I miss guitar solos.

[RandomKoolzip]

When was the last time you heard a new song in the mainstream that had a guitar solo in it? It's been a long time.

There's a few bands operating in the indie-rock realm who feature expressive soloing on the electric guitar, for instance Karate (git: Geoff Farina, a fantastic jazzy player operating in a kind of mutated emo context), Built to Spill (git: Doug Martsch, who can solo for hours and often does on stage), and Guided by Voices (git: Doug Gillard, whose angular lines and left-field melodicism are the perfect foil for the lyricism of the songs). And of course, there's the whole Jam Band phenomenon, ie Robert Randolph, Trey Anastacio, etc. too. But for the most part, electric guitars are used for texture these days, not as a vehicle for expression. Why is that?

I know a lot of people who were turned off to the sound of a guitarist going off by the widespread profusion of godawful hair-metal bands in the eighties; my wife is one of those people. She HATES electric guitars and is a big Bjork fan (ick!) And to a lot of tastemakers, guitar solos are SO blase, for some reason. Think of the radio rock you've heard since 1995 or so: where are the solos? One wonders whether we've seen the last of a lost art form, like the use of saxophone in rock (jeez, when was the last time you heard a SAX SOLO?!!? That's awhole 'nother thread....)

Where are the Tom Verlaines, the Jimi Hendrixes, the D. Boons, the Frank Zappas, the Robert Fripps these days?

Anyways, what are your thoughts here?

[Hogarth]

1. Eddie Van Halen, and

"Eruption"

[Hogarth]

3. Sorry ...

... I left out an "r", but you get the point, I'm sure.

[reknewcomer]

2. I am left comfortably numb by the lack of solos

As for Sax...there is no such thing as bad Sax - just too little or too much.

[Systematic Chaos]

4. Um, Robert Fripp is all over the place!

Just not on the radio.

http://www.king-crimson.com/

Their latest album is "The Power To Believe" and it is great. His co-guitarist and frontman since 1980, Adrian Belew, is also very busy with Crim and a lot of other projects.

For a lot of good guitar work in the melodic- and progressive-metal spheres, check out Century Media Records and ask for a catalog. You'll have more options than you'll ever know what to do with!

http://www.centurymedia.com/

Mind you, this web sites' intro page currently features samples from one of their heavier artists, but this is NOT indicative of everything the label has to offer.

Oh, and did I mention Spock's Beard?

http://www.spocksbeard.com/

[RandomKoolzip]

9. I'm a big prog-rock freak too....

Although I'm turned off by a lot of the "progressive metal" type of bands I've heard, i.e. Dream Theater, Flower KIngs, etc. I'm more of a Canterbury guy (Hatfield and the North, Matching Mole, VDGG, etc.) myself. I realize Fripp is still everywhere, but he doesn't carry the kind of weight in the consciousness of the maisnstream he used to. Would King Crimson get signed to a major today? Very doubtful.

So, again, my question is...apart from subgenres like prog, undergound metal, jam band, et al. where are the mainstream rock guitarists who solo? I've heard a lot of material on "modern rock radio" that cries out for a guitar solo, like the Disturbed, Saves the Day, Jimmy Eat World, and others, but the solo never comes. It's like the guitar is relegated to a background, textural function, merely to provide a vehicle for the singer. Why? I believe that with the loss of this particular form of expression in the mainstream, the art of crafting or improvising a solo will disappear, except for the music of specialized realms like prog, etc.

[Systematic Chaos]

12. Yeah, I see what you're saying.

As long as simplicity and accessibility remain the cornerstones of radio programming, I don't think it's very likely to change. Popular music is so much more about image now than it ever was before. Not to mention how hard everyone seems to try and copy someone who came before them when it comes to vocal style or arrangements... whatever. Even the haircut bands of the 80's didn't take it as far as they're trying to now.

