Pete Townshend has enormous respect for Angus Young. He also believes the AC/DC guitarist is living proof of what can happen when a musician spends too much time on the road.

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2000, the Who guitarist argued that many rock musicians stop evolving because they're constantly touring instead of developing new ideas in the studio.

“I think a lot of great musicians become frozen in time because of their obsession with the road,” Townshend said. “I mean, look at AC/DC. They've never stopped touring and Angus is still wearing those stupid shorts. He still plays brilliantly—and he's one of my favorite guitar players—but the band is definitely stuck in a rut.”

It was a surprising jab at one of rock's most enduring guitar heroes — and, in fact, AC/DC are currently out on their massive Power Up tour, which returns to the U.S. on July 11.

But for Townshend it illustrated a larger point. Long before home studios became commonplace, he'd built one of his own and made it the center of his creative life.

“I was the first person,” Townshend told Guitar Player. “The only people I know who had home studios before I did — apart from electronic music composers — were Les Paul, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Barry Gray, who did music for English cartoons.”

Having his own studio gave Townshend a place to experiment with sounds and develop songs long before he brought them to the Who. Working alone, he built remarkably complete demos that served as blueprints for ambitious projects including Tommy, the abandoned Lifehouse project and Quadrophenia, allowing the band to hear exactly what he envisioned before they entered the studio.

Many of those recordings were eventually released on the Scoop albums, Lifehouse Chronicles and expanded editions of classic Who releases, including Who's Next/Lifehouse and My Generation.

Despite his reputation as one of Britain's most influential guitarists, Townshend said recording — not playing guitar — had always been his true passion. In addition to his fluency on electric and acoustic guitar, he’s also a capable drummer, bass guitarist and keyboardist when it comes to turning his ideas into fully formed demos.

“Recording has always been a passion of mine, and it still is,” he said. “I find it hard to talk about guitars and amplifiers because playing guitar is just something that I do—it's not a passion. The guitar just happened to be what I fell into, and the guitar has become an icon that has grown out of all perspective. The way that I used the guitar in the early days was incredibly irreverent. To some extent, I continue to be irreverent about it.

“My passion and enthusiasm has often been contained in my home studio — partly because it's private, and it's where I've found a way of expressing my complete musicianship. For me, the creative idea is about a neighborhood. The creative spirit needs roots — you have to be fairly well grounded before you can set it free. My studio provides me with a place to create and to be creative.”

Townshend believed the place where music is made becomes part of the music itself, pointing to early rock pioneers like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, who rehearsed and recorded in garages.

“I’m a great believer in the concept that the creative process is often about where the music comes from,” he said. “People like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly rehearsed their routines and made recordings in their garages — Cochran used to engineer his own records!

“So you can't remove the garage from the sound of their early work. You'd never find a painter, for example, who would say they didn't need a place to work, but a lot of musicians undervalue the importance of the studio space. They'll say, ‘Here's my guitar and my bottle of water, so now I can go anywhere.’ Crap! You can't really do that.”

Townshend's own fascination with home recording began in the early 1960s after meeting Barry Gray, whose electronic soundtracks for British television introduced him to the creative possibilities of recording outside a commercial studio.

“He was doing those cartoon soundtracks electronically with simple organs,” Townshend recalled. “Pete Wilson, the guitar player in my very first band, had his father arrange for us to record our first demo in Gray's studio. We recorded one of my first songs, ‘It Was You,’ which was also the first song I ever published. This was around 1963 or ’64.”

Townshend soon began experimenting with a pair of film-location tape recorders, bouncing tracks between the two machines to create sound-on-sound recordings before upgrading to a Revox recorder with Dolby noise reduction and, later, a 3M eight-track machine.

By 2000, Townshend had embraced Pro Tools, but his old analog studio remained his creative refuge. It was the kind of space he believed every musician needed—a place to experiment, evolve and avoid becoming, in his words, "frozen in time."

“If I want to make a great-sounding demo,” he said, “I'll go back to my classic analog equipment.”

If Rob Arthur gets to do a director's cut of his new Frampton documentary, he knows what the first addition to the story will be.

“The one thing I regret we couldn't fit in is the Phenix story,” Frampton's longtime keyboardist tells us via Zoom. He's of course referrnig to the famed 1954 Gibson Les Paul that was given to Frampton by a fan after a 1970 Humble Pie gig but was presumed destroyed in a 1980 crash of a cargo plane transporting his gear from Caracas, Venezuela.

The tail section of the plane stayed intact amidst the debris, however, with all of the guitars intact — although it wouldn't return to Frampton until 2011, after passing through a variety of hands in the Caribbean. He rechristened it Phenix at the time, as in rising from the (literal) ashes. Frampton also gave the name to his Nashville recording studio and to a film production company he and Arthur started during the pandemic, which produced Frampton.

“It's a really fascinating story about the guitar. A great story, an amazing story — but not a character-based story,” Arthur says of the decision to leave Phenix on the cutting-room floor. “We had so much to say about him and how he maneuvered his career and his life that I just couldn't see taking any of that stuff out to fit in the Phenix story.

"If we ever get a chance to make it longer, then maybe it gets back in. On the other hand, it's been covered. Gibson did a whole piece on Phenix, and it's beautifully shot and really well done, so the story's still out there for people to get.”

Frampton had its premiere on June 4 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Its future has not been announced yet, but Arthur is confident it will be picked up by a streaming service and perhaps even have some sort of limited theatrical release.

The deeply candid Frampton does, however, cover the story of how he “almost” became part of the Who.

It occurred during the early '80s, when the glow of 1976's Frampton Comes Alive! had faded. The combination of the I'm in You album and the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie had made him a punchline, he'd been dropped by his label (A&M Records) and split with his manager, Dee Anthony.

All of which left him in such deep financial straits that Frampton had to borrow money from Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun. Around then he received a call from Pete Townshend, explaining that he'd decided that, à la Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, he was going to give up touring with the Who but would still write songs for the band.

“I didn't think it was a great idea,” Frampton says now, with a laugh. “I was kind of laughing as he was talking about it, to be honest. I wanted to say, ‘You must be kidding! First of all, I can't jump that high. Secondly, I'm not you, and you've got an awfully large pair of shoes to fill, live.’

"I really didn't think it would happen. But when the leader of the Who or a founding member of the Who says, ‘I think I want you to play with the Who now,’ you go, ‘Well, that's crazy ... But wait. I don't have anything going on, so maybe it is a good idea.’”

Frampton — who first revealed the invitation in 2020's Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir — told Townshend he wanted assurances that the other members of the Who, particularly singer Roger Daltrey, were onboard with the idea. Townshend said he would discuss it with them and get back to Frampton, who even started practicing his windmills at home.

But there was radio silence from Townshend for three weeks after that, and an anxious Frampton had to track the guitarist down at a recording studio, by phone, to receive a profuse apology and an acknowledgment from Townshend that he “should never have” made the offer. (Years later, while suffering from tinnitus, Townshend brought Steve Bolton on tour to handle electric guitar duties for the Who's acclaimed 1989 tour — although Townshend was along as well, playing acoustic.)

Arthur says the incident “symbolized to me that here's a guy who's so desperate, he's grabbing at anything. He's got to get something going on. There's no way Pete Townshend is going to let someone else be in his place onstage, but Peter just didn't have a lot going on and was like, ‘I need to know! I need to know!’ That, to me, was the bottom for him. That's a rock 'n' roll bottom — really wishing that might happen so he could ignite a fire again after the fall.”

Frampton — whose career, of course, picked up again after childhood friend David Bowie took him out as a guitarist on his 1987 Glass Spider Tour — adds that the Who story was “too big a deal to leave out” of the film. “I didn't want to put down Pete, but it happened, and he knows it did. He was there.”

The two bumped into each other not long after backstage at a Bruce Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden, where they kissed (Townshend on Frampton's head) and made up. “He apologized, and I love him dearly and we're great friends,” Frampton says. “It was just a brotherly problem for a minute — a big one, though.”

In addition to the documentary, Frampton is also promoting Carry the Light, his 19th studio album as a solo artist and first of all-new songs in 16 years. Released May 15 and co-produced with his son Julian Frampton, it features guest appearances from Tom Morello, Sheryl Crow, Graham Nash, H.E.R. and saxophonist Bill Evans. His continuing struggle with the degenerative Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), however, has kept him from making any tour plans in the near future.

The Who’s Roger Daltrey says his band invented heavy metal — and he believes the evidence is already on the record.

Most fans credit Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath with creating heavy metal in the late 1960s, forging a darker and heavier sound in industrial Birmingham after Iommi abandoned the Stratocaster-style guitar he nearly launched the band with.

But others have long argued they helped lay the groundwork. Paul McCartney famously tried to “dirty up” rock music with the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” while Blue Cheer turned Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” into one of proto-metal’s defining early statements.

Daltrey’s argument, however, has less to do with specific songs than with the Who’s sheer volume, aggression, and use of feedback at a time when few bands were operating at that intensity.

“We were just different than everybody else,” Daltrey tells Rolling Stone. “Americans don’t really know the Who from the early ’60s, but as the drummer of Deep Purple [Ian Paice] said recently in a magazine, ‘The Who started it all.’ We were the first heavy metal band.”

For proof, Daltrey points to Pete Townshend’s pioneering use of Marshall amplification and the destructive stage theatrics that later became synonymous with hard rock.

“Jim Marshall invented the 4×12, 100-watt stack for Pete Townshend,” Daltrey said. “All the guitar smashing that Jimi Hendrix became famous for, in his style, was basically copied from Pete Townshend.”

In truth, Ronnie Wood laid the groundwork for the 4x12 stack, but there’s some truth to Daltrey’s claim. Townshend’s quest for ever-louder stage volume helped push amplifier design into new territory, laying groundwork for the massive guitar tones that would later define hard rock and metal. The Who’s confrontational performances and instrument destruction also established a blueprint for the genre’s rebellious spirit.

Daltrey even argues that albums like The Who Sell Out and Tommy helped elevate rock into something more ambitious and theatrical.

“We elevated rock to be maybe up its own ass in a way, you could say it,” he said.

Whether that makes the Who the inventors of heavy metal is another question entirely.

While the band undeniably influenced rock’s volume, attitude, and presentation, many fans still view Sabbath as the group that fully established metal as a distinct musical language. Iommi’s downtuned riffs, ominous songwriting, and industrial heaviness created a sound that countless bands would follow.

Other musicians have also staked their own claims. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page both argued that the guitar riff in “Beck's Bolero” was among heavy metal’s earliest defining moments — although they never agreed on who actually wrote it.

Ultimately, the strongest argument for Sabbath may be the reaction the band provoked.

“When Sabbath first played in the USA, people were frightened of us,” Iommi once told Classic Rock. “They thought we’d turn them into a frog! It was very peculiar. They were frightened to death!”

That sense of menace and shock became central to heavy metal’s identity — and it’s a large part of why many fans still place Sabbath on the throne, even if the Who helped build the stage beneath it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only after a while did Townshend ask the obvious question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It might be some hits.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Townshend believes Tommy resonates more powerfully today than it did upon its release 57 years ago — and he points squarely to social media as the reason.

The album’s narrative turns on a traumatic childhood rupture: young Tommy witnesses the murder of his father by his mother’s lover, reflected in a mirror. The shock leaves him psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind.

Townshend sees a modern parallel in the digital environments children now inhabit.

“So many issues that we deal with today, particularly with our kids living on social media,” he said in June 2024 on the red carpet at the Tony Awards. “The iPhones that we all look at now are like the mirror in Tommy. It's a very adept, a very succinct reflection of what it is that I feel we're facing today with kids growing up with tremendous anxiety, with suicide issues, and acting it out sometimes.”

Townshend originally conceived Tommy through the lens of his own postwar upbringing in Britain. Raised in the shadow of World War II, he has described a gray, emotionally constrained childhood in which children were often reminded of the sacrifices made by the previous generation.

His home life grew more unsettled after his parents separated, forcing him to live with a mentally unstable and abusive grandmother — a formative relationship he has frequently cited as both painful and complicated.

“You know, the story of Tommy was written when I was looking back at my post-war childhood, thinking, ‘Our parents fucked up,’ and it would be tragic to allow this to happen again,” he explains.

“We've had no war, but we've got climate change, we've got some big issues. Let's not leave our children to do whatever they want; they need to be guided and cared for.”

Tommy’s sweeping narrative arc marked a turning point for rock, helping establish the concept album as a serious artistic form. Townshend has said the project was partly born out of creative necessity after encountering Jimi Hendrix and his electric guitar talents.

“He came along and… just swept everything aside,” Townshend told Guitar Player in September 1989. “I had to learn to write, and it became like a new art, from a new angle.”

The album’s success — and its reputation as rock’s first true opera — led Townshend to revisit large-scale conceptual storytelling throughout his career. Most notably, he developed Lifehouse, an ambitious follow-up that anticipated elements of the internet and artificial intelligence (something he’s jokingly threatened to use himself). Though the project remained unfinished in its original form, many of its songs were issued as Who's Next.

Townshend returned to the material decades later, culminating in the 2023 release of Who’s Next/Lifehouse, an expansive 11-CD box set accompanied by a graphic novel that reimagines the story.

Perennially outspoken guitarist Pete Townshend has made no shortage of controversial claims over the course of his long career. But do his famously derogatory remarks about Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin truly reflect what he thinks of his groundbreaking peers?

This is, after all, a guitarist who once said Jimi Hendrix wasn’t “creative,” dismissed Ritchie Blackmore as overrated among rock’s most famous electric guitar players, and, in a 1989 interview with Guitar Player, harshly criticized the musical substance of heavy metal acts, despite acknowledging the technical proficiency within their ranks.

“I’d trade 150 Def Leppards for one R.E.M.,” he remarked. “It’s as simple as that.”

Not even his bandmates exempt from his inflammatory remarks. As recently as 2019, Townshend said he was glad drummer Keith Moon and bass guitarist John Entwistle were gone, adding that they had been “fucking difficult to play with.”

Given that history, it’s hardly surprising Led Zeppelin were not spared his criticism.

“I don’t like a single thing that they have done. I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them,” he said in 1995. “I just never, ever liked them. It’s a real problem to me because, as people, I think they are really, really great guys. I just never liked the band.”

While he conceded that some of his resentment may have stemmed from the fact that Led Zeppelin “became so much bigger than the Who,” he stood by his assessment.

Page, for his part, was far less severe. Speaking to Trouser Press in 1977 (via Rock and Roll Garage), he offered a measured evaluation: “Really good. He had his limitations, though. He was no Beck, but he was all right.

“Beck, myself, and Clapton were sort of arch-buddies,” he added, referring to Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. “Townshend was sort of on the periphery. He was like a white elephant, but he was very good.”

In recent years, Townshend has suggested his earlier comments were often more impulsive than deeply held.

“In the years when I drank and shot from the hip, I rarely got into the kind of trouble I could get into today,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2022. “I once said some stuff about Led Zeppelin, that I’d never heard one of their songs, and about Eric Clapton, that after his experience as an addict, he’d never play as well as when he was a young man, and in every case, I’ve been forgiven. I suppose that’s because people see you as a big-mouth rock star, and this is what they expect from you—to be full of shit.”

In that same conversation, he also acknowledged the musical potential he once saw between the two rival camps.

“I’ve always felt there was a real potential for something explosive and nuts with the Who and Led Zeppelin,” Townshend said. “The principals in Led Zeppelin are much more musicians than they’re perceived to be by the heavy metal fans who just think it’s about heavy shit.”

That hasn’t stopped Townshend from delivering headline-grabbing quotes in recent years, including describing himself as a “dangerous fucker” when discussing the Who’s future and threatening to turn to AI in apparent retaliation against segments of his fanbase.

More than a decade before the first distorted power chords echoed through London’s underground punk clubs, Pete Townshend was drafting that genre’s blueprint. While his mid ’60s contemporaries were lost in psychedelic whimsy or blues-rock virtuosity, the Who’s primary architect was busy weaponizing the electric guitar and transforming the stage into a theater of destruction that prized raw, visceral energy over technical perfection.

Feedback and smashed Rickenbackers were the results of his frustration with both suburban life and his limited guitar skills. Townshend and the Who didn’t merely play music — they assaulted it with sheer volume and a ferocious approach the punks would follow.

Townshend was thrilled with punk and happy to be recognized as its godfather. He was, however, less enamored with another genre of music that bore his sonic signature: heavy metal.

Years before punk’s arrival, Townshend was being credited for laying the foundation of heavy metal with the Who’s live 1970 document, Live at Leeds. The record is considered among the greatest live albums in rock history, capturing the Who at their raucous peak as Townshend wielded distortion, feedback and power chords to create a sound that was heavier and more aggressive than anything previously recorded.

Live at Leeds tracks like “Young Man Blues,” “My Generation” and “Summertime Blues” established the high-gain and overwhelming intensity that would become the foundational requirement for all metal that followed. Even Eddie Van Halen studied the album, down to each of Townshend’s riffs and solos.

“We sort of invented heavy metal with Live at Leeds,” Townshend told the Toronto Sun in 2019. “We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know, heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar.”

But as Townshend revealed in a 1989 interview with Guitar Player, the genre transformed into something he scarcely recognized by the dawn of that decade. The glam trappings of spandex, makeup and big hair were ubiquitous, as were the “bad boy” lyrics of heavy-metal songs and the virtuoso solos played on pointy electric guitars.

“I think it's very lighthearted, isn't it?” Townshend offered in a 1989 interview with Guitar Player. “You know, I'm not into men in spandex trousers with hair like that [holds palm one foot from head]. I'm kind of confused as to why these guys look like that, and why it is that they think they look so cool. Maybe they would just say that I was old-fashioned, I don't know.”

He had to admit, though, that the guitar playing from these groups was outrageously good.

“A lot of these guys in spandex trousers and hair like that are playing some of the most unbelievable guitar, and you can't really argue with it,” he said. “It's just that sometimes the vehicles seem to leave a little bit to be desired.”

That was true, he thought, even when heavy-metal acts were covering his own songs. He pointed to the band W.A.S.P., which had covered “The Real Me,” one of the tracks from the Who’s Quadrophenia.

“You give them a good song, and they're fuckin’ out there; it's frightening,” he admitted. “But it’s interesting that they picked that song; they picked a song which is a boast, a threat. It's just that the form is limiting, and I suppose part of that I actually respect, because I think that limitations are very, very valuable.

“But I just can’t understand how so many musicians just want to be the same as so many others.”

To Townshend’s point, heavy-metal’s look and sound were becoming homogeneous by the late-’80s end of its reign. About the only good thing he could say was that the music was inspiring youngsters to pick up guitar and develop into young virtuosos.

“Kids have been playing guitar and having lessons from the age of eight, sometimes younger,” he noted. “So when they hit 14 or 15 or 16, they're sort of going past their peak.

“There's some wonderful stuff happening there,” he admitted. “I just wish there was a better medium for it. I wish we had something that was more akin to jazz in its ability to take virtuoso performers and give them a stage, rather than just be hit with little tongue flashings and wagging fingers and legs astride, and waggling very big kind of psychedelic cocks at the audience. So in that sense, I suppose I do despise it.”

What he preferred was music that cut its own path. In that respect, he was drawn to the sounds of alternative rock, in particular R.E.M. Though they started out in the early 1980s as architects of southern gothic jangle-pop, by the end of the decade the group had transformed from college-radio darlings to a stadium-ready rock powerhouse through hits like “Orange Crush,” “Stand” and “The One I Love.”

Within Peter Buck’s aggressively strummed Rickenbacker rhythm work, Mike Mills lead-style bass and Bill Berry’s thundering drums, Townshend heard something not unlike the Who nearly two decades earlier.

“I'd trade 50 Def Leppards for…” Townshend began. “That's not enough. I’d trade 150 Def Leppards for one R.E.M. It's as simple as that.

“I heard R.E.M., and my heart just soared. To me, that’s just divine music; I like the sound of it, I think the words are brilliant, I think it's just perfection, and the fact that none of them can kinda go [he mimics shredding] just doesn't interest me at all, because if they wanted to, they could go out and they could hire any one of those guys.

“What's really important is the music, the content, the heart of it.”

Guitar Player is closing out 2025 by republishing 25 of your favorite stories from the past year. We thank you for spending the past year with us and look forward to bringing you more of the stories you want in 2026.

Pete Townshend is hailed as one of rock’s greatest rhythm players. Even he’s not shy about his talents, telling Sound International in 1980, “in that particular area, I don’t think I’m topped.”

But when it comes to lead work, he admitted long ago he’s not much of an improviser. Most of his solos — from “I Can’t Explain” to “Love Reign O’er Me” were composed ahead of time.

“I started out as a rhythm player, and a few of my lead licks are things I’ve basically developed in recording sessions,” he told Guitar Player in May 1972. “I’ll never be able to play the kind of leads I want. I was happiest listening to Jimi Hendrix — that, to me, was like heaven.’

From early on, Townshend focused on rhythm guitar work, playing slashing chords with his windmilling right arm. By the end of the 1960s, he developed a signature style of 16th-note strumming with his motif for “Pinball Wizard,” played on a Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar, from 1969’s Tommy.

The release of Live at Leeds in 1970 gave a little evidence of his talents as a lead player. He unleashes his fury in a stunning bit of solo work on Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues" and plays some inspired jagged lines on Johnny Kidd's "Shakin' All Over." Townshend has only improved as a lead guitarist since then, as heard on Who tracks like “Join Together” and — a deep cut — David Bowie’s “Slow Burn,” from 2002’s Heathen. Even when his solos are composed, their impact lies in his execution, and Townshend always connects with listeners emotionally rather than through acts of technical virtuosity.

