My Favourite Guitarists. Have Away!

I’ve been having an email argument about guitar players with my friend David. He, like me, plays the guitar, and has done so, I think, for rather more than fifty years. He also plays stand-up bass, organ, piano and heaven knows what else, and has received the Order of Australia for his work in choral church music. As a musician, he functions on a far higher level than the amateurish one on which I operate.

Though he is only a few years older than me, David’s musical taste and mine are a generation apart. I love all kinds of music but am basically a rock fan, and though I play a lot of different styles of guitar, rock was my departure point. His taste, I suspect, ranges as widely as my own, but his preference set barely intersects with mine. He’s a jazz lover, and the kind of jazz he loves best is the kind that was popular when his parents were courting. He’s old-fashioned in that way – and in many others too, more power to him.

David is a temperate, courtly gent of becoming humility. It is very hard to argue with him because he won’t argue back. His sweetness and tolerance are thoroughly aggravating, so one is naturally driven to provoke him ever more outrageously. Mainly the effort is futile, but not long ago I found a tiny chink in the shining armour. I told him that no jazz guitarist ever knew how to get a decent sound out of an electric guitar till rock guitarists came along and showed them how.

That fetched him. In reply, I was frostily informed (this is the only portion of our exchange that I plan to quote directly) that he was ‘happy to leave the screams, the bent strings, the fuzz, the waa-waa and the burn-out to others,’ before proceeding to explain to me what jazz guitar was all about. He illustrated his exegesis with the names of famous jazz guitarists, each exemplifying one of the particular virtues he listed.

My riposte was not pacific. I was especially scathing about two offenders, Joe Pass and Howard Roberts, whose crimes against art and the guitar I regard as particularly black. He was, as he always is, gentle and forgiving in reply. Ah, David, if you but knew how those coals of fire burn...

I hadn’t the heart to trouble him further, but I thought it a bit of a shame that, after I’d roughed up his darlings, I gave him no opportunity to belabour mine. I thought at first to do it in an email, listing my favourite guitar players for him to have a go at, but then I thought: why not write a blog post and give everyone a chance to rough them up, and me too in the process if they felt so inclined?

So here it is, folks, Notes from Ceylon’s Top Twenty guitarists, plus a few extras thrown in because, like a certain big-selling brand of artificial snack, once you pop it’s hard to stop. I compiled the list by writing names down as they occurred to me, figuring that the ones I thought of first would be the ones I liked best, or at least the ones that have influenced me most as a guitarist. That didn’t quite work out, but I’ve kept the order, more or less as it came to me. Your opinions, etc, welcome.

😎

Los Lobos

Two for the price of one. These guys, to me, exemplify really good guitar music. David Hidalgo is the virtuoso and sometimes shows off a bit, but he and his southpaw buddy César Rojas are all about playing what suits the song best. There’s rarely a superfluous note; everything fits perfectly together to manifest the music and encourage the listener to embrace it. In addition to guitars both acoustic and electric, they are also capable players on a variety of guitar-like Latin American instruments like the bajo sexto and the charangua, which add an ethnic flavour to Los Lobos’s music that has grown more pronounced over the years. Their other flavours are R&B, country and rock. Fun fact: they once complained that Paul Simon had ripped them off on songwriting credits.

Cliff Gallup

Once upon a time there was Western swing, a forgotten musical form rooted in the blues and now hopelessly confused with country-and-western, which it helped engender. But Western swing also gave rise to another form – rockabilly, whose earliest big stars were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and, er, Johnny Cash. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps came along right after those pioneers.

Vincent’s guitar player, Cliff Gallup, was by far the best of the old rockabilly guitarists. His playing was influenced by Western swing as well as the more urbane sounds of jazz, but he could play in just about any style of the day. Rockabilly, though, was the art that he truly made his own. Unusually, he played with all five fingers of his right hand: thumb and index to hold a flatpick, middle and ring fitted with fingerpicks and the little finger reserved for the vibrato bar. Fun fact: When Cliff died in 1988, his widow begged the press not to mention his rocking days with the Blue Caps in the obituaries, but rather that he’d been director of transport and maintenance for the Chesapeake, VA school system.