Maybe it's because there's almost no music education in public school anymore? Just a random thought that popped into my tired brain. :shrug:

[Leftist78]

5. As a guitarist

I kinda miss it, but on a musical level I understand that many songs don't need one. Hendrix is a god and I could listen to him solo all day, but for every Jimi Hendrix there is a C.C. Deville just getting his rocks off at the expense of a song. I guess it really depends on the style of music

I play in two bands. One of them is a 3 piece blues/rock outfit and I play guitar and sing in that one, and obviously there are plenty of solos because the music calls for it. The other one is an grungy/indie/punky sort of thing. I play bass, and there are very few solos because the style doesn't call for it.

All things being equal, if I have to choose between losing the solos and gaining musical quality or getting the solos back and regressing to 80's hair and spandex rock then I'd choose to lose the solo.

[Paul Hood]

6. Everything that's gone will be back again.

Did D. Boon from the Minutemen play a lot of solos? I thought their thing was really short punchy songs.

[RandomKoolzip]

7. D. Boon was a FANTASTIC soloist.

He had his own personal style, like all the guitarists on SST (god, I miss that label's heyday!) Anyways, yes, their gimmick was the "short song," but within that style, D. Boon ripped off some quite astounding guitar magic.
Check out his solo on "#1 Hit Song" off of Double Nickels and tell me that guy wasn't a GOD on the six string.

[Paul Hood]

8. I have a tape from an MTV show called "The Cutting Edge"

with the Minutemen on it. Every time I here the Jackass theme I think about it, they cut between concert footage and the band playing acoustic on their porch.

[RandomKoolzip]

10. I would pay good money for that tape.

I'd love to have video footage of any of the SST bands; I've got some Flag and Husker footage, but very little Minutemen. You lookin' to sell or trade?

PS, it really pissed me off that Watt allowed the Jackass people to appropriate "Corona" for their theme song. Now I can't listen to that song without imagining a midget stapling his scrotum to his inner thigh or some shit like that....

[Paul Hood]

14. If I can find it.

It wouldn't be a problem to dub a tape of it. You wouldn't have to pay "good money" for it. I think they were on a show hosted by the Bangles and the way the show ran, there was only an eight minute segment on each band. I don't know what the best way to do this would be but let me know if you would like a VHS of it.

[RandomKoolzip]

20. Sorry, I went to sleep before I read this post....

Anyhow, yeah, I'd love to see it; PM me if you want my address and we can set up something, okay?

[mindless]

11. I agree, but Santana (the best ever) still does solos...

even if they are Pop songs.

[RandomKoolzip]

13. That's true.

Even though I don't think he's the best ever (although Lotus is one of the most psychedelic albums of all time). It's odd though, although there are guitar solos on his his, it's almost as if HE's the guest on a Mtchbox 20 single or something. I mean, he has completely sublimated his band's ensemble sound to craft those radio hits. Plus, he's an older dude. Had he not had "name" credibility, would he have a shot at getting signed today to a major? Prolly not.

Good point though; I hadn't even thought of Santana when I decided to post this thread.

And welcome to DU, mindless!

[mindless]

15. Thanks Random.

I Play and just feel that Carlos can make the guitar sing like no other. Just mho.

[DS1]

22. ugh gag puke cough hack wheeze

Santana is boring as all hell, and in fact, ruins music with his pretentious over-soloing, it's like having a nagging child at your ear for 10 minutes.

[Philostopher]

16. I have a funny theory and a serious one.

The Funny Theory:

Paul Westerberg single-handedly killed the rock guitar solo. When he played that solo in 'The Ledge,' he started a chain of events that resulted in the death of the guitar solo in mainstream rock music. The solo was so definitive, cheesy and quintessential, there was no need for anybody ever to play a solo again on a mainstream rock song. He really didn't tend to concentrate on them anymore, after that, did he? I don't remember any impressive solos on any of his post-Mats stuff. Paul played the 'Everysolo' and eventually, everybody just gave up on it for good.

The Serious Theory:

Guys like guitars. Girls like guys with guitars -- but they don't like guys with guitars who look like idiots when they try to play the songs everybody likes off the radio. You sell lots more guitars -- and CDs of bands -- if everybody who has two intact hands can pick up a guitar at the music store and instantly hash out half the songs he's hearing on the radio. Do you remember hearing high-school guys mutilate Eddie Van Halen's solos in the stores? I sure as hell do.

