Jim McCarty (guitarist)

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Jim McCarty is an American blues rock guitarist from Detroit, Michigan. He has performed with Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels, the Buddy Miles Express, Cactus, the popular Detroit rock band The Rockets, and more recently, Mystery Train.

He also recorded with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Seger. He has a classic heavy blues-rock style that has inspired fledgling guitar players for more than thirty years now.

Since the '60s his respective band tenures — Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, the Buddy Miles Express, Cactus, the Rockets, Mystery Train — have borne the twin marks of diligence and class. Among a certain generation of heavy-rock fans, he remains one of America's most esteemed musicians. It's telling, though, and more than a little bit vexing, that among the Motor City's contemporary garage-punk scenesters who've elevated his peers Ron Asheton and Fred "Sonic" Smith to godhood, McCarty's a prophet without honor — and he remains a performing mainstay locally.

In 2006, he participated in a Cactus reunion, performing in New York City, Sweden, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. It coincided with the release of a new Cactus album, Cactus V. In 2007, Cactus played a Detroit date, a McCarty homecoming, to a sold-out, standing room only house. In an August 2006 interview on VH1 Classic, Ted Nugent remarked "I'm the only guy in Rock'n'Roll that plays that hollow body jazz guitar and it's because in 1960 I saw Jimmy McCarty creating those big fat full chords like I do on "Stranglehold"; I learned that from Jimmy McCarty. Remember the name Jimmy McCarty. He is as important as Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and Les Paul...A god on guitar."

Jim lives near his friend and bandmate John "Bee" Badanjek in a suburb of Detroit with his two black cats Lou and Dexter...

Contents

[edit] Selective Discography

[edit] Buddy Miles Express

  • Expressway to Your Skull (1968)
  • Electric Church (1969)

[edit] Cactus

  • Cactus (1970)
  • One Way... Or Another (1971)
  • Restrictions (1972)

[edit] The Rockets

  • Love Transfusion (1977)
  • Rockets (Turn Up the Radio) (1979)
  • No Ballads (1980)
  • Back Talk (1981)
  • Rocket Roll (1982)
  • Live Rockets (1983)

[edit] Mystery Train

  • Love Lost


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