Session great Carlos Alomar on his time as Chuck Berry’s rhythm guitarist

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Session guitarist extraordinaire Carlos Alomar has shared the stage with a veritable list of icons, from David Bowie to James Brown and The Main Ingredient.

Later, he joined the ranks of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney collaborators, contributed to Alicia Keys' album The Element of Freedom, and played on the worldwide hit Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. However, before hitting his stride with Bowie, Alomar played second fiddle to none other than Chuck Berry.

“He came in with this guitar, a beautiful ES-335, and he would lift the headstock up and down and that would tell you what to play,” recalls Alomar in the latest edition of Guitarist.

“Depending on how he moved his headstock, you’d stop or start. That was it. And man, he walked in and said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ But I had the audacity to say, ‘Are we gonna rehearse, Mr Berry?’ He didn’t turn around; he whipped around and yelled, ‘We don’t rehearse rock ’n’ roll!’ Let me tell you, I still give my musical cues to this day with the headstock, just like Chuck Berry.”

In the late '60s, Alomar had an eight-month stint with James Brown, which saw him tour the East Coat and pick up life lessons along the way.

“While I was playing with him, he kept saying, ‘We’re gonna take it to the bridge,’ but I had to wait for the cue. Finally, he whipped around and said, ‘Hit me,’ and, unfortunately, I did not hit him at all [laughs]. I missed the cue.

Alomar describes how he went to collect his money when he quickly discovered that some of his hard-earned cash was missing.

“I looked at the guy and said, ‘Hey, there’s $20 missing.’ He said, ‘Yeah, Mr Brown said you didn’t hit back.’ I was intelligent. My father gave me a mantra: ‘If you can’t explain it, defend it.’ So I learned to talk real fast and to explain exactly what I wanted… And I was fired.”

For more from Carlos Alomar, plus new interviews with Joe Satriani and Joe Perry, pick up issue 516 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.