The Greatest Living Guitarist

At any given moment, the guitarist has a multitude of notes from which to choose.  The good guitarist knows enough to steer clear of the wrong notes.  Enough to remain within the vast realm of good note choices.  The great guitarist, by contrast, sizes up those choices and picks well.  He plays not only the right notes at the right times, but great notes at great times.
There are actually a fair amount of great guitarists alive today.  On any given night one might be playing in the arena downtown.  Another might be playing in the corner bar down the street.  But on certain nights, on certain stages, you’ll find a guitarist who makes not only great choices, but the perfect choices.  At that moment, he can do no wrong.  Every note he plays is the perfect note – not simply because of the note, but because he plays it so perfectly that it becomes instantly clear that nothing anyone could have played at that instant could have been better.  At this moment, he is the Greatest Living Guitarist.
         On New Year’s Day 1970, this man was Jimi Hendrix.  The apocalyptic waves of organic, interstellar feedback – that started as vibrations under his fingertips and cascaded across the Fillmore East that night – blurred the distinction between music and noise to the point of irrelevance.  Halfway through his first song, right before Buddy Miles and Billy Cox pull out of machine gun precision, Jimi swoops in from the brink of oblivion to lay fire atop the sweltering rhythmic jungle, and sweep them back into the dark, brooding groove beneath.  In those moments, and probably for that entire night, Jimi Hendrix was unquestionably the Greatest Living Guitarist.
         On a late March afternoon in 1993, in a recording studio in the California desert, Johnny Hickman wore the crown.  As David Lowery cynically rasped out, “life’s a scream…when you’re submarined,” Johnny ripped into his Stratocaster with the desperation of a man down to his last.  The split second he waits to deliver his third blazing salvo as the major chord exhaustedly falls breaks your heart with anticipation.  Nearing the end of his last stand, Hickman chokes back the distortion and lets his Strat defiantly sing its last clean notes like the final desperate flames of a tragic blaze of glory, flickering out into the smoldering embers of defeat.
         For about an hour and a half last weekend, onstage at Starr Hill Music Hall, Sam Wilson was the Greatest Living Guitarist.  He slid into his first solo of the night like a seasoned studio vet on cruise control.  As brother James goaded him on with a rousing “Roll on Sammy!” he swaggered cockily behind the beat with syncopated, staccato stabs so sly they slung a wide grin from one side of my face clear off the other.  Thirty five minutes later he flew out of a blistering barrage of Randy Rhodes-style pull offs into a manic atonal tailspin, and then seconds later pulled back into a delta fire crescendo furious and filthy enough to make a bayou drenching hurricane blush.  I was blown away with the breeze.
         Tonight I’m not in the presence of the Greatest Living Guitarist.  I sip Budweiser and watch a genuinely good guitarist ape Lynyrd Skynyrd riffs over a sped up Tom Petty cover. But somewhere in the world, he is bent over his ax – drenched in sweat, eyes closed and fingers throbbing.  Wherever he is, he is surely wailing.