Only crazy people and ignorant people don’t agree that Mr. Campbell was a dozen kinds of awesome sauce at playing guitar, but do you know who Mr. Cooper thinks was the best guitar player ever?
FWIW, I’ve seen Mr. Cooper quoted numerous times over the years with this assessment; I think the first time I read it was in about 1991 or so in a guitar magazine.
A weirdo technical wizard that releases shit-tons of albums of him shredding. No good songs. Great player, just…meh.
I think Zappa was an amazing player too, but he wrote…eccentric…songs that not everyone, self included, can really get into. That’s just me.
Pete Townshend and for acoustic Adrian Legg
His desire to be seen as a ‘serious composer’ was somewhat thwarted by his penchant for recording burping and farting noises, along with juvenile lyrics.
LOL. The song “Bobby Brown” from Sheik Yerbouti immediately springs to mind.
For Zappa sometimes the best ways to appreciate his playing is when he is just doing an instrumental without the humor. To whit:
Or in nine minutes, you hear a sample of everything he did.
Yea, I find it interesting that (IMO) so many of the virtuoso players are not good song writers. Buckethead, Malmsteen, and Vai come to mind. I’m am impressed by their speed and technical wizardry, but I find the writing and arrangements boring. Tony MacAlpine probably takes the cake in this regard. I have his 1986 album Edge of Insanity. Every song is nothing but back-to-back arpeggios played at lightning speed, one after the other. Very impressive, no-doubt. But I can only listen to it for about five minutes. (I heard he’s changed his style since then. Hopefully so.)
I completely agree. In fact, Joe Satriani may be the most gifted songwriter of these types of players with his “Always With Me, Always With You” winning a Grammy. It’s an instrumental.
Can’t believe I forgot Dave Davies. Just listen to this slinky groove on the title track to the “Arthur” album. The Kinks songs had some amazing lead guitar lines.
Being a good virtuoso and being a good songwriter are largely separate skills. Not surprising they rarely intersect. Me, I think the best songwriters are Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon. But there are certainly better singers.
Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. In the world of classical music, how many of the most successful or virtuosic performers have ever composed or improvised anything particularly interesting?
Alex Degrassi. I think just about everything he does is of his own composition and in some weird tuning. Among the all-time best, IMO.
Short Order
Deep at Night
Waltz #4
That IS slinky. I have never heard that before, and when I heard the opening notes, the guitar tone made me immediately think of “Day Tripper”'s guitar sound.
True, but the guys we’re referencing (except maybe Satriani) are all classically trained/Julliard schooled rock guitarists that try to write rock songs. It’s just ironic to me that they can play all these complicated passages and read sheet music and compose some killer instrumentals…just no rock songs with words that are any good, although Yngwie charted with that terrible “Heaven Tonight” late 1980’s song.
But there are cases of brilliant songwriters who are also virtuoso guitarists. Maybe Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler are the best examples.
I think it may be important to make a “shredder vs non-shredder” distinction too. The aforementioned Mssrs Vai, Malmsteen, Macalpine, etc et al are definitely shredder types, Knopfler is anything but. My 16 year old me would think shredders are “better”, but this 52 year old version of me strongly disagrees.
I used to live in Dallas and saw lots of great rock music there. The best band for my money was a local band called Lightning featuring the great Rocky Athas, an amazing player himself (later in Black Oak Arkansas). He did finger tapping back in the seventies.
Anyway, I was at a hole in the wall on night watching Lightning and Zappa strolled in (they had played in town earlier that night). He sat in - whoa! for a guy that seemed to play a lot of keyboards, that man knew his way around the fretboard. That was one of the memorable nights of my life. Blazing.
Rocky:
I’d give a lot to have seen that.
Being able to tell stories in bars that you saw Hendrix’s jaw drop when someone else played would be truly great.
If you were in Texas I’d have to go with Stevie Ray Vaughn.
I had a chance to see him but for reasons (none good) I didn’t and he died that night (Alpine Valley).
One of my biggest regrets was missing that concert.
Dunno what they put in the water in Texas but damn they produced some fine guitarists:
