By Paul Freeman [ 2004 Interview]

His fingers funneled lightning onto the frets. Alvin Lee played with soul and imagination, as well as sensational speed.

The guitarist-singer-songwriter was born in Nottingham, England in 1944. In 1960, the teen formed the British blues-rock band Ten Years After. They released 10 albums, earning widespread acclaim. They had a 1971 hit with Lee's more pop-oriented "I'd Love to Change The World." "Hear Me Calling" and "Love Like a Man" were also in-demand tracks.

Touring enhanced their reputation. Like Lee's scorching string work, crowd responses to live shows could be frenzied. He didn't just entertain. He dazzled.

The band's performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival, particularly on the number "I'm Going Home," became legendary. Lee's electrifying riffs influenced generations of guitarists.

Lee went solo in 1973, seeking new musical directions. Over the years, his albums encompassed diverse styles.

We interviewed Lee after the release of his 2004 album "In Tennessee," which teamed him with Elvis Presley's original Sun label bandmates Scotty Moore (guitar) and D.J. Fontana (drums). Lee's last studio album was 2012's "Still on the Road to Freedom." He passed in 2013 in Spain.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
The "In Tennessee" album has an amazing energy to it. Did it surprise you at all, the process of recording with Scotty and D.J.?

ALVIN LEE:
Well, it was a surprise as much as I didn't really know what to expect. I knew I'd get something good out of it. I didn't know what it would be. And it's funny, because I was really nervous. I thought those guys may kind of treat me like a young upstart or something. In fact, they gave me the greatest compliment they could give me -- they treated me like one of the boys.

PCC:
You had met Scotty at a ceremony in London, when they introduced the signature guitar [the ES-295]?

LEE:
That's right, yeah. Actually, I first met Scotty as a fan in 1995. I went over to Nashville and I got his autograph and had my photo taken with him [laughs].

PCC:
Had you called to tell him you'd like to meet him?

LEE:
A friend of mine knew where his studio was and I just went around and introduced myself.

And then at the beginning of '99, George Harrison called and said, "Scotty Moore and D.J. are coming over. Do you want to join in?" And we had a good evening at George's, playing guitars and stuff. And it was after that he invited me to come and play at this Air Studios [Sir George Martin's studio] Scotty Moore guitar presentation, which is when I really tasted what it was all about.

PCC:
So you got to jam on some of the classic rock 'n' roll numbers?

LEE:
That's right, I did. I did an Elvis medley. I did 'Rip It Up.' It's funny, because "Rip It Up" starts with a cymbal beat. I said, "Let's do 'Rip It Up.' You all know that one. I turned to D.J. and he wasn't doing anything, so I did the "ch-ch-ch-ch" [making the cymbal sound]. He said, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I haven't done that tune for about 30 years." [Laughs]. It's just the one I happened to pick.

No, but it was great, though. I did "Mean Woman Blues," "Hound Dog," I think. "Blue Suede Shoes." And I've been a fan of Scotty's since I was 13 years old. And D.J., too. All those early Sun recordings. But it was a just a mind-blower for me to be up there, playing with those guys. I said, "Is there any chance of getting you guys in the studio?" And they said, "Yes, sure, any time."

PCC:
Was that earlier get-together what sparked the idea for doing this album? Or was it an idea you had been toying with for some time?

LEE:
No, that was definitely it. It was actually D.J.'s drums that did it for me. I left London. I was driving out of London and these drum sounds that I'd just been playing with were still in my head. And I thought, "Wow, that's like playing with those old Sun recordings!" I got really excited about that.

So I started writing new songs in that vein that would work with those guys. Because what I didn't want to do is kind of go over there and record lots of old Elvis songs, because that's kind of "Elvis for the Day." And I don't think anybody can fill his blue suede shoes.

PCC:
How difficult was it to write new material that seemed true to that style?

