As a songwriter, David Bowie’s legendary status is undisputed. But what was he like as a guitar player?

The chameleonic rock icon produced 26 solo albums during his lifetime, with one posthumous album following in 2021. Over the course of his prolific career, he partnered with a number of incredible guitar players, who often took on the lion's share of six-string duties.

Bowie could play guitar, and wasn’t opposed to strumming an acoustic or electric guitar on stage – especially early into his career – so what did the stars he worked with make of his playing?

“This is an interesting thing,” Adrian Belew – who featured on Lodger, the live album Stage, and later served as his musical director on the 1990 Sound+Vision tour – tells Guitar World when asked exactly that. “All the time I worked with David, I actually never saw him play much of anything. Not piano, not guitar. He must have done it privately.”

Thankfully, come the early 2000s, Bowie was a little less cloak-and-dagger with his playing, as Gerry Leonard recalls.

“David wasn’t virtuosic or anything like that. He didn’t have any aspirations in those ways,” he notes. “He had a kind of caveman instinct with the guitar of what he wanted to do in a broad sense.

“For instance, when we did The Next Day [2013], he’d say, almost apologetically, ‘Do you mind playing this part?’ And he’d play me a part from the demo, which was a stabbing chord or something like that. It was great, so raw and punk rock. He’d say, ‘Take it and do what you want with it,’ so sometimes I would modify it, but I would always be very careful to try and keep the intention.”

Bowie, then, perhaps knew his craft – it was raw and emotive rather than technical and virtuosic – and so he entrusted his foils to bring some nuance to his parts.

“He had good instincts,” Leonard says. “He could write on the guitar, and he could play a mean riff, too.”

Speaking of riffs, Peter Frampton, who played on 1987’s Never Let Me Down, had an interesting story to tell.

“David played the riff on Rebel Rebel, so we know he was a great guitarist,” he nods. “But I think he used guitar and keyboard to write.”

Mark Plati worked with Bowie in the 1990s and believes once his band pivoted to having two guitar players “he became more of a frontperson”, but he had chops to embolden his creative process.

Expanding on that, Carlos Alomar, who was Bowie’s most-used guitarist in the studio, said: “Bowie, like John Lennon, was a great rhythm, acoustic guitar player. Basically, they played triads, and they could play chords, but they couldn’t play chords and bass lines together in opposition. It’s what we call metronome playing. They could keep the rhythm down for the whole song.”

As Frampton says, the guitar, for Bowie, became a vehicle to create, and he could lead his cavalry with real class, but when he needed a little, he knew he wasn’t the man for the job.

The full interview with Bowie’s rich lineage of guitarists is the cover story in the latest issue of Guitar World. Copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

A towering love story set in the face of the division of Berlin during the Cold War, Heroes is one of David Bowie's greatest achievements – an epic that will long outlive him (and has already). It wouldn't be half of what it is, though, without Robert Fripp.

It was Fripp that contributed the song's defining instrumental element, a whirring guitar part that adds a touch of the weird and surreal as it coils around Bowie's heroic vocal performance.

When Bowie called up Fripp again for some more studio work a few years later, though, he had something very different in mind.

The assignment was Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), the swaggering rocker that would become one of the centerpieces of Bowie's 1980 album of the same name.

Fripp – who had initially hesitated when asked to contribute to Heroes – was more gung ho when asked to play on Scary Monsters.

“I was a working player and ready to go,” he told Guitar World in a recent interview. “I was a focused rock player, and I recorded for two nights, beginning at midnight, at Trident Studio at St. Anne’s Court in London.

“I only had chord sheets, and the advantage of that is that you don’t have to sit down with a manuscript book and listen through the songs a few times until you have the map. You have the map in broad outlines and you just go.”

Fripp's newfound role as a “focused rock player” very much came in handy at the sessions.

“I remember I asked David, ‘Any suggestions?’, because there’s any number of ways you can go,” he told GW. “He said, ‘Think Ritchie Blackmore.’ I didn’t expect that, but I understood what he meant.

“Did I sound like Ritchie Blackmore? No. But I’d seen Ritchie in the Outlaws in Poole when I was 17, and his playing was phenomenal. He had all the moves. So I’d seen Ritchie, I’d heard Ritchie, and I wasn’t going to play like Ritchie would, but I knew what David meant.”

Asked by Guitar World how the great artist should be remembered, the King Crimson mastermind said, “Simply as we knew him. Some people knew him personally, other people knew him through his work, and still other people will remember David as the person who said to them very directly, ‘You have permission to be who you are.’”

For more from Fripp, plus interviews with some of Bowie’s other key guitarists, pick up issue 607 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

For his first three years as a superstar, David Bowie found his partner in crime in Mick Ronson.

The guitarist’s expressive playing style never shied away from different sonic territories, lending itself to Bowie’s genre-blending songwriting style on classic early albums including The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973).

It set the stage for the caliber of six-string talent that accompanied Bowie throughout his career.

Adrian Belew was one such talent. On the recommendation of producer extraordinaire Brian Eno, Belew graduated from the Frank Zappa Band right around the time Bowie was looking for a new guitarist.

“We first met when he appeared at a concert in Berlin, when I was playing with Frank Zappa,” recalls Belew in the new issue of Guitar World.

“Two nights before that, Brian Eno had come to the show in Cologne, and Brian knew David was looking for a fresh guitar player, so he told him, ‘We’ve got to go see this guy that’s with Zappa.’”

And, turns out, Zappa’s onstage theatrics helped Belew land his next gig.

“There was a part of the show where Frank took an extended 10-minute solo, leaving just Terry Bozzio (drummer) and Patrick O’Hearn (bassist) on stage, and the rest of us were supposed to walk off the stage at that point.

“As I was doing that, I looked over at the monitor guy, and there was David Bowie and Iggy Pop standing there.”

Belew wasted no time. “I walked over and shook David’s hand and said, ‘I just want to really thank you for all your music.’ I didn’t even have time to say anything to Iggy before David said, ‘Well, good. How’d you like to be in my band?’”

To this day, it remains a standout moment in Belew’s career and still gives him shivers. “Two weeks later, I was in David’s rehearsal.”

Belew ended up serving as Bowie’s lead guitarist on his Low / Heroes World Tour in 1978 – documented on the live album Stage. On the recording front, he lent his chops to his 13th studio album, Lodger – the final release of his Berlin trilogy.

However, his tenure with Bowie didn’t quite end there. 12 years later, he returned as Bowie's musical director on his mammoth Sound+Vision Tour.

“That was a whole other level; it took me months of preparation,” says Belew.

“One of the main difficulties was that he wanted just a four-piece band, and yet he was doing a retrospective of all his career.” Fortunately, this coincided with the arrival of the first-ever sampler on the market, prototypes of which Roland had sent to Belew, making all the instrumental layers possible.

“Me and my engineer and the keyboard player, Rick Fox, sat for hours and tried to sample all this stuff. We kept buying more samplers, so in the end we had two huge racks of samplers!”

For more from Belew, plus interviews with some of Bowie’s other key guitarists, pick up issue 607 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

A former member of groups such as Blue Mink and Sky, the late Herbie Flowers toured with David Bowie and T. Rex, while his basslines, like the distinctive sliding line on Lou Reed's Walk On the Wild Side, are nothing short of legendary.

A veteran musician who started out playing the tuba and double bass in the Royal Air Force during the 1950s, Flowers recorded over 20,000 sessions, but, as he once told Bass Player, he wasn't always sure who the sessions were for.

“The rate was about £6 for a three-hour session, recording about 20 minutes of music. In those days, I spent more time with session drummer Barry Morgan than I did in bed with my wife! But you wouldn't necessarily know who it was for and the booker wouldn't give a shit who the band was.”

With two tracks simultaneously played on a bass guitar and a double bass, Flowers’ iconic bassline on Walk On the Wild Side is known the world over, adding a touch of class to one of the darkest pop songs ever written.

“I played that on my old English pine double bass and my Fender Jazz. There was no inspiration, just a bar of C and a bar of F going round and round. I'd put double bass on the bottom end, playing the bottom note, and then I asked to put bass guitar above because I wanted to try something else.

“But I'm sick of people saying, ‘Walk On The Wild Side is a classic, you must be rolling in it!’ I got paid £12, and Bowie – who was voted Producer of the Year – didn't even show up until all the tracks were down. That's good production, isn't it? Phone some clever people up, stay out of the way, then collect the award! It was just a lucky thing. I got paid £12 for the session, end of story.”

The following interview was first published in the October 2006 issue of Bass Player.

What are the golden rules for studio musicians?

“The first thing is that you can't ever be late. They play you the song or sling you a chord chart, and you come up with what you think are fancy basslines. You hang on to the click track, get your job done as quickly as you can, and as soon as they say, ‘Thanks very much’, get the hell out of there. Studio work is expensive. The producer doesn't want you hanging around, being in the way.”

Did you ever feel like you were in a band?

“A little bit. I was in T. Rex in the latter years, but T. Rex was Marc Bolan. Marc was the writer, performer, co-producer and publisher, and we were paid wages. It was all his, and I was perfectly comfortable with that.”

Did it bother you that you didn't own any part of a recording?

“I wouldn't want to own it. I don't want to own any part of Diamond Dogs or Transformer, because it could have been anybody. I had no involvement in the composition of Walk On The Wild Side, despite the fact that it's a pretty well-known bassline. It's only a bassline!”

What was the story behind Blue Mink?

“That began at Morgan Studios where six of us were booked for a two day session for a band called Family Dog. We finished in one day, so there was a day free. We decided to lay down some tracks as Roger Cook had this song called Melting Pot, and before we knew it, it was No. 2 in the charts. Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris stopped it getting to number one and I was playing on that too!”

And Sky?

“A hybrid band that sprang out of drummer Tristan Fry, Francis Monkman on keys and myself doing things for John Williams’ Travelling album. John was looking for another musical area so we put Sky together, made a few albums, did a few concerts, and were fortunate enough to get a hit with Toccata.

“Our diverse backgrounds gave us an advantage. We added Kevin Peek, who's really good at electric rock guitar. Francis was the original keyboard player with Curved Air and an early user of sequencers.”

What equipment did you take to sessions?

“If I was booked on bass guitar, I'd take my Jazz Bass and my little Wallace amp. The amp was only for my benefit as a monitor, and the engineer would say, ‘Can you turn your amp off for the take?’, so there’d be no spill. The speaker had wheels on it and if I played loud enough the speaker used to move across the floor! But we never played that loud in studios.

“I’ve also got a beautiful old English pine double bass that I bought in 1959 for £40, and an old tuba that I bought when I came out the Air Force for about £25. They're the only instruments I've ever had.”

Tell us about your Jazz Bass.

“I bought it in Manny's Music Store in New York, for $70 in 1959! To this day, it's got the same frets, pickups and dual pots, in Electric Blue sprayed over red, over the top of a white primer. I know because the paint's worn off the back.

“It's completely and utterly original, but it's never had a transfer on it, just the Fender 'F' on the bridge cover plate. I had to take the covers off because there was no room to play with a plectrum, but I've still got them in a drawer.”

So what else can you remember playing on?

“War Of The Worlds with Jeff Wayne, Brotherhood of Man, The Fortunes, every other Eurovision song, Love Affair, Sports Night and that Tony Hatch Crossroads theme, one of the hardest sessions I've ever done.

“A lot of the Pink Panther stuff, Dusty Springfield, Rock On by David Essex, a lot of the Nilsson Schmillson stuff. Elton John's early things, like Burn Down The Mission and Tumbleweed Connection. Eloise for the Ryan Brothers – that's got the longest bass gliss in the world.”

Although forever linked to David Bowie’s breakthrough success – and what is, for many, Bowie’s golden era in the early ’70s – Mick Ronson’s career continued long after his departure from Bowie’s band, the Spiders from Mars.

Bowie’s announcement from the stage of the London Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, when he unexpectedly declared that the Spiders had played their final show together, came as a huge shock to the rest of the band.

Ronson had carved out a reputation for himself as not only one of the premier guitar heroes of the glam age, but also as a gifted producer and arranger. While the band were understandably dismayed and disappointed at Bowie’s decision, plans were afoot to turn Ronson into a solo star in his own right.

Unfortunately for Ronson, he never seemed as comfortable in the spotlight as he was when acting as a visual and sonic foil for the extravagance of Bowie.

Ronson’s first band, the Rats, were a blues/rock band who made a handful of singles in the late ’60s. Hailing from Hull, in the northeast of England, the band undoubtedly suffered from being based outside the extremely London-centric scene that was the British music business at that time.

The Rats were an excellent band, with a sound not unlike that of the Jeff Beck Group, and Ronno could carry off the extended blues soloing that was becoming de rigueur in the age of Jimi Hendrix et al. with considerable aplomb.

Ronson’s playing was a cut above the clichéd blues rock excesses that so many mediocre Hendrix wannabes resorted to. Check out the Rats’ Telephone Blues from 1969 – no wonder that Bowie told Tony Visconti that he’d “found his Jeff Beck” when Ronson was recruited for Bowie’s band in 1970.

A month after formally joining the Hype, the original name for Bowie’s backing band, Ronson played on Elton John’s Madman Across the Water as part of the Tumbleweed Connection sessions. The song didn’t make the cut for that album, but a re-recorded version became the title track of John’s next album. The Ronson version of the song didn’t turn up until 1992 on a compilation of Elton’s rarities.

It’s difficult to understand why Ronson’s version wasn’t used at the time; his blues-laden lines punch home with attack and verve – utterly dominating the song. Perhaps that is the reason his version stayed in the vaults, as Ronson completely overshadows Elton John’s performance.

While Ronson was primarily occupied with Bowie’s touring and recording cycle as he made his most iconic albums, he also was working as a producer and arranger – on his own and in tandem with Bowie. Ronson’s most famous co-production was his work on Lou Reed’s Transformer in 1972, on which he added guitar and piano to Perfect Day and Satellite of Love.

He added his arranging skills to Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes the same year; he also struck up a friendship with Mott singer Ian Hunter that was to endure for the rest of his short life.

With the departure from Bowie a done deal, Ronson began to put together ideas for his debut solo album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, which was released in 1974.

There was a lot riding on the record, and a major British tour was booked to promote it. The album received a mixed response. Listening to it now, it stands up well in its own right, although, unsurprisingly, the influence of Bowie seems to permeate the record. Ronson’s voice was up to the job of fronting a band, but he seemed to be moving outside his comfort zone in the live shows, where the focus was entirely on him.

The record contained a mixture of originals and covers; Ronno’s take on Love Me Tender saw him enter the U.K. singles chart, and the album achieved respectable sales figures.

According to Mike Garson, whose unique piano stylings featured on Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust tour and the Aladdin Sane album, and who was a member of Ronson’s live band, attendances were poor for many of the shows. Many who did turn up were hoping Bowie might put in an appearance – a disheartening experience for Ronson.

Bowie’s management company, Mainman, still felt there was potential for Ronson to crack the big leagues as a solo act, and he was tasked with putting together a follow-up album, Play Don’t Worry, for release in 1975.

Prior to the release of his second album, he joined Mott the Hoople just before the band fell apart, to play on their final single, Saturday Gigs. While Mott were about to dissolve, Ian Hunter knew he’d found an ideal partner in Ronson – as a musical ally and a friend. Hunter was planning a solo career and wanted Ronson onboard.

The disappointing sales and critical response to Play Don’t Worry were, perhaps, the clincher in Ronson deciding to put aside plans for a solo career. Although the record moved away from a dependence on Bowie, it was still mainly comprised of covers, from Little Richard’s The Girl Can’t Help It to the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, although that song actually utilized an unused backing track from Bowie’s Pin Ups sessions.

The Ronson-penned single from the album, Billy Porter, received plenty of airplay but failed to make a dent in the charts, while the album just scraped into the top 30.

With solo aspirations on hold, Ronson threw his energies into co-producing and playing guitar on Hunter’s self-titled solo album in 1975. Although Ronson only co-wrote one of the songs, his influence is all over the album, which features some of his most blazing solos since his best work with Bowie.

Once Bitten, Twice Shy was a particular highlight, with an epic Ronno solo, scoring Hunter his last hit single and becoming a staple of his live set ever since. Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott was a lifelong fan and eventually became friends with Ronson in 1980. “For me, Ronno’s solo on that song is one of the greatest solos of all time, no question,” Elliott says.

With the pressure off, Ronson was free to do what he did best, which was (ironically) the title of his last album, Play Don’t Worry. Hunter remembers Ronson channeling a lot of his frustrations with the way things had been going career-wise into his playing, particularly the solo on The Truth, the Whole Truth, Nuthin’ But the Truth.

Ronson’s guitar work mixes delayed lines, manic wah tones and a devastating vibrato to deliver a performance of almost psychotic intensity. Blues-fired runs cascade and crash, but never descend into sloppiness, thanks to Ronson’s impeccably clean picking technique.

Says Elliott: “I played that on the tour bus a few years back, and Viv [Campbell] had to stop what he was doing and just sit back and listen with his eyes shut. He’d never been a particularly big Ronson fan until then, but the intensity of that solo was just insane.” Given the artistic and commercial success of the album, surprisingly, Hunter and Ronson didn’t work together again until 1979.

Ronson joined Bob Dylan’s live band for the Hard Rain tour in 1976, which came as a surprise to his friends, Since he’d never been much of a Dylan fan. The hard truth of Ronson’s situation was that, in spite of his high profile and reputation, he had never really earned the kind of money he should have received.

He wasn’t particularly well paid during his time with Bowie and needed to keep working to maintain financial stability. The Dylan gig was a welcome payday, although Ronson would never prioritize a lucrative deal over something that offered greater artistic considerations. Ronson actually received less than £50 per day (about $120 in 1972) for his work on Lou Reed’s Transformer, with no further royalties payable.

Alongside Ronson’s work with Dylan in 1976, he played on and produced former Byrd Roger McGuinn’s solo album, Cardiff Rose. A stylistically diverse collection of songs – from folk to upbeat pop/rock – it’s a record McGuinn has often cited as one of his favorites from his catalog. Ronson and McGuinn had both been part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and the album featured several other members from the live show.

Ronson’s background may have been hard-edged blues and rock, but he’d demonstrated his ability to cross stylistic barriers on his two solo albums. McGuinn recorded a version of Bowie’s Soul Love for the album, although it only turned up many years later on an expanded edition of Cardiff Rose.

Ronson may have embraced the role of sideman after the relatively disappointing response to his first two albums, but he continued to record his own material, with an eye on a third record. He recorded a full album’s worth of songs at the end of 1976, although the project only saw an official release in 1999, under the title Just Like This.

RCA refused to release it at the time, as they had lost faith with Ronno’s ability to sell records. Ironically, this would have been his strongest, most consistent album. With Ronson one of the few names from the pre-punk age not subjected to the year zero excoriation of all that had gone before, he could have capitalized on his cult hero status, had the album seen the light of day.

The title track is a punchy rocker, with a sound that seemed in step with the burgeoning punk/new wave scene that exploded while he was working on the album.

Given the U.K. punk scene’s enduring love of the work of Bowie and Ronson, it is unsurprising that Ronno was asked to play on and/or produce records for a number of the first wave of British bands.

Slaughter and the Dogs, who were one of the very first handful of punk bands to release a record, were such massive fans that they actually took their name from Ronson’s Slaughter on 10th Avenue album and Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.

Slaughter and the Dogs guitarist Mick Rossi managed to track down Ronson and struck up a friendship with him. When they signed to U.K. label Decca, they invited Ronson to the sessions for their debut album, Do It Dog Style, in 1978.

Rossi remembers: “Mick was such a friendly guy. I was only 15 when I went with a friend to see him on his solo tour in 1975. It was in Sheffield, and we lived in Manchester, which meant we’d have to spend the night after the show sleeping in the bus station. We were only 14. We managed to meet Mick on his tour bus after the gig.

“When he realized we had nowhere to stay, he paid for a hotel room for us where the band were staying. He even gave me his phone number and said to keep in touch, which I did, and that was how I managed to get him to play on our album.”

Rossi remembers a particularly magical moment in the studio during the day Ronson spent adding his guitar to a couple of the tracks. “I’d bought a Marshall stack and I had a Les Paul, but I was just turning everything up to the max. The sound wasn’t really working. Mick came in with his Les Paul, plugged in to my amp and fiddled with the controls for a moment. All of a sudden there it was, the full Ziggy Stardust tone. It was just incredible.”

Glen Matlock, who first came to prominence in the Sex Pistols, asked Ronson to produce Ghosts of Princes in Towers, the debut album for his band Rich Kids, released in 1978, after he left the Pistols. As with everybody who worked with Ronson, he was bowled over by his complete lack of pretension and incredible friendliness.

Typically of Ronson, who never really seemed to refuse any request to work with him, Matlock had answered a phone call in his manager’s office, realized it was Ronson he was speaking to and invited him to come to their rehearsals at the spur of the moment. While Ronson didn’t play guitar on the record, he played keyboards on a few songs and added a creative spark to the sessions to help Rich Kids deliver an underrated new wave classic.

By 1979, Ian Hunter had recruited Ronson again to produce and play on You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic. Hunter acknowledged the importance of Mick, stating that nobody could ever play his songs the way Ronson did. Hunter continued to rely on Ronson’s production and guitar skills for the next three years, recording Welcome to the Club in 1980 and Short Back ’n’ Sides the following year.

Ronson toured extensively with Hunter, being given full rein to unleash the best soloing of his career. YouTube is full of performances showing the intuitive level of rapport that Hunter and Ronson enjoyed, delivering live versions of classics that actually blow the original recordings out of the water.

During his extended run with Hunter, Ronson had recorded a number of tracks for a project that was mooted as a soundtrack for a film that didn’t actually get made. The album later turned up as Indian Summer in 2001. The majority of the songs were recorded in 1981, with several being cut the following year.

Ronson’s frustration with his solo work must have been exacerbated by this latest failure to get one of his own projects off the ground, following RCA’s refusal to release Just Like This a few years earlier. Ronson’s contribution to Hunter’s 1983 album, All the Good Ones Are Taken, was minimal as Ronno was seriously considering dropping out of the music business altogether – unsurprising given how frustrating it must have been to have been unable to find recognition for his own projects.

Mick Rossi had maintained his friendship with Ronson. He remembers that Ronson never really complained about anything, always maintaining an upbeat, positive vibe. “I think perhaps, given that Mick knew how much I looked up to him, he didn’t ever want to come across as negative,” Rossi says. “I’ve heard from others that he did feel that things weren’t all they should be, but he never really seemed to dwell on the downside of things.”

The previous year, 1982, had seen Ronson’s arranging skills hit paydirt for John Mellencamp, who’d been struggling to record his breakthrough hit, Jack and Diane, while still performing as John Cougar.

Ronson was working on the session as a guitarist and came up with the big choir-style hook in the middle of the song. It was a lightbulb moment for the session, and a song that was in danger of being junked became transformed into a global hit.

Ronson also produced the first of two albums, No Stranger to Danger, for Payolas, a Canadian band notable for their inclusion of future mega-producer Bob Rock among their ranks, playing bass. He produced Hammer on a Drum for them the following year. No doubt Rock picked up plenty of tips that would stand him in good stead as he went on to become one of the most in-demand producers from the ’90s onwards.

Ronson decided against dropping out and was energized by watching a performance by Lisa Dal Bello in 1983. He contacted her and they teamed up to work on her fourth album, Whomanfoursays, which she recorded under the name Dalbello. Ronson and Dalbello produced the album together, and all instruments were played by the pair.

Elliott remembers going to see Ronson playing in a pub venue in London with Dalbello: “The place was full of Ronson fans. A lot of people there were in other name bands, guys who’d always loved Mick’s work.”

At the time Ronson became involved with the Dalbello project, he had been offered the chance to produce Tina Turner, but was unable to follow through, missing out on what would have been his most lucrative job to date. The oft-reported tale that Ronno always prioritized artistic interest over commerce was proven true yet again.

Although there was little happening on the recording front, Ronson decided to return to live work in 1985, touring with Ian Hunter and also fronting his own band, continuing to tour regularly with Hunter throughout the remainder of the ’80s.

Given the longevity of the relationship of Ronson and Hunter, it seemed long overdue when they announced that they planned to record as the Hunter Ronson Band, with their first album, YUI Orta, appearing late in 1989.

One of the strongest albums in either artist’s catalog, surprisingly, it didn’t sell as well as expected, and although a follow-up was planned, that fell by the wayside once Ronson’s health started to fail.

Billy Duffy remembers buying tickets for a scheduled Hunter Ronson show: “It got canceled – I couldn’t believe it. I was so disappointed. I even managed to get the poster advertising the show, which I’ve got on my website. What a brilliant band that was.”

Elliott is convinced that the combo of Hunter and Ronson brought out the very best in both of them. “The work Ian did with Mick is just fantastic,” he says. “That was a gift that Mick had, the ability to bring out the very best in anyone he worked with.”

In 1991, Ronson received the diagnosis that he had liver cancer, and that it was inoperable. According to friends, he seemed to be able to remain relatively upbeat in the face of such devastating news. In 1992 he was asked by Morrissey to produce Your Arsenal. Given Ronno’s tricky financial situation, the timing was perfect as it provided him with the biggest payday of his career, relieving a huge amount of strain.

Ronson made his final live appearance at the Freddie Mercury tribute show, at Bowie’s suggestion, playing All the Young Dudes with Hunter on vocals. That was followed by a deeply moving version of Heroes, made all the more poignant in hindsight with the knowledge that it was to be Ronno’s last show.

Elliott remembers, “To be standing on the stage with Phil [Collen], doing backing vocals, with Brian May next to us, then looking across at Mick, Bowie playing sax and Ian Hunter singing, backed by the rest of Queen – there is nothing that could ever top that.”

Ronson’s last appearance on record was on My Baby Is a Headfuck by the Wildhearts, where he unleashes an explosive slide solo. He had been working on his final solo album, eventually to be released in 1994 under the title Heaven and Hull but was unable to complete it, before he succumbed to cancer in April 1993. Ian Hunter, David Bowie, John Mellencamp and Joe Elliott stepped in to add vocals and help complete the record.

For many, Bowie’s best work was created in tandem with Ronson. Likewise, few could argue that Ronno took Ian Hunter to new heights. Ronson was the perfect combination of artistic ability and iconic imagery, the definition of everything a guitar hero should be. His influence stretched far beyond the time when he was Bowie’s ultimate sonic and visual counterpart.

Randy Rhoads lifted Ronson’s image wholesale, and even emulated his “Les Paul into a Marshall with a cocked wah” sound. Michael Schenker admitted to basing much of his tonal approach on Ronson’s sound. Billy Duffy remembers watching Ronson on Top of the Pops and realizing that was what he wanted to do. Joe Elliott and Phil Collen have endlessly waved the flag for Ronson’s remarkable abilities.

Perhaps the most telling example of Ronson’s abilities lies in a short YouTube clip filmed not long before his death for a BBC documentary.

He’s playing the blue Tele that he favored in later years, into a small practice amp – worlds away from his signature gear choices of a Les Paul and a Marshall stack, yet the sound produced is so unmistakably that of the Ziggy era, that the oft-stated notion that a person’s sound is all in their hands, seems to be proven once and for all.

By his own admission, Mike Vernon was no more than a competent guitarist (“I didn’t play anything particularly well”). And while his eponymous Mighty Combo of later years certainly lived up to the billing, it could only ever be an addendum to Vernon’s wider contribution to the British blues scene and, in particular, his showcasing of the great players during the ’60s boom.

As producer of Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, and such Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac masterpieces as Albatross and Black Magic Woman – among countless others – there’s an argument that nobody ever caught better electric guitar tone in the bottle.

Born in November 1944, Vernon’s youth echoes many of that era’s rock galacticos: a childhood in Surrey, an early shift in the school choir, the epiphany of imported American rhythm and blues, then a shift to the big city with his studies at Croydon Art College.

It was here that Vernon began following the bands of homegrown movers ’n’ shakers Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies – and soon the younger man proved equally influential, co-founding the tastemaker fanzine R&B Monthly with his brother Richard, widely read across the London scene.

After blanket-bombing the capital’s record labels with job applications – and landing an A&R assistant post at Decca in 1962 – Vernon pitched himself as producer for John Mayall’s so-called ‘Beano’ album of 1966.

The material and personnel were solid gold, with the wily bandleader recruiting the unfeasibly talented former Yardbird Eric Clapton and setting him loose on standards like Freddie King’s Hide Away and Memphis Slim’s Steppin’ Out. But a vital element, too, was Vernon’s production, which caught all the fit-to-burst intensity of Clapton’s Les Paul and Marshall combo.

“Nobody had ever made that kind of noise on record before,” he told this writer. “It was such a huge noise. Eric put the cornerstone down. There it was. Y’know, ‘That’s how it’s supposed to be.’ And everyone just followed him.”

When ‘Beano’ unexpectedly hit UK No 6, making a star of Clapton, Vernon’s career was off to the races, too. And as the Bluesbreakers line-up evolved – with first Peter Green, then Mick Taylor, taking the spot of the Cream-bound Clapton – the producer showed a sharp ear for the sonic landscape each player needed to shine.

Alongside his own hugely respected Blue Horizon record label – co-founded in 1965 with Neil Slaven – Vernon was drafted to work on Green’s post-Bluesbreakers project, Fleetwood Mac.

“I barely knew Peter when I made the Bluesbreakers’ A Hard Road album. He wasn’t as assertive during the course of that album as he became once he had his own band. Peter, of course, was outrageous, just the most wonderful player. He was special. There’s no doubt about that.”

Vernon went on to produce British stalwarts like Savoy Brown, Ten Years After and Chicken Shack, while Blue Horizon gave a valuable platform to such seminal-but-fading US blues titans as Otis Spann, Bukka White and Lightnin’ Slim.

“In those days, Freddie King never really made the same sound in the studio as he did live,” he remembered. “So when I had the opportunity of working with him, we made sure the sound got bigger.”

Even after moving to Spain in the post-millennium, Vernon could occasionally be tempted back into the fray when he recognised a stellar talent, manning the desk for Oli Brown’s Heads I Win Tails You Lose (2010), Dani’s Wilde’s Shine (2011) and Laurence Jones’s Take Me High (2016). “Everyone does the copy-and-paste thing now,” said the latter. “But I don’t think anyone else can make an old-school record.”

Looking back in an interview that same year, the only job Vernon squirmed over was the 1967 debut by a then-unknown David Bowie. “I hate talking about it and, to be really truthful, when it was all done and dusted, I was rather glad it was over. It just didn’t do anything for me. I just wanted to get to my next blues session.”

Mike Vernon was a joy to interview – friendly, funny and wearing his fathoms-deep knowledge lightly. But make no mistake: this was one of the chief architects of perhaps the most compelling British guitar movement in history, and it simply wouldn’t have sounded as urgent or exciting without him.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Earl Slick has looked back on his experience of replacing Mick Ronson in David Bowie’s band, admitting he was apprehensive about stepping in for the underrated guitar hero.

In the mid-1970s, after Ronson left the Bowie camp, Slick was appointed his replacement. It was a daunting task, to say the least, with Slick stepping into one of the most coveted session spots in popular music.

Not only did he have to hold his own against a bona fide musical visionary in the form of Bowie himself, he also had to follow in the footsteps of an immensely skillful and popular outgoing guitarist, who was loved both by fans and the media.

In a recent interview with NME, Slick reflected on the momentous milestone in his career, and recalled feeling rather nervous about the task at hand.

“I wasn’t nervous about anything other than the fact I was replacing one hell of a guitar player, who I was a big fan of,” Slick admits.

“Mick was a star, man. It felt like replacing Keith [Richards] or something. I shat my pants. I thought everyone was going to hate me, the crowd was going to try to kill me and the press would murder me.

“The next day we got the reviews and the reaction for the fans. I was like, ‘Phew! I did it!’ After the first gig I was fine, but that’s where the stress came from.”

There was also the question of just how close Slick should emulate his predecessor. The guitarist wanted to do things his own way. Bowie agreed.

“One thing I’m really lousy at is that I cannot copy other people note-for-note, so I don’t really do a lot of sessions,” he continues. “I didn’t want him to want me to be Mick.

“I said, ‘How do you want me to approach this?’ He said, ‘I hired you because I like what you do. Do what you do’. Obviously, there are key things that Mick did that I couldn’t do any better so I did those, but the rest of it I just did like me.”

Slick’s fear was understandably, but ultimately unfounded. Indeed, he quickly fell into step alongside Bowie and the rest of the creative camp, contributing to several worldwide tours with Bowie and working on albums such as Young Americans and Station to Station.

Earlier this year, Slick sat down with Guitar World to discuss how he assembled his fellow Bowie band alumni for KillerStar – which Bower gave his blessing to before he passed away.

And, in related Ronson news, Gibson recently honored the quietly spoken rock ‘n’ roll guitar hero with a limited edition recreation of his Bowie-era Les Paul.

They may never have topped the charts, but they won fans in the Beatles, David Bowie, Barbra Streisand, Todd Rundgren and Lowell George. One thing’s for sure: San Francisco-via-Manila sisters June and Jean Millington were always destined to break the mold.

They co-founded one of the world’s first rock bands composed entirely of women and signed a multi-record deal with a major label – the Frank Sinatra-founded, Warner Records subsidiary Reprise Records – bringing their own unique brand of technical prowess and art-rock, blues-inflected, unmistakably rock-through-and-through sound to crowds in the States, Europe and beyond.

And it all started from what June calls “a handmade, small guitar from the southern Philippines,” which the pair’s mom got for them. “When we got here to the United States, hootenanny [an informal party or folk music concert, often featuring open-mic performances] was all the rage. Jean and I played a lot of those.”

As June describes it, guitar music also served another role: “[It was] our pathway into having friends and joining society here in America.

“Guys got into music or rock and roll for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. We just wanted to make a friend. We loved playing music. I mean, we're Filipina. Filipinos are incredibly, incredibly musical, and it’s in our DNA for sure.”

A casual “Hey, you want to start a band?” from a drummer at another high school quickly snowballed into Jean and June’s mom taking them to a music store to get proper equipment – despite their dad’s initial hesitancy.

“My mom didn’t say anything, but she took me and Jean to a music store, and that’s when it all changed,” June recalls fondly. “She bought Jean an electric bass, an amp, me an electric guitar, and an amp. I had a small electric guitar I bought in a pawn shop with my dad, from Sears or something like that. But now, we got the real gear. I think we were copying the Beatles. We wanted their equipment.”

Fast-forward to the early ’70s, and what would become Fanny – composed of June on guitar, Jean on bass, keyboardist Nickey Barclay, and drummer Alice de Buhr – would end up recording at the Beatles’ very own Apple Studios in London, with their legendary engineer Geoff Emerick.

“We got down to work,” she continues matter-of-factly. “And although we were recording every day, when we had the time, we also flew over to Germany to record Beat-Club [a West German program that aired between 1965 and December 1972]. We did the BBC, we were playing gigs around London… Every single day was an intense schedule.

“We did it because, well, number one, we were young. I don’t think we got that much sleep, but we had worked so hard to get to that point.”

Active between 1969 and 1975, the band toured relentlessly, released five studio albums, and was admired by the crème de la crème of the industry. Yet, as sisters and co-founders, June and Jean Millington, tell Guitar World, it was a journey marked as much by misogyny as by sisterhood and musical innovation – decades ahead of its time.

“Do you remember the sneers we got from the boys?” June reminds her sister.

“For the longest time, we had to first prove that we could actually play,” Jean responds. “For the first 10 minutes people would not believe me. Then they understood that we actually play. But that went on for a long time.”

“Nuance is what we had,” the lead guitarist asserts. “Every gig we did was a success. We never failed. That was not an option because we knew we were holding up for future generations.”

In 1965, you started the Svelts, and the choice of who would play bass famously came down to a coin toss. Looking back, how significant was this small decision on your sound?

June: When you hear Jean’s bass parts, they’re totally amazing and electric. Bass is not something you should take up if you're not going to be serious about it, because it’s a very powerful instrument, and you have to simplify everything down, yet be complicated.

Jean: You tailor your parts. I did. And the other thing is, a lot of bass players don't sing. I was the lead singer of a lot of material, so to play bass and sing at the same time, you really have to split your brain. I mean, it’s so hard.

And how did the Svelts transform into Fanny?

June: Wild Honey [the band preceding Fanny] is actually the band that signed the deal with Reprise [the record label], and after we signed the deal, Addie [Lee] – she was the lead guitarist, I was rhythm and singer – she left the band, and I had to learn how to play lead in a year.

Jean: I have to say that for June, seeing her make the transition to being the lead guitar player within a year was really incredible. She sat in her room every day, playing with cassettes and learning how to play the guitar. Quite a phenomenal achievement!

June: Richard [Perry, the record producer who signed Fanny] told us he was getting us a deal in late ’68 when we went down to the Troubadour [the legendary LA venue], and we got to Fanny Hill, our house, in May of ’69. We were girls, we were going to move into that house and just start playing. We cleaned that whole house, and I wrote to my mom, saying, ‘Richard Perry is coming over tomorrow, and we’re having our first rehearsal together.’

What gear were you using at that time?

June: I think I had gotten my [Gibson ES-]355 by then. I exchanged whatever guitar I was playing with a guitar player in a band from San Jose. The 355, let's face it, is the original guitar sound of Fanny. I had a Fender amp. Jean, what bass did you have then? Because your final bass was under a chair at some recording studio…

Jean: I kicked something underneath, and it turned out to be my bass, the Precision I’ve had all this time. The Jazz Bass; that’s what I played for a long time, but when I got to the P-bass, I really just melded with that sound.

And did you have any pedals?

June: No… I mean, Jimi Hendrix was using a wah, but all that stuff [pedals] wasn’t even invented yet. We didn’t even have tuners. We just created our own sounds. And by the way, that 355 was a stereo guitar, and I am deaf in one ear. That’s why I’m always on the left side of the stage. I even tried to play it through two amps.

Then Richard [Perry] came back from London because it was 1970, and we were in the studio, and he had a tape of the Beatles, and it wasn't finished yet, but it had George Harrison playing the [Let It Be] solo through a Leslie speaker. And I freaked out. I couldn’t believe it.

It wasn’t done, but it was so powerful, and I went right out and told our roadies we had to create my rig to include playing through a Leslie. I had a pedal, and I could turn it on, and I could vary the speed. So I did have two amps on stage. I had my Fender, and I had that Leslie, and nobody else was doing that at the time. That Leslie was heavy, but we carried it everywhere.

I had friends who were creating what we call the classic rock sound now, and those were Lowell George and Jeffrey [‘Skunk’] Baxter. They were literally creating those sounds, and I would hang out with them, or I’d go with Lowell, and he would check out everything. So we were in the right place at the right time. Moving to LA in ’69 was really incredible for a young band to get into the mix.

How did you maneuver being in such a male-dominated industry, especially at the time and at such a young age?

June: First of all, we stopped listening to people. We shouldn’t have read the reviews, because there was always so much condescension, but we literally stopped listening to what people were saying about us because it wasn't helping things.

I actually didn’t survive the terrible misogyny that was coming at us. It was so big and so strong that I finally broke, and I had to leave the band to learn how to become a real person. That was my intuitive feeling. I didn’t know how to grow up.

It was hard to leave Jean, and it was hard to leave the band. It was almost impossible. But my mom was afraid I was going to die because I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep. I think it was grief. We should have had at least four hits by the time Fanny Hill [1972] came out, and then we did that album with Todd [Rundgren, who produced 1973’s Mothers Pride].

So we did those four great albums, and we didn’t have a top 30 hit… top 40, but not top 30, and that doesn’t get us into the history books. What gets us into the history books is that we actually existed, and we were really good, and people can’t deny that now, but they ignored us for so long.

I stayed in the band longer than I should have because I was so wrecked. But that only shows how much Fanny really meant to me. People didn’t see that aspect. [Instead] it was like, “Oh, what does it feel like to be a girl and play bass? What do you eat? What's the makeup you use?” I mean, are you kidding me?

You were also working as session musicians and even recorded with Barbara Streisand at one point. How did that happen?

Jean: Richard produced Barbra Streisand, so that’s how we got the gig. Two songs were rock tunes. We learned them, and then she came in and sang over them. And the thing about Barbra Streisand, every time she sang, it was different. She was such an incredible vocalist. But she was very respectful of us. We had a good time together.

You've mentioned working with Richard, who obviously played a big role in your career. But you also recorded with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick and Todd Rundgren. In what ways did the two influence your sound?

June: Well, Richard was developing his production chops when we got signed. We were learning how to record and figuring out how this whole thing was going to work. We would go into different studios in the middle of the night, when it was cheap, and we would record demos and work on songs. We did that for a year.

He was learning how to become a great producer while we were learning how to record and become a great band in the studio. To become studio savvy, you really gotta work on it. And also, in those days, I think it was still eight-tracks, so if we wanted to sing a backup part, we would have to learn how to position ourselves around one microphone to get the sound we wanted.

By the time we met the Beatles, I think they were thrilled to meet us. We didn’t meet them en masse at the same time, but it was clear that they really liked us, and they liked us in part because we were women who could play, and we knew what we could do well.

We recorded [1972’s Fanny Hill] at the studio at Apple [the studio that formed part of the British multimedia company Apple Corps Limited that the members of the Beatles established], and their engineer, Geoff Emerick, was ecstatic when he realized A) We could play; and B) We knew how to record.

So we were very skilled by 1971 – between 1965 when we started the Svelts, and December ’71 when we got to Apple in London – and Geoff Emerick realized, “Wow, these girls are really doing it.” He was so happy. He just broke out in a huge smile.

He was the only engineer I've ever seen who literally was so into it that he would run from station to station – setting up a mic for Alice [de Buhr, Fanny’s drummer], for example, to capture the cymbals and the toms. And then he would run to my station and do whatever he had to do. He’s the best engineer I’ve ever worked with.

Now, with Todd Rundgren, we recorded with him because we liked Hello It’s Me [the Rundgren-penned song that was released by his group, Nazz]. We loved that recording. I don’t know that that was actually the right decision, but we chose him, and we ended up with Mothers Pride. We all met at a place where we really wanted to show our art.

That was January ’73, and after we finished recording that album, we went straight on the road with Chicago for three weeks, and then the album came out, and it was just gig after gig after gig.

I left in October of that year, and we did a whole European tour that summer. Like I said, we never failed, but it was never enough. That's where it broke me. We were at the top of our game, and it was not enough.

David Bowie publicly championed Fanny. How did you end up meeting him?

June: Well, we met him in Liverpool – we played in Liverpool the same night, different gigs. We didn’t even know that he was in town.

Jean: In fact, he stayed in the same hotel.

June: I didn’t even really know who David Bowie was, although apparently he had sent us his first record as a fan and said, “I love you, and here's my first record.”

When we got to the hotel that night after the gig, the concierge said, “You have a note here from Mr. David Bowie. He would like to invite you to a party in his penthouse.” So we said, “Sure.” We got on the elevator up to the penthouse, it opened, and it was like a movie.

There was a party going on, and it was a really nice party. There were a lot of people there, but it wasn’t raucous. There weren’t people yelling and shouting and screaming and drinking too much. It was very convivial. And that's how we met David.

In 1975, you had Butter Boy, which hit No. 29, and that was toward the end of the band’s lifetime. How did it feel to finally have that hit just as you were about to go your separate ways?

June: Jean was sitting in my living room. The phone rang, and we picked it up, and it was a call for Jean from LA. I had just asked Jean, “So what’s happening with the band?” She said, “Oh, we have finally broken up. That’s it.”

Fanny is finally broken up, and then the phone rings. It was like a movie – telling her that she had a hit and she had to come back to LA because they could now make some money by going on the road. And about two weeks later, she called me up and asked me to play on that tour. So it was very interesting that it came back together. We had a great time playing, and it led to a lot of things, but it was almost comical.

You’ve obviously mentioned a lot of challenges that you faced. So, on the flipside, what were some of the biggest highlights?

June: Really, the most successful gig was the night we played the Troubadour [in Fall 1968], because no-one believed in us. The manager said to Jean, “You can only play for a few minutes.” So we played three songs, and at the end of those three songs, we never had an audience reaction like that before or since, because the entire audience jumped up on their tables.

They were banging their feet on the tables, going, “More and more and more,” clapping, screaming, going crazy. And that poor manager had to run up to Jean, and he said, “Yeah, would you play some more?” Jean looked down at him and said, “Well, you said five minutes….” I would hate to be that guy!

So it was really incredible. I looked over at Addie, who, at the time, was our lead player, and we didn't need to say a word – well, we couldn’t have said a word because the crowd was so noisy. But that, to me, was the apex of our career because of the audience reaction.

Now, if audiences would have kept doing that, and the radio stations had followed that feeling… That, to me, is the tragedy. They were just too ignorant, too much misogyny.

In 2018, you reunited and recorded Fanny Walked the Earth. What was it like to play as Fanny after so long?

June: For us the really big thing was that we felt like we were 17 again. We felt like we were playing in a club. It was basically that same orb of us on stage, our own world, our own way of playing.

You never know where the miracle is going to come from – the fact that the three of us [Jean, June, and Brie Howard-Darling, one of Fanny’s early-years drummers] got together to play again in our late 60s and early 70s.

There was only one Fanny, and it will never be replicated. We were our own creation. We created ourselves. We were not created by a company, a man, a group of men – nothing. We created ourselves, and went down to LA and kept creating ourselves, and in that way we succeeded, because we have something that people are freaking out over even now.

• June Millington's new record, Home to My Soul, is out now. In 2018, the newly reunited Fanny – rebranded as Fanny Walked the Earth – released a self-titled album, available on streaming services.

Over the past decade, Earl Slick has been approached to play on numerous David Bowie-related projects, and he’s turned down most of them.

He did take part in a Station to Station tour in 2016, during which he and Rolling Stones backing vocalist Bernard Fowler performed the singer’s epochal album to celebrate its 40th anniversary, but he agreed to it before Bowie’s death. And even then, he checked in with the man he called “boss.”

“I spoke with David about it the October before he died. I didn’t know he was sick, and I wanted to give him the courtesy,” Slick says. “I said, ‘Look, Boss, I want to do this.’ The only thing he asked me was who was singing. He didn’t want a Brit Bowie copy guy. I said, ‘No problem there, because I got Bernard Fowler.’ He was quite happy with that.”

The venerable guitarist, who has the distinction as Bowie’s longest-serving axeman, starting in 1974 for the Diamond Dogs tour and returning for multiple albums and tours over the next four decades, was thrilled when he was asked to join a new band, KillerStar, led by the U.K.-based duo of singer-guitarist Rob Fleming and drummer James Sledge, that would also feature a group of Thin White Duke alumni (guitarist Mark Plati, pianist Mike Garson, backing vocalist Emm Gryner, saxophonist Donny McCaslin, and bassists Gail Ann Dorsey and Tim Lefebvre).

But what prompted him to sign on had as much to do with what the outfit was as what they weren’t.

“It’s not a Bowie tribute,” he says, “though it’s hard for people not to think of us as that, because look who we have. We’re not doing Bowie songs. We’re doing Robert’s stuff, which isn’t Bowie. It’s got Robert’s flavor, and trust me, I had to learn some of his weird chords when we record. The [Bowie] stigma is there, whether we fucking like it or not. It’s not a bad thing.”

“It’s more like flavors of Bowie,” Fleming says. “He’s one of many influences we have.”

The group issued a self-titled full-length album in 2024 that blended atmospheric art rock and gritty classic rock-tinged tunes. There were no attempts at cloning the likes of Heroes or Suffragette City, but one could easily conjure a Bowie aura floating over the proceedings.

“You never know how something’s going to land, but we were really happy with the reviews and feedback,” Fleming says. “People from the Bowie community dug it, but there were quite a lot of people who got into it who aren’t Bowie fans.”

Buoyed by the response to the album, Fleming and Sledge got the gang back together to record a follow-up. Well, most of them – bassists Dorsey and Lefebvre have been replaced by Plati.

“Mark slotted in really well when we did live shows,” Fleming says. “He joined the band for gigs in New York and London, and he played bass on those shows. It was a natural thing to ask him to play bass on the new album.”

Slick laid down his parts for the debut album remotely, but for the new record, titled The Afterglow, the New York-based guitarist recorded the majority of his tracks at London’s RAK Studios with Fleming and Sledge overseeing.

He prefers it old-school, saying, “These days, everybody expects you to record at home and engineer it yourself. But I’m a guitar player. I can run Pro Tools well enough to do an overdub, but while I’m pissing around with a machine, all the vibe goes away.”

The two guitarists didn’t play together live in the studio, but Fleming, who recorded basics with Sledge before Slick came to the studio, says their parts seemed to bond in the most surprising ways.

“That’s why I love Earl. That’s the magic dust,” he says. “The structure of the songs didn’t change from the demos in terms of basic patterns and chords, but certain things change when Earl gets involved and adds melody parts. There are some songs we’re both playing lead on, but Earl added things so unexpected, and they blended magically with what I already had.”

The new album punches harder than its predecessor. So Easy, driven by a simple yet spikey guitar riff, recalls glam rock’s glory days, and Proud is a mean and muscular piece of business with a surreal edge.

Slick’s echo-drenched slide playing dominates the ambient gem There Has to Be a Reason, and, as he notes, it was all done in a moment of spontaneous splendor.

“I didn’t have any notion of playing slide on the song,” he says. “Robert didn’t even put a guide vocal on it. So I just decided to do whatever. I just picked up the slide and did it in one take. If you’ve done this long enough, you know where the verses and choruses are going to be.”

On their first go-round, KillerStar played three sold-out shows at London’s 100 Club, and they returned to the venue to celebrate the release of The Afterglow.

As to the possibility of playing more gigs this year, Fleming says the challenge lies in the logistics of getting the entire group together.

“We really just focused on getting this album out the door to see how people like it first,” he says. “I’m sure there will be more shows to come.”

For his part, Slick is gung-ho to play. He’s especially keen to perform in the U.K.

“I wouldn’t mind playing the 100 Club and then maybe the Arts Centre in Norwich and a gig in Liverpool,” he says. “I spend more time there than most of the other guys. I’m more than available to go there all the time. If I were younger, I’d be buying a place there.”

• The Afterglow is out now via Vintage League Music
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

The first time this writer saw the original guitar that this latest Gibson Custom Collector’s Edition model replicates was watching David Bowie on Top Of The Pops on 6 July 1972.

Even by the standards of the emerging glam-rock scene, Bowie and the Spiders from Hull – Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder – looked otherworldly, but my eyes were glued to that guitar.

As Ziggy exploded, that 1968 Les Paul Custom was everywhere and pretty much the only guitar Mick used throughout his time with Bowie – and beyond with the numerous artists he worked with and produced. It only fell out of use after a headstock break and repair. Hey, it’s a Les Paul!

In The Spider With The Platinum Hair book (by Weird & Gilly, the pen names of Eric Demattio and Karen Laney) it’s suggested that Ronson got the black Les Paul Custom in 1968 while working with the Hull‑based pro band, the Rats.

They supported Mick’s idol Jeff Beck in March of that year, then stood right in front of Jeff and recorded the gig so they could learn the songs from the as-yet-unleashed Truth album.

Building quite a local reputation in Hull by this time, Mick had met folk singer-songwriter Michael Chapman (who asked Mick to play on his second album, Fully Qualified Survivor, released in 1970), whose roadie Pete Hunsley saw Mick as a local hero and wanted to work for him.

Apparently, Pete told Mick that Michael had stripped the front of his Gibson J-200, and Pete did the same to the Les Paul Custom. “Whether Mick actually wanted him to or not is open to debate!” Chapman is quoted as saying. “Mick finished up with the only natural Les Paul around.”

The other mods aren’t documented, although if you were a fan of Clapton and Beck – as Mick was – you’d obviously remove your pickup covers, and losing the pickguard and swapping the volume control knobs for gold reflectors is done in minutes.

Opening the case of this latest repro, we find ourselves transported back in time some 54 years: it’s that guitar looking like it’s already been on a few world tours and played hard.

The two-piece plain maple top has some attractive wavy grain, not a conventional figure, and there’s plenty of wear and ‘age’ to the top, especially by the controls where the multiple edge binding feels bumpy to the touch. The cracked, yellowed nitrocellulose probably isn’t what was on the original, but it does add to the illusion here.

The back and sides are a worn-looking black (or Ebony, as Gibson prefers) with relatively little wear; there’s certainly no bare wood from a belt buckle. It feels like an old Custom, too, not least the weight, a relatively manageable 4.24kg (9.4lb).

Admittedly, it’s collector’s money, but this guitar is an evocative reminder of the man and the music he made. Mick Ronson, who was born in 1946 and passed away in 1993, would have been 80 this year.

• The Gibson Mark Ronson 1968 Les Paul Custom Collector's Edition is priced £8,990/$9,999. See Gibson for more details.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Best known as a member of David Bowie's band, which she joined for the Outside tour with Nine lnch Nails back in 1995, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey has carved a niche for herself by always serving the music with which she's involved.

“Being a good bass player is like being a good lover,” she told Bass Player back in 2014. “You have to be as in tune with the music as you would be with your partner. You have to know exactly when to lead and when to support.”

Born in West Philadelphia, Dorsey started on guitar at age nine – inspired by Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner and Chicago's Terry Kath – and took up clarinet in school. By age 14, having played guitar in a neighborhood group with friends, she was determined to get in a working band for the summer.

“I headed to the local record store and I found a bulletin board full of bands looking for bassists. So I got an Epiphone bass, taught myself by playing along with the radio, and got a gig in a cover band. What I didn’t know at time was that I was learning from folks like James Jamerson, Chuck Rainey, and my all-time favorite, Joe Osborn.”

By the early ‘90s Dorsey had completed her first two solo albums and toured with Tears For Fears, when a production deal brought her to England in time for a phone call from David Bowie.

“I was writing with Roland Orzabel at his home studio in Bath, England, and David called me there. I thought it was someone joking around. He was doing a six-week tour opposite Nine Inch Nails, and he asked me to play bass.

“Those six weeks turned into eight years – the first two virtually without a break. It took me about that long to get the courage to ask him why he hired me. He said he was in a London hotel room in the late '80s, flipping through channels, when he saw me speak and play on a talk show – I was promoting my first album – and he made a mental note that I was someone interesting he'd like to work with someday. Five years later, he called.”

When Bass Player caught up with Dorsey again in late 2016, Bowie's passing earlier that year was the first thing she mentioned.

“It still shocks me when I hear his songs in a supermarket and think ‘He’s gone.’ I still find it hitting me in the face hard. There's no one else in my life I can compare to the connection and the time I spent with him.

“I've had family and friends pass away, but with David it's been a public thing; it's hard to have a private mourning when he's so famous, and it's harder to process it. I get strangers still coming up to me saying how bad they feel.”

Bowie's various bands featured the finest musicians anywhere on the globe: he retained Dorsey for almost 20 years.

“He considered me his bass player, even though I was only on three or four albums. It was the longest stretch I worked with anyone. He gave me exposure and recognition that I'd never dreamed of, and I'm so grateful for that – but his loss brings up one's own mortality on a deeply personal level.”

How did you approach the bass chair with David Bowie?

Initially I was terrified, so I took a lot of time to learn to play exactly what was on the albums, in all of David's eras and styles. It was just about getting the notes and making the part feel good.

Early on, he explained to me that he puts a band together the way a director casts a movie: You know what each actor can do and which role they will fill, and you know their personality, so you just turn them loose.

Do you have favorites among Bowie's past bassists?

They're all great. My favorites, though, are the early guys, like Herbie Flowers and Trevor Bolder. Herbie is one of the top English session bassists of all time; he did Space Oddity and Diamond Dogs, among others.

Trevor did The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and was in the Spiders From Mars band. I like that you can hear them really digging in, their flatwounds flapping, much like my session heroes Joe Osborn and James Jamerson.

What were the gig's most creative and challenging aspects?

The biggest challenge was singing and playing, especially when you're trying to sing something soulful and laid back while keeping the bass right in the pocket, like when I had to sing the Luther Vandross part on Win from Young Americans.

Did David ever have suggestions about your bass parts?

Sometimes he had a suggestion. If he had a specific thing he wanted to hear, he would ask for it or try to explain it. He would maybe have a vocal melody and some kind of drum machine and some chords – pretty rudimentary things.

There was a song that we did for the Long Live Tibet album called Planet Of Dreams. There’s a bass part at the beginning that he had in his mind. I would never have thought of it, because there’s nothing else going on there to indicate to do that, but he was like, ‘Do this little thing at the front’ – and then after that I was free to figure out how I wanted to approach the song.

You also worked with Lenny Kravitz, who is a bass player himself.

When it comes to the bass part, Lenny is completely the opposite – he wants it to sound exactly like he did it! And that’s a challenge sometimes, but it’s really fun for me because I discovered so much. You know, playing for lots of different people has been the best education for me as a bass player, because I never went to school to study bass.

I can’t read music, I don’t know theory, I don’t know harmony, I don’t understand how to apply all that stuff – so it’s all my ears and patterns in my own visual kind of way. But each artist I’ve worked for has taught me another facet of how to approach the bass, and that’s always exciting. It’s been really like going to school.

How does Kravitz compare with Bowie, work-wise?

“Lenny is so different from David, as their work ethics are opposite. Lenny works crazy hours where David worked around family times. Lenny will start rehearsals at 11pm, but David would keep things more nine to five, and we had weekends off. But I'll jump in the car and get into the city whenever Lenny calls.

“Lenny doesn't give you as much freedom because he plays most of the instruments on his albums, and he wants to hear it as he played it. I try my best to play it like he did and so far, so good. He's more of a taskmaster, and this is a mirroring job. Lenny's great because he's got a huge heart, and is totally fun.”

The Gibson Custom Shop has unveiled a reissue of Mick Ronson’s Les Paul Custom to honor the legacy of David Bowie’s late, legendary guitarist.

The Gibson Mick Ronson 1968 Les Paul Custom Collector’s Edition was first teased to Guitar World at NAMM 2026. Only 100 meticulous reproductions of the guitar that Ronson played while in Bowies band will be made.

Away from Bowie, Ronson was also a talisman for the likes of Lou Reed, Ian Hunter, Bob Dylan, Roger Daltrey, and Van Morrison, with his late '60s Les Paul his trusty steed.

Ronson’s famed electric guitar originally sported an Ebony finish, but was stripped away for a raw look that contrasted with the glam rock image for which he was known. Here, Gibson’s Murphy Lab aging techniques have carefully captured that character, “wear, feel, and sonic personality,” of the original.

The guitar itself has a mahogany body with a plain maple cap, and a mahogany neck that’s carved to an Authentic ’68 Medium C profile. That's topped with an ebony fretboard with mother-of-pearl block inlays – what else? – while Grover tuners, an ABR-1 bridge, and a heavily worn Stop Bar tailpiece also make the cut.

The replica arrives looking as road-worn as the original, and boasts unpotted, aged ’68 Custom humbuckers with Alnico 2 magnets. Free of covers, they promise “aggressive, expressive” tones, with period-specific wiring via CTS 500k audio taper potentiometers and Black Beauty capacitors, ensuring it oozes vintage charm.

It ships in a Gibson Custom case featuring a reproduction of Mick Ronson’s signature, and players will find a replica strap and a Certificate of Authenticity booklet inside. In all, Gibson believes it makes for “a faithful recreation that captures the soul, character, and unmistakable aesthetic of Ronson’s original Bowie-era guitar.”

It’s a process that Gibson has previously completed with Jeff Beck’s Yardburst Les Paul, the “Greeny” Les Paul, and, more recently, for Noel Gallagher. Still, it looks like its skills have been really put to the test here with this naturally worn and weathered instrument.

“I think Mick would be totally astonished that he’s still being talked about in such a positive way,” Ronson’s widow, Suzi, reflects. “I think this guitar just adds sparkle to an already legendary life.”

“Mick Ronson is a true musical legend, and his impact – delivered in far too short a time – cannot be overstated,” adds Lee Bartram, Head of Commercial and Marketing EMEA at Gibson. “The world misses Mick Ronson more than it likely knows. We hope that this project advances the broader recognition he so richly deserves.”

The Gibson Mick Ronson 1968 Les Paul Custom Collector’s Edition is available now for $9,999. Time to raid the piggy bank.

Head over to Gibson for more.

Rock ’n’ roll’s most quietly spoken guitar hero was far more than just Bowie's foil, and Guitar World's deep dive into his post-Bowie adventures is well worth a read.

George Murray spent six years as a member of David Bowie's band – locked tight with drummer Dennis Davis and guitarist Carlos Alomar – to cut the studio albums Station to Station, Low, Heroes, Lodger, and Scary Monsters, and the live discs Stage and Live Nassau Coliseum '76.

Murray's pivotal basslines from this fertile period range from Heroes, which he played on a Rickenbacker using a pick, to his slapped P-Bass on Ashes to Ashes.

His personal favorite is the lesser-known The Secret Life of Arabia, a funky sub-hook that closes Heroes. But first, who is George Murray, and how did he come to occupy one of the most important bass chairs in rock?

Born on October 12, 1951, in the Jamaica, Queens area of New York City, Murray was raised on the sounds of Count Basie, and Frank Sinatra, before the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show led him to want to play an instrument.

He started on drums in 7th grade, before switching to bass guitar as a high school sophomore, buying a Hagstrom with the money he saved from mowing lawns and shovelling snow.

“I was always pulled to the rhythm,” said Murray in the September 2018 issue of Bass Player. “Whatever was driving the song – and that was drums and bass.”

Having moved from the Hagstrom to a 1973 Fender Precision, Murray started playing with Dennis Davis and Carlos Alomar, ranging from local theater and clubs gigs to road work in Detroit and recording with Luther Vandross.

The pair had already worked with David Bowie on his Young Americans album, and in September 1975, Davis called Murray to ask if he'd come to L.A. to work on Station to Station.

“I met David at the rehearsal studio,” said Murray. “He shook my hand and said, ‘Here's the song I want to do.’ It was Golden Years. Essentially, I was auditioning during the recording of the album.

“I got to create my own basslines for the entire album, except for a specific line he gave me for the first part of the title track.

“We had some philosophical conversations, but David didn't give a lot of feedback musically. He'd play something on a tape recorder in Carlos’ ear, or occasionally he'd say, ‘Turn the beat around’ or ‘Play it backwards.’ He loved ideas and sounds and textures.

“A few weeks later, his business manager called and asked if I was free to go on tour into the next year, and that began our six-year run.”

Asked to pick a favourite bassline from his tenure with Bowie, Murray named The Secret Life of Arabia from Heroes.

“I don't remember what possessed me to come up with that line. I was just reacting to the chords, and channeling everything l'd learned to that point.

“The rhythm is clearer than it is on other tracks; there's a separation, so you can really feel the bass and the drums moving the song forward.”

The session took place at West Berlin's Hansa Studio by the Wall in July and August 1977. Present for the rhythm-section tracking were Davis, Alomar, Brian Eno on keyboards, Bowie on a guide vocal, and producer Tony Visconti (Robert Fripp's lead guitar was added later).

“Even though we sped up a tiny bit at the end due to excitement, my concept was to play the part right in the middle of the pocket, because that's how David presented the song.”

Three years later, after the Scary Monsters record, Bowie began his move back toward the mainstream, culminating in a new band as his Let’s Dance era dawned. Although it was unexpected, Murray – who had moved to Los Angeles – took it in his stride, but he was never able to establish himself on the L.A. scene.

“My time with David was special – a musical high point for sure. I wish I'd gotten to know him better and had taken more advantage of the places we traveled. Now it's about time for my next musical adventure.”

Since making its debut on October 11, 1975, NBC’s Saturday Night Live has been a pop-culture juggernaut like no other.

But before becoming a weekend staple for generations of late-night viewers, creator Lorne Michaels’ variety show began as a brash, uniquely irreverent counterculture experiment boldly pairing off-the-cuff outsider comedy with of-the-moment musical guests – for the record, the first show featured Billy Preston, Janis Ian and, arguably most memorably, Andy Kaufman miming his way through the Mighty Mouse theme song.

Indeed, while it’s a comedy-first operation, music has always been a major part of SNL’s appeal – and, obviously, that means we’ve seen a lot of guitarists grace the show’s stage.

It’s been a spot for bands to crank it up just before their careers went supernova. Others faltered spectacularly on live TV, beneath the bright lights of Studio 8H and under the watch of millions of viewers at home.

Some of the greatest guitar virtuosos showed up unannounced for once-in-a-lifetime jams. A pair of blues-loving bees morphed into the show’s breakout musical act.

While it’s all made for hundreds upon hundreds of must-see moments, to paraphrase the show’s iconic metalhead character, Wayne Campbell – a.k.a. Mike Myers, an obtuse on-air shredder in his own right – some were more worthy than others.

So, in honor of the show’s staggering 50 years on the air, ladies and gentleman, behold the 50 greatest guitar moments in SNL history.

50. The Rolling Stones – Shattered

Season 4, Episode 1; October 7, 1978

While nabbing the Stones was a major coup, the band’s lone SNL appearance isn’t remembered for being great. Mick Jagger’s voice is shot and unpretty through Beast of Burden, but Shattered taps into the sleazy urgency of the Some Girls era.

It also embodies the chaotic, anything-goes-in-the-moment spirit of live TV right about the time Jagger starts snapping his ivory sportcoat at Ronnie Wood, wet-towel style.

49. The Devil Can’t Write No Love Song sketch

Season 25, Episode 5; November 13, 1999

Garth Brooks plays a down-on-his-luck musician willing to sell his soul for a hit. Ready to make a trade, Lucifer – a horned-and-bearded Will Ferrell – bursts onto the scene with a devil-red Fender built out of a “hell-spun mixture of the bones of fornicators.” Trouble is, the dark lord is a damned terrible songsmith. Fred’s Slacks is a brittle-toned, out-of-tune geek-rock atrocity, and his originals only get cringier from there.

48. Joan Armatrading – I’m Not in Love / Down to Zero

Season 2, Episode 21; May 14, 1977

The highlight of Joan Armatrading’s SNL performances is the sound of her rich and oaken vocal – but her stately 12-string chording chimes through the mix quite nicely, too.

Whether through the dew-eyed I’m Not in Love or the yearning folk-rock of Down to Zero, guitarist Jerry Donahue also brought a waterfall-rippling wave of flanged-out fretboard elegance to the arrangements.

47. System of a Down – B.Y.O.B.

Season 30, Episode 18; May 7, 2005

The SNL censors were prepared to bleep out the F-bombs SOAD’s Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian regularly scheduled into their zany, kinda thrash/kinda ska single B.Y.O.B. The latter let loose an unscripted “fuck yeah” during a surf-zested string slide, though, which ended up putting he and the rest of System on SNL’s blacklist. They never played the show again.

46. Metallica – Fuel

Season 23, Episode 8; December 6, 1997

An argument could be made that SNL blew it by not booking Metallica during the height of ’80s thrash and that they slept on the biggest metal band in the world circa Enter Sandman.

But producers gave ’tallica fans that which they desired by finally bringing aboard the band during their Reload period. Fuel found Kirk Hammett all-gassing his wah-wah solo. James Hetfield kept on theme by strapping himself to a flame-emblazoned Flying V.

45. The Tragically Hip – Grace, Too

Season 20, Episode 16; March 25, 1995

When original Not Ready for Prime-time Player Dan Aykroyd was asked to co-host this episode, he agreed – with a caveat: fellow Ontarians the Tragically Hip had to come along with him.

Gord Downie grinned cherubically as he flubbed his first line, but Canada’s Band otherwise nailed the artfully hard-rocking Grace, Too, guitarist Rob Baker flexing a wide, flavorful vibrato into its finale.

44. Adam Sandler – The Thanksgiving Song

Season 18, Episode 7; November 21, 1992

Sandler used his Weekend Update segments to test out goofball characters like Cajun Man and Opera Man. The news desk was also where he developed his voice as a singer-guitarist, and that all starts with The Thanksgiving Song.

Coming out the gates with cheerful 7th chords and a toothy grin, he uses the quaint acoustic jazz-folk song to toast turkey dinners and serve up a side of pop-culture non-sequiturs.

43. Queens of the Stone Age – Little Sister

Season 30, Episode 19; May 14, 2005

Though drummer Joey Castillo was already clonking his plastic jam block hard-and-heavy through this segment, Will Ferrell apparently felt that Queens could use more cowbell.

The comedian reprised his famous Gene Frenkle character – ill-fitting shirt and all – and whapped to his heart’s delight, but the impromptu percussive performance wasn’t the scene-stealer. Credit that to Josh Homme putting on a clinic with his serpentine flair.

42. Big Ricky & the Minnows – “Bass Lake” sketch

Season 50, Episode 16; April 5, 2025

A lakeside potluck jam on Tom Petty’s Free Falling goes horribly awry once Big Ricky – played by an increasingly exasperated Jack Black – realizes everyone hitting the stage is hoisting a bass and the soupiest tone of all time (“The quality of sound feels like a sinus infection”).

