And now the closer... Pick 10: You Got Me - Captain Kirk Douglas (The Roots) It's live and it's only the solo portion but Kirk takes it to another level. Then again, the guy destroys on a nightly basis at 11:30 ET every night so this shouldn't be a shock. Pick 1: Hot For Teacher - Eddie Van Halen Pick 2: Mr Crowley - Randy Rhodes Pick 3: Paranoid Android - Jonny Greenwood Pick 4: Time - David Gilmour Pick 5: Crazy on You - Nancy Wilson Pick 6: Downhearted - How Blue Can You Get (Sing Sing Thanksgiving) - BB King Pick 7: Yellow Ledbetter - Mike McCready Pick 8: Do You Feel Like We Do - Peter Frampton Pick 9: Spirit of the Radio - Alex Lifeson Pick 10: You Got Me - Captain Kirk Douglas
After Nico selects, I'm wondering if the draft participants would be amenable to my submitting a stealth draft -- or I could just put in a post-draft thread.
I'll probably give him until Monday evening before making the voting thread. I want to give him an after-work weekday time to vote.
Voting and comment thread is up. https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/threads/guitar-solo-draft-2014-voting-and-comment.2003301/
While we wait, here's something I turned up while looking for a vocal track with Django Reinhardt on it-- Django, Stephane Grappelli and Eddie South pay tribute to the 18th century's greatest jazzbo, Johann Sebastian Bach. There's no guitar solo and in fact the guitar is really just a rhythm section for a fiddle duet, but it seemed too cool to ignore:
Here's the Steuart Smith solo I didn't take-- 1:47-2:19. Rodney Crowell, with Vince Santoro on drums.
I found a lot of good Roy Clark stuff, but most of it was instrumental. I wanted to throw this live cut of Orange Blossom Special in (1:34) but opted for the Queen solo instead.
Soloists I would have expected to take but did not: James Burton-- all I could find were very early and very late stuff, the early before he was at full power, the late after his hands had started to slow down. Did find one thing from "Black and White Night" where he was trading solos with Springsteen, but it was just too embarassing to Springsteen. The long long version of "Hello Mary Lou" which was the beginning of the concept of "guitar solo" for me doesn't seem to exist at all, only the short long version... Albert Lee-- there's a ton of good stuff, but nothing good enough to bump anything I did take. Tom Verlaine-- he seems to be camera shy or something-- couldn't find anything really representative of his talent. Eddy Shaver-- almost took the version of "If I Gave My Soul" from "Tramp on Your Street." Shreds. Albert Collins-- Best thing I found was instrumental. Roy Buchanan-- Wanted "Sweet Dreams," but is instrumental; Mick Ronson-- wanted "Sweet Dreamer" but is instrumental, and the live versions don't measure up to the studio, which doesn't seem to be posted anywhere. Jesse Taylor, Terry Ware--nothing decent available. Philip Donnelly-- There's some okay stuff with Nanci Griffith or Mary Chapin Carpenter, but not special. Didn't find any Everlies... June Millington, Alice Stuart, Nina Gerber, Tony Rice, Clarence White, David Bromberg, Robben Ford, Pat Metheney, Jeff Beck... Thought very hard about Todd Rundgren, "Bat Out of Hell"-- but it isn't really the solo that's impressive, its the revving motorcycle. Which isn't. They forgot to record one, so Todd played it on his guitar... Oh-- and Jerry Garcia-- this below was my first alternate if someone had taken anything I did choose. There are "solos" from 2:53-3:35 and 4:22-6:17 -- they are actually kinda guitar-keyboard duets-- but the one I wanted was the tag lead Garcia almost always played on this, which is from 7:48-8:50. (As posted this claims to be from the Vancouver show of 5/17/1974-- but the song doesn't appear on any setlist. Possibly it was the encore and got left off the lists
I looked pretty hard at that too, but I think you made a better choice. What I really wanted from Clark was "Caledonia", or, really, "Under the Double Eagle"-- which is instrumental. I looked for Eldon Shamblin too, but Wills never let him play when he was on camera...
Haha, I went and had a look and you weren't kidding. Poor Brucie may as well be playing air guitar. It looks like from the list of ones you skipped you had a lot of country/rockabilly guys. I found that for album cuts in those genres, the solos, while sounding damned good and tasteful really weren't anything to ooh and aaah over. I'm not sure if that's because a lot of traditional country doesn't lend itself to farting around like the rock guys like to do.
