Guitar World famously listed Stanley Jordan as one of 40 players who changed the post-1980 modern era of guitar playing, and by the sound of it, he’s about to do that again.

Jordan, a player we associate with the frontiers of jazz guitar, is working on a metal album.

And not only that. In a new interview with Guitar World, Jordan says he’s using James Hetfield’s signature ESP Iron Cross single-cut to do it. “It’s a great heavy metal guitar with a great feel for the right hand,” he says.

No doubt! But what’s this about a metal album?

“Yes, it’s coming! With my tandem guitars, I can run different distortion pedals and wah-wahs on both guitars at the exact same time,” he says. “It’s insane what you can do.”

The “tandem guitars” setup needs an explanation. This is all kinds of nuts. If you have seen Jordan perform live, then you’ll know exactly what this is. Jordan’s two-handed “touch technique” allows him to effectively play two guitars at once. And we thought one guitar was difficult enough to control. He says his Vigier is still his number one electric guitar, but why restrict himself to just one?

“I’ve recently gone back to my “tandem guitars” setup where I play two guitars simultaneously. For the right-hand guitar, I’m using a PRS Santana. I love its short-scale length. The strings feel loose, which makes the touch technique much easier.”

The other guitar in this setup right now is the Iron Cross. Jordan is getting it adjusted as we speak so that it fits better in this “tandem” setup.

It’s like every time Jordan picks up the guitar, the act of playing has been transformed in some way, like he’s turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Even his collabs are crazy. Sadly, B.B. King died before the pair for the chance to record together, but they had effectively shook hands and agreed they’d work together, and were – get this – going to cover the Doors’ Riders on the Storm. Seriously.

What will Jordan think of next? Well, he’s developing a DJ/guitar live setup involving two computers running Ableton Live with the intent of bringing is voluminous knowledge of jazz theory into electronic music. “I use a massive array of foot pedals to DJ with while I’m playing guitar with my hands,” he says.

But whatever you do, if you see him down at your local science museum, stand well back. He’s been exploring methods of controlling fire with his guitar.

“I’ve also wanted to do a flame technique,” he says. “I once visited a science museum where they hooked me up to a Rubens tube, meaning my guitar was literally controlling and shaping physical fire. You can find the video of it on YouTube.”

And you can watch it below.

You can read the interview with Stanley Jordan in full in the new issue of Guitar World, which is on sale now. Better still, Subscribe and save a heap of money.

Michael Hampton was barely 20 when he recorded Funkadelic’s 1975 record Let’s Take It to the Stage. He was young compared with his P-Funk bandmates, earning him the nickname Kidd Funkadelic – but he quickly settled into the funk collective, and the good times soon rolled.

“Once I got in the band and out on the road, I just practiced and played,” Hampton says. “When we got into the studio, maybe I’d bump into a few beers and just kick it and have a good time.”

With this, Hampton admits he “couldn’t tell you the actual process,” mainly because Funkadelic was a collective of free-spirited, drug-using, hard-partying musicians looking for nothing more than a groove to accent their good times.

“Those guys were older than me,” Hampton says. “They were putting it together. There was probably a lot of ‘paperwork’ I missed out on. [Laughs] But, hey, I’d rather have the few brain cells that I’ve got left than worry about any of that!”

Like most of Funkadelic’s ’70s output, Let’s Take It to the Stage is a banger with lots of guitar heroics to spare.

“We saw it as like a battle of the bands, you know, that type of relationship,” Hampton says. “We always tried to do our best on tour. That’s where ‘Let’s take it to the stage!’ came from. We’d be like, ‘Let’s do this sucker!’ We were like a funk mob, just doing our best to smoke the stage and outdo whatever other band was coming.”

Now 69, Hampton isn’t a “Kidd” anymore, but he fills up with youthful energy when he looks back on Funkadelic’s halcyon era.

“It means something to me on the groove trip,” he says. “If you don’t like it, take your dead ass home, you know? [Laughs] Shit, I still love that stuff. I love playing it. When I do, I pull out the best equipment, so that whatever I use will be louder and funkier. We still say, ‘Let’s take it to the stage,’ you know? It still represents us. It’s about having fun and that competition, which is alright by me.”

How did the sessions for Stage kick off?

We went up to Michigan United Sound, which was near Wayne State University’s campus in Detroit. We stayed across the street at a little motel, and that was where we came up with a lot of stuff. I’d have to listen to the album to remember exactly what happened and where, but I do remember that.

Can you remember the first song that you recorded?

That woulda been Be My Beach. I actually did the sessions for Let’s Take It to the Stage the same day I did the first sessions for Bootsy Collins’ first album, Stretchin’ Out [1976].

Given the free-spirited nature of Funkadelic – and your playing – what was your general approach?

I had no idea where we were going. [Laughs] I don’t know what the process was because there wasn’t one! We went in there, said, “We’re gonna record this song,” and we just did it. No-one ever approached me formally and was like, “This song is gonna be on this album, and we’re gonna do it this way…” We just did a lot of sessions for both albums, and they picked out the best stuff that made sense for the albums.

So you had no idea if you were recording a track for Funkadelic or Bootsy?

It wound up as a process of elimination. Everybody was just recording all the time, 24/7. It was like one giant shift; you’d get back up, go over there, play, do it, hang out, kick it, put some parts on and then come back out. It’s hard to even know who played on what track, to be honest with you.

That checks out, as the credits on P-Funk albums are murky at best.

A lot of things went undocumented. I’d have to listen to try and figure out who played with me on this or that track. There might be a log out there somewhere that had that, but I don’t know. I’d go in there early in the morning and be on this or that song, but things changed so often, and the process was fluid.

Who plays guitar on Good to Your Earhole, which features a ton of ripping guitar?

I know that one, man. That’s Eddie Hazel! I didn’t play the foundation of that or anything. Everybody was recording, and Eddie probably went in there, did his thing and probably did some singing because he was a great singer, too. That’s the story there.

According to George Clinton, a “smack addict” wandered into the studio, laid down the solo for Get Off Your Ass and Jam and was paid $50. Is that true?

I heard a story like that, but I don’t wanna say the guy who did it was a smack addict, you know? [Laughs]

Paul Warren of Rare Earth has claimed that the solo on Get Off Your Ass and Jam was, in fact, him. Should we put the “smack addict” rumor to rest once and for all?

Yeah, I don’t know! Maybe it was a guy on smack who got paid $50. But let’s just roll with what George Clinton said. [Laughs] So, yeah, sure, the original story is probably true.

Did you play on Get Off Your Ass and Jam, too?

I did the loop when the song starts off. They looped it real fast, and then I’m in the back doing some whammy stuff later on. And it’s funny because I think Tupac Shakur sampled that in one of his tracks [1993’s Holler If Ya Hear Me]. Somebody sent it to me. They broke it down, and it’s like three notes running; he made all these beats and different time signatures. It was a cool sample.

What gear were you working with?

We had a lot of Marshall amps. And we had the old backline from Aerosmith, which were Music Man amps, and Crown power amplifiers. So, yeah, we were using Aerosmith’s old equipment.

How did Funkadelic end up with Aerosmith’s gear?

That’s a good question! [Laughs] There was a guy called “Rabbit” who we coulda asked, but I don’t know about any of that, man. I don’t wanna drop any names, but I just heard that’s where we got the Music Man and Crown stuff.

I’m not quite sure if we borrowed them, if it was an actual purchase or a trade, but there were a lot of things going on back in the day with roadies and things like that, so who knows about the actual transaction.

Is that to say maybe a side deal took place between roadies?

Well, there were some guys that worked with Aerosmith that were actually techs, and they were working with us, too. I don’t know because I didn’t see the guys, and I didn’t talk to anybody that did the deal. I just know that we wound up with it, and that’s what was used. They worked, I plugged in, and that’s how it was!

What guitars did you use on the album?

I had an old Gibson L6-S. I kept it all original, and that’s the guitar I used a lot back then. I also had a Les Paul and an old Framus that was kind of Les Paul-shaped [probably a 10600]. I had that guitar worked on; it had these weird augmented pickups where the coil and the wire wrapped around them made crazy sounds.

I ended up having DiMarzio pickups put in there instead. And then I had an Alembic guitar that I bedazzled with rhinestones, mirrors and shit. [Laughs] Oh, and I had my B.C. Rich Bich.

How do you view the album’s legacy?

Some people just have their favorites, but it doesn’t matter to me too much. It’s about how well you play. Once somebody gets into it, that’s what matters. But it’s funny because I had no idea people would like it so much. You play the songs, rehearse them and do the shows, but you don’t know it’s gonna be something that loops on forever.

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

When Alek Darson was hired to mix and master a batch of demos, it seemed like the kind of straightforward job he regularly handles in his Port Colborne, Ontario studio. Instead, the guitarist and producer found himself pulled into Inner Child, the progressive project led by guitarist Carlos Borges and anchored by Animals As Leaders drummer Matt Garstka.

By the time the self-titled debut was finished, Darson had contributed lead and rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards and programming – while producing, engineering, mixing and mastering the album too.

Borges had initially presented himself as a client, but Darson recalls the job kept expanding: “We need bass for this part. We need guitars for this.” Soon he was adding solos, reshaping sections and suggesting arrangements. Most of the album was assembled remotely before the team spent four days tracking drums with Garstka at East Iris Studios in Nashville.

Calling Inner Child progressive metal only gets you partway there. The music moves through odd meters, jazz-fusion phrasing, heavy riffing and quieter passages, while guitars, keyboards and orchestration shift underneath. Garstka’s drumming can be explosive and hyper-detailed, while string arrangements push the music well beyond a standard trio.

There’s virtuosity everywhere – but the record unfolds in layers rather than simply overwhelming the listener. That complexity makes Darson’s guitar choices more interesting. Much of Inner Child lives in clean and edge-of-breakup territory rather than constant high gain, which pushed him outside his comfort zone.

“A 5150, chugging along: that’s my happy place,” he admits. The cleaner approach gave him room to experiment, especially with economy-picking concepts from longtime influence Frank Gambale.

For the heavier material he leaned on his WoodGuerilla Ghost of Isabel, a multiscale eight-string with a 26.5-to-27.5-inch scale and Fishman Fluence pickups. He likes the glassy top end, while the extended scale gives the lowest strings an almost piano-like fundamental.

He uses an unusual E-A-D-A-D-G-B-E tuning that opens up less predictable low-register voicings. When he wanted something warmer, he reached for Puffy, his neck-through WoodGuerilla seven-string and longtime touring workhorse.

Darson’s amp world is equally modern. He’s largely moved to Fractal’s Axe-Fx platform after years of hauling traditional rigs, but he says searching for the right tones still feels like swapping amps, cabinets and microphones in a studio. Some DI tracks were also re-amped through Cubase’s stock VST amp simulator, particularly for clean sounds. Darson may miss the physical ritual of using real amps, but as he puts it: “They've nailed it in the box.”

He says his “producer brain” is always involved when choosing instrument tones as “half of the mix is within the arrangement.” If a guitar needs drastic EQ later, his instinct is to question the part, voicing or register first. Picking a sound and arranging a part are really the same process: making sure every layer earns its space.

There were moments when the Inner Child project was quite challenging. For Solace Darson wrote a sweeping, nearly chromatic unison with the synth that became one of the hardest guitar passages he’s ever tackled.

“I don’t think I've ever practiced anything that much in my entire life!” he says. “I can barely play it at tempo.”

It’s a revealing admission from an accomplished progressive guitarist whose technical vocabulary can make difficult parts sound almost casual. His fretboard fluency was built over many years – he started aged 10 on his mother’s nylon-string in Belgrade, then heard Dream Theater's Images and Words as a teenager and was floored by the unison passage in Metropolis Pt.1.

He later studied counterpoint, harmony, figured bass and solfege while touring, as the Eastern-influenced music around him provided an almost subconscious education in odd meters. Berklee had long been the dream; once financial help made it possible, he moved to Boston. Years after Dream Theater first inspired him, he found himself playing guitar and bass on Jordan Rudess’ 2019 solo album Wired for Madness.

The title Inner Child also became unexpectedly personal – as an only child who spent much of his youth looking inward, Darson connected with the idea. “I’m still the same kid in a sense,” he says. “Still gazing at these instruments, like, ‘It would be cool if I could play that!’”

Asked which track he’d suggest to introduce Inner Child, he settles on Guided Anger, while giving Wonder an honorable mention for its guitar and drum interplay. Both reveal the balance at the heart of the record: chops are welcome, but never simply for their own sake.

Whether he’s choosing an eight-string, dialing back the gain or wrestling with a brutal unison line, Darson keeps returning to the same question: what does the song need?

• Inner Child is out now.

Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher spent his summer taking people to school. It’s a sweltering afternoon in Zagreb, Croatia, and Kelliher is sitting backstage before one of the final shows of a European tour.

Naturally, the master metalmaker has been crushing it on stage with the Atlanta-formed outfit, putting on a clinic while delivering an authorial blend of battering-ram rhythms, prog-spiraling licks and interstellar melodicism – hallmarks of classic albums including 2004’s Leviathan and 2009’s Crack the Skye.

Kelliher was dropping knowledge before those sets, too. All tour long he’d been knuckling into a series of one-on-one guitar lessons with fans – sometimes explaining the fundamentals, other times teaching aspiring six-stringers how to play Mastodon’s most memorable moments. Above all, he drilled in the importance of playing through your own voice, no matter whose riff it is you’re riffin’.

“The theme of the whole lesson is this: don’t be like, ‘I’m never gonna be as good as that guy,’” he says. “I learned not to think like that a long time ago – and that rhythm is everything.”

Notably, Kelliher is saying this while seated beside current co-guitarist Nick Johnston, the Canadian virtuoso who joined last year following the departure of founding guitar hero Brent Hinds.

Nicknamed “Manimal,” Hinds’ visionary fretboard dynamism led him through countless mind-bending solos with Mastodon over the years, but he’d left the group unexpectedly in March 2025.

The ensuing months found Hinds stating that his exit was not his choice – and less than amicable; Kelliher suggested more diplomatically at the time that they’d grown apart, while this year’s The Mastodon in the Room mini-documentary adds that Hinds’ substance-abuse issues played a part in the disconnect and departure from his bandmates.

But they expected he’d eventually come back. Devastatingly, they’d never get the chance to reconnect; Hinds was killed in an August 2025 traffic accident after an SUV struck his motorcycle.

Mastodon now address the profound loss of their friend and former bandmate in Your Ghost Again, the first single from the act’s ninth album, Marrow Deep. It begins with erratically stagger-stomped brutishness, then Kelliher and Johnston team up for a dizzyingly zoetropic run. As the song cosmic-portals itself toward a melancholic, prog-tinged plane, drummer Brann Dailor and bassist Troy Sanders croon of “feelings of regret” and “visions of a future non-existent.”

While the album was written and recorded in Hinds’ absence, his presence was felt deeply within the walls of Atlanta’s West End Sound studio. Kelliher often dialed monster tones out of Hinds’ old JMP head, dubbed the “Unicorn.” The lyrics to the urgent, yet grief-stricken Snakes for Dinner further reference their late friend by name-checking Hearts Alive, a Leviathan track that featured one of Hinds’ most towering performances. While gone, Hinds is anything but forgotten.

“We weren’t expecting Brent to pass away,” Kelliher says. “We parted ways, we were moving forward, and all of a sudden that happened. So, we started reflecting on it. We couldn’t just ignore it and write some happy record. It was like, ‘This is the topic – we have to remember the good times, express it and get it off our chests.”’

Though he’s guarded on certain details, Kelliher admits Mastodon were on a “rocky road” while navigating their split from Hinds. Linking up with Johnston has helped put the veteran act back on track.

The Toronto-based Johnston first met the band members nearly a decade ago, through mutual friend and Dethklok guitarist Brendon Small. Johnston and Dailor stayed in touch, as the former carved out a body of instrumental solo work and collaborated with the likes of Paul Gilbert, Guthrie Govan, Intervals’ Aaron Marshall and Polyphia’s Tim Henson.

Johnston was putting the finishing touches on an as-yet undetailed solo album when Dailor reached out to float the idea of jamming with Mastodon. While intimidated by the prospect of joining one of his favorite bands, the Canadian six-stringer learned their set while “trying to unlock all the unique ‘isms’” of Kelliher and Hinds’ playing.

“Watching Bill work on a riff is one of the most amazing things, because he’ll sit there for hours until it’s sculpted into this perfect shape,” Johnston says, now that he’s peeked behind the curtain. “I’m not able to do that. I’m stunned at that ability. You hear that all through the music, that relentlessness.”

Mastodon played one show with YouTube shredder Ben Eller before Johnston made his onstage debut in spring 2025. He’s since clocked dozens of global appearances, including a memorable mini-set at Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell show in Birmingham, England. That summer 2025 concert, both guitarists say, is what sealed the deal.

“It’s like he was the long-lost cousin,” Kelliher says. “He just jumped right in. I know they’re big shoes to fill, but he’s got big feet!”

Johnston ended up co-writing a few tracks on Marrow Deep. His solos run from simply-stated, yet canyon-sized bending (Your Ghost Again) to uproariously mercurial legato (Out Like a Lamb) to lysergic improvised trade-offs with keyboardist João Nogueira. Though Kelliher offered minor notes like “let’s try it a little bit more evil,” he encouraged Johnston and Nogueira to run wild and free with their playing.

Though it may be Mastodon’s first release without Hinds, the collection also surrounds the act with several lifelong friends, tourmates and studio collaborators: Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme; Clutch vocalist Neil Fallon; Gojira’s Joe Duplantier; three members of hardcore band Converge (including album co-producer Kurt Ballou); and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, who gets gloriously gloomy with his bass intro on The Vanishing.

From losses, to leads, to legendary guest spots, Mastodon’s current guitar tandem discuss the gratitude they’re feeling deep in their bones these days.

What was it like processing both Brent’s departure from the band and his death throughout this record?

Bill Kelliher: That’s a fairly tough question, because I don’t know if I’ve really processed it yet, you know? It was a surprise, but it wasn’t unexpected. Maybe part of me was ready for it.

You know, Brent was a wild man – one-of-a-kind, cavalier and incredible. There’s no-one like him, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. And like [Your Ghost Again] says, I still see him out of the corner of my eye sometimes, because he was omnipresent in the band, on the tour bus or in the practice room.

Barbarian’s Blood starts the album off with heavy patterns in 7s and 4s. How did you end up leaning into that sludgy groove?

Kelliher: Most of the songs were demoed last year, but then I heard this band called Generation of Vipers. I don’t really like anything contemporary, but I’d heard them and went, “Man, I gotta go back to the drawing board; we gotta be heavier.” They shook my foundation.

On a day off in Belgium, I sat in my room and wrote three or four almost-complete songs, and that was one of them. When I played it for the guys, everyone was like, “That’s gonna make the record, that’s sick.” It’s a perfect opener. It’s definitely Mastodon… but it’s kind of left of center within our sound. And it’s tuned to A, so it’s fucking heavy.

I write weird time signatures. I can’t explain why, it just grooves to me. It did get changed, though. We took a note away, per Brann. He was like, “What if we took one note out so it grooved like this?” And it worked!

The acoustic section in Moth and Bone is one of the gentler pieces.

Kelliher: When Brann’s mom passed away [in 2025], I was writing a lot on acoustic. I had it in this weird tuning, almost like an open G. It lends itself beautifully on acoustic – when you hit the two high strings it gives off so much emotion. There’s dissonance. It’s melancholy.

So I had his mom in mind, and I came up with that pattern, which was very odd. Everyone wanted to fix it and make it straight, but I was like, “No, this is the way it goes.”

Nick Johnston: Once you get that groove and rhythm with your hand, it’s this propulsion thing – but it’s not an obvious pattern. It’s just about how tight you can get all that stuff. I’m used to tracking a looser or improvised kind of playing, but this was awesome once it started to get locked in. I like the way that song ramps up, but tracking that whole heavy section was hard, with that sliding thing at the end.

Kelliher: With the dynamics, I keep thinking, “How are we going to do this live?” Am I going to have a stand with an acoustic and a double-neck that I’ll borrow from Geddy Lee?

Johnston: That would be sick! [Laughs]

Out Like a Lamb closes with two gigantic solos – one from Nick, then an organ solo from João.

Johnston: Brann and Bill had sent the song over and were like, “We need a solo as a placeholder, just to illustrate the arrangement.” That was the first take I sent over.

Kelliher: You wanted to redo it, and we were like, “No fuckin’ way are you gonna redo that.” [Laughs]. Oh my god, it’s incredible.

Johnston: I didn’t expect it to make the record because part of me was like, “I’m going to go over the top at the end, just for fun, and see what happens.”

Kelliher: It was my 55th birthday and I was on an hour-long drive to pick up some Brazilian wood [to build a table out of], and that’s when I put the whole record on for the first time after it was mastered.

When it got to that solo, it was just tears running down my face like someone was squeezing my eyeballs. I was about to go in and get the wood, but I was like, “I can’t go in there like this; I’m a mess!”

Nick, you adapted the set-up of your Schecter signature to play in Mastodon. What went into the build of your Silverburst Traditional?

Johnston: That was the first guitar I had done with Schecter that was just two humbuckers. I started out with all single-coils, and then I started doing HSSs and then felt this was the proper application to do two ’buckers. It’s a little hotter output.

I keep gear real simple. I usually plug right into the amp – I’m using a Bad Cat and a couple of Boss pedals to sweeten it if I need to. It’s my same guitar since the beginning; it’s just that now it’s got two humbuckers.

Do you ever drop to low A in your solo work?

Johnston: This is the first time I’ve even played in D standard.

Kelliher: You didn’t know a guitar could go that low!

Johnston: I played in E flat my whole life. Getting used to playing in these new tunings for the record – drop C and drop A – felt great.

The finish fits the aesthetic of Bill and Troy’s instruments. Is there a story behind Mastodon’s love of the Silverburst?

Kelliher: They were so rare in the wild… but I found one when I was a kid. I remember going to [Geneseo, New York’s] Big B Buzzo’s Music and putting $50 down on a Les Paul Custom Silverburst – this was 40 years ago, and it was probably $500. I never went back to get it. I always felt so shitty that I never did.

Then one time I had a guitar stolen when we were in Houston. We pulled over to a Sam Ash or a Guitar Center and there was a used Silverburst Les Paul Custom on the wall, an ’82. It’s my favorite guitar. I still have it. That one has tons of mojo. Brent also had a Flying V Silverburst, so we both loved them. They just look fucking cool as hell!

What were you playing on this record?

Kelliher: I used a baritone ESP Viper on Barbarian’s Blood. I completely redid the guitars, because Kurt wasn’t happy with [the original tracking]. He was like, “I can hear some tuning things – let’s try this.” I ended up using that on a lot of stuff. It just sounded so big-dick-swingin’. I was like, “Woo-hoo! This thing’s great!”

I played a ’77 white Les Paul Custom. I used some ESP Sparrowhawks. And I used the ESP Ron Wood; that’s the secret weapon. I really love the sound of it, to fatten stuff up in the frequencies the humbuckers don’t pick up.

What did it mean to have Geezer Butler play the intro on The Vanishing?

Kelliher: Brann orchestrated all that.

Johnston: I didn’t even know it was happening until it was basically delivered!

Kelliher: Even before Back to the Beginning, Brann got heavily back into listening to Black Sabbath. He was wearing different Sabbath T-shirts for a year straight. I was like, “Wow, he has a different Sabbath shirt on again!” [Laughs]. I think he was channeling Bill Ward.

I wrote that opening riff one day at practice, and Brann was like, “That’s fucking cool, let’s work on that!” It turned into an ode to Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, because we were about to do that show.

Then Brann was like, “He’s mentioned our band in his audiobook [ed. 2023’s Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath – and Beyond], we’ve toured with Black Sabbath [ed. during the 2005 Ozzfest], and we were invited to do this show… would he do this?” And then Geezer was like, “Do you want it in the style of N.I.B.?”

We were beside ourselves when we heard him doing the intro, even through the cellphone. Listening to that freakin’ tone was incredible.

Did Geezer come to Atlanta?

Kelliher: No, he did it remotely. It would have been cool if he came to our little studio, put some headphones on and did it. But that didn’t happen.

Marrow Deep reflects on the past, but likewise references a new day rising. Bill, how are you feeling about where Mastodon is positioned?

Kelliher: It’s never been better. We wouldn’t have gotten to where we are without a quarter-century of working with Brent, but I believe everything happens for a reason. Unfortunately, they’re not always the best outcomes for certain people.

• Marrow Deep is out now via Loma Vista.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Sterling Ball has resurrected his secret supergroup for a new age, recruiting Joe Bonamassa, Steve Vai, Steve Lukather and more for an upcoming covers album.

Those attuned to Ball’s musical history will know that this is essentially a continuation of the off-the-books supergroup he has been spearheading for decades.

In the past, the group has boasted everyone from Albert Lee to Eddie Van Halen on its roster. Now, it has some fresh faces set for a surprising covers record that will see each of them go out their comfort zones.

Biff Baby’s Allstars features a core lineup of Ball – who is both Ernie Ball’s son and a bass guitar legend for his work on the Bongo Bass – drummer John Ferraro and keyboardist Jim Cox.

Across their new self-titled album, expect guitar solos galore, with everyone from John Petrucci and Steve Vai, to Steve Lukather, Albert Lee, and Joe Bonamassa contributing.

Many of those players are part of the Ernie Ball clan, naturally, but it isn’t an exclusive party, as Vai and Bonamassa’s presence confirms.

Blues Saraceno, who once played in a band with Cream alumni Ginger Backer and Jack Bruce, and drummer Chad Wackerman (Frank Zappa, Allan Holdsworth) also feature.

“So thrilled to be part of another monumental collaboration forged by my dear friend, Sterling Ball,” Petrucci enthuses. “Joining my brothers in shred for this incredible Allstars lineup is an absolute honor.”

The record is made up of newly interpreted cover songs, including Golden Earring’s Radar Love – perhaps in honor of George Kooymans who passed away last summer – and a medley of two Allman Brothers Band classics: Whipping Post and One Way Out.

“It truly is pure joy to hear everyone’s unique interpretations of these classic songs and make music together with my friends,” Petrucci adds. “I can’t wait for everyone to hear this very special release!”

Biff Baby’s Allstars continues a glowing legacy for Ball’s supergroup. They once boasted Eddie Van Halen amongst their ranks, and at one notable gig, Albert Lee had the virtuoso squirming.

“On a couple of gigs, we had Eddie Van Halen playing with us. He said, ‘I can’t play on that!’ I said, ‘Yes, you can – you can do all that tapping!’ And of course he was great,” Lee told Guitar World earlier this year.

“In 1982 I started a band to play California Clubs called Biff Baby’s Allstars,” Ball explains in his own Instagram post. “The original core was me, my brother Sherwood, John Ferraro, Jim Cox and Albert Lee. On my 30th birthday Steve Morse joined the band. We played clubs all over California.

“Along the way Steve Lukather joined. It was awesome. We would call a club and tell the band to not play, they would get paid and I would buy their dinners. In the early ‘90s Eddie Van Halen played a bunch, Rodney Crowell, John Petrucci, Blues Sarasceno Steve Vai, Jay Graydon were regulars. It was ego free, with everybody bringing their best playing and even better accompaniment.”

The band stopped gigging around 15 years ago, but their friendship has gone the distance. So, it was time for a reunion, and to play some “fun old songs.”

“Most of the great guests picked songs that you would never associate with them,” Ball says, which means the 11/8 boogie of Whipping Post may not feature the algorithmic right hand of John Petrucci.

The album releases on November 27. Head to Biff Baby’s Allstars for more.

Alice Cooper welcomed Nita Strauss back into his band to perform in Las Vegas for an NFL halftime show.

