But she influenced people who became stars. I could never in my wildest dreams find something as beautiful as they find for a single song let alone album after album. That kind of storytelling has fallen out of pop music, for the most part. His singing and keyboard playing had a dark richness, a soulfulness that added one more color to the Allmans' rainbow. Rolling Stone's Top Ten Keyboard Playersdo you agree? I first saw them play in 1979 at Madison Square Garden, before their singer Bon Scott died and was replaced by Brian Johnson. It's all about attitude. He was capable of playing his instrument, but he was too fucked up to do it. They used to have to go out there and tape foam rubber around everything that Axl could touch from his teleprompter to his mic stand to make sure he wouldn't break anything, or hurt himself. Ronnie Van Zant was Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ian Stewart 7. His playing is both simple and complicated he can communicate with just one or two notes. This thread is archived And when I saw Wolf, yes, he was a big guy. Thank you, Creedence, for being popular and timeless enough to be on CD jukeboxes. fan meant being part of a tiny community. He said, "Hello," and I thought, "Uh-oh, this isn't fake. Because of stuff like Pro Tools, they figure they can fix it all in the studio. This is the way Wolf treated you. Every Cliff Burton-based solo I've ever heard is a soulful, psychedelic, headbanging expression that rocks your world, trips your brain out and gets the house rockin'. It was like a doctor told him he was going to die, and he was trying to get it all down on paper. Zappa was a huge influence on how I wrote music for Phish. Sometimes we'd have talent competitions. The shame is, I know how great the Yardbirds were. 1. But it was always Booker T. and the MGs playing. But the crowd loved them, because they weren't trying to be black rappers. We had an old battery-powered radio, and we'd listen to this half-hour program that came on at night. It's one of the greatest rites of passage for any artist, and it's something that touches us most deeply. He was streamlined in a way that reminded me of Keith Richards, was always wasted and had a careless guitar style that was really cool. There's a damaged quality to David Bowie's original mix that is way ahead of its time. went to England in 1985, I drove through Muswell Hill and it certainly wasn't romantic-looking. "Hail Mary" is just perfect: "Picture paragraphs unloaded/Wise words being quoted." 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He's approachable, affectionate and funny. All of us on the East Coast loved Tupac. It didn't seem like the sunset was happening in some king's country, in some other world. They were definitely going for a hit single with the song "(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth." And Santana is the light. I love all those other groups but with Pink Floyd I understand the emotion. I couldn't get in. The Shirelles were given some of the all-time greatest songs to sing: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "Soldier Boy," "Tonight's the Night," "Mama Said." He seemed destined for such greatness, and yet his life ended up playing itself out like some cheap B-grade film noir. A lot of the magic in the Dead's music came from Phil and Jerry learning how to play together, combining Phil's approach with Jerry's unique blend of influences. Derek Sherinian It's a great trick it's impossibly catchy, people play it at their weddings, but it's a stalker song. When I was a teenager, it was a career aim for many of my friends to have a song written about them by Elvis Costello. Songs like "Paradise City" and "Welcome to the Jungle" were just simple enough; the chorus lines came right when you wanted them. That's why we look forward to listening to Eminem's lyrics and finding out where the hell he's headed next. I had never seen or heard anything like it before. One of Tina's big hits is called "We Don't Need Another Hero." I was in my third year of classes at a place in London called the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture, which is where I met Nick Mason and Rick Wright. He's a poet with a punk's heart. Eminem is a true poet of his time, someone we'll be talking about for decades to come. The words, the melodies and the sentiment are all there, clear and true. Before Clapton, rock guitar was the Chuck Berry method, modernized by Keith Richards, and the rockabilly sound Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup popularized by George Harrison. Soon after that, they broke up, which to me marked the end of Seventies rock. When I was just starting to learn how to play guitar, Aerosmith gave me the shove I needed. When you're up on that stage or when you record, you want to be a tool that light shines through to everybody.". After that he was front and center, singing the lead about a "Gypsy Woman" in an exotic brew of castanets and dark minor chords. They have become a household name with music that is anything but mainstream. But like Dizzy Dean used to say, "If you can do it, it ain't bragging," and Phil can do it: play piano and guitar, compose and produce. It was precise and explosive and heavy. You want to go toward the light. In these fan testimonials, indie rockers pay tribute to world-beating rappers (Vampire Weekend's Ezra. We all used to sing on the corners, at school functions and at house parties. Theyve all put a smile