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Revisit our 2008 interview with the fleet-fingered Ten Years After guitarist.
This is a 2008 interview with former Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee.
“This is a little thing called 'I'm Going Home,’” says Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee in the 1970 documentary Woodstock. It’s almost a whisper, as if the guitarist is just awaking from the deepest of dreams. But then, a blitzkrieg of viciously fast, caterwauling guitar spews forth, and the energy is so intense that it seems to levitate all 400,000 hippies sprawled across Max Yasgur’s farmland a few feet into boogie heaven.
“I was a young guy with young energy, and that’s just the way I played,” says Lee from his current home in sunny Spain. “But, to be honest, I also was trying to make a name for myself, so maybe I was a bit too flashy. Playing fast helped me get noticed, but I didn’t believe the hype about it all. I was always aware that Django Reinhardt, John McLaughlin, and others were much faster than I was. But those jazz guys play so smooth that their runs don’t appear to be fast, so I decided to use my fast licks like a machine gun with the effect of devastation—if you know what I mean [laughs]. I kind of enjoyed that, and it seemed to get the audiences up.”
The Alvin Lee of 2008 may be a bit less frenetic— “As my taste matured, I realized that the notes you don’t play are as important as the ones you do”—but he’s a long way from slowly navigating his walker down to the local pub. He still gigs regularly, and his latest release, Saguitar, was recorded in his home studio with Lee playing almost all of the instruments.
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