Fretboard fumbles: the 10 worst guitar solos of all time
For any aspiring guitarist, the solo is where you really get to flex your muscles. There are so many opportunities for you to play riffs on every song, but the solo is where you spend time reaching into the depths of your soul to try to find the best melodic phrase you can think of. Or if you’re in bands like Metallica, you end up putting together tracks that feel like an amateur hour from the first time the solo starts.
Then again, this isn’t supposed to be about making solos, which are the most complex things in the world. Some of the best music ever made was usually taken at a slow tempo, and even the best players know how to tone things down when it comes time to put together a decent solo for a middle eight.
For these players, much of the solo is spent wondering when they will actually get on with it and play an actual solo. Even though they may have come with a certain amount of bravado when they strapped a guitar on, the end result feels like the kind of thing that most kids would chastised for behind the scenes, either being told to go back to the drawing board or find another instrument to master.
It’s even more tragic when you see the pedigree of some of the musicians, either being taken from artists who were having an off night or clumsy musical fools who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Whereas most guitar players can make their instruments cry, scream, and sing whenever they play, guitars that are subjected to solos like this deserve to be put out of their misery.
10 worst guitar solos of all time”
10. ‘Cover of the Rolling Stone’ – Dr Hook
Dr Hook and the Medicine Show were never meant to be a serious band. Just judging the titles, tracks like ‘You Make My Pants Want To Get Up and Dance’ aren’t written by someone looking to be the next Bob Dylan. It’s one thing to make songs that sound cheeky, but their biggest hit does have one outright stinker right in the middle of the track.
Since ‘Cover of The Rolling Stone’ was meant to be a piss take on kind of surefire hits that the magazine would eat up, this solo feels like making fun of every solo that’s ever been made. Coming from the era of guitar gods, this feels like the kind of playing that Jimmy Page would belt out if he was half-asleep and still hung over from the day before. It’s clear by the end that even the band thinks that the solo is garbage, but in a song that’s meant to mock the kind of guitarists who don’t play the best solos, can you at least spare us the details of slowly murdering a six-string?
9. ‘Love Song’ – Alice in Chains
Nothing about the Seattle grunge scene was meant to be thought about for too long. Every band in the area was always working with whoever they were friendly with, and it wasn’t out of the ordinary for someone who sang on one record to be playing lead guitar on a song with a completely different group. In keeping with the out-there mentality, Alice in Chains had an idea made in Hell: what if everyone played the exact opposite of what they were hired for?
At the very end of their acoustic EP Sap, ‘Love Song’ feels like an acid trip from a nightmare, featuring every band member switching to a different instrument. Bassist Mike Starr manned lead guitar duties for this one, and this can only be described as someone doing what they think death metal is supposed to sound like, with hardly anything keeping in tune and every member trying to create as much dissonant noise as possible. Then again, since the rest of the album had to do with mellow pieces that everyone toned things down for, maybe this was a reminder that the band could get heavy when they wanted to.
8. ‘Milk It’ – Nirvana
By the time Nirvana hit the big time, Kurt Cobain wanted nothing to do with hit singles. As far as he was concerned, he was in charge of what Nirvana played, and the next album was going to be as uncommercial as a mainstream product could be. In Utero may still have some great songs on it, like ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, but someone should have talked with the guys to keep Cobain from going too far on ‘Milk It’.
In an attempt to make something artsy, it sounds like the band had one good riff and figured they wing it for the rest of the recording. While the verse doubles as the solo section, Cobain doesn’t even try to think of anything resembling a key, usually fumbling around in the dark and just hitting any note that springs, depending on where his fingers are on the fretboard. Given Cobain’s laugh halfway through his vocal take, this may have been intended as humour, but it still tends to feel like a joke shared by everyone except the audience.
7. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ – Deep Blue Something
There’s always been the age-old question surrounding music: is it better to be offensive or boring? Even though there are a lot of songs that many have pointed to and laughed at over the years, there are just as many who have been put into a comatose state whenever they listen to the odd album with nothing to offer. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ may have worked as radio filler back in the 1990s, but there comes a time when you forget you’re even listening to music.
Since most of the song involves the most desperate attempt at romance ever found in a track, it’s only natural that the guitar solo would have the same amount of passion. For every lead guitar break, the guitarist sounds like he’d rather be anywhere except in the studio, turning in a solo that borders on nursery rhyme levels of laziness before just returning to bashing out chords. That said, it’s not his basic playing that’s hurting the song… it’s the passion behind it. You have one of the best jobs in the world as a musician, and yet you’re playing something delivered the same way most people would order a sandwich.
6. ‘Mother’ – The Police
No one will hear your humble author talk trash about Andy Summers. The Police were a damn fine power trio for a reason, and the amount of technical finesse and effects expertise that Summers brought to the table is second to none in an industry full of wannabe guitar wizards. For a brief moment in time, it seemed like everyone’s quality receptors were slowly muted when Summers got to work on one of his own songs.