Cooper’s and co entertained the Allegiant Stadium Raiders in Sin City as the Kansas City Chiefs faced off against the Las Vegas Raiders.

It was a quickfire set of three early 1970s hits: No More Mr. Nice Guy, I’m Eighteen, and School’s Out. It was Strauss' first show with the band since becoming a mother earlier this year.

Strauss handpicked 22-year-old Brit, Anna Cara, to take her place from April as she went on maternity leave. Cooper had Facetimed with Cara's parents ahead of her joining, and the young starlet has more than held her own, despite the overwhelming size of the gig.

Yet Strauss looked like she had never been away during the performance. Mind you, she was in familiar territory, having been in Cooper’s band since 2014. She is set to make a permanent return to the lineup in the coming weeks.

“Quick trip to Vegas for a super fun (but short) Alice Cooper set at Allegiant Stadium Raiders v Chiefs halftime today,” Strauss posted on Instagram after their set. “Heartbreaking end to the game, but we had a blast.”

Strauss will return to the fold properly for Cooper’s run of shows with Criss Angel starting in late November.

“Nita opened our 2026 touring season in Las Vegas back in March and is now returning to close out 2026 with us there,” Cooper said last month (via Louder). “We’re really looking forward to welcoming the Hurricane back onto the stage. Bringing Nita back after she took a break to start a family is the perfect way to wrap up 2026.”

While Strauss was away, Ibanez dropped another new signature for the shredder, and the rest of the band were blown away by Cara’s playing, attitude, and Gary Moore-like Vibrato.

The objective for Jake Kiszka is the same as ever – to play guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll from the heart. But after years of success with Greta Van Fleet, Kiszka stepped away, formed another mega-band in Mirador and, shall we say, expanded his portfolio. Circling back to Kiszka’s objective, with his attention back on Greta Van Fleet via a new album, 2026’s Palace for the People, yeah, it’s the same, but with a twist.

“The sonic identity for me, from a guitar perspective with Greta Van Fleet, is to do something much wider than I’d ever done before,” Kiszka tells Guitar World. That meant Kiszka needed to take inventory of what the guitar meant to him, what it could do for him and how he’d wield what he calls “Excalibur” in the studio and on stage.

“It’s a utility of projection,” he says. “It’s a vehicle that can take what’s in your heart, mind and body, and translate it in some ways.” This mindset extended to the rest of Greta Van Fleet while recording Palace for the People. Also on the band’s mind is the Internet’s habit of slogging the band at every step.

Not that this is a hindrance. “It’s never really a factor,” Kiszka says. “Experientially, we see it as if you’re an artist, if you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably not making great art.”

Greta Van Fleet has certainly done plenty of that. Sure, their social media following is in the millions. The members – brothers Jake, Sam and Josh Kiszka, along with Danny Wagner – have become cultural icons on the backside of hit records, including 2018’s Anthem of the Peaceful Army, 2021’s The Battle at Garden’s Gate and 2023’s Starcatcher, but that hasn’t stopped people from labeling them as “imitators.”

Further complicating matters is the mantle of “saviors of rock ’n’ roll” that was unfairly thrust onto the band. And then they delivered the goods – but critics and certain sectors of fans still turned on them. But through it all, Kiszka remained level-headed and is more confident than ever as the band prepares for the post-Palace windfall.

“This album is an interesting intersection of our musical journey,” Kiszka says. “It just sort of came about through having more worldly influences than ever before.

“A big part of the project itself was the title. It comes from the Alexandra Palace in north London. The idea was, it’s this palace built for the people by the British monarchy, and we thought that was a beautiful concept. It became identifiable, a modus operandi and our philosophy for this record.”

Kiszka reflects on his journey like a man beyond his years. He broke in so young, and it seems like he’s been around forever, so it’s hard to believe he’s just 30. Couple that with the shots he’s taken versus the immediate and ongoing praise, and you have an artist with thicker skin than most.

“No matter what you are, you’re fighting an uphill battle,” Kiszka says. “The idea, or the objective of the spirit, of the fighter, or the reluctant one, is that in the soul of the artist, we’re not only going to climb the mountain, we’re going to the summit of the bastard!” [Laughs]

Kiszka’s laughter reminds us that there’s plenty of levity left in his spirit. Coming from the right place from the jump saw to that.

“With music, and specifically the guitar, I really feel like the boy who pulled the sword from the stone,” Kiszka says. “And that’s beautiful. I guess it’s been a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways, you know? There was hope and destiny that I’d find some sort of freedom through this thing – and that’s exactly what happened.”

Ironically, that proverbial sword has brought Kiszka everything he could have asked for, but it’s also brought the greatest challenges of his life. “I couldn’t have imagined it would have happened so young,” he says. “There was this explosion; Greta Van Fleet’s first record absolutely erupted.”

This brings us back to the never-ending cycle of pop culture-driven love and hate that Kiszka and his cohorts experience. But Kiszka is here for all of it. “That just kept going,” he says. “It was a rocket, an explosion. It’s been an enchanting, wild and frenetic adventure ever since.” For Kiszka, it’s all about perspective, which can only be gained through the give and take, the push and pull, his career has afforded him.

“To wrap up why we’re put here… yeah, there’s been a lot of achievements,” Kiszka says. “On paper, I guess you could look at it that way. But I think the greatest accomplishment for us so far is the beauty in seeing the lives we’ve touched, the love we’ve conveyed to people and the hope we’ve brought. But all of that comes with great sacrifice, and this is still just the beginning.”

That last bit ensures that the rumors that Kiszka is breaking up Greta Van Fleet in favor of Mirador or going solo can be put to rest. If anything, Greta Van Fleet are stronger and more apt to take on a cruel world than ever.

“This is who we are,” Kiszka says. “We’re just the same as everybody else. We’ve got a beautiful story to tell. All we want to do is bring that love and light to the world.”

As for Kiszka personally, who in recent years has seen his success elevate him to A-list status when it comes to six-strings, he’s aware of it, but not letting it inflate his ego.

“I’m now a piece of the lineage,” he says. “I’ve walked in the footsteps of my heroes. In so many ways, I’m just very grateful, you know? I’m just another guitar player. In some ways, I’m just another guy who fell in love with the guitar and rock ’n’ roll.”

The last few years have certainly raised the stakes for you. But you’re still so young, and it’s still early in your journey. Have you taken a step back and thought back to when you first picked up guitar, and what that young kid might have thought about all this?

That’s a profound question!

Gotta get you thinking right out of the gate!

Exactly! At this point, in achieving the things we’ve been grateful to achieve, and putting out work that I suppose the world has come to appreciate and herald… that feeling of reciprocation and reaffirmation that what we’re doing has a social or popular-culture impact… that’s the main thing. It’s surprising in so many ways.

Dig into that for me.

When I picked up a guitar when I was a kid, it was this object or artifact… a monolith of freedom and self-expression. Being raised in the place we were raised in [Frankenmuth, Michigan], I think when we’re all coming up, we’re learning who we are, what we’re meant to do and where we belong.

And the guitar helped you with that?

There’s this sense of great repression in some ways – social confines. To me, the guitar was something no one could take away. I had so much taken away at a young age, and this was sort of a defiance against structure and systems. It was an object of fighting for freedom, like Excalibur or something. I really felt that way.

With that object of freedom, you’ve made a cache of memorable records. But this is the Internet Age, where artists are peppered with criticism, especially a band like Greta Van Fleet, which has gotten so big so fast. So, while the guitar gave you freedom, it also, ironically, presented challenges for you to navigate at a young age on a big stage.

That’s interesting, isn’t it? The idea of freedom, and, I guess, creation and the idea of dreams, right? Like, everything that surrounds us, in some ways, is brought through this filter of human imagination, with guitars being one of those things.

So, that question becomes paradoxical in a sense because the sole reason why I do what I do, why I play guitar and why Greta Van Fleet does what it does is we’re trying to bring a sense of imagination, hope and love to a generation through rock ’n’ roll.

Have you always seen rock music as a vehicle for that sort of imagination, hope and love?

I guess it’s the one that chose us, you know? That’s just what we grew up with, so that’s the music we play. And in some ways, it’s ironic to see the turmoil or the sense of cultural degradation – or even devolution – in the realm of the internet.

As in keyboard warriors and the like?

It’s the lack of, I guess, consequences – or even accountability for things people say. If no one is held accountable, they don’t feel an obligation to be sensible or caring.

There’s no sense of character anymore when it comes to the internet. It’s like this Wild West and free form of shit-talking and spreading hatred… but I guess that sort of applies to everything and everyone.

In that context, your mission, if we can call it that, of spreading imagination, hope and love feels important.

That’s why the human experience is so important. That’s why music and many other forms of art hold ground so strongly against devices of evil. It’s the human experience. When we’re all at a concert, we’re sharing this emotive collective energy, this consciousness, where everybody feels each other, and there’s this emanation of spirit. That polarizes the hypocrisy of the internet and the hate.

With that comes pressure, which you’ve managed well over the long haul. But have you ever felt the need to step back and go within? And if so, how did that help you grow?

That’s the challenge. Having a sense of soul really does help. I can’t speak to those who have walked this path alone because I’ve done it with my brothers in many ways. That sense of shared experiences and brotherhood, you know, siblinghood, is a support in having a unified mission statement.

But there’s that point where we as humans – there’s this idea of stagnantness, whether it’s guitar or any art, that follows us through our journey in life. It always comes to these points where we have to surrender the pieces of us that no longer serve us to reinvent them.

It becomes that mythological story of the phoenix in some ways, like being reborn. Greta Van Fleet has been turning up the road below us for years, and all of a sudden, we had to take a step back.

We started when we were kids, so the majority of life has been in the spotlight. I think walking away and returning, so much of ourselves had changed. So much of the introspection had happened. A sort of rebirth had occurred, and I think we approached our music and returned to our instruments in a very different way.

During that time away, you had success with Mirador, which must have been gratifying. Can you track where you were as a player and songwriter when you returned to Greta Van Fleet after so much success outside it?

It spreads you out a bit further. It expands that conscious thought of approaching something musically. For me, working with other people in Mirador, those guys are all English and European, so the approach to music and their thought process was different.

I’d only ever shared that sort of kinship with my brothers, and in that sense it was a different lens. So, you’re always learning something, and that’s the object.

There’s this insatiable lust to try to find something new beyond the horizon. It feels like constantly pushing against the wind. I discovered a lot of that, and I was able to bring some of that self-discovery and new ideas to Greta.

It really felt like a new creation. I think we were surprising each other. Everyone was going, “What if we did this?” And then, it was like, “Where are you even coming from with that idea?” There was a lot of excitement in that. We were sort of trying to impress each other, like we might have when we were teenagers in our parents’ garage. [Laughs]

Diving into Palace for the People, you can hear that. The classic rock riffs are there, but there are underlying prog influences and other new sounds throughout, too.

I would say this record’s influence is far more eclectic than anything we’ve previously recorded. The problem we’ve always had – which is in opposition to most people’s problems – is we’ve had too much material. That’s a good thing in the long run, but it’s about pulling apart all these different things.

But I’ll say this: it’s when we put something through the Greta Van Fleet filter that it comes out a certain way. There’s always going to be elaborate guitar pieces, riffs, heavy, explosive drums, soaring vocals, and bass and keys that will be interesting and detailed. That’s the siphon, so it’s about filtering influences through Greta Van Fleet in a way we hadn’t done before.

Tell me about Tear It Down, which features a sort of off-the-rails guitar solo.

Yes. [Laughs] Mike Elizondo produced the record, and his studio is battle-ready. There are all these amplifiers strung up on the wall, and cabinets out in an isolated booth. You could press any button, and pretty much activate, or make combinations of amps, and throw those through any cabinet you want.

And then, there were pedals laid out, like, built into this shelf Mike put together. It almost removed the entire factor of having to find the equipment, pulling it off shelves and finding the sounds. It was really just plugging in and playing with it. It was a really quick workflow for me. It also gave me the ability to just be, you know?

I probably played more guitars through more amplifiers than any other record I’ve ever recorded. [Laughs] It was very electric, but with Tear It Down, that was my ’61 [Gibson] Les Paul SG going through a modern Fender Champ.

And there might have been a Klon [overdrive] and some stereo reverb from an EMS outboard. I think I used that on the solo as well – which I’ve never used before. But I used it a lot across the record. And specifically on the solos, I used a Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer. It’s a physical compressor box that I’d stick onto the guitar.

It’s really strange, but Mike had one, and he was like, “Do you want to try this?” I’d used a compressor pedal before, but this was on a whole other level. I think Ry Cooder used that quite a lot when he was playing with John Lee Hooker.

Another memorable track is Dreams You Told, which has an underlying, almost quasi-’80s metal-meets-prog vibe. There’s a vibe I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and that’s very different from typical Greta tracks.

Yeah, that’s a really strange one. [Laughs] That song was written, probably two or three years ago. But I think it was written in the consciousness of the rest of the record, where there were pieces and an arsenal of songs.

But yeah, that one started with the riff, as many Greta tracks do. What was interesting was the idea of taking all these alternative concepts and putting them together, and then you had Sam exploring with synthesizers, which was huge. Sam’s interpretation brought this edge of modernity to it.

The highest and most singular objective, you know, the mission statement for me as an individual, and with Greta Van Fleet, is to create things we’ve never heard before. It’s channeling different concepts to push into new territories and not stagnate. When we heard that, it was mesmerizing, like, “Boom. We hit the mark.”

It’s something we’ve never heard before. I think you’re right [about the sound of the track], but your interpretation is interesting. I hear it in a certain way, and some of the stuff you said I totally agree with, but some of it I hadn’t thought about until now. I think you’re totally on it, but it was just a product of combining different ingredients.

Toward the back end of the record, there are two really memorable solos on So You Stand and Call My Own. Both are soaring, but your work on Call My Own is atmospheric and casts you in a different light, sonically.

Call My Own was an interesting one. It was done on my Telecaster with a B-bender, which has very early T-Top humbuckers. Honestly, most of the solos on this record were done through combo amps, and Call My Own was probably an old Magneto, and there was a lot of stereo reverb.

That gives everything much more space, where you can put vocals right through the middle. So, there’s a lot of stereo slap, and stereo phasers and stereo reverb. If you listen to the record on headphones, you’ll get the full effect. [Laughs] It’s quite radical!

What gear did you use for Saw You Stand?

That was my ’61, the beloved Number 1 [Gibson Les Paul SG]. But that was another one, where, you know, I don’t like to take more than a few takes of a solo. Typically, I can somewhat get it early on, but I also sort of design it in my head.

Why is that?

Because there’s a separate, I think, for me as a guitar player. I often approach something with an idea I construct in my mind, then have a layout with a map or blueprint and parameters to work within. But then some solos are off the cuff and very much made up in the moment. I think Saw You Stand was one of those solos I had already orchestrated and wasn’t improvised. And because it’s quite a long solo, if I continued to do takes, it might have sounded too refined for me… maybe too manufactured.

It’s not about perfection – it’s about a vibe.

I don’t want to play it perfectly. I want to play it from the gut. I want to shoot from the hip. I want it to feel human. So, with Saw You Stand, I came back the next day and had it in one or two takes; on that second day, that’s how it landed.

There is also some great acoustic work on Palace for the People. You have a sort of shaggy style, which interweaves really well with your electric tone.

I like it! That’s why they call me Shaggy Jake. [Laughs] But that’s brilliant! What a great term because, yeah… it is a bit shaggy, isn’t it? My playing is a bit messy. But I like that because I try not to perfect anything. That’s a good question because on this particular record, I tried to take the acoustic element of Greta Van Fleet a little bit further.

On Boughton Bliss, for example, there’s acoustic layering with electrics throughout. But there’s moments on the record where it’s more prevalent, so I was trying to push that a bit further. And I used a lot of Nashville tuning, some Martin 12-string. And for the solo on Boughton Bliss, typically, that’s something I’d have been inclined to take up with an electric guitar. But instead, I favored a classical guitar with nylon strings, so that was another thing where I pushed into stranger territories.

Pushing boundaries, having the confidence to lay down solos in fewer takes and owning your sloppiness – in a good way – it all shows the trust you have in yourself and your growing confidence as a player. Have you had time to reflect on that?

It took a long time for me to approach my instrument that way. It took a long time to get my playing to where I’d be able to record something and just let it be what it is. That’s a byproduct – and also the essence of – feeling comfortable with your identity as a player.

And that’s what’s taken me the longest. I’ve played since I was quite young, and Greta has been going for a decade, so it’s been a really long journey from the boy who pulled the sword from the stone, you know, this manifest destiny, to being here now and coming to terms with who I am as a person.

But also, the identity as a guitar player, and how I approach the instrument itself, you know? I’ve been through some things at this point with Greta, music and life, and I’m strong in my identity. I’ve been able to just let it be recorded as imperfectly and as humanly as possible, you know, to let it bleed.

All of that has seen you elevated to an A-list player by most people’s accounts.

I don’t know… for me, it’s the highest honor that, in some ways, maybe… yes, I’m conscious of the fact that perhaps people celebrate my guitar playing. I’m really grateful for that. In some ways, my greatest achievement as a guitar player is that, as a kid, the guitar heroes I looked up to, and the dreams, influence and inspiration they imparted on me and awakened in me – perhaps I could do the same for this generation or the next.

Earlier, we talked about the almighty Internet culture swirling around us. Within that context, Greta Van Fleet – and Jake Kiszka – aren’t just musicians or a popular rock band; you’ve become cultural icons and had tracks in video games, yet people still take a lot of shots. With that, the negative perception doesn’t always align with reality. From your perspective, what do people get wrong?

I suppose in a sense… I guess there’s the social or political construct or people saying, “There’s a lineation between innovation and imitation,” right? In many ways, people perceive our sound to be one way, but in reality, it’s far more complex and nuanced than that.

Can you dig deeper into that?

I’m not necessarily saying just strictly music, but the story, and who we are as human beings. A lot of people have looked at Greta Van Fleet, and, as you said, there’s a lot of controversy on the internet, which has expedited and proliferated it, where it was a fire in the corner, and now it’s a conflagration of some sort. That being said, Greta Van Fleet has become quite a massive thing – to my surprise – in some ways.

But we’re polarizing, I think, so there’s a lot of attention on that. Some said we were the “saviors of rock ’n’ roll,” or whatever, and I think that’s a misconception as well. All of that, I think, is balled up in one, and it makes it sort of an inaccurate representation of us.

So, who are you really?

I think we’re a bunch of young guys who grew up in mid-Michigan, in a little town somewhere, and in a garage, we fell in love with American blues and music of all cultures from all places. We fell in love with the idea of manifest destiny and adventure. We became a part of that.

People can perceive this as one or another, and there’s a lot of attention. Let’s say there’s a lot of negative commentary that perhaps comes from the evolution of Greta Van Fleet, and how quickly it exploded and how polarizing it has become. I think that would be something that people misperceive or get wrong.

The “saviors of rock ’n’ roll” thing has always been sort of ridiculous to lay on anybody. It’s really a label perpetually thrust on young bands, and when they don’t deliver – because no one can – it’s used against them, just as it has been against Greta Van Fleet. And really, does rock ’n’ roll really need saving anyway?

Exactly! It’s an interesting thing, man. Because is rock ’n’ roll dead? I don’t think so. It never truly dies; it just lays in wait, you know? And then it’s there for the next generation to pick up.

To be an artist, I think, is to want to be understood. If you are understood is another matter entirely. What do you want people to understand about you?

That’s a complex question, and it’s deserving of a complex answer. Ultimately, do you mean as a human being or an artist?

Both. There’s certainly an intersection, if you’re an artist, where your humanity overlaps the artistry.

Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps in both senses, as a human being, I’m as imperfect, flawed, ridiculous and mad as anybody else. I’d certainly have to be a little insane, or a little mad, to carry the torch or climb this hill. [Laughs] In that sense, I bleed just like everybody else. But I enjoy the human experience, all the pain, all the beauty and all the things I’ve seen in this lifetime. And so far, all of that has greatly informed the music I create and the guitar I play.

All of that has become sort of a manifest. It manifests in myself, in my music and my guitar playing and as an artist overall. I think that’s the idea… with all of the good and evil in the world, it’s the artist's job, or the modus operandi, to take all those things, internalize them intrinsically and reflect them back onto society.

Sparking not just curiosity within yourself, but within others…

Yeah. In some ways, you question things. Like, how to create what the universe cannot naturally. We take the emptiness of these voids, and we inherently intersect them, sew them back together, and weave them to bring them back to the people. I think that’s what we’ve done.

Salvaging what’s there culturally, I think, is sort of what Greta Van Fleet is about. But also, as an individual, I think the conveyor of truth is there’s a lot of people – and there’s no right or wrong with this – who play an instrument, or an artist, and there’s some sort of persona in place.

And that’s brilliant in so many ways that someone can take a creation and characterize themselves with that. But I will say that, with Greta Van Fleet, and with myself as an individual, I don’t so much do that.

We truly are who we are on that stage, as much as we are off of it. I’m maybe a personification of myself on that stage – but it’s truly me. I play that way. I truly play through my experiences, through my life, my head and my heart. And so, through and through, I suppose that, in part, is who I am. So maybe I’d like to just state that what you see is just the truth.

Where does Greta Van Fleet go from here?

Only up, Andrew! Right to the top! [Laughs] I don’t know… I just think it’s marching forward boldly and gorgeously. We’ve said it in this interview, but there’s been quite a bit achieved at a young age for us. We’re young men now, but there’s a long, long way to go. And yeah, it’s exciting because there’s so much to invent, you know?

There’s so much to create and so much to bend and break. But we’ve got a lot of surprises for this year for sure – and for the coming years within the musical sphere and realm. And even outside of that as a creative entity. I suppose we’re looking forward to all of it.

• Palace for the People is out on October 9 via Lava/Republic.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

AC/DC once said it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ’n’ roll. Alice Cooper knows the truth in that statement. His new autobiography Devil On My Shoulder documents his journey from infamy to icon, documenting the band’s climb up the greasy pole and the truth – or at least, his truth – behind the outrageous tales that have followed in his wake for the last 50 years.

As Cooper puts it: “In the beginning Alice Cooper was the name of a rock group. Then my stage name. And then a monster. Now I’ve written a book that tracks Alice’s evolution, how he and I became almost fatally intertwined, and how I’ve tamed him at last.”

In this exclusive excerpt, Cooper recalls the band’s first grimy residency in New York, the city that never let them sleep, in 1969. They went hoping to take a bite out of the Big Apple – but ultimately it took a bite out of them.

Expect big knives, drag queens, horrible dining habits, and a gear nightmare that drove guitarist Glen Buxton to the brink. Over to Alice...

America was opening up for us, a little. Shep [Gordan] and Joey [Greenberg] worked the phones from a brownstone in Greenwich Village in New York, booking us everywhere they could – Denver, Colorado Springs, Portland, Passaic, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Toledo – mostly Midwestern venues so we could drive from town to town, but also occasionally flying places.

Shep would ostentatiously slap his Louis Vuitton executive briefcase and wallet on an airline ticket counter and write out a check that would only bounce after we’d got off at the other end. We rifled through more than a few groupies’ handbags across the country and skipped out on a lot of motels.

Band on the run! We had nothing you could call a per diem, but we made do. I remember Glen [Buxton, guitarist] complaining one morning that his breakfast doughnut was stale, then dunking it in beer, and voilà, fine dining! Sleeping sometimes in the car or six to a room, our personal hygiene must have been off the charts horrible – but it was a joy because for the first time we were almost making ends meet.

And then there was New York, which was a revelation to us Phoenix homeboys. It was a different world entirely. We knew Arizona. We knew Hollywood. We knew Detroit. But we were not prepared for New York.

We tramped the streets in the broiling heat in awe of the din, the jackhammers pounding and yellow cabs honking, the street vendors hollering, the odor of garbage piled high on the curbs, the brownstones bristling with ironwork, the neo-Gothic churches with their blackened spires and the gleaming skyscrapers curving over the horizon, the sidewalks dotted with dog poop, the peep shows and grindhouse theaters, the touts and hustlers working the corners, the games of three-card monte there one moment and gone the next, the steam hissing up from the subway grates like a whiff of Gotham City or the underworld.

We reckoned we were kindred spirits with bands like the Velvet Underground who were writing about sadomasochism, drag queens, and paranoia instead of hippie optimism and utopian slogans. But when we got there, they and their cooler-than-thou fans were not impressed.

We went onstage at Steve Paul’s The Scene, a short-lived but legendary dark, cramped kind of basement speakeasy room near Times Square for the rock elite, and beat each other up and turned on the fire extinguisher. I brandished my sword with dollar bills skewered on the blade. I stood on the tables and kicked the glasses to smithereens and all that. And they didn’t raise a single eyebrow. They were so jaded, so tragically hip, it was like, go home, little boys.

Our first night in town, Neal, Glen, and I went to check out The Scene, where I think Jimi Hendrix was sitting in, and as soon as we arrived, this drag queen pulled me into the women’s bathroom and stuck something up my nose. I go, “What was that?” And he goes, “Mexican heroin.” Welcome to New York!

Then on the way out, we hail a taxi, and a turtle- shaped cab driver snaps at us, “Get in.” Then a big Black guy comes over and says to us, “This is my cab.” The driver says, “I got somebody,” and the big guy pulls out a knife. Then the little guy pulls out a zombie knife and says to us as we cower in the back seat, “That cocksucker, I’m gonna cut him down the middle.” This is our first night. We looked at each other and went, like, Wha? We thought we were tough guys, but maybe not so much.

We checked into the Hotel Earle near Washington Square Park, where a band from Denver called Zephyr let us share rehearsal time in the cellar with them, the rats, and the roaches. The Earle had once been a natty residential hotel where luminaries like P. G. Wodehouse, Ernest Hemingway, and Bob Dylan had stayed (Joan Baez too; she refers to it in Diamonds & Rust), but by the time we got there it was seriously past its prime.

We took a room with six or seven beds and a cot, the walls wallpapered with grimy oilcloth; we got in so late that we just piled all our stuff there and crashed. The next morning when we got up, Glen started screaming, “Where’s my guitar? Where’s my fuckin’ guitar?” His beloved white semi-hollow-body Gretsch with gold pickups was missing.

Nothing else was touched. In a mad thrashing panic, we turned everything inside out and upside down. The door and windows were locked. The fire escape was pulled up. How could this have happened?

We charged down to the front desk and yelled, “We’re checking out of here, your security is beyond lax,” and then went across the street to the Howard Johnson’s to make new plans and get a bite to eat, leaving our stuff with the concierge. Or did we pace in the lobby angrily, wondering what to do? Or did we stand, fretting, on the sidewalk with our luggage, waiting for a cab? Again, memories vary.

We were tired, hungover, disoriented, and afraid. But whatever we did or didn’t do, next thing we knew, Glen’s suitcase was gone. And a week later, after we’d moved hotels, his pink Les Paul too. Welcome to New York.

Glen was devastated. We felt so bad for him, but what could we do? Shep and Joey bought him another guitar. I tried to cheer him up, saying, “Look on the bright side. Somewhere in Manhattan there’s a wino with green velvet pants and a pink Les Paul.” And if looks could kill…

Michael [Bruce, guitar] says that Glen was never quite the same afterward, that the brand-new Rickenbacker he selected never gave him the feedback or sustain he wanted. To him, his Gretsch wasn’t just a guitar; he’d modified it according to his own specifications – reengineered it with his own patented “giggy” bits – and there was no replacing it.

But worse, some kind of pilot light inside of him was snuffed out. He’d already been drinking harder than the rest of us every day – a bottle of whiskey a day, plus the weed and uppers and downers and everything – but Michael maintains it was after the theft of everything he owned – his guitars, his clothes, his identity – that he really started overindulging.

