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Right; I wrote this yesterday, and haven't had a chance to really edit or spell/fact check it, but, in no particular order, here goes;
Johnny Ramone
I get really fed up with people carrying on like “the great thing about the Ramones was that their music was so dumb and easy – learn one chord and start a band man” etc. etc. So let it be said once more; playing the guitar with the same velocity and consistency as Johnny Ramone is REALLY FUCKING HARD. Many have tried, but few have actually had the stamina and single-mindedness to achieve that totally relentless downstroke assault. It’s so fantastically ARTLESS – he plays the guitar like he’s driving a bulldozer – “alright lads, let’s knock this bloody wall down and we can all go home for tea!” That churning fuzz just goes straight to my head every time – amazing.
Neil Young
All the musos and guitar magazine people seem to have a problem with Neil Young – there seems to be a belief that he can’t play properly and he plays bum notes and he’s just fakin’ it etc. etc. What the hell is up with those people I can’t possibly begin to imagine. Just stick on any of the records he’s make with Crazy Horse – if that’s not playing the guitar “properly” then FUCK playing the guitar “properly”. Neil Young can’t play the guitar the same way Picasso can’t paint. He’s perhaps the only guy in the world who can jam around playing variations on the same solo in a standard rock vein for 15 minutes and keep me utterly spellbound throughout. Just as much so as the melodies he writes and the way he sings them, when he’s on form it’s as if he’s tapping a direct line to some infinite motherlode of harmonic beauty and transforming it into raging, shambolic rock n’ roll.
Richard Thompson
Jack Fear speaks the truth on this one. He’s never really capitalised on it by gratuitously showing off or building a cool-guitar-god persona for himself, but Mr. Thompson is one of the most startlingly talented and innovative guitarists around. I remember seeing a clip of an early Fairport Convention TV appearance – I don’t recall which song they were doing – where the camera zooms in on Richard, who’s modestly standing at the back, and he casually knocks out this quick little 15/20 second solo which is absolutely mind-boggling, like some kind of deranged raga/blues type mutation the like of which I’ve never heard before or since, then he gives a little smirk, the camera zooms out and the band goes back into the song. An exercise he’s repeated in various forms throughout his career.
John Fahey
Well SOMEONE’S got to mention John Fahey, so it may as well be me. It would take somebody a lot more eloquent than me a lot more words than I can spare to really get to grips with the myriad reasons why John Fahey was as great as he was, but beyond his ingenuity in terms of the forms and traditions he mixed and integrated, beyond his hypnotic virtuosity and musical ambition, beyond his role as the sole well-spring for record collections full of exciting contemporary musicians…… basically, just kick back for a few minutes everyday and LISTEN to the guy, and you shouldn’t need an explanation of why he’s “great” any more than I need an explanation of why John Coltrane or Nina Simone are “great”.
Tony Iommi
The Riff-Master General. The guy who, without even knowing what he was doing, dragged the corpse of the whole blues/rock guitar tradition to it’s bleak, logical conclusion, tore out it’s heart, opened a portal to an endless black void of mystical, howling adolescent nihilism, and stepped straight through. Like the black magicians of old with their circles and swords, his Orange amplifiers unleashed primeval forces he couldn’t begin to comprehend, much less control, and embedded a piece of them in the soul of every lonely, frustrated teenager in the Western world. Survey the Metal section of your local record shop and the kids browsing there, and see what he hath wrought. Or just listen to ‘Master of Reality’ at maximum volume through your headphones and feel your existence as a citizen of the modern world peel away under the assault of primal consciousness.
Lydia Lunch
For her guitar in Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. In a strange, indirect kind of way, the screaming, satanic girl-child of the ‘Sabbath generation. Hysterically uncontrollable feral teenage angst and abuse victim misanthropy channelled directly into howling, atonal, sadistic, no-chord slide guitar. Even after nearly three decades of subsequent noise-rock, still one of the mostly shockingly violent and unrestrained things you’ll ever hear.
Kawabata Makoto
In the nicest possible way, this guy’s kind of like a funnel; every imaginable form of pre-existing loud, crazy music pours in, and a vast, endless mass of wild mutations of it all flows out, condensed and amped up to the point of utter mind-flaying cosmic oblivion. And no fucking shortage of it either. I think his daily routine must be; get up. Turn on tape recorder. Play guitar until he collapses in exhaustion. Repeat. Electric Warrior!
Akata
Put simply, I think this guy sounds like the future of electric guitar-playing in much the same way Jimi Hendrix must have done in the ‘60s. Before I saw Melt Banana live I thought they were doing half this stuff with samples and turntables.
Lou Reed
For his stuff in the Velvet Underground obviously. I still don't know what the hell all that ‘Ostrich neck guitar’ is supposed to be about, but it seems to have led straight to the bloody root of exhilarating avant-skronk electric guitar. You know the bits I’m talking about here; ‘Heroin’, ‘Run Run Run’, ‘The Gift’, and it’s absolute pinnacle on ‘I Heard Her Call my Name’…… aaaarrrggh, it sounds like he’s taking on Albert Ayler with rock guitar moves and almost winning!!! And some of those lengthier live jams just melt down my brain and feed it back to me.... Unprecedented, feedback-spewing, strangulated free-jazz genius. So good I’ll even forgive him wasting the rest of his life as lame egomaniacal self-parody. And that’s not all; I mean, what about those fucking MONSTER guitar-drones on ‘Venus in Furs’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’?!?! (I’m assuming those were Lou rather than Sterling); decades ahead of their time, and even the most wasted contemporary psychedelic ensembles would have to work hard to capture tones as effortlessly thrilling & evocative as those.
