Jim Nollman once wanted to be the next Eric Clapton. Instead, his guitar playing took a surprising detour – specifically, via a sea cove in British Columbia – as he piped his sound underwater to create 65 hours of whale song/guitar recordings.

Now he is releasing a compilation of these interspecies jams on Smithsonian Folkways, collecting together highlights of the tapes made between 1985 and 2002 at his Interspecies non-profit in B.C.

Here, in his own words, Nollman tells us what it was like to spend his playing career making music with whales…

Pet Sounds

My background is in theater music. Absurdists like Eugène Ionesco influenced me, so [before the Interspecies residency started] I’d already done music with other animals.

I didn’t enjoy playing on stage, so I asked a radio station if I could produce a Thanksgiving Day show. I went to a turkey farm and recorded with 300 turkeys. It’s still played all the time on American radio. I realised I much prefer to play in nature than on stage or on the road, living in motels. I just wasn’t made for that.

[When I set up the British Columbia residency] we decided we would play from after dark until about midnight, otherwise there was too much boat noise in the water. We didn’t want to compete with outboard motors.

It was pitch black; we’d have to keep the electricity off and play with a couple of candles. It’s a strange place to play music because you’re in the bowels of this cabin cruiser, and if the wind is up the boat’s shaking and rolling.

After dark

This one orca came around at night. I was really into primitive country blues at the time. I played a 12-bar blues riff really slowly with a very strong beat. This whale, I swear, whenever I went up to the 4, he came in right on the beat. It was shocking to me that that could happen!

I quickly realized that I needed a sound system that would let me hear the orcas as well as interact with them. [Fortunately] I was getting so much publicity, it was easy to get funding and attract recording engineers.

I had an underwater speaker and a hydrophone. When they’re about 100 yards from the boat the orcas start echolocating, which is their way of perceiving distance and objects in their path; basically clicks. It sounds like giant woodpeckers, because it’s a couple of octaves below what a normal woodpecker does.

Deep blues sea

I was playing a lot of country blues to the whales. I played James Brown music and it was the best reaction I ever got. They weren’t impressed by human virtuosity – they didn’t need David Gilmour or Mark Knopfler. What they wanted was Jimmy Nolen, James Brown’s lead guitar player; they liked the groove.

In the beginning I was playing my Peavey guitar, but I soon attracted the attention of a young guitar maker in Oregon. He built me what he thought would be the perfect guitar to play with orcas; I made a few changes to it, though.

He put on a triple-bucker, and it was too AC/DC, too thick. It wasn’t what I wanted to give the orcas. He used lots of brass – it was a heavy instrument. I gave it to a great luthier, Bobby Warren, and said, “Can you lighten this up a little bit, give me sustain, but also make it really clean?”

The triple-bucker was set into a solid brass cup built under the strings, so Bobby took the center one out. There was this hole about an inch between the two, and being in that brass shroud made a unique, beautiful tone. I’ve been using that ever since.

Communication Breakdown

An orca researcher camped down the strait from us, and he’d come up for dinner sometimes. Halfway through the project he said, “Those orcas that are coming to you – it’s a mother and her son. Most of the orcas don’t care about this music, but these two are coming to you every single night!”

The orcas are majestic, crazy loud, and in the key of D. Most of their calls are D to C to D. We’d have musicians start playing that riff, and the whales would sing it back to them. The musicians would get really excited: “I’m communicating with whales!”

I would always have to break the bubble: if you don’t play, they do the same thing. The whole point is to get them off of that D-C-D.

The record is all field recordings, exactly as it happened. I had the hydrophones about eight feet apart on the boat, basically starboard and port – sound travels almost five times faster under water than above water. So eight feet apart, it’s like having one microphone.

I would duplicate it and then shift it up, EQing the bottom on one track and the highs on the other track, to get a fuller picture. It’s all mono. If people are going to like it, they’re not going to care if it’s Dolby Atmos. It has its own built-in allure!

And I swear that I don’t have a gun

We played for them for eight years, and in the last year the mother orca died of old age. She was in her 50s. The son lost interest in us. When I moved to the island where I now live, I gave up the guitar and started playing mandolin.

The guy who made the guitar for me gave me a prototype guitar the size of a mandolin. I gave it to my luthier, who made it into an electric mandolin, and I’ve used that for the last 20 years, making music with different whale species.

I started playing with lots of dolphins – much higher pitched – and got into playing with beluga whales. They have this very different sound from the orcas. They’re much jollier and never stop talking!

I’ve had almost no luck with them, though, because everywhere in the Arctic, beluga whales are being hunted by native people or being killed in oil discovery. I’m a guy on a boat standing up holding a guitar; the beluga would never come close because they don’t know the difference between a guitar and a gun.

I had a hard time figuring out how to justify what I was doing all those years, especially to the scientific community. I went to several whale science conferences and sometimes got booed off the stage because they felt I was trying to humiliate them.

But I never called myself a scientist. In my 20s I thought I was going to be the next Eric Clapton. As it turned out, I did something very unusual.

As told to Cheri Amour.

• Orcas’ Greatest Hits is out now via Smithosian Folkways.

America’s Got Talent breakout star, guitarist and vocalist Nene Royal, stunned the judges at her audition round with her take on The Cranberries’ Zombie.

After yet another buzzy performance in the Judges Callbacks round, where she covered Muse’s Hysteria and sailed through to the quarterfinals, Royal delivered a searing rendition of Soundgarden’s 1994 hit Black Hole Sun – complete with a standout guitar solo.

Much like her previous performances, the 16-year-old from Phuket, Thailand, wielded her trusty Ibanez Musician Series MC300 for the occasion. Judging by the audience’s reaction, her take on Soundgarden proved that she’s one to watch in the competition and beyond.

“I know I'm not supposed to say this. NBC, give her the million right now,” judge Howie Mandel commented right after her performance.

“Nene, I think you could really win this competition,” added Sofía Vergara. “Because you can sing and you can play that guitar. I mean, insanely. The way you look. No wonder everybody in the street asks me about you. I think you can win.”

Judge Mel B also gave her two cents, “You are just like the most quietest, humblest, sweet young lady. And then you've come out on this stage and it's a different vibe.

“I have to say that I love really good vocals. I'm a ’90s girl. I'm into pop music. That kind of music is not my vibe. But your vocals are on point, your guitar is on point, your look, your energy, your vibe.”

The former Spice Girl proceeded to activate the Golden Buzzer, fast-tracking Royal into the final round of the competition.

Before the competition, the guitarist had already built a following on social, with her covers of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and System of a Down’s Sugar and Chop Suey going viral.

While live dates haven’t been announced yet, her official website states that she is currently “focused on preparing new music and upcoming performances” – including the AGT final – and that “official public appearances and concert dates” will be announced soon.

The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has heaped praise on UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham for his recent riffing, calling it a “victory for guitar.”

In his latest exhibition of his guitar chops, Manchester-born Burnham showed his support for Ukraine amidst their war with Russia by visiting Kyiv and jamming The Smiths’ Rusholme Ruffians with soldiers. It came after he jammed with another Manchester icon a few weeks ago.

It didn’t take long for word to get to Marr, who wrote the song for the band’s standout sophomore record, Meat is Murder, in 1985.

“I can’t quite get my head around it,” Marr told Absolute Radio (via Music Radar). “I don’t know if pride’s the word, but it probably is. I’ve only just been told about it, in great detail.

“I think it’s an amazing thing,” he added. “In all honesty, for me, it’s like a victory for the guitar.”

The song in question was indirectly influenced by Elvis Presley, with Marr drawing from Del Shannon’s cover of his 1961 hit, (Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame. In fact, the two songs collided in a medley on Rank, the band’s only live album. They recorded it at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, London, in 1986, and released it two years later.

“It’s kind of beyond me to process it, really, because it could be massive, that,” Marr continues. “But I just sort of go, ‘How great is the guitar? What an amazing tool the guitar is.’”

The guitar that Burnham played on – a silver-finished T-style from Kyiv-based brand WM Guitars – was used to entertain soldiers on the front lines of war and boost their morale. It shows the instrument’s magic.

Proving he’s still a man of the people despite his guitar hero status, Marr recently helped a session player get their guitar back after FedEx had a shipping nightmare.

Marr is also set to part ways with some illustrious Smiths-era guitars and beyond in a bumper auction next month.

I met David socially in 1972 a couple of times. When we played the first King Crimson show at the Speakeasy in London in April 1969, I was told afterwards that David and [his then-wife] Angie Bowie were jiving.

I also saw the Ziggy Stardust show at the Rainbow Theatre in Finchley when Roxy Music were in support. I was very impressed with the Ziggy show. It was one of the finest rock concerts I’d been to, which I mentioned to David in Berlin during Heroes. His comment was something like, “You saw what we were doing. You saw what was going on. You got it.” It was a perfect show.

When I got the phone call for the Heroes session in 1977, I was in New York. I didn’t view myself as a working player at that time, having just been in retreat for 10 months with no intention of going back to anything like that, so when David asked me to provide guitar, I said, “Well, I don’t know, but if you’re prepared to take a chance, so am I.”

I packed my Les Paul and a pedalboard by Pete Cornish, which had a volume pedal, wah and fuzz box, and flew to Frankfurt, where I was transferring to Berlin. It was the first time I had flown first class, which was wonderful.

Those were the days of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, so going through German immigration and customs with this box of wires and wood was difficult. They had to go through all the pedals to make sure they worked and that everything was legitimate before I flew to Berlin.

The person who was supposed to meet me at the airport didn’t arrive, so I caught a cab to the hotel and then to Hansa Studios. I arrived about half past six in the evening, plugged in my guitar and we were away. One, two, three, four, and off we went.

I don’t remember any direction from anyone on Heroes, although I’m not saying it didn’t take place. The recording lasted three days, I believe, and it was very ‘in the moment,’ because it was spontaneous and really without thought. It was about immediacy, play and laughter, which are ideal working conditions for an improvising, creative person.

At the same time, we were in a liminal zone, by which I mean an in-between space, whether in time, in people or in places. We were in a liminal space geographically within Berlin; although we were technically in West Berlin, it was an in-between zone between East and West Germany.

In David’s life, too, it was a time between what was happening and what was coming next, and as for me, I had just moved to New York, so it was a liminal period in my life. With Brian Eno, I think he was in between as well, because he was out of Roxy Music but not quite the Brian that we know today. So it was a liminal zone in time and place and persons.

David was in New York toward the end of ’77, and he invited me to his hotel, so I went along. He asked me to go on tour as his live guitarist, and I said, “No. I’ve just come off the road after six years of touring.”

He was very charismatic. That’s the first word I’d use to describe him, but it wasn’t right for me at the time. Would I have been a good live guitarist for David? I don’t know. I think his live guitarist probably did a far better job of covering his catalog than I would have ever done.

In 1980, I was invited to play on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and now I was on the other side of the liminal zone, so I was a working player and ready to go. I was a focused rock player and I recorded for two nights, beginning at midnight, at Trident Studio at St. Anne’s Court in London.

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

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

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

How should we remember David Bowie? Simply as we knew him. Some people knew him personally, other people knew him through his work, and still other people will remember David as the person who said to them very directly, “You have permission to be who you are.”

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

Dolly Parton's Jolene had a monumental impact – not only on the history of country music and Parton's career trajectory but also on the globalization and crossover of country into the pop realm. Reflecting on her enduring hit, which was reinvented by Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, Parton said it all started with one “little guitar lick.”

“The thing I remember most was all the musicians when I came up with the little guitar lick, the Jolene lick, saying: ‘Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick,’” Parton told The Guardian.

“I was playing guitar pretty serious back then, before I had all the long nails. I remember all the guys learning to play it and everybody thinking how cool a rhythm it was.

“It was a little out of the norm for the things we’d been doing up to that time. I remember everybody in the studio just loving that song.”

The country icon had a distinctive playing style that revolved around the ‘thumb and flick’ technique pioneered by Maybelle Carter – the picking-hand thumb plucks a bass note before the first finger flicks down to sound the full chord

Parton would later embrace open tunings to tackle the challenges posed by her trademark fingernails, but sawed the nails down when she was writing new material.

Elsewhere in her Guardian interview, Parton named Jolene as one of the songs she's most proud of in her rich body of work.

"The one that’s most recorded is Jolene. That seems to be the favorite – do you know that song has been recorded, somebody told me, 450 times in the last 52 years? I’m so proud of it."

The iconic guitar parts on the recording of Jolene were performed by Nashville sessionists Wayne Moss and Chip Young. Moss played the complementary steel-string part from the second refrain onwards while Young thumb-picked the primary pattern, following a style popularized by Grammy Award-winning guitarist and singer-songwriter Joe South.

Another of Parton's session players, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, has previously discussed his experience of recording guitar on her mega-hit 9 to 5.

Dolly Parton, the inimitable country singer/songwriter who rose from humble beginnings to become a chart-topper and cultural icon, has died at 80, her family says. The news was confirmed by her nephew, Bryan Seaver, in an Instagram post.

“My name is Bryan Seaver, son of Cassie Parton, and I’m representing the Parton and Owens family today announcing the passing of my aunt, Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, Sister, Sis, and Granny to one generation and Gigi to the next,” he said in a video.

In the video, Seaver speaks to her generosity, and enormous influence on generations of musicians, concluding with “Rest in peace, Aunt Dolly – Aunt, Granny, Gigi. May God bless Dolly Parton, and may God bless you all. She will always love you.” No cause of death was given, though just last week Parton disclosed that she had been struggling with various health issues in recent months.

Unmistakable in her endless parade of huge blonde wigs and loud outfits – an image she brilliantly cultivated herself, not at the behest of others – Dolly Parton was an illustrious figure in country music, and was one of the first artists in that genre to find equal fame and superstardom outside of it.

At the heart of it all was her songwriting. Led by that twangy, charming voice, her biggest hits were transcendent, and larger than life. The pleas of the Western-flavored Jolene, the epic ballad I Will Always Love You – made immortal by Whitney Houston – and the chicken-scratch rhythm of the chart-topping 9 to 5; all shattered norms and genre boundaries.

Born in 1946 in the Smoky Mountains region of Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children, Parton grew up in a small cabin with her many siblings. In her youth, she absorbed the gospel music and Appalachian folk songs she was surrounded by, and began performing as a singer when still in her pre-teen years.

Moving to Nashville in her late teens, Parton quickly became an in-demand songwriter, penning hits for prominent country artists like Hank Williams Jr. She was determined, however, to have a country career in her own right, and by 1967, she became a country chart presence both on her own and in tandem with her frequent duet partner, Porter Wagoner.

It wasn’t until 1973, though, that Parton really hit it big. The winning ticket was Jolene. Snaky and grooving, the song was inspired by a woman who flirted with her husband, and was written and sung from a place of insecurity – it sounded like no other country song that had come before it. The sublime fretwork that drove it didn’t hurt.

“The thing I remember most was all the musicians when I came up with the little guitar lick, the Jolene lick, saying: ‘Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick,’” Parton told The Guardian in an interview last year.

“I was playing guitar pretty serious back then, before I had all the long nails. I remember all the guys learning to play it and everybody thinking how cool a rhythm it was.

“It was a little out of the norm for the things we’d been doing up to that time,” she continued. “I remember everybody in the studio just loving that song.”

The string of country hits would continue for the rest of the decade, but it was those aforementioned long nails that would produce the hit that made her a bona-fide, across-the-board superstar.

The theme song for the 1980 movie of the same name – which Parton starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin – 9 to 5 topped the country and pop charts, and was a proud statement in favor of equality and fair treatment for women in the workplace.

The whole thing came from idle time during filming, when a rhythm came to Parton’s head, and – lacking a guitar – she clicked the rhythm out with those long nails.

Indeed, Parton’s brilliant musical instincts often went sorely under-appreciated. She was a skilled guitarist who could take a bluegrass-inspired solo, and whose ‘thumb and flick’ rhythm work was always on point.

Though she never again had a hit like 9 to 5, Parton’s stature only grew in the following 45 years – her independence and timeless songs remaining a touchstone for three, then four, generations. Just watch her hold Glastonbury in the palm of her hand a decade ago.

The tributes that have come pouring in in the wake of her death have come from every corner of the musical world: Jack White said simply, “Instant sainthood”, alt-rockers Garbage called her, “A sparkling rhinestone for all eternity”, and jazz/metal virtuoso Alex Skolnick cited her as “a true ambassador for the guitar”.

It was perhaps her country contemporary and friend Reba McEntire who said it best, rounding out her own tribute with the words, “There will never ever be another you.”

Eric Johnson has given Guitarist a fascinating insight into his vintage gear-loaded live rig, and in doing so, let slip the most important thing he looks for in a guitar.

The Cliffs of Dover fretboard burner is most often seen armed with a Fender Stratocaster – although he admits vintage isn’t always best. Vitally, though, he says finding the right guitar goes far beyond the make and model.

“Some guitars fight you when you play, and other ones kind of play with you,” he explains when asked why certain guitars in particular speak to him.

“I think it’s the breathing of the resonance of the wood – whether the envelope is matching your picking style, or if it’s kind of the opposite. You can kind of feel it when you pick.”

Of course, some players like a guitar that puts up a fight – something Keith Urban has been trying to put that philosophy in his signature PRS. Johnson, meanwhile, wants to feel like he and his electric guitar of choice are in perfect unison.

If you can find a guitar that works with you, rather than against you, you might have hit the jackpot. That’s probably a good place to start, and sage advice for everyone who might find themselves in the market.

“Some of them are kind of stiff and too in your face,” he adds of his search for the right instrument. “Other ones fold in and out like they’re breathing with your picking. So, I look for ones that do that. That’s probably my most important thing.”

Ultimately, what he craves isn’t something that can be remedied in the aftermarket.

“I can get used to the neck or change the pickups,” he adds. “But the most important thing to me is that it has that kind of envelope breathing thing – you know, that matches your picking.”

His wild PRS prototype is another insight into what Johnson looks for in a guitar. Sadly, though, it never went into production. For more nuggets of wisdom, see Johnson’s valuable advice for players “trapped in patterns”.

Last year, Johnson found a surprise new squeeze in Dave Mustaine’s signature Dean, which was a pleasantly bizarre watch.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has shown off his guitar chops yet again, treating Ukrainian soldiers to a taste of his hometown during a trip to Kyiv.

Weeks after jamming with Manchester indie icon Aziz Ibrahim, Burnham paid a visit to the country’s capital, where he pledged his support for Ukraine amidst its ongoing war with Russia.

To mark the occasion, he played a lovely silver T-style guitar alongside a number of soldiers.

The meeting took place in a mobile recording studio of Ukraine’s military and artistic unit. They regularly perform on the front lines, in hospitals, and at rehabilitation centers.

“It was an honour to spend time with Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv. Not sure if they regret handing me that guitar now,” the caption on Burnham’s Instagram post reads.

In the video, he takes the jack cable to play The Smiths’ Rusholme Ruffians.

The Smiths are from Burnham’s hometown of Manchester, where he was Mayor for nearly 10 years before becoming Prime Minister. The 56-year-old has yet to shy away from a chance to champion the music he grew up on.

The guitar he played was hand-built by WM Guitars from Kyiv. This model in particular brandishes a Cultural Forces emblem – a platform said to unite artists, activists, business, and international partners to boost the morale, cultural and educational level, and motivation of soldiers.

It seems to have been gifted to Cultural Forces, with a handwritten message partly visible on the guitar’s arm contour.

Burnham isn’t the only political figure to lend a few chords to the Ukrainian cause. Former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken played Neil Young in a Ukrainian bar during an international visit in 2024.

Meanwhile, SWFT GTRS has turned the horrors of the Ukraine-Russia war into guitar art, with head luthier Nikita Zhemerenko making his first guitar out of materials recovered from his destroyed apartment.

Another luthier has also pulled off a miraculous restoration of a Les Paul left charred and blackened by a Russian drone strike. The Ukrainian guitar community is showing its resilience.

A GoFundMe has been started to support Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, who has been diagnosed with bile duct cancer.

Sean Seymour, who plays bass in Lloyd’s solo project, has set up the page. He’s raising funds to help cover Lloyd’s medical expenses, as he reveals the extent of his condition.

