Van Wilks
John Hiatt
Van is an awesome guitar player from Austin, TX, I've been a huge fan for years. Met him a number of times there and San Antonio, one of my very favorite guitar players. I'm still wishing I could find a copy of his duet with Eric Johnson doing a christmas song.
www.vanwilks.com is worth a look if you're not familiar with Van's work, great rock and blues guitar. If you're into guitar players like Billy Gibbons, Sammy Hagar, Robin Trower check out Van Wilks, he toured with ZZ Top years ago and can stay onstage with Eric Johnson, I've seen that with my own two eyes. Not as fast as Eric but every bit as tasteful and gets sounds out of a strat from really nice cleans to Gibbons style nasty on a strat or Les Paul, and some awesome slide work too.
John Hiatt has been a songwriter since the 60's, wrote Jeff Healey's hit "Confidence Man", the Eric Clapton/BB King effort "Riding With the King", Bonnie Raitt's "My Little Runaway" (I think that's the one) and a horde of others. He has also recorded several albums, "Perfectly Good Guitar" is my favorite, the title track is worth the purchase price and it has several other killer tunes too. Perfectly Good guitar is about those guys who smash up their equipment. "It breaks my heart to see those stars; Smashing a perfectly good guitar"...and so on. I can't remember the guitar player's name, but a killer guitar player on that album, great really raunchy sound and some great licks. derfinitely worth a listen. One of the best songwriters around.