Blood, Frets and Tears: Documentary Celebrating the Guitar Gods Coming Soon

Blood, Frets and Tears is a music documentary celebrating the guitar and many of the great players from the 60s through the 80s. Directed by Andrew Klein [Randy Rhoads: The Quiet Riot Years (2012) and Tuff Luck (2015)], the upcoming film is currently set to be released on November 11, 2017, however, the official trailer, which has been embedded below, gives a release date of December 2017.

The world was first brought to its collective knees through the innovations and inventiveness of four extraordinarily gifted guitar gods who emerged during the 1960s: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. True masters, this quartet revolutionized the sound and style of the electric guitar. Then in the late ‘70s, another God-in-waiting emerged, a European immigrant who would create his own six-string vocabulary. What Eddie Van Halen wrought on “Eruption,” a track from the group’s eponymous debut album, was a style that would come to be known as tapping. This unorthodox approach to guitar playing coupled with his spectacular fretboard wizardry and mindblowing musicality and imagination, ushered in a new generation of players all consumed by the pursuit of mastering this new tapping phenomenon.

Paul Gilbert, Yngwie Malmsteen, George Lynch, and other forward-thinking fret warriors cracked the code and added personal twists, deviations and left turns in writing a lexicon all their own. These whammy bar wonders were out in front in leading the charge of a sonic assault that was eventually heard ‘round the world.

Blessed with extraordinary gifts and driven in a singular fashion that is difficult to imagine, these electric troubadours sacrificed all they had in hopes of finding their own voices. Now these plugged-in pioneers tell their tales in a series of candid and historic interviews. The film brings together compelling conversations with legendary guitar builders, renowned music journalists, photographers and influential record executives who closely examine both the birth and aftershock of an unprecedented musical movement.