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Volume 1-2016
MUSIC BOOKS FINE ARTS FILM THE WORLD
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PLAYING GUITARRolling Stone's Top 100 Guitarists of All TimeBy RAR Not to give away my age – as if that would be an issue for a lad such as myself – but this year of 2014 marks my 50th anniversary as a guitar player. I started at age eleven for those of you inclined to math, though don’t feel encouraged to explore that too deeply. I have seen and heard a lot of guitar players and, in my early years, they all amazed me, doing things that to me seemed humanly impossible. My progress as a player was slowed by this inaccurate insight. One tends to limit one’s self in proportions equal to one’s own courage and I was utterly in awe of the guitar gods and could not imagine going the places they went on their instruments. If you happen to be a young player reading this, please know that such self-limiting perspectives are nothing more than wasted time. I personally started to get a lot better as a player when I determined that there were no barriers to playing anything at all, and that even deficits of innate talent tend to bend to the will of time and determination. That is the place of understanding where mystic things begin to occur in both one’s playing and possibly even in one’s personal development. “Playing an instrument is a very spiritual thing…” – Richard Thompson The most important thing I ever learned about playing any instrument was to experiment and, in the process, trust yourself. The things you will discover will be the things that everyone discovers, and the way that you devise to address those discoveries will come to define you as a player. For my entire life, as far back as I can remember, the extent to which I have been able to express myself on the guitar has been a perfect measurement of how well I have been able to transact life in general. It is like a real-time measure of personal confidence, upon which personal expression is critically based. Anyone who masters anything at all gets into a zone of execution with their endeavor inside which they make all the right moves. Playing music, after all, consists of an array of choices the player makes to go from point A to point B and beyond. Just understanding that there are infinite possibilities, and that the choices you make will work as well as will any other, is like a door opening. On the other side of that door is the universe of musical expression, so people spend lifetimes prying it open. Some people, like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, get there really early, while the vast majority of us struggle just to mimic what they are doing. One of the great values of committing one’s self to some treasured pursuit is that it provides an opportunity for some measure of enlightenment, perhaps yielding insight enough to work through a great many of issues that hold one back as a player. Once you have seen, heard, and sounds coming out of your instrument that are close to the sounds you have always heard in your head, you can imagine that same thing happening in other facets of your life and being. What I always notice is that people who are highly advanced in their area of personal passion are often highly advanced in a lot of areas of their lives. Truly advanced instrumentalists tend to be highly intelligent and sensitive people regardless of the type of music they play. The metal shredders Yngwie Malmsteen and John Petrucci, and the prog-rockers Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani, are all extraordinarily thoughtful and well-spoken people, as is Jeff Beck, as was Frank Zappa. I am less certain about Eddie Van Halen, as substance abuse has a way of neutralizing even the most prodigious talents and abilities, but as a general rule the higher up the chain of achievement you look, the greater the frequency of advanced spirit types, for lack of a better describer. LEMONS, LIME, APPLES AND ORANGESIn 2013, Rolling Stone did one of those top 100 guitarists of all time lists, which featured a voting panel of virtually every well-known guitarist still around to vote, including many who would show up on the list (see below, the names in red being voters who were not themselves voted into the Top 100, while names in white made the list). The names of the groups with which certain of the panel members are associated (in parentheses) are presented just as they were in Rolling Stone, which seems to offer assistance to readers who may not otherwise know who some of these people are. That probably says something about Rolling Stone and its survey worth remembering as you peruse their final rankings. THE VOTERS: Trey Anastasio, Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys), Brian Bell (Weezer), Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple), Carl Broemel (My Morning Jacket), James Burton, Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains), Gary Clark Jr., Billy Corgan, Steve Cropper, Dave Davies (The Kinks), Anthony DeCurtis (Contributing editor, Rolling Stone), Tom DeLonge (Blink-182), Rick Derringer, Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars), Elliot Easton (The Cars), Melissa Etheridge, Don Felder (The Eagles), David Fricke (Senior writer, Rolling Stone), Peter Guralnick (Author), Kirk Hammett (Metallica), Albert Hammond Jr. (The Strokes), Warren Haynes (The Allman Brothers Band), Brian Hiatt (Senior writer, Rolling Stone), David Hidalgo (Los Lobos), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Lenny Kravitz, Robby Krieger (The Doors), Jon Landau (Manager), Alex Lifeson (Rush), Nils Lofgren (The E Street Band), Mick Mars (Mötley Crüe), Doug Martsch (Built to Spill), J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr.), Brian May, Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Roger McGuinn (The Byrds), Scotty Moore, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Tom Morello, Dave Mustaine (Megadeth), Brendan O’Brien (Producer), Joe Perry, Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Robbie Robertson, Rich Robinson (The Black Crowes), Carlos Santana, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Marnie Stern, Stephen Stills, Andy Summers, Mick Taylor, Susan Tedeschi, Vieux Farka Touré, Derek Trucks, Eddie Van Halen, Joe Walsh, Nancy Wilson (Heart) My initial reaction to Rolling Stone survey, and most all surveys of this kind, is that the poll is meaningless, doomed by its conceit, because what they ended up producing was a list of great guitarists who have achieved visibility through record sales. That, as Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz recently pointed out in an excellent Huffington Post piece, is a feat quite beyond musical genius; a level of success having much more to do with professional business apparatus. The Top 100 guitarists listed are those who have had that kind of organizational support. Notably absent from that list are today’s top metal players, who have expanded modern music ten-fold through their exploration of exotic scales (notably Phrygian Dominant, the Lydian, and the Hungarian Minor scales), and through virtuosity. Perhaps it is well to remember that this is a Top 100 list, rather than a Best 100 list, which otherwise would be populated by the Joe Satrianis, Steve Vais and John Petruccis of the world. You got to have a good management team and a good agent.