The low-end nightmare swells into a dozen rhythm-stringers and one particularly talented basset hound trying to find their footing within the frequency, with disastrous results.

41. Spinal Tap – Big Bottom

Season 9, Episode 18; May 5, 1984

Talk about bass chops, these guys got ’em. Unlike Black’s bass sketch, Tap’s low-end monstrous performance of Big Bottom was no shit sandwich. Performed on air just two months after This Is Spinal Tap hit screens, the band’s performance of their multi-bass opus rumbled with hilarious, horn-dog fervor.

Derek Smalls lays down the initial rhythm with a double-neck bass. Nigel Tufnel hits those perfect fourths like a pro. The synth-bass is on point, too. But it might be David St. Hubbins mud-flappin’ lead bass prowess that pushes the ludicrous metal anthem into overdrive.

40. J Mascis & the SNL band – Out There

Season 25, Episode 16; April 8, 2000

It’s a travesty that J Mascis never got to chop through this Where You Been? stunner on the show with the rest of Dinosaur Jr. in the ’90s. Nevertheless, a 20-second sampling of Out There – which Mascis performed while sitting in with the house band – found the alt-rock guitar hero wham-smashing his way through a micro-sized but massive-sounding SNL moment. This performance took us to the commercial break seconds after the show staged its iconic “More Cowbell” sketch.

39. The Black Crowes – Sometimes Salvation

Season 18, Episode 9; December 12, 1992

Sometimes Salvation is a funny pick because the Crowes’ aching, extended blues ballad shares a similar feel to the SNL band’s longtime closing credits jam, Waltz in A. Where it differs is that the Georgia rockers also had Marc Ford sustaining a series of seismically reckless and romantic bends through his spacious solo. And it’s spectacular.

38. Foo Fighters – Times Like These

Season 28, Episode 13; February 22, 2003

Foo Fighters are prolific SNL guests, having hit the program nine times since 1995. Their third pop-in at 30 Rock came during the promotion cycle for One by One and began with a crunching version of All My Life.

But Times Like These is what makes the highlight reel – not just because the Foos crushed their yearning anthem with ease, but because Jim Carrey stormed the stage mid-song to air guitar his right leg like a maniac.

37. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stone Cold Bush / Under the Bridge

Season 17, Episode 14; February 22, 1992

Dubious to include, but hard to ignore, the Chilis left a strange taste in millions of mouths with this off-kilter two-fer. Stone Cold Bush was funky, but merely fine – Flea gets appropriately slappy on the bass, but things get weird when vocalist Anthony Kiedis soccer-slides toward John Frusciante and boots his bandmate in the butt.

Under the Bridge is even more tense, with Frusciante cresting through a loose fluidity that paints a bit too outside the lines – and with a lot of brown. He ends the alt-ballad howling in falsetto like a hound from hell. The rest of the band seem stunned over their tragic Magik performance.

36. Boz Scaggs – Lowdown

Season 2, Episode 2; September 25, 1976

Elliot Randall’s wildcard solo is one of SNL’s most uproarious musical WTF moments. Halfway through the hit’s soft disco shuffle, Randall rips out to center stage for a furious hellfire of hammer-ons.

He tries to hit a behind-the-nut bend but kind of biffs it, then walks back with a huge smile to resume his soulfully rhythmic plinking.

Slang-style praise or secret diss, Scaggs jumps back in to croon with perfect comedic timing: “You ain’t got to be so bad.”

35. Prince – Partyup

Season 6, Episode 11; February 21, 1981

Prince’s most storied SNL performance arguably isn’t this one, and it wasn’t even in public – rather, a slow-jammed Let’s Go Crazy during the show’s 40th-anniversary afterparty in 2015 apparently had cast members losing their minds. But his televised Partyup in ’81 was still plenty iconic, with the Purple One parading around in thigh-high boots and sex-grinding his guitar with slinking funk licks.

34. Tracy Chapman – Give Me One Reason

Season 15, Episode 9; December 16, 1989

Here’s a good reason to have owned a VHS machine in the ’80s: Chapman’s rhythm-locked, Grammy-winning blues-rocker Give Me One Reason was performed on SNL a full six years before it made it onto an album.

Chapman anchored its television debut with subtle, staccato acoustic fingering and her soulful vocal, though the house band gets into the action, too; Tom “T-Bone” Wolk injects jumping-bean bass accents while bandleader G.E. Smith delivers Delta-ready slidework.

33. Devo – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

Season 4, Episode 2; October 14, 1978

Devo’s subversive take on the Stones classic harnesses the palpably anxious and painfully horny undercurrent of the anthem arguably better than when it’s ever sung by Jagger.

Sweet release arrives through this performance, where Devo – deep in their matching hazmat suit-and-3D glasses era – twitch through the tune like a bunch of broken androids, Mark Mothersbaugh wilding out while using a Hagstrom 1 with boosts and overdrives duct-taped all over its cherry body.

32. Pearl Jam – Not for You / Rearviewmirror / Daughter

Season 19, Episode 18; April 16, 1994

Pearl Jam were arguably the biggest band in the world in the spring of 1994, so SNL showcased the hell out of the Seattle quintet during their second appearance on the show – even offering them a rare third song. Their Daughter performance, in particular, presented an extended Jam; the group gave the alt-rock anthem a funky two-minute outro full of vibe-heavy fretless bass and ad-libbed Crazy Horse lyrics.

31. AC/DC – Stiff Upper Lip / You Shook Me All Night Long

Season 25, Episode 15; March 18, 2000

AC/DC’s SNL debut found the band cranking into their Back in Black classic a whopping 20 years after its initial release. In a solid performance, Angus Young wails hard and goes full-Curly while spinning around the ground during the finale.

Earlier in the evening, though, the eternal schoolboy and brother Mal arguably locked in harder for the gritty, then-current and super-underrated Stiff Upper Lip.

30. Punk Band Reunion at the Wedding sketch (Crisis of Conformity – Fist Fight in the Parking Lot)

Season 35, Episode 14; February 6, 2010

What begins as a father sheepishly getting his old band back together at his daughter’s wedding reception quickly devolves into one of SNL’s most raging hardcore performances ever. Fred Armisen sneers his way through ’80s-style Reagan-punk lyrics, while the arrangement itself quotes Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized.

The table-crashing, glass-smashing melee gets all-too-real once drummer Dave Grohl’s mic cuts out. A cream Strat-strapped Kutcher saves the day by lunging over with another mic – which also reveals he’s definitely not the one punk-chording through their Parking Lot.

29. The Replacements – Bastards of Young / Kiss Me on the Bus

Season 11, Episode 7; January 18, 1986

G.E. Smith was a Replacements fan and called the group when SNL needed a last-minute replacement for the Pointer Sisters. The Replacements proceeded to get drunk backstage with host Harry Dean Stanton and strolled out to deliver slapdash Tim songs while sloshed out of their skulls.

Paul Westerberg fumbled lyrics, Bob Stinson played a loaner Les Paul after he fell on his own guitar on the way to the stage. The night was best summed up by the first line of Bastards of Young: “God… what a mess.”

28. Bonnie Raitt – Thing Called Love

Season 15, Episode 11; January 20, 1990

Nearly 12 years to the day after her first SNL appearance, Bonnie Raitt returned to the show to slide through this blues-rock blazer. At one point she bats at the body of her Strat to gain some gnarly sustain. Later, she juxtaposes a fiery, near-30-second glass slide solo against the arrangement’s laidback, roadhouse-reggae breakdown.

27. Lenny Kravitz – Are You Gonna Go My Way / Always on the Run

Season 18, Episode 18; April 17, 1993

Everything went Kravitz and co-guitarist Craig Ross’ way. Sporting the rawest and most iconic rock riff of ’93, the pair brought harmonized pull-offs and Hendrix-ian sharps to a pitch-perfect performance of Are You Gonna Go My Way – and then Ross delivered a wailing solo.

They then dug into their retro-rock war chest for Mama Said single Always on the Run, expertly swaggering themselves through fuzz-funk syncopation before Ross splintered off with another heater solo.

26. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit / Territorial Pissings

Season 17, Episode 10; January 11, 1992

Nirvana’s Nevermind dethroned the King of Pop’s Dangerous from the Number 1 spot on the Billboard chart the same week they dropped by SNL. Understandably, they played Teen Spirit, the industry-revolutionizing game-changer that got them there.

That said, Territorial Pissings was the livelier of their two performances; Cobain capped the manic track by smashing his guitar into a tower of logo-less cabs; Krist Novoselic hucks his bass into the air like loose change; Grohl rains drum hardware across the soundstage.

25. Rage Against the Machine – Bulls on Parade

Season 21, Episode 17; April 13, 1996

Interestingly, the SNL time bookers paired billionaire media mogul and Republican nominee hopeful Steve Forbes with left-leaning political rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine.

Rage tried to hang upside-down U.S. flags across their cabs as a form of protest, which led to an onstage confrontation with patriotic stagehands, who yanked away the subversive Stripes milliseconds before the band kicked into Bulls. Tom Morello crushed it with his wah work and mock-scratch technique. Then the band got booted out of the building.

24. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – You Don’t Know How It Feels / Honey Bee

Season 20, Episode 6; November 19, 1994

Petty’s fifth of eight appearances on SNL came during his Wildflowers cycle and boasted a new, temporary Heartbreaker behind the drum kit: Dave Grohl. The performance interestingly falls between the latter’s post-Nirvana, pre-Foo Fighters period, and he hits those cans heavy.

You Don’t Know How It Feels was a crowd pleaser, but the real treat is Honey Bee. The swamp-soupy garage-blues tune had Mike Campbell dripping out liquid gold guitar leads, but Petty hits an uncaged-and-uncouth, bendy solo of his own.

23. Aerosmith on Wayne’s World

Season 15, Episode 13; February 17, 1990

Satirically or not, SNL’s resident headbangers-cum-cable access hosts hoisted the flag for heavy music during a time where the show probably should have booked more metal acts.

Nevertheless, Wayne and Garth still got their party on with Aerosmith one time, with Joe Perry and Brad Whitford beefing up Mike Myers’ mock-squealing Wayne’s World theme as a basic-but-brawny basement rocker. Aerosmith also hit a pair of Pump tunes for the show, but this was their biggest bash of the night.

22. Fear – Beef Baloney

Season 7, Episode 4; October 31, 1981

Fear was brought onto SNL as a favor to fan and then-former castmate John Belushi, whom showrunners were hoping would pop back on the program for a cameo.

Fear then invited hardcore kids from across the Eastern seaboard – including members of Minor Threat and Negative Approach – to mosh out during a chaotic four-song medley. Bassist Lee Ving is constantly chasing a micstand as it gets knocked about by stage divers.

21. Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End

Season 46, Episode 11; February 6, 2021

Phoebe Bridgers wasn’t the first person to smash a guitar on SNL, but she’s the one who got the most flak for it. I Know the End starts subtle, but the indie-rocker ended up primal screaming her way through the climax – which likewise found co-guitarist Harrison Whitford delivering quixotic scalework – before yanking off her jet black Danelectro and decimating it against a speaker wedge. The misogyny brigade tried to shame her on socials; Bridgers sold the axe for $100,000 and donated it all to charity.

20. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band – Hot Head / Ashtray Heart

Season 6, Episode 2; December 22, 1980

Beefheart’s underrated early ’80s period found the experimental icon making music with the meanest-sounding iteration of his Magic Band. They put on a feisty performance for a shocked SNL crowd – guitarist Moris Tepper, in particular, spewing hot fire with his junk-blues sliding.

Beefheart cradled a cigarette, brilliantly rifling off a dadaist word salad through a haggard wheeze that sounded like his lungs had burnt right down to the filter.

19. Living Colour – Cult of Personality / Open Letter (to a Landlord)

Season 14, Episode 16; April 1, 1989

Living Colour’s April Fool’s appearance found Vernon Reid going off-the-charts gonzo with his inspired fusion playing.

He cut loose through a mind-bending, minute-long solo on Cult of Personality and then leaned into a vivid display of ambulance siren-styled inverted bending on Open Letter (to a Landlord).

The only thing that might’ve outshone Reid’s playing was Corey Glover’s extremely late-’80s, iridescent purple-and-yellow BodyGlove wetsuit.

18. Rihanna (with Nuno Bettencourt) – Diamonds

Season 38, Episode 7; November 10, 2012

Nuno Bettencourt never got the funk out on SNL during Extreme’s peak. Despite this, the Boston virtuoso was able to shine bright like a diamond when he popped up on the show as part of Rihanna’s backing band. The focal point is the pop star, without question, and Bettencourt begins the song with minimalist, volume pot-craning ambiance. But by song’s end, he’s soaring through the mix with a boldly prismatic vibrato.

17. David Bowie – Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Season 22, Episode 12; February 8, 1997

Armed with a Parker Fly, an unruly series of harmonic slides and an onslaught of out-of-control pinch-squeals, ace guitarist Reeves Gabrels (nowadays a member of the Cure) was a beast to behold on Scary Monsters.

Bowie & Co. were supposed to play something off 1997’s Earthling, but they went rogue and performed the retro cut as a form of protest after the singer objected to a sketch idea – and as a dig on Lorne Michaels, who told Bowie about a terrifying cocaine binge he’d been on while listening to Scary Monsters in the ’80s.

They were ushered out of the building ASAP. Bowie reportedly regretted not grabbing the fruit basket on the way out.

16. Top of the Pops sketch (aka Ian Rubbish & the Bizarros – It’s a Lovely Day)

Season 38, Episode 21; May 18, 2013

Fred Armisen’s SNL tenure was full of musical characters, one of his most memorable being comically hate-filled Spirit of ’77 punk eccentric Ian Rubbish.

While the U.K. snarler had many memorable lyrical barbs, Armisen’s last show as a full-time cast member found him slapping on Rubbish’s peroxide wig and a Fano Alt de Facto to deliver an earnest farewell anthem called It’s a Lovely Day.

It turns into a jam featuring Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, J Mascis, Aimee Mann and Michael Penn. Is this one of Armisen’s top-10 greatest TV appearances of all time? Yeah, probably.

15. H.E.R. – Hold On

Season 46, Episode 4; October 24, 2020

H.E.R. wowed guitar-heads doubly in this Season 46 standout moment. She shot melodious, mile-wide vibrato through the ceiling during a revelatory performance of R&B slow jam Hold On.

She also used her time on SNL to showcase a then-brand-new signature Fender Chrome Glow Strat, which reflected a rainbowed array of colors beneath the stage lights that was almost as resplendent as her tone.

14. Robert Cray – Smoking Gun / Right Next Door (Because of Me)

Season 12, Episode 13; February 28, 1987

While Smoking Gun was tight, we’re going to suggest that it’s Cray’s run-through of Right Next Door that left a stronger impression on the music-loving public.

There’s a sleek, clean-channel mystique coursing through the smooth-blues arrangement, Cray accenting his adulterous tale with perfect, passionately plinking accent rhythms.

By song’s end, he bait-and-switches us with a yearning backend climax of wry little wriggles and finger-snapped string work. Of course, if you're going back and watching all these, don't deprive yourself of Smoking Gun.

13. The Smashing Pumpkins – Cherub Rock

Season 19, Episode 5; October 30, 1993

The Pumpkins went in for the kill during their first appearance on SNL. The performance of loud-quiet-loud classic Today was spectacular, but the alt-rock champs went nuclear on Cherub Rock.

Billy Corgan shreds his sinewy vocal cords throughout and wails a furious solo on his modded Bat-Strat. James Iha likewise gets in a few nasty and textural bends before they put this all-out bash to bed.

12. Beastie Boys – Ricky’s Theme / Heart Attack Man

Season 20, Episode 8; December 10, 1994

The Beasties’ second muscial spot of the night began with instrumental soul jam Ricky’s Theme, where auxiliary Beasties player Money Mark’s morning glory electric piano glistened against Ad-Rock’s sly-and-wily wah-wah guitar and MCA’s lithe standup basslines.

An extended cymbal segue leads to gear-swapping and a furious aesthetic pivot, as the Boys then go buckwild with a pacemaker-exploding old-school hardcore freakout. Ad-Rock smashes an S-shape into the ground – splinters fly into the air as the screen fades to black.

11. Adam Sandler – Lunch Lady Land

Season 19, Episode 11; January 15, 1994

From Red Hooded Sweatshirt to The Chanukah Song, most of Adam Sandler’s SNL music went unplugged. But unencumbered by the confines of the Weekend Update desk, the Sandman went full-electric with a black Gibson Les Paul to strum this Bruce Springsteen-ian opus about elementary foodstuffs revolting against their maker.

Sandler sells his Jungleland rip with goofball heartland earnestness. Of course, the sight of Chris Farley’s hair-netted Lunch Lady gracefully plié-ing across the stage near Kevin Nealon’s sentient Manwich pushes the performance into all-timer territory.

10. Fishbone – Sunless Saturday / Everyday Sunshine

Season 16, Episode 16; March 23, 1991

Despite its gloom-clouded song title, Fishbone were beyond brilliant on Sunless Saturday. Frontman Angelo Moore somersaulted across the stage with manic energy and put on an acrobatic vocal performance. John Norwood Fisher flexed thick bass thwaps across the soul-metal fusion piece.

A double-strapped Kendall Jones switched between acoustic strums and flanged-out-and-frantic tap solos on an S-shape. Keeping things on-theme, they then dipped into the funkily Vitamin D-dosed “Everyday Sunshine” for their second song.

9. St. Vincent – Birth in Reverse

Season 39, Episode 21; May 17, 2014

While the Season 39 finale brought out rappers 2 Chainz and Lil Jon for a pair of sketches, Annie Clark commanded the stage with playfully panicked art-punk energy during her performance of Birth in Reverse. Early on, she’s twitching out jazz chords on a vintage 1955 M-75 Aristocrat.

By the finale, a choreography routine finds St. Vincent and guitarist Toko Yasuda harmonizing post-shred bristliness while parading the stage like a pair of nectar-crazy hummingbirds.

8. Elvis Costello – Radio Radio

Season 3, Episode 8; December 17, 1977

“I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen; there’s no reason to do this song here.” In one of the show’s most iconic moments, musical or otherwise, Elvis Costello came into 8H to play Less Than Zero but abruptly and awkwardly halted the single to re-route his band toward a spritely but unexpected Radio Radio.

The swerve had staff panicking behind the scenes. He’d later say it was because Zero was too slow; it might’ve been that its lyrics on the rise of British fascism were, well, incredibly British. Costello satirically recreated the chaos for SNL’s 25th-anniversary special in 1999, hijacking Beastie Boys’ Sabotage to once again play Radio Radio.

7. David Gilmour with G.E. Smith & the SNL Band – Song for My Sara

Season 13, Episode 7; December 12, 1987

This episode brought out two musical guests, wildly juxtaposing Buster Poindexter’s broad, brass-heavy calypso-sleaze smash Hot Hot Hot with Gilmour’s tastefully funky instrumental, Song for My Sara.

Supported by the SNL band, the latter echo-quaked melodious vibrato from his headless Steinberger GM 3T. T-Bone Wolk thumb-and-finger popped his way through the piece. G.E. Smith is all smiles while supporting the Pink Floyd legend. The song was never officially released, making Gilmour’s drop-in appearance even more unique.

6. Eddie Van Halen with G.E. Smith & the SNL Band – Stompin’ 8H

Season 12, Episode 13; February 28, 1987

Van Halen’s lone and unplanned SNL appearance arose out of boredom. As then-wife Valerie Bertinelli was rehearsing skits that week, EVH ended up in the music office trading licks with Smith, and together they whipped up a bluesy lil’ choogle named after the show’s 8H soundstage.

Eddie goes full Orca-moan on his striped Kramer 5150 before flitting between tasteful quarter-note taps and cut-throat runs. Smith is ear-to-ear grinning while chopping at his Tele. The two guitarists literally – but playfully – butt heads mid-stage, though they stood united for this memorable drop-in moment.

5. Stevie Ray Vaughan – Say What! / Change It

Season 11, Episode 10; February 15, 1986

As Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton recalled years later, host Jerry Hall’s then-husband, Mick Jagger, was around during rehearsals. Mick almost sat in with the band for their SNL debut but ultimately didn’t have the stones to go through with the team-up. Instead, a mass of Texas talent graced the stage, with SRV first hitting 12-bar instrumental Say What! as a screaming, whammy-and-wah-wild workout.

For the cocksure Change It, he strutted through flavorful blues runs alongside fellow Strat-smith, brother and Fabulous Thunderbirds co‑founder Jimmie Vaughan.

4. George Harrison and Paul Simon – Here Comes the Sun / Homeward Bound

Season 2, Episode 8; November 20, 1976

Back in the first season, Michaels went on-air to offer the Beatles a hilariously paltry $3,000 – to split however they’d like – if they appeared on his show (“You want to give Ringo less? That’s up to you”). Paul McCartney and John Lennon were apparently watching the show together in NYC and damn near took a cab to 30 Rock to collect. But it was Harrison who became the first Beatle to play on SNL, and he did it with another music icon.

In one of most stunningly tender musical moments of the early years, Harrison and Paul Simon teamed up to strum and folk-finger through the former’s Here Comes the Sun and the latter’s Homeward Bound, back to back. Outside of their acoustics and gentle vocal harmonies, it’s pin-drop silent in the studio, the audience watching history in the making.

To say the least, the performance was more than alright – it was god damned magical. McCartney would ultimately show up as a musical guest four times between 1980 and 2012, and he closed out this year’s 50th-anniversary show with another Abbey Road classic, The End. Ringo hosted in 1984.

3. Jack White – Taking Me Back / Fear of the Dawn

Season 48, Episode 13; February 25, 2023

Ever since the White Stripes bashed through a radically raw Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground on 8H in 2002, Jack White has been an SNL fixture.

On top of being a five-time musical guest, he once ripped a solo as a six-stringing wedding crasher in a 2018 sketch and also covered Rockin’ in the Free World during this year’s SNL50 concert.

While he cut a memorable double-handed tapping tribute to EVH in 2020, his mic stand-toppling, pedalboard-maximalist Taking Me Back / Fear of the Dawn medley in 2023 was a fiendishly feral display of fuzz-blown sonics and wah expressionism.

2. The Blues Brothers – Soul Man

Season 4, Episode 6; November 18, 1978

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd prototyped their musical-brothers band in the first season with a buzzy, bee-costumed performance of Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee. They eventually bought some fedoras and rechristened themselves as Jake and Elwood Blues.

Flanked by members of the SNL band (blues vet Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Stax session all-stars Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn), this Season 4 cold open is the Brothers’ defining moment – and it led them toward a hit record and a blockbuster film.

After smashing into a sweat-box vamp of Otis Redding’s I Can’t Turn You Loose, they choogle through a cool-as-ice cover of Sam & Dave’s Soul Man. Cropper steps into the spotlight with sleek vibrato waggling while Elwood honks his harmonica.

1. Frank Ocean with John Mayer – Pyramids

Season 38, Episode 1; September 12, 2012

Pop-bluesmith John Mayer’s earnest-but-animated performance style was roasted on the show several times, via squinty-eyed, fat-tongued and faux-ripping impersonations from Bill Hader, Jimmy Fallon and host Ashton Kutcher. Mayer got the last laugh with his staggering 2012 guest solo for Frank Ocean.

The R&B singer walks over to a vintage arcade cabinet and starts gaming once Mayer unearths deep, atmospheric bends on a finish-obliterated Strat. A fighting game plays on in the background, but Mayer delivers the knockout blow.

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

It didn’t skyrocket to the top of the pops – thanks, in part, to Machiavellian intrigue by a certain artist manager – but David Bowie's 1970 epic, The Man Who Sold the World, nonetheless became one of the touchstones of the glam era.

It also established Tony Visconti, working from a platform established by earlier pioneers such as Paul McCartney and Jack Bruce, as a co-conspirator in the quest to elevate rock bass playing beyond merely articulating root notes.

Visconti's bass on The Man Who Sold the World dances all around the music, adding countermelodies, harmonies, and solos in a thrilling onslaught. Even more exciting, his basslines are loud, and they're loud long before urban artists began begging mastering engineers to pump up the low-end on their discs.

Visconti – a street-smart, classically trained jazz musician from New York – was technically and conceptually well-equipped to innovate, but a couple of other pieces had to lock into place before the sonic barrage of The Man Who Sold the World came to be.

Bowie's band for the album included guitarist Mick Ronson, whose love of Cream and Jack Bruce fuelled a desire to crank up the bass in big ways, and drummer Woody Woodmansey, a combination of a more elegant Keith Moon and a ballsier Ginger Baker, who provided Visconti with the rhythmic fusillades to explore wilder and more intricate basslines.

In one of those little gifts of fate, the ‘power trio’ of Visconti, Ronson, and Woodmansey unleashed a high level of musicianship while simultaneously introducing a fiercely rocked-out Bowie to a public who had previously known him only for Space Oddity.

“We started to live together in a big apartment in Beckenham, Kent, and that's where we rehearsed for the sessions,” Visconti told Bass Player back in 2016. “We worked out about half the album down in a converted wine cellar that acted as our rehearsal space.

“It was there that my basslines were starting to get developed. I didn't quite write them down, but I organized the parts in my head. The other songs were written in the studio.”

How did the musical relationship between you and Woody develop?

“We jammed in the cellar and felt each other out. Woody is a very intuitive drummer, and I'm a very improvisational bass player, so it worked great in the studio, because we were making up our parts as we went along.”

In your musical life before meeting Bowie, who were your influences on bass, and how would you typify your style at that early stage?

“When I first started playing bass, I was a double bass player. In high school, I was a member of the All City High School Orchestra, where I played Schubert's First Symphony, and pieces like that.

“So I was already influenced that the bass has a strong voice where you played the bottom lead line. It wasn't like rock ’n’ roll at the time, where the bass always played the root note.

“Shortly afterward, I was drawn to jazz players such as Charlie Mingus and Scotty LaFaro. Mingus because he was very uninhibited-a wild man on bass – and LaFaro because he was one of the first lead bass players in the jazz field.

“I thought I was going to be a jazz musician, so I bought a Fender Jazz Bass. When I started to drift back to rock, I was attracted to melodic players like Carol Kaye, James Jamerson, and Paul McCartney. I thought, Why should a rock bassist play dumb notes all the time – stay down there and play G, G, C, C, E, E?

“When The Man Who Sold the World first exploded out of my tiny record player, I remember it as one of those albums where my young ears went, ‘Wow, the bass is really driving the songs.’ When I hear it today, I'm embarrassed. I wish I could remix that album – let's put it that way.

“But I'm glad the bass came into prominence at that time, because Jack Bruce did pave the way for lead bass playing. Mick Ronson was the one who wanted me to mix the bass up real high – not in all of the mixes, but definitely on songs like Width of a Circle.”

What do you think prompted Mick to want the bass like that?

“He loved Cream flat out, and because we were a power trio, I was expected to fill a lot of space. Also, from the start, we decided to let everyone have an equal voice. Everybody had to show themselves off to their best abilities, and that was the theme of the album – no holds barred.

“So Mick made the suggestion that I should be a bit more adventurous. He asked me to cut loose. He totally approved of me, and he was quite ruthless. He had already fired the drummer, because he wasn't up to his standard.

“And quite frankly, David and I wanted someone more adventurous – like Ginger Baker – because we were playing in odd time signatures, which was my forte. That's when Woody came in.”

What was the recording process like?

“I followed Mick's lead and turned everything full up! We were playing extremely loud –ungodly loud – and our amps were about 20 feet to the left and right of Woody. I wore headphones more for ear protection than to hear David's vocals. David was the only one in an isolation booth.”

“In those days, we went for live takes. If you made a mistake, you'd do another live take until the band played it perfectly. If they were cool mistakes, you'd leave them, because they were a ‘feel’ thing. You didn't put your finger in exactly the same place at the same time? So what? What's the big deal?

“Obviously, there's a lot of signal bleed when you do live takes playing that loud, and that made punching in at a later date almost impossible. But the mentality of fixing your parts wasn't popular back then, anyway. It was looked upon as cheap and amateur-ish to want to punch in and keeping punching in.

“We also felt it was a waste of time. We weren't opposed to splicing two takes together to get the best of each. Oh, and no one would play with a click track – that was for chumps. But, to be honest, now I can't live without one.”

Do you remember the gear you brought in for the sessions?

“I had a 200-watt Wem tube bass amp with two Wem 2x18 cabinets. It had a black-plastic front, with controls for volume, bass, middle, treble, bass boost, and treble boost – and it was loud. By then, I had sold my Jazz Bass, because it didn't have the low-end, it didn't give me enough highs, and it didn't rock.

“So I bought a Fender Precision. But when I switched from playing with my fingers to a pick, I missed the bottom-end. I wanted it to rumble. I had luthier Roger Gitten put a Telecaster Bass pickup on the P-Bass with a toggle switch. Then, I could switch between the P-Bass pickups and the Tele pickup, which would rumble the way I wanted when I played with a pick.

“Roger did another modification for me in the mid 1970s, installing two DiMarzio pickups near the bridge, adding active circuitry for treble and bass and a toggle switch, and carving a cavity in the back to accommodate a 9-volt battery.

“The Precision is only on a couple of songs on The Man Who Sold the World: She Shook Me Cold and Width of a Circle. For a lot of the other songs, I used a borrowed Gibson EB-3, because we were getting back to Mick Ronson's insistence that I sound and play like Jack Bruce.

“I also had an 8-string Hagstrom bass, and an Ampeg Baby Bass that I used for a lot of the bowed and pizzicato parts.”

David Bowie's Let's Dance is a masterclass in guitar production. Aside from featuring both Nile Rodgers and the then-little-known Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar, the rhythm guitar parts in the verses are now immediately recognizable due to their trademark delays – a happy accident courtesy of engineer Bob Clearmountain.

Yet the genre-blending, post-disco hit started its life on an acoustic 12-string guitar with only six strings.

“I was staying at his [Bowie's] house in Switzerland, and frankly, I was asleep,” Rodgers recounts in an interview with the Victoria and Albert Museum.

“He walked into my bedroom, and he says, ‘Darling, I think this is a hit.’ And I went, ‘Oh, cool man, let me hear it.’ And he starts playing something that's going like [vocalizing a rhythm part]. He's playing it on a folk guitar, a 12-string guitar with only six strings on it.

“I go, ‘David, what do you call that?’ ‘Let's Dance.’ ‘Why do you call it, Let's Dance?’ And he had this really complex concept of dancing – the dance that people do in relationships... lengthy explanation. I was like, ‘David, I come from dance music. Can I do an arrangement?’

“So I wrote out an arrangement for two guitars, bass, and drums, because I knew that if the vibe was in the rhythm section, that's all I needed to hear. I easily knew that I could put strings or whatever on top of that if I wanted to, but if the funk was in the basic groove, we had something.”

He continues, “And we get to the recording studio, which was owned by the band Queen. It's called Mountain Studios, and I count the song off, and we do the little dominant pyramid thing [referring to the song's intro]. As soon as we played that pyramid and I played it first, I scream and go, ‘Woo,’ or something like that, and I could tell right away that it's a smash.

“David was really happy, and I remember this like it was yesterday. I said, ‘You think this shit is happening? Wait till you hear my guys play it.’ Because I knew once we got back home, and it was the people that I played with playing my arrangements, it was going to be killer.”

As for his own relationship with Bowie, Rodgers waxes lyrical, “He gave me some of the best musical times of my life. It was just a joy working with him. His unbridled enthusiasm for a project was contagious, to say the least, and his unshakable belief in the potential of the song, Let's Dance, prophetic.”

However, he does admit that the working relationship was also complicated, due to one specific reason: “All I wanted for him was super success, and David seemed to want me to work against that principle. He wanted me to make a record that was not super accessible.

“He wanted it to be more avant-garde," he divulges. “David was paying for the record with his own money, which was amazing to me. He had no record deal. I gotta get this right. And, ‘David, please believe me, when these people who are going to come in and bid for this record [to] hear it, we got to knock them off their seat.’”

Rodgers recently added another mega-act to his star-studded list of collaborators – Coldplay, with whom he collaborated on their latest album, Moon Music.

Earl Slick’s resumé certainly isn’t short of high-profile session stints – he’s played and recorded with John Lennon, Robert Smith, John Waite and David Coverdale over the years – but his time in David Bowie’s band could widely be considered his crowning achievement as a guitarist.

Slick first replaced Bowie’s outgoing electric guitar player Mick Ronson in the mid-1970s, and stuck by Bowie’s side for the Diamond Dogs tour, later contributing to both Young Americans and Station to Station. Though he left in 1976, he’d return to the Bowie band in the early 2000s for more shows, and more albums.

During his tenure as Bowie’s guitarist, Slick admits he was largely given free rein to use whatever gear he thought fit for the job. There was, however, one time when Bowie was looking for a heavier sound – and ended up issuing a guitar recommendation.

When asked for his golden tips on becoming a successful sideman in a new interview with Andertons, Slick reflects, “You have to know where you fit in. ‘What’s my role? Am I going to be the guitar player that wants to keep standing in front of the singer all night?’

“And if you’re lucky enough, like I was, to work with the right people, they picked you for a reason,” he continues. “The whole idea is you don't want to have to be sitting there instructing everybody like they were in the first grade about, ‘Well, you got to play it this way. You got to use this kind of amp.’

“Any records that I've done, especially the last few that I did, I brought all the right guys I knew were gonna bring the right shit to the table. We didn't have to discuss anything. It wasn't like, ‘Use that amp,’ or, ‘Use this guitar.’ If you bring in a sideman that you need to tell everything to, then he’s probably not your guy.”

Though Slick was very much ‘that guy’ for Bowie, there was one instance where his gear choices didn’t seem to cut it as the legendary singer set about recording Reality in 2003.

“You know, David did make one suggestion after we did the first special gigs in the early 2000s and we did the Reality record,” Slick remembers.

“It was a heavier record, and at one point he said, ‘You know, Slicky, you don't have Les Pauls anymore.’ I said, ‘I haven't been playing them because I was playing the Tele.’ He said, ‘You need to get a couple.’

“But you know what? We needed them. We needed them for the stuff. But that was it. He wasn't about what kind of amps to use or any of that kind of stuff.

“I find that this is why groups break up and fight all the time. It usually means there's some wrong people in there. But you know, you shouldn't have to sit on top of people to get the job done.”

Speaking to Guitar World last year, Slick recalled the time he said no to Whitesnake.

On 23 June, it was announced that English guitarist Mick Ralphs, famous for his work with Mott The Hoople and Bad Company, had passed away at a care facility in Henley-On-Thames, aged 81.

