Music licensing, or making music available for use in TV and/or film, has become very popular over the past few years.
This is greatly due to the number of TV shows being produced now and the need for lots of music to fill up an hour or half-hour time slot.
This growing demand for TV background music has really helped to become the source of supplemental, and sometimes primary, income for a lot of musicians. It is very difficult to rely on CD and/or MP3 sales for any kind of income. Taking the same songs from your CD — and now making them available to a host of different production music libraries — can give new life to the songs and make the chances greater of making money with your music.
First of all, if you have not already done so, pick a PRO or performance rights organization to affiliate with. Without being affiliated to a PRO, you cannot get paid. The three companies in the U.S. are BMI, ASCAP and SESAC. In Canada, the main company is SOCAN. In England it is PRS.
The key to being successful at music licensing is to be diverse in the styles of music you compose — and to be prolific. This is not to say that submitting a handful of songs to a library cannot yield you a lot of money; this happens all the time, but to see steadily rising amounts of money in your royalty checks, it is best to have a big catalog of music.
Whatever style of music you're most comfortable writing, definitely write a lot of that, but also try writing in styles that you might not be as familiar with or even like. They might be styles that are in high demand. I grew up listening to and writing rock music, but now I compose in most styles. The more convincingly you can compose in a style, the more of a chance you have of your music being licensed.
Compositionally, no matter what the style, if you are writing with the intention of presenting your music to libraries, there are a few things that can greatly increase your chances of having your track accepted and possibly placed. Most TV cues (songs/compositions) only need to be 1:30 to two min long. In that short span of time, there should be a lot of movement/ changes. For a two-minute cue, try and have it change up three or four times, while still retaining a good flow. This will make it more attractive to an editor and can make it easier to chop up, so you almost get four cues in one.
Here's an example of an orchestral/trailer piece I did that changes a few times throughout the piece:
Another technique that's useful for TV composing is throwing in a one- to two-second sec dead stop someplace in the middle. This will make it easy for an editor to chop up and just use part of the cue if they want. Here's a rock cue I did that has that kind of a break in it:
Definitely, stay away from any kind of shredding, unless requested. Think simple and catchy. Flashy here and there is OK sometimes, but in very small amounts.
Spend some time making sure your mix sounds great also. It would be a shame if you wrote something really cool that had a lot of placement potential but was rejected or passed over because of a poor mix.
A great resource for finding libraries to submit to is musiclibraryreport.com. There are hundreds of libraries listed there.
I hope this has been helpful for all of you who would like to take a stab at this kind of composing. The time span between submitting a track and seeing money from it could be up to two years, so patience is a must. It will be well worth it in the end.
Steve Booke is a composer for film and TV from the New York area. His compositions range from orchestral to metal to world styles from every corner of the planet. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Steve has played guitar for more than 28 years. He has recorded 10 albums of his own and has played on countless others. He plays gigs in the NY area and tours the East Coast with a variety of bands. He has performed with Ben E. King and members of Mahavishnu Orchestra. He endorses D'Addario/Planet Waves, Larrivee Guitars, Levy's Leathers, Peavey, Stylus Pick, Finale PrintMusic, Pigtronix, Tech 21, Toontrack, Graph Tech, Seymour Duncan, Waves, Studio Devil and L.R. Baggs. His music is available on iTunes and Amazon. Steve is now offering Skype lessons and can be contacted at info@stevebooke.com. Visit stevebooke.com and Facebook.com/SteveBookeGuitaristComposer.
Below, check out a recently posted demo video of a new product called the Hammer Jammer.
Six-string players can install the device on their electric or acoustic guitars (We've even included the company's official "installation and tweaking" video below) to produce a different-sounding, percussive attack — something, perhaps, in the ballpark of a hammer dulcimer on speed.
The only line of promotional material we have from the company is this: "The Hammer Jammer provides incredibly fast hammering techniques, unique sounds and unusual patterns for six-string guitars."
Be sure to check out the video and let us know what you think. For more information, visit bigwalnutproductions.com.
Marty Friedman has premiered a new song, "Meat Hook," and you can check it out below — along with a commentary video featuring Friedman.
The track is from the former Megadeth guitarist's new album, Inferno, which will be released May 27 through Prosthetic Records. It features vocals and saxophone by Jørgen Munkeby of Norwegian blackjazz group Shining.
Inferno was recorded primarily in Los Angeles with engineer Chris Rakestraw (Danzig, Children of Bodom) and mixed by Jens Bogren (Opeth, Amon Amarth). It features what Friedman recently told Guitar World is "the most intense writing and playing I can do."
The album includes guest appearances by Rodrigo y Gabriela, Children of Bodom's Alexi Laiho, Skyharbor's Keshav Dhar and Revocation's Dave Davidson. Also included is Friedman's first songwriting collaboration with Jason Becker since the pair played together in Cacophony.
Look for Friedman in the new June 2014 issue of Guitar World, which is available now. Also be sure to check out his new Guitar World column, Full Shred.
Takamine invites players to experience the Hardest Working Guitar with the Takamine Test Drive retail promotion.
Those who visit a participating authorized Takamine dealer between May 1 and June 30, 2014 and “test drive” any Takamine acoustic/electric guitar can register to receive a free Takamine-branded leather guitar strap as a gift for trying out a Takamine instrument.
“Takamine guitars are known the world over as the Hardest Working Guitars, played on stages around the world by some of the biggest names in music,” said Dave Gonzalez, product manager for Takamine Guitars.
“This promotion allows players to see, feel and hear the rock-solid performance, exceptional playability and superior sound quality found in every Takamine, and they get a great free strap just for participating.”
For more details and official rules, and to find a participating authorized Takamine dealer near you, visit www.takamine.com/features/test-drive.
Old Crow Medicine Show has announced their upcoming new album Remedy, due out July 1 via ATO Records.
Ten years after the massive success of folk anthem “Wagon Wheel,” which started as a track on a Bob Dylan work tape later finished by fiddler/band leader Ketch Secor, Remedy features a new Dylan/Old Crow penned collaboration on the new track “Sweet Amarillo.”
The album also features the return of producer Ted Hutt (Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, Gaslight Anthem), who produced 2012’s Carry Me Back.
Long before the resurgence of folk and roots rock, Old Crow Medicine Show was performing their fiery style of amped up old-time music, cultivating a fan base who thrive on the band’s energetic performances.
“This is country music for people who think country music needs a whoopin’” says Secor, who adds, “Country music that knows how deep its roots run – from the dirtiest blues to the folkiest folk, the songwriters, the crooners and the Outlaws, to the Opry stage; it's all here.”
