 So let's say we do a chord progression that goes from C to F minor. Hi, I'm Elliot Easton. You may know me from my band, The Cars. The lead guitarist with that band, and I'm happy to join you today. I guess the guitar really attracted me from a really young age, like three. It was like early days of television. I'm talking about 1956, and I used to sit there and watch the Mickey Mouse Club show and cowboy movies, and both of those type of shows featured a guy playing a guitar. On the Mickey Mouse Club show, the host Jimmy Dodd had a mouse guitar, it was called, and it was a little Martin acoustic that they put mouse ears and they fixed it up in props to look like a Mickey Mouse face. And so of course I got the plastic ukulele Mickey Mouse guitar, and my parents were amazed because I could pick a melody out of it from a very young age out of this little plastic thing with nylon strings. Right around that same time, this would be 1956, I saw Elvis on TV, I was three years old. Oh my God, and I already loved guitar and the image of a guy playing a guitar looking cool was already something I loved. So when I saw Elvis on television, it was all over. Game was up. I immediately got a glass of water and a comb and brought to my mother and had her comb my hair and like a, you know, duck's ass and pull it down in front and I'm standing in front of the mirror with my Mickey Mouse guitar, I'm checking myself out. And at three, I'm a rocker. I'm like trying to figure it out. What I would say, one of the major things that I took away from studying music at school was to learn what you call the nomenclature and just the language of music, how to express yourself to other musicians. And this helped me greatly in the studio, communicating to other musicians. It gave me the language to express what I'm hearing. It taught me the names for the sounds. It didn't so much influence me stylistically, but it might have influenced the way I see chord changes and the way I'd navigate through it a bit just because it was a jazz school and they emphasized the way to do that. And so even though I went into pop and rock and roll, to a degree applied those same principles. Well, yeah, primarily people might see me as a pop rock guitarist from knowing my work in the cars. But if you listen to it, you'll find that I'm drawing on a lot of different influences. There's country influences. There's blues influences. There's, of course, you know, rock and roll. There's a little bit of jazz influence in just my own sense of melodicism, my own how I hear melody and time, you know? Because a lot of it's just down to your individual nervous system, how you hear it. You play, some drummers play on the beat, some behind it, some forward, and it's just a feel thing. So that's a big part of it too. But in the car solos, you can clearly hear those influences. For instance, like a song like Best Friend's Girl, right? It's got a lick, let me put a little slap back on here. So for instance, in Best Friend's Girl, it's a pop song and this and that, but there's country looks in there. There's like, you know, this is all that. I'm doing all that kind of, or even like at the end of a, like in the solo for Just Where I Needed, you know, it goes a very sort of country, even a little bit of an R&B kind of thing there. I do a lot of bending and I just, I always enjoyed trying to play like pedal steel licks on guitar and certain things. And I try to incorporate that into what I do. For instance, I have fun kind of trying to find ways to get pedal steel licks without a B-bender that a lot of players use. So I'll go like something like bending away from myself. And the thing about that stuff is that takes some practice is to be able to bend all the strings and have them be sweet and in tune. Another thing I like to do with the bending is bend in thirds. And so an example of that, let's say we're in the key of C. And so you can use it to kind of outline your major chord. And add to that, and it's a melodic statement. Then if you move it to a minor chord, say you go... So let's say we do a chord progression that goes from C to F minor. And so the trick is having both strings be in tune. And that takes a little bit of practice to make it sound sweet like that. Or even like pedal steel, those kind of pedal steel kind of moves and stuff like that. So I do bring a lot of that into the car solos and a little bit of chicken picking and stuff like that. And you absorb this stuff and you can use it to make it sound sweet. And that's what I do. And you absorb this stuff and it just comes out in ways you may not expect. You're in the hot seat and you gotta pull something out of your hat and you just draw on your vocabulary of what you've learned. And that's what they call your style. That stuff. Yeah, it's fun. The first thing that comes to my mind of what I look for in a guitar amp is an amp that just doesn't fight me. A guitar that lets me play and that I can feel it under my fingers and feel comfortable. I said that this is the amp that I've been waiting 40 years for. What I meant is very simple is that I'm able to get all the tones that I need from one amplifier. For me, all this gear stuff is about getting into a place where the gear disappears and you can just fly and play music. And when a piece of gear does that for you and you don't have to worry about it and you're not tweaking and constantly adjusting, that piece of gear becomes your friend. So what