Plenty of rock guitarists have a legitimate claim to being the most influential of all time. Jimi Hendrix transformed the sound and vocabulary of the electric guitar. Chuck Berry established the instrument as the engine of rock and roll. Eddie Van Halen reinvented its technique for a new generation. But Tony Iommi did something arguably even more consequential: he created an entire musical ecosystem.

Iommi’s innovations extended far beyond his ominous tone and down-tuned guitar. Together with singer Ozzy Osbourne, bassist and chief lyricist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward, he established the basic grammar of heavy metal: the riff as the central compositional force; the use of chromatic movement and the tritone to create menace; and the idea that sheer sonic weight could carry emotional meaning. His guitar did more than provide accompaniment or decoration. It created an atmosphere that was industrial, apocalyptic, supernatural and profoundly alienated.

Most influential guitarists inspire other guitarists. Iommi inspired genres. Doom, thrash, sludge, stoner rock, death metal, grunge, glam and industrial metal all contain some trace of his musical DNA. Even musicians who rejected Black Sabbath’s tempos, imagery or monumental heaviness embraced Iommi’s fundamental proposition: a sufficiently powerful riff could become the song.

More than a half century after Black Sabbath’s debut, heavy metal remains perhaps the most durable commercial laboratory for electric-guitar innovation. It is one of the few substantial corners of popular music in which guitarists are still expected to search for new tunings, new tones, new rhythmic languages and new extremes of precision and physical impact. Pop music continues to use the guitar but rarely asks the instrument to reinvent itself. Metal does.

METALLICA HAD CARRIED Iommi’s revolution into another generation. Guitarist Hetfield did not merely imitate the Black Sabbath sound. He extended Iommi’s method, making the riff faster, tighter and more rhythmically exact. With the enormous success of Metallica’s self-titled “Black Album,” he also demonstrated that music descended from Sabbath’s forbidding early records could conquer mainstream culture without surrendering its essential heaviness.

That is what makes this conversation more than a fascinating archival encounter between two musicians. It captures a symbolic meeting between the architect of heavy metal and one of his most consequential descendants. One man invented the language, and the other used it to address the world.

Despite metal’s typically grim disposition, the conversation with Iommi and Hetfield was anything but solemn. Conducted over many drinks at a New York tavern, with my fellow rock journalist Alan Paul joining the exchange, it proved to be a surprisingly good time with plenty of belly laughs.

Tony, what were your earliest influences?

TONY IOMMI In the beginning I was primarily influenced by old blues records. Since liner notes on most blues 78s were either sketchy or non-existent, I never knew who half of the musicians were. I still don’t.

What was your first band like?

TONY IOMMI There were six of us: the four original members of Black Sabbath plus a sax player and a slide guitar player. I think we called ourselves the Polka Tulk Blues Band, or something equally stupid. We eventually broke up so we could get rid of the sax and slide player. The four of us wanted to move away from the blues thing.

How did you make the leap from playing traditional blues to composing the heavy, riff-oriented music that characterized Sabbath?

TONY IOMMI We just became so fed up with people talking while we were playing that we said, screw it, let’s turn it up so they won’t be able to chatter. [laughs] The band just kept getting louder and louder.

Did your new sound provoke an immediate response from the audience?

TONY IOMMI After we wrote “Wicked World” and “Black Sabbath,” we thought, well, we’re going to have to try them out. When we did, everybody in the club just froze. All these blues people just scratched their heads and said, “What’s that?” The reactions were very strong, both pro and con. But I think most people enjoyed what we were doing because they had never heard anything like it.

James, how did Metallica come to pioneer thrash metal?

JAMES HETFIELD Like Tony, we also played cover tunes when we first started. We were influenced by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which included bands like Venom and Diamond Head—underground stuff. We learned a bunch of songs from a batch of obscure imported singles. Most people thought we were performing originals which was good for us—we took all the credit! You know: “Hey, you guys write good songs.” We certainly weren’t going to tell them the truth. [laughs]

Eventually we started playing everything faster because, just like Sabbath, the crowd wasn’t paying attention to us and that pissed us off. We decided to try to wake everybody up by playing faster and louder.

Nervousness also contributed to our sound. Our drummer Lars was always nervous onstage, so he’d play faster and faster. It was a huge challenge for us, but nobody wanted to wimp out and tell him that he was playing too fast. We just figured, hell, we’ll just play fast, too. It became part of a game.

Tony, in the early days of Sabbath, did you ever feel like you were competing with other heavy bands like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin?

TONY IOMMI Certainly. There was always competition between Zeppelin, Purple and ourselves. In fact, Robert Plant and John Bonham were from Birmingham, which was our hometown. We all knew each other, which made it worse! John was actually my best man when I got married.

The main thing I remember about Bonham was that he was in an incredible number of groups. He’d only be in them for a week, and they’d get rid of him because he was too loud. He had this tremendous list of bands that he’d played with written on his bass drum case. He’d cross the old one off and then add the next one.

Was it hard to play in a tough factory town like Birmingham?

TONY IOMMI It had an effect on us. We were completely surrounded by violence and pollution, so that was a big part of our music. We were living our music.

What’s your best Ozzy story?

TONY IOMMI There are so many. Here’s one. We were all in an elevator in this real plush hotel, and Ozzy decided to take a crap. As he was doing it, the elevator was going down to the reception floor. The door opened suddenly, and there was Ozzy with his pants around his knees. And all these people in fur coats were just staring at him with their mouths open. [laughs]

JAMES HETFIELD I heard that your drummer Bill Ward once showed up for a tour with his only suitcase filled with beer!

TONY IOMMI Well, Bill never used to take many clothes at all. And when he did, he’d have two suitcases—one with dirty clothes and one with dirtier clothes. [laughs]

I used to do terrible things to Bill. I actually set him on fire once—honest to God. We were recording Heaven and Hell, and I asked, “Can I light you on fire, Bill?” And he said, “Well, not now.” So, I said, “Okay,” and then forgot about it.

An hour later Bill said, “I’m going home now. Do you still want to set me ablaze or what?” I said, “Sure.” So, I got this bottle of petrol, tipped it on Bill, set fire to him and—voormph! I couldn’t believe it! He went up like a Christmas tree. He screamed and started rolling around on the floor. His clothes started burning and his socks melted, and the nylon socks stuck to his legs. I wasn’t able to help him because I couldn’t stop laughing.

It was actually pretty serious, and he had to go to the hospital. I felt really bad. He had third-degree burns on his arms and legs and everywhere. The next day his mother phoned me up and said, “You balmy bastard. Our Bill is going to have to have his leg off.” She exaggerated a bit, but things like that were a regular occurrence with Bill.

Tony, you were one of the first rock guitarists to lower the pitch of your strings, which helped create Sabbath’s signature dark sound.

TONY IOMMI People would always tell me, “You can’t lower the pitch of your strings, that’s not right. I actually used several different tunings. I would try anything. Occasionally, I’d tune as much as three semitones down for Ozzy because he couldn’t hit certain notes.

JAMES HETFIELD Wow! So, you tuned down to a C# or something?

TONY IOMMI We’d try anything to make our sound heavier.

JAMES HETFIELD Wasn’t it hard to stay in tune, especially since you use lighter strings?

TONY IOMMI It was. But I had to use light strings. I had a work-related accident that cut off the tips of my fingers. As a result, I can’t bend heavier strings. I can’t even feel the strings [shows us his amputated fingers]. See, this one’s cut off, and that one’s off that way.

JAMES HETFIELD Whoa!

TONY IOMMI Suddenly, I had to develop a new way of playing. Ironically, I had the accident on the same day that I was supposed to quit my factory job to tour Germany with this group. So, when I started playing again, I had to devise a new way. I used to play a lot with my forefinger and pinkie because the two middle fingers were bandaged up. I learned to use and bend with my little finger a lot.

As you can imagine, I also had to learn to play standard chords in very unorthodox ways. Then I created these plastic thimbles that extended the length of my fingers, which allowed me to play in a more normal fashion.

JAMES HETFIELD Why did you need the thimbles? Why couldn’t you just use your shortened fingers?

TONY IOMMI There’s only one layer of skin that covers the bone. Sometimes when I’m playing, the thimbles accidentally come off and…

JAMES HETFIELD Ouch! So basically, cutting off the tips ofyour fingers indirectly led you to develop this completely unique style.

TONY IOMMI Yeah. At first I thought I was finished, because I went to all of these specialists and they said, “Forget it, your guitar playing days are over.” Then a friend of mine bought me a record by jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and told me to have a listen. I told him I thought he was great. Then my friend said Django was only able to use two of his fingers. It started me thinking, well, if he was able to do it, I’m gonna have go. And that’s what started me on my way.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, check out the recently published Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, available here: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

One thing no one tells you when you decide to become a writer or musician is how many hours you will spend alone, whether you’re practicing scales or searching for the right words to express an idea. You have to find some romance in isolation because, sooner or later, it becomes more than a condition of the work. It becomes part of the work itself.

When I first heard Joni Mitchell’s Hejira as a teenager, I thought it was an album about the allure of the open road. With its hypnotic guitar textures and experimental tunings, the music seemed to conjure endless highways, enormous skies and limitless possibility.

But as the years unspooled and I gathered some life experience, I began to hear a more complicated album, one that understood solitude as both liberation and loss. Perhaps more than any other album, Hejira has kept me company by refusing to resolve that contradiction.

BEING ALONE WAS not an abstract concept for Joni Mitchell in 1976. At thirty-two, she was one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of her generation, but success had left her restless. After the commercial triumph of Court and Spark, she had deliberately begun moving, as she put it, from “the hit department to the art department.” The Hissing of Summer Lawns, released in 1975, replaced the intimate confessionals of her earlier work with stranger rhythms, denser arrangements and coolly observed portraits of women trapped inside marriage, money and suburban expectation. Critics and her fans were divided, but Mitchell had little interest in retreating to familiar ground.

Her personal life was becoming equally unsettled. In late 1975, she joined Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, a traveling rock-and-roll carnival populated by musicians, poets, actors, lovers and an extraordinary quantity of cocaine. Mitchell later recalled that the drugs produced both “great and disastrous” results: terrible insomnia accompanied by long, feverishly written poems. By early 1976, her on-again, off-again relationship with drummer John Guerin was collapsing, and a tour behind The Hissing of Summer Lawns ended prematurely amid exhaustion and turmoil. Mitchell retreated to Neil Young’s beach house, physically depleted and uncertain what to do next.

Then two friends appeared and invited her to drive across the country. Mitchell immediately accepted. They traveled from Los Angeles to Maine, where she left her companions and continued alone, heading south to Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico and west through the desert toward California. She had no driver’s license, so she followed truckers who signaled when police were ahead. In New Orleans, she disguised herself with a wig and adopted false names, enjoying the rare freedom of passing through the world without being recognized. “Nobody knew where I was,” she later remembered. For one of the most famous women in music, anonymity had become its own form of emancipation.

Six of Hejira’s nine songs emerged from that journey. Mitchell briefly considered calling the album Travelling, but the word implied a destination, and these songs were about something more psychologically elusive. Searching through a dictionary, she discovered hejira, a word associated with exodus or departure. To Mitchell, it meant “running away, honorably”: leaving a relationship without declaring either person guilty, and treating departure not as failure but as an act of self-preservation.

The road had long been one of rock music’s favorite symbols, but it usually belonged to men. For Kerouac, Dylan and countless guitar-playing outlaws, travel represented conquest, escape and limitless possibility. Mitchell’s journey was different. As a woman traveling alone across America, Mitchell understood that freedom came with genuine danger. The road offered what she called “the sweet loneliness of solitary travel,” but it also forced her to confront everything she had left behind: failed relationships, competing desires, the burden of fame and the possibility that her fierce independence might be both her salvation and the source of her isolation.

The road became more than the setting of Hejira. It became the album’s governing metaphor: a place where escape and discovery, self-possession and loneliness, could occupy the same lane. Mitchell is almost always moving—driving through deserts, passing towns, hotels and strangers—but the deeper journey occurs inside her head. Movement strips away ordinary responsibilities and relationships, leaving her alone with memory, desire and the contradictions in her character. She wants intimacy, yet resists anything that might restrict her freedom. The road gives her autonomy, but it cannot give her comfort.

SONICALLY—WITH ITS vast sense of space and hushed intimacy—there is still nothing quite like Hejira. The drifting ambiguity of Mitchell’s guitar chords and her avoidance of conventional verse-chorus song structures leave the listener floating and unmoored, much like the travelers who inhabit her songs. Hejira does not merely tell us about rootlessness; it makes us experience it.

Popular music ordinarily gives us clear coordinates: major or minor, tension and release, departure and return. Mitchell repeatedly withholds those assurances. Her open tunings generate chords without readily identifiable names, while ringing strings persist across harmonic changes, blurring the point at which one chord ends and another begins. We sense motion, but not necessarily a destination.

Even the word “rootless” operates on two levels. Mitchell is rootless in the geographical and emotional sense, while her music frequently leaves the function of its tonal center uncertain. The open tuning of the song “Hejira,” for example, contains no third and therefore refuses to tell us whether we are standing in major or minor territory. We remain emotionally undecided.

Mitchell never allows the listener to feel more settled than the woman telling the story. The open strings continue ringing as the chords change around them, leaving traces of one emotional state inside the next. We may not consciously understand the harmonic mechanism, but we feel its consequences: suspension, distance and the uneasy exhilaration of having nowhere particular to belong.

On four of the album’s most important tracks, fretless bassist Jaco Pastorius heightens the uncertainty. A conventional bassist might clarify Mitchell’s harmonies by planting firm roots beneath her chords. Jaco frequently does the opposite. His lines slide between pitches, rise to the instrument’s upper register and behave almost like a second melodic consciousness. Instead of laying solid pavement beneath Mitchell, he sometimes seems to remove the road entirely.

To create the album’s glacial shimmer, Mitchell recorded her electric rhythm guitar parts several times, deliberately allowing the performances to drift slightly out of alignment. She drew inspiration from the way Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter begin in unison and gradually separate on Nefertiti, like two images slipping out of register. By layering her guitars in the same fashion, Mitchell essentially created a chorus effect by hand, before she possessed a machine capable of reproducing it.

THE STARK COVER art of Hejira completes the album’s psychological landscape. Mitchell wanted the central portrait to look “haunted, like a Bergman figure.” Norman Seeff photographed her, while Joel Bernstein supplied images taken on frozen Lake Mendota after an ice storm. Mitchell then constructed the sleeve from fourteen separate photographs, blending the frozen landscape, roadway and portrait into one continuous dream image.

The most striking detail is that the highway passes directly through her body. She isn’t merely traveling on the road; she has internalized it. It has become part of her identity. Yet everything surrounding her is frozen: the lake, the palette, the atmosphere and seemingly human connection itself.

The back cover makes this even more poignant. Figure skater Toller Cranston and a distant woman in a bridal gown occupy the same frozen expanse yet remain separated from one another. The bridal figure suggests the domestic life and lasting attachment Mitchell repeatedly approaches throughout the album but cannot—or will not—inhabit. Marriage is visible across the ice, but unreachable.

It is also difficult to ignore the period’s other meaning of “snow.” Cocaine had become part of Mitchell’s life during the Rolling Thunder Revue, contributing to the insomnia, overstimulation and “abnormal mindset” from which she was attempting to recover. Whether or not the reference was intentional, her wintry figure surrounded by an expanse of frozen white inevitably carries an additional narcotic chill.

The cold is part of the album’s paradox. Solitude offers Mitchell clarity, freedom and refuge, but not warmth. She has escaped the crowded rooms, the failing relationship and the narcotic chaos surrounding her. What remains is the severe beauty of the ice—and the unsettling possibility that freedom and emotional isolation may be different names for the same place.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, check out the recently published Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, available here: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

I’d usually laugh and say, “Yes, that was a long time ago...but how in the hell do you know about October?”

It was a legitimate question.

October was a deeply experimental five-piece consisting of me on violin and guitar, two keyboard players, a bassist/singer, and a drummer. We existed for only about four years in the late Seventies and early Eighties, played a handful of gigs around Detroit, and recorded an album for the tiniest of independent labels. Who could possibly remember that we ever existed?

Here’s the small miracle.

In the days before the internet, the few copies of our album that were pressed somehow began changing hands. Everyone knows about obsessive collectors of jazz, classical music, and obscure punk records, but unbeknownst to me, there was an equally rabid underground culture devoted to progressive music. And somehow, those people found us.

They bought the record. Taped it. Traded it. Bootlegged it. Eventually they uploaded it, downloaded it, and passed it around internationally for the next fifty years.

None of the surviving members of October had anything to do with any of this. Aside from the occasional phone call from a collector searching for a copy of our suddenly “rare” album, I’m not sure any of us realized that the record had acquired a strange little mystique of its own.

So, imagine our surprise when, nearly fifty years after we made the thing in almost complete obscurity, a record label in France, Disques Plusqueréel, contacted us out of the blue.

They wanted to release our debut, October.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thrilled. It touched me quite deeply that something we’d worked so hard on as youngsters had somehow survived and that, after all these years, people were still interested in hearing it. Especially since the music was so naïve, ambitious, and peculiar.

So, who was October?

IN THE LATE SEVENTIES, in the suburbs of Detroit, I formed an experimental band with four other adventurous souls —Jeff Rozany (bass, vocals); Mark Sterling (keyboards, guitars, vocals); Mark Krench (keyboards); and Pat Carson (drums and percussion). I played violin and guitar.

