“It has to be more about the music than about myself.” Jimmy “Scratch” James is explaining his approach to guitar from his home in Seattle. It’s one of several conversations we have over a few weeks, on FaceTime and by phone. “I play the guitar like a drum,” he adds, “and even though he was a bass player, not a guitar player, I think about [legendary Motown bassist] James Jamerson a lot.” “Nobody ever forced older music on me,” he continues. “But that old music—James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Sly Stone—it’s like being at your grandma’s table, and she serves you food that sticks to your ribs. You can go to a drive-through, and that food may look good, but it’s not gonna stick to your ribs the way your grandmother’s food is gonna do. That’s what it’s like listening to those old records.” It’s been almost a quarter century since the retro-soul movement took root, with record labels like Daptone, Colemine, and Big Crown bringing artists like Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, and Lee Fields to listeners’ ears; sounds first pioneered more than 60 years ago in places like Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Detroit. But Jimmy James is a modern-day part of that revival. Soul and funk place a strong emphasis on the ensemble rather than the individual, so it’s rare for a guitar player to stand out within those genres. But two instrumental bands out of Seattle, True Loves and Parlor Greens, have provided breakout space for James, who may be the retro-soul scene’s first guitar hero. Indeed, the nickname “Scratch” is a reference to rhythm guitar players of the past who brought a percussive beat to their fretwork—musicians like Nile Rodgers of Chic and, before him, Jimmy Nolen of James Brown’s band. “I gave myself that nickname as an homage to them,” James explains, “But people just call me Jimmy.” The difference between Parlor Greens and True Loves, Jimmy explains during a call on a rare day off from gigging, “is like the difference between Motown and Stax.” I’ve asked him why he needs two full-time bands. “In the True Loves, we have a horn section, so it’s more groovy that way, like a pop thing. Parlor Greens is an organ trio, and since there are only three of us, I naturally have more sonic space there. I’ve been with True Loves longer, but I love the two bands equally.” James, now 45, is a double threat on guitar. He’s a rhythm player who “scratches” deep in the pocket of the groove but who’s also able to explode into psychedelic lead-guitar thunder reminiscent of his fellow Seattleite, Jimi Hendrix, who was a big influence on him.“The thing I love about Hendrix,” James tells me, “and also jazz guys like John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker, is they took risks. I remember Hendrix once, in 1969, went on The Dick Cavett Show and said, ‘The reason I make mistakes is because I’m trying new things.’ I respected him, and he represented freedom to me. They all tried new things. But Hendrix was always expanding. Every time I heard him, I felt like I was going into another dimension, another galaxy.”“That old music, it’s like being at your grandma’s table, and she serves you food that sticks to your ribs.”It was during middle school that James’ late older sister first played “Purple Haze” for him. “Let me tell you, that scared me—I never heard anything like it,” James remembers. “I thought it was heavy metal at the time, because my sister was listening to a lot of Metallica then. So I thought Hendrix was current at that time. Of course, I later found out.”A native of the Holly Park section of South Seattle, James has no spouse or children. He lives to play, and he walks the earth with four ghosts looking over his shoulder. “My family is all gone—my grandmother, my mother, and my two sisters,” he explains. “They were Leola, Marie, Regina, and Chelsea. They were all musicians, and they all had a profound impact on me. My grandmother was a singer and a championship jitterbugger. My mother was a vocalist, and she sang in a local group called the Champelles. This was the mid ’60s. They opened up for Johnnie Taylor, Solomon Burke, and the Sweet Inspirations. That group had Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy, in it. My oldest sister, Regina, she was a pianist and flutist. The younger of my sisters, Chelsea, was a drummer, and she played in a band in Seattle in the ’90s called Tribal Therapy. Chelsea used to say to me, ‘Pocket and tempo are everything. Stay out of the way and play the part that fits the song.’