It’s no coincidence that the rise of rock and roll and the evolution of the electric guitar went hand in hand back in the 1950s. This is a list of five creative, innovative, groundbreaking electric guitarists who never caught the fame train the way others did, never became household names but should have. But first, a little backstory.
The entire evolutionary history of the modern guitar is basically the story of musicians wanting their instruments to be louder. The first instruments called guitars were small bodied, gut-stringed lap instruments, descendants of the far more effete-sounding lute and cittern, in the chordophone family of instruments. Their function was to play polite music for polite guests in a polite parlor. Nothing that says rock and roll yet, right? If “chordophone shredding” was ever a thing, the term didn’t survive.
As humans are wont to do, some players got good enough on these cute little lap boxes to want to jam with other musicians for fun, fame, and profit. That’s where their early axes failed. Unless they were playing only with other guitarists, their instruments just didn’t make enough noise. Harps, brass, woodwinds, percussion, early keyboards, all of them would have drowned out a lead guitarist and prevented him from getting free drinks and picking up women.
Guitar design followed the demand for volume. Bigger bodies, steel strings, metal bodies, resonators; every innovation that resulted in bigger sound was snapped up by musicians wanting to turn pro. Competition for jobs in music combos became a typical man-style contest - “my lower bout’s bigger than yours,” “my instrument plays deeper,” “my steel strings are harder,” a few unemployed purists with older instruments in the background claiming “guitar size doesn’t matter.” But they were all screwed when big band jazz exploded as the most popular music across every demographic during the 1930s and 40s swing era. No version of acoustic guitar could cut through the volume of those bands, so no jobs were available. That’s when the tinkerers started to tinker and found ways to electrify and amplify their chordophones.
The earliest attempts were forgettable, if not laughable. Attaching microphones and telephone transmitters, possibly with some forgotten forerunner of duct tape, to the guitar’s body produced a lot of impressive feedback but not a lot of music. George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker are credited with inventing the first electromagnetic guitar pickup, and the path to rock and roll was set. Leo Fender, an electrician, not a musician, applied Henry Ford assembly line techniques to the production of inexpensive one-, then two-, pickup electric guitars, and suddenly, during the post-war economic boom, electric guitars were in the hands of surly, rebellious teens across western civilization.
There were a lot of loud, crappy-sounding chord progressions bashed out in a lot of garages as a result, but, of course, some young electric guitar owners became amazingly skilled players. They rode the wave of contracts and gigs suddenly available to them as record companies raced to cash in on the new rock and roll craze. The ones who survived and flourished are legend now – Eric, Jimi, Jimmy, Carlos, Jerry, Duane, Keith, and later Eddie and Stevie Ray. I’m guessing even the most casual of rock fans don’t need me to fill in the last names. Women carved out their shredding space, too – Bonnie Raitt, Nancy Wilson of Heart, Joan Jett, and Peggy Jones (“Lady Bo” of Bo Diddley’s band) but, until recently, the music industry was far less interested in promoting females who strapped on the big, loud instruments.
• Rory Gallagher (1948 - 1995): A hard-drinking Irishman who came of age around the same time Clapton, Page, Hendrix, et al, were discovering American blues music. While those three, and many others, found fame by turning their inspirations into a more accessible and psychedelic sound, Rory stuck to his guns. He played fiery, hard electric blues-based rock, period. He typically played live in jeans and a flannel shirt in front of his power trio, on a road-worn Stratocaster that looked like it had been run over by the tour bus a few times. Hendrix once called Rory “the best guitarist in the world,” and Clapton credited him as “the man who got me back into the blues.” Rory was a national hero in Ireland, reasonably popular throughout Europe, but barely a cult figure in the U.S.
EARWORM: “Tattoo’d Lady” (1974) – A superb live recording of one of his best songs, recorded on a standing-room-only tour of Ireland.
• David Lindley (1944 - ): Jackson Browne’s wingman on his early records and live performances. The man can play (brilliantly) any stringed instrument humans ever invented. David’s slide guitar and pedal steel defined the sound of Jackson’s early, and justifiably most famous, records, and that’s his goofy falsetto you hear on “Stay” at the tail-end of Running on Empty. He was a first-call L.A. studio player back then, too. Hired by Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby and/or Nash, Dylan, Rod Stewart and dozens more, David was as ubiquitous in the L.A. music scene of the 70s as cocaine. But what puts this guy in the criminally underrated category for me are the three solo albums with his band, El Rayo-X. Gloriously fun and irresistible rock and roll with hints of R&B and reggae, David’s amazing playing stealing every song.