October was essentially a product of rock’s first great wave of progressive bands like Yes and Traffic, but we were also trying to evoke the sophisticated darkness or melancholy we heard in the work of Miles Davis, film composer Bernard Herrmann, and King Crimson. We thought the name October—with its associations with autumn, Halloween and Samhain—captured that slightly spooky atmosphere without being too obvious about it.

We were in our late teens and early twenties and knew next to nothing about jazz harmony or classical composition, but that didn’t stop us from learning. We were determined to make serious music, and we were remarkably disciplined about it.

Not surprisingly, gigs were difficult to find. October wasn’t exactly Top 40 club material.

We self-produced shows at small auditoriums, and a few adventurous Detroit jazz and rock clubs would book us from time to time. We were pretty happy if we could perform once every two or three months. Then we caught a break when the local Detroit public radio station, WDET, took a liking to us. They began playing our music and booking us for larger shows alongside other adventurous Motor City acts like Griot Galaxy and the Mary Roberts Band.

We understood that we’d chosen a complicated path, but our attitude was essentially “go big or go home.” October became a real fire-breathing monster live, particularly after the album was recorded. Whether people actually liked us was another matter, but even those who didn’t quite understand what we were doing generally acknowledged that we were serious musicians playing interesting music.

To some degree, that was all we’d ever wanted.

Our record was independently produced and recorded in Dearborn, Michigan, by an enthusiastic audio engineer named Jon Jarvis, who loved progressive rock. He was convinced we were the only band in Detroit worth recording and, even more improbably, that we had the potential to become a huge arena act.

Jon had a eight-track home studio crammed into the upper level of his house, with barely enough room for five musicians and their instruments. We recorded most of the basic tracks live, then added vocals and solos as overdubs. Only two musicians could fit in the main room, so the rest of us were scattered through hallways and squeezed into the recording booth.

We couldn’t really see one another, which meant we had to listen intensely through our headphones. It was a little stressful, but none of us had ever recorded in a professional studio, so we simply assumed this was how records were made.

Fortunately, we were extremely well rehearsed, and most of the basic tracks went down in one or two takes. The solos were largely improvised, and I remember the drama whenever one of us stepped forward to record one. Everyone else would wait, then we’d gather around afterward to hear what had happened.

Most were finished within a couple of takes, and as far as I can remember, there were virtually no punch-ins or corrections. What you hear is pretty much what we played.

October shot on 16mm film in 1977 by a friend of the band for $0.

WHILE IT WAS disorienting to learn that Disques Plusqueréel was interested in reissuing our album, perhaps even more surprising was discovering that they had somehow procured a second album of studio outtakes entitled After the Fall. None of us had given producer Jon Jarvis permission to release it, but apparently he had—and it, too, made the rounds among prog aficionados.

The story behind After the Fall goes something like this. Several months after the release of our debut, keyboardist Mark Krench left the band, and Mark Sterling recruited Craig Furkas to take his place. In addition to being a skilled keyboardist, Furkas was a gifted composer whose harmonically dense style can best be heard on “Through the Light of Reason.”

With Furkas, October began moving away from the wild improvisations that characterized the first album and toward more focused, highly arranged compositions. Jarvis was excited by the new music and urged us to return to his studio. It was during this period that we began recording the material that eventually became After the Fall.

Before we could finish, however, we decided to change direction for both commercial and artistic reasons. Musical tastes were shifting rapidly, and we were finding it increasingly difficult to book shows. So, about two-thirds of the way through, we abandoned the sessions and moved on.

Jarvis, however, was not to be denied. He loved what we’d recorded and eventually released much of it—without our knowledge—as a second album, which is included in the Disques Plusqueréel re-issue.

I hadn’t heard any of After the Fall since we recorded in 1978. Listening to it now is a strange experience. It’s clearly unfinished, and I’d still classify much of it as a work in progress. But some of it is genuinely exciting, and I can hear five young musicians pushing themselves as hard as they knew how, trying to make music that didn’t sound quite like anybody else’s.

And perhaps that’s the nicest surprise of all.

It’s comforting to know that life can still reach back across the decades and tap you on the shoulder. I can barely believe that the strange, ambitious music we created in an attic in Michigan somehow survived, crossed an ocean, and found an audience we never knew existed.

Nearly five decades later, October is getting another October. Not bad for a band that could barely get a gig.

PS. The video below features five additional unreleased songs by October right before we called it quits. It’s more post-punk than progressive, but I believe it shows the band at the height of its powers.

Those wishing to purchase the October album on numbered, limited edition vinyl or on CD go to: https://pqrdirect.my-online.store/

After chronicling more than half a century of almost nonstop invention and upheaval, my co-author Alan di Perna and I had a surprisingly difficult time coming up with an ending that felt equally exciting or optimistic. Instead of pointing toward some thrilling new frontier, our final chapter began to sound more like a requiem for the instrument.

The best we could manage were hopeful-but-hardly-inspiring lines like this: “No one can predict the future. But the electric guitar’s versatility and adaptability make it a highly likely candidate for survival in the Darwinian mechanics of musical evolution.”

Survival?

After everything we’d just written about Leo Fender, Les Paul, Seth Lover, Jim Marshall, Roger Mayer, Eddie Van Halen and generations of inspired troublemakers who had repeatedly reinvented the instrument, survival seemed like a pretty low bar.

But if we were being honest, by 2016 it was beginning to feel as though the electric guitar had run out of gas.

PERHAPS IF WE’D been a little more attuned to what was happening on the digital side of the fence, we might have seen what was coming around the corner.

The first clue actually arrived before digital technology had taken over anything. In 1982, Boston mastermind Tom Scholz introduced the Rockman, a pocket-sized analog headphone amp and recording device that could convincingly simulate the sound of a fully produced electric guitar without requiring a conventional amplifier or microphone. It might have looked more like a Walkman than a revolution, but the idea behind it certainly was: for the first time, the sound of a guitar amplifier was becoming something that could be separated from the amplifier itself. And this wasn’t merely a novelty for bedroom guitarists.

Scholz used his technology extensively on professional recordings, and the Rockman soon found its way into the studios of major players and producers, including Mutt Lange, Billy Gibbons, and Jeff Beck. A device small enough to clip onto your belt was suddenly capable of making sounds good enough to appear on hit records.

Then digital technology blew that door wide open.

BY THE LATE Nineties, increasingly powerful computers made it possible to recreate amplifiers in software. Line 6’s Amp Farm, introduced in 1998, was a particularly important milestone, putting virtual versions of numerous coveted amplifiers inside a computer, where guitarists and engineers could summon them with the click of a mouse. Soon, instead of owning a roomful of expensive vintage amps, you could effectively carry an entire warehouse of them around on a laptop.

It was incredible in theory, and often impressive in practice. But there was still a catch. Early digital modeling could approximate the sound of a great tube amplifier remarkably well, but it didn’t always capture its feel, responsiveness and unpredictable interaction with a player’s touch. For many professional guitarists and engineers, digital amps remained useful tools rather than convincing replacements for the real thing.

But computers have a funny habit of getting better.

Kiki Wong of the Smashing Pumpkins with her digital Reactor amp.

OVER THE NEXT two decades, the technology improved at a dizzying rate. Companies became increasingly adept at modeling not only amplifiers, but speaker cabinets, microphones, effects and virtually every other link in the guitar signal chain. And as processing power increased, the gap between the virtual world and the real one began to shrink dramatically.

Manufacturers like Fractal Audio pushed digital modeling to increasingly sophisticated levels, while Kemper’s groundbreaking Profiling Amplifier allowed musicians to digitally capture the personality of a specific amplifier and carry that sound virtually anywhere. Neural DSP would push the technology even further, using machine learning to help recreate the complex behavior of real amplifiers, cabinets and effects.

At the same time, all that computing power began migrating back into the humble guitar amp itself. By the end of the 2010s, companies like Yamaha, Fender and Positive Grid were ushering in the era of what we might call the “smart amp”: compact, digitally connected amplifiers that could communicate with phones and tablets, access enormous libraries of sounds, stream music, provide backing tracks and perform tricks that would have seemed like science fiction when Scholz introduced the Rockman.

Looking back, the electric guitar hadn’t run out of gas at all. We’d simply been watching the wrong gas station.

BUT THERE WAS something curious about all this extraordinary technological progress. For forty years, digital guitar technology had been getting progressively better at answering essentially the same question: How can we reproduce the sound and behavior of a great amplifier without actually using that amplifier?

Positive Grid’s Reactor poses a different question: What if we stopped merely copying the great amps of the past and started using computing power to create new ones? Reactor has the ability to replicate the classic sounds of the past, but what intrigued me was its Creator Hub feature found on its app (see video).

CREATOR HUB IS essentially a creative assistant for guitar tone. Instead of requiring you to understand amplifiers, effects, EQ and signal chains, you tell Reactor what you’re trying to achieve, and its Amp Intelligence figures out the equipment and settings needed to get you there. The system is based on Positive Grid’s analysis of more than 200 amplifier designs and more than a million guitar tones.

There are four basic ways to use it:

1. Text — Tell it what you want.
Type something like “a nasty early-Seventies British blues-rock sound,” or describe an artist, amp or style, and Reactor creates an appropriate virtual amp-and-effects setup.

More excitingly, you can request something entirely abstract: “What would Picasso’s Guernica sound like as a guitar tone?” or “Create an effect Jimi Hendrix might have wanted if he’d lived to 2026.” In those cases, Reactor isn’t simply trying to reproduce a known guitar sound. It’s interpreting an idea and constructing an amp and effects chain that it associates with that description. You haven’t told it which amp, pedals or settings to use. You’ve supplied an artistic concept and asked the system to translate it into guitar tone.

2. Image — Show it what you want.
Take a picture of an amplifier, pedalboard or other piece of gear and Reactor will interpret what it sees and create a tone inspired by it. More playfully, you can give it virtually any image—a hot rod, a dark forest, a flaming meteor—and let the AI translate the mood of the picture into sound.

3. Audio — Let it hear what you want.
Give Creator Hub a recording containing a guitar sound you like, and it analyzes what it’s hearing, then builds a playable tone intended to approximate it. In other words: “I want my guitar to sound something like that.”

4. Fix My Tone — Tell it what’s wrong.
If you’ve already created a sound but don’t quite like it, Creator Hub can analyze the preset and suggest ways to improve it. So rather than having to know that you need to reduce 400 Hz, change the gain structure or alter an effect, you can simply tell the system what isn’t working and let it diagnose the problem.

WHILE I’VE ONLY had a short time to work with Reactor, the results have been surprising, musical and remarkably detailed. As an experiment, I took a quick snapshot of a new abstract painting I’d recently acquired and uploaded it to Creator Hub without providing any additional instructions.

The amp quickly went to work and generated three separate sounds inspired solely by the image. Even more interestingly, it explained what it thought it was looking at and how it had translated the image into sound:

“You’ve asked for a guitar sound inspired by an abstract painting of lily pads on water with vibrant teals, greens, reds and warm lamplight—aiming for a lush, ambient Shoegaze tone.”

It then offered three variations. Ambient Painting combined a Twin-style clean amp with compression, chorus, modulated delay and long reverb for what it called “immersive, shimmering ambience.” Lily Pad Dream used a high-headroom clean amp, slow chorus, tape delay and plate reverb to create a “vibrant, floating texture.” And Lily Pad Glow employed an ultra-clean amp, chorus, multi-tap delay, EQ and extended hall reverb for “spacious, crystalline highs and peaceful ambient depth, like sunlight on water.”

And damned if that’s not pretty much what they sounded like.

To my ears, the three presets suggested the kinds of watery sonic explosions Andy Summers created with the Police, but with a decidedly more modern twist. And remember: I hadn’t asked Reactor for Andy Summers, shoegaze, chorus, delay, reverb or even lily pads. I had simply shown it a painting.

One can only imagine what Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen might have made of something like this as a creative tool in the studio.

This is only scraping the surface of what Reactor is capable of, and I’m sure guitarists will spend years discovering uses for it that Positive Grid itself never anticipated. That’s usually what happens with genuinely interesting technology. Hendrix didn’t invent the Marshall stack, fuzz box or wah-wah pedal. He simply heard possibilities in them that nobody else had.

And perhaps that’s the most exciting thing about the amp. For most of the digital era, guitar technology has been obsessed with looking backward: How perfectly can we reproduce a 1959 Fender Bassman, a ‘65 Deluxe Reverb or a late-Sixties Marshall Plexi? Reactor can certainly play that game, and play it remarkably well. But for the first time in a long while, the more interesting question isn’t how accurately an amplifier can reproduce the past. It’s what sounds we haven’t imagined yet.

Is Reactor really the biggest leap in guitar amplification since the 100-watt Marshall? Ask me again in ten years. Technology doesn’t make musical revolutions. Musicians do.

But ten years after writing that the electric guitar’s greatest hope might simply be its ability to “survive,” I’m happy to admit we may have seriously underestimated the old bastard.

Turns out it wasn’t running out of gas after all.

If you’re still curious, here’s a deeper dive into Positive Grid’s Reactor.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, check out Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, available here: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

Published by Ruffian Books—the independent imprint founded by Alternative Press creator Mike Shea—the thing arrives in a hand spray-painted 14-by-14-inch box designed to resemble the graffiti-covered exterior of a Lower East Side club. Open it up and you’re greeted by an equally audacious volume: 540 oversized pages wrapped in a riot of black, yellow, and pink, packed with hundreds of extraordinary photographs and Stegall’s deeply informed, often surprising chronicle of punk’s formative decade.

Many of you already know Tim through his wonderfully opinionated Substack, but he’s been documenting punk since the mid-1980s in publications including Flipside, Alternative Press, and The Austin Chronicle. Few writers have spent more time excavating punk’s forgotten corners, rescuing overlooked artists, or challenging the movement’s accepted mythology.

I FIRST MET Stegall years ago when I was editing Guitar World. He wandered into our offices looking as though he’d rolled out of bed after a long night at Coney Island High, the legendary club that served as a fixture of New York’s punk scene in the 1990s. He was smart, streetwise, played guitar, and, above all, radiated authenticity.

I remember laughing, saying something to the effect of, “We need a degenerate around here.”

Tim took me at my word. One of his first assignments was an ambitious oral history of the New York Dolls. It was fascinating, sprawling, and far longer than we’d expected. Then, just as we were finishing the edit, Tim vanished. We couldn’t reach him. After a few days of head scratching, we shrugged, ran the story anyway, and figured he’d turn up eventually.

Years later, Tim told me he’d disappeared down a personal rabbit hole and had come close to abandoning writing altogether. Thankfully, he found his way back. The same qualities that made him an unconventional freelancer—his curiosity, his refusal to follow the crowd—have since made him one of the most imaginative and original voices in music journalism.

All of those qualities are on full display in Anarchy In The Studio. Through the stories behind more than 140 landmark albums, Stegall chronicles punk rock's explosive first decade. The usual suspects are all here—the MC5, the Stooges, David Bowie, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Damned—but one of the book’s greatest pleasures is the attention paid to neglected pioneers such as The Saints, the Dead Boys, and the Cramps, whose influence often exceeded their commercial success.

Organized chronologically by each album’s original release date in its country of origin, Anarchy in the Studio unfolds like a guided tour through punk’s evolutionary tree. Stegall seamlessly blends meticulous historical research with outrageous stories, generous musical analysis, and firsthand observations from the artists themselves. Joey Ramone, never one for false modesty, proudly declares, “We really changed rock ‘n’ roll. When we came out in ‘74, rock ‘n’ roll was pretty much dead. It was just disco and corporate rock... All the fun was totally gone. We rocked the boat.”

About halfway through the book, I found myself laughing—not at the stories, but at the staggering amount of work that must have gone into assembling them. As an author, I know what it takes to chase down obscure recording dates, contradictory recollections, forgotten interviews, and elusive photographs. It’s a monumental undertaking. Then I remembered who I was dealing with. Knowing Tim, I suspect he enjoyed every obsessive minute.

That’s ultimately what makes Anarchy in the Studio so much fun. Stegall’s enthusiasm is irrepressible. Whether he’s writing about T. Rex or some gloriously forgotten band that deserved a better fate, his excitement is contagious. You don’t simply read the book—you keep turning the pages because he’s convinced you there’s another great story waiting just around the corner.

Additionally, since this is Guitar Land, I also have to mention one unexpected bonus: this book is absolutely littered with awesome guitar porn.

To be honest, it had never really occurred to me before, but Gibson clearly won the hearts and minds of Seventies punk rockers. Les Pauls, SGs, Juniors, Flying Vs—they’re everywhere. Was it because two of British punk’s defining guitar heroes, Mick Jones and Steve Jones, both favored Les Pauls? (After all, you’ve got to keep up with the Joneses.) Or was it Gibson’s thick, snarling humbucking pickups, which could bulldoze their way through even the loudest clubs? Probably a little of both.

In many ways, Anarchy in the Studio feels like the book Tim Stegall was born to write. Punk has always celebrated the obsessive outsider—the person willing to dig deeper, challenge convention, and devote unreasonable amounts of time to subjects that polite society dismisses as noise. Tim has been doing exactly that for more than forty years.

The irony, of course, is that punk was never supposed to be respectable enough to inspire a lavish, 540-page coffee-table monument. Yet here we are, and somehow it feels exactly right. Like the music it celebrates, Anarchy in the Studio is loud, messy, funny, passionate, occasionally profane, and utterly uncompromising.

