Rolling Stone did another "Greatest Guitarists" list. I have notes.

 Amid the greater chaos of political, economic, social and military tumult, throwing the livelihoods and lives of so many into a state to be considered with care and sober mind, let us never forget that the universe operates according to rules.  At the macro level, bodies move according to mechanical laws which we can describe by equations observed and derived by Newton and Einstein, with the greater puzzles of subatomic particles and their apparently probabilistic motion still perplexing the greatest minds in the world.  Yet those, too, can be observed experimentally, and the probabilistic equations that one finds in your standard physics textbook still seem to work with repeated experimentation.  And even in the social world, patterns can be observed.  The DDRR pattern in presidential elections holds true, with the twist that a sharp downturn in the economy, when measured in Q2 of the election year, will flip the result.  We can observe other patterns beyond, some of which are surprising, and others not.  Amid the chaos, never lose sight of the fact that patterns exist, and be comforted by the fact that the world is not a place of pure, unadulterated randomness nor unpredictability.  Amid the order, we know that a magazine that no one reads, called Rolling Stone, will frequently publish stupid lists, like "The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time," and it will cross my path because I am on an included artist's email list.  Yay.  Let us consider this list.  Because I do not want to indulge in anything that matters today.

Guess who got the top spot.  Just guess.  C'mon.  That's right, Andres Segovia!  How'd you know?  Just kidding.  Classical guitar doesn't exist, and nobody has ever heard of Andres Segovia, who was recording and revolutionizing the instrument as a virtuoso beyond compare long before any of the novices on Rolling Stone's list were ever born.  Let us consider, though, James Marshall Hendrix, and more interestingly for today, why he tops every pop list you ever have seen, or ever will see from now until the day you die, even if scientists somehow invent immortality.  Never in your life, nor in your great-great-great grandchildren's lives, will anyone be allowed to consider another name.  This is a social rule no less certain than Newtonian mechanics.

If you look for the virtuosos on the list (as opposed to the lesser players on the list), and ask whom they worship, you will see something rather different from the list as given.  Even among the rock players, they will not just say, "Jimi Hendrix."  Many of the names they give will not even be on the list.

Jazz artists will list Django and Wes, sure, but they are at least as likely to say Joe Pass, and perhaps even more likely to say Allan Holdsworth or Al Di Meola these days given fusion.  Even metal god, Tosin Abasi will give Holdsworth's name, and Tosin has a strong claim to the #1 spot rather than the #99 place he got on the list.  Plenty of jazz guitarists would say Charlie Hunter.  Hunter would say, Blind Blake, who would be listed by plenty of blues musicians.  Hunter has spent quite a bit of time trying to master Blake's style, and in my opinion, nailing it.

Rock?  The serious players no longer see Hendrix as the end-all-be-all that he was in '67.  Ask players like Tim Henson or Yvette Young, as they were in a joint interview, and they'll tell you that Guthrie Govan is the man.  If you go through guitar commentators on the intertubes, a lot of them will say Govan, but that will depend on subgenre.  Math rock players, tappers and others may say Ichika Nito.

Jimi Hendrix was, to be sure, a great guitarist, yet if you asked someone like Rick Beato (himself, a better player than many names on that list), he'd tell you that by the mid-'70s, Jeff Beck was more creative and more skilled than Hendrix.  There are several elements to this sentence for us to unpack.

First, remember who wrote this list.  The writers and editors of Rolling Stone, who are not guitarists, and in many cases, do not understand the instrument.  They know something about the general history of music, but they do not understand the instrument.

Consider, for example, Roy Buchanan.  In a sense, the writers deserve a bit of credit for including Buchanan on the list, even if #183 is rather absurd given how many lesser players they put higher.  Buchanan was Jeff Beck's hero.  They put Jeff Beck at #5, and if someone had asked Jeff Beck who was the best, Beck would have said Roy Buchanan.  Jeff put one of his best tunes-- a tribute to Roy-- on Blow By Blow, which is arguably his best album (either that, or Wired).  Yet to understand Roy, you need to understand the Telecaster and what makes it unique.  Roy played a Tele.  No pedals, effects, or anything.  Everything was just Roy, the volume knobs, harmonics, and the full potential of the minimalist, twangy set-up.  If you don't understand that, then you will hear a few subtle tricks of harmonics and think, oh, that sounds kinda cool.  If you play guitar and understand the Tele, you will think, this man is GOD.  Do you prefer Hendrix's music?  OK.  I think Band of Gypsies is an all-time classic album, as an example, but as an instrumentalist, Roy was more skilled.  Jeff was more skilled, but to understand that, you need to know the instrument.

