The war began two hours ago, his wife is at home in northern California nine months pregnant, and Steve Morse is standing backstage in a Malibu nightclub hoping just to get through the day. Two out of every three great guitarists are poor, and of those two, one is just making it.

Morse flew himself in for the gig in a prop plane he paid for over time with Morse band airfare allotments; Edward Van Halen and Albert Lee came down the canyon road. This is no joke to Morse, whose wife is getting ready to go into labor, and Albert seems content just to have a quiet place to sit, but it's all fun for Ed, whose own pregnant wife just wants to go.

Word is that no one up in Ed's front office was particularly thrilled about his taking part in any extracurricular jamming that could signal interest or attention outside his big-bread-and-butter day gig with Van Halen the band. To Ed's credit, he insisted on joining this overnight supergroup to play at Musician's annual concert at the NAMM convention–and plug Ernie Ball's new Edward Van Halen guitar. More important, it's a chance for Van Halen to breathe some fresh creative air.

The Malibu gig is a warm-up, and Eddie can't stay put. He's circling the club like a dervish, jumping onstage to check his sound, jumping off to make nice with his wife, jumping into conversations with small gatherings of guests and jumping out mid-sentence. Ed suddenly appears near the dark corner table where Morse has been warming up. Eddie's face goes blank and grave as Steve's as he watches Morse's fingers do a quick dance over the strings of his guitar. He dashes off, leaving Morse to his intense ritual of practice.

When they join Albert and the rest of the band for soundcheck , Ed plugs himself into a bank of amplifiers and lays some familiar squeals across country tunes. Moments later, Albert and Steve lay country lines over Hendrix. It's one of those "fun" gigs that actually manages to entertain largely because the atmosphere is informal and non-competitive, and the soundcheck, like the dining room annex being used as backstage, is open to the world in four different directions. Even during the actual show, the first four bars of each guitarist's solos go unplayed for the exchange of delicate pinky-shakes or congratulatory high-fives. This is blowing time. This is country metal. This is Albert Lee's meat.

"Country swing, he smiles, that's what I'm best at, really. I'm just trying to keep up with these guys and all the whoooo!" His wife and another couple laugh. Yeah, Big Al, trying to keep up. The guy's a fire hazard up there.

Someone else adds diplomatically that bombast just isn't Albert's style, and he shrugs and looks at his wife, who puts her hand on his shoulder. "I don't think you work hard at it, do you?"

"Well, no, I don't." The women start laughing, but Albert is neither joking nor apologetic. "No, I just don't have my rig set up for that kind of sound, to begin with. I love a real clean sound."

"You've got your own style, which is great." The second woman cocks her head. "You don't want to sound just like all the rest." He smiles politely.

"I used to be worried that I didn't sound like all the other players."

"You didn't worry for long," says Mrs. Lee.

"Tonight is about as far out as we've ever gone," Steve laughs "And it's really a challenge. It's a humbling kind of gig, and that's important to do on a regular basis, to put myself in a position where I have nothing: no big rig, no control, nothing. I'm playing through those two little amps." He points to two small boxes that look like flashbulbs atop Edward's speaker wall. "It's like being out in a jungle with just a knife and finding your way back." Edward's a bit less metaphorical. He hops off the stage, sits down in the front row to hear the rest of the band howl away, then taps my knee and leans over: "I don't think my sound is right for this band."

But even if the most copied guitar sound in contemporary music isn't right for a bar band, there's still a place for it among friends. The band begins a second set and keyboardist Jimmy Cox sets everyone up; as the playing moves across the stage, from the right wings to the left, the three different lifestyles and approaches become most pronounced. Albert's soloing in the lower register is as resonant as a piano; fluid and deep rolling country figures swerve around torn-off blues phrases. When he kicks into overdrive he makes mountains of sound. Steve builds his lines slowly but with complex unpredictability, inching his way through the changes, does a Hawaiian-style interlude, then plays lines on the same theme in double-stop harmonics, finally drilling it home with dizzying speed-picking and screams. The place is stunned. Eddie takes the hint and eases into things patiently with nice, strong blues and a hint of wah-wah. He's having a great time up there, and he's so excited when they get around to playing "Fire" that he keeps coming in early with the guitar refrain.