on my face.. After that, Pink Floyd started to go professional, and we would run into Cream on the road. Their thing was "What do we do with these sounds?" There are three kinds of record producers. If you listen to a Talking Heads bass line, you think the song's going one way, and then you listen to the drums and you think it's going a different way, and then you listen to David Byrne's lyrics and you're like, "This is a completely different song from what I thought it was going to be." He gets inside your head, and he doesn't let go. His lyrics are deep enough to demand exegesis (see: Decoded), at times, cute and playful enough to be memorized by every "mean girl" at my high school (see: his verse on Mariah Carey's "Heartbreaker"). It's not that they're indifferent it's that the strength of character in their music is beyond their control. There were songwriter-producers before him, but no one did the whole thing like Phil. He could turn the corniest things into funk. Following Brian Eno's example, Reznor unpacked his synth and threw away the manual. In the songs he wrote with Robert Hunter, and in Bob Weir's stuff too, you're also hearing music from 40 years ago. He takes artists with great potential and makes them even better. It belittles Radiohead to describe their music as having "hooks." They've put out genius records for decades. Everyone focuses on the magic of Jerry's guitar playing and the vulnerability of his voice, but his sense of melody and chord changes was unbelievable. Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has ever lived, is still living or ever will live. When Carl hit the stage, he just ripped the room apart. Neil Young was there that night, and he was shaking his head. Even when it's just him and a piano onstage, it's powerful. My favorite line is "Wet bus stop/She's waiting/His car is warm and dry" he communicates the entire song with those 11 words. People don't know him the way they should now. And so, that year, I heard Lynyrd Skynyrd making their Atlanta debut at a very dangerous club on Peachtree Street called Funocchio's. Most guitar players like to go crazy, but Steve picked his spots, and when he spoke, it was profound. It was raining. Carl would go home from the fields, be practicing a Roy Acuff country type of thing on his guitar, and then he would start bending the notes. It wasn't heavy metal. I was pretty much just into "Suzie Q" and "Born on the Bayou" back then, but I came to appreciate almost everything they ever did. p.s. He discovered Snoop one of the two greatest living rappers, along with Jay-Z and signed Eminem, 50 Cent and the Game. The Allmans were without question the first great jam band, and they took the jam to heights that it had not previously reached. Hank had a voice that split wood. Sometimes you think, "How can you top anything by the Yardbirds, or Zeppelin, or the Stones?" I'm still coming up with stuff that is a complete and blatant rip-off. The Allman Brothers Band was a true brotherhood of players one that went beyond race and ego. At that time I was very much into folk music and turning the corner into R&B, and I'll never forget seeing that cover, with all the Tempts dressed as Foreign Legionnaires, sitting in the desert. A lot of deep records like Pink Floyd's The Wall or Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile are dense, long journeys. The essays on these top 100 artists are by their peers: singers, producers and musicians. You can always tell when you're hearing Tupac verse. The Top Ten 1 Dave Greenfield (The Stranglers) He had a tone and a style that were uniquely his. And they continue to rock on. I love singers whom you can identify the first second they open their mouth, and Levi Stubbs is one of those; he's one of the greatest of all time. They may have had three guitar players, but they understood restraint. Anyone who has ever been to a Metallica show, and banged their head, and thrown up the devil horns, has been a part of something great. People are listening. I've got pretty much every note the Kinks recorded on my iPod certainly everything through 1980. When we did a long stand at the Fillmore in the late Nineties, I talked Carl into sitting in with us. The Beatles covered five of Carl's songs on record. 50 Greatest Bassists of All Time - Rolling Stone They have a phase one, a phase two, maybe even a phase three and four. He looked young and on fire. I first met Dre in December of 2003. This is a band getting very strung out, putting so much blood and soul into what it's doing, and for the most part looked upon as trash. Our meal was served by one of the members of Einstrzende Neubauten. It seemed like he was singing about me walking in the sunsets in Oklahoma. And it opened up my mind to the mighty force of nature that is Metallica. Dickey was remarkable in his own right. Then there's the producer who does it all. When David Gilmour sings about the sun going down, there's something simple about it. From his records, it sounded like he was projecting from a completely different place in his body. Eminem does for his audience what Dylan did for his: He writes how he feels. They poured their lifeblood into that groove, and they mastered it. Of course it could, but few would deny that Keith Emerson is a worthy winner. While the music got louder, the paint hurtled around us faster and faster till we ran nauseous from the cafe, chased by infernal screaming lavender, blue and black snakes. The 30 greatest