We were virtually unknown in New York, but because what we wore on the street was exactly the same as on the stage, drag queens and ladyboys flocked to us like moths to a flame, following us around like we’d walked into a scene from Last Exit to Brooklyn. I thought they had a sad edge to them, but also a defiance that you had to admire. They weren’t just dressing up, they had to dress up – to become the people they wished they were. They knew they’d always be social outcasts, they knew they’d be beaten up and spat on, but they had no choice.

Still, I never felt too comfortable with them. I get that the outrageous glamour, the too-fabulous RuPaul thing, can be an art form, yet here’s these guys that want to be not just female but an exaggerated, garish version with scarlet lipstick and huge hair. I’ve never understood why more women don’t think it’s making fun of them or insulting them at some level.

Anyway, there was this one Puerto Rican guy with curly hair who was really getting on our nerves. He knocked on the door of our hotel room with a couple of his friends, all made up and mincing about, wired on bennies, and after a couple of hours Glen gets up, says to the guy, “Here, follow me,” and goes to the bathroom. “Get in the bathtub,” he says.

So the guy does, real excited like something sexual was going to happen. Then Glen turns on the cold water from the showerhead and drenches the poor guy, and Michael says he’ll never forget him wailing, “Glen, you’re the devil!” like it was the end of the world.

Anyway, one good thing: As I recall, Glen got one of his guitars back from a pawn shop after one of those very same drag queens gave us a tipoff. But, honestly, we left the city feeling beat up, spat out by the Big Apple like a mouthful of seeds.

• Excerpted from Devil on My Shoulder: A Memoir by Alice Cooper, published on October 6, 2026.
  
  Copyright © 2026 by Nightmare, Inc. Used by arrangement with Da Capo Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.

When Prince saw Andy McKee play his 2006 classic Rylynn, he wasted no time in recruiting the fingerstyle acoustic guitar virtuoso for his Welcome 2 Australia tour.

And, in true Purple One style, he had big plans for the show – but not all of them felt natural to McKee.

As McKee explains in a new interview with Guitar World, Prince had grand designs for his role, but his intended entrance and set-opener spectacle proved to be an uncomfortable proposition.

“We toured in Australia and did nine concerts, and that was an unbelievable experience,” McKee tells us. “Never would I have dreamed something like that would happen.

“Even if we never did any shows together, just to have him appreciate what I did was so incredible. It was very moving for me.”

“He originally wrote to me about opening the concerts, and he had had this whole plan laid out,” he remembers. “I was going to come up on an elevator and have this 50-foot cape on, and start playing something in a minor key, kind of mysterious.

“Then I was supposed to walk down the stage, which was his symbol, and my 50-foot cape was going to unfurl. They were going to have these projections on the back of it.

“Then he was like, ‘Maybe switch into something major key.’ The projection on my back was going to turn into fire and explosions and stuff. But it was a bit too much for me, man.”

It was a Very Prince Plan, but one that took McKee a bit too far out of his comfort zone. Stepping up to open Prince’s show was already spectacular enough. So McKee came up with an alternative option.

McKee continues, “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I could do that.’ So I just sent him a version of me playing Purple Rain. I was like, ‘Would this be okay?’”

Prince was clearly impressed by the arrangement, so much so that he dropped his vision for fire, explosions, and a 50 foot cape in favor of McKee’s more humble, virtuosic entrance.

“Prince was like, ‘That’s cool, man. I’ll let you do that.’ So I just came up on an elevator and played that,” McKee says. “You know, I’m a bit too shy to do something like that.’”

Head over to the Guitar World YouTube channel to watch the full interview with Andy McKee.

Tapping genius Stanley Jordan has looked back on the time his playing left Eddie Van Halen lost for words.

Van Halen revolutionized what was possible on the electric guitar. Jordan’s expansive two-handed tapping techniques have equally expanded the electric guitar vocabulary.

Given their prowess, it was a crying shame the pair only traded notes once, but on that occasion, Jordan left his counterpart speechless. That’s no mean feat.

“We participated in a documentary concert honoring Les Paul [in 1988], where a huge group of us played with him,” Jordan remembers in the new issue of Guitar World. “There was Brian Setzer, B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Miller, David Gilmour and me. We jammed together at the end.”

That’s a raft of talent for just one event. Jordan had delivered his own solo performance earlier on in the night, but it left him with mixed feelings. It did not make the cut for the film, but it did leave a mark on those who saw it.

“I played a solo piece of my song Flying Home,” he remembers. “To me, it was one of my best performances ever, though they didn’t end up putting it in the final film. Right after I played it, Eddie came up to me and said, ‘I’m speechless. I had no idea you were that good.’ Hearing that from him was incredibly special.”

Jordan has previously confessed that his unusual approach to the instrument – and off-the-wall tuning to boot – was a happy accident, and it’s gone on to define his career. Unfortunately, however, he never got to cross fretboards with Eddie again despite their best intentions.

“A while later, Eddie and I ran into each other at a NAMM Show, and he said, ‘Let’s go jam!’” Jordan remembers. “But in the chaos of the convention, someone spun him around, he got pulled away and it didn’t happen.”

If Jordan’s talents were ever in doubt, his cover of Stairway to Heaven on two guitars – simultaneously! – shows exactly why the world’s greatest guitarist was blown away by his craft.

Jordan also has a very unique practice routine, with massage videos at its core. It’s an eyebrow-raiser, for sure, but it works.

The new issue of Guitar World, featuring the full interview with Jordan and chats with Zakk Wylde and Tony Iommi, is out now. Print and digital copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

Nene Royal made quite an impression on America’s Got Talent before she won Season 21. When her name was called out, the 16-year-old guitarist from Phuket, Thailand, dropped to her knees. “I really didn’t expect to win,” she recalls. “My dream was to get through to the finals, and I hoped I could make it into the top two.”

Her performance on the show included heavy versions of the Cranberries’ Zombie, the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army and Muse’s Hysteria. Her take on Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun earned her Mel B’s golden buzzer, which launched her straight to the finals. Long before that, Royal spent years practicing, playing regularly in Phuket and building her sound around a guitar given to her by a fan.

She first picked up the guitar at seven years old, learning with the help of YouTube videos. and she was soon performing her first song. “I played four chords for three or four days until I learned Zombie,” she says of the track she returned to for her America’s Got Talent audition.

Her dad played a big part in getting her into rock music. Family car rides featured Deep Purple and Metallica playing in the background, and by the age of nine Royal wanted to try playing that kind of music. She recalls that he wasn’t sure at first, since most of the women guitarists he’d seen played softer material. But Royal didn’t see why girls couldn’t play rock, and her dad soon became her biggest supporter.

She chose an ambitious introduction to playing lead: “I wanted to challenge myself, so the first solo I learned was Hotel California.” Deep Purple’s Highway Star helped develop her tapping technique. “I just kept practicing over and over until I got better at it.” On school days she practiced from 5pm until 9:30. When she was off school “I would practice all day from morning until night,” she says.

Later she became influenced by Avenged Sevenfold’s Synyster Gates – if she could spend an hour learning from any guitarist, he would be her choice. She’s especially interested how he uses harmonics and creates the darker sounds that have become such a big part of his playing. “I love how he can make things sound creepy,” she says.

It’s another of Royal’s dreams that could come true – on October 13 she’ll open for Avenged Sevenfold in Singapore. It’s a remarkable leap from Phuket’s Naka Weekend Market, where she built her chops and confidence while studying live performances by A7X and Green Day.

Since 2021 she’s been with her band Ozone, who joined her during the AGT finale. She describes them as like brothers to her. “I love playing with them,” she says. “It’s more exciting than backing tapes. We have a lot of fun together.”

But her confidence onstage doesn’t necessarily carry over after the show. Royal says people who meet her backstage are surprised by how quiet she can be. “They tell me I’m really shy, but when I get onstage, I change – it just feels natural.”

Her night market gigs united her with one of the most important guitars in her collection: her vintage Ibanez MC300. “A fan from Denmark saw me perform and decided to give it to me,” she says. “I’ve had it for three years.”

Part of Ibanez’s Musician series from the late ’70s, it has a through-neck design intended to add rigidity and sustain. But when Royal talks about it, she keeps things much simpler: “It just feels really smooth when I play it. I love the feel and the way it looks. It’s really easy to play solos on too. People tell me it’s really heavy, but I’m used to it.”

Her rig includes a Fractal Audio AX8 that handles her amp sounds, cabinet simulation and effects. Her guitar teacher suggested she get one. “I learned to use it from watching YouTube,” she reports.

While she’s still learning about technical aspects, she knows what she likes when it comes to tone. Depending on the song, she’ll tune to drop D or drop C,. She hasn’t made the jump to a seven-string guitar – for now the Ibanez and Fractal remain the heart of her setup.

Nene worked with AGT’s team over song choices, but she was determined that the arrangements were her own creations. “I remember Howie Mandel telling me, ‘Just keep surprising us,’” she says. “I wanted to make the songs feel very much like me.”

She’s taking that same approach to the music she’s started writing, inspired by A7X, System of a Down, the Warning and Linkin Park. “Sometimes I’ll just come up with a random melody, then I’ll build from that and start finding lyrics.”

Inspired by joining Linkin Park for The Emptiness Machine on AGT, her near-future plans include releasing original work, collaborating with other artists and getting out on the road. “I want to be a rock star and tour everywhere,” she confirms. “I want to play all over the world.”

Royal is aware that success brings new voices into the room. Producers, managers and other industry people will have ideas on what she should sound like or where she should go. But she’s determined not to lose the instincts that got her to where she is. “The most important thing is just being myself,” she says. “That’s all I need to do.”

• For more info, head to NeneRoyal.com.

Tony Iommi has looked back on his Back to the Beginning experience, admitting he was shocked to see the state Ozzy Osbourne was in when they met for rehearsals.

Iommi reunited with his original Black Sabbath bandmates one final time last summer for Ozzy’s farewell gig. 17 days after the show took place, the Prince of Darkness passed away at the age of 76.

Osbourne’s final bow onstage was a triumphant one. But behind the scenes, Iommi found it tough. His struggles worsened when Ozzy flew into town for rehearsals.

“Difficult,” Iommi says in the new issue of Guitar World when asked how he found the show. “Initially, when it was mentioned to me, I said no, because we’d done The End Tour [2016 to 2017] and I didn’t want to be like, ‘Here we are again, another tour.’

“But when it was mentioned about it being for charity, then yes, I was into it. Still, I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like? We haven’t played with Bill [Ward, drummer] for years.’

“And when we got into rehearsal, I hadn’t seen Ozzy since we’d done the Commonwealth Games in 2022. That was the last time I’d seen him, because he was in the States and he couldn’t get over because of his health situation; they wouldn’t let him fly.

“Eventually, when he came over, and we met for rehearsals, we were floored, because he was carried in, basically. I couldn't believe how he’d deteriorated.”

Iommi was so stunned by Ozzy’s condition that he offered to do the whole set instrumentally. Ozzy could be there, but he didn’t have to push himself too hard. But the Prince of Darkness wasn’t to be deterred.

“We were all in shock, really,” Iommi continues. “He sat there, and I said to him, ‘You know, you don’t have to sing, we’ll just run through it instrumentally,’ but he said ‘No, I’ll have a go’ and he’d sing for a bit.

“And then we’d finish for the day and I said, ‘Don’t bother to come in tomorrow, we’ll just run over the songs instrumentally with Bill.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and then he might turn up the next day – or not.”

The show itself was also a rather difficult experience for Iommi. He couldn’t see Ozzy, who was positioned in a chair at the front of the stage.

Iommi was needed at the back, to help keep drummer Bill Ward in check. When he did get a glimpse of Ozzy on stage, it was sobering.

“It was very difficult, because I was so used to Ozzy jumping around and running up to me and grabbing me,” he remembers. “It was just a terribly different thing altogether, and it was very hard to do it.

“But, you know, I’m glad we did it, because it was the original band and we won’t be doing it again. I’m really glad we did it for Ozzy and for the fans.”

Iommi’s full interview can be found in the new issue of Guitar World, which includes features with Zakk Wylde and Stanley Jordan. Copies can be found at Magazines Direct.

Jared James Nichols has shared his hot guitar take and explained why he simply has no time for overly precious collectors.

The blues rock guitarist, who has just swapped Blackstar for Marshall after 15 years with the amp makers, believes too many collectors have the true value of vintage guitars misplaced.

In a new interview with Solar Guitars owner and Swedish shredder Ola Englund, Nichols was asked if it was irresponsible to take a $100,000 guitar on tour. Ultimately, he says, it is – but guitars were made to be played, so they should be played.

“You would see this hanging at the guitar store, never to be played again, or in someone’s collection,” he says, holding his latest vintage Les Paul purchase in his hands.

“But man, I’d be the first one to say it, and this is a hot take: 90% of these vintage guys... you hear them play it and you go, ‘Dude you can’t even play the guitar.’”

Nichols then mimics one of these collectors, mockingly asking, “Do you know how much this is worth?” It’s a real pet peeve of his.

“[They’re like], ‘This is a ‘59 Les Paul. Oh, don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it.’ You’re a dentist and your value is based on a guitar that is worth something. It's like having a sports car, and you can't drive it.

“After you see the same person do this over and over, you're like, ‘I’m not into it, bro’,” he adds. “But is it responsible to bring this [guitar he is holding] on the road, spill beer on it and [get] sweat all over it and scratch it? No, but you know what? It was made for that.”

In related news, Nichols has detailed the best and worst advice he ever received when honing his fingerstyle skills, and recenly reflected on making his new album with amps and cabs belonging to Jeff Beck and Dave Grohl.

Queens of the Stone Age ringleader Josh Homme is no stranger to obscure gear, and his unusual approach to assembling his guitar rig has led him to some serious bargains – and oddball choices.

In stoner rock giants Kyuss, Homme was notable for pairing an Ampeg VT-40 bass amplifier with the neck pickups of his electric guitars. In QOTSA, his secret weapon was revealed to be a very unassuming practice amp.

He doesn’t go for the tried-and-tested gear combos, and he believes his “dumb system” has served him well over the years.

“There's a lot of unsupply, undemand,” Homme tells Rick Beato in a discussion of his gear choices. “If I see a lot of something – I've seen a lot of Marshalls and Les Pauls in my life, and a lot of Strats – I just won’t do that. We have plenty of that.

“That’s largely been quite good to me,” he adds of his approach. “Especially in the early days of eBay and when I was an avid pawn shop guy on tour, because things which I did not normally see turned out, six times out of 10, to be fucking amazing.

“And they were like 50 bucks, right? So the experiment to find yourself in what you do not see became this obsession that was really rewarding.”

Homme did not need validation for his approach, but when he learned the Rolling Stones also played Ampegs, he knew he’d found a winning – albeit spontaneous – formula.

He notes, “It made me feel very proud. It was almost like confirming my own ridiculous metric for making choices. You know what I mean? I didn’t need that confirmation, but I was like, ‘See? If you use my dumb system it’ll work out this way.’

It’s something he mentioned in his bumper interview with Guitar World earlier this year. In particular, it drew him towards Japanese guitars, as the country, in the Post-World War II economy, was pumping out “really well-made shit” that most players overlooked.

A lot of these guitars, as Homme points out, often had extra buttons on them, such as bass or distortion boosts, and nowadays he can be found slinging guitars from lesser known brands like Motor Ave and Maton. He prefers to swim upstream.

“That is how I got into Japanese guitars,” Homme extends. “It’s like, ‘Wow, this one has buttons on it.’ And the Univox stuff, which is made in Japan and has a switch that adds distortion. Like, ‘Holy fuck, this is amazing.’”

Elsewhere, his QOTSA bandmate Troy Van Leeuwen has become the first player to get a signature Squier Paranormal, and has revealed how his love of 12-strings and Robert Fripp have impacted the sound of the new Queens of the Stone Age record, Perfecth.

Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega recognizes the power in threes, and he has good reason to believe. A trio since shortly after releasing their 2017 comeback album, Interiors, the influential post-hardcore band released the third album of its second act (and fifth LP overall) in July, the crushing Bring On the Psychics.

“You start to know what you want and understand what works,” Vega says of how he feels he and guitarist and singer Walter Schreifels finally gelled on album three post hiatus. “We wanted to make something that would feel urgent and feel like live music. And definitely that’s where we’re the most calibrated.”

Schreifels went back even further than Quicksand’s seminal 1993 debut, Slip, and 1995’s Manic Compression, to find inspiration for the unrelenting 10-song album – all the way to his late-eighties hardcore bands Youth of Today and Gorilla Biscuits, which have both been active on the live scene in recent years.

That spirit of self-empowerment imbues the urgency of songs like Get To It and Regenerate, where he alternates between bludgeoning riffs and shoegazey interludes, a callback to Quicksand’s early music.

“I can put a lot of tension into something that isn’t really complicated to play,” Shreifels says. “I just play on the margins.”

In the outro to Regenerate, that means turning the thundering riff into a drone while Vega plays the progression on a Fender Bass VI, one of the most-deployed tools in his arsenal.

As much as Schreifels plays with rhythms and tempo in his guitar playing, his taste in tones is rooted in relatable guitar hero-worship.

“I’m always going for an Angus Young/Jimmy Page combo, and when I use that sound in a hardcore sort of way, which is how I came up playing, it just has a different context,” he says. “It has that distorted sound, but you can also hear the playing, I think, a little bit more.”

While Vega switches between a Jaguar four-string and the Bass VI he began experimenting with during a decade playing bass with Deftones, Schreifels’ current obsession is a Japanese-made Greco Les Paul copy – acquired with settlement money after an airline lost the Gibson Les Paul Custom he played for years.

“I was like, ‘I’m gonna buy another Les Paul,’ but Les Pauls are super heavy. They’re breaking my shoulders.” The Greco, he says, isn’t just lighter, but perhaps has more esoteric qualities, as well. “It’s got a lot of, like, good vibes. Not to sound too hippie, but it has soul. It’s lived. It came all the way from frickin’ Japan!”

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

If Steve Rothery and Steve Hackett were to hang it up today, they’d go with their heads held high. But – fear not – they’re not going anywhere. Former Genesis man Hackett has a busy solo career, as does Rothery, who’s deliriously active with Marillion.

Yet, somehow, they found time to record a new joint album, a little something called The Roaring Waves. Although these guys have known each other since Risky Business, Flashdance and Return of the Jedi were in theaters, this is the first time they’ve recorded an entire album together.

On that note, we’ll let them take it from here.

You’ve known each other for ages. Have you always admired each other’s work?

Steve Rothery: We met in 1983. Steve was actually one of my main influences because I discovered Genesis early. So he was a great inspiration and one of the reasons I wanted to become a musician.

Steve Hackett: We immediately connected – personally and musically.

How did The Roaring Waves kick off?

Rothery: I played on Steve’s Genesis Revisited II [2012] and on its subsequent tour, and then Steve guested on my album, Ghosts of Pripyat [2014]. We always talked about trying to work together and eventually found time in our insanely busy schedules.

Hackett: Yes, we talked a lot about making an album together. Our first session went so well – we knew it was going to work, so we just took it from there. Despite our schedules, the whole project developed in a unique way.

What gear did you use?

Rothery: A Groove Tubes Trio three-channel valve preamp, a Fryette power amp, Free the Tone delays, an AnalogMan chorus and Prince of Tone overdrive, plus a Dumble clone. My guitars were my signature Jack Dent SR and my Blade RH4.

Hackett: I used a [goldtop] Fernandes with a Sustainer pickup, plus a Yairi nylon-string, a sitar guitar and a Brian May Red Special. I favored a cranked-up Engl amp, a SansAmp for distortion – sometimes two in series – plus a DigiTech Whammy and a phaser.

Which song would each of you call out from a guitar perspective?

Rothery: Probably the last part of the title track, The Roaring Waves. The interplay is really special. The first part of the song was an idea that Steve had, and I recorded it at his house using my Quad Cortex and laptop.

Hackett: I agree with Steve – that one sounds particularly good!

What sticks out about each other’s playing?

Rothery: Steve is incredibly melodic and inventive – with a unique voice. We speak the same musical language but with slightly different influences, his being more classical, mine more folk. Working with Steve was fun; there were no egos or arguments – just two friends enjoying playing and writing together. Great chemistry.

Hackett: I’ve always loved Steve’s soulful, heartfelt playing. We complement each other in a special way.

How do you view your legacies?

Rothery: I’m proud of everything Marillion has done. We’re recording our 19th album and just got back from two sold-out shows.

Hackett: I was proud to be a part of Genesis in the ’70s. We created some groundbreaking work. Since then, I’ve carried the flame through for music that crosses over boundaries in my own solo work.

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

At SXSW 2014, before Kelley Deal joined the Detroit-based post-punk band Protomartyr, she met guitarist Greg Ahee and the rest of the band when she was trapped behind a stuck door in a backstage bathroom.

“We heard pounding on the door and it took a while to actually get the door open,” Ahee says. “We immediately became really good friends with her. We love her to death.

“Her sense of melody is unlike anyone I've ever played with. She'll run everything – her keyboard, her guitar, and her vocals – all through the same pedal chain and she makes it sound unbelievable regardless of what she's putting through it.”

While Deal remains a permanent fixture in the Protoverse, she’s taken a step back from the band to focus on the Breeders. Filling her shoes is multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas of the neighboring Detroit-based band Tyvek. In fact, it was Tyvek who helped get the band out of Detroit.

“Our friends liked us, but nobody thought that we would make it outside of Detroit, including ourselves,” he says. “Joe [Casey, vocals], was hanging out with our good friends Tyvek, and through them he met Ruben Mendez, who worked at Hardly Art. Once we had a few songs recorded, Ruben gave it to the people at Hardly Art.”

The band just released their seventh record, Hotel Usona. It’s their fourth on Domino Records since leaving Hardly Art after 2015’s The Agent Intellect. When Ahee was writing the record, he was inspired by a book that he’d read about 1950s exotica music.

“Guys like Les Baxter and Martin Denny, who made easy listening music in a post-war setting,” he says. “I’d be writing the album and go into the other room and watch a genocide happen [and,] seeing like Trump post AI slop of Gaza as this beach town, it reminded me of what exotica music was supposed to be – trying to sterilize these horrors in a way that made them palatable.”

Ahee’s weapon of choice on Hotel Usona was his Reverend Jetstream. The three P-90 pickups were a challenge for him at first – “I usually use humbuckers just to get a heavier sound,” he says.

“I never used P-90s before this Reverend guitar, but I'm loving how it sounds. I haven't even really experimented with all three pickups, but at some point I'll get around to actually like blending them. It’s not fun if I’m not challenging myself.”

• Hotel Usona is out now via Domino.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

As the original guitarist of the Misfits, Franché Coma recorded one of punk’s great lost works, Static Age, before leaving the band in 1978. “Should I have done it? No. But I did,” he says.

In fairness, who could blame him? The Misfits were initially met with a wave of rejection from labels – even the one that funded their recordings. It wasn’t until they hired Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein as Coma’s replacement that they pushed to the forefront of punk via buzzsaw tunes and horror aesthetics.

He stayed friends with his old bandmates, watching their star rise. “I had no animosity,” he says. “There was no friction; no words, no fighting, no nothing.”

Some of the songs from Static Age – a 17-song session tracked in just 20 hours – trickled out in the ‘80s, before the full album was finally released in 1996. Since then it’s become iconic in its own right.

“Glenn Danzig was never difficult to work with,” he adds. “We had natural chemistry, except when I decided I wanted to leave the band, which was a mistake. But who knew? I thought I was moving on to something better.”

How did you end up with the Misfits?

We used to hang out at this park called Redstone Lane. [Bassist] Jerry Only and I were best friends. Jerry started playing with this band, with Manny Martinez and Glenn. They wanted to get a guitar player, and Jerry knew I was starting to play a bit. So they brought me down to Manny’s house, and that’s pretty much how I ended up with the Misfits.

What was your initial impression of Glenn?

I had no problem. He was a very talented musician, a smart guy, and had some insight into the scene in New York, which was a plus. He really knew what was going on. He wasn’t difficult to work with because he wrote the songs – he knew the songs.

He’d show you and say, “Do something like this,” or, “What do you want to do in this part?” We all just clicked.

Was the overall vibe pretty gritty, given financial constraints?

We played if we got $50, $60, or $100 bucks, whatever. It went toward the recording or the cover for the recording. So there were financial constraints, but we made it happen. I don’t ever remember taking a nickel, or even asking for a nickel.

How did the writing and sessions for Static Age kick off? What gear were you working with?

It was all the songs we originally started doing. Bullet became our first single and Attitude was on the flip side. My gear – I’m working on some of that same gear right now – was an Ampeg V4 head and a 42-inch V2 cabinet. And I used an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, and that’s pretty much it.

I bought a Gibson Explorer from a music store in Ridgewood, New Jersey: Victor’s House of Music, which is no longer there. But the guitar had no balls with the Gibson pickups, which were humbuckers. With the clean Ampeg, it was lacking the breakup we needed. So I changed to DiMarzio Super Distortions, added the Big Muff, and that pretty much created the sound.

How did Last Carress, Static Age, Bullet, and Teenagers from Mars come together?

Glenn had the rhythm for all the songs. If he wanted a little bit of a whatever with the vocals or the guitar, he’d say, “Let’s do it this way.” He’d say, “Here, give me the guitar – I’ll show you,” then I’d add what I do – you know, better!

Why did the band struggle to find a label?

We had our own label called Blank Records; a subsidiary of Mercury Records came out with that. I can still picture the one guy’s face who we worked out a deal with. We got 20 hours of recording time, the masters, the mother tapes, and an opportunity to be on Mercury.

But that never came about. They were stereotypes who thought they knew what was up-and-coming. They thought the punk scene was too underground and was never going to click. Well, 50 years later, I guess you can see it did. We really thought we had something. A lot of labels were like, “Fuck you,” and we were like, “Well, fuck you!” They thought there was no market, but you can see how things changed.

Is that why you left the Misfits?

There was no fallout. The band I was in after, Active Ingredients, I thought would go a lot further. We were headcases back then, because we turned down gigs with Iggy Pop and Tom Verlaine, because – I don’t know, we thought it was the smart move.

Glenn was probably a little frustrated with me, and I don’t blame him. But we were still all friends. I just thought the other band was going to make an impact. It was a really good band, but unfortunately it didn’t go in the direction it should have. But Doyle came along, and let’s face it, he’s the bulk image of the Misfits.

Glenn re-recorded many of the songs from Static Age in a reformed Misfits in the ‘80s. How did you feel about that?

I have no regrets about that – but I regret leaving the band. But putting the songs on Legacy of Brutality before we released Static Age in ’96, that kind of hurt a little bit, but I was like, “What an idiot I am!” Hindsight is 20/20.

But still no animosity?

Not really. I worked out it was a foolish move to leave. When Doyle came into the band it was all cool. Personally I don’t know if I could have done that. All things happen for a reason, I guess.

As you mentioned, Static Age was finally released in ’96 and is now considered a defining work.

I feel great about that. Glenn doesn’t recognize the Static Age name – he’ll tell you he believes it comes off Legacy of Brutality. I get it. But it’s what we did, and it’s pretty much everything.

I just wish I had gotten to record Horror Business, Children in Heart, and Who Killed Marilyn? I played those live before I left, and I did them a little differently. You know, different guitar player, different things. Nothing against any of the guitar players after me. I just mean it would have been cool to hear my ones.

Have you reconciled with your regret?

We always have regrets – especially when you see a band you were in playing Madison Square Garden. Doyle’s image is phenomenal, and his stage presence is outrageous. So I have no animosity. I left the band, and I shouldn’t have. We can’t undo what was done.

What might the Misfits be like had you stayed?

They were into the makeup and the horror, and all that. Could I have stepped into those shoes? I’d probably say no. I was never into horror punk. But I think my legacy is pretty good.

