The 1967 song Slash called one of the greatest guitar songs ever written: “Phenomenal”
It’s almost impossible to picture Slash without a guitar in his hands half the time he plays.
It’s bad enough to picture the guy without his signature top hat, but whenever he goes onstage, his fingers are what’s doing the talking for him whenever he kicks off one of his signature licks. And while Guns N’ Roses gave the world more than their fair share of epic guitar moments, Slash felt that some of the most beautiful guitar songs went far beyond anything that he could ever come up with.
But rarely has a guitar hero made their craft look so easy whenever they play. The entire solo to a song like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and ‘Paradise City’ are some of the most challenging tunes of the 1980s, and yet when you look at footage of Slash playing them back in the day, you can tell that he wasn’t just playing for the hell of it. This was a man possessed to play guitar, and that’s the kind of spirit that every great guitarist almost comes packaged with.
If you think about it, Eric Clapton wasn’t the kind to make music that sounded like it took a lot of effort. Even when he was going through his fair share of problems, he made every one of his licks look like the most natural thing in the world, but even in an age where Clapton was ‘God’, no one could have found the same sense of swagger that Jimi Hendrix did whenever he played his masterpieces.
Aside from being one of the greatest lead guitarists to ever walk the Earth, though, not many people give Hendrix the time of day as a songwriter. He was one of the most creative songsmiths of his generation, and even though a lot of his stuff was still rooted in blues, it was impossible to ignore the kind of strange harmonies that were going on when listening to ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ for the first time.
Even in the context of Hendrix’s masterpieces, though, ‘Little Wing’ deserves to be in another league than everything else. This song is a piece of musical perfection that’s stretched out for just under three minutes, and while it doesn’t exactly have the most off-the-rails solos that anyone has ever heard, Slash needed to pay his respects to someone that could write something so beautiful.
Because even with guitar legends like Joe Perry and Joe Walsh in his record collection, nothing was eclipsing ‘Little Wing’ in Slash’s mind, saying, “It’s just one of those great guitar passages. There’s nothing flashy, not a note is out of place, everything flows perfectly. But with Hendrix, pretty much anything he did was phenomenal.” And a lot of that comes from the way that the chords weave throughout the entire song.
Not many people even realise that the song is going through different borrowed chords throughout its runtime, but that’s the mark of a great songwriter as well. Hendrix might not have even known what was doing when going through every single chord that he could think of, but the fact that he could take all these bits and pieces of music theory and combine them into one of the most fluid guitar tracks of all time is still a feat that no one could ever improve upon even if they’ve practiced it for years on end.
So while Slash is happy to carry on the gospel of what great guitar music was supposed to sound like, there’s a reason why Hendrix is always going to be considered one of the most singular guitarists to ever walk the Earth. He may have written music that people could pick up pretty quickly, but anyone trying to get anywhere close to what he did is going to sound completely normal compared to his guitar tone.
