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Founding member of Mott The Hoople and Bad Company, Mick Ralphs, has passed away at the age of 81.

The Hereford hard rocker had been bed-bound for almost a decade as a result of a stroke suffered back in 2016. It happened after his final-ever performance, a blowout Bad Company gig on 29 October at London’s O2 Arena.

“Our Mick has passed, my heart just hit the ground,” Ralphs’ former Bad Company bandmate, Paul Rodgers, shares in a statement. “He has left us with exceptional songs and memories. He was my friend, my songwriting partner, an amazing and versatile guitarist who had the greatest sense of humour.”

• READ MORE: “When you get to our age, things just go wrong. We’ll probably keel over after two songs!”: Ozzy Osbourne on Black Sabbath’s final show

“Our last conversation a few days ago we shared a laugh – but it won’t be our last,” he continues. “There are many memories of Mick that will create laughter. Condolences to everyone who loved him especially his one true love, [Ralphs’ wife] Susie. I will see you in heaven.”

Fellow Bad Company drummer, Simon Kirke, has also issued a statement: “He was a dear friend, a wonderful songwriter and an exceptional guitarist. We will miss him deeply.”

Ralphs’ impact on English rock music can be traced back to the ‘60s. After performing with a slew of acts through his teen years, he would eventually form Silence – a band that would later adopt the name Mott the Hoople after singer Ian Hunter joined the ranks in 1969.

Despite Ralphs embracing the newer injection of glam rock, there was a clear rift between himself and the new frontman. Eventually, he would part ways with the band in 1973 – a decision that would allow him to form Bad Company with drummer Simon Kirke and bassist Boz Burrell the following year.

“I used to always feel a part of Mott, but things have changed a lot since the old days,” Ralphs told Rolling Stone around his 1973 departure. “Ian has sort of taken the initiative now, which is great for the band as a whole but not very good for me as an individual. I should be singing and writing more than I am, but rather than fight with Ian all down the line, I thought it best that I just leave.”

Earlier this year, Ralphs contacted Billboard to acknowledge Bad Company’s planned induction to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame this November. “I am elated and think that Bad Company’s induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is fantastic!” he said.

Mick Ralphs leaves plenty of marvellous rock tunes in his wake, from Mott The Hoople’s Rock And Roll Queen to their David Bowie-produced 1972 record, All The Young Dudes. The entirety of Bad Company’s Billboard chart-topping 1974 debut, Can’t Get Enough, is also full of top tier rock anthems.

The post “Our Mick has passed, my heart just hit the ground”: Bad Company and Mott The Hoople’s Mick Ralphs has passed away appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

While Guns N’ Roses have calmed down a bit nowadays, they had a reputation for debauchery in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. And manager Alan Niven has seen it all.

In his new book Sound N’ Fury, Niven charts some of the craziest stories from the rock juggernauts’ heyday, including the time Slash and Izzy Stradlin avoiding getting busted by airport security by taking their entire drug stash in one go. “That’s a fuckin’ waste of good smack,” Stradlin is quoted as saying.

• READ MORE: “It was so hot in Saudi Arabia that the wax in my pickups melted!”: Guns N’ Roses guitarist proves guitars and desert heat don’t match

Now, in a new interview with the LA Times, Niven recalls landing the GNR gig, and remembers his rather eventful first meeting with the band.

“Why was I managing Guns N’ Roses? Because nobody else would do it,” he asserts, adding that the firm previously managing the band “could not get away fast enough”.

“No one else would deal with them,” Niven goes on. “Literally, I was not bottom of the barrel, darling – I was underneath the barrel. It was desperation.”

Niven remembers his first meeting with the rockers, and what he now believes was a test by Slash to see if he could hack the job.

He explains how as he entered the house where the meeting was taking place, he walked past a broken toilet and “one of the better-known strippers from [the] Sunset Strip”, before encountering Slash and Stradlin. As the story supposedly goes, after the meeting began, Slash fed a “little white bunny rabbit” to his pet python.

“And I’m sitting there going, ‘Keep your cool. This may be a test. Just go with it and get through it.’ But that was my first GNR meeting,” he concludes.