“He has tumors in his liver, including one located dangerously close to a major blood vessel,” Seymour writes. “Because of its location, doctors cannot safely operate to remove it at this time.”

He adds that Lloyd has been through “an extraordinary amount” in recent months, including seven spells in the ICU dealing with “serious complications, including sepsis twice”, and issues with his liver and kidneys. His health has also forced him off the road.

Seymour continues, “For a working musician, that’s devastating – not only because performing is what he loves, but because touring is his primary source of income.”

Lloyd’s wife has since become his full-time carer, and “unresolved royalty issues dating back roughly two years” have created mounting financial worries. A GoFundMe target of $80,000 has been set, and just shy of $69,000 has been raised at the time of writing.

Television’s 1977 debut album, Marquee Moon, is seen as a landmark moment in punk’s evolution, as Lloyd swapped power chords for jazz-tinted complexity and showed another side of the genre. It helped define a decade of post-punk, new wave, and indie rock bands, and is now hailed as a classic.

Away from Television, Lloyd befriended Led Zeppelin, sat in with John Lee Hooker, and become a celebrated solo artist, all of which he opened up about in a career-spanning Guitar World interview back in January. His relationship with Television bandmate Tom Verlaine was also discussed.

“I am usually a pretty upbeat person, and I am taking this in stride, but it has become very difficult on our own; financially, we are strapped,” Lloyd writes. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

Seymour concludes his post with a call to arms: “Richard has spent decades giving his music to other people. Now it’s our turn to give something back to him.”

Those who want to share the fundraiser or donate can find more information on GoFundMe.

The 2010 movie The Runaways introduced a whole new generation to the trailblazing ’70s band that bore that name.

With the definitive lineup featuring Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitars, Cherie Currie on vocals, bassist Jackie Fox, and drummer Sandy West, it was the two guitarists who carved out successful careers beyond the band’s lifetime.

Despite their chops and constant hustle, The Runaways never made it big in the States, but became something of a sensation in Japan.

The biopic-of-sorts offers a glimpse into their story and the complex world they had to navigate during that time – as well as the heartbreak that followed when the band officially dissolved in April 1979.

“I was devastated when the Runaways broke up, for a million reasons – my dream was over,” Jett told Guitar World back in 2010.

“I felt we had failed; I thought maybe it was all my fault. And I just felt really laughed at. It was like you could sense all of Los Angeles going, ‘We told you it wouldn’t work. Ha-ha.’ And I was probably drinking too much, partying too much, kind of spiraling downward.”

Jett reveals that she even thought about pursuing other avenues. And while Lita Ford traded her Gibson SG for the cosmetics counter, Jett briefly considered enlisting in the military.

“I figured it’d help me get myself together; I’d get to travel some, maybe get some discipline.”

Much like her experience with The Runaways, Jett faced one closed door after another when she decided to go solo.

“Kenny [Laguna, Jett’s longtime producer/business partner] knew a lot of people, and he figured he could get me a deal quick, no problem. But everybody he went to said, ‘Can’t help you, Ken, can’t do it.’

“And they all gave various excuses that he thought were ridiculous: ‘She can’t play.’ ‘She can’t sing.’ ‘She’s too intense.’ ‘Maybe she should lose the guitar.’”

Creating her own label, Blackheart Records, was therefore born out of necessity, or as Jett put it, “We had to.”

“I’m glad it went that way, because now we own all our stuff,” she clarified. “But it was totally DIY, selling records out of the trunk of the car after the show, getting the music directly to the fans.

“And I mean, back when we were being turned down by all these labels, the songs we had been sending around were I Love Rock ’n Roll, Do You Wanna Touch Me, Bad Reputation, Crimson and Clover...”

As Jett very aptly pointed out, all these songs eventually became hits.

I Love Rock 'n Roll, her first studio album with her backing band, the Blackhearts, reached the number 2 spot on the U.S. Billboard 200 in 1981 – cementing her status as a true rock ‘n’ roll icon.

In the immortal words of 38 Special, “Just hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.” Those are the lyrics I offer to Cut Worms’ Max Clarke as he describes relinquishing control of his music to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who took on the role of producer for Cut Worms’ latest LP, Transmitter.

The indie singer/songwriter, who lifted his band name from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell – “The cut worm forgives the plow” – stares blankly back at me through our Zoom meeting, completely bemused by my callback to one of classic rock’s great wordsmiths.

“Yeah, that’s a good one,” he manages. Even if he was silently judging my taste in music, the cut worm forgave the reference.

“Historically, I’ve white knuckled it through other people’s playing,” Clarke says. “I had a very specific idea of what I wanted, and I did it all myself a lot of the time. I had a stranglehold on the thing. This time, I trusted that somebody else could bring something to the music that I couldn’t. He pretty much got what I was going for right away.”

If you’re going to enlist an outsider to bring a fresh perspective to a song – and maybe an expensive guitar or two – Tweedy and The Loft is not a bad choice. Since Tweedy records at The Loft on a near-daily basis, Clarke spent virtually no time setting things up or getting sounds.

“If you wanted to use an instrument, you just picked it up and used it,” he says. “At one point, when we were sitting there in the control room area, I reached for an acoustic guitar to idly play or strum. Jeff’s like, ‘That’s the most expensive guitar in this building.’ He wasn’t taken aback, but it was like, ‘Just so you know.’ I didn’t ask how much it was. I was just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”

It’s good to know that Tweedy’s on-stage, chill dad persona translates to the studio. “He had 15 original Rickenbackers from the ’60s,” Clarke says. “Even though there was all this really cool old gear and things that could be in museums, Jeff wasn’t precious about any of it. The instruments are meant to be played.”

• Transmitter is out now via Jagjaguwar
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

With the Fender Telecaster celebrating the big seven-five this year, Guitar World has been speaking to some of the biggest names to pick it up in anger. Here's Blur's Graham Coxon's take on the Tele, and he's very much of the opinion that Leo got it right the first time around.

“It’s one of the first designs for an electric guitar, and there’s nothing on there that you don’t particularly need,” says Coxon. “If I had a perfect Strat, I’d take off a volume and a tone knob – because I’m a dreadful man – just to make it stripped down like a Tele.

“The Tele is a stripped-down hot rod. It’s easy to play, simple and really versatile. It’s a funny-looking thing, but I think people who actually settled down with a nice Tele as a wooden wife saw this incredible thing that Leo Fender decided to make.

“He made it out of bits of old tin and wood and put strings on it, and it was one of the best things ever – and it still is one of the greatest guitars ever built. Maybe because the design was too perfect in the first place, compared to the Strat, which came after… it was an absolutely perfect design.

“But it’s a funny old shape. And the headstock isn’t quite like a Strat headstock. With the Tele, it’s like, 'What’s happened to your headstock?' And it’s like, 'Man, I was born this way…' [Laughs] It’s kind of weird and not quite formed. It’s strange, but it fucking does the job!”

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

When Led Zeppelin were in session, Jimmy Page was on top of everything. He knew the arrangements. He knew exactly how he wanted his guitars to sound. And he expected everyone else to be on point, too.

The sessions for Physical Graffiti are a cautionary tale of what can happen when someone takes their eye off the ball – you can lose something great. That nearly happened to Page.

Speaking to Guitar World in 2005, he explained how disaster struck when one of the hottest engineers in the business turned out to be not the best for LedZep. The band had repaired back to holy ground, at Headley Grange, and it was time to put the finishing touches on a track they had sitting around on tape since 1972 and the epic sessions for Houses of the Holy at Mick Jagger’s country manor, Stargroves.

“The Rover was originally recorded at Stargroves during the making of Houses of the Holy, with Eddie Kramer using the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording unit,” said Page. “When we began recording Physical Graffiti, we continued working on the track at Headley Grange. At the time, we were using [Faces bassist] Ronnie Lane’s mobile recording truck and an engineer called Ron Nevison, who everyone was recommending at the time.”

The Rover wasn’t the only holdover from the Stargroves. Led Zeppelin had recorded Black Country Woman out in the garden at Stargroves, like a field recording capturing the world’s biggest rock band. You see photos from the time, Page, bearded, in his element playing a Martin D-18.

It was a legendary location. The Stones tracked there. The Who recorded there. Doctor Who was filmed there, too. It was all going on. Lane’s recording truck had a state-of-the-art Helios console with 16 tracks.

Page had some great stuff recorded for The Rover – but he had some ideas on how to finish it off. He told Nevison to roll the tape. There was a take incoming. Oh, and he had a word of warning before the red light came on…

“I had an acoustic guitar overdub that I wanted to put on the verses of The Rover, and I told him, ‘Be sure you record this onto an empty track,’” recalled Page. “I went back into the hall at Headley Grange to record the part, but I thought the track sounded a bit odd through the headphones.”

Something was not right.

“When I went back into the mobile studio, I saw why it sounded that way,” said Page. “He erased one of the original guitar tracks, which we’d recorded with two microphones across two tracks. For some reason, he’d rubbed the damn thing out. I’d told him what to do, but he hadn’t paid attention and erased this wonderful, fat-sounding guitar.”

This was a five-alarm fire. The Rover had been rattling around Page’s mind for nearly five years. He started working on it in 1970, initially envisioning it as an acoustic song. Listening to it now, that’s hard to believe; Page’s Les Paul sawing its way across the mix, the metallic sheen of the modulation (the Eventide FL 201 Instant Flanger entered the picture during the Physical Graffiti sessions)… It’s just so electric.

Also, how all that hard-rock strut gives way to the chorus melody is primo Led Zeppelin. After all this time it was coming together and now it was ruined. But Page knew who might be able to fix it.

“When it came time to mix the song, we went to see Keith Harwood, who I had a great relationship with and who was really sympathetic to the band, and we went about salvaging it,” said Page. “Keith took the safety copies of the originals, but we discovered then that there was a problem: it sounded like someone had thrown a blanket over the guitar.

“Keith went to [London’s] Olympic Studios and ran some cables from Studio 2 to Studio 1 and he re-EQ’ed the signal to put more treble on it.”

Harwood and Page copied sections of the track then dropped them in and fixed it up. Harwood worked miracles. Little wonder he got a special thanks in the liner notes. Nevison, who, for the record, denies Page’s account of events and says he never recorded the overdubs, got a barb aimed at him. Thirty years on, Page’s feelings with regards to Nevison had not changed.

“It was an amazing salvage,” he said. “I remember Ron Nevison saying, ‘Oh, never mind…’ when I’d ask him something. I thought he should change his name to Ron Nevermind – because after Physical Graffiti, that was what I thought of him. [laughs] No, he didn’t work with us again, though later, he did work with Heart.”

What Nevison did next might have been the source of Page’s ire, or at least contributing to it. The Physical Graffiti sessions started late. The band had to wait around playing Elvis covers until John Paul Jones got there.

Nevison says he didn’t even know it was a double album when they started. “I don’t know if anybody knew that it would be a double album,” he told The Sonic Road Podcast last year. “But at some point in the recording, they decided to take some tracks from Houses of the Holy.”

Nevison had a hard deadline. He was booked to work on the Tommy film with the Who.

“I called up and said, ‘Look, I can’t continue working on the record,’ and they weren’t really happy about that,” he said. “I guess nobody quits Led Zeppelin, right?”

In its earliest days, Guitar World ran a number of columns authored by the late Merle Travis. One of the greatest country guitar players of all time, he was so influential that one of the more common styles of fingerpicking is named after him.

Travis was one of the ultimate “been there, done that” guitar guys (though he was always incredibly humble), and had stories aplenty, some of which he kindly shared to Guitar World readers when the magazine was still in its infancy.

In Guitar World’s second ever issue (September 1980), Travis paid tribute to his late friend, Paul Bigsby, inventor of the revolutionary vibrato tailpiece that still bears his name.

Travis had already known Bigsby – who, in addition to his luthiery hobby, was a motorcycle designer and racer – for years when he asked him to take a look at his Vibrola, the earliest guitar vibrato device. Fitted to Travis’ Gibson L-10, the Vibrola was fine mechanically, but it often pulled the country legend’s strings out of tune.

Bigsby had impressed Travis when he crafted a guitar for his friend, Joaquin Murphey. Travis wrote in Guitar World that when he asked Bigsby if he could fix the Vibrola, “Without hesitating a second, he roared, ‘I can fix anything!’”

Only, things didn’t quite go according to plan at first.

“In about a week he brought it back,” Travis wrote in the 1980 column. “With a flourish he pitched the thing to me and said, ‘Now, see how it works.’

“It was as bad as ever. We all kidded P.A. [Bigsby]. He turned a little red around the ears. His only comment was, ‘The damn thing’s made wrong in the first place.’

“‘You're just a big blowhard,’ I kidded him,” Travis recalled. “‘Let me see you build a vibrato contraption that works.’ ‘By god, I'll do it,’ Bigsby said, and had a hearty laugh.”

Bigsby was confident, determined, and innovative, and had no intention of striking out twice.

“In a couple of weeks he brought over a neat-looking thing with pegs sticking out of a roller for the string ends, and a handle on it. A triangular affair went back to the guitar where the tailpiece fits,” Travis wrote.

“On it was the name ‘Bigsby’. A ‘Bigsby Vibrola’. I put it on my Gibson L-10 and it worked like a charm. There was no way I could pull the strings out of tune.

“I still have that Vibrola. I see its great grandchildren on every kind of guitar imaginable. Later P.A. sold his gadget to Ted M. McCarty. His name is still on it, as it should be.”

Being Eric Clapton’s sideman is no easy feat. Around 1978, Albert Lee found himself in the unenviable position of being Clapton’s right-hand man for five years, following the release of two back-to-back albums, 1977’s Slowhand and 1978’s Backless – and just as Clapton was in the midst of firing his entire backing band.

“We’d met a few times,” Lee tells Guitar World in a recent interview. “When he was with Mayall, I was with Chris Farlowe; we’d play at the Flamingo Club and run into each other fairly often. We didn't hang out much, but he was really friendly; we saw each other a lot and admired each other’s playing.”

Lee was working on an album with Texan singer-songwriter Mark Benno when Clapton’s manager called.

“I did a week in the studio with Eric, and we had a great time. At the end, his manager pulled me aside and said, ‘Do you fancy going on the road with him?’

“My first album was just about to come out, but I thought, ‘I want to do this!’ So off I went with Eric. He fired the whole band at the end of that tour, and I managed to survive. Two years later, he fired another band, and I survived that time, too. So he liked having me around, which is nice! I enjoyed it.”

During this period, Clapton was going through intense mental health struggles while also grappling with substance abuse… which may gone some way to explaining why he was often firing and hiring different band members.

When it came to the music, however, the Clapton–Lee duo worked well, with their contrasting styles complementing instead of competing with each other.

“I thought it would work really well because we’re so unalike. A lot of guys who play with him have always been blues players. But that’s his job, you know? So I thought, ‘I’ll do what I do and try and complement him.’”

Lee was also involved in the 1979 show at Tokyo’s legendary Budokan, immortalized on Clapton’s live album Just One Night. Released in 1980 as a double album, it achieved astounding commercial success, especially for a live album, reaching No. 2 and No. 3 in the US and UK, respectively.

“[I was] in that building and seeing this huge Japanese flag with the rising sun and thinking, ‘Boy, what a place!’” he recalls. Lee goes on to reveal that he was encouraged to play his single, Country Boy, during the show, although it was not included on the live album.

“Eric wouldn’t play on that – he’d usually sit behind his amp with a cigarette and a glass of brandy, going, ‘Go on, Albert! Go on!’ It was great.”

During his time with Slowhand, Lee also wielded a Les Paul Custom that originally belonged to Clapton.

“At the first rehearsals I did with Eric, we were talking about guitars, and I said, ‘I used to have this Les Paul Custom.’ I think I had a picture of it. He said, ‘I’ve got one of those at home somewhere.’

He continues, “And the next day, Alan Rogan, the guitar roadie, walks in with this Les Paul Custom. That became my guitar for when I was working with Eric. That show at Budokan was with the Les Paul.”

Despite Clapton’s personal struggles, Lee notes that he was “very gracious. He let me play solos. I was stretching out towards the end… Maybe I was stretching out a bit too much! [laughs]”

To celebrate 75 years of the Fender Telecaster, Guitar World assembled a riotous group of Tele superfans – who just happen to be pro players in their own right – to decide whom and what they are carving into the side of a mountain in tribute to the guitar that changed the world.

Who’d be carved into your Telecaster Mount Rushmore?

Mike Campbell: James Burton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. But also Mike Bloomfield because he killed it on that first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album [self-titled, 1965]. I wore out that record. He burned that Telecaster all over the place there. He’s the main one who turned me on to that sound.

John 5: Jerry Reed – and Brent Mason because he had that weird-looking Tele and was a huge inspiration to me. Jerry Donahue, who I love so much with those behind-the-nut bends, and, of course, Keith Richards.

John Osborne: Brent Mason introduced a lot of people to the Tele by what he did – and is still doing – on these country records. Then Vince Gill, Danny Gatton and Steve Cropper. Bonus pick? Albert Lee.

Joanne Shaw Taylor: Albert Collins is an absolute legend, and his vibrato is one of the most distinctive in the history of the instrument. Then Prince, one of the most underrated players ever. Keith Richards; I don’t think there’s a guitar player alive who’s come up with as many iconic riffs as Keef. And Jeff Buckley, who gets overlooked, but he created some beautiful guitar parts in his short career.

Greg Koch: Jimmy Bryant because he’s the O.G. James Burton because he was the first and finest of the poultry pluckers. Albert Collins because he was a true original with the tone and chops of doom. Roy Buchanan, just because. And Danny Gatton, because, because… [Laughs]

Kirk Fletcher: Prince, Bobby Womack, Eddie Hinton, Albert Collins, Reggie Young, Cornell Dupree, David Spinozza, Al McKay, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Jesse Ed Davis, John Leventhal, Roy Buchanan, Roy Nichols, Brent Mason, Guthrie Trapp, Mike Stern – and I definitely still missed a huge amount. And, hands down, Robben Ford!

Keith Urban: James Burton, Keith Richards, Ray Flacke and Brent Mason.

Brent Mason: Jerry Reed, James Burton, Roy Nichols and Danny Gatton.

Jim Weider: Roy Buchanan for his tone, touch and expression; James Burton for his fingerpicking style with country bends; Steve Cropper for his rhythm playing, which set the standard; Jesse Ed Davis for his touch, tone, feel and liquid bends.

Hugh Cornwell: James Burton epitomizes the Tele. Then there’s Steve Cropper, a lesson to us all in longevity, and Wilko Johnson. His style was so unique.

J Mascis: D. Boon from Minutemen for being lovable, energetic, trebly and inventive. Keith Richards… just riff after riff, song after song, and cool solos. “Cousin” Kenny Vaughan from Marty Stuart’s band for his ripping country and rock licks and always serving the song. And Terry Reid. I loved seeing him with a Tele in his hand at Glastonbury [1971].

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: Prince for the way he approached the guitar. Albert Collins for that icy, cutting tone. “Frosty” says everything you need to know. It’s raw, direct and unmistakable. Cornell Dupree for taste and feel. The way he sits in a groove is unreal.

He shows you how musical a Tele can be without ever overplaying. Keith Richards – the riff side of it. Open tunings, rhythm playing, just that attitude. He made the Tele sound like a band by itself. Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton stretched the instrument in ways that still don’t make sense. Honorable mentions to Bill Kirchen and Freddie Stone!

Graham Coxon: Wilko Johnson and Albert Lee. And then Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Albert Lee was insane because he was 16 and playing with all these people, like the Everly Brothers, doing that chicken pickin’. And Frank Black from the Pixies, because Surfer Rosa was amazing.

But there’s also Paul Weller, David Gilmour and George Harrison, who you saw playing that solid-rosewood monstrosity at that point where they seemed to be allowed to play something other than Rickenbackers and Gretsches through Vox amps. [Laughs]

Marty Stuart: Clarence White, Roy Nichols, Luther Perkins, James Burton, Ralph Mooney, Don Rich and Jimmy Bryant – all with a fun, accessible California vibe. Living in Mississippi, I could close my eyes and see palm trees when those guys played.