“They’re all gone now,” James says wistfully. “Everything I do is still for them, and it always will be. I started out as a drummer, around the sixth grade, because that’s what my sister played. But then I heard Motown guitar lines like ‘My Girl,’ which was played by Robert White. And I heard Eddie Willis playing the guitar line on ‘I Second That Emotion,’ and I loved that. My mom helped me move the drums that I had over to a friend’s house so we could play. He was playing guitar, but we swapped instruments, and as soon as I started playing some open notes, fooling around on the guitar, I realized that that’s what I was into.” James’ mother bought him an acoustic guitar in those early days. “I started picking things up off of records, Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker,” he recalls. “But I also liked folk music. And I liked soul. The first rhythm and blues thing I learned how to play was ‘Mustang Sally.’ Then, in high school, I was in the band, and most high school bands play jazz, but we were more into Kool & the Gang and James Brown. And I couldn’t read music. The horns could read music, but we just had to pick it up and figure out which notes went together.Jimmy “Scratch” James’ Gear List Guitars:1964 Silvertone 14541995 Squier Stratocaster 2019 Fender Custom Shop Tele 2022 Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster Fender ’62 Jazzmaster Reissue 1980 Guild X-170 Archtop 1960s Harmony Rocket Amps:Fender Hot Rod DeluxePeavey Delta Blues Templo Devices Nomad 50 Watt Battery Amp Strings, Picks, & Cables:D’Addario flatwound stringsErnie Ball roundwound strings“Super heavy” picksLava cables“I remember one time I got a bad grade, and my mother took my guitar away. Man, I whimpered, and I cried, and later she told me, ‘That’s when I knew how badly you wanted to play, you never moped like that over anything else.’ I just could not think of anything else; I just wanted to play guitar. I felt safe in the music, I just knew I wanted to play.” On the road today, James totes two main axes. One is a 1964 red Silvertone that he picked up about 16 years ago at Georgetown Music in Seattle. It has a stock single-coil gold-foil pickup in the neck position, but the bridge pickup is an old Epiphone humbucker that was installed when Seattle luthier Chris Lomba was rehabbing the guitar. “We bought that instrument from some guy, really for parts,” Lomba recalls on the phone. At the time, Lomba was the resident luthier and guitar tech at Georgetown, where James was a frequent customer. “I remember pulling things out of the scrap pile and just putting it together for Jimmy. And we put in new frets and a new bridge,” Lomba remembers. “The Epiphone pickup in the bridge position was just something we had lying around, like a spare. The amazing thing about that Silvertone is really how much he loves it. Jimmy believes in that guitar 100 percent, and he’s always concerned about its well being.” “I don’t really mess around with pedals, because I like the sound of the guitar just how it is.” James’ other go-to axe is a 1995 Mexico-built Squier Stratocaster that his mother purchased for him. Resources in the family were stretched thin, and his mom worked overtime six days a week to make sure her son got the instrument. “She didn’t need to do that; it was hard for us financially. But we went to a place called American Music so that I could get some fresh strings for another guitar, and I was eyeing that Stratocaster in the store and trying to play it cool; I didn’t want her to notice how much I was looking at it,” James recalls. “Finally, she said to me, ‘You really want that guitar, don’t you? Go ahead and put it up on the counter, you never ask me for nothing. I’ll figure it out.’ I miss my mother; she’s been gone for four years now. I named that Stratocaster ‘Bessie’ for my favorite blues singer, Bessie Smith.” I ask James how he’s processed so much loss in his life, and he tells me, “I just play through it. I wish they were here. I wish they could see what I’ve done and where I’ve gone around the world to play my guitar. We were all close through music. And playing music is the closest I’ll be to them.” Watching Jimmy James play through it is to experience an artist conjure his apparitions; it’s a guitar seance onstage. His solos flow as though he’s lighting candles to illuminate a spectral pathway back to the here and now for his lost family. When Jimmy James opens that door, his facial expression becomes otherworldly—his jaw drops agape, silently mouthing the notes ringing through his pickups as he frets them. His wailing, full-step bends soar towards the heavens. He’s playing for his ghosts. James is precise and articulate, tending to pick each note, avoiding hammer-ons and pull-offs unless the solo cries out for it. His tone is clean and stompbox-free; his guitar cable runs straight to his amp. When he is ready to open this ethereal portal in a solo, he strides over to the amplifier and quickly flips an overdrive switch. It’s all the crunch he needs. “I don’t really mess around with pedals,” James explains. “Sometimes, if