The 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time

Annie Clark of St. Vincent opens her self-titled 2014 album with “Rattlesnake,” about coming across a rattlesnake while walking naked on a West Texas ranch. “It was fucking terrifying,” she told Rolling Stone. The song is spacious and spooky, and its solo — played on her signature Ernie Ball Music Man guitar — channels that feeling into violent, thrilling peels that feel strung between wide-open freedom and impending doom. “A lot of my guitar heroes are guitar anti-heroes, like [Robert] Fripp, [Adrian] Belew, Marc Ribot,” she has said, “the kind of people who make the hair on the back of your neck stand up because the note is, like, hurty.” —J.D.

Sonic Youth’s twin-guitar savants, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, were always fearless improvisers, right from their earliest New York avant-punk noise days. But Ranaldo was a Deadhead at heart, and that side of Sonic Youth blossomed on Nineties albums like Washing Machine and A Thousand Leaves. “The Diamond Sea” was a free-form, 20-minute tempest that went somewhere different every night. “We used the word ‘extrapolations’ a lot — like a jumping-off place of exploration,” Ranaldo said. “And that’s very Grateful Dead-like. It’s not alone in that: It could be John Coltrane-like at the same time, or Albert Ayler. Those people were doing the same thing — starting with the head and then going off for 20 minutes and coming back to it.” John Oswald, the “plunderphonics” producer who mixed the Dead’s “Dark Star” into Grayfolded, is giving the same treatment to Sonic Youth, warping 32 different live versions into the upcoming Diamond Seas. —R.S.

If there’s a Yoda of shred guitar, it’s surely Joe Satriani, whose list of illustrious students includes fretboard Jedi like Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett of Metallica, and Alex Skolnick of Testament. His 1987 album, Surfing With the Alien, became a must-have for every aspiring guitarist of the era and was certified gold. “The album’s title track was done under much duress because we were late getting out of the studio that day,” Satriani told Eon music. He still sounds as cool as a cucumber, gliding with maximum restraint while using a wah-wah pedal to coax a vocal expressiveness from his guitar. As the song progresses, he ups the notes-per-second count with blisteringly fast-pick tapping and nimble neo-classical runs, leaving no doubt that he’s as much a master as any of his star pupils. —T.B.

Howlin’ Wolf made his own kind of blues evil — but the menace in his music came from his right-hand man Hubert Sumlin, who summoned up those terrifying guitar sounds. Fellow guitarists speak his name with a rare kind of awe. “I love Hubert Sumlin,” Jimmy Page once said. “He always played the right thing at the same time.” He echoed Wolf’s growl with doomy riffs like “Smokestack Lightning” and “Killing Floor,” as well as razor-slash solos like “Spoonful.” He was just a kid when he first met the Wolf — sneaking into one of his shows — but became his guitar player in 1954, the most iconic singer/guitarist duo in blues history. “We were like father and son, although we had some tremendous fights,” Sumlin recalled. “He knocked my teeth out, and I knocked his out. None of it mattered; we always got right back together.” —R.S.

The Stones’ take on a world spinning off its axis in 1968 boasts a Keith Richards solo that’s stark, spare, and the definition of simple elegance. The way he drops out and leaves spaces between the first few bursts! Those bent high notes! That quick flurry that sounds like an SOS right before the band goes back into the chorus! It’s the sort of solo that erupts into the middle of the song, yet never becomes the kind of flashy, virtuoso fireworks display that eclipses it. Asked in 1969 by Rolling Stone about their upcoming album Let It Bleed, Richards noted that there was a lot of bottleneck playing on it, adding that “I really got hung up on that when we were doing ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’” His hang-ups paid off, however. The satanic majesty of that solo still inspires awe — and more than a few shivers. —D.F.

By the time he started the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was a master of every rock & roll rhythm — Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, surf and doo-wop and rockabilly and R&B — to the point where he could play any style of music and give it a nasty little throb. But he really went off the deep end in “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the feedback explosion from the Velvets’ avant-punk opus White Light/White Heat. He took inspiration from free jazz, saying, “I had been listening to a lot of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and wanted to get something like that with a rock & roll feeling.” At the climax, Reed declares, “And then my miiiind split open!” — then plunges into the crazed solo that launched a million noise bands, while Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, and John Cale pound on that primitive backbeat. It’s the Velvets’ loudest, meanest, most mind-splitting-open moment. —R.S.

