Remembering Leslie West

LESLIE WEST WAS always an unlikely guitar hero. His massive physical presence — he weighed 300 pounds at the dawn of the Seventies — defied the longstanding vogue for undernourished-looking, rail-thin rock guitar slingers. And he never cultivated dazzling fretboard techniques, relying instead on pure soul, a powerhouse singing voice, and one of the meatiest electric guitar tones ever to burst from a speaker cabinet.

“I didn’t play fast,” West said in 2011. “I only used the first and third finger on the fingering hand. So I worked on my tone all the time. I wanted to have the greatest, biggest tone, and I wanted vibrato like somebody