“When Surfing with the Alien was being played on the radio, we
did a European Tour that The Rolling Stone survey tends to lump together guitarists from all kinds of different genres that are largely comparable only within their own groups. Those who made the list tend to be players that the voting body were influenced by as kids, so the whole list seems to stop in the year 1985 or so. This makes this list seem a little unknowing and even cast some doubt on the pro voters. Guitarists are far more sophisticated today than they have ever been before, just by virtue of technologies that make available the greatest library of musical research and development yet conceived my man. This Rolling Stone list tends to tip the hat to those who “made it all up” without the benefit of today’s Internet-based technologies. (Anyone can now pull note-by-note transcriptions of every great guitar solo ever played, which can then be practiced against readily available backing tracks until proficiency is achieved – a far cry from what it was like for guitar students in the 1950s, when Mel Bay instruction books were about as good as one could do.) Can one really compare the “greatness” of a blues player, a metal shredder, and a country-blues finger picker? My inner voice says of course not! but then, thinking further about it, all musical styles use the same notes and time signatures, and everything beyond that is simply a matter of choice in style and technique. Whatever, the poll seemed to reveal that even the most commercially successful guitarists in the world tend to respond to the same artists that the average guy on the street responds to. Jimi Hendrix typically places number one in these surveys (though not in the Guitar World series, see right column). In terms of personal expressiveness and distinctive approach, he was without peer to most of us, although that may in part be because most of us had never heard Buddy Guy, as Hendrix had. Hendrix had been around the block as a guitarist with the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and, in England, with Curtis Knight and the Squires. It was there that Hendrix started running Marshall stacks in sequence, to devastating effect, and he gave himself full leeway to play with that cavalier style that became his character, and that masked his musical sophistication in a way that produced what looked and sounded like an alien product. It was so powerful that no one who has picked up a guitar since Hendrix can play without being compared to Jimi Hendrix, even by non-musicians. (Even Buddy Guy, who is still around, gets introduced as the guy who influenced Hendrix.) Hendrix comparisons are particularly in play if a player uses feedback or any of the bag of tricks for which Hendrix became famous (e.g., the Wah pedal as a soloist’s effect, let alone the guitar destruction flamboyances). Personally, I’m okay with that, but wish Hendrix would have stayed around so we could hear him play in his senior years. Would he have become Django Reinhardt or Joe Pass, or would he have just done really loud tours with other nostalgia bands like Guns’n Roses or Journey? All praise for Jimi Hendrix notwithstanding, it still seems ridiculous to imagine an alpha player, a number one who stands above all other famous guitarists. Using the Rolling Stone survey, players are grouped in the table below into ordered lists under the category of music that they might be best considered to represent. This is also an imperfect instrument for comparing guitarists, as many of these players have worked in more than one musical genre. This is why most entrants are lumped into the Rock and Pop-Rock categories, though generally the players are organized into the areas with which they are most closely associated. Their standings in the very general Rolling Stone survey are shown in parentheses.