Before Rage Against the Machine played even a single public concert, they had the bare bones worked out to their debut single, “Killing in the Name,” a generational call to arms that remains their signature work and the only one in their catalog to surpass a billion streams on Spotify. The main riff came to Tom Morello when he was giving guitar lessons to pay the bills. “I was showing this young man how to do drop-D tuning,” Morello recalled in 2025. “And then I was like, ‘Hold on one second.’ I got my little cassette recorder, I pressed record, saved that for myself.” The song climaxes with a chaotic guitar solo that sounds as if Morello somehow fused his instrument with a turntable. The secret to nailing the sound: Set your whammy pedal two octaves up. —A.G.

It’s hard to think of a 21st-century guitarist more associated with a specific solo than Nels Cline is with “Impossible Germany,” a cornerstone of any Wilco live show. Cline has said he doesn’t much like the tone he plays the solo in (“little trebly for me,” he once said), but nearly every night onstage, he expands upon the dream-like trance of the two-and-a-half minute display on the studio version from 2007’s Sky Blue Sky (for a particularly revelatory and drawn-out take, check out the version from 2024’s Solid Sound festival). Everyone from singer-songwriter Jay Som to jam-band aficionados have fallen for Cline’s solo, which dips and flies and sparkles without ever meandering too far from the song, before it interlocks with the song’s primary riff, played by Jeff Tweedy and Pat Sansone. It’s the highlight of any Wilco show, and for good reason. —Jonathan Bernstein  

Robbie Robertson’s solo on “It Makes No Different,” especially the version on The Last Waltz, is a master class in tone and mood. It arrives at the very end of the ballad, defined up to that by point by Rick Danko’s devastating vocals, a staggering performance that Robertson echoes with his own. Rather than launching into a weepy waterfall, Robertson hits pointed staccato notes that pierce the heart. His guitar seems to break, falter, and stumble, not unlike Danko as he strains for lines like, “Well, I love you so much/And it’s all that I can do.” Just as crucial though is the way Robertson’s solo works alongside Garth Hudson’s saxophone on the outro. If Robertson gives voice to the thousand cuts of heartache, Hudson lends “It Makes No Difference” the cathartic sob it deserves. —J. Blistein

Elvis Presley’s sped-up 1954 version of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s jump-blues tune “That’s All Right” helped define the sound and spirit of rock & roll, and a huge part of its greatness is due to Scotty Moore’s guitar solo. Knocked out during a break at Sun Studios in Memphis and then recorded at the insistence of Sun head Sam Phillips, who loved what he heard, Presley’s take is flirty and frisky, and Moore answers him back with rockabilly licks that are just as playful. “Bill [Black] started just slapping the bass. And it sounded pretty good what they’re doing, so I started just playing some kind of rhythm thing with them, too,” Moore later recalled. It’s a tossed-off good time that changed history. —J.D.

There’s nothing theatrical, showy, or self-indulgent about Bonnie Raitt’s dancing slide guitar on this R&B jaunt, originally made famous by Wilson Pickett in the 1960s. Raitt first recorded the song on her 1977 classic, Sweet Forgiveness, and has turned it into a live showstopper ever since (watch her stretch out on this 1989 version, or her spirited take on Jools Holland). The slide solo is all start-and-stop staccato and precise rhythm; it’s over barely before you realize it’s started. “I taught myself how to play,” Raitt once said of her signature slide style, “so my hand positions aren’t 100 percent correct — and I put the bottleneck on the wrong finger.” —J. Bernstein

A Live One, Phish’s first official live release, captures excellent versions of the band’s classic repertoire, filled with some of Trey Anastasio’s most blazing solos. He is more melodic elsewhere, but “Stash” stands out for his aggressive, outré playing. The song begins with the formality of a string quartet, with each member of the band playing well-defined parts, before Anastasio and keyboardist Page McConnell start pulling at the threads. The guitarist then explodes with careening intensity, playing a repeating lick that leads the band toward outer space. As the intensity builds, they edge toward blowing apart, before pulling back to the riff and group vocal and safely landing the ship. It’s the type of group interplay and go-for-broke jamming out of a tight composition that represents Phish at their inspired best. —Alan Paul

When B.B. King showed up in the 1950s, he transformed the way people heard the guitar. As Buddy Guy said, “Before B.B., everyone played the guitar like it was an acoustic.” King changed that with his string-bending flash on “Lucille,” the Gibson he could make weep like a real woman. He took his blues style from his idol T-Bone Walker, but refined it in hits like “Sweet Sixteen,” making everyone else want to play like him. “Every electric guitarist you listen to, there’s a little bit of B.B. in there,” Guy said. “He was the father of squeezing the string on the electric guitar.” “Sweet Sixteen” was King’s 1960 comeback after a failed string of flop pop ballads, reclaiming his blues crown with his toughest and meanest playing. He famously did an epic version at the 1974 Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire — where his guitar made Ali jump out of his seat. —R.S.