LEE:
Actually it seems easy to me. I kind of lean that way anyway. I was brought up with that kind of music. I don't know if you know, but my dad used to collect old ethnic chain gang songs and blues records and all roots stuff. He had an amazing collection. So I was kind of brought up with that kind of music anyway. I was brought up listening to the music that probably Elvis and Scotty were listening to when they were 12 and 13 years old.

PCC:
So the guitar became a way of life for you early on?

LEE:
Yes, it did. I actually started on the clarinet when I was 12 years old. I took a year's lessons on the clarinet. I listened to Benny Goodman a lot. So when I listened to Benny Goodman, I heard Charlie Christian [the legendary jazz guitarist who played with Goodman's band]. And I had a leaning towards the guitar. I wanted to play more like Charlie Christian than Benny Goodman.

And of course, as soon as the rock 'n' roll came in, then I wanted to sing as well. And you can't sing and play the clarinet [laughs]. So that was a pretty easy decision. And when I first heard Scotty, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, to me, that was like hearing all the old blues I'd been brought up with, but with more energy and also attitude. Because there was that kind of rock 'n' roll rebellion thing going on, wasn't there?

I mean, Elvis was pretty outrageous in the 50s. Stems from that James Dean kind of era. Remember the "Rebel Without a Clue"? [Laughs] And all of that. Rock 'n' roll was a way of life. An attitude. Most of the older generation thought it was terrible. It was typical teenage music, wasn't it?

PCC:
And you actually joined the Elvis fan club to get some photos?

LEE:
That's right. I did -- the English one. The reason was, I saw an advert in a magazine and it had pictures of Elvis. And it had pictures of Scotty, as well, Scotty with his guitar. So I actually went for the pictures of Scotty and his guitar. I wrote to this girl, Jeanne Saword [who co-founded the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain and the Commonwealth]. I didn't actually tell anybody, because I was a bit embarrassed [laughs] about being in the fan club.

PCC:
But it did serve as inspiration?

LEE:
It did, yeah. Those were really keen days. Just to get a picture of a guitar. I mean, I used to go see concerts, because I heard the band had Fender guitars of something. Because in England, there were lots of cheap copies of guitars. There was the Futurama, which looked like a Fender. Sounded like an orange box. And if anybody actually said, "Well, this band's got a real American Fender," you'd travel 50 miles just to go and see the guitar.

PCC:
Did you try to track down a guitar like Scotty's, when you were a kid?

LEE:
That was very difficult. Those [Gibson] Switchmasters, they're kind of hand-carved. They're pretty expensive. In those days, that sort of guitar wasn't really a consideration [laughs]. It wasn't in the budget.

PCC:
So that wasn't something you could land until later in life?

LEE:
That's right, yeah. I finally got a Gibson in about 1962.

PCC:
What is it about Scotty's playing that makes him so unique and that makes him stand out, even after all these years?

LEE:
The fact that he is unique. The fact that no one else plays quite like that. He put solos together which are tunes in their own right. Incredible solos. Just the art of being able to play a guitar solo. Especially when you remember, at my session pretty much, but even more so in the 50s, they would be recording straight to the master.

And Elvis would be in the same room as the bass, drums and guitar and the piano. And all the mics bleed onto each other. It's all taken in one take. You've got the adrenaline of going for the one take. And then, when the solo comes up, that's a pressure situation. You've got to deliver a good solo like that. And if Elvis does a perfect vocal and the guitar's made a mistake, they're going to take Elvis' good vocal every day. So it's a big pressure situation to come up with a unique solo. He just seemed to do it so easily.

PCC:
Is he a laid-back guy?

LEE:
He's a very laid-back guy. It's funny, one of the first things, they were at George's, the reason we got on so well together, was because everybody was being kind of over-cool and respectful. And as soon as I got there, I said, "Hey, Scotty, grab this guitar, show me how to do that on 'That's All Right Mama.' [Laughs] And everybody else was like, "Yeah, yeah!' They were worried that he might not want to. But actually, he was quite happy to do that. And we swapped guitar licks for a couple of hours. And I think that's where we got off together, because we're both mad on guitar. He still is mad on the guitar.

