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The 100 Greatest Guitarists (vol. 7)
| Artist | Song | |
| U2 |
The Fly 
|
|
| Freddie King | Hide Away | |
| Mick Jagger / Ry Cooder | Memo From Turner | |
| Metallica | Welcome Home (Sanitarium) | |
| The Grateful Dead | Dire Wolf | |
| Jeff Beck | Beck's Bolero | |
| The Ramones | Teenage Lobotomy | |
| The White Stripes | I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself | |
| Dale Hawkins | Susie Q. | |
| The Beatles | Something | |
| Steely Dan | My Old School | |
| Fairport Convention | Sloth | |
| Nirvana | Smells Like Teen Spirit | |
| Stevie Ray Vaughan | Texas Flood | |
| BB King | Every Day I Have The Blues | |
Comment:
This is #7 in the series of the 100 greatest rock guitarists ever. Just one more to go. Who will be in the top ten?The other six volumes can be found here.
Quiz #7-(open only to those not winning another quiz in this series - one copy to a customer) For a free copy of the entire 8-volume set, answer this one. Which of these musicians has a cowgirl singer as namesake?
Notes on the seventh volume
25 The Edge: Rarely has a guitarist achieved so much by playing so little. Most of what the Edge played on early U2 albums can best be described as circular arpeggios swimming in oceans of reverb; few conventional chords or solos. But the elegant urgency of the Edge's minimalism perfectly framed and fueled the earnest, flag-waving theatricality of Bono's voice. Less is most.
24 Freddie King: King was born in Texas, but at age sixteen, his family moved to Chicago, where he would sneak into clubs to play with Muddy Waters' band. His style was a mixture of country and urban blues. His playing employed taut, melodic riffs that erupted into frantic, wailing solos on the upper frets. 23 Ry Cooder: In Ry Cooder's hands, the guitar becomes a time machine. He is a virtuoso in a host of guitar styles going back to the most primitive bottleneck blues, country, vintage jazz, Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Bahamian folk music and countless other styles. He's combined all these idioms into his own style as one of the foremost performing musicologists. He got his start playing the blues with Taj Mahal, moved on to Captain Beef- heart's band, made numerous solo records, collaborated with world music artists such as Ali Farka Toure, and wrote a score for the critically acclaimed film Paris, Texas. 22 Kirk Hammett: On any given Sunday night, at least half the parking lots in America have a car with the windows down, the speakers cranked and a couple of dudes sitting on the trunk playing air guitar to Kirk Hammett's solos. Hammett is so steeped in metal history he reportedly paid for his first guitar at fifteen with ten dollars and a copy of Kiss' Dressed To Kill. Metallica's dense thrash redefined hard rock more completely than any band since Led Zeppelin. 21 Jerry Garcia: Garcia was a folk and bluegrass obsessive who started playing guitar at fifteen. It was those roots, as well as a lifelong love of Chuck Berry, that gave his astral experiments with the Grateful Dead a sense of forward momentum. Garcia could dazzle on slide ("Cosmic Charlie") or pedal steel ("Dire Wolf"), but his natural habitat was playing lead onstage, exploring the frontier of psychedelic sound. He died in 1995 while in rehab for his longtime drug habit. But his guitar still shines like a headlight on a northbound train. 20 Jeff Beck: Beck was the second of the Yardbirds' three star guitarists, leading the group's swing into R&B-charged psychedelia ("Shapes of Things," "Over Under Sideways Down") with his speed and deft manipulation of feedback and sustain. In 1967, Beck formed his own group with then-unknown singer Rod Stewart that became a major label role model for Page & Plant's Led Zeppelin. His commercial peak came in the mid-1970s, with an idiosyncratic style of jazz fusion that he still plays today with undiminished class and ferocity.
19 Johnny Ramone: Johnny Ramone invented punk-rock guitar out of hatred: He couldn't stand guitar solos. So the former Johnny Cummings of Queens, NY played nothing but concrete-block barre chords on 21 albums and 2,263 shows with The Ramones. His elementary attack was part of the essential simplicity - matching last names, two-minute tunes, a strict uniform of black leather and ripped denim - which ruled punk until 1996.
Feedback:
continuation of notes on the musicians
18 Jack White: White has become the hottest new thing on six strings by celebrating the oldest tricks in the book: distortion, feedback, plantation blues, the 1960s-terrorism of the Stooges and the MC5 onstage. Decked out like a peppermint dandy, he violates classical covers with fireball chords and primal, bent-string screams. Don't pay attention to the notes; White is not a clean soloist. He's a blowtorch.
