Top Ten Electric Guitarists

Cervantes said, “Comparisons are odious.” Actually, it was someone before him, but he usually gets the credit. In any case, I agree with the statement. However, everybody loves a list, and so why be the one righteous person in an internet rife with lists everybody loves? Or loves to hate. So here comes mine.

My research on this subject comes from 50+ years of listening to music, just about every kind. I’m light on classical, hip-hop, Thracian and Gamelan, but as far as I know, they don’t use generally electric guitars. Well, maybe hip-hop does sometimes. Anyway, this is a list of electric guitarists, though if the guitarists have occasionally forayed into playing acoustic, that’s ok.

Don’t expect anything here other than my opinion. I haven’t consulted with hundreds of musicians and critics. They’d just come up with another Rolling Stone Magazine list.

I will, however, set out a few ground rules.

Speed does not greatness make. Alvin Lee will not be on this list. Or Steve Vai, or Buckethead, or that Yngwie guy. It’s cool, I don’t put it down, it just doesn’t rise to the word great. Great implies something else. For instance, these guitarists I just mentioned have worked their entire lives perfecting impossible speed runs on the fretboard. Oh wow! you say, Did you hear that? But we are not 17-year-old boys easily impressed by an ardent display of preening show. At least I hope not. We are more discerning folks here at Muddy Water.

But technique, you say, that’s a huge part of it, right? Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’m sure you or I could get an AI program to create an example of electric guitar technique taken to infinity and beyond, just by writing the proper prompt. Oh wow! we would say, but would it touch our hearts, lift our souls? Only superficially. A momentary thrill, perhaps. This is the difference between fast and great. How deeply, profoundly, music touches us. That will be the judgement of greatness here.

Another criteria will be influence. Influence on other guitarists and music in general. Ok? Got it?

All righty then. As Andy Partridge says in The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead, “Let’s begin!”

10 - Robert Johnson

Ok, so I lied. Robert Johnson is the one exception on this list who didn’t play electric guitar, but deserves acknowledgement anyway. He created guitar parts that would later become the bedrock of electric guitar in rock music. His playing is so complex and intricate that Keith Richards, on first hearing it, thought it was two players. The guitar figures he invented within the form of the blues have been endlessly recycled by rock and blues guitarists, since the posthumous collection of his songs, King of the Delta Blues Singers, was first released in the early 60’s. There is also the widespread influence of his legend, which most people have heard about, him leaving town, going to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil in an existential bargain to be able to play the blues. The truth of it is, he studied with blues musician Ike Zimmerman, who lived a couple of towns over, who himself had a legend of procuring his ability to play from visiting graveyards at night. It’s all perfect lore as a bluesman’s background story, but it’s evident Johnson learned and innovated and honed his skills by practicing relentlessly during his study with Zimmerman. Johnson is also the first member of the 27 Club of doomed musicians, including Jimi, Janis, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. He was poisoned at a juke joint he was playing, handed a bottle of toxic whiskey, because he was flirting with a married man’s wife. It doesn’t get more blues that.

Robert Johnson’s songs will be the subject of another post. To listen to “Hellhound on my Trail” is to hear the barren landscape of existential blues at its most raw and sublime. As the lyrics in “Stop Breakin’ Down” say, which applies equally to his guitar playing, “Stuff I got’ll bust your brains out baby, gonna make you lose your mind.”

9 - Charlie Christian

Charlie Christian was among the first to plug in, and the first to widely popularize the electric guitar, so he rightly deserves to be on this list. Before Christian, the guitar was mostly a rhythm instrument within an orchestra, (though Django Reinhart also pioneered lead guitar, non-electric, with the Quintette du Hot Club de France.) The guitar was used mainly for rhythm before then, striking strings chucka-chucka. Christian was recommended by the great John Hammond to Benny Goodman, and became a featured soloist in Goodman’s orchestra. A great guitarist in the be-bop style, he went on to play with jazz artists like Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke. Christian’s solos are less guitar-like in structure, he was instead influenced by horn solos, and the guitar sound he went after being that of a tenor sax. He became the outstanding example of a guitarist as stand out instrumentalist. Christian heavily influenced jazz, and later became the pioneer figure for countless lead guitarists who followed.