But from the beginning, the Who’s true guitar player has been the bassist: John Entwistle. It’s Entwistle who takes the lead break in “My Generation,” and whose bass guitar skills came to the fore from Tommy onward, even as Townshend was improving as a lead player.

“What’s interesting is our group is, of course, that the roles are reversed. John is the lead guitar player and although I’m not the bass player he does produce a hell of a lot of the lead work,” Townshend said in the 1980 Sound International interview.

“It’s really funny to this day where you get a song like ‘Dreaming From the Waist’ [from 1975’s The Who by Numbers], when John is doing this blinding bass solo and making Alvin Lee look like he plays in slow motion, and I’m just standing there strumming a chord.

“And the audience looks at me and goes, ‘How does he do it? How does he produce that noise?’”

Part of Entwistle’s stealth is his lack of movement, combined with his penchant for dressing in dark colors.

“You see, for years nobody even knew John was there,” Townshend continued. “He used to wear all black and nobody ever put a lamp on him: if we appeared on TV you never saw him unless the camera was whipping from Roger to Keith.”

As the late Entwistle himself told Guitar Player in the November 1975 issue, “I’ve never truly considered myself a bass player. I think I'm a lead/rhythm bass player. Because the Who was a three-piece, and we tried to reconstruct the same sound as on record, I used to play most of the time with a plectrum and played rhythm figures on the bass.

“Then, when we started doing more complicated stuff with Tommy, I started playing lead figures. Occasionally before that, when the guitar went off, I'd have to take over a solo and turn everything full up and go into a solo.

“Maybe if I'd been with another band I might be one of those very tasteful bass-y players, a proper bass player, really.”

Entwistle went on to explain how he managed to make his bass cut through by switching to a Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar for live performance and using “full treble all the time. We found that it cut to the back of the audience as well, so you could hear what the bass was playing, instead of a blur.”

He also confirmed Townshend’s recollections of how his live bass work confused fans.

“It does tend to happen,” he told Guitar Player. “A lot of people in England, when ‘My Generation’ first came out, thought that Pete was playing the solo — the bass solo. And for months, when we were playing it onstage, that solo would come up, and they always used to look at Pete.

“And after the bass solo was over they used to clap for Pete. I use a very guitar-like sound, so if the audience don't know about the instruments they're obviously going to get confused.

“The offensive thing is they automatically think it's Pete. Yet they can't understand why Pete just has his hands on a chord he's just strummed, and there's a lead figure coming out, and they're still looking at him and saying, ‘How's he doing that?’”

Townshend and Daltrey have announced the Who’s long reign as a performance act is coming to an end. On May 8, the duo — the only surviving members of the original lineup — announced The Song Is Over North America Farewell Tour, named after the band's 1971 hit. The road show begins August 16 in Sunrise, Florida and wraps up on September 28 in Las Vegas.

Tickets will be available starting with a Citi presale and through the Who Fan Club (details below) beginning on Tuesday, May 13.

The news isn’t exactly unexpected. Townshend recently announced he is retreating from performance. “I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t fill my soul in the way that you see some performers — just their soul is filled through being on the stage. That’s not me.”

Last March, Pete Townshend teased he would use AI to create new songs that sound like everyone's favorite Who songs. It was an acid-tinged response to fans who refuse to give his new music a try.

But if he was just tweaking noses then, the iconic rock guitarist sounds much more serious about AI these days.

In a new interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, Townshend says he's considered embracing AI as he delves into his archive of incomplete song demos.

“I’ve managed to wade through about half,” he says of the trove. “What’s interesting is, I don’t know what to do with it! I’m quite interested in AI.”

AI has often been derided as a threat to the music industry, with Jimmy Page and Brian May both campaigning for the U.K. government to make laws that would better protect the intellectual property rights of artists.

But in other uses, it’s proven to have some merit, including Positive Grid’s Bias X amp plugin, which is able to generate guitar tones from prompts. For that matter, surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr used the technology to create the song “Now and Then” from a John Lennon demo.

It's an approach Townshend thinks has some merit..

“I’m quite interested in [using it to repurpose] some of my old songs that didn’t quite work,” he continues. “I didn’t get them right the first time round.”

He adds that if he were to funnel the music into AI, he could see “what it can make of it,” using it to spur new ideas and breakthroughs based on what the technology perceives as his signature style.

“There might be some hits!” he adds.

Of course, the biggest issues arise when projects that use AI fail to acknowledge it. It’s why the current number one country song in America is causing a stir, and why the BBC is under fire for championing a new act that uses AI.

But where creativity and AI work in harmony — as with McCartney and Starr — the issues are less controversial, because there is still human endeavor involved in the creative process. Townshend seems keen to explore that middle ground.

Elsewhere, Townshend has revealed the Who’s real lead guitarist is, and why some fans struggled to comprehend his noise-making at first.

And the man who played his parts on the band's 1989 tour has dished the details on what it was like to be the group’s stand-in lead guitarist. One rehearsal, he says, caused Townshend to smash a guitar to smithereens in anger.

After 60 years of shows, the Who finally called it a day this past September.

But as Pete Townshend just revealed, he didn't expect the group to last but two weeks when they started out in 1964.

Now 80, and fresh off the road from the group's farewell tour, the guitarist looked back on the group’s early days on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he shared the real reason he smashed his first guitar and the moment he realized the Who were built to last.

“The Who were a gang,” he explains. “I was at school. I was 16 years old. I was doing art classes in the summer and taking my final exams.

“This guy, Roger Daltrey, was the school bully. He'd been thrown out the year before. He's a year older than me, and he came up to me in the corridor, said, ‘You! I hear you play the guitar.' And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to be in my band?’”

Townshend agreed, thinking Daltrey's could give a scrawny guy like him protection against other rough characters.

John Entwistle had already signed up to play bass in the band, and the teenagers got to work.

But while Daltrey might have harbored dreams of rock stardom, Townshend was less committed.

“I kept it secret, I didn't tell my arty-farty art school friends I was in this band,” he confesses. “Until one day there was this college dance thing and we were hired to do that, and all these fabulous-looking hippie art school girls were pretending to be Beatles fans and were screaming at me. I thought, This is great!”

Yet Townshend — who would go on to rub shoulders with Jimi Hendrix and push guitar amplifiers to their limits in a fierce battle of volume with Ronnie Wood — says it did little change his thoughts about a career in music.

“I thought of myself as a creative,” he reasons. “I wanted to be a painter or a sculptor and that the band would last a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. And that's why I accidentally smashed my first guitar; I didn't care. I thought, ‘Well, we'll be gone in two months and I'll just borrow some money from my dad and buy another one.’”

What changed his mind was hearing the group's first single on the radio.

“We had a hit record, ‘I Can't Explain,’” Townshend says. “I was driving my mom's little yellow van back to Ealing, where we lived in West London. I heard it on the radio, and that was it. I thought, Wow, I'm communicating. I have an audience. They were committed to what I was writing.

“Then I wrote ‘My Generation,’ which was just huge. I had an audience, and then in a sense, I left art behind. There was magic happening.”

By his own admission, the Who were never the most glamorous band — but they made up for it with instrument-smashing chaos. Musically, Townshend learned to leave lead duties to Entwistle, and, as a result, mastered a different art of guitar-playing.

The bassist’s death in 2002 had rocked the group, but Townshend has revealed how he and Roger Daltrey rallied in one of their darkest moments to get the band moving again.

When Pete Townshend’s touring days with the Who came to an end earlier this month, there was no final guitar smash as a punctuation mark for the British rock giants. Which is a surprise, considering that he’s been breaking electric guitars for as long as he’s been playing them.

Born in West London in May 1945, Townshend was raised in a family in which musicality was expected of him. His father, Cliff, was an alto sax player in the Royal Air Force's dance band, the Squadronaires. His mother, Betty, was a singer with the Sidney Torch and Les Douglass Orchestras. The couple also owned an antique store, which provided the means for young Pete to get his first proper guitar.

He tells Playboy that, after failing at playing his father's clarinet — “I couldn’t make a sound” — his father suggested he try guitar. For some reason, his grandmother was given the task of making the purchase.

“My grandmother was — let me put it politely, because she is my beloved, beloved grandmother — clinically insane.

“Somehow she was elected to buy me my first guitar, and the one she chose was one of those you hand on the wall of an Italian restaurant. A cheap Italian restaurant.

“When I complained, my father said, ‘When you can get a tune out of this I’ll buy you a good one.'”

Some time later, a much better guitar showed up at the Townshend's antique store. Despite his father's earlier offer, it was left to Pete to buy the guitar, using money saved from his paper route.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for him to destroy it. Appropriately, it happened in front of his pal John Entwistle, who — as the Who's future bass player — would see him destroy many more guitars.

“I was 13,” Townshend recounts. “John Entwistle and I were rehearsing together in the front room of my house. My grandmother came in shouting, ‘Turn that bloody racket down!’

“I said, ‘I’ll do better than that,’ and I got my guitar — this was a good guitar that I had paid for myself with money I earned from a paper route — and smashed it to smithereens.

“I said, ‘Now will you fucking get out of my life!?’ and she stomped out.”

The consequences of his actions quickly dawned on him.

“I looked at John and said, ‘What now?’”

The ever-reserved bassist was quick with an appropriately dry — and practical — response.

“He said, ‘Another paper route, I think.’”

Townshend says that, from that moment forward, smashing a guitar was never out of the question.

“Once I had done it, it was always there as a possibility,” he explains. “If ever I wanted to deal with any kind of hidden rage, I could always take it out on the guitar. I could always trigger the same little bit of psychotherapy.”

Decades later, after guitar smashing became a key part of the thrill of a Who live show, Townshend refused to apologize for his actions. After all, he said, he ever shared other guitarists' affection for the instrument.

“Young kids that buy their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it,” he said. I've never had that.”

By the time the Who went on to play their first U.S. show, the need to repeat such violent feats night after night posed problems. Townshend found the answer in glue

“When we first came to New York, we did a thing called The Murray the K Show and we'd play four times a day,” Townshend told Jimmy Fallon last year. “I only had one guitar, so I'd have to break it and fix it four times a day. In the end, it was more glue and string [than anything else].”

By 1989, a year in which Townshend had hand-picked Atomic Rooster's Steve “Boltz” Bolton to be his co-guitarist for a tour as he struggled with tinnitus, his sense of rage, and the need to break guitars like they were nothing to satiate the red mist, had yet to quell. Bolton says he smashed a Takamine acoustic to pieces right before his eyes for one small error during a run-through of "Pinball Wizard" at rehearsals.

However, Bolton walked away with some more positive memories and a few of Townshend’s greatest guitar secrets up his sleeve.

And though those destructive days are now, at 80, behind him, he's made cryptic clues about what the future of both the Who and Pete Townshend, the solo artist, which may involve using AI to appease his fans. That came just weeks after he admitted to falling out of love with playing live.

He's since revealed he had to get sober again, after a 30-year streak, ahead of the Who's final tour.

The Who have always been one of rock’s most aggressive acts. That has usually come out in their performances when Pete Townshend smashes his guitar and Keith Moon topples over his drum kit.

That sort of violence has always been part of the act. Townshend’s freewheeling attitude toward his guitars persisted over the years because he claims that, unlike other guitarists, he never had a relationship with the guitar. Lead singer Daltrey says he never liked Townshend’s guitar smashing very much, and says he only destroyed one guitar in his life, then quickly came to regret it.

But one thing he doesn’t regret is the time he and Pete came to blows — and the singer landed a punch that put the guitarist out of commission.

“I had one fight with Pete where I knocked him out, which I’ve always felt bad about because it was so unnecessary,” Daltrey tells Classic Rock in a new interview. “But I had no choice, because unfortunately I was the one being held back and he was hitting me with a guitar at the time.”

Not surprisingly, Townshend’s guitar of choice at the time was a Gibson SG, the very model of electric guitar that he came to prize among all others in the early 1970s, thanks to both its sound and its compliant nature when driven like an axe into the stage floor.

But Daltrey was understandably upset to find himself on the receiving end of Townshend’s unapologetic guitar-smashing tendencies.

“And if you break a Gibson SG over someone’s shoulder it’ll fucking hurt,” he says with a laugh.

As for the fight that knocked Pete out cold?

“It was only one punch,” Daltrey admits. “And unfortunately it hit him when he was off balance, coming forward after throwing a punch at me, which I dodged. It was his own fault, because he told the roadies to let me go,” he explains laughing.

“But I’ve always felt bad about it, I don’t know why. He did go out cold, and the next thing I know I’m sitting in the fucking ambulance holding his hand.”

As the Who’s only remaining members, Townshend and Daltrey have tried to keep the battles to a minimum over the years. Townshend says they still rarely see eye to eye.

“We don’t communicate very well,” Townshend says. “He and I are very different and we have different needs as performers,” stemming largely these days from Daltrey’s near deafness.

The two men finished the Who’s final U.S. tour, titled The Song Is Over, on October 1 at Palm Desert, California. And while hitting the road at their respective ages is difficult, Daltrey says they owe it to the fans. He notes how the band carried on even after John Entwistle’s drug-induced death in Las Vegas at the launch of the group’s 2002 U.S. tour. He says canceling the tour was only briefly a consideration.

“But we considered everything,” he says. “We considered how many people we would be letting down.”

Even now, Daltrey says, quitting at their age without a tour would have been understandable. But both he and Townshend feel “it’s too easy at our age.

“We’ve always been a band that reflects what’s happening in our generation, and we’re unfortunately the next in line for the hole in the ground — fact of life.

“We owe it to our fans, our original fans that are our age now, to show them how to live. And you don’t fucking give up because one of your mates died, mate. You carry on. If you don’t feel you’ve got anything to offer, then by all means stop, but at the moment I feel we’ve still got a lot to offer.

"Pete’s writing new stuff now, I can still sing as good as I ever could, Pete’s one of the genius guitarists and songwriters of the last century, why not go on? It might not be the same, but it doesn’t make it irrelevant.”

While the Who's final tour is over, Townshend hasn't closed the door completely on future performances. Guesting on BBC Radio 4's My Cultural Life program this past May, Townshend was asked the inevitable: Is this really the end?

“It’s certainly the end of touring in America,” he replied. “I asked Roger if it’s the end of touring Europe, and he said, ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’”

Guitarists aren’t so quick to reveal their secrets — until they have to.

And when the Who prepared for their 1989 25th anniversary tour, Pete Townshend was in no shape to keep his guitar secrets to himself. The Who co-founder was battling tinnitus and had brought Atomic Rooster guitarist Steve “Boltz” Bolton onboard to perform his electric guitar parts while Townshend played acoustic.

In the course of teaching Bolton his songs, Townshend told him the surprising details behind some of the guitars he used for classic Who tracks, including “My Generation” and “I Can See for Miles.”

“I learned quite a few things about Pete that I didn't know, especially with the correct way of playing the songs,” says Bolton, who previously told Guitar Player about how he had to endure Townshend’s temperamental ways during rehearsals.

“For example, on all the songs on the My Generation album including the title song, you’d think, because it’s bombastic, there’s loads of guitars. But there's only one guitar on every track, and it is a 12-string Rickenbacker [360-12].

“If you listen to it, all the main racket is coming from the bass. There are no other guitars, or any overdubbed guitars or anything. There may be a little piano on, but that’s it. It’s just how they sounded.”

Bolton recalls a moment during the tour’s stopover in Seattle where Townshend’s less-is-more modus operandi was further affirmed.

“I went into a record store and they had this fantastic sound system, and they were playing, ‘I Can See For Miles’ really loud,” Bolton recalls. “And it just sounded great with the drums, guitar and bass.

“I got back to the hotel and saw Pete and said, ‘Listen, I've got to tell you, I was in a record store and they were playing “I Can See For Miles.” And it was just the most amazing experience!’

“And he was just like a little boy. He said, ‘Oh yeah, should I tell you how I did that? And I answered, ‘Please do!’ He explained that it was just a Telecaster through a Fender Champ. And that was it. Yet, the guitar sounded absolutely enormous.

“I said, ‘My god, Pete, it sounds like 50 Marshall stacks!’”

The reunion tour also brought Bolton a glimpse into Townshend’s approach to songwriting and how jazz pianist Mose Allison inspired “My Generation.”

“In the ’60s, everyone used to do a song by Mose Allison, who was this white jazz piano player,” he explains. “And one of his songs, ‘Young Man Blues,’ was covered by the Who.

“Pete told me that when he wrote ‘My Generation,’ he actually wrote it and demoed it like a Mose Allison song. That was what was in his head. But by the time it got into the lion's den with Keith Moon, it turned into that bombastic anthem.”

In addition, Bolton learned the correct way to play “My Generation.” He says Townshend tuned his guitar down a whole step and played an A chord shape, which sounded as a G.

“It’s an interesting technique,” Bolton says. “Pete plays the main riff using his thumb on the bass string, then the thumb goes down to play the F.”

When it came to the gear for the tour, Bolton used a 1962 Fender Stratocaster that he first bought back in 1977.

“I bought it in London for 240 pounds and sold the Strat for 12,000 pounds only few years ago,” he exclaims. “So that guitar was my main electric for the tour, and I alternated between that and a 12-string Rickenbacker and my stack of Mesa/Boogie amps.

“Pete mainly played a Takamine acoustic, a 12-string Rickenbacker and a bunch of Eric Clapton Signature Strats. And he used rack-mounted channel-switching Mesa/Boogie studio preamps — one for the electric, one for the acoustic and two for backup. He primarily played acoustic guitar at the start of the tour, and the crew had built him a little gazebo onstage to protect his hearing.

“But by the time we got two thirds of the way through the tour, he was breaking out the Strats. So we were both playing Strats.

“They were recording the shows every night too. Pete came up to me one night as we came offstage and said, ‘I spent all night listening to the live recordings and it's fucking fantastic. Don't change a thing. I love what you're doing.’ Which was great to hear because he’s a tricky guy, you never know what’s going to happen with him.”

And what was one of the most surprising discoveries Bolton made from his time working with Townshend?

“He loves new guitars,” he says. “On that tour, he played a new Eric Clapton signature Strat. So, when he saw my ’62 Strat, Pete said, ‘What are you doing playing that onstage? It should been in a museum. Why don’t you play a new guitar?’ I was having trouble with the volume pot, it kept getting locked halfway, so I had to get it repaired.

“So he had a point. All my guitars are new now.”

Noel Gallagher may have once made the bold claim that Oasis were bigger than the Beatles, but few artists have trashed the band’s musical abilities. The Who’s outspoken guitarist Pete Townshend, however, bucked that trend when, in the mid ’60s, he called the Fab Four “lousy.”

At a time when the Beatles were putting out their sixth studio album, Rubber Soul, the Who were experiencing a breakthrough year. Their debut album, My Generation, had been hastily put together following the success of the early single "I Can't Explain" and the fervor around Townshend's unapologetic guitar-smashing antics.

Both bands were at markedly different points in their respective arcs. Still, when teed up to talk about the reigning champs in a 1966 TV interview, Townshend didn’t hold his razor-sharp tongue once the subject of "quality" came up.

“What has got quality in the pop business?” he asks. “What’s got quality in anything? It’s just a matter of standards. In the pop business, we’re lucky in that there are no standards.”

That led one of the interviewers, a young woman, to question if Townshend's argument applies to the Fab Four.

“But wouldn’t you say the Beatles and people like that have a certain musical quality?” she questions.

“Ooh, that’s a tough question,” Townshend replies, before telling a story about himself and Who bass guitarist John Entwistle.

“Actually, this afternoon, John and I were listening to a stereo LP of the Beatles in which the voices come out of one side and the backing track comes out of the other,” he said.

“When you actually hear the backing tracks of the Beatles without their voices, they’re flippin’ lousy,” he said, spitting the words out.

Unfortunately, this was a common problem with records mixed for stereo in the early 1960s. Before the use of four-track tape decks, around 1964, two-track machines were commonly employed, with the instruments recorded together on one track and the vocals on another.

This worked out fine for mono LPs, but it caused problems for stereo albums, where the only way to create a stereo picture was to place the music on one side and the vocals on another. As the Beatles' first two albums were recorded on two-track tape decks, they both suffered from this when reproduced for stereo.

In addition to sounding awful, the procedure exposed flaws in the playing that vocals — or careful mixing — might have concealed. As one would expect, Townshend tuned into the performances, and he found them wanting — although in all fairness, Please Please Me, the Beatles' first album, was recorded in a single day.

The Who, on the other hand, suffered no such indignities. They were recording on four-track by the time they released My Generation. Although issued only in mono originally, it was remixed for stereo in 2002, with Roger Daltrey's vocals front and center, with Townshend, Entwistle, and their seemingly octopus-limbed drummer, Keith Moon spanning across the stereo field.

Townshend would, of course, come around to the Beatles, eventually.

"I just loved them. They were joyful, they were funny," he said years later, while admitting, "They were more a pop group than I would have liked."

He said the first Beatle songs that "really blew me away" were the single "Day Tripper" and its flipside, "Paperback Writer," a pair of tunes unusual in that they weren't love songs.

"They weren't about falling in love," he said. "They weren't about [girls]; they were about jobs, creativity. They were interesting songs, those two, and I suddenly realized that they were gonna do great things."

Considering those tunes came out in May 1966 — likely around the time of Townshend's 1966 interview — one has to assume he had a change of heart about the group not long after making his comments.

Townshend's mellower moods have seen him praise the Oasis song that made him cry, and reveal his affection for Who singer Roger Daltrey as the band's "driving force," despite the fact that they "don’t communicate very well."

