Into The Music
Ross “The Boss” Friedman, the guitarist who helped invent American hard rock twice over, died on Friday. He was 72. His death was confirmed by former bandmates and friends on social media. Friedman had revealed earlier this year that he was battling ALS, the neurodegenerative disease that had progressively limited his ability to play and perform.
Friedman was the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Dictators, the New York band whose 1975 debut The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! arrived roughly two years before punk officially declared itself into existence. The record had it all: loud, fast guitars, a sneering sense of humor, and a genuine love of teenage absurdity dressed up in leather. People who tracked the bloodline of American punk invariably ended up at that album eventually. The Ramones certainly knew it. So did a generation of musicians who came through New York in the years that followed.
But Friedman did not stop there. After the Dictators dissolved and re-formed and dissolved again across the late seventies and eighties, he ended up in Manowar, the band that took everything metal had to offer and turned it into a kind of operatic, ridiculous monument to itself. Where the Dictators were sarcastic and streetwise, Manowar were deadly serious, committed to a vision of heavy metal so grandiose it circled back around to being genuinely compelling. Friedman was the guitarist through their early peak, playing on records like Battle Hymns and Into Glory Ride, and his playing on those albums remains among the most committed, technically capable guitar work the genre produced in its formative years.
He eventually left Manowar under circumstances that were never fully and publicly untangled, spent years doing session and live work, and eventually returned to the Dictators before forming his own group, the Ross the Boss Band, which he led until his illness made touring impossible. That band made a credible case that he still had things to say: their late-period records were not nostalgia exercises but actual heavy metal records made by someone who understood the form from the inside.
The thing about Friedman is that he belonged to two different strands of rock history that don’t usually get mentioned in the same breath. Proto-punk and epic metal are not obvious companions. But Friedman moved between them because what he actually loved was the electric guitar played with conviction, whether that conviction was directed at a crowd of CBGB regulars or an arena full of people ready to be told that they were the true kings of metal. He did not need those worlds to reconcile. He just played.
He is survived by his family and by a catalog that influenced far more musicians than will ever properly credit it. The Dictators in particular deserve a full reassessment. Go Girl Crazy! is one of the great rock albums of the 1970s, full stop, and Ross Friedman’s guitar playing is a big reason why.
