Seven decades since it rolled off the production line in Fullerton, California – and whatever your personal tastes – you’d have to agree that Leo Fender’s deathless doublecut is the quintessential electric guitar.

It’s the shape a kid would draw if you handed them a crayon. It’s the model you’d show to a visiting glow-fingered alien curious about humanoid rock ‘n’ roll.

To sling a Strat is to experience the ultimate collision of tone and ergonomics.

Respect to the Telecaster (born three years earlier, in 1951), but it’s a caveman’s club next to Leo’s next great lightbulb moment.

Sleek as a surfboard, contoured to the body like a well-cut suit, with stellar access and the first bulletproof tremolo system. Sonically unique, with an unmistakable singlecoil ‘cluck’ that could be fattened, starved, or stacked via a cluster of idiot-proof dials and a five-way selector (from the mid-’70s on).

Back then, in 1954, the Strat seemed to come from the future, and even now, if you pause and consider it afresh, it still does.

But the Fender Stratocaster would just be a glorified carpentry project without the players who danced across its neck and gave it life. Here we celebrate 25 of the very best Strat-o-masters, from the worlds of blues, rock, funk, disco, prog, shred, grunge, metal, and beyond.

Buddy Holly

It’s December 1, 1957. Buddy Holly is performing That’ll Be The Day on his Ed Sullivan Show debut, and the great American public is seeing the Fender Stratocaster in action for the first time.

He might look like a librarian on uppers, but the Texan bandleader’s piston-pump rhythm work is not to be sniffed at, and to a generation that has known nothing but horn bands, that hard, biting jangle is a clarion call announcing that things will be different from now on.

Jimi Hendrix

Admittedly, the defining image of the Strat’s greatest Sixties ambassador sees him torching the damn thing onstage at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. But the instrument’s real pyrotechnics happened before Jimi lit the match.

Exploring the outer limits of its mischief-ready sonic scope and easily abused tremolo, he couldn’t have conjured the same black-magic cacophony – or the beauty of Little Wing – from any other model. Jimi’s trademark flip ‘n’ restring, meanwhile, was an audio-visual WTF that only cemented the impression he’d just stepped off a spaceship into Swinging London.

Hank Marvin

You Americans don’t know how lucky you are. It wasn’t until 1959 – a full five years after US production began – that Shadows bandleader Cliff Richard bought and gifted to his guitarist what is believed to be the first Strat on British shores (a Fiesta Red stunner with gold hardware). Those gorgeous, glassy, plaintive melodies on Apache and Wonderful Land wouldn’t have shimmered the same on anything else.

Jeff Beck

Sure, a Telecaster (in the Yardbirds) and Les Paul (on Blow By Blow) were fine for the punch-your-lights-out early stuff. But when Beck really found his voice and fell into his signature techniques – the volume swells and whale-song whammy tickles, exemplified by Where Were You – only the Fender doublecut could get the job done.

“What is it about the Strat that I love so much?” he mused in an interview with Malcolm Gerrie of Sky Arts. “Its endless color…”

Eric Clapton

Like Beck, EC played ’em all, from his Yardbirds Tele, through the revved-up Les Paul of the Bluesbreakers, to the SG-fueled ‘woman’ tone showcased on Cream’s Disraeli Gears. But like so many Sixties galacticos, as the decade turned, he was drawn to the Strat, retooling a clutch of second-hand models bought from a Nashville music store into the fabled Blackie mongrel that drove everything from Cocaine to Wonderful Tonight.

“I felt like Blackie had become part of me,” Clapton once told Guitar Player. “A guitar like that comes along maybe once in a lifetime.”

David Gilmour

Compared to his ’70s-gunslinger peers, the Pink Floyd man didn’t play too many notes. But the sweetness of his phrasing, twinned with the haunting, bell-like quality of his ’69 Black Strat, meant each one was a symphony (revisit the shivering four-note starburst of Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part II).

That Black Strat was just recently auctioned from the private collection of late Indianapolis Colts boss Jim Irsay for $14.5 million, making it officially the world’s most valuable guitar.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

The Texas bluesman picked up his early-’60s Strat – known as both Number One and First Wife – from an Austin music store in 1974. As a man who played so hard he had to perform DIY on his own tattered fingers, the instrument probably deserved its retirement in 1990 – while SRV’s tragic death that August meant he never saw Fender’s signature replica launch two years later at NAMM.

Ritchie Blackmore

Deep Purple’s dark wizard got his wings on a Gibson ES-335, but a fateful 1969 encounter with Eric Clapton’s roadie changed everything (“He brought a Strat, so I said to him, ‘Do you want to sell that guitar?’”).

In a 2024 GW interview, Blackmore told us he tracked Smoke On The Water on a mongrel, before summing up the Strat’s pragmatic magic: “It’s a way of paying the bills. It also happens to be an incredible guitar.”

Nile Rodgers

Just for a moment, consider how many unfathomable millions of dollars must have flowed through the Chic legend’s ‘Hitmaker’ Strat.

Seeing action with everyone from David Bowie to Madonna, the sonic character of its unusually light alder body is perfect for Rodgers’ muted hits and zingy chord fragments. But he might never have picked it up from a Miami pawn shop in ’73 were it not for the curt advice of wingman/bassist Bernard Edwards (“Get a Strat, motherf***er!”)

Yngwie Malmsteen

Before the Scandi shredder broke out with 1984’s Rising Force, ‘scallops’ were something you gagged on at posh dinner parties.

Inspired by a 16th century lute with carved-out frets, Malmsteen recalled that “people thought I was crazy” when they saw his teenage handiwork. But there was no arguing with the added velocity of scalloping, which made this already-lightning-fast player even speedier, like strapping rockets on Usain Bolt’s sneakers. Only Clapton was offered a Fender signature Strat before him (but Malmsteen’s ’88 model was the first to feature his signature on the headstock).

Dave Murray and Janick Gers

Given all that demon iconography, you’d expect Iron Maiden’s three-guitar frontline to reach for something macabre from the B.C. Rich brochure. In fact, the British metallers’ gallop is largely underpinned by a pair of workhorse Strats, with Janick Gers favoring a Seymour Duncan JB JR-bolstered model and Dave Murray driving a pair of Hot Rails (Adrian Smith is more of a dabbler, mostly wedded to his Jackson San Dimas).

Tom DeLonge

The Blink-182 man has bounced between Fender and Gibson his whole career, and lately seems sworn to his signature Starcaster. But after retiring the iconic early “Sticker Strat”, the Enema Of The State period saw DeLonge punch out parts like All The Small Things on a pastel-hued Custom Shop Strat with a lonely Seymour Duncan Invader bridge ’bucker (it was released in 2001 as a production guitar).

Albert Hammond Jr

Beset by bowel-tuned nu-metal, it felt like we hadn’t seen a Strat in years when The Strokes broke out with 2001’s Is This It.

While Nick Valensi was all studied cool on an Epiphone Riviera, his corkscrew-curled wingman hammered thrillingly at a high-strapped 1985 reissue of a ’72 Strat (that instrument was also behind the feral, Freddie King-inspired solo on Last Nite).

Billy Corgan

Alt-rock will forever be associated with a sticker-coated Jazzmaster, but look closer and the Strat appeared in the hands of everyone from Kurt Cobain (at the ’92 Reading Festival) to Mike McCready (the out-of-phase shimmer on Yellow Ledbetter). Amongst these, Corgan was arguably the greatest virtuoso and most committed Strat-o-phile.

In his words, the Smashing Pumpkins leader “walked into a Guitar Center one day and, off the wall, bought an Eric Clapton ’57 reissue. That became the main guitar for Siamese and Mellon Collie, and launched a thousand ships of people chasing that sound.”

Mark Knopfler

Before he settled back into the molten Les Paul solos of Brothers In Arms, the Dire Straits leader was the fastest gun on London’s post-punk scene, revered for the quicksilver bob ‘n’ weave outro to 1978’s Sultans Of Swing.

Tellingly, the red ’61 he played it on (supposedly something of a partscaster) was one of the few models that Knopfler chose to ring-fence from his 2024 guitar auction.

Bonnie Raitt

The Californian slide goddess and 13-time Grammy winner picked up her first Strat on the street following a 1969 gig – immediately falling for the often-neglected third position. “It’s all about that middle pickup,” says Raitt. “You just can’t beat it.”

Eric Johnson

The Cliffs Of Dover virtuoso could easily have followed his G3 brethren into an Ibanez endorsement. But Johnson is a Strat diehard with a very specific wishlist, insisting that models from ’54, ’57, and ’58 are best (“I think Fender had a shipment of wood that was real special”) and adding an offbeat f-hole to his 2018 signature thinline.

Cory Wong

Funk belongs on a Strat – don’t argue – and Wong’s kinetic grooves with Vulfpeck have moved more feet than anyone on the modern scene. He’s proved price isn’t everything with his dedication to his teenage Highway One model – also the inspiration for his 2021 signature model – and should really be taking a salary as Fender brand ambassador.

Wong was led to the aforementioned Highway One Strat by his father, who – Wong said in a 2023 Guitar World interview – told him, “‘Listen! You love the Chili Peppers, you love Stevie Ray Vaughan. Look at Jeff Beck, look at Jimi Hendrix, look at Stevie Ray and Eric Johnson.’ He gave me this lineage of the Stratocaster and basically said: Look at all the things this guitar is capable of.’”

H.E.R.

The Strat’s generation-leaping appeal is underlined by Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson, whose breakout 2021 album, Back Of My Mind, bends the backbone of vintage R&B into bold new shapes.

“The Strat is an iconic guitar, just because of the look and shape,” says the 28-year-old Californian (who got her own signature model in 2020). “But the tone, the heaviness… to me, it’s the unicorn. It’s classic, but it’s new at the same time.”

Rory Gallagher

Bought on credit in 1963, and beaten like a dog through the ’70s and ’80s, the Irishman’s ’61 looked set for a quiet retirement. Instead, it now enjoys an afterlife as a blues-rock Excalibur, loaned out to wide-eyed fanboys like Joe Bonamassa.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna take so much shit for this’,” recalled the US bluesman of test-driving Rory’s doublecut at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2011. “Because everyone on the Internet will go, ‘Who do you think you are?’ But anybody would have done it…”

The Edge

U2’s sonic maverick has built up quite a rack since 1980’s Boy (you could argue he’s equally associated with the Explorer). But hands-down the most neck-tingling moment of any show is the delay-drenched jewelry box tinkle of Where The Streets Have No Name, and for that, a Strat on the middle pickup is non-negotiable.

Mdou Moctar

If your first guitar had been built from driftwood, bicycle cables, and the keys used to open sardine tins, you’d be glad to get on a Strat too. The desert-blues figurehead’s only stipulation is that the strings on his American Professional left-hander are at least two years old.

Steve Lacy

Every time you think you’ve got the Strat all figured out, a twenty-something gunslinger comes along and flips it on its head.

Take the Californian alt-R&B phenom, who splits his licks between solo work, The Internet, and a billion guest-spots with everyone from Vampire Weekend to Tyler, The Creator. Then there’s Lacy’s rulebook-shredding People Pleaser signature Strat – complete with an onboard fuzz circuit.

Ry Cooder

There’s a case that the Californian slide man barely qualifies as a Strat player. His trademark ‘Coodercasters’, after all, are so heavily modded that Leo Fender would barely recognize them as his children. But Cooder demands inclusion for his beyond-spellbinding, desert-baked, and dust-blown tone.

Buddy Guy

When the great Louisiana bluesman headed north in ’57, he assured his ailing mother he’d return from Chicago at the wheel of a polka-dot Cadillac. Guy couldn’t keep that promise, but made amends by commissioning his spotted Fender signature model.

He’s never strayed from the Strat, and even on the brink of his nineties, used it to dig out a gorgeous fingerstyle blues in the credits scene of last year’s Oscar-winning Sinners.

Back in the mid-1960s, Gibson’s cherry sunburst Les Paul Standard had been discontinued five years previously. But some devotees of blues guitar, such as a young Eric Clapton, knew that, if you could find one, the pre-SG Les Paul was an instrument to be reckoned with. The problem was finding one.

A post-war embargo on American luxury goods and musical instruments had ended only a few years previously, in June of 1959, and US guitars, such as Strats and Les Pauls, were rare birds and genuine examples coming up for sale were hunted down diligently by London’s leading guitarists.

So when Eric’s 1959 Les Paul Standard he used on John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton – aka ‘Beano’ – was stolen from a church hall in Brondesbury, London, where he was beginning rehearsals with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker for their nascent supergroup Cream, Eric needed to get his hands on a replacement in a hurry and there were very few to be had.

In the end, Eric turned to another young pro on the London scene, Andy Summers, and implored him to sell his 1960 Standard.

Despite Summers’ initial reluctance, money – to the princely tune of £300 – soon changed hands and Clapton had the guitar he needed to press on with recording Fresh Cream, the debut album for a group that would become every bit as influential as Clapton’s era-defining work with John Mayall.

Beano’s replacement wasn’t perfect, however. Not that it mattered much at the time, but it featured a newer style of sunburst that Gibson had debuted in 1960 to avoid fading red tints in the finish – a process that customers didn’t like at the time, but which has since passed into ’Burst lore – and this newer finish had a gaudier ‘tomato soup’ tone to it.

Eric’s new Lester also had a malfunctioning bridge pickup that would need sorting out, too. But in the cut and thrust of the 1966 music scene none of that mattered much – it could all be fixed or overlooked – because the sound that guitar made was tarnishless gold.

By turns biting and mellifluous, the voice of that guitar is all over Cream’s debut album, recorded at London’s Rayrik and Ryemuse studios and released in the UK on 9 December 1966, which featured tracks that shaped what blues could be in a new, free-thinking era of psychedelic rock. Tracks such as Spoonful, I’m So Glad and the single I Feel Free, which appeared on Atco’s 1967 US release of the album.

But though the guitar’s story as a famous instrument began in London, it ended – or rather went dark – across the Atlantic in New York, where Clapton and Cream soon ended up, initially playing dates at the RKO Theater in March of 1967, before returning to record their follow-up album, Disraeli Gears, in May of that year.

Somewhere in among these New York trips, Clapton’s Les Paul suffered what is now believed to be the second of two serious neck breaks and he took it to Dan Armstrong’s repair shop, where it was given a ‘creative’ headstock replacement that was crafted to please the young guitarist but prompted him to dump the guitar at the shop after refusing to pay the bill.

And there, after changing hands a few times, the guitar came to rest – in New York, in a private collection, kept out of sight through all the years that saw original sunburst Les Pauls change from being somewhat obscure, niche collector’s items to icons of mid-20th century guitar making.

There it stayed, widely speculated about but seen only in scarce photographs. Until today. Now, Matthieu Lucas of Matt’s Guitar Shop in Paris has acquired the guitar, which has sometimes been dubbed the ‘Summersburst’, and wants to share it with the world while it remains in his keeping. We join Matt to pick up the story…

How did this guitar come into Clapton’s hands originally? And what was Andy Summers’ connection to it?

So this guitar was bought by Andy Summers originally, way before he went into The Police, in 1964, to the best of my knowledge, at Rose Morris in London. At the time, there were only about two Les Pauls available in London – or very few.

We all know that Keith Richards was already playing one [in The Rolling Stones], and I think his was the very first sunburst Les Paul to appear on [British] TV, so he was playing his. But in ’64, it was not easy to get one in London.

During my research, I’ve seen Andy talking about how he got the guitar at Rose Morris and Clapton was playing with John Mayall already at the time, and then Clapton saw this beautiful Les Paul that Andy had in the case, and he said, "Wow. Where did you get that?” Andy told him that he bought the guitar at Rose Morris’s shop, and so Clapton went right away and bought the guitar we all know as ‘Beano’.

Then Andy was not really using the guitar that much and, in the meantime, as we all know Eric’s ‘Beano’ ’Burst got stolen – and we are still wondering where that guitar is. So Clapton kept calling Andy Summers and reportedly he said something along the lines of, “You need to sell me your guitar. I’m going to record Fresh Cream, I need a Les Paul, that’s the sound I want.”

Andy initially said no because he wanted to keep the guitar for himself, but, apparently, Clapton [persevered] and pressed him to sell him the guitar and, in the end, Andy accepted. I think he charged him £300.

An interesting point to draw attention to is that when Andy sold the guitar to Eric, the bridge pickup didn’t work properly and Andy was already using a Tele at the time, which he still has today. So he sold him the guitar, and after that Cream were rehearsing in London and recorded Fresh Cream.

The headstock on the guitar today is very clearly non-original – what’s the backstory of the neck on this guitar and how did it end up with this mandolin-style headstock?

In my opinion, Clapton broke the headstock of the guitar twice. The first time was very early on after he bought the guitar from Andy Summers. I can’t tell where and when, but when you really search the archives, in the very early pictures of Clapton with that almost ‘bowl’ haircut, you can already see that the headstock has been badly repaired and it has already been broken off, in a major way, a first time.

Apparently, what happened – although of this we can’t be sure – is that the repair [of the first break] was so bad that when the guitar was dropped a second time Clapton went to Dan Armstrong’s shop in New York City to have the guitar fixed properly.

Dan Armstrong was there and a then-young luthier called Matt Umanov, who checked the guitar, said, “Well, it’s not possible to fix the [original] headstock on that guitar because that’s a really, really bad break that the guitar just had,” so they offered to replace the headstock for Clapton.

And that’s where Matt Umanov got very innovative with the way he replaced the headstock of the guitar. He removed the original headstock and we don’t know where it went.

But then he grafted a new headstock on, keeping the original binding and fingerboard intact, and what he did was create the [new-built] replacement in the shape of the headstock from an F-5 mandolin, which made the guitar unique because nobody ever did that again on a Les Paul, to my knowledge.

[He] put Eric Clapton’s name, with a mother-of-pearl inlay on the headstock, too, plus a [representation of someone’s] face. It’s unclear if it’s a woman or if it’s Eric Clapton’s face that Matt Umanov put on that guitar with mother-of-pearl inlay.

What happened next?

From what I can tell, Eric Clapton was very unhappy with the repair, and that way he didn’t pay for the repair, but he just said words to the effect that, ‘No, no, I don’t need the guitar any more anyway, I’m starting to use the ES and the SG,’ because he was already searching for another kind of sound. So the guitar just stayed in [Greenwich] Village of New York City, at Dan Armstrong’s shop.

Then the guitar went to a guy called Adrian Barber, who was the guitar player for a Liverpool band called the Big Three at the time. After he quit the band, he stayed in Germany and he became a sound engineer. When he passed away, the guitar went [back] to New York with his son, who was living there. He didn’t really want the guitar, so he called somebody named Chris Such, who had a small guitar shop in the [East] Village called Mojo Guitar.

Chris’s place was a little neighbourhood guitar shop, so he didn’t have the money to buy a sunburst Les Paul at the time, so that’s how he called [collector] Perry Margouleff to offer him the guitar, and Perry met the guy and just gave him money, and then owned the guitar since 1986.

Nobody saw that guitar for many years because, first of all, Perry was a curator for the largest guitar collection ever – and this was part of his private stash – but mainly because Perry was very attached to 100 per cent original ’Bursts, at the time, and he didn’t care so much about the fact it had been Clapton’s guitar. And, in any case, the market for star-owned guitars didn’t really exist back then.

It was kept in the collection for years and, eventually, when I first met Perry 13 years ago, he showed me a lot of those guitars, and I was very blessed that he kind of put me under his wing – he was always showing me and teaching me about [vintage] guitars, especially this one.

Back then, you know, I was never in a position even to imagine that I was eventually getting this guitar 12 years later, but that’s what happened. And we started talking, I would say, around October last year. It took a bit of time, but we arranged a deal a few weeks ago and then I went to New York City and picked up the guitar myself.

Tell us about the pickups. The bridge humbucker isn’t the Patent Applied For humbucker it left the factory with. So what’s the story behind that?

Well, what’s interesting is that when you look at the picture of [this guitar] in The Beauty Of The ’Burst book [Yasuhiko Iwanade]…

We all know that picture of Perry with the ’Burst wall behind him – there’s [famous ‘named’ ’Bursts] Red Eye, there’s the Stanley ’Burst, the red cherry [finish] ’59 Les Paul, all of those, and there is also Eric Clapton’s guitar on there and you can recognise the guitar immediately from the mandolin headstock, of course.

But what’s interesting is that this guitar – on that picture – has a zebra bridge pickup, which, of course, it doesn’t have today. That pickup is long gone and Perry doesn’t have any idea where it went.

But what Perry is sure about is the Patent Number pickup – because the pickup now in the bridge is one of those, a mid-’60s Gibson pickup, which is good news for the guitar because Perry remembers that this pickup was in the case of the guitar, in the case pocket.

And that matches Clapton playing this guitar with the double-black pickup in the bridge. So Perry said, “Okay, well, we have this pickup in the case and I think that’s the pickup that belongs to the guitar, I’m going to put it back, so it matches really what Clapton was playing at the time.”

Because if Perry had restored the guitar [to a generic period-correct spec] back then, based on his meticulous restoration work, he would just have put an original Patent Applied For [pickup in the bridge] that he had back then from his stash – he would never have put the Patent Number pickup in the bridge position [but for the Clapton connection].

The [otherwise anomalous] Patent Number pickup makes total sense because when you read Andy Summers’ biography, and the interviews that Andy gave on that guitar, that’s one of the reasons why he sold the guitar to Eric in ’65 or early ’66 – because the bridge pickup didn’t work on that guitar.

My guess is that Clapton obtained a pickup on Denmark Street – a Gibson pickup – from 1965 or early ’66, which was a Patent Number humbucker, and he put the pickup in the bridge position of the guitar and then went to record Fresh Cream with that pickup configuration because the neck pickup on that guitar is the original Patent Applied For pickup.

We checked the solder joints on the parts, and that guitar for sure has all-original solder, except for the volume pot in the bridge position – and that’s the only major electronic change that’s on the guitar. Back then, nobody cared about original [Patent Applied For pickups] – they were all players [not collectors], and so my guess is that he just put a working pickup in the bridge position and that was it, you know?

So that’s the journey of this guitar, and that’s interesting because I knew about it for years; I couldn’t tell anyone about it because that’s not how Perry is working – he wants his guitars to be top secret, if I can say.

But then I decided to make it public for several reasons because my theory is that guitars like this should be played, should be shared with people, and I think it’s not even belonging to me, or whoever is going to buy the guitar – it’s belonging to, I would almost say, humanity because that guitar is a major piece of the ’60s and the British music and a major piece of guitar history, so my feeling is that all those guitars need to be shared and played.

So that’s why at some point, I said to Perry, “I want to buy this piece, but in my opinion it’s just a shame that it stays off the internet because I think it’s a different time now and everybody should know what happened to this guitar,” because nobody knew where it was, basically.

Speaking of the guitar just as an instrument in its own right, what’s it like from a player’s perspective?

I have had the chance to play ‘The Fool’ SG, I’ve played Eric’s 335 and – with the exception of the Firebird – I’ve played a lot of instruments that he played in the Cream era. And it’s funny because all of them [have notably slim necks], except the 335, which has more like a ’64 neck but still a very thin neck.

So I think Clapton really loved a very thin neck on guitars, you know? This guitar is quite the same: it has one of the thinnest necks on a ’60 I’ve ever played.

I would say it’s a very late ’60, too, probably one of the last 1960 [Les Paul Standards] ever made because of that ‘tomato soup’ finish and other details. It’s not a lightweight guitar, but the neck is, as I say, super thin and, surprisingly, somebody did refret it at some point with huge frets – it would make sense if that was in the ’80s as they were all refretted with big frets back then…

But yeah, the neck is super-thin. I think maybe they shaved the neck a bit when they put that new mandolin headstock on [during the repair process by Matt Umanov] and a new finish on the neck – and I would say there is a very old overspray on the guitar, too.

Structurally speaking, it’s super-easy to play and super-fast because of that thin neck. I would say the neck pickup is one of the creamiest neck pickups that I’ve tried. It’s not like a woody sound, it’s very creamy, very dense. It makes total sense when you put the guitar into a Marshall and you put the tone at zero – you get exactly the Spoonful sound.

Also, the fact that on the bridge position you have a Patent Number makes total sense because it’s really brighter in those mid-’60s Gibson pickups. When you play the guitar, you really hear the Fresh Cream sound, which is very particular.

I would say this pickup had [originally come] from an SG – it’s so bright and it’s such a rock ’n’ roll-sounding guitar. And in the middle position, surprisingly, the tone is almost out of phase as well. Or rather, not out of phase but it’s almost there – it’s really close to that sound. When you play the guitar, it’s incredible because that’s the record, you know? It already sounds like the record.

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

In the late 1960s, when both Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were leading the charge in blues rock music, the two change-makers were pitted against one another in a fierce battle for ultimate guitar god status.

It was, in theory, an easy comparison to make. Both guitarists were taking the electric guitar to an all-new level.

Clapton had already been anointed ‘god’ by the press, but Hendrix’s arrival in London in ’66 exacerbated the six-string arms race. Within months, he left his contemporaries quaking in their boots – Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, you name it. Britain’s biggest players knew they had met their match.

Clapton was included. After Hendrix crashed a Cream gig and famously stunned Slowhand and his audience with an impromptu stage appearance, he knew things would never be the same again.

It was one of guitar’s most intense – yet respectful – rivalries, one which found fans and the press alike comparing the two guitarist’s playing styles.

This didn’t sit right with Hendrix. As he once explained during an interview with Jazz & Pop Magazine in 1968, it was a forced rivalry he didn’t really understand. In his mind, they were two completely different players.

“That’s one thing I don’t like,” Hendrix had said at the height of the pair’s perceived rivalry. “Sometimes the notes might sound like [we’re alike], but it’s a completely different scene between those notes.

“First they do that [compare him to Clapton], and then they expect me to play blues exclusively. We just say we don’t want to play blues all the time – we just don’t feel like it all the time. You see, there are other things we can play too, nice songs or different things.”

Clearly, Hendrix didn’t think of himself and Clapton as similar players, but that’s not to say we didn’t rate his ‘rival’. After that Cream gig, the pair remained friends, and Hendrix never held back in dishing out praise.

“But as far as the blues scene goes, some of the things that Albert King and Eric Clapton do are very good,” he continued in his Jazz & Pop interview, which was re-published in the November 1991 issue of Guitar World.

“I don't have any favorites. It's very hard because there are so many different styles, and it's so bad to put everybody in the same bag. I like to listen to anybody, so long as they don't bore me. I tend towards the blues as far as guitar players are concerned.”

The ‘competition’ was healthy, and both players left a lasting impact on one another. Clapton once credited Hendrix with influencing his decision to turn to the Stratocaster.

Slowhand even purchased a rare left-handed Strat as a gift for Hendrix in 1970. As fate would have it, he never got the chance to give it to the American guitarist, who died the night it was going to be presented.

Hendrix and Clapton never let the forced rivalry get between them. Instead, it helped them both hit new heights.

This interview with the late Hubert Sumlin was originally published in the March 1992 issue of Guitar World.

Few musical marriages have been so magical, so intuitively right, as that of the great blues singer Howlin’ Wolf and his guitarist, Hubert Sumlin.

From the time he joined the blues legend’s band in 1954 until Wolf’s death in 1976, Sumlin played a central role in crafting some of the century’s most memorable and influential American roots music. His economical, stinging fills, unusual rhythmic approach, and perfectly placed bent notes are as integral as Wolf’s growl to the blues power of classics like Spoonful, Smokestack Lightnin’, Killing Floor, and The Red Rooster.