So why is Hendrix at the top of every list, and why do we know this, before reading it?

Some discussion of history is only partially indicative.  When Are You Experienced? was released, it sounded different.  Hendrix sounded different from every other guitarist around.  Was he playing the instrument a step beyond his contemporaries?  Yes.  A step beyond what anyone could do?  No, as demonstrated by how many guitarists were playing beyond him, just a few years later.  See, for example, Jeff Beck.  Yet, he was innovative, and he forced everyone to hit the woodshed.  Some, like Jeff Beck, rose to the challenge, and the next generations of guitarists had more and more who could play with more advanced techniques.

This raises several questions.  Was Hendrix's innovation in sound just such a fundamental change from every other sound as to place him in a top spot merely because the magnitude of the change, pre and post, was unsurpassed?  That is hard to say.  Consider, for example, The Kinks, and distortion.  Psychedelic sounds were being explored by plenty of bands.  Hendrix took it further, and did it better, and he was by far the best guitarist in that bunch, but he did not invent either distortion or psychedelic music.  He extrapolated from it.

From an innovation or importance perspective, then, one could make a case for Muddy Waters over Hendrix.

Historical importance.  This is a difficult thing to assess.  One can somewhat understand putting Chuck Berry high on the list simply because the Johnny B. Goode riff was so historically important, even though as an instrumentalist, Berry really was not anything special.  Hendrix opened a lot of doors, but here's the real historical importance, as far as I assess him.  He forced everyone to take the instrument seriously.  Return, again, to Jeff Beck.  Pre-Hendrix, Jeff Beck was just playing at a level necessary for the British blues scene.  Then, Hendrix came along, and like the rest of the players on that scene, he shit a few bricks, but unlike the other two Yardbirds guitarists, his response was to say, OK, I cannot simply keep cruising at my current level.  Sure, Clapton could surround himself with every virtuoso he could find, from Duane Allman onward, including Albert Lee (conspicuously missing from the list), but he was doing that with Cream anyway.  Page's philosophy was always just plagiarism through a funhouse mirror, so who cared?

But Jeff Beck said to himself, I must work harder, and never stop working harder because there's a hellhound on my trail.  (See what I did there?)  That is what Hendrix did.  Is that enough to be the forever-#1?  I don't know.  After all, to a lot of the most impressive and important guitarists around today, the guy in that role isn't Hendrix.  It may be Guthrie Govan, Bumblefoot, Mattias Eklundh or someone like that in rock.  Bluegrass guitarists don't look at Molly Tuttle as god, impressive as she is, but Doc Watson, or perhaps David Grier, Jim Hurst or Bryan Sutton.  Jazz guitarists have a plethora of choices from names previously mentioned to the new kid scaring the shit out of everyone, Matteo Mancuso.

Kids may still pick up a guitar upon hearing "All Along the Watchtower," but that's not what's pushing them anymore.

One could even make the case that in terms of conceptual innovation, for all the bombast and juvenile absurdity of the band, Eddie Van Halen's leaps forward were bigger.  I prefer Hendrix, as a matter of taste, but if this is about concept and innovation, I'd have to cede the point to the Van Halen partisans.

Point being, can one truly justify Hendrix on any first principles?  No.  Rather, there is a social rule that pop magazines, the editors of such lists, and anyone engaged outside the realm of instrumentalists is simply required to say, Hendrix.  Behold-- a rule.

The rule is an interesting sociological phenomenon.  It is akin to the rule that the greatest band is The Beatles.  Same era, same principle.  The greatest writer is Shakespeare.  These are rules.  How do these rules develop?  By common decree that you must agree to them, rather than a standard by which we judge them.

