Sean Lennon and his musical partner in crime Les Claypool wanted to up the ante for the Claypool Lennon Delirium's third album, The Great Parrot-ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.

They’ve done that, tackling important themes including AI and sustainability in a rock opera of sorts. It’s important stuff – but in typical fashion, the duo went about it from a humorous angle. “It wasn’t about what was in the news in terms of negative things,” Lennon says. “We were just kind of trying to write something compelling that basically made us laugh.”

And though he’s an outright pedal fiend, he doesn’t muck about when it comes to his guitars. “I’m a boring guitar player,” he admits. “I’m a little bit lazy. I can’t even get to the point where I’m gonna have a different guitar for every song!

“I just like to change sounds with pickup settings and pedals, and maybe the amp settings a little bit. I don’t switch out 100 guitars; it’s too much to think about.”

He confirms that his inspiration as a player comes from his Beatle father, John Lennon. “It hasn’t just impacted me,” he says of his dad's influence. “It’s more than that. It’s the only reason I play music.

“I always say that I don’t think I was especially gifted as a musician. I have talent – but there are a lot of people on Instagram, and if you look you realize they’re prodigal geniuses. I didn’t like playing music because my band was successful, or because I’d get noticed as a guitar player. I just played because I missed my dad. That was it.”

How did The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy kick off?

It started with us wanting to not just do another Delirium record. It felt like a third album is kind of a milestone for a band, so we wanted to do something bigger – a full-blown rock opera with a film concept. That was kind of shooting for the stars! We wanted something epic and expansive.

Big topics such as AI and sustainability run throughout. Are those important issues to you and Les?

We’d written one or two other stories that we abandoned because we weren’t excited enough about them. I’d been reading about the paperclip dilemma, a thought experiment – it’s basically a warning against what could go wrong if you design an out-of-control AI system.

A super-intelligent robot could just turn everything on the planet into paper clips because it doesn’t know that it shouldn’t do that – it was programmed that way. We just thought it would be funny to turn that into a story where it’s actually happening.

It wasn’t like we were trying to be relevant – we just thought it was funny! But it turned out to be timed really well. It feels like we're sort of at a peak for people wondering if we’ve gone too far with this stuff.

What’s the division of labor between you and Les in the studio?

We’ve done a lot of different songs in a lot of different ways. We’ve jammed on ideas and maybe five or 10 ideas will come out, and we’ll record them on a cellphone. Then we go home and see if either of us hears anything interesting.

I’d say the most common method is not unlike the early John and Paul method: each of us has an idea for a song, we bring it to the other person, and if they like it, we finish it off together.

Do you generally write on guitar?

I usually write on an acoustic guitar because I’m too lazy to set up an amp just to write a song! But my comfort zone is also to have a keyboard or piano nearby. I’ve found that, when I’m stuck or confused, it unlocks something in my brain if I figure it out on the piano. But with the Delirium, I mostly write on guitar.

Do you have a favorite acoustic?

Yeah! My guitar teacher – I only took two lessons with her, and I forget her name because I was so young – had a Martin 00-15, the mahogany one. When I was working on my [2006] solo album Friendly Fire, I bought one from a vintage shop in LA. That’s my favorite guitar.

It’s very small and easy to carry. I toured Friendly Fire with it. I just love the look of it. I associate the dark brown mahogany with learning to finger-pick at summer camp, so it’s sort of my earliest idea of a guitar.

Do you still tour with that guitar?

I don’t know if this is uncool or whatever – but do you know those Fender guitars that are acoustic but look like an electric guitar? They’re like $600.

An Acoustasonic?

Yeah! I’ve trashed a bunch of acoustics in my life, so I take those Fenders on tour now because I’m not too worried about banging them up. They’re actually even lighter than an acoustic, so I tend to write with them when I’m with Les because they’re easier to carry. Those Fenders are great.

A lot of modern guitar companies have really figured out how to machine the necks now so they play very well – whereas for most of my life, to get a really great guitar, it would have to be old. But in the last 10 or 20 years, everyone has really stepped up their game, and even cheaper guitars play pretty well.

Looking at two of the singles from the new record, what gear did you use on WAP (What a Predicament) and Meat Machine?

We always record at Les’ studio, Rancho Relaxo. He has one Mesa/Boogie with a couple of 10” speakers; it was in his extra shower, where he stores things. We found that, and it just stayed on for like three weeks!

I ran my pedalboard through it, and essentially all the sounds I’m getting are from pedals. I don’t do a lot of amp and guitar-swapping; part of the quality and charm of the Delerium records is having a very limited palette.

What tends to catch your ear as far as pedals go?

I used to be known as a pedal guy – an effects pedal expert – in the ‘90s and early 2000s, but there was a pedal renaissance and all these boutique pedal companies came out, and I just couldn't keep up anymore!

I was the guy where you could say, ‘Hey, what’s this?’, and I pretty much knew. But now there’s just so much stuff out there that I have no clue. There’s just so many great pedal companies.

What’s the most interesting pedal on your board now?

My Delirium pedalboard is pretty basic stuff. But the most interesting one is on the song Melody of Entropy. There’s a famous pedal called the Tremopolis – have you heard of it?

I can’t say I have…

It’s famous because it’s impossible to get. It’s extremely bizarre. It’s a tremolo pedal made by this very strange guy who disappeared. No one knows where he is, this pink-haired dude on Facebook who made a couple of these pedals.

They’re extremely strange – this tremolo reacts to volume, like an attack. The speed of the tremolo changes drastically depending on how the guitar is played, and it makes some really wild sounds. The tremolo goes up so fast that it almost sounds like a glitch. It’s really great!

It’s very much featured on Melody of Entropy. We wrote that song because of the pedal. I was like, “Hey Les, I wanna show you this weird pedal I brought!” I was just playing something to show him how it worked, and it wound up being the song.

What electric guitars do you favor?

My favorite guitars of all-time are Jazzmasters. I have a ’67 and a ’59 that’s really fancy. They’re my favorites, but I don’t like touring with them because I’m scared of damaging them. So Nels Cline introduced me to the guy at Bilt Guitars, and they made me a bunch of custom guitars for the Delirium.

Is that the SS Zaftig and the Revelator?

Yeah. If you’re a Delirium fan, you’ll know my silver Bilt guitar and my green sparkle one. They’re incredibly well-made – they’re the first guitars I ever had custom-made for myself, and they’re the first new guitars that I think are as well-made as the ‘50s Fender stuff. They’re beautifully crafted.

It goes without saying that you have a great guitar-related lineage through your dad. Do you think you play like him?

I think I’m always gonna be rooted in a British harmony kind of thing, but I don’t think we play exactly the same. I think his playing was a lot more raw; I probably spent a lot more time trying to learn certain things. I don’t think he ever cared to do that, so I do think we play differently.

I probably have a little more facility with my fingers – but I don’t think I’m as good a songwriter as him, so there’s that!

Do you have any of your dad’s old guitars?

My mom [Yoko Ono] has his guitars. Growing up, I was allowed to play with them because they were still lying around in our apartment. But I think my mom realized they were precious items that she probably shouldn’t let me destroy! So I was banned from playing them by the time I was 12, maybe.

I’m glad she did that, and I’m very grateful because she also let me get my own guitars, which is all I needed. So I don’t play his guitars, but I’m looking into taking care of them.

I’m making sure they’re happy, you know? I feel like a happy guitar should be worked on, played, and restored. It’s something I think my mom was less interested in because she’s not a guitar player.

It’s not that they weren’t taken care of; it’s that they were sitting in storage. I think it’s just entropy – if you leave any object in the closet for long enough, it just starts to fall apart. I’m having them looked at by some people I really trust.

Overall, can you measure your dad’s impact on your playing?

When I think of music I think of my dad. So it’s fundamental to me. Learning to play guitar was only cool because it made me think about him. He wasn’t around, so it was definitely a way for me to feel closer to him.

The first songs I learned to play were Beatles songs, and after that it was like Hendrix and Zeppelin. But my foundation, my initial reason for wanting to play music at all, was my dad.

What’s next for you?

I’m really excited about the tour for this record. I feel like the response for the first couple of singles has been bigger than our other albums.

But “big” is a relative term! I know we’re still an indie band, but it feels like we have a lot of fans now. I guess it’s from years of touring and putting out multiple records – you build an audience. I’m really excited to go out there and play these songs for people who seem excited about them too.

• The Great Parrot-ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy is on sale now. Check out The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s upcoming tour dates.

With Paul McCartney releasing his first solo album in over five years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and the Beatles’ four-film biopic’s main cast already announced, it seems only natural that the actor who’s transforming into Macca – Paul Mescal – had a chat with the legend about his songwriting process. And luckily for the rest of us, it was captured on camera.

“I teach some kids up in my old school in Liverpool, and that's like the first thing [they ask]. I don't know how to do this, which is not very inspiring. I haven’t got a formula,” McCartney tells Mescal.

“They used to ask me and John [Lennon], ‘How’d you do it? Who writes the music, who writes the words?’ I don’t know. To me, I think any story or song you’re gonna do, it’s gotta involve memory. With the Beatles, we always tried to write something different.”

Lennon still serves as a source of inspiration for McCartney – especially considering his upcoming album turns a lens inward and revisits the formative years that not only shaped his own life but the very foundation of the Beatles.

“I ran into this guy called John Lennon, and he was kind of fighting life,” he reminisces of his collaborator., whose first single, Love Me Do, was released in 1962.

“He'd had a lot of trouble. His dad had left home, his mom had got run over… so he was putting up a shield, so he's very witty, very biting. And then when it came to writing, that kind of relationship stayed there.

“So on this record, I might even refer to him in my mind, as if we're still writing together. I'll write something and go, ‘What's that? Is that any good?’”

“And you're talking to him?” inquires Mescal.

“Kind of,” the older Paul affirms. “In my mind. Sometimes I get away with it. Sometimes you say, ‘No, it's shit.’ Well, his spirit’s sort of still in me, and I’m very glad of that.”

The first Lennon-McCartney Beatles single, Love Me Do, was released in 1962. Their final collaboration, Now and Then, was released in November 2023.

The full conversation is available on Amazon Live and in the Amazon Music app.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is out on May 29 via MPL/Capitol Records.

Over the last 30 years, Sean Lennon has put together quite a musical résumé – a trio of adventurous and acclaimed solo albums, a number of film scores, and heaps of fascinating collaborations, the most prominent being the Claypool Lennon Delirium, his ongoing project with Primus bass wizard Les Claypool.

Sean has done more than enough to step out of the enormous shadow of his late father, John. Far from bristling at the famous parent subject, though – as can sometimes be the case with second- or third-generation stars in entertainment – Sean Lennon has no hesitation in acknowledging the role played by his father, who was murdered when he was barely five years old, in his decision to pursue music.

“It hasn’t just impacted me,” Sean said of his father’s influence in a new interview with Guitar World. “It’s more than that. It’s the only reason I play music.

“I always say that I don’t think I was especially gifted as a musician,” he explained. “I have talent, but there are a lot of people on Instagram, where, if you look, you realize there are prodigal geniuses out there.

“But I didn’t really like playing music because my band were successful, or because I’d get noticed as a guitar player. I just played because I missed my dad. That was it.”

To get into more technical territory, Sean does see his guitar style as distinct from his father's, which was shaped by the rough-'n'-ready simplicity of '50s rock 'n' roll.

“I think I’m always gonna be rooted in a British harmony kind of thing, but I don’t think we play exactly the same,” he told Guitar World. “I think his playing was a lot more raw, I guess. I probably spent a lot more time playing guitar and trying to learn certain things. I don’t think he ever cared to do that, so I do think we play differently. I probably have a little more facility with my fingers.

“But,” he added with a laugh, “I don’t think I’m as good a songwriter as him, so there’s that.”

Our full interview with Sean Lennon features an in-depth look at the new Claypool Lennon Delirium album, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, discussion of the mysterious pedal that serves as the backbone for one of the record's key songs, and a whole lot more. Keep an eye out for it in the coming weeks.

“The Gretsch is pretty special,” Amelia Walker of Christie’s reflects of John Lennon’s 1963 6120 Chet Atkins, now sold at auction for $1,270,000.

“But both this guitar and the Model 1996 Rickenbacker are incredible because of the provenance. In both instances, how these came into The Jim Irsay Collection is the most perfect sort of backstory you could ever want.

“The Rickenbacker was given to Ringo by John [in 1968], and then Ringo sold it over four decades later at auction at Julien’s [in 2015], which is where Jim Irsay bought it.

“The Gretsch was given by John Lennon to his cousin David Birch, who wanted a guitar for his own band. David kept it for almost 50 years and then sold it privately to Jim Irsay. So you don’t really get any better than that.

“And the fact that we can obviously photo-match the Gretsch because of the unique grain pattern in the headstock and on the back of the neck, as well, means that you know that absolutely everything checks out.”

“The amazing photos that were taken at the Paperback Writer/Rain session by Leslie Bryce for The Beatles Book [aka The Beatles Monthly] publications present this really great series of shots of John with the guitar – both on his own, next to the amp fiddling around, and then with the other members of the band as they were literally recording the song.”

• “Lot after lot we felt like we were making history”: World record for most expensive guitar shattered three times in one night as Jim Irsay auction sees David Gilmour's Black Strat fetch $14.5m
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

“Nothing’s changed on it,” says Christie’s Amelia Walker of the glowing NOS look of John Lennon’s 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996. “The Rickenbacker wasn’t used for a huge amount of time – it was a sort of replacement while his black 325 was being mended – but it’s got such a distinct look because it was one of the English [Rose-Morris] models with the f-hole like a violin,” she adds.

The guitar has now sold for $1,270,000 as part of the mammoth Jim Irsay Collection auction. But it had a long history leading up to the sale. Guitar historian Tony Bacon picks up the story here.

“In 1964, Rickenbacker began exporting guitars to the British distribution company Rose-Morris. Rickenbacker had produced some of its short-scale 300-series guitars with an f-hole, unlike those with the regular sealed top. Rose-Morris liked the f-hole and asked for it on the bigger-body guitars it bought, too, instead of Rickenbacker’s regular slash-shape soundhole,” Tony explains.

“The firm had its own model-number system and catalogued its Rickenbacker line accordingly – 1993 (Rickenbacker’s 330/12), 1995 (615), 1996 (325), 1997 (335), and 1998 (345) – but stopped Ricky imports a few years later as sales faltered.

“John Lennon had played a couple of American originals of Rickenbacker’s 325 model since his band’s early days, and it was his second 325 that suffered an unfortunate accident at a Beatles Christmas ’64 residency at Hammersmith Odeon [which ran from 24 December 1964 to 16 January 1965], resulting in a crack from the nut and around the back of the headstock,” Tony continues.

“Rose-Morris came to the rescue, happy to provide one of its ‘British’ model 1996 versions of the 325, finished as standard in fireglo red-sunburst, rather than John’s preferred black.

“He used it for the remaining shows, but soon had his regular 325 back in a reasonably playable condition, ready for the band’s first sessions of 1965 at Abbey Road. He later gave the 1996 to Ringo Starr [in 1968], who sold it at auction in 2015.”

“The Rickenbacker doesn’t necessarily have any key recordings associated with it,” Amelia Walker adds. “It was basically used [as a replacement] at Hammersmith during the Beatles’ Christmas Show in 1964 [to 1965]. And then after that it was kept in Lennon’s attic studio at Kenwood.

“You can see the guitar in photographs right by his Farfisa and the Brenell tape machines that he had up in the attic. It’s right there, so you can assume that it may have figured in compositions or on demos, but I don’t think it was used on any [official] recordings.”

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

Back in 1998, on the eve of the release of the extensive John Lennon Anthology box set – which featured four discs of previously unreleased material – Guitar World gathered a number of the Beatle's closest collaborators, including Yoko Ono, to discuss the ups and downs of his solo career.

The ups were legion, of course – the raw fury of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band; Imagine, whose piano-led, plea-to-humanity title track became arguably as synonymous with the man as any of the songs he penned for the Beatles; Double Fantasy, a thoroughly contemporary, and later incredibly bittersweet, document of a man who had finally found peace.

But there were, by the admissions of their own creators, some lower ebbs – the inconsistent, in some cases very-poorly-aged, Sometime in New York City comes to mind.

Then there was Rock 'n' Roll, the 1975 covers album Lennon recorded under threat of a lawsuit, while in the midst of his infamous “Lost Weekend”, a period of separation from his beloved Yoko Ono.

Said legal threat came from Morris Levy, Chuck Berry's music publisher, over Lennon's lifting of a line from Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me on the Beatles' Come Together. If Lennon recorded an album with a few other songs Levy controlled the publishing for, the latter suggested, there'd be no lawsuit.

It was under those less than creatively inspirational circumstances, in 1973, that Lennon gathered a who's who of West Coast session greats at A&M Studios in Hollywood.

“The sessions could have been absolutely brilliant,” drummer Jim Keltner told Guitar World, “but toward the end of each evening, it would just waste away because of the drinking and the drugs all of us were taking, including Phil [Spector, the album's producer]. By the end of the night, John would be singing all slow and slurry.

“Just Because [the album's closing track] is a perfect example of that. It started off early in the evening with a really great tempo, great feel, good vocal. And by the time it was done, it was just a real parody of a drunken John Lennon with a bunch of drunk musicians all playing live.”

The drinking was even worse outside the confines of the studio.

One of the session aces employed on Rock 'n' Roll was the late guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, who more than enjoyed the rampant hijinks.

“Jesse was John's partner in crime, only because Jesse was an unmarried guy who loved trouble,” Keltner recalled to GW. “He was crazy himself. He would always volunteer to be with John, like, ‘I'll take care of him; don't worry.’ Because, amazingly enough, John didn't have a bodyguard in LA – unlike Phil.

“But this one evening Jesse drafted me to help him with John, saying, ‘Get in the car with us. You take one side and I'll take the other.’ Because John was starting to freak out.”

Booze and cars – never a good mix.

“He was so drunk that he was yelling and screaming at everybody,” Keltner said. “He was yelling, ‘Yoko!’ at the top of his lungs. Somebody put May [Pang, Lennon's then-girlfriend] in John's lawyer's car. And I was in the back of this Cadillac with John in the middle and Jesse on the other side, and we were trying to hold him down. Because he was trying to kick the windows out of the car.

“He had these big cowboy boots on. John was very strong when he was drunk. He shoved me down to the floor of the car and was pulling my hair and just kicking the windows. He was shoving and hitting Jesse. And the whole time he's yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘Yoko! I want Yoko!’ And screaming, ‘You know who the fuck I am?’ He was just out of it completely.”

Though that particular episode luckily ended without further harm, the album's recording was made even more tumultuous by Phil Spector. The great producer's mental health was already precipitously declining, and with it came the rise of his well-documented obsession with firearms. Of course, that combination would later end in tragedy.

“We got kicked out of the Record Plant [Studios, where the sessions had moved] because Phil shot his gun off in the canteen,” Keltner said. “He shot his gun at the floor and it ricocheted up into the ceiling. Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone, the studio owners, both decided that was that. We were outta there.”

This behavior, coupled with Spector's famously controlling nature behind the boards, soured his relationship with Lennon, and the troubled LA sessions collapsed entirely.

As if the album's gestation wasn't crazy enough as is, Spector then absconded with the tapes – it would be months before Lennon could get them back.

Yoko Ono, with whom Lennon was still in touch, had felt from the outset that the project wasn't in her husband's best interest, a viewpoint he would, understandably, come to share.

“I told John it wouldn't work,” Ono told Guitar World. “He said when he was in LA, ‘I think I'm gonna do this thing with Phil.’ I said, ‘John, I don't think you should do that.’ He said, ‘Don't worry about it, don't worry.’ But I just knew it wasn't going to work. And of course he called me later and said, ‘Yeah, you were right – again.’”

By late 1974, Lennon had returned to New York, straightened himself out, and gotten another original album (Walls and Bridges) out of his system. With the threat of a lawsuit still hanging over his head, though, he got another set of crack, first-call players together (including some, like Keltner and Davis, who had played with him during the album's shambolic early sessions the previous year) and had another go at a host of the '50s-era standards he and his Beatles bandmates had cut their teeth on.

For all the tumult, Rock 'n' Roll proved to be mildly successful, though it would be the penultimate solo album Lennon released during his lifetime.

Most importantly, though, it helped pave the way for Lennon's reunion with Ono. He would remain in New York City for the rest of his life, settling comfortably into the role of a dutiful husband and father to his son Sean – born later in 1975 – before he met his tragic end on December 8, 1980.

Looking back on Rock 'n' Roll in a Rolling Stone interview in 1975, Lennon said, “It started in ’73 with Phil and fell apart. I ended up as part of mad drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can’t begin to say, it’s just barmy; there’s a jinx on that album.”

Christie's has just announced the details of the historic sale of the Jim Irsay Collection. Widely regarded as the greatest guitar collection on Earth, it will be auctioned off in a series of sales in 2026.

Compiled over decades by the late billionaire businessman and owner/CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, the Jim Irsay Collection has achieved a mythical status, as it includes some of the most famous acoustic and electric guitars to ever exist.

“Jim Irsay was an incredible collector with an eye for rare treasures tied to the most important moments in our collective history,” explains Christie's Americas President, Julien Pradels.

“It is a privilege to offer this renowned collection at Christie's, giving collectors and visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view, be inspired by, and bid on these objects.”

The first live sale is set to feature around 50 lots, comprising some of the most sought-after treasures in the collection

Highlights include David Gilmour's “Black Strat,” Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit 1966 Fender Mustang, Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, John Lennon's 1963 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120, George Harrison's stage-played Gibson SG, and Eric Clapton's MTV Unplugged 1939 Martin 000-42.

The once-in-a-generation auction will kick off with almost 400 items, tracing pivotal moments in music, film, sports, pop culture, and, of course, guitar, history, over four auctions from March 3 to March 18 – alongside a free, public exhibition at Christie's New York from March 6 to March 12.

For more information, head to Christie's.

A new study of the web’s most popular guitar tabs has sought to find out which artists are shaping the playing journeys of modern guitarists – and both legacy and contemporary acts rank highly.

UK gear retailer guitarguitar has done the exhausting number crunching, analyzing the 5,000 most-viewed tabs and chord sheets on Ultimate Guitar. From this, 3,424 songs from 1,340 artists were put under the microscope, with page views tallied to determine the players and bands that are most popular with guitarists.

Chart-smashing loop pedal aficionado Ed Sheeran has topped the artist rankings, beating The Beatles and Taylor Swift, who came second and third, respectively.

In a breakdown of songs, Sheeran's 2017 track Perfect was noted as the fourth most in-demand song to learn. Jeff Buckley’s perpetually covered Hallelujah, Oasis' Wonderwall – no doubt buoyed by the band's blockbuster reunion – and Jason Mraz's I'm Yours all ranked higher in terms of the most viewed songs, but the Sheeran's overall influence was enough to see him crowned as the most popular player overall.

Interestingly, Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling in Love rounds out the top five songs. That means there's no place for Seven Nation Army, Come As You Are, and Stairway to Heaven, which were crowned as the most Googled guitar riffs in a 2024 study. Only Stairway (12) features in the top 20 most-viewed tabs.

Sheeran’s catalog-wide tally of 229.5 million tab views trumps his closest competitors, the Beatles (226.1 million), Taylor Swift (167.8 million) – who recently broke Michael Jackson's 36-year-old sales record – and Metallica (125.9 million).

Other interesting results include Adele, an artist whose music is more regularly associated with piano and orchestral arrangements rather than the guitar, ranking sixth – while Bruno Mars' guitar-less piano ballad When I Was Your Man helped the singer to a ninth-placed finish.

Metallica are the only metal band in the top 20, with Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay also making notable appearances.

“It’s no surprise to see artists like Ed Sheeran, The Beatles, and Taylor Swift leading the list, with their timeless songs that translate beautifully to guitar,” says Adam Speck, Marketing Director at guitarguitar.

“From classic ballads like Let It Be to modern favourites like Perfect, these are the tracks people dream of being able to pick up and play. What’s really encouraging is that so many of these songs are completely achievable for beginners with a bit of practice.”

In related Sheeran news, he recently surprised a school with a visit as he donated a score of Lowden acoustic guitars to its students.

Picture “The Beatles” in your mind – what do you see? There's the logo, four mop-top lads in suits, screaming girls mobbing airport runways... and Paul McCartney plucking away at his Hofner violin bass guitar.

Obviously, though, generational talent that he is, McCartney is and always has been a mean guitarist as well. Even before the world's most famous rock group went their separate ways, McCartney had already put to vinyl an enviable catalog of six-string greatness.

As a matter of fact, McCartney was originally supposed to not only be a guitarist in the Fab Four, he was supposed to be the lead guitarist.

In the following exclusive extract from the updated The Beatles Anthology book, McCartney shares the story of how a single onstage clam-up in the band's early days paved the way for a young George Harrison to claim the lead guitar role, which he would occupy for the rest of the band's music-reshaping existence…

PAUL McCARTNEY: A great thing about Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and the provinces, is that they all have places with famous names, and the first gig with The Quarry Men was on Broadway – in Liverpool. (We made our first record in a little demo studio in Kensington, Liverpool.)

For my first gig, I was given a guitar solo on Guitar Boogie. I could play it easily in rehearsal so they elected that I should do it as my solo. Things were going fine, but when the moment came in the performance I got sticky fingers; I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was just too frightened; it was too big a moment with everyone looking at the guitar player. I couldn’t do it. (I never played a solo again until a few years ago.) That’s why George was brought in.

I knew George from the bus. Before I went to live in Allerton, I lived in Speke. We lived on an estate which they used to call the Trading Estate. (I understand now that they were trying to move industry there to provide jobs, but then we didn’t ever consider why it was called a trading estate.)

George was a bus stop away. I would get on the bus for school and he would get on the stop after. So, being close to each other in age, we talked – although I tended to talk down to him, because he was a year younger.

(I know now that that was a failing I had all the way through the Beatle years. If you’ve known a guy when he’s 13 and you’re 14, it’s hard to think of him as grown-up. I still think of George as a young kid. I still think of Ringo as a very old person because he is two years older. He was the grown-up in the group: when he came to us he had a beard, he had a car and he had a suit. What more proof do you need of grown-upmanship?)

I told John and the other Quarry Men about this guy at school called George: ‘He is a real good guitar player, so if you’re thinking of guitar – this is your boy.’ They said, ‘OK, let’s hear him, then.’

George could play Raunchy so well it really sounded like the record. We were all on the top of an empty bus one night and I said, ‘Go on, George.’ He got his guitar out and sure enough he could play it, and everyone agreed, ‘You’re in. You’ve done it.’

It was rather like me knowing the words to Twenty Flight Rock. With George it was: ‘He’s a bit young, but by God he can play Raunchy well.’ George was like our professional guitarist from then. Later, John did play some Chuck Berry-style solos, but he gave over the solo chair to George and became known as rhythm guitarist.

• This excerpt is taken from The Beatles Anthology 25th Anniversary Edition, published by Chronicle Books.

The greatest guitar collection on Earth is set to be sold next spring when artefacts from the late Jim Irsay – widely considered to be one of the most renowned gear collectors of his time – go up for auction.

For guitar fans, Irsay’s collection needs no introduction. It’s not a stretch to say it’s perhaps the most culturally significant and historically important assortment of guitars to ever be curated. The list of guitars included in the collection reads like the stock inventory of a museum.

It includes many of rock and pop’s most famous electric guitars, many of which Irsay purchased himself at auction for multi-million dollar deals over the years. Highlights include (but certainly are not limited to) Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s Tiger and the Strat Bob Dylan used to ‘go electric’ at the Newport Folk Festival.

That’s before we mention The Fool SG, which once belonged to Eric Clapton and Todd Rundgren, and John Lennon’s Gretsch 6120 Country Gentleman. Oh, and Irsay’s collection also features instruments and guitars once played and owned by Prince, Eddie Van Halen, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and more.

Such is the cultural significance of Irsay’s collection that he was once offered $1,000,000,000 (yes, one billion dollars) by a “middle east element” as part of a deal that would see it be relocated to Dubai.

Irsay held on to it, though, and in August this year he put his world-famous guitar collection on public display. In a bid to keep the legacy of each guitar alive, he was also prone to lending a few of his prized possessions to big-name players for live performances.

Now, in light of Irsay’s passing – and in a move that answers everybody’s queries as to what will happen to his collection – the entire thing will be offered at Christie’s New York in a series of auctions beginning in March 2026.

“Christie’s is honored to offer this magnificent collection, so lovingly compiled, maintained, and shared by legendary collector Jim Irsay over decades,” says Julien Pradels, president of the Christie’s Americans region.

“These extraordinary objects will be made available to passionate collectors around the globe, who have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of history, and provide this exquisite collection its next chapter.”

Given that a handful of the Irsay-owned guitars are already auction record-breakers in their own right, it feels very safe to say that this particular auction will set a new world record for guitar auction sales that will most likely never be beaten.

Gilmour’s Black Strat, for example, was picked up for $3,975,000. Irsay forked out $4,550,000 for the Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang. The Fool SG set him back $1,270,000.

These are all now going to make their way to new collectors, and given the caliber of guitars included in the auction, expect individuals with very deep pockets to spend big when the event rolls around next year.

Simply, it promises to be the biggest guitar auction event of all time.

Head over to Christie's to find out more in the meantime.

Irsay passed away in May this year, and was honored by his football team Indianpolis Colts with a memorial Stratocaster.

The release of the Beatles’ album Help! in August 1965 marked a significant shift in the group’s sound. Their fifth LP release, it would also be their second film soundtrack, following A Hard Day’s Night from July 1964.

The band had met folk singer-songwriter Bob Dylan while in America that same year, and been bowled over by the compositions on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. In conversation (and after Dylan had introduced them to marijuana), the singer advised John and Paul to “stop writing for the meat market” and come up with more thought-provoking lyrics.

This would contribute to making Help! a more acoustic-led affair, with songs that shifted away from the ‘boy and girl, you and me’ hit-making formula of She Loves You, From Me To You and I Want To Hold Your Hand.

To this end, Lennon acquired his Framus Hootenanny 12-string guitar on the band’s return to London. The unspecified shop paired it with an Australian-made Maton case that can clearly be seen in photos from the Help! film set.

The Beatles already owned US-made acoustics – John and Paul had Gibson J-160Es and Paul had his Epiphone Texan. And at the height of Beatlemania Lennon was clearly flush enough to go this route again, or indeed that of Martin, but he obviously bonded with the German-built Framus.

It’s said he particularly liked its sound and how it blended with Harrison’s Gibson. Also, with its adjustable bridge, perhaps the guitar was easier to manage than fixed-bridge models with ’60s-style actions and the hefty strings of the day.

Let’s also not forget that Framus was already a popular marque with UK groups. For instance, McCartney’s own first instrument was a Framus Zenith, Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones famously used a Star bass, and The Animals, The Herd and others also favoured the brand.

Both Lennon and Harrison played the Hootenanny on the Help! album: John and George on Lennon’s Dylan-influenced You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, and Lennon using it to drive the wistful It’s Only Love and the title track itself. You can also see John miming to the former track in the film, and noodling on the instrument in stills from the movie.

The guitar carried over to the following album, Rubber Soul, too. Lennon played it, capo’d at the 7th fret, on his soulful ballad Girl, while Harrison provided rhythm back-up on McCartney’s uptempo I’ve Just Seen A Face and John’s Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).

These were the last Beatles songs on which the Framus would be heard, since at the end of 1965 John presented the Hootenanny to Gordon Waller of Peter And Gordon. McCartney had penned hits for the duo (the other half of which, Peter, was the brother of McCartney’s then girlfriend, Jane Asher), including Nobody I Know and A World Without Love.

Waller later gave the guitar to his manager. He stashed it away in his attic, where it stayed for decades until being discovered, still in its ‘original’ Maton case.

When the decision to sell the 12-string was made, Julien’s in New York proved to be the preferred auction house. Julien’s liaised with Andy Babiuk, author of the well-respected reference work Beatles Gear, to verify this was John’s instrument.

Babiuk confirmed that Framus 5/024 Hootenanny, serial #51083, is indeed John Lennon’s guitar. His detective work focused on comparable darker patches in the wood grain in the soundhole rosette, specific features on the guitar’s top, plus likenesses in the swirl of the mock tortoiseshell pickguard.

As the Framus was in poor condition after years in an attic where huge temperature fluctuations can occur, Julien’s had to make a decision about restoring the instrument to playing status or leaving it as an unplayable museum piece. Deciding to restore, Julien’s enlisted Ryan Schuermann of LA Guitar Repair to undertake the work.

Among other things, Schuermann reset the guitar’s neck, repaired the top, steam/heat-treated the warped bridge, and dressed its corroded frets. Julien’s says it not only looks wonderful and plays fantastically well, but emits the exact tone heard on all those unforgettable numbers.

While several less auspicious Beatles instruments had previously been sold, including Harrison’s Grazioso/Futurama and Maton Mastersound, and the fretless Bartell on which he played the solo in Happiness Is A Warm Gun, the release of something so well documented on both record and film was obviously going to cause a stir.

On sale day, 29 May 2024, an unspecified buyer dipped into their pocket for an amount of $2,857,500 – so far a record for any guitar previously owned by a Beatle. With McCartney’s ‘lost and found’ Höfner bass estimated to be worth £10 million, we shudder to think what his Yesterday Epiphone Texan, John’s Get Back Casino or George’s ‘Rocky’ Strat might one day fetch.

Of course, there have been attainable reissues of all these models. And now that Framus has reintroduced the Hootenanny, you can grab a significant piece of Beatles history for a more manageable price.

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

Of all the storied guitar stores that once lined 48th Street in New York City, none had quite the pedigree of Manny's Music.

To list all of the store's notable clientele over the decades before its closure in 2009 would be a fruitless exercise – suffice to say, even the biggest of rock's big names walked through its doors at one point or another. And we do mean the biggest.

One day in the mid-’60s, with Beatlemania still raging, the Fab Four (sans George Harrison) strode into Manny's. It was a busy day, though, and they weren't about to get special treatment.

Speaking to Guitar World back in 1980, the shop's longtime owner, Henry Goldrich, recounted, “It must have been in the mid-’60s that they came in the store, and we were just too busy to take care of them. We asked if they would come back but they said they would wait and they sat in the back and amused themselves for about a half-hour until we could get a salesman free.”