He will be remembered as one of the most influential rock guitarists to emerge in the late ’60s and ’70s, though he continued writing and recording with Bad Company through the ’80s and ’90s, and even released a pair of albums with his own blues band in times more recent.

Born in 1944 in Stoke Lacy, Herefordshire, Ralphs picked up the guitar as a teenager and began his career playing in bands like The Buddies and Mod Doc Thomas Group, the latter of whom would go on to rename themselves Mott The Hoople in 1969.

Their self-titled debut album of that year opened with an instrumental version of You Really Got Me by The Kinks, Ralphs using a 1961 Gibson SG/Les Paul with a sideways vibrola – acquired during his time backing reggae pioneer Jimmy Cliff – through a wah pedal to replicate the vocal melodies heard on the original.

“We were quite outrageous in the Mott The Hoople days, but it was more like a punk band than a glam-rock band,” he told Guitarist in 2013. “It was just full-tilt rock because I remember people like Mick Jones of The Clash used to come and watch us play a lot in the old days.”

The band became household names in 1972 when David Bowie produced their fifth album, All The Young Dudes, and even went as far as writing its title track, underlined by some phenomenal fretwork from Ralphs.

“[Bowie] basically saved the band,” he once told Guitarist. “We didn’t really know him at all, and we were at a low ebb and felt that we weren’t getting anywhere. We always had a good live following, but we weren’t very good at making hit records.

“And then Bowie heard about the fact that we were thinking of packing it in and he wrote a very nice letter saying, ‘I really love your band and hope you won’t break up: but if you’re going to, would you consider doing this song?’ And he sent a little reel-to-reel tape with All The Young Dudes on.”

Similar high praise could be afforded to the group’s sixth album, Mott, on which the guitarist played keyboard and organ, following Verden Allen’s exit a year prior. The release included one of the group’s biggest hits All The Way From Memphis, partly inspired by one of Ralphs’ guitars getting stolen in Long Island before a gig in Memphis.

That same year, he left Mott The Hoople and formed Peter Grant-managed supergroup Bad Company with ex-members of Free and King Crimson. Their debut self-titled full-length of 1974 remains one of the most important hard rock albums of the mid-’70s, perfectly encapsulating the jaw-dropping versatility in Ralphs’ comprehensive range of talents.

Hit tracks like Can’t Get Enough and Movin’ On, both penned by the guitarist, saw him using an open C tuning (CCGCEC) to get the right kind of response and ring. It’s a high tuning that makes the strings feel very tight, he once admitted, while explaining how those songs never sounded quite right in standard.

Closing track, Seagull, is based around a simple D chord strummed on an acoustic guitar during the verses with a major triad shifted around the 7th, 10th and 5th frets during the choruses. It was famously covered by Joe Bonamassa on 2007 fan-favourite Sloe Gin, showing how the music had remained relevant and influential several decades on from release.

Later on in his career in the mid-’80s, Ralphs was recruited by David Gilmour to perform in his solo band on the About Face tour, which spoke volumes about his stature within the guitar community. In the years that followed, he kept busy with his own solo music as well as reunions with both of the bands he was best known for.

Following the announcement of Ralphs’ death, less than five months before Bad Company are due to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in November, tributes came in thick and fast to celebrate the life of a man who changed the world with his guitar.

“He has left us with exceptional songs and memories,” wrote Paul Rodgers, describing his Bad Company colleague as “my friend, my songwriting partner, an amazing and versatile guitarist who had the greatest sense of humour.”

Joe Bonamassa remembered Ralphs as “one of the greatest to ever do it”, praising him as a “wonderful kind man with the greatest rock and roll Les Paul tone”. And KISS guitarist Tommy Thayer mourned the loss of “one of the all-time greats”, noting how “one of my biggest influences has left the stage”.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Now the hysteria surrounding King Crimson offshoot Beat is dying down, Adrian Belew knows what’s next. “I want to get back to angry guitar and also fretless guitar,” he says.

It couldn’t be a better time for the Zappa, Bowie, and Fripp alum to revisit those styles – he’s just had carpal tunnel surgery and reports he’s recovering well. “The speed I’m playing at is as good as ever,” he says of his left hand’s progress.

“With some things, I had to practice hard to get back up to speed,” he explains. “The thing about being older is keeping yourself in shape and keeping yourself creative. I’ll keep making new records – making music is the most important thing to me. The performance is just the second half.”

What’s the prognosis for your left hand?

“It was an easy recovery and an easy operation; no problem at all. While recovering you can’t do much with it and it’s a little tender. Then you finally work back up to tempo. I’m playing as I always did – except there’s no more pain.”

What exactly had been going on?

“My hand started getting numb, and during part of the Beat tour it would stay numb from the moment I woke up until sometime during soundcheck. It was a little scary. I’d be like, ‘You better wake up soon here, hand!’”

Was there a moment you feared that you might not play again, or it might impact your playing forever?

“Yes – but also, not really. Steve Vai was able to walk me through the process since he’s had it done twice. He assured me it was a simple operation and it wasn’t going to go wrong. And he introduced me to one of the best surgeons in the US.

“Dr Azari is so good at what he does. He was one of the first surgeons who did a hand transplant successfully. So, carpal tunnel, for him, is like changing strings! I was actually going to ask him to put on a second left arm, to see what I could do with three hands on the guitar!”

Have you needed to circumvent the impact of age on your playing?

“The truth is I’ve never worked on the basis of notes, speeds, scales, and all that stuff. The physical aspect of it was never as important to me as the mental aspect. I imagined making the guitar do more than just what it does.

“A lot of guitar players just want to be like their heroes; but as you get older that gets harder and harder. But I can still get the sounds I’ve always gotten, so it’s not harder – there’s just more of them!”

You and Steve Vai both have histories with Fank Zappa. Has that helped you forge a working relationship together?

“The year I spent with Frank was the first and only time I’ve ever had serious instruction. Frank was a great teacher and very generous to me. He taught me a lot of things about music and the business of music. It wasn’t just how to play odd time signatures or do wild stuff, but how to behave and have a life as a professional. All those things were unknown to me.

“Steve and I agree that when you go through what Frank teaches you, you come out as a high-quality professional. You know you’ve got to play things consistently and correctly and that you can’t mess around. The main thing Frank wanted from you was to show up at every gig in perfect shape and do the music correctly.”

Without that Zappa training, could you have handled working with David Bowie thereafter?

“It would have been harder to some degree, but I think that music could have been done. But then you move forward a year or two, and I’m in King Crimson, where it’s all about playing in one time signature, and singing in another.

“I would have had a much more difficult time with that if I hadn’t worked with Frank. By the time I came out of that I was very comfortable with odd time signatures – I could write in seven, five, nine, or whatever was required. I understood it from a different basis than some people might have.”

What was Frank’s explanation of odd time signatures?

“It was that you felt the accents. If it’s a seven, that’s what you’re feeling. You’re not counting seven – that would be ridiculous. I’d been a drummer since I was 10, so once I understood that it rang a bell: ‘All I have to do is learn what those accents are, and then I can play in 15.’ I’ve been doing it ever since. Without Frank I would have just been guessing.”

Did that idiosyncratic thinking makes you appealing to Talking Heads?

“Absolutely. They needed someone to throw a lot of color on the painting, and someone who could break loose and do wild soloing. Those things were the perfect additions to their music, but they couldn’t do them. They were really nice to me; they loved what I did and were very supportive.”

Have you ever wondered how an off-the-beaten-track player like you keeps finding himself at the center of pop culture moments?

“I don’t know… You think of people like David Bowie, innovators, and I think I belong in that club. I certainly don’t belong in the club that's doing sessions every day, or the club that’s shredding, or any other club!

“But club I do belong to is the one where you do interesting things that no one else has done. As I said, I always wanted to express sounds with the guitar, more than just knowing how to play the notes. I guess that's how I’ve moved from one thing to another so quickly.”

What are some of your favorite off-kilter guitar sounds?

“The first one that comes to mind is a piece I wrote for my second solo record, Twang Bar King, called Ballet for a Blue Whale. I wanted to make the guitar sound like it was an actual whale. An expert informed me that it’s not the sound of a blue whale – it’s the sound of a humpback whale! But ‘blue whale’ sounds more artistic! Figuring out how to do that was a tremendous thing.

“You have to play through a synthesizer. Then I put it through a delay with an expression pedal. Then I made it so you weren’t hearing the original note – just the note that was being bent by the expression pedal. It could go all over the place. It was fascinating to hear and do that.

“Many times when I’m doing something it just catches my ear, and that takes me in a new direction which leads to new music and songs. Like, if you don’t have the tight, fuzzy sound on the song Big Electric Cat, you’ll never come up with the song Big Electric Cat!”

What pedal did you use for that?

“That’s a Foxx Tone Machine, a pretty underrated ’60s pedal that I found in a pile in a music store. Once I realized what it could do I did so many things with it.”

What’s the most interesting pedal you’re currently using?

“On stage with Beat I play an Electro-Harmonix Echo Flanger. Not many people realize this, but with the five-way mode selector switch you can catch it between two modes. If you do that with the feedback turned all the way up, you can get all kinds of crazy sounds.

“You can make it sound like big, flying metal insects, or make it so that it slows things down. It’s just a monster thing – but it really wasn’t supposed to be that. It was accidental, so thanks for the accidents!”

What sounds are you looking to mess with next?

“I think I’d like to do some tricky stuff with delays and pitches. I wrote a piece a long time ago called Variations of Wave Pressure in which I could play one note, get another note in harmony and a bass note as well.

“You can come up with some really interesting things if you do that. And you’re actually not playing much if you take away the effects – you can’t play a lot because it’ll be too busy. You’re making sure the notes fit properly, which can be really great.”

• Beat will release Beat Live on September 26.

On May 21, 2013, the bass world lost one if its unsung stylists in Trevor Bolder, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 62. Born June 9, 1950, in Hull, England, Bolder grew up in a musical household, taking up cornet and trombone in school and picking up bass guitar in his early teens.

Bolder teamed up with Mick Ronson shortly after the guitarist began backing David Bowie as a member of the Hype in 1970, and by 1971, he had replaced longtime Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti on bass.

Bolder, Ronson, and drummer Woody Woodmansey would form the core of the Bowie backing band known as the Spiders From Mars, appearing on Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and Aladdin Sane.

“I used mainly a Gibson EB-3 through my time with David,” Bolder told Bass Player. “Trying to get the big sound Andy Fraser got on it, with Free.

“A lot of the basslines had to come off the top of my head. We'd get maybe two run-throughs and then we did the take. We had a bit of rehearsal time for Ziggy Stardust, but for much of Aladdin Sane, it was the same on-the-spot situation.”

As Aladdin Sane producer Ken Scott recounts in his memoir, Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust, “We started recording tracks, some of which would eventually become part of Aladdin Sane, in New York City at RCA Studios, amid a North American tour.

“I loved Drive-In Saturday. It feels more American to me than anything else on the album, probably as a result of David's time in the States.”

Released in April 1973 as the second single from Aladdin Sane (following The Jean Genie in November 1972), Drive-In Saturday does indeed bear the hallmark of 1950s American doo-wop, with its 12/8 rhythmic lilt and ‘doo-doo-wah’ backing vocal tracks. But on bass, Bolder takes a decidedly bolder tack.

After calmly setting the pace in the 2-bar intro, Bolder wastes no time asserting his presence once the verse begins, juxtaposing held notes at the front of the bar with rapid-fire 16ths toward the back.

As the I-VI-V progression of the verse gives way to the IV chord at the start of the pre-chorus, Bolder begins to reach into the higher registers, building intensity at 00:50 with a crescendo into the key change at the chorus.

Here, Bolder seamlessly injects further rhythmic and melodic flair into his bassline with a syncopated run at 01:11, and by ditching the root in favor of the D chord's 3rd at 01:15.

By contrasting the density of his fills with big, held notes in the descending line at 01:24, Bolder gives his subhooks just the right amount of breathing room.

On Drive-In Saturday, Trevor Bolder proves himself every bit the master as John Deacon with Queen, or Dee Murray with Elton John, two contemporaries who also expertly infused melodic runs and rhythmic nuance into settings that would overpower a lesser player.

Bolder and Ronson went on to contribute to Bowie's 1973 collection of cover songs, Pin Ups, but by that time relations between the singer and his band had soured. Bolder recorded two albums with Ronson before replacing John Wetton in Uriah Heep in 1976, remaining with the band through 2013.

While we mourn the loss of a great talent, we celebrate the lasting legacy of “Weird,” as Bowie famously referred to Bolder in Ziggy Stardust.

Weird? Perhaps. Wonderful? Without a doubt.

• Aladdin Sane is out now via Rhino/Parlophone.

Trailblazers Fanny are, undoubtedly, one of the most underrated rock bands of the ’70s. The outfit, heralded by sisters June and Jean Millington – on guitar and bass respectively – recorded four albums together before the original line-up split.

However, during their time together, the band was bona fide pioneer – receiving nods from contemporaries such as David Bowie, who hailed them as “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time.”

“They were extraordinary: They wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers,” he continued in a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone. “They were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them.”

The L.A.-based quartet initially met Bowie in Liverpool in 1973, where both were performing – an occasion that June Millington reminisces about.

“We got back to the hotel, and when we walked up to the desk to get our keys, the guy said, ‘There’s a message from David Bowie,’” she tells Music in the Berkshires. “‘He’d like to invite you to a party up at the penthouse.’ It was one of the most fabulous parties I’ve ever been to.”

The Bowie connection doesn't stop there, however. Her sister and bandmate Jean dated Bowie for a year or so in the mid-’70s, and later went on to marry Bowie guitarist Earl Slick.

“They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time,” Bowie continued. “Revivify Fanny. And I will feel that my work is done.”

In 2018, Fanny did, in fact, reunite to release the reunion album, Fanny Walked the Earth – followed in 2021 by the documentary film Fanny: The Right to Rock, which recounts the band's astounding story and equally important legacy.

When Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1974, there were internal discussions about whether the group could continue without their talisman guitarist. The story goes that David Coverdale, who had joined the band one year earlier, had been listening to Billy Cobham's Spectrum at the time, which featured Tommy Bolin’s talents. But he wasn't the only name in contention.

Clem Clempson, who had journeyed from jazz-rock wizards Colosseum to Humble Pie, where he replaced the outgoing Peter Frampton, was the other clear frontrunner. He even jammed with the band before Bolin got his chance, and though he quickly established a fruitful rapport with Glenn Hughes, he was ultimately overlooked.

“We had fun jamming for a couple of days and just hanging out,” he tells Guitar World of his audition experience.

“Although I think everyone enjoyed the playing we did together, it was clear that they didn’t just need a guitar player to replace Ritchie; they needed someone who could also fill Ritchie’s role as the main songwriter in the group,” he continues. “I definitely didn’t see myself as being the right man for the job in that respect.”

Bolin, conversely, had the songwriting skills the band needed, even if some may argue Clempson had more fiery chops. When Bolin joined, he’d co-write seven of Come Taste the Band’s nine tracks.

Before that, he’d proven an innovator. His wild, Echoplex-powered solo on Spectrum cut Quadrant 4 became a core influence for Steve Stevens’ now-iconic, toy ray gun-utilizing Rebel Yell solo. Looking back, Clemson understands the band’s decision.

“I believe Tommy had lots of songs which were exactly what the band needed,” he says. “And his style was more akin to Ritchie’s than mine. I was never into heavy rock as such. For me, there’s a subtle difference between Humble Pie and bands like Zeppelin, Purple, and Black Sabbath.”

Though his audition wasn’t successful, the guitarist didn’t feel his time was wasted. In fact, he has fond memories of the experience, which nearly spawned another project entirely – the thought of which will have ’70s rock fans salivating.

“One of the highlights was spending a very late night with Glenn Hughes and David Bowie,” he reminisces. “We wrote a song based on a riff I had, and made plans for a new band, the idea was to be Mahavishnu Orchestra with vocals.”

Bowie would stick around for Bolin's audition shortly after, as Glenn Hughes recalled last year, playing the role of chauffeur. The bassist felt immediately drawn to the band’s soon-to-be new guitarist.

“On his [Tommy’s] audition, [David] Bowie drove me down to the audition to meet Tommy, and I walked up to Tommy, I saw this guy with green and purple hair,” he says. “I whispered in his ear, ‘If you don't get the gig, you're coming back to my house tonight.’

“And he got the gig and he stayed at my house for three months. He moved in with me, and we became best friends. We wrote Gettin’ Tighter the first week together at my studio and look, I can talk about guitar-playing friends all day, but Tommy's in my top three friends and guitar players.”

Bolin's only album with the band received a mixed response from the fan base and at live shows, with many disgruntled that his solos were a stylistic far cry from Blackmore's – not to mention the excessive drug use throughout the group.

The line-up disbanded in 1976. Bolin would go on to record and release a second solo album, Private Eyes, later that year but, while on tour with Jeff Beck and Peter Frampton, tragically died of an overdose. The last photo taken of him sees him sitting alongside Jeff Beck.

The story goes that Beck told him to take care of himself when they parted ways, with Bolin responding, “I've been taking care of myself my whole life. Don't worry about me. I'm going to be around for a long time.”

His beloved Les Paul is now in the hands of Joe Bonamassa, who had to conduct a séance with the late virtuoso to get his permission. To this day, Bonamassa says it is one of the strangest guy purchases he's ever made.

Guitar World's full interview with Clem Clempson will be published in the coming weeks.

Julien's Auctions has recently announced the return of its Music Icons sale – and this year's two-day sale includes over 700 collectible items from some of the world's biggest music icons.

The sale includes several guitars that were stage- or studio-played by the likes of Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Brian May, Melissa Etheridge, and Bob Dylan, to name a mere few.

“This incredible collection brings together the instruments, fashion, and personal items that shaped the soundtrack of our lives – from the guitars that changed music history to the unforgettable looks worn by the world’s biggest stars,” comments Martin Nolan, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Julien’s Auctions. “It’s a celebration of artistry, legacy, and the timeless power and endless enjoyment of music.”

Among the gems, guitar aficionados can find Cobain's 1989 Takamine FP360SC left-handed electro-acoustic guitar, played during Nirvana’s 1991 Hilversum Sessions recorded in North Holland, which is expected to sell for between $300,000 and $500,000.

Elsewhere, Eddie Van Halen's stage-played circa 2007 Charvel EVH Art Series – black with red and white stripes – which the virtuoso played (and signed) on October 5th, 2007 in Uncasville, Connecticut is estimated to fetch $20,000 to $40,000.

Another Nirvana link-up comes by way of a 1989 Warwick Dolphin Pro I bass, which Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic played during a session in Hilversum, also in 1991, just before the band’s performance at Amsterdam’s Paradiso. It’s estimated at $100,000 to $200,000.

Eric Clapton's 1980 Santa Cruz FTC-15 is also part of the auction. This acoustic guitar – owned and played by Clapton – was crafted by Santa Cruz luthier Richard Hoover, who in 1980 received a handwritten letter from an “E. Clapton.” Upon opening it, Hoover discovered it was indeed from Eric Clapton, who had seen the FTC in a magazine and wanted to know how he could “lay my hands on this particular model.” The guitar is expected to fetch upwards of $40,000.

Also featured is a Gibson Les Paul Special DC Tribute in cherry red, signed and stage-played by Joe Perry during Aerosmith’s 50th-anniversary concert in 2022 in Boston, which is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000. David Bowie's name also makes an appearance with a signed 1998 Seagull S6 Mahogany Spruce acoustic, played during his final Australian performance.

Other notable guitars include a Noel Gallagher-autographed Suzuki Hummingbird in cherry burst, and a 2012 ESP Ronnie Wood signature Telecaster, signed by the Rolling Stones guitarist and accompanied by a handwritten lyric: “Have you heard about the midnight rambler?”

An exhibition of the Music Icons highlights will be on display at the Hard Rock Cafe Piccadilly Circus in London from May 9 to May 13, before heading across the pond to the Hard Rock Cafe New York from May 21 to May 31. The collectibles will then hit the auction block on May 30 and 31. For more information, visit Julien’s Auctions.

Late last year, the original Mary Kaye Strat – one of the most iconic Fender electric guitars of all time – sold for $227,500 at an auction hosted by Julien's.

The death of David Bowie on January 10, 2016, was a major loss for the music world and the creative arts overall. Like Miles Davis in jazz, Bowie's drive to constantly reinvent himself led to much innovation in the rock and pop realms (not to mention film, fashion, theater, and other media). Along the way, the U.K. native left a considerable low-end legacy in his music.

The roughly two-dozen bassists who recorded with Bowie range from session players like Herbie Flowers, Willie Weeks, and Tony Levin, to band members who made important road and studio contributions, such as Trevor Bolder, George Murray, Carmine Rojas, and Gail Ann Dorsey, to bass-playing producers Mark Plati and Bowie's longest-running foil, Tony Visconti.

Bowie's final album, the Visconti-produced Blackstar, added another forefront name to that list in Tim Lefebvre. The veteran of Wayne Krantz's trio and Tedeschi Trucks Band was also a member of saxophonist Donny McCaslin's acclaimed quartet, with drummer Mark Guiliana and keyboardist Jason Lindner.

While collaborating with the Maria Schneider Orchestra in 2014 for his song Sue (Or in a Season of Crime), Bowie met McCaslin, who was one of the track's soloists. Having checked out McCaslin's album Casting for Gravity, Bowie went to see the quartet at 55 Bar in New York's Greenwich Village, leading to the unit's pivotal role as the backing band on Blackstar.

“Working with David was great,” Lefebvre told Bass Player back in 2018. “He was very hands-on and warm and witty – he told me he liked the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Still, when I first heard his voice in my headphones, there was that moment of, ‘My God! I'm recording with David Bowie!’ He meant a lot to so many people, and it's a real honor to be a small part of his legacy.”

The track that perhaps best captures the quartet's magic and Lefebvre's deep-pocketed creativity is Lazarus, the first single from the album, and also the name of Bowie's Off-Broadway play.

Having previously received a demo of the song (for which Lefebvre made his own basic chart), the quartet ran the tune down to check the form, and then cut live to Bowie's scratch vocal. Lefebvre would later overdub his intro part and Bowie later added his final vocal and the guitar power chords.

Given the direction to use a pick, Lefebvre got to sculpt his sound, with the guidance of Visconti. He played his '68 Fender Precision, with DR Strings flatwounds (which he muted with his palm) and a Dunlop .73mm pick.

He recorded direct via an Avalon DI and through his Yamaha EM-80 mixer into an Ampeg B-15 cabinet. Additionally, he kicked on his Boss OC-2 Octave for the song's bridge, and later overdubbed two “808 drops” using the pedal.

Lazarus begins with eight overdubbed measures of Lefebvre's upper-register improvisation. “At the end of the track, we started improvising, and they liked the vibe of what I was doing, so they asked me to do it as the intro, too.

“The inspiration was this band that I'm into, called Fink. The singer-guitarist, Fin Greenall, plays in DADGAD tuning, which creates cool suspensions of 2nds and 4ths against the root. That's what I'm doing here, adding color tones against the harmony. There aren't really chords behind me in the intro, but you can hear them in the outro.”

Lefebvre soon settles into the bassline from the demo, adding embellishments to get to the target notes and make the part his own. “I'm channeling people like Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Carol Kaye, and especially Dave Richmond on Serge Gainsbourg's album Histoire de Melody Nelson.”

Lefebvre continues the part through the first verse, (dig the subtle string bend at 01:28), the sax-led transition at 01:33, and the third verse. The song's bridge or B section kicks in at 02:43.

Again, the demo included the basic shape of the bassline and the use of the 3rd in the D-chord measures, but Lefebvre (after stepping on his octaver) adds rhythmic motion by matching and playing off Guiliana's kick drum.

The return to a verse finds Bowie singing more bluesy, to which Lefebvre reacts by getting noticeably more improvisational. He maintains this trend through McCaslin's solo at 04:12, as he gets busier within his reactions to both the sax and to Guiliana's more active kick (catch the cool sequence at 04:54).

“The key is to go for a percussive sound and sit squarely in the pocket; Mark tends to play in the center of the beat, and I focused on locking with his kick drum. I played mostly downbeats with the pick, anchoring the side of my pinkie on the body below the G string and muting the strings with my palm.”

At 05:26 Lefebvre returns to the intro figure, revealing that at 05:33 his first three notes echo the song's sax part. He settles on an A to ride out the track, while Bowie's power chords ring out.

Steve Jones is never short of anecdotes – especially when it comes to the Sex Pistols' heyday. Now the guitarist is setting the record straight on what can only be described as a quintessentially rock 'n' roll rumor that's the stuff of music biopics: one that sees him nicking David Bowie's equipment in his pre-fame days.

The fateful date was 3 July 1973 – the same day David Bowie was about to announce the retirement of Ziggy Stardust – and the Spiders from Mars – at London's Hammersmith Odeon [now called the Eventim Apollo], in front of thousands of fans, famously declaring, “This is not only the last show of the tour, but it is the last show we will ever do”. As legend has it, Jones used the historic moment as an opportunity for a lucrative side hustle.

“They played two nights, and after the first night [2 July] they left all the gear up, because they were playing there the next night,” Jones tells The Guardian.

“I knew the Hammersmith Odeon like the back of my hand, I used to bunk in there all the time. I was like the Phantom of Hammersmith Odeon.

“It was about two in the morning. I stole a little minivan and I got in. There was no-one there, other than a guy sitting on the fourth or fifth row, asleep – he was snoring. It was dead silent. I tiptoed across the stage, and I nicked some cymbals, the bass player’s [amplifier] head – a Sunn amp it was – and some microphones. I got Bowie’s microphone with his lipstick on it!”

While Bowie later had a hunch that Jones was the one behind the robbery, the guitarist did eventually ’fess up... during a phone call.

“He knew I’d done it; he thought it was funny. Actually, I don’t think I nicked anything off him – I don’t think the microphones were his. The only ones I felt bad for were Woody [drummer, Mick Woodmansey] and [bass player] Trevor Bolder.”

Jones even went one step further – confessing and apologizing to Woody on air – albeit a few decades too late.

“I actually did make amends with Woody. He came on my radio show a few years back, and I thought I’d tell him live, when we were on the air, what I did.

“I was like, ‘I’ve got to make amends to you, Woody. I nicked some of your cymbals. What can I do to make it right?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know; give us a couple of hundred bucks.’ I think I gave him $300, so he was well happy.”

Speaking of Steve Jones' side hustle, Thin Lizzy guitarist and Live Aid mastermind Midge Ure recently shed more light on Jones' [ahem] habit – recalling how, on the very day he was approached to join the Pistols, he bought a stolen amp from Jones' car boot.

If the feel-good grooves of Detroit's Motown Records in the swinging '60s had the world dancing in the street, the raw power of the Motor City's proto-punk posse Iggy and the Stooges soon sent it running for cover.

Formed in 1967 by singer Iggy Pop, guitarist Ron Asheton, drummer Scott Asheton, and bassist Dave Alexander, the powerhouse band blended the blues with heavy psychedelic rock, serving it with over-the-top stage performances that are the stuff of legend.

By most accounts, the Stooges’ volatile nature onstage was mirrored offstage; after its self-titled debut in 1969 on Elektra Records and its Fun House follow-up in 1970, the band began to splinter. Following the ejection of bassist Alexander, Elektra pulled the plug, putting the band's future in doubt.

It took a chance meeting between Pop and David Bowie in 1971 to put the band back on its feet. Viewing Iggy as a sort of Stateside Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's management company brought Pop and guitarist James Williamson to the U.K., securing a deal with Columbia Records.

Though the Asheton brothers were originally kept out of the loop, it didn't take long for Iggy and Williamson to realize that the Asheton element would be crucial in this critical reformation of the band.

With Ron Asheton switching from guitar to bass, the re-named Iggy and the Stooges soon began recording what would be their most influential record, 1973's Raw Power.

From the opening stanzas of the album's searing opener, Search and Destroy, to the closing bars of bombast, the band created what has since been regarded as a blueprint for punk rock: blistering riffs, bile-laden lyrics, and balls-out intensity.

But it wasn't always so; the album was largely overlooked, and before the band could hit its stride touring behind Raw Power, it once again dissolved.

Back in 2010, with the induction of Iggy and the Stooges into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a newly re-mastered Legacy Edition of Raw Power, it seemed the world was finally ready to acknowledge one of the best ever punk rock bands.

Photographer Robert Matheu was just a kid when he first saw the Stooges play in his native Detroit, but in the years since he became something of an expert, befriending brothers Ron and Scott Asheton following the Stooges breakup in 1974. At the band's Hall of Fame induction, Matheu stood stage-side in the official capacity as the band's photographer and “Stoogeologist.”

“Ron's first gigs-in his high school band – the Chosen Few – were on bass guitar,” Matheu told Bass Player. “And I know for a fact that he was very proud of his bass playing. I suppose I'd compare Ron's playing style to that of John Entwistle or John Paul Jones – he was definitely into that kind of rhythmic gallop.

“In my book, The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story, my friend Ivan Suvanjieff writes that Raw Power was originally overlooked because you just couldn't hear Ronnie in the mix.

“He plays some great stuff on it, but I think it was a matter of the original mastering engineers not knowing what to make of the album; it was probably the loudest damn record they ever heard!

On Raw Power – perhaps even more so on the 2003 remaster – Ron Asheton's bass finesse belies the fact that he's regarded mostly as a guitarist, and Search and Destroy is truly a shining moment.

From the get-go, Asheton gooses key notes with hammer-ons and slides, and attacks riffs with a kind of measured abandon, steaming full-bore, yet never risking derailing. There might not be many flashy fills or dazzling technical displays in the line, but make no mistake – there are some tricky twists.

First up is to try to cop Asheton's near-constant hammer-ons, especially as they appear in the main riff. Make too much of each hammer-on, and the groove disappears, yet breeze by them and the line suddenly looses it mojo.

At the first chorus, Ashton's rock-steady rhythm and root-5 action is peppered with some righteous runs. After returning to another verse and chorus, he rips into the bridge with a thunderous slide.

After powering through James Williamson's guitar solo, Asheton begins to open up the verse line with propulsive rhythmic variations, and follows up with a more driving take on his chorus part; note that what was once syncopated is now a driving eight-note line. Another big slide launches into the outro. Dig that chromatic variation at 03:08, ending with a final flourish at 03:20.

“For Raw Power, I'm pretty sure Ron played a Fender Precision,” says Matheu. “But live, all the bass photos I have of Ronnie are with his Guild. And I'm pretty sure he used Hiwatt amps on stage.” Another rare Raw Power-era shot shows Asheton playing a Gibson SB 400 through a stack of Sunn amps.

Amid a stunning new album and a short-but-sweet return to the stage with The Cure, Robert Smith’s stock couldn’t be much higher as the new year beckons. But his career as a singing guitarist got off to a cacophonous start as he drunkenly butchered a Jimi Hendrix classic.

“I was horrified when I ended up as the singer,” he tells The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess on his Absolute Radio show.

At the start of his career, Smith loathed center stage, preferring to simply strum his electric guitar away from the spotlight – or avoid the stage entirely.

“At school, I never did anything on stage, I was always doing wardrobe stuff,” he relays. “Even when we did our first shows, I sang one song at our first show, just to see what it felt like, and I sang the wrong song.

“I sang and played Suffragette City and everyone else was doing Foxy Lady. I was so drunk I didn’t even know!”

That calamitous gig did his confidence no good. He believed he was destined for a career well away from microphones.

“I never felt like I was cut out to be a singer, I kind of just grew into it because I fell out with everyone else who occupied that position until I became the de facto singer,” Smith extends.

That’s why, he says, his voice is so low in the mix on the band’s early records, explaining: “I didn’t think anyone would like what I sounded like. I didn’t!”

And yet the gothic songsmith has had a glittering career – despite the decidedly un-glittery sound of The Cure’s music. New album Songs of a Lost World, their first in 16 years, has received rave reviews, while Smith’s current live rig has turned heads.

Featuring discontinued plastic pedalboards and outdated modeling combo amps, it’s a setup that flies in the face of modern guitar culture. In truth, though, it’s fitting for a musician who has never followed or bucked to trends. It stands as a totem for doing it your own way.

“For whatever reason, when I sing, people connect with it,” he concludes. “I have no idea why, and I don’t think any signer does.”

Even though he felt his vocals were sub-par, he still pushed on, chasing art over perfection. The Cure were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, which is quite the turnaround from butchering Hendrix via a mashup no one wanted, but a small unsuspecting crowd got.

With its unique balance of blues roots, pedal to-the-metal hard rock, and vocal pop sensibilities, Trevor Bolder's bass playing was a fascinating contrast of approaches. On Uriah Heep’s acclaimed 2008 release, Wake the Sleeper, Bolder can be found pumping piston-like eighth-notes in a verse, before shifting gears to a soaring counter-melody line in the chorus, via his trademark sliding octaves.

Then again, when your career begins with a visionary like David Bowie, imagination is not a problem. “A lot of the basslines for Bowie had to come off the top of my head,” Bolder told Bass Player back in 2008. “It was an on-the-spot situation. We had some rehearsal time for Ziggy Stardust, but for much of Aladdin Sane we’d get two runthroughs and then do the take.”

Born on June 9,1950, in Hull, England, Bolder heard the sounds of skiffle, early rock, and the big band jazz of his trumpet-playing dad. This led to trumpet lessons at age nine, and school brass bands. When the Beatles and Stones hit, Bolder and his older brother bought guitars and started a band.

Bolder ended up on a Burns solidbody bass guitar, picking up tips from his brother's guitar teacher and the upright bassist in his dad's big band. Deeply into the blues, the group covered Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. Soon, Bolder was adding the influences of Paul McCartney, John McVie, John Entwistle, and his main inspiration: Jack Bruce.

“I saw Jack with Cream, and he just blew me away with his energy – plus he sang. I got Fresh Cream and sat for hours in my bedroom with my bass and amp, playing along. Jack has a great melodic sense from his cello background, but he also lays it down with a heavy feel. I'd been a solo cornet player in brass bands, so I could relate! Through Jack I developed my style, which was to push it a bit further and probably play a little more than I should have!”

Making his way through various bands, Bolder eventually hooked up with guitarist Ronson, leading to his stint with David Bowie.

Our interview from the Bass Player archives took place in October 2008.

How did you come to join David Bowie’s band?

“Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey had done Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World album, and they came back to Hull, not wanting to do the Bowie gig anymore. But then Bowie called them because he needed a band to do the John Peel radio show, so I tagged along for the ride.

“Herbie Flowers was supposed to do the date, but he couldn't make it. So Bowie said to me, ‘You'll have to play bass.’ I asked how many songs, and he said, ‘Eight!’ I spent all day learning them, and the next day we did the show.