Teenaged boys determine much of what's played on the radio. They like songs they can bang out on their little $150 Korean Squire Strat that Mom bought them for Christmas last year. They're more likely to buy those albums than ones that have those inconvenient 'solos,' or anything that it might require 'lessons' to learn to play. Simple, droning barre chord songs allow any schmoe to play something near enough what he's hearing on the radio to keep him going back both to the record store and to the music store.

But hey -- that's just my 2¢ worth. I could easily be wrong.

[RandomKoolzip]

26. Hmmmm. Paul westerberg?

Didn't Bob Stinson also kill the guitar solo night after night while on tour with the Replacements? There's a funny story in Micheal Azzerrad's "our Band Could BE your Life" where he talks about their version of "Hey, Good Lookin'" that was put ut on a B-side...they were playing the tape of Bob's horrendous solo over and over in the van, cracking up, while Bob kept trying to snatch the tape out of the player. And there was the time Weterberg added dots to Bob's fretboard and Bob got lost on his way to a solo.....

[Zorra]

17. It's pretty difficult

to be original on a guitar solo nowadays without being atonal. There have been quite a few absolutely smokin' guitar players over the last 50 years, starting with the old blues masters through Page, Hendrix, Clapton, Beck, Zappa, Stevie Ray, Johnny Winter, Santana Knopfler, Blackmore, Fripp, Gilmour, Summers, MacLaughlin, etc. and up to people like Eric Johnson, Al Dimeola, Satriani, and all things in between. Not to mention the hot jazz players. I mean, there have been a lot of really great players, the instrument has been pretty well covered. So many styles and tonal textures have been covered that it's pretty tough to put out a unique sound and combination of notes with feel and tone that has not been done before. The guitar solo has been pretty thoroughly explored.

The electric guitar solo never seems to lose it's prominence in the blues genre; it is hard not to appreciate a heartfelt blues solo that is well done. I think, most of the time, it's better to tastefully say what you have to say, do it well and get out rather than go off on some long repetitive wanks and scale running fingertap fests.

I don't really listen to much mainstream music anymore, it all sounds like schlocky remakes of remakes of tunes that were first done 20-30 years ago but without the soul or talent of the original ideas and compositions. Every once in awhile I get surprised by something cool but that usually happens once every 2 or 3 years.

The music business is so shark infested now, and there are so many bands out there, a lot of really great players will never get heard by more than a cult following. The music biz, IMO, is no longer about discovering and developing great artists with a new sound, it's now about creating, sustaining, and supplying a controlled market for a deliberately standardized "consumer" demand.

[Squeech]

18. Richard Thompson

You won't hear him on mainstream radio because (1) his songs are intelligent, well-crafted, and idiosyncratic (2) his voice isn't conventionally pretty, and (3) he lost his major label deal and now records for a small indie. And he plays a jaw-droppingly magnificent guitar.

If you don't know his stuff, here's the deep background. He was a founding member of Fairport Convention back in the '60s, when they were a bunch of singer/songwriters knocking around the London folk clubs, and were collectively impressed by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, and all the other American bands that singer/songwriters were forming under the influence of whatever there was to influence. He was still there when Fairport discovered their own folk heritage, and recorded Liege and Lief and Full House, still the best records of English electric folk rock ever made. Then he went solo, and has made a couple dozen records on his own, with a body of songs massively influenced by British Isles ballad and dance tunes. As a guitarist, he's been invited to appear on boatloads of other people's records, from other English folkies to American experimentalists like Henry Kaiser and David (Pere Ubu) Thomas to African high-life musicians, and even Rolling Stone recognized him as one of their top 100 guitar slingers; I think he came in at something like #17.