Blues and rock guitarists who cut and bloodied their teeth on Howlin’ Wolf tunes were heavily influenced by Sumlin: Hendrix often covered Killing Floor; the Rolling Stones, Clapton, and countless lesser blues-rock lights continue to play The Red Rooster; the Doors remade Back Door Man in their own image; The Sky Is Crying, a 1991 collection of Stevie Ray Vaughan outtakes, includes the late guitarist’s version of May I Have a Talk with You; and Page, Clapton, and Beck each flattered Sumlin by imitating him on Spoonful and Smokestack Lightnin’.

Sumlin backed Howlin’ Wolf for 23 years, a stretch broken only by six months in 1956 when he worked for Wolf’s arch rival, Muddy Waters. After Wolf’s death, Sumlin launched his long-delayed solo career, becoming a Chicago blues club fixture and making occasional festival appearances.

Did Howlin’ Wolf explicitly tell you what to play?

Not really. When I first got with him, he told me that I wasn’t ready to play his music, so I should go home and think about it for a day, a week, a month, or a year, whatever it took. “Come back when you’re ready,” he said. “When you figure out how to play my stuff, then you’re hired.”

I went home and prayed and slept with my guitar under my pillow trying to figure something out, because I knew that this man was serious. Wolf did not bullshit.

I had played with a pick for eight or nine years, and I couldn’t put it down. Then I woke up one morning and started playing without a pick, and the first thing I thought of was Smokestack Lightnin’. I played it better than I ever had and realized, I don’t need no pick. I don’t need anything but my fingers. And that was it.

Everything fell into place when you got rid of the pick.

Exactly. I started playing with a lot more soul. I never used a pick again. That was my secret to unlocking everything. My tone, my sound, everything happened right then. People can’t understand how I play. The average guitar player don’t know what I’m doing. But it’s my thing. It’s what God gave me; I don’t need a pick because I got five fingers. How can one pick compete?

One unusual aspect of your style is that you don’t play a lot of chords.

No, I don’t, but I play a lot of tricks. Like Muddy Waters once said, I’ve got a lot of gimmicks up my sleeves. I know when to get in and when to get out. Lots of guitarists just miss out on that aspect of playing. I know how and where to put it, which is what it’s all about.

Did many of your personal playing trademarks develop as a result of playing with Howlin’ Wolf for so long?

Yes and no. I also played with Muddy Waters for six months and, Lord, I learned a lot from Jimmy Rogers [Waters’ lead guitarist].

I picked up from every guitarist I ever worked with. I’d take a note from here and a note from here, a lick from him and a lick from him, and put it all together. That’s the Hubert Sumlin style. And that’s what I would recommend any guitarist do: listen to players you like and pick things up from everyone and everywhere.

You have to learn how to use your instrument to its fullest. You got five different Es, you got five different As, and you got to use them all. If you’re all over the neck, you’re better. That’s why I never used a clamp [capo] like Muddy or Albert Collins or Jimmy Rogers: Why limit yourself? You’ll notice that kids coming up today play great, and they don’t use a clamp because they’ve got better knowledge of the instrument.

There’s one element of your background that’s almost unique among bluesmen: you studied guitar at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. What was the extent of your formal training?

I studied for six months with this old guy who was with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was the first time I ever saw a dude who played both opera and blues on his guitar. It had a huge impact on me, because I didn’t know the piano keyboard and I didn’t know how to read – I didn’t know an F from an A, an A from a B or a B from a C. That guy showed me so much in just six months.

Even though you always played electric guitar with Wolf, your sound often had a bit of a country blues vibe. Is that where you come from, musically?

Actually, when I was a kid I wanted to be a jazz player like Charlie Christian more than anything, but I also loved and heard the blues.

[Those players] were all around me, and at a certain point, I realized how great all these dudes I listened to were: Charley Patton, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson… all those guys. Peetie Wheatstraw, the “devil’s son-in-law” – Jesus, man, he was something! Then when I got with Wolf and Muddy I realized that they actually played with these guys, and that blew my mind.

I’ll never forget my old 78 of Charley Patton. He was a wizard, man, a genius. I tried to ask Wolf about him, and he said, “Aw, you young punk, you’re too young to understand.” It always hurt me that I missed out on seeing and playing with those old guys, because they wrote the book that Wolf and Muddy electrified and expanded. If Wolf and Muddy were the fathers of rock and roll, then those acoustic guys were the granddaddies.

It sounds like Wolf was very conscious of the age difference between you two.

Yeah. He told me one time, a couple of years before he died, that he was “40 years too early.” He said, “I plowed mules barefoot in December, with snow on the ground, the dirt frozen as a rock.” I said, “Don’t lie, man.” And he said, “I’m not lying. I’m 40 years too early. Things are getting better all the time.” The next year he got sick and went on a kidney dialysis machine.

It can be said that you are the link between the Delta bluesmen and rock and roll. On the one hand, you played with Wolf, who was a contemporary of Robert Johnson and the other guys you mentioned. At the same time, you also exerted a huge influence on the next generation – rock guitarists who weren’t really all that much younger than you.

I’m very proud of that, and I got to meet those guys. I met Eric Clapton in 1970 when I played on Wolf’s London Sessions. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but Clapton said, “If Hubert’s not there, I don’t record.” Then Wolf said he couldn’t record without me, so they had to bring me.

Wolf was on a dialysis machine right in the studio, with doctors tending him night and day. He was so sick that on a couple of nights we didn’t even record; we just sat in the studio and got high. Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman came in, and we partied all night long, man. The cleaning lady came in the next morning and everyone was laying there on the floor. Mick Jagger had his head up inside the bass drum. [laughs] It was wild. We had a ball.

Did you spend much time with Clapton?

Yes. One day, Eric sent a limousine for me, and we drove for 30 or 40 miles outside of London to his big old mansion in the country. A gorgeous place, like a castle. We had a beautiful dinner, then he took me down to the basement, where he had all these guitars. It looked like a factory: three and a half walls of a room lined with every kind of guitar you can imagine.

He said, “Pick out a couple of those guitars, Hubert. I’m giving you two of them.” I walked all the way around the room, looking at every one of them. Then I saw this case sitting in the middle of the room. I sat down on the floor and said, “What’s in there?” He said, “It ain’t nothing, man.” I asked if I could take a look. He said. “You don’t want that.” I opened the case and took out this beautiful Fender Stratocaster and started playing it there, sitting on the floor.

He said, “Hey, man, I told you to pick any two you want from those that are up against the wall.” I said, “I know, but this Fender sure sounds good. Is it your regular?” He said, “It sure is.” I said, “I knew it, because that’s the one.” He said, “You mean to say you’re going to take it from me, man?” I said, “No, I can’t do it. I don’t want none of these.” He said, “Take it, man. At least I know it’s got a good home. Just promise me that if I ever want it back you’ll give it to me.”

I kept it for two years and hardly ever played it. Then we were both at the Montreaux Jazz Festival, and I brought it over to him. He asked me how much money I wanted, if there was anything I needed. I said, “Nothing man, it’s your guitar. Don’t embarrass me.” He just gave me a hug. He’s a nice guy. A beautiful guy.

Did you have any sense that you were making history when you recorded those classic tracks with Wolf?

No, and I really didn’t care. But I knew that he was going to be one of the greats. And I was so devoted that I wanted to push him to the top.

When you’re recording for people the caliber of Howlin’ Wolf, you’re going to do your best. And in those days, there wasn’t even a question, man: you were going to play your guts out. There had been some days in the past when my stomach ached from not having anything to eat. When I recorded, I would remember those days and remember how I never wanted to go back to them. And I would play!

What kind of personal relationship did you have with Wolf?

We were like father and son, although we had some tremendous fights. He knocked my teeth out, and I knocked his out. None of it mattered; we always got right back together.

You fought with Wolf? He was a huge man.

Oh man, he was big. He could wrap one of his fingers around my guitar neck three times. One time after a gig, we were loading up the truck, and I wasn’t there because I’d run off with this cute girl who’d been sitting on my amplifier, smiling at me all night long. When I got back they were just finishing loading, and Wolf was standing on top of the stage. He started yelling at me, calling me every name you ever heard – and some you couldn’t imagine – because he had to load my gear. I was embarrassed, man, because this was right in front of the whole band.

So I thought, ‘He can’t do this to me. He can’t humiliate me.’ So I waited until he was looking the other way, and I hit him in the face as hard as I could. He didn’t move. He just turned back real slow and slapped me with the back of his hand. I fell and rolled down the ramp that was pushed up to the stage to load the amps. I got up and walked back, screaming at him. When I got to the top he did the same thing again, and I rolled right back down, spitting out teeth.

Is that why you left to play with Muddy Waters?

No. Me and Wolf patched it up right away. In fact, the next morning, my wife woke me up and said that Wolf had been sitting in his car in front of my house all night long. I went out there and he apologized and gave me money to fix my mouth. I left to play with Muddy because he tripled my salary. They were rivals, and Muddy wanted to take me away from Wolf.

Was the rivalry between Wolf and Muddy apparent to everybody?

Sure. They were jealous of one another; they were enemies: “You stole my shit.” “You did this.” “You did that.” It was endless because they were the two biggest dudes in Chicago, and they were always arguing and competing about who was number one. [laughs]

I’ll never forget the day we played the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, and Wolf and Muddy sat down and talked and made friends. They shook hands and said, “No more enemies.” That thrilled me so much, I went and got a beer.

This is a business we do every day and love to death, and I never understood that jealousy. It’s music. Who cares who’s the best?

What are your memories of Jimi Hendrix?

He was just a little ol’ dude living in England. It was before his band, the Experience, hit it big. We played in Liverpool, the Beatles’ home, and in walked Jimi Hendrix, a little ol’ hip guy wearing earrings and a bandanna. Wolf said, “What the fuck is this guy? I ain’t saying nothing to that motherfucker.”

He came right up to Wolf and asked if he could play his guitar. Wolf nodded and Hendrix picked it up, turned it over and played it with his teeth. [laughs] He played the hell out of it. Wolf looked at him, big-eyed, and said, “You hired, man, you hired!” He said, “No thank you, Mr. Wolf. But I admire you and the blues. You guys are 100 percent. Beautiful, man.”

I never played with him after that, but I saw him do his thing in New York, after he hit, and I fell in love. The guy was great! Just a little ol’ skinny youngster. He was in his twenties, but he looked 16 or 17, and he was good, man. I mean, really good.

Hendrix often called you a big influence. Your playing on several tracks from the Fifties represents some of the earliest instances of a guitarist using distortion. How did you do that?

I was just using my Gibson and my Wabash amp, which I used for a long time. It was one of the first amps to have 15-inch speakers. I also got an Echoplex right when they came out, and combined with those 15-inch speakers, that made “distortion.”

What sort of Gibson did you play?

A Les Paul – I believe it was a ’56. I often played them. I also had a Kay guitar. For four years, Wolf didn’t have a piano or even a bass – just two guitars and drums, so Jody Williams [Wolf’s second guitarist] and I coordinated our parts closely and decided that we would both play Kays. I didn’t like that Les Paul all that much, but I sure do wish that I had it now. [laughs]

Stephen Bishop, the prolific songwriter who penned the 1976 soft rock hit On and On, and who infamously had a guitar smashed over his head in Animal House, is back on the road after a brief retirement.

He’s 74, but his approach hasn’t changed. “I've always preferred to keep things simple,” he tells Guitar World. “Give me a good guitar, a microphone, and a great song, and I’m happy.”

Bishop wasn’t thinking about music during his downtime, but now he’s thrilled to be marking the 50th anniversary of his beloved debut record, 1976’s Careless. “I'm excited to get back out there, celebrate these songs, and thank the fans who’ve been with me all these years one final time,” he says.

“Careless represents a very specific moment in my life. I was a young songwriter trying to prove that I could stand alongside the established writers. I was hungry. I wanted people to see that my songs could compete. Deep down, I believed the songs were incredible – thankfully, audiences did too.”

He adds: “To think these songs started as rough drafts in notebooks on my kitchen table, and that I still have those notebooks today, is pretty remarkable. An album that once existed only in my imagination ended up becoming part of so many people's lives. That’s a really good feeling.”

What prompted you to come out of retirement?

I thought I was retired for good. I was looking forward to spending more time with my family, especially my son, who just turned 2 and is the joy of my life. But after I announced my retirement, my agent told me the demand for shows had gone through the roof. Funny how that works!

How are you getting back up to playing speed?

I’ll admit I was rusty. It had been almost a year since I’d even picked up a guitar. But now I have a great vocal coach, a guitar coach, and even a stage coach. It’s become like a real job – which is funny because I’ve never really had one before.

I’m putting in the work because the fans deserve the very best version of me. That means practicing every day, exercising regularly, eating right, and making sure I’m prepared mentally and physically for life on the road.

What gear did you use while recording Careless?

I used my 1969 Martin D-28, which I still have and still love. Back then, my gear setup was pretty simple because I was a broke songwriter trying to make a living. It was my first album and my first real adventure into recording.

Making an album isn’t easy, especially when you’ve never done it before. Having musicians like Eric Clapton, Art Garfunkel, and Chaka Khan involved was incredible. But honestly, a lot of it was luck.

How so?

Except for Eric, Art, and Chaka, many of the session players weren't household names, but some of them went on to become even more successful than I was.

What was Clapton like?

When my manager at the time, Bob Ellis, was at Shangri-La Studios visiting Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones, another of his artists, Eric happened to be there. Bob told him, “You should meet this young artist I'm working with named Stephen Bishop. He's a funny guy – I think you’d like him.”

Eric came by the studio with his guitar, and thankfully Bob was right; we hit it off immediately. I played Eric some of the songs I was working on, and to my relief, he really liked them. He performed the guitar solo on Save It for a Rainy Day and added his beautiful slide guitar work to Sinking in an Ocean of Tears.

As a 16-year-old kid I’d seen Cream perform, so having Eric playing on my debut album was pretty surreal. He was exactly like what you’d imagine a rock star should look like; he had this effortless charisma about him.

What means the most to me, though, is that all these years later we're still friends and still keep in touch. As important as Eric was to Careless, the album would probably never have happened without my lifelong friend, Art Garfunkel.

Art was the one who discovered you, right?

My dear friend Leah Kunkel, who sadly passed away last year, gave Art a cassette of my songs. Art liked what he heard and recorded two of them for his Breakaway album in 1975, including Same Old Tears on a New Background, which I later recorded for Careless.

Art’s support helped open doors that ultimately led to my record deal. He also sang background vocals on several songs on Careless, and I returned the favor by singing background vocals on Breakaway. That's how our friendship began, and it's lasted for more than 50 years.

On and On was a significant chart hit.

It started long before we ever got into A&M Studios. In the mid-1970s I was living in Laurel Canyon – the traffic was terrible, dogs were always knocking over trash cans, and I was just another songwriter trying to make it. I had a little recording setup in a closet.

I invited a couple of friends over to help me record a demo of On and On. Mike [Staton] played Hawaiian steel guitar, Jeff played bass, and I played guitar. The Hawaiian steel gave the song a sound that immediately stood out.

When it came time to record the song at A&M Studios, I wanted to recreate the magic of that demo. I brought Mike into the session. He played a few takes and then suddenly announced he had to leave. I said, “What do you mean? We’re making a record here!”

I called his brother and complained that Mike had walked out on the session. Fortunately, he came back and ended up playing some of the most memorable parts on the record. Those Hawaiian steel lines became one of the signature sounds of On and On.

Did you have a feeling you were on to something with the song straight away?

On and On started with a chord progression I couldn’t stop playing. I’d sit there for hours playing it over and over. I like to joke that people came from miles around just to hear that one chord. I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping – I was just playing it endlessly until I finally realized I should write a song around it.

Back then, I liked writing lyrics about little details that made the songs feel more real. But I never thought On and On would become a hit. It was simply a song I loved and believed in.

You toured with Fleetwood Mac at their height of craziness on and off stage.

I hate to disappoint anyone looking for wild stories, but honestly, nothing particularly crazy happened while I was touring with Fleetwood Mac! At least not around me. What I remember most is how talented and professional they were.

I was friendly with Stevie Nicks. She was always incredibly kind, warm, and supportive. One memory that stands out happened around Christmas. I performed The Christmas Song, and afterward, Stevie came over and hugged me because she really liked it. That meant a lot coming from someone with such a unique voice and artistic presence.

What did you think of Lindsey Buckingham?

I’ve always thought he’s a remarkable musician. His guitar playing was inventive, distinctive, and unlike anyone else’s. He had a way of making complex parts sound effortless, and his contributions were a huge part of what made Fleetwood Mac so special.

But if you want a strange Fleetwood Mac-related story, I do have one! When I was making my second album, Bish, in 1978, I wanted the cover to have a romantic feel. I decided to interview about 40 different models for the cover photo.

I eventually chose a young woman named Sara. Years later, she became the inspiration for Stevie Nicks' Fleetwood Mac song Sara. I’ve always thought that was one of the stranger coincidences in my career! She married Mick Fleetwood. Sometimes the music business is a very small world.

Tell us about your infamous Animal House acoustic scene, where you cameo as the folkie who gets his guitar smashed.

This is probably the question I get asked most. People want to know if that was really me and whether John Belushi actually smashed the guitar. The answer is yes to both! I still have the smashed guitar – I even have the back piece that flew off. It’s in my living room, and the entire cast signed it!

When John smashed that guitar above my head, I knew it was coming because we’d talked about it beforehand. But it was terrifying nonetheless. We did the scene in only two takes.

Was it scripted?

No. We used the song I Gave My Love a Cherry – also known as The Riddle Song – because it’s a 15th-century English folk song. It was in the public domain so there were no licensing fees. I also wrote and sang the theme for Animal House and another song called Dream Girl.

So it really is me in the scene, although I don’t look much like myself. At the time I was touring with Linda Ronstadt and had long hair and a beard. For the movie they wanted me to fit the period, so I had to shave off my beard. Deborah Landis, John Landis' wife, pinned my hair back to make it appear much shorter.

Judy Belushi is sitting right behind me in the scene. John was a good friend and incredibly talented. He had that rare ability to walk into a room and immediately make people laugh. Sometimes the most talented ones just don't make it. I’m grateful I got to know him. I still stay in touch with several members of the cast.

You also appeared in Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video.

I’m the guy in the yellow shirt in the movie theater scene. While they were filming, I spent a lot of time wandering around the set, taking photographs and soaking it all in. None of us knew we were witnessing one of the most iconic music videos ever made.

One of my favorite memories from that experience was talking with Michael. He told me the first record he ever bought was On and On! Years later, Janet Jackson confirmed the same story. That really blew my mind – one of the biggest entertainers in history telling me he bought one of my records!

Is it bittersweet to be on your farewell tour?

Not really. I’m doing this for the fans. They’ve supported me and my music for nearly 50 years, and I wanted to thank them in person one last time. The hardest part isn’t the thought of saying goodbye; it’s the preparation. Fortunately, I have some help.

I also bring along a very special guitar: my 1984 Ferrington Stephen Bishop model. It’s bright blue, impossible to miss, and I’ve had it for a very long time. It’s been with me through a lot of chapters in my career; it’s always nice having it along for the ride. The truth is, I don’t need much. I don’t use an iPad on stage. I don’t rely on a lot of electronics or technology.

What are you proudest of?

Since I was 15 I’ve lived by a quote: “In my life I will lose good friends, girlfriends, and faith in some people, but I will always have my songs.” Through all the changes, successes, disappointments, and surprises, the one constant has been songwriting. It’s given me experiences I never could have imagined as a kid growing up in San Diego.

Do you have any regrets?

Honestly, not many. I’ve lived the life I wanted to live; not everyone gets to say that. Of course, there are things I might have done differently along the way, but I wouldn’t change the overall story.

The one exception might be that I never got to write a song with The Beatles. I’ve been a Beatles fanatic my entire life. Like most songwriters, they changed my music forever. If I have one remaining item on my bucket list, it would be to write a song with Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr. Then again, there's still time – Paul, Ringo, give me a call!

• Bishop will announce details of his 2027 farewell tour via his website.

When Eric Clapton reached out to Derek Trucks to invite him onto to his collaborative record with JJ Cale, the slide guitar master thought he was being prank-called.

In 2006, Cale and Slowhand teamed up for The Road to Escondido, a star-studded blues album that also featured contributions from John Mayer, Billy Preston, Taj Mahal, Steve Jordan, Pino Palladino, and more.

Clapton also tried to approach Derek Trucks for the album, but it was a rocky recruitment phase. Not only did Trucks ignore the call, he was skeptical whether the real Slowhand had phoned him.

“I was here at home playing poker with my grandfather and dad and brother and a bunch of friends, and I remember just getting a call on my cellphone,” Trucks remembers of the project in an interview with Alan Paul.

“This is early days, where you had to have a specific international plan or you couldn’t call them back. I just didn’t recognize the number so I let it go to voicemail.

“It was like, ‘Hello. This is a message for Derek Trucks. This is Eric Clapton. This may sound like a hoax but it’s not.’”

Trucks had missed the call, and because of his cellphone plan, couldn’t get hold of Clapton straight away.

“It was amazing,” Trucks adds. “I was like, ‘What is going on?’ [The message said], ‘When you get a chance, call me back.’ So I had to go down to the Verizon store the next day and get an international plan so I could call him back.

“Then he invited me out for the JJ Cale record, which I think in hindsight was more of a ‘make sure we could hang and make sure you’re not a total knucklehead’ situation.”

The pair got on, and Trucks ended up contributing to The Road to Escondido, later joining Clapton’s touring band and hitting the road with him in 2007.

A regular contributor to the Crossroads Festival, Trucks also partnered with Clapton and a whole host of other guitar greats for the Cale tribute record, The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale, in 2014.

In more recent Trucks news, the guitar hero recently made headlines when he played Jerry Garcia's $11m Tiger guitar mere hours after it was sold at auction.

Eric Clapton’s long-lost Les Paul is back after six decades in the wilderness. But which iconic guitars are still missing in action, and why haven’t our heroes heard of padlocks? Drilling into that very subject, via the medium of a conversation with, er, ourselves… It’s Fret Buzz.

I keep hearing about Eric Clapton’s Summersburst. Has the veteran British bluesman brought out a new Snapple flavor?

That would be amazing. But no. The Summersburst is the 1960 Les Paul bought by Clapton from The Police’s Andy Summers and played on Cream’s 1966 debut album. It’s been missing for [checks watch] 60 years. But it just resurfaced in a Paris guitar shop.

Where’s it been all this time?

Hanging out with the absinthe fairy and cancan dancers at Moulin Rouge? For a long time, its last-known location was Dan Armstrong’s repair shop in New York, where Clapton was apparently unhappy with the neck fix, refused the bill, and ditched the guitar. Now it’s been revealed that it had been kept under the watchful eye of collector, Perry Margouleff.

How does Clapton feel about its resurfacing?

Publicly, he doesn’t seem that bothered. After all, the guy’s already auctioned his guitar collection. Maybe it’s like when you’ve tidied the shed and your neighbor suddenly returns that rusty lawnmower you’d forgotten about. Or your idiot kid comes home from college and starts yelling on Fortnite. And besides, his Beano is still missing.

Well, it’s only a comic book. Just buy another one. It costs, what, $4?

No, we mean the 1960 Les Paul that Clapton played on the Bluesbreakers’ fabled ‘Beano’ album of 1966. That one was swiped from a church hall in the same period.

Any leads?

Joe Bonamassa insists that Beano “is in a collection on the East Coast. It still exists. I haven’t seen it, but I have it on good authority from people who have.”

How do you smuggle a guitar out of a dressing room anyway?

We can only assume, in harem pants. But it happens more than you’d think. Keith Richards had nine guitars stolen from the Stones’ Côte d'Azur mansion during the recording of 1972’s Exile On Main St.

Nine! But surely Keith in that early-’70s period was alert and vigilant, and would have fitted out Villa Nellcôte with burglar alarms or at least completed the relevant contents insurance forms?

Erm, you might want to read his memoirs. Anyway, one of Keith’s Les Pauls turned up last year at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Looking pretty rough after all these years, I’d imagine.

There was deep weathering after decades of abuse. As for the guitar – that looked pretty good!

At least Michael Angelo Batio’s four-neck Quad couldn’t feasibly be stolen.

Actually, it was, in El Paso, by a particularly ballsy thief who presumably told security he was holding an enormous pair of garden shears. Only the top two necks were ever recovered, which is still more than any reasonable person needs.

So stolen guitars do come back?

If you wait long enough, it seems, the universe will provide. In 2024, Paul McCartney was reunited with the legendary 1961 Höfner bass stolen 52 years earlier. And no doubt did a cheery thumbs-up for the cameras.

So what you’re saying is: ‘guitars are like homing pigeons’?

Even better. Because they don’t crap on your shoulder when you’re busking.

As a prolific songwriter, Stephen Bishop has penned songs for the likes of Art Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, and Phil Collins.

However, Bishop is also the artist behind the 1977 soft rock hit On and On, as well as Save It for a Rainy Day, from his breakthrough album, Careless, which featured a veritable list of collaborators, including Eric Clapton.

“When my manager at the time, Bob Ellis, was at Shangri-La Studios visiting Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones, another of his artists, Eric happened to be there,” Bishops recalls of the collaboration in a new Guitar World.

“Bob told him, ‘You should meet this young artist I'm working with named Stephen Bishop. He's a funny guy – I think you’d like him.’”

Clapton dropped by the studio with his guitar, and, as Ellis predicted, the two hit it off immediately.

Bishop continues, “I played Eric some of the songs I was working on, and to my relief, he really liked them.”

Clapton performed the guitar solo on the single Save It for a Rainy Day, which ended up peaking at number 22 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in December 1976.

He also provided what Bishop describes as “beautiful slide guitar work” on the fourth track on the album, Sinking in an Ocean of Tears.

“As a 16-year-old kid, I’d seen Cream perform, so having Eric playing on my debut album was pretty surreal,” he says. “He was exactly like what you’d imagine a rock star should look like; he had this effortless charisma about him.

“What means the most to me, though, is that all these years later we're still friends and still keep in touch.”

However, as important as Clapton was to Bishop’s breakthrough, no one was as critical to his success as his “lifelong friend” Art Garfunkel.

“Art’s support helped open doors that ultimately led to my record deal,” Bishop reveals. “He also sang background vocals on several songs on Careless, and I returned the favor by singing background vocals on Breakaway. That's how our friendship began, and it's lasted for more than 50 years.”

Guitar World’s interview with Stephen Bishop will be published in the coming week.

And, speaking of Clapton, his ‘Summersburst’ – used on Cream's debut album – has finally been unearthed after 60 years.

As a guitarist that plays a lot of blues, I find myself performing many different kinds of shuffles, from slow to medium to fast. One of my all-time favorite blues recordings is Steppin’ Out, as covered by John Mayall on Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. (The original version is by Memphis Slim and features Matt “Guitar” Murphy, of The Blues Brothers fame, on guitar.)

Steppin’ Out is a hard-driving medium-up shuffle in the key of G, and Clapton’s guitar playing on that track is just incredible. He plays with so much fire and creativity, as well as this distinctly youthful British exuberance.

Figure 1 is a two-bar phrase along the lines of the signature lick in Steppin’ Out. It’s played in the key of G and is based on the G minor pentatonic scale (G, Bb, C, D, F), with an abundance of quarter- , half- and whole-step bends on the G string.