Watch the Remedy album teaser:
In support of their upcoming release, the band has announced their biggest headlining tour ever with stops including Red Rocks, The Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (Atlanta), The Philadelphia Folk Festival and London’s The Roundhouse.
Opening acts for the tour include folk duo Shovels & Rope, Hurray For The Riff Raff, and Parker Millsap who will be opening all of the band’s UK dates. For a complete list of tour dates see below.
"Sweet Amarillo," the debut single is available now at all digital retailers, including iTunes and Spotify. The album can pre-ordered at iTunes, Amazon and on the band's website.
Tour Dates:
5/22 Mobile, AL @ Saenger Theatre
5/23 St. Petersburg, FL @ Jannus Live
5/24 Evans, GA @ Banjo-B-Que Music Festival
5/25 St. Augustine, FL @ St. Augustine Amphitheatre
5/29 Ft. Wayne, IN @ Foellinger Theatre
5/30 Rochester Hills, MI @ Meadow Brook Music Festival (supporting The Avett Brothers)
5/31 Saginaw, MI @ FirstMerit Bank Event Park
6/01 Kalamazoo, MI @ Kalamazoo State Theatre
6/28 Owensboro, KY @ ROMP Music Festival
7/01 Nashville, TN on the Grand Ole Opry @ Grand Ole Opry House
7/04 St. Paul, MN on A Prairie Home Companion @ Macalester College
7/05 St. Paul, MN on A Prairie Home Companion @ Macalester College
7/10 Tulsa, OK @ The Brady Theatre
7/11 Dallas, TX @ House of Blues
7/12 Austin, TX @ Nutty Brown Amphitheatre (with Ray Wylie Hubbard and The Wheeler Bros.)
7/14 Amarillo, TX @ Civic Center Auditorium
7/16 Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre (with Carolina Chocolate Drops)
7/17 Kansas City, MO @ Uptown Theater (with Caroline Chocolate Drops) 7/18 St. Louis, MO @ Peabody Opera House (with Hurray for the Riff Raff)
7/19 Cincinnati, OH @ Buckle Up Festival
7/26 Charleston, WV @ Appalachian Power Park
7/29 Shelburne, VT @ The Green at Shelburne Museum
7/31 Toronto, ON CANADA @ Echo Beach (with Matt Andersen/Del Barber)
8/01 Montreal, QC, CANADA @ Osheaga Festival
8/03 Cooperstown, NY @ Ommegang Brewery
8/14 Harrisonburg, VA @ Rockingham County Fair
8/15 Schwenksville, PA @ Philadelphia Folk Festival
8/16 Cockeysville, MD @ Hot August Music Festival
8/17 Richmond, VA @ Maymont Park 8/20 Raleigh, NC @ The Red Hat Amphitheatre (with Shovels & Rope)
8/21 Charlotte, NC @ Uptown Amphitheatre (with Shovels & Rope)
8/22 Alpharetta, GA @ Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (with Shovels & Rope)
8/23 Nashville, TN @ The Woods at Fontanel (with Shovels & Rope)
9/18 Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern Theater
9/20 San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic
9/24 Portland, OR @ The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
9/26 Seattle, WA @ The Paramount Theatre
10/19 Manchester, ENGLAND @ The Ritz
10/20 Dublin, IRELAND @ Vicar Street
10/21 Belfast, NORTHERN IRELAND @ Mandela Hall
10/22 Glasgow, SCOTLAND @ O2 ABC
10/24 London, ENGLAND @ The Roundhouse
10/26 Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS @ Paradiso
This time, a guitarist named Sinisa Cekic plays 45 scales in one solo. Of course, it wasn't done in one sitting (His guitar changes from time to time, and there are some edits), but he definitely manages to sneak in an impressive amount of scales, including Ethiopian Tizita minor, Spanish 8 tone, Super Lydian mode — and 42 others.
Best of all, he provides fretboard diagrams for all the scales.
For the tabs to every note played in this video, head here. Enjoy!
Friday, May 2, 2014, marks the one-year anniversary of the passing of Slayer’s founding member, guitarist Jeff Hanneman, who was 49.
With that in mind, the gang at Loudwire.com have launched their #ScreamForJeff campaign.
The idea — according to the LoudWire crew — is, "On May 2, no matter where you live, no matter what time zone, there will not be one moment that passes where someone isn’t yelling ‘Slayer!’ or hearing someone else yell ‘Slayer!’ — creating a worldwide echo chamber.”
Check out the video below (some of which was filmed at Revolver's 2014 Golden Gods awards) for more information.
Last week, Slayer announced that their new studio album, tentatively set for an early 2015 release, will be released on Nuclear Blast Records through the band’s own label imprint, the name of which has yet to be announced.
Last month, we saw how harmonica legend Little Walter applied his improvisational genius to slow blues. This month, we’ll see what Walter can teach guitar players about up-tempo soloing.
Walter served his musical apprenticeship in Delta roadhouses during the early Forties and intently studied the style and techniques of down-home blues harmonica masters such as John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, but he also took the instrument into new territory by emulating the jazz-tinged phrasing of jump-blues saxophonists.
Jump was an offshoot of big-band swing that featured fast 12-bar boogie-woogie grooves and full horn sections, and saxophonists were the instrumental stars of the day. With his amplified harp backed by only electric guitars and drums, Walter proved that he could swing with the best of the big bands.
But he also created a unique instrumental voice by fusing wind-driven reeds with electric power and grit. A prime example of Walter’s jump style was captured on his best-selling 1955 single “My Babe” (FIGURE 1 adapts similar phrases to the guitar).
Walter compensates for the harp’s relatively limited melodic range by exploiting rhythm, dynamics and its unique tone, particularly the natural overtones that make every note sound bigger than the equivalent picked string. Guitarists need to crank up the distortion and reverb in order to narrow the gap. More challenging to emulate is Walter’s masterful breath control, which he uses to add subtle swing and dynamic variations to every phrase.
We guitarists can approximate some of the same qualities with ghost notes—fretting certain notes (indicated by Xs in the tablature, as in bar 2)—without fully depressing the string. On individual notes, enhancethe effect with hybrid picking (pick-andfingers technique). Pick the ghost note with a downstroke and pluck the following regular note with a bare finger.
For arpeggios (as in bar 6), sweep pick with consecutive upstrokes and quickly mute the fretted notes immediately after you pick them by relaxing your finger pressure against the strings so that they break contact with the fretboard and cease to ring.
Walter also frequently thickens his sound with double-stop trills, as in bar 1, going into bar 2. On guitar, fret the double-stop with your index finger at the 13th fret and hammer-on/pull-off repeatedly with your middle finger.
