Lonnie Mack - Career

Career

Lonnie Mack's music career began in the mid-1950s. It included historically significant recordings, critical and popular recognition, and periods of reclusion, rediscovery, and comeback. He never became a commercial superstar during his years as an active performer, but has acquired the status of an "unsung hero" of early rock guitar. He performed regularly until 2004. He still occasionally appears at special events. On November 15, 2008, he performed at a production of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honoring Les Paul. On June 5-6, 2010, he performed at a reunion concert with the surviving members of his early-'60s band. In 2011, after a 21-year recording hiatus, he announced the upcoming release of a self-published "album" consisting of entirely new, informally recorded tunes.

As a frontman, Mack has been described as rock's first "virtuoso" lead guitarist and its first "guitar hero". In the early 1960s he augmented the electric blues guitar genre with fast-picking techniques borrowed from traditional country and bluegrass styles, leading one early reviewer to puzzle over the "peculiar running quality" of Mack's bluesy solos. These recordings prefigured the fast, flashy, blues-based lead guitar style which dominated rock by the late 1960s.

Although better-known as a guitarist, Mack was a double-threat performer from the outset. A 1968 feature article in Rolling Stone magazine rated Mack a better gospel singer than Elvis Presley, who earned all of his Grammys as a gospel singer.

By the 1980s Mack was recognized as a pioneer of virtuoso rock guitar, and according to Guitar World magazine influenced every major rock guitarist of the day, "from Clapton to Allman to Vaughan" and "from Nugent to Bloomfield". His early "blue-eyed soul" vocals remain notable for their gospel-like fervor.

Mack's recordings drew on rural and urban blues, country, bluegrass, rockabilly, vintage R&B, soul, and gospel styles. Attempts to classify Mack's music proved challenging, but the common thread in Mack's best-known music is a unique mix of black and white musical roots, later dubbed "roadhouse rock". Music critic Alec Dubro summarized: "Lonnie can be put into that 'Elvis Presley-Roy Orbison-Early Rock' bag, but mostly for convenience. In total sound and execution, he was an innovator". In a 1977 interview, Mack commented on his merger of country and blues styles: "I think they're about the closest musics there are. They're the earth musics of the white and black people. Country is never gonna die, and neither is the blues—and rock and roll is a little bit of both."

Mack's managers over the years have included the late Harry Carlson of Fraternity Records, John Hovekamp, formerly the manager of Pure Prairie League and James Webber, formerly vice president of Elektra Records. Webber is listed on Mack's website as his current manager.