His soloing is peculiar. While the traditional dance tune sound is seldom far from the surface, he allows incursions from other genres. He'll do a fair amount of rockabilly style chicken picking, or sweep the pick across all the strings in a flurry of odd notes. He does a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs, and when he's in that frame of mind his guitar almost sounds like something else, clarinet or bagpipe or something. And he doesn't always stick with standard harmony or the "blues box," even though his song melodies seldom stray from the diatonic folkie realm. His fingerpicking is amazing; he can chord with half of his hands and play contrapuntal accompaniment with the other halves. He uses several alternate tunings, and I don't know what they are, so I can't follow what he's doing by looking at him :-(

Can you tell I'm a partisan? I don't claim he's the *best guitarist in the world,* because it seems to me if you really were the best, you could cut everybody else, and there are too many other magnificent players out there with their own styles. I would never claim Thompson could do Fripp or Verlaine. But neither could Fripp or Verlaine do Thompson, and his style is fully mature and elegant and highly expressive, and his technique is world class, and he deserves your attention. Unless you hate everything remotely Celtic :-)

All that said, I'm disappointed in his latest record, The Old Kit Bag. I think he took the idea of being on an indie too much to heart, and deliberately tried to sound like REM or something. My favorite of his from the '90s is Mirror Blue; it's full of good-to-great songs and contains several solos that just might nail you to the floor. And of course the classic Thompson record is Shoot Out the Lights, which "everybody knows" is about the breakup of his marriage to his long time singing partner Linda-- except he swears it isn't, and really, the stuff he's writing about on SOTL is the same sort of alienation and desperation he's always written about-- and that's the other reason you won't hear him on the radio, he is definitely not a feel-good kinda guy.

[RandomKoolzip]

19. As if you couldn't guess by my original message,

I know who Richard Thompson is! His opening solo on "Calvary Cross" is one of my favorites, but my all-time fave Thompson solo is on the live version of "Can't Win" on the Watching the Dark retrospective. I love the guy's tone and his style and his songwriting, etc. Believe me I know who he is, but like a lot of the others mentioned, he's not exactly mainstream.

I'm afan of all kinds of guitarists and all kinds of music. And Richard Thompson used to be an obsession of mine, especially "Henry the Human FLy," his most underrated album. I used to come home from work everyday and put that CD on for about six months....

So that leaves us with the original question....why has the music industry marginalized the guitar hero?

[toddzilla]

21. this is like being smarter than the president..

After teaching guitar for a few years, i came to realize that the vast majority of people just don't want to put the time in to be proficient. I agree people want to play what's on the radio without really having to push their limits.


The longer i've played the less i want a screaming solo when it is just self-serving. If it doesn't fit the song, then don't play it, or bring it down a couple of notches so it isn't the centerpiece, but an accentuation of the song.

When i got my last job as a commercial painter, i started having problems with fatigue in my forearms and hands because of all the physical work involved. This affected my playing quite a bit, but not in the way i thought it would have. My chops obviously became a shadow of their former selves, i used to burn through all the modes at 185+ with 16th notes. The most suprising thing was that my phrasing improved immeasurably. I was forced to say what i wanted to say without the benefit of high speed runs and manic flurries of notes, and instead i really focused on note choices, dynamics and timing. I generally took much less time on solos, and they were much more expressive and recieved a better and stronger response from people listening. This is what the 80's did i think, it got to the point where technical mastery eclipsed true musicianship. Being able to burn 16th notes at 240 doesn't make you a good musician, and people got sick of it. Hopefully the music industry will allow musicians to reclaim the soul and feeling that was prevalent in the period between the late 60's and the late 70's when solos were in support of a song rather than just a vehicle for them. it seems we threw the baby out with the bathwater when popular rock embraced grunge, and subsequently this neo-metal-rap-hardcore-whatever you call it that we are forced to endure today..



my brain hurts.

:freak:

[RandomKoolzip]

23. Yeah, there seemed to be a paradigm shift circa 1996 or so...

The last great solo I heard on modern rock radio was on Stone Temple Pilots' "Looking Through a Hole In a Paper-something or other" or whatever that song was called, in 1996. And Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins was also a versatile soloist (although I hated his music). As the music industry began forcing musicians to streamline their music for radio play, and began jettisonning the appearance of the original grunge standard bearers (i.e. Soundgarden's guitarist Kim Thayil, another great soloist) on the charts in favor of dudes who LOOKED the part, but hadn't paid their dues, it seems even these examples became a thing of the past.

