Randy Rhoads and George Lynch. Were you much of a shredder?

Not really, no. I more or less decided that I would never develop those kinds of chops. For a good while, I sat on my parents’ sofa, playing my guitar and pondering.

I’d just seen B.B. King – I even got a chance to meet him. There was something about the blues that had touched me deeply, because it’s a cry of the soul. It felt so authentic, especially when compared to the phoniness that was around at the time.

I considered all that stuff out of L.A. contaminated by the ethos of Hollywood, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. On top of that, George Lynch tried to steal my girlfriend.

Oh, well, that would sure turn you off metal.

[laughs] It didn’t help. But yeah, prior to that, I was playing lots of rock covers like everybody else – “Rocky Mountain Way” and stuff like that.

After the revelation of seeing B.B. King, how did you do your homework and absorb the blues?

It actually started with Chuck Berry. My parents listened to the Beatles and the Stones, who both name-checked Chuck. They covered him and talked about the debt they owed him. They celebrated him.

I went out and bought Chuck Berry Is on Top, which was on Chess Records, and from there I started checking out other people on the label: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter. It happened really quickly.

I imagine you felt like an outlier in L.A. Everybody was getting into the Sunset Strip shred-metal scene while you’re digging into older stuff.

I was very much out of anybody else’s orbit. I just didn’t participate in their scene. But it was a conscious decision. At first I felt a bit awkward, but the magnetic pull of the blues was too strong.

Now, you did a bit of reverse engineering. You went to the U.K. because you were inspired by their blues players, but those were the same people who revered American blues artists.

You’re absolutely right. I was getting the echo of the echo, so to speak. But the way that it was marketed, whether it was Cream or Hendrix or even the Beatles, it was all about appealing to youth. I was young – a generation out, perhaps, but I was still a youth.

How do I put this? I just thought of England and Europe as angular, whereas America was square. There was something coming out of England that felt like a way in. To me, a player like Mick Taylor was a revelation in the beginning, more than even somebody like Peter Green. Hendrix was immediate.

I was hearing all this stuff long after it was released by listening to friends’ older brothers’ records. It all just started to percolate and simmer.

But yeah, I decided to go to England because I just wasn’t thrilled with what I was getting in America.

You became friends with Mick Taylor. How did you two meet?

I went to a show of his, and then it turned out that I knew his manager. Also, I had spoken to somebody in a restaurant adjoining the club who turned out to be his best friend. She had a dog named Roxie, and my dog was named Roxie.

The stars aligned, basically. It was fate. Mick and I met up and hit it off. He was such an important player to me in terms of understanding overbends. We all started doing two-and two-and-a-half-step overbends from hearing Crusade [by John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, 1967], specifically the song “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Mick was 17 at the time, and I started listening to it when I was 17. I was like, Oh this guy did this at my age. Incredible!

Did Mick take you under his wing?

He did. I think he was expecting a Stones freak initially, so he was pleasantly surprised that my interest was more in the blues stuff and the John Mayall records. He toured with me as a special guest, and I think he’s on three of my albums.

The way “The Fall of America” came about is interesting: Mick was living with me. I’d just come back from a trip to L.A., where I’d seen the Kills. The band’s guitar player, Jamie Hince, is fond of hooking the thumb over the neck to make chords – an old bluesman’s trick. I thought, Wow, yeah, I should try some more of that.

I started to noodle around, and Mick came into the room; actually, he was sort of lingering in the doorway while going to make some tea or whatever. He would listen to me sometimes, but he wouldn’t say anything.

So this one time he was listening, and I knew he was there. I was playing around with this riff, and finally he said, “That’s so powerful. It’s really intense and hypnotic.” Then he left to go into another room but not before saying, “It needs to go to E.” And that’s why it goes to an E at the end.

I was inspired by seeing the Kills, but Mick, to his credit, knew not to interrupt me till the right time. He could sense something was being born.

You also became friends with Eric Clapton. That must be pretty remarkable.

Oh yeah. We met through mutual friends. In the beginning, it was like a dream coming true, and you can’t quite believe it – you’re hanging with one of your heroes.