Attempting to capture the qualities of another instrument can be a slippery task because it challenges guitar-centric assumptions about technique and phrasing. Aspiring to evoke the spirit of Little Walter shows us just how much there is yet to discover right under our own fingers.
Trying to make a seven-string guitar play like a six-string is very tough, especially if you've been a bluesy player your whole life.
The “thumb over the neck” approach doesn't work as well. Also, some seven-strings sound like a middle ground between a guitar and a bass (like the one I used for this example), which makes openly strumming “cowboy chords” a terrible decision.
So while companies are still trying to figure out how to truly understand the construction of seven-string guitars (They're doing a great job so far!), it's best to treat a hybrid instrument like its own unique instrument.
Here's a fun example I came up with while my six-string was in the shop. The chords are D, G, D/F#, E minor. It's always a good time to play around with natural harmonics because of the register and tonal change between a fretted and un-fretted note. It also can lend itself to percussive playing, which really only comes out in the video, not the tab.
The tab in this case is more of an outline than listening/seeing the example played. You often see players like Tommy Emmanuel or Justin King and other solo acoustic guys making more use of harmonics, and I'm not sure why. Possibly because they don't have a band to play with, so they have to get every possible sound out of the instrument. But, electric or acoustic, this is good practice.
The example requires a little bit of a hand stretch, but it's not too extreme, especially if you're tried modern shredding (Rusty Cooley for sure). There are really two tough parts. The first is getting your fingers directly over the frets. Try not to rely on high compression to make them ring out. Getting very accurate is important for all kinds of playing, slow or fast.
The other is the final eighth notes. At faster speeds, retaining the accuracy needed to make the harmonics ring true is very hard (a harmonic melody Steve Vai used a lot). Also this may be tough for inexperienced fingerpickers, as eighth notes at 190 bpm aren't easy. I split the riff into three sections:
Example 1 is the D chord.
Example 2 is the G and D/F# chord
Example 3 is the E minor chord
Here's the video, slow then fast:
I hope you enjoy this challenge! If you have any questions or anything, feel free to reach out to me here or my YouTube channel.
Elliott Klein is a New York City-based guitarist/singer/songwriter who plays in Bright and Loud, Party Lights and many more.
Rob Zombie — who won the Best Live Band award at last week's 2014 Revolver Golden Gods — covered Metallica's "Enter Sandman" during his band's April 29 show at the Myrtle Beach House of Blues.
You can check out a bit of fan-filmed footage the magical moment below (Note: The song begins around the 1:30 mark, so feel free to skip ahead) — and let us know what you think in the comments or on Facebook!
The Black Keys have premiered the music video for "Fever," the first single from their upcoming album, Turn Blue. You can watch it below.
The album will be released May 13 by Nonesuch Records — and the band will celebrate the occasion with a May 10 appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live.
The Black Keys will headline the Hangout Festival in Alabama May 16 before embarking on a European festival tour this summer; more U.S. dates will be announced soon. You can see their current dates below the video.
Turn Blue was recorded at Sunset Sound in L.A. in 2013 with additional recording done at the Key Club in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound in Nashville in 2014. Produced by Danger Mouse, Auerbach and Patrick Carney, Turn Blue features 11 new tunes.
This is the duo's eighth full-length album and the followup to 2011’s El Camino, which made its way onto a few year-end best-of lists here in GW Land. Will the new album do as well? Only time will tell.
THE BLACK KEYS TOUR
May 16-18 Gulf Shores, AL Hangout Music Fest
June 20 Neuhausen Ob Eck, Germany Southside Festival
June 22 Scheessel, Germany Hurricane Festival
June 24 Zagreb, Croatia Inmusic Festival
June 25 Pilton, U.K. Glastonbury
June 27 St. Gallen, Switzerland Open Air St. Gallen (sold out)
June 28 Beuningen, Holland Down The Rabbit Hole
July 2 Gdansk, Poland Open’er Festival
July 4 Pas-de-Calais, France Main Square Festival
July 5 Werchter, Belgium Festivalpark Werchter
July 6 Belfort, France Les Eurockennes
July 8 Rome, Italy Rock In Rome
July 11 Lisboa, Portugal Optimus Alive
July 12 Bilbao, Spain Bilbao – BBK Live
July 15 Nîmes, France Festival de Nîmes
July 17 Les Vieilles Charrues, France Les Vieilles Charrues
July 20 Suffolk, U.K. Latitude Festival
July 22 Nyon, Switzerland Paleo Festival
The Hartford Courant reports that Fender Musical Instruments Corp. will be closing its Ovation plant in New Hartford, Connecticut.
The company, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, is ceasing U.S. production of Ovation as part of its consolidation of U.S. musical instrument manufacturing. Work at the New Hartford plant will end by June. Fender will now make Ovation guitars in China, South Korea and Indonesia.
According to the Courant, the decision ends half a century of guitar-making in Connecticut that began with spare wood initially bought to make helicopter rotors by Charles Kaman, the founder of Kaman Corp., which sold the guitar business to Fender in 2007.
Fender moved production of its Guild and Hamer guitars to New Hartford in 2008. The company stopped production of the Hamer line in New Hartford last year.
"We are committed to providing the same high quality musical instruments our artists, consumers and customers expect and demand, and will continue to support the brands that are currently being produced in New Hartford," Richard McDonald, senior vice president of Fender, said in a statement.
"It's the end of an iconic American brand," Richard Hall, who works at the plant, told The Republican American. "In the 1970s and Eighties, just about every big touring band was playing Ovation."
A young John Petrucci accompanies Dream Theater singer James LaBrie in this tenderly performed acoustic version of “Another Day.”
Yes, the audio is spotty, but it’s worth checking out nonetheless.
Petrucci, one of the founders of Dream Theater, is widely recognized as one of the top metal guitarists of all time. So it’s especially nice to see his stylings on acoustic guitar.
LaBrie joined Dream Theater in 1990 after he beat out several hundred other hopefuls.
Check out the new 2DVD set, Ozzy Osbourne: The Randy Rhoads Years, and learn the guitar styles and techniques Randy Rhoads made famous with Ozzy Osbourne. Each part is played up to speed, then broken down note-by-note in this set, which provides an in-depth analysis of eight songs.
He influenced a generation and changed the course of metal forever. Guitar World presents the complete, untold story of Jeff Hanneman, Slayer’s guitarist for more than 30 years and the man behind such legendary thrash anthems as “Angel of Death,” “South of Heaven” and “War Ensemble.”
CAST
• Tom Araya: Slayer frontman/bassist • Kerry King: Slayer guitarist • Dave Lombardo: Former Slayer drummer • Kathryn Hanneman: Wife of Jeff Hanneman • Gary Holt: Longtime friend of Jeff Hanneman and current Slayer fill-in guitarist
When news broke in the early evening of May 2, 2013, that longtime Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman had succumbed to liver failure at age 49, a shockwave of atomic force rippled its way across the metal community that left many stunned.