it’s a very powerful amp and there’s too much headroom for it to break up, I’ll put something in front of it. But very rarely, because I like the sound of the guitar just how it is.” Parlor Greens recently dropped a new record, Emeralds. The last track, “Queen of My Heart,” is James' homage to his late mother. The recording contains the last words she ever spoke to him, in a video selfie sent to his phone shortly before she passed. His guitar leads cry out in an emotional letting-go, a projection of the hurt in Jimmy James’ soul. “James Jamerson once told his son, ‘If you don’t feel it, don’t play it,’” James relates to me. “That’s how I approach it. Oscar Wilde said something, too: ‘You can only be yourself, because everyone else is taken.’ That’s what it is. If you take Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and hand it to B.B. King, and you take B.B.’s guitar and put it on Jimi Hendrix, they are still gonna sound like themselves. And my mother instilled that in me. She’d tell me, ‘Have a sound! When you hear a Motown track, you know it’s Motown before the words even hit.’” I comment to Jimmy that, for a 45-year-old man, a guy who grew up in Seattle during the peak of grunge, his spirit feels pretty old. He explains that listening to that classic music from the ’60s and ’70s is what shaped him. “When I was young, I would hear things like Johnnie Taylor’s ‘Who’s Makin’ Love,’ or ‘California Dreamin’’ by the Mamas & the Papas,” James reminisces. “Musically and lyrically, all that stuff spoke to me. My friends didn’t get it. They’d say, ‘Why are you listening to that grandparents' music?’ But I loved the lyrics and how there was a story to be told. And when you think about the blues, it’s the foundation. So it all felt grounded to me; that older stuff has a deep conviction to it. You can listen to it and know that they worked very hard, and it came from deep within. “Sometimes I do feel like I was born at the wrong time. But after my mother passed, I had a dream. I came to her, and I said, ‘Mom, what’s the point of my living? Why can’t I be with you all? We could be a family again. And in this dream, she said to me, ‘Don’t be anxious for nothing, baby. You got better things coming your way. Just you wait.’ And she always had that wisdom. Music can change a lot of things.”

When you hear songs played on guitar, it’s common to hear familiar chords that use open strings: D, C, G, Am, etc. These can make for some beautiful music, but at some point there might be an interest to explore more of what’s possible. One way is to include open strings for new ways to play voicings with close intervals, and also expand the possibilities of the fretboard. premierguitar · Open String VoicingsI started to get interested in chords with open strings around the late ’90s. I think I came across the idea from an Eric Johnson video when he mentions “a real pretty Wes chord” (which you can find in Ex. 6). It wasn’t until much later, though, that I started to really explore them. I remember being intrigued by some of the things that were possible when an open string (or two or three) was included in a chord, and how the sound/timbre of the voicing changed when mixed with the fretted notes. I’d like to start by showing two close voicings I came across (which are not otherwise possible without including an open string) and explain the process I worked through to find them. I’ve always loved the sound of harmony moving in thirds, so for these examples I’ll be exploring B major sounds and G major sounds focused around the root, 3, 5, 7, 9, and #11.Ex. 1Here’s where I eventually ended up: a chord containing the root, 3rd, 7th, 9th, and #11 with two whole steps on the bottom. On a piano, this wouldn’t be too challenging, and normally on guitar, it wouldn’t be possible. But with the addition of the open string we are able to easily get to it. Something that I find somewhat challenging about these voicings is that the lowest sounding note is not always on the lowest string of the voicing—it might be somewhere in the middle. So when I work on new voicings, I’ll try to play through them one note at a time from lowest note to highest note, then highest to lowest—I think it helps my ears connect with what my eyes are seeing. Ex. 2When I started exploring the idea of major 7th chords with open strings, I probably started with something like this: 3rd, 7th, and an open string as root. (You could also start with the 3rd or 7th as an open string, depending on the key.) In this range, we have a familiar fretted interval—a 5th—with an open string a half-step above the 7th. Ex. 3After working on the open-string idea for a while, the term “zones” kept coming back to me. Playing in “positions” on the guitar is pretty common, but that has more to do with giving each finger a specific