Pete Townshend
This list isn’t in any real order. If it had been, Pete would have been a lot higher on it. He was the first guitar player who really inspired me, my first ‘favourite guitarist’. His music can be imaginative and exploratory, tender and confessional, yet never loses its open-handed, life-affirming impact. It slaps sense into you. As a guitarist, he was one of the electric innovators: he showed people how you could torture a guitar into making sounds it hadn’t been designed to, and thereby greatly expanded the sonic palette of rock guitar.
Jim Morrison used to talk a big game about the Dionysian spirit of rock, but The Who could show him a thing or two about that. For all that they comprised four very different and idiosyncratic personalities, the band on stage were always a collective manifestation of Pete Townshend: Roger brought the rock ’n’ roll posturing, Keith the vandal spirit, John the musical elegance; Pete himself supplied the artistry, and the brains. He wrote the songs, though John would contribute a couple now and then. Their records displayed their musical craft and his songwriting talent, but live was where The Who excelled. For all the crashing and falling about, the music never faltered. They were broke for years when they started because they had to keep replacing the instruments they smashed on stage. Fun fact: Pete had kicked Abbie Hoffman – a man who incorporated in his person all that is irritating about hippiedom – offstage minutes before they gave the performance captured below.
Jim Morrison used to talk a big game about the Dionysian spirit of rock, but The Who could show him a thing or two about that. For all that they comprised four very different and idiosyncratic personalities, the band on stage were always a collective manifestation of Pete Townshend: Roger brought the rock ’n’ roll posturing, Keith the vandal spirit, John the musical elegance; Pete himself supplied the artistry, and the brains. He wrote the songs, though John would contribute a couple now and then. Their records displayed their musical craft and his songwriting talent, but live was where The Who excelled. For all the crashing and falling about, the music never faltered. They were broke for years when they started because they had to keep replacing the instruments they smashed on stage. Fun fact: Pete had kicked Abbie Hoffman – a man who incorporated in his person all that is irritating about hippiedom – offstage minutes before they gave the performance captured below.
B.B. King
Muddy Waters was the electric blues pioneer. The other two Kings, Albert and Freddie, was each great in his own way. Buddy Guy, a bit younger than they, was a worthy contender. B.B., though, was the finished article. He was at his absolute best just before he was discovered by White listeners (check out Live at the Regal), but this 1972 clip, live at Cook County jail on his home turf of Chicago, beats any other filmed performance of his that I have ever seen and heard. Although he, too, is an improvising guitarist, his playing is the polar opposite of the Joe Pass/Howard Roberts school – it’s all in the tone, those rich and varied timbres, with every note given its own expression. There is a very real sense in which electric guitar never got any better than this. Certainly nothing B.B. himself recorded or filmed after this was much good. He’d made it by then, after a long hard career on the chitlin’ circuit, and he was milking it as he had every right to do. Fun fact: how blue can you get? Exactly this blue, and no more. Scientists have proven it.
Robert Johnson
Po’ Bobby, as I like to call him, probably never held – probably never saw – an electric guitar. He made just two recordings in his life, one in 1936 and another in 1937. Each contained the same songs as the other. A year after he made the second he was dead, killed in a fight over a woman at the rock ’n’ roll-approved age of 27.
His short, hard life distilled all the poverty, racial oppression and violence of the American South. His father abandoned his mother, fleeing Johnson’s birthplace, Hazelhurst, Mississippi, ahead of a lynch mob. Bobby himself grew up hungry and often in trouble with the law; he used at least eight surnames during his short life. Known today as the ancestral begetter of rock guitar, he was a mediocre player in his early years; he then suddenly disappeared (something he was wont to do) and reappeared a year later playing as you hear him on the recording below. Word got about that he’d sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads outside Clarksdale, Miss., for the ability to play like the Delta blues hero Son House. House, doubtless feeling the young hellhound on his trail, wasn’t shy about putting that story about himself. Johnson was the kind of man of whom you would believe it.
If you’ve don’t often listen to old, pre-WW2 recordings, you’re going to have trouble with this. Persevere, however, and the music will eventually possess you. Playing in the style of Johnson remains a challenge even for capable guitarists today; just ask Eric Clapton about that. Fun fact: when Brian Jones first played Robert Johnson’s album to Keith Richards, Keith’s first question was, ‘Who’s the other guitarist?’
Richard Thompson
In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, the rock-snob narrator reserves for Richard Thompson the ultimate rock-snob accolade. I don’t know if I would go that far, but the man’s a master. Emerging from the seminal folk-rock band Fairport Convention, he carved out a career (and a life) that was very un-rock, becoming a strict practising Muslim and divorcing his wife and musical partner, Linda Pettifer, for not being religious enough or something. His austere onstage presence does evoke the mullah, and seems wholly at odds with the wrenching, often bitter emotional storm he whips up on his guitar. His searing music is a product of deep feeling and long study; in the clip below, you’ll hear the use of drones as in mediaeval European folk music, exotic scale snippets, atonal passages and a tremolo effect like the voice of Malak Jibreel, but the result sounds anything but schooled. He’s as good, or better, on acoustic, correctly treating it as a completely different instrument from electric – but I’d have to post another video for that, wouldn’t I? Here it is. Not-so-fun fact: he walked out on Linda just after they’d had their third child; Shoot Out the Lights was written during roughly the same period.
In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, the rock-snob narrator reserves for Richard Thompson the ultimate rock-snob accolade. I don’t know if I would go that far, but the man’s a master. Emerging from the seminal folk-rock band Fairport Convention, he carved out a career (and a life) that was very un-rock, becoming a strict practising Muslim and divorcing his wife and musical partner, Linda Pettifer, for not being religious enough or something. His austere onstage presence does evoke the mullah, and seems wholly at odds with the wrenching, often bitter emotional storm he whips up on his guitar. His searing music is a product of deep feeling and long study; in the clip below, you’ll hear the use of drones as in mediaeval European folk music, exotic scale snippets, atonal passages and a tremolo effect like the voice of Malak Jibreel, but the result sounds anything but schooled. He’s as good, or better, on acoustic, correctly treating it as a completely different instrument from electric – but I’d have to post another video for that, wouldn’t I? Here it is. Not-so-fun fact: he walked out on Linda just after they’d had their third child; Shoot Out the Lights was written during roughly the same period.
Reeves Gabrels
Tin Machine, the hard-rock band David Bowie unaccountably decided to form at the end of the Eighties when the mainstream career he’d begun to enjoy with Let’s Dance began to pall on him, were never a very attractive proposition. The rhythm section were two born-to-privilege louts who were best known for working with Iggy Pop. Bowie himself sang and played saxophone and wore shiny pea-green suits on stage. The music, played mostly on ugly headless Steinberger guitars, was mostly terrible. The saving grace, if you can call it that, was Reeves Gabrels.
The metal boys can play microdemisemiquavers at 300bpm and use the sludgiest of distorted tones but they’re a carnival house of horrors compared with the authentically intimidating Gabrels. This now-elderly man (he wasn’t young even in the Tin Machine days) is an expert at negotiating the interface between beauty and terror. What are those notes he’s playing? What scale is that? Hell, are those even notes? It all goes by so fast the questions become moot before they’re fully formed in your head. He’s also great at layering sheets of deliciously tormented chordal sound, rich with harmonies that shimmer like the blade of a kris, over rhythm tracks. His brilliance couldn’t save Tin Machine, a concept that should have been drowned at birth, but Bowie, who knew a great guitar player when he saw one, kept him on after the band folded, relying on him as a key member of his live backing group and also to help produce and play on those terrifying albums the Dame made in the Nineties: 1.Outside, Earthling, ...hours.
I think this live performance of a classic older Bowie tune captures everything I like about this guy. Yes, of course it’s schooled brilliance. And yes, it’s exhibitionistic and over the top – it’s meant to be. But if you ever heard Bowie’s original single (with Robert Fripp on guitar) and thought its razor riffage couldn’t be improved upon – c’mon, check this out. Fun fact: the song features a guest performance by Black Francis, aka Frank Black.
Andy Summers
Reeves Gabrels is not someone you can listen to every day. This guy, on the other hand, I could listen to all day. He’s a real veteran – his career goes back to the Sixties – and he began as a jazz musician, a form he returned to in later life after his world-buggering success with The Police left him able to indulge a taste for music that makes no money.
His work with The Police owed a lot to jazz; he stole from bebop players the trick of omitting thirds from his chord voicings to create major-minor ambiguity, often filling the resulting harmonic space with suspended seconds, suspended fourths and their dominant extensions. Sting was left to insert the thirds...where he could. The two ex-jazzmen each had harmonic gifts that complemented the other’s perfectly; Sting only found his mojo as a songwriter after meeting Summers. The whole-tone bass line on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: Sting could never have got away with that if he didn’t have Andy to help extend those notes harmonically.
