Angine de Poitrine remain the buzz band of the year. It’s essentially now a legal requirement for guitarists to have a strong opinion on them. If only there was a way to choose a side without three days of doom-scrolling. Wait, there is... It’s Fret Buzz!

Catch me up. Who are these clowns?

Is your Wi-Fi down or something? Angine de Poitrine are a Québécois experimental rock duo and viral phenomenon. They’re everywhere. Selling out tours. Drawing record crowds at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Wigging out on Later With Jools Holland. Opening for Jack White. Poor old Rick Beato has begged people to stop emailing about them. He can’t keep on top of his inbox.

What kind of music do they play?

A sort of stabby, scronky math-rock, using loop pedals and microtonal guitars. It’s pretty good. But the music is arguably just a footnote in their overnight fame.

Do you think their polka-dot costumes and papier-mâché masks might have something to do with it?

It seems likely. If you’ve ever thought, “I quite like rock ‘n’ roll but wish it had a soupçon of street-theatre whimsy”, this is the act for you. The lineup features a guitarist (Khn) with a proboscis you could use to artificially inseminate livestock. And a drummer (Klek) who looks like the bastard child of a dalmatian and the Pulp Fiction gimp.

Slipknot and Ghost wear masks too. But I don’t hear you taking the piss out of them…

That’s because we’re scared they’ll send us a dead crow in the mail. I mean, what are these guys going to do – perform a strongly expressed mime?

Where did Angine de Poitrine come from, anyway?

The official PR line is that they’re 333-year-old time-traveling aliens. And they’re not a band, by the way, they’re a “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist orchestra”.

That sounds a little pretentious.

Yes it does.

It sounds to me like they’re getting on your nerves.

Well, like I said, the music is really interesting. But the backlash has already started. Devin Townsend recently pondered: “Would they have that same attention if they weren’t wearing big clown noses?”

Well, would AC/DC get the same attention if Angus Young wore jeans and a T-shirt?

Yes! We think so. Wouldn’t they? We’ve never actually thought about that before.

So Devin has spent his entire career dressing soberly, in a bid to draw precisely no notice to himself, has he?

Er, not really. There were the white top hats. And now you mention it, I think he dressed up as a superhero in the PowerNerd video.

I mean, are polka dots inherently annoying?

They don’t have to be. Buddy Guy and Randy Rhoads’ guitars were riddled with the pox and we still love those guys. That reminds us: Khn might even have a signature Godin microtonal double-neck in the works.

What are microtones anyway?

Oh, you Westerners! Microtones are the in-between notes you pass through when you’re tuning to standard pitch. Angine de Poitrine are far too arty to be constrained by your fusty 12-semitone system.

So these guys could discover, I dunno, H sharp?

Er, sure... If Cruella de Vil doesn’t flay them for their spotted skin first.

• Correction July 30, 2026: This article was updated to remove a line that incorrectly stated “poitrine” was French for ‘boobs’, as opposed to meaning ‘chest’ in this context.

The Ozzy Osbourne-Randy Rhoads dynamic duo is the stuff of legends. After Ozzy was ejected from Black Sabbath, his quest to launch a solo career brought together British veterans Bob Daisley, Rainbow’s ex-bassist, and former Uriah Heep drummer, Lee Kerslake.

At the same time, a certain Randy Rhoads, from LA's Quiet Riot, was tired of the internal turmoil within his band, and their seemingly never-ending chase for a US record deal. In October ’79, after he heard that the former Sabbath frontman was auditioning guitar players, he somehow found himself in the Ozzy circus.

“Even though I was fucked up on cocaine and booze, I remember when I first met Randy Rhoads,” Osbourne told Guitar World in 2002.

“I was staying at a hotel called Le Parc on West Knoll off Santa Monica Boulevard [in West Hollywood]. I used to live like an animal then. And Dana Strum from Slaughter says to me, ‘I’ve got this fucking amazing guitar player for you.’

“And I go, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ’Cause at the time, everybody was a fucking Hendrix clone. So it was one in the morning, and I was fucking smashed. Off the wall. And this little guy comes in. He looked like a fucking doll. But even in my stupor, I realized he was great as soon as he started playing the guitar.”

Osbourne fondly recalled working with Rhoads on Goodbye to Romance – the 1980 ballad influenced by the chord progressions of Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

As this song demonstrates, Rhoads drew heavily on his rigorous classical training, favoring European classical modes over pentatonic scales while placing a premium on virtuosity.

“I was a drunken, drugged-out, fucked-up slob,” Ozzy continued. “But Randy was patient with me.”

“Randy said, ‘Maybe if you tried it in this key…’ He worked with me. He had the patience because he was a guitar teacher. And he gave me a lot of confidence. He wouldn’t intimidate me. Because, believe it or not, I’m quite easily intimidated.”

As for the rest of the album, Ozzy confirmed that “it was a writing team,” with Rhoads crafting the riffs, Bob Daisley writing the lyrics, and the Prince of Darkness coming up with vocal melodies. Through their collaboration, the triumvirate created a timeless record that marked a move away from Sabbath’s heavy metal sound.

Another nod to classical music comes by way of Dee, included in the Blizzard album tracklist – an homage to Rhoads’ mother.

“Randy absolutely adored his mother,” Ozzy said. “And one day Randy came to me and said, ‘Do you mind if I do this classical guitar piece for my mum?’ And I said, ‘Fuck, what yer askin’ me for? Go ahead.’”

The band’s hard work paid off, with singles Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley hitting both the US and UK charts. Most importantly, it solidified Ozzy as a bona fide solo act who could stand on his own – with a little help from Rhoads.

Glam rock and Hollywood go hand in hand. Named after the celebrity drinking club founded by Alice Cooper in the ’70s, the Hollywood Vampires are as extravagant as supergroups get.

Not only does it include bona fide rock legends Cooper, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, and Cooper/Crossbone Skully bassist Tommy Henriksen, but movie star Johnny Depp is a core member of the lineup. Even his bandmates get starstruck from time to time.

“People are shocked that we are so good, and I can see why. It’s sorta glam, and you’ve got the movie star in there,” Cooper tells Classic Rock.

“Johnny has always wanted to be in a band, and now, finally, he’s in one,” adds Perry. He’s, of course, referring to Depp’s highly documented road to becoming a rockstar.

From picking up the guitar at 12 to dropping out of high school to pursue music, moving to LA with his then-band, and chasing a record deal, Depp’s goal was always to become a serious working musician – before he fell into acting.

“After the second or third song people get over the shock of seeing Johnny Depp up there with a guitar. And it’s legit. The band really plays. And you know what? He’s a great player.”

Cooper recalls that he had never met the actor until filming Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s Gothic fantasy film in which the veteran rock star made a cameo.

“I was telling Johnny about the drinking club with John Lennon, Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson,” he continues.

“During the shooting, I played the 100 Club on Oxford Street and invited Johnny along. He got up with us and nailed every song. I said it would be fun to be a bar band again and play all the songs of my dead drunk friends.”

Perry was the last one to join. “I was staying at Johnny’s house working on a solo record,” he says. The Aerosmith guitarist was immediately recruited.

“We have so much fun playing together. I always think of the Vampires as the best unknown garage band in the world.”

“And certainly the most expensive one,” quips Cooper.

The supergroup would go on to debut at the iconic Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, over two nights in September 2015. Fast forward to 2026, and the band is still going strong, with a UK and European tour kicking off on August 12 at London’s O2 Arena.

Asked about the challenge of juggling everyone's packed schedules, Perry hints at the balancing act: “I can tell you that some people in his [Depp’s] camp are not happy he’s taking a couple of months out to play music.

“But when it’s time for Johnny to play guitar, he knows it’s time.”

George Orwell’s novel 1984 envisioned a dystopian future where totalitarian governments ruled the world, and the average person’s attempts to enjoy even the slightest personal pleasure were patrolled and punished by the Thought Police in service of Big Brother.

However, when mankind finally reached that symbolic year, the prevailing atmosphere was more of a hedonistic non-stop party than a period of peril. We have the power of the mighty Van Halen to thank for much of that.

Considered by many – including Eddie Van Halen himself – as the band’s masterpiece, 1984 was one of Van Halen’s best-selling albums and one of the best-selling rock albums of the entire ’80s.

It has earned RIAA Diamond certification for surpassing 10 million units sold – a feat the band only matched with their 1978 debut album, with the two perfectly bookending the beginning and end of Van Halen’s classic era with David Lee Roth fronting the band.

Clocking in at a lean 33 minutes and 22 seconds, 1984 was, as the saying goes, all killer and no filler. Even the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, can’t make that boast (does anyone even remember Baby Be Mine and The Lady in My Life?). 1984 produced an impressive string of four hit singles, with Jump delivering Van Halen’s only Number 1 charting hit single in the band’s entire career.

Panama and I’ll Wait both peaked at Number 13, and Hot for Teacher came in at a not-too-shabby Number 56. Even the album’s “deep” tracks – Top Jimmy, Drop Dead Legs, Girl Gone Bad and House of Pain – were scorchers too hot for the Top 40, but found a welcoming home on more adventurous FM station playlists.

The only outlier is the album’s title track, but Ed’s solo synth performance perfectly set the mood as a brief overture that boldly introduced Van Halen’s brave new world.

Future Control

With 40 years of hindsight, it’s tempting to look back and conclude that the phenomenal popularity of 1984 was primarily due to it being the perfect album released at the perfect time.

However, its success also benefited significantly from several years of extremely hard work leading up to its release, along with a series of high-profile events that brought Van Halen prominently into the public’s awareness.

During the early ’80s, Van Halen had become one of the world’s biggest touring acts. The band sold out every single one of its 83 shows in the United States and Canada on its 1982 Hide Your Sheep tour, and in early 1983 they made their first ever appearances in South America during a month-long leg that introduced the band to thousands of rabid fans.

A few months later, Van Halen staked a claim as the biggest band in the world when they headlined “Heavy Metal Day” on May 29, 1983, at the US Festival, performing in front of an estimated audience of 375,000 – Van Halen’s largest audience ever. Their fee for the US Festival gig was $1.5 million, setting a new world record at the time.

Van Halen was also experiencing a significant upward trajectory in record sales. 1984’s predecessor, Diver Down, was a commercial success thanks in large part to the hit status of the 1982 single (Oh) Pretty Woman, which peaked at Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

The only previous time that Van Halen cracked the Top 20 was when Dance the Night Away reached Number 15, and that was all the way back in 1979. From their debut effort onward, each album that Van Halen released charted higher than its predecessor, with Diver Down peaking at Number 3 compared to Fair Warning’s top position at Number 5.

Van Halen’s tour, album and single statistics were notable, but what truly catapulted the band into the public limelight was Ed’s increasing celebrity status, even though the guitarist never sought the spotlight and was never comfortable with being called a rock star.

His marriage to popular television actress Valerie Bertinelli led to appearances on mainstream prime time shows like Entertainment Tonight, making the Van Halen name a household word. Ed’s charming, down-to-earth demeanor won over many new fans who would have been shocked by the raucous atmosphere at a typical Van Halen concert, let alone the band’s backstage antics.

But perhaps the biggest turning point that made Ed a bona fide celebrity was his guest appearance on Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, on Beat It. Jackson wanted to record a rock song, and he knew that getting the world’s most popular guitarist to play a solo would introduce and endear the singer to an entirely new audience.

What Ed didn’t realize at the time was that his performance on Thriller would similarly cause Jackson’s fans to notice Van Halen. Beat It went on to top the charts worldwide, and those 33 seconds of shredding guitar bliss became an immortal symbol of the most enduring cultural crossover of pop, R&B and rock.

Eddie didn’t want his name to appear on Thriller’s credits, mainly to keep the session a secret from his bandmates, but there was no mistaking who performed that solo.

Despite his request to remain incognito, record company and musician’s union agreements led to his name appearing four times in the liner notes, and his wife Valerie and engineer Donn Landee, who had recorded every Van Halen to date, also were thanked for good measure.

It didn’t matter anyways as David Lee Roth immediately knew it was Ed the first time he heard Beat It blaring from a car stereo in a 7-Eleven parking lot.

Brave New World

Edward Van Halen’s creative inspiration increasingly grew during the early ’80s as he broadened his horizons into new musical styles and techniques and explored instruments beyond the guitar.

While he was initially pleased with Van Halen’s fifth album, Diver Down, he wasn’t happy with the rapid-fire approach to the sessions, which were completed in a mad rush over a period of 12 days.

On the band’s previous album, Fair Warning, Ed had finally become comfortable with spending considerably more time recording and crafting multiple guitar tracks in the studio while also experimenting with a broader palette of guitar tones. He felt that the slam-bang live performance blueprint used on Diver Down was a regression to the band’s first three albums, and the outcome left him creatively unsatisfied.

“I was always butting heads with (producer) Ted Templeman about what makes a good record,” Van Halen said in 2014. “Diver Down was a turning point for me because half of it was cover tunes. When we made Fair Warning I spent a lot more time with [engineer] Donn Landee working on my sound. I became much more involved in the recording process.

“To me, Fair Warning was more true to what I am and what I believe Van Halen is. We’re a hard rock band, and we were an album band. I like odd things. I was not a pop guy, even though I have a good sense of how to write a pop song. When we started work on 1984 I wanted to ram it up Ted’s poop chute and show him that we could make a great record without any cover tunes and do it our way.”

In order to be able to do things his way, Ed took dominant control of the creative reins by building a professional multitrack studio at home in 1982. Initially, the plan was to build a studio for recording demos, but as work progressed the guitarist realized that, with Landee working by his side, he could record Van Halen’s next album there.

“I did not set out to build a full-blown studio,” Ed admitted. “I just wanted a better place to put my music together so I could show it to the guys. I never imagined that it would turn into what it did until we started building it. Slowly it turned into a lot more than I originally envisioned.

“Everybody else was even more surprised than I was, especially Ted. They thought I was just building a little demo room. Then Donn said, ‘No man! We’re going to make records up here!’ Donn and I had grown really close and had a common vision. Everybody was afraid that Donn and I were taking control. Well… yes! That’s exactly what we did, and the results proved that we weren’t idiots.”

Ed’s new home studio, named “5150” after the California law code for taking a mentally disordered person into custody when that person is considered a danger to others, was completed by the end of 1982.

In a recent interview with Greg Renoff for Tape Op magazine, Landee recalls that the first recording session took place on January 2, 1983, with Ed on synthesizer and his brother Alex Van Halen on drums.

Although Ed said in his 2014 Guitar World interview that he didn’t want to record cover tunes, ironically the very first song ever recorded at 5150 was a cover of Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour.

It’s very likely that this was a calculated move on Ed’s part to appease David Lee Roth and Templeman, perhaps hoping to convince them that the studio was indeed up to the task after they worked there and heard the results. The fact that the song was never released and is still locked up in 5150’s vaults suggests that Ed may have never actually wanted to record it in the first place.

However, Ed boldly revealed his hand with his next move. Over the previous few years, the guitarist had worked on a synth-dominated song that would later be named Jump after Roth wrote the lyrics, and with the studio up and running he recorded an instrumental demo of the tune, performed on an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer with accompaniment from Al on drums and Michael Anthony on bass.

“When I first played Jump for the guys nobody wanted to have anything to do with it,” Ed said. “Dave said that I was a guitar hero and I shouldn’t be playing keyboards. But when Ted heard the demo and said it was a stone-cold hit, everyone started to like it more. Ted only cared about Jump. He really didn’t care much about the rest of the record and just wanted that one hit.”

The band worked diligently recording new material for most of 1983, with the exception of the month of May, which they spent preparing for their appearance at the US Festival. Ed particularly reveled in having “unchained” freedom to experiment whenever and for as long as he pleased.

This included some explorations he wouldn’t have tried at a regular studio, like when he backed up his 1970 Lamborghini Miura S near 5150’s doors and miked its mighty roar. Initially intended for use during the chorus of Jump, the Lamborghini’s forceful growl eventually found its immortal home on the bridge of Panama.

Necessary tools for the party

In addition to equipping 5150 with a solid selection of classic studio gear that included a Universal Audio console purchased from United Western Studios, 3M M56 16-track tape machine and various items of high-end outboard gear such as Eventide Harmonizers, Teletronix LA-2A and UREI 1176 limiters, Lexicon Prime Time digital delay and EMT140ST plate reverb, Ed also added a wide variety of new instruments to his creative arsenal.

Ed had become enamored with the Oberheim OB-Xa polyphonic synthesizer and its updated version the OB-8, and they played a major role in three of the album’s songs.

Keyboards had actually prominently appeared on all three of Van Halen’s previous albums – a Wurlitzer electric piano on And the Cradle Will Rock… (Women and Children First), an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer on Saturday Afternoon in the Park and One Foot Out the Door (Fair Warning) and a Mini Moog on Dancing in the Street (Diver Down) – but they were distorted and usually employed as ersatz guitars. With 1984, Jump and I’ll Wait, there was no mistaking that Ed was playing synths.

However, Ed was still a guitarist at heart and to his core, and he made many new additions to his guitar collection. The most notable newcomer was a rare vintage 1958 Gibson Flying V that Ed bought from Dan Martin of Missouri’s St. Charles Guitar Exchange – the first of many vintage guitars Ed would buy from the dealer over the years.

The V was Van Halen’s primary guitar on the album, used to record Hot For Teacher, Girl Gone Bad, the main riff of Drop Dead Legs and, as recently discovered, quite possibly for Jump [researcher Allan Garber has uncovered a behind-the-bridge pick scrape in the isolated guitar track, corresponding sonically with the V’s tailpiece configuration].

The guitarist had also acquired a few of Steve Ripley’s stereo guitars, featuring hexaphonic pickups (essentially each string had its own individual pickup) and panning controls for each string.

Ed put the Ripley to good use on Top Jimmy, using an open D7 tuning (DADACD, low to high) and playing harmonics that bounced across the stereo soundscape. This is probably the song called Ripley on a Warner Bros. memo that Ted Templeman wrote on August 23, 1983.

Ed later recycled the title for another song he wrote for The Wild Life soundtrack since it also used the Ripley guitar. That song later became Blood and Fire on Van Halen’s 2012 A Different Kind of Truth album.

Photos taken at 5150 during this period show a Veilette-Citron Shark baritone guitar, but apparently any songs where he might have used it didn’t make the final cut on the album. That Warner Bros. memo lists a song called Baritone Slide – very likely an unreleased or unfinished track featuring this instrument.

Ed had given conflicting reports over the years about the use of his original Frankenstein guitar or his Kramer 5150 to record the album. He had officially publicly retired the Frankenstein starting with the tour in support of 1984, but it’s plausible that he used it for one last hurrah.

However, Ed also had a habit of immediately putting new guitars to use once they orbited into his universe. As the 5150 became his favorite main guitar on albums recorded for the remainder of the ’80s, he may have played it on 1984. But one confirmed constant throughout all of Van Halen’s first six albums was the use of his 1968 Marshall Super Lead 100-watt head with its voltage reduced via a Variac.

“I had my old faithful Marshall head and bare wooden 4x12 cabinet facing off into a corner,” he recalled. “Al was in the other corner, and we set up some baffles to have isolation between my guitar and the drums. Because the space was so limited, Alex had to use a Simmons kit except for the snare.”

Ed employed effects much more sparingly than he had on previous Van Halen albums. Most notably, he used a pair of Eventide H910 or H949 Harmonizers that were slightly detuned and individually panned left and right to provide a stereo spread and subtle chorus effect on many guitar tracks.

Panama made good use of rhythmic delay, and the studio’s EMT plate reverb was employed tastefully on that song as well as Girl Gone Bad and House of Pain. However Ed’s usual MXR flanger and phaser pedals are absent.

Ministry of Truth

The finished product exceeded all expectations and then some. 1984 was a document of a band at its prime, where years of relentless touring had made their sound tight and their improvisational communication almost psychic.

Ed’s songwriting talents had expanded and grown, with his knack for pop hooks balanced by ambitious excursions inspired by progressive rock and fusion jazz.

Perhaps the most surprising element of 1984 is the fact that the first note of guitar is heard after more than two minutes have passed. This was partly the result of Templeman’s late comment that he wished the album had a song called 1984.

Landee realized that he had about 45 minutes of Ed improvising solo on the Oberheim that could be edited down to an instrumental intro, and voila! He had his wish. The 1984 synth instrumental made the perfect dramatic statement and lead in to Jump.

Jump was pure pop perfection that fit right in with the synth-crazy mid-’80s, but Ed’s dynamic guitar solo was the secret weapon behind its success, giving Van Halen a competitive crossover advantage with a hard rock audience that would never be caught dead listening to groups like the Human League, Depeche Mode or Soft Cell.

Panama may be the ultimate classic Van Halen tune, with Roth’s raunchy “fast car and faster girl” lyrics perfectly capturing the So Cal party vibe that made the band so irresistible from day one. It’s also one of two songs on 1984 that were inspired by AC/DC, which was not a bad move considering how Back in Black had already become the best-selling hard rock album of all-time.

The infectious, bouncy energy of Top Jimmy made it a strong contender for a fifth single or at least a hell of a B-side. However, it was probably held back by the difficulty of switching from open D7 tuning to standard for the solo’s delirious whammy bar workout, which prevented Van Halen from ever performing the song live.

Drop Dead Legs similarly should have been a hit, partly thanks to its relentless pile-driving Michael Anthony/Alex Van Halen rhythm section groove.

“That was inspired by Black in Black,” Ed admitted. “I was grooving to that beat, although Drop Dead Legs is slower. Whatever I listen to somehow is filtered through me and comes out differently. It’s almost a jazz version of Back in Black – I put a lot more notes in there.” It was never played live until the final 2015 tour.

Jump and its supporting music video may have made Van Halen seem harmless and cuddly, but Hot for Teacher was the opposite, exposing the band as the bad boy party animals they really were.

Alex Van Halen’s galloping Simmons drum intro sounds like a nitro-fueled dragster revving up before he switches to a Billy Cobham-meets-Buddy Rich swing that pushes Ed’s hot-rodded tapping into overdrive.

Roth’s schoolboy-in-heat lyrics are given extra punch and verve by Anthony’s high-pitched harmonies, while Ed keeps things loose and raunchy with ZZ Top-inspired bluesy finger-plucked riffs.

I’ll Wait was the album’s other synth-driven hit, with the yin of Ed’s sophisticated keyboard chords and a chorus with smooth yacht-rock lyrics penned by the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald counterbalanced by the yang of Roth’s semi-goofball rants about “heartbreak in overdrive” and “such good photography!”

The guitar solo similarly provides a contrast between Ed’s melodic phrasing and fusion-esque flourishes with explosive vibrato bar noise.

When the album’s final sequence was being prepared in late 1983, no-one had any inkling that the band’s classic era with David Lee Roth would soon come to a close, yet the final two songs on 1984 delivered about as perfect a send-off as any fan could ask for.

Girl Gone Bad is simply epic and the closest thing to a progressive rock song that the band ever recorded. Ed delivered a tour-de-force performance with dynamic shifts in emotion from elegiac tapped harmonics to dark, drama-filled riffs. This was Van Halen’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin’s Achilles Last Stand with the added bonus of a truly blazing Van Halen solo heavily inspired by Allan Holdsworth.

Dating back to Van Halen’s early club days (demos were recorded in 1976 with Gene Simmons and in early 1977 for Warner Bros.), House of Pain was the only song not completely written fresh for the album, although the only element that remained from the early versions was the song’s main riff.

“I guess nobody really liked it the way that it originally was,” Ed said. “The intro and verses are completely different, and the fast part in the middle for the solo and the groove at the end are almost like entirely new songs.”

House of Pain showed that Van Halen had grown and evolved considerably over the preceding seven to eight years without losing any of their hunger, intensity and power.

Gin-scented tears

All good things must come to an end. They were too good to last. Always leave the people wanting more. These may be overused clichés, but it’s difficult to think of better ways to describe the aftermath of the 1984 album, its ambitious supporting tour and the eventual breakup of Van Halen’s classic David Lee Roth lineup.

Did success spoil Van Halen? Yes, and no. Eddie Van Halen’s ever-growing musical ambitions and desire to pursue different sonic paths collided with David Lee Roth’s incessant adoration of the spotlight and aspirations to pursue a career as a movie star.

With two diametrically opposed forces in conflict, the tensions inevitably sucked all the air out of the room until no one could comfortably breathe. Trying to outdo 1984’s success would have been an unfathomable challenge for any band, so it sadly made sense for Van Halen to end that chapter at the top of their game.

Van Halen fans both new and old maybe didn’t get exactly what they wanted, but instead they got what they needed. The Van Halen brothers and Anthony joined forces with Sammy Hagar and his growing legion of fans to take the band in a different and arguably more progressive direction it couldn’t have tried with Roth.

5150 didn’t reach the staggering commercial sales heights of 1984, but it became Van Halen’s third all-time best-selling album with 6x Platinum certification. It was also the first Van Halen album to finally reach the #1 spot on the charts. [1984 likely also would have achieved that feat, but it had the disadvantage of going head-to-head with the best-selling album of all-time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was in the beginning of several extended periods where it completely dominated the charts for several months.]

Meanwhile, Roth put together one of rock’s greatest supergroups, recruiting the extraordinary talents of guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan and drummer Gregg Bissonette to keep the rip-roaring party going full blast.

Roth’s first full-length album Eat ‘Em and Smile was nowhere near as commercially successful as the albums he recorded with Van Halen, but with Vai and Sheehan’s instrumental pyrotechnics and Roth’s inimitable character it kept the white-hot flame burning very brightly for classic Van Halen fans.

The split resulted in a Dave vs. Sammy argument as incessant as it is meaningless. For some fans, the change truly was the best of both worlds, but it didn’t last. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Van Halen had won the victory over itself.

Kiss have announced that their upcoming Kiss Kruise: Land-locked in Vegas, taking place between November 13 and 15 at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, will feature a historic Ace Frehley All-Star Tribute.

The one-night-only celebration will see Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Tommy Thayer, and Eric Singer come together with special guests to honor the memory and legacy of the late Frehley, their founding lead guitarist.

These guitarists and artists – whose names have not been announced yet – were personally handpicked by the band and will be supported by the Ace Frehley Band. Furthermore, each current member of Kiss has personally selected and will individually perform a song from the Spaceman’s vast repertoire as part of the tribute.

“Another year of the Kiss Kruise experience and the best one yet is on the way. Everything we’ve learned at sea and on land over the past years is going into making this the ultimate weekend with us,” comments Stanley.

“We can’t wait to be back together with the Kiss Army and Navy from around the world for more killer performances, incredible artists, events, and exclusive experiences you won’t find anywhere else.”

In addition to the Ace Frehley All-Star Tribute, fans can expect two unmasked Kiss sets – one acoustic and one electric – and ’80s nostalgia galore, with performances from the likes of Bruce Kulick, Slaughter, and Night Ranger.

Frehley had previously joined his former bandmates during the Kiss Kruises, most notably in 2018, when he performed four songs with the band – 2000 Man, New York Groove, Nothin' to Lose, and Rock and Roll All Nite, with Kulick also on guitar.

Following his death on October 16 last year, Kiss also paid tribute to their late guitarist during an “unmasked” show at last year’s Kiss Kruise. It also happened to be their first live performance in nearly two years, following the final show of their 2023 farewell tour.

For more information about this year’s Kiss Kruise, head to its official website.

Mastodon will release their next album, Marrow Deep, on August 28, and have dropped a new single, Snakes for Dinner, which features Josh Homme.

Marrow Deep is the band’s ninth album, and first without former guitarist Brent Hinds, who left the group in March last year, and was killed in a motorcycle accident last August.

It will also be the first with new guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira, who has been added as an official member of the band. It makes for a new-look Mastodon.

The band has already released Your Ghost Again, which saw them face Hinds’ loss head-on, and last week released a short film that celebrated his life and legacy.

Homme, who previously featured on Colony of Birchmen, returns to the fore with some harmonized vocals, while Bill Kelliher and Johnston's riffs propel the track forward. Some fierce fretboard runs nod to the band’s Leviathan and Blood Mountain eras.

Marrow Deep is inspired by the Three Fates of Greek mythology. Life, loss, and destiny are three interconnected themes throughout, as the band prepares to release yet another album dominated by grieving.

Emperor of Sand found Bill Kelliher writing by his dying mother’s bedside, while its follow-up, Hushed & Grim, was underscored by the death of their manager, Nick John.

The album was recorded at West End Sound in Atlanta with Patrik Berger, who has worked with Lana Del Rey, and Kurt Ballou (High On Fire, Converge). The album is said to feature “a staggering roster of guests”, which will be revealed in due course.

Having wrapped summer dates with Loathe, Mastodon will embark on the Poisonous Weapons Tour, which starts in Orlando on September 16 and concludes on October 24 at Sick New World Dallas.

Marrow Deep is available to pre-order now.

This feature was originally published in the June 2016 issue of Guitar World.

By the fall of 1985, David Lee Roth had seemingly put the breakup of Van Halen in his rearview mirror.

Hoping to capitalize on his MTV-driven video stardom, Diamond Dave now set his sights on the big screen.

Along with his creative partner and manager Pete Angelus and writer Jerry Perzigian, Roth wrote a screenplay entitled Crazy from the Heat. Angelus and Roth then sold it to CBS Theatrical Films, secured a 10 million dollar budget, and camped out on the CBS movie lot in Burbank to do pre-production for the musical comedy. Angelus recalls, “I was going to direct it and Dave was going to star in it.” If all went according to plan, Crazy would hit theaters in the summer of 1986.

But in early November, just days before they would begin shooting, the phone rang in their studio offices. It was Roth’s attorneys calling to deliver some terrible news. CBS, facing serious financial woes, had shuttered its film division, leaving Angelus and Roth without a means to make their movie.

Angelus says, “When we put the phone down, I remember we were both kind of speechless for a moment. We’d spent the better part of a year preparing for that film. We’d done the casting. We’d done the location scouting. We’d been working with the set designers and the wardrobe people. We were fully into it and fully prepared.” At that moment, it appeared all their work had been for naught.

This setback seemed tailor-made to trigger a crisis of confidence for Roth. He’d trumpeted his movie plans in the press throughout the summer past, previewing a bikini-packed plot that would see rock star Roth squaring off against his greedy manager while on an island vacation.

He’d minimize the challenges inherent in filmmaking, declaring on the David Brenner Live show that both starring in and making a film was the “next logical step” after his success with video. “It’s the same thing… except our movies have been three minutes and twenty-eight seconds. So now it’s time to just bump it up to 90 minutes.” But now it seemed unlikely that his movie would ever arrive in theaters.

Meanwhile, Roth’s former bandmates in Van Halen had seemingly suffered no ill effects from his summer 1985 departure. They had a new blond-maned, leather-lunged lead singer, Sammy Hagar, and had begun work on the follow-up to their multi-platinum smash, 1984.

Roth also had to live with the fact that Eddie Van Halen, who’d told Roth in the spring of 1985 that he had no interest in scoring Crazy because the guitarist expected the film would “probably stink,” seemed to have made the right decision after Roth’s deal disappeared.

But as the months that followed would demonstrate, Roth was nothing if not resilient.