Here's my Stealth Draft: Only two real misses are the Prince, How My Guitar; and the Frampton, Do You Feel. 1. Hubert Sumlin Howlin' Wolf | 300 Pounds of Joy Solo: 1:30 About 30 seconds of surgical, Delta-infused, electric Chicago nastiness. Let a whole generation of skinny British kids know what's happening. 2. Freddie King Have You Ever Loved a Woman, Live in Europe Solo: 1:30 - 5:05 If you took the 200+ years of Southern gospel preaching and distilled it into a guitar solo, this is what you'd get. 3. Brian Setzer Brian Setzer Orchestra | Mystery Train Solo: 31:35 Taking the most basic of roots riffs and jazzing the f/ck out of it with a shockingly minimal loss of soul. (would love to select his version of Caravan in this clip [21:30] but I know it's not eligible.) 4. Pete Townsend The Who | Anyhow, Anywhere, Anyway, Live at the BBC Solo: 0:55 Recorded at the BBC, May 24, 1965. It's one year after the Beatles smoked weed for the first time with Bob Dylan, two years before the summer of love, and its the peak of foot stomping, suit wearing, rave-up popularity for The Who -- yet after a lovely set of opening chords and boy band harmonies, Pete Townsend delivers a prototype freak-out, letting the world know what is around the corner. 5. Stevie Ray Vaughan Voodoo Chile, Live Solo: 4:59 This was the moment, for me at least, when I realized that someone could actually be as alive and soulful as Hendrix, be respectful of Hendrix, be as deeply conversational and intergalactic with a guitar as Hendrix, and actually be better than Hendrix. 6. Tom Verlaine Television | Marquee Moon Solo: 4:45 Dear New Wave, Your Welcome. Love, Tom 7. Robert Quine Matthew Sweet | Girlfriend Solo: 1:40 From exploding all over Richard Hell's Blank Generation to fuzzing out a pure pop gem, Quine is the pre-post-punk's post-punk pro. The opening solo is equally fuzztastic. 8. Roddy Frame Aztec Camera | Jump Solo: 3:15 In what has to be the world's most sarcastic guitar solo ever, Roddy Frame turns hair metal into pensive shoe-gazing folk rock, and then caps it off with a sneering scorcher. IF YOU ONLY LISTEN TO ONE OF THESE PICKS, LISTEN TO THIS ONE 9. Adrian Belew Talking Heads | The Great Curve, Live in Rome Solo: 5:05 I was tempted to take Belew's first solo at 1:55 because it is such a tightly constructed / deconstructed sonic masterpiece that segues seamlessly into new wave bounce and then stops on a dime. But this closing solo is too epic -- because it's not only the end of an incredible song, but it's the final moment of an epic, epic, epic live performance. And the wildly building rhythms and vocals of the whole night seem to be circling around waiting for release of Belew's monstrous Gojira-like guitar -- like a bunch of lunatics just dying to throw themselves headfirst into the mouth of his six-stringed volcano. 10. Joe Callahan Pop O Pies | Timothy Leary Lives Solo: 1:04 Punk rock.
Well, you know, I'm just a skinny white kid from Idaho who has grown old and fat... when I was a lad all that stuff was considered rock and roll and played on those stations. Grand Old Opry didn't even allow drums or horns in my early childhood... The earliest guitar heros were Scotty Moore, Burton, Roland Janes, the elder Perkinses (not Wayne,) guys like that. Media attention came backwards in time to the blues guys and Charlie Christian half a decade later, for the most part. And while I'm not opposed to "farting around like the rock guys do" I also don't regard it as the primary objective. I'd like a solo to have a certain purposive nature no matter how exploratory-- I'd like it to reach some sort of destination, relieve some sort of tension, display some process of thought, something like that. "Sounding damned good and tasteful" is often what I "ooh and ah over." As I said earlier, I was trying to treat this as a draft of solos, not soloists. When in scoring I gave points for "fame of soloists," it wasn't "fame for being outrageous" or "fame for technical prowess" I was considering, but "fame for finding stuff that informs other players solos." For example, Alvin Lee in MNSHO was just very fast at the same scales everyone else practiced-- I never hear another player and say to myself "that's Alvin Lee influence there, that is." So was Eddy Van Halen, for that matter, but he was very gifted at getting new sounds from existing technology; he legitimately expanded other people's palettes if not so much their chops. (People want to credit him with the tapping and harmonics tricks, but Jeff Beck and Dick Dale were doing that ten and twenty years earlier... and slack-key guys accoustically back into the mists of recording's dawn...) I do hear stuff in more mainstream players that shows me the shadow of EVH. But Satriani-- or Vai for all that he'll settle for pure flash sometimes--show real substance; in fact there's a "Penguins in Bondage" out there that I didn't take because I couldn't decide whether I liked Vai's solo or Zappa's better. Man, I meant to look for Dick Dale stuff, and Atta Isaacs and Gabby Pahinui too.