Alex Lifeson’s contributions to Rush are indispensable, as he demonstrates on “Limelight,” the lead single from the band’s career-defining 1981 album, Moving Pictures. Lifeson’s chunky tone and shimmering power chords give the track’s introductory riff and verses — both of which are performed in geeky odd time signatures — their arena-rocking power, and his lyrical approach and unwavering sense of economy are what make the “Limelight” solo section so evocative. Lifeson opens with a series of sustained notes and controlled feedback, all manipulated with perfectly controlled tremolo-arm dives and vibrato, and only then digs into a series of ascending scale patterns that crescendo in wailing, upper-register bend.  “The solo reflects the emotional character of the song,” Lifeson said on Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett’s Shred With Shifty podcast. “The disconnected feeling of living a life that’s on a stage and the loneliness that comes with it.” —T.B.

Ray Davies originally wrote “You Really Got Me” on piano, but by the time the song was done, the Kinks had cooked up a deranged rocker with a distorted guitar sound that transformed the future of human noise forever. The opening riff is legendary, and Dave Davies’ wild, wiry solo brought a whole new kind of chaos in rock. They got that scabrous sound when Dave cut into his amp with his mother’s knitting needles. It’s no wonder that a little over a decade later, Van Halen chose to put a Californicating version of “You Really Got Me” on their debut album. It’s the place where over-the-top heavy metal thunder was born. —J.D.

One might argue that all seven minutes and 18 seconds of “Ball and Biscuit” count as one long solo, or a series of them tightly woven together to make one badass patchwork quilt of blues-rock. Jack White cranks up the fuzz on a Big Muff pedal, oozing in the distortion and shriek-heavy notes, which contrast with his unwavering spoken-word lyrics. Meanwhile, Meg White is the backbone, supporting him on this wild ride with minimal yet fervent drumming. It’s teamwork from one of rock’s greatest duos, making it not just the Elephant centerpiece, but the White Stripes’ definitive statement — one that Bob Dylan loved so much, he insisted on playing it live with White in 2004.–A.M.

Some may consider it the first rock & roll guitar solo. Others simply consider it the first rock & roll song. Released in 1944, “Strange Things” was Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s first crossover hit, from gospel to R&B, or what Billboard then deemed “race records.” If she had only ever recorded this song, her influence on rock & roll would be impossible be overstate, not the least because of the measured thrill, fury, and rapture she captured in her merely 25-second guitar solo. And in those 25 seconds, you can hear the thrilling dawn of a new era, of postwar American life: “Her rhythmic approach,” writes James Perone in his book Listen to Soul!, “fits in the middle of the gap between the triplet-based swing feel of the rest of the band and the straight eighth-notes that began to mark rock & roll music.” —J. Bernstein

Rock-guitar hits in the Seventies were almost always going for loud, huge, arena-filling power. Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits went in a different direction with his nimble, intricate, finger-style playing and the bright, clean sound he got from his trusty 1961 Fender Stratocaster on “Sultans of Swing.” His first solo is 30 seconds of airy, precise beauty that at times almost sounds like boogie blues played on a steel guitar. His second is laid-back lightning that crescendos in blazing arpeggios. But when even the notes are flying like crazy, his playing feels cool, careful, and conversational. It was most of the world’s introduction to Dire Straits and would be their biggest hit for years. “As for the actual solo,” Knopfler recalled, “it was just more or less what I played every night.” —J.D.  

All it takes is 26 seconds of sweet, low-gain distortion — played by the guitar maestro himself, George Harrison, in tones more akin to a piano — to make one of the most dynamic and memorable solos of the Beatles canon. Complemented by swelling strings, “Something” is, well, something in its surprising simplicity. “George’s material wasn’t really paid all that much attention to — to such an extent that he asked me to stay behind after [everyone else had gone],” said engineer Glyn Johns, who recorded the song’s demo. “He was terribly nice, as if he was imposing on me. And then he plays this song that just completely blows me away.” —S.H.

Tony Iommi has long maintained that he didn’t write Black Sabbath’s canonical riffs and solos as much as he conjured them into being through extensive jamming based around mood. And nearly always, the mood was dark. The band’s classic 1970 anti-war anthem “War Pigs” opens with doomy guitar drone and air-raid sirens to set the scene, but it’s Iommi’s highly evocative solo that truly captures the song’s apocalyptic vibe. Known for eschewing technical displays in favor of creating cinematically heavy atmosphere, Iommi opens the solo with his trademark sludgy minor-key blues, but his raw, improvisational style leads to a chaotic, disorienting barrage of bent notes and sustained feedback that captures the fear and confusion of the time and vividly brings Geezer Butler’s brutal lyrics to life. —J.R.

