Guitar World magazine turns 25 this year, and it's celebrating with an anniversary issue that is the literary equivalent of a screaming, shrieking guitar solo with the amp turned to 11 and enough feedback to make your ears bleed and the fillings fall out of your teeth.
And this is altogether fitting and proper because Guitar World is not only America's most popular guitar mag, it's also the guitar mag that isn't afraid to take things one step too far -- and then go a couple steps further. It is, for example, the magazine that conducted an interview with guitar god Jimi Hendrix despite the inconvenient fact that Hendrix had been dead for decades.
The anniversary issue details Guitar World's shameless (but highly successful) stunts, including an interview with Jimi Hendrix -- long after his death.
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"I thought, 'What would it be like to talk to Jimi Hendrix?' " recalls Brad Tolinski, Guitar World's editor-in-chief. "And then I said, 'Let's try to talk to Jimi Hendrix. Let's have a seance!' "
This brainwave occurred in 1993 -- 23 years after Hendrix's death and about five years after Tolinski was hired to liven up a lackluster guitar mag started by a cheesy New York publisher as a way to cash in on the rock market.
Tolinski borrowed one of Hendrix's Flying V guitars from the Hard Rock Cafe and somehow acquired an amulet allegedly made out of a lock of Hendrix's hair. Accompanied by a gaggle of Hendrix acolytes and a soothsayer named Zena, Tolinski carried these holy relics to Electric Ladyland, the famous New York studio where Hendrix recorded the 1968 album named after the studio.
As Tolinski and friends circled the sacred guitar, shut their eyes and held hands, Zena contacted Hendrix. Jimi issued a warning against dope and booze, but when the Guitar World folks asked technical questions about the master's greatest solos, the phone lines to the afterlife got fuzzy and Zena couldn't hear Hendrix's replies.
In other words, the interview was a dud. But Tolinski had persuaded "Good Morning America" to cover the seance, so at least it worked as a publicity stunt.
"We're shameless," he explains.
Shamelessness is a big part of what makes Guitar World fun, and the 25th anniversary issue is a shameless chronicle of shameless stunts.
It recounts the story of Guitar World's absurd "insect-themed" issue in 2001, which featured stories on the Beatles and the rap/metal band Papa Roach.
And its goofy 1999 3-D issue, which included a pair of cardboard glasses that enabled readers to eyeball a 3-D cover photo that showed one guy from Limp Bizkit yelling into the ear of another guy from Limp Bizkit, whose eyes seem to be popping out of his head.
But all this tomfoolery serves merely to disguise the fact that Guitar World is really a serious educational magazine. Not only does it publish countless interviews with great guitarists, it has also taught a generation of Americans the finer points of playing rock guitar.
In fact, a case can be made that Guitar World and its spinoff mags -- Bass Guitar, Guitar World Acoustic and Guitar Legends -- are among America's most effective educational publications for teenage boys, who make up a large portion of GW's 200,000 circulation.
"We get them to pick up the instrument, play the instrument, express themselves and read," says Tolinski. "That's a tough thing to get a young guy to do, and Guitar World gets people to do it."
