My goodness. My good friend Victor Keong has forwarded to me a comment regarding the Vancouver Canucks-Minnesota Wild series, made by the former Iraqi Communications Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf:
"The Vancouver Canucks have enshrined themselves in history again. They have given the Minnesota Wild the gift of achieving the previously unthinkable. It is written that it's better to give than to take, so thank you Vancouver Canucks for making history again. The primitive foundation of hockey - it is an undertaking that requires anthropologic instincts, physical ability and in some small way human intelligence - prevents those that are civilized and evolved to prevail. By deferring victory the Vancouver Canucks have preserved their continued civility and human dignity."
Friday, May 09, 2003
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
“I haven’t heard a guitar solo for a long time.” Gilby Clarke, in a recent interview.
I know what he means. The age of the guitar solo has diminished to such an extent that you can actually identify it as an age.
I noticed this recently at work. A co-worker, who sits about 20 or 30 feet from me, has her radio tuned to the local classic rock station. I can barely hear it, but from time to time I run over to her desk after picking up a bit of high-frequency fretwork (”was that ‘War Pigs'!?”). All the wailing and weedling on it stands in marked contrast to anything else I hear, even on CFOX or XFM. The younger, guitar-based bands don’t really do solos anymore.
It got me thinking about guitar solos, and the ones I like the best. I decided to make a list: my 20 favorite guitar solos of all time. Keep in mind that it’s subjective, and is not the product of a great deal of reflection. I made up my mind quickly, and went with my gut instinct. And, to an extent, I surprised myself with the results.
In making this list I’m talking about solos, not instrumentals (maybe that’ll be next). They have to fit into a song. This explains the absence of players like surf king Dick Dale. I suppose some may also be offended that I’ve left out some greats, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie Van Halen. But I’m just going with what I like. If I was compiling a list of instrumentals, Eddie Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ would surely be on it. I remember hearing it for the first time. I was absolutely dumbfounded. I suspected trickery.
I’ve also omitted my heroes, AC/DC. But to me Angus Young’s guitar playing is an extension of his crazed gyrating, which itself is a product of the real essence of AC/DC: riffs and grooves. If I had to choose between a riff and a solo, or between a band that can groove or a band that can weedle, I’ll take the former every time.
Anyway, here it is. My 20 favorite guitar solos of all time.
***
-Heartbreak Hotel - Scotty Moore (Elvis Presley)
I figure there are about four tunes that make Elvis Presley’s legend as the King of Rock and Roll: ‘Hound Dog,’ ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ There are all sorts of cool histrionics in these tunes, especially using the drums. For instance, the drum roll at the end of the verses in ‘Hound Dog,’ or the cool drumming during the verses in ‘Jailhouse Rock.’
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ features the ‘Bang Bang’ thing during the verse, ie: ‘Well, since my baby left’ (Bang Bang) I found a new place to dwell (Bang Bang).’ This kind of cool factor is what has preserved rock and roll for half a century.
Oh yeah, the solo. It’s comprised of exactly three notes, and of those only one gets about 80 per cent of the work. There are a great many guitar players in this world who need to be force fed this song for about three months straight, twenty-four hours a day.
And if that’s not enough, Moore’s raucous, minimalist guitar work gives way beautifully to a cool little piano piece.
***
-School Day - Chuck Berry
A great chugging tune. In a sense, the whole song is a solo; I love the way the guitar answers back the vocal lines, like it’s an animal trying to get out a box. By the time the solo comes along the guitar surges out and struts around the room. It’s essentially a twelve bar tune, but the solo gets a head start on the 12th bar, like an old car revving up. That’s the best part.
***
-Sunshine of Your Love - Eric Clapton (Cream)
Although the British started to rule the guitar rock roost from 1963 or so, it has been said that, aside from Eric Clapton, no one in the British scene could really play very well until Hendrix came along. Part of this is because, when it comes to the electric guitar, the amplifier is part of the instrument. Amp technology lagged behind guitar-making technology until about the mid-1960s, when Englishman Jim Marshall started making units that could pump out huge volume, and could be overdriven in such a way as to give electric guitar players some real sustain.
