If I were to describe my journey as a guitarist (obviously a very amateur one, of course), I would have to start with my youthful passion for the Italian band The Pooh. Yes, The Pooh, that’s right., the name comes from the famous cartoon… But what do the Pooh have in common with blues-rock, with Hendrix, Clapton, and the likes of John Mayer, which I am currently covering? How did I go from Italian melodies to playing the John Mayer Trio’s production? Well, it may seem surprising at first glance, but there is a connection. First of all, it should be emphasized that these are four musicians of the highest caliber. One might think, okay, you’ve grown up and your tastes have changed. But that’s not really the case. It may seem strange, but there is a consistency, a logical thread that can be found…

First of all, we need to clarify what we mean by Pooh’s music. They are Italy’s longest-running band, having been around since 1966, and they have sold more records than Genesis, despite their audience being limited to the Italian peninsula and its emigrants. But apart from these facts, I cannot call myself a Pooh fan in the strict sense of the word. I was a fan as a teenager and I remained attached to some of their work, particularly that from 1977 to 1980. Not all of it, of course. Why did I like those Pooh songs and why do I still like certain things? Simple, because I like electric guitar. I discovered the Fender Stratocaster with Dodi Battaglia, not with Hendrix. Dodi Battaglia is an exceptional guitarist and a technically accomplished musician. When he was very young, he opened Jimi Hendrix’s concert in Bologna with his band and had the audacity to play a Hendrix cover. It was teenage recklessness, but also confidence in his own abilities. Dodi Battaglia is much closer to blues-rock than the Pooh’s production in the 80s and beyond would suggest. And the Pooh are much better known for that production than for what I still listen to and play. There are the Pooh and there are some: I’m not referring to famous orchestra-based songs that made them famous with typical Italian singable melodies. Those are things that have nothing to do with my tastes.

But their albums Rotolando Respirando, Boomerang, Viva, and Stop contain lesser-known gems that are musically very valid and not at all easy to approach. They can easily be defined as melodic or neoclassical prog. Even in their earlier albums, from 1973 to 1976, and in some singles, there are 10-minute suites in which the melodic and rhythmic structure changes constantly. One could even talk about experimentation, but most people would at least smile mockingly at the use of these terms when talking about the Pooh (also hinting at how bad their name may sound in English…). Instead, every now and then I enjoy playing a short clip of a solo by Dodi Battaglia from a little-known song and smiling at comments like: who is that, Satriani? Malmsteen? Steve Vai?

However, during that period, when I was feeding off this music and trying to play it, I couldn’t stop listening to songs like My Sharona by The Knack, first and foremost. But also Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits and Message in a Bottle by The Police. And I couldn’t figure out how to play them. To try to explain: these are songs that aren’t easy to play with friends on an acoustic guitar on the beach. The Pooh were better suited. Yet I dreamed of playing My Sharona in a band. Today, I think these songs were supposed to point me in a different direction from the one I had taken. They were a signal that I needed something more. Or maybe they better explained what I was looking for in the guitar when I tried to emulate Dodi Battaglia. But for some reason, I didn’t explore the albums by The Knack, Dire Straits, and The Police. And I didn’t have any friends around who could suggest anything else.

I ended up following the usual Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, of course, as well as The Police and a certain mainstream. Toto also arrived with Rosanna and Africa. I also went through Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. But I didn’t “realize” what I was really looking for until I got to Bruce Springsteen. Here, perhaps, the message could be clearer: I was looking for something that communicated with my more instinctive and emotional side, not with my mental and rational one. I always wondered why the Beatles and Genesis (but also Van Halen, Satriani, Vai) weren’t interesting to me. Well, I respect the Beatles for their enormous importance. They never really played blues, but they opened the door for it when it was just a niche genre in the UK, allowing the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and others to rise to fame. They took some of the fundamentals of blues and translated them into a more common language, suitable for becoming mainstream at the time, revolutionizing the popular music of the era in less than a decade of activity. And yet they don’t really engage me that much. Too much narrative, too many twists and turns, too much attention required. Like Genesis, it’s music that stimulates the mind, not the body. And I, obviously, have never sought that.

The Pooh of the late 1970s are often dismissed today as “pop,” Italian melodies, silly songs, but back then they were quite the opposite. They were played, pulsating, physical songs. There was an idea of a band, of bass and drums driving the song forward, of guitar that, although the star, kept the song going, was at its service, in the words of Battaglia himself. Without knowing it, I learned there that music can work even without flexing its muscles: it just has to move. And then there was My Sharona. And something different happened there. I couldn’t stop listening to it. Not because it was profound, but because it was obsessive. That riff didn’t accompany the song: it was the song. Repetition, stop & go, continuous tension, sexual too, of course—that’s part of adolescence. It was music that entered the body before it entered the head. In hindsight, I understand that I wasn’t looking for a style: I was looking for groove. I could find the same things in Message in a Bottle or Tunnel of Love. And later in Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born to Run. Or in the obsessive rhythms of U2’s The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. If you think about those driving rhythms, the passion with which the songs are performed and sung, perhaps it’s clear that what I was looking for was something deep, a direct connection with basic emotions. Even the Pooh, the ones from 77-80, did things like this, even if people don’t know it.