As Facebook and Twitter became overrun with postings of shock, grief and recollections from fans who had spent the better part of their lives following Slayer like Rottweiler puppies, you could feel it—this one was different. This one hurt.
To anyone who came of age in the mid Eighties wearing a denim jacket and studded wristband, Slayer was their introduction to aggressive speed metal, with riffs that cut like a buzzsaw blade and dark lyrical themes that often crossed into objectionable territory—and Hanneman was the primary force behind it.
“By all accounts, he was the band,” says Slayer frontman and bassist Tom Araya.
For those who had spent a lifetime in a perpetual state of whiplash from headbanging to such Hanneman-penned Slayer anthems as “Angel of Death,” “South of Heaven,” “Chemical Warfare” and “Raining Blood,” the reason he meant so much to so many was simple: because you could always count on Jeff to be Jeff, in the same way you could always count on Slayer to be Slayer.
He didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. He wrote the lion’s share of the band’s most beloved songs and lived to come out from behind a wall of Marshalls every time the band took the stage, raise his fist triumphantly to the rafters, and destroy. For nearly three decades, Jeff Hanneman was a fixture of that stage—a blonde symbol of young headbangers who fell in love with satanic-infused heavy metal aggression and never looked back well into their adulthood.
“I’m amazed at how many people he touched,” Araya says. “They hardly knew him, but he affected a lot of people. And he didn’t even realize it.”
But for all the love the heavy metal community had for Jeff Hanneman, there was a dark side to the guitarist that confused many of those who came into contact with him. Unlike, say, Dimebag Darrell, Jeff wasn’t everybody’s “bro.” He didn’t pose happily for pictures, glad-hand his way across the NAMM convention floor every January or help needy children. He had no love for the media.
He also had a morbid fascination with Nazi Germany and derived a perverse sense of joy from proudly—and controversially—displaying Nazi iconography on his guitars. And he drank. A lot.
“If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t be hanging with you,” says Araya from his family farmstead in Buffalo, Texas. “He could pick at you and make you feel like crap. But if you tolerated it and stuck it out and showed that you could deal with the bullshit, then that’s how you became friends with him.”
Slayer’s origins date back to 1981 in the South Gate and Huntington Park areas of Los Angeles. King and Hanneman met at a warehouse complex after King had gone there to investigate a band that was holding auditions for a guitar player.
“As I was leaving, I saw Jeff just kinda standing around playing guitar, and he was playing stuff that I was into, like Def Leppard’s ‘Wasted’ and AC/DC and Priest. So I started talking to him and just said, ‘Hey, you want to start a band?’ I already knew Dave [Lombardo, drummer] and we had been playing together in his parents’ garage a bit, and so I brought Jeff in, then went to Tom [Araya, vocalist/bassist], who I was playing with in another band, and said, ‘Hey man, I have a different band if you’re interested.’ And that was it.”
Lombardo remembers the first time he met Hanneman: “Kerry brought him to rehearsal in the garage one day. He had a small Fender Twin and the black Les Paul that’s on the back of Show No Mercy, and he was kinda quiet.
Jeff hadn’t been playing for very long at that point, and everything he did know he basically taught himself. But something about it just felt right from the get-go. It worked.”
This fearsome foursome was now a unit, hell-bent on fusing elements of Iron Maiden, Motörhead, Dead Kennedys and Venom into an aggressive style of thrash metal that would ultimately alter the course of music. They were four youngsters with a shared vision, though Hanneman did stand apart from his cohorts in one respect: he didn’t drive.
So while everyone else was able to get to and from rehearsal via their own wheels, Hanneman—who, depending on whom you ask, either never had a driver’s license or lost it early on after various DUI infractions—needed to be shuttled back and forth whenever the band got together.
“When we started the band, Kerry would pick him up from his house in Long Beach and I would drop him off after rehearsal,” Araya says. “That was the trade-off. So we spent a lot of time in the car together, usually drinking beer. I would drop him off, and sometimes I’d hang with him at his house with his parents.”
It was around this time—April-May 1983 to be exact, nine months before the release of the band’s debut album, Show No Mercy—that Hanneman met a girl named Kathryn. They hooked up as teenagers—he 19, she 15—and stuck together like glue for the remainder of Jeff’s life, up until the day he died. It’s safe to say their fate as a couple was sealed by the bizarre circumstances of their introduction.
“My girlfriend and I were getting tired of going to the movies every weekend, so we decided to go see this band called Slayer at a little club in Buena Park called the Woodstock,” says Kathryn, who is now 46, from her home in southern California. “They were playing with a band called Leatherwolf. I begged my father to let us go to the show, knowing that I would be home later than my 10 o’clock curfew, and he was okay with that. There may have been 15 or 20 people at the show, so I was able to stand up front against the stage, on Jeff’s side. And before I knew it, he kneeled down, grabbed me by the hair, and started making out with me. I was blown away, and that was how we met.”
Had Hanneman attempted this act of onstage molestation with a different girl that night, he may have found himself in the back of a squad car. Instead, he found himself getting messages from the band’s manager that Kathryn—who had reached out to management to share photos she had taken that night—wanted Jeff to call her.
“I asked the manager if he could have Jeff call me, and he told me Jeff was in Vegas visiting his grandmother,” she says. “I thought that was so sweet. About three weeks later, I was at home and my phone rang one night, and I picked it up and the voice on the other end said, ‘Hi, Kathy, this is Jeff from Slayer.’ And my heart started racing. I asked him how his grandmother was, and he said to me, ‘I wasn’t visiting my grandmother. I went to Vegas to break up with my girlfriend.’ And that was what I loved about Jeff—he was honest from the get-go.”
Jeff and Kathryn’s relationship continued to grow as Slayer gained traction within the underground metal community—that is, as long they could figure out a way to travel the 20 or so miles between her home in Buena Park and his in Long Beach.
“Since neither of us drove we either had to rely on Tom to pick me up and drive me to rehearsal to see Jeff or get my mom to drive me to Long Beach to see him,” Kathryn says. “And whenever Jeff could, he would take a bus to come see me. That’s how our relationship started, and eventually we just never separated unless he was on the road. We spent as much time together as we possibly could.
“At first my dad was a little nervous when this guy showed up at our house wearing a leather jacket with black makeup around his eyes, but it didn’t take long before they were all getting along great. My parents loved him. All my girlfriends fell in love with him too. And they were always quick to say so.”
