There is this whole thing in popular culture right now about relatability. Oh, would you look at them, they’re just like us. He likes pastrami on rye, too! And so on. Blame social media.

But sometimes, oftentimes, our pop-cultural heroes are more spectacular when they appear to have been wired to a different power grid – that there’s a little bit of Planet Krypton to them.

Reassuringly, Chuck Berry is like that, and in a recent interview with Rob Cass for the dopeYEAH talk YouTube show, session great Marc Ribot reminded us of the magic of the Godfather of Rock ’N’ Roll – and he did not disappoint.

Ribot got the privilege of playing alongside Berry when he was playing with the Realtones, the band fronted by Brenda Bergman. Bergman had to take some time out for “a drug problem”.

Thereafter, the Realtones – who were latterly known as The Uptown Hordes – would become a renowned backup band in the late ’80s, playing out of Tramps, in NYC, playing with a rotating cast of R&B greats, including the likes of Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke and Carla Thomas.

“Because of that, we got to back up Chuck Berry whenever he’d come to town,” says Ribot. “And we took it super-seriously, as well we should have.”

Ribot says when Berry played, something magical happened. He didn’t need too many notes to do it either.

“The thing was that Chuck Berry’s power as a guitarist was such that when he’d play one note, you could see a ripple go out in the audience,” says Ribot. “It was like an electric charge. He had such an amazing economy of play, and an amazing power of playing, and what [Spanish poet, Federico] Garcia Lorca would have called Duende – just this attitude.”

But Berry was notoriously difficult. He was exacting on the guitarists he played with. Just ask Keith Richards. Berry punched him right in the kisser.

Ribot says backing Berry was a test of a player’s nerves, but more than that, it was a test of their dedication to their craft. Every player should know Berry’s guitar parts, front to back.

“It’s like if you’re a preacher, you should know the Bible, and if you’re a rock guitarist, you should know every Chuck Berry solo,” says Ribot. “It’s amazing. We would back him up, and we wrote out all the horn parts. We learned all the horn parts.”

Berry would not always turn up ahead of the show. If he did, the band could run things through with him. If not, they just had to be as prepared as they could be.

“If we're lucky he made it to part of a soundcheck. If we weren't, otherwise he’d just show up at the beginning of the gig, and he would call his tunes in whatever keys he felt like,” says Ribot. “But we were ready. We transposed them.”

The hard work paid off. Berry would haze guitarists who overplayed, who underplayed, who came somewhere in between but still fell short of moving him.

“I was very proud because Chuck was notoriously hard on guitarists,” says Ribot. “He was famous for featuring them, having them stand out front, and saying, ‘Isn’t he fabulous, ladies and gentlemen?’ You know, they clap him. ‘Now get the fuck out of here!’ [Laughs] Happily, I didn’t meet that fate.

“Its a thin line, because a lot of guitarists would go and either be so worshipful that they would want to imitate him exactly, which he didn't like, or they would be saying, ‘Hey, man, I’m gonna show everybody that I can play better than Chuck Berry.’ So they’d do some kind of bullshit hot-dog solo, and he’d say, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’”

Ribot was different. He actually got praise.

“He had kind words to say about my blues playing, which I never forgot,” he says. “So, yeah, it was great.”

You can check out the full interview above and subscribe to the dopeYEAH talk here. And if you think Chuck Berry sounds nuts, then Ribot has some fun stories about Wilson Pickett.

Who would have thought the soul star would be such a riot starter, but there you go. It's like the man said, take your pleasure where you find it.

Keith Richards has looked back on the time a close encounter with one of his guitar heroes didn’t go exactly as planned.

Boil down the Rolling Stones’ music to its core components, and you’ll find nods to the impassioned licks of Howlin’ Wolf and the hip-swinging charm of Chuck Berry. So, when Richards found himself in Chuck Berry’s dressing room early in his career with the Stones, it was a dream come true. Soon, though, he was sent crashing back down to earth.

“He punched me once, years ago, in the ‘60s, I think,” Richards reveals of his meeting with Berry to the Guardian. This would have likely been in 1969, when the Stones, their star rising, toured the US and had Berry as a fill-in opening act on some nights.

“We were in his dressing room, I was having a peek at his guitar, and I was just about to stroke it, and he went: ‘Nobody touches it!’ And bam!”

Chuck Berry’s Gibson ES-355 is the stuff of legend. Richards quickly realized his mistake.

“I would have done the same,” he admits. “I’ve never had to, but then I’ve never caught someone doing that.”

Despite the close encounter, Richards remains effusive in his praise of Berry, who helped shape the Stones sound.

“There’s something about those early records of his,” he says of Berry. “They have an ease about them and a sophistication in a way. I loved his naturalness when he was playing, the way he moved – his whole body became part of the guitar.

“He made me focus on what was possible for me, which made my mother shell out for an electric guitar,” he adds. “I just felt a natural affinity for him, even though he was a cussed bugger!”

Suffice to say, Richards never tried to touch the guitar again. Luckily, he now has his own line of ES-355s that carries more than a little of Berry’s DNA.

The Rolling Stones are set to release their second Andrew Watt-produced album, Foreign Tongues, next month, and Ronnie Wood has been discussing his artful weaving around Richards’ guitar parts ahead of it.

Meanwhile, Joe Perry has thanked Richards for turning him onto the ultimate slide guitar.

Tony Garnier has been doling out basslines for chart-toppers since his early-'70s stint with Asleep at the Wheel. Most notably, he has become a keen interpreter of song for Bob Dylan. Indeed, 38 bassists appeared on Dylan albums before he came onboard; in the 37 years since, no others have.

In addition to multiple albums with Dylan, Garnier has recorded with Marshall Crenshaw and Tom Waits, manned the bass chair at legendary venues The Lone Star and Tramps, and anchored everyone from Dr. John to Chuck Berry.

“I asked Chuck how he liked to hear the bass,” Garnier told Bass Player back in May 2015. “He preferred broken eighth-notes on the root, as opposed to a moving pattern of steady eighths.”

Garnier also subbed for T-Bone Wolk on Saturday Night Live for three years, which is where he met guitarist G.E. Smith and drummer Chris Parker, who were in Bob Dylan's band.

In 1989, Dylan bassist Kenny Aaronson had to take a medical leave. Garnier was flown to Europe to fill in for six weeks, ended up finishing out the year, and has remained ever since.

When Smith departed two years later, Garnier stepped into the bandleader role – “making sure the songs start and end where they're supposed to.”

How would you describe the bass role in Bob's band?

Simplicity works best. Complicated basslines can be distracting. You don't want to disrupt the song; you want to help it along. I'm all about trying to add some movement in between the vocal or the verses, but not sound like I'm just filling.

I'm looking to provide subtle forward motion, as opposed to playing a fixed, steady groove. I'll come up with my own basslines, or versions of basslines from Bob's earlier songs, and if he wants it different he'll let me know.

What inspires you when creating parts?

The lyrics and the vocal, as well as what the rest of the band is playing. You have to learn the lyrics to the songs. That will tell you what and how to play, and it makes your job easier because you have a connection; you're not just playing notes and chords.

I've always told new guys in the band, “You're not playing guitar – you're playing a song.” I know what the songs are about, and that gives me an emotional attachment when I'm coming up with the basslines. And of course there's Bob's interpretation to draw from.

He seems to vary his renditions quite a bit.

Absolutely; the songs are different every night because he never sings them the same way, so we're not playing them the same way. If he's phrasing a little differently on a song like A Simple Twist of Fate, the bassline I played the night before might not work.

He may bunch up some words or draw them out, and it goes beyond that; sometimes he'll change the chords. Or he'll sing a different melody for a few nights, or change the lyrics – like on Tangled Up in Blue, the lyrics in the live show are different from the recorded version.

Ultimately, it's a conversation between everyone onstage. All I have to do is listen and react. It's actually a lot easier than having to play the same basslines every night, and it's much more creative and fun.

What would you say you've learned from Bob, playing-wise?

The concepts I've learned are like what you might learn from Duke Ellington or Miles Davis – ideas that you can use with other artists throughout your career.

For example, in Bob's book Chronicles: Volume One, he speaks about music in terms of numbers and how three and five are interesting choices. Maybe he'll write a song with three verses and a bridge, or create a melodic line in groupings of five, and the same can apply for basslines. If I'm stuck, I may apply that, or something like what Rick Danko did on Chest Fever, by The Band.

What advice would you offer to young bass players?

I'd advise getting a home studio and start writing and singing. Whatever it takes – just don't sacrifice your ideals. It's very challenging now in the music business, but music is a big part of people's lives all over the world, and the need for good musicians will always be there.

If my two kids want to become musicians, I won't discourage them if I see they have the passion for it. If that describes you, keep practicing and expanding your musical horizons.

“This is Keith” is a pretty mundane phrase, but when you answer your phone and you hear those three simple words growled at you by the most distinguished rhythm guitarist of all time, they make a lasting impression.

The 30-minute interview that follows is no less impactful. Even at 82 years old, Keith Richards is in devilish form, prone to laughing hysterically at his own jokes, dropping clusters of F-bombs, mocking some of GW’s more naive questions and generally behaving like the snaggle-toothed Captain Jack Sparrow caricature that all Rolling Stones fans recognize and appreciate.

Talking to him, you don’t feel like you’re in the company of some godlike rock star; you feel like you’re backstage at a Stones show, laughing it up over life’s more surreal and stupid moments.

Still, Richards, who was infamously labeled “mad, bad and dangerous to know” more than half a century ago – and with good reason (you already know the coke, heroin and switchblade anecdotes) – is a mellower character these days than the terrifying Glimmer Twin persona of decades past.

He’s a well-spoken fellow; you can still hear traces of the suburban London accent that he shares with his fellow Stone Mick Jagger as he talks enthusiastically and at length about all things guitar.

He’s a committed lover of his instrument – almost literally, by the sound of it – and is especially keen to discuss his latest signature model, the Gibson Keith Richards 1960 ES-355 Collector's Edition.

Built by hand at Gibson’s custom shop in Nashville and available in a limited run of 150 units, 50 of which are signed on the F-hole label and headstock and 100 on the label only, this guitar comes in at a marriage-destroying $29,999 and $19,999 respectively, in other words too expensive for you and me; well, maybe you but definitely me.

The point of the new ES-355 model is that Richards’ original, which has been 3D-scanned by Gibson to make the new version a millimetrically identical copy, occupies a rare spot in guitar history; he used it (among other guitars) to record the Stones’ seminal Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St. albums in 1971 and ’72, and has played it on every Stones tour since 1997. If you ever get your hands on one, count yourself lucky.

The same adjective applies to Richards himself. He’s still in pretty good shape despite an early-career adherence to the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle that few could possibly survive; he’s an acknowledged legend in his own lifetime; and he still wants to be better at what he does.

I was expecting him to be pretty jaded at the prospect of yet another guitar-related interview, but the opposite turned out to be true. You’ll enjoy the chat that follows, even if your relationship with your instrument isn’t quite as intimate as his.

Hello, Keith. Are you at home in Connecticut?

I am, yes. We’re absolutely snowed in. Nobody can get here except a man with a snowplow. He’s working away right now. I quite like it, because it means I can’t get out.

This new Gibson ES-355 of yours is pretty tasty, isn’t it?

Yeah, yeah! What a surprise, and what a fuckin’ honor. I tell you, when they came at me with this one, I was like, “How can I refuse?” It was a shock to me at first, because when I started, the idea of even owning a Gibson was pretty much out of the picture.

There are only 150 of them. How many of them are Gibson giving you?

Oh look, I have enough guitars already.

Is it true you have 3,000 guitars in your personal collection?

It’s something like that. You can call my guitar man, Pierre de Beauport, if you want the exact number, but it’s around there. But it’s not like I go around buying them or anything; a lot of these guitars have been given to me. I’ve never seen them all.

I actually only use about… well, the working number is about 15 guitars in the rack, for different sounds and whatever. But the other 2,900, I don’t know. They’re taken care of, though. I mean, this is a prime collection.

You’re known for putting groove into your playing and hanging back behind the beat.

It’s actually nothing you can put into words, because it’s just the way I feel the rhythm. I always say that I can only do this because I’ve been blessed with the best drummers in the world. I have the luxury of knowing that the guy knows what he’s doing, you know.

Were you the first guitar player to bring that swing to rock music?

Well, if you think about it, it’s the other way around. Rock music came out of swing music. You listen to any of the old ’30s and ’40s big bands, they’re playing as much rock ’n’ roll as Bill Haley or Little Richard. The essence of a lot of it was in those big bands and their rhythm sections.

You played with Chuck Berry in the ’80s. What was he like?

Chuck, as a person, was an ornery old fucker – a lovable, ornery old fucker.

Why do you admire his guitar playing?

The same thing you’re talking about; there was something about the way he used that rhythm behind the drums that, to me, was fascinating. He said to me, “I was just playing with the right guys, [bassist] Willie Dixon and [pianist] Johnnie Johnson.” And that’s the way I feel about the way I play – lucky to play with the right guys.

We’re talking about a mysterious thing, a thing called feel, a thing called groove. Luckily you can’t put your finger on it, you know. But I try! [Laughs]

Is the way you weave lead and rhythm parts playing with Ronnie Wood an unspoken thing?

Oh, absolutely. There’s something between us. It was the same with me and with Mick Taylor, and also with Brian Jones, back at the beginning. You’d meet the right guys and automatically they knew that “You take over here, I’ll come in underneath,” and there was a beautiful little ballet going on. That’s amazing, and that’s what makes it worth doing, you know – this interconnection between musicians.

When it works, it seems almost telepathic.

Yeah, it is kinda telepathic, in a way. I suppose. You can put that word on it. [Shouts] Ronnie! [Laughs] And it’s something you don’t wanna fuck with. Once it’s there, you don’t talk about it amongst yourselves. It’s an unspoken reliance upon each other, which is a beautiful thing.

You mentioned Brian Jones, who we rarely discuss as a guitarist. What was his playing like?

Personally, he was the first steel slide player I heard. His middle name could have been Elmore, because he used to just play Elmore James stuff. He was really, really in front of that game, and that’s what I really admired about him when we first started playing together.