I love the way Eric draws from his Freddie King influence, in terms of his melodic phrasing and articulation, as demonstrated in the pickup bar and bar 1 of Figure 2, into the Freddie-style reverse-rake “slurs” at the end of bar 2 into bar 3. Throughout the example, notice all of the subtle, expressive bends on the top three strings.

In bars 8-12, the melody and phrasing is so simple – just swinging eighth notes – but the lines are delivered in a way that is also a nod to the great T-Bone Walker, in the use of hammer-ons from the minor 3rd, Bb, to the major 3rd, B, as well as the inclusion of the 2nd, or 9th, A.

In bar 12 into bar 13, I switch to G major pentatonic (G, A, B, D, E), moving back into G minor pentatonic in bar 16. In bar 17, I play a series of D notes on the B string, all on the eighth-note upbeats, that are bent in increasing increments, ending with a one‑and-a-half-step bend that is shaken. In bars 19 through the end of the example, I move freely between G minor and major pentatonic ideas.

Clapton also loves to go up high on the neck and hit you with aggressive unison bends on the top two strings, a la the phrases that kick off Figure 3. This lick begins with F, at the 18th fret on the B string, bent up a whole step to G while a G note at the 15th fret on high E string is strummed together with the B string, ultimately adding aggressive vibrato to the unison bend.

The remainder of the example is played in the 15th-position G minor pentatonic box and features fast hammer-ons and pull-offs as well as vocal-like, wide and fast vibratos.

When soloing over a shuffle like this, it’s wise to hold back some ideas at first, so that you don’t play everything you know in the first chorus! Take your time, hold and shake some notes and let the solo build in a musically natural way. Follow your stream of consciousness and use dynamics to tell a musical story.

Just about every blues show I attended in the ’80s and ’90s started with an uptempo shuffle like Steppin’ Out, and the Mayall-Clapton version is a great vehicle for learning what blues soloing is all about.

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

Matthieu Lucas, from the Parisian guitar emporium Matt’s Guitar Shop, has unearthed a few musical gems during his lifetime. But, perhaps his proudest moment happened very recently, when he brought Eric Clapton’s influential ‘Summersburst’ – which has been hidden away from public view for nearly 60 years – to the public.

Eric Clapton’s fabled 1960 Les Paul Standard – his ‘Beano’ ’Burst – was snatched from a church hall in Brondesbury, London, at the height of his mid-’60s Bluesbreakers fame. He also happened to be just starting rehearsals with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker on a certain project called Cream. After the robbery, Clapton hastily bought another ’60 Les Paul from future Police guitarist Andy Summers for £300.

This guitar would shape Clapton’s next era – including, most pivotally, his work on Cream’s debut album, the game-changing Fresh Cream. Somewhere in between his trips across the Atlantic, though, the Les Paul would suffer the second of two serious neck breaks. While it was given a “creative” headstock replacement at Dan Armstrong’s repair shop, Clapton seemed unhappy with the result and left the guitar at the shop after refusing to pay the bill.

After changing hands more than a few times, fast-forward to 2026, when the guitar somehow found its way to Paris and into Lucas’ hands via renowned guitar collector Perry Margouleff.

“I knew about it for years,” Lucas says in the latest issue of Guitarist. “I couldn’t tell anyone about it because that’s not how Perry is working – he wants his guitars to be top secret, if I can say.

“But then I decided to make it public for several reasons, because my theory is that guitars like this should be played, should be shared with people. I think it doesn't even belong to me, or whoever is going to buy the guitar – it belongs to, I would almost say, humanity because that guitar is a major piece of the ’60s and British music, and a major piece of guitar history, so my feeling is that all those guitars need to be shared and played.”

At some point, Lucas stepped in and told Margouleff, “‘I want to buy this piece, but in my opinion it’s just a shame that it stays off the internet because I think it’s a different time now and everybody should know what happened to this guitar,’ because nobody knew where it was, basically.”

Lucas says that when he first met Margouleff around 13 years ago, the veteran collector took him under his wing and showed him a lot of his star-owned guitars. However, the future owner of Matt’s Guitar Shop wasn’t in a position to purchase Clapton’s guitar – that is, until 12 years later.

“It took a bit of time, but we arranged a deal a few weeks ago, and then I went to New York City and picked up the guitar myself.”

Having played Clapton’s “The Fool” SG, his 335, and other Cream-era instruments, Lucas has a few thoughts on how this Les Paul compares.

“It’s funny, because all of them [have notably slim necks], except the 335, which has more like a ’64 neck but still a very thin neck. So I think Clapton really loved a very thin neck on guitars, you know? This guitar is quite the same: it has one of the thinnest necks on a ’60 I’ve ever played.”

Lucas notes that it was probably made in the latter part of 1960 “because of that ‘tomato soup’ finish and other details,” while, structurally speaking, “it’s super easy to play and super fast because of that thin neck.” He goes on to point out that “the neck pickup is one of the creamiest neck pickups that I’ve tried.

“It’s not like a woody sound, it’s very creamy, very dense. It makes total sense when you put the guitar into a Marshall, and you put the tone at zero – you get exactly the Spoonful sound.

And the one thing that still blows his mind? “When you play the guitar, it’s incredible because that’s the record, you know? It already sounds like the record.”

For the full story and more about Eric Clapton’s iconic guitars, pick up issue 539 of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.

At nearly 90 years old, Buddy Guy is still carrying the torch for the blues and remains a guiding force for current and future generations of blues players.

Fresh off his cameo in Ryan Coogler's highly lauded film Sinners, Guy’s legacy is continuing to be celebrated, as Blackbird Presents and Live Nation are teaming up to organize Buddy’s Got the Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert Celebration.

The event, taking place on October 1 at the iconic Radio City Music Hall in New York City, is set to be a one-night-only event with collaborations, performances, and heartfelt tributes from artists influenced by Guy’s work.

The all-star lineup includes a veritable list of legends and blues virtuosos: Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi & Derek Trucks, Jon Batiste, Aloe Blacc, Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark Jr., Shemekia Copeland, Robert Cray, Samantha Fish, Eric Gales, Billy F Gibbons, Ivan Neville, Robert Randolph, Bobby Rush, Isaiah Sharkey, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Jimmie Vaughan, Ally Venable, Willie Weeks, and Kim Wilson.

More artists and special guests are set to be announced soon, and the man himself, Buddy Guy, will (of course) also perform, proving that he's still got the blues.

Current Rolling Stones drummer Steve Jordan serves as the musical director.

Speaking about the event, Guy says, “Can't wait to celebrate 90 years of living, loving, and playing the blues with all my friends. We’ll make it a night not just for me, but for the folks who taught us, the friends we’ve played with, and the ones coming up behind us.”

In a recent interview with Guitar Player, the blues icon has explained why he’s not giving up touring just yet, as he prepares to hit the road on July 15, starting at Massey Hall in Toronto.

“I thought about retiring twice,” he says. “But, y’know, I thought about all those great blues players who are no longer with us – B.B. King. Lightnin’ Hopkins, all those guys – and they used to tell me, ‘You need to keep playing and keep representing the blues,’ ’cause they don’t play it on radio or anything anymore.

“So I said to myself, ‘Well, Buddy, you better hang on a little longer. My health ain’t doing too bad, so I’m still doing what I’ve always done. Every time I get onstage, just try to play the best I can.”

Tickets go on sale to the general public on June 26 at 10 AM ET. Head to Buddy 90 to find out more.

Guy is set for a very busy rest of the year, having also been announced for this year's edition of Eric Clapton's Crossroads Festival.

Ask any bass-playing great of the last 50 years who their heroes are, and you can bet that Jack Bruce will feature high up the list.

The driving force behind ’60s supergroup Cream – not to mention his stints with Alexis Korner, Graham Bond and the Bluesbreakers – Bruce was one of a very short list of pioneers who were challenging the traditional concept of what a bass guitarist could, and should, play, creating lines that linked the jazz-inspired drumming of Ginger Baker with the blues-inflected guitar of Eric Clapton.

“Clapton isn’t God. Jack Bruce is,” wrote Jeff Berlin in the October 2003 issue of Bass Player. “When I was 14, I sprayed his name on my bedroom wall with luminous paint to remind me who was the greatest bass player in the world.”

Bruce’s innovations – first with his Fender VI and then with his Gibson EB-3 – provided a cornerstone in the instrument's development. His playing in the trio’s legendary live jams liberated the bass for generations of players who followed.

“Jack's playing on these songs might be the first recorded example of an electric bass player with chops,” said Berlin. “I'm So Glad (Goodbye) is perhaps the most intense of the live jams, but for me the definitive Jack is on Sweet Wine from Live Cream. Jack's playing on that cut changed me forever.”

“For pure composition, listen to As You Said on Wheels of Fire, which features Jack on cello, acoustic guitar, and vocals accompanied only by Ginger Baker's hi-hat. Who else in all of rock could have come up with that priceless tune?”

As well known for his outspoken views on music, bass playing and… er… metronomes as he is for his unquestionable command of the bass guitar, Berlin remembered meeting his hero at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London.

“We were introduced by the fine English drummer Jon Hiseman. I quickly discovered that Jack is one of the funniest guys l've ever met. He gave me a lift back to my hotel, and he had me laughing so hard I was crying.

“The next time we met, I was performing at the Music Fair in Frankfurt, Germany, and I was playing really well. It was one of those special nights that happens only once in a while for musicians. Then Jack walked in.

“My hands developed rheumatism in three seconds. I couldn't play a thing. I got nervous because I know that if Jack can do anything, he can hear everything that's going on – and that's why I played bass like Rocky Balboa when Jack sat down in the front row.

“Another time, Jack did a clinic at the Musicians Institute in L.A. Bruce Gary was on drums and I played guitar. I can't remember how we got into it, but Jack and I suddenly found ourselves singing White Room like Jerry Lewis would sing it.

“Through the laughter, I found myself thinking, ‘Here I am playing Cream tunes with the same guy whose name was spray-painted on the wall of my mother's home, the same guy who influenced me to buy a bass and spend the better part of 25 years trying to learn how to play it.’”

After Bruce's passing in 2014, Berlin released the tribute album Jack Songs, featuring contributions from a stellar line-up of guest musicians, including Alex Lifeson, Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal and Eric Johnson.

“When he died, I immediately set out to choose some of my favourite songs of his and record them via my own musical vision. I wanted this record to be brilliant to honour his spirit. He really means this much to me.”

The inimitable Billy Squier drops in on GW for a quick-fire Q&A covering all things strings, from first electric guitars to the holy grail threatened by a house fire in New York – and why he doesn’t feel the need to practice.

What was the first guitar you owned?

My first electric was a two-pickup Danelectro I bought along with a little Supro amp. I found out years later that Jimmy Page used the same stuff. I paid around $75 for both when I was about 13. I bought them from the older brother of a school friend who didn’t want them anymore.

I’m not sure why he had them to begin with. It was probably just around when the Beatles were hitting, but it hadn’t yet become a thing where everybody was playing guitar.

What’s the first song you learned on that guitar?

I have no idea. My memory has been worn down by copious LSD experiments that I did back then! I remember being told that one thing to worry about with taking acid is that it doesn’t do your memory any favors. Maybe I’m finding that out now. I’d guess it could’ve been a song from the first Beatles album.

What was your first gig?

At around 14, I had a band in high school called the Reltneys. Our first gig was at a dance at a church hall. The first significant gig I can recall was a battle of the bands at my high school gym, where I duked it out with my local rivals, some of whom were my friends.

Ever had an embarrassing moment on stage?

I’ve never been embarrassed on stage. I do have an irrational fear of embarrassing myself because of the way I grew up – certain things happened to me when I was younger that made me feel I was never really good enough, and I was afraid people would find out.

At the same time, I developed tremendous confidence in myself and where I was going with my music. Try reconciling those divergent aspects of your personality!

What’s your favorite piece of gear?

Amp-wise, my hot-wired Super Lead 100 Marshall heads, which I’ve had since the ’70s. They’re unbeatable – the best Marshalls I’ve ever heard. But I have a lot of memorable pieces. I still have the 1960 Fender Telecaster Custom I used on most of Don’t Say No [1981], the one that’s on the album cover.

The building is burning down. What one guitar would you save?

My ’59 burst, which is named “Fanny.” In fact, it already happened to me a few years ago. It turned out it wasn’t serious, but I live in a large building on Central Park West in Manhattan, and there was a fire in the basement.

There was a big commotion – alarms going off and fire engines circling – so I went straight to the closet, looked at my four Les Pauls, grabbed that one and my dog, and trotted down the back stairs and out onto the street. Everything was fine in the end; we didn’t lose anything.

When was the last time you practiced?

I don’t like to sound cavalier about this, but I rarely practice. I stopped seriously practicing a long time ago because the only time I found it to be really valuable was when I was trying to learn something specific to where I wanted to go.

When I was 16, I was transfixed by Clapton’s soloing on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. There were so many things I couldn’t figure out and wanted to play. I’d spend hours dropping the needle on those solos, committing them to memory and working out how he did them.

Once I got going, I’d just find myself in situations where I’d be playing a lot of the time, for example, in a tune-up room at a gig or at soundcheck.

I’d always have a cassette player nearby, and if I came up with something I thought was good, I’d record it. The rest I’d leave to fate. If I do feel the need to test myself, I play Peter Green’s version of Freddie King’s The Stumble.

What aspect of the guitar would you like to be better at?

My acoustic playing could be more ingrained. I was never much of an acoustic player. I’m not an adept finger-picker. I could always strum chords and play parts as needed on my records, but it was never something I devoted any time to.

When I made my acoustic record, Happy Blue [1998], I made the guitar the centerpiece of the album; it’s the only instrument other than my voice. I taught myself to play in different tunings and came up with things I never imagined I could play.

I probably couldn’t play a lot of that stuff straight-off today because it was a one-time challenge I gave myself, and I don’t revisit it all that often. I’m very proud of that record; there’s some real good playing.

What guitar-centric advice would you give your younger self if you could?

That’s a tough question. If you ask me about things I’d say to young players today, it’d be something like, don’t learn solos from watching YouTube.

Figure them out for yourself. I’d use the example of how I learned to play by ear and picture the notes on the fretboard in my mind. If I could visualize the fretboard in my head and memorize solos by ear, I could put the pieces together – and it all made sense. Think of it as a relationship; get as close to the instrument as you can.

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

Most of us guitarists are perpetually chasing ways to raise our game. That is part of the fun, after all. But sometimes what we seek is already freely available, without studying music theory, learning scale/arpeggio shapes or drilling picking exercises.

I’m talking about the rhythm of what we play, which is arguably 50 per cent (if not more) of what makes phrases appealing and memorable.

If we feel we should be working harder, this is when we’re most at risk of overplaying, filling all the gaps and overcomplicating things (take it from someone who’s done it). Sometimes what feels good to play doesn’t translate to what sounds good to the listener, who may not play guitar or be wowed by rippling arpeggios.

If we listen closely to the greats, especially in this genre, you can hear that not only do they leave spaces, but when they do play, there’s a rhythmic signature to their phrasing.

For example, Clapton in Crossroads, Gilmour in Comfortably Numb and Peter Green in Black Magic Woman all have their own take on how they approach rhythms in the phrasing, giving a uniqueness while using the very same pentatonic shapes.

One thing that isn’t demonstrated explicitly here is the spaces in between. That would certainly be easy to transcribe (and read!), but ultimately not particularly helpful, so do bear in mind that even these examples are a concentrated version of what you might want to play in a real-life musical scenario.

The four phrases were played separately, but could be joined up to make a solo if you prefer. That being said, the fourth example is really an alternative take on Example 1, or perhaps a suggestion of how you might continue onwards in a similar style. I hope these examples are useful and enjoyable. See you next time!

Example 1

A quick rake leads into a contrasting held bend, giving a sense of space to start. Bar 2 then features some repeated triplets – feel free to pull back and play these late, you’ll know when you’ve gone too far.

Note the quarter-tone bends in bars 2 and 3. These are very subtle but add so much in terms of attitude. The final phrase crosses bars 3 and 4 – it’s a smooth bend/release leading to a quick flurry, similar in essence to the introductory phrase.

Example 2

Keeping with the triplet theme to start, this example then takes a leaf out of Peter Green’s book, especially in bar 3 where the rhythmic groupings feel as though they’re floating independently of the beat.

They aren’t really in this case, though the last four semiquavers do pull back in tempo noticeably.

This shouldn’t be set in stone, keep experimenting – you can always dial it back if you think you’ve lost the feel. The pre-bend with fast vibrato in bar 3 is another detail worth spending some time on.

Example 3

This rhythmic idea is similar to some of Eric Clapton’s phrasing during his solos in Crossroads. The rhythmic groupings are quite funky and you will want to use down- and upstrokes to aid with this.

Use this idea as a basis for further experimentation, rather than conforming precisely to any rhythm. There are no rules, but you can pick up some hints from watching the video. Also, watch for details such as quarter-tone bends, staccato/short notes and vibrato.

Example 4

An alternative opening phrase, or a suggestion for how things might continue, this example draws on David Gilmour’s phrasing from the solos in Comfortably Numb, Another Brick In The Wall (Pt 2) and Have A Cigar.

As with Example 3, it’s questionable how useful it would be to duplicate this exactly. This is more of a ‘feel’ thing, based around choppy/staccato or muted up- and downstrokes.

We finish with a classic pentatonic lick, the last note of which (D) holds, adding a slow quarter-tone bend after crossing into bar 4.

Hear it here

Eric Clapton – Crossroads

One of the details which makes Eric’s playing so appealing is his use of rhythm. Check out the solos in Crossroads and you can hear him experimenting – and really pulling against the beat at times. He can also be heard (in a more restrained manner) on the Bluesbreakers (‘Beano’) album a few years earlier.

More recently, he revisited this approach in Bad Love. Like anything, the rhythm is just a part of the picture, so often isn’t as blatant as some of the examples.

Albert Collins – Truckin' With Albert Collins

The Iceman himself, Albert used an unusual F minor tuning (low to high: F C F Ab C F) often with a capo at the 5th to 7th fret, which contributed to his sound, but that need not concern us too much here. All the same, check out Frosty from the 1969 album Truckin’ With Albert Collins.

On that same album, see if you can sit comfortably with the lilt between the guitar and brass on Tremble! Finally, have a listen to his playing alongside Gary Moore on his cover of Too Tired.

Peter Green – The Pious Bird of Good Omen

Peter’s manipulation of rhythms is perhaps the most subtle of the players cited here, but his rhythmic groupings on Black Magic Woman, Supernatural and Need Your Love So Bad demonstrate a free flowing ‘push and pull’ against the beat, with some unexpected pentatonic flurries that sound easier to play than they actually are.

All are great demonstrations of the use of space, plus you can hear the intention behind each and every note.

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

Greg Leisz doesn’t consider himself a session musician – but his résumé in the field is unparalleled. He’s worked with Matthew Sweet, Smashing Pumpkins, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Daft Punk, and so many others we’d be kept going for ages.

“I was always interested in connecting the parts on the records to the names I was seeing,” he says. “But playing on records myself was a pipe dream.”

So what put him on so many artists’ speed dial? “It took many years, and a fair amount of encouragement from players and producers, to develop the confidence and trust in myself.”

He continues: “The best training ground for me has always been to play live in group situations. It taught me how to listen to what’s happening in the moment with other players, and react without thinking.”

At 76 he has no intention of stopping. “It’s very intuitive,” he says of session work today. “Even if I’m overdubbing on a song after it’s been recorded, I try to find a way to make it sound like I was there, so it doesn’t feel like an overdub.”

Despite his achievements, his career still feels like a dream. “A few years ago I found myself playing guitar for Aaron Neville at Electric Ladyland in New York, sitting next to Keith Richards, who was co-producing the album. It was just two guys sitting and playing the guitar. Doesn’t get much better than that!”

Did you set out to be a session musician?

I certainly did not! I started playing guitar in 1962, teaching myself out of folk singalong books. The players on the albums I first heard were usually not named, although I do remember first seeing accompanist names on some of the early ‘60s folk albums by people like Judy Collins.

In 1966, I remember seeing a credit for organ by Van Dyke Parks on the Byrds' Fifth Dimension album. That stood out to me – it was unusual for bands in those days to credit other musicians on their albums.

So what got you into session work?

I came up through the self-taught garage band paradigm in the ‘60s. Gradually, through playing with better musicians than myself and learning to play a wider range of musical styles, I started to find myself in recording situations by the mid-1970s. You could say I just fell into doing more and more session work.

What was your toolkit like?

It’s pretty much always been an extension of the gear I first played in the ‘60s, when all I had was one acoustic and one electric guitar and an amp. I accumulated more; I needed a wider variety of sounds, so I experimented with new instruments outside guitar. I taught myself dobro, lap steel, and pedal steel, along with some basic mandolin and banjo, and I even found myself on bass occasionally.

But if I had to choose one guitar, it would probably be the 1964 Stratocaster that got stolen out of a club dressing room in the 1980s.

Since I doubt I’ll ever get it back – although if anyone finds serial number L35655, black refinished, please return it to me! – I might take my’ 64 Fender Jazzmaster. Between that and my ‘62 Gibson ES-330 it’s impossible to pick one guitar! And I’d need a vintage Princeton Reverb and a tuner pedal, since I lack perfect pitch.

How did you first meet Matthew Sweet, leading to your work on his Girlfriend album?

I met him in 1985 at a New York City club I was playing. Four years later he had me come back to New York to play on Girlfriend. I played a grungy low lap steel on the title track as an overdub, right after Robert Quine had overdubbed his lead guitar. I also overdubbed some pedal steel on a couple of others.

I think what made that album stand out sonically at the time was its being completely devoid of reverb. That, and the combination of Matthew’s pop-rock melodies with Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine’s intense, angular electric guitars.

I went on to play on many other of Matthew’s albums after that, including In Reverse, which I co-produced, and I even did some touring with him.

How about k.d. lang?

We met in 1988 when she was doing some TV talk shows in LA and needed a steel guitar player. That led to the first record I did with her, Absolute Torch and Twang. The record was recorded in Vancouver with her band, The Reclines.

I took quite a bit of gear with me – I played a ‘66 Emmons D10 pedal steel, a Fender 800 pedal steel, a Fender Stringmaster Console steel, a 1940s six-string Bakelite lap steel, and a Weissenborn. I probably used ‘60s Fender blackface amps.

I worked with k.d. on and off for the next 18 years and played on most of her albums during that time. Being an accompanist to her has truly been a high point in my career.

In the ‘90s you worked with Smashing Pumpkins on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and with James Iha on his solo album, Let It Come Down.

The only Smashing Pumpkins track I played on was a song by James called Take Me Down. I believe it was the only song he wrote and sang on the album. I briefly met Billy Corgan in the studio when we ate lunch, but he wasn’t involved in the session at all. Later, I worked on an entire solo album with Iha.

How did you meet Lucinda Williams ?

I’ve known her for a long time, since the 1980’s, from playing the same clubs in LA. We’ve worked together a lot, especially on the two albums I co-produced and played on, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and The Ghosts of Highway 20.

I also played on Blessed, the reworking of the Sweet Old World album, and Vanished Gardens, with Charles Lloyd and The Marvels. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done together. She loves electric guitar and always has great players in her bands.

There were usually two other guitarists besides Lucinda – myself and Bill Frisell, Val McCallum, Stuart Mathis or Doug Pettibone. Lucinda is very intuitive and [knows] when a song has found the right home.

How about Eric Clapton?

I first met him through Doyle Bramhall, who was producing and playing guitar in Eric’s band. Doyle brought me in to do some recording with Eric on a couple of his albums, mainly Old Sock. He asked me to tour with him after that, and I jumped at the chance.

The band was incredible and Eric was amazing every night. I was blown away by how great a singer he is. He’s very relaxed on stage; he’s there to enjoy what he loves doing. He gives very little direction, and I found him to be a true gentleman. He’s very respectful and trusting of his band.

How did you hook up with John Mayer?

I met him when I played on a couple of songs for his Heavier Things album. I had worked with Jack Joseph Puig, his producer, before then, and Jack brought me in to try a couple of lap steel parts.

I’ve worked on three of John’s albums and I’ve always enjoyed the process. He’s very focused, knows what he’s looking for, and he’s good at giving direction while still allowing you to use your own intuition. The only time I played live with him was when he asked me to sit in at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival in 2013, when I was a member of Eric’s touring band.

Two interesting credits on your resume are Daft Punk and Avenged Sevenfold. How did they come about?

Maybe it sounds a little out of left field for those groups to use pedal steel, but they were specifically looking for that sound in their music. Daft Punk were looking for someone with a ‘70s sensibility, I think. And I guess Avenged Sevenfold wanted to put a touch of country into their sound on a couple of things. I also played some banjo on that session.

With a sprawling résumé and sessions still pouring in, do you see yourself retiring anytime soon?

I don’t see it on my calendar yet. In the last 15 years I’ve had the good fortune to have played with many other artists. But when I think of the work I’ve done, I have a hard time thinking of myself as a “session” musician.

The way I met and recorded with a lot of them, it’s not usually been through some session networking protocol. The threads that connect us are varied and surprising. So I don’t really think of myself as a session musician, though I know it’s a real thing that people do.

What’s your best piece of advice for young players looking to get into your line of work?

I would say: definitely don’t do what I did! Or at least do what I didn’t do. Go to a good music school; seek out teachers and mentors; learn your chosen instruments backward, forwards, up, and down.

Listen to and learn to play every style of music you can, but don’t count on falling into work like I did. There was way too much luck involved.

Tom Misch has reflected on the time he played at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, when he was joined on stage by one of his biggest heroes.

In 2019, Misch – the neo-soul, jazz-funk and hip-hop powerhouse – joined the Crossroads festival bill alongside the likes of Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, Albert Lee, Jeff Beck, Marcus King, Gary Clark Jr., and more legendary guitar players.

Another name on the lineup was John Mayer, who offered to jam with Misch during his set at the very last minute.

“It was crazy. It was Eric Clapton’s Crossroads guitar festival, I think it was just before COVID,” Misch remembers in a new interview with Guitar World. “First of all, I was like, ‘Eric Clapton’s invited me to do this, this is incredible. He knows who I am!’

“Then, I was on the way there and I got a DM from John Mayer saying, ‘Do you want some assistance on your set?’ I just couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t spoken to him before and he was reaching out. I was so excited.”

Mayer reaching out was a huge deal to Misch, who has cited the Continuum guitarist as a key influence in his guitar playing. To this day, Misch still plays a John Mayer Fender Stratocaster signature.

He continues, “I just couldn’t believe it. I knew he was going to jump up for the set I was doing. It was a great lineup – I had Yussef Dayes on drums and Rocco Palladino on bass, and we were playing a couple of my songs.

“I think it was a quite short set – we had like 20 minutes. I remember John came into the room half an hour before we went on just to jam some of the ideas. He was really tall. And, obviously, had such big energy. He comes into the room and literally had his hands up in the air. He’s a really nice guy, he’s very complimentary.”

It was a whirlwind experience for Misch, but it didn’t end there. Not only did he get to play with Mayer, his hero also made a unique observation about his own playing that reframed his entire perspective.

“I remember him pointing out something interesting,” Misch recalls. “He was saying that I play very laterally, as opposed to horizontally. That’s something I’ve never noticed before, but I’ve thought about it a lot since. If I do a scale I’ll go up the fretboard, as opposed to across the strings.”

