Buckethead may have entered mainstream consciousness thanks to his four-year stint with Guns N’ Roses in the early 2000s, but his solo career has always been more interesting (and that’s even with Slash and Duff McKagan rejoining Guns this year). The avant-guitar shredder, known for wearing a bucket on his head (obviously), quit all of his myriad projects in 2011, then quit the road in 2012 to focus on his Buckethead Pikes series of albums (he released 118 of them last year alone and is up to 234 as of this writing). The results have been predictably unpredictable, a mash-up of all of the genres Buckethead has explored in his three-decade-plus career, which is pretty much all of the genres, period. Now, after four years, Buckethead is back on the road and on his way to the Tower Theatre on Friday.

Buckethead: 8 p.m. Friday; $37.25, $26; Tower Theatre, 835 NW Wall St., Bend; www.towertheatre.org or 541-317-0700.