Ricky Phillips, Eric Singer, and a Bevy of Guest Stars Help Finish Ronnie Montrose’s Last Album
WHENEVER RONNIE MONTROSE AND I WOULD TALK about music, he was always looking to the future. He’d be thinking about his next tour, or his next project, or he’d say something like, “Wait until you hear this acoustic stuff I’m working on. It will blow your mind.”
So he was probably juggling a ton of ideas when he passed away on March 3, 2012. Many of those creative strategies ended that day, as well, but one of Montrose’s projects was saved from oblivion by his wife, Leighsa, and bassist/ producer Ricky Phillips (Styx). If you want to hear a tale about a near miracle, you might want to check out the backstory of how Montrose’s final album—10x10 [Rhino]—almost never was.
In March 2003, Montrose called Phillips and drummer Eric Singer (Kiss) to tackle a power-trio project that would rock harder than anything he had done in years— a sort of “homecoming” to the sound of his original Montrose (1973-1974) and Gamma (1979-1983) periods. This was big news, as the artistically restless Montrose followed his muse without question, and his frequent stylistic shifts sometimes frustrated audiences who adored his early riff rock.
“Ronnie was calling up Eric and me for all kinds of festival and club gigs,” says Phillips. “It was obvious he was having fun playing rough-and-tumble rock and roll again.”
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PRS
PREVIOUSLY PART OF PRS's Maryland-built guitar line, the SE NF3 was recently reissued in the company's offshore-produced SE series. The SE NF3 is so named for its Narrowfield Deep Dish (a.k.a. DD) \"S\" pickups. These unique PRS-design units have deeper bobbins to accommodate more windings and extra metal pieces between the magnets to yield a more powerful \"single-coil\" tone, while remaining noise-free because they are in fact humbuckers. A control set consisting of master volume, tone and a five-way blade switch allows the usual selections of bridge, middle and neck pickups by themselves and the neck-plus-middle and bridge-plus-middle combinations that allow the SE NF3 to veer into Strat-like territory in switch positions two and four.
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