The pair would later team up for an NPR Tiny Desk performance in 2020, but have yet to collaborate again. If Misch has his way, more team-ups could eventually follow.

“I think it will happen,” he says. “I want to find the right project, you know, to ask him if he wants to get involved. I reckon he’d be up for it.”

Guitar World’s full interview with Tom Misch will be published soon.

Misch tours the EU next week, starting with a show in Amsterdam on June 8. Visit Tom Misch's website for a full list of dates.

Jimi Hendrix spent his formative years, in the early ’60s, on the Chitlin’ Circuit (a network of clubs and venues that featured Black artists) working as a backing musician for a range of soul and blues stars – essentially serving his apprenticeship and honing his skills.

Unsurprisingly, once he’d decided he’d had enough of standing in the shadows, and started to front his own band, much of his repertoire comprised cover versions of the same blues and soul material that he’d cut his teeth on, with a handful of contemporary pop and rock classics thrown into the mix.

Here are 10 of his finest moments, where he took the raw material of an original, injected the spark that was his unique mojo, and recreated the songs in his own image – often almost as if they were written for him.

1. All Along The Watchtower (Electric Ladyland – 1968)

The ultimate mark of respect that any artist can receive for a cover version of a song is when the original artist adopts the new version for their own future performances, which is exactly what happened with Bob Dylan when he heard Hendrix’s reinvention of Watchtower.

As is frequently the case with acts covering Dylan’s songs, the original version often becomes, essentially, a songwriter’s demo (see pretty much every Byrds cover of a Dylan track).

Where Dylan’s original lumped along in a fairly pedestrian fashion, Hendrix took the bare bones and soared, to create a track that would feature high on the list of any compilation of Jimi’s greatest moments.

Dylan himself was generous in his acknowledgement of what Jimi brought to the piece, “He took some small songs of mine that nobody paid any attention to and brought them up into the outer limits of the stratosphere, turned them all into classics.” Not only is this the greatest cover of any Dylan song, but it is also, for many Hendrix fans, one of his absolute career highlights.

Jimi creates a unique atmosphere with layers of guitars, including subtle wah-wah embellishments, Wes Montgomery-like octave runs and deft slide work that all combined to provide a strange sense of otherworldliness that chimed perfectly with the song’s opening line, “There must be some way out of here…”

2. Hey Joe (Smash Hits – 1966)

Hey Joe has received countless different treatments across numerous cover versions, but again the Hendrix take provides the definitive reading of Billy Roberts’ lyrically dark tale of murder. Ignoring the temptation to increase the tempo, as in The Leaves’ hit version, Hendrix substitutes depth and power for their frantic garage band approach.

Jimi released the song as his debut single, scoring his first hit anywhere in the world, eventually reaching number six in the UK pop charts. As with all of Hendrix’s hit singles, the soloing is taut, economical and memorable, creating parts that are as essential to the song as the lyrics and melody. No doubt manager Chas Chandler was a key figure in maintaining the band’s strict focus in the studio.

Jimi was already covering this song, as well as several others on this list, when he was playing regular shows at the Café Wha in Greenwich Village. This was the first song that future manager, Chandler, saw Hendrix play in 1966; he’d gone to check him out following up on a recommendation from Linda Keith – Keith Richards’ girlfriend.

It was on the basis of that night’s show, that Chandler invited Hendrix to go back to the UK with him, with the intention that Chandler would – in the words of the old cliché – make him a star.

3. Wild Thing (Live At Monterey – 1967)

This song could have been written for Hendrix – there is certainly very little that is wild about The Troggs’ original version. Essentially a novelty song in its original incarnation, it hit the top of the US charts in 1966. As if to emphasize the absurdist aspects, the solo on the Troggs’ version, as performed on the obscure ocarina, practically sounds like a spoof on the title. Wild? Yeah, right.

What is undeniably wild though, is the sound of Hendrix’s guitar – at its most rampant as he powers through the simple three-chord intro, bringing an entire universe of subtext to the table.

Many of the ‘wild man of rock’ cliches spring from Jimi’s rendition of this song in the movie, Monterey Pop, with the guitar-burning finale.

This is not the best version, however. Jimi usually prefaced the introduction with some severe Strat whammy bar wrangling. The downside of such abuse though, is the calamitous effect it had on the guitar’s tuning.

Jimi would often try to remedy this as the song was in progress, but it’s clear that on the Monterey version, there are still some issues. Ironically, that slightly sour clash of intervals actually enhances the outside nature of Jimi’s take.

In fact, for one of the best filmed performances of this song, check the rendition from 1967, from the Blackpool Opera House in England, where the tuning problem doesn’t really impact on Jimi’s playing.

4. Killing Floor (Live At Monterey & BBC Sessions 1967)

Allegedly, after witnessing Hendrix tearing through his total reinvention of the Howlin’ Wolf original, in a guest spot with Cream in 1966, Eric Clapton was so taken aback with what Jimi did that he had to leave the building. Clapton has said that it made him reassess everything he’d been doing.

Chas Chandler recalled, “Clapton stood there and his hands dropped off the guitar. He lurched off the stage.” Clapton himself recalled the event, “Of course Jimi played it exactly like it ought to be played, and he totally blew me away.”

There were never any sour grapes on Clapton’s part though; they were good friends for the remaining years of Jimi’s life and Clapton actually cited the BBC version of Killing Floor as his favorite Hendrix song.

The blistering pace at which Jimi takes the song transforms it from the sedate – though undoubtedly menacing – pace of the original into a hypersonic adrenaline blast. The speed and dexterity with which Hendrix punctuates the rhythm parts truly conveys the impression that there are two separate guitarists playing.

As great as Hubert Sumlin’s work was on the original, Hendrix was always able to find a further, unimagined dimension in every song he covered.

5. Like A Rolling Stone (Live At Monterey – 1967)

Another Dylan interpretation, and another hangover from the Café Wha days. Bob’s original, recorded after he’d fully embraced the electric, rock focused approach that had divided his fans so sharply, remains one of Dylan’s most loved songs.

With this one, Hendrix didn’t tear up the blueprint and rewrite the rules, but what he did do was to bring a cool, laconic vibe that wasn’t present in Dylan’s own version. Where Dylan sounds bitter – few can sneer a lyric the way Bob could – Hendrix conveys a sense of ‘it’s your loss, not mine.’ There is a wry, humorous air to Jimi’s reading of the lyrics and of course, his playing is, as always nonpareil.

The Monterey version includes the iconic moments where he says, “Let me play my guitar” in the intro, and also the casual way he relays to the band that he missed a verse out towards the end.

Fans are evenly divided between this and the Winterland version, recorded in 1968, on which is best. The argument for Jimi as the ultimate interpreter of Dylan – posited via Watchtower – is further strengthened with Rolling Stone, and a couple of more entries further down this list.

6. Rock Me Baby (Live At Monterey – 1967)

Jimi had so totally reinvented B.B. King’s original that it made perfect sense to rename it and make it his own song, morphing into Lover Man. Of course, B.B. never rocked out to any significant degree, even in his earliest ’50s recordings, so there isn’t a comparable moment from King’s own mighty back catalog.

B.B.’s own opinion on the Hendrix version isn’t known, though he did relate, in a number of interviews, that he’d encountered Hendrix in Jimi’s early days – when Hendrix was playing with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers – finding him to be quiet and friendly, and they did encounter each other towards the end of Hendrix’s life. King often spoke of his admiration for Jimi’s playing.

Hendrix had quite a few attempts at recording Lover Man but was never happy enough with any of them to sanction their release. Jimi applies the same formula to Rock Me Baby as he did to Killing Floor, where all that really remained of the original song was the lyrics.

Again, Jimi blends in rhythm and lead parts to create the illusion of two guitarists playing at once, and also employs the Delta blues trick of singing and playing the same melody lines at times – something he did to great effect on his own track, Voodoo Chile.

7. Star Spangled Banner (Live At Woodstock – 1969)

As always, Hendrix finds a way to keep the essential core of the original melody whilst simultaneously taking it to places that no other artist could have even imagined.

Often interpreted as an anti-Vietnam protest – though Hendrix never said that himself – it sounds more like the soundtrack to Armageddon. The full blown aural assault assails the senses – indeed pushing the listener into sensory overload, as Hendrix replicates the essence of the Sturm und Drang of bloody, violent warfare.

There is a common misconception that this was a one-off protest by Hendrix, but he had been playing the piece for quite some time and had also adopted a similar approach with the UK national anthem, and allegedly, though no aural evidence exists, the French national anthem.

The concept of ‘killer guitarist plays solo national anthem’ has become a fairly common occurrence at major sporting events, but no other artist has ever dared take it to the places Jimi did, to deliver a pioneering exploration of the outer limits of what a man, possessed of unrivalled skills and imagination can wring out of an electric guitar set to stun.

8. Drifters Escape (Loose Ends 1973)

The third dip into the Dylan songbook for this list, covering a track that the Bobster never actually played live until 1992. It was originally on Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album, which was released to mixed reviews back in 1967.

Hendrix recorded his version three years later, though it remained unreleased in his lifetime, initially turning up on one of the many posthumous cash-in compilations – Loose Ends, before later appearing on the far superior roundup of outtakes and works in progress that was South Saturn Delta.

The song is essentially based around the I chord, with brief forays to the IV, creating an endlessly repeating loop that didn’t offer a wealth of harmonic potential, something that clearly didn’t faze Hendrix, who sprays superlative fills and rhythmic motifs across the verses and choruses, and unleashes yet another Hendrix masterclass on the solo.

Although Jimi didn’t give the song the radical reworking that he applied to other cover versions, he did manage to repurpose it for an electric rock audience from its acoustic guitar/harmonica folk-based source.

9. Come On Part 2 (Electric Ladyland – 1968)

Earl King’s original single version was split across both sides of the 7” and named Parts I and II accordingly. Hendrix’s cover combines both sides of the single, although he calls it Part I. (When Stevie Ray Vaughan covered it, he called his version Part III, in a clear nod to King and Jimi).

Hendrix brings a stomping upbeat soul feel which he welds onto an otherwise faithful recreation of the original, until the solo, where Hendrix once again pours his own special sauce across three choruses of fluid, dynamic incendiary fretboard fire in the middle of the song before returning to the main theme, and again for a couple of choruses at the end.

Jimi had been covering the song for many years since its release in 1960, performing it in some of his first bands; much like Freddie King’s Hideaway it’s the kind of blues rite of passage standard that guitarists saw as a benchmark of their abilities, and one of the staples of the blues guitarists’ canon in the early ’60s.

Earl King re-recorded the song in 1977, taking some inspiration from the Hendrix interpretation to complete the full circle of song evolution. According to Experience bass player, Noel Redding, it was the last song recorded for Electric Ladyland, “We just played it live and they took it.”

10. Johnny B. Goode (Hendrix In The West – 1970)

One of the most covered songs of all time, and a staple in the repertoire of every bar band since Chuck Berry released it, way back in 1958. Johnny B. Goode doesn’t appear on this list due to Jimi’s reinvention of the song, but rather, his reinvention of the typical approach to the solo.

The average guitarist is usually content to blast out a stream of archetypal Chuck Berry licks, mixing and matching Berry’s blueprint in a predictable way. Hendrix eschews the obvious, of course, and brings his signature supernatural take, whilst still maintaining contact with the essence of the song, though there are moments when it almost feels like he’s about to leave the whole thing behind.

Each of the six choruses of solos kicks off with the Berry motif before launching into outer space for a series of crazily bent notes that reach pitches that shouldn’t exist. The tone that Jimi creates with the mix of Strat, Marshall and unfeasible overbending, excoriates all subsequent cover versions, rendering them redundant.

11. Daytripper (BBC Sessions – 1967)

Although Hendrix brings plenty to the table with this cover, it doesn’t really fall under the “made it his own” umbrella and hence is added as an extra for consideration - a side dish to the feast that is the ten songs above.

One of many tracks that were uniquely cut for various BBC radio shows in the UK (all captured on the essential BBC Sessions collection), Jimi laid down this version a couple of years after The Beatles’ original hit the top five on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s interesting to compare the unrestrained, free-flowing vibe that Hendrix introduced, which takes the song to another level.

Jimi’s version is far more urgent, making the Fab Four’s original sound a little sedate by comparison – something that happened every time Hendrix covered a song. With the Beatles’ version, not much really happens in the middle break – of course, Hendrix grabs the opportunity to blaze through a rip roaring solo, overloaded with scorching guitar pyrotechnics.

Slight Return – a handful of contenders for further consideration

Although the tracks above are the cream of the crop, there are a handful of other noteworthy examples, including the BBC Sessions cover of yet another Dylan song, Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, any of the attempts at Hound Dog – a song which Hendrix toyed with on a number of occasions, his mini version of Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love and another BBC Sessions cut showcasing Jimi’s spin on Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie Man.

Session heavyweight George Terry has had quite the career, having amassed credits with ABBA, Bee Gees, Diana Ross and many, many other big-name acts over the years.

Not only that, during the 1970s the unsung electric guitar hero was Eric Clapton’s guitarist, providing chops on No Reason to Cry (1976) and Backless (1978), and hitting the road on numerous occasions throughout the decade.

Through Slowhand, Terry was also given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet a Beatle – which took place after a particularly heavy night of drinking.

Speaking to Guitar World, Terry recalled the time he met George Harrison while staying at Clapton’s house.

“The band had to practice jams of slow blues tunes for over a week,” Terry explains. “It drove me crazy to do the same thing every day. After more than a week of it, I had a little too much Jack Daniels and went to sleep in the upstairs bedroom.

“Early the next morning, I woke up to Eric and George playing ukuleles at the foot of my bed. I thought I was dreaming, but the hangover assured me I wasn’t.”

Terry’s time as Clapton’s guitarist during the ’70s was certainly eventful, even without the impromptu ukulele jams with George Harrison.

He once had to step in and cover his boss’ playing when Slowhand was spiked with LSD before a show.

The pair would do great things together in the 1970s, and as Terry recalls, their relationship began rather spontaneously: Terry – who was at this point already a seasoned session player – spotted Clapton walking towards Criteria Studios, and offered to give him a lift.

“After giving Eric a ride to the studio, I told him I played with an in-house band that Mack Emerman [who founded Criteria Studios in 1958] let hang out there.

“I told Eric that we usually play for fun, in between being called into sessions, and invited him to join us if he wanted to play a bit or run down a song. He took me up on the offer and we played a few different kinds of grooves.”

Eric Clapton brought a show in Madrid, Spain, to a premature end after he was hit by an object thrown by an audience member.

As captured in footage from the show, Slowhand was nearing the end of his performance at the Movistar Arena last Thursday (May 7) when what appeared to be a vinyl record was thrown, hitting the guitarist in the chest.

Clapton was winding down the set at the time, having just finished performing his cover of J.J. Cale’s Cocaine. Because of the incident, he didn’t return for the expected encore, which would have been Before You Accuse Me.

“Very sad image today in Eric Clapton concert in Madrid,” wrote on X account. “Some guy threw something to EC at the end, ending with no encore.”

Clapton was in the middle of an EU tour, which is set to conclude in Germany this week with shows at the SAP Arena in Mannheim (May 13); Lanxess Arena in Koln (May 15); and Olympiastadion München (May 17).

The blues guitar icon will return to the US later this year for a six-date tour of North America, kicking off September 6 in Detroit and wrapping up in Kansas City on September 17.

Like the Europe shows, Clapton will be joined by his usual backing band comprising Doyle Bramhall II and Nathan East, as well as drummer Sonny Emory, and keyboardists Chris Stainton and Tim Carmon.

Visit Eric Clapton’s website for a full list of dates and tickets.

Right before his passing in December 2025, Stax guitar legend Steve Cropper was working on a new record featuring an all-star cast including Eric Clapton, Brian May, Billy Gibbons, and Ronnie Wood.

Now, Cropper’s final project, Watching the Tide – a reference to his performance on Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay – has been confirmed for release on August 28, with the first song, Ticket First, alongside Eric Clapton, giving us a taste of what to expect from the posthumous release.

Speaking about the single and the subsequent album, acclaimed songwriter-producer Jon Tiven – and Cropper’s close collaborator – says, “Making music was Steve's greatest joy. Steve was so encouraged by Friendlytown [his 2024, Grammy-nominated release]. He was adamant he wanted to do another record.

“I sent out some emails to guitar players I knew who had a great affinity for Steve, and two days later, I got an email back from Eric Clapton's manager, saying he’d be in Nashville for a concert and could we do it then,” Tiven recalls.

“He did, I believe, 11 takes on guitar. At the end, Steve and I looked at each other and said, ‘Man, you just turned the song inside out. I think we're gonna have to give you a writer's credit.’ Eric looked pretty stunned by that. And he said: ‘Well, anything to get my name next to Steve Cropper’s…’”

The A-list cameos continue with Brian May and Billy Gibbons, who lend their chops to the ballad My Angels Are Calling, Ronnie Wood on Until Now, and Tiven himself, who takes on lead guitar duties on Blood From A Stone and Here & Gone.

Yet, the process was far from easy, as those around Cropper knew he was running out of time. “I finished the mixes about a week and a half before Steve passed, and we brought a CD to him at the medical facility,” Tiven says.

“He called me the night before he passed to tell me how much he loved it. He was playing it for everyone who came to visit him, telling them it was the best record he’d ever made.”

“I know this record provided great joy to Steve in the last year of his life, and I’m so glad he was able to have this great creative burst that was so strong…” he concludes.

Watching the Tide is available to preorder via Provogue/Artone Label Group.

Late session legend Steve Cropper recorded a song with Eric Clapton shortly before his death, and it’s set to be released tomorrow (May 7).

“We lost a true architect of soul in December 2025,” a post from Cropper’s Instagram, featuring an image of the pair warmly embracing, reads. “Steve Cropper’s sound, feel, and songwriting shaped generations – and his music still speaks louder than ever.

“Ticket First (feat. Eric Clapton) is part of his final body of work – a moment where two legends met in the studio and pushed each other to something unforgettable. What started as a joke turned into a track that Steve knew had magic in it. It will come out this Thursday, May 7.”

Judging from the post, we have one last Steve Cropper album to look forward to. The guitarist released two solo efforts in his later years: Fire It Up in 2021 and Friendlytown, which features Billy Gibbons and Brian May, in 2024. It seems his inspiration didn't stop there.

Thankfully, then, it’s not a long wait to hear what is on paper – and almost certainly in reality – a very exciting collaboration. We're intrigued to hear how, exactly, a collaboration between two icons started as a joke, too…

In his heyday, Cropper played on a dizzying number of records as a versatile session player for the Stax Records house band. That included work with Otis Redding and Neil Young, as well as writing the timeless Booker T. & the M.G.'s cut Green Onions.

He famously learned to play rhythm and lead parts simultaneously to navigate the label’s budget restraints, and was met with an outpouring of love following his death last year, aged 84.

“Words fail me in describing his impact,” wrote Joe Bonamassa, while Mick Fleetwood called him a “trailblazer,” and Tommy Emmanuel said he was “one of the most influential guitar players of our time.”

As Bonamassa says, it’s hard to quantify just how much Cropper has imprinted his effervescent personality onto the guitar landscape in just a few words. Tales of his generosity and warmth, as Sheri Miller says of her time in the studio with her hero in 2012, and humility – he told Total Guitar that his playing “has always sucked” in 2024 – help paint just a corner of the picture of his life and career.

And as the stories that weave themselves into Friendlytown's licks prove, Cropper still had fire in his belly until the end. Brian May had turned down a chance to feature on the record, but when Cropper turned his rejection email into a song, he went back on his decision and brought his flair to an album that, until now, appeared to be his last hurrah.

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.

At just 32, Matthieu Lucas has managed to build something extraordinary.

The entrepreneur, guitarist, and music enthusiast has painstakingly chipped away at building the emporium that is Matt’s Guitar Shop from the ground up, attracting A-list clients from all four corners of the globe.

The journey was far from plain sailing. However, judging by the caliber of artist guitars gracing every inch of the walls in this slice of musical paradise – tucked away on an unassuming street in Paris – it has well and truly paid off.

“It was not easy because you just show up at a store, and you look like a baby, and somehow, you start talking big dollars to very reputable dealers or collectors, and some of them were like, ‘How is this possible… this guy is selling drugs somewhere,’” he quips, as he recalls the early days of his ambitious venture.

However, it’s perhaps Lucas’ marketing prowess and ethos – that even the most prestigious of guitars are meant to be played on stage – that has transformed him into the go-to guy for artist guitars, with players such as Marcus King, Craig Ross, Billie Joe Armstrong, Myles Kennedy, and Yungblud all getting in on the action.

“I was very inspired by banks and huge associations buying Stradivarius [violins] very early on and lending them to musicians on tour playing classical music,” Lucas says.

“Guitars need to be shared with the world. That's my theory. That's why we lend ours on stage all the time, and that's always going to raise the value. They're really artifacts of a very specific period when the guitar revolutionized everything.”

What inspired you to start Matt’s Guitar Shop in the first place?

It’s been a little bit more than 10 years, actually. Time flies! [However], it all started when I was 15 years old.

I was not really interested in music or guitar in general. I was just playing video games with a friend of mine. His father showed up in the room and he said, “Guys, you need to listen to AC/DC.” And then I said, "Okay, [I’ll] give this guy five minutes with his old band and then I'm going to be finished with him.”

And we listened, and Angus Young was really the guy who penetrated my brain, and my passion for guitar started there. Six months later, I was seeing AC/DC in a stadium and buying an SG copy, and that started it all. And then I just wanted to buy more and more guitars because I started to discover bands.

Step by step, I went to Paris guitar stores. I was hanging out in a store called Guitar Store in Paris, and the guy was nice to me, and he let me discover the world of guitar sales – buying, selling… the daily life of a guitar shop.

I was already buying and selling privately. So it [Matt’s Guitar Shop] started in an apartment in Paris – a very small apartment. Three years, maybe four years later, we had the opportunity to get the place here, and that was it.

What were some of the initial challenges, especially as a young businessman?

They really put you in boxes initially, and that was not easy, but step by step, we met people that trusted me, and I knew who I wanted to work with over time.

I don’t come from a musical family myself. So I was mainly listening to those guys in my headphones when I was younger. I was listening to Lenny [Kravitz] and Craig [Ross] quite a lot because I have deep respect for that duo and what they represent.

One day, I show up at Rudy's Music [in New York], and Rudy just traded me one of Craig’s main touring guitars, which was his 1964 ES-345.

I didn't have the money back then, so I said, ‘Give me three months. I'm going to buy and sell in France, and I'm going to come back and pick it up.’ And my friend, who was with me at this time, told me, ‘Are you crazy? This guitar is way too much money.’

It was a time when social media was different. I just sent a message to Craig on Facebook, and two weeks passed by, and I was like, ‘Okay, this guy is busy. He's never going to reach me.’ And, suddenly, my phone is popping off, and Craig Ross just answered me, and he was so kind. [He was like,] this guy is 22 or 23 years old, he just made a huge purchase for himself, compared to his capacity.

So when I bought this guitar, we met at L'Olympia in Paris, and we got that connection going. So, for me, just meeting him was great because Craig really proves that you can’t buy class. I met Lenny later, but with Craig, it's been like 10 years and I still have that connection with him.

Which artists’ guitars command the most demand and attention?

It's quite mixed. We have John Frusciante's 1961 [ES-]335 that he played on stage. We have, of course, Paul Kossoff's 1955 “Black Beauty”, which was also used by Eric Clapton during Cream because they used to trade guitars quite a lot.

I’ve had this guitar for almost 10 years now, and I don't regret buying it. Another interesting one is Steve Lukather’s 1951 Esquire. We [also] have AC/DC's Cliff Williams’ bass – we have number three, which was toured all around the world for four years with AC/DC.

How has your vision for the showroom evolved, compared to when you first opened the doors?

When I started this business with artists’ guitars, I had two kinds of people: the people who believed in it and the people who were laughing at me.

Now, I was very proud when I was assisting at the [Jim Irsay] auction in New York City because I think that the guitar changed the world, and that the guitar will still be listened to in 1,000 years, and all those guys will be gone, and what's left is the music and their instrument. [When you buy that guitar,] you are the owner of their legacy.

So we feel kind of amazed at the shop every day because I really believed in that market when it was not fancy.

What made the Jim Irsay auction different?

Everybody was waiting for that auction. That was, after all, the greatest collection [that ever existed] of artists’ guitars.

People are starting to understand that there are good aspects to buying a guitar – whether it's for the investment or whether you're a guitar player – but if you choose wisely, those guitars will never go down [in price] because there is always somebody richer than you who wants to have that guitar.

Why have the Jim Irsay guitars leapt in value in such a short time span?

It depends on the auction house you're dealing with, the place you're buying the guitar from, and the marketing around that.

Marketing is key when you want to sell a pricey instrument like that, and I think Christie’s did a great job. They went everywhere, and when you're doing that, you just attract the best buyers because they don't have any doubt about what they're buying.

Everything went through the roof because those buyers were brought together by Christie’s in one room. They could have been telephone bidders. They could be room bidders, or internet bidders, but they were all together in one room for this collection, which was exceptional.

I see that with the shop. I don't have a single customer older than 60, and usually my customers are between 25 and 50, so it's a new generation who just discovered the world of guitars, and those people are working hard to get those guitars.

When you put them in one room, I can guarantee you that you will see new world records. If Jimmy Page's “Number One” was in that room that day, that would be between 20 and 30 million [dollars] easy.

But who are these people? What are their backgrounds?

I can give you an example of one person I know: Bobby Tseitli in Chicago. Bobby is a good friend of mine – those guys are really amazing, and they're putting together a collection called Family Guitars.

I knew they wanted [Jerry Garcia’s] “Tiger” so much. I gave him a huge hug when he bought that guitar, and I can guarantee you that this guy probably cried like a baby in his room sleeping next to the guitar that night, and that everybody in the room was feeling amazed because he was bidding with all his heart. The night after, Derek [Trucks] played it on stage. I mean, what's better than that?

I think we should be thankful for those guys who believe in the market and make it dynamic because they're not only buying guitars; they are making the shows more attractive. Everybody in the room will remember the day they saw Jerry Garcia's guitar in the hands of Derek Trucks. [In terms of the buyers’ backgrounds], I never ask too much unless they talk about themselves.

For sure, at Christie’s, we saw hedge fund guys, tech guys, cryptocurrency guys… so it's new money, in a good way, not in a bad way. From what I can tell, we have more and more young people who are just working hard, and they could be in tech, they could be in sports, whatever… we have so many kinds of buyers, and that's the beauty of this job.

Do you think we're going to see David Gilmour’s Strat one on stage anytime soon?

I know by name the guy who bought it. I don't know him personally. If he reads the interview, [I would say] I think you should put that guitar on stage. But I hope all those guitars [from that auction] are going to be on stage soon.

How do most of these clients find you?

Social media helps. You put the guitars on stage, and people are always filming. The audience recognizes the guitar, and I get texts or messages on Instagram.

So, I think it's a win-win-win because the crowd is winning because they get to see a very special guitar that day. Marketing-wise it's great for the shop, and it's also great for the artist because when this is going to the press, the tour is gonna get some marketing.

