For Chicagoan Frank Blinkal, a day-and-night club job at Buddy Guy’s Legends gave him a front row seat and unprecedented access to some of the greatest names in Blues — Otis Rush, Lonnie Brooks and Junior Wells, not to mention Legends’ illustrious owner.    

As the innovative guitarist and imposing 300-pound frontman for Mountain, Leslie West was the king of power and tone in the ’70s, inspiring successive generations with his thunderous riffs.   

There are guitar slingers, guitar masters, guitar heroes and guitar stranglers, and then there are the rare guitar icons, players who possess a distinctive style that makes them immediately recognizable after just a few notes. Sonny Landreth is surely among that hallowed group.   

Eight years ago, guitarist/vocalist Justin Ringle relocated from his native Idaho to Portland, Ore., and very quickly shifted his stylistic allegiance from the aggressive Rock he had played at home to a gentler Folk sound. He formed Horse Feathers to pursue his newfound acoustic passion and garnered rabid fans and critical acclaim, with reviewers consistently pointing out the wonderful tension between the dark poignancy of Ringle’s lyrics and the expansive beauty of the music that surrounds them.  

 Ric Hordinski’s name on any project or event is the musical version of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. So it is with Joel Henderson’s release gig at Hordinski’s Monastery studio in Walnut Hills as he introduces his new release, Locked Doors & Pretty Fences.  

During the past decade and a half, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Tim Kasher has served as the reeling ringmaster for the dark, wonderfully dysfunctional circus known as Cursive. A constantly fluctuating membership has resulted in Cursive’s fascinatingly malleable sound, from the Indie Rock gravity of 1997’s Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes to the denser and more conceptual Early Summer: Semantics of Song in 1998 to the string-driven Burst and Bloom and The Ugly Organ in the new millennium.   

When Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady assembled Hot Tuna in 1969, it seemed like little more than a busman’s Blues holiday for the respective guitarist and bassist from Jefferson Airplane, a way for the duo to work out their Delta and Piedmont obsession while the Airplane sat on the runway. Amazingly and against all conceivable odds, Hot Tuna is still a vital musical entity 43 years after its formation.  

Although it’s only been two years since the formation of D.R.U.G.S. (stand down, Million Mom outragists — the name’s an acronym for Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows), the Post Hardcore quintet ru  

In the mid-’80s, I saw Leo Kottke at Bogart’s with the intent of getting close enough to assure myself that the 12-string master didn’t have a third arm, nine fingered hands or a magic guitar. I