THERE’S A TIME when the phone’s ringing and burning up, then there comes a time when the phone doesn’t ring as much. That’s just reality,” Eddie Martinez says. “I think every guitarist experiences that in one way or another, especially when you’re in the studio session scene. You have your period when you’re hot, and then the time comes when you’re not. It is what it is.” For the better part of the 1980s, nobody was hotter than Martinez. Thanks to his arena-quaking rhythms and paint-peeling solos on Run-DMC’s groundbreaking single “Rock Box,” the guitarist’s prodigious skills — everything from walloping crunch to buttery-smooth grooves to whacked-out, explosive leads — was sought out by the likes of Robert Palmer, David Lee Roth, Steve Winwood, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger and a host of other music legends.
“It was an exciting time,” says the Queens, New York-born guitarist who began his career in the mid-Seventies playing with the funk-rock band Labelle. “It was the culmination of a lot of years when I played with people like Nona Hendryx, George Duke and Stanley Clarke. A lot of situations didn’t call for frontal guitar, but other opportunities emerged that called for me to crank it up. I was kind of bubbling under the surface for a while, and then it all kind of exploded. It was like a sequence of events that just blew my mind.”
Martinez laughs at the serendipity of it all, especially since he admits that he never had a career path mapped out. “In my early