Much of the soloing you’d hear on 1950’s rock and roll songs is either blues-oriented picking (Chuck Berry), or stuff built on chording or specific rhythm patterns (eg. Bo Diddly or Buddy Holly; actually Bo was a bit of both). The surf rockers of the early 1960s pushed the electric guitar sound into new territory, but the lack of sustain meant that they stuck with reverb-soaked speed runs, as well as some wonderful riffs and melodies.
Eric Clapton was one of the first to suss out the power of heavy amplification. He cannily used it to create more sustain, which actually slowed down a lot of lead playing. If you could play one note and let it ring for a while, you didn’t have to worry about dead air, and you weren’t pushed into always playing busy little solos. The result was soloing that was often more emotional and tuneful (and yes, sometimes more wankish). Of course, more speed was possible as well, but it was speed that now made use of sustain-generated pull-offs and hammer-ons (eg. Hendrix) as much as Dick Dale-style picking.
When Eddie Van Halen pushed things along in the late 1970s, he was, like Clapton, taking advantage of even more sustain, created by some of the high gain amplification and high output pickups that started appearing around that time. Hammer-ons became hammer-on/finger taps. But there’s only so many types of tunes you can play a speed solo to. While many of Van Halen’s solos were fairly simple and melodic (‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love;’ ‘Jamie’s Crying’), it seems to me that many of the guys who came after him wrote the tunes around the solos, rather than the using a solo to enhance a good tune.
But getting back to ‘Sunshine of Your Love;’ I suppose this is the song that cemented the ‘Slowhand’ legend. The solo is played over one of the killerest riffs in rock history. It seems to me that Clapton was at his best when he had two macho-man egomaniacs (Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker) to push him. Through the 1970’s his swagger seemed to disappear, replaced by laid back, easy listening fare. Or worse, the coma-inducing wankery of ‘Cocaine,’ a song that has the exact opposite effect of its subject matter.
***
-While My Guitar Gently Weeps - Eric Clapton (The Beatles)
It’s a Beatles tune, but Clapton played the lead on it. There’s maybe a tinge too much melodrama in his ‘weeping’ vibrato, but I like it anyway.
***
-All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix
There are a few Hendrix solos I could include. I like this just because of the ambience. I’m not sure what pedals he’s using; a wah wah and something else. I don’t know. It sounds cool. I like what he does with this song in general, and the solo enhances it.
***
-Paranoid- Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath)
This song is remarkable in that you could drop it into an FM playlist from 1969 to the present and though it would sound a bit different, it could still be fully contemporary. I always liked the tune, though I’ve become a full-blown Sabbath fan rather late in the day. Iommi’s reputation has grown over the years, with his disciples spanning the various harder rocking genres. I saw an interview with him recently, in which he stated that he always considered Sabbath to be simply hard rock: ”Heavy metal...I don’t know where that came from.” Exactly.
***
-Whole Lotta Love - Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin)
One of the great moments in all human history takes place when the bizarre sound effect portion of this song concludes with a long Bonham drum roll and erupts into a sequence of BOOM BOOM tick tick tick tick tick BOOM BOOM tick tick tick tick tick....over which Page layers a solo that is note perfect. A thundering echo, I’d say, of some of the old Presley tunes.
***
-American Woman - Randy Bachman (The Guess Who)
This solo defines cool. Using sustain, tone, taste, and some well-placed grit, Bachman sets his measured playing perfectly against the surging riff that drives the song. An idiot guitarist would simply have wanked out on this, achieving nothing and ruining the tune in the process.
***
-Can't You Hear Me Knocking? - Mick Taylor (The Rolling Stones)
Man, I adore the Stones, especially Keith Richards, and this is the only tune of theirs that makes it onto my list? Well, as with AC/DC, I’m talking solos here, not riffs. In the early days, Keith held down most of the lead while Brian Jones played rhthym guitar/sitar/xylophone/moroccas. With Jones’ departure, Mick Taylor was recruited from the ranks of the London blues scene.
According to one story, he left the Stones in a huff after they edited out a portion of his solo on ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’s’ ‘Time Waits For No One.’ I have the album, and, frankly, if they did edit it, they did good. You can say what you want about the Stones, but they’ve never really degenerated into instrumental wankery.