While Kathryn has always taken careful steps to shield herself from the spotlight, she did play a key role in Slayer’s early Eighties reputation as a group parents abhorred when she agreed to pose in an early band promotional photo as a bloodied, lingerie-clad corpse.
“I was around 16 at the time,” she says. “Jeff called me one evening and said they were about to do this photo shoot and that the girl they were going to use broke her toe and had to cancel, so he asked if I would fill in. And that I needed to bring some sort of black lingerie. I told him I had to get permission from my parents but that I’d be happy to do it. And since neither of us had driver’s licenses, Tom came out and picked me up and we went to the garage at Tom’s parents’ house, which is where they would rehearse, and we did the shoot. I was very shy and conservative in those days, but it was the least I could do. I was honored that they chose me.”
Contrary to internet reports of them marrying in 1997, Jeff and Kathryn wed in Las Vegas in 1989 in a simple ceremony consisting of the happy heavy metal couple and the bride’s parents. The decision to marry wasn’t difficult for either Jeff or Kathryn, as they learned over a mid-afternoon breakfast at a local Denny’s a few weeks before heading to Vegas.
“We ordered breakfast and we each ordered a beer, and Jeff was just very quiet,” Kathryn says. “I looked at him and just said, ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking—but whatever you ask me, I’ll say yes to.’ He waited, and then he looked up at me and said, ‘Okay, let’s just fucking do it.’ And I said, ‘Okay, let’s just fucking do what?’ And he said, ‘Let’s just take off and get married.’ I said okay and asked him if he was sure, and he said, ‘Yes, I’m sure. I marry you, I marry you for life.’ ”
Hanneman’s official cause of death was alcohol-related cirrhosis, a result of a lifetime of drinking. “Jeff was always a drinker,” says Lombardo, who left the band (for the third time at least) earlier this year. “He always had a Coors Light tall can in his hand. Always.” “Jeff and I always drank,” King adds. “They called Steven Tyler and Joe Perry the Toxic Twins. We were the Drunk Brothers.” He laughs. “The difference being that I don’t wake up in the morning and need a beer. Jeff didn’t know how not to drink.”
“We partied and we partied hard,” says Exodus founder—and current Slayer touring guitarist—Gary Holt, who became friends with Hanneman in the early Eighties. “I have a million photos of us back in the day, just hanging out and drinking, beers in hand in the middle of the day at load-in.”
For Kathryn, memories of Jeff and her father bonding over martinis in the evening are still vivid. “About a year or so after we met, Jeff moved in with me and my parents, and my dad would always love to come home and have a couple martinis. And he would offer Jeff a drink and they would sit and have their martinis and play video games. So I have known Jeff to drink from the day that I met him. I never really understood it, but drinking was always very much a part of Jeff’s life.”
Hanneman’s reliance on alcohol was obvious to anyone who spent enough time with him. However, he did manage to stay away from hard drugs for most of his life, except for a few years in the mid Eighties when cocaine use became a common activity for Jeff and Tom.
“You start making a little money, and the next thing you know, it’s there,” Araya says. “It’s readily available and people are eager to provide it. After a weekend binge, you find yourself driving down the 405 at six in the morning—I’m driving, Jeff’s feeding my nose, he’s feeding his nose. And you suddenly realize how easily this could have turned bad. I remember stopping, looking all around us—nobody else on the highway—and I looked at Jeff and said, ‘Man, this is fucking crazy. Look at us. We can’t be doing this.’ And we stopped, threw what we had out the window and never touched it again. He stuck with his alcohol and I stuck with my ‘greenery,’ and we went about our existence.
“We had our vices, but we didn’t let them control our lives like you see with a lot of other bands that are just starting out. That was the one thing that I thought was really cool about us—we didn’t let those things destroy us. We had control of ourselves to some extent.”
The extent to which Hanneman had control of his alcohol intake became questionable in the mid Nineties, when it started becoming more apparent to his wife and bandmates that Jeff was no longer just a hard-partying goofball metalhead from L.A. but a serious adult drinker.
“I would express my concern, and he would back off for a few months—but then he would go right back to drinking,” Kathryn says. “A few years before his dad died in 2008, I did notice that Jeff was relying on alcohol to start off his day. But I couldn’t say much at that point, because I just knew we’d wind up in a verbal confrontation about it. And I’m not going to say I didn’t drink with him—I did drink with him, sometimes quite heavily. I figured if I couldn’t beat him, join him. But eventually I realized that I couldn’t go on like that, and that if I stopped I might be able to help him get away from it too. But I couldn’t. He just relied on it too much to get him through the day.”
His bandmates are quick to point out that Hanneman’s drinking rarely became an issue within the group, though it did creep in on occasion.
“The only thing that comes to mind,” says King, “was when we were on the Divine Intervention tour [in 1994/95], when Paul [Bostaph] was with us, and we wanted to play ‘Sex. Murder. Art.’ live. But on that album I pretty much played everything in the studio, so I don’t think Jeff had ever played that song. And he was just too messed up all the time to learn it, so Paul, Tom and I just did it as a three-piece because Jeff would not come onstage and play it. After that, we said, ‘Listen dude, like it or not, you’re a part of this band, and if we decide to play a song, you gotta play that fucking song.’ ”
On the road, particularly in later years, Jeff spent most of his time on the tour bus after gigs by himself, watching the History Channel or reading a book about World War II. “Jeff was super intelligent about history—World War II became his thing,” says King.
Hanneman, whose German-American father fought as an American soldier in World War II and brought home medals from dead Nazi soldiers that he gave to his son, was morbidly fascinated by the Second World War and Nazi Germany, collecting dozens of German soldier action figures and naming his various dogs and cats after Nazi officials and elements of WWII-era Germany. His own wedding ring was a collectable replica of a skull-emblazoned band worn by high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich. While objects connected to this time in history are understandably offensive to many, to Jeff they were just symbols of the same darkness that energizes metal’s imagery.
“Jeff wrote what he wrote,” says Araya. “And people would analyze it and come up with their own conclusions—but to Jeff it was just a song about this or that. There was no deep meaning behind anything. And a lot of the stuff he did, he knew that it would cause a reaction—he knew it would get a response. And if you’re going to make a big stink about it, that’s your problem—that was his attitude about it.”
As the “quiet one” in Slayer, the guitarist never made socializing with fans a top priority.
“He’d stay on the bus for a long time after a show,” Araya says. “And then when the crowds would thin out and all the VIPs were gone—all the wannabes who were hanging out and partying—once they dissipated, he would make his way out and see who was still hanging out. There are people who want to hang out just because it’s cool, but Jeff didn’t want to hang out with those people, so he would wait. If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t hang with you.”