This band was started by a piano player, Ian Stewart, and he had Brian with him. Once I heard Brian playing Elmore James, I thought, “I’ve found a guy here who I can mess with,” and then we got into Jimmy Reed stuff and, of course, Muddy Waters, all of that… I wouldn’t call it a university education. [Laughs]

Have you ever played with a guitarist who couldn’t groove?

I very rarely play with stiffs! I’ve been lucky to play with the best. Listen, I’ve played with the guys I grew up listening to. Little Richard, Scotty Moore. Jesus Christ, should I go on? [Laughs]

Did you know John Mayall?

I had great admiration for John. He was such a scholarly guy about it. John was sort of a shadowy figure. A lot of those guys came out of the folk music scene, as it was known at the time, because for some weird reason in those early years, there were hierarchies between traditional jazz and folk music.

You know, people got fussy about shit. Anyway, it was amazing to me that these guys were dying to play music that comes from thousands of miles away and that it resonated with them. Therefore the resonation continues; music is about resonation.

Did you like the British folk guitarists?

Yeah, I did listen to them, and they were good pickers, you know. Wizz Jones used to come round to my house and hang out for a few free cigarettes and show you a lick or two. Do you remember Wizz Jones? He was an incredible guy. I really actually admired those guys. Bert Jansch was fuckin’ amazing. And unrecognized, really, for how great they were.

When you got into open-G tuning on five strings, it seemed to change your whole view of guitar playing.

It did, actually, and anybody that tries to get into it, it changes their fucking mind, too. [Laughs] Because it is a really strange setup, especially if you’re used to six-string guitars.

You have to reconfigure everything, and you realize you’ve restricted yourself to five strings and three open notes [GDGBD], you know. You have to learn to play the chords. I figured it out. It’s still fascinating. I’m still rambling around in there, looking for stuff.

Is the objective of the partial chords you often play to strip the music down?

Yeah, basically, because with five strings in open G, your bottom string is a G, so you’re immediately stripping away a whole load of possibilities of being Jimi Hendrix. [Laughs]

Also, if you get into it, you find a million other things people haven’t explored before, or at least, very few of us have. For me, it started off as an interesting sort of experiment and then I suddenly found that, hey, this is the stuff.

You mentioned Hendrix. Did you ever want to be a virtuoso soloist yourself?

No, I have never really wanted to go down that path. I mean, with solos, I admire the virtuoso and the technique and the nimbleness, but at the end of the day, what are you soloing over? You’re the icing on the cake. And I’m the cake!

So what did you think of the Sunset Strip shredders that got big in the ’80s?

[Laughs] I laughed my fuckin’ head off! Like, “Oh my God, what have we spawned?”

They were skilled players, though.

Yeah, they were good pickers, and they had a hit record here and there, but that’s pop music. Look, as long as you’ve got something to solo over, then go. But that never appealed to me. What appeals to me is what’s going on underneath. What I really do love is two or three guitars playing together, because that’s what fascinates me. Just one guy soloing means nothing much to me. Right?

Do you play fewer notes these days?

Yes, I do, because I’m not as fast as I used to be. [Laughs] I tell you what, at my age, what I find most interesting about the guitar is you can compensate for certain disabilities and nimbleness and find other ways of getting around the problem, and it still teaches you another thing – you never stop learning with the damn thing. I love it and it’s my friend forever. If I had to, I’d fuck it.

Noted. Are your hands holding up OK at age 82?

Well, I do have arthritis and very large knuckles. They don’t hurt, but it does get in the way sometimes. I’m going for a wider fingerboard for that reason.

Do you warm your hands up before a show?

I sit on ’em. No, I do have one of those hand pumps, you know. I’m really lax, quite honestly. I just look at my hands and my hands look at me, and we say, “Well, let’s see what we can do today.” And that’s the way I play guitar. I look at it and I say, “We’ve got nothing else to do. Come here. I love you!” [Laughs]

What’s your favorite song ever?

What, just one? Oh man, you’re sticking me against the wall. You’re killing me here.

It’s what we do.

Yeah! I gotta go with Robert Johnson’s Come On in My Kitchen. It’s all there – originality, everything. It’s fantastic.

And if you could only play one guitar for the rest of your life, which would it be?

Whoa… you’re a firing squad, ain’t ya? I have a little black Gibson looking at me right now, a 1936 acoustic, broken, battered. I’d keep that one with me.

You’ve often said acoustic playing is at the heart of what you do.

Well, you can’t become an electric guitar player without knowing where the damn thing comes from. If you don’t get the basics, where do you think you’re going to end up? [Laughs]

Are you still learning as a guitar player?

Who isn’t? That’s the beauty of the thing. My teacher never stops teaching. I’ve been at it for years now and he still knows more than me.

Have you got any advice for our younger readers about guitar playing?

I cannot give you any advice, kids. If you love the thing and feel like playing it, just dig in and find out yourself. It’s a great pal, and when there’s nothing else around, there’s always a guitar. It becomes a friend, a real deep friend, and also a challenge. It looks at you across the room and leers at you. [Laughs] “Come on, you ain’t got nothing out of me yet.”

It’s been 11 years since your last solo album. Will you do another one?

I’m thinking about it. I never plan these things. [Rolling Stones drummer] Steve Jordan and I were having a chat about it the other day, and usually you start by just saying, “Let’s go in and cut a track or two.” Sometimes that’s what happens, and other times you say, “Hey, here’s another one, and here’s another one.” So I’m not counting it out.

Are you still inspired to write songs?

Oh, God, long may they come. They come out of nowhere. They come out of babies’ mouths, they come out of a car crash; you never know. Everything’s a song.

They say the best songs come when you’re feeling anger and frustration. Is that true in your experience?

Anger and frustration help for a while, but you’ll never make a living at it.

What makes you happy these days?

Well, breathing. [Laughs] No, this winter my grandkids have been around. They’re all ones and twos and threes; it’s fascinating to watch. I’m starting to get the hang of it, you know. Over this winter, they’ve been my inspiration.

What are your goals at this point?

To make it to the next winter!

• For more information on the Keith Richards 1960 ES-355, head to Gibson.com.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Session guitarist extraordinaire Carlos Alomar has shared the stage with a veritable list of icons, from David Bowie to James Brown and The Main Ingredient.

Later, he joined the ranks of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney collaborators, contributed to Alicia Keys' album The Element of Freedom, and played on the worldwide hit Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. However, before hitting his stride with Bowie, Alomar played second fiddle to none other than Chuck Berry.

“He came in with this guitar, a beautiful ES-335, and he would lift the headstock up and down and that would tell you what to play,” recalls Alomar in a new interview with Guitarist.

“Depending on how he moved his headstock, you’d stop or start. That was it. And man, he walked in and said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ But I had the audacity to say, ‘Are we gonna rehearse, Mr Berry?’ He didn’t turn around; he whipped around and yelled, ‘We don’t rehearse rock ’n’ roll!’ Let me tell you, I still give my musical cues to this day with the headstock, just like Chuck Berry.”

In the late '60s, Alomar had an eight-month stint with James Brown, which saw him tour the East Coat and pick up life lessons along the way.

“While I was playing with him, he kept saying, ‘We’re gonna take it to the bridge,’ but I had to wait for the cue. Finally, he whipped around and said, ‘Hit me,’ and, unfortunately, I did not hit him at all [laughs]. I missed the cue.

Alomar describes how he went to collect his money when he quickly discovered that some of his hard-earned cash was missing.

“I looked at the guy and said, ‘Hey, there’s $20 missing.’ He said, ‘Yeah, Mr Brown said you didn’t hit back.’ I was intelligent. My father gave me a mantra: ‘If you can’t explain it, defend it.’ So I learned to talk real fast and to explain exactly what I wanted… And I was fired.”

Mary McGlory's enthusiasm for playing bass has never faltered. It's been more than 60 years since the birth of her band The Liverbirds, a UK four-piece who would become peers of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks but never attained the same worldwide commercial success.

Yet Valerie Gell (guitarist and vocalist), Pamela Birch (guitarist and vocalist), Mary McGlory (bassist), and Sylvia Saunders (drummer) are etched in history, as the Liverpool band paved the way for women in rock at a time when there weren’t many women playing in bands.

“We realized we were the very first in Europe. But that was what we wanted to be,” remarks McGlory. “And we wanted to show that girls can do it and it's not just the boys' world, guitars; it's female. It's male, female, everybody can do it.”

From booting Chuck Berry’s manager off stage to touring Japan and blazing a screaming trail across Europe, the band cemented their position as pioneers, all while spreading their own twist on Merseybeat beyond the British shores. 

Apart from these successes, however, it’s their genuine friendship, enduring passion for their instruments, and the impact they had on a new generation of women in rock music that’s stuck in McGlory’s mind.

In fact, the two surviving members, McGlory, 78, and Saunders, 77, have just released a memoir, The Liverbirds: Our Life in Britain's First Female Rock 'n' Roll Band. The band and their lived experiences also inspired the Liverpool-based musical Girls Don't Play Guitars.

But the story of The Liverbirds doesn't end there. McGlory and Saunders, along with two actors from the musical, were recently in the studio, recording music for a brand-new Liverbirds album, set to be released later this year. 

We spoke to McGlory to get the lowdown on The Liverbirds' remarkable story, the bass gear she used throughout her career – and what really happened with John Lennon and Chuck Berry's manager…

What attracted you to play bass?

“To be quite honest, when we got to the shop to buy the instruments, we hadn't even decided except that Valerie was definitely gonna play lead guitar. The rest of us hadn't really thought about what we wanted to play. 

“But I'd seen The Beatles just before in The Cavern and we had a little chat with them. That was when John Lennon said, ‘Girls don't play guitars.’ And Paul McCartney said, ‘What a great idea.’ And I thought, well, I'll just play bass because that's what Paul McCartney played.”

So once you decided to play bass, where did you buy your first bass from, and what was it?

“It was 1962. And it was in the shop called Hessy's, where nearly all the groups bought instruments, including The Beatles. When we went, we hadn't even started playing and so we weren't earning any money except from our weekly jobs that we had. So it had to be a price thing as well. And the man in the shop, he was a very well-known person in Liverpool, he suggested I buy the red Framus bass, first of all, because it wasn't that expensive and because it wasn't that heavy, either.”

And how did you four decide to start a band? 

“It was after seeing The Beatles at The Cavern. And really, the first time I had the idea of starting a group was when I was in The Cavern with my cousins, and we thought we would start a group. 

“Valerie and Sylvia, they were these girls thinking about starting a group. And they got in touch with me, and Valerie could play. She was a really good guitarist. When she realized that I couldn't play she said, ‘It doesn't matter, Mary – I'll teach you.' Sylvia was already gonna play the drums. And we needed Pam. She came later. And that was when we finally settled as The Liverbirds and knew that this was the right lineup.”

Where was your first gig? Was it in Liverpool?

“It was in Liverpool. I mean, first of all, I was very religious at the time and had good connections to our parish priest. And he said, ‘You know, girls, before you start playing, if you'd like to just play to a little audience, so you know what it's like.’ 

“And so our very first gig was playing for the old-age pensioners. And, of course, at the time, we still were only instrumental, and they were all clapping and shouting. And when we came off this very, very small stage, we said to each other, ‘I bet you they didn't have their hearing aids.’ So that was the very first gig. 

“And then we had one in Chester, which is quite close to Liverpool because we had really promised to do our first [proper] gig [in Liverpool] at The Cavern because we knew Bob Wooler [The Cavern’s compere]. To do The Cavern as your very first real gig might be a bit nerve-racking. So we did a small club in Chester first, and that went very well. And then the next gig was The Cavern.”

You played The Cavern Club on your third show? You went big from the get-go!

“Yeah, yeah, we did. And of course, we were the very first all-female band to play at The Cavern. And we didn't know how the female audience was gonna react to us because we thought maybe they might think, ‘Oh my gosh, they're gonna take our boyfriends away from us,’ or, you know, the groupies might suppose, ‘Oh, they're gonna get the first choice of the bands.’ And then we started playing, the girls started screaming just the way they did for the boys.” 

Your interaction with John Lennon is widely publicized. How did comments like ‘girls don't play guitars’ push you to become a professional band?

“It encouraged us more than it disheartened us. And all the other groups, they were all fantastic. I mean, even groups like The Searchers, or Gerry and the Pacemakers, the groups that were very big at the time, they all said, ‘Listen, girls, if you need any help, just get in touch with us.’ And some of the groups really did come, one or two members of them to some of our rehearsals. So there was absolutely no problem there at all.”

You've toured extensively in Europe, and you're also based in Hamburg now. How did the music scene there differ from what you had experienced till that point in the UK?

“Well, when we came over to Hamburg, we'd already started. Pam joined us, and Pam and Val started singing together, so we didn't have to just play instrumentals anymore. A lot of the tunes that we played when we first arrived in Hamburg, we only rehearsed on the train coming to Hamburg. 

“So we'd never even heard them over an amplifier because two hours after we arrived in Hamburg, we were already on the stage at The Star-Club. We were playing things like Roll Over Beethoven and Boys and Roadrunner. So it was quite amazing to hear that we'd done a good job of it.

“We were supposed to stay at The Star-Club for six weeks, and then go back to England. But after we'd been there for a week, the owner, Manfred, made us a management offer. And he said, ‘I will book all over Europe, if you stay here, not just the Star-Club.’ 

“And that's what he did. He kept his word. And we traveled all over Europe, more or less, and even ended up going to Japan. So even though people said, 'Why didn't you take the offer of Brian Epstein? Or of Larry Page, The Kinks' manager?', we never regretted taking Manfred as our manager, because for six years, he really took care of us.” 

What were the best or most memorable gigs you played? Do any shows come to mind?

“Of course. In Berlin with Chuck Berry. I mean, Chuck Berry's manager said, ‘Nobody's allowed to play any Chuck Berry songs at the concert.’ But we had no choice. Otherwise, we couldn't have done the two 20-minute sets. So we started playing Roll Over Beethoven on our second set.

“Chuck Berry's manager ran onstage and tried to stop us. Valerie just pushed him off the stage and said ‘Get lost,’ but with other words, even stronger words, and we carried on playing and the audience was going absolutely crazy. They would scream and break the chairs and jump up and down and say, ‘Fantastic, girls, you show them,’ and yeah, that's one of the main concerts that stayed in memory.” 

“In them days, they didn't have arenas. It was more like what they call in Germany the Stadthalle, where they usually have about 7,000 to 10,000 people. We did a fantastic one in Vienna.