If you love punk rock, you’ll lose yourself in its pages. If you’re merely punk-curious, you may come away understanding why this unruly little movement continues to cast such a long shadow over modern music. Either way, Stegall has produced one of the most entertaining—and unquestionably one of the most graphically ambitious—books ever written about punk.

Just don’t try carrying the thing onto an airplane. It weighs almost as much as Iggy Pop did in 1973.

###

Anarchy in the Studio: Punk Music 1970–1979, The Rise of Punk Rock is available directly from Ruffian Books. If you’re a serious punk fan—or simply appreciate beautifully produced music books—I recommend buying it from the publisher and supporting an independent press that’s taking chances on ambitious projects like this.

As a kid growing up in the Sixties, I dreaded the moment some Las Vegas-style crooner like Paul Anka or Vikki Carr appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show or The Hollywood Palace flanked by a platoon of sequined dancers who proceeded to stomp, kick, and pirouette all over an otherwise perfectly decent pop song like “Going Out of My Head.”

To me, backup dancers represented the death of spontaneity. Every smile was rehearsed, every move predetermined, every gesture polished to within an inch of its life. It never looked like anyone was actually having fun.

Fortunately, rock and roll promised something entirely different. Watching the Beatles, the Young Rascals, or Sly and the Family Stone, you got the feeling that anything could happen. Their performances felt loose, joyous, and gloriously unpredictable—as though the music itself was in charge rather than a choreographer standing just offstage with a stopwatch.

There were exceptions, of course. Motown groups like the Temptations and the Supremes performed tightly rehearsed routines, but they sang while they danced, and their movements always seemed to emerge naturally from the music. They invited the audience into the performance instead of asking us to admire its precision.

IN RECENT YEARS, I realize those sequined dancers never really disappeared. They simply changed costumes. Over the past two decades, the Las Vegas aesthetic has quietly worked its way back into mainstream pop and hip hop, where elaborately choreographed productions have increasingly replaced the loose, unpredictable energy that once made live music feel so exhilarating. Somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing concerts and started seeing productions. I was watching “spectacular entertainment,” but I was no longer experiencing that sense that anything unexpected might happen.

Oddly enough, it took me years to connect those childhood memories of television variety shows with my growing sense of disconnection from much of today’s pop music. Then, within the space of a few weeks, two seemingly unrelated performances made the connection impossible to ignore.

THE FIRST CAME when Phoebe Bridgers appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to perform her wistful new song, “Lost Boys.” Instead of surrounding herself with a troupe of impeccably synchronized dancers or a cast of anonymous supporting performers, she walked onstage with a band of young musicians—some as young as eight—who looked as though they’d just been handed the greatest gig of their lives. They weren’t acting out joy; they were experiencing it on national television.

To be clear, there was nothing amateurish about the performance. The young players were remarkably accomplished. But what moved me wasn’t their technical ability. It was the unguarded enthusiasm they brought to every note. The performance was polished, yet somehow remained ecstatic, innocent, and emotionally disarming. Watching those kids look at one another, grinning as they made music together, I felt something I hadn’t experienced in a long time: hope.

A FEW WEEKS later I found myself in a brewery in Lodi, California, at the Women’s International Music Network’s She Rocks Showcase. There wasn’t a video wall. There wasn’t a troupe of dancers. There wasn’t a whiff of manufactured spectacle. Instead, there was only a succession of gifted female performers standing onstage playing mostly original songs with the kind of wholehearted exuberance that reminded me why I fell in love with live music and rock and roll in the first place.

The show began with Two O’Three, a Northern California-based teen quartet who performed grungy originals sweetened by vocal harmonies that occasionally recalled Weezer. They were followed by a 15-year-old vocal powerhouse named Abigail Jones who began by singing an introspective version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with only an acoustic guitar, followed by several of her own compositions with titles like “Shame,” anchored by a sharp choruses delivered with head-turning confidence.

Another standout was Canadian musician Sierra Levesque, who took the stage armed with a black Flying V that dwarfed her small frame and thunderous backing tracks produced by Ron “Bumblefoot” Thall of Guns N’ Roses. Afterward I discovered she played every part herself—drums, bass, backing vocals, and additional guitars.

Other performers leaned toward more mainstream pop, including Isolde Fair and Tia Penny, who delivered sophisticated, emotionally charged ballads; the refreshingly bluesy Sweet Taunts; and Ariel, a guitar shredder who regularly performs with Debbie Gibson and has appeared on Broadway. Yet all of them projected the same unvarnished delight and enthusiasm I've been missing in this age of social-media hustle.

It turns out I never really hated backup dancers. I hated watching people pretend to have fun. The musicians who moved me this summer weren’t pretending. They were living inside the music, and they invited the rest of us in with them. Entertainment isn’t built on perfection. It’s built on the possibility that something unexpected—and wonderfully human—might happen.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

In July 1967, a police raid on an after-hours club ignited one of the bloodiest urban uprisings in American history, leaving 43 people dead, more than 1,100 injured, and prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to send Army troops and the Michigan National Guard into Detroit. The politics and headlines were different, but many of the questions about policing, the limits of government authority, and the deployment of law enforcement against civilian communities continue to divide America today.

While researching MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, I found myself returning to that horrific week through the recollections of guitarist Wayne Kramer, singer Rob Tyner, manager John Sinclair, and others who lived through it.

The MC5 are often remembered as America’s most revolutionary rock band, but in July 1967 they were simply an ambitious local group trying to make a name for themselves. Before Kick Out the Jams, before the White Panther Party, before the arrests, the headlines, and the mythology, they found themselves caught in one of the most explosive episodes of civil unrest in American history.

MC5’s Wayne Kramer would later dismiss the notion that Detroit ever experienced the carefree hippie optimism associated with San Francisco’s 1967 “Summer of Love.”

WAYNE KRAMER: “The Summer of Love never came to Detroit. It didn’t fit. The Summer of Fear and Paranoia was more like it. The draft board would come around and fuck with you, patrol guys would fuck with you...it was endless.”

The day before the uprising erupted, the MC5’s manager, poet and activist John Sinclair, had spent the evening speaking to an unlikely audience: the local chapter of MENSA.

JOHN SINCLAIR: “The day before the 12th Street Detroit riots ignited, a bunch of us jumped into a van and went out to the northern suburbs somewhere to visit with these people that belonged to MENSA, the organization for people with high IQs. We were their guests of the month. They wanted to see if hippies were a new form of intelligence or something.”

“We got totally smashed. We finally left early Sunday morning, higher than goats. When we woke up that afternoon, the rioting was going full blast. You could see the fires. We saw troops, tanks, convoys, and police of every description converge.”

The violence wasn’t something Sinclair watched from afar. It arrived at his own front door.

JOHN SINCLAIR: “We watched one convoy come down the street, and it came up to our door. Suddenly, the police came charging through our little hallway and started banging on the door.”

“When I opened it up, there was a shotgun pointed right in my face.”

“I said, ‘What the fuck? Is there a warrant or something? What’s your problem?’

“’We hear there are snipers up on the roof, and we’re investigating.’

“’Bullshit, there’s no snipers up here; are you crazy?’

“One police officer called me by name and said, ‘Aw, shaddup, Sinclair, or we’ll blow your head off.’”

“That made me snap. I started hollering, ‘Go ahead, blow my head off. I don’t give a fuck if it’s going to be like this, if you can just walk in here and stick guns in our faces. Either blow us away or get the fuck out of here. Ain’t no snipers here, and you know it.’”

“I just ranted and raved. Those guys kind of looked at each other and backed off, because they could tell I literally didn’t care. That was a turning point in our development. It just blew our minds.”

For MC5 singer Rob Tyner, the events of that week exposed just how much unchecked authority had been handed to the police and National Guard.

ROB TYNER: “The authorities were so arrogant, they called our own National Guard on our people, right here in this country! The Michigan National Guard was issued live ammunition, real guns, and there were snipers all over the place. It was bad.”

His wife, Becky Tyner, remembered something equally unsettling. In the confusion of those eight days, the normal rules no longer seemed to apply.

BECKY TYNER: “The riots gave the police free rein to oppress the community. And the local cops knew what was going on within their area, and they took advantage of the situation to violate people’s rights.”

Rob Tyner decided it was safest to leave Detroit. Others stayed behind.

ROB TYNER: “Becky and I left town, but other people in the band chose to stay, and some of them wound up in jail. Cops just came and grabbed Wayne and threw his ass behind bars. They were just picking up people, even if you weren’t doing anything.”

Kramer had escaped the city for a day at the beach. By the time he returned home, Detroit had become almost unrecognizable.

WAYNE KRAMER: “I went out to the beach on the Sunday the riots started. It was really hot. We were driving back from our picnic when I saw these big flames bursting out.”

“When we made it back to our apartment house, we went up on the roof and started watching as this police car pulled up and two Guardsmen got out. Two cops got out on the other corner, and we watched them run into a house. Then we heard shooting.”

“The next day we found out they had shot and killed an old drunk guy with a broom on the fire escape. They thought he was a sniper.”

As the days wore on, Kramer found himself fearing the authorities more than the unrest itself.

KRAMER: “It went on for a week, and it was like a war zone. Sinclair, Tyner, and Fred Smith split town, but I stayed. My mother called and said, ‘Wayne, are you all right? Do you have any guns or anything?’ I said, ‘Ma, I don’t need any guns.’

“’Well, what are you going to do about the Blacks?’

“I said, ‘I’m not worried about the Blacks. I’m worried about the police. The people in the neighborhood are just people.’”

The paranoia spread in every direction. At one point, Kramer and his roommates were using a telescope to watch the activity outside. Police mistook it for a sniper’s scope.

KRAMER: “They busted into the house. They stormed in yelling, ‘Everybody get up! You’re going to be shot! Everybody lay down on the floor! You’re going to be shot!’ So, everybody’s laying on the floor with shotguns in their faces.”

“All they found was a knife and a bag of cannabis seeds. The white troopers didn’t know what the seeds were, so they yelled, ‘Go get that Black officer! He’ll know what this is!’ And he did.”

“They took us downtown. We walked past cellblock after cellblock where we saw Black guys just beat to fuck.”

For the MC5, the Detroit uprising wasn't simply another chapter in the city's history. It became part of the band's DNA. The distrust of authority, the sense of confrontation, and the refusal to back down that later exploded through Kick Out the Jams weren't born in a rehearsal room. They were forged during one unforgettable week in July 1967.

Reading these conversations today, what strikes me isn't how much America has changed, but how many of the same questions still refuse to disappear. The faces are different. The politics are different. Yet the voices of Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Rob Tyner, and Becky Tyner still sound remarkably close—as if that long, hot summer never ended completely.

###

Many of the interviews excerpted here originally appeared in MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock's Most Revolutionary Band (Hachette), which I co-authored with Jaan Uhelszki and Ben Edmonds. If this story intrigued you, the book explores the band's remarkable history in much greater depth.

The short answer is that, for Beck, guitars and cars were never separate passions. They sprang from the same place.

In fact, there’s a remarkably deep connection between electric guitars and automobiles that stretches back to the birth of the solid-body guitar itself. Both were products of postwar optimism, industrial ingenuity, chrome-plated excess, and the belief that machines could be transformed into works of art.

No one understood that better than Leo Fender. Long before he revolutionized popular music, Fender’s fascination with electronics grew out of time spent around his uncle’s automotive repair shop. Later, when he began building guitars, he borrowed Henry Ford’s assembly-line production methods, finished his instruments in Detroit automotive paints, and even gave many of his models names borrowed from America’s love affair with the automobile.

The Fender Jaguar, introduced in 1962, shared its name with the glamorous British sports car. The Mustang debuted in 1964, the very same year Ford unveiled the pony car that would define a generation, and by 1969 Fender was decorating certain models with racing stripes inspired by the high-performance machines of Carroll Shelby. A few years later came the Bronco, another model whose name was lifted directly from Ford’s rugged new SUV.

Gibson, headquartered just two hours from Detroit in Kalamazoo, Michigan, drew inspiration from the Motor City as well. In 1963, the company unveiled one of its boldest designs, the Firebird, a futuristic solid-body guitar penned by renowned automotive designer Ray Dietrich. Dietrich had earned his reputation creating elegant bodies for Packard, Lincoln, Chrysler, and other luxury automobiles during the golden age of American coachbuilding. Rather than asking a traditional luthier to shape its next-generation guitar, Gibson hired a man whose instinct was to sculpt steel, chrome, and horsepower.

The Firebird looked unlike anything else on the market. Its sweeping lines, elongated body, and dramatic reverse headstock evoked the soaring tailfins that had become Detroit’s visual signature during the late 1950s. Even its name suggested speed and motion rather than music. Although the guitar initially sold modestly, it eventually became one of Gibson’s most distinctive creations—a reminder that, in America, guitars and automobiles were often imagined through the very same design language.

From the very beginning, electric guitars weren’t simply musical instruments. They were automobiles you could wear.

WITH ALL OF that in mind, there were few people better qualified to discuss the connection than Jeff Beck and his longtime friend—and fellow hot rod enthusiast—Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Back in 2014, I invited the two of them to sit down for a conversation about their twin passions: guitars and engines.

What is the cosmic connection between the appreciation of an automobile and a guitar?

BILLY GIBBONS It’s a big question, but a good one! What’s really the wicked connection is that they can be loud and fast; yet they can also be quite elegant. While I was in Spain visiting Nacho Baños, the noted authority on early Fifties blackguard Fenders, we spent more than a day and a night—make it days and nights—talking about automotive elegance and the connection with the unchanged beauty of that original Fender. Call it the Telecaster, the Esquire, the Broadcaster or call it the No-caster—it’s become one of those timeless things.

JEFF BECK Guitars and cars offer experiences that are both quite amazing. The other day I was thinking, why are there so many people in cars? It’s because it’s such a pleasure to have that experience, regardless of where you are going. It’s almost habit forming. You want to control your movement, but at the same time your brain is going at an unnatural speed and you’re putting yourself in danger.

There’s that element of excitement every time you turn the ignition. It’s not that you’re just driving from point A to B—you’re enjoying every second of being in control of your life…or avoiding death! Listening to great rock and roll music also gives you this exhilarating sense of awareness similar to what you have when you are driving.

There are other more obvious connections. Hot rods are cool looking and rock and roll is cool looking, and they both came of age at the same time in the Fifties. If America never created anything else, thank you very much for the hot rods and rock and roll!

How are cars and guitars different?

GIBBONS Jeff and I were out with our gals one night, making the rounds in London, when one of the most striking revelations came as Jeff remarked, “We’re going to be better guitarists if we relax and throw caution to the wind. And should we make a mistake, it ain’t no big deal. That’s the best part of the game. However, when you’re behind the wheel of a car, one has to remain extremely focused.”

Jeff then went on to declare, “Keep steady behind the wheel. And when behind the guitar, let it rip!”

So, what you’re saying is part of your enjoyment of a car is that it’s defined and controllable, whereas music is often completely open-ended and abstract.

GIBBONS Compare it to a modern couch with squared, definable corners as opposed to puffy round ones. The couch may be inviting; however, there’s no sharp definition if it’s so rounded. That’s the dilemma: the traveling minstrel’s world is often without definition. You don’t know what city you’re in. You don’t know which city you’re going to. You don’t even know what day or what time it is.

With something like a car, the engine and body parts are measured within thousands of an inch—a welcome relief to an existence with so few fixed points.

BECK When it comes to music I have a cranky brain. I can’t really put what it means in words. I’m sure Billy would agree that the creative process is a bit unpredictable. I can’t just sit down and be a good boy and write a great song; I have to be prodded by my inner feelings.

But I’ve found that while I’m working on one of my hot rods—bruising my knuckles and cursing—sometimes the music will come to me. If I hear the clank of a wrench or the ring of a piece of steel, it’ll trigger an idea. So it’s important for me to work on the cars for my music to pay for the cars. [laughs] It’s a great symbiotic relationship. It keeps me occupied, because I’m a dangerous person when I’m not occupied!

What was your first serious car?

GIBBONS There was a guy from California named Art Grindle that opened a Chrysler dealership in Houston. He was a stone character and sponsored something called The Saturday Jungle Theater on television. He had a fleet of junkers, and at an unannounced time during the two-hour show, he’d appear, saying, “The next 10 people to arrive at my dealership will get in on the Westheimer Special!”

The special was a $100 automobile, and the first ten people to arrive were allowed to put a signed $10 bill into a hat. If your bill was drawn, you got the car for ten bucks.

Well, my dad fell for it and bought a brand-new ’64 Dodge Dart—a spiffy two-door model complete with one luxury item: a heater! Believe it or not, I qualified and got a full driver’s license when I turned 13.

Wait…you had a driver’s license at13? Texas is nuts!

Oh yeah, man! For $50, you could take a quick, behind-the-wheel course, and if you passed, then you were issued a driver’s license. Anyway, the Dart was my first car, and like my first Marshall amp, I still have it!

Regarding design, do you have a favorite car and guitar?

BECK I don’t have a favorite guitar. They’re all revolting and a bloody nuisance! They just get in the way of what I’m trying to say musically. [laughs]

When it comes to cars, it changes constantly. They’re fascinating. They’re living things to me really. Driving a different car isa refreshing experience. You have to remember how this one twitches, and how the brakes are—if they pull or if they’re great. It’s an alert mechanism, and it’s almost a fashion thing. You know, “I think I’ll drive this one today and cruise through the village and frighten people.”