I don’t know what could have taken place because Doyle was always there, since he’s Jerry’s brother. He was learning the songs because Jerry always has a backup plan. Maybe we both woulda been in the band… but I doubt it.

He’s one of the greatest guitarists of all time by the metric of sheer technical ability alone, but of course, there was so, so much more to Eddie Van Halen than the eye-watering speed.

He had showmanship, and a composer’s flair for the dramatic, but more than that, he completely re-engineered the guitar itself: how it was played, and how they were made.

Playing-wise, EVH wasn’t the first guitarist to elicit oohs and ahhs with two-hand tapping, but he perfected it, and put it on the radar of every aspiring guitarist.

On the luthiery front, not content with the tonal limitations of his Stratocaster, Van Halen modified it with a powerful humbucker pickup – thereby helping launch nothing less than an entire new breed of electric guitars.

His tone – the legendary Brown Sound – is one of the most imitated in all of rock guitar, the product of endless tinkering and experimentation. Oh, and he was also one of the pioneers of the home recording studio.

All that said, there’s a reason his name comes up more than that of just about any other guitarist (Hendrix maybe has him beat) in this publication. But how well do you know him? His music, those technical innovations, and quirky guitars? Test your knowledge in our quiz below.

Guitar heroes came in all shapes and sizes in the ‘90s. Mark Bryan might not have riffed as heavily as Cantrell, slung Superstrats like Morello, or oozed sex appeal like Navarro, focusing instead on good old-fashioned songwriting and a humble attitude on Hootie & The Blowfish hits like Let Her Cry, Hold My Hand, and Only Wanna Be with You.

“I remember saying we would have been happy if we could just sell out clubs all over,” Bryan says of their 1994 breakthrough success, Cracked Rear View. “We had no idea what was coming. It made me want to get better in order to live up to it – I was so green when we hit. I did a ton of woodshedding and songwriting, since I didn’t have a real job!”

That commitment made him the writer, player, and producer he is now with Hootie and his own band, The Screaming Trojans. “I started a home studio; it’s still evolving to this day,” he says. “Rather than try to expand my sound on just guitar, I built my studio with instruments I learned to play, like ukulele, mandolin, lap steel, and banjo.”

His current focus is his new label, Stone Point Records. And though they’re on the sidelines, Hootie & The Blowfish are still very much a thing.

“If you told me when I was young that I’d spend my entire adult life doing what I love, with some of my best friends, I would have told you. ‘That sounds like a dream come true,’” he says. “I’m still living the dream.”

What inspired you as a young player?

I grew up in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., in the ‘80s. Danny Gatton was the local guitar hero, but I was too young to ever see him. Hardcore punk and go-go were raw scenes in the city; they definitely influenced how I expressed myself through music.

But I was this awkward jock from the suburbs – I had no idea who myself was. Then, when I was around 13, I heard My Generation, arguably the first punk rock song of all time, on the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio show. There was something in the energy of that song that I had to follow.

Pete Townshend became a major influence, not just as a guitar player but also composer. So did Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen, and all the heroes I discovered listening to rock radio. Once I got to college it was The Edge, Peter Buck, and Paul Westerberg.

What got you going toward being a professional musician?

I was in a high school band with Dean Felber from Hootie, called Missing in Action. I had the same cherry Gibson Les Paul Standard that I still play today. I played it through a Peavey Deuce that had channel switching.

How did you meet Darius Rucker, leading to the formation of The Wolf Brothers?

We lived in the same hall in Moore Dormitory at USC. We would put a boombox in the showers before going out, and that’s where I first heard his voice. I had my shitty Ovation acoustic at school with me. We started figuring out songs we both knew, like Take It Easy, Feelin’ Groovy, Sail On, Sultans of Swing, Family Tradition… yes, Hank Jr. – and Rocky Raccoon!

When Hootie formed, what was your vision from a guitar perspective?

Dean was the obvious choice on bass, and he also decided to attend USC, so Darius moved in with him in the dorm to make sure he would show up to shit. Dean and I would teach Darius chords and he quickly got pretty good.

For a long while, I thought we’d grow as a rhythm-lead guitar team, but Darius was more interested in singing – he’s happy to just strum along on songs he feels comfortable with.

What were the first songs you wrote, and what gear were you using on the demos that got you signed?

The first two Hootie demo cassettes actually had all of the hits from Cracked Rear View on them. I was playing my Les Paul through a Mesa Boogie Mark III at the time, but it got stolen soon after. So I bought the Mesa Boogie .50 Caliber head that I still use on tour today. I’ve played through both Marshall and Boogie cabinets live, but producer Don Gehman’s Marshall cab is the one you hear on Cracked Rear View.

How did your amp get stolen?

We had a practice space in a warehouse that we shared with other bands. Someone decided to remove my Mark III head and Marshall cabinet. I was really upset – I had to save for long periods of time in order to afford gear in those days.

We knew who did it but there was no way to prove it. I even went to his house and asked his mother to let us look in his music room. She told me to eff off or she’d call the cops. I told her, “Go ahead, call ‘em!”

I couldn’t find another Mark III head, but I found a Mark III combo 1x12; it’s hot, but just not the same. I ended up falling in love with the .50 Caliber, and I added a Tube Screamer for what would have been the middle channel on the Mark III. That’s still my live sound with Hootie.

What do you remember about making Cracked Rear View?

I used my trusty ’73 Cherry Les Paul Standard, my new-at-the-time Gibson Tennesseean hollow body, my ’69 walnut-stained Gibson ES-335, and my buddy Steve Lipton’s Fender Telecaster. I mostly played through my .50 Caliber Boogie head, connected to Don’s vintage Marshall cab. He also had an early ’60s Gibson J-45 acoustic that we used.

Where did you get the ’73 Les Paul?

I bought it for $500 in high school from my friend Bijou Khan. Jimmy Page was obviously the inspiration – I strapped it low. I never made any mods.

What can you tell us about making Let Her Cry, Hold My Hand, and Only Wanna Be with You?

We came up with the accompaniment for Let Her Cry during soundcheck at the Brewery in Raleigh while we were hung over! Darius was excited about playing us the song he’d written after he got home from the bars early that morning. I think we were playing it the way you hear it now by the third time we went through it.

Hold My Hand was the first song Soni [drummer Jim Sonefeld] brought into the band when he joined. I remember sitting on the college bedroom couch in my senior year and coming up with that high inversion part while he strummed the chords – all three of ‘em!

I came up with the riffs for Only Wanna Be with You on my 4-track and gave it to Darius to write lyrics. We were playing occasional shows with Dillon Fence at the time, and it has a similar rhythmic bounce to one of their songs, but with a double-time strum pattern. It was more like Pinball Wizard or something. It’s really fun to play, and we added some mando to the recording.

Cracked Rear View was a huge hit record. Did Bob Dylan coming after the band over Only Wanna Be with You catch you off guard?

We got clearance to use the Dylan lyrics in Only Wanna Be with You, but they still came after us on a technicality, which was kind of surprising. I sure wish they’d have handled it the way Tom Petty and Sam Smith did [when they settled a rights dispute over Smith’s 2014 song, Stay With Me, and its similarity to Petty’s Won’t Back Down]. We could have made Bob Dylan a writer on the song. But that’s all past now.

At the height of Hootie’s fame, did you get the chance to meet any of your heroes?

I met Eddie Van Halen – or ‘Shredward,’ as the guitar player from Ugly Kid Joe called him. He couldn’t have been cooler. We shared a dressing room at the Grammys, and after we won he gave me a big hug, and we all just hung out. He was so sincerely humble for a guy who was maybe the greatest on the planet. He was genuinely excited for us that evening, and I’ll never forget it.

What led to Hootie’s hiatus?

We’d done five albums and about 20 straight years of touring. It was time for a break; we were even doing Darius’ first country single on our last tour. I’ve always made solo albums out of the songs we don’t use on Hootie albums – not because I was after a career as a solo artist, but because I wanted to give those songs a life that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

You reunited and put out a new record, Imperfect Circle, in 2019. What’s the latest, considering Darius has been hinting at retirement lately?

He always says stuff like that! I think he is still enjoying it. I think we have another great album in us, maybe our best yet, since we have a way of saying things now that we never could have had when we were younger.

They say the best way to improve as a guitar player is is to record yourself and listen to it back. But it’s not easy. In fact, it can be all kinds of horrible.

It used to be worse. At least nowadays we can quickly record something, apply a little bit of digital voodoo to it, a nice IR, some reverb for space, gussy it up and make it sound all right, even if the playing stinks.

But if you’re at the stage where you are listening to yourself back and thinking of sticking your electric guitar on Reverb and giving up, then just take a moment, because you’re not alone. Even the pros feel this way from time to time.

Chet Atkins is one of the greatest to ever have done it – hero and mentor to Tommy Emmanuel, inspiration to a generation and all-round virtuoso. They called him ‘Mister Guitar’ – he’s the one and only Country Gentleman – and yet Atkins would hear himself play and his heart would sink.

Speaking to Guitar World in March 1986, he admitted that his playing made him feel sick. “I never like what I play – especially the old things,” he said, and there was one incident that especially stuck out in his mind.

“I remember going down the road one day and I heard a tune on the radio called The Love Bug Crawl,” said Atkins. “I can’t even remember the artist, but I was listening to this thing and I said, ‘Boy, that sounds good. Wonder who that guitar player is?’ Then suddenly I realized it was me and it sounded terrible.”

Atkins would have been forgiven for the lapse. The Love Bug Crawl was an old rockabilly standard from 1957, recorded by Jimmy Edwards. Atkins was just a young buck when he sat in on the session, alongside the likes of Floyd Cramer and Buddy Harman, aka the Nashville A-Team.

But then again, Atkins would later sign Edwards to RCA on a one-year deal, and got him to track y Otis Blackwell’s Your Love is a Good Love. So there’s that.

But anyway, the point is, our perception of our playing is now how others hear us. When Atkins was listening to this long-forgotten recording, it sounded good. It still sounds good.

But there’s a psychological switch that’s flipped when we know that’s us. For Atkins, it was a particularly violent and visceral reaction.

“It’s always that way when I hear myself,” he said. “If I don’t know it’s me I think, ‘Damn, that’s pretty good. Wonder who that is?’ Then when I realize it’s me I kind of want to throw up.”

The moral of the story? There’s a fine line between applying a critical ear to your playing and to trashing it completely, and if the great Chet Atkins feels like this, what hope do the rest of us mortals have?

Last year, Tommy Emmanuel – one of Atkins' proteges – revealed how he first met his biggest guitar hero by knocking on his door unannounced.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a pop or rock guitarist who came of age in the ’60s who isn’t a fan of the Beatles. Carlos Alomar is no different. This is why, despite years spent working with James Brown, Chuck Berry, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger, Alomar was slack-jawed at the chance to work with Paul McCartney on his 1986 record, Press to Play.

“It was truly a wish-come-true moment,” Alomar says. “I’m not sure why Paul liked my playing, but maybe my success with David Bowie, Iggy Pop, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Duran Duran and others might have tickled his curiosity.”

This seems a good time to remind you that, in 1976, Alomar actually co-wrote a song – Fame from Bowie’s Young Americans – with Lennon, putting him in rare company with McCartney. And yes, Alomar also shares that co-write with Bowie.

Regardless of how or why it happened, Alomar lent his unique brand of rhythm playing (and a bit of lead) to McCartney tracks like Press, Pretty Little Head, Stranglehold and Only Love Remains, all of which turned 40 years old this year.

“The fact that I was included with such notable musicians who have played with Paul was awesome in itself,” Alomar says. “Paul was gracious enough to allow me to always complete my musical ideas, and then he’d simply say, ‘Great! Let’s try another song.’ Many of my tracks were first takes.”

While he and McCartney got on well during the Press to Play sessions, they haven’t seen one another since. “I departed the same way I arrived,” Alomar says. “Happy and knowing I had just served Sir Paul McCartney. Paul, in turn, met a Puerto Rican Buddhist rocker who satisfied his curiosity and gave him stories to remember!”

What led to your being called to play on Press to Play?

Like most musicians, it always starts with a call to action. I got a call from producer Hugh Padgham, whom I’d met when he produced David Bowie’s Tonight [1984]. He was now producing Paul and wanted to know my availability.

Paul had laid down some guitar parts, but Hugh felt that a “finishing” session with me would complete the tracks. At first, the answer from Paul was, “No.” But a little later, I received a call confirming that, on second thought, Paul thought it was a good idea. So off I went to meet my second Beatle.

What was it like meeting Paul?

It was unreal to meet another Beatle. [Laughs] I’d already worked with John and Yoko, and my wife, vocalist Robin Clark, worked on Ringo Starr’s 1977 album, Ringo the 4th. So – to us – George Harrison was the only missing member.

Paul is known to be pretty chill. What was he like?

He was the most regular guy I’d ever met. Almost a farmer, the kind of guy that frequents the local pub, no pretense whatsoever… a lovely chap. And I was in a friendly “home” environment as well. His wife, Linda, was there; his daughters, they were all there! But here’s my real first impression.

When I arrived, Paul invited me up to his study. There, a comfortable high‑back velvety chair invited me into its warm embrace. We talked. Paul was super-intrigued by my stories about being on the R&B chitlin’ circuit tours. We talked about Bowie, James Brown, the Apollo Theater and Harlem. Quite honestly, my curiosity as a Buddhist prompted me to ask about the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That time in their career had always intrigued me.

While listening, Paul turned his back to me slightly to get something. What emerged was a perfectly rolled Jamaican “carrot” ganja joint. [Laugh] We talked and talked, and time stood still. Finally, I said, “Maybe I should listen to some of the tracks before it gets too late – or we get too wasted.” That’s when we headed down to his Hogg Hill Mill studio [in East Sussex, England].

What was Hogg Hill Mill like, and what gear did you bring in?

I brought my favorite Strat, thinking it might be stylish enough to create whatever I’d need. And yes, maybe I’d get an offer to try one from the studio. But it wasn’t really a plan… more like a wish. [Laughs] But since you asked, I’ll tell you this. While maneuvering the corridors to his studio, we came across an enclosed glass studio room.

My gait stalled while the vision of what lay within froze me instantly. I felt a slight lip-drool. I might have slobbered a little as I stood in front of all this vintage Beatles gear. I’m talking about his Hofner basses, Vox amps, Mellotrons and a Beatles-logo drum kit.

There was so much gear that it was impossible to take it all in. It was too much for any musician to endure for too long, so I followed them down the hall, promising myself the luxury of returning to this sacred crypt once again.

Paul and Hugh Padgham produced Press to Play. How did they impact your guitar playing?

Hugh is one of my favorite engineers. He mixes while we’re listening. That’s really cool. So when I play anything, it already sounds like it’s mixed into the record. And he records everything, regardless of what you think. This methodology helps capture great bits of music when you least expect it.

What do you remember about putting together Press and Pretty Little Head?

We finally got to the studio, and Hugh started playing tracks for me. First song, I said, “Nah! That sounds finished. Next...” And another, I said, “That one’s cool… “Nice guitar work…” Finally, they played Press. When I listen to the tracks, I try to hear this other [hypothetical] guitar player, not me, playing something, you know?

I kinda hear it, and then I think, “Damn! Can I play that? So I look over at Hugh and tell him that I hear this digital delay effect on my guitar, and we started setting the timing.

Little did I know, he was recording everything. It appears as the intro to the song before the count-in, which was brilliant. After that, I just used classic call-and-response for the rest of the song. And then it happened – the moment every guitar player wants to hear: “Would you like to take a solo?” I was in heaven. Somebody pinch me! [Laughs] Incidentally, we used the same digital delay effect on Pretty Little Head in the Ursa Major section of the song.

What are your memories of recording Stranglehold and Only Love Remains?

Not much, because there are some songs that you have to lay in the cut, you know? Like, no signature guitar lines, just accompaniment and tone. For example, when you have a string section playing syncopated stabs and other rhythmic parts, it’s best to just play a little acoustic for color. For horns, it’s best to follow or get out of the way. Sometimes less is more; don’t disturb the groove.

Pete Townshend played on Angry. Were you in the studio with him?

No. Regrettably, sometimes we are called upon to do overdubs and not the basic rhythm tracks. To that end, I’ve not met many iconic guitarists that I’ve shared credits with. I guess the wish list continues.

The first time you heard Press to Play, what were your thoughts?

I loved it – especially the intro to Press. And I liked that it was the album’s sort-of title track. Wish-list – check! Also, remember that the final vocals, some of those spoken voices and other tidbits weren’t there when I laid down my tracks. I heard it all for the first time just like everyone else. I love being a fan.

40 years later, what does Press to Play mean to you?

It was a pleasure working with Hugh Padgham again, and we’re still connected. As for Paul, he and I had a large time. We raised our glasses high, visited Jamaica on the down-low, flew kites on the hilltop and broke bread together as family. Who could ask for more? Although we haven’t spoken since, I can always visit him in the inner chambers of my heart.

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

Anyone looking for a natural inheritor to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn should pay serious attention to rising Scottish guitarist Sam Grassie.

Grassie grew up around traditional folk music in Glasgow, and his deft, melodic guitar playing was shaped by the influence of British players including Dick Gaughan, Dave Goulder and the aforementioned Jansch and Renbourn. His blending of folk and trad, with complex yet expressive playing, has seen him share stages with Robert Plant, Martin Carthy and Gwenifer Raymond.

Having played with Scottish trio Avocet, Grassie moved to London in 2022 and immersed himself in the folk community, playing in ‘travelling folk club’ Les Caravanes and London collective The Broadside Hacks.

He has now released his solo debut, Where Two Hawks Fly, 11 tracks featuring both traditional and Grassie-penned arrangements, with a host of collaborators. When he spoke to Guitarist, Sam seemed happy with how the guest-filled LP translated to the live stage.

“I toured with Alfie Jones [grandson of Wizz Jones] on electric guitar, which really works well depending on the venue,” Grassie explains.

“It was great to have lots of people involved on the album, but the nice thing about acoustic guitar playing in the vein that we’re chasing is that if you’re on stage, feeling calm and your fingers are working, the guitar can do a fair amount of talking.

You’ve played in various line-ups on the British folk scene. Why did now feel like the right time for your solo debut?

I love collaborating and probably never want to do this alone, but I’ve wanted to create my own album for as long as I’ve been recording anything. When Avocet came to an end, I tried to work on my singing, but chronic fatigue meant I’d get dizzy. It was hard to practise as I was so ill. In some ways it happened as early as it could.

My Sandwood EP [2024] did better than I expected, so I wanted to build on that. Luckily, on that day I actually managed to play in time! Going from trying to play technical guitar that was above me and too fast, I realised that all the greats are just playing in time, and that’s why it sounds so bloody good.

I sent the tune that became Abhail’s to Alfie Jones [Wizz Jones’s grandson]. He added some lap steel, and that little bit of alchemy on a bare guitar track made me think that could be the sound of the album. I went for it and ran off to Berlin to record it as quickly as I could.

What did you learn from the recording process?

There was enough material to create something fairly coherent, but I was a bit slapdash when I went to Berlin and the guitar I recorded on was a nightmare! My friend Herbie Loening, who played double bass on the record, is a trad strummer and lent me his Yamaha FG-110: small body, high action, not good for fingerstyle.

There’s so much reverb on the track [so] the guitar sounded like a metallic Transformer walking down the road!

[Another thing I learned was] just be way more ready than you think you need to be. Because every time you sit down, you make loads of mistakes and you’ve spent £300 per day!

You often cite Bert Jansch as a major influence. How has your relationship to his music changed over time?

“I like that it hasn’t [changed]; it’s a constant. The deeper I go, the more admiration I have. It’s an asymptotical relationship – I’ll never be able to do what he was doing, but it’s that freedom I chase, his dexterity and fluidity. When I started getting into guitar and writing my own stuff, I thought he was the GOAT, and if I could ever do anything like that it’d be fun.

I still come back to tunes like Come Back Baby from the really early days and just think, “Fuck, that’s it.” For me, it doesn’t really get any better – it’s raw, rugged, gritty, stubborn, dark but free.

Production-wise, it’s interesting to see how the pressures of being a proper recording artist affected his later work, but I’m lucky that I’m unsuccessful enough that those pressures won’t be on me! But he always stayed true to what he wanted to do.

Your 2025 EP, Jarabi, Winter Has Gone, blended Celtic trad with Malian blues. What drew you to that crossover?

What’s cool in London at the moment is quite gritty, while in Scotland, everyone is playing super-fast and technical; it’s light and breezy with electric guitar, synth and a token gesture towards dance music with the thumping bass. But that lighter aspect isn’t raw. So there’s dark folk that’s raw, but the light folk is very clean, and something that’s trying to be light doesn’t need to be clean.

Martyn Bennett took Scottish trad music and fused it with drum and bass and jungle – his albums will knock your socks off – so when all these bands take light folk and add all this soft stuff, it’s like, “Surely, you’re all aware of this guy?” He managed that, and we should all be striving for the same.

I came across Malian music by attending gigs at the Fringe, like banjo player Jayme Stone with kora player Mansa Sissoko playing Africa To Appalachia. Malian music is the closest you can get to the sound of life and the natural world. It’s so free, fluctuating, fluid and absolutely beautiful. I’d love to find a collaborator to do more of that, but I don’t know if I have the tekkers!

You’ve had the chance to play Bert Jansch’s and Jackson C Frank’s guitars – and you recently performed a set for Turnstone Guitars with a Select Series TG model. Do you have a preference between vintage or modern instruments?

I love vintage guitars, but the Turnstone guitar [made from katalox and Swiss moon spruce] knocked me out, to be fair. I love playing beautiful modern boutique luthier guitars, and some aspects are better than vintage for live, especially unamplified. That Turnstone guitar echoed through the room, it was like playing a harp.

For recording, I really prefer vintage. Modern guitars have so much to say, so there isn’t much space left for giving it what you want to. You have to do what the guitar tells you to do – modern guitars are all light and amazing and everything is ‘Wow!’ But what if the song is sad? It’s different tools for different jobs.

I’ve literally just been to the [New Kings Road] Vintage Guitar Emporium to play a 000-28 from 1967. It was fucking amazing! But for gigging I use a modern Martin that I’ve set up myself to sound twangy and old. I’ve got a 1968 000-28; I love playing it, but I don’t have enough money to risk taking it around the place.

I have Bert’s Yamaha [LL11e] from the ’90s. It’s strange playing that because if you’re a big fan you’re thinking of the Blue Album [self-titled debut] when he had a Martin. Yamahas are great, but for me [they] don’t stand up to a high-end Martin. I’ve had nice moments sitting with it, thinking, “Shit this is Bert Jansch’s guitar and I’m lucky to hold it,” but, playing-wise, it’s not super-inspiring.

However, Jackson’s guitar was a [1948] Brazilian rosewood D-28 and it’s probably the best guitar I’ve ever played, like a whole other thing, and speaks to the fact it was there. It was inspiring to play that, and felt like there are songs still in there.

In a recent interview, you talked about coming from a rich folk tradition that’s being chipped away by TikTok. How do you think social media has shaped your playing?

Hopefully it hasn’t! The more you engage with it, the more you’re vulnerable and likely to be malleable to it. It’s like an alternate reality that we believe to be the same as our own. For me, the guitar is opposite to all that.

There are all these things in life that try to compartmentalise and distract and atomise, but when you’re playing guitar – and if you manage to get to that nice spot – you’re in a nice state of flow. If anything, it’s decreased the frequency and ease with which I can get there, but what I’m making isn’t tailored to that at all.

One of reasons I’ve stuck with the guitar is that it’s like a torch to follow; the ‘me’ when I’m playing guitar in the way that I want to play it, or [am] trying to, is a better person than me outside of that. I can learn from that self. If I could take a leaf out of the ‘guitar Sam’ book and apply it to other things, that’d be good – and one of those things is fuck social media changing how I do this thing.

What have you got planned next?

I’m going to get a dreadnought Martin, as I’ve missed that. And it’d be really cool to record the next album live. I want to get the funds together to get everyone in the room and capture that moment over a few days or weeks. Giving tracks to people to work on at home is not the same as working together in the room; people can inhabit the songs and find their space within it.

• Where Two Hawks Fly is out now via Broadside Hacks Recordings.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Jim Root has responded to the backlash that has faced Slipknot’s decision to book Marilyn Manson as the opener for their upcoming stadium tour.

The nu metal giants will embark on a massive world tour in 2027. They’ll kick off with a 90,000-capacity show at London’s Wembley Stadium, with a rotating support cast of Marilyn Manson, Lorna Shore and Hatebreed in tow.

However, Manson’s inclusion has come as a surprise to many, in light of him facing a wave of sexual misconduct allegations in recent years.

In 2025, a four-year investigation into allegations from multiple women concluded with no charges filed. Another case of alleged sexual assault concerning Manson is set to go to court in November 2027. Manson denies any wrongdoing.

For Slipknot fans, Manson’s presence on the bill makes for uneasy viewing. Jim Root, however, has tried to downplay the controversy of his booking ahead of some monumental shows for Slipknot.

Root says he “stay[s] out of the logistics of touring,” (via Louder), adding, “I concentrate on writing and being a guitarist, so forgive my ignorance about who we do shows with.

“There are other people with much bigger brains than I that coordinate all that and I honestly don’t keep up with new bands or new music,” he adds.

“[I’m] stuck listening to the same music my parents listened to when I was forming myself as a little human,” Root continues. “And I purposely don’t listen to or pay attention to what’s ‘trending’ or what’s happening at the moment so as to not get influenced by anything.”

Speaking to Guitar World earlier this year, guitarist and composer Tyler Bates, who has been part of Manson’s band across four albums since 2015, defended sticking by the singer despite the allegations.

“I had to do my homework,” he said. “I’m not endorsing any behavior other than healthy behavior.”

Elsewhere, Jim Root has recently discussed being a rare vanguard for Teles in metal. His slew of signature guitars will be vital components during next year’s Worldwide (sic)est stadium tour.

As a teen, Leo Nocentelli lent his licks to Motown’s biggest and brightest stars. In his 20s, he formed funk legends The Meters. Beyond that he’s worked with Albert King, Paul McCartney, Etta James and Peter Gabriel.

He wrote hits including Sophisticated Cissy and Cissy Strut – but he took little to no credit. “I did what I had to do,” he says. “But I don’t owe nobody nothing. I really didn’t owe nobody from Jump Street. I did it because that’s the way my heart is.”

He believes his appeal – for big names in rock, soul and blues to the countless hip-hop producers who have sampled him – is simple.

“I was able to adapt,” he says. “It didn’t matter the genre. It could have been Coltrane; it could have been Miles Davis; it could have been anybody. Everyone who hired me knew I’d adapt.”

Nocentelli is likely one of the most widely recorded and sampled players of all time. “I’m like the guy from that movie,” he laughs. “I’m a guy that happened to be at a certain place at very historical times, so I’d call myself the Forrest Gump of the music industry!”

What got you started on guitar?

My dad played banjo in a band in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. He grew up in New Orleans, met my mom, and didn’t do any more gigs. He kept after me to try and play ukulele, and I started hearing some things. I graduated to six-strings and started picking out things that were interesting to me.

I don’t know where it came from, though. It’s just what was in me. Regardless of genre, I was attracted to things, and I really wanted to play them when I heard them. Everything from Bach and Beethoven to country sounded interesting.

By 13 you were working on sessions for Otis Redding, The Supremes, The Temptations and more.

I just played for different people who were looking for music. I just happened to be 13! My first major recording was for Allen Toussaint with an artist called Lee Darcy he was producing. That started me in the recording industry.

What gear were you using for Motown?