“And we did them all over the place – in Copenhagen, in Amsterdam, in Stockholm. We couldn't believe that people liked us that much. And even just the fact that they knew about us because, of course in them days, there was no social media. It was all down to word of mouth or publicity.”

Did you ever go back and play in the UK after you found success in mainland Europe?

“No. They make a great part in the play [The Liverbirds musical] when somebody says to us, ‘What did you ever regret?’ And then, this is on stage, one of the actors says, ‘Well, we do regret that we never came back to play in Liverpool.’ And then they say, ‘Well, this is a place. So let's change things. Let's do a final gig of The Liverbirds in Liverpool.’ And everybody really, really liked that part of it because that was like finally doing a farewell to Liverpool.”

It’s interesting that you were really embraced in mainland Europe but the UK kind of lagged behind...

“I met Charlie Watts about 10 years ago. We played with the Rolling Stones when we were still in England. And when he found out who I was, he said, ‘You know, Mary, Bill Wyman and I, we always said, we wonder what happened to them fantastic girls. We never heard of them again in England.’

“So you know, even people like The Stones, or later on The Kinks. They all really liked us and thought that we had something special. Which, to be quite honest, there's only Sylvia and I left. And we've only just realized ourselves now how special we were because we had no other girls who we could look up to and say, ‘Well, let's try and be like them.’ We had to be like ourselves.”

In terms of bass gear, what did you use throughout your career with The Liverbirds? Was it always the same bass that you bought in Liverpool?

“The first one was a Framus. And then shortly after we got to Hamburg and we were earning very good money, I went and bought my dream bass, which was a Gibson, a red Gibson, and unfortunately, that got robbed after four weeks.

“Then I bought a semi-acoustic Vox. When we went to Japan, Yamaha presented us all with a set of equipment as a present. And so I had a Yamaha bass, like a copy of the Fender bass. I kept that, I've still got it, but when we went into the studio in September [2023] to record our new album, and I got my bass out of the case, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my god, either this bass has gone bigger, or I've gone smaller. That looks so massive on me.’ 

“And I knew it was too heavy to have it on all day in the studio because we recorded a whole album. So I bought myself a new bass, a semi-acoustic Hofner, which is ideal for me because it's the right size. But because of old memories, I insisted on playing my old bass on a few of the songs as well.”

And what bass amps did you use during that time?

“It was an amp I bought in Liverpool. It was a WEM. And then, of course, when we got to Hamburg, we bought Vox amplifiers. When we got the Yamaha amplifiers as a present, of course, sometimes we used them, but mainly it was the Vox that had the sound that we wanted.”

You mentioned that you recently recorded a new album...

“Yeah. Sylvia and I, and the two girls from the musical that played Pam and Val in the musical, they came over to Hamburg, and a German record producer did a whole album with us. And at the moment he's gradually releasing singles on streaming and on the YouTube [channel] The Liverbirds. 

“In the new songs, we wanted to keep the '60s feeling while being able to use the new possibilities that you have nowadays in a studio, so you can definitely hear them two things on it.”

So there are obviously more women in bands now, but you were one of the very first bands with women, in a very different time. Were there any particular hurdles you faced simply because you were women navigating the rock scene?

“We had some very near-misses when you think about it. There was the situation with Jimmy Savile [the British media personality and the subject of hundreds of sexual abuse allegations following his death in 2011]. Of course, nobody knew what he was up to at the time. We’d see him going to this hotel with school girls. We'd say to Jimmy, ‘What are the girls doing here?’ And he'd say, ‘I just give them a bit of pocket money to clean my room.’ 

“Then there was the thing with Gary Glitter here in Hamburg. When he was trying to get into my room in the hotel… there were a few things like that. But on the other hand, we always had good protection from, first of all, our manager, road manager, and male fans.

“But it does surprise us, even though we're really, really happy there are more girls playing guitars or in groups now. But it's still not that many when you think about it.

“That's what we realized when the musical was on in Liverpool: how many young girls came up to us, when we were signing autographs at the end and said, ‘I'm gonna go home now and get a guitar. I've never even realized it. But it's right. We girls have to start doing this.’

“And some of them have [actually started a band], because when Sylvia and I were promoting our book in Liverpool in March, some girls did come up and say, ‘We are a group now. We got together after your show.’”

Last week, it was reported a 1964 Gibson Firebird that had been stage-played by Chuck Berry at one of London’s most iconic venues was going up for auction, and that it was expected to fetch a healthy five-figure sum.

Well, that guitar has now sold, ever-so-slightly exceeding its £20,000 forecast and selling for a total sum of £21,488. Admittedly, the guitar went under the hammer for £17,000, and it was only a 26.4% premium charge that pushed it over the threshold.

Nevertheless, it’s a significant sum of money for a six-string befitting its heritage, having played a crucial role in Berry’s 1972 headline show during The Rock and Roll Show at London’s Wembley Stadium.

As the story goes – and, indeed, as video footage verifies – Berry was playing his Cherry Red Gibson ES-330TD for the majority of the set, though ran into a spot of bother when one of the electric guitar strings snapped during the end of the show.

Thanks to some quick thinking from his back-up guitarist Terry Gibson – real name Terry Clemson – Berry was handed a refinished Firebird to finish his set with. In the video below, the whole switch can be seen around the one-hour-and-16-minute mark.

Upon completion of the set, the Firebird was handed back to Gibson, who kept it until his death. The Firebird then passed on into the possession of its current owner, who purchased the guitar around 2020.

Notably, the guitar itself was originally a sunburst-finished six-string, though had received a fresh lick of black paint sometime between the late ‘60s and 1972. Other specs include a rosewood fretboard and Maestro Vibrola tremolo system.

The guitar in its black-finished state could also be seen on the cover of Berry’s 2017 three-album reissue of Rockin’ at the Hops, One Dozen Berrys and New Juke Box Hits, courtesy of a picture that was snapped at that London show.

As well as its connection to Berry, the Firebird was also a faithful member of Terry Gibson’s own axe arsenal, having featured on the front of his own solo album, Downliner, in 1990.

For more information, head over to Gardiner Houlgate.

A stage-played 1964 Gibson Firebird that was once owned and used by rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry is set to go up for auction in the UK later this month.

Though the Firebird wasn’t one of Berry’s go-to Gibson models – the ES-350T and, later, the ES-355 received that honor – the electric guitar legend was forced into playing this particular six-string during a headline performance at the 1972 Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium in London, when his main instrument snapped a string.

After Berry’s guitar went a string down, his backing guitarist, Terry Gibson, showed impeccable initiative by handing over the Firebird in question, which Berry used to finish the set. 

Berry can be seen switching to and playing the Firebird in the video below around the one hour and 16 minute mark.

After the show, the guitar was given back to Gibson – whose real name is Terry Clemson – who kept it until his death.

Gibson, who had a prolific performing career as a solo artist and session man – his credits include work with Berry, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley and Screaming Lord Sutch – passed away in 2020, with the guitar moving hands to its current owner around that time.

Despite its black lick of paint, the Firebird originally flaunted a sunburst finish, though was refinished sometime between the late ‘60s and 1972, when Berry was snapped playing the Firebird at Wembley.

One of the pictures captured from the event, which shows Berry in one of his iconic power poses, was later used for a three-album reissue of Rockin’ at the Hops, One Dozen Berrys and New Juke Box Hits in 2017. The Firebird was also used for the artwork of Gibson’s own solo album, Downliner, in 1990.

In terms of specs, the Firebird features a refinished body, rosewood fretboard and a Maestro Vibrola tremolo system, and is being auctioned off alongside a guitar strap that is believed to be the one used by Berry during the gig.

Owing to its association with Berry, the Firebird is expected to fetch a five-figure sum at the auction – as much as £20,000, to be precise – when it goes under the hammer next Thursday (March 9) in Wiltshire, England.

Head over to Gardiner Houlgate to find out more about the guitar.

Though nothing beats the feeling of playing an actual guitar – be it an electric guitar or an acoustic guitar – sometimes circumstances force us into playing something else entirely: nothing at all.

If it wasn’t clear, we’re talking about the air guitar: a deceptively difficult discipline that, believe it or not, was once a taboo instrument – something that was played away from prying eyes when the overwhelming feelings of separation from a real six-string became too great to bear.

But that all changed when Tom Cruise made air guitar a public nuisance in 1983’s Risky Business. With the house to himself, the underwear-clad Cruise did some mighty Chuck Berry-esque guitar work while frolicking to the chunky blues rock riffs of Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll.

The best thing about playing air guitar? That is, other than the fact you can be entirely tone deaf, you don't have to fork out for an actual instrument, an appreciation of music theory is entirely unnecessary, and you can have all the musicality of a hockey puck? You can play as loud as you like without fear of receiving any noise complaints.

With that in mind, here are 10 tracks of varying difficulty that will put your air guitar abilities to the test. Master these tracks and you’ll be on your way to the Air Guitar World Championship in no time. Yes, that is a real thing.

10. Chuck Berry – Johnny B. Goode

An entry level track for those looking to kickstart their air guitar journey in the easiest possible way. In fact, if you can't navigate Chuck Berry's primal rock 'n' roll riffs, perhaps the discipline isn't for you after all. If the song proves too difficult to learn, never fear: you can still work on that iconic duck walk of his – a stunt best practiced behind closed doors and definitely not in front of mixed company.

9. Beastie Boys – (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)

With their punk hearts, hip-hop minds and '80s metal sensibilities, the Beastie Boys tried and succeeded for a while in becoming all things to all people. For air guitarists, they did not provide consistently fertile ground, but this frat boy anthem has become a quiet classic in the annals of flailing air-meisters.

8. The Who – Baba O'Riley

Okay, puff that chest out and plant those legs. It's time for one of the greatest air guitar moves developed in the short history of this amazing art form: the Windmill. Thank you, Pete Townshend – though you may be a pretty good real-life guitar player, your contribution to the oeuvre of air guitar poses and mimicry will live on forever.

7. Aerosmith – Walk This Way

A riff that really needs no introduction, Joe Perry’s low-fret throwdown from 1975 separates the good air guitarists from the great air guitarists. It may revolve around only a handful of frets, but that’s no excuse to get complacent – your right hand will need to keep up with your left hand for this one. A lack of synchronization will just put a spotlight on the shortcomings of your technique.

6. Boston – More Than a Feeling

Tom Scholtz's hermetic guitar artistry is legendary, so it comes as no surprise to see his byline on a list of air guitar songs. The tone alone allows air guitarists to feel the heat of the spotlight, hear the roar of the crowd and think about what would have happened if they had only learned to play a real guitar.

5. Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird

As the solos that close this epic veer off in a million directions like a gorgeous display of fireworks, a seasoned air guitar vet knows that they need not follow one solo arc specifically, for Free Bird is more about "feeling" than it is about technique. Still, those lightning-fast pentatonic licks are not for the faint of heart.

4. The Troggs – Wild Thing

Like the primal scream of the Troggs themselves, this song is great for beginner air guitarists. The melody is familiar and there are enough vocal hooks to distract any onlookers from noticing big gaps in your technique. Simply put, it's a three-chord masterpiece, and one that needs to be in the repertoire of all serious air guitarists.

3. AC/DC – You Shook Me All Night Long

With his manic gestures and incessant mugging, Angus Young may just be the quintessential role model for an air guitarist. Not only is this chord progression standard for all air-heads, but it also provides an amazing sing-along chorus for those players who aren't afraid to sing and play at the same time.

2. Jimi Hendrix – Foxy Lady

Hendrix doesn't turn up on a lot of air guitar lists because, well, frankly, not many air guitarists dare take on the Great One. The fact is, even pretending to be Hendrix is difficult. Tackle at your own risk. For experienced air guitarists only.

1. Derek and the Dominos – Layla

Multiple guitar parts are the ultimate challenge for air guitarists, no matter what their skill level. In this instance, do you follow Clapton's rhythm track on this classic, or do you take the high road and play Duane Allman's memorable lead line? It's a no-brainer, really...

In the hit 1985 film, Back to the Future, 1980s teen Marty McFly, played by Michael J Fox, fills in on electric guitar at the high school dance.

As we all know by now, he blows the minds of the '50-era kids and musicians in attendance by incorporating powerchords, feedback and tapping into Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode.

“I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet,” he tells the bewildered crowd. “But your kids are gonna love it.” True. Very true.

Something that wasn't very “true” about the scene, however, is the guitar McFly is using. He is, in fact, playing a Gibson ES-345, which wouldn't be introduced until 1958. The scene is set in 1955. 

Apparently on his way back to '55, McFly must've made a pit stop in '58 to pick up the guitar. Or maybe Marvin Berry – who was already playing the guitar before handing it off to Marty – made a quick trip to 1958, and then back to 1955. OK, we think you get the idea.

The biggest difference between Gibson ES-345s available today and Marty's guitar is that Marty's was retrofitted with a Bigsby, as many good guitars are.

McFly was emulating Chuck Berry and playing Johnny B. Goode before it was even released, thus insinuating that Berry got the idea for the song from McFly. Hey, anything's possible!

Above, check out the Gibson ES-345 scene from the film, and below, watch Fox performing the song with Coldplay in 2016. Sadly, he's playing a Les Paul rather than an ES-345 in the latter, though it's a killer performance nonetheless.

Rock journeyman Steve Miller has been discussing his early years as a player, revealing an enviable musical education from guitar A-listers, including Les Paul and T-Bone Walker. 

Speaking to our friends over at Louder, Miller explains how Walker taught him how to play behind his head, when the budding guitarist was only nine years old.

“I was really fortunate because my parents loved music,” Miller says. “My dad loved jazz and blues, and he had a tape recorder right after World War II – one of the first really good professional ones. He offered to record Les Paul. Les and Mary Ford were working at a club in Milwaukee and they became very good friends with my family…

“I watched Les perform quite a bit and he was so good and funny and made it look so easy. He made anybody think they could play the guitar. Next thing I knew, we moved to Texas and I was nine years old and T-Bone Walker came over to the house to play a party… [He] played from 6pm to 5am and he and my dad became good friends. He came over again and again. So I have all these memories. And he taught me how to play guitar behind my head and how to play single-note leads.” 