There was a cool factor. They could dazzle you, but they could also lay low with three notes. I’ve heard the songs a thousand times over, but they still light my heart up the same way they did the first time I heard ’em.

What are your favorite Tele riffs or solos?

Mike Campbell: My first thought is me going to the first Led Zeppelin record – all those riffs on Dazed and Confused and Good Times Bad Times.

John 5: Jimmy Page played the Stairway to Heaven solo on a Tele – and how incredible is that? And I love those Rolling Stones songs where Keith Richards plays a Tele, like Honky Tonk Women, and when Jerry Reed did Jerry’s Breakdown on a Tele.

Greg Koch: The Nightrider by Jimmy Bryant & Speedy West, Ice Pick by Albert Collins, Albert Lee’s solo on Dave Edmunds’ version of Sweet Little Lisa, Roy’s Bluz by Roy Buchanan and any version of Danny Gatton doing Harlem Nocturne.

Brent Mason: Two More Bottles of Wine, which has Albert Lee soloing on Emmylou Harris’ single. Workin' Man Blues, specifically James Burton’s solo and intro. Alabama Jubilee, but the original version with the Jerry Reed intro and solo. Goodnight, Irene with Jerry Reed’s solo and intro.

And Honky Tonk Night Time Man with Roy Nichols’ solo. All these tunes inspired me to play a Tele as a kid. I also watched my Uncle Terry play his white Tele with his blackface Super Reverb and coil cord. With tons of reverb!

Kirk Fletcher: Rainy Night in Georgia by Brook Benton, I’m in Love by Wilson Pickett and Memphis Soul Stew by King Curtis, but I like the live Fillmore version with Cornell Dupree and the studio version by Reggie Young.

Done Change My Way of Living by Taj Mahal with Jesse Ed Davis, Natural Anthem by Jesse Ed Davis, Frosty by Albert Collins, Jesus Just Left Chicago by ZZ Top, Sweet Dreams by Roy Buchannan, Swinging Doors by Merle Haggard, Start It Up by Robben Ford and so many more!

Keith Urban: Guitars & Cadillacs by Dwight Yoakam (Pete Anderson on guitar), Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen (with Brian May playing the solo), Country Boy and Chattahoochee by Alan Jackson (featuring Brent Mason) and Highway 40 Blues by Ricky Skaggs.

Taylor Goldsmith: Brown Sugar by the Stones, Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, Paranoid Android by Radiohead, Breakdown by Tom Petty, Mama Tried by Merle Haggard and Let It Be by the Beatles.

Jim Weider: Paul Burlison’s Train Kept-a-Rollin’ with that thumb and first finger; Roy Buchanan’s Sweet Dreams, which is so beautiful and melodic; Jesse Ed Davis on Jackson Browne’s Doctor My Eyes – his solo, tone and double-stop bends. Any live James Burton with Elvis Presley, any Ricky Nelson with his pick-and-fingers country bends, and Clarence White doing the Byrds’ Eight Miles High live with his B-bender.

J Mascis: Happy by the Stones. It’s got a ripping riff right outta the gate, and it goes on from there. Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin because it’s punishing and awesome. Last Word by Youth Brigade for its buzzsaw mayhem. American Girl by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers because it’s classic, and the lead at the end is magic. Cut by Minutemen because it’s relentless and piercing, yet harmonic.

Hugh Cornwell: James Burton's solo on Ricky Nelson's Just a Little Too Much. I had the record in my teens, and the solo was my favorite part of the song. You can't get a more perfectly composed solo.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: The live While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Prince. It didn’t feel like he was playing a Tele; it felt like he was playing everything at once. [Ed. Note: Prince is actually playing a Hohner Madcat in that classic 2004 video. There was a Tele on the scene, but it was played by Jeff Lynne.] Plus Frosty by Albert Collins, Hey Joe by Roy Buchanan, Brown Sugar by the Stones and Hot Rod Lincoln by Bill Kirchen. They’re all from different worlds, and that’s kind of the point.

Joanne Shaw Taylor: Iced Over by Albert Collins, Grace by Jeff Buckley, Prince’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps – and Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Tumbling Dice by the Rolling Stones.

Graham Coxon: Country Boy by Head Hands & Feet with Albert Lee. He’s just going insane. I’ll send that off to people because it makes people happy, and it’s just brilliant. And then there’s early Zeppelin, where Jimmy Page had that Dragon Tele. This was before he got his Les Paul and all his sperm were going nuts. [Laughs] And then, early Eric Clapton with the Yardbirds.

That stuff… what an experience that would have been to get that flipping amp and just dime it. As far as others, in America – in Nashville – there are people. Those people will read this and think, “Who is this asshole, Graham Coxon?” And those people are playing Teles properly, you know, just doing it nicely.

Marty Stuart: If you go to Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, there are several versions of Folsom Prison Blues, but if you go to the live recital version, what Luther Perkins played on that takes me back to when I was nine and got my first guitar. It reminds me of everything I love about the guitar. Merle Haggard’s Workin' Man Blues with James Burton playing the solo; if they recorded that song one more time, it would not have sounded the same. They caught lightning in a bottle.

Clarence White’s solo on This Wheel’s on Fire from Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde – go figure that one out! [Laughs] Love’s Gonna Live Here by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. If [Buckaroos guitarist] Don Rich had lived – same as Clarence White – there’s no telling where he would have taken it.

Why do you play a Tele?

John 5: When kids are growing up, they see something and are drawn to it. I saw that guitar and loved it. I had an acoustic when I was six, but then I saw the electric guitars on Hee Haw. I was like, “Wow!” They looked so shiny – and the shape… I didn’t think there was any other shape for an electric guitar besides a Telecaster. They all used Teles on that show, and I was so taken aback by it.

Greg Koch: It was the only Fender that was available to me in my formative years, and it just so happened to be the perfect tool for what I do. I love other guitars, but the Telecaster and its variants are always home for me. If I have to bring one guitar into the breach, that’s the one I’m reaching for.

Brent Mason: It’s perfect for any situation. Whether it’s country, rock, jazz, blues… the tone, the pickups, the wood all play into its character. And it’s practically indestructible!

Keith Urban: It’s like meat and potatoes, and it’s built to take any player's style, from a light touch to beating the hell out of it.

Joanne Shaw Taylor: I started on a Strat, and while I still enjoy it for rhythm parts, I prefer the Tele for its bite. That and its versatility seem to suit me best.

Jim Weider: It was popular in the ’60s and used by the guitar heroes I watched, like Steve Cropper, James Burton, Rick Nelson, Jeff Beck, Robbie Robertson and Roy Buchanan. I also loved – and love – the look and feel of the Tele.

J Mascis: I just like the leads I play on a Tele better than other guitars. It sounds more inspired and less generic.

Graham Coxon: It’s light, and it seems to disappear when you play it. I was this Les Paul person when I was young, and it felt kind of sharp, and it was hurting my ribs. Then, in the early days of Blur, while we were recording the first few records with [producer] Stephen Street, he had this lovely old Tele, and I was like, “This is so comfortable.”

I didn’t have to think about bruised ribs. I’ve never used Teles nicely. I’ve put them through tons of pedals to get what I need out of them, but it’s such a beautiful and easy instrument to play, so that’s why I used them, just as a tool to get the sounds I needed. But I’ve realized that proper Tele players don’t really do that. [Laughs]

Marty Stuart: When I was falling in love with guitar and putting my first band together when I was nine, I’d look around on TV and magazine covers, and it was the guitar my heroes played. I just wanted to get into the parade, wear cool cowboy clothes and boots, play a Telecaster through a Fender amp and play the kind of songs that I loved.

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

Jerry Cantrell can be his own worst critic. He will have song ideas he will sit on and see nothing in them, only for his bandmates in Alice In Chains – or his producer – to persuade him to change his mind.

Speaking to Guitar World in 1996, upon the release of the Seattle grunge legends’ eponymous third album – the so-called ‘Dog Album’ – he explained how it took a group effort to help him sort treasure from trash.

“We have shared tastes as well as shared dislikes. It’s an unspoken language that we have,” he explained. “That’s not to say that we don't sometimes disagree on stuff. There have been plenty of times where I think something is completely horrid and the other guys will make me check it out again. For weeks I’ll be like, ‘God, that sucks!’ Then one day it’s like, ‘Ohhh, I get it. Okay. That’s good!’ [laughs]”

As Cantrell says, it can take weeks for him to come around to an idea he originally thought was bogus. Sometimes longer. Sometimes he never comes around to them, especially when it comes to his guitar solos. It’s always weird to hear an artist appraise their own work, especially when that work has established itself as part of the pop-cultural canon.

For many, Dirt is a front-to-back classic, the feelbad hit of the ‘90s, all swampy nihilism and self-loathing. But key are the moments of grace and levity that give it this great dynamic power. Cantrell’s ‘70s rock influences expanding the canvas. Hate to Feel could be an alternate title track, such as it captures the vibe.

But its seesawing wah solo? Cantrell never liked it. “I thought the solo on Hate To Feel was a piece of shit,” he said.

Cantrell was in good spirits in ’96. The ‘Dog Album’ had his tail wagging. They had recorded it at their usual spot in downtown Seattle, Studio X, then owned by the Heart sisters, Ann and Nancy Wilson.

Even so, there was part of him that still wished he could have found the time to nip back into the booth to fix up the solo to Grind and do it all over again. Toby Wright, the producer, talked him out of it. What we hear on the record was what he tracked for the ADAT demo.

“[It] works fine. I didn’t think it was that strong, but I never got around to fixing it,” said Cantrell. “Toby kept trying to sell me on it. I kept telling him I wanted to do it better because it just didn’t seem to work for me. In the end, it’s perfect for the record, but it took me a long time to feel comfortable with it.”

Maybe that is because Cantrell doesn’t see lead guitar as his strongest suit. We know he can rip – the solo to Them Bones has everything, including that Aristotelian narrative structure where we get a beginning, a middle and an end. Plus, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Cantrell says he has never been big on solos.

“I just put in what needs to be there. I’m more of a rhythm player who plays lead – or tries to play lead,” he said. “I’m not saying I do bad shit, but I just do what fits the part. I’m more interested in what the whole picture is instead of creating a big vehicle for Cantrell to wank off all over everybody.”

Heartland storytelling seems to come easy for Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon, but he couldn’t do it without the guitar. “The guitar is a magical thing,” Fallon tells Guitar World. “Even more so after I found my own style.”

That style is apparent on classic Gaslight songs like Great Expectations and American Slang, and his latest solo singles, Not Bad for New Jersey and Better Before, which come from his upcoming solo record, Not Bad for New Jersey.

Once again, it all boils down to six-strings. “I really love this,” Fallon says. “A lot of players don’t want to try and find their own thing, but it’s really important. I just put my fingers where they feel good, and that works. Sometimes people are afraid of that, but there’s no reason to be.”

The rest of 2026 sees Fallon focusing on his solo work with his band The Painkillers, but 2027 will be for The Gaslight Anthem. “It works because those guys in Gaslight like to chill and recharge for a year after we tour and do promo. That’s when I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do my other thing over here,’’’ Fallon says.

“I just love music so much that I can’t sit still. I need to do it all the time. I’ll do my solo shows, and during that time, I’m writing for Gaslight, so I’m always flip-flopping. I wouldn’t recommend it, and I don’t know why it works, but it does. [laughs]”

During a break from the action, Fallon dialed in with GW to talk gear, his love for and approach to rhythm guitar, why Keith Richard is the GOAT, and more.

Do you write mostly on guitar?

I almost always write on guitar. I’ve written a few songs on piano, but it rarely happens. It’s always guitar, and never acoustic. I like electric guitar – especially a [Fender] Telecaster. I can just sit in the back of a van, play that thing, and if you stick your chin up to it, you can hear it. It's usually either my black Tele or an old ’62 Fender Jaguar that’s been re-fanned.

What about the Tele and Jag inspires you?

I can do everything with the Tele. It goes everywhere with me. It’s become part of me and is a really trusted tool. And in a completely different way, the Jaguar is old and mysterious… it’s a little beat up, and I wonder who owned it, where it’s been… someone really played the crap out of it. [laughs]

Do you prefer worn-in guitars as opposed to new ones?

I do wonder where [they’ve] been before me and what spooky stories are in [them]. I think the old ones do that. The new ones have another kind of thing, too. When you get a certain guitar, it will make you play differently from others. It’s about how the instrument grabs you.

But the old ones have this other element… if it’s too nice, I don’t like it. [laughs] The vintage ones that hang on the wall, those are not for me. I feel like they repel me, because I have a couple of really nice guitars, like a 1945 Martin, and it sounded good, but it was like sunlight to a vampire.

Is that because you couldn’t really lay into it?

Yeah, I knew that it was delicate. Like, it had a little case bite hold in it, and you could just tell that it was like, ‘If you treat me the wrong way, I’m gonna fall apart.’ [laughs] I don’t like that feeling… I can’t be trusted with nice things. That’s the truth!

As you’re working on your new solo music, what amps and pedals help shape your tone?

Most of the time it’s the same. Anytime I try and change it, like patching in a Quad Cortex, I get it sounding good, and then it goes back to the nice things thing… I’m just one of those people who needs to have this one thing, and it does that thing, and I know what it does, and that’s it.

I usually use an [MXR] Phase 90, a wah pedal, and for this stuff, I wanted more of a chorus sound, like The Police, so I have [producer] Butch [Walker] help with that. I can say to him, “Dude, do something like Mark Knopfler,” and it might as well be like Mark Knopfler is sitting there.

How do you view the progression of your playing?

I can only do what I can do, and that’s it. I can’t try to keep up with everybody – and I don’t have to. I do one thing, and I think I do that thing better than almost anyone, you know, the rhythm thing. I’m like the guy in the back who plays rhythm. I’m like Izzy Stradlin.

What’s the key to solid rhythm guitar?

Not getting in the way of the song – but also not being boring. Rhythm guitar is an incredibly difficult skill, and the people who are best at it, like Keith Richards… it’s not just sitting there and strumming a chord. You’re not just playing parts – you’re catching an upstroke, you’re adding a triad-based thing, so it’s all of that. I don’t think I’m a master yet, but I’m getting to be Bruce Lee-level on rhythm guitar. [laughs]

A common thread within your solo work and with The Gaslight Anthem is storytelling. How does the guitar lend itself to that?

Man, it’s really important. It’s bizarre because if I sit at a piano and play the same chords, it’s not the same as on guitar. There is nothing like the sounds you can make on guitar – especially a Telecaster. That sound really speaks to me. Like, the overtones in a chord, there can be only a little bit of information; your brain fills in the other instruments, and it becomes a symphony.

What advice would you have for young players struggling to find their sound, considering that the information overload out there today causes players to become discouraged by their so-called limitations?

I struggled with that for a long time. So many players out there are just so advanced from what I think I’m capable of doing. But going back to Keith Richards, while he didn’t have much to do with this record, his essence of guitar playing lives in my [style].

I’ve always viewed him as… I can’t do all that other stuff, but I can do that. I feel that rhythm deep in me. Keith did that with all the attitude in the world, and it was awesome, and it was totally cool. So, you can do your own thing. You don’t have to be a shredder.

And even if someone can shred, can they write a song?

Totally. Some people underestimate what a great guitar player is. There’s multiple facets to it. There’s the traditional shredder, but then there’s Julian Lage or John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take Snow, for example; that lick isn’t hard to play…, but it’s super hard to get up to speed for five minutes.

I don’t think a lot of people could do it cleanly. I really try to excel at that kind of thing. Instead of solos, I want to learn licks. It’s about the relationship between the two. That kind of playing is overlooked.

We have a lot of Ron Wood’s and Mick Taylors’, but we need more Keith Richards’s and Marley’s. But you know what I think is one of the most fundamental licks?

What’s that?

Your Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow. It’s crazy. It’s slamming. That opening lick is so dope. It’s Wendy Melvoin, and it’s perfectly played. That there is the goal. If you’re a guitar player out there, go listen to her – that is the way you should play guitar. But only half of you… the other half needs to be shredders, because every Izzy needs a Slash. [laughs]

Where does your solo work sit compared to your work with the Gaslight Anthem?

With the Gaslight Anthem, we know what people want from us. We’re all explorers… those guys really love to search and see what we come up with. I’m a huge fan of that. But at the same time, there’s this other thing where I want to steer the whole thing.

It would be a disservice to the guys in Gaslight to instruct them on what I want a song to be. But I always send those guys my solo records before anyone else hears it. I was like, “You guys check this out and see what I’ve got,” and they send me their stuff, too. So, we’re in a good spot now because we’ve been best friends for like 20 years.

What’s next for you in the near and far?

Next, we will probably write the next Gaslight Anthem album, and then probably work on that next year. And on guitar, I’ve been doing this weird thing where I’ve been learning the solo from Skid Row’s I Remember You. [laughs] I’m like really [New] Jersey, and I wanted to learn some of those little dive bomb licks. Let’s just say it’s funny what you can do with a Jaguar and that floating trem. [laughs]

• Not Bad For New Jersey is out September 10 via Lesser Known Records
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

“I’d never say they were difficult to work with, because we had a really good understanding of each other,” Elliott Randall told me during a recently rediscovered – and previously unpublished – 2003 interview. He was talking about working with Steely Dan’s co-founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

“Everybody’s got their own brand of craziness,” Randall said. “With Donald, Walter and me, we just realized we were a bunch of nutty guys, and – as long as we could get together on a level that we felt happy when creating music – what more could you ask for? Nobody could be more meticulous than those two. They were absolutely the top of the bill.”

Prior to working with Becker and Fagen on their Steely Dan outings, Randall first met the pair when they were doing time on the road as part of Jay and the Americans’ backing band and later while working on early pre-Steely Dan demos.

“We’d been friendly acquaintances for quite a while, and I was asked to do a bunch of their demos when they were trying to get themselves a deal in New York,” Randall said. “This was way before they got signed to ABC. Then in 1972, they moved to California. I moved there too [from New York], sort of part time to test the waters and see if I liked it.

“At that point they asked me to join the group, but I had a funny feeling that I’d be better off just being friendly with the guys. I said, ‘I don’t want to join the group, but I’d be happy to make records with you. If you want me to come and do personal appearances, that’d be fine, but I don’t want to be a full-time member of a group at this point in my life.’ That was met with a little bit of eyebrow raising.”

When Becker and Fagen finally began working on Steely Dan’s debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, they asked Randall to contribute guitar to two tracks, Kings and Reelin’ In the Years, the latter of which would secure Randall’s reputation as one of the group’s go-to guitarists. His blistering solo is nothing short of iconic.

“That solo actually was the first thing that happened when they hit the red button,” Randall said. “I listened to it a couple of times and said, ‘Let’s roll the tape – let’s record.’ I just wacked it off from the very beginning to the very end, but it turned out that the tape operator hadn’t pressed the ‘record’ button. So we wound up doing another one, which is the one you hear on the record.

“[Because of] that incident, producer Gary Katz introduced a policy of where the minute somebody starts doing anything, he made sure you hit the red button so everything was recorded. You never know when you’ll get an accidental piece of music.”

Randall used his usual workhorse, a ’60s Fender Strat, on the track. “I bought it in 1965, though it was two years old at the time,” he says. “It cost me a whopping $175. While the body is ’63, the neck is ’65 [because] I had put it in the trunk of a friend’s sports car on the way to a gig. When we got there, the case had wiggled around so much that the neck got broken.

“But I was able to get a new neck right away. The guitar has been basically that ever since. It’s souped up in terms of the pickups and electronics. The front pickup is a Gibson PAF humbucker I [installed] in 1969.

“There’s a wonderful guitarist from Toronto, Dominic Troyano. He had a Telecaster with two humbucking pickups, and I loved the sound of it. He said, ‘If you love it, let me take you to my friends, Barney Kessel’s Music World in L.A., and they’ll put one in for you.’ They totally warmed up the instrument. It’s really big and fat and very un-Strat-like.”

And then there’s that fiery, unrestrained solo on Kings.

“It’s a really out-to-lunch solo that goes from being very sort of within the changes to being dissonant and wacky,” Randall said. “It actually kind of spoke from my head state at the time. I was going through some serious life changes. I had a failed marriage – we just didn’t understand each other – and I was in the process of getting a divorce. I just played out my nuttiness in that song.”