Eddie has balls of brass for getting into what's basically an Albert Lee set of demanding hoedowns. Most of the time he rises to it, but he simply doesn't have the right hand to keep up with these cats. What he can't tackle with melody he pounds out by hitting his whammy bar in time to the song, sticking to Hendrix themes and screams. Morse plays the life out of a slow one, squeezing some liquid lines that sound like a pedal-steel, and by the time the the baton gets to Ed he knows his number's up–he's got a lot of assets, but being a sensitive balladeer isn't among them. When it's obvious he can't cut it in the few moments, Ed resorts to the "elephant," a novel way of making a guitar groan by hitting three dissonant notes and swelling up the volume. The crowd responds accordingly. But when everyone starts trading fours on a high-velocity country blues, Ed begs off and watches aghast as Albert and Steve burn chorus after chorus, Steve flailing arpeggios, Albert just simply, unbelievably Albert. The country boys really stick it to the city slicker this time; Ed's got the wind knocked out of him. He throws his head back and blows his cheeks out in disbelief.

The scene makes a troubling comment about music and celebrity, especially since the screams for the worst solos are as emphatic as the screams for the best. This doesn't slip by Morse. "That's part of anything," he says, practicing backstage after the set. "You ever notice those pictures of governments that you've never hear where they're having a parade and carrying a big poster of a guy wearing a headdress? He looks just like any of those citizens. But the fact that he's walking behind those pictures makes the people freak out. They wait for hours to see him go by, and they pray and they applaud and faint. It's part of the euphoria of rock music. Fame's a powerful drug, you know? Why do people pay to go to baseball games? It's not that exciting to watch. It's that they're close to what's happening, what they've seen only on TV. Just the fact that people recognize a song makes a huge difference, and they get into it more no matter what." Barroom chatter resumes its battle with televised news of war, and everyone is hugging one another and reliving the set. "I'm just here to add a little noise," Eddie keeps telling people. His wife, pregnant, hungry and impatient, grabs his wrist and drags him off into the night.

A day later, above the whoosh of flushing toilets, Eddie calls out his half of the conversation from the urinal. His voice honks around the room as he describes some construction work being done at home, particularly the attendant studio makeover which he says is transforming the sonic essence of his new album with Van Halen. This is a public hotel men's facility, but the traffic coming through is bearable, and the few music conventioneers who interrupt are polite about it–each courteously washes his hands before shaking Ed's. The idea of leveling one studio to put up another seems like a costly undertaking, Eddie.

"Naw, I didn't break it down, I added to it Okay, put it this way: What I used to have was the size of one racquetball court, because that's what it was, and I put everything in it. And then I changed it. I didn't fuck with that at all, I just put in a new console and added another racquetball court. The first racquetball court was sittin' like that"–he puts a cigarette in his mouth and chops out the design on the sink with the side of his hands, one perpendicular to the other. "Then I added another one sittin' like that. We added a whole drum room, so I can get live drum room so it just blows my shit."

This is something new to the Van Halen recording ethos, which Eddie's been instructed not to discuss. "The only reason I don't want to talk about the record is because it's not done. You know, when it's done, then I'm gonna talk about it. I don't even know what to..."

Well, there's also a sense of curiosity about what you want to see happen with the record–

"Can we wait, can't we wait with all that shit? I guarantee that I will give you an interview when the record is done.

"You know, put it this way–" "Put it this way," it turns out, is Ed's bridge between saying "I don't want to answer your question" and telling you whatever on his mind superficially resembles the topic he's been asked about. "The reason I hate all this shit is because if I start talking to you about it...'Oh, why didn't he talk to me about it?' You know, it's just like releasing a single too soon to one radio station, and the other ones get pissed off. You know what I'm saying? I just think it's bad for me to do, I dunno."

Eddie talks about a lot of things–his new record, his new studio, his new guitar, his unwillingness to talk. Absolutely nothing about him suggests any interest in self-examination. He obviously drinks to steel his nerves, so he's asked if he smokes cigarettes for the same reason. His tautological reply: "No, because I'm a smoker!" A sore spot on his mind–and he can't stop picking at it–is his uncredited contribution to the design of the Floyd Rose vibrato-bar device. It's faster if I explain: Floyd kept showing up at Van Halen's early Seattle gigs with a prototype that didn't yet feature knobs which allow for fine-tuning the guitar by hand; at that point it required cumbersome little wrenches. Over three years of Van Halen tours and Edward's urging, Floyd refined the unit to where tuning required no wrench adjustments. "I never asked Floyd for any thing for the help," Ed says, "and I'd like you to print that, too." He laughs. "I was very involved in development on that thing. I don't care what he says. He kind of threw me a bone, but I'm a bit ticked." Eddie started ticking even louder at this year's NAMM convention, where the stalwart Fender Guitars announced their side of a lucrative new licensing deal–with Floyd Rose.