fret. I think the term “zones” leaves a little more interpretation as to what’s possible in each place on the neck. For instance, in this example, there are five “zones” that give us all the possible ways to play these two fretted notes with the open B, and each one of them offers a slightly different area, sound, and range on the fretboard. These will be the shapes we start with as we work through some of the possibilities of each one. Work through Examples 3a through 3e to hear some of the different colors. Even though the last voicing has the 7th an octave higher, it seemed too good not to share here.Ex. 4Similar to Ex. 3, these are the possibilities for B, F#, and open G—shapes to build from as we explore these zones. Ex. 4a gives us a usable range of F# or G in the low end up to an A (the 9th) on the high E string.The zone for Ex. 4b offers the possibility of adding a note on the 5th string, since the B and F# are on non-adjacent strings. The second voicing also might look familiar as a Bm triad (on the bottom three strings), and the third voicing also allows us to play that same voicing, but with two open strings.Ex. 4c gives us access to the highest range—reaching up to a high D on some of the voicings here. Eventually, as I kept exploring, I came across the two chords from Ex. 1 by moving Ex. 3a up an octave and adding the 9th, which gives us Ex. 5. An important idea with this voicing is that with the fretted notes in the lower octave, an open string would create an interval of a half-step, but by moving the fretted notes up an octave, that same open string would then create an interval of a major seventh. Ex. 6 (Eric Johnson’s “Wes chord”...)I hope you found something interesting here, or maybe are able to come away with a new voicing you haven’t seen or thought of before. I always try to remember that it’s not so much about how many voicings one knows—it seems more about knowing one or two that you can really use and that can become part of your playing. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into things like this, I’ve got a Patreon page dedicated to it: https://www.patreon.com/ryanferreira.

The 1970s were a time when the great guitar heroes ruled the earth. Legendary 6-string warriors like Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, and Ritchie Blackmore regularly held tens of thousands of fans spellbound in arenas and stadiums across the United States and beyond.Among those titans stood Robin Trower. His breakthrough album, 1974’s Bridge of Sighs, featuring the FM radio staple “Day of the Eagle,” transformed his power trio into one of the hottest live acts in rock. But it wasn’t just the virtuosity or the riffs that captivated listeners—it was his sound. Vast, emotional and velvety, it moved and churned like a rising tide enveloping the listener.“We recorded Bridge of Sighs quick—in just a little over two weeks,” Trower recalls to Premier Guitar. “The guitar sound was my invention, but we were very lucky to get Geoff Emerick to engineer it. The studio was quite big, and Geoff just listened while he walked around the room and placed the mics where he thought things sounded best. There was no science—it was just him and his magic set of ears.”At the time, Emerick was one of the most respected engineers in the world, having worked extensively with the Beatles, and his instinctive approach helped shape the immense, swirling guitar tone that became a defining element of Trower’s music.The following year, that humungous sound arrived onstage in Stockholm.On February 3, 1975, Trower, bassist-vocalist James Dewar, and drummer Bill Lordan stepped onto the stage of Stockholm Concert Hall to begin a European tour. The stately 1,770-seat venue—home of the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Nobel Prize ceremonies—was designed for classical music, but its wood-paneled interior gave the trio’s sound an unusual warmth and clarity. What the band didn’t realize was that Swedish Radio was recording the entire performance on a state-of-the-art RKB-branded Nagra eight-track mobile recorder, capturing what would eventually become one of the most celebrated live guitar albums of the decade.