Except, ha ha, in ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ (maybe the exception that proves the rule). The song starts as a lurching raunch-rocker and turns into a latin-flavoured jam. Taylor’s playing is rough in places (he wouldn’t be a Stone if it wasn’t), but it hits the spot nicely nonetheless, and has a good, jammy, off-the-cuff feel to it.
Another well-played Taylor solo can be heard on ‘Heartbreaker.’
***
-Time - David Gilmour (Pink Floyd)
A sweeping, soulful and dramatic masterpiece from ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’ The exquisite sound of a rosewood neck stratocaster. I never tire of this solo.
***
- Lazy - Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple)
There are a couple of guitar solos in this long, groovy shuffle. Both are great, and what’s more is that almost every note is memorable, though unlike tunes like ‘Highway Star,’ Blackmore is not repeating refrains. It’s just a fast-flowing stream where virtually every note hits the mark. Brian Burke once described Pavel Bure's genius as being that he could stickhandle while skating fast. "Usually players either dipsy-doodle, or they just go fast and push the puck ahead of them; very few do both at once." Guitarists are similar, except that they usually sacrifice taste when they speed up. They just go as fast as they can, pushing a forgettable array of histrionics in front of them. In ‘Lazy,’ Blackmore stickhandles deftly at high speed.
***
-Jesus Just Left Chicago - Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)
Nice gritty tone on the guitar in this solo, and great bluesy playing, ending in a super-cool descending refrain. From ZZ Top’s ‘Tres Hombres’ album, which I highly recommend.
***
-Baker St - Gerry Rafferty
This song has a nice little verse that takes a superb turn into something a bit darker, but what really drives it is a slow heavy progression that introduces the tune, then reappears in between the verses. There’s a brilliant sax riff that layers the progression most of the time, but later on the guitar takes over with a piercing, singing refrain. Resonant and far more muscular than 98 percent of any hard rock playing you’ll ever hear.
The thing is, this kind of stuff used to be a staple on AM radio. You could be a little kid listening to the radio and you’d hear this kind of kickass guitar on a regular basis. If you picked up a guitar yourself, this was already in your bloodstream. Another example of great guitar that was always in your face would be Lindsay Buckingham’s playing on Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way.’ You can hear a snippet of that solo and know what song it is.
***
-Hotel California - Joe Walsh; Don Felder (The Eagles)
These guys are kind of a bunch of pricks, but I have to be honest and put this solo on the list. It’s a great one. Walsh and Felder trade off some great parts before joining up in a memorable double lead melody. It’s really a very good song, and playing lead guitar over well-written progressions makes for better solos. There’s no point in having the chops if you don’t have the tunes.
***
-Calling Dr. Love - Ace Frehley (Kiss)
Kiss hit the big time with their concert album 'Alive.' After that, they released a superb piece of bubblegum metal, the Bob Ezrin-produced 'Destroyer.' Putting together a credible follow up to 'Alive' was of critical importance to the band’s world domination agenda, and no expense was spared in getting 'Destroyer' right. This included getting a lot of outside help in the songwriting department, and, as Gene Simmons has recently let on, in the guitar playing department as well. Apparently, the hard-to-discipline Ace had so many run-ins with the taskmaster Ezrin that a pinch hitter was hired; a guy who once played guitar for Lou Reed.
After Destroyer came 'Rock and Roll Over,' which included 'Dr. Love.' It is a strange album, clearly intended to capitalize on post-Destroyer Kissmania in that there’s something stripped down about it, as if they were trying to keep new product moving onto the shelves before their fans grew out of puberty. It includes some very cool tunes, even if it lacks the Seventies teenage dreamworld/apocalypse ambience that the artfully-crafted Destroyer conveys so well. Nonetheless, it is still a letdown from 'Destroyer,' and a forshadowing of the largely crapless 'Love Gun,' a record that even the most naive pre-pubescent kid could see through.
Simmons, in his recent autobiography, says almost nothing about 'Rock and Roll Over,' and based on his comments about the guitar work on 'Destroyer,' I’m not sure whether to give Frehley credit for the fretwork on 'Dr. Love' or not. If it isn’t him, though, it’s at least someone paying superb tribute to him. It features some of the Frehley hallmarks--the way it opens by repeating one note for instance--and it has that Frehley staggering quality to it, made all the more sweet by the ballsy Les Paul tone. A great piece of work, set in one of the greatest trash rock songs of all time.