In the summer of 1986, the rock superstar would re-emerge with a hot new band comprised of virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai, bassist extraordinaire Billy Sheehan, and monster drummer Gregg Bissonette. He’d release a million-selling new album, Eat ’Em and Smile, and two new MTV-hit videos, Yankee Rose and Goin’ Crazy, all built upon the creative foundation he’d laid down for the aborted Crazy from the Heat. He’d follow that up with a barnstorming six-month tour of North America.

Despite stepping out from Van Halen, the massively popular act that had been the vehicle for his stardom, and the unexpected loss of his hard-won movie deal, Roth proved that he could weather adversity and still come out on top, smiling from ear to ear.

In early June 1985, nimble-fingered bassist Billy Sheehan, then a member of the heavy metal band Talas, got an unexpected phone call at his Buffalo home. “It’s from David Lee Roth’s office. He wants me to be in his movie. Can I come out to L.A. right away and talk to him?” Sheehan immediately said yes, passing the word to Roth’s representative that the timing for this meeting was ideal, since the upcoming Talas and Yngwie Malmsteen tour would commence at the Hollywood Palladium on June 7.

Sheehan, who’d gotten to know Roth back in 1980 when Talas had toured with Van Halen, made plans to arrive in L.A. a couple of days early. But prior to leaving home, Sheehan rang up a friend. He says, “I called Ed Van Halen to see if he wanted to come down to the Palladium show. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Van Halen breaking up. Ed said he was busy and couldn’t come, but said, ‘Have a good show!’” Before Sheehan got off the phone, he mentioned that he’d recently received a call from Roth.

“Wait. What! Why’d he call you?”

“Oh, he wants to have a meeting with me at his house.”

“Really? You’re kidding! You’ve got to call me back as soon as you have the meeting, because I think he’s going to pull an Ozzy Osbourne on us.”

In other words, Van Halen’s guitarist suspected that Roth’s next move was to become a solo artist, much like Ozzy had done in 1979 after leaving Black Sabbath.

Sheehan says that he now realized that he’d stumbled onto a minefield of inter-band politics. “I thought, ‘Jeez, now I’m in the middle of something,’ but I went ahead with the meeting with Dave.”

A few days later, Roth detailed his movie plans and laid out his vision for his new group to Sheehan. “We had the talk,” Sheehan recalls, “and decided to start the band. He said, ‘It will be you and me. We’ll find a guitar player and a drummer.’”

Sheehan agreed to join forces with Roth as soon as his two-month tour with Talas ended, but after the singer swore him to secrecy, Sheehan realized he couldn’t return an important call. “So now my head’s about to explode, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I better not call Ed back.’ I felt terrible, because I was friends with Ed.”

As it turned out, Eddie wouldn’t need an update from Sheehan. Around the same time, he and Roth had a climactic meeting of their own at Roth’s place, with the longtime musical partners deciding that it was time for them to go their separate ways.

“When I shook Edward’s hand goodbye,” Roth explained later, “we hugged each other and cried and said, ‘Hey, it’s musical differences and career differences, like all bands.’”

For his part, Roth left that meeting with the impression that their parting was mutual and amicable. But once the star guitarist bitterly denounced Roth for leaving the band to become a movie star in the August 15, 1985, edition of Rolling Stone, an occurrence that Angelus says shocked both him and Roth, the rock world knew that Van Halen had broken up.

Roth shook off this unpleasant episode by searching for a guitar player to pair with Sheehan. After consulting with Ted Templeman, who’d be producing the forthcoming soundtrack album for Crazy from the Heat, Roth offered the gig to Billy Idol axman Steve Stevens. But Stevens told Roth that because of his musical commitments to Idol, he couldn’t work with Diamond Dave sooner than the following summer, a schedule that was unworkable in light of Roth’s movie timetable.

Roth then circled back to Sheehan and Templeman for advice. Sheehan recalls that after Stevens passed, “I mentioned Steve Vai to Dave, and I may have mentioned him to Ted as well.”

Templeman, who’d gotten turned onto Vai’s astounding playing some time earlier, remembers endorsing the former Zappa and current Alcatrazz guitarist for Roth’s new band during an impromptu listening session.

“Dave had a beat-up, noisy cassette of Steve Vai, and we listened together in some garage with the tape player on the fender of a car. I said to Dave, ‘Yes, that’s the guy.’”

Roth then placed a call to the guitarist. Vai said at the time, “I pick up the phone and hear, ‘Hey man, this is David Lee Roth. How ya doin’, Steve? I’m making a movie and I’m looking for some music.’” Vai, who’d just finished working on the soundtrack for the blues-themed movie Crossroads, agreed to get together with Roth and Sheehan once he finished a short summer tour with Alcatrazz.

By August, Vai, along with his drummer Chris Frazier, would appear at the Roth mansion to jam with Sheehan and Roth. Sheehan recalls, “Steve came down to Dave’s basement, and he brought his drummer with him. Chris had worked with Steve on a couple of records.”

Once they plugged in and tuned up, the first signs of the remarkable musical chemistry that made the original Roth band so powerful made themselves manifest, according to Vai. “The moment we started jamming,” he told journalist John Stix, “it sounded great.”

By the end of that day, Vai had the gig, which made perfect sense to Sheehan, and not just because of his remarkable fretwork. “I love Steve Stevens, but Steve Vai had that Zappa-esque, tongue-in-cheek, comedic, entertainment vibe that was really important for the Eat ’Em and Smile band, because we’d be involved in a lot of comedy in our live show.”

Over the next few weeks, Sheehan and Roth, with Frazier on drums, worked up approximately 15 song ideas. In late September, however, Roth abruptly decided to audition other drummers rather than giving Frazier the gig. Sheehan comments, “Chris is an awesome drummer, but for whatever reason, Dave wanted to get somebody else.”

After placing want ads in the local trade papers, Vai and Sheehan set up shop at Hollywood’s S.I.R. Studios. Even though the listings didn’t mention David Lee Roth, word traveled fast in the Hollywood rock community that a coveted spot in Roth’s band was up for grabs. On the morning of the audition, scores of drummers flocked to S.I.R.

One of them was Detroit native Gregg Bissonette. The drummer, who’d gotten an invite call from Vai thanks to a referral from former Kiss guitarist Vinnie Vincent, had a résumé that at first glance seemed ill-suited for a hard rock outfit like the David Lee Roth Band. After graduating with a degree in music from North Texas State, he’d been the drummer for The Merv Griffin Show, soft-rocker Gino Vannelli, and jazz legend Maynard Ferguson. Still, he’d grown up a big rock fan.

Bissonette was thrilled about the opportunity, but when he arrived, his heart sank. “I just remember this huge line, just down the block.”

As he waited, he questioned friends who emerged from the audition room. Bissonette recalls, “I asked Matt Sorum, who later played with the Cult and Guns N’ Roses, and he said, ‘Oh they wanted me to play double bass, but I don’t really play much double bass.’ I did know Hot for Teacher really well, because I was a huge Van Halen fan. So I’m in line, and now I’m getting my feet warmed up, thinking, ‘Here we go – it’s double bass!’”

Soon it was Bissonette’s turn. “So I walk in the room, and it’s Steve and Billy and this funky old drum set. I sat right down and they said, ‘Hey, could you play a solo for us?’” After Bissonette finished, Vai showed him a guitar part that would later be enshrined on Roth’s 1988 album, Skyscraper.

“This piece would end up being Hot Dog and a Shake. Steve wanted me to hit these breaks with him and Billy, and during all that, he would solo. So as Steve was talking I reached into my backpack and took out a Sharpie. I’d brought my own snare, so I started writing out these figures on my snare head. Steve goes, ‘Woah! So you can read and write music? This is amazing!’”

The next day, Bissonette’s phone rang. It was Vai, who told him, “Hey, you’re a great guy and we love the way you play. We’re all going to meet at Dave’s place today, and we’re going to have you play for Dave.”

As Bissonette explained to Modern Drummer, this jam session couldn’t have gone better. “I went in the next day, met Dave, and we played… It was just like magic.” Soon after, he’d audition for Templeman, who, like Roth, came away impressed by Bissonette’s big-band experience and killer chops.

But before Roth told Bissonette he had the gig, he attended to some pressing film-related business.

On October 27, the Fabulous Picasso Brothers, as Angelus and Roth had dubbed their creative partnership, held an old-time cattle call audition at the Hollywood Palace in order to cast new talent for Crazy. With Sheehan, Vai, and Bissonette looking on, Roth marveled at the droves of the wildly attired actors and scantily dressed actresses, telling the Los Angeles Times, “This is a hell of a way to spend a Sunday, isn’t it?”

Bissonette, who like Vai and Sheehan, had never experienced this kind of rock pandemonium, says, “There were just lines of girls in bikinis.”

Bissonette’s week only would get better.

On a night that underscored just how high Diamond Dave’s star had risen in 1985, Roth informed Bissonette that he’d gotten the gig on the same night the singer would be appearing live on national TV. “It was Halloween,” the drummer recalls, “and Dave said, ‘I’m going to be on The Tonight Show tonight!’ Joan Rivers was the guest host, and we all went down to the set. It was like a dream when they told me.”

Bissonette now went to work with the others as they rehearsed and worked up new material. During these sessions, the three sequestered themselves in Roth’s basement while Roth and Angelus worked upstairs on pre-production for Crazy from the Heat. Vai says, “Once we’d all gotten into the basement and started jamming, writing, and playing, it was a very open, free, creative environment.”

Sheehan stresses that much of this creativity flowed from the fact that he and Vai shared many of the same musical influences. He says, “Steve and I were into a lot of the same bands, like early Bowie and Hendrix. When we came up with musical ideas we’d say, ‘That’s kind of a Hendrix-y thing’ or ‘That’s kind of a Bowie-thing.’ The ZZ Top shuffle and the ZZ Top feel were a big part of the influence too.”

Roth, listening through the floor, would regularly join them to review the new material. Sheehan says, “Dave would come downstairs and tell us what he liked, and what he didn’t like. We threw away what he disliked, and then he’d say, ‘Okay, now come up with a chorus.’ We eventually came up with all of these pieces of music.”

Roth also helped inspire Vai and Sheehan’s manic and sophisticated solo parts. As Sheehan explained in Guitar World, when he’d ask Roth, “Hey, Dave, is this bass part too busy?” Roth would shoot back, “No, do it twice as fast and Steve, you double it.” Likewise, Vai told Guitar Player that when he’d ask Roth if he was “overplaying,” Roth would reply, “No, keep going.”

Along with original material, the band considered a number of cover songs for their upcoming release.

Sheehan recalls, “I was in the Kim Mitchell band briefly. He’d sent me a demo with four songs. Kids in Action was one of them, and I just loved it. I played it for Dave and he really dug it. He also dug a Rory Gallagher song I played for him. It was from one of his mindblowing Rockpalast concert performances. I think it was called Secret Agent.”

Roth had plenty of song suggestions too, one of them being Speak of the Devil by the early Seventies Texas power-trio Stray Dog. “He played it for us,” Sheehan says, “and we all said, ‘It’s perfect.’”

At the same time, Roth and Angelus worked to prepare everyone for filming. Vai, who recalls the zany plot included parts for all of the band members, says, “We had a lot of fun preparing for the movie. We got together with [choreographer] Toni Basil and started working out choreography for the songs. It was going to be really great.”

Sheehan says that Roth and Angelus even arranged for a private showing of a cult film that had inspired them as they worked on Crazy. Sheehan continues, “We went to a screening of a 1940s movie called Hellzapoppin’. It’s just a wild, amazing movie, with a bunch of skits and vignettes and craziness. That was one of the templates Dave and Pete were using.”

Sheehan likewise remembers that as filming drew closer, the tunes they wrote soon made their way into the script. “I know songs like Goin’ Crazy were going to be integrated into the movie somehow. I remember reading the dialogue in the movie, and there were a lot of scenes with the band.” These musical scenes included a concert performance of Shy Boy and a nightclub scene that featured Roth crooning his way through Sinatra’s That’s Life.

All of this planning and scheming, however, came to a standstill on that fateful November day when CBS pulled the plug.

Angelus says that after the initial shock dissipated, they began discussing their options, asking each other: Apart from litigation against CBS for breach of contract, what’s our next step? Sheehan recalls telling Roth that day, “‘The hell with it. We’ve got a band. We’ve got songs. Let’s go out and tour!’ Not that he already didn’t think that, and not that he needed any encouragement from me, but I just remember thinking, ‘I’m ready to play.’”

Roth would get clarity about the next moves to make once he, like Sheehan, considered the full breadth of the creative endeavors they all had underway.

“The movie was just one part of a whole program,” he explained to Creem. “Obviously, when the movie fell out, we just continued with the rest of the program.” Angelus observes that what Roth termed “the program” had included “a coordinated release of the film, the [soundtrack] record, and, of course, the tour to accompany it.”

With his film in limbo, Roth and Templeman held pre-production meetings for what would now be a stand-alone rock record rather than a soundtrack album. They decided that the forthcoming Eat ’Em and Smile would include covers and originals, ones that represented a middle ground between the pop flavored, big-band sound of Roth’s Crazy from the Heat EP and the guitar-oriented pop metal showcased on his albums with Van Halen.

As Diamond Dave would later say, even though he’d put together a band capable of playing the most technically sophisticated heavy metal, he didn’t want fans of California Girls wondering “what happened to the brass on this record? Where’s the saxophone? Where’s the shoobee-doobee-doo-bop?”

In late November, just days after the movie was put on hold, the four musicians entered Berkeley’s Fantasy Studios with Templeman and engineer Jeff Hendrickson.

Hendrickson, who’d already worked with Templeman on Hagar’s V.O.A., Aerosmith’s Mirrors, and Roth’s Crazy EP, recalls that the producer had a particular way he liked to begin recording sessions. “Ted and I usually tracked everything in the first couple of days, so the band could just get a feel for things. Sometimes we would keep those as our master takes because they’d turn out so well.”

Templeman believed that this cut-live approach helped musicians avoid the dreaded red light fright and allowed him to determine which songs would ultimately work best on the album.

“We got a lot of keepers that way,” Hendrickson observes, “because when the band members don’t feel like they are on the spot, they play like they do when they’re out on the road, and so you get a lot better feel. But then again, sometimes you’d hear that a certain track would need a lot of work, or even that a track isn’t going to work at all.”

Templeman and Roth then listened back. They’d initially settle on 11 tracks for the album. These included six Vai/Roth compositions and five covers, including the Sheehan-penned headbanger Shy Boy, which dated from his Talas days.

While Roth was well accustomed to Templeman’s ways of working, it took a bit of getting used to for Vai, who had a very different mindset when it came to studio work.

“At times I didn’t know if I liked [Ted’s approach],” he explained to Guitar Player. “But then I realized, boy, it’s really fun. Get in there and do it. We kept about 50 percent of what Dave sang on the basic tracks. I’m used to sitting in the studio and tweaking and playing and punching and tweaking some more and EQ’ing and punching again. With this, it’s get in there and kill the guy with the ball.”

Templeman’s method, as it had done for him and Roth during their Van Halen days, paid dividends at Fantasy. The four musicians produced high-energy, minimal-overdub takes of Roth classics like Tobacco Road, Goin’ Crazy, and even the frenetic Shy Boy.

In the weeks that followed, the band would reconvene in New York to track at the hottest studio in America, the Power Station. Roth, in particular, loved working there because he felt inspired by Manhattan’s energetic street vibe.

“The Power Station is in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, which is more dangerous than New Guinea,” he proclaimed to a reporter. “When you’re there for more than a month recording, you’re bound to soak up a lot of the anxiety from the surrounding streets, and that comes out on the album.”

One track that generated some New York anxiety for Vai was the languid Ladies Nite in Buffalo.

Vai recalled that his original demo “had tons of keyboards and all sorts of guitar overdubs.” But when Templeman had asked the band to first run through Buffalo, Vai gamely collapsed all of his guitar parts into one so they could cut the song live, fully intending to replace this basic track and overdub multiple guitar lines in the coming days.

Templeman, however, had a different take. When he played the track back for everyone, he thought the guitarist had pretty much nailed the song on his first pass. Vai, in turn, thought Templeman had lost his mind. As Vai told Guitar Player, “Of course, being an artist, I hemmed and hawed: ‘I want to do it again.’”

Hendrickson recalls, “Vai kept fighting us because he felt his rough track was terrible. He was so meticulous. But he’d played this basic track that just blew everybody away. We couldn’t believe he wanted to change it.”

Ultimately, Vai says, Templeman and the others got him to see that his guitar part “was beautiful the way it was.”

Despite Templeman’s aversion to overdubbing, a persistent Vai did convince the producer to let him add additional guitar parts to the album. For example, he says, “I remember we were doing Elephant Gun and I said I wanted to double the guitar part. Because the part is all over the place, Ted goes, ‘What do you mean, double it?’

“I can double every single little thing, perfectly.”

After first saying no, Templeman did give the go-ahead. Vai started to double the part, but before he finished, he broke a string. Templeman said, “Well, probably we should just leave it with the one guitar.” Soon after, the producer departed the studio for the day.

Vai immediately went to work. He says, “I finished it. And when Ted heard it the next day, he liked it, so that’s why it made the record.”

Vai also layered some of his patented guitar eccentricity on what would be the album’s first single, Yankee Rose.

As he explained to Guitar Player, “The half-time section in the middle had this nice little arpeggioed chordal thing that was kind of open and bare. So I said, ‘Let me try putting a solo on it. Let me try something weird.’ I hooked up a couple of delays set to some long delay… and they rolled the tape.”

Roth also had some ideas for the guitar parts for Yankee Rose. While Vai overdubbed, Roth got him focused on constructing an outro solo that might be visually arresting for MTV audiences. Roth coached Vai, saying, “Here in the video I want you to do something where you can take the guitar and ram it between your legs.” Vai then came up with the whipsawing whammy bar licks for the song’s conclusion.

Despite Roth’s MTV-driven mindset, the New York sessions also produced a song seemingly more suited for the Thirties than the Eighties.

I’m Easy, a spirited big-band song originally recorded by Australian singer Billy Field, came into Roth’s orbit thanks to Templeman, who thought it fit perfectly with Roth’s “Gigolo” persona. Bissonette recalls that, weeks earlier, when the producer had played it for the band during pre-production, he said, “Gregg, this is going to be right up your alley, because you’re used to kicking five trumpets, five trombones, five saxes.”

At this point, Bissonette got to draw on his musical connections from his Maynard Ferguson days as Templeman worked to recruit session players for the track. He recalls, “Ted said, ‘Hey Gregg, you seem to know everybody. So can you help us put together a killer big band in New York?’ I said, ‘Man, I sure can.’” On the day of the New York session, Ted pulled Bissonette aside to thank him, saying, “Wow, you got all the A-list guys.”

Vai also played a vital role in making the horn parts on I’m Easy sound great. He explained, “I wrote the score and directed the horn section. You should have seen it. I had snakeskin pants on, my hair was flipped out, and I was sitting in this director’s chair with a baton in one hand and a big score in another. Twelve of New York’s best studio blowers were there, and I’m going, ‘Okay, now, can you make this a little more staccato over here?’”

Bissonette says everyone was amazed as they watched the Berklee-trained Vai, nominally a guitarist, do this work for the track. “He just sat down with pen and manuscript paper and wrote out the big band arrangements. The session guys then played along with our track and overdubbed. It was phenomenal.”

As the final overdubbing sessions wrapped up in the spring, Templeman and Roth looked to trim their song list down to 10 songs from the 11 they’d completed.

Ultimately, Kids in Action didn’t make the cut, to the dismay of both songwriter Kim Mitchell and ace session keyboardist Jeff Bova, who’d added synths to the track while the band worked at the Power Station. Bova observes, “I know they were toying with keeping either Kids in Action or Tobacco Road. I remember when the album came out being a bit disappointed because I did a lot of cool keyboard stuff on Kids.” To this day, the track remains unreleased.

With the album in the can, the Fabulous Picasso Brothers turned to scripting and filming promo videos for two of Eat ’Em and Smile’s forthcoming singles: Yankee Rose and Goin’ Crazy! Determined to make good use of their months of effort on Crazy, Roth and Angelus scripted two mini-movies as preludes to the band performance footage that would be the centerpieces of the videos.

Along with casting many of the performers who’d been slated to appear in the movie, they also drew upon their months of work on wardrobes and makeup. As Sheehan explains, “Most of the clothes we had in the Eat ’Em and Smile videos, and the fat suit that Dave wore in Goin’ Crazy, those were all meant for the movie, initially.”

Bissonette adds, “Goin’ Crazy and Yankee Rose were a big part of the proposed look of that movie. Even though Crazy didn’t happen, the videos sure did, and they were amazing. To this day, nobody makes videos like that.”

In June, Roth unleashed an all-out promotional campaign. He talked about his new band, album, and upcoming tour to the press with enthusiasm, telling a reporter, “If you love Van Halen, if you like rock and rolling, you’re going to be blown away. We’ve got all kinds of new tricks to show you.”

He was much less sanguine, however, when it came to the current incarnation of his former band. Responding to the salvos fired at him over the prior months by Hagar and company, Roth stated, “Whenever you have a big ugly divorce, there’s hurt feelings. On the other hand, Sammy’s only angry because he knows I’m better than he is.”

On July 7, Eat ’Em and Smile finally dropped. Driven by the success of Yankee Rose at radio and on MTV, the album would peak at Number 4 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart. In the weeks that followed, Warner Bros. Records would also release the Van Halen–esque Goin’ Crazy, and the Sinatra standard That’s Life as singles, pushing sales of the LP over one million copies by the fall.

The Eat ’Em and Smile tour, which began in August, likewise did big business, from the first date onward. Vai, who’d never played arenas before, says that in fact the tour’s sold-out opening night provided him with one of the most vivid memories of his career.

“It was just amazing to be on that tour, but being on the stage that first night was a shock. You realize you’re now a rock star performer. There are 20,000 people out there, and you’ve got to deliver. At one point, Dave did this thing where he just stops and puts the mic out to the crowd. The screaming went on for like 10 minutes. It was so loud that Billy and I were looking at each other because we were scared. It was louder than our amps. I just thought, ‘What’s happened? Because this is wild.’”

Every night the four musicians, along with tour keyboardist Brett Tuggle, would blast through a setlist packed with new Roth favorites and classic Van Halen tunes, interspersed by flashy solo segments by Bissonette, Vai, and Sheehan. But as Sheehan explained to Guitar World, the solo performances of the two guitar players became more engaging as the tour progressed, thanks to the input of Angelus and Roth.

“We needed to come up with something to entertain everyone. At the start of the tour, I did my solo the same way I always did it, and Steve did his own solo, too. Although the musicians in the crowd may have loved it, I’m sure a lot of the other people were yawning… So Pete Angelus suggested that we do a guitar duel – and it’s a riot.”

Sheehan says with a smile that Roth’s advice was to “make it like a contest, like a tractor pull. That was the phrase he used. So Steve would come out there and start playing, I’d come up behind him and stop him and push him out of the way and play a while, then he’d push me out of the way. Then we’d push each other, and chase each other around until we’d get to the end when we’d have this big grand finale.”

Over the course of the next six months, Sheehan, Vai, and the rest of the band would play over 100 dates, entertaining arena audiences all across the continent.

Today, members of the group are both nostalgic about and proud of their accomplishments during these years. Sheehan, who’d leave the group in early 1988, says, “My experience with Eat ’Em and Smile and Dave was just amazing and incredible. On tour, places were packed, there were gorgeous girls, and everybody was at the top of their game.”

Vai adds, “Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect, and all the elements came together. You could put on the biggest stage show, and you could wear anything you wanted, and boy did we ever. But what was most exciting to me is the rawness, intensity, and attitude of the music.”

Bissonette remarks that since “the David Lee Roth band was my first big rock gig,” these years will always have a special place in his heart. “Dave,” the drummer says, gave “me my platinum musical passport, good over the world. It’s been the coolest.”

Today, both fans and band members are hopeful for a reunion of the classic Eat ’Em lineup. This is especially true after the Hollywood fire marshal blocked Roth, Vai, Sheehan, Bissonette, and Tuggle from performing at an oversold Lucky Strike Live on November 25, 2015, in what would have been their first performance together in decades.

Vai says ruefully, “The Lucky Strike thing was almost like rock star interruptus. People say the fire marshal stopped us minutes before we went on, but it was seconds. I was standing behind the curtain with a hot guitar in my hands and I was ready to start. I did everything I could to get us to play, but we just couldn’t. Afterward I thought we’ve got to do something together, because there’s just too much cool energy here.”

While everyone’s schedules are packed, there’s a shared desire among the principals that they should all reconvene at some point soon, assuming Roth will light the fuse again.

Sheehan observes, “It’s all up to Dave. This is his game. If he wants to do it, I’m so into it. Ideally, it would be great to record a song or two and then go out and do a bunch of shows: Europe, USA, maybe South America, Japan. It would be great, to get everybody together again, to do it all again, just for the hell of it.”

Vai says, “I think that would be really nice to honor the legacy of the Eat ’Em and Smile album and band. There doesn’t have to be any big commitment. It would just be about getting out there and bringing it home, the way we used to do it, while we still have the juice, which we do.”

Last November, Roth appeared to leave the door open to a reunion, suggesting to fans on his way out of Lucky Strike Live that one day the group might have to book the Hollywood Palladium and give it another go.

Nearly one year after Brent Hinds’ tragic death, Mastodon members are opening up about their complicated 25-year-relationship with the former lead guitarist – and the brain injury that nearly spelled the end of the band.

In an infamous accident that happened right after the 2007 MTV Video Awards, Hinds was involved in an altercation that resulted in a significant head injury that, for years, was rumored to have involved System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian – one that multiple sources have since dispelled.

“He, I guess, was kind of running around this casino and ended up just pissing off the wrong person,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor.

“In his very drunken states, he would be a habitual line stepper. He crossed the line with somebody, from what I was told. This person said, ‘Don't do that to me,’ and he did it and got punched, and I think he fell over and hit his head, and I think that was what did the most damage.

“It was really, really, really scary, and we thought we might lose him then.”

“Yeah, we thought the band was over,” adds co-guitarist Bill Kelliher. “He's crossed the line; he's gone too far. He was really fucked up for a long time.” Hinds’ fellow band members even thought that the brain damage was going to be “irreversible” and “substantial.”

However, it also seemed like his recovery served as an intense period of inspiration for Hinds, who, according to Kelliher, was “playing acoustic guitar a lot” and had written an impressive number of songs.

“[We were thinking], man, maybe this is a good thing. Then, Crack the Skye happened, and it was like, wow – he came [up] with all these songs and riffs and ideas, and it was like this rebirth.”

“Every riff and song and composition that he brought in at that time, I was in absolute awe of it,” continues bassist Troy Sanders.

“It was next-level Brent; it was peak Brent, and if someone like Brent was really excited about something, it was on. All three of us, we [were] glued to him. That led to this magical, spiritual-like moment that became Crack the Skye.”

Released in 2009, Mastodon’s fourth studio album became one of their highest-selling albums to date – and marked a significant sonic shift for the band that many consider their masterwork.

“It was a very exciting time, looking back on it,” reflects Kelliher.

“It was a big jump for our band to go from Blood Mountain to Crack the Skye. I remember all of us saying we want to make a classic album that you can pull off the shelf in 20 years from now, 30 years from now, and go, ‘This record stands the test of time.’”

Mastodon recently released Your Ghost Again, their first song without Hinds. The track introduces new guitarist Nick Johnston, and serves as a taster of the band's album, slated for release later this year.

The group's The Poisonous Weapons Tour kicks off on September 16 in Orlando, Florida.

1980 saw the release of more classic metal albums than perhaps any other year in music. From AC/DC’s Back in Black to Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, Judas Priest’s British Steel to Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, the new decade was ushered in with landmark albums from some of the genre’s biggest names. Add to this list the self-titled debut from five lads from East London who called themselves Iron Maiden.

Though initially lumped in with the then-burgeoning New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement (which included bands like Motörhead, Def Leppard, Saxon and Angel Witch, all of whom also released albums that year), Maiden over the course of the decade rose to become one of the biggest and most successful acts in heavy metal, a position they still hold today, 30 years later. Along the way, the band’s sound influenced generations of newer metal acts, from legends like Metallica to contemporary headliners like Avenged Sevenfold.

In 1980, however, Maiden were little more than a struggling young outfit themselves. Formed by bassist and songwriter Steve Harris five years earlier, the band burned through a slew of members before lead guitarist Dave Murray and singer Paul Di’Anno came onboard in the late ’70s, solidifying Maiden’s core early lineup.

It was then that the band’s sound – metal riffs and rhythms played with punky speed and aggression, and tempered by twin-guitar harmonies and progressive twists and turns – came into focus.

“I think if anyone wants to understand Maiden’s early thing, in particular the harmony guitars, all they have to do is listen to [British rock band] Wishbone Ash’s Argus album,” Harris says.

“Thin Lizzy too, but not as much. And then we wanted to have a bit of a prog thing thrown in as well, because I was really into bands like Genesis and Jethro Tull. So you combine all that with the heavy riffs and the speed, and you’ve got it.”

By 1978, Iron Maiden had built a solid following around London as a result of their energetic shows (which already included an appearance from an embryonic version of their fiendish mascot, Eddie).

A four-song demo recorded at the end of that year, and later released as The Soundhouse Tapes, attracted a manager, Rod Smallwood, who subsequently landed the band a deal with EMI.

And so, in early 1980, Maiden – which in addition to Harris, Di’Anno and Murray also included co-guitarist Dennis Stratton and drummer Clive Burr – entered London’s Kingsway Studios to record their debut album.

“We had done The Soundhouse Tapes, but this was a whole new thing,” Murray recalls. “Just the whole experience. You had the amps and the cabinets in there and your headphones on, and it was like, This is it: the big time.”

Adds Harris, “We did the whole thing in 13 days, which was fine. We knew the stuff backwards and forwards because we had been doing it onstage for three or four years before that. So there was no problem there.”

According to the bassist, however, there was a problem with their producer, Will Malone.

“We were all young and naïve and we didn’t know about producers and what they do– or don’t do, really,” he says. “And [Malone] was just a waste of time. He didn’t do anything. He just sat there with his feet up reading Country Life. So in the end we just bypassed him and dealt straight with the engineer.”

Harris reports that his main instrument for the sessions was a ’70s-era Fender Precision Bass, which he still uses to this day.

“Back then it was matte black, but I’ve changed the color over the years,” he says. “And I was likely playing through a Hiwatt amp. I was just trying to get as much top end and presence out of my sound as possible.”

In fact, throughout much of the album, Harris’ propulsive and melodic bass lines are pushed far up front in the mix, a sonic trait that has since become one of the band’s calling cards. On Iron Maiden, however, this was somewhat unintentional.

“The truth is that the guitars were mixed too low,” Harris says. “I think the lead sounds are fine, but the rhythms weren’t beefy enough. They sound a bit weedy, really. And I suppose because of that my bass popped out even more than it should have. And from a selfish point of view, yeah, that’s nice, but if you’re considering the overall band sound, it’s not so good.”

For his part, Murray reports that he used his trusty black 1957-era Fender Strat on the recording. The guitar, which had previously belonged to Free’s Paul Kossoff, became Murray’s primary studio and live instrument for much of the ’80s, and it is also the basis for his current Signature Series Stratocaster. “

As for amps,” he says, “I was going into Marshall 100 watts. And in between I had an MXR Phase 90, an MXR Distortion+ and a wah pedal.”

