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The Latest Breaking News from John Lee Hooker

“One day I was in an elevator with Miles Davis and he said, ‘Hey, do you got a wah wah yet?’ ‘No, I don’t play a wah wah.’ He says, ‘You gotta get a wah wah!’”: Carlos Santana on Miles and McLaughlin, Hendrix and SRV, and his quest for eternal melody

“I wanted my guitar to sound like a female – like the voice of my favourite singers”

MusicRadar

“There is not another guitarist in the world who plays like him. As raw as John Lee Hooker and sophisticated as Andrés Segovia from one phrase to another”: The life and times of Grateful Dead icon Bob Weir

We salute the Grateful Dead original, who – in the last 30 years of his life – stepped out from Jerry Garcia’s considerable shadow to emerge as a guitar hero in his own right

Guitar World

“David Bowie had to mix him out of his own song because Tom drove him nuts in the studio”: Richard Lloyd on episodes with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, and his bittersweet relationship with Tom Verlaine

They lost touch long before Verlaine’s death, but now the guitarist is at peace with those adventures. He reflects on Television, and his memories of backstage lessons with Jimmy Page's tech, and an onstage jam with John Lee Hooker

Guitar World

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“You look at everyone who’s ever stood in front of a band playing guitar and it all traces back to one man”: How T-Bone Walker invented electric blues guitar

T-Bone Walker may have been the first true hero of modern electric blues, but he stood upon the shoulders of jazz and blues giants

Guitar World

“He told me, ‘Come in closer, I’ll tell you the secret of playing electric guitar’”: How an art-punk icon ended up playing with one of the blues’ all-time greats

Pre-Television, Richard Lloyd rubbed shoulders with many guitar stars, and had a rather memorable encounter with John Lee Hooker backstage at one of Boston’s premier jazz venues

Guitar World

"You only get in trouble if you steal people’s melodies and words, as Led Zeppelin did": The story of the classic "inspired" by John Lee Hooker that paid for Foghat's drummer's Lamborghini

"Of course Slow Ride is about sex,” says Foghat drummer Roger Earl. "All rock'n'roll songs are about sex, aren’t they?"

Louder

“It’s hard to watch a friend face down their demons in front of you and come off second best”: The doomed blues hotshot who blew away Bono and toured with Dylan – but ran from fame and died in obscurity

He was signed to the same label as Dylan and Springsteen and brought the blues into the 1990s, but success eluded him

Louder

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"He was a guy who would chop the bedroom door down with an axe, like Jack Nicholson": A decade on from the disease that nearly killed him, Walter Trout is on a roll, looking at a world gone wrong

Walter Trout on growing up, deep fakes, John Lee Hooker and John Mayall, defeating addiction and new album Sign Of The Times

Louder

“So, Dave, how do I slash the amp?”: Dave Davies picks up a razor and slashes a speaker on camera to demonstrate how he got the Kinks’ iconic proto-fuzz guitar tone

There are gear demos and then there are gear demos in which a guitar legend performs the most radical amp mod to show us how he got the guitar tone on You Really Got Me

MusicRadar

“It’s weird when I look at the list. If you go folk or blues or jazz or rock, I’ve actually been there”: Danny Thompson covered more ground than even he thought possible in a career spanning seven decades

The revered double bassist worked with Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, John Martyn, Bert Jansch and countless others. On 2012 album Connected he assembled some of his proudest moments

Louder

Classic Rock's Tracks Of The Week: August 18, 2025

Eight songs you need to hear right now, from Ricky Warwick, Deep Purple, Paradise Lost and more

Louder

“The only guitar I could ever play was the 125, but I wore them out – they were costing thousands to repair. They stopped making them around 1970; I was ready to stop playing”: George Thorogood on his “mutt” amp, and talking shop with Hound Dog Taylor

The 75-year-old – who’s not sure how he gets his sound – almost gave up playing when Gibson discontinued the ES-125. Now he says he’ll keep going until the guitar gives up on him