LISTENING TO BECK and Gibbons, it becomes clear that neither man ever viewed automobiles as a distraction from music. They saw both as expressions of craftsmanship, individuality, and mechanical beauty. Whether shaping a guitar solo or tuning a V-8 engine, the goal was remarkably similar: take something already wonderful, make it your own, and enjoy the ride!

Upcoming Book Release Events:

If you’re in the Manhattan area or Southern California I’d love to see you at one of two upcoming events celebrating the release of Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story.

Jeff Beck Book Release Party & All-Star Tribute Concert/
The Cutting Room • New York City, NY • July 17 • 7:00 PM

A celebration of the life, music, and enduring legacy of Jeff Beck. Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story authors Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill will be joined by best-selling writer Alan Paul for an evening of stories, conversation, and book signings. After, there will be live performances featuring Andy Aledort and an all-star New York band honoring one of the most innovative and influential guitarists of all time.

https://www.eventim.com/event/jeff-beck-book-release-party-all-star-tribute-concert-the-cutting-room-21715670/

Author Q&A and Signing/
Book Soup • West Hollywood, CA • July 23 • 7:00 PM

I’ll be joined by author and fellow Substacker, Michael Walker, for a deep conversation about Beck’s remarkable life and career, followed by a book signing.

https://booksoup.com/event/2026-07-23/brad-tolinski

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Little did Key, Smith or Hoover suspect that the song would one day become the Mount Everest of electric guitar showboating. Over the next century, it would be interpreted by everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck to Metallica, Yngwie Malmsteen and countless local heroes armed with enough distortion, whammy-bar dives, and pinch harmonics to qualify as a military reenactment.

Somewhere along the way, the anthem evolved from a patriotic hymn into a six-string proving ground—a musical high-wire act capable of inspiring either goosebumps or secondhand embarrassment.

TO BE HONEST, as I wandered down the YouTube rabbit hole I was stunned by just how many guitar legends have marched to centerfield, convinced they could out-Hendrix Jimi Hendrix. It almost became a parlor game.

Did Stevie Ray play the national anthem? Of course he did…on slide!

Did Jeff Beck? Absolutely. In fact, he performed it at Comerica Park in my hometown of Detroit.

Did Buckethead—a man who performs wearing a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head? Inexplicably, yes.

The list goes on…and on.

Now, I’m not suggesting every guitar rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” is a crime against patriotism.

Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes wisely resisted the temptation to treat it like an Olympic gymnastics routine. And while it’s not technically the same piece, Chet Atkins leaves almost everyone in the dust with his dazzling interpretation of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

However, some performances honor the song, while others simply declare war on it.

I have absolutely no intention of ranking these interpretations. That’s the sort of thing that starts family arguments at Fourth of July barbecues. Instead, I’ll simply present the evidence and allow you, dear reader, to decide which truths are self-evident.

Not as well known as his live Woodstock version, but impressive nonetheless, is Jimi Hendrix’s multi-layered studio version of the National Anthem. If you have not heard it, prepared to be astonished.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

JEFF BECK would have turned 82 on June 24.

In the course of researching our upcoming book, Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story (July 14, Da Capo Press), Chris Gill and I spent years interviewing Beck’s friends, bandmates, rivals, managers, and collaborators. Along the way, we uncovered countless stories that revealed just how unlikely—and at times fragile—his journey really was.

Most fans know the broad outlines of Beck’s career: the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group, Blow by Blow, Wired, and the groundbreaking instrumental work that followed. Fewer know that in November 1969, a devastating car accident nearly brought it all to an abrupt end.

At the time, Beck had already established himself as one of rock’s most innovative guitarists, but he was also at a crossroads. He had dissolved the original Jeff Beck Group, missed Woodstock, and was struggling to determine what came next. Then, in the early hours of November 2, fate intervened.

The following book excerpt tells the story of the accident that nearly ended Jeff Beck’s career before it had truly begun.

ON THE BRISK MORNING OF November 2, 1969, Jeff Beck found himself wide awake before the dawn, his mind churning. The preceding months had been difficult. In a move that had shocked many, Beck had dissolved The Jeff Beck Group at a critical juncture, scrapping plans for high-profile appearances at two legendary 1960s festivals: the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in New York, and the Isle of Wight festival in England.

The band’s singer, Rod Stewart, believed that performing at Woodstock could’ve saved the band and catapulted them to superstar status. He might have been right, but Beck had his doubts. Contrary to rumors that he had fled back to England to salvage a crumbling relationship, Beck later revealed he had intentionally disbanded the group prior to Woodstock because he felt the vibes in the band “were totally shredded.” With the festival set to be immortalized on film, he couldn’t bear the prospect of a poor performance.

He knew he had sabotaged himself, yet he still clung to the hope that the damage was superficial. On November 3, he and manager Peter Grant were scheduled to fly to New York to meet up with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice, laying the foundation for a new incarnation of The Jeff Beck Group. Beck still hoped to coax Stewart back into the fold, but the odds were slim. Stewart’s professional respect for Beck remained intact, but personal tensions and his dislike of the proposed rhythm section made a reunion unlikely.

Bogert and Appice, more clear-eyed about Stewart’s reluctance, reached out to Rusty Day, the former vocalist of the Detroit band The Amboy Dukes, best known for their 1968 hit “Journey to the Center of the Mind.” The idea intrigued Beck, but he was wary of forming a predominantly American band, fearing it might lead to extended periods away from home. “It’s bad enough just visiting America for a few weeks,” he told NME. “Let alone buying a house and living in the middle of all that rubbish.”

Restless and sleepless, Beck wandered to his garage. Waiting for him there was his latest acquisition and obsession: a 1932 Ford T-bucket hot rod, recently imported from Boston.

His love of cars had started almost as early as his love for guitars. As a boy, Beck’s automotive awakening came via his Uncle Frank, who owned a pair of sporty MG roadsters and was handy with a wrench. “Every weekend I’d run errands for him,” Beck recalled. “He’d give me pocket money and drive me around in his MG with the top down. That was it for me.” But it was his mother who sealed deal — first by taking him to see the film Hot Rod Gang, and then by bringing home a copy of Rods and Customs. “That magazine ruined me,” Beck laughed. “She inadvertently introduced me to my two loves: music and cars.”

Those interests had converged in May 1969. During a Jeff Beck Group tour stop in Boston, Beck ducked into a local speed shop and was lured outside by the rumble of a healthy-sounding V-8 engine. A local builder, Rick Heinrich, had just pulled up in a Chevy-powered T-bucket Ford, and the two instantly bonded over their shared love of hot rods. That night Beck handed him $2,500, and the car was immediately shipped to England. It wasn’t his first attempt to bring a hot rod home — in San Francisco a few months earlier, he’d tried to buy a legendary Model A coupe but never ended up claiming it. This time, the deal stuck.

NOW, IN THE early hours of November 2, Beck climbed into the bucket’s low-slung cockpit and fired up the engine. He roared through the Kent countryside as the sun began to rise — until disaster struck.

While speeding through the town of Maidstone, his tire blew out, causing his car to veer uncontrollably across the road. Beck recalled the incident vividly: “It wasn’t the speed that was the problem. When the front tire blew out, the rigid cross-ply treads lost all traction — it was suddenly like skating on ice. I had no control; the car just went straight across the road.”

The ensuing collision with an oncoming Morris automobile was devastating. Beck was ejected from his hot rod, landing on the road with severe injuries: a four-inch skull fracture, a broken nose, and facial lacerations. He spent two days under hospital observation, where further X-rays revealed additional spinal injuries, necessitating three weeks of strict bed rest.

The accident’s timing was eerily significant — it occurred on the exact date of a childhood incident where Beck had been hit by a car while riding his bike, which also damaged his skull. This coincidence left him deeply superstitious for the rest of his life; he made it a point to lay low on November 2^nd to avoid any other potential life-threatening mishaps.

When Peter Grant and producer Mickie Most, visited Beck in the hospital they were taken aback by the severity of his condition. Given Beck’s propensity for drama, they half expected to find him with a single bandage wrapped around his little finger. Instead, they discovered their star client was genuinely bruised, broken, and barely able to move. All future plans were shelved.

As Jeff recuperated over the next year, his envisioned supergroup evaporated. Bogert, Appice, and Day formed Cactus with Detroit Wheels guitarist Jim McCarty, and Rod Stewart joined the Faces alongside Ronnie Wood. Beck, meanwhile, retreated to his cottage with girlfriend, Celia Hammond. The slower pace gave him time to reflect on what he had accomplished and where he hoped to go next.

His previous exploits with The Yardbirds seemed like a distant memory, and the lingering headaches from his accident made the thought of performing the high-decibel rock of The Jeff Beck Group almost intolerable. Disenchanted with the psychedelic excesses of the Sixties, which he dismissed as a blur of “lost souls, ludicrous trousers, and women in floppy hats,” Beck yearned for something more authentic.

He found some comfort in repairing the wrecked T-bucket, which he later sold to Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, and found musical inspiration in the polished sounds of his Motown records. His fondest memories of The Jeff Beck Group were bonding with Stewart over the undeniable greatness of the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder. The influence was subtle but present on Beck-Ola, especially in the swagger of “Plynth” and the groove-soaked “Jailhouse Rock,” and Beck sensed a future there, even if the road ahead remained unclear.

As the months passed, he was keenly aware that his inactivity couldn’t last forever; his financial realities were pressing, and he knew he needed to break free from the seductive inertia that had enveloped him. It was during this period of recovery that Jimmy Page once again stepped back into the picture, rekindling Beck’s musical ambitions.

While Beck was sidelined, Led Zeppelin had surged to the forefront of rock music. Just days before the decade’s end, on December 27, 1969, Led Zeppelin II hit Number One on the Billboard charts, overtaking The Beatles’ final album Abbey Road, marking a significant shift in rock’s hierarchy. Zeppelin celebrated their ascendency with a concert at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall on January 9, 1970, coinciding with Jimmy Page’s 26^th birthday. The event was not only a celebration but also filmed for a potential television special.

Reflecting on that night, Page said: “The Royal Albert Hall was a massive gig for us, and we really wanted to excel. The venue was magic. It was built in Victorian times, and we went in there thinking of all the musical history that had preceded us. Additionally, for John Paul Jones and myself, it felt like a homecoming since we both grew up in the area. That night, we were acutely aware of every note we played.”

Beck, emerging publicly for the first time since his accident, was among the audience. He knew Zeppelin were going to be good, but he was genuinely impressed by the band’s progression. “It was the only time I ever saw them,” Beck recounted. “Sitting up in the balcony, I was utterly amazed. There I was, without a band, watching Zeppelin own the stage.” He felt a sting of jealousy, but the show spurred Beck to reengage with music, igniting a year of experimentation.

Upcoming Book Release Events:

Over the next few weeks, Chris Gill and I will also be celebrating the book's release with events in New York City and Los Angeles, and I hope to see some of you there.

Jeff Beck Book Release Party & All-Star Tribute Concert:
The Cutting Room • New York City, NY • July 17 • 7:00 PM

A celebration of the life, music, and enduring legacy of Jeff Beck. Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story authors will be joined by best-selling writer Alan Paul for an evening of stories, conversation, and book signings. After, there will be live performances featuring Andy Aledort and an all-star New York band honoring one of the most innovative and influential guitarists of all time.

https://www.eventim.com/event/jeff-beck-book-release-party-all-star-tribute-concert-the-cutting-room-21715670/

Author Q&A and Signing:
Book Soup • West Hollywood, CA • July 23 • 7:00 PM

I’ll be joined by author Michael Walker for a conversation about Beck’s remarkable life and career, followed by a book signing.

https://booksoup.com/event/2026-07-23/brad-tolinski

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder. To celebrate Jeff’s birthday, for a short period of time we can offer 25% of our book! This offer expires on Friday!

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Although he left us in January 2023, Beck’s influence seems only to grow with each passing year. Every few months, another young guitarist discovers his music, another established player cites him as a formative influence, or another debate breaks out over where he belongs in the pantheon of rock’s greatest musicians. More than two years after his passing, the fascination remains undiminished.

For me, the past several years have been consumed by a single goal: trying to understand the man behind the legend. Alongside my longtime collaborator Chris Gill, I spent countless hours interviewing Beck’s friends, bandmates, rivals, managers, producers, and fellow musicians for our new biography, Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, which will be published by Da Capo Press on July 14.

To celebrate Jeff’s birthday month—and the upcoming release of the book—I thought I’d share a few excerpts over the next couple of weeks. Rather than focusing on the polished virtuoso who dazzled audiences in later years, I wanted to begin with the moment when a young, scruffy, utterly uncompromising mechanic walked into an audition for the Yardbirds and proceeded to change the course of guitar history.

The following excerpt chronicles Beck’s turbulent introduction to the band he would help transform—and the first signs that he wasn’t interested in following Eric Clapton’s footsteps so much as blowing up the path entirely.

BECK’S INITIAL ENCOUNTER with the Yardbirds was unexpectedly adversarial. The four remaining band members were praying for another Eric Clapton to stroll through the door, but instead they were greeted by his antithesis. Where Clapton was meticulous and stylish, Jeff Beck, with his greasy jeans and scruffy, shoulder-length hair, resembled someone who had just emerged from under a car…and probably had.

Beck’s grungy appearance made a statement. Deep down, he believed he had more to offer the Yardbirds than they had to offer him, and he wasn’t about to dress up just to win their approval. Beck recalled, “I didn’t like the band when I met them. They didn’t seem particularly eager to welcome me. It appeared they were still nursing resentment over Eric’s departure and were worried that their whole sound would disappear without him.

“They asked me rather condescendingly, ‘Can you play blues?’ I shot back, ‘What kind of blues—slow blues, jump blues, Chicago blues?’ I played a few licks, and though they seemed impressed, they advised me to ditch my echo units because ‘You don’t use an echo in Chicago blues.’ I just shook my head, wondering if they truly grasped anything. Had they ever listened to Buddy Guy, whose guitar sound was drenched in echo?”

Yardbirds rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja chuckled at Beck’s testy recounting of their initial meeting. “We were in a panic after Jimmy Page declined to join the band, and we felt like we were settling for Jeff,” he confessed. “Moreover, he was unlike the rest of us and did appear a bit rough — he was a mechanic. I remember him telling me this story about someone infuriating him, so he doused their car in paint stripper. Nervously, I thought, ‘Yes, this is just what we need in this band…’”

Despite this, Dreja understood the challenge Beck faced by joining a group that had already been together for three years. “[Bands are] closer than marriages. We had our own language and our own humor — a lot of it was Eric’s invention, I might add. Jeff was introverted and socially a bit off, but we all agreed that he was incredibly inventive, and his playing was astounding.”

And for the moment, that was enough. With “For Your Love” climbing the charts and a packed schedule of concerts, television appearances, and promotional obligations looming, there was little time to ponder whether Beck was the ideal replacement for Clapton. The Yardbirds needed a guitarist, and Beck needed a break.

His first test came quickly. The Yardbirds were scheduled to perform on March 5, 1965, at Fairfield Halls, a venue in Croydon, South London. Beck had barely a week to notify his current band, the Tridents, of his departure, learn fifteen songs, and step into the shoes of what many considered England’s most respected guitarist.

Before he could face the audience, however, there was one other matter to address: his appearance. Dreja, who had absorbed a few fashion lessons from Clapton, was assigned the task of making the band’s scruffy new recruit look presentable.

“I took him off to Carnaby Street, got him a fashionable haircut, and bought him nice shirts,” Dreja recalled. “Everything happened quickly because ‘For Your Love’ was a hit and suddenly we were on theater tours and television.”

As for Clapton, he was surprised and somewhat irked that the band didn’t collapse in the aftermath of his exit. Intrigued by his successor, he discreetly attended one of Beck’s final gigs with the Tridents. He was both shocked and slightly relieved by what he witnessed. Beck’s unruly hair and “all this fucking echo” on his guitar made Eric wonder if the Yardbirds had truly comprehended what they were getting into.

Clapton’s youthful arrogance and steadfast loyalty to tradition prevented him from seeing the truth: Beck’s wild, psychedelic guitar playing wasn’t an attack on his cherished blues but a glimpse into the swiftly approaching future — one that would pave the way for innovative players like Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and, yes, Jimmy Page. For now, Clapton was merely content that his former band would be stuck with what he perceived as an unkempt barbarian.

Meanwhile, Beck had little time to think about his judgmental predecessor; he was too busy gearing up for an undoubtedly challenging couple of weeks. To many, Clapton was synonymous with the Yardbirds, and after the music press announced his departure, Eric’s devoted followers couldn’t wait to chase the new guy offstage. But Beck wasn’t going to be coerced or cowed. When he took the stage for his debut Yardbirds performance, he locked eyes with the Croydon audience with the unwavering resolve of a gunfighter at high noon. In response to someone in the crowd shouting, “Where’s Eric?” Beck defiantly retorted, “Haven’t you heard? Read the papers. He’s gone.”

And for the next 40 minutes, the guitarist did his best to make them forget Clapton had ever existed. “I tore the place apart,” Beck recounted. “The gig bolstered my confidence, but I knew our next show would be even more demanding. I was going to face Eric’s regular crowd at the Marquee and was a little nervous. Nevertheless, I also came to the realization that being part of the Yardbirds was the best break I’d ever get, so I just went for it. Fortunately, I had a fantastic night. I played ‘Jeff’s Boogie’ [an early Beck signature piece] and received a ten-minute ovation.”