Murray recalls that co-guitarist Stratton primarily played a Les Paul. “So there was a good balance between us, with the Fender and the Gibson,” he says. “And as far as our parts, we’d sit down and work out harmony bits and stuff.

“Dennis was quite good. I used to go see him play in bands back in East London and I thought he was stand-out. So it was nice that we got to play together for a bit. And I think there are some great moments on the album.”

Indeed, Iron Maiden is an incredibly strong effort from start to finish. The album features some of the band’s most beloved and enduring songs, including the rampaging opener, Prowler, the hooky Running Free, the epic Phantom of the Opera and the pummeling, twin-guitar-laced Iron Maiden.

As for his personal favorite, Harris doesn’t hesitate: “Phantom of the Opera,” he says. “I felt that was probably the first song I’d written that was a bit more proggy. It had a lot of time changes in it and different movements and moods. It was indicative of where I wanted to take things with the band.

“And looking back on it now, I can see it was really a pivotal point in the direction of our music. I’ve always felt you shouldn’t have to do verse/chorus and that’s it; you should be able to do whatever the hell you want. And that song really proved it.

“But the album is actually rather strong all around. In a way you could argue that it’s a best-of of the first four years of the band. So it’s all gonna stand up, track-wise.”

Preceded by the release of the Running Free single, Iron Maiden, replete with cover art that presented a somewhat punked-up rendering of Eddie, was issued in the U.K. on April 14, 1980. (The U.S. version, which hit shelves in August of that year, tacked on the previously single-only release Sanctuary.)

In what was a surprise to all involved, the album shot straight into the British charts at Number Four. “We thought we’d do reasonably well, because we had a hardcore following up and down the U.K. from playing the clubs for years,” Murray says. “But the fact that it debuted so high was unbelievable for a new band.”

In support of the album, Iron Maiden spent the rest of the year on the road in the U.K., and even opened for Kiss on a string of dates throughout England. By the time the band regrouped at the end of 1980 to begin work on its second album, Killers, Stratton had been sacked.

Harris says, “Everyone always uses the term ‘musical differences’ when you’re changing a band member. But with Dennis that was the case. He was a good player, but his influences and the things that he liked and the way he saw things was totally different to where we were heading. We were hoping it wouldn’t be, but it was.”

In his place Maiden recruited Adrian Smith, a childhood friend of Murray’s who had been fronting his own band, Urchin (an outfit which, at one time, included Murray in its ranks). One album later, the band would trade Di’Anno for Bruce “The Air-Raid Siren” Dickinson and begin its ascent to the top of the metal heap in earnest.

And yet, many of the songs from Iron Maiden’s quickly recorded debut continue to be fan favorites, as well as staples of the band’s live show. “Iron Maiden is always in there,” Murray says. “And on this most recent tour we closed every night with Running Free. So it shows you these songs have really stood the test of time.”

As for why he believes this to be the case? “The album just captured something,” Murray says.

“Listening to it now, 30 years later, it’s still quite interesting. It’s very raw sounding, and for the most part quite uptempo – the songs are almost frantically fast paced. But that was our frame of mind at the time. We were very excitable back then.” He laughs. “Though I suppose we still are.”

• Originally published in Guitar World, December 2010

In June 1980, Led Zeppelin embarked on a 14-date tour of Europe. Beginning on June 17, in Dortmund, Germany, the tour would also wrap up in Germany, with a July 7 show at Eissporthalle an der Jafféstraße in Berlin.

Tragically, that Berlin show would prove to be the band's last ever performance with drummer John Bonham, who passed away on September 25, 1980, after a day of heavy drinking. He was just 32 years old.

Though Bonham's health was already in decline throughout the summer trek (he collapsed three songs into the band's June 27, 1980 show in Nuremberg, Germany, forcing the band to cancel the rest of the show), you can't hear any evidence of it in the soundboard recording – posted below – of the band's July 7 gig.

Throughout the 14-song set – which included a number of tunes (In the Evening, Hot Dog and All My Love) from the band's 1979 In Through the Out Door album, alongside classics like Black Dog, Kashmir, Whole Lotta Love, and Stairway to Heaven – Bonham was in typically thunderous form. Like the rest of the band, Bonham was all too eager to show audiences that – even after a decade-plus at rock's pinnacle – the mighty Zepp still had plenty of gas in the tank.

Though their commercial standing had never been higher at the dawn of the ‘80s, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Bonham were jittery about the band's place in rock at the time.

The band's August 4 and 11, 1979 mega-shows in Knebworth, England – designed to be a triumphant live return to their home country after an absence of four years – were polarizing. Many fans felt that the gaudy production of the concerts – which were attended by hundreds of thousands of people in total – distracted from the music itself, which was more than a little ragged at times.

Of course, by this time, punk and especially new wave had gone from buzzy sub-genres to the kings of the hill, rendering the long-form, blues-based music of Zeppelin and their late-‘60s/early ‘70s contemporaries largely out of fashion.

With that in mind, the quartet viewed their summer 1980 gigs as a reset. No big light show, no lasers, no white smoke – not even any lengthy stand-alone solos or flamboyant outfits.

Even the venues on the tour were significantly downsized, the small Western and Central European arenas the band tore through on it being a far cry from the masses at Knebworth and the enormous arena and stadium American crowds the band had entertained on their last tour, all the way back in 1977.

The success of the 1980 European tour gave the band a jolt of momentum, and persuaded them to book a North American tour for the fall of 1980, with a similarly scaled-down approach.

It was during rehearsals for that tour – which was scheduled to begin on October 17 – that Bonham passed away.

We'll obviously never quite know how Led Zeppelin would have evolved from 1980 forward had Bonham lived, but the soundboard recording from their last show with him certainly suggests that they had plenty of musical fire left.

Last year, the AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown went viral, with the “band” racking up millions of streams in mere months.

Their three albums, Floating On Echoes, Dust And Silence, and Paper Sun Rebellion – complete with AI-generated album covers – sounded so uncannily real that they left music fans scratching their heads and questioning whether they were fully AI-generated.

According to an investigation by The Guardian, it’s still unclear what music The Velvet Sundown’s albums were trained on.

Furthermore, when an alleged spokesperson for the band, operating under the pseudonym Andrew Frelon, spoke to Rolling Stone, claiming that the music was created using the AI tool Suno, a Velvet Sundown X account clarified that, “We understand the intrigue our project inspires – and we’re not here to dispel mystery.

“But we are here to correct the record….The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources – not fabricated accounts or synthetic media.”

Now, a real, human band is attempting to fight back against AI-generated music by forming a Velvet Sundown tribute band – aptly named Bootleg Velvet Sundown.

“I formed a tribute band of the most famous AI group of all, Velvet Sundown,” says Simon Balch, the progenitor of this project.

“Instead of giving any money to the Velvet Sundown, I’m giving all the profits to real musicians, whose work AI [has] stolen in the first place. This is humans versus machines, and today, the humans are rising.”

So what’s Balch’s master plan? “First up, we're re-recording some of their tracks in studios [featuring “real musicians” Leo Walrus, Enzo Allen, Milo Garland and Luke McQueen],” he details. “I want to be the first tribute band to get more streams than the original band.

“I've not heard a whisper from The Velvet Sundown themselves, but if you are listening, here's a message to you: I'm not giving you a penny,” he insists.

“All the profits that we make will be going to real musicians. Am I a musical Robin Hood?... But in this case, my arrows are tribute bands, and my target, AI music.”

And while we’re all waiting to see what Balch and co.'s next step is, you can follow the “real” tribute band’s exploits on Bootleg Velvet Sundown’s official Instagram.

In more recent news, influential players, including Sophie Burrell and Sophie Lloyd, have spoken about how their work is being manipulated by bad actors who are using AI to defraud guitar fans.

American punk band Alkaline Trio has been forced to cancel their UK tour at the last minute as guitarist/vocalist Matt Skiba fights a medical condition that has left him unable to walk.

Former blink-182 guitarist Skiba says his condition has left him unable to “walk, talk, play, or sing” properly, forcing the cancellation of five UK shows and a headline appearance at the 2000 Trees festival.

The band has not revealed the specifics of Skiba’s condition, but the tour has been canceled after the band arrived in the UK. They have now returned to the States for treatment.

“We are immensely sorry, but we must cancel our dates in England… due to medical issues Matt has been suffering from that have worsened,” the band’s statement reads.

“He’s gonna be okay, but needs to be treated stateside as soon as possible. We will be back healthier and stronger.”

The reluctant but necessary cancellation, announced on the day of their first show in Birmingham, has been met with an outpouring of love from their fans. That prompted Skiba to address the issue directly via a video posted to Instagram.

“Thank you for all the love and support,” he says. “It means the world to me. You guys deserve a better show than I can throw right now. I've got numbness in my feet, numbness in my hands, and as you can tell, I’m losing my voice. I can’t really talk, walk, play, or sing.

“I’m gonna go home and get looked at. I love all of you so much, and we’ll be back ASAP to make these shows up to you.”

Shows in Birmingham, London, Newcastle, Leeds, and Manchester are affected and are expected to be rearranged in due course. Beloved UK alt-rockers, Don Broco, will take their place at the Gloucestershire, UK, gathering, which was meant to conclude their tour.

Guitar World wishes Skiba a speedy recovery.

While Eddie Van Halen was Van Halen's linchpin and chief songwriter, the Sammy Hagar era saw the Red Rocker prove himself as a songwriter in his own right.

Coming into the band, Hagar had something of an upper hand: the Van Halen brothers were already fans of the material he had recorded with Montrose in the mid-’70s, while his solo career was already on the rise.

Therefore, it was no surprise that Hagar brought his own ideas to the fore – even if Alex Van Halen wasn’t so keen at times. Eagles Fly, which ended up on Hagar’s 1987 solo record, I Never Said Goodbye, was one such track.

“When I sing Eagles Fly, it's about being born,” Hagar tells Total Rock when asked to pick the song he enjoys singing the most from his vast repertoire.

“And once again, I had a vision. It wasn't a dream. I was wide awake, and I had a feeling in a special place. I was in a special place.”

He continues, “I showed him [Alex Van Halen] that song, and Eddie's going, ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ And Alex goes, ‘Yeah, yeah. It sounds like John Denver; it's cool.’”

Hagar explains that, at the time, Alex “wasn’t about me writing songs for Van Halen,” preferring that Eddie handle the musical composition while assigning Hagar “the lyrics and the vocals.”

However, the drummer soon did a 180 when he heard it as a fully-fledged track on Hagar’s ninth solo album – and his first solo effort since becoming Van Halen’s front man. Eddie not only stepped in as the album’s co-producer – alongside Hagar himself and David Thoener – but also laid down the low end and a quintessentially Eddie guitar solo.

“When it came out, and we finished my solo record, Alex heard it, and he goes, ‘Hey, why the fuck didn't we put that on a Van Halen record!’” Hagar says.

“I went, ‘Well, Al, if you don't remember, I can remember you said it sounded like John Denver,’ because I was playing it on acoustic guitar!”

In more recent Van Halen-related news, Joe Satriani recently recalled being approached by David Lee Roth for a Van Halen cover band – when Eddie was still alive.

For their most recent respective releases, The Rolling Stones and Beatles bassist Paul McCartney shared a producer – i.e., producer to the stars, Andrew Watt. Not only that, though, Macca is reportedly the one laying down the low end on an upcoming Stones track, titled Covered in You, from their upcoming album (out July 10), Foreign Tongues.

“You could be a bit blasé and go, ‘Yeah, OK, so what?’ But for me, it wasn’t – it went the other way,” McCartney told NME.

“It was like, ‘Wow, there’s Mick [Jagger]! Ooh, there’s Keith [Richards]! Woah, there’s Ronnie [Wood]!’ It was exciting. It was really good. A great thing is all I had to do was play bass and not make mistakes, so it was good.”

As for Jagger, the Stones' iconic frontman revealed that the new tune required more of a “funk bass part.”

“Obviously, I’ve known Paul for ages. He’s not a stranger, but he’s never played bass with us before,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s a different thing, you know?

“I said to Andy [Watt, producer], ‘Is he gonna be into this? Because it’s a punk tune and I want overdriven bass. It’s gonna be simple, no mucking about.’ And Paul did exactly what was needed in, like, 10 minutes.”

Now, McCartney did also play bass on Bite My Head Off, from the Stones' 2023 album, Hackney Diamonds (some Foreign Tongues tracks date back to those sessions), but these instances didn't mark the first time the two collaborated.

The Macca-Lennon powerhouse wrote the Stones’ second single, I Wanna Be Your Man, back in 1963, while the late Brian Jones also contributed to the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Jagger, meanwhile, contributed backing vocals to Baby, You’re a Rich Man.

Another instance where the two bands collided was when members of the Beatles and the Stones did a legendary one-off performance together as part of the TV spectacular, the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, where Lennon and Richards played the Beatles’ Yer Blues in the temporary supergroup the Dirty Mac – alongside Eric Clapton and Mitch Mitchell.

In more recent news, Paul McCartney recently challenged fans to work out the mystery guitar chord that inspired his new album – and, here at Guitar World, we figured it out.

Whether they’re being praised as torch-carrying titans or derided as classic-rock cosplayers, Canadian duo Crown Lands are often cited as the modern-day Rush.

But Kevin Comeau – their guitarist, bassist, keyboardist and now primary producer-engineer – isn’t concerned about the endless comparisons, which continue with the release of their third LP, the conceptual sci-fi epic Apocalypse.

But they’re expecting that chatter; after all, the reference point was consciously baked into the band’s DNA back in 2015, when he met his long-lost brother in prog, drummer-singer Cody Bowles.

“When we started the band, we joked to ourselves, ‘What if the White Stripes covered Rush?’” Comeau tells Guitar World. “We just kept leaning more into the Rush than the White Stripes as time went on. I still think, sonically, Rush’s Moving Pictures is as perfect a record as you can get. As a producer, I’m always chasing the clarity of something like Power Windows.”

In fact, connecting these virtuosic Canadian bands feels like the ultimate accolade. “We’re not worried about people comparing us to Rush,” he says. “I don’t think you can get more complimentary than a comparison to Rush. I love seeing the discourse online – ‘I don’t like them. They sound too much like Rush.’ Or ‘I don’t like them. They don’t sound enough like them.’

“I’ve always loved Rush’s [philosophy of thinking] – ‘We want to be the world’s smallest symphony orchestra.’ Trying to do that with two people is like trying to one-up our heroes – or one-down our heroes.”

Apocalypse is their most grandiose adventure into this symphonic realm, building on the proggy template – and interstellar good-and-evil storyline – they established with 2023’s Fearless.

The album balances spacey balladry (Through the Looking Glass) with heavy, punchy rockers (Blackstar), all building to the 19-minute climax of the title track, which also pulls inspiration from the Allman Brothers Band and the bonkers 1974 Yes piece The Gates of Delirium.

Their long-form centerpiece, with its textural shifts and cinematic key/tempo changes, offers plenty of space for Comeau on guitar – from crunching power chords to jittery arpeggios to bluesy leads that sound beamed in from The Wall.

That fluidity and constant surprise keeps the piece engaging, much like Echoes or Supper’s Ready. “When you have a record about going through a black hole and fighting your arch villain through time and space,” he says, “the music ends up writing itself. You end up pushing all the crazy polyrhythms even further.”

But the monster runtime wasn’t the ultimate goal, even if Comeau gets a nerdy thrill out of seeing the track tick past the 19-minute mark.

“You’re chasing length a lot of the time in prog,” Comeau says. “I’m always chasing the 20-minute opus. When we sent the final mix to Ted Jensen, it was 19 minutes and 1 second. Mastering engineers will often lop off any dead space, and the master came back at 18:58.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had to send a revision – ‘It sounds great, but can you restore the four seconds of silence at the very end so that it stays past 19 minutes?’ It’s so stupid, but that’s progressive rock, baby!”

Even if all of these tunes had been short, Comeau would’ve had his hands full on Apocalypse; along with playing guitar and producing the bulk of the material, he also continued to handle all of the bass, synths and bass pedals. To put it in Rush terms: part Alex Lifeson, part Geddy Lee.

To pull off that crazy feat on stage as a two-piece, especially with their songs growing more complex, Crown Lands would either need to scale back dramatically or get super creative.

They’ve chosen the latter route, with Comeau often playing a double-neck guitar/bass custom-built by luthier Brock Stoyko. (There was also a major assist from Lee’s bass tech, John “Skully” McIntosh, who helped him wire it. And to land on a suitably “ergonomic” design, Comeau went to Lee’s home and took measurements of the Rush legend’s own double-necks.)

Comeau’s admiration clearly extends well beyond “casual fan.” In 2021, Crown Lands joined Lifeson on stage during the annual Andy Kim Christmas Show in Toronto, joining for an all-star Led Zeppelin medley.

“In rehearsals, I’m playing every Rush riff I know, like The Necromancer, and Alex is just laughing,” Comeau says.

“He was so cool. He said, ‘I don’t want to play my double-neck for this song – it’s too long and heavy.’ I said, ‘I’ll do it!’ He lent me his white Gibson EDS-1275 for Stairway, so I’m doing the 12-string part while he’s doing the solo. I’m like, ‘Holy shit, this is life-affirming.’”

Later, Comeau helped Lifeson catalog and tune his guitars for a charity auction, and he wound up being Lee’s keyboard tech ahead of 2022 Taylor Hawkins tribute show.

Prog is in Crown Lands’ blood, and their Rush worship is pure. “When I found Cody, it was like, ‘It’s perfect!’ We’re so deep into this niche; I don’t know where we’d be if we didn’t have each other to fill in [our] musical holes. I see that in Rush.

“They’re such singular musicians that, if they were in any other context, it wouldn’t work. The way they were able to last for 40 years, how they’ve stayed friends when the meat grinder of the industry destroys friendships, is so special.”

• Apocalypse is out now via Inside Out.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

It was backstage in Australia, of all places, that D12 got serious. “We was on Snoop Dogg’s I Wanna Thank Me tour in 2023,” remembers the Michigan hip-hop collective’s co-founder Kuniva.

“We was kicking it in his dressing room and he said, ‘Yo, did y’all hear that crowd out there when y’all came out? Man, y’all need to keep this going. The world needs D12. If they askin’ for it, you gotta give it to them. And they're screamin’ for it. Don’t stop now!’”

From the fateful day in 1996 when late Detroit rapper Proof assembled Motor City’s greatest street-poets under the banner of D12 – followed by their explosion on 2001’s Devil’s Night, with a peak-fame Eminem at the helm – the band’s legend was cast in stone.

But they only released one more full album – 2004’s D12 World – before Proof’s fatal shooting in 2006 and Eminem’s hiatus slowed their studio activity to a trickle. On 2018’s Stepping Stone, the ice-blond rapper went so far as to declare: “The moment that Proof died, so did the group. D12 is over.”

You could have fooled us. With Kuniva first to join today’s Zoom call, the faces start popping up like mushrooms. Here’s Swifty McVay: the friendly, thoughtful OG who’s mostly happy just to sit in. There’s Jeff and Jake Bass: the father-and-son studio team who produced and played guitar and bass on long-awaited third album D12 Forever.

The banter begins. “You're looking like Hugh Hefner over there, Jeff, with the robe and little fucking pipe and shit!” Kuniva tells his freshly showered collaborator as he exhales a flume of smoke.

“Minus the women,” drawls Jeff in response.

That industrial-strength chemistry shouldn’t surprise. Long-standing D12 fans know that Bass Snr’s association goes right back to the mid ’90s. One fateful morning at 3am, the story goes, Eminem and the D12 crew turned up to his studio on 8 Mile Road (the address should sound familiar) and put their sound in the hands of Jeff and his brother Mark, collectively billed as the Bass Brothers.

From that moment, right up until Eminem’s 2010 album Recovery, Jeff was a studio fixture (and fixer), sporadically producing and co-writing, while playing guitar, bass and keys for both groups.

“I remember when I first met them,” he reflects. “They were young and nobody knew anything about anything. But after Em blew up, he brought his boys in, and we continued working with them. It’s been a lot of years.”

The pick of the back catalog is probably Jeff’s brittle, pulsing, angry-hornet guitar intro to Eminem’s inescapable 2002 8 Mile soundtrack hit, Lose Yourself. “I never talked about that song with any of the guitar magazines,” he says, “because everybody thought it was just a sample.

“Y’know, Tone Lōc, back in the day, had used Eddie Van Halen’s Jamie’s Cryin’ on Wild Thing – but that was a sample. When I began to play the guitar parts live on these records, it gave hip-hop a different sound. D12 came along right after that, and they were using guitars in their work, too. And that’s the Detroit sound. You mix a little bit of everything together.”

Jake Bass was not yet a teenager when those classic albums went down –but already the kid had his antennae up. “I was 11 when they did Devil’s Night, and I was nerding out, studying what my dad did on that first record in real time,” he reflects. “I watched which guitars he chose, which Line 6 POD settings he used on the session for These Drugs. That kidney bean was the best!”

“You never know what your child's watching you do,” chuckles his old man. “Thank God that Jake picked up on all that kind of shit, as opposed to the drugs and the alcohol that I used to be fucking around with. He chose the right substance!”

For D12 Forever, Bass Jr took charge not just of production at Michigan’s FBT Studios, but the bulk of the album’s guitar and bass parts. “I went with that old-school Run-DMC/Beastie Boys vibe, but I did it all real and original and live on my PRS 40th anniversary McCarty SC56,” he tells us of the fiery rhythm work on recent single Tear It Down.

“I just wanted something with constant motion, because it was so high-energy. Something they could just go crazy on as far as rapping. If you break that guitar part down, you’ll see there’s seven or eight harmonies going on to give it that fullness.”

Another guitar standout is Tenderism, Jake’s snakecharmer lick coiling around a guesting Method Man’s bullet-belt vocals. “I wanted a hybrid of what would happen if D12 was mixed with Van Halen, mixed with the Ohio Players. And for the bass parts I used the exact same P-Bass my dad used on Devil's Night.”

“I bother Jake at all times of the day and night!” laughs Kuniva. “I call him up with ideas and he’s like, ‘Okay, I'll do it soon as I put the kids to bed!’ He’s always on deck for whatever you need. That's just a dope thing when you have someone who’s that in tune with your sound.

“Shit that I can't explain with words, Jake knows what I mean. He can play damn-near anything. Y’know, he comes in with a flute sometimes, or a mandolin.”

Those jawbreaker tracks couldn’t be further from the vibe of What If?, where Jeff steps up with a sunbeam outro solo beneath Melanie Rutherford’s vocal. “This album is Jake's baby,” nods the veteran.

“But I was honored they asked me to play the guitar on that track. I used a 335. I was always a Strat guy back in the ’90s, on Eminem and D12’s early stuff. Now I tend to gravitate more towards a fuller-bodied guitar.”

“What Jeff played on What If? just pulls at my soul,” reflects Kuniva. “I get choked up when I hear it.”

But the most poignant cut of all is saved for last – with Forever airing unheard posthumous vocals from the band’s fallen leader. “All the things that Proof happened to say on that recording were just so appropriate in such a beautiful, eerie way,” says Jake.

“It’s like, ‘It’s not over; it's not the end – it’s not gonna stop.’ I wanted the guitar to reflect that. There’s no chorus in that song; it’s just a constant motion.”

Along with Snoop’s pep talk, remembers Kuniva, Forever threw down the gauntlet, convincing D12 to raise their game, push this third studio album over the line and commit to their future.

“That song is so powerful, y’know? And I speak for all of us – when we heard the Proof verse, it was like, ‘Man, there’s something crazy in the air here that we have to match.’ It just means a lot to still connect with someone who was such a force in in your life.

“We came into this game not caring what other people thought about us. We’ve defied so many odds, survived so much, endured so much. So we’re really making a statement on that song – ‘Yo, no matter what happens, D12 is always gonna be here. We’re never going away. We’re gonna live forever!’”

• D12 Forever is out now.

When Slipknot released their self-titled debut on Roadrunner Records, precisely on June 29, 1999, singer Corey Taylor, percussionists Shawn “Clown” Crahan and Chris Fehn, drummer Joey Jordison, bassist Paul Gray, turntablist Sid Wilson, sampler/keyboardist Craig Jones, guitarist Mick Thomson, and original guitarist Josh Brainard altered not only the sound but also the very image of heavy metal as it entered the new millennium.

And while breakthrough single Wait and Bleed was pivotal in introducing Slipknot to the masses and opening the floodgates to nu metal, as Thomson said in a 2014 Guitar World interview, it wasn’t quite the musical trajectory the band wanted to follow for the rest of their career.

“For a long time, I resisted anything that had melodic choruses. I was very anti anything like that,” he said.

“I mean, I thought it was great how Wait and Bleed ended up on the radio. It’s a great song. But when we were having success with that on our first record and the label says, ‘Yeah, we need five more Wait and Bleeds, I was like, ‘Go fuck yourself!’”

Thomson went on to clarify why he had that immediate reaction – despite the single’s international success. “‘You want five songs that can be radio singles? Well, we’re really not that band. You sell our records, and we’ll make them, okay?’”

The guitarist even pointed out that the radio edit was significantly different than the album version – the label’s attempt at making Wait and Bleed more “commercial” and palatable for the mainstream.

“The more melodic sing-songy part of the chorus, which is on the radio edit, was different on the album,” he asserted.

“It was a background vocal, made lower, that Corey barked over. But then the fuckin’ label gets a hold of it, and they want a radio single, so they ended up having it remixed so the brutal vocal drops and the melodic vocal is now on top. But that’s not what you get when you see us live.”

As Thomson very aptly described the band’s core ethos – especially at the time – in a 2024 interview, “People didn’t fucking know what to think or do with us early on. But our thing always was, ‘Fuck your labels – just listen to the shit. Do you like it?’ You don’t have to categorize it and this and that. Just ask yourself, ‘Is it cool?’”

Elsewhere in the 25th anniversary retrospective, Thomson revealed why all of his solos were cut from the final record, and gave Guitar World a peek into the chaotic and intense recording sessions that made Slipknot such an iconic album.

Gear damaged during flights is an unfortunate reality for touring bands. However, gear damaged during pre-flight checks, well, that’s another story altogether.

According to the Boston-based blues band GA-20 – comprised of guitarist Matthew Stubbs, lead vocalist/guitarist Cody Nilsen, and drummer Josh Kiggans – one of their high-end guitar cases got damaged thanks to a particularly enthusiastic TSA agent at San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport in California.

“Big shout out to this fine TSA @tsaamerica agent at San Luis Obispo airport who insisted that taking everything out of my @monocreators guitar case and swabbing it wasn’t enough,” the band writes on social media, accompanied by an actual video of the ordeal.

“He then spent 20 minutes ripping out all of the padding/stuffing from the case and of course he was unable to put it back together. To top it off we all have TSA Pre check & this agent refused to run the case through xray until he ripped all the padding out of the case. The gig bag is trash now. ($380 case) Good news they gave me a business card and said if I have a complaint feel free to email.”

Safe to say, a multitude of musicians pitched in with similar experiences. Guthrie Trapp noted, “This is f*cking insanity!! Worst ‘case’ of this I’ve ever seen,” while singer/songwriter Bones Owens commented, “I had two guitars destroyed by baggage handlers on a flight earlier this year.. different situation, with a similar disrespect for musicians’ livelihood while traveling by air.

“There seems to be a lack of common sense, a lack of consequences, and mostly a lack of care. Sorry to see this happen to your gear, but thanks for sharing it here. It’s the best thing we can do to spread awareness and hopefully illicit [sic] some change.”

As for TSA itself, its policy states that, “Musical instruments must undergo screening when transported as carry-on or in checked baggage. Musical instruments transported as carry-on require a physical inspection at the security checkpoint. Inform the TSA officer if your instrument requires special care and handling. You may pack brass instruments in your checked or carry-on baggage.”

In more recent news, a clip posted to TikTok – with more than four million views – has sparked outrage after footage of a baggage handler carelessly throwing guitars on the ground went viral.

Angine de Poitrine have been on everyone’s lips since that polka-dot and microtone-heavy live session dropped on Seattleite radio station KEXP’s official YouTube channel. Since then, the Canadian duo’s lives have changed completely, as they’ve brought their unique brand of “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist” orchestral sounds to, well, the masses.

One of the most distinctive calling cards is guitarist Khn’s microtonal double-neck guitar/bass, built by luthier Raphaël Le Breton. Eastwood even created its own version in the form of the limited-edition Microtonal Doubleneck 4/6 Electric Guitar/Bass, which allegedly came together after Le Breton approached the company about creating a tribute to the original model.

Now, it seems like Khn himself is wielding a new version of the polka-dotted double-neck that led to Angine de Poitrine’s fame. During some of their latest shows, eagle-eyed fans noticed another version – this time by renowned (Canadian through-and-through) brand Godin Guitars.

According to reports by Guitar Bomb, the band’s viral success and subsequent world tours meant that Khn needed a solid backup. However, Le Breton was tied up with other work, so Quebec’s own Godin Guitars came through and built a custom double-neck for the guitarist.

Specs for the new-and-improved backup build include custom fretwork, with the upper neck featuring a standard 6-string electric guitar configuration, and a lower neck that functions as your typical 4-string bass.

Both fretboards are subsequently fretted to split the traditional 12-tone octave into 24 quarter tones, making them microtonal-ready.

Another key feature of this new build is its weight. Godin crafted this model to maximize ergonomics, chambering, and weight distribution – reducing the load on Khn.

Other tweaks include relocating the two dedicated output jacks to the bottom edge, with the guitar and bass necks split into separate signals routed to a Roland Jazz Chorus JC-120 and a Hartke HA2500 amp stack, respectively.

The band’s polka-dot aesthetic is further enhanced with matching black-and-white graphics. Finally, the original build’s “69” dice knobs have been swapped for custom “3” dice controls.

Judging by the response on Reddit, it’s safe to say that Angine de Poitrine fans and math-rock aficionados have gone crazy over this guitar – all begging the question: could the band be teasing an official signature model?

In more recent news, GuitarWorld.com’s editor-in-chief recently witnessed the dynamic duo live – and hailed Khn as the greatest polka-dot guitar hero since Randy Rhoads and Buddy Guy.

You never really know when you’re going to get your break. Dead Pioneers’ early single, Bad Indian, created a momentum they hadn’t anticipated. Things only accelerated when they mailed a copy of their music to Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament.

“I was 38 when we went on tour with them,” says guitarist Josh Rivera. “A long time ago I’d kind of given up on the dream of something like that happening. Pearl Jam asking us to come out and play was kind of the ultimate confirmation that maybe we were doing something right.”

That validation can be heard all over their forthcoming album Wagon Burner – while the Dead Pioneers’ politically charged identity remains intact, the record dramatically expands their sonic palette, pushing their sound and identity far beyond straightforward hardcore punk into something heavier, more atmospheric, and surprisingly dynamic.

“We got heavier and dirtier on this record than we ever have before,” Rivera says. “But we also cleaned it up and explored a lot more atmosphere.”

That evolution largely came from the chemistry of the band as a whole; their collaborative approach became central to the record’s identity.