Then it changes and you’re dealing with a human being, and through that process, when you’re actually becoming friends, it goes through phases and you get closer and closer. All of that stuff happened.

Any preconceived notions I had of what he was like went out the window pretty early. He was nothing like what I expected.

Do you two sit down and play together?

Oh, no. No, no, that’s not happened, at least not yet.

He’s commented on your playing and has been quite complimentary.

Yeah, that’s brilliant, isn’t it? It’s mind-blowing, really. You hope for it, but you tell yourself not to expect it.

What kind of impact did Eric have on your playing?

Oh, a lot. [laughs] In my journey, I got my head around overbends, so I went back to the people who started it. Albert King did overbends left, right and center. I would listen to him, but I couldn’t figure him out. This was all before YouTube. I had to do it by ear.

Now, if you overbend by two steps, the note has a different tone than if you just fret honestly on the neck. It’s not dishonest – it’s just got a whole different thing. The tone is different; the timbre of the way the string vibrates is different.

With Eric, I heard the solo he did on Cream’s “I’m So Glad,” and he’s doing different things. I was knocked out.

That and the “Steppin’ Out” solo – I was literally speechless. I know that’s an overused figure of speech, but that’s how I felt. My whole foundation was rocked. Just when I thought I might be getting somewhere with the guitar, I heard this and thought, Holy shit!

You’ve put out some terrific albums, but 2020 Visions feels like a breakthrough. The electric guitar sound is wild, trippy and dramatic, and it’s not typical of how most blues guitarists sound. And you have more than one sound.

I’ve spent years thinking and working on this. To me, tone and textures are every bit as important as what you’re playing. I don’t want to sound like anybody else, and I don’t understand why other people would want to.

What I’m seeking is some sort of a sonic texture that’s unique. It’s not quirky or weird, like it’s a novelty or gimmick; rather, it’s related to what the music is addressing. It’s a style. It’s a sonic style as opposed to a musical style.

It’s easy to say, “I want to sound unique.” It’s quite another thing to pull it off.

It is. One big thing that’s helped me was getting an original Marshall JTM45. It’s part of the toolbox that enables me to do this. I hate to say that, because the amp was stupidly expensive.

I didn’t want it to be true, but the way those amps were designed with the negative-feedback loop, it stacks harmony when you’re sustaining a note. It’s more of a musical instrument than just an amp.

Let’s talk about some of the songs on the album. The title track is blues, but it’s got a very pronounced punk rock side to it.

Sure, sure. I mean, I’m playing blues licks, no doubt, but it’s got another thing. You know, I never really used to like Iggy Pop until I read that he went to Chicago and tried to be a blues guy for, like, six months. Then I kind of understood.

The guitars on the song are trashy and reckless. It’s like they collide off each other.

As well they should. The guitars on the chorus are just driving and out of control, but there’s the call-and-answer guitar to the vocal. It’s got a bluesier, warmer sound. But I’m purposely trying to smear notes, bitter to sweet.

You’re very rough with your guitar on “The Fall of America.” Every riff, power chord and solo is brutal. It’s not festival-tent blues.

It’s designed not to be that at all. There are people who can do that beautifully and brilliantly, and my hat is off to them. It’s just something that doesn’t interest me. I guess I take my sensibilities from the British musicians of the ’60s and ’70s. They were making new art.

That sounds pretentious, but they weren’t just making an archive of what was happening in the room. They were using all the tools of technology to create something unique in that moment, and it was as far from field recordings as you could get.

At nine minutes long, the song is epic. For much of it, it seems like you’re having fun exploring tones.

Oh, I am, I am! Yeah, we went on for a bit, but hey, America’s a big country. [laughs] The subject of what’s going on is a big subject. I’d never written a nine-minute song before, but it went where it wanted.

“Roxie’s Song” is altogether different. It’s a tight, beautifully constructed instrumental.

Yes, Roxie was my miniature schnauzer, and she died. With this record, there was a musical concept. I wanted it to be an honorific homage to the bent note on the guitar.