I used a big hollowbody guitar, because when I started out, I wanted to be a jazz player like Wes Montgomery or Kenny Burrell; but then I got caught up in playing different genres. To survive in New Orleans – and to survive, period, as a Black guitarist – I had to learn how to play different genres.

How did you come to play for the Temptations and the Supremes?

I got a call one day to take a trip to Motown in Detroit. This guy named Joe Jones had a deal with Barry Gordy to bring four artists there, and I was one of them. Motown and Barry Gordy loved the band, so we started playing behind a bunch of acts that had no names at the time. They’d pay us $12 a side, and we’d be playing behind acts that became The Moonglows, The Temptations, and The Supremes.

What was the first Motown hit you played on?

It was Where Did Our Love Go, Baby by the Supremes. Nobody knew it was a bunch of New Orleans musicians – and then everyone in Motown was tripping out about this new band from New Orleans. This was before James Jamerson and all that. So you might say that New Orleans was more Motown than Detroit was at first!

In the mid ’60s you joined the army. But you kept on doing sessions during your breaks, leading to the formation of The Meters.

I was drafted but I went voluntarily. When I got there, I ran into a few musicians in Fort Riley, Kansas, and they asked me to do some gigs. I started playing guitar around there, and when I came back, The Meters started to happen.

You penned two hits: Sophisticated Sissy and Sissy Strut.

I not only had a big hand in those – I had the whole hand! Of course, those songs couldn’t have been manifested, even though I wrote them note-for-note, without the individuals in the band. That’s why I gave them credit and didn’t take it all for myself.

Do you regret not taking more credit?

After a while I thought, ‘I should take credit for writing.’ The problem was I felt like I should give them something – so I did. I gave them six or seven different albums’ worth of songs that I wrote. They used to come into the studio and wait for me to play the song, and then they’d put their expertise on it. I didn’t start taking credit until later.

What was your primary guitar with The Meters?

All those early albums were done with my Gibson ES-175. But after we signed with Warner Brothers and started Cabbage Alley, I started using a Fender Starcaster. They didn’t make many of them back then, so I was really the only notable one playing one. I actually started getting some recognition for playing one.

What led to The Meters hooking up with Dr. John for In the Right Place?

I played on a lot of Allan Toussaint's productions; I really did all of them. He had us fly down to Miami to Criteria Studios, where we did that album. I didn’t really have too much of a hand in deciding anything – Dr. John told me what to play. But it was a fantastic experience.

In 1975, The Meters attended an infamous boat party hosted by Paul McCartney. What was that like?

We had a lot of fun! Paul came down to New Orleans to record an album called Venus and Mars, and I played on a couple of songs. He asked us to do the going-away party on the Queen Mary, and we played live.

Everyone was there from Yul Brynner to Fred Astaire – he was dancing to Cissy Strut – and even Michael Jackson from The Jackson 5, who was dancing right in front of the stage to us. To be witnesses to all that, man, to be involved, was just amazing. I got to be really good friends with Paul, who showed his admiration for me and The Meters.

He was a fan of blues and R&B – no doubt, man. There’s actually a couple of photos of Paul, me and Linda, and a couple of other big stars. I think in one of the photos he’s actually passing me some weed!

You went on work with everyone from Albert King to Etta James to Peter Gabriel. What do you think all these artists liked about you as a player?

That I managed to come up with something unique when I’d play. On that Albert King record [New Orleans Heat] he recorded one of my songs.

Were you caught off guard when hip-hop artists started sampling The Meters’ songs in the ’80s and ’90s?

The first thing I thought was, ‘How much money am I gonna make from it?’ I wasn’t thinking, ‘Wow! They must really love the way I sound.’ I eventually did make some money. That was the slickest thing that ever happened to me on a business level.

A lot of those samples were used without clearance, right?

Yeah. I was honored to be sampled by Naughty by Nature, Snoop Dogg and all that. But then you had LL Cool J, who didn’t want to pay nobody. We wound up suing him, and the court granted us a win. That’s when I really learned how much money you could make. Then everybody started sampling The Meters, man – but they were doing the right thing and paying us.

In 2021 your unreleased solo album from 1971, Another Side, generated a lot of attention. Are you working on new music?

Yeah, and it’s got a lot of people on it. I’ve got Peter Gabriel, Stanley Clarke, Harry Connick Jr. and a lot of other people. It’s called Leo with The Project, and man, it’s killer. There’s no category you could put it in. I’m expecting it to be nominated for a Grammy, man. I can’t wait for the public to hear it.

Do you still play guitar every day?

No; I’m kind of really sick and tired of it. I dread doing it every time I have to, you know? I don’t feel the same way about it. I’ll play, but I don’t play with the passion I used to. I can still play at the same level, or close to it, but I don’t have anything to prove as a player. I am who I am.

Is there a future for The Meters?

It was eight or 10 albums, and I was always there until four o’clock in the morning, editing stuff and getting no credit. That’s not where my head’s at anymore. As for live gigs, I’m not really for that either. I wouldn’t care if I never did it again.

We’re starting to get revisited again; we did two sold-out shows in New Orleans at Jazz Fest, and there’s one at the Orpheum Theater that’s gonna be totally sold out. But I don’t hustle for gigs. I don’t look to be booked because I don’t really want to be booked.

Do you have advice for young players?

Learn the business. No matter how good you are, get paid for it. Otherwise you could end up being broke. It’s a cesspool of a business, man. Everybody is grabbing at you and taking advantage, so please learn the business. They’re cold-blooded, and only care about what they’re gonna get from you.

This month on Bought & Sold, Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash fame drops in to talk all things guitar, from first loves to his current live rig, gear regrets and the answer to some of the guitar world's most difficult questions…

What was the first serious guitar that you bought with your own money?

It was a Burns jazz guitar. Burns hooked up with, I think, Rice Krispies and if you entered this competition on the back of the cereal box, you could win this guitar. There was no chance that I would win, although I think I did enter the competition. But, like a lot of kids in the ’50s, I had a paper round and I managed to save up money.

Somebody had won one of these guitars – this must have been about a year or two later – and wanted to sell it. So my mother pinned all the money I’d earned from the paper round to the inside pocket of my school blazer, and I went down on the train and I bought this guitar off this boy and came back on the train.

And that was my first serious guitar. It was a great guitar, it was a short scale and it had a tremolo arm on it, so I was able to emulate my hero, Hank Marvin.

Later, just before I joined Wishbone Ash, I decided I was going to go on a big adventure to Morocco overland. I’d had the guitar for a few years and played in bands with it, but I decided that I needed to travel more than I needed the guitar and I sold it.

I went up to London, sold it to Macari’s Musical Exchange and I believe at the time they gave me 40 quid for it, which was enough to go on this overland trip in a Land Rover with a bunch of strangers and end up in Marrakesh with food poisoning!

What was the last guitar you bought, and why?

Well, I’m known for being a Flying V player, but the last really good guitar I bought was a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster. I used to collect guitars and I had a collection of about 85, and I had Stratocasters all the way from ’54 through to the early ’60s.

Anyway, I bought this Stratocaster and it’s the closest I’ve found to some of the vintage ones. It’s a good one, you know? It has a resonance to the body and you can get all the Strat tones out of it, and it’s just absolutely brilliant. They finally figured out how to remake them. I paid way too much money for it, but it will find its way onto an album.

What’s the most incredible find or bargain you’ve had when buying gear?

Probably the most incredible guitar I got was a ’58 Flying V. Later on, I got a ’59. So those two would be the most amazing guitars that I was offered. I was playing a ’67-style V; different concept, really, but also a great guitar. I never realised, but they only made about 100 of [the ’59s], but the ’58, I think they made about 98 of them.

They were subsequently sold, and I made good money on selling them. But I would say the first ’58 I got, I just couldn’t believe it. I think I appreciated these things as works of art, actually – as well as being guitars, they played great and they sounded fabulous.

What’s the strongest case of buyer’s remorse you’ve experienced when buying gear?

I had two Firebird VIIs. The most gorgeous-looking one that I bought was an original white Firebird VII with gold hardware, and I tried and tried to make that guitar sound good.

But what had happened was, at the Gibson factory, they had put so much paint on the guitar – there was probably about 3lb of paint on that guitar – it would come off in chips a 16th of an inch thick.

I tried to bring it into the stage show, but it was a thin-sounding guitar because the lacquer had simply killed the tone of the wood. I never really regretted it, I loved having it as an artefact sitting around the house, but eventually it got sold to Stephen Stills.

Have you ever sold a guitar that you now intensely regret letting go?

Well, that would be the ’58 V. I mean, I could have put my sons through college with the money from that! I could have bought a house for that! Well, times two because I had the ’58 and the ’59.

They sounded amazing and they were great, but they had big old necks on them. Albert King had big hands, he could master one of those things. I’ve got small hands, you know? So it was quite a beast, but as a thing, as a beautiful instrument, as an investment, as a piece of history, yeah, I pretty much intensely regret that.

What’s your best guitar-buying tip?

Well, first of all, don’t plug it in. Just put it on your knee and play it. Does it feel as if the whole thing is resonating? Is it responding to your touch?

And if that’s happening, then plug it into an amplifier, preferably an old tube amp, and then see if the pickups are matched with each other. Does it seem balanced? I’d say those are my two big tips. The guitar has to work acoustically, it has to give you something back.

If forced to make a choice, would you rather buy a really good guitar and a cheap amp, or a cheap guitar and a top notch amp?

Oh, that’s a really tough question. If you were looking to make a big, good sound on stage, and you were looking to make the right kind of sound on an album, probably the amplifier would make a big difference.

You could compensate for a lot of things that were wrong with the guitar with your fingers. I mean, I’ve got a ’59 Bassman sitting over there in the corner. That’s been on many albums, and if you plug a cheap guitar into that amplifier, it would sound very good.

Andy’s Go-To Rig

I’m doing a lot of festivals in the summer, so I have gone over to using a semi-digital amp called a BluGuitar made in Germany by Thomas Blug. I can throw it in a backpack, and then no matter what speakers they give me at a festival, I can plug that in. I met Thomas and he’s shown me how to do a few tweaks on it. And so, yeah, that amp with two 2x12 speaker cabs. I do prefer 10-inch speakers, to be absolutely honest with you.

I’m using fewer pedals compared with what I used to. My main overdrive is an Analog Man King of Tone. It’s got two channels and I use one as a crunch and one as an overdrive, and then if I really want to go berserk, I bring in an Ibanez Tube Screamer on top. Then it’s just a standard Boss Delay and I use an Analog Man chorus unit.

Oh, I use an [Xotic] EP booster, too. I use that a lot, especially if I want to bring the level down and I want more definition for picking. I went through a whole phase of using piezo pickups on the guitar.

I had some Flying Vs made with piezo pickups in the bridge, and I would often take a signal off and run that through the PA system. But these days I’ve found I’m going simpler and simpler. It’s all about gain management: how much do you need? When do you need it? And how do you manage it?

As far as guitars are concerned, I have to play a V. I mean, I have no choice!

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

It’s often hard for players to recall the exact moment they stumbled across a riff or lick that would end up becoming a hit. It’s equally difficult to pinpoint the ins and outs of a recording session. That was especially the case for Mars, who failed to remember recording of Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls – because he was unconscious for it.

Bizarre stories fly out of the Mötley Crüe camp with wild abandon, and have done since their 1981 debut album, Too Fast for Love, hit the shelves. In the May 2005 issue of Guitar World, Mars regaled another.

The story centers around the band’s fourth album, Girls, Girls, Girls. It was a standout smash in 1987, and is certified four times platinum in the US.

Mars revealed he recorded the title track’s water tight rhythm parts with a “Kramer through a Marshall head absolutely dry”. No effects were allowed anywhere near his signal.

“It's doubled,” he adds. “So it's big, but everything's dry – a nice big dirty sound.”

As for its leads, while a guitar solo punctuates the middle section, a descending staccato run rounds the song out in flashy fashion. The rumor was that Mars fell off his chair while recording it and producer Bob Rock simply let the tape run. Mars remembers it in a slightly more dramatic – and suitably rock ’n’ roll – manner.

“I was drunk,” he says. “I fell flat on my face, but I held onto the guitar neck, so I could still squeeze out some notes, even though I was unconscious.”

It sounds impossible – and it could well be, given that not all stories that come out of the Crüe camp are based entirely in reality. But we’ll let this one slide, as it’s a great tale regardless. Even if it comes from the band’s most substance-soaked era.

“That was during a dark period,” Mars accepts. “I was drinking my head off. It's always something. I have a very addictive personality. Even when I quit drinking, I couldn't stop taking pain medication.”

Sadly, for Crüe fans, Mars acrimoniously left the band in 2023. John 5 was drafted into the group in his place. Mars has since said that reconciliation is off the table and the relationship between both parties continues to sour amid disputes over the resulting lawsuits.

But the crazy stories of the band’s 1980s peak cannot be taken away from Mars, and recording licks like that on Girls, Girls, Girls – while slipping out of consciousness – is classic Crüe, whichever way you look at it.

Eric Clapton says selling two of his prized electric guitars at auction in 2004 was a “big, big mistake” but accepts the wider context justified the painful split.

The two guitars – his late Cream-era Gibson ES-335 and his iconic “Blackie” Stratocaster – sold for a combined $1,807,000 at the Christie’s auction. In total, the event raised $7.44 million, with roughly $6.4 million going to Clapton’s Crossroads drug addiction rehabilitation center.

The ES-335, a 1964 model with a mysterious origin story, featured at Cream’s farewell show at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1968. It’s now been confirmed that Epiphone will release a special re-issue of the guitar next summer.

The Strat, meanwhile, came into Clapton’s life in 1970, and was pieced together from three different 1950s models. He recorded seminal hits including Cocaine, I Shot the Sheriff and Lay Down Sally with the guitar.

They’re both iconic six-strings in their own right, and they helped raise vital funds for Crossroads, which celebrated its 28th anniversary in star-studded style over the weekend. But that didn’t make letting them go any easier for Slowhand.

“When the auction was going on, I had to constantly keep saying, ‘This is your purpose. You are an alcoholic, and if you don't stay sober, you won’t be able to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety,’” he recalls in an interview with Guitar Center.

“So this is all for that purpose. Crossroads is for that purpose. So I’m disproportionately obsessed with the survival of that place.”

Crossroads offers “a therapeutic, supportive and safe environment—away from the confusion of life in addiction – on the beautiful island of Antigua” in the Caribbean.

Everything from high-profile auctions to seven editions of the Crossroads Guitar Festival, which unites a host of prolific players on the stage, have helped raise funds for the center. It means everything to Clapton.

“My primary purpose is to stay sober, and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety,” he notes. “That’s above me being a musician or a husband or a father. It’s the number one thing.”

So, yes, selling those guitars, he says with a nervous laugh, was a “big, big mistake.” But zoom out, and it's easy to see why Slowhand parted ways with them.

Now, Guitar Center’s Crossroads collection – which takes in high-end recreations of some of Clapton’s most historic guitars – is adding more money to the pot.

25 years ago, Jimmy Eat World’s breakthrough 2001 album, Bleed American, took the Arizona emo band from VFW hall shows to the top of the charts. But it almost didn’t happen at all. To paraphrase frontman and co-guitarist Jim Adkins on the album’s mega hit The Middle, it just took some time.

Scooped up by Capitol Records during the ’90s alternative-rock gold rush, Jimmy Eat World arrived in major-label land with just a scrappy indie release of speedy pop-punk under its belt and a growing interest in the barbed riffs and mathy rhythms of post-hardcore. After two albums, 1996’s Static Prevails and 1999’s Clarity, posted dismal sales, though, they quietly exited the big machine.

But unlike scores of other alt-leaning rock bands that were gobbled up and spit out by the majors, Jimmy Eat World wasn’t finished yet. Hopeful for a second chance, the band again enlisted producer Mark Trombino, who had helmed their previous records – albums which, especially Clarity, fans loved for their strong melodies, titanic riffs and increasingly ornate instrumentation.

In the van Capitol bought them years earlier, Jimmy Eat World toured relentlessly and saved the earnings to pay Trombino. They grabbed copies of their Capitol releases to sell at gigs while playing to thousands across Europe and worked day jobs in the interim. When they had pooled together enough cash to track Bleed American, they not only had the strongest songs of their career but had tightened into the band that could pull them off.

“Going in to make Bleed American was a little bit different than making Clarity because of the amount of touring that we were doing in between, and just being in that environment where it's just two guitars,” Adkins says, “so you're thinking about your creative solutions with that in mind.”

Stripping their sound back to a two-guitar attack from the adventurous experimentations of their previous work – whose lack of sales got them dropped, only to be rediscovered and championed by bands like Paramore during the aughts emo explosion – suited their increased use of drop-D tuning, which helped lower the boom on songs like the stomping title track.

“At first it was like a novelty thing, like you get a new effect pedal and all of a sudden you write a song around it,” he says. “It's that thing that tricks you to get you out of your own head, so you can just experiment. Then you hear yourself play something that sounded cool so you do that again, and before you know it, you're fleshing out a song.”

While dialing up their ambitions in songcraft, the band also scaled down the scope of their songs. Adkins says he found inspiration listening to classic songwriters like the Everly Brothers and Bruce Springsteen, who mastered the ability to execute an idea with simplicity and directness.

“You might have heard it a million times and not really paid attention to it growing up, but then all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute – Dancing in the Dark just works,” he says. “Like, what is it that makes it work? How can I do that? I think most of our material that pushes the band forward has started off like, ‘I don't know if we can get away with this, guys.’”

But they did and then some. After total sales of their previous album barely cracked five digits, Bleed American’s punchy, anthemic tunes quickly scored the band its first Platinum album.

Three singles – the bruising title track alongside the thundering sing-along Sweetness and the emotive Hear You Me – all yielded Gold and Platinum platters of their own. But The Middle, certified 9x Platinum, peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it a genuine crossover smash. In 2024, the song joined Spotify’s Billion Streams Club.

On the opening riff of The Middle, Adkins and Linton lock into a tightly wound guitar figure composed of variations on the same riff.

“Sometimes it might be unison, sometimes we might hit a lower voicing, the notes that imply the progression, but add in a mid-to-high voicing that's sometimes unison or sometimes maybe like a harmony itself,” Adkins says – the kind of interlocking guitar line he traces back to Thin Lizzy's twin-guitar harmonies.

After years chasing the sprawl and mathy detours of post-hardcore, the band started exploring how to extract the most from each riff instead. “There was a tendency to scale back the scope of what you're trying to do," Adkins says, “and push how tight and lockstep you can make it and how simple you can make it, as almost a subversive kind of goal.”

For two guitarists who'd been shredheads in the early '90s, stripping a song down to a handful of chords was more Never Mind the Bollocks than Surfing with the Alien. "That's the best way I can describe it: oh man, we can get away with this!"

The guitar solo on The Middle broke a different rule. Where the solo on Bleed American and most of the band's earlier leads – like the extended bridge solo on Clarity’s Just Watch the Fireworks – grow out of the vocal melody, hinting at it and then taking off, the solo on The Middle has no connection to anything else happening in the song. "That was different," Adkins says. "That might be the first time we've ever done that."

He built it across a series of takes rather than working it out on paper. "I knew what I wanted to do; the arc of it was there from the beginning," he says. "It was just figuring out how to build something with that arc – theme, repeat, variation, kick it up a notch." The one consistent trick, he says, is that it never backs off: "always ascending, that's either ascending or faster."

Adkins doesn't consider himself a lead player by nature.

"I'm not like a shredder guitar player. I don't do leads, even though I kind of grew up with that scene of players," he says. "It was more about finding a clever way to make a theme and variation of it that is building. There's a narrative arc to it, and that I knew I wanted to have. But what actually happened in it was figured out on the spot."

Across the album, Adkins and co-guitarist and vocalist Tom Linton kept the gear simple, a stark contrast from Clarity’s kitchen-sink list of bells, chimes, glockenspiels and other ornamentation.

Adkins used a Gibson Les Paul Studio and 1979 Marshall JMP Super Lead, while Linton played his Gibson SG through an Orange AD140, with a Vox AC30 and a Fender Princeton for occasional overdubs.

However, the band did experiment on the album’s more reflective moments. Hear You Me, Your House and Cautioners all feature looping, shimmering guitar textures built with Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler pedals, which had recently hit the market.

“You could loop things and then reverse it and do an octave and record it. Sometimes it might take like 10 minutes to get the composition of your loop just right. After you’d get it to a place that sounded cool, we’d hit record, walk out of the room, and five minutes later come back.”

While Bleed American changed everything for Jimmy Eat World, Adkins and his bandmates were seasoned enough to keep the focus on the music and not merely the success.

“The best outcome would be this gives us an opportunity to keep doing this,” he says of the band’s philosophy of the new world they entered on Bleed American. “That's the best we could hope for.”

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

Back in 1982, a fast-rising – and perhaps unassuming – jazz virtuoso by the name of Emily Remler told People Magazine, “I may look like a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey, but inside I'm a 50-year-old, heavy-set black man with a big thumb, like Wes Montgomery.”

She may not be a household name, but Remler had the technique to hold her own alongside contemporaries like Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Joe Pass and Jennifer Batten. She also had something rarer: a sound and a musical personality that were unmistakably hers.

This was precisely what drew filmmaker Al Naffah, the writer, director and producer of Firefly: The Emily Remler Story, to her. It eventually compelled him to craft a documentary that celebrates her work and legacy – often ignored in the mainstream.

“I was a student in Paris and used to regularly listen to the station TSF Jazz. I remember one evening hearing Emily play and feeling an immediate connection to her phrasing and tonality,” he tells Guitar World in an exclusive interview.

“Discovering not only that it was a woman playing, but also that she had died at just 32 made me intrigued to find out more about her life and discover her outstanding discography.”

Naffah couldn’t help but draw parallels between Remler and another jazz great gone too soon.

“I remember watching Asif Kapadia’s Amy about Amy Winehouse and thinking about Emily Remler. Both were extraordinary Jewish women in music who battled addiction and intense sexism but whose lives were cut tragically short,” he explains.

“But what stayed with me was the possibility of hearing Emily tell her own story. When I realised how much footage and audio of her existed, I could see a film built around her voice and performances. That was the moment she stopped being a subject I admired and became a film I felt I had to make.”

Naffah went on a journey to unearth rare performances, television appearances, photographs, and interviews in which Remler speaks about her life, in her own words.

He also went a step further by interviewing a rolodex of guitarists, including Jennifer Batten, Martin Taylor, and The Last Dinner Party’s Emily Roberts – those who either experienced Remler’s music firsthand or were influenced by her legacy.

“What comes through in the interviews is that Emily’s influence began with how she played. She was doing that in a world where women instrumentalists had to work much harder to be taken seriously. She endured horrific sexism and misogyny throughout her career but became something that she had to rise above.

“She would frequently say that she had to be ‘Twice as good as a man.’ [For example,] Emily used Polytone solid-state amplifiers and Fender tube amplifiers, but frequently had to endure comments like, ‘Can a woman really carry that big amp?’

“One contributor in the film even tells of how she would go into recording studios, and people would look at her like she didn’t know how to plug in the guitar.

“Emily refused to let those expectations define what she could do. For later guitarists, that combination of musical excellence and determination made her a powerful example.”

Moreover, he notes that Remler herself refused to be defined by style or genre – describing herself as a “melting pot” in archival footage. She wasn’t just a composite of her heroes – namely, Wes Montgomery, Herb Ellis, Joe Pass and Charlie Christian – but, armed with her distinctive red Gibson ES-330, and later, a Borys B120 hollow body, took a magpie-like approach and created something uniquely hers.

“She studied the tradition closely, then played with enough conviction that you hear Emily, rather than a list of her influences,” Naffah continues.

“Seeing the evolution of her playing in early footage of concerts alongside people like Astrud Gilberto to her towering presence on stage leading a group of guitar legends – John Abercrombie, Mick Goodrick and John Scofield – you can see how much she wanted to be, and was, a natural leader.”

After poring over hundreds of hours of footage and interviews, Naffah points to a story that best encapsulates Remler’s character and dedication to her craft.

“My favourite story in the film is her simple reply to what she would consider to be the greatest achievement of her career: to have earned the respect of the idols she looked up to.

“For Pat Martino to tell her he had a good time, for Pat Metheny to be in the audience at her shows, and for Joe Pass to have recommended her for gigs. It says so much about her character and her motivation to be respected amongst the greats despite all the obstacles she had to deal with.”

Remler’s promising career was cut short when she died of heart failure at the age of 32 while touring in Australia. Her longstanding addiction to heroin and Dilaudid is thought to have contributed to her death – a tragedy that Naffah says the team was careful to touch upon without falling into the trap of sensationalism.

“We have worked very hard in co-operation with Emily’s closest friends and family, particularly her sister Jane Remler Blank and childhood friend, Susan Itkin Kurshenoff.

“We all felt that it would be wrong to ignore the theme of addiction in the film, and we have managed to find previously unseen footage of Emily discussing her challenges openly so that the audience can hear it directly from her.”

As Remler would have turned 70 next year, Naffah says it feels particularly timely to release the documentary in 2027.

After receiving crucial support from Berklee College of Music and Beth Marlis at Musicians Institute Hollywood, he’s now appealing to the guitar community to contribute to his team's Kickstarter campaign. The aim is to raise roughly $27,000, “to strengthen the story edit and move the film toward completion.

“We felt that starting with the Kickstarter was the right way to tap into Emily’s huge grassroots fanbase and invite people to become part of the project,” he explains.

“A personal recommendation to a friend, a guitar teacher, or a local jazz group can make a real difference. Backing it will help us build momentum and bring Emily’s story to the screen.”

More importantly though, releasing the film during such a poignant year gives Naffah, his team, and Remler’s friends and family a chance to bring her work to a new generation.

“I don’t think a film can define Emily’s legacy; she did that through her playing. But it can help ensure that more people hear it, understand the obstacles she faced, and recognise just how much she achieved.”

• For more information, head to Firefly: The Emily Remler Story's Kickstarter campaign.

Eddie Vedder saved an Irish rock band over the weekend, offering up his own electric guitar for use after all their gear had been stolen.

Two days after playing at the iconic Troubadour in West Hollywood, Florence Road were scheduled to play Vedder’s Ohana Festival in Dana Point, California.

However, they were forced to pull out, announcing they’d had all their guitars and pedalboards stolen from their van. In a statement posted to Instagram, the band wrote, “We’ve tried absolutely everything to make it happen.”

Vedder heard of Florence Road’s troubles and came to their rescue. Not only did he help find them a new evening slot to play on Saturday night, he personally gave frontwoman Lily Aron his own guitar so the set could go ahead.

“What an insane 48 hours!!!” Aron wrote on Florence Road’s Instagram. “We couldn’t be more grateful to Eddie Vedder and the team at Ohana Festival. The second Eddie heard our guitars were stolen he insisted I play his. A true gentleman.”

Aron also shared a picture of Vedder handing over his heavily decorated black Fender Telecaster, which flashes a ‘Joe Strummer Trash City’ sticker below the bridge.

Vedder is no stranger to a sticker-bound Telecaster, and this particular model looks like the Pearl Jam frontman’s own DIY take on the Joe Strummer’s Custom Shop signature guitar.

Strummer, a man whose sticker antics characterized his relationship with the guitar, was honored by Fender in 2024 with a Masterbuilt recreation of his main axe.

Whatever the story behind Vedder’s Tele, it was graciously gifted temporarily to Florence Road, who were able to continue their run of US shows in style thanks to the Seattle icon.

Florence Road have yet to release their debut album, but they’ve emerged as one of rock’s most exciting modern acts. The four-piece have toured with Wolf Alice and Olivia Rodrgio, and have millions of likes on TikTok. And now they’ve been championed by Vedder.

Head over to Florence Road’s Instagram page to check out their material.