As one might expect, the boys were looking for a guitar – though Goldrich, frustratingly, couldn't recall the make or model when telling GW the story. Either way, it's one hell of an anecdote.

“They wanted a guitar for one of their albums,” Goldrich – who passed away in 2021 at the age of 88 – recalled. “So we called up the guy who owned the company, I can't remember the name, and told him what they wanted.

“The guy said, ‘I can't give them a guitar but we'll sell it to them for cost.’ So [John] Lennon says to me, ‘Tell him we'll put it on our next album cover.’ I tell him and the guy says, ‘Nope, I'm sorry.’ And they didn't end up using the guitar after all.

“Oh, and by the way,” the store's manager concluded, “the album they were talking about turned out to be Sgt. Pepper's.”

Though its physical location was closed in 2009, the Manny's trademark was owned by Sam Ash Music Store until that brand closed its own stores last year. Sam Ash then sold the Manny's trademark to Vista Musical Instruments, which subsequently opened a digital store under the Manny's name.

What is it?

The backstory to John Lennon’s association with the Framus Hootenanny 12-string is a tale for another day. But the basic headlines are that Lennon bought his Framus acoustic guitar in 1964, allegedly inspired by Bob Dylan’s use of a 12-string on a recent recording.

It made its first appearance with The Beatles in the studio during the sessions for Help! and subsequently on Rubber Soul, and can be seen in the film footage from the movie Help! during the You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away sequence.

Subsequently, the guitar was gifted to a friend and ended up packed away in an attic until its rediscovery and verification a few years ago. When it reached Julien’s auction in New York in May last year, it went for an eye-watering $2.8 million.

The good news is that Beatles fans without such deep pockets can now recreate their own fab moments thanks to Framus reissuing the exact model used on those historic recordings. And as a bonus, Framus has released a six-string Hootenanny from the same period, too. Alas, this never featured in The Beatles’ long and rich history, but it’s nice to have it along for the ride.

Of the original Hootenanny 12-string guitar, Julien’s text accompanying the auction lot states: “When strummed, it immediately identifies itself as that guitar. If you know the chords, Beatles tunes fall out of the soundhole effortlessly. Like an audio time-capsule from 1965, the Framus is a direct link to those records.”

How faithful its 21st-century doppelgänger is in that respect remains to be seen – and heard, of course – but our curiosity, particularly that of the ardent Beatles fans among our number, was stirred.

Obviously the star of the show here is the 12-string and so that was the instrument we first plucked from its case. The first thing that struck us was the ’50s/’60s look of the guitar. It definitely is a bit of a time capsule in its own right in that respect.

We’re all used to contemporary acoustic designs, many of which, if not all, are based on guitars hailing from the big names in the USA. But back then there was a distinctly European flavour to the look of some acoustics.

For instance, how long is it since you’ve seen a floating bridge on an acoustic guitar? They were, and still are, commonplace on archtops but comparatively rare in the acoustic world. And metal string saddles are another mark of the past.

Gibson experimented with adjustable saddles on some of its mid-’60s acoustics and it’s certainly true that the ability to raise or lower the action with a thumbwheel is less time-consuming than taking a trip to a luthier to shave a bone saddle to gain the same effect.

Then there’s the archtop-like tailpiece and zero fret to take into account. All hallmarks of a different age and furnishings that help fix the Hootenanny to a point in time.

Looking past the guitar’s inherent quirkiness, we find a spruce top with sapele back and sides. Lennon’s original had mahogany for its back and sides, but while this is a diversion from the ’60s spec, sapele is a good enough substitute.

Another surprise is the nitrocellulose finish throughout, and beyond that Framus offers a variety of different finishes for both models including sunburst, high polish or satin.

The neck is mahogany with a distinct wide and shallow D profile; it shares many characteristics with that of a classical guitar in that respect. And the likeness to classical guitars doesn’t end there as the rosewood fingerboard is completely flat with no radiusing at all.

While we’re down the business end, we’ll add that the frets are very low, too. Not 1950s Gibson Fretless Wonder low, but at 0.96mm they’re on the skinny side. As a comparison, a Les Paul Standard we have to hand measures in at 1.29mm fret height.

The six-a-side tuners have Kluson-like casings and vintage-inspired white buttons and the truss rod cover is gold-coloured metal that has been embossed with the Framus logo. It’s also a nice touch that both guitars come with a choice of two different self-adhesive scratchplates that you can choose between to complete that 60s look.

The spec sheet tells us that the Hootenanny is a “round-shouldered dreadnought”, but it’s a little more trim than the standard 380mm to 400mm widest-point dread dimensions at 374mm. Once again, overall, the body doesn’t look too far off from the outlines of a classical guitar, rather than the bulk of a contemporary D-18 or J-45.

Whereas you might expect the 12’s six-string sidekick to be essentially more of the same, and this is true in terms of body furnishings and materials, it goes rogue when it comes to body shape. Once again the spec hails the six as a “round-shouldered dreadnought”, but it is decidedly smaller.

To look at it without a tape measure in hand, you’d swear it was more of a folk size or a slightly more meaty 00. In any case, the Hootenanny 6-string arrives with an attractive dark sunburst and a satin finish. As we’ve said, many of the 12’s construction details are to be found here, including the tailpiece, floating adjustable bridge, spruce top and sapele back and sides.

It certainly maintains that unmistakable ’60s vibe of acoustic guitars from Europe found on its sibling. Obviously, the neck dimensions are different – although we still have those low frets and flat fingerboard – but the profile is a more comfy C, rather than the 12’s D.

Casting a critical eye over both instruments reveals that the build is good in both cases, but the crux of the matter is how they sound. Will we be able to summon up the 12-string spirit of Lennon and Harrison? There’s only one way to find out...

Specs

Framus Hootenanny 6-string

• Price: £809 (approx. $1,040 – inc hard case)
• Origin: China
• Type: Round shoulder dreadnought
• Top: Sitka spruce
• Back/Sides: Sapele
• Max Rim Depth: 113mm
• Max Body Width: 372mm
• Neck: Mahogany
• Scale Length: 643mm
• Tuners: Vintage-style, closed nickel, ivory coloured buttons
• Nut/Width: Bone/44mm
• Fingerboard: Rosewood
• Frets: 19
• Bridge/Spacing: Height-adjustable rosewood with metal saddle
• Electrics: N/A
• Weight (kg/lb): 1.45/3.2
• Options: Finishes only: Vintage Natural High Polish or Sunburst High Polish (£899), Vintage Natural Nitro High Polish or Sunburst Nitro High Polish (£989)
• Range Options: Hootenanny 12-String
• Left-Handers: No
• Finish: Vintage Sunburst Satin

Framus Hootenanny 12-string

• Price: £1,050 (approx. $1,145 – inc hard case)
• Origin: China
• Type: 12-string dreadnought
• Top: Sitka spruce
• Back/Sides: Sapele
• Max Rim Depth: 114mm
• Max Body Width: 374mm
• Neck: Mahogany
• Scale Length: 645mm
• Tuners: Vintage-style closed nickel, ivory-coloured buttons
• Nut/Width: Bone/50mm
• Fingerboard: Rosewood
• Frets: 19
• Bridge/Spacing: Height-adjustable rosewood with metal saddle
• Electrics: N/A
• Weight (kg/lb): 1.99/4.4
• Options: Finishes only: Vintage Natural Satin or Sunburst Satin (£870), Vintage Natural High Polish or Sunburst High Polish (£960)
• Range Options: Just the Hootenanny 6-String in either plain or sunburst finishes (as above)
• Left-Handers: No
• Finish: Vintage Natural Nitro High Polish
• Contact: Framus

Playability and sounds

We’ve all heard the jokes about the time it takes to tune a 12-string, but we were a little taken aback with our initial experiences with the 12 in this respect. Having tuned each individual string with a Peterson tuner, our first exploratory chord was still way out of tune.

Testing the guitar’s intonation at the 12th fret we found that it was out by a semitone. In other words, instead of an E on the top string at the 12th fret, we were greeted by an F. Something was wrong here and, as always, the prime suspect was the position of the bridge and, sure enough, it was in completely the wrong position.

This is something every seasoned archtop player will have encountered at one time or another and it’s a relatively easy fix with a floating bridge… but it’s a time-consuming bout of trial and error, nonetheless.

A little while later and everything was ship-shape in the intonation department and so we returned to listening to what the Hootenanny had to say for itself. Initial probing strums revealed a very bright sound, no doubt helped along by the zero fret at one end of the scale length and that metal saddle at the other.

It’s doubtless that the tailpiece and floating bridge contribute to the slight ‘unamplified archtop’ timbre we detected, too. We took a listen to The Beatles’ You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away and John’s 12-string there does have that similar trebly edge to it and so this guitar passes the ‘Fab Four’ test.

As far as playability and feel are concerned, the wide flat ’board and those low frets take a little getting used to, but once we’d spent some time playing, we found we could pretty much forget about both these factors and get on with the job of executing just about every 12-string guitar part we could remember.

Over to the Hootenanny 6-string and we immediately categorised the sound as being rootsy, bluesy with a touch of front-porch Americana on the side. We’re sure the tailpiece and floating bridge play a serious sonic role here as both guitars share very similar traits.

If Delta blues is your thing, there’s a lot to be recommended, but if you’re looking for a more modern Martin/Gibson dread experience, you’re not going to find it with the Hootenanny. However, we’re happy that both instruments are exactly what they’re set out to be: snapshots of the past.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★☆

With instruments so specifically aimed at the target of yesteryear and with – as far as the 12 is concerned – a very specific instrumental voice, it’s always hard to judge them without letting any prejudices inspired by playing and listening to big-league acoustics for many years cloud your vision.

But that’s really not what these Hootenanny guitars are all about. These are voices from the past and will appeal to players who are seeking the particular niche that they represent.

Guitar World verdict: It’s true to say that there are guitars out there that would do a similar job – and many of them may cost less. But if it’s the whole ’60s chic, floating bridge, jazz-box tailpiece and (as far as the 12 is concerned) Beatles association that appeals to you, then we’d recommend you seek them out.

Hands-on videos

Thomann

• Best 12-string guitars 2025: our pick of 12-string acoustic and electric guitars
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

An English guitarist has unwittingly bought John Lennon’s old Fender Deluxe guitar amp for less than $4,000, after the historic combo ended up on Facebook Marketplace.

Father of two James Tyler, 45, of Brighton, England, works in the Hi-Fi industry and was perusing the social media giant’s listings when he came across a mid-’60s blackface Fender Deluxe combo for a not-too-shabby price.

The seller, who is believed to be the amp’s second owner after John Lennon first parted with it in the early ’70s, had hinted at its illustrious past during the trade, but Taylor “didn’t pay it much mind” until after the sale.

By 1968, the Beatles were the biggest band in the world. Around that time, Fender gifted the band three pieces of gear – a Fender VI, a silver-panel Deluxe Reverb, and a black-panel Deluxe – for use during the White Album sessions at Abbey Road and Trident Studios (as per Andy Babiuk’s book, Beatles Gear).

As per Manchester Evening News, Taylor suspects the amp he bought from Facebook Marketplace is the same one that was used during these sessions.

As the story goes, Lennon later gifted the combo to guitarist Rod Lynton as a thank you for playing acoustic guitar on his 1971 solo album, Imagine. Lynton – who wrote a letter of authenticity to vouch for its provenance – is then believed to have sold it to the seller from whom Taylor bought it.

“They told me it might have been gifted to someone by John Lennon, but I have heard these stories before,” Taylor tells the Manchester Evening News.

“I bought the amp because I wanted the amp,” he adds, “and I didn't pay John Lennon sort of money for it.”

After Taylor acquired the amp, a research deep dive led him to his discovery. “I realized I had something very exciting on my hands,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting it at all.

“It plays and sounds fantastic. I had used it in my own band practices prior to authentication. I might have been a bit more cautious had I realized the historical importance.”

Considering John Lennon’s recently re-discovered Please Please Me Vox amp sold for £151,200 (approx. $203,000) when it went to auction last year, it’s understandable that the idea of selling the amp is tempting.

“It would be scary for me to have something so valuable in the house,” he concludes. “There are many parts of me that wish I could hold onto it, but it is a risk to keep in a house with toddlers rushing around.

“I could probably use the money from selling it to get myself a mortgage and get on the property ladder.”

Taylor is now reportedly looking for additional help to authenticate the amp, and to confirm whether his suspicions that his new Fender Deluxe was the one used during the White Album sessions.

Elsewhere, Lennon's $2.8m Hootenanny 12-string acoustic has been revived with permission from the late guitarist's estate, and Paul McCartney brought his Höfner violin bass, lost for 50 years, back to the stage for a spot alongside Ronnie Wood.

“‘You’ll have to explain this a little to me. I have no idea what the Plastic Ono Band is. Is that Yoko’s band? Do we have to go naked onstage or what?’”

It's September 1969, and bassist Klaus Voormann is on the phone with his friend John Lennon, who'd spontaneously decided to do a set at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival.

Just one small problem. He didn't have a band, and the set was due to occur the following day.

Well, Lennon was in a band at the time – the Beatles; you might have heard of them? John, Paul, George, Ringo? But given their animosity towards one another at the time, never mind the fact that the set was in 24 hours, a performance from them was out of the question.

Lennon had done an extra-curricular performance the year before, with an ad-hoc supergroup called the Dirty Mac – Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards on bass, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Mitch Mitchell on drums, not bad! – assembled for the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus TV special (which wouldn't end up seeing the light of day until 1996).

But this was for a massive live audience, and other than a pair of avant-garde albums with Yoko Ono, the iconic sing-along single Give Peace a Chance, and the soon-to-be-released rocker Cold Turkey, Lennon didn't really have a set, other than what he had recorded with that famous band of his.

Despite the aforementioned Beatles situation, Lennon turned first to George Harrison as his six-string cohort for the performance. Harrison, however, had no interest.

Clapton was the natural next choice, and he was game. Despite his initial hesitation, Voormann said yes, and once Lennon recruited drummer Alan White – who would later go on to play with Yes – the Plastic Ono Band, in that form at least, was born.

“Rehearsals” were done on the flight from London to Toronto. In keeping with the theme of the festival (and as a practical matter, given the familiarity of all those involved with said material), the group decided to open with a few rock 'n' roll standards, while also tackling the rough-edged, Lennon-penned Beatles tune Yer Blues (as the Dirty Mac had done the year before), the in-development Cold Turkey, and the simple enough Give Peace a Chance.

Ono was also given a mini-set of her own, which closed with some proto-Sonic Youth free-form feedback.

Loose or not, Lennon was far from confident beforehand about playing for thousands without the band that had made him one of the most famous musicians in the world.

“John was very, very nervous,” Voormann told Guitar World in a 2011 interview. “He had no idea what was coming. He’d never played with Alan White before.

“We hadn’t really rehearsed. So as we were walking to the stage, he said, ‘Hang on, boys, hang on!’ And he went in the corner and vomited. Okay, it was partly the drugs he was taking, but partly it was stage fright.”

Of Lennon’s decision to perform the show, Voormann said in the same interview, “In one way, he was saying, ‘Oh fuck it, let’s do it. It’s fun.’ But suddenly he realized, ‘My God, I’m John Lennon. I was with the Beatles and now I’m going out there with a band – no rehearsal, no nothing. Just play some old rock numbers. Is that really the thing to do?’ But he pulled it through, somehow.”

Perhaps the most consequential result of the ragged set was how it confirmed in stone a decision Lennon had made just before the festival.

“We were in Apple [the Beatles' HQ] and I knew before I went to Toronto, I told Allen [Klein, the Beatles' then-manager] I was leaving [the Beatles],” Lennon told Jann Wenner in 1970.

“I told Eric Clapton and Klaus that I was leaving and I’d like to probably use them as a group. I hadn’t decided how to do it, to have a permanent new group or what. And then later on I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to get stuck with another set of people, whoever they are.’

“So I announced it to myself and to the people around me on the way to Toronto the few days before. On the plane Allen came with me, and I told him, ‘It’s over.’”

Last month, Gibson released 150 Murphy Lab replicas of a special 1958 Les Paul Custom. Although Gibson has given Eric Clapton’s name to the run, the guitar has belonged to Albert Lee since 1979. In a new video for Gibson, Lee reveals the guitar’s full history, and Clapton isn’t even the guitar’s most famous player.

The story begins with a young Albert Lee’s obsession with Selmer, a guitar shop on London’s Charing Cross Road.

“Every Saturday I'd come up on the train see what was in in Selmer's,” begins Lee. “So he opened up this guitar case, and there's a brand new Les Paul Custom with a Bigsby on it. I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll join your band!’” he laughs.

“I played that guitar throughout the early ’60s. This guy persuaded me to sell it to him. He pestered me and pestered me,” Lee continues. “I let it go, and I regretted it for a long, long time.”

In 1978, Lee joined Eric Clapton’s touring band, and the subject of his old Les Paul came up.

“I remember the first day, chatting with Eric,” he recalls. “For some reason I had a picture of my old guitar with me, you know, and I showed it to him. I told him how much I missed that guitar. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I've got one of those at home somewhere.’”

“I didn't think any more of it,” Lee remarks. “The next day at rehearsals, you know, the roadie, he walked in with this big case and opened it up, and it's Eric's Les Paul Custom for me to play.

“I guess it was mine. From there on, I used it on the whole tour. Eric never asked for the guitar back. He was happy that I was enjoying it and using it on stage.”

Lee had no idea of the guitar's full history when it came into his possession.

“I found that out later on,” he admits. “I thought maybe it was Cream and maybe Delaney and Bonnie.”

Lee was correct in those assumptions, but it had a much longer history, as he now recounts:

“From Paul Kossoff to Eric and John Lennon and George Harrison playing it. I’d no idea Eric used it with Derek and the Dominos. Great bit of history there.”

The guitar had in fact been used to record Cream’s Disraeli Gears, where Clapton first used ‘woman tone,’ the sound of the bridge pickup with the tone control all the way off.

After that the guitar turned up in the hands of Free’s Paul Kossoff, although Clapton doesn’t remember what he did with it after Disraeli Gears. Still, the guitar was in Kossoff’s possession from ’67–’69, a period that includes the recording of Free’s debut, Tons of Sobs.

Clapton’s memory of the period is fragmentary, but he remembers, “We [Free and Blind Faith] were touring together,” adding that the two jammed together “quite a lot.”

After regaining the guitar, Clapton was pictured with it in The Sunday Times Magazine, at which point the guitar had uncovered humbuckers; the covers are now back in place.

In 1969 Eric Clapton joined John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band to perform at the Toronto Rock n’ Roll Revival. Footage from that concert shows Clapton with the Les Paul Custom.

From there, Clapton played the guitar on tour with Delaney and Bonnie, alongside George Harrison.

Michael Doyle, who researched the guitar for Gibson’s replica, says photos exist of George Harrison playing the guitar onstage while Clapton plays Harrison’s Strat. We couldn't find that, but we did find a widely circulated picture that appears to show Harrison playing the guitar while hanging out with Clapton and Bonnie Bramlett. Here's footage of Clapton playing the Les Paul with Harrison:

Michael Doyle also says that a photo of Derek & The Dominos shows Eric using the Les Paul Custom for slide work, “which makes sense,” Doyle contends.

“One of the reasons why he gave it away was because the frets were so skinny. If you can't get on with a guitar because the frets aren't right for you, what do you do? Well, set it up for slide.”

In other Albert Lee news, Steve Lukather recently spilled the beans on his secret supergroup with Lee, Eddie Van Halen, and Steve Morse. Meanwhile, Dunlop issued an Eric Clapton Crybaby in recognition that Clapton was one of the wah's earliest champions.

German luthier Framus has reissued its Hootenanny 12-string acoustic guitar, made famous by John Lennon 60 years ago.

An important instrument in Beatles history, Lennon's model was used to track a score of iconic tracks including Norwegian Wood and Girl. It also featured extensively in the Beatles film Help!, in which George Harrison also slung it over his shoulder.

Yet, while it played an important role in several Beatles recording sessions, it then inexplicably went missing and was lost for 50 years.

The historic guitar was discovered in the attic of a rural family home just outside London last year and then went under the hammer. It promptly became one of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction, ultimately selling for $2,857,000.

Recreating the guitar for a market release was no small feat. Framus used an identical 12-string Hootenanny, temporarily prised from its Framus Vintage Museum, and pages and pages of old documents to reconstruct it to the exact specifications of the original. Lennon's estate has approved the guitar's reissue.

Available in 12-string (€1.099, approx. $1,145) and six-string (€999, approx. $1,040) models like Lennon's long-lost beloved, they comprise spruce tops, with mahogany for their back and sides. They too feature flat 19-fret rosewood fingerboards with a zero fret and are adorned with a decorative soundhole made of individual pieces of wood.

Beyond that, there's ivory binding, nickel Trapeze tailpieces, and nickel, closed vintage-style tuners. Other specs shared across the models include Framus’ choice of a black pickguard, ivory-colored dot inlays, and silver nickel frets. A special Hootenanny headstock is unique to each variant.

It's available in open pore and high gloss nitro lacquer finishes in Vintage and Sunburst colorways for those who like darker guitars.

“We are very proud to bring this unique instrument back to life,” says Framus. “We are convinced that we will inspire many Beatles fans all over the world with this beautiful acoustic guitar.”

Both models are available to order now, and prices start at $/€999. Head to Framus Hootenanny for more.

“I thought long and hard about this,” says producer Jack Douglas. “I asked myself, ‘Am I selling John out?’” Douglas is talking about his 2010 stripped-down remix of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1980 album, Double Fantasy.

The disc is part of the massive rollout of reissued Lennon solo material that EMI recently prepared to commemorate what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday on October 9, 2010, and the 30th anniversary of his death on December 8, 1980.

Double Fantasy was the last album Lennon released in his lifetime. It hit the streets about a month before his murder, a grim chronological juxtaposition that has always lent greater poignancy to the album’s songs.

Double Fantasy was meant to be Lennon’s “comeback” album, his return to the music business and public life after five years of retirement during which he had focused on the simple joys of domesticity and raising his son, Sean.

Instead, the album became Lennon’s farewell to a vast and adoring fan base, many of whom had admired him since the earliest days of Beatlemania.

It was Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, who asked Douglas to revisit Double Fantasy on the occasion of last year’s anniversaries.

“I got a call from her office asking if I’d be interested in doing something with Double Fantasy, not really knowing what,” says the producer. “I said yes. It shouldn’t be anybody else. I produced it. I pretty much knew where everything was on the master tapes.”

This left Douglas to decide what could or should be done with Lennon’s original masters.

“I realized it couldn’t be an ‘unplugged’ album,” he says. “If you unplugged all the electric instruments, there wouldn’t be anything left. And John’s original rough demos for the album were already in circulation, either illegally as bootlegs or legally in a box set [1998’s John Lennon Anthology]. So I thought the best thing to do was break it down to the original rhythm section that we recorded live in the studio, and just discard a lot of the overdubs and production.

“While the album holds up well, I thought it sounded like an Eighties production. And John was insecure about his vocals throughout his career, but particularly in this case, where he was coming back after a long time out of circulation.

“So, we had buried his vocals in the mix, double-tracked them, and I put a bunch of slap echo and reverb on them. But I realized that it would be really compelling to bring his vocals really up front – and Yoko’s too, although to a slightly lesser extent – so you really hear the emotion in John’s voice and feel what he was singing about. So far, people who have heard the mixes are stunned by how much you feel like you’re right in the room with him.”

But is this what Lennon would have wanted? That was the question Douglas struggled with. Was he indeed selling John out? In the end, the producer decided he wasn’t.

“I went back to John’s early solo work, when he first left the Beatles, the Plastic Ono Band stuff. And he didn’t mind pulling down his pants and being right up front at that point. That was because he was confident then, whereas he was just a little insecure when he did Double Fantasy, because he’d been away for a while. But in fact his voice was fantastic on that album, although I couldn’t convince him of that at the time. And now you get to hear it.”

So Douglas found himself returning to tracks he’d recorded 30 years ago. But by an eerie coincidence, he found himself transferring the original analog multitrack masters into the digital domain in the very same room where he’d last worked with Lennon, on the very last night of his life, completing a recording of Ono’s song Walking on Thin Ice. In 1980, that 10th-floor room at 321 W. 44th St. in Manhattan had been part of the Record Plant. Today, it’s a Sony transfer facility.

“They called me, and said, ‘We want to tell you something, Mr. Douglas. This is really strange. The very room where we do the transfers is rumored to be the last room you and John worked in the night he was assassinated.’ So in fact I was going to start this project in the very same room where I left it 30 years ago. The room was the same, and it was completely by accident.”

But, as a longtime believer in karma, astrology, and numerology, Yoko Ono might contend that such occurrences are no accidents.

“I didn’t even invite Yoko to these transfers,” Douglas says. “I thought that would be too upsetting for her. That was John’s last elevator ride that he took downstairs. It was all just way too much. And in fact, in the two weeks that we spent doing the transfers, it felt like John was a ghost in the room with me. It was very disturbing.”

The transfer process itself was painstakingly meticulous. Douglas originally recorded the album on two 16-track analog multitrack machines, synchronized via SMPTE time code.

These analog masters needed to be transferred to the Pro Tools digital platform at the highest possible sampling frequency, using the best A-to-D converters available.

First, however, the original analog tapes had to be taken from their secure storage area and baked at a carefully controlled temperature in order to re-adhere the oxide to the magnetic tape stock, a standard restoration process when working with older analog tapes.

“The tapes are held under lock and key at Studio One [Ono’s production company],” Douglas explains.

“They were taken from there to another facility, where they were baked, and then brought to us at the Sony transfer room. The masters would come in to us with an armed guard. We’d get four to six reels at a time to work on. The whole process took about two weeks. We took files of everything – outtakes, the works. And we brought it all to [engineer] Jay Messina’s facility, West End Studios.

“We started to analyze everything we had. At that point, John stopped being a ghost and became an active participant in this thing. He started to give us little clues of where we could find little gems – funny count-offs and pieces of comic business and one point where there was going to be a saxophone solo and John hummed the whole solo. So we took out the sax and put in the humming.”

Indeed, Lennon’s little snippets of banter between takes are one small treasure of Double Fantasy’s stripped remix.

At the outset of the album’s opening track, Lennon dedicates the song to his rock and roll heroes, “This one’s for Gene [Vincent], Eddie [Cochran], Elvis [Presley], and Buddy [Holly],” establishing the mood of nostalgia and romance that wafts throughout all of Lennon’s contributions to this musical dialog that he shared with Ono.

“Those fun bits of business totally reflect what the album was about,” Douglas says. “The original idea was that the album was a play that you were watching onstage, or onscreen as a film – a dialog between a man and a woman. And it occurred to me at this point that you could take that, bring it off the stage, and involve the audience in this dialog by making it very intimate, bringing John and Yoko into the room with you.”

Neat chronological decimals mark Lennon’s life trajectory with eerie regularity. In 1960, at age 20, he first left his native Liverpool and landed in Hamburg to play the rough clubs of that city’s Reeperbahn red-light district with an embryonic incarnation of the Beatles. It was the start of a chapter in his life that would climax in the worldwide hysteria of Beatlemania.

Ten years later, Lennon celebrated his 30th birthday while recording his first solo album, The Plastic Ono Band, in 1970. He was glad the Beatles were now behind him and eager to commence another new chapter of his life. And in 1980, embarking on his 40th year of life, he completed Double Fantasy.

It was meant to herald the start of a triumphant third act for Lennon. His troubled youth behind him, reunited with Yoko after a mid-Seventies separation and drunken, desperate Lost Weekend, Lennon was now a contented father and family man. He saw this as a new beginning, although fate would soon transform it into a bittersweet denouement.

After a long silence, during a vacation in the Bahamas, Lennon suddenly came up with a batch of new songs that reflected where he was at that point in his life, his love for his wife and son, the rough times he’d been through, and the new equilibrium he had found. These songs would form the backbone of Double Fantasy.

“John wanted the album to be the sound of a 40-year-old man with a kid,” Douglas says. “He said, ‘We’re going to get blasted for this: John Lennon is not rocking anymore. But that’s what this record is. It’s about me now. And it’s made for my people. I want my contemporaries in the room to record it with me.’”

To co-produce the album, Lennon and Ono chose Douglas, who had helped engineer some overdubs on Lennon’s landmark Imagine album in 1971 and had since gone on to distinguish himself with outstanding rock albums by Cheap Trick and Aerosmith.

In keeping with Lennon’s wishes, Douglas recruited a top-drawer coterie of session musicians who were more or less in Lennon’s age group, including bassist Tony Levin, drummer Andy Newmark, and keyboardist George Small, along with a few players who’d worked with Lennon in the past. Percussionist Arthur Jenkins had played on the 1974 Lennon album, Walls and Bridges, while guitarist Hugh McCracken was a veteran of Lennon’s 1971 single, Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

McCracken has the added distinction of having played guitar with all four former Beatles. He’d previously played on Paul McCartney’s Ram album, in 1971.

“John said to Huey, ‘Love your work with Wings. Very good.’ Huey said, ‘Oh thank you, John.’ And John said, ‘You know, of course, that was just an audition to play with me.’”

Working from cassette demos Lennon had made in the Bahamas, Douglas put together some orchestrations with arranger Tony Davilio and began to rehearse the band without Lennon. In fact, Lennon was so uncertain about the whole project initially that Douglas wasn’t even allowed to tell the musicians the name of the artist on whose album they were working – although a few of the players soon guessed.

The cat was fully out of the bag when the location for the final rehearsal was announced – Lennon and Ono’s apartment at the Dakota building at 72nd Street and Central Park West in Manhattan.

At the very end of that rehearsal, as the musicians were walking out the door, Lennon suddenly announced that he had one last song idea.

He sat down at a Fender Rhoads electric piano near the door and played Just Like Starting Over, a song that would become the lead and keynote track for Double Fantasy, celebrating Lennon and Ono’s joyous reunion after the Lost Weekend separation period and the start of a new phase of musical and artistic collaboration together.

With sessions due to commence the very next day, Douglas opted to record this new song first, giving Lennon and the session players a chance to work spontaneously in the beginning, without pre-written charts or arrangements.

And he threw one more wild card into the band: guitarist Earl Slick, perhaps best known for his work with David Bowie. Slick had played on Bowie’s hit Fame, which had been co-written by Lennon, and on Bowie’s cover of Lennon’s song Across the Universe. Both tracks had appeared on Bowie’s 1975 album, Young Americans.

“I think John wanted me on his album because I was the street rock guy,” Slick says. “Everybody else in there could read music. They were session guys. I was the loose cannon.”

And so Slick turned up for the first day of recording at the Hit Factory on 48th Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues, unrehearsed and not sure what to expect. “I got there two hours early,” Slick recalls.

“Not that I was excited or anything! [laughs] Nobody’s there. I walk out of the control room into the main studio and John’s sitting in the middle of the room on a chair, playing his guitar.

“The gear wasn’t even set up yet. I went over and introduced myself, and he said ‘Good to see you again.’ I said, ‘Really? Have we met?’ He said, ‘Well, the Bowie thing.’ I said, ‘I think we recorded at different times.’ He said, ‘No, no. We were in there together.’

“We had this banter going on for about five minutes, and we were both laughing our asses off. Finally I said, ‘Look, let’s be straight here. You’re John Lennon, a Beatle! If I met you, I’m thinking I would remember that, unless I was so fuckin’ stoned.’ He goes, ‘Well that’s a possibility.’”

Slick vividly remembers his guitar and McCracken’s guitar contributions to Just Like Starting Over.

“I played the [rhythm guitar] chops that go with the snare drum, and Huey’s playing that low melody line. And in the bridge, there’s a slightly heavier guitar in there and that’s me.”

Playing guitar with Lennon was a treat for both Slick and McCracken.

“It was all pretty natural,” Slick recalls. “Things just fell into place. My rhythm style would have been closer to John’s, and Hugh had a lot more of the colorful nuances that would go rhythmically with what I did – because I played like John, very primal. And on solos, John would divvy up who he thought would be the best guy to play certain solos. Some of them were cut live. Like the solo on Cleanup Time that I played. That was on the rhythm track, and John just liked it, so he kept it.”

“John brought all of his guitars to the studio,” Douglas recalls. “Every Beatle guitar that you ever saw him with was in the room – his Rickenbacker 325, his Epiphone Casino… There were about 20 guitars in the room: beautiful old Strats, Les Pauls, 335s, and other things like that. But every time, John would end up using one of three guitars: a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic, Ovation acoustic, or this electric guitar called the Sardonyx.”

The Sardonyx, a curious footnote to electric guitar history, was a very sci-fi-looking custom instrument, with a pointy headstock that somewhat resembled a Flying V’s, and a squared-off body with pontoon-like metal appendages affixed to either side of the body. It looked a bit like a Star Trek–era spaceship or, in the words of Earl Slick, “like a fuckin’ ski rack for a car.”

Lennon’s affection for the instrument is very much a testimony to his restless quest for novelty. A man who’d quickly burned through LSD, Transcendental Meditation, heroin, and radical politics, he was easily bored and always looking for the next new toy, belief system, or lifestyle.

“The Sardonyx, Ovation, and Hummingbird all lived behind John’s bed at the Dakota,” Douglas remembers. “John could just reach behind the headboard and grab one of those. Those were the guitars he played when we were working on preproduction for the album, and he gravitated toward them in the studio as well.”

Most of Lennon’s electric guitar work for the album was played through a Fender Twin miked with a Sennheiser 421, Shure SM57, and Sony C30 in a triangular configuration. McCracken played a Strat, Gibson ES-335, and Les Paul, while Slick employed a Les Paul and 1965 Gibson SG Junior mainly through a late-Sixties 100-watt Marshall head and one 4x12 cabinet.

The sessions’ level of guitar geekery hit a new plateau when Rick Nielsen, Bun E. Carlos, and Tom Peterson of Cheap Trick came into the studio on August 12, 1980, to work on two songs for the album, Lennon’s I’m Losing You and Ono’s I’m Moving On. One of the world’s foremost guitar collectors, Nielsen was intrigued by the historical instruments Lennon had brought into the studio.

“I never called him ‘Mr. Lennon’ or anything,” Nielsen says. “It was ‘John.’ And we talked guitar stuff, gear. I got to the studio first. He comes walking in and says, ‘Oh, you!’ And I said back to him, ‘Oh, you!’ I think Jack had explained to him who we were.

