Guitar International Turns 1: Top 10 Guitar Interviews

By: Staff

As Guitar International celebrates its first birthday we at the magazine have decided to share our top articles from this past year with you, our readers.

Here are the Top 10 most popular interviews from our first year, thanks again to all our readers for making our first year such a great success!

******

1. Interview with Guitar Sensation Orianthi: From the six-year old dreamer, to the lead guitarist for the King of Pop, to her red-hot solo career, guitar virtuoso Orianthi has a story to tell. A story that stars the young Aussie as she dreams of becoming a guitar master and recording artist, both of which would come to fruition with the crucial role of supportive parents who were behind her all the way. Recalling the trials and tribulations she experienced while studying music in her native Australia, Orianthi tells us what it was like being a woman in the male-dominated realm of guitar players.

2. Hagar the Horrible: Eddie Van Halen: I’ve never seen Eddie Van Halen so angry. Maybe he never has been this angry. He storms around the lounge in his 5150 studio, clenching his hands into fists, and pointing menacingly into the air with wicked finger jabs. Cigar smoke wafts through the air, and the studio is strangely quiet-no music is playing. But this isn’t about music, not today. Eddie is outraged over the recent events surrounding the band that bears his name. He feels that he has been lied to, betrayed, and made out to be a conniving cutthroat musician by the press, by the music community, and by the people he felt had been his friends. In this latter category, two people in particular are the thorns ripping into his side. Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth.

3. David Bowie: No Longer a Lad Insane: David Bowie is one of a handful of people who have directly influenced the course of popular music during their careers. It may even be safe to say that Bowie is the only musician who has been able to change the face of rock music more than once in his career. Through it all, he has been supported by some of the best guitarists in the business, many of whom rose to fame on the strength of their stints with David. With the release of Outside, his 24th album, Bowie has created yet another eclectic combination of guitar players. In this exclusive interview, Bowie reflects on the guitarists he has worked with over the past 25 years, starting with Mick Ronson and hinting at the possibility of a future collaboration with Jeff Beck.

4. Paul Gilbert: The Fuzz Universe Interview: Paul Gilbert is a guitarist who wears many hats. During a long and successful career he’s worked as a solo-guitarist, is a long-time member of metal powerhouse Racer X and has enjoyed rock stardom as the guitarist for Mr. Big, where he became known the world over for his acoustic guitar work on the band’s smash hit “To be With You.” Being able to move between bands, genres and sonic situations has firmly cemented Gilbert as one of the top electric guitarists of his, or any, generation.

5. Van Halen: The Guitar Interview: Edward Van Halen is the prototypical American guitar icon. No stateside guitar player since Jimi Hendrix has managed to capture the collective imagination and awe of the world’s electric guitarists like Van Halen – no one. We are proud to have Eddie as the subject of our first Guitar Interview. Over the course of two days, we spent time with him as he filmed the video to “Don’t Tell Me,” a part of the corporate music process he particularly dislikes. We also observed the frenzy at his home studio, 5150, as the band prepared for the release of its 10th studio album, Balance. Despite the madhouse atmosphere at 5150, it was clear that EVH would be an extremely happy guy if he could spend all his time there. Given this fact of life, and Eddie’s very specific ideas on the difference between what is work and what is play, we have divided these two days – and two different aspects of making music – into separate profiles of Edward Van Halen: At Work and At Play.

6. Jimmy Page Interview: As the blues-rock of the late ’60s hurtled towards the hard rock of the ’70s, four men were pushing the limits: Jimi Hendrix, and the Yardbird triumvirate of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Page. Jimi Hendrix is gone. This apparently doesn’t affect his legacy, but it does affect his ability to create new music that still matters, regardless of how many “lost” recordings are posthumously released. Jeff Beck, who continues to be an amazing and inventive guitarist – and has the edge over Hendrix in the still-alive-and-well department – tends to prefer spending time with cars instead of guitars. These days he appears on record and on stage with less frequency than Elvis. Eric Clapton, meanwhile, has all but forsaken the driving blues-rock music that propelled him to early fame, opting instead for his current grandfatherly white-bluesmaster persona. One needs to look no further than what he did to “Layla” on his MTV Unplugged special to see that rock and roll is indeed a distant memory for Slowhand.

7. Steve Morse Begins His Purple Reign: Steve Morse is sitting in a studio on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida, chewing on a chocolate chip cookie and waiting patiently for the members of his band to show up for rehearsal. The band that’s he’s waiting for, though, is not made up of his regular musical partners. They are not the members of Dixie Dregs, not the members of the Steve Morse Band, not even the members of Kansas. No, this time Steve Morse is waiting for Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice – a group of Englishmen known for almost 30 years as Deep Purple.

8. Great Kat Interview: Pushing the pedal to the Metal on guitar and violin, Katherine Thomas, better known to Metal Heads as The Great Kat, offers up nitro-inspired works by great classical composers. With musical inspirations such as Richard Wagner and Paganini, The Great Kat is relentless in her mission to introduce her “slaves” to classical music, in a manner that incites feeding frenzies by her fans. Born in Swindon, England, the Great Kat now lives in one of the world’s fastest-paced cities, New York. A graduate of the Julliard School, The Great Kat spent of few years on the road playing conventional-style classical music before embarking on a thrash metal take-over aimed at inspiring the younger generation to become fans of the grand masters of classical music.

9. Jimmy Page: The Gear of the Gods Interview: As the reigning rock guitar icon from the 1960s and 1970s, Jimmy Page is the owner of one of music’s most examined lives. Yet he and his work remain an extraordinary contradiction of terms. An intensely private man, Page’s personal life is still the subject of the most-talked-about rumors ever associated with a rock musician. More than any other guitarist, he forged the blues into cranium-splintering hard rock, yet he as a pioneer in bringing lesser-known cultural music forms from the Middle East, Northern Africa, and the British Isles into the rock mainstream. Universally thought of as a musician with a Les Paul in his hands and a Marshall behind him, he nonetheless recorded with mandolins, banjos and the masonite Danelectro early in Led Zeppelin’s prolific career. An innovator in applying bizarre effects and gear to his sound, he today relies on the tried-and-true tools of yesterday to grind out his decidedly non-digital sound. When you think of it, the contradictions are as in-your-face as every riff Jimmy Page has ever written.

10. Jerry Cantrell: Why is this Man Smiling? : It’s a nice day in Seattle. No rain, few clouds, a lot of sun, and temperatures in the mid-60s. Latte and espresso vendors clog the city’s street corners like legalized crack dealers. In the famous Pike Place Market, tourists videotape everything that moves, from guys making crab salad to street corner dulcimer players. Downtown, business people rush in and out of the high-priced coffee shops which are nestled nonchalantly between porn theaters and sporting goods stores. In nearby Pioneer Square, the turn-of-the-century “quaint” section of downtown Seattle, Jerry Cantrell sits in an anonymous second floor management office overlooking the street. Dozens and dozens of gold and platinum records, posters, awards, and promotional items featuring Alice In Chains and Soundgarden clutter the office. In the confines of this building, Alice in Chains is omnipresent.