You are told that Hendrix is the greatest guitarist, even if you have no idea how to play guitar.  You are told that The Beatles are the greatest band, even if you have no idea how to write, nor even if that is the standard, nor what the standard might be.  You are told that Shakespeare is the greatest writer, even though you probably cannot parse a stanza.  You are merely told these things.

Hendrix and Shakespeare are more interesting.  Most people have no idea how to play guitar, and hence cannot assess, say, Tim Henson.  His playing is non-linear.  The way he composes and plays will fuck with your head, and since he does not play single note lead lines in the structured manner of a 60's/70's blues-rock guitar hero, eschewing too what he derisively calls "boomer bends," non-guitarists often will not get what he is doing.  Yet, two of Polyphia's most famous tracks are cheekily called "G.O.A.T.," and, "Playing God," and guitarists mostly get annoyed because he has the skill to back it up, in contrast with the infamous incident of Kenny G. overdubbing himself on Louis Armstrong.  Is ego worse when you can back it up, or when you can't?

Yet what he does is so different from a blues-based lead line that re-adjusting your head to absorb it can be a challenge for those who do not study guitar, in the same way that if you do not study Shakespearean English, then a performance of Julius Caesar, no matter how good, will mean nothing to you, and you will not even be able to parse most of it.

You may know that you are supposed to say that Shakespeare is the best, but if you are asked why, can you defend it?  Literary scholars and writers generally still put Shakespeare in a top spot, in a way that guitarists rarely do with Hendrix, but they can explain it.

In order to explain guitar techniques, consider.  Would you have any idea how to compare acoustic fingerpicking to electric, single-note lead lines?  Do you know the difference between hammer-ons and pull-offs, and cross-picking?  When addressing the placement of Roy Buchanan, I mentioned harmonics.  Do you know what harmonics are?  Artificial harmonics?  How can you compare Hendrix to Doc Watson to Lenny Breau without knowing any of this, presuming you have even heard of the latter two, presuming the comparisons are even possible?

You are told that Shakespeare is the best, and you might give the name even if you cannot parse a soliloquy without Cliff Clavin's notes to help you through the tough and chewy bits.

But you'll still say Billy.

The difference is that you can tell yourself you know something about guitar because the solo from "Purple Haze" sounds cool, and the same social process that told you Shakespeare is the best also told you that Hendrix is the best.

Or rather, you thought it was the same social process, but there is a difference.  At the mass level, it is the same social process, but at the scholarly and artistic level, it is quite different.  Read great authors, and they will tell you that they worship Shakespeare as the best.  That's just no longer true with guitar.  Returning to Tim Henson, look who he gets to do guest spots on his albums.  Yvette Young.  Ichika Nito.  Steve Vai.

Interesting that Vai was so much lower on the list than Zappa.  Zappa is among my heroes, of course, but for a guitar list, let's straighten the record.  Zappa hired Vai because he was writing guitar parts that were so insanely complex that he couldn't play them himself.  He needed the most virtuosic player in the world, and the kid he found was Steve Vai.  He still kicked Vai's ass with compositions that were close to impossible to play, because he was Frank Zappa, and Zappa was a mad genius, but there is something just a little strange about a guitar list that puts such a discrepancy between Zappa and Vai.  In my opinion, Zappa's best albums were pre-Vai (e.g. Hot Rats), but as a guitarist, Steve Vai is one of those people who still scares the shit out of everyone, including Tim Henson.  There are great guitarists, and there are scary guitarists.

So no, it actually is not the same process with Hendrix and Shakespeare.  If you mistake the editors of pop magazines for scholars and virtuoso musicians, it will look that way, but if you understand that you probably know as much about jazz guitar as Shakespearean English, and the same is true for the editors of Rolling Stone, then there is a difference, as opposed to someone like Beato, who actually was, for a time, a professor of jazz guitar along with several other career lines.

The problem is a disjoint.  A breakdown.  Many arts, like guitar, have progressed, but that does not get communicated beyond the social consensus that developed in 1967 that Hendrix was the forever-best, and since it takes knowledge to make any such assessment, the social consensus is all most people have.  The breakdown, and the idea of a forever-best, is the glitch.