And when it came to sightseeing, “Jeff pretty much only went to war museums, as you can imagine,” King says. “I remember the first time we went to Moscow, maybe around 1998. His whole thing was going to one of the Moscow war museums, so I was like, ‘Hey, that sounds cool,’ so I went with him. And it was just windy and cold as fuck there. But Jeff loved that stuff.”
For Kathryn, who preferred to remain at home when Jeff went on tour, all she could do was count the days until he returned. “It was extremely hard for me,” she says. “The first tour they did was a three-week tour from southern California up to San Francisco, and in those days there were no cell phones or internet, and it was difficult for him to stay in touch with me. And at first I just thought, Oh my god, I’m gonna die. When the band finally started touring Europe, he made sure to send me letters and postcards almost every day, and that was the only thing that kept me going, because I really didn’t know when I would talk to him again.”
As the years wore on, returning home from tour usually meant the rest of the band had seen the last of Hanneman for a while. “He would just go home and detach,” King says. “He might have lived only 45 minutes away, but unless you were part of his inner circle, it was hard to stay in touch with him. And it took me a few years to understand that. For a while I was just like, ‘Why isn’t this guy calling me back?’ But as I got older I just realized that that was who Jeff was.
“I don’t think Jeff and I were ever best friends,” continues King. “I think we were probably the closest in the band, but never best friends. To put it in a way that everyone could understand, Jeff and I were like business partners. Was he my friend? Of course he was my friend. But we didn’t really act like that. The last time I was at Jeff’s house was January 2003. We went to his place to watch the Raiders in the playoffs. And it sounds horrible, but it wasn’t horrible. That was just how it was.”
“When Jeff was home, Jeff liked to be home and stay home,” Kathryn says. “He was over it—over the road, over people, over everything. He just wanted to hibernate for a while, and I always respected that. When he was home he liked to sleep in and just kick back during the day. Sometimes he’d get an idea for a song and run down to his music room and start working on music.
And video games—Jeff was a huge video game buff. It started around 1983 with Intellivision, and after that it was Sega and Nintendo and everything else. If any new system came out, we went out and got it immediately. First-person shooters were his thing. He kept up to date on all of them.
“The TV was always on Seinfeld, Frasier, Cheers, Scrubs. And of course football or hockey. Sometimes all the TVs in the house would be on, and we’d be watching different games in every room.”
Pets, football, Seinfeld, video games, music—yes, home life for Jeff and Kathryn Hanneman was almost surprisingly wholesome, particularly around the holidays.
“Christmas was his absolute favorite holiday,” Kathryn says. “He loved giving gifts, and he would always get me quite a few gifts. He started me on a German nutcracker collection and a bear collection, so he was always buying me new pieces for those. For Jeff, the bigger the tree, the better. Our house has 24-foot-high cathedral ceilings, and I remember one year him coming home with a tree that was 22 feet high! [laughs] And of course I would be the one climbing up and down the ladder decorating it. Jeff liked to just sit back and watch me decorate the tree.”
When it came to playing guitar and writing songs at home, Jeff never had any kind of set structure. He would go long stretches without picking up a guitar when the band wasn’t active, and songwriting was done on the spur of the moment, whenever inspiration struck.
“He would never ever say, ‘I need to go and write a song,’ ” Kathryn says. “It would just hit him out of nowhere. He never planned it or was preoccupied with it. If we were at a restaurant, he would ask me if I had the recorder with me, and I’d pull it out and he’d basically hum the riff or speak the lyric into the recorder. And if we were home in the middle of watching TV, he’d get up and run down to the music room and start laying out the drums. That’s how many of his Slayer songs came about.”
Hanneman established himself as Slayer’s principal songwriter early on. By the late Eighties and early Nineties, he had formed a close working relationship with Araya, who handled lyrics for many of Hanneman’s most iconic songs, including “South of Heaven,” “War Ensemble” and “Seasons in the Abyss.”
“We seemed to connect on ideas and themes,” Araya says. “He would have an idea that was half-written, and I’d read it and work on it and disappear and put thoughts together and then I’d say, ‘What do you think?’ and he’d say, ‘This is great. This is exactly what I was hoping you’d come up with.’ He was very encouraging about me putting my ideas down and the two of us working together. I always liked working with Jeff because he allowed me to do things that came naturally. There was a lot of freedom between the two of us when we wrote music and created songs. I think I’m really going to miss that.
“Of all the songs that we’ve ever written as a band, the two songs that ended up getting Grammys—‘Eyes of the Insane’ and ‘Final Six’—were songs that Jeff and I worked on together. That’s something I’m really proud of and something I always tried to make him proud of. I would say, ‘Look, you wrote two Grammy-winning songs. You can’t get any better than that. That’s a milestone.’ ”
Lombardo, too, had great respect for Hanneman as a songwriter and admired the fact that Jeff would present his songs with a basic drum-machine beat already in place. “So many guitar players can’t program a drum machine or play along with their own songs,” says Lombardo, who is currently performing and writing with his band, Philm. “Doing it the way he did takes a lot more talent because you’re thinking of all the instrumentation in a song rather than relying on other people. He heard everything in his mind before anyone else did.
“The ‘vibey’ quality of Jeff’s songs allowed me to create these crescendos and decrescendos, making the song dynamically louder or bringing it back down with the drums. His songs were never just a constant roar of guitar playing—they were dynamic, and it gave me the opportunity to decorate the songs a little more in a form that made sense.”
While news of Hanneman’s death in May came as a shock to all but his closest friends and family—“Was I surprised by how he died? No,” King says. “Was it a surprise that it was that quick? Yes.”—there were events that occurred in the previous few years that could be viewed as contributing factors in the guitarist’s downward spiral. One was the death of his father in 2008.
“That’s when things really started to go downhill for him,” Kathryn says. “It was probably the hardest thing he ever had to face in his entire life. When I met Jeff he didn’t have all that great of a relationship with his father. But as time went on they became very close. So that took a toll on him. He was never quite the same after that. I just don’t think he cared anymore.”
It was also around this time that Jeff was quietly battling an arthritic condition that had been progressing over many years and was now beginning to worsen to the point of interfering with his playing. “His ability to play was slowly deteriorating,” Araya says, “but he didn’t let anybody know that. We could just tell that things were going wrong. It was becoming hard to get stuff out of him. He was very proud and didn’t want to make anyone worry about anything. Jeff would show up and play, and he didn’t want anyone to know or worry about what else was going on with him. He tried to be really strong and sometimes that can weigh you down.”
“You would notice it in his hands and a little bit in his walk,” Lombardo says. “It seemed like he was struggling with his playing—it wasn’t fluid. You could hear it in the leads. His playing just wasn’t as tight as it could have been.”
