Arlen Roth

He released a Slide Guitar Summit album in 2015 featuring duets with guitarists Cindy Cashdollar, Sonny Landreth, David Lindley, Greg Martin, Lee Roy Parnell, Jack Pearson, Rick Vito, Jimmy Vivino, and Johnny Winter. This is said to be Johnny Winter's final recording.

His first book, Slide Guitar, was published by Oak Publications when he was 21. In 2012, Thank You Les, a Les Paul Tribute album and documentary were released with Roth performing "Mr. Sandman" and his daughter Lexie Roth singing the Les Paul and Mary Ford song "Vaya Con Dios".

From 2007–2012 Roth hosted a series of daily video lessons at Gibson.com. It is estimated he has close to 1 million students on Gibson. He also wrote daily blogs for Gibson Guitar. Arlen has also been known as the "Master of the Telecaster".

The Hot Licks catalog grew to also include instructional videos for drums, banjo, lap steel, mandolin, voice and harmonica, with 150 artists and 180 videos. Roth has been recognized as the first to create video music instruction. In 2006 The Music Sales Group acquired the Hot Licks video catalog.

In 1998, Roth lost his wife Deborah, and their first child Gillian in a fatal car accident on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Gillian was 14 years old, and Deborah was 47. Gillian was an actress, a model and was a guitarist like her father. She had just signed on to do a 27 episode TV show for Nickelodeon called the "Gunks" which was a show about an all-girl rock band, loosely based on "The Monkees."

In 1979 Roth and his wife Deborah started the Hot Licks Audio and Video label. With only $2000 left to their names, Roth decided that he was going to act on the idea he got back in 1973 to create taped musical instruction based on how he always encouraged his students to tape their private lessons. His very first advertisement featured 42 cassette lessons in all, stretched over 7 series of 6 tapes apiece. The tapes very quickly became very successful worldwide and many of his students were also very experienced professionals. While teaching Ralph Macchio the guitar parts for the movie Crossroads, he began recording his first videos (in 1984). Six of these featured Roth as instructor and one was by his friend John Entwistle, bass player of The Who. The close-ups of fretting, strumming, and other techniques he helped develop, and which were prominent in Crossroads, became the trademark of the videos.

He began to back-up in recording and touring with Happy and Artie Traum, Eric Andersen, Tony Bird, Paul Butterfield, Art Garfunkel, John Herald, Janis Ian, Janey & Dennis, Looking Glass, Don McLean, John Prine, Helen Schneider, Pete Seeger, Phoebe Snow, Dusty Springfield, Loudon Wainwright III. He toured with the Bee Gees in 1974, Simon and Garfunkel in 1983, and Duane Eddy with Huey Lewis and the News. In 1976, he appeared in the Bob Dylan film Renaldo and Clara performing with Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Patti Smith and Phil Ochs.

Roth attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City from 1966–69 as an art student. He then studied at the Philadelphia College of Art from 1969–1971. His band Steel lived with him and would play in Woodstock, New York on weekends, where he was discovered. In 1970, Steel put on the first Woodstock Reunion concert to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the festival in Bethel, New York, where Roth lived every summer since he was born. Steel was the only band and played four hours each day. Soon after, he moved to Woodstock, New York, and began his career as a professional guitarist.

He is featured performing on his 1953 Telecaster with Patti Smith in the 2019 Bob Dylan / Martin Scorsese film "Rolling Thunder." From the 1975 tour of the same name.

Arlen Roth (born October 30, 1952) is an American guitarist, teacher, and author. From 1982–1992, he was a columnist for Guitar Player magazine. Those ten years of columns became a book, Hot Guitar.