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 February 15, 2008 More Guitars I can’t remember a time when guitars didn’t rule the earth. For my parents’ generation, saxophone players, trumpet players, pianists, vocalists, even trombone players divided the glory among themselves. For its first ten years, rock’n’roll belonged to singers, even if they were also great instrumentalists, such as Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, rock’n’roll was dominated by soloist guitarists. Jimi Hendrix and the great guitarists of the Yardbirds -- Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page -- seemed to set the tone for rock guitar, and long guitar solos became the order of the day. Other guitarists who came to prominence at about that time, such as Jerry Garcia and Mike Bloomfield, also helped establish the guitar soloist as the voice of rock music. Sometimes, all this guitar-slinging made for good music. Hendrix and Cream, the Allman Brothers, the James Gang -- all those and more created music that justified the guitar’s importance. Unfortunately, the guitar reached a saturation point. Guitarists are now a dime a dozen, and the only rock guitarist right now who seems to be doing something new is Wilco’s Nels Cline. I rarely get the thrill I did when I first heard the guitar giants of my youth. The last guitarist I heard whose work made me want to hear everything he’d done was Grant Green, a jazz player I didn’t catch up with until almost 15 years after his death. Herewith, a follow-up to the piece I wrote a couple of months ago, with five more guitar solos that have stayed with me through the years. My criterion for a great solo is that it should still grab me even after hundreds of hearings. So while I’m tempted to include Nels Cline’s solo in "Impossible Germany," from Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, I’ve lived with it only a few months and need to give it more time.
Every musical-instrument store in the Western Hemisphere has a sign posted on the wall near the guitars, threatening to banish guitarists from their premises for playing riffs from songs the staff has grown tired of hearing. "Stairway to Heaven" used to be on that list, along with "Enter Sandman." Maybe a few others have joined them since then. When I was in high school, "Smoke on the Water" was on the list. "Stairway" is much maligned and overplayed, to the point that Robert Plant didn’t want to sing it at Led Zeppelin’s recent reunion concert. Because I avoid classic-rock radio, I hear the song only when I want to, and there are plenty of other Zep tunes I like more. But this solo is one of Page’s best, and one of the best in all of rock. Its bright, cutting tone jumped out of AM radios in 1971, and it sounds even better on good gear. Each part of Page’s solo is perfectly developed and carefully constructed. He sets the stage for it with the shimmering guitar chords at the climax of the song’s middle section. Every statement in the solo, beginning with the descending line that opens it, resolves fully and fits logically with what follows. Page carefully develops tension, the solo’s elegant first half giving way to a more brutal, slashing series of high notes before it closes in a blur of notes. Frank Zappa’s The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life includes a version of the song done in Zappa’s Spike Jones-style nose tweaking. Its note-for-note copy of Page’s solo is performed by the band’s horn section.
The Rolling Stones popularized the Chess Records blues style that helped bring the guitar to such prominence in rock, so it’s ironic that Keith Richards never fell prey to the excesses of guitar slinging. He never had to. He could say more in a few notes than most guitarists can in 15 minutes of noodling, proving that he really did learn from the blues masters. His solo on "It’s All Over Now" is unruly, sloppy, rudimentary, and absolutely compelling. By the time Richards enters with his solo on "Sympathy for the Devil," Mick Jagger has introduced the song’s narrator and catalogued his -- and our -- sins. Richards distills into a few notes the evil Jagger has described in the previous three verses. He doesn’t venture far from a spot high up on the guitar neck, and he plays for effect, not flash. The guitar is set to the treble pickup and the amp is cranked up till it’s overdriven and distorts. The solo begins with a riff that sounds as if the hellhounds really have broken loose and are leaping out of the speakers. It’s the sound of a scab being ripped off a wound. Richards continues with a series of short, high-note runs that, because of the amp’s distortion and the way he’s holding his guitar pick, burn and tear. This astonishing performance expresses a frightening, remorseless evil in a way that even Jagger’s smart, erudite lyrics can only hint at. When Richards is done, he gets out of the way without fanfare. Jagger is frightening and convincing in "Sympathy for the Devil," but it’s Keith Richards’ guitar solo that sealed the Stones’ outlaw status.