There remained one more significant hurdle. The Yardbirds were set to perform at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where ardent blues enthusiasts congregated. As Beck recalled, it was “an athletic, smelly place to play,” where the audience expressed their enthusiasm by standing on each other’s shoulders and cheering or showing their disapproval with clenched fists.

“It was the first time I genuinely felt like I might get slaughtered,” said Beck. “But I was cocky. I was like, ‘All right, you lot, get a load of this!’”

Beck managed to win the skeptical crowd over, even though few thought of him as a “genuine” blues player. Unlike Clapton, he never fully embraced the music. Instead, he took some pride in being an iconoclast — a hybrid of [Gene Vincent guitarist] Cliff Gallup, Buddy Guy, and Les Paul. The audience thought he was peculiar…yet oddly intriguing.

“I vaguely recall [Yardbirds singer] Keith Relf being a purist,” said Beck. “I thought, ‘You can be a purist, and you can be broke.’ I’ll do what I believe is right. Before the Yardbirds invited me to join, I was already moving toward avant-garde and experimental music — a bit like [jazz saxophonists] Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk. I’m not comparing myself to them musically, but the essence of what I was doing involved creating the strangest sounds I could. That’s when Eric [Clapton] came down to see me and realized where his job was going.”[1]

WHILE BECK WAS finding his footing with the Yardbirds on British stages playing his ’59 Telecaster through two Vox AC30 amplifiers, “For Your Love” continued its steady ascent, peaking at number three on March 20, 1965. This success secured the band several television appearances, including spots on two of Britain’s premier music shows: Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go!

With his gleaming blonde hair and wraparound shades, Keith Relf naturally commanded the most on-camera attention. But Beck’s presence also caught the media’s eye, with some music publications even noting his passing resemblance to Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.

“I was on the telly, and suddenly I was somebody,” Beck recounted with a hint of his astonishment at the time. “It was a mind-blowing experience.”

Although Beck had no experience before a camera, his presence was magnetic. It was on these shows that the guitarist carved out a brooding persona that stuck to him like an adhesive for decades to come. With an air of smoldering indifference, his menacing nonchalance would be studied and emulated for years by future guitar legends such as Ritchie Blackmore, Joe Perry, Chrissie Hynde, and even Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel. Dark, cool, and disenchanted, Beck provided the perfect gritty contrast to Relf’s androgynous, flaxen-haired hipster.

“The fans loved Jeff,” said drummer McCarty. “Eric’s shoes were still warm, but there was something about Jeff that ignited their imaginations. The way he moved, the way he dressed — to the kids, he wasn’t “one” of them, he was them. The fans worshipped Eric, but they wanted to be Jeff.”

[1] Grow, Kory, Rolling Stone, May 16, 2018

Upcoming Book Release Events:

If you’re in the Manhattan area or Southern California I'd love to see you at one of two upcoming events celebrating the release of Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story.

Jeff Beck Book Release Party & All-Star Tribute Concert
The Cutting Room • New York City, NY • July 17 • 7:00 PM

A celebration of the life, music, and enduring legacy of Jeff Beck. Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story authors Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill will be joined by best-selling writer Alan Paul for an evening of stories, conversation, and book signings. After, there will be live performances featuring Andy Aledort and an all-star New York band honoring one of the most innovative and influential guitarists of all time.

https://www.eventim.com/event/jeff-beck-book-release-party-all-star-tribute-concert-the-cutting-room-21715670/

Author Q&A and Signing
Book Soup • West Hollywood, CA • July 23 • 7:00 PM

I’ll be joined by author Michael Walker for a conversation about Beck’s remarkable life and career, followed by a book signing.

https://booksoup.com/event/2026-07-23/brad-tolinski

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

Before you start worrying, let me assure you that I have no plans to shuffle off this mortal coil anytime soon. I still have books to write, records to discover, and entirely too many guitars to justify purchasing.

Still, for a lifelong music obsessive, the question is hard to resist. Most people leave behind a will. Music fans leave behind playlists. And if you’re going to make one final musical statement, it might as well be a good one.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that a funeral playlist isn’t really about death. It’s about autobiography. Every song is a clue. Every selection reveals something about who you were, what you loved, what made you laugh, and what you believed mattered. The choices say as much about a life as any eulogy ever could.

SO, HOW WOULD I like to be played off the stage?

I’ve assembled a kind of song cycle built around wonder, gratitude, mystery, humor, and the strange beauty of being alive…and the unfortunate inevitability of DJ Grim Reaper. Enjoy!

“Care of Cell 44” — The Zombies

My first three selections are surprisingly uplifting—flowers for the living.

Sure, I might be dead, but it’s your good fortune to still be here. The buoyant and sweet “Care of Cell 44” spreads a little sunshine on a cloudy day. It’s also a music nerd’s way of encouraging everyone in attendance to revisit the Zombies’ masterpiece Odessey and Oracle…before it’s too late!

“Somebody Made for Me” — Emitt Rhodes

Following “Care of Cell 44” with “Somebody Made for Me” deepens the feeling. Emitt Rhodes always sounded like someone who believed that beauty was hiding just around the next corner. There is something hopeful and deeply human in his music that feels right for the occasion.

“We Have Heaven” — Yes

Short, mysterious, spiritual, and childlike all at once, “We Have Heaven” feels like a doorway between worlds. Jon Anderson’s layered voices drift in and out like a celestial choir. But for this mixtape, it’s the moment when the mood begins to shift to the reality of the situation.

“Dead Flowers” — The Rolling Stones

The music of the Rolling Stones has always carried with it an appreciation for the grit, humor, and absurdity of earthly existence. I’ve always loved how casually “Dead Flowers” treats mortality. Actions have consequences, bouquets eventually wilt, and none of us are getting out alive. The important thing is to keep dancing while you still have the chance.

“Moonlight Mile” — The Rolling Stones

While “Dead Flowers” brings sly humor, “Moonlight Mile” brings longing and transcendence. Few songs capture the feeling of standing at the edge of mystery quite like this one. It’s music designed to accompany a traveler into the great unknown.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” — The Rolling Stones

None of us really knows what’s waiting on the other side, but this is one of the few rock songs that acknowledges disappointment while remaining fundamentally hopeful. It accepts life’s limitations without surrendering to bitterness.

Then comes that extraordinary ending. The choir returns, the music swells, and for a few fleeting moments the song seems to leave the earth behind altogether. It doesn’t promise heaven or offer easy answers, but it gestures toward something larger than ourselves—something mysterious, beautiful, and just beyond reach.

That’s a lesson worth carrying with you.

“My Way” — Sid Vicious

Yes, I know this is supposed to be a solemn occasion, but let’s not get carried away.

A conventional funeral ends with dignity. I’d prefer mine to end with a little anarchy. Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way” is rude, chaotic, funny, and strangely life-affirming. It dismantles any self-importance that may have accumulated during the proceedings and reminds everyone that I never really liked to behave.

“Happy Trails” — Van Halen

Anyone can end with a hymn or a tearjerker. I’d rather end on an affectionate note.

As someone who believes this isn’t the end of the line, I’d like to think I’ll meet up again with family, friends, and fellow travelers somewhere farther down the long and dusty road. Van Halen’s version of “Happy Trails” feels like the perfect sendoff.

But that’s not all, folks.

Every great album has a hidden track, and so does my funeral mixtape.

After a two- or three-minute pause, just as people are gathering coats, exchanging hugs, and heading toward the door, I’d like Bob Dylan to get the final word—as if I’ve stepped back into the room for one last moment.

“One Kind Favor (See That My Grave Is Kept Clean)” — Bob Dylan

What’s particularly beautiful about Dylan’s version is that it isn’t mournful. It’s old, wise, weathered, and accepting. The song has traveled through Blind Lemon Jefferson, generations of blues singers, and finally Dylan himself. It carries the weight of tradition behind it.

In a strange way, it may be the most honest song on the list. Not because it dwells on death, but because it acknowledges the profundity of death without drama.

After all, death is serious business.

And while none of us gets a vote on whether we have to leave, there is something deeply human about making one final request before we go…just see that my grave is kept clean.

NOW IT’S YOUR turn! What tunes would you like played at your final farewell? Think of it as your last chance to impose your musical will on the poor folks trapped at your wake. I’d love to hear your selections

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

.

These movements are now accepted as essential chapters in modern music history.

Yet there is another musical revolution that has never received the same level of recognition, despite its enormous influence on generations of musicians. Its principal architects were Joe Satriani and Steve Vai.

For more than forty years, both men have occupied a curious place in popular music. Among guitarists, they are revered. Among the broader critical establishment, however, they have often been treated as specialists, admired for their technical skill but rarely included in larger conversations about artistic innovation or cultural impact.

Part of the problem may be that critics have generally viewed Satriani and Vai through the narrow lens of virtuosity. Once a musician is labeled a “guitar hero,” discussions tend to focus on speed, technique, and instrumental prowess. What often gets overlooked are the larger historical questions. What did these musicians create? How did they influence the generations that followed? What role did they play in shaping modern guitar culture?

Viewed from that perspective, the story of Satriani and Vai begins to look less like the tale of two exceptional musicians and more like the birth of an entirely new musical movement.

Like many important stories, it begins with a moment of inspiration.

ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1970, fourteen-year-old Joe Satriani learned that Jimi Hendrix had died. Deeply affected by the news, he made a decision that would alter the course of his life. He would become a guitarist.

The path he chose was unusual. Unlike many of the great guitarists who came before him, Satriani was not apprenticed into an established blues tradition. He did not spend his formative years learning standards from older musicians. Instead, he largely taught himself, studying music theory books from local libraries and developing a fascination with the underlying mechanics of music.

Satriani approached the guitar with the curiosity of a researcher. He wanted to understand why certain sounds worked, how harmony created emotion, and how melody could be organized into something memorable and expressive. Later, he supplemented his self-education with formal study and lessons from accomplished musicians, including jazz players who expanded his understanding of harmony and improvisation.

Before long, he developed a reputation not only as an exceptional guitarist but also as an unusually gifted teacher. One of the students who sought him out was a thirteen-year-old guitarist named Steve Vai, and the relationship that followed has few parallels in modern popular music.

Vai did not simply take lessons from Satriani; he immersed himself in them. By all accounts, he approached the instrument with extraordinary seriousness, arriving prepared with questions, ideas, and an intense desire to understand music at the deepest possible level. Satriani provided the foundation, but Vai quickly demonstrated a restless imagination that would eventually carry him into entirely new territory.

In retrospect, their relationship has an almost mythological quality. A young musician answers a calling, dedicates himself to mastering his craft, becomes a teacher, and then mentors a disciple who eventually emerges as a master in his own right. It is the kind of narrative that appears repeatedly throughout the history of art, literature, and music.

The story becomes even more remarkable when one considers what happened next.

BOTH MUSCIANS EVENTUALLY left Long Island and carried their ideas into the wider world. Vai moved west and entered the orbit of Frank Zappa, perhaps the only major rock musician of the era who fully appreciated the breadth of his ambitions. Working with Zappa exposed Vai to advanced composition, complex rhythms, and a philosophy that viewed music as an endless field of experimentation. The experience encouraged him to think beyond conventional categories and pursue a highly individual artistic vision.

Satriani’s journey took him to Northern California, where he established himself as one of the most respected teachers in the Bay Area. His students included future stars such as Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Alex Skolnick of Testament, and Larry LaLonde of Primus. Through his teaching alone, Satriani’s influence spread into multiple genres and reached audiences far beyond his own recordings.

What makes this story especially significant is that neither Satriani nor Vai fit comfortably into existing musical traditions. They were not blues guitarists in the mold of Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan. They were not jazz musicians following the path of Joe Pass or John McLaughlin. Nor were they classical guitarists adapting centuries-old techniques. Instead, they belonged to one of the first generations of musicians raised primarily on rock guitar itself.

This distinction matters.

The British guitar heroes of the 1960s were largely translating blues into rock. Jazz innovators such as Charlie Parker were extending the language of swing. Satriani and Vai, by contrast, were solving problems that rock music itself had created. They were exploring how far melody could be stretched, how harmony could be expanded, and how technology could be integrated into the expressive possibilities of the genre.

The language they developed drew from many sources. One can hear traces of heavy metal, jazz, progressive music, fusion, and avant-garde composition. Yet the end result was something distinct from all of them. They were not preserving a tradition, they were creating one, and this is one reason their influence is often underestimated today.

Successful revolutions eventually become invisible.

MOST LISTENERS NO longer think about how revolutionary it once was for rock musicians to write their own material because The Beatles made the practice commonplace. Likewise, few people stop to consider how radically electric blues transformed popular music because its influence became woven into the fabric of rock and roll itself.

The same phenomenon has occurred with Satriani and Vai. Many of the ideas that once seemed radical have become standard elements of modern guitar culture. Advanced theoretical concepts, instructional materials, clinics, educational videos, and highly sophisticated approaches to technique are now commonplace. Entire generations of musicians have grown up in an environment shaped by the innovations that Satriani and Vai helped popularize.

In many ways, they helped create the modern culture of guitar education.

Before their emergence, aspiring players largely learned from records, local teachers, and personal experimentation. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a far more systematic approach to learning the instrument had emerged. Guitarists increasingly discussed scales, modes, harmony, phrasing, composition, and technique with a level of sophistication that would have been unusual in earlier eras.

Satriani and Vai did not create this shift by themselves, but they became two of its most visible and influential advocates.

Their influence extended beyond education and into performance. Albums such as Flex-Able, Passion and Warfare, Not of This Earth, and Surfing with the Alien demonstrated that instrumental guitar music could function as a complete artistic statement rather than merely a technical exercise. Around them, an entire ecosystem began to form. Labels such as Shrapnel Records helped nurture a generation of ambitious players, while magazines, instructional videos, clinics, and festivals provided gathering places for a growing community.

Like every successful movement, it soon developed a second generation. Players such as Paul Gilbert, Marty Friedman, John Petrucci, Guthrie Govan, St. Vincent, Tosin Abasi, and Angine de Poitrine all emerged from a world that Satriani and Vai helped create. Some sounded like them, while others moved in entirely different directions. What united them was not style but inheritance. They were participants in a musical culture that did not exist before Satriani and Vai helped bring it into being.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for their significance can be found in their longevity. If Satriani and Vai had merely been products of a passing guitar fad, they would have disappeared alongside many of the trends associated with the 1980s. Instead, both artists remain active, relevant, and capable of attracting substantial audiences decades after they first emerged.

The fact that two largely instrumental guitarists can still sell out venues such as New York’s Beacon Theatre more than forty years into their careers is extraordinary. Audiences do not continue showing up for four decades simply because they are impressed by technical ability. They return because they feel connected to the music, the ideas, and the culture that surrounds it.

In that respect, the story of Satriani and Vai begins to resemble the stories of other important musical movements.

The lasting significance of Charlie Parker was never that he played more notes than anyone else. The significance of Jeff Beck was never that he played louder than his peers. What mattered was that both men expanded the language of their instruments and inspired generations of musicians to follow them into new territory.

The same argument can be made for Joe Satriani and Steve Vai.

Their greatest achievement was not speed, technique, or virtuosity. Their greatest achievement was creating new possibilities. They helped establish a musical language, a culture of learning, and a lineage of musicians that continues to evolve more than four decades later.

Whether critics choose to recognize it or not, that is what musical revolutions look like.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

It may be that guitar solos themselves have become something of an anachronism.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies, only a relatively small fraternity of players had mastered the art of making a guitar sing, cry, and speak in tongues. Every great solo felt like a new frontier being discovered in real time.

These days, thanks to endless YouTube tutorials, slowed-down Instagram clips, and an infinite supply of tabs, the once-mystical art of lead guitar has been thoroughly demystified. Your twelve-year-old cousin — or sixty-year-old granny with a Strat and too much free time— can now rip through a perfectly respectable version of “Sultans of Swing.”

Still, it wasn’t surprising that plenty of people asked me what I thought of the Rolling Stone list and, by extension, what some of my own favorite guitar solos might be. As someone who has spent a good chunk of his life writing about guitar history, I felt at least mildly obligated to have an answer to both questions.

REGARDING THE ROLLING STONE piece itself, I’d give it a B. For a publication that still positions itself as the magazine of record for popular music, too many of the selections felt self-indulgent and lacked historical perspective. I mean, the guitar solos on Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” or Girlschool’s “C’mon Let’s Go” certainly have their charms, but ranking them among the 100 greatest guitar solos of all time requires a level of stretching usually reserved for Olympic gymnasts.

Still, I was impressed that they made room for semi-esoteric landmarks like Buddy Guy’s “Stone Crazy,” Megadeth’s “Hangar 18” and Television’s “Marquee Moon.” I also have to salute them for placing Jimi Hendrix’s magnificent, difficult, and emotionally devastating “Machine Gun” in the Top Five, where it absolutely belongs.

However, while Prince’s dramatic solo in “Purple Rain” deserves a place in the Top 100 — maybe even the Top 20 — proclaiming it the single greatest guitar solo of all time felt driven more by modern mythology and click economics than genuine historical perspective.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a hater. Prince is a terrific guitarist, and “Purple Rain” is a beautiful, dramatic pop song whose elegiac chord progression provides the perfect runway for an emotional solo. But his playing on the track, while effective, wasn’t especially innovative or historically influential, drawing heavily from the melodic vocabulary of one his personal guitar heroes, Carlos Santana.

