Unfinished Business

The cover photo is almost worth the price of this album: it shows guitarist Danny Gatton at a very young age — possibly still in his teens? — holding the inevitable Telecaster and sporting a pair of truly monstrous muttonchops sideburns. It signals the fact that this is a reissue of his 1987 studio album; that album preceded his tragic death by suicide at age 49 by seven years. Gatton is regarded by some as the greatest guitarist who ever lived; his playing is certainly the standard against which that of all other Telecaster specialists is measured. He was a technical wizard, but he was always more than just a stunt guitarist (the insane tempo of “Fingers on Fire” notwithstanding); he played virtuosically and idiomatically in country, jazz, rockabilly, blues, R&B, and rock idioms, and you can hear him doing most of that on this album.