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I have two favorites: Les Paul and T-Bone Walker. Les Paul is a phenomenal soloist and jazz player, but he also invented a lot of the tools that we take for granted now. He was instrumental in inventing the solid-body electric guitar, of course, and he also invented the multitrack tape recorder.
When I was a child, Les actually gave me my first guitar lesson. My dad was a tape-recorder nut -- he had probably the only one in Milwaukee. What happened was, Les came to Milwaukee and my dad went over there with a tape recorder and asked if he could record him. I watched him play every day; I was four or five years old and thought it was the neatest thing in the world. That was a huge influence on me.
Later, my family moved to Texas. One day, my dad rented a piano. I
was getting ready to go to school, but I immediately got sick and
stayed home -- I was nine. T-Bone Walker showed up. He drove into
our driveway in a flesh-color Cadillac convertible with
leopard-skin seats and stepped out. He was the sweetest man and a
phenomenal player.
The reason T-Bone is so important is that he is the bridge between
jazz and blues for the electric guitar. Charlie Christian was
great; T-Bone was even cooler, because he was bluesier, and that's
where I learned to play lead guitar and where I also learned to put
the guitar behind my head and do the splits.