‘”One day around 1988, my phone rings and the voice down the line says ‘Boltz, it’s Pete Townshend!’” Steve Bolton about his career-changing phone call. “And I go, ‘Yeah right,’

“But he says, ‘No, don't hang up, I've got a question to ask you. Will you play lead guitar for the Who?’”

So began one of the stranger moments in the history of the Who and the career of a guitarist little known outside of England. Steve “Boltz” Bolton has performed with some of the biggest artists of the day, including Dave Gilmour, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie, and he played with British hitmaker Paul Young in the 1980s.

But Bolton’s greatest claim to fame is with Atomic Rooster, the hard rock group he joined in 1971, left in 1972 and rejoined in 2016. The group’s latest outing titled Circle the Sun to be issued this October, is their first full collection of studio recordings in over 40 years.

Despite his unfamiliarity in America, Bolton was well known in England in the early 1970s. Townshend was particularly fond of him. Bolton first caught his ear when Atomic Rooster shared the bill with the Who (along with the Faces and Mott the Hoople) in 1971 for a show at the Oval, London, where Bolton plugged his guitar into Townshend's Hiwatt stack. Bassist Pino Pallidino recalled that, while working with Townshend on his White City: A Novel solo album in 1985, the guitarist asked him about Bolton.

“He said Pete then got up on the studio desk in front of a full room of people and did a perfect imitation of all my moves and everything,” Bolton explains

Following the Who’s celebrated reunion at Live Aid in 1985, Townshend began preparing the group for its 25th anniversary reunion tour, dubbed The Kids Are Alright Tour. Unfortunately, the world’s most famous guitar-smasher was suffering from tinnitus and wanted another guitarist to handle the electric guitar parts for the tour while he performed acoustic guitar. For that matter, the Who would be embellished with numerous other members, bringing the quartet's number to 15.

As Townshend explained on Good Morning America in 1989. "The more musicians you have, the quieter you can play. It's a bit difficult to make a big sound with an electric guitar unless it's quite loud. I'm paying the price now for playing too much loud guitar."

Enter Bolton.

“Pete said, ‘I’m a big fan of yours and have seen you with the Paul Young band quite a few times,’” Bolton says. “ ‘I recognize myself in you.’

“He said, ‘There are only two people I would consider for this job: One is Joe Walsh and the other is you. Can you come over to my studio in West London for some kind of audition and we’ll run over some acoustic stuff?’”

On the day of the audition, Bolton arrived and was quickly escorted to the studio’s control room where Townshend was holding court.

“Pete asks one of his minions to get his Gibson J-200 out,” Bolton recalls. “His minion brings the case, and as Pete opens it, the bridge of the J-200 came unglued and all the strings went ‘boing,’ all over the place!

“I said, ‘Look, the guitar smashes itself!’

“And Pete replies, ‘You’ve got the job!’”

Bolton was given box full of cassettes and instructed to learn 200 songs, including the entirety of Tommy, the Who’s breakthrough 1969 rock opera. Rehearsals began without the Who present. But a few weeks in, Townshend dropped by unexpectedly to see how things were coming along. To his dismay, the sound was far too loud.

“Pete pulled me aside into another room and said, ‘You can’t play that loud. It's too loud!’” he reveals.

“My guitar tech made a few phone calls, to this company in Manchester who were making these tiny five-watt amps. But using such a small amp was a ridiculous concept so it never went any further. We just left it and I carried on with my 100-watt Mesa/Boogie one-by-12 combo.”

As the rehearsals went on, his rig grew even bigger. “By the time of the first production rehearsal in America, I was using four of those combos with extension cabinets,” Bolton says. “So it was like a double stack slaved up in the middle with an identical bunch of stuff in the middle. It was fucking louder than I'd ever been in my whole life!”

Bolton recalls a moment during production rehearsals where Townshend’s reputation as the angry young man of his generation was brought to bear.

“We were in this huge rehearsal room in West London, which had now become small in space due to all of the gear,” Bolton begins. “Pete brings along a bunch of minions with him, and one of them says to all of us, ‘Pete would like the band to run over ‘The Overture’ from Tommy.’”

As its title suggests, “The Overture” consists of the album’s primary themes woven together. Among them is the signature, briskly strummed acoustic guitar riff to “Pinball Wizard.” Bolton had been playing it on electric guitar when Townshend was away. But now that he was back, he assumed the guitarist would take the part on himself.

To protect Townshend’s ears, a booth had been built in the studio for him. “It was like a garden shed, with a sound screen and a window,” Bolton explains. “It had two speakers on the wall and a picture of the Queen. He's in there with a Takamine acoustic.”

When it came time for the “Pinball Wizard” riff, there was absolute silence.

“There's nothing, because I'm not playing, and he’s not playing,” Bolton says. “I look diagonally across the room, and Pete's glaring at me. He shouts, ‘Stop!’ And everyone stops.

“He then smashes the Takamine to smithereens, kicks over the front of the shed and walks right over to me. He’s right in my face and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

“I pulled him by his lapels and said, ‘Listen — I've been covering for you while you've been swanning around America,” Bolton continues. “I thought, because you were here and you've got your guitar, you would be doing that bit. That's why I didn’t play.’

“And do you know what he said to me? ‘It’s my fucking band. I can do whatever I like!’”

Despite the problems, Bolton considers his Who stint one of his most memorable and most cherished of his career. His relationship with Townshend remains a constant today.

“Pete is a very complex character,” he says. “But that's what makes him who he is.”

The Who — Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey — are currently performing on their farewell tour.

Pete Townshend says his addiction to painkillers made it difficult to get in shape for the Who's final tour.

But, speaking to the New York Times, Townshend has revealed that getting show-ready was an uphill battle.

“I went through a period of feeling very depressed, and when I had a knee operation early this year, I got readdicted to painkillers,” ” Townshend told the New York Times.

“This is the way rock stars die,” he added, “OxyContin.”

Townshend's words aren’t melodrama. Prince died from a fentanyl overdose in 2016, seven years after Steven Tyler got hooked on prescription opioids. Musicians and painkillers can be a potent mix, and tragically, Townshend’s troubles came after three decades of sobriety.

“I’d gone through severe alcohol addiction for many years, then narcotics,” he says. “I’d been clean for over 30 years.”

Thankfully, the story has a happy ending.

“I called a close friend who’s working for a recovery clinic in Spain,” he explains, “and he got my head sorted out. I’m feeling really good at the moment.”

The guitarist, who turned 80 in May, has previously played down this tour being the definitive end for the Who. When asked about the band’s plans post-tour, he’d offered a cryptic response, adding, “I’m a dangerous fucker.”

His response to The New York Times was somewhat more measured.

“It’s in Roger’s hands,” he replied. “I don’t like being away from my family, my studios, my dogs, and my friends. I’m not looking to spend the next five years of my life waiting to drop dead on the stage.”

But he isn’t looking to end his 64-year partnership with Roger Daltrey either.

“The end of the tour could give Roger and I permission never to call each other again,” he admits. “I hope that doesn’t happen.”

He does accept, however, that he and Daltrey “are very different and we have different needs as performers.” The singer is dealing with deafness, which has obviously complicates his performance abilities. Says Townshend, “He’s a singer, and he has to be 100 percent fit in order to do his job.”

Billed as The Song Is Over, the Who tour set to conclude in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on September 28.

Although Townshend has said performing “doesn’t fill my soul” like it does for other performers, he appreciates the U.S. audiences and is glad to be able to give them one final swan song. The Who's first American performance took place in June 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival.

“The warmth and engagement of those audiences began back in 1967 with hippies smoking dope, sitting on their blankets, and listening deeply and intensely,” he said when the 15-date run was announced in May (via Guitar World). “Music was everywhere. We all felt equal.”

As the Who undertake their final tour, it’s worth remembering that half the original group is no longer with us. Drummer Keith Moon died in 1978, and bass guitarist John Entwistle in 2002.

And yet guitarist Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey have continued on as the Who, the famed British Invasion group, which launched its final tour on August 16. As Townshend explains, the group has become something larger than itself, which is why the duo have kept it going all these years.

“It’s a brand rather than a band,” Townshend tells AARP. “Roger and I have a duty to the music and the history. The Who [still] sells records — the Moon and Entwistle families have become millionaires. There’s also something more, really: the art, the creative work is when we perform it. We’re celebrating. We’re a Who tribute band.”

With that said, Townshend has said before he’s not fond of performing, explaining, “I don’t hate it,” he said earlier this year, “but it doesn’t fill my soul in the way that you see some performers — just their soul is filled through being on the stage. That’s not me.”

He admits to AARP that the feelings are somewhat more complicated.

“It can be lonely. I’ve thought, Well, this is my job, I’m happy to have the work, but I prefer to be doing something else.

“Then, I think, Well, I’m 80 years old. Why shouldn’t I revel in it? Why shouldn’t I celebrate?”

Townshend has spent more than 60 of those years in the Who, having formed the group when he was all of 18 or 19, after attending art college. Fame in England followed almost immediately for the group with the release of their second single, the hit “I Can’t Explain.”

Townshend would go on to become one of rock’s most singular guitarists, both with his rhythm guitar work — both with electric and acoustic guitars — and his onstage antics, including destroying guitars, making creative use of feedback and windmilling his strumming arm.

Despite the fact that he seems made for fame, Townshend says it was never a goal.

“A rock star is something I didn’t really want to happen,” he says. “[‘I Can’t Explain’] was bigger and better than the art stuff that I was a student for. So I ended up as a rock star — and I think I’m not really good at it,” he added with a laugh.

The group’s final jaunt comes amid some controversy with their drum chair. Their long-time drummer Zak Starkey was fired on April 16, 2025, then rehired, only to be let go again on May 18, 2025, stating it was time for a change after many years of his work.

Starkey has since explained that his fallout with the band began when Daltrey lost his place during the Who’s performance of “The Song Is Over” last March at the Royal Albert Hall, due to the drummer’s bass drum being too loud in Daltrey’s mix. Starkey told The Telegraph in a June interview, “What happened was I got it right and Roger got it wrong,” and blamed the error on a lack of rehearsal and proper planning.

Daltrey fired back, accusing the drummer of something akin to “character assassination.”

Townshend seems to be taking it all in stride. “It looked like Roger made a mistake, but something technical went wrong,” he says. “[Zak’s] handling of it, was, I suppose, light-hearted, but you know Roger.”

Indeed, Townshend and the singer have their own issues even after all these years together.

“We don’t communicate very well,” he says. “He and I are very different and we have different needs as performers,” stemming largely these days from Daltrey’s near deafness. “He got upset because he felt I had sometimes given the impression of having left the building. Roger complained about the fact that he is deaf. He’s a singer, and he has to be 100 percent fit in order to do his job.”

As for the future, Townshend expects he’ll do more solo work, including the release of an album built around his 2019 debut novel, The Age of Anxiety. He adds that he’ll do solo shows and that he and Daltrey might even do shows for charity or special projects.

“Together we represent all aspects of the Who legacy. You know, I’m the songwriter and creator, but Roger’s been the driving force, meaning keeping The Who band and his brand on track. Even with his solo work, we’ll continue to work together, even if we rarely socialize.”

Years before he scored international hits in the 1970s with Canada’s Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Randy Bachman made his mark in the 1960s with the Guess Who. Unfortunately, the group’s name caused some confusion with another hit-making quartet: the English group the Who.

The similarity in their names stemmed from a publicity stunt created by the Canadian label of Bachman’s previous group, Chad Allan and the Expressions. The band scored a hit in 1965 with its cover of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over,” which went to number 22 in the U.S. and topped the charts in Canada.

However, the group’s Canadian label, Quality Records, decided to credit the single to “Guess Who?” In an attempt to create publicity for the band. When the record became a success, the band had to add Guess Who? to its name. By the following year, they shortened it to the Guess Who.

As Bachman tells Classic Rock, it was around this same time that the Who began to gain popularity in North America with songs like “My Generation” (a number three hit in Canada) and “Happy Jack” (a chart topper in that country). The Guess Who were afraid the British act’s success would create problems for them and decided to take the matter into their own hands.

“We found out about this English band called the Who and were determined to force them to change their name,” he says. “So we were in London and the Who were playing at the Marquee club. Down we went to confront them.

“They were being filmed for German TV at that show, so we had to wait around for about four hours.

“Eventually, we get to meet them and say, ‘Look, we were here before you. So change your name. It’s confusing people.’

“Pete Townshend looked at us and replied, ‘There’s the Yardbirds and the Byrds. Nobody’s confused by that. So bugger off!’”

Townshend’s declaration charmed Bachman and his bandmates, and the two groups “became great friends,” he says. “And that phrase ‘bugger off’ was our in-joke. We’d check into a hotel and find out the Who were there, so we’d call up one of the guys at 3 a.m. and when they answered we would say, ‘Bugger off!’ then hang up. They’d do the same to us.”

Bachman said the similarity caused confusion from time to time. In a 2023 Facebook posted, in which he shared a photo of himself with Townshend, Bachman said both bands were occasionally mistaken for the other back in the day.

“Neither band minded and sometimes even played a song or two of each other's during shows,” he wrote. “We crossed paths all the time over the years, most recently was when I saw Pete Townshend at the premiere of Tommy at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. He's a great guy.”

However, he went to explain that the confusion has been a curse at times. Who drummer Keith Moon was known for destroying rooms, blowing up toilets and tossing TV sets into the pools of the hotels the group stayed in. As Bachman explains, his antics caused the Guess Who trouble when they tried to book rooms at the Continental Hyatt House in Los Angeles, also known as the Riot House for the many bands who trashed its rooms.

“We were refused because we could not convince them we were quiet Canadians, a different band altogether from the Who,” Bachman wrote.

“Finally, we were shown to the suite. Keith Moon had made a terrible mess there previously but everything had been redone. While I was sitting at the little desk making a phone call from my room, I tried to slide out the chair but it caught on the shag rug. I'm a big guy. I stumbled backwards and fell over, breaking the chair in two.

“You can imagine the look on the staff's faces when I brought broken furniture down half an hour after checking in!”

After scoring hits with the Guess Who, including “Undun” and “American Woman,” Bachman launched Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the 1970s and went on to craft more chart toppers with “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” each written and performed with his 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins electric guitar.

In recent years, Bachman has made a virtual side career from discussing his experiences with a variety of musicians, including Bo Diddley, Steven Tyler, Frank Sinatra and Neil Young, whom he befriended while the two guitarists were growing up in Winnipeg. It was through Young that he met his guitar idol Stephen Stills, resulting in a humorous exchange when Bachman told Stills “You have no idea how many ideas I’ve stolen from you.”

Following years of acrimony, Bachman and his Guess Who bandmate Burton Cummings have settled their differences recently and plan to embark on a Guess Who tour in 2026.

“We can’t wait,” Bachman says. “The response from fans has been overwhelming, like ‘Go, go, go!’ We’ve got so many great songs to play — talk about overwhelming.”

One of the the early 1970s’ most iconic rock images is of Pete Townshend in a white jumpsuit playing a cherry-red Gibson SG Special. The Who were rock’s newly christened gods in 1970, thanks to the success of Tommy, which brought them widespread acclaim and a reputation as one of the greatest live acts of the day.

Rock concerts had been growing both in size and audio-visual sophistication since the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour. The Who proved themselves capable of filling the larger venues and generating both the volume and visual excitement required.

While Townshend’s habit of trashing his electric guitars was a frequent highlight of the Who’s stage shows, what’s often overlooked is the sheer physicality he brought to his performance on the instrument. From his windmilling right arm to his incredible stage leaps, Townshend made guitar playing an acrobatic workout.

Along with it, between 1968 and 1972, he developed an entirely new style of playing after he became enamored of the Gibson SG Special. Although the model was introduced in 1961, when Townshend adopted it in 1968 he preferred models made from 1966 onward, with a narrower nut width, larger batwing pickguard, and the neck join at the 19th fret rather than 22nd fret as on the earlier guitars.

While it’s often thought Townshend liked the SG Special because it broke easily, with wood-splintering results, he was actually drawn to its lightweight and somewhat pliant design. With 22 frets, the guitar could be easily flexed, particularly by a someone with as physical a playing style as Townshend.

“I got into this thing also of temper tuning the guitar,” by tuning the third string slightly flat and “pulling back slightly on the guitar all the time to bring it into pitch,” he told Sound International in a 1980 interview.

He found the tuning could also be modulated by grabbing the guitar and giving it a good jostling.

“That’s when I started to develop that technique, because you didn’t need a tremolo arm. You could do it by just shaking the guitar.”

His choice of heavy strings added a bit of fight to the execution, and possibly better pitch stability — although that’s debatable given Townshend’s rough handling.

“I’ve never used light-gauge strings. I’ve always used heavy strings,” he said. “The top string is an .012 downwards, and I use two Bs instead of a B and a G string.

“I can’t stand light strings; you don’t have to struggle for it.”

As he pointed out, he developed these techniques in response to the SG. He had originally begun playing Fender Stratocasters onstage in 1966 because they could stand up to his abuse. But the Strat’s tone proved unsuitable to him around the middle of 1968.

“The first time I started to use the Gibson SG model guitar is when I got fed up with Fenders, because they were too clean,” he told Guitar Player in 1972.

“So I went to the manager and said, ‘I really need an alternative to this,’ and he said, ‘I think you'd like the newest SG,’ and I looked at it. I played it and it rang, it sang to me.”

But having adopted the SG and put himself through these paces, Townshend found himself in trouble when Gibson changed the SG’s design in the early 1970s. By the time of his 1972 interview with Guitar Player, Gibson’s owner, Norlin, has begun introducing variations on the SG and reintroduced the Special as the SG Pro, with a join at the 18th neck, and the bridge pickup moved closer to the bridge, among other controversial design changes.

It didn't pass muster with Townshend.

“That thing I do with the neck — bending it back to stretch the strings as the chord rings — you don't need any strength to make the whole guitar bend, because it's made out of such a lightweight wood. But the factory stopped making those particular SGs.”

Townshend asked Gibson to make him custom SGs for the Who’s Next tour in 1971, but he was unhappy with what he received. “We had four of them made for the beginning of the tour. They brought them up to us but the guitars were totally different. The pickups were in a different position, and on and on, so we said, ‘Forget it.’”

In desperation, Townshend put out a call to find SGs made between 1966 and 1970.

“They took the old SG off the market like about a year ago, so we used up every old SG in the country. I raided every music store in the country practically, looking for old SGs.”

He eventually gave up. Townshend reportedly last used a red-finished SG Special of his preferred vintage at the Who’s gig in Paris on September 9, 1972, and began playing pre-1965 Specials in Polaris White. At the time of his Guitar Player interview, he was making the move to the Les Paul Deluxe and working on ideas for modifying its pickups.

“My favorite guitar now for the stage is the Les Paul Deluxe with the small Epiphone pickups that you can buy on the shelf for $50,” he said. “They're like a humbucking, but they're small, like what you have on Epiphones, and they're really loud. I like those. I think that's what I'll probably end up using. Either that or I quite like those Dan Armstrong pickups.”

Eddie Van Halen’s love of Eric Clapton’s Cream-era guitar playing is well known. The guitarist talked in depth about learning Clapton’s licks and solos note for note in his first-ever interview, with Jas Obrecht, in Guitar Player’s July 1978 issue.

What’s less well known is that Eddie had also learned the Who’s Live at Leeds album down to each of Pete Townshend’s riffs and solos.

In a new interview with Professor of Rock, former Van Halen bass guitarist Michael Anthony recalled his first jams with Eddie and his brother Alex, saying he was particularly impressed by Eddie’s ability to perform Townshend’s parts perfectly.

“When I jammed with Eddie and Alex that first time, they played some of their original stuff,” Anthony explains. “They were going through these time changes, and I’m like, ‘Whoa! What a trip!’

What's more, says Anthony, “He could play the whole Live at Leeds album, playing it note for note. It was just as good, if not better than Townshend!”

Released in 1970, Live at Leeds is celebrated as one of rock’s great live albums, and one that marked a turning point for the Who. By the dawn of the '70s, they’d become known as one of rock’s greatest performance acts, but they had yet to release a live album. They were also concerned that the success of 1969’s Tommy rock opera had boxed them in as an art-rock group.

The time was right for the Who to make a live album. They had recorded some shows from the Tommy tour but were unhappy with the sound. Early in 1970, they booked a pair of shows with the intent of recording them for an album. They included a February 14 concert at Leeds University and another the following day at Hull City Hall.

By this point Townshend’s stage gear consisted of 1968/’69 Gibson SG Specials in Cherry finish and a pair of customized master-volume Hiwatt CP103 “Super Who 100” heads, as well as a Shaftesbury Duo fuzz pedal. A WEM Copycat tape echo was applied to his guitar at the soundboard. Townshend would switch to using SG Specials in Polaris White finish in 1972. The SG would remain his main electric guitar until 1973, when he switched to the Les Paul Deluxe.

Townshend talent for coaxing a wide range of tones from such a simple rig was impressive. And, as it turns out, Van Halen wasn’t the only famous guitarist moved by Townshend’s work on Live at Leeds. Joe Satriani was blown away by the sound he was able to achieve from his gear, and picked the disc as one of the 10 albums that changed his life. He added that it would be his sole pick if he could choose only one.

“Pete Townshend, to me, is another one of those amazing musicians who put so much energy and originality into his playing,” Satch said. “He risks everything for the performance and the expression, which is another thing that I love dearly. When I see a performer just go crazy like that — and the fact that his rhythm playing is just unbelievable — I’m blown away. And his choices for guitar sounds are just unbelievable.