Unlike many punk bands where guitar roles stay rigidly separated, guitarists Rivera and Abe Brennan approached Wagon Burner as a communal creative process where riffs constantly evolved in the room.

“This is the most collaborative band I’ve ever played in,” Brennan says. “Someone brings in a riff, and pretty soon everybody’s adding to it. Suddenly, you’ve got this Frankenstein song – but it works. I’ve always believed punk should evolve. If you’re just recreating the same thing over and over again, eventually it stops feeling honest.”

That attitude pushed the band to explore unfamiliar territory. Songs like Nazi Teeth lean into massive octane-drenched riffs and near-metallic aggression, while tracks like Never Alone incorporate cleaner layers, chorus textures, and the sort of melodic space that was only hinted at in prior releases.

“We explored using all sorts of pedals on this record,” Rivera says. “I probably brought 20 or 30 into the studio. There were always a dozen different things at my feet.”

Sessions took place at The Blasting Room studio in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he had the luxury of recording close to home instead of flying into sessions with limited gear. That freedom allowed him to constantly swap gear and textures. “On the last record I was mostly using whatever the studio had. This time, if I wanted a different guitar or a weird pedal for one section, I could just go grab it.”

They relied extensively on the EarthQuaker Devices Gary Overdrive, while also using the Chase Bliss Generation Loss Mk. II for degraded chorus textures and warped ambience. “Anytime I needed something a little warbly or weird, I was reaching for the Generation Loss,” Rivera says.

He leaned heavily on his Ryan “Fluff” Bruce signature Music Man StingRay alongside several PRS guitars. Meanwhile, Brennan tracked much of the record using his Gibson SG. “I love the way the SG reacts,” he says. “Anything weird or chaotic just feels right on that guitar.”

Brennan’s pedal choices played a huge role in the record’s heavier moments as well. He frequently used the EHX POG throughout the hard-charging Nazi Teeth, helping create some of the thickest guitar tones the band have recorded thus far.

“Once Abe kicked on the POG for some of those single-note riffs, everything just got massive,” Rivera says. “It stopped sounding like a normal punk guitar and started sounding almost mechanical and overwhelming – in the best way possible.”

Even fuzz tones carried deeper meaning. Dead Pioneers have repeatedly pointed to Indigenous-owned pedal company NativeAudio as a defining part of their sound, particularly the Frybread Fuzz and War Party pedals.

Their willingness to experiment mirrors their larger mission: originally born from singer/songwriter Gregg Deal’s spoken word performance project The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy, the band have always approached punk through a political lens rooted in Indigenous liberation, class consciousness, and anti-capitalism.

“You can’t talk about Indigenous rights without talking about capitalism and the way it’s affected our communities,” Deal explains. “You cannot talk about Indigenous liberation without talking about class war.”

That urgency drives the emotional core of Wagon Burner. Deal adds: “If Never Alone is saying music can bring people together, the rest of the record is explaining why you need that community in the first place.

“We have more in common with each other than we do with any billionaire dickhead. That’s the whole point. We’re trying to bring people along with us.”

• Wagon Burner is releaed on June 26, and it’s available for pre-order now.

For every wildly successful Metallica, there are countless metal bands that never grabbed the brass ring. In the ‘80s, extreme metal was breaking through, and there was a plethora of great bands to choose from.

While most never reached the heights of the Big Four, many of them are still slugging it out, and they’ve stuck around long enough for new generations of fans to discover them.

When the New Wave of British Heavy Metal hit in 1979, it encompassed a wide variety of bands – from Iron Maiden to Def Leppard. Raven and Venom were both three-piece outfits from Newcastle, England.

Raven’s sound was more upbeat than the Satanic darkness of Venom – and Raven singer/bassist John Gallagher jokingly described the other band’s sound as “Motörhead, on the wrong speed, in a cement mixer!”

Both bands were on the indie label Neat Records, whose owner, Dave Wood, told Gallagher that a guy with the biggest independent record store on the East Coast wanted to work with Raven. “America was a huge thing,” Gallagher recalls. “I never knew anyone who’d been there.”

The guy was the late Jonny Zazula, who signed Metallica and Anthrax to his Megaforce label, and added Raven too. “Jonny Z changed our lives,” Gallagher confirms.

“He was the next really seismic event for us. He was a larger-than-life character – one man against the world, definitely a David against Goliath. He was like a preacher, coming down from the mountain with the metal gospel and spreading it around the world.”

Metallica and Raven went on tour together. KJ Doughton, who ran Metallica’s first fan club, recalls: “Raven’s debut album, Rock Until You Drop, was the first NWOBHM album I’d ever purchased.” The band were featured on a lot of compilation albums, “and they were often the best band featured.” He went to three shows on the tour and argues: “Raven rivaled Metallica as a live band.”

Exodus came out of the legendary Bay Area thrash scene as San Francisco became a crucial area for the development of thrash metal. While it may seem odd that such violent, aggressive music could come from an area so mellow, it was a place where movements – beat poets, hippies, bikers, or the gay community – thrived.

Thrash was even new territory for the musicians who played it. Guitarist Rick Hunolt joined Exodus in 1984, not long before they recorded Bonded By Blood. He’d grown up with Zeppelin, Bad Company, and Thin Lizzy, and Exodus was the first time he’d heard thrash.

“It was all so new back then; no one was doing it,” he says. “I thought, ‘Dude, this shit is crazy – this music is insane!’” Of course, Bonded By Blood is widely considered one of the great classics of the genre. Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian said of it: “Best debut album of the Big 5? I think so.”

In the beginning, most artists didn’t think of success. “Nobody had any idea it was gonna be this huge,” says Hunolt. “It wasn’t about money for a very long time.”

Jeff Becerra, lead singer of Possessed, says: “We felt like we were part of a movement, like a revolution.” But he recalls that bands had to be unique. “If you came out as an Exodus clone band, that shit would not fly. Copying a band was instant suicide. You had to be original or you didn’t get a place in line.”

One of the most underrated bands on the SF scene was Blind Illusion, who had a trippy hippie vibe and weren’t afraid to bring new elements into their music. “Anything good we’d hear, we’d put it into the music,” says singer/guitarist Mark Biderman. “The diversity in the scene was really good. You had to stick to your guns and be what you were.”

Les Claypool was their original bassist. He first joined in 1978 as he was learning to play. “By ’80-81, he was already amazing,” Biderman says. “He was a natural, doing some really great stuff.”

When Possessed wrote the song Death Metal, Becerra says they wanted it to be, “an anthem to brand it. We wanted people to say, ‘Oh, that death metal band!’ That would make us musically different in the Bay Area underground and elsewhere.”

Still, it took time for people to catch on to what Possessed were doing – especially the deep, guttural vocals which are now common place in extreme metal. “I wanted the signing to match the music,” Becerra says.

Many thrash bands had to make do with whatever gear they could afford. While some had metal tools of the trade like BC Rich and Jackson guitars, James Hetfield famously had a cheapo Flying V copy as his main instrument for years.

Exodus’ Gary Holt had to record Bonded By Blood with a borrowed Hiwatt amp when his Marshall went down. He used a distortion pedal with the gain all the way off, and the rest of the knobs on full, turning it into a booster. That was also the key to Ian’s rhythm sound with Anthrax. (Randy Rhoads did it too.)

For Dark Angel’s Darkness Descends – one of the most brutal thrash albums ever recorded – Eric Meyer and the late Jim Durkin used the same stock 50-watt Marshall, and Meyer used a delay pedal to add more gain to his tone. In the case of Holy Terror’s massively underrated Mind Wars, the brutal tone was crafted by playing around with an EQ pedal until they got the right level of crunch.

Metallica entered the top 30 with Master Of Puppets in 1986, and went on tour opening for Ozzy Osbourne. The future of metal was pointing to them, and suddenly a very uncommercial genre looked like it had more potential than many had thought.

“When Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer, and Megadeth all got big, that’s where we all went, ‘So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance?’” recalls Forbidden guitarist Craig Locicero. “Very few of us made it through the keyhole – there wasn’t a lot of room in there.”

That year marked the peak of thrash, with the arrival of Metallica’s Master, Megadeth’s Peace Sells, and Slayer’s Reign in Blood. The latter is often considered the big daddy of the genre, while Dark Angel’s Darkness would become a big influence on death metal and grindcore.

But a second wave followed in 1987 as Testament, Death Angel, and Sacred Reich stormed out of the gate with excellent debut albums. Anthrax released their masterpiece, Among the Living, while the scene started to go deranged via Death’s Scream Bloody Gore and Napalm Death’s Scum.

Sacred Reich, who took a nod from the punk scene, were one of many thrash bands with a social conscience. Vocalist/bassist Phil Rind says: “I always felt that the lyrics were the nail and the music was the hammer. If you have the opportunity to say something, you should.

“Every band has to figure out who they are, what they want to talk about. I felt if we could help turn somebody on to something, open their minds a little bit and show them how things are, there was a benefit to that.”

While Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer all did well on major labels, others weren’t so lucky. Bands tended to fall into the same traps. Some faltered because the label had no idea what to do with them. Some suffered when the A&R executive who’d signed them moved on or got fired. Many succumbed to label pressure to be more commercial, and alienated their hardcore fanbase.

“There was a lot of interference and push to be more commercial,” says Gallagher of Raven’s nightmare experience. “We went along for the ride – and got left in the middle of nowhere. It took a long, long time to rebuild the damage done by Atlantic, and by ourselves.”

By the end of the decade thrash was preparing to jump the shark, as many fans turned to much heavier music. “The thrash movement, which used to be dangerous, became safe,” Forbidden’s Locicero says. “Thrash lost it edge, but bands like Sepultura, Pantera and Death had a new edge.”

When the hair bands went down in the ‘90s, a lot of heavier outfits nearly went down with them. But metal came back the following decade, arguably bigger than ever. And for the bands that deserved another chance, a new generation of fans were ready to discover them.

Gallagher says Raven aren’t bitter about not being bigger: “There’s nothing to complain about being a cult band. We have a following where we can tour and play live pretty much anywhere. For a couple of kids from Newcastle it’s pretty amazing.”

Doughton argues: “Raven are still in the fight – kicking ass for over 40 years without the creature comforts afforded bigger bands. They’re more deserving of respect than any other band alive, in my opinion.”

“If I wanted to get big, I’d tone down Possessed’s music,” Becerra says. “I’m happy with my cult status. When people were pushing us to get bigger, I didn’t play the game as much as I should have. But I still just want to play my music the way I want to.”

Rind comments: “It’s funny to see parents bringing their kids to our shows and turning them on to Sacred Reich. I appreciate that people still show up. Metal comes from the underground and it never goes away – it just goes back underground and percolates. It always comes back. And the fans are loyal; they’re the best.

“The fans thought we should have been bigger, but I always thought, ‘We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.’ The fact that we got as far as we did is beyond my comprehension. We’re very fortunate.”

So, guys, anything new? Here at Guitar World, we believe in hitting artists with the hard questions first.

“Not much at all,” Geddy Lee deadpans. The bassist is speaking via Zoom from his home studio, a wall of basses behind him. “I’ve just been playing a lot of cards with Al, trying to win some money off him.”

“He always does,” says Alex Lifeson, joining in on Zoom from his own home music sanctuary. “He’s vicious at Go Fish.”

While we’re on the subject of games, suffice to say that nobody – including, for the longest time, Lee and Lifeson – had “Rush going on tour in 2026” on their bingo cards, and it wasn’t until the spring of last year when the idea started to look like a distinct possibility. Even after the two had finally come to a decision that yes, this was going to be a thing, they kept word from leaking out for months.

“Nobody knew,” Lee says emphatically. “I didn’t even tell my kids.”

“In this day and age, it’s so difficult to keep a secret,” Lifeson says. “We did our best to keep it quiet, and we were pretty successful, I think.”

The announcement was made almost casually, during a private event for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, last October, when, responding to an intentionally placed “fan” question asking if the band would ever tour again, Lee answered, “I kind of think we should tour next year.”

Initially, the tour, dubbed Fifty Something, was a relatively short run of seven major cities, but following near-instantaneous sell-outs, more cities were added, and then more, and as it now stands, the tour will encompass North America, South America and Europe, 86 concerts in all, and won’t wrap until April 2027 in Helsinki, Finland.

“It was very surprising,” Lifeson says of the reaction from fans.

“We knew there were fans that wanted us to come back,” Lee says. “We’d get messages from fans all the time and they want to see Al and me playing together again in whatever form we had chosen. We’re very fortunate we have such a loyal fan base, but I don’t think Al or I or anyone associated with us expected the overwhelming response to the very first announcement. It’s very nice, very gratifying.”

Lee admits to feelings of frustration following the conclusion of Rush’s last tour, R40, in 2015. In his view, the band was playing at peak form, and both he and Lifeson wanted to keep going. Drummer Neil Peart, however, had other ideas about how he wanted to live the rest of his life. “He was so happy being a full-time dad,” Lee says, “and his body just said to him, ‘That’s enough as a touring musician. I can’t do it anymore.’”

Over the next few months, Lee and Lifeson accepted Peart’s decision. “That’s life – no hard feelings.” Lee says. “The man certainly earned a break from the madding crowd.”

Following Peart’s tragic death in 2020 from glioblastoma, Lee and Lifeson gradually occupied themselves with various activities. Lee, who already published his first book, Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass in 2018, cranked out two more: 2023’s My Effin’ Life: From Holocaust Roots to Rock and Roll Stardom and 72 Stories: From the Baseball Collection of Geddy Lee. “Writing my first book was very gratifying,” he says. “It taught me that instead of banging out notes, I can bang out words. It sent me down a different path.”

Lifeson posted a couple of solo instrumental tracks, Kabul Blues and Spy House, on his website before forming an alt-rock band called Envy of None with bassist Andy Curran, guitarist Alfio Annibalini and lead singer Maiah Wynne. The group issued a self-titled debut in 2022 and a follow-up, 2025’s Stygian Wavz, but played no live shows. “I really didn’t have any interest in going back on the road,” Lifeson says. “I felt like I was really done with that.”

The former bandmates reunited on stage a few times in 2022, first with Primus to celebrate South Park’s 25th anniversary (the show’s co-creator, Matt Stone, played drums on Closer to the Heart), and they performed mini-sets of Rush classics at a pair of tribute concerts for the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, during which they were backed by a number of drummers: Dave Grohl, Tool’s Danny Carey, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith and former David Bowie sticksman Omar Hakim.

“The Taylor Hawkins tribute shows were pivotal for a lot of reasons,” Lee says. “Obviously, we got a chance to pay tribute to Taylor, but also we got a chance in our own way to pay tribute to Neil, which was long overdue. To play our songs again with some other brilliant musicians, it showed us that our music is still alive.”

Riding high from those shows, the two briefly considered taking things a step further and playing together in an official capacity. “But it didn’t work out,” Lee says. “No sense dwelling on it, just move on with your life.”

For Lifeson, that meant tending to his health. Stomach surgery to correct a hiatal hernia resulted in gastroparesis, a chronic condition in which the muscles in the stomach don’t move food as they should for it to be digested.

The guitarist visited a wellness clinic in Austria and learned to manage the condition through strict lifestyle changes (alcohol, smoking, gluten, lactose and junk food are out). Once he was back home, he would get together with Lee, just like always, and soon they began jamming. Then they began jamming on Rush songs, just two old friends having a blast.

Only it wasn’t that simple. This wasn’t just two old friends having a blast. It was something more than that… but what? Could they really tour once again as Rush? Should they? Warming up to the idea took some time, especially for Lifeson, who had previously stated that Rush’s touring days were over. And the biggest question of all was, if they did play live again, who would sit in that drum seat? As Lee says, “How do you ask someone to replace a guy who’s irreplaceable?”

Through his bass tech, John “Scully” McIntosh, Lee was tipped off about Anika Nilles, a German composer, producer and music educator, and as it turns out, a virtuoso drummer (her resume includes a 2022 tour with Jeff Beck). As Lee recalls, “We did a Zoom call together and said, ‘Look, we’re thinking of going on the road, and obviously we need a drummer. Would you be interested in playing some Rush songs with us?’

That’s really all we asked. She was totally game for it and said, ‘That sounds great.’ So she hopped on a plane and played with us for a week, and it was on the last day Alex and I looked at each other and went, ‘Wow, I think we have a drummer… Now what the fuck do we do?’”

When was it exactly when you two started playing Rush songs together again?

Geddy Lee: I would say it was in late 2024. I had just finished my third book, and I was sitting down here looking at all these bass guitars, and they were making me feel very, very guilty. So I started getting my fingers back in shape – and they were really out of shape.

I came down every day and played, and I was having dinner with Al one night and I told him, “Yeah, I’m getting my fingers back in shape. I’ve been writing a bit of lyrics and stuff. Maybe we should jam.” We always saw each other anyway every couple of weeks for dinner or drinks or something.

Al came over and we just started jamming and having fun the way we always do after we drink too much coffee. [Laughs] We’re having a laugh. Then Al, I think, or one of us suggested, “Let’s play a Rush song for fun and see if we can remember it without doing any homework.” Of course, we could only remember parts of them. That’s kind of how it started.

Aside from Rush songs, what else were you jamming?

Lee: We were just jamming, making shit up. That’s what jamming is.

When two guys from Rush get together to play Rush songs, what do they play?

Alex Lifeson: There are only like a thousand songs to choose from. We tried to get the easiest ones –

Lee: There are no easiest ones. [Laughs]

Was it just the two of you playing on your own, or did you have any sort of rhythm loop for accompaniment?

Lee: It was just the two of us. Sometimes we’d pull up the song and play along with it just to see – “What the fuck does that sound like?” That would help you remember all the things you forgot. I think Al remembers Freewill being the first song we tried.

Lifeson: Sure it was, yeah.

Lee: Which for a bass player is not a walk in the park. That was interesting to see my fingers tell me to fuck off. But it was fun. We ended up really laughing. And when we walked away from that goofy session, not only had we put some interesting jams down on tape, which I don’t know what’ll ever happen with them or they’ll remain in the bin, but we walked away with this smile. Playing our songs was so much fun.

The next time we got together to jam, we started challenging each other – “Can you remember this one?” Then we would flail through it. After enough of that, we started getting this sheepish grin at the end of our sessions. It was like, “What are we doing here? Are we doing something? Are we quietly tricking each other into going back on the road?” But that was still a ways away before we could agree to that.

What was that moment like when one of you finally said it out loud? Who was the first to say it?

Lee: I don’t know how that went. In the past, it was usually me who would say, “Hey, Al, do you want to do some shows? Do you want to think about this?” But I was a bit sheepish to do that because we’ve already been down that road and it didn’t work out after the tribute shows for Taylor.

We went down that road a little bit, but Al wasn’t into it for a lot of reasons. I don’t know who… I think we both just kind of gravitated to looking at each other saying, “This is kind of fun.”

Lifeson: I remember Ged saying, “We should get together. You should come over, have a coffee. There’s some stuff we need to talk about.” I went over and we did exactly that. We kind of talked about, “Why don’t we just play one of these days? Just play some stuff, maybe work on some stuff or whatever.”

That’s what led to that. I think Ged knew I was not really enthusiastic about even considering going back on the road, doing a tour, especially something that’s turned into this size of a tour. I think he was cautious and just wanted to have… I mean, we’ve been playing together for 60 years, and he just wanted to play together. That’s what we did the first day, and we were laughing and smiling and really enjoying it.

Like he said, we were jamming. We were playing bluesy stuff and whatever, and that led to playing a Rush song or two. That eventually led to playing maybe more Rush songs, and then the ball started rolling and it started to grow on its own, and it seemed to have a life of its own and an energy of its own. Everything started falling into place and moving toward ultimately getting together and doing this tour.

I needed convincing, for sure. Once I felt better – I got my health in order at the beginning of 2025, and that was one big hurdle for me. I was not feeling well enough health-wise to go back onto the road or to commit to doing anything with that sort of thing in mind.

But as the time went by and I felt good, and we started playing more and other ideas came up, it seemed natural that we would follow through with this and really start playing together.

It’s one thing to do one song, but it’s a whole other thing to do 40 songs. And I’ll tell you, it’s hard. It’s hard, hard, hard, but it’s really exciting, and it feels really good when the songs start coming together, and the fingers start going to the right places and it all comes back to you. Muscle memory is a mysterious thing, but it’s beautiful.

That must have been a strange and incredible process. As you said, you needed convincing…

Lifeson: It was gradual. When we started really sounding good together again, like more recently, when I could see a faint light at the end of the tunnel, it almost turned a switch on for me. I went from having self-doubt and not being really positively sure that I really wanted to do it… but I’d made the commitment. It was at that moment that I realized that, yes, this is going to be a good thing. It’s going to be a good thing for me personally and for us.

No doubt you were also considering your health and wondering, “Physically, should I do this?”

Lifeson: Well, I just concentrated on my digestive system. [Laughs] That was the main problem I was dealing with. I’ve had arthritis for years, and I’m pretty successful in dealing with that, but it was the digestive issues that were the real problem.

Millions and millions and millions of people go through that sort of thing. I managed to find a good way to mitigate some of the worst parts of it, and I just feel so much better about my energy and everything in my life, really.

Would it be right to assume that numerous drummers have approached you two over the years?

Lee: Well, yes. I mean, people who are close to us – good friends that are successful drummers – would never infer something like that because they have too much respect, not only for Neil and for the situation… They were grieving as well, so they wouldn’t be so selfish as to say something inappropriate like that.

There were many other drummers who reached out to me in the aftermath of Neil’s passing that were pushing themselves, and that was most distasteful to me. It was completely inappropriate timing.

Of course, we have some great pals who are amazing drummers in their own right, and they’re in very successful bands. We didn’t really know where to begin to look when it was time to choose a drummer. We started with Anika because she had been recommended to me, and I had done some research on her. I loved her vibe and her diverse style, and I had her in mind in case I was going to do some kind of project.

We didn’t have a list. We never, ever accumulated a list of drummers. When Al and I finally said, “Okay, I guess we’re getting serious. Who’s going to sit in that impossible seat?” How do you ask someone to replace a guy who’s irreplaceable?

It’s daunting. We started with the name that was already on my mind. We called her up, she came, and we hit it off. Once we were sure… She brought a lot to the table, but more than her chops, more than her guts and her willingness to sit in that hot seat, she brought an intelligence and a story. I love her story.

This is someone who grew up in Germany in a family of musicians. Her dad was a drummer. She’s played drums her entire life. She doesn’t even remember the first time she picked up sticks. It’s who she is. I thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice to bring someone so fresh in our midst to inspire Al and me?”

She’s a bit younger than us, and she likes to remind us of that. Every time we tell a story about a gig in 1971, she goes, “Wow, I wasn’t even born yet.” I’m just a big fan of hers, and I think Al has become a big fan of hers.

Part of this little journey we’re on now is about rooting for her. I really want her to succeed in this moment because she’s taking all the heat. The fans love her right now, but they’re going to scrutinize her, and she’s up for it. I just love that about her.

Did you give Anika a big list of Rush songs to prepare for when she came to play with you?

Lee: We just picked a few classic Rush songs. I said, “Learn these as best you can and let’s see what happens.” It was very casual, very relaxed, and it wasn’t an audition. We said to her, “We’re not auditioning drummers, but your playing really interests us. So just come and let’s see what happens.”

Lifeson: I didn’t know what the expectations were. I probably thought, “She’s very good. She seems to have a good grasp of the songs technically.” But there was something that was just not quite there. It wasn’t really until the last day that suddenly she sort of blossomed and understood better what we were kind of looking for or going after. And then after that, it’s just been better progressively through the whole year of rehearsals we’ve been doing.

Lee: On the fifth day, this is what happened: we’d gone four days and Al and I hadn’t even talked about her. We only had her for a few days, so we wanted to work through all these songs and see her reactions. See her gut feel, learn a little bit about it. We didn’t know her. She was a complete stranger, really.

She was a bit intimidated when she first arrived, of course, because she’d heard of the band, but she wasn’t a Rush fan. She didn’t know the songs intimately.

Of course, she knew songs like Tom Sawyer, and she knew of our reputation, and of course, there’s no drummer on the planet that doesn’t know who Neil Peart is and doesn’t revere that name. It was a tall order for her, but we were so busy working through these songs that we hadn’t chatted.

On the last day I said, “Al, can you pop into my house? We have to talk about what’s going on here.” [Laughs] He came over and I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “I don’t know. What do you think?” I said, “I don’t know. What the fuck are we doing?” [Laughs] We talked about her pros and cons. There was a sliver of doubt. Her technique was incredible, her facility…

Playing the fills was the last problem she would’ve had. She nailed the fills. That’s not the thing. There’s a lot more to playing a Rush song than the fills. It’s the feel. It’s the nuances. Our music is idiosyncratic, and that just takes time.

We’ve played Rush songs with maybe five or six different drummers over the last few years. Every time you sit and play a Rush song with a drummer, I don’t care who they are, there’s an adjustment. There’s a little translation that Alex and I have to do with the drummer about this little part or that little part. That’s normal. But we just weren’t sure because this was all new to us. So we went to that last day with an open mind, but a little doubt.

And song after song we played with her, she just killed it. I mean, she understood all those little things that Alex and I had been telling her all that week, and she processed it and delivered. That’s when we looked at each other in the studio and went, “Yep, we have a real problem, because now we have a drummer and we’re going to make a commitment.”

For Anika, it wasn’t just about recreating the records. It was about bringing her own perspective to the music.

Lee: I don’t know if Al feels the same way, but I think she’s very respectful of whose parts she’s playing. She understands that air drummers for the last 45 years have been out there mimicking some of those parts. She wants to do that justice. At the same time, she’s a completely original and independent creative force, but she’s sublimating a bit of that for the sake of a tribute to Neil.

At the same time, the more she knows the songs, the more confidence she has with the songs. There are moments where she’s now able to put her own special sauce on this song or that song. We’ll start looking for moments to let her stretch out. We already have a couple in the set where I look at her and go, “Anika, this is free time. You go wherever you want to go, and I’ll be there. We’ll meet you there.”

I look at it like this: There have been phases to this adventure. Phase one was her understanding Neil’s role in Rush. Phase two is like, we’ve learned all the songs, now let’s have some fun with them. Now we’re massaging the arrangements and seeing how they can go.

At the same time, we’re not out there to turn it into a new thing. We’re there to represent our songs with our hearts and with our best playing fingers forward. And we want fans to celebrate that music with us. The mandate isn’t to change everything. The mandate is to be respectful of the arrangements of the song at the same time elevate from the norm.

You’ve hired Loren Gold as a touring keyboardist, so it’s something of a new presentation.

Lee: That’s correct. That’s what we wanted. When people come in and look at the stage setup, it’s not a trio. It’s not Rush 2.0. It’s a new time and we’ve got a different vibe, but the music is treated respectfully.

Alex, are there any new guitars you’ll bring out on the road?

Lifeson: Yeah, a few. Kirk Hammett gave me one of his Greenies. I’ve been having fun with that. It’s a pretty raunchy Les Paul, for sure. The Gibson Custom Shop did such an amazing job on it. The relic’ing is just spectacular. It sounds really, really great. There’s a couple of other Les Pauls. [He gestures to an Explorer on the wall]

Oh, and I just got this from Gibson. This is a guitar that Cesar [Gueikian], CEO of the company, made with some of the craftsmen there. He sent that along for me to check out, so I’ve been fiddling around with that. It’s so different for me in terms of its shape and style. I’ve got to get used to it.

My original ES-355 has gone to someone else, but I have one of the reissues that I’ll have on the road. I’m still sort of building that arsenal. I think I had 23 guitars on the last tour. I’ll probably have 15 or 16, something like that. I don’t know how many Ged’s going to take out this time around. Ged, I think you had probably 25 basses on the last tour.

Lee: Last tour, I had 27 vintage bases that I played. I don’t know if I’ll get through 27 this time, but it’s a slightly shorter show and I’ve fallen in love with my beautiful ’62 Jazz Bass. I’m going to play that on quite a few songs, but I’m also planning to bring some unusual things out. I’ve got a couple of classic Rickies that I’ll bring out. I’ve got some Hofners and T-birds that I’ve fallen in love with. I’m going to have, I don’t know, maybe 10 to 15 instruments I’ll try to work into the set.

At the end of those five days you did with Anika, if things didn’t work out, for whatever reason, would that have been the end of this experiment, or would you have regrouped and tried something else?

Lifeson: Who knows? I mean, it’s impossible to say.

Lee: My gut tells me we would have regrouped and looked elsewhere, but I’m very happy we didn’t have to do that. We’re really lucky. And also with Loren Gold, our keyboardist – I met him in 2014 when I did a charity show with the guys from the Who in London for their 50th anniversary, ironically.

We kind of hit it off. Again, he was one of those names that just stuck in the back of my mind. And when we talked about adding a keyboard player, his was the first name that came to mind. We’re very fortunate that the two people who were top of our minds both have worked out really, really well. That’s a little bit of a blessing from above, I think. Someone’s looking after us there.

Of course, as you said, Neil is irreplaceable, and he’s beloved by the band’s fans. That said, people seem to be very excited to see Anika play with you guys.

Lee: We’re very gratified with how well she’s been welcomed by the Rush family, so to speak. They haven’t even heard her play one note with us yet, and there’s already this kind of outpouring of love for her, and they’ve shown her tremendous kindness, which I know is inspiring for her. It’s been very gratifying to see the response.

She must be a real inspiration to female drummers around the world.

Lee: Yeah. I think that’s a great part of her story. I love that part of her story. I’ve gotten mail from young girls, older women saying, “Right on, man. Thank you.”

And now she’s part of your story.

Lee: Totally. But let’s be clear: we did not hire Anika Nilles because she’s a woman. We hired her because she’s an incredible drummer, and not just an incredible drummer – an intelligent, hardworking, responsible… I couldn’t even get her drunk last night! [Laughs] I tried.

She’s a unique individual. In many ways, she reminds me of the big goof who sat on the throne before her. She’s a total professional, a work-first person. The fact that she’s female and she’s doing that for women musicians around the world, that’s a bonus. It’s not the reason she’s in that seat.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

When Kurt Cobain set out to create what would eventually become Bleach, he was still living in Aberdeen, Washington, and working as a janitor.

His guitar playing, coupled with his introspective songwriting, was attracting attention, however – especially when a nascent Nirvana, comprising Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Chad Channing, turned Shocking Blue’s Love Buzz into their live showcase track.

A dozen letters to labels later, Sub Pop head honchos Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman decided to take a chance on a very desperate Cobain, who accepted a less-than-ideal deal that saw the band absorb all the recording costs.

Recorded in four sessions in late December 1988 that spanned roughly 20 hours, Bleach is pure rawness. It cost the band – or, rather, Jason Everman, a musician, soldier, early Nirvana fan, and briefly the band’s second guitarist – $606.17, which he fronted.

“We literally tracked it all in three days,” producer Jack Endino told Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross in an interview published in Guitar World in June 2005.

Their rehearsals carried a similar DIY spirit, as the band honed Bleach in an Aberdeen hair salon owned by Novoselic’s mother, which could only be used after hours.

“The place closed at eight, so we’d start rehearsing then and playing until eight in the morning, when it opened again,” recalled Channing.