“Six months later we came back down to London to record Hunky Dory. I used mainly a Gibson EB-3, trying to get the big sound Andy Fraser got with Free.”

How did you come up with your bass parts?

“It was a challenge, first because it was lighter music than I had been used to playing. And to teach you his songs, he'd come in with an acoustic guitar and say, ‘Okay, play along.’

“David had written The Jean Genie on the back of a Greyhound bus on tour in America. We went into RCA Studios in New York to record, and he started playing the song. Well, as soon as I heard his opening guitar riff I thought, ‘That's I'm a Man by the Yardbirds.’ So I took bassist Paul-Samwell Smith's triplet line and extended it, and that's what you hear at the beginning of the song.

“Sometimes we'd listen to David and write down chord sheets and then follow those while coming up with parts. When we did Live in Santa Monica 72, I had to learn Tony Visconti’s basslines on The Man Who Sold the World; I learned the notes and then tried to make the parts my own. Overall, I'd say my favorite tracks with David were Quicksand and Moonage Daydream.”

You've said your style really came together when you joined Uriah Heep.

“I think so, yes. I wasn't really doing anything in 1976, when Woody, who was in a band on the same label, called me to say Heep was looking for a bassist. I auditioned in London and got the gig.

“What I liked was they were a blues-influenced heavy rock band, but with a melodic side, as well – with the big vocal harmonies. So I could play heavy, but there was also plenty of room to move about as a melodic-minded bass player.

What tracks stand out for you?

“Shadow is cool; it has an old Free or Cream feel – slightly funky and bluesy. We were struggling with the groove until I came up with my Andy Fraser-like bassline; that locked everything else in place.”

Let's discuss your technique.

“I strike the strings with the tips of my fingernails. I don't slap or pop, but I use a pick occasionally, and I like to bend up the G string at times. I pluck all the way back by the bridge, and I favor the J-Bass pickup I had put on my P-Bass. I've used my '71 P-Bass on just about every Heep album and concert, so the body is worn away under the strings from my nails.”

What other bassists have caught your ear?

“Jaco, of course; he came along and hit the nail on the head as to what the instrument could really do and really sound like. I still listen to McCartney with the Beatles, Entwistle with the Who, and Jamerson on Motown; some of his basslines are better than the songs!

“I love Pino Palladino, who is a longtime mate of mine. I heard some incredible multi-bass tracks by Michael Manring. And I still have my Ray Brown method book; I got to meet him as a kid, through the big band guys my dad played with.”

Growing up in the Bronx, the shadow of the church loomed large over a young Carlos Alomar. But larger still was the shadow of a Sears and Roebuck guitar/amp combo gifted to him by his father as a teen.

Some years before when he was 10 years old and playing in his local church’s band, Alomar couldn’t have known that around a decade later, he’d be standing beside David Bowie as a member of the legendary DAM Trio – which featured Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass and Dennis Davis on drums – and aiding in the creation of iconic records like Station To Station (1976), Low and “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979).

Looking back on Bowie’s decision to put together a proper rocking band out of New York City, Alomar tells us:

“David left The Spiders From Mars and then he came to America. The fact is that he had this black rhythm section backing him all these years and nobody ever really said anything about it. As we get older, we have a legacy.”

Before then, Alomar starred with everyone from Chuck Berry to James Brown to The Main Ingredient. And once with Bowie, he held his own on tour while perched beside the likes of Earl Slick and Adrian Belew en route to becoming Bowie’s musical director and lifelong friend. Alomar stuck with Bowie – albeit in an on-and-off fashion – until the early 2000s.

Along the way, he appeared on records by Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and The Pretenders, and even lent his licks to Mark Ronson’s 2014 mega-hit, Uptown Funk.

As for Bowie, the two kept in touch and Carlos took the iconic vocalist’s 2016 death from liver cancer hard. When many of Bowie’s past cohorts celebrated his career, Alomar, stricken with grief, chose to refrain (“Man, I would have started crying right in the middle of those songs,” he says).

But now, Alomar is preparing to step out of the shadows. “I’ve got to be able to preserve that legacy. Brian Eno and David Bowie were very smart about taking that opportunity to introduce electronic music to the world via the [Berlin] Trilogy albums [Low, Heroes and Lodger].

“But it came at the cost of diminishing the great works that the DAM Trio had done. All the experimental albums got a lot of acclaim because of the electronica, but that was when we were at our strongest.”

Alomar is so passionate about the legacy of the DAM Trio that he’s called George Murray out of retirement and plans to insert any number of superstar guitarists into the mix.

“I really want to do a tour to commemorate the life and times of David Bowie and Dennis Davis,” Alomar says. “So I’m [doing] something that will honour the legacy of all those people I’ve admired and the music that has been my vehicle of expression,” he says. “It’s time for me to unleash that onto the world.

“It’s not my final dance,” he adds, “but it is a dance of purpose that I need to do, and as long as you’re curious, you’ll stay young. Right now is a wonderful time, like all times are. Everything’s in its time, and in its time, everything.”

How did your foray into guitar begin?

“It started after my father, a Pentecostal minister, gave me a guitar. The next thing I knew, that guitar came with obligations – not responsibilities, obligations. Suddenly, I found myself the only guitar player in church and I was about 10 or 11 years old. I knew three chords, man.

“But my father knew something that I didn’t and one day he went into my room and saw that there was blood on the sheets, so he pulled them back a little and realised that my fingers were bleeding. I had this old Stella guitar and the action was high… I don’t know what the hell I was thinking [laughs]. I think he knew I was dedicated to the instrument.”

Can you remember what it was about guitar that led you to persevere?

“There’s something mystical about an instrument to a small child. The metal key tuning pegs, the strings… It had wonder. And for a kid, man, that was everything. When I went to church and played, I played it like I meant it; I played it like I wrote the song.

“My father rewarded that dedication by taking me to the music store – and I was in awe. There was this Mel Bay chord book that said, ‘Learn 1,200 chords’. Dude, I knew three chords, so I bought that book. And it had pictures of fingers on the fingerboard. I studied that book like it was the Bible.

“I learned how to play a diminished chord and I practised every chord in that book, and everything was fine until I got to the dominant 7th chord. For all of you who don’t know what that means in the regular world, the dominant 7th chord is the rock ’n’ roll chord. When you hit that 7th chord, boy, your butt starts shaking [laughs]. That’s when I started getting into trouble. I was told, ‘You’re playing the Devil’s music,’ and I got put on discipline!

“By the time I was 14 I had formed a little band and we were rocking that church. Next thing I knew, I had the audacity to tell the minister, ‘If it wasn’t for my music, nobody would even come to this church.’ I got put on discipline [laughs].

“Anyway, my father says to me, ‘Carlos, what’s going on?’ And I said, ‘I’m playing God’s chords.’ My father died a little bit later, but he had bought me a Sears and Roebuck guitar amplifier, like a little grey amplifier with one speaker. That was it. That was my heaven.”

And it was around this time that you met Luther Vandross, right?

“After my father’s passing, I got to go to Fordham University for a program for underprivileged kids. The best part was during the summer when they took us to see plays. That’s when I met Luther, who became my best friend when I was 14 or 15.

“Luther had this opportunity to go to the Apollo Theater [in New York City] because there were auditions for this group. He said, ‘Carlos, come with me; I need moral support.’ So Luther sang and he got in that group, and the next week, he said, ‘Carlos, come back. I’m in.’

“So I sat down and watched, and the director said, ‘Boy, what do you do?’ I said, ‘I play guitar, sir.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to see your face around here unless you bring your guitar and show me what you can do.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ But oh my God, I was from the Bronx, man. What the hell was a 15 or 16-year-old kid doing on the train with a Sears and Roebuck guitar, carrying my guitar and amplifier to the Apollo Theater?

“I could hear them chuckling and laughing at my Sears and Roebuck guitar. But I plugged it in, played a solo and they applauded. I got the gig and that was the beginning of my life.

“That group was the one that did the pilot for Sesame Street back in the day. People like Nancy Wilson, Cannonball Adderley and Flip Wilson would all come to see us. And not long after that, when I was 17, I started working around joints in Harlem.”

While working at the Apollo, you played behind Chuck Berry. How did that go down?

“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. 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.”

You toured with James Brown a bit, too.

“With James Brown, I had an opportunity to do a small bit of roadwork with him on the East Coast. 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. So when I went down on Friday to pick up my money – in the old days, they used to stuff all your money in a small yellow envelope – 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.

“I was always taught patience and understanding, and I realised that I didn’t need all these credits with James Brown, I just needed one. And so, yes, I worked with Chuck Berry; yes, I worked with James Brown. But the anxiety of a job being where I’m supposed to stay forever was never a part of my mentality. When you don’t feel beholden to somebody else, it’s great.

“From there, I kept playing and getting more and more gigs. I’ve always had the mentality of, ‘You don’t owe me anything.’ Even with David Bowie, after I got to play with him on Young Americans, I was shocked that I got the second phone call and the third and the fourth and the fifth…”

Afterwards, you began your session career and recorded Everybody Plays The Fool in 1972 with The Main Ingredient.

“I got my first real job as the guitar player for The Main Ingredient. Everybody Plays The Fool became a hit and the next thing I knew, we’re going on the road. By then, I started getting really good and became the house player at RCA Studios.

“I was working in Studio A and during that time Tony Silvester [from The Main Ingredient] introduced me to David Bowie. I was really excited. That was the beginning of everything.

“Bowie said, ‘I’m working on an album. I’d like you to come down.’ The Main Ingredient had a hit and we were touring the East Coast. I was making money, I was married, so it was steady. So I got myself a white manager and I told my manager to negotiate something. And I heard, ‘Oh, maybe $200 and maybe we can get it up to $250.’

“I was making about $600 to $800 with The Main Ingredient and all the other jobs I was doing. So in the middle of that conversation, I said, ‘Gentleman, I’m so sorry, but honestly, I’m already making $800 a week; if you can’t match that, I ain’t doing it.’ I answered to a higher power – and that’s my wife [laughs].

“We stayed in contact and next thing I know, he’s recording again and he says, ‘I’m getting ready to do something and I want you to come down and work with me.’ He said he’d take care of the money. And he did. I was called up and told I’d be working on his new material, the Young Americans album. I showed up at the studio and that was it.”

What did your rig consist of at that point?

“During those years, I was more of a rhythm guitarist. My usual equipment was a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier, my go-to, and I had a red Gibson ES-335, which was so clean. I showed up with that 335 for the sessions and it was just glorious.”

What was it like touring with David for the first time?

“When I got the call to do the tour, they had this lead guitar player called Earl Slick and he rolled up with a Marshall stack with the volume turned to 11. It was just like the movies. The easiest thing for me to do was turn my amplifier down, but the minute I did, David turned around and said, ‘Earl, could you turn your amplifier down? I can’t hear Carlos.’”

Did your rig change much when you recorded Station To Station?

“That was when I got introduced to some new equipment and understood the value that equipment could have. While we were doing Station To Station, I said to David, ‘I can’t play with a Twin Reverb amplifier any more. Would it be okay if I got another type of amplification?’ He said, ‘Yes, whatever you want.’

“I ended up getting a customised system done and, to my credit, it was one of the first ever rack systems used on stage. I had a three-tier system and it was the size of a refrigerator [laughs]. Not only that, but I also had them do a crossover network so that I could cross over the amount of power that went into each unit.

“Luckily, during those years, we had a budget for everything. There were ridiculous amounts of money they were throwing at this man. The main rig then was my Alembic ‘Maverick’ Guitar, my MXR rack with a crossover and equaliser, and Crown power amplifiers. The speaker cabinets had tweeters, twin 12-inch fibreglass encased mini-cabs, and a 15-inch Gauss speaker bass cab.”

Rolling into the 80s, you worked with Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, The Pretenders and more. What kept you in such demand?

“It comes down to two aspects: a musician should know their place and their style. I was always taught to say yes to everything. Anytime I got a phone call, I’d say, ‘Yes.’ Sometimes it’s like, ‘Do you play mandolin?’ I don’t own a mandolin, but I’d buy one. Did I know how to play mandolin? No. But have I played mandolin on records? Yes.

“But it’s not just the proficiency that you have on your instrument but the personality. Let’s say you have three choices for who is going to do the job; only one of them is the right one. You can have the quiet guy, who is always out front.

“And then the other guy who may have personality, he’s smart and plays really well – that’s the guy you want to go on the road with for eight months, that’s the guy that you can get along with. I was calm and played excellent guitar, a combination that helped me when trying to get a job.”

You’re planning to celebrate David’s music with other members of the DAM Trio. How do you think this will take shape?

“This is news for everybody, but, yes, I am planning to do a tour. I want to pay tribute to David Bowie and the DAM Trio. I want to do a tribute to the trilogy of albums we made in the 70s: Low, Heroes and Lodger. Why? Because that’s when the DAM Trio was at its height.

“I called George Murray, saying, ‘Hey, man, let’s put the band back together again.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ I think I want to use Vernon Reid from Living Colour or maybe Steve Stevens. I really want to highlight all the powerful stuff that we created during those times. Quite honestly, a lot of those pieces have never been performed in their entirety because they’re so damn difficult to play.

“I’m speaking to promoters now and getting the lay of the land. I’m really used to being a quiet sideman, man. I prefer to stay more hidden, but the time for staying hidden has to have a moment of clarity attached to it. And I think my vision is pretty clear about what I want to do right now.”

By the dawn of the ’70s, though he was only 19, Carlos Alomar, a Puerto Rican-born New York citizen and son of a strict Pentecostal minister, had made a lifetime’s worth of memories. Not only had he regularly dominated the stage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, but he’d backed Chuck Berry and James Brown and even served as the house band for Sesame Street’s first few episodes before moving on to session work for RCA Studios, which was booming by 1970.

Soon, Alomar joined the Main Ingredient, an NYC-based soul and R&B group that had a hit with Everybody Plays the Fool, which bolstered Alomar’s cachet, as did a notable guest spot with Ben E. King on Supernatural. And while all that was wonderful, none held a candle to what was next – a gig beside David Bowie as he entered his most experimental period.

The connection between Bowie and Alomar – who’d soon become the former’s musical director – was immediate. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, and their inherent sensibilities were far-spaced, too. But it worked, as evidenced by 1975’s Young Americans.

However, the next album – 1976’s Station to Station – was truly special; it was the inaugural album featuring the D.A.M. Trio. “As far as the D.A.M. Trio goes,” Alomar says, “you had me on guitar, Dennis Davis on drums and George Murray on bass. We had a tight, cohesive sound. It underpinned much of David’s music during that era. We were a crucial part of his transition through different musical phases. And this fact is also undeniable: the D.A.M. Trio’s legacy equals, if not surpasses, that of the Spiders from Mars.”

That’s a weighty claim. But then again, listening back to Station to Station and the iconic – and highly experimental – records that came next (1977’s Low and Heroes and 1979’s Lodger – AKA the “Berlin Trilogy”), maybe Alomar has a point.

Flourishes of funk, R&B, jazz and rock are apparent throughout, all of which are in stark contrast to Bowie’s other partner in crime, Brian Eno, who injected massive doses of Weirdsville electronica into the mix. But that was just fine by Alomar.

“Hearing the finished product of Low was definitely surprising,” he says. “It was so different from anything we had done before. I was very happy with the D.A.M. Trio and our offerings. And then I flipped over the album; I just turned off all the lights and got lost in the ambiance. It was exciting to hear how our collective efforts resulted in something so groundbreaking.”

As impactful as he was in the studio, Alomar’s influence didn’t end there. Once on tour and competing with Earl Slick’s walls of Marshall stacks, Alomar devised one of the earliest examples of a live rack system.

“I could now compete with any Marshall stacks with these bad boys,” he says. “I developed one of the first rack systems for rhythm guitar – out of necessity. I did it to keep all my gear organized in total stereo, and to make it easily accessible. My main live guitar at that time, “Maverick” – a custom-made instrument from Alembic – and my new rig gave me the confidence, flexibility and reliability I needed for live performances.”

Alomar rounded out the ’70s touring beside Adrian Belew, who had joined Bowie’s band, resulting in 1978’s live record, Stage.

“Touring with Adrian was a blast,” he says. “He brought a very creative and experimental energy to the band. He, along with Roger Powell, Simon House and Sean Mayes, added a bright, whimsical and fun styling to the D.A.M. Trio. While Adrian’s style differed from Earl Slick’s, we found a good rhythm together. Adrian’s avant-garde approach was a great complement to my funkier style.”

By 1979, Alomar wasn’t yet 30, but much like his 19-year-old self in 1970, he’d done more than most could claim to have done in a lifetime. He’d go on to do more and impact music in ways he’d never have imagined, but if not for gaining a foothold in the industry in the ’70s, none of it would have been possible. “I was born a Pentecostal minister’s son, and I learned to play guitar in church at 10 years old,” Alomar says. “I honored my parents.”

“When my dad died,” he continues. “I sought my fortune at the Apollo Theater and married my teenage sweetheart. After-hours joints, small gigs, commercials, jingles, session work and Bowie followed. My daughter Lea-Lórien was born during the recording of Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.

“I was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, and in this epoch of music during the ’70s, I traveled around the world with a bona fide rock star. So mark me down as someone who loved the ’70s!”

Entering the ’70s, did you have a good bead on the type of guitarist you wanted to be?

“Absolutely. I entered the ’70s with a strong sense of who I was. I had a wonderful family and religious upbringing as a minister’s son. My father gifted me a guitar when I was 10. My dad died when I was just 15, but by then, he had already given me his blessing to pursue my career as a guitarist.

“I learned to be versatile and innovative, blending my roots in R&B and soul with a growing interest in rock and funk. My key was always to stay adaptable and open to new sounds and techniques.”

What did your rig look like as you got rolling with session work?

“In the early ’70s, I still used my Gibson ES-335, paired with a Fender Twin Reverb. This was standard gear for R&B. I loved the clean, powerful sound that setup gave me, which was perfect for the wide range of session work and commercials I was doing, which, at that time, was jazz and R&B.”

It was early for that sort of thing, but did you use many pedals?

“Initially, I didn’t use many effects, just a little amp reverb. I focused on getting the right tone directly from my guitar and amp. However, as the decade progressed, I heard Shaft by Issac Hayes, so I started incorporating a wah-wah and, of course, Jimi Hendrix’s Fuzz Face, as well as occasionally a phase shifter to add some color to my playing.”

How did you get involved with the Main Ingredient?

“Through connections at RCA Recording Studios, where I became their in-house guitarist – and through producer Bert DeCeaux. He introduced me to Tony Sylvester, a member of the Main Ingredient.”

How did you approach the gig once you joined?

“They were looking for a guitarist to add a fresh, soulful vibe to their sound. They had recently lost their lead singer, Donald McPherson, to diabetes, and Cuba Gooding Sr. was brought in as the new lead singer. They also wanted a new band. I approached the guitars with a focus on complementing their rich vocal harmonies, using smooth R&B rhythms and melodic lines – what I then called ‘chord-based’ soloing.”

What was it like working with Ben E. King on Supernatural?

“It was an amazing experience. It was at the beginning of my career, around 1974-75. I was working with the Main Ingredient; Tony Silvester, one of the singers, recommended that I work with Bert De Coteaux, and that’s how I got on the session. Supernatural had this infectious groove; I wanted to capture that with my guitar work. There was more than one guitarist, so I used a lot of syncopation and tight, funky rhythms to enhance the track’s feel.”

How’d you meet David Bowie?

“Surprisingly enough, I met David at RCA. Again, Tony Silvester recommended I play in a session with Lulu. She was a recording artist who would have a session at RCA. So I accepted the job, thinking I’d meet Lulu, who appeared in To Sir, With Love, the 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier. I figured that would be like being six degrees of separation from Poitier, but regrettably, she wasn’t there. The person who was there, though, was her producer – David Bowie.”

What were your initial impressions of David?

“We hit it off while in the studio, and I invited him to my apartment to meet my wife, Robin Clark, for a home-cooked meal. He must have weighed about 98 lbs., with orange hair and pasty white skin. To my surprise, he actually accepted my invitation. He came to my house in Queens.

“We jammed, I talked about the Apollo Theater, he talked about the Spiders from Mars. I invited him to see me at the Apollo to see the Main Ingredient and Richard Pryor, which he did. He had a great time; we hung out a bit, and then he asked me if I would work with him.

“I was already working with the Main Ingredient, and they had a hit with Everybody Plays the Fool, so we were working a lot, and I was married and making good money. So, regrettably, Bowie couldn’t afford me.”

What led to you eventually working with Bowie?

“Later, he was desperate to record in Philly, and that’s when he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He hoped to get TSOP (the Sound of Philadelphia) as his backing band, but they turned him down. He was looking for a new sound, and after working together, he invited me to join his band for the Young Americans sessions.”

What did your rig look like as you entered the studio to work on Young Americans?

“I hadn’t really expanded my rig at all. By then, I knew some of the outboard gear found in studios and depended on 19-inch studio rack units instead of pedals to experiment with new sounds. I was using an ES-335TD CRS Country Rock Stereo for its warm, rich tones.”

How did your style specifically impact songs like Young Americans and Fame?

“My style brought a distinctive funk and soul flavor to those tracks. On Young Americans, my rhythmic playing helped define the groove, giving it that soulful Latin feel. For Fame, the main riff I came up with became the backbone of the song. It was all about creating something catchy yet intricate and continuing to follow the templates of funk that I learned at the Apollo Theater.”

Speaking of Fame, what was it like working with John Lennon?

“I was in the studio with [producer] Harry Maslin, and suddenly Bowie walks in – and he’s accompanied by John Lennon and May Pang, who I’m still friends with. They were extremely joyful and jovial. When they came in, the whole place kind of stopped. I stopped recording – and then it was just us.

“David let John hear the track I was working on – but I must say, although he listened, he and David were still totally engaged and the laughter never stopped. You have a person who is so famous – John Lennon – and all he cares about is making himself the blunt end of the joke in order to make everybody else feel comfortable.”

“I really liked him. He was approachable, not a hard character at all. He laid down a simple guitar part. He was accommodating and didn’t try to disturb the groove at all.

“Then David asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with them! I had a big ‘dilemma’ moment; I was hearing certain [musical] things in my head, so I didn’t wanna go and start talking to John and David and possibly lose myself in the drinks or their conversation.

“I decided to exclude myself, return to my guitar parts and finish my ideas. When they came back, David heard what I did and was so impressed that I had done so much in such a short time. He loved it. He said, ‘Let me just put down this one little guitar part.’ It was a perfect Bowie part; he recorded this distorted, one-line guitar that cut through all that funky clarity.

“With that one part, that was it – the record was done. He had another session where he recorded variable-speed versions of ‘fame, fame, fame fame’ – but that was it. What an amazing experience.”

How did things shake out on David’s next record, Station to Station?

“It was an intense and creative process. When I first arrived at the sessions, I chose my Twin Reverb. When Slicky came in, he dragged in a Marshall stack and would not turn it down. So I decided to turn my guitar down. When Bowie came in to rehearse, we started playing; he stopped and immediately turned around and asked Slick to turn down because he couldn’t hear me.”

Was there a trick to sharing space with Earl?

“That ploy worked for rehearsals, but I knew I was in sonic trouble with Slick and his Marshall stacks. Since I now had an ES-335TD CRS Country Rock Stereo, I got two Fender Twin 12s and turned them up to match my mood. Sharing space with Earl Slick was a balancing act of sorts. We each had our unique style, so it was about complimenting each other rather than competing.”

A yin and yang?

“Communication and mutual respect were key to making it work. But you should duly note that I was not alone. This was the formation of the D.A.M. Trio, featuring drummer Dennis Davis, me on guitar and bassist George Murray. We would remain with Bowie throughout many collaborations.

“At this point, Bowie and I agreed that I’d work only as a trio, and everything else would be an overdub. This remained so throughout our relationship, so we didn’t really have any problems, though we had challenges. Again, communication and mutual respect were key to making it work.”

Once David got rolling with Brian Eno on the next record, Low, how did that impact the D.A.M. Trio?

“Well, in a way, it did, but it really didn’t. As the D.A.M. Trio, we were really trying to develop our own sound. This was evident from all the material from the Berlin Trilogy, meaning the things that were not the more computer-based symphonic orchestrations that dominated the headlines.

“The D.A.M. Trio was the bedrock and the foundation for what was to follow. So we were very proud of all the songs and singles released that identified our sound. But the collaboration with Brian Eno on Low also brought a new dimension to our sound. The D.A.M. Trio had to adapt to a more experimental approach, which included more ambient and electronic elements.”

How did it impact your guitar sound specifically?

“We also collaborated with other international musicians. I loved it. It pushed me to think differently about my guitar parts, often simplifying them to fit the broader, more atmospheric context. That experience truly changed me, and I’ve got Brian Eno to thank. Respect. Even now, I wanted to recreate that discovery of wonder that comes from experimenting.”

Can you remember the sessions for Heroes, specifically the title track?

“The sessions for Heroes were magical. The title track was particularly special. We recorded it in Berlin, and the atmosphere was just electric. Ahhh, Berlin, the Wall, the gunners, Checkpoint Charlie, the speakeasies, Romi’s place, the underground. Brian had his synths and all kinds of magnetic ribbon things sticking out of it. It was mesmerizing.

“That song was like riding a wave… a sonic wave. It just had a beautiful drone that we didn’t want to disturb. My approach was to keep the guitar parts simple yet powerful, allowing David’s vocals and the overall production to shine.”

Where did you get your Alembic guitar, which you used pretty often around that time?

“Oh, man! You’re talking about Maverick, my stereo Alembic guitar. I love that guitar. Did you know it was used exclusively with David? Yep! Maverick only 'twanged' for Bowie. Here’s how it went down: I found out that Stanley Clarke used an Alembic bass; I was always so impressed with his tonal capabilities.

“I then discovered Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead had commissioned them to make a guitar version. That was all I needed to hear. I immediately contacted Alembic and asked them to build a guitar to fit my fingers and style.

“Now that I had a new powerful stereo guitar with total tone control, I knew I’d have to address that situation with Earl Slick and his Marshall stacks. In that moment of clarity, I decided I had to get into some kind of amplifier design.”

Is that what led you to develop your rack system, one of the first of its kind?

“Yes. By this time, I was very comfortable with studio-quality 19-inch effect rack units. I decided my best option would be to create a rack unit for the road. I told David, and he endorsed and financed the whole thing. I’m sure he was eager to see the results. So I consulted and hired builders to build me racks units, some speakers and a special rig to compete against Marshall stacks. What an awesome experiment it was.”

What were the specs?

“Tweeters for highs, two 12-inch speakers in an enclosed fiberglass Alembic cabinet for the mids and an inverted 15-inch Gauss speaker bass cabinet for the low end – coupled with a three-way crossover system to integrate them all. Separate crown power amps to power them all. And then my 19-inch rack units, MXR flangers and phasers and other effects topped the cake.”

Rounding out the ’70s, you recorded Lodger. Where was your head at, musically, by then?

“By the time we recorded Lodger, I was in a very experimental mindset. The ’70s had been a decade of incredible growth and change for me. Musically, I was focused on pushing boundaries and continuing to evolve my sound. I wasn’t thinking about recording. I was playing with my toys. But regrettably, I also found this period to be a little awkward.”

Why is that?

“Firstly, we were touring and had to record during a break… we really had nothing prepared. Secondly, the studio was rather dull and uninspiring. And third and final, the Eno experiments had waned. We had fun, but we could have been better prepared.”

How do you measure your impact on David’s music?

“It was extremely significant in terms of bringing a unique rhythmic and melodic sensibility to his work. The ease of collaboration in the studio, extraordinary diversity of styles, cadences, syncopations and ethnic diversity that I offered David was unsurpassed, if I do say so myself. However, on a more esoteric level, our personal relationship, which developed over these decades, was crucial to David’s comfort and, thus, growth.”

How do you measure your growth as a player during the ’70s, and was it stifled by the electronic music with Eno?

“My growth as a player during the ’70s was tremendous. Bowie was an integral part of it, but it wasn’t my only source of inspiration. Working with many diverse artists and styles pushed me to constantly improve and adapt. While the electronic music with Eno was challenging, it wasn’t stifling. Instead, it broadened my perspective and forced me to innovate in new ways.”

Looking back on the ’70s, is there anything you’d change?

“Oh no – I’m delighted to face my fate and destiny. What a glorious odyssey it still is. I’m most proud of the work I did with David Bowie, especially on Young Americans and Station to Station. If there’s anything I’d change, it might be to have experimented even more with different sounds and techniques. But overall, I’m very satisfied with what I accomplished during that incredible decade.”

On December 27, 1969, just a few days before the dawn of the new decade, the music world witnessed an extraordinary changing of the guard as Led Zeppelin II reached Number 1 on the Billboard charts, dethroning the Beatles’ final full-on studio effort, Abbey Road.

After hearing Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant proclaim “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love” on their hit, Whole Lotta Love, the Beatles probably realized their days of singing sweet harmonies in an octopus’s garden were numbered.

And if the cover of Abbey Road is any evidence, the Fab Four apparently saw no other choice but to immediately vacate their recording studio and march, single file, into the streets of London, never to be heard from again.

Zeppelin would go on to dominate the sound and psyche of the ’70s. Their first four albums created templates for almost everything that was to follow in the next decade, including riff rock (Whole Lotta Love), heavy metal (Immigrant Song), prog (Dazed and Confused), power balladry (Stairway to Heaven), arena blooze (The Lemon Song), glam (Black Dog) and country rock (Bron-Yr-Aur-Stomp).

They even paved the way for late-’70s punk and the first Van Halen album. Guitarist Johnny Ramone once confessed that he honed his pioneering punk-rock skills by playing Zeppelin’s Communication Breakdown repeatedly. And Edward Van Halen told Guitar World in 2008 that, “I think I got the idea of tapping [while] watching Jimmy Page do his Heartbreaker solo back in 1971.”

But perhaps Led Zeppelin’s most important contribution to the ’70s was their fierce, uncompromising attitude. The band revolutionized the music industry when they negotiated their game-changing record deal with Atlantic Records that allowed guitarist Jimmy Page to produce their albums without any label interference. Additionally, the group retained control of all jacket artwork, press ads, publicity pictures and anything else related to their image.

As Page explained, “I wanted artistic control in a vise grip, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”

And what Zeppelin wanted to do was… everything and anything! They had this crazy notion that musicians should have the artistic freedom to play what they want — and that their fans might enjoy it. As it turned out, people did indeed love their wild experimentalism, and so did the record companies, who discovered they could make a ton of cash by allowing the band to have their own way.

Zeppelin’s example opened the floodgates to an intensely creative era that ushered in dozens of astonishing new genres of music, all played on adventurous FM radio stations.

Just a tiny sampling of the albums released in ’70s is enough to make any guitar nerd choke on their Ernie Balls – The Dark Side of the Moon, Sticky Fingers, Hotel California, Marquee Moon, Night at the Opera, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Van Halen, Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, Machine Head – the mind boggles.

Given the vast scope of music made during the ’70s, trying to sum up guitar playing in the era is like attempting to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded while riding a roller coaster in sequined bell-bottoms. It’s damn difficult! But let’s give it a shot…

The rise of heavy metal

You could argue that heavy metal was forged in the Sixties by bands like Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Jeff Beck Group and, of course, Led Zeppelin. But you’d be wrong.

Sure, those bands started the ball rolling by chugging power chords through big-ass 100-watt Marshalls, but most of what they were playing was just amplified blues mixed with a bit o’ weird hippie psychedelia.

To make real heavy metal – 100 percent certified heavy metal – they were missing two ingredients: the devil… and Tony Iommi.

Hailing from the sooty factory town of Birmingham, England, Black Sabbath, featuring guitarist Iommi, along with vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, set the world ablaze in 1970 with two groundbreaking albums, Black Sabbath and Paranoid. Their ominous riffs and occult-inspired lyrics on anthems like Iron Man, The Wizard and Electric Funeral would inspire thousands of bands, including Judas Priest, Van Halen, Slayer, Metallica and Ghost.

Given their preoccupation with the supernatural, it’s no surprise that their backstory reads like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales… but a whole lot grimmer. On the day Iommi was quitting his sheet metal factory job to become a full-time musician, catastrophe struck – he lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand in a gruesome industrial accident.

A machine press came down and caught his fingers, and when he recoiled, the ends were ripped right off! (If there was ever a sentence that deserved an exclamation mark, it’s that one.)

However, Iommi wasn’t going to let a little thing like a couple of severed fingers stop him from playing guitar. Resourcefully, he used his machine-shop skills to custom-make special fingertip pads out of plastic and leather. Then, to make his guitar easier to play, he set his instrument’s action as low as it could go and detuned his strings to lessen the tension even further.

To Iommi’s surprise, when he plugged in his guitar into his Laney amp and cranked up his Dallas Rangemaster overdrive pedal, those elements coalesced into a deep, gut-rattling sound unlike anyone had heard before.

As Iommi later observed, “Some people believe the accident invented heavy metal, and it probably did. It helped me invent a new kind of music – a new sound and different style of playing.” He probably should’ve added, “But kids, don’t try this at home…”

Southern Harmony

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so while Black Sabbath were busy serving up doom and gloom in U.K. in 1970, the Allman Brothers Band were spreading good vibes and magic ’shrooms throughout the southern United States.

Formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969, the Allman Brothers Band migrated to Macon, Georgia, where they began building a reputation for their incredible live shows that combined elements of rock, blues, jazz and country music into memorable songs and explosive improvisations.

Their exciting smorgasbord of influences was unlike anything audiences had ever heard, but what really made the six-piece band unique were the soaring, harmonized twin lead guitars of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

Traditionally, when you had two guitarists in a rock band, one played rhythm and the other played lead. Betts and Allman threw that playbook out the window, trading leads and orchestrating tight harmony parts similar to the way jazz horn sections worked together.

The concept wasn’t completely new. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck briefly experimented with the idea when they were both in the Yardbirds in 1966, but Allman and Betts elevated their two-guitar attack into a brilliant artform – one that would influence and shape dozens of Southern bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, the Outlaws, 38 Special and the Marshall Tucker Band throughout the ’70s.

It helped that both Allman and Betts were terrific musicians with distinct sounds and approaches to their instruments. Allman brought a new level of virtuosity and aggression to the electric slide guitar that remains influential today, while Betts added a sophisticated sense of composition and melody to the duo.

Their landmark live album, At Fillmore East, released in July 1971, sent shockwaves through the guitar community. It not only changed the way blues and metal guitarists thought about two-guitar bands and improvisation, but it also influenced the sound of country music in ways that can be felt today.