However, the Fly Like An Eagle songwriter says not every encounter with a guitar icon turned out quite so well. In the same piece, Miller recalls a period in which he backed the notoriously prickly Chuck Berry, which resulted in a pretty spectacular fallout.

“When the Miller Band backed him at Bill Graham’s request, first thing he said at rehearsal was: ‘Okay, no one take a shave or shower until we’ve played,’” recalls Miller. “[Then] just before the gig, he disappeared, and returned loaded as a zombie on downers. 

“We backed him all over California for two years and he got more and more annoying. At the Carousel Ballroom he got shitty with us on stage. Afterwards he came to my dressing room and I told him: ‘Hey, fuck you, Chuck. Get your own fucking band, get your own fucking amp and get the fuck out of my dressing room.’ He was fine from then on.” 

That’s probably what we would have done in that situation, too… Head over to Louder to check out their full Steve Miller interview, which sees the guitarist and songwriter discussing his (successfully unsuccessful) Vietnam draft interview, writing Fly Like An Eagle and California’s psychedelic gold rush.

When you’re done with that, you can find out about the secrets behind Miller’s incredible guitar tone on his standout track Jet Airliner.

There’s a good story told about Chet Atkins. One day, someone who had stopped to listen to him play said, “Man, that guitar sure sounds good!” According to the tale, Chet put the guitar down on a chair then said to its admirer: “How good does it sound now?” 

His point, of course, is that guitars are just lumps of metal and wood until a player brings them to life. As enjoyable as it is to pore over the technical evolution of famous guitar models – and we do plenty of that – instruments can’t be truly historic until they are used to make influential music. Pioneering musicians, in their turn, set the agenda for the next generation of instrument design – and so the wheel of history turns. 

In that sense, the player and the instrument itself are forever entangled, indivisible. That’s why, when we decided to explore which guitars have had the most impact on history, we realised it must include not just classic models (though sometimes it is enough to simply invent something first to make history), but also identify specific iconic instruments that represented a fleeting moment when the world stopped to listen to a new sound and, in so doing, was changed forever. 

For example, it’s hard to imagine Peggy Sue without Buddy Holly’s ’55 Strat. By the same token, the Strat itself might never have become an icon of rock ’n’ roll without Buddy Holly. 

The following article therefore represents an attempt to trace the most crucial pairings of artist and instrument, each of which tilted history on its axis just a little and set music rolling down a new path. They also contain lesser-known contributions to the evolution of the instrument that were made by guitar designs that, without setting the world alight, nonetheless changed our perception of what the guitar could and should be.

Our guide in this endeavour is celebrated guitar historian Tony Bacon, who compiled the following list of 50 extraordinary instruments that mark a watershed in the history of the instrument, both musically and technically. We hope you gain fresh insight into the evolution of guitar as you join us on the journey. 

1. c.1590 Unknown Maker five-course guitar

This very early guitar is a rare survivor, thanks partly to its prized workmanship. It has five courses, a format that developed around the mid-16th century from the earlier ‘treble’ four-course instrument. A course can be a single, double (as here), or even triple string. Inevitably, this guitar has been restored: as such, the top has been replaced and the neck rebuilt and cut down, although a beautiful central ‘rose’ in the soundhole is original.

2. c. 1804 Pagés six-course guitar

Around the end of the 18th century, makers began to move from five to six courses, and with the addition of the low-E course, tuning began to settle at EADGBE. A further change to six single strings, at first in Italy and France, resulted in something closer to a modern flat-top. This six-course guitar was made in Cadiz, Spain, by Josef Pagés with 12 full-size metal frets and shorter ‘treble’ frets on the body.          

3. 1888 Torres classical guitar

In the 19th century, the classical guitar began to take shape, and the maker most responsible for this evolution was a Spaniard named Antonio de Torres, active from the 1850s to the 1890s. He determined the guitar’s top as key to its sound and developed a fan-strutting pattern for the underside. Torres domed the lower bout, shifted the bridge further into the body, and used relatively thin woods. His ideas for an integrated guitar were widely adopted in Spain and abroad.

4. Maybelle Carter’s 1928 Gibson L-5

Lloyd Loar’s greatest contribution at Gibson was the Master Series L-5 guitar, introduced in 1922. It had violin-style f-holes instead of a regular soundhole and established many of the ideas for the modern archtop acoustic. 

Maybelle Carter regularly played an L-5, setting templates for much of country, bluegrass and folk guitar. Her style neatly blurred the lines between melody and rhythm, always supporting the singer and providing crisp leads where needed.

5. Joan Baez’s 1929 Martin 0-45

Following Martin’s innovative X-bracing, in the early decades of the 20th century, it came to define the modern flat-top guitar, and by 1928 was bracing all models for steel strings.

Joan Baez acquired this ’29 0-45 in 1959 for $200 and has played it (or a replica) ever since. Martin’s Size 0 was a relatively large ‘parlour guitar’, a little over 13 inches wide, and 45 was the fanciest Style with distinctive abalone inlay.

6. Lead Belly’s c.1930 Stella 12-string 

The skiffle, folk and blues boom of the '50s and '60s brought a new popularity to the 12-string, its sizable singer-supporting sound coming from strings arranged in six pairs tuned in octaves and unison doubling. 

Records by the country bluesman Lead Belly, who mostly played a Stella 12 like this one, were a big influence. The Stella brand was used at the time by the Oscar Schmidt instrument company of New Jersey.

7. 1932 Rickenbacker Frying Pan prototype

This maple lap-steel experiment was the first guitar to feature an electro-magnetic pickup, which makes it effectively the basis for the majority of electric guitars that have followed since. 

George Beauchamp was a partner in Ro-Pat-In – soon renamed the Electro String Instrument Company – along with Adolph Rickenbacker and Paul Barth, and he devised the instrument’s ‘horseshoe’ pickup. Electro began selling the cast aluminium production-version A-25 lap steel later in 1932.

8. Charlie Christian’s c.1937 Gibson ES-150

This was Gibson’s first Spanish electric guitar, launched in 1936. After World War II, electrics would become an important part of Gibson’s revived business, but the ES-150 marked an important first step in that direction. 

Charlie Christian played early Gibson electrics, including a 150, with Benny Goodman, and his pioneering work proved that amplified guitars could work as soloing instruments in jazz and elsewhere. He died just 25 years old in 1942.

9. Mark Knopfler’s 1937 National Style 0

When Mark Knopfler’s National guitar, shining like the Mississippi Delta, starred on the cover of Dire Straits’ 1985 album, Brothers In Arms, it sparked a revival of interest in resonator instruments. 

Visible on Knopfler’s guitar are the vivid decorations National sandblasted onto the bodies of some of its models. John Dopyera and George Beauchamp at National developed a system with aluminium resonators suspended inside a guitar’s metal body to produce extra volume and a distinctive sound.

10. 1939 National Sonora

This was probably the first two-pickup electric guitar. Until National in California introduced this model, the electric lap steel and Spanish electrics that began to trickle out from some makers during the 30s all had single pickups, usually at the bridge (although Gibson, for example, put its Spanish guitar pickup at the neck). 

The obscure Sonora model paved the way for two, three or more pickups – but there remained an appeal to the simplicity of one.

11. 1948 Bigsby Merle Travis

This remarkably influential guitar looks closer to our idea of a modern solid electric guitar than anything that had gone before.

Merle Travis was a fine country guitarist, Paul Bigsby a mechanic and woodworker who fixed motorcycles and built custom pedal-steel guitars. They devised the Bigsby-Travis guitar in California in the late 40s, pre-dating Fender’s first solidbody.

Bigsby – better known for his vibrato, patented four years later – produced some similar guitars but only in small numbers.

12. 1950 Fender Broadcaster

This is the guitar that roused an entire industry to seriously consider the new idea of a modern mass-produced solidbody electric guitar. Gretsch complained about Fender’s original name, Broadcaster, and during 1951 Fender changed it to Telecaster. 

The much-copied Tele retained its straightforward, no-nonsense style and playability through the ensuing decades and remains a near-perfect utilitarian design geared for mass production – and for players who continue to recognise the value of elegant simplicity.

13. Les Paul’s 1952 Gibson Les Paul Model

Even a conservative Midwest company such as Gibson did not wait long to react to Fender’s activities in California, and soon the firm was busy designing its own new solidbody. 

It was introduced in 1952, reflecting Gibson’s craft heritage in contrast to Fender’s unpretentious approach, and endorsed by America’s most famous guitarist, Les Paul. This guitar, since much restored, was one that Gibson gave to Les Paul himself and which the guitarist used widely in the 50s. 

14. Grady Martin’s 1952 Bigsby doubleneck

Among the Spanish electrics made by Paul Bigsby was the first solidbody doubleneck guitar, built in 1952 for the busy Nashville studio guitarist Grady Martin. He ordered his Bigsby doubleneck with a regular six-string neck plus a five-string mandolin neck. 

For Bigsby, used to making double- and triple-neck steels, the design may have seemed a logical step, but it paved the way for other brave makers and strapping musicians to chance their arm with several necks.

15. Buddy Holly’s c.1955 Fender Stratocaster

Fender’s second solidbody was introduced in 1954. Three years later, in December ’57, American TV provided a boost for the guitar when Buddy Holly strummed a Strat on The Ed Sullivan Show. 

Holly had topped the charts with That’ll Be The Day and now had a new 45, Peggy Sue, and his Strat was on the cover of his ’57 album, The “Chirping” Crickets, too. Suddenly, thousands of aspiring guitarists knew the guitar they wanted for Christmas. 

16. Chuck Berry’s 1955 Gibson ES-350T

Chuck Berry invented so much about electric guitar playing – including the signature licks that influenced every budding rock ’n’ roller in the '50s and early '60s – that it’s easy to overlook his guitars. 

Chuck’s axe of choice in the classic early days was a stylish 350T, which combined a comfortable thinline body with a shorter neck and scale, and the model set the style for many of the electric hollowbodies to come from Gibson as well as other makers.

17. 1955 Stratosphere Twin

This rare model is the one for which the Missouri-based brothers Russ and Claude Deaver will go down in guitar history because it was the first production doubleneck electric and it incorporated the first 12-string electric. 

Their 12-string, also offered as a single-neck model, used an unusual tuning system that required guitarists to reconsider their playing techniques. Chet Atkins used a Twin, as did the West Coast session guitarist Jimmy Bryant, but Stratosphere’s instruments soon faded from the scene. 

18. Joni Mitchell’s 1956 Martin D-28

Joni Mitchell learned to play guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction book. She soon developed her own picking style and a fondness for alternative tunings, which she played during the late 60s and early 70s on her main guitar of the period, a ’56 D-28.

Martin first made the big dreadnought guitars in 1916 for Ditson, and in 1931 introduced its own models, the D-18 and D-28, followed by the high-end D-45 in ’33.

19. 1957 Silvertone 1323

The mighty mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck was an important source of affordable guitars in the '50s and '60s. 

Danelectro, Harmony, Kay and others supplied instruments to Sears bearing the company’s own Silvertone brand, and, by the late-'50s, Sears was offering a line of models such as this Silvertone 1323, derived from a Dano U2. 

Thousands of would-be American guitarists started out with their cheap, effective Silvertones thanks to the Danelectro factory in New Jersey.

20. 1958 Gibson ES-335

The now-classic 335 was Gibson’s most revolutionary electric guitar. It had two radical body features: double cutaways, and a semi-solid structure. The cutaways made it easier to reach higher frets, while a solid maple block inside the body tamed feedback and combined solidbody-like sustain with a hollowbody’s woody warmth. 

The result was a comfortable electric for the modern player who wanted to explore traditional tones at elevated volume levels.

21. 1958 Fender Jazzmaster

Following the success of the Telecaster, Esquire and Stratocaster, as well as the Precision Bass and Jazz Bass, in 1958 Fender introduced a further solidbody guitar – the high-end Jazzmaster. 

It had an enlarged headstock, a body with Fender’s new offset-waist design, the first Fender appearance of a separate rosewood fingerboard, two new-style single-coil pickups, a floating vibrato bridge, and an array of controls including a switch to select between preset rhythm and lead settings.

22. John Lennon’s 1958 Rickenbacker 325

The Beatles have been important to Rickenbacker, and this is where that connection began. John Lennon bought this, his first American guitar, when his band played a residency in Hamburg, Germany, in 1960. 

After a long life, today it has a non-standard pickguard and knobs, and the finish restored to original natural. Lennon played this and a later 325 throughout most of the band’s life on stage and in the studio.

23. Dave Davies’s 1958 Gibson Flying V

In 1958, Gibson introduced the Flying V and Explorer models to almost universal disapproval, and only 98 Vs were made before production ceased in ’59. 

When Dave Davies happened on an original V during a Kinks US tour in 1965, he went on to provide the first glimpse of this rare instrument for many fellow guitarists. It became clear to players what a great guitar this was, and showed makers that a solidbody could be virtually any shape.

24. Bo Diddley’s 1958 Gretsch custom rectangular guitar

Rock ’n’ roll hero Bo Diddley teamed up with Gretsch to create a series of unusually shaped guitars, including this flat-sided beast from 1958. Billboard magazine noted that Gretsch “has made a special custom-built square guitar for Bo Diddley – this is a strong artist who would probably sound great even with glockenspiel accompaniment”. 

Here was early and very public evidence that some players no longer required instruments that matched the conventional template.

25. Eric Clapton’s c.1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard ‘Beano’

This guitar, missing since stolen in 1966, is a rare example of an influential instrument that no-one has seen for a very long time indeed. Clapton bought the sunburst Les Paul in London in ’65, using it for John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album.

The cover had EC reading a copy of the Beano comic – hence the guitar’s nickname – and sunburst Standards rose dramatically in popularity and value as Clapton and others demonstrated their musical worth.

Read more: The strange case of the missing Beano: where is Eric Clapton’s stolen Les Paul?

26. George Harrison’s 1963 Rickenbacker 360/12

Rickenbacker models became the electric 12-strings of choice during a mid-60s trend for the 12’s big chiming sound, prompted by George Harrison.

Rickenbacker gave him this guitar – actually an early prototype – during the group’s first American tour early in 1964, and he used this and a second gifted Rickenbacker on many Beatle live shows and recordings, including A Hard Day’s Night and Ticket To Ride. 