You might say Ernie Isley was born for the role of guitar hero — he grew up as the kid in the family, watching his big brothers reign as one of the Sixties’ biggest R&B groups. For a couple of years, in the early 1960s, the Isleys’ touring guitarist lived in the family home: a future superstar named Jimi Hendrix. But they raised their game when Ernie joined, still in his teens. “That Lady” was ubiquitous in the summer of 1973, a seductive soul smash driven by Ernie’s fuzzed-out Jimi-style Strat, wailing through a Big Muff and a Maestro PS-1A phase shifter. When he cut it, his first reaction was, “I played the wrong shit.” But the next day, he asked, “What was I talkin’ about?” The solo became a hip-hop touchstone, sampled in classics from the Beastie Boys (“A Year and a Day”) to Kendrick Lamar (“i”). —R.S. 

The defining moment of Mick Taylor’s five-year stint in the Stones came about more or less by accident during the 1970 sessions for Sticky Fingers. “We didn’t even know they were still taping,” Keith Richards would later recall. “We thought we’d finished.” Instead, the tape kept rolling to capture the fantastic groove odyssey that closes this song, with the 21-year-old young gun stretching out to Santana-ish dimensions. “I like to think I added some extra spice,” Taylor said. “Charlie [Watts] said I brought ‘finesse.’ I’ll go with what Charlie said.” —Simon Vozick-Levinson

So much of Carlos Santana’s style of guitar comes from his expansive, omnidirectional range of influences: He learned to play from his father, a mariachi musician, and soon incorporated Latin jazz and blues influences, informing a preternatural, completely fluid way. A lot of that defines the solo in “Black Magic Woman,” the bluesy classic written by Peter Green and first popularized by Fleetwood Mac. In Santana’s dexterous hands, the song suddenly got a livewire burst of new energy, blended into conga-driven percussion. The sound gave the song new power while still preserving Green’s dynamic solo, just adding Santana’s touch — classic, effortless, and lingering a bit on the beat. —Julyssa Lopez

Everything Kirk Hammett knows about guitar resides in the second solo of Metallica’s breakthrough hit, “One”: ricocheting finger-tapped triplets, diminished jazz swoops, blues bends, wah-wah emoting. His playing reflects every lesson he got as a student of Joe Satriani, and his own ingenuity while cutting his teeth with Metallica, pinning the melodiousness of his “Fade to Black” solo against the fiery barrages of “Master of Puppets.” “I lost a lot of sleep over that set of guitar solos,” Hammett once told Guitar World. “The main guitar solo at the end, with the right-hand, Eddie Van Halen–type tapping, came almost immediately … What was going on with the rhythm section in that part of the song was just very, very exciting for me to solo over.” It’s even more exciting to hear played live. —K.G.

When the power trio Cream played their take on the song at the Winterland Ballroom in 1968 — the version that shows up on their third album, Wheels of Fire — the solo that Eric Clapton unleashed was enough to make you think that maybe the graffiti wasn’t quite as hyperbolic as you might have thought. When he tears into the second of the song’s two instrumental showcases — i.e., the largely improvised section that begins at the 2:30 mark — it’s as if the entire Sixties British blues revolution hits its apex, then goes up in a burst of flames. An entire generation of American rock fanatics took notice, while legions of aspiring guitarists from all over the globe took copious notes. When asked about his love of the solo during an interview, Eddie Van Halen proceeded to play it note for note off the top of his head. —D.F.

The riff that introduces GNR’s breakthrough single may be iconic, but it’s Slash’s solo that gives “Sweet Child O’ Mine” its heart and soul. As lyrical as Axl Rose’s cooing vocals in the verses, it’s a crisp and clean Les Paul tone that slowly builds to an explosive blast of bluesy distortion. It’s also the only part of the Appetite for Destruction track that Slash likes — he often criticizes “Sweet Child” as being too much of a ballad. “It really rubbed me the wrong way,” he once told Guitar Center. “I came in with the chord changes for the solo part, which for me was the only redeeming part of the song.” —J.H.

Television were the ultimate New York guitar band, exploring a new kind of punk psychedelia in the urban grime. With Tom Verlaine on Fender Jazzmaster and Richard Lloyd on Strat, these boys jammed onstage like CBGB’s answer to the Dead. “Marquee Moon” is their grand 10-minute epic — Verlaine soars over a staccato groove full of spooky after-hours dread, hypnotized by the city lights, with his eerie upper-register twang. Patti Smith described his sound as “like a thousand bluebirds screaming.” They took “Marquee Moon” somewhere new every night — especially the 17-minute version from Portland, Oregon, in 1978. “It was just being onstage and wanting to create something,” Verlaine said. “So I would play until something happened. That much more comes from jazz or the Doors or the Five Live Yardbirds album — that kind of rave-up dynamics.” It’s a guitar adventure open to any band crazy enough to try it, whether that’s Pavement,  Wilco, or Geese. —R.S. 