Eds dismay over the transaction registers as little more than the affront you might suffer at not getting invited to a lawn party. The biggest problem Floyd's deal creates for Eddie is that when he called Floyd recently to get a couple of the units for testing, Floyd told him, "'I can't give you any. 'I said, 'What?!"' Ed groans, then taps off the tape recorder for the first of what will be several such episodes throughout the weekend. It's interesting: Even if he'd gotten his pound of Floyd, he'd have to sell countless guitars just to make a fraction of what he'd have made from, say, a proper negotiation for his unpaid solo on Michael Jackson's "Beat It." That's Eddie. At the moment he seems more interested talking about fine-tuners.

"Okay, so he showed up with a goddamn wrench! Now you need one for the front, and a different-size wrench for the strings to finetune. I'm goin', 'Ahh, that ain't fuckin' what I wanted.' So after three years, he finally got it right and I said, 'Okay, great. Now let's...' So that's kinda like having something to do with it, don't you think? You get involved with people where you think everything's going to be okay, and all of a sudden...you know, its like...I don't know. Put it this way–" A gentleman comes out of a stall, approaches Ed with an outstretched unwashed hand and says, "Just like to say how much I enjoy your music." Edward doesn't even think twice about it. "Obviously, the main thing I look for..."–he sips a beer–"is a sweet, warm sound that isn't like someone chuckin' razor blades at you. And something that's easy to play. That's why to make my new guitar, we copied the neck off my last guitar, because it's been played for years. So when you pick up the guitar it's like putting on some old favorite shoes, already worn in the way I play."

So everyone who buys one will have an exact replica of what you like in a guitar.

"I used to play with just one pickup, now I play with two. I got a right to change my mind, don't I? Put it this way: The way the guitar is is what I'm comfortable using. And who knows? In the future we might come out with another style guitar, you know? We might."

There's some discussion about you doing just that.

"Yeah, well, let's not talk about it yet."

Jeez, look, I don't care if we...

"No, no, no. What I'm saying is, I'm coming out with another guitar already, okay, real soon, but I don't want to talk about it until it comes out."

So if you had an opportunity to talk to Picasso while he was painting, you'd rather wait until he was finished and then listen to him tell you, "Oh, just look at the picture–that will answer your questions"?

"Okay, we're building another guitar. All right, all right, all right." (Ed turns out to be an easy mark after all.) "But the thing is, it's a very important part of this new record that's coming out. I'm using a bass, actually."

A six-string bass?

"Yeah, okay, and we're coming out with one, and until I get it sounding right, I don't want someone beatin' me to the punch. So I'd rather not talk about it until we have the prototype ready."

Meaning someone else is going to invent a six-string bass and come out with an album with your style of playing?

"Yeah, come on! Hey–you know how many times I've been fucked? Every goddamn company used to make a Strat style guitar with one pickup and one knob. That was not my idea, was it? I'd just rather not say anything until it's out there and people know it was my idea, just because...that's the way I want it.

"Put it this way. I don't like telling you I'm working on a song that sounds this way until I'm done recording it. For me to explain to you what I'm writing or what I'm designing or what I'm working on...serves no purpose until you can actually see it, hold it, touch it, play it."

How about, "Buy it"? What you're doing while you're recording is part of the creative process. That's what's interesting.

"Matt, Matt, Matt! At the same time, a lot of times, if you ask me a question and it's premature, it might not end up the way I'm telling you. And then people go, 'Hey, this guy's full of shit."'

Okay, fine. When you play with guys like Albert and Steve, does it inspire you to play differently, give you ideas to go back and work within your own music?

"I have no idea. Put it this way: You've heard me play before? Okay, you heard me play Thursday night. Did I play different?"

Than you usually do? No, but that's because you've only played with them a couple of times. But does it affect you?

"No. I mean, nothing really affects me, unless I drink too much." Ed's groan makes it quite clear that he's kidding. "Heh. No, I mean, obviously, everything you're exposed to somehow... If you're listenin' to the radio too much and you hear a certain type of music, sooner or later it's going to come back through you, you know what I mean?" He pauses. "I'm just nervous about this whole gig, seriously, since Thursday."

Are you intimidated by guitar players who. ..

"I'm intimidated by myself," he laughs. "I get like, sometimes..."

When you play with your brother and Michael Anthony you're a harmony center. To keep the sound of that trio fresh, do you have to keep reinventing yourself every time you go onstage?

"Let me say this, okay? In a funny way, it's questions like that that intimidate me more than anything, because to me, making music is a very from-the-heart-and-soul kind of deal, and I have no idea what I'm going to be playin' tonight. That's what I meant by, 'I intimidate myself,' cause I have no idea what the hell I'm doin'; it's like there's somebody up there pullin' the strings for me. It's not calculated, is what I'm sayin'. I don't know what the hell I'm doin'."

