Guitarists: Dan Auerbach

Are you aware that Joe Walsh is a big fan of your guitar playing?

I heard that. That’s amazing. He’s great. He’s from the Akron area like me – bands like Kent and James Gang.

As for yourself, you always had a fondness for the old blues guys.

Well, blues stuff I got into because of my family. My mom’s family played bluegrass and blues when they would get together, and so I would get to see that. And my dad played lots of old records. Besides old rock’n’roll albums, sixties stuff, he would play old blues – Son House and Robert Johnson and stuff like that. So I heard it growing up as a kid and it’s really basic. When you start to play guitar it’s sort of the foundation of everything. It’s really easy in a sense, deceptively simple, but it’s easy. And once you kind of learn a blues formula, all these other songs start to make sense, these rock’n’roll songs. You start to understand them and you can kind of make them out. Even a Beatles song.

Blues is the blueprint for it all?

Yeah, it’s like the foundation of modern music. But I just loved it. When I was starting to play guitar I got more and more into it and kind of obsessed with it and would just sit and play for hours and hours. And those guys always played a certain kind of guitar – a cheap, pawn-shop kind of guitar. And they have a certain sound and I like that sound. To this day those are the kind of guitars I use. None of my friends liked blues music. That was more me at home playing guitar.