Buckethead

Buckethead (born Brian Carrol) is a guitarist and composer who has recorded several solo albums, as well as collaborative albums with Bill Laswell, Bootsy Collins,

Buckethead (born Brian Carrol) is a guitarist and composer who has recorded several solo albums, as well as collaborative albums with Bill Laswell, Bootsy Collins, System of a Down's Serj Tankian, and Primus bassist/singer Les Claypool. He has also worked with Viggo Mortensen on several limited-release albums. His stage persona is unusual: he wears a white kabuki mask (which seems to be a "Michael Myers" mask from the Halloween series of slasher films), and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket atop his head. In addition to his eccentric aesthetics, he displays this persona to press and fans alike: instead of communicating as Buckethead in public, he ventriloquizes with another mask, his "personal spokesman" Herbie. On stage, Buckethead enjoys not only entertaining by means of his guitar work, but also with displays of his nunchaku kata and pop-and-lock breakdancing skills.

A supremely versatile artist, Buckethead performs and releases music rooted in many varied genres. Although viewed by most as a "shredder" whose primary concern is virtuosity and blinding fretwork speed, his dedicated fans see beyond this and try to quell this popular misunderstanding. His dozens of limited-release albums cover, blend, or completely defy musical genres, but the common denominator in theme proves to be storytelling. Instrumental though most of his work thus far has been, his albums seem to all tell a story and evoke in the listener the imagination to hear the story unfold without a word spoken. Imagination tends to be the word best suited for the eclectic artist, who names his primary influence as Disneyland.