Country music, according to the thumbnail sketch of an English historian, is a derivation of English and Irish folk musics brought over to North America and popularized in the southern states. Albert is in the middle of this explanation while he, Ed and Steve get ready to pose for photographs. The band lie on their backs for the camera in a flower-shape pattern, legs out, and everyone sings and jokes at each other's expense. Morse is laughing as he practices.

Of the three star players on the bill tonight, Albert is the eldest by 10 years and by far the most reserved. Big Al's an English gentleman, one of country guitar's finest, and he's had an interesting ride indeed, jumping between solo projects and sideman tours with Eric Clapton and the Everly Brothers. Is it tough to be a country guitarist born in the wrong country?

"I don't think it's been detrimental at all, really. I don't think it's alien for anyone who's British to like that kind of stuff. To me it's more natural than a British person liking the blues, you know? I've got a unique approach to country probably because I was born in England; I've given it that rock edge, whereas otherwise I would have probably ended up like Ricky Skaggs. I admire Ricky's playing, but I would have been so embedded in country that it would have been hard to break out. I played in an R&B band, but I never did play hard rock. When everyone was buying Marshall stacks I went the other way and was using a Fender Bassman; to me that was what a guitar should sound like, and I've always maintained that attitude. I love it loud, but above all, it's got to be really clean."

Like Morse, whose brief affair with the rock band Kansas in 1986 betrayed starvation for exposure as much as plain financial necessity, Al has hooked up lucrative gigs like the Everlys and Emmylou Harris to make the rent. Unlike Morse, he's often found himself in the company of mainstream names that threaten to supersede him by something far worse than sales: by placing him in a forum where his formidable abilities blend into a utilitarian backdrop. The crime isn't that people don't know it was him on "Lay Down Sally"; it's that the gig showcased but a fraction of a big, beautiful picture.

"There were good and bad things about that gig with Eric," Al admits after a long pause. "It did hold me back musically in a lot of respects. But I had fun. Plus, I was earning good money. Eric is a dear, good friend of mine–we met in '65, '66. When he asked me to join his band I knew it wouldn't be stretching me, but it was terrific fun and I could learn a lot from him, and he maybe learned something from me. I don't know if he did, though, because he's so traditional; the blues is everything, and he doesn't like any slight deviation off the course." The integrity of Clapton's blues is a separate shouting match; what could Lee possibly learn from him? "I did learn how to relax, get the most from the least amount of notes," says Albert. "That's never been my forte. I mean, if there's a chance to play a dozen notes, I'll play'em. And obviously it's going to go over a lot of people's heads, but I've never played for other people anyway. I've always just played to enjoy myself, really."

"You can have an elegantly simple melody that's very fast, too," Steve Morse adds. "Eric Johnson's song 'Cliffs of Dover' is arpeggiated. If you take the top notes of the arpeggio, it's a simple melody, but if you break it up, it's a complex part. Simplicity can be implied, or just simply played out. But some part of it, from a distance, has to sound simple. Like that song by Focus years and years ago?" "Hocus Pocus"? Steve is sung the long, complex line, and he points out the first note in each phrase. Then he sings those notes back. "That's the melody," he explains, "but it was broken up into arpeggios. There are ways to have a lot of complexity in a simple tune."

Steve is a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll. "And I love both styles," he says. "I love the bending and beautiful stuff Albert does, and Eddie kind of defines rock guitar these days. And shit, I don't know what the hell I am. I'm not jazz, I'm not rock, I'm not country, I'm not anything. So I feel a little identity-less onstage," he laughs.

Steve is also a little bit too self-deprecating for someone so damn good. Some might say too good, which usually makes life difficult in a market quick to affix labels and slow to chew on anything it doesn't immediately recognize as "product." "You ever notice in a live show, the guitarist will be playing all night and then the bass player takes one little solo and the audience just goes nuts? Because it's different. People like the change of pace, just as they like the idea of a famous person being close by."

But that's only a conclusion you come to after years of being a focused artist without being rewarded with that kind of attention. "VVhen you're in front of an audience, you have that audience," he explains. "VVhen you release a record and they're playing all the big things on MTV and on radio, they're not going to put you on just because you're different. If I was put in front of an audience I would obviously–obviously–have more success. I wouldn't be the big-time superstar because I'm not going for that real common denominator thing. That's why rap music is barely even singing; it's the denominator everyone can get into, which is rhythm. But when you take rhythm and add complexity on top of it and then weird composition on top of that, you're getting into more selective audiences."

