Ross the Boss

Ross the Boss — Ross Friedman, born in the United States in 1954, died on 26 March 2026 — was Manowar's founding guitarist and one of the most improbable career paths in heavy metal. Before Manowar he came from punk. He was the founding guitarist of the Dictators, a New York band that, alongside names such as the Ramones and the New York Dolls, helped form the scene that would give rise to American punk rock in the 1970s. It is an origin that contradicts everything Manowar would come to stand for — solemnity, epic scale, virtuosity, warriors of steel. He met Joey DeMaio on Black Sabbath's 1980 tour, when he was playing in a support band and DeMaio was working as a technician, and together they founded Manowar. His guitar defines the first four albums and reaches its peak on Kings of Metal (1988): broad riffs, solos with dirty, bluesy phrasing beneath the grandiloquence — a direct inheritance from punk and 1970s hard rock, and what kept the band from sounding merely pompous. He left in 1988 and spent the following decades on his own projects, performing the classic-era repertoire live. In February 2026 he publicly revealed that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; the disease advanced rapidly and he died a little over a month later, aged seventy-two.