The year’s best guitar music

DON’T LET THE finality of The End fool you. Despite the connotations of the title of Wolfgang Van Halen’s third and latest album as Mammoth, the hard rocker’s thrilling new era has only just begun. Wh

SINCE MAKING ITS debut on October 11, 1975, NBC’s Saturday Night Live has been a pop-culture juggernaut like no other. But before becoming a weekend staple for generations of late-night viewers, creat

AFTER SLASH AND Duff McKagan exited Guns N’ Roses in the mid-Nineties, things went kinda sideways for a bit. The band kept rolling, but it was host to a cavalcade of guitar players, from Buckethead to

SLASH WAS THERE when, in the aftermath of Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction, the band suddenly exploded onto a chaotic arc from Sunset Strip hopefuls to one of the biggest, mos

“MY WIFE HAS enrolled me in a gym, and I have to go lift weights for an hour after this,” chuckles blues guitarist extraordinaire Walter Trout, the 74-year-old survivor of a drug habit and subsequent

The month’s best guitar music – a hand-picked selection of the finest fretwork on wax