When Marcus King was touring in Paris 10 years ago, he was playing in clubs [in front of] 20 people, and we were there already, and now he's more famous, of course. And he still loves to play that Paul Kosoff guitar. Every time he’s in Paris, he plays that guitar on stage, and it's one of his favorite guitars to play.

What trends are you noticing in the types of guitars that command the highest prices in today's market?

When I started, nobody really wanted a guitar from Green Day, for example. Now, I’m getting asked more often.

I think it's a generation thing – Green Day are getting bigger because the older they get, the bigger their legacy. When the band is getting older, their fans are also getting older, and they have more capacity to buy the items of their dreams. When artists pass away, sometimes you get a bit emotional. So, of course, people are missing them so much that they want their guitars.

But I would be curious to have one of those big “dinosaur” guitars on stage [at an auction]. After the success of the Gibson Keith Richards signature, [I would be curious to have] one of Keith's guitars going on stage, the black [ES-]355, the “Micawber” Tele... or Jimmy Page's guitars or Brian May's guitar or Paul McCartney's bass – those legendary guitars that are still used by them.

I think we would be surprised by the price they fetch because records are made to be broken and are made to be set higher every time. And again, it wouldn't surprise me in the near future if we see a guitar [sell for] between $20 and $30-40 million.

Do you see any risks or misconceptions for new buyers entering the vintage guitar market, especially those treating it as an investment?

I would suggest that you check the provenance of the instruments. You have to choose wisely. If you're advised wisely and if you decide to buy the guitar at the right price, that's great.

To give you an example, when I bought Steve Jones' guitar, I knew there were rumors of Steve selling the original one 14 times to different people.

So we checked the mother-of-pearl inlays. We checked all the dings and marks. We scanned the pictures of the guitar today, and we matched those mother-of-pearl inlays. When [there are] three matches, then you know.

Beyond the monetary value, what makes a guitar collectible?

The more provenance you have and the more history you have with the guitar [the better]. For example, if Keith Richards just played one guitar one time on the sofa two minutes backstage and signed it, that doesn't really make sense to me. But what matters to me is if he played it on stage. Why did he choose that particular one for his personal collection? Was there a reason sound-wise?

I don't agree with comments on the internet that say that, ‘Oh well, David Gilmour modified the Black Strat like 700 times over time…’ [If you want a pristine guitar,] then just buy a vintage guitar. Don't even look at an artist guitar.

I understand that it doesn’t make sense for some people to buy a $15 million guitar, but I think the more modifications it has, the more personal the instrument becomes – and that’s what makes its value even higher.

There's been a lot of criticism over the amounts spent at the Jim Irsay auction. What would you say to people who feel that collectible guitar prices have lost touch with reality?

I think we are living in a world where records are made to be broken.

I would get [that comment] from the perspective of somebody earning a medium salary. That's understandable, because for some people, it's just hard to feed their children, and then you see on the news that somebody just bought David Gilmour's guitar for $15 million.

But I would say it has been like this forever, in sports, the arts… let's not even talk about the football world. I think the world is discovering guitars with these auctions, with these pieces of history, [and] with the new players as well. The rich will always be richer. We can't control that. If they want the David Gilmour Strat for $50 million one day, that's it.

What's been your proudest moment of seeing one of your guitars being played on stage?

I lent Myles Kennedy Jeff Buckley's guitar on stage in Paris a few years ago. That was the final show I assisted before Covid, but that was a moment because it was at L'Olympia [in Paris].

It was full of symbolism. We were preparing for that day for four months. Myles was the perfect guy to sing Hallelujah on stage with the very guitar that Jeff recorded the song with. I still get chills talking about it.

[Another standout moment was when] I saw Craig Ross playing [Jeff Beck’s] Yardburst in Paris.

If I told my young self, [who was] listening to Lenny Kravitz and Craig Ross, that one day I would have Jeff Beck's guitar and then Craig would play it on tour, especially in Paris, my hometown, I wouldn't believe it. It was really a full-circle moment.

• Learn more about Matt's Guitar Shop.

Fender and Gibson are two of the most iconic electric guitar brands of all time – and Todd Rundgren has stated that, in his heyday, you either played one or the other. Players had to pick their poison.

The versatile guitarist, producer, and songwriter, who's worked with Meat Loaf, New York Dolls, and Grand Funk Railroad, emerged from the psychedelic scene of the 1960s. He was well aware of what was happening across the Atlantic at the time, and that awareness informed his choice of guitar.

“In those days, there were kind of two camps,” he tells Guitar Player in a new interview. “I came out of the Yardbirds camp – the Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck kind of things – and you played a Gibson guitar.”

The other camp, which played Fenders, had Jimi Hendrix as its leader. But Rundgren aligned himself with the “classical” playing styles of the other Yardbirds group, in contrast to Hendrix's liquid fire.

Indeed, it was Hendrix's unique prowess with a Strat, as well as the differences in their individual styles and techniques, that solidified Rundgren's early loyalty to Gibson. At the time, he felt he couldn't get what he needed from a Fender.

“I played a Les Paul, which had no whammy bar, no tremolo tailpiece on it,” he explains. “Jimi played a Stratocaster and made full use of the whammy bar. I personally didn’t have the sense of freedom Jimi Hendrix had, in that he might not play the same thing every time.

“A lot of what I was listening to before that was kind of classical guitar solos that Beck and Clapton would play, and you would learn those literally in the same way you would learn every George Harrison guitar solo – literally. They’re like primers in guitar playing; you’d learn how to play this melody and be expected to play it at the drop of a hat.”

As Rundgren notes, it was the work of Cream- and Yardbirds-era Clapton and Beck – both of whom played Gibsons at the time – that pushed him towards that camp. Notably, Jimmy Page, another Yardbirds alumni, also played a Les Paul during his time in the group.

Ironically, while Page has largely remained loyal to Gibsons – though by no means has he played them exclusively – Clapton and Beck would go on to softly change camps. So too would Rundgren himself.

For example, Beck's Oxblood Les Paul, which he used to record his game-changing solo record Blow by Blow before it became the world’s most expensive LP last year, was later joined by a Fender Strat.

Despite previously waxing lyrical about the instrument’s tonal quality, Beck explained his U-turn by describing the Strat as providing “endless color,” and it was that instrument that he played almost exclusively for the last 40 years of his career.

Clapton, meanwhile, also developed an affinity for Fenders. While Rundgren would eventually take ownership of Slowhand's iconic 'The Fool' SG, Clapton himself later stuck largely to Strats.

Maybe that's why Rundgren also began embracing Fenders and S-types later on. Indeed, although Hendrix's liquid fire on the whammy bar may have seemed out of reach for Rundgren at the time, he later began playing a black Fender Mustang, making its tremolo system a core part of his sound in the late 1970s.

Clapton's 'The Fool' SG, which Rundgren once bought for $500, sold earlier this year as part of the Jim Irsay Collection auction for $3,003,000.

Backstage Auctions has launched a new collection of historical musical items, which includes gear used by Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and more – and it's expected to fetch a cumulative figure of up to $1.5 million.

The auction is already live and taking bids, with storied and oddball pieces – many from the collection of the late Small Faces founder, Ian McLagan – making up the lots.

It includes the Don Musser acoustic guitar that Eddie Van Halen reportedly used on two 1990s Van Halen albums, Balance and Van Halen III. It can be heard on the likes of Take Me Back, Without You, and Neworld.

According to a 1995 Guitar World interview, EVH had bought the acoustic from Norman's Rare Guitars, and it was regularly put to work at 5150 Studios.

Also featured is Eric Clapton's stage-played 1974 Fender Strat, which Ronnie Lane also played after it was gifted to the Small Faces/Faces guitarist circa 1977.

See also Keith Richards' 2005 semi-hollow Duesenberg Starplayer Outlaw electric guitar, which sports a unique mosaic-mimicking finish described as a “custom pearl finish.” It was a birthday gift from Richards to McLagan, and it features chrome skull knobs to really tap into the Outlaw vibe.

There's also a movie star up for grabs... sort of. When Elvis Presley was filming Viva Las Vegas, he fell into a pool with a guitar, and when it was discovered to be water-damaged, a Gibson acoustic was drafted in for the remainder of the scenes. Yes, that back-up guitar is up for auction.

McLagan's 1965 Telecaster, customized with a Strat neck and featuring a “custom-painted psychedelic pickguard,” is also of note. Bought for his first show with the Small Faces, it was later used by Steve Marriott to record Tin Soldier and All or Nothing.

It was originally Cream, but that finish was stripped off to reveal a natural look in 1969. That same year, Peter Frampton hand-carved its neck pickup hole to accommodate a Gibson humbucker salvaged from the SG that Townshend had been brutally smashed to pieces during a show at the Marquee Club.

Consequently, Backstage Auctions has dubbed it “a singular piece of rock and roll history.”

Bidding is now open. See Backstage Auctions for more.

Eric Clapton’s 1913 Gibson Style-0 archtop acoustic guitar, nicknamed “Pattie” after George Harrison’s wife and Clapton’s love interest, Pattie Boyd, is up for auction on May 8 as part of Heritage’s Vintage Guitar Auction.

It's the same guitar that was used to write some of the most iconic tracks of Clapton's Cream era, as well as George Harrison’s post-Beatles career

Last May, the historically significant guitar went up for sale on Reverb for $949,999. Now, Beatles and Clapton music fans have another opportunity to lay their hands on a guitar on which tracks like Here Comes the Sun, Something, and I Me Mine were written.

“Few instruments capture a personal and artistic story as vividly as ‘Pattie’ – a guitar that sits at the intersection of love, collaboration and some of the most influential songwriting of the late 1960s,” says Aaron Piscopo, Heritage’s Director of Vintage Guitars & Musical Instruments.

While not much is known about the acoustic’s early years, the guitar – serial number 14106 – met its fate when it was acquired by Eric Clapton in 1968. Prior to that, it seems to have been well taken care of – retaining its original finish and the quintessential Gibson scroll design on the upper boat.

While he was in town for Cream’s October 19 concert at the Forum in Los Angeles, Clapton brought the guitar to the home of Alan Pariser, the manager of husband-and-wife act Delaney & Bonnie, where he ended up meeting Harrison.

As legend has it, the pair shared some of the most fruitful workshopping and songwriting sessions, sowing the seeds for tracks such as Here Comes the Sun, Something, I Me Mine, All Things Must Pass, Let It Rain, and Presence of the Lord, and also believed to have helped inspire Clapton’s Layla.

Fast forward two years, and Clapton would pass the guitar on to Delaney Bramlett, during his collaboration with Bramlett’s band, Delaney & Bonnie. It remained in Bramlett’s possession for decades till his death in 2008. In 2013, it was sold in the Bramlett estate auction, and is now up for sale again via Heritage.

The all-star auction lineup also features Ace Frehley’s 1972 Gibson Les Paul Custom, which the Kiss guitarist used on tour during the band’s mid-to-late ’70s era, with photographic evidence and documentation cementing Frehley’s link to the instrument.

“Ace Frehley’s identity is inextricably bound to the Les Paul,” Piscopo adds. “Its sound and visual presence became inseparable from the rise of KISS and the larger-than-life persona of rock in that era.”

The live auction will be taking place at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, starting at 12:00 PM CT, while the online session will be kicking off at 4:00 PM CT.

For more information, visit Heritage Auctions.

In more recent news, the seventh edition of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival was announced, featuring a packed lineup including the likes of Buddy Guy, Joe Bonamassa, and John Mayer.

Since its inception in 1999, Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival has featured the crème de la crème of guitarists who, in one way or another, have earned the blues-rock legend’s respect.

Now, the seventh edition of the festival will be held on September 26 and 27 in Austin, Texas, at the Moody Center, marking the 28th anniversary of the 1998 founding of the Crossroads Centre Antigua, the drug treatment facility spearheaded by Clapton himself.

Among the numerous Crossroads veterans returning this year will be Joe Bonamassa, Billy Gibbons, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., Sonny Landreth, John Mayer, the Del McCoury Band, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Jimmie Vaughan, as well as Clapton himself, who will be performing on both nights. Meanwhile, Trey Anastasio, Tommy Emmanuel, Julian Lage, and Pete Townshend will all be making their festival debut.

Guitar Center was also announced as the exclusive retail partner of the festival, and, in addition to onsite retail, there will also be a rare showcase of its Legends Collection. This includes Clapton’s 1956 Fender Stratocaster, “Blackie,” the 1964 Gibson ES-335 he played in Cream, and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s iconic 1965 Fender Stratocaster, “Lenny.”

Speaking about the festival in a 2019 interview with Guitar Center, Clapton said, “My identity is always going to be linked to Crossroads. I can't walk away, so I've come back to do the thing I know how to do best, which is play, and also invite people that I have high admiration for in the music world.”

He continued, “I like to use the festival platform as a way of getting [musicians] to come and play to a big audience, maybe for the first time. I think it's quite nice for the other musicians to meet them, too. I like cross-fertilization. I mean, that was a fascinating thing for me, the fantasy. And it worked.”

Tickets for the event will go on sale on April 3 at 10 a.m. CDT. For more information, head to the official Crossroads Guitar Festival website.

Last month, I discussed some of the advantages of playing in a power trio, such as the open harmonic canvas that it affords me as a guitar player. Threw Me to the Wolves is a song of mine that presents many opportunities to explore and exploit the creative freedom that the three-piece ensemble allows.

With the song’s solo section, my mindset is that we’re at the start of a musical journey, and it’s my mission to “tell a story” that will take the audience from one place to another. In this lesson, I’d like to share how I go about doing that.

Let’s first look at the solo section’s chord progression. As shown in Figure 1, we’re in the key of A minor, and the progression begins with the bVI (flat six) chord, F(sus2), which moves to the bVII (flat seven) chord, G5, then resolves to the tonic, or root, chord, Am. Each chord lasts for two beats, so the first bar is Fsus2 to G5, and the second bar is Am to G5. This two-bar pattern then repeats throughout the solo.

For the F and G chords, no 3rd is played, which gives me more melodic freedom when soloing. This sense of “open harmony” allows me to hold long, sustaining notes over all three chords, and then travel through the progression with melodic freedom, in my quest for memorable, singable solos.

Figure 2 illustrates how I get into the solo. Taking an Eric Clapton/Albert King-inspired approach, I begin with a whole-step bend from D, the 4th, up to E, the 5th, which I hold and shake, after which I slowly move back down to the A root note via the notes D and C, as well as the 2nd, B. The overall scale I rely on here is A minor hextatonic (A, B, C, D, E, G), which is A minor pentatonic (A, C, D, E, G) with the note B, the 2nd, or 9th, added.

Another thing I love to do here is reference the chord progression with double-stops, specifically 6th intervals, or 6ths. Figure 3 has me sliding into a C-A double-stop over Fsus2, a D-B double-stop over G5 and an E-C double-stop over Am.

Figure 4 demonstrates a neat little trick I picked up from Joe Bonamassa: when playing a 6th or 10th interval as a double-stop, instead of fretting the higher note normally, play it one fret lower then bend it up a half step and add some vibrato, to make it really sing.

Another cool way to elaborate on 6ths is to create a “pedal tone”-type melody. In Figure 5, I begin with straight 6ths over Fsus2 and G5 then use the lower note as a rearticulated pedal tone against a melodic line played on higher strings.

I also like to reference each chord with simple triad arpeggios. In Figure 6, I play F, G and Am triads on the top three strings while adding vibrato in an Otis Rush-type manner.

Figure 7 and 8 illustrate a tremolo strumming technique I picked up from Stevie Ray Vaughan: Figure 7 shows Am, Bm, Csus2 and Dsus2 triads played on the top three strings. In Figure 8, I create a tremolo effect by lightly strumming the strings with the tip of my pick-hand index finger as quickly as possible.

This is the last installment of Hardwired for now. I hope you’ve been able to incorporate some of my ideas into your own playing and hope to see you at a show soon!

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

While the Yardbirds are rightly famed for having kickstarted the careers of three British guitar legends – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page – the band was far more than a mere nursery for six-string superstars.

Their freewheeling mid-song interludes (dubbed “rave-ups”), deft combination of blues and harder-edged sensibilities, and willingness to engage with non-mainstream ideas such as Gregorian chant exerted a powerful influence on their mid-'60s contemporaries and presaged many developments in the worlds of experimental and heavy rock.

In its heyday, the group enjoyed success on both sides of the Atlantic with such hits as For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul, and Shapes of Things.

Like many other low-enders, the band's founding bassist, Paul Samwell-Smith, started out as a guitarist. “When the Yardbirds started, under the name of the Metropolis Blues Quartet, Keith Relf was playing guitar, and playing rather well,” said Samwell-Smith in the March 2017 issue of Bass Player. “So I volunteered to play the bass – well, someone had to!”

The Surrey, England-born musician cites Ricky Fenson of the Cyril Davies Band as an early influence. “He blew my mind when I watched them play. I copied much of his style, as did others, including Bill Wyman.”

The Yardbirds' first studio album, Yardbirds – a.k.a. Roger the Engineer and released in the States as Over Under Sideways Down – opens with Lost Woman, a riff-based number that features a prime example of the band’s rave-up style.

Samwell-Smith – who also served as the album's co-producer – believes the song was likely recorded live in one take, with the bass guitar sound captured using a miked Marshall rig comprising an amp and a four-speaker unit.

“I used my Epiphone Rivoli bass, a short-scale model that I used for everything, and which made it easier to play chords. In fact, I found it easier all around to reach the notes – those long-scale Fender Jazz models sounded fantastic, but they scared the hell out of me. I used black nylon tapewound strings to reduce the friction, as I played a lot of chords and slid up and down the fretboard a lot. I found with wire-wound strings I'd wear my fingers down.”

Following a hi-hat count-off, the bass announces the song's foundational hook: a bobbing pick-plucked riff built around the G minor pentatonic scale. This riff continues through the guitar-free intro and verse, accompanied by drummer Jim McCarty's throbbing tom-tom ostinato and Relf's vocals.

Samwell-Smith changes tack for the chorus, deploying root-5th power chords (enlivened by an occasional 6th) while adding beat four color to the C and D chords with a minor-3rd-to-major-3rd half-step. “These are the classic Jimmy Reed-type blues chords, which I used a lot.”

Following a repeat of the verse and chorus, the song segues into the rave-up section at 00:51 via the pivotal D7#9 chord. Here, the bass, harmonica, and a single guitar hammer out a snappy unison line. Dig how the bass duplicates the bluesy bends of the guitar and harmonica throughout this section. “That was me just trying to be a guitar player, yet again.”

At 01:21, the bass drops to a low, 3rd-fret G, heralding a slow, whole-note climb up the G minor pentatonic scale that extends under Relf's wailing harp solo and Jeff Beck's off-the-cuff axe-work.

Samwell-Smith takes over Dreja's hypnotic 16th-note G's at 02:06, gradually adding in the 5th and octave above, as the rave-up careens toward an abrupt climax. This is followed by a return to the main riff at 02:39, and a recap of the verse and chorus before closing out over a raucous G9 chord at 03:05.

Regarding the band's slow-build interludes, Samwell-Smith explained: “It was something we always did in our live performances, so it was easy to agree on the basic shape of the improvised part and make it up on the spot. It relied on eye contact to indicate when the rave should end and the riff come back, which was usually me, since I had to get back to the riff double-sharp.”

Samwell-Smith quit the band shortly after finishing the Yardbirds album to pursue a career as a producer, later working with such artists as Carly Simon, All About Eve, Cat Stevens, and Jethro Tull. “I was so tired of touring endlessly, always traveling for hours to a gig miles from anywhere.

Making the album was a brief period of sanity for me; I think we spent five consecutive days in the studio, and I loved it. It was definitely what I wanted to do. So when we finished the album and went back on the road, I realized that I had to change my job.”

In the mid-'80s, however, Samwell-Smith teamed up again with Yardbirds founding members Dreja and McCarty to form Box of Frogs, which recorded two blues-rock albums featuring a host of musical buddies, including Beck and Page.

It was the night when the records fell – 23 of them in total – when all pre-auction estimates were smashed, and quite possibly the market for vintage guitars with player kudos will never be the same again.

The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame auction, hosted at Christie’s in New York, was truly a historic event, with all 44 lots sold and a cool $84,091,350 changing hands – a record for a guitar auction. By close of play, those figures saw Christie’s exceed its sales estimate by 373 per cent.

After 21 minutes of intense bidding – received like a Federer vs Nadal rally at the Arthur Ashe Stadium – the world had a new most-expensive guitar, and to the surprise of no one in the weeks leading up to the auction, it was David Gilmour’s Black Strat, the heavily modified Stratocaster that “he grew tired of” and sold, but not before tracking Comfortably Numb and Shine on You Crazy Diamond with it, anointing it as the ne plus ultra of Pink Floyd guitars.

The hammer came down at $14,550,000. For that kind of money, here’s hoping they threw in a guitar strap and a fresh set of D’Addario NYXL 10s.

But it did not take long for jaws – and records – to fall once more. Inside the hall, there were some Amex Platinum credit cards going uncomfortably numb as the bidding heated up for Jerry Garcia’s custom-built Tiger, the electric guitar that was six years in the making, comprised of the finest tone woods known to humanity, and the Grateful Dead icon’s most-celebrated guitar.

It set another record for a Garcia-owned guitar – and needless to say, for a guitar built by Doug Irwin, selling for $11,560,000.

Of course this was the sort of night that someone would spend the best part of seven million bucks on a left-handed student-model Fender guitar that is the definition of player grade.

Yes, Kurt Cobain’s 1969 Competition Mustang from the Smells Like Teenage Spirit video fetched a record (for a Cobain guitar) $6,907,000. It was previously the world's most expensive guitar, and so, on the night, its record was broken three times.

Julien Pradels, president, Christie’s Americas, said the night was a testimony to Irsay’s curation of the most important guitars, musical instruments and pop-cultural ephemera in history.

This wasn’t just guitars breaking records; we had Ringo Starr’s Beatles logo Ed Sullivan Show Ludwig drum head going for $2,881,000; Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics sheet for The Times They Are a Changin’ sold for $2,515,000… Someone paid over one-and-a-half million dollars for a saddle!

“Lot after lot we felt like we were making history,” said Pradels. “The Irsay sale did justice to the brilliance of the collector, and of the monumental pieces he brought together, iconic objects that tell the story of our culture and our times. The Irsay Collection is singular, but Christie’s will have other amazing sales in this space moving forward.”

There was the record sale for any guitar owned by a woman, as Janis Joplin’s Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar went for $381,000.

There was a new record set for a Gibson guitar, as Eric Clapton’s The Fool SG sold for $3,003,000, while his 1939 Martin 000-42 – i.e. the one from MTV Unplugged, “See if you can spot this one…” and all that – changed hands for a whopping $4,101,000.

It was an expensive night to be a Beatlemaniac with deep pockets. Brace for more records: George Harrison’s Gibson SG Standard mopped up $2,271,000; John Lennon’s Broadwood piano (okay, that’s not a guitar) sold for $3,247,000.

Even when the lots were not making world records they were destroying pre-auction estimates.

Many exceptional guitars were sold for eye-watering sums, such as John Lennon’s 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996 and his 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins, with both going for $1,270,000.

Prince’s Custom ‘Yellow Cloud’ seems a bargain at $635,000, and that seems to be the going rate for iconic “shape” electrics as The Edge’s korina Explorer, a backup on U2’s Joshua Tree tour, went for the same price.

Harrison’s Bisgby-equipped Maton Mastersound, which older readers might remember seeing onstage when the Beatles played the UK in the summer of ’63, sold for $279,400 – and please let it have been Josh Homme who bought it, because that would look just the thing on a QOTSA stage.

The 1966 prototype Vox Kensington semi-hollow guitar, once owned by the Beatles, would look crazy on any stage with its tulip-inspired body shape and arcane electronics – and at $609,600 it would legit be crazy to take it on any stage, or out of the house for that matter.

Would this even be a history-making auction without a Johnny Cash guitar? Of course not. The Man in Black’s 1956 Martin D-21 fetched $215,900, and with its battered top and vibe off the charts, that, legitimately, feels like a good buy.

And so it went on, Paul McCartney’s Yamaha BB-1200 (an underrated bass guitar) sold for $228,600. Oh, and another David Gilmour guitar breaking the multi-million-dollar mark with his Wish You Were Here 1969 Martin D-35 going for $2,393,000. A lot of money, but you can be damn sure that it’ll make your Em7 and open G chords sound godly.

Last, but by no means least, one of the coolest guitar-related items to be auctioned in opening salvo from the Jim Irsay’s über collection is taken from the Grateful Dead’s ‘Wall of Sound,’ the 600-watt/300-watts-per-channel McIntosh MC2300 power amp nicknamed Budman. It sold for $381,000. That’d add a little punch to your backline.

So there you have it. As a wise man who is known to collect the odd guitar (to play them too), always says, “A guitar is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.”

But that's not all from Jim Irsay Collection. There will be a further three epic auctions, with the Icons of Popular Culture going live today, (March 13), The Jim Irsay Collection: Icons of Music going live on March 14, while the Jim Irsay Collection: Online, which is live from March 3 to 17.

See Christie's for more details.

The Jim Irsay Collection: what sold and for how much?

• David Gilmour Black Strat – $14,550,000
• Jerry Garcia Tiger – $11,560,000
• Kurt Cobain Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang – $6,907,000
• Eric Clapton’s MTV Unplugged Martin 000-42 – $4,101,000
• Eric Clapton’s Gibson SG “The Fool” – $3,003,000
• David Gilmour’s Wish You Were Here Martin D-35 – $2,393,000
• George Harrison’s 1964 Gibson SG Standard – $2,271,000
• John Lennon’s 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996 – $1,270,000
• John Lennon’s 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins – $1,270,000
• The Beatles' 1966 Vox Kensington prototype – $609,600
• Prince’s Custom ‘Yellow Cloud’ Electric – $635,000
• The Edge's 1976 korina Gibson Explorer – $635,000
• George Harrison's Maton 'Mastersound' – $279,400
• Johnny Cash's 1956 Martin D-21 – $215,900
• Gibson circa 1954 Les Paul Custom prototype – $152,400

During his lifetime, the late Indianapolis Colts owner and CEO Jim Irsay used his considerable wealth to amass the most valuable private guitar collection in the world.

Three of the 10 most expensive guitars ever sold at auction – including Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang and David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, numbers 2 and 3 on that respective list – belonged to Irsay, and the value of his whole collection has been estimated at a billion dollars.

After his death last May, questions swirled as to what would become of the collection, given that Irsay was adamant that even the most valuable guitars in it be played onstage, and not merely sit encased in glass.

Earlier this year, though, it was revealed that the whole thing – the jewels included – would go under the hammer at Christie's auction house in New York. As the auction unfolded today (Thursday, March 12), we were live on the floor.

The big question on our minds was, inevitably, will we see the great big record – the $6 million shelled out for Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E in 2020 – fall?

Did it ever! The previous record holder now finds itself in 4th place.

On top once again is David Gilmour's Black Strat. Having set the record as the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction back in 2019, for a measly $3.975 million, the Black Strat reclaimed its record once again with authority, selling for an astonishing $14.5 million.

Also going for eight figures was Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, which fetched $11.5 million. Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, previously #2 on the list with a selling price of $4.55 million, went for a cool $6.9 million.

Read on for our live report from the floor, as it happened, and check out our full overview of the auction here.

The room's filled up since this writer took this photo. Recognize those guitars up there in the front?

No blockbuster guitar sales yet, but we've just seen one of Ringo Starr's drum kits sell for north of $2 million!