27. Johnny Winter’s 1963 Gibson Firebird V

With Fenders popular, Gibson looked for a competing design, landing with the Firebird line, new for 1963 and devised by car designer Ray Dietrich. Firebirds had a neck-through-body design and a similar look to Fender’s offset style, which gained these first Firebirds the ‘reverse’ nickname. 

The Texan bluesman Johnny Winter favoured a sunburst V, which he bought around 1970 for $225, and he showed just what it could do, especially when he took a slide to it.

28. 1966 Vox Guitar Organ

The Guitar Organ – devised by Dick Denney, who designed many Vox amplifiers – had frets with contacts connected to the innards of a Vox organ in the body. The idea here was to create organ sounds or guitar sounds, individually or simultaneously. 

It was a difficult instrument to play, not least because of a neck wider at the nut than the body, and did not last long, but it provided an early suggestion that a guitar might be made to sound like a keyboard. 

29. Jack White’s c.1965 Airline 7283

Alongside Sears, Roebuck, the other big name in US mail-order was Montgomery Ward. Like Sears, it bought in instruments for its house brand, Airline, and served many a fledgling guitarist. 

Valco in Chicago built a series of models for Ward, some of which used moulded-fibreglass bodies, like some similar Valco-made National and Supro guitars. When Jack White later used an Airline for his work in The White Stripes, Airline became a key name in retro-land. 

30. Kurt Cobain’s 1965 Fender Jaguar

Kurt Cobain’s favoured guitar for Nevermind-era Nirvana was a left-handed Jaguar. It had some odd features for a ’65, various aftermarket mods, including DiMarzio pickups and an extra volume knob, and it soon gained a taped-off toggle area. 

During the 90s and beyond, Cobain’s love of offset Fenders did much to repopularise these models, which had gone in and (more often) out of fashion through the years since their introduction.

31. Jimmie Webster’s 1966 Gretsch White Falcon Super Project-O-Sonic 6137

The White Falcon was a spectacular gleaming object that appeared in 1955, designed by Gretsch’s chief ideas man, Jimmie Webster.

This double-cutaway guitar was owned by Webster himself and typifies Gretsch mid-'60s style, with double mute switches and pads, telescopic vibrato arm, multiple stereo controls, Space Control bridge, T-Zone slanted frets, thumbnail markers, two Filter’Trons, and, of course, That Great Gretsch Sound. It surely qualifies as a gadgeteer’s guide to extreme gadget guitars.

32. 1968 Micro-Frets The Orbiter

This innovative instrument was probably the first wireless guitar, well ahead of its time. The onboard FM transmitter’s antenna sat on the upper horn of the body and a receiver plugged into an amp. 

The idea came to Ralph Jones at Micro-Frets in Maryland from the growing popularity of wireless-controlled garage doors. Micro-Frets guitars had an unusual side-join body construction, and some had a clever intonated nut, but the brand was gone by the mid-70s.

33. 1969 Ampeg Dan Armstrong See-Through

Ampeg, better known for amps, hired Dan Armstrong to design this guitar, which had a body carved from a block of clear plastic, as much to grab attention as to exploit any sonic potential the material might have. 

Another novel idea was the six slide-in/slide-out pickups – Rock, Country or Jazz in Treble or Bass varieties. The See-Through guitar lasted little more than a year in production, brought down by conservative guitarists (Keef excepted) and expensive production.

34. Jimmy Page’s 1971 Gibson EDS-1275

Jimmy Page ordered a doubleneck from Gibson in the early 70s so that he could play both the six-string and the 12-string parts of Stairway To Heaven on stage without changing guitars. 

It prompted a surge of prog-tastic interest in such twin-pronged beasts from the likes of John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra), Steve Howe (Yes) and Alex Lifeson (Rush). Gibson spotted the trend, too, and reissued its EDS-1275 Double 12 in 1975.

35. Angus Young’s c.1971 Gibson SG Standard

The SG was a fine piece of sculptural guitar design when Gibson introduced it in 1961, a modernistic amalgam of bevels and points much studied by other makers. Angus Young showed how one model type could sustain a guitarist through his whole career, acquiring his first SG in Australia in the early 70s. 

In addition to his SG Standard, also notable is Angus’s iconic c.1970 SG Custom, used throughout the Back In Black tour, which had its middle pickup removed and pickguard replaced.

36. 1971 Ovation Electric Legend 1617

In 1971, Charles H Kaman’s Ovation brand popularised the integrated amplified acoustic, an idea that caught on quickly among many other makers. Ovation had already raised eyebrows among the conservative world of flat-tops with its ‘Lyrachord’ composite fibreglass bowl-shaped backs. 

The brand’s electro-acoustics were a more important development, using piezo pickups mounted under the bridge saddles linked to an onboard preamp to provide an amplified acoustic sound, with controls on the body’s side. 

37. 1976 Fender Telecaster Deluxe

Influenced by a popular mod that added a neck humbucker to a Tele, Fender put twin humbuckers on the existing Thinline in ’71 and the Deluxe (’73), and a neck ’bucker on the Custom (’72). 

Fender said of the two-’bucker models: “The humbucking pickups not only help eliminate feedback, they also add a gutty midrange and bass sound.” It was about as close as Fender would come officially to say: “This Fender is like a Gibson.”

38. 1976 BC Rich Mockingbird

On the road to the pointiest of pointy guitars, BC Rich in general and the Mockingbird in particular drew the eye of many a metallic musician. It wasn’t only its dangerous curves. 

Bernardo Rico’s guitars often had neck-through construction, and the controls provided a knob-twiddler’s paradise. The ’76 Mockingbird has a volume per pickup and a master tone, a regular three-way toggle, a coil-tap per pickup, a phase switch and a five-way chickenhead varitone filter. Enough?

39. Edward Van Halen’s c.1977 Frankenstrat

Ed’s guitars paved the way for '80s SuperStrats as a result of his fun with DIY. His Frankenstrats began around 1977 with the black-and-white guitar seen on the cover of the first Van Halen album. 

He took a Strat-style body and neck from Charvel, a PAF humbucker from a 335, slanted at the bridge, glued in some jumbo Gibson frets, screwed on a Strat vibrato, and fitted a single volume control. Ready to rock.

40. 1981 Gibson Chet Atkins CEC

Amplifying a nylon-string guitar for stage use took a useful step when Gibson collaborated with Chet Atkins to design the CEC electro-acoustic classical. Despite his reputation as an electric player, Atkins was, by the 80s, mostly playing nylon-string classical-style flat-tops, and he wanted a practical electric model. 

His idea for Gibson used a semi-solid body and a piezo bridge pickup, the result mostly looking and feeling something like a classical guitar but louder.

41. 1982 Fender Squier Series Telecaster ’52

Fender introduced vintage reissues with a trio of models in 1982 that recalled '50s features, at first made at the Fujigen factory in Japan. The company’s European agent requested budget-price versions to compete with the multitude of Fender copies, which, in its view, were damaging the market. 

The result was the Squier, which has since expanded greatly to a strong second-tier brand for Fender, and the spur for many other makers to develop quality overseas manufacturing. 

42. 1983 Jackson Randy Rhoads

Randy Rhoads was playing with Ozzy Osbourne in 1980 when he met Grover Jackson, and the two designed a custom guitar based on a classic Flying V. A little later they collaborated again on a radical variant with a notably offset body style, which established the ‘extreme V’ style.

Following Rhoads’s tragic death in ’82, the first Jackson-brand production instrument, the Randy Rhoads model, appeared the following year.

43. 1983 Roland G-707

Guitar synths started to appear in the mid-70s, promoting the idea that a guitar rather than a keyboard could control a synthesizer. Roland became the busiest activist, developing models from 1977 with separate guitar (“controller” in Roland-speak) and synthesizer unit. 

The most unusual was the G-707/GR-700, introduced in 1983, and the 707 guitar/controller was quickly nicknamed ‘The Coat Hanger’ for its look. But still the guitar-synth remained a specialist item.

44. 1983 Kramer Pacer

Kramer was the most successful electric brand of the '80s, leading the push to ‘SuperStrat’-heaven with a line of simple, effective shred machines. The brand also helped establish the Floyd Rose locking vibrato, which quickly became the metal guitarist’s vibrato system of choice. 

Other locking systems were developed at the time, by Rockinger, Kahler, Ibanez and others, but the Floyd, especially with the addition of fine-tuners at the bridge, was top of the divebombers’ tree. 

45. 1985 PRS Custom

Paul Reed Smith was among several makers in the 80s who wanted to combine the best of Gibson and Fender. An early result for his new-for-1985 PRS company was the Custom. 

Its mahogany-maple construction and fancy timber recalled 50s Les Pauls, while the through-body stringing and simple vibrato came from the Fender rulebook. PRS has ranged far and wide since, but this was the model that first put it on the map.

46. Steve Vai’s 1987 Ibanez JEM777LG

Ibanez made a breakthrough among extreme rock players in 1987 with the distinctive Steve Vai JEM model. It had colourful HSH DiMarzios, a Monkey Grip body handle, Disappearing Pyramid inlays, a thin 24-fret neck (the top four frets scalloped), and Lion’s Claw cutouts behind the Edge locking vibrato for pull-ups. 

It formed the basis for Ibanez’s highly successful RG series of ‘SuperStrats’, while many JEM variations followed alongside Vai’s Universe seven-strings. 

47. 1991 Charvel Surfcaster

An early sign of the '90s retro fashion came with Charvel’s Surfcaster. Makers looked back for features that made past instruments distinctive, borrowing them to give new models a modishly vintage vibe. 

The Surfcaster mixed old influences – lipstick pickups (Danelectro), slash soundhole and triangle markers (Rickenbacker) and a pearly pickguard (Fender). Many other electric brands took note of this early indication that retro could not only look good but also sound good and attract players. 

48. 1993 Parker Fly

Ken Parker and Larry Fishman cut a unique swathe through 90s electrics with the hybrid Parker Fly models. Their radical construction had ultra-thin wooden bodies strengthened by a composite carbon and epoxy material forming an ‘external skeleton’ around the wood. 

Necks were similarly made, and the guitars combined sounds from piezos and magnetic pickups. It was an intriguing but short-lived look at what an electric guitar could be.

49. 1994 Martin Backpacker

Upon its 90s launch, Martin’s Backpacker was an inexpensive compact guitar with a narrow body about nine inches at its widest and a 24-inch scale length, the whole thing around 3ft long and weighing a touch over 5lb. 

Its take-anywhere vibe was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when astronaut Pierre J Thuot took one on a space-shuttle mission in March ’94, and since then it seems as if every acoustic maker has offered a travel model. 

50. 1995 Fender Relic Telecaster

Fender popularised the idea of the relic’d guitar, starting in 1995 when Vince Cunetto began ageing the bodies, necks and parts Fender sent to his Missouri workshop. 

Four years later, the work moved to Fender’s Custom Shop. It wasn’t a new idea – repairers have always restored old guitars. Now, though, a new-oldie could take away the fear of damaging a collectable, and modern relics were soon to be seen in many other makers’ freshly aged inventories.

In celebration of the birthday of Chuck Berry (October 18), Gibson has unveiled a Murphy Lab-aged Custom Shop version of the rock and roll pioneer's 1978 Wine Red ES-355.

Staying true to Berry's original model's spec sheet, the new electric guitar sports an all-maple body with red spruce bracing and F-holes, a three-piece maple neck – with a profile that's been matched to Berry's original model – and a 22-fret ebony fingerboard with custom block inlays.

Electronics include a pair of Gibson 68 Custombucker Alnico 5 humbuckers, controlled via two volume pots, two tone dials and a three-way Switchcraft pickup selector. Other electronics include 500K CTS audio taper potentiometers and ceramic capacitors.

Other historically correct appointments include aged gold hardware, a Tune-O-Matic bridge, bound tortoiseshell pickguard, Maestro Vibrola, Grover tuners, a six-position Varitone switch, and a classic split diamond headstock inlay.

“Chuck Berry was a founding father of rock and roll,” Gibson wrote in a statement accompanying the news. “His stagecraft and musicianship laid the foundation for nearly every genre of rock and popular music. His playing, showmanship, and catalog of music helped launch many musicians' careers, and countless sidemen shared the stage with him. So did his trusted Gibson guitars.”

Limited to only 100 units worldwide, the Chuck Berry 1970s ES-355 is available now for $6,999, and comes with a certificate of authenticity. 

For more information, head to Gibson.

To celebrate Chuck Berry’s 95th birthday, it has been announced that an all-new live album recorded by the father of rock ‘n’ roll back in ‘05 and ‘06 will be released on December 17.

Live From Blueberry Hill, which is being released by Dualtone Records, will be assembled from recordings taken from Berry’s gigs at the Blueberry Hill venue in St. Louis – a stage the electric guitar icon played more than any other in the twilight of his career – and will feature classic Berry tracks such as Sweet Little Sixteen and Johnny B. Goode.

Described as “an indelible document of the rock ‘n’ roll icon’s legendary hometown shows," the album captures the gigs that were originally organized after Berry voiced, in his later career, his desire to return “to play a place the size of the ones I played when I first started out."

Speaking to his longtime confidant Joe Edwards back in 1996, the pair decided to host the concerts at the Blueberry Hill restaurant, which Edwards owned. 

As such, a new room in the restaurant – christened The Duck Room, after Berry’s iconic stage move – would go on to accommodate 209 performances from Berry and his band over the next 17 years.

After experimenting with different bands for the performances, Berry landed on the Blueberry Hill Band, which featured close friends, family members and local music stars such as his daughter Ingrid Berry on the harmonica, son Charles Berry, Jr. on guitar, bassist Jimmy Marsala, pianist Robert Lohr and drummer Keith Robinson.

The Blueberry Hill Band would go on to be Berry’s longest-running backing band ever.

Check out the tracklist for Live From Blueberry Hill below.

1. Roll Over Beethoven
2. Rock And Roll Music
3. Let It Rock
4. Carol / Little Queenie
5. Sweet Little Sixteen
6. Around And Around
7. Nadine
8. Bio
9. Mean Old World
10. Johnny B. Goode

• Live From Blueberry Hill is available to preorder now via Dualtone Records.

It’s May 1951, and Sixty Minute Man by Billy Ward and His Dominoes plays on the Moondog Show. The lyrics – “I rock 'em, roll 'em all night long” – were some of the first to use the words “rock” and “roll,” and would inspire American Disc Jockey Alan “Moondog” Freed to popularize the term on his 1950s radio show. 

