The 1956 song George Harrison and David Gilmour both called the greatest: “So perfect”
In the world of guitarists, anyone would be glad to be able to make the guitar sing like George Harrison and David Gilmour did.
Even though they were two of the less flashy guitarists of their generation, what they played served the song better than any virtuoso ever could whenever they worked on one of their anthems. Everything that they played was exactly right for the song every time they played, and that came from listening out for what the guitarist’s role was supposed to be every single time they made a new record.
Because in the pre-rock and roll age, the point was never to make a record that wowed everyone just from a decent guitar solo. There were so many more avenues for them to go down with what a guitar player could do, but when you listen to the simple guitar solo in the middle of ‘All My Loving’, it was all about trying to make the best statement that you could and getting out of there before you overstayed your welcome.
Harrison was practically the master at that, and a lot of that mentality came from him trying to create the best energy on every single take. He wanted to weave together something magical the same way that he heard on some of those early Carl Perkins records, and a lot of that came down to studying what every artist did whenever he listened to one of their records back in Liverpool.
Chuck Berry and James Burton each had a lesson to teach every single time they played one of their solos, but if it weren’t for someone like Elvis Presley out front, none of that would have mattered. Presley was one of the biggest stars in the world, and from the moment that he heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Harrison knew that he was listening to one of the greatest anthems that rock and roll had ever conceived.
He would later go down the rabbit hole of Indian music, but as far as he was concerned, there was nothing that could compare with what Presley did when he was finding his roots, saying, “It had an incredible impact on me just because I’d never heard anything like it. I mean, coming from Liverpool, we didn’t really hear the very early Sun Records. The first record I remember hearing was probably a big hit by the time it got across the Atlantic.”
Pink Floyd was only a far-off dream for Gilmour at that point, but he still felt that what Presley created on that tune defined what rock and roll was supposed to sound like for years to come, saying, “‘Heartbreak Hotel’ as a song and as a recording, it’s like three instruments or something Just so perfect, every bit of it. It’s just, it couldn’t be more alive, and give you the atmosphere of something more perfectly than that.”
And looking at the way both of them approached guitar, it’s no surprise why they ended up catering to what Scotty Moore was doing so much. A lot of his playing was incredibly lyrical every single time he played, and he was willing to do everything he could to get the right sound to compliment anything that Presley sang about on any of his tunes, and you can hear that on everything from ‘Comfortably Numb’ to ‘My Sweet Lord’.
Because in their minds, rock and roll didn’t have to be about making the loudest noise possible or anything. It all came back to how you served the song, and it’s any other rock and roller’s duty to be able to serve the song as well as Moore did when slowly walking that bassline down his fretboard.