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Guitar World Magazine's List of Top 100 GuitaristsGuitar World took another approach to recognizing the guitar greats, creating a 132-guitarist tournament that got great response, with 500,000 votes cast by readers. As no one other than guitar players or people associated with that industry read Guitar World, one can probably assume that the voters had some sort of a relationship with the instrument and were thus qualified to vote. Guitar World recognized its readership by including in their 132-player field a bunch of metal shredders who were ignored by the Rolling Stone survey. (One gets the feeling of two distinct voter groups, one with an average age of 60 and the other an average of, say, 32.) One may assume that the results of the Rolling Stone came out as they did because their panel consisted entirely of people whose identities all rely on their places in the music business. As a result, they recognized their peers, i.e., players their age and older who have been big commercial successes. Commercial success in the record-selling business does not necessarily rely on expert guitar chops, and in fact cannot be achieved merely through the acknowledgement and support of knowledgeable musicians. Commercial success takes fans, who are typically non-musicians and are more likely to recognize a celebrity than they are a player. This would explain a Lenny Kravitz. Guitar World's tournament concept is as flawed as the Rolling Stone write-in candidate concept, relying on matchups to make their bracket system produce a final list. That means that Kenny Wayne Shepherd, for instance, lost in a first round matchup with Jimi Hendrix, guaranteeing that Kenny Wayne would rank near the bottom of the final rankings. Had he been matched in the first round against, say, Cheech Marin (who is a guitarist), then Kenny Wayne Shepherd would have been guaranteed a place much higher in the rankings, though he's the same guitarist either way. Otherwise put, these surveys are sort of dumb and are hardly useful as more than a tip of the hat to those who get their names mentioned. They should not, however, be imagined to be holy grail as far as actual quality ratings. Guitar World voters ranked the Top 100 as follows:
1. Eddie Van Halen 2. Brian May 3. Alex Lifeson 4. Jimi Hendrix 5. Joe Satriani 6. Jimmy Page 7. Tony Iommi 8. Stevie Ray Vaughan 9. Dimebag Darrell 10. Steve Vai 11. Randy Rhoads 12. Dave Mustaine 13. David Gilmour 14. Les Paul 15. Duane Allman 16. Robert Johnson 17. John Petrucci 18. Zakk Wylde 19. James Hetfield 20. Ritchie Blackmore 21. Angus Young 22. Slash 23. Paul Gilbert 24. Buddy Guy 25. George Harrison 26. Vernon Reid 27. Frank Zappa 28. Eric Clapton 29. Billy Gibbons 30. Chet Atkins 31. Dickey Betts 32. Django Reinhardt 33. Mark Morton 34. Mark Tremonti 35. Warren Haynes 36. Kirk Hammett 37. Jerry Cantrell 38. Buckethead 39. Jeff Beck 40. Keith Richards 41. Michael Schenker 42. Carlos Santana 43. Yngwie Malmsteen 44. Chuck Berry 45. John Frusciante 46. Jason Becker 47. Eric Johnson 48. Joe Bonamassa 49. Alexi Laiho 50. Dave Murray 51. Allan Holdsworth 52. Joe Walsh 53. Rick Nielsen 54. Jerry Garcia 55. B.B. King 56. Lindsey Buckingham 57. Tom Morello 58. Steve Lukather 59. Son House 60. John Lee Hooker 61. Steve How 62. Chuck Schuldiner 63. John McLaughlin 64. Albert Lee 65. Pete Townshend 66. Alex Skolnick 67. Johnny Winter 68. George Lynch 69. Kerry King 70. Michael Angelo Batio 71. Jeff Loomis 72. Steve Morse 73. Rory Gallagher 74. Ted Nugent 75. Joe Perry 76. Al Di Meola 77. Andy Summers 78. Chris Broderick 79. Gary Moore 80. K.K. Downing 81. Nuno Bettencourt 82. Robert Fripp 83. Glenn Tipton 84. Malcolm Young 85 Jeff Hanneman 86. Peter Frampton 87. Synyster Gates 88. Neil Young 89. Kenny Wayne Shepherd 90. Robin Trower 91. T-Bone Walker 92. Ace Frehley 93. Gary Rossington 94. Albert King 95. Jack White 96. Mark Knopfler 97. Tosin Abasi 98. Derek Trucks 99. John 5 100. Wes Montgomery |
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ARTIST NEWS THIS EDITION ABOUT MUSIC MUSIC REVIEWS BOOKS CINEMA FASHION FINE ARTS FEATURES SERIES MEDIA ESSAY RESOURCES WRITTEN ARTS POETRY CONTACT ARCHIVES MUSIC LINKS
Copyright © November, 2018 Rick Alan Rice (RARWRITER)