While she’s a self-professed “novice” guitarist, Olivia Rodrigo has become a massive proponent of the instrument since her debut album, 2021’s SOUR, brought her alt-pop-rock musings to the mainstream.

Now, as she kicks off The Unraveled Tour in support of her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, her penchant for unique and highly customized guitars is on full display. Her arsenal includes a relic’d single-pickup Jazzmaster custom that she uses on the track Maggots for Brains, where she showcases her lead guitar playing.

Another interesting pick comes by way of a tasty, heart-shaped guitar, crafted by LA guitar repairer and luthier Luis Munoz. The guitar builder, who counts the Smashing Pumpkins, Deftones, and Anthrax among his clients, flexed his skills with this baby pink guitar, which, according to his socials, took awhile to build and perfect.

“I’ve somewhat retired from touring to be home with mi mija Rosie, but getting to contribute like this? La neta, that means everything. I’m sure Olivia has every guitar company in the world in her DMs, and she still trusted a small shop in East LA,” he wrote on Instagram, alongside photos of Rodrigo with the guitar and snaps from the building process.

“Five prototypes before I got the body right. It had to look cool, play easy, feel comfortable, and most of all, sound good. Built completely by hand, late nights after shop hours.”

Considering fans’ positive reaction so far, Munoz teased whether we can expect to see similar builds, or perhaps even a signature model. “One of one. For now,” he adds.

Rodrigo has used St. Vincent’s ergonomically game-changing signature guitar with Ernie Ball Music Man on previous tours, after praising its design and calling it “such a fucking cool-looking guitar.”

During a 2021 appearance on Jimmy Fallon, actor and model Cara Delevingne showed off her surprising guitar chops by playing Sweet Home Alabama behind her head. Now, she’s returned to the show to perform her new single, and showed that her electric guitar talents aren’t just for a cheap gag.

The 34-year-old Brit made her name as a model before turning to acting, starring in the 2016 film, Suicide Squad, among others. Music, however, has always been one of her other big passions in life, and she’s just released her debut album, Not Normal, to prove just that.

The release has seen her return to the show, triple-humbucker Bigsby-loaded Telecaster Deluxe in hand, to complete a pretty impressive full circle moment.

“Everyone thought it was a party trick,” she says in an Instagram post reflecting on that 2021 appearance, and her subsequent performance of Crazy, Baby. “It was actually foreshadowing.”

Delevingne’s playing sits atop a bed of pulsing synths, with smart pop-rock hooks and bursts of overdriven barre chord stabs plentiful. But the song also sees her showing some authority on the instrument, with a guitar solo getting a big reaction from the crowd.

It's not overly flashy, but she shows a strong melodic sensibility with it, and rounds it out with a tapping lick that I’m not sure many people saw coming.

Guitar-touting actors are no new phenomena. Johnny Depp plays in the Hollywood Vampires alongside rock royalty, and he’s also made an album with Jeff Beck.

Paul Mescal, meanwhile, had the chance to have a guitar lesson from Paul McCartney to help with him playing the Beatle in the Fab Four’s upcoming biopics, but it turns out that he didn’t need any help. Then there’s everyone from Adam Sandler to Zooey Deschanel and Kevin Bacon, who rewrote a rock classic with Fallon last year.

Delevingne, then, is in good company, and her performance should be seen as a celebration of the instrument we love.

Neil Henderson, the Scottish guitarist who played a key role in the early days of the Bay City Rollers, has died aged 73.

Henderson joined the Edinburgh pop-rock group in 1970, a role he held for two years, playing on formative hits like Keep on Dancing and We Can Make Music. He later joined fellow Scottish outfit, Middle of the Road, who confirmed his passing.

Middle of the Road have paid tribute to their “original lead guitarist, songwriter and friend,” on social media. At the time of his joining, the band were experiencing a raft of line-up changes, with Henderson just 17 when he was brought in to replace Davie Paton.

“Neil had been ill for some time and was fighting to recover from a stroke a few years ago,” the band’s post continues. “His memory will live on with all who had the pleasure of sharing the stage with him as will his music.”

According to the Telegraph, Henderson quit the Bay City Rollers because “he wanted to make it as a musician rather than play in a band that was being manufactured,” with Middle of the Road already proving hitmakers when he joined.

While his former outfit would go on to enjoy great success, Middle of the Road were anything but what their name suggests. The group shifted over five million records, with the Henderson-penned tracks Rockin’ Soul and Everybody Loves a Winner contributors to those figures.

Later in life, Henderson ran a music shop in Stewarton, south-west Scotland. He also built a home studio following the passing of his wife, because he knew he could finally "get away with it".

Reacting to the news of his passing, Stuart “Woody” Wood, who played with the Bay City Rollers during their commercial peak, wrote: “Just heard the very sad news about Neil Henderson, one of the original Bay City Rollers.

“Though I never met him personally, Alan [Longmuir, bass] spoke very highly of him. Sincere condolences to all his family and friends.”

Neil Henderson is survived by his two daughters, Heather and Shona.

Laurence Juber grew up a Beatles fan, which isn’t exactly uncommon, especially among the generation of British musicians born in the early ’50s.

“When I started playing guitar in November 1963, it was during the breaking wave of Beatlemania in the U.K.,” Juber tells Guitar World. “The Beatles had an impact, but so did the Shadows, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and other British Invasion bands. My focus was on being a studio musician – once I learned that it was an actual career path.”

That career path got rolling pretty quickly, as Juber, a versatile player with a knack for laying back and choosing the right gear, became an in-demand session guitarist. His first brush with the Beatles’ universe came when he hooked up with their producer, George Martin, for Cleo Laine’s 1976 album, Born on a Friday.

“George was the first real record producer I worked with – and an icon,” Juber says. “His manner in the studio was relaxed and encouraging.”

It’s very possible that Martin’s relaxed demeanor rubbed off on Juber; still, the guitarist admits to feeling nervous when he joined Paul McCartney’s successful post-Beatles band, Wings, in 1978, replacing Jimmy McCulloch, who had been fired for drunken misbehavior.

“Recording was my day-to-day experience,” Juber says. “Being on stage with a Beatle was a different perspective.”

In the case of Back to the Egg, the 1979 Wings album on which Juber played (along with another new member, drummer Steve Holley), perspective is everything.

Some of its reviews were negative, perhaps because the LP represented the tail end of a band that was a spent force after eight years of ups and downs. Then again, there are some fabulous moments, like Rockestra Theme, which bagged a Grammy, plus Spin It On, Getting Closer, Arrow Through Me and After the Ball/Million Miles.

There was a missed opportunity, though, with Goodnight Tonight, one of Wings’ last hits. Although it was recorded during the Back to the Egg sessions, it didn’t appear on the album, robbing the LP of the pop single it needed to take it over the edge.

What led to your joining Wings? Longtime Wings guitarist Denny Laine had a hand in it, right?

I was very active in London as a session guitarist in the mid-’70s. I was playing lead guitar on a TV show with David Essex. Denny was a guest, performing the Moody Blues hit Go Now! [Editor’s note: Laine was in the Moody Blues from 1964-66]. He liked my playing and recommended me to Paul and Linda McCartney.

What were Paul’s expectations of you going into the studio, and what do you think he liked about your playing?

The basic expectation was that we were forming a new incarnation of Wings and to think of it as a band. I think my versatility was an asset. My predecessors were fine rock players, but Paul was looking for a more comprehensive approach to the guitar.

What was the studio like, and what gear did you use?

We started Back to the Egg on the farm in Scotland, where the studio was basically a barn with a mobile recording truck. It was quite basic but functional.

My go-to electric guitars at the time were a mid-’70s Gibson Les Paul Custom, a ’63 Fender Strat and a mid-’70s maple-board Strat. For acoustics, I had a Martin D-28 and some Ovations. I had been using a Music Man amp, but we also had some small old Fenders and a Mesa/Boogie.

Paul is on the record as suggesting he wanted to record an up-tempo album influenced by things other than the previous Wings albums. Is that how you remember it?

The musical zeitgeist was changing, punk was in the air and new wave was around the corner. Our co-producer Chris Thomas was in between doing the Sex Pistols and the Pretenders.

What was it like putting together To You, Spin It On, Old Siam, Sir and Arrow Through Me?

The first tunes we recorded were To You, Spin It On and Old Siam, Sir. To You was interesting, as Paul played a Zemaitis acoustic bass on the track. For the solo, I was playing the ’63 Strat through the Mesa/Boogie.

Paul was in the control room manipulating an Eventide harmonizer while I was improvising, so I was hearing notes in the headphones that were transposed from what I was actually playing. That led me to play outside of the changes… weirdly satisfying.

The Spin It On solo was done in the control room with the same gear. Paul and I sat eye to eye, and I learned his strengths as a producer while he coaxed a punk-rockabilly-like solo out of me. Arrow Through Me had a whole different sensibility and was keyboard- and horn-driven.

How about Rockestra Theme, Winter Rose/Love Awake and The Broadcast?

Winter Rose was started in Scotland. I played an Ovation nylon-string direct with a pickup that alternated the strings left and right in the stereo spread. Love Awake was recorded in our second studio, which was a medieval castle [Lympne Castle in Kent]. I played bass when we cut the track, while Paul and Denny played acoustics.

I figured Paul would replace the bass, but he said he liked my part. When I rerecorded it, he knelt on the floor in front of me and gave me picking tips. It was pretty cool getting a bass lesson from Macca. I overdubbed the harmonic cascades near the end with an Ovation Adamas.

The Broadcast was also done at the castle. Paul played a Tele copy with a Gizmotron prototype, plusa Mellotron for strings. I played my ’70s Strat with a Roland pickup through an Arp Avatar guitar synth with a string-type patch. I used that setup on Reception, too, doubling the lead guitar with a horn patch.

We demoed Rockestra Theme at the castle but recorded it with the full Rockestra band in Studio Two at Abbey Road. That was quite a session – being in the guitar section with Denny Laine, Hank Marvin, David Gilmour and Pete Townshend.

And then there’s After the Ball, which has a brief outro solo made up of longer solos played by Denny, Paul and you.

Also done at the castle. I recall playing a Gibson ES-335 Dot, the same one that’s in the Goodnight Tonight music video. I forget which amp I used. That guitar also was on Baby’s Request – and that’s curious since I had a Gibson Super 400 [archtop], which would have been the more obvious choice. I think I played it through a 50-watt Hiwatt. The tone was right.

What did you think of Back to the Egg the first time you heard it?

I thought it turned out quite well – the fans liked it. Other than Rockestra Theme and a few other spots, Denny mostly played acoustic guitar and contributed to the backing vocals.

The sound of Paul, Linda and Denny singing together still gives me chills. In the 2026 Man on the Run documentary, the director, Morgan Neville, very effectively used some of the Back to the Egg tracks as underscore. Hearing the music in a Dolby Atmos mix made me want to hear the whole album that way.

Some of the reviews for Back to the Egg were negative, which is interesting because, as you said, fans tend to love it. How did the reviews affect everyone?

Not all the reviews were negative – just the ones Paul reacted to. It went platinum in the U.S. and was more successful than some other Wings projects. The album would likely have sold better if the hit single from that period, Goodnight Tonight, had been on it.

Why was Goodnight Tonight omitted?

The Beatles’ singles in the U.K. weren’t on the albums, and Paul had the notion of standalone singles giving the fans extra value. It didn’t really work the same way in the U.S., where labels depended on singles as the primary promotional tool.

I don’t know if he regretted not putting the single on the album. Goodnight Tonight and its B-side, Daytime Nighttime Suffering, were added to the CD release. Paul generally seems to move on to the next project without reflecting much on the previous releases.

Some fans also wonder why Denny Laine’s Weep for Love wasn’t included on the album.

It wasn’t recorded for Back to the Egg; the album was already finished. It was recorded at Lympne Castle, May 23, 1979, during the period we were filming the video special [also called Back to the Egg].

We had the mobile studio and did some extra recording on days we weren’t filming. Steve plays the percussion groove. Paul is playing the bass guitar with a drumstick. I played the tremolo electric guitar and both of the harmony solo parts.

How do you think the album stands up?

It occupies a unique spot in Paul’s artistic timeline – a slightly different dimension. [Laughs] I’m gratified. It’s nice to get some peer recognition, but the real satisfaction is reaching people with music.

Over the years, it’s been reevaluated and recognized on its own musical terms, especially among musicians and musical artists, and Rockestra Theme won the first Grammy awarded for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1980.

How do you view your time with Wings?

I look at it as getting my “master’s degree from McCartney University.” [Laughs] It was a great musical experience, an education in the business of music, plus it gave me a launching pad to develop the next phase of my life and career.

The Japanese bust was unfortunate [Editor’s note: McCartney was arrested in Tokyo in January 1980 for attempting to smuggle around 7.5 ounces of marijuana into Japan]. It functionally put an end to the touring band. Subsequently, Wings’ live version of Coming Up went to Number 1 in the U.S.

What advice would you offer a guitarist stepping into a similar situation?

For professional freelance players, be a musician – study the masters, take care of business and be on time and well-prepared for the gig. In the studio world, you never know what you might be called on to play. For performing artists, life on the road can be hard and, for solo performers, quite solitary. But it develops chops, style-refining opportunities and audience interaction.

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

On his second album, Wrong Kind of One, Birmingham, UK-based folk singer-songwriter Amit Dattani is taking listeners deep inside the heart of Americana.

Songs such as Steady The Boat, Gathering Acorns and One Too Many Mornings are brimming with a sense of soul-baring honesty, almost like a musical confession, one where the guitar tones are every bit as exquisite as the voice accompanying them.

Fingerstyle Fan

Though he grew up listening to blues masters such as Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy, it was the fingerstyle approach of Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten that helped guide Amit towards the musical style he would pursue.

“Hearing them cover so many bases with their fingers blew my mind wide open,” he says. “It was magic. I got pretty obsessed with trying to work out how the heck they managed it, spending weeks and months working on my right hand – learning how to syncopate, mute and emphasise different notes.”

Open Approach

This led to Amit discovering the likes of Kelly Joe Phelps and Paul Curreri, and looking deeper into their techniques. “That’s when I got into open tunings,” he continues, “as well as wrapping your thumb over the top of the neck to grab those lower strings, giving more freedom to my fingers. I was amazed by how they were able to merge voice and guitar in such a unique way.

“Now I listen to folks like Ali Farka Touré, Joseph Spence and contemporary players like Kris Drever or John Doyle. I’m always interested in new picking patterns and ways to express yourself through guitar in ways that best serve a song.”

Custom Creativity

On his latest recordings, Amit can be heard playing his custom Hammett Guitar Co Astro Strat.

“It’s a hollowbody electric fashioned after the old Harmony Stratotones,” he says. “I’d always been an acoustic player. In 2018, I got diagnosed with a genetic degenerative nerve condition that impacts my hands and my feet. Long story short, the prognosis was I’d likely have two years of playing left in me before the batteries in my hands ran out.

“I got talking to Pat Hammett and we hatched a plan to create a custom electric with lower string tension and a flatter angle for my picking hand, plus super-wide string spacing. It has single-handedly helped me carry on playing.”

Electric Connection

The album was recorded live with Steph Sanders on drums. “I plugged my Astro Strat into a Tone King Imperial amp,” Amit says. “Stepping into the electric space as a fingerstyle acoustic player has been so fun. Everything was in straight takes with my incredible drummer Steph.

“I find her musicality so inspiring. I wanted to make an album that sounded like the stuff I listened to as a kid – stripped back, live and all about the energy and performance. It’s all about connection between the folks in that room in that moment.”

Under the Thumb

A Rory Gallagher DVD inspired Amit to give thumbpicks and fingerpicks a try.

“He was on an old National and I just loved the sound,” Amit says. “By then I was already sort of hybrid picking with a plectrum and using my middle and ring finger to pick melodies, so the transition to a thumbpick felt natural. I find using it with fingerpicks helps me to play cleaner and more articulately.

“The main thing for me is making sure the thumbpick blade is tiny. I file it right down so it’s more like an extension to my thumbnail. I would recommend experimenting lots and making sure it’s on tight – I once had one fly off mid-concert before, which was not fun.”

Amit picks his favourite guitar moments on Wrong Kind Of One…

“There’s a semi-improvised take on the hymn Just a Closer Walk With Thee that felt super emotional to record. And the song Now I Can Play On is an ode to my guitar and literally being able to play on.

“It makes me smile because I can sort of hear the joy I’m feeling from being able to play along to Steph’s drums in full flow. The hardest song to play is the title track. It’s a pretty detailed picking pattern, and depending on what kind of day my hands are having, it can be tricky to keep up.”

• Wrong Kind of One is self-released and out now. Get it at the official Amit Dattani website.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Drowning Pool’s juggernaut single Bodies was released on May 14, 2001. The debut single from the Texan metal mob quickly made its presence known to hard rock fans around the world, and changed the lives of the four musicians who recorded it.

Their signature brand of nu-metal placed equal emphasis on heavy groove and melody. For guitarist C.J. Pierce, who wrote the iconic riff, it was a case of combining the Mardi Gras music that soundtracked his childhood with the distortion and intensity he fell in love with as a teenager, in order to create something joyful and spirited.

This is Pierce’s story of the song that filled the floor of almost every metal club across the globe and become an anthem for a generation.

A house in New Orleans

I grew up in New Orleans, surrounded by jazz and funk. One of my first loves was funk – stuff by James Brown and The Meters. Later on the Red Hot Chili Peppers came out, and John Frusciante was a huge influence on me.

Then I got into Testament. Alex Skolnick is one of my favorite guitarists of all time, so that was my journey from funk into thrash. I’ve met him at the NAMM conventions. I’m always nervous – like, “Hello Mr. Skolnick, so nice to meet you!”

Then you have players like Nuno Bettencourt who mix heavy with funky. Faith No More were huge for me. When we started, Angel Dust was an album every single member loved.

I was doing a lot of electrical work during the early ’90s. I’d get home and rock out on my guitar. I still have the four-track tape with the first version of the riff. You’d be surprised; everything on it, including Bodies, was in a straight-up funk style.

The song carried on evolving when me and [drummer] Mike Luce moved to Dallas and joined-up with Stevie Benton [bass]. Our original singer Dave Williams’ voice was the icing on the cake. When he came in, he added more heavy. There was more of a Pantera influence coming through.

In the beginning we used to count to eight. In the studio we cut it down to four. There was also some wacky Mike Patton-style stuff that Dave used to do – some local people might still have that demo version.

Dive bombs

When we started out as a local band we didn’t have many fans. We had friends who wanted to stage dive, but nobody would catch them. They would literally hit the floor, which is how we came up with the lyrics.

I remember drinking a couple of Coors Lights and Jägermeister shots then trying to write a good rock song while having fun with music and lyrics. I wasn’t trying to be the best guitar player or songwriter in the world; I just wanted to create something fun. I had six strings and definitely had three of them figured out. In the end that was good enough!

The song is in drop C. Maybe it wouldn’t have sounded as big in standard or regular drop D. Lower tunings add that bottom end and thickness. I currently use 13-65 gauge strings, but for the recording it would have been 12-60.

We tracked Bodies at NRG Studios with Jay Baumgardner. There was this modded Marshall JCM800 head and a black Les Paul that James Hetfield from Metallica had recorded with. We turned that shit up way loud and just went for it.

That’s been my setup ever since. I still swear by Marshalls – they’ve always been a big part of my rig. They have such a wide range. Turn any knob and the tone will change a lot. Other amps don’t do that as much.

You can have five people play the same rig and it’ll sound different, because these amps let you hear the player. Marshalls are just the universal rock amp for me. I didn’t need any overdrive pedals for the recording; I just went straight in.

Break stuff

The first time we played it live was at Zeppelin’s in Metairie. My mom was at the show and there was such a vibe. I figured if she liked the song, then it must be cool. Now it doesn’t matter if there’s four people or 4,000 people – everyone goes nuts. It’s not really about the band, it’s purely about the music. The pit becomes like a tornado.

One time someone was crowdsurfing and threw out their prosthetic leg for me to sign! Another time we saw a guy crowdsurfing in his wheelchair – it got totally destroyed. The audience threw all the pieces on stage and we had to call the security to help him out. Luckily nobody got hurt.

Crazy things happen when we play this song. One time we played it outdoors where they’d just put new grass down. People started throwing chunks everywhere. By the end of the song it had all ended up on stage. I swear we didn’t incite that!

Don’t get me wrong

Bodies has been quite misinterpreted. It’s about being in the pit of a rock show and helping your friends get back up. So the idea of our music being used for anything negative – especially torturing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay – is very strange to us. We didn’t want that to happen. We still don’t know if it did even happen; it might have been a hearsay thing. I jokingly tell everyone that I torture people every day when I pick up my guitar!

Seriously though, music should be a positive thing, so we had to hit this on the head and explain that it’s a moshpit anthem. It’s definitely not about killing people. I don’t mind it being used in sports – you’ll hear it at wrestling events. I’ve heard it in movies and on soundtracks. That’s all great. The torture thing is terrible. It never made any sense to me.

A 25-year rollercoaster ride

I couldn’t have imagined how far this song would end up taking us. But I guess thinking back to that first live performance, we could tell something magical was happening. Our lives changed pretty fast once the single came out and went straight to MTV.

We were the last band added to Ozzfest 2001, going on stage at 10am every morning. They’d open the gate, everybody would come running to the stage and then we’d start playing Bodies. I remember seeing Tony Iommi watching from the side of the stage.

We ended up playing shows with Korn, Rob Zombie, Alice In Chains and Limp Bizkit. I try to be cool when I meet my heroes, but I’m screaming in the back of my head. We even ended up working with Nikki Sixx on some songs.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride. A lot of great things happened in the first two years of this band. To get to that level and still be touring 25 years later is crazy. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush I get when I come off stage after playing Bodies. It takes hours to come back down every night.

• Drowning Pool tour the US throughout October.

Fingerstyle acoustic guitar is a hard game. It’s possibly the most exposed, intricate form of guitar to perform in front of an audience. There’s no safety net, no band to carry some of the weight of expectation or mask mistakes. So it’s unsurprising that Pierre Bensusan has spent a fair bit of time thinking about the deep questions of what connects a guitarist to an audience and what conjures magic from the thin air of solo performance.

Half a century on from the start of his career with the brilliant folk album Pres De Paris, Pierre believes that summoning perfect poise and concentration when playing guitar are hard disciplines to master – but that it is the duty of every guitarist to try to let nerves and ego fall by the wayside when you play, so the music can truly and fully come to life.

As he sits down to a cup of coffee in the Guitarist studio – he didn’t sleep well the night before – Pierre says that the mundane cares of daily life are a recurrent enemy to what a touring musician can achieve on stage, if you let them be.

“I guess this is the work,” he reflects. “To travel, to have to deal with all the aggravation of being away from home. Having to go through all kinds of little things, such as driving long distances, parking, dealing with aggravations and stuff, in order to be in a venue and play music for people.

“And when people come, of course, you give your best – you have to be at your top every time, and so you cannot let any grain of sand come and destabilise this,” he says.

“So, for me, everything else is just building momentum for that to happen. Whatever happens, it has to be recycled and transformed into pure energy…. touring life is full of so many little details, which are absolutely nothing to do with a pure rendition of the music when it happens. And yet it feels like if you succeed well to go through all of those, the music is going to be better.”

As a solo fingerstyle guitarist, do you think you have to be uniquely present and focused on your performance in a way that might not be necessary in a band?

I don’t know. I think you have to be present. You play one note, whatever you do… even if you play in a band, you have to be present. You have to be present listening to what other people play, how they interact with the music, how they expect you to interact with it… So I think presence is the key. If you are not present, you lean towards chaos as soon as you start thinking about something – that’s it, you’re no longer in the moment.

But when you are a solo performer, whatever the instrument, it is even more crucial [for you to be present in the moment]. Because it’s only you who is making this music. This music needs 200 per cent of you. But the balance is extremely subtle between being present but not being overwhelmingly present.

If you are too present and you make yourself too important, you hide the music. So, for me, a musician serves an intention, serves a continuum, serves a storytelling through music. And, of course, you need to be listening carefully to what you play.

In fact, you need to be a listener – a big-time listener. There is not much difference between you listening and the person in front [in the audience] listening. We are two listeners – and the person listening is also very creative. Because, in fact, when I play for myself, I play for myself; there is only me and the music.

But when we are together [as performer and audience] we share this intimacy, I hear the music and I understand that it’s far more, it’s going much further than just my moves to make that music happen. You should never play without listening to what you play – there is no reason why you should play if you don’t listen. What’s the point?

But all my moves, I look at them with a microscope before each sequence, the geography of where my fingers and hands are on my fretboard. The geography of my right hand touching the strings, where they are, how they touch…

All those little things can be slightly nuanced to make a sound richer by just where you touch, how you work on the sustain of a note, how you express that note.

Do you use vibrato? Or do you have the note just stand straight? Because no vibrato is also an effect – too much vibrato is a way to hide something, and it’s too much sometimes. So the effects need to remain effects, but something neutral with no vibrato is also very beautiful.

So this is a thing, you know. How do you make the music stay and then be shared by people without intruding as an ego? And so I think when you play for people, this is when you understand a lot of those things; you understand them better than when you play for yourself.

For me, music needs the experience of being shared to understand what it takes to go from you to another person – to create that bond without intruding. And so that’s why playing for people is part of my progression and evolution. I’ve learned so much.

And also, when you play for yourself, you can stop any time. When you’re recording in the studio, you can stop any time. And to know that you can stop already dictates something in the dynamic. But when you’re on stage, the only reason that I will stop will be because my guitar is so out of tune that I have to stop and tune. But now I stop between each song and I tune my guitar again, and I take the time to tune before each song.

In this era of on-demand digital entertainment, it’s easy to forget that an audience contributes directly to a live performance, through their engagement and emotional response; it’s not just a passive thing.

People are part of the music. In fact, they make the music. They let this music enter and they start to process what they hear, so they take advantage of the person playing to start creating something, and so the music becomes a pretext to get to a state of being that is going to allow this person to open up completely.

So, you know, the beginning of a concert is very important. People come and they are not aligned [with the performance] at first. They come from their reality, from work or whatever, they talk with friends, and then the music starts. They need time to be receptive.

All of that is important, especially nowadays with artificial intelligence. What’s the point to do something perfect if it’s made by a machine, right? Why should I feel anything? But this is a live performance, it is still one of the very last things where people are people – people come to see and they get what they see, it’s all there. There are no secrets, nothing hidden. What you hear is what you see, and it’s made for you.

It’s like a cooking recipe by a chef who is working very hard for all the taste to be there for the people who are going to appreciate the meal, to really have the best possible [experience] – and that’s why I didn’t feel those 51 years go by.

Each concert is very different for me and I do play notes that… try to capture what I hear at the moment, and I really try to play what I hear. It’s not always the case. Sometimes I go back to what I know for security, and I try to enhance that in the most beautiful way possible. But when I can incarnate what I hear, this is when I really am the happiest man.

When playing solo fingerstyle guitar, it’s really hard not to let conscious thoughts intrude as you play – the part of your brain that vocalises self-criticism if you scuff a note or play something slightly wrong can really upset the flow.

That thought could lead to losing it. To shut the mind from thinking… this is something that every one of us is trying to [achieve]. How do we stop thinking, even when we go to bed? How do we stop thinking and let sleep come? The mind is always late… the attention, the reaction are, in fact, the instant thing.

So when we play there is no time for thinking. The thinking comes before, maybe like when you are away from your instrument and you start imagining the music. I don’t even know if it’s a thought or if it is a very active mental vision, not even mental, but something you hear inside of you. It’s not mute, it’s very rich, you know?

I do compose a lot by just imagining music and by imagining where that music could go… and this is the beginning, for me, of the creative and compositional process: that I identify a journey and then when I take my guitar, I go back to that journey and try to make it on the guitar – to make it playable.

