What is the easiest classic guitar solo to play?
There isn’t a soul on the planet who picks up a guitar and doesn’t want to be one of the greatest to ever play the instrument. No one likes settling for second best, so it’s everyone’s dream to try to produce something no one has ever heard to put themselves on the same level as people like Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix. But while anyone can practise their scales up and down to build that dexterity, one of the most complicated arts in rock and roll is making something simple.
Not every tune is supposed to be the most mind-melting song anyone has ever heard, and it shouldn’t be any different when talking about guitar solos. People like George Harrison were known to make incredibly tasteful guitar breaks, even if they weren’t the most intricate parts in the world, and the entire reason why punk rock existed was to get away from that kind of self-indulgent playing people had done in the 1970s.
When it comes to the guitar, though, there’s always been the phenomenon of the one-note solo. As opposed to everyone’s inclination to overplay whenever they get a chance to grandstand, some of the greatest musicians of all time only need to worry about finding the one note they need, often hitting it a bunch of times until they get all of the emotion out of it as they can.
It’s hard to call many of those solos particularly iconic, but there are ways to make them interesting. But whereas Pete Townshend used his limitations to create textures with The Who and Johnny Ramone practically raised a middle finger to soloing on ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’, Neil Young became the true king of the one-note solo the minute that he hit upon the main guitar break in ‘Cinnamon Girl’.
Why is ‘Cinnamon Girl’ the easiest classic solo of all time?
Because outside of the minimalists that came after him, Young took all the swagger that he had and put it into one note. The song is already based on that droning open D note on the highest string of the guitar, but it’s easy to forget that Young’s only playing that one tone, as if he had an entire solo worked out that happened to only take place on one string.
The main difference between this and what Johnny Ramone does is how Young approaches the solo. Ramone famously hated guitar solos, and his version of playing lead was practically a pisstake, but Young never shies away from this being an honest-to-God guitar solo, even playing it up a little bit by striking the string harder every time he plays, almost like he’s in some sort of battle with his instrument.
That’s not to say that Young wasn’t punk rock about it, either. There had been far too many guitar solos that had come out of the woodwork by the time Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was released, but this was a message of what minimalism could do. Eric Clapton could play fast and leave people with their mouths on the floor, but what he needed a thousand notes to do, Young could accomplish with only one.
But Young probably didn’t think about creating the simplest guitar solo of all time when he was playing the tune. He was interested in capturing moments on record rather than the most pristine performances, and listening to him hang out on that one D note for what feels like an eternity is what makes the song classic. In a world before punk rock existed, Young was the one pioneering the idea of going against the grain.
