A great solo is primal yet precise, mixing sheer attack and sonic delicacy.
John Perry of the Only Ones chooses his top 10
There are few sounds in rock to rival a great guitar-player hitting his stride. Power, melody, the tension between attack and delicacy – all these separate the real players from that vast band of also-rans.
Let’s define terms. The solo exists to break up the typical verse/chorus/verse/ chorus structure of songs from every genre of popular music. A well-turned guitar phrase can form a song’s principal hook (eg, Satisfaction), the “hook” being the bit you can’t stop whistling – or, alternatively, the bit that drives you mad because you can’t get it out of your head. Hooks sell records. (Or stimulate downloads, in the new digital economy.)
What makes a great soloist? Technical virtuosity is not enough. Top jazz-rock and fusion players have amazing facility, but all too often nothing to say. Theirs is the musical equivalent of juggling seven balls while balancing a chair on your nose. It’s impressive in its way, but nothing that moves the heart; ultimately, it is just glib. Great guitar-playing bypasses the intellect and connects straight to the soul.
The fusion wizards can’t be dismissed as unaccomplished, but their style, to paraphrase the baffled priest preparing Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, is “like developing one tiny part of a person and calling it a whole human being”. Classical guitarists (including lutenists such as Julian Bream) have great virtuosity, but their technique is transparent. It serves the music, and that is the vital distinction – the precise opposite of the jugglers we have just been discussing. Whenever technique becomes an end rather than a means, there is aesthetic trouble ahead.
After punk made ignorance a virtue – so long as the result was exciting – a reaction was inevitable and, spurred on by the emergence of MTV, the 1980s made a cult out of pure technique (and big hair). Private guitar “institutes” flourished, teaching speed-guitar techniques. The schools churned out lightning-fast young wizards with precocious facility and nothing to express.
So, what’s going on in a solo? The interplay of two main elements: melody, ie, the notes selected and the order in which they are placed (the tune); and rhythm, ie, the length of each note and of the intervening gaps (phrasing). Special emphasis on the gaps, since it’s not what you play so much as what you leave unplayed that speaks loudest. The soloist with no feel for rhythm is less likely to create a satisfying, completed structure and is more prone to meaningless “widdling” (widdley, widdley, widdley), the stock phrase of the classic guitar cliché – fast triplets. Compare Keith Richards’s simple but perfect solo on Gimme Shelter with almost anything from the blues-boomers of the year 1969.
To make an objective claim for the 10 best solos in rock would, like the 10 best goals or most elegant cover drives, be fatuous. I’ve selected 10 that have stood the test of time – and that still move me.
If you wonder why Eric Clapton isn’t there, let me quote you a remark made to him by Jimi Hendrix: “Man – how come you can’t play rhythm guitar?” He had a point. To invert the popular wisdom, Hendrix was a supreme rhythm guitarist who happened to play exquisite lead guitar. In any case, his work often disposes of the distinction between lead and rhythm. The British blues boom of the mid1960s elevated lead guitarists to cult heroes and relegated rhythm guitar to the role of dull cousin. The archetypal British blues fan resembled a trainspotter. He knew the serial numbers of old blues 78s and liked a static hierarchy of UK blues guitarists, with Clapton at the top.
This hierarchy held until mid-September 1966, when Hendrix arrived at Heathrow.
Within a couple of weeks, he appeared on stage at the Central London Poly to jam with Cream, who were then at the peak of their powers.
Blues fans were outraged. Cream floated so high above the rest that to even dream of “sitting in” with them was heresy. So, when an unknown, gawky black left-hander walked on stage, everyone was prepared for a ritual humiliation. The ignorant Yank would soon be shown what real blues was about.
Clapton discreetly barred Jimi access to his Marshall amp, so Hendrix plugged into Jack Bruce’s. He kicked into the double-time riff from Killin’ Floor (available on the DVD of the 1967 Monterey pop festival), and Bruce and Ginger Baker joined in.
Clapton, who didn’t deign to play, leaned against his amp, smoking a cigarette. Within 30 seconds, his expression turned from amused disdain to disbelief. By 45 seconds, his mouth hung open. He had ears, but he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This could not be happening. Hendrix overturned the established order for ever. Deicide in 60 seconds.
