Richie Sambora celebrates his birthday on July 11, and in addition to being a prolific guitarist, he also has one of the best “guitar faces” in the game.
What’s a “guitar face,” you may ask? It’s the many facial expressions a guitarist makes while they’re playing guitar, whether it’s when they’re crushing a solo or bending a note. As far as “guitar face” goes, Birthday Boy Sambora’s is iconic.
Want proof? Just scroll through our gallery below and see for yourself!
But First: What’s New With Richie Sambora?
This past year has been a rather eventful one for Sambora. He notably was featured in the Hulu docuseries Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story. As previously reported, Sambora said he believes Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story was Jon Bon Jovi’s “project” and “perspective” and noted he viewed things differently than the frontman.
Sambora told Allison Hagendorf in May that the four-part docuseries could’ve been “more of a celebration” of Bon Jovi’s music. He also said he would have cut the five-hour docuseries down to two hours.
When asked whether he would change anything about Thank You, Goodnight, Sambora replied, “Everything. There’s one thing that’s not in there, and it’s everything. Like I said, to me, this is Jon’s baby.”
Following the release of Thank You, Goodnight, Sambora shared a clip to Instagram that he captioned, “From the cutting room floor of #ThankYouGoodnight.” The clip shows an alternate angle of one of Sambora’s sit-down interviews from the docuseries. While some of the clip below was included in Thank You, Goodnight, some was cut from the docuseries.
Part of Sambora’s comments that were cut from the docuseries included him talking about a lack of compassion for what he was going through in his personal life, which included his addiction issues and other issues related to his ex-wife Heather Locklear, the mother to his daughter, Ava.
Sambora says, “I was in this organization for 31 ½ years, and everybody has their personal tragedies and things like that, but I didn’t receive a lot of compassion coming back for what I was going through. I believe everybody had their own perspective on fame and fortune. Everybody experiences that at different speeds. That’s how life can get whacked from one guy to the next and blah blah blah. I was essential because I spent more time with Jon than even his wife and was more honest.”
He added, “We spent a lot of time in a room with no windows for the beginning stages of just writing the material … I was a fan, too. I could be a fan of Jon and go, ‘I don’t want to hear you sing that.’ I wrote him from the song on up, also. ‘This is what I would like to hear from you, if I’m a fan in the audience,’ that kind of thing. I think that was one of my primary roles, besides being his right hand and an accurate mirror, so to speak.”