Neil Young

Maybe it’s just sour grapes, but gratuitous exhibitions of virtuosity often leave me cold. Neil, whose playing on both electric and acoustic often attains the sublime, is as far from being a virtuoso as you can get; just listen to what George Harrison had to say about his lead playing. However, it was precisely Young’s ramshackle but compelling style that encouraged me to pick up the electric guitar; if he could get away with that, I reasoned, anyone could get away with anything. On acoustic, he’s a wholly different creature: his playing is fluent, economical and evocative, carrying a haunting quality that fits his music perfectly. I love his work on both instruments.

Something the people on my list have in common is that, unlike jazz musicians most of the time, they tend to perform music that they wrote themselves. This often makes it impossible to consider their playing as an entity apart from the music as a whole. Neil Young is one of two people whose music helped get me through the worst period of my life (the other is David Bowie) and his music means a great deal to me. He would have been higher on this list if I’d deliberately set out to order it by preference. Fun fact: Neil Young is so analog he used to fit his amps with pedal-operated servos to turn the knobs.

(The particular version of Powderfinger

 I want to share with you

isn’t on YouTube, so please click here.)

Albert Lee

My introduction to Albert Lee was watching him play behind Eric Clapton at Guildford Civic Hall in 1980. I don’t think I’d really heard a chicken-pickin’ guitarist before and when he got to do his party piece at the time, Country Boy, about halfway through the set, I was blown away. Later, after I’d become familiar with the likes of James Burton and had a basis for comparison, I was still hugely impressed. He’s actually an all-rounder and a veteran of the music scene, but that high-energy style of country-rock is his bag. For a guitarist, at least, it’s exciting music to listen to. I said I don’t care much for virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity, but there are exceptions. Fun fact: he can sing too, and this more or less impromptu version of Jimmy Webb’s The Highwayman is ace. Listen from 1:56:00; there’s a slight preamble which is, I think, worth hearing, before he starts.

And then there’s this.

Paco de Lucia

I don’t listen to him as often as I do some other guitarists on this list, but he stands here not just for himself but for an entire musical form, flamenco. My friend and former bandmate Pascal, who plays keyboards and whose missus is Spanish, says flamenco and rockabilly are physically the hardest styles to play, and I agree; I can’t play flamenco at all. De Lucia remains, by general acclaim, Top Flamenco Guitarist; Martin Carthy of Steeleye Span once told me that he’d watched the Guitar Trio – John McLaughlin, Al di Meola and Paco de Lucia – playing live and ‘there was only one guitarist in it.’ I don’t go in much for exhibition matches, but who am I to disagree? Have a look for yourselves and see. Fun fact: it’s a wicked lie that you can’t be a proper flamenco guitarist unless you need to shave three times a day.

Tom Verlaine

If you had those initials, what else would you call your band? Television came out of the New York punk scene that grew up around a club, CBGB's – legendary today though it was a just filthy boîte not much bigger than a coffin. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Blondie all came out of there. So did Television, which was a punk band who could (i) play and (ii) didn’t care who knew it. I think they only ever made two albums; their first, Marquee Moon, is the classic. The second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, is Verlaine’s ideal foil. Verlaine plays lead guitar, sings (punkily but Romantically) and, of course, wrote all the songs. His is a unique voice on guitar; no-one before or since has sounded quite like him. Fun fact: one of Television’s best songs is about falling into the arms of Venus de Milo.

Joni Mitchell

You never knew Joni Mitchell was a great guitar player? Well, listen to this: she milked the muse by tuning her guitar in strange ways (e.g. CGCEGC, or C#D#G#F#G#C#) and catching the melodies and harmonies that fell out of the instrument as she noodled about on it. She would turn them into songs, record them and play them live. In the early days, this meant this meant long pauses between songs while she retuned; later, it meant a guitar shop behind her on stage, every instrument tuned differently. Heaven knows how she kept track of them.

When you use an alternate tuning, you have to learn the fingerboard all over again. It would be, if you were playing a piano, as if some of the black and white notes suddenly had different values: the one that used to be C is now C#, the one that used to be F is now G. It’s not that hard to do if you stick to a few popular open or alternative tunings – open G or DADGAD, for instance – but imagine doing it for every tuning under the sun. Well, that was Joni. She got a lot of respect from jazz musicians (the Pat Metheny Group once served as her backing band, Jaco and all) but she transcends all musical forms. She is her very own unique amalgam of folk, jazz and Laurel Canyon Sixties hippiedom. Fun fact: she also paints, and her method is the same – slap on some paint, see what it suggests, then slap on some more to enhance the suggestion.

Continued in Part II>>