TUNE-UPS
Remembering Leslie West
THE BIG MAN WHOSE BIG GUITAR SOUND HELPED LAUNCH HEAVY METAL
By Alan di Perna
Leslie West performs on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert December 13, 1975
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
LESLIE WEST WAS always an unlikely guitar hero. His massive physical presence — he weighed 300 pounds at the dawn of the Seventies — defied the longstanding vogue for undernourished-looking, rail-thin rock guitar slingers. And he never cultivated dazzling fretboard techniques, relying instead on pure soul, a powerhouse singing voice, and one of the meatiest electric guitar tones ever to burst from a speaker cabinet.
“I didn’t play fast,” West said in 2011. “I only used the first and third finger on the fingering hand. So I worked on my tone all the time. I wanted to have the greatest, biggest tone, and I wanted vibrato like somebody who plays violin in a hundred piece orchestra.”
West, who died of a heart attack on December 22, 2020, at age 75, was a key architect of the heavy guitar aesthetic that coalesced in the late Sixties/early Seventies and has been a staple of rock music ever since. He was born Leslie Weinstein on October 22, 1945, in Forest Hills, Queens, and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. He bought his first guitar with money from his bar mitzvah at age 13. With his brother Larry on bass, he formed the Vagrants in the mid Sixties.