JACK THE RIPPER featuring John Brookhouse AND What makes a good guitar player?
Our song Jack the Ripper features a ripping guitar solo by our friend John Brookhouse, of the Boston metal band Worshipper. John will appear again later on the album. His solo plays tribute to Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Steve Lukather - the sort of histrionic yet very musical and melodic masters that were branches growing from the tree of Eddie Van Halen. I don't see anything at all bananas about that last sentence.
I won't say Vai et al are underrated per se - they are very much not underrated to many guitarists - but there's no mention of any of them, for example, on Rolling Stone's list of 100 greatest guitar players, and so according to that list they don't belong in the illustrious company of Steve Jones, Kurt Cobain and Bruce Springsteen. (They're all good guitar players, especially Bruce, but they belong much more in a discussion of what makes a good guitarist, not a list of greatest innovators. When you're trying to winnow such a broad field down to 100 at some point you have to eliminate someone like Jones, who is merely a very important part of a larger machine, which is a perfectly fine and valuable thing to be, but why not Malcolm Young in that case? The obvious answer there is that we're trying to include punks, but why are we trying to include musicians from a genre that specifically de-emphasized musicianship on a list of best musicians? And if we are why not Tom Verlaine or David Byrne?)
Obviously a list like this is totally arbitrary, it's almost impossible for it not to be - for example it starts to beg questions like "is Derek Trucks a better player than Buddy Guy?" According to Rolling Stone, yes. He is a badass, there's no question. But it certainly points to a preference for white charlatans with the "right" look, like him and Clapton and Page, when they're higher up on the list than the guys most responsible for inventing modern rock guitar: BB King, Chuck Berry and Buddy Guy.
Rolling Stone is a very far from a source that I would trust on this issue anyway, as they're likely to spout off the most predictable mainstream answers you could imagine, to the point where one has to wonder why a list like this is even needed. It doesn't do anything but confirm what's already cemented in the public mind. But then the list was voted on by actual guitarists, very good ones. So maybe it's fine, could I do any better? Of course I could, how dare you.
For some reason writer David Fricke gets his own sub-list, and to my surprise it is a great deal more imaginative than the democratic list. I've never read David Fricke, I may start.
Having said all this I'm not even sure that I would put Vai et al in a top 100 list. Lists are tricky, especially when you're trying to cover such a vast swath of time. If you did it on a timeline, by year, based on activity it would probably be a little easier. For example in 1981 Neal Schon from Journey would be on my top 100 list, in 1987 both Vai and Satriani would be on it, in 1994 they probably wouldn't be, maybe Cobain would be, I don't know. I never really liked Nirvana that much.
When I'd originally asked John to do the solo I thought I'd probably only use about half the length I sent and edit it together, but it's such a sick solo that I just kept the whole thing and made the song way too long, to an almost comic effect. It's totally ridiculous but I think it works.