JOHNNY WINTER
The Texan whose Firebird lit up blues‑rock with thumbpickin’ heat
There was always something otherworldly about Johnny Winter, as though he had one foot in this life and one in the next. The rake-thin Texan with the long blond hair and Gibson Firebird was all angles. And his style was all action, all attitude. He had the voice to match, too. Winter approached the electric guitar differently to most blues players, preferring a thumb pick and applying a country-esque, Chet Atkins-style approach to blues-rock, and would glean insight not just from blues guitar practitioners but from mouth organ licks, expanding his vocabulary on the guitar, and taking blues-rock forward.
Winter started out young, and his big break arrived in 1968 when Mike Bloomfield invited him to play with him at New York City’s Fillmore East, where the suits from Columbia Records were in attendance and could not help but notice Winter’s capacity for showmanship on a performance of BB King’s It’smyownfault. They signed him, offering winter a record $600,000 advance.
Winter’s legacy was writ large on not just how he played the guitar but how he recorded it, having tracked a trio of Muddy Waters albums in the late 1970s, also playing some guitar as well as producing.
RORY GALLAGHER
The blues-rock powerhouse who gave the art form a Celtic flavour Great blues players always have the whiff of legend about them. There’s something about biographical apocrypha that ennobles their art, like the story that Gallagher played the first Fender Stratocaster ever sold in Ireland. It’s quite possibly true – the esteemed Dave Hunter suggests as much in his book Ultimate star guitars: the guitars That rocked the world. But what really matters is how Gallagher played this 1961 model, and how he treated it. This was a guitar that looked like Gallagher sounded; a Sunburst relic’d raw by hard miles on the road.
He threw everything at it, powerchord riffs, saucing the pentatonic scale with notes from the minor scale, a fiery slide technique that ebbed and flowed and held the audience’s emotions in its travel. Gallagher was similarly adept with an acoustic guitar. Check out the virtuosic Justthesmile, a track that brought Americana together with Celtic folk elements. Gallagher influenced everyone and anyone who heard him play. Most notably, his use of a Vox AC30 with a treblebooster in front inspired Brian May to do likewise. To follow in his footsteps is to similarly commit to high-volume tube amp tone and the temperament to bring it to heel.