8 -Mike Bloomfield

Bob Dylan said that Mike Bloomfield was the best guitarist he had ever heard and that he couldn't think of anyone else to play guitar on his record. The record was Highway 61 Revisited, and more specifically, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Al Kooper came to that recording session as a guitar player, and the instant he heard Bloomfield, put his guitar away. The result was Kooper, also a piano player, made his way over to the organ, just to be a part of the record. Dylan’s engineer, Tom Wilson, saw Kooper at the organ and said, “What are doing there, you’re a piano player,” but then laughed and let Kooper stay. In the playback, Wilson had the organ part down low, and Dylan said, “Hey, turn that up.” Resulting in the iconic organ part of “Like a Rolling Stone,” etched now in history.

Bloomfield’s guitar playing on Highway 61 is blistering, best exampled on “Tombstone Blues.” It wails with emotion, raw and biting, pierces the hearer’s chest. Bloomfield was the guitarist for the groundbreaking Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the influential group of the 60’s, who married Muddy Waters style blues to a more modern sound. Bloomfield’s guitar was essential to that mix. The thing about Bloomfield’s playing is, it cuts, it screams, it breaks the shell of the ordinary and exposes the nerve endings of feeling. To feel, perchance to ache, then heal. Something Bloomfield himself couldn’t do.

7 - B.B. King

When I was talking about all the Captain Speedfinger guitarists above, they all to a person wither and fall to single note from B.B. King. One note, ringing, sustained, beautiful, pure, breathtaking, held just until… then a few added notes of resolve. B.B.’s playing has a sublime architecture to it, not a note out of place, not one too many or too less, each with its purpose, remove any note and you lessen the effect of all the others. Like Platonic forms or an Einstein equation, B.B.’s solos are perfect things, honed by his mastery, a lifetime of playing and endlessly polishing them. And for that lifetime, he brought something else to the experience every single time he played - his entire being. His complete self in the moment, the outpouring of his essence, his soul, his heart, his blues.

You might expect Eric Clapton to appear on this list, but he won’t. The reason is, as polished as his playing is, as much as it emulates and tries to capture the blues, it always plays out like an approximation of the blues, once removed, a museum piece, a rendering of the thing, but not the thing.

B.B. King is the thing.

6 - Keith Richards

Keith dreamed the riff to “Satisfaction,” recorded it on a little tape machine beside his bed, then left it on to record 45 minutes more of Keith snoring. When the song came out in 1965, it roared out of transistor radio and car speakers with the fuzz distortion sound that was becoming more popular with guitarists, but Keith used that sound to emulate an entire R&B horn section. This way, The Stones could sound like Otis Redding’s band without hiring on trumpets and saxes. It also sounded more rock and roll, rougher, grittier, a logical extension of the overdriven guitar Chuck Berry first used in “Maybelline.” Richards used a Maestro Fuzz Tone to get the effect, widely popularizing the device to the point that the company sold out of them. Redding would later on cover the song himself.

Keith is a good blues and Chuck Berry style guitarist, his solos do exactly the right thing to elevate Stones songs, his rhythm playing always driving them, and the weaving of guitars he and Ronnie Wood have developed is a thing of beauty in itself. Listen to “Beast of Burden” and hear the seamless back and forth lines sweetly sink into one another, rise and acquiesce in respectful dialogue, neither ever overpowering the weave.

But the thing that puts Keith on this list isn’t either of those things. It’s his creation of riffs. Riffs that are carved in granite. Brown Sugar. Start Me Up. Honky Tonk Women. Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’, Tumblin’ Dice, Love is Strong, Bitch, Gimme Shelter, Street Fighting Man, Jumpin’ Jack Flash… and on and on. Richards invented and popularized the use of the power chord, often employing open tunings. His are exquisite power chords, complex, layered, modal, ringing, hanging in the air for eternity. Dah dah, dut dut, da dah dah. See? You know the song.