PCC:
Was he very familiar with your work?

LEE:
I don't think so. He'd heard of Ten Years After. But I don't think he knew much about it. In one interview recently, Scotty said, "That Alvin, he plays faster than I can listen." [Laughs] And he said to me one time, we did that tune "Going Home," and he said, "Why would anybody want to play that fast?" I said, "Well, you did, on "Big Hunk of Love." "Oh, well, that was a long time ago." [Laughs] He used to play fast, too.

PCC:
What about D.J.? Hearing him on your own songs, that must have been a treat.

LEE:
Oh, that was fantastic, playing along with him. It's a bit like playing with the maestro. He's so cool. He just listens to a song, makes a few notes, and then he's got it. It's in his head. And he never wavers. He's as solid as a rock. And he's just great to play with. He doesn't waste energy on unnecessary drum fills. He puts in very little, but what he does, he really makes it sound cool. To me, he's the ideal drummer. I just love to play with him.

I mean, actually, I was really nervous. When we started and D.J. counted it in, I thought, "Whoa, I'm playing with D.J., I'd better not screw up." [Laughs] But those guys made me feel very at home, very welcome.

PCC:
It must have been a great atmosphere.

LEE:
It was a great atmosphere. A lot of fun. And of course, it was quite new to them to do extended solos.They're used to one guitar solo, maybe two one-verse guitar solos in a song. And I was doing like 80 guitar solos [laughs]. They were going, "I thought that song was never going to end!" I said, "Well, I'd be happy if it never did end" [laughs]. The beauty of CDs these days... In the old days, with vinyl, you'd have to cut everything down, to get all these songs on the album. And a lot of times, the best bits, which were the jams at the end of the songs, they got left off. But there's no need for that these days.

PCC:
Do you feel that going back to the roots actually can help to move music forward?

LEE:
Yes. I was brought up on early rock 'n' roll music and I had my own take on it. In those days, English bands, we used to play all those rock songs, but we used to play them much more desperately. A lot more energy. Less roll. And when I listen back to those records, in my memory, you kind of tend to think, something like "Whole Lotta Shaking," you think, "Oh, yeah, that's really hard rock 'n' roll and really fast and ravey." And it's not.

"When I listen to it now, it swings like hell. It's got more roll than rock. It's got swing. It's got pace. It's got lots of subtlety, which, when I was a teenager, I hadn't really noticed. Then it was rock 'n' roll and how I heard it was really loud and brash. Little Richard's stuff swings like hell. It's not mad, crazy, bashing rock 'n' roll at all.

So it's a matter of getting back to that and doing it like should have been, properly, in the first place. To me, it's a gap in education, which had to be filled. And the only way to do that was to play with those guys. I could play songs all day in England for a year and i'd never get that sound that those guys can get. For them, it's just natural. They've got the roll. I went back to visit it to find out what it's all about. And it's still there. It moved me. And I loved it. I'm really proud of that album. I'm so glad that I did that.

PCC:
And you can take what you've learned from that experience forward into your future projects?

LEE:
Oh, for sure. I actually made the effort to underplay on this album. I made the effort to leave spaces. I made the effort to get the feeling of not filling everything up, which was my natural way to play, when I was young. And I still play that way. I'm still doing some mad, crazy guitar, as well. I haven't changed my style. But I like visiting these different styles. I think that's how you learn. I always have learned that way.

I did a kind of country-inclined album, my first solo album, called, "On the Road to Freedom" with Mylon Lefevre. And I did an album called "Pump Iron," which was kind of leaning to the funky side. And I've done melodic, tuneful albums. I've done hard rock albums. I like to experiment, to lean to another direction and see where it takes me and where I can take it.

PCC:
You have performed on stage with many other great guitarists. Is that all part of the learning curve? Why are you drawn to events like "Night of the Guitars"?