In August 1970, Duane Allman heard that Eric Clapton was down in Miami, recording with his new band. So he casually dropped by the sessions — and made history. “There had to be some kind of telepathy going on,” producer Tom Dowd said, “because I’ve never seen spontaneous inspiration happen at that rate and level.” Skydog and Slowhand had never met, but they had instant musical chemistry, turning the whole Layla album into a guitar duel — especially the title song, a desperate plea to George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd. According to Clapton, Allman came up with the 12-note riff, but then topped it with that high-pitched screaming slide solo, which sounds like a theremin chased by a Delta hellhound. You can hear someone in the studio gasp “woooo!” For the coup de grace, Allman adds the final bird chirps, after the piano interlude. —R.S.

Neil Young’s saga is full of so many ragged guitar glories, from the one-note solo in “Cinnamon Girl” to the reveries of “Like a Hurricane” or “Cortez the Killer” or “Danger Bird.” But “Powderfinger,” the monster centerpiece of his 1979 classic Rust Never Sleeps, is Shakey at his fiercest, rising to the challenge of punk rock. His solo is full of brutal violence, yet so vulnerable and elegiac, a pained lament for a lost kid trapped in a war he can’t understand. Backed by the mighty stomp of Crazy Horse, he sails away on Old Black, the 1953 Les Paul Goldtop he’s been beating up onstage since the late Sixties. It’s still the highlight of his live show, with Young blazing for verse after verse. “You can’t practice and be great,” he says in the bio Shakey. “You gotta be in tune with yourself — then you can play an out-of-tune guitar and it’s great.” —R.S.

The solo in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s recording of “Texas Flood” sounds as vital today as when the blues revivalist first recorded it during the 1982 sessions for his debut album. That too was titled Texas Flood, and it helped spur new interest in the genre. To guitar-blues neophytes, Vaughan’s soloing is startling: The nearly two-minute spotlight exorcises all manner of demons, with the late guitarist consistently pushing his Fender Strat further and further. According to bassist Carmine Rojas, who recorded with Vaughan during David Bowie’s Let’s Dance sessions, SRV let the muse guide him. “Most guys are very good, technically, but they’ve got no spirit. You need to have the two,” he told Classic Rock magazine in 2020. “Texas Flood” is an emotional song. You put it on, and it sounds like he’s coming through the speakers. He wasn’t bullshitting around.” —J.H.

Considering how innovative Jeff Beck was, this list could’ve easily been 100 Jeff Beck solos. The lead break on the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things” sounds like a tremulous rock raga; “Beck’s Bolero” combined a laser-beam lead whine with sighing blues guitar; the weepy, brittle break on “People Get Ready” effects more soul than Rod Stewart’s rasp; and “Nadia” is a fluttering whammy-bar meditation that trembles in and out of trip-hop beats. But his legacy blooms in Blow by Blow’s instrumental “Freeway Jam,” four-and-a-half minutes of jazz-fusion expressionism on which Beck bends floating harmonics, shimmies on the high notes, and lets notes warble as he plays with the frets. It’s a master class in musicianship but the tip of the iceberg. —K.G.

What song is it you wanna hear? There is only one answer: “Free Birrrrrrd!” Ever since Lynyrd Skynyrd released their lighters-up Southern guitar epic in 1973, it’s been a title that fans love to scream, even at other artists’ shows. (Even at the Band’s farewell Last Waltz concert in 1976, Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus reported, “Damned if somebody didn’t yell for ‘Free Bird.’”) Skynyrd began stretching it out in their early Florida bar-band days, to let singer Ronnie Van Zant catch his breath. “Y’all play a little longer,” he told the boys. “My throat’s hurting, and I need a break.” Allen Collins played the four-minute solo on his Gibson Explorer, with Gary Rossington adding slide fills on his SG. “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself,” Rossington said. “He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad.” The solo has been making bikers cry into their beers ever since.

