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 A ...