The members of Guns N’ Roses have left that level of mayhem in the past, and nowadays Slash prefers to spend his time watching YouTube guitar tutorials, apparently – at least according to YouTube instructor Marty Schwartz.

“He said he had some of my instructional stuff saved on his computer and there were some really cool blues-style techniques that he learned from some of my stuff,” Schwartz said. “He was so nice and complimentary… That was one of [those] moments in my life where everything felt validated.”

Alan Niven’s new book Sound N’ Fury is out now.

The post “Keep your cool. This may be a test”: Guns N’ Roses manager claims Slash fed a “little white bunny rabbit” to his pet python during their first meeting appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

As acts like Sleep Token steadily grow in popularity – finding success by flavouring metal with a slew of external genre influences and experimental sounds – it’s clear many modern heavy bands no longer fit the classic rock mould. But Kenny Leckremo, frontman of Swedish unit H.E.A.T, believes there’s a charm to classic rock ‘n’ roll that the modern genre lacks.

Speaking to Classic Rock, Leckremo explains how, while he doesn’t disapprove of up-and-coming bands toying with genre, he believes old school rock should still have a place on the radio. “What matters is that we get the message to younger generations who don’t even know what rock ‘n’ roll music is,” he insists.

• READ MORE: Learn how Martin guitars are shaped by the iconic musicians who play them in the 2025 Martin Journal

“I’ll go to the gym and put some music on, and someone will come up to me and say: ‘What the hell is this?’” he explains. “And I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? It’s Survivor! How do you not know this?!’”

Asked whether rock bands have become too apologetic and lost their ability to write strong songs, Leckremo replies: “It’s not just in rock, it’s in every genre. I guess people associate it with a ‘retro’ style of music.”

But he says H.E.A.T have no shame in sticking to the tried and tested rock blueprint. “We’re not going to do some sort of hip-hop or EDM song for the sake of pushing boundaries,” he jokes. “All the old-school bands we looked up to knew exactly who they were.” He adds: “In H.E.A.T we’re not ‘apologetic’ or ‘retro’. We love that kind of music.”

Leckremo is of the opinion that “rock is definitely a little bit underground at this moment”. “It’s definitely not the centre of attention,” he says. “You’re always going to have AC/DC and Iron Maiden and Springsteen, but regular rock bands aren’t gonna have the same space in the media as your Taylor Swifts.”

However, there are bands waiting in the wings for their time to shine. “It’s exciting right now,” he adds. “There are a lot of great fucking bands just waiting to reach that big audience. And there is a big audience for rock music, it’s just about reaching through the noise.”

And, as Leckremo notes, “the more noise we can make as a community, the better.”

On the same note, Ozzy Osbourne recently discussed how he feels the mainstream is ignoring the massive popularity of metal music. The singer – who is set to perform alongside his original Black Sabbath bandmates at their final show, Back to the Beginning, next month – said: “As far as the media goes, heavy music isn’t popular.”

The post “People associate it with a ‘retro’ style of music”: H.E.A.T frontman on the state of the rock genre appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

In some ways, it’s hard to know whether to categorize the Martin D Jr E StreetLegend as a backpack or travel guitar. After all, Martin still maintains the LX Little Martin line, which is marketed in very specific terms as a travel instrument. And the D Jr E’s size, which isn’t a whole lot smaller than my Martin 00-15, stretches the boundaries of that classification. But Martin definitely leans into the go-anywhere appeal of the D Jr E and its brethren in the new revamped Junior Series. If the soft case fits, wear it. Assuming it lives, at least partly, in that category, it is among the best sounding travel guitars I’ve ever played. Thanks to the all-solid spruce and sapele body construction, it possesses a warm, woody, and organic voice that is likely made richer by the new, longer 24.9" scale.

Stretching Travel Boundaries

Even apart from backpack-guitar-or-not classification questions, it must be a little tricky marketing the D Jr E StreetLegend. With its distressed finish, the StreetLegend version costs just less than 900 bucks, which, in inflationary times, might be a threshold that budget-conscious, small-guitar customers might be hard-pressed to cross. But if you broaden your expectations of what the D Jr E StreetLegend can be, the price looks less formidable, because it can definitely be a front-line, everyday instrument.

