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This working-class lad from northern England lent musical substance to David Bowie's theatrical conceits in the Seventies. Ronson, who died in 1993, was the archetypal flash Brit guitarist, known for wrenched, physical solos that favor his hero, Jeff Beck. A sharp, sensitive accompanist, he worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to Morrissey.
Reid reinvigorated hard rock with shots of soul, jazz and hip-hop. Reid's solos embraced the free-form abstraction of his early days as a jazz player, but they flexed enough muscle to bowl over any Metallica fan.
Sumlin's work on Howlin' Wolf classics such as "Wang Dang Doodle," "Back Door Man" and "Spoonful" inspired Keith Richards and an entire generation of British bluesmen. Wolf's idiosyncratic phrasing humbled countless sidemen, but Sumlin embellished the singer's every pronouncement with angular phrases, vibrato-laden riffs and audacious glissandos.
Wray is the man behind the most important D chord in history. You can hear that chord in all its raunchy magnificence on the epochal 1958 instrumental "Rumble." By stabbing his amplifier's speaker cone with a pencil, Wray created the overdriven rock-guitar sound taken up by Townshend, Hendrix and others.
Miller was tightly tempered on the Pacific Northwest R&B bar scene before joining the San Francisco ballroom band Moby Grape. His playing was never self-indulgent, and his soloing was propulsive, always aware of where the song was headed.
The sound-obsessed Van Halen makes even simple lines sound like towering chorales and pioneered all kinds of tricks, such as fingers hammering the fretboard. Van Halen sought something different from his rock peers: music that was defiantly arty, but never so much so that it lost touch with devastating hooks.
During an era when everyone wanted to be a bluesman, Howe brought jazz, country, flamenco, ragtime and psychedelia into the mix for prog-rockers Yes. The ringing harmonics that open "Roundabout" may be Howe's best-known moment but Close to the Edge shows his range, from acoustic delicacy to high-octane riffs.
The secret to Mitchell's daring guitar work is that she uses more than fifty different tunings. Mitchell devised the alternate tunings to compensate for a left hand weakened by childhood polio. In time she used them as a tool to break free of standard approaches to harmony and structure.
Sam "Lightnin' " Hopkins learned the blues from Blind Lemon Jefferson in the Twenties. He was a ferocious electric stylist in the Fifties, though he's perhaps best known for his nimble acoustic fingerpicking during the Sixties folk-blues revival. As unpredictable as John Lee Hooker, he seemed to be making it up as he went along, and often was.
Anastasio can play anything he hears. Phish's guitar anti-hero has Pat Metheny's cinematic sense of pacing and Frank Zappa's impish inclination toward noise. His epic solos balance technical finger-work against screaming climaxes, and they're exciting even when he's sloppy. Especially when he's sloppy.
In the early Seventies, Winter took the blues into hard-rock territory with his overdrive takes on anthems such as "Johnny B. Goode" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash." He produced a string of solid albums for his hero Muddy Waters in the late Seventies. "It's a living music," Winter has said. "For me, blues is a necessity."
In high school, Tool's Adam Jones played bass in a band with future Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. In Tool, he combines the tuned-down chug of death metal with ominous atmospherics influenced by Rush and King Crimson. Rarely letting loose with a conventional solo, Jones prefers riffing in 15/8 time.
Vestine's interplay with Alan Wilson's slide in Canned Heat sparked hits including "On the Road Again" and "Going Up the Country." "Sunflower," as he was called, was an early member of Zappa's Mothers and played with free-jazzman Albert Ayler.
The Malian singer and guitarist is often compared to John Lee Hooker, though that's too easy. He has clearly been influenced by rural blues, but Toure is a technical marvel, and his delicately plucked clusters and blindingly fast runs gather influences from African hymns to folk songs.
Robertson's songwriting laid the foundation for the Band's rustic soul, but his terse, poignant guitar playing was the group's most underrated weapon. The Canada-born Robertson and the rest of the Band — then still called the Hawks — backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour, in 1966, during which Dylan proclaimed him a "mathematical guitar genius."
In the few months he spent as lead guitarist for Gene Vincent's Blue Caps in 1956, Gallup introduced the stylistic swagger that every rock guitarist now takes for granted. His slashing, razor-blade-in-the-ducktail assaults pushed the instrument one big step away from country picking and down the mean streets that rock & roll guitar has traversed ever since.
With a guitar style that owed as much to free jazz as it did to blues and rock, Quine was the perfect choice to complement Richard Hell's intuitive street poetry in the New York punk band the Voidoids. Quine went on to make vital contributions to Lou Reed's solo masterpiece The Blue Mask and Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend.
Trucks hit the road with his first band at age twelve. Now thirty, he does double duty as guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band and leader of the jazz-tinged Derek Trucks Band. He's a fluid slide guitarist who moves easily between Southern rock, reggae, gospel, jazz and African music.
Roger Waters gave Floyd conceptual weight and lyrical depth, but Gilmour brought drama. His solos exuded a slow-burn stateliness that could be soulful ("Comfortably Numb") or evoke sci-fi dreamscapes ("Echoes") first glimpsed by the man he succeeded, acid casualty Syd Barrett.
The haunting, delicate clarity of Young's acoustic playing should not be underestimated. But it's on electric that he has staked his claim to ragged glory. A restless experimenter, he returns without fail to simple melodies, bludgeoning chords and a savant's knack for transforming the most obvious music into something revelatory.
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