***
-How Soon is Now? - Johnny Marr (The Smiths)
This song by itself is enough to put the lie to any suggestion that the 1980’s were a musical writeoff. The guitar is absolutely mesmerizing throughout; if it was an instrumental it would work fine. The solo is simply an opportunity to savour Marr’s playing (I really have no idea how he gets the sounds he does) without the vocals getting in the way, though to be fair, it’s one of Morrisey’s best moments as well.
***
-Sweet Child ‘O Mine - Slash (Guns ‘n’ Roses)
The first part of this solo has a gentler, melodic feel, played with the pickup set either on the front or middle position, against a progression that acts as a kind of departure in the song. It’s not bad, but halfway through, Izzy, Duff and soon-to-be-fired-for-being-on-smack drummer Steven swing back into the chorus, Slash flicks back to the bridge humbucker, stomps on the wah wah, and, as the expression goes, gives ‘er.
***
-The Real Thing - The Edge (U-2)
During the 1980s, when hard rock guitar was degenerating into wankery, the Edge offered an alternative. Over time, he’s expanded his repertoire, but he generally eschews the blues-based string bending of the 1960s and 1970s guitar gods. Maybe U-2 saw themselves as a better fit in the punk camp, and yet the Edge is too accomplished to be a punk. His trademark is a kind of chiming, two-note drone sound that he layers to great effect over Adam Clayton’s no frills bass lines.
In 'The Real Thing,' (on the ‘Actung Baby’ album) he only goes into his chime thing near the end. I really like the way he holds back for the first four bars, letting the bass and drums carry things by themselves. Then he comes in with what I think is an e-bow. His notes are very nicely chosen.
The Edge is a great and unique guitar player. If there was a rock guitarist security council, he would be one of the five permanent members.
***
-Smells Like Teen Spirit - Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
A lot of Nirvana’s songs are built around simple, slightly off-the-wall progressions. What made Cobain great was the way he layered vocals and guitar. A good example is ‘Heart Shaped Box,’ (which also has a short but very neat guitar solo). There are a lot of hooks in Nirvana’s sound, and most of them come at the vocal level, not the riff level.
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is built around a simple but effective progression, but what makes the tune is the meandering but well-constructed melody that is placed overtop. If you listen, the progression stays the same (it ramps up heavy-wise during the ‘chorus’ part but keeps the same chords), while Cobain changes the melody three times on top of it. He had a great instinct for this. Few people do.
The solo basically just re-inforces the melody. He bends the strings to match his vocal inflections (this sets him apart from other punks...most punks don’t bend strings; it’s beneath them--or beyond them. They leave that sort of thing to the old school dinosaurs). So what you get is a heavy, string-bending solo (a la Clapton or Iommi) that takes after the song’s vocal melody (a la George Harrison). Obvious and yet unique. You can tell that he really listened to music, as well as just playing it.
***
-Erica Kane - Nash Kato (Urge Overkill)
Probably the most obscure entry on the list, a crazy little song about the American soap opera character from...what was it...All My Children? Anyway, the solo comes across like a hail of machine-gun fire.
Urge Overkill never threw the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve heard them derided for being retro, but I think it’s more accurate to say that they refused to toss out what worked simply because it wasn’t fashionable.
If the electric guitar is to survive, not simply as a fashion accessory, but as a tool for making music, we need more bands with the U.O. stubborness. And more fans with it as well.
******************************************************************
And that’s it. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be much more of it on the way. It seems to me that most of the bands of the last decade that can actually offer guitar solos of any calibre have guitar players that are creeping through their late 30s or early 40s.
The guitar playing world seems to have settled on Jack White and a few others as its saviours, but the era of rock guitar may well be gone for good. I’d liken it to the British Empire. Just as the English dominated the world in the 19th century, rock guitar enjoyed a kind of Pax Axeana from the mid-Sixties to the the early-Eighties. And just as every empire is ruined by excess, so was the guitar empire; built substantially on ego and flash, and ruined by the same thing.
I often tire of the punk sensibility, where any hint of ability must be purged, like Pol Pot’s henchmen rounding on people with glasses because they exhibited a telltale sign of being able to read. Nonetheless, the punks have always had a point; when you put the weedling before the tune you end up with nothing. The guitar solo became such an overwrought farce that you can’t play one now without a sizeable portion of the audience writing it off as ironic, regardless of its musical merits.