“In 1980, Cheap Trick was pretty high on the charts. So it was just a musician-to-musician kind of thing. I brought a couple of my guitars, and John had his stuff. I was the first guy in America to have a Mellotron back in the Sixties, and John of course had his black, dual-keyboard Mellotron. So it was just gear talk.

“I brought a Les Paul and Hamer and a Fender Telecaster with a B-string bender on it. John had never seen one of those. So I ended up giving him that guitar. I was leaving for Japan the next day. I said, ‘Here, take it and try it out.’ I ended up getting it back three years after he was murdered. That was the guitar I used on the solo for Baby Loves to Rock [from Cheap Trick’s 1980 album, All Shook Up].”

Nielsen was somewhat horrified when Lennon opened up one of his guitar cases and brought out a Veleno, another one of his novelty instruments with a V-shaped headstock and mirrored-chrome body finish. Lennon seemed intent on using this guitar for his tracks with Cheap Trick.

“I said, ‘John, no. No. This is not right,’” Nielsen says with a laugh. “He had old, cruddy strings on it. But then he showed me his Rickenbacker 325, which I believe he’d played with the Beatles at Shea Stadium. It still had the song list scotch-taped to the side. I’m a guitar collector, so that was the coolest.”

Nielsen took some surreptitious measurements of the instrument’s short-scale neck and later had Hamer make a custom guitar for Lennon. Along with gear, fatherhood formed another bond between the two men.

Rick’s son Dax, his first child, was born on the very day the session took place. Nielsen had a hard time tearing himself away from his wife at this critical juncture in their lives together, but an opportunity to play and record with John Lennon was an honor that the guitarist couldn’t pass up.

“My standard joke is, had it been McCartney the answer would have been no,” Nielsen says, laughing.

Fatherhood was a big priority for Lennon at this point in his life, too. The birth of his son Sean some five years earlier had been a major factor in Lennon’s decision to retire from music from 1975 to 1980.

One of his first acts upon entering the Hit Factory to record Double Fantasy had been to tape a picture of Sean up over the console. Sessions generally had to end in time for Lennon to get home and tuck Sean into bed. Failing that, work would halt while Lennon made a good-night phone call to his son. Naturally, Lennon and Ono were enthusiastic in congratulating Nielsen on the birth of his first son.

“I’d flown in from Montreal and brought some Cuban cigars down with me,” Nielsen recalls. “So we lit them up and celebrated my son’s arrival. John and Jack, we were all smoking the Cuban cigars I’d brought in. Yoko had one, too.”

It’s somewhat surprising to hear of cigar smoke filling the control room during the Double Fantasy sessions. Most accounts of the dates stress the almost new-agey vibe of the sessions; all the players’ astrological charts had been checked in advance.

There was a “quiet room” and a shiatsu masseuse on hand. Tea and sushi, macrobiotic food, sunflower seeds, and raisins were on offer, but there was also junk food stashed in the studio maintenance room. There are also hints that cigars weren’t the only things being smoked in the control room.

“It wasn’t as strict as all that,” Earl Slick confesses. “John would chain-smoke cigarettes, and I was drinking like a fish. And he put up with me, God bless him. I mean, I never got drunk enough not to play, but that was back in my pre-clean days. And I was a bad boy.

“I remember going out with [engineer] Lee DeCarlo pretty much every night after the sessions and getting stupid. John used to think it was quite funny when I’d crawl into the studio the next day after being out all night and fucked up. He’d just laugh and say, ‘You’ve had a night out!’ I think he got a kick out of me because he was seeing a bit of himself in the old days and living vicariously through my dysfunction.”

As it turned out, the Cheap Trick versions of I’m Losing You and I’m Moving On didn’t make it onto the album. Ono is generally credited with vetoing the tracks.

“She thought Cheap Trick were just some band I was trying to give a boost to,” Douglas says, “even though they’d been quite successful and were in the process of making an album with George Martin, ironically enough [All Shook Up].”

Accounts vary as to how the album version of I’m Losing You, with Slick and McCracken on guitars, was recorded.

Douglas remembers playing the Cheap Trick recording in the studio musician’s headphones and having them play along, in order to duplicate the feel. Slick and McCracken have no recollection of this, but Slick does recall Lennon’s unique approach to recording the guitar solo for the album version of I’m Losing You.

“John said, ‘Okay, Slickie, you’re going to come in with the first part of the solo and Huey the second, Slickie the third, and Huey the fourth.’ And once we laid our parts down, we tripled them, with each guy doubling the other guy’s stuff and adding harmonies over the top.

“As I recall, we had two small amps facing each other – little old Fenders, probably – with a stereo mic in the middle. John told us that that’s what he and George Harrison had done on Nowhere Man. And if you listen to that song, even though the tone on the Beatles track is a much more high-endy AC30 sound, you’re still gonna hear a similarity between those two solos and how they were done.

“Because there’s like six guitars on there, all very clean and very compressed, which is something I never would have thought of doing. I learned an awful lot from being in there with John.”

In 1998, the Cheap Trick recording of I’m Losing You was included on the John Lennon Anthology box set. The performance is certainly heavier than the version of the song on Double Fantasy, an approach that well suits the song’s edgy qualities.

Melodically somewhat reminiscent of the Beatles’ Glass Onion, the song features a lyric that seems like something from Lennon’s Lost Weekend period, but it was actually written during the same Bermuda vacation that yielded Lennon’s other songs for Double Fantasy. On his own in a strange place, without Ono, the notoriously insecure Lennon began to fear that Ono was slipping away from him one night when he couldn’t get her on the phone.

Ono’s answer song, I’m Moving On, seems to justify all his worst fears, with its repeated accusation, “you’re getting phony.”

It’s a moment you’ll find in any relationship. All couples have their ups and downs, and Double Fantasy captures the inner dynamic of one of the world’s most famous love relationships with the candor and honesty that characterizes most of Lennon and Ono’s work, individually and collectively.

Lennon got the album title from the name of a flower he’d seen at a botanical garden in Bermuda, and it became the work’s central metaphor. Double Fantasy is a glimpse into Lennon and Ono’s respective inner worlds. As much as the album celebrates the love that unites them, it also dramatizes just how different those two worlds were.

While Lennon was enjoying domestic bliss and tranquility during his retirement period, Ono had taken on the management of the couple’s funds, increasing their wealth substantially while secretly working her way through a relapse into heroin addiction.

Lennon’s Double Fantasy songs tend toward the romantic – lyrics filled with moonlight, angels, and tenderness, whereas Ono's lyrics tend to foreground cold, hard realities and the dark places of the mind.

Compare for instance Lennon’s Beautiful Boy with Ono’s Beautiful Boys. The Lennon song is gentle and reassuring, whereas the Ono track offers the quizzical cold comfort of lines like, “Don’t be afraid to go to hell and back,” set to ominously foreboding gunshot sounds in the background.

Musically as well, Lennon and Ono are coming from very different places on Double Fantasy.

Lennon’s work is deeply steeped in musical nostalgia. From the Beatles’ 1968 White Album onward, Lennon became increasingly open about referencing his musical roots in Fifties rock and roll. He emerges on Double Fantasy as a man totally at ease with his own musical past, a 40-year-old guy who no longer cares if his tastes and preferences in music seem outdated.

With its piano triplets and somewhat schmaltzy chord progression, Starting Over offers frank homage to Fifties rock and roll balladry, a fact underlined by the stripped remix with its spoken dedication to “Gene, Eddie, Elvis, and Buddy.”

Woman fits comfortably alongside early Beatles-era Lennon ballads like If I Fell, a kinship that’s particularly apparent on John’s 12-string acoustic guitar demo of the song, included on the Lennon Anthology.

By contrast, Ono’s contributions to Double Fantasy are quintessentially Eighties sounding. Kiss Kiss Kiss wouldn’t be out of place on a Lene Lovich album, and Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him could be an outtake from a Blondie disc.

“My feeling was that she had to sound like that,” Douglas says. “She always seemed to be cutting edge. There is no retro in her book.”

“On Yoko’s stuff, I tended to use more pedals and effects,” Slick says. “Boss made this black auto-swell pedal that would make things almost sound backwards. No disrespect to Huey, but I think I might have done more of the weird, outside shit on Yoko’s stuff, because my brain was more wired that way. And that comes from working with Bowie.”

Lennon and Ono worked separately on their respective tracks much of the time, coming into the studio at different times of the day and night, although sometimes they worked together.

“When she was singing, John would be in the control room with Jack,” Nielsen recalls. “She’d be saying, ‘John, how should I do this?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, you do it this way, Mother.’ He called her ‘Mother.’ And they’d argue back and forth a little. She’d say, ‘Fuck you, John. Fuck you.’ Typical married couple.”

As part of Lennon’s mature level of comfort with his own musical past, he would sometimes reference a Beatles track while giving direction to the studio musicians. And he’d graciously accept it if one of the players couldn’t help playing a quote from some Beatles song or other – an inevitability in a roomful of musicians who all grew up loving the Beatles.

“You know what we’d do to the poor guy?” Slick rhetorically demands. “Once in a while one of us would start playing a Beatles song. And John would act like he hated it. But then he might join in. You can hear it on the box set from ’98. I think I’m playing She’s a Woman, which is a Paul song. And you can hear John in the background saying, ‘Who’s playing that? Stop playing that fucking song!’ But once in a while, he’d sit down and join us.

“You could get him going. If one of us started playing a Beatles song, he’d chime in for a verse or something like that. Then he’d say, ‘Okay, that’s enough of that.’”

Slick also slipped the riff from Bowie’s Fame into the outro of Cleanup Time.

“I’d never noticed that before,” Douglas says, “not until I did this remix. John would never stop reminding Slick that he [John] had cowritten what was Bowie’s only number-one hit at the time.”

The live dynamic of the sessions, with their sense of fun and interplay, comes across more clearly on Douglas’ stripped-down Double Fantasy remixes.

“John would be in his vocal booth when we’d do a take,” Slick recalls. “Once in a while he’d have a suggestion for a guitar part and say, ‘Huey, you cover this and Slickie, you cover that.’ But a lot of times we were left to our own devices.

“John picked everybody in there for what they could bring to the table, as opposed to dictating to us. That’s what I loved about working with both John and David Bowie. In the time I worked with them, what each of them wanted was Earl Slick. And that’s the proudest work I have in my entire discography, and I’ve got my name on a number of albums in my time.”

“Most of the vocals on the master track itself were the live vocals that John recorded in the room during the tracking,” Douglas says.

“There were only fixes if he sang the wrong lyric, wanted to change a lyric, sang off-mic, or just did something completely wrong. Because he was playing guitar at the same time he was singing, either an acoustic guitar, which you can hear on the live vocals, or an electric guitar with an amp in another room, and you can hear the pick running across the strings on the live vocal track. Which is kind of fun.”

Douglas captured Lennon’s voice with a Neumann U47 or U87 or a Telefunken 251; he tended to favor the 251. As the vocals went to tape, they were processed with a little compression from a UR EI LA -2A and a bit of Pultec EQ. For the original album release, Lennon doubled all his vocal parts, but Douglas left the overdubs off for the stripped remixes. The result is a more intimate vocal feel.

But that’s not all the stripped remixes accomplish. With the schmaltzy choir overdubs and dated-sounding Eighties signal processing removed, the songs themselves come more clearly into focus. And, almost magically, the contrast between Lennon’s material and Ono’s starts to soften.

Perhaps the new remix does an even better job than the original mix of realizing Lennon and Ono’s original vision. They show us how two very strong and distinctly different individuals could become as one in a love relationship. By clearing away aural clutter, the new mixes create a space where hopeless romanticism and hard-edged realism can indeed co-exist.

“Yoko helped a lot with these remixes,” Douglas says. “She’d come in every few days and listen to two or three mixes at a sitting. And she’d make some suggestions to us, which were all very good. Although she doesn’t speak in technical terms, she would notice little things.

“If I added a little Pultec high-end to the snare drum, she’d say, ‘All of a sudden the snare sounds like boof, boof, boof. Too much, too much. Too much Andy [Newmark].’ And it would just be a little bit of 10kHz on the snare. I’d say, ‘Okay.’ I’d totally respect her opinions, because she would hear every little thing we did.

“But mostly it brought her to tears. John being in the room was an unnerving experience. It was disturbing to her. But she absolutely loved it. I saw her the other night and she gave me a big hug and said she’s so thrilled with this.”

This feature originally appeared in the Holiday 2010 issue of Guitar World.

The Beatles have been the subject of some high-profile documentaries recently. In 2022, we had Peter Jackson’s Get Back epic, which charted the Fab Four’s journey in the lead up to recording their last-ever studio album.

This year, we have Beatles ’64 – a hugely anticipated film produced by generational filmmaker and award-winning director Martin Scorsese, which tells the story of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison’s seminal appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. And, thanks to this Disney+ Black Friday steaming deal, you can watch the doc – and a ream of other Disney titles – from as little as $2.99 per month.

Few gigs are as famed as the Beatles’ New York turn from 1964, which was eternalized on The Ed Sullivan show. The first of three performances in February that year was viewed by 73 million viewers – making it the most-watched event of its time – and is considered to be the catalyst and cultural watershed moment that triggered Beatles hysteria (or ‘Beatlemania’) in the US.

Beatles ’64 – which is available exclusively on Disney+ – throws viewers into this formative time of the Beatles career, documenting the aftermath and cultural impact of the band's historic trip to New York for the gig.

Directed by David Tedeschi and produced by Scorses, Beatles ’64 is currently receiving rave reviews – it is sitting with 97% on Rotten Tomatoes – and should be considered essential viewing for all Fab Four fans.

For Black Friday, Disney+ is offering some bundle deals for new subscribers, the best of which lets you get both Disney+ and Hulu (both with ads) for just $2.99 a month for a full year. That represents a huge saving over the regular rate of $10.99 a month. To put that into perspective, this bundle will help you save a grand total of $96 over the course of 12 months.

Once signed up, you also have access to the rest of the Disney+ catalog, meaning for just $2,99 a month (that’s less than a cup of coffee) you’ll never be short of Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, or Pixar titles to choose from.

For more Cyber Weekend discounts, be sure to keep it locked to our Black Friday guitar deals page, where we'll be showcasing the very best deals from across the internet.

A letter written by John Lennon and addressed to Eric Clapton – in which the former Beatle invites the electric guitar hero to form a new band with him – is expected to sell for as much as €150,000 at auction.

Dated September 29, 1971, the eight-page letter penned by Lennon and Yoko Ono was sent to Slowhand during an especially troubled time during his life, when he had withdrawn from touring, music, and the public eye in general as a result of numerous personal struggles.

The letter was drafted after Clapton had briefly performed with Yoko and Lennon under the Plastic Ono Band umbrella in 1969 prior to The Beatles’ split, and after Clapton’s infamous appearance at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh benefit shows in August 1971.

In it, Lennon calls upon Clapton to join a brand-new band he was planning on forming, and lays out the in-depth plans he had for the potential group, including name-dropping other potential members.

Not only that, but Lennon also reassures the ex-Yardbird guitarist that he can help him overcome some of the personal and professional struggles he was facing during that time – and help elevate his music to new, greater heights.

“You must know by now that Yoko and I rate your music and yourself very highly, always have,” the letter opens with. “You also know the kind of music we’ve been making and hope to make.

“Anyway the point is, after missing the Bangla-desh concert, we began to feel more and more like going on the road, but not the way I used to with the Beatles – night after night of torture,” Lennon continues. “We mean to enjoy ourselves, take it easy, and maybe even see some of the places we go to!

“We have many ‘revolutionary’ ideas for presenting shows that completely involve the audience – not just us ‘superstars’ up there – blessing the people – but that’s another letter really.

“We’ve asked Klaus [Voormann], Jim Keltner, Nicky Hopkins – Phil Spector even! to form a ‘nucleus’ group (Plastic Ono Band) – and between us all would decide what – if any – augmentation to the group we’d like – eg saxs, vocal group whatever we like they all seem to [have] agreed so far – and of course we had YOU !!! in mind as soon as we decided.”

Lennon’s reasoning for wanting Clapton to join the group, he later goes on to say, has nothing to do with his “name”, but rather his “mind”, and the fact he feels he could help “bring out the best” in the withdrawn guitar star.

“I’ve/we’ve long admired your music – and always kept an eye open to see what your [sic] up to of late. I really feel that I/we can bring out the best in you – (some kind of security financial or otherwise will help) but the main thing is the music.

“I consider Klaus, Jim, Nicky, Phil, Yoko, you could make the kind of sound that could bring back the Balls in rock ‘n’ roll. Both of us have been thru the same kind of shit/pain that I know you’ve had – and I know we could help each other in that area.

“But mainly Eric – I know I can bring out something great – in fact greater in you that has been so far evident in your music, I hope to bring out the same kind of greatness in all of us – which I know will happen if/when we get together.”

The letter features many corrections, alterations and deletions, and has been officially labeled as a draft by International Autograph Auctions – the auction house in charge of the sale of the letter.

The contents of the final version, which was sent to Clapton, are unknown. What is known, though, is the fact that Clapton turned down Lennon’s proposal.

Lennon’s letter will go under the hammer as part of International Autograph Auctions’ upcoming Autograph Letters, Historical Documents and Manuscripts collection on December 5.

It is expected to sell for anything between €100,000 and €150,000, which is an approximate upper estimate of $158,000. That would make it significantly more expensive than what it was initially valued, when it sold in 2012 for €22,728.

To find out more, head over to International Autograph Auctions.

A 1962 Fawn JMI Vox AC15 Twin, believed to be John Lennon’s first Vox amp, is up for auction tomorrow (November 14). Lennon is thought to have used the amp during The Beatles' early shows at the Cavern Club and in recording their debut album, Please Please Me, at Abbey Road Studios.

“John, Paul, George, Ringo, the first time they ever performed together in the Cavern Club in Liverpool, this Vox AC 15 twin amp was the amplifier that they used,” comments Mark Hochman from auction house Propstore.

“It had been previously purchased around about three or four days earlier by Lennon himself and their manager, Brian Epstein, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

The historic amp is estimated to sell for between approximately $127,000 (£100,000) and $254,000 (£200,000), with current bids already exceeding the former figure.

In the video below, session musician Stuart Sidney puts the amp through its paces – courtesy of another piece of British music history, Noel Gallagher's Custom Silver Sparkle Gibson Les Paul Florentine guitar.

Back in July, Guitar World reported that the 1962 Vox AC15 Twin, bearing serial number 4583, had resurfaced on an auction site in December 2023, where it was subsequently purchased.

The previous owner, presumably unaware of the serial number’s link to Lennon and the Fab Four, had painted the exterior matte black. Once the connection was discovered, the paint was meticulously removed to expose the original Fawn covering.

The brown diamond-pattern grille cloth and Goodman Alnico speakers were also restored to a period-correct format. Despite general scuffing and clear signs of age, the amp remains in remarkably good condition.

Since the initial Guitar World report, further research and photographic evidence indicate that Lennon’s AC15 Twin remained with The Beatles longer than first thought, until late 1963.

The live sale section of Propstore’s Entertainment Memorabilia auction, will begin at 10:00 AM EST/3:00 PM GMT tomorrow (November 14).

For more information, head to Propstore.

An amp believed to be John Lennon’s first Vox – used in Cavern shows and in the recording of the Beatles' first EMI sessions, including the tracks Please Please Me and Love Me Do – is going up for auction via Propstore next month (November 15).

Back in July, in a Guitar World exclusive, we reported that the 1962 Vox AC15 Twin, bearing the serial number 4583, had been spotted and purchased after it resurfaced on an auction site in December 2023.

At the time, the listing showed an amp that had been painted black and did not detail a serial number. The current owner (and a few other bidders) only spotted the correlation after requesting additional pictures, eventually securing the unit for a final bid of £16,000.

Now, restored to its original fawn finish and with period-correct speakers, it's headed back to auction, but this time with the Lennon association front and center of the listing – and an estimated price of $130,000-$260,000.

The auction house behind the sale, Propstore, tells GW that it has conducted its own research and checks to authenticate the amp and is confident that it is Lennon’s unit. This counts for something as the firm’s policy essentially offers a money-back guarantee of authenticity.

“It is arguably one of the most significant Beatles and Lennon artefacts to come to market,” states the listing. “It was the catalyst in forming the early tone and sound of one of The Beatles, considered one of the most influential bands of all time.”

Since Guitar World’s initial report, further research has revealed that the unit remained under the Beatles’ care for slightly longer than initially thought, with pictorial evidence of its use until late-1963, rather than early ’63.

As such, it was likely used intermittently with the black AC30s the band was first supplied directly by Vox owner Jennings Musical Instruments that year, as part of its burgeoning sponsorship agreement.

Lennon’s own ‘fawn’ covered unit was purchased, alongside much of the Beatles’ early gear (including the recently resurfaced George Harrison Futurama guitar) from Liverpool store Hessy’s Music in July 1962.

Ringo Starr joined the band around the same time, playing his first shows with the group in August 1962, so Lennon’s AC15 Twin saw use through a formative period for the group, including Cavern shows (indeed, it features in the only known video footage of the band performing at the legendary Liverpool venue) and during the group’s first sessions at Abbey Road for EMI.

AC15 Twin amps of the era – distinguished by their twin speaker configurations – are notoriously rare in their own right and Beatles gear tends to demand a premium, so if buyers are confident in the authenticity, then this lot could well exceed its estimate.

As we noted previously, a Vox AC30 belonging to Bill Wyman of the ’Stones previously sold for over $100,000, but the Beatles – and, particularly, Lennon’s – auction cache is arguably much higher. How much so? Well, we’ll find out when it goes under the hammer next month…

The amp will be sold as part of Propstore’s forthcoming Entertainment Memorabilia auction on November 15. Head to Propstore to browse the full listing and images of the amp.

“Working with John Lennon was the least painful thing I ever did in my life,” New York studio giant Gordon Edwards told Bass Player. “When you played with him, you could feel him listening to you. He didn't bother or bug you at all; he let you be yourself. He'd just sit down and we'd start playing.”

Edwards ranks highly among the unsung bass guitar heroes of the ’70s recording scene: bass players who operated largely under the showbiz radar but who nevertheless helped churn out hit after hit, all while quietly weaving their own low-end legacies into the fabric of music history.

In addition to his work with one half of the world's most famous songwriting team, Edwards’ discography also boasts collaborations with such artists as Paul Simon, Donny Hathaway, James Brown, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Aretha Franklin, Joe Cocker, Hall & Oates, Carly Simon, Grover Washington Jr., and Van McCoy (yep, that's Edwards laying it down on The Hustle).

He was also a founding member of the pioneering R&B/funk unit Stuff, featuring A-list session buddies Cornell Dupree, Eric Gale, Steve Gadd, Chris Parker, and Richard Tee.

In 1973, when John Lennon began putting together his fourth post-Beatles album, Mind Games, Gordon's close connection with David Spinozza – Lennon's musical arranger – put him in the right place at the right time.

“For me, John just made it completely easy,” Gordon told Bass Player. “It was a perfect example of very cool songs written and played by an artist with the most tremendous feel.”

Mind Games opens with a moderately paced pop ballad bearing the same name, which has since become one of Lennon’s most popular songs. “David Spinozza knew the melody; he had that written out. But as for the arrangement, he left that to the musicians. Basically, all we had were the chord changes.

“I used a 1958 Fender Precision strung with La Bella medium gauge flatwounds, and we had one line going directly into the board as well as a mic’d amp for that external sound and feeling; I think it was a tube-type Ampeg B-15. The whole rhythm section tracked together, and I think they added a few parts later.”

The song kicks off with a four-bar phrase built on a series of simple chords that outline a descending C major scale. Edwards shadows this downward movement with sustained half-notes throughout the intro and first verse, offering little hint of the masterclass in space and pacing about to unfold.

In the next section, Edwards flouts convention by skipping the downbeat of each bar, while also leaving acres of room between his considered rhythmic comments. “I went into a reggae mood in the middle section; that was easy to do since I'm West Indian, anyhow. I like to make space for the melody to come through – I learned that from jazz bassist Leroy Vinnegar. He'd play melodies within his basslines, and he influenced me a lot.”

Reintroducing his downbeats in the second verse, Edwards returns to longer notes and begins mixing in chromatic connections between the primary tones. The first bar contains a particular treat as Edwards slips in a delightfully jarring B, on beat four as he moves from the Em/B chord on beat three to the Am7 downbeat, alluding to a Bb7 tritone substitution for E7.

Though the second verse is rooted firmly in C major (with a short nod to G major courtesy of the D7 chords), the bassline touches upon every note of the chromatic scale – atleast twice.

As the song heads toward the fadeout, Edwards again underlines his penchant for coloring the basic harmony through the use of the 5th, which he foregrounds heavily during the track's last seven bars.

Reflecting on his style in general, Edwards told Bass Player: “Some people like to solo, but I really enjoy laying a groove down; I used to loop before people even knew what looping was!

“When I do make a change it's because I'm going into the channel or something, and it's time for something new. But when I'm laying down a groove, there's no way you can stop me – even if you've got a pistol!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you get involved with the Main Ingredient?

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

How did you approach the gig once you joined?

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

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

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

How’d you meet David Bowie?

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

What were your initial impressions of David?

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

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

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

What led to you eventually working with Bowie?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was there a trick to sharing space with Earl?

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

A yin and yang?

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

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

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

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

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

How did it impact your guitar sound specifically?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What were the specs?

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

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos Alomar says he turned down dinner and drinks with David Bowie and John Lennon in order to dedicate himself to working on the guitar parts for their collaborative track, Fame.

Speaking to Guitar World, Alomar says he was in the studio already with Bowie’s Young Americans producer Harry Maslin when Bowie walked in with John Lennon.

“When they came in, the whole place kind of stopped,” recalls Alomar. “I stopped recording – and then it was just us. David let John hear the track I was working on – but I must say, although he listened, he and David were still totally engaged and the laughter never stopped.”

Alomar’s impression of Lennon as a person and a guitar player was positive – and he notes that, regardless of the concept of the track, there were no egos at play, musically.

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

Despite the good vibes, though, Alomar says the session left him having to make a tough decision.

“David asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with them!” explains the guitarist. “[So] I had a big ‘dilemma’ moment.

“I was hearing certain [musical] things in my head, so I didn't wanna go and start talking to John and David and possibly lose myself in the drinks or their conversation. I decided to exclude myself, return to my guitar parts and finish my ideas.”

While GW can’t promise we would have been so professional, it seems Alomar’s social sacrifice was ultimately the right move, at least in terms of rock history – and probably his future opportunities.

“When they came back, David heard what I did and was so impressed that I had done so much in such a short time,” says Alomar.

“He loved it. He said, 'Let me just put down this one little guitar part.' It was a perfect Bowie part… this distorted, one-line guitar that cut through all that funky clarity. With that one part, that was it - the record was done.”

Alomar’s sharp-eared experience cuts a characteristic contrast with that of one of his fellow guitarists on the session.

Indeed, earlier this year, Earl Slick told Guitar World that he was so high during the recording of Young Americans that he had no recollection of meeting John Lennon. A fact Lennon reportedly found hilarious, when Slick introduced himself to the Beatle five years later…

To read Alomar’s full interview, pick up the November 2024 issue of Guitar World over at Magazines Direct.

It is quite possibly the amp find of the century. An AC15 Twin believed to be John Lennon’s first Vox amp has been located and recovered for the first time in over 60 years, after an eagle-eyed Beatles fan and guitarist discovered it – disguised under a coat of black paint – in an online auction.

Lennon’s 1962 AC15 Twin, carrying the serial number ‘4583’, was purchased by the songwriter from Liverpool store Hessy’s Music in July 1962 for £123 and saw use in the Beatles’ shows at the Cavern Club and on early EMI sessions, including the recordings of Please Please Me and Love Me Do. It also features in some of the only footage of the Beatles performing at the Cavern Club.

The amp still requires expert verification but is off to a very promising start – with a matching serial number, correctly dated internal components, photographic evidence and the fact that only 30 or so AC15 Twins were produced in the era, all running in its favor.

Guitar World was invited for an exclusive look at the rediscovered amp, which was temporarily back in situ at the Cavern for a photoshoot – likely its first visit to Liverpool’s Matthew Street since Lennon parted ways with the combo in early 1963.

The owner has asked to remain anonymous, but is represented by Nathan Hodgson (who brought to light Jeff Beck’s prototype Ibanez signature last year).

“The owner is recently retired and has been collecting for quite some time," explained Hodgson.

“He keeps it all low-key but he’s got quite a collection behind him. He spotted the amp a while back [in December 2023], on Gardiner Houlgate, an auction site.”

The amp had been painted black and clearly needed some work, but the owner tells Guitar World that they thought, based on the low cost, it would be worth restoring and, in the end, they might have an authentic version of Lennon’s first Vox.

What they didn’t realize at that point was that it was Lennon’s first Vox.

“There was only a £1,000 reserve on the amp, so I asked for more pictures,” the owner told Guitar World, via email.

“When I got the pictures checked, with the specification [and serial number] in the Vox book, I suddenly noticed it was the same as John Lennon’s amp. I couldn’t believe it.”

The owner hoped they might be alone in requesting more images, given the only picture on the listing gave nothing away, but in the end it took a winning bid of £16,000 to secure the anonymous amp.

“I was getting outbid by others who must have realized it was John Lennon’s. I kept on bidding with excitement and some nervousness,” says the owner.

“In my head, I said, ‘This is John Lennon’s…’ I had a limit of £15,000 – must be mad, I thought! It hit £15,000 – I said, ‘£16,000 and that’s it!’ Once I bought it I was happy, relieved, excited. All these emotions!”

What condition is the amp in?

Guitar World got hands-on with the amp at the Cavern and it is in surprisingly good shape, given its 60-year journey.

In the pictures supplied to the owner (and, it appears, others) around the auction, the amp is fitted with Celestion Greenback speakers, but the owner has since sourced and installed period-correct Goodmans speakers as part of the restoration.

The black paint has also been removed, revealing the original fawn finish (fawn fell out of fashion down the line, so it seems that a later owner must have opted to ‘refinish’ it) and a new Vox diamond grille cloth has been fitted.

The amp was in full working order at the time of its auction purchase and remains so.

“It was like going back 60 years,” said Hodgson, of the first time he tried it. “You can imagine what it would have sounded like in the Cavern in the heady days of the ’60s.”

How do we know it is Lennon’s amp?

The short answer is we don’t yet, but the signs look very promising indeed.

Pictures of the amp and the documentation of the serial number (initially mis-recorded as ‘1583’ on the hire purchase agreement) have long been in circulation and noted by Beatles and Vox gear authorities Andy Babiuk and Jim Elyea, but the fate of the amp after 1963 has been a mystery.

The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein struck up a Vox endorsement deal in 1963, at which point Vox owner Jennings Musical Instruments paid off Lennon’s hire purchase agreement and supplied him with a new, larger AC30 amp in the process.

It is thought that Lennon’s first Vox would simply have been sold on at that point, probably through its London retail outpost, Jennings.

The present owner says he was told it was kept in storage for 20 years prior to the recent listing, but client confidentiality has kept the auction house from revealing the source of the sale.

One issue with vintage Vox amps is that some unscrupulous traders have been known to swap chassis between cabinets, so the cabinet and serial number could be original but the internals sourced from another amp.

Guitar World has seen the serial number plate on the cabinet and can confirm that it matches Lennon’s and looks period-correct (featuring the same hand-stamped format of other vintage Vox amps of the era).

We were not able to inspect inside the amp at the Cavern, but we have seen images and the owner maintains he has dated the components to May 1962, which would align well with Lennon’s July purchase date.

The fact it was listed as a generic Vox, with no serial number image on the listing – and that, alongside the present owner, other bidders also spotted the serial number after requesting images – also suggests this was not an attempt to sell it as a fake or present it as one now.

Likewise, the scarcity of 1962 AC15 Twin amps in the first place presents a potential barrier to any bad actors in sourcing the components to create a ‘fake’.

What will happen next?

Guitar World is told the present owner has not fully decided on the future of the amp and was initially intending to keep it, but a sale at auction now looks likely.

Wherever and whenever it sells, the owner intends to donate a portion of the proceeds to LIPA (the Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts, which was founded by Paul McCartney in 1996).

What is Lennon’s first Vox amp worth?

Famous amps are notoriously tricky to value compared to celebrity guitars, perhaps lacking cache in the eyes of non-playing fans. However, we do have a useful marker in the form of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman’s 1964 Vox AC30, which sold for $106,250 in 2020, setting a new record for amp values in the process.

“The owner knew it was significant but I don’t think he realized quite how significant it could be,” says Hodgson. “We’ve since spoken to a few auction houses who have said it could be £100,000 to £250,000 [approx. $123,000 to $320,000], maybe more.”

We’re inclined to agree. High-end celebrity gear valuations are all about iconography and it’s hard to find a bigger – and more universal – musical icon than John Lennon, or a more iconic gear pairing than the Beatles and Vox amps.

Then you can add in its history at the Cavern and early EMI Abbey Road sessions. Not to mention the fact AC15 Twins of the era are sought-after vintage models in their own right.

As such, the list of potential buyers is also enormous, with just about every big-name musician of the last 50 years having been influenced by the group.

There’s also a litany of extremely high net-worth fans outside of the music industry itself. Not least Jim Irsay, whose billion-dollar collection already includes Ringo Starr’s drum kit, plus Lennon’s 1963 Gretsch 6120 Country Gentleman and 1964 Rickenbacker guitars.

Lennon’s first Vox, used in the Cavern and in the recording of the single that brought Beatlemania to the USA? It’s not out of the question that this could be the world’s first million-dollar amp.

• If you know anything about the amp or its timeline – or would like to make inquiries about it – please get in touch on guitarworld@futurenet.com with the subject line 'Lennon Vox'.

John Lennon’s Framus Hootenanny acoustic guitar, which was found in an attic after disappearing for 50 years, has become one of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction.

The discovery of the 12-string guitar – famed for featuring on the Help! recording sessions in the ‘60s – was announced last month at an unveiling in London hosted by auctioneers, Julien's Auctions.

At the time, Julien’s claimed the vintage Framus could set a new world record for a guitar to be sold under the hammer, potentially surpassing Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18e, which sold for over $6,000,000 in 2020.