synth players of all time: keyboard wizards, programming gurus and sound design legends By Scot Solida ( Computer Music, Future Music, emusician, Keyboard Magazine ) last updated 30 October 2020 Your votes have been counted, so who came out on top? They were playing a weeklong engagement, and each night I'd hear another great original song from them and knew I'd found the band I was searching for. You can see what it was like in the movie What's Love Got to Do With It. Dre productions like Tupac's "California Love" were just so far beyond what I was doing that I couldn't even comprehend what was going on. The greatest keyboard players of all time, revealed | MusicRadar List of famous female keyboard players, listed by their level of prominence with photos when available. His tone just bleeds through everything. He said he didn't like the way Tupac behaved because he knew that Tupac knew better. Join Now and SAVE!!! I just shook her hand and tried to swallow. Lou Reed, myself and a friend known as Warren Peace were having dinner in one of those old-style Greenwich Village places where Pollock was supposed to have fought other painters. If you love Elvis Costello, it's because you love what he's thinking the depth and breadth of his notice is astounding. Some people might not know that Carl played guitar with Johnny Cash for 10 years on the road. Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc reveals his love of the piano and shows you how he recorded his first track in Ableton Live, How a song written in 1974 turned up on Bowie's Let's Dance and unwittingly kicked off a controversy. Let me say first off, I am a huge Nirvana fan and believe he was a very talented guitar player. Richard Wright 4. Even Elvis Presley knew why Wilson was called "Mr. When Eminem and I did "Stan" at the Grammys in 2001, we got together to rehearse out in the Valley. And he was a great harmonica player. Songs like "You Enjoy Myself" and "Split Open and Melt" were completely charted out because he had shown me it was possible. When I got home from holiday, I immediately bought Wish It Would Rain. Iggy's parents were intellectuals his father was an English teacher and that gave him an edge. He just made that one fatal mistake taking that one hit after he cleaned up, still thinking he could take the same amount. He's one of the greatest players who ever lived. Learn how to play rock and blues piano from one of rock's greatest. No, man, he had all that action. You never heard Jagger hanging out on a single note the way Keith Relf could. I've always held on to the same dreams as Freddie. But he would also work very hard harder than I ever did on honing it down. We were playing the Deep South Crunkville, before there was crunk and it was just black people at those shows. He was not the kind of guy to blow his own horn; he was very humble. Sometimes I put on Tupac's best songs, followed by Biggie's best songs. On Sea Change, I made a conscious effort to try to write songs as direct as Hank's. They played like no other band. He was wearing all black and standing in front of a giant video wall. They put rock with rap like we did, but it made so much sense when they did it because they were punk rockers. I heard a lot of Aerosmith in them, which meant I also heard a lot of bands that came before us. And, of course, there were two other wonderful singers in the Supremes, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard. Bobby Keys - Wikipedia But everyone contributed material and incredible musicianship to the effort: Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, then Don Felder, and later Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit. The second is the type who serves the artist; I would be so brash as to include myself in that category, along with John Hammond, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, and Bob Thiele music fans who try to develop great singers. There was a synchronicity between the Dead and the crowd, and it was mesmerizing to watch Jerry, in his own understated way, steering that ship knowing it was a big ship that could barely be steered, but if anybody could steer it, it was him. Later, when Holland-Dozier-Holland left, I co-wrote "Still Water (Love)" with Frank Wilson for the Four Tops. Everybody knows that they're going to die. When I sang backup for Don Henley in the early Nineties, it was a surreal experience, supplying vocals every night to Eagles songs. The American Dream has a lot of back alleys, and he was showing those things, and I felt like, here's a guy trying to talk to me about something I had seen firsthand. No matter how much they let go in their shows, they never lose their clarity. He's pretty much a recluse. Steve Winwood 8. When I first met him, he was very young, sleeping on the couch at the Atlantic Records offices and using the switchboard after hours. As we all know now, the unsung heroes were the Motown house band, the Funk Brothers. I also remember being on a long cross-country family road trip as a kid, driving across the Texas desert at night. I remember hearing Dre's music before I really knew who he was. His solo in "Crossroads" on Wheels of Fire is impossible: I don't know how he kept time while he played. History Lesson: The Rolling Stones' Keyboard Players - irocku And I hope he breaks into another grin from ear to ear as he feels "that's why I'm here.". Then Iggy turned to the side of the stage, where the elite were standing Sonic Youth, Queens