1. Lonnie McIntosh, known as Lonnie Mack, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
55 Facts About Lonnie Mack
1. 2.
Lonnie Mack was influential in the development of blues rock music and rock guitar soloing.
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Shortly after the album's release the British Invasion hit American shores, and Lonnie Mack's recording career "withered on the vine".
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Lonnie Mack regularly toured small venues until 1968, when Rolling Stone magazine rediscovered him, and Elektra Records signed him to a three-album contract.
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Lonnie Mack was performing in major venues, but his multi-genre Elektra albums downplayed his lead guitar and blues rock appeal and record sales were modest.
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Lonnie Mack became increasingly unhappy with the music business during this period and finally left Elektra in 1971.
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In 1985, Lonnie Mack resurfaced with a successful blues rock LP, Strike Like Lightning, a promotional tour featuring celebrity guitarist sit-ins, and a Carnegie Hall concert with Roy Buchanan and Albert Collins.
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Lonnie Mack continued to perform, mostly in small venues, until 2004.
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Shortly before Lonnie Mack's birth, his family moved from Appalachian Kentucky to Dearborn County, Indiana, on the banks of the Ohio River.
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Lonnie Mack was raised on a series of nearby sharecropping farms.
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Lonnie Mack began playing guitar at the age of seven, after trading his bicycle for a Lone Ranger model acoustic guitar.
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Lonnie Mack's mother taught him basic chords, and he was playing bluegrass guitar in the family band.
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Lonnie Mack soon taught himself to merge finger-picking country guitar with acoustic blues-picking, to produce a hybrid style which, Mack said, "sounded like rockabilly, but before rockabilly".
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Lonnie Mack would skip school to play music with Trotto at the latter's house.
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In 1954, at age 13, Lonnie Mack dropped out of school after a fight with a teacher.
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Lonnie Mack played guitar on several low-circulation recordings in the late 1950s.
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Lonnie Mack soon recorded additional tunes to flesh out his debut album, The Wham of that Memphis Man.
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Lonnie Mack made some notable recordings later, particularly in the 1980s, but his debut album is widely considered the centerpiece of his career.
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Lonnie Mack recorded many additional sides for Fraternity between 1963 and 1967, but few, if any, were broadly released or strongly promoted, and none charted.
20.
In November 1968, the newly founded Rolling Stone magazine published a rave review of Lonnie Mack's discontinued 1963 debut album, persuading Elektra to re-issue it.
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Lonnie Mack was performing in major rock venues, including the Fillmore East, the Fillmore West, and the Cow Palace.
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At that point in his career, Lonnie Mack took a break from performing and recording.
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In 1971, with one album left to complete his contract with Elektra, Lonnie Mack moved to Nashville.
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Lonnie Mack had begun missing the sense of connection with small-town audiences early in his time with Elektra and soon soured on the fantasy of rock celebrity status.
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In 1977, Lonnie Mack was shot during an altercation with an off-duty police officer.
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In 1983, Lonnie Mack relocated to Austin, Texas, for a collaboration with his blues-rock disciple, guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
27.
In 1985, Lonnie Mack staged a "full-fledged comeback" with the blues-rock album, Strike Like Lightning, a tour featuring guest appearances by Vaughan, Ry Cooder, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood, and a concert at Carnegie Hall with Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan.
28.
In 1986, Lonnie Mack joined Buchanan and Dickey Betts for the Great American Guitar Assault Tour.
29.
On March 12,1963, at the end of a recording session backing the Charmaines, Lonnie Mack was offered the remaining twenty minutes of studio-rental time.
30.
Lonnie Mack recorded an energetic instrumental take-off on Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee".
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Lonnie Mack had improvised it a few years earlier, when his keyboardist, Denzil "Dumpy" Rice, who normally sang and played the Berry tune, missed a performance.
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Lonnie Mack didn't know the tune's lyrics, but when the audience called for it, he improvised a highly embellished electric guitar instrumental grounded in Berry's melody.
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Lonnie Mack made the instrumental a regular feature of his live act, calling it simply "Memphis".
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Lonnie Mack typically cradled the arm in the fourth finger of his picking hand, toggling it while continuing to pick.
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Lonnie Mack often fanned it rapidly to the tempo of his simultaneous tremolo picking, to produce a machine-gunned, single-note, "shuddering" sound.
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Lonnie Mack showed everybody how to use a [vibrato arm].
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Lonnie Mack's playing was faster, louder, more aggressive than anything people were used to hearing.
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Lonnie Mack essentially paved the way for the electric guitar to become a soloing instrument in rock music.
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Lonnie Mack took rock guitar playing to a whole different level.
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Lonnie Mack made the crucial bridge between the black blues and white hillbilly music via his lead work.
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Guitar players, true musicians, and real music fans realize that Lonnie Mack was the Jimi Hendrix of his time.
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Between the era of Chuck Berry and the era of Hendrix there were a handful of guitar players like Lonnie Mack who were making ground-breaking music that paved the way for the [lead guitar] Revolution.
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Lonnie Mack was closely identified with the distinctive-looking Gibson Flying V guitar that first appeared in 1958.
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Lonnie Mack was viscerally attracted to the arrow-like shape of the guitar.
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The title of Lonnie Mack's final album, Attack of the Killer V, was a reference to his guitar.
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Early in his career, Lonnie Mack added a Bigsby vibrato bar to the guitar.
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Lonnie Mack said that the wound third string was important to his sound.
48.
Lonnie Mack made a couple of adjustments and then proceeded to begin OFFICIALLY TEARING THE ROOF OFF THE PLACE.
49.
Lonnie Mack peeled the paint off the walls with my rig.
50.
Lonnie Mack owned the stage and had everybody doing exactly what he wanted them to do.
51.
Lonnie Mack cut my other lead player's head clean off when they were swapping licks, [which] was pretty funny, as [my other lead player] is a big Eddie Van Halen-style flash player.
52.
Lonnie Mack made my rig absolutely come alive in ways I've never heard.
53.
In 2012, early rock guitar sensation Travis Wammack asked Lonnie Mack to join him on a proposed tour to be billed as "Double Lonnie Mack Attack".
54.
Lonnie Mack said he can't play standing up any more [and] it's hard to hold a Flying V sitting down.
55.
Lonnie Mack died from natural causes on April 21,2016 at Centennial Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee.