HeyJaredBrad Tolinski
Tall tales and the wild history of rock's favorite weapon, told by author and longtime Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
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- Sep 29, 2026
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- Jul 7, 2026
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The Ballad of Led Zeppelin IV, Part 1 (opens the original)
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BY THE AUTUMN OF 1971, executives at Atlantic Records were anxiously waiting for a new Led Zeppelin album. Advance reports suggested the band had made its best work yet, a goddamn epic that would arrive in time for Christmas.Then manager Peter Grant delivered the news. The band’s fourth album would have no title, no group name on the outside sleeve, no record company logo, no catalog number and no musician credits. Atlantic’s seasonal cheer gave way to alarm.This S
Why The Cry of Love Might Be Jimi Hendrix’s Greatest Album (opens the original)
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NOBODY TALKS MUCH about Jimi Hendrix these days. It’s understandable. Although he is still generally acknowledged as rock’s most innovative guitarist, he died on September 18, 1970, which is a very, very long time ago.But the recent anniversary of his death, along with the upcoming October 16 release of Magic Boy: The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live at Berkeley (First Show)—an excellent 1970 concert presented for the first time in its original running order—got me thinking about him again.The loss
All Hail CREEM! Still America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine (opens the original)
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BACK IN 2020, publisher J.J. Kramer and Jaan Uhelszki asked me to help edit a special 50th-anniversary celebration of CREEM. Founded in Detroit in 1969, CREEM was the rude, funny and defiantly irreverent alternative to the increasingly respectable rock press. Billing itself as “America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine,” it approached rock music with a mixture of enthusiasm and healthy skepticism, while providing a home for such remarkable writers as Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Robert Christgau, Richa
Into the Void with Tony Iommi and James Hetfield (opens the original)
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WHEN I BROUGHT Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi and Metallica singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield together for an interview in 1992, they were meeting for the first time. Yet in a musical sense, they were hardly strangers; Hetfield had spent much of his life inhabiting a world Iommi had created.Plenty of rock guitarists have a legitimate claim to being the most influential of all time. Jimi Hendrix transformed the sound and vocabulary of the electric guitar. Chuck Berry established the
Joni Mitchell’s Deep Freeze (opens the original)
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I don’t mind solitude.One thing no one tells you when you decide to become a writer or musician is how many hours you will spend alone, whether you’re practicing scales or searching for the right words to express an idea. You have to find some romance in isolation because, sooner or later, it becomes more than a condition of the work. It becomes part of the work itself.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a
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