While tracks like ‘Driven to Tears’ have had strange solos even by The Police’s standards, ‘Mother’ seems to take every wrong step when completing the backing track. Ignoring the absolutely nutty vocal that Summers put on top of everything, the guitar behind him feels like it’s deliberately trying not to be listened to, taking the basic structures of chords and bending the strings so everything sounds intentionally out of tune. It’s certainly a great tone painting to soundtrack a domineering mother, but somewhere in another world, there’s a quality guitar solo that the band threw out to put this on instead.
5. ‘Fight For Your Right’ – Beastie Boys
The Beastie Boys never claimed to be rock and rollers. They were always the kind of wise-guy punks that you always wanted to hang out with after school, and that usually meant listening to loud music that was more concerned with making noise than sounding good. So when the time came to actually put together a guitar solo for one of their first hits, how did they end up getting a metal icon to play something this sloppy?
Since Slayer guitarist Kerry King laid down a solo on ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’, they figured they keep him around to deliver on ‘Fight For Your Right’. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that King heard this song five minutes before he started, only being able to squeak out a few bends and what sounds like a customary blues scale before getting out there before he embarrasses himself. For all of the obnoxious energy on the rest of the track, maybe it was supposed to sound like a snotty kid half in the bag.
4. ‘Some Kind of Monster’ – Metallica
Anyone who knows the reputation of Metallica’s St Anger knows the joke behind the guitar solos. Even though they had the musical equivalent of a Ferrari in Kirk Hammett, the album features almost no guitar solos, only providing the basic rhythm guitar behind James Hetfield as he shrieks out in pain about his internal problems. There’s certainly nothing wrong with being honest, and the album does have its fans, but ‘Some Kind of Monster’ is everything wrong with the project, down to Hammett’s minuscule solo.
Since the song is eight minutes long, the band had better take on some sort of musical journey. Instead of a whirlwind of hooks like on ‘Master of Puppets’, the piece features the group asking the question: how long can we play on this same riff before people want to start ripping their ears off? When Hammett does get his chance to shine, all he can muster is just one lead guitar bend before the rest of the band continues to talk about their troubles. If anything, the fact that this part exists at all feels like more of a crime. You were on the verge of something good…and you just had to stifle it, didn’t you?
3. ‘Unskinny Bop’ – Poison
In the world of hair metal, there were always two schools when it came to guitar playing. Either you saw Eddie Van Halen and were convinced that you were going to become as good a guitarist to rival him, or you were going to adopt every one of his mannerisms and hoped the “skill” part of guitar playing would take care of itself. CC Deville may have demonstrated some skill behind the fretboard in Poison, but how they let this version of ‘Unskinny Bop’ pass defies human reasoning.
Appearing on The American Music Awards, Deville uses his solo section to ham up as much as possible, guitar playing be damned. Instead of sticking to the decent studio version, DeVille decides to fill his time with a series of whammy bar dives, scalar runs that lead to nothing, and choosing to take his hand off the fretboard entirely to salute the crowd for no reason. We’re all proud that you’re patriotic, Mr Deville; now, can you please just put the solo together as it was supposed to?
2. ‘Lyla’ – Oasis
The lead guitar playing of Noel Gallagher looks more like a backwards evolution chart these days. The Oasis mastermind may have been known for making timeless solos back in the day on songs like ‘Live Forever’, but ever since Be Here Now, Noel seemed to forget lead guitar playing and turned all duties over to Gem Archer both with Oasis and solo. Given what he sounds like when he solos on ‘Lyla’, though, maybe giving up the lead guitar duties was all for the best.
Being the kind of big, loud single meant to rally every Oasis fan together, ‘Lyla’ does its job as a decent live track, only for Noel to give us nothing when he solos. Rather than try to put together a decent string of notes, ‘The Chief’ hangs on just one note throughout the entire solo, making the guitar sound less like an instrument and more of a drone going throughout the song. One-note solos were considered a bit of a power move when played by legends like Johnny Ramone and Neil Young, but you have to earn that, and Noel’s version of it just sounds like he couldn’t think of anything else.
1. Whatever this is – Limp Bizkit
Most nu-metal bands didn’t concern themselves with playing solos. As far as they could tell, that was still hair metal shenanigans and was supposed to be ignored in favour of the lowest tunings ever conceived by man. There were a few guitar heroes to be found in the genre…but Fred Durst is practically everything a guitar villain should be when he decided it was time to rock the house at a Limp Bizkit show when he got a Les Paul in his hand.
Even though most Limp Bizkit guitar solos stand out as strange, with Wes Borland behind the fretboard, Durst is everything that people think of when they think of the talentless rockstar. Whereas most musicians can back themselves up with decent production or, you know, being able to play music decently, this song is footage of Durst having a drunken epiphany and finding out that he’s God’s gift to guitar players and abusing a poor vintage guitar. Most guitarists have their off nights every now and again, but this is the kind of sound that most teenagers make in their room before deciding that a life in music isn’t really their calling.