Owned by John Lennon and used by him for the Beatles' 1964 Christmas show – then later gifted to Ringo Starr – this 1964 Rickenbacker has become the first mega guitar sale of the auction, with a sale price of $1.27 million.

Aaaaand the 1964 Gibson SG pictured below – used extensively by George Harrison from 1966-1968 – has said, “hold my beer!” $2.27 million! This was well over its estimate. Will that be a theme as the evening goes on?

Though not the most valuable guitar in the lot, this custom, prototype guitar made by Vox for the Beatles in 1966 is certainly one of the most unique. Someone's just parted ways with just about $600k to grab it.

One of the most iconic guitars of the 1960s, Eric Clapton’s The Fool SG, has just sold for a whopping $3 million, after a massive bidding war. This is also far above its estimate. One of the most significant six-strings in the lot, it will forever be associated with Slowhand's tenure in Cream.

So, I'm not supposed to curse, but holy shit. David Gilmour's Black Strat, the guitar most synonymous with the Pink Floyd legend, has just sold for $14.5 million, after 21 minutes of bidding. This more than doubles – destroys, really – the previous record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.

Well, the excitement from the Black Strat sale lasted about 10 minutes. Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar has also obliterated the pre-auction record mark, selling for $11.5 million. Two guitars have more than doubled, or come close to doubling, the previous record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, in less than 15 minutes.

It almost doesn't feel noteworthy at this point, but the $6 million flat high water mark set by Kurt Cobain's MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E six years ago has been eclipsed a third time – by the Nirvana man's Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, previously the second most expensive guitar ever sold at auction. It's fetched $6.9 million.

The Martin 000-42 Eric Clapton used for his beloved, enormously successful MTV Unplugged performance has also fetched a princely sum: $4.1 million. Classic rock-affiliated six-strings in particular have blown well past their estimated values this evening.

And that about wraps this sucker up, in terms of blockbuster guitars. We figured going in that this would be the biggest guitar auction of all time, and truly, nothing else comes within the zip code of this sale. For the first time (at least publicly), we've seen individual guitars sell for eight figures. We only hope that some (all, ideally) of the new owners of these instruments follow in the footsteps of their previous owner in not keeping them permanently behind glass.

Until then, we uh, need to completely re-write our list of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction...

No electric guitar on earth is so uniquely recognisable as this totem of Clapton’s epochal time in Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker – but its origins remain frustratingly obscure to this day.

“There’s a lot of mystery around exactly where and when this guitar was acquired by Eric Clapton,” says Amelia Walker of Christie’s. “I’ve seen it [stated] in some places that George Harrison gave it to him, but he likely bought it in early ’67 because he was sick of getting Les Pauls stolen.”

Guitar historian Tony Bacon takes up the story here: “In the first few months of 1967, Eric Clapton went shopping and bought a circa-1964 cherry-finish SG Standard. His customary hunting ground was the West End of London and its music shops, notably the Gibson-centric Selmer store in Charing Cross Road, and that seems a likely source, though there’s no firm evidence,” Tony adds.

“Why an SG? As Amelia Walker notes, perhaps he was fed up with the fact that his two Les Paul ’Bursts had been stolen during the previous nine months or so and fancied a change of style – but keeping the familiar humbuckers and control layout.”

With Clapton now the proud owner of a then-three-year-old SG, the burgeoning psychedelic scene prompted Clapton’s management to suggest an unlikely collaboration with two in-vogue Dutch artists, who later became known by the collective name The Fool.

“I think that Robert Stigwood, who was their manager, hooked him up with The Fool, and as well as decorating their instruments, they also styled [the band] in terms of their fashion,” Amelia Walker says. “So we’ve got this fabulous photograph taken by Karl Ferris, who told me that he looked after The Fool [in a quasi-managerial sense].

“He took this amazing series of photos the day after the painting on the guitar was finished, so the paint was literally fresh, and they posed in the studio with their mad outfits and mad instruments.

“But I don’t think that the artists, Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma, were actually known as ‘The Fool’ collective by that exact point, though they obviously became known as such and were sought out to paint the wall at Apple studios.

“They also painted John Lennon’s piano at Kenwood. We’ve got this photograph of them painting [that piano]; included in The Irsay Collection is a piano that’s behind that [painted] one, so you can see them midway through painting it.”

“[Cream] were very part of the whole 1966 psychedelia zeitgeist, so it’s not surprising that Robert Stigwood, Cream’s manager, wanted that look for the band: something fresh, new and hip.

“The reason The Fool SG has changed so much is because they didn’t seal the painting, so with Eric’s playing, it very quickly got very worn. There was no protective over-layer on the paint. They even painted the whole fingerboard, which clearly didn’t last very long.”

Tony Bacon says that Clapton adapted the guitar in more conventional ways, too, during his time with it: “The guitar still had its original Deluxe Vibrola when Eric bought it, but its cover plate came off to reveal more of the artwork. Soon he disengaged the Vibrola altogether, at first leaving the arm pointing backwards and out of the way.

“Later, into ’68, he had the Vibrola’s arm and mechanism removed, leaving just the frame as a simple tailpiece. He replaced the guitar’s original Kluson tuners with Grovers, a popular move and one he knew about from his Les Pauls. Paint began to flake from the rear of the neck, and he had at least some of the extra paint there permanently removed.”

Clapton, of course, moved on to other guitars – and The Fool in its turn passed into the hands of other musicians, as Tony Bacon explains: “Eric eventually let it go, perhaps to George Harrison, but it certainly went to Jackie Lomax, a musician friend of George’s from the old Liverpool days.

“Around 1971 it moved on to Todd Rundgren, who fitted a stopbar tailpiece and an incongruous Schaller ‘harmonica’ Tune-o-matic. Todd had the body paint restored and sealed, and had someone replace and re-paint part of the neck and the headstock.”

“Todd Rundgren did a very good job of restoring it,” Amelia Walker adds. “You can’t see exactly what’s been over-painted and what’s original because it now has a completely clear [topcoat] layer, so nothing fluoresces under blacklight – or rather the whole thing fluoresces.

“When we’re dealing with paintings, you can blacklight it and it will show up very obviously what’s original, where it’s been touched up, where it’s been overpainted and so on. But with this guitar, unfortunately, you can’t see it at all because of this [single, uniform clearcoat] layer that covers the whole thing.

“The headstock got pretty damaged when it was with Eric,” she adds. “I don’t know what Jackie Lomax then did to it, but by Todd Rundgren’s account, it was sort of hanging on by a thread or had been repaired badly [when he took ownership and had it restored]. Then I think what happened is the repair person was going to throw it away.

“Luckily, somebody said, ‘Don’t do that!’ [laughs] and it got rescued. The original headstock wasn’t with the guitar when it was sold by Todd at Sotheby’s in 2000, and when it was exhibited alongside the guitar at The Met Museum’s 2019 ‘Play It Loud’ exhibition, it was noted as being part of Perry Margouleff’s collection.”

• Christie’s will auction The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame on the evening of 12 March. See Christie's for more information.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Many famous guitar collections are simply impressive – but some go far beyond that. So far, in fact, that they become as culturally important as anything found in a museum and raise questions about the role private guitar collections play in preserving pillars of modern culture.

Jim Irsay, who died last year, was that kind of collector. The catalogue of his collection reads like a roadmap of American pop culture and includes everything from the original paper-roll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to Miles Davis’s Martin trumpet and, of course, some of the most important guitars the world has ever seen.

“As a very wealthy individual, Jim Irsay had the means to collect so many iconic objects, which most of us can only dream of,” says Amelia Walker, who is specialist head of the Private & Iconic Collections at Christie’s.

“But I think he was genuinely just a really nice guy who loved guitars, loved music, and felt a responsibility to look after these things and steward them onto their next home. I think he was aware that you can’t be buried with these things – you are but the temporary custodian of them.

“So I think his main aim was to bring them together and let people access them, and he did a lot of touring exhibitions. He got the instruments played by The Jim Irsay Band, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd played the Black Strat. So I think he was very open to sharing them. And because he was also a player, I think he knew that, where the instrument’s condition allowed, these things should be played – they should be loved and warmed up and all of that sort of thing.

“While he was definitely somebody who had them behind glass in his office – which I think is every guitarist’s worst anticipation of what happens at auction – he did also play them.”

Eleanor Jane, founder and editor of Eleven magazine and the book Superstar Guitars, concurs, recalling her time documenting Jim Irsay’s instruments in a similar light.

“His office was like a museum – but one in which you were encouraged to interact with the artefacts,” she recalls. “I photographed the guitars up close and personal – a phenomenal collection of hitmaker after hitmaker. After the photoshoot, Mr Irsay arranged for a private concert for me and the team, demonstrating the most iconic guitars and flying in some of the best musicians around to perform and jam, including Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

“He even drove in Hunter S Thompson’s iconic ‘Red Shark’ car as an incredible backdrop for the event. This turned out to be the first of many, much larger, free concerts and exhibitions across the USA, in which Mr Irsay brought in artists such as Billy Gibbons and Tom Bukovac to perform, allowing thousands of fans an experience of a lifetime.”

All very commendable, but surely a collection of this calibre represents, in the final analysis, a cultural commonwealth of the kind that typically belongs in museums. Now that it’s all up for sale, is it likely that major pieces from the collection will end up in public hands again?

“Well, it’s interesting – and I’ve had the same conversations with people here in LA and in London,” says Amelia Walker. “You looked around the room at just a few of the highlights that we had and it was sort of like a museum exhibition, rather than an auction, because each of those items is an amazing item on its own individual merit, like you would see in a museum celebrating the best of the best of whatever category – and so it is museum-quality.

“People have all sorts of different thoughts and feelings about where collections such as this should end up, and I imagine there will be some participation from institutions.

“But people also forget that museums don’t have any money and it’s often down to generous philanthropic donations that they get pieces like this, like The Met collection donation from Dirk Ziff, which is one of the most incredible philanthropic donations ever, in this world [of iconic guitars].

“So it’ll be interesting to see who bids on these items. I suspect it will be a huge, varied mixture of guitarists, collectors, museums and investors.”

Indeed, the authenticators behind high-profile sales of this kind have to employ the sort of forensic approach normally reserved for academics.

With many of the modifications made to famous guitars taking place over decades on dim backstage workbenches or even at the hands of DIY-oriented players themselves, how do latter-day specialists determine what changes have been made (and when) in order to establish provenance?

Sometimes techs keep methodical, detailed notes over the years, but that kind of evidence is rare when it comes to fully confirming the backstory of iconic guitars.

“It’s a really good question and it keeps me up at night a lot of the time,” Walker says. “But we do our utmost to talk to every single person who’s touched that instrument, in terms of the techs, the roadies, the restorers, the dealers. Obviously, with the Black Strat, Phil Taylor wrote a whole book about it, so he was very, very involved, so we’ve obviously spoken to him recently.

“We do everything we can to get to the bottom of modifications, and we’re really lucky to be able to call up people like Seymour Duncan and ask, ‘Do you remember doing this? Is that what happened?’ And most of the time, people are so kind and generous with their recollections or their records, and it’s part of our due diligence process.

“But we do have to include a caveat that we will never be able to fully list every modification that would have happened since 1970, for example. This was a big issue with the Jeff Beck sale because they were Fenders [Beck’s Strats] and he continually swapped necks around and continually swapped the pickups around, and did it himself without telling his techs most of the time.

“I had such a nightmare trying to marry things up. We have a very clear line that we try to be spot-on with everything, but we cannot possibly list the full modifications, and part of being a touring and recording artist’s instrument is being modified for their needs. So that’s what we do. Basically, we go to pretty extreme lengths to try to get to the bottom of everything.”

• Christie’s will auction The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall Of Fame, including the iconic guitars in this feature and others, plus some of the most important cultural objects of the 20th century, on the evening of 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie's
• Photographer and editor Eleanor Jane’s new book, The Guitar Chronicles, is due to be released on 17 September via Welbeck.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Eric Clapton has announced a run of US tour dates, which will take place later this year.

The six-show run is set to kick off on September 6 at the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, and will see Slowhand visit Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, before wrapping things up in Kansas City on September 17.

Fellow blues electric guitar hero Jimmie Vaughan will serve as the special guest at each show. Clapton’s band will feature Doyle Bramhall II and Nathan East, as well as drummer Sonny Emory, and keyboardists Chris Stainton and Tim Carmon.

The upcoming tour will commence almost a year to the date that Clapton last played in the US, after shows in New York and Uncasville in September 2025. The news follows the announcement that Clapton will be performing across a run of dates in Europe.

This will see Clapton perform in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland Spain, Germany and more, with a headline show at the Sandringham Royal Estate completing the run on August 23.

Artist pre-sale for the US dates goes live today (March 3), with a Live Nation pre-sale scheduled for March 5. General sale tickets for the shows will go on sale March 6 at 10am local time.

Head over to Eric Clapton’s website to find out more. A full list of dates can be found below.

• September 6 – Detroit, MI, Little Caesars Arena
• September 8 – Cincinnati, OH, Heritage Bank Center
• September 11 – Chicago, IL, United Center
• September 13 – Milwaukee, WI, Fiserv Forum
• September 15 – St. Paul, MN, Grand Casino Arena
• September 17 – Kansas City, MO, T-Mobile Center

A new book called Cream Chronicled, authored by Ginger Baker’s daughter Nettie, sets out to document every gig and recording session, and various major events that happened to the band between 1966 and 1968.

It also covers the times Ginger, Jack and Eric got back together at the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall Of Fame inauguration in 1993 and the reunion gigs in 2005.

Needless to say, painstaking research, combined with an obvious love of the subject matter, has resulted in an amazingly authoritative book. We speak with Nettie about what it was like to spend so much time in Cream’s glorious past.

One thing that struck us when we read the book was how hard Cream were worked throughout their lifetime as a band.

When I started researching, that’s when I realised how intense their workload was and it seemed that it was a normal thing to do, and probably a lot of other bands at the same time were doing it, too.

I think their rise was so quick, it exacerbated the pressures. Very often they would go to all-nighters, which, at the time, was a big thing. A band would play a gig and then they would go off to another club to do an all-nighter and play from 11 till 12, and then play again at 2.30 to 4.30 [in the morning] or something like that. It was completely insane.

Can you remember the effect that had on your dad?

“Well, I think it was stress – the ambition and the hard work and the attention to detail. There were a lot of other things going on because at the beginning he was sort of running it, collecting the money and all of those sorts of things. I think at first he was very happy, but they did have the [burden] of going around the country in a van. No-one flew anywhere. And, as it went on, the stress began to affect him.”

In the book, you say that Ginger eventually put his foot down to playing two gigs a day.

“I don’t think anyone took any notice. I think it’s very important to understand that all three of them were not in control because they were young men; they were in their 20s, and it was a new phenomenon. It was a new genre and it suddenly caught on.”

How difficult was it to research the book? Did your dad keep diaries or any other records?

No. I mean, I’ve got a BA and a MA in English Lit from Queen Mary [University of London], and they’re one of the top research universities. So I was actually able to bring some of my academic qualifications into this thing, which is different from the other books I’ve written. And I’m a diarist, so I had diaries from the ’60s and I had diaries from the 2005 [reunion], so I was able to bring a bit of that in. But you just have to find as many sources as you can.

“I mean, the internet is great now, but I did go through books, too. Some of these retrospective anecdotes are not reliable at all, but you might get two or three sources that agree. So you think, “Yeah, that’s quite likely.” You just have to keep going. I just went everywhere and to everything I could find, you know?”

You said that Cream Chronicled sets out to bust some of the myths about the band. Which ones were you specifically keen to clear up?

That they all hated each other; they never socialised; they never travelled together. That Jack and Ginger were always fighting, according to all the retrospective accounts. And on the Goodbye album cover, that the photos of them were shot separately and then they superimposed their heads on the picture or something. I mean, for goodness’ sake!

Later in the book I say that when they came to do the Hall of Fame, people just got stuck on an image of axe-wielding maniacs on drugs or if they would even speak to each other. So I tried to say that the band split mainly because of the pressures of touring and the stresses they were under.

They didn’t say that they didn’t argue – because they were like brothers. Even in 2012 Jack was saying, ‘I really love Ginger, he’s my brother and brothers sometimes fight.’

I also explained that they didn’t tell everyone at the time, but they were socialising, but because people would have just said, “Oh, are they going to get back together again?” they probably thought, “Just leave us alone.” So yes, they socialised the whole time.

How do you think Ginger looked back on the Cream years?

I think he was so proud because it was his band. I think when he did look back he only ever wanted to play Cream songs with Cream, which was why he didn’t really like BBM [the group that featured Jack, Ginger and Gary Moore] that much. He felt quite strongly about that.

I think the legacy of the band is immense. I’m proud to have managed to document it because no-one’s done that. They’ve just fallen down the rabbit hole of ‘Oh, they all took drugs and hated each other,’ which is just completely and utterly not true; even the drugs they get wrong.

There was one heroin addict, which was Ginger, and most of the time in Cream he was not taking it. And when he did, in his own autobiography, he held his hands up. I think they did have some sort of [trauma] afterwards. 1968 wasn’t a happy time for them. They really didn’t want to break up.

• Cream Chronicled is out 20 March via Wymer UK
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

We know the guitars Eric Clapton played in Cream. All of them Gibson: the ‘Beano’ Les Paul, the ‘Fool’ SG, the cherry red ES-335 and the sunburst Firebird I.

While that list is, of course, correct, dig a little deeper and a few oddities and anomalies poke their heads above the parapet. But as with anything musically historical, evidence is often vague or contradictory, so what follows here is as close as we can get with the sources available.

With Clapton only just having left John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the ‘Beano’ Les Paul was predictably his instrument of choice in early Cream rehearsals.

It was used at the band’s initial get-together at Ginger Baker’s flat in Neasden, Northwest London in mid-July 1966, and the ‘secret’ two-set gig at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, over the evening and early hours of 29 and 30 July respectively.

Sadly, though this guitar, with its recognisable double-cream open-topped neck humbucker and all-black bridge pickup, was stolen soon after.

Eric then played some early Cream shows, including the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival on 31 July, on a Bigsby-equipped ’59 Les Paul. From what we can gather, The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards loaned his Satisfaction Les Paul to Eric for some gigs and recording, then in 1967 Keith (or some say the band’s keyboard player, Ian Stewart) sold it to Mick Taylor.

Taylor used it during his tenure with The Bluesbreakers and, somewhat ironically, when he was conscripted into The Stones in 1969. It’s almost certain that the guitar also appeared on Cream’s debut album, Fresh Cream.

It currently resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (The Met). Taylor has asserted it to be his own Les Paul that was stolen in the legendary heist of Stones guitars at Villa Nellcôte, in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, and is in dispute with The Met. Meanwhile, the museum claims its provenance is well documented and that the guitar was never officially owned by Taylor.

Clapton’s Bluesbreakers Les Paul had been purchased for a meagre £80 after Andy Summers, later of The Police and owner of a Les Paul that Eric had coveted, had tipped him off about another’s whereabouts.

Upon the theft of this instrument, Clapton contacted Summers to see if he could purloin his original Standard, most likely a 1960 model as Eric’s first LP was also thought to have been (although some say Eric’s was a ’59). He has commented on how he liked its slim neck, a characteristic of 1960 models.

Summers recalled: “Knowing that I had the other one, Eric starts calling me and asking if I would sell it. I’d moved on to the Fender Telecaster by then, and also there was something wrong with my Les Paul; the back pickup wasn’t working. He was offering me £200 for it, more than twice what I’d paid for it.”

Apparently, Clapton didn’t have the bridge pickup fixed. It seems he used it (neck pickup only, the inspiration for ‘woman’ tone’, perhaps?) and Richards’ Bigsby Les Paul on the Fresh Cream album sessions. These began in early August 1966. It seems the ‘Summersburst’ suffered a headstock break and was eventually sold or stolen.

On 16 August 1966 Cream played London’s legendary Marquee club, and Eric is pictured playing a cherry red 1960 Les Paul Special double-cutaway with twin P-90s. He tells the audience that it’s a new guitar and he’s only just getting used to it. Was this a stop-gap (some say it was borrowed) between the ‘Beano’ Les Paul stolen in rehearsals and getting the Andy Summers guitar?

Playing The Fool

Clapton’s most famous Gibson and the one he was most photographed with in Cream is undoubtedly his 1964 SG Standard. Nicknamed the ‘Fool’ after the Dutch art syndicate led by Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger who gave it its psychedelic paint job, the guitar underwent several changes during Clapton’s ownership of it.

The Maestro Vibrola’s ‘lyre’ chrome coverplate was removed, presumably to display the Fool’s artwork underneath. And although EC may have occasionally used the Vibrola for some light chord wobble (White Room, perhaps?), usually he preferred the arm swept back out of the way, especially when playing live. Later, he would remove it completely.

The Fool SG debuted on 25 March 1967 at the RKO Theatre in Manhattan. Eric loved its ‘access all areas’ neck and full-fat, fruity tones, and played it extensively until mid-1968, including on the brilliant live Crossroads and Spoonful from Wheels Of Fire.

On Cream’s demise, Eric gave the guitar to George Harrison, who in turn presented it to Apple-signing Jackie Lomax. Lomax later passed it on to guitarist/producer Todd Rundgren (who produced Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell among many others). The Fool SG sold for a staggering £1.023 million ($1.27 million) on 16 November 2023.

Another Les Paul that Clapton obtained during this time was a three-pickup, black Gibson Les Paul Custom, which he bought in Manny’s Music in New York, March 1967. Eric would often play this guitar during his Blind Faith period, but it also appeared on the album Disraeli Gears, released in November 1967.

Other instruments for the recordings include the Fool SG, and one or two unspecified electric 12-strings for the Byrds-like Dance The Night Away. These were possibly a Fender Electric XII and/or Rickenbacker 12-string. There’s no evidence to suggest it, but it would be lovely to think that George Harrison gifted Eric one of his Ricky 12s.

A more surprising guitar owned and played by Clapton in Cream was a Danelectro DC-59 Shorthorn, similar to the one played by Jimmy Page. Eric later used it in Blind Faith with what looks like a sponge-effect paint job, but he was pictured playing the original black-and-white Dano with Cream at the Swan pub in Birmingham, May 1967.

For Blind Faith’s free debut concert in Hyde Park on 7 June 1969, Clapton sported a 1962 bound-bodied Fender Custom Telecaster with a small-headstock maple Stratocaster neck. This was actually the neck from his Layla Strat, ‘Brownie’.

However, Eric had acquired the Tele in early 1968, and appeared playing it with Cream in the Danish film Det Var En Lørdag (It Was A Saturday Night). Interestingly, in the film the same Tele body sported a post-CBS large-headstock, rosewood-’board Strat neck. Whether it was ever played on a Cream album, we can’t say.

Clapton bought another Les Paul, originally a 1957 Goldtop that had been refinished in see-through cherry red by its second owner, Rick Derringer (Johnny and Edgar Winter, Steely Dan), who got it from Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist John Sebastian.

It’s not known whether he ever used it in Cream, but Eric famously gave the instrument to George Harrison and then played the solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps on it. Harrison christened the guitar ‘Lucy’ after American comedienne Lucille Ball, and used it for his solo on Something.

Clapton also acquired a 1953 Les Paul Goldtop around this time and played it with Cream at Hunter College Auditorium, New York City on 29 March 1968.

A Gibson guitar that Clapton enjoyed during this same year, but was not often photographed with, was his sunburst 1964 Firebird I. This instrument remained in the touring arsenal until Cream’s final shows on 25 and 26 November at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

The Firebird featured on the first of these shows, and the ES-335 on the second. Eric is said to have bought the guitar on 13 April 1968, remarking that he loved the guitar’s bright and articulate single bridge pickup. He notably used it for his blistering intro and solos in the live rendition of Sitting On Top Of The World from the band’s farewell album Goodbye.

Another Les Paul that surfaced during Cream’s dying days was a 1958 Les Paul known as the ‘Darkburst’. Eric played it on some 1968 US Cream concerts, but in 1969 while Free was supporting Blind Faith on a few US shows, traded it to Paul Kossoff for his Les Paul Custom. It ended up with that band’s singer, Paul Rodgers, who later sold it at auction, with Clapton verifying its provenance.

Seeing Red

We’ve left Eric’s cherry red 1964 ES-335 until last, not only because it was the final six-string he played with Cream at the 26 November Royal Albert Hall farewell concert, but also because questions abound regarding the guitar’s past.

Did Clapton really buy it new in 1964 while in The Yardbirds, as he has proposed? The fact that there are no photos of Eric with the guitar either in The Yardbirds, with John Mayall, or at any time prior to his last run of Cream shows suggests not.

Would he have borrowed guitars for gigs and albums had he owned this rather special guitar? Tele-master Jerry Donahue is adamant that this is not the case and that he personally sold Eric the ES-335 while working at Selmer’s music store in London in 1968.

Jerry asserts it was bought for the Royal Albert Hall farewell concerts. This story seems plausible, even though it flies in the face of auction records and what many, including Clapton himself, believe. Whatever the case, the guitar sold at Christie’s in New York in 2004 for $847,500 (£645,197).

Gibson has released modern recreations of Clapton’s ‘Beano’ Les Paul, the ‘Fool’ SG, Firebird I, ‘Lucy’ Les Paul and ES-335. There has been a Danelectro remake of the painted Blind Faith Shorthorn, and Fender even released a Blind Faith bound-bodied Tele-Strat. Such is the esteem in which Clapton’s Cream guitars are held, today these instruments exchange hands for eye-watering sums.

So, that’s the story of Eric Clapton’s guitars from the short but extraordinary, musically spectacular period between July 1966 and November 1968. While the details of some of the guitars might remain sketchy, one thing we know for certain is we’ll never see a combination of such talents – Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker – again.

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

Bass phenom Kinga Głyk is leading the vanguard of musicians taking jazz to the mainstream – with a little help from YouTube and social media, of course.

“My dad always told me to be 100 percent involved in whatever I play, no matter whether there are five thousand people or just one person in the room,” Głyk told Bass Player in a 2020 interview. “In music, it’s very important to put your heart into what you play.”

Głyk applies this same approach to her covers. Precisely a decade ago, the then 19-year-old posted her own take on pioneering fusion bassist Jeff Berlin’s rendition of Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. What started as an unassuming cover quickly turned into a viral video that empowered Głyk to take her career beyond her native Poland.

“I think what happened with Tears in Heaven for me, years ago, I didn't know that was possible,” she says matter-of-factly in an interview with Rick Beato.

“I thought my computer actually broke. I called my brother, and I was like, ‘Do you see the views... you see them moving? This is not normal.’”

As for how social media can actually serve as a launchpad – rather than a hindrance – for artists, Głyk says that, “Now I think it's much easier to do it. I think it's a good side of it – we all can share things, and people can follow you for that and be with you and support you.

“But I think it's important to sometimes remove your brain from this world. I treat it more like my job, where I do it and then I go and live my life. So it's not for me, constantly thinking about if people reacted to something well or not, because you can be very depressed [if you do that].”

And, speaking of social media pressures on musicians, last year virtuoso Yvette Young spoke candidly about the pressures of touring in the social media age – and why we all need to rethink our relationship with music.

By the mid-’60s, as jazz bands slowly faded from the front pages of the music press, they were gradually replaced with rhythm and blues bands.