My brother was at U of Illinois in the early 80s. One of his housemates was taking a class in baroque music or something like that. Sitting in on the class was ... Adrian Belew. That came in handy when my brother and his friends planned a "David Bowie" party... i.e., a party at which they played nothing but David Bowie songs without telling anyone that's what they were doing... just to see how long it took people not in the know to catch on. My brother at that time knew of Belew from my King Crimson albums (might've been singular "album" at that time), as well as the copy of Belew's solo effort, Lone Rhino, that I'd given him... but he didn't know that Belew had played with Bowie. That had to be, musically, one of the best college parties in the country that year because my brother's housemate mentioned the party to Belew, who dropped by with a shitload of tapes (studio and live) from his days with Bowie. It thinned the party out sooner than it would've otherwise been thinned out, but the people who stuck around got to hear some great stuff (plus, they had more beer!)
With that in mind, who the heck was the first country or rock guy to do stuff like this? (52 seconds in) You hear this type of solo all the time in country, stuff like Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Alan Jackson. I was trying to figure out who started doing that type of thing but couldn't really narrow it down.
Here's some other leftovers: Derek Trucks lives up to his first name, his lineage, and the song's writer, all in the same solo. 5:36-6:44 Susan Tedeschi is what you get if you take Greg Allman ,and add intellect and estrogen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v-NlB-CwPE Roy Buchanan plays Hendrix. Introvert as guitar hero, just farting around,2:45-6:17 Buck and the Snakestretchers again. (This is the instrumental I was whining for... 1:20-1:59, 2:29-3:35) And another instrumental. The reason I didn't take anything by Albert Collins, the reason I'm not big on Freddie King. Don't quit before you hear Gate-- I know it's slow developing, but he will play.
And finally, just for Auria-- Keef, Eric, and Uncle Chuck with Steve Jordan, Johnny Johnson, and Joey Spampinato...
I was tempted to try and sneak this one by the judges. There is a spoken line in there. Also a steel pedal solo.
I would have fared terribly in this draft and been way over my head. I would have included stuff like my favorite ~20 seconds of guitar in any song - 1:04 to 1:29 in Ritchie Valens' rock-and-roll version of La Bamba - which isn't terribly challenging but was remarkably transformative. It took one kind of music - a particular song - and made a whole new kind of music using the same song, primarily by changing the guitar itself (tempo too, but the guitar mostly IMO). And mattered in terms of race and identity in Southern California in the 1950s to boot. Of course he says "Orale!" in the background so maybe it isn't even a solo at all. Just awesome.
Not a bad choice at all (I gave it some thought myself anyway.) The guitar on that is Carol Kaye of the Wrecking Crew. She was kind of the Tal Wilkenfeld of the late fifties to late sixties; started playing guitar around the bebop clubs in Los Angeles about 1950, as a fifteen year old. Her bass lines are familiar to most here-- "Mission Impossible," "Andmoreagain," "Homeward Bound,"River Deep Mountain High," "These Boots Are Made for Walkin',"The Way We Were," "This Diamond Ring," Soul and Inspiration," "I'm a Believer," and a fat ton of Beach Boy and Glen Campbell hits. She also played in Lenny Bruce' backup trio, and with Billy Higgins' band, and played guitar on lots of early Mothers of Invention stuff too. Robert Quine has claimed her as an influence, and Neil Young surely heard her guitar work as well...