In the areas of arrangement and composition, Morse's new Southern Steel is an abrupt turnaround from High Tension Wires, a very personal solo recording that summoned everything he ever touched: rural twang, passionate excess, lofty structure, raw speed. Never self-indulgent, it was a masterpiece that spoke as much about the artist as it did the virtuoso. There's no mistaking Steel for a Dregs record, though a cynic could perceive its rock focus as tailored for the mass market Morse has yet to tap.

"Our marketing plan is the same as it's ever been," he says. "They're not going to do any videos, we're not going to be on Letterman, so what does it matter when we tour? It would help if we could tour with another guitarist who had a different audience, but I don't hold my breath. The only way I've survived is by being self-sufficient, and that's the way it always will be. It's rare that a break happens. And as far as big breaks happening, I don't think they ever have."

Steve's used to putting his butt on the chopping block, maintaining complete control, which makes the all-star gig so intense. He built his studio; on tour he loads, drives and fixes the truck, and he needs to be pin-sharp to fly the band's Cessna 310 after a long midnight haul. "People say, 'How can you own your own studio?' It's simple: How can you give the money to another studio? People say, 'How can you own your own plane?' Well, people own cars to go to work. You just use the money you'd be spending. Things like that give you more control over your life. It adds stress, being further in debt, but if you're willing to accept that, you can have things you really can't even afford," he laughs. "Knowledge is power: The more you know, the more you see ways around problems.

"There's no tour support from the record company, no big advertising, there's nothing except what we do ourselves to get to those pockets of people who have been kind enough to keep coming back. That's my reality of the music business. What you're doing in Musician makes it possible to keep doing it at a certain level–it would be even smaller without that–and I really appreciate it. But the bottom line is, self-suffficiency gives me security in this business. Another way to have security is to have a lot of money and a portfolio. But this is a different way, and it's an okay way. I feel comfortable with it."

Morse is packing up to move from California to Florida, where he was born (note: Steve was born in Ohio, not Florida) and where he formed the Dixie Dregs. He'd just finished setting up his elaborate garage studio when the deal closed on the house. "It's the only way to sell the place," he says with a shrug. "You know, if you want it to rain, you've got to wash your car."

Playing with Albert and Steve presents a different kind of challenge, wouldn't you say?

"Sure. Yeah. You're right," Ed says, taking a swig. "It is a different...it's a whole different ball of wax, uh, but I'm still kind of doing my thing along with them."

Are you refining''your thing"? Do you ever think of different colors to add to it?

"I'm a couch picker. I sit on the couch, watch TV and pick. And if my style changes, it's very subconscious. I do not say, 'Okay, now I'm gonna do this.'l don't even know what a pentatonic scale is. I seriously don't. I've said this in the past, that my whole trip is falling down the stairs and landing on my feet–hopefully. Because if I counted the stairs and put one foot in front of the other, I'd probably trip."

You had so much acclaim when you were young. A lot of musicians stagnate because when they hear, "That's great, keep doing it," they feel people don't expect them to grow away from the formula.

"I think I've changed in lots of ways, man. I'm playin' a lot more keyboards, I think I'm writing better music. See, I'm not just a guitarist; I write songs, you know?"

Why don't you do a solo album? It could be incredible.

"Well, I'll answer that right there. Every record I do is a solo record, because it's all my music."

I've always thought that if you were working with a better rhythm section–no offense to your brother...

"Oh, oh, oh, oh." Edward leans back and turns away, almost bracing himself. "You say that one more time, we're stoppin' this right now. My brother is the baddest motherfucker on the planet on the drums."

Okay, but let's be honest, Eddie. If your bass player allowed you and your brother to attack more interesting music, it might push you as well. I know Michael Anthony's your pal, but there's...

"What's the point to being pushed?"

Well, if you're not fighting your way out of a jungle, Ed, you'll never know. So let's go ask an objective outside authority on Van Halen. "What happens is a necessary process." David Lee Roth is wandering around his home as he talks. Dave likes to keep moving; it helps the flow. "Good musicians generally pick one or two kinds of music they like, and that's all they listen to and that's all they play! Great. We live in the age of specialization. The positive side is that as you become increasingly sport-specific, you develop abilities you otherwise wouldn't. But the downside to specialization comes in the definition: You learn more and more about less and less until you know absolutely everything about nothing."

Roth is more diplomatic than you'd expect, considering the lashing he took from the Van Halen camp–even from new vocalist Sammy Hagar, who didn't even know Roth–when he and the band split after their breakthrough 1984. "It's not something you have choice over," notes Roth, "once you've been in a band you 'grew up with,' a la Van Halen. We started off making a living for the first time off of music, and you learn a lot in that phase. What you learn and experience there affects your music and your character as a human being. And you can't replace that virgin experience. Once you're no longer with that grouping, one person has to become musical director."