5 - Chuck Berry

What can you say? The creator of guitar-based rock and roll. Poet chronicler of Americana. The Walt Whitman of rock and roll. The creator of the Chuck Berry style guitar playing, copied, adapted, refashioned, messed with endlessly. The duck walk and double stops. Everybody has been influenced by him. “Johnnie B. Goode” is rock and roll’s national anthem, covered by Johnny Winter, the Grateful Dead, Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Prince, Peter Tosh, Motorhead, Judas Priest, Larkin Poe… That classic riff, played by a thousand garage bands (who are playing it still) echoing over the land. Chuck Berry took the blues and made it the bedrock of a popular, accessible sound that was just dangerous enough for the kids to love and just safe enough for the old folks to approve. With a wink and a sly smile, Chuck courted white America and made it fall in love with him, but beneath the showmanship and willingness to please the audience was a master guitarist, steeped in the blues, whip smart, wary, supremely savvy, ready to give the world what they didn’t know they wanted - real rock and roll.

4 - Jimmy Page

I was hesitant at first to include Jimmy Page in the list, though he routinely makes top five. Jimmy though, as many people have noted, is often technically sloppy, he reels out his fast licks and smears them all over the place, half making half the notes, giving enough of a semblance of what the solo should have been to carry it through, and a lot of people don’t really notice, because its fast and gritty. But guitarists do. I put it down to a certain spontaneity in his playing, something he nurtures. He wants it to sound alive, not canned. An example of where he caught lighting in a jar is “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” When the solo is moving to the second chord in the progression, the four after the one, he does a slinky, swift filigreed descending riff of three or four sliding notes that have taken my breath away since I first heard it. It achieves greatness, there’s speed and soul and an unexplainable profundity to it. Some alchemical magic, the kind he was always going after. If you watch the trajectory of Led Zep’s live shows in How the West Was Won, a great video record of their live performances, you see that as time goes on, during his solos he practically levitates off the stage as the band, with him, reach transcendent places, one organic whole creation. It’s stunning that three instruments can make the music they made. One stage or on record, this was always his goal. Rendering the magical real.

To me, Page is a metaphysical guitarist. He wants most to create a different dimension - the solo in “Whole Lotta Love,” the riff of “Kashmir,” the majestic build-up in “Stairway to Heaven,” the quirky bits of odd time signatures he inserts in songs, as he does in “The Ocean,” going between 4/4 and 7/8ths time, a device designed to keep you just enough off kilter for him to slide the magical in. He falls only slightly behind Keith Richards, for me, in power chord riffs, some would rank him higher, a question of taste. His acoustic guitar playing emulated (some say stole from) Bert Jansch, and Scottish folk music, but was an exquisite aspect of Zep, incorporated into their acoustic as well as their heavy songs, something unknown in a rock band until then.

Jimmy, they say, dabbled in the occult. Occult means things hidden, what is obscured by the veil of illusion, adherence to the artifice of the ordinary. In 1978, Page said of his beliefs, “I feel Aleister Crowley is a misunderstood genius of the 20th century. It is because his whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity and that restrictions would foul you up.” Page used this philosophy to open portals to liberation through his guitar, probing past the veil to unearth what’s hidden behind. You hear this all through Led Zep. So if at times something’s slightly sloppy, who am I or any of us to point a critical finger? Entering into other dimensions can get messy.