Perhaps one of the most underrated elements of Bleach-era Nirvana is Novoselic, who not only served as a reliable friend for Cobain but also stood out as a noteworthy bassist who perfectly complemented the rising face of grunge’s angular guitar playing.

When Cobain brought forward the riff for School, Novoselic told him, “That is the most ‘Seattle’ fucking riff I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Despite the band not living in Seattle, the city’s sludge metal scene of the ’80s and early ’90s, spearheaded by the Melvins, served as a clear influence and gave them a much-needed sense of aspiration early in their career.

Novoselic even went as far as to say that “School is the ultimate grunge song,” and thus, consequentially, the ultimate Seattle song.

Bleach, released on June 15, 1989, did not chart upon initial release, and Cobain in particular was frustrated by Sub Pop’s lack of promotional efforts.

Things started to shift after the British music press began touting the band as rising stars, and Bleach became a staple on many US college radio stations.

Then, following the release of their many-times-Platinum album Nevermind in 1991, Bleach finally received the widespread attention it deserved and became a cornerstone of the grunge movement.

In more recent news, the backline used on Nirvana’s Bleach tour hit the auction block just two months ago.

Billy Idol and Steve Stevens are the latest names to be inducted into Guitar Center’s Hollywood Rockwalk.

The star-studded strip at Sunset Boulevard has been Guitar Center’s way of honoring rock greats since 1985, with the pair now joining the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Carlos Santana, and 2024 inductee, Gary Clark Jr.

Stevens – who is also famed for the Top Gun anthem – has been Idol’s flamboyant foil since day dot, which has seen him craft guitar solos with toy ray guns, and pen a score of rock classics.

“Billy Idol and Steve Stevens didn’t just write hits, they built a partnership where a punk frontman and a virtuoso guitarist made each other sharper,” says Guitar Center CEO, Gabe Dalporto. “The Rebel Yell intro alone has inspired generations of guitar players. Walk into any Guitar Center on a Saturday, and you’ll still hear someone chasing that tone. That’s the definition of Rockwalk-worthy.”

“Steve and I have spent so much of our lives around music shops, trying new things while working hard to perfect our sound, with Guitar Center right at the center of it all,” Billy Idol returns. “Being inducted into the Rockwalk together feels like a real full-circle moment after all these years of making music side-by-side.”

Stevens is equally as honored at the nod, which will see their handprints and signatures cast in cement at an in-store ceremony.

“We join some of the greatest musicians ever in this honor,” he notes. “I hope some young guitarist looks down at our impressions and marches inside to buy his first guitar, just as I did. This building is filled with dreams and possibilities. All you need is desire and passion.”

Eric Clapton, Black Sabbath, and Jimi Hendrix (posthumously) have also been inducted into the Guitar Center Rockwalk, with Zakk Wylde performing at the late Dimebag’s 2007 induction.

Elsewhere, Dalporto has been talking to Tosin Abasi about why the electric guitar design needs to evolve as the launch of Guitar Center’s in-house guitar brand draws nearer.

Earlier this week, Guitar World reported that a band falsely posing as Angine de Poitrine was doing the rounds in Russia. Now, the real story has been revealed.

The real Angine de Poitrine have been nothing short of a sensation in 2026, with their KEXP performance surpassing 15 million views at the time of writing, and their wild microtonal math rock – powered by one of the most unique guitars in the business – selling out shows with ease. Everyone, including Dave Grohl, is obsessed with them.

So, when footage of a Russian band dressed like Angine de Poitrine, but lacking their secret weapon, emerged on social media, even the band’s art director felt like they were being ripped off.

“They don’t even say it’s not a real band,” Sam Murdock had said. “And they have a one-neck guitar.”

He also commented that he’s removed 700 fake Poitrine t-shirts from Tee Republic and Red Bubble, as they battle against those trying to make a quick buck off their success. Thankfully, this Russian band isn’t actually a real band.

“This was a one-off joke event for Escapist bar’s birthday,” a representative of the Moscow venue has told Stereogum. “We prepared the costumes, and musicians from the bands Hadn Dadn, Shajjm Orchestra, and DYW learned the material and put on a great show.”

The band called themselves Urin de Potrin and have now broken up, and have “no future plans.”

“It was all just a fun joke,” the representative adds. “Entry was free, and the bar made no commercial profit from it – especially since producing costumes like these is not exactly cheap.

The hype surrounding the actual band, meanwhile, shows no signs of diminishing. They’re set to embark on a fresh world tour next week, having played a packed-out Bristol show that left GW’s online editor Michael Astley-Brown picking his jaw off the floor.

“With this tour, Khn has established himself as the greatest polka-dot guitar hero since Randy Rhoads and Buddy Guy,” he writes. “The guy has legit jazz chops, and his fluid microchromatic runs, tapping bursts, and head-spinning riffs turn guitar tropes on their heads.”

Making the most of their popularity, Eastwood Guitars is now selling a double-neck microtonal guitar after an apparent custom model with Khn fell through.

Death Cab for Cutie recently took to the road to celebrate the 20th anniversaries of their Transatlanticism and Plans records. Both tours were huge successes that reinforced those albums’ lofty stature in the ‘oughts rock catalog, though the former was cited in one prominent review as “Peak millennial nostalgia, in the best way.”

Even with that caveat, oof. What to do as a band when people are throwing the “nostalgia” tag at you in headlines?

Emerging from those big celebrations of the past on one end and personal upheaval (Death Cab singer, songwriter, and guitarist Ben Gibbard went through a divorce in 2024) on the other, the band’s eleventh album, I Built You a Tower, sounds amazingly unbothered, in a way. It documents a band that’s comfortable, but never content.

Having labored over 2015’s glossy Kintsugi and 2018’s Thank You For Today, their first album without longtime lead guitarist Chris Walla since their debut, the band turned to veteran producer John Congleton to take the reins for the smoother, more self-assured Asphalt Meadows in 2022. When the material for what would become I Built You a Tower began to take shape, a second dance with Congleton was a no-brainer.

“We were really happy with how Kintsugi and Thank You For Today turned out,” Ben Gibbard tells Guitar World from his home in Seattle. “But, due in large part to the material that was brought in in various stages of completion and arrangement, those records took a long time to make.

“After working with John on Asphalt Meadows and having things move quickly – and given the material that we were bringing in and that I was writing – there weren't as many question marks of how this collection of songs were going to be put together.”

You can really feel that lack of second-guessing. For instance, lead guitarist Dave Depper's feverish, dissonant break on the spiky Punching the Flowers sounds perfectly comfortable next to Pep Talk, a contemplative song that’s all twinkle and jangle ‘til you hit one of those gut-punch Ben Gibbard choruses – the kind that are easy to take for granted after all these years.

Gibbard tells Guitar World that the process of developing these songs harkened back to the band’s earliest days, but don’t mistake this for some reactionary and defensive “Back To The Basics™️” record.

During our chat, the legendary indie statesman and Dave Depper were all too eager to discuss how I Built You a Tower was borne from new tools, madcap experiments, and – a decade after Chris Walla’s departure brought Depper and keyboardist/guitarist Zac Rae into the fold – an easy six-string chemistry that’s brought this band into their second era.

Ben, when you brought these particular songs to the band, did you have arrangements in mind, or is that something you generally leave to the band when you guys are in the room together?

Gibbard: There were a few things that we wrote in varying stages of together but everything that I had, I brought in kind of a power trio form. There'd be a drum riff, my guitar part, and in most cases a bass part that all kind of linked together.

This album, certainly more than Asphalt Meadows, was more in keeping with how I brought songs in on the band’s first two or three records. For Dave and Zac it was more about light touches and ways to support the song, rather than, “This song desperately needs a guitar part” – for most of them, there was already a riff that made sense.

What’s your favorite track on the record, guitar-wise?

Gibbard: Punching the Flowers is probably my favorite from a guitar perspective, because I feel like my playing on it is very… of me. As I was writing this record I was listening to an egregious amount of Fugazi. I obviously wasn’t trying to do what they do guitar-wise, because no-one can do what they do, but I was really becoming more influenced by dissonance than I had in awhile.

The first notes of the song are a dominant seventh, just an octave and a seven – that's the chordal information. The slidey stuff is very reminiscent of some early Death Cab guitar work, and then I'm doing this weird pull-off riff in the chorus.

It really speaks to my disdain of farmer chords. I loathe writing with traditional chords – strumming an acoustic guitar, writing a song where you're just strumming chords. It's such a wide lane of harmonic information that doesn't leave a lot of room. I just really don't like chords – I don't like playing them. I find music so much more interesting when everybody is playing some kind of weaving harmonic line that creates a wider picture in the stereo field than two people just strumming the same chord.

Depper: I love Punching the Flowers too, but I think my own pick would be How Heavenly a State. It was this totally gonzo guitar idea I had. I'd been listening to a bunch of those records by the Smile, and there are several songs of theirs where Jonny Greenwood is using this very particular crazy delay setting, where the delay note is coming in, like, 9 8th notes behind the original note.

It's really difficult to do, but it leads to these really unexpected, kind of orchestrated guitar parts you can play live. So, I decided to see if I could do my own spin on that, with a different delay setting, and I came up with this pretty intricate architecture for a song where I'm just relentlessly doing this thing the whole time – I'm really proud of how it came out. I'm terrified of doing it live, because if you make one mistake, you’re really in the weeds.

Dave, you mostly stick to Fano guitars. What drew you to them?

Depper: My first Fano was the orange one that I still play at every Death Cab show. I'd already been asked to join Death Cab, and was a few months away from my first rehearsal with the band. I went into a guitar shop in Tucson, and that Fano was just sitting there.

I thought it was a totally ridiculous, crazy-looking guitar, and I picked it up. But I think what drew me to it were its Lollar Firebird pickups. I’d never played with Firebird pickups before. I was constantly at war within myself between single-coil chime and humbucker power and I was always frustrated that I couldn't really capture both of those tones with one guitar. And all of a sudden I picked up that guitar and it had both.

You put it on the bridge pickup, it sounds like an awesome humbucker. You put it on the neck pickup, and it’s this beautiful, round, chimey thing. The [look of the] guitar was almost incidental. Like, I like how it looks. I think it's kind of ridiculous and fun, but unique. It has a great neck. But if anything, I'm really just addicted to those Firebird pickups.

I also play a Novo guitar now, which I used a bunch on the record, but I put the same Firebird pickups in it. It sounds essentially identical. But anytime I move away from using those Firebird pickups, I sort of feel like I'm not really expressing myself to the fullest anymore. It's a little bit of a challenge. But when I'm using one of those guitars, my voice just comes through the instrument.

Ben, you teamed up with Fender to make a signature Mustang a few years back. What is it about the Mustang that clicked with you?

Gibbard: Well, for a while I was playing G&Ls, and when I started writing songs for [2011’s] Codes and Keys, I found myself not playing a lot of guitar because I just didn't like how my hands felt on the G&Ls. [They had] a full-scale neck, and I've always liked the smaller, three-quarter size neck. That’s why I played Fender Bullets when the band first started. I just like that smaller scale.

I ended up with a Mustang in a trade with a friend, and I just really gravitated towards it and loved it. I ended up writing a lot of the songs on Kintsugi on it, and moving forward, they became my primary touring guitars.

But in my home studio, I try to keep a pretty small arsenal of guitars, maybe three or four, just because I'm kind of a utilitarian – I don't like having a lot of things that I can't use. And one of the guitars I have is this Fender Pro Jaguar – it’s, like, Olive Green, and I believe they only made it for one pass, in 2017 or so. I ended up with one from Fender around that time, and it became my go-to guitar.

I wrote everything on this record on that guitar, which also has a smaller-scale, three-quarter neck. I took some writing trips, and I brought that guitar, a ‘72 Thinline Telecaster, and my signature model down to the studio. Dave, I don't know if you would’ve monitored this to the extent that I did, but I don't think I played another guitar, other than the Pro Jaguar, on anything, if it wasn't an acoustic.

Depper: John had this amazing original 1953 Gibson Les Paul Jr. that I think you played on How Heavenly a State.

Gibbard: You're right, yeah, so the stabs on Heavenly are on that. But I think almost everything else is the Pro Jaguar. I mean, Dave and Zac are real kind of tone craftsmen, and they're really, really good at that. And that's just never been a skill set of mine. I've always viewed the guitar as a writing tool, rather than a tool for sonic exploration.

Were there any pedalboard additions for either of you on this record?

Depper: I had an interesting Chase Bliss pedal called the Onward, which I used for a lot of the more ambient pad stuff. I sort of gave myself a challenge on this record – I didn't want to play any keyboards, because I often play some keyboards, and I thought it'd be fun to try to use guitar if I had something keyboard-y to say. So I used that.

This isn't new to my pedalboard, but I'm a heavy user of the EHX Superego pedal. It’s my secret weapon for eerie, weird melting pad kind of stuff. I use that all over the place. I also used a Meris Polymoon, which I bought when we made Thank You for Today, but hadn't used since.

It’s a very weird pedal. It does all sorts of strange stuff. I haven’t mastered it yet, but it's got a really incredible stereo-izer kind of function. So you go in with your mono guitar sound, and it sounds really great going direct into the board with a hard left and right pan.

I was really interested in playing a lot of direct guitar on this record, especially clean tones, and that pedal was great for that. But it also has this built-in flanger, phase shifter, rhythmic delay thing. Every time you plug it in, it sounds totally different, but it always sounds awesome. So I use that a lot. Other than that, I used my tried and true – a RAT for big distortion, Xotic BB boost for my mid-gain stuff, a compressor pedal, a Strymon El Capistan for delay… that's the meat and potato stuff.

Back in 2019 you revealed that you’d gone digital, to Fractal, is that what you’re still intending to use for this year’s tour?

Gibbard: I was the most skeptical of going to modeling over real amps, even though my amp is off-stage, so that it doesn't go into the vocal mic. I mean, all of our amps were off-stage by the time we went to Fractals.

I never thought I’d be a proponent of it, but the number of times that the amp starts sounding weird because the tubes are going bad, or the power is weird in the building, or the speakers are starting to kind of fray… over the course of a tour, you get so locked into the minutiae and the small variances in sound. Those happened often enough to – not throw a whole show for me – but I would definitely start to go, like, “Why is my guitar so weird today? It sounds different than it did yesterday.”

I just love the consistency of what the Fractal has brought for me, because I can just concentrate on playing and performing and not get lost in the weeds of, “Are my tubes going bad?” I respect the people who still want to use amplifiers – I totally get it. It certainly feels awesome to have that much air pushing on stage if you have the amps on stage. But it's just not necessary for me anymore.

Depper: There's just so many reasons those Fractals are great. I mean, even in terms of being able to be more flexible – in terms of what shows you agree to, because you can't fit your entire gear pack into a small radio session or something like that.

We've been using Fractal Axe-Fx II since the Thank You for Today tour, and Zac and I are curious about where the modeling technology has gotten to since then – we've just sort of been in a ‘If it ain't broke, don’t fix it’ kind of mode. But it's coming up on eight or so years of using these things, so I think we’re going to explore the newest Fractals, Tonex, and things like that during these rehearsals, and see if anything can beat it. But honestly, it's just set it and forget it with these things.

Our front-of-house guy loves mixing with them. They're amazing for our monitors. Even if amps never had tubes go, or never had settings bumped, the microphone is still never going to be in the exact spot in the amp, the room is never going to be exactly the same. It's incredible what a consistent show you can put on with these things.

You guys did 20th anniversary tours for both Transatlanticism and Plans. Dave, given that you guys were really presenting these records in their entirety, how faithful did you feel you needed to be to Chris Walla’s parts live?

Depper: The goal was to be as faithful as possible. I love Chris’ parts. I love Chris as an artist, and those choices resulted in those records being what they are, so I’m absolutely going to try and replicate those as closely as possible. There's a few songs from those records that we've been playing almost every night since I've been in the band, so they've sort of organically morphed into my own version of what that song is.

While prepping for those tours, I went back and listened to those records again and kind of compared what I had been doing for the last several years. And there were a few songs where I was like, “Whoa, I've really drifted a bit far away from what Chris was doing. I'm going to try and get back there.”

Those tours were designed to play those albums as closely as possible, and I just wanted to honor those – there's no ego involved about putting my own stamp on anything like that. That wasn't what it was about. So I was happy to do it. And if I didn't get close on some things, that was a personal failing.

Gibbard: Dave understands the assignment. When we initially brought Dave and Zac into the band they were brought in primarily as hired guns. We needed people to help us play this record [Kintsugi] with the hope that over time we would gel enough musically and personally that we could have them join the band properly, which they did, many years ago now.

As a band leader, [I think] Dave and Zac have a very unique perspective and voice musically, but they also – having joined playing Chris's parts – have an understanding of the DNA of what makes this band this band. They've both done a really great job in integrating those two things, bringing their own personal voice and style to the band, while also understanding what it is about the band that makes it the band.

• I Built You a Tower is out now.

No matter the drummer, whoever was to step onto Neil Peart’s lofty drum riser in a reprised Rush was always going to have a massive task on their hands.

Jeff Beck-approved Fusion drummer Anika Nilles’ first shows with the prog giants have been met with widespread acclaim, but getting Rush back on stage wasn’t exactly smooth sailing – nor was Nilles’ rollercoaster 'audition'.

Her first sessions with the band, Rush bassist Geddy Lee says, were “casual.” But for two musicians who spent the best part of half a century playing with one of the world’s best drummers, there was a difficult musical and personal adjustment period to weather.

As Lee remembers in the new issue of Guitar World. “We said to her, ‘We’re not auditioning drummers, but your playing really interests us. So just come and let’s see what happens.’”

Lee says he and bandmate Alex Lifeson had no expectations during the first four of their initial five days together. Lee wanted “to work through all these songs and see her reactions and her gut feel.”

“We didn’t know her. She was a complete stranger,” he develops. “She was a bit intimidated at first because she’d heard of the band, but she wasn’t a Rush fan.”

By the time the sessions neared an end, both Lifeson and Lee realized they harbored reservations about going forward with a reunion.

“There’s no drummer on the planet that doesn’t know who Neil Peart is and doesn’t revere that name,” Lee acknowledges. “It was a tall order for her, but we were so busy working through these songs that we hadn’t chatted.”

So, before their last session, Lee called Lifeson over to his house.

“He came over, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. What do you think?” Lee remembers. “I said, ‘I don’t know. What the fuck are we doing?’

“There was a sliver of doubt,” he admits. “Her technique was incredible. She nailed the fills, [but] there’s a lot more to playing a Rush song than the fills. It’s the feel. It’s the nuances. Our music is idiosyncratic, and that takes time.

“We’ve played Rush songs with maybe five or six different drummers over the last few years. Every time you sit and play a Rush song with a drummer, I don’t care who they are, there’s an adjustment.

“But we just weren’t sure because this was all new to us. So we went to that last day with an open mind. And song after song, she killed it. She understood all those little things that Alex and I had been telling her all week, processed them, and delivered.

“That’s when we looked at each other in the studio and went, ‘Yep, we have a real problem, because now we have a drummer and we’re going to make a commitment.’”

“There was something that was just not quite there,” echoes Lifeson. “It wasn’t really until the last day that suddenly she sort of blossomed and understood better what we were kind of looking for or going after.”

The band are so committed to Nilles that they aren’t discounting writing music together, and the praise for Nilles has been flooding in since the tour began.

For Rush, replacing Peart was difficult for a number of reasons, but despite a long line of drummers vying for the gig, Nilles was their only choice.

Rush’s full chat can be found in the latest issue of Guitar World. Head to Magazines Direct to pick up a copy.

“The desert is where mirage and myth are created, and so is Hollywood,” Eagles founding member Don Henley tells Guitar World. “We are just as susceptible, now, to illusion as the pioneers were – if not more so.”

That mirage, myth and illusion was immortalized on Hotel California, the Eagles’ big American dream-come-true. “Hotel California was obviously our creative peak,” Henley says. “Every band, every artist, has one.” Released 50 years ago – on December 8, 1976 – it’s not only their personal best, but the third-best-selling album of all time, at 32 million copies and counting (the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) is Number 1).

The epic title track inspired a thematic album about the toll of dreams, touching on fame (New Kid in Town), the high life (Life in the Fast Lane), relationships (Victim of Love) and westward expansion (The Last Resort). The message throughout was that dreams often look different up close and have a way of vanishing in thin air.

“We were always keenly aware of the transitory nature of fame and fortune,” Henley says. “The entire Desperado album was basically about that. We had witnessed all the wreckage alongside the Yellow Brick Road. Pop culture, for lack of a better term – and which might be an oxymoron – is all about the new.

“You grind away for seven or eight or 10 years, and suddenly, boom, you’re on the radio; your face stares out from a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. Then your sophomore album flops, your record label drops you, and you’re right back to square one – ‘Please drive through.’”

While square one wasn’t part of the Eagles story, chasing the new was. And the turmoil and pressure to keep outdoing themselves led to substance-fueled power struggles that turned once-close friends into rivals and led to a breakup three years after Hotel California. As Glenn Frey once said, “We made it, and it ate us.”

Significantly, the mythic desert passage is one that all five band members on the album had made respectively in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It was a more innocent time, as they relocated from the South and Midwest with hopes of being part of the burgeoning hippie country scene in and around Laurel Canyon and nightclubs like the Troubadour.

The spot where everyone from Kris Kristofferson to Carole King made their debut is where Henley first joined Glenn Frey for a beer, starting a friendship and the creative nucleus for the Eagles. Back then, the two would ride around L.A. in Frey’s ’55 Chevy, nicknamed Gladys, “plotting and planning.”

It took a while for things to take shape. Both were already in groups signed to the same indie label. Henley’s Shiloh made one album, produced by Kenny Rogers. Frey’s Longbranch Pennywhistle (with J.D. Souther, a key collaborator on Hotel California) did one that included Wrecking Crew cats James Burton and Larry Knechtel. Neither record troubled the charts.

The duo joined Linda Ronstadt’s touring band in 1971, which soon added bassist Randy Meisner of Ricky Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band and guitarist Bernie Leadon of the Flying Burrito Brothers. The proto-Eagles quartet played together only once, during Ronstadt’s engagement at Disneyland, on the Coca-Cola Terrace in Tomorrowland. It was a prophetic spot for the birth of a band that would become as ubiquitous – and successful – as America’s favorite soda.

Within two months, thanks to help from Jackson Browne, they’d signed to David Geffen’s Asylum Records. Their first two albums – Eagles and Desperado – produced by Glyn Johns, were released in 1972-73, inside 10 months. And thanks to Take It Easy and Peaceful Easy Feeling, the group quickly climbed to the top of the country-rock heap. But they craved a bigger heap, especially when they found themselves on the bill with arena rock acts.

“Opening for Jethro Tull and Yes was odd because it was such a mismatch, musically, but it did have the effect of toughening us up,” Henley says.

“But our main problem was that we didn’t have a repertoire. We had released only one album, and Take It Easy was our only hit song at that point. But somehow we survived. Glenn was right saying so-called country rock had its limitations in terms of commerciality, but I think we defied those limitations as we expanded our stylistic perimeters to include more different veins of music. Ronstadt did that, too.”

In the studio, the toughening up got a boost from a new producer. “My first thought was, ‘I don’t want to do a cowboy band!’” Hotel California producer Bill Szymczyk tells Guitar World.

“But they wanted to rock. They’d started their third album with Glyn, who was one of my heroes. But they weren’t happy. Glyn was a taskmaster and had rules about no drink or drugs in the studio. Meanwhile, the guys had heard The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, which I did with Joe Walsh [in 1973], and said, ‘Who produced this?’”

“Bill was – and is – a lover of rock ’n’ roll, blues and funk music,” Henley says. “He had produced Edgar Winter and B.B. King, among others. After a long day of grinding away on our own material, Bill would put an Ohio Players or a Parliament album up on the big playback speakers in the studio, and we’d kick back and listen. It was fun. The great thing about Bill was that he was willing to let us follow our own instincts, which, at that time, were leaning more toward rock and R&B.”

Szymczyk called Johns to get permission to take over the album. “The answer was, ‘Better you than me, mate!’” A week later, they cut Already Gone, a rousing rocker that gave Frey a chance to bust loose with some razor-tooth lead guitar. Suddenly, the band was getting the edge they wanted.

“It was the beginning of a great marriage,” Szymczyk says, “with each album doing better than the one before, and then Hotel California, which was the high point of their career – and mine.”

For 1974’s On the Border, they added hotshot guitarist Don Felder, who’d been touring with David Blue and Crosby & Nash. Bernie Leadon, who’d played with Felder in high school bands, said, “Felder was a really great guitar player, but when he joined, I could see the writing on the wall for me. I thought, if I’m going to leave, better that a friend of mine gets the gig.”

Leadon stayed for 1975’s One of These Nights, which further upped the ante on extended solos (the title track and the underrated Visions were both six-string showcases). “We were balls to the wall on that album,” Szymczyk says. “They wanted to rock, and we proceeded to damn-sure rock.”

With each album came more fame, more pressure to outdo themselves and more substances. In the mid-’70s rock world, cocaine was the drug of choice. “It was a writing tool, but one that brought out the worst in everyone,” Frey once said. But even without drugs in the mix, there was always creative friction between Henley and Frey.

“It was the Lennon and McCartney thing,” Szymczyk says. “Don writes this way, Glenn writes that way, but together they write better than they do separately. There was always a lot of competition. Frey was competitive in everything! Darts, shooting pool, you name it. He wanted to win. Henley wasn’t as up front about it, but he knew very well what he had, talent-wise. We called him Golden Throat.”

Since the days of cruising around in Gladys, there was one thing the two leaders did agree on; they wanted their band to be the biggest on the planet. And that meant pushing the rock sound to the limit. As Leadon predicted, that put him in their crosshairs. The guitarist had played lead on Take It Easy and Tequila Sunrise. He’d co-written Witchy Woman. His background with the Flying Burrito Brothers had imbued the Eagles with country-rock cred.

For all that, his relationship with them was never easy. Exhaustive touring (he’d already logged five years of roadwork before he joined) and the drug use (he’d kicked those habits) only deepened his discontent. “None of it sat well with Bernie,” Szymczyk says. “The further we went into rock, the less he liked it.”

He remembers asking the guitarist what he thought of a take of One of These Nights with Leadon replying, “I think I’m going to go surfing.” Things came to a head one night in 1975, backstage at the Orange Bowl. As Frey was rallying the band, Leadon poured a beer over Frey’s head and walked out.

Enter Joe Walsh. Late of the James Gang, Walsh was three albums into a successful solo career in 1975. He was already friendly with the Eagles from crossing paths on the road. When they approached him, his response was, “Being part of a group would take a whole lot of weight off my shoulders.”

But it’s easy to forget what a mismatch it seemed. Walsh recalled in The Guitar Greats, “I think 80 percent of people said, ‘That’s stupid – there’s no way it’s going to work.’”

Not only did it work, it changed the band’s energy level. “For starters, things got louder,” Henley says. “Joe, being a bona fide rock ’n’ roll guitar slinger, was the perfect foil for Don Felder. They propelled one another in a friendly-but-competitive sort of way. We had upped our horsepower. This is not to take anything away from Bernie, who was – and still is – a highly skilled musician.”

“As we got into Hotel California, it was like, ‘This is a match made in heaven,’” Szymczyk says. “The friction with Bernie was gone, and it was replaced with somebody that could just blister with a forceful edge.”

Speaking of forceful edge, in Walsh, the Eagles now also had a resident bad boy and gleeful wrecker of hotel rooms. His instrument of choice was a chainsaw. Dressers, chairs, tables got sliced, diced and tossed from windows.

“Keith Moon and Joe were good buddies, and that, of course, led to some mischief,” Henley says. “It was amusing for a little while, but it eventually became a very expensive hobby, and we were beginning to get barred from some of the hotels we liked to stay in. So, after a while, the chainsaws got locked away in storage and other kinds of dramas replaced the ‘remodeling’ of rooms and hallways.”

He adds, “But, at least Joe got a hit song out of it,” referencing 1978’s Life’s Been Good.

In 1976, the Eagles played 68 shows worldwide, from Tucson to Tokyo. For most bands, that would not be a year to make a new album. But the Eagles did, grabbing studio time whenever and wherever they could.

“The demands of touring definitely made it more difficult for us to stay in a creative space, particularly in terms of songwriting,” Henley says. “But, because we were young – and driven – we managed to learn how to juggle. Did the work suffer? Probably, but we did the best we could, given the circumstances we were in. It’s a demanding job, feeding the machine. The machine is always hungry.

“But momentum is important,” he continues. “Once you’re on a hot streak, it’s wise to try to maintain it. Otherwise, you get forgotten or replaced pretty quickly. Back in the ’60s, the Beatles had set an impossibly high bar, both in terms of quality and quantity. So record companies had come to expect an album or two every year. But the Beatles had been able to stop touring and focus solely on recording. Touring was a necessity for us so that we could pay for rent and gas.”

The first sessions for Hotel California were in March at Studio C, the coveted big room at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, with Szymczyk back behind the board. “We’d do two or three weeks, then the band would go back on the road,” he says, recalling they had only one finished song – Meisner’s Try and Love Again. Beyond that, just a “handful of fragments, licks and phrases.”

As Walsh said in Buzz Me In, “We took all of that, put it on a table and said, ‘Okay, let’s pretend this is a jigsaw puzzle,’ and we started piecing things together.”

The jigsaw puzzles could be complex. On the surface, the album’s first single, New Kid in Town, is a soft-rock sigh. But structurally and harmonically, it’s one of the most-involved Eagles songs. Henley says, “That one was mostly J.D., with some essential input from Glenn in terms of words, melody and arrangement, and a few lyrical contributions from me. It’s a great piece of work.”

Modulations, shifting choruses, meticulous ornamentation from Felder on electric and Meisner on the guitarrón Mexicano, wrapped in a harmony cascade that earned a Grammy for Best Vocal Arrangement (“It had parts out the wazoo,” Szymczyk says). How did those beautifully complex arrangements get written?

“Well, nobody ‘wrote’ anything; it wasn’t that formal,” Henley says. “We did everything intuitively, including vocal harmony arrangements. First, we’d decide who was going to sing the lead vocal and then assign harmony parts around that, depending on the key of the song and where the melody sat within the chord progression.”

In the studio, they worked from “2 to 2, with a dinner break at 7,” usually at Dan Tana’s, a favorite red-boothed old Hollywood eatery, next door to the Troubadour. Though friends dropped by the studio, mostly it was the band and Szymczyk, who they nicknamed “Coach.”

“They said I was the Don Shula of rock ’n’ roll,” he says, referencing the Miami Dolphins’ legendary honcho (who was at the helm for their perfect 1972 season). “I was a player’s coach more than Shula,” says Szymczyk with a laugh.

He kept a keen eye and ear on the sessions and was a wizard with a tape-editing razor. And on Hotel California, he had to lay down what he called “the six o’clock rule” to make sure recreational activities didn’t derail progress, including his own.

“Everything was getting a little out of hand by three in the afternoon, so I was like, ‘Okay, enough of that. No beer, no blow, no reefer, no nothing until six.”

That worked for a few weeks; then the grumbling started. Szymczyk says, “I’d be changing reels in the control room, and I’d hear them muttering, ‘Is it six yet?’ followed by ‘It had better be.’”

On the initial pressings of the album, “It is six o’clock yet?” was etched into the runout groove of Side A.

