Guitar Heroes, Part 2: Midway Through Skool

Now we're going to hit the guitarists who come after Chuck Berry, and these are the people that people "yawn," sort of idolize like some molten idol of the Ba'al of Peor. If you ask, "Who was the best guitarist ever?" you'll likely get one of the guitarists off of this list. The era we are in here is maybe mid to late 60's to the late 70's. The thing is that this was a great era for the guitar. It really was. The problem is that there are other ways of looking at guitar than your standard "Jimi Hendrix," or "Eric Clapton," or "Robbie Robertson," type of formulaic answers.

All three of those guitarists were killer guitarists by the way, and I mean no disrespect to any of them. In fact, even though two of them died young, these were not evil men. They were men with real big hearts and real big drug problems, and that is not necessarily an evil man. Clapton managed to get some recovery, and was alive at least a few years ago, and he had recovered enough to be a respectable adult male.

We'll also list some people that few people have heard of, and we're going to list some people that might not even make much sense, even if you've heard of them. We'll talk it over after the list, and we'll have to branch out eventually, because not all of these guitarists are rockers. Eventually we'll get a 'round tuit'.

1. Wes Montgomery
2. Jimi Hendrix
3. Charlie Christian (Early jazz guitarist, more like the early 50's, we'll skip that for now.)
4. B.B. King
5. John Lee Hooker
6. Eric Clapton
7. George Harrison
8. Robert Fripp (Later, later.)
9. Steve Hackett (Also, most likely, later.)
10. Robbie Robertson
11. John McLaughlin
12. Jimmy Page
13. Jeff Beck
14. Brian May
15. Pete Townshend
16. Frank Zappa
17. Stevie Ray Vaughn
18. Duane Allman

We're not going to go into Wes Montgomery much, but Wes Montgomery was, and remains, the best jazz guitarist who ever lived. He studied personally with Charlie Christian, and he mostly recorded with B-3 organist Jimmy Smith in order to put money in the bank. He played most of his own music live at small nightclubs in NYC and recorded next to none of that music.

He was really a re-bop player, and there are one or two recordings, one on the Verve catalog, where he really shows off his stuff. He is the unbeatable jazz guitarist, and all you can do and listen and emulate. What he pulls off is history, and that is often the way with a seminal artist like that. You might be better at playing your own music, but you won't ever re-bop on guitar like Wes Montgomery.

John Lee Hooker is an interesting one. He is very much in the gut-blues tradition. With his music, you get a loose semblance of 4/4, and no more than that, and as you might guess from his stage moniker, the guy had been around more than one block more than a few times. He is also an unreal guitarist and blues artist. There is a recording done when he was well into his 80's of one of his signature tracks, "Boom, Boom, Boom," a track about seducing a stripper, and you can get it off of Gnutella and you should get it off of Gnutella - if you dig guitar.

However, there is one middling reference in the first verse to something far less than humorous, and you'll have to use your own discretion about the tune. No cuss words, no direct nastiness, but it is a nasty tune. Otherwise, how many millions of songs are there about strippers? - and this is not by far the worst version of that one.

Jimi Hendrix. First, forget Foxey Lady and all of your other idols and go to Gnutella and download the LIVE Monterey-Pop version of a song named "Machine Gun," that Jimi never put on an official record during his lifetime. Here is the thing. Jimi works this guitar over in a way at that show that cannot be real, because he is not compressing his sound hardly at all. You can tell because there are all of these incredibly fine variations of volume and tone, and a normal compression setup, even back then, would have annihilated all of those little subtleties. UNREAL GUITARIST.

Second, every track Jimi did is some re-working of a blues form. From his most esoteric stuff to the more obvious blues relatives, Jimi played blues, even if it was psychedelic blues. Machine Gun is no exception. Third, Jimi was trying to get clean off of speed - really - at the end of his life, and he was talking about how he didn't want to lose his entire style, but that he was aging out of exploding amplifiers and all of the sham and glam. Not that Jimi was entirely a sham, but he got done a lot of what he got done by sheer muscle and glamor.

That Machine Gun is a sign of what could have been. It is fun showing muscle - remember - I like to play hard rock - but mature artistry has a great deal of subtlety to it rather than pure muscle. Jimi killed himself by accident with a mixture of the sedatives they were using to ramp him off the speed and a great big bottle of liquor. Jimi was a guy who was known for being "all heart," which means that he was just that gentle, loving kind of man.

Apparently he was even that way on the speed, and the music he could have made. To be blunt, there is not a guitarist I can think of that would be willing to go onstage today with a setup like Jimi used in that live Machine Gun recording, simply because compression is what covers your hiney. There has to be a little compression on Jimi's guitar because of some of the effects he is getting, but he is using next to zero compression. That is guitar, and Jimi was trying to build some jazz chops, and the music he could have made.

We're going to have to split this one, but let us talk about two of the others on the list because of their relationship to Jimi. One was B.B. King. Jimi and King were friends, and King was always a very conservative type of man, and shepherded Jimi as much as he could, in a very sincere way, without trying to take advantage of Jimi. Jimi did not have too many such people in his life. King is a blues player of the very smooth variety. I believe he passed away last year, and he was just an elder.

A very subtle, smooth blues player that never tried for jazz sophistication or more than doing theater shows and playing some blues right up until he died. I guess he must have been well into his 70's when he died. His late recordings are amazing. With King you just have to realize how understated the talent and the personality was, and also, like any great musician, he just got better and better right until he passed away. A wonderful man by all accounts. Struggled with obesity and not with too much else. Ordinary, and entirely amazing.

The other is Stevie Ray Vaughn. SRV was not known as a guy who was all heart. He was known as a psychopath. SRV idolized Jimi, and he met Jimi once. Jimi had an autistic flair from the start, and the drugs accentuated that problem. Jimi was well-known - if he really didn't like someone - he wouldn't bother with a courtesy, he'd just say nothing and meander off. That is what he did to SRV and it broke SRV's heart.

SRV did get clean, but he lost a lot of his virtuousity at playing when he did, got right back on and OD'ed and died, which is unfortunately - kind of a normal addiction process. The big thing is that SRV recorded an instrumental version of Little Wing that is unforgettable, and you figure that the guy had a soul that might have showed up if he had stayed clean and stuck with all the problems that does inevitably bring to someone in recovery. Again, SRV's "Little Wing," it's on Gnutella, and it is a wonder what that man could do with a guitar.

So we'll stop with this part of this part, and hey! - we are going to get further down the wire. I'm going to do a few more of these and then I'll probably talk about my two big guitar heroes, who are Robert Fripp and Bill Frisell. I would like to cover a little more of our late 60's and 70's material, but it will be at least 3 more articles, and I'll do one more and talk about Fripp and Frisell. You'll see. While I'm kicking back for a moment, I'm going to do Jimi's Machine Gun and SRV's Little Wing, and I suggest you do that as well.