Sterling Morrison
Yeah, I like the VU a lot. The best rhythm guitarist of all time. His no-mind D chord chuggin’ never ceases to inspire me, maybe even more so than the twisted solos. “It’s that New York sub-way sound!”
PJ Harvey
Whoever was praising PJ’s resurrection of blues guitar earlier in this thread is spot-on. If we take the basic idea of blues guitar to be taking almost knuckleheadedly simple combinations of chords and notes and investing them with so much power and emotion that they’re transformed into raw, staggering emotion that knocks you sideways, then PJ’s got it. Anybody can play those same chords in that same order.. but they sound NOTHING like.. THAT.
(And by the way, I’m terribly embarrassed by the fact that there are only two women on my list so far, both of whom are chiefly notable for their primitive approach. I know I could rattle off a pretty lengthy list of fantastic female singers, songwriters, bass-players, drummers, noise-makers whatever…. but suspiciously few top ranking “what-the-hell-was-that-it-was-brilliant-wow!” style guitarists... What’s up with that?)
Kevin Shields
You know the score.
“Bugs” Henderson
This guy played lead guitar on "Maid of Sugar, Maid of Spice" by Mouse & the Traps, a great ‘60s psyche-punk stormer and a regional hit in Texas. To further propagate a rather appalling cliché, I don’t know what he was smoking at the time, but I’d sure like to get hold of some. It sounds like his guitar’s gobbled up too much sugar and gone bouncing on the trampoline.
Thuston Moore & Lee Ranaldo
Grant puts it very well above. Perhaps the key to Sonic Youth for me is that, when they try to play straight rock, they can get a bit dull. And when they launch into full-scale avant garde abstraction, they can get a bit self-indulgent. It’s within that knife-edge balance between the two that the magic lies. Order / Chaos. Mmm. Thuston’s percussive approach is also always a joy; if in doubt, give it a good whack! Or three.
Zoot Horn Rollo & Antennae Jimmy Semens
You all know Trout Mask Replica, right? And you’ve heard those demo/rehearsal tracks that prove that every second of apparent chaos on it was carefully planned out? And you’ve heard the Beefheart-wrote-every-note myth convincingly exploded right? Well then it’s probably time to ask ourselves…. where the hell were this guys getting this shit from?
Alex Chilton
Just for the way those guitars on those Big Star albums SOUND more than anything.. like GIANT guitars, played by GIANTS. Real Cosmic American Music. Death by Jangle. What a way to go.
Jack Rose
Shit, this guy is good. Declaring him the natural successor to John Fahey would seem kind of cheap, but it’s an unavoidable comparison. Definitely the most extraordinary player of the current solo acoustic guitar revival (also see Ben Chasny, Christina Carter, Glenn Jones, James Blackshaw et al.).
Bert Jansch, John Renbourne and Davy Graham
The holy trinity of shit-hot British folk revival joy. They’re big, clever and great, and they know they are, but in a typically British way, they’re kinda modest about it... and the results are SWEET. Watch those fingers fly!
Arto Lindsay
The unquestioned kind of high intensity, free improv, metal scraping post-punk skronk madness. A relatively obscure figure I guess, but very, VERY influential.
Tom & Christina Carter
Some of the electric guitar jams on Charalambides albums totally blow my mind. It’s something like what the Grateful Dead might have sounded like if they were actually as good as their fans seemed to think they were; beautiful, entwining meshes of psychedelic guitar, in love with the whole universe.
J. Mascis
King Dude! I saw this clip of him being interviewed on German TV once and it went a bit like; “WHAT IS THE REASON WHY DINOSAUR JR PLAYS SO LOUD?” “uh… ah, shit, I dunno, it’s like… uh, just being loud, y’know… like Motorhead..” “SO YOU ARE LOUD SO YOU CAN BE LIKE MOTORHEAD?” “Yeah, I mean, uh, no! I mean, uh.. oh, fuck it man..”.
Kerry King & Jeff Hanneman
Have you HEARD those solos on ‘Reign in Blood’? eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Margaret Garrett
From Mr. Airplane Man. If this world rewarded subtlety and cool as well as it does sound and fury, she’d be where Jack White is right now.
Barry Melton
An always spot-on guitarist in a laidback pot-smokin’ West Coast way, and much overlooked. An absolute master of playing sweet lead guitar throughout the duration of a song without getting in the way of the singer or the rhythm, as demonstrated on Country Joe & The Fish’s fantastic ‘Electric Music for the Mind & Body’.
Charley Patten, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Asie Peyton, R.L. Burnside et al.
A lifetime of listening to sloppy, lazy, standardised rip-offs had led me to believe for ages that whilst the original blues guitar styles were obviously massively important, they were basically pretty samey and formulaic. A couple of minutes of attentive listening to any of the above, plus many more, swiftly proves otherwise. Absolutely mad, incredible playing. It’s just the rhythm and the multi-layered noise they manage to generate as much as anything else.
It would be so great to be able to get Clapton and Jeff Beck and all of those losers in a room and play them some of these records and say "Go on – do THAT. I dare ya. And furthermore, do it on the cheapest guitar in the shop with second-hand strings and a broken beer bottle." And then laugh at them as they flounder around. |
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