“We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night,” Trower says. “We were performing in a proper concert hall and it sounded fantastic, which inspired us to play in top form. It was very refreshing, because most of the time we were playing in these hockey arenas that sounded awful. We weren’t even aware that they were recording it.”To Trower’s surprise, a few months later Swedish Radio sent the band a cassette of the broadcast. Like many European broadcasters at the time, the network routinely recorded touring rock acts for its archives. Hearing the power of the performance—and the unusually high quality of the recording—the decision was made to remix the tapes and release them as a live album.The result surfaced a year later, in March 1976, as Robin Trower Live!, a record that arrived just as the guitarist’s career was reaching its commercial peak. Mixed by Trower and Emerick, the album cracked the Top 10 in the United States and became Trower’s biggest chart success in the U.K., confirming what concert audiences already knew: that the soft-spoken guitarist from Southend had quietly become one of the defining players of the decade.But despite its reputation among fans, the original Live! album only told part of the story.The Stockholm concert itself had been considerably reshaped to fit the limitations of a single LP. Of the twelve songs performed that night, only seven were selected for release. Even those tracks were re-sequenced, abandoning the original running order in favor of a set designed to deliver maximum impact across two vinyl sides. The result captured the spirit of the show—but not the full arc of the performance.“We were very lucky that tape was rolling that night.”Even the album’s artwork introduced a bit of theatrical sleight of hand. The cover image suggested Trower performing before a vast outdoor stadium crowd—a sea of heads stretching into the distance. In reality, the recording came from a comparatively intimate Scandinavian concert hall.“It didn’t occur to me at the time,” Trower says when asked about the discrepancy. “There were no photos taken at the gig. The one they used was from a baseball stadium in San Francisco, I believe.”If the cover leaned toward rock ’n’ roll illusion, the audio carried its own behind-the-scenes adjustments. During the mixing sessions at London’s AIR Studios, Emerick and Trower discovered that Dewar’s vocal microphone had captured substantial spill from the drums and amplifiers onstage, making it unusable. The solution was simple: Dewar re-recorded his vocal tracks in the studio.“Jimmy sang it all again,” Trower explains matter-of-factly. “He polished it off in about an hour—just ran through it in real time.”Nearly 50 years later, the new anniversary edition of Live! reveals the full picture for the first time. Remixed by Richard Whittaker from the original tapes, the restored edition presents the entire Stockholm performance exactly as it unfolded that evening—12 songs rather than seven, sequenced in their original order, with Trower’s onstage introductions and the audience’s reactions intact. What once felt like a highlight reel now plays like a complete musical journey.The difference is striking. The pacing of the show suddenly makes sense. The opening salvo—“Day of the Eagle” followed by “Bridge of Sighs”—builds the atmosphere naturally before the trio moves into material from For Earth Below, which had not yet been released at the time of the concert. Later in the set, the delicate meditation of “Daydream” gives way to the explosive momentum of “Too Rolling Stoned,” a moment when the band shifts into near-punk velocity.Listening now, what stands out most is the chemistry between the three musicians. Dewar’s bass lines provide both muscle and melody beneath his soulful vocals. Lordan’s drumming drives the music forward with power. And at the center stands Trower himself, shaping vast arcs of spacey atmosphere and psychedelic blues from his Stratocaster. Together, they created a sound that felt far larger than the trio format should allow. And on that winter night in Stockholm, the band was flying.“If there’s any secret to my tone, it’s that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings.”So how exactly did Trower achieve that otherworldly sound?“There was no magic amp or special guitar,” he says. “Almost everything I owned was pretty new. I just went to Manny’s, the legendary guitar shop in New York City, bought a 100-watt Super Lead Marshall, and listened to about six or eight Strats acoustically before settling on a black-and-white one with a maple neck.“If there’s any secret to my tone, it’s that all my guitars have relatively high action and heavier strings. Back then I played in standard tuning and used .010-gauge strings. It’s all about getting the strings to ring acoustically, and that’s what translates into a great electric sound.”Effects also played an important role in shaping Trower’s liquid tone. His signal chain typically included a Vox V846 wah, a Shin-ei Uni-Vibe, and a custom-made boost pedal that pushed the signal level before hitting his Marshall. The simple “clean boost” provided a lift for solos without drastically altering the guitar’s character, adding sustain, thickening the Strat’s midrange, and making the Uni-Vibe’s swirling modulation sound even more liquid.Trower also kept his overall gain surprisingly restrained.