On Side B, the etched phrase was, “VOL is five-piece live.”

“That’s because we were proud that we got that song, Victim of Love, in one take without any edits,” Szymczyk says. The rocker began with a Don Felder guitar instrumental that he passed to Henley and Frey. They brought in J.D. Souther again, who came up with the concept – that having a broken heart is like being a victim of a car crash. In that scenario, all three were frequent car crashers, burning through relationships. “Dudes on a rampage” was how Henley described it.

When it came time to do an album, he and Frey would usually move in together. Before Hotel California, they were briefly ensconced in a Beverly Hills house that once belonged to actress Dorothy Lamour. With panoramic 360-degree views, it was nicknamed “the Eagles’ nest.”

They were an odd couple – Henley the tidy one, Frey the lovable slob, leaving mountains of cigarette ash everywhere. The togetherness might not have helped their friendship, but it was great for songwriting.

Victim of Love’s tale of betrayal and disillusionment was paired with a stuttering, crunchy groove. Felder had assumed he would sing lead, but after a week’s worth of takes, his vocal was deemed “not up to band standards.” Henley recorded the lead while manager Irving Azoff took Felder out to lunch to break the bad news.

In the summer, Szymczyk moved the sessions to Criteria Studios in Miami. “The guys were actually quite happy to be out of L.A. and away from all the partying and the hangers-on,” he says. The only challenge in Miami was the occasional ear-splitting squall coming from the studio next door, where Black Sabbath were recording their 1976 album Technical Ecstasy.

Meanwhile, in the world outside the studio, the United States was basking in its bicentennial. On the surface, the country’s 200th birthday was all stars and stripes, but that was tainted by a Watergate hangover and relentless dark stories in the news.

“The ‘peace and love’ idealism of the ’60s had faded by the beginning of the decade,” Henley says. “The so-called counterculture, due in part to its own excesses, had disintegrated. The U.S. was trying hard to focus on the bicentennial, but the Cold War continued and the Boomer generation had slowly realized that the same corporate forces that had always been in charge were still, in fact, in charge, and there was an air of capitulation.

“There were now the realities of jobs and families to consider. Gone was the dream of a new kind of America; gone was the appetite for rebellion. ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.’”

One of the album’s standout tracks was both a celebration and critique of L.A.’s decadence and the band’s own excesses – Life in the Fast Lane could’ve been subtitled Nervous, Edgy Feeling.

“There are a great many of our songs that could be retitled Note to Self,” Henley says. “Excess – too much of a bad thing or a good thing – was a subject we examined, both from a personal perspective and an American cultural standpoint.”

The song’s classic riff began as what Walsh called his “coordination drill.”

“I had this lick that I played that I would warm up for a show with,” he told Paul Shaffer on Plus One. “It’s an exercise between your right and left hand, faster and faster. I was just playing, warming up for the show, and Glenn comes busting in my dressing room and says, ‘What the hell’s that?’ ‘I don’t know, it’s just this lick I warm up with.‘ He said, ‘No, that‘s an Eagles song, dude!’”

On In the Studio with Redbeard, Frey said the title came one day after a crazy car ride with a drug dealer nicknamed The Count. Going 90mph, Frey asked the dealer to slow down, and the answer came – “It’s life in the fast lane!” With that title, he and Henley wrote the lyrics and melody together.

“We knew it was going to be the most rock ’n’ roll thing the Eagles had attempted so far,” Walsh said. “They turned me loose on that one.”

And what guitar was he using? “That’s a Strat,” Walsh told Total Guitar, “and the amplifier was probably this little orange Roland Cube I was using a lot back then. I found it to be a pretty darn good little amp for recording with a Strat, by turning it up pretty good to make it work.”

The killer riff doubled with guitar and bass, cliff-hanging power chords and trademark four-part harmonies on the chorus. This was a classic Eagles record, yet one that sounded like nothing they’d ever done. And as sonic icing, Szymczyk employed a Jimi Hendrix trick – the “Electric Ladyland two-track flange technique” – to add a whooshing sound to the song’s off-ramp exit.

“When I suggested phasing at the end of the song, Henley and Frey were skeptical,” he says. They thought it might sound too much like the Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park, which Szymczyk says was the inspiration. “I just wanted listeners to feel the rush of the wind in their hair!”

An ocean breeze was in Don Felder’s hair the afternoon he got the idea that would become Hotel California. In his Malibu beach house, noodling on a 12-string Martin acoustic, he hit on a Spanish-sounding chord progression. He put it down on a reel-to-reel four-track, then layered on syncopated electric guitars and a samba beat from a Rhythm Ace drum machine.

He sent it off to Henley and Frey on a cassette with another dozen snippets. They liked what they called “the matador in Mexico” vibe of it and experimented with lyrical and melody ideas.

Henley took the cassette in the car, his favorite place to write. He says, “I think it has something to do with movement and a constantly changing view. Just sitting in a room and trying to find inspiration can be stifling; it’s a static situation. Driving, if you’re not in heavy traffic, creates a feeling of flow that can free the imagination and call up memories and images while the music’s playing.”

After a week or two, the song took shape. “The hotel concept came first, and then the melody,” Henley says. “Sometime in May of ’76, Glenn and I had gone to see Neil Simon’s play California Suite in Los Angeles. But that was after we had come up with the hotel concept; seeing the play was a ‘field research’ trip, just to see if it would help us to flesh out our initial idea. But it wasn’t very helpful; it wasn’t dark and spooky enough for what we were after.”

Or maybe the title influenced them, because their spooky inn became the Hotel California, and in turn, a metaphor for everything from the myth-making of the American Dream to an artist’s search for the muse and spiritual meaning.

The recording of the song took some searching, too. “We cut the track several times, first at Criteria Studios, shortly after Felder had given me the demo,” Henley says.

“The Miami recording was a rough arrangement with the working title ‘Mexican Reggae.’ The second time we cut it was at the Record Plant in L.A., after Glenn and I had come up with some ideas for lyrics and melody, but that recording turned out to be in the wrong key, at least for singing.

“There was often a schism between what key was best for the guitars and what key was best for the lead vocal. At the end of the day, though, the vocal has to take precedence. There are workarounds on the guitar – tunings, capos, etc – but you can’t capo a voice. Or at least you couldn’t then. So we ended up cutting the final track in Miami in the key of B minor with the choruses going to G major.”

Szymczyk recalls that the final version consisted of “33 separate tape edits from five different takes.”

Aside from being the album’s thematic centerpiece and the Eagles’ best song, it also rode out on one of rock’s most iconic guitar duels, with Felder and Walsh trading sizzle and sting, one-upping each other, then finally merging in triumphant two-part harmony.

“We worked really well together,” Walsh told Guitar World while promoting Analog Man in 2012. “It was competitive. We brought out the best in each other. We liked to kick each other in the butt! He would play something, and I’d get an attitude, like, ‘Oh yeah? Listen to this.’ And he’d go, ‘Wow, listen to this!’”

“For two days, we workshopped the hell out of that,” Szymczyk says. “We had amps out in the studio, but Felder and Walsh were in the control room with me, one to the right, one to the left, like gunfighters! Felder was the ultimate technician, always a tad on top of the beat. And Walsh was the ultimate ‘feel’ guy, always a tad behind it. Together, they were phenomenal. Those two days were one of the high points of my career.”

“There are at least half a dozen guitar tracks on the original recording,” Henley says. “In live concert settings, this required Felder to play a double-neck guitar, with the 12-string neck being capo’d on the seventh fret for the intro and the breakdown, and the six-string with no capo for the single-line phrases and the tag solos.

“One of the unique things about the song is that it ends with extended dual guitar solos. Skynyrd had done something like that a couple of years earlier.”

Another thing it shared with Skynyrd’s Free Bird was a length that wasn’t exactly radio friendly – six and a half minutes, to be exact. “The label wanted us to do a single edit, and we all said no way,” Szymczyk says. “Obviously, we were right to.”

After seven months of off-and-on recording, the album wrapped in October.

The cover artwork, designed by John Kosh (who also handled Who’s Next and the Beatles’ Abbey Road), featured a photo of the Beverly Hills Hotel taken from a cherry picker 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard at dusk. Built in 1912 in a Mediterranean Revival style, the pink stucco hotel had hosted famous guests from Marilyn Monroe to Frank Sinatra.

A month after the album came out, when the hotel learned that the Eagles had used the image without permission, they threatened a lawsuit, then dropped it when they realized their bookings had tripled because of the record’s success.

Hotel California was released December 8, 1976, and certified platinum in its first week. It went to Number 1 on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for eight weeks. Reviews were glowing. Creem said there were “no weak tracks; the music flows majestically every step of the way.”

Phonograph Record praised its “peerless harmonies" and said it was “pretty and punchy, as the best albums of fellow troubled hedonists Steely Dan and the Beach Boys are.” NME said, “There’s no laurels-resting, and a lot has gone into its meticulous crafting.”

While Szymczyk calls the record a “quantum leap forward,” Henley’s estimation is more modest. “I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘quantum leap,’” he says. “One of These Nights had three big hits on it. But, in terms of growth and consistency and range, I’d agree that Hotel California was an improvement.”

But the 10-month, 72-date world tour that followed was grueling, so much so that the band’s road crew nicknamed it “The Prison California.” Everyone traveled with their own little entourage. Walsh and Felder had their faction, briefly entertaining the idea of forming their own band.

In History of the Eagles, Henley said, “Glenn and I saw ourselves as the leaders, but other people saw us as dictators. You just cannot have five leaders in a band. It doesn’t work.” But according to To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, even the two leaders had stopped talking and would only communicate through second parties.

There were also cocaine-induced physical ailments. Stomach ulcers all around. Henley suffered back pain. Frey’s nasal lining was shot (he’d have two surgeries before getting his nose repaired with teflon). By the end of the tour, Meisner had become persona non grata after refusing to sing Take It to the Limit at one show; he left the band shortly after.

The Eagles managed one more album, 1979’s difficult The Long Run (“We called it ‘The Long One,’” Szymczyk says) then broke up after a benefit concert where Frey and Felder openly threatened to fight each other on stage during the performance. It would be 14 years before they reunited.

Despite one album of new material in 2007, the Eagles have become a heritage act, playing the hits – albeit one of the highest-grossing ones on the circuit. After Glenn Frey died in 2016 at age 67, they soldiered on with his son Deacon and Vince Gill taking his place. And so it’s gone over the past decade.

Meanwhile, there are at least 10 high-profile Eagles tribute bands who are on the road as much as the Eagles were in their ’70s heyday. And though classic rock radio has mostly disappeared, subscription services have kept the music playing. Hotel California alone passed two billion streams on Spotify in October 2025.

During the Eagles’ 2026 residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere, Henley confided to CBS Sunday Morning that “This year will probably be it. I’ve said things like that before, but I feel like we’re getting toward the end.”

Meanwhile, their Sphere setlist contains the three key tracks from Hotel California – New Kid in Town, Life in the Fast Lane and the title song. With sold-out audiences singing along to every word and guitar lick, this is music that is now an indelible part of musical culture. It’s a reminder of how the world felt and sounded in the mid-’70s, and also how the American Dream continues to roll along that desert highway, toward the light, but surrounded by the dark.

It makes the album sound just as relevant as it did 50 years ago. “I could make a case for it,” Henley says. “The political chicanery, the national delusion, the undoing of decades of environmental progress, the rebirth of the military-industrial complex. I’ve lived long enough to see that we go around in circles. I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.’”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

A teaser of the tracklist for Stage Tour – the upcoming rhythm-action game by Guitar Hero producers RedOctane Games – has just been released, and, spoiler alert, it includes a bunch of hits.

Largely perceived as the spiritual successor to Guitar Hero – the multi-million dollar rhythm game series released between 2005 and 2015 – Stage Tour was announced in February and is scheduled for release later this year.

Red Hot Chili Peppers make an appearance with their 2006 release, Dani California, while Swedish band Ghost contribute Square Hammer – their Billboard Mainstream Rock chart topper.

Elsewhere, RATATATA – from Japanese kawaii metal band BABYMETAL and German electronicore band Electric Callboy – also makes the cut.

Nuno Bettencourt’s Extreme, with their 1990 single Get the Funk Out – whose solo Brian May himself hailed as a landmark in rock history – is also included in the tracklist, with Weezer’s alt-rock early-aughts hit Island in the Sun, Static-X’s Terminal Oscillator, and Good Kid’s Mimi’s Delivery Service rounding off the list.

Aside from this Rolodex of artists, Gibson, Kramer, Epiphone and Mesa Boogie are all in on the action, as a new Kramer-modeled guitar peripheral has been unveiled at the 2026 IGN Live event this past weekend. Other instruments and equipment from these brands are also said to be featured in the game.

RedOctane Games confirmed that Stage Tour will support plastic instrument controllers and up to four players across groove/bass, vocals and drums, as well as support for standard computer keyboard controls and gamepads.

With the ultimate aim of not only bringing rhythm games back, but bringing them back better than ever before – at least according to project lead Alex Jeffreys in the developer spotlight trailer – the game looks set to follow Guitar Hero’s lead.

If the initial tracklist is anything to go by, it will not only give a boost to established names in music, but also help launch new ones.

Guitar Hero did help transform bands like DragonForce into household names after all – so much so that, according to Herman Li, the song featured in the game, Through the Fire and Flames, tends to overshadow the rest of the band's repertoire.

The game also helped inspire a newer generation of artists to pick up guitar and make it their own. Yasmin Williams is one such guitarist who, inspired by Guitar Hero, flipped her acoustic onto her lap and developed her unique lap-tapping technique.

Proving that imitation really is the greatest form of flattery, a bootleg version of viral sensations Angine de Poitrine has been playing shows in Russia and raising a few eyebrows in the process.

The polka-dot-loving, microtonal duo have taken the internet by storm in 2026, with their KEXP performance watched 15 million times since February, winning the heart of Dave Grohl along the way.

But with great power comes the great possibility that a tribute band will come out of the woodwork. Except this isn’t a tribute band – they’re posing as the real thing.

The downside of wearing elaborate stage costumes and masks like the Canadians do means it’s harder to distinguish real from ripoffs, but the fact that this band plays what looks to be a single-necked, non-polka-dotted eight-string guitar, rather than the unique twin-necked beast that has become the real band’s centerpiece, does give the game away.

Well, that and the fact that they sound like a Temu version. This is “we have Angine de Poitrine at home” manifest.

“There’s a fake [version of the] band touring Russia already, with the costumes and everything,” Sam Murdock, the real band’s art director, tells Exclaim. “They keep tagging the band, and they don’t even say it’s not a real band. And they have a one-neck guitar.”

Of course, there’s nothing untoward about tribute bands, but Murdock feels this goes beyond traditional, artist-impersonating realms. And it’s Murdock’s job to separate fact from fiction.

“We’re living in a weird time where everyone’s trying to make money off the band,” he says. “Right now, there’s like 1,500 fake T-shirts online already. I removed 700 fake T-shirts on Tee Republic and on Red Bubble, but they keep on popping up.”

Footage of the fake band performing in Moscow has emerged online, with a clear gulf in class between them and the real deal.

But with Eastwood now offering an Angine-coded microtonal double-neck, born after a failed signature guitar collab, the fake band might look a little more convincing in the near future. Not that we should be giving them any ideas.

The actual band, meanwhile, are on tour for the rest of the year, starting in Canada, before moving through Europe in October and finally landing in the US in November/December. At the time of writing, Russia isn’t on the schedule.

Prog rock legends Rush have made their long-awaited return to the stage.

11 years after the band exited stage left at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, they were back at the same venue with new drummer Anika Nilles in tow as they kickstarted the Fifty Something tour in style. Our friends at Classic Rock did the math, with the band ending the 3,964-day wait by playing a song that has never opened a Rush set before.

Launching into Xanadu, from 1977’s A Farewell to Kings, the new-look lineup did little to shy away from the fan favorites, with mammoth hits including Moving Pictures’ bangers Limelight and Red Barchetta, The Spirit of the Radio, La Villa Strangiato, and Subdivisions all packed into a breathless two sets. And yes, they played 2112, stripping it down to just three parts.

But it wasn’t just the big hitters on show. Unexpected songs, including Dreamline, The Garden, a tender cut from the band’s superlative final album, Clockwork Angels, and By-Tor & The Snow Dog, ensured the setlist represented a career-wide representation of one of the best bands to abuse time signatures and double-neck guitars with wilful abandon.

And, shock horror, there were plenty of guitars on display. From Geddy Lee’s double-neck Rickenbacker and Lifeson’s double-neck Gibson SG used on that rip-roaring opener, to a Gibson Custom Shop Greeny – gifted to Lifeson by Kirk Hammett – the pair have brought a wealth of gorgeous instruments onto the tour bus.

Tonally, Lifeson has also opted to include his signature IK Multimedia TONEX pedal in his live rig, as he vies to replicate the classic sounds of the band’s records across the set, making it a history of Rush tone, too.

Rush produced 19 albums and a sea of classic material over a change-making 40-year career. That was widely believed to have ended after the R40 tour concluded in 2015, given that Peart wanted to retire from the road.

Peart passed away in 2020, with most fans believing that spelled the end of the band for good. But after the success of Lee and Lifeson’s cameo at the Taylor Hawkins tribute show, the pair opted to revive the band with the help of former Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles and ex-Who keyboardist Loren Gold.

Though there was a queue of what Geddy Lee calls “distasteful” drummers eyeing Peart’s drum throne, it was German fusion drummer Nilles who was given the nod. The fact that she wasn’t already immersed in the prog scene, or even a Rush superfan, helps create a degree of separation between Rush with Neil ‘the Professor’ Peart, and this surprise new era of the band.

“When Al and I finally said, ‘Okay, I guess we’re getting serious. Who’s going to sit in that impossible seat? It’s daunting,” Lee admitted to Classic Rock. “[Nilles] brought a lot to the table, but more than her chops, more than her guts, and her willingness to sit in that hot seat, she brought an intelligence and a story.”

The band will now traverse across the US and Canada, with South American and European shows taking place next year.

Rush setlist: Kia Forum, Los Angeles

Set 1

• Xanadu
• Limelight
• Far Cry
• Subdivisions
• Freewill
• Bravad
• Caravan
• La Villa Strangiato
• Vital Signs
• The Spirit of Radio

Set 2

• 2112 Part I: Overture
• 2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx
• 2112 Part VII: Grand Finale
• Distant Early Warning
• Red Barchetta
• Dreamline
• Natural Science
• Time Stand Still
• Red Sector A
• YYZ
• The Garden
• Tom Sawyer

Encore

• By-Tor & The Snow Dog
• Working Man

Radiohead went wireless for the first time during their recent tour after testing a new system that left even their most cynical techs impressed.

The band’s shows across the UK and Europe late last year were their first in seven years, and a newly forged relationship with US firm Sound Devices has helped modernize their live rigs and perhaps convinced them to ditch cables for good.

“The band doesn’t tend to change how they operate for the sake of changing; they are only interested in upgrades that will serve their musical goals,” says Radiohead FOH mixer Simon Hodge. “Although the band has used RF [Radio Frequency] systems for guitars in the past, the opinion was always that it never sounded as good as a cable.

“In an arena, you have so many factors affecting the sound that go far beyond RF or cables, which is why we spend so much time in advance doing blind tests and ensuring we’re starting from the best place.”

Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Thom Yorke, as well as bass player Colin Greenwood, have all welcomed Astral ARX32 Wireless Receivers and Astral TX Wireless Transmitters into their setups.

One important factor was Sound Device’s Astral Guitar Cable – for connecting electric guitars to the Astral transmitters – which ended up having no impact on their tone whatsoever.

“We brought it into Jonny’s studio and did some blind tests between Astral and their preferred cables,” Hodge recounts. “We all listened, and even the most cynical guitar techs were impressed.

“The quality of the audio path was obvious, and it wasn’t changing the sound at all. The packs also auto-detect the cable, allowing us to easily adjust them in the receiver menu or UI as needed per instrument.”

Then there was the matter of dealing with the multiple guitar changes throughout the set.

So, the tech fed the Astral ARX32 inputs into a Prodigy Audio Processor via Dante and custom Streamdeck controllers, essentially creating a main hub for all the guitar signals.

“The band travels with dozens of guitars; Ed O’Brien himself had 32 on this run,” Hodge says. “This was the first time we could have all 32 at once accessible and easily switchable in the same interface, a choice that either the musician or tech can make as needed.

“The Astral Guitar System ended up being a game changer for us.”

As revealed to Rolling Stone in March, the band has adopted a less chaotic touring model moving forward, promising 20 shows per year on a different continent. Last year, they played four-show residencies in five European cities, with other continents set to get some Radiohead action in the near future.

Elsewhere, Ed O’Brien, who recently announced a new solo album, has opened up about how the guitar has helped him combat depression.

When The Sweet were forced to part with their singer in rather chaotic circumstances, a heavy metal legend offered up his services to a band in disarray.

Andy Scott is the last man standing from the group’s 1970s heyday, which yielded timeless glam hits The Ballroom Blitz and Fox on the Run. In a new interview with Guitar World, he details how Brian Connolly’s time in the band, marred by drinking problems, came to a head during a bizarre shotgun incident.

Yet, before Connolly was shown the exit, the band was offered an escape route.

“We played some shows in America with Rainbow, and at one point, Ronnie James Dio came into the dressing room,” Scott recalls. “He said, ‘You can see what’s going on here. Brian isn’t going to last the distance. If you need some help with the vocals, I’m your man.’”

As it transpired, Dio was also looking for a change of pace. He was disenchanted with life alongside Blackmore – a man who, a former bandmate once said, “chewed up and spat out musicians.”

“He called me later and said, ‘I don’t like what’s going on with Ritchie Blackmore, and I’m looking for an escape,’” Scott goes on. “Brian was gone at that point, so I talked to the guys. Steve [Priest, bass] was so against it. He said, ‘We’ve been singing our own songs without Brian. Why would we need someone else?’”

Upon Connolly’s dismissal, the band had plowed on, with Priest handling the bulk of vocal duties rather than replacing him outright. Priest was steadfast in his thinking, and Dio was equally as determined to get his way.

“I told Ronnie how Steve felt, and he said, ‘You could always leave and join me,’” Scott reveals. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea,’ but I couldn’t do it. I knew that if I left The Sweet, that would be the end. The other guys weren’t band-leader types.”

Dio would get his escape, though, as he was soon selected as the man to replace Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, with Ozzy going on to make history with Randy Rhoads.

For The Sweet, their aptly-titled third album, Identity Crisis, was poorly promoted, and they’d go on to take a three-year hiatus between 1982 and 1985, before continuing as spinoff groups.

Little did they know, but the snubbing of Dio set both parties on very different paths and trajectories. Oh, what could have been...

Scott’s full interview is available in the new issue of Guitar World, which features Rush on the cover. Copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

2112 is widely regarded as Rush’s commercial breakthrough. Disappointing album sales of 1975’s Caress of Steel, coupled with declining attendance at shows – not to mention a less-than-ideal critical reaction and the potential catastrophe of being dropped by their label – spurred Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, and Neil Peart to, frankly, give it their all.

Now, as the newly reformed Rush – with drummer Anika Nilles – are set to embark on the Fifty Something Tour, kicking off on June 7, Lifeson recalls that uncertain period and how much of a make-or-break moment it really was for the band.

“We were heavily in debt,” Lifeson says matter-of-factly in an interview with Rick Beato. “Our managers had spent so much money just keeping us on the road, and there was a lot of pressure.

“It really was, either we go home, and I go work for my dad as a plumbing assistant, or we just say screw everybody, we're just going to make the record that we want to make, and if it fails, then at least it's our thing, we did it. That was [1976’s] 2112 – so that was my protest record.”

Lifeson clarifies that the record’s success wasn’t “instantaneous,” but rather, “it took a year for that record… touring and promoting it” to find its audience.

“What happened was people really locked onto it. This happens to so many people: when you discover a band, you feel like that's your band. I'm the only person that knows how great this band is. That's kind of what happened, one gig at a time.”

By the end of that same year, the record had gone platinum, even entering the Canadian Albums Chart, peaking at No.5, as well as becoming the band’s first record to crack the U.S. Top 100.

“We were on a much better track,” Lifeson continues. “Now the gigs were starting to come in, we were headlining more… we felt emboldened, and never was a record company executive or management allowed in the studio from that point on. That bought us our independence, and we were precious with that.”

In a classic Guitar World interview from 1996, the Rush guitarist described the atmosphere that led to the creation of 2112.

“Because there was so much negative feeling from the record company, and our management was worried, we came back full force with 2112,” he recalled. “There was a lot of passion and anger on that record.”

Ultimately, “it was about one person standing up against everybody else.”

In more recent news, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson revealed that, following Peart’s death, several drummers tried to force a Rush reunion on them while they were still in mourning.

With Paul McCartney releasing his first solo album in over five years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and the Beatles’ four-film biopic’s main cast already announced, it seems only natural that the actor who’s transforming into Macca – Paul Mescal – had a chat with the legend about his songwriting process. And luckily for the rest of us, it was captured on camera.

“I teach some kids up in my old school in Liverpool, and that's like the first thing [they ask]. I don't know how to do this, which is not very inspiring. I haven’t got a formula,” McCartney tells Mescal.

“They used to ask me and John [Lennon], ‘How’d you do it? Who writes the music, who writes the words?’ I don’t know. To me, I think any story or song you’re gonna do, it’s gotta involve memory. With the Beatles, we always tried to write something different.”

Lennon still serves as a source of inspiration for McCartney – especially considering his upcoming album turns a lens inward and revisits the formative years that not only shaped his own life but the very foundation of the Beatles.

“I ran into this guy called John Lennon, and he was kind of fighting life,” he reminisces of his collaborator., whose first single, Love Me Do, was released in 1962.

“He'd had a lot of trouble. His dad had left home, his mom had got run over… so he was putting up a shield, so he's very witty, very biting. And then when it came to writing, that kind of relationship stayed there.

“So on this record, I might even refer to him in my mind, as if we're still writing together. I'll write something and go, ‘What's that? Is that any good?’”

“And you're talking to him?” inquires Mescal.

“Kind of,” the older Paul affirms. “In my mind. Sometimes I get away with it. Sometimes you say, ‘No, it's shit.’ Well, his spirit’s sort of still in me, and I’m very glad of that.”

The first Lennon-McCartney Beatles single, Love Me Do, was released in 1962. Their final collaboration, Now and Then, was released in November 2023.

The full conversation is available on Amazon Live and in the Amazon Music app.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is out on May 29 via MPL/Capitol Records.

After three decades, ’90s alt-rock producer extraordinaire Butch Vig has officially reunited with the Smashing Pumpkins to work on a new single.

“Back in the studio with Butch Vig for the first time in 32 years! James, Jimmy, and I had an awesome time recording this new single,” shared Billy Corgan on social media.

Corgan gave more details during his Substack livestream on May 19, where he teased what happened during the session, as well as what fans can expect from this new single.

“We’ve just recorded one song,” Corgan revealed [transcribed by Rolling Stone].

“It’s for a specific purpose, which I can’t give that part out … I haven’t come up with a title yet, honestly. The plan is the song will be released this year. I can’t say exactly when. There’s reasons for that … The song is really cool. It’s basically done recording. I’d say there’s a couple little things left. I’d say it’s 98 percent done.

“If this isn’t a 10 out of 10 announcement, I don’t know what is,” he continues. “This may be an 11 out of 10 announcement. This news isn’t anywhere. You’re hearing this first.”

However, fans hoping to hear the track live during the band's recently announced Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness anniversary tours in the UK, Europe and the States may be disappointed, as Corgan cautioned it may not be possible due to a “timing issue.”

Vig made history with Corgan and co. when he produced their seminal first two albums, Gish (1991) and Siamese Dreams (1993).

In a recent interview with Guitar World, Corgan revealed that he is “very focused on guitar music,” so the collab reveal bodes well for a potential Pumpkins album following their 2024 release, Aghori Mhori Mei.

“It’s the most motivated I have been to make a guitar record in 20-25 years,” he said. “Part of that is shoegaze music has really come back in the culture, which we’re commonly associated with.

“There came a point in the mid-2000s where it seemed like guitar was totally out of vogue. I’m not a Luddite – if people are not interested in guitar, that’s cool by me, and I’ll try to come at it a different way. But guitar is the thing I understand the most, and where I’ve had the most influence.”

In more recent Smashing Pumpkins news, amp builder Brian Carstens has revealed how he went from being a Corgan superfan to crafting amps for his hero.

They go by names like the Doobie Others, Listen to the Music, and the Brothers Doobie. These are just some of the myriad Doobie Brothers tribute bands currently circulating. There’s even a group called the Doobie Doubles, who apparently specialize in playing only uptempo rock songs (mellow soul ballads are a no-no with these guys).

Neither Tom Johnston nor John McFee have witnessed these outfits (“I guess I’m missing out,” Johnston says with a laugh), but Patrick Simmons has checked out a few of them online, and he admits they’re not bad.

“They’ve got some great musicians,” he says. “They never sound exactly like us, but I don’t think that’s important. It’s great that musicians would want to take the time to learn those songs and perform them. I can’t fault people for trying to make a living and coming up with a novelty idea, and if they enjoy the music, that’s really flattering for the rest of us.”

Guitarists Johnston and Simmons have been playing together off and on (mostly on) ever since they founded the Doobie Brothers in San Jose, California, back in 1970. McFee, who has something of a Swiss Army Knife role in the band (in addition to guitar, he also plays mandolin, banjo, violin, cello, and pedal steel – basically, anything with strings), joined the Doobies in 1979 but still refers to himself as “the new guy.”

Collectively, they represent each era of the hit-making, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. There’s the funky, boogie-rock Johnston period of the early Seventies that yielded AM/FM radio gems like Listen to the Music, China Grove, Black Water, and Long Train Runnin’, along with the late-’70s/early-’80s mellow soul phase during which second-wave frontman Michael McDonald delivered crossover smashes like Minute by Minute, Real Love, and the Grammy-winning chart-topper What a Fool Believes.

The latter song is widely seen as a key example of the genre known as “yacht rock,” the very mention of which elicits good-natured chuckles and eye rolls from the group’s guitar trio.

“I’ve never even been on a yacht,” McFee says, to which Johnston adds, “I don’t even know what the term is supposed to mean – ‘yacht rock.’ It just seems kind of absurd to me.”

There have been breakups and reunions, and in-between it all McDonald established himself as a solo star, but Johnston, Simmons, McFee, and McDonald have been together as Doobies since 2019.

They released a solid studio recording, Walk This Road, last year, and this summer they join guitar legend Carlos Santana on his Oneness Tour.

“We’ve toured with Carlos before,” Johnston says. “I’ve known him since 1971, ’72. I hardly ever see him unless it’s on the road, but he’s such a good guy. I love playing with him and his band. We have a ball.”

Whatever differences contributed to the band’s various hiatuses (the longest was between 1982 and ’87) seem to have been ironed out long ago.

“We have disagreements like anybody else,” Simmons says. “We’ve certainly had our moments when we’ve gotten on each other’s nerves, especially at the end of a tour when it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, is he gonna keep snoring when I’m trying to sleep?’ But we’ve been lucky enough to sustain our relationships, and really, it’s all about the music. We’ve got great writers and players, and people love what we do.”