3 - Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is the one guitarist on this list whose palette doesn’t start with the blues. Thompson cut his teeth playing with Fairport Convention, whose sound was rooted in British and Scottish folk songs, and the reels and jigs are there in his playing. Thompson was also strongly influenced by jazz at an early age, making its way into his solos with Fairport, touches of Django Reinhart and Charlie Christian, continuing in his playing until today. Thompson is noted especially for his finger picking style used in both his acoustic and electric playing. Open tunings abound, esoteric sprays of Eastern music, jazz and rock, his solos often full of complex chord voicings, tasteful runs played with jaw-dropping speed and precision, all of this combined in a style that is eclectic and unmistakably his. A mark of greatness is when you hear a particular singer or guitarist and you know instantly who. This is the case with Richard Thompson. His guitar tone is ache and yearning, joy and loss, often side by side. The masterful acoustic finger picking style is seen in the classics, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” and “Beeswing.” Sounds like two guitars again. Thompson doesn’t often take long showboat solos, but rather features his best playing in the service of the song, so you have to wait for the sublime snatches, as in “Mystery Wind,” from Rumor and Sigh.

Thompson considers himself a songwriter first, and indeed his songs, like the above mentioned, are devastating, heartbreaking tales, his characters are either in the parade of misfits, like the psychotic young man of “I Feel So Good,” or the heartbroken, like, well, most of the songs. But that’s another post.

2- Jeff Beck

There’s been a bunch of Jeff Becks. The first was the guitarist for the Yardbirds, the “Over, Under, Sideways, Down” Jeff with the sitar sounding lead, “Heart Full of Soul,” with its gritty fuzz tone, and “Shapes of Things,” feedback in the solo, pre-Hendrixing Hendrix. Jeff innovated these things, but it was also stuff he could play in his sleep. The Jeff Beck Group came next, with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood on bass, and they made two very good albums, Truth and Beck-Ola. Rod Stewart’s vocal on “Old Man River” is rather magnificent, back when he actually felt what he was singing, and Beck’s slide work is equal to it. “Beck’s Bolero,” though, is the masterpiece stand-out track, groundbreaking, pointing to Beck’s future jazz fusion forays. The searing guitar sound on the track is like an orchestral violin section playing gritty fiddles, that then is lifted by the lovely, ethereal slide guitar part, the melody coming back and it all combines, the rockin’ middle and now there’s cosmic synth or something floating in background, and it’s building, building, to that last piercing note that hits high and gets psychedelically sucked away. There goes the top of my head being blown off.

Then, in 1975, “Blow by Blow” came out. It might have been seen by Beck’s fans as an odd choice of style for him to adopt, but jazz fusion was in full swing at the time, and if you’d been paying attention, and especially given Beck mercurial temperament, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. This entirely instrumental album, produced by George Martin, went to number four on the Billboard charts, which was about as crazy as “Bitches Brew” hitting number thirty-five in 1970, or Herbie Hancock’s “Headhunters” hitting number thirteen in 1973. This was a more accessible version of jazz fusion, though, and it had an added unique element - a popular rock guitarist, Jeff Beck. “Freeway Jam” was the song most heard on the radio, but the treasure here is Stevie Wonder’s “Cause We Ended as Lovers.” Beck never stayed exactly in one area, but this song represents what Beck would continue to be most known and admired for, beautiful melodic songs in which the guitar becomes the lead vocal voice. His recording of The Beatles “A Day in the Life,” from the movie Across the Universe, became, along with “Lovers” his signature guitar pieces in concert.

I saw Beck play in 2009, with Tal Wilkenfield on bass, hearing him play both of the songs above. There’s very few times when you get to be in that close proximity - it was a medium sized club in New Hampshire, a thousand people or so - to a master at work. During “A Day in the Life,” the audience was rapt, hanging on every note as Beck wrung the spectrum of complex emotion out the melody and words Lennon wrote, more so that I’d even heard in the song itself, and perfectly recreating the upbeat Paul section, “woke up, got outta bed…” with its dream sequence. A guitar as a human voice as an instrument that can do almost anything. Talk about profound. That’s it, that’s all I got. Listening to it now, getting emotional.

The late, great Jeff Beck.