of the Stone Age, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the other all-access rock stars and he gave us the jerk-off motion. He once told me, "Tom, I like you so much if I lived by you, I'd cut your grass." Anybody who's serious about metal will tell you it all comes down to Sabbath. The haunting opening strains of "Hotel California" came on the radio. It was like I unlocked a box: His music spoke to me. Steven Wilson: "He's probably the biggest influence of all for me.I grew up in the 80s, and it was a pretty bad decade for music. He reinforced that I was still Stevie Nicks. In the beginning, Tina's music was based on hard times and harsh realities. He was just a stunning and singular musician who was gone way too soon. I would sit and listen to Wolf talk. It's testament to Jordan Rudess's skill and popularity that he's the one contemporary keyboard player to have challenged for our top spot. In my lifetime, Jay-Z has, by far, been the most artful and exciting musician to consistently make hits, and I mean real hits Top 10 singles deep into his career, like "Empire State of Mind." The well-known music magazine Rolling Stone in its September 18, 2003, issue 931 published a list of the 100 best guitarists of all time. I remember hearing those boot stomps to "Holidays in the Sun." Pink Floyd were always a group of great creative minds who did whatever the fuck they wanted and didn't worry about all the little rules. People look at Ross and say she had great songs, she was a good-looking girl, behind her she had Berry Gordy who, in my book, is the greatest record man who ever lived she had all these things. It wasn't punk rock. I was simply staggered by the amount of equipment they had: by Ginger Baker's double bass drum, by Jack Bruce's two 4-by-12 Marshall amps and by all of Eric Clapton's gear. Now that he's not here, he's bigger than ever. he took that country-picking thing into the rock world. As I waited backstage to present my speech, I was approached by three women arguing with one another as to who should be the one to go onstage and claim the award that was to be given to Jackie. John Fogerty wrote more classic songs in a three-year stretch than anyone other than the Beatles. In those days, musically, Clapton was a total wild man. When he soloed, he wrote wonderful symphonies from classic blues licks in that fantastic tone, with all of the resonance that comes from distortion. And Ad-Rock is just full of life. Jimmy Rogers, who played in Muddy's band, used to laugh and joke about what Wolf had to say about Muddy and what Muddy would say back. Don't miss the latest deals, news, reviews, features and tutorials. Don't be influenced by anything. But if it were only that, I wouldn't go back and listen to those records again and again. Of all the bands I'd come across in my life, they were the finest arrangers. The Boy Georges of the world all got up in a twist about it. The more I learned about producing hip-hop, the more I respected what Dre was doing. So he pulled back, like Dylan and Lennon did. Steve Winwood 8. Obviously, most of today's jam bands are influenced by the Dead. When he took the stage, adorned in a magnificent white suit, he spread his arms open wide, as if trying to embrace the entire room. It's the benchmark you measure your album against if you're serious. It's no accident that the Beatles' Apple Records signed James Taylor at its inception. In 2006, I did 27 shows with him. Amen to that. I remember someone handing me a copy of Appetite for Destruction and saying, "You've got to hear these guys they're the new big thing." Their songs are universal they're part of all of our lives. There was violence a crazed woman once shot him as well as tax problems, drugs, divorce and mob associations that made demands he couldn't refuse. We used to have these Blue Mondays in Chicago that would start at seven o'clock in the morning. Rolling Stone's Top Ten Keyboard Playersdo you agree? Duck was a great bass player, and very funny one of them good old Southern beer-drinking boys. But if they were aiming at becoming one of the most successful rock bands of all time, they sure were going about it in a kooky way. I'm sure people told them it was too long or had too many movements. In the end, nobody described George Clinton's music better than the man himself: It is "Cosmic Slop," it is funkadelic funky and psychedelic. He's got some serious babymaking music. Tom had the same influences we had the Byrds, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash but he dropped in lots of serious old blues. When she asked, "Where did our love go?" The places he played were so tough that he hired a wrestler, Cannonball Nichols, to be his bass player. If they didn't have the intelligence to see his intelligence, that was their problem. When I started doing my first solo album, Bella Donna, my first thought was, "Who produces Tom Petty?" Fogerty plays what I would if I was 22, more talented and into the blues. When you're in a band and you find something that breaks every rule, it gives you creative hope. It was on this song that the group combined doo-wop with very accessible pop melodies: It began with the whole group singing, "Doo ron, day ron, day ron day papa, doo ron," then one of them would sing, "Well, I met him on a Sunday." Phil Spector could be the greatest of these. Their music talks to you, in a real way. Bands like the Clash had already mixed it with punk, but the Police did it flat-out it was like reggae for music geeks. The Kinks slipped into rock history through the back door. When everyone was writing song cycles about Eastern mysticism, Ray Davies was writing about a two-up/two-down flat in some English suburb. Anyone who plays lead guitar owes him a debt of gratitude. By the time Lifes Rich Pageant was gracing the yellow Sony Sports boomboxes of the world, R.E.M. Clapton absorbed that, then introduced the essence of black electric blues: the power and vocabulary of Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and the three Kings B.B., Albert and Freddie to create an attack that defined the fundamentals of rock & roll lead guitar. It was warm and round and full and dripping with chocolate. I thought he was a big, light-skinned guy. In a way, that upheaval may be part of the reason they recorded so many immortal songs over such a long period. Al, he was a crooner. Holland, Dozier and Holland were amazing songwriters, just pure melody men. It was the cutest thing. The sanctions and the embargo were on. And, of course, she was glamorous: I remember all those furs, diamonds and early bling-bling. He would leave his guitar on a stand as he conducted the band. Booker T. pioneered a lot of sounds on the organ. You can hear the click when Beck hits his fuzz box. He wrote the fundamental language, the binary code, that everyone uses to this day. We used Brian May amps and wrote songs with different movements. His songs weren't as political as Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway. When My Chemical Romance were making The Black Parade, we watched tons of documentary footage about A Night at the Opera, Queen's best album. So whenever I had to do a solo, I would just play that. He once said to us, "You want to be like emissaries of light. The riff in "Walk This Way" is just us trying to explore the blues in the Yardbirds model. But the right people did. His music never went away on the West Coast, and you can still hear his mark all over music today. There was nothing about him that was contrived. And what they wanted was Jackie Wilson. They played traditional blues mixed with their own unique brand of rock & roll, and there was nothing but strength in that group. Notorious B.I.G. I think he's enthralled with what he's doing; he's intimately involved with his art. Ted Nugent picks the 11 greatest guitarists of all time Booker T. and the MGs had that Southern funk flavor. MTV had just started to sink its claws into people, and that song was like an anthem for coked-up adults trying to make sense of their world. Mick and KeithAnd Chuck: The Rolling Stones - Vanity Fair But what's interesting to me is that they wrote their very first hit, "I Met Him on a Sunday," themselves, when they were still high school students in New Jersey. Layla was, for me, the last time everything the singing, songwriting and guitar playing were all at the same high intensity level. A five-minute-long bass solo is a sure ticket to commercial success. I must have done something right. Then there's Jack Bruce probably the most musically gifted bass player who's ever been. Joni had an edginess that not many women expressed then. When I did my first sessions at Stax, I learned everything about record production from those guys. It can build to where you think the whole thing will crumble beneath its own weight and then Thom Yorke will sing some melody that just cuts your heart out of your chest. I became such a fan that if I hadn't been in a band myself, I would have joined that one. He shared abo. They could do pretty much anything with just bass, drums, guitar and vocals. The Dead were aficionados of folk, acoustic blues and bluegrass particularly Garcia. He was so loud. They were the first group from the neighborhood that sang modern harmony: They could sing like a gospel group but then do R&B like no one else. It's, like, from 1982.". Keep on chooglin'. Everything you wanted was right there, touchable to me, in that voice even when Wolf wasn't singing. But he also had intelligence and honesty. 100 Greatest Guitarists - Rolling Stone Everything on a song like "Black Magic Woman" works: the keyboards, the congos, the drums, the vocals. When I'm trying to create something, I always refer to the Sex Pistols, because they show you what the possibilities are in music. fan, happy to venture beyond the pale of the radio singles, was a rare thing. Even the way he casually held his hands while singing was hypnotic. Chuck Leavell has been pleasing the ears of music fans for more than 40 years now. God, these guys have suffered, or they can fake it like nobody else. You're in the resistance now, son. Raw Power was made by a different lineup, with James Williamson on guitar and Ron on bass. He may no longer be with us, but he leaves an indelible legacy. They were called metal at the time, but they weren't: Metal isn't sexy, but rock is. Genius, maybe? Like I know the blues, Gram Parsons knew country music every nuance, every great country song that was ever written. He stood there, not moving a muscle, while he issued the most savage assault you had ever experienced, unless you were at the debut of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" and your seat was in front of the cannon. I first met Gram in 1968, when the Byrds were appearing in London I think it was a club called Blazes. They're a fucking piece of the mountain coming down behind you, and you can't do anything about it.