Where I’ll give Rolling Stone’s selection the benefit of the doubt is in recognizing Prince’s extraordinary ability to sell a solo, as he famously did during the rain-soaked climax of his Super Bowl XLI halftime performance of “Purple Rain” in 2007. And to be fair, selling the moment has always been an essential part of rock and roll. But that’s still not quite the same thing as bending the instrument — and perhaps the listener’s sense of reality — the way Hendrix does on “Machine Gun.”

SO, THAT BEGS the question: what would I consider the greatest rock solos of all time?

To answer that, I probably need two separate lists: one created by the music historian side of my brain, and another by the less responsible, snobby guitar creep who enjoys excessive displays of technique, harmonic invention, or something so weird and twisted it makes me burst out laughing.

The historian in me requires a few things. To earn a place on a true Top 100 list, a solo should possess several of the following qualities:

• say something genuinely fresh melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, or sonically
• influence music history in a profound or meaningful way
• inspire generations of musicians to rethink the possibilities of the instrument
• elevate a popular song so completely that its success becomes almost unthinkable without it
• redefine what audiences believe the guitar is capable of
• introduce a new vocabulary, technique, or sonic language
• capture the spirit of a cultural moment or movement
• remain dangerous, emotional, or modern decades after it was recorded
• create a signature guitar moment recognizable within seconds
• achieve emotional impact through restraint rather than technical excess
• balance composition and improvisation in a way that feels inevitable

The snob however says, “Fuck all that.” Which, if I’m being honest, is probably the side most Substack readers would root for.

NOW, CLEARLY, I don’t have room to share 200 guitar solos, but here’s my Top Five in both categories.

The Historian:

1) Chuck Berry: “Johnny B. Goode” (1958)

Just as Action Comics #1 introduced Superman to the world and effectively invented the superhero genre, Chuck Berry’s celebratory “Johnny B. Goode” helped create the mythology of the guitar hero. Of course, none of that cultural significance would matter much if the song itself didn’t also contain the most iconic guitar breaks ever recorded.

2) Jimi Hendrix Experience: “Purple Haze” (1967) Guitarist: Jimi Hendrix

If Chuck Berry introduced the mythos of the rock and roll guitar solo, Jimi Hendrix’ psychedelic “Purple Haze” demonstrated just how far the form could evolve. Hendrix once claimed the song was inspired by “the history of the wars on Neptune.” More than fifty years later, the solo’s transcendent use of fuzz, feedback and controlled chaos still sounds like something from another planet.

3) Michael Jackson: “Beat It’ (1982) Guitarist: Eddie Van Halen

Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” remains one of the most successful songs in pop history. And while Eddie Van Halen’s incendiary guitar solo is routinely praised as essential to the song’s crossover success, it’s rarely acknowledged just how profoundly weird it actually is.

Compressing nearly every innovative technique he had developed over the previous five years into twenty seconds of pure dynamite, Van Halen unleashed a solo so original it sounded like a cross between John Coltrane and an explosion in a doorbell factory. The fact that something so utterly unhinged feels perfectly at home inside such a polished commercial juggernaut only makes it more astounding.

4) Led Zeppelin: “Stairway to Heaven” Guitarist: Jimmy Page

One could argue the guitar solo reached its glorious, over-the-top apotheosis during the classic-rock explosion of the Seventies. And no song or guitar solo looms larger over that era than “Stairway to Heaven.”

The entire track is a marvel of musical architecture, but in many ways everything before the final section merely functions as a runway for Jimmy Page’s exquisitely transcendental closing solo — the sound of a Telecaster ascending toward the pearly gates.

5) Queen: “Bohemian Rhapsody” Guitarist Brian May

This was a difficult choice. Do I choose something raw and incendiary like Neil Young’s gloriously primitive solo in “Cinnamon Girl,” which demonstrates just how powerful a single note can be in the hands of the right player? Or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which demonstrates how refined, melodic, and perfectly sculpted every note can sound in the hands of a master?

By virtually every metric that matters historically — innovation, influence, emotional impact, and cultural permanence — I ultimately had to go with the latter for the fifth slot.

BUT HERE’S THE rub. As much as I respect these Top Five selections, I’m also a little sick of them. Honestly, if I never heard any of these solos again, I’d be perfectly fine. Whatever shock, joy or revelation they once gave me has inevitably faded through decades of repetition and my own evolving tastes.

With that said, here’s an alternative list of solos that may not always appear in the official canon, yet somehow still sound fresh, dangerous, surprising, and alive every time I hear them.

My Subjective List:

1) Mahavishnu Orchestra: “Birds of Fire” (1973) Guitarist: John McLaughlin

By and large, most jazz-rock fusion is awful — the worst of both worlds. But for a brief moment in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the genre became a thrilling hotbed of musical experimentation. At the center stood a remarkable British guitarist named John McLaughlin, whose jagged funk rhythms and lightning-fast, Indian-influenced solos fueled several extraordinary Miles Davis albums, including In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson and the essential Bitches Brew.

In 1971, McLaughlin formed his own five-piece band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which released two astonishing studio albums: The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire. Combining the harmonic sophistication of Miles Davis with the sheer aggression of early heavy metal, the group briefly sounded unlike anything else on earth.

While I’m crazy for just about everything on both records, McLaughlin’s reckless soloing on “Birds of Fire” — the opening track from their second album — remains one of the most exhilarating guitar performances I’ve ever heard, possessing the same abandon as Little Richard or the New York Dolls at their absolute wildest.

2) Band of Gypsys: “Machine Gun” (1970)) Guitarist: Jimi Hendrix

Rolling Stone recently recognized “Machine Gun” as the second greatest guitar solo of all time. It was a bold choice considering how daring, abrasive, and emotionally exhausting Hendrix’s twelve-minute anti-war statement remains fifty years later. But there’s little question it stands among the most imaginative performances ever coaxed from guitar.

Through a terrifying combination of long, fluid improvisations, violent percussive riffs, and eerily controlled feedback, Hendrix transforms the instrument into a living battlefield — conjuring helicopters, explosions, machine-gun fire, and the screams of the wounded and grieving with almost supernatural realism.

3) King Crimson: “Fracture” (1974) Guitarist: Robert Fripp

Featured on King Crimson’s 1974 album Starless and Bible Black, “Fracture” is a fiendishly complex instrumental built around a punishing, relentless three-minute guitar solo — starting around the 2:53 minute mark —that its own composer, Robert Fripp, once declared nearly impossible to play.

The piece is so notoriously difficult that it inspired an entire book — Failure to Fracture: Learning King Crimson’s Impossible Song — documenting the author’s grueling twenty-two-year obsession with mastering it.

But technical complexity alone doesn’t explain the solo’s greatness. What ultimately makes “Fracture” so compelling is its strange mixture of dark beauty, mounting tension, and icy precision, all of which culminate in a dynamically explosive — and surprisingly funky — conclusion.

4) Robin Trower: “Daydream” (1973)

On his debut album, Twice Removed from Yesterday, Robin Trower introduced one of the most sensuous guitar tones in rock history. His beautiful ballad “Daydream” is less like a conventional song than a luxurious plume of ganja smoke, featuring a slow-rolling solo that perfectly captures the beatific essence of its title.

5) Jeff Beck: “Going Down” (1972)

As Gwen Stefani once sang, “This shit is bananas!” If there is such a thing as a guitar GOAT, Jeff Beck belongs in the conversation and this performance is just one reason why. Who else could play a blues standard while avoiding almost anything that remotely resembles a traditional blues lick? Endlessly inventive, Beck’s version of “Going Down” sounds less like “Sweet Home Chicago” than something that escaped from the Bugs Bunny soundtrack — and it probably did.

SO, WHAT ARE the five greatest solos…and your personal five favorites? No judgments…well, maybe some.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

Other books by yours truly include Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

On the practical side, somebody also had to show up with a photographer, document the occasion, keep the discussion moving, and make sure there was enough usable material to justify everyone’s time. Once the interview was over, there were transcripts to edit, stories to shape, and—usually—a painfully short window to pull it all together before going to press.

Most artists appreciated having somebody there to quietly keep the machinery running. Others occasionally viewed it as meddling.

Recently, on Billy Corgan’s excellent podcast, The Magnificent Others, he spoke at length with Wolfgang Van Halen about an interview I arranged between him and Wolfgang’s dad, Eddie. Billy jokingly suggested that I hovered a bit too much during the conversation, as though I didn’t entirely trust him alone with one of his musical heroes.

I was a little surprised by the comment, because I never doubted Billy’s ability to have a great conversation with Edward. I was simply doing the job the way we always did it at Guitar World. Looking back, though, I probably could have explained the process more clearly. In truth, we usually relied on publicists to handle those details, but they rarely bothered.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT highly of Corgan ever since I first heard the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1991 debut, Gish. Critics tended to lump the band in with the emerging alt-rock and grunge movements, but I heard something more ambitious underneath the distortion. There was a layered musical sophistication to the Pumpkins’ sound — the arrangements, textures, and dynamics — that immediately set them apart from many of their peers.

Not long afterward, I asked Corgan if he’d be interested in writing a monthly column for Guitar World, and he enthusiastically agreed. His column, Guitar Geek USA, ran for six months, and over the next several years Billy became a regular fixture in the magazine’s pages.

Like many people at the time, we initially assumed he came from the standard alternative-rock school that viewed flashy guitar playing and heavy metal with suspicion. But Billy’s musical tastes turned out to be remarkably broad. He loved everyone from Black Sabbath to Cheap Trick, and he had a particular affection for Van Halen. At one point, he described Eddie as “the man I most wanted to be at 17.”

Guitar World’s close relationship with the late, great Edward Van Halen was well known. Some readers probably imagined us with a special red telephone—decorated in black-and-white stripes, naturally—that connected directly to Ed’s 5150 studio. That wasn’t exactly true, but we did enjoy a level of access rarely granted by the notoriously protective Van Halen camp.

So, when Billy floated the idea of interviewing Eddie, it struck me as both unexpected and inspired. After a few phone calls, we arranged for Billy to visit Van Halen at his legendary 5150 Studios in early 1996.

And yes, I was there. I probably did hover a little, occasionally tossing in a question or steering the discussion when it seemed useful. What Billy couldn’t have known, however, was that Eddie could be surprisingly shy and cautious around new people. At the time, he was also dealing with growing tensions inside Van Halen, particularly with singer Sammy Hagar, and the people around him wanted a familiar face in the room in case things became uncomfortable—which, thankfully, they never did.

Here’s an edit of the rather lengthy conversation.

BILLY CORGAN: So, after 20 years of recording, what makes you still want to rock?

EDWARD VAN HALEN: It’s because I’m still sixteen inside. I still have that passion, and any true musician doesn’t do it for any other reason than passion. My motivation has never been financial. Music is what I do. It’s the only thing I know how to do.

CORGAN: But don’t you ever have to fight yourself to keep your music exciting?

VAN HALEN: Sure. I have my low points. For example, we recently finished a grueling eleven-month tour and I was beat to hell. I was depressed. I had the post-tour blues – whatever you want to call it.

Usually, I can shake it by just doing some work in my studio. Up until that time I always thought of my studio as my sanctuary — a place to jam and clear my head. But, for the first time, it didn’t seem that way.

I just didn’t have the desire to play at all. In fact, I was so fried I wondered whether I was ever going to be able to write anything again. So, I just simply let go. Then, boom, one day, suddenly the desire came back.

I think I learned something important. There are really three parts to the creative process. First there is inspiration, then there is the execution, and finally there is the release. The last part is more important than I ever realized. And after the last tour, I didn’t allow myself to cleanse before I jumped back in, and it really screwed me up for a while.

CORGAN: One of the things that struck me after listening to all your albums is your fearlessness — you’ve never been afraid to go where you’ve wanted to go. You’ve played blues, you’ve played crazy music, you’ve played synthesizer music…

VAN HALEN: I think my desire to do my own thing came from my dad. He was a real soulful guy. He played sax and clarinet like a motherfucker. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic who died when he was 66. But he lived a full life.

My mom, on the other hand, is 80, but she doesn’t live. So, I’m trying to find a balance between them. I don’t want to be like my mom and live to be 80 and not live. And I don’t want to die at 66 like my dad.

CORGAN: You created the sound of Van Halen. After all these years, how do you confront your own legacy? Do you ever worry about repeating yourself?

VAN HALEN: Not really. Change is a natural part of my evolution as a player. It just happens, because everybody changes over a period of time. It’s a very unconscious thing. I think the unreleased acoustic piece I just played you before the interview sounds different from anything I’ve ever done, yet I didn’t sit down and say, “I have to do something different.”

CORGAN: I admire your attitude, because I feel like I’m always fighting not to repeat myself.

VAN HALEN: I don’t know. Every time I walk into the studio it seems like the first time. It’s like I’ve never written a song before. I’m just as scared. In fact, someone asked me the other day, what I thought I had learned about making music after all these years, and I said, “Nothing.” I’m scared shitless all the time. I’m really insecure that way.

CORGAN: So how did you get from playing your first open G chord to playing Eruption?

VAN HALEN: Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt tails. My brother would go out at 7 p.m. to party and get laid, and when he’d come back at 3 a.m., I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years. I still do that.

CORGAN So, what was it like to wake up and find you were everybody’s guitar hero? Suddenly everyone was tapping and doing whammy-bar dives.

VAN HALEN: Actually, I thought it was kind of funny. Because, with me, it was a form of expression – part of my style. When I used the stuff I invented, I was telling a story, while I felt that the people who were imitating me were telling a joke.

CORGAN: On your debut album, Van Halen [1978], your guitar solo, Eruption, was the second track. Wasn’t it kind of a bold move to place this crazy guitar instrumental so close to the beginning of the record?

VAN HALEN: The whole story behind Eruption is unusual. It wasn’t even supposed to be on the album. I showed up at the recording studio early one day and started to warm up because I had a gig on the weekend and I wanted to practice my solo guitar spot.

Our producer, Ted Templeman, happened to walk by and he asked, “What’s that? Let’s put it on tape!” So, I took one pass at it, and they put it on the record. I didn’t even play it right. There’s a mistake at the top end of it. To this day, whenever I hear it I always think, “Man, I could’ve played it better.”

CORGAN: But what was the idea behind making it the second track? It certainly gave it more weight than if you had sequenced it at the end of the album.

VAN HALEN: I think they put it there because it was different, but I’m not really sure. At that point in my career, I really didn’t have any control over anything. I was just like, “Yes, sir. Whatever.” We barely had any input in the early days of the band.

I mean, there are so many things wrong with those early records — the drums sound like shit on the first album and the bass is barely audible. We just played live, they recorded it, and it got put out.

CORGAN: How did you guys write the first album? It’s my guess that much of your early music evolved out of jamming.

VAN HALEN: A lot of the basic ideas were things that I came up with when I used to practice on the edge of my bed. I would take those ideas to band practice. At the time, we were rehearsing in David’s father’s basement, so me and AI would go over there by ourselves and jam on the ideas for hours until we came up with something we were happy with.

For example, AI and I jammed on the basic riff from And The Cradle Will Rock two hours a day for two straight weeks. [laughs] We didn’t really know what to do with it, but we were having fun because it just sounded so wicked. Then, out of nowhere, the chorus came to us and it was finished.

Sometimes you really have to work for inspiration. But ultimately, it’s not really work, because my brother and I genuinely love to jam. I’d say that’s the way most things happen in our band. It usually begins with me and Al, which is funny in a way, because most people don’t usually think of the guitar and drums as a unit. It’s usually bass and drums.

CORGAN: But I think that’s the way a band should be constructed — the core of a band should be built on the relationship between the guitarist and the drummer. It’s the simpatico relationship between me and our drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain, that provides the foundation for the Pumpkins. Drums can do so much more than just hold down the groove.

VAN HALEN: Exactly. I think Al’s drumming is more musical because he listens to me rather than just being concerned with maintaining a steady groove. Billy, how do you write with the Pumpkins?

CORGAN: It’s close to how you do it. I’m definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it’s not very productive to come in with nothing.

VAN HALEN: It’s the same with us! You know, it’s like, “Well, watcha got, Ed?”

CORGAN: Yeah! And if you don’t have anything, everybody will stand around and look at their watches and say things like, “This is boring. Uh, can I go? I got a date tonight.” On the other hand, you can’t do it yourself. I’ll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can’t underestimate band chemistry. You still need that — it’s that weird gelling of people.

CORGAN: “Van Halen II [1979] is a really good record, but it sounds to me like you didn’t have the time to fully explore all your guitar and song ideas.”

VAN HALEN: It was very hurried. We had just toured for a year, and we only had two weeks to write and record. But I’ll never forget the questions we got after the second record was released: Why does this record sound different from the first album? Because it’s not the first album! It’s always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you’re the same, and they hate you if you’re different.

CORGAN: But you agree that it wasn’t completely realized?

VAN HALEN: Yeah, but I don’t think it was because of us. There was a lot of cocaine on the console — and it wasn’t necessarily the band’s. That was a problem. And we weren’t allowed any input on the mix. But ultimately, we were just plain rushed. That’s why you hear that little riff fade out at the end of the album — Al and I didn’t want to stop. [laughs] We weren’t done, but we had a deadline.”

CORGAN: I think two great albums are Women and Children First [1980] and Fair Warning [1981].