“Little Wing” might be one of Jimi Hendrix’s shortest songs, but it’s also his most stunning. The Axis: Bold as Love highlight is the true definition of “less is more,” a beautiful burst of euphoria that drifts away before you even realize it was there. Hendrix wrote it after performing at the Monterey Pop Festival, a legendary experience he captures perfectly on the solo. On it, he delivers dreamy, slow-tempo notes through a Leslie speaker cabinet, a wooden device originally designed for organs. “‘Little Wing’ is painfully short and painfully beautiful,” John Mayer told Rolling Stone in 2010. “It’s like your grandfather coming back from the dead and hanging out with you for a minute and a half and then going away. It’s perfect, then it’s gone.” —A.M.

In the mid-Seventies, Randy Rhoads’ band Quiet Riot ran in the same circles as Van Halen, where he was considered just as innovative and imposing as Eddie Van Halen. But where Van Halen became instant superstars with their 1978 self-titled debut, Quiet Riot initially failed to break through. Enter Ozzy Osbourne. Fresh out of Black Sabbath, the Prince of Darkness now needed to keep up with Van Halen, and luckily Rhoads had the necessary spitfire ambition and unique verve to stand out from Eddie’s would-be clones. Rhoads’ solo on “Crazy Train” blends the minor-key drama of Beethoven with fingertapping and blues whines, and there’s a quality to his tone that feels like it’s cutting a hole in your speakers. Steve Vai once called it the first solo he ever heard that made him feel scared. —K.G.

Jerry Garcia loved to play “Morning Dew” his entire life. Folk singer Bonnie Dobson wrote it in 1961, but in Garcia’s hands, it became an epic psychedelic lament. This glorious 14-minute “Morning Dew” has gone down in history — the legendary climax of the most legendary show the Dead ever played, at Cornell University on May 8, 1977.  It’s Garcia at his most transcendent. They dropped this “Dew” on a crowd already dazed by a 27-minute “Scarlet > Fire,” coming right out of “St. Stephen” and “Not Fade Away.” Garcia soars on his Travis Bean TP500 guitar, especially in the final six minutes, where he builds from a hushed whisper to a full-on electric-funeral howl. Like “Dark Star,” “Morning Dew” was a story the Dead kept telling over the decades, with so many crucial versions. But ever since the Cornell show hit the 1970s tape-trader circuit, this “Dew” has been showing Deadheads the light. —R.S.

Prince’s now legendary, mega-viral guitar solo from the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony was allegedly a response to being snubbed on this publication’s 2003 “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list. (On the updated 2023 version, he’s at 14.) Midway through a star-studded closing performance of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” His Purpleness suddenly emerges unannounced from the shadows and effortlessly throws down three minutes of sublime guitar badassery that leaves Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne grinning as they eat his paisley dust. The largely improvised and unrehearsed solo is emotionally charged from the first note, erupting into a blaze of acrobatic shredding, rapid-fire legato runs, and electric showmanship. But even at his flashiest, Prince keeps his phrasing rooted in the melody of Harrison’s White Album classic — a show of respect from one all-timer to another. —J.R.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is filled with to-the-max flourishes, chief among them Brian May’s charging nine-measure guitar solo, which links the song’s balladic opening and its increasingly frantic operatic breakdown. In an interview with Guitar Player, May said that he wanted to match the song’s vocal showmanship with his own instrument: “[Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury] said he wanted a solo in there, and I said I would like to, effectively, sing a verse on the guitar,” May recalled. “I would like to take it somewhere else. I would inject a different melody.” May’s solo stands alone melodically (“That melody isn’t anywhere else in the song, but it’s on a familiar chord sequence, so it dovetails in quite nicely,” he said), and it is a master class in maximizing a short amount of time in the spotlight. —M.J.

For his 22nd birthday, Duane Allman was sick in bed. So his brother, Gregg, came by with a present: a bottle of pills. But a couple of hours after leaving, Gregg got a call saying, “Baby brother, get over here now!” Duane had emptied out the bottle and started using it as a slide, playing the old Blind Willie McTell tune “Statesboro Blues.” “I just sat around for three weeks and practiced,” Duane told Rolling Stone in 1971. “It still sounded terrible.” Yet he used that bottle slide — and that song — for the rest of his all-too-brief life, as the Allmans hotwired “Statesboro Blues” to kick off their live classic At Fillmore East. Duane crammed a lifetime of legendary guitar into his 24 years: the epic jam of “You Don’t Love Me,” the down-home serenity of “Blue Sky,” the lovelorn screech of “Layla.” But his whole story is in “Statesboro Blues.” His surviving bandmates played it at his funeral. —R.S. 