The Allmans were primarily a U.S. phenomenon, but British blues rock legend Eric Clapton took notice. After seeing the Allmans play in Miami, Clapton was so blown away by Duane’s slide technique, he invited him to play an equal role on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, one of the greatest albums of the ’70s and one of the most exciting blues rock albums of all time.

“The Allman Brothers were unbelievable,” Clapton told journalist Sam Hare. “Duane and Dickey Betts were in such harmony. Their playing was very strong and well thought out. When Duane came to the studio [to play on Layla], I was so taken with him that I started ignoring my own band.

“I just tried to keep thinking of songs we’d both know so we could duet. We’d play blues standards like Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out and Key to the Highway. All these things were just really vehicles so we could play – just excuses to jam with one another.”

Tragically, on October 29, 1971, Duane Allman, then 24, was killed in a motorcycle accident. But despite the loss, the band miraculously carried on, recording their most commercially successful album, Brothers and Sisters.

Without Duane, guitarist Betts flourished, his sunburst Les Paul planting the seeds for modern country artists like Chris Stapleton, Eric Church, Lucinda Williams and the Zac Brown Band, all of whom have covered Allman songs in more recent years.

Just say Yes to prog rock

They say the best comedy is based on the truth, and that certainly goes for the one guitar joke that everybody knows:

Q: How many guitarists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: One to screw it in and another dozen to say, “I could do that.”

Guitarists have always been competitive, and that was certainly true in the ’70s. It was no longer enough to write great songs and look good – you also had to have serious chops.

Musicians playing under the banner of “progressive rock” or simply “prog” turned technique into a religion, and the result was some of the strangest and most ambitious music to ever grace the Billboard Top 20 charts. The most interesting prog bands were King Crimson, ELP, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Rush, Kansas, U.K. and Gentle Giant, but it was Yes who were the most commercially successful exponents.

Each member of Yes was an exceptional musician. Singer Jon Anderson – with his sweet tenor – had one of the most distinctive voices in rock; and virtuoso keyboardist Rick Wakeman – who wore sequined capes on stage – was flashy both visually and technically.

But the real star of the group was guitarist Steve Howe. Howe thrilled audiences by playing in a formidable assortment of styles on an astonishing array of electric, acoustic and steel guitars… often during the same song. Some critics accused him of being excessive, but for the most part, he was tasteful and generous, allowing his Yes compatriots to shine and take turns in the spotlight as evidenced by the band’s biggest hit, Roundabout.

During the band’s heyday, which lasted throughout the ’70s, his work on The Yes Album (1971), Fragile (1971), Close to the Edge (1972), Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) and Relayer (1974) opened huge doors for guitar players looking to expand the techniques and colors they could use within a rock context.

Howe experimented with flamenco, Chet Atkins-style fingerpicking, classical harmonies and exotic chord voicings while shredding some of the speediest, harmonically advanced soloing ever heard on a rock album.

He was an amazing technician, but his lead playing also had an appealingly jagged edge that always kept the music rooted in rock ’n’ roll, no matter how complex it got.

Howe pushed the boundaries of popular music about as hard as any musician in the Seventies, and he did much of this on electric f-hole guitars like the Gibson ES-175, which was more associated with jazz players.

“The decision to buy the ES-175 set me on a course,” Howe said. “I didn’t consider myself to be someone who played solid bodied guitars at the time. It’s helped me to forge an identity as a guitarist with a full sound that isn’t reliant on distortion or tremolo or other gadgets.”

He was so dominant in the ’70s that he won “Best Overall Guitarist” in Guitar Player magazine an unprecedented five years in a row, influencing players as diverse as Alex Lifeson (Rush), John Petrucci (Dream Theater) and John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers). But unlike Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen, few people attempted to sound like him, probably because it was so difficult to do.

His lasting impact has been more about his grand concept than his style. He is the guy you can thank for introducing the idea of owning dozens of guitars for different colors and sounds. So, the next time anybody gives you shit for buying yet another Les Paul Junior or Epiphone Casino, just blame it on Steve.

Lighting the fusion

Guitarists like Howe, Frank Zappa, Tommy Bolin and Jeff Beck shaped the sound and style of Seventies rock by incorporating elements of jazz into their arsenal of licks. But just as significant were a new crop of young jazz players who started experimenting with the volume and aggression heard in rock music.

Guitarist Larry Coryell, sometimes called the “godfather of jazz-rock fusion” summed it up when he said, “We loved [jazz trumpeter] Miles Davis – but we also loved the Rolling Stones.”

Starting in the early ’70s, a gang of extraordinarily gifted young jazz shredders like Coryell, Pat Metheny, Al Di Meola and John Scofield scared the bejeezus out of rock’s greatest players with their command of the electric guitar. But the jazz shredder who made the most impact was the fast and furious John McLaughlin, who played a double-neck Gibson EDS-1275 through a 100-watt Marshall amp “in meltdown mode.”

Starting his career as a session musician in England, McLaughlin moved to the U.S. in the late ’60s, where he played with jazz drummer Tony Williams’ group Lifetime.

He then performed with the legendary Miles Davis on several pioneering electric jazz fusion albums, most notably In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson. But it was his work in the ferocious Mahavishnu Orchestra that made him a superstar in the rock world.

The five-piece Mahavishnu Orchestra combined elements of metal, jazz, funk and Indian classical music into their compositions, which they performed at lightning tempos. As Guitar World once put it, the band left you feeling as if they “were always on the very edge of exploding into a thousand pieces, so far did they push and extend themselves and each other.”

Guitar legend Jeff Beck was particularly floored. “Things took a funny turn for me in the early ’70s,” Beck recalled. “But it all turned out well after hearing John McLaughlin play on Miles Davis’ Jack Johnson album and with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Every musician I knew was raving about him, and I thought, ‘I’ll have some of that.’ The mastery of his playing was unequaled.”

Soon after hearing McLaughlin, Beck turned down a spot in the Rolling Stones and began experimenting with his own jazz-rock band. He was warned that playing fusion was commercial suicide, but ironically, it resulted in his most commercially successful album, Blow by Blow, released in 1975.

In the early ’70s, the radical Mahavishnu Orchestra recorded two brilliant studio albums, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, and performed more than 500 shows, playing unlikely bills with straight-up rockers like Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult and the Eagles.

While many rock audiences were confused by their weird, explosive music, others were intrigued, catapulting 1973’s Birds of Fire to Number 15 in the Billboard charts. However, just as it looked as though they were about to achieve the impossible by bringing avant-garde, freak-out jazz to the masses, they imploded.

“It was fantastic that we had popularity, but I think we had too much success too quickly,” McLaughlin said. “The band ended very acrimoniously, and that upsets me to this day. I have great relationships with all the musicians I worked with. Except that bloody band.”

Despite their brief lifespan, Mahavishnu left a lasting mark. Not only did they influence classic rockers like Beck and Carlos Santana, but their albums have also inspired current avant-garde heroes like Guthrie Govan, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (the Mars Volta) and Ben Weinman (Dillinger Escape Plan), proving that musical boundaries are meant to be shattered.

Glam bam, thank you, ma'am

While it was exciting that bands like the Allman Brothers and Yes were stretching the boundaries of popular music with their technical skills, many musicians were less than enthusiastic about prog. It was too damn complicated, and besides, who was going to piss off parents, disrupt social norms and have fun while looking cool? It didn’t take long to find out.

The answer came slinking out of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1971 when the Alice Cooper Band rose to fame with the hit single I’m Eighteen. Featuring a male singer with a woman’s name, the five-piece group were notorious for their theatrical stage shows, androgynous outfits and playing loud, obnoxious rock.

Boring old farts called them “degenerates,” but the press referred to them as “glam rock,” and it wasn’t long before the glitter craze took off, especially in England where David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars, T. Rex, Slade and Queen became mega-stars.

Glam was primarily about “the look,” but the bands also shared a common approach to their music. Unlike the progressive movement, glam rockers kept their songs tight, danceable and catchy. Instrumentally, their tunes were often powered by chunky heavy metal guitars and short, memorable guitar solos.

Mick Ronson, the iconic blond guitarist for David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars band, made no bones about being more interested in composing great riffs than diddling around with weird scales or playing 30 different guitars. Ronson believed if you wanted to play like John Coltrane or Mozart, go fuckin’ do it – but leave rock ’n’ roll out of it.

He had a point. It didn’t mean Ronno was a primitive musician. In fact, he was quite sophisticated. In addition to providing killer guitar parts to memorable rockers like Bowie’s Suffragette City, Panic in Detroit and Jean Genie, he was also a deft arranger, composing the dramatic orchestral parts on Bowie’s 1972 glam rock classic, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

One sterling example of his artistry can be heard on the album’s classic, Moonage Daydream. He begins the song with a couple thunderous power chords, then slowly layers parts on his blonde 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom through a half-cocked wah-wah pedal, until the song reaches a soaring, spiraling conclusion of ascending strings and tape-delay guitar.

While his parts aren’t particularly difficult to play, they are beautifully constructed, executed, and perfect for the song. In other words, totally rock and roll.

Ronson’s smart, economical playing (and glittering stage outfits!) helped create the template, not only for glam rock in the Seventies, but also Eighties hair metal. Ozzy Osbourne guitarists Randy Rhoads worshipped Ronson, meticulously imitating his look and use of a blonde Les Paul.

“Randy was a big fan,” said his brother, Kelle Rhoads. “That’s where his obsession with polka dots came from. He saw Mick Ronson with polka dot knee pads and Randy took it to another level.”

However, it would be wrong to imply that Ronson was the only influential glam guitarist in the ’70s. There were plenty of others including Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, Marc Bolan of T. Rex and Glen Buxton of the Alice Cooper Band. But perhaps the most famous and fairest of them all was Queen’s tall and elegant Brian May.

Queen have become so ubiquitous in our modern music culture that it’s easy to forget that in the ’70s they were originally a huge part of the same glam movement that spawned Bowie and the likes of Roxy Music and Sweet. But it might also be because Queen didn’t really sound like anybody else, and that was primarily due to May’s unique approach to playing and recording.

Far more ambitious than his fashionable contemporaries, his multi-layered guitar orchestrations on songs like Killer Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody ventured perilously close to being “prog.”

But May also knew how to boogie and always balanced his excesses with some good old-fashioned hard rock, as on We Will Rock You, Stone Cold Crazy and Keep Yourself Alive. Yes, Brian May could go over the top, but with Queen, he also knew when to kick royal ass – even while wearing flowing silk blouses and crushed velvet trousers.

Never mind the bollocks here's punk

Given how disheveled the typical punk rock musicians appeared with their ripped-up jeans and spiky hair, it was almost comical how much in they had in common with their glam rock counterparts. The Clash, Dead Boys and the Sex Pistols also believed that rock music should sound gritty, dangerous and close to the streets.

Punk guitarists didn’t just dislike progressive rock – they actively hated it. They were repulsed by what they perceived as the bourgeoisie snobbery of bands like Yes and Genesis. As for the Mahavishnu Orchestra… they couldn’t even pronounce it.

Punk musicians wanted to return rock and roll to its “everyman” fundamentals, so that anyone wanting to master three chords could take the stage and become a star. No one represented this attitude more singularly than the Ramones, a raucous four-piece juggernaut from New York City.

All members of the Ramones looked the same (shaggy hair with bangs), wore the same clothes (jeans, leather jackets and Converse All-Stars) and even shared the same surname.

Their songs all sorta sounded similar and their lyrics were hilariously moronic with titles like I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend and Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue. From a guitar perspective, it was the same story: every song consisted of an interchangeable series of power chords played with the same jack-hammer downstrokes by Johnny Ramone on his cheap Mosrite guitar.

On paper the Ramones sounded stupid and one-dimensional – and they were – but it’s also what made them great. They say the hardest thing about making great art is deciding on a direction and sticking with it. If that’s true, then the Ramones were the Picassos of punk.

They did one thing, and they did it incredibly well, and in concert, the band was as direct and as powerful as a locomotive. (I was tossed around so much during an out-of-control Ramones show that I lost one of my shoes after the third song and never saw it again.)

When the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, it was said that their first album, Ramones (1976), saved rock from becoming “bloated and narcissistic.” While that’s not completely true – there was certainly plenty of bloat and narcissism to go around – they did provide a compelling alternative.

AOR in the USA

Punk wasn’t for everyone. But neither was metal, Southern rock, glam or any of the junk we’ve been talking about. That was the great thing about the ’70s. A lot of the music was kinda weird or extreme in some way. Even the biggest bands were odd when you really examined them closely.

The Wall by Pink Floyd was psychotic. Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin was fantastic, but totally wacky. And let’s not even get started on progressive bands like King Crimson and Jethro Tull.

Was there anything that was normal in the ’70s? Well, yes, there was plenty of meat and potatoes to be had. About halfway through the decade, many of the FM stations that were adventurous during the early part of the ’70s discovered they could grab more listeners and sell more advertising if the music they played was a little shorter and a bit more conventional. The stations shifted gears, and so did many rock bands who discovered they could sell more records if they did the same.

Suddenly, bands that appealed to more mainstream tastes started popping up like toadstools in Pennsylvania. Some called it “pop metal,” but most referred to it as Album Oriented Rock or AOR.

Platinum-selling bands like Foreigner, Journey, Boston, Styx, Eagles, REO Speedwagon, Steve Miller Band, Kiss, Toto, Pat Benatar, Kansas, Heart, Triumph, Bad Company and Fleetwood Mac were not particular innovative, but they wrote catchy songs that sounded great in the car.

While that might sound like an insult, it isn’t. Much of the music was very good and featured incredibly skilled guitarists like Neal Schon, Joe Walsh, Rick Nielsen, Ace Frehley, Steve Lukather and Gary Richrath, among others.

Now mix a bit of AOR with some Led Zeppelin, a bit of Pink Floyd and the more accessible “hits” of some of the more adventurous bands we’ve mentioned, and there you have the ’70s in a nutshell.

But wait… wait, wait, wait. What about Van fuckin’ Halen? Weren’t they part of the ’70s?

Well, the truth is – and this is highly classified information – that even though Van Halen’s first two albums came out in 1978 and 1979, they did not belong to the ’70s – they belonged to the ’80s. It was all a big mistake.

Eddie Van Halen insisted on arriving two years early, so he could gently guide guitarists to the next decade, where he would rule like a king for the next 10 years.

But you gotta promise not to tell anyone! If you do, I’ll deny everything. You know, conspiracy theorists, they’re all 5150…

Bass icon Herbie Flowers, best known for his thick, jazzy-style bass tone on tracks like Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side and David Bowie's Space Oddity, died on September 5 at the age of 86. The news was confirmed on Facebook by a close relative.

“Lorraine’s beloved uncle, Herbie Flowers, passed on yesterday. While we knew and loved him as Uncle Herbie, his musical contributions have likely touched your lives as well. He played bass on many of the songs from the golden age of rock,” wrote Kevin J Conklin, the husband of Flowers’ niece.

The Estate of David Bowie paid homage to Flowers and his work, posting, “Aside from his incredible musicianship over many decades, he was a beautiful soul and a very funny man. He will be sorely missed. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.”

Brian Keith “Herbie” Flowers was born in Isleworth, England, in 1938 and began his musical journey in 1956, picking up the tuba when he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force. He added the double bass to his toolkit to secure a promotion within the Air Force, after which he transitioned to bass guitar.

In the early 1960s, he completed military service and promptly joined several Dixieland jazz bands. Around this time, he discovered modern jazz and first heard an electric bass at a New York nightclub, leading him to acquire a $70 Lake Placid Blue 1960 Fender Jazz Bass from Manny's Music.

His session career took off in the late '60s when he began working for esteemed producers like Tony Visconti (David Bowie, Marc Bolan), Shel Talmy (The Who, The Kinks), and Mickie Most (The Jeff Beck Group, Suzi Quatro).

In 1969, Flowers became one of the founding members of the six-piece pop group Blue Mink. Their single Melting Pot clinched the number 3 position on the UK Singles Chart that same year. Alongside Blue Mink, Flowers was also a member of CCS and the final lineup of T. Rex.

However, it was his sliding, now-iconic bassline on Lou Reed's David Bowie-produced single Walk on the Wild Side that forever etched Flowers' name in rock history. “Lou had the chords written out on a piece of paper and my job was to come up with the bassline,” he told Mojo writer Phil Sutcliffe.

“What the producer wants is for you to come up with something that is a bit catchy and with Lou Reed it was easy to say, ‘Can I get the double bass out of the car? Because this song is a bit jazzy and the electric bass doesn’t work, although it did work when I put the bass guitar on a 10th above it. You could only do that once on a record because it’s such a distinctive sound.”

In addition to the Lou Reed hit, Flowers spent the 1970s recording with Marc Bolan until the T. Rex singer's death, co-writing the novelty song Grandad for Clive Dunn, performing with the progressive rock group Sky (which he co-founded), and sessioning for dozens of artists.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Flowers is said to have participated in over 20,000 sessions, recording with Elton John (Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water), Lou Reed (Transformer), Cat Stevens (New Masters, Foreigner), Paul McCartney (Give My Regards to Broad Street), George Harrison (Somewhere in England, Gone Troppo, Brainwashed), and on Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, to name but a few.

Carlos Alomar says he turned down dinner and drinks with David Bowie and John Lennon in order to dedicate himself to working on the guitar parts for their collaborative track, Fame.

Speaking to Guitar World, Alomar says he was in the studio already with Bowie’s Young Americans producer Harry Maslin when Bowie walked in with John Lennon.

“When they came in, the whole place kind of stopped,” recalls Alomar. “I stopped recording – and then it was just us. David let John hear the track I was working on – but I must say, although he listened, he and David were still totally engaged and the laughter never stopped.”

Alomar’s impression of Lennon as a person and a guitar player was positive – and he notes that, regardless of the concept of the track, there were no egos at play, musically.

“I really liked him. He was approachable, not a hard character at all,” says Alomar. “He laid down a simple guitar part. He was accommodating and didn't try to disturb the groove at all.”

Despite the good vibes, though, Alomar says the session left him having to make a tough decision.

“David asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with them!” explains the guitarist. “[So] I had a big ‘dilemma’ moment.

“I was hearing certain [musical] things in my head, so I didn't wanna go and start talking to John and David and possibly lose myself in the drinks or their conversation. I decided to exclude myself, return to my guitar parts and finish my ideas.”

While GW can’t promise we would have been so professional, it seems Alomar’s social sacrifice was ultimately the right move, at least in terms of rock history – and probably his future opportunities.

“When they came back, David heard what I did and was so impressed that I had done so much in such a short time,” says Alomar.

“He loved it. He said, 'Let me just put down this one little guitar part.' It was a perfect Bowie part… this distorted, one-line guitar that cut through all that funky clarity. With that one part, that was it - the record was done.”

Alomar’s sharp-eared experience cuts a characteristic contrast with that of one of his fellow guitarists on the session.

Indeed, earlier this year, Earl Slick told Guitar World that he was so high during the recording of Young Americans that he had no recollection of meeting John Lennon. A fact Lennon reportedly found hilarious, when Slick introduced himself to the Beatle five years later…

To read Alomar’s full interview, pick up the November 2024 issue of Guitar World over at Magazines Direct.

Carlos Alomar is best known for his seminal rhythm guitar work with David Bowie from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, contributing to classics like Young Americans, Station To Station, and Low, to name but a few.

However, Alomar's influence extends beyond Bowie and into the world of amps, as he was the mastermind behind one of the earliest examples of a live rack system.

“I developed one of the first rack systems for rhythm guitar – out of necessity. I did it to keep all my gear organized in total stereo, and to make it easily accessible,” asserts Alomar in an upcoming issue of Guitar World.

Forced to compete with fellow Bowie guitarist Earl Slick and his wall of Marshalls, Alomar devised a way to stand out.

“I knew I’d have to address that situation with Earl Slick and his Marshall stacks. In that moment of clarity, I decided I had to get into some kind of amplifier design… By this time, I was very comfortable with studio-quality 19-inch effect rack units.”

He continues, “I decided my best option would be to create a rack unit for the road. I told David, and he endorsed and financed the whole thing. So I hired builders to build me rack units, some speakers, and a special rig.”

The specs for this innovative setup? “Tweeters for highs, two 12-inch speakers in an enclosed fibreglass Alembic cabinet for the mids and an inverted 15-inch Gauss speaker bass cabinet for the low end – coupled with a three-way crossover system to integrate them all.

“Separate Crown power amps to power them all. And then my 19-inch rack units, MXR flangers and phasers and other effects topped the cake.”

However, aside from the novelty and ginormous sound, Alomar admits it all boiled down to feeling confident on stage. “My new rig gave me the confidence, flexibility, and reliability I needed for live performances. I could now compete with any Marshall stacks with these bad boys!”

The full interview with Carlos Alomar will be published in issue 583 of Guitar World, on sale 9/3.

Helmet's founding member and guitarist Page Hamilton might be one of the most enduringly influential guitarists from the North American alt-metal movement of the ’90s.

His heavier approach might not make him one of the first guitarists that come to mind as a potential David Bowie guitarist, but he was handpicked by the chameleon of rock as his guitarist for 1999’s Hours tour.

“He told me he was a fan the first time I met him in '97. And then I got the call from him a couple of years later,” Hamilton reveals in a new interview with Premier Guitar.

“He was really complimentary about my guitar stuff. One thing he said I'll never forget was, ‘It sounds like it's very abstract what you do, but it's very thought out.’ He said, ‘You remind me a bit of Phil Manzanera from Roxy Music,’ and I was like, ‘Thank you. That's amazing.’ Yeah, he told me I nailed the guitar sound on Rebel Rebel, which we did on SNL.”

David Bowie parted ways with longstanding guitarist Reeves Gabrels in 1999. Immediately after, he got Page Hamilton on board for the tour and TV appearances in support of his 22nd album Hours.

“Reeves, who’s been a friend of mine for many many years, was going through a very difficult time in his life and he and Bowie parted ways after 13 years,” Hamilton said in a 2016 interview with Louder.

“Bowie knew Helmet – we had met two years earlier at a festival in Germany – I met him and he was like ‘Helmet? I love Helmet!’ And I start laughing, like ‘Yeah… right. Right!’ And he says, ‘We go way back.’”

Besides his heavier work with Helmet, Hamilton is a jazz-schooled guitarist, whose avant-garde collaborations and soundtrack work no doubt contributed to him landing the gig. By 2000, he parted ways with Bowie to be replaced by the returning Earl Slick.

Elsewhere in the Premier Guitar interview, Hamilton gives more insight into the gear he used with Bowie. “I have here this ESP Strat [referring to the guitar in the video], it's called the Vintage Plus. These are the guitars I used when I played with Bowie on the 1999 Hours tour. I have three of these, a black, a gold, and this blue one."

In terms of amps, Hamilton opted for a Fryette Pittbull Ultra-Lead into a Fryette Fatbottom 4x12 cabinet, which he still uses “for everything except for jazz...These are just incredible amps for rock stuff [and] for noise.”

Helmet released their ninth album, LEFT, last November, marking the band's first studio album in seven years.

Glenn Hughes may have ongoing disputes with the current members of Deep Purple. However, he recently gave more insight into his special friendship with the late Tommy Bolin, who was Deep Purple's guitarist between 1975 and 1976.

“Well, when I joined Purple, I was left with, you know, in a band that weren't really a family band,” admits Hughes in an interview with Guitar Interactive Magazine.

“As you know, it really wasn't a fun place to be. On his [Tommy’s] audition, [David] Bowie drove me down to the audition to meet Tommy, and I walked up to Tommy, I saw this guy with green and purple hair. I whispered in his ear, ‘If you don't get the gig, you're coming back to my house tonight.’

"And he got the gig and he stayed at my house for three months. He moved in with me, and we became best friends. We wrote Gettin’ Tighter the first week together at my studio and look, I can talk about guitar-playing friends all day, but Tommy's in my top three friends and guitar players."

In the same interview, Hughes reveals where he currently stands with Deep Purple's three longest-serving members, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, and Ian Gillan, after a tense exchange at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony back in 2016.

“I will never speak to any of them again,” he asserts. “Simply because they were rude. Both Roger, Ian, and Gillan were rude to David [Coverdale]. Very, very hurtful. I didn't give a fuck actually, because I knew they were rude to begin with.

“I was the only sober man there. I don't care about those guys. Gillan was rude to me on stage, accepting the award. He looked at me in the eyes, like I didn't exist." 

In April, Deep Purple ushered in a new era with Portable Door – the lead single from the upcoming album =1 and the first release to feature new guitarist Simon McBride.

Since his days alongside Frank Zappa, David Bowie and Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew has refused to remain static. Now, at 74, the Kentucky-born Strato-slinger is at it again, this time with his latest and entirely mega project, Beat.

You’ll have heard the news, which Fripp leaked a few weeks before the band formally announced themselves in April. And you’ll be preparing for wild prog rock dreams to come true when Belew hits the stage with Steve Vai, Tony Levin and Danny Carey to celebrate King Crimson’s well-loved ‘80s albums Discipline (1981), Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984).

Though Fripp declined an invitation to participate, Belew was glad to receive his blessing, because he holds his ex bandmate in the highest esteem.

“It was a great pairing,” Belew says. “We could interlock our styles of guitar playing – but we could also go completely apart from each other. It was wonderful; I knew what he was going to play and vice versa. We did three world tours; and strangely, those records are now coming back into people’s minds again. I think they’re as fresh as ever.”

Taking on King Crimson music without Fripp is challenging, but Belew believes he and Vai are up for it. “The internet is already full of comments and thoughts, so it’s a lot of pressure. I think we’ll do great. Steve and I will have to do the same thing that Robert and I did – Steve and I are going to be guitar partners. I’m absolutely certain he can do it.”

“He’s on tour now with Joe Satriani. I texted him yesterday and I said, ‘I’m thinking about adding these two songs. Did you happen to bring that book of transcriptions?’ And he said, ‘It’s sitting right here beside me on the bus.’ We’ll dedicate ourselves to trying to bring this music from where it once was to where we are now.”

You, along with several other alumni, have been celebrating the music of David Bowie lately. 

“I sometimes join the large expedition, where they put a new band together. I’ve had a lot of chances to go back through that era and listen through it again. What happened to me from ’77 through about ’82, with Frank Zappa straight into Bowie straight into Talking Heads straight into King Crimson, I was traveling at light speed!”

You came in during a pretty experimental period alongside the D.A.M. Trio. What was that like?

“It’s hard to remember because so many things happened so fast. It was like I was halfway dreaming, halfway awake; I just could’t focus – like, ‘This is what’s happening here. Not two years ago, I was making $75 a night, if I made that much, playing in bars. And now here I am at Madison Square Garden with David Bowie!’

“I was lucky to fall into that era of his music; the Brian Eno trilogy, as they call it. They were stretching things and trying a lot of new things, and I seemed a good fit for that. They used to laugh at me, saying: ‘You’re not supposed to be able to play that!’”

It must have been a trip going from working with Bowie after someone like Frank Zappa.

“Frank’s work, for me, was life lessons – how to be in the music business, be a professional touring musician and travel around the world. Maybe even, you know, make records or films; we did both of those.

“It was how to how to run your own business – so many things that weren’t really related to the notes and the sound. But of course, learning five hours of Frank Zappa material was a 24/7 job for me the whole time!

“I was catching up because I was the only one in the band who didn't read music. Frank wanted you to play his music correctly and consistently. He wasn’t really there for you to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to try this. How about that?’

“That was not Frank’s way. He had everything the way he wanted, and he needed people to play it right, be on time, and not come in half-drunk or any of those stupid things.”

How did working with Zappa prepare you for what was to come with Bowie?

“It was a school and I graduated from it. Before that point no one had really shown me anything – not even how to play guitar. I worked things out myself. To have someone of Frank’s stature, his genius, telling me what to do and showing me the ropes, was more important than even being in the band. It was incredible tutoring.”

“David wanted someone to just go wild on guitar. That’s what he needed; Frank didn’t need that from me. He needed me to sing a lot and play his parts. David needed me to grow wings and fly away. And he encouraged that all the time.

“You can see in some of the videos that, while I’m taking a solo, David’s standing with his arms crossed and beaming like a Cheshire cat because he just loves it. He loved to hear people go wild like that.

“And it fit in with what he was doing: David’s music was always strangely mainstream and yet really off-the-wall, especially during that period.”

I imagine your previous experience of working things out on your own lent itself to going off the wall with him. 

“Absolutely. I was ready to go. I didn’t have a lot of titles or sounds to choose from, but I was able to combine them in different ways with some of the hand techniques I was using, like bending the neck and crazy things like that.

“It all came across as kind of a new picture; I don’t think anyone had heard or seen that. It was another thing David loved – he wanted somebody that could kind of match his stage thing, not just another player standing up there playing their instrument.”

Did your gear change much as you transitioned from Zappa to Bowie?

“Oh, yeah – everything changed. When I was with Frank, I had just come from nowhere; I had no equipment to speak of. I auditioned for Frank through a little Pignose [battery-powered] amp. But by the time I got to David, I had discovered a the Roland Jazz Chorus [JC-120], and that became my amp.

“That really changed things. It was a completely different way of playing guitar. Strangely, it’s solid-state, very clean, and Japanese-sounding. But there were other things you could do – you could warm it up and pair it with some of the Electro-Harmonix pedals.

“One day I realized that if I walked over in front of the Roland Jazz Chorus, a Stereo Chorus amp, I could suddenly point the guitar at the front of the amp and move it around, and it would make this incredible oscillating sound.

“I could take the chorus setting and move it back and forth between that and vibrato and so forth. It’s a sound you cannot possibly get – no pedal in the world will make it. It’s a natural occurrence between two speakers being in chorus together. I used that a lot of early records.”

How did you take the rig you used with Bowie and push it forward with King Crimson?

“The main thing that changed from that first period from David to Talking Heads to King Crimson was that I went to Japan. I met the people at Roland and they said, ‘We have a new thing – a guitar synthesizer.’ I’d been dying to have something akin to what keyboard players could do for 10 years, and they gave me one.”

You were one of the earliest adopters of the guitar synth, right?

“I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure I had the first one in New York, as they weren’t available there yet. When I joined King Crimson, Robert had a Roland JC-120 and also the synthesizer; it was actually the second one they made, but it was the first one that anyone ever used.

“The first one has been a bit too much – it was like a big Farfisa organ. The second one is the blue one, the GR-300. So much of the King Crimson sound of the ‘80s came from that one device.

“It was a simple instrument: you could only do maybe five or six things with it, and you had to manually tune all the different oscillators. You couldn’t save a sound! It was the era before things got much more digitized.”

You’re primarily known as a Strat guy, so the guitar synth must have been a shock to the system.

“Even if you just put it with the guitar, you had a very unusual sound. The guitar didn’t sound like a normal guitar and that really changed things. So the next thing I did in that period was my first solo record, Lone Rhino, using all the things I had coming from David, Talking Heads and King Crimson.”

What was that setup like?

“The Strat and maybe four, five or six little pedals. But for Twang Bar King, the second solo record, I started using the guitar synth. I had Fender build me a Mustang with all the accoutrements from the guitar synthesizer.

“You had all kinds of things you could operate from the guitar, and you had to have a special pickup. Once that got designed, I started using what became known as the ‘Twang Bar King guitar’ because I made that record with it. I used that in King Crimson from there on.”

You’d matched wits with Zappa, Bowie, Eno and David Byrne – a lot of interesting characters. What was it like working alongside Fripp?

“The first thing with Robert was that he’d already designed the kind of guitar playing he favored – fast picking; very, very precise. He needed a second guitar player to play it. It required two people playing the same thing, offsetting from each other. Frame by Frame is a great example of it.

“Robert and I sat down for hours every day; I had to get up to speed with being able to play like him. After we got to a certain point, and I was getting good enough to do it – because it wasn’t my style at all, and I’m not the best picker in the world – and Robert was feeling good about it, I started trying to write songs with it.

“Then it was, ‘Okay, get back to your Stratocaster and start making your sounds like an elephant!’ It really came to the point where Robert and I had separated into our own worlds. I always said it was two sides of the same coin: Robert has his approach, and I had my approach of making those sounds, noises, feedback, and bird calls.”

Fripp named the Beat project – is that right?

“Yes – in brief, I’d been working on the idea of putting together a band to do those three records – Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair – the ‘80s trilogy. I talked to Robert in 2019 and he declined being any part of it. But he said, ‘If you want to celebrate King Crimson and you want to drive it, go ahead. I will give you my blessing.’”

How did Steve Vai become involved?

“We started thinking, ‘Well, who could possibly be in the band?’ The big part would be, ‘Who would step into Robert’s role?’ The only person I could think of was Steve. I heard him say in an interview that he had a lot of affection and admiration for Robert.

“So I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a chance – you never know.’ I called him, and lo and behold, he was so excited; I couldn’t believe it. So we started talking… and then, of course, COVID hit. That added another two and a half years onto the waiting process.

“I wasn’t sure Steve would ever be able to do it because, after COVID, he had 18 months of touring commitments that he’d previously booked. We had to keep waiting. By the time we thought, ‘Okay, let’s call Steve now,’ he was ready to do it; he thought he could fit it into his busy schedule.”

Is that when you approached Tony Levin and Danny Carey?

“Yes. Tony had been in King Crimson, but I didn't think we were ever going to get him. But his schedule opened and he was delighted to do it – he said, ‘It would be a big challenge!’ But he accepts that kind of thing. He thrives on it.

“I thought, ‘Wow, we are one person away from having the kind of elite musicians that could do this.’ I didn’t want to have a band that didn’t do it as well as it could possibly be done. You had to have people of that caliber. And then Danny Carey came into the picture. 

“I’ve known Danny for many years; he’s always talked so much about Bill Bruford and those three records. He said that when he first started drumming, those were the things he listened to and was inspired by.

“So I knew he was a huge fan of that music. The same thing happened – the Tool tour was about to end and they were going into writing mode and didn’t know how long that would take. So yes, Danny wanted to go off for a few months with us.”

How will you and Steve approach the gig?

“We got together in L.A. after we had all that stuff in place. He and I sat down in his studio full of gorgeous stuff – like 400 guitars – and we sat there for a whole day ticking through. We listened to all the songs I had decided we should do; although I’m still considering things. I’m going to have that done in a few days.

“We had a book with all the material transcribed for guitar – my parts and Robert’s, except my solos. They say in the book that there’s no way they can tell you how to play my solos. And that’s true because I can’t either!

“I think it really relieved Steve a lot because he wants to make sure that what we do is honorable to the originals. Not that we have to play them exactly the same, and not that we're going to be a cover band. We certainly will not be over time; I believe we will make it our own. 