Guitar World

“I always played B.B. King. His style was commercial, not like the gutbucket style”: You may not know his name, but Jimmy Johnson was a contemporary of Buddy Guy – and the ultimate example of a Chicago blues virtuoso who ventured well outside the box

Brother of acclaimed guitarist Syl Johnson, the late Jimmy Johnson was a singular player who was a mainstay of his city's legendary blues scene, and wowed onstage into his 90s

Guitar World

“He would beat the crap out of the guitar. The result can best be described as Jackson Pollock trying to play like John Lee Hooker”: Aggressively bizarre, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica remains one of the craziest guitar-driven albums ever made

Dense as a rainforest and often hard to grasp, Captain Beefheart's best-known album is the poster boy of late-Sixties avant-garde rock

Guitar World

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Louder

"He was the first time I'd ever seen the potential of music to be evil": From Oz punk to Detroit blues, Nick Cave names his Desert Island Discs

Nick Cave chose eight favourite songs on the long-running BBC Radio show

Louder

“A really painful song about how hard it is to lose friends. When I sing it, I think of John Belushi”: We asked Blues Brothers star Dan Aykroyd to give us his 11 favourite blues records, and he delivered

John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells - Blues Brothers and former SNL icon Dan Aykroyd knows his blues

Guitar World

“Like Gretsch’s Duo Jet, it was surely spurred by Gibson’s success with the Les Paul”: The mysterious history of the Guild M-75 Aristocrat, the blue-blooded hollowbody played by John Lee Hooker, John Mayer, St. Vincent and Dan Auerbach

This evocative downsized archtop appeared in mid-’50s New York and would go on to delight jazz players and rootsy bluesers alike

Louder

"He was trying to numb the past, dull the present and look for comfort in the future. He found it there and it killed him": Dan Aykroyd on the tragedy of John Belushi and the making of The Blues Brothers

Cult movie The Blues Brothers exposed a generation to the brilliance of blues and soul legends like John Lee Hooker and Aretha Franklin

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Guitar World

“Music has to be heartfelt. Robert Johnson didn’t go back and redo anything. John Lee Hooker, he walked in there and did it once”: Tab Benoit on returning from the swamp with the blues comeback of the year, and why he’s a one-take wonder

After more than a decade spent clocking up road miles, the Louisiana blues ace is back with a new 10-song collection, I Hear Thunder

Guitar World

“You can only imagine the effect this had on the young Keith Richards and Eric Clapton”: 9 must-hear albums that fueled the British blues guitar boom

The essential records that chart blues music’s epic journey – from its Delta roots through to the masterpiece that launched the heavy rock movement

The Guardian - UK

Letters: Cleo Sylvestre obituary

Ron Gould writes: We all went backstage and Cleo was serenaded by John Lee Hooker

Louder

"He was definitely a component part of what informed the vocals of Robert Plant and Ian Gillan": Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson on the bluesman who inspired the great rock singers

Chicago guitarist and singer-songwriter JB Lenoir avoidedblues cliches to tackle politics and social justice in his lyrics,influencing a whole generation of classic rock acts

Guitar World

Peter Green shaped his playing, John Lee Hooker enlisted his talents and Woodstock made him a guitar legend – nobody builds a blues solo like Carlos Santana

Ever since his Woodstock performance in '69, Santana has been one of the world's biggest guitar talents, with a melodic sensibility few can match. We go deep into his lead style

Guitar World

“It never dawned on me that I could make a living playing music. For many years, it was just a hobby, a way I could express myself”: John Mayall changed blues music forever – and introduced the world to some of its greatest guitar players

“The Godfather of British Blues” left us in July at age 90. We look back at his many achievements, triumphs and essential releases

The Guardian - UK

John Mayall obituary

Bandleader, composer, instrumentalist and singer who nurtured players such as Eric Clapton and put British blues on the map

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