Don’t Be CruelAlvin Lee

Alvin Lee

Alvin Lee is most famous for his time in Ten Years After, a band enjoying moderate success as a blues-rock band and happy with pop obscurity until his mind-blowing style was captured on film in a legendary Woodstock performance. Fortunately for the rest of the band, but to Lee’s horror, they quickly became superstars, a status capped by Columbia pushing them into a more pop-oriented album and the instant classic with I’d Love to Change the World. The resulting fame drove Lee from the band, so he could produce more artistic, pleasantly highest-common-denominator work. But he did keep returning to the band, off and on, for the next thirty years.

Lee was called “the world’s fastest guitarist” in the 60s and 70s. But it was more of a compliment than when applied to the “rain of notes” players of the eighties and nineties. He didn’t just spew scales and riffs at high velocity, he played lightning-fast melodies, creating a song from his guitar work itself…when he chose to play fast. In a callback to Chicago style, he would vary between shredding speed and sculpting notes in a slow and powerful way, forming Blues-rock masterpieces like evolution.

Lee was a beloved collaborator in the rock world, working alongside so many greats that compiling them here would wear out the Genius server. A subset George Harrison (The Beatles), John Mayall, Steve Winwood, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood (of The Rolling Stones), Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac), Albert Lee, Peter Frampton…well, you get the idea.