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1 week ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
This 102-minute interview took place on September 17, 1992, in the Manhattan office of Keith’s personal manager, Jane Rose. In a great mood that evening, Keith had just finished mixing his Main Offender solo album and was happy to talk about a wide range of subjects.
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2 weeks ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
Being an editor for Guitar Player magazine in the pre-internet days brought endless opportunities to listen to reader-submitted cassette tapes and CDs. The vast majority of ’em featured generic playing, albeit often expertly performed. Once in a great while, though, something quite extraordinary—thrilling, even—showed up in the mail.
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3 weeks ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
To listeners of Atlanta-based radio station WSB, Dan Hornsby was known as “Cheerful Dan, The Man With the Two-Octave Voice.” His pop and hillbilly recordings under his own name and with the Dan Hornsby Trio enjoyed decent sales, especially his original “The Shelby Disaster.” Cheerful Dan’s greatest claim to fame, though, are his accomplishments during his tenure as Columbia Records’ go-to man in Atlanta.
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1 month ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
Taped on July 23, 1987, the interview you’re about to hear was originally done for Guitar Player magazine. Three months earlier Suzanne’s breakthrough Solitude Standing album had come out, and at the time we spoke her hit single “Luka” was #3 on the U.S. record charts. We focused our conversation on Suzanne’s approaches to songwriting and playing guitar.
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1 month ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
While an editor at Guitar Player magazine in the mid-1980s, I came up with the idea of asking famous players to send me one of their guitar picks. (We eventually published three fold-out poster displays of these picks.) I was surprised when one of the musicians I contacted, world-class fingerpicker Leo Kottke, sent me a note instead: “I don’t use picks.
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1 month ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
Gruff, direct, and fiercely individualistic, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown had a rich singing voice and a spirited, horn-like approach to the electric guitar, which he played bare-fingered. Unlike his contemporary T-Bone Walker, who unabashedly declared himself a bluesman, the Stetson-wearing, pipe-smoking Brown took umbrage at this classification. “I’m a musician,” he once growled at me, “not some dirty lowdown bluesman. I play American and world music, Texas-style.
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1 month ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
When Jimi Hendrix returned to America in 1967 in advance of his breakthrough performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, he spent his first day in New York City. Brushing off his jetlag, that evening he took his entourage to see Richie Havens perform in Greenwich Village. “He’s worth listening to hard,” Jimi advised. Their playing styles couldn’t have been further apart, but their friendship ran deep.
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1 month ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
During his teens Barney Kessel jammed with his hero Charlie Christian and played in Oklahoma swing bands. Moving to Los Angeles in 1942, he became a first-call studio guitarist and played bop in nightclubs. As the 1940s and 1950s progressed, he performed and recorded influential jazz with Artie Shaw, Bennie Goodman, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and the Oscar Peterson Trio, to name a few. He was voted the number-one guitarist in DownBeat, Metronome, Melody Maker, and Esquire polls.
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2 months ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
His birth name was Huddie William Ledbetter, but he was best known as Lead Belly, the self-proclaimed “King of the 12-String Guitar.” The brawling, stocky, 5'7" songster had done hard time for murder and then virtually exchanged worlds in 1934. Leaving behind his chain-gang shackles, he became lionized by New York City’s high society and performed for receptive audiences on college campuses, concert halls, and over the radio. He was among the most recorded blues artists of the 1930s and ’40s.
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2 months ago | 
jasobrecht.substack.com | Jas Obrecht
While I was a staff editor at Guitar Player, we decided to feature Eddie Van Halen on the cover of the July 1984 issue. Since I’d already interviewed Eddie four times for the magazine, we asked if he’d be willing to give our readers a crash course in his playing style. Eddie agreed, and our music editor, Jim Ferguson, was dispatched to Los Angeles to meet with him for the “My Tips For Beginners” section of the cover story.