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I had prostate cancer that, for me, was debilitating. I didn't touch a guitar for two years, but when I realized I was seeing the light at the end of the recovery tunnel and was going to live pain-free, I realized again that it was a fun little instrument to play.
Well, I got pretty good and went on the road with a group. We starved. At that time I didn't realize that you'd work one gig in Kansas City, the next in Florida and the next gig will be in Louisville. You know, a thousand miles a night. That was really rough, man.
My father was always playing this ethnic blues stuff around the house, and both my parents played. Then one day my father brought home Big Bill Broonzy, and there he was sitting in our living room playing, and blues was in my heart from the time I was 12 years old.
I remember one of the first gigs I played with that amp was at a local church. They wanted someone to fill in with the guitar and my friend say, 'Ah, he can play.' And so I dragged the amplifier down and started playing and everybody started yelling 'turn it down!'
Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.
While it is true that Frank had a great sense of humor, he was also very serious about composing music. In reality there are only a handful of skilled players who can play his most complex pieces. It takes a lot of patience to learn and requires a fantastic memory.
I come from a big family of musicians, so I was lucky enough to grow up with guitars all around the house. Even though I didn't really know much at the time, my brother had a Les Paul Goldtop, and my dad always had this Fender or some bizarre Pedulla-Orsini guitar.
We played New Year's Eve in Los Angeles, maybe 1978, opening for Kansas or somebody. Driving to the hotel after the gig, we came on KLOS. It was like, 'All right! We're in L.A., we just played a big gig, and we're on the radio!' That was the start of something big.
Jeff Beck is my idol .. sometimes he finds notes that I just do not have on my guitar. Frank Zappa's another one .. I loved Frank Zappa ... I do think Van Halen reinvented the guitar ... he's an excellent musician, a shrewd guitarist and as a person he's wonderful.
When I was starting my journey as a young guitar player, I was listening to The Beatles, the Stones, and all the British invasion bands, Top 40, Motown, and all the great music of the '60s. Then the alien ship landed, and life changed again forever... Jimi Hendrix.
I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.
What I've done from the very beginning is play everything with extreme accuracy. I never said to myself, 'Okay, if I put my fingers this way, it's gonna result in this.' I've never taken a lesson. My way of playing the guitar was a fresh approach to the instrument.
I think I'm built like a painter. I have friends who are painters and they reflect a similar psychological attitude towards their work. They don't know what's coming next, they just wait for the message, for orders to come and then off they go on their next project.
First and foremost, with everybody we wanted to see if they can pull off the songs, play them correctly, and that they it felt right musically. That's something Mike [Mangini] did, it felt like the band. He really gets the style and delivers in a powerful metal way.
In 1984, I was contacted by Michael Taylor, who had won a commission from a sponsor and decided he would like to paint a picture of me. I agreed to do it, because I'm not unused to sitting for portraits: my father was a commercial artist and I used to model for him.
I think that ultimately - as I say to most of the people who are acquiring art - I can tell you my reality of a piece, but ultimately what's more important will be yours. I can tell you what a piece means to me, but just as valid if not more is what it means to you.
I was three years old, and I walked onstage during a performance that my father was a tenor in 'The Barber of Seville.' I walked out onstage, and people started laughing and clapping, and that was it. That was all it took. Laughing and clapping, I still enjoy today.
I saw Deep Purple live once and I paid money for it and I thought, 'Geez, this is ridiculous.' You just see through all that sort of stuff. I never liked those Deep Purples or those sort of things. I always hated it. I always thought it was a poor man's Led Zeppelin.
A number of Iraqis told us they had welcomed the U.S. forces as liberators initially but in the intervening months, they had come to feel that they had swapped one oppressive regime for another. The Iraqis did exchange one oppression for a lighter kind, in some ways.
And then as we played more and more as a trio, it became more and more of a situation where we realized we really knew how to use the fourth member of the group - that space. The thing about the trio is that it's the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.
After a while, no matter how much you love any pop song, you're going to get tired of it. That's the way it is with any entertainment. It's good when you first hear it or see it, you like it for a while, then it gets old. It gets chewed up and spit out and it's done.
Guitarists shouldn't get too riled up about all of the great players that were left off of 'Rolling Stone Magazines' list of the Greatest Guitar Players of all Time' ... Rolling Stone is published for people who read the magazine because they don't know what to wear.
I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.
The Beatles, they brought a whole new dimension to pop music. Of course, the psychedelic period is much more interesting to me, starting with 'Rubber Soul' and on to the 'White Album.' Great, great records. I was such a Beatles fan. I was very sad when they broke up.
Since I don't feel like I belong solely to any one of them I find that it makes me even more interested and open to other cultures as well. It's also fun looking ethnically ambiguous because no one can quite put a finger on what I am and it's very entertaining to me!
There's nothing definite yet. Of course, any time you have a book, there's going to be book signings and stuff. We'll do bookstores that handle both audio and video. And some of the stores want to have the CDs available at the same time. So that part looks real good.
I saw this trend happening with the proliferation of guitar clinics and schools. And I was approached to do a camp in the past, but I wanted to have a good enough idea because most of them are just about jamming and learning. I decided I wanted a theme for each camp.
Today, somewhere in America, there's a kid who's got a laptop and a guitar and a couple of his friends he's putting together to play drums and bass, who's gonna change the way we say things, the way that we dress, the way we view things, the music we hear, everything.
I started using contact microphones that you can place on common, ordinary objects, like a rake. I put a microphone on it and it picked up the tines vibrating and turned it into a horrible din. What attracted me to it was the horrible din - that's what I really liked.
It's a diabolical business. I can't imagine how hellish it must be to be hounded like Amy Winehouse and people like that. I have a little peripheral place on the outskirts of celebrity, when I go to premieres and that sort of stuff, which is as close as I want to get.
I've learned that there's a signature Metallica sound, and if we stray too far from that, our fans get impatient, or they just don't understand, or they miss the point. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing; it's just something we have to contend with.
History's most treasured musicians were believed in and cultivated to reach their potential. Today, it would be difficult for those musicians to get deals. We have the insight and the tools to identify and bring to fruition the dormant talent that our artists possess.
When I was younger I would have told you it was my genius, but now I don't believe that for a second. Music just comes out of you, it flows through, it's weird. If you think about it intellectually, how does someone come up with two hundred riffs over their life time?
If I played something incorrectly, I whipped myself mercilessly. Whenever I made a mistake, I made sure that I would never allow myself to repeat it. Every guitarist wants to play well. But in reality, if good intentions were all it took, then everyone would be great.
We grew up in the middle of nowhere. We didn't have a rich uncle in the music industry or some contact through someone that our dad worked with. And we went into the world blindly, and just through believing, dreaming, and working hard, Good Charlotte came to fruition.
Hendrix was the bass player for Little Richard. We were both left-handed, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. In fact he used to say, and this is documented, 'I patterned my style after Dick Dale.'
Walking up to the Whisky some guys said to me 'the Scene is dead. Stop wearing makeup faggot!' All I could do was smile and think about the BVB Army and the legions of dedicated fans BVB has. I will wear my warpaint proudly, thank you very much! Seriously love you all.
I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.
Rock guitarists usually do not wish to think trains of thought about anything but their own guitar playing during a long solo, and I could not play this way if I were not able to divide my attention between my ever changing musical environment and my instrument itself.
In 1978, I was in Paris - I was in someone's car and listening to the radio - and on comes Paco de Lucia. I'd never heard of this chap, and I just thought, 'I have to meet him.' And I was very lucky; I found him very quickly. Crazily enough, he happened to be in Paris!
For the 'Load' album, I was experimenting so much with tone that I had to keep journals on what equipment I was using. For 'Hero of the Day', I know I used a 1958 Les Paul Standard with a Matchless Chieftain, some Boogie amps and a Vox amp - again, they're all blended.
For the 'Load' album, I was experimenting so much with tone that I had to keep journals on what equipment I was using. For 'Hero of the Day,' I know I used a 1958 Les Paul Standard with a Matchless Chieftain, some Boogie amps and a Vox amp - again, they're all blended.
When I was 13, I was playing in the bars. I guess it's a changing world. Some things are better today, like the internet. We have different ways of reaching each other. E-mail and all that stuff is wonderful. I actually think the kids are missing out on a lot of stuff.
There's something about when humanity goes from hoping they get lucky in finding something fermented to doing it on purpose. They don't understand what they've done until the late 1800s, but they know if they combine things in a certain way, they'll get something magic.
I think we get on with living our lives like everybody else does. Where we're at in music is trying to explain what's going around us either directly or by analogy and trying to create a parallel, an analog, sometimes musical, sometimes dramatic, that might be truthful.
I started The Runaways with Sandy West. We shared the dream of girls playing rock and roll. Sandy was an exuberant and powerful drummer. So underrated, she was the caliber of John Bonham. I am overcome from the loss of my friend. I always told her, we changed the world.
And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.
I always get frustrated when I hear someone talking about sweep arpeggios. Though there are plenty of licks and examples out there, no one has ever really broken down the mechanics of the technique. As a result, guitarists have had to figure them out by trial and error.
In 'The General Strike,' we celebrate those who bring a new vision for the world to the table. People who stand for workers rights, human rights, a just representative political system, and a new mode of doing business where sustainability is the norm not the exception.
On 'Metallica,' I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to play the composite solo, tightened it up and replayed it for the final version.