The obscure lyrical content to Steely Dan’s music has confounded many fans, yet Becker and Fagen have consistently refrained from revealing much behind the songs’ meaning, preferring the subject matter to remain enigmatic.

“They were into combining elements of good literature along with their sophisticated musical knowledge,” Randall said. “They’d write a song like Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, and there’d be a story behind it, but you play it for 10 different people and 10 different people will find 10 different stories.

“That’s the beauty of it. It’s almost like looking at certain kinds of paintings and how they will evoke different thoughts from different people. You can span the entire spectrum, and nobody’s wrong. And the painter’s having a good time because everybody’s enjoying the work in their own way.”

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

Sharing airspace with someone while they listen to your music is among the most mortifying things a working musician can experience. It often happens at the most unsuspecting moments, and it never gets any less embarrassing.

During our call, Kyle Thomas – aka King Tuff – recounted an example of this humiliation ritual during an Uber ride. The former L.A. but now Vermont-based singer/guitarist is one of those insanely prolific rock ’n’ roll lifers who always seems to be recording or touring in one of his bands: King Tuff, Witch or Ty Segall’s backing band, the Muggers. Naturally, Thomas had his guitar in tow. It’s a late-’90s Gibson SG that Thomas painted with metallic blue craft paint.

“I don’t tour with this guitar anymore,” Thomas says. “It has a broken headstock that was fixed with this Frankenstein bolt. I snapped the headstock while trying to do a throw-it-over-my-shoulder move. I brought it to an idiot who tried to fix it with epoxy.

“Within weeks it peeled away and ruined the joint so you couldn’t even use wood glue. I brought it to Reuben Cox at Old Style Guitar Shop in L.A. He’s a genius. He just drilled a bolt through it and put it on either side and it stayed ever since. A lot of people might think it was ruined, but I think it’s like 10 times cooler because of that.”

The Uber driver, noticing his guitar case, probed Thomas about its contents. Rather than let the driver imagine some Antonio Banderas-in-Desperado gunslinger fantasy, Thomas told the truth.

“I told him the name of my band and he wanted to listen to it. I’m like, ‘Oh, God… here we go,’” Thomas says.

It gets worse.

“He turns it down and says, ‘Okay, here’s my review: the band is good. It’s got a good groove, but you’ve got to get a new singer,’” he says with a laugh. Thomas agreed completely.

“I sound kind of like a demented child, but there are people out there that relate to it or like it,” he says.

“There are some songs where I do think I sound great. A lot of the singers that I love don’t have technically great voices, but I love them because they’re unique. You’ve got to embrace it all. You’re not gonna win over every Uber driver, and you’re not gonna win over everybody on the planet.”

• MOO is out now via MUP.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

On May 7, 1964, a who's who of future blues guitar luminaries – among them Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones – gathered, with a number of other excited blues fans, at the Wilbraham Road train station in south Manchester.

Clapton, Beck, and co. had journeyed to the out-of-use station all the way from London to see a show unlike any other – the Blues and Gospel Train.

Staged dramatically on the station's platform – with the audience on one end of the tracks and the performers on another – and filmed for a Granada TV special, the show gathered together a mind-blowing lineup of blues giants: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann, and the Reverend Gary Davis.

Though all of the aforementioned blues legends brought their A-game, it was Tharpe – brought to the stage in style in a horse-drawn carriage – who completely stole the show.

Inspired by the downpour that had lashed the station shortly before her arrival, Tharpe decided to open her set with a ferocious rendition of the gospel standard, Didn’t It Rain.

Armed with her beloved, three-pickup 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG Custom, Tharpe treated those in attendance – and the estimated 10 million viewers who would later watch the broadcast at home – to a display of powerful, hard-driving blues guitar fire that was years ahead of its time.

You can draw direct lines, for instance, from Tharpe’s fluid but always in-the-pocket rhythm work to Richards’ later playing with the Rolling Stones, and hear the influence her lyrical slides would go on to have on Jones, already a huge fan of slide master Elmore James.

You can see Tharpe’s Didn’t It Rain performance above, and the full Blues and Gospel Train TV special below.

Tharpe’s performance has now been commemorated with a plaque at the Manchester Central Convention Complex – the former Manchester Central Railway Station – where Tharpe and those she shared the bill with boarded the train that took them to the Wilbraham Road station.

The plaque is part of a Manchester-based campaign by social historian and broadcaster Karen Gabay, to place plaques that honor Black musicians who influenced the city.

Of Tharpe, she told the BBC, “She was one cool sister; that swagger, that strut, the way she played the guitar – so many people who see it for the first time are instantly taken aback.”

Back in 2022, Lizzo guitarist Celisse and Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/guitarist Amythyst Kiah staged – as part of Gibson's Shout, Sister, Shout! mini-documentary on Tharpe – a tribute to the 1964 train station performance.

Wielding Custom Shop replicas of Tharpe's 1961 Les Paul SG Custom, the duo put their own, unaccompanied spin on Didn’t It Rain, while retaining the spirit and passion of the original.

“She [Tharpe] entranced audiences and inspired untold numbers of blues-loving players from across the pond, people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards,” Celisse says in the film. “There’s an endless list of artists that borrowed from Sister Rosetta – folks like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, even me!

“Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born to be on stage and channel her joy of faith through her powerful voice and volcanic playing. She took audiences to church and her male guitar playing contemporaries to school.

“While it’s taken decades to finally give her her due,” Celisse concludes, “there is no debating that Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the unquestioned founding mother of rock 'n' roll.”

Though popular and commercially successful in her day, Tharpe – who died in 1973, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia – has only recently begun to receive recognition as one of the formative figures in blues and rock electric guitar playing.

In 2018, decades after many of the guitarists whose style she helped shape received the same honor, Tharpe was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in the “Early Influences” category.

Greg Dulli has fashioned himself into an indie rock icon with the Afghan Whigs. Albums like 1992’s Congregation, 1993’s Gentlemen and 1996’s Black Love explore his vision, as does their latest record, Soft Control.

“I write songs the exact same way I did when I was 15,” Dulli tells Guitar World. “I might bring other things in, but it’s all about coming up with a riff, putting a melody on top, and then writing the words.”

He’s also remained in his comfort zone when it comes to playing guitar. “I started very late,” he says. “My playing had nowhere to go but up! I’m still very remedial, but I can play better than when I started. But I’ve had excellent taste in guitarists along the way – I’ll employ a ringer when I need to!”

1. What was your first guitar?

It was a Hagstrom 12-string with six strings taken off, and I played it as a six-string. I got a Tele in the mid ’80s that had a sort of swirled pattern, and then I got a rosewood Telecaster. For the last 20 years I’ve been playing a Gibson ES-335.

2. What are the quirks or habits that define your playing style?

I lived in Phoenix for the summer of ’86, right before I went back to Ohio and started the Whigs. This dude named Ryan, who I had a band with for a couple of weeks, taught me a couple of tricks that I use to this day.

He was like, “I can show you how to play five notes by moving one finger.” He did, and I still do that. So I owe it all to Ryan. I don’t remember his last name, but that’s still in my trick bag!

3. What’s your number-one tone tip?

Know what sounds good. If you can get a guitar, an amp and pedals you like, dial that in. I’ve been using Mesa/Boogie since 1996 – that’s my tone. And with pedals, it’s the silver one, the red one and the black one!

4. You can only take a Strat or a Les Paul to a gig. Which?

I wouldn’t wanna play a gig with either of those! They’re great in the studio, but I can’t make them work for a show. It’s like saying, “You can either use a Marshall or you don’t play.” I’d just rather sing then!

5. What’s been the hardest time you’ve had in music?

I come from a blue-collar background and I’ve seen tough times. My times as a musician haven’t been as tough as times I’ve seen, so in that regard, I wouldn’t say it’s been any tougher than it’s been for any other human.

I sort of always did music; it was my constant companion. Even if it wasn’t feeding me physically, it was feeding me in other ways.

6. Is there a philosophy that’s stuck with you?

Dare to fail – try anything, man. Don’t be afraid to do something because you’re worried about how it’ll come out. Just let it come out and react to it then.

7. What’s the best guitar tone of all time?

Listen to any Prince record – there’s your tone.

8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?

I’ll say the same thing I’ve said for 40 years: Jimmy Page. And he could play the Les Paul at the gig! First of all, he’s a songwriter. Like Prince, when you’ve written and produced the song, you know how it’s gonna sound in your head. It’s called a vision, and both those guys had it.

Vision is something you can’t learn. You have it; you don’t develop it. On top of being phenomenal guitar players, they’re both phenomenal songwriters, live performers and producers.

9. What makes you pick up the guitar over and over?

Because I can, and because I can put something down that wasn’t there two seconds before I picked it up. I can make a sound.

10. What appeals to you most when you pick up the instrument?

I can comfort myself. I can entertain myself. I can drive myself crazy. As soon as I pick up a guitar, possibilities are at hand. That’s always tempting.

11. What’s your number-one guitar?

That would be my 1946 Martin acoustic that I bought in 1994. It’s the guitar that I write on. I bought it at a place called American Music in Seattle – I walked in the place and saw it like you’d see a pretty girl across the room.

I was just drawn to it. I sat down with it, started playing, and I felt like I’d known it forever. It’s either in my bedroom or downstairs with me. If the house were on fire, it wouldn’t just be the one guitar I’d take – it would be the one possession I’d take. I love it that much.

• Soft Control is out now.

A GoFundMe has been set up to support veteran session guitarist Chris Spedding as he begins treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Campaign organizer Eden Cale writes that Spedding – whose illustrious résumé includes credits with Paul McCartney, Brian Eno, the Pretenders, John Cale, and Jack Bruce – was recently diagnosed with large B-cell high-grade, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and is now undergoing intensive chemotherapy treatments.

“Chris’ genius as a musician, session guitarist, and producer has touched generations of music lovers. But to our family, he's just been Uncle Chris,” Cale says. “Now, at 82, Chris faces a tough new battle.”

“Because this fight will pause his ability to work and tour, Chris and his wife, Jody, need our support to help cover essential living expenses and additional medical expenses as they navigate this difficult period.

“Anyone who knows Chris knows he is a kind, generous soul who would step up for anyone in need. For decades, he has given us unforgettable music. Now, it is our turn to rally around him to show our appreciation of him during this challenging time.”

The campaign aims to raise £50,000, and is online now.

Earlier this year, Spedding spoke to Guitar World about some of the highlights of his amazing, 60-year career. Aside from his work with McCartney, Eno, the Pretenders, Cale, and Bruce, Spedding has also played with Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Elton John, Tom Waits, and Robert Gordon.

Back in 1969, a 22-year-old drama student, Albert Goodman, found himself face-to-face with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and managed to capture his iconic closing set.

Now, this rare footage has been unearthed in a new film, Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock – A Second Look, which premiered during a YouTube livestream on August 18 at 9 pm ET.

Goodman left his tent and managed to sneak onstage, shielded by a friend who was carrying a guitar. After securing AC power for his Sony CV ½” video camera, he set it up just 15 feet across the stage where Hendrix would grace the Woodstock revellers.

According to the official description, “Goodman was left alone, assumed to be just another member of the sprawling film crew who had surrounded the stage for the entire event. He settled in behind percussionist Juma Sultan and prepared to document history.”

While technical limitations caused occasional interruptions in the video signal, the more obvious glitches have been replaced by photos.

Goodman managed to capture Hendrix in his prime on August 18, 1969, in Bethel, New York. The newly available footage includes Purple Haze, Voodoo Child, Hear My Train a Comin’, Message to Love, and his history-making rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Wielding a Strat, Hendrix can be seen setting the stage on fire with his playing, alongside the newly formed Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, also known as the Band of Gypsys.

The lineup consisted of guitarist Larry Lee, bassist Billy Cox, Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, and percussionists Juma Sulytan and Jerry Velez.

Following Woodstock, Goodman hitchhiked and was offered a ride by a driver who, coincidentally, said he was friends with people working at the house Hendrix was renting nearby. This eventually led to the legend himself screening Goodman’s footage and giving his seal of approval.

Goodman kept his tapes stored for the next three decades, before making them available to the Hendrix family.

Since footage from Woodstock is rare, these new videos offer new insight into a performance that not only captured the zeitgeist, but also cemented Hendrix as a guitar hero for the ages.

Johnny Marr has accumulated a fair few guitars since his time with British indie rock pioneers The Smiths. In fact, he's gotten to the point where he’s auctioning off his four-decade guitar collection at Christie’s in London this September.

Yet, among them all, there’s one guitar – a 1960 Cherry Red ES-355 – that harks back to a very exciting time for Marr. It was 1984, around the time The Smiths started generating enough buzz to be wined and dined by the industry.

So, when legendary music executive Seymour Stein of Sire Records approached the band, Marr took the opportunity to coax him into acquiring his dream guitar.

“[It was] one night in 1984. It was a done deal we were going to sign to Sire,” Marr tells Guitarist. “We’d have happily paid him: it was our dream label. But I was asking about The Stones in the ’60s, and he made the mistake of telling me he’d always take Brian Jones to get a guitar. So I saw my opportunity. I told him if he bought me a guitar, The Smiths would sign to Sire.”

Marr was committed to not letting Stein’s promise slide. “On a snowy day in New York, I hung around the Sire offices all day, so Seymour wasn’t going to escape,” he reveals. “We walked to We Buy Guitars on 48th Street and, as is often the way – and it’s a bit like this with pets – it already felt like I owned it when I saw it.”

Now estimated to fetch over $200,000 at auction, the Cherry Red ES-355 is one of the guitars that’s most associated with Marr’s Smiths era.

The veteran guitarist points to the “romantic notion” that many musicians, including himself, have: “that instruments have music in them”. And, in the case of the ES-355, it would deliver some pretty timeless hits.

Not only did he write two songs shortly after acquiring it, but he also used it extensively in the studio for the band’s sophomore album, Meat Is Murder. It was a fixture on stage throughout 1984 and 1985 as well – widely regarded as The Smiths’ golden era.

“As soon as I got that 355 back to the hotel, I wrote Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” he remembers fondly. “Which took about 10 minutes. Then I immediately wrote Girl Afraid.

“There’s a few guitars like that in the auction. If they end up in the hands of songwriters, they’ll definitely deliver songs.”

For more from Marr, pick up issue 541 of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.

Back in mid-1967, neither Jimi Hendrix nor Buddy Guy had yet cemented themselves as Mount Rushmore-level guitar pioneers who delighted in breaking rules, bending convention, and blowing minds.

Hendrix was on the cusp of a blinding ascendancy that would see him become, arguably, the most influential electric guitar player who ever lived by the time of his tragic death just three years later. Guy, however, was – and would remain for decades – not nearly as famous as some of the A-list blues-rock guitarists who took cues from his stinging phrases, piercing volume, and embrace of feedback.

Back in 1967, you could forgive the man for snickering a little when compared to one of his younger, more famous blues guitar contemporaries. For instance, Eric Clapton, who decades later would refer to Guy as “the greatest living guitarist”, was already packing arenas with Cream by that time.

Speaking to Guitar World in 1983, Guy recounted the first time he came across Jimi Hendrix’s name in 1967, via an excited concertgoer who was trying to pay him a backhanded compliment after a gig.

“He said, ‘You sound like Jimi Hendrix!’ I said, ‘Jimi who?’” Guy remembered. When the surprised fan asked the Chicago blues legend, “Don't you know Jimi Hendrix?” he replied, “‘No, but if he and I play alike you should ask him if he's heard of me.’”

It wasn’t long before Guy met Hendrix in person, with the latter supposedly telling him that he cancelled a gig to see Guy play. Not too long after came an after-hours Guy/Hendrix jam that was captured for posterity via some wonderfully grainy footage.

Ironically, given that Guy was often chided early in his career for playing too loudly, he felt the same of Hendrix when he first saw the latter play live.

“You’ll laugh, but I thought he used to play too loud,” Guy told Guitar World last year. “When I first came up, Muddy Waters and those guys had two little speakers at each corner of the blues club, and it was a clean sound.”

Waters and co. weren’t playing arenas, however. As rock shows began drawing people by the tens of thousands, and with amp technology in many ways still in its infancy, the first volume wars took hold.

“The clean sound went away because, with the amplifiers, it was a dogfight. It was just a rat race,” Guy told GW. “And then all the special effects came in, and Jimi, I think he was one of the greatest who ever took advantage of the special effects, because a lot of people used them after him.”

Today, Guy is a mainstay act on the ongoing Experience Hendrix tribute tour series. “I'm so grateful we had the chance to become friends,” he told GW last year. “It's an honor to help keep his legacy alive.”

Self-taught guitarist Sawyer Hill went from playing in an Arkansas high school garage band to America’s next best country-tinged indie-rocker overnight, after a viral video of Look at the Time flooded his inbox with A&Rs applauding his flair, hair and knack for songwriting.

“You’re an unknown – then all of a sudden 10 million people have seen you,” Hill recalls. In 2023, after being fired from his lab assistant day job, he’d decided to stop “sleepwalking through life” and devote himself to guitar, determined to prove his viral success wasn’t a fluke.

Three years on he’s tallied up over 130 million streams of Look at the Time, opened a North American run for Yungblud, and now awaits the launch of his debut record Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy. “Playing for Yungblud’s crowd was really incredible,” Hill says.

“Ozzy had just passed and Yungblud was on his rise. Everyone was really excited for rock music, and obviously I’m a rock musician. So it was the perfect storm of this moment between generations and genre.

“I didn’t have to fight the audience on anything – everything we did super-hit. Yungblud taught me how to control a room three times bigger than anything I’d ever played before. He’s a fucking entertainer.”

Hill’s fascination with music kicked off in the early 2010s with classical ukulele. Longing for more strings, he was gifted a $100 Epiphone Dreadnought one Christmas from his grandparents, which he used to write some of his most-played songs.

His love for rock began during a high school lunch break talent show. “I thought it was the sickest thing ever. I auditioned to be in the band with the intro of Stairway to Heaven.” He got the gig and was handed an Ibanez Artcore – although, as it turned out, it had been stolen from a pawn shop.

Fast-forward to present day and he now plays a Gibson 335. “I always found Artcores to play easily until last year, when I went to a Gibson showroom. I wanted a light guitar that’s gonna play similar every time. I really hate a heavy guitar that cuts off your circulation.

“Gibson lent me a 335 that’s super-light and sick. It’s fucking amazing; it plays great. I played that on the Yungblud run with the intention to give it back. Little did they know, at the end of every set I would crash the headstock on a cymbal. I bent the tuning pegs all out of whack.

“Magically they still work, but they were all sorts of fucked. I posted a photo with the 335 on socials, and Gibson said, ‘You look so great, keep the guitar!’”

Hill plays his askew 335 through a Fender Blues Junior after he learned that “you don’t need a giant-ass amp to be super-loud and have a great tone.” He pairs it with a small pedalboard consisting of distortion –always on – plus an overdrive for ripping solos and a trusty tuner.

Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy is a captivating mix of country and indie blues rock, each track tied with a sweep of slide guitar. “Some of the singles might have painted a picture about the record’s totality, but I think the record will catch people off guard,” he says.

The 11-track debut rejects country’s notorious themes of love and heartbreak. “It’s half-autobiographical and half what I’m feeling at the time,” he explains. “The songs that are really sad for me are some of the more happy sounding ones, and there isn’t one total message throughout.”

Fuzz-filled track Jimmy’s Gone Numb was recorded using a “crazily” tuned-down hollow-body, paired with another dropped acoustic – and bizarrely, it’s played even lower live. Described by Sawyer as “Johnny Cash meets surf rock,” it juxtaposes the promised American dream and its harsh awakened reality – despite the song’s upbeat feel.

Slide guitar is the “connective tissue,” heard in second-to-last track Lady Arkansas, which is a heartfelt piano-led tribute to his hometown, with a solo that melts like butter, written by Yungblud collaborator Chris Greatti.

“Musicians are overthinkers,” Hill argues. “With the Lady Arkansas solo, I wanted a musical non sequitur, which is really hard to communicate with someone. Chris is a guitar god. We composed it together; it’s really nice how that solo pans over.