17 James Burton: James Burton mainly plays a dark-red '53 Fender Telecaster that he bought in a Louisiana music store when he was thirteen. He's performed a lifetime's worth of hot licks and fluid solos on it, on songs such as Dale Hawkins' "Susie Q" and Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou." Besides being an in-demand Stax sessionman, Burton anchored the touring bands of Elvis Presley and Emmylou Harris. His country-rock style combines finger and flatpicking; he's also a master of dampened string, staccato note "chicken-pickin'."
16 George Harrison: As the Beatles' lead guitarist, George Harrison never played an un- necessary note. In his solos and fills, he prized clarity and concision above all else. But every note made history, from the Cavern Club R&B frenzy of his breaks in "I Saw Her Standing There" to the hallucinogenic splendor of his contributions to Revolver and the matured elegance of his work on Abbey Road. John Lennon and Paul McCartney dominated the Beatles revolutionary course through 1960s pop, but Harrison defined the musical character of those innovations in his explorations of studio technology, tonal color and Indian scales. At the same time, he never strayed from the terse, earthly qualities of his first love, 1950s rockabilly, and his biggest idol, Sun Records star Carl Perkins. Harrison's final album, Brainwashed, recorded in the years before his death from cancer in 2001, features some of his finest playing.
15 Jeff "Skunk" Baxter: There are many great guitar solos throughout the Steely Dan canon, and many superb guitarists that played them, but no one ever topped the fire, variety and endless inventiveness that Skunk Baxter poured into every line of his solos. He moved easily from clean sweet-soul melody riffs to bluesy Hendrix-style cries to jazz octaves, Bakersfield twang licks, Robertsonesque harmony tweaks and more. The ultimate session man, he was as passionate in his playing as if had written the songs himself
14 Richard Thompson: Richard Thompson is the best folk rock guitarist, and that's only one of the genres he's mastered. He was eighteen when he co-founded Fairport Convention in 1967. By the time he left in 1971, Thompson had created a seamless world music for acoustic and electric guitar drawn from Celtic minstrelsy, pyschedelia, Cajun dance tunes and Arabic scales. He is also one of Britain's finest singer-songwriters. His records with his former wife Linda are marvels of hair-raising musician- ship and emotional candor. Try to see him live with an electric band. The solos run long and wild.
18 Jack White: White has become the hottest new thing on six strings by celebrating the oldest tricks in the book: distortion, feedback, plantation blues, the 1960s-terrorism of the Stooges and the MC5 onstage. Decked out like a peppermint dandy, he violates classical covers with fireball chords and primal, bent-string screams. Don't pay attention to the notes; White is not a clean soloist. He's a blowtorch.
17 James Burton: James Burton mainly plays a dark-red '53 Fender Telecaster that he bought in a Louisiana music store when he was thirteen. He's performed a lifetime's worth of hot licks and fluid solos on it, on songs such as Dale Hawkins' "Susie Q" and Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou." Besides being an in-demand Stax sessionman, Burton anchored the touring bands of Elvis Presley and Emmylou Harris. His country-rock style combines finger and flatpicking; he's also a master of dampened string, staccato note "chicken-pickin'."
16 George Harrison: As the Beatles' lead guitarist, George Harrison never played an un- necessary note. In his solos and fills, he prized clarity and concision above all else. But every note made history, from the Cavern Club R&B frenzy of his breaks in "I Saw Her Standing There" to the hallucinogenic splendor of his contributions to Revolver and the matured elegance of his work on Abbey Road. John Lennon and Paul McCartney dominated the Beatles revolutionary course through 1960s pop, but Harrison defined the musical character of those innovations in his explorations of studio technology, tonal color and Indian scales. At the same time, he never strayed from the terse, earthly qualities of his first love, 1950s rockabilly, and his biggest idol, Sun Records star Carl Perkins. Harrison's final album, Brainwashed, recorded in the years before his death from cancer in 2001, features some of his finest playing.
15 Jeff "Skunk" Baxter: There are many great guitar solos throughout the Steely Dan canon, and many superb guitarists that played them, but no one ever topped the fire, variety and endless inventiveness that Skunk Baxter poured into every line of his solos. He moved easily from clean sweet-soul melody riffs to bluesy Hendrix-style cries to jazz octaves, Bakersfield twang licks, Robertsonesque harmony tweaks and more. The ultimate session man, he was as passionate in his playing as if had written the songs himself
14 Richard Thompson: Richard Thompson is the best folk rock guitarist, and that's only one of the genres he's mastered. He was eighteen when he co-founded Fairport Convention in 1967. By the time he left in 1971, Thompson had created a seamless world music for acoustic and electric guitar drawn from Celtic minstrelsy, pyschedelia, Cajun dance tunes and Arabic scales. He is also one of Britain's finest singer-songwriters. His records with his former wife Linda are marvels of hair-raising musician- ship and emotional candor. Try to see him live with an electric band. The solos run long and wild.