According to Kathryn, uric acid buildup from alcohol consumption no doubt contributed to Jeff’s arthritis, but there wasn’t much she could do about either problem that was plaguing the guitarist. “We took him to a specialist and got him diagnosed,” she says. “But as you can imagine, Jeff didn’t want to deal with any medication to help the problem. Jeff wasn’t a pill popper. When I would see him take an Aleve, I would know that he was in extreme pain from the arthritis and the Aleve would help him get through rehearsal or whatever he had to do. He dealt with that for many, many years.
“Doctors wanted him to stay away from three of his favorite things—beer, red meat and peanut butter—but Jeff was going to do this his way, and he would just deal with the pain on his own terms.”
In January 2011, an incident occurred that many would later assume was the cause of his death but wasn’t. Jeff was bitten on his right arm an insect that was carrying a flesh-eating disease called necrotizing fasciitis. Reports circulated that it was a spider that bit Jeff, but that was never confirmed. Whatever bit him, it was enough send the guitarist’s life into a tailspin.
“Jeff had been visiting a friend in the L.A. area,” Kathryn says. “He was in the Jacuzzi one night relaxing, and he had his arm over the side, and he felt something, like a bite or a prick. But of course he didn’t think anything of it. He came home about a week later, and he was pretty well lit when he came through the front door. He wasn’t feeling well, and he just wanted to go upstairs and go to sleep. Before he did he said, ‘Kath, I need to show you something, even though I really don’t want to.’
"And he took off his shirt, and I just freaked out when I saw his arm. It was bright red and three times the normal size. I said, ‘Jeff, we need to go now. We need to get you to the ER.’ But all he wanted to do was go to bed and sleep, and I knew that I was trying to rationalize with a very intoxicated person. So there was nothing I could do that night. But the next morning I convinced him to let me take him in. He didn’t have a lot of strength, but I was able to get him into the car.
“When we got to the hospital in Loma Linda, they took one look at him and they immediate knew what it was, so they took him right in. Jeff told me to go home because we both knew he’d be there for hours and neither of us thought it would be a life-or-death situation. About three or four hours later, Jeff called me and said, ‘Kath, it’s not good. They may have to amputate. I think you need to come back here.’
"When I got there, Jeff was on the stretcher waiting to go into surgery, and the doctor put it in perspective for me. He said, ‘I need you to see your husband. He may not make it.’ The doctor looked at Jeff and told him, ‘First I’m going to try to save your life. Then I’m going to try to save your arm. Then I’m going to try to save your career.’ And looking at Jeff on that stretcher and possibly saying goodbye, knowing that I may never see him again…”—she pauses—“…was one of the hardest moments of my life.”
The next few days for the Hannemans could only be described as nerve-wracking. Jeff was in the ICU in an induced coma after the initial surgery and breathing through a tube, his arm, for the most part, intact. Doctors attempted to remove the breathing tube at one point, but Jeff was unable to breathe on his own. Finally, after about the fourth day, the tube was removed and Jeff was breathing again. Her husband was alive, but as soon as they removed the bandages from Jeff’s arm, Kathryn knew the road to recovery would be long.
“I’ll never forget it—I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she recalls. “All I could do was look up at the doctor and say, ‘How the hell do you fix this?’ And he said, ‘You know, Mrs. Hanneman, you’d be very surprised.’ And at that moment I had all the faith in the world that this doctor could fix his arm.”
Back home soon afterward, Jeff could begin the process of rehabilitating his arm in the hopes of regaining his ability to play guitar. The next few weeks saw more surgeries, staples and multiple grafts using skin from his left thigh. Wound-care suction devices were on hand to draw out the infection and help the skin grafts take. Physically, Jeff’s arm was on the mend. Emotionally, however, he was struggling. Depression was setting in.
“I couldn’t get Jeff to go to rehab or therapy,” Kathryn says. “I think he was letting the visual of his arm get to his emotions, and it was messing with his mind. It was hard to keep him upbeat at that point.
“I think he thought he could do this on his own—that he would just to go rehearsal and play, and that that would be his rehab. But I think he started to learn, once he tried rehearsing, that he wasn’t playing up to his ability and that he wasn’t able to play guitar at the speed he was used to. And I think that really hit him hard, and he started to lose hope.”
The incident with Jeff’s arm couldn’t have come at a worse time for the band. A European tour was booked for March and April 2011, and the legendary Big 4 tour, which saw Slayer sharing a stage with fellow thrash pioneers Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, was on the schedule between April and September. These shows were immensely important for the band, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that Jeff wouldn’t be able to participate.
“For me it was really difficult to make the decision to go on without Jeff,” Araya says. “They started naming names to take his place, and I’m like, How can you guys even think about this? We can’t do this without Jeff. But we had to do something. Slayer, aside from being band members and really tight-knit, we are a business. Those are aspects of what we do that fans have a tough time understanding. So we had to make decisions because we were obligated to do these tours.”
Of all the possible replacements for Hanneman being bandied about, everyone was most comfortable with Exodus mainstay Gary Holt, a longtime friend of the band’s.
“I remember when the tour came up, Jeff said to me, ‘No. No. There’s no way in hell this band is going out without me,’ ” Kathryn says. “He was definitely hurt by the fact that, for the first time ever, the band had to go on without him, but eventually he became okay with it, and a lot of that was because it was his friend Gary that was going to fill in for him. He knew the band had to go on.” “Gary was a friend, he wasn’t an outsider,” Araya says. “We’ve known him for 30 years and he was a good friend of Jeff’s. When we first met Exodus, he and Jeff were inseparable.”
Fans were hopeful that Hanneman was well on his way to a full recovery when the guitarist joined his bandmates onstage for two songs—“Angel of Death” and “South of Heaven”—at the Big 4 show in Indio, California, on April 23, 2011, four months after the bite on his arm. Behind the scenes, however, a different story was emerging.
“He wasn’t at his best that night, but he was able to come out and do those two songs,” Araya says. “It was after that that I think he realized that he could only play for a little bit and then had to stop. He would come in to rehearse and he would jam out some parts and then he’d stop and just kind of fiddle with his guitar. He did that a few times, but then he just stop coming to rehearsal.
“We told him, ‘Listen, we understand that you’re having a tough time playing your guitar, having a tough time coming back 100 percent, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be a part of what we do, which is write songs. You are still Slayer, you are a big part of this band, you can still write music and you can still put ideas together. Sit in the studio and work with us, make us what we are.’ He was a big part of this band. I knew it and realized it a long time ago.”
“We were holding out hope until the day he died,” King says. “If he ever came to us and said, ‘Okay, I can do this,’ there was no question. This was his gig. Now, did I think that would actually happen? No, I didn’t.”
