10 guitar solos that overshadow the song
Any great rock song tends to be built off of the guitar. The whole point of having a great guitar lick is to catch the listener’s ears in the first few minutes and have them begging for more when the rest of the band kicks in. Although many guitarists have left their mark on rock and roll every time they picked up their instrument, artists like Eddie Van Halen may have done their jobs a little bit too well when working on their respective tunes.
Then again, any guitarist’s duty is about not getting in the way of the song. Each artist is supposed to serve the tune’s melody, but in the case of these tracks, the guitar sometimes becomes far too dominant, if only because the solo is too good to be ignored compared to everything else.
This isn’t an example of artists overstepping their bounds, though. If anything, it’s an indictment of the song itself not being that interesting. So, when there’s a great guitar solo absolutely dominating the conversation, it’s the exact opposite of the turd in the punchbowl situation.
While many of these tracks have gone down in musical history for a good reason, the fretboard masters behind the tunes may as well go down as musical saviours for the job they did here. Each act was working with lukewarm material, but it took one guitarist with the right passion to turn a small spark into a forest fire.
10 guitar solos that overshadow the song
10. ‘Reach Down’ – Temple of the Dog
No one was going into the sessions for Temple of the Dog to grandstand. The whole premise behind the supergroup coming together was to pay tribute to the memory of Andy Wood, so any person trying to show their stuff and prove that they were the best in the world would have been playing in poor taste. In the case of ‘Reach Down’ case, though, Mike McCready became the best thing the band could have asked for when they were going for an elongated jam.
From the minute Chris Cornell laid down the demo, he envisioned the tune as the kind of song mostly made up of guitar solos, much like Neil Young would do on some of his records. It was all meant to be a joke, but McCready was deadly serious, spending one of the first takes tearing through as many Stevie Ray Vaughan-style blues licks as he could until everyone else stopped jamming.
Even McCready allegedly didn’t know what he was playing half the time, saying that he blacked out during the recording and then listened back to what he had laid down and was shellshocked when he heard the playback. Suddenly, the Seattle scene had a new guitar hero, and after the sessions wrapped, McCready had a new musical home when Pearl Jam was formed.
9. ‘My Love’ – Wings
Every one of Paul McCartney’s hits tends to be in danger of going way too far into ballad territory. There’s nothing wrong with being able to profess one’s love to their partner, but the minute that Macca gets on a tangent, he can turn into the most sentimental and insufferable person in the room. ‘My Love’ was teetering on the edge of that mentality half the time, but the minute that McCartney relinquished guitar duties, Henry McCullough laid down something much more tasty.
McCartney’s style is far more indebted to what vocal melodies sound like, but hearing this guitar solo gives the tune the edge that it needs. The entire track could have been his vain attempt at trying to best George Harrison’s ‘Something’, but the solo is part way between the more tuneful moments of Jimmy Page while still keeping in the spirit of McCartney’s love song to Linda.
Most people could call the tune part of his usual ‘granny’ fluff, but judging by where Wings would go, McCartney at least knew the power behind having the right guy behind the fretboard. Because once there’s some muscle behind later tracks like ‘Hi Hi Hi’, why would anyone want to go back to simplistic playing?
8. ‘My Sharona’ – The Knack
The pop market will never run short of a few fluffy tracks now and again. Even though the greatest artists of yesteryear tend to say that the best music was made years before, it’s hard to argue that point when they were also from the same generation that birthed The Captain and Tenille. Pop music will always have fluff, but sometimes power-pop can deliver a few surprises like what The Knack did on ‘My Sharona’.
Despite the tune being known more for its guitar lick and some random dude with a bad hairdo singing the thing on television, the song’s breakdown is far better than it frankly deserves. After first getting a change in musical modes, hearing the lead guitarist turn in some melodic licks feels like it’s ripped off of the best Cheap Trick that no one ever got to hear.
For a song meant to have a weapons-grade level of cheese, this is the only few seconds where it seems to get a dose of swagger. While The Knack weren’t around for much longer after their huge hit, ‘My Sharona’ does at least earn some level of cool points for having the guts to put something a bit weirder than the typical pop-rock formula.
7. ‘Love is the Law’ – The Seahorses
At the dawn of ‘Cool Britannia’, guitar solos weren’t exactly the coolest thing in the world anymore. As much as some people still loved listening to their Guns N’ Roses albums in secret when no one was looking, anyone trying to outwardly sound like Slash was more likely going to get laughed at and told to listen to what was happening on the street. Then again, no one would ever tell John Squire what he was supposed to play when working in The Seahorses.
With The Stone Roses now a thing of the past, ‘Love is the Law’ was the moment where Squire’s playing truly went off the rails. Although the single version has its fair share of decent licks, the guitar outro at the end of the album version runs much longer, including some rapid-fire lines up and down the fretboard and one instance where he starts playing so hard that his fingers fly off the fretboard.
While it could be argued that a lighthearted song didn’t need a solo that went that hard, it’s rarely a bad thing to get this much of a result from a guitarist. Britpop may have relied on anthems with booming choruses, but what’s the point in filling the world’s stadiums without a massive guitar solo?
6. ‘Do It Again’ – Steely Dan
Looking back on their history, Steely Dan feels more like a state of mind than an actual band. Throughout their history, what Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created was the kind of music that felt sculpted together in a lab to be perfect, which meant no one had any business fooling around with the arrangements. While Can’t Buy a Thrill is the closest thing they have to a patchy record in their discography, ‘Do It Again’ introduced them to the world with one of the most bonkers guitar solos ever.