Freed, who often played R&B and rock records to bridge the gap between white and Black listeners, described the emerging rock 'n' roll style as a “river of music that has absorbed many streams” of music, all of which contributed to the “big beat.” 

However, it wasn’t until Chuck Berry’s explosive distorted guitar on Maybellene arrived on the scene that the new style developed a lasting sound that would influence guitarists for decades to come.

Many often refer to Chuck Berry as the father of rock 'n' roll because of his ability to synthesize various genres of music into a sound that could appeal to both teens and adults alike. His fusion of jazz, country, blues and more was enjoyed by everyone, regardless of their race, while his licks and mastery of melody drew people from all walks of life, and contributed to what many see as the blueprint for rock 'n' roll that would last forever.  

Charles Edward Anderson Berry (aka Chuck Berry) was born in 1926 in the segregated community of St. Louis, Missouri. His mother, Martha Bell Banks, was a public school principal, and his father, Henry William Berry, was a carpenter and deacon of Antioch Baptist Church. Berry was the fourth of six children and picked up his love for music from his mother, an accomplished pianist and singer. 

This exposure to instruments at an early age was what gave way to his passion for music, which would lead him to perform while attending the first all-Black private high school west of the Mississippi – Summer High School. At the annual school talent show, he sang Jay McShann's Confessin' the Blues. The crowd gave him a reverberating applause that immediately piqued his interest for performance – an interest that would eventually lead to his infectious stage presence and signature “duck walk”, which he would introduce in a 1956 New York City show. 

Berry picked up the guitar shortly after his riveting high school performance and began learning techniques from jazz guitarist Ira Harris. These lessons helped him define his distinctive rhythm guitar in hits like Rock and Roll Music and Roll Over Beethoven, which was later attributed to opening the door for the rock 'n' roll sound.

Influenced by the guitar playing of T-Bone Walker (who played a Gibson ES-5), Berry modeled his sound to be gritty yet still retain clarity. One of his most iconic guitars was his Gibson ES-350T, which he played for most of his guitar parts in his Chess Records catalog. 

During this period, Gibson was active in adapting to the changes in popular music. They produced instruments that gave guitarists such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, B.B. King, T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry the versatility they needed to continue cultivating the sound.

“You can hear the gritty-yet-clean guitar tone that Chuck Berry had in records such as Johnny B. Goode,” said Mat Koehler, Head of Development, Gibson Brands. “It was a humbucker-equipped sound that would set the benchmark for players who wanted to capture Berry’s fat, but elegant, tone.

“Berry’s tone was one that many guitarists wanted because of the focused intentionality in the overdrive," Koehler continued. "It had clarity like you would expect in country music, but it also had some weight behind it.”

His tone and skill are just two aspects of his legacy. His showmanship engaged crowds and seamlessly related to his audiences, young and old. The infamous “duck walk” was a move that T-Bone Walker began to do in the 1930s, and it heavily influenced Chuck Berry to incorporate these performance antics in his shows. 

“I was always impressed by the fact that he could play guitar solos and dance at the same time,” says Austin native and blues singer-songwriter Jackie Venson. “That inspired an everlasting effort in me to move and be more animated during my performance solos.” 

Venson is the youngest of eight and, like Berry, was exposed to music at a young age, having played the piano for 13 years before picking up the guitar. “There was something about the pressure of music, college, and the desire to perform that made me realize I needed a change in my instrument selection if I were to continue pursuing music," she mused. "It was this gut feeling that led me to guitar.” 

With influences like Chuck Berry, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, and Eric Gales, Venson has used her Gibson Les Paul Studio – affectionately named Rosetta – to cultivate her own sound that caters to the current generations of teens and adults. 

“Right now, my current tone lies in the middle of a triad comprising my hands, my Gibson Les Paul and my Kemper profiling amp," Venson reveals. "My sound has become consistent and has allowed a space for me to flourish as myself in my own lane."

Growing up, her father was a professional bassist who also had his hand in many areas of the music business, including booking and management. Watching her father in action, Venson gained experience about how the industry operates and duly applied those skills to build her career.

Reflecting on the impact her father had, Venson mused, “Looking back on it today, I’m sure my dad influenced me in ways I don’t even realize. A big question I get is, 'Why guitar?' Watching my dad work as a professional bassist and being involved in many aspects of the business were two of my primary influences. 

"But I am also deeply impacted by the depth of Chuck Berry’s influence, which manifested in the generations of artists that came after him.”  

The essential role that Chuck Berry played in pioneering rock 'n' roll music and performance opened up the doors for exaggerated innovation on the stage. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, Berry and his effervescent music continues to be played worldwide to this day.

“Chuck Berry is rock 'n' roll," said Greg Harris, President of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. "The undisputed original poet laureate, he influenced every rock artist after him and every guitarist that ever plugged in." Berry would go on to influence and unify music fans for decades to come, and that is what makes him a legend and a blueprint for the culture.

“I made records for people who would buy them," Berry famously said. "No color, no ethnic, no political – I don't want that, never did.”

A new documentary profiling the life of legendary rock 'n' roll pioneer Chuck Berry is to air July 27 on PBS.

Featuring interviews with his widow, son and grandson – as well as colleagues and musicians who consider him an inspiration, including Keith Richards, Robert Cray, Slash, Darius Rucker and more – the TV special will look at some of the highlights of Berry's decades-spanning career.

“He had a sound that was like nobody else,” Rucker says in a preview video. “He'll always be considered the king of rock 'n' roll,” adds Slash.

“To his family, Berry was a sensitive poet and devoted family man,” PBS says. “To others, he was a demanding and difficult artist, a ‘diabolical genius’ driven by a voracious appetite for money and deep desire for respect and control. Abstaining from drugs and alcohol, he had a weakness for women. This episode takes a riveting ride on the Chuck Berry train, exploring the life, the legend, the music and the man.”

The documentary will arrive as part of a three-part series, In Their Own Words, with two more episodes detailing the lives of Pope Francis and Diana, Princess of Wales airing on July 20 and August 8, respectively.

Three additional episodes will air in the fall profiling former US president Jimmy Carter, Tesla/SpaceX boss Elon Musk and Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel.

For more information on the Chuck Berry TV special, head to PBS.

Hot on the heels of Eric Clapton’s 1954 Sunburst Fender Strat hitting the block for $1,000,000, auction house Gotta Have Rock and Roll has announced another historic electric guitar for sale: Chuck Berry’s owned and heavily-played 1967 Gibson ES-345.

The Cherry Red instrument, serial Number 000037, comes out of Berry’s personal collection, and was used by the legendary guitarist for a private performance in Seattle on April 13, 2002.

According to Gotta Have Rock and Roll, Berry then gave the guitar to business mogul Mike Malone, and Berry signed the guitar in black felt pen, adding a drawing beneath the signature.

The ES-345 is accompanied by a copy of the William Morris Agency contract for Berry to perform at the private Seattle gig, at DMX Music, in 2002, as well as a full letter of provenance from Mike Malone and a Gotta Have Rock and Roll Certificate of Authenticity.

The 1967 Gibson ES-345 auction opens on November 25, with a minimum bid of $200,000.

For more information, head to Gotta Have Rock and Roll.

The same auction is also playing host to the 1966 Fender Jazzmaster that Chris Cornell used to record Soundgarden's Superunknown.

US R&B star Nelly has been cast to play Buddy Holly in the upcoming Buddy Holly biopic, Clear Lake.

The film – which is being directed by Bruce Beresford – is based on a screenplay written by Patrick Shanahan, and has been authorized by the Buddy Holly estate through BMG, the company that controls the publishing rights to Holly's catalogue.

As reported by Variety, Clear Lake tells “the story of how Holly and other famous musicians of the late 1950s gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll while changing the trajectory of civil rights in America.”

Other cast members include Ruairi O’Connor as Buddy Holly, Colin Hanks as Holly's manager and producer Norman Petty, and Diane Guerrero as Holly's wife, María Elena Holly. Guerrero also serves as one of the movie's associate producers.

Speaking about the film back in May, Beresford told Variety: “I found myself attracted to Clear Lake because the script tells the tragic story of Buddy Holly and his era in fascinating detail and with vivid characterizations.”

Buddy Holly died in a plane crash at the age of 22 outside Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959.

Beresford continued: “Needless to say, the added plus of all the wonderful music was also a major lure.”

In other Chuck Berry news, the first trailer for a documentary about his life, The Original King of Rock ‘N’ Roll, was released this month.

A new official Chuck Berry documentary, Chuck Berry: The Original King of Rock 'N' Roll, is coming to video-on-demand platforms, DVD and Blu-ray this month, and now the official trailer can be viewed online.

The film is directed by Jon Brewer, whose credits include B.B. King: The Life of Riley, Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story and Guns N’ Roses: The Most Dangerous Band in the World.

The new doc features fresh commentary about the electric guitar legend from the likes of Gene Simmons, George Thorogood, Alice Cooper, Nils Lofgren, Gary Clark Jr and Steven Van Zandt, as well as archival footage of Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and others testifying to Berry's greatness.

Brewer discussed Berry's impact as a guitarist in an interview with Below the Line, saying, “He was quite aggressive with his guitar. It was almost like a percussion instrument, the way he played it. It came over in a different way than a normal guitar player.

“It wasn’t the licks – there was some sort of kick in it that made you move. He had that tremendous get up and move accompaniment with the guitar.”

George Thorogood takes it further in the documentary, saying of Berry, “He is the most important guitarist in rock history.”

Or, as Gene Simmons puts it, “Chuck Berry was Chuck Berry. The definition of Chuck Berry is… Chuck Berry.”

You can watch the official trailer for Chuck Berry: The Original King of Rock 'N' Roll above, and for more information, head to Cardinal Releasing.

Gibson has been hinting at a Chuck Berry 1955 ES-350T all year, and now the impressively-spec'd limited-edition electric guitar has been officially announced.

The model, created in conjunction with the Chuck Berry family, is an historically accurate, "perfect" replica of Berry’s 1955 ES-350T and, incredibly, the first-ever Berry signature guitar.

The new 1955 ES-350T boasts a three-ply figured maple/poplar/maple Venetian cutaway hollow body, an Authentic '55 medium C-Shape three-piece walnut/maple/walnut neck and a 22-fret Indian rosewood fingerboard with double parallelogram inlays.

Pickups are a pair of custom dog-ear P-90s, with two 500K CTS volume and tone knobs.

Other features include Kluson single line single ring tuners, a no-wire ABR-1 bridge and an engraved wire loop trapeze tailpiece.

The guitar comes with a Custom Shop ES-350T case, a replica strap and a replica of the Zuni 'Sun God' bolo tie that Berry wore throughout the 1950s.

The Chuck Berry 1955 ES-350T is being produced in a limited run of just 55 examples. 

The guitar will be available for $14,115 beginning on October 18 - what would have been Berry’s 93rd birthday.

For more information, duck walk over to Gibson. 

That astonishing price is even higher than the previous record-holder, Slash's $13,299 1966 EDS-1275 Doubleneck.

He may have just wrapped a U.S. tour with The Rolling Stones, but Ronnie Wood is already back at it with a new album, Ronnie Wood with His Wild Five - Mad Lad: A Live Tribute to Chuck Berry.

As stated quite clearly in the title, the effort is a nod to one of Wood’s – and the Stones’ – biggest influences.

In addition to Berry tunes like Back in the USA and, of course, Johnny B. Goode, the 11-track set, recorded live at Wimborne’s Tivoli Theatre in 2018, also boasts Wood’s own Tribute to Chuck Berry.

You can check out Wood’s version of Berry’s Talking About You below.

Due November 15 via BMG, Mad Lad sports hand-painted album artwork from Wood and will be available digitally, on CD, heavyweight vinyl, as a deluxe box set (featuring a CD, LP and 12x12 artcard of the album artwork) and in a super deluxe limited-edition box set that adds in a t-shirt and signed and numbered set list.

The album also features guest appearances from singer Imelda May and pianist Ben Waters. 

According to Wood, the record is the first in a trilogy that will pay tribute to his musical heroes. Stay tuned for who might be up next.

In the meantime, you can preorder Mad Lad here.

NAMM 2019: In addition to a spat of recently-announced new electrics and acoustics, Gibson has teamed up with Chuck Berry’s son and grandson to recreate Berry’s famed ES-350T. According to the company, Berry’s original guitar was “x-rayed down to the micro-level” in order to craft the new instrument.

The company has also reported that several additional signature models are currently in the works. These include: an Epiphone Ltd Ed Thorogood “White Fang” ES-125TDC; an Epiphone Limited Edition Jared James Nichols "Old Glory" Les Paul Custom Outfit; an Epiphone Limited Edition Dave Rude Flying V Outfit; a Custom Shop Dave Amato Signature Axcess Les Paul; a Custom Shop Brian Ray '62 SG Jr.; a Custom Shop Lee Roy Parnell Signature 1959 Les Paul Standard; a Slim Harpo ’62 ES-330 and a Michael Clifford Signature Melody Maker.

This new announcement follows the recently-revealed Chris Cornell Tribute Model ES-335. Features of the Cornell guitar include aged Lollartron humbucking pickups, clear “no number” Top Hat knobs, an Olive Drab Satin finish and a Mother-of-Pearl Chris Cornell ‘signature’ peghead inlay. Only 250 will be available, with a portion of the proceeds going to charities in his name.

For more information, head over to Gibson.com.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a new exhibit titled Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll, featuring more than 130 instruments that were used by artists including Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Metallica, Jimmy Page, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, Steve Miller, Elvis Presley, St. Vincent, and more. 

According to Rolling Stone, the collection boasts instruments spanning from 1939 to 2017, and was curated from 70 private and public collections in the U.S. and U.K.

Some of the featured items, most of which have never been seen apart from their performances onstage, include Eric Clapton’s “Blackie,” Eddie Van Halen’s “Frankenstein” and Jerry Garcia’s “Wolf.”

Other highlights include Chuck Berry’s main guitar from 1957 to 1963, Jimmy Page’s “dragon-embroidered costume” worn during Led Zeppelin’s live shows circa 1975 to 1977 and St. Vincent’s electric guitar from 2015.

Play It Loud will go on display on April 8, 2019 through October 1st, 2019. It will then move to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

For more information, head over to MetMuseum.org.