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s all over. To further the empire analogy, Great Britain has settled into being a good and reasonably influential nation. It just doesn’t dominate everything anymore. The same goes for the electric guitar. It still has a place, it’s just that it’s place is alongside other strains of music, not on top of them.
Nothing wrong with that.
I know what he means. The age of the guitar solo has diminished to such an extent that you can actually identify it as an age.
I noticed this recently at work. A co-worker, who sits about 20 or 30 feet from me, has her radio tuned to the local classic rock station. I can barely hear it, but from time to time I run over to her desk after picking up a bit of high-frequency fretwork (”was that ‘War Pigs'!?”). All the wailing and weedling on it stands in marked contrast to anything else I hear, even on CFOX or XFM. The younger, guitar-based bands don’t really do solos anymore.
It got me thinking about guitar solos, and the ones I like the best. I decided to make a list: my 20 favorite guitar solos of all time. Keep in mind that it’s subjective, and is not the product of a great deal of reflection. I made up my mind quickly, and went with my gut instinct. And, to an extent, I surprised myself with the results.
In making this list I’m talking about solos, not instrumentals (maybe that’ll be next). They have to fit into a song. This explains the absence of players like surf king Dick Dale. I suppose some may also be offended that I’ve left out some greats, including Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie Van Halen. But I’m just going with what I like. If I was compiling a list of instrumentals, Eddie Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ would surely be on it. I remember hearing it for the first time. I was absolutely dumbfounded. I suspected trickery.
I’ve also omitted my heroes, AC/DC. But to me Angus Young’s guitar playing is an extension of his crazed gyrating, which itself is a product of the real essence of AC/DC: riffs and grooves. If I had to choose between a riff and a solo, or between a band that can groove or a band that can weedle, I’ll take the former every time.
Anyway, here it is. My 20 favorite guitar solos of all time.
***
-Heartbreak Hotel - Scotty Moore (Elvis Presley)
I figure there are about four tunes that make Elvis Presley’s legend as the King of Rock and Roll: ‘Hound Dog,’ ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ There are all sorts of cool histrionics in these tunes, especially using the drums. For instance, the drum roll at the end of the verses in ‘Hound Dog,’ or the cool drumming during the verses in ‘Jailhouse Rock.’
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ features the ‘Bang Bang’ thing during the verse, ie: ‘Well, since my baby left’ (Bang Bang) I found a new place to dwell (Bang Bang).’ This kind of cool factor is what has preserved rock and roll for half a century.
Oh yeah, the solo. It’s comprised of exactly three notes, and of those only one gets about 80 per cent of the work. There are a great many guitar players in this world who need to be force fed this song for about three months straight, twenty-four hours a day.
And if that’s not enough, Moore’s raucous, minimalist guitar work gives way beautifully to a cool little piano piece.
***
-School Day - Chuck Berry
A great chugging tune. In a sense, the whole song is a solo; I love the way the guitar answers back the vocal lines, like it’s an animal trying to get out a box. By the time the solo comes along the guitar surges out and struts around the room. It’s essentially a twelve bar tune, but the solo gets a head start on the 12th bar, like an old car revving up. That’s the best part.
***
-Sunshine of Your Love - Eric Clapton (Cream)
Although the British started to rule the guitar rock roost from 1963 or so, it has been said that, aside from Eric Clapton, no one in the British scene could really play very well until Hendrix came along. Part of this is because, when it comes to the electric guitar, the amplifier is part of the instrument. Amp technology lagged behind guitar-making technology until about the mid-1960s, when Englishman Jim Marshall started making units that could pump out huge volume, and could be overdriven in such a way as to give electric guitar players some real sustain.
Much of the soloing you’d hear on 1950’s rock and roll songs is either blues-oriented picking (Chuck Berry), or stuff built on chording or specific rhythm patterns (eg. Bo Diddly or Buddy Holly; actually Bo was a bit of both). The surf rockers of the early 1960s pushed the electric guitar sound into new territory, but the lack of sustain meant that they stuck with reverb-soaked speed runs, as well as some wonderful riffs and melodies.