Can I assess the claim that Shakespeare is the forever-best?  No.  I like to quote my favorite quotables, but while the eulogy for Caesar, for example, holds up well over time, much of Shakespeare does not retain the aesthetic beauty that it had during its era, so few of us can make any such assessment.

Guitar?  That, I can assess, and this list is hilarious.  In some sense, I can smile that their list bothered to go beyond the obvious names, and included Ernest Ranglin, Joseph Spence and a few other interesting players.  Yet generally speaking, it was clearly not written by anyone who knows thing 1 about guitar.  Without naming names, some of the artists included couldn't pass an audition for rhythm guitar in a small town bar band.

With that in mind, I have no "Greatest Guitarists" list of my own.  Such lists are silly.  Instead, I wrote a "100 Silly Exclusions" list.  The silliest?  Eh.  All of the players listed blow are players I consider to be "god-tier" guitarists, across many genres, excluded from the Rolling Stone list, which instead included people who can barely play, for reasons that make no sense.  I am arguably cheating by incorporating lap-style slide, but as far as I'm concerned, that is still guitar.  I plugged it all into a spreadsheet and alphabetized by last name, since any other ordering is silly.  I would not care to argue that Guthrie Govan is "greater" than Ichika Nito or vice versa.  Both scare the shit out of every guitarist who has ever heard of either.  Everyone here is god-tier.  Believe me, or don't.  Go watch some youtube clips, or listen to something.  These players know their way around the guitar.  For a music selection, you will find a live version of Bill Kirchen's "Hot Rod Lincoln," on which he does guitar-impressions of the greats.  He has Redd Volkaert playing rhythm.  Redd is on my list.  Notice how many of Rolling Stone's list Bill can do.  Bill and Redd did a one-off group together called The Twangbangers.  Classic.  Bill is very good.  Redd is scary.

Achison, Geoff

Anderson, Scotty

Andress, Tuck

Assad, Badi

Balawan

Baugh, Phil

Bensusan, Pierre

Bhattacharya, Debashish

Blind Blake

Bola Sete

Breau, Lenny

Brown, Junior

Brozman, Bob

Bryant, Jimmy

Buckethead

Bumblefoot

Burkey, Rand

Camarena, Mario

Catfish Keith

Clark, Roy

D’Gary

deGruy, Phil

Di Meola, Al

Douglas, Jerry

Eklundh, Mattias IA

Emmons, Buddy

Fernandes, Manuel Gardner

Finger, Peter

Fowler, Damon

Garland, Hank

Gatton, Danny

Ghent, AJ

Gismonti, Egberto

Govan, Guthrie

Graham, Davy

Grier, David

Healey, Jeff

Hedges, Michael

Henderson, Scott

Herring, Jimmy

Hiland, Johnny

Hirokazu, Yamazaki & Takaaki, Mino

Holdsworth, Allen

Hunter, Charlie

Hurst, Jim

Ickes, Robert

Jones, Nic

Jordan, Stanley

Juber, Laurence

Kapsalis, Andreas

Keel, Larry

Kido, Natsuki

Kottke, Leo

Kunene, Madala

Lagrene, Bireli

Landreth, Sonny

Lane, Shawn

Lang, Jeff

Leadbelly

Lee, Albert

Legg, Adrian

Lucas, Gary

Malmsteen, Yngwie

Mancuso, Matteo

Maphis, Joe

Marcin

Martino, Pat

Masvidal, Paul

McFadden, Eric

McTell, Blind Willie

Montgomery, Monte

Montoya, Carlos

Navarro, Dave

Nito, Ichika

Pass, Joe

Phelps, Kelly Joe

Randolph, Robert

Ray, Will

Razafindrakoto, Solo

Reed, Preston

Rhythm Shaw

Rice, Tony

Rivers, Jimmy

Roth, Arlen

Sabicas

Segovia, Andres

Sharkey, Isaiah

Simpson, Martin

Spiegel, Lloyd

Stefanovski, Vlatko

Stephan, Joscho

Tadic, Miroslav

Taylor, Martin

Teta

Tibbetts, Steve

Tounkara, Djelimady

Towner, Ralph

Volkaert, Redd

Watson, Doc

West, Speedy