Arlen Roth (born October 30, 1952) is an American guitarist, teacher, and author. From 1982 to 1992, he was a columnist for Guitar Player magazine. Those ten years of columns became a book, Hot Guitar.
Music career
Arlen Roth's father, Al Ross (Abraham Roth), was a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine and many other publications over a 75-year career. He lived to the age of 100, and was one of the four Roth Brothers: Al Ross, Irving Roir, Ben Roth and Salo, all of whom became cartoonists. Al Ross was also a great painter and fine artist, and he was the one who encouraged Arlen to become a guitarist when he saw Arlen playing along with the flamenco records he would play in the Bronx apartment.
Roth attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City as an art student from 1966 to 1969. He then studied at the Philadelphia College of Art from 1969 to 1971. His band Steel lived with him and played in Woodstock, New York, on weekends, where he was discovered. In 1970, Steel put on the first Woodstock Reunion concert to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the festival in Bethel, New York, where Roth lived every summer since he was born. Steel was the only band and played four hours each day. Soon after, he moved to Woodstock and began his career as a professional guitarist.
He is featured performing on his 1953 Telecaster with Patti Smith in the 2019 Bob Dylan / Martin Scorsese film "Rolling Thunder." From the 1975 tour of the same name. Bob Dylan borrowed Roth's Martin 000-18 guitar that night, which Arlen bought from Ry Cooder earlier that year when Arlen was on tour with John Prine.
His first book, Slide Guitar, was published by Oak Publications when he was 21. In 2012 Thank You Les, a Les Paul tribute album and documentary, were released with Roth performing "Mr. Sandman" and his daughter Lexie Roth singing the Les Paul and Mary Ford song "Vaya Con Dios".
Roth is a Telecaster enthusiast who wrote the book Masters of the Telecaster detailing the techniques of many famous Telecaster guitarists.[2] He has been called "Master of the Telecaster."
Roth's version of "Scarborough Fair" is featured on the soundtrack of the film Lost In Translation.
In 1998, Roth lost his wife Deborah, and their first child Gillian in a fatal auto accident on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Gillian was 14 years old, and Deborah was 47. Gillian was an actress, a model, and a guitarist. She had just signed on to do a 27-episode TV show for Nickelodeon called the "Gunks" a show about an all-girl rock band, loosely based on "The Monkees."
Hot Licks video and audio instruction
In 1979 Roth and his wife Deborah started the Hot Licks Audio and Video label. With only $2000 left to their names, Roth decided that he was going to act on the idea he had had in 1973 to create taped musical instruction, as he had always encouraged his students to tape their private lessons. His very first advertisement featured 42 cassette lessons in all, stretched over 7 series of 6 tapes apiece. The tapes very quickly became very successful worldwide - many of his students were also very experienced professionals. While teaching Ralph Macchio the guitar parts for the movie Crossroads, he began recording his first videos (in 1984). Six of these featured Roth as instructor and one was by his friend John Entwistle, bass player of The Who. The close-ups of fretting, strumming, and other techniques he helped develop, and which were prominent in Crossroads, became the trademark of the videos.
The Hot Licks catalog grew to also include instructional videos for drums, banjo, lap steel, mandolin, voice and harmonica, with 150 artists and 180 videos. Roth has been recognized as the first to create video music instruction.[citation needed] In 2006 The Music Sales Group acquired the Hot Licks video catalog.[4]
From 2007 to 2012 Roth hosted a series of daily video lessons at Gibson.com.[5] It is estimated he has had close to 1 million students on Gibson.[citation needed] He also wrote daily blogs for Gibson Guitar. Arlen has also been known as the Master of the Telecaster.
Roth has stated that "many of these Hot Licks artists were also personal heroes of mine, and it was an honor to work with them".[6]
Roth wrote and performed most, and coached all of Ralph Macchio's guitar parts in the 1986 movie Crossroads and directed many of those scenes. He also served as the film's official authenticator of any scenes involving music, and the performing of the music. On one day, the scene of Robert Johnson recording was halted because Roth noticed that the guitar's tuning pegs were from the wrong era.
Roth's trademark tune is his instrumental version of "When a Man Loves a Woman", and was called "Perhaps the most intense workout ever recorded on a Telecaster" by Tom Wheeler of Guitar Player magazine. It reached No.2 on the British Pop Charts, and was used by BBC Radio to sign off the air every night for many years.
His column in Guitar Player, "Hot Guitar", ran for 10 years, and was later published as a book. He also wrote numerous articles for this and other magazines.
Roth performed on the live German TV show, Ohne Filter, with Jack Bruce on bass, in 1984.
In 2014 Roth was interviewed on Dan Aykroyd's syndicated "Elwood's Bluesmobile" radio show for his SLIDE GUITAR SUMMIT album, and they talked about when he was on SNL in 1978, and when he, John Belushi and Akyroyd initiated the first trial Blues Brothers performance to warm up the crowd before the show.
In 2016 Roth wrote and performed a solo acoustic guitar piece for an ESPN film at the Minskoff Theater in NYC with Daveed Diggs and Leslie Odom, Jr. of the play Hamilton.