“Roxie’s Song” has a really long bend, which is the sad part. Obviously, I was gutted that my dog was dead, and I was missing her like nothing else.

But what about the happy times? So there are middle bits where it’s sort of like in summer grass and how she had to hop around to be seen. There are fun bits and moments of exhilaration, like how you play chase with your dog, or how they go crazy when you walk in the door.

How did you and Mick Taylor collaborate on writing “Sputnik Days”?

That was another one of those times when he heard me working on something, but rather than lingering in the doorway, he felt compelled to pick up a guitar.

He co-wrote it with me. It sums up what I aspire to: It’s rooted properly in deep blues while living in the present and being aware that we have tomorrow to look forward to.

One song that is very reverential to the blues is the very short instrumental “On Top.”

Yeah. That’s Sophie Lord playing bass and doing some serious chording – lovely tone clusters as the bedrock. I don’t mind going there – you know, the reverential thing – but it’s why it’s short as well.

“Zombie Train” has a bit of funky soul to it. It’s got a bit of a ’70s feel, but again, it sounds very current. And it’s a great showcase for everybody in the band.

Oh, yes, for sure. That’s another one on which Sophie is front and center. It was sort of showcased for the bass. Both Sophie and Jack Greenwood play brilliantly throughout the record.

“Zombie Train” is this spoken-song verse, and I really loved being able to stretch out on the guitar solos. It’s another long one, and it’s closer to us being a jam band or something.

You have all these Beatles connections. Ringo Starr does a spoken intro on the song “The Ending of the End,” the album’s artwork was done by Klaus Voormann, and you’re photographed by Pattie Boyd.

Yeah, it’s something. Actually, Pattie photographed me for two album covers. You know, my parents played the Beatles; they were part of my musical journey.

When I met Jimmy Page the first time, we talked through it and he agreed. He said, “Well, yeah, they’re rooted in the blues.”

The Beatles are like blues songs with pop choruses. “Can’t Buy Me Love” is a blues progression, and so is “She’s a Woman,” “Lady Madonna,” “I Feel Fine” and on and on.

“Yer Blues,” obviously.

Sure. That was a great one.

You recently started playing the Gibson Custom Modern Flying V.

I did. That’s a whole different experience because it’s so lightweight, and it kind of folds into you. You’re almost wearing it. It’s an insane guitar, and I love it.

On 2020 Visions, I mostly played a cherry-red [ES-]355 reissue. It’s the star of the record. It’s like the Cadillac of guitars. It’s semi-hollow, and it just feels like a proper guitar. I grew up hating 355s. I thought solid-body guitars were the only real guitars. Lately, I’ve done a complete turnaround.

Is there anybody in the current crop of blues guitar players who stands out to you?

There’s some great players. Connor Selby, Toby Lee – those are two off the top of my head.

It’s hard for me to criticize anybody, because I think anybody doing it should be applauded. If they’re out there and playing, they’ve already accomplished so much.

At the same time, so much current blues has become formulaic – the sounds and just the concept of what a blues record in the modern age should be.

A lot of that has to do with people being concerned about airplay. I’m unsure how it all happens. Is it the artist? The producer? These people can be great players, but it’s hard for me to listen to another blues song that’s produced the same way or with the same approach.

Sometimes I can’t get past it, but that’s a personal problem. It’s got nothing to do with anybody else.

Order Stephen Dale Petit’s 2020 Visions here.

Released in 1968, the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” single was a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Signaling a return to the band’s blues guitar roots, the track has remained a setlist staple for decades.

In spring ’68, just prior to the single’s release, two different music videos were shot in a day's work at London’s Olympic Studios with director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus, The Beatles' Let It Be.)

One of the films presents a makeup-free Rolling Stones along with a totally unique version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” while the other (notable for the band’s warpaint) features an alternative vocal take dubbed over the single’s backing track.

“We shot the one without the makeup first,” explains Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who first encountered the Rolling Stones while working on the British music TV show Ready Steady Go!