The Framus didn’t quite reach those heights, but it did comfortably make it onto the list, having eventually sold after 20 bids for a whopping $2,857,000.

That figure makes the legendary Beatles instrument the fifth most expensive guitar to have sold at auction, usurping the $2.7 million ‘Reach Out to Asia’ Stratocaster and coming in behind none other than Eddie Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher Kramer, which went for $3,932,000 last year.

Notably, it also becomes the most expensive Beatles guitar to go under the hammer – a mantle previously held by John Lennon’s $2.4 million Gibson J-160E.

Though the Framus was originally set a highly conservative upper estimate of $800,000, everyone who had an eye on the sale knew it would fetch far more when the first day of the auction rolled around.

As well as featuring on Help!, the Framus can also be seen in the Beatles film of the same name, and was used for the band’s performance of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. It was also said to have been used on Girl, as well as the rhythm track for Norwegian Wood.

It was used extensively by most members of the Beatles during this decade – Lennon and George Harrison were both pictured playing the guitar – and was recently held by Ringo Starr, after Julien’s reintroduced the Beatle with one of the band’s most influential acoustics.

As the tale goes, Lennon once gifted the Framus to Gordon Waller of Peter & Gordon, who in turn later gave the guitar to its pre-auction owners. For the past decades, it has laid unplayed, and was left in hibernation until a family, who were moving homes, stumbled upon it in their attic.

Julien’s was called to the scene, and the guitar was quickly identified as the Help! acoustic. 

Luckily, it had remained in top condition, and was accompanied by its original Maton case – which had to be salvaged from a skip during a “cold, dark, wet March evening”, having originally been thrown out.

The guitar itself is a 5/024/12 flattop Hootenanny model, and features a mahogany neck and rosewood fingerboard, as well as a Trapeze tailpiece and rosewood bridge.

“This guitar happens to be one of the most important Beatles guitars and instruments ever to come to the auction block,” said Darren Julien at the unveiling. “It’s so important, so historic. We thought this guitar was gone – we thought it was lost forever.”

Find out more at Julien’s Auctions.

Julien's will host the second and final day of its mammoth Music Icons auction tomorrow (May 30). The exhibition includes a handful of other iconic guitars, including Prince's Cloud 3, which is expected to sell for $600,000.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What attracted you to play bass?

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

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

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

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

And how did you four decide to start a band? 

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

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

Where was your first gig? Was it in Liverpool?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what bass amps did you use during that time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Lennon's long-lost 12-string Framus Hootenanny acoustic guitar has come a long way. After 50-plus years, it was found in the attic of a home just outside of London. Now, it's expected to fetch $800,000 at an upcoming auction – but not before being restored to its former glory.

Guitar repairer Ryan Schuermann is the man behind this one-of-a-kind restoration project. In a recent interview with the LA Times, Schuermann explained how the biggest gig of his life came about.

In mid-March, Schuermann – who previously worked on Robbie Robertson's Gibson double-neck – was asked to restore a 12-string by Mike Adams of Julien’s Auction House in Beverly Hills. However, Schuermann immediately knew this wasn't just any guitar. The gig came with a four-page nondisclosure agreement which he had to sign before even taking a peek at the guitar.

“There was a lot of cloak and dagger to it, which I’m not used to. I asked him what’s the guitar and he said, ‘I can’t tell you,’” said Schuermann. “I sign it. He opens the case. I see the guitar. He says, ‘This is John Lennon’s guitar from Help.’

“You can be really nervous, but all you can do is prepare. I have done this for 15 to 20 years and I’ve done it a lot. It’s just preparation. I wasn’t super-nervous once it’s go time. I was ready... I just went slow.”

The guitar had a lot of structural issues. However, the neck reset was the biggest undertaking. “The neck pull, as it’s called, came out completely flawless. There was no damage to any finish, which is kind of like hitting a home run when you need to hit a home run. You get one shot at it,” Schuermann said.

After the operation, Schuermann tried the guitar out. To mark the special occasion, he played Beatles songs like You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away and Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). As for the whole experience? “It’s a little dizzying. I’m proud of how clean the guitar was and in immaculate condition and left my shop in even better shape.”

YouTuber Mike Adams (aka Puisheen) was also involved in the restoration project.

“First, I want to tell you that it was an immense pleasure to authenticate this with the help of Andy Babiuk, who is a wealth of Beatles knowledge and really drove home the importance of this guitar," he shared on Instagram. 

“Second, I was honored to facilitate the process of bringing it back into perfect playing shape with my friend Ryan. At the end of that long road was truly the most comfortable-playing 12 string acoustic I have ever encountered. I’m not kidding. 4/64” action across the board – bonkers!”

John Lennon's 12-string Framus Hootenanny acoustic guitar will go under the hammer on May 29 and 30 as part of Julien's Music Icons auction. For more information about the auction, head to Julien's Auctions.

John Lennon’s long-lost Framus Hootenanny acoustic guitar has been found – and it’s set to go under the hammer next month for what could potentially be a world record-smashing auction.

One of the most iconic and influential instruments to have been used by the Beatles, the 12-string guitar was used during the Help! recording sessions in the ‘60s, and can be seen in the Beatles film of the same name.

Notably, it was used for the film’s performance of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, and it can also be heard on It’s Only Love and I’ve Just Seen a Face. Furthermore, the Framus is said to feature on the recording of Girl, as well as the rhythm track for Norwegian Wood.

It was played extensively by most members of the Beatles during this era, with pictures from the decade depicting Lennon and George Harrison both wielding the acoustic.

Making the announcement even more significant, the Framus was recently discovered in the attic of a rural family home just outside London, having been missing for over 50 years. Before its discovery, the forgotten Framus was believed to have been lost forever.

But now it’s been found and – despite an incredibly conservative official estimate of $800,000 – is being tipped as what could potentially become the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.

The guitar itself was unveiled today (April 23) by Julien’s Auctions during a live preview event at the Hard Rock Cafe at Piccadilly Circus, London, which Guitar World attended. 

Even before the Framus was fully unveiled, Julien’s Executive Directors Darren Julien and Martin J. Nolan were hyping up the significance of the discovery, telling the Hard Rock Cafe crowd that the guitar in question could potentially surpass the record set by Kurt Cobain’s $6,000,000 Martin D-18e.

Their stance became clear once the lid of the original battered Maton guitar case – which had to be salvaged from a skip during a “cold, dark, wet March evening”, having originally been thrown out – had been lifted.

“This guitar happens to be one of the most important Beatles guitars and instruments ever to come to the auction block,” said Darren Julien at the unveiling. “It’s John Lennon’s Framus guitar that he used in the movie Help! He used it on the album Rubber Soul, as well as Help!”

“George Harrison used it,” he continued. “We have great photographs of it in the studio being played by John Lennon, George Harrison, all the Beatles are there.”

During the presentation, Nolan also revealed he and Julien recently reunited the Framus with Ringo Starr, who added his own name to the list of Beatles to have played the storied instrument.

As for how the Framus ended up in the back of an attic, Julien explained Lennon once gifted the guitar to Gordon Waller of Peter & Gordon, who in turn later gave the guitar to its current owners. For the past five decades, it has laid unplayed.

Fortunately, the guitar is still in pristine condition, with Julien saying it “plays unbelievable”. In terms of its build, the 5/024/12 flattop Hootenanny features a mahogany neck and rosewood fingerboard, with a Trapeze tailpiece and rosewood bridge.

As mentioned, the Julien’s team are (quite rightly) expecting this Framus to sell for a rather significant sum come next month. 

It will most likely become the most expensive Beatles guitar ever sold at auction, but that’s not all: it’s also expected to rival Cobain’s Martin as the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.

“We are so excited to be the caretakers of this treasure, which we think has the possibility to set a new world record,” Nolan concluded at the preview. “We broke the world record for guitars in 2015 when we sold John Lennon’s Gibson J-160E.

“Then we sold Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E, it sold for over six-million. This could be the guitar that sets a new world record. It’s so important, so historic. We thought this guitar was gone – we thought it was lost forever.”

The Framus is set to go under the hammer as part of Julien's Music Icons auction, which takes place May 29-30. Before then, it will be displayed at various locations around the world, including England, Ireland and the USA.

To find out more, head over to Julien’s.

This is the second Beatles instrument to have been discovered in an attic this year, after Paul McCartney’s legendary Höfner bass was recently unearthed after it was stolen over 50 years ago.

Founded in Liverpool in 1963, The Liverbirds are widely regarded as the UK’s first all-female rock group – a story documented in new book, The Liverbirds: Our Life in Britain's First Female Rock 'n' Roll Band.

In the autobiography, bassist/singer Mary McGlory and drummer Sylvia Saunders recount the time the band were introduced to The Beatles at The Cavern Club before the heyday of Beatlemania.

“Bob Wooler [The Cavern's compere and DJ] told them: ‘This is the Liverbirds, they're gonna be the first all-girl group,’” McGlory and Saunders write. “‘What a great idea,’ said Paul, but Lennon was sarcastic. ‘Girls don't play guitars,’ he said.”

“After we left the dressing room we huffed, ‘The cheek of it! We're going to prove him wrong.’”

“It’s clear his feelings about women evolved, but we also wonder if what he said that day in the Cavern dressing room was meant to test us, provoke us into making a success of the band. If so, it certainly worked.”

The Liverbirds were active between 1963 and 1968. With guitarists and vocalists Valerie Gell and Pamela Birch, McGlory on bass and vocals, and drummer Saunders, they were one of the world's first all-female rock bands. 

Early in their career, they made their way to the then-rock 'n' roll music mecca of Hamburg and performed at the notorious Star-Club. During their residency there, they released two albums and several singles on Star-Club Records and found commercial success in Germany. The band broke up in 1968 shortly after a tour in Japan.

In 2010, Ace Records compiled all their recordings and released them in the UK for the first time ever – nearly 50 years after the band recorded them.

The Liverbirds: Our Life in Britain's First Female Rock'n'Roll Band is out now.

Throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s, Earl Slick was living most rock ’n’ roll guitarists’ dreams. He’d logged several worldwide tours with David Bowie and played a vital musical role on albums such as Young Americans and Station to Station. 

As if working with one British rock legend weren’t enough, in 1980 Slick was chosen by John Lennon to play guitar on the former Beatle’s first album in five years, Double Fantasy.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Slick says. “I was really, really busy back then. There are days now when I astonish myself going, ‘Christ, did I really do all that?’ I’ll go on Wikipedia and be like, ‘Oh, there’s this and that.’ Or somebody will call and say, ‘I was just on Spotify and you’re on this record.’ I’ll say, ‘Now that you mention it, I am. I forgot about that one.’”

By the mid-’80s, however, the high-profile gigs weren’t coming like they used to. Slick attempted a career reboot with ex-Stray Cats members Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker in Phantom, Rocker & Slick, but their union lasted for only two albums. 

After kicking a debilitating drug and alcohol dependency, he joined the L.A..-based glam-metal band Dirty White Boy, who went belly-up after one album. A short stint with another L.A. outfit, Little Caesar, yielded similar results. Finally, in 1992, fed up with beating his head against the wall, Slick decided to chuck it all and headed to Lake Tahoe. For the next four years, he pursued a “normal job” selling timeshares.

“Only problem was, I sucked at it,” he says with a laugh. “I was no good at it at all. It was a strange time – I was adjusting to being sober, and I was filled with anxiety and discouragement from being jerked around by record companies. I just thought, ‘I need a drastic change.’ So I went somewhere I could be anonymous and get away from it all.”

In an unlikely turn, Slick was tempted to ditch retirement by a Tahoe neighbor, Whitesnake singer David Coverdale, who floated an offer for the guitarist to join the veteran hard rock band. 

“I gave it some serious thought, but I finally had to say no,” Slick says, “I realized I would have been faking my way through it, and it would have backfired on both of us.” More to the guitarist’s liking was a six-month writing collaboration with Coverdale that resulted in the singer’s third solo record, 2000’s Into the Light.

After recording the album, Slick still wasn’t convinced that he was ready to return to music full time. That all changed in 1999, when he received a vague and bewildering email indicating that somebody was looking for him. Some amateur sleuthing revealed that the somebody was none other than David Bowie. “I contacted David, and before you knew it I was back in,” Slick says.

Over the next 14 years, Slick played with Bowie on Heathen (2002), Reality (2003) and The Next Day (2013) and toured with the singer until 2004 (after suffering a mild heart attack on stage in Prague, Czech Republic, during the Reality Tour, Bowie was forced to cancel his remaining dates and never resumed full-time performing). 

Meanwhile, the guitarist released solid solo albums (2002’s Slick Trax, 2003’s Zig Zag and 2021’s Fist Full of Devils), toured with the New York Dolls and the Yardbirds, as well as a band called Slinky Vagabond (which included the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock and Blondie’s Clem Burke).

Recently, Slick was reunited with various Bowie alumni (among them pianist Mike Garson, guitarist Mark Plati, bassists Gail Ann Dorsey and Tim Lefebvre) on a new band project, KillerStar, spearheaded by singer Rob Fleming and drummer James Sedge. The group recorded an album’s worth of material remotely, and there are plans to perform live.

Thus far, only two tracks have been released – the faintly Bowie-esque Should’ve Known Better blends classic rock and art rock, while Falling Through bears traces of prime Pink Floyd – but Slick isn’t sure which is which.

“I don’t know titles, really,” he says. “I don’t even know half of the Bowie titles I’m on except the hits. But I had fun doing the KillerStar stuff. It seemed like a good opportunity, and it turned out well. Technology is amazing; I can do all this recording without leaving home.”

I’m going to jump around a bit, but I wanted to start by asking you about Mark Plati. You two worked on some of David Bowie’s early 2000s records, and he produced your album Zig Zag. How do you two bond guitar-wise?

“We get on great. He’s a terrific guitar partner, but then he does everything. He’s a motherfucker of a rhythm player. He doesn’t just get the parts down – he gets the feel. Whenever we played together as a guitar team, if he was playing rhythm, I didn’t have to think about anything. It was great.”

Mike Garson is also on the KillerStar album with you. What do you remember about playing with Mike on Young Americans?

“My recollections are vague. Out of all the stuff I did with David, I have a memory block about Young Americans, which doesn’t make sense because we were far more fucked up when we did Station to Station. On that record, we went in and we stayed there until we finished everything. With Young Americans, we did maybe a week of sessions and then we were back on the road. It wasn’t one continuous job, per se.”

Even with your vague memories of Young Americans, can you speak to the differences in working with producer Tony Visconti on that record versus Bowie’s later albums?

“I might as well just stick my foot in my mouth. One thing about artists like David Bowie – there’s a producer there, but when we worked on parts and stuff, all of that was David. Tony was there and he kept things organized, but the creative ideas, when it came to me, that was David. It was the same way with [producer] Harry Maslin and Station to Station; it came down to David. Most of it was the two of us working my shit out. Like on The Next Day, my favorite track is Valentine’s Day.”

Beautiful song.

“David played that for me in the control room on an acoustic the day we were going to cut it. As soon as I heard it, I said to him, ‘The Kinks’, and he went, ‘Great.’ If you notice, the rhythm guitars on that song are very Waterloo Sunset.”

That song has a memorable riff and a striking solo. 

“Yeah, well, after I said ‘Kinks,’ I started to noodle around on some rhythmic things, and David said, ‘We need an opening riff and some other riffs.’ He would play a couple of notes, and I’d get an idea and develop it. Then I’d wait to see the smile on his face, and I’d think, ‘OK, now we got it.’ It never really took a lot of time.”

You mentioned Station to Station; that title track is so revolutionary, and your end solo is way out-there in terms of experimentation. Do you ever listen to it and go, “What the hell were we doing?”

“[Laughs] I mean, on the occasion when I hear something on the radio or I might play a few tracks, part of me is going, ‘Christ Almighty, we really did pull off some cool stuff together, and it was timely.’ In hindsight, it doesn’t sound that outside the box, but at the time we did it, I guess it was.”

Do you remember which guitars you used on it?

“On Station, I used a Strat on some of the rhythm parts; actually, on the first half, where it’s a little dirge-y. Then when it goes uptempo, I’m using my black Les Paul on the rhythm and also on that solo.”

What about on Stay? That’s another gem on Station to Station.

“The rhythm is the Les Paul, and the solo is the Strat.“

Both of those songs are so freeform; they feel like one-take keepers.

“Stay was pretty much a one taker. On Station, we sat down with a couple of guitars, and we wanted it to have a little bit more structure to it, a little bit more of a melodic thing, which Stay wasn’t – that was just going to be a bluesy kind of free-form solo. But on Station, we wanted something different, so we were just sitting there with a few guitars and coming up with different licks for each little bit.”

Back to Young Americans for a second, was that your first contact with John Lennon?

“It was, but I can’t remember it.”

Because you were high at the time?

“Well, yes, I was. This is so strange because John is my favorite Beatle.”

No memory at all of working with him on Fame?

“No, I can’t remember… So fast-forward to 1980. I was uncharacteristically nervous before Double Fantasy started. I went in early on the first day. I thought if I could grab a cup of coffee and a smoke and just chill out… I got to the studio and nobody was there – except for John. I introduced myself, and his reaction was, ‘Why?’ Because to him, we already knew each other. And I said, ‘Well… I don’t remember.’ 

“The second I said it, I thought, ‘Oh, God, this could go really bad.’ You know – he called me to play on his record, and he is who he is, and I’m telling him that I can’t remember playing with him on a Number 1 record. But he thought it was hysterical. It became kind of a joke during the recordings.”

Do you recall which guitars you used on Double Fantasy?

“I used my ’65 SG Junior a lot. I had a black early ’70s Les Paul Special. Those were the two main ones. There was a Strat on a few of those things, as well as my ’68 Gibson J-45.”

Did John have firm thoughts on guitar sounds or parts? Would he direct you at all?

“None of that came up at first. John didn’t lay out anything like, ‘OK, guys, maybe you should go for this sound or that sound.’ We would learn the songs – me, John and the other guitar player, Hugh McCracken – and as we went, John would say, ‘Slick, why don’t you go a little dirtier?’ Then he’d say to Huey, ‘Why don’t you try this?’ But that would happen as the tracks were being run down.”

This was after a period when John sort of retired for five years. Was he a little rusty on the guitar, or did he have all his skills together?

“All of his guitar chops were there. His vocal chops were there. He was right on the money.”

As you and Hugh worked things out, did you do any jamming with John?

“Absolutely – and it was a gas. Every day John would break into some Fifties or Sixties thing – Eddie Cochran or Buddy Holly. We’d all join in for a while, and then he’d say, ‘OK, back to work.’ Once in a while, Hugh and I would start playing a Beatles song, and John would go, ‘Cut that shit out!’ It was really funny.”

Which Beatles songs would you play?

“There were a few things. One that would really get to him was She’s a Woman, which isn’t a Lennon song. It’s a McCartney song.”

In his last interviews, John said he planned to tour. Did he talk to you about being in the band?

“Oh yeah, it was all set. He started to talk about it during the last couple of weeks of recording, and in the final week he went to everybody individually and asked if we wanted to do it. The obvious answer was yes. [Laughs] At the time, I had just signed to Columbia, and I was supposed to start a record in February of ’81. 

“At that point, John had a plan to do Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey at the same time, but then the plan changed to put out Double Fantasy first, and then we’d finish Milk and Honey and go out on tour.

“I explained my situation to John, that I had a record deal and all that. He got in touch with my management, and they worked everything out with Columbia, who were actually thrilled I’d be going out with Lennon before my record. Sadly, none of that happened.”

Soon after, you were working with Yoko again on Season of Glass with Phil Spector producing.

“Yeah, for the first two weeks. Thank God she got rid of him. It was a nightmare. I mean, he was crazy.”

I’ll do my best deadpan: No, really?

“Yeah. [Laughs] It was the same band from Double Fantasy, but [producer] Jack Douglas wasn’t there. When Yoko said Phil was doing the record, I thought, ‘I’ve worked with a lot of the best producers, and it will be great to work with Phil Spector.’ Well, my tune changed within the first 24 hours of being in a studio with him. He was a fucking nut.”

Did he bring guns to the studio?

“Oh yeah. He had a bodyguard the size of the Empire State Building with him, and he was carrying one of those long barrel Clint Eastwood .44 Magnums in a shoulder holster. I’m going, ‘Dude, this woman’s husband was just killed, and you’re walking around with a gun.’

“The sessions were torturous. I got in the elevator one day with Yoko, and I said, ‘What time is Phil coming in?’ She goes, ‘He’s not going to be here today.’ I asked when he was coming back, and she said, ‘He’s not.’ That was the entire conversation.”

Moving forward, after a while apart, you were pulled back into Bowie’s orbit. Was there a pattern in how and when he called you for various albums and tours?

“I had to learn how David’s mind works. Whatever hit him at a particular time, that’s what he did. I had to go with the flow. I remember I played with him in 2000 – we did Glastonbury and a gig at the BBC Theatre. There were some gigs in New York. 

“A while later, he was talking about touring on the Heathen record. So this is weird – I got a call from Mark Plati, and he said, ‘Before you hear this from somebody else, it looks like David’s got another guitar player, so you won’t be going on the tour.’ I just went, ‘Well, another day with David.’

“I was in New York for the week, so I emailed David and asked if he wanted to have coffee. We were supposed to meet, but then his assistant called and said he wasn’t feeling well, and then she asked me to lunch. I went to meet her, and then we went to Looking Glass Studios, where David was doing some vocals. He wasn’t well; he had a cold or the flu. I said hi and was there for a bit, and finally he said, ‘By the way, what are you doing in April?’ I just laughed and said, ‘Why, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘We’re going out.’ I said, ‘Great.’ That’s just the way it went.”

You’re on a couple of other songs on The Next Day – Dirty Boys and (You Will) Set the World on Fire. How did David arrive at which songs he wanted you to play on?

“On that album, unbeknownst to me, David had been in the studio on and off for a year. I was in touch with the guys playing on it, but nobody could say a word because they signed NDAs. So I’m in Montclair, New Jersey, doing a blues gig. I was with a surgeon friend and he had a Cobra car. He said, ‘Hey, let’s drive the Cobra to the gig.’ Sounded good to me… On the way there, the engine caught fire and the car blew up.”

Nice.

“We’re in this high-end neighborhood, and there’s this car in the middle of the street engulfed in flames. The police and news people came down. Somebody spotted me, and it hit the internet. David saw this and he sent me an email – ‘Are you OK?’ I wrote him back and said I was fine. A couple hours later, I got another email – ‘So how have you been?’ ‘Good, how are you doing?’ 

“We started doing these weird emails throughout the day, and finally I said, 'Are you going somewhere with this?' He goes, 'I’m in the studio making a record, and you need to play on it.' When I got to the studio, I said to him, ‘Did I have to blow up a fucking car?’ [Laughs] You can’t make this shit up.”

Were you surprised when he didn’t call you for Blackstar?

“No. The thing with Blackstar was, none of us knew he was ill. We knew he was ill when the announcement came that he was dead. I spoke to him on the phone the October before he died. I had to ask him some questions because I was doing that Station to Station tour in the U.K. and Japan with Bernard Fowler.

“We had a conversation, but he didn’t mention Blackstar. None of us from the band are on that record, and I can see why. It’s a different kettle of fish from what we would’ve done; it’s kind of an odd jazz thing going on. With David, people were always coming in and out.”

Another guitarist David worked with quite extensively was Reeves Gabrels. You two never played together with David, though, right?

“Not with David, but Reeves did work on my last solo record. We met around 2010 or so, and we discovered we had more than David in common. When I was just starting out, my bands would play in Staten Island, and Reeves would come to watch me. I had no idea about that until we met.”

You two have jammed together?

“Oh, yeah. A while ago, I was in England working with Glen Matlock, and Reeves was around. We had him come in and sit in with us. As weird as he can play, he can play anything. He’s fantastic.” 

You turned down joining Whitesnake because you knew it wouldn’t be a good fit, but have you ever accepted a gig and regretted it?

“There has been that. There have been times when things were slow, and something would come up and I’d do it. But I try to suss that out beforehand so I don’t wind up in something that doesn’t work.”

What kinds of guitars are you playing these days? I assume it’s a lot of your signature guitars…

“Slick Guitars – we’ve got a new batch coming soon. We had one last year [the SL56] with f-holes. It’s really lightweight. The pickups kick ass. They’re made by GFS, but they’re Slick brand pickups. The Tele-style pickups are like old-school Tele models. I play Nash guitars a lot, and I’ve been playing Teles again. 

“I’m back to Fender amps. For the last 10 years, I’ve been playing Teles. A few years ago I went out and used Supros. Then when I got home, I plugged into a Bassman and a Marshall Plexi, and I went, ‘A Telecaster with these amps – that’s the shit.’”

Even though he launched a legion of low-end disciples with his landmark bass playing, Paul McCartney was not the only bass presence in the Beatles' orbit. Shadowing Macca was soft-spoken, German-born Klaus Voormann, whose supple, tasteful P-Bass lines anchored a decade of discs by rock's royalty – including seminal solo works by the other three Beatles.

Born in Berlin in 1942, Voormann studied classical guitar before picking up a bass guitar in the band Eyes, in 1964. While performing in the trio Paddy, Klaus & Gibson, and shortly before replacing Jack Bruce in Manfred Mann, Voormann met and befriended the Beatles in Hamburg. Their relationship eventually led to the band's request that he apply his graphic art skills for the cover of Revolver. 

Calls from John Lennon to play on the Plastic Ono Band's Live Peace in Toronto, and from George Harrison to do The Concert for Bangladesh, meant covering McCartney lines and more – which led to  a permanent slot with Lennon and much session work with Ringo Starr. “Ringo is a fantastic drummer,” Voormann told Bass Player. “He has a great, loose feel and subtly brilliant creativity.”

Voorman can also be heard on such John Lennon classics as Imagine and Instant Karma, but the 1974 goodtime ditty Whatever Gets You Thru the Night from Walls and Bridges is what earned Lennon his first No. 1 solo hit. 

New York's Record Plant was the setting for the summer '74 session. Present for the live track were Lennon and Elton John on vocals, drummer Jim Keltner, saxophonist Bobby Keys, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, and percussionist Arthur Jenkins. Lennon also played guitar, and later overdubbed piano. 

Voormann plucked his sunburst '64 Fender Precision with La Bella flatwounds, recorded both direct and through a mic’d Ampeg B-15, and he had no chart. 

“We started at a slow tempo and it was a happy song, so I thought, I can play a nice hop-along part. But as the session wore on, people were heading to the bathroom and sniffing stuff, and the tempo got to be almost twice as fast! The bass part ended up sounding so busy, even Keltner said to me, ‘Klaus, that's a little much you played there.’

“It was a complete take, but I thought we could have done a better one; you can hear us all getting lost in spots, although I made no fixes.”

The track begins with Keys's sax-solo intro and Voormann's galloping bassline. The first chorus contains some key Voorman concepts: the overall syncopation, the drop down from C to open E, and the climbing figure in bar 11.

In addition to these Jamerson-esque moves, Voormann plays a bluesy C against the A chord in bar 13. “I'm not sure what my inspiration was. I tried a few ideas until John looked at me with his usual little grin that meant, 'Nice – carry on!’ 

Following a second chorus, another sax solo sees some interesting use of chromatic passing tones by Voormann, a device employed in the same sections later on. The quirky form continues in a seemingly whatever-gets-you-through-the-tune way, with a bridge, followed by a sax solo, a chorus, yet another sax solo, a repeat of the bridge, and – what else? – a sax-solo out, at 02:38.

Throughout the tune, Voormann's subtle variations foster the bass part's development. “The essential aspects of the part are the movement from the root either up or down to the 3rd, and the way the melodic lines lead to the next chord or downbeat. It was a real trip laying it down.”

The Beatles’ far-reaching and enduring influence has meant that the pop annals are full of stories of musicians’ near-spiritual encounters with the Fab Four, but Earl Slick’s tale of meeting John Lennon tops most of them – mainly because he has no recollection of it.

In early 1975, Slick had been working on and off with David Bowie and was called into Electric Lady Studios for a session with Lennon on the track that would become Bowie's 1975 hit Fame.

However, in a new interview with Guitar World, Slick – who like Bowie himself was indulging heavily in recreational drug use in the mid-’70s – explains that he has no memory whatsoever of his first contact with the Beatle. 

“It was [our first meeting], but I can't remember it,” says the guitarist – who is, inevitably, then asked if he was high at the time. 

“Well, yes, I was,” continues Slick. “[But] this is so strange because John is my favorite Beatle.”

That in itself is quite the rock ‘n’ roll anecdote, but as Slicks explains, it was somewhat compounded when, five years later, he got the call to work on Lennon’s own record, Double Fantasy…

“Fast-forward to 1980,” says Slick. “I was uncharacteristically nervous before Double Fantasy started. I went in early on the first day. I thought if I could grab a cup of coffee and a smoke and just chill out... I got to the studio and nobody was there – except for John.”

Put on the spot, Slick tells GW that – despite his nerves – he went over and said hello.

“I introduced myself, and his reaction was, ‘Why?’” recalls Slick. “Because to him, we already knew each other. And I said, ‘Well... I don't remember.’ 

“The second I said it, I thought, ‘Oh, God, this could go really bad.’ He called me to play on his record, and he is who he is, and I’m telling him that I can’t remember playing with him on a Number 1 record.”

Fortunately, Lennon took it well. “He thought it was hysterical,” says Slick. “It became kind of a joke during the recordings.’”

Indeed, Lennon was on good form during the sessions. 

“All of his guitar chops were there. His vocal chops were there. He was right on the money,” says the guitarist. 

“Once in a while, Hugh [McCracken, the other guitarist] and I would start playing a Beatles song, and John would go, ‘Cut that shit out!’ It was really funny.”

As 1968 came to a close, the Beatles were for the first time in a state of creative limbo. In late November of that year, they’d released The Beatles, their sprawling double-disc effort popularly known as the White Album. The record showed an impressive creative breadth, yet it revealed the band’s lack of focus with its assortment of disparate songs, many of which were recorded without the participation of the full band. 

While the White Album was an unqualified success at retail, critics were sharply divided in their estimation of it. Nowhere was this more evident than in the New York Times, where it was deemed a “major success” by one reviewer and “boring beyond belief” by another.

The start of a new year is a traditional opportunity to take stock of one’s circumstances and begin anew. Certainly, that’s what the Beatles had in mind when, on January 2, 1969, they convened for the first time since the White Album sessions to begin work on a new project titled 'Get Back.' Dreamed up and orchestrated by Paul McCartney, the effort was designed to get the foursome back on track, working together as a single entity and recording live in the studio, with no (or minimal) overdubs, as when they’d made their first recordings for EMI in 1962. 

The project would entail an album, a film and, somewhere along the way, a live performance, the first since the Beatles quit performing publicly in 1966. Altogether, the sessions might have resulted in something great. Instead, they gave the world Let It Be, an album (and now out-of-print companion film) that showed the Beatles coming apart rather than coming together.

Let It Be has always been an anticlimax to the Beatles’ stellar career. John Lennon himself famously pronounced the album “the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever.” George Harrison called the sessions simply “hell” – quite a statement coming from a spiritual seeker. 

The disc stuck in McCartney’s craw for decades, to the point where, in 2003, he oversaw the remixing and remastering of the project, which resulted in the album Let It Be... Naked.

Indeed, Let It Be documents a great band – arguably the greatest rock band ever – in the process of disintegration. For that reason it is both fascinating and frustrating. “We didn’t realize we were breaking up as it was happening,” McCartney later said of the recording process.

Chronologically speaking, Let It Be isn’t the Beatles’ final set of recordings. That would be Abbey Road, which was recorded the following summer and is widely considered to be one of the finest works in the group’s catalog. But the difficulty of compiling an album from the tense and troubled sessions delayed the release of Let It Be again and again. In the meantime, Abbey Road was released, in September 1969, leaving Let It Be to serve as the Beatles' swan song, a somewhat sorry ending to an otherwise glorious career. 

There is an immense amount to be learned from half-finished or failed songs by great songwriters. And while Let It Be felt disappointing to Beatles fans when the album was first released in May 1970, we now live in an era of bonus tracks and revisionist compilations of previously unreleased studio outtakes and in-concert meanderings by classic rock artists. These days, we’re better equipped to deal with CD releases of uneven or dubious quality than audiences were in 1970.

By today’s standards, Let It Be is actually quite a package. It’s got three bona fide McCartney-penned hits: Get Back, The Long and Winding Road, and the title track, plus the Lennon classic Across the Universe (actually recorded in early 1968, rather than during the Let It Be sessions). 

That’s more than enough for the digital download age, now that the idea of the rock album as art form has all but passed into history. But the rock album was just coming into its own back in 1969, thanks to masterworks like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, and the Who’s Tommy – albums where every song was a winner and/or contributed to a cohesive overall musical vision. 

Then again, 1969 was a funny year. For every triumph like Woodstock, there was a tragedy like Altamont. It was the year the Jimi Hendrix Experience broke up and Brian Jones died. The hippie dream was unraveling.

The Beatles were certainly beat up at the dawn of that year. Six years of intense, unprecedented fame had taken their toll on the group’s sanity. They’d been running a bit rudderless ever since the death of their manager Brian Epstein, in 1967. Tensions between the band members flared up during the making of the White Album, opening a rift between them that had not begun to mend by the time the Let It Be sessions began. 

Apple Corps, the multifaceted enterprise they’d established in 1968, was rapidly going bankrupt, and business differences had bitterly divided the group’s members. Lennon, Harrison and Starr had decided to assign management of the Beatles to New York businessman Allen Klein, while McCartney wanted to go with the New York law firm of Eastman & Eastman, run by the family of his new girlfriend, and soon-to-be-wife, Linda Eastman.

As a backdrop to all of this, the Beatles had simply grown apart as people, as often happens with bands or groups of friends who get together in their teenage years and later forge incompatible adult identities. 

George Harrison had become deeply involved in the spiritual traditions of India. Lennon had gotten into spirituality, radical politics and the avant-garde art world of his new girlfriend, and future wife, Yoko Ono. Indeed, both Lennon and Harrison seemed ready to move on from their teenage band. Starr, increasingly insecure about his role, had quit the Beatles once, briefly, in 1968.

But McCartney desperately wanted to keep the Beatles together. To his way of thinking, the way to do that was to get the group back to its roots in live performance, something they’d abandoned in 1966. He floated the idea that the Beatles should do a concert in front of a live audience that would be filmed and used to create a one-hour television program.

It was a modest proposal at first – a one-hour concert TV show. But things quickly got out of hand as band members dreamed up an increasingly ambitious, expensive and unmanageable series of potential venues for this return to live performance – a Roman amphitheater, an Arabian desert, an ocean liner (or maybe two), a rooftop in India.... And that was just the beginning. 

McCartney’s original plan called for the band to perform a greatest-hits set, but the idea soon emerged to write a whole new set of songs for the project. While it was an excellent idea in theory, the Beatles were pretty well tapped out – nearly all their song ideas had gone into the double-disc White Album. As McCartney quipped during the sessions, “The only thing we haven’t got for every song is the song.”

Nonetheless, on January 2, 1969, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr assembled on a soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios in London to begin rehearsals and songwriting for the project, which had acquired the working title 'Get Back,' signifying the band’s proposed return to their roots. Also on hand was a film crew under the direction of filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg. In the absence of a definitive decision on a concert venue, the plan was to start shooting rehearsals, just to get something in the can.  

McCartney should have known better. He had tried a similar strategy shortly after Epstein’s death with the ill-fated Magical Mystery Tour – get a camera crew, pile onto a bus, start shooting with no script or coherent plan in mind, and see what happens. What happened then was the Beatles’ first-ever critical flop. And that was when the band members were still on relatively good terms.

What happened at Twickenham was considerably grimmer. All the inter-band tensions of the White Album sessions quickly reasserted themselves, now exacerbated by the looming presence of film cameras and crew. As in the past, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had a hard time tolerating Yoko Ono’s presence and very vocal involvement in the musical process, sitting close by Lennon’s side throughout the rehearsals. And McCartney, desperate to pull the whole thing together, became over-assertive. 

He clashed with Harrison in particular. McCartney had always been quite hands-on with the Beatles’ lead guitar work, playing some of the band’s most notable guitar solos, including Taxman and Good Morning, Good Morning, himself.

Harrison had always accepted this with good grace. The youngest member of the Beatles, not to mention the youngest child in a large family, he’d always fit into something of a “kid brother” role, eager to please and deferential to his elders. But on January 10, 1969, Harrison’s carefully cultivated meditative serenity failed him. He lost his cool and quit the Beatles, storming out of Twickenham and calling derisively over his shoulder, “See you ’round the clubs.”

It was all captured on film and would eventually become part of the feature film, Let It Be. Following Harrison’s angry departure, Yoko Ono took up the seat he had been occupying and joined the three remaining Beatles in a free-form noise jam, lending her signature improvised vocal ululations to the proceedings. The tacit implication seemed to be that vocal performances of this nature could fill the space formerly occupied by Harrison’s lead guitar in the Beatles music.

Harrison rejoined the Beatles five days later, on the strict condition that all plans for a live performance be scrapped. The project would now be, in essence, a live-in-the-studio, back-to-the-roots Beatles album, with film cameras on hand to document the rehearsal and recording process. Late in January, the Beatles left Twickenham and adjourned to their new recording studio in the basement of Apple HQ, in London’s Savile Row. But more trouble awaited them there.

Construction of the new studio had been entrusted to Alex Mardas, a friend of the band’s who had been appointed head of Apple Electronics. “Magic Alex,” as Lennon had dubbed him, was certainly a visionary. His ideas for the Beatles’ studio included creating an invisible force field around Ringo’s drums, to control mic leakage, and a 72-track recording system, with a separate speaker for each track, no less. (This was at a time when eight-track was still the standard format, with 16 tracks just on the horizon and seeming quite futuristic.) 

The problem was that Magic Alex lacked the technological know-how to make any of his visions a reality. The Apple studio was just about totally dysfunctional. As the studio’s inaugural Beatles sessions got underway, a hasty request was sent to EMI’s Abbey Road for two four-track mixing consoles to go with Apple’s eight-track tape machine, one of the few pieces of gear in the place that actually did work.

On January 22, the Beatles finally got down to some serious recording at Apple. While their longtime producer George Martin was present at some of the sessions, his role was minimal this time. John Lennon – a man with an insatiable appetite for biting the hand that fed him – had ordered that there was to be none of Martin’s usual “production nonsense” for this project. Let It Be would become the only Beatles record not produced by Martin. 

The results serve as a dramatic testimonial to Martin’s key role in the Beatles and a clear lesson in why a producer is vital to the recording process.

Instead, the band hired Glyn Johns to act strictly as a balance engineer. Johns had previously distinguished himself with his engineering work on the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, and he had served as engineer on Led Zeppelin’s debut album, which was released in January, during the Let It Be sessions. 

Also in the control room was another soon-to-be studio legend, Alan Parsons, who would go on to engineer Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and garner considerable radio airplay with his own Alan Parsons Project.

As session tapes and logs make clear, McCartney was the only Beatle who came to the sessions having completed his songwriting homework. By the third day of recording, the band had assayed Paul’s Two of Us, a tuneful, if somewhat lightweight, track, packed with melodic hooks and one of those picture-perfect McCartney bridges. Soon after, McCartney’s Get Back, Let It Be, and The Long and Winding Road were duly committed to tape.

What’s interesting about McCartney’s big Let It Be compositions is that they all contain references to going back home or moving backward to some more secure time or place. Of the four Beatles, McCartney was the one who most wanted the quartet to “get back” to where they once belonged, to paraphrase a line from his song Get Back.

As for the song Let It Be, it is often taken as one of McCartney’s most overtly religious statements. However, the “Mother Mary” invoked in the song’s lyric is not the Blessed Virgin of Christian tradition but rather McCartney’s own mother, whose name was Mary, and who died when Paul was 14. This loss helped form an early bond between McCartney and Lennon, who also lost his mother at an early age. 

In interviews about the song, McCartney has mentioned that, in times of crises, he would indeed see his mother in dreams or otherwise feel her comforting presence. In this sense, Let It Be is a field day for Freudians. With the band that brought him fame and fortune falling to pieces, McCartney wants to regress to the womb.

The Long and Winding Road, with its repeated refrain, “and still it leads me back,” also expresses a wish to move backward in time, to stability and security, although here the wish is couched in terms of a romantic relationship, the more conventional context for pop song lyrics. 

In a sense, The Long and Winding Road is a gateway to McCartney’s post-Beatles solo career, with its celebration of domesticity – the cozy comforts of home; family, the well-stuffed armchair, and a nice cup of tea. While these themes were always present in McCartney’s songwriting, they move to the foreground post-1970. But on Let It Be, McCartney at times veers too far in this complacent direction. 

The Long and Winding Road, in particular, crosses the thin line dividing sentiment from sentimentality. It’s easy to see McCartney’s Let It Be tracks as the dawn of his “adult” songwriting phase, far from the adolescent vigor of rock and roll.

While McCartney embraces the comfort of fuzzy, warm nostalgia, Lennon aspires to the shock of unsettling and outlandish wordplay. Absurdist nonsense rhymes had been a part of Lennon’s creative modus operandi ever since school days. This prolix urge found an outlet in Lennon’s first two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. In the Beatles’ earlier career, Lennon had learned to place his hyperactive verbal imagination at the service of the boy-meets-girl lyrical conventions of the day.

But, when Bob Dylan and psychedelic drugs liberated rock lyrics from those strictures, around 1966, Lennon’s muse was set free. The result was heard in imagistic Beatles classics like Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am the Walrus. But by the time of the Let It Be sessions, Lennon was relying too much on his gift for spontaneous poetic non-sequiturs. 

Perhaps this is attributable to the influence of Yoko Ono and the Fluxus art movement, with which she was associated, and which held the firm conviction that anything nonlinear is ipso facto profound and arty. That concept seems to be behind Lennon’s lyrics to tracks like Dig a Pony and Dig It.

As nonsense song titles go, there isn’t much distance between I Am the Walrus and Dig a Pony. Both seem like jokey working titles for songs in the early stages of development, but that’s where the similarities end. As for the differences, one might look to George Martin’s inspired orchestral and arrangement work on I Am the Walrus. 

Lacking any cohesive narrative or theme, the song derives its exposition from Martin’s arrangement and production, which highlight the Zen resonance of Lennon’s lyric. But by banning what he called Martin’s “production nonsense” from the Let It Be sessions, Lennon prevented his own songs from receiving the benefit of Martin’s talents.

Dig a Pony certainly could have used the producer’s help. Unlike I Am the Walrus, which coupled imagistic lyrics with some of Lennon’s most inventive music ever, Dig a Pony marries his lyrical abstractions to a fairly standard-issue R&B chord progression. 

Lennon’s muse seems to desert him utterly when the chorus hits, leaving him to serve up the punch line, “All I want is you.” The song’s distinctive riff is certainly strong, with bluesy elements and a suggestive groove, but the Beatles seem unable to rally their forces and perform it with conviction.

And then there’s Dig It, another loosely constructed Lennon track. It isn’t even a song, merely an exercise in free-form glossolalia set to the chorus of Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. It seems like just a rehearsal-hall lark, but the Beatles actually attempted to record it on two consecutive days, suggesting that Lennon had designs on the jam becoming something more cohesive. One version went on a full 12 and a half minutes, of which less than a minute was deemed worthy of release.

Even when they worked together, Lennon and McCartney were unable to conjure up the magic they had in the past. I’ve Got a Feeling makes this evident. McCartney tries to shore up his mere two verses with a riff, a bridge and some of his best Little Richard–style screaming, but the song is desperately crying out for a chorus. 

Rather than deliver the goods, Lennon just turns on his “Dylan goes Fluxus” faucet, free-associating over McCartney’s two overworked verse chords with scarce melodic content: “Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time,” and so on. It’s more than a little reminiscent of his “everybody’s got one” coda on I Am the Walrus, but less than half effective.

What Let It Be makes clear is that McCartney and Lennon, one of the greatest songwriting teams of all time, have become like two ships passing one another on a foggy night, each unaware of the other’s presence, or out of one another’s depth.

“When it came to Let It Be we couldn’t play the game anymore,” Lennon later remarked. “We’d come to the point where it was no longer creating magic, and the camera being in the room with us made us aware that it was a phony situation.”

The unreleased tracks from the sessions bear this out. Unable to get together on the new material, the Beatles delved into the past, jamming on old Fifties rock and roll tunes they’d loved growing up, old music hall songs, and even some of their own earliest material. 

The Let It Be track The One After 909 was one of the first songs Lennon and McCartney wrote together, and the Beatles had even attempted to record it at one of their earliest sessions, in March 1963. It’s telling that this adolescent Lennon/McCartney effort outshines some of the “mature” work on Let It Be.

Certainly, Let It Be didn’t suffer from a lack of musical ideas but rather from the group’s inability to bring many of them to fruition. Among the songs that various Beatles brought into the room were the future Abbey Road classics Oh! Darling and I Want You (She’s So Heavy), as well as Isn’t It a Pity, which would emerge on George Harrison’s solo album All Things Must Pass, and Teddy Boy, which McCartney recorded for his self-titled first solo album. 

Was it George Martin’s absence that kept these songs from reaching full realization in early 1969? Was it the film cameras’ all-too-palpable presence? Or was it simply the wrong time and place?

One composition that does come together quite nicely on Let It Be is Lennon’s R&B inflected Don’t Let Me Down, which was released as the flip-side to the album single Get Back. The song’s stripped-down, soulful style renders it quite amenable to McCartney’s original idea of recording live in the studio. The tempo and chord changes are ideally suited to the scrappy tone of Lennon’s Epiphone Casino, McCartney’s ’63 Hofner bass, and the bright, rhythmic comping of Harrison’s newly acquired rosewood Fender Telecaster. 

There’s also something incredibly poignant in the sight and sound of Lennon and McCartney facing one another amid these troubled sessions and repeatedly singing the line, “Don’t let me down.” It’s a plea that encapsulates the sad mood of their crumbling creative partnership, as well as the feeling of Beatles fans everywhere as they watched their idols chip to pieces and disintegrate.

Don’t Let Me Down is one of the Let It Be tracks greatly enhanced by the presence of American keyboardist Billy Preston, whose Fender Rhodes electric piano work lends authenticity and depth to the song’s soul vibe. Preston had been drafted into the sessions as soon as the project moved from Twickenham to Apple. He’d stopped by Apple to pay a visit to the group and was invited by Harrison to sit in on the sessions.

As Harrison said in interviews, he believed the keyboardist might be just the guy to help the sessions go smoothly and keep the four Beatles on their best behavior, as they often were when guest musicians were on hand. For that matter, if the Beatles were going to be true to the idea of recording with minimal overdubs, Preston could prove a useful addition to the group’s four-piece ensemble.

Preston and the Beatles had first met up on the road back in 1962, when the keyboardist was part of Little Richard’s band, and they’d remained friendly ever since. There was a sense of camaraderie there, as well as plenty of mutual respect. But the 11th-hour debut of this unlikely fifth Beatle, however gifted, is another element that leaves Let It Be feeling strangely like it’s not a “real” Beatles album. 

Part of the reason may be that Preston, rather than the Beatles, provides some of the record’s strongest musical moments, from his electric piano comping and solos on Get Back and Don’t Let Me Down to his show-stopping solo organ break on Let It Be.

As it turned out, Ringo Starr’s budding film career put an end to the difficult sessions at Apple. In early February, filming was scheduled to begin on The Magic Christian, a feature that had Ringo. In need of a neat way to wrap up his documentary filming at Apple, Lindsay-Hogg hit on an idea that would lead to one of the most memorable performances in the history of rock on film: the Beatles’ final live performance on the roof of Apple headquarters on January 30, 1969.

As with many historic events, none of the participants thought it was particularly historic at the time it took place. No one knew it was the “last performance,” nor was it actually a performance in the traditional sense. 

Few members of the “audience” – chance passers by on the streets of London and those lucky enough to be in an adjacent building – could actually see the band. It was just another day’s shooting for a film project in which several members of the Beatles were reluctant participants at best. But there is a kind of ragged glory in the fact that the Beatles – grouchy and on the verge of burn out – could still muster some of the old, live rock and roll chemistry.

While popularly regarded as the Beatles’ farewell, or at least the conclusion of Let It Be, the rooftop performance was followed by another day of recording down in Apple’s basement studio, which yielded the master recordings of McCartney’s two piano ballads, Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road, plus the acoustic guitar–driven Two of Us, which found McCartney playing his Martin D-28 acoustic. And then the Beatles went their separate ways for a while, Ringo to his film project, John and Paul to some of the most significant events in their lives. 

Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman on March 12, 1969. Eight days later, John Lennon married Yoko Ono, and the couple went on to stage their historic “Bed-In for Peace” events in protest of the Vietnam War. Lennon also began to perform and record as a solo artist at the head of the Plastic Ono Band.

Get Back and Don’t Let Me Down were duly mixed and released as a successful single in the U.S. in May (in April for the U.K.). As 1969 wore on, Glyn Johns made two attempts to assemble and mix the Apple session tracks into a complete album, but both efforts were rejected by the Beatles. Meanwhile, by mid-1969, the Beatles were back at Abbey Road with George Martin producing the studio masterpiece that should properly be regarded as their final artistic statement, Abbey Road.

But the Apple sessions and film footage continued to haunt them, even as their business relationship grew increasingly strained and they hurtled toward the final breakup. Let It Be was selected for single release and had been spruced up with a few overdubs, notably a new guitar solo and lead overdubs played by Harrison through a Leslie tone cabinet given to him by Eric Clapton, and vocal harmony overdubs by Paul and Linda McCartney with George Harrison.

As 1970 dawned, plans were in place for Lindsay-Hogg’s footage – edited and released as a feature film, to be titled Let It Be. It was decided to release a soundtrack album, also named Let It Be, to coincide with the film. Once again, the Apple tracks came under review. 

Two songs previously not included in Glyn Johns’ album lineup were added to the proposed sequence. One was George Harrison’s I Me Mine, a song that the guitarist had written in the thick of the Apple sessions as he witnessed the tensions and strife of those long and difficult days.

Sung from the perspective of Harrison’s spiritual practice, the song laments the way in which petty ego identification and materialistic grasping cause endless suffering in the world. While Harrison had presented the song to the band during the Twickenham sessions, no master recording was achieved at that time. But since Harrison, McCartney and Starr are seen rehearsing it in the film (while Lennon and Ono dance apart from the group), it was decided that the song should be included on the soundtrack disc. 

To achieve this, Harrison, McCartney, and Starr knocked together a quick recording of the tune at Abbey Road on January 3, 1970. Lennon was on vacation in Denmark at the time and, as in the film, did not participate.

Also selected for inclusion on the album was Lennon’s Across the Universe, a song that he had recorded back in February 1968, with high harmony vocals from two teenage female Beatles fans picked at random from the crowd outside of Abbey Road. 

Across the Universe dates from a time when Lennon was also investigating Indian spirituality, and he included the mantra “Jai Guru Deva” in the song’s lyric. While the verses contain some of Lennon’s most lovely lyrical imagery, he was never completely happy with the composition, which was first released on a benefit album for the World Wildlife Fund in late 1969.

“The original track was a real piece of shit,” Lennon later recalled. “I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir we got fans from outside. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.”

To redeem this and other tracks, Lennon and Harrison, in concert with Allen Klein, enlisted legendary American record producer Phil Spector to do some emergency editing, overdubbing and remixing. As architect of the mid-Sixties “girl group” sound, Spector had pioneered the idea of the three-minute pop single as “little teenage symphony,” which is to say, a bona fide work of art. 

He was one of the first producers to lavish an almost obsessive level of production attention onto rock and roll and pop singles, creating his much-vaunted “Wall of Sound” on classic hits by the Ronettes, Righteous Brothers, Ike & Tina Turner, and countless others.

Lennon was a great admirer of Spector’s productions. The producer could be difficult, confrontational and even violent. (He is currently serving a prison sentence for murder.) But Lennon, having come from a working-class Liverpool background and been handy with his fists as a youth, could deal with Spector’s brand of aggression. The two men had previously worked together on the Plastic Ono Band single Instant Karma and struck up a relationship. Spector would go on to produce several subsequent Lennon solo records.

There’s no denying that Spector appreciably beefed up Across the Universe, flanging Lennon’s acoustic guitar track for a thicker sound and adding massive orchestral overdubs to the track. The ascending cello line that trails the “Jai Guru Deva” refrain is particularly reminiscent of George Martin. 

The 14-voice choir parts may have been suggested by Lennon’s impulse to use a choir on the original track. But Spector must have liked the choir, because he used it on the two other Let It Be tracks that received the full orchestra treatment: I Me Mine and The Long and Winding Road.

It should be clarified that Spector did not write the orchestral arrangements for any of these recordings. Brian Rogers did the Lennon song, while Richard Hewson arranged and conducted on the Harrison and McCartney tracks. But the lavish sensibility behind the orchestrations is pure Spector. 

McCartney was incensed at what Spector did to The Long and Winding Road. The producer’s recasting of the track was even mentioned in the legal documents that made the Beatles’ dissolution official. But arguably, all that Spector did was to amplify the song’s inherent sentimentality. And who’s to say how much schmaltz is too much?

Let It Be, the album and film, came out in May 1970, just about a month after McCartney’s April declaration that he had left the Beatles. Viewed in that context, both releases carried much emotional resonance at the time. 

Interest in the disc was revived in 2003 when McCartney released the digitally remixed and remastered Let It Be...Naked, excising all traces of Spector. Stripped of all its overdubs, the album may be more to McCartney’s original concept. But with or without Spector’s gloss, the sound that comes through loud and clear is of the world’s greatest rock and roll group breaking up.

• This feature was originally published in the June 2010 issue of Guitar World. 11 years later, the release of the Peter Jackson documentary, Get Back, would shine new light on the genesis of what would become the Beatles' final release as a band, Let It Be.

When it comes to guitar auctions, artist connections rule. The world’s most expensive electric guitars and acoustic guitars have been refinished, refretted, and beaten up, but thanks to their rock star provenance they’re worth more than any mint condition 1959 Gibson Les Paul.

The list that follows, containing the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction, is all the evidence you need to prove such a theory. The list itself looked very different, up until March 2026, when the greatest guitar auction in history took place in New York.

The Jim Irsay Collection auction – hosted by Christie's and comprising some of the late collector's storied possessions – shattered records, smashed estimates, and obliterated expectations, completely flipping the list of the most expensive guitars of all time on its head.

Private sale prices are notoriously hard to confirm. As a result, we’ve left out Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock Stratocaster (reportedly sold for $1.3m in 1993 to Microsoft’s Paul Allen) and the infamous Peter Green/Gary Moore Les Paul, for which Kirk Hammett allegedly paid $2 million in 2014.

Everything else goes, though, so read on to find out which instruments make it into the list of the most expensive guitars to go under the hammer.

22. Eric Clapton's "Blackie" Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2004
Price: $959,000

"Blackie" set a world record auction price at the time of sale, but now barely scrapes into the top 11.

When Clapton fancied a Fender Stratocaster in 1970, he bought the entire stock from Nashville’s Sho-Bud. He gave three to his friends George Harrison, Pete Townshend, and Steve Winwood, and assembled his ideal Strat from the rest: a ’56 body, ’57 neck, and a third guitar’s pickups (two '50s models and one 1970 grey bottom).

Clapton played it almost exclusively from 1974 to 1985. By the end, the neck was so worn that the low E string hung off the edge, which must be why it didn’t quite reach the one-million mark.

21. Bob Dylan's 1964 Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2013
Price: $965,000

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan went electric, toting this 1964 Stratocaster, which he subsequently left on a private plane. Pilot Vic Quinto picked it up, and it stayed with his family for nearly 50 years.

Auction catalog photos show it in excellent condition for a gigged guitar, with the Three-Tone Sunburst largely free of dings or fading. As an example of a pre-CBS Stratocaster, this was a fine specimen even before you consider the history.

With original strap and case included, it was expected to fetch up to $500k. In the event, it stole "Blackie"’s crown.

20. Rory Gallagher's 1961 Fender Stratocaster

Sold: London, 2024
Price: $1,160,000

The announcement that Rory Gallagher's family would be selling his legendary 1961 Fender Stratocaster – along with a load of his other gear – quite literally sparked international interest. Members of the Irish government endorsed a grassroots fundraising effort to keep the guitar in the late blues rock great's native country of Ireland. Joe Bonamassa endorsed the idea.

Owing to the significance of this particular Strat (legend has it it was actually the first to ever reach Irish soil), no one will be surprised to see it make this list. Gallagher wielded this heavily aged guitar throughout the course of his career, and used it to cement himself as one of the all-time greats of guitar music.

When the auction rolled around in October 2024, the hammer eventually went down at £700,000 (£889,400 with the added buyer's premium), which equates to $1.26 million. Fortunately for those who wished to see the Strat stay in Ireland, the successful bidder donated it to a national museum.

19. Duane Allman's 1957 Gibson Les Paul

Sold: Dallas, 2019
Price: $1,250,000

Guitar nerds may be surprised that the most expensive Les Paul is not in fact a Burst, but this 1957 Goldtop. It was used on first two Allman Brothers albums, as well as Derek & the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, before Duane traded it for a sunburst model. Allman insisted on keeping the pickups, so this guitar now has the humbuckers from the Burst.

A subsequent owner refinished it badly, before Tom Murphy restored it to glory. Former owner Scot Lamar frequently loaned it out, so you’ve seen it on stage with the likes of Billy Gibbons, Kirk Hammett, and Derek Trucks.

18. John Lennon's 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $1,270,000

One of three John Lennon guitars on this list, his Gretsch 6120 Chat Atkins was used during the recording sessions of Paperback Writer and Rain. The 1963 model also sold for $1,270,000 – a figure justified by the influence it had during one of the Beatles’ most innovative and creative periods in the lead up to Revolver.

It stayed in Lennon’s home studio until late 1967, when he gifted it to his younger cousin. By then, it had already been etched into Beatles lore.

17. John Lennon's 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $1,270,000

A few John Lennon guitars went under the hammer for the Jim Irsay Collection auction in March 2026, and while none pipped the Framus or the J160E, his stage-played Rickenbacker– used during the Beatles Christmas shows in 1964 and 1965 – crept into the top 20 when it sold for $1,270,000.

Lennon and Ricks go hand in hand, hence the price of this one. Notably, this one has traditional f-holes instead of the usual Rickenbacker ‘slash’ soundholes. In 1968, it was gifted to Ringo Starr. So, a double-whammy for Beatles fans.

16. Kurt Cobain’s 1993 Fender Mustang “Sky Stang I”

Sold: Nashville
Price: $1,587,500

March 1, 1994 marked the date of Nirvana’s final show with Kurt Cobain – and the Sky Stang I featured heavily in that performance, having become the frontman’s go-to guitar for the majority of the band’s In Utero tour dates.

The instrument was one of 10 ordered by Cobain in July 1993. It was built in Japan at the iconic Fujigen factory by custom luthier Scott Zimmerman.

Why Japan? Well, at that point, Fender’s US custom shop did not produce left-handed models, so the task fell to Zimmerman – the man behind the necks on Cobain’s first Jagstang builds.

Following Cobain’s death, the Sky Stang I passed to his brother Chad Cobain before eventually going to auction in late 2023. The guitar was purchased by Japan-based businessman Mitsuru Sato, so after 30 years abroad, it seems the instrument headed home.

15. David Gilmour's 1954 Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2019
Price: $1,815,000

Here’s a guitar that would have been collectible even without the Pink Floyd provenance. Its serial number, #0001, makes it confusingly not the very first Strat (that was #0100) but nevertheless among the first pre-production Strats given to Fender endorsees.

The first owner was country star Rex Gallion, and en route to Gilmour it was owned by Seymour Duncan. The fact that it was also used to record the Nile Rodgers-esque rhythm parts on Another Brick in the Wall was just a bonus. Auctioneer Christie’s guide price of $100-150k proved unnecessarily pessimistic.

14. Jerry Garcia's "Wolf"

Sold: New York, 2017
Price: $1,900,000

The only guitar here not built by a major manufacturer, the "Wolf" was luthier Doug Irwin’s bespoke creation for the Grateful Dead guitarist. Using laminated maple and purpleheart – an incredibly stiff South American wood – Irwin invented an instrument with a new shape, hardware, and controls.

An ingenious plate system allowed pickup systems to be dropped in and out, while two outputs let Garcia run his effects loop separately and switch it from the guitar. Iconic to Deadheads, the "Wolf" was the flagship of a Grateful Dead auction that raised $3.2 million for civil rights charity, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

13. George Harrison's Gibson SG Standard

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $2,271,000

A new entry into the list as of March 2026, George Harrison joined John Lennon in the annals of expensive guitar history when his 1964 SG Standard sold for $2,271,000 as part of the Jim Irsay Collection auction.

It’s a lot of money for an SG Standard, of course, but the Fab Four connection here is the key. It was used extensively by the Beatle both on stage and in the studio between 1966 and 1968, making it one of Harrison’s longest-serving instruments. It was played during the sessions of both the White Album and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and was also used by Lennon during the making of Hey Bulldog in 1968.

Christie’s said “it’s impossibly rare for such a well-documented and extensively used Beatles guitar to come to auction”.

12. David Gilmour's Martin D-35

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $2,393,000

Another Gilmour record-breaker, the Martin D-35 that he used to record Wish You Were Here was sold for $2,393,000 – a sizable increase from the mere $1,095,000 it sold for in 2019.

In 2003, David Gilmour told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs his Martin D-35 was the one luxury item he’d want if he were stranded at sea. “It’s the best guitar I own,” he said. “It’s the guitar that’s always by my side. I’ve written just about every piece of music using that guitar. My ideas come through that guitar.”

Most prominently heard on Wish You Were Here, it was used on every Pink Floyd album from Dark Side of the Moon (1973) to The Final Cut (1983). The 1969 D-35 proved not to be entirely indispensable, however, as Gilmour auctioned it to benefit the charity ClimateEarth.

11. John Lennon's Gibson J160E

Sold: Los Angeles, 2015
Price: $2,410,000

Whacking a pickup in a standard acoustic guitar was a Gibson masterstroke, giving rock ’n’ rollers exactly what they needed to be heard. John Lennon used this particular guitar to write hits like I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and to record most acoustic moments on Beatles songs from 1962-1963.

The acoustic was even on the Beatles’ first US number one, Love Me Do, but was stolen at a Christmas concert in 1963. Lennon replaced it and carried on using J-160Es for the rest of the Beatles’ career. Given its significance to rock history, it’s hardly surprising that it fetched a record price when it re-emerged in 2015.

10. Reach Out to Asia Fender Stratocaster

Sold: Qatar, 2005
Price: $2,700,000

Unique here in that it was never owned by a superstar, the Reach Out to Asia Strat was auctioned for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

It was a humble Mexican Standard Stratocaster bearing the signatures of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend, Mark Knopfler, Ray Davies, Liam Gallagher, Ronnie Wood, Tony Iommi, Angus and Malcolm Young, Paul McCartney, Sting, Ritchie Blackmore, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams.

New made-in-Mexico Strats sold for around $350 in 2005, making this objectively the most overpriced axe of all time.

9. Eddie Van Halen's ‘Kramer Ad’ guitar

Sold: New York, 2025
Price: $2,734,000

Built in the early 1980s, this was one of the very first Kramer guitars that Eddie Van Halen built and used, and was famously featured in Van Halen’s “It’s very simply the best guitar you can buy today” Kramer ad.

The Kramer was also one of the first builds the brand and Van Halen collaborated on together, and was modeled after Van Halen’s iconic Frankenstein, carrying over the black/red/white striped colorway from the OG six-string.

It was used on stage during a number of occasions across 1982 and 1983, in locations such as Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela.

8. John Lennon's Help! 12-string Framus Hootenanny

Sold: New York, 2024
Price: $2,857,500

In April 2024, at a special preview event shrouded in mystery, Julien’s announced its discovery of John Lennon’s 12-string Framus Hootenanny – a hugely influential Beatles instrument that was used extensively during the Help! recording sessions in the ‘60s.

Used to record the film of the same name – and seen during a performance of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away – the guitar was found in the back of an attic, having been missing for 50 years. Its saviors were under no assumption: the Framus would be making headlines the world over, and could even set a new world record for guitar auctions.

While that didn’t quite happen, it did comfortably make it onto this list, smashing its absurdly conservative estimate of $800,000 and selling for $2,857,500 in May 2024. It also set a record for the most expensive Beatles guitar to sell at auction, beating out Lennon’s $2.4 million Gibson J-160E.

7. Eric Clapton’s 1964 ‘The Fool’ Gibson SG

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $3,003,000

Three years after it sold for just over $1,000,000 in 2023, Clapton’s ‘The Fool’ SG entered the top 10 in March 2026 when it re-sold at auction for $3,003,000. It ticks a lot of boxes as far as historical, musical and cultural significance is concerned.

The Fool became Slowhand’s go-to guitar in his post-Bluesbreaker days while he and his Cream bandmates were piecing together the riff-orientated Disraeli Gears. It became the face of the psychedelic era, thanks to its wild artwork, and helped concoct Clapton’s heralded ‘woman tone’, which underpinned hits such as Sunshine of Your Love.

Another headline-stealer from the Jim Irsay Collection auction, it broke the record for the most expensive Gibson guitar of all time.

6. Eddie Van Halen's Hot For Teacher Kramer

Sold: New York, 2023
Price: $3,932,000

There’s been no shortage of Eddie Van Halen guitar auctions over the past few years, but when news broke that the late guitar legend’s Hot For Teacher Kramer was going under the hammer… well, it was apparent that this case was different from all the others, and that the striped Kramer in question would be rubbing shoulders with some of the six-strings on this prestigious list.

Exceeding its auction estimate by nearly $1,000,000, the Paul Unkert-built beauty was reportedly one of Van Halen’s primary instruments in 1983 and 1984, and most notably starred in the iconic Hot For Teacher music video. Owing to this history, it sold for just shy of the four million dollar mark in early 2023.

Few guitars of this caliber from the Van Halen camp are currently out in the wild, and we doubt those of greater significance will ever hit the auction block. As such, this might just be the most expensive Van Halen guitar that will ever sell at auction.

5. Eric Clapton's MTV Unplugged Martin 000-42

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $4,101,000

For a long time, Cobain’s D-18E was the only acoustic in the top 10 of this list. Now, thanks to Clapton’s record-breaking Martin 000-42, it’s got company. The 1939 acoustic famously featured on that iconic MTV Unplugged performance, and when it sold for $4,101,000 in 2026, it became the most expensive Slowhand guitar to ever go under the hammer.

It was expected to sell for up to $1,200,000 but, of course, it smashed that ceiling. This Martin can be seen on the MTV Unplugged cover, and was one of four guitars used for that concert. With this, Clapton played eight of the 17 songs, including Layla, Before You Accuse Me, and Old Love.

4. Kurt Cobain's Martin D-18E

Sold: Los Angeles, 2020
Price: $6,010,000

In summer 2020, there wasn’t much to do apart from play guitar and bid on online auctions, which might be why Kurt’s guitar so comprehensively smashed all records.

The D-18E was used for Nirvana’s immortal MTV Unplugged set, including the goosebump-raising cover of Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. Because that gig was televised and universally lauded, this iconic instrument is indelibly associated with Kurt Cobain.

Rode Microphones owner Peter Freedman was the man with the dented wallet after the auction. He has promised to exhibit the guitar on a world tour, although Covid-19 has thus far scuppered that plan.

3. Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $6,907,000

It wasn’t that long ago that Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang went under the hammer for $4,550,000. At the time, it was a big deal. It was the second most expensive guitar to be sold at auction in 2022.

Amazingly, it’s been demoted a spot despite the fact it’s actually gone up in value, with the Mustang in question – which helped catapult Nirvana into the stratosphere and cement Smells Like Teen Spirit as a grunge anthem – selling for $6,907,000. And, yes, it was another Jim Irsay Collection auction sale.

Known for its starring role in the Smells Like Teen Spirit music video – which in turn played a vital part in launching Nirvana’s popularity straight into the stratosphere – the Mustang’s near-mythical appearance has now been viewed on YouTube almost 1.5 billion times, after it made its debut on MTV’s 120 Minutes on September 29, 1991.

