Guitarist

And I got a nice quote from Steve Lukather.

It's taken from Guitar Player magazine back in 1984.

And this is what he said about this track.

I'm going to substitute the word ma, by the way, for ma, because it just doesn't sound right in an Irish accent, OK? I flipped the first time I heard myself on the radio.

I mean, it was such pain.

So they helped me drape a shirt over my shoulders and they handed my guitar to me and I could just, you know, kind of sit in the guitar player position.

I couldn't move my shoulders past, you know, above my ears.

It was really painful and it got worse.

Tower Records and Barnes & Noble were thriving retailers.

For those of us who played guitar in the 1990s, these cultural institutions made up the bulk of our information diet.

And it all culminated at the magazine rack where a cornucopia of guitar periodicals like Guitar Player, Guitar World, and Guitar for the Practicing Musician awaited.

The guitar rags provided a generation of aspiring hipsters, metalheads, chicken pickers, and jazzers with lessons, transcriptions, reviews, plenty of gear to salivate over, and glossy cover photos featuring so, so much hair.

That's who Jeff was.

I mean, look, He was a guitar player's guitar player.

And when your audience is made up primarily of guitar players as opposed to just fans, to be honest, your reach is limited.

You know, to put that in perspective, Van Halen sold somewhere between 70 and 75 million records.

Jeff sold 5 million.

Early 1978, I'm writing for a Japanese magazine called Player,

which

is basically the Japanese equivalent of Guitar Player and Guitar World.

But, um, yeah, but I, yeah, I kept up with Jeff throughout all that stuff, and so I just really, you know, stuck with him.

And, um, of course, so I got the job at Guitar Player magazine in the early '90s, and top of my list was to interview Jeff Beck, and boom, I did it.

That was my first cover story for them.

Wow.

And I was coming to Jeff's house with the guitar picks of Cliff Gallup, of Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, you know, which was Jeff's big guitar hero, you know, to present it to him as a gift.

And, and not only did I come bearing this gift of these guitar picks, but I also had a ton of information about Cliff Gallup, because I had interviewed Cliff Gallup's widow just on a whim.

I called up the phone number we had in the Guitar Player magazine Rolodex because Dan Ford had interviewed Cliff Gallup during the, the mid-'80s.

And sure enough, she picked up the phone and I talked to her for two hours, which is a great thing, because when, when Cliff did the interview with, with Dan Ford, he was really very private and short and guarded, you know, so Dan didn't get a whole lot of information out of him.

You know, my background, so I don't know.

I graduated high school, and I was a guitar player.

I was a heavy metal guitar player for about 12 years on the road, just pursuing a career in music.

And, you know, as a musician, you're not really disruptive enough But I was always looking for angles to sound different because in that world, everybody, you know, everybody sounds the same and you're trying to, you're trying to stick out a little bit.

And then I got into business and my first businesses were telemarketing companies, which, you know, that's a straightforward hard closing sale type organization.

That's what I tell people.

You don't go to Denny's, but you do end up there.

I was a guitar player doing very well, and I developed tendonitis, and I had to stop playing.

this, this is, this is a great album.

Play Guitar? Is Play Guitar on there? Can you believe I don't know that?

Play Guitar's on this, Jack, you know.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.