“But there are many well-defined elements in King Crimson’s music that have to be there. Steve was concerned about those things, and after we went through it, and I told him the things I thought we could branch out from, he felt a lot more relieved.”

What’s the key to locking in with Steve, seeing as you’re both going to need a lot of space?

“We don’t know – we have yet to play a note! I suspect Steve and I will end up being the same as Robert and me. A different version of it, of course, but two sides of the same coin.

“I’m anxious to hear what he’ll come up with – which won’t be just him playing Robert’s parts. But Robert’s parts are fantastic, and they will need to be there. Once we’ve had some rehearsals, I’ll tell you how it’s going. Until then, I’m guessing.”

• Beat commence their tour on September 12. See Beat Tour for full dates.

David Bowie’s music was decidedly mercurial, with hits that embraced glam, pop and classic rock. Within those pockets of chart-topping ecstasy lay moments of hyper-fluid experimentation, which could surprise even the staunchest Bowie supporter.

Such shifting music required the shifting of musicians, too; and one of those was George Murray, who held down the low end from 1976 to 1980. Alongside Carlos Alomar (guitars) and Dennis David (drums), Murray formed The D.A.M. Trio, who helped Bowie deliver some of his most challenging albums: Station to Station (1976), Low and “Heroes” (1977), Lodger (1979) and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980).  

Murray wasn’t called back after Scary Monsters. He wasn’t fired or decisively replaced – the phone just stopped ringing. It was a tough pill to take, and he struggled with it for a time, leading to his leaving the music business altogether by 1986.

These days, though, he’s put it behind him, and alongside his former bandmates, he’s prepping for a return to action. “Carlos and I may be doing something later on this year, showcasing the music that we recorded with David as the D.A.M. Trio,” Murray tells Bass Player. “It’s not finalized, but it’s almost finalized.

“And I’m scheduled to appear at the Bowie fan convention in Liverpool in July. I’m looking forward to the convention – though not looking forward to the flight!”

What inspired you to pick up the bass?

“In sixth and seventh grades, it was the sounds I heard on the radio. My parents would have the radio on in the car, and jazz on the radio on Saturday afternoons around the house. My uncle wanted to be an opera singer… he wasn’t successful in that, but he was a hell of an electrician!

“I was pulled in to music just as The Beatles broke, and all that music from the UK – The Dave Clark Five, The Yardbirds and John Mayall caught my ear.”

Can you remember your first bass?

“I read something from Bass Player with [Bowie’s next bassist] Carmine Rojas in January… Carmine and I have very similar backgrounds and similar histories. He wanted to be a drummer, and I wanted to be a drummer.

“My parents didn’t have enough money to afford a set of drums, even though I was able to take drum lessons. I had a rental set for a little while, which was an antique. But no matter how much snow I shoveled or lawns I cut, I wasn’t making a dent in the price tag. A bass guitar was a little bit more affordable.

“The first one I had was a Hagstrom short-scale bass. The first thing I remember being able to grasp was Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. I was always looking for performers who liked the kind of music I did, and when Jimi released Are You Experienced, that’s one of the main licks that I remember nailing, because it was simple. Another reason I picked up the bass was because I figured I could grasp those concepts, those notes, easier.”

Once you became more established, what did your first proper bass rig look like?

“I played the hell out of that Hagstrom for years and years and years. In college, I think, the first good bass that I got was a Fender Precision Bass. And it was a beautiful bass. It had a satin finish to it, not a gloss finish, and it had a maple neck.”

And how about amps?

“I went through several amps earlier in my career. I’ve been partial to Ampeg, though I used Acoustic and Fenders. When I showed up for the first rehearsal with David Bowie, he said, ‘What do you want to play through?’ I said, ‘An Ampeg SVT.’ So that was what I had: a straight Fender Precision and an SVT, and I recorded through that.”

How did you get the gig?

“I got a call – the same as Carmine Rojas did. But I almost missed the call that day. Around New York City I’d met Dennis Davis and Carlos Alomar, and I knew they had the Young Americans gig with David.

“We were knocking around New York City doing independent things, recording here, playing there. One day in September 1975 – a warm day – I left the house to catch a bus. I had forgotten something; I don't know what it was. As I came back I heard my father say, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, here he is!’  

“I walked in and he handed me the phone. It was Dennis letting me know that David was looking for a bass player. He wanted to know if I’d come out to Los Angeles to work on Station to Station. I said, ‘Sure!’”

Is that when you initially met David Bowie?

“I met him at a rehearsal studio on Coalinga Boulevard, when I went to start rehearsal. I looked at it as a live audition to work with David Bowie and my friends, Carlos and Dennis. I looked at the experience pretty much as a live audition until I got the offer to go on tour.”

Working on Station to Station must have been an interesting dynamic. You guys were a rocking New York City band, while Bowie seemed to have distinctly UK sensibilities.

“It came about in a number of ways at the first rehearsal – which, I might add, is the only album we rehearsed before we went into the studio that I remember.

“David, when he came into the studio, said, ‘Hi, my name is David.’ I said, ‘I’m George,’ and we went from there. The first song he laid out for us was Golden Years, and he explained the premise behind why he wrote it.

“Many think their golden years are something they enjoy much later in life, but the idea was that your golden years are being formed in the moment you’re in. And I grabbed onto that piece of information.

“To this day, it’s still one of my favorite, if not my favorite, songs I recorded with David. That underlying rhythm just grabs you and pulls you along as it grooves.

“If you listen to it closely, with Dennis’ hi-hat parts, and the way the guitars interchange with each other, you can see a little bit of what was known as the Philly groove going on underneath it.

“Then we moved on to Station to Station – I looked at it as a song with three separate parts, or three separate movements, that David had presented. We worked on all three of those parts separately but played them together. I remember it as being one full take.

“I don’t know if David had cut anything or sliced anything together as far as rhythm tracks; but just listening to it, I don’t think so. And on the first movement, David gave me that bassline to play, and we latched on to it naturally.

“That was one of the few times he gave me something to play. Most of the time he’d just say, ‘Here’s the changes,’ and we’d go from there. We kind of felt those parts out for ourselves.”

From there, you made the trio of records – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger – on which David collaborated with Brian Eno. Those records erred toward electronica, contrasting with what the band brought.

“I tell folks that it was a unique experience with all these experimental things that David was doing at that time. I kind of think he did it because he had to give these albums to RCA.

“This is just my perspective, but I think he took the opportunity to really give them the ideas and the concepts that he was interested in at that time. And his interest, I think, helped form that bond with Brian Eno. I don’t know what their history was before that. 

“The electronics, mixing and experimental stuff usually came after I was gone. The rhythm tracks went down as rhythm tracks, and in that, concepts were presented, like, ‘We kind of want it to sound like this; we want it to feel like this,’ or ‘Dennis, will you play that backward?’ – which he did on a couple of things.

“But Carlos, Dennis, and I played the rhythm. We nailed it down, kept it going, and we were able to experiment within the rhythmic structure. David was happy with that; it gave him a foundation to lay on whatever else he wanted to lay on top of it, along with Brian.”

It must have been exciting for you as a young bass player to be working with Bowie and Eno during such an explorative period.

“It was, because it was different – different but exciting. All of it was exciting. It was more than I’d hoped for or even imagined up to that point.

“But the surprise comes when you put something down, and you remember it one way, and then you hear the finished product coming back at you. It took some adjustment, listening to how David used our contributions.

“The sounds were very different; that’s probably the best way that I can explain it. And you know, the albums – especially the second album, Low, that we did at the studio in France – was almost unrecognizable to us when we got it back.

“When I would play something for a friend or an associate, I would look at their reaction when they heard it. They would have a puzzled look on their faces because it wasn’t what they were used to. It was unique, introspective and far-reaching. I’m still enamored that I got to do that with him.”

You wrapped up your time with Bowie with Scary Monsters, which was a little less experimental and featured the classic Ashes to Ashes. 

“No, that was kind of experimental also. The rhythm tracks were a little... I don’t want to say elusive, but they took a little thought to grab onto. By that time, I was using a different bass for recording – I had a B.C. Rich Eagle. I think they’re discontinued; I still have that bass, though.

“One of the pickups was out of phase and I was experimenting with different sounds on different tracks. Again, I was a little surprised by what the finished product was – not quite as much as Low, but I was surprised. Ashes to Ashes is one of my favorites.”

After Scary Monsters, did you keep in touch with Bowie?

“We didn't have any more contact. The last contact I remember having was when we did the Saturday Night Live performance. I think we did The Man Who Sold the World and Boys Keep Swinging. That was the last time I saw David. He did other things on small, medium and large scales.”

You had such a remarkable run with him; that must have been disappointing. 

“When I got the call in 1975 to work on Station to Station, I knew I was replacing somebody. I didn’t ask why; I didn't want to know. I would hear things and I just filed them away. But I kind of thought to myself, ‘Yeah, one day, I won’t be here anymore; but I don’t know when that’s going to be.’

“So for the time I was there, I was there, and I was committed. And with all the good – hardly any bad – just all the good that went along with it, I was very, very appreciative to be there.

“But when it was over, it was over. I just didn’t get called back. When he transitioned to Let’s Dance, I don’t want to say I was left behind, but I wasn’t called back. I wasn’t fired – I just wasn’t called back.

“I eventually squared with it, but it was painful. Going back to Carmine, who stepped in to replace me… David was in town, Carlos was in town, and Carmine was playing on that tour; and I had to go to their hotel, the Westwood Marquis, on the west side of Los Angeles.

“My wife at that time worked at the hotel, and I had to give her something or whatever. So I had gone up to see Carlos, and as we were coming back down to the lobby, I found myself in the elevator with Carmine and Carlos.

“I was tempted just to say, ‘Carmine, are you playing my parts right?’ But the little voice in the back of my head said, ‘George, don’t say that. It’s unprofessional and uncalled for. Just leave it be.’ And I did. I just let it be. But I had to struggle with it for years.”

What did your life look like after Bowie?

“I moved to Los Angeles in 1979. I packed up my stuff, drove over the George Washington Bridge, and I never looked back at New York. I was one of those California dreamers; I thought I would enjoy a similar degree of success in Los Angeles as I had in New York. 

“People tried to convince me to stay, but I kind of made up my mind made up on it. I wasn’t able to duplicate that same degree of success in Los Angeles. I did continue in the music business for a while, but nothing panned out.

“Things started to diminish; I couldn’t find a lot of work. And the work I could find I really didn’t want to do – although there were some very enjoyable moments. I had a number of jobs over that time.

“I worked in studio instrument rentals for a little while, so I was on the other side of the equipment; until I had to wrestle a Hammond B3 up the stairs with somebody, and I said, ‘This ain’t happening.’

“Then I was a delivery driver for a florist in Beverly Hills, which helped me pay the rent and work on my other projects. But I couldn’t survive on what I was making, so I started working for one of the local school districts here in 1987, the Alhambra Unified School District. I stayed there for 35 years.

“I didn’t do hardly any music. My wife at the time was the musician in the family. My participation in the music industry subsided from 1986. I hadn’t really performed until October of 2023, when I started stepping out again.”

Now you’re back out there celebrating it, how do you view your contributions to  Bowie’s catalog?

“Looking back now, I realize I just so fortunate to have had that experience and been able to work with Dennis and Carlos and all the people I met along the way. 

“I look at it as David taking the opportunity to say, ‘Okay, if I gotta give RCA the albums, I’m going to give them what I want to give them and not worry about anything else,’ which I think he might have done. 

“I don’t know whether that was truly his motivation, but I was fortunate. I’m happy to have been part of that and am very happy now, looking back on everything.”

• Murray appears alongside Alomar at the David Bowie World Fan Convention in Liverpool, UK in July. 

Throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s, Earl Slick was living most rock ’n’ roll guitarists’ dreams. He’d logged several worldwide tours with David Bowie and played a vital musical role on albums such as Young Americans and Station to Station. 

As if working with one British rock legend weren’t enough, in 1980 Slick was chosen by John Lennon to play guitar on the former Beatle’s first album in five years, Double Fantasy.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Slick says. “I was really, really busy back then. There are days now when I astonish myself going, ‘Christ, did I really do all that?’ I’ll go on Wikipedia and be like, ‘Oh, there’s this and that.’ Or somebody will call and say, ‘I was just on Spotify and you’re on this record.’ I’ll say, ‘Now that you mention it, I am. I forgot about that one.’”

By the mid-’80s, however, the high-profile gigs weren’t coming like they used to. Slick attempted a career reboot with ex-Stray Cats members Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker in Phantom, Rocker & Slick, but their union lasted for only two albums. 

After kicking a debilitating drug and alcohol dependency, he joined the L.A..-based glam-metal band Dirty White Boy, who went belly-up after one album. A short stint with another L.A. outfit, Little Caesar, yielded similar results. Finally, in 1992, fed up with beating his head against the wall, Slick decided to chuck it all and headed to Lake Tahoe. For the next four years, he pursued a “normal job” selling timeshares.

“Only problem was, I sucked at it,” he says with a laugh. “I was no good at it at all. It was a strange time – I was adjusting to being sober, and I was filled with anxiety and discouragement from being jerked around by record companies. I just thought, ‘I need a drastic change.’ So I went somewhere I could be anonymous and get away from it all.”

In an unlikely turn, Slick was tempted to ditch retirement by a Tahoe neighbor, Whitesnake singer David Coverdale, who floated an offer for the guitarist to join the veteran hard rock band. 

“I gave it some serious thought, but I finally had to say no,” Slick says, “I realized I would have been faking my way through it, and it would have backfired on both of us.” More to the guitarist’s liking was a six-month writing collaboration with Coverdale that resulted in the singer’s third solo record, 2000’s Into the Light.

After recording the album, Slick still wasn’t convinced that he was ready to return to music full time. That all changed in 1999, when he received a vague and bewildering email indicating that somebody was looking for him. Some amateur sleuthing revealed that the somebody was none other than David Bowie. “I contacted David, and before you knew it I was back in,” Slick says.

Over the next 14 years, Slick played with Bowie on Heathen (2002), Reality (2003) and The Next Day (2013) and toured with the singer until 2004 (after suffering a mild heart attack on stage in Prague, Czech Republic, during the Reality Tour, Bowie was forced to cancel his remaining dates and never resumed full-time performing). 

Meanwhile, the guitarist released solid solo albums (2002’s Slick Trax, 2003’s Zig Zag and 2021’s Fist Full of Devils), toured with the New York Dolls and the Yardbirds, as well as a band called Slinky Vagabond (which included the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock and Blondie’s Clem Burke).

Recently, Slick was reunited with various Bowie alumni (among them pianist Mike Garson, guitarist Mark Plati, bassists Gail Ann Dorsey and Tim Lefebvre) on a new band project, KillerStar, spearheaded by singer Rob Fleming and drummer James Sedge. The group recorded an album’s worth of material remotely, and there are plans to perform live.

Thus far, only two tracks have been released – the faintly Bowie-esque Should’ve Known Better blends classic rock and art rock, while Falling Through bears traces of prime Pink Floyd – but Slick isn’t sure which is which.

“I don’t know titles, really,” he says. “I don’t even know half of the Bowie titles I’m on except the hits. But I had fun doing the KillerStar stuff. It seemed like a good opportunity, and it turned out well. Technology is amazing; I can do all this recording without leaving home.”

I’m going to jump around a bit, but I wanted to start by asking you about Mark Plati. You two worked on some of David Bowie’s early 2000s records, and he produced your album Zig Zag. How do you two bond guitar-wise?

“We get on great. He’s a terrific guitar partner, but then he does everything. He’s a motherfucker of a rhythm player. He doesn’t just get the parts down – he gets the feel. Whenever we played together as a guitar team, if he was playing rhythm, I didn’t have to think about anything. It was great.”

Mike Garson is also on the KillerStar album with you. What do you remember about playing with Mike on Young Americans?

“My recollections are vague. Out of all the stuff I did with David, I have a memory block about Young Americans, which doesn’t make sense because we were far more fucked up when we did Station to Station. On that record, we went in and we stayed there until we finished everything. With Young Americans, we did maybe a week of sessions and then we were back on the road. It wasn’t one continuous job, per se.”

Even with your vague memories of Young Americans, can you speak to the differences in working with producer Tony Visconti on that record versus Bowie’s later albums?

“I might as well just stick my foot in my mouth. One thing about artists like David Bowie – there’s a producer there, but when we worked on parts and stuff, all of that was David. Tony was there and he kept things organized, but the creative ideas, when it came to me, that was David. It was the same way with [producer] Harry Maslin and Station to Station; it came down to David. Most of it was the two of us working my shit out. Like on The Next Day, my favorite track is Valentine’s Day.”

Beautiful song.

“David played that for me in the control room on an acoustic the day we were going to cut it. As soon as I heard it, I said to him, ‘The Kinks’, and he went, ‘Great.’ If you notice, the rhythm guitars on that song are very Waterloo Sunset.”

That song has a memorable riff and a striking solo. 

“Yeah, well, after I said ‘Kinks,’ I started to noodle around on some rhythmic things, and David said, ‘We need an opening riff and some other riffs.’ He would play a couple of notes, and I’d get an idea and develop it. Then I’d wait to see the smile on his face, and I’d think, ‘OK, now we got it.’ It never really took a lot of time.”

You mentioned Station to Station; that title track is so revolutionary, and your end solo is way out-there in terms of experimentation. Do you ever listen to it and go, “What the hell were we doing?”

“[Laughs] I mean, on the occasion when I hear something on the radio or I might play a few tracks, part of me is going, ‘Christ Almighty, we really did pull off some cool stuff together, and it was timely.’ In hindsight, it doesn’t sound that outside the box, but at the time we did it, I guess it was.”

Do you remember which guitars you used on it?

“On Station, I used a Strat on some of the rhythm parts; actually, on the first half, where it’s a little dirge-y. Then when it goes uptempo, I’m using my black Les Paul on the rhythm and also on that solo.”

What about on Stay? That’s another gem on Station to Station.

“The rhythm is the Les Paul, and the solo is the Strat.“

Both of those songs are so freeform; they feel like one-take keepers.

“Stay was pretty much a one taker. On Station, we sat down with a couple of guitars, and we wanted it to have a little bit more structure to it, a little bit more of a melodic thing, which Stay wasn’t – that was just going to be a bluesy kind of free-form solo. But on Station, we wanted something different, so we were just sitting there with a few guitars and coming up with different licks for each little bit.”

Back to Young Americans for a second, was that your first contact with John Lennon?

“It was, but I can’t remember it.”

Because you were high at the time?

“Well, yes, I was. This is so strange because John is my favorite Beatle.”

No memory at all of working with him on Fame?

“No, I can’t remember… So fast-forward to 1980. I was uncharacteristically nervous before Double Fantasy started. I went in early on the first day. I thought if I could grab a cup of coffee and a smoke and just chill out… I got to the studio and nobody was there – except for John. I introduced myself, and his reaction was, ‘Why?’ Because to him, we already knew each other. And I said, ‘Well… I don’t remember.’ 

“The second I said it, I thought, ‘Oh, God, this could go really bad.’ You know – he called me to play on his record, and he is who he is, and I’m telling him that I can’t remember playing with him on a Number 1 record. But he thought it was hysterical. It became kind of a joke during the recordings.”

Do you recall which guitars you used on Double Fantasy?

“I used my ’65 SG Junior a lot. I had a black early ’70s Les Paul Special. Those were the two main ones. There was a Strat on a few of those things, as well as my ’68 Gibson J-45.”

Did John have firm thoughts on guitar sounds or parts? Would he direct you at all?

“None of that came up at first. John didn’t lay out anything like, ‘OK, guys, maybe you should go for this sound or that sound.’ We would learn the songs – me, John and the other guitar player, Hugh McCracken – and as we went, John would say, ‘Slick, why don’t you go a little dirtier?’ Then he’d say to Huey, ‘Why don’t you try this?’ But that would happen as the tracks were being run down.”

This was after a period when John sort of retired for five years. Was he a little rusty on the guitar, or did he have all his skills together?

“All of his guitar chops were there. His vocal chops were there. He was right on the money.”

As you and Hugh worked things out, did you do any jamming with John?

“Absolutely – and it was a gas. Every day John would break into some Fifties or Sixties thing – Eddie Cochran or Buddy Holly. We’d all join in for a while, and then he’d say, ‘OK, back to work.’ Once in a while, Hugh and I would start playing a Beatles song, and John would go, ‘Cut that shit out!’ It was really funny.”

Which Beatles songs would you play?

“There were a few things. One that would really get to him was She’s a Woman, which isn’t a Lennon song. It’s a McCartney song.”

In his last interviews, John said he planned to tour. Did he talk to you about being in the band?

“Oh yeah, it was all set. He started to talk about it during the last couple of weeks of recording, and in the final week he went to everybody individually and asked if we wanted to do it. The obvious answer was yes. [Laughs] At the time, I had just signed to Columbia, and I was supposed to start a record in February of ’81. 

“At that point, John had a plan to do Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey at the same time, but then the plan changed to put out Double Fantasy first, and then we’d finish Milk and Honey and go out on tour.

“I explained my situation to John, that I had a record deal and all that. He got in touch with my management, and they worked everything out with Columbia, who were actually thrilled I’d be going out with Lennon before my record. Sadly, none of that happened.”

Soon after, you were working with Yoko again on Season of Glass with Phil Spector producing.

“Yeah, for the first two weeks. Thank God she got rid of him. It was a nightmare. I mean, he was crazy.”

I’ll do my best deadpan: No, really?

“Yeah. [Laughs] It was the same band from Double Fantasy, but [producer] Jack Douglas wasn’t there. When Yoko said Phil was doing the record, I thought, ‘I’ve worked with a lot of the best producers, and it will be great to work with Phil Spector.’ Well, my tune changed within the first 24 hours of being in a studio with him. He was a fucking nut.”

Did he bring guns to the studio?

“Oh yeah. He had a bodyguard the size of the Empire State Building with him, and he was carrying one of those long barrel Clint Eastwood .44 Magnums in a shoulder holster. I’m going, ‘Dude, this woman’s husband was just killed, and you’re walking around with a gun.’

“The sessions were torturous. I got in the elevator one day with Yoko, and I said, ‘What time is Phil coming in?’ She goes, ‘He’s not going to be here today.’ I asked when he was coming back, and she said, ‘He’s not.’ That was the entire conversation.”

Moving forward, after a while apart, you were pulled back into Bowie’s orbit. Was there a pattern in how and when he called you for various albums and tours?

“I had to learn how David’s mind works. Whatever hit him at a particular time, that’s what he did. I had to go with the flow. I remember I played with him in 2000 – we did Glastonbury and a gig at the BBC Theatre. There were some gigs in New York. 

“A while later, he was talking about touring on the Heathen record. So this is weird – I got a call from Mark Plati, and he said, ‘Before you hear this from somebody else, it looks like David’s got another guitar player, so you won’t be going on the tour.’ I just went, ‘Well, another day with David.’

“I was in New York for the week, so I emailed David and asked if he wanted to have coffee. We were supposed to meet, but then his assistant called and said he wasn’t feeling well, and then she asked me to lunch. I went to meet her, and then we went to Looking Glass Studios, where David was doing some vocals. He wasn’t well; he had a cold or the flu. I said hi and was there for a bit, and finally he said, ‘By the way, what are you doing in April?’ I just laughed and said, ‘Why, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘We’re going out.’ I said, ‘Great.’ That’s just the way it went.”

You’re on a couple of other songs on The Next Day – Dirty Boys and (You Will) Set the World on Fire. How did David arrive at which songs he wanted you to play on?

“On that album, unbeknownst to me, David had been in the studio on and off for a year. I was in touch with the guys playing on it, but nobody could say a word because they signed NDAs. So I’m in Montclair, New Jersey, doing a blues gig. I was with a surgeon friend and he had a Cobra car. He said, ‘Hey, let’s drive the Cobra to the gig.’ Sounded good to me… On the way there, the engine caught fire and the car blew up.”

Nice.

“We’re in this high-end neighborhood, and there’s this car in the middle of the street engulfed in flames. The police and news people came down. Somebody spotted me, and it hit the internet. David saw this and he sent me an email – ‘Are you OK?’ I wrote him back and said I was fine. A couple hours later, I got another email – ‘So how have you been?’ ‘Good, how are you doing?’ 

“We started doing these weird emails throughout the day, and finally I said, 'Are you going somewhere with this?' He goes, 'I’m in the studio making a record, and you need to play on it.' When I got to the studio, I said to him, ‘Did I have to blow up a fucking car?’ [Laughs] You can’t make this shit up.”

Were you surprised when he didn’t call you for Blackstar?

“No. The thing with Blackstar was, none of us knew he was ill. We knew he was ill when the announcement came that he was dead. I spoke to him on the phone the October before he died. I had to ask him some questions because I was doing that Station to Station tour in the U.K. and Japan with Bernard Fowler.

“We had a conversation, but he didn’t mention Blackstar. None of us from the band are on that record, and I can see why. It’s a different kettle of fish from what we would’ve done; it’s kind of an odd jazz thing going on. With David, people were always coming in and out.”

Another guitarist David worked with quite extensively was Reeves Gabrels. You two never played together with David, though, right?

“Not with David, but Reeves did work on my last solo record. We met around 2010 or so, and we discovered we had more than David in common. When I was just starting out, my bands would play in Staten Island, and Reeves would come to watch me. I had no idea about that until we met.”

You two have jammed together?

“Oh, yeah. A while ago, I was in England working with Glen Matlock, and Reeves was around. We had him come in and sit in with us. As weird as he can play, he can play anything. He’s fantastic.” 

You turned down joining Whitesnake because you knew it wouldn’t be a good fit, but have you ever accepted a gig and regretted it?

“There has been that. There have been times when things were slow, and something would come up and I’d do it. But I try to suss that out beforehand so I don’t wind up in something that doesn’t work.”

What kinds of guitars are you playing these days? I assume it’s a lot of your signature guitars…

“Slick Guitars – we’ve got a new batch coming soon. We had one last year [the SL56] with f-holes. It’s really lightweight. The pickups kick ass. They’re made by GFS, but they’re Slick brand pickups. The Tele-style pickups are like old-school Tele models. I play Nash guitars a lot, and I’ve been playing Teles again. 

“I’m back to Fender amps. For the last 10 years, I’ve been playing Teles. A few years ago I went out and used Supros. Then when I got home, I plugged into a Bassman and a Marshall Plexi, and I went, ‘A Telecaster with these amps – that’s the shit.’”

Back in the mid ‘70s, David Bowie assembled a new rhythm section, which comprised drummer Dennis Davis, guitarist Carlos Alomar, and bass guitar player George Murray.

Together, they became known as the ‘D.A.M. Trio’ – a backline tour de force that recorded extensively with Bowie across a hectic 10-year period that saw the release of Station to Station (1976), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979), among others.

In the words of Alomar himself, the D.A.M Trio “redefined David Bowie once again and helped launch him into the next levels of his career” – but it turns out the revered rhythm trio came close to not existing at all.

As Murray explains in an upcoming Guitar World interview, he almost missed the call-up to Bowie’s band... because he had to catch a bus.

“I got a call, and I almost missed the call that day. I almost did,” he recalls. “I was around New York City and met [drummer] Dennis Davis and [guitarist] Carlos Alomar. I knew Carlos and Dennis had the gig with David from Young Americans.

“One day in September 1975, which was a warm day in New York City, I left the house; I was living with my parents,” Murray continues. “So, I was walking to catch a bus, and I had forgotten something; I don't know what it was. 

“As I came back up the driveway to the house, the window was open in the kitchen, and I heard my father say, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, here he is.' I walked in, and my father handed me the phone. 

“It was Dennis letting me know that David was looking for a bass player. He wanted to know if I wanted to come out to Los Angeles to work on the album [Station to Station]. I said, 'Sure.' So, I got the flight, and two or three days later, I was in Los Angeles.”

Maybe Davis would have called back later when Murray had returned from his trip, and Murray may still have been sought after by the drummer had he actually remembered to pack properly. It was a mighty close call, though.

As Murray goes on to explain, he linked up with Bowie – as well as his future D.A.M Trio colleagues – shortly after the call for what he viewed as a “live audition”.

“I looked at it as a live audition, like I was auditioning for the spot to work with David Bowie and my friends, Carlos Alomar, and Dennis Davis, on a recording for David. I looked at the experience pretty much as a live audition until I got the offer to go on tour.”

The rest was history. Murray contributed to six studio albums between 1976 and 1980, and featured on some of Bowie’s biggest hits. He is also credited with working on two live albums from 1976 and 1978, which were released in the 2010s.

Keep your eyes peeled on GuitarWorld.com for the full interview with George Murray.

George Murray will be appearing alongside Carlos Alomar at the David Bowie World Fan Convention later this year. The event will take place 26-28 July in Liverpool, UK. For tickets and more information, visit the Bowie Convention website.

The Beatles’ far-reaching and enduring influence has meant that the pop annals are full of stories of musicians’ near-spiritual encounters with the Fab Four, but Earl Slick’s tale of meeting John Lennon tops most of them – mainly because he has no recollection of it.

In early 1975, Slick had been working on and off with David Bowie and was called into Electric Lady Studios for a session with Lennon on the track that would become Bowie's 1975 hit Fame.

However, in a new interview with Guitar World, Slick – who like Bowie himself was indulging heavily in recreational drug use in the mid-’70s – explains that he has no memory whatsoever of his first contact with the Beatle. 

“It was [our first meeting], but I can't remember it,” says the guitarist – who is, inevitably, then asked if he was high at the time. 

“Well, yes, I was,” continues Slick. “[But] this is so strange because John is my favorite Beatle.”

That in itself is quite the rock ‘n’ roll anecdote, but as Slicks explains, it was somewhat compounded when, five years later, he got the call to work on Lennon’s own record, Double Fantasy…

“Fast-forward to 1980,” says Slick. “I was uncharacteristically nervous before Double Fantasy started. I went in early on the first day. I thought if I could grab a cup of coffee and a smoke and just chill out... I got to the studio and nobody was there – except for John.”

Put on the spot, Slick tells GW that – despite his nerves – he went over and said hello.

“I introduced myself, and his reaction was, ‘Why?’” recalls Slick. “Because to him, we already knew each other. And I said, ‘Well... I don't remember.’ 

“The second I said it, I thought, ‘Oh, God, this could go really bad.’ He called me to play on his record, and he is who he is, and I’m telling him that I can’t remember playing with him on a Number 1 record.”

Fortunately, Lennon took it well. “He thought it was hysterical,” says Slick. “It became kind of a joke during the recordings.’”

Indeed, Lennon was on good form during the sessions. 

“All of his guitar chops were there. His vocal chops were there. He was right on the money,” says the guitarist. 

“Once in a while, Hugh [McCracken, the other guitarist] and I would start playing a Beatles song, and John would go, ‘Cut that shit out!’ It was really funny.”

Queen and Davie Bowie’s 1981 collaboration, Under Pressure, is regarded as one of the most successful cameo pairings of the decade. It propelled both acts further into the commercial stratosphere at a time when Bowie was about to dominate stadiums with his latest reinvention, Let’s Dance, and Queen were at the full height of their majestic rock pomp. 

As a result, Under Pressure topped the charts in several countries, became an essential inclusion in the greatest hits compilations of both acts, arrived right in time for MTV’s launch and then, less than 10 years later, provided a bed for Vanilla Ice to, er, rock the mic like a vandal. 

However, in a new interview with Total Guitar, Brian May reveals that the track was initially much more guitar heavy and he’s never liked the resulting mix of the song – the outcome, he says, of the somewhat fraught clash of the “awesome creative forces” of Freddie Mercury and Bowie.

“It was all done spontaneously in the studio very late at night after we had a meal and a lot of drinks,” recalls May. “And it was a pretty heavy backing track. When it gets to ‘Why can’t we give love’, we were all working on it together, and it sounded like The Who. It sounded massively chord-driven. 

“And I was beaming because I liked The Who. I remember saying to David, ‘Oh, it sounds like The Who, doesn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, well it’s not going to sound like The Who by the time I’ve finished with it!’ You know, in a joking kind of way. But he didn’t want it to be that way.”

As such, the classic guitar band sound that had been fleshed out in May’s mind and on tape soon evaporated, as Bowie’s input dragged the song in another direction.

“It was very difficult… because we all had different ideas of how it should be mixed,” says May.

“I think it’s probably the only time in my career I bowed out, because I knew it was going to be a fight. So basically it was Freddie and David fighting it out in the studio with the mix. And what happened in the mix was that most of that heavy guitar was lost.

“And even the main riff, I played that electric, pretty much in the sort of arpeggiated style which I do live now. But that never made it into the mix. What they used was the acoustic bits which were done first as a sort of demo.”

The idea of a heavy guitar mix of Under Pressure, complete with a big central riff is an appealing proposition, but it was not to be when it came to the final production. 

Since then, May has learned to live with the results, for the most part…

“I never liked it, to be honest, the way it was mixed,” May tells Total Guitar. “But I do recognise that it works. It’s a point of view, and it’s done very well. And people love it. So we play it quite a bit different live, as you probably noticed, it is a lot heavier and I think it benefits from it. 

“I mean, David was an awesome creative force. But you can’t have too many awesome creative forces in the same room. It starts to get very difficult! Something has to give.”

In September 2014, fans of a certain glittering era in British rock music were treated to four unique concerts in which David Bowie's 1970 album The Man Who Sold The World was performed in its entirety. The album's producer and bassist, Tony Visconti, was there, as was original drummer Woody Woodmansey, while vocals came from Heaven 17 singer Glenn Gregory and guitar was supplied by Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet in the absence of the late Mick Ronson. Bowie himself didn't take part, but gave the dates his blessing.

Visconti, who we spoke to just before the shows, had a long and creative relationship with Bowie that extended to the great man’s final studio album, Blackstar, which was released in January 2016, just two days before his death.

Asked about his extravagant bass playing on The Man Who Sold The World, Visconti told BP: “I can still play like that now, but there's not much call for it. When I started out playing bass I was a jazz bassist on the double bass – so I was playing far-out solos when I was 16 or 17. When you're the bass player and it's time for the solo, you go nuts, because you've been playing rhythm for everyone else for so long, but the person who really spurred me an was Mick Ronson.”

“David and l adored Mick and looked to him for advice and guidance, and Mick said I had to listen to Jack Bruce playing with Cream. That was the style he wanted me to play. Jack's style was lead bass, which was similar to mine. I was also influenced by Noel Redding, who was a friend of mine: I adored the Jimi Hendrix Experience and saw them live several times. So this style of playing was in the air at the time, and I loved it!”