Over time, I gradually came to humbly tackling Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Jimmy Page, though with reverential awe. Clapton was instrumental in translating early blues into something more suited to the 1960s. First with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, then with Cream, he used a more saturated guitar with higher gain; he was the first to do something new: playing blues as his main language, but with rock instruments.

If the Beatles established songwriting and the Stones established the attitude with which to present oneself to the public, Clapton demonstrated the instrumental language. After Clapton, the guitarist became the frontman (as Chuck Berry and Buddy Guy had already been in blues), the solo became narration, and blues became expandable.

Jimi Hendrix also had the blues as his sound universe, drawing on it as well as on soul, funk, R&B, and psychedelia. But his innovation was to use the blues as an emotional foundation, employing feedback, noise, effects, extended chords, double-stops, pull-ups… He integrated rhythm, soloing, and color in a single gesture. And the result is a blues that ceases to be a style and becomes a cosmic language. After Hendrix, the blues no longer had boundaries.

With Jimmy Page, however, blues remains the raw material. He too comes from Delta blues and Chicago blues, but combines English folk and experimentation; he is also a session musician and an expert in studio recording. With his band Led Zeppelin, he takes the blues and fragments it, speeds it up, darkens it, adding heavy riffs, open tunings, and extreme dynamics. Thus, the blues becomes hard rock, proto-metal, no longer “traditional blues.” For Page, the blues is not sacred, it is material to be molded.

Blues then returned to the United States thanks to a great band like the Allman Brothers. Duane Allman’s guitar lines amazed Clapton himself, who, while listening to a song in his car, is said to have slammed on the brakes and called his producer to find out who that guitarist was. He must have felt the same way I did when I first saw a video of Jimi Hendrix and was left speechless. It happened to me again when I first heard Stevie Ray Vaughan. Perhaps for me, he is the ultimate expression of the guitar and my beloved Stratocaster.

Stevie Ray Vaughan is the pure emotional catalyst of electric blues, the point where groove becomes substance and urgency at the same time. He plays with massive dynamics, great energy on very thick strings, every bend, slide, or vibrato has physical weight, his Texas blues is visceral, not reflective. If with the Pooh, let’s say, of quality, I had had my first exposure to ‘physical’ bands, while I strongly perceived the hypnotic groove of My Sharona / Police / Dire Straits, when I discovered SRV everything became energy, that groove now had color, urgency, risk. Listening becomes almost physical, it is almost inevitable to move, tap your feet, feel the song in your body. And for me, it was a big emotional novelty. I was looking for something that would draw me into unknown territory, which I was afraid to cross before.

David Gilmour and Marc Knopfler also drew heavily on the blues, and if you like, they perhaps have something that can explain what the Pooh have to do with someone like me who ended up in blues-rock. I am attracted to the groove that walks by itself, to the guitar that excites, to repetition that creates trance. My Sharona was the first song that made me feel certain raw emotions. Well, some Pooh songs did the same in Italian. I then found the same instinctive communication in Springsteen and U2. Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, and Toto also have certain melodic lines and an epic intensity that can be likened to the Pooh of the period I am referring to.

For quite a long time, I listened to and played Pearl Jam’s music. They are my age, but I’m not much of a grunge type, actually. I find them more akin to classic rock, instead. I like their energy and grit, both in their music and in Eddie Vedder’s powerful voice. I find the lyricism of Springsteen and the intensity of U2 in them, but also the sonic impact of Led Zeppelin. It’s as if, until then, I had been looking for groove, hypnosis, and tempo control, and with Pearl Jam, the groove remains, but it is charged with emotional weight and tension. Pearl Jam’s music is not virtuosity and technicality. It is dense with emotion. It is like a sort of evolution of My Sharona, which could very well have been written by them. Well, John Mayer appreciates them very much, as he also appreciates Bruce Springsteen. Some of JM’s songs were inspired by Pearl Jam. They have the same emotional grammar but with different vocabularies. It is no coincidence that, in a well-known seminar at Berklee Music College, Mayer performs a short excerpt from PJ’s Betterman to explain how he understands making music, with a song that, in his opinion, has everything, is exemplary, complete in its simplicity.

