Peace, Love and Loud Guitars

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a number that feels like it was written for a pack of long-haired bikers and peace-sign hippies who still believe six strings can settle an argument. “Peace, Love and Loud Guitars” is Anthony Gomes riding high on High Voltage Blues, and if you have been hanging around THE ZOO long enough, you already know this one hits the room like a revved engine and a daisy chain at the same time. The Zoo Freaks out there in the cheap seats tend to clap along on the chorus without anybody having to ask, which is exactly how a radio song ought to behave.

The tune first showed up as the title track of Gomes’s 2018 album of the same name, the record Blues Rock Review later crowned its number one album of that year. Gomes has said the title was his way of talking about world peace without climbing up on a soapbox. He wanted the message flippant and fun, the kind of thing you can shout with a grin instead of a lecture. The lyric lays it out plain: it takes all kinds to make the world go around, you are not going to find common ground on a battleground, and sometimes you have to turn it up to get the low-down. Then comes the line the whole crew leans into. We are here to make music, not war. There are three things worth fighting for. Peace, love, and loud guitars. Put the guns down and pick up a guitar. From Montreal to Mozambique, clap your hands and stomp your feet. That Montreal shout-out is not an accident. Gomes is a Toronto kid, and the Canadian rooms have been in his corner since the club days.

When Rat Pak Records came calling, the label folks told him they had drunk the Kool-Aid and wanted to push his catalog toward the rock side of the fence. High Voltage Blues, issued in 2022, is mostly new versions of songs the faithful already knew by heart, plus a few fresh cuts. Gomes was honest about how scary that idea felt. He said re-recording tracks everybody had blasted through a Burger King drive-through at two in the morning could not just be pretty good. Nostalgia would win unless the new takes were ten times better. He worried right up to release day that he might have pulled the most boneheaded move of his career. The people who bought the record did not see it that way. The album opened at number one on the Billboard Blues chart, sat on that chart for 58 weeks, and landed on Billboard’s year-end blues lists for both 2023 and 2024.

The High Voltage Blues reading of “Peace, Love and Loud Guitars” is the one spinning here, and it is a different animal from the 2018 cut. Billy Sheehan, the bass man from Mr. Big and David Lee Roth’s band, and Ray Luzier, the drummer from Korn, sit in on this one and on a handful of the other tracks. Gomes joked in an interview that he had followed them around for months, taken incriminating photos, and blackmailed them into the session. What he really did was let the label’s Joe O’Brien talk him into the idea, then he and his producer and manager Peter Carson set about blowing the old versions out of the water. Reviewers heard extra shred right at the top and new licks through the body of the song. One listener called the bass growl killer and said the thing sounded like a real arena anthem. Rock and Blues Muse put it simpler: Gomes, Sheehan, and Luzier turn the song into a stadium-worthy rocker, high-velocity lick after high-velocity lick, a band with so much horsepower it ought to be licensed as a motor vehicle. Gomes’s own nutshell for the whole album is the line he keeps repeating. If B.B. King was in AC/DC, that is what it would be.

There is gear talk in the story too, the kind the guitar heads in the Zoo Freaks crowd like to chew on. Gomes told Vintage Guitar he tracked the record on a Kemper, which he knows sounds a little sacrilegious to the tube-amp faithful, and he talked about a 2002 Gibson Flying V he calls his midlife-crisis guitar. His tech told him to find one from that year. A couple of chords in, he knew it was the one. He also keeps a Custom Shop Les Paul, a Malcolm Young signature Jet, and a Todd Krause master-built Tele in the rack. None of that hardware matters if the hands and the heart are not there, and Gomes has both.

The man behind the riff came up in Toronto, born in 1970 to a Portuguese father and a Canadian mother. As a kid he soaked up Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Eddie Van Halen. At fourteen the guitar grabbed him and did not let go. He was not only a bar-band grinder. He studied history at the University of Toronto, won the C.P. Stacey Award for the top grade-point average among history majors, and wrote a master’s thesis on the racial and cultural evolution of the blues, graduating with high distinction. Years later he put some of that scholarship into a book, The Black and White of Blues, which picked up a Blues 411 nomination. The player and the student have always lived in the same guy.

The road out of the clubs ran through Chicago, where he cut Blues in Technicolor in 1998, and then through Nashville and on to St. Louis, which became home base. The break that still gets told around the merch table happened at a jam. B.B. King’s bus driver was in the room, liked what he heard, and walked Gomes over to the King himself. King heard him, believed him, and put him on a string of opening dates in 2005. Gomes still quotes the compliment. A very talented guitarist, King said, and where did that voice come from? From there the bills got bigger: Buddy Guy, Robert Plant, Joe Bonamassa, Heart, Sammy Hagar, Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Guitar World readers later voted him among the best blues guitarists going, and Total Guitar put him on a list of the hundred greatest blues guitarists. He still talks about wanting to make the world a little better and put smiles on faces, which is why he started the Music Is The Medicine Foundation back in 2010, a nonprofit aimed at kids with cancer, young adults with autism, and veterans living with PTSD.

If you want the whole trail, the official home is Anthony Gomes, where the High Voltage Blues story still sits in the bio right next to the newer records. The day-to-day hangout is his Facebook page, the photo stream lives on Instagram, and the short dispatches go out on X. The diehards have their own clubhouse too, the Fans of Anthony Gomes WORLDWIDE group, a busy room he has pointed people toward himself when the tour videos start piling up. Crank it, Zoo Freaks. Peace, love, and loud guitars. That is the whole sermon, and the Crew is already cueing the next side.