1 - Jimi

Many years back, a roommate of mine had a classical record, the Chicago Symphony playing Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, he only wrote one, featuring violinist Jascha Heifetz. I was blown away by it, the violin soloing was incredible to me. So I decided I wanted to hear other versions by other orchestras with other violinists, and proceeded to buy a string of CD’s. I was disappointed by every one of them. “You’ve got it wrong,” I’d think, theirs being two dimensional in contrast. “Listen to this, listen to Heifetz. That’s how you play it. See? It’s alive.” I didn’t realize at the time that there was so much leeway allowed in classical music. It, like rock and roll, was dependent on feel to be great. Which was what, beyond his spectacular technique, Heifetz had. This was a bit of a revelation to me. It didn’t matter that it was written as such and such in the musical score, there was malleability still possible.

Like Heifetz, nobody can play like Hendrix and shouldn’t try. I’ve heard enough of them to know I don’t need to hear any more. You can keep your Stevie Ray’s and so and so’s and drop ‘em to the bottom of the sea, it don’t mean nothin’ to me. Most guitarists trying to play Hendrix border on being an insult to my ears. You can’t do it so don’t.

Talking about his idea of his music as an ‘electric church,’ Jimi said, “It's just a belief I have, you know, and we do use electric guitars. Everything, you know, is electrified nowadays. So, therefore, the belief comes in through electricity to the people, whatever. That's why we play so loud. Because it doesn't actually hit through the ear drums - like most groups do nowadays. You know, they say, we're gonna play loud too because they play loud. And they've got this real shrill sound. You know, it's really hard. We're playin' for our sound to go inside the soul of the person, actually, you know. And see if they can awaken some kind of thing in their minds, you know. Because there are so many sleepin' people. You can call it that, if you want to.”

My italics.

I don’t have to retell the story, everybody knows it, Chas Chandler, England, Monterey, Woodstock and the national anthem will never the same, the three core albums and he’s gone. 27 club, off to meet Robert Johnson. One of the greatest musical tragedies, because, whatever happened, Jimi wasn’t doomed like Janis or Morrison, he could have gone on to play for a long long time.

I’ve read all these fools on the internet talking about how Hendrix wasn’t so great, listen to how fast Yngwie Vai Buckethead is, and therefore their guy is better. The most strident of them always, for some reason, holds up a white guy as their guy. I mean, it’s never Vernon Reid. Or Eric Gales. Which to me, makes their motives suspect.

“Third Stone from the Sun” came out on the first album. The sound and direction was fully formed at that point. Only The Doors, with their first album, were as complete right out of the gate as The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I mentioned earlier that classical scores have malleability. Alternately, you can’t write Jimi’s solos down as musical notation. The warping and woofing and bending and feedback sounds aren’t transferable. And the other thing that isn’t transferable is Jimi’s deep connection to the cosmos, to the higher energy of existence, which we was able to pull out of the universe itself and recreate in the sounds that went into his mind and through his fingers and onto the strings and out through the amplifier and inside souls, to wake people up. He wasn’t just a guitarist, folks. Jimi was the closest thing we’ve had in modern times to a walking here on earth spiritual guide who wasn’t a bullshit pretender. And his method of doing it was with a left-handed Stratocaster and a Marshall amp.

If the scriptures are the records, I would say the mysteries can be found in the various live recordings. That’s where he explores the cosmos, and the listener is graced to travel alongside. His long form live solos are orchestral in scope, redefining music in their constant shift of sound, which is based on his own intuitive movements within the structure of it. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he finds what’s there, and that’s where he is, and then he searches on. It’s a visionary experience in the truest sense. He had his gigantic arsenal of practiced riffs and blues lines and tremolo bar dives and lifts and Wes Montgomery double stops and Chuck Berry licks and Hubert Sumlin stuff and all the rest at his ready, and he used it all, but that was just the ship he sailed on, and the rest was him playing what he saw from the bow.

Sail on, Jimi. Wherever you are.

*****

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