“If you’ve been given a talent, you have to do something with it. Otherwise you’re displeasing fate, Mother Nature – whatever you like to call it. You have to act in the world; you can’t just work on one song or album for three whole years. That’s what was so great about The Beatles. They made a song and moved on to the next one.”

• Everybody’s Home, Nobody’s Happy is out now. Sawyer is on tour from September 23 to November 21, with further dates booked for 2027.

The Yardbirds’ revolving mid-’60s line-up is unrivalled when it comes to guitar star power. The London group famously featured Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, in that order, across a period of just three years.

However, what’s less well documented is that there was an attempt to recruit Page to the band’s ranks before Jeff Beck’s arrival, while Eric Clapton was still in the band.

Page discussed the clandestine offer in one of his most detailed and candid interviews – a legendary six-hour discussion with Dave Schulps of Trouser Press in 1977. Part of that interview was later featured in the book Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell: An Illustrated History, and appeared in Guitar World in 1991.

“The Yardbirds’ manager, Giorgio Gomelsky, approached me and said that Eric wasn’t willing to ‘expand,’” recalled Page. “I guess it was probably pretty apparent to them after they did For Your Love – Clapton didn’t like that at all. They had already started using different instruments, like harpsichords, and at that point Clapton felt like he was just fed up.”

Page then revealed that it wasn’t the only time he was approached while Clapton was still in the mind.

“The first time… was some time before then,” said the guitar icon. “Gomelsky said that Eric was going to have a ‘holiday,’ and I could step in and replace him.

“The way he put it to me, it just seemed really distasteful and I refused. Eric had been a friend of mine, and I couldn’t possibly have been a party to that. Plus, Eric didn’t want to leave the band at that point.”

Clapton, Beck and Page had a rivalry of sorts, but it was a friendly one, with all three players forming part of the bustling blues scene that was coming out of London’s Richmond-upon-Thames, at venues like The Crawdaddy Club and Eel Pie Island.

When Page did eventually agree to join the Yardbirds, it wasn’t as Clapton’s replacement, or even Beck’s, but after a request from the latter, who suggested he play as emergency cover for bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, who had quit suddenly in 1966.

That would prove to be a fateful decision, laying the foundation for Beck’s departure and emergence as a solo star, for Page’s own chapter with the group, and his eventual vision for ‘The New Yardbirds’ – perhaps better known by their later moniker… Led Zeppelin.

The start of the the 1980s saw the dazzling rise of the Pretenders. Led by American expat Chrissie Hynde, the dynamic British rock ’n’ roll quartet issued a one-two punch of albums, Pretenders (1980) and Pretenders II (1981), that featured memorable hits such as Stop Your Sobbing, Brass in Pocket, Kid, and Talk of the Town.

A former rock critic, Hynde quickly established herself as a crafty songwriter and a captivating singer, and she was aided by an ace band that included drummer Martin Chambers, bassist Pete Farndon, and the immensely gifted guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott.

The band’s rapid ascent came to a crashing halt in June 1982. First came the firing of Farndon (his increasing drug use had fractured relations within the group), and two days later, Honeyman-Scott died of heart failure caused by a cocaine overdose (a year later, Farndon succumbed to a heroin overdose as well).

“I was good friends with Jimmy, and his death was such a shock,” says guitarist Robbie McIntosh. “I met him before he joined the Pretenders, and we had stayed in touch. He had actually talked to me about playing with the band. The idea was to flesh things out as the band were evolving. I hadn’t said I’d definitely do it, but it would have been great. It’s a shame it didn’t happen that way.”

Hynde and Chambers channeled their grief by recording a smashing double hit single, Back on the Chain Gang and My City Was Gone, utilizing ex-Rockpile guitarist Billy Bremner and Big Country bassist Tony Butler. Because of his commitments to Big Country, Butler was unable to join the Pretenders, and in the case of Bremner, McIntosh says, “I don’t think Chrissie saw him as the right fit. He’s a great player, obviously, but he was more of a rockabilly guy.”

McIntosh, who had played various bands throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties, shared Honeyman-Scott’s musical tastes. “We were rock and pop guys,” McIntosh says. “We loved Pete Townshend, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. That might be a reason I got called up to audition for the band.”

By the end of 1982, McIntosh was asked to join a new Pretenders lineup, which would also include bassist Malcolm Foster. Much was expected of the band – could they match the power and tunefulness of the first two albums? – and they came through like champs with 1984’s Learning to Crawl.

The record featured Back on the Chain Gang and My City Was Gone, but it also packed forceful rockers like Time the Avengers and Watching the Clothes, along with two tracks that demonstrated Hynde’s softer side, Show Me and the shimmering Christmas ballad 2000 Miles.

The album burst out of the gate with the seismic single Middle of the Road, on which McIntosh burned through a breakneck solo that ranks as a masterclass in kinetic excitement.

“I’m extremely proud of the album,” says McIntosh, who stayed with the Pretenders until 1987. “It was a big jump for me, working with a famous band and with Chris Thomas, an established producer.”

He laughs. “I did get some bad reviews, though. Some people called me ‘the guy who ruined the Pretenders.’ But you can’t take reviews seriously – good or bad ones. The album did extremely well; it went double platinum in America, so there was that. I was young and confident, so I just plowed on.”

Being that James Honeyman-Scott was a friend, did you have mixed feelings about auditioning?

Yeah, although I felt very lucky in one respect that I had been his friend. The fact that I did an audition meant I didn’t walk straight into the gig. I mean, the band might not have liked what I did, but as it turned out, they did. For the first few songs we did, I thought things worked out pretty well.

Did you have any interactions with Chrissie Hynde before the audition?

No, I met her at the audition. That was the first time, and then she rang me a few days later and said, “Do you want to join the band?” Obviously, I said yes.

What did the audition entail? Were you given a list of songs to prepare?

No, we just jammed. I played for maybe 20 minutes with another guitar player, Mick Green, who I was sort of in awe of, and a bass player whose name I can’t remember. Martin was playing drums. Chrissie and Dave Hill, the manager, sat in front of the stage. A few days later, I got the call from Chrissie and she said she wanted me in the band. I didn’t have a clue that I’d passed the audition.

The great thing about the Pretenders is that Chrissie is kind of garagey and punk – she’s a great songwriter and lyricist, and she’s got an individual voice – but it was embellished by Jimmy’s musical style. He wasn’t into punk at all, and neither was I.

What was it like the first time you played in rehearsal with Chrissie?

I remember she played quite loud, but that didn’t worry me. I was more concerned with how I could complement her and play off what she did. I can’t remember whether the first thing we did was 2000 Miles or Middle of the Road. I think it was Middle of the Road.

Okay, dude… that solo, I mean, come on. It’s so electrifying and beautifully composed. How long did it take you to work it out?

Thanks so much. But no, I didn’t work it out. Chrissie had the chords, kind of a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels thing, and I came up with some ideas.

I remember there was a growing riff part – I came up with that, and it seemed to work. In the studio I did maybe three or four solos, all different kinds of things, and Chris Thomas said, “I like that bit. We’ll keep the first half.” I think I dropped in the really fast bit on its own, and I did that thing with the delay at the end of the solo. We worked on it for maybe half an hour.

Which guitar did you use for that track?

My 1977 Fender Telecaster, which I still own. And my amp was a Marshall 20 head into a 2x10 cabinet. I had Marshall 100s as well, so maybe there was a bit of that in there. But the body of the sound was the Marshall 20, which is my favorite amp.

If Chrissie had any doubts about hiring you, they were put to rest with that solo.

[Laughs] It was a bit more aggressive and flashy than what Jimmy would’ve done. People always ask me about the picking on that solo. I just used my fingers, and the pick was inside my hand. Then if I needed the pick, I’d just pull it out.

Chris Thomas always complimented me on the guitar playing on the album. I saw him a couple of years ago and he said the same thing. He said what a great time he had making that album. I was quite chuffed.

You mentioned 2000 Miles. Chrissie later said that she should have given you songwriting credit because of the riff you came up with.

Yeah, it was the same with Middle of the Road, actually. Chrissie would come up with a very basic accompaniment, and then I’d come up with riffs that went over the top. It was the same later on with Don’t Get Me Wrong. That guitar part is very distinctive.

Did Chrissie demo anything, or did she just play what she had right in the room?

It was all done in rehearsal, and we just remembered it. It was old-school. We never recorded anything. If you came up with something great, you just hoped you’d remember it.

How much leeway did Chrissie give you in terms of coming up with guitar parts?

The big thing with Chrissie was, she would say, “Don’t be too smooth.” I mean, Larry Carlton never would have fit in her band, and I say that as someone who loves Larry Carlton. I hate to use the expression “dumb it down,” but, to a certain degree, playing with Chrissie is about doing just that. She was into Mitch Ryder, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Ramones, while I was into the Beatles and Bad Company.

But you know, Chrissie is a great songwriter, and a lot of the greats, apart from people like Jimmy Webb, don’t really have a clue about the mechanics and the rudiments of music. That’s what makes them so good or so unique.

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

Def Leppard and Last in Line guitarist Vivian Campbell says that his cancer has returned.

Campbell was first diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2013, and announced in 2025 that he was “completely in remission” after undergoing a donor transplant.

Now though, in a new interview with Francisco Sigüenza of Radio YSKL FM in El Salvador, Campbell revealed that the transplant “didn't stick.”

“There’s only been one time that I felt it was gonna kill me,” Campbell said in the interview [transcribed by Blabbermouth]. “In the winter of 2023, I got really scared about what was happening and the pace at which it was happening. And I realized at that point that I had to do a donor transplant. It was my only hope to survive. And that’s what I did.

“I did that in January of 2025. I did a donor transplant. Unfortunately, it didn't stick. So the cancer has returned. And I’m continuing treatments to manage it.”

Campbell says he’s facing the development head on, and has no intention of pulling back from his creative endeavors.

“I’ll probably have to do another transplant within a few years with another donor to try and see if maybe that would cure me,” he said. “But in the meantime, I’m certainly not slowing down. I’m doing as much with my life as possible, not just with Def Leppard and Last In Line – I’m also rally driving, ’cause I always wanted to do that. So I’ve been doing that more and more, ’cause I love cars and I love driving.”

“Life is for the living,” he added. “And I encourage everyone to look after their own health – and if you are unfortunate enough to get a cancer diagnosis, to overcome the fear. Fear is inevitable when you’re first told those words. But once you get over that, you gotta realize just how to manage it and how to deal with it as best as possible, and just don’t give in.”

Asked about his cancer treatment in a 2019 Guitar World interview, Campbell struck a similarly determined note.

“It’s difficult with touring, but I’ve been doing immunotherapy for the last three-and-a-half years,” he said at the time. “Even when it was at its worst it was the least of my concerns. I’m stubborn and Irish and refuse to capitulate to cancer. I’ve never been so busy, and I fill every day with work. It makes me happy and my body responds to it. I believe that’s helped me survive it.”

Yngwie Malmsteen’s journey to becoming a master neoclassical shredder began when his sister gave him a copy of Deep Purple’s Fireball for his eighth birthday.

“When I heard that, my path was clear,” Malmsteen said in a 2008 interview with Guitar World.

“What I loved about Blackmore’s playing were his syncopated pentatonic lines. I bought [Deep Purple’s] Made in Japan when it first came out, and a year later I knew all of those solos inside out. I would play them all day long.”

Malmsteen also primarily plays through Marshall stacks because of Blackmore (and, of course, Jimi Hendrix). Both guitarists wield white Stratocasters, too.

Fast-forward to 2018, and his guitar hero had plenty of praise for the Swedish virtuoso and his playing.

“I know him, and he’s a very nice guy,” Blackmore told Guitar World. “Excellent guitar player. A lot of people have kind of questioned his angle, but he obviously knows his stuff.

“He might be a bit too tall, but that’s my only criticism,” he quipped.

Blackmore even went as far as to say Malmsteen was “like a family member”, sharing his admiration for the Swedish maestro’s technical knowhow.

“I definitely think he’s probably the best at what he does and – for what it’s worth – the fastest. And he doesn’t play the typical blues, minor kind of interpretations. He knows his scales. It’s more interesting.”

Despite heavy fan speculation – and several Deep Purple covers featuring in Malmsteen’s live shows over the years – the two have never officially collaborated.

However, with Ritchie Blackmore returning to the stage for a surprise appearance with Deep Purple last week, and a new Malmsteen album in the pipeline, we still hold out hope for a Blackmore-Malmsteen collaboration one day.

Lita Ford started her professional career at 16 years old with ’70s rock band The Runaways alongside fellow guitarist Joan Jett.

However, when the band parted ways in ’79 – and after years of not being taken as seriously as their male peers – Ford went through a period of “seclusion for a few years.” She traded her Gibson SG for the cosmetics counter of a department store.

However, she was anything but resentful. “It was kind of fun,” she told Guitar World in 1985. “I used to go all dressed in black leather, and I used to wear my Runaways tour jacket. Everybody there thought I was in a gang… But I got bored and couldn’t really handle it after a while, so I split and started practicing.”

She eventually found herself putting together another band – but only after an intervention by Eddie Van Halen.

“[He] had come over and yelled at me for not doing anything, and my friend Ray Marzano got me into rehearsing every night. I went looking for a male singer, but I couldn’t find anybody that was really different.”

She scoured the scene for female singers. But she didn’t manage to find the right person, either – or, as she put it, “I couldn’t find anybody that really had the balls to sing what I wanted to write. They all sang sort of lightweight stuff. So I decided to do it myself.”

It was an arduous task for Ford, who didn’t consider herself a singer. Ever the perfectionist, she wasn’t at all happy with her debut album, Out for Blood, released in 1983. “It was poorly produced,” she said. “The performance was real good, but it wasn’t properly produced, so you don’t come across well because of the production.”

Ford wasn’t discouraged and kept going, cementing herself as a guitar icon along the way.

“This is what I am. I live up to me. I don’t do anything that isn’t real. I’m not a bullshitter, and I can’t lie or be phony about anything. I would never get on that stage and play anything that I didn’t like or didn’t believe was really me… So when I write these songs, this is really me.”

Joe Bonamassa may now be the reigning king of signature models – only last week, he added a new Martin signature to his roster. However, two decades ago, the Nerdville owner’s first artist model wasn’t deemed a surefire hit – so much so that it was limited to a run of 300.

“Mat Koehler over at Gibson told me that next year is the 20th anniversary… Time flies!” he says on the Gear Gab Podcast with Eric Dahl. “We originally started with 300 Custom Shop ‘Inspired By’ Les Pauls – that was my take on an old Goldtop.”

True to its name, this early model drew inspiration from Bonamassa’s childhood and his own much-modded 1955 Goldtop that came through his dad’s shop when he was just 11 years old.

“The late, great Pat Foley [Gibson artist relations executive] was the one that basically approached me about that,” he continues. “Rick Gembar, who was the head of the Custom Shop at Gibson at the time, he was the one that greenlit the whole thing. ”

During this period, Bonamassa was transitioning from being a fringe blues player to one of the leading bluesmen of the modern era.

His 2007 record, Sloe Gin, marked his first foray into the U.S. Billboard 200. He even topped the Billboard Top Blues Albums chart, and this success had an impact on signature model sales.

“I don’t think they were expecting to sell those kinds of guitars that fast,” Bonamassa says, “especially because I was not as well known, but for some reason they sold really fast, and we did other ones.”

Between signature Gibsons and Epiphones, Bonamassa’s total signature-model tally is now well into the tens, with no signs of slowing down. As for sales, he estimates that well over 40,000 Gibson and Epiphone signature models are now out in the wild.

“Custom Shop JB ones… there’s maybe a couple thousand out there. I know there’s at least 20,000 Epiphones out there, so we’re vastly approaching 25,000 Gibsons over the last 20 years.”

Despite his arsenal of models, the novelty of having his own name etched on a guitar hasn’t worn off, as Bonamassa himself explained in a chat with Norm Harris from Norman’s Rare Guitars.

Back in 2017, JoBo traded the prototype of his first Gibson signature at the legendary guitar store, prompting him to reflect on the moment it was first delivered to him.

“When you’re a kid, and you see a Gibson Les Paul, and then something that you’ve idolized over the years shows up at your door, and it says [your name] on the truss-rod cover – it was a very special day.”

When Vivian Campbell joined Dio in early 1983, he found himself thrown in the deep end. The band had just parted ways with future Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee, and had already written most of their debut studio album, Holy Diver.

“One reason I was hired for this band was because I have empathy with song,” Campbell told Guitar World back in 1985.

“I’m not out there to be the fastest guitarist in the world,” he said. “There’s also too much competition among players. They approach the instrument like an athlete approaches a race… I’m not in competition with Eddie Van Halen or Gary Moore or Yngwie Malmsteen. They’re my contemporaries, not my competitors.”

It was perhaps Campbell’s self-confidence that helped him push through the initial doubts of joining Dio.

“I was playing in my first band, Sweet Savage, and we were touring through Ireland with Wild Horses, a band which featured Brian Robertson on guitar and Jimmy Bain on bass. Jimmy told me he really liked my playing a lot.

“And then, when we ran into each other again, he told his friend Ronnie James Dio called him from L.A. to tell him that he and Vinny had just left Black Sabbath and that Ronnie was looking for a guitarist and bassist.”

Bain went as far as to recommend him for the guitar spot. Campbell gave him an audition tape, and a month later, he scored the gig. While he maintained his cool, he soon came face to face with the reality of recording the band’s debut record. Safe to say, the new responsibility took its toll.

“My hands started shaking as soon as I began recording,” he admitted. “I mean, we weren’t talking about it or rehearsing – we were actually doing it. It was the first time I was ever in a professional situation of this sort, and the pressure was getting to me.”

Released on May 25, 1983, Holy Diver became a heavy metal staple and cemented Campbell as a fast-rising guitar hero. While he parted ways with the band in 1986 – or, as he later revealed, was fired – and subsequently joined Whitesnake, those years proved to be formative.

“Ronnie gave me great advice about building a guitar solo with memorable lines – and not overplaying,” he told Guitar World in 2024, despite his complicated relationship with the frontman.

“I appreciated that guidance; if left to my own devices, it would have been a case of how many fucking notes I could fit in.”

David Bowie, who left us on January 10, 2016, was a highly accomplished singer, songwriter, performer and actor, and a fine musician too, although he knew his limitations when it came to musical virtuosity.

As he told Guitar Player’s Joe Gore in 1997, “My guitar playing hasn’t moved with the times at all. I use the same chords as always, but I do know a lot of them, and I’m able to put them together in interesting juxtapositions. Any time I did spend being disciplined was learning how chords work together.”

Make no mistake, Bowie knew his way around a fretboard, as a number of stellar guitarists explain to us below – but he had bigger goals in mind than being a virtuoso axeman.

In his 54 years as a recording and performing artist, he managed to redefine the role of the theatrical musician, refining the art of the alter-ego, touring the world in several incarnations and making an impact on the worlds of cinema and finance (remember those 1990s Bowie Bonds?) along the way. To help him achieve those objectives, he recruited some of the most fiendishly talented guitar players in the world.

You’ll already know most, if not all, of the names on the roster. For his first three years as a bona fide star, after he blew the minds of a generation with 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie’s guitar partner was Mick Ronson, who also played so memorably on Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups (both 1973), as well as performing on the Ziggy Stardust World Tour.

Listen to the metallic solo on The Width of a Circle, from The Man…, the acoustic textures on Oh! You Pretty Things from Hunky Dory, and the all-out wall of sound on Suffragette City for a taste of Ronson’s magical approach. Sadly, he died in 1993 at age 46, or we’d be talking to him today about that unmatched early catalog.

After the unsung session hero Alan Parker helped out on 1974’s Diamond Dogs, assisting Bowie on the unforgettable main riff of Rebel Rebel, Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar, the latter Bowie’s longest-serving guitarist by some distance, stepped up to the plate for his next five and 13 studio albums respectively.