“I usually kept the volume around seven or eight,” he says. “You need to have a little head room. I’m not interested in having too much distortion. My goal is to keep the clarity of the notes and chords and maintain a clear midrange, which is very important to my sound. I tried to avoid creating any mush.”While Trower is proud of the 50th anniversary edition of Live!, he’s not particularly nostalgic or inclined to dwell on the past. What’s remarkable is that he has continued releasing albums well into his late seventies and early eighties—something very few guitarists from the classic-rock era have managed. In the last decade alone, he has recorded eight albums, including Come and Find Me (2025) and the blistering concert set, One Moment in Time – Live in the USA (2026).Still, if Trower tends to look forward rather than back, he has no hesitation when it comes to praising the musicians who helped shape his most celebrated work—especially bassist and singer Dewar, who died in 2002 at the age of 59. Dewar was far more than a supporting player in the trio. With his rich, soulful tenor and muscular bass lines, he provided the emotional center of the band’s sound, grounding Trower’s expansive guitar work with a voice that was equal parts blues grit and melodic warmth. Across seven studio albums—from Twice Removed from Yesterday through Victims of the Fury—Dewar emerged as one of the defining vocalists of the 1970s guitar era.“I’ve always enjoyed the trio format. It forces me to cover a little more ground instrumentally, but in a way, the economy was our secret weapon.”“I couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator than Jimmy,” Trower says. “He was warm, funny, and never sang a bad note. People always say he’s underrated, and I totally agree. But that probably wouldn’t have been the case if we’d been called the Jimmy Dewar Band,” he adds, with a wry shrug.Alongside them was drummer Bill Lordan, whose disciplined yet powerful playing completed the chemistry of the group. Lordan, who had previously worked with Sly Stone, brought a precise sense of groove that allowed Trower’s expansive guitar phrasing to breathe, while still driving the music forward with authority. Together, the three musicians created a sound that felt far larger than the trio format might suggest.For Trower, the stripped-down lineup was never a limitation—it was the very thing that made the band’s sound so powerful. “I’ve always enjoyed the trio format,” he says. “It forces me to cover a little more ground instrumentally, but in a way, the economy was our secret weapon. It was much easier to achieve definition and clarity with just three instruments and a vocal when you played in those big, boomy halls. It would be less of an issue today—the PA systems and monitors are so much better.”That sense of space and definition is part of what gives Robin Trower Live! its enduring power. Unlike many live albums of the era, which relied on layers of overdubs or heavy post-production polish, the Stockholm recording captures a band operating with remarkable precision and restraint. The trio moves with the ease of musicians who had spent hundreds of nights refining the material onstage, allowing the songs to stretch and breathe without losing their focus.Years later, Robert Fripp, the famously exacting guitarist of prog-rock pioneers King Crimson, offered a vivid assessment of Trower’s playing during that era. Fripp first encountered Trower while touring the United States in the early 1970s.“I toured America in 1974 with Ten Years After top of the bill, King Crimson second, and Robin Trower bottom,” Fripp recalled in a 1996 essay penned for the liner notes to a Trower reissue. “The chart positions were the opposite: Ten Years After in the Billboard 160s, Crimson in the 60s, and Trower climbing remorselessly through the Top 20. Nearly every night I went out to listen to him. This was a man who hung himself on the details—the quality of sound, the nuances of each inflection and tearing bend, and the abandonment to the feel of the moment. He saved my life … and later, in England, he even gave me guitar lessons.“He is one of the very few English guitarists that have mastered bends and wobbles,” Fripp continued. “Not only has he got inside them, with an instinctive knowing of their affective power, but they went to live inside his hands.”Fripp’s admiration speaks to something many guitarists recognized at the time but rarely articulated so clearly. Trower’s playing was never about speed or flash. Instead, he built his style around touch—wide bends, patient vibrato, and an almost orchestral sense of space that allowed every note to bloom and hang in the air.That sensibility is all over Robin Trower Live! Nearly half a century on, the sound Trower summoned from a Strat and a Marshall still feels otherworldly. It’s no wonder even Robert Fripp went looking for lessons.