Van Halen Mach 2 has for the last several years functioned because, at least commercially, their careers as individuals and as a collective have been encouraged to operate inside an impenetrable bubble. But unnatural insularity can be self-destructive. Roth sighs, admitting he probably wouldn't even recognize today the personalities he shook hands with six years ago, but his reflections about what once motivated his old band strike a telling contrast to the present. "We would alternate. With Van Halen, you got all five sides of the coin, whereas most musicians intentionally flatten it into a one dimensional image: easily palatable, instantly digested. So in essence, here is the 'mean' band"–Dave affects a deep, mean drawl–"'Hey, you big bully. 'You can tell he's a bully from all the belts. And here's a band who is socially conscious and sticks with one sales pitch. We never did that in Van Halen. You would have elements of brooding and great celebration, often in the context of the same song, so that you could reinterpret infinitely what you were hearing. Were we angry? Were we happy? Were we happy to be angry? Well, yeah, we all feel all three of those things, but you very rarely get to the third level in most big rock contexts. And it has to happen musically, as well as lyrically."

"You don't care a-bout me, I don't care a-bout that..." Someone is doing a damn good Hendrix a la John Wayne through the P.A. at soundcheck for the big Saturday gig. Steve runs through the heads of some of his new songs, then he and Edward compare shots at the solo break from "Whole Lotta Love." A call from the floor implores Ed to "Do the elephant!" and with the wattage he's packing, the empty ballroom shakes as if under siege from a passing herd; Ed shows Steve the right notes, but Steve's Lilliputian amp setup is just too weak for the elephant. While they wait for Albert, they work through other chestnuts: Zeppelin's "No Quarter" gets a rise out of the crew, and Morse kills it. Drummer John Ferraro cowbells the intro to Van Halen's version of "Dance the Night Away" and Eddie chimes right in with the tapped harmonics from the recorded guitarbreak.

Guitar etymologists need only compare the verse arpeggiations, sliding barre chords and overbent notes in "Good Times, Bad Times" to Van Halen's parts in Fair Warning's "Unchained"; young Ed may have had his fingers doing Clapton, but he was hearing Page. Those are the nuances that make Eddie great, more so than his showing on a vehement stop-time rendition of Albert's "Country Boy," where his creative use of trademark hammer-on lines raises eyebrows even among seasoned hoedowners like Big Al and Morse. There are times in the set when you know he's just riding his amps where he once might have had something fresh to say, back when he used speed as a release rather than a recourse. Other times, he's almost appealingly primitive against the NAMM backdrop of his more practiced, less inebriated imitators. Eddie still rips it up, but as good as he is, you'd hope that after so many years he would organize it a little more cohesively.

There's terrific pressure on Ed to be a superhuman soloist, and he wears it in the way he's so scattered, so insulated even within an insider-only environment where everybody loves and respects him not only as a music hero, but as an unlikely industry kingpin–sort of the way the inventor of Teflon might be treated at a cookware convention. He's not a shroud-me kind of star except when his personal safety is in jeopardy; fact is he's probably the most guileless person in high-level rock, which makes it painful to see how his talent is hoarded by imitators, by his "people" who discouraged him from appearing with Albert and Steve and who fear he might communicate with a journalist for any purpose except that which serves expressly to move product.

But Ed's been caught up in the machine so long they've even got him rused; he expects the same tired questions, responds to his band with the same tired solos, and everything becomes strict black and white. This may sound like insider quibbling, but there's an artistic price paid when the motivations of a talented musician–and as instrumentalists go, rock has very few–are swayed by "people" who respect his music as if it were no more valuable than, say, a Teflon crock at a cookware convention.

For that reason he also doesn't get to mention Allan Holdsworth, whose formative influence on Ed indirectly makes him the second most copied guitarist in rock. Ed and Allan have been casually friendly since jamming years ago in L.A., and in a sense, their relationship mirrors the spiritual connection a star like Clapton has with Buddy Guy, that Stevie Vaughan had with Albert King. All three pairs have jammed, exposing the indebtedness to a small audience; all bore notable referencing on pop records, from verbatim Albert licks by Stevie on Bowie's "Let's Dance" to the Holdsworth whammy-bar dips in "Panic Station" that not only became much of Eddie's acclaimed "Dreams" solo, but a staple of the younger player's style. The parallels are endless here. In thinking of them, it's hard not to flash on a scene that takes place every sundown, when the soup line gathers just outside the mission directly across from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

Right now Eddie is in his most enviable position yet this weekend. He's in an unlocked room crowded with strangers and only four people, those whose meals are getting cold a few feet away, are gawking at him uncontrollably. Make that five–with her seventh visit to the table, our waitress has just undone what could have been a convincing stab at professional attentiveness.