And so if I have an idea I will record it or I will write it down in [such] a way that it can be played. But all my ideas have to be there as well – and it also has to be doable physically. It has to be playable. Very often I end up writing music that I have no idea how to play. But I think that technique [when used properly] becomes completely invisible. The technique is a tool, so you need a lot of technique, you need a lot of expertise, you need a lot of ability to make that technique become invisible, in order to just let the music be…

And I’m sometimes thinking, ‘Is there an artificial intelligence that could just listen to my thoughts and put them on paper, so I can hear them?’ In fact, no. It’s going to be my work – that’s what is going to make it happen, all my short lifetime. So there is no time to lose, really. Especially now, 51 years on, I need to see what is essential. I cannot lose time.

You’re known for pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the DADGAD tuning. How did you first discover it?

Well, I mean, I found it on my own when I was 13 or 14 – I played guitar before in standard tuning and sang and even wrote lyrics and songs.

When I found DADGAD, it was a time when I started to listen to Alan Stivell playing the harp and then from him I went to listen to Irish music but also British folk music, Steeleye Span, Fairport, Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan, Nic Jones. Some of my friends were into Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, but I also played bluegrass – and I loved Doc Watson and Joan Baez and Dylan and Cat Stevens and Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell.

I’m self-taught, so I was free. And I like that freedom; I don’t like people to tell me what I should do. But I learned [the value of taking] advice later in my life. Can you help me? Can you inspire me? What is the next move? And so, of course, that’s different… but then I came from piano and I already had a lot of information that helped me to really love music.

I knew from a very early age that my life was going to be in music, since I was 12 years old. I knew that I would be playing full-time, so I didn’t deviate. And today I’m just on the same road that I [embarked on] when I was six, when I started to play piano.

No-one told me, ‘Oh no, you should not play in different tunings,’ you know? Some self-taught guys did it and they were playing beautiful stuff that was very interesting. For me, it was always obvious that I should try different tunings.

There was a Martin Carthy tuning, which I tried, and I even played a couple things with that tuning, but after a while I found DADGAD and it spoke to my North African roots, my Jewish roots… you know, it opens things. And that taught me especially to work on melodies or phrasing without having to worry about chords because of the three Ds – the drone and everything – so that really spoke to me.

It’s like a relationship. You meet someone and at the very beginning you see what is obvious. But what is less obvious, you will have to work hard [to reveal].

You will have to really want to deepen that relationship. Some people like to stay at the surface, but they are afraid to deepen things because deepening means to put yourself in danger. And I think some people like to play because they are creating a zone of comfort, and it’s great. We need to reach that zone – but that zone of comfort is very short, it is a very short pleasure, in fact.

It doesn’t last long and so you always go from one zone to another zone to another zone, and in order to go from one zone to next, you have to study. I think studying is beautiful, you know? Studying means deepening, to go into the core of things, into the heart of the things. I cannot explain where music comes from. I don’t explain where my inspiration comes from. I have no idea. I haven’t learned it. I’m listening, and I’m very grateful and I’m lucky – but that means a lot of responsibility and a lot of work.

To go back to your question about guitar technique, I never try to impress people. I try to tell a story with sound and that story requires dynamics, and so I can look at music with a microscope to see how those dynamics work, and it requires a lot of introspection on the technique – that I need to do this, or I need to touch the guitar like that – and then I expand my technique and my vocabulary every time I’m confronted with a technicality that I do not master, and there are a lot of those. I try to understand what it takes and I confront myself, and I win because there is no choice.

• Azwan is available on MVD Audio
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
  

In the ’90s, Joe Satriani had already spent roughly a decade as one of the buzziest virtuosos in the guitar world, and with that privilege comes a long list of esteemed artists vying to collaborate. And on his sixth studio album, simply titled Joe Satriani and released in 1995, Satch very nearly ended up with Mick Jagger on his record.

He told the tale to Guitar World in 1996: “While I was doing some early sessions for the record with Jeff Campitelli [Satriani’s longtime drummer] and John Cuniberti [recording engineer and producer], the Stones came to town to play at Oakland Stadium.

“Pierre [deBeauport, the Stones' guitar technician] called us up and said, ‘Why don't you guys come over to the stadium and hang out a while?’ So we were sitting backstage in the Voodoo Lounge [tour], and Mick and I started talking.”

That was when Jagger offered his harmonica services.

“He said, casually, ‘Oh, Joe, if you want some harp playing on your record, just give me a call. I'll be in the States for a while, and I'll gladly do some harp tracks for you.’”

Satch’s original idea was to have him play on the tracks Cool #9 and Luminous Flesh Giants, but after a while, he realized that those songs weren’t “really suited for harmonica.”

“So then I wrote S.M.F. specifically for Mick to play on. We recorded an ADAT [Alesis Digital Audio Tape] demo and sent it off to him in South America or someplace. I think he was in Australia before he got to doing it and sent the tape back.”

However, the plan changed yet again when record producer Glyn Johns got on board. “When we were recording S.M.F., I told Glyn that there was this harp part that Mick Jagger was going to do. But Glyn said, ‘Well, why don't you just play it?’ I'd done things like that on The Extremist tour – playing harmonica live while playing guitar.

“We tried it, and it worked out fine. So by the time we heard the ADAT of the demo with Mick on it, we had this new live version which we liked much better,” he added sheepishly. “I haven't told Mick yet. Now I have to call up Mick Jagger and say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

As he sums it up, “A very embarrassing situation.”

George Thorogood’s knack for popularizing older songs by blues greats – coupled with his trademark brand of high-energy boogie blues – has made his music a radio mainstay for the past couple of decades or so.

And, much like his inextricable link to American rock radio, Thorogood has been associated with his go-to hollow-body electric guitar, the Gibson ES-125, since the early ’70s.

A week before his first gig with what would become the touring behemoth, the Delaware Destroyers – later, the Destroyers – Thorogood headed to a pawn shop to buy the guitar model that would go on to accompany him throughout his career.

“I’d been traveling around the country as an acoustic street musician,” Thorogood recounts on his official website. “I was back home for my sister’s wedding, and Jeff booked the gig without telling me.”

Speaking more about his early days to Guitar World, Thorogood describes what led him to the ES-125: “I was broke. I only had $200, and we booked a gig, and there was this guitar at a pawn shop – a $200 Gibson that had been there for years. So, I bought it, and it worked because I was always playing acoustics.

“And in those days, they called those guitars [the ES-125] ‘semi-acoustic.’ And the Beatles played guitars like that, and so did Keith Richards. I thought, ‘If it’s good enough for The Beatles and The Stones, it’s good enough for George.’"

The rest, as they say, is history, though Thorogood can now be seen mostly playing Epiphones – a decision born out of necessity.

“I’m using a custom-made Epiphone archtop, single cutaway design, just like my Gibson [ES]-125 that I used to play, because I wore them out,” he explains. “The only guitar that I could ever play was the 125, and I wore them out so bad; it was costing thousands of dollars to repair them.

“And they stopped making them in like 1970, so I was ready to stop playing altogether. And then, our manager got together with Epiphone, and they donated me like 10 Epiphone guitars. 10 of them!

“I said, ‘Wow…’ and they started working on them to make the sound right. So, that’s what I’m using these days.”

As for how his new Epiphone compares to his vintage Gibson, Thorogood – with the help of some baseball jargon – admits he still prefers his trusty Gibson.

“There’s no comparison. It’s [the Epiphone] like hitting a baseball into the gap, and you have to slide into second [base] with a double. The other thing [the Gibson] is like hitting a ball into the upper deck,” he adds with a laugh.

This interview shouldn’t be happening. He’s pulverized our ears since the mid ’80s in such anvil-heavy operations as Napalm Death and Godflesh – but most media requests to Justin Broadrick, the reclusive godfather of industrial-metal, are met with silence. Forget about Zoom, suggests his press officer, but try emailing a few questions about a catalog whose shuddering highlights have influenced Nine Inch Nails, Metallica and more.

Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, we get the word: Broadrick is willing to talk. And how: in a world of say-nothing, media-trained stars, the Birmingham-born songwriter is a bucking bronco of an interviewee, daring you to interject in his bitingly funny, brutally honest five-minute screeds.

And while Godflesh's penultimate album, Decay, is the hook, Broadrick – who attributes his “hyper” personality to a late-life autism diagnosis – is happy to drag us all over the map of his seminal four-decade career.

You don’t normally do phone interviews. We appreciate you doing this one.

I’ve just always hated speaking on the phone. It’s fucking horrible. I mean, the best of people get anxiety about it.

Do you remember the moment you knew you wanted to play guitar?

It was prompted by a photograph in Sounds magazine of Micky Geggus from the Cockney Rejects. They were a pretty remedial punk-rock band. But he was stripped to the waist, he had a really gnarly-looking face, and he was holding a barre chord on, like, a Gibson SG. That photo just captured me. I wanted to know how to play that chord.

When you first picked up the guitar, was it a toy, a weapon, a comfort blanket?

All of those things. Even though I come from a poor council estate in Birmingham, I had a stepfather who played a Strat, which he couldn’t really afford. He barely spoke, my stepdad. In hindsight, he was clearly autistic himself. But he was a brilliant guitarist and painter.

He taught my mum to play bass and they were in a short-lived but somewhat legendary punk band called Anti-Social. He showed me how to play this chord. I ran it up the neck and I was like, “Wow, I can play Discharge riffs!” He tried to say, “I can teach you more,” but I was like, “Nah, I don’t need to know anything else!”

Punk rock was your founding influence?

The record that got me straight away was the first Stranglers album [1977’s Rattus Norvegicus]. JJ Burnel’s bass was the lead instrument, which was a life-changing thing for me – that’s why the bass in Godflesh sounds like it does. I was buying any seven-inch single I could get, even though we had no money, because we were just “dole-dwellers” or whatever.

What emotional impact did punk have?

I was a frail, scared kid. At my infant school and junior school, I couldn’t speak to people. I was mute; I was isolated – I couldn’t deal with anything. My sensory shit is off the charts. So I often say that punk saved my life, because it got me out of my ultra-introspective autistic state.

At my first year of senior school in 1980, where I would have normally been bullied the fuck out of, I went armed with all these punk rock records. And these tough kids who’d have kicked the shit out of me for being a fucking freak, I would speak to, because they were into punk rock too. It was a survival thing.

How did your own music-making progress?

I was bought my first cassette recorder when I was nine. I started recording myself on any instrument I could pick up, just making a fucking noise. I was doing these shit punk demos with guitar and my stepdad’s really basic drum machine. So I was literally already a one-man band at 11 years old.

You played guitar on Napalm Death’s 1987 grindcore classic, Scum, then joined Head of David still aged 17.

In Head of David I was drumming, but also writing guitar and bass parts. When we did Dustbowl [1988] I was the only guy who worked on the mixes with Steve Albini – the rest of the band had given up by that time. They kicked me out because I was writing what they called “noisy bastard music.” They basically left me at a bus stop.

But I was already writing these grinding, evil basslines, dissonant guitars, beats that I wanted to crush with. I was living with Ben Green [Godflesh bassist] at the time. So I was like, “I want to use these songs,” and that was the genesis of the first Godflesh album.

What was your approach to the Godflesh material?

For a start, I wanted to tune everything down as far as possible. I wanted this repulsive sound – I wanted it to be an expression of pain by going as low as possible, making a terrifying sound, you know? As a scared little kid who was terrified of everything, it was my way of communicating that horror. I wanted to make fucking terrifying music, in any which way I could. Filthy, dirty, mechanized but organic painful fucking music.

What gear did you use to create that?

Shitty stuff, back then. The first two Godflesh albums was the same Westone ST guitar I used on Scum. I've still got it now in my studio. I was just using junk prior to that, from second-hand shops. The Westone had a tremolo arm, which I used a lot on Godflesh’s debut mini album and Streetcleaner [1989].

I was using a shitty amp borrowed off some kid who lived on the street. An HM-2 pedal, a cheap Boss delay, half-broke cables – council estate equipment, basically. After that, the band started earning money, so I got a Strat. And my wish was always to use what I've been using since 1990: a Marshall JCM800 and 4x12 Marshall speaker.

By the early ’90s Godflesh were a pretty big deal. Did you have the personality type to cope with being a well-known musician?

Not at all. My fantasy of expressing myself that began when I was eight years old – by the time I started getting on stages, I was like, “This is fucking horrible!” The whole thing was so overwhelming that the only way I could get by was with alcohol and whatever substances would nullify the experience.

I mean, I stopped proper touring almost 20 years ago. At most I do six shows in a row, and that’s it. I will not tour because I can’t fucking stand it. I just go into self-destruct. Even now, every time I’ve got a show, the lead-up is utter distress for me. I don’t want to leave the house. I don’t want to leave my things. I don’t want to be in unpredictable situations with unpredictable people.

Luckily I jacked the alcohol years ago. Now it’s all just medication. I used to be brought onto a plane, pissed out of my mind. Now I take benzos to fly.

Godflesh had a US tour around the turn of the millennium that you canceled. What happened there?

Ben had already left the band, so the band had changed – it felt like it had run away from me. The day of flying out to a seven-week tour in America, having just done two months in Europe, I knew, “The only way I’m getting through this is by alcohol.”

Every time I was on tour I’d turn into an alcoholic. Back then, I couldn’t communicate it to people. I’d tell them: “Touring is a fucking major problem for me,” and they’d say, “Well, you get onstage, you play your music. What’s the fucking problem?” You were bullied into everything, by labels, by everyone.

The day I was meant to leave for that tour, I hadn’t slept for three days, I was having panic attacks, and I was lying in my bed, paralyzed, just crying. I was like, “I can’t fucking do this anymore. If I’ve got to keep doing these tours, I’m going to end up dead by the end of the next one. So for the sake of self-preservation, I’m finishing Godflesh right now.” On the day of the fucking tour. And I tell you what – I was made to pay for that.

What were the repercussions?

The tour had no insurance, so everyone came to me for compensation, and I was fucking broke. It took two years for me to financially recover. I had to get credit cards to pay off credit cards; you know, that shit. I even had death threats from the tour bus company. He got me on the phone and said, “I am a fucking Vietnam vet. I know people in your fucking area. If you don’t pay me within two weeks, I wouldn’t like to say what’s gonna happen to you.”

It got so out of hand. So for two years I had zero money. I had to remortgage my house three times. It was terrible. Luckily, while Godflesh was gone, I was working on material that became the first Jesu album. My whole experience of this shit went straight into that.

Tell us about your recent collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers.

I’m on Bobby and the hidden track Best Dressed. The collaboration was nothing to do with Godflesh. People in the media wanted to run with, ‘Godflesh man works with Phoebe Bridgers!’ I was really upset, because I’m not there because of Godflesh.

On the album I’m credited as Justin Broadrick/Jesu. Phoebe doesn’t even know Godflesh. She’s got no fucking interest. But she loves Jesu. She knows every fucking song. She was like, “You do something that people in melancholy music don’t do, and it's the heavy factor. I’ve got to get you in there, fucking doing that.”

Bobby sounds great – Best Dressed is even better, though. It’s slower; even more melancholy. It's a sad fucking track, man. It’s much more droney, played on an ultra-low-tuned eight-string guitar. You know, loads of minors, open strings, open tunings, shit like that.

Decay has some seismic guitar moments, from Fodder to Feral Colony. How did you approach them?

My main guitar on the album was a seven-string Schecter Hellraiser Hybrid. But ultimately, the guitar is just a tool to me. I probably spend more time on computers, taking my guitar and chopping it up, than I do physically making the music.

On Decay I used the guitar sparingly for hyper-focused moments. It’s really quick shit that I do with guitar on this album; I don’t sit there and jam. I don’t rehearse. I don’t do that shit.

Decay is supposedly Godflesh’s penultimate release. Why stop?

I can’t perform this music live. I had surgery for a debilitating hernia, and if I shout like that again I’m going to break my abdomen wall. I had a six-and-a-half inch incision and really complex surgery. It’s fucking brutal, man.

All that shouting I do with Godflesh is all rooted from my abdomen, you know? It’s so physical and I don’t fake anything. I can’t go through the motions. When I get on a stage, it’s got to feel like this is the end – it’s the last performance I’m ever going to do, and I could fucking die right now.

So what’s next for you?

Jesu can do anything because it’s essentially shoegaze metal, so I don’t have to shout or move much onstage. I’ve got my heavy electronic project, JK Flesh. The last Godflesh album will come out, then I've got my new project, White Light District. It’s not a Godflesh replacement. It’s heavy and guitar-oriented, but more all-encompassing.

I was tiring somewhat of the Godflesh template. I wanted to step outside of guitar/bass/drum machine and samples; it’s too restrictive now. Obviously I’m fucking autistic, so I’m entirely ritualized and entirely restricted – but the Godflesh template, I’m starting to tire of it.

I want to step outside of it, make heavy, ugly music that isn’t written whatsoever to perform live. I want it to be cinematic and really fucking ugly. Way uglier than Godflesh. Really terrifying. A massive wall of sound.

Looking back over your career, do you have a theory on why you're so productive?

Oh, absolutely: it’s my autism. I never knew about any of this shit – why I operate like I do – until I got diagnosed. I’ve been surrounded by people all my life who have always questioned it. Like, “How are you so prolific?”

It’s no coincidence that any artists who are close to being as prolific as me seem to be spectrum-dwellers themselves. It’s singular, hyper-focused obsessive behavior – and a bludgeoning need to express myself.

• Decay is out now.

It’s been 13 years since Guitarist stood onstage with Eric Johnson for a tour of his rig. And we muse that it had probably seen some changes since that time.

“Not as many as you’d think,” he says with a laugh, explaining that he actually ships his USA rig across to Europe, rather than hiring backline on this side of the Atlantic.

“Yeah, it’s pretty extravagant,” he continues. “I’m going to go home broke because I shipped everything over here, so I’ll be eating bread and cheese for the next year or two, but that’s okay, at least I’ll have my sound, I guess.”

Known for his connoisseur-level guitar tone, we were surprised to find that the actual sum of parts doesn’t comprise anything that might be described as ‘exotica’. We were even more surprised to find that Eric has been experimenting with digital amps. But the 21st century hasn’t quite found its way onstage with the Tonemeister General quite yet…

Could you give us a guided tour of your live rig?

I use three different sounds: the guitar goes into two A/B boxes; the first A/B selects whether it’s going to be lead or it’s going to be a choice of rhythms. So it comes out for the lead, goes into a wah-wah, and then it goes over to an Echoplex and a Tube Driver, and it comes out of that and goes into a Marshall [JMP] head connected to the bottom [Marshall] cabinet. I can then switch to a second A/B box, which will give me a choice of rhythm.

The first is a clean rhythm, which goes into a loop box for the Deluxe Memory Man, which goes into another Echoplex and a TC Stereo Chorus. That goes into two [Fender] Deluxe Reverbs.

If I choose the other type of rhythm, I can switch this second A/B box and get a dirtier rhythm, which goes into an [Ibanez TS808] Tube Screamer, an [Arbiter] Fuzz Face, and an MXR Digital Delay. That goes into a Two Rock Classic Reverb amplifier, which goes into the top Marshall cabinet.

So it’s really just a matter of having three different sounds: one clean stereo rhythm, one dirty rhythm with fuzz, or a lead with the tube overdrive. Pretty much the same as it’s been for years, although the particular amps might change, but the general structure and architecture stays the same.

A lot of players have a single amp setup and use pedals for a clean boost, crunch and a lead sound. When did you discover the three-amp system worked for you?

Well, one thing is the gain structure of the amps. I was able to get a better lead tone out of a high gain or a higher gain amp like a Marshall. And I was able to get a better rhythm tone out of a lower gain amp like a Fender.

Also it’s the way the tone controls work on the amp. The tone controls are in a different place in the schematic on a Marshall than they are on a [Fender] black-panel, so it affects the sound.

So to try to get that clean country tone, or Wind Cries Mary kind of tone, the black-panel Fender works for that. But the Marshall works better for that blues-rock thing, so I just had to part it out because I could never figure out a way to make it work just using one amp and getting all those sounds. I wish I could do that. I think they actually call that the Neural DSP [Quad Cortex], don’t they?

Have you experimented with digital amps?

A little bit, yeah. The Tone Master by Fender and the Neural [Quad Cortex]. Still messing with it. I’m trying to decide whether to try to replicate my sound or to just go with it in a different sonic direction. I think at this juncture it seems that its strength is to use it as its own tool instead of trying to make it sound exactly like a vintage amplifier, you know?

What about guitars?

I just use my ’54 Strat, and I have one of my EJ rosewood [fingerboard] Stratocasters with me. But the Strat is the main thing I use for most of the show. I also brought a Custom Shop Les Paul along for a few songs.

Do you have very specific setup requirements for your Strats?

I like the fretboard a little flatter with bigger frets, and I hook [the lower] tone control up to the bridge pickup. The neck and middle are the old pickups, but I replaced the bridge pickup with a HS2 DiMarzio. But I don’t hook up the bottom coil, I just leave it single coil, so it has a little bit more gain than a regular Fender pickup. The action is not too low, but kind of low; so that it doesn’t fret out, you know?

It’s been refinished and [the neck] was already flattened before I got it, which is perfect because nowadays you don’t want to touch it anymore. But in the old days it didn’t matter. I mean, I used to find [’50s Strats] for 400 bucks and you could do whatever you wanted. But it’s kind of become a stigma now. This is the only ’54 I have and it’s a good guitar, although it’s not particularly original, but it does the job.

What about the profile of the neck? Is it a soft V?

“It’s not too sharp, which I like. It’s kind of rounded, that’s really my favourite neck. They’re smaller than they were in the later ’50s, but they’re thicker and rounded, which I find to be kind of nice because with the smaller neck you can do different [chord] voicings and stuff like that.

What gauge of strings do you use on your Strat?

I just use a stock 10 through 46: 0.010, 0.013, 0.017, 0.026, 0.036, 0.046. I was using a little bit thicker [gauge] but it kind of got to where I thought these were more balanced.

You actually started on piano. How do you think that influenced your guitar playing?

It was in a pretty major way because I kind of assimilated all the nuances and technique of piano and so when I started guitar, I wanted to get those chord voicings. So it’s almost like your principal language in a way, whether you got real good at it or not, you think that way, and so I transferred that to guitar, and it helped me not be too myopic about how I looked at chord voicings or tone.

I like the sound of the piano because it’s a lot of note and not a lot of attack. Usually on a nice piano, and similarly with some of my favourite guitar players, there wasn’t a lot of noise or attack. It was just the blooming of the note, like Wes Montgomery, or in particular steel-guitar players. They get this sound where it just jumps out because of their picking.

Do you think it’s true that guitar players learn chords and scales using patterns or diagrams, whereas a keyboard player would learn the same information from a more musical perspective – note names, key signatures and so on?

That’s true, and I think most guitar players are still somewhat trapped in patterns. But I think the less you are, the better, obviously. We’re all trying to get out of that and become more liquid and just be able to play melodically.

When I started playing guitar and didn’t know how to play, one of the first things I did was teach myself by sitting at the piano with the guitar in my hand and taking the notes and moving them over [to the guitar].

So what I had to do with this strange way of learning guitar was learn all the notes on all the frets; that’s one of the first things I did. And I think it helps if you look at a string on a fret, and you immediately know what note it is. So that you’re not so bound by those patterns.

Guitarists can find it very difficult to break away from shapes and patterns…

One of the first things [to do] is just sit down and learn – to where you [can do it] without thinking – to look at any fret on any string and know what note it is. It is a daunting task, but it’s totally doable. And then, once you get it, it’s like breathing. We don’t think about breathing, we just do it, and it really helps free you up and not be so stuck on the pattern thing.

In the past you’ve said that your style is a mixture of diverse influences, from Eric Clapton’s period with John Mayall to jazz players such as Wes Montgomery. How did that come about?

“You know, when I was really young, my dad loved music so much he just played all these records of all these different styles. And I saw how much it made him happy. [I thought] “Oh, there must be something to this music thing”. Then you start listening to different music, which continues to this day.

I mean, you can find stuff in any style of music. It’s just incredible, and I think it kind of broke the conceptual mould for me. I realised I just like the sound of the guitar, whether it’s Chet Atkins or Jimi Hendrix or Django Reinhardt or Wes Montgomery or Jerry Reed.

With all these musicians there’s something there, so I think that’s what prompted me to keep the door open and stay a student of the guitar and learn from everybody. And you never really arrive on your journey because you go back to the ’30s and ’40s and listen to all the sax players or keyboards, all different instruments, and you go, “Oh well, I’m not doing anything new!” I should have started when I was two years old if I wanted to catch up with these people, you know?

• To keep up to date with Eric’s tour dates, clinics and album releases, visit the Official Eric Johnson Website.

Victoria Williams may now be living quietly in California’s Joshua Tree; however, at one point, she was carving out a path as one of the most distinctive voices in American rock – both as a lyricist as well as a guitar slinger – and opening for the likes of Neil Young.

“I never play the same solo twice,” Williams told Guitar World back in 1995. “And that's pretty dangerous, ’cause you never know what you're going to get.”

On her third studio album, Loose, her lead guitar chops are on full display on several tracks, with her percussive soloing style evoking Young’s. Williams had crossed paths with the Godfather of Grunge in 1993, when she landed a support slot on his tour.

“I got to know Neil when he asked me to open for him after he heard the version of Don't Let It Bring You Down that I did on The Bridge, the Neil Young tribute album.

“He was supposed to play the solo on You R Loved, but he couldn't make it, so I did it myself,” she added.

Around the same time, though, the promising artist’s career nearly came to a tragic end.

“I was on the 23rd show,” Williams told NPR in 2017.

“All of a sudden my hands were numb, and I couldn't play the guitar, so I'm just standing there, sitting and singing a capella. His manager said, ‘You've got to go to the hospital and figure out what's wrong with you.’”

Williams was eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a long-lasting and degenerative condition of the central nervous system. This meant she had to choose between her budding career and regaining her health. Unable to tour, she was soon overcome by medical bills, when an impressive number of artists stepped in.

“I was mesmerized,” said Sylvia Reed, the late Lou Reed's second wife. “Her voice and the song, the lyrics were amazing. And I called Lou over and said, “Look at this, look at this…’”

Reed, Pearl Jam, Lucinda Williams, The Waterboys, and a host of other artists came together to release a benefit album – Sweet Relief: A Benefit for Victoria Williams – to help cover her medical costs.

Williams managed to get her health back on track enough to hit the road in 1995. Not only that, the benefit album raised enough funds to kickstart her own foundation, Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, which provides financial support to musicians struggling to make ends meet to this very day.

There are perks to growing up with a pro guitarist as a dad. "I consider myself extremely lucky," says Italian virtuoso Matteo Mancuso. "I think we had almost 50 electric guitars at home, so I had plenty of choices when I was a little kid especially."

The spread was impressive: five Strats, three Les Pauls and plenty of other brands – the young musician got to experiment with an array of sounds, figuring out what spoke to him and what didn’t.

“Once you go past that period of time where you need to know the different guitars, you can have a clear idea of what you really want from [one],” he adds.

All of that early homework proved valuable for Mancuso as his playing evolved. The fingerstyle master needed a versatile guitar to handle his equally versatile music, which on his latest LP, Route 96, ranges from fiery prog to delicate classical-guitar textures to jazz-fusion workouts.

Back in 2017, he discovered an ideal vehicle for that range: the Yamaha Revstar, which is now his go-to instrument “90 percent of the time”. Two years later, he received a custom shop model, and now he’s taken that partnership one step further with the signature RS20MM, featuring custom inlays and DiMarzio PAF 36th Anniversary pickups.

We spoke to Mancuso about his distinctive technique, the target player for the RS20MM, and why the Revstar is an ideal Swiss Army knife for his style.

