“I had the audacity to say, ‘Are we gonna rehearse, Mr. Berry?’ He whipped around and yelled, ‘We don’t rehearse rock ‘n’ roll!’” Session great Carlos Alomar on his time as Chuck Berry’s rhythm guitarist
Session guitarist extraordinaire Carlos Alomar has shared the stage with a veritable list of icons, from David Bowie to James Brown and The Main Ingredient.
Later, he joined the ranks of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney collaborators, contributed to Alicia Keys' album The Element of Freedom, and played on the worldwide hit Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. However, before hitting his stride with Bowie, Alomar played second fiddle to none other than Chuck Berry.
“He came in with this guitar, a beautiful ES-335, and he would lift the headstock up and down and that would tell you what to play,” recalls Alomar in the latest edition of Guitarist.
“Depending on how he moved his headstock, you’d stop or start. That was it. And man, he walked in and said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ But I had the audacity to say, ‘Are we gonna rehearse, Mr Berry?’ He didn’t turn around; he whipped around and yelled, ‘We don’t rehearse rock ’n’ roll!’ Let me tell you, I still give my musical cues to this day with the headstock, just like Chuck Berry.”
Carlos Alomar at Stevens Institute of Technology - YouTube
In the late '60s, Alomar had an eight-month stint with James Brown, which saw him tour the East Coat and pick up life lessons along the way.
“While I was playing with him, he kept saying, ‘We’re gonna take it to the bridge,’ but I had to wait for the cue. Finally, he whipped around and said, ‘Hit me,’ and, unfortunately, I did not hit him at all [laughs]. I missed the cue.
Alomar describes how he went to collect his money when he quickly discovered that some of his hard-earned cash was missing.
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“I looked at the guy and said, ‘Hey, there’s $20 missing.’ He said, ‘Yeah, Mr Brown said you didn’t hit back.’ I was intelligent. My father gave me a mantra: ‘If you can’t explain it, defend it.’ So I learned to talk real fast and to explain exactly what I wanted… And I was fired.”
For more from Carlos Alomar, plus new interviews with Joe Satriani and Joe Perry, pick up issue 516 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.
Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she's not writing, you'll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.