LEE:
Well, that, Miles Copland phoned me up and said, "I'm organizing this tour with one rhythm section and 10 lead guitarists all traveling on one bus." I said, "You're mad. I'll do it." [Laughs] I thought, "That's got to be wild." It was quite healthy, actually. Everybody was quite well behaved, which surprised everybody else. And we had a good time. Mind you, I only did the English leg of that tour, which was two or three weeks long. It did go on to Europe and I heard that there were scuffles and differences later on. But I was lucky. I didn't see any of that.

PCC:
And you actually have a chance to play with Hendrix.

LEE:
I did, yeah. A couple of times. He got up and jammed at the Scene club in New York, Steve Paul's Scene club. That would have been about 1967, the first or second trip to America. So he came up and said, "Can I jam?" And I offered him a guitar, but he couldn't play a right-handed guitar left-handed. So he took the bass and turned it upside-down and proceeded to jam with the bass. And he ended up doing this amazing solo and we all actually stopped playing, so we could listen to what he was doing on the stage [laughs].

He was amazing. And he liked some of the stuff I did. I was doing a 20-minute version of "I Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes" and I was using octaves a la Wes Montgomery, one of the old jazz players. And he was hip to that music. He said, "Oh, yeah, I like that Wes Montgomery thing. I'm doing something along those lines." And I said, "Well, I beat you to it." Cheeky. I was a cheeky boy back then. He was an amazing character, a larger than life personality. I mean, you didn't think you were talking to Joe Schmo down the road, when you were talking to Hendrix. You knew that was something special.

PCC:
And when you have those sorts of interactions, does it seem to invigorate you? Or is it a competitive kind of thing, trying to top one another?

LEE:
It's both, really. Talking-wise, it's great, with someone like Jimi Hendrix, or anybody who says, "Oh, I like when you do that." And they take interest in your playing. And they comment on it. That's very complimentary. And it gives you a boost.

Playing sometimes, it's strange. Sometimes it does that. But sometimes it makes you kind of go shy. I know first time I played with Scotty, I had that thing. I didn't play any lead licks, because I didn't want to get in his way. You know what I mean? [Laughs] I didn't know what to expect from the man. So I just played rhythm and second line stuff. I kept out of his way and gave him all the solos.

Often happens, when there's a lot of respect, people may tend to back off and underplay. And then you get those terrible occasions where there's three or four lead guitarists on the stage and they're all trying to out-blow each other. And it turns into a cacophony. A racket.

In fact, there's a funny story, actually. George Harrison came round to my house, because we used to live about three miles apart. George came round with Eric Clapton... and Carl Radle [bassist from Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour] was with him. And [laughs] his first comment was "Have you got anything to smoke?" I said, "Oh, George, you only come around here to get free drugs, don't you?" And Eric said, "I didn't realize you two knew each other so well." [Laughs].

But we went into the studio to have a jam. I had been doing rehearsals and the drums and everything were set up. So I played guitar. George played guitar. Eric played guitar. My bass player played guitar. So there were four guitarists, bass and drums. And we did this funniest jam that we called "The Two Many Lead Guitarists Blues." It says, "I've got two many lead guitarists and I just don't know what to do."

It ended up with me shouting, "Everybody -- take it!" And it was a send-up, really, but there was this racket at the end, this biggest cacophony, you've ever heard. Four guitar solos all happening at once. And we were all rolling on the floor, holding our sides. Terrible noise. if you were to hear it on the radio and not know what it was, you'd think, "What on Earth is that? What a terrible racket!"

PCC:
Getting back into the roots on this project with Scotty, do you think rock has truly progressed over the years? Or have we lost something along the way?

LEE:
Well, it's evolved, as all music does. And it evolves in circles, too, I always find. In a way, it's two steps forward, one step back. There's always a need for the retro, to go back to the roots. I mean, there was a big rockabilly craze about 10 years ago with Stray Cats and all of that, which is pretty much 50s rock 'n' roll yet again. Not really changed that much.

I don't know. To me, the roll was drifting out a bit. That's why I wanted to do this album myself. I consider the stuff on that album the real thing. Some people might argue that it wasn't actually recorded in 1956. But it's the closest you can get these days. It sounds like that era. And yet it's all done on new equipment. The only difference is the equipment. We thought about that. Scotty used his old mics. So he uses a 1956 RCA microphone and stuff like that. If you go through those mics and go onto digital equipment, it's still got that basic old sound.