Although Jimmy Page had a special place in his heart for the guitar break in ‘Reelin’ In the Years’, ‘Do It Again’ feels like it’s being beaming in from another planet. Instead of using the typical effects pedals, the decision to play the whole thing on an electric sitar gives an otherworldly feel tot he entire track, especially when they get rolling on those Lynyrd Skynyrd-style riffs.
There’s a lot to like about ‘Do It Again’, but considering what they had to work with, the solo is enough to leave everyone wondering what the rest of the song is even doing. While Fagen’s vocal delivery is still rough around the edges on this record, he wishes that he had half the confidence that this solo has for its brief few minutes.
5. ‘The End’ – The Beatles
There had to have been a few heavy hearts amongst The Beatles going into the recording of Abbey Road. As much as they wanted to strike out on their own and make solo material, losing a band that most of them would have considered brothers would never be an easy road to cross. If this was truly the last time they would be together, though, what better way to bring things to a close than with a good old-fashioned guitar duel?
While ‘The End’ really should work as a broader part of the band’s medley on the second side of the record, hearing all of them play off each other is the main reason why people come back to it. After Ringo Starr gives his drum solo, hearing each of them trading licks against each other feels much more playful than outright competitive, especially when John Lennon cranks the gain put on his guitar to get the gnarliest tone he possibly can.
Although Yoko Ono was still present during the sessions for the album, this was one of the few times when Lennon asked her not to come onto the studio floor with him. So, in that respect, this was more than the group bowing out one last time. It was an opportunity for Lennon to remember the days when musical brothers played together for no one other than themselves.
4. ‘Running With the Night’ – Lionel Richie
R&B as a genre doesn’t always lend itself well to having wild and off-the-wall guitar solos. That’s reserved for the rockstars of the world, and as much as great artists like to work off each other, it wouldn’t have made any sense seeing someone like Jimmy Page contributing to a song by The Temptations, for example. All good session players know how to work under pressure, though, and when working with Lionel Richie, Steve Lukather delivered the kind of hair metal style solo that no one thought was possible.
Even though Richie is one of the last musicians most would describe as ‘intense’, the outro of ‘Running with the Night’ contains some of the flashiest playing that anyone ever laid down in the 1980s, and yes, that includes Eddie Van Halen. Compared to most artists who build up their solo to this massive crescendo, Lukather takes the slow-burn approach, occasionally switching between his different pickups until he has something that he can work with for every section.
Radio restrictions may have limited his time on the radio, but cutting out the solo on this tune is an insult to good musical taste. There’s the makings of the greatest solo of the decade in here, and yet it seems to be fading away right before it truly gets started. Cest la vie, I guess.
3. ‘Side of a Bullet’ – Nickelback
There’s always been a certain stink coming off of Nickelback since they first started. While they’ve earned the label of one of the great punching bags in rock and roll, it’s not without good reason. For all of the genres they have destroyed, though, they can pull off metal decently, especially when it means having a metal god among their ranks.
While the musicians behind Chad Kroeger know how to play, ‘Side of a Bullet’ was a chance for them to prove that they could hang with the big guns. Right where most would expect a cheap ripoff of a Kirk Hammett-style solo, we get a posthumous guitar solo from Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell, which sounds like it could have been taken from some of the tapes he had been working on before his tragic assassination.
Despite the dirtiness that I feel in recommending a Nickelback song, this isn’t even the first time they have had someone huge on their record, with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top contributing guitar parts and vocal lines on the same album. Nickelback is far from the 2000s equivalent of rock giants, but whoever is in charge of their marketing team deserves a round of applause for getting these Dimebag licks into the world.
2. ‘Beat It’ – Michael Jackson
First off, let’s get one thing straight. Not every song that makes it on a list like this has to be bad, and in the context of Thriller, ‘Beat It’ is a damn near flawless piece of Michael Jackson’s discography. If you judge it based on its being a pure rock song, the tune belongs to Eddie Van Halen from the minute that his harmonic tapping lick comes in at the very top of the tune.
While the members of Toto are no slouches playing the gritty backing track for Jacko, Eddie’s screaming solo is everything great about his guitar in less than a minute. For all of a few seconds, Eddie puts in every one of his trademarks, from the tapping licks throughout the body of the solo to the standard tremolo picking towards the end, which sounds like the guitar is about to become airborne.
And considering Eddie did the tune at absolutely no charge is still astounding to think back on. Outside of delivering one of the most phenomenal solos of all time, to think about what he’s left on the table by not asking for a few royalty points on the record would have been astronomical by any hard rock band’s standards.
1. ‘Bullets’ – Creed
No other band has fit the term ‘beautiful contradiction’ more than Creed. As much as people like to jam out to songs like ‘Higher’ with no irony today, the fact that the group had a mammoth band behind Scott Stapp’s nasally croon was one of the most ill-advised choices that any mainstream act ever made. When Stapp did bother to turn everything down for a second, ‘Bullets’ became the kind of song that reminded everyone of the guitar god he had standing next to him.
While Mark Tremonti did have a few guitar hero moments on all of Creed’s albums, there were always pieces holding him back. ‘My Sacrifice’ and ‘With Arms Wide Open’ had some incredibly pretty guitar lines, but having him do the bare minimum next to the equivalent of Eddie Vedder with a sinus infection would never work. In the case of ‘Bullets’, this was what the post-grunge genre was built for, taking the makings of a hard rock song and putting a bit more atmosphere on it.
Tremonti would eventually save the best moments of his guitar career for Alter Bridge, but looking back on it, ‘Bullets’ is more than only a good song by Creed’s low standards. Considering where metal had gone in the late 1990s, this is the kind of brooding metal that Metallica probably wished their Load era of even St Anger actually sounded like.