Both men recorded away from Bowie in extended breaks from his band, but they’re the most prolific of his sidemen by a long shot. Where to start? Check Slick’s performance on 1975’s Young Americans and Alomar’s sterling work on Bowie’s Berlin-recorded landmark, Low (1977), which also featured the late Ricky Gardiner, or any of the early-2000s albums that kept Bowie in the millennial bloodstream.

Let’s not forget the guitarists who played with Bowie’s live band, of course, even if they didn’t record album sessions; these include Stacy Heydon, who held it down on the Isolar Tour 1976; the great Adrian Belew, who graduated from Frank Zappa’s band in time for the Stage live album in 1978 and returned 12 years later as musical director of the Sound + Vision Tour; and the equally great Peter Frampton, who came alive on the Glass Spider Tour in ’87.

It says much about Bowie that many of his guitar players were superstars themselves. Take King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, who recorded Bowie’s best-known lead line on Heroes in 1977; Stevie Ray Vaughan, who guested on Let’s Dance in 1983; and Nile Rodgers of Chic, who played on and co-produced the same album.

Lesser-known session stalwarts played their part, too, notably Chuck Hammer, who played guitar synth on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980. That album also featured a notable guest slot by Pete Townshend of the Who.

In 1988 Bowie took a four-year sidestep off the main drag with Tin Machine, the heavy rock quartet in which Reeves Gabrels carried most of the weight, guitar-wise.

Live, he was assisted by Eric Schermerhorn, who went on to work with Iggy Pop after Tin Machine called it quits; Gabrels later played on Outside (1995), Earthling (1997) and Hours... (1999). In the 2000s, Gerry Leonard played textural guitar on Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) and on the accompanying tours, joined on those albums by Mark Plati, also an acclaimed producer and multi-instrumentalist who had previously worked with Prince.

Slick, Leonard, David Torn, producer Tony Visconti and Bowie himself recorded guitar for The Next Day in 2013, and for his valiant, multifaceted final curtain, 2016’s still-astonishing Blackstar, jazz guitarist Ben Monder was recruited.

So what memories do these musicians have of their late employer – and what did they think of Bowie as a guitar player? Let’s find out. Belew, Schermerhorn, Leonard, Plati, Frampton and Alomar are grilled on that subject below (Fripp gave us such an expansive interview that we’ve given him his own feature, coming soon).

As for the much-missed Vaughan and Ronson, they’ve been jamming away in the sky since 1990 and 1993, respectively, but we’ll raise our glasses to them in salute.

Was David Bowie a good guy to be around, generally speaking?

Adrian Belew: Absolutely. David wasn’t a person to say bad things. That would be left to someone around him. To me, he was always upbeat. He loved me, we loved each other, and we had a great time together, so there was nothing to be critical about.

It was simple. If he didn’t like something, he’d simply say, “I don’t know about that,” and that was as far as it would go. I never saw him angry. He was too sophisticated. He had so much interest in so many different things.

That’s one of the things I loved about him. He would always discover a new subject matter to start reading about. Once he got into something, man, he knew everything about it. That’s what made him such an interesting person to be with.

Eric Schermerhorn: His bunk was above mine on the bus, and he read books non-stop. I remember talking to him about Philip K. Dick. The best thing David did for me, which really shows his character, was after we played the Budokan at the end of the tour in 1992. I talked to him and he said, “We’re done. The gig’s over. What would you like to do in the future?”

I heard Chrissie Hynde was looking for a guitar player, so I was like, “Well, Chrissie Hynde would be fun.” I get back to New York, and two weeks later, his manager calls me and goes, “Chrissie wants to meet you in London.” I went to London, hung out with her all day at her house, and she was great.

She said, “David says you’re really good. I need a guitar player.” I had already sent Iggy Pop a tape, and he said, “Let’s do something,” and I said yes because he lived in New York, but I look back sometimes and think, “I could have moved to London in 1992, and that would have been fun.”

Gerry Leonard: David was very perceptive and insightful – and he had this gift for reading a room. Everybody that was in his band was there for a very specific reason that he had in his mind. He had this knack of figuring out people’s strengths and really leaning into those strengths. He was very good at pulling together all of those seemingly disparate elements into making art.

Mark Plati: Aside from what a lot of people say about his curious nature, and how he was always trying to stretch his own musical and visual boundaries, he just really enjoyed doing it.

He loved the process and had a lot of fun with it, and that was contagious to anybody in the room, which made these experiences a really wonderful adventure. Sometimes you didn’t know where you were going, but boy, you had a good time getting there.

How did you first meet him?

Belew: We first met when he appeared at a concert in Berlin, when I was playing with Frank Zappa. Two nights before that, Brian Eno had come to the show in Cologne, and Brian knew David was looking for a fresh guitar player, so he told him, “We’ve got to go see this guy that’s with Zappa.”

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

As I was doing that, I looked over at the monitor guy, and there was David Bowie and Iggy Pop standing there. So I walked over and shook David’s hand and said, “I just want to really thank you for all your music. You’ve really inspired me. You’ve done so much amazing stuff.”

I didn’t even have time to say anything to Iggy before David said, “Well, good. How’d you like to be in my band?” It was an amazing moment. It gave me shivers. Two weeks later, I was in David’s rehearsal.

Schermerhorn: I met Reeves Gabrels in Boston in 1979. We played in different bands together, and we worked at the same music store. We were just guitar buddies, and we were into Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew as well as older guys like Jimi Hendrix.

His wife, Sarah, worked for David as his publicist, so he got the Tin Machine gig around 1988 after she said to him, “Hey David, my husband’s a guitar player” and gave him a cassette. When I was in Boston I was in a band called East Of Eden.

We were on Capitol and we did a record with Roy Thomas Baker, opened for the Psychedelic Furs for a tour and then we broke up. I moved to New York in 1990, and Reeves calls me around April or May of 1991 and says, “Hey, do you want to come out to L.A. and audition? We need a guitar player for Tin Machine.”

I was like, “Whoa… this is life-changing!” So I learned the records in every key, because you never know when you go to an audition; flew out to L.A. and played a couple of songs with the band.

It was great, and at the end Reeves goes, “Hey, Eric, play [Jimi Hendrix’s] Little Wing for David,” because he knew I could play that shit. So I did that, and as we’re packing up, David comes up to me right there, shakes my hand, and goes, “I’m really looking forward to working with you.”

Leonard: David was intrigued by my playing, I think. He came and saw me play live and then asked me to be part of it. I think he wanted somebody to cover the stuff Fripp had done, or Belew had done, or Eno had done, and that was right up my street, because I was a big fan of all those guys.

I didn’t study Fripp or anything, but people would tell me, “You sound like Fripp,” and I would deliberately not listen to him when I heard that, because I didn’t want to be a copyist. Of course, I’ve listened to Fripp since, and he’s got a beautiful tone and a unique style.

Plati: I worked with Prince before I worked with Bowie, which I guess is kind of an odd combo in that you don’t expect one to follow the other in sequence, but that’s David. I can think of a lot of other artists who would have been like, “He worked with Prince – that’s really not up my street.” Not David. If anything, he’d be like, “Wow, what’s this guy about?” because he had an eternally curious nature.

Were you a fan of his music before you played with him?

Schermerhorn: Absolutely. I bought Low and Heroes in high school. Those records were so powerful. When I met David, I said to him, “Those records changed my life,” and he said, “They changed my life, too!”

Plati: My first experience with Bowie’s music was Space Oddity. I most likely heard that on the radio when I was, maybe, 12. If you were a musically aware teenager in the early ’70s, you got to grow with David’s music and with his guitar players.

Station to Station was the first big Bowie record for me that I was aware of as an album and on FM radio. All those tunes were on the radio, and the guitar playing from Carlos and Slicky really stuck with me.

How did you approach the task of being Bowie’s guitar player?

Belew: He really had a fascination for guitar players, and one of the things I noticed is how much his songs were open to guitar playing. Songs like Stay or Heroes are custom-made for guitar. I was his musical director in 1990, and that was a whole other level; it took me months of preparation.

One of the main difficulties was that he wanted just a four-piece band, and yet he was doing a retrospective of all his career. So you had symphonies, you had saxophone sections, you had everything in there.

Fortunately, this coincided with the first sampler coming out. Roland had the first couple of samplers and they sent them to me, so me and my engineer and the keyboard player Rick Fox sat for hours and tried to sample all this stuff.

We kept buying more samplers, so in the end we had two huge racks of samplers. Most of the stuff was played live, but anything that was beyond our ability was Rick Fox just pressing a sampler button, and the stage would fill with beautiful orchestral sounds.

Leonard: I tried not to be too intimidated by the lineage that had gone before me, because hats off, those guys are incredible voices on the guitar.

But, you know, that was David’s thing, too: he was very generous in that way, validating you when you couldn’t do it for yourself. We need that as artists: at times, we need someone to say “Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s going somewhere.”

Plati: When I met him, he was writing with Reeves Gabrels, and while they would both play guitar when they were composing, Reeves would go off and record the parts, and David was perfectly fine with that because he was always about the people he would bring into the story. He was always about letting them do what they do best.

Carlos Alomar: I’m just fine all over the place, playing what we call rhythm-lead. Because in my world, there’s no lead guitar player. You play a part, I play a part, and we switch off. And if I want to, I’ll play your part too if I need to.

Did Bowie have specific requirements, or was he more about, “Hit me with what you’ve got”?

Peter Frampton: He never said a word apart from, “Just come and be you.” It was such an honor and a relief that he trusted me, you know, and got me there because of what I do. So I wasn’t on Let’s Dance, and I didn’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but I quoted Stevie and all the other great guitar players. It was a thrill to be able to do that.

Belew: I had just come from working with Frank Zappa for a year, and Frank was very directive. He wanted you to play consistently and correctly, and he really didn’t need you to come up with much of anything. The music was the way he already wanted it to be. David was entirely the opposite.

He was just thrilled to have someone who could play wild and run around on stage with him. At one point he said, “You can be my Keith Richards!” He never really directed me about anything. He was a supporter more than anything else. He just got so excited if you did something really cool.

There’s a video of me playing Stay on the German television show Musikladen, and I launch into the first section where I can play a solo. He’s standing across the stage with his arms crossed, with this big grin, looking at me the whole time. He’s got this look on his face like, “That’s my boy!”

Schermerhorn: I think his genius, probably like Miles Davis, was to ask himself, “Who do I have around me?” Even if he had a guy who could only play two chords, then he’d write something using those two chords. His genius was hearing what you could do.

Alomar: I always say this: if you had Jimi Hendrix as your guitar player, would you tell him what to play? Fuck no. I tried to be inspiring, and I tried to give him what my best was. We always asked ourselves, “What if?” like, “What if we take the amplifier and we put it in the hallway?”

One time, Tony Visconti found a chandelier and threw a rope over it and then hoisted a microphone up there. These types of outlandish ideas, and that curiosity, will keep you young forever.

What did you think of Bowie as a guitar player?

Belew: This is an interesting thing. All the time I worked with David, I actually never saw him play much of anything. Not piano, not guitar. When I was his musical director in 1990, I just about managed to talk him into playing saxophone for one song, just because I thought it would be a cool look for David.

All those years I never thought about it, but when I ask myself when he sat down and wrote all these great songs, I don’t know the answer. He must have done it privately.

Schermerhorn: I thought what was cool was he never did barre chords. He did the E shape and slid that up and down the neck. He was letting the other strings ring on the 12-string. That’s how I remember him playing, and his timing was great.

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

For instance, when we did The Next Day, he’d say, almost apologetically, “Do you mind playing this part?” And he’d play me a part from the demo, which was a stabbing chord or something like that. It was great, so raw and punk rock.

He’d say, “Take it and do what you want with it,” so sometimes I would modify it, but I would always be very careful to try and keep the intention. So he got people to do the things that he wasn’t able to do himself, but he had good instincts; he could write on the guitar and he could play a mean riff, too.

Plati: In the Spiders, he was basically the second guitarist for a while and he had chops, but once he started incorporating two guitar players in the band, then he didn’t have to be that any more; he became more of a frontperson.

Alomar: Bowie, like John Lennon, was a great rhythm, acoustic guitar player. Basically, they played triads, and they could play chords, but they couldn’t play chords and bass-lines together in opposition, so the bass couldn’t go down when the chord was going up. You always have to hit the root: you never hit an inversion. It’s what we call metronome playing. They could keep the rhythm down for the whole song.

Frampton: David played the riff on Rebel Rebel, so we know he was a great guitarist, but I think he used guitar and keyboard in order to write. He was like me in the sense that I can play piano enough to write a song, but I’m not a piano player, whereas I am a guitar player.

When were you last face to face with Bowie?

Belew: A long time ago. I don’t know. He called me several times, though. One time he called and asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m out in my garden.” He said, “You’ve got a garden?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve got a garden. You could have a garden, too, if you want. You’re David Bowie!”

Schermerhorn: I ran into him a few times in New York, and he was always so nice to me.

Alomar: About a year or so before he died. It was Tony Visconti’s birthday, and he was there. I didn’t know he was sick. He seemed a little pale and rather frail, but it was mostly just about renewing old times, tying up loose ends, and rededicating our passion and love for each other as well as celebrating Tony’s good fortune and health.

Later on, I found that it was more of a pleasant goodbye. But one of the things that we have in Buddhism is that we don’t look at death as being death. It’s like when you call somebody after a long period of time.

You’re just calling to see how they are, to make sure that they know that you remember them and cherish them. As a Buddhist, I feel that if I don’t make that phone call to check up on you, then you’re still having a good old time. I know you’re fine.

What is your best memory of him?

Belew: Oh, man. There were so many. I feel like I have my own private film in my mind of everything that went on. Maybe the Sound + Vision tour. That was 108 shows, and it went for a year, and we played in 26 countries.

That’s when I really got to know David and befriend him. I got to experience a side of him that few other people did, because I spent time with him at night in his room, just talking about things, or having dinners or whatever. We were pals, so everything comes out. All kinds of joyful things happen.

Leonard: The whole experience was life-changing, and I feel very lucky. It was a little bit of “right place, right time” for me.

Alomar: I love the Scary Monsters… album. We had this period where we were so locked in. We could do anything; we were flipping beats and doing split-rhythms, and it was just amazing.

When we got together, our intent matched the level of our efficiency, so satisfaction was guaranteed. As a traveler in time, every one of us has that moment where you can hitch a ride to a star, and I think Bowie did a pretty good job of that.

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

A decade before he joined Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Nils Lofgren was flirting with the idea of joining another rock institution when he heard Mick Taylor was quitting the Rolling Stones.

For any player in the mid 1970s, the chance to join the Stones as Taylor’s replacement would likely be the gig of a lifetime.

So, when Taylor’s eventual successor Ronnie Wood was having second thoughts about the gig full-time, Lofgren volunteered his services.

Taylor left the Stones in late 1974, having played a starring role in classic Stones albums. A fleet of big-name players were linked with his vacated spot.

Wayne Perkins, Harvey Mandel and Jeff Beck, who turned the band down, were among those considered, while Wood came in as a temporary replacement. The Black and Blue recording sessions taking place across Europe at the time of Taylor's departure were going to be used as a trial by fire for the aspiring suitors.

Lofgren wanted to be on that shortlist. In the September 1988 issue of Guitar World, he recalled how he volunteered his talents. Soon afterward, he says, “I pulled another U and went bowling because I remembered, ‘Ronnie Wood! Of course they’ll get him.’”

His intuition turned out to be correct but that didn’t stop him from shooting his shot. Ironically, Wood was his inroad.

“I had been pretty friendly with Ronnie Wood and decided to give him a call,” he explained. “Just to find out what was up so I could get it out of my head.

“He wasn’t so sure about joining, ’cause he felt loyal to the Faces. So he gave me the number where to call up Keith Richards. And I’m shaking and nervous and call Keith. You know... ‘Hi, Keith, this is Nils Lofgren, Ron Wood might have mentioned me...’

“And I hear him go, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, how’s it goin’, mate?’”

Richards was getting tired of the lack of progress in finding a replacement. Lofgren was poised to audition. Then the door slammed shut.

“They were trying out a lot of people,” he says. “Rather than take two years and follow up every lead, the Stones decided to hold open auditions, play as a band, and have guitar players go up, play a song or two, [then onto the] next guy, and do the same.

“I was all set to get on the plane to Geneva,” he adds. “But, as it turned out, Ronnie decided to do it.” It paved the way for his iconic weaving partnership with Keith Richards.

Mandel, who also played on Black and Blue, has since stated he would have been a better fit for the band than Wood, who remains in post today. Both he and Lofgren can now only look back and think about what could have been.

By the time Springsteen came calling, Lofgren was broke and living with his parents. He said linking up with the Boss saved his life. The heartbreak of missing out on the Stones gig was remedied overnight.

For countless players around the globe, working with a band like the Rolling Stones is a dream gig. Canadian musician Ben Mink can say he’s done exactly that, but he was none the wiser at the time.

In 1997, the Stones released Bridges to Babylon, the band’s second studio album since penning a big money deal with Virgin. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, credited as the Glimmer Twins, co-produced it with Don Was, The Dust Brothers, Rob Fraboni, and Danny Saber.

The slinking blues tune Anybody Seen My Baby? was chosen as the record’s lead single, but there was a small problem.

“In 1997, while diapering my daughter, I got a call from my lawyer who told me to ‘sit down,’” Mink recalls. “Apparently, she had just gotten off the phone with the Stones’ manager and explained that they had a new album, single, and video coming out in a few days.”

The single would go on to become the band’s 38th Top-40 hit on home soil, and it scored even better in mainland Europe and in Canada, where it topped the charts. But before it could be released, the band had some loose ends to tie up.

“Apparently, Keith Richards’ daughter noticed the similarities between the two songs,” Mink continues, referencing k.d. lang’s 1992 hit, Constant Craving, which he had co-written. “Their legal reps did not want any difficulties, so they kindly suggested a co-authorship with k.d. and myself.”

No wonder he was told to put the diapers down and take a seat. It was an easy yes.

“I’d been a Rolling Stones fan since I was 13 and knew all of Keith Richards’ guitar solos,” he reveals. “For something like this to happen was beyond the beyond. As a kid, I used to joke that ‘one day they will cover one of our songs!’ Who knew? [laughs]

“They were very kind and gentlemanly about the whole event, and I’m deeply honored and still incredulous. What a thing to happen!”

It was the chorus melody, in particular, that was reminiscent of Constant Craving. But the song was nearly left on the cutting room floor.

“When we first recorded it, it turned out that it was in too low a key for k.d.’s voice, so it was almost abandoned,” Mink told the Guardian in 2017. “I stayed up late and reworked the guitars in a key that suited her. If I hadn’t stayed up, it might never have been finished.”

Lang was already “pissed off” with the song as it was, deriding its happy “poppy, celebratory, upbeat” nature in the face of the Ingénue album’s darker sounds. Mink not only saved the song from oblivion, but also provided a unique moment in the history of one of the world’s biggest bands.

Mink’s full interview with Guitar World will be published online in due course.

Meanwhile, Jagger has been talking up the value of his guitar chops in the band, even if Keef isn’t too happy about it.

In the 1980s, Eddie Van Halen sparked a shred revolution, and ever since, hordes of players have tried their utmost to channel his magic. Jacob Deraps is blowing everyone else out of the water.

From Saint-Georges, Quebec, just down the road from Angine de Poitrine – what is in the water over there?! – Deraps is the real deal. He’s got chops for days and with his namesake band, he’s hellbent on bringing catchy rock kicking and screaming back into the mainstream.

He’s got the Eddie factor down to such an uncanny standard that he’s become the face of the EVH brand’s latest line of Wolfgang Special guitars. It’s the ultimate recognition for a guitarist who has obsessed over Van Halen his entire life.

“Hearing that guitar sound, it was like heaven,” he told Guitar World earlier this year in a video well on its way to one million views. “It became an obsession.”

The internet has been glued to his extremely faithful take on a sound that defined a generation. One commenter on the GW video put it best, saying: “As EVH himself said, you can copy notes, but you can’t copy the spirit. This guy gets as close as I’ve ever heard anyone.”