Not content with rewriting the parameters of pop-song harmony, Summers is also important in musical history for adding an entire new palette of sounds to the electric guitar. He is the master of electronic tonal effects. People like The Edge and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead are just followers in his footsteps; only Fripp and Adrian Belew, who sprang from very different roots, can really compete. The Police arrived on the scene just as digital recording and tone shaping became possible, and he made the field his own. He also invented (or at least popularised) a new rock guitar sound, relatively clean and chorus-based, which became an Eighties cliché – Prince used it on Purple Rain – and which you can still hear at any Colombo nightspot where live music is played.
I was going to post my favourite guitar solo of all time – on Driven To Tears – but decided not to because it’s in the same musical jurisdiction as Gabrels on Scary Monsters. So here, instead, is the song on which I think his sonic experimentation with The Police is most clearly and expressively heard. Remember, as you listen, that drums and bass apart, there’s just on guy on stage making all those sounds. Fun fact: at home or abroad, I have never seen any cover guitarist play the guitar parts of Message In A Bottle or Every Breath You Take correctly. The five-fret stretch required for those suspended chords (or the string-skipping skills you need to avoid the stretch) are very difficult to do fluently in a live setting – unless, of course, you happen to be Andy Summers.
Not content with rewriting the parameters of pop-song harmony, Summers is also important in musical history for adding an entire new palette of sounds to the electric guitar. He is the master of electronic tonal effects. People like The Edge and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead are just followers in his footsteps; only Fripp and Adrian Belew, who sprang from very different roots, can really compete. The Police arrived on the scene just as digital recording and tone shaping became possible, and he made the field his own. He also invented (or at least popularised) a new rock guitar sound, relatively clean and chorus-based, which became an Eighties cliché – Prince used it on Purple Rain – and which you can still hear at any Colombo nightspot where live music is played.
I was going to post my favourite guitar solo of all time – on Driven To Tears – but decided not to because it’s in the same musical jurisdiction as Gabrels on Scary Monsters. So here, instead, is the song on which I think his sonic experimentation with The Police is most clearly and expressively heard. Remember, as you listen, that drums and bass apart, there’s just on guy on stage making all those sounds. Fun fact: at home or abroad, I have never seen any cover guitarist play the guitar parts of Message In A Bottle or Every Breath You Take correctly. The five-fret stretch required for those suspended chords (or the string-skipping skills you need to avoid the stretch) are very difficult to do fluently in a live setting – unless, of course, you happen to be Andy Summers.
Warren Haynes
The Frog King comes on like an out-of-shape redneck with a face that even a mother might have trouble loving. Then he opens his mouth. Luminous honey pours out. After that he starts playing his guitar, and that honey just keeps on drippin’.
Emotive, tasteful and steeped in tradition, Haynes is not really a songwriter, although his on-and-off jam band, Gov’t Mule, do have a few original numbers. He’s really a cover artist, at his best reinterpreting classic songs from the past. He’s been in the Allman Brothers for years, playing co-lead guitar with Derek Trucks. His net is cast wide: I’ve seen him sing and play Into The Mystic, Wish You Were Here, Son House’s Death Letter Blues and even Elvis Costello’s Alison. He’s also a promiscuous collaborator, playing with everyone from John Schofield (this one’s for you, David) to, er, the Grateful Dead. Here is one of my favourite performances of him on video: Haynes covering Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer with the Dave Matthews Band.
Emotive, tasteful and steeped in tradition, Haynes is not really a songwriter, although his on-and-off jam band, Gov’t Mule, do have a few original numbers. He’s really a cover artist, at his best reinterpreting classic songs from the past. He’s been in the Allman Brothers for years, playing co-lead guitar with Derek Trucks. His net is cast wide: I’ve seen him sing and play Into The Mystic, Wish You Were Here, Son House’s Death Letter Blues and even Elvis Costello’s Alison. He’s also a promiscuous collaborator, playing with everyone from John Schofield (this one’s for you, David) to, er, the Grateful Dead. Here is one of my favourite performances of him on video: Haynes covering Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer with the Dave Matthews Band.
More to come in Part III
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