VAN HALEN: I was starting to get more involved.

CORGAN: And it shows.

VAN HALEN: Especially on Fair Warning. But what I had to do to get involved was very strange. We’d work during the day, and I wasn’t very happy with the way things were going or the way people were approaching the whole recording process.

I would sneak back into the studio at 4 a.m. with Don Landee, the engineer, and completely re-record all the solos and overdubs the way I wanted them. The fucked-up thing was, no one even noticed. That’s how uninvolved they were on a musical level.

CORGAN: Let’s talk about some of the specifics of Fair Warning. What can you tell me about “Push Comes to Shove”?

VAN HALEN: That was Roth’s idea of trying to cash in on the reggae thing. I said, “Okay, if you want that kind of beat, I’ll see what I can do.”

CORGAN: That song has an incredible guitar solo!

VAN HALEN: I’ll never forget that one. We were sitting in the studio with our producer, Ted Templeman, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I must have played that solo over 20 times, and Ted kept saying, “No, it’s not good enough.” So, I said, “Okay, but I don’t understand what you want.” So, we just called it a day.

Later that night I came back and played the same solo that I played 20 times that day and left it. The next day he heard it and said, “That’s great.”

It’s like the solo in “Unchained.” I love that song. It’s rare that I can listen back to my own playing and get goose bumps, but that’s one of them. My frustration continued to grow when we made our next album, Diver Down [1982]. Half that album was damn cover tunes, and I hated every minute of making it.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half-way home. C’mon! Van Halen doing “Dancing in the Street”? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else’s music.

Ultimately, that’s why I built the studio we’re now standing in. I built it so I could work on my music without having to battle anybody. So, after Diver Down I demanded that we do 1984 [1984] in my own studio, my way.

The motivation behind Diver Down – which was to play it safe and make money – was completely different from 1984. One had heart where the other was bullshit. Diver Down is my least favorite record – even though I still tried to put myself into it.

CORGAN: You did what you felt was right and it succeeded. I ran into similar obstacles recently. I met with a lot of resistance when I wanted our newest album [Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness] to be a double CD. Many people thought I was going to ruin the band by doing it. But it proved to be the right thing.

VAN HALEN: You have to follow your heart. But don’t ever get cocky and say to yourself, “Hey, I was right.” Just do what you feel. Do you understand what I mean?

CORGAN: Yes, you can’t gloat.

VAN HALEN: Right. When “Jump” went Number One, I was almost embarrassed. You did this double album because it’s what you wanted to do, not because you wanted to prove anybody wrong or make money.

CORGAN: In the beginning, though, I have to admit that I did have a chip on my shoulder. I did want to prove everyone wrong. But after I went through the process and came out the other side, I realized why I had to do it. It wasn’t about anyone else. In fact, the deeper I get into my life as a musician, I’m discovering that it becomes less and less about other people, and more about what I want to do. And that’s a good place to be.

I can understand what you’re talking about. There are all these fish swimming around you, and their motivation is not necessarily to make sure that you’re playing great or that you’re going have a great show that night. Instead, it’s, “Are there people in the fucking seats?”

VAN HALEN: The thing is, after twenty years it doesn’t change! I hope you’re prepared for that. [laughs]

### ###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

A follow-up to the bestselling Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, this book goes beyond the myth, uncovering the restless creative force behind Beck’s relentless reinvention—from his groundbreaking work with the Yardbirds to his genre-defying solo career.

Other books by yours truly include Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

We should be clear: while the evidence is compelling, it is not conclusive. But in the world of blues archaeology, the absence of certainty cuts both ways. To sit on an image of this magnitude—if there’s even a fractional chance it captures these figures together—felt like the greater mistake.

We aren’t sharing this as a definitive claim, but as an invitation: to look closely, to debate, and to dig deeper. In this third installment, we explore how the photograph was discovered and the intriguing backstory behind its survival.

* * *

AS THE MOST famous name in country blues—both for his extraordinary talent and enduring mystique—Robert Johnson is naturally the main attraction in our photograph. But for music historians, the other three men—Johnny Shines, “Papa” Charlie McCoy, and Kansas Joe McCoy—are equally intriguing, giving the image even greater potential significance.

Johnny Shines is particularly important to the story. Raised largely in Memphis, he spent his youth playing slide guitar in juke joints and on street corners before moving to Hughes, Arkansas, in 1932, where he worked on farms and temporarily set music aside.

Everything changed after a chance encounter with Robert Johnson. Inspired by the older musician’s talent and restless spirit, Shines returned to performing, and beginning in 1935 traveled extensively with Johnson throughout the South and Chicago until the two parted ways in 1937, just one year before Johnson’s death. [See Robert Johnson photo, Pt. 2]

Unlike Johnson, however, Shines lived long enough to tell the story. After decades of relative obscurity, he was rediscovered during the blues revival of the late 1960s by Vanguard Records and eventually became a respected figure on the international blues circuit, performing alongside legends such as Big Walter Horton, Willie Dixon, and Robert Lockwood Jr.—widely believed to be Robert Johnson’s stepson.

CHARLES McCOY—BETTER known as “Papa Charlie” McCoy—was a Delta blues songwriter, mandolinist, and guitarist widely regarded as one of the great accompanists of his era. Performing with groups such as the Mississippi Hot Footers he became known for his fluid mandolin playing and versatility across multiple instruments.

As a slide guitarist, McCoy also recorded under the name Tampa Kid, releasing hits like “Keep on Trying.” During the 1930s and ’40s, he frequently performed and recorded with his older brother Kansas Joe McCoy as the McCoy Brothers—the same period in which our photograph appears to have been taken.

KANSAS JOE’S CAREER as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter was arguably even more colorful. In the early 1930s, he teamed up with his future wife, Lizzie Douglas, better known as Memphis Minnie, and the duo recorded a series of influential sides for Columbia Records, including “Bumble Bee.”

Today, however, Kansas Joe and Minnie are perhaps best remembered for recording “When the Levee Breaks,” the haunting blues composition later transformed into a rock epic by Led Zeppelin on its landmark fourth album.

After his marriage to Minnie ended, Kansas Joe reunited with his brother Charlie, and the pair became involved with the Harlem Hamfats, one of the most influential Black swing and blues ensembles of the late 1930s.

All of this is relevant for obvious reasons.

KANSAS JOE AND Papa Charlie regularly traveled and performed together throughout the late 1930s—the same general period in which our photograph appears to have been taken. Both men played mandolin, the instruments seen in the image, and, as we established in the previous installment [Part 2], both lived in the Chicago area and were ultimately buried just a few miles from where the photograph likely originated.

Just as importantly, the McCoy brothers were musicians of a caliber that would have made them natural collaborators for players like Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines.

SHINE’S CONNECTION TO Johnson, meanwhile, is not speculative at all. The two men are known to have traveled and performed together extensively during this exact period.

Of all the figures in the photograph, Shines bears perhaps the strongest resemblance to his older, well-documented self—a point we’ll explore further in this final installment of this series.

Which raises an unavoidable question: even if the evidence remains circumstantial, what are the odds that two guitar-playing men who closely resemble Johnny Shines and Robert Johnson, performing in the same geographic corridor at the same moment in history, are not Johnny Shines and Robert Johnson?

The same argument, arguably, applies to the McCoy brothers.

OVER THE LAST several years, the photograph’s owner, Johnny Jetson, and I have employed a variety of facial comparison methods in an attempt to gather additional evidence supporting the identities of the men in the image.

We also experimented with several artificial intelligence platforms, which were almost uniformly enthusiastic about the proposed identities of the musicians. Still, Jetson and I remained skeptical, fully aware of A.I.’s tendency to tell users what they want to hear.

Ultimately, we concluded that the photograph itself remained the most compelling piece of evidence and decided to consult a facial comparison specialist, Paula Ann DiGati, for additional analysis.

Because so few verified images of these musicians exist—particularly in the cases of Robert Johnson and the McCoy brothers—precise one-to-one comparisons proved difficult. Still, several striking similarities began to emerge.

We’ll begin with Johnny Shines.

Johnny Shines: Eye and Ear Overlay

USING A WELL-ESTABLISHED photograph of Shines, we created a series of overlays with the newly discovered image to see how the facial features aligned. By adjusting the opacity at different levels (between 30% and 90%), it becomes easier to compare the positioning and proportions of the eyes, mouth, jawline, and ears.

We ask you to pay particular attention to the outer ear, which is unique to every individual, stable over time, making it a surprisingly reliable tool in forensic identification. This is particularly relevant in the Shines comparison, as he is close to three decades older.

Johnny Shines: Ear Overlay

Robert Johnson: Eyes and Ear Overlay

THE FOLLOWING OVERLAYS compare the newly discovered image with two verified photographs of Robert Johnson from around the same period.

Several details immediately stood out to us, including Johnson’s relatively faint eyebrows, the distinctive shape of the ears, his long fingers, and—particularly in the final series of comparisons—the striking similarity in the part and contour of the hairline.

Robert Johnson: Ear Overlay

Robert Johnson: Mouth Overlay

Papa Charlie McCoy Direct Comparison

THE PHOTOGRAPH ON the right is one of the few known close-up images of Papa Charlie McCoy. While the limited visual record makes definitive analysis difficult, we found the resemblance striking enough to speak largely for itself.

Kansas Joe McCoy Direct Comparison

WE HAD GREATER difficulty finding verified photographs of Kansas Joe McCoy that aligned closely enough for direct comparison. Still, as with Charlie, the resemblance remains substantial.

Although Kansas Joe appears considerably older in the reference photograph on the right, several features remain distinctly recognizable—particularly his high cheekbones, pronounced eyes, and uniquely angular facial structure.

At a certain point, the similarities become difficult to dismiss. What are the odds that two mandolin-playing brothers with such distinctive—and strikingly different—appearances are not Kansas Joe and Papa Charlie McCoy?

So, Is It Them?

IN THE END, no single detail definitively proves the identities of the men in this photograph. Not the facial comparisons. Not the instruments. Not the clothing, geography, or historical timelines.

But taken together, the evidence begins to form a remarkably coherent picture.

At the very least, what survives is an extraordinary glimpse into a poorly documented world of itinerant blues musicians moving through the American South and Midwest during the 1930s—a world that helped shape modern music while leaving behind precious little visual evidence of its existence.

And if the men in this photograph truly are Robert Johnson, Johnny Shines, and the McCoy brothers, then we may be looking at one of the most significant unseen images in blues history.

Finally, Johnny Jetson and I would like to thank everyone who followed all three installments of this series and was willing to entertain the possibility—with curiosity and an open mind.

# # #

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

A follow-up to the bestselling Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, this book goes beyond the myth, uncovering the restless creative force behind Beck’s relentless reinvention—from his groundbreaking work with the Yardbirds to his genre-defying solo career.

Other books by yours truly include Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

We should be clear: while the evidence is compelling, it is not conclusive. But in the world of blues archaeology, the absence of certainty cuts both ways. To sit on an image of this magnitude—if there’s even a fractional chance it captures these figures together—felt like the greater mistake.

We aren’t sharing this as a definitive claim, but as an invitation: to look closely, to debate, and to dig deeper. In this second installment, we explore how the photograph was discovered and the intriguing backstory behind its survival.

* * *

SO, HOW DID JOHNNY JETSON find the image? In a way, it found him. Raised in New York City, Jetson has spent a lifetime collecting pop ephemera and oddball Americana. In recent years, he settled in Minnesota, where quirky thrift stores are plentiful and estate auctions—if you have a sharp eye—can still yield the occasional buried treasure.

One afternoon in 2019, he drove to a promising estate sale in Plymouth, Minnesota. “I’d heard there were some vintage toys for sale, and I had my eye on a 1960s Corgi Batmobile,” Jetson recalled. “I ran in, grabbed it immediately, and asked the guy at the register to hold it while I kept looking.”

That’s when the afternoon took an unexpected twist. “I turned and, maybe a dozen feet away, saw a Ziploc bag filled with old photographs sitting on a dining room table,” he said. “On the top was this image of four Black musicians in suits. There was something about it—it just jumped out at me.”

Part of the appeal was immediate and familiar. “I already collect photos from the ‘30s and ‘40s—people dressed in their Sunday best, usually posing next to their cars,” Jetson explained. “This had that same feel, except these guys were holding instruments. And since I’m a musician too, it really spoke to me.”

But as he looked closer, curiosity gave way to something deeper.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God…could that be Robert Johnson?’” Jetson said. “It seemed crazy. But I trusted my gut and bought the whole bag of images—all from the same period.”

When he got it home, he found himself haunted by the composition: a sharply dressed in black, flanked by the others in white, as if the scene had been deliberately staged. He had to know more.

THAT IS WHEN Jetson reached out to me. As a music and guitar historian, he hoped I might offer some insight. After a preliminary review, I tentatively identified Johnson and the other men in the photo as Johnny Shines—one of Johnson’s known traveling companions—and the brothers Kansas Joe and Charlie McCoy.

Encouraged, Jetson began to tackling the larger question: was it even plausible that Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines had ever been in Minnesota?

We know the duo traveled extensively between 1935 and 1937, drifting across the American South and as far north as Windsor, Ontario. But a stop in the Twin Cities has never been part of the lore. Historically speaking, it seemed unlikely—bordering on impossible.

Still, the photo kept calling to him.

DRIVEN BY CURIOSITY, Jetson reached back out to Caring Traditions, the estate sale company, hoping to trace the origins of the collection.

“They contacted the family to let them know I believed the photo might be historically significant, but there wasn’t much interest,” Jetson recalled. “What they did confirm was that the photos had been in a family’s possession for decades. They also identified a woman appearing in several of the other images as Johanna “Hannah” Tawzer, their grandmother.”

Jetson began digging into Tawzer’s history, and what he uncovered provided the first geographic bridge to the Delta blues. The photographs, it turned out, were not taken in Minnesota, but in Illinois.

Tawzer is believed to have worked at the Cook County Infirmary—a sprawling state-run hospital and “poor farm” in Oak Forest. Her residency there is confirmed by the 1940 Census, which lists her as 44 years old and living in Oak Forest, roughly 20 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.

Evidence suggests the photographs were taken on or near the grounds of the facility.

At the time, Oak Forest was a vital waypoint. The Rock Island rail line ran directly through town, and the main highway from Memphis to Chicago followed a similar path. For Black travelers heading north—including itinerant musicians like Johnson and Shines—it was a natural stop along the way.

TAKEN TOGETHER, THESE details begin to form a pattern that is increasingly difficult to dismiss.

The images appear to date from around 1937—a crucial detail. In a 1970 interview, Johnny Shines explicitly recalled traveling with Robert Johnson to Chicago that very year. It remains one of the few documented instances where the two men can be placed together in a specific region at a specific time.

Additional connections further anchor the McCoy brothers to this geography. Oak Forest sits just five miles from Restvale Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois—the final resting place of both Charlie and “Kansas” Joe McCoy.

By 1937, all four men were moving through the same narrow geographic orbit. The question is no longer whether they could have been in the same place—but whether this photograph captures the moment they were.

THE OBJECTS CAPTURED within the frame tell a story of their own. According to vintage instrument experts, the guitars appear to be Oscar Schmidt models—inexpensive, sturdy instruments that were widely distributed through Chicago-area mail-order catalogs during the 1930s. The mandolins are equally consistent with the era.

Even the fashion—from the cut of the trousers, the shoes, the ties—aligns with mid-to-late 1930s style. One of the younger men appears to have his hair straightened, a grooming trend that was just beginning to gain traction at the time.

Then there’s the physical presence of Hannah Tawzer herself. Two additional photographs from the same collection show her directly on the grounds of the Oak Forest facility, strengthening the likelihood that the primary image was taken there—or nearby.

None of these details, on their own, constitute proof. But taken together, they begin to close the gaps. What once seemed geographically improbable now falls within a plausible corridor, linking the Delta to Chicago through roads, rails, and lived experience.

AN INTERESTING SIDE NOTE is how impeccably the four musicians are dressed. While the popular image of the “drifting bluesman” conjures rags and dusty roads, many itinerant players carried—or had access to—at least one set of “Sunday best” clothes for the right occasion.

Johnny Shines famously recalled how he and Robert played everything from polka dances to synagogue gatherings. They were musical chameleons, and dressed accordingly.

Facilities like Oak Forest were more than just institutions; they were self-contained communities. Like many state-run operations of the era, they likely hosted Sunday religious services, often accompanied by live music. It’s not difficult to imagine a moment where traveling musicians were invited to perform in exchange for a meal, a few dollars, or simply a place to rest.

Perhaps the most telling detail lies on the reverse of the photograph. Hannah Tawzer left a handwritten note—simple, direct, and sincere:

“These were born in Christian homes.”

IN THE FINAL INSTALLMENT (next Tuesday), we’ll apply facial comparison techniques, focusing on key features, with particular attention to the ears. Yes, ears. The outer ear is unique to every individual, stable over time, and even capable of distinguishing between identical twins, making it a surprisingly reliable tool in forensic identification.

# # #

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

A follow-up to the bestselling Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, this book goes beyond the myth, uncovering the restless creative force behind Beck’s relentless reinvention—from his groundbreaking work with the Yardbirds to his genre-defying solo career.

Other books by yours truly include Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

WAY BACK IN 2019—before artificial intelligence went mainstream and long before anyone was seriously talking about “deepfakes” — I received an unexpected phone call that would lead me down a remarkable rabbit hole.

I was out for an evening walk in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where I was living at the time, when my cell phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number and almost let it go to voicemail, but curiosity got the better of me.

“Is this Brad Tolinski?” a man asked, his voice carrying a distinct New York accent. “I think I have something that might interest you,” he added, lowering his tone slightly. “Would you mind if I texted it to you?”

I said go ahead. Within seconds, a photograph appeared on my screen.

As I opened it, the caller introduced himself as Johnny Jetson—a name colorful enough to raise an eyebrow. Still, he pressed on, explaining that I’d been recommended to him as someone who knew music history and could be trusted with something unusual.

“What do you think of the picture?” he asked.

I studied it carefully. It appeared to be from the 1930s: four Black musicians posed together, two holding guitars, two holding mandolins. I wouldn’t call myself a country blues expert, but at least one of the faces looked familiar.

“Is that Johnny Shines in the top right?” I asked.

“Yeah… I think so,” he replied. Then, a little impatiently: “But who do you think the other guitarist is?”

I looked again—really looked this time—focusing on the man beside him. The long, spidery fingers. The slightly off-kilter gaze. Something about the face felt uncannily familiar.

I stopped walking.

“No… fucking… way,” I said quietly. “It can’t be. Is that Robert Johnson? Where did you get this?”

He laughed, and said, “You’re not gonna believe it… It’s a long story.”

And that was the beginning — nearly seven years ago now — of my journey with musician and collector Jetson.

AFTER A CONSIDERABLE amount of research, both Jetson and I have come to believe that the photograph may show four legendary but largely undocumented blues musicians: Robert Johnson, Johnny Shines, Wilber “Kansas Joe” McCoy, and his brother Charlie “Papa” McCoy, arranged clockwise.

We should be clear: the evidence, while compelling, is not conclusive. But the absence of certainty cuts both ways. The history of Delta blues is riddled with gaps, lost stories, and undocumented moments. To sit on an image like this—if there’s even a chance it captures these figures together—felt like the greater mistake.

So, we’re sharing it. Not as a definitive claim, but as an invitation to look closely, to argue, and to dig deeper.

Or, as Jetson put it to me early on: “No matter what anybody thinks—it’s still a hell of a picture.”

ROBERT JOHNSON, BORN 115 years ago on May 8, 1911, remains the ghost at the center of American music. He recorded fewer than 30 songs, died young under murky circumstances, and left behind a legacy so outsized it borders on myth. For all his influence, he barely exists on photographs — just a couple of images and a trail of stories that only partially agree.

The men around him — Johnny Shines, Kansas Joe McCoy, and Charlie “Papa” McCoy — were part of that same wandering world, musicians who learned on the road, played wherever they could, and left behind only scattered traces. Shines, in particular, is known to have traveled and performed with Johnson, moving through the same circuits at the same time. Their music helped define the Delta blues, but their lives were rarely documented in any formal way.

Which is what makes the photograph I was sent that night so rare and remarkable—and potentially so important.

In the next two installments I will dive deep into how the photo surfaced and what we’ve been able to learn about its origins, followed by a closer analysis, including side-by-side comparisons and insights drawn with the help of artificial intelligence. From there, you can come to your own conclusions — we’ve taken it about as far as we can.

For quick reference, here are some of the very few known photographs of Robert Johnson and the McCoy brothers. The McCoys are somewhat older in these images, but Charlie’s gaunt features—and Kansas Joe’s rounder face with its high cheekbones—remain unmistakable. Johnny Shines is also much older in this photo, yet the resemblance is striking. The man we believe to be Johnson is more difficult to confirm, but in the next installments we’ll make the case for his identification.

# # #

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

A follow-up to the bestselling Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, this book goes beyond the myth, uncovering the restless creative force behind Beck’s relentless reinvention—from his groundbreaking work with the Yardbirds to his genre-defying solo career.

Other books by yours truly include Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A COUPLE YEARS before the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud formally linked Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge, I had already begun to sense a deeper musical kinship between Page and White.

On the surface, the connection was obvious: both artists drew from the raw electrified essence of the blues and reshaped it for their own eras. But the more I listened—and the more time I spent with their work—the more I noticed something less discussed, yet just as telling. Both Page and White infused their music with a subtle strain of fine art and mysticism.

For Page, it surfaced in ritualistic gestures—most famously in the extended live performances of “Dazed and Confused”—and in the deliberate use of sigil magick on Led Zeppelin IV. White, meanwhile, expressed a more modern, stripped-down version of the same impulse: an obsession with numerology, particularly the number three as a kind of personal trinity, and a tightly controlled color palette of red and white, symbolizing passion and purity.

One was a towering figure of classic rock mythology, the other was a modern minimalist, stripping rock back to its elemental core and rebuilding it with a sense of urgency that felt both retro and radical. But when you placed then side by side, the parallels snapped into focus.

So, in 2006, I set up a meeting in New York, and when the two finally sat down together, the conversation confirmed and illuminated the connection.

With White gearing up for another run on the road this year, it seemed like the right moment to revisit this exchange. Because if there’s one thing it makes clear, it’s that the distance between past and present in guitar culture is a lot shorter—and a lot more mysterious—than it might appear.

And, if you’re wondering, yes—ThomasTull, the producer of It Might Get Loud later admitted that the resulting Guitar World story inspired the film that followed two years later.

The following is an excerpt….

Jack, you’ve used primitive elements of the blues to rebel against what you perceive as an excessive and overly processed and technological culture.

JACK WHITE: That’s the main thing to rebel against right now—overproduction, too much technology, overthinking. It’s a spoiled mentality; everything is too easy. If you want to record a song, you can go digital and record four hundred guitar tracks. That leads to overthinking, which kills any spontaneity and humanity of the performance.

What was interesting about Led Zeppelin was how well they were able to update and capture the essence of the scary part of the blues. A great Zeppelin track is every bit as intense and spontaneous as a Blind Willie Johnson recording.

Led Zeppelin’s version of Bukka White’s “Shake ‘Em on Down” on Led Zeppelin III [entitled “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”] is a great example of a track that captures the essence of country blues without copying them.

JIMMY PAGE: The key is you don’t want to copy the blues; you want to capture the mood. On III, we knew we wanted to allude to the country blues but, in the tradition of the style, we had to be spontaneous and immediate. I had this old Vox amp, and one day Robert Plant plugged his mike into the amp’s tremolo channel, and I started playing and he started singing. And what you hear on the album is essentially an edit of our first two takes.

But that gets back to what you were saying: You can’t overthink this music. Mood and intensity can’t be manufactured. The blues isn’t about structure; it’s what you bring to it. The immediacy of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.

Jack, Jimmy went to art school and you’ve taken some cues from the world of fine art. Your second album was entitled De Stijl after the Dutch movement that attempted to purify art by bringing it back down to the basic colors and form.

JACK WHITE When we were finishing that album, I decided I wanted to dedicate it to Blind Willie McTell. [De Stijl features a cover of McTell’s “Your Southern Can is Mine.”] During that time, it hit me that McTell and most of the great country bluesmen were recording and performing in the early 1920s, which was the same time period as the De Stijl art movement was taking root. They were both doing the same things: breaking things down to their essences.

In my mind, both country blues and the De Stijl movement represented a new beginning of music and art, perhaps for the rest of eternity. Both broke their respective arts down to its very core. You couldn’t get any more simple and pure than the De Stijl school. They only used squares, circles, horizontal and vertical lines, and primary colors. That’s it. The country blues of Son House and Charley Patton also brought music down to its fundamentals.

I think people think I was an art student, which I wasn’t. I couldn’t afford it. I probably would’ve gone if I could.

But you don’t have to go to college to study or read about art.

JIMMY PAGE: I think that’s a good point. If you are on to something creative, school can inhibit you. The wrong teacher, man, can really mess you up.

There is something else unusual that unites both of you: Zeppelin wrote lots of great riffs, great hooks, and refrains, but rarely did the band write what I would call a conventional chorus. Zeppelin’s biggest hits—“Stairway to Heaven,” “Kashmir,” “Over the Hills and Far Away”—don’t have choruses. The same is true of many White Stripes’s biggest songs, including “Seven Nation Army” and “Blue Orchid.”

JIMMY PAGE: Yes, it was done purposely. We wanted every part of the song to be important and have movement. There was no need to retreat to the security of having a big chorus in every song. If you emphasize on part of the song, it trivializes the rest of the music.

JACK WHITE: As far as I’m concerned, the riff in Led Zeppelin’s “The Wanton Song, for example, is the chorus. It could go on for a half hour and I would be completely satisfied. It’s so powerful and concise that it never gets boring.

JIMMY PAGE: A riff can take on the aspect of a chorus in a listener’s psyche. When that happens, the whole song becomes one big chorus. The idea of a hypnotic riff as the prime mover of a piece of music has been around for a long time, whether you’re talking about the Delta blues or music from the Middle Eastern and African cultures.

Is there one piece of music the either of you can point to that in your mind represents a Platonic ideal of a great song?

JIMMY PAGE Picasso once said that a painting is never done. I sort of feel the same way about music. I would never say something is perfect. There are performances that can generate a lot of emotion in me when I hear them, but I can’t say if anything is perfect.

JACK WHITE That sounds good. I’m gonna go with Jimmy on that one!

IF YOU WOULD like to read more of my conversations with Led Zeppelin’s producer/guitarist, I humbly suggest Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page. Rolling Stone magazine said: “Keep a copy near the records—and your guitar.” And no less than Billy Gibbons opined: “From the mild to wild, Jimmy sez it all. This fine work will rock you!”

Other books by yours truly include Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story (out on July 14), Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen and MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band.

One of my favorite recurring features was pairing two musicians and simply letting them talk. Some matchups were obvious—Jeff Beck and Buddy Guy, Tony Iommi and James Hetfield—and occasionally some were surprising like Jimmy Page and Jack White, which later inspired the documentary It Might Get Loud, featuring Page, White and the Edge.

One of my favorites—and certainly one of the most unexpected—was a conversation we set up in 1992. Early that year, progressive guitar titan Robert Fripp visited Guitar World’s offices to discuss The Essential King Crimson, a deluxe four-volume box set chronicling his work with the quintessential Seventies art-rock band. During our chat, the British guitarist spoke glowingly of Living Colour, then riding high on the success of “Cult of Personality.”

“They are the only band that seems to be working in the same area that King Crimson was interested in,” Fripp said. “Their energy makes you want to reach for your instrument and play, which is the highest compliment anyone can pay another musician.”

Fripp’s effusiveness took me somewhat by surprise. On the surface, King Crimson’s angular European art rock seemed to have little in common with Living Colour’s explosive alternative funk. But on closer inspection, the connection made perfect sense. Like Crimson, Living Colour was fiercely committed to breaking down barriers and pushing the limits of popular music.

With that in mind, several months later, I contacted Fripp and proposed that he interview Living Colour’s guitarist Vernon Reid. He responded enthusiastically.

“The past year-and-a-half of my life as a working musician has been unfortunately hampered by various legal problems with my former management,” Fripp said. “Day after day, for 12 to 14 hours at a stretch, I’ve been slaving over a personal computer, trying to get things sorted out. And what got me through it all was Living Colour. I would play their music and feel instantly renewed. The power of music helped get me through that frustrating time. So, yes—I’d love to talk with Vernon.”

As it turned out, Reid was equally fluent in Fripp’s world, well-versed in Crimson classics like Starless and Bible Black and Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, just as Fripp had immersed himself in Living Colour’s Vivid. Reid had long cited Fripp as a key influence on his playing.

On paper, they came from different planets. In practice, they were chasing the same idea: total musical freedom. The conversation lasted close to three hours, and the following is an excerpt.

ROBERT FRIPP Let’s discuss when it is appropriate to improvise. Living Colour has four very talented members, all of whom can actually play well—a rarity today. Anyone that has seen the band knows that they can turn a song around and take it “out.” Is there any pressure on you to keep it “in”?

VERNON REID When you are part of an improvising band, you enter a subtle contract with your audience. You give them sort of what they expect, and then they allow you take it away for a while. Hopefully, there is a give and take.

But the pressure to keep the music “in” does not always come from the audience; it also comes from within the band. As a fan, I personally like it when a band plays my favorite song and leaves it relatively intact. For example, I saw Alice in Chains recently, and I was thrilled when they played a note-for-note version of “Would?” It was the same when I went to see one of my heroes, Carlos Santana, and he performed “Black Magic Woman,” which is almost a couple decades old. I just stood at the side of the stage and said, “My god! That’s great.”

But at the same time, I felt guilty for enjoying it. I know from experience that songs can become like straightjackets, especially when you have to play them the same way every night. But I also know that it’s wrong to turn every song inside-out, so we try to strike a balance. That way the audience gets a strong performance because we’ve kept the set fresh, and at the same time they get something familiar.

ROBERT FRIPP Yes. When you improvise, you sacrifice form in order to make a leap. And if you leap to the right place, then a form will be waiting. So, the assumption is that the audience is there to support you while you are flying. If you fly, then everybody gains. The trick is to find an audience that is willing to support you.

I’ve discovered that if an audience is any larger than 12,000 to 15,000, it is difficult to improvise. If you are playing an arena, you have maybe 40 minutes to pummel the audience into submission—10 to 20 minutes to move their attention around, the 20 to 30 minutes to bring them on home so that the next time you go that town you can earn a living. Now, if you aren’t willing to go that route, then you put yourself outside of the mainstream.

VERNON REID I think you are absolutely right. That’s why it is important for musicians to know what they want to play and who they want to play to. If you want to put yourself outside the mainstream, you have to expect smaller audiences. I know many musicians who want to exist outside of the mainstream but still crave mainstream acceptance. But you can’t have both things. If you refuse to accept the limitations of your audience, it will lead to frustration and anger.

ROBERT FRIPP With all that said, I think that it is possible, under certain circumstances, to play improvised music to large numbers of people. However, three conditions would have to be met: First, the situation would have to be something more than just a musical event—it would have to become a communal event. Next, I would prefer it to be an event held outdoors or in a stadium—that way there would be no barriers other than those defined by the community of persons. Finally, the event would ideally be free of charge. In other words, if you introduce commerce, it becomes something else—the audience has a right to make demands. At a free show, they have no rights other than to be there. Under these circumstances a concert can be a musical event, and then go beyond a musical event.

At a commercial event, people can get pissed off. And if you have any more than 10,000 people pissed off, you have a riot. I speak from experience. Back in 1973, King Crimson was playing in Milan, Italy, for the first time. During the concert, 200 Maoist communists broke through a glass wall to get in. They felt that music was for the people and should be free. This triggered a huge panic.

We had no idea that there was any trouble and, for whatever reason, we decided not to play an encore that night. When we got backstage, someone informed us that police were on stage with machine guns and that the crowd was rioting. We were asked if we could go back because the police would really rather not machine gun the people. So we went back, only to discover that the crowd had pulled the power cable. So we were on stage, with a rioting crowd, police with machine guns. So that is the kind of situation that a working musicians can find himself in, and you have to come up with strategies to deal with it.

VERNON REID What are some of the strategies that have helped you as a working musician?

ROBERT FRIPP I’ve tried to divide my work into three different divisions. The first division is mass culture, the second division is that of the working musician, and the third division is research and development. The ideal for me is to be able to move among all three divisions. My participation in the first division (mass culture) is playing on things like David Bowie’s records; the second division (the working musician) is playing in King Crimson, and the third division (research and development) includes expanding and experimenting by playing with people like the English jazz musician Keith Tippett.

VERNON REID It’s great that you have the desire to move among those divisions. Most musicians don’t. My interest in music has always been additive. I still like the music I liked when I was young—Motown, Funkadelic and so on. But I’ve also allowed new things to come into my life. Eric Dolphy came into my life. The Sex Pistols came into my life. King Crimson, Soft Machine, and Kool and The Gang came into my life.

For example, I just recently got the most amazing reissue. It’s a live album by James Brown, recorded back in 1971 in Paris, called Love, Peace and Power. It’s awe-inspiring. You always think of James as a great, funky singer and dancer, but this album demonstrates why he was also a revolutionary composer. It’s amazing how uses all the instruments as percussion—the guitars and horns are all used as rhythm instruments. But. The album is also very adventurous harmonically. But it still worked on people and made them move and sweat.

My point is, I don’t think anyone has to be threatened by a different form of music, whether it’s jazz, classical, or world music. Techno isn’t designed to replace Alice In Chains, Neil Young, or Living Colour. It’s a totally unique experience.

If you go to a techno club to hear a wailing guitar, you’ll be disappointed. But if you go looking for a transforming human experience, there’s a chance you’ll be fulfilled. Some people are trapped by the music they heard when they first got laid. But as a musician I’m not interested in limiting myself.

###

IF YOU WOULD like to read more stories like this, keep your eye out for Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by me and co-author Chris Gill, on sale July 14, or available for preorder: https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/brad-tolinski/blow-by-blow/9780306836589/

Drawing on more than thirty hours of original interviews with Beck, along with extensive conversations with friends and collaborators including Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, John McLaughlin, Billy Gibbons, Donovan, Johnny Depp, Clive Davis, and many others, if offers more the most complete and revealing portrait of Beck to date.

A follow-up to the bestselling Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen, this book goes beyond the myth, uncovering the restless creative force behind Beck’s relentless reinvention—from his groundbreaking work with the Yardbirds to his genre-defying solo career.

Other books by yours truly include Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, MC5: An Oral History Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band, and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.