Eric Clapton was one of the first to suss out the power of heavy amplification. He cannily used it to create more sustain, which actually slowed down a lot of lead playing. If you could play one note and let it ring for a while, you didn’t have to worry about dead air, and you weren’t pushed into always playing busy little solos. The result was soloing that was often more emotional and tuneful (and yes, sometimes more wankish). Of course, more speed was possible as well, but it was speed that now made use of sustain-generated pull-offs and hammer-ons (eg. Hendrix) as much as Dick Dale-style picking.
When Eddie Van Halen pushed things along in the late 1970s, he was, like Clapton, taking advantage of even more sustain, created by some of the high gain amplification and high output pickups that started appearing around that time. Hammer-ons became hammer-on/finger taps. But there’s only so many types of tunes you can play a speed solo to. While many of Van Halen’s solos were fairly simple and melodic (‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love;’ ‘Jamie’s Crying’), it seems to me that many of the guys who came after him wrote the tunes around the solos, rather than the using a solo to enhance a good tune.
But getting back to ‘Sunshine of Your Love;’ I suppose this is the song that cemented the ‘Slowhand’ legend. The solo is played over one of the killerest riffs in rock history. It seems to me that Clapton was at his best when he had two macho-man egomaniacs (Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker) to push him. Through the 1970’s his swagger seemed to disappear, replaced by laid back, easy listening fare. Or worse, the coma-inducing wankery of ‘Cocaine,’ a song that has the exact opposite effect of its subject matter.
***
-While My Guitar Gently Weeps - Eric Clapton (The Beatles)
It’s a Beatles tune, but Clapton played the lead on it. There’s maybe a tinge too much melodrama in his ‘weeping’ vibrato, but I like it anyway.
***
-All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix
There are a few Hendrix solos I could include. I like this just because of the ambience. I’m not sure what pedals he’s using; a wah wah and something else. I don’t know. It sounds cool. I like what he does with this song in general, and the solo enhances it.
***
-Paranoid- Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath)
This song is remarkable in that you could drop it into an FM playlist from 1969 to the present and though it would sound a bit different, it could still be fully contemporary. I always liked the tune, though I’ve become a full-blown Sabbath fan rather late in the day. Iommi’s reputation has grown over the years, with his disciples spanning the various harder rocking genres. I saw an interview with him recently, in which he stated that he always considered Sabbath to be simply hard rock: ”Heavy metal...I don’t know where that came from.” Exactly.
***
-Whole Lotta Love - Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin)
One of the great moments in all human history takes place when the bizarre sound effect portion of this song concludes with a long Bonham drum roll and erupts into a sequence of BOOM BOOM tick tick tick tick tick BOOM BOOM tick tick tick tick tick....over which Page layers a solo that is note perfect. A thundering echo, I’d say, of some of the old Presley tunes.
***
-American Woman - Randy Bachman (The Guess Who)
This solo defines cool. Using sustain, tone, taste, and some well-placed grit, Bachman sets his measured playing perfectly against the surging riff that drives the song. An idiot guitarist would simply have wanked out on this, achieving nothing and ruining the tune in the process.
***
-Can't You Hear Me Knocking? - Mick Taylor (The Rolling Stones)
Man, I adore the Stones, especially Keith Richards, and this is the only tune of theirs that makes it onto my list? Well, as with AC/DC, I’m talking solos here, not riffs. In the early days, Keith held down most of the lead while Brian Jones played rhthym guitar/sitar/xylophone/moroccas. With Jones’ departure, Mick Taylor was recruited from the ranks of the London blues scene.
According to one story, he left the Stones in a huff after they edited out a portion of his solo on ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’s’ ‘Time Waits For No One.’ I have the album, and, frankly, if they did edit it, they did good. You can say what you want about the Stones, but they’ve never really degenerated into instrumental wankery.
Except, ha ha, in ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ (maybe the exception that proves the rule). The song starts as a lurching raunch-rocker and turns into a latin-flavoured jam. Taylor’s playing is rough in places (he wouldn’t be a Stone if it wasn’t), but it hits the spot nicely nonetheless, and has a good, jammy, off-the-cuff feel to it.
Another well-played Taylor solo can be heard on ‘Heartbreaker.’
***
-Time - David Gilmour (Pink Floyd)
A sweeping, soulful and dramatic masterpiece from ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’ The exquisite sound of a rosewood neck stratocaster. I never tire of this solo.