“It's the whole thing with him. He’s such an original. So if I had to pick one album, it would be Live at Leeds because I can’t even fathom the fact that he’s got the guitar on the right side and the reverb and the tape echo in the center. It’s just the craziest thing. I still don’t understand how that band, with those three guys playing, made such a beautiful sound where you didn’t want for another instrument. I still can’t understand it. It’s pure magic.”

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

Tear-jerking isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when Oasis’ name is mentioned, but Pete Townshend has revealed the one song by the Manchester indie legends that has him bawling — and he wasn't embarrassed to admit it.

The Gallagher brothers and company have reunited for their first shows together since 2009. The Manchester group's Oasis Live '25 tour kicks off July 4 and 5 at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium ahead of three massive shows in their hometown next week. Their return comes almost a full 31 years after their seminal debut album, Definitely Maybe.

The single that has the Who guitarist weeping, however, didn’t actually make the cut for the record. It was originally releasing as a B-side to the swaggering, Beatles-esque stomp of “Whatever.” Written by Noel Gallagher, who assumes lead vocals on the track, the acoustic guitar affair left its mark on Townshend.

“The thing that got me about Oasis was Liam’s voice, not so much the attitude,” he tells The Times. “It took me a while to get used to the attitude, and I felt Noel was the one with the most edge.

“Liam used to come to Who gigs with his girlfriend, and he was always charming,” he reveals. “And despite the fact that it was intended to be threatening and to have no emotion, it was loaded with emotion.”

Through their tough-guy demeanor, Townshend could see the band’s musical DNA clear as glass, and it wasn’t just the Fab Four, from nearby rival city Liverpool, who Oasis were drawing influence from.

“The songs were inspired not just by the Beatles, the Who and the Kinks but also had this feeling of coming from an entirely new place, and I don’t really know where it is,” he muses, “I feel a bit exposed, talking about it now, but the song that brought me to tears is ['Half the World Away'].

“I’ve heard it again and again because I’m such a fan of The Royle Family [the British sitcom, which picked the track for its theme song], and it moves me. Beyond the swagger is an incredible view of normal British life they seem to tap into.”

Even without “Half the World Away” on it, Definitely Maybe has gone down as a timeless indie classic. It’s certified Platinum in the U.S. and nine times Platinum in the U.K., and it launched the band’s career with serious fireworks.

By their third album, Be Here Now, the group were kings of the rock world, but the hangover from that album — no doubt literal and metaphorical considering their reputation — Noel Gallagher kicked his Marshalls to the curb as he overhauled his gear.

“No disrespect to Marshalls, but they have one sound, and that's just about it,” he explained to GP at the time. “They're either really loud or really quiet. In the past, I would just have a couple of 100-watt Marshalls, a Les Paul, and my Epiphone Casino, and that would be it.”

In related news, Liam Gallagher has issued a hilarious response to a fan trolling Green Day by playing “Wonderwall” on stage in Luxembourg instead of their 1997 hit, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”.

Side-splitting quips aren’t exclusive to Liam, however. Noel has revealed what he said when his son asked him why he couldn’t shred like the guitar slingers on Instagram, and it's brilliant.

And despite their ticket site-crashing comeback, there's no Rock Hall spot for Oasis this year, after being shunned once again. The White Stripes, Soundgarden, and esteemed session player Carol Kaye, who isn't best pleased about her impending induction, are set to be inducted alongside Bad Company, meaning Oasis miss out despite nominations across two consecutive years.

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.

Woodstock is remembered as three days of peace, love and music. But for every person who attended — and for every performer who played — the 1969 festival would come to mean something entirely personal.

For Who guitarist Pete Townshend, it was a dispiriting tragedy. The group’s set in the early morning hours of August 17 featured a performance of their then-new groundbreaking rock opera, Tommy. It was the Who’s breakthrough album, a smash hit that secured them a place in America some two years after their debut performance at 1967’s Monterey Pop festival, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience had also made their U.S. premiere.

But unlike Monterey Pop, Woodstock looked to Townshend like a disorganized mess. The sight of roughly half a million fans camped out on the muddy fields of Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York was bad enough. To make it worse, delays caused the Who’s set to move from late Saturday night to five o’clock on Sunday morning, August 17.

Taking the stage, Townshend was dismayed to deliver his rock opera to thousands of stoned and sleeping attendees. The Who should have been celebrating their place as one of rock’s foremost groups. But all Townshend could think was that he was losing his audience.

“I find myself in sort of a class of one having the courage to admit that I hated Woodstock and that it was actually quite horrible to be up to your neck in mud,” he told Guitar Player in the October 1989 issue.

“And in a sense, what people were looking for was just something to hang on to. Tommy actually filled a need. There were people out there with a spiritual hole in their life, which they filled up and partly created by using psychedelic drugs. Everybody was using psychedelic drugs.

“And the people who weren't were using strong hallucinogenics — even though they didn't know it — in the shape of marijuana. You know, where if you took six joints in a row you were in the first stages of a psychedelic experience anyway. And that was just rampant.

“And Woodstock… well, the whole audience was on LSD. It's really quite a grotesque idea that you're actually there with a million mad people.”

Among them was a man who was, if not “mad,” then truly angry: Abbie Hoffman. One of the 1960s most influential political activists, Hoffman was the founder of the antiwar Youth International Party, whose members were known colloquially as Yippies.

At the time of Woodstock, Hoffman was preparing to stand trial as one of the Chicago Seven, who were charged in 1967 with crimes for activities associated with protests against the Vietnam War. That trial would begin in September 1969.

But in August 1969, Hoffman was preoccupied with a different trial, that of John Sinclair. A poet from Flint, Michigan who managed the MC5 and founded the militant anti-racism White Panther party, Sinclair was busted for offering two joints to an undercover officer. He was given nine and half to 10 years in prison.

Hoffman and Sinclair were cut from the same cloth politically, and Hoffman was outraged at the harsh punishment his friend had received. Disgusted by the blissed-out hordes at Woodstock, he chose the middle of the Who’s set as the moment to vent his anger.

As the final chord of “Pinball Wizard” rang out, Hoffman ran onstage and commandeered a microphone. Footage of the moment doesn’t exist, but the audio recording captures it in detail:

“I think this is a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison,” Hoffman sneers.

A chorus of boos cries out from the audience..

Almost immediately, Townshend can be heard responding off mic.

“Fuck off!” He demands.

Hoffman utters something that sounds like “What?” — a response to Townshend, or possibly a continuation of his diatribe. But before he can utter another word, Townshend cuts him off.

“Fuck off my fucking stage!” he roars.

There’s the sound of guitar noise, some fiddling on the bass guitar by John Entwistle, and then deafening cheers from the crowd as Townshend goes after Hoffman, reportedly hitting him in the back with his Gibson SG Special to drive him offstage.

The video returns almost immediately, revealing Townshend, scowling, as he takes his position at the microphone.

“I can dig it,” he says mockingly.

The band continues on, playing Tommy’s “Uncle Ernie,” but Townshend is distracted by his guitar, which is now out of tune following his assault on Hoffman. As the verse ends, he immediately runs his pick down each string to check his tuning before stepping up to the microphone.

“The next fucking person that walks across this stage is gonna get fucking killed,” he announces to cheers and applause.

So much for peace and love.

“You can laugh,” Townshend says, although no one is heard laughing. “I mean it!”

Townshend would later say he had no idea who Hoffman was. Ironically, he not only agreed with him about Sinclair’s imprisonment — he harbored the same feelings about Woodstock’s wasted teens.

In the end, the Who’s set would be seen as one of the festival’s standout performances. Tommy had demonstrated that Townshend was a songwriter and musical innovator, and that the Who were a powerhouse act. But Woodstock proved that they were one of the era’s greatest performing acts.

As a one-two punch, Tommy and Woodstock was an unbeatable combination that made superstars of the group. But all Townshend saw was how the event — both in its size and recreational drug use — was creating a rift between him and his audience.

“What ultimately alienated us from our fans was the way Woodstock turned us into superstars,” he told me in 2000. “In some ways that was wonderful. We went from being a band with a predominantly male following to one where Roger [Daltrey] seemed to be like a new kind of rock sun god. And we had a few women in the audience for a change.

“But in other ways it was disarming, because the actual natural, easy connection between me, as the writer, and the audience was broken.”

It was also at Woodstock that Townshend began to fear the 1960s teen culture revolution had lulled itself — and pop music — into irrelevance.

As the sun rose that Sunday morning, he saw not the 1960s’ promised nirvana but the “teenage wasteland” he would evoke in the Who's 1971 hit “Baba O’Riley.”

“‘Baba O’Riley’ is about the absolute devastation of teenagers at Woodstock,” he said, “where everybody was smacked out on acid and 20 people, or whatever, had brain damage. The contradiction was that it became a celebration: ‘Teenage wasteland! Yes! We’re all wasted!’”

Devastation had influenced Townshend before. Seeing the guitar talents of Jimi Hendrix in 1967 wrecked his confidence and convinced him he was outgunned. In response, he put his focus on songwriting. The result was Tommy.

Now, disillusioned with the wasted youth of Woodstock, Townshend would respond with a new rock opera called Lifehouse, about a populace that whiles its life away in state-assisted slumber. The project would overwhelm him and push him to verge of suicide before he abandoned it.

But from its ashes, he and the Who would create Who’s Next, the 1971 studio follow-up to Tommy that firmly established them as one of rock and roll’s biggest acts and Pete Townshend as one of rock’s most visionary talents.

As the Who’s guitarist and main songwriter, Pete Townshend has shaped the group’s sound and musical style over its now 61-year history.

But from the beginning, Townshend’s role in the band has itself been transformed by his push-pull dynamic with singer Roger Daltrey.

The guitarist says that, from the very start, Daltrey’s role in the Who impacted him in ways not obvious to outsiders. Townshend has credited the singer with bringing him out to the forefront of the band and not allowing him to hide in the back as he preferred.

At the same time, the guitarist says his growing familiarity with Daltrey’s intellect allowed him to compose songs he didn’t dare write when the group was getting its start in London in 1964.

Even before the Who formed, Townshend says, he was content to be a sideman, like his father, Cliff, a professional alto saxophonist in the Royal Air Force's dance band the Squadronaires

“When I first started, as a kid, I didn't really want to be in a successful band,” Townshend told Guitar Player in our March 1995 issue. “I think it's been one of the things that I've had great psycho-neurotic difficulty with.

“I just wanted to be like my dad. You know, I worshipped him. He was a magnificent player and a fantastic man.

“Although I wanted to work in a different kind of music, I still wanted to be a sideman rather than a frontman.”

He achieved his wish, albeit briefly, in the Detours, the band he performed in with Daltrey and bass guitarist John Entwistle in the early 1960s. Daltrey, who preceded Townshend in the band, was the lead guitarist, but after they went through a run of frontmen, Daltrey decided he was going to take over as singer.

More significantly, he decided he would quit playing guitar. That move forced Townshend — who suffered from insecurities about his looks — closer to the band’s frontline.

“Roger was the one who really pushed me into the front,” Townshend explained. “You know, he decided that he didn't want to be the lead guitar player anymore and he wanted to be a singer, partly because he was frustrated with his own guitar playing, but also partly because he wanted more attention and more central visual control.

“I thought he was a very good guitar player — he had a kind of fairly clumsy style, but it was extremely attractive.”

Townshend, for that matter, was uncomfortable with his lead guitar abilities. He saw himself as a rhythm guitarist, something he continued to feel has been his strength throughout his career,

“I'd already forged a very strong characteristic rhythm style of my own, because I started as a banjo player when I was 11,” he continued. “So my whole kind of flourishing guitar style had started on the banjo — trad-jazz, Dixieland, and stuff.

"I was happy there.”

Daltrey’s decision challenged Townshend to up his game, which he did by the time the group released their second single, “I Can’t Explain,” in 1964. Although it was long thought that Jimmy Page — then a session guitarist — played the song’s electric guitar solo, Page himself has said he was hired for the recording as a rhythm guitarist, and credited Townshend with the solo, performed on his Fireglo 1964 Rickenbacker 360/12.

But performance was just one aspect of change Townshend had to deal with. He also had to develop as a songwriter when the Who began looking for a recording contract. Up until then, they had played covers.

“When we went in for our first record deal, the guy said, ‘You're a great band and we'd sign you, but you've got to write your own material.’

“We didn't have any. And there was nobody in the band who could write, except me.”

Townshend may have had talents as a songwriter, but he realized early on he would need to write material that not only made the most of Daltrey’s powerful vocal talents and range but also suited his cocky, macho personality. Townshend responded with songs that expressed defiance, sexual power and independence.

But it wasn’t easy.

“I found it quite difficult to write for Roger,” he said “Songs like ‘My Generation,’ ‘I Can't Explain,’ ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,’ and lots of songs I wrote that never actually made that period, which I've got on demos, are embarrassingly macho, because I was trying to find things that he would feel comfortable singing.”

Townshend’s own preference was for songs about insecure characters who endure life's harsh realities or rise above its difficulties: the protagonist of “Happy Jack,” who suffers cruelty by letting it slide off his back, or the young brothers in “Tattoo” who get inked as a way to prove their masculinity, only to be beaten by their irate parents.

To his great surprise, Daltrey was happy to take on songs others might have found emasculating.

“I liked singing stuff like ‘Happy Jack,’ ‘Pictures of Lily’ and ‘I’m a Boy,’ which I was later delighted to discover that Roger was happy to sing, too," Townshend declares. "I thought, How could Roger Daltrey, this tough Shepherd's Bush guy, possibly sing about a boy who was brought up as a girl, wearing girls' clothes?

“And he was quite comfortable with it. Maybe he didn't understand it, I don't know. I think he did, but by that time he just felt certain enough of his own masculinity not to worry about it. That was my idea of fun.”

It apparently became Daltrey’s as well. By the time Townshend composed Tommy, the group’s groundbreaking rock opera, in 1969, the singer was onboard with the guitarist’s increasingly introspective, narrative style of songwriting and the range of characters, with their quirks and insecurities, who populated it.

In related news, Daltrey was awarded knighted by England’s King Charles III on June 14 for his services to charity. He has been a patron of the Teenage Cancer Trust for 25 years, during which time he’s directed its annual concert series at the Royal Albert Hall.

“It is a wonderful honor for me and especially for Teenage Cancer Trust,” Daltrey said in a statement shared in Instagram.

“I accept this award not only for myself but on behalf of all the unsung heroes who have given their energy towards making the Teenage Cancer Trust the success it has become.”

Townshend and Daltrey — the Who’s only remaining original members — 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.

As is so often the case with some of rock's biggest names, the end isn't always the end. For evidence, you only need to look at Kiss's impending Las Vegas unmasked show in the wake of their extravagant farewell tour (which wasn't their first), or Ozzy Osbourne's 1992 No More Tours retirement jaunt, which has since been succeeded by a pair of road stints (including No More Tours 2).

Considering Pete Townshend's new, cryptic comments on the Who's future, that group may soon be added to the list of long goodbyes that never were..

The band, which formed in 1964 and carries on with original members Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey, will play its last U.S. shows in August and September this year.

“Well, all good things must come to an end. It is a poignant time,” Townshend said ahead of the tour (via Louder). “For me, playing to American audiences and those in Canada has always been incredible.

“The warmth and engagement of those audiences began back in 1967, with hippies smoking dope, sitting on their blankets, and listening deeply and intensely. Music was everywhere. We all felt equal. Today, Roger and I still carry the banner for the late Keith Moon, John Entwistle, and of course, all of our long-time Who fans.”

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.

Guesting on BBC Radio 4's My Cultural Life program, Townshend was asked the inevitable: Is this really the end?

“It’s certainly the end of touring in America,” he replied. “I asked Roger if it’s the end of touring Europe, and he said, ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’”

According to Far Out, Daltrey was asked a similar question at a press conference announcing the U.S. tour. “Let’s see if we survive this one,” he replied.

Townshend shows a clear intention to carry on, even if touring is off the table. In a chat with BBC Radio 4, he said the “suffering” he endured as a child shaped him as a musician.

“I'm a dangerous fucker,” he quipped. “There’s no question. When I work, I am charged, and I feel that came from the time with my grandmother when I had to build up some level of resistance.”

The Who's career has spanned decades and several music milestones, starting with the 1969 rock opera Tommy, which Townshend was inspired to create after Jimi Hendrix dethroned him as Britain's most outrageous showman.

He subsequently claimed Hendrix “wasn't creative” and stated rhythm guitar was the one thing in his trick bag that no one could beat him at.

His rhythm comments were especially meaningful, considering that he told Guitar Player in 1972 he'd “never be able to play the kind of leads I want.”

As far as Townshend was concerned, the Who's lead guitar player wasn't him but John Entwistle, whose bass parts often saw him assuming that role.

Whatever happens with the Who after the final U.S. jaunt remains to be seen. But if we’ve learned anything from the past decades, it’s that farewell tours are rarely the swan songs they’re made out to be.

It’s been ages since Pete Townshend smashed a guitar onstage. The last time was 2007, when a Gibson acoustic guitar sadly met its fate in his hands when it proved impossible to tune.

Townshend had actually intended to give up the habit on July 24, 2004, during the Who’s show in Yokohama, Japan, when he destroyed a guitar during a medley from Tommy.

But as the Who prepare to launch The Song Is Over North American Farewell Tour on August 16, it remains to be seen if he’ll do it again for old times' sake.

If his recent comments are any indication, all bets are off.

At the Who's May 8 London press conference to announce the tour, Townshend was asked what he thinks about the instrument upon which he's built his career and reputation. His answer was anything but sentimental.

“I’m not the person to talk to about guitars,” he replied. “I don’t have a relationship with the guitar. It’s a tool.

“Quite a few famous guitar players have spoken about the guitar as a tool. We’re in an era now where some guitars have been made for hundreds of years, like Stradivarius violins.

"They become incredibly valuable because they’re old and they’re collectable and rich people will pay huge amounts of money for them.

“But they’re still a slab of wood with strings.”

Townshend's not entirely passionless about the instrument. He says he can appreciate quality when he encounters it. He revealed that he recently purchased two guitars “that blew me away” — a Paul Reed Smith and a Jackson, he said, without elaborating on the models.

But don’t expect to see either onstage when the tour gets underway in August.

“Onstage, I have to go back to something which is proven and isn’t going to fall apart in my hands," he says. "Because I’m pretty brutal.”

Although fans have always enjoyed Townshend’s guitar-smashing antics, they’ve rarely gone over as well with Who singer Roger Daltrey. As he revealed in 2024, he doesn’t have Townshend’s appetite for it.

“I’ve only ever smashed one guitar, and I’m really sorry I did it,” Daltrey told Shawn Keaveny’s Daily Grind podcast in March 2024. I don’t know why, just this thing came over me.

“I’ve always regretted it. I thought, I shouldn’t have done that. That was like killing the wife.”

In that same interview, Daltrey lamented the cost and spectacle of Townshend destroying his guitars at the end of the group’s sets.

“[Fans] never came to hear the music,” he said. “They came to see the guitar being broken.

“The trouble is the guitar was worth 50 gigs.”

Daltrey grieved about the destruction in his 2018 memoir, Thanks a Lot Mr. Kibblewhite: My Story, calling it “heartbreaking,” particularly when he recalled how he “struggled” to buy his own first guitar.

“It was like watching an animal being slaughtered. An expensive animal that we’d have to replace with another expensive animal before the next gig,” he wrote.

The cost went up whenever the damage extended to the venue, as when Townshend broke his first guitar, accidentally, in September 1964. The episode occurred when he raised his 1964 Rickenbacker Rose Morris 1998 too high and hit the low ceiling during a performance at the Railway Tavern.

“And we had to pay for the hole in the ceiling,” Daltrey wrote. “From then on, the audience expected us to break our instruments. It was our thing.”

Although Townshend seemingly destroyed dozens of instruments — one report claims he clobbered more than 35 in 1967 — he was careful to break each instrument so that it could be repaired for the next day’s show.

“It was costly in glue because as fast as we were smashing it — we had four sets of gear — it then got glued. And by the time we got to smash it again, the glue had set,” Daltrey told the How to Wow podcast in 2020.

“They weren’t prop guitars. They were real guitars, but we worked out very cleverly. Very rarely did the neck break. As long as the neck didn’t break, you could glue the body back.

"Even with holes in it, it didn’t matter, as long as the distance between the bridge and the nut of the guitar was the same, you could make it work.”

As Townshend explained in a 1968 interview, the guitar destruction was part of an effort to cover up for the Who’s rather unglamorous looks. The guitarist was particularly sensitive about the size of his nose, which he explained was entirely the reason he began playing guitar in the first place — in order to be admired.

Despite his efforts, he never mastered guitar soloing. “I’ll never be able to play the kind of leads that I want,” he griped to Guitar Player in the magazine's May 1972 issue.

His inability led him to claim the Who’s real lead guitarist was bassist John Entwistle, whose clear and resonant bass guitar tones became more prominent on the band’s records.

In related news, the Who announced on May 19 that drummer Zak Starkey has been fired from the band for a second time. Starkey was sacked a month ago and quickly reinstated.

Townshend announced his departure on Instagram. Starkey, the son of former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, has been the Who’s drummer since 1996.

He will be replaced by Scott Devours, who has performed on Daltrey’s solo shows.

“After many years of great work on drums from Zak the time has come for a change,” Townshend wrote. “A poignant time. Zak has lots of new projects in hand and I wish him the best.'

