Photo by Nicole Roegner

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The story of blues guitarist Buddy Guy as a boy, using a necktie pin as a phonograph needle to play a 78-rpm record of John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillin’” – by holding the pin between his teeth, no less – is one nugget in a gold mine of anecdotes in the book Guitar Masters: Intimate Portraits (Hal Leonard Books, $29.99). Author Alan Di Perna, a Phoenix resident and senior editor of Guitar World magazine, paints vivid portraits of nine awesome ax-men, including Guy, Dick Dale, and Keith Richards, who reveals the Stones and the Beatles had “a deal between us, almost” to not put their new records out at the same time. The full-color, glossy pages include several photos – perhaps most memorably a pre-big-beard shot of ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons.