100 greatest guitarists

100 greatest guitarists

Jimi Hendrix
I feel sad for people who have to judge Jimi Hendrix on the basis of recordings and film alone; because in the flesh he was so

extraordinary. He had a kind of alchemist's ability; when he was on the stage, he changed. He physically changed. He became incredibly

graceful and beautiful. It wasn't just people taking LSD, though that was going on, there's no question. But he had a power that almost

sobered you up if you were on an acid trip. He was bigger than LSD.

What he played was fucking loud but also incredibly lyrical and expert. He managed to build this bridge between true blues guitar — the

kind that Eric Clapton had been battling with for years and years — and modern sounds, the kind of Syd Barrett-meets-Townshend

sound, the wall of screaming guitar sound that U2 popularized. He brought the two together brilliantly. And it was supported by a visual

magic that obviously you won't get if you just listen to the music. He did this thing where he would play a chord, and then he would sweep

his left hand through the air in a curve, and it would almost take you away from the idea that there was a guitar player here and that the

music was actually coming out of the end of his fingers. And then people say, "Well, you were obviously on drugs." But I wasn't, and I

wasn't drunk, either. I can just remember being taken over by this, and the images he was producing or evoking were naturally

psychedelic in tone because we were surrounded by psychedelic graphics. All of the images that were around us at the time had this kind

of echoey, acidy quality to them. The lighting in all the clubs was psychedelic and drippy.

He was dusty — he had cobwebs and dust all over him. He was a very unremarkable-looking guy with an old military jacket on that was

pretty dirty. It looked like he'd maybe slept in it a few nights running. When he would walk toward the stage, nobody would really take

much notice of him. But when he walked off, I saw him walk up to some of the most covetable women in the world. Hendrix would snap

his fingers, and they followed him. Onstage, he was very erotic as well. To a man watching, he was erotic like Mick Jagger is erotic. It

wasn't "You know, I'd like to take that guy in the bathroom and fuck him." It was a high form of eroticism, almost spiritual in quality.

There was a sense of wanting to possess him and wanting to be a part of him, to know how he did what he did because he was so

powerfully affecting. Johnny Rotten did it, Kurt Cobain did it. As a man, you wanted to be a part of Johnny Rotten's gang, you wanted to

be a part of Kurt Cobain's gang.

He was shy and kind and sweet, and he was fucked up and insecure. If you were as lucky as I was, you'd spend a few hours with him after

a gig and watch him descend out of this incredibly colorful, energized face. There was also something quite sad about watching him.

There was a hedonism about him. Toward the end of his life, he seemed to be having fun, but maybe a little bit too much. It was

happening to a lot of people, but it was sad to see it happen to him.

With Jimi, I didn't have any envy. I never had any sense that I could ever come close. I remember feeling quite sorry for Eric, who thought

that he might actually be able to emulate Jimi. I also felt sorry that he should think that he needed to. Because I thought Eric was

wonderful anyway. Perhaps I make assumptions here that I shouldn't, but it's true. Once — I think it was at a gig Jimi played at the Scotch

of St. James [in London] — Eric and I found ourselves holding each other's hands. You know, what we were watching was so profoundly

powerful.

The third or fourth time that I saw him, he was supporting the Who at the Saville Theatre. That was the first time I saw him set his guitar

on fire. It didn't do very much. He poured lighter fluid over the guitar and set fire to it, and then the next day he would be playing with a

guitar that was a little bit charred. In fact, I remember teasing him, saying, "That's not good enough — you need a proper flamethrower, it

needs to be completely destroyed." We started getting into an argument about destroying your guitar — if you're going to do it, you have

to do it properly. You have to break every little piece of the guitar, and then you have to give it away so it can't be rebuilt. Only that is

proper breaking your guitar. He was looking at me like I was fucking mad.

Trying to work out how he affected me at my ground zero, the fact is that I felt like I was robbed. I felt the Who were in some ways quite a

silly little group, that they were indeed my art-school installation. They were constructed ideas and images and some cool little pop songs.

Some of the music was good, but a lot of what the Who did was very tongue-in-cheek, or we reserved the right to pretend it was tongue-

in-cheek if the audience laughed at it. The Who would always look like we didn't really mean it, like it didn't really matter. You know, you

smash a guitar, you walk off and go, "Fuck it all. It's all a load of tripe anyway." That really was the beginning of that punk consciousness.

And Jimi arrived with proper music.

He made the electric guitar beautiful. It had always been dangerous, it had always been able to evoke anger. If you go right back to the

beginning of it, John Lee Hooker shoving a microphone into his guitar back in the 1940s, it made his guitar sound angry, impetuous, and

dangerous. The guitar players who worked through the Fifties and with the early rock artists — James Burton, who worked with Ricky

Nelson and the Everly Brothers, Steve Cropper with Booker T. — these Nashville-influenced players had a steely, flick-knife sound, really

kind of spiky compared to the beautiful sound of the six-string acoustic being played in the background. In those great early Elvis songs,

you hear Elvis himself playing guitar on songs like "Hound Dog," and then you hear an electric guitar come in, and it's not a pleasant

sound. Early blues players, too — Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Albert King — they did it to hurt your ears. Jimi made it beautiful and made

it OK to make it beautiful.

Duane Allman
If the late Duane Allman had done nothing but session work, he would still be on this list. His contributions on lead
and slide guitar to dozens of records as fine and as varied as Wilson Pickett's down-home '69 cover of "Hey Jude"
and Eric Clapton's 1970 masterpiece with Derek and the Dominos, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, constitute
an astounding body of work. But Allman also transformed the poetry of jamming with the Allman Brothers Band,
the group he founded in 1969 with his younger brother, singer-organist Gregg. Duane applied the same black soul
and rebel fire he displayed as a sideman to the Allmans' extended investigations of Muddy Waters and Blind Willie
McTell covers and to his psychedelic-jazz interplay with second guitarist Dickey Betts in live showpieces such as
"Whipping Post." Although Duane and Gregg had played in bands together since 1960, Duane did not learn to play
slide until shortly before the start of the Allmans. In his only Rolling Stone interview, in early' 71, Duane said that
the first song he tried to conquer was McTell's "Statesboro Blues." Allman's blastoff licks in the recording that
opens his band's third album, At Fillmore East, show how far and fast he had come — and leave you wondering how
much further he could have gone. In October 1971, eight months after the Fillmore East gigs, Allman died in a
motorcycle accident in the band's home base of Macon, Georgia.

B.B. King
The self-proclaimed "Ambassador of the Blues" has become such a beloved figure in American music, it's easy to forget how revolutionary

his guitar work was. From the opening notes of his 1951 breakthrough hit. "Three O' Clock Blues," you can hear his original and

passionate style, juicing the country blues with electric fire and jazz polish. King's fluid guitar leads took off from T-Bone Walker. His

string-bending and vibrato made his famous guitar, Lucille, weep like a real-life woman. It was the start of a hugely influential blues-

guitar style. As Buddy Guy put it, "Before B.B., everyone played the guitar like it was an acoustic."

King grew up on a Mississippi Delta plantation and took off in 1948, at twenty-three, for Memphis, where he found fame as a radio DJ on

WDIA and earned the nickname "Beale Street Blues Boy." Along the way, he picked up a uniquely eclectic vision of the blues, blending the

intricate guitar language of country blues, the raw emotion of gospel and the smooth finesse of jazz. His Fifties classics — "Every Day I

Have the Blues," "Sweet Little Angel," "You Upset Me Baby" — are tender as well as tough, and 1965's Live at the Regal remains one of

the hottest blues-guitar albums ever recorded. King remains unstoppable, touring hard and cutting albums such as his recent Eric

Clapton collaboration, Riding With the King.

Eric Clapton
It first appeared in 1965, written on the walls of the London subway: "Clapton is God." Eric Patrick Clapton, of
Ripley, England — fresh out of his first major band, the Yardbirds, and recently inducted into John Mayall's
Bluesbreakers — had just turned twenty and been playing guitar only since he was fifteen. But Clapton was already
soloing with the improvisational nerve that has dazzled fans and peers for forty years. In his 1963-65 stint with the
Yardbirds, Clapton's nickname was Slowhand, an ironic reference to the velocity of his lead breaks. But Clapton
insisted in a 2001 Rolling Stone interview, "I think it's important to say something powerful and keep it
economical." Even when he jammed on a tune for more than a quarter-hour with Cream, Clapton soloed with a
daggerlike tone and pinpoint attention to melody. The solo albums that followed Layla, his 1970 tour de force with
Derek and the Dominos, emphasize his desires as a singer-songwriter. But on the best, like 1974's 46I Ocean
Boulevard and 1983's Money and Cigarettes, his solos and flourishes still pack the power that made him "God" in
the first place.

Robert Johnson
Johnson is the undisputed king of the Mississippi Delta blues singers and one of the most original and influential
voices in American music. He was a virtuoso player whose spiritual descendants include Eric Clapton, Keith
Richards and Jack White. Johnson's recorded legacy — a mere twenty-nine songs cut in 1936 and '37 — is the
foundation of all modern blues and rock. He either wrote or adapted from traditional sources many of the most
popular blues songs of all time, including "Cross Road Blues," "Sweet Home Chicago" and "I Believe I'll Dust My
Broom." Johnson, the illegitimate son of a Mississippi sharecropper, poured every ounce of his own poverty,
wandering and womanizing into his work — documenting black life in the Deep South beneath the long shadow of
slavery with haunted intensity. "It was almost as if he felt things so acutely he found it almost unbearable," Clapton
said of Johnson's music. Legend has it that Johnson made a deal with the devil to acquire his guitar gifts. There was
certainly a lot of daredevilry in his flouting of standard tempos and harmonics; his records are breathtaking
displays of melodic development and acute brawn. Johnson died in 1938 at twenty-seven, poisoned by a jealous
husband. Fifty-eight years later, a box set of his recordings was certified platinum. "Hell Hound on My
Trail," Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (1990)

Chuck Berry
There would be no rock & roll guitar without Chuck Berry. His signature lick — a staccato, double-string screech
descended from Chicago blues with a strong country inflection — is the music's defining twang. He introduced it in
his 1955 Chess Records debut, "Maybellene," and used it to dynamic effect in nearly two dozen classic hits in the
next ten years, including the best songs about playing rock & roll: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Rock and Roll Music"
and "Johnny B. Goode." Born in San Jose, California, in 1926, Berry learned to play guitar as a teenager but did
time in reform school for attempted robbery and moonlighted as a beautician in St. Louis before "Maybellene"
made him a star. Berry's career was sidelined by a two-year jail stint in the early 1960s; his only Number One single
was the mildly pornographic singalong "My Ding-a-Ling" in 1972. But Berry was the first giant of rock & roll guitar.
Nothing else matters.

Stevie Ray Vaughan
With the blinding stratocaster fireworks on his debut album, Texas Flood, in 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan kicked off a
blues-rock renaissance when the music needed one most: the heyday of hair-spray metal and synth-pop. Until 1982,
Vaughan's fame was limited to clubs in central Texas, where he perfected a brass-knuckled soul influenced by Jimi
Hendrix's psychedelia and the funky twang of Lonnie Mack. But after David Bowie saw him at the 1982 Montreux
Jazz Festival (a rare gig for an unsigned act), Vaughan was invited to play on Bowie's Let's Dance. By the late 1980s,
he was filling arenas with his longtime band Double Trouble. On August 27th, 1990, Vaughan died in a helicopter
crash in East Troy, Wisconsin, after leaving a venue where he had just jammed with his guitarist brother Jimmie,
Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jeff Healey and Robert Cray. He was thirty-five.

Ry Cooder
In Ry Cooder's hands, the guitar becomes a time machine. Ever since he began as a teen prodigy in the Sixties, he
has been a virtuoso in a host of guitar styles going back to the most primal bottleneck blues, country, vintage jazz,
Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Bahamian folk music and countless other styles. He's combined these different musical
idioms into his own eclectic style as one of the world's foremost performing musicologists. He got his start playing
the blues with Taj Mahal in the Sixties and, after a stint in Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, began making solo
records such as Paradise and Lunch and Chicken Skin Music, unearthing obscure folk tunes like "Vigilante Man"
and "Boomer's Story" and breathing slide-guitar life into them. Cooder also gave one of the most significant guitar
lessons in rock & roll history: During his sessions with the Rolling Stones in 1968, he taught Keith Richards five-
string open-G blues tuning, which Richards used to write some of his greatest riffs for songs on Beggars
Banquet, Let It Bleed and Exile on Main St. He played on the Stones' "Love in Vain," which features Cooder on
mandolin, and on Randy Newman's "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield." Since the Eighties, he has composed
acclaimed scores for films such as Paris, Texas. He continues to explore sounds from around the world,
collaborating with African guitarist Ali Farka Toure on the 1994 Talking Timbuktu and assembling old-school
Cuban musicians for the wildly successful Buena Vista Social Club.

Jimmy Page
In the 1970s, there was no bigger rock group in the world than Led Zeppelin and no greater god on six strings than
Zeppelin's founder-captain Jimmy Page. Nothing much has changed. The imperial weight, technical authority and
exotic reach of Page's writing and playing on Zeppelin's eight studio albums have lost none of their power: the
rusted, slow-death groan of Page's solo, played with a violin bow, in "Dazed and Confused," on Zeppelin's 1969
debut; the circular, cast-iron stammer of his riffing on "Black Dog," on the band's fourth LP; the melodic

momentum and chrome-spear tone of his closing solo in Zeppelin's most popular song, "Stairway to Heaven." Page
actually built Zeppelin's sound and might from a wide palette of inspirations and previous experience. In the early
and mid-1960s, Page was a first-call studio musician in London, playing on Kinks and Everly Brothers dates and
honing his production skills on singles for John Mayall and future Velvet Underground vocalist Nico. And before
forming Zeppelin in London in the late summer of 1968 with singer Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and
bassist John Paul Jones, Page had been the lead guitarist in the final lineup of the Yardbirds.

Keith Richards
In his forty-one years with the Rolling Stones, Richards has created, and immortalized on record, rock's greatest
single body of riffs — including the fuzz-tone SOS of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," the uppercut power chords of
"Start Me Up," the black stab of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and the strum and slash of virtually everything he plays on the
Stones' 1972 classic, Exile on Main St. Richards is not a fancy guitarist; his style is a simple, personalized extension
of his teenage ardor for Chuck Berry and the swarthy electricity of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Born in
Dartford, England, in 1943, he was expelled from a technical college when he was sixteen. He immediately joined
his childhood friend Mick Jagger and another R&B aficionado, Brian Jones, in a combo, Little Boy Blue and the
Blue Boys, that by 1962 — with bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts — had become the Rolling Stones.
Richards is routinely hailed as the most indestructible of rock stars, but he credits his music with giving him life. As
he told Rolling Stone last year, "You gotta be a real sourpuss, mate, not to get up there and play 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'
without feeling like, 'C'mon, everybody, let's go.' " "Happy," Exile on Main St.(1972)

Kirk Hammett
On any given night, at least half the parking lots in America have a car with the windows down, the speakers
cranked and a couple of dudes sitting on the trunk playing air guitar to Kirk Hammett solos. Hammett is so steeped
in metal history that he reportedly paid for his first guitar at fifteen with ten dollars and a copy of Kiss' Dressed to
Kill. Metallica's dense thrash redefined hard rock more completely than any band since Led Zeppelin. Hammett's
lead guitar is the emotional heart of the music, from acoustic angst ("Fade to Black") to badass flailing ("Master of
Puppets"), and, in "One," the sound of a guitar tapping out a cry for help in Morse code, over and over, until the
parking lot closes down.

Kurt Cobain
"Grunge" was always a lousy, limited way to describe the music Kurt Cobain made with Nirvana and, in particular,
his discipline and ambition as a guitarist. His cannonballs of fuzz and feedback bonfires on
1991's Nevermind announced the death of 1980s stadium guitar rock. Cobain also reconciled his multiple
obsessions — the Beatles, hardcore punk, the fatalist folk blues of Lead Belly — into a truly alternative rock that
bloomed in the eccentric, gripping hooks and chord changes of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Come as You Are."
Recorded six months before Cobain's suicide in 1994, MTV Unplugged in New York reveals, in exquisite acoustic
terms, the craft and love of melody that illuminated his anguish.

Jerry Garcia
Garcia was a folk and blue-grass obsessive who started playing guitar at fifteen. It was those roots, as well as a
lifelong love of Chuck Berry, that gave his astral experiments with the Grateful Dead a sense of forward momentum.
Garcia could dazzle on slide ("Cosmic Charlie") or pedal steel ("Dire Wolf"), but his natural home was playing lead
onstage, exploring the frontier of psychedelic sound. The piercing lyricism of this tone was all the more remarkable
for the fact that he was missing the third finger of his right hand — the result of a childhood accident while he and
his brother Tiff were chopping wood. He died in 1995 in rehab for his longtime drug habit. But his guitar still shines
like a headlight on a northbound train.

Jeff Beck
Beck was the second of the Yardbirds' three star guitarists, leading the group's swing into R&B- charged psychedelia
("Shapes of Things," "Over Under Sideways Down") with his speed and deft manipulation of feedback and sustain.
In 1967, Beck formed his own heavier variation on the Yardbirds — the Jeff Beck Group, with then-unknown singer
Rod Stewart — which added heavy-metal pow to British blues and became a major role model for Jimmy Page's Led
Zeppelin. But Beck's commercial peak came in the mid-1970s, with an idiosyncratic style of jazz fusion (whiplash
melodies; artful, roaring distortion; whammy-bar hysterics) that he still plays today with undiminished class and
ferocity, when he isn't in his garage at home in England working under the hoods of vintage cars.

Carlos Santana
The piercingly pure tone of Santana's guitar is among the most recognizable sounds in popular music. A towering
musician who brought Latin rhythms and jazz improvisation to rock, Santana formed the first lineup of his
namesake band in 1968. His varied influences — from Mike Bloomfield and Peter Green to Miles Davis and John
Coltrane — resulted in a singularly innovative approach. A fiery, impassioned soloist, Santana articulates fluid
passages that culminate in lengthy sustained notes. From Santana's career-breakthrough performance at
Woodstock in 1969 to the 2000 Grammys — where he won eight awards for Supernatural, tying Michael Jackson's
record — Santana has remained a compelling musician with a devotional spirituality fueling his muse.

Johnny Ramone
Johnny Ramone invented punk-rock guitar out of hatred: He couldn't stand guitar solos. So the former Johnny
Cummings of Queens, New York, played nothing but concrete-block barre chords on twenty-one albums and 2,263
shows with the Ramones. His elementary attack was part of the essential simplicity — matching last names, two-
minute tunes, a strict uniform of black leather and ripped denim — with which the kings of Queens ruled punk rock
from the mid-1970s until they called it quits in 1996. But there was more to Johnny's sound than bricks of
distortion. "In sound checks, the band would do a couple of songs without vocals," recalled the band's late singer,
Joey Ramone, in 1999. "I'd listen to John's guitar and hear all these harmonics, these instruments like organ and

piano that weren't really there. And he didn't use any effects." Johnny now lives in retirement in Southern
California.

Jack White
White has become the hottest new thing on six strings by celebrating the oldest tricks in the book: distortion,
feedback, plantation blues, the 1960s-Michigan riff terrorism of the Stooges and the MC5. Onstage, decked out like a
peppermint dandy, he violates classic covers (Dolly Parton's "Jolene," Bob Dylan's "Isis") with fireball chords and
primal, bent-string scream. He is also an acute orchestrator in the studio, stirring the scratchy-78s atmosphere of
Blind Willie Johnson sides, 1970s punk and Led Zeppelin-style drama into his own howl. Don't pay attention to the
notes; White is not a clean soloist. He's a blowtorch.

John Frusciante
In 1989, Eighteen-year-old John Frusciante, a bedroom-guitar prodigy from California's San Fernando Valley who
had never played in a group before, auditioned for his favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He got the job —
replacing Hillel Slovak, who died of a drug overdose in 1988 — and transformed the Peppers' rascally punk funk
into beefy arena pop. On the 1992 multiplatinum album,BloodSugarSexMagik, Frusciante fortified the band's
bone-hard grooves with a mix of Hendrixian force and, in the hit ballad "Under the Bridge," poignant Beatlesque
melody. When Frusciante abruptly quit the Peppers in the middle of a Japanese tour in 1992, he left a big hole in the
group's sound that was only filled with his drug-free return on the Peppers' 1999 comeback album, Californication.

Richard Thompson
Richard Thompson is the greatest guitarist in British folk rock — and that's only one of the genres he has mastered.
He was eighteen when he co-founded the English folk band Fairport Convention in 1967. By the time he left, in '71,
Thompson had created a seamless world music for acoustic and electric guitar drawn from Celtic minstrelsy,
psychedelia, Cajun dance tunes and Arabic scales. He is also one of Britain's finest singer-songwriters. His records
with his former wife Linda, made between 1974 and 1982, are marvels of hair-raising musicianship and emotional
candor. Try to see him live, with an electric band: The solos run long and wild.

James Burton
James Burton mainly plays a dark-red '53 Fender Telecaster that he bought in a Louisiana music store when he was
thirteen. He's performed a lifetime's worth of hot licks and fluid solos on it, on songs such as Dale Hawkins' "Susie
Q" and Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou." As an in-demand Sixties sessionman, Burton played often-uncredited
guitar and Dobro on countless records by artists ranging from Buck Owens and Buffalo Springfield to Frank
Sinatra. In the Seventies he anchored the touring bands of Elvis Presley and Emmylou Harris. Burton's country-
rock style combines flatpicking and fingerpicking; he's also a master of a damped-string, staccato-note "chickin'
pickin'."

George Harrison
As the Beatles' lead guitarist, George Harrison never played an unnecessary note. In his solos and fills, he prized
clarity and concision above all things. But every note made history, from the Cavern Club R&B frenzy of his breaks
in "I Saw Her Standing There" to the hallucinogenic splendor of his contributions to Revolver and the matured
elegance of his work on Abbey Road. John Lennon and Paul McCartney dominated the Beatles' revolutionary
course through 1960s pop, but Harrison defined the musical character of those innovations in his explorations of
studio technology, tonal color and Indian scales. At the same time, he never strayed from the terse, earthy qualities
of his first love, 1950s rockabilly, and his biggest idol, Sun Records star Carl Perkins. Harrison's final
album, Brainwashed — recorded in the years before his death from cancer in 2001 — features some of his finest
twang.

Mike Bloomfield
Bloomfield's reputation as the American white-blues guitarist of the 1960s rests on a small, searing body of work:
his licks on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, his two LPs with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and his sublime
jamming with Al Kooper on 1968's Super Session. Born in Chicago, Bloomfield grew up in local blues clubs, where
he worked with many black legends. His modal runs and jabbing breaks were executed with pinpoint force in a
ringing-bell tone. Bloomfield's gifts faded as he fell into drug abuse. He died of an overdose in 1981.

Warren Haynes
Haynes is possibly the hardest-working guitarist on the planet — a cornerstone of the Allman Brothers Band, leader
of Gov't Mule, pivotal member of Phil Lesh and Friends. Displaying controlled intensity, he's a meaty and masterful
slide player, as well as a soulful singer and songwriter. Steeped in the uncut blues of Muddy Waters and Elmore
James, and especially bitten by the heavy rock-trio sound of Cream and Mountain, Haynes has kept the blues-rock

The Edge
Rarely has a guitarist achieved so much by playing so little. Most of what the Edge (real name Dave Evans) played on
U2's early albums, from Boy in 1980 to the '87 global smash The Joshua Tree, can be described thusly: circular
skeletal arpeggios swimming in oceans of reverb; few conventional chords or solos. But the elegant urgency of the
Edge's minimalism on those records perfectly framed and fueled the earnest, flag-waving theatricality of Bono's
voice. With U2's swerve into apocalyptic dance music on 1991's Achtung Baby, the Edge coated his riffs in extreme
distortion and electronic treatments but without betraying his playing credo: Less is most.

Freddy King

King was born in Texas, but in 1950, when he was sixteen, his family moved to Chicago, where he would sneak into
clubs to play with Muddy Waters' band. His style was a mixture of country and urban blues, and his instrumental
sides such as "Hide Away," "Just Pickin" and "The Stumble," from the early Sixties, had immense impact on the
British blues scene — Eric Clapton says King was one of the first guitarists he tried to copy. His playing employed
taut, melodic riffs that erupted into frantic, wailing solos on the upper strings. King, who also recorded for the
Cotillion, Shelter and RSO labels, died at forty-two of heart failure in 1976.

Tom Morello
In the early days of Rage Against the Machine, Morello watched local California metal guitarists play "as fast as
Yngwie Malmsteen" and realized, "That wasn't a race I wanted to run." So he began to experiment with the toggle
switch on his guitar to produce an effect like a DJ scratching a record. The result was true rap metal and a
redefinition of the guitar's potential. Morello absorbs hip-hop mixology as a true son of Grandmaster Flash and the
Voodoo Child, making his riffs rumble and boom like crosstown turntable traffic.

Mark Knopfler
Dire Straits founder and solo artist Mark Knopfler emerged at a time when guitar virtuosos were spurned by punks
and New Wavers. Yet from the first stinging notes of "Sultans of Swing," Knopfler's roots-based approach and
supple, burnished leads found almost universal appeal. A fingerpicker who favors Fender Stratocasters — a
Knopfler-designed Strat was introduced in July as part of Fender's "Artist Series" — he's known for his rich tone,
sinuous melodicism and rangy, fluid solos. "My sound is fingers on a Strat," he once said.

Stephen Stills
"He's a musical genius," Neil Young said of Stills in a 2000 interview. He should know. The two have been
bandmates and competing lead guitarists on and off since 1966: in Buffalo Springfield, the supergroup Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young, and the short-lived Stills-Young Band. But those groups' ego-and-drug dramas have
obscured Stills' prowess as a musician — he played nearly every instrument on Crosby, Stills and Nash's 1969 debut
— and especially as a guitarist. In Springfield and CSNY, Stills challenged and complemented Young's feral breaks
with a country-inflected chime. And a continuing highlight of CSNY shows is Stills' acoustic picking in "Suite: Judy
Blue Eyes" — a paragon of unplugged beauty.

Ron Asheton
Nobody ever accused Ron Asheton of being a nice guy. "Any guitar player worth his salt is basically a thug," his lead
singer, Iggy Pop, once said. "They test you with that thug mentality. They ride you to the edge." Asheton was the
Detroit punk who made the Stooges' music reek like a puddle of week-old biker sweat. He favored black leather and
German iron crosses onstage, and he never let not really knowing how to play get in the way of a big, ugly feedback
solo. This spring, Asheton joined Iggy and the other Stooges for their first gigs in nearly thirty years. He still sounds
like a thug.

Buddy Guy
A key influence on Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy put the Louisiana hurricane in
1960s electric Chicago blues as a member of Muddy Waters' band and as a house guitarist at Chess Records. A
native of the Baton Rouge area, he combined a blazing modernism with a fierce grip on his roots, playing frantic
leads heavy with swampy funk on Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" and Koko Taylor's "Wang Dang Doodle" as well as
on his own Chess sides and the fine series of records he made with harp man Junior Wells. One of the last active
connections to the golden age of Chess, Guy still plays with his original fire.

Dick Dale
Dick Dale reigns across the decades as the undisputed king of the surf guitar. In Dale's own words, "Real surfing
music is instrumental, characterized by heavy staccato picking on a Fender Stratocaster guitar." Moreover, it's best
played through a Fender Showman Amp — a model built to spec for Dale by Leo Fender himself. Igniting
California's surfing cult with such regional hits as "Let's Go Trip-pin'," "Surf Beat" and "Miserlou," Dale made
waves with his fat, edgy sound and aggressive, proto-metal attack. "Miserlou," released in 1962, marked the first use
of a Fender reverb unit — creating an underwater sound with lots of echo — on a popular record. Fittingly, it
sparked a surf-music revival when director Quentin Tarantino used it in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction.

John Cipollina
Cipollina was half of the twin-guitar team — with Gary Duncan — that drove San Francisco's Quicksilver Messenger
Service, the best acid-rock dance band of the 1960s. Cipollina's spires of tremolo, enriched with the erotica of
flamenco, in "The Fool," from the band's 1968 debut, and his ravishing improvisations in Bo Diddley's "Mona" and
"Who Do You Love" on '69's Happy Trails, are supreme psychedelia, authentic evidence of what it was like to be at
the Fillmore in the Summer of Love. The classic quartet lineup of 1967-69 made only two albums, though
Quicksilver re-formed with various players over the years. Cipollina, who suffered from severe emphysema, died in
1989.

Lee Ranaldo
Thurston Moore
When Sonic Youth burst onto New York's downtown scene in the early Eighties, guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee
Ranaldo got plenty of attention for attacking their axes with drumsticks and screwdrivers. But their real legacy can't
be bought in a hardware store; it's the way they've opened rock guitar up to the world of alternate tunings. On the
band's masterpiece, 1988's Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth created their own language of strange and blissful
guitar noise. Neither Moore nor Ranaldo is a master of technique, but they're both virtuoso soundsmiths, and a
generation of alt-rockers — from Nirvana to Dashboard Confessional — owes them big.

John Fahey
John Fahey created a new, enduring vocabulary for acoustic solo guitar — connecting the roots and branches of folk
and blues to Indian raga and the advanced harmonies of modern composers such as Charles Ives and Béla Bartók —
on an extraordinary run of albums in the 1960s, released on his own Takoma label. Fahey knew American pioneer
song in academic detail; he wrote his UCLA master's thesis on blues-man Charley Patton. Fahey was also a precise
fingerpicker addicted to the mystery of the blues as well as the music, a passion reflected in apocryphal album titles
such as The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, from 1967. Fahey endured illness and poverty in the 1990s, but re-
emerged to a new wave of acclaim from bands such as Sonic Youth. He continued touring and recording — often on
electric guitar — until his death in 2001.

Steve Cropper
As a member of the stax records house band Booker T. and the MG's, Steve Cropper, a white guy from Willow
Springs, Missouri, was a prime inventor of black Southern-funk guitar — trebly, chicken-peck licks fired with
stinging, dynamic efficiency. If Cropper had never played on another record after 1962's "Green Onions," his
stabbing-dagger lines would have ensured him a place on this list. But he also played on — and often co-wrote and
arranged — many of the biggest Stax hits of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Four decades after "Green Onions," he
continues to perform and record with his seminal, down-home touch.

Bo Diddley
Diddley's beat was as simple as a diddley bow, the one-stringed African instrument that inspired his nickname. But
in songs such as "Mona," "I'm a Man" and "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover," his tremolo-laden guitar argued
that rhythm was as important as melody, maybe more so. Born in Mississippi, he grew up as Ellas McDaniel in
Chicago, where he studied violin and learned how to make both violins and guitars. His late-1950s singles on
Checker could be both terrifying ("Who Do You Love") and hilarious ("Crackin Up"). The sounds he coaxed out of
his homemade guitar were groundbreaking, influencing just about everyone in the British Invasion.

Peter Green
Many six-string devotees — including fellows named Carlos and B.B. — insist that Britain's greatest blues guitarist
isn't Clapton or Beck, it's Peter Green. In the Sixties, first with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, then as the original
frontman for Fleetwood Mac (long before Stevie Nicks entered the picture), Green played with a fire and fluidity
that's rarely been matched. But in 1970, with the Mac on the verge of super-stardom, Green quit the band, saying he
needed to escape the evils of fame. It was the beginning of a long, drug-fueled breakdown that would include stints
in mental institutions and on the street. Miraculously, Green recovered and took up guitar again in the mid-
Nineties; though his leads aren't as authoritative now, the spirit of a true survivor is in every note.

Brian May
When the lead singer of your band is Freddie Mercury, you're lucky if anybody notices your guitar playing at all. But
Brian May was every bit as flamboyant as his frontman in terms of getting attention, and he defined the sound of
Queen with his upper-register guitar shrieks. May juiced the treble all the way for a clear and piercing tone, playing
solos with grandeur and campy feather-boa humor. From "Killer Queen" to "Bohemian Rhapsody," May offered
counterpoint to Mercury's operatic falsetto, pushing glitter rock over the top until the sound was sheer heart attack.
He will, he will rock you.

John Fogerty
In the late 1960s, at the height of psychedelic excess, John Fogerty wrote, sang and played guitar with Creedence
Clearwater Revival like a man from another decade: the 1950s. His impassioned vocals and plainspoken
workingman's politics were a big part of CCR's crossover appeal on underground-FM and Top Forty radio. But
Fogerty's taut riffing, built on the country and rockabilly innovations of Scotty Moore and James Burton, was the
dynamite in CCR hits such as "Born on the Bayou" and "Green River." Fogerty can also be a lethal jammer: See his
extended break in CCR's '68 cover of Dale Hawkins' "Susie Q."

Clarence White
A child-prodigy bluegrass picker, White found early fame with the Kentucky Colonels, but he's best remembered for
his association with the Byrds. His classy twang first popped up on their 1967 album Younger Than Yesterday,
came through loud and clear on 1968's Sweetheart of the Rodeo and only grew more important as the band delved
further into country rock. White's fame among players was sealed with his co-invention of the Parsons/ White
StringBender, which enables a regular guitar to simulate a pedal steel. It's used by everyone from Jimmy Page to
Kirk Hammett. Sadly, the man who brought it to prominence died way too soon, mowed down by a drunk driver in
1973.

Robert Fripp
Starting in 1969 with King Crimson, this native of Dorset, England, has helped define prog-rock guitar. Robert
Fripp's trademarks are swooping fuzz-tone solos that skirt the fringes of tonality; slashing rhythm parts in an array
of tricky time signatures; intricate, finger-punishing single-note lines. In the mid-Seventies, Fripp and his friend
Brian Eno invented the "Frippertronics" infinite tape-loop system, thus helping create a new subgenre: ambient
music. As a sideman, Fripp played on David Bowie's Heroes; as a producer, he handled Peter Gabriel's second
album and the Roches' 1979 debut.

Eddie Hazel
Hazel was the guitar visionary of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic empire. Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Hazel
grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, where he fell in with Clinton's funk mob. For the title track to Funkadelic's 1971
album Maggot Brain, Clinton famously asked Hazel to imagine the saddest possible thing. Thinking of his mother's
death, Hazel unleashed ten minutes of sad acid-rock guitar moans. "Maggot Brain" became a landmark, and Hazel
inspired disciples from Sonic Youth to the Chili Peppers with a Strat full of cosmic slop. Hazel died in 1992. They
played "Maggot Brain" at his funeral. You can still hear his soulfully twisted freakouts in P-Funk gems such as "I'll

Bet You," "Music for My Mother" and "Standing on the Verge of Getting It On."

Scotty Moore
Moore played electric on the eighteen epochal sides Elvis Presley cut for Sun Records in 1954 and '55, including
"That's All Right," "Good Rockin' Tonight" and "Mystery Train." His mix of country picking and bluesy bends would
later be termed rockabilly. When the King signed with RCA, Moore went along with him, and the result was another
round of classics: "Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Too Much" (the last featuring a particularly angular Moore
solo). Later, Elvis would turn to Nashville and L.A. session guitarists, but when he wanted to reconnect with his
roots for his 1968 comeback special, Moore got the call once again.

Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa was a drummer (at age twelve) and composer (writing a string quartet in his teens) before he got
serious about the guitar. But in his more than four decades on stage and record, Zappa — who died in 1993 — soloed
with the same discipline and experimental appetite that he applied to the rest of his protean legacy: symphonies,
doo-wop parody, big-band fusion, sociopolitical satire. For a man who ran his Mothers of Invention with an iron
fist, Zappa was actually a joyful improviser who combined the melodic rigor of his orchestral ideals with the dirty,
frenzied pith of his earliest love, 1950s R&B. He also came up with the best instrumental titles in the business,
including "Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin" and "In-A-Gadda-Stravinsky."

Les Paul
Les Paul, born Lester Polfus in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on June 9th, 1915, is a guitar inventor as well as a player. He
was tinkering with electronics at age twelve and built his first guitar pickup from ham-radio parts in 1934. By 1941
— after a career as a hillbilly star under the names Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red — he had built the first solid-body
electric guitar prototype. In 1952, Gibson began selling the Les Paul model, now a rock & roll standard. He was also
a pioneer in multitrack recording and a staggeringly talented guitarist, cutting a string of futuristic pop hits with
wife Mary Ford in the early Fifties.

T-Bone Walker
T-Bone Walker invented the guitar solo as we know it — he was the guy who figured out how to make an electric
guitar cry and moan. Born in Texas in 1910, he was a bluesman touring the South by the age of fifteen. As early as
1935, he was playing primitive electric-guitar models. But he shocked everyone with his 1942 debut single, "Mean
Old World," playing bent notes, vibrato sobs and more wild new electric sounds that other guitarists hadn't even
dreamed of. Walker invented a new musical language, from the urban flash of "The Hustle Is On" to the dread of
"Stormy Monday." Through the Forties and Fifties, he led his suave L.A. jump-blues combo on classics such as
"You're My Best Poker Hand," "I Know Your Wig Is Gone" and "Long Skirt Baby Blues."

Joe Perry
Joe Perry has spent most of his three decades in Aerosmith being compared to Keith Richards: as the guitar pirate and songwriting foil to
Aerosmith's own Jagger, Steven Tyler. But Perry's admiration for both Richards' riffing and Jeff Beck's screaming leads was grounded in
blues and R&B: Perry's immortal pimp-roll lick in "Walk This Way" was a natural progression from Aerosmith's early covers of Rufus
Thomas' "Walking the Dog" and James Brown's "Mother Popcorn." And everything Perry loves about Jimi Hendrix's iridescent lyricism
comes through in Aerosmith's "Dream On," one of the only power ballads worthy of the term.

John McLaughlin
After playing with British Blues Bands in the mid-Sixties, McLaughlin moved to New York, where he helped pioneer the jazz rock that
became known as fusion in the early Seventies. Miles Davis' jazz-rock classic Bitches Brew doesn't just feature McLaughlin, it also boasts
a track named after him. In 1971, McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which combined the complex rhythms of Indian music
with jazz harmonies and rock power chords. McLaughlin played blizzards of notes, clearly influenced by the sheets of sound of his idol,
John Coltrane. The first two Mahavishnu albums, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, are every bit as incendiary as their titles
suggest.

Pete Townshend
Pete Townshend destroyed guitars almost as much as he played them in the mid- and late 1960s, smashing his Rickenbackers and Strats
in frenzies of ritual murder at the end of the Who's stage shows. But he also pioneered the power chord on the Who's 1965 debut single, "I
Can't Explain," and on the follow-up, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, "Townshend was arguably the first in rock to use feedback as a
soloing tool. Live at Leeds is an exhilarating display of his unique guitar violence, while Who's Next, the Who's greatest studio
achievement, shows how much melody and beauty there was inside Townshend's thunder and lightning.

100 greatest guitarists

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