By DAVID FRICKE

The gui­tar has been the king of rock & roll instru­ments for more than half a cen­tury. What you are about to read are twenty rea­sons why the present and future of rock gui­tar are as excit­ing and explo­sive as its his­tory. In attack, tech­nique, lyri­cal ambi­tion and exper­i­men­tal drive, these play­ers are all descen­dants of the orig­i­nal heroes — includ­ing Jimi Hen­drix, Eric Clap­ton, Duane All­man and Jimmy Page — who trans­formed the elec­tric gui­tar in the Six­ties and Sev­en­ties. As John Frus­ciante says, “For me, the gen­uine gui­tar heroes had a lot to say musi­cally and put them­selves out there. They tried to take the instru­ment to new places.”

But Frus­ciante, Derek Trucks, John Mayer and the other gui­tarists in these pages are all heroes and gods in their own, often extreme, right. They are also proof that, long after Chuck Berry minted the fun­da­men­tal twang and addict­ing joy of rock & roll gui­tar on his 1955 debut sin­gle, “May­bel­lene,” there remains much to dis­cover and study in the unlim­ited alchemy you get from wood, six strings, elec­tric­ity and the highly per­sonal poetry of touch and strum. The dis­tin­guish­ing mark of rock’s great­est gui­tarists is, Mayer insists, “they’re all stuck on what they’re seek­ing, not where they are.”

This cel­e­bra­tion dif­fers from our 2003 sur­vey, “The 100 Great­est Gui­tarists of All Time,” in some ways. The gui­tarists here are, by the mea­sure of rock’s extended his­tory, new. Most are under forty, and all have made their impact in the last two decades. Also, there is no rank­ing. Num­bered lists can be fun; we still get blow­back from last time about who should have been up, out, in or down. But nerve and orig­i­nal­ity are not eas­ily quan­tifi­able, and that goes for record sales too. Frus­ciante and Mayer are among the few mul­ti­plat­inum sell­ers here. Yet every­one in these pages is a true star of the instrument.

In one cen­tral way, how­ever, this trib­ute to the gui­tar and those who play it is exactly like the 2003 issue: You can­not turn a page with­out a ref­er­ence or a deep bow of grat­i­tude to Hen­drix. Frus­ciante, Mayer and Trucks all speak of him with informed rev­er­ence, and Hendrix’s cat­a­clysmic influ­ence appears repeat­edly in the sound and vision of the other play­ers. In the Rock & Roll Gui­tar Hall of Fame, Jimi Hen­drix is, by every stan­dard, Num­ber One. Every­one else — includ­ing the hun­dreds of great gui­tarists who will be cited in the bliz­zard of let­ters and e-mails sure to fol­low — is Num­ber Two.

Ask John Mayer if he is a gui­tarist or a singer-songwriter, and he replies imme­di­ately: “Always a gui­tarist.” As a kid, he goes on, “I had this vision — sit­ting by a win­dow on a rainy after­noon, just play­ing gui­tar. I said to myself, ‘If I have enough strings and elec­tric­ity, I can play gui­tar for­ever. I don’t need any­thing else.’” Today, Mayer, 29, is more famous as a singer-songwriter. His first two albums, 2001′s Room for Squares and 2003′s Heav­ier Things, have sold a com­bined 6 mil­lion copies, and his lat­est record, Con­tin­uum, is nom­i­nated for five Gram­mys, includ­ing Album of the Year. But as a teenager, Mayer — who was born in 1977 in Bridge­port, Con­necti­cut — was so obsessed with Texas gui­tarist Ste­vie Ray Vaughan that, Mayer recalls, laugh­ing, “in my mind, I was on my way to being the next Ste­vie Ray.” Instead, Mayer is a pop star and a dynamic, accom­plished gui­tarist with an electric-Chicago attack and melodic con­ci­sion best heard on Try!, his 2005 live album with the John Mayer Trio. He is also a pas­sion­ate apos­tle for the blues elders he loves so much, such as Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Eric Clap­ton. “I never prac­tice,” Mayer insists. “I’m always play­ing. I want to write songs peo­ple can just jam on.”

In your Jimi Hen­drix essay in our 2004 “Immor­tals” issue, you wrote, “Who I am as a gui­tarist is defined by my fail­ure to become Jimi Hen­drix.” Can you elab­o­rate on that?
If I could play more like Hen­drix, I would. I’d want to do it all the time. But who I am is an amal­gam of pop and some­thing root­sier. It’s not a choice. As for Jimi Hen­drix, all gui­tar play­ers feel that way: “I’m not him.”

When did you get your first gui­tar?
It was Jan­u­ary 1991. I was thir­teen. My father rented a Wash­burn acoustic gui­tar from a music store. I took it to the bath­room, closed the door and sat there, think­ing, “How do I find out what’s in here? What are you hiding?”