He added in a second post, “The Who are heading for retirement, whereas Zak is 20yrs younger and has a great future with his new band and other exciting projects. He needs to devote all his energy into making it all a success. We both wish him all the luck in the world.

When the film Rock Around the Clock arrived in England in 1956, Pete Townshend was among the youngsters who filled theaters eager for the sight and sounds of the era’s new rock and roll artists. Townshend, then all of 11, saw the film repeatedly and even went to see its star attraction, Bill Haley and the Comets, when they toured the U.K.

But the future guitarist for the Who had his eyes set on becoming a journalist, not a musician. How he came to pick up a guitar in the first place is a story of two gifts he never asked for: an acoustic guitar.... and a very large nose.

Appearances have always been important in the world of pop. The Beatles are perhaps the epitome of 1960s rock and roll glamor and fashion, with their matching haircuts and suits made by master tailors Beno Dorn and Douglas Millings.

The Who certainly knew the importance of appearances. From the start, the group cut a figure with their mod clothes and the highly physical performance style of both Townshend and drummer Keith Moon.

They soon became a group to watch closely when Townshend and Moon began destroying their instruments at the end of sets. Meanwhile, singer Roger Daltrey made a signature move out of swinging his microphone over his head. Even bass guitar player John Entwistle became a figure of note, if only because he barely moved an inch in contrast with his three bandmates.

But as Townshend revealed in a 1968 TV interview, the group's stage antics were done in part to distract audiences from the group’s rough appearance.

“Our group’s probably one of the most unglamorous on the stage today,” he said. “I mean, this was one our big problems — and probably still is. The group didn’t have enough glamor. It was all clothes and smashing things up.”

But of the four, Townshend was beset by a unique problem: his unusually large nose. It was Daltrey who, upon meeting Townshend, dubbed the rail-thin guitarist “a nose on a stick.”

“I was very embarrassed and self-conscious about my nose for quite a while,” Townshend admitted to Playboy. “I got obsessed with it.”

It didn’t help matters that his parents were both very attractive. “My mother was no help,” he told Playboy. “She seemed to think that anybody who wasn’t beautiful couldn’t be any good. She was gorgeous, of course. My father was very good-looking, too. How they spawned me I’ll never know.”

School was especially difficult, as Townshend revealed to Rolling Stone in September 1968.

“When I was in school the geezers that were snappy dressers — and got chicks like years before I ever even thought they existed — would always like to talk about my nose. This seemed to be the biggest thing in my life: my fucking nose, man.”

Townshend says not a day went by that he didn’t obsess over his outsized proboscis. He soon realized the only solution was to “distract attention from my nose to my body and make people look at my body instead of at my face — turn my body into a machine.”

He found his solution in the guitar.

“At that time, it was the reason I did everything. It’s the reason I played the guitar — because of my nose,” he said. “The reason I wrote songs was because of my nose.”

For Christmas 1956, 11-year-old Pete received a guitar from his grandmother. His father showed him a few chords, but otherwise Pete was self taught, pushed along by his desire to do something unique — something that the bullies who taunted him about his nose couldn’t do.

“I knew down inside that the only way I was really gonna become confident was to become something everybody could respect,” he told Playboy. “So I labored at the guitar, trying my best to be incredible within a few weeks.” It was an unreasonable demand to place upon himself, but he pushed himself forward anyway.

“And when it didn’t happen, it destroyed me,” he said.

It’s safe to say his deep insecurities about his appearance as well as his social awkwardness defined Townshend’s early songs and the teenage characters who inhabited them, who often dealt with social anxieties, physical impairments and limited social status. He stitched his protagonists together as he himself began to make his own sense of self whole.

“As soon as I started to write, I really came together in one piece for the first time,” he said. “Even in the early years of the Who, I suffered that frustration of searching for my niche. That’s why my first songs were so screwed-up and indecisive.”

And yet, remarkably, Townshend had been correct from the very beginning when he said guitar would prove his worthiness. Although not particularly talented as a lead guitarist in the group’s early days, he was a remarkable rhythm guitarist who had developed a signature style. And he proved as well to be an original and gifted composer.

By 1968, some four years into the Who’s run, he had enough success to feel comfortable discussing his insecurities with the press and, in doing so, revealing his deep insights into his psychology.

“What is interesting is the fact that it was me versus society,” he told Rolling Stone, “until I could convince them that there was more to me than what they thought.”

By then, however, Townshend would be dealing with new insecurities about his guitar playing brought about by the arrival of Jimi Hendrix. Townshend was dismayed not only by Hendrix’s remarkable electric guitar talents but by his stage show, which was even more physical and outlandish than the Who’s.

Eventually, this too would pass when Townshend reinvented himself as rock and roll’s greatest story teller with Tommy, the Who’s groundbreaking 1969 rock opera.

“I suppose I went away and got very confused for a bit, he told Guitar Player of Hendrix’s arrival. “I just sort of felt that I hadn't the emotional equipment, really, the physical equipment, the natural psychic genius of somebody like Jimi, and realized that what I had was a bunch of gimmicks which he had come and taken away from me…

“The weirdest thing of the lot is that, although people really, really value those early years, the Who was not a particularly important band at that time. We were at the end of an era; under normal circumstances the band should have just disappeared. But because he came along and, kind of like in early punk, just swept everything aside, I had to learn to write, and it became like a new art, from a new angle.”

Townshend and Daltrey continue on today as the Who's only surviving members. And while they continue to tour, Townshend has recently revealed that he prefers to work alone and offstage these days.

Michael Bruce “has always been kind of the riffmeister of the band, and a really good pop writer,” says frequent Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin. “He was very much the sort of prime motivator of the pop stuff we did with the original Alice Cooper group."

And nowhere was that more true than the 1973 single "No More Mr. Nice Guy."

The third single from the band's Billion Dollar Babies album was also its third highest-charting effort, reaching number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 behind only "School's Out" (number seven) and "I'm Eighteen" (number 21). It also helped power the album to the top of the Billboard 200 chart for the first and only time in Cooper's career.

Cooper, who wrote the song's lyrics, says he saw its potential immediately.

"It had all these open areas in it," he explains, singing the tune's Rolling Stones–like opening electric guitar riff. "It was a great hook. And a song like that — you try to make it as simple as possible.

“We didn't want to give up being Alice Cooper, but at the same time, that was probably the most pop song we ever did — that and 'Be My Lover.' And both of those are Michael Bruce songs."

Bruce, the group's lead guitarist and primary music writer during the ’70s, tells Guitar Player that "No More Mr. Nice Guy" had actually been around for awhile before it was tapped for Billion Dollar Babies. "I had written it after Love It to Death and before Killer [both in 1971], and then Schools Out [1972],” he recalls. "I kept pushing and bringing the song up, but it didn't fit. It was too pop.

“By the time Billion Dollar Babies came around, it fit. It was perfect for that album."

Well, almost perfect. Bruce had originally written it from the perspective of a guy whose girlfriend uses him for a doormat.

“The original lyrics went, 'I used to be such a sweet sweet thing, but that was just a burn / I used to break my back just to kiss her ass, got nothing in return,'” Bruce says.

"So I gave the song to Alice and he changed it — made it about himself and the press.”

By then Cooper’s increasingly shocking stage show had begun to alarm parents and led the BBC to ban the video for “School’s Out.” With Cooper's rewrite, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" became an anthem to nonconformity while providing a back story to Alice's outlandish behavior.

“Everybody was like, 'You're a weird boy — playing with snakes, cutting up babies,’” Bruce recalls. “His mother used to say, 'What are you doing out there? You should be a good Christian boy!'

“So he wrote it about him being converted to No More Mr. Nice Guy.”

Bruce says he wasn’t pleased about the song’s revision initially. “I was kinda like, 'Why don't you do it the way it is?' But I got over it."

As for the song's riff, there was no specific impetus for it.

"I was just playing, trying stuff," he says. "It's an A chord but it's played in the fifth position, and it's melodic. It starts to carry the melody as it descends down the scale — that's the best way I can describe it."

Cooper has kept "No More Mr. Nice Guy" a staple of his concert sets over the years. He says he received new insights to the song when the Who's Roger Daltrey — joined by Slash, Alice in Chains' bassist Mike Inez, guitarist Bob Kulick, drummer Carmine Appice and others — covered it for the Humanary Stew: A Tribute to Alice Cooper album in 1999.

“Roger said, 'That song just felt so easy and natural to sing’ And I said, 'Well, it should. It's 'Substitute!'" Cooper recalls, referring to the Who's 1966 U.K. hit single.

“And Roger went, 'Oh yeah, that's why it feels so natural.'"

Cooper says hearing Daltrey sing "No More Mr. Nice Guy" was a revelation.

“I never realized how close it was to 'Substitute' before," he explains. "It just has that same exact feel. When you listen to the Who, most of their stuff was pop songs — hard pop, not your normal pop songs, but still pop."

Billion Dollar Babies was, until now, the penultimate album by the original Alice Cooper Band, which split up after 1973's Muscle of Love. Cooper, Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neil Smith have regrouped for a new album, The Revenge of Alice Cooper, due out July 25, with the late Glen Buxton represented on one of the new songs as well as a bonus track, "Return of the Spiders 2025," an upgraded remix of a track from the group's second album, 1970's Easy Action.

One month after suggesting that AI could be used to create new music for nostalgic Who fans longing to relive the band’s heyday, Pete Townshend has revealed that he doesn’t actually enjoy being onstage.

His comments come as he continues to promote the forthcoming Quadrophenia ballet. Townshend says he far prefers working behind the scenes rather than performing in front of a crowd.

“Most musicians are not like me,” he told Spanish radio station RockFM (via Blabbermouth). “Most musicians do two things that I don’t really do, or don’t enjoy doing. One is they love performing. I don’t love performing. I don’t like being on a stage.

“I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t fill my soul in the way that you see some performers — just their soul is filled through being on the stage. That’s not me.

“The other thing,” he continues, “is they love to collaborate with other musicians. I think that, for me, collaboration is something that I find very difficult. If I was in a studio with a really great musician, or with a group of really great musicians, I think I would find it very hard.

“I find it difficult to collaborate. I find it very difficult looking in the eyes of another musician. I find myself looking to my own energy to express myself.”

The new ballet, which is set to be staged in Plymouth, Edinburgh, Southampton, London, and Salford in the U.K. this summer, is an exception to the rule. The project, he says, isn’t collaborative in the traditional sense.

“On the other hand, of course, I really admire the process of collaboration. I admire the process of dance and music. Quadrophenia is currently being turned into a ballet. We had our first rehearsal on Monday. It’s gonna be fantastic.

“But I think one of the things about that is that that kind of collaboration is an exploration of the human body, of dancing. With music, I find myself wanting to stay in my box for a while.”

It’s a mindset that stands in stark contrast to the wild young guitarist who once fought loudness wars with the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood and regularly smashed guitars with freewheeling abandon. But it reflects how Townshend’s relationship with music — and performance — has evolved over time.

Last year, he opened the Townshend Studio, a new teaching and creative center at the University of West London in Ealing. While his solo career continues, live shows have become increasingly rare.

Pressed by RockFM to name other notable collaborations, Townshend highlighted two legendary players.

“I loved working with David Gilmour on my White City album, and we co-wrote some songs, but that was an uneasy collaboration,” he says. “I actually made it clear I’m not a natural collaborator.

“And I really enjoyed working with Eric Clapton back in 1973 when we did the Rainbow Concert together,” he concludes. “I think it’s interesting, ‘cause so many new musicians that I really respect want to work with me, and I wish I was more open to it. I could have fun with some of the greatest musicians in the world.”

In related news, Townshend recently spoke about the one part of his guitar playing he believes no one can best — and discussed how Jimi Hendrix, who he controversially claimed “wasn’t creative,” inspired the creation of "Tommy".

Few songs can claim to be ground zero for heavy metal. Black Sabbath’s eponymous 1969 album opener is largely accepted as the genre’s starting point, but Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues," released in January 1968, also bears substantial sonic weight.

And then there's "Helter Skelter," the Beatles dark and savage hard rocker from 1968's White Album. While it was recorded and released after Blue Cheer's disc, it enjoyed a much larger audience and had more staying power and influence over the long haul.

With its driving rhythms and erratically performed vocals, "Helter Skelter" is primal enough to be considered a metal song. But, oddly, the Beatles couldn't have explored such musical depths were it not for another group of rockers: the Who.

Paul McCartney, the song’s chief songwriter, regularly looked outward for inspiration. His 1965 composition “Michelle,” for instance, was written as an imitation of French cabaret, while “Got to Get You into My Life,” from 1966's Revolver, was steeped in Motown flavors.

For “Helter Skelter,” he looked to the Who, a band that was proving violent and rambunctious in the studio and on the stage.

In fact, McCartney was a little jealous of how animalistic Pete Townshend and company would get. As he once revealed, he “read a review [of a Who record] which said, ‘And this group really got us wild, there’s echo on everything, they’re screaming their heads off.’

“I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do one. Pity they’ve done it. Must be great— [a] really screaming record.’

"And then I heard their record, and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated.”

Considering that the "Helter Skelter" recording began in May 1968, it's possible McCartney is referring to The Who Sell Out, which was released in late 1967. The most likely candidate from that album is the hit single "I Can See for Miles."

Either way, the surprisingly classy record, to McCartney at least, left the door wide open for the Beatles to deliver the kind of song he’d expected it to be full of.

"Helter Skelter" started life as a bluesy jam on acoustic guitar, which the band toyed with while preparing to record "Blackbird" at Abbey Road. It would go through several iterations of heaviness before landing the right punch. The initial jams took place on July 18, 1968, with McCartney on guitar and John Lennon on bass. The longest jam captured that day is said to have lasted over 27 minutes.

They returned to the recording on September 9 and 10. In his 1994 memoir, Many Years From Now, McCartney reflected on how the song was tracked “in total madness and hysterics”.

“We got the engineers and [the producer] to hike up the drum sound and really get it as loud and horrible as it could,” he said. “We tried everything we could to dirty it up, and in the end, you can hear Ringo say, ‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers!’ That wasn’t a joke put-on: His hands were actually bleeding at the end of the take, he’d been drumming so ferociously.”

The band never produced anything as frantic and maniacal again, and on an album that also offered songs as delicate as “Blackbird," it shows the quartet’s creativity and versatility in spades.

Whether the song is heavy metal remains up for debate, but the Who, and a perhaps slightly verbose music journalist, can be credited for inspiring a wildcard Beatles’ hit.

Meanwhile, Guitar Player has recently explored the White Album song that nearly landed the Beatles in hot political water and how a candid moment caught on camera led to the final Beatles song ever recorded. In related news, Pete Townshend has suggested he may turn to AI to silence the Who fans that want him to repeatedly relive his '70s heyday.

Pete Townshend says he's fed up with fans who continue to request Who songs at his solo shows and suggests AI may provide a solution.

Speaking to The Times, Townshend suggested he could turn to AI to create faux Who songs. The guitarist, whose music often draws inspiration from his background in art school, says doing so would allow him to focus on his myriad current projects while satisfying fans who desire his earlier musical styles

“I have a solo career,” he stresses. “I have all this art school stuff going on. It is a tremendous irritation to Who fans that I don’t just stick to the old catalog and do it until I die.

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

As evidence, he points to the Beatles' success using AI to turn an old John Lennon demo it “Now and Then,” which claimed Best Rock Performance at this year’s Grammys. It should be noted, however, that former Beatle Paul McCartney said AI was used simply to extract Lennon's voice from his demo for the song, which remained unfinished at his death.

Of course, AI has been used to create original recordings in the styles of various artists and genres. Alex Van Halen has expressed an interest in using the technology to create songs from demos and audio clips Eddie Van Halen left unfinished.

Townshend recently saw his Quadrophenia opus made over as Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet, with orchestrations by his wife, Rachel Fuller He told The Times the new ballet gets closer to expressing the message of his 1973 creation with the Who, which is, he says, "about spiritual resolve, about tryinh to get back to being a young person."

"What nobody noticed was the spiritual message of Quadrophenia," he says. "So I’ll be honest and say that when it came to the first workshop of the ballet, I wasn’t expecting much.

"Then I saw it: no rock and roll bullshit, no drummer whiting out halfway through the show, the original message of the piece embodied by the movement of these young dancers. It meant Quadrophenia had another life.”

However, he was adamant that the story's ending and the fate of its hero, Jimmy, should remain ambiguous.

“I’ve been accused of having a dramaturgical failing by not ending my stories,” he says. “I’ve always thought, That’s not my job. That’s your job. You end the story.”

Of course Townshend is no stranger to merging rock and roll with the classical arts. His 1969 creation Tommy was a rock opera that he was inspired to make after realizing he could never compete as a guitarist at the level of his late-1960s contemporaries Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

“I suppose I went away and got very confused for a bit," he said of that era. "I asked my wife to marry me before it was too late [laughs], and started work on Tommy a bit later. I did actually feel stripped, to some extent, and I took refuge in my writing.”

The Who have just wrapped up two more shows at their annual charity bash for the Teenage Cancer Trust at London’s Royal Albert Hall – their first live appearances since last year’s frivolities. But the band are by no means a done deal – even if he admits his devotion to the Who isn't as “absolute” as vocalist Roger Daltrey's.

Rather, he’s got plenty to keep him occupied. He’s just turned the band’s landmark rock opera “Quadrophenia” into a ballet, having opened the Townshend Studio, a new teaching and creative center at the University of West London in Ealing last autumn. His solo career still has life in it too. As such, he’s growing tired of fans focusing solely on the former glories of his parent band.

When GP asked Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera to name the 10 albums that changed his life, he laughed.

“How long have you got?”

Of course, time wasn’t an issue, which is a good thing, as Manzanera, who, in addition to Roxy Music, has collaborated with everyone from good pal David Gilmour to John Cale, along with embarking on a lengthy solo career. Along the way, he's become famous for playing the Cardinal Red Gibson Firebird VII electric guitar that's been a constant companion since his days with Roxy.

To that end, if you dug into Manzanera’s records, you know that his influences run the gamut, meaning they’re not strictly guitar-based. “I love Mozart,” he says. “It’s like rock and roll — it has a great beat. I’ve always been attracted to music with a strong feel and pulse to it.”

But that doesn’t mean Manzanera — who recently shared with us the stories behind his top five tracks — isn’t into guitar music, too. He holds a special place for Jeff Beck, who, like Manzanera, was never content to just be a strummer.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, Jeff Beck was the best British guitarist ever,” he says. “He could do things that nobody else could do. And technically, his sense of pitch was extraordinary.”

Before revealing his 10 choices, Manzanera continues, saying, “I can keep going. I could go on forever. There’s just so many great albums in so many different genres. There’s just been so much great music over the last 50 years. I love all different kinds of stuff.”

Revolver — The Beatles (1966)

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when Brian Eno and I had a chance to do an experimental record called 801 Live with our band 801, we chose ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ It’s a track you should never attempt live, because it’s an amazing construction made in the studio using tape loops. But we did it a live version anyway and made it the first track on the album.

“Revolver was important as the first album where the Beatles used the studio as an instrument. It showed what was possible.”

Are You Experienced — The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

“You have to remember, there was nothing like him when he arrived. It was just a mind-blowing thing to guitarists. When I first saw him on Top of the Pops in England, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was just so incredibly exciting. He was doing things that defied anything that I’d seen before or read about in any ‘teach yourself guitar’ books. He showed us all what could be done.”

My Generation — The Who (1965)

“Roxy Music was an art rock band, and at the time of this album, the Who made their statement that they were the first art-rock band. Pete Townshend played with feedback, and what he did was a statement of art that really appealed to me. The interesting thing was the person who taught him at art school was the same person who taught Brian Eno when he was in art school. What they got from it was a way of thinking and a sort of attitude toward music.

“But, obviously, the great thing about Pete is that he could write amazing songs and lyrics as well as put them across with the real strength of the sound of his guitar playing. And it was also at this time that you get the arrival of the big Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinets, as well as Pete Townshend, Clapton, and soon after, Hendrix. These were all guitarists who were able to control feedback from their guitars.

"And My Generation is where it started. It really wasn’t much in evidence before they unleashed sonic experience.”

In a Silent Way — Miles Davis (1969)

“The thing that I took from Miles was his sonority, his idea of what pitch was. It’s a different kind of in-between-the-cracks kind of attitude, with space and improvisation. It’s not as if you stuck a tuner on his trumpet said, ‘That’s out of tune’ — because it’s not. And as far as I know, with those sessions, he would just play and then choose the bits he liked and stick it all together.

“I was thinking about this the other day: You can give any title to an album you like, but it doesn’t describe that album. And that’s true here, especially the title track itself. There’s a sort of calmness about it, and with beauty; it’s very much like a sort of painting. The sounds Miles painted are the absolute essence of less is more and are about tone and texture. That’s what I took from him.”

Sketches of Spain — Miles Davis (1960)

“Sketches of Spain is based on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Miles didn’t just copy what Rodrigo wrote but did an impressionistic version of it, so you almost get abstract art. In that period, with how things worked in the ’60s, there was a lot of improvisation and experimentation of sound — and that’s what I love about it all.

“Funnily enough, that’s what we’ve returned to now with my new project with Andy Mackay. It’s about 80 percent of his input, though it’s not jazz. It’s about sound, texture and space, and it’s about being in the moment. So we don’t expect big audiences for that, but we’re very happy to get small again, make it intimate, and connect with the audience.”

Canciones de Mi Padre — Linda Ronstadt (1987)

“I love this album, which is Linda Ronstadt singing in Spanish, and it was beautiful. I had no idea of her Mexican background and no idea that she could speak Spanish. So in a lot of those songs — and remember, the title of the album is ‘Concerning songs of my father’ — they’re like classic, evergreen songs, and she does them so incredibly well. And those are songs that I grew up listening to and knowing while in Cuba. I come back to this album a lot, actually. I love her voice.”

Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin (1969)

“Jimmy Page’s playing on the first Led Zeppelin album — we just hadn’t heard someone let loose like that. And John Paul Jones and the power trio, with, of course, Robert Plant, whose voice was just absolutely, well, you just can’t do a three-piece without having an incredible singer.

“Those guys had so much experience, meaning John Paul Jones and Page playing sessions, and they could really play. It’s not easy to play those twelve-string parts on double-neck guitars, and the way they looked was just exciting, and it was a very exciting kind of music. I mean, you could say that about Jeff Beck with Rod Stewart, too. That was a little bit like what they could have been like.”

Pablo Honey — Radiohead (1993)

“Some of the guitar playing was just jaw-dropping. They’re doing these crazy things, and you’re thinking, How did you do that? That is very, very rare. You could hear people making technically brilliant sounds and things like that, but the combination of this sort of very advanced level musicianship and the songs they brought to a musical environment was great. They were definitely a unique band.”

Fresh Garbage — Spirit (1968)

“I loved the band Spirit from the West Coast of America. I love Randy California’s guitar playing and the way he seemed to be able to play with harmony. It still baffles me how he did it. One of my friends came back from being over in LA, saw them, and came back raving about them. But for me, with Spirit, the most important album was Fresh Garbage, which was just fantastic.”

The Soft Machine — The Soft Machine (1968)

“The first Soft Machine album was fantastic. I loved the way that Mike Ratledge played the Hammond organ through a fuzz box so that it sounded a bit like a guitar. And in the end, it sounded like the guitar playing that Robert Fripp ended up doing. So that was my ultimate ambition: to sound like the organ playing of Mike Ratledge on Soft Machine’s albums.”

Phil Manzanera's memoir, Revolución to Roxy, was published in 2024 and is available for purchase.

Whether smashing guitars or popularizing the concept album, the Who’s Pete Townshend has always done things differently. In a newly resurfaced 1990 interview with Guitarist magazine, he sheds light on his change-making use of feedback. At the same time, Townshend takes the opportunity to point out that Jimi Hendrix wasn't doing anything with guitar that he and Eric Clapton hadn't already made part of their repertoires.

Townshend credits three factors for influencing his use of amplifier feedback during his early playing days. The most relevant force was the sheer volume of the British group's stage show, which was in part an effort to impress his art school peers.

“I'm afraid I was an arty little sod and I was actually experimenting,” he said when asked if his feedback shenanigans were calculated or a happy accident. “I was at art school, surrounded by real intellectuals, people that were experimenting all the time. I was greatly impressed by all this and wanted to please these people.

“A lot of it was posing, trying to drag something out of the band that it was resisting. As I got louder, [bassist] John Entwistle got louder by inventing the 4x12 speaker cabinet, which he did with somebody up at Marshall. Then I got a 4x12 cabinet and put it on a chair, so then he invented the 8x12 cabinet, to get louder than me, and I invented the stack by getting two 4x12s and stacking them up."

But there was more to it than a volume war. Townshend says it was also a way to drown out the loudmouths in their audience.

“Our experimentations were all to do with our irritation with the audience, who heckled if you played a rhythm-and-blues song that they didn't know," he says. "You'd get blokes in the back with their pints of beer shouting, 'What's all this rubbish? Play some Shane Fenton!' And we just got louder as a result."

The upside to it all is that Townshend and the Who became known as rock's loudest band, a label that served them well as bands moved from clubs to arenas to stadiums in the 1970s and '80s.

“It shows that radical experimentation really is worth pursuing," he says. "Because even though it might feel stupid and pretentious if you do discover something new, it's your property and you're identified with it forever.”

Townshend accepts he wasn’t the only player who found feedback worth embracing, although not all players can agree on who got there first. Some point out that John Lennon was perhaps the first to use it intentionally and creatively when he employed it on the opening of his 1964 Beatles song "I Feel Fine." But Townshend says the use of feedback was gaining popularity with bands as early as 1963, when Jeff Beck used it with the Tridents, two years before he joined the Yardbirds.

“Other people stumbled on feedback at the same time as me,” Townshend says. “Jeff Beck was using it when Roger [Daltrey] went to see the Tridents rehearsing.

“He said, 'There's a shit-hot guitar player down the road and he's making sounds like you.' Then later, when we supported the Kinks, Dave Davies was adamant: 'I invented it, it wasn't John Lennon and it wasn't you!' ”

But Townshend pours cold water on Davies’ claim.

“I believe it was something people were discovering all over London. These big amps that Marshall were turning out — you couldn't stop the guitars feeding back!”

The origin of using feedback as a tactful play is admittedly blurry. But one thing Davies and Townshend can agree on is how their use of it differed. Davies was more animalistic. Townshend’s art school background, meanwhile, saw him longing for a more musical application.

“On 'Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,' during the solo, on the note A I would flick a harmonic, get it feeding back, and then go 'dit-dit-dit-dar-dar' with the switch. And by standing at certain angles I could get incredible sounds out of it, some of which were just characteristics of the Rickenbacker body, which I stuffed with paper.

"You could control it and it could be very musical,” he goes on. “Certainly that sort of thing where you hit an open A chord and then take your fingers off the strings... the A string is still banging away but you're hearing the finger-off harmonics in the feedback.

"Then the vibrating A starts to stimulate harmonics in other strings, and it's just an extraordinary sound, like an enormous plane. It's a wonderful, optimistic sound and that was something that happened because I was posing — I'd put my arms out, let go of the chord then find that the resulting noise was better.”

The interview also saw Townshend discussing Jimi Hendrix’s talents. His fellow feedback-loving guitarist Jeff Beck said Jimi's arrival on the scene nearly ended his career. While Townshend was impressed by his chops, he didn't find him to be an original when it came to his more blues-based guitar playing and some of his stage antics, which included destroying his instruments as Townshend had been doing for years.

“Hendrix was a great player,” he says, “but he wasn't really creative. He was dealing in other people's ideas, old blues things and tricks that were either borrowed from Eric Clapton or the pyrotechnic things that he had caught off watching me.

“He used to follow the band around, watching, and then he suddenly appeared on stage doing all this stuff. But it was something else that made it extraordinary. Talk to the women who came in contact with him — he literally enchanted them. He was a pretty unremarkable kind of gnarled-looking guy, but he was a real enchanter.”

London's Brixton Academy has hosted its fair share of epic events in its history as a live music venue. However, few of those featured two generation-defining guitarists sharing the same stage — which is exactly what happened in November 1985 when Pete Townshend and David Gilmour came together for what would be known as Deep End Live.

The project, billed initially as Pete Townshend with Dave Gilmour and Deep End, played two nights (the second of which thankfully was captured on film) at the U.K. venue in support of Townshend's Double "O" charity, aiding those with drug and alcohol issues, and victims of domestic violence, as well as providing support for underprivileged musicians.

The Deep End band, which included Townshend, Gilmour and a whopping 16 other members, featured session greats such as Simon Phillips on drums and Chucho Merchán on bass, as well as a full brass section.

Highlights of the nearly 90-minute performance include Townshend's version of “After the Fire,” originally written for Roger Daltrey's album Under a Raging Moon, Screamin' Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” the Who anthem “Won't Get Fooled Again” and the Townshend solo tune “Give Blood” — the latter, driven by the intricately cascading assault of Gilmour's looping riff. Townshend and crew never sounded better performing this underrated classic, which closes the show on a high.

A third show was expected to take place in Brixton, with talk of a potential tour that included international dates. But surprisingly poor ticket sales led to those plans being axed.

In an interview with David Letterman just weeks after the shows took place, Townshend explained how the project freed him up creatively. "I played anything I wanted to play,” Townshend said of the show's eclectic set list. "I did ‘Put a Spell on You,'… I did a Miles Davis song called ‘Walking.’ I did old blues things, and I did kind of early Who things. I had such a good time. It reminded me that music first has to be fun."

Gilmour was armed on the night with a couple of 1984 reissues, including his now iconic EMG SA single-coil–loaded Candy Apple Red Strat (which would go on to sell at auction in 2019 for $615,000), which he played through a combination of two Fender Twin Reverbs and Mesa/Boogie Mark I. His effects included a Boss HM-2, CE-2 Chorus and DD-2 Delays, as well as his famous MXR rack-mounted Digital Delays.

Townshend kept it simple with a pair of thinline Washburn acoustics, which he occasionally swapped out for a Takamine EN-10C, now housed within London's Hard Rock Cafe Vault.

Deep End wasn't the first time the pair had worked together, as just the year prior, Townshend had penned lyrics for the tracks “Love on the Air" and “All Lovers Are Deranged” from Gilmour's second studio album, About Face. Gilmour would return the favor by lending guitar parts to tracks on Townshend's fifth solo record, White City: A Novel.

Had this project been a success, you can't help but wonder what might have been — particularly as both Gilmour and Townshend were in transitional periods with Pink Floyd and the Who, respectively. Luckily, we have this performance captured for us to enjoy.

Earlier this month, David Gilmour released his sixth solo studio album, Luck and Strange, with tour dates kicking off next month that include stops at the Circo Massimo in Italy, the Intuit Dome, Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl and London's Royal Albert Hall.

Meanwhile, Townshend celebrated 60 years of the Who in 2024 and expects more shows from the band in the future. He recently dropped a solo collection Live In Concert 1985–2001, a 14-CD box set which features even more cuts from the Deep End shows, including a fun performance of the Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup–penned track (later made famous by Elvis Presley), That's All Right, Mama.

Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the Mid-Atlantic US in October 2012, claimed much in its damage toll. Amongst the wreckage was a vintage Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar belonging to Blitzen Trapper's Eric Earley.

Yet, despite coming out the other end “warped and screwed up,” the acoustic showed its strength and was brought back to life by his luthier. Today, it’s still going strong as his main live guitar.

Speaking in the latest issue of Guitar Player, the guitarist detailed some of his most beloved six-strings, with the seemingly invincible Hummingbird right at the top of the list.

“Somewhere around 2008 I walked into a good guitar shop in Eugene, Oregon and picked up a Hummingbird, and I’ve been playing that guitar ever since,” he says of the love story's beginnings.

“It’s mostly my live guitar. I will track with it now and again, but I don’t mess with it too much when I’m not on the road.” It's wise, considering the guitar is lucky to even still be playable. “That guitar has been through so much,” he adds.

“One time when we were on tour with Brandi Carlile in 2012, the Hummingbird got flooded along with the whole bus during what I’m thinking might have been Hurricane Sandy. We had the bus parked in New Jersey while we were in New York City, and it flooded all night. When we arrived at the venue the next day I pulled the guitar out and it was soaked and warped and just screwed up.”

For one, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour – who says his forthcoming solo LP is the best thing he’s written since The Dark Side Of The Moon – said recently that he believes vintage guitars will always sound better. Especially so with acoustics, he specified, saying that their different pieces of wood “gradually become in harmony with each other over years of playing.”

Earley, then, can throw a resistance to storms among the list of plus points when it comes to vintage craftsmanship. After the tour, a visit to his luthier, Hummingbird in hand, underlined the guitar's staying power.

“My luthier back home said, ‘Well, let’s clamp it up, dry it out and see what happens.’” Earley details. “Insurance paid me out for the claim, and then two months later the guitar was right back in shape. It was like a freebie.

“I was like, ‘Holy crap, I’m going to tour with this guitar some more!‘ Those old Gibsons are so tough, it’s crazy.”

A mahogany build, Earley has attributed the wood’s ruggedness for the Hummingbird's resurrection.

“I’ve toured with an all-mahogany SG for years, and that thing is also indestructible,” he says. “I think that one went through the flood too, but nothing happened. It just dried out.”

Similarly, Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson lost “scores of vintage guitars” at the hands of Hurricane Sandy, but another steely Gibson, a ‘68 Goldtop, was able to pull off a similarly miraculous feat.

“I lost around 70 guitars,” he told Total Guitar. “My 1964 ES-335 got destroyed. I sent it to get fixed because it was delaminating and they tried but it was never the same. It sounded horrible to me and didn’t play well.

“But,” he continues, “there was a 1968 Goldtop that got damaged and actually came back better after getting fixed.”

Before the turnaround, the guitar’s condition looked bleak. Robinson’s expectations were low.

“It was so destroyed you could take the paint off with your hands,” he recalls, with the guitar’s legacy now expanding onto his pedalboard.

“They mixed [the old paint] back together to refinish the guitar,” Robinson says. “Then used the leftovers for a pedal which had a mahogany back, just like the Goldtop!”

When it comes to storm-battered Gibson guitars, then, it turns out there’s life in the old dogs yet.

To read the full interview with Earley, pick up a copy of the new issue of Guitar Player at Magazines Direct.

Though often overshadowed by other electric guitar greats that got their start in London in the mid-'60s – your Jeff Becks, Jimmy Pages, and Eric Claptons – Ronnie Wood was right there with them, coming to notice via his guitar work with the Birds (not the Byrds).

Wood's diaries of that formative time, published in 2015 as How Can It Be? A Rock and Roll Diary, make it clear just how enmeshed in the booming London scene he was. One entry – featured in a 2015 Guitar Aficionado article – read “Discovered first second-hand news about Eric leaving Yardbirds.” Dated February 24, 1965, it shows that Wood heard about Clapton's departure from the popular group weeks before it was known to the general public.

Among other fascinating windows into that time, How Can It Be? also features anecdotes about the early days of Marshall, and how it transformed from humble beginnings into perhaps the most iconic guitar amp manufacturer of all time. 

Alongside the aforementioned budding British guitar heroes of the day, Wood – via Marshall – was pushing the boundaries of amplification. “Me and Pete Townshend had a sort of rivalry back then to see who could get the loudest,” Wood told Guitar Aficionado in 2015. “We kept on pushing Jim Marshall to make amps with more watts and volume controls that went up to 12!”

In another 1965 entry, Wood takes note of receiving a 100-watt head and 8×12 speaker cabinet from the Marshall shop. Significantly, Wood later claimed that he was the first to suggest a cabinet with eight speakers to Jim Marshall, and was subsequently the first to receive one. 

“Pete Townshend came in [to the shop] and went, ‘You bastard!’” Wood later wryly noted. 

Though they never reached the commercial heights or influence of some of their contemporaries – the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, and the Yardbirds, for instance – the Birds were well-respected, and indeed, Wood garnered enough of a reputation with his playing to later join the Small Faces' successor group, the Faces, and the Stones, of whom he remains a member to this day. 

“The Birds were very busy and trying to get better all the time,” Wood told Guitar Aficionado. “We’d gather in the gig wagon and off we’d go to play shows almost every night of the week. I kept my journal to sum up how the audiences were, how we played, and how much money we made. It was a sliding scale that kept rising. We went from making 50 pounds to 75 pounds to 100 pounds. 

“We always would compare what we were making to the Stones, who were making 250 pounds a night back then. We kept going, ‘We’re getting there!’”

In 1975, Guitar Player published an issue dedicated to the late electric guitar icon Jimi Hendrix. Included in the issue was a 1970 interview with Hendrix conducted by John Burks.

An excerpt of that conversation – featuring Hendrix ruminating on songwriting, live performances, and his favorite contemporary musicians – can be found below.

When you put together a song, does it just come to you, or is it a process where you sit down with your guitar?

“The music I might hear, I can’t get on the guitar. It’s a thing of just laying around daydreaming or something. You’re hearing all this music, and you just can’t get it on the guitar. As a matter of fact, if you pick up your guitar and just try to play, it spoils the whole thing. I can’t play the guitar that well to get all this music together, so I just lay around.”

For your own musical kicks, where’s the best place to play?

“I like after-hour jams at a small club. Then you get another feeling. You get off in another way with all those people there. You get another feeling, and you mix it in with something else that you get. It’s not the spotlights – it’s just the people.”

How are those two experiences different?

“I get more of a dreamy thing from the audience. It’s more of a thing that you go up into. You get into such a pitch sometimes that you forget about the audience, but you also forget about all the paranoia – that thing where you’re saying, ‘Oh, gosh, I’m onstage – what am I going to do now?’ Then you go into this other thing, and it turns out to be almost like a play in certain ways.”

Which musicians do you go out of your way to hear?

“Nina Simone and Mountain. I dig them.”

Do you dig parodies like the Masked Marauders or the English radio program, The Goon Show?

“I never heard it. I heard about it. The Fugs – they’re good. I’ve heard they don’t have The Goon Show over here. They’re the funniest things I’ve ever heard – besides Pinkie Lee. Remember Pinkie Lee? They were like a classic of a whole lot of Pinkie Lees put together, and just flip them out together.”

You were a Pinkie Lee fan?

“I used to be. I used to wear white socks.”

Have movie people tried to lure you into films by saying you’d be a hell of a gunslinger or an astronaut?

“An astronaut! No, well, you know – I’m trying to get the guitar together really.”

Ever think about getting other guitar players into your trip?

“Oh, yeah. I heard Duane Eddy came into town this morning [laughs]. He was groovy.”

Have you played with people like Roland Kirk?

“Oh yeah, I had a jam with him at Ronnie Scott’s in London, and I really got off. It was great. It was really great. I was so scared! It’s really funny – I mean Roland, that cat gets all those sounds. I might just hit one note, and it might be interfering, but we got along great, I thought. He told me I should have turned it up.”

Have you jammed with Larry Coryell, Sonny Sharrock, and people like that?

“Larry and I had, like, swift jams down at The Scene, but I haven’t had a chance to really play with him. I sort of miss that. Who’s the other guy? I think I’ve heard some of his things.”

Sonny Sharrock? He’s all over the guitar. Sometimes, it sounds like it’s not too orderly.

“Sounds like someone we know, huh? [laughs]”

Guitar-smashing is and has always been a source of controversy. To some, it represents a cathartic act of destruction that goes along with the force of their music; to others, it's a waste of an instrument that might've had a long and happy life in the hands of someone else.

Rock's most famous guitar-smasher, Pete Townshend, (mostly) abandoned that particular act over 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean he's wracked with guilt over his innumerable six-string (and not to mention guitar amp) beatings. 

In a recent interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the Who guitarist cited his dislike of – and subsequent lack of bond with – his first guitar as the possible source of his cavalier attitude. 

“Young kids that buy their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it – I've never had that,” Townshend told Fallon. “I think a lot of people struggle to buy their first instruments and they build up a relationship with them.

“In those days,” he went on, “Every kid wanted to be Elvis Presley and they wanted the cheap guitars [that he'd play]. They were trash guitars – the kind of guitars your grandmother would buy you for Christmas – they'd be unplayable.”

Townshend said that he asked his father, a professional musician, to buy him his first guitar. His father, however, deferred to the guitarist's grandmother.

“My grandmother bought me my first guitar from off the wall of the Greek restaurant in Eeling where we lived. No one's gonna tell me that that hunk of wood with some strings stretched across it is sacred. Not to me.”

The climactic bursts of destruction were so important to the Who's stage act, that they're actually what kept Townshend firmly in the Stratocaster camp for longer than he intended. 

Though he'd later return to the Strat, the Who guitarist was all Gibson when he sat down with Guitar Player for an interview in 1972. 

Asked why he'd switched to SGs, Townshend said, “I got fed up with Fenders because they were too clean, but I liked them because they were tough. In my guitar-smashing days, the Fender would last two or three shows, and if I wanted to smash it up, it took ten minutes. But, they were fuzz-box numbers – clean until you hit the fuzz box.”

This interview was originally published in Guitar Player magazine in 2012.

When Carolyn Wonderland took the stage at Yoshi’s in Oakland, California, the crowd didn’t know exactly what to make of her at first. She appeared somewhat shy and unassuming, armed with a Tele, a lap-steel, and a tiny Fender combo. 

As the band went into the opener, the first thing listeners were struck by was her singing voice, an amazing instrument unto itself, with uncommon power, dynamics, and range. Comparisons to Janis Joplin are inevitable, but Wonderland possesses a purity of tone that is all her own. She is such a good singer that some might initially overlook her guitar playing, but not for long.

Midway through the first tune, her attack, touch, and tone took center stage and held their own with her tremendous vocals for the rest of the night – no mean feat. By the second song, she had won the entire audience over and overwhelmed the wait staff at Yoshi’s who, not realizing who they were dealing with, didn’t schedule enough people to handle the increasingly boisterous crowd. 

Next time Carolyn Wonderland comes to town, the club had better be ready, because everyone in attendance will surely come back and bring their friends.

And so it has gone for the Houston native who now resides in Austin (“The land of free guitar lessons,” she says), playing gig after gig and watching as her gutsy voice and fiery 6-string and lap playing hooks and reels in new fans. Her latest release, Peace Meal, will surely garner her even more supporters with its broad range of tones and grooves and boatloads of great guitar playing.

Talk about your right-hand technique. You don’t use a pick.

“When I was about 11, I got really into the Who when I was playing my Mom’s old Martin. I thought it looked cool to do the windmill thing, but when my Mom saw how badly I had scratched up her guitar she said, ‘No more pick for you.’ 

“She also had a Strat that she let me play, but I still didn’t use a pick. I like playing fingerstyle because there are three different surfaces: You’ve got the nail, the side of your finger, and the fingertip. It’s cool. I tried a pick a few times – like, for mandolin – and there have been times, especially on acoustic, where I wish I could play with a pick, but I don’t.”

Your record has a diverse array of tones. How did you get the guitar sound on St. Marks?

