The one musician The Edge wants to meet in heaven: “More than any other”
There are very few guitarists who could manage to make one instrument sound as huge as The Edge has throughout his career.
He didn’t claim to be the best guitarist in the world, and there are more than a few songs where he looks like he’s doing absolutely nothing, but when you listen to the way that he performs, it’s not that he’s trying to create an entire orchestra with nothing but a few delay effects and a few basic chords. But if he was looking to talk to the true legends, he wanted to know what made every one of those guitarists tick when they first thought about making their classics.
Because for everyone in U2, music wasn’t meant to be just about one singular goal. Anyone can try to get into the business for nothing except the fame and money, but The Edge had something to express on every one of their albums. Bono may have been the one who was delivering it to the people half the time, but you can hear his guitarist trying to create some kind of epiphany in the listener’s head whenever he played one of his tunes.
And that wasn’t all that different from what some of his guitar heroes were doing. He was the first to say that he could never have played with the same dexterity as a band like Yes or anything, but the way that Steve Howe arranged his guitar parts was all that he was after. He wanted to create his own world with a bunch of sounds, but that wasn’t necessarily a new concept when he started making music.
The entire 1960s was all about expanding minds, and you could throw a dart onto the year-end charts and find a handful of songs that revolutionised what rock was supposed to be. There were The Beatles making one masterpiece after the next, The Rolling Stones redefining what heavy rock could sound like, and even new faces like The Doors, but no one will ever do more for guitar than what Jimi Hendrix did.
Which is strange because that’s not exactly what he set out to do in the first place. Hendrix was quoting a lot of his favourite blues artists and trying his best to make something that no one had ever heard before, but when you look through some of the biggest hits of his career, every one of them was a new adventure to go down. Countless artists were drooling over every riff he played, and The Edge was fascinated with the way that he seemed like this towering god of rock and roll.
So when The Edge passes on, he said that Hendrix was one of the few people that he wanted to talk to, saying, “I hope Jimi Hendrix. I don’t play anything like Jimi Hendrix, but to be able to express something emotionally through your instrument, he really did it, more than any other guitar player, he had the ability.” And chances are that Hendrix would have been proud of what people like him were doing with the guitar.
The Edge didn’t have the kind of finesse to play as Hendrix did, but he didn’t really need to. The biggest lesson the guitar wizard had to teach was about being yourself behind your instrument, and The Edge was doing everything he could to make himself stand out, whether that was playing something a bit more space-y than what everyone else was doing or managing to run his guitar through the kinds of pedals that no one would have ever thought of.
And somehow along the way, The Edge has become one of the few guitarists who have made a sound all their own, just like Hendrix did. There are countless imitators of what Hendrix did, but as long as there are people out there trying to make a chilling atmosphere on the guitar, they are always going to sound like The Edge whenever they throw on a few delay pedals and start picking away.