"I'm not one of these kind of guys who's out to change the world," Eddie proclaims. "I'm just doing what I do. And I'm having fun doing it. You know what I'm saying'"

But you choose who you work with.

"Yeah, yeah. And to me, it's like family. I'm not into divorce or putting my kids up for adoption," he laughs. "You would like to see me, probably, explore different avenues. Well, I'm not into it. I'll explore whatever avenue I want to explore at the time. It's like...let me turn this off just one second." Eddie clicks off the recorder again. He seems to do that solely as his honest version of a politically correct gesture, as he only does it after saying something that just borders on being volatile, and follows up with unrecorded, off-the-record comments too innocuous to be even remotely incriminating to anyone. This time it's about not really wanting to play with other musicians.

If you like the idea of falling and seeing if you land on your feet, I say when tape rolls, getting in with players who challenge your creative abilities might find you moving into more interesting areas.

"The challenge to me is just doing what I do," Ed says. "I'm playing with these guys because they're buddies, you know, it's a lot of fun. I'm not doing it to raise my consciousness musically or anything. I don't care! I'm a musician by luck. I do what I do because I like it and I happen to make money at it, and I'm grateful for that, but I do not plan the shit."

You can be a player of incredible subtlety and scope when you get the opportunity...

"But at the same time, I am just a medium, man. The shit's coming from somewhere. I don't sit down and really think! I just get in this mode and I do what I do. That's why I hate doing interviews, because people ask me, 'How do you do what you do?'l don't know!"

I didn't ask you that, Edward.

"No, I know. I mean, you're hintin' to it."

I just asked if you ever thought about playing with a different band, that's all.

"No, no. I mean, my brother and I started from day one, and when you hear this next record, you're gonna go, 'Holy shit.' You're gonna rethink the whole rhythm section. Because there's one thing about playing live, and another thing about capturing it on record. And I'll tell you, man, this new record is like drums from hell." Ah, Eddie turns out to be a really easy mark after all. "This is Al and [producer] Andy Johns really cookin' together and getting what Al perceives as being the shit. We've never captured on record what the shit is, really."

The shit is a live thing, then? So technology is getting to where...

"No, it's not necessarily technology, it's being recorded right," Edward laughs. "Flat-out, stone-cold simple."

But that means putting down your tracks separately, where you lose that live interplay. I guess your production procedures are pretty natural, but for the first time since the new band, you're recording guitar parts while standing behind the console. Which seems like the opposite of what a player like you would want to do.

"That's what I'm doing, yeah. But the thing is, I can see my brother, and...l don't know. Actually, every track, I've played behind the console."

Every track on this new record?

"Yeah, yeah."

And the band interplay is there anyway?

"No, well."

Do you feel it's possible that the performance will be affected by the method of recording?

"Oh, yeah! But the way we're recording now is the way, because the way it sounds is three people playing at the same time. Obviously we're overdubbing the vocals, and actually, a lot of 'em are live, too. Sammy's in the control room singin' through a Peavey hand-held mike," Ed laughs. "A lot of it works, a lot doesn't; some of it, we need those old German Neumanns, and this and that, to get the sizzle, depending on how many guitars I overdub. You've got to be able to hear everything."

How did you usually do the drums before you built a drum room?

"Close-miked, you know, and Al used to use a Simmons bass drum, which is kind of bullshit, but it worked for the time."

But the drum sound you guys had was a trademark.

"Oh, you're talkin' about Al's snare; that's the way he tunes the fucker. Oh, yeah. Put it this way: Between Alex and Andy Johns–I mean, Andy Johns, he's a cartoon, he's the greatest, man. He did Stairway to Heaven, all that shit. All the best Zeppelin stuff, in my mind, and our stuff sounds very, very much the way Alex and I always imagined it to be. All the tone that comes out is on record now, as opposed to where before, we sounded very thin on record, and it sounded good live. And now, it's going to be hard to sound like this live. It's fat, it's thick, it's big stick, you know what I mean?"

Albert closes his eyes and laughs quietly as one of his all-star cronies drops his pants and shoots him the moon through the veranda window. This time, backstage is the cruel combination of a ground-floor hotel suite without a bathroom, lined with nothing but stacks of beer cases. Eddie has to penetrate a crowd of fans just to take a leak.