“They were great. As we were doing it, I felt there was an ingredient missing, although at that point I didn’t know what it was. We had a small meal break and I saw Brian Jones sitting by the makeup table and sort of playing with the colors – putting it on his face and then wiping it off – and I thought, Huh. That’s a real interesting look.

“And so I said to Mick, Keith, Charlie and Bill, ‘Just go over there to the makeup table and see what it’s like if you put some stuff on your face – either stripes or eye makeup, or full-face glitter, whatever strikes you.’”

Today, the Rolling Stones and ABKCO Music & Records Inc. have released both versions restored in 4K resolution.

According to Lindsay-Hogg, only the most popular bands of the time were making “promo” videos such as this (effectively, the prototype of the music video format that exploded in the early ‘80s with the advent of MTV.) The idea being to provide promotional broadcast material in countries where there were “genuine security issues.”

Recalling his memories of shooting the second version, Lindsay-Hogg said, “The director of photography, Tony Richmond, and I thought there’s another way to light them as well, because it was kind of general performance lighting on the first one we shot in the early afternoon.

“In the second version, we shot them in these shadows. It was much more to do with shadows, and Mick coming in and out of light, and that whole little walk he does at the beginning.

“We put that together, and that’s the one they liked best because it had a slightly decadent feel to it.

“When I edited them and played them back, they loved the videos. I’d hate to think they didn’t, because then I went on to do their videos for 15 years.”

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

Keith Richards is famously associated with many classic electric guitars.

His curiosity for the instrument and open-minded approach to tone has seen him play a wide variety of models over the years from popular designs like the Fender Telecaster and Gibson Les Paul Standard to some more leftfield axes like the Ampeg Dan Armstrong “Plexi” guitar.

Along the way, Richards has acquired some great custom-built guitars. And while some names like Zemaitis may sound familiar, others are decidedly more obscure.

Take the Doug Young-made solidbodies for example. Though these boutique beauties are less well known, Richards spoke very highly of them during an interview with Guitar Player back in the early ‘80s.

The following interview extract appeared in the April 1983 issue of Guitar Player that featured Richards on the cover holding his Doug Young custom-built double-cutaway solidbody.

How did you come about acquiring your new guitars?

“Friends of mine introduced me to Doug Young, who built them. After seeing some of his things, I knew he was capable of exceptionally fine work, so I more or less commissioned him to build me a guitar.

“He ended up making me two – the red one is a gift for my girlfriend, actually. Basically, that's the lowdown.”

Did you specify exactly what you wanted?

“Not really. We didn't have to say very much about it. I was very impressed by the things I saw, and I wanted a similar guitar for myself.

“But it's also this patronage that players and builders can get involved with – Renaissance man, and all that, the old system of someone like me encouraging guys like Doug.

“His guitars are too good not to be given help.”

So you didn't request a certain wood for the fingerboard, a certain pickup design?

“Not too much, no. I said, ‘Make me a guitar.’ I figure that's the difference between working with an artist as opposed to just anyone.

“I mean, if you want a suit made, you don't want to have to tell the tailor how to do everything. You want to find someone who doesn't need all that, you see? It's more, ‘I want to see what you can build for me.’

“There are very few people like that. Most people, you have to sit on their ass and watch them: with Doug I just left him to it. I was in Paris for months, recording. I'd almost forgotten it was going on until I saw what he'd done.”

Have you had a chance to play them in the studio yet?

“Not in the studio, but I went out and banged on them a bit. I'll be back in the studio soon, and then we'll beat them into shape.” [laughs]

After playing hundreds of guitars, what quality in these instruments made you take notice?

“It's a recognition you develop. I think, and I'm sort of instinctive about these things – sit down and play it, feel it.

“I knew that Doug was thinking along the same lines as myself, but far ahead, because I'm not technical. Only after the event of building it when I've got it in my hands, can I know what's right.

“I can't say, ‘Well, it was the magnificent electronics,’ or ‘the wonderful bonding of the woods,’ and each specific thing.

“It was simply a fine instrument. Lovely wood!”