Coco Montoya is left-handed, but he plays a guitar strung for a right-handed player, which means every string is upside down: his downstrokes hit the thin high strings first and he bends notes by pulling toward the floor instead of pushing toward the ceiling. Born on October 2, 1951 in Santa Monica, California, he did not begin his professional career as a guitarist at all. In the mid-1970s he was recruited as the drummer for Albert Collins, who took him under his wing and taught him his signature blend of freezing, crystalline treble and fiery, overdriven runs. This episode looks at how a drummer’s sense of the pocket and micro-timing, filtered through an inverted fretboard, produced a sound nobody else could physically replicate.

The conversation follows the chance night in the early 1980s when John Mayall heard Montoya playing in a Los Angeles bar and recruited him into a reformed Bluesbreakers, where he stayed for ten years. It argues that the decade as a sideman was not hiding but an incubator, a paid master class in pacing a show and reading a room without the pressure of his own name on the marquee. It then covers his 1995 solo debut Got a Mind to Travel at roughly age 44, his appearance that year on the Cate Brothers album Radioland, a 2002 Bo Diddley tribute, and a run of twelve solo albums including Suspicion, Dirty Deal, Hard Truth, Coming In Hot, named a favorite blues album of 2019 by AllMusic, and Writing on the Wall in 2023.

• What actually changes in attack and phrasing when a guitar’s strings are reversed
• Why starting on drums gives a lead guitarist an unusual command of rhythm and negative space
• How rare it was for a bandleader like Albert Collins to teach his own drummer to become a guitarist
• Why ten years with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers mattered more than an early solo leap
• How debuting as a solo artist in his mid-40s fits the lived-experience demands of the blues