The Latest Breaking News from Jim McCarty

“Those Fender Jazz basses sounded fantastic, but they scared the hell out of me”: Why bassist Paul Samwell-Smith chose a short-scale Epiphone for his “rave-ups” with the Yardbirds

The blues-rock opener from the band’s 1966 debut album showcases a standout example of Samwell-Smith’s fluid, freewheeling bass work

Guitar World · Mar 21

“I guess like John Lennon and Brian Jones, we’re not up front, but we keep it all sticking together”: Chris Dreja turned down Led Zeppelin, but he will be remembered as the Yardbirds’ unsung bass hero in a band of guitar superstars

Co-founder of the Yardbirds, Chris Dreja – who supported Clapton, Beck and Page on rhythm or bass guitar, then went on to become a photographer – has died, aged 79

Guitar World · Dec 24, 2025

“The bar owners pulled guns on us. It was over whisky and disrespect. We were 22 and hard as steel”: The incredible story of the forgotten Detroit hellraisers who blazed a trail for Alice Cooper, Bob Seger and The Stooges

Mitch Ryder And The Detroit Wheels are one of the great lost American bands of the 60s

Louder · Nov 23, 2025

The laziest bands in the history of rock: 10 follow-up albums that took decades to appear

Think waiting 53 years for a new MC5 album is a chore? They're merely the latest in a long line of slow-working, deadline-averse dawdlers

Louder · Nov 17, 2024

"I was very green and it was a tentative start, but we knew we had something":The complicated birth of Led Zeppelin

How the most creatively fertile era in the history of British Music produced the most important hard rock band of all time, Led Zeppelin

Louder · Sep 20, 2024

"A load of big names kicked us off tours. We frightened them": Cactus should have been huge but it never happened - so we asked them to tell us why

Born out of hard rock pioneers Vanilla Fudge and contemporaries of Led Zeppelin, Cactus are the unsung innovators of 70s US rock

Louder · Aug 1, 2024

“Beck, Clapton and Page are okay. But they’re no better than Jim McCarty from Cactus and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels”: Ted Nugent weighs in on top guitarist lists and the unsung heroes who deserve more recognition

Ted Nugent names the guitarists he thinks deserve to be championed as much as Beck, Clapton and Page

Guitar World · Jun 20, 2024

"There's nothing wrong with the Cactus debut - it's just that so many other albums circa 1970 did the same things better": Cactus's first album showed they had the chops but not the songs

What do you get if you mix men from Vanilla Fudge, Amboy Dukes and Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels? The first album from Cactus

Louder · Jun 10, 2024

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do in every respect”: How Jimmy Page built Led Zeppelin from the ashes of the Yardbirds

Using knowledge gleaned from his time as a first-call session pro – and his brief but crucial tenure alongside Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds – Page formed a rock colossus from the ground up

Guitar World · Jul 31, 2023

Early Renaissance five disc box set to be released in April

Live At The Fillmore West And Other Adventures will be released as a five disc set on April 28

Louder · Mar 29, 2023