PCC:
What about the decision to include "I'm Going Home"?

LEE:
Well, that wasn't in the original plan. That was Pete Pritchard [the bass player]. He said, "I've always loved that song. I've always wanted to play it. Can we do it?" And I said, "Well, okay. I always do requests." He was just very keen to play it. And I could see why, because he just burned it down to the ground. He had obviously listened to it a lot himself.

And D.J. was great on it, too. It's a song that doesn't have a fixed arrangement. And D.J. and the keyboard player had a bit of trouble at first, so I said, "We'll just jam this one." If I lift my head, we'll stop. And if I keep nodding my head, we'll keep playing. And we got it down real quick. I was worried. D.J.'s in his 70s and that's a pretty heavy number. And he really whacks those drums. He doesn't play lightly. He really thumps them. But he was great. He didn't bat an eyelid and said, "Okay, next."

PCC:
Are you surprised at the way that song has become kind of a fixture in pop culture, because of Woodstock?

LEE:
I often wonder how the situation would have panned out had the Woodstock movie featured a different song, if it had featured "I Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes" or a slow blues or something. I mean, "I'm Going Home" is a great ending number. But it's not so much a song. I sometimes joke, people say to me, "Did you write 'I'm Going Home'"? I say, "Yeah, I wrote all the words myself." It's "I'm goin' home, to see my baby. I'm goin' home, to see my baby." That's about it, really.

It's a jam. But it's a vehicle. That's what's so great about it. It's a vehicle to go off and boogie and play solos and it's a great tempo. And there's rock 'n' roll medleys within it and stuff like that. I mean, I've recorded it like 20 times and it's always been different. And that's what's good about it, I think.

PCC:
The whole Woodstock experience, do you have vivid memories of that?

LEE:
I do, actually. Most people say, "If you remember Woodstock, you weren't there." I remember it well. When we first heard about it, it was just another name on the date sheet. Nobody expected anything. It was just another festival. And I'd done a lot of festivals that year. I did the Atlanta Pop Festival. I did the Texas International Pop Festival. And at the time, I actually thought they were better than Woodstock, because they were better organized. But the day we arrived, they said, "You can't get in by road. We're going to have to take you in by helicopter." It was obvious then, from that minute, that this was going to be a very special date. And it was.

Had we just come in, gone on stage, played and left again, maybe it wouldn't have been so memorable. But the storm happened before we were going to play, so we had to wait about three hours for the stage to dry out. There was all that electricity to be concerned about. I actually wanted to play. I said, "Let's just go out there and play. If we get electrocuted, think how many records we'll sell." [Laughs] But they said we had to wait until it was all dried up.

So I went for a walk out into the audience. I went around the lake. They'd run out of cigarettes backstage. So I said, "I'll go out and I'll score some cigarettes." I was gone for about two hours. I came back with about 20 joints and no cigarettes [laughs]. There were no cigarettes out there, but lots of other stuff. I remember there was a cop car there, the police were guarding the area, making sure nobody went backstage. And these two cops were smoking joints. They said, "Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." [Laughs]

I don't think anybody knew I was in a band or anything, as I walked around. I was just another freak. But there were people offering me food. Anything they had, people were sharing, their food, their drinks... and their girlfriends. It was a wonderful attitude. That whole peace movement was very magical, from '67 onwards. When I was first in Haight-Ashbury, I got into it there. I really believed in it. I really gave it every chance. And Woodstock was kind of the epitome of it.

The trouble is, when the movie came out, it made the peace movement kind of a fashion. It made the peace sign a fashion. And like all fashions, fashions come and go. And I think by the early 70s, to say "I love you" and give the peace sign wasn't cool anymore, which I thought was a bit sad. I often think the peace generation came together for Woodstock and then went they went home again and dissipated... But I hope that sort of idealism will return.