Unplugged
JukeBox
Mountain - Climbing! (1970)
In the early ‘70s, the transition of rock as a form of expression towards the mass market entertainment industry swept aside in its wake a large number of musical pioneers – pioneers such as Mountain, the missing link to heavy metal’s beginnings, among others. The rock behind the mountain is none other than Leslie West, one of history’s...
Rush - Roll the Bones (1991) / R40 Live Tour (2015)
Alex Lifeson is probably the most admired and followed guitarist by lovers of this instrument, no matter what their musical taste may be. Just about everybody is an admirer of Rush, a band that has been a reference in the progressive rock genre for four decades. Going into the final straights of 2015, this fortieth year landmark is being...
Queen - A Night At The Opera (1975)
Brian May learnt how to discover the magic hidden in the stars - both those to be found in the night sky and those in the music business. A professor in Radio astronomy and a maestro of the guitar, the former surely served to better understand what he accomplished by means of the latter – namely, to convert Freddie Mercury into a supernova....
The Robert Cray Band - 4 Nights of 40 Years Live (2015)
Four nights lit up by a guitar-shaped moon and the soft touch of the blues massaging your ears. Forty years commanding a Stratocaster crammed into four nights. This is the life of Robert Cray, one of the few musicians who not only knows how to play guitar, but also puts their heart and soul into their craft. A magical mix of soul and rock -...
Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic (1975)
Out-and-out children of the '70s. A loud and raunchy band of rockers hell-bent on living the rock 'n' roll life to its ultimate consequences, swimming in a sea of alcohol and taking any illegal substance that they chanced to come across along the way. Halfway through the decade and with only two records to their name, the band had already...
Dream Theater - Images and Words (1992)
There are probably many Dream Theater fans who’d choose another title as the best album recorded by a band with 30 years at the forefront of progressive rock under its belt. If we were to also focus exclusively on the figure of guitarist John Petrucci, a consensus would be impossible to reach. Image and Words, their second...
Lynyrd Skynyrd - One More For The Fans (2015)
The umpteenth self-tribute to the legendary band converted into the symbol of southern rock boasts the virtue of bringing together a goodly number of leading figures of genuinely American music to perform the greatest hits of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Some of the guests are as unexpected as Cheap Trick and an older gentleman with a shaved head who turns...
Keith Richards - Crosseyed Heart (2015)
It was 20-odd years ago, the equivalent of a couple of Ice Ages in rocker chronology, when yours truly had the pleasure of attending one of the concerts presenting Main Offender, featuring Keith Richards and his X-Pensive Winos on the stage of a small, long-gone Madrid venue. The most influential rhythm guitarist in history hadn't yet fallen...
Toto - Toto (1978)
They deserved to win that 1979 Grammy for Best New Artist. But the award went to A Taste of Honey, a disco group that has not exactly gone down in history, despite the resounding success in record stores and on the airwaves of Toto's debut album. The critics, however, went for the throat, something that soon became the norm with very few...
Yes - Close To The Edge (1972)
There are any number of reasons to bring a masterpiece of '70s progressive rock to our jukebox, an album that almost inaugurated an entire era by itself. The least important one is that it was released 43 years ago, on 13 September 1972. Another one, unfortunately, is the death this June of Chris Squire, a bassist who deserves his own chapter...
Buddy Guy - Born To Play Guitar (2015)
On the cusp of turning 80, finally he admits that he came into the world with a guitar –a Fender in his case- for an umbilical cord and that his first cries as a baby were in fact a blues ditty. Even his own website has trouble listing the immense discography Guy built up over the course of a career so long that he can boast of being one of...
Johnny Winter - Johnny Winter (1969)
Hearing the introductory chords to the opening track on his first album is all it takes for anyone to understand Johnny Winter. Even the provocative title I’m Yours and I’m Hers is a trademark of his unmistakable style of living blues and rock through the neck of a guitar. His long albino mane became a part of the musical landscape for...
Carlos Santana - Abraxas (1970)
It was a case of second time lucky. A very young Carlos Santana had already made his presence felt when his debut album slammed its fist, or better yet, his guitar, down on the table of a rock world gearing up to enter the '70s. Abraxas suddenly turned the son of a mariachi musician into the #1 gun with the best-selling record of the...
Joe Satriani - Shockwave Supernova (2015)
Like the explosion of a genuine supernova. How easy the master made it to describe the opening to his new disc, the heart and soul of the great guitarist's set on his umpteenth world tour. This is Satriani for all tastes, from the hardest rocker to the purely virtuoso. With nothing to prove now, a song like Crazy Joey is a delight albeit not...
Al Di Meola - Elegant Gypsy ~ Elysium (1977/2015)
Some artists have a place set aside for them in these pages just because they have earned it. Al Di Meola is one of them. As fate would have it, just when my body and soul were crying out to listen to Elegant Gypsy, maybe due to a side-effect of this heat wave, and I was of a mind to writing a few lines about it, I saw that his new album,...
Frank Zappa - Guitar (1988)
The grand master made it easy. The album title alone is enough to choose it for our JukeBox from the nearly 90 recordings released under his name. Guitar. This is not the only album Frank Zappa dedicated to the instrument, nor the one that includes arguably his greatest solos, or at least the best-known ones. It doesn't rank as one of his...
Pete Townshend - Truancy, The Very Best Of (2015)
We continue with more commemoratives and reissues. Next up is Pete Townshend, another gifted guitarist, or at least that is what many of the specialist 'encyclopaedias' would have you believe, ranking him among the all-time top-ten greats of the six strings. Such reverence comes as a surprise to many of the more common garden guitarists,...
Marillion - Misplaced Childhood (1985)
Do you remember? A simple question with which one of the loveliest songs of the 80s starts off, serves to remind us of the album that kick-started Marillion's stratospheric musical career all those thirty years ago. The British band's third record breathed life back into the progressive rock movement, bringing it into public view for all to...
Van Halen - Tokyo Dome Live In Concert (2015)
The problem with this record is that we Van Halen fans were so excited at the prospect of seeing David Lee Roth up on stage once more that we would have forgiven him for just about anything. Even the fact that his voice (he is now 60 years old) is not what it used to be or that the 2015 concert had not been preceded by the recording of new...