It's no secret that the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards is one of the late Chuck Berry's biggest—or at least most famous—fans.

Richards, who based his initial guitar style on Berry's, has been recording his own versions of Berry's tunes since the Stones covered "Carol," "Around and Around" and "You Can't Catch Me" in 1964. Richards also inducted Berry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

But a lot of people might not know that Chuck once punched Keith in the face. Hey, at least it was over something a lot of Guitar World readers can appreciate: a guitar.

As Keith explained it to Jimmy Fallon in 2014: "I was in his dressing room, he was doing a gig, he went off to collect the money, I think. He was a tightwad—bless you, Chuck! His guitar was laid out in his case. [I thought], 'Ah, come on, Keith, just a touch. Just let me give it a little E chord.'

"[Chuck] walked in and goes, 'Nobody touches my guitar! BONG!' It was one of Chuck's biggest hits."

You can watch Keith tell more of the story in the top clip below (skip ahead to 2:00)—and then watch the scene from 1987's Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll where Chuck and Keithplay "Nadine."

In February 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono took over The Mike Douglas Show for a full week.

It was a week filled with unusual guests, including Ralph Nader, Jerry Rubin and Surgeon General Dr. Jesse Steinfeld. Douglas called it "probably the most memorable week I did in all my 20-something years on air."

The musical highlight of the week, however, was an appearance by one of Lennon's biggest heroes, Chuck Berry. Berry and Lennon even performed Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" and "Memphis, Tennessee" with Lennon's average-in-every-possible-way 1972 backing band, Elephant's Memory. You can watch both performances below.

As we've seen in two similar one-off Lennon performances from 1969 (with Eric Clapton) and 1971 (with Frank Zappa), Yoko Ono likes to scream into the microphone for reasons that are not immediately obvious, often taking otherwise-decent performances to unexpected places (and quality levels). Her appearance with Berry and Lennon was no exception. Check out Berry's facial expression at 1:21 during "Memphis, Tennessee" (the middle video) when Ono starts doing her thing.

"[Berry] was writing good lyrics and intelligent lyrics in the 1950s when people were singing 'Oh baby, I love you so,'" Lennon said during the show. "It was people like him that influenced our generation to try and make sense out of the songs rather than just sing 'do wah diddy.'"

Berry died March 18, 2017, at age 90.

Chuck Berry wrote dozens of rock and roll classics, but perhaps the best-known of them all is “Johnny B. Goode.” The track was a Number Two Billboard hit when it was released in 1958 during the first rock and roll boom and went on to influence rock and roll guitarists throughout the next decades.

Berry wrote the song in 1955, lifting the opening guitar riff pretty much verbatim from the single-note opening riff to Louis Jordan’s 1946 recording “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman,” but adding double-stops to fatten it up.

The success of “Johnny B. Goode” inspired Berry’s followup songs “Bye Bye Johnny” and “Go Go Go,” as well as his 1969 album Concerto in B. Goode and its nearly 19-minute title track. The significance of “Johnny B. Goode” was acknowledged when the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 for its influence as a rock and roll single.

In this video, uploaded more than a year ago on December 24, 2015, Paul Davids provides a thorough lesson in how to play “Johnny B. Goode,” complete with backing track, available here.

Paul takes you through the track note by note and then performs the intro at 120 bpm and 145 bpm (the original is played at about 170 bpm). He includes several camera angles and tab, so if you’ve wanted to learn Berry’s classic riffs, here’s your opportunity.

Be sure to check out Paul’s other videos, including his lessons and gear comparisons, at his YouTube channel.

"Lady B. Goode," a rocking new song by the late Chuck Berry, was posted to the guitar legend's official Vevo page yesterday.

It's the third song to be issued from Berry's new album, Chuck, which will be released June 9. You can hear the first two songs, "Big Boys" and "Wonderful Woman," under RELATED ARTICLES.

As its title suggests, "Lady B. Goode" is the sequel to "Johnny B. Goode," one of Berry’s most influential songs. It also sounds a lot like its 1958 predecessor, capturing the essence of an electrifying rock-and-roll sound Berry helped create.

"In 'Johnny B. Goode,' Berry created the ultimate rock-and-roll folk hero in just a few snappy verses," wrote Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna in their latest book, Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

"As we all know, Goode wasn’t pounding a piano, singing into a microphone or blowing a sax. In his choice of the electric guitar, something sleek and of the moment, the fictional character of Goode would forge an image of the archetypal rocker, doing as much to shape the history of the instrument as any real-life figure ever has. The song’s opening riff is a clarion call—perhaps the greatest intro in rock-and-roll history. It was played by Berry on an electric Gibson ES-350T, and it indeed sounded “just like a-ringin’ a bell.”

Comprised of 10 new recordings, eight of which were written by Berry, Chuck is the late guitarist's first new album since 1979’s Rock It. It was recorded and produced by Berry in various studios around St. Louis and features his longtime hometown backing group—including his children Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (vocals, harmonica), plus Jimmy Marsala (Berry’s bassist for 40 years), Robert Lohr (piano) and Keith Robinson (drums)—which supported him for nearly two decades on over 200 residency shows at the famed Blueberry Hill club.

The album also includes guest performances by Tom Morello and Gary Clark Jr., plus Chuck’s grandson Charles Berry III. Acclaimed author and historian Douglas Brinkley wrote the liner notes.

Be sure to check out "Lady B. Goode" below. We've also included the new music video for "Big Boys," which was posted May 17. It happens to be Berry's first-ever music video.

Berry died March 18, 2017, at age 90.

"Wonderful Woman," a rocking new song by the late Chuck Berry, was posted to the guitar legend's official Vevo page last night. It's the second song to be issued from Berry's new album, Chuck, which is expected to be released this summer. You can hear the first song, "Big Boys," right here.

"Wonderful Woman," which you can hear below, features guitar work by Gary Clark Jr.—plus contributions from Berry's son, Charles Jr., and grandson, Charles III.

"When [Berry's] manager called me up and asked me to play on Chuck, I was really honored," Clark Jr. told Rolling Stone. "… He was playing incredible still and singing amazing. I'm looking forward to this record."

Comprised of 10 new recordings, eight of which were written by Berry, Chuck is his first new album since 1979’s Rock It.

It was recorded and produced by Berry in various studios around St. Louis and features his longtime hometown backing group, including Ingrid Berry (vocals, harmonica), Jimmy Marsala (Berry’s bassist for 40 years), Robert Lohr (piano) and Keith Robinson (drums)—which supported him for nearly two decades on over 200 residency shows at the famed Blueberry Hill club.

Stay tuned for more information—and be sure to tell us what you think of the new song.

With the passing of rock and roll legend Chuck Berry, his label has released a single from Berry’s forthcoming album, Chuck.

The track, “Big Boys,” features Prophets of Rage guitarist Tom Morello and Nathaniel Rateliff of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. It’s a classic-sounding Chuck Berry rock and roll tune, and you can hear it below.

Dualtone says it will release Chuck on June 16. The record will feature the first new recordings in nearly four decades by the founding rock and roll legend, who passed away on March 18 at the age of 90.

Comprised of 10 new recordings, eight of which were written by Berry, Chuck is his first new album since 1979’s Rock It. It was recorded and produced by Berry in various studios around St. Louis and features his longtime hometown backing group—including his children Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (vocals, harmonica), plus Jimmy Marsala (Berry’s bassist for 40 years), Robert Lohr (piano) and Keith Robinson (drums)—which supported him for nearly two decades on over 200 residency shows at the famed Blueberry Hill club.

In addition to appearances by Morello and Rateliff, the album includes guest performances from Gary Clark Jr. and Chuck’s grandson Charles Berry III. Acclaimed author and historian Douglas Brinkley contributes liner notes.

“Working to prepare the release of this record in recent months and in fact over the last several years brought him a great sense of joy and satisfaction,” the Berry family said in a statement posted to Facebook earlier this week. “While our hearts are very heavy at this time, we know that he had no greater wish than to see this album released to the world, and we know of no better way to celebrate and remember his 90 years of life than through his music.”

Some of the songs on Chuck were originally conceived as far back as the 1980s, with Berry developing them in his home studio in St. Louis over many years during down time between tours. He worked on the album through 2014.

When health concerns forced him to stop touring and recording in 2015, Berry continued to oversee production and planning for Chuck, enlisting his family and close friend Joe Edwards, the owner of Blueberry Hill, to fulfill his wishes that the album be completed and released. And from album highlight “Lady B. Goode,” a spiritual sequel to the iconic “Johnny B. Goode” featuring ripping solos from three generations of Berry guitarists, to the poignant country balladry of “Darlin’,” a duet with his daughter Ingrid, Chuck truly is a family affair.

Chuck Track List
Wonderful Woman
Big Boys
You Go to My Head
3/4 Time (Enchiladas)
Darlin’
Lady B. Goode
She Still Loves You
Jamaica Moon
Dutchman
Eyes of Man

Chuck Berry was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1984 Grammy Awards.

The actual award was handed to Berry by Stevie Ray Vaughan and George Thorogood, who—along with Stray Cats' Brian Setzer—were considered the mid-Eighties' more high-profile young roots-rocking guitarists to have taken a page or two out of Berry's book.

The evening's festivities also included a performance of "Maybellene," which you can check out below (top video). Berry launches into a top-notch duck walk at 1:28, escorts Vaughan to the stage at 1:41 and is joined by Thorogood at 1:45. At 1:58, the younger guitarists kick off a quick Berry-inspired jam as Berry avoids the spotlight and hangs out by the amps.

The late Arturo Toscanini and Charlie Parker also received Lifetime Achievement honors that night, and—and you can see in both clips—John Denver was there too.

Guitarist Chuck Berry—who helped shape rock and roll by mixing elements of blues and country, adding boogie woogie piano and kicking it all together with his own slashing shuffle rhythms—died today (March 18) at age 90.

His death was confirmed by the St. Charles County Police Department in Missouri on its Facebook page. According to the post, first responders found Berry unresponsive, and he could not be revived. He was pronounced dead 1:26 p.m. local time.

Berry was instrumental in making the electric guitar rock and roll’s primary instrument. For many years (and in some circles, to this day), rock guitar was defined by Berry’s distinct, T-Bone Walker-inspired doublestops and frequent, dramatic use of slides, slurs and bends.

Berry, who turned 90 on October 18, 2016, made the most of the occasion by announcing a new studio album—Chuck—which was to be released this year via Dualtone Records.

“This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy,” said Berry in a statement last autumn, referring to his wife of 68 years, Themetta Berry. “My darlin’ I’m growing old! I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!”

A renaissance man rocker, Berry was not only a brilliant guitarist and performer, but was unparalleled as a songwriter. His most enduring song, appropriately, celebrated himself; “Johnny B. Goode” was a thinly disguised account of Berry’s rise to international stardom.

“The song had its birth when a [1955] tour first brought me to New Orleans, a place I’d longed to visit ever since hearing Muddy Waters’ lyrics, ‘Going down to Louisiana way behind the sun,’ ” wrote Berry in his autobiography. “That inspiration, combined with little bits of dad’s stories and the thrill of seeing my black name posted all over town in one of the cities they brought the slaves through, turned into ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ ”

After naming the song’s protagonist Johnny after his keyboardist Johnnie Johnson, Berry wrote the lyrics in two weeks of “periodic application.” The repeated chorus calls of “Go Johnny Go” are a tribute to Berry’s mother’s constant encouragement, while other imagery was also inspired by his family. “I’d been told my great grandfather lived ‘way back up among the evergreens’ in a log cabin,’ ” Berry wrote. “I revived that era with a story about a ‘colored boy name Johnny B. Goode’…but I thought that would seem biased to white fans...and changed it to ‘country boy.’ ”

The single was recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago, on December 29 or 30, 1957, with Berry backed by a lean, swinging blues trio of Willie Dixon (bass), Lafayette Leake (piano) and Fed Below (drums). The same session also yielded “Reelin’ and Rockin’ ” and “Sweet Little Sixteen.” While those tunes also became standards, their impact pales in comparison to that of “Johnny B. Goode.”

As Billy Altman notes in his liner notes to The Chuck Berry Box (MCA), the song has become so ingrained in American culture that it’s hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist. And, thanks to the late astronomer Carl Sagan, the whole universe may know the tune by now; it was hauled off on the Voyager 1 space probe, hurtling past Jupiter and Saturn and toward Neptune, some four-billion miles away.

Berry's songs were covered by the biggest names in rock and pop, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles; but seriousy, every self-declared rock guitarist has played a Chuck Berry song—or riff—at one point or another.

Berry received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, and was in the inaugural class of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees in 1986. He was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 2000, placed #5 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All-Time in 2010, and was given the first-ever PEN Award for literary excellence in lyric writing in 2012. Several years ago, Guitar World readers voted "Johnny B. Goode" as the 12th best guitar solo in rock history.

Below are classic clips of Berry performing "Johnny B. Goode" in 1958, followed by a clip of “School Days” with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, from the 1987 concert film Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll.

Chuck Berry, the artist who codified the sound, rhythm and language of rock and roll, celebrates his 90th birthday today, October 18, with the surprise announcement that he will release a new album.

Titled simply Chuck, the disc will be released in 2017 on Dualtone Reocrds and consist primarily of new, original songs written, recorded and produced by the founding rock and roll legend.

Berry’s first new album in 38 years, Chuck was recorded in various studios around St. Louis and features Berry’s longtime hometown backing group, including his children Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (harmonica), plus Jimmy Marsala (Berry’s bassist of 40 years), Robert Lohr (piano) and Keith Robinson (drums). The band has supported him for more than two decades on more than 200 residency shows at the Blueberry Hill club. The album cover art is shown below .

• “This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy,” said Berry in a statement, referring to his wife of 68 years, Themetta Berry. “My darlin’ I’m growing old! I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!”

Charles Berry Jr. says the songs “cover the spectrum from hard driving rockers to soulful thought provoking time capsules of a life’s work.”

It would be impossible to overstate Chuck Berry’s influence on popular culture around the globe (and beyond it). According to Rolling Stone magazine he “laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance,” and many of his compositions—“Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music” and others—have become the genre’s canonical texts. Another, “Johnny B. Goode,” is the only rock and roll song included on the Voyager Golden Record, launched into space in 1977, and intended to represent life and culture on Earth to extraterrestrial beings.