One such band featured Graham Bond, a complicated figure and musical innovator who would go on to inadvertently pave the way for many bands over the next few decades.

We go back to the beginning – including the bust-ups and band-member swaps – to detail the rise of one of Britain’s most revered supergroups.

The name’s Bond

Bond started his career in jazz, playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. He left the outfit in 1962 and formed the Graham Bond Quartet with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, both from Alexis’s band, along with guitarist John McLaughlin.

By the mid-’60s Bond decided to move toward the more-successful blues scene, keeping members of the quartet together and adding Dick Heckstall-Smith to the line-up. Dick replaced Bond on sax as Bond switched over to Hammond organ and vocals. As the Graham Bond Organisation, they very quickly established themselves, and released their first album in February 1965.

By this time, drugs had become an issue for the band, and Bond, in particular, found it difficult to deal with the associated problems. On top of that there were a lot of arguments between Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, sometimes getting violent.

A stressed Bond decided to hand over leadership to Ginger Baker, who saw this as a perfect opportunity to fire Jack Bruce. The band limped on as a three-piece, but the magic had gone. Although Ginger stayed in the band for a time, he decided to quit when Bond’s increased drug habits made him too unreliable.

Ginger was now at a loose end and was keen to form a band, and set about finding like-minded musicians. He was already familiar with Eric Clapton and his guitar playing when they frequently met on the London club scene, and so he wanted to approach him first. It’s worth knowing that at that time graffiti would often be spotted in London proclaiming that ‘Clapton is God’, such was the strength of his loyal following.

Part of the reason for Eric’s popularity was the tone he achieved with his beloved 1959 sunburst Gibson Les Paul played through a JTM45 Marshall amp.

He had bought the guitar from the Lew Davis shop in London’s Charing Cross Road in 1965 with money he earned playing with John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers from 1965 to 1966. It was the album cover of Freddie King’s Let’s Hide Away and Dance Away that influenced him to buy the guitar, even though Freddie was, in fact, holding a Goldtop.

A New Trio

Ginger went to see The Bluesbreakers at a gig at the Town Hall in Oxford on 13 May 1966 and asked if it would be okay to have a jam. Ginger and Eric had an immediate musical chemistry and got on well, too. After the show, Ginger gave Eric a lift home and asked him if he would be interested in joining the new band he was forming.

By this point, Eric was tiring of copying his blues heroes and he, too, was looking for new opportunities. It didn’t take long to make a decision, but his only condition was that Jack Bruce would have to be in the band. Eric had no knowledge of the past tensions between Jack and Ginger.

Ginger was taken aback but highly respected Jack’s musicianship – he could see the potential for the three members coming together as a band. After some persuading from his wife, Ginger went to visit Jack to find out if he would be interested in putting the past behind them and joining the band.

At the time, Jack was under contract with the group Manfred Mann but was not happy at the pop direction they were pursuing. Jack was also familiar with Eric and his guitar playing as he was also in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers for a short period in during late 1965.

Both he and Eric enjoyed the experience of playing together, and later even recorded a few tracks for a blues compilation album, What’s Shakin’, for the Elektra label in March 1966. Jack was in and Ginger immediately suggested Robert Stigwood as their manager, having known him from his time with Graham Bond.

The three musicians wanted to be collaborative, rather than act as three soloists competing with each other. Originally, Eric Clapton had visions of being the lead singer but conceded that Jack had a far more powerful voice with a wealth of experience behind him. Eric considered the band to be ‘the top of the milk’ in terms of musicianship, and suggested it made sense to call themselves ‘The Cream’.

Initial rehearsals took place at Ginger’s ground floor maisonette in Neasden, North London, before moving to St Anne’s Brondesbury Church Hall in West Kilburn. As soon as they started to jam, all three felt the magic. They instinctively knew they were on to something.

Melody Maker’s Chris Welch was at the hall and during a break joined the band at a cafe opposite. Robert Stigwood attended the rehearsals and asked Chris if he thought they were any good.

Luckily, he said yes. Had he said he wasn’t that moved, it could have been the end of the band before they even started. However, Stigwood did have a contribution and that was the band should simply call themselves ‘Cream’.

A few days in, Eric’s beloved ‘Beano’ Les Paul was stolen from the rehearsal hall. His distinctive leather guitar strap with the names of his blues heroes carved on was attached to the guitar; that was also gone.

With a view of getting the public’s help, Eric gave interviews in the music press, sharing details of the guitar as well as mentioning the carved names: Buddy Guy, Big Maceo and Otis Rush. With that information, it would be easy to detect the stolen items should anyone try to sell them.

As for the guitar, Eric described it, precisely to Record Mirror as “a Les Paul Standard, five or six years old, small and solid. It has one cutaway and is a red-gold colour with Grover machineheads. The back is very scratched and there are several cigarette burns on the front”.

It’s worth noting that toward the end of 1965, Eric had removed the metal pickup covers to reveal the bobbins: double-white at the neck, double-black at the bridge. In early 1966, he told Beat Instrumental: “You’ve probably heard about me taking the covers off my pickups: this is something I would definitely recommend for any guitarist. The improvement, sound-wise, is unbelievable.”

To this day, despite rumoured sightings on the East Coast of America, nothing ever materialised. Later, Eric confirmed this Les Paul was the best he’d ever had.

Although he also had a Gibson ES-335 from his time with The Yardbirds, he loved the sound achieved with the Les Paul. So for the first few months of Cream he borrowed a Les Paul, possibly from Keith Richards, before buying another ’Burst from Andy Summers.

To twist the knife further, his original Les Paul case was later stolen from a Cream show at Klooks Kleek. Eric surmised that the person responsible for taking his guitar had now come back for the original case.

Perhaps the most surprising piece of information was that Eric seriously considered getting a Rickenbacker shortly after the theft, as Les Paul guitars were hard to find at the time. It would seem a strange decision as the sound would have been very different from a Les Paul.

Waxing History

Stigwood set about organising press releases, tour dates and recording studio time for a single and album. The biggest issue was that Ginger and Eric were not songwriters. But Jack was a good composer and joined forces with lyricist and beat-poet Pete Brown for a selection of collaborative songs to feature on Cream’s first album. It was a mix of pop numbers with a selection of well-chosen blues covers.

They spent three days in August 1966 recording at Rayrik Sound Studios in Chalk Farm with a view to getting an all-important single in the record shops and hopefully the charts. The studio was relatively primitive and better suited to demo recordings, but during their time there they recorded four songs: Coffee Song, Beauty Queen, You Make Me Feel and Wrapping Paper.

After much deliberation they decided to release Wrapping Paper, a somewhat bland and presumably unrepresentative song with no commercial appeal. It was more a whimsical music-hall folly than a blues or pop number, at least as far as the public were concerned. Coffee Song had also been considered for release but lost out.

It was disappointing and Stigwood’s label, Reaction, pulled 10,000 copies from shops as they could not give the single away. Eric tried to explain to Record Mirror at the time: “I’m tired of being called a specialist musician. People thought Cream was going to be a blues band, but it’s not – it’s a pop group, really.”

Eric also told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch: “Most people have formed the impression of us as three solo musicians clashing with each other. We want to cancel that idea and be a group that plays together.”

Whipped Cream

Cream’s tour started with a warm-up show on 29 July 1966 at the famous Twisted Wheel in Manchester, with another set in the early hours of 30 July. The next day, they played the 6th National Jazz and Blues Festival at the Royal Windsor Racecourse in Berkshire – their official debut.

They played a 40-minute set in the pouring rain, but despite the weather, some 10,000 fans cheered the band on through the electrifying and powerful set. There were several highlights, including Ginger’s epic drum solo in Toad, which drove the crowd crazy and demanding more.

The tour carried on throughout the year around the UK, and the band often played two shows a night. Cream were not known to invite guests on stage with them, but there was one exception during a show on 1 October 1966 at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London.

Jimi Hendrix, the new kid on the block, asked if he could jam on a couple of numbers. Eric and Jimi admired each other, so although Ginger was not so keen, the band allowed the guitarist to come on.

They played a powerful version of Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor to the delight of the crowd. As word spread about the jam that evening, the glowing reputation of both Cream and Hendrix were now a done deal.

The recording sessions for Fresh Cream, the band’s debut album, were fitted in during rare days off on the tour, at Ryemuse Studios in Mayfair. I Feel Free, backed with N.S.U., was released as their second single as a taster to the album in December 1966. Completely different in feel to the first single, it screamed ‘pop’ song and went as high as No 11 in the UK charts, creating plenty of anticipation for the album.

The album cover varied with different typefaces for the UK, Europe and the US. Another change was the addition of the UK single I Feel Free to the later US release in 1967, replacing Spoonful, meanwhile Europe had the benefit of having Wrapping Paper and The Coffee Song added as a bonus.

Perhaps the most exciting release was reserved for the French market, though, where Polydor released a four-track EP containing a unique take of Cat’s Squirrel with a totally different guitar solo by Eric. Needless to say this grew to be a major collectors’ item over the years. Luckily, it is now readily available on the deluxe editions of the album at a reasonable price compared with the original EP.

In the days before social media, bands would promote their records by doing radio sessions for the BBC as well as appearing on popular youth-orientated television shows such as Ready Steady Go!. Cream’s many BBC Radio sessions sealed the deal on their popularity, and over the years their debut album has grown in stature and remains an essential album to this day.

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

Few guitarists have shaped progressive and avant-garde music as profoundly as Robert Fripp. With King Crimson, Brian Eno, David Bowie and others, Fripp perpetually reinvented the six-stringed wheel with ease.

He usually did so with a Gibson – or something that looked like a Gibson – in hand. This is why if the building were burning down, Fripp would grab his beloved ’59 Les Paul Custom.

“It’s the one that’s worth the most,” he says with a laugh. “That’s for sure!”

“I’m not a collector,” he adds. “[The guitar you buy] should be the one that’s right for the music you’re playing. So I guess the criteria is, ‘Why might you choose this guitar?’ And all my good instruments have been Gibsons or facsimiles. It’s the right fit. I put it up to my body, and it’s the right fit for my left hand and my right hand.”

With all that in mind, we asked Fripp to select and discuss the three guitars that have “fit” him the best over the past six or so decades.

1962 Gibson ES-345

I bought it in the middle of 1963 when I was 17. Up until then, my first guitar was an appalling instrument called an Egmond Frères that my mother bought me for Christmas in 1957. I still have it. It was appalling. My second guitar was a Rosetti, and that was appalling. My third guitar was a Höfner – a President, I think – which was really a semi-pro instrument.

In England at the time, it was very difficult to get American instruments, and you needed a lot of money. But come the middle of 1963, I needed to move on to a proper instrument and bought a 1962 model. The ES-345 was made the year before, I believe, and I bought it from Eddie Moors Music Shop in Boscombe near Bournemouth.

It was £350. I still have the original case and strap. But I needed to buy it on hire-purchase [lay-away], so I went to my father. Because I was 17, you needed a mature person to sign off on the guarantee for payment. My father refused to sign an authority until I had a £100 deposit. I was earning £5 a week, so £5 a week to get to £100 is a bit of a struggle.

1959 Gibson Les Paul Custom

On to the 1959 Les Paul Custom! I bought it in November 1968, when Giles, Giles and Fripp were just about to become King Crimson. King Crimson were lent £7,000 by a businessman called Angus Hunking. He took an interest in us, and I believe £2,000 came in cash in a briefcase.

So I went shopping in the West End of London with Michael Giles. We went to a music shop on Shaftesbury Avenue; in the window was this Les Paul for £400. I’m not sure of the exact equivalent of what that might be in today’s cash, but I think it would probably be five-to-seven-and-a-half thousand. I went online today and I found a pristine model the same as mine, advertised at $139,000! And that was an instrument without provenance.

But I went into the shop with Michael Giles with the cash, and I asked for a cash discount. The shop assistant, a young man I disliked because of his attitude, said, “I could phone up Eric Clapton and he’d come and buy it.” And I thought, “Then why haven’t you phoned him already?” So this young man was lying to me, and I didn’t like him. Anyway, I bought the instrument for £380.

This was my main instrument from then onwards. I used it with Crimson and my other work up until 1980. It’s on all the Crimson albums – In the Court, Poseidon, Lizard, Islands, Larks’ Tongues, Starless and Bible Black and Red, and moving on with David Bowie on Scary Monsters and all the Eno albums.

But in early ’78 in New York I bought a second ’59 Les Paul, which I then left in New York, where I was living at the time. I would use it at the New York sessions. Nevertheless, that first 1959 Les Paul was my staple.

2004 Fernandes custom goldtop

My third instrument is the Fernandes, though there are honorable mentions in between. I began using Fernandes, I think, in 1995, when we were in Japan. Fernandes expressed interest in making instruments for Adrian Belew and me.

They made Adrian a couple of red ones, and he cobbled together the best of each, and I bought it from him, probably about 20 years ago. I still play it from time to time. But around 2004, they made me the first goldtop. My contact there was Ken Suiguira, and that was a superb instrument. They made me a second replica goldtop in 2016 as a spare, which is virtually identical to the original from 2004.

But the original 2004 goldtop became my main instrument with King Crimson from 2014 through 2021, and it’s still my main practicing instrument. I’m no longer a touring musician, but I continue to practice as a way of earthing and centering myself, kind of like guitar yoga. [Laughs]

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

Billy Corgan’s guitar tone is one of the most emulated on the planet. Whether driven by op-amp Big Muffs or boutique heads, his sounds, both high-gain and clean, are the stuff of legend.

But as the Smashing Pumpkins leader tells Guitar World in a new interview, it all starts with the guitar. Corgan didn’t seek out a special instrument when he was picking out gear to record what would become masterpieces, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. He simply strolled into Guitar Center and found a guitar that spoke to him.

“The guitar that changed my life, at least in terms of my recording, was I walked into a Guitar Center one day and, off the wall, bought an Eric Clapton [spec] ’57 reissue Strat with Lace Sensor pickups,” he says.

“It was affordable enough for me as a touring musician, and that became the main guitar for Siamese and Mellon Collie, and launched 1,000 ships of people chasing that sound.”

Lace Sensor pickups are integral to the early Pumpkins tone. Glassy and balanced, they don’t output the same ‘Strat-iness’ that you might expect from a typical Fender, and were Clapton’s pickups of choice for his own signature model.

(NB: Those single coils didn’t come as stock in the ’90s ’57 reissue Strat, but by a twist of fate, they were fitted to the one Corgan picked up off the wall that day. As he recalls, Guitar Center was using Clapton to promote the configuration of his chosen Strat.)

That off-the-wall sunburst Fender would undergo many alterations over the years. To fans, it’s known as the Bat Strat, so-called because of the bat stickers adorning its refinished silver body, and has seen use throughout the Smashing Pumpkins’ discography.

The experience of walking into a guitar store and buying a brand-new instrument that delivered on all counts has stayed with Corgan, and continues to inform his own signature guitars with Reverend today.

“I didn't go out and buy some $4,500 boutique guitar. I bought a production-model guitar off a wall, and it became super-valuable in my life.

“Every time I work with a guitar or amp manufacturer, I always say the same thing: I don't want this to be out of the price range of anybody. All the Reverends I play on stage, they're all production models. I don't have a special one only for Billy – special neck, special pickup – nothing. They are literally off-the-wall Reverends.”

When we talk, the Pumpkins main man revealed he is now seeking out another Strat in the same vein – with, naturally, a few modifications…

“I was on Reverb recently, poking around, looking for that same model. Because I’ve never found a modern Strat that bested that Strat.

“I wouldn’t go back to Lace Sensors, but I was thinking about, what if I bought an off-the-wall ’57 reissue Strat from the early ’90s, but drop my signature Railhammer pickups in, or I could even go to [pickup builder] Joe Naylor and say, ‘Can you make me stacked single coils?’

“I was just getting sentimental for going back to play that guitar a little bit on stage, because I like the way that guitar feels in my hands.”

Billy Corgan’s full interview with Guitar World will be published later this month.

Last month, Corgan announced the Laney Supergrace, a pedal amp that seeks to capture the firebreathing tone of his live Smashing Pumpkins rig.

Jim Irsay’s guitar haul is widely regarded to be the finest publicized collection in existence, featuring a sizeable chunk of the most famous instruments of the 20th century, including Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, David Gilmour’s Black Strat and Eric Clapton ‘The Fool’ SG, alongside a host of Beatles kit.

Following Irsay’s passing last year, it was confirmed that the collection would be sold via Christie’s in London and the first 50 lots – including the aforementioned Mustang, Black Strat and The Fool SG – are going under the hammer this March.

Now our UK sister publication Guitarist has been granted an exclusive look at three of Jim Irsay’s most treasured electric guitars from this historic collection, before they are potentially split up following the sale.

“Jim Irsay was so proud of having acquired this guitar. It was like the jewel in the crown of his collection,” Christie's Amelia Walker explains in the clip above.

“It was the most expensive guitar ever when it sold in 2019, and it was something that he loved for everything it represented about music, David Gilmour's creativity, and what he produced.”

Like most of his guitars, Irsay didn’t want them to be locked away in class cases like ancient relics. He regularly loaned them out for performances. For instance, Kenny Wayne Shepherd performed Comfortably Numb on the Black Strat and told Guitar World that he had to adapt to the instrument because it remained set up to Gilmour’s liking. Irsay wouldn't have it altered.

Three years after buying the Black Strat, Irsay broke his own record when Cobain's Mustang went under the hammer in New York.

“It was used to record much of Nevermind, and In Utero, and by all accounts, it was one of his most prized possessions,” says Walker.

“It’s unusual, because he [Cobain] couldn’t find many left-handed vintage guitars and [it was used to record] a generational anthem. Jim Irsay loved it; he recognized its importance in the canon of American music.”

The Fool SG, meanwhile, is a guitar slightly less known in the wider public consciousness, but no less historic. It was built in 1964 and given its kaleidoscopic paint job by the Dutch design collective The Fool, which gave it its name.

After that, Clapton wielded it at the height of Cream's monumental success, making it a totem of the Summer of Love in 1967 and the guitar on which he mastered his iconic ‘woman’ tone, before ending up in the hands of producer/guitarist Todd Rundgren.

“It's the embodiment of psychedelia; it’s mad, beautiful, and colorful,” Walker continues. “It’s a moment in time, and it’s where that whole inimitable Eric Clapton [image] was created.”

Indeed, Clapton/Cream classics, like Crossroads and Sunshine of Your Love, were born from this guitar's dizzying color palette – both tonally and aesthetically – meaning its comparatively humble $1.27M sale in 2023 could very well be usurped in March.

Irsay reportedly once turned down an offer of $1 billion for the collection, deemed by many the world’s finest of its kind, but turned it down. They meant more to him than their weighted price tags alone.

Indeed, of the world’s most expensive guitars, Irsay had won two of the top three – Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang ($4.55M) and David Gilmour’s Black Strat ($3.975M) – and famously said that the chart-topping guitar, Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Marted D-18, wasn’t worth the $6 million figure it sold for.

Irsay's favorite guitar? Well it remains unconfirmed, but it’s thought to be the one he purchased for £1M in 2013 after it was discovered in a woman's attic.

The late Jack Bruce was a force of nature. His bass playing in Cream’s legendary live jams liberated the instrument for generations of players who followed.

Improvising freely within (and beyond) the chord progressions, Bruce created lines that linked the blues-inflected guitar of Eric Clapton with the jazz-inspired drumming of Ginger Baker.

“My concept during live Cream jams was to start off supporting Eric, all the while playing with Ginger,” Bruce told Bass Player back in 2001. “Then I would build and almost goad Eric to reach the heights of his playing – and when that happened, I would take off, as well.

“If you think of the first live version of Crossroads – which was maybe the best example of what the band was like live then – we start up high and stay up high.

“On others, like Spoonful, we were trying to get this primeval big vibration that just lasts. I would use 5ths, chords and countermelodies to fatten things up, because when Eric would play high, above my bassline, it left a lot of space in the middle. But it was with more of a lead-bass attitude.

“My goal was always to create a bassline where, if you took away or changed one note, the whole song would collapse. I tried to carve the bass part out of the music, like a statue, so that I knew it would last.”

Once they had the freedom of eight-track recording, Cream began to embrace the studio as a space for experimentation – layering parts, adding keyboards, and expanding their sound. While their live performances pursued a rawer, more volatile energy.

“When we got to eight tracks on Disraeli Gears, we saw the possibilities of the studio, with overdubs and my ability to play keyboards – while live, we saw the opportunity to achieve something completely different.

“The great aspect of recording is you have time to work out the basslines. You perfect the part on run-throughs. Badge is a good example; we had the whole day to get it down – it was the most number of takes we ever did.”

Despite Clapton being Cream’s most recognizable star, Bruce was often the voice behind the group’s most enduring songs, even as record company executives openly questioned his place beyond the rhythm section.

“I don't want to give the impression that people were falling all over themselves to record White Room or Sunshine of Your Love. Nobody believed in them. People at Atlantic Records told me, ‘Eric should be the lead singer and the writer, and you are just the bass player.’

“So I cried in the corner while they came up with Strange Brew, which was actually Hey Laudy Mama with a new song grafted on. In the end, the only reason my songs were done was because Eric couldn't come up with anything.”

Bruce also launched the concept of “covering the top and the bottom,” something he loved doing. Of course, it meant having to deal with singing and playing independent parts.

“I very much enjoy being the top and bottom at the same time. It gives you a tremendous opportunity to be a catalyst; being the bass player and singer gives me two chances to make that happen, but it takes a bit of work.

“The first time I had a problem with it was when Cream did Politician. The very first time we did it, we were recording at the BBC. I just had the riff and Pete Brown had written some lyrics. At the time, the BBC had 3-track recording, so the song was improvised and recorded separately – I overdubbed the vocals, in other words. And when I came to play it with the band, I realized I couldn’t.

“It was simply a matter of working it until I got it, and that was a breakthrough because after that I was able to do a lot more where the vocal and the bass part were in opposition. It's just like being a drummer and having independence. You don't want to think about what you're playing; you just want to feel it.”

Ever the risk-taker, Bruce left it all onstage and in the studio, with every performance and recording. That spirit, along with his considerable musical contributions as a vocalist and composer, is what Bruce left for the rest of us.

Now in his mid-60s, Larry McCray’s career has taken him all the way from new kid on the block to elder statesman of the blues.

With mentors such as Albert King, Buddy Guy and Albert Collins, McCray was schooled in the art of pentatonic conversation like few others and learned how to make his guitar speak as profoundly as any human voice.

This year the Michigan-based musician is back with new album, Heartbreak City, which was produced by Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith and features a host of special guests including the producers themselves, along with Kirk Fletcher and Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Wynans.

This is a very uplifting record that crosses over into lots of areas of the blues.

That’s the intention. Whenever I’m asked what kind of music I play, I usually say I play ‘feel-good music’. I like to sing songs that are soothing in any kind of situation. I always felt that blues was broader than how it was depicted. Whenever I meet people who don’t have the same appreciation for it, I realise they haven’t discovered the right presentation of it.

The opening track, Try To Be A Good Man, kicks everything with some Albert King-inspired lines that really wail.

He was one of my biggest mentors. I loved Albert King. He would notice if you were trying to be good. You always had to show a bit of respect to Albert because that’s just what he was like.

He’d come around saying stuff like, ‘Hey boy, what you playing? Quit doing all that skipping and gimme something from the gut!’ like an antagonistic coach [laughs]. I’m lucky I got to meet people like him, BB and Koko Taylor. They made me fall in love with music in the first place. I used to be the youngest of all these players and now I’m the fuckin’ oldest!

The title track is a G minor blues that runs seven-and-a-half minutes long. What’s the secret to holding people’s attention like that?

It’s because I’ve listened to a lot over the years and incorporate other elements into my sound. Being a teenager in the ’70s, I was a big funk fan, listening to Larry Graham and Louis Johnson.

Then I left Arkansas and moved to Michigan and got exposed to heavy metal. I ended up becoming a big Def Leppard and Judas Priest fan. My criticism of blues at the time was that everybody was going for the post-war or Delta acoustic sound. Nobody was trying to take things to the next level, which is something I’ve always strived for.

You’re holding a Guild electric on the cover. Is that what we’re hearing?

That’s the one. It’s a Polara S-100 reissue with push-pull switches to split the coils. It’s a great-playing guitar, man. I wrote them a letter this morning trying to see if they would endorse me.

Because I love guitars like the Bluesbird, which is a bit like a Les Paul, and the X-175, which is reminiscent of the ES-175. The tones you hear are incredible.

I think Guild guitars sound in between a Fender and a Gibson. They are brighter than Gibsons, but still have the low-end punch of a humbucker. I’ve played Gibson my whole career – now I want something different.

And what were you plugging into?

I played through Joe’s rig. He has a nice collection of Dumble amplifiers. It was a little combo that was about the size of a Princeton, with a really warm tone. I plugged into Joe’s MXR FET Driver and a Klon clone. I have a real Klon, but I don’t take it anywhere because it’s worth so much. Effects are great, but the more you have, the more things can go wrong.

It’s amazing how lyrical your solos can be, almost most like a voice at times.

I use vocals for inspiration. I’m a baritone singer; I can only go so high, so I use my guitar to visit places I can’t with my voice. It’s like I’m singing through the guitar. I forced myself to learn all five pentatonic positions. Most people only tend to play in the 1st and 2nd [positions].

The best key to learn in is A minor: you can start with a G note on the 3rd fret and then climb into the 1st position, moving up the neck horizontally. You can mix minor with major for a blend.

You can transfer this knowledge to any key and find melodies naturally. We all know how the pentatonic scale sounds. It’s such a big part of the guitar, so it’s important to know how to play it across the neck.

Beyond that, what’s the secret to a good blues solo?

When I start playing, it’s usually with a slow bluesy lick. The second time I come around, I might throw in something a little jazzy. The third time, I might be all-out rocking and then the final pass is bringing it all back home.

It’s good to change it up. Try not to think in the same vein, whether it’s how you attack the notes, what notes you play or the rhythm. You have to tell your truth. As long as you’re speaking your truth and playing from the heart, people will listen.

This is your second time working with Joe. What have you learned from him?

I learned I’ll never be able to play like him and it’s best to stick to what I know. Joe is a one-in-a-million kind of player. He’s a special talent, and the same goes for Josh Smith, who wrote Bright Side and the title track. Even though I can’t play like Joe, I still use him for inspiration.

I have good dexterity for moments that call for me to play fast and step outside of the box. It was fun jamming together on the track I Know What I’ve Done. It reminds you to stay humble and be as good as you can be. Music isn’t a competition against other players. It’s a competition against yourself.

It really is an all-star cast on this album, especially with Reese Wynans involved.

I loved talking to Reese about his time with Stevie [Ray Vaughan], who I never got to hang with. The night he died, I was at Buddy Guy’s Legends club [in Chicago] waiting for Buddy, Stevie and Clapton because there was a rumour they were about to come and jam. All these musicians were waiting to see them.

Then we were told they’d all gone down. You’ll never see a house full of people get so quiet, it was pin-drop silence, and eventually we found out Buddy and Eric were okay. It was a terrible thing. I’ll never forget that day.

You’ve seen this kind of music rise and fall numerous times over the years. Where does the blues stand in 2025?

There are some great people trying to keep the blues alive. My biggest criticism is that the format seems to have changed. When we were coming up, there was always a structure; you’d know where the changes are. Nowadays, young people just change when they want to.