I’m attracted to what I don’t know. Every­one else I knew said things like, “I watched him play, and it made me want to quit.” I never wanted to put the gui­tar down. I watched guys who made me want to pick it up. That’s when you have the dis­ease: You get your ass kicked, and you say, “I’m going to fig­ure out why I lost that fight.”

How did you first hear Ste­vie Ray Vaughan? And why did he make such a big impres­sion on you?
In 1991, a neigh­bor gave me a cas­sette of [1983’s] Texas Flood. What hit me was the tone, the tex­ture. It was rich, deep and round. It was wet, fluid, like mer­cury. I remem­ber say­ing, “I don’t know how you describe it, but that’s the sound I want.”

Ste­vie also began this amaz­ing genealog­i­cal hunt for me: Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Fred­die King, Albert King, Otis Rush and Light­nin’ Hop­kins. I wrote Buddy Guy fan mail when I was six­teen: “Dear Mr. Guy, I love your records. I’m going to play with you some­day.” Buddy used to play at Toad’s Place [in New Haven, Con­necti­cut]. I wasn’t old enough to get in. I’d call the guys there: “I’m a huge Buddy Guy fan. Please let me in. I won’t drink.” They never let me in.

When you’re onstage with Buddy Guy, he treats you like an equal. Do you feel like one?
I’m not an equal. But I feel like I can hold my own. And hold your own doesn’t mean com­ing out the win­ner. When I play with B.B., I play as few notes as pos­si­ble. I’m there to sat­isfy his sound. The first time I played with B.B., he kept going, “Play another solo.” I don’t think he was being gen­er­ous — I think he didn’t want it to be a cut­ting con­test. As I played with him more, he’d turn his vol­ume knob up. That’s when I said, “Wow, B.B.’s really let­ting me in.”

How would you describe your gui­tar style?
I don’t play so much like Ste­vie Ray Vaughan any­more. I real­ized my sig­na­ture is not solo­ing. It is in the chord voic­ings, the inver­sions. In “Wheels,” on Heav­ier Things, the lead line is chords.

That explains why you once said “Axis: Bold as Love” is your favorite Hen­drix album. It’s his most con­cise, song-based record.
The songs on Axis are an exten­sion of beau­ti­ful gui­tar play­ing. You can almost hear Hen­drix look­ing at the gui­tar as he plays [makes the sound of a long, shiv­er­ing note], going, “I won­der what that does?” There is an ele­ment of dis­cov­ery. Are You Expe­ri­enced? is like a rough draft. Axis sounds like the col­ors on the cover.

Do you have an iden­ti­fi­able tone or color?
I’m going for the biggest, fluffi­est, tub­bi­est sound. I want my gui­tar to sound like Sting’s voice — thick, on the bot­tom. I want to fig­ure out my own phras­ing, my own vocab­u­lary. Eric Clap­ton is so influ­en­tial that peo­ple go, “Is that Clap­ton or some­one doing Clap­ton?” I would like to get to the point where some­one says, “I can tell that’s John Mayer.”

Why didn’t you play more solos on your first two albums?
I landed in Atlanta in 1998 and wanted to be in a band — play elec­tric gui­tar and sing. I couldn’t find any­body. And the elec­tric gui­tar doesn’t sound great alone. So I wrote Room for Squares on an acoustic gui­tar. Com­po­si­tion­ally, there was no room for me to sprawl. And Heav­ier Things was my Axis: Bold as Love intention.

But I came off the road after Heav­ier Things and went, “Why am I still not happy?” How could I have sold that many records and still mis­rep­re­sented where I’m com­ing from? The Trio saved me. It was me putting up a road­block and say­ing, “There is some shit I have to do, to get back on track.”

The Trio album is mostly orig­i­nal songs. Did you write them with the band in mind?
Orig­i­nally, we were just going to play cov­ers. But I love com­posers who write for the for­mat. Gui­tarists like John Scofield and Pat Metheny write for the per­son­nel. So we wrote songs lightning-fast. “Good Love Is on the Way” was writ­ten out of want­ing to have a song like “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” by Derek and the Domi­nos. “Out of My Mind” — I wanted a slow blues tune. You gotta be high to like that one — it’s so slow.

You did some song­writ­ing with Eric Clap­ton in Lon­don last year. What was it like?
One of the most piv­otal weeks of my life. That man is bullshit-free. We had lunch, and he told me some­thing that I think about every day: “You can’t mas­ter­mind every­thing. You’ll go crazy. Just show up and play.”

But look at who his heroes are. You’re only as good as your heroes, and Eric is flaw­less at giv­ing his bib­li­og­ra­phy, his foot­notes. Eric embraces his lin­eage. And he said some­thing to me — he let on that just as Muddy Waters took him in, he was tak­ing me in, as a passing-on. That was absolutely huge.

Read the inter­views with Derek Trucks and John Frus­ciante here.

Source: Rolling Stone Magazine