Berry received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, and was in the inaugural class of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees in 1986. He was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 2000, placed #5 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All-Time in 2010, and was given the first-ever PEN Award for literary excellence in lyric writing in 2012.More recently, he was the subject of a widely discussed essay by author Chuck Klosterman predicting that hundreds of years hence, Berry would be singularly synonymous with rock and roll itself, and last month his classic 1973 red Cadillac Eldorado went on display as part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American Culture and History.

For more about Berry, visit ShoreFire.com, ChuckBerry.com and his Facebook page.Below is a classic clip of Berry jamming “School Days” with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, from the 1987 concert film Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll.

What if nine of the biggest blues guitar legends, dead or alive, came together for one epic jam? Well, it might look something like the video below. One can only imagine the conversations that would take place as these guitar icons sat around in the studio.

Would Jimi Hendrix and SRV discuss who did Little Wing better? Would BB King challenge Buddy Guy to a guitar face duel? I’m certain Jimmy Page would talk shop about his Gibsons with the gearhead and fellow Les Paul player Joe Bonamassa. Billy Gibbons would most definitely receive questions about proper beard maintenance.

It’s interesting to liken this situation to the All-Star game in baseball. Picturing this many of our guitar heroes coming together for a fun jam like this would truly be a spectacle to behold, and the music that came out would surely be a track for the ages.

How could we make such a gathering happen? We’d probably need a time machine to go back and get most of these guys… I wonder how hard they would be to find? Envision yourself being tasked with locating a young Eric Clapton at the height of his fame. He could be anywhere, from hanging out with George Harrison in London to ripping it up on the stages of music venues in New York City with Cream, among many other places.

It should go without saying, but this isn’t the definitive list of blues guitar legends. I chose musicians who had the biggest impact on my own playing. With that in mind, who would make your list of blues legends, and what kind of conversations would they have with each other, both in real life and on their instruments? We can only imagine.

Tyler Larson is the founder of the guitar-centric brand Music is Win. His insightful, uncomplicated guitar lessons and gear demonstrations along with entertaining, satirical content about life as a musician receive tens of millions of video views per month across social media. Tyler is also the creator of the extremely popular online guitar learning platform, Guitar Super System. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Tyler has been teaching guitar for over a decade and operates a production studio in Nashville, TN.

I'd like to address a very meat-and-potatoes bit of info that very rarely gets mentioned.

Who should you emulate in order to be a session guitarist?

The answers and the reasons for each might very well surprise you. Also, you might assume you know how to play like these guys, but, until you really try it, you do not know how!

I'm not kidding here; I guarantee you don't know how. And not a week goes by when I'm not asked to imitate at least one of these guys.

So now, in the photo gallery below (in no particular order), I give you a list of players you'd better become intimately aware of and learn at least a few of their licks! It will start, save and prolong your "studio guitarist" career.

One more thing before I start: These names are used in the way "Kleenex" means "tissue." If someone asks you for a Kleenex and you give them an off-brand tissue, it's the really same thing. So if someone asks for EVH, you know they want some tapping, whammy bar, bluesy, fast playing. Get it?

One final note! Learn the history of popular music as seen through the eyes of a guitarist. Play in a wedding band. Play in a show band. Play in a cover band. You will thank me.

Ron Zabrocki is a session guitarist from New York, now living in Connecticut. Says Ron: "I started playing at age 6, sight reading right off the bat. That’s how I was taught, so I just thought everyone started that way. I could sight read anything within a few years, and that helped me become a session guy later in life. I took lessons from anyone I could find and had some wonderful instructors, including John Scofield, Joe Pass and Alan DeMausse. I’ve played several jingle sessions (and have written a few along the way). I’ve “ghosted” for a few people who shall remain nameless, but they get the credit and I get the money! I’ve played sessions in every style, from pop to jazz.

I was recently invited to be a judge at a shredding contest called the Demon Rock Off alongside fellow Guitar World blogger Joe Matera.

Each guitarist in the contest was to play for 60 seconds through one of three combo amps: a Marshall JCM900, a Fender Twin and a Vox AC390. The majority of the contestants must have been in their late teens or early 20s, and they all did a great job of getting up on stage in a high-pressure situation in front of a crowd of cross-armed fellow guitarists and doing their thing. The finalists had to take part in a shred-off against Satan (actually Kris Petersen from Syndicate), which was pretty awesome.

As a perennial guitar geek, I thought this was a really cool opportunity to observe the current state of guitar playing from the bedroom jammer's perspective. Were there any consistent stylistic traits? A popular guitar brand that everyone leaned toward?

From the contestants I was able to glean a few things. For starters, it seems everyone still falls back on the same tried-and-true blues lick (informally known as "The Chuck Berry") while plotting their next move. It's a cool lick and it works, so that's all good.

Secondly, there were no particular guitar preferences evident during the evening. There was an Ibanez Jem, a Charvel So Cal, a Gretsch Duo Jet, one or two Strats, some Gibsons. So no particular trend to observe there.

But there was one overriding theme throughout the night. It was related to amp choice. And no, it wasn't that the majority of the players chose the amp with the most distortion (the Marshall) over the ones with less gain (the Fender and Vox).

It was that nobody knew how to turn the amps on.

In between contestants, the amps were usually put into standby mode. Those of us who are used to tube amps will know that the amps have two "on" switches: one for On/Off and one for Standby/On. But it was clearly evident that most of these players had grown up in the era of modelling amps (which typically only have a single On switch) or software amp sims, and they didn't have the faintest idea how to turn on a tube amp!

Although purists will undoubtedly be wiping the spat coffee off their monitor after reading that, it's not really a surprise and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, either. It's just the way of the world. Tube amps are heavy, they can be a bitch to maintain, and most newer players simply don't start out with a tube amp. They start with something solid state or digital and go from there.

Modelling amps do a great job of preparing players for what to expect tonally when they do finally plug into a real Marshall Plexi or Voc AC30. But with the exception of some tube-powered models like the Line 6 Spider Valve and the Peavey Vypyr Tube 120, these amps don't really prepare players for the totally different kind of attack and punch of a real tube amp—and evidently they don't prepare them for knowing how to use a Standby switch.

So what's the solution? Should the Fender Mustang amp include a model of a Standby switch alongside its '57 Deluxe replica? Should Line 6 come out with an aroma module that makes the innards of any amp smell like a glowing EL34 power tube? Should Agile Partners create a "Set up and turn on a tube amp" app that makes a game out of issues such as blown fuses, microphonic tubes and amp/speaker impedance mismatches? ("Dude, I totally scored 10,000 on biasing an unmatched pair of KT88s!")

I dunno. Ultimately the answer lies in exposure and education. I hope there never comes a day when tube amps are obsolete—hey, they've already withstood about 30-plus years of solid state challengers—but let's face it, if a whole room of guitarists doesn't know about something as simple as a Standby switch, maybe the times really are changing.

Interestingly, the clear winner of the shredding contest, Dylan Boyd (pictured), played through the AC30 and knew immediately how to use the Standby switch.

DEMON ROCK OFF - Rock Star Bowling - Satan's Intro:

Peter Hodgson is a journalist, an award-winning shredder, an instructional columnist, a guitar teacher, a guitar repair guy, a dad and an extremely amateur barista. In his spare time he runs a blog, I Heart Guitar, which allows him to publicly geek out over his obsessions. Peter is from Melbourne, Australia, where he writes for various magazines as well as for Gibson.com.

These videos and audio files are bonus content related to the May 2015 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now or at the Guitar World Online Store.

When Joan Jett recorded the title track to I Love Rock ’N’ Roll, which was a cover version of a song originally released in 1975 by the British band the Arrows, little did she know that this pagan battle cry would in time earn her status as one of rock’s most iconic figures.

Upon its release in 1982, the song stayed at Number One on the Top 100 chart for seven weeks and has since been named Billboard’s 56th greatest rock song of all time.

Now, more than three decades later, Joan is still rockin’ hard, and rock and roll is still alive and well. In this extended edition of In Deep, we’ll examine the roots of true rock and roll guitar and its essential, foundational elements that were chiseled into stone by the style’s founding father—the immortal Chuck Berry—the man whose playing would inspire and inform many of the world’s greatest rock bands, from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to AC/DC.

One of the small handful of records regarded as the “first” rock and roll song is “Rocket 88,” recorded in March 1951 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. Brenston was actually a horn player and singer in guitarist/keyboardist Ike Turner’s band, the Kings of Rhythm, and he is credited with writing “Rocket 88.”

Produced by Sam Phillips in Memphis and released on the Chess label, “Rocket 88” went straight to Number One and it’s incredible success enabled Phillips to launch Sun Records.

For the rest of this column, including the tabs, check out the May 2015 issue of Guitar World.

This past Saturday night, Michael J. Fox (who has Parkinson's Disease) strapped on a red Gibson ES-345 and performed Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"—just as he (as Marty McFly) did in the 1985 comedy Back to the Future.

Of course, he wasn't actually playing the guitar in the movie, of course; he was just going through the motions, as actors tend to do.

But when he took the stage in New York City this past weekend for his annual charity benefit, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cure Parkinson's," he made up for all that by actually playing the song—guitar solo and all.

It was obviously his density!

You can check out the 2011 and 1985 videos below.

Find out more about Fox's charity right here.

I was fortunate to grow up in a neighborhood on Staten Island, New York, where, if I walked a few blocks in either direction, I encountered about every ethnic group one could imagine at the time.

Aside from smelling great cooking and appreciating how others lived, I also could hear music from a variety of places. I took this all for granted, as I hadn't even dreamed of playing a musical instrument, but it did keep my mind open to different sounds.

Couple that with a family that naturally loved music, and I was surrounded. My parents loved big-band swing, all the great crooners, and my mom would listen to "The Grand Ole Opry" while she was ironing. My older sisters were mad for Afro-Cuban music, probably due to the huge Hispanic population in New York, but also jazz, rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll like Little Richard and Chuck Berry (aka God).

Fast forward to me starting to work as a sideman and session guitarist, and without my even realizing it -- osmosis, I guess -- I was able to bring something different to the party than others might. When starting out in LA, I was playing rock of course, but also playing with bands in in the ghettos of South Central, getting schooled in funk rhythms and backing up some old school R&B singers.

And the older I got, I began to explore more by listening to what's now referred to as world music. I started to devour what I could find by guitarists from Africa, the gorgeous melodies, rhythms and chord progressions that can only be heard in Brazilian music, Celtic music, etc, etc.

I touched on this very briefly in my last blog, but even if you're never asked to play ANY of these types of music, by at least having a cursory knowledge of them, it seeps into your playing and makes you a better guitarist. And should someone call you for a gig or session, and they pull out a reggae song, you won't be in the dark and may be the guy that saves the day. Plus it's very impressive at parties if you can talk about some obscure Argentinian composer. :)

My talented pal Ron Zabrocki, also a GuitarWorld.com blogger, weighs in:

"Even though I considered myself a rock/blues/pop player, I figured that if I learned other styles that I felt were harder and maybe more thought requiring, I would become a more knowledgeable musician and a well-rounded guitarist. I was 17 at the time and I still believe to this day it was a seminal moment in my career! Studying with Joe Pass, Alan DeMause and John Scofield didn't turn me into a jazz player. But it did enable me to be more creative and better underdstand the inner workings of improvisation."

Thanx, Ron!

So you don't need to live in my old neighborhood to accomplish any of this. With the Internet, it's all at your fingertips. It's treasure trove of music that I could only dream of as a kid. So start digging in to compilations if you're not sure about individual musicians. A great way to discover. Don't forget, music is THE language, and the better vocabulary you have, the more you're gonna say with your guitar.

Nashville-based guitarist George Marinelli is a founding member of Bruce Hornsby and The Range and has been a member of Bonnie Raitt's recording and touring band since 1993. He has performed and/or toured with Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Art Garfunkel, Shaun Colvin, Faith Hill, Dixie Chicks, Wynona Judd and Vince Gill, to name just a few. He is busy with session work as a sideman and as a solo artist, and he often can be found recording and producing indie projects at WingDing Studios. Check out his music at Amazon, iTunes and CD Baby.

Friday (July 29) morning, legendary guitarist Chuck Berry was honored in his hometown of St. Louis with the unveiling of an 8-foot-tall statue. Berry, 84, was on hand for the festivities and told Rolling Stone, "That sort of honor is seldom given out. But I don't deserve it."

Elvis Costello sent along a taped message of congratulations to Berry. "Congratulations to everybody for getting a beautiful statue of Chuck Berry put up in St. Louis where it belongs," Costello said. "I guess now the campaign begins to have another statue in every town that Chuck Berry mentioned in his songs."

The statue wasn't without some controversy, as a local resident tried to stop the monument due to Berry's checkered past. Despite getting over 100 signatures against the statue, the ceremony went on as planned. No protesters attended.

You can read the full report here.

Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was recently voted the No. 1 classic rock guitar song of all time by Guitar World in our August issue. You can buy the issue here

We all know a great lick when we hear one—Jimmy Page’s solo breaks in “Whole Lotta Love” and Mark Knopfler’s blistering triads in “Sultans of Swing,” for example. Moments like these grab your attention and aurally brand your ears forever. Or, sometimes it acts more subliminally: You suddenly find yourself playing a certain lick over and over again, wondering, Where have I heard this before?

Through the years, these licks have evolved into a vocabulary for the guitar. And like great writers who are always able to find the right word to make a point, great guitarists always have that essential lick at their disposal to express, in the moment, what they’re feeling. And whereas the best writers are able to string those words together to form remarkable prose, the best guitarists link their licks to form living, breathing, musical statements.

We called upon our mighty stable of instructional writers to assemble these 101 Amazing Guitar Licks, spanning over eight decades and ranging from rock, metal, and blues to jazz, country and bluegrass. Regardless of what style music you play, it will do your ears and your chops good to go through each of these licks. Learn them, master them, and keep them on file for the next time you’re looking for just the right way to say what’s in your soul.

BLUES

FIGURE 50

Origin: Chuck Berry’s opening lick in “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the greatest and most-copped blues-rock licks of all time. This famous lick originated from the blues boogie with a straight-eighth feel.
Theory: Berry hits the chord tones in addition to a 6th (F#) and a passing blues move (C to C#).
Playing Tip: Use all down strokes to get a uniform attack.

Check back tomorrow for Figure 51!