Even Eddie Van Halen’s own brother and bandmate, Alex, never could understand it. Why did Eddie unleash his entire bag of tricks, the greatest arsenal of stunts any guitar player has ever amassed, in a single 20-second guest solo on a Michael Jackson song, without credit or even payment? It’s all there, from the two-handed tapping to the magical harmonic squeals to the furious tremolo-picking to the whammy-bar abuse — an entire decade-shaping vocabulary, all from one pair of hands. It’s quite possibly the most generous guest appearance in the history of recorded music, and nothing like it has graced any pop song before or since. Well before Run-D.M.C. met Aerosmith, it tore down walls between genres, and helped Jackson push past MTV’s reluctance to play Black artists. —B.H.

“All Along the Watchtower” was already a classic before Jimi Hendrix grabbed hold of it. It’s one of Bob Dylan’s scariest songs, a stripped-down acoustic Biblical parable from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding. But Hendrix, a longtime Dylan fanatic, took it to a whole new level, drastically reworking it into a howling-wind guitar storm. He recorded “Watchtower” just a few weeks after the original came out, for Electric Ladyland. His five-part solo brings the stark atmosphere to life, especially that ghostly slide groan at the two-minute mark. “It overwhelmed me, really,” Dylan said in 1995 of Hendrix’s version. “He had such talent — he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using.” —R.S.

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the White Album classic, is the most legendary of Beatles solos — yet it was played by George Harrison’s best friend, Eric Clapton. It was a spur-of-the-moment whim: George invited his mate to come play just before the session, while the two were driving into London. Clapton was horrified, saying, “No one plays on Beatles sessions!” George just replied, “So what? It’s my song!” But he had an ulterior motive — he was sick of the open warfare at Abbey Road, and he knew the Fabs would mind their manners around an honored guest. As he quipped, “They were all on their best behavior.” Clapton played a very Harrison-like solo on a cherry-red 1957 Les Paul he’d just given George as a gift, nicknamed “Lucy.” George used it on the White Album and Abbey Road, including “Something.” (Yes, that’s right: He played his most romantic love song to Pattie Boyd on the guitar Clapton gave him.) —R.S.

According to legend, P-Funk mastermind George Clinton told guitarist Eddie Hazel to play the opening track of Funkadelic’s 1971 album as if he’d just been told his mother died. The result is the sort of heartbreaking, mind-bending instrumental that feels like a transmission of pure, uncut grief. A self-taught guitarist who worshipped Jimi Hendrix, Hazel contributed a lot to the P-Funk canon. But the nearly 10-minute guitar solo that kicks off their dark, troubling, yet still groovy-as-fuck 1971 LP is still the cornerstone of his legacy. Notes are not played so much as wept and wrenched out of his instrument; Hazel eventually conjures a sense of perseverance, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of his echo pedals in the final minutes. “It’s a piece of music to evoke the ghosts of the past,” Living Colour’s Vernon Reid said. “It evokes the suffering. It evokes the joy. It’s a masterwork.” —D.F.

In classic Steely Dan fashion, Larry Carlton spent at least 90 minutes — possibly more — in the studio with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, working on the guitar solo for “Kid Charlemagne.” The jazz-trained guitarist, so renowned for his use of the Gibson ES-335 he earned the nickname “Mr. 335,” even had to do several takes, at Becker’s behest, with a Fender Stratocaster before being allowed to return to his primary guitar. “It was not long after that, that we were into it,” Carlton recalled in one interview, exuding a nonchalance befitting his work on “Kid Charlemagne.” His mid-point and outro solos (the latter done in one take) masterfully balance complexity and ease, solid gold pop-rock melodies unafraid of cosmic jazz twists. And his phrasing never falters, an effortless glide even at the speediest or prickliest parts, each note melting like ink off a blotter. —J. Blistein

“I thought ‘Stairway’ crystallized the essence of the band,” guitarist Jimmy Page told Rolling Stone in 1975. He’s not wrong. The eight-minute odyssey from Led Zeppelin IV showcases what each member did best: Robert Plant’s Celtic-inspired, pastoral lyrics, delivered through his iconic banshee wail; bassist John Paul Jones, as versatile as ever, contributing mystical recorder and electric piano; John Bonham bringing both heaven and hell with his thunderous drums. Then there’s Page, who used a 1959 Fender Telecaster gifted to him by Jeff Beck for the dazzling finale. Page’s solo was totally improvised, a “first-thought-best-thought” master class in melody and power — just enough to bring it on home, but not so much where it overshadows everything else. “Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time,” Page said. “And I guess we did it with ‘Stairway.’” —A.M.