continuation of the continuation
13 Kurt Cobain: "Grunge" was always a lousy, limited way to describe the music Kurt Cobain made with Nirvana and, in particular, his discipline and ambition as a guitarist. His cannonballs of fuzz and feedback bonfires on 1991's Nevermind announced the end of 1980s stadium-style guitar rock. Cobain also reconciled his multiple obsessions - the Beatles, hardcore punk, the fatalist folk blues of Leadbelly - into a truly alternative rock that bloomed in the eccentric, gripping hooks and chord changes of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Come As You Are." Recorded six months before Cobain's suicide in 1994, MTV Unplugged in New York reveals, in exquisite acoustic terms, the craft and love of melody that illuminated his anguish.
12 Stevie Ray Vaughan: With the blinding Stratocaster fireworks on his debut album, Texas Flood, in 1983, Vaughan kicked off a blues-rock renaissance when the music needed one most: the heyday of synth-pop and hair spray metal. In small Texas clubs, Vaughan perfected a brass-knuckled soul influenced by Jimi Hendix's psychedlia and the funky twang of Lonnie Mack. After David Bowie saw him at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival (a rare gig for an unsigned act), Vaughan was invited to play on Bowie's Let's Dance. By the late 1980s, he was filling arenas with his longtime band Double Trouble. He died in a helicopter crash in 1990, just after leaving a venue where he had jammed with his brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jeff Healey and Robert Cray. He was thirty-five.
11 B.B. King: The self-proclaimed "Ambassador of the Blues" has become such a beloved figure in American music, it's easy to forget how revolutionary his guitar work was. From the opening notes of his 1951 breakthrough hit "Three O'Clock Blues" you can hear B.B. juicing the country blues with his electric fire and jazz polish. His string-bending and vibrato made his famous guitar, Lucille, weep like a real-life woman. As Buddy Guy put it, "Before B.B., everybody played the guitar like it was an acoustic."
13 Kurt Cobain: "Grunge" was always a lousy, limited way to describe the music Kurt Cobain made with Nirvana and, in particular, his discipline and ambition as a guitarist. His cannonballs of fuzz and feedback bonfires on 1991's Nevermind announced the end of 1980s stadium-style guitar rock. Cobain also reconciled his multiple obsessions - the Beatles, hardcore punk, the fatalist folk blues of Leadbelly - into a truly alternative rock that bloomed in the eccentric, gripping hooks and chord changes of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Come As You Are." Recorded six months before Cobain's suicide in 1994, MTV Unplugged in New York reveals, in exquisite acoustic terms, the craft and love of melody that illuminated his anguish.
12 Stevie Ray Vaughan: With the blinding Stratocaster fireworks on his debut album, Texas Flood, in 1983, Vaughan kicked off a blues-rock renaissance when the music needed one most: the heyday of synth-pop and hair spray metal. In small Texas clubs, Vaughan perfected a brass-knuckled soul influenced by Jimi Hendix's psychedlia and the funky twang of Lonnie Mack. After David Bowie saw him at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival (a rare gig for an unsigned act), Vaughan was invited to play on Bowie's Let's Dance. By the late 1980s, he was filling arenas with his longtime band Double Trouble. He died in a helicopter crash in 1990, just after leaving a venue where he had jammed with his brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jeff Healey and Robert Cray. He was thirty-five.
11 B.B. King: The self-proclaimed "Ambassador of the Blues" has become such a beloved figure in American music, it's easy to forget how revolutionary his guitar work was. From the opening notes of his 1951 breakthrough hit "Three O'Clock Blues" you can hear B.B. juicing the country blues with his electric fire and jazz polish. His string-bending and vibrato made his famous guitar, Lucille, weep like a real-life woman. As Buddy Guy put it, "Before B.B., everybody played the guitar like it was an acoustic."
Stellar series!
I think this is my favorite set, at least the most number of my favorite guitarists.
awaiting the conclusion of this series with mixed emotions. i can't wait to see how it ends but i don't want it to end. thanks!
I'm relieved that U2 didn't make it higher on your list. The Edge, rules, but my utter hatred of Bono keeps me from enjoying it. Had U2 been your number one I would have lost all respect for you. I can handle a respectable 25 in recognition of the guitar work alone. - anxiously awaiting the last installment.
Oh yeah, and I've always been partial to that word 'Dandy' but rarely work it into everyday conversation.
Ah, I too have an unnatural hatred for nearly all things U2. They should've just hung it up when Radiohead surpassed them with The Bends. Don't know how White compares objectively with guys like Hammett and Garcia, but happy to see him here.