“I think part of him knew that he wasn’t going to be back in the band,” Kathryn adds.
As the realism about his situation began to set in, Jeff was forced to accept the fact that his livelihood was being stripped away, no doubt fueling his alcohol-induced decline over the next year and a half. Factor in Hanneman’s uncommunicative, reclusive nature, and there wasn’t much his bandmates could do but carry on.
“People have to make their own decisions about how they want to live their lives,” Araya says. “You can’t start dictating to people how they should live because it just pushes them away. It doesn’t help anything. It wasn’t easy but it’s not like we were blind to what was going on. We knew. And there were points that we tried to help and encourage him to come back—tell him he could still be a part of what we do, even if it wasn’t full time.
“But I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that he didn’t want to let us down. He didn’t want to disappoint us. He was very prideful and wanted to make sure he could come back at 100 percent. I think when he was having real difficulty over that last year, he just didn’t want us to know about it. He kept saying that he needed more time. And the isolation didn’t help much either. I think that no matter how things would have worked out, the end result would have been the same.”
“It eats you up because you think, Why can’t I fix this guy?” King says. “And it’s not that he didn’t want to be fixed. I mean, he didn’t want to die. But he also couldn’t help himself before it was too late.”
On May 2, 2013, the sudden news took the metal community by storm: Jeff Hanneman had died. Araya recalls his final communications with his longtime friend and bandmate: “I had been texting with him, and he even sent me a song that he had been working on. So it seemed like he was doing okay. But when I got the call that he was back in intensive care, I became concerned. Eventually he stopped responding to my texts. It was like a one-sided conversation.
“I was home with my family when I found out he had died. The phone rang and my wife answered it, and she had this look of dread on her face. She handed me the phone and didn’t say anything, and it was our manager, Rick [Sales], and he told me. I hung up the phone and went to my room and I cried.
“It hit my family hard, because they really liked Jeff, they knew him really well. My mother was really upset, my sisters really loved Jeff, and my brother too—he was Jeff’s tech for a long time. Everyone in my family knew him and loved him a lot.”
Currently, the future of Slayer is uncertain. Upcoming short tours of Europe and South America will go on as planned, but what happens after that is anyone’s guess.
“I plan on continuing,” King says. “I don’t think we should throw in the towel just because Jeff’s not here.”
As for Lombardo, even though his split from the band a few months ago was publicly acrimonious, he says his door is open for any future discussions with his former bandmates. “If they want to talk, I’m here. I don’t want any kind of animosity between us. Life is too short and we’re too old for that shit. I’m ready and willing, so we’ll see what happens.”
Araya, on the other hand, has no idea what the future holds for this band. And it’s a decision he’s currently struggling with.
“After 30 years, it would literally be like starting over,” he says. “To move forward without Jeff just wouldn’t be the same, and I’m not sure the fans would be so accepting of that drastic a change. Especially when you consider how much he contributed to the band musically. And you can have someone sit in for him, but there’s no one on this planet that can do what Jeff did.
We've been waiting a while for this video to be posted to YouTube, and it's finally here.
Below, check out a pro-shot clip of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble — with Jimmie Vaughan — performing "Texas Flood" at a 1989 concert celebrating the inauguration of George H.W. Bush.
The performance is from a new DVD from Shout Factory, A Celebration of Blues and Soul: The 1989 Presidential Inaugural Concert, which will be released May 6.
Vaughan was part of an all-star lineup that also featured Bo Diddley, Dr. John, Sam Moore, Billy Preston, Albert Collins, Percy Sledge, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Joe Louis Walker, Ronnie Wood and SRV's older brother, Jimmie Vaughan.
Video of the show was considered lost for more 20 years before it was rediscovered six years ago.
As if often the case during this period of his brief career, Vaughan is in top form in this video. Dressed in a tux with a wide-brim hat, Vaughan "roars" the lyrics and digs into a blistering solo, parts of which he plays behind his back and at the edge of the stage.
“Texas Flood” is part of 25 minutes of Vaughan songs on the new DVD. You can see the complete track list — and pre-order the DVD — right here.
In the exclusive new video below, all three members of California Breed — vocalist/bassist Glenn Hughes, drummer Jason Bonham and guitarist Andrew Watt — discuss their self-titled debut album, which will be released May 19 via Frontiers Records.
California Breed was produced by Dave Cobb (Jamey Johnson, Rival Sons, Shooter Jennings) — who also appears in the video — and recorded at his Nashville studio. Hughes and Bonham played together for several years in Black Country Communion; Watt — who is 23 — was introduced to Hughes by Julian Lennon in 2013.
This is the second in a series of exclusive clips that will be premiered prior to the album's release. Visit GuitarWorld.com every week for new episodes!
The album will be available as a CD, digital download and a deluxe CD/DVD featuring the bonus song “Solo,” two video clips and a documentary. Fans who pre-order the digital download on iTunes will receive an instant download of “Sweet Tea” and "Midnight Oil" upon ordering.
You can pre-order the album at iTunes and Amazon. The deluxe CD/DVD is available here.
The band will announce U.K., European and U.S. tours in the near future. Stay tuned for updates!
In the new video below, which was created and posted by the crew at DiMarzio pickups, Whitechapel guitarists Alex Wade, Ben Savage and Zach Householder play several songs and give insight into the writing process for their new album, Our Endless War.
The album was released April 29 through Metal Blade Records.
In the video, Wade plays his LTD AW-7 guitar; Savage plays his LTD BS-7 and Householder plays his LTD ZH-7. All three guitars are equipped with DiMarzio pickups.
For more about the pickups — which include the D Activator 7, the LiquiFire 7 and the Crunch Lab 7 — head to dimarzio.com.
In the video below, Guitar World's Paul Riario checks out the new GA-SC64 speaker by Eminence, part of the company's signature series of speakers.
For the demo, the speaker was installing in a cabinet built by amp maker George Alessandro. The guitars — a Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul and a Fender Strat — are played through an EVH 5150III head.
The speaker features a vintage American ceramic magnet tone approved by Alessandro. It is well-balanced from top to bottom with tight, full lows, warm mids and warm but open highs.
For more information on the Eminence GA-SC64 speaker, visit eminence.com.
San Francisco Bay Area thrash veterans Death Angel, who are featured in the May 2014 issue of Guitar World, have posted the official music video for the title track from their new album, The Dream Calls for Blood.
Check it out below — and be sure to tell us what you think in the comments or on Facebook!
The Dream Calls for Blood was recorded at AudioHammer Studios with Jason Suecof. It features cover art by Brent Elliot White.