They’re finger-pickin’ good
1 MOONLIGHT DRIVE Robbie Krieger, the Doors Krieger created visual soundscapes: look at Francis Ford Coppola’s use of The End in Apocalypse Now. With a lyricist of Jim Morrison’s singularity, he had to devise a way of accompanying narrative. Krieger did it without ever straying into melodrama, as on this signature track from Strange Days.
2 LOVE IN VAIN (live) Mick Taylor, the Rolling Stones Live from Madison Square Garden on the Stones’ 1969 US tour, the one that stepped in something nasty at Altamont, Taylor’s solo (among the loveliest he created) can be heard on the album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, but it’s better watched on DVD (the Maysles brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter). As Taylor improvises an achingly lovely bottleneck refrain (on a standard-tuned guitar), the film cuts to slo-mo footage of Mick Jagger doing his Nijinsky routine.
3 OMAHA & HEY GRANDMA Jerry Miller, Moby Grape Moby Grape are among several groups with peerless credentials whose careers were wrecked by CBS Records. Bursting at the seams with talent – three great singers, three great guitarists and one authentic loony in a five-piece band – here was a band that simply could not fail. What’s more, they were great live.
4 BANGKOK Alex Chilton He was the 16-year-old Memphis prodigy who sang The Letter with the Box Tops. Chilton’s later work included Big Star’s essential third album, Sister Lovers, released shortly before Bangkok, a solo single of 1978. The guitar solo here is made up almost entirely of feedback, noise and random squeaks.
5 PAINTER MAN Eddie Phillips, the Creation Unless you’re familiar with rock’s back streets, you probably know this song as a mid1970s MOR hit for Boney M. But, 10 years earlier, the original, by pop-art band the Creation, scraped into the Top 40. Phillips used a violin bow on the guitar, and, since electric-guitar strings don’t respond well to a bow, all sorts of strange overtones are generated.
Hard sound to describe. Red with purple flashes.
6 DRIFTING Jimi Hendrix, on First Rays of the New Rising Sun “Drifting. . . on a sea of forgotten teardrops” – Jimi’s favourite compositions were his ballads.
He was clearly a man carrying a weight.
His melancholia found its purest expression on ballads such as The Wind Cries Mary, Little Wing and Angel. Drifting is not the greatest of these, but it contains three or four seconds of the most beautiful electric-guitar tone ever recorded: 2’23” to 2’26”. Amid sparse backward-guitar, Jimi hits a high note, slides down, then, playing with just one hand (his right), weaves a melodic phrase through his backwards-guitar part. It’s Hendrix in cameo; beautiful, effortless, casual, throwaway.
7 I CAN SEE FOR MILES Pete Townshend, the Who (best on 7in vinyl)/CINNAMON GIRL Neil Young, on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Two very different examples of that specialised solo form, the one-noter. Townshend uses (rapid) mandolin picking to turn that one note into a blur; Young keeps steady time and holds a single high D going over eight chords.
8 YOU’LL BE MINE Hubert Sumlin, with Howlin’ Wolf The one and only Sumlin mixing it with the Wolf’s peerless Chicago blues band. Marc Bolan “borrowed” most of the song for T Rex’s Jeepster.
9 CHAMBERTIN Bert Jansch Davy Graham came first, but Bert had the charisma. This record is unobtainable on CD, but there’s a knockout live version on an album called River Sessions. Jansch at his finest.
10 I’M LEFT, YOU’RE RIGHT, SHE’S GONE Scotty Moore, with Elvis Presley On this B-side of Presley’s fifth single for Sun, Moore rocks up the basic Chet Atkins style to give the King the bounce he needed. The solo is a gem, mirroring the vocal in the treble register and bouncing it off syncopated picking in the bass line.
Another player, another planet
There shouldn’t have been a guitar solo in Another Girl, Another Planet at all – punk didn’t have much time for them. Still less for one as literate, eviscerating and technically dazzling as the 24 bars of virtuosity unleashed by John Perry.
It had pretty much everything: speed, noise, Fender-driven fluidity, melody. It was perfectly paced. It had structure, building in pitch and intensity, a wonderful counterpoint to Peter Perrett’s scratched south London vocal. Critics marvelled and attempted to excuse the solo, to give Perry an alibi – it wasn’t a guitar solo at all, it was instead a “guitar solo”, an ironic postmodern joke, something Perry found hilarious.