It also seems in retrospect that this was part and parcel of a gradual shift towards replacing the rythym section as well with computerized ryhtyms, a la dance pop or hip hop. That year, 1996, Beck released "Odelay," and was hailed as a kind of savior, for uniting grunge fans and hip hop against a backdrop of kitchen-sink samples, thus creating an example for the record industry to copy: the singular artist, uniting disparate genres (i.e. black and white people. Who wouldn't object to that?), without the need for other musicians, thus cutting overhead costs in the recording process. This was a cheaper method of recording than the earlier grunge model, whose paragons often demanded paid babysitters, drum techs, multiple takes in the studio, and often had costly drug habits, further hindering the profit-taking of the industry honchos. Synthesizers and computers don't ask the record company for per diems.

The industry, of course, applauded any kind of cost-cutting, and poured money into promotion for hip-hop and dance musics rather than uppity musicians who needed to learn how to play instruments ($$$ for lessons) or to be fed, clothed, given new instruments, and kept high on the company's dollar. The streamlining of modern rock was now firmly in place. In the process, the appearance of guitar solos began to wane, culminating in the state of music in which we find ourselves today: dire.

By the way, guys, you're looking at the reason why I no longer can make a living as a rock critic.

[Squeech]

24. Sorry!

You didn't mention him, so I didn't know you knew.

The bigger question, of why there are no guitar solos on the radio: because the vocal has always been the key thing for non-musicians to relate to. Solos are actually something of an abberation in popular music, and there are very few instrumentalists who could hold the attention of the general audience-- and they're all in the pantheon of heroes, of course: Benny Goodman, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, and their rarefied ilk.

One theory about where extended solos came from, which I'll accept, is that they evolved to keep a groove going whenever people were dancing. That was certainly the impetus in the Summer of Love (Jack Bruce used to say that he learned to play the bass on stage at the Fillmore with a head full of acid), and I'll also cite that Duke Ellington Newport appearance where he had Paul Goncalves (sp?) take chorus after chorus because some woman in the audience started dancing and he wanted to give her every opportunity to continue, and the performance ended up on a record that was a pretty substantial hit.

Which reminds me that there had to be a technology that allowed extended solos to be captured. The LP record that allowed that solo to appear in its entirety was maybe five years old at the time; before that, the standard was a 78 RPM disc that had a maximum time of less than four minutes. The logic of how to do radio-- play three or four songs, break for commercials, play three or four more songs, break for station ID-- was pretty much set in stone back then. I used to do non-commercial college radio, where my only time constraint was to do a station ID every half hour, and I used to play plenty of "songs" that took up entire album sides. (The CD didn't yet exist.) But that's a different realm, with way different ground rules.

Another possible reason why solos are out of fashion is that popular music is designed, more than ever before, to be homogenous. It feels like every danceable hit is using the exact same groove, and almost the same chirpy melody. A solo, almost by definition, and certainly by design, breaks up the monotony.

Seems to me that whenever I hear a guitar solo in normal broadcast media nowadays (including Internet radio, played by my boss), it's a Pink Floyd song. I do think Gilmour's languorous sustain is a major contributor to the uniqueness of PF's sound, and at this point is the only thing they have left besides their cavernous sound space, which Coldplay can simulate pretty well. The next solo you'll hear on the radio will be Coldplay, if they can learn how.

I could go on, but this is enough blather for one post.

[RandomKoolzip]

25. You make some good points.

Sorry, I didn't mean to seem snippy to you in that post!

THose are some very interesting contentions; however, Coldplay (and Radiohead) seem more influenced by The Edge or Johnny Marr (two of my LEAST favorite guitarists) in the git dept. than Pink FLoyd. Certainly they have modified their own music to rid themselves of the blues influence Gilmour displayed in his solos.

I'd like to hear more of your blather; THis kind of stuff is really interesting to me!