“That was the magic of the room. We were at Levon Helm’s place. I set up my live rig one time for all the tracks we did there and we did all the tracking basically live. We also cut Golden Stairs, which is a song that my friend Vince Welnick wrote with Robert Hunter years ago. 

“I hadn’t done it in a long time. Vince and I recorded it when we were in the Jerry Lightfoot Band of Wonder, and he’s since passed away. It’s one of my favorite songs, but it made me cry for a few years. Levon’s seemed like the perfect place to do it again.

“We did the Janis song, What Good Can Drinkin’ Do, because the first place I ever did that song live was at Levon’s, so that seemed to make sense. We tracked Shine On there, too.”

Your live rig when you played in Oakland was a Tele, a Tube Screamer, and a Fender Blues Junior. Is that what you recorded with?

“No, I used my red sparkle ValveTech amp. I adore those amps. They’re freaking awesome. But at that gig that you saw she happened to be in the shop, so I had my trusty little Blues Junior. My ears prefer the ValveTech but my back loves that Blues Junior. 

“My Tube Screamer is the Keeley Mod version. It sounds more like the original, and the footswitch is more solid. There’s a roundness to it. It doesn’t get quite as jumpy. I kick it in for solos and dirty licks.”

Is the Telecaster Thinline your main guitar?

“Yeah. She and I have been through a great deal together. I also have a Gibson Blues Hawk that I love – as well as a bunch of other instruments – but the Tele’s the one that always goes out with me. That guitar has Joe Barden pickups. Originally I got them so it could keep up with a Les Paul, but then I fell in love with them. Because of the blade, you can do all those pedal-steel-style bends and never go off the magnet.”

It seems like you typically run both pickups at once.

“I like to start in the middle, and then I can go a little darker on the neck pickup if the song needs it or a little nastier on the bridge. The middle position is just crunchy enough that you can still strum a chord and not get lost.”

How would you describe the difference between your Tele playing and your lap-steel playing?

“My approach is to hang on for dear life on both instruments. Because I’m less experienced on the lap-steel, it’s sometimes more fun to write things. You come up with accidental riffs because you’re not stuck in that box yet. It’s a little more experimental. I also like to think of horn parts, and because of the way the strings line up on the lap, there’s almost always a triad in there somewhere, which makes those kinds of parts easier.”

Your intonation on the lap-steel is fearless. You don’t even look when you throw the bar down.

“For the first few years on that instrument my intonation was all over the place. I had to learn how to close my eyes and just listen for it. 

“Most of what I know on lap-steel is from watching folks. The lesson that I got the most out of was being in the same room with Cindy Cashdollar. She’s one of my favorite lap-steel players. I was lucky enough to kidnap her for this record, and she played on What Good Can Drinkin’ Do.”

What’s going on when you bounce both hands on the strings when you’re playing rhythm on the lap-steel?

“I’m trying to find a way to be rhythmic and percussive and also give myself a couple of clue notes to help my singing. Depending on the monitors, you can’t always hear what’s going on. I try to leave myself some notes here and there so I can go into a lick and know where I’m at.”

You phrase with a lot of triplets when you play electric – that sort of “da-diddly, da-diddly” thing. Where does that influence come from?

“I’ve had a couple of guitar players ask me to show them that lick that you just sang, I’m pretty sure I got that from Willie Nelson. There’s a live version of Whiskey River where he goes ‘wang-diddly, wang-diddly’ over and over. For whatever reason it stuck in my head and it makes me giggle. I do it a lot, but I always try to stop just this side of a ‘look at me’ lick.”

Who else inspired your lead playing?

“Most of the folks I saw in Houston: Little Screamin’ Kenny, Jerry Lightfoot, Albert Collins. They would all blow my mind as a kid. Eddie Shaver was a huge influence. I put him right up there with Danny Gatton, who was another guy who just killed me when I saw him. 

“They have a similar thing. Some people talk in little spurts or sentences. These guys had paragraphs and novels and they never repeated themselves. I’m still hanging on to the few licks that I can, but when I let go, I try to be more like them.”

Who inspired you from a guitar tone standpoint?

“Billy Gibbons. My Mom always played acoustic and had this beautiful, rich tone that I loved, but it was folks like Billy Gibbons and Jimi Hendrix and the bizarre sounds that they made that fascinated me as a kid.”

What’s the difference between a good gig and a great gig?

“When people get it and you see them light up. Sometimes the band thinks we played really well, but the crowd doesn’t get it. But when there’s that positive feedback loop, when the energy is coming back to you, you don’t have to work so hard expending or trying to create energy, because it’s already there. It’s effortless.”

Performed on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom, the Band's "farewell concert appearance" was captured in the Martin Scorsese-directed rockumentary The Last Waltz. 

Released in 1978, the film featured guest spots from Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and more.

There are many highlights in The Last Waltz, but chief among them for guitar players has to be the sight and sound of Eric Clapton and Robbie Robertson trading solos on "Further On Up the Road," the Texas shuffle first recorded by Bobby "Blue" Bland.

It was a moment that was totally unplanned.

"We had just kicked off the song," said Robertson, "and Eric was playing his opening solo on it. When you look at the movie now you can see his strap is kind of folded over and it looks like it could come off at any time – and it does. It just slips off, so the guitar just falls down, and when that happened – just like you do when you're playing music in a group – you just cover their back. 

"I just jumped in and tried to make so that it wasn't an issue. So then he got his strap back on and came back in and the whole song turned into kind of a guitar dialogue back and forth. People refer to it as a 'duel' but it was more of a guitar conversation with a lot of passion."

It's an unusual piece of pyrotechnics in a sense, because there aren't that many blazing guitar solos in the Band's recorded work. As Robertson explains, that's because he'd already grown out of his 'blazing' phase.

"I started playing professionally on the road for a living when I was 16 years old with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks," he says, "and when I was playing with Ronnie, I was blazing. There were guitar solos in almost every song. Because I was 16 and so hot-to-trot, I came out with the pedal-to-the-metal all the time. And after a period of time I started to understand some of the subtleties and cooler ways to approach things than just putting your fist through the ceiling constantly. But I was still blazing. 

"Then, after we left Ronnie Hawkins, we went into a bit of a different musical world at that point, playing a lot in the South and – in the music that we heard and the people that we were around – I started picking up some other aspects of guitar playing. I would see the guitar player for Little Junior Parker's band [possibly Pat Hare – Ed], for instance, and it was a style of playing that, the motion of it and the groove of it, played just as big a part as the solos did. And the rhythmic playing – playing different rhythms against the song and, not blazing fills, cool little fills on the lower strings, and I thought, 'Hmm, that's interesting'.

"And I quite liked Curtis Mayfield's playing, just because it was so damn cool. Never nervous. Never trying too hard. Always understated. And I started to appreciate that and was moving somewhat in that direction, and then we hooked up with Bob Dylan. He was just getting on the train of rock and roll so they talked about it back then of him 'going electric'? I'd never been non-electric! I didn't know folk music. I came in on the rock 'n' roll, blues and rhythm and blues train – so when we started playing with him, the idea of blazing guitar solos in the middle of his songs – he really enjoyed that fire in his music.

"So in his songs, he'd sing a verse or two and then he'd nod at me and I'd play a solo, and he'd sing another verse, nod at me and I'd play another solo. He liked this thing. I was going right back – not to the subtle place, more to the blazing place with him, and if you hear the kind of playing on 'The Albert Hall tapes' with Bob Dylan [later released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966] the solos are really flailing or burning. I wanted to lean in this subtle direction, but the intensity of the music and the velocity that he wanted to sing it and play it just kinda pumped me back up to that place again."

You were facing a lot of animosity…

"There was anger involved in this too, you're right. If people were going to boo you, you were going to become somewhat aggressive. It's human nature. So it was my way of fighting back or something. Then after that, when we were doing The Basement Tapes and the Band was preparing to do Music From Big Pink, I got to say, 'okay'. 

"At that point there seemed to me to be an overload of guitar players. When I first played with Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan that style of guitar playing was somewhat rare. By 1967/68 screaming guitars were becoming quite common, and I'm sure that Jimi Hendrix was one of the main reason for people going in that direction. 

"But in this period, there was guitar players coming out of the wood work and everyone was blazing and I felt like I'd already been down that path. When The Band was doing the first record, I really wanted the emphasis to be on the songs, and the way the songs were constructed, the musical parts, the way we played off one another – real subtleties. So I had the opportunity to go in another direction. 

"When our first album came out, Eric Clapton became a tremendous supporter of the Band. I mean, he told everybody about the album – he told the Beatles and the Stones and, at the time said, 'And that's the kind of guitar playing that I'm interested in now' and that was when he left Cream, saying 'I want to go in this other direction too'. 

"I completely understood his feelings: you can only come out screaming for so long and then finally you're just yearning for something a little more tasty and little more sophisticated musically. Because you grow up a little bit and guitar players like Steve Cropper and Curtis Mayfield really mean something to you. They're so understated. They leave out all the bullshit – all the unnecessary stuff is left out.

"So it was going from one extreme to another. I wanted to be able to prove something that wasn't all about the acrobatics."

The following interview excerpt appeared in the May 1972 issue of Guitar Player.

The Who were into instrument destruction onstage, and found it gave recognition and a musical peak to their performances. Chief lick-maker of the Who is Peter Townshend, whose influences have included John Lee Hooker and Steve Cropper, along with Jimi Hendrix and a bit of the Yardbirds.

He is acclaimed as the first guitarist to stack amplifiers, and is also among the first to use feedback creatively.

He is the epitome of stage presence with his long, lean figure jumping seemingly six feet in the air, and his windmilling arm striking his guitar’s strings with the effect of a lightning-clouded sky.

How did you come to use Gibson SGs?

Well, it’s a bit of a disappointing story. I got fed up with Fenders because they were too clean, but I liked them because they were tough. In my guitar-smashing days, the Fender would last two or three shows, and if I wanted to smash it up, it took ten minutes. But they were fuzz-box numbers – clean until you hit the fuzz box.

So I went to the music store, and said I really need an alternative to this, and the manager suggested the SG. I played it, and it sang to me, and I’ve used SGs ever since. 

The finest guitar I’ve ever owned, however, is this 1958 Gretsch Chet Atkins that Joe Walsh gave me. It’s the loudest guitar I’ve ever had. It is so loud, man. I used that guitar on every track of Who’s Next.

How much of your leads are improvisation?

Well, in the loose bits, it’s like off the cuff. Sometimes, when an audience is passive, we freak and say, “Get up off your ass and do something!” But although they sometimes aren’t openly freaking, there can be definite strong vibes of “we’re here to hear.” And when you walk on stage and meet that, it makes you feel a bit more of a musician than an acrobat. So a lot of things come out that don’t ordinarily come out.

But when you are actually playing a lead, is it out of scales, chords, patterns or what?

I started out as a rhythm player, and a few of my lead licks are things I’ve basically developed in recording sessions. I’ll never be able to play the kind of leads I want. I was happiest listening to Jimi Hendrix – that, to me, was like heaven.

For me, it was probably a good thing that he died, because it made me realize that I wasn’t going to be at any more Jimi Hendrix concerts and feel that bit of downfall. I was going to have to try and do it for myself again.

Is the music as important as the stage act?

I can’t separate the music and the act anymore. My favorite quote I said in an interview is “We never let the music get in the way of our stage act.” In a lot of ways that’s true, because “stage act” means that we are committed to one another and the audience, and “music” means we are committed to the way we play – or committed to our limitations.

You know, if there’s something on the guitar that I want to do, but I can’t, I’m going to be frustrated.

Growing up in classic rock’s golden years shouldn’t negate the possibility that you enjoy music made today. I may have an extensive vinyl collection of favorites dating back to my childhood, but I stream music everyday and constantly discover great songs by inspiring artists across the genres.

Yet, there are some who believe the modern music scene is a wasteland.

If you think that, you probably aren’t listening. But if one thing has suffered in the past two decades, it is the long-player. There are fewer epic albums being made today, and there is less reason to invest one’s time and ears in 40 minutes or more of an artist’s music.

Of course, I say this with the benefit – and certainly blessing – of having grown up at a time when the album was king.

Take 1973. A half century ago, we experienced one of the greatest years in rock and roll. It was a year that saw debuts from potent acts like Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, as well as from guitar heroes like Tony Rice and Lindsey Buckingham, making his nod with Buckingham Nicks.

From my youthful vantage point, 1973 was lived as 52 weeks of breathless Saturday trips to the record store, where we were tempted by such epic albums as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Who’s Quadrophenia, not to mention prog monsters like Yes’s live three-album set Yessongs, Manfred Mann Earth Band’s Solar Fire, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard/A True Star, Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery and, the behemoth of them all, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

In 1973, we saw the last flashes of glam rock with Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups, Rick Derringer’s All American Boy, Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and the debut from the New York Dolls.

But it was a great year for art rock, with Fripp and Eno’s experimental tour de force (No Pussyfooting), John Cale’s orchestral pop masterpiece Paris 1919, Lou Reed’s dramatic Berlin, Camel’s brilliant self-titled debut, and a pair of landmark Roxy Music albums: For Your Pleasure and Stranded.

That was all but the tip of that year’s multi-genre, stylistically freewheeling musical iceberg.

For any album to stand out among this pack, it would have to be pretty freaking great. Which is the least you can say about Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, a compilation of eight wildly inventive songs that together serve as a cross-section of that year’s dizzying musical styles, including prog, reggae, glam, folk, funk and art-rock.

It was the first Zeppelin album I bought and the first – perhaps only – album they made that kept their bombast in check, served up an ear-catching range of styles and delivered with economical arrangements.

As Jimmy Page said: “You can hear the fun we were having.”

Indeed, we can, to this day. Here’s to singing in the sunshine and laughing in the rain.

At its best, psychedelic rock could transport listeners to alternate worlds with tableaux that evoked unusual settings and past eras, as the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In this regard, it provided fertile ground for Pete Townshend’s growing musical ambitions.

After the Mod stylings of the Who’s first releases, Townshend plied his talents in psychedelia with 1967’s The Who Sell Out, a concept album structured as songs and commercials broadcast by a pirate radio station in London.

“At the time, there was this idea that there was a need to create these new things, and that we needed to create them very, very quickly,” Townshend told Guitar Player. “Because the notion in pop music was that everything was going to be so brief. We never realized that this music would still be around 50 or 60 years later.

While tracks like “I Can See for Miles” and “Magic Bus” stand out as obvious examples of his psychedelic leanings from this time, the songs “Tattoo” (with its early use of Leslied guitar) and “Silas Stingy” are excellent representations of how the genre provided artists like Townshend with a palette for creative storytelling and sound design.

Best of all was the group’s June 1968 single “Dogs,” a whimsical music hall-style number about greyhound racing that includes spoken-word passages.

Though it was a dog on the charts, it is nevertheless a masterpiece of psychedelic pop.

Browse the Who catalog here.

The résumé of Andy Fairweather Low reads like a checklist of music stars.

Among those hundreds of musicians with whom the Welsh guitarist has played are the likes of Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, George Harrison, Roger Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Joe Satriani, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Kate Bush.

His illustrious career began in the late ‘60s as a founding member and frontman of chart-topping rockers Amen Corner.

By the mid-’70s, Fairweather Low had struck out on a solo career, releasing his debut LP, Spider Jiving, in 1974.

Aided by Glyn Johns, he released his highly acclaimed sophomore album, La Booga Rooga, in 1975, followed by Be Bop 'N' Holla in 1976.

Fairweather Low’s significant vocal contributions to the Who’s 1978 top ten album Who Are You and rhythm guitar work on the band’s 1982 LP It's Hard led to him becoming one of the most in-demand session players in the business.

With the phone ringing off the hook, the maestro managed to squeeze out another solo album in 1980 – Mega Shebang. But it would be 26 years later when the long-awaited follow-up appeared – the Johns-produced Sweet Soulful Music.

Zone-O-Tone by Andy Fairweather Low & the Lowriders arrived in 2013 and the band enjoyed a slot supporting Eric Clapton (with whom he has worked since the early ‘90s) on tour that year.

Maintaining his loyal fanbase, Fairweather Low managed to tour yearly ever since, until lockdown put the kibosh on gigging.

Like so many musicians during this difficult period, the guitarist was effectively forced off the road. But what better way to spend that time than writing and recording a new album?

“I’d always been writing and scribbling away,” says Fairweather Low. “I do my demos at home on a Boss 1180, and I love my demos. They’re not sort of high-tech quality sound, but they’ve got a thing about them.”

Settling into Wales’s storied Rockfield Studios, the Low Riders’ Paul Beavis was drafted in to lay down drum tracks. Fairweather Low played all other instruments.

“The only thing I can’t stand is the drum machine that I use,” he explains. “So this time, I thought, I’ll tell you what, I’ll go to Rockfield, and I’ll do my demos but at a better level – a better technical level – and with a proper drummer.

“I asked Paul Beavis, the Low Riders’ drummer, if he’d come and sort of duplicate the drum patterns that I had, and he said yes, and off we went.”

Entering the hallowed grounds of Rockfield was like a homecoming for Fairweather Low whose history with the studio goes back decades.

“In 1965, I was there. And the staircase that I put my foot on is still there,” he recalls. “I put my foot on it again and it was a bizarre feeling, but it was also the perfect thing.”

Although the guitarist hadn’t planned on making an album, the stars suddenly aligned when Rockfield co-founder, Kingsley Ward, suggested he pay them a visit.

“Two years of Covid, and I didn’t know what to do,” continues Fairweather Low. “And then Kingsley suggested that I come down. And I thought, you know what? I think I’ll take Kingsley up on his offer. And I did.

“‘You don’t have to pay, you know, you can have it for nothing, just come down and do something, it will be good to see you’, Kingsley said. And it was like going home. It’s become like part of a family really, part of the Rockfield family. It did complete a circle. It was just meant to be.”

The result is Flang Dang – an album described in a recent review by our U.K. sibling magazine, Guitarist, as “a notable return to form” and “a joyful party.”

Slated for release on February 24, 2023, via Last Music Company, the album’s eleven tracks cross genres while maintaining Fairweather Low’s eminently soulful touch.

“There are a lot of soulful and gospel-tinged songs, there’s a bit of blues, there’s a bit of ska, there’s a bit of country, there’s a bit of everything,” he points out. “It’s everything I’ve ever listened to.

“My perspective on music since Sweet Soulful Music has not really changed. It’s always the same approach. It was my demos then, it’s my demos now. And I have days when I’m sort of spiritual and I have days when I’m not.

“It’s a constant conversation. So, I’m not tied down to anything.”

Ahead of Flang Dang’s release, Fairweather Low has unveiled the groove-laden "Somebody Wants My Soul."

Listen out for the vibey, fuzzed-out guitar solo from 2:20.

“When I hear this track, I hear Rockfield,” he told us. “I hear the room. Love the groove. Love the guitar sound.

“What’s not to l like? I’m souled!”

Pre-order Andy Fairweather Low's new album, Flang Dang, 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.

When Leslie West passed away on December 23, 2020, at age 75, the list of guitar legends queueing up to honor him told its own story.

Many of them are among the players who appear on the new release Legacy: A Tribute to Leslie West (Mascot label Group), featuring contributions from such luminaries as Slash, Zakk Wylde, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Morse and Martin Barre, all of which highlights West’s towering influence over rock and roll’s many diverse strains.

To the uninitiated, West is best remembered for “Mississippi Queen,” an essential hard rocker from the classic rock canon.

Anyone with a deeper interest in the music West created, both as a member of Mountain and under various solo and band guises, would know his work is crammed with thundering riffs and exquisitely expressive soloing.

It’s a veritable treasure chest packed with memorable, moving songs.

In acknowledging the guitarist’s monumental influence, nearly everyone sooner or later (and often immediately) seizes upon the same word: tone.

The sound that West achieved with a P-90-loaded Gibson Les Paul Junior has been consistently cited as one of the most distinctive in rock music. His sonic signature is a thick, singing tone that has both weight and depth, and a vibrato that can sustain a note for days.

His phrasing is all about economy. The man wasted not a single note to overplaying, or tried to dazzle with bombastic flurries of speed.

As he said many times, his aim was to create solos that could be sung, and music that moved the heart and soul, rather than impressed minds with its technical prowess.

He was born Leslie Weinstein, in New York City, 1945, but grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, before returning to New York and living in several neighborhoods.

After his parents divorced, he shortened his surname to West, gaining an air of showbiz cool as he cast off his Jewish ethnicity.

He discovered the power of rock and roll as a child when he attended what he thought was a taping of The Jackie Gleason Show, the comedian’s popular CBS television program. “My uncle used to write for Jackie Gleason, and my grandmother used to take me to all the tapings,” West recalled.

“One summer, she took me to see Jackie Gleason’s American Scene Magazine [Gleason’s show from 1962 to 1965], but there was a replacement. Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey had the stage show instead, and you know who was the guest on the show? Elvis Presley.

“That’s when I started playing guitar – saw that son of a bitch come out and go, ‘Well it’s one for the money,’ and thought, I gotta play this thing.”

West’s first taste of success came as a member of the Vagrants, a blue-eyed soul group from Long Island that scored a couple of minor regional hits with “I Can’t Make a Friend,” in 1966, and a burning cover of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect,” in 1967.

A fascinating clip from this time, filmed in 1966 for the American-British teen movie, Disk-O-Tek Holiday, shows the Vagrants performing “Oh, Those Eyes,” with West stepping forward for a great solo in an otherwise fairly unmemorable song.

He mimes to the music with a 12-string Danelectro, but his main axe at that point was a 1958 sunburst Fender Stratocaster that he bought with his bar mitzvah money.

