Guitarist Arlen Roth is perhaps not a household name. But ask any professional guitarist and they’ll tell you – Roth is the real deal.
Roth is known as the “Master of the Telecaster,” but he is also a renowned acoustic guitarist. And he is an expert slide guitarist. His wealth of talent and diversity in multiple musical genres enabled him to maintain a busy career as a performer and recording artist since the 1970s.
Roth started out playing classical guitar at age 11. He took a few lessons and then his teacher refused to continue teaching him because he got an electric guitar. From that point on he was self-taught.
“I was falling in love with The Beatles… like everyone else was at that time. So I just taught myself,” said Roth, in a telephone interview from Martha’s Vineyard.
Roth started out his professional career as a sideman. He toured and/or recorded with such renowned artists including Simon & Garfunkel, Don McLean, John Prine and Phoebe Snow. He started the innovative Hot Licks instructional audio and video company. He also has released 15 solo albums and he’s not slowing down.
“I just spent a week in the studio with John Sebastian, cutting all his old Lovin’ Spoonful hits, doing it just (him and me),” said Roth. “It’s exciting to do these projects with some people that I grew up idolizing, and some people who are my peers. They love to line up to play with me, which is an amazing thing. It’s a very humbling thing to think that all these folks are willing to do that.”
Some of the other musical icons who are lining up to work with Roth are Joe Bonamassa, Steve Cropper, Vince Gill, Albert Lee and Brad Paisley. They are all part of Roth’s Tele-Masters album/video documentary project.
“People labeled me the master of the Telecaster,” said Roth, “but there have been a lot of masters of the Telecaster. And what I’m saying with this album is we’re paying tribute to the great Tele masters of the past and also the current Tele masters.”
Roth’s previous collaborative effort, “Slide Guitar Summit” (Aquinnah, 2015), features Cindy Cashdollar, Sonny Landreth, David Lindley, Jimmy Vivino, Johnny Winter and others.
“‘Slide Guitar Summit’ was a huge smash all over the world. I mean it’s the quintessential slide guitar album. It’s the last thing that Johnny Winter ever recorded.”
Roth added: “It certainly makes my musical life interesting. Everybody talks about me being this legend. When you have people like Sebastian and Brad Paisley and Vince Gill stepping up to the plate and saying ‘I’d love to play with you, Arlen. You’ve always been one of my favorite guitar players,’ that to me is very humbling.”
In addition to the collaborative efforts, Roth’s catalog includes solo albums of originals as well as compilations of other artists’ material.
“My most recent album is my acoustic Rolling Stones album. It’s called ‘Painted Black: Acoustic Stones’ (Aquinnah, 2016).
“Nobody else had ever done a solo acoustic guitar album of the Rolling Stones, so I did it,” said Roth.
Other compilations include the music of Bob Dylan (Aquinnah, 2015) and Simon & Garfunkel (Aquinnah, 2015).
It was early in Roth’s career that he developed a unique style on acoustic guitar.
“When I started touring with a lot of folk acts like Eric Andersen and John Prine and Tony Byrd… it was just the two of us. And I would take the acoustic guitar and use it almost in an electric way. I’m known for my string bending so I would bend the heck out of the strings on acoustic guitar, which is something most people don’t even think of doing because it hurts your fingers too much. I would plug (the guitar) into an amp. So I would have the acoustic guitar but with an electric approach, like a blend of the 2 techniques.”
In 1979, when he had no more tours lined up, he decided to pursue an idea of his, which was creating guitar lessons on audio tape. He called the company Hot Licks.
“It turned out to be a worldwide phenomenon,” said Roth. “In ’84, when I was working on the movie ‘Crossroads’ [Columbia, 1986] with Ralph Macchio, I decided to go to video. I ended up recording about 180 artists for about 220 videos. We had created something that had never existed. Nobody had ever done video lessons with famous artists before.”
Though Roth sold the company, he was hired by Gibson Guitars and did over 1,000 lessons for them.
Roth has done so much in his musical career and one night in concert can barely scratch the surface of his diverse catalog. Yet it will offer a glimpse into the legend’s talents and hopefully will offer the listener a great career retrospective.
“I’ll be playing acoustic, probably some electric and some slide guitar as well,” said Roth. “I’ll be doing songs from all different albums, from the Simon & Garfunkel, the Rolling Stones, lots of original things of mine, a lot of Bob Dylan from the Dylan album that I did. I kind of mix it up. I have so much material that I never really know what I’m going to break into when I hit the stage. They usually have to tell me ‘hey, time is up’ because I can keep on going.”
Roth added: “I played (at Kennett Flash) before and it’s a really nice place to play and it’s a cool little town there.”