“We had our conflict in the Seventies,” Johnston says. “As time goes by, you learn what to do and what not to do. You learn to take care of yourself and not be destructive. We all get along now, and we just want to keep on moving forward. I think if you keep moving forward, things have a way of fixing themselves.”

The Doobies have something like 300 songs, and a lot of them are hits. Who decides the setlist each night?

Tom Johnston: Pat and I do a lot of that, and then we bring Mike in on it. It's really based around the guys who are going to sing, but we also look at the set and tailor a lot of it to what the crowd wants to hear and the songs we're okay with playing.

Obviously, we want to play the hits for the audience. We've been playing a lot of stuff off the new album, and we’ll probably do one or two new songs when we open for Carlos. The rest will be stuff everybody knows.

The new album is the first one the band has recorded with Michael in four decades. Does it feel like you’ve got two eras of the group comfortably accounted for in this lineup?

Johnston: I think it's a good idea to look at it that way, because that's what we're doing, whether it’s on record or live. We put it all out there. All the eras of the band are represented, and the people love it.

John McFee: I think the music integrates from all the different eras. I love it.

Patrick Simmons: It’s more than two eras, I think. We’ve always had multiple writers, multiple approaches and different influences. The biggest influences, of course, would be Tommy and Mike. They're both prolific writers and great singers. You're going to feel their influence over and above everybody else just by virtue of their… what's the word? Their energy!

John Shanks produced this one and the album before it, Liberté. He’s also a notable guitar player.

Johnston: A really good guitar player.

Does he get really granular with suggestions for guitar tracks – to the point where it’s annoying?

Johnston: No, not in that way. He did play on the album – and quite a bit – but everybody contributed all the stuff they normally would. Mostly John was involved with a lot of the writing. He co-wrote every song on the record.

Was it a smooth process writing with him?

Johnston: It went fine. Albums can be smooth and not smooth at any given time with pretty much anybody, but I thought it went pretty well. The only difference about working with John is that whoever co-wrote is the one that's in the studio. The whole band is hardly ever in there. You work on it to a certain point, and then you bring in guys to sing and play parts and whatnot.

That’s not the way you’ve always recorded.

Johnston: Before this one and Liberté, we’ve kind of had the whole band in a lot of the time, especially doing basic tracks. You come up with ideas as you’re hearing them – everybody throws stuff out there. That’s kind of how the band worked for a very long time. So this one and the last were different in that aspect.

Let’s talk about the guitar frequency puzzle. John, I know you play a lot of other instruments, but at any given time the three of you are playing guitar on stage. How do you divvy up the sonic real estate?

Johnston: We don't look at it like that, at least I don't. I think if it sounds good and everybody has their own parts, that’s just what naturally works itself out. John uses a digital rig, which is different from amplifiers. Pat uses an amp, but he plays Strats. I use PRS. All of that creates different sounds on stage as far as the guitars go.

McFee: I think it’s got a lot to do with the parts that are being played. A lot of the time it depends on who played what on the records. Obviously, Tom is going to start Long Train Runnin’ with that rhythmic hook of his. The other parts get divided up depending on how the record was done. A lot of times on the records there's more than two guitar parts, so live we’re able to cover those parts without anything being missed. It's a song-by-song situation.

Simmons: I don’t think we analyze it too heavily. I just want everybody to have fun and feel good. If I'm sitting there criticizing – “There's too much going on” – it starts to become contentious. I’ll certainly confront something if it’s important, but I would never go, “What can I find wrong with this?”

Do you feel obligated to try to recreate the sound of the records as much as possible?

Johnston: I think everybody kind of does the same thing they've been doing for years. We have changed songs’ arrangements here and there, but it basically kind of adheres to the way the song sounded originally.

Sometimes there’s a different way of looking at a song, like having Marc [Russo] on sax, for instance – he plays quite a few solos throughout the set. And then Mike’s on keys, so he’s got his own take on how parts are played. I haven’t changed my rhythm parts on these songs, except sometimes they get expanded.

John, you brought up Long Train Runnin’, which is a perfect example of Tom’s right-hand rhythm technique.

McFee: I had the hardest time teaching that to him, by the way. Just kidding! [Laughs]

Johnston: I think they call it “chunka-chunka.”

Exactly. Tom, where did that come from? Who were you listening to?

Johnston: I think it came from writing songs and playing acoustic a lot in the late Sixties. I didn’t always have people around, like a drummer or bass player or whatever. In order to implement the kind of rhythm I was thinking about, I would do it on the guitar. It’s basically like playing drums and guitar at the same time.

I mean, not exactly, but the idea is to get the rhythm structure across to somebody if you're going to end up playing it in a band or if you're going to end up recording it. I used that rhythm on quite a few songs, but it just happened naturally. I didn't think about it; I just started doing it.

Patrick, have you always found Tom’s rhythms easy to play along to?

Simmons: I think you either play along with somebody and try to complement what they're playing in terms of mimicking the part, which I've done before, or you can break it up and play counter rhythms. I’ve done that, too – it’s sort of my go-to place. I think Tommy prefers it when I play arpeggiated parts, which I do a lot.

John does that, too. Tommy and John have different voices within the context of what they play. John is a little more sophisticated in terms of his choice of notes and his ability to play a little more “outside.” I won't say it’s jazz, but it’s more complementary outside chords, which I think really helps us to create a larger palette, if you will.

That rhythm guitar playing is a big part of Listen to the Music.

Johnston: Sure. I was sitting there with an acoustic, coming up with chord changes – the rhythm and the chord changes set the tone for what I was thinking about. It reminded me of a utopian thing. I was thinking, ‘Can the leaders of the world just sit down and shut up and listen to the music instead of what they were doing?’ This was the Vietnam era.

Simmons: That was a funny track for me. We’d played it for a year and a half, two years, in clubs, and I’d always played kind of an arpeggiated, banjo-ish part. When we cut the song in the studio, I played my part, but it just didn’t kill me.

The other guys sounded great, but I didn’t know what I should do. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll just sing on it.’ Then I started listening to the Eagles and what Bernie Leadon played on Take It Easy. He played the banjo. I mentioned it to producer Ted Templeman, and he said, “Let’s rent you a banjo and see what you can work out.”

I didn’t have anything in mind at first, but I went in the other room and worked out a banjo part. Ted said, “Let’s lay it down.” We laid it down, and he said, “That’s it. That’s the part – you did it.”

What do you guys remember about recording Long Train Runnin’?

Johnston: That was a jam.

Simmons: Tommy had that song when I joined the band. It was basically a jam with the same riff throughout the whole song. We played it that way and made it really long. He’d take a solo and I’d take a solo – we’d stretch it out. We had the “without love” part. Every night he’d make up some lyrics, and I'm going, “Man, don't you have a song for this?” He’d say, “No, not really.” Every night he’d make up lyrics. I was like, “Well, it’s a good song, but whatever.”

Johnston: I even questioned Teddy – “Are you sure you want to record this?” Because it didn't even have lyrics at that point. And he said, “Yeah, we’ve got to do this.” Because we'd been playing it for two or three years at that point, and it was just a jam we did live. It had various names, but it didn’t have words. I would just make ‘em up every night. Finally, we did the track and it got honed in. I wrote lyrics and tried ‘em out, and away we went.

Simmons: We cut the track, and Ted said, “It works, I like it, but it needs some arrangement. As it is now, it's a Latin blues with no form.” So he came up with the stops – that real break at the end before it commences again. I thought that was brilliant, because it gave the song so much more life.

Johnston: The same sort of thing happened with China Grove.

Another song with a brilliant rhythm guitar riff.

Johnston: It's a little different because it's more of an edgy rock and roll thing. I wrote it on an acoustic, same as the others, and came up with the chord changes. Then I grabbed [drummer] John Hartman and started blasting away. We came up with an idea for the song, and then I had to write the lyrics once again.

When you wrote these songs, did you think, “These are hits”?

Johnston: The only one I've ever felt correct about was Listen to the Music. I called Teddy up in the middle of the night and told him that, which he wasn't really thrilled about. But the others I didn't push as singles at all.

Live, you guys still perform tunes like Rockin’ Down the Highway and Jesus Is Just Alright. They must be fun songs to play on guitar.

Johnston: It depends on how long we’ve been out! [Laughs] No, really, they're still fun to play. What really makes them fun is the crowd. The crowd’s reaction drives your exuberance for a song, because we played these songs to death. We've been playing them for over 50 years. When the crowd gets up and starts singing along and dancing and stuff, that makes it all worthwhile.

There’s a lot of muscle memory that goes into playing those solos, but do you ever just say, “Screw it. I’m playing something totally different tonight”?

Johnston: Yeah, usually that's not a great ending from my experience with it.

McFee: We have a fair amount of improvisation that's available to us in the course of the show.

Johnston: People always ask me if I get tired of playing the same songs, and the answer is “no.” They're hits, and I don't get tired of them because every night is different. The challenge is to just do my best every time we go out on the stage.

I think you’d get tired of playing non-hits that nobody wants to hear.

Johnston: We try to weed those out. [Laughs]

Let’s talk about your guitars. Tom, you played Gibsons back in the day…

Johnston: Les Pauls, SGs, 335s, stuff like that.

You’re pretty much a PRS player now, though.

Johnston: Yeah, they’re really dependable. You can get pretty much any sound you want using humbucking-type pickups. If you're playing a guitar a lot, you want to know what to expect from it.

What amps are you using?

Johnston: I’ve been using Mesa for the last five years, I guess. Prior to that, I used a whole bunch of different amps. In the early days, it was all Fender stuff, and that kind of slid over into Ampegs for a while. Live, I try to get a similar sound to the records. You gotta mess around to get the right punchy rhythm tone. For soloing, you want to get something that sings a bit.

Patrick, you also played Gibsons in the Seventies and Eighties, but you’re playing something different these days.

Simmons: It’s sort of a variation of a Stratocaster. What happened was, I fell in love with Jeff Baxter’s Strat, which he built himself. I played it in the studio occasionally – it was great. A friend of mine who worked as our guitar tech for a while said, “I'm building guitars, and I'd like to build you one. What do you want?” I said, “Build me a Strat like Jeff's.” That’s what he did.

We used a lighter wood for the body. Jeff has a maple body, but I used ash. It’s a lighter wood. I used Seymour Duncans originally, and then I switched to different pickups [Ed note: EMGs].

What kinds of amps do you play that guitar through?

Simmons: Mesa Boogie Mark Vs. I’ve got two amps – one for my clean to mid-range “Keith Richards sound,” as I call it, and another for overdrive and leads, my “Carlos Santana sound.”

John, you’re pretty much a Line 6 Variax guy, right?

McFee: For live performances, for sure. I use them in the studio a lot, too. I started using them because I need to be able to get different sounds and different tunings and even different instruments. Like on Listen to the Music, there's a banjo in the chorus, and so my role in the band requires me to have these things available. It would be very difficult to achieve that without something like the Variax.

Did it take you a while to get used to playing without an amp?

McFee: Not at all. I know a lot of people who transition to in-ear monitors have difficulty, but I grew up doing session work in the studio, and I was always on headphones. That’s how I heard myself. I wasn’t standing in front of a Marshall stack, letting it blast.

Obviously, you guys know your way around a guitar, but you’re also an impeccable vocal group.

Simmons: That was always important to us. When we got together, I think our template was Moby Grape; everybody in the band sang. We knew we wanted to rock, we wanted to play the blues, but we loved Moby Grape and their harmonies. And the Beatles!

All the bands we admired were harmony bands – Chicago; Crosby, Stills & Nash… We’ve always worked on our singing. During rehearsals, we spend hours figuring out parts. We’ll have things all worked out, and then somebody will say, “There’s one note here…”

We’ll put things under a microscope. It’s something we love. I love harmony, especially the kinds of things Mike brings to our singing – close harmonies. It’s nice having a guy who really hears that and can come up with cool parts. Our harmonies really opened up, and I think it’s true now more than ever. We’ve really stepped up our game.

• Walk This Road is out now via Rhino.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Rhea Thompson has set the record straight over her departure from Tailgunner, while it's been confirmed bass player Tom Hewson will be stepping back amidst recent allegations that have been leveled against him.

It’s a significant shake-up for Tailgunner, who impressed many – K.K. Downing included – with their fiery 2026 sophomore album, Midnight Blitz, which has guitar solos and classic heavy metal pomp galore.

Manchester, England-based guitarist Thompson joined the band following the release of their debut album, Guns for Hire, and has helped the band’s stock rise in recent years.

However, the young shredder has now issued a lengthy statement about how she left the group, after rumors of her departure circulated online.

It comes after Tailgunner issued a statement of their own, confirming Hewson would be taking a step back from the band after they were “made aware of recent allegations made against him”.

“I want to ensure my truth is told and set the record straight regarding the current situation with Tailgunner,” Thompson writes on social media. “I will not be addressing any details involving the allegations; however, I will confirm that, due to moral and ethical concerns, I am no longer playing for Tailgunner.

“This decision is something I wish I never would have had to make, but ultimately it was one I felt needed to be made.”

Thompson goes on to say that she “became aware through the band’s social media activity and later through word of mouth that I have been replaced for the upcoming shows this summer”.

“After many ignored communications, I initiated a call to discuss what was going on,” Thompson alleges. “At this point, I had never formally resigned. I just stated that I am not comfortable playing with the band under the current circumstances.

“Due to the response from this, it became clear to me that stepping back was the only option, particularly as arrangements had already been made for the shows to move forward without my involvement,” she adds.

In a separate post, Tailgunner revealed that Hewson will not be working with the band in light of the allegations Thompson mentioned in her post.

“Tailgunner has been made aware of the recent allegations against Thomas,” it reads. “While he denies all wrongdoing, he will be stepping back from the band while this situation is properly addressed.

“We as a band take this matter very seriously, and we approach it responsibly and respectfully towards everyone involved.”

The allegations have not publicly come to light at the time of writing.

The K.K. Downing-backed band told Guitar World they are flying the flag for old-school metal, and have appearances at Download Festival in the UK and Dynamo MetalFest in the Netherlands ahead of them. They’ll also be touring with Accept this winter.

The Judas Priest guitarist says the band has “an unashamed appreciation for what came before them” and helped mentor the band while producing Midnight Blitz.

The Sweet may be known as the satin jumpsuit-clad outfit behind iconic ’70s tracks such as The Ballroom Blitz and Fox on the Run. However, as guitarist Andy Scott – the lone survivor of the original powerhouse lineup – tells Guitar World, beyond the glitz, glamour, and the hits, the band eventually felt “it was more important to make music we wanted to hear without compromise.”

Unfortunately, The Sweet’s trajectory was marred by vocalist Brian Connolly’s drinking problems.

“When we recorded Love Is Like Oxygen [widely regarded as their last international success in 1978] we had to do it in the morning when none of us were at our best because we knew that by afternoon, Brian would be drinking so heavily he wouldn’t be capable of singing,” Scott shares.

“The reason Steve [Priest, bassist] and I each sang a song on Level Headed was because Brian was in no condition to do them. That continued, and in 1978, he collapsed a couple times on tour.”

Things finally came to a head when the band was recording 1979’s Cut Above the Rest at Clearwell Castle in England, which would eventually become the first release without Connolly.

The reason was simple: “We couldn’t get a single usable master vocal out of Brian,” Scott admits.

“We did everything we could, but he was beyond control,” he continues. “At one point, he fired a shotgun out of a window into a bird sanctuary. When we heard the bang, we said to the tour manager, ‘You need to take that gun off him!’ He said, ‘I’m not going in there.’ Steve said, ‘Well, if we go in, he might shoot us.’”

Eventually, the owner of the castle managed to take the gun away from him, but that incident was very much the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“After Christmas, we were called into our management’s office. They said, ‘There’s only one way the band survives. Brian has to go.’ And the rest of us kept the band going as a three-piece,” Scott concludes.

For more anecdotes about The Sweet, plus new interviews with Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, pick up issue 605 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

Prog giants Rush are set to hit the road for the first time since Neil Peart’s passing next month, with former Jeff Beck drummer Anika Nilles sitting in for the Professor. But while the band was still in mourning after his death, Geddy Lee says some drummers were already eying Peart’s position.

The band had retired in 2015 after the R40 tour, with Peart’s deteriorating health the main reason for their curtain call. Peart passed away five years later, with most assuming that Rush, simultaneously, were no more.

That has, of course, proven not to be the case. Nilles was recommended to the band by a tech who spent time on the road with Jeff Beck’s 2022 tour, and Lee and Lifeson eventually approached her. However, they note some other players were tactless in their approach.

“People who are close to us – good friends that are successful drummers – would never infer something like that because they have too much respect, not only for Neil and for the situation,” Lee tells Guitar World. “They were grieving as well, so they wouldn’t be so selfish as to say something inappropriate like that.”

However, he adds that “there were many other drummers who reached out to me in the aftermath of Neil’s passing that were pushing themselves, and that was most distasteful to me. It was completely inappropriate timing.”

Lee says it was when he and guitarist Alex Lifeson linked up with Dave Grohl to play Rush songs at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert in 2022 that sparked their reunion. Two years later, they were back on stage again as part of a Gordon Lightfoot tribute show, and the rumor mill began spinning when Lifeson confessed that the pair had been jamming.

But timing and finding the right drummer were everything.

“We didn't really know where to begin to look,” Lee says. “We started with Anika because she had been recommended to me, and I had done some research on her. I loved her vibe and diverse style.

“We didn’t have a list,” he adds. “When Al and I finally said, ‘Okay, I guess we’re getting serious. Who’s going to sit in that impossible seat? It’s daunting. We started with the name that was already on my mind.

“We called her up, she came, and we hit it off. She brought a lot to the table, but more than her chops, more than her guts, and her willingness to sit in that hot seat, she brought an intelligence and a story.”

Born into a family of musicians, Lee says the 42-year-old, born between the Rush's ninth and tenth albums, “doesn’t even remember the first time she picked up sticks,” rather, “It’s who she is.” Her relative freshness, he adds, has been vital in Rush’s second coming.

They soft-launched their comeback at the Juno Awards in late March. Their full-fledged return is happening next month at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, on June 7, where they played their final show with Peart 11 years ago.

Rush are the cover stars of the new issue of Guitar World. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

The Strokes have announced that guitarist Nick Valensi will be taking a “temporary break” from the band’s upcoming tour promoting their seventh studio album, Reality Awaits.

“Nick will be taking a temporary break from the scheduled tour, but we look forward to his return,” the band wrote yesterday (May 14) on their Instagram stories.

While they did not give a reason for his hiatus, they did mention that “holding down the guitar in the meantime is our old friend Steve Schiltz, who many of you will remember from the early NY days.”

A long-time associate and friend of the band, Schiltz was part of the New York-based shoegaze band Longwave. Best known for their early albums Endsongs and The Strangest Things – released in 2000 and 2003, respectively – the band also supported the Strokes on several occasions.

Things came full circle when The Strokes invited him to fill in on guitar for a gig at New York’s Irving Plaza in 2021 and again earlier this year. He will once again take on guitar duties for the upcoming world tour, which kicks off at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee on June 12.

In related news, Haim’s Danielle Haim recently spoke to Guitar World about her experience sidemanning for Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas’ solo project early on in her career.

This interview was first published in the February 2011 issue of Guitar World.

“Sometimes you have to let go of something in order to hold on to it,” says Ray Toro, My Chemical Romance’s lead guitarist.

“I’ve heard that expression before, but I never thought I’d have to apply its meaning to our band. Of course, I didn’t think that things would get as rough as they did for us recently.”

For Toro, fellow guitarist Frank Iero, and the rest of the New Jersey–based group, which also includes lead singer Gerard Way and his bassist brother Mikey (drummer Bob Bryar left the outfit in early 2010), the road to multi-Platinum success has been relatively smooth since My Chemical Romance formed in 2001.

Rising from the East Coast underground goth-emo/punk-pop scene, MCR moved from the indie Eyeball Records to major-label Reprise just two years after they first jammed together. Their 2004 major-label release, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, a Cuisinart of emo, alt-rock, and punk with a metallic guitar bite, hit the mark. Videos for songs such as Helena, I’m Not Okay (I Promise), and The Ghost of You received as much exposure on MTV as the network would provide for just about any rock act.

But it was their next release, 2006’s The Black Parade – helmed by Rob Cavallo, Green Day’s longtime knob turner, and now chairman of the WBR Label Group – that made MCR arena fillers.

While the record might have been bombastic and bleak, it was the right album for the right time. “Downtrodden times, actually,” Iero says. “Which might be why people responded, because they were feeling depressed.”

Befitting any good concept package, the band donned monochromatic uniforms, and frontman Way played the part of the album’s protagonist, the whacked-out “Patient.”

Once again, My Chemical Romance scored a hit, but the success became too much for them.

“We were spent, burnt, totally out of it,” Toro says. “Being this costume band in black night after night, country after country, it was a grind. We started to see The Black Parade as the enemy, one we wanted to kill on our next record.”

Enlisting superstar producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Bruce Springsteen) seemed like the sure-shot move to take things to the next level. O’Brien is known for his no-nonsense approach, which was just what the band wanted.

Gerard set down a strict mandate, to which the band readily agreed, that the new album would involve neither concepts nor costumes. “It was time for us to stop being so elaborate and just make music,” Iero says. “We had everything plotted out, everything was in order. Things were going to be great.”

Only they weren’t. The band slogged their way through recording sessions through much of 2009, making slow and steady progress, but nothing seemed to light anybody’s fire.

“We hit a wall,” Toro says. “We were trying way too hard to be perfect and be this other ‘thing.’ Not that you shouldn’t try to grow and develop, but we were just killing ourselves with trying. It wasn’t fun.”

Listening back to what they’d recorded with O’Brien, MCR made the painful (and expensive) decision to bag the sessions and go back to the drawing board with Cavallo. “It was a hard decision to scrap the record we made with Brendan, but in the end, it was the right decision,” Toro says.

Once ensconced with Cavallo, the band tore through the new album, which now sported a title: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. Full of whim and vigor, Toro and Iero apply guitar sounds both au currant and vaguely nostalgic to insanely catchy, fast-paced tracks such as Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na), Bulletproof Heart, The Only Hope for Me Is You, and Planetary (GO!).

While there is a subtle storyline linking the songs (something about a post-apocalyptic California in the year 2019), the music is neither depressing nor weighed down by overt narrative. This is an album built for speed.

As for the band members, who grumbled their way through the last months of the Black Parade tour, they’re ready to get their act together and take it on the road once more. “Only this time we’re going to try to work a lot smarter,” Iero says. “Everybody has families now, so we’re not going to grind ourselves down. We need to have lives just like anybody else. That said, we’re feeling recharged and ready to play again.”

When the band decided to scrap the album you had made with Brendan O’Brien and start working again with Rob Cavallo – even though Rob is a Warner Bros. company man – I have to imagine that didn’t go down very well with the accountants.

Ray Toro: You’d think that, but they were very supportive.

Frank Iero: Actually, the way it happened was so organic that it sort of turned out all right. Basically, we set out to make one kind of record. I think we defined it before we wrote the songs. Big mistake. Anytime you put yourself in a creative box, it’s going to stifle you; it’s not conducive to the writing or recording process.

I think we went with the album already mapped out in our heads out of fear. We were thinking about what we had done before on The Black Parade and the toll it took on us. So we kind of said, ‘Okay, we’re not doing that this time; in fact, we’re going to do something totally different.’

We had no concepts, no characters, no costumes, and no extra instrumentation – just stripped-down songs. That’s what we wanted the band to be… or so we thought. We listened back to what we had done, and we definitely accomplished the goal, but it didn’t feel right; it felt like we’d tied our arms behind our backs. We hadn’t pushed things to the next level. So while we were mixing we thought we had something more to say – a lot more to say, actually. Thank god Rob Cavallo was available to come onboard and help us figure everything out, ’cause we were kind of lost.

Toro: We spent so long writing and recording and trying to make a real stripped-down record. I remember distinctly – whereas in the past I would have laid down a bunch of different guitar tracks, harmonies, and stuff – this time I said, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ After a while, it started to feel like I was going against my nature. Things just didn’t feel like they should.

Did Brendan notice that things weren’t working? Did he ever say to you guys, “This is good, but it’s not great”?

Toro: He was really trying. He did the best he could with us. He knew things weren’t clicking, and he’d try to rally us. I remember he said, “Hey, on some songs, I’d love to hear you do what you did on The Black Parade.” Because there weren’t any of the harmonized guitar parts or the stacking that I usually do. He was trying to get us to make one record, and we wanted to make something totally different.

Which was, as you said, more stripped-down and direct.

Toro: That’s right. Musically, we wanted to go back to our basement. But just because we wanted to do something different didn’t make it easy. In many ways, we felt as though we were holding ourselves back creatively. We were just going through the motions. The creative spark of the band wasn’t there.

It’s a difficult balancing act, knowing you have to change and then actually changing. Some of the songs were good, but we weren’t happy with all of them.

What was the defining moment, though, when the band sat down and decided it wasn’t working?

Iero: There wasn’t so much one defining moment; it was more like a gradual malaise was coming over us. We all knew that something was wrong and that people weren’t acting all excited about what they were hearing us do.

Did any songs from the original sessions make the finished album?

Toro: Yeah, but we recut them. There’s Bulletproof Heart, Party Poison, and a song called The Only Hope for Me Is You. Those songs always excited us, so we weren’t going to lose them.

Iero: I think the moment we realized we were back on track was when we started writing songs like Na Na Na and Planetary (GO!) and a couple of other ones. At that point, we went, ‘Whoa! Something’s happening here – we’re not trying to write an album, but that’s what’s happening.’ The creativity was happening, but we weren’t imposing any rules on ourselves. Things felt very free. The more we listened to the new batch of tunes, we were flying.

Danger Days is much more upbeat than The Black Parade.

Toro: It’s weird. That wasn’t the goal at any point. I think it was just how we were feeling in the studio once we got back with Rob.

Iero: See, I do think it was the goal, at least to me it was. It’s very real. It’s a celebratory record. You’re hearing a band that’s having fun and being creative. So it’s a lighthearted album in that way. It was so difficult at first and we were just beating ourselves up wondering, ‘Why isn’t this working?’ So by the time we were on a roll, we were just in love with what we were doing. All in all, it turned out to be a great experience.

My Chemical Romance are from New Jersey, but you guys don’t seem to share anything musically with Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi, or even a punk band like the Gaslight Anthem.

Toro: No, we don’t. I think our connection with those bands comes more from our attitudes. We’re blue-collar guys. It’s a work-ethic thing that comes from East Coast bands. We’re not afraid to get our hands dirty and do the job, you know?

Our actual sound – that’s hard to describe. We probably have more things in common musically with the Misfits, who are another Jersey band. We come from more of a punk aesthetic.

As guitarists, who are your influences?

Toro: Really, my biggest influence was my older brother, Louie. That’s how I first got into the guitar, from hearing and watching him. He was into Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Metallica, Mötley Crüe – a lot of classic rock with some metal thrown in. So I got into all that stuff as well.

He helped me out a lot. He had a stack of Guitar World magazines and stuff – I’d go through them and look at all the tabs. Then I got more into guys like Jeff Beck and David Gilmour.

Iero: For me, it started off with my dad and my grandfather, both of whom are drummers. My dad was very influential with the music he exposed me to. He was really into blues and folk, so he’d play me guys like Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker and Richie Havens – a lot of very emotional players.

From there, it was a natural part of the evolution for me to go out and find my own music, which turned out to be punk rock. When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad’s blues. It’s music from the underground, and it’s real, and it’s written for the downtrodden in uncertain times. I discovered a lot of Jersey bands, plus groups like Sonic Youth and art-rock bands.

I love players like Thurston Moore. I mean, you can put notes down on a sheet of paper, and if you practice and get your chops up, you can play like an Eddie Van Halen or a Steve Vai. But nobody can do what Thurston Moore does; he’s his own guy. He talks through his instrument in a language that’s all his own. Same with Jack White: the emotion with which he plays, the tones that he gets… it’s not sterile by any means.

Toro: What I try to do is throw everything together, classic rock and metal bands: Megadeth, Metallica, Pantera, Iron Maiden… I think I’ve always had more of a faster-riffing, minor-key thing going on. As I got older, I got more into punk bands. So I mix it up: I love the attitude of punk, but I love the precision of a lot of metal players.

What kind of practice schedule do the two of you adhere to?

Iero: I’m kind of a feel player. I’ll stretch out before a show a bit and do some playing, but that’s about it. I’m not one of these 10-hour-a-day playing guys.

Toro: I definitely used to practice more. I think I found that the best middle ground is one where you’re hitting your notes and you feel comfortable on the fretboard, but you still want to leave room for attitude and freshness. Listen to a guy like Stevie Ray Vaughan, who’s one of my favorites. He’s a flawless player, but you hear the heart and soul there – he’s reaching for the moment. That’s what I try to achieve, in my own humble way. [laughs]

Even though you guys don’t showboat, you’re not anti-guitar solos…

Iero: We’re not, but we don’t like overdoing it. A guitar solo in the same part of every tune – that’s been done so much. I think solos shine more when you have them in specific and unexpected places.

It’s no secret that Ray is a genius when it comes to writing solos. Watching and hearing him play, I’m just so inspired. I’ve learned more from playing with him than I have from any lessons I ever took. And really, that’s part of what being in a band is all about: teaching one another, rubbing off on one another, helping the other guys do their best – all of that.

Toro: I’m constantly trying to come up with new lines and parts. Every song is a challenge. That’s what keeps me excited.

For instance, on Planetary (GO!), I had to figure out how to make the guitar sound like a synthesizer. What I ended up doing was using an Electro-Harmonix POG, which is one of my favorite pedals. It’s sick – you have all of these octaves to play with. I found some great sounds to use there.

But on a song like Save Yourself, the playing is more precise, with heavy palm muting on the verses. The solo is more of a pentatonic thing, like what Kirk Hammett might play. So exploring all of those aspects but trying to keep it fresh and with a bit of a punk spirit is what keeps me going.

Two-guitar bands are funny animals: one guy can’t do what the other guy does, because it just doesn’t work. Do the two of you have to hold back or change your styles to play with each other?

Iero: I think the reason why we’ve gone on for so long and have had such success is because there are no egos between the band members. Ray and I trade off on leads, but when it comes to solos, that’s his thing. I have no want or desire to solo. I’d rather create melodies and accompanying parts.

Toro: And I love playing with Frank. Our styles are very distinct. He’s much more melodic than I am. If you listen to him, he’s always harmonizing with or backing up the lead vocal melody. I might be the “lead guitarist”, per se, but we’re always swapping roles. Sometimes he does little leads on the choruses. He has an energy that I find very inspiring.

What kind of guitars are you two playing these days?

Toro: I’m still a Les Paul player, but recently I had the chance to play one of Jimi Hendrix’s Strats. Totally mind blowing! This guy, Jimmy, from Mates Rehearsal Studios in California, had one. I had shown up at the studio, and I didn’t have a guitar to play, so Jimmy let me play this Hendrix Strat that he got from Jimi’s old guitar tech. The thing was beat to shit, but it was the best-playing guitar ever. I played it for a year – Jimmy let me use it in the studio. Man, I loved that.

