The 10 Years After bassist revisits the remastered 1969 album Shhh and reflects on Hendrix, Joplin, rejected Motorhead tapes, and why music still heals a polarized world.
If anyone deserves to write a memoir called Right Place, Every Time, it’s Leo Lyons. The bassist, producer, and founding member of 10 Years After sits with Don, Dean, and Tina on Press Play Conversations and drops a line that sums up an entire era:
“I feel a bit like the Forrest Gump of rock and roll.”
He’s not kidding. Lyons was in Hamburg when the Beatles were just another band hustling onstage; he played San Francisco at the dawn of psychedelic rock; he was onstage at Woodstock; he crossed paths with Hendrix and Janis when they were peers, not legends. Listening to him is like hearing history speak casually over tea — no myth-making, no ego, just memory.
The conversation starts with the newly remastered release of Shhh, the band’s 1969 record — the first they ever cut on 8-track. Lyons admits he was nervous to hear it again (“I’m scared to listen to something recorded 50 years ago”), but the new mix surprised him.
“It sounds clearer. You can hear things you couldn’t hear on the original.”
He lights up describing the moment labels approached him to reissue the album with photographs and a live 1969 recording from Helsinki that surfaced seemingly out of nowhere. “The record company found it, and they’re really glad they did,” Lyons says.
Lyons’ Woodstock story is not the romanticized version circulated by documentaries and nostalgia packages. He calls it what it was:
chaos, exhaustion, helicopters, mud, rain, and 26 toilets for half a million people.
“We knew nothing about it. We didn’t even know how big it would be,” he says. He didn’t understand the significance until weeks later, when he returned to the States and suddenly clubs that once held 2,000 people were drawing 20,000 on a Wednesday night.
Still, Lyons missed the immediate aftermath entirely — he rented a horse and mule and disappeared into the Sierra Nevada mountains for two weeks. By the time he returned, Woodstock had become a cultural earthquake.
Lyons pushes back on one myth: that 60s rock was born fully formed.
“It was 98% rejection,” he says.
“It still is.”
Bands were underground — playing for love, not for corporate planning. After Woodstock, everything changed.
“The lawyers moved in,” Lyons says. “The media woke up. The business changed.”
A four-word Lyons truth bomb: “It goes round in circles.”
What’s forgotten becomes influential later. Blues artists who never received credit or royalties suddenly become the backbone of rock guitar vocabulary decades later.
Lyons laughs often while discussing musical influence — and theft.
Leslie West once told him, straight-faced:
“I nicked your bass riff from ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ and played it backwards.”
No check arrived in the mail, but Lyon shrugs — that’s how music always worked.
ZZ Top comparisons? Sure. Motorhead? He actually produced early Motorhead recordings until the label refused to pay the bill — and the studio seized the tapes.
“Somebody needs to find those,” Don says in the interview. “Yes,” Lyons replies. “Everybody’s looking for unreleased tapes.”
Somewhere, in a forgotten storage vault, lost Motorhead sessions produced by Leo Lyons still exist.
The interview takes a thoughtful turn when Lyons reflects on politics and society.
Was 1969 more divided than today? Or have things gotten worse?
“The difference now,” he says, “is instant information. You hear everything immediately. It’s 24 hours a day — shootings, stabbings, bombings. It’s not good for the psyche.”
Dean notes that in the 60s, polarization produced timeless songs; today it produces posts. Lyons nods. “It probably won’t come out of this era the same way,” he says.
Still — he refuses to be cynical.
“Music is food for the soul,” Lyons says, speaking with a quiet clarity earned from decades in the business. “I would encourage anyone, no matter how bad they are or how old they are, to take up an instrument and just play.”
When Tina asks what song he would dedicate to the world, Lyons doesn’t hesitate:
“I’d Love to Change the World.”
It’s a song Alvin Lee wrote, and Lyons calls it “the best thing Alvin ever did.”
The track became an anthem not because it was perfect, but because it captured a moment — confusion, optimism, frustration, hope — in three minutes of musical tension.
The greatest accidental merch quote of the interview:
“I play music — I don’t dance.”
That one belongs on a Press Play shirt immediately.
Lyons doesn’t act like a historian. He talks like a survivor who doesn’t quite know how he survived.
He doesn’t mythologize Woodstock — he remembers the mud.
He doesn’t romanticize Hendrix — he remembers the gigs.
He doesn’t obsess over legacy — he remembers the 98% rejection that led to the 2% that mattered.
And that is why this conversation matters.
For listeners who want to experience the full story — Hendrix, Hamburg, Motorhead tapes, Spotify discoveries, first kisses, and lyrics lost to time — the complete interview with Don, Dean, and Tina is streaming now on Press Play Conversations.
To dive deeper into Leo Lyons’ music, history, and updates, visit:
👉 https://mosaic.pressplay.me/profiles/leo-lyons