2. Jerry Garcia Tiger

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $11,560,000

Somewhere further down this list, you’ll see Jerry Garcia’s Wolf guitar, which sold in 2017 for just shy of $2,000,000. Well, step aside, dear Wolf, because there’s another Garcia guitar in town now – the equally iconic Tiger, which fetched $11,560,000 at the Jim Irsay Collection auction in 2026.

It’s now one of two guitars not made by a major manufacturer on this list (something that no doubt heightens its appeal and prestige) and we’re not surprised to see yet another Garcia guitar get so much love. It was expected to sell for $2,000,000. It sold for a lot more.

1. David Gilmour's Black Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $14,550,000

When it sold in 2019 for nearly $4,000,000, David Gilmour’s legendary Black Strat became the fourth most expensive guitar ever sold at auction. When the Jim Irsay Collection auction swung around in March 2026, though, it was launched all the way to the top spot – selling for a staggering, record-shattering $14,550,000.

That’s a value increase of more than $10,000,000. Understandably, it holds a fair few records now. It’s the most expensive guitar ever. It’s the most expensive Fender Stratocaster ever. It’s the most expensive David Gilmour guitar ever. It is, quite frankly, an assortment of records that will probably never be broken.

Gilmour himself said he couldn’t tell the difference between the Black Strat and his signature model. But hey, you’re not paying $14,550,000 for just any ol’ Strat. It’s the Gilmour Strat, the one that played the Comfortably Numb solo. Its upper pre-auction estimate of $4,000,000 looks very silly now.

Just shy of 60 years after they forever altered the landscape of popular music with their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and 43 years after the tragic murder of John Lennon, a new song from The Beatles – said to definitively be the last – has been released.

The song, Now and Then, was written by Lennon, and recorded (in demo form) at his apartment in New York City. As part of The Beatles Anthology project, the surviving Beatles – Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr – added new instrumental and vocal parts to Lennon's demo. 

Now and Then was one of three Lennon demos the remaining Beatles worked on – the other two being Free as a Bird and Real Love. Though the latter two were released on the band's mid-'90s-era Anthology 1 and Anthology 2 albums, respectively, the technological limitations of the day prevented Now and Then from being completed to the band's satisfaction.

Now though, Now and Then is finally seeing the light of day. Featuring newly recorded contributions from McCartney and Starr, and guitar work from the late Harrison, the song can be streamed below.

In a recent statement, McCartney said of recording Now and Then, “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear. It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. 

“In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.“ 

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us,“ added Starr. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.“ 

Guitar World magazine Editor-in-Chief Damian Fanelli has been playing George, John and Paul's guitar parts for the past 39 years with his New York City-based band, the Blue Meanies. Aside from being regular performers at the annual Abbey Road on the River festival in Jeffersonville, Indiana, the Blue Meanies recently played the Beatlesfestivalen in Bergen, Norway, where they shared the bill with former Beatles drummer Pete Best. 

Of Now and Then, Fanelli said, “I think it’s great – thumping and dreamy with an updated nod to that very specific psychedelic sound they helped create all those years ago. The lyrics are definitely weak, but hey, the whole thing is based on an incomplete demo recording.

“Think about the song’s title and how it relates to the band members; we’re hearing John in his 30s, George in his 50s, Paul and Ringo in their 80s and backing vocals from when these guys were in their 20s; it's like this weird dream – but then you wake up and say, 'Wait, this actually happened?!' 

“Hats off to Paul for making Now and Then his white whale, for being its Dr. Frankenstein and bringing it back to life with deluxe parts. Speaking of which, I appreciate Paul’s slide solo, which fills out the song nicely while also honoring George, one of the greatest slide players of all time. 

“If you’re gonna put a bow on your band’s legacy – 53 years after breaking up and after two members have passed away – this is a nice way to do it.“

Since cracking the New York studio scene in the early 1970s, Tony Levin has enjoyed one of the most enviable existences in bassdom. He's played on countless records, he's a core member of the envelope-pushing King Crimson, and he’s worked closely with Peter Gabriel since 1977. By 1980 his legacy had grown to include sessions for Pink Floyd, Yes, Paul Simon, and John Lennon, who had been writing for his Double Fantasy album.

The former Beatle had already enlisted producer Jack Douglass and a studio band that included guitarists Hugh McCracken and Earl Slick, keyboardist George Small, and drummer Andy Newmark, when he learned that bassist Willie Weeks was unable to make the session – and that the band wanted Levin to replace him at New York’s Hit Factory. 

“We got the bass player by default,” said Lennon. “Because Willie Weeks was supposed to do it. It turned out he was doing a George Harrison session and he’d booked for that a long time ago. Then we found Tony Levin, and I’m thankful for that now. He absolutely would just pick it up and play."

Speaking to Bass Player in 2014, Levin was a little unsure how he got called for the session. “I had worked before with Jack Douglas, and done many albums with Andy Newmark as a rhythm section, and even more albums with Hugh McCracken. I assumed one of them had recommended me for the session with John, but I still don’t know, really."

By 1980 Lennon was a full-time New Yorker, which Levin was totally comfortable with. “John came right up and said hi, and in a very straightforward, New York way, his first words to me were, ‘They tell me you’re good. Just don’t play too many notes.’ I replied, ‘No problem.’ He was thinking, ‘Oh, he must be one of those fast guys and I don’t want him ruining my music. He didn’t know it, but I actually don’t play too many notes. So that was the end of the discussion.”

Studded with hit songs – from I’m Losing You to I Don’t Wanna Face it – Double Fantasy showcased the impeccable bass guitar playing that had made Levin’s name as a top studio player. “John was very happy with my bass parts and completely left me to it,” said Levin. “The way he worked, we would spend a few hours just writing the song down, which is more than enough time to come up with a part you like. The band would do it and that would be the take. With someone like him, who gives the bass player such a good sense of what the song is about, it’s very easy to come up with an appropriate bass part.”

As a way of avoiding major publicity, the studio personnel were under strict orders to keep the sessions from the press. "We were asked not to tell anyone who we were working for, a situation I found quite silly. On the third day I got into a taxi and told the driver to let me off at 48th Street and 9th Avenue; he said, ‘Oh, that’s near the studio where John Lennon is recording.’ How did he know? He had heard it on the radio!”

The studio sessions lasted about two weeks, and included songs for what would become Lennon’s follow-up posthumous release, Milk & Honey. “There was a talk of doing a world tour afterward,” said Levin. “But that never happened, sadly.” On the evening of December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot dead in the archway of the Dakota. 

Levin, Earl Slick and Andy Newmark did finally take to the stage together for a headline show at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall for the 2022 Beatleweek Festival, which Levin documented via his YouTube channel.

Double Fantasy is available to buy and stream.

For his last studio album, Ozzy Osbourne assembled a who’s who of electric guitar heroes, calling upon the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Zakk Wylde and many more for one of 2022’s biggest blockbuster records.

If he were forced to refine his six-string selection, though – as he was made to do in the new issue of Metal Hammer – which guitarists would the Prince of Darkness choose for his dream supergroup?

That was the question put to Osbourne by Metal Hammer Guest Editors Jack Black and Kyle Gass, who quizzed the Black Sabbath icon over who – alive or dead – he would want to collaborate with.

“I’d love to do something with John Lennon or Hendrix," he answered. “I’d love to do something with Randy Rhoads again. I’d love Paul McCartney to play on one of my albums. He’s a great bass player.”

As for drums, the sticks were given to Osbourne’s current drummer Tommy Clufetos, who has been working with the vocalist since 2010.

We know we’re not the only ones thinking that a supergroup comprising Osbourne, Hendrix, Lennon, Rhoads, McCartney and Clufetos would have made for one ridiculous link-up, not least in part because of the eclectic styles each party would bring.

Hendrix’s blues-y pentatonic licks and Rhoads’ virtuosic solos over a Beatles-based backline delivered by Lennon’s pop progressions and McCartney’s melodic low-end lines? All underneath Osbourne’s mountainous metal vocals?! You’d have to have a wild imagination to even comprehend what that would sound like.

Elsewhere in his conversation with Black and Gass, Osbourne gave further credit to the Beatles by name dropping She Loves You as the song that inspired him to pursue a career in music.

“The song that made me decide what I want to do in my life was She Loves You by The Beatles," Osbourne reflected. “I had this blue transistor radio – I remember it like it was yesterday – and I went, ‘Fuck... what is this?’ It was so profound! 

“They just fired my imagination. I wanted to be a Beatle. I wanted Paul McCartney to marry my sister! My bedroom wall was covered in fucking Beatles pictures.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the Tenacious D takeover edition of Metal Hammer.

Most Beatles fans who play guitar obsess over the electric guitars and guitar amps that the band members played through various stages of their career. 

However, with the exception of the Gibson J-160E acoustic-electrics that were seen throughout the entirety of the band’s existence, the acoustic guitars that they played don’t get as much attention, even though they played equally important roles in the acoustic songs they recorded, as well as those where acoustic and electric instruments were blended together.

George Harrison and John Lennon purchased a pair of brand-new Gibson J-160E guitars in 1962, and Lennon replaced his with a new 1964 model after his was stolen. 

Although a J-160E doesn’t have the most stellar acoustic tone (the Beatles used theirs amplified as often as they recorded it acoustically), it managed to provide a good driving rhythm texture behind the band’s electric tones. 

By 1964, the band had greatly expanded their acoustic guitar arsenal, with Lennon having a Ramirez 1A nylon-string classical and Framus Hootenanny 12-string, Harrison also owning a Ramirez classical, and Paul McCartney acquiring an Epiphone Texan FT79. These guitars were immediately put to good use on songs like And I Love Her, Norwegian Wood and Yesterday. 

In 1968, the Beatles expanded their acoustic collection further, with Lennon and McCartney each obtaining Martin D-28 dreadnoughts (Lennon soon stripped the finish off of his) and Harrison buying a brand-new Gibson J-200. 

These guitars appear on the White Album, with Harrison’s J-200 provided the driving rhythmic backbone to While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and McCartney’s D-28 playing a prominent role on Blackbird and Mother Nature’s Son. Harrison played his J-200 often until the band’s final days, using it to record Here Comes the Sun.

Many guitar nerds note that perhaps the most important detail of replicating the Beatles’ tones after their guitars and amps is the type of strings that they used. It is generally believed that Harrison and Lennon used flatwound electric guitar strings in the early years up until late 1965, just after the release of Rubber Soul. After that, from Revolver and beyond, they apparently switched to roundwound strings.

This argument seems to make sense from both sonic and historical perspectives. The more balanced and less brilliant tone of flatwounds certainly explains why some critical listeners today are under the mistaken impression that George didn’t play an electric 12-string on Ticket to Ride (George Martin’s handwritten notes indicate that Harrison did indeed use his Rickenbacker 360/12) since most guitarists today are used to the sound of electric 12-strings with roundwounds. 

A 12-string electric with flatwounds sounds more blended and even. Heavy-gauge flatwound strings (like Pyramid .012-.052) are also a critical element of Lennon’s Rickenbacker 325 Capri setup. Because the 325 has a short 20-inch scale length, modern lighter gauge slinky strings are too floppy and loose.

• How the Beatles crafted the guitar and bass tones that forever changed the sound of rock music

The Beatles’ shift to roundwound strings likely had more to do with the new instruments the band acquired than any personal preferences. Most electric guitars shipped with flatwound strings until the mid-’60s, so when John and George bought their new Epiphone Casinos, George bought his 1964 Gibson SG and McCartney acquired his 1964 Fender Esquire, these guitars probably came from the factory with roundwounds installed. 

Back in those wild and wooly days before guitar magazines existed, no one knew what brand of strings the Beatles preferred, and once when asked, McCartney coyly responded that he liked “long shiny ones”. 

After the fact, it’s been determined that the Beatles probably used Pyramid flatwounds in the early years and Gibson Sonomatic and Rotosounds during the latter part of the band’s career. Generally, they used heavy-gauge sets with .012 or .011 high E strings, although they may have used lighter gauges starting in 1968 or ’69.

For more on the Fab Four’s guitar gear, check out our guide to how the Beatles crafted the guitar and bass tones that forever changed the sound of rock music.

If you want to imitate the sound of the Beatles by acquiring the exact same models and vintages of gear that they used, good luck.

The guitar and amp models the Beatles played are some of the most collectible and expensive items on the vintage market today, especially items that match the same exact years, like their 1962 and ’64 Gibson J-160E acoustic-electrics, 1957 Gretsch Duo Jet, or a 1963 Rickenbacker 325.

Check our guide to how the Beatles crafted the guitar and bass tones that forever changed the sound of rock music for more on those exact models.

Similarly, vintage Vox tube amps from the ’60s fetch a pretty penny, and the hybrid solid-state/tube Vox models like the 7120 and UL730 are exceedingly rare, although fortunately the silverface Fender amps they used in the latter years are still somewhat reasonably priced.

Manufacturers often produce limited reproductions of the guitars the Beatles played, but usually these are expensive collector’s items aimed at boomers with large bank accounts. Occasionally an affordable run of instruments will emerge, particularly around notable anniversaries, but these items also get snatched up quickly.

With the exception of the rare Vox hybrid amps and most Rickenbacker guitars and basses (which have highly protected copyrights), the sound of many of the Beatles rigs can be replicated with affordable, readily available gear. We’ve put together a list of our favorite choices that won’t break the bank. While not everything will meet the needs of players in Beatles tribute bands who need to accurately look the part, these instruments certainly sound the part.

Electric guitars

Original: Rickenbacker 325 CapriAlternative: Squier Mini Stratocaster

John Lennon’s 1958, 1963 and 1964 Rickenbacker 325 Capri electric guitars (the latter actually being a Rose-Morris 1996 variant) are iconic instruments of the early days of Beatlemania. 

Because Rickenbacker vigorously guards copyrights and its instruments are so unique and distinctive, the best option for purists is to dig deep into their pocketbooks and buy an actual Ric. 

With its short 22-inch scale (two inches longer than the 325’s scale) and three single-coil pickups, the Squier Mini Stratocaster is about as close as one can come on a budget. Use heavy-gauge flatwound strings.

Original: 1957 Gretsch 6128 Duo JetAlternative: Gretsch G5230T Electromatic Jet

Harrison’s Duo Jet had a pair of DeArmond Dynasonic single coils, so to replicate his twang you’ll want to replace the Electromatic’s humbuckers with Dynasonic-inspired pickups like the TV Jones T-Armond.

Original: 1963 Gretsch 6122 Country Gentleman / c. 1962-63 Gretsch 6119 TennesseanAlternative: Gretsch G5420T Electromatic Classic Hollowbody

Although many Beatles enthusiasts consider the Gretsch Country Gentleman an essential Beatlemania guitar because it appeared in many live shows, television broadcasts and the film A Hard Day’s Night, George Harrison actually used his Gretsch Tennessean hollowbody more often in the studio. 

The Gretsch G5420T Electromatic Classic Hollowbody is a great alternative (particularly the walnut stain finish version), but like the Electromatic Jet, it has humbuckers. TV Jones TV-HT replacement pickups sound very close to the Tennessean’s original HiLo’Tron single coils.

Original: 1961 Fender StratocasterAlternative: Fender Vintera ’60s Strat

The Vintera 60s Strat has the closest vibe to a vintage ’60s Strat that you can buy for just over a grand.

Original: Epiphone E230TD/TDV CasinoAlternative: Epiphone Casino

Played by Harrison, Lennon and McCartney on dozens of songs, an Epiphone Casino is a must-have for any guitarist who wants to duplicate Beatles guitar tones. Fortunately, Epiphone offers an affordable import Casino model that perfectly captures authentic Beatles tones and vibe.

Original: 1963/65 Rickenbacker 360/12Alternative: Reverend Airwave 12-string

Like the Rickenbacker 325, there really is no substitute for a Rickenbacker 360/12. However, the Reverend Airwave electric 12-string guitar  ticks a lot of the right boxes, including its semi-hollow construction, single-coil pickups and 24.75-inch scale.

Original: 1964 Fender Esquire/1968 Fender Rosewood TelecasterAlternative: Fender JV Modified ‘60s Custom Telecaster/Eastwood Mad Cat RT

Fender currently doesn’t offer any Esquire or Rosewood Telecaster models (although that could change at a moment’s notice), but a good ’60s-style Telecaster will get you at least 90 percent of the way there for authentic Beatles tones. 

We particularly like the JV Modified ’60s Custom Telecaster for its overall versatility. If you prefer the look of Harrison’s rosewood Tele, the Eastwood Mad Cat RT is a super cool choice.

Original: 1964 Gibson SG StandardAlternative: Epiphone SG Standard 60s Maestro Vibrola

With its Maestro Vibrola tailpiece and ProBucker pickups, this Epiphone model not only looks the part but it sounds like it, too.

Original: 1957 Gibson Les Paul StandardAlternative: Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50s

Like the Epiphone SG Standard, the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50s is about as good as it gets for under a grand. This model may not come with Lucy’s red finish, but the Metallic Gold option hints at Lucy’s origins.

Acoustic guitars

Original: 1962/64 Gibson J-160EAlternative: Epiphone Casino

Neither Gibson nor Epiphone offers a J-160E-style model anymore. Because the original ’50s and ’60s models had heavy tops with ladder bracing, a modern acoustic-electric won’t really cut it either. 

However, the fully hollow Epiphone Casino actually delivers unplugged acoustic tones that come close, and the neck P90 pickup can closely duplicate the tones of the J-160E’s P90 when plugged in.

Original: 1964 Epiphone Texan FT-79Alternative: Epiphone Masterbilt Texan

Epiphone still offers a Texan model, and it’s a highly affordable Masterbilt model – enough said.

Original: 1968 Gibson J-200Alternative: Epiphone J-200

Harrison’s ’60s J-200 had a Tuneomatic bridge that gave it a distinctive jangly tone, but many acoustic purists consider the bone saddle in the Epiphone versions bridge a more traditional and better sounding option. The jumbo body dimensions also deliver the requisite volume projection and bass.

Bass Guitars

Original: 1961/63 Hofner 500/1Alternative: Hofner Violin Ignition SE or Ignition SE Cavern

Featuring hollowbody construction and a short 30-inch scale length, Hofner’s Ignition Series basses deliver sound and looks to please discriminating fans of original Beatle bass tones that come direct from the source.

Original: 1964 Rickenbacker 4001SAlternative: Rickenbacker 4003S

Similar to the Rickenbacker guitars above, there really aren’t any affordable brand-new alternatives to the Ric 4001S on today’s market. If you absolutely have to have a Ric bass, the 4003S is available for just over two grand.

Original: 1966 Fender Jazz BassAlternative: Fender Player Jazz Bass

The Fender Player Jazz Bass delivers the classic punchy, rumbling tones of McCartney’s latter-day Beatles bass tracks. 

Original: 1968 Fender Bass VIAlternative: Squier Classic Vibe Bass VI

Instead of shelling out thousands for an original vintage Fender Bass VI or a baritone that’s more suitable for metal, you can pick up a Squier Classic Vibe Bass VI for less than five bills. It even has the same bound fingerboard and large CBS-era-style headstock as the model played by John and George.

Amps

Because the Beatles used so many different amp models in the studio over the course of 1963 through 1970, it can be frustrating attempting to duplicate their amp rigs. 

The hybrid tube/solid-state Vox amps, which are quite rare, can be particularly difficult to replicate accurately, but fortunately the Fender amps they used in the latter days are the opposite. Instead of chasing individual tones, I recommend casting a net wider and focusing on good general-purpose tones that can be divided into two distinctive camps: Vox and Fender.

Vox AC15C2 2x12

The Vox AC15C2 does a great job covering the gamut of classic Beatles tones from their mop-top beginnings to their early psychedelic explorations. Its clean tones are particularly stellar, and the Top Boost channel can dial in period-correct tonal character. If you need more volume output for performing on stage, the AC30C2 delivers the goods for a few hundred more bucks. 

Fender ‘68 Custom Princeton Reverb

With the exception of McCartney’s Blonde Bassman and Harrison’s blackface Showman and Deluxe, most of the Beatles’ Fender amp tones in the studio came courtesy of late ’60s silverface models. 

The Fender ’68 Custom Princeton Reverb provides very sweet silverface clean and overdrive tones at studio volume levels. For higher stage output levels, the Fender ’68 Custom Pro Reverb occupies a nice sweet spot between the Deluxe Reverb and Twin Reverb amps.

Effects pedals

The Beatles did not employ too many pedal effects in the studio other than various fuzz boxes and an occasional wah or volume pedal. 

Many of their more dramatic effects were created using studio techniques like tape flanging or ADT (artificial double tracking). However, a handful of fuzz boxes and pedals that duplicate studio effects are very helpful for nailing authentic Beatles tones.

Boss TB-2W Tone Bender

A Sola Sound Tone Bender first showed up at Beatles sessions while they were recording Rubber Soul in 1965, and various Sola Sound Tone Benders played important roles on Revolver and beyond. 

The Boss TB-2W accurately replicates the tones of an original Sola Sound Tone Bender Mk II, while its adjustable voltage settings expands the range of available tones. Medium Attack settings are ideal for mid-’60s lead tones, while dialing the Attack up full takes the sound into Sgt. Pepper territory.

JHS Colour Box 2

A modern reproduction of the REDD.47 line amplifier that was used to generate the gritty distortion on Revolution will set you back more than two grand, but the JHS Colour Box 2, based upon a Neve 1073 mic preamp, will get you very close to that distinctive sound for less than a fourth of that price. 

It’s also in a pedal format so you can use it on stage, and it’s a highly versatile preamp/EQ that sounds great with any instrument or vocals (not just for over-the-top distortion).

Dunlop JDF2 Classic Fuzz Face

A Fuzz Face is essential if you want to replicate most of the distorted lead guitar tones heard on Abbey Road and Let It Be. 

Keeley 30MS Automatic Double Tracker

This pedal’s “Abbey” mode should give you a good idea what it does. Yes, this is an electronic version of the tape machine-based ADT effect that the Beatles often employed. Your guitar will gently weep when you plug it into this.

Electro-Harmonix Lester K

If you don’t have the space or upper body strength to deal with a huge Leslie 147RV cabinet, the Electro-Harmonix Lester K provides dazzling rotating speaker effects that sound every bit as good as the real thing, and fits into your guitar case.

No band has had more pages written about them than the Beatles. There are books that examine every day of the band’s history, large volumes about their recordings and books devoted entirely to their gear. Yet for all that has been written about them, there is still much mystery about the finer details, such as what exact guitars and amps they used to record specific songs.

We set out to answer that last question by closely examining a select group of songs spanning the Beatles’ entire recording history. A big part of the challenge is that a great amount of conflicting info exists, even among the experts. Even the members of the Beatles, producer George Martin and engineers like Geoff Emerick have provided conflicting accounts, and sometimes those people have contradicted themselves.

Photos taken during the recording sessions provide helpful hints, but all too often crucial details are missing, and the best anyone can do is speculate. Internet forums are frankly a hell-hole of highly opinionated alpha characters who insist they have golden ears but are usually pulling utter BS out of their golden rears.

What follows is our best attempt to determine the guitars, basses, amps and effects that the Beatles actually used. This information is not perfect and in many cases is highly speculative (such as the amp that Lennon used to record his solo on The End). However, we hope it will provide a good guideline for guitarists who want to decode the magical mystery of the iconic sounds that the Beatles’ crafted over an incredibly prolific seven-year period.

Please Please Me – Please Please Me (UK), 1963

George Harrison 

Guitar: 1957 Gretsch 6128 Duo Jet
Amp: 1962 Vox AC30 combo with two Celestion T530 12-inch speakers

John Lennon 

Guitar: 1958 Rickenbacker 325 Capri
Amp: 1962 Vox AC15 combo with two Goodmans 12-inch speakers

Paul McCartney 

Bass: 1961 Hofner 500/1
Amp: Leak Point One preamp, Leak TL-12 Plus power amp, 1x15 cabinet with Tannoy Dual-Concert speaker

The Beatles’ debut single Love Me Do enjoyed only moderate success, but their follow-up, Please Please Me was the band’s first bonafide hit. Like most of the other material the Beatles recorded in the early Sixties using two-track recorders, the recording primarily captures the band performing live, with George Harrison’s Gretsch Duo Jet dominating the instrumental accompaniment. 

The melodic hook features Harrison’s Gretsch and John Lennon’s overdubbed harmonica playing in unison. This technique of combining and layering instruments together was something the Beatles employed often throughout their career.

The guitar tones are very clean, with Harrison taking advantage of his Duo Jet’s low-end twang (picking near the bridge) while Lennon’s rhythm part is subdued and low in the mix. The Quad QCII bass amp Paul McCartney usually used for live performances at the time was not considered up to snuff for the recording, so he plugged into the studio’s Leak preamp and power amp instead. 

Harrison and Lennon owned 1962 Vox 2x12 combo amps with fawn-colored covering, with Lennon playing though an AC15 and Harrison using an AC30 with an add-on treble boost circuit that became known as Top Boost on later Vox AC30 models, which Harrison used to brighten his guitar’s treble frequencies.

A Hard Day’s Night – A Hard Day’s Night, 1964

Harrison 

Guitar: 1963 Rickenbacker 360/12 electric 12-string
Amp: 1963 Vox AC50 Mk I head and 2x12 cabinet with two Celestion T530 12-inch speakers and Goodmans Midax horn

Lennon 

Guitars: 1963 Rickenbacker 325, 1962 Gibson J-160E acoustic electric guitar
Amp: 1963 Vox AC50 Mk I head and 2x12 cabinet with two Celestion T530 12-inch speakers and Goodmans Midax horn

McCartney

Bass: 1963 Hofner 500/1
Amp: 1963 Vox AC100 head and 2x15 cabinet with Celestion T900 15-inch speakers

The Beatles progressed to using four-track recorders in the studio early in 1964, which gave the band more freedom to experiment with overdubs and more advanced arrangements. 

By mid April of 1964 when they recorded A Hard Day’s Night, Harrison and Lennon had expanded their guitar collections, which now included various Gretsch and Rickenbacker models – most importantly George’s newly acquired Rickenbacker 360/12 electric 12-string that played a crucial role in this song’s signature sound.

Musicologists can explain the intricacies of the song’s opening chord in better detail, but it was created by a blend of Harrison’s Rickenbacker 12-string, a D from McCartney’s bass and overdubs of Lennon’s Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric and a piano chord played by producer George Martin. 

The main rhythm guitar parts were recorded as a simultaneous performance, with Harrison on the Rickenbacker 360/12 and Lennon on his new 1963 Rickenbacker 325, both playing through new Vox AC50 Mk I heads with 2x12 cabinets that delivered ample clean headroom for the strings to sing with clarity and twang. 

The amps were probably set with the Treble controls near full, the Bass rolled down around 2 or 3 and the Volume no higher than 5 to avoid upsetting the lab coat-wearing engineers at Abbey Road.

Harrison’s overdubbed solo employed a crafty studio trick devised by Martin. The solo was recorded at half speed, which made it easier for Harrison to play the notes on his 360/12, and Martin played a piano in unison at the same time. 

Played back at normal speed, the pitch is transposed up an octave, giving the guitar a distinctive timbre. Guitarists hoping to duplicate this sound live can use a pitch shifter set to an octave up effect, like an Eventide Pitch Factor, Boss PS-5 Super Shifter or DigiTech Whammy (avoid Octavia or octave fuzz pedals, which sound too distorted).

I Feel Fine – Beatles ’65 (USA), 1964

Harrison 

Guitar: 1963 Gretsch 6119
Tennessean
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head with 4x12 cabinet with four Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers and two Goodmans Midax horns

Lennon 

Guitar: 1964 Gibson J-160E
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head with 4x12 cabinet with four Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers and two Goodmans Midax horns 

McCartney 

Bass: 1963 Hofner 500/1
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head with 2x15 cabinet with Celestion T1074 15-inch speakers

his recording is notable for featuring possibly the very first instance of intentional feedback, which was the effect of Lennon’s amplified Gibson J-160E becoming driven by the resonance of a low A note played on the bass by McCartney during the intro. 

Instead of the usual high-pitched howl, the J-160E’s resonant chamber caused its sympathetic open A string to vibrate – similar to the effect of an E Bow – so vigorously that it buzzed against the fretboard.

Lennon’s amplified J-160E provided that backbone for the guitar riff heard throughout the song, which has an unusual organ-like timbre. Unlike a modern acoustic-electric, the J-160E was designed with a heavier top and stiff ladder bracing to suppress vibration. Ironically, this was Gibson’s attempt to avoid feedback, but the model’s most famous use is to generate feedback.

A P90 single-coil identical to those found on early Les Paul models was mounted under the top at the edge of the fretboard, with the polepieces extending through the top and covered with a small plastic housing. The P90 works better with standard nickel electric strings. Lennon probably used flatwound Pyramid Gold strings (most likely .012-.052), which also contributed to the smoother-sounding timbre.

Harrison’s part mostly consisted of him doubling Lennon’s riff on his Gretsch Tennessean, most likely set to the bridge pickup as heard in his brief twangy solo. 

Ticket to Ride – Help!, 1965

Harrison 

Guitars: 1963 Rickenbacker360/12 (rhythm), 1961 Fender Stratocaster (overdub fills)
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head with 4x12 cabinet with four Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers and two Goodmans Midax horns 

Lennon 

Guitar: 1961 Fender Stratocaster
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head with 4x12 cabinet with four Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers and two Goodmans Midax horns

McCartney 

Guitar: 1962 Epiphone Casino E-230TD (lead)
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head with 4x12 cabinet with four Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers and two Goodmans Midax horns
Bass: 1963 Hofner 500/1
Amp: 1964 Vox AC100 head 2x15 cabinet with Celestion T1074 15-inch speakers

The topic of who actually played what parts and what exact guitars on the Beatles recordings is subject to much speculation, but “Ticket to Ride” is one exception where this info can be confirmed, thanks to George Martin’s detailed track notes about the instruments and players. 

Martin’s handwritten notes specify that Harrison played his Ric 360/12 accompanied by Lennon on a 1961 Fender Stratocaster on the rhythm part and McCartney laid down the fills and outro on his 1962 Epiphone Casino. 

On track four, Harrison also overdubbed a few accents, like the descending pattern on the second “ride” of the chorus, using a ’61 Strat while McCartney recorded his lead fills on the same track. The Help! sessions were notable for featuring McCartney’s first contributions beyond bass as a guitarist, a role which he would expand even more on later recordings.

As in previous instances, the Vox AC100 guitar amps are dialed to crystalline clean tones with the Treble above five and the Bass barely up. McCartney probably plugged his Epiphone Casino into Lennon’s amp and used either the middle or neck pickup setting with the guitar’s tone knobs backed down a bit. 

Although Harrison’s Ric 12-string had defined much of the early Beatles’ signature sound up until this point, Ticket to Ride was one of the last instances where he used it in the studio. “All it ever seemed was that there was one sound I could get (from the Rickenbacker) where it was bright,” Harrison told the BBC in 1987. “(That’s) the sound you hear on Ticket to Ride.” Soon, his Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars became distant memories as his taste in guitar tones progressed. 

Michelle – Rubber Soul, 1965

Harrison

Guitar: c. 1963-65 Gibson ES-345 (solo), Framus Hootenanny 12-string (Rhythm)
Amp: 1963 Vox AC30 Top Boost combo with two Celestion T530 12-inch speakers

Lennon 

Guitar: Ramirez 1A classical

McCartney 

Guitar: 1964 Epiphone Texan FT-79
Bass: 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S
Amp: 1964 Fender Bassman (blonde) 6G6-B head, 2x12 cabinet with Jensen C12N, Oxford 12M6 or possibly Utah speakers

A photo shot at Abbey Road Studios during a pre-recording rehearsal of this song gives a very good idea of the exact guitars used by Harrison, Lennon and McCartney for the recording of the main acoustic rhythm track: a Framus Hootenanny 12-string (Harrison), Ramirez 1A nylon string classical (Lennon) and Epiphone Texan FT-79 (McCartney). 

One particularly revealing detail is that all three guitarists used capos on the fifth frets of their guitars. Also of interest is a later photo showing McCartney playing his Rickenbacker 4001S bass also with a capo on the fifth fret. Harrison’s 12-string is very low in the mix, heard most prominently on the descending line in unison with McCartney and Lennon’s louder six-strings.

The big unsolved mystery is which guitar Harrison used for the sultry, horn-like solo heard in the middle and ending of the song. “The guitar solo in ‘Michelle’ is my composition, actually,” producer George Martin revealed in a 1993 interview. “I wrote down the notes and said, ‘I’ll play this. George, you can do these notes with me on guitar. We’ll play in unison.’” 

Apparently, Martin’s unison part was discarded. Harrison’s guitar tone is very warm, muted and unusual compared to other Beatles recording, which suggests he may have used a Gibson ES-345 semi-hollow, which briefly showed up in his possession around the date of these sessions.

Other speculated candidates include his Gibson J-160E, Epiphone Casino and even the 1961 Strat using the neck pickup and tone control rolled off. The jazz hollowbody-like warmth and humbucker-like fatness, however, strongly suggest he used the 345’s neck pickup, rolled down the tone control and played with his fingers. The amp he used is also unknown, although session photos show that Harrison and Lennon had dusted off their trusty black 1963 Vox AC30s.

Taxman – Revolver, 1966

Harrison

Guitar: 1964 Gibson SG
Standard 
Amp: 1966 Vox 7120, 4x12 cabinet with Celestion T1225 12-inch speakers 

McCartney 

Guitar: 1962 Epiphone Casino E-230TD
Amp: 1964 Fender Bassman (blonde) 6G6-B head, 2x12 cabinet with Jensen C12N, Oxford 12M6 or possibly Utah) speakers 
Effect: 1966 Sola Sound Tone Bender (Mk 1.5)
Bass: 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S
Bass amp: 1964 Fender Bassman (blonde) 6G6-B head, 2x12 cabinet with Jensen C12N, Oxford 12M6 or possibly Utah) speakers

Many guitarists consider this one of their top 10 favorite Beatles tunes, thanks to the biting guitar tones, Harrison’s cutting 7th chords and McCartney’s gritty raga-style solo and punchy bass riff. For some unknown reason, Lennon sat this one out when it came to playing a guitar track and his only contribution is backing vocals. To fill the sonic space, Harrison double-tracked his rhythm guitar part by playing two identical takes.