Chuck Berry perfected the rock & roll guitar solo as we know it in “Johnny B. Goode,” the definitive guitar-hero anthem. His opening 18-second barrage was the shot heard around the world, a Tunguska-level blast of electric bravado that inspired half the players on this list to pick up their first guitar. As Keith Richards said, “Chuck is the granddaddy of us all.” It’s the tale of the Louisiana country boy who strums while his mama urges, “Go, Johnny, go!” But it was inspired by playing his first gig in New Orleans, haunted by the city’s history. As he wrote in his memoir, “The thrill of seeing my Black name posted all over town in one of the cities they brought the slaves through turned into ‘Johnny B. Goode.’” Every tradition of American music is somewhere in Chuck Berry’s guitar — never louder or more defiant than right here. —R.S.

Nearly a half century after Van Halen released their self-titled debut, it’s almost impossible to conceive of the impact that the album’s second track, a minute and 42 second guitar solo aptly named “Eruption,” had on the course of guitar history. Eddie Van Halen’s succinct statement of purpose, with its revolutionary use of two-handed tapping, total mastery of the whammy bar, blinding speed, and rich, overdriven tone — he referred to it as the “brown sound” — establishing the lexicon for a new generation of guitarists. As Van Halen — who often complained that “Eruption” has a mistake in it that he couldn’t subsequently reproduce — told it, the solo’s inclusion on the album was almost an afterthought. “We were in the studio practicing for a show we had that night at the Whisky, and I was warming up with my solo,” Van Halen said to journalist Jas Obrecht. “Our producer, Ted Templeman, walked by and said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s just it’s a little thing I do live.’ And he said, ‘Hey that’s great; let’s put it on the record!’” —T.B.

David Gilmour’s transcendent “Comfortably Numb” solo isn’t merely one lead but the best parts of five or six takes, not that anyone would know it. “I just followed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and mark out bar lines, saying which bits are good,” Gilmour once said. He simply raised and lowered the faders whenever a phrase perked up his ears, creating a mosaic that became the most affecting solo of his career. His playing is weepy, soulful, and beautiful, giving the dreariness of The Wall human warmth. Luckily for Pink Floyd fans, he kept it in the band’s sets after Roger Waters left, expanding it brilliantly on live albums like Pink Floyd’s Pulse and his own recent solo live album, The Luck and Strange Concerts. According to Gilmour, every time he played the solo, it turned into something new onstage. —K.G.

There’s simply no denying the peerless Seventies rock-radio greatness that is the dueling guitar solos in “Hotel California.” Preserved for all time by producer Bill Szymczyk in the marathon title track to the band’s 1976 album, the solos are a high-noon showdown between guitar slingers Joe Walsh and Don Felder. They’re also eminently singable — admit it, you’ve shouted “da, da, da, da …” in the car during the song’s climax. “There was always a little competition between Felder and I. We always tried to kind of one up each other … ‘Oh yeah? Listen to this!’” Walsh says in the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles. Whether on the original recording or onstage, the guitar solos never fail to summon that cool breeze and warm smell of colitas. Says Szymczyk, who oversaw albums by B.B. King and Bob Seger, “The ending of ‘Hotel California’ is one of the high points of my recording career.” —J.H.

Nobody ever did more with the guitar than Jimi Hendrix, but “Machine Gun” is Hendrix at his most Hendrix — the most ambitious, raw, soulful, go-for-broke expression of his musical genius. It comes from Band of Gypsys, recorded live on New Year’s Day 1970 at the Fillmore East, a 12-minute firestorm of electric anguish and political rage, inspired by the violence in Vietnam and America. So many guitar legends have called this the greatest solo ever, from Slash (“that’s the Holy Grail”) to Kirk Hammett. “Not only is this my favorite guitar solo of all time,” Phish’s Trey Anastasio said, “but it includes the single greatest note ever played on electric guitar: the high screaming note Jimi plays right at the beginning of his solo.” (Check it out right at the four-minute point.) Hendrix had bigger hits, but this is the furthest he ever traveled. Over 50 years later, “Machine Gun” remains the outer limits of how high a guitar — and a guitarist — can reach. —R.S.

The origins of “Purple Rain” are filled with legends: Prince thought it could’ve become a country song; he offered it to Stevie Nicks, who felt it was too cinematic for her to record; and a homeless woman was the first to hear it when Prince invited her into the Revolution’s rehearsal space. But none of that matters, since for everybody else, the band birthed “Purple Rain” at Minneapolis’ First Avenue on Aug. 3, 1983, when Prince wrung a solo from his guitar that felt more like a moving cry of the soul than a musical spotlight. It’s the first time they played it live, and it’s the version on Purple Rain. Prince’s guitar prowess was well documented by that point, but the fluidity of his phrasing on the song and the way he pinched his strings for notes that ascended heavenward spoke more about what “Purple Rain” meant than his obtuse lyrics. —K.G.