Visconti's memories of recording the album remained clear. “I was working hand in hand with the engineers to get a sonic identification for the band. We worked as an arranging team: I wasn't exclusively calling all the shots just because I was the producer. The song Black Country Rock has my bassline, and Width Of A Circle has David's melody, and the opening riff is his. We had such a ball making that album, because we were a real band, and the tragedy is that we never got to perform it live.”

So what happened, we ask? “We had every intention of going out on the road as David Bowie & The Hype. It never happened because David had his hit, Space Oddity, and he met Tony DeFries, who he adored and wanted to manage him because he was parting ways with his previous manager, Ken Pitt. It was a changing of the guard, and I had some business with Tony DeFries of my own, before David even met him, because he worked for the accountancy firm that I used. I didn't trust Tony, and David and I fell out over him. 

“Plus Tony didn't like the idea of the band: he told David, ‘You don't need these guys.’ Mick and Woody went back to Hull for a whole year before they made Hunky Dory together, and then went on to do Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. So Tony DeFries was the catalyst that foiled all our plans, really!”

It's all ancient history now, of course, and the zest with which Visconti and drummer Woodmansey attacked the old material spoke volumes about the quality of the music. Listen to pretty much any song on the record and you'll encounter some fairly complex bass parts; how did Visconti address them when he came to rehearse again after all these years?

“I started practising on my Fender P-Bass, because I played that bass on a few songs on the album. But when I came to do Black Country Rock, I didn't remember the main bassline being that hard to play. You have to stretch from the E to the G# on the A string. I realised that I'd played a Gibson EB-3 on that track, so I went and bought myself a new Gibson SG bass. The SG has about the same scale as the EB-3, like a 30.25-inch scale, so all of a sudden I found myself playing notes that I couldn't play on the P-Bass. 

“That was the Jack Bruce style of playing, on a little bass, with real fast runs. There's a triplet run when it goes to the D boogie section on Width Of A Circle, and I'm playing a very fast G triad. It's GBD, then F#DA, very high on the neck – and that would be impossible on a P-Bass with my size hands. I don't have big hands. I could play it on the SG though!”

Like the petty hacks we are, we spotted a bum note and felt the need to tell Visconti about it. It's at 06:58 on Width Of A Circle. When this is pointed out, rather than telling us to get stuffed as we deserved, Visconti merely laughed and said, “Oh, towards the end? That's an old musician's trick. If you make a mistake, do it twice and it sounds like you did it on purpose. I think I played a D when it was an F, but you could play a D against an F chord, certainly in jazz.”

Visconti's bass tone is to die for on the album – fat, overdriven and falling off the rails especially towards the end of She Shook Me Cold. How did he achieve it in the days when effects for bass were almost unknown? “I had a very powerful valve bass amp, a 200 watt WEM, with two 2x15 cabinets. I did what Mick did and just turned everything up to 10: those speaker cabinet were vibrating heavily and dancing round the studio! I only had one effect in those days and that was a Fuzz Face, so possibly I put it in there for a little overdrive, but it wasn't turned up much, because a lot of the distortion was coming from the amp.”

When Dave Davies is your uncle, it’s a fair shot you’ll have at least a passing interest in guitar. The Kinks guitarist’s nephew, Phil Palmer, has that and more.

Dating back to the early '70s, with his trusty Fender Nocaster – a gift from Uncle Dave – Palmer has played in dozens of sessions including appearances with Iggy Pop, Sheena Easton, Eric Clapton, Bryan Adams and Dire Straits, of whom he was an official member in 1992 and ’93.

Indeed, they call him ‘the Session Man,’ and Palmer holds the moniker so dear he’s named his autobiography after it: “I’ve had a long career,” he tells Guitar World. “And I was never one to think about it; I just went from one project to the next.

“Then the lockdown came, and it occurred to me I was sitting on my bum, so I might as well write about my career. And I’m glad I did it. It was fun researching myself, looking back on everything I've done, and then thinking about why I did it.”

Memoirs aside, the guitarist is also on the road with the Dire Straits Legacy tribute act. According to Palmer, it’s been a blast, but no new music will come out of it: “We’re just getting off on touring,” he says. “But I promise you that the reaction we get wherever we play is the same as when I was in the band. People love the songs.

“And they should – they’re pieces of genius. They’re brilliant and they’re great to play. So as long as they keep moving people we’ll keep delivering them. Honestly, I’m busier now than I’ve ever been. Being a session player is about getting away with it, and given how busy I am, I guess I’m still getting away with it!”

Your uncle is Dave Davies. Is that who influenced you to pick up the guitar?

“Yes. My uncles were in The Kinks, which was and still is a massive influence on me. But the guitar came about when I was five after I’d picked up a ukulele. And as my hands grew, I got into six-string acoustic and electric guitars.

“But Dave helped me a lot and supplied me with a few early instruments, including a Vox amp and a Fender Nocaster he'd picked up in America. He gave that guitar to me for my 18th birthday, and by the time I was 20, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

Can you recall your first session?

“It was with a young girl called Claire Hamill. She was from County Durham in North England. She was signed to Ray Davies’ Konk label and had a few hits. I was very young and just noodling around, and when Claire came into the studio, I didn’t know she was there, and she heard me playing and said, ‘I need help on my next tune. Would you like to play on it?’ And that was my first session.”

As a session player, how do you approach rhythm and lead playing – especially given that you need to be a chameleon?

“It’s a matter of being invisible. During sessions, you learn some of everything from being thrown into the deep end. So, you either sink or swim. You quickly learn when to play, when not to, and how to read what people need.

“It becomes a fascinating psychological journey, since you’re walking into a room filled with strangers. But if you’re good and get away with it, you’ll do more sessions and get good at it. So I approach it by knowing when to be invisible and when to shine.”

You mentioned the Nocaster that Dave gave you. Did that become your go-to guitar?

“I did use it often. But I used to carry a cross-section of stuff. I’d always have an acoustic, a nylon-string, and a couple of electrics. I’d also have a Vox AC30 and a few pedals, too.

“I liked to have a compression and chorus pedal, but the latter kinda went out of fashion in the ‘70s, so I stopped using it. I was never a big pedals guy – I’d rather drive the amp using the valves and get some crunch from there rather than pedals.”

Tell me about your contributions to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. 

“I was home one evening, and at around four o’clock in the morning I got a call from David Bowie, who was in Berlin at the time. He said they needed a guitar player for Iggy’s album and asked if I’d come over. 

“I threw the Nocaster on my back and, a few days later, I was in the studio. It was a strange session – there was a lot of energy between David and Iggy. They were winding each other up and finding exciting things. I found myself stuck in the middle, but it was very interesting.

“The first track we did was Nightclubbing. David’s direction was: ‘Imagine you’re walking down a busy street in London with music coming out of both sides, and as you’re walking down, you hear the music coming out of nightclub doors.’

“So, I said, ‘Right. Any clue about the key?’ And David said, ‘Don’t worry about the key, just the rhythm. Be the music that you’re hearing coming out those doors.’”

You used the Nocaster, but what amp did you plug into?

“It was vague. I just stood inside the studio with a Marshall amp and a wah pedal that belonged to Thin Lizzy – who were also in the studio – and gave it a shot. Another weird thing was we’d be recording all night from about 11pm to 8 or 9 in the morning. But a lot of cool gear was around; I just plugged in and made a racket that seemed to fit the bill.”

Fast-forward to the late ‘80s, and you’re working with Eric Clapton. How did you meet him?

“I had been working with a talented Irish singer called Paul Brady; we did a few big albums and tours through Europe. The first time I met Eric was through Paul, while playing in a small club called The Mean Fiddler. I’ll never forget it – I looked up and Eric was in the crowd. That was unexpected!

“I ran into him down the line while on holiday in the West Indies; we were both on the beach, and he asked me to come down and play on his Journeyman record, which I did.

“I loved working with Eric because he gave me space to play. Unlike other sessions I’d been on, he wanted me to bring something new to the table and contribute.”

What lessons did you learn while touring with Eric?

“An example of the lessons I learned can be heard on our Royal Albert Hall vinyl recordings. He reminded me to be at home on stage and never be nervous – Eric never was. He loved big events, and he always enjoyed the evening. So, a big lesson for me was always remembering to have that mindset and do the same.”

Before joining Dire Straits, you had a chance to play on Eric’s Unplugged record, but had to turn it down. Is that right?

“I was still working with Eric, and we did a big outdoor show in Knebworth. During that gig, Eric and Mark Knopfler decided to amalgamate the two bands, and we did some of Eric’s songs and some of Dire Straits’ songs. I got on well with those guys, and things evolved to the point that I ended up joining them.

“But the catalyst was that Eric had a major disaster in his life when he lost his son in New York, who fell out of a window and sadly died. We all went to the funeral, and just after, Eric’s manager said, ‘Guys, if anything comes up you should take it, as Eric won’t be doing anything.’

“Soon after, I negotiated a deal with Mark and signed a contract with Dire Straits. But literally the day after, Eric called me, saying, ‘Listen, I’m not going to sit around on my ass. I want to make an Unplugged album. Can you do it?’ I had to turn it down. It was terrible.”

Mark Knopfler is undoubtedly different from Eric. Was there a period of adjustment for you?

“Strangely, one of the reasons I got the gig with Dire Straits is that I came from the same school as Mark. I played fingerstyle and had the same country influences, and that’s probably why I fit so well.

“Up to that point, the guitarists that Mark had in the band didn’t do much – I think he had me come on because he wanted to be challenged. He wanted me to play a lot of what he played so he could easily explore new avenues, other licks and new ideas.

“I had to learn his very strange picking technique, where his right hand, almost like a banjo picker, does these odd things. So we got together, I nailed it, and off we went. Mark is so inspirational, and he loves to experiment. It was amazing to play alongside him for those two years.”

These days, you're on the road with the Dire Straits Legacy tribute. What's the latest?

“Over the last 10 years we’ve been keeping the Dire Straits thing alive. It happened by accident. We were brought together for a charity gig in Italy – and to our surprise, 10,000 people showed up. There was no promotion; it just happened.

“So we said, ‘Wait a minute, this has some legs. Why don’t we follow it and see it through?’ And 10 years later we’re preparing to go to Germany, Shanghai, Australia, and New Zealand. We love doing it, and we’re looking forward to more.”

• Palmer’s book, Session Man, is out now.

“It needs to be a bit weird,” said producer Gus Dudgeon, vaguely explaining to his team of session players how to interpret David Bowie's Space Oddity at Trident Studios in 1969. Good thing bassist Herbie Flowers was on the case. His unusually complex and harmonically probing bassline helped propel an unlikely tune to the top of the English pop charts, foretelling a prolific recording career.

Flowers’ thick, retro bass sound and jazzy-style soon became a sought-after studio voice, leading to bass-prominent hits like Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side and Harry Nilsson's Jump In The Fire, as well as countless Bowie tracks. 

Even though Flowers used a pick for Space Oddity, the tone he achieved was mellow, with very little high-end attack. “I was a tuba and double bass player, and I wanted the strings to feel like a double bass,” Flowers told BP. “But there was no intention to be clever. We really didn't know what we were doing!” 

Proudly insisting that the session group's playing was “more jazz influenced, not American influenced, with a lot more freedom,” Flowers added that “unusual styles of playing made hit records.” 

The song itself has simple enough changes inside the C major/E minor relative tonality. It's what Flowers does inside them that's so special, giving a traditional chord progression a swift kick with hidden root notes, high ascending melodies and flat-out weirdness that complement the song's eerie subject material (about an astronaut becoming marooned in space for eternity). 

After sparsely setting the scene, with root notes in the first verse, Flowers launches into the first chorus with a slightly swinging feel, laying back while using slides and well-placed staccato notes to emphasise the slow, heavy groove. Post chorus, the backbeat lightens up, and Flowers goes way up high, giving extra lift to Bowie's lyric about “floating in a tin can” before descending back to the low E. 

By the time you get to the jazzy interlude, you begin to realise the incredible breadth and creativity of this bassline. In his second go round at the chorus, Flowers gets even more adventurous, before he straightens out on bars 60 and 61 (“there’s something wrong…”) for the set up of the song's emotional climax.

The following three bars gradually intensify using alternate root notes and Jamerson like syncopation, before exploding in a completely unexpected lick in bar 64. The bassline stabilises for just long enough to launch one of the weirdest and most unsettling fades in pop music history, with the whole band (including a young Rick Wakeman on keyboards) tinkling over a nebulous E chord as Major Tom drifts off into endless space. 

In the final bars before the fade, Flowers pushes the register envelope of his 1960 Fender Jazz Bass about as far as anyone could. Hanging out in the stratosphere of 13th and 14th position, he throws down a fearsome flurry of fills and odd rhythms, all with a dark, muted feel that evokes the discordant image of Paul McCartney playing an atonal upright bass solo. It's pretty much centred on E Mixolydian, but Flowers throws in plenty of ‘out’ notes for good measure. 

“Keep going, keep going”, Flowers recalled producer Dudgeon saying, partly because they needed the time for DJs to announce over the ending, a standard practice in the days of classic rock radio.  

Flowers did it all with the only electric bass guitar he’s ever owned: a 1960 Fender Jazz Bass with all original components – the same frets, the same pickups – everything. His studio rig was a 20-watt all-tube Wallace amplifier with a mic'd 18-inch speaker.

A handful of some of David Bowie’s closest collaborators have reunited as KillerStar – an all-new band blending elements of classic and art rock that have now released their debut single.

Should’ve Known Better features Rob Fleming and James Sedge, as well as an army of Bowie’s “most trusted” session players: Earl Slick and Mark Plati on guitar, Mike Garson on Piano, Gail Ann Dorsey and Tim Lefebvre on bass guitar, Emm Gryner on backing vocals and Donny McCaslin on saxophone.

As an ensemble, KillerStar collectively contributed to key Bowie eras. Slick, for example, worked with the singer between 1975 and 2013, while Dorsey began her prolific partnership with Bowie back in 1995.

As such, the KillerStar project – which nods to Bowie’s 2003 track, New Killer Star – marks a key musical chapter for this assortment of reunited and newly acquainted musicians, all of whom have explored different paths since Bowie passed away in 2016.

“Since Bowie died, we’ve all gone off in different directions,” Slick said in a statement. “But with this album we worked on new material and that was great.”

Per the band’s own words, KillerStar’s sonic direction is rooted in classic rock and art rock – something that’s evident in the debut single, which paves the way for a full-length album. Crunchy hooks courtesy of Slick and Plati form the bedrock of the track, which weaves together interstellar synths, kaleidoscopic electronic soundscapes and ethereal harmonies.

“Should’ve Known Better contains all the flavors of what we’re trying to do,” Fleming said of the effort. “It has a rock vibe, but with hooks, ambient melodies and layered backing vocals throughout.”

Despite its obvious links to the legendary musician, KillerStar isn’t Bowie, nor is it trying to be: “There are fleeting touches that recall classic Bowie moments, but really this is something altogether new and exciting,” a statement reads. “Bowie chose these musicians for their unique style and ability, and that is what they have brought to the record.”

Still, Bowie’s spirit remains the glue that holds KillerStar together: “The Bowie alumni have a very special bond and we always will,” said Gryner. “David united us in a truly special way, where we spent a lot of time together, and to be able to hear each other again in this way was unique. I am sure David would have loved this album.”

KillerStar’s debut album will arrive March 1 2024.

Head over to KillerStar’s website for more info.

It’s crazy enough that, in the synth-happy early ’80s, Stevie Ray Vaughan had a top-20 hit with a Strat-fueled, 12-bar-blues shuffle called Pride and Joy. Even more bizarre is that, that same year, his raunchy Albert King–inspired bends graced a bona-fide mega-hit, David Bowie’s jittery Let’s Dance, which spent a solid three weeks at the top of the charts.

Let's Dance – and the album of the same name – is notable because it served as the world’s introduction to Vaughan’s dynamic fretwork. Vaughan met Bowie at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. After SRV's performance, Bowie was so impressed that he later said, “[He] completely floored me. I probably hadn't been so gung-ho about a guitar player since seeing Jeff Beck with his [pre-Yardbirds] band, the Tridents.“

Of Bowie, Vaughan said, “To tell you the truth, I wasn't very familiar with David's music when he asked me to play on the sessions... David and I talked for hours and hours about our music, about funky Texas blues and its roots. I was amazed at how interested he was.“

Let's Dance raised eyebrows, expectations and bank accounts for all involved.

Vaughan plays lead guitar on several Let's Dance tracks, including two of the album's many mega-hits (Let's Dance and China Girl), but guitar-wise, the best of the bunch is the less-famous Cat People (Putting Out the Fire).

It's got the album's healthiest serving of SRV: he solos in the middle, adds Albert King-style bends throughout and also solos near the end of the song.

SRV was slated to hit the road with Bowie to promote Let’s Dance in May 1983 – but Texas Flood was about to come out. The Bowie tour would keep him on the road for a year, keeping him from promoting his own album. Bowie’s management decided to let Vaughan open select dates on the tour.

That sounded fine to SRV. But shortly before the tour began, Bowie’s management reneged. Not only would they not allow Double Trouble to open for Bowie, but Vaughan couldn’t give interviews about his album while on tour for Bowie. SRV never got to decide whether or not to stay with Bowie. Chesley Millikin, his manager, did it for him.

Moments before Vaughan boarded Bowie’s bus, the tour manager pulled his gear and bags off the vehicle. The bus took off without him, leaving SRV on the sidewalk with no idea what to do next.

SRV talks briefly about the circumstances surrounding his unceremonious exit in a 1986 interview on a New Zealand TV show, which you can watch below. The Bowie chat starts at the 1:20 mark.

“It stopped because Double Trouble was really never ever included on the shows,“ a clearly hurt Vaughan explains. “It was just a lot of bullshit. He [Bowie] just wanted me to play with him. So I didn't go.“

Of course, we all know what happened next. With his new freedom, Vaughan focused his attention on promoting Texas Flood and turned the loss into a gain, setting him on the path to becoming a blues guitar hero.

If it weren't for the Stratocaster master's untimely death in 1990, who knows whether SRV and Bowie would reunite down the line. Yet, regardless of what went down over the tour, we have the Thin White Duke to thank for bringing one of the all-time guitar greats to the wider world of music.

Throughout her distinguished career as a bass player, which included a twenty year run with David Bowie, Gail Ann Dorsey has relied on a tried-and-tested formula of Ernie Ball Music Man basses and Ampeg amplification. “I got my first StingRay in ’84 or ’85 on the first tour I’d ever done with a band called the Thrashing Doves,” said Dorsey in the May 2010 issue of Bass Guitar Magazine. “With a StingRay bass guitar I can cover just about anything.”

Affectionately known as Marilyn, that same StingRay remains Dorsey’s favourite bass to this day and has accompanied her on tours all over the world. But why 'Marilyn'? 

“I was on a train reading some magazine and there was a picture of Marilyn Monroe – not that I’m a big Marilyn Monroe fan or anything, but it was just a great photograph. She was reading a script in her trailer for the last film she ever did before she died, and she looked so perplexed, like she was never going to remember her lines; and there was just something about that picture that resonated with the way I feel when I’m trying to get something right on the bass. I could just imagine what was going through her head.

“So I ripped the picture out of the magazine and took it to a printer’s in London and had them blow it up so I could put it underneath the clear scratchplate that I’d already got for my StingRay. That picture has been there ever since, and for every tour I do I try and have Marilyn with me.”

Following Tony Levin’s fretless work on David Bowie’s Outside record, Dorsey added a fretless bass to her collection for Bowie’s 2003 A Reality Tour. “I used an MTD fretless on The Motel and Slip Away. Initially, I didn’t own a fretless, so I used a TC Electronic chorus pedal and an Ibanez AD99 Analog Delay. The TC is such a good chorus – you don’t lose any bottom at all and it doesn’t thin the sound out. 

"Even with the fretless I still use the Ibanez for my own compensation, because I’m not really a fretless player and it gives me a bit more room if I don’t quite make the note. I don’t really like fretless basses to be honest: it’s not my favourite sound, but some players can really pull it off, like Tony Levin – he has a gorgeous fretless sound. Pino I like, and Jaco Pastorius, but that’s about it.”

Despite her long-standing relationship with Ernie Ball, and her wariness of active basses, Dorsey sought out revered bass builder Michael Tobias of MTD basses following an unusual gig in France. 

“I got a job playing for an amazing event at Le Bercy in Paris called Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil, which featured three Algerian singers – Khaled, Faudel and Rachid Taha – the Cairo Orchestra, a horn section from the UK, some amazing percussionists…  Altogether there were 52 people onstage! It was mainly groove based and I used my StingRay on a few of the tunes, but I didn’t really know what I was in for, so I wanted to get a bass that was a little more ‘high tech’ in case I really needed to cut through.” 

“I went to a music store in Kingston, New York, and there was an MTD in there – a Grendel, which Michael doesn’t make anymore. It just felt so smooth and easy to play. The neck was much flatter than a StingRay or a Fender bass, and I could actually dial in a nice tone that wasn’t too intimidating. I could crank the treble and the active pots for that modern sound, but I could get a much warmer tone, and Michael lives in Kingston, which was just down the road from me, so it was nice to support a local maker!”

Like her Music Man ties, when it comes to amplification Gail’s affiliation with Ampeg is equally long-standing and plays a key part in her onstage sound. ‘It took me a while to find the right amp, but I think Ampegs are the best bass amps ever made and I don’t play anything else. There are other bass amps that are really good, but they often have too many knobs and can be very bright. My Ampeg can do that, but for the most part it just has a beautiful tube sound.”

A Reality Tour is available to buy on Amazon.

It wasn’t the biggest-selling album of David Bowie’s career but The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is the album that thrust him into the public’s consciousness, broke him in America and heralded the arrival of a new artistic force on a global scale. People are still talking about it today: To mark the 50th anniversary of the Spiders' final gig in July 1973, Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture, the classic concert movie by D.A. Pennebaker has been digitally restored and is being re-released in US cinemas throughout July. 

The album itself was released in June 1972 and reached number 5 in the UK and a lowly number 75 in the US – but went on to sell in excess of 7.5 million copies.

With his band, the Spiders From Mars — Mick Ronson (guitar), Trevor Bolder (bass) and Woody Woodmansey (drums) — Bowie adopted the Ziggy Stardust character and in doing so created the ultimate concept album. That said, many of the songs on the LP were recorded several months before any such ideas were even suggested, shortly after Bowie’s previous album Hunky Dory was finished. 

Trevor Bolder, a phenomenally talented and melodic bassist, could be seen with Rickenbacker and Fender instruments at the time – but for this album and its 1973 follow-up Aladdin Sane, he made the most of a Gibson EB3 bass, either plugged direct or using Marshall and Ampeg amplification. Judging from the sound of the basslines, flatwound strings were certainly the order of the day, most likely courtesy of Rotosound.

Bolder’s first bass had been a Burns (“They were horrible, weren’t they?” he joked) and then a Precision that he swapped for a Mustang when he joined Bowie’s band: “I only swapped it because I had such small hands,” he told Bass Player. 

“With Bowie I used a 100-watt Marshall bass head and two 12” cabs,” he said. “That was it. It was like, plug in, turn it up, and away you go. I was a huge fan of Jack Bruce so I had a slight edge of distortion on it, but there were no pedals or anything like that back then.”

One fan of Bolder’s playing is a fellow bass player from Hull, Lou Duffy-Howard of the Red Guitars. “Trevor was a fantastic bassist,” she said. “He was just such a melodic player and he never played anything the same twice – listen to the songs. If you listen, he's playing something different in every chorus, always got loads of different interesting little runs.”

Bolder was a multi-instrumentalist – like his hero Jack Bruce – and he felt that helped him develop his style. “I think the thing that was good for me – like it was for Jack Bruce who played cello, which is a melodic instrument – was that I played trumpet and I adapted the trumpet stuff to the bass as well, playing melodic parts,” he told Let It Rock. 

“I never wanted to just be a bass player plonking away, I always wanted to have the edge to the sound and be able to play with a melodic feel. I play a lot of notes – too many notes sometimes," he joked. "A bass player isn’t just somebody who just sits back there and plonks away, it’s somebody who adds a lot to the music.”

The album opener Five Years features a picked bassline that sits perfectly among the drums and piano of the verses, with a low-mid presence that fits the instrumentation of the track. The song never breaks away from its mid-tempo rhythm, and Bolder’s performance reinforces its simplicity, sitting perfectly with Woodmansey’s bass drum.

Soul Love features a constantly moving bass part. Even when playing in the upper register, Bolder’s bass tone is full, consistent and smooth. The track was recorded in November 1971, before Hunky Dory’s release. 

Moonage Daydream was written by Bowie in early 1971 and released as a single in May that year by the band Arnold Corns, a short-lived Bowie spinoff project, before being revisited for this album. Both Woodmansey and Bolder cite the track as their favorite on the album, as did producer Ken Scott. Bolder’s signature ascending and descending grace notes shift between each root note in the verses – and his descending bassline, in unison with Bowie’s descending backing vocal, creates a memorable earworm.

Did Bowie get involved in writing the bass parts, we asked him? “No, it was all mine,” said Bolder. “With him, he played you a song, and you had one run-through and that was the one you took. That was it. Ziggy Stardust was recorded in a day and mixed in two days. The backing tracks for Aladdin Sane only took two days.”

For budgetary reasons? “No, that was just how he worked. He was an easy man to work with, but it was difficult when you were doing something like The Jean Genie, [from Aladdin Sane] which he played you once and then made you record it. That’s why that cock-up is on there at the end of the first verse, where he says ‘Get back on it’. I went down to the B before I should have done, one bar early. He liked it, though, and said he wanted to keep it.” (Later, Bolder went “on tour with a couple of the guys from Def Leppard a few years ago and we played that song every night – and I had to play that mistake every night, because they said, everybody knows it!”)

Ziggy's lead single, Starman was the last song written for the album. It climbed the charts slowly, but after it was performed on Top Of The Pops in July 1972 it took off, taking the album with it. Now everyone knew who Bowie and his Ziggy creation were, including the more traditional TV viewers of the day, some of whom were appalled by Bowie’s affectionate embrace of Ronson. 

Lady Stardust is believed to be about Bowie’s fellow glam-rocker Marc Bolan, and features a fine performance on piano by Mick Ronson, a man of many talents and the perfect foil for Bowie at this time in his career. Star combines several different feels, rhythms and tempos while Hang On To Yourself has an almost punky feel, certainly from the bass performance.

Ziggy Stardust itself needs no introduction. It’s one of Bowie’s signature compositions, resplendent with a fine bass performance from Bolder. It’s played with a pick, with slid notes and constantly moving, sometimes tasteful venturing into the upper register for good measure. 

It’s easy to wax lyrical about David Bowie and his musical output, despite some of his misfires. But Ziggy Stardust is not only one of the highlights of his back catalog, but a great record of Bolder's talent and his status as one of the most influential bassists of the 70s. His later work with Uriah Heep only added to his ongoing legacy.

David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture is showing at selected cinemas across the US throughout July. For info and tickets visit Bowie's website. A 50th Anniversary Soundtrack album will be released on 11 August via Rhino. The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is available to buy and stream.

When the legendary Jeff Beck passed away in January, he was remembered as a player who epitomised ‘feel’ in just about every conceivable way. Summarising the profound sense of loss for the guitar community, Total Guitar noted how Beck was truly in a class of his own. The same is true of another player we lost more than 30 years ago: Stevie Ray Vaughan.

SRV had that same magic touch that all guitarists strive for, never running out of ideas that could amaze the listener at every turn. As with Beck, you got the sense that this was a musician speaking through their instrument, conveying deep emotions and telling stories via the means with which they were most at ease – a rare gift in being able to effortlessly move audiences through honesty, passion and charisma. 

Many guitar players will remember hearing the song Lenny for the first time and feeling like their eyes had just been opened – Stevie Ray Vaughan using sophisticated sixth voicings, Hendrixian doublestops and mouth-watering pentatonics to pay tribute to his wife Lenora Bailey, who bought him the 1965 Stratocaster also named after her.

Then there are tracks like Scuttle Buttin’ which saw him defining what would become known as the Texan sound, ripping through open position blues runs at speeds few had ever dared. 

From early fan favourites like Pride and Joy, Texas Flood and Cold Shot to latter works like Crossfire, Tightrope and the jazz-influenced masterpiece Riviera Paradise, SRV was in many ways the Jimi Hendrix of the 1980s, paying tribute through renditions of Hendrix classics Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and Little Wing, and also by tuning half a step down. 

“I loved Jimi a lot,” Stevie told Guitar World in 1984, noting how Hendrix “could do anything” and “was so much more than just a blues guitarist”, while also adding how he’d been learning various parts and “trying to expand on it – not that I can expand on it a whole bunch – but I try”. 

Like his biggest hero and influence, SRV was a daredevil who would throw himself into the eye of the storm in order to conjure up magic, taking risks as an improviser and somehow managing to never set a foot wrong or run out of gas.

Comparisons can also be made to the late great Eddie Van Halen, and the sheer sense of technicality that they both brought to their respective genres – SRV taking the innovations of Albert King, B.B. King and Freddie King to new virtuosic heights, more aggressive than any blues artist before him and leading the charge for a whole new wave of harder-hitting players. 

His range of dynamics was as wide as it gets, going from furious tremolo picking and wailing bends to breath-taking moments that were as quiet as a whisper, making the listener lean in and almost strain to hear the ghost notes he may or may not have been playing.

As Eric Clapton once said of SRV: “I don’t think anyone has commanded my respect more.” On that fateful night in 1990 when Stevie died in a helicopter crash, he and Clapton had performed together on stage mere hours earlier. 

In a heartfelt tribute, Clapton recalled: “The first time I heard Stevie Ray, I thought, ‘Whoever this is, he is going to shake the world.’ I was in my car and I remember thinking, I have to find out, before the day is over, who that guitar player is. That doesn’t happen to me very often. 

“I remember being fascinated by the fact that he never, ever seemed to be lost in any way… It was as though he never took a breather or took a pause to think where he was gonna go next, it just flowed out of him. It’s going to be a long time before anyone that brilliant will come along again.”

But it wasn’t just SRV’s playing that took the world by storm – it was also his tone, a glassy edge-of-breakup kind of sound that almost every blues player on earth will have ended up chasing at some point in their life.

And, all in all, his was a fairly simple rig: positions four and five on his Strats were often his favourites, usually fed through an Ibanez Tube Screamer (he used TS808s, TS9s and TS10s at various points of his career), along with a Vox V846 wah pedal that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix and a couple of high-powered Fender amps. 

And let’s not forget the man’s dress sense – given his love for black hats, flamboyant shirts, cowboy boots, conchos and ponchos, he was someone who looked every bit the guitar legend.

He was born Stephen Ray Vaughan on October 3 1954 in Dallas, Texas, and as a young boy he was guided towards music by his older brother Jimmie, who went on to become famous in his own right as guitarist of The Fabulous Thunderbirds. 

For his seventh birthday, Stevie was given a toy guitar from Sears, and a couple of years later he was donated a Gibson ES-125T from his brother, which he’d use to mimic the immortal lines he’d heard played by Albert King and Muddy Waters.

“Jimmie would leave his guitars around the house and tell me not to touch ’em,” Stevie once revealed. “And that’s basically how I got started. I actually wanted to be a drummer, but I didn’t have any drums. So I just go into what was available to me at the time.”

Through his early teens he performed with a number of bands – The Chantones, The Brooklyn Underground, Southern Distributor and Liberation, the latter supporting ZZ Top at Dallas’ Adolphus Hotel and even jamming on stage with them. 

By this point, Stevie had lost interest at school and had ultimately decided what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He joined Cast Of Thousands, with whom he made his very first studio recordings, and then formed his own group, Blackbird, followed by stints in Krackerjack and then The Nightcrawlers. 

But it was The Cobras that helped him cast his name as a Texan blues legend, and it was during these years that he wound up guesting with heroes like Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Albert King at famous Austin blues nightclub Antone’s. After some personnel changes the band was renamed Double Trouble, eventually settling with Chris Layton on drums and Tommy Shannon as the bass player. 

In 1982 the trio got their big break after being invited to perform at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, but the set wasn’t particularly well received thanks to the amount of sheer volume coming from the stage. 

As Stevie would recall of the booing they received, “It wasn’t the whole crowd. It was just a few people sitting right up front. The room there was built for acoustic jazz. When five or six people boo, wow, it sounds like the whole world hates you! They thought we were too loud, but shoot, I had four army blankets folded over my amp, and the volume level was on two. I’m used to playin’ on 10!”

Some good came out of it, however. One of the people watching happened to be one of the most famous musicians in the world, David Bowie, who later said of SRV’s playing: “It completely floored me.” Bowie was reminded of witnessing Jeff Beck play live in the ’60s in one of his early groups. “I hadn’t been so gung-ho about a guitar player since seeing Jeff Beck with The Tridents,” he raved.

And that wasn’t the only music contact that the band acquired during their first overseas visit. The night after the festival, the trio performed at Montreux Casino where singer-songwriter Jackson Browne was in attendance. 

Browne was so impressed he offered them free use of his Los Angeles recording studio, and it was during these sessions, for what would become debut album Texas Flood, that Bowie called to invite Stevie to play on his album Let’s Dance – produced by legendary Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers.

SRV played lead on six of the eight tracks on Let’s Dance, a major contribution comparable to those of other great guitarist who had worked with Bowie in the past, including Mick Ronson, Robert Fripp and Carlos Alomar. 

The album’s title track and lead single was more of a funk-pop number than the 12-bar turnarounds SRV had cut his teeth playing, which is perhaps what made his contributions so striking – taking the influence of blues to new places and winning himself new fans in the process, while also landing a deal with Epic for his solo releases.

The collaboration with Bowie came to an abrupt end, however. After he had been picked to play in Bowie’s backing group for a world tour on which he and Double Trouble were lined up as the opening act on selected dates, the offer was retracted, leaving Stevie with no choice but to throw himself into his own music. So that’s precisely what he did. 

Texas Flood signalled the arrival of a new kind of blues that was less loose and free, and instead more focused, sharp and energetic. The album’s opening track Love Struck Baby sounded like Johnny B. Goode on steroids, while Pride and Joy and Testify had an irresistible swing to them thanks to SRV’s right hand strum. 

Elsewhere, a stylish cover of Buddy Guy’s Mary Had A Little Lamb demonstrated a mid-tempo slickness to show how Stevie was much more than a one-trick pony, with the beautiful Lenny ended the album on an apex of vast emotional intelligence, pulling at the heartstrings like few guitarists had done before him. Stevie Ray Vaughan had arrived. Guitar music was never to be the same again…