What’s interesting, though, is that there’s a modern edge to the song he wrote, recorded, and performed for the Wolfgang Special promo video. Sure, Eddie’s flourishes are in there, especially in the dextrous two-handed tapping lick that makes a teasing, fleeting appearance, and the growl of tremolo in parts of the main, drop-tuned riff.

But it’s less of a cosplay than it is a guitarist showing what he can do in his own right, all while offering echoes of a player the guitar world still greatly misses. It’s a big moment in the spotlight, and he’s put himself, not his hero, right in it.

“I had the immense pleasure of working with my guitar hero’s company, EVH Gear, for the release of this Wolfgang Special guitar,” Deraps writes on Facebook.

“I created and recorded this track using my Wolfgang Special T.O.M. guitars, and was then flown out to California for the video shoot.

“This is an absolute honor and a dream come true for me.”

The new Wolfgang Special comes loaded with a Floyd Rose trem with Eddie’s famous D-Tuna tech. It pairs a basswood body with an arched top and a bolt-on, quartersawn, baked maple neck.

Alnico 2 humbuckers deliver plenty of grit and growl, and the guitars come in at $1,499 apiece.

Deraps more than deserves his moment.

See EVH Gear for more info on the model.

FOMO can be a hell of a drag. No-one wants to miss a great show. But say you are up onstage at your own gig, under what circumstances would you think of bailing on it to have a better time elsewhere?

Stevie Ray Vaughan had the answer to that question. The late blues guitar icon could remember the night as clear as day when he spoke with Guitar World in September 1988: the time when he was up onstage and just decided that, no, he had somewhere better to be.

Now, this might be the only story of someone walking out of a Stevie Ray Vaughan gig and the person doing the walking was Stevie Ray Vaughan. But his hero, Albert King, was in town, and Vaughan had yet to see him play live. He had already copped a lot from listening to King.

“I do owe a lot to that man. That’s where a lot of my ideas about how to play guitar came from,” said Vaughan. “I don’t know of anybody who can play sassier than Albert. There’s a lot of different kinds of blues guitar, a lot of different styles, but the first time I heard Albert King I thought, ‘This is it!’ I still think so.”

Picture the scene on this night in 1972. Vaughan was playing in one of Austin’s legendary/notorious dive spots – “a little dump in Austin called the One Knight on 8th & Red River, a block from the police station.”

Like many of the bands who played there, Vaughan would be playing for tips.

“There was no cover at this place, just a pass-the-hat situation,” he explained.

The One Knight was quite the place, like the Double Deuce without Swayze on the door, Harleys out front, and it was tiny. This was the spot where Pink Floyd were told in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome to jam onstage because they were not a blues band. It’s not called Stubbs.

But as Michael Corcoran writes in this superlative Overserved Substack, back in the day the One Knight used to host the elder Vaughan brother, Jimmie, and Doyle Bramhall’s band, Storm, every Monday night for five years. Stormy Monday. And there was a legendary night involving The Velvet Underground.

This, however, as not going to be one of these legendary nights, not after SRV got wind that Albert King was making an unscheduled appearance across town.

“He was substituting for Bobby Bland, who was in the hospital,” said Vaughan. “Actually, Bobby was supposed to open for the group Cactus, but when Cactus found out it was Albert, they insisted on opening up for him.

“Anyway, that night somebody came over and said, ‘Albert King’s in town, filling in for Bobby Blue Bland. You wanna go?’ And I got on the microphone and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna go see Albert King, and if you got any brains you will, too.’ And I just packed up and went. Man, it was quite a night.”

King’s influence is all over Vaughan’s playing. If there’s sassiness, then that’s where it’s coming from. Vaughan studied his every move.

“I remember seeing him on TV doing Born Under A Bad Sign. I just couldn’t get enough of the guy,” admitted Vaughan. “And I began trying to figure out what he was playing, just listening to his records day and night and kind of feeling my way around the neck, figuring out those bends.”

Vaughan made it across town in time for the show. He was one of the few.

“There were only about 75 people there when Albert played, but every single person was there to hear Albert King,” he said. “The vibe was really happening.”

In his stocking soles, Albert King stood at 6ft 4-inch or 6ft 7, depending on whom you asked. And he was broad, too. They didn’t call him the Velvet Bulldozer for nothing. There was no missing the big man on stage. And yet Vaughan still maneuvered a better vantage point, standing on a table side of stage by the PA system.

“I just stared at him,” said Vaughan. “And partway through the show, he takes his mic stand and walks over there to the side of the stage, plants it and just stood there singing and playing to me the rest of the night.”

And this is when the two blues legends met for the first time. King appreciated the support and made a beeline to Vaughan after the show to thank him.

“I mean, here was this little kid, all of 18. I guess I yelled right or something, 'cause he really took a liking to me,” said Vaughan. “After he finished playing, he walked over to me, handed me his guitar and shook my hand. I was, like, stunned. I'll never forget that evening. There wasn’t very many of us there, but he gave it everything he had.”

That was the code of honor that all the blues greats had: they put everything into the show. Playing the blues is a little like stand-up comedy in that respect: the audience matters. They’ll make the show or break it. Cats like the Albert King knew this. Like the best of the original bluesmen, he knew people – and he never forgot a face.

A few years later, King was passing through Texas again. This time the show was on the calendar and Vaughan did not do anything so foolish as to book himself a show that night. He made sure he got to Antone’s early. He wanted to see King soundcheck. He wanted to see it “from the word ‘go’”. King spotted him immediately.

“First thing he did was he walked up to me, started pointing his finger and said, ‘I remember you, ‘bout three-and-a-half years ago we met,’” said Vaughan. “He never forgets people. He started calling me by name, telling me where we met, what happened and everything.”

Vaughan did not know it at the time. But it was a good thing that he decided to take in the soundcheck because he was about to become part of the show, and a little bit of blues history was about to be made. The kid whose style was cribbed from King was about to have the night of his life.

“Later on that night, I was sitting in the audience, and he starts talking about this little kid, 98lbs, soaking wet, you know… then all of a sudden I hear my name,” said Vaughan.

“He called me up to the stage with my guitar and I thought I was gonna play maybe one song with him. But I ended up playing with him for the rest of the night. It was amazing, you know? He’s an amazing guy. Nicest guy I ever met.”

Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee had been getting together for casual jams for years. However, they still took everyone by surprise last October when they announced their reunion under the Rush moniker – with Anika Nilles filling the shoes of the late, great Neil Peart.

The pressure was on. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lifeson spoke candidly about the challenges he faced ahead of the Fifty Something Tour’s kickoff in Inglewood, California, on June 7.

“14 months of rehearsal – it was difficult,” he admits, “and in the last month of rehearsals, there were times I was sitting on the edge of my bed thinking, at 2 o'clock in the morning, if I made the right decision.”

Lifeson boils these worries down to “rehearsal syndrome,” which caused him to question, “Can I play? Am I good enough?

“It wasn't really until Sunday when we played that gig that it all kind of came down this funnel and spilled out, and it was at that moment that I thought, ‘Yeah, this has all been worth it, and this is where I really am happy to be.’”

Lifeson has been battling a series of health issues in recent years, including recovering from stomach surgery, gastroparesis, Chronic Psoriatic Arthritis, as well as giving up weed at the age of 72.

As his long-time friend and Rush brother-in-arms, Geddy Lee, says, “It was really hard for him to get ready for this tour because he's battling genetics, and he's wrestling with [it] because he's crazy.”

The bassist goes on to say that Lifeson makes things even more difficult for himself by choosing “this fucking incredibly complicated setup of pedals and sounds, just because he wants each moment of the song to be true to the original moment of that song.

“So he really tackled a lot, and we were watching from the sidelines, going, ‘Poor guy.’” There were also instances when Lifeson told him he’d be ready in five minutes, and 30 minutes later, Lee was still patiently waiting for him to finish setting up his pedals so they could rehearse a song.

“We have the technology now to do those sorts of things,” Lifeson says. “So I really embraced it, but it requires a lot of attention and a lot of work.”

Lifeson's new digital rig ditches physical amps in favor of IK Multimedia TONEX and Fractal modelers to replicate decades of recorded sounds live.

“With the advent of AI [machine learning] helping, they sound like the greatest amps ever,” he previously told Rick Beato.

“There’s depth in the bottom-end. There’s real character. It’s not just the fuzziness and the noise that you get from an amp; it responds beautifully.”

Rush's Fifty Something tour continues through the USA and Canada throughout the remainder of 2026, before heading to South America and Europe in 2027.

Queen guitarist Brian May has found a 17-year-old fan who he believes sounds closer to his own iconic playing than most have ever gotten.

Matthias Reisböck has the tools for the job. He’s got a Red Special copy, he’s got May’s curly locks and, most importantly, he’s got the touch and feel of a guitarist once voted the world’s best. He regularly posts Queen covers on his Instagram, and May can’t believe it.

“Bloody hell,” he commented on one video. “You’ve got the touch, young sir. I can retire now. A fabulous rendition.”

Other comments have included “you’re sounding more like me than me” and, on his take of the Bohemian Rhapsody guitar solo, he beamed: “Perfect tone. I think that’s about the closest to my feel in that solo anyone ever got.”

Unsurprisingly, that recognition has left Reisböck jumping for joy. May is, he says, the reason he picked up an electric guitar in the first place.

“When I discovered the Bohemian Rhapsody film, I knew I wanted to play the guitar like him,” he says in a post reacting to one of May’s delighted comments. “I started playing about three years ago during a challenging and hard time for me.

“I began to play on my grandmother’s old acoustic guitar and learned the first few chords, feeling that I really wanted to become a guitarist. I watched YouTube videos of Brian and Queen and fell more and more in love with the music, Brian’s sound and his technique.”

Guitar heroes are looking out for the next wave of star players. Nuno Bettencourt recently uncovered a “generational talent” on social media. Earlier this month, Steve Vai and Dave Navarro championed a teenage folk guitarist who blew them away.

Meanwhile, a 16-year-old Thai shredder has stunned America’s Got Talent judges and looks to be the show’s latest child prodigy. They’re out there in droves, and if they’re playing Queen covers, there’s every chance Brian’s watching…

Carlos Alomar has looked back on his first encounter with Paul McCartney, after he was recruited to play on one of the former Beatles’ solo records in the 1980s.

Alomar boasts the unique merit of having met more than one Beatle in his time. By the time he joined Macca on Press to Play, he’d already crossed paths with John Lennon and Ringo Starr.

But the session veteran’s involvement with Macca was far more involved, in more ways than one.

“It was truly a wish-come-true moment,” Alomar says in the new issue of Guitar World. “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.”

Alomar, who also played with David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop, was asked to record some finishing guitar tracks for Press to Play. Macca was skeptical at first, but he eventually warmed to the idea.

“I got a call from producer Hugh Padgham, whom I’d met when he produced David Bowie’s Tonight [1984],” Alomar remembers. “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.”

Alomar first met McCartney in the Beatle’s office. The two hit it off. Their first encounter was relaxed and friendly, if a bit hazy.

“When I arrived, Paul invited me up to his study. 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.

“While listening, Paul turned his back to me slightly to get something. What emerged was a perfectly rolled Jamaican ‘carrot’ ganja joint,” he adds with a 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].”

It was an excellent first encounter, and Alomar would lend his unique rhythm guitar style to tracks such as Press, Pretty Little Head, Stranglehold and Only Love Remains, all of which turn 40 this summer.

Pick up the newest issue of Guitar World at Magazines Direct to read Alomar’s full interview. The issue also includes features with Peter Frampton and Kim Thayil.

On August 12, 2026, at Jones Beach Arena on Long Island, New York, Ritchie Blackmore reunited with Deep Purple for the first time in 33 years.

It was an astonishing feat, and not something anyone – including Purple’s current guitarist, Simon McBride – saw coming.

“It was all very last-minute,” McBride tells Guitar World. “Gillan got an email from Ritchie about a week before the gig, requesting to get up and play with us.”

Given the perceived layer of thick, unthawed ice between the camps, one would think there was a lot to hash out. It wasn’t the case. “The talks were very short,” McBride says. “Gillan asked us if we’d mind, and there were no objections from anyone.”

And really, how could they say no? “Ritchie was a big part of the band’s legacy,” McBride reminds. “I know they’ve had their differences, so it was nice to see them put that aside. From my point of view, it’s not every day you get to appear on stage beside one of the greatest icons in guitar history.”

Naturally, Blackmore’s legend status had McBride more than willing to step aside for his one-song cameo.

“I just said to Ritchie, ‘I’ll be your rhythm guitar player today. Just do your thing.’”

Blackmore did indeed do his thing, as only he can. “It was pretty cool,” McBride, who grew up digging Blackmore’s licks and, at 47, is the youngest member of Deep Purple.

“I got to stand on stage beside the guy who started this whole thing,” he says. “Ritchie is a legend, a great player, and a great innovator. I think all musicians grew up listening to his work.”

McBride joined Deep Purple in 2022 as a replacement for Steve Morse. Before that, he’d been around the blues-rock scene for decades, but he and Blackmore had never crossed paths before the Jones Beach jam.

“I was a little curious as to what he was gonna think of me,” McBride admits. “But he was a super-cool, nice guy.”

In fact, Blackmore liked what McBride was putting down. “He was really complimentary, which was a shock to me,” McBride says. “It’s very bizarre when these legends admire my playing. My head starts to explode! [laughs]”

But McBride is in no danger of getting a big head; he knows that evening was all about Blackmore. “It was a magical moment,” he says. “I think there were a lot of tears in the audience. And on stage, there were just smiles everywhere. I’m very lucky to have been part of such an iconic situation.”

That magic hasn’t stopped internet trolls from criticizing Blackmore’s playing. McBride isn’t having it. “People will always say stupid things,” he says with an eye roll. “I ignore that. Ritchie is in his 80s and plays great.

“He has health issues. If I can play that well when I’m that age, I’ll be happy. People should look at it for what it was: a magical night. There’s a lot of history in this band. That show was a part of it. A reunion between old mates who haven’t seen each other in years.”

In the days since the reunion, good vibes have flowed from Blackmore and Deep Purple’s camps. There have been photos showing old friends sharing laughs over cold beers. “That was great,” McBride says. “There were a lot of stories.”

“It’s a little bit of closure for the guys, he concludes. “There's a lot of history, and not all good. But they are older and wiser… it was great to see them close the door on all the negative history.

“As for me, I just wanted Ritchie to be happy and do his thing, which he did. Ritchie is and always will be a great player.”

When you think of movie directors, you probably think of a bullhorn-wielding figure, script in one hand, camera in the other. Now, add a guitar slung casually across their shoulder, and you’ve got Robert Rodriguez. The Texas-born filmmaker is the director behind cult classics like From Dusk Till Dawn and Planet Terror, as well as box-office smash hits like Sin City and the family-friendly Spy Kids franchise – and he’s just as passionate about guitars as he is about making movies.

While many film fans know him for his flicks, fewer may know him as a keen guitar player – although guitars are featured heavily in his works. Take his Mexico Trilogy – El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico – where a wandering, guitar case-carrying musician named El Mariachi takes on the bad guys.

​We dial in with the director, and it seems he’s more than happy to get a chance to talk about his passion for the six-string.

“I was super-excited to get that call,” he says from his home in Texas. “I’m a huge fan of the magazine, obviously, since I was a kid. I was thinking, ‘Am I the first director to be on Guitar World?’” he quipped, and well, he very well may be the first we’ve featured.

Rodriguez grew up in a musical family, so it was inevitable he’d pick up an instrument, he tells us.

​“There was always music in the family. My mom used to take Spanish guitar lessons. She would have us all sing. As the family grew, she would learn guitar and sing Spanish songs – and she would have us sing for anybody who came over,” he recalls.

“I remember taking my first guitar lessons around 12 with my older brother. He was always a better guitar player. Around that age, a family friend was teaching us, just kind of simple chords,” says Rodriguez. “But there was a real romanticism towards the guitar in the family. I think probably because it was just so portable, too. We could all kind of go learn piano, but this one you could just pass around the house. I just found that I loved the iconography of it. I loved how it felt.”

​The guitar has become one of Rodriguez’s secret weapons, helping him unlock his creativity in other areas of his life, like filmmaking.

“I realize it’s instant meditation. So it really triggers a lot of ideas if you’re creative and kind of helps bring a lot of focus,” he says. “That’s why you’ll always see pictures of me with a guitar on a movie set. I’m probably the only director who always has a guitar on his set.

​“As soon as you’re done filming the shot, you put the camera aside, and you’re waiting for the next setup. Instead of pacing around or looking at my phone, I would pick up a guitar, and it would instantly keep me in creative mode. I’m not thinking about the guitar. I’m thinking about what the next shot is going to be, and inevitably, I would end up writing something.”

​These snippets of ideas would often lead to full-blown tracks that would go on to underpin iconic moments in his films, as Rodriguez explains.

“I remember I was on the set of Spy Kids 2, and my still photographer came over, and he goes, ‘What’s that thing you’ve been playing for the past few days?’ I went, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Do you like it?’ He goes, ‘You should record that.’ ‘I’ll go record it tonight. Maybe it’s the theme for this movie!’

​“It wasn’t the theme for Spy Kids 2,” he says. “It was the theme for the next movie I was doing, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, that I had already shot – it turned into the song. I recorded it that night, and Salma [Hayek] ended up singing it. It’s the end title song, and that theme is the theme of that movie.”

Rodriguez’s approach is a little left-field when compared to his peers, but it could be argued that his attitude to filmmaking, composing, and, of course, the guitar, is what makes his films unique. “I’m a better filmmaker by playing guitar. I’m a better storyteller by playing guitar,” he says with confidence.

And, as he tells us, music is just as important as the lines the characters are saying. “You have a soundtrack of dialogue to tell people about your movie. Well, the music’s like a soundtrack that tells them about your character.”

Rodriguez has amassed a pretty broad collection of guitars over the years. Some models he bought for movie projects, some were elaborate gifts from studios, and others are the tools he uses to perform live with his band, Robert Rodriguez’s Chingon Band, a music collective the director put together to perform popular songs from across his filmography with their signature Latin rock style.

“It’s kind of cinematic Latin rock, but for people who don’t even like Latin rock – it’s got its own, very cinematic quality to it,” he says.

To pull off this unique blend of “Mexican Spaghetti Western,” Rodriguez tells us that 24 frets are an absolute must, and that’s why, for a long time, he relied on a PRS Custom 24. However, his head has recently been turned by a striking custom build from Castedosa Guitars that got some serious action during a special Chingon performance in Los Angeles at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to celebrate the anniversary of From Dusk Till Dawn and Spy Kids earlier this year.

​“When I met the Del Castillo brothers that are now in my band, they were playing these Yamaha or Takamine 24-fret acoustics,” he says. “They would do these harmonized runs all the way up to the 24th fret. So when they joined my band, I thought, I like that sound, but I want to do it with electric. Not a lot of electric guitars are 24 frets, so I had to go with a PRS. So that’s why that became my main guitar,” he elaborates.

​“I’ve always had painters paint my guitars,” he tells us. “The famous Latin painter, George Yepes, painted this one. He’s the one who did the cover of our Mexican Spaghetti Western album and the famous Los Lobos album La Pistola y Corazón. I was a fan of his art and wanted playable fine art, something I could hang on my wall yet also pull down and play.”

As much as Rodriguez loves his personalized PRS, it is now playing second fiddle to his new Castedosa Maravilla.

​“I heard about Carlos Lopez starting his own company, [Castedosa Guitars], and I bought one of his baritones, which is an awesome freaking guitar. This baritone is so killer, but I had limited use for it in the band,” he says.

​“I told him three years ago, ‘If you ever do a 24-fret guitar, that would be my main guitar.’ Then I saw that he started making them, and I told him about the LA show. So he made that guitar and had Sergio Robleto do a painting on the back because he wanted to showcase Latin art on the back of some of his guitars,” says Rodriguez.

“I didn’t know he was going to throw that in. And I also thought he was just going to make me a guitar for that one show. But as soon as I played it, I was so blown away that I knew it would be my main guitar going forward!”

​“The PRS is great, but this is a custom,” he continues. “You can just tell these are magically hand-built guitars that sound great. So for my live stuff, that’s definitely my main guitar now.”