Truth is, Perry was really a very traditional rock guitarist, his heroes Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Keith Richards. He was just a lot, lot, better than any of the guitarists in competing bands. Meanwhile, we young punks sat at home astonished. What the hell was that? A guitar solo? We thought they were banned! Can we have some more, please?
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels]
19th August 2007 08:05 AM
Mr Jurkka
I got one solo for you -Pink Floyd 'Comfortably Numb'!-
19th August 2007 08:42 AM
mrhipfl
"cause we've ended as lovers"
"november Rain"
"SFTD"
19th August 2007 12:36 PM
Chuck
"Great guitar-playing bypasses the intellect and connects straight to the soul."
I couldn't agree more. Great article. Thanks.
19th August 2007 01:04 PM
jaymze
"Upside Down" Nile Rogers guitar solo on the Diana Ross track. They were playing it over the PA at the Slane gig lastnight. Its such a funky, scratchy, infectious guitar solo.
19th August 2007 01:10 PM
the good
quote:Mr Jurkka wrote:
I got one solo for you -Pink Floyd 'Comfortably Numb'!-
Hell yeah.
19th August 2007 04:10 PM
Lord (Hetero)
"Cause we ended up as lovers" Hear hear
but even better "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" off of 'Wired' album.
Gilmore' solo from "Numb" is decent but it sounds like every other solo of his. The choice of notes.
19th August 2007 05:01 PM
Wide As The Clyde
Keith's "blistering attack" on Sympathy, by a mile.
I really like Mick Taylor on "Sway", and also on "Time Waits For No One".
I'll chuck in this odd 'un: Johnny Marr, on "Paint A Vulgar Picture" from the last Smiths LP...it's not particularly fast or fiddly or technical or dazzling, it's just really nice. Very elegant and calm and......stuff.
I'll get me coat.
19th August 2007 09:27 PM
Chuck
I'll nominate Joey Molland's guitar solo in 'Baby Blue' by Badfinger:
19th August 2007 11:42 PM
Promo
I always loved that Badfinger solo. Oh the days of yore...
Besides Mick T's...How about...
Woody's solo in "Shattered"
Keith's solo in "Slave"
Keith's solo at the end of "Bitch"
[Edited by Promo]
20th August 2007 12:03 AM
Stonesthrow
It's all a bunch of subjective shite. By best, do you mean most pleasing to the ear? Most difficult to perform? Even with those questions in mind, I have to admit that the last :30 of Mick T's solo in Sway is right up there in both categories. Not to mention, Hendrix' guitar in All Along The Watchtower and Alvin Lee's in Love Like A Man and I'd Like To Change The World. I'm sure there are more, but those come immediately to mind. Keith on Sympathy was moderately listenable, too. Even though they weren't quite as gymnastically amazing, Keith and Mick T's work on Can't You Hear Me Knocking makes that one of my all time favorite songs.
20th August 2007 12:59 AM
Chuck
Duane Allman and Dickey Betts play beautiful guitar solos in 'Blue Sky'.
It is and it would be a great Live song to concert. Better than SOL.
[Edited by Mr Jurkka]
20th August 2007 09:29 AM
BONOISLOVE
All those people are dead. WHY ?? WHY???
20th August 2007 09:52 AM
Joey
" 7 I CAN SEE FOR MILES Pete Townshend, the Who (best on 7in vinyl)/CINNAMON GIRL Neil Young, on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Two very different examples of that specialised solo form, the one-noter. Townshend uses (rapid) mandolin picking to turn that one note into a blur; Young keeps steady time and holds a single high D going over eight chords. "
YES !!!!
20th August 2007 11:26 AM
Zack
How about Pure & Easy from Odd and Sods?
Shiver!
21st August 2007 11:01 AM
gimmekeef
From The Last Waltz...Clapton and Robbie Robertson trading licks on.."Further On Up The Road"
"As Clapton was taking his first solo on "Further on Up the Road", his guitar strap came loose. Clapton said "Hold on," but Robertson picked up the solo without missing a beat."
One of the greatest moments in Rock History and captured brilliantly in the movie....
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