Maybe that’s why I found myself covering the John Mayer Trio. I discovered John Mayer because my wife found a video of a famous live performance from Crossroads 2007, the charity event organized, coincidentally, by Eric Clapton. This young American guy played and sang his song Gravity, with an amazing final solo. I was very surprised to see that in the 2000s there was still someone playing guitar in a certain way, something clearly inspired by Clapton, Hendrix, and SRV. Blues phrasing, melody, great intensity, communicative simplicity. I bought the album Continuum more for my wife than for myself. And I ended up playing Gravity with my cover band. Later, I discovered that John Mayer was initially famous for melodic songs that fell more under the folk/pop genre. Then at some point he appeared with a Stratocaster slung over his shoulder and an SRV tattoo on his arm, in a power trio with Pino Palladino on bass and Steve Jordan on drums (musicians older and more experienced than him, with jazz and fusion influences), in a clear homage to other legendary trios such as Hendrix’s Experience, Clapton’s Cream, and SRV’s Double Trouble. And it seemed to me that I had finally found the answer: someone who knew how to interpret that music in a modern way, who did justice to the electric guitar, especially the Stratocaster. John Mayer Trio had given me back certain feelings (those of My Sharona, to make myself clear) but now with an awareness of blues. Maybe I wasn’t looking for a style. I was looking for a guitar that would move my body before my head. Music that could go on even without me following it, that demands attention but not analysis, that grabs you physically, not mentally.

Mayer plays blues lines, solo phrases, micro-licks, but always thinks from within the groove; every note has a temporal function: if you remove the drums, he still keeps time. This is what is known as groove-based lead playing. But John Mayer is a direct descendant of Clapton, with an awareness of Hendrix and SRV (and almost zero Page). What Mayer seems to take from Clapton is the blues as his mother tongue, with economical, singable phrasing, relaxed timing, and dynamics of touch before effect. There are never any unnecessary pyrotechnics, solos “above” the song; Mayer thinks like a singer, just like Clapton.

From Hendrix, John Mayer takes 9th and 13th chords, thumb-over techniques, and the use of the guitar as a rhythmic instrument, but not feedback as a structural element, noise, total deconstruction, or psychedelia. Mayer uses Hendrix as a harmonic vocabulary, not as an aesthetic.

He takes almost nothing from Page, he has even stated this himself, he is a Stratocaster guy, not a Les Paul guy, not into stuff like Led Zeppelin. Page uses heavy riffs, open folk-blues tunings, layered production, narrative aggression; he works on structure, tension, myth. Mayer focuses on intimacy, micro-dynamics, the relationship between voice and guitar. If Jimmy Page is musical architecture, with Mayer it’s conversation. John Mayer is the point where blues becomes adult, conscious, and modern. It doesn’t want to conquer: it wants to talk.

His trio is different from Clapton’s with Cream: the latter use the trio as a vehicle for power, high volumes, constant saturation, long and muscular improvisation. The guitar fills the space, guides, dominates. In the John Mayer Trio there is more balance, groove before volume. Silences become fundamental, the dynamics extreme, with a guitar that comes in and out, breathes, never overpowering. If Cream uses the trio to push the blues beyond its physical limits, John Mayer uses it to discover what happens below those limits. The Jimi Hendrix Experience trio uses the blues as a natural force, a primordial energy. The blues should not be controlled, it should be liberated. The guitar, with pushed amps, fuzz, feedback, wah, invades, drags, transforms the song: Hendrix does not converse, he overwhelms.

It is said that a young John Mayer locked himself in his room with his guitar and a Stevie Ray Vaughan cassette, causing his parents to seriously worry about his mental health. The initials SRV are tattooed on John Mayer’s arm. He undoubtedly made a significant contribution to JM’s musical development. From him, he gained both an awareness of groove and pure emotional power. Mayer is not a clone of Vaughan, but every phrase is more passionate, more incisive, even in the controlled parts. In practice, his phrasing is as precise as that of the first foreign bands that impressed me, Pink Floyd/Police/Dire Straits, but the touch, saturation, and feel are closer to Vaughan.

While I was captivated by the musical skills of the Pooh, the physical groove (My Sharona, Police, Dire Straits) spoke to me. Somehow it was telling me that I would go through the trance/minimalism of Pink Floyd, the passion and roughness of Springsteen and U2, and a return to the energy of My Sharona with Pearl Jam. I would then rediscover blues as “material to be molded” thanks to the structures of Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin and blues to be experimented with in the sound universe of Jimi Hendrix. In all this, Vaughan enters as a point of fusion between body and soul, an example of how the guitar can speak directly, an emotional model for learning how to make the touch “sing.”

Blues awareness would eventually come with the John Mayer Trio. Coming full circle…