The wildest guitarist in rock, according to Brian May: “A magnificent thing”
Of all the ways that you can describe Brian May as a guitarist, he wasn’t necessarily the most bonkers soloist in the world.
Every one of his songs was carefully constructed until they sounded perfect, and while there wasn’t much room for him to improvise, it was worth it to be able to him virtually every song that he ever made with Queen. But even if he didn’t have the same kind of improvisational moments as some of the best guitarists in the world, he had a great deal of respect for those who could create magic by flying off the handle.
Not everyone in the rock world is great at improvising, and even if someone like George Harrison could create beautiful melodies every single time he made a solo, he didn’t ever want to try and fly blind whenever he had a lead break. May was from the same school of creating songs within songs whenever he made a guitar piece, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have friends who could fly off the handle.
Tony Iommi was one of his closest friends in the business, and while Black Sabbath did have a few riffs that were mandatory to play at every single show, Iommi was proud to have a few moments where he could play a solo twice and put them right up next to each other in the mix every single time he made a record. Nothing was locked to a grid, and getting that kind of musical dexterity down is the mark of any good guitarist.
But Sabbath already belonged to a family of bands that practically gave birth to heavy metal. While they were one of the few bands that could justifiably claim to be the originators of the genre, they wouldn’t have been able to make that leap were it not for some of their contemporaries like Led Zeppelin.
Jimmy Page was an absolute wizard whenever he strapped on his guitar, and while May had a great love of everything that Zeppelin and Sabbath did, there was a spontaneity that Deep Purple had that always resonated with him. No one was quite sure what they were going to get whenever Purple took the stage, and in their early days, having someone like Ritchie Blackmore behind the fretboard meant that every show was going to be a sight to behold whenever he took a solo.
Compared to every other guitar hero around that time, Page felt that Blackmore would forever be one of the most wild guitarists he ever saw, saying, “Ritchie really is a great originator and creator of the wild electric guitar. There are a lot of people who can play fast now. But they can’t be Ritchie Blackmore. I think Ritchie will be remembered as somebody wild and untamed to the end of his days. I think that’s a magnificent thing to be. When people get things all in perspective, Ritchie will be right there as one of the cornerstones of what rock and roll is today.”
Sure, there are some songs like ‘Highway Star’ where Blackmore could be a bit more precise with his solos, but a lot of the best moments of those Purple shows were not knowing what he was going to do. There might have been a few songs where he could play soft and melodically, but there were others where he was practically at war with his guitar, whether that was him performing long sweeping solos or playing it with his ass.
Jimi Hendrix does deserve some credit for being one of the truly free-spirited guitarists, but there was something about the way Blackmore played that was truly feral in May’s mind. No one knew what he was going to do, but the fact that they all knew they were going to love it was the kind of thrill that no other guitarist could really pull off.