The solo is one of the main sources of guitarists’ fascination with this song. McCartney confirmed that he played his 1962 Epiphone Casino (probably set to the bridge pickup), and photos taken in the studio around this time strongly suggest he plugged into his trusty Fender Bassman head and 2x12 cabinet. 

A Sola Sound Tone Bender Mk 1.5 (set with Level just above 5 and Attack at 6 to 7) also seen in photos likely provides the distortion heard on the solo, riff unisons and fills.

Details about Harrison’s rig are more sketchy. To me it sounds like he’s playing his Gibson SG Standard (bridge pickup) through one of the new hybrid (solid-state preamp/tube power amp) Vox 7120 amps the band acquired thanks to the fast, percussive attack, scratchy treble and nasal midrange. 

Other options include his 1961 Strat and a new 1966 Fender Showman stack that appeared around this time, but blackface tube Fender amps generally sound more polished and sparkling than what is heard here.

McCartney’s bass tone is impressively punchy and robust. He probably plugged his Ric 4001S into the same Bassman rig that he used to record his guitar part to give the tone more presence.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Harrison

Guitar: 1964 Gibson SG
Standard
Amp: 1967 Vox UL730 head, 2x12 cabinet with two Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers

McCartney

Guitar: 1962 Epiphone Casino E-230TD
Amp: 1967 Vox UL730 head, 2x12 cabinet with two Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers
Bass: Rickenbacker 4001S
Amp: DI (direct)

Thanks to the agreement that manager Brian Epstein arranged and maintained with Vox, the Beatles enjoyed a constant influx of the newest Vox amp models in the studio up through Epstein’s death in August of 1967. In February 1967 when the Beatles started work on the Sgt. Pepper’s album, the band took delivery of several Vox UL730 hybrid solid state/tube amps, which they immediately put to use. 

For the album’s title song, Harrison and McCartney first recorded their rhythm guitar parts together, each using separate UL730 amps dialed in to tones with just a hint of overdrive. 

Later in early March, McCartney recorded an additional lead track using the UL730’s built-in fuzz effect, which was accessed via an on/off footswitch (with no controls for gain or intensity, just fuzz on or off). The early rhythm guitar track was panned to the center (it can be isolated by adjusting balance to the left) while McCartney’s fuzz lead guitar overdub is panned to the right along with his lead vocals.

McCartney is seen in a photo taken on March 3, 1967, during the overdub session playing a Fender Esquire plugged into a Selmer Thunderbird 50 Mk II combo amp, with his Epiphone Casino resting at an angle on the amp. It’s widely assumed that Paul used this rig to record Sgt. Pepper’s, but a more likely scenario is that he used it for the bright, jangly rhythm guitar part heard on With a Little Help from My Friends also recorded that day as no fuzz pedal (which is essential for his lead track) is in sight.

Although bass amps are still seen in Beatles studio photos from this point onwards, McCartney was recording most of his bass tracks using a DI box instead of miking an amp. The bass amp was just there so his bandmates could hear his bass parts while they were recording.

Revolution – B-side of Hey Jude single, 1968

Harrison 

Guitar: 1964 Gibson SG
Amp: Redd.47 line amplifier 

Lennon

Guitar: 1965 Epiphone Casino E-230TD
Amp: Redd.47 line amplifier 

McCartney

Bass: 1964 Rickenbacker4001S
Amp: DI

About a year and a half after Paul McCartney started recording his bass direct in the studio, Lennon and Harrison first adopted this approach as well when recording Revolution. The motivation for this was driven by Lennon’s demand for the most violent and extreme distortion tones on guitars as possible. 

After attempts with traditional amps and fuzz boxes failed to satisfy Lennon, engineer Geoff Emerick conceived the idea of recording the guitars direct and overdriving the tube-powered REDD.47 line amplifier/mic preamp modules in the studio’s console. He finally accomplished the sound Lennon had in mind by cascading two REDD.47 units together, both with the gain set to excess levels. 

Although a later promo video shows Lennon playing his Epiphone Casino (with the finish stripped off), Harrison on his 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul Standard and McCartney with his iconic Hofner 500/1 bass, Lennon’s Casino is likely the only guitar actually used on the studio recording. Instead, Harrison probably played his Gibson SG and McCartney used the Rickenbacker 4001S bass that had become his mainstay.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps – The Beatles (“The White Album”), 1968

Harrison 

Guitar: Gibson J-200 acoustic

Lennon 

Guitar: 1968 Fender Bass VI 
Amp: 1966 Fender Deluxe Reverb with Oxford 12K5-6 12-inch speaker

McCartney 

Guitar: 1964 Esquire
Amp: 1964 Fender Bassman (blonde) 6G6-B head, 2x12 cabinet with Jensen C12N, Oxford 12M6 or possibly Utah) speakers 
Bass: 1966 Fender Jazz Bass
Amp: DI

Eric Clapton 

Guitar: 1957 Gibson Les Paul Standard
Amp: 1966 Fender Deluxe Reverb with Oxford 12K5-6 12-inch speaker

Although George Harrison was the Beatles’ lead guitarist and had penned a song with “guitar” in its title, his guitar playing mostly took a backseat on the recording of While My Guitar Gently Weeps as he contentedly strummed acoustic rhythm on a Gibson J-200. 

Granted, Harrison may have actually planned to play electric lead until he decided to invite Eric Clapton to play the song’s legendary solo, but since Harrison was Clapton’s good friend and he highly respected his playing it’s easy to understand his understated role.

The presence of Clapton in the studio motivated Lennon and McCartney to step up their game. McCartney contributed a solid electric rhythm guitar track that he played using his trusty Fender Esquire guitar/Fender Bassman amp rig, and Lennon doubled many of McCartney’s lines on a Fender Bass VI six-string bass (or possibly a Stratocaster or other electric) plugged into a Fender Deluxe Reverb.

Clapton’s solo is rightfully the song’s main focus thanks to his soulful lines played on Harrison’s 1957 Gibson Les Paul Standard (nicknamed “Lucy”) through a Deluxe Reverb cranked almost all of the way up.

To make Clapton’s part sound more “Beatley,” his track was processed with ADT (artificial double tracking) during mixing. Producer Chris Thomas handled the task of manually adjusting varispeed during the ADT process, which gave the guitar its distinctive warbling texture.

Let It Be – Let It Be, 1970

Harrison 

Guitar: 1957 Gibson Les Paul Standard (album)/1968 Fender Rosewood Telecaster (single)
Amp: 1966 Fender Deluxe Reverb with Oxford 12K5-6 12-inch speaker (album)/Leslie 147RV (single)

McCartney 

Bass: 1963 Hofner 500/1
Amp: DI

When it comes to discussion of the guitar tone on Let It Be, the first question is whether it involves the single or album version, which are quite different from one another though each is equally impressive in its own right. The single was released first in March 1970, while a different version appeared on the Let It Be album released May 1970. 

The single version’s solo was recorded in late January 1969. Although Harrison felt that the solo he played on a previous take was better, the consensus was that a later take featured a better overall performance even though Harrison’s guitar solo wasn’t quite as good. A few months later in late April, Harrison recorded a new solo, and a new mix of the song was done for the album.

For the single version, Harrison played the 1968 Fender Rosewood Telecaster that had become his favorite ax for the Let It Be sessions. He plugged it into a Leslie 147RV rotating speaker cabinet, which provided the warbling, thick, chewy textures. 

His approach to the solo he recorded in April 1969 for the album version was more straightforward, employing his 1957 Gibson Les Paul Standard “Lucy” through an unknown amp cranked up to a good amount of overdrive. The midrange punch suggests he used a smaller amp, most likely a Fender Deluxe Reverb with a 12-inch speaker. There’s also the possibility Harrison played his Epiphone Casino E-230TDV instead of the Les Paul.

The End – Abbey Road, 1969

Harrison 

Guitar: 1968 Fender Rosewood Telecaster
Amp: 1966 Fender Deluxe Reverb with Oxford 12K5-6 12-inch speaker
Effect: Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face

Lennon

Guitar: 1965 Epiphone Casino E-230TD
Amp: 1967 Vox Conqueror with two Celestion T1088 12-inch speakers

McCartney

Guitar: 1962 Epiphone Casino E-230TD
Amp: 1968 Fender Twin Reverb with two Oxford T126 12-inch speakers
Bass: Rickenbacker 4001S
Amp: DI 

This song’s section where McCartney, Harrison and Lennon traded solos was one of the last truly happy moments that the three shared while they were still the Beatles. “I think in their minds they went back to their youth and all those great memories of working together as a band,” engineer Geoff Emerick later recalled. “Suddenly there was just this great vibe in the studio.”

Many guitar historians assume that each member of the guitar trio plugged into separate Fender Twin Reverb amps, similar to the setup seen in filmed Get Back/Let It Be footage. However, Emerick says that this was not the case: “I took great care to craft a different, distinctive sound for each Beatle, so it would be apparent to the listener that it was three individuals playing and not just one person taking an extended solo. They were each playing a different model guitar through a different type of amplifier, so it wasn’t all that difficult to achieve.”

Unfortunately, Emerick did not specify or recall exactly which guitars and amps they used. Most historians are pretty certain that Harrison played his Rosewood Tele and Lennon and McCartney played their Epiphone Casinos (maybe Emerick was confused by the contrast of the stripped finish on Lennon’s Casino and the original sunburst on McCartney’s Casino). 

Going out on a limb to guess the amps, McCartney starts with a slightly overdriven tone that sounds like a Casino through a Fender Twin. Harrison’s tone has a sweet singing overdrive/distortion that sounds like a smaller amp (perhaps a Fender Deluxe Reverb) driven by a fuzz pedal, most likely one of the Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Faces seen in the Get Back footage. 

Lennon’s tone is characterized by distorted grit and an unusual honking midrange that’s unlike any of the Fender amps the Beatles used during that period. It’s possible that Lennon dusted off the Vox Conqueror last seen during the White Album sessions and used its Boost and MRB (Midrange Boost) functions. 

The trailer for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is here, and it sounds like Director James Gunn has once again dug out some under-appreciated musical nuggets for the space-faring epic’s final chapter.

The trailer for Vol. 3 is soundtracked by an orchestrated take of In the Meantime by the 90s English-American rock band Spacehog. Aside from the extraterrestrial nod in the band's name, the song's heart-wrenching lyrics capture the apparent mood of the story perfectly. In an interview with Songfacts, frontman and bassist Royston Langdon explained, "It was me trying to reach people. It's using some kind of metaphor of a worldly or inner-worldly search for the end of isolation.” 

Released as the first single from their 1995 debut album Resident Alien, In the Meantime soon became the band's signature song, and was picked up by rock radio stations everywhere. With an undeniably catchy hook, and a sample of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Telephone and Rubber Band, bassist and lead singer Royston Langdon deserves extra kudos for tackling both the falsetto vocal line in the chorus and the McCartney-esque bass riff in the verse.

The song was initially recorded at a small studio called Crushing on West 57th Street in Manhattan in 1994, and according to drummer Jonny Cragg, Langdon played a Rickenbacker 4001 that he had borrowed from Sean Lennon. 

“Sean came down to the studio with his guitarist Timo Ellis,” says Cragg. “He invited us back to the Dakota Building to jam. I'd been in New York about a year and there I was, wearing Yoko's slippers, with one of John's guitars slung over my shoulder. It was pretty surreal. I think Sean gave Roy one of his dad's Rickenbacker 4001 basses that night and he ended up using it to cut the single.”

A Rickenbacker 4001 features heavily in the official video, above.

Over the course of 10 years, which included a couple of breakups and reunions, Spacehog toured with Oasis, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. They released four studio albums before they broke up for good in 2014.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will arrive in cinemas on May 5, 2023. 

The following feature on the Beatles' Revolver first appeared in the Holiday 2011 issue of Guitar World.

Revolver is the album that made the Beatles recording artists in the absolute sense of the term.

Their previous six albums had demonstrated John Lennon and Paul McCartney's increasingly ambitious songwriting skills and the group's competence with a range of musical styles. But the productions, while strong, were undistinguished. Apart from some reverb, compression and EQ, the instruments and vocals were recorded in a wholly representational manner.

But even as early as 1963, while recording With the Beatles, the group's members had begun asking why their instruments and voices couldn't sound like something... else.

"Can we have a compressor on this guitar?" George Harrison had asked Norman Smith during the recording of his song Don't Bother Me in September of that year. "We might try to get a sort of organ sound."

At the same session, Lennon had been voted down by George Martin when he plugged into a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone. By 1966, no one, not even George Martin, could hold back the Beatles' musical ambitions. Not only was their music changing; their consciousness was expanding, courtesy of experimentation with pot and LSD. This synchronism would culminate, creatively, in Revolver, the only album the group released that year. But what an album it was.

From its inception, Revolver was designed to be an exploration of sound as it had never been heard before in pop music.

And no one, apart from the Beatles themselves, was more instrumental to that end than 20-year-old Geoff Emerick, who engineered Revolver and created its many groundbreaking sounds. Emerick had served as tape operator on a number of Beatles sessions with Norman Smith, during which time he had become friendly with McCartney. 

When Smith quit working with the group to become a record producer at the start of 1966, Emerick was asked to become the Beatles' engineer over some of his more qualified colleagues. "I suspect Paul had something to do with that," Emerick says. "We got along well, and I was young, so he knew I would be open to the kind of experimentation they wanted to do."

Though shy and quiet, Emerick was rebelliously disdainful of EMI's strict policies, which forbade microphones to be placed closer than 18 inches to drum kits and discouraged the overloading of audio signals to create distortion and "unnatural" sounds. On Revolver, Emerick systematically broke one rule after another in his efforts to give the Beatles the new and unusual sounds they demanded. 

"I've always thought of sound as images rather than in strict technical terms," Emerick explains. "A lot of the sounds I heard in my head were dark, with more depth. And with Revolver, it was more about making things sound different, rather than real."

The new direction was evident from the very first track recorded: Tomorrow Never Knows. Titled simply Mark 1 at the time recording commenced on April 6, 1966, the song was written by Lennon, the product of his experience with LSD, which he'd taken the previous January. 

Using lines from The Psychedelic Experience, an LSD manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, he wrote the song as a mantra composed of one repeating melody line over a driving bass and drum track. "It's only got the one chord, and the whole thing is meant to be like a drone," Lennon told Martin and Emerick.

Additionally, he explained, he wanted his voice to sound "like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop." Says Emerick, "I was thinking, Well, I've got an echo chamber and... that's all! I didn't know what I was going to do. And suddenly, there it was, staring me in the face!" 

"It'' was the studio's Leslie rotary speaker cabinet, a standard piece of equipment for organs but one that had never been used for any other instrument or for voice.

As Lennon's voice came swirling through the Leslie, the assembled group listened in awe from the control room. "It's the Dalai Lennon!" exclaimed McCartney. 

Emerick also showed his ingenuity in recording the song's drums to achieve the "thunderous" sound Lennon had requested. In addition to moving the mics right up to the drum heads (earning him an EMI reprimand for "microphone abuse"), Emerick applied a heavy dose of compression using a Fairchild 660 limiter to give the drums a very forward, "pumping'' sound. 

"What on earth did you do to my drums?" Ringo Starr asked Emerick. "They sound fantastic!" (Emerick would go on to use close-miking elsewhere on the album, including for the horns on Good Day Sunshine and the strings on Eleanor Rigby.)

The day after Revolver's groundbreaking debut session, Tomorrow Never Knows was completed with another unusual technique: an overdubbing of tape loops assembled by McCartney, featuring distorted guitar and bass tones and sound effects. Tape loops had long been used in composition by avant-garde composers, but for the pop music world, it was entirely new.

For all of Emerick's sonic trickery, one of his greatest achievements on Revolver was his work on the Beatles' guitar tones. Over the past year the group had been unhappy with their guitar sounds, especially with the lack of presence. 

For Revolver, they had some new and powerful amps to work in their favor, including a cream-colored Fender Bassman (intended for McCartney but appropriated by Harrison), two new blackface Fender Showmans with 1x15 cabs, and 120-watt Vox 7120 guitar amps.

New guitars for the sessions included Harrison's recently acquired 1964 Gibson SG Standard, his main guitar for Revolver, and Lennon and Harrison's sunburst Epiphone Casinos, a model that McCartney had owned for some time and also used on Revolver (Harrison's and McCartney's models had vibratos; Lennon's had a trapeze tailpiece). 

Lennon also used a Gretsch 6120 during the recording of Paperback Writer on April 3, and he and Harrison might have used their Sonic Blue Fender Stratocasters, acquired in 1965 during the making of Help! McCartney, for his part, relied on his Rickenbacker 4001S bass, which he had received in the summer of 1965.

But Revolver's guitar sounds aren't simply a product of the Beatles' gear. Again, it's down to Emerick's touch with, once again, the Fairchild 660 limiter. 

"It added a lot of presence," Emerick says. "Even if you just plug it in and use its circuitry – it sounds like the best tube amp ever." 

To record Revolver's guitars, Emerick used his beloved Neumann U47 tube mics. These, however, he kept well away from the speakers, "normally about a foot, 18 inches away." This, he says, is where the magic arrived. "That's where it sounded good." 

The payoff of his efforts can be heard all over Revolver tracks like And Your Bird Can Sing, She Said She Said and, especially, Taxman. The Harrison-penned track was considered so strong that it was chosen to lead off the album – though it was McCartney, not Harrison, who handled lead guitar duties on the song.

McCartney also joined Harrison to record the stunning dual-guitar lead work on Lennon's And Your Bird Can Sing.

Twin-guitar leads, Leslie-phased vocals, tape loops, strings and horns... It's no wonder that when, upon completing Revolver, the Beatles undertook what would be their final commercial tour – from August 12 to 29, 1966 – the set list featured not a single song from the album. Nearly everything on it would have been impossible for them pull off as a four-piece. 

In almost every respect, Revolver represented a departure from the band's teenybopper past and, simultaneously, a signpost to the Beatles' psychedelic future.

It was but a test run for the album that followed: their 1967 milestone, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Ahead of the arrival of the Special Edition reissue of The Beatles’ 1966 studio LP Revolver, a never-before-heard demo of Yellow Submarine – one that sees John Lennon perform it as a solo acoustic guitar ballad – has been released.

It’s certainly Yellow Submarine like you’ve never heard before, swapping out Ringo Starr’s vocals and the peppy, upbeat sing-along vibe for a far more reflective, melancholic direction.

Titled Yellow Submarine – Songwriting Work Tape / Part 1, the track sees Lennon see-saw his way through some down-tempo chords, which play host to both his vocals and a set of lyrics that never made it onto the final cut.

Given the track was penned as a children’s song, it’s no surprise the lyrics that can be heard on Lennon’s demo were ditched in favor of the more kid-friendly version that underpins Yellow Submarine as we know it today.

“In the place where I was born, no-one cared, no-one cared. And the name I was born, no-one cared, no-one cared,” Lennon can be heard singing. It’s a far cry from the easygoing lyrics of the original song, which opens with, “In the town where I was born, lived a man who sailed to sea. And he told us of his life, in the land of submarines.”

Lennon’s Yellow Submarine demo was reworked by Giles Martin – son of the band’s original producer, George – who utilized the “de-mixing” technology that was developed by Peter Jackson’s audio team for the recent Get Back Disney+ documentary.

“The whole album is them saying, ‘Hey, let’s make it all completely different,’” Martin told Rolling Stone. “This was the nitroglycerin that blew everything up.”

Martin also went on to reflect how influential Lennon was in the making of Yellow Submarine. Though Paul McCartney wrote the famous chorus hook and Starr took vocal duties for the official version, Lennon played an equally important part in shaping the track.

“I had no idea until I started going through the outtakes,” Martin continued. “This was a Lennon-McCartney thing. I said to Paul, ‘I always thought this was a song that you wrote and gave to Ringo and that John was like, ‘Oh, bloody Yellow Submarine.’ Not at all.”

Joining the radical rendition of Yellow Submarine is an energetic, fuzz-tinged outtake of Got To Get You Into My Life, which goes heavy on the chime-y, crystalline electric guitars.

Both tracks hint at the many surprises the upcoming Revolver reissue promises to have in store for listeners. In total, the Super Deluxe version of the record features 31 outtakes from the vaults, including three home demos, all of which aim to highlight the experimental nature of the legendary Revolver sessions.

Martin mixed the Special Edition Revolver with the help of engineer Sam Okell, with all 14 tracks of the original album arriving in stereo and Dolby Atmos, as well as a mono mix sourced from the original mono master tape.

The Super Edition Revolver reissue will be released next Friday (October 28) in Standard, Deluxe and Super Deluxe formats, and is available to preorder now.

Having enjoyed the runaway success of his bravura three-part documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which picked up five Emmy nominations and brought Beatlemania kicking and screaming into the 21st-century, Peter Jackson has announced that he has a follow-up in the works.

Speaking to Deadline, Jackson would not be drawn on the details, but did say he was in conversation with the Fab Four’s surviving members, bassist/vocalist Paul McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr, about another Beatles film – one that just might turn out quite differently.

“I’m talking to The Beatles about another project, something very, very different than Get Back,” Jackson said. “We’re seeing what the possibilities are, but it’s another project with them. It’s not really a documentary … and that’s all I can really say.”

He has said plenty. For Beatles fans, having a filmmaker such as Jackson turned loose on archive footage and reanimating the band’s legacy for the present day is huge news. 

Get Back presented an invaluable perspective on a pivotal moment in the band’s history, and in popular culture – also giving us a hi-def look at the electric guitars and guitar amps that were used back then. Where he takes this collaboration – animation, another excavation of the archives for some sort of concert performance – is guaranteed to be fascinating.

Jackson was, however, more expansive when talking about Get Back and the joy he took as a Beatles nut spending four years of his life poring over and restoring 130 hours of audio and 57 hours of video archive footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg for his 1970 documentary Let It Be.

With access to this, and a longer run-time, Jackson could open up the story of the Beatles’ final album, and topped it off with The Beatles: Get Back – The Rooftop Concert, which opened in January.

But there was more than this. Jackson also provided Paul McCartney with the A/V background to perform a duet on I've Got a Feeling with his late bandmate John Lennon when he headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2022. It was the moment of the week; a pop-cultural moment for the ages. But Jackson was not sure how McCartney would take it when he first had the idea for it.

“I had that idea when I started working on Get Back, four years ago,” Jackson said. “We had access to all that footage, and to do something like that, you need the footage. The shots have to be right. I didn’t mention it to Paul. I thought, ‘Suggesting to Paul that he sing onstage with John, he’s going to think I’m a fanboy geek idiot.’”

Jackson shot some footage from McCartney when he played Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium on July 13 2019, with plans to mock up a CGI demo of what it would look like with Lennon on the jumbotron. The pandemic arrived and he never shared it. Besides, he worried about appearing “geeky”, becoming another super-fan with a super-crazy pitch.

But ideas like that tend to have a restless quality. They need out. Once Jackson was back in the editing suite for Get Back, and the McCartney touring machine restarted, he made his move. 

“Finally, I thought, ‘I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life if I don’t even suggest it,’” he said. “I sent him a text. I didn’t send him the mockup version, just a text trying to describe it to him. Within 10 minutes, he replied to me: ‘Yeah, this is a fantastic idea; let’s go do it.’ Then it was a frantic rush to restore frames that were missing from that long shot of John from Let It Be. But Paul was thrilled by it.”

Jackson also paid tribute to Lindsay-Hogg for shooting so much footage. The Lord of the Rings director has described Get Back as a documentary about a documentary before, and he believes Lindsay-Hogg, and his film, are underrated. 

“The way he should be thought of is, he not only made Let It Be, he shot all the footage we see in Get Back,” Jackson said. “That’s all his and Michael deserves a huge shout out.”

Jackson’s sound editing team had to develop artificial intelligence to restore the sound and separate the tracks to Get Back. The film is nominated for Outstanding Sound Editing for a Nonfiction or Reality Program. You can read the full interview over at Deadline.

All three guitarists in The Beatles were fine players, but their impressive individual musicianship and unrivalled writing prowess is often overshadowed by the sheer enormity of the group’s success. 

Here, the aim of our lesson is to apply some of the tried and tested harmonic concepts used by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison during their eight-year run at the top. That means we’re focusing on chords, progressions and songwriting methods. 

With a catalogue so iconic and influential it’s fair to say that studying and learning some of the band’s nuts and bolts will benefit your overall musicianship. More importantly, much of what you’ll learn here was so influential that it’s been absorbed into the canon of rock music – so it applies to almost any style of music. 

We’ve recorded 10 contrasting progressions to showcase some of the chords and changes that give the Beatles their trademark sound.

1. Melody in chord changes

This first Beatles-y example features a melodic trick called ‘voice leading’ that’ll lead your ear as the chords change. The A note in the opening chord descends a semitone with each change, going from A to G# then G when you reach the A7 chord. The run continues with an F# note in the Dmaj7 and an F in the Dm. 

2. Dissonant sounds  

These chords are dissonant in their nature, but they provide a great basis for a change to the mellower sounding Am9 root chord. Listen to I Want You (She’s So Heavy) to hear some similar sounds, including a variation on this E7b9 shape. 

3. Barre chords

These generic barre chord types are at the core of many of the Fab Four’s rhythm parts. They’re standard shapes used everywhere from Hey Jude to Help. The closing chord evokes the opener from A Hard Day’s Night. 

4. Rock ’n’ roll & dominant 7ths 

Taking our inspiration from I Saw Her Standing There, you’ll see how bar 1 is a traditional rock ’n’ roll style riff (similar to Lennon’s part in ISHST) and the chords in bar 2 are akin to Harrison’s chords.

5. Beatles vs Hendrix 

The 7#9 chord was of course a favourite of Jimi Hendrix, but Beatles classics like Taxman and Step Inside Love feature it too. The A7 and G7 chords can be played with a fretting-hand thumb for the bass notes.

6. Minor voice leading

Remember voice leading? Well, here is a minor version of the concept we looked at right at the start. This idea is well used in many songs by a huge variety of artists and is handy for providing interest when several bars of a minor chord are required.

7. Modal interchange 

Modal interchange is a fancy name for changing chord types on one root note. Here the D major chord changes to D minor, which provides both a surprise and a cool tension. Another well-used alternative is a minor chord progression that finishes on a surprise major chord (e.g., Am-Dm-Em-A). 

8. Major chord run (ascending)

Just as we created a descending melody in a major-chord run in Example 1, we can also create ascending movement. Here the augmented chord sounds most effective, it’s mild dissonance pulling you into the next chord change. 

9. Chromatic chords

The use of chromatic chords is a great way to introduce fresh sounds into tried and tested chord progressions. Here C#m is followed by an unexpected and not-in-key C major chord. 

10. Diminished chords 

The diminished 7 (a favourite of George Harrison) is great for creating smooth transitions between chords a tone or semitone apart. Here the Ab moves to the Bb via Adim7 – that’s a semitone from Ab to A, then a tone from A to Bb.

As Peter Jackson's landmark documentary, Get Back, finally sees the light of day, Guitar World is celebrating the 50 best guitar moments from the band's hit-making history.

The Beatles were such talented songwriters that it’s easy to overlook the fact that their music has some great – and occasionally groundbreaking – guitar work.

In assembling this list, we looked beyond our personal favorite songs and reflected on where John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney showed their talents as guitarists, whether in a solo, a riff, a technique or by their astute selection of instrument and arrangement.

For some songs, we’ve gone a step further and analyzed the guitar work to give you insights into the magic that makes these moments so special. Enjoy!

50. Across the Universe

Album: Let It Be… Naked (2003)

John Lennon considered the Beatles’ recording of this 1967 composition “a lousy track of a great song,” dismissing even his own work on it.

He was too hard on himself: his imperfect acoustic guitar work and vocal delivery effectively work in service of the song’s sincere devotional message, though overdubs of strings, background vocals and electric guitar obscured the delicacy and intimacy of his performance.

The release of Let It Be… Naked in 2003 set the record straight, offering a bare-bones acoustic mix of the track that even Lennon might have approved of.

49. Flying

Album: Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

The strongly pulsing tremolo on the rhythm guitar makes the instrument sound as if it’s riding slightly behind the beat, giving the song a druggy languor appropriate to its title. (In the film Magical Mystery Tour, Flying accompanies scenes shot high above the clouds).

The crystalline acoustic guitar that appears about 13 seconds in lends the song a country vibe, culminating in a tasty double-stop lick that lazily meanders down the fretboard. Heavenly.

48. Helter Skelter

Albums: The Beatles (1968)

It’s not a stretch to say the Beatles prefigured heavy metal’s doomier side with this 1968 Paul McCartney track.

For this recording, McCartney set aside his bass duties and strapped on his Fender Esquire to deliver the track’s brash rhythm work, while Harrison performed the searing leads on Lucy, the 1957 Les Paul Standard gifted to him by Eric Clapton.

But the best work here is performed by Lennon on, of all things, a bass (either a Fender Bass VI). His sloppy but inspired playing propels the song along and provides its main rhythmic interest.

47. Yesterday

Album: Help! (1965)

McCartney’s melancholy, acoustic guitar-driven ballad marked a symbolic, pivotal point in the Beatles’ career as a band in that it was their first song in which any of the members – three in this case – did not participate in the performance.

McCartney tuned his guitar down one whole step for this song (low to high, D G C F A D) and performed it as if it were in the key of G, with the detuning transposing it down to the concert key of F.

This may have been made for the sake of putting the vocal melody in a more optimal key for McCartney; it certainly made the bass notes sound deeper and richer, while the slackened string tension contributed to the thicker texture of the chord voicings.

46. For You Blue

Album: Let It Be (1970)

Written by Harrison, this seemingly straightforward blues workout in D stands out as a bouncy oddball in the Beatles’ catalog.

Not only is it one of the band’s few forays into 12-bar-blues territory; it also finds Lennon stepping into the uncommon role of lead guitarist, supplying a spirited solo and fills on a Hofner Hawaiian Standard lap-steel guitar in open D tuning.

To make things even weirder, he uses a shotgun shell as a slide. In addition, there’s no bass on the recording; McCartney performed on piano and the song received no overdubs.

45. Free As a Bird

Album: Anthology 1 (1995)

Released in 1995 as a post-mortem Beatles track built upon a John Lennon home demo, Free As a Bird makes a valiant attempt to resurrect the spirit of the group’s glory days.

While some will quibble about the lackluster songwriting, it’s hard to find fault with Harrison’s stinging slide work. Starting off with a few restrained lines, Harrison lets his playing soar on the solo, the one moment in which the song truly takes flight.

44. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)

Album: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Recorded quickly in a single session, this rocking reprise of the album’s opening track features some fiery lead guitar work from Harrison.

Written as a bookend to the album-opening title track, the reprise is both faster and a whole step lower than the original, although halfway through it modulates up a whole step. (Modulation is a technique rarely found in the Beatles compositions, And I Love Her being another example from the group’s catalog – see entry 30…)

43. I Will

Album: The Beatles (1968)

This quiet love song, written by McCartney, features only him on lead and harmony vocals, two acoustic guitars and scat-sung “vocal bass,” with Lennon and Starr providing percussion.

McCartney overdubbed, on top of his main, strummed guitar part, a second, melodic part played in a rockabilly lead style reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s lead guitarist Scotty Moore, picking out syncopated, ringing melodies built around a first-position F6 chord shape with decorative, bluesy hammer-ons from the minor third to the major third.

Years later, Cars guitarist Elliot Easton played a similar line on the chorus tags to My Best Friend’s Girlfriend.

42. The Ballad of John and Yoko

Album: 1967–1970 (1973)

In this 1969 musical telling of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s wedding and honeymoon, Lennon’s acoustic strumming sets up the song’s infectious rhythm, while his electric guitar fills play call-and-response with his vocals.

The track was written and recorded in April of that year, fresh off the sessions for Let It Be, in which the group attempted to get back to their rock and roll roots. That might have inspired Lennon’s musical direction with this track, which he closes with an electric guitar riff reminiscent of Dorsey Burnett’s Lonesome Tears in My Eyes, which the Beatles covered early in their career.

41. Yer Blues

Album: The Beatles (1968)

Lennon wrote this 1968 song as a rude sendup of the electric blues boom that had taken London by storm, but the suicidal feelings he expresses were a sincere articulation of how he felt trapped both in his unhappy first marriage and in the Beatles.

Likewise, his primitive two-note solo could be regarded as mocking disdain for the genre’s slick white imitators, but he plays the riff until it’s as raw as his emotions. He would pursue this proto-punk style of guitar playing further on his 1970 solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

40. Help!

Album: Help!

The Beatles’ mix of acoustic rhythms and electric guitar leads from 1964 through the end of 1965 helped greatly to define the sound of folk-rock. Written in the midst of his “Bob Dylan phase,” Help! shows Lennon continuing to divulge the vulnerability express on previous songs like No Reply and I’m a Loser, with the acoustic guitar providing the requisite balladeer instrumentation. 

Here, Lennon robustly strums out the rhythm on his 1964 Framus Hootenanny 5/024 acoustic 12-string, with Harrison contributing jangly lead lines and three-note descending passages on the choruses with his Gretsch Tennessean.

39. Dear Prudence

Album: The Beatles (1968)

This 1968 composition is arguably one of Lennon’s greatest achievements as a guitarist and demonstrates his development at the time into a bona fide acoustic fingerpicker. 

Having recently learned a basic eighth-note Travis-picking-like pattern from British pop star Donovan, Lennon put the newly learned pattern to great use in compositions like Julia, Happiness Is a Warm Gun and, most brilliantly, Dear Prudence, applying it to an ethereal modal chord progression he invented, which he performed in drop-D tuning (low to high, D A D G B E), using the two open D strings (the fourth and sixth) as ringing drones, or pedal tones throughout the majority of the song. 

The thumb-picking pattern goes fifth string, fourth string, sixth string, fourth string and repeats consistently through the changing chords, interrupted briefly at the end of each verse.

38. If I Needed Someone

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

Although the Beatles were rock’s foremost trendsetters, they still were influenced by other artists. Case in point: George Harrison’s 12-string riff on If I Needed Someone. Played in a second-position D-chord shape with a capo on the seventh fret, the line was based on Jim McGuinn’s chiming guitar work in the Byrds’ mesmerizing 1965 track The Bells of Rhymney. 

In the mid '60s, Harrison and McGuinn had formed a mutual-admiration society: If I Needed Someone featured Harrison’s second Rickenbacker 360/12, a rounded-off 1965 model that resembled McGuinn’s 1964 Rickenbacker 360/12, which McGuinn bought after seeing Harrison’s first Rick in the film A Hard Day’s Night.

37. Day Tripper

Album: 1962–1966 (1973)

Lennon and McCartney’s hip-shaking 1965 hit is a thinly veiled ode to “weekend hippies” who embrace the drug counterculture when they’re not pursuing their careers. McCartney referred to this song and Drive My Car (recorded just days earlier) as “songs with jokes in” them, but there’s nothing laughable about this track’s swaggering guitar riff, borrowed from the Temptations’ 1964 hit My Girl and given a liberal dose of self-assured attitude. 

Lennon reportedly plays the solo, most likely using his Sonic Blue Fender Strat, while Harrison’s guitar parts were probably recorded with his Gretsch Tennessean.

36. Think For Yourself

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

The Beatles had been interested in creating distorted guitar tones since at least 1964, when they attempted unsuccessfully to use a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone on She Loves You and Don’t Bother Me (see entry 23). 

They were more successful with Harrison’s excellent 1965 composition Think for Yourself, for which McCartney plugged his Hofner bass into an early version of the Tone Bender fuzz pedal, created by electronics designer Gary Hurst and eventually marketed by Vox. The result is the harsh-sounding “lead bass” tone that bobs menacingly – and memorably – alongside Harrison’s lead vocal.

35. Mother Nature's Son

Album: The Beatles (1968)

Throughout this song’s verses, McCartney fools you into thinking that he’s playing more than he actually is by filling out the harmony with his vocal melody. For example, while the ear hears a very strong D-to-G movement in the first two bars of the verse, all McCartney is actually playing is D to Dsus4; his vocal melody intimates the G chord by moving to B, that chord’s third. 

The verse also features, in the third and fourth bars, brilliant oblique motion – where one voice moves up or down while one or more other voices remain stationary. By moving the root of a B minor chord, B, down to the minor seventh, A, and then down to the sixth, Gs, while keeping the notes D and F# constant above this descending line, McCartney implies a slick progression of Bm D (or Bm7) E9. He does the same thing at the very beginning of the song.

34. Girl

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

Lennon conjures up this song’s dreamy, Gypsy-like reverie by capoing his Gibson J-160E at the eighth fret, making the guitar sound similar to a mandola. Harrison furthers the vibe on the third verse, playing a mandolin-like melody on Lennon’s Framus Hootenanny 12-string acoustic. 

But the crowning touch comes at the coda, when a third acoustic guitar enters, playing a Greek-style melody that’s plucked at the bridge with sharp strokes, making it sound like a bouzouki and further emphasizing the song’s smoky, old-world aura. The British group the Hollies would copy the effect on their hit Bus Stop, recorded at Abbey Road some six months later.

33. Birthday

Album: The Beatles (1968)

Like I Feel Fine and Day Tripper (see entries 12 and 37), Birthday delivers a classic and memorable guitar riff. Whereas those previous two songs veered from the traditional 12-bar blues formula, Birthday hews closely to it during its verses. 

McCartney and Lennon wrote the song in the studio during an evening session, which included a recess during which the band went back to McCartney’s house to watch a TV broadcast of the 1956 teen film The Girl Can’t Help It. The soundtrack – which included performances by Little Richard, Gene Vincent and other Beatles’ favorites – undoubtedly contributed to the song’s raucous vintage rock-and-roll vibe.

32. One After 909

Album: Let It Be (1969)

This tune had been in the Beatles’ song bag for years, surfacing first as a rickety blues-style shuffle at a March 1963 recording session.

By the time they tackled it again during their January 1969 rooftop performance at Apple, the Beatles were nearly finished as a group, but they were at long last able to breathe life into the tune, revving it up with a rock and roll beat and laying into it like the seasoned performers they were. Harrison delivers a stellar country-rock solo, using his rosewood Telecaster.

31. Norwegian Wood

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

This acoustic-rock masterpiece, written by Lennon, is not unlike Here Comes the Sun (see entry 4), in that it’s a folky chord-melody type of accompaniment that could easily stand on its own as a solo instrumental, with the vocal melody conveniently woven into the chords.

However, unlike Here Comes the Sun, the melody sits in the middle, rather than on top, of the chord voicings, and is performed with more full strumming in a flowing 6/8 meter. 

Lennon performed Norwegian Wood as if the song were in the key of D, the verses being in D major and the bridge sections switching the parallel minor key of D minor, and used a capo at the second fret to transpose everything up a whole step, to E major and E minor, respectively.

30. And I Love Her

Album: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

It’s overshadowed by the Beatles’ more innovative songs, but And I Love Her demonstrates a leap in the group’s harmonic sophistication and musical arrangement skills. Harrison performs delicate arpeggiations on his 1964 Ramírez nylon-string classical acoustic, while McCartney subtly propels the song along with his soul-inflected bass work. 

A modulation from the key of E to F on the solo ramps up the drama and keeps the song from flagging. The final chord, D major – the relative minor of F – delivers surprise and emotional uplift that allows the song to end hopefully, in keeping with the optimism of the lyrics.

29. Not Guilty

Album: Anthology 1 (1995)

Recorded for 1968’s White Album but unissued until the release of Anthology 1 in 1995, this Harrison track was a lyrical response to his fellow Beatles, who felt that their trip to India at his urging to study transcendental meditation had been a waste of time. 

It’s hard to understand why this track was abandoned, especially after the group devoted more than 100 attempts to the rhythm track. Harrison’s guitar work is especially superb, from his sinewy lead lines to his sizzling tone, achieved by placing his amp in one of Abbey Road’s echo chambers and cranking it up for maximum effect, while he performed, safe from the volume, in the studio control room. Harrison eventually re-recorded this song for his self-titled 1979 album.

28. Old Brown Shoe

Album: 1967–1970 (1973)

Dishonorably relegated to the B-side of the single The Ballad of John and Yoko (see entry 42), this 1969 Harrison composition is one of his best. His stinging guitar work is at times reminiscent of Clapton, especially on the solo, where he plays his rosewood Telecaster through a Leslie cabinet, his preferred effect of the period. In addition to guitar, Harrison plays organ and, by his own account, the buoyant bass line. “That was me going nuts,” he said of the bass work in a 1987 interview. “I’m doing exactly what I do on the guitar.”

27. Michelle

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

Another great example of McCartney’s innate gift for songwriting/composing, Michelle features, in its intro and elsewhere throughout the song, the previously mentioned standard “minor-drop” progression heard in And Your Bird Can Sing and All My Loving (see entries 7 and 16). 

The song also includes some rather clever and original harmonic twists and turns, such as the use of, in the second bar of the verse progression, the dominant-seven-sharp-nine (7#9) chord pointed out earlier in regard to Harrison’s Till There Was You solo, which, in both songs, is voiced “widely,” low to high: 1(root)-5-3(10)-b7-#9. Lennon, by the way, would later also employ this same chord voicing in Sexy Sadie, a chord that he, McCartney and Harrison all learned early on from a friend and local guitar-hero in Liverpool named Jim Gretty and dubbed “the Gretty chord.”

26. Cry for a Shadow

Album: Anthology 1 (1995)

In 1961, unknown and looking for a break, the Beatles supported British rock and roll singer Tony Sheridan on a recording date in Hamburg. While there, they recorded two tracks of their own, including this Harrison-Lennon guitar-instrumental written in the style of UK pop group the Shadows (hence, the title). 

The recording provides early evidence of Lennon’s steady and dynamic rhythm guitar work, as well as McCartney’s melodic skills on the bass, which he had just begun playing. But it’s Harrison who shines, making the most of the trite melody with double-stop licks and generous use of the whammy bar on his Strat-style Futurama electric guitar. He ends the song with a major sixth – C6, specifically – a voicing that would become a signature Beatles coda on songs like She Loves You, No Reply and Help! (see entry 40).

25. Hey Bulldog

Album: Yellow Submarine (1968)

McCartney’s lead guitar work had characterized most of the great solo guitar moments on the Beatles’ records during 1966 and 1967. But with Hey Bulldog, recorded in February 1968, Harrison came charging back with a guitar solo that’s heavier and hairier than just about anything in the group’s catalog. 

For the song, he played his red 1964 SG Standard, using a fuzz box (most likely his Tone Bender) to give his sound a snarl befitting the song’s title. Recalls engineer Geoff Emerick, “His amp was turned up really loud, and he used one of his new fuzz boxes, which made his guitar absolutely scream." Equally outstanding is Paul McCartney’s buoyant bass work, which is practically a lead instrument on its own.

24. I've Just Seen a Face

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

Written by McCartney and musically inspired by the skiffle movement that was popular in the UK in the late '50s and early '60s, this up-tempo knee-slapper features Lennon, Harrison and McCartney all playing acoustic guitars, with Ringo Starr providing percussion (brushed snare drum and overdubbed maracas). 

The lyrical instrumental intro features a bass-line chord-melody, played (most likely by Harrison) on a 12-string, which serves to octave-double the bass-line melody, over which McCartney and Lennon flatpick a single-note melody based on double-stops, mostly sixth intervals, played up and down the G and high E strings in a quick, unbroken triplet rhythm, beautifully outlining the underlying chords with ascending and descending note pairs.

23. Don't Bother Me

Album: With the Beatles (1963)

Harrison’s first solo songwriting effort for the Beatles sounds like nothing else in the group’s catalog. With its moody minor chords, propulsive drum beat and tremolo guitar, this 1964 track has more in common with California surf music than it does the American rock and soul that inspired the Beatles’ music at the time. 

The tremolo – provided by Harrison’s Vox AC30 – gives the song an air of menace appropriate to the song’s title, and its use here marks the first time the group used an electronic effect on a finished recording.

22. Octopus's Garden

Album: Abbey Road (1969)

By 1969, George Harrison had put down his sitar to focus on his first love, the guitar. The results are apparent on Abbey Road, which features his most fluid and confident playing to date. On Octopus’s Garden, one of Ringo Starr’s rare Beatles-era tunes, Harrison calls on his country/rockabilly influences for the first time since the band’s pre-psychedelic days. 

The intro is a slick masterpiece in the major pentatonic scale, the same territory Dickey Betts would later visit on Blue Sky. The song’s fun, twangy solo could sit snugly among James Burton’s work on Merle Haggard’s late-'60s albums.

21. Till There Was You

Album: With the Beatles (1963)

With this charming early cover of a love song from the popular 1957 Broadway musical play and 1962 feature film The Music Man, the Beatles demonstrated their stylistic versatility as they authoritatively breeze through the song’s harmonically sophisticated, jazz-like chord progression. 

Harrison’s solo break conveys a musical savvy on par with that of a veteran jazz improviser, as he strongly outlines the underlying chord progression, producing a perfect melodic counterpoint with the bass line by using arpeggios and targeting non-root chord tones, such as the third or ninth, on each chord change. 

Also impressive is his incorporation of two-, three- and four-note chords into what would otherwise be a predominantly single-note solo to create jazz-guitar-style chord-melody phrases, as well as his superimposition over the five chord, C7, of a daringly dissonant Gb7#9 chord (voiced, low to high, Gb Db Bb E A), a trick known in the language of jazz as a tritone substitution. 

20. Good Morning Good Morning

Album: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Let’s face it: there aren’t many ferocious, brash and screaming guitar solos in the Beatles’ catalog. That said, Paul McCartney’s razor-sharp solo on Good Morning Good Morning is all that and a bag of chips. 

The 13-second-long treble fest, played on a Fender Esquire through a Selmer amp, features a strong East Indian vibe, perhaps a nod to George Harrison’s burgeoning fascination with Indian religion and music. 

Like its stylistic predecessor, McCartney’s Taxman guitar solo (see entry 3), Good Morning Good Morning incorporates open-string drone notes and rapid-fire descending hammer-pull slides, mostly along one string, in this case, the B string.

19. I Need You

Album: Help! (1965)

By 1965, the Beatles were making noticeable strides in their arrangements and instrumentation. A prime example is I Need You, one of two George Harrison compositions to appear on Help!

The recording represents Harrison’s first use of a volume pedal. The guitar’s dramatic, almost pedal-steel-like volume swells – which frame Harrison’s curt, suspended chords – only add to the song’s wistful lyrical content. 

The volume pedal was a step up for the band; the guitar swells heard on Baby’s in Black, which was tracked the previous summer, were the result of John Lennon turning the volume knob on Harrison’s 1963 Gretsch Tennessean as Harrison played it.

18. You Can't Do That

Album: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

On February 25, 1964, the Beatles entered the studio with an exciting new piece of gear: a Fireglo 1963 Rickenbacker 360/12. George Harrison had received the guitar only 17 days earlier when the band was in New York shooting its initial Ed Sullivan Show appearance.

The song’s chiming intro riff, with its middle-finger hammer-ons from a minor third to a major third within the chord, offered a taste of what lay ahead for the guitar, which would see heavy action onstage and in the studio through 1965. John Lennon performed the guitar solo on his new Jetglo 1964 Rickenbacker.

17. Let It Be

Album: Let It Be (1970)

As Beatles obsessives know, there are three versions of George Harrison’s solo for this track: the original, recorded in January 1969 with his rosewood Telecaster (available on 2003’s Let It Be… Naked); the second, recorded the following April with his Tele through a Leslie rotary speaker (released on the single Let It Be in 1970); and a third version recorded in January 1970 using his “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Tone Bender (released on Let It Be). 

Nice as the first two are, they have nothing on the third, a blistering performance that raises the song’s drama to a higher level of emotion.

16. All My Loving

Album: With the Beatles (1963)

For this pop song’s thumping, quasi–jump blues, rockabilly-style groove, Harrison crafted a convincingly authentic Chet Atkins/Carl Perkins–like solo break that clearly demonstrates his familiarity with that '50s Nashville style of electric guitar soloing. 

Employing hybrid picking (pick-and-fingers technique), the guitarist acknowledges and gravitates toward the underlying chords in his melodic phrases, employing country-style “walk-ups” and “walk-downs” and plucking double-stops (pairs of notes) to sweetly and effectively outline the chord changes with a pleasing thematic continuity. 

Lennon contributed an energetic rhythm guitar part, one that he later expressed being rather proud of, which propels the groove with tireless waves of triplet chord strums, similar to those heard in the Crystals’ song Da Doo Ron Ron.

15. Ticket to Ride

Album: Help! (1965)

This proto-heavy-metal track was the first Beatles recording to feature McCartney on lead guitar and the last on which George Harrison used his Rickenbacker 12-string. 

McCartney plays the note-bending fills at the end of the bridges and on the outro, while Harrison plays the song’s arpeggiated riff and Lennon handles rhythm guitar. But the heaviest part might just be the droning open-string A notes that Harrison overdubbed on the verses, suggestive of the classical Indian music he would begin to explore later that year.

14. Dig a Pony

Album: Let It Be (1970)

The song’s driving, bluesy riff is as durable as any that Muddy Waters ever wrote, but the 1969 recording is also notable for Harrison’s smoky guitar work on his rosewood Telecaster – from the double-stop licks on the verses to his confident and impeccably developed solo. 

You can hear Harrison’s signature style beginning to develop here, with the smoothness of his lines pointing toward the fluid slide style he would develop over the following year. His guitar tone is also very similar to that of Octopus’s Garden (see entry 22) recorded later that year, for which he may have also used the rosewood Tele.

13. Nowhere Man

Album: Rubber Soul (1965)

According to Harrison, he and Lennon perform the song’s bright, chiming solo together in unison, using their matching Sonic Blue Fender Stratocasters. Lennon also revealed to guitarist Earl Slick, during the making of Lennon’s 1980 album Double Fantasy, that the solo was recorded through a pair of small amps with a single microphone positioned between them. 

The Strats’ trebly nature was further accentuated on Nowhere Man by boosting the high frequencies via the mixing console. “We wanted very trebly guitars,” McCartney says. “They’re among the most trebly guitars I’ve ever heard on record.”

12. I Feel Fine

Album: 1962–1966 (1973)

Audio feedback was just an annoying electronic phenomenon until the Beatles used it as an attention-getting way to start I Feel Fine. The song itself is a rather standard riff rocker inspired by Bobby Parker’s 1961 R&B hit, Watch Your Step, but its distinctive intro came about by accident when McCartney played a low A note on his bass as Lennon was leaning his Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric against his amp. 

The note set Lennon’s guitar vibrating, and its proximity to the amp caused the sound to feed back. “We went, ‘What’s that? Voodoo!’ ” McCartney recalls. Yes, that too.

11. Blackbird

Album: The Beatles (1968)

McCartney recorded this beautiful song’s gentle, fingerstyle acoustic accompaniment on his Martin D-28. He creates an elegant, classical-guitar-style chord movement by using two-finger chord shapes exclusively, most of which form 10th intervals on the A and B strings, in conjunction with the open G-string note, which he picks in opposition to the chord shapes and employs as a droning common tone. 

His unique fingerpicking technique relies largely on his thumb, which he uses to pick bass notes, and index finger, which he uses for pretty much everything else, employing brushed downstrokes and upstrokes and often brushing across two or more strings. 

This often results in notes that are “ghosted,” or barely articulated, a “flaw” that is a testament to his innate musicality – McCartney’s touch is charming and greatly contributes to the overall feel of the song.

10. Something

Album: Abbey Road (1969)

Ironically, while the Beatles were breaking apart in 1969, George Harrison was coming into his own as a songwriter and guitarist. His Abbey Road contribution Something is among his finest songs, and his guitar playing here and throughout the album is masterful. 

Harrison’s mellifluous lead lines, in particular, are more expressive than anything he’d done before, demonstrating his newfound confidence and evolving connection to his instrument and creative muse. 

Performed with his “Lucy” 1957 Gibson Les Paul played through a Leslie speaker, the solo simmers as Harrison turns up the heat on his melody and dynamics, then cools it down with bluesy restraint. 

“George came into his own on Abbey Road,” says Geoff Emerick, who engineered this and other Abbey Road sessions. “For the first time he was speaking out and doing exactly what he wanted to do. And of course he wrote these beautiful songs and we got a great new guitar sound.”

9. I Want You (She's So Heavy)

Album: Abbey Road (1969)

John Lennon was composing some of the heaviest rock and roll in the Beatles’ catalog in 1969, and this song – true to its title – is among the most crushing, thanks to an abundance of doubled and overdubbed guitar lines that give it some serious sonic heft. 

Lennon wrote the song for Yoko Ono, with whom he was newly in love, and the result is a spellbinding exercise in obsessive repetition, from its lyrics – consisting almost entirely of the title and roughly five other words – to the ominous guitar lines that recur throughout it. 

Clocking in at 7:47, the song is also one of the Beatles’ longest. And although it consists of nothing more than a verse and a chorus repeated several times, it is rhythmically one of their most intricate tunes, switching between 12/8 meter and 4/4 rhythms alternately played bluesy and with a double-time rock beat. Few other artists could have made so much with so little.

8. I'm Only Sleeping

Album: Revolver (1966)

Harrison’s startling backward guitar solo on this Lennon-penned song is one of his greatest guitar moments on 1966’s Revolver.

Over the previous year, he had used an expression pedal to create a volume-swelling sound, similar to a reverse-tape effect, on several tracks, including Yes It Is and I Need You (see entry 19). But for I’m Only Sleeping, Harrison wanted to hear his guitar truly in reverse, a decision undoubtedly inspired by Lennon’s own retrograde vocals on Rain, recorded earlier the same month, April 1966.

Rather than simply improvising guitar lines while the track was played backward, he prepared lead lines and a five-bar solo for the song and had George Martin transcribe them for him in reverse. Harrison then performed the lines while the tape was running back to front.

The result is a solo that surges up from the song’s murky depths, suffusing it with a smeared, surreal, dreamlike ambience. Within a year, Harrison’s idea would be copied by such psychedelic rock acts of the day as the Electric Prunes, who employed it on their 1966 hit I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night), and Jimi Hendrix, who used it to great effect on Castles Made of Sand.

7. And Your Bird Can Sing

Album: Revolver (1966)

This middle-period Beatles gem, written primarily by Lennon, features Harrison and McCartney on impeccably crafted and performed harmony-lead guitar melodies, a pop-rock arranging approach that was still in its infancy in 1966. It would later be employed extensively in the southern rock genre by bands such as the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as hard rock and metal acts like Thin Lizzy, Boston and Iron Maiden.

Together, Harrison and McCartney’s individual single-note harmony lead guitar parts form, for the most part, diatonic (scale-based) third intervals in the key of E. Lennon performed his rhythm guitar part as if the song were in the key of D, using a capo at the second fret to transpose it up a whole step, as he did on Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man and Julia.

The quick half-step and whole-step bends that Harrison and McCartney incorporate into their parts here and there in lock-step fashion are particularly sweet-sounding. Heard together, they have the precise intonation of a country pedal-steel part performed by a seasoned Nashville pro. 

The harmonized lines that the two guitarists play over the “minor-drop” progression during the song’s bridge section, beginning at 1:05, reveal their musical depth and sophistication and command over harmony beyond the basic “I-IV-V” pop songwriting fodder.

6. A Hard Day's Night

Album: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

It lasts all of roughly three seconds, but the sustained opening chord to this classic Beatlemania track is one of rock and roll’s greatest and most recognizable musical moments. Bright and bold as a tolling bell, it loudly announced in 1964 not just the start of the Beatles’ latest album but also the dawning of a cultural transformation that owed nearly everything to the group’s influence. 

The song was written to order for the Beatles’ feature-length film debut, A Hard Day’s Night. According to George Martin, “We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning.” 

The dense harmonic cluster that Martin and the group created is the result of four instruments sounding simultaneously: Harrison on his 12-string Rickenbacker and Lennon on his Gibson J-160E acoustic, both strumming an Fadd9 chord (with a G on the high E); McCartney on his Hofner 500/1 bass, plucking a D note (probably at the 12th fret of his D string); and Martin on grand piano, playing low D and G notes. 

The resulting chord has been described as, technically, G7add9sus4, but to millions of eager listeners in 1964, it was simply the sound of an electrifying new era.

5. Revolution

Album: 1966–1970 (1973)

At the time that this 1968 track was recorded, distortion was well established as an electronic effect for guitarists, but no one had ever used it to the extreme that the Beatles did here. 

According to Geoff Emerick, Lennon had been attempting to create distortion by cranking up his amp during sessions for Revolution 1, the slower version of the song, which the Beatles recorded in May and June of 1968. Emerick had abetted his efforts by overloading the preamp on the microphone used to record Lennon’s guitar, but even this wasn’t enough for Lennon, who told the engineer, “No, no, I want that guitar to sound dirtier!” 

By the July recording of Revolution, Emerick determined that he could distort the signal even more by patching Lennon and Harrison’s guitars directly into the mixing console via direct boxes, overloading the input preamp and sending the signal into a second overloaded preamp. 

“I remember walking into the control room when they were cutting that,” recalls Abbey Road engineer Ken Scott, “and there was John, Paul and George, all in the control room, all plugged in – just playing straight through the board. 

All of the guitar distortion was gotten just by overloading the mic amps in the desk.” As Emerick himself notes in his 2006 memoir Here, There and Everywhere, it was no mean feat: the overloaded preamps could have caused the studio’s tube-powered mixer to overheat. “I couldn’t help but think: If I was the studio manager and saw this going on, I’d fire myself.”

4. Here Comes the Sun

Album: Abbey Road (1969)

Harrison’s jangly chord-melody playing on this song is exemplary. Using first- and second-position “cowboy” chords with a capo at the seventh fret, the guitarist loosely doubles and supports his catchy, syncopated vocal melody by working it into the top part of his acoustic-guitar accompaniment. 

He does this by using a “picky-strummy” technique (similar to what Neil Young would later employ in his song The Needle and the Damage Done), in which the pick hand gently swings back and forth over the strings in an unbroken down-up-down-up movement, like a pendulum viewed sideways. 

In doing so, Harrison selectively grazes certain strings on various downbeats and eighth-note upbeats, resulting in a seemingly casual mix of full-chord strums, single notes and two-note clusters that form a pleasing stand-alone guitar part that could easily appeal as a solo instrumental performance. 

The high register achieved by using the capo so far up the neck – the song is played as if it were in the key of D but sounds in A, a perfect fifth higher – makes the guitar sound almost like a mandolin, an effect similar to that achieved by Bob Dylan on Blowin’ in the Wind (also performed capo-7).

Also noteworthy are the ringing and musically compelling arpeggio breaks that punctuate the song in various spots, such as after the first verse (immediately following the lyric “It’s all right”) and during the bridge/interlude section, behind the words “sun, sun, sun, here it comes.” Harrison employs a highly syncopated “1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2” phrasing scheme in the first instance and “1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2” in the latter, creating a rhythmic “hiccup” that resets the song’s eighth-note pulse.

3. Taxman

Album: Revolver (1966)

Bassist Paul McCartney had first demonstrated his six-string talents on 1965’s Help!, where he played lead guitar on several tracks and performed on acoustic guitar for his song Yesterday. But McCartney would truly come into his own as a guitarist with this cut from 1966’s Revolver. 

His stinging solo, performed on his 1962 Epiphone Casino through his cream-colored 1964 Bassman amp, is a stunningly sophisticated creation, drawn from an Indian-derived Dorian mode and featuring descending pull-offs that recall Jeff Beck’s work on the Yardbirds’ Shapes of Things, released earlier that year. 

How the solo came to be played by McCartney – and not Harrison, who wrote the song and was the Beatles’ lead guitarist – is a story in itself. 

According to Geoff Emerick, Harrison struggled for two hours to craft a solo before producer George Martin suggested he let McCartney give it a try. McCartney’s solo, Emerick says, “was so good that George Martin had me fly it in again during the song’s fadeout”. 

Portions of it, played backward, were also applied to the Revolver track Tomorrow Never Knows. Apparently, Harrison didn’t feel slighted. At the time of making Revolver, he was ambivalent about his musical ambitions and pondering Indian mysticism, to which he would eventually convert. 

“In those days,” he said, “for me to be allowed to do my one song on the album, it was like, ‘Great. I don’t care who plays what. This is my big chance.’ I was pleased to have him play that bit on Taxman. If you notice, he did like a little Indian bit on it for me.”

2. While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Album: The Beatles (1968)

While My Guitar Gently Weeps has become one of George Harrison’s signature tunes, but when he wrote the song in 1968, he couldn’t get his bandmates to take an interest in it. Frustrated, he asked his pal Eric Clapton to sit in on the recording session for the track, hoping his presence would put the group on its best behavior. 

Clapton accepted the invitation and delivered a performance that remains a high point in the Beatles’ catalog. For the session, Clapton played a 1957 Les Paul Goldtop that had been refinished in red. He’d purchased the guitar in New York City sometime in the '60s and in 1968 gifted it to Harrison, who nicknamed it “Lucy”. 

The guitar was already in Harrison’s possession at the time of this recording. When he picked up Clapton to take him to the studio for the Beatles session, the famous guitarist was empty handed. “I didn’t have a guitar,” Clapton recalls. “I just got into the car with him. So he gave me [Lucy] to play.” 

Harrison was concerned that Clapton’s solo was “not Beatley enough,” as the group was by the time of this recording well known for their sonic innovation. During the song’s mixing stage, the band had engineer Chris Thomas send Clapton’s signal through Abbey Road’s ADT – Automatic Double Tracking – tape-delay system and manually alter the speed of the delay throughout Clapton’s performance, making the pitch sound chorused.

The effect is especially noticeable in the final measure of the second middle-eight, after the line “no one alerted you”. Ironically, while the solo is one of Clapton’s most famous, he was never credited on the recording.

1. The End

Album: Abbey Road (1969)

The round-robin solos that bring The End to its exhilarating peak are without question the group’s most powerful statement expressed through the guitar.

Here, for a mere 35 seconds, three childhood friends and longtime bandmates – Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon – trade licks on a song that represents, musically and literally, the Beatles’ last stand as a rock group before they broke up the following year. 

The End is the grand finale in the medley of tunes that make up much of Abbey Road’s second side. As such, it’s designed to deliver maximum emotional punch, and it succeeds completely, thanks in great part to the sound of McCartney, Harrison and Lennon rocking out on their guitars, as they did in their first, embryonic attempts to make rock and roll some 12 years earlier.

“They knew they had to finish the album up with something big,” recalls Geoff Emerick, the famed Abbey Road engineer who worked on the 1969 album. “Originally, they couldn’t decide if John or George would do the solo, and eventually they said, ‘Well, let’s have the three of us do the solo.’ It was Paul’s song, so Paul was gonna go first, followed by George and John. It was unbelievable. And it was all done live and in one take.” 

Much of the song’s power comes from the sense that the Beatles are making up their solos spontaneously, playing off one another in the heat of the moment. As it turns out, that’s partly accurate.

“They’d worked out roughly what they were going to do for the solos,” Emerick says, “but the execution of it was just superb. It sounds spontaneous. When they were done, everyone beamed. I think in their minds they went back to their youths and those great memories of working together.”

Klaus Voormann, born in 1938 in Berlin, first heard rock ’n’ roll being thrashed out in a club in Hamburg by a five-piece group of Liverpudlians known as the Beatles. 

Voormann briefly played bass with the Fab Four while their original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe took a break, and went on to join John, Paul, George, and Ringo on a variety of post-Beatles projects – including Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass albums, both recorded in 1970.  

By then, Voormann had enjoyed a stint with Manfred Mann between 1966 and ’69, and become a sought-after session bassist. His distinctive playing can also be heard on the intro of Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1971) and on Harry Nilsson’s definitive cover of Badfinger’s Without You (’72). Notably, he appeared on Lou Reed’s 1972 album Transformer, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson.  

Beyond the bass, Klaus has enjoyed a separate career as an artist, designing album sleeves for acts as diverse as the Bee Gees, Wet Wet Wet, and the Scorpions. His best-known cover, the Beatles’ Revolver, earned him a Grammy award in 1966. That’s quite a resumé, as we agreed when we met the 83-year-old recently. 

What is your preferred recording setup, Klaus? 

“I used a Fender Precision and an Ampeg with a 15-inch speaker. I always played that bass with flatwound strings – and they were old, I never changed them. I didn’t always use the amp – I would plug straight into the board.” 

Tell us about your influences. 

“I was always listening to jazz, because I like the double bass. It’s interesting – my main influence was James Jamerson, who recorded a lot of Motown. He was a double bass player who got into electric playing. 

“He did the same thing that I did – he held a sponge under the strings. I didn’t know he did it, but it muffled the tone on the sound of those Motown records. It was magic to me, what he did.” 

Your relationship with the Beatles began in Hamburg at the start of the '60s. 

“Yes, it started there. We sat there for a while as spectators, listening, looking  and having fun with a drink and dance. Bit by bit we all wanted to connect, and among our group, I was asked to go up and talk to them. I met John and he introduced me to Stuart Sutcliffe, and from then on it was like a world on fire. It was about art, movies, and music. 

“They were so open – and it was difficult for us, being German, to understand. They would easily talk about their inner feelings; they weren’t scared of opening up. When they did that, they opened us up and showed us how people can be. Germans in general are very scared to open up their  inner life. We were taking purple hearts [amphetamines] and talking so much... It was unbelievable.”

You are also one of the few people to have played with them live. 

“Yes. Stuart handed me his Hofner President bass, and went off for a cuddle with Astrid Kirchherr [photographer]. I played it with my back to the audience. It was the early hours of the morning with a few couples dancing and one or two sleeping at the bar – it was a real night atmosphere. It was the first time in my life I had a bass in my hand.”  

You’ve worked with the Plastic Ono Band for many years, on and off. Is it true that the early-'70s sessions were difficult for Ringo Starr, because John Lennon had become a different person through primal scream therapy?  

“Yes, Ringo was a little upset at first. John and Yoko were so engaged with one another, that it wasn’t the same type of work he did in the Beatles. It was just John and Yoko, and they were so together that Ringo was a little sad. Later, John said to him, ‘It’s not just me any more – it’s Yoko and me. We are together, and it’s different.’ 

“Ringo hadn’t known a relationship the way John and Yoko were: he would be more used to a more macho relationship [with Lennon]. When [Lennon] met Yoko, that was the real John. Back in Hamburg, he was a cocky rocker. John was always frustrated until around Sgt Pepper, and after that, he met Yoko, and he was departing.” 

The Plastic Ono Band albums of 1970 were recorded just months after the Beatles’ split was announced. 

“Yes, Paul made it public with the announcement but [the split] was clear long before – this was not new to John. His frustration was over, he was relieved. He was free now. John still had some obligations, but he was completely free. He saw it as fact. I don’t think he was angry about it.”   

How much freedom did you have when recording bass with John? 

“John gave me all the freedom in the world. He never told me what to play.”  

You continued to work with John throughout his solo career, as well as recording with George and Ringo. 

“It was like a snowball effect. Once I played for John, I was asked by George, and I couldn’t have been happier. Then it was Carly Simon and Lou Reed – it was such a nice selection of people that asked me to play. All the people I played for I had fun with, and was happy about the fact they asked me.”  

How did your experience in the studio differ between each Beatle?

“George would come into the studio with little joss sticks: he would light a candle and dim the lights – it was like a little altar. He would take much more time to record. The Beatles were never mentioned: it was time to turn the page and move on. 

“Ringo would always need someone to help him play the chords. He would rely on friends. He was different in that I think he would have played with the Beatles until the end of his life. 

“John would rely on Yoko. She was a great catalyst for him most of the time: even with just a few words she said the right thing, and that wasn’t easy to do.”

Tell us about working on Transformer with Lou Reed, David Bowie and Mick Ronson. 

“Lou Reed was fantastic, and such a lovely person. He was great long before this album, he was underrated. This project with Bowie and Mick Ronson was a well-done record, and Lou had such great songs. Walk On The Wild Side is not me playing bass [it was Herbie Flowers – Ed] but I loved it. 

“He and Bowie got on well: They were always laughing and having fun. It was a strange atmosphere in a great way, you know – they were writing about pimps, transvestites…"  

You also recorded All Things Must Pass with George in 1970. 

“I love All Things Must Pass. With the title track and Isn’t It A Pity, there is a sense of looking into the past but also the future. A lot of people say it’s sad, but George believed that his body was not important; it was a shell for the soul. That’s difficult for people to understand. It sounds very sad – but it’s not really: he was very happy about his life.” 

• Klaus Voormann's art is available through his official webstore.