EARWORM: “Brother John” (1982) – Recorded not long after John Lennon was killed, the traditional Cajun (by way of the Neville Brothers) funeral march song is a perfect showcase for the man’s gorgeous slide playing.
• Andy Gill (1956 – 2020): Getting more obscure now, Andy was the guitarist for an amazing British band named Gang of Four, signed by EMI in the late 70s during the British punk era. GoF had a suitably aggressive sound for the times, but they were a lot smarter, and had a different agenda, than the safety-pin, ripped t-shirt crowd. A simple four-piece; guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, they were the missing link between punk and James Brown-style funk. They wanted their audiences to dance and think at the same time. Like a classic jazz band, all three instrumentalists were talented soloists. They created their fractured dance music by weaving in and around each other while vocalist Jon King spewed out brilliantly hooky lyrics about the pitfalls of modern civilization. Andy added sharp, catchy shards of electric guitar riffs to the mix, like tossing glass into a blender. A completely original and exciting player, I’ve never heard his style copied in the decades since the band’s moment in the sun, which was way too brief.
EARWORM: “Not Great Men” (1979) – A Gill tour de force. Agitated chords slash across the mix, single note runs jump out like gunfire. As a bonus, you get snippets of Jon King’s too-seldom-featured harmonium playing. It’s only a single note, but it’s spot on.
• Susan Tedeschi (1970 - ): On the rock family tree, Susan, founder and guitarist for the Susan Tedeschi Band, married Derek Trucks, founder and guitarist for the Derek Trucks Band, and together they formed…wait for it…The Tedeschi Trucks Band. As has been the case throughout rock music history, Y-chromosome Derek gets 99% of the TTB guitar god props (he did, after all, occupy the Allman Brothers’ Duane chair for many years), while his wife is often described as the group’s singer. But make no mistake, before she hooked up with Derek, Susan made her mark as the guitar-slinging frontwoman for a sizzling blues-rock combo. She opened shows for B.B. King, Buddy Guy, The Allmans, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones (!) and had a gold record of her own in 1998 with Just Won’t Burn. A gold blues record is rare enough, a gold blues record by a woman is about as likely as finding a Walmart on Mars. When TTB decided to record their own version of the entire Layla album earlier this year, she and her hubby handled the Eric and Duane parts like the guitar wizards they (both) are.
EARWORM: “Voodoo Woman – Live in Austin” (2004) – Let ‘er rip, girl.
• Richard Thompson (1949 - ): And last, but not least (in fact, he probably should have been first), is one of the greatest guitarists in popular music history. Master of an encyclopedia of alternate guitar tunings, American rock and roll, blues, and British folk music, his recorded work is an undiscovered galaxy of sublime playing for the uninitiated. When he unplugs, his acoustic work is as astonishing as his electric playing. Mr. Thompson is not a sentimentalist, his lyrics can be as incisive and biting as his playing, which probably has detracted from his commercial success over the years, especially on this side of the Atlantic where we tend to prefer a little sugar in our tea. He’s still going strong at 72, putting out fabulous albums and playing stunning live shows around pandemics. He’s also developed quite a successful side hustle in recent years as a celebrity host for pricey guitar workshops across the U.S. and U.K. Mr. Thompson is a completely unique musician. Like Miles, Coltrane, Jerry Garcia, and Keith Jarrett, his playing is instantly recognizable from the first couple of notes. I’ve heard every record he’s ever put out and have a collection of prized bootlegs to flesh out the catalog. One of my all-time all-timers.
EARWORM (electric): “When the Spell is Broken” (2002) – As close as RT got to a hit song in the U.S., which is to say not very close. There was an MTV video for it back in the day, aired every other Thursday at 3:40am as I recall. This live recording opens the song up and gives the man a lot of room to play.
EARWORM (acoustic): “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (1991) – Uncountable calluses have been raised on guitarist’s fingers trying to learn this one. Most can’t get past figuring out how RT’s guitar was tuned. Delicate, intricate, beautiful fingerpicking on a song about a vintage motorcycle. The lyrics and vocals are terrific, too.
Five at a time, I could keep making lists of unsung guitar heroes for the rest of my life. The electrified, amplified chordophone became the foundation of rock and roll, rock, hard rock, progressive rock, heavy metal, punk; pretty much every branch of the tree that grew out of rebellious kids weaned on black radio stations and 45s. If you’ve got favorite guitarists, especially if they’re players not mentioned in this post, I want to hear about them. Maybe the next list will be the ones I egregiously overlooked.
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