If you’ve spent any considerable time with Martins, the D Jr will feel familiar, and though its shrunken dreadnought body profile can be oddly disorienting, the longer, 24.9" scale (the previous Junior series guitars featured a 24" scale) is the same as full-sized Martin mainstays like the 000 and 00. At 1 3/4", the nut width matches the wider spec for the Martin OM, which lends the D Jr E fretboard a spacious, accommodating feel. I’d wager that more than a few players would identify the D Jr E as an instrument from Martin’s full-sized lines. Body aside, it just doesn’t feel small.

Like many guitars built in Martin’s Mexico factory, the D Jr E StreetLegend’s build quality is excellent. And though it doesn’t benefit from the nano-level attention to detail of an upmarket Nazareth-built guitar, you won’t see a trace of the hastily sanded bracing or sloppy fret dressing that mark many accessibly priced instruments. The rounded and beveled fretboard edges, which also highlight the very nice fretwork, give the D Jr E a comfortable, broken-in, and inviting feel. Our review guitar’s action was on the high side (though well within the bounds of acceptable), and though Martin didn’t include a hex wrench for adjusting the neck relief, there is room for adjustment there, as well as a break angle at the bridge that will permit shaving a few millimeters off if you want to adjust the action from that end of the string’s length.

“You won’t see a trace of the hastily sanded bracing or sloppy fret dressing that marks many accessibly priced instruments.”

It’s important to know that the D Jr E StreetLegend is not the only junior dreadnought in the line. And if you want to save 200 bucks you can opt for the natural finish D Jr E. That’s a good thing in more ways than one, because the distressed finish on the StreetLegend version is bound to be polarizing. Though the “wear” is patterned after instruments in Martin’s own museum, and identical to the pattern on the $2,500 D-18 StreetLegend, the effect is created on the D Jr E by dyeing the top and the almost uniform flatness in the distressed zone makes the faux finish damage less than convincing.

Boisterously Voiced

The D Jr E, like many small-body flattops, is strong in the midrange, which can generate brashness under really hard strumming, and if you use that technique exclusively, the bass can be a bit too boxy to offset the bright presence of the mids. If you suspect you have a heavy hand, it will pay to check how the guitar responds to your approach. A lighter touch definitely brings out the best in the D Jr E, and though there’s not much dynamic range in terms of headroom, it sounds awake and responsive to picking nuance.

The Martin E1 electronics and built-in tuner go a long way toward enhancing the utility of the D Jr E. The presence of any reasonably effective pickup and preamp would make the D Jr E very appealing to a gigging guitarist on the move. But the E-1 system is remarkably natural sounding for an affordable acoustic pickup and it can do a lot to round off sharp edges in the guitar’s treble spectrum when amplified and playing loud.

The Verdict

Though the effectiveness and appeal of the distressed StreetLegend finish will be a very personal matter, there is no denying the D Jr E’s strengths—most notably a great neck, solid woods, and responsiveness to a light touch. The extra 200 bucks you’ll pay for the StreetLegend finish makes the D Jr E seem more expensive than it should be, so it’s important to point out again that the more traditional natural finish model, at $699, will be much kinder to thy wallet and is priced more in line with comparable guitars in the liminal market space between travel, backpack, and merely small guitars. Given that, you should consider the value and design scores here on a sliding scale. But any small flattop that features all-solid-wood body construction, an OM’s wider nut width, a full scale, and fits in an overhead bin merits attention. Martin has, indeed, carved out a very interesting niche here.

Guitars represent a rich musical legacy and hold a special place in our hearts. The new Marcus King ES-345 is a beautiful example of that tradition—a recreation inspired by his main guitar, “Big Red,” the 1962 ES-345 handed down from his grandfather to his father and finally to him.

This modern version captures the look and soul of the original, with only the features that Marcus finds essential, including mono wiring, a pair of Custombucker humbucking pickups, a fixed Vibrola tailpiece for improved tuning stability, and a stud anchor cover customized specifically for Marcus. All the hallmark features of the ES-345 are still here, just refined through the lens of a legacy that spans generations and stages around the world.

Gibson Marcus King ES-345 Semi-hollowbody Electric Guitar - Sixties Cherry