“When the Vagrants started, we all wanted new guitars, so I traded it in for – get this – a Kent,” he once revealed. “A red Kent with three pickups! It was disgusting.”

Although the Vagrants never achieved much success, playing in the band introduced him to multi-instrumentalist songwriter and producer Felix Pappalardi, who oversaw some of the group’s work.

When West parted ways with the Vagrants in 1969 to pursue a solo career, Pappalardi came along to produce and play on his solo album, Mountain.

Although the record was named for the guitarist’s larger-than-life physique, by the time it hit the stores West had proposed launching a power trio with that title and asked Pappalardi to come onboard, along with drummer N.D. Smart.

West had good reasons to pick the talented producer, not the least being that he had worked with Cream, the ultimate supergroup, producing their 1967 psychedelic breakthrough, Disraeli Gears, as well as the two albums of theirs that followed: 1968’s bluesy Wheels of Fire and 1969’s swan song, Goodbye.

While it was obvious for Rolling Stone to describe Mountain as a louder version of Cream, given Pappalardi’s background, it was also accurate.

Mountain’s music was packed with explosive, dynamic blues and rock masterpieces that could sit comfortably alongside the likes of Hendrix, the Who and Ten Years After, all of whom performed that year at Woodstock, where Mountain appeared on the second day of the festival.

They scored the gig – only their third show as a band – due to the fact that they shared an agent with Hendrix.

“We were getting five grand for it, which was incredible money for your third show in 1969,” West revealed.

At the dawn of the age that brought forth a new breed of powerhouse guitar hero, his guitar playing immediately resonated with listeners hungry for unique voices.

West always said he wasn’t a fast player – all that mattered to him were tone and a desire to have a vibrato like a classical violinist.

As he said in 1987, “I’m no great guitarist technically, but you wanna know why people remember me? If you take a hundred players and put them in a room, ninety-nine of ’em are gonna sound the same.

“The one who plays different…that’s the one you’re gonna remember. I learned that you should think about the song, think about the chords you’re playing behind. Most of my solos come right out of those chords. You play the notes within the chords and try to pick a melody from there.”

His powerful guitar tone was matched by his equally imposing declamatory vocals.

The contrast with Pappalardi’s softer voice does much to belie the clichéd description of Mountain’s music as the forerunner of heavy metal. That simplistic tag overlooks how broad the scope of their music was, with both light and shade in their sound and across their albums.

West’s guitar tone was as immense as the man himself.

His reputation was built on his use of the humble Les Paul Junior with a single P-90 pickup. West saw the advantage of having the extra space that a single-pickup guitar gave him when it came to generating his distinctive use of pinched harmonics.

“You gotta have the Junior to do ’em right, because of the single pickup,” he said once, when demonstrating his technique.

“See the way the strings can bend down when you hit ’em? If there was a neck pickup, it’d be in the way. You bury the pick with your thumb and you have all the room you need.”

By the time the first Mountain album was recorded, West had a couple of Juniors from the 1950s, both a single and a double-cutaway.

“The single-cutaway had a better sound than the other one,” he said. “I used to string them with standard sets of La Bella strings, but I’d substitute a .010-gauge A banjo string for the high E string and move the other five strings down one slot, because you couldn’t get extra-light sets at that time.”

When it came to amplifying West’s gutsy approach, a happy accident led him to finding the perfect fit.

“It was just two Sunn stacks with the [Sunn] Coliseum PA heads,” he explained. “They were Hendrix’s old amps, re-Tolexed and reconed.

“See, the PA heads had those four inputs and a master volume, which started the distortion thing for me. This was years before guitar amps had master-volume controls. The head had huge transformers and gigantic KT88 tubes, and the cabinets were loaded with Eminence speakers, which never hurt your ears even with the treble all the way up.”

It was that amp that appeared on 1970’s Climbing!, Mountain’s debut album, which included the song that would forever be linked with West: his raging hard rocker, “Mississippi Queen.”

“I’d turn the mic volume and the master all the way up, and overdrive the thing like crazy,” he said.

Arriving on the heels of their Woodstock performance, Climbing! received strong reviews and reached number 17 on the Billboard chart, propelled by both “Mississippi Queen” and “Theme For an Imaginary Western,” a song written by Cream bassist Jack Bruce for his first solo album.

By this time, Smart had moved on to join Great Speckled Bird and Corky Laing had come onboard, solidifying Mountain’s most celebrated lineup.

West’s talents were widely lauded by the rock cognoscenti. When the Who arrived in New York City in 1971 to record what would become Who’s Next, Pete Townshend asked him to perform in the studio with the group so that they could track the songs as a live act and eliminate guitar overdubs.

Although West’s recordings with the band were unused after the Who subsequently remade the album back in England, some of them‚ including an early version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” showed up as bonus cuts on reissues of Who’s Next and on an extended version of the leftovers compilation Odds and Sods.       

Mountain’s second album was, in the minds of many, their best. Nantucket Sleighride came out in 1971, peaking at number 16, one spot higher than their debut.

Among the highlights were West’s opening track, the hard-charging “Don’t Look Around,” his funk-boogie “You Can’t Get Away” (a worthy successor to the similar “Mississippi Queen”) and Pappalardi’s haunting “Travellin’ in the Dark.”

But it was the title track that showed Mountain at their best, a prog-like mini opera about whalers leaving for sea and the perils they faced.

Key to the drama was an instrumental centerpiece that showed all four musicians – by now Mountain had been fortified with keyboardist Steve Knight – whipping up a formidable storm of hard rock, powered along by West’s gloriously overdriven power chords.

Oddly, this fragment served as the theme tune for Britain’s long-running political discussion show Weekend World, in the 1970s.

Unaware of its use, West was apparently bemused by the enthusiastic response the song would get when Mountain performed it in the U.K.

The end of 1971 saw Mountain release Flowers of Evil, comprising a side of live tracks recorded at New York City’s Fillmore East that same year, and a side of new studio tracks.

The fact that the band could deliver only one side of original material demonstrates how their relentless workload had drained their creative energies. Worse, relations between West and Pappalardi had begun to deteriorate.

The guitarist explained in later interviews that the change came when the bassist claimed a quarter of writing royalties for “Mississippi Queen,” despite having written what West called “a handful of notes.”

As the guitarist admitted, drug use exacerbated their problems, and after a 1972 U.K. tour, Mountain broke up.

It was here that the Cream connection reared its head again, when in 1972, West and Laing teamed up with Jack Bruce to form the supergroup West, Bruce and Laing.

The lineup generated intense record industry interest, with Columbia signing the band to a lucrative contract deal.

Why Dontcha, their 1972 debut album, was a worthy entry into West’s catalog, but is inferior not only to the previous Mountain studio albums but also to Bruce’s work with Cream.

While it sold well, the band struggled with their follow-up, Whatever Turns You On, which just scraped into Billboard’s top 100.

By then, fighting had taken its toll. West, Bruce and Laing split up. Joined tenuously by their contractual obligations, they issued one last disc, the 1974 concert album Live ’n’ Kickin’.

For a band that had been together just 18 months, it was a fruitful union, albeit a short-lived one that produced little of consequence.

Apparently, the time apart had done West and Pappalardi some good. In an unlikely turn of events, Mountain reformed to tour Japan in 1973 and released the live album Twin Peaks.

After extensive touring both overseas and in the States, they released a new studio album, Avalanche, in 1974. While not a bad disc, it again fell short of the first two Mountain records, and the group carried on touring until the end of the year, when they broke up once again.

West continued to play live and recorded a couple of solo albums, including 1975’s The Great Fatsby and 1976’s The Leslie West Band.

He was rumored to have been in line for a shot at replacing Mick Taylor in the Stones, a match-up that seemed ideally suited on paper, given the way that guitar duties were divided between Taylor and Keith Richards during Taylor’s tenure.

Unfortunately for West, Ron Wood, who seemed born to be a Rolling Stone, snagged the spot, returning that group’s sound to the organic interweaving of guitars that had been its modus operandum prior to Taylor’s arrival.

West briefly lost his love for music in 1977, only to be reinvigorated by the emergence of Van Halen’s self-titled 1978 debut album.

While Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnical electric guitar technique might seem a million miles away from West’s deeply blues-rooted approach, he was a huge admirer of the elder man’s playing.

As the two formed a friendship, West’s desire to play returned, even as the brand of music he was known for fell from favor.

Perhaps the only concession he made to the emergence of the era of shred was in his change in equipment. In addition to abandoning his Les Paul Junior for a variety of pointy 1980s axes, he developed a particular fondness for headless guitars.

West also began to introduce some subtle whammy-bar histrionics into his playing, perfectly exemplified in his 1992 appearance on The Dennis Miller Show, in which West was at his most commanding, plugging a Steinberger into a pair of Marshall stacks as he roared through “Mississippi Queen” before making a segue into “Nantucket Sleighride.”

Mountain would continue to reform sporadically over the subsequent decades, although without Pappalardi, who was shot dead by his wife in 1983 under suspicious circumstances.

Released in 2007, their Bob Dylan covers album, Masters of War, was an unlikely entry in the group’s catalog but was much better than might have been expected.

West’s heavyweight guitar-and-vocal combo powered many of the tracks to hard-rocking heights that allowed him to take ownership of the songs.

Perfect examples of the Mountain blitzkrieg approach are “Everything Is Broken,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

West’s ability to shift from those powerhouse vocals to a softer, more reflective treatment was perfectly showcased on his acoustic guitar reading of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” before it morphs into a dinosaur-sized stompathon.

West recorded a number of solo albums for various labels over the years and continued to tour extensively, even through the various health problems that dogged him throughout his life.

He had managed to deal with long-standing addiction problems only to be diagnosed with diabetes in the mid 1980s, and then had further problems when he developed bladder cancer around the turn of the millennium.

West recovered but had new issues with his diabetes, which led to him having to have his right leg amputated at the knee in 2011.

He continued to play live shows and record, even after so many setbacks. He lost a considerable amount of weight which undoubtedly improved his overall health, but sadly he died from a cardiac arrest in 2020.

West’s legacy is clear in the number of artists who sought to work with him during his career and in the tributes that were reported at the time of his passing.

Even if he were remembered only for “Mississippi Queen,” that one song would be enough to cement him as one of the most strident axe-slingers in the history of a genre not short on killer guitarists.

However, West had so much more to offer, and an exploration of his back catalog will reveal numerous riches, not only from his early period of success with Mountain but also right through to the later blues guitar albums that he recorded as a solo artist.

In truth, you can’t go far wrong with any of his albums, as any Leslie West solo is a masterclass in tone, touch and taste from the ultimate “feel” player.

Order Legacy: A Tribute to Leslie West here.

Scott Metzger is known for kicking out Grateful Dead grooves and whooping up cosmic electric licks in Joe Russo’s Almost Dead tribute act, as well as jamming with improv maestros like Nels Cline and John Scofield.

But when the live scene went dark due to COVID, Metzger followed a vintage Martin down an acoustic rabbit hole to create a cool, understated solo album.

Too Close to Reason (Royal Potato Family) is mostly moody and spacious, rather than chock full of burning chops, although Metzger is capable of conjuring fire.

Check into the Showdown Kids to hear his proficient gypsy jazz hands, as well as those of his violinist wife, Katie Jacoby, who also happens to hold down the fiddle gig in a little British Invasion band from London led by Pete Townshend.

To hear Metzger’s electric howl, turn an ear to his power trio WOLF! On the other hand, his new solo acoustic album is a truly singular effort. He plays every note, except for Jacoby’s delicate violin on “Only Child.”

Too Close to Reason is simply a lovely listen, and a departure from run-of-the-mill guitar showcases. Metzger is not trying to juggle five parts simultaneously or worried about pulling it all off alone onstage.

To cut the album, he simply followed his acoustic muse, either melodically or rhythmically, and then typically threw in a complementary track, plus another for texture. The result is kind of like a duo with himself, with some sauce on the side.

It’s refreshing to hear an electric guitar player taking a stab at an unplugged album in his own style, completely for its own sake.

Performed with a plectrum, Metzger’s effort falls outside the realm of flashy fingerstyle fabulosos or the jam-jazz world he usually inhabits.

The first single, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” is a slice of Americana built on a lilting melody that downloads direct to memory.

“Café Hidalgo” is a haunting minor mystery, and “When Katie Smiles” is classically inspired.

Metzger excels at playing in 3/4 time, and the latest release, “Waltz for Beverly,” has a wistful bounce.

How does your acoustic guitar approach compare to electric?

The acoustic is a completely different instrument that has to be approached completely differently, but hopefully I have a similar voice on both.

I try to incorporate more open strings and let them ring out to maximize resonation on the acoustic. The idea is to highlight its beauty by featuring the overtones and other elements that you can’t get out of the electric.

Two of your primary influences, Django Reinhardt and Jerry Garcia, blurred the lines between acoustic and electric styles. How did you get into Django?

I got to Django through the jazz guitar players I admired that he inspired. I grew up reading interviews with players like Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery, who would mention Django, so I picked up one of his CDs.

I think it was the third volume of Djangology, which was a lucky choice, because some of that stuff is stronger than others, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The feeling of swing and forward momentum in the groove was unbelievable, and his control over the guitar seemed impossible, covering such wide spans with so many arpeggios and other methods on the fretboard.

And then I found out he was doing it with only two fingers on his left hand, which led to more disbelief and deepened my obsession.

I formed Showdown Kids with Simon Kafka on guitar and my wife, Katie, on violin essentially as a vehicle to get my version of gypsy jazz out of my system, because I love that music so much. It’s a great way to blow off steam.

How awesome is it to have a wife that can play Stéphane Grappelli to your Django?

Well, that was a big moment in the courting process, I’ve got to be honest. When she picked up a violin and started playing the Grappelli solo on “Minor Swing,” I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. This has potential.” [laughs]

I definitely did a double take.

What element of the Django inspiration carries over into your own album?

The biggest thing for me is the way he emotes. He could sound angry or gentle, or anything in-between. His ability to set the mood made it very obvious.

It’s in his approach to dynamics, his sense of rhythm and all of the fundamentals involved with playing the guitar. I don’t think there’s a better example of a player having mastered them all.

What do you love most about Jerry Garcia’s playing?

Actually, Jerry would always mention Django Reinhardt in interviews as well, and I think it’s the Django influence in his playing that I love most.

That’s obviously more apparent in his acoustic playing, due to the nature of the instrument, but I don’t claim to be an expert on all things Jerry. I tread lightly when I get into Garcia’s stuff. I tend not to study it too much because I do so much of it with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, and I don’t want to end up sounding like a watered-down version of Garcia.

I did get a chance to play his [Doug Irwin–built] Wolf guitar after it was auctioned off in New York City. Joe Russo put together a stacked lineup of players, including Nels Cline, John Scofield, Neal Casal, Cass McCombs and Tom Hamilton Jr. [from Almost Dead].

I remember that the guitar was very heavy, had a lot of switches and played great. It was amazing and nerve racking to hold such a piece of rock and roll history. All I could think about as it was handed off from player to player to take a solo was, I don’t want to be the guy that drops it. [laughs]

I had a chance to check out his 1943 Martin D-28 and had a similar feeling. Wasn’t it a vintage Martin that triggered your recent run of acoustic material?

Yes. Around late May of 2020, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be touring that year, I decided it was a good time to fulfill a lifelong dream and add a nice vintage acoustic to my collection.I shopped around online and wound up buying a 1955 Martin 000-18 from Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville.

I live in Brooklyn, so the salesman played a few chords over the phone and sent me a photo. It sounded good and I thought it looked cool. I actually wanted an instrument that had been played and looked beat up, not some collector-grade guitar.

When I received the package, it was perfectly in tune right out of the case. The clear, chimey tone pops right out. It doesn’t take much effort with the plucking hand to make it project. You can really feel the guitar doing its thing.

All of these melodies almost started playing themselves on this guitar. I couldn’t put it down, and there was nowhere to go anyway. I wrote over 30 songs within a few weeks.

The most unusual song with the most unusual sound is actually the opening track, “Appropriate Wattage.” Are you playing that acoustic with an EBow?

Yes, you’re absolutely right, well, it’s actually two acoustic guitars playing counterpoint off of one another. I used an EBow on both. There’s no pickup, just a microphone in front of the guitar.

To me, the sound is like when you rub your finger around the outside of a wine glass. It’s a very pure, crystalized sound. Every now and again the string would catch the EBow a little bit and make a sharp, metallic sound. I liked the contrast of those two things.

During the mixing process, [engineer] D. James Goodwin added in a lower-octave effect and drenched it in reverb. The concept was to have an off-center introduction that didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the record.

The title comes from a conversation I had with Nels Cline about the appropriate amps to bring to a gig we were doing together.

The rest of the record has more of a rootsy vibe, and the first single, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” sounds like perhaps there’s a bit of a Chet Atkins influence?

The melody is nice and simple, almost like a Christmas song that’s hopefully catchy and has a bit of metric modulation in it on the back half. I was trying to highlight the dynamics of the guitar on the bridge.

It’s very quiet compared to the following melody as well as the outro, where there’s certainly a Chet Atkins influence. I went through a very big Chet Atkins phase years ago, and while I would never try to make an entire record in that style, it’s definitely a nod to that phase.

You just released a video for “Waltz for Beverly.” What’s the story behind that tune?

I was kicking around that melody, which is like an Irish reel, with no harmony supporting it at all. So I put that down and then worked up some changes behind it. I’m not a huge fan of playing to a click track, but it was necessary for this situation in order to put the pieces together cohesively.

What’s great about playing over a waltz rhythm?

The great thing about a waltz is that the feel can be either very sad or very happy. It can sound lonely or like you’ve got a spring in your step walking down the street, depending on the feel.

I’d like to think “Waltz for Beverly” threads the needle between both of those. It’s got a little bit of sentimental melancholy as well as a hopeful, very major diatonic sound.

There are three tracks: one straight rhythm, one straight melody and then a third track for atmosphere, with lots of harmonics, open strings and clusters of very close-voiced chords ringing over the top.

“Only Child” is a lovely lullaby in waltz time with your wife Katie on violin, and “When Katie Smiles” has an interesting feel because it sounds like a waltz with a rest on the third beat, like two inside three, right?

Simon is going to play second guitar on the gigs I have coming up and he said the same thing, so there must be something to it, but I think of “When Katie Smiles” as being in four.

It’s also interesting that the foundation sounds rather basic, and yet you play some of the most flowery melodies and almost classical-sounding flourishes over the top, wouldn’t you say?

Sure. And a lot of the chords are slash chords [with the bass note different from the root]. I went to see the Who a bunch of times because my wife plays with them, and Pete Townshend uses so many slash chords in his writing. That influence definitely came through there.

 The single-note stuff you’re talking about is playing upper harmonics and extensions over a different bass note [than expected].

How fun is it that you get to hang out at Who gigs?

It’s unbelievable. I don’t even know what to say. Sometimes I can’t believe my life.

Order Too Close To Reason here.

90 years ago, Rickenbacker launched the world’s first commercially available electric guitar following the introduction of the game-changing ‘horseshoe’ pickup in 1931. And though much has changed over the years in terms of technology and musical styles, the basic principle of the electric guitar remains the same to this day.

It was a watershed moment for the music industry and pop culture as a whole. Over the decades, Rickenbacker continued to evolve their designs, producing a huge range of instruments including acoustic guitars, jazz guitars, semi-hollowbodies, solidbodies, bass guitars, laps steels, pedal steels, amplifiers and more.

Now, for the first time ever, Rickenbacker’s conclusive history has been captured in fine photographic detail, from the earliest days of the 1930s up to the turn of the millennium.

Created by the Kelly brothers – author Martin Kelly and photographer Paul Kelly – Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo provides readers with a full and detailed account of Rickenbacker guitar evolution that is finally rendered accessible by an easy-to-follow chronological layout.

Much like their previous book, The Golden Age of Fender: 1946-1970 (Cassell Illustrated), The Kelly brothers’ quest to nail the ultimate history of Rickenbacker took them on a journey around the world photographing collections of rare instruments and conducting countless hours of interview.

The result is indeed “definitive,” according to Rickenbacker Chairman and CEO John Hall. A family-run business for many years, his father – F.C. Hall – acquired the firm from Adolph Rickenbacher in 1953 at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

Celebrating the launch of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, a special exhibition is being held at Shapero Rare Books in London. Earlier this month, Guitar Player caught up with Hall at a Q&A event held at the prestigious Mayfair bookshop.

“It was a big undertaking for Martin and Paul Kelly,” Hall told us. “Naturally, I was careful about who I would permit access to. The project was initially arranged via Alan Rogan. (The late Alan Rogan was a respected guitar collector/expert who famously worked as Pete Townshend’s guitar tech.)

"He was the one who came to me and said, ‘John, I know these guys. Do you want to do a book? I think they’d be good.’ So I felt comfortable that Martin and Paul were the right people to do the job.

“There’s some amazing information in the book. It fleshed out a lot of details, including some of the stories I knew.”

One such story included in the new Rickenbacker book concerns a young John Lennon who, in 1960, stumbled across what would later be revealed as the first Capri model ever made. Needless to say, the young Beatle’s purchase was a turning point in guitar history.

This truly remarkable tale that bounces back and forth across the pond is told in authoritative detail along with many others in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo.

Other influential electric guitar players and a bassists featured in the Kelly brothers’ new book include Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Brian Jones, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Dee Dee Ramone, Paul Weller, Peter Buck, Johnny Marr, Susanna Hoffs, Chris Squire, Lemmy, Geddy Lee and others.

You can order a copy of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo directly from Phantom Books here.