Recommendations of the Editorial team
ROLLING STONE has chosen the 100 best guitar solos of all time. It starts at number 100 with AC/DC, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is at number 14 and Steely Dan also made it into the top 10. Not to forget: Two songs by the Beatles are among the best guitar solos.
This is where things get interesting, however, because both “Something” (32nd place) and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (10th) are pieces on which George Harrison sang. The latter song, from the white album, has a special status because it was the sensitive guitarist’s first major success as a songwriter. He had always felt inferior to Lennon/McCartney.
Harrison achieved a breakthrough primarily because he asked his friend Eric Clapton for help. A curious music-historical point, because Clapton helped the band achieve what was probably their best solo. “It’s wonderfully elegiac,” Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone in 2002. “Only a guitarist could have written this song. I love it.”
A guitar that sounds like a piano
“Something” (from “Abbey Road”), on the other hand, is exciting with its 26 seconds of gentle, quiet distortion because its tones – supported by swelling strings – are more reminiscent of a piano than a guitar. Harrison had already written the ballad on the piano in 1968.
Paul McCartney called it the best song Harrison had ever written. “It took my breath away,” producer George Martin later said, “especially because I never thought George could do it. It was hard for him because he didn’t have a springboard to build on like the other two did. And so he was a lone wolf.” And: “Something” ultimately became the second most-covered Beatles song after “Yesterday.”