Live, I’m still a Les Paul guy, but playing Jimi Hendrix’s Strat really got me interested in Strats and other guitars. In fact, I’m in desperate search for the ultimate Tele to play. If I can find one, I’m there.

Iero: I’ve been playing Epiphone Les Pauls for years, but lately I’ve been working with the company to come up with a new model based on the Wilshire guitar. It’s a guitar they made in the Sixties; the junior model to it would be the Coronet.

The Wilshire is the one with two pickups. It’s tentatively going to be called the Phantom-Matic. It’s going to be a fun guitar. It’ll have the balls of a Les Paul, but it’ll be a much lighter instrument. I’m playing a prototype of it now.

• This interview was first published in the February 2011 issue of Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Alex Van Halen has bid to “put the record straight” regarding Michael Anthony’s absence from Van Halen’s final reunion with David Lee Roth, claiming he was offered the gig.

After a brief second era with Sammy Hagar from 2003 to 2005, Van Halen’s third era, with Diamond Dave once again fronting the band, began in 2006, with Eddie’s son, Wolfgang, unveiled as their new bassist. But he only got the gig after Anthony ghosted them, Alex claims.

“We did call,” he tells Brazlian outlet KazaGastão. “To put the record straight, we did call Mike because we owed him that, and he just didn't answer.

“We had the same manager,” he adds. “Come on! He was important for the band.”

So, when “nobody showed up” at the studio to accompany the Van Halen brothers, the job eventually went Wolfgang, who ended up impressing Eddie and Alex during a jam.

Alex adds: “People think there were family influences in how he [Wolfgang] became part of the band, which is simply not true.” He insists the then-teenager got the job on merit

Wolfgang has said that the reunion hinged on his involvement, and with Alex’s claims, it’s easy to see why. And he even had to keep his dad in check at times. Alex, meanwhile, is glad Wolfgang has gone on to be “his own man.”

“He’s very careful that he doesn’t want to be Ed Jr,” he continues. “He was in a very tough spot. He could have just continued with the Van Halen stuff, but he decided he was his own man.”

Indeed, Wolfgang said it would have “ruined” his life had he messed up covering Van Halen at Taylor Hawkins’ tribute show as he bid to carve out his own path. He’s kept his late dad close by, occasionally recording with Eddie’s beloved Frankenstein guitar, and carrying the torch of his tapping legacy, but his band, Mammoth, operates in a whole other sphere.

And as EVH the brand updates Wolfgang’s namesake guitar, Alex is busy working on a new Van Halen album with Steve Lukather.

Steve Vai, who has praised the quality of the unreleased Van Halen he's heard, believes Lukather is “the best guy” to complete material. It was recorded during Eddie Van Halen’s lifetime and intended as a successor to the 2012 album, A Different Kind of Truth.

Canadian math rock sensations Angine de Poitrine have been globetrotting amidst their recent viral success, and their one-of-a-kind double-neck guitar has been causing chaos at customs.

The duo, whose KEXP performance has clocked up 13m views in three months, use loop pedals and microtonality to make their hypnotic, off-kilter music. Their double-neck guitar – with one neck for bass and the other for a six-string electric guitar – and its many frets sit at the center of their success. But getting it through the airport has been another matter.

“The guitar gets funny questions because I carry it in a sleeping bag and it looks like a dead body,” says Khn de Poitrine, the beast’s tamer, in a rare new interview with the Guardian. (In case you’re wondering, the duo’s masks don’t cause the same problems, since they’re stashed in their suitcases.)

So far, the custom double-neck, which is equipped with micro-tonal frets, has made it through security each time. The band’s experiments with 'in-between' notes originated when drummer Klek sawed extra frets onto an existing guitar, with a less crude model coming later.

With King Gizzard beating them to the microtonal chase by a handful of years, the band accepts that they are entering lesser-explored territory rather than entirely new ground.

But Klek pins some of their success on the fact that microtonal “sounds new for people.” King Gizzard are by no means a small band, but it really feels like the Canadians have put microtonal music well and truly on the map.

“There’s a feeling of anxiousness or something that comes with the repetitions, the frictions with the microtones,” Klek says in the Guardian interview. “We’re always playing with that feeling, and tension and release.”

Khn, meanwhile, says their limited numbers and reliance on loop pedals to maximize their sound live means they have a “tendency to make songs that go from A to Z without coming back to A or B.

“People have fallen in love with the rawness and simplicity,” he adds.

They’ve previously admitted their first microtonal explorations started out as a joke, but the way the band has blown up in recent months is no laughing matter. And in an age when AI music is infiltrating streaming services, Angine de Poitrine have given the tech a whole new world to decode. It might just make it implode.

Former Arch Enemy vocalist Alissa White-Gluz has been named as the surprise new vocalist for power metal band DragonForce.

The British band, formed by speed merchant guitarist Herman Li in 1999, have confirmed that White-Gluz, who becomes their third vocalist, and first frontwoman, has joined the band alongside singer Marc Hudson, who joined in 2011 and has featured on five albums.

It's being billed as “a momentous union of two storied and unstoppable forces,” with the new-look band's first shows taking place at Welcome To Rockville this weekend (May 9) and Sonic Temple (May 17).

The band will kickstart their new era by celebrating the 20th anniversary of their name-making album, Inhuman Rampage. Certified Gold and immortalized by Guitar Hero staple (itself recently celebrating 20 years), the album put Li's Whammy-ravaged shred into the limelight, and he's continuing to dazzle since.

“Alissa joining the band is an expansion of everything we’ve done up to this point,” Li details. “Together we will honor what made Inhuman Rampage matter, while showing people exactly where we’re going next.

“Having Alissa in the room changes everything,” he adds. “She doesn't just sing, she makes all aspects of our music better. And she sounds incredible live.”

“I am beyond excited to be bringing such iconic music to life with these amazingly skilled musicians in such a fun and inspiring environment,” their new vocalist expands. “I want to keep pushing my boundaries and delivering exceptional music and live experiences to the fans that I cherish so much.”

Yet, the timing of the news is a big surprise. The vocalist announced her departure from Arch Enemy after 11 years in November, and simultaneously launched her solo career with Michael Amott’s signature guitar in her hands.

She's since unveiled two excellent shredders, Alyssa Day and Dani Sophia, for her solo band, Blue Medusa. So, questions about what happens to Blue Medusa now are certainly warranted, and it looks to have at least put the brakes temporarily on the Day-Sophia guitar tandem.

DragonForce has also seen a change in their bass department in recent years. Alicia Vigil, who briefly played alongside Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Kiki Wong in Vigil of War, joined in 2022 after a two-year spell as a touring bassist.

As a member of two major hard rock acts, Winger and Whitesnake, Reb Beach knows a thing or two about the intricate art of crafting an arena-worthy guitar solo.

Now, with both bands calling it quits and Beach looking back on his formidable career, the question is: which one allowed him to fully flex his guitar chops – and, more importantly, his individual playing style?

“Winger, for sure,” he replies matter-of-factly in a new interview with Guitar World. “I did a record with Doug Aldrich [one of Whitesnake’s guitarists] at his house, but we didn’t have an amp, so I went direct. He said he would do the thing where you mic up the amp later – re-amp it.”

Beach insists that not only did it not sound good, he was far from happy with that. However, it all stemmed from the boss’ orders.

“David Coverdale, for some reason, wanted my solos to be a certain way,” Beach explains.

“The record I wrote with him, he said to Joel Hoekstra [another one of Whitesnake’s guitarists] [in a regal voice], ‘You can play whatever you want, but Reb, I am going to take you under my wing.’ He had to kind of approve my solos.”

Beach pinpoints one album in particular on which he had to get all his guitar solos signed off by Coverdale.

“It wasn't as much on the one I wrote with him, Flesh and Blood, but The Purple Album, he was all over my…” he quips. “What’s that Deep Purple song? Mistreated! Yeah, he was all over me on that one. I had to make David happy on that.”

As for Winger, it was a whole different story. While Beach admits that he also had to make [frontman, lead singer, and bass player] Kip Winger “happy,” their long-term dynamic helped ease the pangs of criticism, notwithstanding that Beach considers him “a musical genius” who “had some great ideas for me as well.”

“I’ve worked with Kip since I was a kid. I don't know… I felt more freedom,” he admits. “I wrote the songs, too; we would always write the solo sections for me. Kip would say [in a dry voice], ‘Okay, and that's good to solo over.’”

Guitar World’s full interview with Reb Beach will be published in the coming weeks.

And if you need a refresher on all the guitarists Whitesnake had over the decades, check out Guitar World's ultimate guide to the shredders who graced the stage – from the project's inception to Coverdale's retirement.

There are bands who define a moment, and there are bands who quietly outlive it. American Football is one of the latter – what began in the late ’90s as a short-lived project built on clean-toned guitars, interlocking parts and emotional sincerity has become something far more enduring.

It’s not just a blueprint for a genre; it’s a way of thinking about music, where vulnerability, complexity and restraint can exist without feeling forced. And American Football’s story is anything but conventional.

Their 1999 debut – now widely regarded as one of the most important records in the history of indie rock – arrived quietly and disappeared quickly. There was no prolonged rollout, touring cycle or cultural coronation. Instead, what followed was absence; and in that absence, something unusual happened – the music grew.

“I think part of the reason it became what it did is because we weren’t around,” guitarist Steve Holmes reflects. “There was this vacuum; not a lot of photos, not a lot of videos. People could kind of project whatever they wanted onto it.”

That vacuum allowed LP1 to transform from an overlooked release into something closer to myth. The house on the cover became an icon, the guitar parts a rite of passage. The band, without actively participating, became shorthand for an entire emotional sonic landscape. But mythology has a way of freezing artists in time.

For a lot of bands, that kind of legacy becomes a trap, an expectation to preserve a singular moment rather than evolve beyond it. American Football, though, have spent their second act doing something far more difficult: refusing to become a museum piece.

When they reunited in the mid-2010s, they came back as adults with families, careers and lives that existed beyond the band. That shift in context changed their relationship to music, giving them a perspective they didn’t have first time round. “I think finding success later in life is very different than finding it when you’re young,” Holmes says. “You don't take it for granted the same way.”

For bassist Nate Kinsella, that timing may have been the band’s biggest advantage. “Having it happen later, that’s the best-case scenario,” he says. “You appreciate it more – and if it went away, you’d still be okay.”

That grounded mindset has allowed American Football to evolve in a way that feels natural rather than forced. They’re not chasing relevance or trying to recreate the conditions that made them influential in the first place. Instead, they’ve embraced the idea of being something closer to career artists, not defined by a single moment but by the arc of what they continue to make.

That arc is what makes their legacy so unique; from bedroom guitarists to modern outfits that don’t even sound like them, the fingerprints of American Football are everywhere. Even the band themselves are still adjusting to that realization.

“For a long time it felt we were just part of a small scene,” guitarist and lead vocalist Mike Kinsella says. “Like the people hearing it were people who understood where it was coming from.”

That perception has shifted as a new generation of listeners have embraced them. “It’s weird realizing that people you don’t know are hearing something that feels really personal. I’m still getting used to it.”

That intimacy may be exactly why the music has endured. American Football’s guitars are complex, often built on unconventional tunings and interlocking patterns; but the feeling is immediate. “I’ve always been drawn to sincere music,” Mike says. “Even if the music itself is more complex, I don’t want the emotional side to feel distant.”

That balance is one of the main reasons their music continues to resonate. But it’s surprising how little they’ve relied on repetition to sustain that connection. Rather than refining a fixed formula, each album has subtly re-contextualized their sound, expanding it while still feeling like them.

“With every record, we’ve tried to make the coolest thing we can with what we have,” Holmes says. “And as we’ve gone on, we’ve had access to more things, more sounds, more ideas.”

Where early material was driven primarily by guitar interplay, later records began incorporating additional textures, vibraphone, keys, ambient elements, not as decoration but as part of the composition itself.

For Nate Kinsella, that evolution feels less like a departure and more like a continuation, and in many ways he’s been one of the main catalysts for that expansion. “Even on the first record, there’s this sense of patterns building into something bigger,” he says. “So expanding the sound just felt like continuing that idea.”

On LP4 (all their releases are officially titled “American Football”) that role becomes even more pronounced, Beyond bass, Nate is often exploring how a part can stretch outward – how a texture can into something structural rather than just supportive.

The band repeatedly points to him as the one nudging ideas into more dimensional territory, through subtle harmonic shifts, textural layering, or simply recognizing when something should breathe longer than expected.

LP4 is a rethink of how the band’s sound is built. Earlier albums began with guitars and built outward, but LP4 frequently does the opposite. “Sometimes the atmosphere came first,” Holmes says. “Like, the big, expansive part already existed, and then we had to figure out what the song was inside of that.”

Nate leans into that approach as well: it’s less about writing a bass part after the fact and more about shaping the foundation of a track. Songs like Blood on My Blood really highlight that shift. Opening with a submerged, almost disorienting synth passage, an emotional tone is set before the guitars even arrive.

That initial texture became the foundation for everything else. “There are these layers underneath that you might not even hear,” Nate says. “But they completely change how the song feels.”

Wake Her Up feels direct, almost pop-like at first, but its structure tells a far different story. “The riff is alternative between five and six, so it’s basically in 11,” Nate says.

“You don’t notice it when you’re listening,” Holmes adds. “But when you try to play it, you realize its not simple at all!”

“Doing the obvious thing is kind of not allowed!” Nate says. “It feels too expected; we usually move away from it.” Even the more subtle elements of the record follow that philosophy; Nate’s bass calls attention to itself, but constantly reshapes the sentimental weight of what’s happening around it.

“It’s kind of best when it’s invisible,” he says. “I’m thinking about how it supports everything, not how it stands out. There are moments, like the expressive bends on Desdemona where the bass steps forward a bit more. Thats probably the one time I’m waving to the camera a little – but it fits the song.”

“It’s never really about the gear itself,” Mike Kinsella says. “It’s more about what it helps you hear. A pedal like the Keeley Caverns might influence how a demo feels, creating a sense of space or cohesion. But it’s ultimately just a tool for unlocking an idea.”

For all the technical intricacy and expanding sonic palette, American Football are still defined by their emotional core. “It’s probably the same voice,” Mike says, “just with more experience behind it.”

LP4 often feels like a dialogue between past and present. “It’s like a conversation with your younger self,” Mike says. But for a band so often associated with nostalgia, they remain remarkably uninterested in looking backward.

Nearly 30 years after their formation, American Football are still in motion. LP4 doesn’t try to recreate what made them important; it builds on it and expands it. And in doing so, it reveals the band’s true legacy: not that they defined a sound, but that they never stopped evolving it.

• American Football 4 is out now.

A judge in London has rejected claims by the heirs of two of Jimi Hendrix’s former bandmates in their bid to secure royalties from the icon’s catalog, following what’s proven to be a long-running dispute with Sony Music and the Hendrix estate.

According to British High Court Judge Edwin Johnson, Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding and drummer John “Mitch” Mitchell both signed a recording agreement on October 11, 1966, that waived their rights and wholly eliminated the possibility of future royalties.

“I conclude that the first owners of the copyrights… were the producers,” Judge Johnson wrote in the 140-page ruling [obtained by Rolling Stone].

The judge goes on to say that a critical clause in the original agreement meant that the producers, and not the Jimi Hendrix Experience musicians, owned the rights to “any sound recordings made hereunder.”

The sub-clause also specified that the rights covered “the copyright throughout the world in all sound recordings of performances of musical works by the artistes.”

The judge continues, “It is difficult to see how this could have been expressed more clearly. The producers were to have the copyright in sound recordings made pursuant to the terms of the recording agreement. This clearly included the recordings, which were all made pursuant to the terms of the recording agreement.”

The agreement was “clear and unequivocal,” with “no temporal or territorial limitation to this agreement” or anything qualifying ownership.

Furthermore, the judge found that, after Hendrix’s death in 1970, a “series of transactions” made his estate “the ultimate successor” to the producers’ rights under the recording agreement.

As for Hendrix’s own heirs, Janine Hendrix, his younger sister and the CEO of Experience Hendrix, cheered the ruling, commenting in a statement, “Jimi’s music is more than a catalog – it’s a living piece of our family’s soul, filled with his spirit, his passion, and his truth.

“This decision means we can continue protecting that legacy with the love, care, and integrity it deserves, and ensure his voice is honored for generations to come.” Redding and Mitchell’s representatives did not reply to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.

Earlier this year, another high-profile royalties dispute was settled after Sting paid around $800,000 to his former Police bandmates, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.

They may never have topped the charts, but they won fans in the Beatles, David Bowie, Barbra Streisand, Todd Rundgren and Lowell George. One thing’s for sure: San Francisco-via-Manila sisters June and Jean Millington were always destined to break the mold.

They co-founded one of the world’s first rock bands composed entirely of women and signed a multi-record deal with a major label – the Frank Sinatra-founded, Warner Records subsidiary Reprise Records – bringing their own unique brand of technical prowess and art-rock, blues-inflected, unmistakably rock-through-and-through sound to crowds in the States, Europe and beyond.

And it all started from what June calls “a handmade, small guitar from the southern Philippines,” which the pair’s mom got for them. “When we got here to the United States, hootenanny [an informal party or folk music concert, often featuring open-mic performances] was all the rage. Jean and I played a lot of those.”

As June describes it, guitar music also served another role: “[It was] our pathway into having friends and joining society here in America.

“Guys got into music or rock and roll for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. We just wanted to make a friend. We loved playing music. I mean, we're Filipina. Filipinos are incredibly, incredibly musical, and it’s in our DNA for sure.”

A casual “Hey, you want to start a band?” from a drummer at another high school quickly snowballed into Jean and June’s mom taking them to a music store to get proper equipment – despite their dad’s initial hesitancy.

“My mom didn’t say anything, but she took me and Jean to a music store, and that’s when it all changed,” June recalls fondly. “She bought Jean an electric bass, an amp, me an electric guitar, and an amp. I had a small electric guitar I bought in a pawn shop with my dad, from Sears or something like that. But now, we got the real gear. I think we were copying the Beatles. We wanted their equipment.”

Fast-forward to the early ’70s, and what would become Fanny – composed of June on guitar, Jean on bass, keyboardist Nickey Barclay, and drummer Alice de Buhr – would end up recording at the Beatles’ very own Apple Studios in London, with their legendary engineer Geoff Emerick.

“We got down to work,” she continues matter-of-factly. “And although we were recording every day, when we had the time, we also flew over to Germany to record Beat-Club [a West German program that aired between 1965 and December 1972]. We did the BBC, we were playing gigs around London… Every single day was an intense schedule.

“We did it because, well, number one, we were young. I don’t think we got that much sleep, but we had worked so hard to get to that point.”

Active between 1969 and 1975, the band toured relentlessly, released five studio albums, and was admired by the crème de la crème of the industry. Yet, as sisters and co-founders, June and Jean Millington, tell Guitar World, it was a journey marked as much by misogyny as by sisterhood and musical innovation – decades ahead of its time.

“Do you remember the sneers we got from the boys?” June reminds her sister.

“For the longest time, we had to first prove that we could actually play,” Jean responds. “For the first 10 minutes people would not believe me. Then they understood that we actually play. But that went on for a long time.”

“Nuance is what we had,” the lead guitarist asserts. “Every gig we did was a success. We never failed. That was not an option because we knew we were holding up for future generations.”

In 1965, you started the Svelts, and the choice of who would play bass famously came down to a coin toss. Looking back, how significant was this small decision on your sound?

June: When you hear Jean’s bass parts, they’re totally amazing and electric. Bass is not something you should take up if you're not going to be serious about it, because it’s a very powerful instrument, and you have to simplify everything down, yet be complicated.

Jean: You tailor your parts. I did. And the other thing is, a lot of bass players don't sing. I was the lead singer of a lot of material, so to play bass and sing at the same time, you really have to split your brain. I mean, it’s so hard.

And how did the Svelts transform into Fanny?

June: Wild Honey [the band preceding Fanny] is actually the band that signed the deal with Reprise [the record label], and after we signed the deal, Addie [Lee] – she was the lead guitarist, I was rhythm and singer – she left the band, and I had to learn how to play lead in a year.

Jean: I have to say that for June, seeing her make the transition to being the lead guitar player within a year was really incredible. She sat in her room every day, playing with cassettes and learning how to play the guitar. Quite a phenomenal achievement!

June: Richard [Perry, the record producer who signed Fanny] told us he was getting us a deal in late ’68 when we went down to the Troubadour [the legendary LA venue], and we got to Fanny Hill, our house, in May of ’69. We were girls, we were going to move into that house and just start playing. We cleaned that whole house, and I wrote to my mom, saying, ‘Richard Perry is coming over tomorrow, and we’re having our first rehearsal together.’

What gear were you using at that time?

June: I think I had gotten my [Gibson ES-]355 by then. I exchanged whatever guitar I was playing with a guitar player in a band from San Jose. The 355, let's face it, is the original guitar sound of Fanny. I had a Fender amp. Jean, what bass did you have then? Because your final bass was under a chair at some recording studio…

Jean: I kicked something underneath, and it turned out to be my bass, the Precision I’ve had all this time. The Jazz Bass; that’s what I played for a long time, but when I got to the P-bass, I really just melded with that sound.

And did you have any pedals?

June: No… I mean, Jimi Hendrix was using a wah, but all that stuff [pedals] wasn’t even invented yet. We didn’t even have tuners. We just created our own sounds. And by the way, that 355 was a stereo guitar, and I am deaf in one ear. That’s why I’m always on the left side of the stage. I even tried to play it through two amps.

Then Richard [Perry] came back from London because it was 1970, and we were in the studio, and he had a tape of the Beatles, and it wasn't finished yet, but it had George Harrison playing the [Let It Be] solo through a Leslie speaker. And I freaked out. I couldn’t believe it.

It wasn’t done, but it was so powerful, and I went right out and told our roadies we had to create my rig to include playing through a Leslie. I had a pedal, and I could turn it on, and I could vary the speed. So I did have two amps on stage. I had my Fender, and I had that Leslie, and nobody else was doing that at the time. That Leslie was heavy, but we carried it everywhere.

I had friends who were creating what we call the classic rock sound now, and those were Lowell George and Jeffrey [‘Skunk’] Baxter. They were literally creating those sounds, and I would hang out with them, or I’d go with Lowell, and he would check out everything. So we were in the right place at the right time. Moving to LA in ’69 was really incredible for a young band to get into the mix.

How did you maneuver being in such a male-dominated industry, especially at the time and at such a young age?

June: First of all, we stopped listening to people. We shouldn’t have read the reviews, because there was always so much condescension, but we literally stopped listening to what people were saying about us because it wasn't helping things.

I actually didn’t survive the terrible misogyny that was coming at us. It was so big and so strong that I finally broke, and I had to leave the band to learn how to become a real person. That was my intuitive feeling. I didn’t know how to grow up.

It was hard to leave Jean, and it was hard to leave the band. It was almost impossible. But my mom was afraid I was going to die because I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep. I think it was grief. We should have had at least four hits by the time Fanny Hill [1972] came out, and then we did that album with Todd [Rundgren, who produced 1973’s Mothers Pride].

So we did those four great albums, and we didn’t have a top 30 hit… top 40, but not top 30, and that doesn’t get us into the history books. What gets us into the history books is that we actually existed, and we were really good, and people can’t deny that now, but they ignored us for so long.

I stayed in the band longer than I should have because I was so wrecked. But that only shows how much Fanny really meant to me. People didn’t see that aspect. [Instead] it was like, “Oh, what does it feel like to be a girl and play bass? What do you eat? What's the makeup you use?” I mean, are you kidding me?

You were also working as session musicians and even recorded with Barbara Streisand at one point. How did that happen?

Jean: Richard produced Barbra Streisand, so that’s how we got the gig. Two songs were rock tunes. We learned them, and then she came in and sang over them. And the thing about Barbra Streisand, every time she sang, it was different. She was such an incredible vocalist. But she was very respectful of us. We had a good time together.

You've mentioned working with Richard, who obviously played a big role in your career. But you also recorded with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick and Todd Rundgren. In what ways did the two influence your sound?

June: Well, Richard was developing his production chops when we got signed. We were learning how to record and figuring out how this whole thing was going to work. We would go into different studios in the middle of the night, when it was cheap, and we would record demos and work on songs. We did that for a year.

He was learning how to become a great producer while we were learning how to record and become a great band in the studio. To become studio savvy, you really gotta work on it. And also, in those days, I think it was still eight-tracks, so if we wanted to sing a backup part, we would have to learn how to position ourselves around one microphone to get the sound we wanted.

By the time we met the Beatles, I think they were thrilled to meet us. We didn’t meet them en masse at the same time, but it was clear that they really liked us, and they liked us in part because we were women who could play, and we knew what we could do well.

We recorded [1972’s Fanny Hill] at the studio at Apple [the studio that formed part of the British multimedia company Apple Corps Limited that the members of the Beatles established], and their engineer, Geoff Emerick, was ecstatic when he realized A) We could play; and B) We knew how to record.

So we were very skilled by 1971 – between 1965 when we started the Svelts, and December ’71 when we got to Apple in London – and Geoff Emerick realized, “Wow, these girls are really doing it.” He was so happy. He just broke out in a huge smile.

He was the only engineer I've ever seen who literally was so into it that he would run from station to station – setting up a mic for Alice [de Buhr, Fanny’s drummer], for example, to capture the cymbals and the toms. And then he would run to my station and do whatever he had to do. He’s the best engineer I’ve ever worked with.

Now, with Todd Rundgren, we recorded with him because we liked Hello It’s Me [the Rundgren-penned song that was released by his group, Nazz]. We loved that recording. I don’t know that that was actually the right decision, but we chose him, and we ended up with Mothers Pride. We all met at a place where we really wanted to show our art.

That was January ’73, and after we finished recording that album, we went straight on the road with Chicago for three weeks, and then the album came out, and it was just gig after gig after gig.

I left in October of that year, and we did a whole European tour that summer. Like I said, we never failed, but it was never enough. That's where it broke me. We were at the top of our game, and it was not enough.

David Bowie publicly championed Fanny. How did you end up meeting him?

June: Well, we met him in Liverpool – we played in Liverpool the same night, different gigs. We didn’t even know that he was in town.

Jean: In fact, he stayed in the same hotel.

June: I didn’t even really know who David Bowie was, although apparently he had sent us his first record as a fan and said, “I love you, and here's my first record.”

When we got to the hotel that night after the gig, the concierge said, “You have a note here from Mr. David Bowie. He would like to invite you to a party in his penthouse.” So we said, “Sure.” We got on the elevator up to the penthouse, it opened, and it was like a movie.

There was a party going on, and it was a really nice party. There were a lot of people there, but it wasn’t raucous. There weren’t people yelling and shouting and screaming and drinking too much. It was very convivial. And that's how we met David.

In 1975, you had Butter Boy, which hit No. 29, and that was toward the end of the band’s lifetime. How did it feel to finally have that hit just as you were about to go your separate ways?

June: Jean was sitting in my living room. The phone rang, and we picked it up, and it was a call for Jean from LA. I had just asked Jean, “So what’s happening with the band?” She said, “Oh, we have finally broken up. That’s it.”

Fanny is finally broken up, and then the phone rings. It was like a movie – telling her that she had a hit and she had to come back to LA because they could now make some money by going on the road. And about two weeks later, she called me up and asked me to play on that tour. So it was very interesting that it came back together. We had a great time playing, and it led to a lot of things, but it was almost comical.

You’ve obviously mentioned a lot of challenges that you faced. So, on the flipside, what were some of the biggest highlights?

June: Really, the most successful gig was the night we played the Troubadour [in Fall 1968], because no-one believed in us. The manager said to Jean, “You can only play for a few minutes.” So we played three songs, and at the end of those three songs, we never had an audience reaction like that before or since, because the entire audience jumped up on their tables.

They were banging their feet on the tables, going, “More and more and more,” clapping, screaming, going crazy. And that poor manager had to run up to Jean, and he said, “Yeah, would you play some more?” Jean looked down at him and said, “Well, you said five minutes….” I would hate to be that guy!

So it was really incredible. I looked over at Addie, who, at the time, was our lead player, and we didn't need to say a word – well, we couldn’t have said a word because the crowd was so noisy. But that, to me, was the apex of our career because of the audience reaction.

Now, if audiences would have kept doing that, and the radio stations had followed that feeling… That, to me, is the tragedy. They were just too ignorant, too much misogyny.

In 2018, you reunited and recorded Fanny Walked the Earth. What was it like to play as Fanny after so long?

June: For us the really big thing was that we felt like we were 17 again. We felt like we were playing in a club. It was basically that same orb of us on stage, our own world, our own way of playing.

You never know where the miracle is going to come from – the fact that the three of us [Jean, June, and Brie Howard-Darling, one of Fanny’s early-years drummers] got together to play again in our late 60s and early 70s.

There was only one Fanny, and it will never be replicated. We were our own creation. We created ourselves. We were not created by a company, a man, a group of men – nothing. We created ourselves, and went down to LA and kept creating ourselves, and in that way we succeeded, because we have something that people are freaking out over even now.

• June Millington's new record, Home to My Soul, is out now. In 2018, the newly reunited Fanny – rebranded as Fanny Walked the Earth – released a self-titled album, available on streaming services.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock without WiFi for the past month or so, you’ll know the Canadian microtonal math rock duo, Angine de Poitrine, has blown up beyond belief. But it was never meant to be like this.

They’ve just released their second album, which was propelled into the limelight after a KEXP performance that went viral at lightning pace – it has 9.6 million views at the time of writing – and their double-necked microtonal guitar/bass hybrid has taken the gear world by storm. Even Dave Grohl’s a fan.

Yet, speaking to Cult Mtl, they’ve confessed that their tumble down the bonkers rabbit hole of microtonal music was a joke at first. Until they realized they’d struck gold.

“This project is a culmination of a lot of years of inside jokes,” guitarist Khn explains. “The names were our alter egos in a 10-minute free jazz project, where I was just fooling around on saxophone and (Klek) was on drums.

“At first, the idea for the costumes was to play more shows and play a bit of an Andy Kaufman-esque joke on the crowd and say, ‘Hey, can we start a band without anybody knowing who we are?” Klek returns.

The guitar and Khn's masterful use of a loop pedal to give them a real, larger-than-life sound are their not-so-secret secret weapons. But that too was born out of the desire for a quick chuckle. The thing is, that never subsided.

“We thought it would look fucking sick, and for 15 seconds, we were like, ‘Oh, that’s a funny joke.’” Klek says of the guitar. “But it became clear that it was a good idea.”

In the first experiment, Klek sawed more frets onto an existing guitar. It was crude. Then, they started exploring more professional options. One quote of $12,000 per fretboard had them bawking, though. So they turned to a “professional friend” for help.

“The whole idea of the band was to assume a bit of a satirical approach to rock music in general,” Khn details. “We wanted an exaggeration, so the double-neck guitar was the perfect choice to kind of make fun of guitar heroes.

“[It's a bit of] a caricature, because you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself and say, ‘What we do is ridiculous.’”

Australian experimentalists King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have toyed with microtonal tunings in the past, but this duo has taken matters to a whole new level.

There are serious levels of musicianship at hand, but the band also doesn't take itself too seriously. No wonder they've charmed half the globe!