I look for in an amp is the versatility to do all the things that I'm called on to do, like as a good example in a band of cars. I mean, within one song, I've got to do clean arpeggios, low string twang with tremolo, and then break out like a high gain solo. So I'm really loving this Black Star St. James because it's almost, not almost, it's kind of like having two great amps in one amazingly convenient package that I can lift with one finger. It's like kind of too good to be true, but it's true. So rather than rely on a lot of overdrive and distortion pedals, the pedals sound fantastic and they're amazing. You know, they're great these days, but it's not gonna be the same as taking a good amp and just cranking it. And that's what I love about this because it's like a yin yang thing for me. It's like I'm like a Telly Les Paul guy and I use like deluxe reverbs and marshals or soldanos. So it's like there's like two sides that are equal for me that I call on for tones. And with the St. James, I can get both sides of that in one amp instead of using like a stereo rig or two amps or relying on distortion pedals. A lot of people see that second channel as like a metal channel. And like I've even watched like Nick's video and stuff like that. And people tend to like hear that second channel and start tapping and doing whammy bar and stuff like that. But I don't do that stuff. And so I didn't hear it that way. And I heard it as just like a really rich, throaty. It's a voice. It's a ha, you know, it's a voice. And that's how I sing through my guitar. And I need a box like this to get it out. And this one does it. I can plug this thing in. And if I don't even have any pedals, I could play a show. It's got great reverb, good sounding like plate reverb. And you know, just to get back to where we started, that's my mark of a good amp that I could get myself out of it. I could express what I want to and it doesn't fight me. It makes me sound good. And that does it. Well, I have had the honor of meeting some of my heroes over the years. Johnny Winter was a huge influence on me. I love the man's playing and I love the man. And it was honor to meet him a few years before he passed. Well, I met James Burton, which who's another hero of mine, the Elvisist guitar player and Ricky Nelson and Amy Harris and lots of people. Oh, I used to go, when I lived in New York, I used to go to a club called Fat Tuesdays. Now it's called the Iridium. And every week I'd go see Les Paul. And I actually got invited to go up to Les's house in Mauan, New Jersey. And that was amazing. He plugged me in to the first Ampex multi-track recorder. He had all his gear set up and he let me play through the first sound-on-sound recorder that he created for Ampex. So that was an unforgettable evening. We stayed up to about four in the morning. He told me stories about playing for the Eisenhower White House. And just, you know, it was just one of those dream come true nights. You just can't duplicate that. You know, I've met Keith Richards, which was great. There's lots I would have liked to meet and hoped to as the years go by. But those are a few highlights. The elephant in the room is the fact that Benjamin Orr was gone. And there was nothing no way around that. He was our main lead singer. Always sang backup harmonies with Greg and I and was, you know, one of the spirits of the band and one of the greatest guys you want to know. So going back to make the record with four of us, anybody who's been in a band knows that with the band chemistry, if you change one member, the whole thing changes. And we just did the best we could as far as like the band friendship and chemistry, that was all great. It's like any great friends that you know and love and if you don't see them for a long time, people always say, he get back together. It's like we just saw each other yesterday kind of thing. And it was like that, you know, the old dumb jokes start coming out and the old band stuff. And so that was all fun, but it was a little bit bittersweet to do it without band. Probably the most game-changing event in my career, I would imagine, I'd have to say, getting a record contract and making the first album. Because everything followed from that. All the good things that happened to us followed from that. And we didn't know that it was going to be a hit. You never know. We made the record in London at George Martin's studio, Air Studios, on Oxford Street in London. Paul McCartney's recording next door and George Martin would come in and listen to us. We were playing something back and he would get up to go out and he goes, George Martin, this is. The Beatles produced, he goes, it's not bad actually. And we were bummed. We were like, oh man, really, it's just not bad. And when he left, the assistant engineer who was staffed and he goes, no, no, you don't understand. That's the best compliment he ever gives anything. He loved it if he said that's not bad actually. And then he loved it so we're like, oh, that's good. But it was a crazy thing. We made the record 12 days to record that record, nine days to mix, 21 days in and out and people are still listening to it. So I call that a blessing and I call that a game changer. Well, that's it everybody. Thank you very much for sharing a few minutes with me. Thank you to the people at Black Star for the time and also for building these fabulous amplifiers that I'm really loving. And see you next time. Be safe.