PLAYING GUITAR

Rolling Stone's Top 100 Guitarists of All Time

By 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 50^th 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 ORANGES

In 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.

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
only consisted of five dates. Mostly we were playing two shows
a night in small clubs…” – Joe Satriani

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.

Guitar World Magazine's List of Top 100 Guitarists

Guitar 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