You play with your fingers on your right hand, a technique inspired by watching your father play classical guitar. Is there anything about the Revstar that complements that playing style? What makes it a good platform for your technique?

I don’t think it’s the specific guitar that helps you, particularly with the fingerpicking style. I think it works for every instrument. For the Revstar, I was just searching for a guitar that was versatile enough to do the rock and jazz stuff. It didn’t have anything to do with the technique itself, let’s say. I was able to play fingerstyle with various guitars.

If there’s a little bit more space between the strings, for example, it usually helps me a little bit for some things – just because I have a little bit more space to have the finger get inside the string and have enough volume as well, and that’s a technique I learned from classical guitar. With electric guitar, you need to develop less volume because you have the amps that help you, of course, and you have distortion as well, and you have pickups.

So the movement is a little less wide compared to classical guitar. It’s not specifically the Revstar that helps me with technique. It’s just that I developed a lot of technique with the classical guitar and then tried to borrow some things from the classical world for the electric.

Derek Trucks is another iconic fingerstyle player, though your techniques are very different. Just curious, though: Have you listened to much of his work?

Oh, yeah! We’ve never met, but I know Derek and his music. Of course, I’m a huge fan of his work. He’s an incredible player. We both play with our fingers, but it’s a completely different approach from my right-hand technique.

Your signature model is based on your 2020 custom shop Revstar. What were the most important specs that you wanted to make sure they got right?

One important thing was the pickups. I’m a big fan of humbuckers, and for the sounds I’m searching for right now, I always get closer when I start with a humbucker rather than a single-coil. But that’s, of course, just preference. In the case of the Revstar, I wanted to have the splitting options just to experiment a bit with how much output I want to have with each sound.

With that kind of stuff, I prefer to have pickups with slightly less output than you’d imagine. My go-to decision was with DiMarzio, and the pickup I’m using now are called PAF 36th Anniversary. They don’t have a gigantic amount of output. It’s the right amount if you want to play clean and distortion stuff as well.

Because they have a solid body, you cannot have the same acoustic volume of a semi-hollow or a hollow body, of course. But the thing with the Revstar, especially the new ones, is that they have a chambered body.

This is for two reasons: for weight relief, so the guitar feels a little bit lighter, and to also have a tiny bit of that acoustic volume that you might prefer, even for solid-body stuff. It’s not a great amount of volume, but you can hear it compared to a full solid-body, you know? Plus the weight relief is great for me. I don’t want to have a heavy guitar.

I can’t play a Les Paul for two hours straight because my back will hurt so much. I prefer to have lighter guitars with small bodies as well. I’m a small person, so I don’t want to have a big guitar with me. I’m more on the ergonomic side of things.

Of course, you also need to like it, aesthetically speaking. I’m a really big fan of gold hardware, so I really wanted to have gold hardware. It sounds like a very small feature, but it’s actually big for me – I have Luminlay dots on the fretboard.

That’s actually very useful if you have a really dark stage in some moments, and you need to know where the 12th fret or 5th fret is. That’s way more important than you can imagine for a lot of concerts. There are a lot of features that I really like on this guitar.

How long did this process take? Was there a lot of back and forth and experimenting? Did you add anything new?

To be honest, the first thing we talked about was the price range. [Laughs.] [Then] I immediately knew what I could have and could not have – and what would be the best solution in that price range. I’m super-happy with the guitar because the most important things are already there.

Of course, if you have an unlimited budget, you can go crazy with it, but at the end of the day, the most important things for a guitar are: It needs to be reliable; it needs to be always in tune; [the wood] needs to be great quality; and of course you need to like the tone.

Once you have those things, everything else is just secondary. Then we tried different neck shapes, and we even tried a very thin neck shape for one of the customs. Even if it was maybe a little more comfortable with the left hand, the sustain was not the same.

Let’s say the quantity of wood in the neck should be the right amount to have the sustain you want. I prefer to have, let’s say, a bigger neck – not too much because I don’t have huge hands – but the right amount of wood to have a great sustain for that kind of guitar. That was very important to me.

Has the Revstar unlocked anything new in your playing?

I’m so used to it that I don’t know if it pushed me to do things differently from other guitars. Of course, if you have a Telecaster in your hands, it will influence you to do things that are associated with the Telecaster. It all starts with the music that is recorded with that guitar – not so much the instrument itself.

When I have a Telecaster in my hand, I immediately think about Brent Mason or Brad Paisley or Johnny Hiland – those kind of guys, because I’m a big country fan. That kind of material can be inspired more with a Telecaster because the sound is already there and closer to what you have in your head, if you want to go that route.

Same with a Les Paul and other guitars – some have such a great character that you can’t deny that you’re influenced by it. I always have music in my head that I want to translate into the real world. Whatever instrument is available to me in the moment can be the right choice.

With the Revstar, of course I tend to have more humbucker-inspired sounds. If I want to do more of a Hendrix-inspired rhythm section, of course the Revstar is not the right guitar to do that kind of stuff. The Revstar is my go-to guitar 90 per cent of the time.

I consider myself extremely lucky because my father is also a guitar player. I think we have almost 50 electric guitars at home, so I had plenty of choices when I was a little kid especially. [Laughs]

We had like five Stratocasters, three Les Pauls, and various brands. We had Gibson, Fender, Squier – actually my first guitar was a 3/4-size Squier because I was a very little kid. The full-size was too big for my body to handle. I got super-lucky because I tried every famous guitar since I was a little kid, and I’d already tried a wide variety of sounds.

Once you go past that period of time where you need to know the different guitars, you can have a clear idea of what you really want from [one], especially if it needs to be a custom model or a future signature model. As a matter of fact, I have two guitars on tour with me: a Yamaha Pacifica, which is a Strat-style guitar, and I play it for more single-coil kind of stuff. If I need to use the whammy bar, it’s my go-to guitar as well.

Of course, I also have my Revstar. That’s it. But in order to get there, you need to try a lot of different guitars and amps, and I got lucky because my father basically did my same job when he was my same age. He was touring a lot, and that was super-useful, having a professional with you when you were a kid.

The Revstar is unique in that doesn’t have that super-famous lineage that some brands might have. It gives you kind of a blank slate.

You can achieve very traditional sounds with Yamaha as well. If you want to get Hendrix stuff with the Pacifica, it can be totally done. If you want to sound like Santana with a Revstar, it can be totally done. But the thing is that I’m not searching for these particular sounds.

I’m just searching for a guitar that is versatile enough to do a lot of things in the same moment. My kind of music goes from heavily traditional, jazz-oriented stuff to almost metal-sounding stuff. So you need a guitar that can have the best of both worlds and be super-versatile for these reasons.

Plus, Yamaha are concentrating on the innovation side of things, and maybe if you go with other brands, there are a lot of people attached to the tradition as well. They want the guitar that is always like the ’60s or ’70s model, and you don’t want to change that if you’re searching for that.

The people who go with Yamaha aren’t those kind of people who say, "I want the old-style version." I think there’s a level of freedom if you’re a brand that doesn’t have that same baggage. There’s a higher level of freedom if you want to experiment with the newer models, as opposed to maybe other, more popular brands in the guitar community.

Your music covers so much ground stylistically – it’s very difficult to describe, in a great way. Do you think the Yamaha is a good canvas for that versatility? How much of your latest album, Route 96, were you able to record with it?

Black Centurion, for example, was totally recorded with the Revstar. Of course, different amps, different digital stuff for every sound, but I think I pretty much recorded everything with just one guitar on that particular tune.

There are some other tunes I recorded with different acoustic guitars. I remember that I used a Guild for some of the acoustic sections. I also have a Yamaha Grand Concert, a great classical guitar, which I used for some pieces on the album.

And the Pacifica, as well. I don’t think there are many electric guitars, maybe just two or three, and maybe there’s more variety on the acoustic and classical stuff. I recorded a lot of stuff just with the Revstar and the Pacifica.

When you created this signature model, did you think much about the target player? It’s obviously a versatile instrument.

First off, it's a great, versatile guitar for everything. It can be for the intermediate player as well, not just professional people. You don’t need to take too much care of the guitar because it’s very stable by itself, and that’s a very important thing I wanted to achieve. I don’t want to touch anything. I don’t want to touch the truss road or adjust the action. I want to do this just one time and then it’ll be okay for the next 10 years.

This is a guitar where you can actually do that. It’s super-stable. It plays everywhere from the last fret to the first one. I think it can be a really good guitar for someone who’s studying music and wants to have a guitar for all kinds of gigs – the more jazz-oriented stuff or the pop stuff.

That can be totally done with the Revstar. It’s a great chunk of people, maybe more toward the rock player because this guitar can be very aggressive as well. A little bit less toward the jazz player because, of course, in the jazz community there’s still a huge number of people who prefer to have the semi-hollow. But I think it will be a great guitar for everyone, from intermediate to advanced musicians.

• For more info, head to Yamaha Guitars.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Jack White is one of the 21st century’s greatest guitar heroes. But like many true guitar heroes – from Hendrix, to EVH and Jimmy Page – he’s also obsessed with the tools that create the music.

White started out as a furniture upholsterer, hiding his own records between the folds – he cares about how things feel and how they look, and what that means for his playing. Now he’s taken that blue-collar mindset and applied it to every possible aspect of guitar gear via his own firm Third Man Hardware. The company has collaborated with everyone from major global firms Fender and Donner to boutique outfits Anasounds and 1981 Inventions.

The result is one of modern guitar’s most idiosyncratic rigs: nearly everything has been designed from the ground up to fulfil White’s every sonic desire. And now I find myself standing onstage at soundcheck, in front of his full pedalboard, and about to play through his entire signal chain, from his mind-boggling Triplecaster to custom pedals and astonishingly loud signature tube amps.

I met Jack’s guitar tech and chief Third Man Hardware collaborator Dan Mancini several NAMM shows past. Every year, I swung by the booth to check out which of Jack’s instruments was hanging out as the resident demo guitar. Once it was his original tour-ravaged Triplecaster prototype. The next it was the Tele he played at the NFL Thanksgiving half-time show with Eminem. No biggie.

But rocking up at Bristol, UK’s Prospect Building 30 minutes earlier to film a walkthrough of Jack White’s guitar rig, I still didn’t believe I’d actually get to experience the full rig at ear-splitting stage volume. I was about to be proven wrong.

Dan is my tour guide, which is fortunate because he’s very encouraging. We start with the pedalboards. By my count, there are 20 stompboxes, not including switchers. He gives me a quick overview of the first half of the ’board. Then comes the question: “You want to try it?” Yes, Dan. Of course I want to try it.

As I sling Jack’s very own Triplecaster over my shoulder, the gravity of the situation hits me. Not only am I about to play through his rig at full blast in front of his guitar tech, sound tech and touring crew, I am navigating an unfamiliar setup. In a tight 20-minute window. And it’s being filmed. And on top of all that, the strap height leaves the guitar hanging nearer my knees than my naval. If I learn nothing else from this experience, I surmise, it’s that Jack White is a lot taller than you think.

At least I know the guitar. I’ve played various configurations of White’s Triplecaster build over the years. For this tour, Jack’s main squeeze is an American-made factory version, rather than a Custom Shop one-off. It has a B-bender fitted and a few aesthetic tweaks, but is otherwise fresh off the production line.

The action on White’s touring guitar is medium to low and the soft V-shape neck really doesn’t feel a world apart from many other modern Fender builds. In short, it is immediately and surprisingly familiar. White started collaborating with his guitars rather than fighting them years ago, and the Triplecaster is the culmination of his efforts. So far, I reassure myself, so good.

Then my eyes dart back to the pedalboard. There are six different types of fuzz alone. Even for the most acerbic of noise-rock guitarists, that would be considered overkill. But this is an interesting experiment. The Bumble Buzz is tight and spitty. The Black Squirrel smooth yet nasty. The Knife Drop… well, that’s like the universe imploding in on itself in an endless downward spiral.

Each time, Dan asks me, “How does that make you feel?” with a glint in his eye. And every effect makes me play differently. I’m normally something of a widdly player. But now, here with this ’board, I want to hear the splutter and fizz of every note, and that means slowing down. Bigger bends, dynamic intervals. Responding to the variations in rhythm as the note decays.

Aesthetics are everything in Jack White’s world. The trademark Third Man yellow and black color scheme is all over his pedalboard, right down to the custom Klon Centaur enclosure. He’s a painter, and the amps are his canvas. The pedals are the paint.

In the moment, you feel the way it’s been geared towards spontaneity. White’s gigs don’t have setlists. He plays what he feels each night. A bank of presets on a MIDI switcher is never going to work. He has to be in the moment and he wants every sound at his disposal.

So many touring rigs are reverse engineered from a starting point of ‘consistency’, but now I realize White has designed his to do the exact opposite. Switching to a different fuzz for a solo one night will make him play differently. It’s another way to guarantee a fresh experience for the next audience.

Thankfully for me, at this point in time, it’s also designed to be immediate. There’s no messing with menus. Each pedal offers an arcade-like instantaneous gratification. For my money, White’s collabs with Black Mountain are the pinnacle: the Roto Echo and (shhh) soon-to-be-announced Roto Trem have a massive rotary dial slap-bang in the center that you can roll with your foot.

The trem is what Dan is most excited for me to try, and it is an unreasonable amount of fun. The ratcheting chop-chop takes the modulation into unhinged territory, creating a sense of drama: “This solo isn’t just off-the-cuff. It’s dangerous.”

It occurs to me that, in my 14 years on the job, this is the first interview I have had to conduct with ear plugs in at all times. White’s 70W Fender Pano-Verbs are staggeringly loud. The vibrations literally move you. They make you want to do crazy things. And it’s easy to forget that feeling in today’s dB-monitored, DI-centric live arena.

Playing through Jack White’s rig is a seat-of-your-pants experience in the best possible way. The tones can lean on the futuristic, but the approach is resolutely old-school. It takes me back to my teenage years, before amp modeling and switching units took over. When your sounds were limited to what was what in your hands, at your feet and in your imagination.

Most of all, it’s exciting, and it makes me question my own rig. Should I re-embrace whammy bars? Ditch the presets? Heck, maybe I do need another couple of fuzz pedals. I resolve to reconsider doubling the size of my pedalboard.

Returning for that evening’s sold-out sweatbox of a show, I hear the setup in the hands of the player it was designed for. White is in astonishing form, darting through his back catalog and summoning devilishly wiry solos. Halfway through, he snaps a string on the very guitar I played. I feel a small twang of guilt. Did my slapdash picking contribute to the wear and tear on those wires?

But I also know that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter to White. This is raw rock ’n’ roll, the likes of which you hardly see in a live setting anymore. It makes the show another one-off. White’s tones that night are unique. And test-driving his rig has given me an insight into just how far he goes in pursuit of that.

This month's Inquirer finds Guitar World in the company of Micki Free, and having administered the truth serum, he's going to tell us all about his firsts – first gigs, first songs and first guitar he ever got – and share his most embarrassing moments.

Just don't ask him to save only one guitar from burning building...

What was your first guitar?

I made it out of a Cheer detergent box! I cut a hole in it and used a ruler as a neck and rubber bands as strings. I’d imitate Jimi Hendrix. Then one day, my Uncle Frank says to my mom, “You’ve got to buy Micki a guitar because he’s driving me crazy with that Cheer box!” So, he finally got me a guitar. It was an acoustic; I don’t remember what kind it was.

What was the first song you learned how to play?

Secret Agent Man by the Ventures because I loved them too. I played that as much as I could play it, and my mom would be like, “Would you shut up with that?” It was annoying because that’s all I could play – but I could play it well.

What was your first gig?

In the early 1970s, we had moved back from Germany to the Midwest. I had a little band there that I was playing with that had started in school. At the time, Grand Funk Railroad was my favorite band, so I thought I was Mark Farner. I even had really long hair. The first gig was playing in the school gym for a dance when I was 16.

Have you ever had an embarrassing moment on stage?

When I was younger, the most embarrassing moment of all I had was when I was trying to look cool onstage as I was playing my guitar. I fell off the freaking stage! They had to help me get back on – and that was pretty embarrassing. After that, I started to get my footing, so I never did that again, thank God!

What’s your favorite piece of gear?

Since I dig Hendrix and Cream, I’m a Marshall purist because that’s what I grew up on. My go-to amp is my 18-watt Marshall 1974X with a 12-inch speaker. It’s like the Bluesbreaker amp.

They have a fantastic sound because their impedance is low, and, because it’s 18 watts, when you crank it up, it breaks up at the best time. It’s like money in the bank. [I can get] the tone I like to get, which is kind of like a cross between Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

The building is burning down; what one guitar from your collection would you save?

That’s too hard. Can I take three? If it has to be one, it’d be my Teye guitar with the turquoise inlays. It’s so versatile. I can get sounds that are close enough to a Strat and to a Les Paul – and if you back it off a little bit, you can get anything you want with it. It has something called a Mojo button on it, and I can select the kind of vibe I want. It’s amazing. I love it so much.

When was the last time you practiced, and what did you play?

I don’t practice a lot. I’m not that kind of a guy that goes, “I’ve got to play my scales.” I pick it up when I feel like it. Billy Gibbons once told me, “Play the stuff you want to play, like, the stuff you hear,” and I got what he meant by that. So, when I’m practicing, I’ll play some Jimi, I’ll play some ZZ Top, I’ll play some funky stuff, some Santana. That’s how I practice. It’s not like a schedule.

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

I’d like to know more about the scales since I’m mostly a blues-rock player. Technically I’d like to really get into scales and see how they do arpeggios and stuff like that, because that’s not in my lane. I play more like Billy Gibbons. Hendrix didn’t play scales, either – and I learned everything from those guys.

But as I listen to current players, there are some where I’ll go, “Wow, that sounds good.” Maybe I should investigate that, widen my style and go to some places where I’d normally not go.

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

I’d tell myself to practice more and widen my range of music besides the greats, like Clapton, Hendrix and Jeff Beck. When I was young, I only listened to blues-rock. I’d tell myself to open my mind a little more.

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

We’ve all been at a party, a few orange juices in us, seen a guitar and been tempted to pick it up and play. Queens of the Stage Age bandleader Josh Homme, however, thinks it’s best to resist the temptation.

“I’ve always had this thing where anyone who picks up a guitar and starts playing at a party, I think, ‘You’re fucking embarrassing, dude,’” he says, in conversation with comedian Dan Soder.

Like most of us, Homme has experienced the party strummer firsthand. Amusingly, though, the Queens man says it’s just as pervasive in celebrity circles and recalls a time actor Harry Dean Stanton – known for his roles in Escape from New York, The Godfather Part II, and The Avengers – was the six-string culprit.

“Harry Dean Stanton is a national treasure,” Homme recalls. “But there was a guitar within eyeshot and he’s sort of like, ‘Oh…’”

At this point, Homme’s internal alarm bells were clearly blaring, but he elected to not intervene.

“He picks up the guitar, and I’m standing there with my youngest [child] Wolfie, who at the time was like seven, and Harry Dean Stanton starts singing in Spanish,” Homme continues. “And of course the party starts to go like, ‘What?’ Everyone starts looking, and they gather around; it was like a movie. I was looking for hidden cameras.”

Homme stresses it’s not personal, but Stanton was dead to rights in this instance.

“Yeah, I love Harry Dean Stanton, and yeah, it sounded great, but I just was like, ‘This is cheesy right now.’ So he finishes this song, and everyone's like 'What the?' And my son goes, ‘Jesus, let’s get out of here!’”

Homme is fresh off dropping new singles with Mastodon and Shania Twain, with QOTSA releasing their latest album, Perfecth, on October 30.

Check out Soder Podcast for Dan Soder’s full conversation with Homme.

Many people will always associate Deirdre Cartwright with the BBC Two programme RockSchool, which ran from 1983 to 1987 and was hosted by top players and teachers of the day: Henry Thomas, Alastair Gavin and Geoff Nicholls.

The show featured tutorials on various styles of popular music as well as pro tips on maintaining gear. Since then, Deirdre has become a well-known jazz player on the festival and club circuits and has released a string of albums under her own name, as well as been an ensemble player on many more.

Her most recent album, Organik, finds her back in the role as band leader.

Why the 15-year gap between albums?

I’ve led lots of really great bands. Some of them involved musicians from Europe, and it’s a lot to organise – touring, getting gigs and all the rest of it – and I think I just became a bit wiped out with it all. At the same time, Alison Rayner, who I’ve played with for a very long time, wanted to form her own band because she wanted to do more composition.

She had written a little bit for my band, but it was mostly my compositions, so she said she was going to form ARQ, the Alison Rayner Quintet, and that started in about 2012, 2013. I actually thought, “Oh, it’s so nice just to be in a band, as opposed to leading a band,” because when you lead a band, you also have to do all the organising as well. So I’ve done four albums with ARQ, and that’s been great. I really love working with that band, and hopefully that will continue.

But gradually I began to get back much more into what I’d call classic jazz, if you know what I mean, and I got into exploring again all those wonderful guitarists – Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, Kenny Burrell and Grant Green – all that kind of playing. I had started to play with Pete Whittaker [Hammond player].

We were doing a sort of jazz-duo gig, and I hadn’t really played with organ before. We just got on really well. And then Gary Hammond, who’s a wonderful conga player and percussionist, played in my bands in the ’90s, and he ended up playing with The Beautiful South. He was down in London and so I thought, “Okay, let’s just try doing an organ trio.” We’ve only ever done about half a dozen gigs [as Organik], but it really gave me enthusiasm again for playing and, I suppose, leading a band again.

What gear did you use to record the Organik album?

When I first started playing with Organik, I was playing a Heritage, which is based on a [Gibson] Super 400 so it’s a really big guitar. I’m relatively tall, but I thought, “Wow, this is a really big guitar…”

I often go down to Cornwall and I know a jazz guitarist down there called Martin Bowie. When I’m down there we often do a duo gig together and he has a Gibson L-4. So I had a little go after a gig and I said, “This guitar is just a little bit smaller and it feels really nice to play.’ I thought I would love to get a blonde 175 like Pat Metheny, who I’ve loved since the ’70s.

I’d been down to the Bath guitar auctions [at Gardiner Houlgate], and they had about half a dozen 175s and L-4s, and I thought I might get one from there, so I tried them all out. I also spotted an L-4 and I thought what a beautiful guitar it was, in really beautiful condition.

Anyway, when the auction came up, I put a bid on a 175 [and won], and I put a lowish bid on the L-4. I’d just arrived in Greece, looked at my phone and it said, “Congratulations, you’ve got the L-4”, and I went, “Oh my God!” So I ended up with two guitars and they’re both really fantastic. They’re both beautiful. So on the album I use the 175 and a Lazy J amp.

Which model Lazy J is it?

It’s a 20-watt model reverb. I used that on the album and then I realised halfway through that it was making a slightly odd sound. I actually discovered afterwards there was a problem with one of the reverb springs, and it was just rattling around a bit.

So I also used my little Fender Princeton, which is a 12-watt amp, but it has a 12-inch speaker in it. It’s a 1971, but it looks like it’s not really a ’70s one inside; it’s all totally ’60s still. It’s got the most beautiful sound. It’s a little too quiet for most gigs, but it’s got wonderful sounds, so that’s what I used on the album: the 175, the Lazy J a little bit, and a Fender Twin that was in the studio and was a little bit bright, and then my Fender Princeton.

Any effects?

No effects. I’m getting less and less into effects. I started off always playing with effects pedals, but I think [not doing so] really improved my technique and my playing. I think it’s really made me focus on the notes more. You have to be able to do it all. So all I had was the guitar lead into the amp, and that was it.

Funnily enough a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to [jazz guitarist] Rob Luft, and he’s got a pedalboard. He was using what looked to me like a Gibson L-5 through all these effects. And I came home and I got my old [Line 6] POD out and I started playing with the delays and I thought, “Oh yeah, maybe for the moment I’m not using effects, but maybe I’ll try the 175 or the L-4 through a couple of things,” you know? I won’t do a Ted Nugent, though.

You’ve included quite a few jazz standards on the album, including The Gentle Rain and On Green Dolphin Street. Are these particular favourites?

Yeah, I’ve always loved The Gentle Rain. I’ve always kept that in my repertoire, even though I play other bossa novas. I went to see Pat Metheny playing in the ’90s at the Mean Fiddler. He played all standards that night – and maybe a couple of his tunes but mostly standards – and he played The Gentle Rain and I thought, “Oh, that’s gorgeous!” It just made me think, ‘I’ve got to learn that tune.’

Are you going to take Organik on tour?

Yeah, I would like to do some more gigs. I’m going to be getting some gigs in the autumn and next spring, that’s the thing. I’ve been offered a couple, which is really nice, because people don’t really know about it and I play with two or three different groups, but I definitely want to tour Organik.

I’ve actually fulfilled a lot of what I wanted to do when I was younger, just being able to play certain things, and I’ve fulfilled a lot of my aspirations, you know? But it doesn’t stop there.

I just always want to learn more and improve and keep on bringing what I observe and what I hear into the music. There’s a couple of great jazz standards I really want to learn, and I heard Bill Frisell playing a fantastic version of Epistrophy, and I just think, “Oh, that’d be great.” So who knows, on the next one I might do a couple of Thelonious Monk tunes.”

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

Yesterday (September 23), 16-year-old rock and metal guitarist and singer Nene Royal was crowned the winner of America’s Got Talent, making her the first artist from Thailand to win the highly coveted TV show.

That same night, Royal linked up with Linkin Park onstage for a live performance of The Emptiness Machine, the lead single from their eighth studio album, From Zero, released in 2024.

Lined up between lead vocalist Emily Armstrong and co-vocalist/guitarist Mike Shinoda, Royal took the lead verse before Armstrong took over. The two even duetted on some parts.

As usual, the up-and-coming rockstar wielded her trademark 1978 Ibanez Musician Series MC300 electric guitar. Right after the performance, Shinoda touted Royal as “incredible,” and Armstrong added, “Good luck, we're all rooting for you for sure.”

Royal also joined The Warning for a surprise performance of Kerosene, their single from earlier this year, at the AGT rehearsal studios earlier this week. The young guitarist shared guitar and vocal duties with Dany Villarreal and looked right at home with the sister trio.

Royal was the fan favorite to win America’s Got Talent after stunning live audiences and judges – and going viral – with her performances of the Cranberries’ Zombie, Muse’s Hysteria, Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, and, finally, White Stripes classic Seven Nation Army.

Dinosaur Jr.’s first album since 2021’s Sweep It Into Space, this past August’s There Near, ditches fancy amps for a back-to-basics approach. Specifically, it was recorded with help of the equipment that guitarist J Mascis used back in the ’80s.

His reasoning? “I was just kind of getting sick of these awesome guitar tones I’ve been getting,” he tells Paste Magazine.

“I have these awesome amps and guitars – I have the same setup that Pete Townshend used on Who’s Next. I just got sick of having this perfect guitar sound.”

So, perhaps puzzlingly, he was on the hunt for a worse tone. “It doesn’t have to be so great and everything. It’ll sound fine.” He dug up the kind of Marshall he used on the band’s second record, 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me, and a ’70s Mesa Boogie Mark I.

According to him, it’s “not the best Marshall sound I can get, it’s just one from my past.” That was the whole point. “I was trying to go back to, like, when I didn’t have the opportunity to do that and I didn’t know any better.”

However, according to Mascis, the experiment didn’t totally work. Apparently, their very first record was cut to tape, and the amp is the same model but not the exact same amp. The guitars are different, and the mics, are of course, way different than they were back then.

“It just doesn’t sound the same,” he concludes. “It doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t precious about it. I just thought it would be interesting.”

J Mascis has always had an experimental relationship with guitar tone. Last year, he told Guitarist how a heckler helped him unlock the sound that would define Dinosaur Jr.