***
- Lazy - Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple)
There are a couple of guitar solos in this long, groovy shuffle. Both are great, and what’s more is that almost every note is memorable, though unlike tunes like ‘Highway Star,’ Blackmore is not repeating refrains. It’s just a fast-flowing stream where virtually every note hits the mark. Brian Burke once described Pavel Bure's genius as being that he could stickhandle while skating fast. "Usually players either dipsy-doodle, or they just go fast and push the puck ahead of them; very few do both at once." Guitarists are similar, except that they usually sacrifice taste when they speed up. They just go as fast as they can, pushing a forgettable array of histrionics in front of them. In ‘Lazy,’ Blackmore stickhandles deftly at high speed.
***
-Jesus Just Left Chicago - Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)
Nice gritty tone on the guitar in this solo, and great bluesy playing, ending in a super-cool descending refrain. From ZZ Top’s ‘Tres Hombres’ album, which I highly recommend.
***
-Baker St - Gerry Rafferty
This song has a nice little verse that takes a superb turn into something a bit darker, but what really drives it is a slow heavy progression that introduces the tune, then reappears in between the verses. There’s a brilliant sax riff that layers the progression most of the time, but later on the guitar takes over with a piercing, singing refrain. Resonant and far more muscular than 98 percent of any hard rock playing you’ll ever hear.
The thing is, this kind of stuff used to be a staple on AM radio. You could be a little kid listening to the radio and you’d hear this kind of kickass guitar on a regular basis. If you picked up a guitar yourself, this was already in your bloodstream. Another example of great guitar that was always in your face would be Lindsay Buckingham’s playing on Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way.’ You can hear a snippet of that solo and know what song it is.
***
-Hotel California - Joe Walsh; Don Felder (The Eagles)
These guys are kind of a bunch of pricks, but I have to be honest and put this solo on the list. It’s a great one. Walsh and Felder trade off some great parts before joining up in a memorable double lead melody. It’s really a very good song, and playing lead guitar over well-written progressions makes for better solos. There’s no point in having the chops if you don’t have the tunes.
***
-Calling Dr. Love - Ace Frehley (Kiss)
Kiss hit the big time with their concert album 'Alive.' After that, they released a superb piece of bubblegum metal, the Bob Ezrin-produced 'Destroyer.' Putting together a credible follow up to 'Alive' was of critical importance to the band’s world domination agenda, and no expense was spared in getting 'Destroyer' right. This included getting a lot of outside help in the songwriting department, and, as Gene Simmons has recently let on, in the guitar playing department as well. Apparently, the hard-to-discipline Ace had so many run-ins with the taskmaster Ezrin that a pinch hitter was hired; a guy who once played guitar for Lou Reed.
After Destroyer came 'Rock and Roll Over,' which included 'Dr. Love.' It is a strange album, clearly intended to capitalize on post-Destroyer Kissmania in that there’s something stripped down about it, as if they were trying to keep new product moving onto the shelves before their fans grew out of puberty. It includes some very cool tunes, even if it lacks the Seventies teenage dreamworld/apocalypse ambience that the artfully-crafted Destroyer conveys so well. Nonetheless, it is still a letdown from 'Destroyer,' and a forshadowing of the largely crapless 'Love Gun,' a record that even the most naive pre-pubescent kid could see through.
Simmons, in his recent autobiography, says almost nothing about 'Rock and Roll Over,' and based on his comments about the guitar work on 'Destroyer,' I’m not sure whether to give Frehley credit for the fretwork on 'Dr. Love' or not. If it isn’t him, though, it’s at least someone paying superb tribute to him. It features some of the Frehley hallmarks--the way it opens by repeating one note for instance--and it has that Frehley staggering quality to it, made all the more sweet by the ballsy Les Paul tone. A great piece of work, set in one of the greatest trash rock songs of all time.
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-How Soon is Now? - Johnny Marr (The Smiths)
This song by itself is enough to put the lie to any suggestion that the 1980’s were a musical writeoff. The guitar is absolutely mesmerizing throughout; if it was an instrumental it would work fine. The solo is simply an opportunity to savour Marr’s playing (I really have no idea how he gets the sounds he does) without the vocals getting in the way, though to be fair, it’s one of Morrisey’s best moments as well.
