The NYC session great recalls his time with Run-DMC, Blondie, David Lee Roth and Robert Palmer. He also sets the record straight about exactly who played the “Addicted to Love” guitar solo (Hint: It was Eddie Martinez!)
By Joe Bosso
THERE’S A TIME when the phone’s ringing and burning up, then there comes a time when the phone doesn’t ring as much. That’s just reality,” Eddie Martinez says. “I think every guitarist experiences that in one way or another, especially when you’re in the studio session scene. You have your period when you’re hot, and then the time comes when you’re not. It is what it is.” For the better part of the 1980s, nobody was hotter than Martinez. Thanks to his arena-quaking rhythms and paint-peeling solos on Run-DMC’s groundbreaking single “Rock Box,” the guitarist’s prodigious skills — everything from walloping crunch to buttery-smooth grooves to whacked-out, explosive leads — was sought out by the likes of Robert Palmer, David Lee Roth, Steve Winwood, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger and a host of other music legends.
“It was an exciting time,” says the Queens, New York-born guitarist who began his career in the mid-Seventies playing with the funk-rock band Labelle. “It was the culmination of a lot of years when I played with people like Nona Hendryx, George Duke and Stanley Clarke. A lot of situations didn’t call for frontal guitar, but other opportunities emerged that called for me to crank it up. I was kind of bubbling under the surface for a while, and then it all kind of exploded. It was like a sequence of events that just blew my mind.”
Martinez laughs at the serendipity of it all, especially since he admits that he never had a career path mapped out. “In my early days, I just wanted to work,” he says. “It’s funny — back then, the West Coast guys were attracted to the East Coast studio scene, and guys on the East Coast were enamored with L.A. I was listening to what Steve Lukather and Michael Landau were doing. Larry Carlton and all the other guys were tearing it up in L.A. I was blown away when I read how they had cartage — their gear would be driven out to the studio. They had their choice of amplifiers and trunks full of guitars. And here I was, on the D train with a gig bag and my Boss pedal. I didn’t have all the toys like those guys.”
As the hit records piled up in the Eighties, his toy box grew. “When I started getting busy,