I know I’m getting older because I sound like my dad! I’m just happy there are people interested enough to preserve it. I love Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram. I have a 25-year-old son who’s a better singer and guitarist than me, so I have high hopes for him. And there’s another great young man in Arkansas called Josh Parks. He’s one to watch.

• Heartbreak City is out now via KTBA.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

It’s easy to be envious of the talents of Eric Clapton, but a session guitarist, famed for his time working with Roger Waters, says the Pink Floyd bass player was “resentful” of Slowhand.

The comments come from Tim Renwick's new interview with Guitar Player. The guitarist, who has also starred in Elton John's band, was part of the group Waters assembled for his 1984 The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking album and tour, with Clapton and Pink Floyd collaborator Michael Kamen also part of the picture. Indeed, Clapton’s guitar solo exploits litter the concept album.

Like Kamen, who helped arrange orchestras for The Wall and played on its succeeding tour, Renwick arrived on the scene having already had previous experience with Pink Floyd.

Later, he would tour A Momentary Lapse of Reason for two years with the group, and record on The Division Bell a decade later. He says that Waters didn’t take kindly to how the audience reacted to Clapton’s playing.

“It wasn't as lighthearted as it could have been,” Renwick says of the tour, with Waters running a tight ship. “He took everything very seriously and tended to want everything to sound exactly the same as the record; he was very vigilant.”

“Roger was a bit resentful of the fact that whenever Eric Clapton got up and played a solo, the place would erupt,” he adds. “People would get their lighters out, and there would be a tremendous outpouring of applause.

“And that annoyed Roger quite a lot because, rightly or wrongly, he felt that the audience weren't actually listening to the songs. They were just watching out for what Eric was doing. So there was a certain amount of resentment there.”

Waters, however, surely knew what he was letting himself in for by welcoming the guitarist into his band. Nearly 20 years earlier, one superfan had graffitied “Clapton is God” onto a London wall – an honor Clapton would later tell Guitar World he deserved – and as the years went by, that hype around him never diminished. The reaction of the audience should have come as no surprise.

In related news, the acoustic guitar that Eric Clapton and George Harrison both wrote hits on went to auction late last year, just months after it was listed on Reverb for a cool $1 million.

Christie's has just announced the details of the historic sale of the Jim Irsay Collection. Widely regarded as the greatest guitar collection on Earth, it will be auctioned off in a series of sales in 2026.

Compiled over decades by the late billionaire businessman and owner/CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, the Jim Irsay Collection has achieved a mythical status, as it includes some of the most famous acoustic and electric guitars to ever exist.

“Jim Irsay was an incredible collector with an eye for rare treasures tied to the most important moments in our collective history,” explains Christie's Americas President, Julien Pradels.

“It is a privilege to offer this renowned collection at Christie's, giving collectors and visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view, be inspired by, and bid on these objects.”

The first live sale is set to feature around 50 lots, comprising some of the most sought-after treasures in the collection

Highlights include David Gilmour's “Black Strat,” Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit 1966 Fender Mustang, Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, John Lennon's 1963 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120, George Harrison's stage-played Gibson SG, and Eric Clapton's MTV Unplugged 1939 Martin 000-42.

The once-in-a-generation auction will kick off with almost 400 items, tracing pivotal moments in music, film, sports, pop culture, and, of course, guitar, history, over four auctions from March 3 to March 18 – alongside a free, public exhibition at Christie's New York from March 6 to March 12.

For more information, head to Christie's.

Bob Margolin will always be grateful to Muddy Waters, who had him play on six of the blues legend’s latter-day records in the ‘70s. “It changed the course of the rest of my life,” Margolin says, “because of the great music I learned from him, and the musicians I met through him.”

Before that, the Massachusetts-born guitarist had spent the late ‘60s merging blues with psych rock, before leaning fully into the blues. “It was moving, fun, and honest music,” he says. “I fell in love with that music and wanted to play it; and then I got into Muddy’s band, which was amazing.”

Another amazing moment came after Margolin had spent three years with Waters – he took part in The Last Waltz. “I realized it was a very special gig when I saw the people in the room,” he says.

He stuck with Waters until 1980 and they remained friends until his death in 1983. Since then he’s built a solo career, winning two Blues Music Awards. But that’s not his biggest takeaway.

“Some of the greatest blues players,like Hubert Sumlin, or B.B. King, were just the nicest people,” he recalls.

“They’d be really sweet to you. They were great and distinctive – you’d know who they were the second they played a note. But they were also the nicest human beings. I think that’s a good lesson.”

What led you to pick up guitar?

I really fell in love with Chuck Berry’s playing in about 1964. I followed that path of inspiration back to Muddy Waters and the blues, and really haven’t crawled out yet! I heard songs on the radio that were bluesy; and later I heard real blues songs, and I sought them out.

In the late ‘60s you were in a psychedelic Boston band called The Freeborne. What was the blue-meets-psyche scene like?

It was a very vibrant scene. There was a really great blues scene there with young people who loved the music. There were good players in town and creative rock music at a time when people were putting lots of styles together. It was a very exciting time for music. – it was a wide-open scene.

What gear were you using then?

I got a Fender Twin Reverb and put some JBL speakers in it. Around 1967 I got a mid ‘50s Gibson Les Paul fairly cheaply. I had it until about 1972, when it got stolen. Once I started playing in blues bands more, I got rid of the Twin Reverb and went to Fender Bassmans. The Twin Reverb seemed too bright and clean, rather than the dirty sound the smaller amps had.

How did you first meet Muddy Waters?

I loved his music more than anybody else’s – he was the main reason for me. I was in bands that opened up for him in the Massachusetts area. He saw our band in 1973, probably in March, and he could see what I was trying to play on guitar.

We were smart enough not to do Muddy Waters songs on a gig opening for Muddy Waters! But I was trying to play Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmy Reid and Elmore James. He was very encouraging to me, which was a thrill; it really meant a lot to me.

What led to your joining Muddy Waters’ band in 1973?

In August 1973 he came to Boston to start 55 days in a club there. I was the first one in the place, and on the first night – I think it was a Tuesday – I came in and the harmonica player asked me the fateful question: “Do you have any reefer?”

Did you?

I did! That’s what local musicians did for bands that on the road back then. But he also said, “Muddy just fired somebody last night.” Before I could even think about it, he went into the dressing room and got Muddy, who came out and said, “Come to my hotel room tomorrow and bring a guitar.”

I had things scoped out pretty good. I also knew it would be the best opportunity to learn about Chicago blues, and play them with the person who was at the top. Muddy knew I’d be interested – he presumed I’d do it if he wanted me. And it worked out that way: he gave me a chance to be in the band, and that lasted for almost seven years.

What was he like to be in a band with?

He could be a little moody sometimes, when he couldn’t hear anything on the bandstand. But a lot of times he was good-humored – and he was a very fair bandleader with the way that he ran the band.

He wanted you to know the music pretty well; not from rehearsing it, but from knowing what the song sounded like, and how to play it in the moment by following the cues that he’d give during songs like Baby, Please Don’t Go, Hoochie Coohie Man, and Got My Mojo Workin’.

It was an opportunity to watch and listen. But it was also about finding a part among seven musicians that wasn’t getting in anybody else’s way, and to add something meaningful . When you get a guitar solo, take it really, really strong – make a nice little statement. Then on the second verse of your solo, drive it home and send it over to the next person.

The band never talked about these things, but that’s what happened onstage from the first night that I played with them.

You participated in The Last Waltz with Muddy.

The band was on the road and he said, “Me, you, and the piano player are gonna fly out to San Francisco in a couple of days.” I had a Gibson archtop ES-150 from about the mid ‘50s with me. I used a Fender Stratocaster most of the time, but I happened to have that archtop guitar, so I used that for The Last Waltz.

When we were rehearsing the day before, I guess that guitar impressed people, because everybody was very nice to me. And they saw that I was playing with Muddy. It was exciting to meet and play with Paul Butterfield and Pinetop Perkins. But they didn’t actually stay past our set, which was around the middle of the night.

After the show, we went back to the hotel where the rehearsals had been. It was kind of a jam room and party. People were playing all night, including a lot of rock stars. Muddy and Pinetop were the oldest people there – they were in their 60s, which sounds young to me now! It was a fun night after the show.

Did you get to chat with Robbie Robertson?

I’ve been thinking about Robbie a lot because there’s a book that he published just before his death a couple of years ago. It’s about the time of The Last Waltz and right after it. But I didn’t really talk with Robbie at The Last Waltz or at the rehearsal – he was kind of busy, and there was nothing I had to say to him.

I did see him in November 2019, where he was a guest at The Last Waltz tribute that he also endorsed. I talked with him then, but we just talked about the music itself.

At the after-hours jam you mentioned, you sat in with Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, right?

What’s interesting is I didn’t see Robbie at the end of the night; I’m sure he was somewhere. But we ended up having a jam at around seven in the morning that Bob Dylan put together. He had me on guitar, Eric Clapton on guitar, Dr. John on piano, Ronnie Wood on bass, Levon Helm on drums and Paul Butterfield on harmonica.

It wasn’t the greatest music I ever played, but it was interesting to sit in a room and see those people playing the blues, with Bob leading the jam and mostly doing Robert Johnson and Freddie King songs. It was fun to trade verses on Hideaway with Eric Clapton.

Did you get to chat with Eric?

We talked a little bit. I was telling him about the new album Muddy had just cut with Johnny Winter in October of 1976, Hard Again. I asked Eric if he knew Johnny because I figured they must have crossed paths since they were both into Robert Johnson and were very well-known blues-rock guitar players.

Eric said they hadn’t met yet. One time he’d called, but Johnny didn’t believe it was Eric! The next time I saw Johnny I asked him about that. He said, “Yeah, some guy said he was Eric Clapton. I hung up on him!”

Speaking of Johnny, you played on his 1977 album, Nothin’ but the Blues. What was that like?

That was recoded after the Hard Again album and tour, which was two months of playing mostly theaters. Johnny said, “I wanna get everybody in the studio right away, while we’re used to playing with each other.” In just a few days we knocked out an album of songs Johnny wanted to cover, and some things he wrote. It had the same spirit of what we were doing with Muddy, but with Johnny singing.

Why did you leave Muddy’s band in 1980?

Unfortunately there was a business problem with Muddy’s manager. The band hadn’t really changed since 1974, and in the middle of 1980, we were all negotiating with Muddy’s manager, trying to protect ourselves. The band ended up leaving – but all of us stayed friends with Muddy.

In November of 1980 I opened a show for him in Washington. I got to have a long talk with him at the end of the night, and said everything I ever would have wanted to say to him. That turned out to be the last time I saw him alive.

“But I’d call him on the phone every few weeks, just to be in touch with him. It meant a lot to me to be able to do that. I talked to him three weeks before he passed. I asked, “Do you ever pick up your guitar at home, just to play it?” He said, “No – I’ve been playing for 50 years. It’s there!”

In the years since, you’ve led a decorated solo career. Are you working on anything now?

I’m working on being at home; enjoying my home, my wife and my pets. I’ve been off the road for about a year. I’m sure I’m not done playing, but I’ve got nothing in the immediate future. I might be the first person you interview who isn’t promoting something new!

Keep up to date via Bob Margolin’s website.

Sheryl Crow has revealed that Don Henley once told her to stop giving her songs away after she wrote a song for Eric Clapton that never got released.

Before Crow was a superstar solo artist she did all kinds of things. She was a session artist and sang backups with Michael Jackson, Neal Schon and Don Henley. And she wrote songs.

She wrote Love You Blind with Jay Oliver, which was later recorded by Celine Dion and released as a non-album B-side to Love You Blind. She wrote All Kinds of People with the late Kevin Gilbert; Tina Turner picked that one up, releasing it on her 1996 studio album, Wildest Dreams.

And in a recent interview with Esquire, the multi-Grammy winning singer-songwriter reveals that she once wrote a song that was picked up by Eric Clapton.

“I had a song covered by Celine Dion and a song covered by Tina Turner. I had a song that Eric Clapton had on hold,” says Crow. “He was going to record it, so they put it on hold so nobody else can record it.”

Note: Clapton “was going to” record it. This track exists, it is on file out there somewhere, but somehow Slowhand never actually got round to using it. For Crow, it was one thing writing songs for artists, but writing songs only for them to go unreleased? That was a turning point in Crow’s career. An Eagle had some friendly advice that set her straight.

“That was when Don Henley said, ‘You need to quit giving your songs away. And if you’re serious about this, you need to hold on to your songs for yourself,’” says Crow.

She pressed forward. Famously, her 1992 debut album was torpedoed – and it was Crow that fired the shot. Tracked with producer Hugh Padgham (Sting), with the likes of Vinnie Colaiuta, Dominic Miller and Pino Palladino, it was too polished for Crow’s tastes. It was canned.

Crow had a vision for how her sound was going to be, and 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club officially introduced her as a solo artist.

All I Wanna Do would become her breakout hit, bringing home the Grammys, plural. We often associate Crow with the acoustic guitar, instruments such as her 2019 customized Gibson Country Western, but oftentimes her songs will start on bass guitar.

She told Bass Player in 2020 that she wrote her first song on bass in 1996, and it was one of her biggest hits, My Favourite Mistake.

Crow tells Esquire that she had never intended to be the star of the show. For her, the joy in music was just to be writing the songs. Carole King and James Taylor were primary influences.

“I never wanted to be a famous rock star. I wanted to be a great writer,” she says. “My first records were Carole King and James Taylor, and they felt like lifelines for me. Tapestry and Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. When you’re a kid and you can’t figure out where you fit in, music was the thing. That was the escape. That was where I could feel like I wasn’t alone.

“It also gave me a feeling I could get out of my hometown and see things. And so that’s what I wanted. I wasn’t thinking about being Mick Jagger. I just wanted to write songs that made other people feel the way I felt when I listened to those songs.”

Will we ever hear the song she wrote for Clapton? Over to you, Slowhand.

The unique 1913 Gibson acoustic guitar, which Eric Clapton and George Harrison used to write some of their most iconic songs, is going up for auction this week.

The quirky Style-0 archtop, fondly nicknamed "Pattie", has been listed by Heritage Auctions, and is currently awaiting an opening bid of $150,000.

The auction comes mere months after the acoustic was listed on Reverb for almost $1,000,000. It remains to be seen whether it will eventually sell for anywhere near that figure when the auction comes to a close in nine days time.

Not much is known about the guitar’s earliest years, but the fate of the Gibson Style-0 Archtop, which bears the serial number #14106, changed dramatically when the two guitarists got their hands on it in the late ‘60s.

It’s lovingly been dubbed “Pattie” after Pattie Boyd, the woman they both married. Heritage Auctions has dubbed it “not only a testament to Gibson's golden era, [but] an icon of late 1960s rock history.”

It came into the pair's possession during a particularly creative patch in 1968, which included some famed collaborative Los Angeles songwriting sessions.

Harrison was photographed playing the guitar in October 1968 alongside Clapton at Alan Pariser's Los Angeles garden. According to reports, it was here that the seeds of some of Harrison’s most iconic compositions – including Here Comes the Sun, I Me Mine, and All Things Must Pass – were planted. It’s also believed to have helped inspire Clapton to write Layla.

This guitar, then, sits at the very center of the Harrison/Clapton relationship, and a shared love that sparked some iconic music.

Clapton later gifted the guitar to Delaney Bramlett, who played a key role in Calpton's and Harrison’s respective solo careers, around 1970. It was first auctioned in 2013, five years after Bramlett’s death.

The guitar is in surprisingly good condition despite being well over 100 years old, although there are some signs of its workhorse nature.

See Heritage Auctions for more.

A cornerstone of the legendary Abbey Road Studios, record producer and engineer Ken Scott played an instrumental role in the careers of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the Jeff Beck Group, to name a select few.

He was also one of the five main engineers for the Beatles, learning the ropes alongside the band's ascent to fame. His first gigs as an assistant engineer included working on several tracks on the A Hard Day's Night album and Long Tall Sally EP.

Scott was also involved in the opus that was to become The White Album, and, in a recent Rick Beato interview, he gave some insight into the industry legend that is Eric Clapton's uncredited solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

“I remember absolutely nothing about it,” he says matter-of-factly. “But I'm not the only one. When I was writing my book, I've been asked the question, ‘What was it like Eric coming and playing on that? How did they react…’ and all of that, and I've just had to answer, ‘I can't remember.’

Scott even admits he “actually tried hypnotherapy” to try and bring back memories from those sessions specifically, so he could answer that million-dollar question, but nothing came up.

“I went to John Smith, who was my assistant engineer, my button pusher at that point [who said], ‘I don't remember anything about it.’ I went to Chris Thomas, George Martin's assistant, who was producing at that point because George was on holiday, and [he said], ‘I don't remember anything about it.’

“The one thing I vaguely remember – Chris and I have talked about it – is Eric saying that the only way he'd play on it is if he sounded like the Beatles, as opposed to Eric Clapton,” he recalls.

The technique they employed to achieve that effect? “We used ADT,” he explains. “ADT is either artificial double tracking or automatic double tracking, whichever you choose to use.”

He continues, “It stemmed from John [Lennon] not wanting to sing the song twice. He went to Ken Townsend, who was one of the amp room guys, and said, ‘Is there a way you can come up with something so that I don't have to sing it twice?’ Ken went away, and as brilliant as he was, he came back and said, ‘I may have got it.’”

Indeed, in a Guitar Player interview from 1987, George Harrison himself actually confirmed that this technique was used to make the solo sound... well, more Beatles-esque.

“Eric played that, and I thought it was really good,” he said. “Then we listened to it back, and he said, ‘Ah, there's a problem though. It's not a Beatle-y enough’ – so we put it through the ADT to wobble it a bit.”

And, speaking of George Harrison and Fab Four solos, in a 1988 Guitar World interview, the famed guitarist revealed that, while he typically sketched out his solos in advance, there was one classic Beatles track that was a notable exception.

For Stephen Dale Petit, new album Be The Love holds a Molotov cocktail of emotions. The Anglo-American bluesman takes a deep breath and decides which one he’ll dredge to the surface first.

There’s pride in an album that is hands-down the career peak of the man once dubbed a “blues hooligan” by Mojo, who has revved and ripped up trad-roots since he debuted with 2008’s Guitararama. There’s heartbreak bleeding across seven tracks that kick the hornet nest of a failed relationship.

Alongside that, there’s gallows humour, which the 56-year-old draws upon more each day as he battles a life-threatening illness. “I didn’t start out trying to make a masterpiece,” he reflects. “But I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2022, within months of starting Be The Love.

“It certainly occupied my mind, the premise that this album wouldn’t get finished. So music became everything. I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to try to please anyone – the songs are the songs, and this album is me.’

The songs on your new album, Be The Love, aren’t written about your illness, are they?

No, I wrote them from a whole different place. The relationship I was in broke up, earlier in 2022. She also happened to be in my band. It was all unclear for a few months. And when I established what the new reality was, I literally broke down. Then I grabbed a guitar and Cherish A Ghost came out.

They say there are five life events that are all equal as emotional minefields. Birth, death, marriage, divorce and moving house. This relationship might as well have been a divorce. We were so close. And I wrote Cherish A Ghost from the wound, when it was still a wound, in the process of healing. I cried and cried.

But you go through every emotion under the sun. A Better Man is almost like a rediscovery: ‘Okay, there is no us, so what’s my identity?’ All the songs are about her, except one – Sky Scraper – which is about another person. That’s the ‘new beginning’ song.

What makes great guitar playing for you these days?

Since I was 12, I’ve been a guitar player. And you want to get better and better, but the whole rating system is like in football. You know, who’s faster? Who’s technically better? Or whatever the category is. It’s the way it’s always been. But it’s a nonsensical quest.

So my priority as a player now is emotion. Being able to move people. Which is akin to the same thing – but not exactly. Because you can move people with excitement and exhilaration as much as you can with passion, sadness, poignance and pathos.

What were the key guitars and amps on this album?

The main amp was my ’65 Marshall JTM45. It’s a musical instrument in itself. All the amp makers who advertise in the magazine will hate this, but I consider most modern amps sound processors. I like the ones that use hand-wiring and hand-everything. No digital. PCBs are a no-no. I used a Budda wah on Low And Tight. That’s a killer track. I’ll put it on in my car and just think, ‘Fuck.’

Guitars? The tracking was my red 355. I have two of them, but the one I used, I think it’s a 2008. And then I have a reissue of the walnut 70s 355 that BB King played a lot. I played my 2008 Firebird, too.

The electric guitar tone is pretty fucking cool on Sky Scraper. The dirt is ferocious. But it’s never like metal. Because a lot of metal guitar is so compressed that it gets quite squishy, actually. I used a L-4 CES for the basic track.

For overdubs, it was a 2012 three-pup Firebird Non-Reverse with a Zvex Woolly Mammoth, and the rest was my red 355. I used a Small Clone with a Mojo Vibe for the flange/chorus and a Klon for the solo. I also used a Lazy J 20 and J 10, separately, for everything amplified.

We associate you with a Firebird. What’s the appeal?

In the beginning, it was because I’d seen people play Firebirds and thought they looked mindblowing. You know, visually, it’s a wing, it’s flying, it’s freedom. I remember Eric Clapton and Johnny Winter playing them.

There’s also something about the Firebird that works with my frame. I can be ever-so-slightly leaning forward and it just hangs as if it’s on a platform, like it’s weightless. And the accessibility to the upper frets is astonishing.

What guitar sounds do you consistently look to for inspiration when writing?

There was something about the ’60s. You had the coolest guitar sounds in a Top 10 song. The feedback on I Feel Fine. The stabs on She’s A Woman: fucking great. The riff on Paperback Writer: fucking phenomenal. Heart Full Of Soul, any of the Yardbirds ones.

You know, Hendrix and Sunshine Of Your Love were in the charts. I sometimes use this as a thought exercise to sonically free up people when I’m working with them: imagine it’s 1965 and Satisfaction doesn’t exist, then you hear it for the first time. That Gibson fuzz pedal – that would have been the most mindblowing sound coming through the radio. And they played Firebirds as well.

What was your most formative experience as a young player?

It was magical being a teenager in Huntington Beach watching the blues guitarists at The Golden Bear. Like Albert King. He played left-handed and he was doing shit where I was just, like, ‘What? How?’ You know, two-step bends with total pitch-perfect accuracy.

Sky Scraper, your “new beginning” song, is such an ambitious track, how it shapeshifts…

I love tempo changes because you have to be a real band to pull that off. Like, people who play in the pit of a West End show – those parts can be written out, but it’s never the same as when it’s done by feel. When you know what direction it’s going, but you don’t have exact measurements, that’s the magic. Because it morphs organically and becomes – in our instance – a three-headed creature, moving as one.

Sky Scraper and Low And Tight are head arrangements, nothing written down, not even charts. The bass player, Jim Mortimore, and drummer, Sam Walker, have been playing together since they were teenagers and that generates musical magic as there’s tangible telepathic communication. Jim is a sound engineer as well – about 40 per cent of the overdub sessions were with him.

The wild, discordant guitars in the How Much Love? outro were from a session with Jim, and I’d never before experienced the adult version of toddlers playing with paint on unlined paper – that sheer innocent joy.

So if at any point I sound like a big-head, then none of this is, like, ‘I did it on my own.’ I worked with some bona fide grade-A geniuses.

My co-producer, Vance Powell, listened in Nashville to my unamplified guitar and vocal melody ideas as iPhone recordings and we’d talk through each song. Charlotte Glasson was the icing on the cake, arranging strings and horns on four songs – and playing on Sky Scraper.

Diamond is another standout on the album – and a more positive song?

I thought, ‘I don’t want a whole song cycle of intractable sadness, bitterness and invective. There were a lot of amazing times, too – so let’s celebrate them.’ That’s what Diamond is. There’s a section of acoustic chords I’m really pleased with. Those big strums are Boz Boorer’s ’70s J-200. Gorgeous guitar.

I just strummed it into the air and said, ‘This is going on the recording.’ That instrument at the top of Diamond is a bass diddly-bow – an ‘E’ bass string nailed to a piece of wood, with fret markings made with a Sharpie, played using a very heavy slide. I got the intonation in about 10 minutes and away we went. Boz plays the lovely floaty fingerpicked pattern in the second verse.

And Boz is one of several special guests?

Yeah, Albert Lee plays the Fender tones on How Much Love? – let’s not forget him! We recorded that at Hoxa HQ, and it doesn’t do half-day hire, so after a four-hour session with Albert, I was on a creative high and set about creating the outro slide part on my 355.

I was just throwing myself off of the cliff – I had no idea what it was going to be – but it’s my favourite slide playing I’ve ever done. I also like the solos on Gift Horse. The middle one is wild, then for the end one, it’s Sam the drummer, who goes feral and I get to be more nuanced.

And then there’s the guest solo that Clapton contributed on A Better Man…

It just felt totally right. I had built this two-and-a-half minute section of music for him. We recorded the song and I just told everybody, ‘There’ll be a solo there from a special guest.’ Nobody really interrogated me. I sent Eric a rough mix and he came back to me, a bit grumpy.

He said, ‘Well, lockdown is finished and now I’m getting inundated.’ So I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s his way of saying no.’ But he got back to me the next day and said, ‘Look, I don’t mean to be a grump, but it’s going to be a long wait.’ I was just getting ready to start chemo, so I thought, ‘Well, fine, I’m in no hurry.’

What do you remember about the session?

He was standing 2ft from me at Hoxa HQ, facing the speakers. When he was done, he said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘I want to cry.’ Because I was so moved. But there were some quick glances between Eric and his tech – like, ‘Er, what does he mean?’ – so I quickly said, ‘No, no, I mean that in the best possible way!’

His solo is fucking insane. That bit where he locks in and repeats a phrase – I’m not saying he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. He did map out certain bits. But he turned off his thinking brain and turned on his channel – his brain is literally a conductor, channelling the energy from Pluto, Uranus, Jimi Hendrix…

What guitar did Eric use?

A Strat. Which one? Well, he’s got a few, doesn’t he? He’d also brought an acoustic and a ’60s brown sunburst 335 – it was gorgeous. We did two days in the studio and normally they’d take the guitars home overnight, but I trusted the place so he left them. I asked Eric, ‘Can I play them?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ So he went home and I had full licence to play his guitars. If that isn’t guitar-player love, I don’t know what the fuck is.

You and Eric are old friends. Would you ever have considered joining his band?

I would watch him get a new guitar player and feel a little bit… whatever. And just think, ‘Well, he’s better for Eric because of this or that, fine, fair enough.’ I mean, Derek Trucks is astonishing. Doyle Bramhall II – he’s a great player, but I look at him and think, ‘There’s not much I can’t do that he’s doing.’

The truth is, I was never in circulation as a gun-for-hire. Eric doesn’t want someone who’s going to be showboating. But we’re just talking about idle daydreams – I never really thought I should be in Eric’s band.

You sound omnipotent on the album. But has illness made it harder to sing, play, record?

Not yet. At the moment, I’m going through some weird thing with my ear, which, if it’s not sorted, could threaten things. I’ve got peripheral neuropathy, which is a side effect of chemo. But we’ll figure it out.

Do you think you’ll make more albums – or play any live shows again?

The truth is, you just don’t know with these things. I’ve had a rough few weeks. I’ve been to A&E, in and out of hospitals, bedridden, suffering the side effects of chemo and immunotherapy. But I want to play these songs live. I’d love to. So watch this space…

• Be the Love is out now via 333 Records.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.