When I was in high school and college in the 1970s, my friends and I thought Neil Young was a great songwriter, an affecting singer, an accomplished acoustic guitarist, and a wretched electric guitarist. How wrong we were about that last one. Neil was never the speed demon that the other guitarists we loved were, but his solos still hold up today, when some of those others have faded from memory. "Down By the River" is a short tale of jealousy and murder that Young tells indirectly in the song’s lyrics. But everything we really need to know about the narrator of the song -- his tenderness, his anger, his brutality -- is described in Young’s guitar solo. Young begins his story with a series of bluntly played notes in the instrument’s middle register, striking the strings hard enough to break them. As a soloist, Young has always used tone, texture, and space. He uses distortion to let notes melt together in a hail of confusion. Young also uses silence where other guitarists would feel obligated to fill every space with notes. For him, it’s a chance for the narrator of the story to catch his breath before going on to his next statement. When Young comes back for the song’s second solo, he continues the story tentatively, then pours out a cluster of notes that seem to stumble over each other, as if the narrator can’t quite get out what he wants to say, as if he didn’t quite believe the excuse he’s making for himself. I don’t know when I realized that I’d been wrong about Young’s guitar playing. When I listen to him now, I can’t believe I ever missed the point. But other guitarists figured it out -- the Posies’ Ken Stringfellow and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy both have built on Young’s strong influence.
Pete Townshend proved repeatedly that a great band didn’t need a flashy lead guitarist, and that a rock-guitar god didn’t even have to solo. Pete’s rhythm guitar playing is rock’n’roll -- powerful, driving, gut-wrenching, and, at the same time, elegantly beautiful. Townshend seldom solos. When he does, he plays for impact. His solo on "I Can See for Miles" consists of him repeatedly striking one open string; as simple as the solo is, it conveys powerfully the anger, confusion, and false bravado expressed in the song. The Who that appeared onstage in 1970 were as heavy as Led Zeppelin, and a testament to what could be accomplished with a few stacks of Hiwatt amplifiers. "Young Man Blues" is the first track on the original LP edition of Live At Leeds, and Townshend’s opening riff gives notice that the Who are as tough and as loud as any other band. Townshend begins his featured portion of the song, following the second verse, with a simple major-chord progression that he strikes firmly. I’ve never really understood what other guitarists meant when they talked about power chords, but surely Townshend plays power chords here. He tames the volume, sustain, and sheer force coming from the wall of amplifiers behind him -- no small feat, because at that volume any mistake is hugely magnified. Townshend mixes single-note runs and sheets of chords to create a glorious tapestry of controlled feedback and deep blues. Nothing complex here, just some pentatonic blues scales -- you can play them, I can play them. We just can’t play them the way Pete Townshend does.
According to Symphony for the Devil, Philip Norman’s 1984 biography of the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards considers this solo to be "the most exciting thing ever recorded. ‘I could never work out how he played it, and I still can’t. It’s such a wonderful thing that I almost don’t want to know.’" Like Cliff Gallup, Gene Vincent’s guitarist -- or like James Burton, who would play with Elvis Presley later in the singer’s career -- Moore was as influenced by country guitar pickers as he was by blues players. John Fogerty would later adapt the arpeggios Moore plays behind Elvis here for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s "Bad Moon Rising." When Moore steps forward for his solo, he begins with a sliding guitar chord that rings out through Sun Studios’ brilliant slap-back reverb. He plays the chord progression twice; it rings out brightly against the song’s spare arrangement. Then he moves on to a series of blues-based intervals. But it’s in the closing notes that he really grabs the listener. He walks down a series of low string notes, softly, haltingly, creating an unbearable tension in just a few seconds. From "I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone," Keith Richards and many other guitarists learned that you can say a lot in just a few notes. Amazingly, no version of The Sun Sessions is currently in print. …Joseph Taylor
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Jimmy Page, "Stairway to
Heaven"
Keith Richards, "Sympathy for the
Devil"
Neil Young, "Down By the
River"
Pete Townshend, "Young
Man Blues"
Scotty Moore, "I’m
Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone"