As a teen growing up in the 1980s, one way I broadened my musical horizons was reading interviews with musicians. So when I recently learned that Guitar Player editor-in-chief Michael Molenda had dug through the magazines archives to collect Guitar Heroes of the ‘70s, I was eager to interview him. This 262-page collection (published by Backbeat Books, a Hal Leonard imprint) documents a variety of guitar greats that helped form the iconic music of the 1970s. The roots of classic rock were built in this era, and this book documents the evolution of the music from the ground floor view of its creators. In editing the book, Molenda aimed to cover a great deal of ground and includes such guitarists as Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jimmy Page, Bonnie Raitt and Pete Townshend (along with a variety of other famous and respected talents).
How did you go about deciding what interviews to include in this collection? Were there some musicians that had been interviewed multiples times in the 1970s, so you had to choose which of the many would be the best to run?
There were the obvious choices, of course — the players who defined classic '70s rock, such as Beck, Clapton, Page, Santana, Frampton, Townshend, Iommi, and so on. Those were the easy selections for inclusion in the collection. The challenges were determining who to spotlight out of the many players who, as a community, really helped forge one of the glory eras of the guitar, but who are not as much on today's cultural radar. Jose Feliciano, June Millington, Lenny Breau, Roy Buchanan, and Steve Hackett are perhaps good examples here. However, I sincerely feel that every guitarist in the book absolutely affected the '70s guitar culture in an extremely positive way, and, to varying degrees, inspired other generations of players.
As for choosing the best '70s interview to run if multiple interviews were available, I always looked for the most inspirational and educational articles. Back then, not every interview focused explicitly on gear or technique or musical influences. But I felt that, for today's audience, a discussion about how a player got his or her sound, or how they approached writing riffs or constructing solos was the hippest option over more cultural discourses. I mean, I love reading about what promoters were like in the '70s, or how record companies treated their artists, and so on, but Guitar Player's main mission is to help its readers sound better and play better. So that mantra was echoing in my brain every time I evaluated the content for the book.
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