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-Sweet Child ‘O Mine - Slash (Guns ‘n’ Roses)
The first part of this solo has a gentler, melodic feel, played with the pickup set either on the front or middle position, against a progression that acts as a kind of departure in the song. It’s not bad, but halfway through, Izzy, Duff and soon-to-be-fired-for-being-on-smack drummer Steven swing back into the chorus, Slash flicks back to the bridge humbucker, stomps on the wah wah, and, as the expression goes, gives ‘er.
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-The Real Thing - The Edge (U-2)
During the 1980s, when hard rock guitar was degenerating into wankery, the Edge offered an alternative. Over time, he’s expanded his repertoire, but he generally eschews the blues-based string bending of the 1960s and 1970s guitar gods. Maybe U-2 saw themselves as a better fit in the punk camp, and yet the Edge is too accomplished to be a punk. His trademark is a kind of chiming, two-note drone sound that he layers to great effect over Adam Clayton’s no frills bass lines.
In 'The Real Thing,' (on the ‘Actung Baby’ album) he only goes into his chime thing near the end. I really like the way he holds back for the first four bars, letting the bass and drums carry things by themselves. Then he comes in with what I think is an e-bow. His notes are very nicely chosen.
The Edge is a great and unique guitar player. If there was a rock guitarist security council, he would be one of the five permanent members.
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-Smells Like Teen Spirit - Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
A lot of Nirvana’s songs are built around simple, slightly off-the-wall progressions. What made Cobain great was the way he layered vocals and guitar. A good example is ‘Heart Shaped Box,’ (which also has a short but very neat guitar solo). There are a lot of hooks in Nirvana’s sound, and most of them come at the vocal level, not the riff level.
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is built around a simple but effective progression, but what makes the tune is the meandering but well-constructed melody that is placed overtop. If you listen, the progression stays the same (it ramps up heavy-wise during the ‘chorus’ part but keeps the same chords), while Cobain changes the melody three times on top of it. He had a great instinct for this. Few people do.
The solo basically just re-inforces the melody. He bends the strings to match his vocal inflections (this sets him apart from other punks...most punks don’t bend strings; it’s beneath them--or beyond them. They leave that sort of thing to the old school dinosaurs). So what you get is a heavy, string-bending solo (a la Clapton or Iommi) that takes after the song’s vocal melody (a la George Harrison). Obvious and yet unique. You can tell that he really listened to music, as well as just playing it.
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-Erica Kane - Nash Kato (Urge Overkill)
Probably the most obscure entry on the list, a crazy little song about the American soap opera character from...what was it...All My Children? Anyway, the solo comes across like a hail of machine-gun fire.
Urge Overkill never threw the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve heard them derided for being retro, but I think it’s more accurate to say that they refused to toss out what worked simply because it wasn’t fashionable.
If the electric guitar is to survive, not simply as a fashion accessory, but as a tool for making music, we need more bands with the U.O. stubborness. And more fans with it as well.
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And that’s it. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be much more of it on the way. It seems to me that most of the bands of the last decade that can actually offer guitar solos of any calibre have guitar players that are creeping through their late 30s or early 40s.
The guitar playing world seems to have settled on Jack White and a few others as its saviours, but the era of rock guitar may well be gone for good. I’d liken it to the British Empire. Just as the English dominated the world in the 19th century, rock guitar enjoyed a kind of Pax Axeana from the mid-Sixties to the the early-Eighties. And just as every empire is ruined by excess, so was the guitar empire; built substantially on ego and flash, and ruined by the same thing.
I often tire of the punk sensibility, where any hint of ability must be purged, like Pol Pot’s henchmen rounding on people with glasses because they exhibited a telltale sign of being able to read. Nonetheless, the punks have always had a point; when you put the weedling before the tune you end up with nothing. The guitar solo became such an overwrought farce that you can’t play one now without a sizeable portion of the audience writing it off as ironic, regardless of its musical merits.
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s all over. To further the empire analogy, Great Britain has settled into being a good and reasonably influential nation. It just doesn’t dominate everything anymore. The same goes for the electric guitar. It still has a place, it’s just that it’s place is alongside other strains of music, not on top of them.
Nothing wrong with that.
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