Someone who obviously overheard the combination code for the suite's door squeezes by and asks Steve if he was the one who did the hogs–a simulated pack of pigs snorting–at the end of an inbred Dregs tune called "Pride O' the Farm." Morse tells him no, that was the road crew, they're good at that sort of thing. The room is packed with guitarists–Yes' Trevor Rabin smiles and mingles aristocratically, Toto's Steve Lukather bear hugs everyone in range. Eddie is bouncing off the walls.

All Albert sees through the glass is indistinct confusion. The last three hours have been pretty good for him; the next few years stand to be even better if he makes the right decisions about where to take his music. "I was a real popular guy in the '70s in country rock when Emmylou was at a peak, and then it tapered off. I was on the road with Eric, and I guess people forget about you. But it seems to have gone right around again. A lot of people call me, and it's fun."

But Al's still kicking himself. The response to his playing, particularly among the hairdo crowd, has been tremendously positive. It's criminal that after 20 years of s stunning audiences, he's still got to prove himself every time he steps onstage, every time he's got to overcome a bigger "name." He must feel it. I feel it, and I'm not even up there. Ed sure feels it; running from the suite to the stage between sets, he keeps telling Al how amazing he is. "I get such satisfaction doing a whole set on my own, singing and playing," Al reflects. "I finally feel I've had a chance to play when I get offstage. I didn't really know how much I was missing until I actually did it."

So there's no bitterness about being so good yet not appreciated for it?

"I thought about it a lot. I've been on the road since 1960 and a lot of my friends become millionaires, guys that I just played with, like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and Steve Howe. But I have no regrets, really, because if I haven't made any money in this business, I have nobody to blame but myself. I have the ability but chose not to go in that direction. That has held me back, but I've enjoyed it, I really have. I think my playing is getting better and I seem to be working more, so I can't complain. If it just carries on like this, I'll be happy."

James Burton, basking in legend, is inside talking to Morse. "Everything you played made sense," Burton tells him. "There's a bit of confusion with players that want to play exceptionally fast; I mean, Van Halen has his style, but there're so many copy guys playin' that particular style, it has no real identity. A lyrical melody makes more sense. Van Halen's a good friend of mine; I love what he does, but after hearing so much of it...I mean, it's all over as far as I'm concerned. This"–James shakes his hands, miming frantic air guitar–"is not where it's at. If you want to sell records."

And if you don't want to sell records? "Then you're out of the business," says Burton. "Then you're doin' it for fun. I don't like to tell someone how to do things, 'cause it's their music and they have to do what they enjoy, but there's one thing you can bet on: If you're going to be in the business, you have to play what people can understand. Hopefully, we make the choice to play the kind of music they can accept and they'll buy. But the great thing is to be able to play simplicity, to know where to put the notes. A guitar solo is so important. Like this guy..."

Burton puts his arm around Steve, who had turned away briefly to sign an autograph. Burton repeats what he said about simplicity's power to sell records, and somebody asks Morse if he thinks that's true.

"To sell records?" he laughs. "Well, I wouldn't know."

"He's in the bathroom!"

A group of people spot Ed en route to another toilet, follow him in and look under the metal partitions for his sneakers. He's got them lifted off the floor and against the stall door to repel intruders. He's chased by throngs as he leaves.

One month later, Kevin James Morse is wailing in his mother's arms as Steve comes in from a morning spent soldering wires for an equipment rack. Outside the kitchen window he watches the first long overdue rainstorm of the season begin its attack on a harsh regional drought. His wife returns the baby to the nursery, and Steve is beaming even through his exhaustion. Kevin is going to be proud of his dad, who's getting ready for a run of solo gigs he's booked–fly in, unpack the gear, mix the sound, perform with tapes made in the garage, pack up and fly home, then start the whole thing over a few hours later. It's a shower of challenges, playing without a net, just making it through the day. Emerson would be proud too: right here among us is an artist, a bastion of self reliance. He may not hang platinum on his garage wall, but he's got something better.

"I'm actually very aware of what it takes to make it big," he says. "I know the business well enough to know exactly what it takes. It takes a bit of luck on top of setting yourself up for it. You have to be lucky. But the reason I haven't set myself up for the big image is I just can't do it with a straight face," he laughs. "But that's okay–it's okay to be different. Music is supposed to express what you are, and not everyone wants to be the corporate head, you know?"

Corporate heads rest on corporate shoulders–they're stuck in one place and can't look around. "Well, I'm not," says Morse, "because I don't depend on anything. I just do what I want musically. So right, marketing-wise it never can happen. But who cares? There's other ways to make a living"

Transcribed by John D. Smith