Corey Feldman discusses his limits as a guitar player, copping David Gilmour’s tone and why his viral guitar solo really is a joke

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Known for his roles in ‘80s movies Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Gremlins, The Goonies and Stand by Me, plus his complex association with Michael Jackson and polarizing TV show Corey’s Angels, Corey Feldman’s name has long been a tabloid target.

He’s also been making music since the ‘90s. He dropped Love Left in 1994, followed by Former Child Actor in 2002, Angelic 2 the Core in 2016 and Love Left 2: Arm Me with Love in 2021. But by his own admission, people generally refuse to take that work seriously.

It didn’t help when a video of Feldman ripping it up on an EVH guitar went viral over the summer. “I know great guitar work, and I’m a fan,” he says with a smile. “I’m a very basic rhythm guitarist – and I’m very pleased with that.”

The performance in question is at the tail end of a song titled The Joke, which he included in his set while opening for Limp Bizkit. It drew varied reactions from laughter to rage. “I’m not surprised,” he says. “In fact, I was hoping for it!

“I know how it works. I’m so used to being picked on that I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to go out there and do something completely ridiculous, just to see if they try and hate on it. If they hate on it, they're playing right into my hand.’ The solo is the joke. You’d think people would get it, like ‘Obviously, he’s no lead guitarist!’”

When did you start playing guitar?

“I started taking lessons when I was 12, for a year or two in junior high. But I wasn’t like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be the greatest guitarist.’ I have long fingers but smaller hands, so it’s hard for me to wrap my fingers around most necks – which made it hard to be a soloist.”

So you fancied yourself as a rhythm guitarist?

“I can play rhythm pretty good, but I can’t play barre chords – I don’t have the stretch. Knowing I was never going to be a crazy great guitarist, I made do with what I had and learned how to work around it.”

How does that work on your records?

“Gregg Sartiano, my musical partner and guitarist, has been with me on my solo work for 12 years. Also there’s a guy named Rob Heskin, who took over on my second record. On my first-ever solo album I had Lita Ford.”

Who writes the guitar parts?

“I come up with most of them. I hear exactly what I want when I’m writing the music. I’ll tell the guitarist, ‘I want you to play this note for note.’ They’ll come up with stuff and I'll go, ‘Yeah, that’s perfect.’ Or I’ll say, ‘No, let’s try it this way.’ It’s always a collaborative effort.”

What’s the purple guitar you’ve been using in the videos?

“I have a great collection of around 50 guitars at my studio, mostly Fenders. Fender is my sponsor; they’ve been so good to me through the years. When I’m on stage I always have a Fender, but the one I’ve been using for the solo is a beautiful purple EVH 5150. It’s got that kill switch button on it that I love so much!

“Then I’ve got my Road Worn Fender with special David Gilmour EMG pickups and DR strings. I know guitars pretty well because my idol – I guess you’d say – is David Gilmour.

“He knows a lot about guitars and constructs his own ones specifically for tone. Nobody has a tone like him. If you listen to my Truth Movement records, you’ll notice I studied Gilmour’s tone pretty hard; our tones are as similar as you can get without ripping them off.”

The viral videos show you can play fast when you want to – though some people seem to think you’re faking it.

“I guess the biggest compliment is that people are like, ‘There’s no way you’re shredding like that – it’s got to be fake!’ People say I was ‘lip-syncing the guitar,’ which is a new one to me. I didn’t even know you could do that! If I was playing with my tongue, that would work pretty well!”

And you’re not faking it.

“No. The Joke is literally my new single. It was specifically written for this tour because of the trolls and haters I’ve had to deal with throughout my music career, who refuse to believe that my music is legitimate.

“Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands – or whatever fans we have around the world – love the music, and it moves them. But there are haters who harass us every time we put something out. And for those people, we wrote The Joke.

“I wrote the lyrics to a guy who’d been making videos, saying I was some type of Spinal Tap act. And it’s because there were moments from 30 years of touring when I hit a microphone with my tooth, I yelled at the lighting guy, or the sound went out and I yelled at the sound guy. There’s just little things that happen to everybody.

“But of course, everybody’s filming me, and every one of those moments from little club dates through the years got put into a gag reel, and they said, ‘Look, he’s doing it for show – nobody has that many problems on stage!’

“But they don’t know touring and live music. We’re humans; there are problems every single night. Sometimes those mistakes are impactful to where I have to say something, but it’s maybe once or twice a tour.”

In essence, the solo is a joke within The Joke.

“I was like, ‘We all know I’m not a lead guitarist, but I’m going to come up with something that’s listenable.’ It shows people that I know my way around a guitar, although I’m no great expert on guitars. And that’s kind of the whole point.”

Why do you think some people still refuse to believe you’re playing for real?

“To be honest, it comes from a hate campaign that started when I came forward about the bad things that happened to me as a kid. The timing was right when my music started blowing up. They felt the best way to hurt me was to make me paint a frame around me that I was crazy.

“It’s like, ‘Okay, anything he says, nobody’s going to believe, because we’re going to paint him as an egomaniac who just wants attention.’ They’d say, ‘He’s super-untalented – therefore, he has no legitimacy.’

“Look, I’m obviously no guitar aficionado. I’m not going to play any mind-blowing solo with an amazing spread of chords or finger work. I’m doing what I can do, and doing it fair enough for people to have a good time. That's what music is all about.”

This is all happening while you’re opening for Limp Bizkit. Fred Durst directed the music video for The Joke. Is that how you got the gig?

“Fred and I have been friends for over a decade. We recorded a song for my album Angelic 2 the Core called Seamless. People kind of skipped over it – but now that we’re on tour together, suddenly it’s got a lot of streams on Spotify.

“We’ve done a lot of stuff together. We did a telethon for autism, and he came on Corey’s Angels. When he called me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do this tour with me?’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ How often do you get the chance to play a great amphitheater tour with Limp Bizkit?”

Fred has taken a lot of shots from keyboard warriors, so it does make sense you two would be kindred spirits.

“Pretty much everybody on this tour is somebody that people say are not real, not serious, weird or different. That’s why we call our fans ‘losers’. If you get what we’re about, you’re in the same club.”

You seem to be embracing the inherent toxicity of the internet, but how do you view its impact on the guitar scene?

“Look what’s happened here because I’m playing this solo, and it’s spreading all over the internet. Do you know what that does? It inspires people to want to play guitar. Even if they just pick it up to goof around and make noise to see what happens, you know, it's an experiment. But that experimentation leads to art.”

You’re proving that art is subjective.

“And that it’s what you believe it is. It’s what you feel and get from it. If you play something and it speaks to somebody besides yourself, then it’s art. If we’re able to reach millions – and I mean millions – of people with this stupid solo, then obviously we’re doing something right.”