Rolling Stone has listed what it claims are “The 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time.” Rather than come up with the definitive list, however, the article simply fans the flames of a long-running debate.
Many music critics would say that sound and inventiveness trumps technique and skill. Serious musicians could counter that even if you stun listeners across the nation with your songs, it doesn’t mean your playing is any good, never mind sophisticated.
The RS list appears to lean toward the former argument. That’s fine, but in reading its list, one can’t help but feel mislead. If they called this list “100 Great Artists Whose Guitar Is Their Primary Instrument,” then, yeah, you could get behind that. But to give props to Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil because he used dropped-D tuning, but exclude technically superior musicians like Eric Johnson and Alex Lifeson … that just seems wrong.
One thing is for certain; Rolling Stone’s list leaves a lot of head-scratching.
Top 5 “what the hell were they thinking?!” moments on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time:
1. Eric Clapton
No. Sorry. He’s not the fourth greatest guitarist of all time. I’m not even sure if he’s the fortieth. Yes, he’s incredibly popular; yes, he’s been around for a bit; yes, he deserves a huge thanks for giving the blues a British renaissance; and yes, the baby boomers love him. But as my old guitar teacher once said, any kid on the street corner can play his licks. The pentatonic scale is just not that hard. If he’s “God,” then my dad’s God … and he’s not.
2. Kurt Cobain
Cobain helped to give the music industry an enema just when its hair band-impacted bowels needed it, and we’re all better off for that. But Cobain was not that great of a guitarist, he just wasn’t it. If you need to recognize a guitarist representing the early ’90s alternative/grunge music, why not Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready?
3. Johnny Ramone
Punk is a good and almost necessary form of music. But its very nature shuns the technical know-how of its contemporaries such as prog-rock. The Ramones is New York punk through and through, but you didn’t go to CBGB to hear an exercise on symmetrical augmented scales.
4. Keith Richards
One of the most overrated guitarists from the world’s biggest overrated band. The Rolling Stones did not do much to innovate. They came along at the right time, tweaking the Beatles sound with a bit more sex and drugs, and most of them had the good fortune to stick together and not die. Richards is a decent guitarist, but he’s not one of the all-time greatest.
5. Neil Young
As a singer-song writer, he’s fine. But like Cobain, he’s simply not that great of a guitarist. If you want to talk musicianship with a flair for songwriting, give me Paul Simon any day of the week.
Runners up: George Harrison (#21); The Edge (#24); Ron Asheton (#29); Tom Morello (#26); John Fogerty (#40); Clarence White (#41); Joni Mitchell (#72); Joan Jett (#87).
