Alvin Lee (19 December 1944 – 6 March 2013) was an English guitarist, singer and songwriter, who was best known as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the blues rock band Ten Years After.
Born Graham Anthony Barnes in Nottingham, Lee enjoyed listening to his father's jazz and blues 78s, discovering material he would later adapt to the rock idiom. He eschewed his father's guitar and his mother's ukulele for the clarinet until skiffle made him switch to guitar.
In 1960, he restyled himself Alvin Lee and formed the Jaybirds with the bassist Leo Lyons. Like the Beatles, they served their apprenticeship at the Star-Club in Hamburg, before returning to the UK and adding drummer Ric Lee and keyboard-player Chick Churchill. By 1966, they were gigging with three-hit wonders the Ivy League but their manager Chris Wright was much more taken with the blues repertoire they performed on their own.
Having renamed themselves after a newspaper headline referring to the emergence of Presley, Ten Years After had secured an engagement at the Marquee and became such a word-of-mouth sensation that Wright moved to the capital to manage them. Wright was a former Manchester University entertainment officer who teamed up with Terry Ellis to form the Chrysalis agency and Chrysalis Records. Income from Ten Years After helped finance Chrysalis, while Wright ensured that the band reaped the rewards of a punishing schedule, including a dozen US tours in less than five years. Lee's performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 was captured on film in the documentary of the event, and his 'lightning-fast' playing helped catapult him to stardom. The film brought Lee's music to a worldwide audience, although he later lamented that he missed the lost freedom and spiritual dedication of earlier audiences. Lee was named "the fastest guitarist in the West" and considered a precursor to shred-style playing that would develop in the 1980s.
Ten Years After had success, releasing ten albums together, but by 1973 Lee was feeling limited by the band's style. Moving to Columbia Records had resulted in a radio hit song, "I'd Love to Change the World" but Lee preferred blues-rock to the pop style the label preferred. He left the group after their second Columbia LP. With American Christian rock pioneer Mylon LeFevre, along with guests George Harrison, Steve Winwood, Ronnie Wood and Mick Fleetwood, he recorded and released On the Road to Freedom, an acclaimed album that was at the forefront of country rock. Also in 1973, he sat in on the Jerry Lee Lewis double album The Session...Recorded in London with Great Artists recorded in London, featuring many other guest stars including Albert Lee, Peter Frampton and Rory Gallagher.
A year later, in response to a dare, Lee formed Alvin Lee & Company to play a show at the Rainbow Theatre in London and released it as a double live album, In Flight. Various members of the band continued on with Lee for his next two albums, Pump Iron! and Let It Rock. In late 1975, he played guitar for a couple of tracks on Bo Diddley's The 20th Anniversary of Rock 'n' Roll all-star album. He ended the 1970s with an outfit called Ten Years Later, with Tom Compton on drums and Mick Hawksworth on bass, which released two albums, Rocket Fuel (1978) and Ride On (1979), and toured extensively throughout Europe and the United States.
The 1980s brought another change in Lee's direction, with two albums that were collaborations with Rare Bird's Steve Gould and a tour for which the former John Mayall and Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor joined his band. Lee's overall musical output includes more than 20 albums, including 1987's Detroit Diesel, 1989's About Time (the reunion album he did with Ten Years After) recorded in Memphis with producer Terry Manning and the back to back 1990s collections of Zoom and Nineteen Ninety-Four (US title I Hear You Rockin'). Guest artists on both albums included George Harrison.
In Tennessee, recorded with Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana, was released in 2004. Lee's last album, Still on the Road to Freedom, was released in September 2012. Lee died on 6 March 2013 in Spain. He died from "unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure" to correct an atrial arrhythmia. He was 68.
His extensive career saw him tour the world multiple times, release 21 studio albums, record 4 live albums and earned him the title “the fastest guitar in the West”. Through all of that, he stayed true to himself, making the music he wanted without outside influence or expectations earning him fans across the globe. At the time of his death, he had a sold-out show booked in Paris for early April and talked about recording a blues album with top musicians in the U.S.
(Edited from Wikipedia, alvinlee.com & The Independent)