We shift focus to one of the director’s early guitars, and it just so happens to coincide with one of his early films, Road Racers. He tells us how he acquired an old Silvertone to use in the movie, and it could be argued that Rodriguez had more than a little hand in repopularizing the guitar stylings of Link Wray.

"I actually got Link Wray to sign it for me, because the whole reason his music came back is that I made this movie called Road Racers just before Pulp Fiction. It’s like a love letter to [Wray]. It was a movie after El Mariachi,” he explains. “I got this guitar to use in that movie, and a friend that co-wrote it with me owned a bunch of old Link Wray records. We’re like, ‘Let’s put all this music in.’ There are five or six Link Wray songs in Road Racers,” he elaborates.

“I was able to license the originals really inexpensively. So when Quentin [Tarantino] heard that I got the licensing for an actual Link Wray song for so little, he put two of the songs in Pulp Fiction – and that got Link Wray’s resurgence.

“So when I met Link, he’d come to Austin in ’97. I got him to sign the guitar and told him that I put his music in Road Racers, and that’s why it’s in Pulp Fiction – he was like, ‘Oh, you’re the reason I got back!’ He was so grateful.”

Now, the crown jewel in his collection once belonged to another guitar hero of his, none other than Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“Some of my best guitars were given to me,” he says. “I’ve got Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 12-string. The guitar is from Stevie’s Live Alive tour. He gave it to his friend Larry Warren back in June of 1989. Larry eventually put it up for auction in 1997,” he explains.

“I did a big favor for a friend of mine at a movie studio by helping them out with some extra filming on one of their movies and not charging them an arm and a leg. They were in a bind; in fact, I probably did it for free, and they were so grateful that they bought me that guitar at an auction. I was stunned! You know, that’s one of the best guitars in my collection.”

Being a proud Texan himself, Rodriguez is quick to point out how much love he had for Stevie from a very young age, getting into music in 1979. “I mean, talk about a blowout year. I was 10. We had Dire Straits’ first album – Mark Knopfler’s stuff blew our minds. Van Halen’s stuff blew our minds, and Andy Summers, what he was doing in The Police. That was all in one year,” he continues.

“So we were all about the guitar and trying to figure out, ‘How do you play that?’ Then Stevie Ray Vaughan came out, and there was no going back.”

Now, that isn’t the only guitar he has with an SRV connection. Rodriguez was also lucky enough to snag the famous “Family Guitar,” which Stevie would play alongside his brother.

“The Rockin Robin double neck is one that Jimmie Vaughan had donated to a big charity auction, and I didn’t think it should leave Texas, so I bought it. It’s a real piece of Texas history,” he says. “And having four brothers myself, I loved that he and Stevie used to play that guitar at the same time for the song Pipeline during shows like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.”

The director has been gifted many instruments over the years, from the financiers of a movie presenting him with a 1964 Fender Stratocaster, to being handed a striking cherry Gibson Les Paul on the set of Grindhouse. He was even gifted a model from Metallica’s shredder-in-chief, Kirk Hammett.

“Kirk Hammett gave me his LTD Nosferatu,” he says. “He had come over to look at some paintings that I had from [Frank] Frazetta, and he was so grateful he gave me a guitar.”

The conversation shifts to nylon acoustic models, and a road-worn, battle-scared Cordoba catches our eye.

“My favorite one that I bought back then when we started the band was this old Cordoba FCE, which I’ve had for about 24 years. I love the thin body of it,” explains Rodriguez.

“I’ve always had this on a set. That’s why it’s all beat to hell. It’s something I bought specifically for recording the Once Upon a Time in Mexico score back in 2002. It’s used throughout that score and just about any other score later that has acoustic nylon in it, which is most of them. I also played it at our live Chingon concerts. It was not used on screen in any movies, but certainly looks like it should be!”

Rounding out our chat with the director, we ask what advice Rodriguez has for aspiring musicians and filmmakers.

“Learn it all,” he says confidently. “Never stop learning. Always be a student and try to live a creative life and actively apply creativity to everything you do. If you actively say, I’m being creative, you’ll see everything change. I found I was happiest, most successful, most prolific, and most fulfilled when I was being creative.

“If somebody asks you, ‘Why do you keep playing that guitar?’ You tell them, ‘It’s just part of my creative process. I’m actually unlocking the secrets to the universe while I’m playing it.’ And you wouldn’t be lying! It’s very much like meditation in that it’s all in the practice of it.”

Peter Frampton has looked back on how he got his hands on one of Jimi Hendrix’s most experimental instruments – which he later used in David Bowie’s band

The Humble Pie legend often finds himself at the heart of intriguing gear stories. The tale of how he ended up with one of only three electric sitars that were once owned by Hendrix is no exception.

“I was finishing [1977 solo album] I’m in You at Electric Lady in New York, which was Jimi’s studio,” Frampton recalls in the new issue of Guitar World.

“As we were leaving on the last night, the studio manager came out with a guitar case and said, ‘We’ve really appreciated you being here; I hope you had a good time. We have something here that we think Jimi might have wanted you to have.’”

Plenty of Hendrix’s gear has ended up in the hands of notable players, often as gifts. Frank Zappa acquired the Strat Hendrix charred at the Miami Pop Festival in 1968, Vito Bratta recorded a White Lion classic with his black Strat, and even My Chemical Romance’s Ray Toro has gotten in on the action.

But when the studio manager opened up the case that day, Frampton was caught off guard.

“I was expecting it to be a Strat, but they opened it up and showed me this electric sitar, and I went, ‘Oh, my God,’” he recalls. “Jimi’s road manager Gerry Stickells once wrote, ‘Jimi had three electric sitars. I know where two are, but I can’t find the other one.” [Laughs] I’ve got it here!”

Stickells can consider that mystery solved, then, and Frampton later put the sitar to use in Bowie’s band. It’s believed that Bowie himself used it to track Zeroes, from 1987’s Never Let Me Down, with Frampton taking it to the stage.

Frampton’s tenure with Bowie came at a key point in his career. A chance to join the Who fell through at the time, with Frampton telling GW in 2022 that Bowie helped him regain his “credibility”.

Elsewhere in the interview, Frampton revealed how he met his new favorite guitar player at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch during a private all-star party.

To read Frampton’s interview in full, grab a copy of Guitar World magazine today. Paul McCartney is the cover star, with the feature tracing 60 years of his finest riffs.

Copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.

It was a huge cause for celebration when Ritchie Blackmore stepped on stage with Deep Purple for the first time in over three decades last week.

Blackmore joined the band he co-founded in 1968 to play their timeless classic Smoke on the Water at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, on August 12. It was his first appearance with the group since 1993, when he left the band mid-tour.

Yet there have been some cynical murmurings in the guitar community about his playing that night in New York. For some, the guitar solo Blackmore delivered was a little underwhelming.

But the 81-year-old, who is recovering from a heart attack, took no prisoners when reflecting on his performance in an exclusive interview with Guitar Player.

“It was very moving because I went on very quickly and had to play immediately,” he said. “I couldn’t warm up, but I wasn’t there to be playing correct notes. I was there to see old friends.

“I hadn’t seen them in [nearly] 40 years, and we’re all getting older,” he added. “I think we realized it could be the last time we see each other, maybe.”

That might be tough to read for some Deep Purple fans, who would no doubt love a third Blackmore-Deep Purple reunion. But that’s the reality, and with health issues hugely limiting where he can play – the New York venue was a drivable distance from his Long Island home – that might have been his last hurrah with the band.

The reunion was the veteran guitarist’s move. He saw the band was in town and offered his services for a special appearance, then teased it online.

“I woke up one morning thinking, the day before their show, ‘You know it would be good for the fans if I just got up for one song, probably Smoke and just show that were not at each other’s throats and don’t hate each other,’” he told Guitar Player.

Mike McCready was sinking just as Pearl Jam’s career was taking flight. The early ‘90s were a blur as he was blacked out on alcohol and drugs and withdrew from the band.

Speaking to Guitar World in April 1995, he recalled how he and frontman Eddie Vedder had grown apart, keeping their distance from one another for the past couple of years.

“I didn’t have a lot of confidence,” said McCready. “I was literally afraid of everybody. I didn’t know how to relate to Eddie, and after the band really took off, I went off in my own world.”

One of the first things McCready did when he got help and got sober was reach out to Vedder.

“I told Eddie, ‘Listen, man, I know I’ve been fucked up for a long time, but I want to reestablish the relationship that we had in the beginning,’” he recalled.

McCready got there in the end, but there were many false starts. He would get on the wagon then come off. His bandmates tried to help as best they could. Looking back at it, he admits he thought that he was going to be kicked out of the band.

“We had a lot of meetings where they would say, ‘Hey, Mike, you’re getting way too fucked up.’ But we’re all really good friends and we love each other,” said McCready. “I think they actually thought I was going to die, but they never took steps to kick me out of the band, which I can’t believe because I fucked up so many times. I was drunk and making an ass out of myself and they were concerned about it.”

McCready bit the bullet and checked himself into rehab. That’s when he realized the strength of his relationship with the band. Before, he had been in a bubble. That’s the company you keep when you’re using.

McCready would have to get sober by himself, but he was not alone. Stone Gossard came out to visit him. They would all check in with him.

“They called me all the time, and it was cool because I really needed their support,” said McCready. “They’re my greatest friends. I couldn’t believe it; when you clean up, you start realizing that people actually care about you. You just don’t think about it when you’re using all the time because you’re only into the people you’re using with. It clouds everything.”

But the newly sober McCready needed something else to occupy himself with. As he tells it, getting off the alcohol saved him from blacking out and the downward spiral, but there was nothing to attenuate life’s highs and lows. He wanted to have a drink when everyone else was. He wanted to drink every day. He just couldn’t.

Instead, he got busy. McCready getting clean is the origin story of Mad Season, the all-star grunge supergroup featuring the late Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley, and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin. While in rehab, McCready had met a bass guitar player called John Baker Saunders.

Saunders would soon join Seattle indie-rock stalwarts The Walkabouts, but right now he had a purpose. Mad Season were going to make an album.

Staley was going through his own issues with substance abuse at the time. Maybe being around these guys could help clear his head, give him something positive to focus on. Pearl Jam had recorded their third studio album, Vitalogy, in sessions snatched between touring commitments. For Mad Season’s debut, Above, sadly their only studio album, McCready could give the material his full attention.

“It’s great to be clear-headed and wake up early and get on with my day,” he said. “And putting this Mad Season thing together has been a blessing.”

As the urge to drink receded over time, he realized two things. One, that his relationship with his bandmates was tighter than it had ever been. And secondly, he was a better musician for that clarity.

He had labored under the misconception that he’d need some stimulant, legal or otherwise, to perform at his best, or to find ideas.

“Playing live, I’m a lot more focused on the music rather than just being in a daze, the way I was before,” he said. “The whole concept of me thinking that I needed something – be it valium or crystal meth or pot – to write songs or be creative is bullshit.

“I couldn’t put anything together when I was doing that crap. LSD might have helped me in certain ways, but it fucked me up a lot more than it helped.”

Perhaps The Darkness – the quadruple platinum, outrageously infectious rock band – made their riff-roaring, double-entendre-laden debut, Permission to Land, 20 years too late. There was a significant backlash on its release: due to the outlandish lyrics and falsetto vocals, many critics were quick to assume the band were a glam rock parody.

Yet here the four-piece unapologetically are, 23 years on, having secured three BRIT and two Kerrang! awards, and with eight albums under their rockstar, or catsuit, belts.

GW sat down with Darkness guitarist and producer, Dan Hawkins, at a weekend-long classic rock workshop, hosted by WaterBear – the College of Music.

What was your first guitar?

My dad had a couple knock-off Les Pauls; they’re the reason why [brother and Darkness frontman/rhythm guitarist] Justin and I are musicians. When I think about an electric guitar, the shape and weight of a Les Paul comes to mind. The only reason I got one was because Justin got one; he’d made some money doing an IKEA advert.

We went to a shop in West London. I said: “That one looks cool, I’ll have that.” Justin said: “Yeah, I’ll have that black one.”

Thin Lizzy – mostly a Les Paul band – are one of your favorites. Did they inspire your guitar playing?

People are always surprised when I say Eric Bell is my favorite Lizzy guitarist, because it completely goes against my look, choice of guitar, and tone. I consider Whiskey in the Jar the best guitar-ing in the world.

I challenge you to put a band’s entire catalog on shuffle, and have it take you through an entire weekend – apart from The Beatles. There’s so many different rhythms and approaches.

There’s a Les Paul Custom here today that Jimmy Page briefly had his hands on.

When Led Zeppelin reformed for their final gig at the O2, Page asked Gibson to make an exact replica of his stolen Les Paul Custom ’57 3-pickup. They sent it to him and he said, “This sounds absolutely perfect – but it’s too heavy for my age!”

It’s the heaviest Les Paul you can get because of the wood, the amount of metalwork, and the extra pickup in the middle. It’s an absolute back breaker.

I happened to phone [Gibson’s] Pat Foley the day it ended up back in his office. The Darkness were recording One Way Ticket To Hell…And Back and I said, “I need a Custom Black Beauty 3-pickup.” Foley sent it to me. It was fate!

One of the pickups has been swapped, hasn’t it?

Its pickup was a Burstbucker, but my other guitars were really high output 498s. It wasn’t loud enough. So my guitar tech – who’d just come off an AC/DC tour – swapped it with one of Angus Young’s pickups. It sounded amazing. I didn’t ask what it was; all I know is it came from one of his SGs.

How many guitars are in your collection?

Every 10 years I have a massive clearout. I have seven Les Paul Standards for my touring guitars, four in Europe and three in America. I play Les Paul Standards from the 2000s. The pickups are too loud – to hear your guitar’s tone you have to drop it back a bit. I worked that out three years ago, so all my albums are just fucking blaring and really distorted!

It took The Darkness 11 years to get proper recognition. When did you first feel out of your depth?

Most of my career, really! Being a musician is weird – it’s an insular thing. I was a session guitarist for a bit, which is unbelievable because I can’t read music; I play by ear. I used to pretend to flip the music sheets during sessions. How the hell I blagged that, I don’t know!

What’s the toughest choice you’ve made as a musician?

There is an answer I want to give, but legally I can’t. Sometimes you have to make really tough choices about who is and who isn’t in your band. We had to stop for Justin to get better, and I understand that. He came out of rehab and suddenly started doing solo stuff; that’s what the rift was.

It’s a miracle my band made it through unscathed. In that capacity, it can affect you really really badly – talk about a recipe for disaster, mental health-wise. I feel I’ve made some good decisions over the years. I’m currently in a really good place.

What does your stage setup look like?

A really big pedalboard, made by Mike Hill, who’s sadly passed. I play with a 100ft cable, which is unusual, straight through to a Marshall 100 watt Super Lead. I’ve got a couple of distortion pedals – mainly old Tube Screamers.

I don’t know why I bother having pedals; the outputs of my Les Paul Standards are so loud they distort the sound of the amp. I’m just piling shit on shit, really… but I’ve got something to stand on!

How has streaming affected your band?

There was a moment when it changed. Our second album didn’t do as well, but it still sold around 100,000 CDs. That was considered a bit of a disaster at the time. These days I’d be like: ‘Oh my god, can you imagine!’ Each record sold used to generate £16, now it generates nothing.

An upside to streaming, and people’s obsession with living their life through a lens, is that the appreciation of live music and human interaction has gone through the fucking roof. You see that in ticket sales and how much people are prepared to pay.

The youngsters know what they want – they want to go to a gig and push each other around. They want records and physical things, and to beat the shit out of each other at gigs. They don’t want AI.

What’s your most memorable encounter with another guitarist?

I’ve been back-to-back with Brian May playing Tie Your Mother Down at Hammersmith Apollo. I thought, ‘What’s Brian doing?’ then I realized he was doing the rock triangle. I’d never done it before. I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I move he’ll fall over!’

It was before he was a Sir. It would have probably been best if I killed him before he was a Sir. If he survived, he would have had me beheaded in the Tower of London. I think those are the sort of privileges you get!

You recently supported Iron Maiden at Knebworth. What’s it like playing to their crowd?

When we started our career we played with everyone: The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Metallica, Alice Cooper, Def Leppard – it’s all we did for two years.

I’ve played gigs – and I’m talking about Metallica here – where the first 5,000 people are either throwing bottles of piss at you, or they’re facing the other way with fingers in their ears. But it wasn’t like that with Maiden. It just went off and it was fucking amazing.

• The Darkness will tour the UK in December.

Ritchie Blackmore may be forever associated with stacks upon stacks of Marshalls. However, it turns out that, at least at the beginning of his Deep Purple years, his Marshalls were actually Voxes – a fact he says Marshall wanted to keep on the down-low.

“I really loved my Vox sound, but I wanted to change to Marshalls for the look,” he told Guitar World in a 2018 interview.

Being a regular at Jim Marshall’s shop in Ealing, London, gave Blackmore the unique opportunity to spend hours tweaking his tone.

“I’d go to the Marshall factory in Bletchley, where I met Ken Bran and Dudley Craven, who devised the circuit for me in a Marshall setup. They’d be there with their soldering irons, and I’d be batting away on the guitar trying to get the amp to sound like a Vox.

“I’d be playing so loud that all the women there, who were doing the construction of the amps, would storm out together, saying, ‘We can’t work with that loud nonsense going on.’ 60 people or so working there would leave the factory,” he admitted.

To accommodate Blackmore, Marshall went so far as to devise a soundproof room for the Deep Purple guitarist to use.

“I was there so often looking for this sound,” he recalled. “One of the secrets that they will deny to this day – ’cause they told me they would – was that they could not come up with the sound that I wanted.

“I wanted this Vox sound which was very distorted and very cutting, but seemed to have a bass resonance. And they just couldn’t get that. So in the end they said, ‘What we’re going to do is get one of our combo amps, and we’ll take out the innards and put in the Vox innards. So you’ll actually be playing a Vox, but it’ll say Marshall.’ That was the big secret of the day.”

Despite this workaround, the Marshall team were “determined” to get the right sound for Blackmore, so that he eventually became arguably the loudest guitarist of that era.

“What they did was put an extra output stage into one of their 200-watt amps [the Major], which gave it a fatter sound, a bit more distorted,” he explained. “This extra output stage basically made the 200-watt into a 280-watt.

“So for the first probably five years of Deep Purple – ’70 to ’75 – I did have the loudest amp in the world. Although I’m sure it’s dwarfed now by people who have a million watts. You know how it is. Everyone’s got to have one more, one more.

“Going up to – what? – 11 now, I guess,” he quipped.

Facebook Marketplace has plenty of deals, but when one user listed his Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar for sale, he didn’t expect a country star to pick it up.

American singer-songwriter Riley Green has released four studio albums, with his latest, That’s Just Me, released in April of this year. Since his 2019 debut, he’s scooped up five Country Music Awards, making the Jacksonville native one of the genre’s biggest rising stars.

His success means he has money to play with. So, when a sunburst J-45 caught his eye on the social media marketplace, he snapped it up. Then, he collected it himself.

“Didn’t really wanna sell this girl, but thought I would throw it on Marketplace,” the seller, Shane Allen of Front Beach Softwash in Panama City Beach, Fla shared on Facebook.

“When I got to the place that I agreed-upon meeting spot, it turned out to be Riley Green himself who was interested in buying it,” he added. “Let me tell ya, folks. This guy didn’t have to meet up with this regular Joe. Heck, he could have sent anybody to buy my guitar! Instead he invited me to meet him and look at [the] guitar.”

Green has just shy of 17 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 3.1 million Instagram followers. He’s a big deal, but opted not to send a lackey to pick up his new squeeze.

“When I [saw] that he was the one buying it,” Allen’s post wraps up, “well, it made selling it feel a little better.”

Green is set to feature as a coach on season 30 of The Voice next month, and is currently in the middle of his largest headline tour to date. Now he has a new guitar for his arsenal, and the world knows the humble means by which he got it.

Dream guitars have also been pried from Facebook Marketplace by the Travis Barker-backed artist KennyHoopla (that one under shady circumstances) and Gibson’s Certified Vintage manager.

One of John Lennon’s amps also popped up on the site, and the buyer had no idea.